CONTENTS
Mental Tyranny
Spells; Or, The Law Of Change
Look Forward
Thought Currents
Healthy And Unhealthy Spirit Communion
Uses Of Diversion
Regeneration; Or, Being Born Again
Lies Breed Disease; Truths Bring Health
God’s Commands Are Man’s Demands
About Economizing Our Forces
God In The Trees, Or The Infinite Mind In Nature
What Is Justice?
Mental Tyranny, Or How We Mesmerize Each Other
Copyright By F. J. Needham, 1890
No tyranny is more widely spread and more subtle than that coming of the control of one mind over another or others. It is often a tyranny in which the tyrant knows not that he rules, nor do those in subjection know they are ruled. The tyrant also is generally in complete ignorance of the means and manner by which he rules, and in similar ignorance are those ruled by him or her.
It is possible for you to come under the rule of another person’s mind and act in accordance with that person’s wishes, when you think you are consulting and acting out your own. No control is more complete than when those who are ruled by others think themselves entirely free.
The child in this way sometimes rules the parent. The child (a spirit with a new body) may have the most powerful mind or quality of thought.
That child’s spiritual existence may be far older than that of the parent who has given it another physical body. It may have through many successive earthly existences grown in spiritual power far greater than the parent. It is ignorant of its power as is the parent. But in its possible humors and whims or in the assertion of its own character that mind acting on the parent’s mind may largely govern it, and the child will do very much as it pleases.
By the terms “powerful mind “or” superior mind or thought,” we do not mean what is commonly termed ” learning.” We mean the superior power of that force which goes from one mind to another, though their physical bodies be apart.
An uneducated person may be endowed with this stronger force. That person will probably be successful in what he or she undertakes. The world terms this “force of character.” The real education means the power inherent in a mind as drawn out and exercised—not opinions, facts (often errors) and figures put on or memorized.
If your thought is superior to mine it will the stronger effect influence or sway others on whom you put it. As an element it goes literally to them and has on them what we must term for lack of a better phrase of illustration a mesmeric influence. In such way, the First Napoleon threw his mind on his troops. Every soldier under him felt it, and had it acting in him. Their minds felt his spirit— as a more powerful element of thought emanating from him, exactly as the physical sense feels the sun’s rays.
Then why you may ask did not his power for victory continue? Because he fell through ignorance into the common error, of allowing his mind to become adulterated with an inferior force or thought.
He mixed his mental gunpowder with sawdust and lessened its strength; when he deserted Josephine for an inferior woman he absorbed the mind of that inferior woman. His thought then no longer acted on others with its old power. Josephine was Napoleon’s natural mate or complement not by man’s law, but the Law of the Infinite. When he received her thought and it was blended with his own, he received an actual power which worked on others separate and apart from his body as does our thought act all the time on others apart from our bodies.
By the same law, the superior element of thought put out by the mind of a great financier like Jay Gould acts in the domain of finance on other minds far and near.
If you have any purpose in life, any well defined undertaking which you are determined to achieve, it may be very injurious for you to come in very close association and sympathy with another or others who have no interest or sympathy with your purpose. You can associate with them to such extent as is necessary for business purposes. But be careful whom you take in close companionship. If in such companionship you admit a person inferior to yourself—making such person the sharer of your leisure hours, depending continually on him or her for company, you are in the way of having your force or thought largely drawn from your undertaking. That other mind may to greater or less extent sway and influence you to some line of action damaging to your purpose.
Is there danger to us then from our associations 1 Yes, and a great deal. You get from your intimate companion or companions in thought, element either life or death, courage or cowardice, confidence or despair a clear mind or a muddled one. Thought as absorbed by you from others and after being so absorbed necessarily acted out and lived out—is the most powerful, most subtle agency in the universe for bringing you good or ill.
You need not from the foregoing suddenly withdraw yourself from any association you now have, for fear of ill to you or as suddenly connect yourself with any other. Let you spirit do this work for you. If separation is better between you and others, the spiritual law and force if relied upon will bring about such separation easily, gradually and without jar or disturbance. It will by degrees interpose agencies, events and material conditions between you and others so that their lives and yours will gradually diverge into other channels and yet all will be peace between you: The infinite brings events to pass by means far wiser than those of man who so often loves to be noisy, turbulent, severe and rough in his methods.
Men absorb thought more readily from women than from their own sex. Women absorb thought more readily from men than from their own sex. Men are more easily ruled by women than by men. Women are more easily ruled by men. Women sway men through their unconscious mesmeric control. Men so swayed and governed may not know it
If you are a man, bent on certain undertakings and you find amusement in your leisure hours with a woman in little or no sympathy with your aims and you become attached to her and find her often in your thought, you will thereby lose a great amount of force which would otherwise have gone to aid your project. You may find yourself at times unaccountably discouraged and in no proper mental frame for pushing things. Or you may find yourself regarding your purpose with indifference. You will lack that flow of calm, steady enthusiasm which makes success certain.
What is the matter? This: You have absorbed of that woman’s mind. You are thinking her thought of indifference or incredulity as to your aim. If you think it you will act it. You have in your mind grafted a partof her inferior mind. You have so made her a part of yourself. You are then to an extent ruled by her, though she may not know it.
She may be agreeable and fascinating. Time passes rapidly in her company. There is in her for you a peculiar charm. You do not for the time care though you find she is not in accord with your deepest convictions. You brush quickly away the momentary pang and disappointment as you find her at times trifling and flippant regarding what you hold most deeply in belief and respect.
If it be the woman who has the superior mind (i. e., the greatest mental force) and she become similarly entangled and charmed with an inferior
The charm under these circumstances lasts but for a season. With closer acquaintance it vanishes for one or the other, sometimes fortunately for both. But ere it has gone, the material marriage of the world may in name and form only have united them. Then comes the long years for one or the other or both of disappointment, for such marriage is in the highest sense no marriage at all.
Here we see the force and application of the Apostolic admonition ” Be ye not unequally yoked together.”
No single man or single woman, who has any real belief and trust in the Infinite and Supreme mind will ever be led astray in this matter. They will be guarded. It is Humanity’s recklessly rushing forward in life without asking for counsel a guidance of the Infinite Wisdom that causes all its troubles.
Mesmerism or ” hypnotism” is but oue form of mental tyranny. In the public exhibition the operator may gain that control over another that even his body is moved and controlled by the operator’s thought. In other words the person mesmerized allows unconsciously his own mind to be displaced, cut off from control of its body while the operator’s thought uses his body as if it were his (the mesmerizer’s) own.
How the mesmerizer does this even he cannot fully explain. He has found that by placing his mind in a certain attitude toward another of certain temperament, he can control that other’s mind. Sometimes, he commences this process by fixing subject’s attention on some material object—say a coin in the palm of his hand. On such coin the subject’s mind may become concentrated and is then less positive or antagonistic to the other’s will. Meanwhile the operator’s mind is in the attitude of silently thinking “must” to the other. He is saying in thought to the other, ” You must do this or that” or “you must think yourself in this or that situation. Your arm is rigid. Your leg is immovable. Tou cannot stir a step.”
As a person is made to think so will he act. The subject is made to think completely the operator’s thought. That thought takes complete possession of him or her and is then acted out physically.
The mesmerizer finds he cannot do this with everyone. Why I Because if you have made up your mind thoroughly and are determined that your mind shall not be so ruled by another you will not be.
The same mood of mind on your part will prevent you from being influenced and controlled by those about you in your daily life, where the process of control of mind over mind is continually going on.
A mind having the use of a body can be controlled, and its body to an extent used by a mind without a body. This phase of mental action of mind on mind goes now by the name of ” mediumship.” The mind not having the use of a physical body may be ignorant, shallow, silly and pretentious. It may lie. It may, in using the other person’s organ of speech, assert itself falsely as some famous character of ancient or modern times. It may be of any shade of character and motive. If weak and erring, it will probably be attracted to and use the organization of some mortal weak and erring as itself.
This form of action of mind on mind can under certain conditions be a means of great good. It is as used to-day productive of much evil as are all new developments of force on this planet until better understood.
No person can without great injury give themselves up passively to the mental control or influence of all and any manner of mind whether that mind use a physical body or be without one.
These forms of mental control known as ” mediumship ” and ” mesmerism ” are but a small part of the operation of this law. Minds are all the time acting upon and controlling other minds or being controlled all through society.
Distance of bodies apart has little effect on these mental forces. Given a previous close companionship and some person’s mind whose body is a thousand miles away may act on yours for good or ill, until its power is weakened or diverted by the action of some other mind.
You may be to an extent placed unconsciously more or less under the power of another person’s mind, and that person may put the power of his or her thought on you, and may or may not be ignorant of the method of throwing their mind on yours.
If such person has a strong and incessant desire that you act in accordance with his or her wishes, and you are much in sympathy and association with him or her and not positively antagonistic to such wish, you are very liable to act in accordance with it, and at the same time think that you so act entirely of your own accord and of your best judgment.
In such case you may possess the stronger mind and more positive will. But ignorant of this law, ignorant of the fact that mind so works on mind separate from any physical effort, ignorant of the fact that whether physically near or apart, that other mind still works on yours, you are taken at great disadvantage, for you have still this unseen, unknown and subtle force of the others thought and desire ever working on you and you never dream of the necessity of resisting it. For asleep as it were, you may come eventually into a state of complete subjection to that person.
The weaker mind may then rule the stronger because the stronger blindly allows itself to be bound by these mental chains.
This tyranny is going on everywhere. Husband so rules it over wife or vice versa. Sister wields it over sister and brother over brother. The one you think your best friend may carry in his mind this strong desire to sway you in some way to his or her purpose and yet be blind to its utter selfishness. But blind or not, the force so put out from that mind will work its results unless you know something of this law and make yourself positive to it.
The evil for you in such case does not stop with mere subjection. As this action goes on you will have grafted on your mind the turbulent moods of the other, their beliefs in error and some form of physical weakness or disease will result of it. Because as so ruled you live in that person’s current of thought and that current is not a healthy one. You are swayed and your life turned from its proper direction, not only by the other person’s mind but by the force also of their unseen following of mind.
You may in such case think your aspirations to be ” whims ” or ” idle notions ” and to be impossible for you to realize. You may doubt your own powers when you should believe in them. Because belief in a power is a Demand for it and the Demand in time will bring more of it. Under such influence you may pine and worry in a life of inaction, because of absorbing so much of another’s trifling and purposeless life and thought. You, your real self is by this unconscious mesmeric process thrust aside and an inferior life substituted for your own.
You may also in such case act out the other person’s moods, tempers and whims exactly as in the public demonstration of mesmerism the subject acts out such mood as the mesmerist may choose to throw upon him.
