Summary: Listen to episode 307 of the Inspirational Living podcast: The Law of Giving & Receiving | It Works. Edited and adapted from Working With God by Gardner Hunting. Inspirational Podcast Excerpt: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. If you enjoy our podcast, please help us spread the word by sharing your favorite episodes on Facebook or Twitter. A positive review at the iTunes store or Google Play would also be much appreciated. Thank you. Today’s reading is a continuation of last week’s reading on How to Transform Your Life, and has been edited and adapted from Working With God by Gardner Hunting, published in 1934. There's a lot of talk these days about the power of thought, and some people are disposed to sneer at it. But there's more in it than these persons suppose, and they suffer because they don't realize its power. Consider this, can you do anything without first thinking about it? Is any discovery or invention, any work of art or book, any newspaper or tool, any manufacturing or any crime, any deed (good or bad) ever performed without some one's first thinking about it? In other words, everything that you do is first an idea in your mind. That is where it is first "created." If you want to make a chair, or a plan, or a sailboat, or a printing press, or a bomb, or a broom, it must first take shape in your mind, as an idea. As a matter of fact, the idea of a thing is the real creation of it. The physical putting it together afterward is a mere copy of the idea in your mind. We are accustomed to think that a certain amount of time and energy is required to make the visible copy of the idea — the visible chair, or plow, or broom. But the more perfectly we think it out (that is, create it as a complete idea in mind), the more quickly and perfectly we can create it in visible form. And as we think it out better and better, we find that we require less and less time to make the visible thing, and less and less energy. Newly invented machines, for instance, are usually crude, cumbersome, heavy, and require a lot of power to operate them. But as they are perfected (that is, as they are thought out) they become lighter, simpler, more efficient, are operated by less power, and do their work more quickly. During this process, the time always comes when the thing that once took a long period and much labor to make is made at a speed so high that the production is in some cases almost instantaneous. If, when we began making this thing, we had understood all the laws of its making, we could have made it instantaneously without going through the process of learning how. But that would have been a miracle! Exactly.
