Early Years
Excerpted from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Clayborne Carson
“I remember another experience I used to have in Atlanta. I went to high school on the other side of town-to the Booker T. Washington High School. I had to get the bus in what was known as the Fourth Ward and ride over to the West Side. In those days, rigid patterns of segregation existed on the buses, so that Negroes had to sit in the backs of buses. Whites were seated in the front, and often if whites didn't get on the buses, those seats were still reserved for whites only, so Negroes had to stand over empty seats. I would end up having to go to the back of that bus with my body, but every time I got on that bus I left my mind up on the front seat. And I said to myself, ‘One of these days, I'm going to put my body up there where my mind is.’”
Popular new age principles tell us that our thoughts create our reality. That if we just have the right thoughts (and corresponding feelings), we can manifest everything we ever dreamed of—the right home, the right relationship, the right prosperity. This idea rides on the coat tails of quantum physics experiments, whereby physicist Heisenberg determined that the behavior of particles changes by the act of observation. We also know from science that thoughts, like everything in the universe, have an energetic vibration. So, it’s not too much of a stretch to conclude that our thoughts have the power to manifest our reality. And they do, but mostly in terms of what meaning we make, and less in terms of actually creating “reality.”
To manifest does not mean to create anew, but simply to reveal what is already there. What is often omitted from the new age equation of manifestation, is the underlying (new consciousness) spiritual principle that there already exists in the universe a source of all being, an omnipresent energetic matrix, or divine presence, within which all that we desire or dream of already exists. We only have to align our individual energetic vibration with what already exists, to reveal its presence: to manifest. This is a subtle difference, but a significant one.
Martin Luther King Jr. did not have the benefit of the New Age concepts to hang his dreams on. He did not spend days in meditation or prayer asking for what he wanted, or trying to align his thoughts with his ideals. He simply assumed that the truth of human rights already existed, and his life exemplified the unfolding manifestation of that source.