If a man fall upon you without intent and knock you in the gutter, may not the injury to you be as great as if he did so wilfully? So works this power of mind as put out and received from one mind to another all the world over. The mother may throw it on the child. The child may throw it on the mother.
The mother from the child’s infancy upward may have at heart this unspoken desire: “I want my child as to occupation or aim in life to be what I wish ; I do not want it to go in this or that path in life.”
But the child’s real self or spirit may be as to inclinations and tastes totally at variance with the mother. In its earlier years it may outwardly act the mother’s thought, having absorbed so much of it. But as it gains more experience, its own individuality may more and more assert itself. It wants to travel a different path, to live its own life, to be its own being. The mother resists. The child may rebel and then there is open war. Or it may outwardly conform to the mother’s wishes in a passive mechanical fashion and become eventually neither one thing nor the other.”
If both mother and child have strong wills, the result may be the death of the child’s body. Its spirit thwarted, in all its inclinations, frets the body, wears it out and breaks at last the chord which unites body and spirit.
As a parent you do not and cannot form any other person’s life or being, no matter what may be the tie of relationship between you. You can to an extent protect and guard it during a certain period of its earlier physical existence, but the time must come, when the spirit with a new body must have its own way, get its own experience, be the path or method what it may, and if it is your ” influence ” and that alone that keeps it in any certain path of life, you have but temporarily enslaved another mind. You are controlling it after your own fashion. It is but a mental puppet you are working. You are retarding the real growth of that mind, and when your influence is removed, it will no longer live the life you have made it seem to live.
To-day there are thousands on thousands of such mesmerized children—it may be added of all ages. They are spirits who have never sundered a link of the mental tyranny unconsciously placed on them by the parents and so they go on believing as the parents believed, erring as the parents erred, suffering in consequence as the parents suffered and in pain and agony losing at last another physical body as the parents lost theirs.
Demand to be free from this tyranny and ultimately you will be. You will come to know more of these laws. Your spirit will feel and know when there is danger of being so tied to and led by another.
If you are in a strange city and have any particular business aim in view keep much to yourself. If while there you go and live in a private family and you are by nature sympathetic and what is termed ” susceptible,” you are liable to be mesmerized and to an extent controlled by that family. If being in a sense a temporary member of such family, you become interested in its people, if you get into their cares and lives and troubles as acquaintance and association unfolds and reveals them to you, you may have, unconscious to yourself, too much of their mind on you. You will then be thinking of and carrying their cares and troubles. If you do you take just so much force or thought out of your own business. You cannot well carry two loads at once. Thousands of plans and business projects are seriously crippled or ruined from this cause. If we do not well guard our sympathy but let it go out freely whenever it is called upon we fritter it away on hundreds and do little good to anyone.
Many a person is subject to certain mental tyrannies who would scarcely dare acknowledge it did they realize it. We are so overpowered at times by officials behind gratings and pigeon holes. We find ourselves in such cases hesitating or weak in asserting what after reflection shows to be for us right and reasonable. Similarly are we afraid at times and places to ask questions for fear of showing ignorance. And before, whom? People with whom, if better acquainted, we should not hold in the highest estimation. Some suffer and endure the little extortions and ” tricks of trade,” because of being afraid to protest or ” make a row ” over such matter. We may try and excuse ourselves on the ground that the matter is not worthy our serious attention. That is not in many cases the real reason. We are afraid of protesting for fear of the opinion of certain people. We are under their smaller minds. We fear being called ” stingy ” or ” mean ” over a matter of a few cents. But justice knows neither of large or small things in its dealings.
A servant in this way may rule an entire household. So soon as the mistress fears the servant— the cook possibly—fears to interfere with the servant—fears to assert her own authority in the kitchen lest said cook ” up and leaves,” then the mistress is under the servant’s mind and is dominated by it. This tyranny goes on in thousands of households. The mistress has then given way, become negative to the servant and is by one mesmeric method, ruled by that servant. It is not merely that one servant’s mind which acts on and rules the mistress. It is also a large following of mind attendant on the servant—invisible to the physical eye which assists in such ruling.
Many a business is ruled in like manner not by the reputed head or master, but some employee or assistant whose usefulness has made him indispensable and who while seeming to serve, really governs that business. In every shop, every store, every factory, every household, some particular mind rules, though possibly unaware itself of its power. If the reputed head has not the force to rule, some head behind it will. That business then is ” mesmerized” by another save the reputed head.
There is, however, much more reason for our bending to this tyranny than we may imagine. The supercilious official in his office is in his fortress. His room is charged and full of his dominating tyrannical thought as well as an unseen following of mind who are in accord with him and can act on another in accord with their dominating mood. Tou may go to such a place, tired, exhausted and therefore in a negative state of mind. You are in no mental condition to resist these influences—nay you are ignorant of their very existence and action on you. But they do act on you in such place. A mesmeric or spiritual power is there seeking to dominate you and you may retire, chagrined, baffled, snubbed and brow beaten. You get indignant when by yourself. You can readily tell friends of these troubles. But there, in presence of your tyrant you were really powerless to assert yourself, for you knew nothing possibly of the power arrayed against you.
This habit of mental subjection to the minds of others becomes so fixed with some that they are slaves to every one who assumes an air of authority with them. They are controlled even by the thought atmosphere of a place or room. They cringe before anyone in a little temporary authority.
Never cringe or feel yourself abased before anyone. If you do you draw on you the slavish current of fear and abject humiliation. You can admire another’s talent. You may respect it. You may rightfully desire to emulate it (not borrow of it).
By such desire or demand you will draw to you such shade or quality of such talent as belongs to you.
You can be and are often mesmerized and controlled by a current of thought as by an individual. Or the individual who in some way discourages you may be but the channel for the conveyance of this thought to you.
The cringing thought, the fear of something, of poverty or sickness as put out by millions of minds on the one hand, and the tyrannical dominating thought which the same order of slavish mind may put out when it can tyrannize, all unite to form a vast volume or current of thought. Open your mind in the least to it and it rushes upon you like a torrent, overwhelms you, forces you for a time to see only the dark side, only poverty, on/ failure, only people all about you who never will under any circumstances assist you when you show a disposition to assist yourself.
All this would be very discouraging. But all these evil or immature forces are as nothing when compared with the Supreme or Overruling Power. They cannot endure when once you begin to open your mind to that Greater Power
It is natural for this question to occur to some on reading the preceding, ” In view of the dangers of intimate association, who should be my associates? How am I to judge in choosing them? From what you say here, it looks as if to live aright was to live something like a hermit. Or are we to measure every man and woman we meet or to whom we are attracted, and still regard them with distrust for fear they may injure us?
We answer first that there Is the very best result coming to us through knowledge of the fact that mind influences and flows into other mind. If we can be influenced for evil, so we can for good. There is, as we often say (and it bears oft repetition), a mind above all individual or human mind—the Supreme Mind and Infinite Force.
If through silent prayer or demand we seek to come into association and company with that Infinite Mind, we shall receive it. We shall be swayed and influenced by it. We might even say we shall be ” mesmerized ” or controlled by it. We can have no objection to such control when it is all for our growing happiness—when our mind becomes clearer and clearer, our bodies stronger, and every faculty more vigorous, keen and alert.
We need to place our association and intimacy with the Infinite Mind anove all individual association. Then we are led by Supreme Wisdom to the very best individual association. Then are we by the Infinite Mind given judgment, keenness and intuition which immediately tells us who is best for such association.
When you put yourself in the influence and thought current of the Supreme Power, you cannot long be influenced, controlled or dominated by any human mind or minds. You will grow beyond their reach. God cannot be dominated by man or anything material. Then the closer is your alliance with the Supreme, the more will you have and use of the powers and qualities of the Supreme.
To be ” one with God ” or the Supreme Power takes nothing from your individuality. It increases it.
The tendency with us all is to think we must work out or study out some complicated and elaborate process for our “salvation.” We must, according to the reason and teaching of our material minds, be ever on the look-out for dangers, snares and pit-falls—we must be rigid in observances—we must ever be in fear and trembling over something.
This is man’s teaching—not God’s. That Power needs only an infinite trust from us, and it will do all the rest.
A Demand.
We ask here—we Demand to come nearer and nearer the Infinite Mind—to feel more and more sure of its reality—to have proof of its reality—to learn that we can trust it to any extent.
We demand to be cleared of all doubt in this matter. We ask that this Infinite Mind be taken more and more into our daily companionship—that we walk with it as with a friend—that we know in the most literal and practical sense that we are dealing with a Grand Reality, which involves and assists in the minutest details of our every-day life as much as it does in controlling worlds and systems of worlds. We ask to feel with this Power that sense of rest and security from all harm—security from want, from sickness, from all the ills, which men dread so that we may say in the fullest belief: ” Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
Spells, Or The Law Of Change
Copyright, 1890, by F. J. Needham
A condition of mind can be brought on you resulting to you in good or ill, sickness or health, or poverty or wealth, by the action, conscious or unconscious of other minds about you, and also through the thought suggested you by objects or scenes about you.
This is the secret of what in former times was called the ” spell.” Through the action of thought a state of mind can be brought on any person which may make them act conformably to such thought.
The “spell” is a matter of every day occurrence in some form or other. To remain for an hour in sight of grand scenery casts on the mind a “spell” of pleasurable thought. To remain for an hour in a vault surrounded by coffins and skeletons would, through the associations connected with such objects, cast on you a ” spell” of gloom. To live for days and weeks in a family, all of whose members hated you or were prejudiced against you, would most likely cast on you a “spell” of depression and unpleasant sensation. To live in a family whose members were always sending you warm and friendly thought would place a “spell” of pleasurable sensation.
If when sick you are obliged to remain for days and possibly weeks in the same room, your mind will become weary of seeing continually the same objects in it. Not only is the mind wearied at sight of these objects, but the sight of each one, from day to day, will suggest the same train of thoughts, which also soon become wearisome. Mind weariness from this or any other cause has a natural drift towards despondency. Matters present and future then assume their darkest aspect and the darkest side of every possibility comes uppermost. Despondent thought, as has been many times repeated, is force used to tear the body down instead of building it up.
This action and condition of thought is one form of the “spell.” This is quickest broken by a change to another place and another room.
For this reason “change of scene ” is frequently recommended to the invalid. Change of scene and locality mean not only a change of objects seen of the eye, but a change also in thought, as new ideas and possibly a new condition of mind comes through seeing the new set of objects. The new condition of mind will ” break the spell.”
There is a much closer connection between things tangible and seen of the eye and things intangible than is generally imagined. In other words, there is a close connection between things material and things spiritual.
The force or element we call “thought” is all pervading, and takes innumerable varieties of expression. A tree is an expression of thought as well as a man, and so are all what we call inanimate objects.
