CONTENTS
Some Laws Of Health And Beauty
Mental Intemperance
Law Of Marriage
The God In Yourself
Force, And How To Get It
The Doctor Within
Co-operation Of Thought
The Religion Of Dress
The Necessity Of Riches
Use Your Riches
The Healing And Renewing Force Of Spring
Positive And Negative Thought
Some Laws Of Health And Beauty
Your thoughts shape your face, and give it its peculiar expression. Your thoughts determine the attitude, carriage, and shape of your whole body.
The law for beauty and the law for perfect health is the same. Both depend entirely on the state of your mind; or, in other words, on the kind of thoughts you most put out and receive.
Ugliness of expression comes of unconscious transgressions of a law, be the ugliness in the young or the old. Any form of decay in a human body, any form of weakness, anything in the personal appearance of a man or woman which makes them repulsive to you, is because their prevailing mood of mind has made them so.
Nature plants in us what some call “instinct,” what we call the higher reason, because it comes of the exercise of a finer set of senses than our outer or physical senses, to dislike everything that is repulsive or deformed, or that shows signs of decay. That is the inborn tendency in human nature to shun the imperfect, and seek and like the relatively perfect. Your higher reason is right in disliking wrinkles or decrepitude, or any form or sign of the body’s decay, for the same reason you are right in disliking a soiled or torn garment. Your body is the actual clothing, as well as the instrument used by your mind or spirit. It is the same instinct, or higher reason making you like a well-formed and beautiful body, that makes you like a new and tasteful suit of clothes.
You and generations before you, age after age, have been told it was an inevitable necessity, that it was the law and in the order of nature for all times and all ages, that after a certain period in life your body must wither and become unattractive, and that even your minds must fail with increasing years. You have been told that your mind had no power to repair and recuperate your body — to make it over again, and make it newer and fresher continually.
It is no more in the inevitable order of Nature, that human bodies should decay as peoples’ bodies have decayed in the past than that man should travel only by stage-coach as he did sixty years ago; or that messages could be sent only by letter as they were fifty years ago, before the use of the electric telegraph; or that your portraits could be taken only by the painter’s brush as they were half a century ago, before the discovery that the sun could imprint an image of yourself, an actual part of yourself, on a sensitive surface prepared for it.
It is the impertinence of a dense ignorance for any of us to say what is in or what is to be in the order of nature. It is a stupid blunder to look back at the little we know of the past, and say that it is the unerring index finger telling us what is to be in the future.
If this planet has been what geology teaches it has been, — a planet fuller of coarser, cruder, and more violent forces than now; abounding in forms of coarser vegetable, animal, and even human life and organization than now; of which its present condition is a refinement and improvement as regards vegetable, animal, and man,—is not this the suggestion, the hint, the proof, of a still greater refinement and improvement for the future; a refinement and improvement going on now? Does not refinement imply greater power, as the greater power of the crude iron comes out in steel? And are not these greater and as yet almost unrecognized powers to come out of the highest and most complex form of known organization, man? And are all of man’s powers yet known?
Internally, secretly, among the thinking thousands of this and other lands, is this and many other questions now being asked: “Why must we so wither and decay, and lose the best that life is worth living for, just as we have gained that experience and wisdom that best fits us to live?” The voice of the people is always at first a whispered voice. The prayer or demand or desire of the masses is always at first a secret prayer, demand, wish, or desire, which one man at first dare scarcely whisper to his neighbor for fear of ridicule. But it is a law of Nature, that every demand, silent or spoken, brings its supply of the thing wished for in proportion to the intensity of the wish, and the growing numbers so wishing; who, by the action of their minds upon someone subject, set in motion that silent force of thought, not as yet heeded in the world’s schools of philosophy, which brings the needed supply. Millions so wished in silence for means to travel more rapidly, to send intelligence more • rapidly; and this brought steam and the electric telegraph. Soon other questions and demands are to be answered, questions ever going out in silence from multitudes; and, in answering them, in at first attempting to carry out and prove the answers and the means shown to accomplish or realize manythings deemed impossible or visionary, there will be mistake and stupidity, and blunder and silliness, and breakdowns and failures, and consequent ridicule; just as there were ten smashups on railways, and ten bursted boilers in the earlier era of the use of steam, to one of today. But a truth always goes straight ahead despite mistake and blunder, and proves itself at last.
There are two kinds of age, — the age of your body, and the age of your mind. Your body in a sense is but a growth, a construction, of today, and for the use of today. Your mind is another growth or construction millions of years old. It has used many bodies in its growth. It has grown from very small beginnings to its present condition, power, and capacity in the use of these many bodies. You have, in using these bodies, been far ruder and coarser than you are now. You have lived as now you could not live at all, and in forms of life or expression very different from the form you are now using; and each new body or young body you have worn has been a new suit of clothes for your mind; and what you call ” death ” has been and is but the wearing out of this suit through ignorance of the means, not so much of keeping it in repair, as of building it continually into a newer and newer freshness and vitality.
You are not young relatively. Your present youth means that your body is young. The older your spirit, the better can you preserve the youth, vigor, and elasticity of your body. Because the older your mind, the more power has it gathered from its many existences. You can use that power for the preservation of beauty, of health, of vigor, of all that can make you attractive to others. You can also unconsciously use the same power to make you ugly, unhealthy, weak, diseased, and unattractive. The more you use this power in either of these directions, the more will it make you ugly or beautiful, healthy or unhealthy, attactive or unattractive; that is, as regards unattractiveness for this one existence. Ultimately you must, if not in this in some other existence, be symmetrical; because the evolution of the mind, of which the evolution of our bodies from coarser to higher forms is but a crude counterpart, is ever toward the higher, finer, better, and happier.
That power is your thought. Every thought of yours is a thing as real, though you cannot see it with the physical, or outer eye, as a tree, a flower, a fruit.
Your thoughts are continually molding your muscles into shapes and manner of movement in accordance with their character.
If your thought is always determined and decided, your step in walking will be decided. If your thought is permanently decided, your whole carriage, bearing, and address will show that if you say a thing you mean it.
If your thoughts are permanently undecided, you will have a permanently undecided gesture, address, carriage, or manner of using your body; and this, when long continued, will make the body grow decidedly misshapen in some way, exactly as when you are writing in a mood of hurry, your hurried thought makes misshapen letters, and sometimes misshapen ideas; while your reposeful mood or thought makes well-formed letters and graceful curves as well as well-formed and graceful ideas.
You are every day thinking yourself into some phase of character and facial expression, good or bad. If your thoughts are permanently cheerful, your face will look cheerful.
If most of the time you are in a complaining, peevish, quarrelsome mood, this kind of thought will put ugly lines on your face; they will poison your blood, make you dyspeptic, and ruin your complexion ; because then you are in your own unseen laboratory of mind, generating an unseen and poisonous element, your thought; and as you put it out or think it, by the inevitable law of nature, it attracts to it the same kind of thought-element from others. You think or open your mind to the mood of despondency or irritability, and you draw more or less of the same thought-element from every despondent or irritable man or woman in your town or city. You are then charging your magnet, your mind, with its electric thought-current of destructive tendency, and the law and property of thought connects all the other thought-currents of despondency or irritability with your mental battery, your mind. If we think murder or theft, we bring ourselves by this law into spiritual relationship and rapport with every thief or murderer in the world.
Your mind can make your body sick or well, strong or weak, according to the thought it puts out, and the action upon it of the thought of others. Cry “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, and scores of persons are made tremulous, weak, paralyzed by fear. Perhaps it was a false alarm. It was only the thought of fire, a horror acting on your body, that took away its strength.
The thought or mood of fear has in cases so acted on the body as to turn the hair white in a few hours.
Angered, peevish, worried, or irritable thought affects injuriously the digestion. A sudden mental shock may lose one’s whole appetite for a meal, or cause the stomach to reject such meal when eaten. The injury so done the body suddenly, in a relatively few cases, by fear or other evil state of mind, works injury more gradually on millions of bodies all over the planet.
Dyspepsia does not come so much of the food we eat, as of the thoughts we think while eating it. We may eat the healthiest bread in the world; and if we eat it in a sour temper, we will put sourness in our blood, and sourness in our stomachs, and sourness on our faces. Or if we eat in an anxious frame of mind, and are worrying all the time about how much we should eat or should not eat, and whether it may not hurt us after all, we are consuming anxious, worried, fretful thought-element with our food, and it will poison us. If we are cheerful and chatty and lively and jolly while eating, we are putting liveliness and cheer into ourselves, and making such qualities more and more a part of ourselves. And if our family group eat in silence, or come to the table with a sort of forced and resigned air, as if saying, each one to him or herself, ” Well, all this must be gone over again;” and the head of the family buries himself in his business cares, or his newspaper, and reads all the murders and suicides and burglaries and scandals for the last twenty-four hours; and the queen of the household buries herself in sullen resignation or household cares, then there are being literally consumed at that table, along with the food, the thought-element of worry and murder and suicide and the morbid element, which loves to dwell on the horrible and ghastly; and, as a result, dyspepsia, in some of its many forms, will be manufactured all the way down the line, from one end of the table to the other.
If the habitual expression of a face be a scowl, it is because the thoughts behind that face are mostly scowls. If the corners of a mouth are turned down, it is because most of the time the thoughts which govern and shape that mouth are gloomy and despondent. If a face does not invite people, and make them desire to get acquainted with its wearer, it is because that face is a sign advertising thoughts behind it which the wearer may not dare to speak to others, possibly may not dare to whisper to himself.
The continual mood of hurry, that is, of being in mind or spirit in a certain place long before the body is there, will cause the shoulders to stoop forward; because in such mood you do literally send your thought, your spirit, your real though invisible self, to the place toward which your power, your thought, is dragging your body headfirst; and through such life-long habit of mind does the body grow as the thought shapes it. A “self-contained ” man is never in a hurry; and a self-contained man keeps or contains his thought, his spirit, his power, mostly on the act or use he is making at the present moment with the instrument his spirit uses, his body; and the habitually self-possessed woman will be graceful in every movement, for the reason that her spirit has complete possession and command of its tool, the body; and is not a mile or ten miles away from that body in thought, and fretting or hurrying or dwelling on something at that distance from her body.
When we form a plan for any business, any invention, any undertaking, we are making something of that unseen element, our thought, as real, though unseen, as any machine of iron or wood. That plan or thought begins, as soon as made, to draw to itself, in more unseen elements, power to carry itself out, power to materialize itself in physical or visible substance. When we dread a misfortune, or live in fear of any ill, or expect ill luck, we make also a construction of unseen element, thought, — which, by the same law of attraction, draws to it destructive, and to you damaging, forces or elements. Thus the law for success is also the law for misfortune, according as it is used; even as the force of a man’s arm can save another from drowning, or strike a dagger to his heart. Of whatever possible thing we think, we are building, in unseen substance, a construction which will draw to us forces or elements to aid us or hurt us, according to the character of thought we think or put out.
If you expect to grow old, and keep ever in your mind an image or construction of yourself as old and decrepit, you will assuredly be so. You are then making yourself so.
If you make a plan in thought, in unseen element, for yourself, as helpless, and decrepit, such plan will draw to you of unseen thought-element that which will make you weak, helpless, and decrepit. If, on the contrary, you make for yourself a plan for being always healthy, active, and vigorous, and stick to that plan, and refuse to grow decrepit, and refuse to believe the legions of people who will tell you that you must grow old, you will not grow old. It is because you think it must be so, as people tell you, that makes it so.
If you in your mind are ever building an ideal of yourself as strong, healthy, and vigorous, you are building to yourself of invisible element that which is ever drawing to you more of health, strength, and vigor. You can make of your mind a magnet to attract health or weakness. If you love to think of the strong things in Nature, of granite mountains and heaving billows aud resistless tempests, you attract to you their elements of strength.
If you build yourself in health and strength today, and despond and give up such thinking or building tomorrow, you do not destroy what in spirit and of spirit you have built up. That amount of element so added to your spirit can never be lost; but you do, for the time, in so desponding, that is, thinking weakness, stop the building of your health structure; and although your spirit is so much the stronger for that addition of element, it may not be strong enough to give quickly to the body what you may have taken from it through such despondent thought.
Persistency in thinking health, in imagining or idealizing yourself as healthy, vigorous, and symmetrical, is the corner-stone of health and beauty. Of that which you think most, that you will be, and that you will have most of. You say, “No.” But your bed-ridden patient is not thinking, “I am strong;” he or she is thinking,” I am so weak.” Your dyspeptic man or woman is not thinking, “I will have a strong stomach.” They are ever saying, “I can’t digest anything;” and they can’t, for that very reason.
We are apt to nurse our maladies rather than nurse ourselves. We want our maladies petted and sympathized with, more than ourselves. When we have a bad cold, our very cough sometimes says to others, unconsciously, “I am this morning an object for your sympathy. I am so afflicted! “It is the cold, then, that is calling out for sympathy. Were the body treated rightly, your own mind and all the minds about you would say to that weak element in you, ” Get out of that body !” and the silent force of a few minds so directed would drive that weakness out. It would leave as Satan did when the man of Nazareth imperiously ordered him. Colds and all other forms of disease are only forms of Satan, and thrive also by nursing. Vigor and health are catching also as well as the measles.
What would many grown up people give for a limb or two limbs that had in them the spring and elasticity of those owned by a boy twelve years old; for two limbs that could climb trees, walk on rail fences, and run because they loved to run, and couldn’t help running? If such limbs so full of life could be manufactured and sold, would there not be a demand for them by those stout ladies and gentlemen who get in and out of their carriages as if their bodies weighed a ton? Why is it that humanity resigns itself with scarcely a protest to the growing heaviness, sluggishness, and stiffness that comes even with middle age?
I believe, however, we compromise with this inertia, and call it dignity. Of course a man and a father and a citizen and a voter and a pillar of the State — of inertia — shouldn’t run and cut up and kick up like a boy, because he can’t. Neither should a lady who has grown to the dignity of a waddle run as she did when a girl of twelve, because she can’t, either. Actually we put on our infirmities as we would masks, and hobble around in them, saying, “This is the thing to do, because we can’t do anything else.” Sometimes we are even in a hurry to put them on; like the young gentleman who sticks an eye-glass to his eye, and thereby the sooner ruins the sight of a sound organ, in order to look tony or bookish, or as a chromo literary fiend.
There are more and more possibilities in Nature, in the elements, and in man and out of man; and they come as fast as man sees and knows how to use these forces in Nature and in himself. Possibilities and miracles mean the same thing.
The telephone sprung suddenly on ” our folks ” of two hundred years ago would have been a miracle, and might have consigned the person using it to the prison or the stake; all unusual manifestations of Nature’s powers being then attributed to the Devil, because the people of that period had so much of the Devil, or cruder element, in them as to insist that the universe should not continually show and prove higher and higher expressions of the higher mind for man’s comfort and pleasure.
Mental Intemperance
Temperance means the proper use of force. Intemperance means the improper use of force.
An angry man has made an improper use of his force, because the element of angered thought he sends from him to another may as thought hurt the other person, and it certainly does hurt the one who sends it.
An angry man is, temporarily, intoxicated as is the man we call drunk from over-much liquor, and for a reason quite similar. He has first called up in himself the element of anger; and this element is attracting of its own kind, as put out from all other angry persons; because thought runs in currents as real as currents of water, and every peculiar order of thought joins its own peculiar current. When you are angry, you connect with the current of angered thought. It then runs through you, and acts on you. You become then a part of the chain for the conveyance of angered thought, as well as an additional battery on that chain for its generation. You are helping to swell the great current of anger; and you are also receiving from, as well as giving to, that current. You are also helping to make other people angry with greater ease, since the angered thought you generate increases the amount and power of all the other volume, from which is sent the element of anger to any person who attracts it by calling up the mood of anger.
In a similar manner will any mood of mind attract to it the same order of thought-element. Your indecision attracts from the great current of undecided thought, and makes you a way battery or station for both the generation and conveyance of that order of thought. You charge your mental battery with the element of fear; and, as it draws such element, it increases its amount and strength for drawing to you more fear.
A violent fit of anger calls that element to act on the body which racks and strains it. Hence the weakness of body felt after and even during anger, since the more healthful and strong order of thought, or force, is temporarily cut off or unable to act on the body.
If so you attract and drink in the thought-element of impatience or indecision or fear, you are quite as much unfitted for successful effort as if you drank alcohol; for, though it does not make you uproarious or stupid, it does wear out your body by degrees. Sudden fright sometimes kills the body instantly. Suspense (only another name for fear) makes the muscles weak and tremulous, affects the stomach, embraces the nerves, and dazes the mind.
Could you see clairvoyantly a man or woman very much frightened, you would see two, — the body in one place, and the invisible self at a distance from the body, struggling to leave it entirely; and, when a man or woman faints, it is because, through pain or terror, so much of the spirit has temporarily left the body.
People very much frightened drink in or absorb this destructive unseen element, and its effects in shaking the nerves and paralyzing physical effort are as strongly marked as when a man drinks too much alcohol. But the element of fear or anger or indecision, taken in lesser quantities day after day, month after month, year after year, as when you are always fearing something in the future, or more or less angry, peevish, irritable, impatient, undecided, every day you live, is a species of tippling with a dangerous unseen element, and wears your physical body out gradually and surely.
It is as cheap to invite, or think, the healthy unseen element of courage as of fear, of even temper as of anger, of decision as indecision; and you do this every time you think or say “Courage,” or “Decision,” or “Good temper” to yourself. The qualities you set your mind on you draw to you; and, for the timid or irresolute or ill-tempered, it is most profitable to spend on arising in the morning, if no more than ten seconds in saying, ” Courage,” “Decision,” “Even temper,” or any quality in which they feel lacking; because in so doing you connect yourself with and draw courage or even temper or decision from the currents of this order of thought. You are also stronger so to draw in the morning than in the latter part of the day. All organized elements — plant, animal, man — are fuller of strength when the tide of the sun’s force bears directly on this planet. When it ebbs in the afternoon, there is an ebb of power, be that power in man applied to muscular or mental effort.
The mood of mind you are in on first arising is the mood most likely to last during the day. You may not feel the growth of more courage, decision, or even temper from this simple practice, at first. You will in time; and you will wonder at the change in yourself, and where your greater force, courage, decision, or other good healthful thought came from. If you call this trivial, ask yourself if you know anything at all of the nature or cause or composition of a single one of your own thoughts.
The worst intemperance of today is that coming of hurry or impatience, or the desire and attempt to crowd the doing of so many things in an hour or a day. The hurried, impatient mood in which you may tie your shoe-strings, or put on your clothing, in the morning, you may carry into every act during the day. You, in so doing, have connected yourself with the current of impatient, hurried thought. You have then become a part of that chain of being, or order, of hurried mind; and, could you see your real situation clairvoyantly, you would see yourself linked by invisible wires to every other hurried, impatient, and consequently fretful, and more or less irritable human being. For hurry and impatience lead as surely to fretfulness, irritability, and ill temper, as the river flows to the sea.
You are very apt to carry the hurried mood of mind in which you tie your shoe-strings into the writing of a letter which may involve to you the gain or loss of thousands of dollars. The hurried, impatient mood runs its wire of disorderly thought and slovenly act straight through from one act to another, and leaves its traces and its damage on all. And so when you have dressed in a hurry, eaten in a hurry, and rushed to the street-car in a hurry, if you do not carry hurry and neglect and forgetfulness into your business, you may still have the harder task to throw off this mood of mind, and get “into the more reposeful and deliberate one in which you pursue your business or occupation; and in trying to get down to your work, or, in other words, get up that interest and enthusiasm or enjoyment in your work, which you crave, and without which you cannot do it, you use up a great deal of force which might have been put directly in your work, and which you might the sooner have had, had you laid for it the corner-stone by tying your shoe-strings with a religious and devout carefulness in the morning, and in so doing have connected a religious, careful, orderly, and therefore pleasant and profitable mood of mind to every act done throughout the day. It pays in dollars and in health and in happiness to make well-formed letters in writing, for the mood which makes the well-formed letter begets the mood which makes the well-formed plan. And, although you may see men apparently successful who are always in a hurry, you will find on closer examination theirs is not a whole success; for, though they may gain in wealth of dollars, they are surely losing in the wealth of health, without which nothing that dollars bring can be enjoyed. That is not a healthy mind or body, either, which can enjoy nothing but the heaping up of money, the article which represents food, clothes, shelter, and all necessary and enjoyable things.”
The slower movement of body which characterizes the religious form, rite, and ceremonial of all faiths, and in all ages, had for its object, and was intended by a greater Wisdom as a first lesson, to teach man the use and profit and pleasure which comes of put ting our thought, or as much thought or force as maj be necessary, on the act we are doing now. It is a law of our beings, that, when the painter can put his whole thought in the handling of his brush; when the orator or actor puts his whole force on his method of expression, and allows none of that force to stray off in the self-conscious channel of thinking how A, B, or C may judge or criticize that method; when, as Shakespeare says, you “give to each proportioned thought its act ” (that is, carry out the act as your thought has first shaped or planned such act), as when the athlete or gymnast or graceful dancer put their whole thought or force in the muscle needed for use, and expression at the instant, — there comes of this the careful religious concentrative mood or use of our force, always bringing pleasure to ourselves and pleasure to others; and the giving first of happiness to ourselves, and next happiness to others, through the proper use and expenditure of the forces belonging to us, is the great aim and use of the sentiment or quality we term religion.
Every impatient act, no matter how trivial, costs an unprofitable outlay of force or thought. Every impatient act is an act without a plan. You do plan a blow with a hammer before you make it: if you did not, the hammer would strike wide of its mark. You plan the proper intonation or accent of a word before you speak it. You plan the graceful movement before you make it. These things may be planned with the quickness of lightning or thought, but planned they are; and those acts bring pleasure to you and others from being well done. That is the reward of mental temperance, and there are much greater rewards, also; for the habit of so doing all acts brings you more and more power and health and strength.
When you tug impatiently at the knob of the door that won’t open easily, or pull impatiently at the knot that won’t untie, you are sending force or thought into that knob or knot with little or no plan as to its use or direction. You are sending, also, a great deal more force or thought into that knob or knot than is needed to open or untie. This is an intemperate use of force. This is the wildest extravagance, because it is expending force you cannot recall, in effecting nothing. It is expending far more power than if it had been deliberately planned, not only uselessly so far as this effort is concerned, but you are strengthening the habit of so uselessly expending or wasting force in the doing of all things. You are training your mind to this habit of extravagance, and this habit will bring you weakness and loss in every direction.
When you send your thought or force ahead of your body, and in the store toward which you are hurrying (as you actually do while hurrying to that store), the most of your real and invisible self goes to that store, and is in that store, uselessly expending itself, because it has not the body, its instrument, to work with. It has not the body’s senses to touch with, the body’s physical eye to see with, the body’s material tongue to talk with. You are really in that store, having only your finer or interior senses, and these cannot act on material things.
You are then as a carpenter would be who came to his work without his saw or hammer or other tools. Your thought, your invisible self, or most of it, in the store represents the carpenter. The saw or hammer represents your body, which you are dragging wearily on, with the little spirit or force left in it, five or six blocks away; and the force you expend uselessly, in dragging it, could have been better used in selecting the proper quality of cloth, or matching colors, or in seeing that you did not have some article forced upon you by the salesman, who knows just what you want, because you haven’t mind enough left in you, when you’ve got your body at last in that store, to know what you want yourself. Force means judgment and tact and discretion and taste; you know you part, temporarily, with most of these qualities when you are hurried and flurried and flustered and excited. It is when in this condition, that the salesman, who is cool and collected, and has all his wits, his force, his thought, about him, can throw his mind or thought into yours, and make you see with his eyes, and judge with his judgment; and as a result you may buy what you find, on getting home and pulling yourself (your mind) together, that you don’t want at all.
