CONTENTS
The Drawing Power Of The Mind
The Use Of Sunday
Grace Before Meat; Or Science Of Eating
The Source Of Your Strength
What We Need Strength For
One Way To Cultivate Courage
The Material Mind Vs. The Spiritual Mind
Marriage And Resurrection
Immortality In The Flesh
Faith; Or Being Led Of The Spirit
Some Practical Mental Recipes
The Use And Necessity Of Recreation
The Drawing Power Of The Mind
We are through our mental conditions always drawing things to us good or bad, beneficial or injurious, pleasant or disagreeable.
There is possible a state of mind which, if permanently kept, will draw to you money, lands, possessions, luxuries, health and happiness. It is a mental condition always serene, calm, determined, decided, self-composed, and bent on some purpose whose aim is lasting good, first to yourself, next to others.
There is another state of mind which, if permanently kept in, will drive prosperity and health from you.
It is only the very small part of what exists in the universe that can be seen, touched or otherwise made evident to the physical senses.
The larger part of what exists and has form, shape and color, cannot be seen, felt or be otherwise made evident to the physical senses.
What we call space is filled with realities. There is no such thing as “empty space.” These realities might be evident to our spiritual or finer senses were they developed. As these finer senses are more and more opened, then more and more of these things or realities will become evident to us.
Whatever you think you actually make. You are making these unseen realities continually as you think. If you think of anything but a second you make that an unseen reality for a second. If you think of it for hours, days and years, you will in some way bring that reality to you in the physical world.
If you keep any idea good or ill in your mind from month to month and year to year, you make it a more enduring unseen reality, and as it so becomes stronger and stronger, it must at last take shape and appear in the seen and physical.
Of whatever you think, you attract its like from the unseen current of realities. Think or dwell on any form of crime, and you attract and draw to you criminal realities from the unseen side of life. These the unseen are the forces for attracting to you material agencies for crime on our side of existence.
When you read with interest in your morning’s paper of murders, burglaries, scandals and dreadful accidents on sea and land, you are attracting to you unseen things of the same character. You connect yourself with this a lower order of spiritual realities, and being then in this current as you so read with interest, day after day, you are the more likely to bring some form of these horrors and miseries to you.
These of the unseen form a current of real element in the unseen world of realities. You connect your spirit with this current when you keep these ghastly things so much in mind. That current then acts on you. You are borne along and carried by it. It will then all the quicker bring to you the elements of crime or evil. If you love to read of the acts of burglars and thieves, you are the more likely to have burglars and thieves about you and in your house. You and they will be brought together, because you and they are in the same current of thought.
Neither you nor the thief is aware of the power which brings you together. But no power is so irresistible as one of whose action upon us and of whose very existence we are entirely ignorant.
If you think but for ten seconds of something ghastly or horrible, something which causes pain of body or distress of mind to another, then you set in motion a force to draw some form of this trouble to you. If you think ten seconds of something pleasant, cheerful or beautiful—something which can give pleasure to another, leaving no sting behind— then you set in motion a force to bring some of this pleasure to you.
The longer you put your mind on any one thing, be it evil or good, the stronger do you make it as an unseen reality. It must at last, as you keep it in mind or put your mind on it, make itself in the seen and physical world an agency for pain or pleasure.
The power to fix mind persistently on some definite purpose, or in a certain frame or mood—say that of calm determination, or to keep mind from being disturbed, is not now very common.
Look at many people about you. On what from year to year is their thought or purpose fixed? On getting their wages at the week’s end. Beyond this nothing. On getting a new bonnet, a new dress, a pleasure trip. Beyond this nothing. On living from day to day, or week to week. Beyond this nothing. Many cannot fix their mind on any useful purpose for two days in succession. It is this thing earnestly desired today, something else tomorrow.
Their mental forces pull a little while on this thing, abandon it, then pull a little on the next whim or fancy and abandon that. There is no steady pull or exercise of drawing power on any one thing.
These are the people who accomplish very little, who are always poor, and often in ill health.
These minds where fixed at all are often on the useless, and injurious. They will read with avidity of horrors and hangings. The longer these are spun out and the more minute are they in detail, the more they like them. They love the drama depicting violence or emotional torture. A vast amount of their force goes in this direction.
It is a force to draw to them some form of evil. If turned in another direction it would draw to them good.
The unseen world and upper currents of unseen realities are full of bright and beautiful things—full of the spiritual correspondences of all luxuries, necessities and good things enjoyed here—full of beautiful things as yet here never seen and enjoyed. When minds here learn, as in time they will, to have faith in these existences, and faith in the simple means of attracting them, they will fix their thought persistently on the bright side of life.
They will come to know that the longer they endeavor so to fix it on the brighter and healthier side, the more power will they have, and the less effort will it cost so to keep their thought in the right direction and in connection with the right current, until at last it will become ” second nature” for them to live in these higher realities, and, as so living, health and prosperity will flow toward them.
They will cease then to think so much and read so much, and talk and live so much in the crude, the horrible, the long-drawn recitals of crime, having learned that these thoughts bring them evil and injure their power for drawing to them that which will result in permanent good.
“Set your affections on things above.” This upper current of thought contains the correspondences in unseen element of all that is good for us to use and enjoy, and more still of joys we do not yet realize. These are the “things above.”
Calm demand brings all good things in time.
Impatient demand drives them away.
Those of horror, ghastliness, crime, and misery on which now so much of people’s affections or thought is set, are “things below.”
Evil of any sort is only to be thought of and dealt with long enough to remedy it. One remains in a cesspool no longer than is necessary to bail out its contents. You want to get your cold, your pain, your last sprained ankle, or the last injustice done you by another out of your mind as soon as you can and not keep making it over and over again, through ever thinking it, brooding over it, and telling it to others whenever you get a chance.
Such mood of mind may become habitual “second nature,” and a power for drawing poverty and ill health.
Constant contact with crime, or misery with ill of any kind, or even the thought of it, will at last beget an unnatural and unhealthy appetite for it. So at last people had rather at the breakfast table talk of sickness and death-bed scenes than of health, or of crime and horrors than of things cheerful, peaceable and pleasant.
All such talk and thought dwelling in misery injures your power for drawing good things to you. It is a direct means for taking money from your purse and health from your body.
Living ever in the thought of sickness will surely bring sickness to you.
For such reason have those who made a study of insanity, gone themselves insane as did an eminent physician a few years ago. As did the superintendent of one of the largest insane asylums in this country. As do very, very many of whom we never hear.
The vast amount of matter printed and read by millions concerning the diseases and death of such prominent persons as General Grant, the late Emperor Frederick, and some others, have put millions of minds more or less in the thought current of sickness, pain and misery.
You will be the more healthy for living as much as you can in the thought and also surrounding of healthy things. You will be the stronger for living in the thought and being in the physical surrounding of strong things—strong animals—strong and vigorous men and women. A circus with its skilled riders, its acrobats and tumblers, and its andience with care for a time off their minds and smiles in their faces, is a far healthier place, and connects one with a healthier thought current than a dissecting room or the poring over a book devoted to the recital of any form of suffering or disease.
What we call the drawing power of mind is not that of longing for things. Longing implies impatience, because they do not come so soon as we desire. The impatient state of mind will either drive what you desire from you or delay its advance. When your thought takes this form, ” I want the thing desired now—right now; I’m tired of waiting ; I can’t stand waiting any longer; I’m sick and tired of waiting,” you are in the wrong mood.
You are then using your force in scolding or grieving or finding fault, because what you desire does not come. When you scold or complain or grieve, because the things you desire do not come, your force is set upon that scolding or grieving, and is not working to bring them to you. It is analogous to the man who, in a fit of rage, should tear his wagon to pieces, because it is stuck in a mire.
The force he used to tear it to pieces might have drawn it out.
The force of mind you need to put out to draw good things to you lies in that mood, which says, continually and calmly: ” I must have these things; I am going to have them, provided that a Wisdom greater than mine sees that it will not work me injury to have them.”
It must be a mental state of serenity and determination decided and positive, but never angered or impatient, or anxious or worrying.
So that you keep your mind in the proper drawing mood, you need not have in mind continually the thing you desire. It is the state of mind that draws money, and things desirable, and not the constant recollection of the special thing desired.
When you can put your mind in this mood and keep it there, when for instance you say to yourself calmly and deliberately ” I am going to travel and see the world abroad;” you can forget for a time that special purpose, and employ and enjoy yourself in the other efforts, without retarding at all the power which will be working to send you abroad.
You need only as your determination to travel or any other aim recurs to your mind have the mood of calm, unruffled determination and decision connected with it.
You lessen this drawing power for good when you get angry or irritable; you increase it then for evil. You lessen it for good through becoming discouraged or despondent. You set it then the wrong way and for evil. You lessen it for good through hurried states of mind.
To covet the property of another person—to cumber the mind with schemes to get property through inheritance of another—to feel anxiety, envy and jealousy of others who may share in such property or who may seem likely to get the whole of it—to set longing and envious eyes on another’s lands, houses, carriages, horses and other evidences of material wealth—to commence calculating on being brought into any degree of association with a rich man or woman, and how you may gain or wheedle, or so become a favorite of such person as to induce him or her to give you of their wealth, all this brings on a state of mind retarding your connection with the greatest drawing power. It brings to you a current of low, groveling and narrow thought. It is loss also to allow yourself to drift into the petty prejudices of people concerning others —to take sides even in thought in petty quarrels.
You lose power by engaging with others in any conversation on a plane of motive and sentiment lower than your own, such as tattle, sarcastic remark on the failings of others, fault finding with affairs which do not concern you, and unwarrantable inquiry and ferreting out other’s private affairs.
You put out in so doing thought forces which are opposed to and will destroy or retard the effect of your higher and more powerful attitude of mind toward all mankind—an outflow of thought which deals only with the best in others ; sees as little as possible of their thoughts ; speaks as little as possible concerning them, and sends them in thought only good will from which you will fight off every shade of malice, envy and jealousy—thoughts now so dominant on our stratum of life and which will thrust themselves in our minds at every opportunity.
You want power to gain the highest health, the greatest success in business, and the growth of your spirit into possibilities not now to be realized. Nothing so much weakens you in every way as descending in thought and talk to ill-natured and ferreting gossip. You descend then to the world of failure and ill health. You clothe yourself then in an actual thought-robe or envelope of weakness— the robes now worn by so many, who ascribe their ill health or non-success to any and everything but this the real cause.
Keep away as much as you can from despondent, reckless and purposeless people, and you will keep your drawing power at its best. You will then not lessen it through adulteration by absorption of their discouraged, undecided, purposeless thoughts.
If of necessity you are thrown in their company, make up your mind beforehand that you will not absorb any of their thought. Then you put on a positive protective armor against such absorption.
If you give a great deal of your sympathy to those who do not believe in these ideas; if you make their troubles your troubles and their cares your cares, you lessen your drawing power for the best and increase it for the worst. For then you absorb these doubts and other defects of mind. You mix up your faith with their lack of faith. You cripple your decision with their possible indecision.
Speak of your purposes only to those of whose friendship you are very sure—only to those who are not envious and who really wish you to have your desire.
Keeping your secrets adds vastly to your drawing power. Walls do have ears. In other words, secrets can get into the air if you talk them out, even when none with a physical body are near you.
If you want to keep a secret from others, keep it as much as possible out of your own mind, save when it is absolutely necessary to recall it. For what you think you make or put out in the air and as put out in the air, when you are much of the time thinking of it, it is all the more likely to fasten on some mind about you, in the form of a surmise, a passing thought, which at last, as you keep forcing it upon them by thinking of it, rii>ens into a suspicion.
All great successes depend on secrecy. That is secrecy from all, save those you can trust and who have an equal interest in the success with yourself. No practical man of business reads his ledgers to the public; or confides his plans to every one.
To talk of your purpose to those who in then secret thought are jealous of your possible success, will lessen your force to draw the thing desired to you. Then you do literally give yourself (i. c, your thought or force) away. Thousands cripple their fortunes in this way.
Temperance and moderation in the use of all things, and in the play of all emotion, is very necessary to the attainment of the most powerful drawing frame of mind. But asceticism and extreme self-denial in anything only lessens this drawing power. For all asceticism creates unnatural longings. Then the force of mind is placed ou what nature is starved of and will long for, and sets its thought or force upon.
Of anything which annoys you, make up your mind that it shall not anuoy you. This decision will increase the drawing power of your mind. But if in mind you give way to annoyances, and do not resist them, you increase their power to annoy you.
You bring on also by this mental condition more and more annoyances.
You lessen also your force for drawing things to you. Or in other words you use that same force to draw annoying things to you.
Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
A disagreeable habit in another person, and impertinence or rudeness in another, a creaking door, anything in the working of the physical world about us, if we do not not set our minds against its annoying us, will grow more and more upon us. It will master us. All these things represent the devil to be resisted.
When we allow ourselves to be annoyed by any person we are ruled by that person. For if we cannot abide their presence in a room, then that person drives us from that room. If we cannot be agreeable to others with that person in our presence, then that person governs our speech and makes us silent and sulky.
But when this resisting power is used, and we endeavor to turn our mind from the annoyance, we shall be carried at last beyond the reach of all annoying things. That is the real power for driving from us whatever annoys us.
I do not here imply that the habit of being easily annoyed or of non-resistance to annoyance, or the habit and love of reading and living mentally in scenes of misery or any other mental habit which lessens our power, can be immediately broken off. That is all but impossible. No mental habit, the growth of years, can be suddenly changed.
How, then, can it be changed?
By not trying too hard to change it. By not becoming impatient on finding yourself unconsciously reverting to the state of mind you wish to get rid of. For impatience at anything is force employed in anger, because matters do not change as quickly as you wish, and that is so much force lost to your drawing power. You can in this way hurt yourself as much when the motive is good as when it is bad.
It will increase your drawing power to fell the real need of the thing you set your mind upon. There is a great difference between wanting things and needing things. Some people want everything they set their eyes on, when they need but few of those things at a time. You may need warm garments for winter. You may want things which may have no use during winter. Now the need for serviceable clothing is imperative. For other things the need may not be imperative, though they have their place and use in good time. If you feel the need of the thing you set your mind upon, you increase the force of your demand for it. This increases your drawing power, provided, as we must say again, your demand is made in the mood of decision and patience, and does not use itself up in the mood of impatience, because the thing demanded does not immediately come.
There are two ways of saying ” I must have the better things desired.” To say “I must,” or “I demand it,” in the mood of ugliness or irascibility, carries little or no power to bring the thing demanded. But a great deal of drawing power is set upon the thing demanded when you say, “I demand this special thing because I need it; because it is right I should have it; because I feel that my ability to benefit first, myself, and next others will be increased by it.”
This is the mood to be permanently maintained from month to month and year to year, until at last it becomes a part of yourself, and you carry such frame of mind whether conscious you carry it or not.
If you feel that there is truth in my assertions, then the seed of conviction is sown in your mind. That seed, that idea, that force will do the work for you. You need in a sense do but little. That truth will take deeper and deeper root. It will grow and increase; you will find yourself gradually changing for the better. You will have less and less inclination to live in the grim and ghastly as you realize more and more the danger of so doing. Better still, you will turn away more and more from the racks and slaughter pens of a lower life as you realize more and more the power, the pleasure and the profit of holding ever in your thought things cheerful, bright, gay and innocent.
When you acquire this power, or in other words get your drawing force turned in the right direction (it is always working in some direction), you will know that it is all yours. No one can take it from you. It must also be ever on the increase; as it increases its force, it is increasing forever.
When it is working in the right direction to bring you health, fortune and success in all you undertake you depend on no one but yourself and the Supreme Power. You lean on no one. You will feel that you have the power within to accomplish all you undertake. You will not then seek fortune by marrying merely for money. Or by waiting for rich relatives to die. Or by pandering in any way to the rich and powerful. Tour body also will by degrees grow more stronger, more healthy, more attractive. For you are then in the current which can carry you beyond the realm of disease.
Permanent peace and tranquility of mind is the proof that this power is working in the right direction for you.
There may be occasional intervals of mental disturbance. At times the force may return in its old direction. This is the effort of the old habit, the material mind to resume its sway. Such disturbances must become less and less violent and of shorter and shorter duration, because your higher promptings or spiritual mind is the greater power, and must always subdue the lower.
The Oriental “Adept” or Fakir has this power to a limited extent, but places it on purposes which, though wonderful from their novelty, are relatively of little use to him or others.
The basis on which he acts lies in the holding of forces in himself and gathering them also from outside sources by a permanently calm, unruffled, deliberate and undisturbed mental state of mind.
Can all attain to this drawing power?
Those who can have faith in it will reverse this same force now, possibly bringing them poverty, sickness and evil, and turn it in the direction of bringing them good. All will not have faith. These will go on as before, using their minds blindly to attract the evil and suffer from it. All must have this power in some existence. All may not reach it in this physical existence, but will in some future one.
If you are alone in the world and lack congenial association, the mood of calm demand based for all things demanded on a continual silent desire or pray to be led by a higher and diviner wisdom than our own, will draw to you in time that association which is the best for you.
Note.—It is in the power of some to have under their own roof a chapel for silent demand or prayer. A room can he set apart, furnished appropriately and held sacred as a place for communion with the Infinite Mind. It should have no thought carried into it save that of an earnest desire to draw power to the spirit, see error more and more clearly, be led of higher wisdom In the right way when we cannot see that way for ourselves and gain ever in faith, in health, in strength, in beauty, in grace, and every desirable quality.
It would prove for the family their inner sanctuary, their holy of holies, and a place which, when rightly kept, would be ever filling with pure, healthy, life-giving and mind-clearing thought. It would be also the portal for “ministering spirits” to enter, who would add their beneficial thought and power to yours. It would confer untold benefit to members of the family, who having lost their bodies, but still drawn by the irresistible bonds of attraction, linger still harmless and lonesome about a former home.
Its paintings and statuary should be suggestive only of nobility, of character, of health, strength, vigor, grace and beauty—for these representations in material element are great helps to lift our minds above the thought of depression and suffering, and draws to us the spiritual element they symbolize.
When the few make these physical conditions (as soon they will), in their homes, there will be closer bonds than ever between the visible and invisible worlds. What is now deemed impossible and visionary will be realized also in time ; but not to satisfy aimless curiosity ; not to be trumpeted abroad as a show ; but only to bring good to those who can believe and act up to a higher life.
The Use Of Sunday
Copyrighted by F. J. Needham, 1889
Rest for both mind and body is the great source of strength and recuperation. If the mind rests, the body is sure to rest.
There is a science of rest. A part of that science consists in throwing oft cares and the turning of our thought from objects which engross much of our time, in order to recuperate and give fresh force to long used and possibly overtaxed departments of mind.
All things seen of physical sense have their correspondences of spiritual elements. These (the spiritual) constitute their real power.
The sun has its spirit which affects us and our earth. There is a sun unseen of the physical eye and unfelt of physical sense which bears the same relation to the sun we see that our spirit bears to our physical body.
The physical sun affects our physical body. But the spiritual sun, or the spirit of the sun aftects our spiritual being in proportion as that being is developed to receive of that peculiar power. If you can receive this truth, or even but entertain it, you will receive from the source we speak of a power greater than can come to those whose belief is limited to the idea that the sun or any other thing in the material world has only those elements which are seen and felt of physical sense.
Those who can believe only in material things must physically decay, because through such belief they attract to themselves only of material element. There are many more “materialists” than those who profess themselves such as atheists or “infidels.”
Practical “materialists” often belong to the church, profess religion, live in strict conformity to all religious observance, yet really believe in nothing but the material.
This they cannot help. Their material natures master them. Their bodies will decay and die. Their spirits in time will use other bodies. Their former earth life will be a blank to them. They will gain in spiritualization during their next physical life, as they have really gained during all previous physical lives. When through successive reimbodiments that gain is sufficient to have taught them the laws of their spiritual beings they will be freed from all ills now affecting the physical being. Neither fire, nor water, nor disease, nor violence can hurt them. They will not taste of death. The truth will make them free. A few such lives have been recorded in the Bible. There is reason for the belief that there were more. This is the ultimate of all human life as our planet spiritualizes.
The sun and the element it sends our earth are not only full of life, but full of intelligence. It is a mental life or power. The sun is something more than an orb—a planet. It is a mighty mind—a spirit. What we see of that spirit is its physical covering or instrument of expression to physical sense, exactly as what we see of ourselves, of the physical body is but the covering or instrument of our spirit.
When we put our minds in the attitude of a calm demand for receiving power from this spirit which warms our entire earth into life we shall receive of that spiritual power or force of the sun.
A higher wisdom in ancient times, aware of this law, set apart one day out of the seven so to draw or attract through giving mind and body more rest, additional force from the sun. Hence the name Sunday.
Traces of this law and observance come down to our own time in the sun worshipers of the East. Understand we do not inculcate all of their peculiar faith or form. But we see in theirs as in other worship expressed as it is through many creeds and faiths a golden thread of truth running through all. Whoever studies the life and practice of the sun worshipers or Parsees, their abhorrence of taking animal life, their distaste for war, their honesty, gentleness and benevolence, cannot but acknowledge that in those lives there is much worthy of our imitation.
The sun is, however, but one source of power to be drawn from. It is but one form or expression of the Supreme Power. There are many—very many other forms and methods. These we shall ever be finding out as our spirits unfold. There is time enough—eternity is before us.
There is a great difference between true worship and idolatry. Worship exalts, idolatry abases. True worship admires and reverences the beauty of a flower, the force of the ocean, the life and force of the sun. Whatever it so admires and reverences it draws power from. That admiration and reverence constitute worship. Then you worship God in spirit. Then, also, as you so worship you draw to you the spiritual force or quality of that physical expression of God’s spirit.
In such spirit you worship the sun. Your worship has then an intelligent purpose. You will know that in ceasing from your usual employment one day out of the seven, and on that day giving up to the silent, warming, cheerful influence of the sun element not only as coming from the orb, but as expressed in flower, in leaf, in the verdure, in all living things which, drawing life from the sun, are expressions, belongings and parts of it, you are drawing more force to you, resting both mind and body and making yourself far better able to make effort and do business for the coming week.
But if anyoue on reading this goes ostentatiously and prays to the sun, they may commit a mockery and a farce. True worship seeks retirement and privacy. It cares not to make known its inmost feelings to the crowd. It confides but in the few— the few who Feel, but do not babble.
True worship feels the sentiment, the influence, the thought coming from every flower, every tree and sun and star. The true poet and painter so worships. Thousands of quiet natures feel and have felt as much and even more than poet or painter. But they had no power materially to express such high and pure thought.
And all thus far in our history have lived and lied in ignorance that in the fueling of this sentiment, this genuine love of nature, this going forth of our own spirit to spirit expressed in other forms, they were receiving of such spirit and of power. They received then an element not only giving health and endurance of the physical life, but one to give power in business, and power in art.
They did not realize in many cases health and endurance of physical life, because after so receiving they did not know how to keep or expend with the best result the thing or element received.
Of such are fine emotional natures. Of such is all true genius. Of such are those most thrilled at sight of the beauty of sky and sea, of storm and varied landscape. Nature speaks to different minds with different tongues. To the coarse she says relatively little. To the fine she may say more in one minute than they can express in a lifetime. To such many a thought cannot be put in words, or in music, or in color.
These emotions or thoughts are all powers and sources of power. Why, then, is genius or the sentimentalist so often unsuccessful in business or weak in body?