There is not a thoroughly dead or inanimate thing in the universe. But there are countless shades of life or animation. Many things seem dead to us, like a bone or a stone; but there is a life or force which has built that bone or stone into its present condition, and that same life or force, after that bone or stone has served a certain purpose, will take it to pieces again and build its elements into other forms. The unbuilding process we call decomposition. It matters not if the stone change or rid itself of but one atom in a thousand years. Time is nothing in the working of Nature’s forces. Decomposition, then, is a proof of the existence of all-pervading and ever-working life or force. Otherwise, the stone or bone would remain without change through all Eternity. Incessant change is ever going on in boundless universe, and is an inevitable accompaniment of all life; and the greater the life and force in you the more rapid and varied will be the changes.
Everything from a stone to a human being sends out to you as you look upon it a certain amount of force, afflicting you beneficially or injuriously according to the quantity of life or animation it possesses.
Take any article of furniture, a chair, or bedstead for instance. It contains not only the thought of those who first planned and moulded it in its construction, but it is also permeated with the thought and varying moods of all who have sat on it or slept in it. So also are the walls and every article of furniture in any room permeated with the thought of those who have dwelt in it, and if it has been long lived in by people whose lives were narrow, whose occupation varied little from year to year, whose moods were dismal and cheerless, the walls and furniture will be saturated with this gloomy and sickly order of thought.
If you are very sensitive and stay in such a room but for a single day, you will feel in some way the depressing effect of such thought, unless you keep very positive to it, and to keep sufficiently positive for twenty-four hours at a time to resist it would be very difficult. If you are in any degree weak or ailing you are then most negative or open to the nearest thought element about you and will be affected by it, in addition to the wearying mental effect first spoken of, of any object kept constantly before the eyes.
It is injurious, then, to be sick or even wearied in a room where other people have been sick or where they have died. Because in thought element all the misery and depression not only of the sick and dying but of such as gathered there and sympathized with the patient will be still left in that room, and this is a powerful unseen agent for acting injuriously on the living.
Those ” simple savages ” who after a death burn not only the habitation but every article used by the deceased when alive, may have known more of Nature’s injurious and beneficial forces than we. Living more natural lives they unconsciously acted according to the law, even as animals in their wild and natural state do, thereby escaping many of the pains and discomforts of the artificial life we have made both for ourselves and the animals we domesticate.
People who have some purpose in life, who travel a great deal, who are ever on the move and in contact with different persons and places, have, you will notice, more vitality, more energy, and physically preserve a certain freshness not evident with those who follow year after year an unvarying round of occupation, carrying them day after day to one certain locality, or office, or desk, or workman’s bench just as a pendulum oscillates from side to side.
These last look older at forty than the active, changing person does at sixty, because their unvarying lives, the daily presence and sight of the same objects at their dwellings or places of business, contact with the same individual or individuals at meals and in leisure moments, and interchange ot about the same thoughts year in and year out, weave about them an invisible web composed of strands or filaments of the same unvarying thought, and this web literally strengthens from year to year exactly as strand after strand of wire laid together forms at last the massive bridge-supporting cable. But the unseen cable so made binds people more and more firmly to the same place, the same occupation and the same unvarying set of habits. It makes them dislike more and more even the thought of any change. It is another form of the ” spell” which they have woven for themselves. It is the sure result of always keeping unchanged your state of mind.
We do not live on bread or meat alone. We live also largely on ideas. The person ever planning and moving new enterprises, the person who throws his force into beneficial public movements, and who from either of these causes is led iuto a varied and ever changing contact with individuals, receives and puts out a far greater variety of thought than the man who lives continually in a nutshell.
There is a time and use for retirement and solitude. There is a time and use for contact with the world. It is desirable to establish the golden mean between the two.
The person whose range of life and movement is narrow, who is doing nearly the same thing and seeing nearly the same things and people from year to year has a tendency to feed mostly on the same old set of thoughts and ideas. Out of himself he generates the same order of old, stale idea and expression. Start him in a certain train of idea or association and he tells you time after time the same old story, forgetting how many times he has told it you before. He has about the same forms of expression for every occurrence and every hour of the day. He regards the world and things generally as about worn out. Lacking in life and variety of thought himself, he regards everything else as lacking in life and variety. For life is to us exactly as we see it through the spectacles we so often unconsciously make to look at it. It our mental spectacles through living unaware in violation of the Law, are blurred, cracked, discolored and dim, the whole world will to us seem blurred, discolored and dull in hue.
Such a person ” ages,” as we term it, very rapidly. Because his physical body is as much an expression of his daily and prevailing order of thought as the apple is an expression or part ot the apple tree. Feeding and living in the same set of ideas continually is analagous to feeding continually on a most limited variety of food. Both bring on disease. In some of the English prisons what are called ” oat meal sores ” afflict the prisoners through being fed so much on that single article.
But the average mental condition shows itself on the body far more rapidly than any result from material diet. It is feeding on the same stale set of ideas, aided by living continually amid^the same physical surroundings and with the same individuals who are likewise subsisting mentally on the same stale mental diet that whitens the hair, stoops the shoulders, wrinkles the face and causes shrinkage of tissues and bodily inertia and weakness. Our land is full of people who at forty-five through this cause look older than others of sixty-five. It is full also of young men and women in the physical sense, who through their poverty of idea, and lack of real life, will be old, worn and haggard within twenty years. They are in substance as much old fogies, ” grannies ” .and ” daddies ” now as are those they ridicule as such. They are traveling in the same narrow rut of idea. Slang phrases and wornout chaff borrowed from others constitute four-fifths of their talk and probably five-sixths of their thought.
To this class also belong those deemed of a higher order intellectually, or of more ” culture,” but whose thought after all is very largely a repetition of what they have heard or read, who look up to and idolize some human authority, living or dead, and who have really very few ideas of their own, not possibly because new ideas occasionally do not suggest themselves to them, but who have not the courage to secretly entertain and familiarize themselves with such ideas. They smother them. They succeed at last in killing them and putting out the little light endeavoring to shine on them. When you destroy or so kill out of yourself the capacity for truthful idea to act upon you, you are killing also by degrees your body. You are cutting off the only source of new life for the body.
Of this order of minds the only claim to youth lies in that physical freshness belonging to the earlier growth and life of the body, which, owing to their mental condition, will fade in twenty years as surely as the absence of sunshine and water will soon wither the young and growing plant.
Such are now unconsciously weaving for themselves the web and ” spell” of ” age” and decay.
A constant renewal of physical life lies only in a never-ceasing change of mental conditions. New ideas beget newer and fresher views of life. There are millions on millions of truthful, new ideas to come to us, so that we keep the mind in the proper state to receive them. We have not to plod and ” study hard ” to receive them. There is no ” hard study” in the kingdom of God or the kingdom of infinite good. If in the line of communication with that kingdom we will ever receive new thought, as the plant receives the sunshine and air, and like the plant just as much as suffices to give us life for the day and the hour. Every mind is now, or is to be at some period of its existence (not possibly in this present physical existence), a fountain for the reception of such new idea. But such new thought cannot come from books or from the minds of others. These may for a time serve to start you on the road, or as temporary props or helps. But if you depend altogether on books or people for new thought, you are living on borrowed life. You, in so doing, keep your own mind closed to the inflowing of the element which its own individual needs call for, and which is for it alone and no other mind. Tou must draw your own sustenance from the infinite reservoir of truthful thought. Until you do you are not a ” well of water springing up into everlasting life,” nor have you reached the initial point of that real and perfected existence which feels at home anywhere in the universe and can draw its self-sustaining life at any place in the universe.
No agency fetters more or does more harm to both mind and body as a very close and constant association with a mind or minds inferior to yours in tastes, in refinement, in breadth of views and quality of motive.
Such order of mind ever near you and with which you are much in sympathy, will infuse into yours more or less of its grosser desire or taste. It will blind you more or less to higher and healthier views and modes of life. You will, unconscious to yourself, live and act out much of that mind’s life. You will be peevish or cynical or mean in your dealings, when it is not the real you that is so thinking or acting, but the constant flow to you and reception by you of the grosser force or element of that mind, which you thus act out. You become, then, literally a part of the other and inferior mind. This will surely affect the body, which in its material substance becomes a material expression of that lower mind grafted on yours. Unless you sunder this mental tie, the inferior graft may outgrow the original tree. You will become physically inert, lifeless, and be affected with some form of disease, because you are then giving that inferior graft your own thought or force. It can appropriate but a small part of that force, but from what it can, it draws its own stinted life. You are then giving of your gold and getting base metal in return. You are then giving of your life and getting a slow and living death in return. For the mind most clear and active in thought, considerate, wise and prudent, broadly but not recklessly benevolent in action, does give to others, and especially to those with whom it is in close sympathy, life and vigor, both of mind and
Talking openly has very little to do with the good or ill results coming of minds in close association and sympathy. It is not what people talk. It is what people think of each other that most affects them. A person always near you and ever thinking of you with dissatisfaction or peevishness, or putting out the thought of opposition to your aims and wishes, will eventually make you feel unpleasantly, be his or her words ever so fair. Such a person under these circumstances will at last injure you in mind and body. That person is throwing a ” spell” on you.
On the contrary, the near presence of a person pleasantly disposed toward you and who wishes to bring you pleasure or benefit without ” an axe to grind,” will give you a feeling of rest and quiet, though such person may not say a word for hours. These different sensations are among the many proofs that thought is a literal element, in some way ever affecting us, and ever bringing results as it comes to us from others or is sent by us to others. In this last case the “spell” may be beneficial to you.
There is but one way of breaking the evil spell caused by continual association with the inferior mind or minds, which spell will surely prove fatal if continued in, and which is proving fatal to thousands to-day. That method is an entire separation from such mind or minds.
Such sundering of these injurious mental ties cannot, however, in every case be abrupt, or evils may result as great as those it is sought to avoid. If a graft, however injurious, be roughly torn from the tree, the tree also is injured, and perhaps destroyed. If your life has been one of long association with a lower mind, and both of you have, as previously stated, grown into a common life and you are suddenly torn apart, the shock may prove to you injurious.
If one subsists for a long time on an injurious food, still a certain kind of life is derived from that food, and as the system has become accustomed to it, it cannot be immediately replaced by a healthier food. The system at first may not be able thoroughly to assimilate and digest such healthier food. There is a similar action and result as regards our mental diet.