It is this habit of mind which causes what is called “nervous diseases.” When you send your thought, or force, away from your body to some place you are hurrying the body to, be it store, railway-station, ferry-boat, or the top of the stairs, you are sending away from you that unseen element of strength for which the nerves are the conductors through your body, as the telegraph-wire conducts from town to town a cruder form of the same force. When you fall into the habit of so sending it away, you are tremulous, — or, as we say, the nerves are shaken, — for lack of this unseen vital power. Sudden fright may send instantly a great volume of this element from you. Hence the body has no strength left in it. In other words, your real self, your spirit, your force, has mostly gone from the body; and, when fright kills, it is because an actual end or link of unseen element, which bound spirit and body together, has snapped. Your invisible self is really an organized body of this force.
The more nerve or force you call to the body, or any part of the body, you would use, the more nerve you will have. The more nerve you get, the more you will attract to you. There is no limit to its increase. Your thought or force — so by habit set massed in a bunch, as it were — is a magnet, ever growing in power to attract more force.
You can throw yourself, or your force, from the word you are speaking, or the idea or emotion you are trying to express, on the next word or the next emotion or idea to be expressed, even as you throw your force, or invisible self, from acting on your body to acting without the body in the store; and, when we do this, we slur our words and sentences. We run them together; and little or no effect is produced on our hearers, because we have in speaking them produced little or no effect on ourselves. You cannot make an audience really feel a sentiment unless you feel it yourself. Enthusiasm and earnestness are contagious. Enthusiasm means ” God with us;” and God is not with us, and cannot be felt, unless we hold for the moment our whole share of the infinite force or mind on that part of the body with which we endeavor to express that mind. You train for the concentration of force in a syllable, in order to give it clear enunciation, when you train to pick a pin from the floor, and think for the moment only of the act, because you are then training to throw your force to any part of the body you wish to use at a second’s notice, and also to throw that force from anyone part to another part, — organ, limb, muscle, lip, eye, forehead, nostril, lung, or tongue, — in that inappreciable flash of time, so rapid that not even the watch’s second-hand can measure its passage; and when you see and hear the oratory or declamation or expression of sentiment from the throat of the singer, or action of the danseuse, that thrills and compels your admiration, you are acted on by so many flashes of power or mind, turned sometimes by a conscious and sometimes an unconscious discipline, to act on that part of the instrument, the body, it is desirable for the fraction of a second to use.
You are training to rid yourself of self-consciousness (only another name for the fear you may have for what A, B, and C may think or say of your body’s expression of an idea) when you train to throw your whole spirit or force, or as much of it as may be necessary, on the proper sharpening of a pencil; for the more readily you can put what volume of power may be necessary to perform one act, the more readily can you turn that power on the performance of any other act; and when you are self-conscious, or thinking of your audience in any way, you are expending just so much power or thought which should be turned on the expression of an idea.
A great orator, a great actor, may be a very slovenly man in other departments of life and action; he may be a very hurried man, and so let his power run to waste. He would have had far greater power in his special talent, had he so trained to hold his force in all acts. He would have lived longer. He would have had better health. He would not have used some artificial stimulant or strength to supply temporarily the force he wasted; for it is exhaustion only that begets a liquor appetite. A tree may grow up and take up a millstone with it. It would be a more symmetrical tree without the millstone. A powerful mind may shine despite its millstone, but the power placed to carry the millstone could be used to better purpose elsewhere. This unconscious wastage of force is as the millstone to many a mind; and the planet has not yet seen the fullest expression of mind, the genius it is yet to see, as mind learns how to cut loose from the many millstones it is now carrying.
If yours is the finest quality of thought, the thought fullest of fertility, of imagination, of invention, of activity, you have the most power for any purpose, mental or physical. But the greater your power, the finer and more subtle and more difficult to retain or hold is that element, or combination of elements, which has made your peculiar order or quality of thought; and, like some chemical combinations, the more explosive power they have, the more difficult it is to hold or keep them. For this reason, it often happens that the highest order of intellect is physically weak. It wastes its strength in some form of impatience. A high order of mind sends out many times the volume of force in a fit of irritability, that a clod would do in similar mood.
As to quality of thought, one mind may, as to power, be as gunpowder, and another, fulminate of mercury. A half thimbleful of fulminate has as much explosive power as lies in half a keg of powder; and the fulminate, whether of thought or substance, must be more carefully guarded than the common powder.
Your sudden cold comes often not because you sat in a draught, but because, through lack of force, sent in an impatient mood from the body, there was not enough left in it to keep open the skin pores, and keep them at work expelling invisible waste matter. The pores then closed up; the waste was re-absorbed into vein and artery, which then carried death instead of life, and made you feel “half dead.” It is the exhausted body which is most liable to take cold. You could have sat in that draught without taking cold had your full force been concentrated on the body, as you had sat many a time in a similar draught without injury.
People unconsciously get so mastered by the habit of sending their force or thought away from the body on the thing to be done, or the place they want to be in, an hour hence, or a minute hence, that at last they lose the ability to fasten their thought thoroughly on anything. That means a “scatterbrain,” or a brain so fallen into the habit of scattering its force that it can do nothing but scatter. That means a weak intellect, — not always because such an intellect as a whole is really weak, but because it has lost the power of bringing its forces together and keeping them together. It is like owning a million of dollars, scattered in ten-cent packages all over the world. Of what help to an engineer would be the steam generated in one hundred teapots? There is steam enough in them to move an engine; but how will he concentrate its force, save in one boiler? We can be as to the use we make of our thought, and the power we get out of it, either an hundred teapots, sizzling and fizzling away, and scattered over a whole town; or we can be a boiler, generating the force to do something and move something.
Lack of power to fasten thought on anything means some of the many shades of insanity. An insane mind is a mind which has lost the power to fasten its thought on any centre or thing; or a mind which, having fastened on an idea, has lost the power to get off that idea, subject, or centre. Habitually keeping thought, or force, thrown off on the thing to be done, instead of the thing we are now doing, leads to both forms of mental derangement. A strong mind, which can mass its forces, cultivates power to forget, for the time, what may trouble, through concentrating on what may please and profit it and others. Example: If I grieve day after day over a departed friend, I hurt myself. I expend so much force on tears and sad thoughts, I hurt also my friend; because, in so directing my mind upon him, I send him a current of gloomy thought, which depresses and worries. He in turn, so oppressed, is the more liable to send the same thought to others, and oppress them. It matters not whether the friend so grieved for, and so injured, be in a seen or unseen existence. The results are the same.
If, unconsciously, you cultivate any of these moods which send the spirit, or force, from the body, you will have, by degrees, less and less of the spirit able to act on the body; and the less of your invisible self you have so to act, the less strength of any sort will you have. A person habitually timid may live with half or more of his real self, and the better half, too, entirely unable to make the body act up to its higher, or more courageous, resolve or thought; because the body grows, and adapts itself in shape and movement and manner of movement in accordance with the order of thought most acting upon it. So a mind having plenty of courage, but which has habitually and ignorantly cultivated timidity, may not at first be able physically to express courage, so great is the power accumulated by the body so trained to the habit of timidity by the mind.
That, also, is a species of mental intemperance, which cannot sit still, — which keeps feet patting ‘ on the floor, or legs swinging, or fingers drumming. You expend thought in these acts; you expend force: you have so much the less force to use. You weaken yourself in every way by these movements, which you may have for years unconsciously cultivated, until it becomes a habit difficult to break off. You are then walking without getting anywhere. You are actually working without accomplishing anything. You will commence the control of your mind, and the preservation of your force for doing something, by keeping your limbs quiet and stopping this waste. You will sleep far better when you have stopped this mental and muscle jigging; for the mind does carry this pernicious habit to bed with it, and there through long habit keeps the body tossing and turning, so preventing the spirit from detaching most of itself from the body, as the spirit must do to give the body sound, healthy sleep. And, when you have conquered this habit, you have made a great stride toward the power of dismissing any train of thought, or of switching your thought from one train or track to another: for the balanced and powerful mind is a system of departments, and has the power at any time to close one department or workshop, forget all about it temporarily in a few minutes, and throw all its force in another; and, when it does this, the department that is closed not only rests, but recuperates and repairs itself.
There are other rests, both for mind and body, besides sleep; and in more advanced and cultivated stages of existence you will rest in change of occupation, and the physical and mental strength you can gain here through cultivating repose ; or, in other words, keeping your thought under control has no limit. As you cultivate this control or repose, you will have continual gain of strength; and, if you do not cultivate it, you will have continual loss; for ” to him that hath shall be given, and to him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”
The Law Of Marriage
The refining element in nature is feminine. The greater constructive force in nature is masculine. The clearer-seeing element in nature is feminine. The ability to do what the feminine force or mind sees is the fit thing to do, is masculine. Woman can best see how effort on the rougher stratum of life should be done. Man is best fitted to do on that cruder stratum, because the masculine or relatively cruder organization is best fitted to work on that stratum. Woman’s spiritual eye always sees farther than man’s. Man’s spiritual hand, or force, has more power to do what the feminine eye sees should be done. Woman’s spiritual eye, or intuition, is always opened in advance of man’s. For this reason, there are far more clairvoyants among women than men. For this reason, women are the first to apprehend all new revelation. In the truths which are forcing themselves into notice today, there are many more intelligent feminine believers than of the other sex. For this reason the most faithful followers of Christ were women. For this reason it has become almost an adage that woman “jumps at correct conclusions,” because her capacity of foretelling results in business, of warning man whom to trust and whom not to trust, — in other words, her sense of feeling the truth,—is keener than that of man’s, on the same principle, and by the same law applied in another direction, that the more delicately adjusted meteorological instrument will be the most sensitive to varying conditions of the air, and therefore give notice of coming changes. For this reason have women been the most devout and persistent in religious observance, — because the Church has held and does hold today the clews which shall yet weld together in a consistent whole what men call science and what they call religion. It has been woman’s spiritual eye which has caught the glimmerings of these truths; perverted, distorted, misinterpreted, and misapplied as they have been, not through any fault of the truth, but through the blindness of the eyes, which it is the office of that truth eventually to make clear.
Woman’s clearer sight will, in all stages of growth and existence, be clearer than man’s; and man will always have the most power to carry out the idea for which he is indebted to woman. And for every man’s peculiar power, there can be but one feminine clear-seeing eye or mind to tell him where and how to use that power; and the feminine eye is predestined for the masculine constructive hand, and only for that hand; and when the two come together and work together, as ultimately they must, there is the true marriage.
The feminine force or mind is a necessary and inevitable part of the masculine force or mind. In other realms of existence where these two, the masculine and feminine, in the shape of one man and one woman, understand their true relationship to each other, and live up to that relationship, there are powers to each coming of the union of these two spirits, that our relatively weak human imaginations can barely realize. Because, in those domains of existence, every thought, every ideal, every imagination, becomes a reality. We dream, and wish, and long, for things desirable. But out of the married spiritual powers of one man and one woman in the higher order of existence, it becomes possible in very short periods of time to make realities of what here we may term dreams and air-castles.
The corner-stone of this power lies in marriage; that is, the marriage of the right man to the right woman, — the eternal marriage of one man to one woman; the eternal union and consequent thought fruition of the predestined man to the woman predestined for that man.
For every created man there is a created woman, who stands to him, and him alone, as the only true wife he can have in this world, or any other. They shall each in the other realize all their ideals of wedded bliss; and their eternal life when both are relatively complete, and when both understand their relation, use, and fitness to each other, shall be an eternal honeymoon.
Many couples are genuinely married now who do not get along at all happily together. They may never live happily together in their present embodiments. But they will assuredly meet in other re-embodiments as other physical individuals, — man and woman, — and with other names and their spiritual or higher selves will eventually recognize each other.
A man’s true wife, whether her mind or spirit have a physical body to use on this stratum of life or not, is the only woman in the universe who can give, impress, or inspire him with the highest ideas he is capable of receiving. And such ideas from such source shall for him have a fitness and use, suitable for his peculiar intellect and his peculiar work, business enterprise, or undertaking, at the time they are received from her; nor can he receive from any other being in the universe that idea or order of thought which shall suit his peculiar needs. The true husband of such a wife, whether his spirit has a physical body or not, is the only man in the universe to carry the ideas received from his wife into execution.
This fitness and adjustment each to the other constitute their oneness. She, through the fineness and greater sensitiveness of her organization, receives thought from the higher domain of mind. She is, so to speak, the more sensitive photographic plate for receiving impression. His is the more suitable intellect for a relatively coarser stratum of life to put the ideas so received into execution. But the man’s is not the stronger intellect for originating ideas; or, in other words, for receiving the finer and more powerful thought. All leading ideas have been brought into the world by women. Man has unconsciously taken or absorbed them from her, and then ignorantly given himself full credit for them. Behind every great enterprise or movement in the world’s history, there has been the generally unknown woman who has inspired the man or men prominent in such movement. It was Mme. Roland who inspired the Gironde to demand a constitutional government for France. It was Josephine who fed Napoleon with the ideas which resulted in his triumphant career until their separation. It was Isabella of Spain, who prompted and persisted and importuned the hesitating Ferdinand to aid Columbus to re-discover that new world which her woman’s intuition, soaring beyond the narrow bounds of what the world calls ” reason,” told her existed. Behind Washington stood his wife, who shared with him the hardships of Valley Forge, and who was also the still unrecognized communicator to him of those ideas and that power which his intellect used in securing American independence. Behind every successful man, in every grade and phase of life, in every successful business or undertaking, there has been somewhere, seen or unseen, a woman, his inspirer.
Woman has more power today, and uses more power, than even she realizes. Because the power and effect of woman’s thought are everywhere, and every man feels it according to his sensitiveness or capacity for feeling, or absorbing thought.
A woman’s mind may teem with invention j and every thought or idea of this order may be absorbed and used and unconsciously taken from her by some man more or less in association with her. A woman’s mind may be full of business ideas and business capacity, and this may be absorbed and appropriated in the same way by a man; while she may neither receive credit for these gifts, nor even credit herself for giving them. It is a truth, that valuable ideas may be given away to others when but few, if any, words pass between them. Worse yet, it sometimes happens, that if yours is the finest thought, and someone with whom you are much in association is the coarser mind, the finer is absorbed to an extent; while you absorb, and get back in return, the coarser. You may then act that coarser thought, think it, and be governed by it. You will not be then using your own, the superior power (that is, thought), but the other, the inferior; and for such reason, you will not prosper so well in business, or succeed so well in your art. This is the damage inferred by an ancient writer when he said, “Be ye not unequally yoked together.”
Woman is not the “weaker,” but the finer vessel. She is to man what the delicately adjusted magnetic needle of the compass is to the helm which steers the ship. Being the finer instrument, she does need to be shielded and protected from the cruder forces with which man deals, as the engineer shields and protects his theodolite, or the sailor his compass or sextant.
If, then, the finer instrument for receiving the finer idea is obliged to deal at the same time with the cruder forces of Nature, or, in other words, do man’s work, the instrument will be injured and blunted, and rendered less sensitive, and in turn man will not, through her, receive what he would were the instrument better protected; and in consequence man will be injured in health and fortune.
For this reason Christ commended Mary, as having chosen the better part, because she did not make of herself a household drudge, as did Martha. Mary, by not tiring her body, was keeping her mind clear to receive ideas. If you tire and fag the body, you make it more difficult for the spirit to act on that body, and more difficult for it to aspire and reach literally out and up, permanently, above the crude stratum or current of thought all about us, and into the regions of higher, finer, and more powerful thought.
It is only the barbaric idea which declares that household work shall be exclusively woman’s work. In-door work, where cooking, bed-making, washing, baby-tending, and a dozen or twenty other duties fall on a woman in a single morning, is far more exhausting than following the plough, or any single line of masculine effort; for the more things you have on your mind, to do within a given time, the more force (that is, thought) are you sending out in different directions within a given time; and this exhausts quicker than if force is concentrated on one line of effort, as when a man is keeping books, or digging, or at work on the forge, the desk, or the carpenter’s bench. So if woman is made a drudge, her spiritual eyesight, or faculty of getting new ideas, is blunted; because the force necessary to get that idea is turned to muscular effort. If man also drudges, his power to receive her idea, and work it out, is also crippled.
If a man will not or cannot recognize this relation and use of his real wife to him, he may have a compass which he refuses to use. If he continually scoffs at her impressions or intuitions or suggestions, as to his life and methods of business, he may at last so injure the compass as to make it quite useless. In other words, he will blunt her intellect, cripple her intuition, and choke up the fount of her inspiration. He will quite sever her connection, and ability to reach and draw from the higher current of constructive thought. He will injure her health and his own. He will injure her intellect and his own. He is dragging down on lower and coarser levels of life himself, and her with him.
They are parts and forces, making ONE Whole, which God, or the Infinite Spirit of Good, has joined together.
The so-called mythological fable, of Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, springing, in full fruition of power, from the brain of Jove, implies the superior feminine capacity for absorbing the finer and more powerful thought, idea, or greater wisdom, and transmitting it to man in mass, the lump of gold which it is his capacity and strength to beat out and fashion into forms of beauty.
The question has often arisen, “Why has woman accomplished relatively, as compared with man, so little in the more active fields of effort, in invention, in business?” The answer is, that in every department of life, without the feminine brain behind his own, so transmitting original and fresher thought and idea to him, man has accomplished little or nothing, whether as conqueror on the field of battle, or conqueror in the fields of art or invention. He absorbed from her idea without knowing it. She has sent her thought to him without knowing it. The man has been in all these cases the unconscious gainer. The woman has been the unconscious giver. Neither knew that the chief parts of their real beings were invisible, and that these parts — filaments, so to speak, of thought — reached out far, far from their bodies, meeting, mingling, attracting, giving, and receiving an unseen element, – thought. In this way and without knowing it, woman has ever done her work; the feeder and inspirer of every man who has ever done anything great — whether such greatness be the greatness of good or the greatness of bad, the greatness of Lucifer’ or the greatness of Christ.
The adoration paid the Virgin Mary by the Catholic Church implies that it is the office and function of the feminine mind or spiritual organization to bring greater wisdom, knowledge, and truth to earth, the lower and cruder stratum of existence. Spiritually Mary’s soul reached far into the higher realm of mind from whence came Christ’s spirit; and without this nearness and relationship of Mary’s to that realm, could she ever have given to the world a body fitted for the use of such an exalted spirit as the Christ’s? And not until men adore and reverence the feminine element, mind and spirit as the agency, conduit, or messenger for bringing more knowledge to earth, will they be able to possess and use powers equal and even superior to those of the Christ’s. Deity is not merely masculine. Deity, or in other words, The Power of Giving, must, to use such power, be both masculine and feminine. When we aspire, when we desire that which is noble and refined up to our full capacity of realizing nobility and refinement, we are actually sending our thought, a literal part of ourselves, into the higher and more refined and more powerful current of thought. The feminine spirit has more power to so send its thought than has the masculine; and although man may express in words or other ways grand and beautiful ideas, it is because those ideas have in the rough, so to speak, been brought him through a woman seen or unseen. She might not have been able to put them out in the form he did, or express or act them in his peculiar method. But she gives the idea just as I may give you the diamond, and you may cut and polish it, which the woman might not so well be able to do. But she finds the diamonds, and for her true companion it is ever her delight to find the diamonds of thought, of idea, of device; and it is in the completed union as great a pleasure for him to put the idea so given by her into practical operation. If woman is made to work as it may suit man’s present convenience to have her work, she will find him clay instead of diamonds.
If woman, when she finds out her true value and relationship to man, will not assert that value and insist on its recognition, not in the style of the scold or vixen, but that of the dignified, loving queen, anxious to please, but firm in insisting on her method of pleasing and serving, then she is as much at fault and fully as responsible for all the pains that she suffers as he is. Because no one can get justice for us but ourselves; and it is our business, when we see clearly that we have a value for others, to make known our value to them. If those te whom we make it known cannot see it, then we should cease giving until they can see it; and if we continue to give when we see our gifts misappropriated and wasted, then we are the greatest sinners. If you throw silver dollars to a crowd in the street, they will scramble for all you throw, and barely thank you for them. There is often just as unwise and profitless giving of sympathy and all the aid that comes of sympathy in the closest relations of life. When any gift ceases to be fully appreciated, and is still looked for as a matter of course, he or she who so continues to give sins more than he or she who receives; for if they know the value of what is given, and the other party does not, it is the business of the wisest party to take some method for making that value known. Sympathy is force. If you think a great deal of another, and yours is the superior mind, you are sending them force, sending them a current of thought element, which may feed, inspire, and strengthen them in both mind and body. If you do not receive back a thought current of similar quality, you are injured in mind and body. You give, as it were, gold, and get back iron. The inferior mind you so feed and strengthen may be able to absorb but a part of your gold—your quality of thought. The rest is wasted. That inferior mind may in cases be that of the true husband, whose spirit as yet has not grown to fully appreciate the value to him of his partner’s thought. A man and woman begin to realize the result and profit of a true marriage when both are united in the purpose of making themselves more healthy in mind, and as an inevitable result more healthy in body, and when both have one great aim or purpose in life.
They will recognize that if the thought of one is in any way low, groveling, or vulgar, such thought must prove an injury, and the greatest of injury, to the other, and if persisted in will ultimately prove an injury to both. Both will be ambitious and aspiring to make of themselves ever-growing powers for good to all. When the man recognizes in the feminine companion mind a source to him of new idea, — a river flowing to him from the currents of clearer thought; when she in the man recognizes in turn the power that shall take and apply this thought to practical uses on that stratum of life with which her finer organization is less fitted to cope — then theirs is a true marriage. Then as regulating their united lives on this basis, and demanding, desiring, or praying often for divine guidance, or, in other words, for ever-increasing store of clearer and wiser thought, will they give each other new life to the body and new life and power to the mind. They will re-clothe their spirits with new bodies. They will ultimately live as they may desire, either in the seen or physical world, or in that unseen world of spirit in which they may belong. They are then on the road to powers hitherto unknown or but vaguely hinted at in this our present stage of immaturity and crude and imperfect civilization. They will be each to the other as healers, as teachers, and always as lovers; and the stage of the next year’s love, the next month’s love, the next week’s love, and tomorrow’s love, will be one more exalted, more blissful, more intense, than the love of today. Because their union is of that order suggested by a teacher of old; it is as “a savor of life unto life,” and not of ” death unto death,” as any outward union must be which is not sanctified by both love and aspiration to be better, purer, and more powerful tomorrow than today. And it is only a united aspiration for more of goodness, more of power, more of Divinity, that will bring what is now so often and so vainly sought for, the love which ever glows, the love which never tires, the love which is today as tender and considerate in so called trivial things as it was when wooing was the order of the day, and the too common indifference of winning had not set in.