Because they do not know how to hold the power they gather. Because the laws affecting their beings are not those affecting the nature wholly material. Because they are more of the spiritual than of the material, yet in ignorance they are trying to live wholly in and by the material. They are like steamboats (supposing steamboats to be intelligent beings), who ignoring steam power and machinery should use only sails to compete with sailing vessels.
Sunday is the one day of the seven especially to be used for the gathering or influx to you of spiritual force. Or, in other words, for the cultivation of repose. The reposeful mind is the mind at peace with all the world. The mind so at peace is the mind of power. That mind can accomplish greater and greater results, since in the cultivation or growth of such peace or repose, it becomes more and more as one with the divine mind or Supreme Power. Such minds “walk with God” and can work with God.
To secure to you the greater inflowing of spiritual element there should be on Sunday cessation from the usual employments of the week and as complete a rest as you are capable of making for yourself.
We say “as complete as you are capable of making for yourself,” because “resting” is of itself an art. Capacity for throwing off all care, all anxiety and all mental working or plans for business, is a most desirable quality, and one which can constantly be increased.
Such cultivation brings the peace which in Scriptural phrase “passeth all understanding.”
Such peace is no myth. It is not a religious sentiment to be merely read and passed over as something very sacred, but withal very impractical and incapable of easy understanding. It is a real thing. It is possible for all to gain who will pray or demand that state of mind which learns to trust for all things to the Supreme Power—which learns so to trust more and more—to fling ourselves back on that power when we have exhausted for the present all our own resource and effort.
It is a peace which can pervade the mind when the purse is low, when rent day is near and no funds seem ready to meet it—when we are living from “hand to mouth.”
That peace will dispel gloom. It will keep our eyes turned to the bright side. It will keep oft depression and discouragement. It brings health, strength and vigor of mind and body. It will bring in time such a faith in these laws that we shall be absolutely certain that when once our minds are turned in the right direction, we shall be freed from sickness and poverty and gain lasting health and prosperity.
As the child looks and trusts to its parents for support, so is it possible in time and in the same way for us to look and trust to the Supreme Power to which we are all linked as parts. As proof on proof comes to us of its reality will our faith in its living existence be measured, and “according to the faith we have shall it be given us.”
I do not say, however, that such faith and trust and the good coming of them can be realized so soon as you make your first effort in that direction. Time is necessary for the growth of such faith. Time is necessary to root out mental errors coming of lifelong lack of such faith. Time is necessary to actually make for us a new mind and a new spirit. Time is necessary to make a mind whose power shall draw good to us instead of drawing evil. Time is necessary to create a firm belief in the power of your spirit to effect results. Time is necessary to destroy that dangerous belief that it is only our physical power or senses by which results are accomplished. Time is necessary to prevent our minds through long habit from slipping back into old and erroneous conditions, and thereby drawing to us evil instead of good.
Spiritual growth means literally the making for you of a new mind which not only believes differently, but whose workings will bring altogether different and better results as regards health and fortune than the old mind and the old self which must be gradually rooted out and destroyed.
Many people through long mental habit are almost incapable of resting and reinforcing. They cannot stop their minds from working. Their thoughts on Sunday, as on any other day, will stray on their business, their plans, their cares in the house, the shop, the office—whether at church or the home. They are unable to turn their current of thought in any other direction. Their minds are as the steam engine without the “governor.” They run or work on and on until such force as they have is exhausted. When they recuperate a little the mental engine works as before, until at last the body, their physical instrument, having so little opportunity for self-repair, tumbles to pieces- as thousands do tumble to pieces all about us.
The mind in repose draws spiritual element and nourishment to recuperate the body. It will draw of this more and more as our capacity for repose increases.
For those who have begun to realize these errors, Sunday, as a day of silent, earnest desire to be rid of them, and to be for that one day in a closer communion with the Infinite Spirit of Good, will be most profitable.
It is far more profitable, if you can do so, to turn your mind on Sunday off the track of business or any planning, either in art or domestic life, for in so doing you are gaining power to carry into the business life and effort of the coming week.
By “silent earnest desire “I do not mean irksome desire. I do not mean that you should force yourself to try and think such desire for a whole day. No good comes of any forced effort. It is enough that you commence Sunday with the simple demand or thought that you shall be taught and led how to make it a day of rest and inflowing of force. So commence the day with that thought, and that thought or force will do the rest. It will not do all, or possibly anything that you can realize for the first Sunday, or the second, or even the fortieth. But as months merge into years and years roll on, you will be sensible that you are acquiring and growing into this most desirable capacity, not merely for Sunday, but for all other days, and that such force has not only come to stay, but ever to increase.
The commandment, ” Thou shalt keep the Sabbath Day holy,” infers that one day in seven shall be devoted ” wholly” to the inflowing to you of spiritual elements.
The “holy man or woman” of the Bible is that man or woman whose body is acted on by their “whole ” spirit.
A “whole” spirit or mind is one educated out of all error. It is a spirit so healthy that it knows or feels any manner of evil thought and knows how to avoid it.
If your mind on Sunday through long habit persists in dwelling on your week-day occupations—will busy itself at the store, the office, the workshop (which for you is work the same as if your body was there), and you are sensible of the injury you are thereby doing yourself, then demand of the Infinite Spirit and source of all power the capacity to get your Sunday rest.
Go into the fields and bask in the sun. “Walk about and walk reposefully. Don’t make Sunday a day of hurry and drive for any purpose. Do not, if living in the city, hurry with crowds to picnics or Sunday resorts if thereby you are far more exhausted than if you had stayed at home. Go to the church if the service rests you and you feel thereby drawn nearer the Infinite. Amuse yourself with any light effort in any direction, so long as it rests you.
All physical or mental eftort is not “work” in the usual meaning of that word. A gentle reposeful outlay of force will often bring rest to a mind, which without it will be restless. Our forces often need some very light physical eflort to concentrate themselves upon and thereby prevent them from spreading, wandering and expending themselves in an exhausting beating of the air as it were. For this reason the whittling of a stick rests a man’s mind. So does the ladies’ knitting or embroidery. So there is rest in a certain kind of reposeful effort. Many a beautiful thought, a pleasant reposeful state of mind is drawn when the material part of our being is so employed. Such employment of the material being gives our spiritual or higher self a better opportunity to act and make itself felt. Better on Sunday thus to divert and amuse our physical self than to have it restless, uneasy and roaming about in thought.
There is in each one of us two beings: the material or physical and the spiritual. The physical being or body has a mind and reason of its own based on what the physical senses bring to it. The spiritual being has another mind based on the use of its other senses or powers.
On Sunday, then, so much as possible, we want to lay aside rest or divert our material part, and through its repose allow our spiritual being the better opportunity to assert itself.
It is very beneficial to commence putting your mind in the desirable attitude for Sunday, resting on Saturday evening. Because then, as we endeavored to express in ” The Mystery of Sleep,” you are giving your spiritual self during the body’s sleep on Saturday night the proper direction to draw to itself that element of rest, which will make you the better able to rest on Sunday.
But to pass Saturday evening even in social excitement, and defer retiring until a late hour with no desire for the morrow’s repose, may send your spirit into a similar realm of feverish excitement, will draw ouly similar element to you, will cause such element to act on your body all night, so that you awake in the morning unrefreshed and with all the less capacity to bring to you the spiritual nourishment and strength that otherwise Sunday can in time give you.
I suggest, then, the following expression or prayer for Saturday evening and Sunday morning, as a means to shape our minds so as to get the most rest and strength on Sunday; I demand from the source of all good power so that I can turn my thoughts from the channels in which they have run during the past week. I demand to realize more and more clearly the great good I shall receive for body and mind through such diversion of thought for one day of the seven. May I see more and more clearly that the cultivation of this peculiar Sabbath rest will give me force to resist disease, to strengthen my body, to clear my mind, to give me new idea, plan, energy and force for next week’s business, which today I demand to forget entirely, since the banishing of business, plan and care for today will allow entrance for that spiritual force which shall all the better push business to successful issue tomorrow I demand more and more proof of the reality of these spiritual laws.”
I demand that I may feel the spirit of that wonderful orb, the source of all life in this planet. I demand that my spiritual sense be so cleared that I may see in the sun the greatest expression of the divine and eternal mind as yet brought near me. I demand to see and feel, and receive also force from all forms of Nature, the tree, the plant, the animal which like myself are warmed into life by the sun’s rays, and are parts and expressions of the life it sends them.”
Do not, however, from what we have said infer that rigid unvarying observance is suggested. Do what your spirit prompts you to do, and when it prompts you. We have little faith in purely mechanical observances. Better is a spirit-prompted prayer or the prayer of impulse once in six weeks on a Sunday or Saturday night than a laboriously repeated prayer on every Sunday for those six weeks. Nor do we insist even on the form of words above given. We only desire and hope that you feel the spirit which those words may convey to you. The feeling is everything, the mere repetition nothing. We suggest no religion of rule and routine. If necessity or the system of life in which you live oblige you to work on Sunday, you can still even in your work feel the spirit of the above demand. That will do you good. It is the spirit and not the letter that is life and brings life.
Grace Before Meat; Or, The Science Of Eating
Copyrighted by F. J. Needham, 1889
The frame or mood of mind in which you eat is of far more importance than what food you eat, assuming of course, that your food is agreeable to your palate. Because in eating you take and incorporate into your spiritual self whatever thought occupies your mind while eating. If your thought at such time be irritable and peevish or gloomy, discouraged and despondent, or dwelling on wrongs or grievances, or you eat in hurry and impatience or anxiety, you are actually assimilating such injurious thought, element, and making it part of yourself. Your food then becomes the material agency or medinm for conveying this injurious thought to you. It matters not how healthy or nutritious your food be, if you eat it in such frames of mind you are making it only the envelope for making these injurious elements a part of yourself.
To eat in a calm, serene, reposeful mind, dwelling in thought or conversation only on things pleasant, healthy and strength giving, is to bring that current of thought to you. Then you consume in a sense such thought with your food and build it permanently into you.
There is a great and beneficial truth in the saying of “Grace before Meat.” It is whether said aloud or in thought the calling to you of that thought current which will bring the mood of mind best calculated to make your food do body and spirit the most good. You can always put out this desire at any time or place, though you eat but a mouthful.
To think while eating of disease or any form of pain is to attract similar elements to you and build them into you. You may not suffer from the particular disease, thought, spoken of, but if this is your mental habit while eating, you will in time suffer from it in some way.
You take in and assimilate during eating more of thought element, good or bad, than at other times, and for the following reason.
You are in a more negative or receptive state when you eat than at other times during the waking hours. That is, your spirit puts itself and the body with it in a condition to receive strength from the food taken. Your whole self, your mind and the body it uses is then as the open palm held out to receive a gift. This does not involve the putting out of so much force as the fist closed to strike or lift a heavy weight. It is in these receptive or force receiving states of mind and body that you receive easiest of anything good or bad in the shape of thought, and you may do this often unconsciously.
While spirit and body are receiving strength from any source they should not at the same time be giving it out, no more than the horse should be worked while eating. You give out strength if while eating your mind is unpleasantly affected in any manner, or if it is on a tension regarding any matter.
For this reason to study, while eating, will prove ultimately injurious to you.
A great deal of beneficial thought element may be brought you when you eat in a serene, easy, peaceful, undisturbed state of mind, a great deal of injurious thought element can be brought you if you eat in a hurried disturbed combative and uneasy state of mind. If you have long been in the habit of eating in the mental condition last spoken of, you cannot break it off immediately. Any mental habit which affects or rules us physically must be changed by degrees.
It will be so gradually changed for the better by the permanent desire or prayer for such change; you will be reminded from time to time, as you commence to eat, that a more reposeful mental condition while eating is necessary, although you may not be able at once to make your body conform to such repose. The body has had its way in this respect possibly many years. It has been fashioned, so to speak, through its habit to run in a rut. The rut cannot be reformed immediately. But your calm demand for the coming of the desirable mental condition to bring body and spirit—the most good is the force strong, slow moving, but sure, for reorganizing you, and whatever injurious habit you may have. That desire brings to you a new thought current, and the continual and growing action upon you of this current must reform you in this particular, as it will reform every other defect.
There is a hurried fashion of eating which causes us often to swallow our food hastily and in too large mouthfuls, being possibly at the time beset by an unpleasant desire to get through the meal as quickly as possible—a desire or rather an influence which sometimes brings on often after partaking of a few mouthfuls a sudden loss of appetite and lack of relish for the food, no matter how hungry you were when you sat down at the table.
People who have long given way to this habit sometimes lose nearly all appetite. The whole time occupied by them in the day’s meals may be embraced inside of twenty minutes. They know very little of the pleasure and rest to mind and body coming of eating in a calm reposeful manner. They realize also very little of the strength which comes of eating in this mood.
This hurried eating is a very dangerous habit. By it, the body is starved of food when plenty may be before it. There is given neither nutriment for body or spirit. Such person wiil waste away and weaken gradually without scarcely knowing it, until at last the unfed body drops from the spirit. He may become a martyr to dyspepsia, and attribute the ailment to this or that article fed upon. The food has very little to do with his distress. The state of K*nind in which he eats it has everything to do with it.
When we eat in the hurried and uneasy mental condition, we are attracting to us forces and intelligences having no pleasure in our eating, and who regard every meal an irksome process, wanting it finished as soon as possible. It is through these forces often unconsciously attracted that the whole organization can be turned against eating, so that it becomes, as is now the case .with a great many people, a habit almost mechanical. This mechanical habit does the body great injury. Any service done the body needs to have taste liking life and spirit put in its doing. Otherwise it is a dead service, and will prove one cause bringing death to the body.
If you become so absorbed in your art or business that you begrudge time for leisurely eating and hurry back to your occupation after swallowing a few mouthfuls, you will surely in time suffer. We cannot replenish spirit and body as quickly as a locomotive may have its fuel shoveled in it, and keep ourselves in proper repair.
It is not a good sign for a person to say that he or she doesn’t care what they eat or that ” one thing is as good as another, so long as it fills up.” It is the spirit that demands varying dishes and flavors. The spirit has reasons we cannot now explain for such demands. When the palate becomes indifferent in these respects, and one flavor is counted as good as another, it proves there is a deadening or blunting of the spirit. The higher the spiritualization of any person the more vigorous and appreciative becomes the palate. It is the spirit that receives the pleasure coming of eating through the physical sense of taste.
Your spirit demands to live and have expression in every department of your physical being. Of this the palate is one. If one department is shut up or closed by improper use, you are deprived of that particular expression of life and pleasure. You are also injured.
This is not to be confounded with gluttony. The glutton does not eat. He swallows. Proper eating dwells on every morsel with relish, and the longer it can be so dwelt upon, the longer it serves as the physical medinm for the conveyance of life to the spirit. The glutton gets very little, real good from Iris food. It is as fuel put in the furnace at once in too great quantity, which does not burn and make force.
Half a dozen mouthfuls eaten in repose, chewed deliberately, and, it may be added, tasted deliberately, will bring you more good than ten times the quantity eaten in a hurried fashion. You are taking in with that food far more than you see with the physical eye. You are then taking in elements of health, strength and repose. The more we grow into this habit, the more will our power increase to bring these desirable elements to us.
Therefore, when at meal times, you have for company bright, cheerful people, not hurried or full of anxiety, or in a wrangling mood, or pre-occupied with business cares, who can eat and chat pleasantly or mirthfully, and whose talk has not the least flavor of rancor, ill-will or biting sarcasm toward others, you have most valuable mental aids for making your food of the greatest good to body and spirit.
The entire company then concentrate on drawing to them a thought current of great power for good. It is the stronger in proportion to the number of minds which are pulling together in this mood.
A meal eaten in the proper mental condition of leisure and cheerfulness, though it last an hour, is a great rest for an hour. When you rest you are tilling up with strength. Your spiritual force when you eat in the proper mind is working on others, possibly far from your body, as much and even more than at some other times. So no time is “lost “while we are engaged in any pleasure, so that we rightly use that pleasure.
Every effort, mental or physical, should give pleasure in the doing. Permanent pleasure, coming of our eating, our sleeping, our walking, our every daily effort, is the proof that life is rightly lived.
To eat and wrangle or engage in heated or angry argumentation is to draw a thought current on all so engaged which injures and tears the body to pieces instead of building it up. Every mouthful swallowed in this mood serves as a conveyance to body and spirit of this injurious force.
Do not before and during meals keep your mind in a fret and worry as to whether this or that food will agree with you. Do not in thought keep saying, ” I expect this dish will disagree with me. I shall have to pay ten times over for the pleasure it gives me.”
You are, in so thinking, making the proper conditions to have your food disagree with you. You are using your force persistently in the wrong direction to make exactly such a stomach as you are then figuring in mind.
Say or think instead and without irritation this: “My food will agree with me. It will give me nourishment and strength. The cheerful thought 1 now have, I am putting into myself with every mouthful, and the more leisurely I eat each mouthful, the more of cheer and strength in coming to me. I am eating to glorify God—the Great Supreme Power of which I am a part—a child.”
This is a good “Grace before meat.”
Then demand forgetfulness that you have a stomach. Don’t think all the time of your stomach or digestion. Eat as a bird eats, knowing only that its food is going where nature intends it should, and that after being tasted, enjoyed and swallowed, it has no further concern with it. If you have an ailing stomach continually in your mind’s eye, you will surely have one in the material. Because what you think you make. What you so much keep in mind you draw more and more to you.
What shall you eat? Eat what most pleases your taste. Nature has given you the sense of taste as a sentinel to guard your stomach. If you don’t like any food, don’t eat it. Eating food for strength, when it gives little pleasure to the taste—when it is eaten more from a certain sense of duty than with a keen relish does little of any lasting good. Eating that to which the taste is indifferent to if not absolutely repugnant, is simply a forcing on both body and spirit to what they do not want. When they benefit at all it is because your mind is in a certain degree of faith that the diet you force on yourself is going to do you good. If you could eat in the same mind or mood of articles which have disagreed with you, you would find after a time their previous ill effects would gradually cease. You would not probably be able to have them so agree with you immediately, because no person who has for years believed that he or she could not partake of any dish without injury can immediately grow into a condition of absolute faith that it need not disagree with them.
The freshest meats, vegetables and fruits contain the most force. Eaten in the right mind they will add the most of their force or spirit to yours.
Salted meats and pickled vegetables have little force for you to absorb. What remains of them after the salting or pickling process, is the most earthy element. Their strongest life has gone. For fruit or vegetable no “preserving process” retains the life which belonged to them when first plucked or dug.
If you are hungry at night, before retiring, eat in moderation. If you go to sleep with the body craving food, your spirit is the more likely to go into the domain of food craving while the body is unconscious. As a result, it will not bring to the body such spiritual elements of strength as it would were the body satisfied.
You may have grown up with the idea that eating just before sleeping was very unhealthy. This thought then becomes an actual part of yourself, and will make the practice a source of pain to you.
The animal eats and sleeps afterwards. Its digestion goes on as well when asleep as awake. So would ours did we give nature more her own way. In England millions eat a late supper at nine or ten in the evening. The average English health is as good as ours.
If an article of food disagrees with you once, that is no proof that it need do so again. Your real and only self is a bundle of beliefs, opinions and habits coming of such beliefs and opinions. Your stomach digests or does not digest in accordance with some possibly long cherished belief regarding its functions, which you may have held unconsciously and never questioned. You may have always believed that a certain food Must not agree with you, or if eaten at a certain time Must not agree with you. The force coming of that idea long held has made it disagree with you. When you reverse this mental error and make this idea work the other way you will gradually put its power in your stomach, improve your digestion and cease to be ruled or annoyed by an unruly organ whose whims you may have so long been nursing and encouraging.
If you crave meat, eat it. If you deny the body its demands you do it a wrong. True, meat is a food grosser and coarser tlnm some others. But your body also is relatively gross as compared with your spirit. It is of the earth earthy. It demands matter akin to itself and of the i arth earthy to give it sustenance.
You can while eating meat desire the best and purest for body and spirit as easily as wLen eating fruit. If you do this you are making meat a conveyance to your spirit of such higLer thought.
You can also, if in the wrong state of mind, put in body and spirit a great deal of wrangle, brutality and other lower passions even if eating cracked wheat and strawberries.
The spiritualization of the body, or in other words the making of the body the more willing and capable instrument to conform to the demands of the spirit and carry out its wonderful powers does not come from mechanical forms or forced methods. It does come from the earnest demand of the spirit or in other words from aspiration. Aspiration carries you gradually beyond the desire or demands of the grosser appetites. It enables you to use them if need be, but prevents their using you. If you starve the body in any way you do not lessen or destroy the appetite for the thing desired or craved. You may eat meat in mind, though you deny the body meat. This in its result is worse than if you ate meat, providing your body desires it. For in eating it there comes a temporary lull of the craving for it. In total denial there may be a perpetual craving. The mind is then continually consuming what is denied the body. This concentrates much of your power or thought on the thing denied when it might be placed elsewhere to better purpose.
The lower or grosser desires are not subdued by the self-denial of a strong will. They are repressed but not destroyed. At repressed, they are ever ready to break out in some form. The person so harsh to his own body is often equally harsh and ugly toward all others who do not accept or practice his harshness.
You can in a sense “spiritualize your body by starving it.” In other words you may make yourself more sensitive to the thought about you.
You may feel the more acutely every mind about you. But you will recollect that you are in this way laying yourself open to both good and evil influences that the evil in some shape may be largely in the majority, and that if you make your body weak through excessive fasting you have the less strength or positiveness for resisting or throwing off evil thought.
There is in meat a positive element. Like pig iron it is heavy, strong, inelastic, blind and unyielding. It is the spirit of the stubbornness or ferocity of the animal. By its consumption we absorb of such spirit. But we can temper this the grosser quality, refine it and make it useful to us.
We must deal with the world and live with it. We cannot on this stratum of life shut ourselves entirely out and live away from it. Real happiness never is attained by such method. It is our business to deal with it, to see it and take it at its best and give it our best.
But in dealing with the world we may need a certain positive element given by and absorbed in part from animal organizations. We need it in the assertion of our own rights. We may need it to keep ourselves positive and avoid absorbing the erroneous thoughts of others. We need not be gross blindly, stubborn or brutal. But our spirits can temper or refine the lower animal element of meat into a gentle firmness or a determination which is decided without being rude, violent or ferocious. The element derived from meat may be one aid to the spirit in the attainment of such qualities.
Our race will cease to eat meat in the future. It will grow gradually both out of the necessity of its use and the desire for it also. It is a cruelty and an injustice to take the life of the animal for our use. But the injustice is in a sense a necessity.
Our spirits are the product from grosser to finer. In other bodies ages since we were far grosser and coarser than today. In future ages our spirits and bodies will be far more refined than at present. So the gross material which is a necessity in one stage, of being ceases to become so in another.
Aspiration will ultimately free the body of all excessive gross appetite. The unruly appetite will drop off entirely. There will be no temptation as formerly. That which tempted will lose its power, its fascination.
As your spirit refines so will all your physical tastes refine. You will naturally become more and more particular in your selection of food, and especially so in a leisurely method in partaking of it. This method itself will be a bar to all excess.
But this crucifying the body denying through our wills what it craves, and rigorously refusing its cravings, is not dependence on the Supreme Power. It implies lack of faith and trust in that Power. It is the faint and futile endeavor to do for ourselves —to make ourselves higher beings—when only that Power can so raise us.
If you will leave your body alone and put your faith and trust in the Great Spirit to lift it out of inordinate and excessive grosser appetite and all things which are crude, you will become virtuous and temperate through and through. If you try to root out the grosser by these external or physical methods, yours will be only an outside virtue with an inside of ever repressed but ever consuming desire.