Once convinced of the evil resulting to you from any close, inferior association, and you will first assume, in mind, that such tie must be sundered. Assume this persistently, and half the work is done. That changed state of mind is the force then always working to free you, as your former state of mind, which endured, suffered and submitted internally, was the force which bound you more and more firmly. The separation is now in your changed mental attitude simply a work of time. You have little to do, save wait and take advantage of opportunities as they ofier themselves. You have, in fact, committed yourself to another current of thought, and the forces coming of your changed mental condition and interior resolve are the spiritual correspondence of a great river to whose current you have committed yourself, and which is slowly bearing you away from your former enslaved condition. This is not a figurative illustration, change permanently a state of mind in which you have been for years; change unwilling submission into a hidden resolve no longer to submit; change endurance of near associations into a permanent and hidden resolve that you will separate from such associations ; change that enforced content called “resignation to circumstances,” as, for instance, resignation to the presence of inferior, squalid and unpleasant material surroundings into that positive internal mental attitude, which in plain language says, ” I won’t put up with this any longer. My body may be obliged to submit, endure and suffer from these things temporarily, as it has done in the past, but in mind I will neither endure nor be resigned as I have been,” and you have placed yourself in the action of another power which will gradually bear you away from the old source of ill. 1
It is not so much what we do as what we think that brings results. By the force put out of what you permanently think are you carried as on a current to those results. You need do but very little until you see that the time and opportunity has come for doing. It would be poor judgment for a man floating on a log down the Mississippi to keep on splashing the water and thereby using up his strength for the sake of ” doing something.” He had better remain quiet and take the chances of being picked up by a passing boat or steamer or wait until he sees an opportunity of catching on to some near projecting headland. Then such strength as he may have been able to reserve may be used to some purpose. When you are in the right current of thought you need in similar manner to reserve your strength until you meet the opportunity that current will bring you, as many projects are injured through unwise and overmuch doing as by too little. If you don’t know what to do, wait. When you wait till your hurry is over you may see what really needs to be done.
Above all things, in any emergency or experience such as is suggested here, demand daily and hourly in silent thought the aid of a Higher Wisdom and Divine Power. There must come response to such demand. I do not assume to lay down a certain unbending rule to govern every individual life. Every individual life when it places itself in the line of communication with its Higher Wisdom through a persistent mental attitude, asking silently for such wisdom, will make its own methods for riddance of the ills from which it desires to free itself, and such methods belong to it individually, and cannot safely be copied and used by any one else. The Spirit of Infinite Good does not reveal itself alike to any two persons. The besetting error of our time is to copy or imitate other people’s methods in everything, or to become blindly obedient to a book or the mind that wrote a book. Your mind, ever asking for Wisdom and Truth, is a power beyond any book, and is now or is to be the reservoir into which ideas will flow different from those contained in any book. The power which generates and suggests new ideas is ever coming to the world. The book does not advance after it is written. But the mind which put ideas in that book may be ever going ahead and finding new meanings and broader interpretations for what it wrote years before. If you wish to find out regarding the latest developments in chemistry or any material science, you do not have recourse to the books written a hundred years ago about such matters. You get the latest works on these subjects, and if possible you will go farther and get access to those now making such sciences their special studies, knowing that they may know something regarding them never yet written.
So even now in your own kingdom of mind there may be ideas and truths beyond any ever written, which you reject as “mere imaginings,” or dare not assert either by word or act for fear of ridicule or opposition.
A book, like Paul, may plant new ideas in your mind; an individual like Apollos ” may water” such idea, but the awakened God in yourself can only give the increase.
Complete isolation from their kind and loneliness is one terrible fear besetting some who live in associations which are really not congenial to them, but from which they dare not separate for fear of that loneliness. Try not to fear this. Permanent solitude is not in the order of Nature for anyone. Minds alike in thought were made to mingle and give each other pleasure. It is often the clinging to that order of association which, after all, only wearies you, and which may oblige you often to play an enforced part to meet such association, that forms the barrier keeping you from your real companions. So long as (in mind) you accept the lower association, so long are you keeping the better away and sending it farther from you. So soon as you reject the lower (in mind), so soon do you set in motion the force to bring the better to you.
Look Forward
Copyright, 1890, by F. J. Needham
The tendency with many people after they are a little “advanced in years ” is to look backward and with regret. The “looking ” should be the other way—forward. If you want to go backward in every sense, mental and physical, keep on cultivating the mood of living regretfully in your past life.
It is one chief characteristic of the material mind to hold tenaciously to the past. It likes to recall the past and mourn over it. The material mind has a never-ending series of solemn amusement, in recalling past joys, and feeling sad because they are never to come again.
But the real self, the spirit, cares relatively little for its past. It courts change. It expects to be a different individual in thought a year hence from what it is to-day. It is willing a thousand years hence to forget who or what it is to-day, for it knows that this intense desire to remember itself fo: what it has been, retards its advance toward greater power and greater pleasure. What care you for what you were a thousand or five thousand years ago 1 Yet then you were then something, and something iar less than what you are are today. Curiosity you may answer to know what you were. Yes, but is curiosity worth gratifying, if for such gratification you must pay the price of dragging after you a hundred corpses of your dead selves. Those selves, those existences, have done their work for you. In doing that work they brought you possibly more pain than pleasure. Do you want ever to bear with you the memory and burthen of that pain? Especially when such burthen brings more pain and deprives you of pleasure. It is like the bird that should insist on carrying with it always the shell from which it was hatched. If you have a sad remembrance fling it oft. If you can’t fling it off, demand of the Supreme Power aid to help you do so, and such aid will come. If you want to grow old, feeble, gray and withered, quickly go and live in your past, and regret your youth. Go and revisit places and houses where you lived twenty, thirty, forty years ago; call back the dead; mourn over them; live in remembrance over the joys you had there, and say they are gone and fled and will never come again.
In so doing you are fastening dead selves all over you. If we came into another physical life with the memory of the last one, we should come into the world physically as miniature, decrepit, grizzled old men and women. Youth physically is fresh and blooming, because it packs no past sad material remembrances with it. A girl is beautiful because her spirit has flung off the past sad remembrance of its previous life, and has therefore a chance for a period to assert itself. A woman commences to ” age” when she commences to load up with regrets over a past but twenty years gone.
Your spirit demands for the body it uses grace, agility of movement and personal beauty, for it is made in the “image of God,” and the infinite mind and life, beauty, grace and agility are the characteristics of that mind. In that phase of existence we called childhood and youth, the spirit has the chance to assert its desire for beauty and agility, because it has not as yet loaded up with false beliefs and regrets.
The liveliness, sprightliness and untiring playfulness of the boy or girl of ten or twelve, is due to the gladness of spirit relieved of the burthen that is carried in a past existence. That burden was one of thoughts improfitable to carry. You would physically have the agility you had at fifteen could you fling off the burthen of sad remembrance and belief in error that you have been loading up with these twenty or thirty years past.
You can commence the unloading process now, by resolving, with the aid of the Supreme Power, to fling off the remembrance of everything in the past that has annoyed you, everything you regret, everything you have mourned over.
God never mourns or regrets.
You as a spirit are made in His image. God is eternal life, joy and serenity. The more of these characteristics you reflect the nearer are you to the Infinite Spirit of Good.
Have you buried your dearest on earth? You do them no good by your sad thoughts concerning them. You place a bar twixt their spirit and yours in thinking of them as “lost.” You may in so doing not only increase and encourage in them a sad mental condition, but bring their gloomy mental condition on yourself, as many do in grieving. The greatest good we can do them is to think of them as alive like ourselves, and to fling their graves, tombstones, coffins, shrouds and ghastliness out of our minds. If we cannot do so of ourselves, let us demand help of the Supreme Power to do it. We often make those who have lost their bodies feel dead when we think of them as such. If we do this they will throw back their thoughts of deadness on us.
Keep out of graveyards. It may seem to some that I am cold and unfeeling to say thus, but the truth, as it presents itself to me, says that the graveyard where your loved ones do not lie is spiritually a most unhealthy place to visit. They are full of the thought of regret, death and decay. When you visit them you incorporate such thought into yourself. It is hostile and killing to youth, vigor, elasticity, cheerfulness and life.
Our graveyards are full of lies. We place a stone over the cast-ofi body of a friend. We place on that stone the word ” died.” That is not true. Your friend is not dead. It is only the body he used that lies there. But that grave is planted in your memory, and your friend in your mind lies in it. Do what we will, try to believe what we may of the eternal prolongation of life and the impossibility of anything like death in the universe, we cannot help making for ourselves when we think of that grave or revisit it, an image of that friend as dead and decaying in his or her coffin. This image we fasten in our minds, and in so doing we fasten on ourselves the thought of gloom, death and decay. The thoughts of decay and death are things and forces. When we keep them so much in mind we add elements of decay to the body.
We need as much as possible to fasten our thought on life and increasing life—life greater in its activity than any we have ever realized. That is not gained by looking backward. Look forward.
Every regret, every mournful thought, takes so much out of your life. It is force used to pile on more misery. It is force used to strengthen the habit of regretting. It is force used to make the mind color everything with a tinge of sadness, and the longer you use force in this way the darker will grow the tinge.
Also, when we are ever going back in memory to the past and living in it in preference to the present, we are bringing back on ourselves the old moods of mind and mental conditions belonging to that past. This feeling constantly indulged in will bring on some form of physical ailment. The ailment belongs to a condition of mind we should be done with forever. If we are looking forward we shall shake it off and be better in health than ever. If the predominant mood of our minds is that of looking backward, the ultimate result will be serious to the body.
In the world’s business your active, enterprising, pushing man of affairs spends little time in sad reminiscence. If he did his business would suffer. His thought is forward. That thought is the real force which pushes his business forward. If he spent it in “sad memories ” of the past his business would go backward. He works his success (so far as he does really succeed) by this spiritual law, though he may not know it.
You may be saying: ” I have failed in life and shall always be a failure.” That is because you are ever looking back, living in your failure and thereby bringing to you more failure. Reverse this attitude of mind; work it the other way and live in future success.
Why do you say : ” I am always sick? ” Because you are looking back, living in your past ailments and thereby bringing more on you.
I have heard the expression used: ” When the earth was young.” As if this planet was now in its dotage and going to decay! In the sense of freshness, increase of life, refinement and purer in every form of life, be that of man, animal, vegetable, and farther on, this earth never was so young as to-day. Youth is life, growing and increasing in beauty and power. It is not the cruder commencement of life.
The so-called ” barren rock ” contains elements which will help form the future tree and flower. Is that part of the rock which enters into tree and flower increasing or decreasing in life ! It changes only into a higher and more beautiful expression of life. So do we from age to age. The rock crumbles that it may live in this higher form. The old mind must crumble and pass away to give place to the new, and make of us the newer spiritual being. As the old mind crumbles so will the old body, for the spiritual change must be accompanied by the physical change. But if you live in the understanding and spirit of this law you need not lose a physical body, but have one ever changing for the better. As you live in spiritual belief, as the old life goes out the new comes in.
Nothing in Nature—nothing in the Universe is at a standstill. Nothing goes backward. A gigantic incomprehensible Force and Wisdom moves all things forward toward greater and higher powers and possibilities. You are included in and are a part of this Force. There is of you in embryo the power of preventing the physical body your spirit uses from decaying, and the power also of using it in ways which even the fiction of to-day would discard as too wild for the pages of the novel.