The reason that the priests of more than one faith are enjoined to celibacy is not because marriage in its highest sense is for them really wrong. It is because that the real wife of the true priest, the man of a finer type than those about him on the earth stratum of life, does not live on this, the seen side of existence, but in the other; and from that other is still constantly bringing him new ideas, new plans, new truth, new inspiration; and should that man come into much association with another person, and allow his sympathies and life to become much absorbed in that person, he would thereby surround himself with that person’s coarser and inferior thought clement; and this, besides giving him lower and coarser thought, would form a barrier and cut him off completely from his companion-priestess, his wife, and the two halves of the complete whole (or the whole in time to be completed) would be temporarily separated. Such separation can only be temporary. When the first Napoleon left Josephine (who was his true wife) and married Maria Louisa, his fortune deserted him, because he absorbed from the Austrian princess an inferior order of thought. It blinded him. It warped his judgment. It cut him off from his true source of inspiration or force. Josephine warned him against undertaking the fatal campaign against Russia; for, such confidence had Napoleon in Josephine’s judgment and intuition, that he sought it many times after their separation. But the atmosphere of the lower order of thought, through daily association, was too near him to see with his true wife’s eyes as before, because the influence or mind of the person you are in the closest association with will be the ruling influence to greater or less extent, despite all your efforts to prevent it. If it be as a lower order of thought, it is pitch; and you cannot escape having that pitch cling to you.
It is not possible for any other man or woman to put asunder permanently those whom God, or the Infinite Force of Good, has joined together. They are as much destined for each other, as the planet is destined for the sun about which it revolves.
It is in the possibilities of existence, that the two of a complete marriage may be the one in the physical, the other in the spiritual or physically unseen life. It is also among other possibilities to be recognized in the future, that through the continual closeness and blending of the thought or spirit of the two, there would grow eventually a tangible union, even on this side of life, and that, in any case, they would be united on the other side; a union which would be retarded if the other road was followed. For, if the man so situated unite himself with another woman, he might find on losing his body, that though his life with her was not happy, yet her influence or thought, whether she was in the body or out of it, still hung about him, drawing him away from his real partner, or forming betwixt him and her a barrier she could not pass or penetrate, and often as a result of this another re-incarnation will be inevitable before his spirit attains to such strength, or sees with the spiritual eye with sufficient clearness to know the woman destined for him.
But I mean here by priest and priestess, every man or woman inspired in the field of poetry, or letters, or statesmanship, or stateswomanship, or art, or invention, or anything which in the domain of mind shines with lasting brilliancy and gives all lasting good. All men and all women who can do anything better than it is now done, and thereby give to life a more lasting brightness and happiness, be they healer, teacher, actor, artist, mechanic, inventor, are priests in their vocation.
The God In Yourself
As a spirit, you are a part of God or the Infinite Force or Spirit of good. As such part, you are an ever-growing power which can never lessen, and must always increase, even as it has in the past through many ages always increased, and built you up, as to intelligence, to your present mental stature. The power of your mind has been growing to its present quality and clearness through many more physical lives than the one you are now living. Through each past life you have unconsciously added to its power. Every struggle of the mind — be it struggle against pain, struggle against appetite, struggle for more skill in the doing of anything, struggle for greater advance in any art or calling, struggle and dissatisfaction at your failings and defects — is an actual pushing of the spirit to greater power, and a greater relative completion of yourself, — and with such completion, happiness. For the aim of living is happiness.
There is today more of you, and more of every desirable mental quality belonging to you, than ever before. The very dissatisfaction and discontent you may feel concerning your failings is a proof of this. If your mind was not as clear as it is, it could not see those failings. You are not now where you may have been in a mood of self-complacency, when you thought yourself about right in every respect. Only you may, now, in looking at yourself, have swung too far in the opposite direction; and, because your eyes have been suddenly opened to certain faults, you may think these faults to be constantly increasing. They are not. The God in yourself — the ever-growing power in yourself—has made you see an incompleteness in your character; yet that incompleteness was never so near a relative completion as now. Of this the greatest proof is, that you can now see what in yourself you never saw or felt before.
You may have under your house a cavity full of vermin and bad air. You were much worse off before the cavity was found, repulsive as it may be to you; and now that it is found, you may be sure it will be cleansed. There may be cavities in our mental architecture abounding in evil element, and there is no need to be discouraged as the God in ourself shows them to us. There is no need of saying, “I’m such an imperfect creature I’m sure I can never cure all my faults.” Yes, you can. You are curing them now. Every protest of your mind against your fault is a push of the spirit forward. Only you must not expect to cure them all in an hour, a day, a week, or a year. There will never be a time in your future existence, but that you can see where you can improve yourself. If you see possibility of improvement, you must of course see the defect to be improved. Or, in other words, you see for, yourself a still greater completion, a still greater elaboration, a finer and finer shading of your character, a more and more complicated distribution of the Force always coming to you. So you will cease this fretting over your being such an imperfect creature when you find, as you will, that you are one of the “temples of God” ever being built by yourself into ever-increasing splendor.
No talent of yours ever stops growing, no more than the tree stops growing in winter. If you are learning to paint or draw or act or speak in public or do anything, and cease your practice entirely for a month or a year or two years, and then take it up again, you will find after a little that an increase of that talent has come; that you have new ideas concerning it, and new power for execution.
You ask, “What is the aim of life?” In a sense, you cannot aim your own life. There is a destiny that aims it, — a law which governs and carries it. To what? To an ever-increasing and illimitable capacity for happiness as your power increases, and increase it must. You cannot stop growing, despite all appearances to the contrary. The pain you have suffered has been through that same growth of the spirit pressing you harder and harder against what caused you misery, so that at last you should take that pain as a proof that you were on some wrong path, out of which you must get as soon as possible; and when you cry out hard, and are in living earnest to know the right way, something will always come to tell you the right way; for it is a law of nature that every earnest call is answered, and an earnest demand or prayer for anything always brings the needed supply.
What is the aim of life? To get the most happiness out of it; to so learn to live that every coming day will be looked for in the assurance that it will be as full, and even fuller, of pleasure than the day we now live in; to banish even the recollection that time can hang heavily on our hands; to be thankful that we live; to rise superior’to sickness or pain; to command the body, through the power of the spirit, so that it can feel no pain; to control and command the thought so that it shall ever increase in power to work and act separate, apart, and afar from our body, so that it shall bring us all that we need of house or land or food or clothes, and that without robbing or doing injustice to anyone ; to gain in power so that the spirit shall ever recuperate, reinvigorate, and rejuvenate the body so long as we desire to use it, so that no part or organ shall weaken, wither, or decay; to be learning ever new sources of amusement for ourselves and others; to make ourselves so full of happiness and use for others, that our presence may ever be welcome to them ; to be no one’s enemy and every one’s friend, — that is the destiny of life in those domains of existence where people as real as we, and much more alive than we, have learned, and are ever learning, how to get the most of heaven out of life. That is the inevitable destiny of every individual spirit. You cannot escape ultimate happiness and permanent happiness as you grow on and on in this and other existences; and all the pains you suffer, or have suffered, are as prods and pokes to keep you out of wrong paths, — to make you follow the law. And the more sensitive you grow, the more clearly will you see the law which leads away from all pain, and ever toward more happiness, and to a state of mind where it is such an ecstasy to live, that all sense of time is lost, — as the sense of time is lost with us when we are deeply interested or amused, or gaze upon a thrilling play or spectacle, — so that in the words of the biblical record, ” a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day.” The Nirvana of the Hindoos suggests all the possibilities of life coming to our planet, — ” Nirvana ” implying that calmess, serenity, and confidence of mind which comes of the absolute certainty that every effort we make, every enterprise we undertake, must be successful; and that the happiness we realize this month is but the stepping-stone to the greater happiness of next. If you felt that the trip of foreign travel you now long for and wish for was as certain to come as now you are certain that the sun rose this morning; if you knew that you would achieve your own peculiar and individual proficiency and triumph in painting or oratory, or as an actor or sculptor, or in any art, as surely as now you know you can walk down-stairs, you would not of course feel any uneasiness. In all our relatively perfected lives we shall know this, because we shall know for an absolute certainty that when we concentrate our mental force or thought on any plan or pursuit or undertaking, we are setting at work the attractive force of thoughtsubstance to draw to us the means or agencies or forces or individuals to carry out that plan, as certainly as the force of muscle applied to a line draws the ship to its pier. You worry very little now as to your telegram reaching its destination, because, while you know next to nothing as to what electricity is, you do know that when it is applied in a certain way it will carry your message; and you will have the same confidence that when your thought is regulated and directed by a certain method, it will do for you what you wish. Before men knew how to use electricity there was as much of it as today, and with the same power as today; but so far as our convenience was concerned, it was quite useless as a message-bearer, for lack of knowledge to direct it. The tremendous power of human thought is with us all today very much in a similar condition. It is wasted, because we do not know how to concentrate and direct it. It is worse than wasted, because, through ignorance and life-long habit, we work our mental batteries in the wrong direction, and send from us bolt after bolt of ill-will toward others, or enviousness or snarls or sneers or some form of ugliness, — all this being real element wrongly and ignorantly applied, which may strike and hurt others, and will certainly hurt us.
Here is the corner stone of all successful effort in this existence or any other. Never in thought acknowledge an impossibility. Never in mind reject what to you may seem the wildest idea with scorn; because, in so doing, you may not know what you are closing the door against. To say anything is impossible because it seems impossible to you, is just so much training in the dangerous habit of calling out “Impossible!” to every new idea. Your mind is then a prison full of doors, barred to all outside, and you the only inmate. “All things” are possible with God. God works in and through you. To say “Impossible!” as to what you may do or become is a sin. It is denying God’s power to work through you. It is denying the power of the Infinite Spirit to do through you far more than what you are now capable of conceiving in mind. To say “Impossible!” is to set up your relatively weak limit of comprehension as the standard of the universe. It is as audacious as to attempt the measurement of endless space with a yard-stick.
When you say, “Impossible !” and ” I can’t,” you make a present impossibility for yourself. This thought of yours is the greatest hindrance to the possible. Ife cannot stop it. You will be pushed on, hang back as much as you may. There can be no successful resistance to the eternal and constant betterment of all things (including yourself).
You should say, “It is possible for me to become anything which I admire.” You should say, “It is possible for me to become a writer, an orator, an actor, an artist.” You have then thrown open the door to your own temple of art within you. So long as you said, “Impossible!” you kept it closed. Your “I can’t” was the iron bolt locking that door against you. Your “I can” is the power shoving back that bolt.
Christ’s spirit or thought had power to command the elements, and quiet the storm. Your spirit as a part of the great whole has in the germ, and waiting for fruition, the same power. Christ, through power of concentrating the unseen element of his thought, could turn that unseen element into the seen, and materialize food, — loaves and fishes. That is a power inherent in every spirit, and every spirit is growing to such power. You see today a healthy baby-boy. It cannot lift a pound; but you know there lies in that feeble child the powers and possibilities which, twenty years hence, may enable it to lift with ease two hundred pounds. So the greater power, the coming spiritual power, can be foretold for us, who are now relatively babes spiritually. The reason for life’s being so unhappy here in this region of being is, that as we do not know the law, we go against it,’ and get thereby its pains instead of its pleasures.
This law cannot be entirely learned by us out of past record or the past experience of anyone, no matter to what power they might have attained. Such records or lives may be very useful to us as suggestors. But while there are general principles that apply to all, there are also individual laws that apply to every separate and individualized person. You cannot follow directly in my track in making yourself happier and better, nor can I in yours; because every one of us is made up of a different combination of element, as element has entered into and formed our spirits (our real selves) through the growth and evolution of ages. You must study and find out for yourself what your nature requires to bring it permanent happiness. You are a book for yourself. You must open this book page after page, and chapter after chapter, as they come to you with the experience of each day, each month, each year, and read them. No one else can read them for you as you can for yourself. No one else can think exactly as you think, or feel just as you feel, or be affected just as you are affected by other forces or persons about you; and for this reason no other person can judge what you really need to make your life more complete, more perfect, more happy so well as yourself.
You must find out for yourself what association is best for you, what food is best for you, and what method in any business, any art, any profession brings you the best results. You can be helped very much by conferring with others who are similarly interested. You can be very much helped by those who may have more knowledge than you of general laws. You can be greatly helped to get force or courage or new ideas to carry out your undertakings, by meeting at regular intervals with earnest, sincere, and honest people who have also some definite purpose to accomplish, and talking yourself out to them, and they to you. But when you accept any man or any woman as an infallible guide or authority, and do exactly as they say, you are off the main track; because then you are making the experiments of another person, formed of a certain combination of elements or chemicals, and the result of that person’s experiments, the rule for your own individual combination of element, when your combination may be very different, and differently acted on by the elements outside of it.
You have iron and copper and magnesia and phosphorus, and more of other minerals and chemicals, and combination and re-combination of mineral and chemical, in your physical body than earthly science has yet thought of. You have in your spirit or thought the unseen or spiritual correspondences of these minerals still finer and more subtle; and all these are differently combined, and in different proportions, from any other physical or spiritual body. How, then, can anyone find out the peculiar action of this your individual combination, save yourself?
There are certain general laws; but every individual must apply the general law to him or herself. It is a general law that the wind will propel a ship. But every vessel does not use the air in exactly the same fashion. It is a general law that thought is force, and can effect, and is constantly effecting, results to others far from our bodies; and the quality of our thought and its power to affect results depends very much on our associations. But for that reason, if yours is the superior thought or power, and I see that through its use you are moving ahead in the world, I should not choose your character of associates or your manner of life. I can try your methods as experiments; but I must remember they are only experiments. I must avoid that so common error, — the error of slavish copy and idolatry of another.
The Christ of Nazareth once bade certain of his followers not to worship him. “Call me not good,” said he. “There is none good save God alone.” Christ said, “I am the way and the life,” meaning, as the text interprets itself to me, that as to certain general laws of which he was aware, and by which he also as a spirit was governed, he knew and could give certain information. But he never did assert that his individual life, with all the human infirmity or defect that he had “taken upon him,” was to be strictly copied. He did pray to the Infinite Spirit of Good for more strength, and deliverance from the Sin OF Fear when his spirit quailed at the prospect of his crucifixion ; and in so doing, he conceded that he, as a spirit (powerful as he was), needed help as much as any other spirit; and knowing this, he refused to pose himself before his followers as God, or the Infinite, but told them that when they desired to bow before that almighty and never-to-be-comprehended power, out of which comes every good at the prayer or demand of human mind, to worship God alone, — God, the eternal and unfathomable moving power of boundless universe; the power that no man has ever seen or ever will see, save as he sees its varying expressions in sun, star, cloud, wind, bird, beast, flower, animal, or in man, or in man as the future angel or archangel, and ascending still to grades of mind and grades of power higher and higher still; but ever and ever looking to the source whence comes their power, and never, never worshipping anyone form of such expression, and by so doing making the ” creature greater than the Creator.”
That power is today working on and in and through every man, woman, and child in this planet. Or, to use the biblical expression, it is “God working in us and through us.” We are all parts of the Infinite Power, — a power ever carrying us up to higher, finer, happier grades of being.
Every man or woman, no matter what may be their manner of life or grade of intellect, is a stronger and better man or woman than ever they were before, despite all seeming contradiction. The desire in human nature, and all forms of nature or of spirit expressed through matter, to be more and more refined is, up to a certain growth of mind, an unconscious desire. The god Desire is at work on the lowest drunkard rolling in the gutter. That man’s spirit wants to get out of the gutter. It is at work on the greatest liar, prompting him, if ever so feebly, that the truth is better. It is at work on people you may call despicable and vile. When Christ was asked how often a man should be forgiven any offence, he replied in a manner indicating that there would be no limit to the sum of one man or woman’s forgiveness for the defects or immaturity in another. There should be no limit to the kind and helpful thought we think or put out toward another person who falls often, who is struggling with some unnatural appetite. It is a great evil, often done unconsciously, to say or think of an intemperate man, “Oh, he’s gone to the dogs. It’s no use doing anything more for him!” because, when we do this, we put hopeless, discouraging thought out in the air. It meets that person. He or she will feel it; and it is to them an element retarding their progress out of the slough they are in, just as some person’s similar thought has retarded us in our effort to get out of some slough we were in or are in now, — slough of indecision; slough of despondency; slough of ill temper; slough of envious, hating thought.
Yet the spirit of man becomes the stronger for all it struggles against. It becomes the stronger for struggling against your censorious, uncharitable thought, until at last it carries a man or woman to a point where they may in thought say to others, “I would rather have your approbation than your censure. But I am not dependent on your approbation or censure, for my most rigid judge and surest punishment for all the evil I do comes of my own mind, — the god or goddess in myself from whose judgment, from whose displeasure, there is no escaping.” Yet as the spirit grows clearer and clearer in sight, so does that judge in ourselves become more and more merciful for its own errors; for it knows that, in a sense, as we refine from cruder to finer expression, there must be just so much evil to be contended against, fought against, and finally and inevitably overcome. Every man and woman is predestined to a certain amount of defect, until the spirit overcomes such defect; and overcome it must, for it is the nature of spirit to struggle against defect. It is the one thing impossible for man to take this quality out of his own spirit, — the quality of ever rising toward more power and happiness.
If you make this an excuse to sin, or commit excess, or lie or steal or murder, and say, ” I can’t help it; I’m predestined to it,” you will be punished all the same, not possibly by man’s law, but by natural or divine law which has its own punishments for every possible sin, — for murder or lust or lying or stealing or evil thinking or gluttony; and these punishments are being constantly inflicted, and today thousands on thousands are suffering for the sins they commit in ignorance of the law of life; and the pain of such punishment has grown so great, and bears so heavily on so many, that there is now a greater desire than ever to know more of these laws; and for that very reason is this desire being met, and these questions are being answered; for it is an inevitable law of nature that what the human mind demands, that it, in time, gets ; and the greater the number of minds so demanding, the sooner is the demand met, and the questions answered. Steam but a few years ago relatively met the demand of human mind for greater speed in travel. Electricity met a demand for greater speed in sending intelligence from man to man. These are but as straws pointing to the discovery and use of greater powers, not only in elements outside of man, but in the unseen elements which make man and woman; in the elements unseen which make you and I.
Henceforth our race will commence to be lifted out of evil or cruder forms of expression, not by fear of the punishments coming through violation of the law; but they will be led to the wiser course through love of the delight which comes of following the law as we discover it for ourselves. You eat moderately, because experience has taught that the greater pleasure comes of moderation. You are gentle, kind, and considerate to your friend, not that you have constantly before your mind the fear of losing that friend if you are not kind and considerate, but because it pleases you, and you love the doing of kind acts. Human law, and even divine law as interpreted by human understanding, have ever been saying in the past, “You must not do this or that, or you’ll feel the rod.” God has been pictured as a stern, merciless, avenging deity. The burden of the preacher’s song has been Penalty and Punishment! Punishment and Penalty! Humanity is to forget all about penalty and punishment, because it is to be won over, and tempted to greater goodness, to purity and refinement by the ever-increasing pleasures brought us as we refine. The warning of penalty was necessary when humanity was cruder. It could only be reached by the rod. The race was blind, and as a necessity of its condition it had to be kept somewhere near the right path by a succession of painful prods and pokes with the sharp goad of penalty. But when we begin to see clearer, as now the more quickened and sensitive of our race does begin to see, we need no rod, no more than you need a man with a club to prevail on you to go to a feast.
Force, And How To Get It
If a medicine was found which would put in a man or woman, boy or girl, force or force of character, — power and capacity to do business, power to influence and govern,—such a medicine would have a very ready sale. Yet keeping yourself in a certain condition of mind will add continually to your force or force of character; and whatever you so add through keeping in this condition can never be lost. That condition is the keeping of the mind in the constant desire for force. Desire for a thing or a quality of mind is a power always drawing that thing or quality to you, whether that thing or quality be for good or evil.
Force is an unseen substance as real as anything you see. The more of force you call to you, the more and more power do you gather to attract force to you, because like attracts like in all elements, seen or unseen. Globules of quicksilver mingle and form one mass; trees of the same species grow together; sheep herd with sheep and not with cows; tramps consort with tramps, because dejected, weak, despondent human spirit naturally runs to other dejected, despondent, unaspiring human spirit; just as men of force, push, and determination naturally drift, associate, plan, and work with other men of force, push, and determination.
What is force? If you have a purpose, a project, a business, and in presenting it or pushing it on people who may at first be indifferent or hostile to it, and in so pushing and presenting it you can always keep up your spirits, your energy, your confidence, and your enthusiasm in that business, you have force. If, after a few attempts, you become discouraged, disheartened, and despondent you lack force. The pedler who goes from door to door and persists in offering his wares despite all rebuffs and snubs and doors slammed in his face, and keeps up all the while a cheerful mood, has force. That pedler is winning his way up to a larger business. It was Cyrus W. Field’s force that made at last the Atlantic cable a success, despite failure after failure, and breakage after breakage, and the invectives and growls of enraged and despairing share-holders. That quality in Mr. Field is a spiritual power; and the force in any man or woman that plans a business and persists in it and pushes it into success is a spiritual power; and the very core, root, origin and corner-stone of that power lies in the quiet, persistent resolve to have force, and the constant imaging or imagining of yourself as an ever-increasing force or power.
When you hold to such resolve and imagining, you are not only attracting force to yourself, never to be lost, but you are also ever sending from you, night and day, a current of force or thought which is pushing your plan, scheme, or business ahead. It is acting on other minds far and near, and putting ideas into those minds in favor of your idea, and making them say when you meet them in person and put out your plan, “That’s just what I need;” or, “That’s just what I want;” or, “That’s just what I’ve been thinking about.”
Force is the power which quickly lifts out of discouragement. Force is the power which, after a night of dejection and perhaps tears, takes you out in the morning, renews your hope and your confidence in yourself, gives you new plans, new ideas, and makes you see new opportunities. Force is that quality or element which makes you stop brooding over mistakes or disappointments, and starts you again on the main track toward success. Force always turns your face toward ultimate success, and away from failure. You will find this element in every successful business man. It is a spiritual power whether used by a good man or a bad one; whether used by the Good Samaritan in dressing wounds, or the Pharisee in making long prayers; whether used by a company of male or female gossips in tearing somebody’s character to pieces and sending them through the air a current of injurious thought or force, or by a company of friends whose talk has only for its aim the benefit of others. You can have more and more of this quality by desiring it, or demanding it, when alone. But you can get far more of it by so desiring it in the company of such people as have a certain faith in the truth of the law, that the more minds who come together to call for force the more will each one receive through such co-operation of demand.
Read the above sentence over again. It conveys a truth, so far as it is in the writer’s power to state it, which is of mighty import on the bread-and-butter, practical side of life.
Force is the element which drives away fear. It is the element which gives you tact and address. As you increase it, you can stand and assert yourself before those who in the past have browbeat you, bullied you, and overcome you by force of stronger will tyrannically exercised. This is the power constantly used against those who are trying to get up in the world. No matter how good, how amiable, how well disposed you are toward others, if you lack force, if you lack the ability to assert yourself or get justice, if your wits are driven out of you temporarily by a snub, a frown, a sneer, you cannot succeed in the world ; you cannot have that to which you are justly entitled.
Force is that quality or element which, in case you receive a sudden shock, a misfortune, an unexpected failure, causes you quickly to rally, get yourself together again, forget all the trouble, and lose sight of it in new efforts to push ahead. Force is that spiritual element which must rule the material. In the physical world there will always be accidents and failures. Houses will decay or burn; business may not succeed for a time according to our hopes; friends may fail in time of need. Trials must come in every phase of life, until they cease to be trials through your growing force. What now may be to you as mountains, will in the future, through getting more force, be but as mole-hills. You may not today fear the person or thing which in your childhood was a terror to you. Why? Because you have more force, more wisdom; and wisdom and force mean the same thing. But wisdom is seeing by the mind’s eye. It is not the knowing or holding in memory of a store of assertions or opinions gathered from books or men.
