I know I’ve posted this before and even made a video about it but it’s such an important concept that I feel I should repeat it frequently. It’s about the Emmet Fox short quip called “The Cafeteria”:

Emmet Fox was pretty new to the United States.  He’d come from London, I believe, England.  He passed by a restaurant and thought “this really looks kind of nice.”

He went in and seated himself at the table and sat there waiting  for the waiter to come on and take his order.  Nothing happened, no one showed up, and he saw all these other people getting their food and he couldn’t figure out what was going on.

He felt something was wrong, and he was getting a bit perturbed, but he’s a very smart man and finally realized that this was a cafeteria although they didn’t have cafeterias yet in England, and he realized that he had to get up and go get his own food.

He made an entire story out of that with excellent meaning and purpose.

In New Thought a lot of people just decide they want something and say “you’re supposed to let God tell you what it is that you want to do, that he wants you to do.”

Metaphysically this means – if we had a banquet table in front of us, and we walked around it for hour after hour after hour, but never said “this is what I want“, we wouldn’t get the food.

We have to get specific and say what we want and make a decision. A lot of people have never learned to make a decision and say “this is what I want.”

If you wanted a car, and you would never say what kind of car you wanted, or the color, or anything else, you’re not going to get it.

Emmet Fox was sitting there and finally realized that he had to get up and go get it, get the food, that it wasn’t going to be brought to him, but it took his watching all the people around him to finally realize that.

You can have a lot of thoughts and ideas but if you never settle on one, never say “this one is what I want”, you’re not going to get it.

No matter how much you watch, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you say you want it, you have to get up and do it.

You have to take action.

Once Emmet Fox  realized that he had to get up and go get the food, he actually had to put his feet on the floor and go do it. The realization wasn’t still going to get him any food. He had to go get it.

Which is the whole idea we have behind the principles that we teach in New Thought – that we have to do something. We can pray, we can meditate, we can find information, we can choose what we want, but unless we actually do something, it’s going to be a long time that we’re just sitting there.

We have omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, and unless we put omniaction in, nothing happens.

We’re in a physical body to take action.

God is spirit.  God doesn’t have the hands and the feet. We’re the hands and the feet. We have to do something.

There’s a lot of people out there that sit and think, “I can create something or make something happen just by thinking it”. They have to be very far advanced for that to happen. They can get the idea from the universe, and it can be a pure idea eventually, but they actually have to implement it.

The more we know about metaphysics, the more we are responsible for.

We can know it and understand it, but we also take action.

Beginners, people who just get into it in the beginning, most frequently get  things right away because all of a sudden they’re getting a new approach to life.

But the more we get into it, the more we realize that for every thing that comes to us in our life, we have to have a change in our minds.

We have to change, have a change of opinion. We have to “let go”…..

We have to let go of “we can’t” and say we can. We have to let go of “not enough” in order to have enough. We have to let go of “poverty” in order to have plenty.

We learn these things. We begin to put these ideas and emotions into stopping the claiming of what we don’t want in our lives. We begin to claim what we do want in our lives and begin take whatever action is necessary.

There are people that say that the New Thought concepts and principles don’t work. Most likely if they have even tried it at all, they haven’t realized these  things from the past, their beliefs, their negative beliefs that they’re claiming, and therefore haven’t let go of them.  Those negative beliefs are anchors weighing you down when you’re trying to move around the ocean.

We’re being held back by our old beliefs and our old feelings and fears and anxieties, frustrations, thinking that we’re not supposed to or can’t or whatever reason we come up with.

What are you waiting for? Take action now!

Terrie