For your spirit youth and ever growing youth is an eternal heritage. If your body has ” aged” that is no sign that your spirit has ” aged.” The spirit cannot grow old in the material sense, no more than the sunlight can grow old. If your body has ” aged ” it is because that body has become the material likeness and expression of a false self or “shell” which has formed on your spirit. That false self is made up of thoughts prevalent around from an early physical age and those thoughts are untrue thoughts. A large proportion of that thought is regret. Regret is an inverted force—a turning of the mind to look backward when its natural and healthy state is to look forward, and live in the joys that are certain to come when we do look forward.
In the new life to come to our race, when we have learned to be ever looking forward to the greater joys to come and cease to look backward and drag the dead past with us, men and women are to have bodies far more beautiful and graceful than those of to-day.
Because their bodies will image or reflect their thoughts, and their thoughts will ever be fixed on what is beautiful and symmetrical. They will know that what is to come and what is in store for them out of the richness of the Infinite Mind must exceed anything they have realized in the past.
To-day with the great majority of people their attitude of mind is directly the reverse. Owing to the little trust that they have in that Power the theologian calls “God,” they are ever in their minds saying: “There are no joys to come for us like our past joys. Our youth has fled. Our future on earth is tame and dull. It is as dust and ashes.”
The truth that life does not end with the death of the body makes slow progress in fixing itself firmly in our minds. The kind of life a man may be living here at seventy does not end in the grave. It continues straight on.
The “old man,” as we call him here, wakes up in the other side of life after losing his body an old man still. If he is one of those old men who have “outlived their day and generation,” who live in their physical past and look back on it with regret— who have become” too old to learn,” and think they have got through with it all, he will be just such an old man in the world of spirit. There is no sudden transformation into youth on the death of a worn-out decrepit body. As the tree falls so does it lie for a period, even in the hereafter.
But in this state he cannot stay forever. He must grow not in age but youth. To do this it is necessary not only that he should leave the old body but the old material mind which made that body. His spirit throws oft that mind when he gains a new body (or is re-incarnated), and he throws it oft because he loses the recollection of all past sad memories and regrets.
The man should in mind be always the boy, the woman, the girl. You can as man or woman be always boy or girl in spirit without being silly or losing real dignity. You can have all the playfulness of youth with the wisdom of maturity. To have a clear powerful mind you need not be an owl.
There may be for a period a certain use for us in going back to our more recent past lives, and for a time living in them.
Sometimes we are pushed back temporarily into some old condition of mind, some old experience in order to make us more alive than ever to the rags and tatters of errors in belief still clinging to us.
This may come of revisiting places and people from whom we have long been separated. For a time during such visit old associations, the moods connected with them and possibly old habits we thought long since cast off, resume their sway. We may become for a time absorbed and swallowed up in the old life. We resume temporarily an old mind or mental condition that was formerly our permanent one in that place or association.
But after a little the new mind, the new self into which we have grown during the long absence, antagonizes the old. It feels aversion and disgust for the narrow life, the false beliefs and the dull, monotonous purposeless lives about it. It (the spirit) refuses to have anything to do with the old.
Then comes a conflict between our two minds, the old and the new, which may result in temporary physical sickness. Our old life or self rises as it were out of its grave and tries to fasten itself on the new and even rule the new. The new self rejects the corpse with horror. But through thus seeing the corpse, it sees also fragments of the old self which, unperceived, have all along been adhering to the new. We do not get rid of error in belief all at once, and often unconsciously retain shreds of such belief when we imagine ourselves entirely rid of them. These shreds are the remains of old thoughts and former mental conditions. Your new mind so awakened arises and pushes off what it finds left on it of the old. This pushing ofl is accompanied by physical disturbance, because your spirit puts all its force in rejecting these fragments of the former self, as you might put all your physical strength in pushing oft a snake.
Our old errors in belief must be so pushed oft before the new thoughts’which come in as the old goes out, can have full sway. If your spirit was contentedly and blindly carrying any scorpion of false belief, you would tumble into the pit eventually as so many are now doing.
When you live several years in any certain house or town or locality, you make a spiritual self belonging to that locality. Every house, tree, road or other object you have long been in the habit of seeing there, has a part of that self in thought attached to it. Every person who knows you there has in his or her mind the self you make there, and puts that self out when they meet you or talk of you.
If you had years before in that place, the reputation of being weak, or vacillating, or impractical, or intemperate, and you returned to the people who knew you as such, although you may have changed for the better, you are very liable iu their thought and recollection of you to have this old self pushed back on you, and as a result, you may for a period feel much like your former self.
You return to such place after a long absence. You have during that absence changed radically in belief. You bring with you a different mind. You are in reality a different person.
But the old ” you,” the old self of former years will rise from every familiar object to meet you. It will come out of houses formerly inhabited by your friends, though now tenanted by strangers; you will find it in the village church, the old schoolhouse, the very rails and fence posts familiar to you long years before. More than all it will come out of the recollection of people who only knew you for what you were, say twenty years before ; every such person strengthens with you this image of your former self. You talk with them on the plane of that previous life or self. For the time being you ignore yourself as it now thinks and believes; you put aside your newer self, not wishing to obtrude on your friends opinions, which to them may be unpleasant, or seem wild and visionary; you meet perhaps twenty-five or thirty people who know you only as your former self, and with all these you act out the old self, and repress the new. This for a time makes the old dead self very strong, but you cannot keep this up; you cannot warm the old corpse of yourself into life. If you try to— if you try to be and live your former self, you will become depressed mentally,and very likely sick physically ; you may find yourself going into moods of mind peculiar to your former life which you thought had gone forever; you may find yourself beset with physical ailment also peculiar to that period from which you had not suflered for years. Such ailments are not real. They are but the thoughts and wrong beliefs which your old ” you” is trying to fasten on you.
I visited recently a place from which I had been absent twenty-five years. I had spent there a portion of my physical youth, and had lived there with a mind or belief very different from which I entertain now.
I returned to find the place dead in more senses than one. The majority of my old acquaintances had passed away. Their remains lay in the graveyards. But I realized this deadness still more among my contemporaries who were said to be living. They had lost the spur and activity of their youthful ambition. They had resigned themselves to “growing old.” They lived mostly in the past, talked of the past ” good old times,” and compared the present and future unfavorably with the past. They were in mind about where I left them twenty-five years before, and about where I was in mind when I did leave them.
Drawn temporarily into their current of thought “for old acquaintance sake,” I talked with them of the past, and for Borne days lived in it. At every turn I met something animate or inanimate to bring back my past life to me.
Then I went to the graveyards, and in thought renewed acquaintance with those whose remains lay there. So I lived for days unconscious, that in these moods of sad reminiscence I was drawing to me elements of decay sadness.
First becoming very much depressed, I was next taken strangely sick, and became so weak I could hardly stand. I was continually in a nervous tremor and full of vague fears.
Why was this? Because in going back into my past life I had drawn on me my old mental conditions—my old mind—my own self of that period. But since that time I had grown a new mind—a new self, which thought and believed very differently from the old.
The new self into which I had grown since leaving that locality would not accept the old. It shook it off. It was the shaking off process that caused me the physical disturbance. There was a conflict between these two forces, one trying to get in, the other to keep it out. My body was the battle-ground between the two. No battle-ground is a serene place to live on when the battle is going on.
It was necessary in this case that I should look backward and live backward for a season to show me more clearly the evil of doing so. For no lesson can be really learned without an experience. It was not merely the evil of living backward in that particular locality that I came to see clearly. I saw also for the first time, where I had unconsciously been living in the past, and living backward in numberless ways and thereby unconsciously, using up force, which would have pushed me forward in every sense.
I understood, also, after passing through this process, why for weeks before visiting that place I had felt depressed, and experienced also a return o1 certain moods of mind I had not felt for years. It was because my spirit was already in that place and working through this change. The culminating point was reached when my material self touched that locality.
All changes are wrought out in spirit often before our material senses is in the least aware of them.
Let no one imagine that because I write of these Spiritual Laws that I am able to live fully in accordance with them. I am not above error or mistake. I tumble into pits occasionally, get oft the
Power comes of looking forward with hope—of expecting and demanding the better things to come. That is the law of the Infinite Mind, and when we follow it we live in that mind.
Nature buries its dead as quickly as possible and gets them out of sight. It is better, however, to say that Nature changes what it has no further use for into other forms of life. The live tree produces the new leaf with each return of spring. It will have nothing to do with its dead ones. It treasures up no withered rose leaves to bring back sad remembrance. When the tree itself ceases to produce leaf and blossom, it is changed into another form and enters into other forms of vegetation.
I do not mean to imply that we should try to banish all past remembrance. Banish only the sad part. Live as much as you please in whatever of your past that has given you healthy enjoyment. There are remembrances of woodland scenes, of fields of waving grain, of blue skies and whitecapped curling billows, and many another of Nature’s expressions as connected with your individual life, that can be recalled with pleasure and profit. These are not of the decaying past. These are full of life, freshness and beauty, and are of to-day.
But if with these any shade of sadness steals in, reject it instantly. Refuse to accept it. It is not a part of the cheerful life-giving remembrance. It is the cloud which if you give it the least chance will overshadow the whole and turn it all to gloom.
The science of happiness lies in controlling our thought and getting thought from sources of healthy life.
When your mind is diverted from possibly the long habit of thinking and living in the gloomy side of things and admitting gloomy thought, you will find to your surprise that the very place whose sight gave you pain will give you pleasure, because you have banished a certain unhealthy mental condition, into which before you allowed yourself to drift at sight of it. You can then revisit the localities connected with your past, remember and live only in the bright and lively portion of that past, and reject all thought about ” sad changes,” and ” those who have passed away, never to return, etc.”
I have proven this to myself.
Is there any use or sense in admitting things to have access to you which only pain and injure you? Does God commend any self-destroying, suicidal act? Grief does nothing but destroy the body.
Thought Currents
Copyright, 1890, by F. J. Needham
We need to be careful of what we think and talk. Because thought runs in currents as real as those of air and water. Of what we think and talk we attract to us a like current of thought. This acts on mind or body for good or ill.
If thought was visible to the physical eye we should see its currents flowing to and from people. We should see that persons similar in temperament, character and motive are in the same literal current of thought. We should see that the person in a despondent and angry mood was in the same current with others despondent or angry, and that each one in such moods serves as an additional battery or generator of such thought and is strengthening that particular current. We should see these forces working in similar manner and connecting the hopeful, courageous and cheerful, with all others hopeful, courageous and cheerful.
