The Stage of Your Mind

     The mind is like a stage—the curtain is always up except when we are asleep. There is always some act being performed on that stage. It may be a comedy, a tragedy, interesting or dull, good or bad; but always there is some act playing on the stage of the mind.
    Have you noticed That without any real intent on your part, in the middle of almost any performance, a shady little thought may creep in from the wings and attract your attention? These delinquent through to will try to upstage everybody. 
    If you permit them to go on, all thoughts of any virtue will leave the stage. You will be left, because you consented to it, to the influence of unrighteous thoughts. If you yield to them, they will enact for you on the stage of you mind anything to the limits of your toleration. They may enact a theme of bitterness, jealousy, or hatred. They may be vulgar, immoral, or even depraved. 
    When they have the stage, if you let them, they will devise the most clever persuasions to hold your attention. They can make it interesting all right, even convince you that it is innocent—for they are but thoughts. What you do at a time like that, when the stage of your mind is commandeered by the imps of unclean thinking? Whether they be the gray ones that seem almost clean or the filthy ones that leave no room for doubt?
    If you can control your thoughts, you can overcome habits—even degrading, personal habits. If you can learn to master them, you will have a happy life. 
    I would teach you this. Choose from among the sacred music of the Church a favorite hymn, one with words that are uplifting and music that is reverent, one that makes you feel something akin to inspiration. Go over it carefully in your mind. Memorize it. Even though you have had no musical training, you can think through a hymn. 
    Now, use this hymn as the place for your thoughts to go. Make it your emergency channel. Whenever you find that these shady actors have slipped from the sidelines of your thinking onto the stage of your mind, put on this record, as it were. 
    As the music begins and as the words form in your mind, the unworthy thoughts will slip shamefully away. The hymn will change the whole mood on the stage of your mind. Because it is uplifting and clean, the baser thoughts will disappear, for while virtue, by choice, will not associate with filth, evil cannot tolerate the presence of light.

    In due time you will find yourself, on occasion, humming the music inwardly. As you retrace your thoughts, you discover that some influence from the world about you has encouraged an unworthy thought to move on stage in your mind, and the music has almost automatically begun. 

    Once you learn to clear the stage of your mind from unworthy thoughts, keep it busy with learning worthwhile things. Change your environments so that your have things about you that will inspire good and uplifting thoughts. Keep busy with things that are righteous. 

    Young people, you cannot afford to fill your minds with the unworthy hard music of our day. It is not harmless. It can welcome onto the stage of your mind unworthy thoughts and set the tempo to which they dance, and to which you may act.

    It is easier, so very much easier, when we take such elusive things as thought and compare them with something the students already know about, in the case the actors on a stage. It is more interesting, particularly to the young people. They remember it, and teaching has taken place.