This thought may occur to some: “But this may be made by others an excuse for every kind of excess.”
First, never mind what others may do or think. Your first consideration is for yourself. There is altogether too much solicitude for the reformation of others, while with every one of us are defects crying for cure and giving us pain while they so cry.
You will not become a glutton if your mind is turned against gluttony or any excess. It is the mind bent on refinement that refines the body. But the body cannot reform the mind.
We are not to be reformed, or, in other words, reorganized spiritually and physically through proper eating alone. Our growth into the higher and better will be a rounded but symmetrical growth not coming of a change or reform in any one thing or department of being. The whole (or holy) man and woman will grow as a perfect flower grows, every leaf and petal growing together and proportionately.
The Source Of Your Strength
Copyrighted by F. J. Needham, 1889
The supply of your physical strength is not generated within your body. You draw it to you from without.
Your mind or spirit is not within your body. It is where most you send your thought. If it is concentrated, and you are absorbed with the thought or recollection of a person one hundred miles distant from your body, your mind is mostly with that person. But if your mind is intent and absorbed in the act of lifting a heavy weight, then it is mostly concentrated on those parts of the body necessary to use in lifting that weight.
The source of all strength of muscle is in your mind. Your amount of physical strength depends on your capacity to call force to act on whatever part of the body you wish to use. Force, spirit and thought mean for us the same thing.
When you lift a weight, you call to you a current of thought whose action as turned on your muscles is to overcome the resistance of that weight.
You will drop that weight or feel a great diminution of power, if while lifting you are suddenly alarmed, or if some person suddenly diverts your attention. Why? Because the force or mind you put into such effort is suddenly drawn from the muscle machinery you use in lifting, and its current turned in another direction. It is as the steam shut off from one portion of the machinery, and turned where it acts on another.
Walking, running, lifting, any effort of muscle is as much a mental actor an effort of spiritual power as oratory or writing. No human body can move a step without thought to move that body.
Fear can paralyze every muscle, make the body weak and trembling, and rob it of nearly all physical strength. Why? Because a current of thought or force has been turned from nerves and muscles acted on in physical effort, and the current cannot at once be turned back again.
A fear current of thought or “panic ” acts on all parts of the body, depresses every organ, and brings unpleasant physical sensations. A “panic” is a fear current of thought invited and given way to at first by a few, communicated to the many, and gathering strength as each successive mind opens itself to it.
There is no power in muscle or any other part of your body to lift, or walk, or run, or perform any other physical exercise save the power or thought you call to it in so exercising. The material of your body is analogous to the piston, the cogs and other gear of the steam engine, only to be moved, to lift, to draw or to do other work, when the power of steam operates on them.
When you lift a weight, you demand force to lift that weight; you put your mind in the attitude of calling for strength. Any other thought that occupies your mind in doing any physical act, is a lessening of the power brought to bear on that act. For this reason a great many people exhaust themselves, because unconsciously they try to do two things at once, and will not allow for one physical act (though it be but the opening of a door), the time necessaiy to direct their force properly in the doing of that act. Here is one great source of physical weakness, for this mental habit extends to the doing of all things.
When you become very tired it is because you have temporarily lost the capacity of calling unseen force to act on your body. Yet then your material body is no more tired than the iron rods of the steam engine are tired when they cease working. The engine may no longer be able to run because the force behind it may be exhausted. The body likewise is no longer able to run chiefly because its supply of force is cub off and cannot for a time be brought to bear upon it.
You can by constant practice call a great deal of power into some special department of your body. You may in so doing become a great walker or rower, or very strong in the arms and lift more than others. But you are then cultivating one set of muscles at the expense of some other department of your being, and will suffer from so doing in time.
The “athlete” may have great physical strength in some portion of his body at twenty-five. But is it enduring? What in so many cases is his physical condition at fifty?
There is a great deal of error as regards ” hardy men,” or a “hardy out-door life,” or ” hardening the muscles,” all involving the idea that a great deal of active out-door life and physical exercise makes ” tough, hardy men.” I have lived with frontiersmen, sailors and farmers, been one among them, and know that many of these are physically on the down grade at fifty. A man may not; be well at all, though strong in the arms, sun-burned and ” wiry.” He often lives out his best from twenty to thirtyfive, and is gray, grizzled, and worn at forty-five, or a bundle of aches and rheumatism.
You want for the realization of the greatest happiness a body on whose departments this power you call to you can be equally distributed—can act readily on any part you wish — can be turned readily from one part to another. You want to be strong in every part. You do not want great strength of arm or leg at risk of injury to heart or lung or some other organ, and this result is very likely to come to those who cultivate and develop disproportionately some particular set of muscles.
You want also a strength of body which comes to stay—which knows no decrease and which shall ever increase.
This you may say is impossible—is against the order of Nature, which, as mankind in the past have believed, decrees ultimate decay and death for all seen forms of life.
It is not man’s province to decree for Nature. As men seek, she is ever showing them new and unexpected possibilities. The railroad will in time give way to some less cumbrous method of locomotion. The telegraph is not the ultimate for carrying news, and man’s physical and spiritual being is as yet scarcely on the verge of the possibilities coming to it.
To bring a body whose strength, shall be equally distributed you will depend on the Supreme Power, and demand for yourself an influx of equally distributed strength.
When you so depend on that power your spirit will attend to this equal distribution and use of force on your body.
This, the highest result comes of a spiritual or thought power and not of a physical power—not from physical exercise.
Every person lives not only in a world or atmosphere of their own peculiar thought and material occupation, but attracts to them from the unseen side of life minds and intelligences of similar thought, tastes, likings and occupations. The professional pedestrian attracts to him intelligences whose passion is merely walking, and who, having no physical bodies of their own, indulge their love of walking through him, and give him also- the strength and inspiration of their thought while he walks.
For others can give you a literal strength through sympathy in auy effort of yours in which they are interested. When hundreds cheer at sight of some favored champion in any contest of physical strength they give him a strength support and inspiration as real as that coming of any food or drink. And minds not having any material body to use, can and do act similarly on minds having a body to use, in all kinds of effort.
Minds on the unseen side of life are of every conceivable grade of intelligence even as here. Wisdom is there far above ours. So is stupidity, folly and wickedness. Tou attract to you of these exactly of your own mind, motive, tastes and sympathies.
Such minds may care more for what brings them immediate pleasure than of the result coming in time of such pleasure—just as you may also do with yourself. They give their strength to the pedestrian, so enabling him to prolong the great strain on his muscles. They give it to gratify themselves. When he has lost nearly all his own capacity for drawing power, still their minds concentrated on him carry him along. Their wills united to his own give him temporarily a great deal of force, but ultimately snch force gains nothing.
Their power so concentrated can for a time impel the pedestrian to renewed effort and keep him braced up and on a tension, just as excitement braces you up for renewed effort for a season.
There is a limit to this condition. That is when the spirit loses capacity for calling more force to act on the body. The body, then fails. Its owner is prostrated. Reaction, and perhaps the body’s death follows. Death of the body means inability of the spirit to act on it and use it.
The following of disembodied minds who have been giving a person their strength in some physical exercise, care nothing, because this strain must at last wear that person’s body out. W hen his body fails their further use, they leave and fasten on some other embodied mind having similar tendencies.
This extends to every occupation on our stratum of physical life. The artist, the writer, the merchant, the lawyer, who are doing a great deal of business, who work from morning till night, and sometimes far into the night, who surprise others by their endurance, are in reality not doing all of their own strength. They are acted on and driven by unseen forces about them—forces and intelligences alike in tastes and inclinations, forces powerful but still unwise and selfish.
The result is that now so common—the body so impelled will suddenly drop. Or the overdriven mind will drift into insanity or senility. These unwisely driven minds hold their bodies but for a few years, relatively speaking.
The day laborer often wears out, and is an old man at forty-five, because he has all his physical life been similarly attended, aided and strengthened in his lifting and tugging from “sun to sun” by minds who have no taste or desire, save to lift, tug and carry, and who having no material body, lift, tug and carry through someone who has, from the same motive as the gambler, who, having no money of his own to stake ou the cards, plays in a sense and realizes something of the excitement of the game in watching others.
The material of the body through incessant use may wear away, and when so worn away spirit or force cannot act out the part necessary to use, even as when a pin or cog in the engine becomes worn. There is damage and disorder very likely to ensue when the force of steam is brought to bear on that machinery.
Your spirit not only gives strength to the body to use in physical effort, but when the body rests during sleep or otherwise, it sets immediately at work to repair waste, and supply new material where it has been worn away by excessive use. The person using his or her body improperly, or, in other words, the person whose permanent state of mind does not call for a body proportionate in all its parts and powers, will have the wear of that body very imperfectly repaired.
If you have been in any degree in this injurious method of life and becoming convinced of your error you give your body more rest, you will probably experience a diminution of strength. You may then not be able to walk or otherwise exert yourself as before. This it would be natural to regard as an unfavorable sign.
But it is not. It is because your mind having changed its altitude, your old following of mind who have been giving you of their strength have now fallen off. You are let down on the basis of your own individual strength which may relatively be small. Tou are in a condition analagous to that oi the person who when temporarily insane has the strength of a giant. Iu his right mind he may be very weak. Why? Because in the delirinm of insanity he was supplied with a fleeting strength by the disembodied insane attracted to him through his mental condition.
In such lassitude or languor the body is really gaining strength and building itself upon a sound basis—just as in the relaxation attendant on sleep, the body is gaining strength.
Languor, lassitude and ” tired feelings ” are the demands of body and spirit for repairs. Very many periods of illness are only varying kinds and symptoms of exhaustion caused through bodies racked, strained and worn to that degree that spirit or force is no longer able to act on them.
Today thousands in every occupation do not think themselves well unless they are always on a tension. They demand a stimulation and a strength for doing their work which must last as long as they choose to do that work. They would grant Nature no time for recuperation and repair, and when Nature, through languor, lassitude or disinclination for effort, says she must have some time to repair the physical machine, they consider themselves ” sick,” and demand some medicine which shall immediately start them afresh, and keep them on that tension which erroneously they regard as an indication of perfect health.
“But business requires this constant activity and exertion. We have no time for the leisure you speak of,” says one.
Yes, business does require all a person may have, to give—time, strength and an incessant drain on vitality. Men at last educate themselves to this routine and can be happy in no other.
But our business system which gives most to the person who for a few years can exceed in strength and activity many others and turns him mercilessly out so soon as he shows weakness, is not in accord with Nature’s laws. Business often says: “You must work or starve,” while Nature is saying, ” If you keep on in this abuse of mind and body the two will soon part company.”
Is there gain of strength through physical exercise!
Not as much as is generally imagined. The time to exercise is when you feel like so doing and can enjoy it. And stop when you begin to feel tired. A boy runs and a young animal plays because they cannot help it. That is healthfully impelled exercise.
If you walk for sake of exercise and are fatigued and exhausted thereby, you have done yourself an injury. You have given out more strength than you received. You have called a current of will to you to shove your body ahead, when the body may have in some way protested. In this mood you call also to your aid the wills and force of others on the unseen side of life who are in error like yourself on this point.
There is not an effort of yours, mental or physical, but meets with aid and sympathy from minds akin to yours in tastes, occupations and sympathies on that side of life not seen of the physical eye, but which is closely woven into and bound up with our own.
Such aid and sympathy may be beneficial or injurious.
You are exercising beneficially when you are quiet and call to yourself the thought of strength, vigor, dexterity in the use of muscle and grace in movement. Tou exercise beneficially as you watch the movements of a spirited horse or playful dog, or any other form of animal life which moves from the pleasure realized io movement. Because in so doing you draw to yourself the thought current of strength and vigor. This in time will enter into you, assimilate with your physical organization, and gradually bring newer elements in your body. It will gradually re-form or re-make new blood, muscles, sinew, nerve and bone. When the newer elements you so call to yourself are sufficiently imbued with their new life, they, or rather the spirit acting on them and of which they are the reflection or material correspondence, will demand physical exercise. You will run or jump or otherwise use your muscles, because you feel like it and are impelled to do it like the child at play.
Now, on the contrary, you may be demanding physical exercise of the body when it has no desire for it.
You exercise beneficially when as you think of your body, you demand a wholly strong body, but not one you shall in thought plan for yourself. You will temper your demand with a deference to the Higher Wisdom or Supreme Power, which knows far better than you how to bring you a body exceeding in power anything you can at present imagine.
Once you could move with the elasticity of the boy of seventeen or as the girl of seventeen should move, and in the future will move, at fifty.
You, a grown up man or woman would very soon tire to run about as a child does all day at play with its companions. In this respect the child is capable of more physical effort than you, though it cannot lift so heavy a weight as you. Why is this?
Because the minds of the group of children at play are unconsciously concentrated in drawing to their bodies a current of playful thought. Place a child by itself, deprive it of its companions, and soon it will mope and become slow in movement. It is cut off from that peculiar thought current and is literally “out of its element.”
You need to bring again this current of playful thought to you which has gradually been turned off. You are too*serious or sad or absorbed in the serious affairs of life. You can be playful and cheerful without being puerile or silly. You can carry on business all the better for being in the playful mood when your mind is off your business. There is nothing but ill resulting from the permanent mood of sadness and seriousness—the mood which by many so long maintained makes it actually difficult for them to smile at all.
At eighteen or twenty you commenced growing out of the more playful tendency of early youth. You took hold of the more serious side of life.
You went into some business. You became more or less involved in its cares, perplexities and responsibilities. Or as man or woman, you entered on some phase of life involving care or trouble. Or you became absorbed in some game of business which, as you followed it, left no time for play. Then as you associated with older people you absorbed their old ideas, their mechanical methods of thinking, their acceptance of errors without question or thought of question. In all this you opened your mind to a heavy, care-laden current of thought. Into this you glided unconsciously. That thought is materialized in your blood and flesh. The seen of your body is a deposit or crystallization of the unseen element ever flowing to your body from your mind. Years pass on and you find that your movements are stiff and cumbrous—that you can with difficulty climb a fence and that you cannot climb a a tree, as at fourteen. Your mind has all this time been sending to your body these heavy inelastic elements, making your body what now it is.
You cannot undo this result by physical exercise ^by moving the body about when you have so earthy a body for such spirit as you can bring to act upon it.
Your change for the better must be gradual, and can only be accomplished by bringing the thought current of an all-round symmetrical strength to bear on it—by demanding of the. Supreme Power to be led in the best way—by diverting your mind from the many unhealthy thoughts which habitually have been flowing into it without your knowing it, to healthier ones.
“But bird and beast weaken and decay with years. Must not our bodies conform to the Law which governs theirs?” one may ask.
Beast and bird are in the same Law governing us. No form of material organization is outside of this Law. Beast and bird also draw force from without. They have intelligence, and intelligence means a degree of spirit. But they are more limited as to spiritual force than mankind. Our average of life is longer than theirs, because the demand of our own race to live is stronger than theirs. The mental force impelling that demand is stronger.
Like the beast, the bodies of those of our race have in the past weakened and decayed. This will not always be. Increase of spiritual knowledge will show the cause of such decay, and will show, also, how we can take advantage of a Law or Force to build us up, renew ever the body and give it greater and greater strength, instead of blindly using that Law or Force as has been done in the past to weaken our bodies and finally destroy them.
When you get in the right current of thought, and your errors in mind are one by one gradually rooted out, there can be no limit to your increase of physical strength—but you will not use it to drudge or in incessant pulling, hauling and lifting.
We are made for far higher uses and far greater enjoyments, and life is a far different existence from what it is as seen and judged from the physical senses.
What We Need Strength For
Copyright 1889, By F. J. Needham
- Blowitz, the noted European correspondent of the London Times, in an article published in Harper’s Magazine, remarks as follows:
“I believe in the constant intervention of a Supreme Power, directing not merely our Destiny in general, but those of our actions, which influence our Destiny.
” When I see nothing in Nature is left to chance, that immutable laws govern every movement, that the faintest spark which glimmers in the firmament disappears and reappears with strict punctuality, I cannot suppose that anything with mankind goes by chance, and that every individuality composing it is not governed by a definite and inflexible plan.'”
In our August number we stated that all strength or power, used either in working muscle or in any exercise of thought, in which muscle is not required, is drawn from without. By “without” I mean that it is drawn from the Supreme Power.
We use the term “Supreme Power” often—our readers may think unnecessarily so. We feel the great, insufficiency of language for expressing a tithe of this Power which moves the planets—which extends through endless space—which moves us, and from which we draw bur strength for the performance of the smallest act—the lifting of a finger or an eye-lash. We do not assume to know its nature or origin. We believe it is unfathomable for any human mind and to any mind in any advanced stage of being. We believe it is that Power alluded to in the Biblical Eecord before which archangels ” veil their faces,” which we interpret as inferring that the highest known order of being feels its relative littleness the more it realizes the immensity of this Power, and the more it apprehends of its workings the more does it see the impossibility of understanding or explaining a Force, which had no beginning and can have no ending.
All of us are parts of this Power. We can and must constantly increase its manifestation through ourselves. The fact that we are parts of it and can so increase it, needs to be brought again and again to our attention, because the more it is brought to us the more its practical reality and use will be clear to us. The more we use it intelligently for our happiness, the more will our minds become educated to draw upon it every moment of our lives, in all effort, all art, all business.
We need to grow to such a faith in the reality of this Power and our ability to draw it to us as the engineer has faith in the reality of the steam in the boiler, his ability to draw steam from that boiler and the power of that steam to drive the machinery.
This faith for us is the source and secret of all happiness. It is not to be gained or realized by hard study, or drudging midnight memorizings from books old or new. It will come to you in all fullness, in all richness, in all inspiration, as you learn more and more to keep your mind in the right attitude to receive it, and as you do all knowledge will come to you as easily, readily, as the rain pours from the clouds.
The right attitude is simply that of an earnest desire to receive of this Power.
As this truth becomes to you as real as the Sun daily seen in the Heavens, you will know more and more that you have a real power to depend upon. Your own mind will answer all questions, and your power will gradually increase whether used through the body or otherwise. For previously in imagining your power as originating within your body, you were, through such belief, cutting off its flow to you from without. When the first feeling of physical fatigue came on, unconsciously you called for further supply of power from within.
Yet a flow to you of power answers even this demand. But it was power you used in the wrong direction. It did not act on the machinery of your body to drive it ahead, but to rack and strain that machinery, as if the force supplied by the boiler was driving all the looms of the cotton mill back ward instead of forward. You may have continued in this injurious mental habit, and it is for this reason that you may now be less able to call power to act on the body, since this reverse action has injured your physical machinery, worn it away or thrown it out of gear, and put the body out of proportion.
Your body will by degrees fashion itself more symmetrically and become more shapely when you get your mind in the right current of thought.
The Supreme Force enters also into your daily business. When you have done all you can, without strain, cease doing further, call on that Power, fall back in trust upon it as the child does on its parents. Demand or pray to learn more and more to trust to it. When you are in the trusting mood you are calling this force to you.
The most practical men, the projectors and pushers of great undertakings, the relatively few moving men of the world, often unconsciously call for this Power, and often unconsciously put their minds in the right state for receiving it far more than is generally imagined. When things look dark, discouraging and perplexing, when a depressed state of mind comes, as come it will at times, such minds say in homely, every day phrase, “Well, I’ve pulled through before and I guess I will somehow this time.”
Now this attitude of mind is a partial trust in a Supreme Power, or in other words a trust in something outside of ourselves.
The words matter not in which an idea is expressed, and when a man or woman who is not afraid of taking responsibilities, sees the outlook dark ahead, and a momentary fear comes upon them, yet they say, ” Well, I guess I’ll rub through somehow;” they get a certain rest out of this thought. They are calling to them the greatest Force in the universe.
You need not always keep this kind of demand in memory, for when you have once got into the right channel or mental attitude you call unconsciously for force in the right direction, and it comes and works in the right direction whether you think of it or not, just as in all these past years you may have unconsciously worked force in the wrong direction.
You cannot get out of your old habit or mental attitude all at once. The error or habit is one often, twenty, thirty or forty years’ growth. You will frequently slip back into it as you may into habit of gait, gesture or manner you wish to break—all of which are habits framed first in mind before being acted out in body. But as you have now received this idea it can never leave you, for no truth once received can ever leave you. It comes to stay and grow, and in its growth slowly and surely push all error out.
In any effort physical or mental, you want to cease trying to make effort through what erroneously you may have thought your power within your body. You need to learn or get your mind on the track of calling for power from without and giving yourself entirely up to its action on you. You want to say in your mind, “I plan a motion with my leg or arm or other portion of the body. It is enough for me to plan that, I call now for the force from without to move my body, and as it comes all I should do is to direct that force to the organ I wish to use. Then you are in the way of ceasing to try to manufacture that force, but only to direct or govern its action precisely as the engineer directs the steam to such part of the machinery he wishes to use.
Similarly in all business undertakings you will have your plan, aim and purpose. Then call for power to move that plan or purpose. You may rest assured that such power as it comes will move you to action. But when it does not come in the form of new idea you will retard your business more than advance it through working and making strained effort simply because you think you must be doing something.
You need not try to think continually of this idea in making your usual efforts, because you cannot always keep any one rule in your memory to the exclusion of everything else. This would retard you rather than advance. The memory is a faculty which will become wearied with the endeavor ever to keep any one thing before it, and weariness in any department of our beings is always to be avoided.
You can safely rely on the spirit of this truth to help you, give you increase of strength and correct your old errors. That spirit does not need memory to hold it. It is beyond and behind memory, and when we try and force it on memory, we are again committing the error of trusting to the material instead of the spirit. When the spiritual part of our beings once accepts a truth it is then really educated in that truth. The spirit goes then to work in its own way to educate the body. It has many ways of its own for forcing this or any other truth ou the notice of your material self and your material memory.
The person skilled in any art, the musician, the orator, the marksman, the painter, all who produce wonderful results can tell very, very little concerning the methods by which they accomplish such results. They know that in time results come, and results often unlooked for. Through long practice? Yes, but not labored practice. No effort either in art or business really puts one ahead when such effort is laborious and irksome. It does set one back. When Power comes from the Supreme Source and is recognized as coming from that source it makes the effort a pleasure.
In his effort and plan the most skillful worker puts his or her mind in a condition of surrender to the Supreme Force. He ceases trying hard to do. When so he ceases his spirit has most freedom to act and call to him power to act with. So quick is this action that it escapes the power of words to describe it, and the expert in any art may fill pages with words in the attempt to give the rules or methods how he does things and be no nearer explanation than before.
Calling force to you from the Supreme brings inspiration, and your walk can be inspired as well as your speech, and “inspiration” is effort without strain—effort of any sort which gives pleasure in its performance, whether it be music or marksmanship or business. Inspiration forgets the body the instrument the spirit uses. Inspiration holds no effort as “work,” but only play. Inspiration knows no laws or methods made to attain it by man, and in its higher and higher flights is ever evading and going beyond such man-made laws and methods.
You need strength for many purposes of far more importance to you than in the use of this power by limb or muscle, or any material organ.
What if a giant in mere muscle finds himself suddenly rooted in his tracks and unable to stir hand or foot? You know results akin to this are accomplished through what was called mesmerism forty years ago, what is called hypnotism now by many, and what may have some other name given it thirty years hence. What really is it? The power of one mind to master and control another mind, and this is done with the same power by which one physical body masters another, only it is applied without using muscle.
This power all possess in embryo. When educated how to use it the man or woman of the future can never be ruled by the mere physical strength of others. Power used separate and apart from the body would not only paralyze the prizefighter’s muscles, but you would throw your own mind into him, send his own to sleep, and make him, if you desired follow you about as a dog follows its master.