Why force should come to us when we set our minds toward it in the attitude of prayer or demand is a mystery. Probably it will always remain one. It is not desirable to be ever occupied in the endeavor to unravel mysteries.
The mystery of existence will always increase. To solve it is to try and find bounds to endless space. We need only to know that which will do us real good for the hour and the day.
It is a truth that we can get more and more force by simply asking for it: and it is in the possibilities of human spirit to get so much, that through it the material world can be wholly subdued and ruled. Then misfortunes are impossible. For if they do come, you have always the power to build up again. You may be turned on the street without food or shelter; yet if you have grown to a full confidence and faith in this power, you will feel certain that by keeping your mind calling for force, force will come to you to relieve your difficulties. It will come in the shape of a friend, or an idea to be acted on immediately. To call or pray for force is to connect yourself with the higher thought-realm of force; and out of this there will always come element or individualized spirit to give aid in some way. But all aid coming of individuals, seen or unseen, cannot be lasting. For if you depend in any way on another, you cease to call for force. You are then content to be carried, not to walk with your own limbs. You are also as much a reservoir — a vessel whose mouth can be turned toward this power to receive of it — as the other person on whose force of character you depend. You want to earn the house you live in, the carriage you ride in, the clothes you wear, the food you eat. Call, demand, pray for force, and then for wisdom to apply it, and you can earn these.
When, through prayer or demand, you have gained force, then ask for wisdom to direct it. You can direct your own force to injure or benefit yourself. You can use your force on a whim, or an imaginary necessity. You may run about half a day to buy something you do not need. You may employ two hours in cheapening an article ten cents; and in so doing, use up the same force which might have made you ten dollars. It is not enough to be merely industrious. Mere industry can use up valuable force in scouring the bottoms of tin pans, or counting the tacks in the parlor carpet. It is quite as important to know where, or on what, to put your industry or force so it shall bring the best result
If you spend half an hour in moping, or fretting, or frantic hurry, or indecision, you spend the same force, the same material, the same element, which would turn in some other channel, push your business, or do you good in some way. The question we need to ask every morning is: “I have now a certain amount of force for today. How shall I expend it so as to get the best results — the most lasting happiness out of the day?” When you arise in the morning, if you need force to push things — if you feel timid and like shrinking away from people, then simply think of force. Keep the word, the idea, in your mind as much as possible. That keeps your mind in the direction of force. What you think of, you are always attracting to you.
The mood in which you keep your mind is a force in the kingdom of nature, as much as the current of air or electricity is a force. The thoughts ever going in a current from you are forces acting on other minds, and as real in such action, though unseen, as is the push of your arm against a door. Your force does not stop with the action of your muscles, but in thought can go, and may now be going, hundreds and thousands of miles from your body, and acting and affecting other mind, or minds, for good or ill as you put out good or ill thought toward them.
Force is that which gives you daily new idea, plan, suggestion, as to business. The methods for every successful business are always changing. Fertility of invention is force. A. T. Stewart’s force begot a new method for carrying on the dry-goods business. The same force which begets a new idea also pushes it. If the timid inventor called for force to put his invention before the public he would get it. Now he often starves in the corner, while the man who knows only how to use force to push an invention takes the inventor’s property and makes by it a fortune.
Sometimes the unsuccessful but talented artist fails to sell his pictures, because he fails to cultivate or bring himself properly before society; while the inferior artist finds a ready market for his work, because he keeps himself favorably before the world. If you stand and point and make faces at the world, no matter how valuable your goods, it will not be so ready to buy of you. It is also a part of life’s business and happiness to make ourselves inviting to others. To do this we must commence and invite from the inside — not the outside alone. The successful business method of today will not be the successful business method of twenty years hence. New force, — that is, new device, — new invention, is always coming. Force begot the railway. But something is to supersede the railway. Force begot the telegraph. But something is to make the telegraph a relatively slow and expensive coach. Minds in sympathy— be the bodies those minds use far apart as they may — can send thought, ideas, and news to each other; and when more is found out how to use, keep, and train such minds, there will be unseen wires dashing intelligence across continents which no monopoly can grasp. The air also will be navigated by man, and with more speed than the railway train; for every need, every longing, every desire of human mind, is a thing, a power, a force, a thought, ever drawing to itself the means and power for material accomplishment.
The force which through countless ages has made man what he is, is to make him far more than he is.
Monopoly of iron rails and locomotives which owns states, and controls legislatures; monopoly of wires and telegraph-poles; monopoly of everything, — is in time to be outflanked, not by the destructive force of violence, but by the stronger, the peaceful, the constructive force of new invention, which shall find out, by the so-called trivial, despised things of today, new powers in nature and new powers in man, which every man shall find it possible to use ; and the wonder then will be that we did not find it out before.
To get force, talk your business, plan, or project over with those who are in full sympathy with you.
The successful business world constantly acts up to this law. Monopolies and powerful corporations are begotten through the originators putting their heads together, and talking the thing over. They so come together day after day, and talk. As the talk goes on, new ideas suggest themselves as to methods of action. The leading idea may seem to come from one man or mind. But it would never have so soon occurred to him, had it not been for the previous combination of the thoughts talked out, and put out, by different minds. The thought elements from those different minds mingle; and out of such mingling, the new element, thought, idea, is born, and eventually expressed by someone of the group, — possibly by the man or woman who says least of all.
The greatest force, the clearest idea, will be developed where woman is a factor in such group.
If two persons combine in harmony their force of muscle to lift a heavy weight, they will lift it easier than one. If four persons so combine, they will lift it easier than two.
The same law and result applies to mental force. Each one of us, consciously or unconsciously, sends out daily and hourly this silent mental force, — this invisible element we call thought, which affects favorably or unfavorably the persons of whom we think. It is the same force which may lift a box, a bag, a trunk. Only it may be differently applied.
If you have in view any enterprise or business, and you can meet at regular times two, four, six, or as many persons as heartily wish you success, and they hear your plan, and talk it over with you, always in earnest sympathy and good-will, you are having their co-operation in making for you a silent force which will aid you more than can anything else. You will then the quicker find persons who are in sympathy with your purpose. People will come to you, or you will be led to people, who will wish to aid you. They will be the persons who will need what you have to give. If you have a new knowledge, or a new truth, or a new invention, or a new device in art, or an improved wagon, or a chimney, or anything in any way making life more comfortable and more happy, you will, through the power of co-operative demand or prayer, be the sooner brought in contact with the people who can aid you, — the people whom you need, and who need you. Your co-operative ill-wish is a co-operative curse, — there is power to harm in a curse. A curse is an ill-wish, — a prayer for evil. Prayer \s simply thought sent out to a certain end or purpose. A curse or ill-wish is a force for evil. It works through a law which is merciless in its operation.
If three or four persons commence ill-natured gossip about another who is absent, and comment sarcastically concerning that person’s character or acts, they send them through the air an actual force or element which does the person of whom they talk harm. The person of whom they talk will feel the power so generated in some way. He will be made either despondent or captious, angry or irritable. All such states of mind in some way injure the body, unless the person talked of sends out constantly toward his enemies the thought of good-will. His good-will is the stronger force, and will turn aside the weaker force of their ill-will. That is the reason that the Christ advocated loving your enemies. The thought of good-will is the stronger power. We want power. We lose power when we send out to another any kind of ugly thought.
It is the peaceful non-combative thought in Quakerism that made the Quakers prosperous. Peaceful thought is constructive power. Ugly thought is alway destructive power.
Christ discouraged all resort to blows or weapons, because he knew there was in the elements a more powerful force which could conquer, and that this power could be generated and used by the mind.
If you wish that your success in any business should involve an equal success for others, your thought or prayer has then the greater power for a real success than if you desire success for yourself alone, with little regard for others. A real success in life means, besides money enough for our needs and tastes, health, and the capacity to enjoy what money wisely expended may bring. A wise selfishness or self-interest will desire or pray heartily that all associated with us shall be equally as fortunate as ourselves. We do not want that our friends shall remain poor while we get rich. You do not want to see your friend obliged to reside in a hovel while you live in a palace. You do not want to see your friends in rags while you are decently attired. Neither do you want that your friends shall be dependants on you, — pensioners on your bounty. You want them equals with yourselves — equals with you in ability to hold their own — to “hoe their own row.”
We are, as members of society, all members of one body. If any member of that body is diseased in mind, or diseased in body, all the other members must in some way suffer. The more health of mind and body or relative perfection around us and near us, the more healthy and perfect shall we become.
There is a certain fascination in watching the working of a powerful steam-engine, — in seeing tons of iron, that a hundred men could with their hands barely lift, rise and fall with the elasticity of a rubber-ball, or in watching the never-ceasing pour of the waters of a Niagara. That is because it is in human nature to love force. Our spirits, in so contemplating such exhibitions of force, connect themselves closer with the element of force and draw then and add eternally to themselves more of this element; and this fascination and admiration of power is, at the same time, your prayer or desire for power, which is immediately answered. And there is great profit in watching for an hour the heave and roll and wash of the ocean-billows against the rocks. And that certain repose and quiet and dreaminess you may feel when in the ocean’s company, is because you are then actually absorbing of its element of force; you are then taking in a spiritual quality — force; and when you go away, you have gained more force to use in any way you choose, — in business, in some form of art, or the management of a family. And when at night, if but for a moment, you lift your eyes toward the countless stars, and try to realize that these are all suns with other earths wheeling around them; and that all the combined force of all the rivers, Niagaras, and oceans on our own little earth is, as compared with the force going on in what we see above us, but as the feeble might of a fly’s wing, — then you have spent another profitable moment in the actual absorption of that much-needed element — force. That is one way of getting force. You are then praying for force; for all intense admiration is true worship, and all true worship is prayer or demand for the quality admired in that which is worshiped.
The Doctor Within
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” If you keep in your mind an image, or imagination, of yourself in perfect health, and full of strength and activity, you keep the forces working to make you so. You are constructing out of the unseen substance of thought a spiritual self (the healthy self hoped for); and this spiritual self will in time rule the material body, and make it like unto itself. If your stomach is weak, refuse in imagination to see it a weak stomach: see it only a strong stomach. If your lungs are weak, see in your mind’s eye your lungs as strong. If your body is weak and sluggish, see yourself in imagination as you were when a boy or girl, when your limbs were full of activity, and you took delight in scrambling over fences and climbing trees. You are then putting out the “substance” of the thing or condition of body “hoped for.” As you continue to see yourself thus, the gradual change in your physical condition for the better will increase your faith that this law is a truth. Keep to this thought of yourself as strong, active, and vigorous, week after week, month after month, year after year, and you fix more firmly in mind yourself as free from all disease. It will be a confirmed habit, or, as we say, “second nature,” for you so to imagine yourself.
What you think or hold most in mind or imagination, that you have most faith in. If you imagine a bugbear, much of the time you will make a reality of such imagining. The “confirmed invalid” sees himself in his “mind’s eye” only as sick. He puts out, or imagines, the wrong image, or imagination. He is unconsciously working the same law. The invalid who always sees himself as sick, is in reality constructing a sick body. You can make a weak stomach for yourself by always in imagination seeing your stomach as weak. The great trouble and error of today is, that, so soon as any organ is a little overtaxed or strained, its possessor is apt to think of it only as weakened and diseased, and in thought dwells only on such weakness: in this, unfortunately, he is too often assisted by others. As all thought put out is substance, the result is, there is by such means made for him, first, spiritually, a stomach, or lungs, or kidneys, or other organ, more imperfect; and this imperfection is embodied and expressed in the material lungs, stomach, kidneys, or other organ.
It cannot be told too often, that all material things are the outgrowth or product of spiritual or unseen forces. Whatever you think of is made at once in unseen substance. So soon as made, it commences at once to attract its like order of substance to itself: so, no matter how weak you are, when in mind you see your body active, strong, and vigorous, you have really made the spiritual body so. That spiritual body is drawing, then, the elements of health and strength to itself. Always in mind see yourself well when your body is sick. This is a simple process, but it involves a wonderful and wonder-working law. When in mind you see yourself diseased, though your body may be so, you are working this law the wrong way.
The imagining of a fresh, sound, vigorous body, is in actual substance, though unseen, a fresh, sound, healthy, and vigorous body. It is a spiritual reality. The material body must grow to be like the spiritual reality. If your body is weak, do not see it in your mind’s eye as weak. See yourself full of life and playful vigor. Don’t see yourself as an invalid propped up in a chair, or confined to the house, though for the time being your body is in such conditions. You are healing yourself when you see yourself running foot-races. You are keeping yourself an invalid when you see yourself ever as one. Don’t expect or fear sickness or pain for tomorrow, no matter what sickness or pain you have today. Expect nothing but health and strength. In other words, let health, strength, and vigor be your daydream. The desirable condition of mind is better expressed by the word “dream” than by the terms” hoping ” or ” expecting.”
“Dreamers” do far more than the world realizes. The “day-dream” of a person who may sit for an hour almost unconscious of what is going on directly around him, is a force working out results in the unseen and mighty kingdom of thought, concerning which we know so little. Only at present, he or she whose thought is so disengaged from the body as to make them for the time quite unconscious of its existence, having no knowledge of the power they are using, no belief that it is doing something, have consequently no faith in it; and without faith, most of the result must be lost to them.
If you know nothing of gold-mining, or of the formations in which gold is found, or the methods for extracting it from the soil, you may dig in rich goldbearing earth for months, and cart it off to fill in sunken lots. With no knowledge of the treasure in your soil, you have no faith in it. We are, as regards our mental or spiritual powers, in an analogous condition. Yet every imagining is an unseen reality; and the longer and more firmly it is held to, the more of a reality does it make itself in things which can be seen, felt, and touched by the physical senses. Dream, then, so much as you can by day of health and vigor. The more you so dream of it by day, the more likely is your thought to enter the same vigorous domain at night, and so recuperate you all the quicker. But if you dream by day of sickness or weakness, your thought at night will be the more apt to connect itself with the current of sick, weak, diseased thought, and you are, on waking, the worse for it. Ignorantly you may store gunpowder in your cellar, thinking it some harmless material. A spark may then destroy your house and your body. In an analogous manner mankind are now constantly bringing pain and evil on themselves through an unwise or ignorant use of their mental forces. As we most think, imagine, or dream, can we store up gold or gunpowder. A daydream, or reverie, is an outflow of force working results. The more abstracted the reverie, the greater is the force working separate and apart from the instrument, the body. When for a time you can forget, or lose consciousness of, your physical self and immediate surroundings, you are working your spiritual or thought power possibly a hundred or a thousand miles away. All occult power, so called, all the miracle power of biblical record, was wrought by this method. If thought can be concentrated in sufficient volume on an image in mind, it can produce instantly that image in visible substance. This is the only secret of magic. Magic infers the instantaneous production of the visible by such concentration.
The power of Christ’s thought concentrated on an imagining, or mental picture, could produce that imagining in visible substance, as he did the loaves and fishes. All minds have these powers and possibilities in embryo.
Faith is indeed as the “grain of mustard-seed ” to which, as to growth, it is compared in the New Testament. But it can grow for evil as well as good, and, if for evil, may become a tree in which every foul bird of evil omen will come and build its nest. Your evil or gloomy imagining is faith in that evil. Your fear of a disease is faith in the perpetuity and increase of such disease. You have a slight derangement of stomach or kidney or other organ. So, having it for one day or a few days, you begin to expect it. You think of it only as an unhealthy organ. You never in mind see it as a sound organ. You may be then told it is in a dangerous condition. You have a name possibly given to the ailment which is suggestive of great suffering, debility, and ultimate death. All this is help to faith in evil. The force of other minds may be added to yours which increases that faith. Friends and relatives may be anxious on your account, and fearful, and continually reminding you how careful you should be. Everything tends to make you see yourself sick, weak, and enfeebled. You have not in your own mind an imagining of the part affected as sound or healthy. None send you their thought, or imagining, as vigorous and healthy. The spiritual thought-constructions sent you are all in the opposite direction. The spiritual force sent you is really all for evil. If your friend says he “hopes you may get well,” he says it with an accent and expression which says he fears you may not. And so your faith in an evil is constantly increased. You always get the “substance” of the thing feared or expected as well as hoped for. In this case you get the substance of evil. You get more disease, more weakness by the same law, or force, which can, otherwise directed, bring you health. You are taught to have more faith, or belief, in sickness than in health. “According to the faith,” says the biblical record, ” shall it be given thee; ” and accordingly you have given you sickness, because you have most faith in sickness.
Nature never really grows old as we understand that term. She is ever casting off her worn-out physical envelopes, or forms of expression. We say the tree decays. But do we not see the new tree springing from the rottten stump of the old one? That is the same tree. In other words, it is the spirit, or force, of the tree we called old, materializing a new form of expression. That process has been going on through countless ages. That species of tree was far coarser than now in some far-off past. It has, through its successive regrowths, been growing finer and finer, and is to grow finer still.
In all animal and other organized life, we find periods of repair and recuperation preparatory to a certain newness of life, and renewal of organization, as when the crab or lobster casts its shell, the snake its skin, the bird in its moulting-season casting its old plumage, the animal shedding its fur. In all these organizations other changes go on, which we do not see. During these periods, the bird, animal, and fish are weak and inactive. Nature demands rest during this reconstruction. Such reconstruction is going on internally in the organization as well as without.
All natural law, as seen in the lower forms of organization, extends to the higher. This same law extends to mankind. There come temporary periods in every person’s life, when all the activities, forces, organs, and functions are more sluggish. We are then undergoing our moulting process. Nature is laying us up for repairs. If we obeyed her demands, we should come forth in a few weeks or months with a renewed life and a renewed body. All that Nature asks of us, is that we give mind and body the rest they call for while in the repair-shop.
We speak of people of “middle age” as having reached their greatest amount of power and activity. After this period, “it is inferred as the law of Nature,” that we decline gradually into “the sere and yellow leaf.” This faith in “old age ” and weakness, by the same spiritual law makes old age and weakness.
The “turn ” at middle age, or a little after, means that the physical body you have been using is giving birth to a new one; in other words, the old is being re-formed, and giving place to the new. During such process of re-formation, a great deal of rest is required. Your real, invisible, spiritual self is busy at work in the process of reconstruction. You should be no more overtaxed at this period than you were when an infant, or during childhood.
We do not grant this rest. We force the exhausted organization to work when it is unfit for work. We mistake our season for moulting, and consequent temporary weakness, for some form of disease. We then fix in our minds, through faith in evil, the idea of disease; so we construct a disease for ourselves. While Nature is trying to give us a new birth, rejuvenate us, and make us stronger, we defeat her purpose, and make ourselves weaker.
In the vast majority of cases, people cannot give themselves the rest Nature calls for. They must work on and on, from day to day, from year to year, to “make a living.” That makes no difference as to the result. Nature’s laws have no regard for man’s systems. So fagged-out and ignorantly disobedient humanity fags on, and thousands “make a living,” and toil and suffer and wear out, and die in misery on respectable beds of sickness.
In cases habit is so strong that people cannot stop their work, or peculiar line of activity. They have no idea or capacity for resting spirit or body. They are miserable unless at work, and yet through growing weakness unhappy while at work, — like so many “house-wives,” always complaining of being worked to death, yet unhappy if not at work.
Could these people once have mind and body brought into a condition approaching that of real rest, they would possibly be alarmed, and fear their powers were failing. They might for a time become sluggish, inert, and relatively inactive. That would be only because the strain being off mind and body, the spiritual power is using its force to recuperate and build anew. But you cannot work force in the outer, or physical, system, and the interior, or spiritual, system, at the same time. While one is at work, the other must stop.
Nature’s great source of recuperation is rest. The land lying “fallow” gathers new force for growing grain. The mother whose mind and body are least taxed during gestation, gives birth to the healthiest child. The broken bone requires rest while being knit together.
By rest we mean rest of mind as well as body. Mental rest is as necessary as physical rest. Thousands of our race have no conception of mental rest, or a mind at ease. With them, worry, fret, uneasiness, and anxiety about something is a fixed habit. Rich or poor, it makes little difference. All this leads to exhaustion, decay, and disease. All this comes because men and women cannot as yet believe that they, as parts of God, or the Infinite Spirit, have spiritual power, which, if cultivated and trusted to, will supply all their needs, grant them perfect health, and give them delights they do not now dream of. Man is to see the day when he shall know that when he says, “I will do thus or so,” and persist in that attitude of mind, that the thing he wills is being done, — that unseen forces are accomplishing the undertaking while his body sleeps, or, while awake, he is re-creating himself.
What we now call “death,” is only the falling away from the spirit of the old body, before it has the power to put on the new one. Through ignorance and violation of spiritual law, our race has not yet given the spirit this opportunity. You cannot die. It is only your body that dies. You had a body in an existence previous to this. That died as others died before it. Your real life is the life of your mind, or spirit. You are not always to suffer the death of the body as in the past. A period is to come when your spirit will have so far matured its powers, that it can clothe itself gradually with a new physical body as the old wears away. Paul inferred this possibility when he said, “The last great enemy which shall be destroyed is death.”
When this law is known and followed, there will be results which would now be called miracles. Spirits (by which name we term all using, and in possession of, physical bodies) will have bodies for use on this stratum of life so long as they desire to use them; and such bodies being more perfect and symmetrical, will, as more perfect instruments, be better adapted to express such spirit’s ever-growing powers. Your real self never loses any power. It is only because of the giving out of the machine, the body, that the spirit is unable to express that power, even as the most skilful carpenter can do little with a dull or broken saw.
Co-operation Of Thought
One aim in the publication of these little books, is to suggest how you can increase your force. In other words, how to so apply your spiritual power as to bring to you and others the best results and the most happiness. The evolution of force out of ourselves can be greatly hastened and assisted by the aid of others similarly desiring force, and who desire it in similar spirit.
All of us on this stratum of being need force far more than we may realize. We are daily beset with a host of unseen ills. We live in groups and communities of people who are unconsciously ever putting out evil or immature thought. We live amid envyings and backbiting, amid those with whom grumbling and fault-finding has become a confirmed habit. We may be compelled to eat daily with people full of ill-nature, cynicism, and peevishness; and of all places the table should be most free from such jarring and discordant elements, for we absorb with our food the thought-element most put out by ourselves and others with whom we eat. We may be obliged daily to meet and mingle with those who are making their bodies more sick and weak through dwelling always in thought on their sickness, which is putting in operation the force to make sickness, — the very force, or thought, which, if directed to the imagining of health and strength, would bring health and strength. We are of necessity often compelled to be with the gloomy, the discouraged, the despondent, the peevish, the victims of inordinate animal or lower desire, and the avaricious. We must be more or less with the vast mass of humanity who live entirely in belief of the material, the perishable, and to whose minds there has not yet arrived a single thought that life, health, and permanent happiness can only come through the knowledge and following of a law which teaches us that we must be in body and mind that which we most think.