When you are in low spirits or ” blue ” you have acting on you the thought current coming from all others in low spirits. You are in oneness with the despondent order of thought. The mind is then sick. It can be cured, but a permanent cure cannot always come immediately when one has long been in the habit of opening the mind to this current of thought.
In attracting to us the current of any kind of evil, we become for a time one with evil. In the thought current of The Supreme Power for good we may become more and more as one with that power, or in Biblical phrase ” One with God.” That is the desirable thought current for us to attract.
If a group of people talk of any form of disease or suffering of death-bed scenes and dying agonies, if they cultivate this morbid taste for the unhealthy and ghastly, and it forms their staple topics of conversation, they bring in themselves a like current of thought full of images of sickness, suffering and things revolting to a healthy mind. This current will act on them, and eventually bring them disease and suffering in some form.
If we are talking much of sick people or are much among them and thinking of them, be our motive what it may, we shall draw on ourselves a current of sickly thought, and its ill result will in time materialize itself in our bodies. We have far more to do to save ourselves than is now realized.
When men talk business together they attract a business current of idea and suggestion. The better they agree the more of this thought current do they attract, and the more do they receive of idea and suggestion for improving and extending their business. In this way does the conference or discussion among the leading members of the company or corporation create the force that carries their business ahead.
Travel in first-class style, put; up at first-class hotels, and dress in apparel” as costly as your purse can buy,” without running into the extreme of foppishness. In these things you find aids to place you in a current of relative power and success. If your purse does not now warrant such expenditure, or you think it does not, you can commence so living in mind. This will make you take the first steps in this direction. Successful people in the domain of finance unconsciously live up to this law. Desire for show influences some to this course. But there is another force and factor which so impels them. That is a wisdom of which their material minds are scarcely conscious. It is the wisdom of the spirit telling them to get in the thought current of the successful, and by such current be borne to success. It is not a rounded out success, but good as far as it goes. If our minds are, from what is falsely called economy, ever set on the cheap —cheap lodgings, cheap food and cheap fares, we get in the thought current of the cheap, the slavish and the fearful. Our views of life and our plans will be influenced and warped by it. It paralyzes that courage and enterprise implied in the old adage, *’ Nothing venture nothing gain.” Absorbed in this current and having it ever acting on you, it is felt immediately when you come into the presence of the successful, and causes them to avoid you. They feel in you the absence of that element which brings them their relative success. It acts as a barrier, preventing the flow to you of their sympathy. Sympathy is a most important factor in business. Despite opposition and competition, a certain thought current of sympathy binds the most successful together. The mania for cheapness lies in the thought current of fear and failure. The thought current of fear and failure, and the thought current of dash, courage and success will not mingle nor bring together the individuals who are in these respective streams of thought. They antagonize, and between the two classes of mind is built a barrier more impenetrable than walls of stone.
Live altogether in any one idea, any one ” reform,” and you get into the thought current of all other minds who are carrying that idea to extremes. There is no ” reform ” but what can be pushed too far. The harm of such extreme falls on the person whoso pushes it. It warps mind,judgment and reason all on one side. It makes fanatics, bigots, cranks and lunatics, whether the idea involves an art or study, a science, a ” reform ” or a ” movement.” It connects the extremests of all people in such order and current of mind, no matter what their specialties may be. Such people often end in becoming furious haters of all who differ with them, and in so hating expend their force in tearing themselves to pieces. The safe side lies in calling daily for the thought current of wisdom from the Infinite Mind.
When that wisdom is more invoked our ” reforms ” and organizations ” for the good of the whole ” will not run into internal wrangles almost as soon as they organize. As now conducted the thought current of hatred of and antagonism to the ” oppressor” and monopolist is admitted at their birth. This very force breeds quarrels and dissensions among the members. It is force used to tear down instead of build up. It is like taking the fire used to generate steam in the boilers and scattering it throughout the building.
When people come together and in any way talk out their ill will towards others they are drawing to themselves with ten-fold power an injurious thought current. Because the more minds united on any purpose the more power do they attract to effect that purpose. The thought current so attracted by those chronic complainers, grumblers and scandal mongers, will injure their bodies. Because whatever thought is most held in mind is most materialized in the body. If we are always thinking and talking of people’s imperfections we are drawing to us ever of that thought current, and thereby incorporating into ourselves those very imperfections.
We have said in previous books that ” Talk Creates Force,” and that the more who talk in sympathy the greater is the volume and power of the thought current generated and attracted for good or ill. A group of gossips who can never put their heads together without raking over the faults of the absent are unconsciously working a law with terrible results to themselves.
Gossip is fascinating. There is an exhilaration in scandal and the raking over of our friend or neighbor’s or enemy’s faults is almost equal to that coming of champagne. But in the end we pay dearly for these pleasures.
If but two people were to meet at regular intervals and talk of health, strength and vigor of body and mind, at the same time opening their minds to receive of the Supreme the best idea as to the ways and means for securing these blessings, they would attract to them a thought current of such idea. If these two people or more kept up these conversations on these subjects at a regular time and place, and found pleasure in such communings, and they were not forced or stilted; if they could carry them on without controversy, and enter into them without preconceived idea, and not allow any shade of tattle or tale-bearing, or censure of others to drift into their talk, they would be astonished at the year’s end at the beneficial results to mind and body. Because in so doing and coming together with a silent demand of the Supreme to get the best idea, they would attract to them a current of life-giving force.
Let two so commence rather than more. For even two persons in the proper agreement and accord to bring the desired results are not easy to find. The desire for such meetings must be spontaneous, and any other motive will bar out the highest thought current for good.
The old-fashioned revival meeting, or camp meeting, through the combined action and desire of a number of minds brought a thought current, causing for the time the ecstacy, fervor and enthusiasm which characterized those gatherings. The North American Indian worked himself into the frenzy of his war dance by a similar law. He brought to him by force of united desire a thought element and current which stimulated and even intoxicated him. His sole desire was to bring on him this mental intoxication. The more minds so working in the same vein, the quicker came the desired result.
The real orator in bis effort draws to him a current of thought, which as sent again from him to his andience, thrills them. So does the inspired actor or actress. They bring a higher and more powerful element of thought to themselves first, and this flowing through them acts on the andience afterward.
If you dwell a great deal on your own faults you will by the same laws attract more and more of their thought current, and so increase those faults. It is enough that you recognize in yourself those faults. Don’t be always saying of yourself, ” I am weak or cowardly or ill-tempered or imprudent.” Draw to yourself rather the thought current of strength, courage, even temper, prudence and all other good qualities. Keep the image of these qualities in mind and you make them a part of yourself.
You have sometimes been beset, absorbed, and even annoyed for days in the thought of the suit of clothes you wanted to buy, the cut, color and fashion of a dress, the selection of a bonnet, or cravat, until you were nothing in thought but clothes, hat, bonnet, dress, cravat or some other detail of life. You may not have been able to make up your mind what you should buy, and have then possibly been tossed about mentally on the billows of indecision for days. You had then got into the thought current of thousands of other minds continually in this mood of thought.
The surest way for a young woman to become ugly is to be discontented, peevish, cross, complaining and envious of others. Because in these states of mind she is drawing to her the invisible substance of thought, which acts on and injures her body. It ruins the complexion, makes lines and creases in the face, sharpens the nose and transforms the face of youth into that of the shrew in very quick time.
I am not moralizing here or saying: ” You ought not to do thus and so.” It is simply cause and result. Put your face in the fire, and it is scarred and disfigured, because of an element acting on it. Put your mind in the fire of ill-will, envy or jealousy, and it is also scarred, seamed and disfigured, because of an element as real as fire, though invisible acting on it.
All things that are evil and imperfect, such as disagreeable traits of character in others—things unpleasant to hear or look upon should be gotten out of our minds as quickly as possible. Otherwise if dwelt upon, they attract of their thought current. They will then become permanent spiritual fixtures, and these will in time materalize themselves into corresponding physical fixtures. If we are always keeping in mind the person doing some wrong thing, we are the more apt to do that very thing ourselves.
Let us endeavor, then, with the help of the Supreme Power, to get into the thought current of things that are healthy, natural, strong and beautiful. Let us try and avoid thoughts of disease, of suffering, of deformity, of faultiness. A field *f waving grain or the rolling suif is better’ to contemplate than to pore over the horrors of a railway accident. We do not realize how much we are depressed physically and mentally by the Incessant feast of horrors prepared for us by the daily press. We invoke in their perusal a thought current, filled with things and images of hoiTor and suffering. We bring ourselves in this way in connection and oneness with all other morbid and diseased mind, which lives and revels in this current. It leads not to life, but to disease and death. Neither others nor yourself are one particle aided by your knowing of every fire, explosion, murder, theft or crime which the newspapers chronicle every twenty-four hours.
If we read books written by cynical, sarcastic minds, who are so warped as to be able to see only the faults of others, and at last unable to see good anywhere, we bring on ourselves their unhealthy thought current, and are one with it. The arrow always tipped with ill-nature and sarcasm is deadliest to him who sends it. In other words, the man who is ever inviting and cultivating this thought current, is inviting the unrest, disease and misfortune it will assuredly bring to him, and when we get too much into his mind we invite similar results.
You may be neat, careful and methodical in your habits, exact and elaborate in your work, yet if you associate closely with those who are careless and slovenly you may find in yourself a tendency to be also careless and slovenly, and a difficulty in resuming and carrying out your former neat, methodical and orderly methods. Because you have not only absorbed of the careless mind, or the mind lacking patience to do anything reposefully, but the fragment of such mind so absorbed is acting as a magnet in attracting to you its like thought current.
When an evil is known it is half cured. Bear in mind when you are in any unpleasant frame of mind that a thought current of such disagreeable mood is acting on you. Bear in mind that you are then one in a sort of electrical connection with many other sickly and morbid minds, all generating and sending unpleasant thought to each other. The next thing to be done is to pray or demand to get out of this current of evil thought. You cannot do this wholly of your own individual effort. You must demand of the Supreme Power to divert it from you.
We can more and more invite the thought current of things that are lively, sprightly and amusing. Life should be full of playfulness. Continued seriousness is but a few degrees removed from gloom and melancholy. Thousands live too much in the thought current of seriousness. Faces which wear a smiling expression are scarce. Some never smile at all. Some have forgotten how to smile, and it actually hurts them to smile, or to see others do so. Sickness and disease are nursed into fresher and fresher activity by the serious mood of mind. Habit continually strengthens the sad capacity of dwelling on the malady, which may be the merest trifle at first. People get so much in this current that woeful diseases are manufactured out of some trifling irritation in some part of the body.