This is not a remote possibility. It is crudely evidenced and worked now. It must develop into far greater proportions. It must be known as the property of all, to greater or less degree, as strength of muscle is now the property of all in greater or less degree.
But this is only one form of power working apart from the body. It can be used with a bad motive as muscular power is used for bad purposes. It is so used now, though people are unconscious that they do use it. But thousands of minds are today influenced, swayed and controlled by other minds. Mesmeric power is but another form of such control. Such power is used in every household in the land. Slaves are to be numbered by thousands who have no idea they are slaves, nor how they become, so. Masters exist also who know only they have mastery. Stranger than all, those really possessing the most power are often ruled by the weaker in mind through total ignorance of their own thought power.
You may need power to overcome this mind-crippling and body-destroying bondage where you have unconsciously, and possibly for years, put yourself under another person’s will.
The power gathered by man’s spirit can overcome and rise superior to all material agencies. It can make the body insensible to heat or cold. It was the power which enabled the three young Jews to walk through a glowing furnace unharmed. It made the serpent’s venom harmless to Paul. It (brought all the so-called miracles attendant on the departure of the Israelites from Egypt.
These powers mean the “Lost Arts.”
Mind more highly developed can make the body superior to the laws of gravitation. Those who in the Biblical record are spoken of as “ascending to heaven,” or being “translated,” did so by virtue of a strength which when applied lifted the body into the air. When the spirit has grown to this power it can dissolve the material elements composing the body and reform or re-arrange them at will.
These possibilities and far more belong to you, and you need to know how to avoid wasting your power to realize them.
Possibly you say on reading this, “But if these are our possibilities, they may not come to me for millions of years in the existence of my spiritual being; they are too far off in realization for my serious consideration.”
This thought is a bar to all advance or growth in any direction. If you limit the utmost possibility for yourself you can conceive now, you limit and stop the very next step in your spiritual growth you might take today. Your being reaches and projects its possibilities into the Eternity of the Future just as far as it can think and imagine possibilities, and when you say “they cannot be,” or they are so remote that it is almost equivalent to their not being, you have thrown a rock far ahead into Eternity to block your train.
But you need not talk indiscriminately of these things to everyone. You need not lose your head, forget the footing you should maintain in the present world of material things and try to fly tomorrow, or pit yourself against a prize-fighter because you have in embryo a power to subdue muscle which need not use muscle.
You do not assert that the apple seed is a full grown tree, yet you know that from that tiny seed can come a tree. You will not say of the apple seed that it can only become a sprout—and no more. Neither should you say of your own powers that they can only develop relatively into sprouts, yet you will not assert that your spirit now but a seedling has all the growth and fruitage of a matured tree.
The tendency with all today is through ignorance to let our strength escape us or so use it as to bring no increase of power. We need this power to keep our minds in the proper condition to throw off all thought coming to us of any form of disease, for the thought of any disease brings some form of disease when we accept and believe it. Millions of people are now always thinking disease—that is, making it in thought first and of course in the material afterward. They had rather at their breakfast tables talk of their ailments than of health. Their minds are much of the time fastened on some form of physical ailment. These minds are ever sending their thought from them. The air is full of it. It fastens on us unawares and affects us with unpleasant symptoms. Many people on a hot day never make any mental resistance to the unpleasant effect on them of the heat. They send this great volume of non-resisting thought from them. This current of thought meets you, You give way to it and suffer like the others.
You do not then suffer so much from the actual heat as you do from the thought thrown oft by others of the unpleasant effect of heat.
Why can the laborer work in the glare of the hot sun when people of more leisure about him are fanning themselves and melting with heat? Because the laborer’s mind is concentrated on his work, and in this attitude does not receive the unpleasant thought of heat. He perspires as freely as those who are suffering, but the flow of perspiration causes him no unpleasantness. Put the same man in clean linen, a broadcloth coat and with nothing to do but walk about ” like a gentleman,” and he will very likely suffer from the heat, because he has nothing to do; nothing to concentrate his mind upon, and for that reason his mind is in the proper condition to receive the thought of heat as it affects others unpleasantly.
We must have in time a strength which will enable us at any time to turn the mind from anything which discomforts the body to something else like the laborer in the sun, and thereby ward off these unpleasant thoughts. When we can so turn them aside, we turn also aside the unpleasant results they cause the body.
When” you receive or absorb an evil or unpleasant thought so coming from another or others, as you think it you receive also the unpleasant symptoms it has caused another or others.
We need a great deal of strength as drawn from the Supreme Source to throw off these evil forces. We contend now with that volume of thought which does not resist evil but accepts it as inevitable, dwells on it, and is therefore ever making more and more of the cough, the cold or other unpleasant feeling of the body and sending it out.
This volume or current of thought so formed is as real as a current of water or air.
The thought or force of millions on millions of minds now works in the wrong direction. It accepts a thousand physical ills as inevitable. It sends out continually the idea that the decay and weakness of old age are inevitable. It nurses and sympathizes with all its physical ailments instead of resisting them. It has a mind trained to nurse and develop sickness. Disease is expected and invited. It says and believes that children must have the measles, whooping cough and other ailments peculiar to infancy, and holds without question that humanity must ever remain heir to pain, sickness and death.
All this thought and far more of the same order goes to form a “Power of Darkness.” It is the Power of the lower thought. It besets you at every turn.
You need strength to resist this power now. Such resistance is the step for us today preparatory to other steps, and more wonderful results in the future.
Our chief need now is to use a great deal of the strength we draw from the Supreme Power to build us into a higher order of beings. We need to have great care how much of this force in the shape of sympathy we give others.
Before we can make others a whole “we must make ourselves whole.”
As we have said time and again, and as we are often obliged to say to ourself, our thought is our force for all things, and we need to keep a great deal of this force to help ourselves. If it is scattered broadcast, if we give interest and sympathy to all who call for it, if we are always lending our interest and sympathy to people who repudiate these truths, who deem them visionary, who do not live in the same world of thought as ourselves, we give them of our strength as much as they can appropriate, and in return we get from their association error and disease. “We are dragged down by the ills they fasten on us, and they are helped very little.
But is this the brotherhood of man? one may ask. Is this in accord with the Christ precept of love to our neighbor?
You will recollect that Christ also said: ” Let the dead bury their death” In other words, let those who will not or cannot see the ever expanding laws of life go their own way, be joined to their idols and suffer in their own way. If you have what you have proven to be a better way of living, and your neighbor is suffering because he cannot believe it or apply it, you will do him no good by your constant outflow of sympathy, thought or effort for him. You will thereby do yourself much harm.
But if he can take hold of the Law along with you, and see it as “you see it, and try to live by it as you may try and live by it, he is then doing you a great deal of good as you are doing him good. Your mutual belief is a great strength and support to both of you.
Those who can walk together in one mind or belief are of great help to each other. Those who try to walk together, with differing minds or beliefs, only cripple each other.
You can think with kindness of your neighbor; though you cannot live with him. But when you get into any person’s life, whose motives and beliefs are contrary to yours, you will waste force on them and injure yourself.
In friendship, sympathy and association we cannot get much into any other person’s life without bearing that person’s burdens.
What troubles them must trouble us; their cares must, through sympathy, be our cares, as their joys are our joys. But if that person cannot believe as you do, that person’s mind is against you. He that is not with you in heart and soul is against you —possibly not consciously against you, but whether conscious or not, the injurious result to you is the same. If a man, through carelessness, drop a brick on your head the damage is the same to you as if he willfully flung it. Those whom we may call our friends and who think themselves really so, may by their different way of life and of thinking, drop unawares many bricks on our heads, and when we feel obliged to go out of their way to avoid them, we may be accused of being harsh and unnatural.
“I come not with peace but a sword,” said the Christ of Judea.
Christ knew that the new ideas of which he was the forerunner would be recognized by some whose greater spiritual growth enabled them to “receive” them, and that they would be rejected by others, because their minds were too dull and material to receive them—that of those who heard him, the father might reject them, while the son accepted, the mother accept while the daughter rejected, that one member of the family had an ear which could hear the new idea that the other member had only a physical ear which was deaf to all but physical things, and that no man nor any agency, save the Infinite Force, could make these duller minds more capable of understanding him.
Life has an ever-growing charm and interest, when we can feel from month to month that we are gaining more and more mastery of the material agencies about us, that extremes of heat or cold discomfort us less than formerly, that we can put on a mood of mind as we would a suit of armor to throw off all manner of annoyances from disagreeable people or surroundings, or harsh noises, or unpleasant sights suddenly thrust upon us, that instead of being their slave we can make ourselves more and more unconscious of them, that when in the morning the whimsical body insists that it has no appetite, and we feel no disposition to take an amount of food necessary for its sustenance, we can command and bring to us a vigorous appetite, and that the “Winter’s cold,” we thought we must endure for weeks we can throw off in a few days or hours.
These are few, a very few of the things that we need strength to accomplish, and the more we silently call on the Exhaustless Bank of Supreme Power for that strength the more will be given us, and we shall go on from victory to victory, from joy great to joy greater, and from power great to power greater.
One Way To Cultivate Courage
Copyrighted by F. J. Needham, 1889
Courage and presence of mind mean the same thing. Presence of mind implies command of mind.
Cowardice and lack of mental control mean about the same thing. Cowardice is rooted in hurry, the habit of hurry or lack of repose.
All degrees of success are based on courage— mental or physical.
All degrees of failure are based on timidity.
You can cultivate courage and increase it at every minute and hour of the day. You can have the satisfaction of knowing that in everything you do you have accomplished two things—namely, the doing of the thing itself and by the manner of its doing, adding eternally to yourself another atom of the quality of courage. You can do this by the cultivation of deliberation—deliberation of speech, of walk, of writing, of eating—deliberation in everything.
There is always a bit of fear where there is a bit of hurry. When you hurry to the train you are in fear that you may be left, and with that comes fear of other possibilities consequent on your being left. When you hurry to the party, to the meeting of a person by appointment, you are in fear of some ill or damage resulting from not being on time.
This habit of thought can, through an unconscious training, grow to such an extent as to pervade a person’s mind, at all times and places, and bring on a fear of loss of some kind, when there is absolutely no loss to be sustained. For instance a person may hurry to catch a street car and act and feel as if a great loss would occur did they not get on that particular car, when there may be another close behind, or at most two or three minutes’ waiting will bring it. Yet the fear of waiting those three minutes grows to a mountain in size, and is in that person’s mind a most disagreeable possibility. Through mere habit a similar condition of hurry may characterize that person’s walking, their eating, their writing—in short, everything they do, and will render it more and more difficult for such person to act with coolness and deliberation.
The quality of mind or emotion underlying all this hurried mental condition and consequent hurried act, is fear. Fear is but another name for lack of power to control our minds, or, in other words, to control the kind of thought we think or put out.
It is this kind of unconscious mental training (which is very common), that begets a permanent condition of mind more and more liable to large and small panics at the least interruption or trivial disappointment. It makes disappointments when none are necessary. It is the ever opening wedge letting in more and more the thought current of fear. For if you so cultivate fear of one thing you are cultivating and increasing liability to fear in all things. If you allow yourself to sit in fear for half an hour that the’carriage may not call for you in time to get to the boat or train, you are much more liable to be seized with a series of little panics at every trivial occurrence or obstacle occurring on that particular journey.
In this way does this habit of mind enter into and is cultivated in the doing of so-called little things. You are writing or sewing, or engaged in the performance of some work which is intensely interesting to you, and’ in which you do not like to be interrupted. If sewing, you reach for your scissors which have dropped on the floor. You do this in a momentarily impatient mood and with a spasmodic jerky action. Your mind, as the phrase runs, is ” on your work.” You will not take it off your work while reaching for the scissors. You are trying in mind to go on with your work and reach for the scissors at the same moment. You make the movement of muscles and the action of the body momentarily disagreeable and irksome, because you refuse for the second to put into that act the force which it demands. When unconsciously you refuse to do this, any act will become irksome and disagreeable, because there is not force enough let you to do the act with ease. It is the endeavor to do it with a weak body. You have the power of throwing your force instantly into any muscle, so making the act easy and pleasant. This capacity for turning on force on any part you will increases through cultivating it. And you can do a great deal more and do it better through this cultivation of deliberation, for deliberation can be as quick as thought, the more the mind is trained in that direction.
If you pick up a pin or tie a shoe-string in a hurry, you do so not only because such act is irksome to you, but because you fear it may deprive you momentarily of some bit of pleasure. There you have again opened your mind to the thought current of fear—fear of losing something.
The cultivation of courage commences in the cultivation of deliberation in so-called little acts like these. Deliberation and courage are as closely allied as fear and hurry. If we do not learn to govern our force properly in the doing of the smallest act we shall find such government far less easy in the doing of all acts.
If we analyze what we fear, we shall find we are in mind trying to deal with too much at once of the thing feared. There is only a relatively small amount to be dealt with now. In any transaction —in the doing of anything there is but one step to be taken at a time. We need to place what force is necessary, and no more on that one step. When that is taken we can take the next.
The more we train our minds so to concentrate on the one step, the more do we increase capacity for sending our force all in one given direction at once. Such force extends, and should be so used in the so-called minutest details of every-day life.
In this way deliberation and deliberate, act becomes habitual, and we are in a sense unconscious of making ourselves deliberate, even as when long trained in the opposite and wrong direction we are unconscious of putting on the hurried frame of mind.
Timidity is often the result of looking at too many difficulties or terrors at once. In material reality we have to deal with but one at a time.
If wre are going to what we fear will be a disagreeable interview with a harsh, irascible, overbearing person, we are apt to go, occupying our minds with the whole interview, setting ourselves down in the very middle of it, and seeing it in mind as necessarily trying or disagreeable. Perhaps we were thinking of it this morning while we were dressing. But it was then our proper business to dress. To dress was a necessary step for the interview and to dress well also. Possibly it occupied our thoughts while eating. But it was then our proper business to eat and get all the pleasure possible from our food. That was another step. The more reposeful our eating, the more vigorous will become our taste, and the more strength will our food give our bodies. Possibly the fear of this interview was on us as we walked to the place appointed for it. But it was then our proper business to walk and get from our walking all the pleasure we could. That was another step. Pleasure is the sure result of placing thought or force on the thing we are doing now, and pain of some sort in both present and future is the certain result of sending thought or force away from the act which needs to be done at this moment. When we dress, eat, walk or do anything with mind placed on something else, we are making the present act irksome ; we are training to make every act irksome and disagreeable; we are making the thing feared a certainty, for what we put out in thought as unpleasant is an actual thing, a reality. And the longer we continue to put it out the more force we add to it, and the more likely is it then to be realized in the physical world.
To bring us what all want and are seeking for, namely—happiness, we need to have perfect control of our mind and thought at all times and places. One most important and necessary means for gaining this, lies in this discipline regarding so-called little or trivial things, just as the discipline and movement of an army commences with the training of the private soldiers’ legs and arms. If you hurry and slur over these so-called petty details, you are the easier thrown off your guard or confused at unexpected occurrences, and in life it is the unexpected that is always happening.
We need to keep always our mind present with us. We want it always on the spot ready to use in any direction. Our thought is not in the spot when we tie a shoe-string and think a mile from that shoe-string—when we mend a pencil and dwell in one of tomorrow’s cares. It is then away, and if it has for a lifetime been in the habit of so straying from the act in hand to the act afar off, it becomes more and more difficult to bring it back to use, and more difficult to use it promptly when it is brought back. Our thought moves from one thing to another with more than electric speed, and we can unconsciously train this quickness to be ever darting from one thing to another until it becomes almost impossible to keep it on one thing for ten consecutive seconds. On the contrary, through cultivation of repose and deliberation in all things we can train ourselves to mass and fasten our thought on anything so long as we please, to th row ourselves into any mood of mind we please, and to throw ourselves at will into sleep or a semi-conscious, dreamy state as restful as sleep. These are very small parts of the possibilities for the human mind. There is no limit to its growth or the increase of its power, and no thing coming within the limits of our imagination but can. be accomplished by it. The steps to these attainments are very small, very simple and relatively easy—so simple and easy that some reject them for that reason.
Unquestionably, these powers and many results coming of their exercise were known ages ago to a relative few. But any power or any condition of mind consequent upon it can be made more clear to an English speaking people, through the use of an English word or form of expression than by terms taken from other languages.
The North American Indian and the Oriental had in cases the power of so dismissing all thought and making their minds in a sense a blank as to become not only insensible to fear, but this mental condition rendered their bodies almost insensible to physical suffering. It was the power of inducing this mental condition which enabled the Indian when taken captive to withstand every device of torture inflicted by his captors, and to sing his death song under the infliction of fire and a slow process of bodily mutilation too horrible for description, and which very few of our race could endure without passing into the frenzy of agony.
The Indian is far more reposeful and deliberate than the majority of our race, in both mental and physical movement. Unconsciously cultivating this repose, and living a life less artificial than ours, he increased his spiritual power, one sure result of which is that command of mind over body which can lessen physical pain, and as an ultimate possibility banish it altogether.
Deliberation of movement, or in plainer English movement of muscle so slow that our mind has time to follow it, gives one time to think in great and small emergencies. But the lack of such training causes unconscious physical action. So confirmed becomes this habit, that the body moves ere we are aware of it. Awkwardness, lack of address, lack of tact are all due to this lack of command of mind caused by lack of delibeiation, or in other words, a trained incapacity for taking time to think or plan the proper thing to do.
The terror-stricken person if the ship seems in sudden danger runs up and down the deck to no purpose, and this physical action is an exact correspondence of the life-long condition of his mind whose thought has been ever so darting from one thing to another, just as the whim seized him.
The more deliberate person whose mind is trained to take time to think and hold or concentrate its thought, holds himself steady, and so gives himself time to see what may be the opportunities for escape. And these two persons would pick up a pin in a very different manner and with very different mental action and method.
To train then for courage is to train for deliberate movement in all things, for that is simply training to mass and hold your force in reserve and let out no more than is needed for the moment.
No quality of mind is more needful to success in all undertakings than courage, and by courage I mean not only courage to act but courage to think. In everyday business, thousands dare not think of taking a step which would involve an outlay of money above the average of their expenditure. They are appalled at mention of so large a sum. They will not, out of pure fright, entertain the idea long enough to familiarize themselves with it. Now if they reversed this mental action, and instead of immediately giving way out of life-long habit to this fright, would take time.and allow the thought to rest in their minds instead of driving it out, there would in time come to them ideas concerning ways and means for meeting the additional expense, and thereby making a larger sum of money in the same time it took to make the small sum.
For instance, you say to the woman who hires out to wash by the day and has never done anything else, “Mrs. A., why don’t you start a laundry? You can make a great deal more money in so doing.”
” I—start a laundry ! where in the world is the money coming from to start a laundry?” is her reply. Here the woman instead of entertaining your idea gives way immediately to fright concerning what seems to her the immense sum required, and following the same unreasoning, headlong, pauicky style of thought, sets up in a moment an opposition to your proposition. She dare think only of working for day’s wages as she is called upon by those who hire her. And thousands for this reason dare not think or find it disagreeable for them to think of getting into some broader, more responsible and more profitable sphere of business, because they bunch at once all its possible difficulties into a mass, and out of mere habit will look only at that awful and imaginary bunch.
But Mrs. 0., the more deliberate washerwoman, hears your proposition and entertains it. In time she says to herself, “Why should I not start a laundry? Other people have and have succeeded.” She lives in the idea, talks to one and another about it, and finds out how they started. The longer she keeps in this current of thought the more plainly does she see the ways and means by which other people have “set up for themselves.” Finally, the idea so grows upon her, that she takes some step toward that end, and then another and another, and so by degrees drifts into the business.
A person is cool and collected in face of any great danger, because he has the power of holding his mind to the thing to be done on the instant. Cowardice has no such power, and can see in mind not only the source of danger, but a score of possible results which may or may not happen to him. In battle one man may attend to his duty with a vivid and by no means agreable condition of mind as he sees men struck and mangled all about him. But the force or thought he can bring to bear on the performance of his duty is greater in amount than that coming of the realization of the slaughter around him, and commands and holds his body to his post. The man who runs, or would if he had the chance, cannot fix his mind on anything but the fearful possibilities of the moment.
In the so-called trivial act of picking up a pin, or threading a needle, or opening a door, I do not argue that all one’s force or thought should be placed on the act, but only enough to perform the act well while the rest is kept in reserve. It is in substance the same as in picking up a weight, you would not try to expend the force in lifting one pound that you would in lifting fifty pounds. You do expend a great deal more force in the act of picking up a pin when your mind is preoccupied with something else, for you are then trying to do two things or lift two weights at once.
You will remember that anything which is done in mind, expends quite as much force as if done with the body, so that the persons who linger abed in the morning and think with dread of the breakfasts to be cooked, or the rooms to be swept, so far as expenditure of force is concerned, will be doing those acts then and there while lying on their backs.
In expending just force enough to perform any act (a capacity which will gradually grow upon you as you familiarize yourself with this idea and set your desire or demand upon it), you cultivate and increase continually that desirable state of mind, which in everyday language is known as ” having your wits about you.” That means, in other words, always having, no matter what you are doing, your mental eyes open in every direction, and while outwardly you seem all intent and occupied in the one act, your mind or spirit like a vigilant sentinel is continually on the look-out, so as to give you notice in the fractional part of an instant of all that is going on about you, and also to direct you how to meet the event whatever it may be. This is not only the characteristic of courage, but of tact and address. It was this electric vigilance and mind watchfulness that gave an American officer during the Revolution, who, in the confusion of battle, suddenly found himself in front of a British regiment, the deliberation to ask, ” What troops are these?” “The Royal Scots,” was the reply. “Royal Scots remain as you are,” was his answer, and he rode oft to his own lines. That man had a mind trained to give him time to think.
On one occasion, Mrs. Parren, the celebrated English actress, discovered where her part required her to hem a handkerchief that the property man had forgotten to lay out the handkerchief, needle, thread, etc. Without a moment’s hesitation she sat down and imitated so naturally the motion and manner of a lady in sewing that most of her audience never suspected the omission. That act involved self possession, coolness, deliberation, presence of mind, courage. Do not all these terms imply a similar state of mind? A woman habitually hurried and flurried could not have done this, and I believe that when Mrs. Farren saw proper to pick up a pin, she did so in a much more deliberate manner than would the habitually hurried, flurried man or woman.
Cultivate deliberate act and movement in all things, and you lay more and more the solid foundation for courage, either moral or physical. But deliberate act does not always imply slowness. Just as thought moves with electric rapidity, so may it move the body when occasion requires, but the thought must be clearly planned, seen and outlined in mind before it is allowed to act on the body. It is so seen or planned, and so acts on or use the muscles in the rapid thrust and parry of the skilled fencer, and similarly with the professional danseuse, in fact in all superior accomplishments, be they of painter, musician or other artist. These, however, in many cases, are but partial controls of mind. Outside of his art, the artist may have little mental control or deliberation, and as a result be “nervous,” vacillating, easily disturbed, whimsical and timid. The mind is our garrison to be armed at all points and disciplined to meet any emergency.
We deal with the making (or self-making) of whole men and women, whose minds are not cultivated all in one direction and neglected everywhere else. It is far better in the end to be growing symmetrically and to be finished so far as we have grown ” all around,” than to have our power all concentrated on one talent or capacity, and becoming what the world calls a ” Genius.” The inside history of Genius is often a sad one, and shows that it brought little happiness to its possessor.
