Your Word Is Your Wand

Every seeker comes at last to one question: does the word spoken in the morning have any power over what the evening brings? This book stands at that threshold and answers without hesitation. The word is a wand. Whatever a person decrees with conviction, the subconscious mind receives and carries into form, and conditions change in answer to the word as surely as iron answers the magnet. Shinn places the working instrument of spiritual law, the affirmation, in the reader's hand and teaches its use with the directness of one passing on a tool long tested.

Behind every life stands a Divine Design, a perfect pattern held in the superconscious mind and waiting to be brought through. Supply flows from God, endless and immediate, and faith and the spoken word release it. This faith is active. The one who asks prepares for the thing asked for, setting the table before the guest is seen, and that preparation is itself the proof of belief. Intuition lights the way forward: the hunch that arrives unbidden and points to the next step on the pathway. Loss, debt and lack are denied outright, for they have no place in Divine Mind, and what has no place there cannot hold its ground on earth.

Shinn holds that the price of happiness and health is mastery of the emotional nature. Resentment, fear and grief each find their correspondence in the body. Forgiveness and non-resistance dissolve adverse conditions, where struggle only fastens them more tightly. The student learns to live under grace rather than under karmic law. The student also learns to refuse the belief in duality in love, in marriage and in supply, and to rest in the oneness that leaves nothing to be lost or fought over.

What the book finally cultivates is poise, the stillness of one unmoved by appearances. From that stillness comes dominion, a fearless spiritual authority that reaches even over the elements. Shinn writes briefly and plainly, so that each page reads as an instruction to be practiced rather than a doctrine to be admired. The reader who takes up these words takes up a wand and is asked only to speak.

The original edition opens with a short note: “This volume of affirmations was written by popular demand. It is a sequel to The Game of Life and How to Play It, where the reader will find the principle more fully explained.”