Many material things are helps to divert a thought current acting disagreeably on you. You may have daily a set of disagreeable symptoms. They may seem to come as adjuncts to the daily routine of life. The breakfast table, the furniture, the conversation and even tbe persons immediately about you seem to recall them. Travel sometimes banishes them entirely. The sight of different surroundings diverts that particular thought current. Material remedies may temporarily effect the same result. So may any sudden change of life or occupation. But all these are secondary aids to the Supreme Power.
The thought current of fear is everywhere. All humanity fears something—disease, death, loss of fortune, loss of friends, loss of something. Every one has his or her pet fear. It extends to the most trivial details of life. The streets are full of people who, if fearing nothing else, fear they won’t catch a train or the next street car. The more sensitive you are to the impress of thought, the more liable are you to be affected by this thought current of fear until your spirit, by constant demand of the Supreme Power, builds up for itself an armor of thought positive to this current, and which will deny it access. You can commence this building in saying, whenever you are affected in the way above mentioned, or in any disagreeable fashion, ” I refuse to accept this thought and the mental condition it has brought on me which affects my body.” You commence then to turn aside the thought current of evil.
Everyone has some pet fear—some disease they may never have had, but always dreaded—something they are in special fear of losing.
Some trifle, even but a word or sentence uttered by another, brings this pet fear to the mind. Instantly through long habit the mind reverts to this fear. Instantly it opens to it, and the whole thought, volume and current rushes to and acts on them. It acts and vibrates on that particular chord of your nature, which for years has sounded your pet weakness.
Then in some way the body is affected disagreeably. There are myriads of different symptoms. The body may become weak and tremulous.
There may be loss of appetite, tremulousness, a dry tongue, a bad taste in the mouth, weakness in the joints, drowsiness, difficulty of concentrating the mind on your business and many other disagreeable sensations.
Such symptoms are often classed as ” malaria.” In a sense the name is a correct one. Only in very many of these cases it is a bad atmosphere or current of thought which is acting on our minds instead of the fancied bad material atmosphere.
Unquestionably an atmosphere full of vegetable or animal decomposition will affect many people.
But some live for years in the midst of stagnant pools and swamps who never have malaria. Others far removed from such locations on high and dry ground do have it. They have taken on a thought current of fear. Place yourself in a house where there has recently been a panic or scare, though you may know nothing of it. You were well and strong the day before. You arise in the morning, and soon this whole train of disagreeable sensations affects you, because the house or place is saturated with a thought current of fear. Put a fear on city, town or country of some deadly epidemic or some great calamity, and hundreds of the more sensitive who may have no fear of that epidemic or calamity are still affected by it disagreeably. That thought current affects them in their particular weak spot. A fanatic predicts some great catastrophe. The sensational newspapers take up the topic, ventilate it, affect to ridicule, but still write about it. This sets more minds to thinking and more people to talking. The more talk the more ot this injurious force is generated. As a result thousands of people are affected by it unpleasantly, some in one way, some in another, because the whole force of that volume of fear is let loose upon them. Some are killed outright. Entirely unaware of the cause, they open their minds more and more to it, dwell on it in secret, put out no resisting thought until at last the spirit, unable longer to carry such a load, snaps the link which connects it with the body.
The more impressional you are to the thought about you the more are you liable to be thus affected. But you can traiu your mind to shut out this thought. You can gradually train it to bar tightly this door to weakness, and keep open only the one to strength. You can do this by cultivating the mood of drawing to yourseif and keeping in the mood and current of thought coming of God or the Supreme Power for good.
Impressionability or capacity to receive thought is a source either of strength or weakness. Fine grained, sensitive, highly developed minds to-day often carry the weakest bodies, because through ignorance they are always inviting some of these currents of evil without any knowledge of their existence or the means of throwing them oft. They are ignorantly either courting or exposing themselves to such current. Improper individual association is one chief source of such exposure.
The fiDer feminine organization is more sensitive to every shade and ray of thought about it, good or bad. Men absorbed in their business generate for a time a certain positiveness which throws off the fear current. But this positiveness cannot always last.
Women from this cause often suffer a thousandfold more in the privacy of their homes than man is aware of. The average man defines it as ” woman’s way,” and wonders why she is so full of ” nervousness,” ” vapors,” ” notions,” and illhealth.
As you place your reliance on the Infinite Mind to bring you out of all these agencies for ill, that mind in some way will bring many material aids to help you out. That mind will suggest medicines and foods and surroundings and changes, not only to help you temporarily, but permanently, so that when you are cured you are cured for all time. A cheerful, buoyant, hopeful mind (and no mind is cheerful, hopeful and buoyant without being nearer the Infinite than one that is depressed, sour and gloomy), be that the mind of your doctor, or your friend, will help you to get out of the injurious thought current. Eegard such mind as a help from the Infinite. But don’t put your whole trust in that individual. Put the great trust in the Supreme Power that has sent to you the individual as a temporary aid or crutch until your spiritual limbs are strong enough to bear you.
The more you get into the thought current coming from the Infinite Mind, making yourself more and more a part of that mind (exactly as you may become a part of any vein of low, morbid, unhealthy mind in opening yourself to that current), the quicker are you freshened, and renewed physically and mentally. You become continually a newer being. Changes for the better come quicker and quicker. Your power increases to bring results. You lose gradually all fear as it is proven more and more to you that when you are in the thought current of Infinite good there is nothing to fear. You realize more and more clearly that there is a great power and force which cares for you. You are wonderstruck at the fact that when your mind is set in the right direction all material things come to you with very little physical or external effort. You wonder then at man’s toiling and striving, fagging himself literally to death, when through such excess of effort he actually drives from him the rounded out good of health, happiness and material prosperity all combined. You will see in this demand for the highest good that you are growing to power greater than you ever dreamed of. It will dawn on you that the real life destined for the awakened few now, and the many in the future is a dazzling dream—a permanent realization that it is a happiness to exist—a serenity and contentment without abatement—a transition from pleasure to pleasure, and from the great to the greater pleasure. You find as you get more and more into the current of the Infinite Mind that exhausting toil is not required of you, but that when you commit yourself in trust to this current and let it bear you where it will, all things needful will come to you.
When you are getting into the right thought current, you may for a time experience more of uneasiness, physical and mental than ever. This is because the new element acting on you makes you more sensitive to the presence of evil. The new is driving the old out. The new thought current searches and detects every little error in your mind before unnoticed, and repels it. This causes a struggle, and mind and body are for a time unpleasantly affected by it. It is like house-cleaning, a process usually involving a good deal of dust and disturbance. The new spirit you call to you is cleaning your spiritual house.
There is no limit to the power of the thought current you can attract to you nor limit to the things that can be done through the individual by it. In the future some people will draw so much of the higher quality of thought to them, that by it they will accomplish what some would call miracles. In this capacity of the human mind for drawing a thought current ever increasing in fineness of quality and power lies the secret of what has been called ” magic.”
Healthy and Unhealthy Spirit Communion
Copyright 1890, by F. J. Needham
The word “Spiritualism” has clustered about it some disagreeable associations. With many people it is suggestive of delusion, fraud and trickery, of insanity resulting from dealing with it, of immoral tendencies, of people duped, and of people ever running after the ” dear spirits” evoked through the agency of some medium. All this and more attaches itself, and with cause, to ” Modern Spiritualism.” Yet below all this froth and scum lies an ocean of truth as the material ocean underlies the foam of its billows.
When some people ask me, ” Are you a Spiritualist?” I prefer to say ” No.” This saves a great deal of trouble in the endeavor to explain what I do believe and what I do not believe as regards communication between the seen and physically unseen domains of existence.
The writings of Moses and others in the Bible, we hold as a true historical record. In that history there is mention after mention of beings from the other side of life, who communicated in various ways with man. That history covers a period of several thousand years. If such communication was possible then, why not now?
If the same forces or elements are in Nature now, which existed then to bring about such results, why should they not operate to-day t
Every person with a physical body has associated with him or her minds without physical bodies (or spirits). The liar attracts lying spirits. The gambler attracts gambling spirits. The woman fretting herself to death with household cares has an unseen company ever about her of like mind who are miserable with her. The drunkard has with him spirits, who feed on the current of intoxicated thought he throws off and get stimulation from it. The man devoted entirely to business has in the unseen the same order of mind about him. The artist has his unseen following of like taste. Those who desire the highest wisdom and would live the most perfect and best rounded out lives will attract an order of mind like in motive to themselves. To this order we assume that you belong.
To ignore these things because of a fear of being called a ” Spiritualist” is something like ignoring the existence of gunpowder, because some people have done foolish things with gunpowder.
To those who are entirely incredulous and skeptical regarding spirit communion, because that communion does not bear such tests as they would subject it to, or because some of the phenomena seems trivial, or because defect, imperfection and trickery are mixed up with it, we say that in so doing you are demanding the perfect development of a science before it has passed through its earlier and immature stages of growth. You are like one demanding at once the perfected steam engine without the preceding experience of trial, experiment and failure of the last eighty years out of which has come the locomotive of to-day. You allow also nothing for the defect, immaturity, misconception and ignorance existing in your own mind when you deal and judge of these things.
The material mind demands proof of spirit existence and spirit power through material evidences. But give such order of mind all it desires, yet it is never satisfied. It is ever calling for more proof. It calls and receives and goes away from the seance wonder struck and then doubts. It is the nature of the material to doubt everything not of the material. It is impossible for it to prevent accounting for spirit manifestations on some material basis. There are people alive to-day who have seen all manner of mediumship for the last thirty or forty years, who are no nearer conviction of spirit reality than they were at the start. Their spirituality means a chronic and consuming demand for new tests. They will never get the ” tests ” their souls demand, save through themselves. When they reach out to the Supreme Power, that power will in time fill their minds with a new light, and make of them new beings with power to see sense and feel what they are not now capable of seeing, sensing and feeling. The material mind must be gotten rid of before the spiritual mind can make us see the things of spiritual or finer element.
As mind not of the body is such a powerful factor in our lives for good or evil, I deem it well to know something about its workings. I consider it, for instance, useful and profitable to know that if I frequent a low saloon or any other low place, I shall attract to myself low degraded spirits, that they will fasten on me, that I shall carry them home with me, that I shall to greater or lesser extent be influenced by them, think their thoughts and have a tendency to act out with my body what they would act out had they (what they much want) material bodies.
And again, if I frequent gossiping or grumbling or despondent groups of people, no matter what may be their social status, and I enter into sympathy with their gossip or grumbling, I am fastening on myself the same order of mind from the unseen side, making those individuals without bodies literally a part of myself, tying them to me, having my thoughts colored by the hue of theirs, and from such thoughts and minds getting inertia instead of vigor, sickness instead of health, weakness instead of strength.
This is a very very small part of the profit coming of some knowledge of Spiritual Laws. We cannot get Spiritual Laws and ignore the existence of individual spirits.
