Florence Scovel Shinn

The teaching

Taught from her own books, above all The Game of Life and How to Play It (1925) and Your Word Is Your Wand (1928).

The game of giving and receiving

Most people, Shinn begins, consider life a battle, but it is not a battle; it is a game, and it cannot be played well without the knowledge of spiritual law, whose rules the Old and New Testaments give. Jesus taught that it is a game of giving and receiving: whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Whatever a person sends out in word or deed returns to them; love brings back love, criticism criticism, and the one who cheats is cheated.

The imaging faculty plays the leading part, and she calls the imagination the scissors of the mind, always cutting out the pictures a person holds, which they meet sooner or later in their life. The game is therefore played chiefly by training the imagination to picture only good.

Three minds and the divine design

She teaches three departments of mind. The subconscious is power without direction, like steam or electricity, which carries out in detail whatever is felt deeply or imaged clearly. The conscious mind, the mortal or carnal mind, sees life as it appears, with its sickness, poverty and limitation, and impresses those pictures on the subconscious. The superconscious is the God Mind within each person, the realm of perfect ideas.

In the superconscious is the divine design of each life: a place that one is to fill and no one else can fill, something one is to do that no one else can do. It flashes across the conscious mind as an ideal that seems too good to be true. So she would not speak the word for a woman to marry one particular man, but only for the right man, the divine selection, since what does not belong to a person by divine right would bring no happiness if gained. God's plan for every life she calls the square of life: health, wealth, love and perfect self-expression.

The spoken word

Death and life, she quotes, are in the power of the tongue. Words and thoughts are a great vibratory force, and her method is to speak the word: a short affirmation, said with faith, such as Infinite Spirit, open the way for the right apartment, or for great abundance. Fear is the one enemy, and she calls it inverted faith, faith in evil instead of good. A denial should always be followed by an affirmation, and Your Word Is Your Wand gathers such affirmations by subject for daily use.

Then the student must act as though the prayer were answered. She takes the rule from the story of Elisha and the kings in the desert, told to fill the valley with ditches though they saw neither wind nor rain: prepare for the thing asked for when there is not the slightest sign of it.

Leads, non-resistance and the burden

After speaking the word, do nothing until a definite lead comes, and ask for it: Infinite Spirit, reveal to me the way, let me know if there is anything for me to do. The answer comes through intuition, a hunch, a chance remark or a line in a book, and her rule is never to violate a hunch. She distinguishes visualising, a work of the reasoning mind, from visioning, the pictures given by intuition from the superconscious, and warns that forcing a result through reason brings it to a standstill.

Resist not evil, she teaches, for nothing on earth can resist a person who is wholly non-resistant, as water wears away rock. Evil comes of believing in two powers instead of one. Burdens are not to be fought but cast: I cast this burden on the Christ within, and I go free.

Karma and forgiveness

The game, she says, is a game of boomerangs: a person's thoughts, deeds and words return to them, sooner or later, with astonishing accuracy, and this is the law of karma. But above it stands the law of forgiveness. Christianity, she teaches, is founded on it, and a person may call on it, giving thanks to be under grace and not under law, and so neutralise what would otherwise return. Order belongs to the same law, and she told a woman who wanted prosperity to begin by putting her untidy house in order.

Her books tell many stories of pupils whose spoken words brought money, homes and husbands, and some of healing by denying the appearance of disease. The house teaches them as her belief; no one falls ill by fearing illness, and illness is a matter for a doctor.