Be our knowledge and faith and attempted practice of this law as great as it may, we must be necessarily more or less affected by the cruder thought element alluded to above so much about us. If we are much with people thinking error, or putting out evil thought, no matter against whom it is directed, we must be to some extent injuriously affected by such thought. It is as smoke blinding our eyes. If we are with the unbelieving and doubtful, we absorb unbelief and doubt. We see less clearly. Our force, or thought, becomes adulterated with their cruder thought-element. For we do absorb the miasma of diseased or erroneous thought as much as we may absorb the material miasma of the swamp or sewer, and then such thought for a time becomes part of us. Besides, we war not only with the seen, but with evil unseen. We “war with the Powers of Darkness.” Every crude, unhealthy mind using a physical body, has its following of like crude and unhealthy minds, without bodies. The more of mind in ignorance and error together on our physical stratum of life, the more of such evil unseen following do they accumulate about them. And the power of this combined thought on us for ill is very great.
All these things operate against us, weigh us down, and retard our progress toward a more happy, more hopeful, more assured, and more powerful, condition of mind.
They prevent us the sooner from attaining more perfect health, more vigor and elasticity of muscle and limbs. They retard the realization of that permanent healthy condition of mind which shall no longer fall into periods of depression and melancholy, whereby relative trifles are magnified into great troubles, and days are spent in dreading evils which never come to pass, for the reason that we are not then thinking our own quality of thought, but that of the fearing, trouble-borrowing, and needlessly anxious people about us. They retard that growth of the spirit which shall bring us ever-increasing clearness and brilliancy of thought, bringing us success in every undertaking, and also ever restoring and rejuvenating the body, and insuring a perpetual maturity, and freedom from physical decay.
For “the last great enemy to be destroyed is death,” and spirit is eventually to grow to that power which shall keep and use a perfect physical body so long as it pleases. This possibility is coming to our race.
In mental and physical power, the race never remains at a stand-still. Neither does the individual. Invention is ever on the move forward, developing new methods to lessen physical labor. Force succeeds force, each greater than the last. In motive power on the water, the sail superseded the ruder paddle, steam took the place of the sail, electricity or some new form of force will take the place of steam. But greater far than all these are the powers which man is to find in himself out of which are to come results to him for happiness infinitely beyond all that he has ever dreamed of, — results which are to revolutionize existing modes of life, and methods of action, but with a peaceful and noiseless revolution ; for the superior power is never heralded by trumpet-blasts. It comes always from humble and unlooked-for sources, — in mangers, as did the Christ of Judaea, whose advent on earth was one dispensation of spiritual power and light, to be surely succeeded by others at intervals relatively more perfect; and, as regards intervals, eighteen hundred years is a short period in the life of a planet as well as in the development and growth of your spirit and mine.
To further these results, we need each other’s cooperation and assistance through the silent power of thought. We need that all who are in agreement with this order of thought, and who to any degree accept the truths which we have endeavored to set forth in these little books, shall give, if fully and cheerfully so disposed, a few minutes daily of their thought to the strengthening of each other against the ills with which we contend. I need, and you need, and all of us who are in the belief of these laws need, each other’s daily co-operative desire or prayer to give us this much-needed strength.
I have sometimes been asked the question, “Do you practice, and live up to, all you write?” I answer, “I do not. I cannot. All of the evils of which I have spoken, I find in myself. Because I can see them, is no reason I can immediately get rid of them. They come in part of life-long mental habit, and habit of any sort can only be worn off by degrees. I can now be irritable, despondent, peevish, or fall into other evil moods, at times. I know the evil of putting out such element of thought; but my knowledge, so far as it goes, is one thing, and my strength to throw off an injurious mood of mind is another. I feel the need of more strength to resist these evil tendencies. I know that more strength will come to me through the silent mental co-operation I suggest, and if you join in such effort it will come to you also; for then many hands will take hold of the log, and many hands lift far easier than one.”
So far as possible, such thought should be given by each at the same time. We suggest that this time be at or about six o’clock in the evening. If you can then retire five or ten or fifteen minutes by yourself, and send your thought to the mutual strengthening of all minds with whom you are in sympathy, so much the better; but if it is not convenient for you so to seclude yourself, be you behind the counter, or at the office, or in the street or the workshop, and you can give but a minute of such thought, it is not lost. It is so much constructive force sent out. It will meet all the other streams and rivulets of similar constructive element so sent out by individuals or companies, be they far or near you on this planet. It is a force for good, and will do you good. It is a treasury in which if you cast a mite, that mite is certain to return to you with compound interest. It will co-operate and act with minds in sympathy with your own whether the bodies used by those minds are known to you or not.
But the sending out of such thought is profitable for you and all, be it at any hour of the day. We suggest as near the same time as is possible, for the reason, that, in so doing, the greater amount of force is gained, as force is gained in any effort when it is exerted simultaneously.
The simple measure here suggested—that of cooperation in silent thought or prayer — will serve as the first step to bring you in spiritual communication with such minds as will cheer, feed, and sustain your own. You will recollect that every thought of yours is a literal part of yourself, and when it is sent out in good will to all, it meets the like current of thought, mingles with it, and forms a greater current, in volume proportionate to the number of minds sending their thought of like spirit to it. You help then to generate a literal, unseen, silent power or force in nature, which is as real a bond of communication and union between you and others of like mind as one of metal. It is far more potent than any material bond of communication, for it is a Living Force which will in time embody itself in beneficial material results to you.
Force by the same law may now be acting on you, but force bringing you mainly unpleasant results; for, being so much surrounded by evil or immature thought, we unconsciously open our minds to it, and send back more or less of gloomy, despondent, peevish, or other unhealthy thought. It is almost impossible to avoid this, since we live in a cloud of such thought-element, and our minds may be trained by life-long habit to give way to it. We are unconsciously daily co-operating with this order of thought. We now seek to turn this force into a higher, better channel; and it is turned into such channel when we, if but for a moment, desire the welfare of all people, and exclude not from such blessing the person to us most repulsive, hateful, and disgusting: for every thought of ours, as sent out, is a force in nature; and the more freighted it is with good to all, the greater is that force; and the more of good it sends to others, the more good through its re-actionary effort comes back to us. A thought is not an “idle breath,” here one moment, gone into oblivion and nothingness the next: and if but once a day we say in all sincerity, ” May the Infinite Spirit of Good bless all men and women!” we shall find, when the grand sum-total of all our life is footed up, that the moment so occupied was of all the most profitable; for the force we sent out in thinking this may have been the only one which penetrated the murky atmosphere of thought so prevalent all about us, and, reaching upward, brought down to us its corresponding ray of higher, purer, life-giving, and constructive force; for every thought of real good brings to us its like in return.
Some of you in thought are quite alone. Though having about you families, relatives, and friends, these do not meet a large part of your being. Your ideas, if you express them, may be termed ” fancies.” You may be called “queer,” “peculiar,” “visionary;” you may have learned to keep these thoughts to yourself; you are shut up, and retired within yourself; you meet all those about you only on their domain of life, interest, and sympathy; the rest of you is ever locked up; you are as much alone as if cast, like Robinson Crusoe, on an uninhabited island; you are spiritually isolated, — the dreariest of all isolation; you are a stranger in a strange land, a foreigner among those of your own blood, and speaking your own tongue. Because physical ties of relationship are not the real ties. Those only are related to you who think as you do, believe as you do, sympathize as you do. These may be people you never saw, and of other lands and races. Your real relatives are spirits whose apprehension and comprehension of life and all it involves is something akin to your own. These, be they with a body, or without one, you need to meet.
It is not good for anyone to live alone; that is, to live separated from all related to them spiritually. In such loneliness you are cut off from your real vital supplies; because, for both physical and mental health, you cannot live on bread alone, or any other material food. You need for actual sustenance and health the occasional presence of those who think as you do; you need their outflow of thought coming to you in kindness, love, and sympathy; you can have this through the means we suggest, even though their physical bodies are not near you, or even known to you. You have many near friends you have never seen. Their thought is a necessity to give you physical health and mental vigor.
Permanent isolation and consequent mental starvation causes minds to warp and wither for lack of needed nourishment. It causes insanity in some of its many shades or gradations, melancholia and a host of physical ills for which medicine, or change of climate and physical surroundings, is in vain recommended.
If you separate a child from its playmates, or keep it entirely in the company of older people whose interests and sympathies are those of more advanced years, that child in time will mope, and grow dull and lifeless. It needs the thought-element coming of the companionship of other children, as much as it needs any other food. Compel a man of dull, slow brain, who finds his principal enjoyment among his cronies at the ale-house, to associate for years only in the company of philosophers and scientists, and that man in time will suffer in mind and body through isolation from his own quality of mind and thought, which is also to him a certain food and support.
You are under the operation of the same law, — the law that minds of like quality must be fed from other minds similar in sympathy and interests, or physical disease will come of lack of such unseen nourishment.
Co-operation hitherto has only been supposed possible by the bringing of people’s bodies together. But, as is often seen, the massing of bodies in societies and organizations when minds are not in unison, has effected little or nothing.
The only successful co-operation for affecting results in business, or any undertaking, is that of the unseen thought-element coming of minds working in agreement and concord. No external organization, whether of politics, religion, or business, flourishes otherwise.
Such co-operation can be effectual when the physical bodies of those so using their thought, or force, are far apart, and (physically) unknown to each other. In other words, if you are daily for a short time sending out a thought of perfect good will to all, friend or enemy, you are attracting to you the beneficial thought-current of all similarly thinking. If you set apart a certain time each day, so to desire or pray for the good of all, you commence the more to methodize or organize this thought current. If, now, two, three, four, or more of you meet, say once a week, to put your minds, or force, if for ever so few minutes, in asking for the realization of the highest, happiest, and most perfected life for yourself and others, you are accumulating still more of this constructive unseen force; and as so you continue to meet, and generate it, you will the more and more develop it into an organized power, and send it to operate in more and more channels for individual and public good, — even as the larger the boiler, the more force in it is generated, the greater the number of machines moved by it, and the more diversified their use.
As all humanity is in spirit joined together, forming one body, so to leave out from your good wishes the ” least of these,” is as if you should, in the cure of your own body of any ailment, leave out (were it possible) a part of that body. So to do, would bring injury to the whole; and so to leave out, through hatred, the least fragment of humanity, is bringing injury to the whole, yourself included.
As so you continue to meet, you will, through this silent and mysterious power, be led to others meeting for a similar purpose. Your force will then meet and Mend with theirs; and so without any previous external organization, without a formal commencement, or written constitution and by-laws, you will find yojrself in time in full communion, sympathy, and pu pose with people all over the land, who in mind, refinement, and tastes are best suited to you, as you are to them.
There is today in our own and other lands, a greater average than ever before of relatively advanced and refined minds, or spirits using physical bodies, who, through the growing spirituality of our era, have been able to be re-incarnated. Because as opinion broadens, and becomes more liberal, on the earth, it represents a literal element which has enabled a finer type of spirits to come nearer earth, and thereby secure for themselves new bodies to act with on the earth; and the securing of these bodies is a necessity in order to acquire that degree of power which shall make the spirit free, independent, and complete master of the material. You, as a spirit, must have and use a physical body, and profit through all the experiences of a physical body, until such power is gained or grown to; and you must be re-incarnated, or use one physical body after another, until you attain to a certain degree of spiritual knowledge, and consequent power.
Then, and then only, does your real life commence. When you have passed the period and necessity of your many past unconscious re-incarnations, the initial point of your real existence has commenced. Then the material is no longer, as now, your master. You are master then of the material, and, having power over the elements, can make at pleasure a physical body, or any other physical thing, to use on the earth-domain of life, — a power to which some individuals have grown in the past, and more are so to grow in the future. Another result of this development, or evolution, will be the blending of the higher spiritual world with our material world, — the coming of the New Jerusalem, as one of the scribes and seers of the early Christian era expressed it, when people shall live in the spiritual or material at will.
If you are of this order of mind and advanced type of spirit, it is of the utmost importance that you heed our simple suggestion. For, in so sending out your thought, you are establishing a bond of mental communion with the like order of mind. This will in time bring you to those who need you as you need them. You need communication and interchange with your like order of thought, in order to strengthen and confirm you, so that you may know that ideas, which for years have been knocking at your doors, are living truths, and not ” notions ” or “fancies,” as you will know when you find that others far from you, and for all your previous life unknown to you, have been thinking similar ideas.
Co-operation of desire in the spirit of perfect good will, though you do not meet physically such as desire with you, will serve as a first step to bring to you more spiritual power here on earth; and such power will go far towards saving you from the ordeal of another unconscious re-incarnation, where, through the relatively slow and cumbersome experiences of physical birth and physical growth, so much must be lived and learned over and over again with each new entrance into the physical life.
When you so come together in the proper spirit, having your bodies rested, and your minds as much as possible rid of daily cares and troubles, you make a thought atmosphere or element into which spirits like your own in high purpose and motive can come and remain, so long as you keep the thought-element pure. These may impress and enlighten you. You make, in this way, a place to which they are most anxious to come. They need you, as you need them. They will be of those very nearly related to you. The disembodied are not all independent of the embodied or of this world. In very many cases they need much assistance that the embodied only can give. There can be no sundering of the ties of spiritual relationship because one mind has a physical body to use, and another has not. The being the nearest related to you of all in the universe, and the one whose mental rapport and communion could be of the greatest use to you, may be eagerly awaiting the opportunity to come nearer you through the means we here suggest; and when these are taken, others will in time suggest themselves, which will render such blending of related minds closer and closer, until possibilities are realized which to the mass of the present day would seem as improbable as a tale of ” The Arabian Nights.”
When you meet together, or retire apart, having chiefly in your mind the desire for the good of all, you draw and acquire power. That power can never be lost. It is not at all necessary, however, when you so “sit for power,” that your minds be kept bent or strained on the purpose in hand. So long as the pupose is strong and uppermost in your mind, that is enough. If there be two, three, or more of you, you can, after a few minutes of silence the better to concentrate your thought on your purpose, engage in music, or agreeable conversation on any subject, so long as such conversation involves no enviousness or any sort of ill will, carping, or sarcasm toward others. If this spirit of evil creeps in, you will send the same spirit out—a rotten strand, weakening your invisible bond of communication with each other, and cutting off your communication with the highest and most powerful quality of thought.
Do not “think hard” when you send your thought of good will to others. If you are bent on a certain purpose, it is not necessary that such purpose is always present in your memory. Your force is acting on and for such purpose all the same, whether you are thinking of it or not.
Those with quick ear and keen spiritual perception will feel the import of what we recommend. It is not expected that our suggestion will be at first regularly or completely carried out. Though engaged in with zeal at first, periods may come when such zeal and interest may for a time fall away, when the cares or pleasures or interests, or other phases of worldly life, may for a period rush like a torrent between us and the daily regular practice of a few minutes of silent prayer. But the seed once sown with you will never die. Something, as time goes on, will, after all relapses, force its importance, and profit more and more upon you. You will take hold after such relapses with renewed vigor. You will realize that this silent communion and mental cooperation is the first step to your new life, — the life of your spirit in happiness infinitely beyond the life of your physical being. You will in time realize that the cultivation of silent prayer, either alone or in congenial and believing groups, is the true means for giving you new life, force, clear sight, and self sustaining power for all manner of undertakings. You will realize that it is the readiest means for drawing on the infinite and exhaustless bank of Infinite Spirit and Power.
“The prayer of faith shall heal the sick;” and the thought sent out, desiring the restoration of a sick friend, carries an aid to that friend. If others join in such prayer in faith and trust, so much the greater silent force is developed, and carried to the sick person. If the physical body be so worn out that the sick spirit can no longer hold it, your thought is still an aid and much-needed help to that spirit without its physical body; for all sickness does not cease this side of the grave. It does not cease in the physical or any other life until the spirit is cured of all unhealthy and false imaginings.
You can excuse your shortcomings as to periods of regular observance; for it is quite impossible to overcome or change in a few months, or even years, the habits and tendencies of the physical life: and it is better far not to sit in silent prayer at all than to make of it a forced, perfunctory, mechanical habit. What cannot be done without heart, had better not be done at all. But you may rely that the live spark involved in this truth will never die out within you, though it may long smoulder.
To no force in the universe belongs such power as that of minds united in one purpose. It acts, and is ever acting, on all grades of motive. The higher the motive, the greater this power. It is used often unconsciously for evil. Its power is greater when used for good; and the power generated of ten minds for good is superior to that of ten thousand minds acting on a lower motive. But it is a silent power. It moves in mysterious ways. It is noiseless. It makes no show of open opposition. It uses no material methods of effort through tongue or arm or physical force.
The White-Cross-Library series, started amid many difficulties and without capital, has, in our belief, been carried forward, and owes its growing success, to the force coming of a few minds, who, whenever practicable, have met in silent desire to this end.
We would ask that those in sympathy with this idea, who shall carry it out for six months, and at the end of that time feel its importance to them individually, shall then, if they are entirely pleased so to do, communicate with us by letter to that effect, — say at date of April 1, or thereabout, 1888. There will then be given further suggestion relative to this matter.
We offer the following to those who may desire a set form of words in which to express a silent prayer:—
Infinite and Eternal Spirit of Good, give up renewed power to overcome all our defects. Give us renewed spirit of good will to all our fellow-beings. Give us faith, and make us see more and more clearly the law, the ways, the means, the methods, that shall bring us lasting health, peace, happiness, and prosperity. Give us perfect trust in the law of eternal life.
The Religion Of Dress
Your thought is an invisible emanation ever going from you. It is in part absorbed by your clothing; and if such clothing be long worn, it becomes saturated with this element. Every thought of ours is a part of our real self. Our last thought is a part of our latest, newest self. If you wear old clothes, you re-absorb into your newest, latest self the old thought you have previously cast off, and with which they are saturated. You may then re-absorb into your newest self of today something of every mood of anger, irritation, or anxiety, sent from you while wearing those garments, and sent into them. You burden, then, your newer self of today with your old dead self of last month or last year. You can be each day a newer man or woman than you were yesterday, and you want as much as possible to keep that newness and freshness unmixed with oldness. It is this sense of deadness felt by your spirit that makes the old coat or the old gown feel so uncomfortable. It is the same sense that makes new clothing seem grateful and refreshing to you. You are then putting on a new material, envelope, or skin not filled and burdened with the thought-emanation of last month or last year.
There is, then, only loss of power for you in wearing old clothes — in other words, putting on a part of your old dead self—for economy’s sake. Not even a snake will crawl into its old skin after casting it, for sake of economy. Nature never wears her old clothes. Nature never economizes after man’s fashion, in putting the plumage on a bird, the fur on a quadruped, the tints on a flower. If she did, the prevalent color of everything would be that of old coats and pantaloons, and the hues of God’s firmament would be those of a second-hand clothing store.
It is healthy to live amid color, and plenty of it. What so pleases the eye, rests the mind; and whatever rests the mind, rests the body.
In dress, and the furnishing of our houses, there are ten new shades of color where there was one twenty years ago. This is one of the many indications of the growing spirituality of the age.
Spirituality implies a keener perception and appreciation of all that is beautiful. A dull mind sees nothing in the glowing, ever-changing hues of a magnificent sunset. Spirituality is entranced and fascinated by it. Spirituality means simply power of finding enjoyment in more and more things. It is but another name for that heaven which all human nature longs for and is eventually to realize, — the heaven of the mind, when every moment is one of pleasure, and all pain is eternally forgotten.
The varied colors of ladies’ wearing attire were all in existence forty years ago — all worn by some plant, some flower, some bird, some animal, but the coarser eye of that time had not detected them. When it did detect them, it desired next to imitate them. It did imitate them; and now the same spiritualized eye is at work detecting new shades and hues, and striving to imitate them. It will imitate them, because, whatever human mind sets its desire or thought upon to accomplish, that it will accomplish.
The same growing spiritualization and refinement of the race cause the greater diversity of garb and color, giving more play and freedom to limb, lung, and muscle, as now worn by men and women in recreative exercises, such as yachting, baseball, bicycling, lawn tennis, and it is gradually bringing more freedom to the individual in his or her selection of the most fitting garb and color.
The phrase “wearing the mantle” of another person, as indicative of filling their place, or taking on their power, is something more than figurative. If you put on the garment of a really superior person, you may absorb something of their superior self or thought. If you wear the garment of a coarse, crude, vulgar person, you will surely absorb of such coarseness. There may be in clothes the contagion of low thought, as there may be in clothing the contagion of disease. Indeed, the contagion of diseased thought and the contagion of diseased germs sent from sick bodies into clothing merge one into the other, and mean about the same thing.
Our clothing can be rested as much as our bodies. When you put on the garment you have laid aside for a period of weeks or months, although it may not feel as one entirely new, still, in a sense, it does not seem quite so stale as when last worn. If hung accessible to sunshine and fresh air, it will cast off more or less of your old thought; for thought in some forms has weight, though inappreciable by any material standard of weight. In proportion to its crudeness, does it, like any other heavy substance, seek or flow to the lowest places. There will be for this reason more evil or evil tendency in a cellar or basement than at the top of the house, and less independence and courage in a low, swampy country than among the dwellers of the mountains. The history of our race has proven this.
But when thought, through the growth of the spirit, reaches a certain point or quality, it ceases to be governed by the attraction of gravitation. In other words, it ceases to be drawn, or draw to itself, any of the quality or element of physical things. It comes then under the rule of another attraction, as yet unrecognized by scientists. We will here call it the attraction of aspiration. This sending thought to the higher or spiritual domain of being attracts also a similar element from that domain, which renders the physical body less and less governed by earthly gravitation or tendency. Through the working of this law, Christ’s physical body did not sink in the sea; and, for similar reason, Christ and the prophet Elijah ascended physically to another realm of existence would absorb of the lower thought emanating from them. If worn by the priest at all times, it would also be permeated by all of his peculiar moods. For priests, like other men, have their lower moods,— their periods when the higher self is temporarily overcome by the lower, — as all other men and women have and must have. But when the priest puts on the dress meant only for the sacredness and gravity, or rather the repose and serenity, of mind proper for the altar or pulpit, and used only when he wishes for and invites this mood of mind or order of thought, — that dress, being only used for such purpose, contains and is permeated only by that peculiar order of thought associated with his priestly ministration.
The religion of any people is the law governing and shaping such people’s lives. It expresses itself in all their habits, manners, and customs. Such religion, or law of life, may be a relatively low or high one; and it will also be a law for some as this planet matures and ripens, always increasing and widening in the methods and paths leading to higher and higher states of happiness.
All religions and all religious form, rite, and ceremonial, be they of any faith or at any period of the world’s generally known history, have been instigated and established through a higher wisdom and more powerful order of mind, not seen or generally known of men; and such rites and formalities have had for their object the teaching to man of methods of life which would bring him more lasting happiness. The priest in ancient and modern faiths is, or should be, the chief aspirer, — the man so highly developed as to be the most powerful in prayer or aspiration; the visible medium betwixt the lower and higher, the seen and unseen worlds.
In all known ages, the priest, whether officiating in the temples of the ancient mythology of Judaism, or Bhuddism, or Catholicism, has worn a garb peculiar to the priestly function. It is a garment consecrated to a certain use. It is not to be worn in public or in promiscuous throngs. If it were, it
Following this same law, we find great use and profit in wearing changes of apparel suitable for certain occupations. An actor feels more his part, and the phase of character he portrays, when he wears the costume adapted to such part, especially when he has played in it many times; because then such costume becomes saturated with the thought peculiar to such part, and he does literally put on a part of his characterization. If you put on the rags of the beggar, you will, for the same reason, the more feel the cringing, crouching, mental condition of the beggar. If in the study or practice of any art you wear a certain dress (and a tasteful one), you will the better prosecute such art, for you have then a dress saturated with the thought of such art; and through such saturation, unseen beings, skilled in such art, can come nearer to you, and impress their skill upon you. If you put on clothing used in every sort of work, and which is worn by you among turbulent, sordid, and low mental atmospheres and surroundings, you place thereby a thought barrier betwixt you and them, which renders you less accessible to them.