Scores and hundreds of the little acts of everyday life, such as picking dropped articles from the floor, opening and shutting drawers, laying or reaching for articles on the toilet table, and attending to minor details of dress, are done unconsciously in this hurried condition of mind, especially when some more important object engages our attention. We snatch, we clutch, we drive recklessly about in the doing of these things, and we weaken our bodies and become tired out, and finally “panicky,” and easily frightened through this mental habit, for fear and cowardice slip in far more easily when the body is weak.
This habit cannot be changed in a day or a year when it has pervaded a lifetime. Neither can the ills, mental and physical, resulting from such habit, be cured immediately. There can be only gradual growth away from them.
If in reading this you feel convinced that there is “something in it,” and feel also a conviction that some portion of it suits your own case, your cure has then commenced. Real conviction, the conviction that comes from within, never leaves one or stops working to get us out of the evil way and put us in the -good one. It may seem buried and forgotten for seasons, and our erroneous habits may seem growing stronger than ever. That is not so. But as convictions take root we are seeing our errors more and more clearly. We forget that at one time we were blind and did not see them at all.
If this book brings to you a conviction of a long established error it is not I individually who brings or convinces. It is only that I put out more or less of a truth, which takes hold of you and the chord of truth in you senses it. If I apply the torch to the gas-jet and light it, it does not follow that I make either the fire or the gas. I am only a means or agent for lighting that gas. No man makes or invents a truth. Truth is as general and widely spread and belongs to every individual, like the air we breathe, and there is pleasure enough in being its torch-bearer without presuming to claim the power of its Creator.
Above all demand more and more courage of the Supreme Power.
The Material Mind
Vs.
The Spiritual Mind
Copyrighted by F. J. Needham, 1889
There belongs to every human being a higher self and a lower self—a self or mind of the spirit, which has been growing for ages, aDd a self of the body, which is but a thing of yesterday. The higher self is full of prompting idea, suggestion and aspiration. This it receives of the Supreme Power. All this the lower or animal self regards as wild and visionary. The higher self argues possibilities and power for us greater than men and women now possess and enjoy. The lower self says we can only live and exist as men and women have lived and existed before us. The higher self craves freedom from the cumbrousness, the limitations, the pains and disabilities of the body. The lower self says that we are born to them, born to ill, born to suffer, and must suffer as have so many before us. The higher self wants a standard for right and wrong of its own. The lower self says we must accept a standard made for us by others—by general and long-held opinion, belief and prejudice.
“To thine own self be true,” is an oft-uttered adage. But to which self? The higher or lower?
You have in a sense two minds—the mind of the body and the mind of the spirit.
Spirit is a force and a mystery. All we know or may ever know of it is that it exists, and is ever working and producing all results in physical things seen of physical sense and many more not so seen.
What is seen, of any object, a tree an animal, a stone a man is only a part of that tree, animal, stone, or man. There is a force which for a time binds such objects together in the form you see them. That force is always acting on them to greater or lesser degree. It builds up the flower to its fullest maturity. Its cessation to act on the flower or tree causes what we call decay. It is constantly changing the shape of all forms of what are called organized matter. An animal, a plant, a human being are not in physical shape this month or this year what they will be next month or next year.
This ever-acting, ever-varying force, which lies behind and, in a sense, creates all forms of matter we call spirit.
To see, reason and judge of life and things in the knowledge of this force makes what is termed the “Spiritual Mind.”
We have through knowledge the wonderful power of using or directing this force, when we recognize it, and know that it exists so as to bring us health, happiness and eternal peace of mind. Composed as we are of this force, we are ever attracting more of it to us and making it a part of our being.
With more of this force must come more and more knowledge. At first in our physical existences we allow it to work blindly. Then we are in the ignorance of that condition known as the material mind. But as mind through its growth or increase of this power becomes more and more awakened, it asks: “Why comes so much of pain, grief and disappointment in the physical life?” “Why do we seem born to suffer and decay?”
That question is the first awakening cry of the spiritual mind, and any earnest question or demand for knowledge must in time be answered.
The material mind is a part of yourself, which has been appropriated by the body and educated by the body. Something as if you taught a child that the wheels of a steamboat made the boat move, and said nothing of the steam, which gives the real power. Bred in such ignorance, the child, should the wheels stop moving, would look no farther for the cause of their stoppage than to try to find where to repair them, very much as now so many depend entirely on repair of the physical body to ensure its healthy, vigorous movement, never dreaming that the imperfection lies in the real motive power— the mind.
The mind of the body or material mind sees, thinks and judges entirely from the material or physical standpoint. It sees in your own body all there is of you. The spiritual mind sees the body as an instrument for the mind or real self to use in dealing with material things. The material mind sees in the death of the body an end of all there is of you. The spiritual mind sees in the death of the body only the falling off from the spirit of a worn-out instrument. It knows that you exist as before only invisible to the physical eye. The material mind sees your physical strength as coming entirely from your muscles and sinews, and not from a source without your body.
It sees in such persuasive power, as you may have with tongue or pen, the only force you possess for dealing with people to accomplish results. The spiritual mind will know in time that your thought influences people for or against your interests, though their bodies are thousands of miles distant. The material mind does not regard its thought as an actual element as real as air or water. The spiritual mind knows that everyone of its thousand daily secret thoughts are real things, acting on the minds of the persons they are sent to. The spiritual mind knows that matter or the material is only an expression of spirit or force ; that such matter is ever changing in accordance with the spirit that makes or externalizes itself in the form we call matter, and therefore, if the thought of health, strength and recuperation is constantly held to in the mind, such thought of health, strength and rejuvenation will express itself in the body, making maturity never ceasing, vigor never ending, and the keenness of every physical sense ever increasing.
The material mind thinks matter, or what is known by our physical senses to be the largest part of what exists. The spiritual mind regards matter as the coarser or cruder expression of spirit and the smallest part of what really exists. The material mind is made sad at the contemplation of decay. The spiritual mind attaches little importance to decay, knowing in such decay that spirit or the moving force in all things is simply taking the dead body or the rotten tree to pieces, and that it will build them up again as before temporarily into some other new physical form of life and beauty. The mind of the body thinks that its physical senses of seeing, hearing and feeling constitute all the senses you possess. The higher mind or mind of the spirit knows that it possesses other senses akin to those of physical sight and hearing, but more powerful and far reaching.
The mind of the body has been variously termed “the material mind,” the “mortal mind” and the “carnal mind.” All these refer to the same mind, or, in other words, to that part of your real self which has been educated in error by the body.
If you had been born and bred entirely among people who believed that the earth was a flat surface and did not revolve around the sun, you would in the earlier years of your physical growth believe as they did. Exactly in such fashion do you in your earlier years absorb the thought and belief of those nearest you, who think that the body is all there is of them, and judge of everything by its physical interpretation to them. This makes your material mind.
The material mind seeing, what seems to it, death, dissolution and decay in all human organizations, and ignorant of the fact that the real self or intelligence has in such seeming death only cast off a worn-out envelope, thinks that decay and death is the ultimate of all humanity. For such reason it cannot avoid a gloom or sadness coming of such error, which now pervades so much of human life at present. One result or reaction from such gloom born of hopelessness is a reckless spirit for getting every possible gratification and pleasure, regardless of right and justice so long as the present body lasts.
This is a great mistake. All pleasure so gained cannot be lasting. It brings beside an hundredfold more misery and disappointment.
The spiritual mind teaches that pleasure is the great aim of existence. But it points out ways and means for gaining lasting happiness other than those coming of the teaching of the material mind. The spiritual mind, or mind opened to higher and newer forces of life, teaches that there is a law regulating the exercise of every physical sense. When we learn and follow this law, our gratifications and possessions do not prove sources of greater pain than happiness, as they do to so many.
By the spiritual mind is meant a clearer mental sight of things and forces existing both in us and the Universe, and of which the race for the most part has been in total ignorance. We have now but a glimpse of these forces, those of some being relatively a little clearer than those of others. But enough has been shown to convince a few that the real and existing causes for humanity’s sickness, sorrow and disappointment have not in the past been seen at all. In other words, the race has been as children, fancying that the miller inside was turning the arms of the windmill, because some person had so told them. So taught they would remain in total ignorance that the wind was the motive power.
This illustration is not at all an overdrawn picture of the existing ignorance which rejects the idea that thought is an element all about us as plentiful as air, and that as blindly directed by individuals and masses of individuals in the domain of material mind or ignorance, it is turning the windmill’s arms, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another; sometimes with good and sometimes with evil results.
A suit of clothes is not the body that wears such suit. Yet the material mind reasons very much in this way. It knows of no such thing as clothing for the spirit, for it does not know that body and spirit are two distinct things. It reasons that the suit of clothing (the body) is all there is of the man or woman. When that man or woman tumbles to pieces through weakness, it sees only the suit of clothes so going to pieces, and all its efforts to make that man or woman stronger are put ou the suit instead of making effort to reinforce the power within which has made the suit.
There are probably no two individuals precisely alike as regards the relative condition or action on them of their material and spiritual minds. With some the spiritual seems not at all awakened. With others it has begun to stretch and rub its eyes as a person does on their physical awakening, when everything still appears to them vague and indistinct. Others are more fully awakened. They feel to greater or lesser extent that there are forces belonging to them before unthought of. It is with such that the struggle for mastery between the material and spiritual mind is likely to be most severe, and such struggle for a time is likely to be accompanied by physical disturbance, pain or lack of ease:
The material mind is, until won over and convinced of the truths, constantly received by the spiritual mind at war and in opposition to it. The ignorant part of yourself dislikes very much to give up its long accustomed habits of thinking. It costs a struggle in any case at first to own that we have been mistaken and give up views long held to.
The material mind wants to move on in a rut of life and idea, as it always has done, and as thousands are now doing. It dislikes change more and more as the crust of the old thought held from year to year grows more thickly over it. It wants to live on and on in the house it has inhabited for years; dress in the fashion of the past; go to business and return year in and year out at precisely the same hour. It rejects and despises after a certain age the idea of learning any new accomplishments, such as painting or music, whose greatest use is to divert the mind, rest it, and enable you to live in other departments of being, all this being apart from the pleasure also given you as the mind or spirit teaches the body more and more skill and expertness in the art you pursue.
The material mind sees as the principal use of any art only a means to bring money, and not in such art a means for giving variety to life, dispelling weariness, resting that portion of the mind devoted to other business, improving health and increasing vigor of mind and body.
It holds to the idea of being “too old to learn.”
This is the condition of so many persons who have arrived at or apast “middle age.” They want to “settle down.” They accept as inevitable the idea of “growing old.” Their material mind tells them -that their bodies must gradually weaken, shrink from the fullness and proportion of youth, decay and finally die.
Material minds say this always has been, and therefore always must be. They accept the idea wholly. They say quite unconsciously, ” It must ‘ be.”
To say a thing must be, is the very power that makes it. The material mind then sees the body ever as gradually decaying, even though it dislikes the picture, and puts it out of sight as much as possible. But the idea will recur from time to time as suggested by the death of their contemporaries, and as it does they think ” must,” and that state of mind indicated by the word ” must” will inevitably bring material results in decay.
The spiritual or more enlightened mind says: ” If you would help to drive away sickness, turn your thought as much as you can on health, strength and vigor, and on strong, healthy, vigorous material things, such as moving clouds, fresh breezes, the cascade, the ocean surge; on woodland scenes and growing healthy trees; on birds full of life and motion; for in so doing you turn on yourself a real current of this healthy life-giving thought, which is suggested and brought you by the thought of such vigorous, strong material objects.
And above all, try to rely and trust that Supreme Power which formed all these things and far more, and which is the endless and inexhaustible part of your higher self or spiritual mind, and as your faith increases in this Power, so will your own power ever increase.
“Nonsense ! ” says the ultra material mind. ” If my body is sick, I must have something done to cure that body with things I can see and feel, and that is the only thing to be done. As for thinking, it makes no difference what I think, sick or well.
At present in such a case, a mind whose sense of these truths new to it, has just commenced to be awakened, will, in many cases, allow itself to be for a time overpowered and ridiculed out of such an idea by its own material mind or uneducated part of itself; and in this it is very likely to be assisted by other material minds, who have not woke up at all to these truths, and who are temporarily all the stronger through the positiveness of ignorance. These are as people who cannot see as far ahead as one may with a telescope, and who may be perfectly honest in their disbelief regarding what the person with the telescope does see. Though such people do not speak a word or argue against the belief of :he partly awakened mind, still their thought acts on such a mind as a bar or blind to these glimpses of the truth.
But when the spiritual mind has once commenced to awaken, nothing can stop its farther waking, though the material may for a time retard it.
“Your real self may not at times be where your body is,” says the spiritual mind. It is where your mind is—in the store, the office, the workshop, or with some person to whom you are strongly attached, and all of these may be in towns or cities far from the one your body resides in. Your real self moves with inconceivable rapidity as your thought moves.
“Nonsense,” says your material mind; ” I myself am wherever my body is, and nowhere else.”
Many a thought or idea that you reject as visionary, or as a whim or fancy, comes of the prompting of your spiritual mind. It is your material mind that rejects it.
No such idea comes but that there is a truth in it. But that truth we may not be able to carry out to a relative perfection immediately. Two hundred years ago some mind may have seen the use of steam as a motive power. But that motive power could not then have been carried out as it is today. A certain previous growth was necessary —a growth and improvement in the manufacture of iron, in the construction of roads, and in the needs of the people.
But the idea was a truth. Held to by various minds, it has brought steam as a motive power to its present relative perfection. It has struggled against and overcome every argument and obstacle placed in its way by dull, material, plodding minds.
When you entertain any idea and say to yourself in substance: “Well, such a thing may be, though I cannot now see it,” you remove a great barrier to the carrying out and realization by yourself of the new and strange possibilities in store for you.
The spiritual mind today sees belonging to itself a power for accomplishing any and all results * in the physical world, greater than the masses dream of. It sees that as regards life’s possibilities we are still in dense ignorance. It sees, however, a few things—namely, perfect health, freedom from decay, weakness and death of the body, power of transit, travel and observation independent of the body, and methods for obtaining all needful and desirable material things through the action and working of silent mind or thought, either singly or in co-operation with others.
The condition of mind to be desired is the entire dominancy of the spiritual mind. But this does not imply dominancy or control in any sense of tyrannical mastership of the material mind by the spiritual mind. It does imply that the material mind will be swept away so far as its stubborn resistance and opposition to the promptings of the spiritual are concerned. It implies that the body will become the willing servant, or rather assistant of the spirit. It implies that the material mind will not endeavor to set itself up as the superior when it is only the inferior. It implies that state when the body will gladly lend its co-operation to all the desires of the spiritual mind.
Then all power can be given your spirit. Then no force need be expended in resisting the hostility of the material mind. Then all such force will be used to further our undertakings, to bring us material goods, to raise us higher and higher into realms of power, peace and happiness, to accomplish what now would be called miracles.
Neither the material mind nor the material body is to be won over and merged into the spiritual by any course of severe self censure or self denial, nor self punishment in expiation for sins committed, nor asceticism. That will only make you the more harsh, severe, bigoted and merciless, both to yourself and others. It is out of this perversion of the truth that have arisen such terms as “crucifying the body” and “subjugating the lower or animal mind.” It is from this perversion that have come orders and associations of men and women who, going to another extreme, seek holiness in self denial and penance.
“Holiness” implies wholeness, or whole action of the spirit on the body, or perfect control by your spirit over a body, through knowledge and faith in our capacity to draw ever more and more from the Supreme Power.
When you get out of patience with yourself, through the aggressiveness of the material mind, through your frequent slips and falls into your besetting sins, through periods of petulance or ill temper, or excess in any direction, you do no good, and only ill in calling or thinking for yourself hard names. You should not call yourself ” a vile sinner ” any more than you would call any other person a “vile sinner.” If you do, you put out in thought the “vile sinner” and make it temporarily a reality. If in your mental vision you teach yourself that you are ” utterly depraved ” and a ” vile sinner,” you are unconsciously making that your ideal, and you will unconsciously grow up to it until the pain and evil coming of such unhealthy growth, either makes you turn back or destroys your body. For out of this state of mind, which in the past has been much inculcated, comes harshness, bigotry, lack of charity for others, hard, stern and gloomy and unhealthy views of life, and these mental conditions will surely bring physical disease.
When the material mind is put away, or, in other words, when we become convinced of the existence of these spiritual forces, both in ourselves and outside of ourselves, and when we learn to use them rightly (for we are now and always have been using them in some way), then to use the words of Paul: ” Faith is swallowed up in victory,” and the sting and fear of death is removed. Life becomes then one glorious advance forward from the pleasure of today to the greater pleasure of tomorrow, and the phrase “to live” means only to enjoy.
Marriage And Resurrection
Copyrighted 1889, By F. J. Needham
A mind or spirit is in affections, interests, tastes, desires and inclinations precisely the same after the death of its body as before. It goes to no faroff place. Were it you whose body had dropped as it were from your spirit, and you had left your husband behind, and you really loved him, and that love was returned by him with equal intensity, you would be as near him a,s you were with a body.
As a wife, suppose for the moment you have lost your body. How near him were you before you lost that body? How near in tastes, inclinations and sympathies? Did he really like all that you liked? Did he care to go wherever you went? Or did you care to go wherever he went? Did you really and mutually like to be in each other’s company for hours and hours, and, at such times, did the hours fly so rapidly away as to cause you wonderment?
If this was the case, then you can get very near your husband now. If he continues to hold you as you do him, in love and appreciation beyond all other women, then you can be still so near each other, and have also a sense of ever growing nearer and nearer to each other, that no other embodied or disembodied man or woman can come between you, and whoever it is, either husband or wife, that is left with a body, will feel by degrees the sense of loneliness or bereavement depart.
What attracted you to the man who became your husband, or the woman who became your wife? Was it the similarity or nearness of your tastes and inclinations? If so, it was a closeness and mingling of both your minds.
That same closeness and mingling of minds, and the accompanying sense of rest and companionship is a possibility where one mind has still an earthly body and the other has not.
Now, please entertain this idea, for it holds good with all who have really and mutually loved each other, be it husband, wife, parent, or child who are now separated by what?
By the loss on the part of one of an earthly body. Through the loss by one of an instrument by means of which expression and emotion could be made plain one to the other. Do not here proceed to rake and scrape up all manner of objections to the possibility of your realizing in time the nearness of the mind and the thought of the person you call here lost or dead, for if you do you will find objections without end, and they will all serve as bars to such much desired and much needed commingling of minds.
We who are left with bodies on earth regard the “loss” of our friends from an extremely one-sided point of view.
The wife who has lost her body has lost her husband also. The loss may be even more bitter than his own. For she, though without a physical body, still knows that he lives and that she lives. He regards her as “dead” in the usual sense of that term. That makes her as dead to him. It is as if you on coming into some loved one’s presence whom you were want to caress and fondle, should become suddenly invisible and deprived of the power of being heard by that person. Your touch makes on him or her no impression. You are as a “nothing” where an hour before your presence was welcomed, seen, heard, felt and enjoyed. That is something very like the condition and experience of those who, having lost their bodies, are lost to their friends having bodies.
The tears that are shed by the living of earth for their loss are very often responded to by the living unseen close to them, who have the additional sorrow to bear of finding all their efforts to console and comfort those nearest and dearest to them of no avail. They cannot say, as they desire to, in an andible voice, “I am here. I live. I am yours, all yours, and it is my only wish to help, cheer and comfort you.”
But how much greater than the grief of those called the ” living ” may be that of those, who losing their bodies, but not their attraction, affection and nearness for another are obliged through the laws of attraction to remain near those they love, and as the years roll on see themselves gradually forgotten, or in remembrance faded out, and sooner or later have their places filled by others.
The time will surely come when those who remain with bodies here will in mind and many material ways act with those who have “passed on ” as if they were with them in the flesh. When such are treated as though they were ” alive ” the ground will be broken for making them alive in every sense.
The one on the “other side,” husband or wife, son or daughter, being the same as ever in love, desire and inclination, deplores deeply the loss of that instrument, the body wherewith it was before accustomed to express its affections and emotions. It sorrows at the loss of its own body since it sees how that body was the means for a tangible communication with those it so much loves.
If, then, those here who have ” lost” near and dear friends (those near and dear having ” lost” them also), could instead of thinking of them as dead and ” lost,” try and reverse the action of their minds and think of them as living though unseen, they would remove one barrier between them and those for whom they grieve.
If, secondly, they would entertain the idea that those they have erroneously called ” dead ” are not only living but want very eagerly to come back to their old homes, their chambers, their accustomed seats at table, to all the old association, companionship and endearment, they would remove another barrier.
But you may ask: “How can I believe that my lost ones live and want to come to me?”
We do not expect of you implicit belief. But you can try and give these ideas a place and a hearing in your mind. If they are truths, they will in time prove themselves.
You may say with regard to this assertion and others that we have put forth : ” But yours are only theories; how can you prove them? ”
We cannot prove them through any material means. But if anything in this order of thought appeals to you as containing a truth, it is for you to prove it yourself. You have also a spiritual machinery to work with, to experiment with, to test with. No one can work that part of your being save yourself. You would be none the better oft, you would be none the more believing were others to prove these things and tell you. You will always doubt until you prove for yourself. Our work ends in simply stating our belief to the best of our ability.
It is a law that if a truth or any part of a truth is entertained in mind and not at once violently opposed, it will more and more assert itself as a truth. If it is an untruth it will die out. If it be a truth, and, as first stated, mixed with some untruth, the untruth will in time fall away from it, and only the pure gold remain.
It is also a law that every demand of human mind must in time bring its supply. Demand may extend for generations without being supplied. Age on age people longed for swifter locomotion and means of conveying intelligence. At last steam and electricity came in response to that silent demand.
Age and age have people mourned for their socalled ” dead ” and wished them back. Is this demand to be the exception unfulfilled and unresponded to?
But something was needed to supplement this demand and make it more imperative. What? The knowledge, the feeling rather, by those who remain on earth by those having material bodies, that their demand and cry to be reunited with their loved ones was responded to just as eagerly by the so-called ” dead ” who wanted the material bodies just as much as their friends wished they should have them.
This reinforced demand is now made, and from this will results the sooner come. It matters not by how few it is made. It matters little that the few who do make it cannot have the full unquestioning belief they would like to have in these possibilities. It is made, and there are those who, as they read it in this little book, will say through that knowledge which comes from within: “It is true.” And from every one of these there will go a thought to a heart or hearts in the other domain of existence who will send back this in response, “It is true”; and say also, “We have also lost you. We desire, as eagerly as you, a tangible communication with you. With our minds united on the seen and unseen side of life in this demand there must come ways and means in time to effect it, for with God, or the Infinite Spirit of God, nothing is impossible.”
In the near future there will be families to whom those dearest to them who have lost their bodies will return and manifest themselves in some way to the physical senses. As knowledge and faith on both sides increase, these proofs of the possibility of spiritual control of matter will become more and more plain. We say “both sides,” for knowledge, faith and effort are as necessary on the part of those who are in the unseen world to accomplish this result, as knowledge, faith and effort are necessary for us in co-operating with them to bring about such result. There is ignorance on that side as well as this. If a mind is ignorant of these truths on losing its body, that ignorance is not immediately dispelled.
