In Tune with the Infinite

Name: In Tune with the Infinite
Author: Ralph Waldo Trine

Ralph Waldo Trine189713 Chapters4h read

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In brief

In Tune with the Infinite, published in 1897 by Ralph Waldo Trine, is a foundational work of American New Thought philosophy and a practical guide to spiritual living. Its central teaching is that conscious realization of oneness with the Infinite Spirit of Life and Power, and openness to its inflow, brings health, peace, power, wisdom, and abundance.

Key ideas

A single Infinite Spirit of Life and Power underlies all things and works through them.
The supreme fact of human life is conscious realization of oneness with that Infinite Life and openness to its inflow.
Thoughts are forces that return in kind, which makes love the governing law of life.
Health, peace, power, and prosperity follow naturally from conscious connection with the Infinite.
Every great religion and every prophet or sage rests on the same natural realization of divine oneness.

You have looked outward for the cause of your troubles and the source of your strength. Trine holds that both were always within, and that one realization, lived rather than merely believed, reorders health, peace, power, and plenty. What that realization is, and how it is kept, he makes plain.

This Book Is: New Thought · Ralph Waldo Trine · Oneness With The Infinite

Chapters

PrefaceTo come into the divine sequence that runs through the universe is to possess unknown riches and undreamed-of powers.3 min

IPreludeThe old roots of the words heaven and hell reveal that you are building one or the other, hour by hour, from within.2 min

IIThe Supreme Fact of the UniverseBehind every flower by the wayside and every snowflake that falls stands one great fact, and the reach of your powers turns on knowing it.6 min

IIIThe Supreme Fact of Human LifeA lotus pond left to a practical-minded renter shows you what happens to a life that shuts its own gate.29 min

IVFullness of Life: Bodily Health and VigorA plague on the road to Bagdad claims fifty thousand lives, yet only five thousand of them were its own doing.51 min

VThe Secret, Power, and Effects of LovePeter had no silver or gold for the cripple at the temple gate, and what he gave instead is the greatest service we can do for another.20 min

VIWisdom and Interior IlluminationA journalist who knew almost nothing of her subject slept on the assignment and woke with the whole article written in her mind.34 min

VIIThe Realization of Perfect PeaceOff duty and walking home, a police officer is so filled with peace that his feet can scarcely keep to the pavement.18 min

VIIIComing into Fullness of PowerPainter, orator, musician, or writer, whatever your calling, one secret of power decides whether your work can ever be first rate.28 min

IXPlenty of All Things: The Law of ProsperityA young woman's morning silence, a bear and a bull, and a tree's old leaves point to a law of supply that hoarding quietly breaks.21 min

XHow Men Have Become Prophets, Seers, Sages, and SavioursHere and there a man recognizes one thing about his own life, lives in it, and in turn becomes a prophet, seer, sage, or saviour.10 min

XIThe Basic Principle of All Religions: The Universal ReligionOnce the truth that runs through all religions is made paramount, a Jew can worship in a cathedral and a Christian in a Buddhist temple.10 min

XIIEntering Now into the Realization of the Highest RichesOne word holds the whole method, and sailors on the Indian Seas show you what a life lived by it gives off to others.13 min

Peace is to be found only within, and unless one find it there he will never find it at all.

About This Book

What would change if the life that holds the stars in their courses were found to be moving, unbroken, through your own mind and body at this moment? Trine places the reader at exactly this threshold. His teaching rests on one truth, from which all the rest unfolds: the great central fact of human life is the coming into conscious, vital realization of our oneness with the Infinite Spirit, and the opening of ourselves fully to its inflow. God and man are one in essence and differ only in degree. The seeker is not asked to reach upward toward a distant power. The seeker is asked to stop obstructing a current that is already present.

From this centre the book traces the laws by which that current takes form. The unseen is the realm of cause and the seen is the realm of effect. Thoughts are living forces. They build the inner life and draw to it their correspondences from without. Health and disease have their roots in mental and emotional states, so fear and worry become the costliest guests a person can entertain, while faith and expectation act as creative powers. Above all of these Trine sets love: the fulfilling of the law, and the one force able to transmute hatred where opposition only strengthens it.

The deeper passages turn inward, to the silence, to intuition, and to the interior illumination that Trine holds to be the source of true wisdom. Here the student learns to find their own centre and to rule circumstance from within, rather than being ruled by it. This entails a quiet independence from second-hand authority, inherited custom, and fixed dogma. The powers of prophets, seers, and sages are no exceptions to natural order but the results of a higher law that is open to all. Prosperity belongs to the same order: an opulence that flows through the one who receives it and asks for stewardship rather than hoarding.

What emerges is a universal religion: the single golden thread that Trine finds running through every faith beneath its forms and creeds. The kingdom he describes is not deferred to another world. It is within, and it is entered now, in what he calls the beautiful eternal now. The book is best read slowly, a little at a time, with pauses for the silence it recommends, so that its principles can be tested in the reader's own experience instead of simply being accepted.

About the Author

Ralph Waldo TrineAuthor of one of the bestselling New Thought books of the late 19th century, bringing the movement's ideas to a wide mainstream audience.

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About this edition

First published 1897.

Because of when it was first published, this text is in the public domain in the United States.

Presented as a reading edition by Better Thought. Typography, chapter titles and glossary links are ours. The words are the author's.

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