There is the germ of a truth in the idea of the amulet or charm, or relic of saint, or bead blessed by the pope, possessing a certain power or virtue. Any material substance once worn or touched by any person will absorb a certain part of that person’s thought or self, and such thought can be absorbed by the person to whom it is given; and, if it is the thought of good, it affects you for good. When you look on the ring given you by a friend, and one whose thought is ever sending out good-will to you, you are reminded of him or her, and in being so reminded you send your thought to him or her; and, if he or she does really wish you unmixed good, you will receive a current of his or her thought back, and it is a help to you.
There is great profit in putting on a fresh change of apparel for dinner or the theatre or opera or any social gathering for recreation; and recreation all should have in the latter part of the day. If you wear your business-suit at dinner or the opera or party, you are bringing, in that clothing, a part of your business self to a place where all business thought should be temporarily laid aside and forgotten, in order that business shall be the better done next morning. You are bringing to dinner or the theatre in that business-suit more or less of the thought it has absorbed of pork or beef or codfish, or bargain or sale, or leases or rents, or other care, fret, worry, or anxiety, which, as a really religious man, you want for the time to be rid of. Your business-suit, so full and infected by the business thought, and possibly iniquity, in which you have been moving and mingling, will throw off this element, besides actually rendering it more difficult for you to rid yourself of business care and anxiety. And such element and condition of your own mind may affect unpleasantly those near you, who are highly sensitive; and though they may not know the cause, yet in the privacy of their souls they may not find you so agreeable as you may wish them to find you.
We need to dress as neatly and tastefully in the privacy of our houses and families, our chambers and working-rooms, as we may do, or attempt to do, in public. There can be a neat and tasteful dress for every employment. It is most profitable to wear such dress. For if we feel ourselves becomingly attired, we shall carry on our faces the impress and result of such dressing. When you feel tastefully attired, it is your spirit and not your body that so feels such pleasure; and as it so feels and also thinks pleasurable thought, so it will be drawing to you that of thought element which will shape your face in accordance with such feeling. So the expression of your face improves through persistent tasteful dressing at all times ; for the whole body moulds its shape according to the moods or mental states of your spirit.
You feel disagreeably a torn gown, a shoe run down at the heel, a seedy hat, a soiled collar. Soiled and long-worn under-clothing becomes irksome. Your spirit participates in the sensation of annoyance. The mind is as much affected as the body. This disagreeable sensation is thought. You are ever putting out such thought element. It imprints its peculiar expression on your features.
If our garments are slovenly in arrangement two thirds of the time, we can never dress with that certain neatness and elegance pleasing to the eyes of others, though they may not be able to tell exactly what it is that pleases. If slovenly habit of attire predominate, slovenly expression in some form will mould itself on the face, because the face will shape its expression in accordance with the prevailing mood of mind. A man scared at something two-thirds of the time will have a scared look all the time. A continual slipshod mood of mind, which ties shoestrings negligently, brushes the hair with “a lick and a promise,” and is never carefully buttoned up in any direction, will carry a slipshod face. If we feel always neatly and becomingly dressed, both as regards the clothing that is seen and that which is not seen, be it dress for sleep, for work, for the kitchen, the parlor, or the studio, we are then cultivating and drawing to us the thought element of order, of neatness, of grace; and such elements will build themselves more and more into us, become parts of us, and the face will show more and more in pleasing expression the result of such incorporation of higher thought.
Tasteful arrangement of clothing for the body must come from within. It is the spirit that dresses the body. The disordered mental states of the lunatic show themselves in disordered or fantastic attire.
The more you invite the thought or moods of order, neatness, grace, — in brief, the ” doing of all things well,” — the more of such thought will flow toward you. With the thought always comes the capacity for such doing. Such order of thought must express and prove itself more and more in every act. Order, neatness, taste, will prevail, not only in the arrangement of your clothing, and the selection of fitting colors, but in all you do, — in your handwriting, in the packing of your valise, in your walk, your speech, your general bearing. The “grace” of the God in yourself is a principle. It colors, influences, affects, your whole life. It is “grace ” in its literal and more common meaning, for “grace” is a Godlike quality, and grace of movement, and grace of bearing, whether seen in the actor, the orator, the danseuse, or the true lady, is born of order, of that attitude or condition of mind, which with electric rapidity plans beforehand what it executes, and plans almost as it executes, be such execution placed on the graceful bow or the accentuation of a sentence which shall convey an idea or emotion too fine to be carried by mere words. In the “kingdom of God,” there are no trivial things. Religion, or the law of life, or the doing of all things well, involves the use, outlay, and application of force; and force is thought, and all thought is infinite spirit; and as we learn better and better how to use and apply this, better and better are the results coming to us from such use.
Colors are expressions of mental conditions and qualities. Despondency, mourning, hopeless grief, chooses black. Our nation, which at heart believes in death, — in other words, regards the sundering of spirit from body as the end of all communion twixt their own and the mind which previously used that body, — puts on black, an appropriate badge for hopelessness and lack of clear idea concerning the whereabouts and condition of very near departed friends. The Chinese, who interpret death only as the loss of a body to a spirit, for similar cause wear white, indicative to them of a temporary sadness, tempered by the certain knowledge that such friend, though not seen of the physical eye, is still as near them as ever. Dull, lusterless black is the color of stagnation and decay. It is the color most prevalent when the life, light, warmth, and cheer of the sun are most shut from us. As now so much worn among us, it is symbolical, and an actual result and outcome of lack of spiritual sight, — in other words, lack of life, light, and valuable knowledge. True, we have systems of education which teach a great deal of what is called knowledge. It is a question how much they teach is worth knowing, and how much is not. How much of our modern “finished education” gives power to accomplish results?
In your dress, your spirit always chooses the colors, or combinations of color, most expressive of your mental condition. If your life is entirely without aim or purpose, you will wear “anything which comes handy,” — parts of different suits, pitched on without regard to becomingness. You will dress in patchwork, and, even when you buy new clothing, you will allow the dealer to fit you out in patchwork. If you are verging on what is called ” middle age,” and regard youth as a period forever past, and look at yourself as on the down-grade of life, bound for a domain of existence where all of life’s pleasures, hopes, and joyousness are to be gradually shut out, and that in a few years you are to become a decrepit old man or woman, you will probably dress in black, — possibly rusty black, — the color so much worn by men and women who seem to have turned their faces permanently toward the despondent and soured view of life ; to whom the presence of youth, in its gayety and love of color, is disagreeable and a folly; and whose internal consolation seems to be that youth is fleeting, and must soon end in a life as hard, cheerless, and somber as their own.
Our land is full of people, men and women, who in dress have “slumped,” — who have little pride or love for what they put on; who pitch at their bodies, in dressing, a hat, a bonnet, a shawl, a gown, or necktie, because custom and habit say it must be worn; who regard care, love, and scrupulousness as to their apparel as matters belonging only to a bygone youth.
These are signs of death. These people’s bodies have then commenced to die. They have “slumped,” because their spirits have “slumped.” For the proper and tasteful adornment of the body, the instrument here used by your spirit is one of the legitimate, pleasurable, and necessary occupations of life. It is the spirit’s outward advertisement of its internal condition. It is truthful in every story it tells in this way. A seedy coat, a soiled rusty gown, tell no lies as to their wearers’ prevailing state of mind.
Slovenly dressing means lack of love for the effort necessary in dressing, and choosing the fashion and color of dress; and whatever is done by the body with lack of love for, and in, the doing is an injury to the body; and, as viewed in this light, not even a millionnaire can afford to wear a rusty hat.
In what we call youth, there is the most of spiritual wisdom or intuition, because your spirit has then a new body; and up to a certain period the spirit is free from the old dead thought and opinion expressed in eternally followed custom and prejudice by the thousands of the middle-aged about it. Rejoicing in such spiritual knowledge and naturalness, youth is playful. It casts off care. It loves personal adornment. It revels like Nature as expressed in the vegetable kingdom in color and variety of color. In this it is right. In the unconscious wisdom of intuition, it is wiser far than so many of middle age, who, through ignorance of the law of life, have at once turned down the corners of their mouths, and turned out all hope of new joys and pleasures. It was for this reason that the Christ of Judaea commended to the solemn elders of Israel the little child, saying, ” Except ye become as one of these, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” For with each new body the spirit feels, rather than sees, a glimpse of its future angelhood, — a glimpse so often and soon covered up through absorption of the worldly thought about it; covered, at least, for that one earthly life.
I hear some say in thought: How can we, on whom the burdens of life press so heavily, get our changes of apparel for different callings and different periods of the day? I answer, Yours is the possibility of getting them in this way: Set your mind — the force which is your eternal birthright, that magnet which will always draw to you the material correspondence of what you most think, or set it toward — in the direction of imperiously but in silence demanding these things, and in time you will see opportunities whereby you shall earn and have them honestly. Refuse in your thought to accept inferior clothes, inferior food, inferior apartments, save as a makeshift; and in time the superior will come to you. If you say, I expect I never shall do any better or have any better than I have now, and that, if anything, my condition a year hence will be worse than now, you are setting in motion, and keeping in motion, that thought force which will weight you down, press you down, and keep you down, and attract you to rags, and rags to you. Set your mind in the direction of having only second and third rate clothing, food, furniture, and surroundings; and the second and third rate only will you attract and have. Set the magnetic power of your mind persistently in the desire and demand of the best of everything; and the best will, by an inevitable and unerring law, eventually come to you.
Set your mind persistently in the direction of second and third rate things; and by this same irresistible force will you be drawn into those crowds of seedy and semi-seedy men and women, who haunt auctions of old furniture, — there buying and carrying home creaky bedsteads; and ague-stricken bureaus, whose drawers won’t shut when opened, and won’t open when shut; old carpets full of the dust of ages, and worse; old clothes full of disease and diabolical thought; and old beds and bedding full of the corpse which died upon them. Get into this current, and you become an actual part of this second-rate life and second-rate being.
The Necessity Of Riches
It is right and necessary that you should have the very best of all this world’s goods — of clothing, food, house, surroundings, amusements, and all of which you are appreciative; and you should aspire to these things.
To aspire is not to covet another’s possessions, or to desire to cheat another out of them. To live in squalor, to dress meanly, to eat coarse and inferior food, to live in barren and meanly-furnished rooms, or where the eye falls continually on dirt and degradation, is to cramp, starve, wound, and degrade the spirit. That will injure the body.
You really need all that your higher and most refined tastes call for and long for. You need and are the better, if surrounded by pictures and statuary of merit, by elegant household decoration, by the finest architecture. You are the better for having free access to the drama, for being able to travel and see other lands and peoples, and that in the best style and with the least inconvenience. You are the better for having your carriage and the means to entertain your friends, and thereby secure to yourself, under the best conditions, the best of association and social recreation. To have the cost of any comfort continually coming between you and the longing for its enjoyment, to see pleasures and long for them your whole life because you cannot afford them, to choke off hospitality when your heart is full of it, to be obliged to deny yourself of recreations and the needed rest they give mind and body, is to live a narrow, starved, cramped life. Starvation of taste, and starvation of any kind, is at the root of all excess and all degradation.
Your starved man overeats, and, having nothing better, will eat moldy bread and tainted meat. Starved human tastes always denied healthy food create unhealthy appetites, and such starved tastes feast on the moldy bread and tainted meat of the meretricious, low, cheap variety theatre, and all other places of similar character.
Refinement comes from the class having the most wealth, and, consequently, the most leisure. It is that class which best pays and encourages art. You do not get the elegancies of life from excessive toil and drudgery. You do find among that element the most coarseness, brutality, vulgarity, and degradation; and these things always accompany overworked bodies. That wealth is abused, that refinement may be mixed with effeminacy, is no proof against the great use and necessity for having, using, and enjoying wisely the best the soil can raise, and the best of all man’s art and skill; or, in other words, the best of all we can do for each other; and in the coming Kingdom of Heaven, which is to be the kingdom of earth, that is what men and women will be joyfully doing for each other; but not without system, not without order, not without the recognition and practice of the law that a righteous and religious business consists in such an interchange of commodities between man and man, so that he who gives shall feel paid by what he receives from another.
Is it not to our profit to have everything about us as beautiful, as neat, as symmetrical as possible, so that on whatever the eye falls or other sense feels, only pleasure thereby shall be caused? For every pleasant thought is a thing and a force, and does you good. Is it, then, to the profit of mind or body to have about you things repulsive, things unclean, harsh, and angular in appearance, muddy and smoky and gloomy, when every thought coming from the sight of such surroundings is unpleasant? And such force does really wound you and injure you.
There is no merit in being poor or in desiring to be poor. Poverty and a “hard time” in early life do not develop and bring out qualities the sooner, as so many argue. You might as well argue that a plant starved of air, earth, water, and sunshine, would the sooner become a healthy, fruitful plant. Strong spirits rich in thought have risen above poverty in spite of its impediments, and many a strong spirit the world never heard of has been crushed by it. The majority of the impelling spirits and leading minds of the American Revolution — Washington, Jay, Adams, Hancock, Morris — were relatively rich or prosperous, nor could they have developed that mental or spiritual force which really carried our cause to success, had the incessant physical drudgery of poverty been imposed on them.
Idea, and the best rounded-out idea, is born always of abundant leisure, and so are great achievements and great inventions.
Christ told his apostles to take neither purse nor scrip; but he did not tell them they should not have, or enjoy of all enjoyable things. By “purse and scrip,” he implied the old and material methods for obtaining what they needed. He wished them to depend on spiritual law; that is, on their own spiritual or mental force, for bringing them the best things as they needed them.
Certain old proverbs encourage the idea that industry leads to wealth; but mere industry does not. Thousands are industrious, and poor all their lives. The point is, where and on what you put your industry. Industry, with little brains, saws wood and shovels coal for a living; industry, with more brains, buys a forest of wood, hires the sawyers and choppers, oversees industriously, and sells at a handsome profit. Neither does mere saving bring wealth. Thousands save and scrimp, and deny themselves of luxuries and necessities, to lay up every spare penny, and are poor all their lives. They call it economy to walk a mile to save a five cent care fare, and in so doing possibly expend enough force and strength which, rightly applied, would make ten dollars. They starve even their bodies, deny themselves of nourishing food, live on the cheapest, and sleep in cold, damp rooms to save a dime, and in so doing contract disease and weakness. This is not real economy. It is worse than the wildest extravagance, for that may bring a short pleasure. This course brings only pain, and only pain and loss is gained by it. Hundreds, if not thousands, of this class, fall a prey to speculative schemers. Their carefully hoarded cash is invested in a mine which has next to no existence, save a name and a gilt-edged prospectus; or it vanishes in some wildcat stock, or in the construction of a railroad whose first shareholders never get a penny of their money back, or other glittering scheme promising large and certain returns, and performing only regular calls for more assessments, to save what is already put in.
Does “Early to bed and early to rise make men wealthy”? Who get up the earliest, work the most hours, and go to bed earliest? Thousands on thousands of the poor, going to their labors at dawn of a cold winter’s morn, while the men who control the finances of the world rise at eight, breakfast at nine, get to business at ten, leave it at three or four in the afternoon, and recreate, possibly till midnight; nor would these men so control the domain of finance did they not give this ease and rest to the body (the spirit’s instrument), in order to generate and use the force of that spirit.
So we find that the old worn-out maxims for attaining wealth do not “hold water.” They are only true when taken with many modifications, and are but fragments of the real or spiritual law which brings abundance.
All material wealth is gained through following a certain spiritual law, or by the use, in a certain way, of human spiritual forces.
It is not a new law. It is followed in part, and quite unconsciously, and always has been, by those who gain wealth. But there is to be a fuller application of this law, whereby not only wealth will come to the individual, but at the same time health, and the ability to enjoy wealth. This law, used wisely and intelligently, is as much yours to profit by as it is the belonging of any other person sufficiently clear in mind to recognize it.
Christ indicated to the apostles the spiritual law on which they should depend for all comforts, necessities and luxuries, when he said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” And in the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of spiritual law, the methods for obtaining all these things are essentially different, and almost the reverse of the purse and scrip, save and starve, body and mind abusing methods used by the kingdom of the material world to get money, and which, when so used, in the majority of cases, does not get it, or if it does, gets it at a terrible cost to the possessor.
You, now a spirit, using a physical body, are a part of God, or the Infinite Force of Good; and belonging to your spirit are powers, now possibly in embryo, but ever growing greater, as they have in the past and during vast periods of time, been growing to their present stature. To know and use these unseen forces intelligently, is to gain knowledge of and use spiritual law intelligently, so as to bring you every possible good. Now, unconsciously, you may be using these very forces to bring you evil.
These forces are your daily, hourly thoughts. If you put those thoughts or forces in one direction, they will bring you health and the goods of this world to use and enjoy, but not to hoard; if you put them in another they will bring you disease and poverty.
Your every thought is a force, as real as a current of electricity is a force. The thoughts you are now putting out are now working to shape your face and body, affecting your health for good or ill, and making or losing for you money.
If you think poverty, you put out an actual force to attract poverty. If in mind you are always seeing yourself growing poorer and poorer, if at every venture you fear and teach yourself to expect to lose money, if your heart quakes every time you pull out your purse, you are by an inevitable force in nature, or spiritual law, attracting poverty. Your prevailing order of thought is a force which brings its like in physical things. If you live in a two dollar per week hall bedroom, and your thought every night and morning is, ” Well, I suppose I must always live in this barren den,” you are by such despondent state of mind creating in the invisible but most powerful element of thought, a power which will keep you in that room, and in a cheap, inferior corresponding order of life. If you say in your thought, and keep saying it, and keep so far as you can your mind in the state to say this: ” I accept this room only as my temporary abode. I will have a better one, and after that a better one still, and everything else better,” you are then, through the mysterious agency of your own thought power, bringing the better to you.
You have then set a magnet as real, though invisible, as the loadstone at work drawing the better to you, and you will find, as this state of mind is persisted in, that you will gradually drift away from cheap and relatively unsuccessful people into a more aspiring, broader, and successful order of mind.
When the hod-carrier thinks, aspires, plans, builds persistently in imagination something higher than carrying the hod, he is on the sure and only road to something better. Persistent desire or demand in thought for the better is the real force, impelling evolution from the lower to the higher. It is this that works, and has ever worked in all nature — in tree, animal, man, all forms of mind acting with physical and visible organizations — and it is this desire, this force, which in all forms of life has carried our planet from chaos to its present more improved and refined state. It was this desire, this almost unconscious prayer, that has, through countless ages, gradually changed the heavy, wallowing, unwieldy, and gigantic birds and beasts of a past far beyond human history, into the more agile, the more graceful forms of the animal life of the present (for we grant mind or spirit in greater or less degree to bird, animal, fish, reptile and plant, and aspiration of spirit also) and it is this same aspiration or desire, the desire of the spirit in all forms of physical life, to be freed from the shackles and impediments of matter that shall, for the future, change plant, tree, and animal, into still finer and freer forms. It will transform men and women into beings and forces for illimitable and ever-increasing happiness, beauty and grandeur not now to be realized or imagined; for of all that is in the universe, and of all the possibilities in the universe, the present utmost scope of human imagination is but as the drop to the ocean.
Theology calls this desire prayer; and prayer is the great elevating force in the universe; and when you desire or demand anything, you pray for that thing, or, in other words, you set at work the force attaching that thing. You can so pray unconsciously for poor things as well as good; and if you do, you attract poor things; and if in mind you see ever disaster, misfortune and the poorhouse, it is the same as praying for disaster, loss and the poorhouse, and by this law, disaster, misfortune and the poorhouse will come to you.
This force belongs to all of you. Such share as you have belongs to you and you alone. It has, through a part of vast periods of time, made you what you are. It is ever with you, increasing. You cannot stop that increase no more than you can stop this planet from improving and refining, for you and I are literal parts of this planet, and this planet is not a dead ball of earth. There is no death at all in nature. This planet is alive, all alive — a living, moving, growing, material expression of a gigantic spirit, even as your bodies are the visible expressions and instruments of your own invisible minds or spirits.
Christ was not poor in the things of this world. He could bring to him, and others, wine and food out of the elements through his power of thought, or spiritual power. He could save himself from shipwreck and drowning as no mere man of money could save himself. He could overcome the elements or create any material article he needed, through his power of concentrated thought.
That same power exists in embryo in every mind or spirit. It can be, and is today, exercised in different channels. It brings to those who exercise it, though perhaps unconsciously, results in money and possessions. It does not work so quickly as with Christ. The results come more slowly; but the power which brings millions to Jay Gould is a spiritual power, a power working apart and often far from his body, and a power, which, like fire or electricity, unless used with the highest motive and for the good of all, will certainly, in time, bring great injury to those using it, either on this or the unseen side of their lives.
In the following lies one part of the spiritual law for gaining what justly belongs to you.
It is a common reproach against ministers that they “preach for pay,” or preach for the largest salary. A minister’s calling is a business. He has, or should have, as regards ideas, a valuable article to give people. In the domain of justice, people should compensate him in proportion to the value of the article he gives. It is not justice in any business to expect or demand something for nothing, or next to nothing.
If you hear a man every Sunday, and his thought interests and strengthens you, and you go away without contributing to that man’s support, or desiring to, you are getting something and giving nothing in return. But if you strongly and earnestly desire to do something for that man, and cannot in money, your thought is a power, and does him good. If you give but a penny in such desire, that penny is carrying to the preacher a thought force for good, and is of far more value than thousands given grudgingly. It was in this spirit that the widow’s mite, so commended by Christ, was given.
You enjoy and are benefited by that man’s mind and talent as much as you are by a meal for which you are obliged to pay. You cannot get the gospel of good cookery without paying for it. No more should you get any other gospel. You would be ashamed to sit at a man’s table every day, eating of the choicest food, without offering him something for it. You would be ashamed to see that man impoverishing himself and denying himself of comforts he needed while supplying you with that food. You would call him an unwise man for doing so. Exactly as unwise are they who think it their duty to preach or give of any gospel for nothing. Their sin is as great as that of those who take it for nothing. If you go into the streets and for the sake of pure benevolence give all your time and strength to people, you will become a pauper, both in mind and body.
The twelve apostles were not told to do this. They were told to depart from any house or any place where they were not properly received. They were told in case of such treatment, to shake from their feet the dust of such house or place as a ” testimony against it.” Lack of proper support is lack of being properly ” received.”
Some say: ” Trust God in doing God’s service.” All manner of service rendered humanity, such as religious, conscientious cooking, or house-building, or keeping a righteous store, is as much service in the spirit of infinite good as that of talking God’s law to people; and trust in God is the following God’s law; and that is the law of justice and compensation ; or, in other words, the law that you cannot, without injury to yourself, do a service to another without in some way or shape receiving its value in return.
If you do not, you will not only give yourself, your power, and all you have, away to others, but you may become a beggar, calling upon others to give you, without any return, that which in the injustice of ignorance you give, and even throw away, upon others who excite your sympathy; and in this way a man distinguished in i-h» outsit -warM W benevolence and kind heart, may get from the woman, his wife, most of the strength he so freely distributes to others, and gives little or nothing back to her. For when a woman looks out, at home, for so many of the man’s material comforts and necessities, and he depends on her, not only for the entire regulation of the household, his well-cooked breakfast, his punctually and properly sewed on shirt-buttons—if not to her care and foresight in paying the rent — even his moral support and moral backbone, drawn of her greater strength of character, or superior thought, and that man takes all this and expends it in the entertainment of other people, and comes to his home only a squeezed out, tired out, irritable sponge, to fill up and absorb more, and then leave her again to her own resources for social enjoyment, there is ignorant violation of the law of compensation, and the end and the penalty of such violation is a broken-down woman, and afterwards a broken-down man, who may never know that he was carried all his life by that woman, and that the strength he had was not his own but hers.