It is a great error to suppose that all wisdom, all knowledge and all happiness comes to” a mind on losing its body. They may remain for long periods as ignorant as before. Ignorance is the mother of misery and pain. They can learn only of those to whom they are most attracted. They cannot get away from those to whom they are most attracted. You may be a person about whom there is ever some mind without a body, drawn to you because it finds in you more desirable company than elsewhere. As you learn these things such a mind will learn of , you. It can learn of no one else. It feels in the atmosphere of your thought a warmth and rest it can feel nowhere else, and so feeling it absorbs all your thought and knowledge. The rest or company which a mind having lost its material body can feel when in the company of a mind with a body, even when the embodied is not aware of such a presence, is analagous to that certain feeling of comfort and rest yoa may feel in a beautiful grove, or a comfortable, cheerful house, even when no person is in it. There are tongues unseen and unheard which can convey thought and idea. There are conveyances of thought other than by means of the physical senses.
What will come in some cases from the unseen to the seen will not be public manifestations. They will be little noised or trumpeted abroad. They will not be made shows for cuiiosity hunters, nor used as a means of money making. That class and calibre of mind best fitted to realize these results will hold these matters as sacred as you hold anything pertaining to the inner privacy of your life to be sacred.
Nor must these results be expected in a day, a month, or a year. Those only who are able to ” abide in faith ” for times and seasons can realize them.
For us to state methodically, or give as a recipe, the means by “which such results are to be brought about, would be as impertinent an assumption of knowledge as for the builder of the first crude railway in England, in 1826, with its stone sleepers, its thin iron slips of rails, to have assumed then to foretell all the improvements in the cars, engines, machinery and tracks of 1889.
Knowledge and power ever build on themselves, and build unexpectedly also. Who will venture today to say what electricity may not accomplish within the next half century? Who will venture today to say that some new force or factor may not now be lying latent and unthought of which may accomplish results far exceeding any yet realized on this planet?
If two persons, husband and wife, one being in the seen, the other in the unseen side of existence, ardently desire to communicate and be tangible to each other, they can be so, if they are really husband and wife, providing that the following beliefs can be established in the minds of both.
That minds cannot die and that the death of the body is not the death of the mind or real being.
That just as minds are in union and harmony here where both had bodies, so must they be when one loses its body.
That those having lost their bodies must not be thought of by their friends here as living in some far-oft locality, enjoying all the beatitudes and relatively indifferent to those on earth, but as in the liveliest sympathy with you in your joys, your sorrows, and all the details of your life, great and small, as they were when in possession of a body.
The longer these truths are entertained the more will they grow into your life. You need not try to convince yourself of them. They will force themselves on you, and from month to month and year to year, you will, when alone, discover yourself almost to your surprise, thinking and even acting as if the unseen were about you with physical bodies.
If such is your state of mind, it will be a great help to those near you on the unseen side. They cannot do so when you hold them in mind as ” dead” and buried in graveyards.
A true husband and wife, each must always be first in the other’s mind and heart under all circumstances. If that first place is taken by any other, when one of the two has lost its body, then they are the more divided. A barrier is placed between them. Love between man and woman is, as to its intensity and perfection, a matter of growth. It is possible for such love to reach a point where husband and wife will be always bride and bridegroom to each other, and their happiness in each other constantly increase rather than diminish, and there is no relatively perfected marriage unless such feeling exist between the two.
If there is a love like this, and in his house the husband has a room devoted and consecrated to the wife who has lost her body, and excludes from it all save such as are in a live sympathy with him and her on the other side, then into that room where the seen should enter, his wife without a physical body can come and mingle her thought with his own far more readily than elsewhere. It should be regarded strictly as the wife’s room, be used for no other purpose whatever, and its furnishing and ornamentation should conform to her known and remembered tastes. So coming, at first intangible to any of his physical sense, she can also at times so mingle her thought with his own as to soothe and cheer him. So coining, as faith and belief with him as to her reality grows more and more, she, though unseen and unfelt, will still become more of a reality to him. As, on his part, the thought and conviction grows, and as the old errors regarding death, or the attitude of her mind towards him are gradually dispelled, there will be developed a power which will enable her to make for herself in that room a means of communicating with him, faint at first, but gradually increasing in strength, until she materializes a physical body also at first extremely limited in power.
But this possibility will require time, faith, patience and a love which can survive the loss of the other’s physical body.
The thought of two such minds (being from each a real element) ever flowing toward each other with the same earnest desire to realize themselves more fully to each other, will eventually become of such concentrated power that it can take a physical expression, and it being the earnest desire of both to make a body for one, such thought will go to form the body of that one.
As thoughts are things or real elements, thoughts can and do often take some form of material expression, good or bad.
Indeed, every physical expression in nature, be it of mineral, plant, bird or animal, is the material embodiment of a thought.
“Magic” implies that power now latent in human minds of concentrating thought in such volume and power as to take on in material substance the form of the object thought of.
This power and science was known to a few ages ago; but it seems to have been a masculine science, so to speak. The use and necessity of the feminine thought in conjunction with the masculine does not seem to have been recognized.
Perfect results and great results will only be realized in every phase of life when the value of the feminine thought as mingled with the masculine forms out of both a power far exceeding either singly.
A few men today realize the value of the wife’s counsel and advice in all business matters. But this is the merest shadow of the value of the feminine element to man.
The more perfect the union between the man and the woman the quicker would results come to them in every department of life.
Love is not a mere “sentiment.” It is a gigantic force to carry forward enterprises and move nations.
Women hold a power today they know not of. Were it possible for all women to refuse men further thought of sympathy, man’s business and man’s body would tumble to pieces, and the result would be equally disastrous to women.
This is not a possibility. But the masculine and feminine thought forces co-operate imperfectly through ignorance on the man’s part of the use and value of the feminine thought to him, and ignorance on the woman’s part of the use and value of the thought flowing in sympathy to the man.
It leads only to misery for a mind with a body to desire to “die” in order to join some loved one on the other side. It leads only to disappointment if the mind on the ” other side,” as is sometimes the case, wishes the mind here with the body to lose that body and ” come over,” as it is termed. Minds in ignorance on the other side do aid this desire with minds here, and in so doing, by force of their will added to the other’s, drag them over. Many a husband, wife, or other person very near and dear to the disembodied, has been thus drawn, as it were, from their bodies. To desire continually to die is a most powerful aid to die. The result in the end to both when on the unseen side is only disappointment. They find ultimately that they are unfinished. They find less pleasure in each other’s company than they anticipated. They find they can only get as near each other as they are now in mind, taste, occupation and inclination. They feel (where they are separated by lack of mutual tastes) that separation much more painfully than they did here. They see or feel what each really thinks and feels about the other, just as clearly as if they spoke such thoughts to the other. They see each other’s minds as through glass, and the sight is most unpleasant.
One result of relatively perfected lives on this planet is to be the attainment of that spiritual power as to be able to take on or put off “earthly bodies” at will, and this can only come of a true accordance with the condition of the mind. If in certain mental conditions it is adding to itself elements of decay, weakness and physical death. If in another mental condition it is adding to itself elements of strength, life and perpetual life. That which the spirit takes on in either case are thoughts or beliefs. Thoughts and beliefs materialize themselves in flesh and blood. Belief in inevitable decay and death brings from the spirit to the body the elements of decay and death. Belief in the possibility of an ever-coming inflowing to the spirit of life brings life.
If new life is being thus added to you, there must also be an accompanying throwing off of the old or relatively dead matter of the body, just as when an influx of new life comes to the tree in the spring it casts off the dead leaves which may have clung to it all winter.
Through similar inflowing of new life or force does the animal and bird yearly shed the old fur or feathers and take on the new, and correspondent changes take place throughout the whole organization of bird, animal and man.
This spiritual law works in all forms and organizations of the cruder form of spirit we call “matter.” In the human being this influx of force is greater than in the lower forms of life. It does not flow equally to all human beings. Some receive more than others. But in the course of advancement men and women are to come who will receive so much of this influx as to be obliged to see these further possibilities of existence, and also to realize them.
When new ideas or thoughts are received by our higher mind or self, they are warred against by our lower or material mind. The body is the battle ground between these two forces, and therefore sutlers. As minds come to trust even to a small extent in the Supreme Power and entertain the idea that physical disease and physical death are not absolute necessities, the higher Power must prevail. Some old error will be cast out; some new idea will come to stay; the body will be better and stronger after each succeeding struggle, and these struggles will also gradually become less and less severe, until they cease altogether.
People have in the past lost their physical bodies, because, being in ignorance-of the fact that sickness is a process for the spirit to throw off the old material thought and take on new, they have used their forces in the wrong way to retain such thought. They retain it by their belief. Your belief will make your sickness a benefit or an evil to you. If you can but entertain the belief that it is a spiritual process for getting rid of old worn out elements, you assist greatly the mind in the performance of this process. If, however, you believe that sickness is entirely a physical condition, and that no benefit and only evil comes of it, you are using force only to load down the spirit with more and more error of which your flesh and blood will be in quality an expression, until at last your spirit rejects the body it has been trying to carry, and drops its burthen. It rejects at last the whole body through the same laws by which it rejects a part of it when tbat part is spiritually dead.
If you receive with scorn the thought that your physical body through fresher and fresher renewal of its substance cannot be made perpetual, you close to yourself an entrance for life, and open another to decay and death.
We do not argue that you “ought” to believe this. You may be so mentally constituted that you cannot now believe it. There are many things to be in the future which none of us have now the power to believe. But we can if the thing deemed impossible be desirable, pray or demand a faith which shall give us a reason for believing, and such faith will come in response to demand.
Faith means power to believe in the true, or the capacity for the mind to receive true thoughts.
The faith of Columbus in the existence of a new continent was a power in him to entertain such idea greater than others of his time. People who to use the common expression “have faith in themselves,” have also an actual power for carrying out their undertakings greater than those who have no faith in themselves. When you demand faith in possibilities for yourself that now seem new and strange; you demand, also, the power and ability to draw to you the capacity to see or feel reasons for truths new to you. If you demand persistently the truth and only the truth you will get it, and the whole truth means power to accomplish seeming impossibilities.
“Thy faith hath made thee whole,” said the Christ of Judea to a man who was healed. To us this passage interprets itself as meaning that the person healed had an innate power of believing that he could be healed. This power which was of his own spirit (and not of Christ’s) so acted on his body as instantly to cure bis infirmities. Christ was a means of awakening this power in that man’s spirit. But Christ himself did not give the person that power. It was latent in the person healed. Christ woke it into life, and probably only temporary life and activity, for we do not hear that any of the recorded cases of sudden healing in those times were permanent. They fell sick again and finally lost their bodies. Why? Because the faith or power they drew to themselves for a brief time did not come to stay. They had not learned to increase it continually through silent demand of the Supreme Power. Their spirits went back into the domain of material belief. When that belief again materialized a load on the spirit hard to carry and they were sick, not one was at hand like the Christ to awaken it into a temporary faith or power.
No person can become permanently whole (which implies among other powers, immortality in the flesh) and entire and permanent freedom from disease, who is ever trusting, or leaning on any other save the Supreme to gain the power of faith. In this respect every mind must stand entirely alone. You cannot draw the highest power if you depend always for help from another or others. If you do you are only borrowing or absorbing their faith. Such borrowed faith may work wonders for a time. But it does not come to stay. When that of which you borrow is cut off, you will fall into the slough of despond and disease again. You had really never drawn from the right source—the Supreme.
Our most profitable demand or prayer made consciously or unconsciously is “Let my faith be ever increased.”
When you reverse your mental attitude regarding sickness and do but entertain the belief that it is an effort of the spirit to throw oft errors in thought which as absorbed and received from earliest infancy are materialized in your flesh, you gradually cease to load up with error. You commence also the process of unloading and casting out all former errors in thought. The sickness you had mauy years ago in fear of death has in a sense packed away that particular remembrance of such mood of fear in your being, and with it the belief that accompanied such remembrance. That belief has been working against you all these years as all wrong belief must work against you.
It is literally a part of your real being, as all past individual remembrances and experiences are a literal part of our beings.
It is retained in your spiritual memory, although its material remembrance may have faded out. That remembrance is in thought a reality. But it is the remembrance of a false belief, teaching that death and decay can never be overcome. This belief, the reversed action and state of your mind will cast out. But such casting out must have a correspondent expression in the flesh. The physical expressions of all your former coughs and colds, fevers and other illness must reappear, at first possihly severe, but gradually in a modified form. You are then unloading your old false beliefs. But if your belief is not reversed and you go on as before, regarding physical decay and death as inevitable, then with every illness in such mental condition you pack away another error, another untruth, and another addition to the load of untruths, whose certain effect is as added to the rest is to weaken, crush, and finally cause the body to perish.
There is no period in the ” physical life” too late for receiving or entertaining the truth. There is no period too late for such truth to commence its process of physical renewal, and though that particular physical life may not be perpetuated, yet the spirit in receiving such truth receives a force which will be of priceless value to it on the unseen side, and by its aid it may be able the sooner to build for itself a more perfect spiritual body, and the ultimate of the relatively perfected spiritual body is the power to be and live in the physical and spiritual realms of existence at will.
If you hold to the idea that mankind are always to go on as in the past, losing their bodies, and are also to remain without the power to keep those bodies in perfect health, then you set your belief against the eternal fact that all things in this planet are ever moving forward to greater refinement, greater powers, and greater possibilities.
Medicine and material remedies may greatly assist the throwing off-process. A skilled and sympathetic physician of any school may be of much assistance. Everything depends on the mind and belief in which you take the medicine and the physician’s advice. If you regard both as aids to your spirit in throwing off a load and building for you a new body, you give in such belief great help to the spirit, so to throw oft. and build. But if you regard both medicine and physician as aids only to the body, and a body also which you hold must at best weaken and perish some time during the next thirty, forty or fifty years, you will load up with belief in error faster than you cast it off, and the load becomes at last too heavy for the spirit to carry.
What causes the man or woman to be “bowed down by age? ” What causes the stooping shoulders, the weakened knees, the tottering gait? Because they believe only in the earthly and perishable. The spirit is not earthly nor perishable. But you can load it down literally with an earthy quality of thought which will ” bow it down toward the earth with such burthen.”
It is not the physical body of the old person that is bent and bowed down. It is that part which is the force moving the body, that is, his or her spirit loaded with material thought which it cannot appropriate or assimilate that becomes so bent, bowed and weak. The body is always an external correspondence of your mind or spirit.
A body thus ever renewing, beautifying, freshening and strengthening means a mind behind it ever renewing with new ideas, plans, hope, purpose and aspiration. Life eternal is not the half dead life of extreme old age.
The person who can see only the physical side and temporary expression of life, who eats and drinks in the belief that only the body is affected by less eating and drinking, who believes that the body is sustained only by force, generated within itself, and that it is not fed of an unseen element coming from the spiritual realm of element, and who believes that nothing exists but what he can see, hear and feel with the physical sense (that is the material which is always the temporary and perishable), draws to himself mostly those forces and elements which cause the temporary and perishable,, and these acting in his body make it temporary and perishable.
Death of the body begins with thousands many years ere they are in their coffins. The pale face, and parchment-colored skin, means a half dead skin. It means a portion of the body on which the spirit works the casting-out process of dead element, and taking on of the new very imperfectly. In the freshness of infancy and early youth, the spirit cast out and took on more vigorously. As years went on untruth was absorbed by that spirit. Its growth in knowledge was more and more retarded. Responding physical changes became slower and slower. The body commences to show ” signs of age,” that is to die. Because such spirit was less and less fed of that element, which brings constant renewal of new thought which is new life.
So far does the belief and faith in weakness and decay prevail with the race that wisdom is often allegorically portrayed as an old man, gray, baldheaded, bowed and sustained by a staff. That means a wisdom which cannot prevent its own body from falling to pieces.
In that form of being we call the child (a spirit or mind having come in possession of a new body), there is for a period a greater spiritual wisdom than when the child is physically more matured. It is the unconscious wisdom of intuition. It is for a time more open to the truth. For such reason, up to the age of eighteen or twenty, the spiritual casting off and taking on processes with the body are more perfectly performed. These relatively rapid changes in the physical maintain the bloom and freshness of youth. Sooner or later, however, the higher spiritual process ceases gradually to operate. Beliefs in the false, as taught or absorbed from others, materialize themselves in the body despite all the resistance of the higher mind as expressed in pain and sickness. The load of belief in the earthy and perishable accumulates. The body assumes an appearance in correspondence with such thought. At last the higher mind refuses longer to carry such a burthen, flings it off, and leaves a dead body.
The death of the body is then the final process for casting oft cruder, element from the spirit which it can no longer use or appropriate.
But it is very desirable for the spirit to be able to keep a physical body which shall refine as the spirit refines, because in such equality of refinement between the spirit and its instrument, our increase in happiness is greatly advanced, and the relatively perfected rounding out of our powers cannot be realized until this union between spirit and body is effected.
When the Christ of Judea said to the elders of Israel of the little child, ” Except ye become as this child ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” he meant as the text interprets itself to us, that they should beeome as open to that inflowing of force as that spirit (the child) was at that period of its existence.
Were such influx maintained, the youth of the body would be perpetual.
The child is more “led of the spirit” than the grown up person. It is more natural. It discards policy. It shows openly whom it likes and whom it does not. It has often more intuition. It will dislike a bad man or a bad woman when its parents see no evil in that person. It knows or rather feels far more regarding life than its parents give it credit for. But it cannot voice its thoughts in words. Yet the thoughts are still there. It has not learned to train itself to the double-faced custom of the world which smiles in your face and sneers behind your back. It is relatively natural. Its spirit for a time gives itself free expression. When the spirit loses this freedom of expression when we pretend what we are not, when we say “Yes” outwardly and think ” No ” inwardly, when we court only to gain a favor, when we feel anger or disappointment or irritation within and pretend content and happiness without, we become more and more unnatural in all tastes and desires. We blunt and for a time destroy all the higher spiritual senses and powers. We become unable to distinguish truth from falsehood. We are unable to feel spiritually what faith means much less draw this great and indispensable power to us, and without this drawing power the physical body must be cast oft by the spirit.
The body in dying does not ” give up the ghost.” It is the ghost (the spirit) that rejects the material body.
Its spirit, through casting off unbelief, becomes more and more accessible to thoughts and things that are true, and, therefore, grows to more and more power, it will, acting in all parts and functions of the body, operate the casting-off process more and more quickly, as it does in the material youth. It will refuse or reject through the physical senses of touch or taste anything which would injure or adulterate it. It can attain to such power that; an active poison if accidentally placed in the mouth would be instantly detected and rejected, or if swallowed would be instantly cast from the stomach.
It is not the physical stomach which rejects food unfit for it or casts out the nauseous dose. It is the spirit which moves the organ to such action through a knowledge of its own, that the cast-out substance is unfitfor it. It is so unfit because there is no spirit nor quality in the rejected element which can assimilate with and help the spirit. As your spirit grows in power this sensitiveness to all things which can do it evil, be they of the seen or unseen world of things, will increase. It grows keener and keener to the approach or presence of everything evil, and casts it oft. It will warn you instantly of the evil or designing person. It will tell you what is safe and fit for your association. It will at last cast out or refuse to receive all evil thoughts which now you may daily receive unconsciously, and which work more harm than anything material can do, for by them the spirit is poisoned.
As faith increases many material aids will be called in by the spirit which will greatly help the renewing processes. These aids will come In the selection of foods, in choosing proper associations and other changes of habit and custom.
But it is the spirit which must prompt and direct these material aids. When such prompting comes you will be obliged to follow it. The food to be avoided, you will not be able to eat. Your taste will reject it. The association injurious to you, you will not be able to keep company with. The habit to be changed will drop oft easily and naturally.
But if you make any rigid rules for yourself in these matters in the hope they will tend to spiritualize you, you are allowing the material self to take the matter in hand. The material or lower mind is then trying to give the law and rule and refine the spiritual or higher self. Let the spirit increased in faith, do the work, and when the time comes for you to reject any animal food or any of the grosser element in any form, the desire and relish for these will Lave gone.
In stating our belief that immortality in the flesh is a possibility, we do not infer that it is one which any now, physically alive, may realize. Neither do we infer it is one they cannot realize. Nor do we argue that people should immediately set to work in any material sense in order to ” live forever.” AVe hold only that it is one result which must come sooner or later of that spirit evolution or growth from the cruder to the finer, which has always been operating on this planet and on every form of matter. Matter is spirit temporarily materialized so as to be evident to correspondent physical sense.
As we grow in the faith of these spiritual processes for casting out the old and taking in the new, and consequently realize the accompanying greater refinement or spiritualization of the body, we shall aid more and more those who are nearest us in the unseeu side of life. For as we become more spiritualized in the flesh they are helped more to materialize of the spirit. In other words, we shall become physically tangible each to the other, because in the material thought we cast off there exists an element which they can appropriate to make themselves more material. Their spiritual bodies are also under the same laws as regards the throwing off and taking on process. What they throw off as coarser to them is the finer and fit for us. This element we spiritually absorb. It is for the time and condition a certain spiritual food and life for us. Through what they throw off we are aided to spiritualize the body. Through what we throw off they are aided to materialize the spirit.
Faith; Or, Being Led By The Spirit
Copyright, 1890, by F. J. Needham
Faith is an element which enters into every successful business. When it is more highly developed, as with all persons who gain great successes, it means a certain power to see clearly in the mind what the greater mass of people may not be able to see.
It is a self prophesying quality or power, and in every successful enterprise or business which has involved new methods, its projector has prophesied to himself his success, because the superior quality and clearness of his thought made him able to see the merit, possibility and success of his enterprise, business or invention clearer than most other people could see it.
Faith is spiritual knowledge. It is knowledge entirely different from that gained from books or from any ordinary process of education. It is that knowledge which the spirit gains as it goes out and lives in its own invisible world of element. It is not merely knowledge. It is an acting and immediate power for moving events and persons.
We have senses for the most part in embryo far finer, more powerful and farther reaching than our physical senses of touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing. The physical senses are very limited in their range. Our physical eyesight extends but for a few miles. But there is a spiritual sight which is infinitely more powerful. It is not obstructed by walls or by any material substance.
This and the other spiritual senses make your higher mind or superior thought. Every effort of genius on any field comes of the working of these finer senses.
Some term them the “inner senses.” It would be more appropriate to call them the outer senses, for they go out from the body and act at great distances from the body.
The spiritual realm of life is infinitely larger than that seen and felt of the physical senses. There is no “empty space.” An active, working, live world of things, of people, of everything we can conceive, though unseen by us, lies at our doors. We live and move in it unconscious of its existence, because our physical senses have no power to see or feel it.
But our spiritual senses can, if exercised, feel and know more and more of this world in which we are so wonderfully mingled.
Our spiritual senses, when developed, will see a thousand fold more of the properties, not of ” matter,” but of the spirit or force which lies behind all forms of matter, shapes them, builds them, and disintegrates or takes them to pieces; and when they are more developed a thousand fold more will be known of healing and aiding properties in herbs and vegetation. They will learn us also of aids to our spirits, coming of physical surroundings, modes of living and associations.
We see spiritual knowledge in the animal and bird. Some call it intuition, others instinct. For us, bird and animal and insect possess a certain degree of mind or spirit. That same quality of intuition tells it when to migrate to colder or warmer regions, what course of flight to take, how to build its nest and guard its young.
We hold that mind extends to all forms both of what we call animate matter and inanimate matter. We see then a spirit in the brd and animal. If there is a spirit there must also be some degree of spiritual power accompanying it, and also of faith, for faith is the trust and use of the spiritual senses, and bird, animal and insect in their range of being trust and use these senses far more than we.
The physical body with its physical senses serve as a necessary rough envelope or covering to our spirits. It is also a protection to the spiritual or finer senses until they have grown to a certain strength or development, and in all stages of our existence an ever refining and relatively material body is necessary as such protection to the ever refining spiritual senses. Therefore the more perfected individual lives of the future, must always retain an ever refining material body as a necessity, indispensable to the symmetrical rounding out of our spiritual powers.