If the man’s is the stronger thought, and the woman’s the weaker, then he is the loser, and, ultimately, so are both losers by the same process.
You will recollect that the force or thought you may have coming to you from another person is a current as real as a current of air or electricity, and that this force acts on you for good or ill. If that person’s thought is richer than yours, that is, if such person has more foresight, is a better judge of character and motive, is more skilful to plan, and more determined, prompt and resolute to execute, that order of thought can feed your spirit, and give it strength, — and whatever strengthens the spirit strengthens the body, — and if yours is the inferior thought, and you cannot, in thinking of such person, send back a quality of element or thought of a corresponding value and richness, you are getting far more than you give. You are being fed of the richer element, and sending back the poorer. Yet, when so fed, you may be able to appropriate or absorb and use but a small part of what comes to you. The rest is wasted. If your thought is, in quality, equal to the other person’s, you will give each other mutual strength. That is just compensation, and a righteous business transaction. These are agencies ever working all about us in the unseen kingdom of thought.
The sin and the penalty is as great for the one that gives such thought, without expecting or exacting a just return, as for the one who takes. It is this unconscious sin and the action of this little-known law that makes poverty, and thousands on thousands of paupers and invalids, in every grade of society; and today many a rich man, whose force of thought, properly directed, would bring money, revenues and possessions, expends the same force on some person, on someone who gives weakness back, and who wastes what is sent. That same force or thought, more wisely directed, would beget ideas, and ideas, when properly directed, can always be turned into money; and the newest and freshest idea is stronger than all the banks and monopolies in the world.
Such as the discovery of petroleum, an idea in some mind before discovery. Boring for it was an idea in some mind long ere the boring. Refining it was an idea long ere it was refined. The invention of the modern elevator, thereby enabling buildings to be made higher, and so making real estate out of air space, was in idea long before it was materialized in wood or iron; nor would any of these ideas, all worth millions, have come either to minds enfeebled by over-worked bodies, or to minds which unconsciously allowed their force to be drained from them in the way indicated above.
” It is better to give than to receive,” you quote. It is better, in a sense. It is to the generous heart more enjoyable to entertain a friend, to give a dinner, to relieve distress, than to be entertained, or feasted, or relieved. But you find no precept of Christ’s against receiving. The very fact of giving implies that someone must receive; but you must take measures and use methods and foresight to keep your reservoir filled up, so as to keep the fountain of your benevolence playing. The sun must draw moisture through evaporation from lake, river, and ocean, before the clouds can drop that moisture again to earth; and in the whole domain of nature we shall find a well regulated and systemized source and means of supply before there can be giving out of that supply. That is business.
Use Your Riches
For ages the idea has prevailed that to attain the highest goodness, or the ” kingdom of heaven,” one must necessarily live poorly, while the “wicked ” live on the best.
On the contrary in the future, the best people, those who through their ever-growing spiritual power have “drawn nearer to God.” or the Source of Infinite Good, will through such power attract to themselves and enjoy the very best of every good thing.
When we live up to the fuller application of the law, life will become a continual succession of good things, to use and enjoy, but not to hoard; for it is a law working in all nature, through plant, insect, animal, and man, that in order to have and enjoy the new, we must first rid ourselves of the old.
If the tree held stingily on to last year’s fruit and leaves, and refused to drop them, would not the vents for next year’s fruit and leaves be choked up? If the bird, from dislike of parting with old possessions, could at its moulting season hold on to its old plumage, would there come the newer and fresher plumage? These are not far-fetched illustrations in evidence of the great spiritual law, that the old must be cast off ere the new can come; for in all of nature’s workings, from the seed to the human soul, there is a wonderful and beautiful correspondence and analogy. The same law governs the growth and fruitage of a tree as of your spirit, only as regards your spirit it is infinitely more varied and complicated in its workings.
As with the tree and the bird, if you would the quicker enjoy the new clothes, the new house, the newer and better surroundings of every sort, that you long for, cease in mind to cling and hang on to all things you have no use for in the present or soon coming future. If so you hold on to half-worn trumpery of any sort, through the mere love of keeping, you are barring out the better thing coming to you. If you so hold on to the inferior, you keep from you the superior. If you will keep company with people who after all only tire you and bore you, who ridicule your ideas if you express them, and are utterly profitless to you, you keep the better people from you. If you cling to the old worn-out suit of clothes or seedy bonnet, and out of stinginess hate to give it away, and expend any amount of your force in haggling and dickering to sell it for a dime, you will not near as soon have the better clothing, for every thought put in the old represents just so much force, which could as well have been put on a plan to bring you hundreds of dollars instead of dimes.
It is the keeping of things, possessions, and the care of them, which you own and have used but which you cannot now use, which diverts your spiritual or thought power from gaining the fresher and better. It uses up that power on the care and keeping of things now of no use to you, and therefore a damage to you. You do not keep the top, the hoop, the clothing of your boyhood, and the valueless valuables with which you used to cram your pockets. Why? Because you know you have outgrown them, that they are now of no use to you; that you want your strength and time and thought for the acquisition of playthings more suited to the child whose body requires more yards of cloth to cover it.
If you have more things about you than you want for immediate use and enjoyment, they prove not only an annoyance, but that annoyance prevents you from gaining the newer and better. If out of desire of getting your money’s worth you eat enough for three dinners in one, you make too large a contract for the stomach to fill, and defeat the purpose for which you put food in your body. If you have a horse in your stables you have no use for, it is more profitable to sell or give him away before he “eats his head off.” If you have a garret full of old chests and chairs and furniture, or drawers full of half worn clothing and shreds and rags and patches, all of which you keep simply from love of keeping them, or from the idea that you may need these things some time or other, it is far more profitable to sell them or give them away. Because these old and unused things do keep newer and better things from you, by being a care, a load on your mind.
Thousands of people go through life lugging and blacking themselves with old pots, pans, and kettles they have no use for. What would you think of a man, who, for sake of keeping a crowbar, should chain it to his ankle and drag it along with him. You can so chain crowbars to your mind. Many a house owned and hired to others proves a crowbar to its owner. Taxes and repairs eat up the rent, and the force put out through the care and anxiety it causes represents just so much capital stock, which, if properly expended, would bring in far more money.
One secret of the kings of finance is that they know when to rid themselves of possessions on seeing how those possessions can be of no farther use to them. In so doing they work by a spiritual method. Far-sighted men are at this moment “unloading” themselves of properties which they see have no immediate money in them, and near-sighted men are at this moment buying those properties, which will for years lay on their hands a care without recompense, and an encumbrance and obstacle to more immediate gain. The real cost of keeping things is the amount of thought you put in their keeping. If you will keep an old bedstead or bureau, or anything else you never have any use for, and pack it about with you at every house-moving, and put study and calculation as to the place it shall occupy, and worry then because it takes room which you need for every-day purposes, you are putting from time to time force enough on a (to you) useless article which, if properly directed, would buy a hundred new bureaus. In this way does this, the blind desire of mere keeping and hoarding, keep many people poor, and even makes paupers.
Mere hoarding is not business. If everyone put away money as they gained it, and lived on as little as possible, and continually decreased their expenses, the world’s business would soon stop, not so much from lack of money lying useless in chests and old stockings, but because there would soon be little left for people to do to gain money. It is large outlays, expensive and luxurious styles of living, the making of the costliest articles, the erection of magnificent buildings, and not hovels, the demand for the very best of everything, that keeps the laborer, the mechanic, the artist in any department, at work, and keeps the stream of wages pouring into their pockets.
Mere hoarding brings nothing in the end to him who hoards but pain and trouble.
The miser is but a one-sided success. He has gained money only to pile it away in vaults. That money brings him only the gratification of owning it and of adding to the pile. That is but a mania. He gets from his money little pleasure for his body, little pleasure coming from the gratification of intellectual or artistic tastes. He owns only a pile of stamped metal or paper, substantially lives in a poor house, and is a poor man.
Families doing no business, and living entirely on the interest derived from hoarded wealth gained by their ancestors, last but a few generations. They die out, because their spiritual activities and forces become inert and sluggish, from lack of exercise. They live the lives of drones, and as one generation succeeds another their minds grow feebler. They become unable even to hold their possessions against the rising and more active forces about them.
Use brings Gain; Hoarding brings Loss.
In point of wealth, where are the families that existed in this country a century ago? In most cases out of sight, impoverished and superseded by those now so prominent in the world of business and finance — the new men, poor materially at the start, but having minds richer in force. They have exercised that force and achieved their partial successes, and their grandchildren or great grandchildren may become paupers, if content merely to exist on incomes, and give no play to their forces. Even in England it becomes difficult to keep wealth in families as handed down by entail from father to eldest son, for even when sons are supplied they often prove unable to keep the property left them, and even the bequeathed title and possessions of a duke or earl may not prevent that duke and earl from being very low in the scale of intellect.
But the life using this present body is the merest fragment of our real existence. There is an inevitable penalty to be surely paid by the hoarder of money or other possessions, on losing his body. He has not “passed away,” he has only passed from physical sight. He has the same desire as ever to control his property and handle his money. He cannot of it lift a farthing in material substance. But he knows that the money he once called his own exists, and where it is. He knows as well as ever the people having still material bodies he once dealt with, while he to them is a blank — nothing. Though he may have “willed” his millions to others, he cannot will the desire for their possession out of his mind. If such desire for mere keeping without using existed during the life of the body, it will be just as strong after the death of the body. Your mental characteristics, your temper, your inclinations, your passions, your appetites, are no more changed immediately on the death of your body than they are changed today, when you cut off a part of that body, say an arm or a leg.
If at the death of your body you are a mere hoarder of things, you will be tied to those things by bonds or chains, which, though invisible, are as real as chains of iron. If, during the body’s life your thought is put entirely on the gold or bank bills in the safe or vault, if nine-tenths of your time is occupied in planning to add to that hoarded and useless store, you are making in the element of thought chains or filaments tying you to the gold, or bills, or house, or lands once yours and now controlled by others, and yours will be the pain of seeing all these things used as others please, while you can neither get away from or cease to claim them as your own.
It is this law of being and of attraction that has forced people, after losing their bodies, to remain long periods of time at or near places where, when in visible form, they buried treasures, or in houses they formerly owned or occupied, which they do literally “haunt” and are sometimes seen by a physical eye, temporarily clairvoyant, or through the disembodied person’s being able to act for a time through or by some physical agency.
” Ghost stories,” so called, have prevailed in every age, in every nation, among people widely separated from each other, and have been told ever since human history was given, either in writing or tradition. They are based on truth and reality.
You do not “pass away” from earth at all on losing your body, nor do you ” come back ” in the sense of coming from some far-off place. You are here still, though unseen, among your friends, if you have any, at your desk, your store, your workshop, where, possibly a few hours previous, your body dropped lifeless, because your spirit had no longer strength to carry it; and if while using the body your heart, soul, and mind were ever bent, wrapped up and directed only to that one place or occupation, and you had little or no interest in anything else — to no art, to the bringing out of no other talent within you save that of mere money getting and property hoarding, then to that one place will you be bound by these invisible ties, nor can you break them and get elsewhere until you learn to cultivate your other powers; in other words, to throw the current of your thought on other interests and pursuits. In so doing you create a literal magnet of thought element as you centre yourself more and more in such pursuit ; and as this, aided by your earnest desire, grows stronger and stronger, it will attract you more and more from the old centre or place to which you are tied, and at last break such tie altogether.
If you do not cultivate your other and latent resources, yours will be the misery of being so bound to that house, place, or pursuit, though it be carried on in a manner against your inclination, though old acquaintances drop out and strangers take their places, though your family mansion passes into unknown hands, — and today many a person without a visible organization lingers in misery in and about the house he once owned, tied to it, because he can centre no interest in anything else, a stranger in the place he tries to call home; and if he approach his own fireside it is only to be repelled or annoyed by the thought atmosphere of the new people about it.
” It is easier for the camel to pass through the needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven,” one may quote against us. The “kingdom of heaven” is located in no particular place in space, and can be and will be wherever mind grows wise enough and strong enough to make it, be it on the earth stratum of life or elsewhere. The ” rich man” who cannot enter is really the poor man who loads himself down with things he cannot use or allow others to use, — a human dog in the manger, spending all his force in standing guard and snarling over what he cannot use and will not allow others to use, and is at last killed by the continual generation within himself of the poisonous thought of snarling and covetousness. But the rich mind and the rich man, who, knowing the law, has the secret and power of attracting the world’s best of everything to him, not only that he himself may use and enjoy, but contribute to the good and happiness of all, lives, in so doing, in the kingdom of heaven. He becomes, as his power and wisdom increases, as a growing river, an ever-flowing stream, ever bearing from the mountain tops both water and soil to fertilize the plains; but if the river hoarded soil and water, what would be the result?
Neither ” moth and rust nor thieves” can affect possessions which are used but not hoarded. The plant appropriates and uses only what it needs for the hour, of air, water, sunshine, and earth element. If more is supplied the plant than is necessary for its present needs, thereby is caused blight and disease. “When man, through his artificial and unnatural methods of cultivation, over-stimulates vegetable growth by excess of fertilizing material, an insect life is bred of the plant. That insect is destructive to that plant, because there has been an over-supply and a hoarding of some element in undue quantity. Element in any form of life must be used, not hoarded, if real profit and pleasure is desired from it. Moths on plants and moths and rust in anything are themselves provisions and methods from the Source of Infinite Good to prevent hoarding. Neither moth nor rust really destroy. They take elements to pieces useless in their present form and scatter and distribute them, that they may enter into new forms of combination and serve new uses.
If you owned this whole earth, in the worldly sense, you could only use and enjoy such portion of its air, sunshine, water, foods, and forces, as would satisfy your needs for the hour and the day. The keeping of the rest would ultimately destroy your body. Your ownership would be a farce. You have no control over the planet’s revolutions, over the tides, the seasons, or the river’s flow to the seas. You have no power over earthquake or storm. You cannot keep your body on the land you think you own, when the time comes that your over-burdened spirit loses the power to hold itself to that body. You lose your body, and what then? You are a miserable prisoner, tied to numberless tracts of land, houses, and all other physical properties, unable to control them, to use them, to enjoy them, and worse still, to free yourself from the delusion that still you do own them. You are really insane. You have then “gained the whole world and lost your own soul.” That is, you have not yet found your soul; or, in other words, the power latent in you to increase ever your thought force so as to draw all things to you, to use and enjoy and then rid yourself of, so as to gain the newer and better.
But following the law common to all life, that of throwing off the old in order to receive the new, exactly as your body throws off what it cannot assimilate and convert into bone, muscle, and blood, will give your spirit more and more power. You are then going forward on the road to complete command over all material things. You will then eventually have power to heal your body of any ailment, to make it ever more perfect, strong and healthy, to be at last beyond the reach of all disease, and as a consummation, to be able to put on or take off that body as you would a garment. So freed from it, your real self is independent of all ordinary means of locomotion. You visit other lands and while there make a body for transient use. These things have been done in past ages. They have been realized in later days to an extent among certain Oriental races. They are certain possibilities for the future.
The basis for attracting the best of all the world can give to you, is to first surround, own, and live in these things in mind, or what is falsely called imagination. All so-called imaginings are realities and forces of unseen element. Live in mind in a palace, and gradually palatial surroundings will gravitate to you. But so living in is not pining, or longing, or complainingly wishing. It is when you are “down in the world,” calmly and persistently seeing yourself as up. It is when you are now compelled to eat from a tin plate, regarding that tin plate as only the certain step to one of silver. It is not envying and growling at other people who have silver plate. That growling is just so much capital stock taken from the bank account of mental force.
But when you have no present use for your palace, give others the use of it, or it will become your poorhouse. If you store it away, you store with it so much weight on your mind, so much thought to be expended in storage, so much spiritual force which might otherwise have been put in the cultivation of a talent. If you have five talents or ten talents it is your necessity to cultivate them all at times, and you want for such cultivation all your power unshackled. You are an institution, and if you do not cultivate every department of that institution, every taste and power you feel within you, you will suffer. The whole man is merchant, mechanic, physician, actor, painter, sculptor, all and everything longed for by his ambition and inspiration. Eternity has time enough for all these, as recreations. You cannot reduce such a man to beggary. Beggary is not in him. Destroy every material thing today he possesses, and tomorrow his force will be attracting more. Men are living today who partly illustrate this law. Others are to come who are to make the illustration far more perfect, and live lives which will fill the world with wonder and admiration.
The Healing And Renewing Force Of Spring
Your body is acted on in its growth and changes by the same laws and elements which govern the growth and enter into all other organized bodies, such as trees, plants, birds, and animals.
In the early spring of every year, there comes and acts on this planet a force from the sun which affects all organized forms of life, — trees, birds, animals, and, above all, man. For man’s being the highest, most complicated, and most powerful mental organism on the planet, absorbs the most of this power, and will absorb far more in the future, and to far greater advantage than at present, as he learns to place himself in the best states to receive it.
Material science calls this force ” heat”; but the quality known as heat is only its outward or physical manifestation. The quality known as heat which comes from the sun is not converted into heat until it reaches our planet and acts on the earth elements. There is little or no heat a few miles above the earth’s surface. Were this force in the form of heat on leaving the sun, or during its passage, the air on the mountain tops would be as warm as that of the valleys. As we know, on the highest peaks snow and ice are perpetual, for the sun-force at such elevation is not sufficiently mingled with earth elements to convert it into that degree of heat felt in the valleys and plains.
This force causes the increased movement and cir> culation of sap in the trees, which commences as soon as the sun of the new year acts on them. The sap is a new life to the tree, from which later comes its buds, blossoms, and fruitage. The inflowing of this unseen sun-force gives the tree power to draw new supplies of nourishing elements through its roots from the earth. It gives it power also to cast off any dead leaves remaining of the last year’s crop which have hung on during the winter, as you may see in forests of oak or hickory.
This force acts also in the later winter and earlier spring months on animals and birds, especially if in their wild or natural state, causing them to shed their last year’s coats of fur or feathers. But this casting off of old visible matter is but a relatively small part of the change going on within them. There is also a casting out or shedding of old invisible matter throughout the bird or animal’s entire body. It goes off through the pores or other passages in various forms, some visible, others invisible, and is succeeded by new elements within, as the new fur, hair or feather is grown without.
Your body is governed by the same law. During the later winter and earlier spring months, you are ” moulting.” You are casting off old, dead matter, and taking in new, providing you give this force opportunity to act on you to the best advantage, by ceasing to be active either with mind or body when they call for rest, as do birds and animals during their moulting period, or process of casting off the old elements and receiving the new.
This element or force received at this time by you and them is invisible to the physical eye, as all force is invisible. The new fur, the new plumage of the bird, the new skin and tissues without and within your body, if received, the new buds, leaves, and twigs, are all materialized expressions of this force. They are new crystallizations coming of a new solution of invisible chemicals, in which bird, animal, tree, and your body are bathed. All of last year’s solution or elements so absorbed have been used up. The tree or other visible organization of bird, animal, or your body, stands in the same relation to this reclothing solution as does the slip of metal in the solution of mineral which attracts out of such solution the crystallizations which form on it.
There is no great dividing line betwixt what we call matter and spirit. Matter is but a form of spirit or thought seen of the physical eye. Matter is force temporarily materialized, as in the lump of coal which, when set on fire, sends off the force bound up in it to move the engine. The lump passes then mostly into element invisible. So all about us we find force ever passing from physical visibility into invisibility, and vice versa. Millions on millions of tons of invisible matter may be on a clear day suspended over our heads one hour, the next to fall in the visible form of rain or snow, which a few hours after may be drawn upward again, but invisible.
The Indian called February and March the ” weak months,” recognizing, as he did, being a closer observer of nature than we, the tendency to sluggishness and inactivity in animal and man, -which always prevails when this power is recuperating, renerving and renewing any organized body.
The most perfect crystallizations out of mineral element come of the solution kept most free from agitation. Your body is governed by the same law in this spring renewing and recrystallization of its elements. To receive the fullest benefit of the healing and renewing element of spring, you should rest whenever you feel like resting, whether it be the middle of the day or the middle of the night. If you keep the body or mind at work against their inclination—if you force your muscles to exertion through mere strength of will — if you work with either mind or body to the verge of utter exhaustion, not knowing how depleted you are of strength until your work is over, as thousands on thousands do and are compelled to do, through our unnatural system. of life and the arbitrary demands of ” business,” you prevent this healing and recuperative power from acting to its fullest extent on the body. You prevent the new element, which is renewing the tree and causing the buds to swell, from assimilating with your body. You hold on to worn-out element which should be cast off as the oak has cast all its dead leaves before the winter is over; you carry, then, this dead element, a ” dead weight,” about with you, instead of the new and upward rising life. It is this, among other causes, which stoops the shoulders, bleaches the hair, and furrows the face with wrinkles, through shrinkage of tissues.
The decay of the physical body that we call ” old age,” is owing entirely to man’s neither believing nor knowing that he can place himself in the proper conditions to receive a never ceasing supply of force, which would reclothe the spirit constantly with new material. Mere muscular strength and constant activity of body are not always signs of the most perfect health. In the delirium of fever a relatively weak man may require two or three others to hold him. When this delirium has passed away, he is weak as an infant, yet often, the crisis being passed, is pronounced out of danger. In a manner somewhat similar in the walks of business, in the keen, almost fierce competition of trade, thousands of people lead a feverish, excited life. They are always on a tension. They demand to be in this state. They cannot work unless “strung up” to a certain pitch. If, at times, through nature’s own demand for rest, their nerves are relaxed and they feel languid, they mistake this friendly signal for some form of disease, and treat it accordingly. Even in these cases, when laid for weeks or months on sick-beds, and nursed through what is called a “dangerous illness,” and believing it to be one, they sometimes come out at last better and stronger than they had been for a long period previous. Why? Because through this enforced cessation from physical or mental activity, nature was at work as well as she could under certain unfavorable circumstances, rebuilding a worn out body, and as a result the man arose with new, fresh element in his bones, muscles, and nerves, put there because nature had then his body laid up in quiet, so it could be repaired.
If you will but entertain this idea of spring’s renewing force respectfully, though you cannot believe it thoroughly at first, you will receive much help by such respectful entertainment; for if you do not kick a live truth out of your mind when it first presents itself, it will take root and live there, and prove itself by doing you good.
Men, through incessant physical toil, wear out far sooner than is generally realized. The hardy sailor’s “hardiness” often lasts but a few years. He is often an old man at forty-five. The toiling farmer, who works the year round from early dawn till dark, and thinks work to be the greatest virtue in the world, is often a mass of bony knobs and rheumatism at fifty. The average duration of lives of hard labor is much less than those given to occupations requiring less physical lugging, straining, and fagging, hour after hour, when the body is really exhausted.
In the mines of California, where I swung a pick for years, and worked with gangs of men, lifting, wheeling, and shoveling, I noted that the last three hours of a day’s work of ten and sometimes twelve hours’ length, was done by the men, strong as they might be, with far less spirit than the earlier day’s labor, — in fact it was often a mere pretence of work, unless the watchful eye of the ” boss ” was constantly on his men. Why? Because physically they were no longer fit to work. It was only will that was urging muscle to exertion. And of the stout, ” hardy ” miners, aged twenty-five or thereabout, who were so working in 1860, and who persisted in such drudgery, a large majority are dead, and of those who are alive today, four-fifths are broken down men.
In the kingdom of nature, we find periods of rest constantly alternating with periods of activity. Trees rest during the winter. The circulation of sap is sluggish. There is no creation of leaf, blossom or fruit. Wild birds and animals after the summer breeding season, do little save eat and sleep. Some animals and reptiles sleep during the entire winter. Even soil must rest to bring the best crop. Where it is forced, through constant artificial fertilization, the product is inferior in flavor and nourishing quality to that raised on “virgin soil.” Disease, blight, and destructive insects come unknown to vegetation in its natural state. When man recognizes the fact that he cannot use his body year after year, from the budding strength of youth to the age of forty or fifty under such a full, unceasing pressure of nerve or will power without great injury, and when he does recognize the fact that through placing himself oftener in restful and receptive states, as do tree, bird, and animal in their natural state, he will then, through receiving far more of this element, enjoy a far greater health of body, elasticity of muscle, vigor and brilliancy of mind. He would also have other senses and powers awakened within him, whose existence is still doubted by most people.
Some Oriental and Indian races have, to an extent, the uses of these senses and powers, partly by reason of their more restful lives and their living like tree and animal, more in conformity to the influence on them of the seasons. They have not our domineering, aggressive force, which invades and conquers for a time, as England has conquered India, and our own people have subdued and almost exterminated the Indian. But mark: this force does not conquer in the end. The thought-power which works most while the body is relatively inactive, is really the strongest, and ultimately prevails. It is subtle, noiseless, unseen. Working with the highest motive, it refines and polishes the rude, warlike, conquering races, by grafting on them the civilization of the conquered. In such manner was the art and civilization of conquered Egypt transferred to the Assyrian. Centuries afterward the conquered Assyrian transferred this power to conquering Greece. Greece fell before Rome, yet Grecian civilization held sway in Rome. Rome fell physically before the Goths and Vandals, the then savage races of Northern Europe; but in the kingdom of mind it is the influence of ancient Italy which has been the great factor in refining the Goth, Hun, and Vandal of ages ago into the modern German, Frenchman, Spaniard and Italian. Every convulsion, agitation, and conquest has made this power take root on a wider field. Today the best English mind is seriously studying the laws which at last it has recognized in India, and that force is in a sense to subdue England, for she is already sitting at the feet of India, receiving her first lessons in the alphabet of laws and force, hitherto quite unrecognized by her learned men. ” What power is this? ” you ask — “How gained? How developed?” It is the power coming of minds united on one purpose, in perfect concord, and who do not use it all in physical activity. For if you put all your thought or force in the working of the members of your body, in working with your hands at any calling day in and day out, year in and year out, with no regard to the impulses and instincts of times or seasons, you keep all that force working merely the instrument — the body — and wearing it out. You prevent it from operating at a distance from the body. You prevent also the inflowing and assimilation of this recuperative power of spring. You breed the habit of keeping the body always in motion. You prevent yourself from getting that order of sleep which would bring your body the most strength for the waking hours. For if the body or mind are fagged out day after day, the same order of thought prevails and is fagging it out by night. You breed the belief and error that you are accomplishing nothing unless at work with body or brain. You cannot get into that state of repose when your thought-power could work at a distance and apart from your body, and bring you in time an hundred-fold more of beneficial result than can ever be realized through mere physical exertion.
The quality in the plant’s leaf, root, or berry, which, when taken as medicine, acts on the internal organs, is the force in that plant, liberated through the digestive process. The strength you get from bread or meat is force liberated from the food in the same manner. Digestion is a slow burning up of the material taken in the body, as coal is burned in the boiler, and the force freed by such burning you use to work the body as the engineer uses heat to run the engine. The newer the bud, the more tender is its outward material formation; yet that bud, when used medicinally, contains the most active force, principle, and quality of the plant. The choicest and strongest tea is made of the topmost and tenderest buds of the plant. In California, the bud of the poison oak affects some people though they only stand near it, so great is an injurious force it sends out in the air. The tender buds of spring contain that force which, later on, will make the more solid leaf or branch. In your own organization in the spring are the same tender, budding elements. So, if your body is weak in the spring, it is a sign that the new buds, so to speak, within you are forming. They are full of force. But that force has not had time to act on your material organization and form the new bone, muscle, and sinew which will come at a later period, providing such budding or new crystallization be not agitated, disturbed, and possibly destroyed by undue exertion of mind or body, where the same relative damage is done your body as would be done the budding tree by a hurricane.
Possibly you say, “But how can I carry on my business and earn my bread if I so lay my body up for nature’s repairs?” We answer, “The laws of man’s business are not the laws of nature. If nature says ‘Rest,’ and man says ‘Work,’ and will work or must work, man always gets the worst of it.” What society calls vicious practices or habits are not the only agencies which bring disease, pain, and death. Thousands perish annually in lingering agony on respectable beds, and in the “best society.” Consumption, cancer, insanity, dropsy, rheumatism, scrofula, fevers, rage and are ever raging among the most correct people, from the conventional standpoint. Why is this?
If you are in conditions of life where at present it is impossible to give yourself needed rest and you feel thoroughly the need of such rest, you may rely upon it that your persistent desire, your prayer, your imperious demand that you shall have opportunity to receive and profit by nature’s restoring forces, will bring you in some way the opportunity to so profit by them. When any need is thoroughly felt, the thought and desire coming of such feeling is itself a prayer — a force which will bring you helps and take you out of injurious surroundings and modes of life. We repeat this assertion often. It needs frequent repetition. It is the main-spring of all growth and advance into a happier and more healthful life. The Christ of Judea embodied this great law in the words, ” Ask, and ye shall receive: seek, and ye shall find: knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” He wisely made no attempt to explain this mystery whereby earnest human thought, desire, or aspiration always in time brings the thing or result desired. For this and other mysteries are inexplicable, and so fast as any alleged cause is given for any certain result in nature’s workings, do we find a deeper mystery in the very cause. We say, “wind is air in motion.” What sets it in motion, and keeps it in motion? Once we “explained” the tides on the theory of the moon’s attraction. But apart from the tides, what power keeps in motion the gigantic system of currents ever traversing the oceans, revealed more fully during the last forty years? What power keeps our lungs breathing day and night, or the blood running to every part of the body? Are not all of these of the power of God, or the infinite spirit or force of good, working within you as it works in everything that lives and grows? Only to us is at last given the knowledge to work this power intelligently. The body of the tree, animal, and bird decays at last, through lack of such intelligence. So, in the past, has man’s material part decayed. But this is not alwa}-s to be. “The last great enemy to be destroyed,” says Paul, ” is death”; implying that as man’s knowledge and faith in the wonderful forces about him and in him increased, he would discover better and better how to place himself in the line of the working of these forces, and in so doing make the mortal part immortal, through incessant renewal of finer and finer elements.
Positive and Negative Thought
Your mind or spirit is continually giving out its force or thought, or receiving some quality of such force, as an electric battery may be sending out its force and be afterward replenished. When you use your force in talking, or writing, or physical effort of any sort, you are positive. When not so using it, you are negative. When negative, or receptive, you are receiving force or element of some kind or quality, which may do you temporary harm or permanent good.
All evil of any kind is but temporary. Your spirit’s course through all successive lives is toward the condition of ever increasing and illimitable happiness.
There are poisonous atmospheres of thought as real as the poisonous fumes of arsenic or other metallic vapors. You may, if negative, in a single hour, by sitting with persons in a room whose minds are full of envy, jealousy, cynicism, or despondency, absorb from them a literal poisonous element of thought, full of disease. It is as real as any noxious gas, vapor or miasma. It is infinitely more dangerous, so subtle is its working, for the full in jury may not be realized till days afterward, and is then attributed to some other cause.
It is of the greatest importance where you are, or by what element of thought as it comes to you from others, you are surrounded when in the negative or receiving state. Because then you are as a sponge, unconsciously absorbing element, which may do great temporary harm or great permanent good to both mind and body.
During several hours of effort of any kind, such as talking business, or walking, or writing, or superintending your household, or doing any kind of artistic work, you have been positive, or sending out force. You have then to an extent drained yourself of force. If now you go immediately to a store crowded with hurried customers, or to a sick person, or a hospital, or a turbulent meeting, or to a trying interview with some disagreeable individual full of peevishness and quarrelsomeness, you become negative to them. You are then the sponge, drinking in the injurious thought-element of the crowded store, the sickly thought-element from the sick-bed or hospital, the actual poisonous and subtle element from any person or persons, whose minds put out a quality of thought less healthy or cruder than your own.
If you go fatigued in mind or body among a crowd of wearied, feverish, excited people, your strength is not drawn from you by them, for you have little strength to give. But you absorb, and for the time being, make a part of yourself their hurried, wearied thought. You have then cast on you a load of lead, figuratively speaking. As you absorb their quality of thought, you will in manythings think as they do and see as they do. You will become discouraged where before you were hopeful. Your plans for business, which, when by yourself, seemed likely to succeed, will now seem impossible and visionary. You will fear where before you had courage. You will possibly become undecided, and in the recklessness of indecision buy what you do not really need, or do something, or say something, or take some hasty step in business, you would not have done had you been by yourself, thinking your own thoughts, and not the clouded thoughts of the crowd around you. You will possibly return home fagged out and sick in mind and body.
Through these causes, the person you may meet an hour hence, or the condition of mind in which you are on meeting that person, may cause success or failure in your most important undertakings. For from such person you may absorb a thought which may cause you to alter your plans either for success or failure.
If you must mingle among crowds or with minds whose thoughts are inferior to your own, do so only when you are strongest in mind and body, and leave just so soon as you feel wearied. When strong, you are the positive magnet, driving off their injurious thought-element. When weak, you become the negative magnet, attracting their thought to you; and such thought is freighted with physical and mental disease. Positive men are drivers and pushers, and succeed best in the world. Yet it is not well to be always in the positive or force-sending state of mind; if you are, you will drive from you many valuable ideas. There must be a time for the mental reservoir of force or thought to fill up as well as give that force out. The person always in the positive attitude of mind—he or she who will never hear new ideas without immediately fighting them — who never take a time to give a quiet hearing to ideas which may seem to them wild and extravagant, who insist ever that what does not seem reasonable to them must necessarily be unreasonable for every one else, such minds will certainly, by constantly maintaining this mental attitude, be drained of all force.
On the other hand, the person always negative or always in the receiving state, he or she who “never know their own minds ” for two hours at a time, who are swayed unconsciously by every one with whom they talk, who allow themselves when they go with a plan or a purpose, to be discouraged by a sneer or single word of opposition, are as the reservoir, ever filling up with mud and trash, which at last stops the pipe for distributing water; or in other words, they have their force-sending capacity almost destroyed, and are unsuccessful in everything they undertake.
As a rule, you must be positive when you have dealings with the world, for very much the same reason that the pugilist must be positive when he stands before his antagonist. You must be negative when you retire from the ring — from active participation in business. You will tire yourself out by constantly standing up before opponents, even in thought, in any sort of contest.
Why did the Christ of Judea so often withdraw from the multitude?
Because, after working in some way his immense power of concentrated thought, either in healing or talking, or giving some proofs of his command over the physical elements, at which times he was positive, or giving out of his force, he, feeling the negative state coming upon him, left the crowd, so that he should not absorb their lower thought. Had he done so his force would have been all expended in carrying such thought. By carrying it, is meant his getting in sympathy with it, feeling it and thinking it, just as you may have done when a person, full of trouble, comes to you, and spends an hour telling those troubles to you, and literally pouring their load of troubled thought into you. You sympathize, you are sorry for them, you desire strongly to help them, and when they leave, your thought follows them. In such case your own force is used up in the feeling of sympathy or sorrow for them, while it might otherwise have been put on something far more beneficial in profitable result to you and them. An orator would not spend an hour previous to his speech in public carrying bushels of coal upstairs to relieve a tired laborer, for if he did, his strength, brilliancy, inspiration, and force for his effort would be mostly used up in the drudgery of carrying coal. The ideas he may put forth may prove the direct or indirect means of relieving that laborer in some way, and thousands of others. You must be positive and restrain the outflow of your sympathetic force very often in the cases of private individuals in trouble, in order to have power to do all the more for them. In politics and the professions, the men who live longest and who exercise most power are those who are least accessible to the masses; for if they are constantly mingling with all manner of people, and so absorbing varied atmospheres, much of their power is wasted in carrying it. Look at the long list of prominent American politicians who have died in the prime of life or but little past it, during the last twenty years: Seward, Grant, Morton, McClellan, Logan, Wilson, Hendricks, Chase, Stanton. Not keeping themselves positive — ignorant exposure to all manner of inferior thought-atmospheres when negative—has been a most important factor in these premature deaths. Great financiers like Jay Gould avoid the crowd and hubbub of the Stock Exchange. They live relatively secluded lives, are not easy of access, and transact much business through agents. In so doing, they avoid hurried and confused thought-atmospheres. They surround and keep themselves as in a fortress, in the clearer thought-element of the world of finance, and from it derive their clear-sightedness on their plane of action. They feel the necessity of so doing without possibly being able to define the law. Many methods are quite unconsciously adopted by people which bring successful results on many fields of effort, and which are adopted through the unconscious action and teaching of the laws governing thought.
If you are now very much in the company of some person whose quality of thought is inferior to your own, you are certainly affected injuriously, through absorbing that person’s thought. For you cannot be positive all the time, to resist the entrance of such person’s thought. When wearied you are negative, or in the state for receiving his or her thought, and then it must act on you. As so it acts on you, you may unconsciously do very manythings in conformity with his or her order of thought, which you would have done differently, and possibly better, had you not been exposed to it and absorbed it. If so you absorb the element of fear or indecision from anyone, will you act in business with your own natural confidence, courage, energy and determination? It matters not what is the relation to you of those whose temporary or permanent association may thus do you harm, whether that of parent, brother, sister, wife or friend, if their mental growth is less than yours and therefore they cannot see as you see, you are very likely to be injured in mind, pocket and health through their constant association. For such reason, Paul, the apostle, advised people not to be “unequally yoked together” in marriage. Why? Because he knew that of any two persons living constantly together, who occupied different worlds of thought, one would surely be injured; and the one most injured is the highest, finest, and broadest mind, loaded down, crippled, and fettered by the grosser thought absorbed from the inferior.
Positiveness means Work; Negativeness means Rest.
If you are in an active business sympathy or relation with any person who is nervous, excited, irritable, destitute of any capacity for repose, always worried about something, and on the rush from morning till night, though you are separated by hundreds of miles, you will, when in the receiving state, have that person’s mind acting injuriously on yours, and you will have thereby sent you much of his or her cruder thought-element, which, agitating and disturbing your mind, will, in time, work unpleasant results to the body.
Your only means of avoiding this is to cease such relation and common sympathy and effort with them as soon as possible, — to put them out of your mind, — to fix and interest yourself in some other diversion or occupation whenever your thought goes out to them. For every time you do so think, you send out your actual life and vitality to them. In so doing you may send them a current of life and force, which will give them a relative success in many undertakings, a success you may lack, for you are giving them your capital stock of force, while you should use it for yourself. The cruder mind can only appropriate a part of this. The rest is wasted. They may be kept alive by it and prosper, and in return send you only element which brings on you disease, lack of energy, and barrenness of idea.
Proper association is one of the greatest of agencies for realizing success, health, and happiness. Association here means something far beyond the physical nearness of bodies. You are literally nearest the person or persons you think most of, though they are ten thousand miles distant.
If you have been long in association with a person so absorbing thought-element inferior to your own, you cannot, though you sever such association immediately, free yourself from the inferior thought-current flowing from them to you, though thousands of miles lay between you. Distance amounts to but little in the unseen world of thought. If such person is much in your thought, their mind still acts on yours, sending you still grosser and injurious element. You must learn to forget them to escape the injury. That must be a gradual process. In so forgetting you cut the invisible wires binding you together, and through which have been sent elements injurious to you.
Does this sound cold, cruel and hard? But where is the benefit of two persons being so tied together in thought or remembrance, if one or both are injured? If one is injured the other must be in time. But the superior mind receives most immediate injury, and many a person fails to attain the position where he or she should stand, through this cause.
Through this cause, also, comes disease, lack of vigor, corpulency, and clumsiness. For the cruder element so sent you by another, and absorbed by you, can materialize itself in physical substance, and make itself seen and felt on your body in the shape of unhealthy and excessive fat, swollen limbs, or any other outward sign of disease and decay. In such case it is not really your own unwieldy or deformed body you are carrying about. It is the inferior body of another person sent you in thought; and as year after year this process goes on, the cumbrous body you so wear becomes at last too heavy for your spirit to carry. It drops off. You are then “dead,” in the estimation of your acquaintances. You are not dead. You have simply tumbled down under a load you could no longer bear.
Even a book in which you are greatly interested, which draws strongly on your sympathy, and has much to say on the mental or physical distress of the person so drawing on your sympathy, can, if you read it in the negative, or receiving state, bring on you some form of the physical or mental ailments alluded to in it. For such a book is the representative of the mind of the individual whose history it contains, acting on yours, and bringing to you in thought-element all that person’s morbid and unhealthy states of mind, which for a time settle on you and become a parasitical part of you. In this way great harm may be done sensitive people through reading novels or true stories full of physical or mental suffering. If a character to which you are strongly attracted is described as being confined for years in a dungeon, suffering physical and mental pain from such confinement, and in the pages of that book you follow such life and become absorbed in it, you do actually live in it. You will, if so reading such history day after day, and getting thoroughly absorbed or merged in it, find your vitality or your digestion affected in some way; though you may never dream that the cold you have taken so much the easier, through lack of vitality, or the headache or weakness of digestion is owing to a mental condition, brought on you temporarily, through living in the thought of that book while in the receiving state of mind. These are unhealthy books; and so are plays which work strongly on people’s emotions in the dramatic representation of scenes of horror, distress, and death. The health of thousands on thousands is injured through drawing on themselves and fastening on themselves, while in the negative or receiving condition, these unhealthy currents of thought and their consequent unhealthy mental states of mind.
While eating, one should always be in the receiving frame of mind, for then you are receiving material element to nourish the body; and if you eat in a calm, composed, cheerful frame of mind, you are receiving a similar character of thought. To eat and growl, or argue violently or intensely with others, or to eat and think business and plan business, is to be positive, when of all times you should be negative. It is like working with your body while you eat. You send, while so arguing or grumbling, that force from you needed for digestion. It matters little whether you grumble or argue in speech or in thought. There is also injurious result to you when any person at the table is for any reason — any offensive habit, any peculiarity of manner or mood—unpleasant to you, and you are thereby obliged to endure them, instead of enjoying their company, for all endurance means the putting out of positive thought; in other words, working in mind to drive off the annoyance. Especially the dinner in the latter part of the day should be the day’s climax of happiness — a union of minds in perfect accord with each other, the conversation light, bright, lively and humorous — the palates all appreciative of artistic cookery, and the eye also regaled with all the appointments of the table and the dining room. Because while in such receptive state of mind you have absorbed a spiritual strength, coming of the thought of all about you as they will absorb of yours. But if you eat in a social dungeon, in the barrack of a restaurant, where only material food is given, in an unhappy family, full of petty jealousies and complainings, in a boarding-house manger, you may exhaust yourself in resisting or enduring annoyances, thereby lessening power of digestion and assimilation of your food; and you absorb, also, more or less of the discontent or moodiness of those about you, and so carry away a load worse than useless — a load the real cause of an imperfect digestion, and consequent physical weakness and mental unrest, or irritability. When you are much alone, you attract and are surrounded by a quality and current of thought coming from minds similar to your own. It is for that reason, that in moments of solitude your thought may be more clear and agreeable than when in the company of others. You then live in another and finer world of idea. You may deem these ideas but as “idle thoughts “; you may not dare to mention them before others. But you long for company. You take such as you can get, or you have it forced upon you. With them your ideal world is shattered. It seems possibly absolute nonsense. You enter into their current of thought, their line of talk and motive. You chatter and run on as they do, and criticize, and’ censure, and judge, and possibly abuse others not present; and when you are again by yourself, you feel a sense of discontent with yourself, and a certain vague self-condemnation for what you have been saying. That is your higher mind, your real self, protesting against the injury done it by the lower mind; not possibly so much your lower mind as the lower thought you absorb while in that company, and which for a time became a parasitical part of you, as the ivy vine may fasten itself to the oak from the root to the topmost branch, drawing its nourishment in part from the oak, giving it poison in return, and at last so covering it up that the oak is concealed and is eventually killed by it.
In very similar manner are refined minds often buried, concealed, and prevented their true expression by the lower and parasitical thought, which, unconscious of the evil it can do them, they enter among, associate with and allow to fasten upon them. They are not themselves, and perhaps from their earliest physical life never have been themselves, so far as outward expression goes. They are as oaks buried and concealed by the poisonous ivy. But you may say: “I cannot live alone and without association.” True. It is not desirable or profitable that you should. It is not good for man or woman to live alone. It is most desirable, profitable, and necessary that you should be fed by the strong, healthy, vigorous, cheerful thought-element coming from minds whose aspiration, ideal, and motives are like your own.
When you cut off association or the flow even of your thought to those who are injurious to you, you prevent not only their evil quality of thought from coming to you, but you open the door for the better to come. You will then by degrees attract to you, in physical form, those who can give you at once more entertainment and more help. For your highest thought is an unseen force or link, ever connecting you with higher minds akin to your own. These cannot act on you to any extent so long as you continue association or are linked in thought to the lower. Such link or association bars the door to the higher.
How much real comfort, strength, cheer or entertainment do you get from your daily associations? Are they live company? Who does the entertaining, you or they? Who must ever keep up the conversation when it flags? Are you never bored by their prosiness, which you have heard over and over again, and if, when on hearing and rehearing it you do not express discontent in your speech, you do in your secret thought? How much of the association that you seek, or that seeks you, is really more endured than enjoyed, and is, in fact, only “taken up with” because of the lack of better?
You will never tire of your true and most profitable associates, who, having opened themselves to the higher, are ever drawing to themselves new idea, and with new idea new life, which they will give to you, as you give them in return. These are the “wells of water springing up into everlasting life.” These are the “saviors of life unto life, and not of death unto death,”‘ as are minds to each other who month after month and year after year only think in a rut, talk in a rut, and act in a rut. These are the dead who should be left to “bury their dead.” True life is a state of endless variety, and involves, through opening the mind in the right direction, and keeping it so open, an endless association with other and like minds, giving ever to each other, and receiving endless supply of strength, vigor, and the elements of eternal youth.
The fountain of youth, and endless youth, is a spiritual reality, as are many other things deemed idle vagaries, and which have been erroneously sought on the physical stratum of life. The fountain of endless youth, youth of body as well as mind, lies in the attainment of that mental attitude or condition of mind which is instantly positive to all evil, cruder and lower thought, and negative or receptive to that higher and constructive thought-current, full of courage devoid of all fear, deeming nothing impossible, hating no individual, but disliking only error, full of love for all, but expending its sympathy wisely and carefully.
PRENTICE MULFORD
The End