Faith is a wisdom and a force in Nature far above that based on human reason or material knowledge. It is a force which as acting on us may cause us to do things seemingly inconsistent and imprudent, yet when in the course of years the whole is summed up we may find that we have been led to better results than could otherwise have been gained.
In such cases we have been “led of the spirit,” or in other words, obeyed the promptings of the spiritual senses instead of conforming to that rule of life which is governed entirely by the physical senses.
There was a boy whose parents had designed for him the education and schooling of the college. He refused it. He disliked the school. He was cast adrift at an early age and obliged to look out for himself. He followed his impulses. He served in one occupation after another for a time, got discharged or left in disgust; engaged in another with similar result, and so went on for several years in what seemed a shiftless, vacillating course of life. Yet this earlier life of change and apparent indecision led him at last into the occupation he had capacity and liking for and in which he made his mark.
This boy we hold as having in such life been “led of the spirit.” That implies for him the possession of another and a higher mind or set of mental faculties, distinct from the lower senses. Such higher mind belongs to all of us. In the boy’s case it would not let him stay where he did not belong. It prompted him to leave this situation or that calling. It impelled him to leave positions which, if held, would have given him a life-long maintenance. It made him half learn a trade and give it up in disgust. In the world’s estimation it made him seem shiftless, vacillating, undecided, and infirm of purpose or resolution.
But his higher self or spirit was all this time leading that boy through the changes in order to plant him in the right spot. It knew better than he or any about him where he belonged. It snatched him from this or that place before he became crusted over with the barnacles of that material thought, which argues that there are no paths for men and women to tread save such as have been trodden before. The Infinite Force has innumerable new paths and plans for men and women, few of which are now known, and you as one of those men and women have also your peculiar path and plan into which you must be led of your own spirit and not of any other person’s advice or suggestion.
It led the boy to a position of influence and prominence, but it did not lead him to the highest, for worldly success tempts people to reject the higher impulse or prompting which, if obeyed, would carry them farther on and to far greater results.
Many founders of great fortunes in this country commenced as boys or young men cast adrift and obliged to plan and do for themselves. In their scope and aim of life we find them ” led of the spirit.” Had they been carefully brought up, cared for by their parents, carefully educated, and on coming of age been placed in positions through the aid of others, their own spiritual power would have been checked, they would have absorbed a load of the old conventional thought about them, their originality of plan and method in business would have been far less likely to have developed itself, and they would not have been so much led of their own spirit into the new path it had destined for them, years before they realized it in material things.
Men like these were not afraid of taking great risks and responsibilities, because as led of their individual spirits, they had a certain belief and trust in their ventures. That belief and trust came of their higher mind or self which, with its spiritual senses unknown to them, went out, and felt and saw the possibilities in their projects, and then returning to the material mind, brought it that certain force and inspiration which goes by the name of courage and confidence. It was an unconscious trust in that force or inspiration so brought them .that caused them to succeed—so far as they did succeed. But you will remember that what the world now calls suceess in life is relatively a very poor success as compared with the more perfectly developed lives and successes to be gained in the. future when people are not to lose their bodies so soon after ” making their fortunes.”
Such men as “led of the spirit” and by a certain amount of faith attain to great success in making money. But beyond this their faith fails. In other words, it becomes fixed on money or high worldly position as the great aims of existence. Their faith stopping at this point, they become blind to other and greater possibilities for them. They become afraid to alter their method of life to any extent, for fear they cannot so rapidly gain money or fame, or blind prejudice and unbelief keeps them in one rut of life.
With such limitation of faith in their other powers, with no demand of the Supreme to be led to the greatest happiness, they may gain the whole world and lose their souls. Or in other words, they gain money and fame and lose, first, the power to enjoy what it can bring them, and next lose their bodies.
We mean in saying that your faith can be continually increased by prayer or demand, that by constant demand of the Supreme Power you will continually receive clearer and more powerful thought; that your spiritual and more powerful senses will come more and more into practical use; that you will believe more and more in their reality and use until at last you will depend on them as implicitly as now you depend on your physical eye in going down stairs.
You will not “try to believe.” That is not believing at all. You do not try to believe that a tree is a tree. You know it is a tree. We need to believe with just as much certainty in the spiritual parts and uses of our being. So we shall in time. Then “Faith is swallowed up in victory.”
The mood of demand or prayer will become habitual, and we shall be in it whether we are, convinced of being so or not,—just as your mind now may be in mood habitually joyous and cheerful, or gloomy and looking at the dark side of things, whether you know such is your mood or not.
Paul says, “Faith is the substance ot things hoped for.” We interpret this as meaning that faith is literal element, or that quality of thought which as received attains at last to such wonderful and unexplainable power as actually to make and bring to the person who receives it the thing ” hoped for,” be those things houses, lands and possessions, or powers greater than as yet have been realized or even thought of.
Our spiritual senses make our higher mind or superior thought. What we call “human reason ” is based in its conclusions on the evidence given by the lower or physical senses of sight, touch, etc. A person’s evidence would be worth nothing in court when if asked on the witness stand how he knew that some event had happened, by replying, “Because I felt that it had happened.” Yet these spiritual senses can, as we exercise them and as we grow into a more natural and healthy spiritual condition, make us feel coining events, coming changes in life. They can make us feel or sense what is true and what is false. They can warn and turn us aside from any danger. How they do this we cannot explain. It goes beyond the bounds of human wisdom or science, which by the way endeavors to explain many things which after all are not explained. No one as yet can tell the cause of life in the tree or why the leaf of one differs from that of another, or why one plant puts out a flower so different in form and color from another plant, or why the crystal of one mineral varies in shape from the crystal of another, or why the lungs and heart work night and day without any conscious effort on our part, or from whence comes the force that sends the earth whirling round the sun, or why, despite all explanation of the material parts of the eye and their uses, that it has the wonderful power of reflecting the images of houses, trees and persons to the iuvisible mystery we call mind.
We state these things, because when we are taxed for not explaining some things more clearly, we think it well to suggest that the more we look at nature the more and more of mystery and the unexplainable do^ we find, and as we gather more knowledge the more of the mysterious and unexplainable shall we continue to find behind what knowledge we have gathered.
Knowledge of what? That certain forces as we find them when used in a certain way produce certain results for making us happier. Like electricity. Of its nature or substance we know very little. But by using certain forces we gather it. Next we use it. It will do certain desirable things for us if used in a certain way. It will kill our bodies if used in another way.
So with faith. That also will in a sense kill or cure according as we use it. There is a one sided faith, a power of belief which may bring a great material success for a time. But if we refuse to go any farther, if we say in substance, ” I don’t want any more of this inflowing offeree or idea, because I fear to follow these promptings, then you close up your source of vital supply. You will not be led of the whole spirit. You fear to trust to that power which has carried you a certain distance. Then you commence to lose energy, to fossilize, to die.
The Supreme Power will not allow men to refuse to be led of the whole (holy) spirit. When man does it warns him by pains and aches, and troubles of mind and body that he has gone out of that “straight and narrow path” by which alone he can realize eternal happiness.
As he keeps on refusing, that same Power allows his present body with its stupid material mind to drop off. It says, in substance, to that man’s spirit: ” Your present body is a useless encumbrance; I will take it away and give you another. With that you will grow quicker; you will learn, if ever so little, to be led of the spirit, and through such leading gain true knowledge without intense material application. And if you fail with that body to learn to trust to your whole spirit, you must get another, and perhaps many others, until you see clearly first of all that the real you is not your physical body at all; that the real way of life is to be led of the spiritual senses, that when you obey their first faint promptings asking of the Supreme to be led aright, you are cultivating and bringing these senses into active play in the practical affairs of life, and so as you cultivate proof on proof will come to you of their reality and use. Then it will be impossible to go astray or fail in anything.
The ignorant, uncultured, unschooled person often has more of this element or force than the book learned and accomplished. For this reason the man of success is not today, as a rule, the scholar or the student. He is the man, however, possessed of the greater spiritual power, and every great fortune comes of a superior spiritual power.
Christ recognized the superior development of these spiritual senses in the twelve unschooled men whom he called as Apostles. He recognized their power to believe or see principles as he saw them. In the unschooled Shakespeare, Burns and many another poet, these spiritual senses asserted themselves with such power as to overcome lack of worldly education. Such also is the power of these senses, that when once fairly awakened they can very quickly take hold of and master the world’s education, which is desirable, certainly, but not essential to eternal happiness.
Knowledge which comes when led of the spirit does not require laborious study. In the ordinary sense it requires no study at all. The spiritual sense knows immediately the thing needed for a certain result, just as the monkey, when bitten by a poisonous snake, knows the plant which will serve as an antidote, or as animals before an earthquake show uneasiness and alarm, or as a cat, if carried in a bag miles away from its home, will find its way back through the forest never seen by her before.
How shall we cultivate and bring out our spiritual or higher senses?
Just as we cultivate and improve our physical powers and senses. That is as we become aware of the reality of any spiritual sense by exercising it, trying it and experimenting with it. By such means it is first proved and then strengthened.
We know little relatively of this power at present. But we give here a very few suggestions, which are of value to us and may be to you in the cultivation and exercise of your mental powers.
On meeting any new acquaintance you may have an impression favorable or unfavorable to him or her. Such impression demands some consideration, because it is the report which your spiritual sense is giv Jig you regarding that person’s character. The more you trust to this sense, use it and cultivate it, the keener it becomes, the more quickly will you read people’s character and temperament, and thereby save yourself from painful experience and financial loss, which you might have To sustain in order to ” find a person out.”
When in this way you come to recognize the reality and use of a single spiritual sense you give your spirit great aid in asserting it and increasing its power. That sense or power in you is like an individual. If you recognize great talent in a man in your employ and you encourage that talent, you stimulate its growth. But if you deny the man’s talent, either purposely or because you are too dull to see it, you cripple it and retard its growth.
To give the spiritual senses opportunity to act, the body and physical senses should for periods he kept very quiet.
So in life and business, when you find yourself in a position in which you don’t know what to do, and when every plan seems beset with difficulties—when you are puzzled and undecided, then do nothing”. Wait. Your spiritual sense or power will then go out and do for you. It will bring at some unexpected moment a plan, or a person, or an impulse to move with the physical sense and body in some direction. The plan will prove the successful one. Or the person will be the very one you needed to assist you in carrying out your purpose.
This spiritual sense works with many people in the practical affairs of life and in business far more thau they realize themselves. Many a man will testify (if he recollects his past experiences at all, and many do not), that after worrying and fretting, and lying awake nights ” thinking it over,” and rushing his body about from place to place, or person to person, that the agency or idea enabling him to carry out his design came when he had almost given up in despair, or when his mind was not on that plan or purpose. Because then he had called his material mind and senses in, and so given the spiritual sense a chance to work. With more knowledge of the physical conditions necessary to allow the spiritual being to work, and with more faith in the reality and use of these senses, they would have worked far quicker and brought him the forces and agents to carry out his purpose far quicker.
Sometimes in conversation you forget the .name of some person spoken of. You bother your material memory with the attempt to recall it. In most cases you are unsuccessful. Yet, after a little time, and when you have ceased trying to recall it, the name comes to you. Because a spiritual sense had gone out and recalled it, it could not bring it to you so long as your material memory was so actively employed.
The real artist in his highest efforts, be he painter, actor, poet, musician or orator, forgets he has a body and forgets the possession of his physical senses. His spirit has then full sway. His spiritual senses are then acting. Then they control his body. Of his efforts no two are alike. For the spirit brings to each some new inspiration, some new coloring.
Try, when you cannot sleep, to forget you have a body. Say to yourself, ” I demand with the help of. the Supreme Power that my physical sight, hearing and sense of touch be put in abeyance ; I demand unconsciousness of their existence or use.”
This thought is one means for liberating your spiritual senses and bringing them into play. For when they most work, the body has less feeling, be its condition that of sleeping or in an inspiration of any effort. It is the body’s continual assertion of itself, and its physical senses that checks the spirit, prevents it from acting. When we have in mind the idea of forgetting the body, we give a great help to the play of the higher senses.
The power of forgetting anything for a season is unlimited. This power is increased by practice.
By forgetting the body, we mean the temporary shutting from the mind all remembrance and excise of the physical senses of touch, taste, sight, ill or healing
You may not at first be able to do this at all. But you can commence such exercise. You can commence, if but for five seconds, by fixing your eyes on any small object about you, say a spot on the wall, a portion of the figure in the carpet, etc., and gaze at it.
Simple and silly as this may appear to you, it is the A B C or commencing step of the power of abstraction. That is the power of temporarily closing up the physical senses and opening the spiritual.
This power has grown to wonderful results among peoples we call simple and ignorant, but who having less “book knowledge” than we, were in some directions more “led of the spirit.” The North American Indian had this power of closing up or deadening his physical sense of touch, so that torture had relatively little effect on him. Thereby was he able to sing his death song while his body was undergoing horrible mutilations.
Do not expect immediate success in this or any other experiment for the purpose of liberating your spiritual senses. A relative Success may require months or years. It may come slowly. But it comes to stay.
Do not make any such effort, mechanical or forced, either. Make it only as the spirit or impulse prompts, if it be but once a week, or once a month. Do not make for yourself rigid rules and set regular periods for “sitting in silence or communing with the gods,” or staring laboriously at spots on the wall. For if you do you will only sicken at last of such attempts and give them up. Trust to the spirit for times and places for these things and it will lead you right.
This spiritual power is possessed by many reptiles, insects and some animals, wbo, on the approach of the winter’s cold, have a natural power of dismissing all physical sensation, and becoming as we say “torpid” or sleeping during the winter months. The snake and the toad lie in the ground. Yet when the ground is frozen, they are not frozen. Neither are myraids of insects frozen who lie all Winter in cracks and crevices or under dead tree bark. Why? Because the spirit of that form of organization, though withdrawn to a large extent from its physical body, is still sending enough life to that body to prevent its decay or freezing.
The same principle extends to the tree. For that reason its sap does not freeze in Winter (save in rare extreme periods of cold).
One spiritual force pervades the Universe. But there are millions on millions of different ” manifestations ” of this spirit.
Some Practical Mental Recipes
Copyright, 1890, by F. J. Needham
The thought contained in this issue is a partial review of what we have published for the last three years and a half. These truths are here brought again to your attention, because in the ground we have entered it is profitable at times to be reminded anew of these laws so new to us. We are habituated to our old and wrong methods of thought, and in the hurry of every-day life and affairs are very apt to forget these spiritual laws, even though we are convinced of their truth.
None of us can expect to believe and live up to new laws, principles or methods of life all at once. Though convinced of their truth there is an unyielding, stubborn part of us which is hostile to them.
That part is our material mind or mind of the body.
There Is A Supreme Power And Ruling Force Which Pervades And Rules The Boundless Universe.
You Are A Part Of This Power.
You As A Part Have The Faculty Of Bringing To You By Constant Silent Desire, Prayer Or Demand More And More Of The Qualities, Belongings And Characteristics Of This Power.
Every thought of yours is a real thing—a force (say this over to yourself twice).
Every thought of yours is literally building for you something for the future of good or ill.
What then is your mind dwelling on now in any matter? The dark or the bright side? Is it toward others ugly or kind? This is precisely the same as asking “what kind of life and results are you making for yourself in the future?”
If now you are obliged to live in a tenement house or sit at a very inferior table, or live among the coarse and vulgar, do not say to yourself that you must always so live. Live in mind or imagination in the better house. Sit in imagination at better served tables and among superior people. When you cultivate this state of mind your forces are carrying you to the better. Be rich in spirit, in mind, in imagination, and you will in time be rich in material things. It is the mood of mind you are most in, whether that be groveling or aspiring, that is actually making physical conditions of life in advance for you.
The same law applies to the building-up of the body. In imagination live in a strong, agile body, though yours is now a weak one.
Do nob put any limits to your future possibilities. Do not say : ” I must stop here. I must always rank below this or that great mau or woman. My body must weaken,decay and perish, because in the past so many people’s bodies have weakened and perished.”
Do not say: “My powers and talents are only of the common order and as an ordinary person. I shall live and die as millions have done before me.”
When you think this, as many do unconsciously, you imprison yourself in an untruth. You bring then to yourself the evil and painful results of an untruth. You bar and fetter your aspiration to grow to powers and possibilities beyond the world’s present knowledge. You cut from you the higher truth and possibility.
You have latent in you, some power, some capacity, some shading of talent different from that ever possessed by any human being. No two minds are precisely alike, for the Infinite Force creates infinite variety in its every expression, whether such expression be a sunset or a mind.
Demand at times to be permanently freed from all fear. Every second of such thought does its little to free you forever from the slavery of fear. The Infinite Mind knows no fear, and it is your eternal heritage to grow nearer and nearer to the Infinite Mind.
We absorb the thought of those with whom we are most in sympathy and association. We graft their mind on our own. If their mind is inferior to ours and not on the same plane of thought, we, in such absorption, take in and cultivate an inferior and injurious mental graft.
If you will keep company with people who are reckless and unaspiring, who have no aim or purpose in life, who have no faith in themselves or anything else, you place yourself in the thought current of failure. Your tendency then will he to failure. Because from such people, your closest associates, you will absorb their thought. If you absorb it, you will think it. You will get in the same mood of mind as theirs. If you think as they do, you will in many things find yourself acting as they do, no matter how great your mental gifts.
Your mind surely absorbs the kind of thought it is most with. If you are with the successful you absorb thought which brings success. The unsuccessful are ever sending from them thoughts of lack of order, lack of system, lack of method, or recklessness and discouraged thought. Your mind if much with theirs will certainly absorb these thoughts exactly as a sponge does water.
It is better for your art or business that you have no intimate company at all than the company of reckless, careless, slipshod and slovenly minds.
When in your mind you cut from the unlucky and thriftless, your body will not long remain so near theirs. You get then into another force or current. It will carry you into the lives of more successful people.
When you don’t know what to do in any matter of business—in anything, wait. Do nothing about it. Dismiss it so much as you can from your mind. Your purpose will be as strong as ever. You are then receiving and accumulating force to put on that purpose. It comes from the Supreme Power. It will come in the shape of an idea, an inspiration, an event, an opportunity. You have not stopped while you so waited. You have all that time been carried to the idea, the inspiration, the event, the opportunity, and it also has been carried or attracted to you.
When in any undertaking we put our main dependence and trust in an individual or individuals and not in the Supreme Power, we are off the main track of the most perfect success.
The highest and real success means in addition to wealth increasing health, vigor and a growth never ceasing into powers and possibilities not yet realized by the race.
As regards your business, don’t talk to anybody, man or woman, regarding your plans or projects, or anything connected with them, unless you are perfectly sure they wish for your success. Don’t talk to people who hear you out of politeness. Every word so spoken represents so much force taken out of your project. The number you can talk to with profit is very small. But the good wish of one real friend, if he give you a hearing but for ten minutes, is a literal living active force, added to your own, and from that time working in your behalf.
If your aim is for right and justice you will be led to those you can trust and talk to with safety. Your spiritual being or sense will tell you whom you can trust.
When you demand justice for yourself, you demand it for the whole race. If you allow yourself to be dominated, brow-beaten or cheated by others without inward or outward protest, you are condoning with deceit and trickery. You are in league with it.
Three persons engaged in any form of gossip, tattle or scandal generate a force and send it from them of tattle, gossip and scandal. The thought they send into the air returns to them and does them injury to mind and body. It is far more profitable to talk with others of things which go to work out good. Every sentence you speak is a spiritual force to you and others for good or ill.
Ten minutes spent in growling at your luck, or in growling at others because they have more luck than yourself, means ten minutes of your own force spent in making worse your own health and fortune. Every thought of envy or hatred sent another is a boomerang. It flies back to you and hurts you. The envy or dislike we may feel toward those who, as some express it, “put on airs.” The ugly feeling we may have at seeing others riding in carriages and ” rolling in wealth,” represents just so much thought (i. e., force) most extravagantly expended, for in its expenditure we get not only unhappiness, but destroy future fortune and happiness.
If this has been your common habit or mood of mind, do not expect to get out of it at once. Once convinced of the harm done you by such mood, and a new force has come to gradually remove the old mind and bring a new one. But all changes must be gradual.
Your own private room is your chief workshop for generating your spiritual force and building yourself up. If it is kept in disorder, if things are flung recklessly about, and you cannot lay your bands instantly upon them, it is an indication that your mind is in the same condition, and therefore your mind as it works on others, in carrying out your projects, will work with less effect and result by reason of its disordered and disorganized condition.
Ill temper or despondency is a disease. The mind subject to it in any degree is to that degree a sick mind. The sick mind makes the sick body. The great majority of the sick are not in bed.
When you are peevish, remember your mind is sick. Demand then a well mind.
When you say to yourself, ” I am going to have a pleasant visit or a pleasant journey,” you are literally sending elements and forces ahead of your body that will arrange things to make your visit or journey pleasant. When before the visit or the journey or the shopping trip you are in a bad humor, or fearful or apprehensive of something unpleasant, you are sending unseen agencies ahead of you which will make some kind of unpleasantness.
Our thoughts, or in other words, our state of mind is ever at work “fixing up ” things good or bad for us in advance.
As you cultivate this state of mind more and more, you will at last have no need of reminding yourself to get into such mood. Because the mood will have become a part of your every-day nature, and you cannot then get out of it, nor prevent the pleasant experiences it will bring you.
Our real self is that which we cannot see, hear or feel with the physical senses—our mind. The body is an instrument it uses. We are then made up entirely of forces we call thoughts. When these thoughts are evil or immature they bring us pain and ill fortune. We can always change them for better thoughts or forces. Earnest steady desire for a new mind (or self) will surely bring the new mind and more successful self. And this will ever be changing through such desire for the newer and ever more successful self.
All of us do really “pray without ceasing.” We do not mean by prayer any set, formality or form of words. A person who sets his or her mind on the dark side of life, who lives over and over the misfortunes and disappointments of the past, prays for similar misfortunes and disappointments in the future. If You will see nothing but ill luck in the future, you are praying for such ill luck and will surely get it.
You carry into company not only your body, but what is of far more importance, your thought or mood of mind, and this thought or mood, though you say little or nothing, will create with others an impression for or against you, and as it acts on other minds will bring you results favorable or unfavorable according to its character.
What you think is of far more importance than what you say or do. Because your thought never ceases for a moment its action on others or whatever it is placed upon. Whatever you do has been because of a previous long held mood or state liud before such doing.
The thought or mood of mind most profitable in permanent results to you is the desire to do right. This is not sentiment, but science. Because the character of your thought brings to you events, persons and opportunities with as much certainty as the state of the atmosphere brings rain or dry weather.
To do right is to bring to yourself the best and most lasting result for happiness. You must prove this for yourself.
Doing right is not, however, doing what others may say or think to be right. If you have no standard of right and wrong of your own, you are acting always on the standard held or made by others.
Your mind is always working and acting on other minds to your advantage or disadvantage whether your body is asleep or awake. Your real being in the form of a thought travels like electricity through space. So when you lay the body down to sleep see that your mind is in the best mood to get during your physical unconsciousness the best things. For if you go to sleep angry or despondent your thought goes straight to the unprofitable domain of anger or despondency, and will bring to your physical life on awakening, first the element and afterward that ill success which anger and despondency always attract.
Health is involved in the Biblical adage, “Let not the sun go down on your wrath.” Every mood of mind you get in brings to you fleshy bone and blood of a quality or character like itself. People who from year to year live in moods of gloom or discouragement, are building elements of gloom and discouragement into their bodies, and the ill results cannot be quickly removed.
The habit of hurry wears out more bodies and kills more people than is realized. If you put on your shoes hurriedly while dressing in the morning you will be very apt to be in a hurry all day. Pray to get out of the current of hurried thought into that of repose. Hurried methods of doing business lose rnauy thousands of dollars. Power to keep your body strong and vigorous—power to have influence with people worth holding—power to succeed in your undertakings comes of that reposeful frame of mind which while doing relatively little with tht body, sees far ahead and clearly in mind.
So, when in the morning, be you man or woman, you look at what is to b3 done and begin to feel yourself overwhelmed and hurried by the household cares, the writing, the shopping, the people to be seen, the many things to be done, sit right down for thirty seconds and say, ” I will not be mobbed and in mind driven by these duties. I will now proceed to do one thing—one thing alone, and let the rest take care of themselves until it is done.” The chances are then that the one thing will be done well. If that is done well, so will all the rest. And the current of thought you bring to you in so cultivating this mood will bear you to far more profitable surroundings, scenes, events and associations than will the semi-insane mood and current of hurry.
All of us believe in many untruths today. It is an unconscious belief. The error is not brought before our minds. Still we go on acting and living in accordance with our unconscious error, and the suffering we may experience comes from that wrong belief.
Demand then every day ability to see our wrong beliefs. We need not be discouraged if we see many more than we think we have at present. They cannot be seen and remedied all at once.
Don’t take a “tired feeling” or one of languor in the day time for a symptom of sickness. It is only your mind asking for rest from some old rut of occupation.
If your stomach is disordered make your mind responsible for it. Say to yourself, “This disagreeable feeling comes of an error in thought.” If you are weak or nervous, don’t lay the fault on your body. Say again, ” It is a state of my mind which causes this physical ailment, and I demand to get rid of such state and get a better one.” If you think any medicine or medical advice will do you good, by all means take it, but mind and keep this thought behind it. ” I am taking this medicine not to help my body but as an aid to my spirit.”
Your child is a mind which having lost the body it used in a past physical existence (and possibly of another race and country), has received a new one, as you did in your own infancy.
Tell your child never to think meanly of itself. For if it becomes habituated to put out such thought, others will feel it and think of the child first and as a grown up person afterward to be of small value.
Nothing damages the individual more than self depreciation, and many a child is weighted down with the elements of failure before it goes into the world through years of scolding, snubbing and telling it that it is a worthless being.
Tell your child in all its plans to see or think only success. To keep in the permanent mood of expecting success brings causes, events and opportunities, which bring success.
Let us also tell this to ourselves very often, for we are but children, also with physical bodies a few years older than the infants.
We have as yet but the vaguest idea of what life really means, and the possibilities it has in store for us. One attribute of the relatively perfected life to come to this race is the retention or preservation of a physical body so long as the mind or spirit desires it. It will be a body also free from pain and sickness, and one which can be made or unmade, put on or taken off at will.
Say of anything that “it must be done ” and you are putting out a mighty unseen power for doing. When your mind is in the mood of ever saying “must,” whether you have in mind the particular thing you aim at or not, still that force is ever working on your purpose. But we need to be careful as to what that force of must is put on. “Must” without asking for wisdom as to where it shall be placed may bring you terrible results.
Always in your individual aims and purposes defer to the Higher Power and Infinite Wisdom. The thing you may most desire might prove a curse. Be always then in the mood of saying, “There is a Power which knows what will bring me the most permanent happiness better than I do. If my desire is not for good let it not come, for in its place I shall have something better.”
If you send your thought in sympathy to every one wbo calls for it, you may have very little left to help yourself. It is necessary to have great care in the choice of those on whom we put our love and thought. One may help build us up; another tear us down.
We need to ask for wisdom that we may know whom to receive in close association.
As you are a part of God or the Supreme Power and a peculiar part, you can always estimate yourself as the very best of such peculiar part. No one else can approach or equal or excel you, as you represent and put out your own peculiar powers, gifts or shadings of mind and character. You will in time command the world of your own mind, and while others may compel your admiration, you will do yourself a great injury if you worship them or abase yourself or grovel before them even in mind.
Idolatry is the blind worship of anything or anybody save the Infinite Force from which alone you draw life, power and inspiration.
The thought of a woman coming to you a man in sympathy or love whose ideas, aims and aspirations are equal to or above yours, may prove to you a source for strength of muscle, health of body and clearness of mind. Her thought so flowing to you is a real element. If a woman inferior to you mentally is your companion or much in your thought, your mind will be much less clear and your health will eventually suffer.
Be you man or woman, your life cannot be complete and you cannot build yourself rapidly into higher and higher powers until you meet and recognize spiritually your eternal complement or completement of the other sex. And from such complement there is no departure.
When we eat and drink let us remember that with every mouthful we place and build a thought into ourselves in accordance with the mood we are in while eating. So be sure to be bright, hopeful and buoyant while eating, and if we cannot, command such mood of mind, pray for it. To ask night and morning of the Supreme Power for the highest wisdom (that is the greatest good and happiness), and to demand this in that frame of mind which acknowledges the superiority of that Wisdom over your own, is certainly putting you in the current of the greatest and most enduring health and prosperity. Because another and better current of thought then begins to act on you and will gradually carry you out of errors and into the light. It will lead you by degrees into different surroundings, different ways of living, and will in time bring you the association you really need and what is best for you.
The Use And Necessity Of Recreation
Copyright, 1890, by F. J. Needhah
Divide the word “recreation” in two parts, thus: re-creation and there is given it a clearer meaning. Recreation is a re-creative process for mind and body. In any healthy amusement we draw and build into ourselves a re-creative, recuperative, lifegiving current of thought. Healthy amusement literally re-creates us. Life without amusement— life sad and serious, seldom, if ever, smiling— life plodding on in a monotonous rut and seeing and finding less and less to enjoy is for the body a de-creative and destructive process.
Re-creation not only throws off care, but adds to the capacity to resist care. Re-creation enables the mind to forget temporarily what is only an injury for it to remember. Re-creation adds new life to the body, because it brings new life to the mind, and life for the mind is life for the body. Re-creation gives strength to meet trial and difficulty. You do not so much want to be spared trial as you want that strength which shall cause you not to fear it.
You do not want to run away from the person or the difficulty or the interview you dread as much as you want that state of mind when you meet that person, that difficulty, that terrible lion in your path, which shall not only rid you of all fear, but make the trial an entertainment for you.
Re-creation, and plenty of it, is one great source for getting this strength, for it is our so much dwelling on difficulties and the difficulty of getting our minds off our perplexities, caused in part through the great lack of color or diversion in our lives that adds to those very troubles by making us weaker to resist them.
Were grown up people able to play more in the spirit in which they played in their childhood, the more would they retain of the elasticity, litheness and vigor of childhood. Children in playing together do literally feed each other with a living element (the spirit of their play), and get from it a great stimulant and strength.
On the other hand, people drudging in companies and engaged in any effort in which they are not interested, feed each other with thought element or spirit heavy and sluggish in quality. People so drudging whose lives are monotonous, colorless and lacking in variety must become at last slow, heavy and sluggish in every movement of muscle, as well as mind.
Every effort we make and every kind of work we may have to do, be it digging in the garden or writing an essay, can be made a source of lifeng amusement or re-creation. No matter what you do it is the same force i’«’. e., thought) which drives whatever part of the body you may use in the doing. If you dig, that force acts through the muscles used in digging. If you are an orator, the same force acts through your tongue to express the thoughts coming to you as you stand before your hearers. If a writer, the thought or force coming to you acts through arm and hand as put on paper.
Our so-called most trivial acts may be made sources of re-creation and pleasure. No act however small should be irksome. We have occasion an hundred times a day to do so-called little things wherein we are impatient in the doing. We snatch the coat from its hook. We reach for this or that article on our writing table, begrudging the time and effort it takes. We shape in writing our letters in a hurry and take no pleasure in giving them form or legibility. We are using our muscles constantly in some way which gives no pleasure. Every movement of muscle which gives no pleasure is a de-creative process. It adds its mite to the wearing out of the body. It begets the habit of impatience and unrest.
It is not work that kills people. It is the manner of doing it. Reposeful work is rest. But the science of repose reaches down to the crook of a finger, and a habit of order which will not neglect the proper place for a pin or a pen. Heaven is born out of the day of small things.
Perhaps you say, “If people should make physical effort in the slow, deliberate way you indicate, they would have very little done by the day’s end.”
To this we answer, that whatever is done in this mood would be well done and would not have to be done over again. But what is of far more importance in this reposeful, deliberate, and, it may be added, pleasure-giving way of performing physical acts, a great deal more at the same time would we be doing spiritually. The greatest results in life do not come of pushing material things about or of using anything material. They will come to you, supposing you have a set purpose in view in proportion as your thought or force works apart from your body on others favorable to that purpose. When you are in the current of hurried, fatiguing or irksome effort that force works at great disadvantage. When you are in the current of reposeful, pleasure-giving effort, in every possible act your force works more and more on others night and day to your advantage. Eesults to you in material things will come quicker and quicker. New ideas will come faster.
Finally, you will gain ability to rest or gain strength in all effort, be it of any sort. You will as you call strength to you in any physical movement reserve of it a little instead of giving it all out in that effort. This is the secret of all physical effort when it is pleasant. It comes of mental or spiritual growth and not from any course of material training.
Especially the room sacred to ourselves should be the place above all for re-creative, reposeful, deliberate effort in the doing of all things. By such doing and in such calm frame of mind do we make a thought atmosphere in which our highest and best friends, unseen of the physical eye, can enter and mingle their thought with ours, so that our happiest moments will be realized there. And this realization of their presence and communion of mind will ever increase, when once we are in the re-creative mood of doing all things, so that finally all sense of loneliness shall depart. More, we can in such place and atmosphere receive the wisest suggestion and impression as to the course most proper to pursue in all our undertakings. Yoi will then have fairly entered when you can so enjoy what most people call ” being alone ” in that vast and unseen world of being, individuality and existence, which lies closer to us than our doors. For it enters our doors. It is about us and all around us, and is surely to be reached and realized by some, in our own time as their minds so grow and refine as to be able to sense it, first faintly and feebly, but as time goes on its reality will be more and more apparent.
In ancient times there lived in oriental lands those of calm, contemplative and re-creative mood, who while acting little with the body accomplished great results through their spiritual power. A part of their secret lay in the cultivation of reposeful, re-creative effort in the doing of all things. The other part lay in their knowledge and trust in the Supreme Power, and ever drawing more and more from that power.
In that world of to us unseen existence many a poet, dramatist and writer has in mind entered and temporarily lived. So did Shakespeare. His creations to us are realities. Had they known better the laws of their being, could they have emerged from the domain of material thought and beliefs, they would at last have believed in their finer and spiritual senses, have more used and trusted them, and so going forward step by step they would have shaken off the fetters of mortality, put on immortality and recognized what even they deemed fancies as truths. Their higher minds wrote down truths which their lower and material minds scorned, discredited and rejected afterward.
But the better period has dawned. Though its gray light as yet but tinges the sky, yet man does today stand in knowledge on the threshold of his more glorious and beautiful life. . Let us not despise as trivial the steps and methods by which only it can be realized; nothing is trivial.
Any effort ceases to be re-creative the moment it becomes wearisome. That is the time when our force or thought ceases to put new element into our mind or spiritual being.
If you come into the thought atmosphere of people, who find pleasure in harmless recreation, you absorb of that atmosphere. It is life and life-giving element. It does good to mind and body. It builds up both and strengthens both.
When you re-create a mind, freshen it, get it for a time off a too much worn track of thought, physical effort or study, it is then cleared to receive new ideas. Inspiration does not come of memorizing or plodding or poring over books.
It comes of keeping the mind in a proper condition to receive newer thought than ever was printed in hooks, and newer device or invention than ever before was seen in the machine shop.
We are all of us dual. That is, we possess and use the mind of the body, and the other and higher mind which acts through the more powerful and far reaching spiritual senses.
The mind of the body or that portion of our mind and force which acts directly on the body, often needs a certain limited, gentle and pleasing outlay of effort in the direction of seeing things of beauty or exercise of muscle, or hearing. Such outlay or exercise can keep it out of injurious currents of thought. For instance, many men get a certain rest in whittling. They can think clearer while so engaged. In other words, the act of whittling concentrates their material mind on such exercise, while the other and higher mind and senses are liberated, and can go forth and act, and that certain repose a man feels while engaged in such act comes of the temporary liberation and exercise of his other and finer senses.
Thinking or getting new ideas does not come at all of trying to think. On the contrary, it comes of getting the mind in the most restful and contented mood. That is why some of my lady readers may get their best and most agreeable thoughts or mental moods while engaged without hurry, in their sewing or fancy work—or in any physical effort which you do not set out to do in just so many minutes, and care not whether it is finished this week or next. Work in this mood ceases to be work at all. It becomes play, and as we have said before, because it is worth twice saying, the gentle unstrained physical effort in getting the material mind on a certain track leaves the higher mind and senses more freedom to act in.
In time to come all the world’s physical work will be done in this restful mood, and without hurry or straining to accomplish a certain amount in a certain time. Then all work will become as play. It will also be far better done. But far more results will come of such method of doing.
If you have any set purpose in view, and you have for the day done all physically you can to attain that purpose, stop further work. Best, amuse yourself in some harmless way and re-create. You are then gathering force and putting it on that purpose. You are sending then force constantly to push your purpose forward.
But if you keep your mind ever on the rack and strain as regards that purpose—if you are making effort all the time with the body only because you think you must ” be doing something,” you are wasting force, driving the best results from you. Though you may gain small successes, they will not last and be as nothing when compared with the greater and permanent result which comes of using and trusting your spiritual power.
Then if your material mind will set up a worry because things look dark or do not move fast enough, demand Faith of the Supreme Power.
The world’s physical business, its building, its manufacturing is far too much hurried and strained. We act too much on the assumption that life is short, and so a great deal must be done in a short time. In a sense this is true. The very mental condition in which so many do business makes life short.
The race will realize in time to come that there is time enough to do all things reposefully and pleasantly, and that such mood of mind is one great factor in keeping the body strong and vigorous, and keeping that body far longer than its present average duration.
The young man who works all day at a trade is sometimes advised to go to the reading room, or a school of some sort in the evening, to ” improve his mind.” Does he ” improve it,” after having worked off so much force in the day time to work off more at night in the endeavor to fill himself with “facts,” a part of which fifty years hence may have proved to be fiction?
There is re-creation in the study of any art when there is pleasure in such study. There is neither re-creation, nor profit in the study of any art when we are tired or it becomes irksome. The moment you become tired is the moment to leave off. If you continue to paint or sew, or write your sermon, or if a lawyer pore over your authorities, or as a mechanic continue your work when mind and body protest in some way against further effort, you have no longer fresh thought force or inspiration to put on such work. You have sundered your connection with such thought current. You have made connection with an inferior drudging, repeating itself current of thought. You are receiving of that thought element and putting it not only in your work hut in your body. As a consequence you will leave off not only tired, but afterward the very thought of your work will give you that peculiar mind sickness or disgust for it which always conies of over-strain and fatigue. So when next you take up such employment you may feel such disgust for the reason that you re-absorb the tired thought you left in your work.
So when our business, our trade, our occupation, our art, be it what it may, ceases to re-create or give pleasure in the doing, or be done with enthusiam and zeal, it is not well done, and really does us and others more harm than good. It is the tired overworked engineer whose exhausted faculties fail to recognize the danger signal and runs his train to destruction. It is the workman made careless through fatigue who allows the flaw to go unperceived in the shaft which breaks and possibly causes the steamer’s wreck. It is the artist who paints mechanically, or the actor who acts mechanically, with little or no love for his art or pleasure in its exercise, w ho never reaches the top rounds.
Up to a certain age, varying somewhat as to condition in life, the child is always learning something new—some new game or sport. This is always giving it new life. If you bring up a child here it has no opportunity so to learn new things, it will be a little old man or woman at ten or twelve years of age. When the boy or girl or young man or woman are put into the harness of conventional life, of the hard, serious, earnest work of life as we call it (which should not be hard, serious work at all were life what it should be and what it will be), when the boy has learned his one trade or profession and settled down to that and tint alone, and the girl has also settled down in life as wife and mother and house carer, and that alone, then it is they commence to become sad and serious—sober and careworn; and so life goes on till the end, and such minds exercised only in a rut—such spirit de-created through lack of re-creation drop after middle age gradually into a corner, is pushed aside by the younger element, become of less and less use and importance in the social or business circle, until at last their worn-out bodies drop away from the spirit and are laid, as people say, ” at rest,” an assertion which may not be so readily believed as more is known of what life really means and what it involves.
Why is this? Because such minds are not recreated by the learning of some new thing—of some new source of re-creation—of some new source of rest whereby the thought or force is for a time diverted from some department of mind to another, some set of faculties to another, so that the lawyer in sailing his yacht shall be a rested and more powerful lawyer the next day—so that the matron in playing her part in the theatrical representation may return re-created and recuperated next morning to the government of that empire in embryo, her household— so that the preacher in his painting loses his preacher self in the paradise of form and color, and returns to his pulpit with afresh growth and shade of thought —grown in these periods of forget fulness of preaching, and in this way should we all be makers of and givers of new life to each other.
For when you amuse or interest me or compel my attention or admiration by the display on your part of some great proficiency in music, in acting, in conversation, in skill and dexterity of muscle, you are proving and expressing some power and quality of God or the Infinite Spirit working through you, and in so centering my thought on one thing, you gather my scattered thought or spirit together, and in doing this you rest my spirit; and if you rest my spirit you rest my body with it; and if you rest my body you strengthen my body ; and if you strengthen it you put in it the force or element to drive out disease.
When we cease to learn the new and take pleasure in such learning, the material part of us (the body) commences dying.
The ultimate of existence is a never ending course of learning and enjoying the new.
Paul says: ” Rejoice evermore.” It is the same as saying ” play evermore.” In other words, ” Rejoice and receive pleasure in the never ending expressions of your spirit as they are one after another developed. Rejoice in your business, your trade, your profession. Rejoice in your walking, your driving, your eating, your painting, your music —in all you do.”
But the physician might say here: “I take pleasure, to an extent, in the exercise of my profession. But sometimes it drives and wearies me. I am the slave of its demand, day and night. I am liable at any hour in the midst of my amusement, or rest, to be called to see a patient. How can I always rejoice?”
This question holds good with many professions.
Now, be your calling what it may, do you consider that you have full capacity and power for its exercise when you are tired, when vitality is at a low ebb, when your effort is strained, when you take little or no pleasure in its exercise? Are you then giving your best self, your best mind, your strongest power to your patient, your client, your patron in anything ! Are you not, on the contrary, dealing out an inferior article?
“But I must go where my business or profession calls me,” you answer,” whether I am physically or mentally fit to go or not. I cannot say to a midnight caller in case of sickness, ‘ I am unfit to give the patient the best of my skill now. He or she must wait till tomorrow.'”
Yes, you can when you trust more in that Supreme Power which stands by every soul in proportion to its trust in it. The greater success awaits those who trust it, and the greatest success means being master of your own time and independence to that extent that you can say “No” to any demand or tempting offer when your highest conscience forbids its acceptance.
But all that interests and amuses minds does not re-create.
That is an unhealthy and injurious taste which takes pleasure in spectacles of human suffering, be the suffering mental or physical. An audience which can look for hours on the spectacle of a human heart writhing in all the torments of jealousy or suspense or grief, is influenced by a grade of the same sentiment which once with pleasure saw the Christian captives suffering the same mental agony or fear as they were torn to pieces by wild beasts. Great talent is unquestionably thrown in such representations as great genins with the brush may expend itself in painting dead human flesh or in blood flowing freely from live human bodies from the axe of the executioner or the dagger of the assassin. That is amusement which does not re-create with healthy thought element. It brings violence and fear and jealousy and all the lower order of thought more prominently to the minds of those who see it. It connects them with that domain or current of thought. It renders connection the more difficult with all that is quiet, beautiful, reposeful and constructive in nature. You absorb only elements of destruction and weakness after seeing a dramatic spectacle in which poison, the dagger, jealousy and revenge form the principal materials. You leave such a play worked up, exhausted, and the better fitted to connect yourself with what you call the Land of Dreams, with the same order of thought and action when your bodies are in the unconscious state we call sleep, and as a result you are the more apt to come back to and take up your physical instrument, your body, in the morning, unrefreshed, unrecreated, because during sleep your mind or spirit in its dual and to your physical self, unconscious life, may have been sending to your body only the agitating violent destructive order of thought you saw last night at the tragedy.
I once asked a noted Italian danseuse, a devotee to the poetry expressed in physical motion, of what use was the maitre de ballet, an accompaniment of the ballet more common years ago than at present. “It is,” said she,” because the presence of the man gives an inspiration or stimulus to the woman.”
There is for all effort, whether as termed mental or physical, a higher and finer inspiration when the sexes mingle as they should in all games or diversions. Man is not improved, or so much benefited, or re-created when he goes by himself to his base ball, his billiards, his bowling alley, his sailing, his driving. Left to himself in these amusements, and without the restraining, elevating and refining element of the other sex, he becomes the coarser. When man herds with man for long periods whether on ship-board, in armies or on frontier settlements, he becomes rough and coarse. When woman meets by herself, as she does in so many of our Eastern towns and villages where two thirds of the men have ” gone West,” she becomes more narrow, gossipy, trivial, and is infected by that over prudishness, which seeing so much evil where evil is not, is the very essence of that evil which it most affects to fear.
Woman has as much nerve as man. She can be as cool in time of danger. Woman has quite as much vigor of muscle and endurance as man. The Sandwich Island women are rated as better swimmers than the men. Could a hod-carrier bound over the stage like a danseuse? In Vienna you may see a certain class of women carrying hods of brick and mortar up the long ladders like men. How many men would care to change places with a farmer’s wife over her Monday’s wash-tub? Or any one of the thousands of poor men’s wives in this country, who are cooking, bed-making, house sweeping, marketing, baby tending, with forty different things an hour for their minds. The more objects you have to expend thought or force upon in a given time—the quicker do you exhaust that force. Is woman really so much the weaker sext Regard the girl acrobat on the trapeze, or the girl rider at the circus. Is she not as lithe and graceful on skates as the man? Regard the girl in her happier and “tomboy” days, when with the boy she has the glorious privilege of climbing trees, rolling down hay mows, roosting on barn ridge poles and sliding down cellar doors. Does she not enter into all these things with the same zest and enjoyment as the boy?
Does she not the more enjoy them when in company with the boy? Does she not as a rule cease to exercise what we will term the athletic side of her nature, when custom says she must cross over to her side of the house and act like a young lady and put on a dress which fetters her limbs? And what then? With less physical freedom, less of the natural and more of the artificial, less of open association, and, in so many cases, more of stolen interviews, is honesty and purity of mind increased. Are the evils which society in so restricting the association of the sexes endeavors to prevent, really prevented?
Both men and women would be the stronger physically were all their re-creative effort in each other’s company, for the reason that the elements flowing in thought from each to each give a certain strength and stimulation which is lacking when they are apart. In this restriction of the sexes which has crept upon us during the ages, and had its origin in the barbaric era when woman was held as a chattel, man has actually deprived himself of the only element which can refine him, and woman is likewise deprived of an unseen element which would strengthen her. It is this unnatural separation of the sexes which long custom has made an unconscious habit in so many phases of life that begets the very evils it is intended to prevent.