If a person desires to know of the unseen world only what comes of raps and table tippings or other phenomena, or of what is given him from time to time through mediums, clairvoyant, clairandient, trance or otherwise; if it is curiosity and desire of seeing the marvelous that chiefly impels him instead of the desire of knowing the truth ; if spirit intercourse is sought as an aid to money making; if year after year he visits this or that real or pretended spirit show as he would a dime museum; if even it is only sought with the desire of communicating with the loved ones on that side of life—the chances are that very little good will come of such dealing with spiritualism.
I will not say that no good whatever comes of such dealing. Thousands of people, who have dealt in spirit intercourse with all its present crudity and mingling of true and false on both sides of life, are obliged to own to themselves that the death of the body does not end all. That is one step ahead, and a profitable conviction for any mind.
Some spirits without bodies will lie as fast as some spirits with bodies commonly called men and women. The loss of a physical body does not change a scamp into a saint, no more than does the loss of the thiePs overcoat change him into an honest man. The spirits you may deal with through the generality of mediums have the current virtues and weakness of humanity. Some are pompously wise, and rather than call themselves Smith or Jones will give the names of Plato or Pythagoras, or Shakespeare or Queen this or that. Some mean well in giving advice, but make grievous mistakes. None are infallible.
People who are made crazy through Spiritualism belong to that class of mind which is quite ready to go into some degree of craziness over any exciting or engrossing subject. I believe, however, that dealing with Spiritualism does have a special danger for this class. Because seances and circles made up of people who are much nearer some form of insanity than they realize, tend to attract half insane spirits, and these can fasten on a very sensitive person, blend disordered minds with theirs, and craze them in time.
I have in past years seen a good deal of various forms of mediumship both in public and private life. I have no interest now in seances or any form of physical phenomena. Indeed, so far as my personal taste and comfort is concerned I know of no better place to keep away from than a seance at a dollar a head, with its usual andience of the ultra credulous who come prepared to believe everything, and the ultra skeptics who came prepared to disbelieve everything.
I see no greater marvel in the materialization of flowers than in the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. I know, however, that certain powers do exist and are worked through the physical organizations of certain people. I know, also, that at times such powers are counterfeited as everything genuine has been counterfeited. I believe the development known as “Modern Spiritualism,” commencing publicly in this country with the Bochester knockings, years ago, came in that crude way, because the increasing quickness of mind and intelligence of people demanded investigation and inquiry into these phenomena, which had been apparent ages before. But superstition and fear had shut immediately down on such phenomena. Superstition is either blindly fearful or blindly credulous.
Spiritualism in its present form is an abnormal and unhealthy development, but none the less true for that. It came of the premature ripening of the spiritual senses and functions in certain individuals. In other words, certain powers in them burst forth before the others had attained a proportionate growth. As people’s spirits are immature, so their spiritual power has partaken of the same immaturity. The continued exercise of any one of our powers to the exclusion of the exercise of the rest, results ultimately in great injury to the individual. Such power may be one of physical mediumship or mental mediumship. It may be clairvoyance or the writer’s power to call to him or her a current of thought teeming with mind-pictures which are transferred to paper, as with the genuine poet or novelist. One involves ” mediumship ” as much as the other.
Besides ” mediums ” who ” sit” for pay there are a great many more than is generally imagined in private life. Their capacity to be ” controlled” or other exercise of the spiritual senses may be known but to a few intimate friends. Their gift is a most dangerous one.
A spirit takes temporary possession of a trance medium’s mind by the same law that the mesmerist controls the mind of the person he operates on. If you control a person’s mind it follows, of course, you can control the body that mind uses.
Any mind, be it of spirit or mortal, so acting on yours from time to time, will leave with yours the seeds or thoughts of its owu errors, especially when it can control your body. When your body is thus used by another mind your own spirit is forced out willingly or unwillingly, and if this continues to go on for any time your own mind or spirit will have greater and greater difficulty in getting control and acting thoroughly on your own body. Two minds have no business using one body. It is unnatural and unhealthful.
But far worse is it for the ” medium ” who gives communications from day to day for several on the unseen side, even though this is done by the agency of one spirit controlling him or her. Such medium may absorb the mental conditions of those who came for sittings and of the minds on the other side who desire to communicate. They are visited by grief-stricken people who want to communicate with their friends. These friends are grieving also, and the medium stands between the embodied and disembodied as a strainer through which is passed the dark and gloomy thought from both sides, and as thoughts are things, and grieving and regretful thoughts are very harmful things, the medium’s mind absorbs a great deal of this element. The result to the body is destructive. The premature deaths of so many known mediums within the last twenty years is due, in a measure, to this cause. Grief is not the only mood brought and absorbed by a public medium. Greed, selfishness, irritability, anger and animality, are likewise brought them in thought by both mortal and spirit. Through their minds as through a channel, such moods are ever flowing in their daily sittings. Did they realize the harm they were doing themselves in this business they would be justified in charging fifty dollars a sitting, and hold themselves as poorly paid at that.
The mediumship that is known is small compared to that which is unknown and all about us. Legions of people are more or less controlled by minds about them in the unseen realm of life. Of this the insane furnish the most marked instance. The victim of insanity may have his or her spirit quite crowded out and forced from the body by the gradual encroachment and action on it of an insane spirit. In other words, the body of an insane patient may be to-day a body which twenty years ago was used by another mind, gradually driven from it by another spirit. The cause and cure of insanity will never be known until people deem spiritual laws worthy of more attention.
Spiritualism with its accompanying evil has served a purpose. It has woke up a portion of the race to the fact that the death or loss of the body is only an episode in the real life—the life of the spirit.
Having served its purpose, Spiritualism in its present form will pass away. The time will come when people will not need any form of physical phenomena to convince them of the reality of another life. There will be people who will have perfect faith in their mental communion or impressions received from those nearest them on the unseen side. There will be the most perfect blending of minds of those with the material body and those without. This blending will result in a ripening of spirit which will bridge for some the present chasm between the two worlds or conditions of existence. This is a healthy spirit communion. The people who realize this will care little whether the outside world of material mind knows they possess it or not, no more than you may care to reveal your power as a merchant, financier or politician to a group of five year old children.
There is every grade and quality of mind on the unseen side of life. There is as much error in that mind which comes nearest the world’s atmosphere of thought as there is with us. If we pin our faith to any individual spirit and accept its utterances as infallible, no matter who it may be or pretend to be, then we are in danger of falling into error. There is but one spirit that can be safely trusted. That is the Supreme Power and Wisdom which rules all things. To it the wisest on the other side go for power and wisdom. They would not allow one of us to depend solely on them for wisdom. They would not allow one of us to blindly idolize them, no matter how much their power might astonish us. They would say to us : ” Go for help, consolation, power and wisdom where we have gone and are ever going to the Supreme and Infinite mind. It is your privilege to draw ever from this mind as much as ours. That mind is no myth, but the greatest of realities.”
Dependence on that power, and that only, can give us a healthy spiritual growth. Any other dependence will give us an unhealthy and one-sided growth. In the healthy spiritual growth the spiritual senses will in time ripen, so that we may communicate with those on the other side who are nearest us and whom we most need.
Dependence and an ever-growing faith in the reality of the Supreme Power brings increasing serenity and repose to the mind. By this serenity and freedom from fear and disturbance are our spiritual powers increased. It becomes then more and more easy for the higher unseen intelligences to impress their thought upon us. When we are very desirous of such communion they can gradually lead us to that knowledge by which the last barrier betwixt you and them may be broken down, and you may see, meet and mingle with them as with people here.
But such meeting, mingling and communion may not come entirely of our physical senses. It will be realized at first during periods when physical senses are partly suppressed, as sometimes happens when you are in deep reverie.
When it is our aim to realize a symmetrical rounded out life and being, we attract to us a like order of spirit. They can live much in our thought atmosphere. That atmosphere makes for them what many of them desire—a home on earth—a place on their old stratum of life to which they can again come and to which they may be most desirous to come.
Because although such beings may have most beautiful homes and surroundings, they are not so wedded to them as to care nothing for their old abodes on earth. You may first have seen the light and passed the days of your childhood in a very humble dwelling, yet though now you live in one far superior, is there not a lively pleasure in revisiting the old home and living awhile in pleasant past remembrances? It is so with spirits. They are human like ourselves. They are not dead to old associations. They are even more alive to them than we. Far beyond this cause of attraction is the Fact that they may desire to come near someone most dear to them on earth, either in this or a previous existence. They watch eagerly the growth of such a spirit in the flesh as each successive gradation in fineness and purity of thought enables them to come nearer and nearer the one they love.
Thought low, coarse, turbulent, envious, jealous and gloomy, is a barrier to the approach to us of the higher natures of the unseen world. They for a time and for a purpose can endure it. Live in it permanently they cannot. Thoughts to them are as real and tangible as wood and stone to us, and the coarser order of thought is to them as objectionable as would be any physical defilement to us.
The mind or spirit nearest related to you—nearest you in heart, motive, tastes and sympathies may be one who has had no physical existence contemporary with your own.
You long, possibly, for the gift of the clairvoyant—the ability to see spirits. But the clairvoyant’s is often a power disproportionately developed or brought out before its proper time, and not always bringing the satisfaction or pleasure imagined. The clairvoyant is sometimes lacking in faith, and even disposed to doubt the reality of his or her spiritual sight. Hence in mind he or she comes into no closer satisfactory relations with the world of spirits than do you—perhaps he lives in a lower realm.
The mind must be raised to a certain level of comprehension with the spiritual senses or it cannot fully profit by them. Clairvoyancy is sometimes to its possessor like an eye, able to get a glimpse of things in the world of spirit, joined to a mind which doubts what its spiritual eye sees. Mediums sometimes doubt the reality of their own spiritual powers. They may see or sense something of what lies beyond physical capacity, yet are so influenced by the materiality of their own minds or the material judgment and opinion of those about them as to have little faith in these their higher senses.
This is another phase of this development adding to the difficulty of investigating the matter. Place some mediums among a group of positive, skeptical minds and there is a possibility that in a short time that medium, through the very laws of his or her own mediumship, would be mesmerized into total unbelief that his or her clairvoyant sight was a temporary hallucination, or that his or her phase of mediumship, whatever it might be, could be accounted for on a physical basis.
Merely to be able to see a spirit very dear to you might soon give you more pain than pleasure. You might see, yet neither hear, nor grasp, nor communicate in any way. What satisfaction would result to you after a short time, from seeing your dearest friend on earth under such circumstances, able only to see but not to communicate in any other way, able only to see but not touch. You could not escape the desire to have a fuller communion because it was a spirit. A spirit is but a being like yourself, only with a body of more rarified element than your own. As thought is an element, and the finer that element coming from you becomes, the more it assimilates with that of elevated spirits. The more you grow away from the cruder and cease to entertain errors of thought, the closer is the mingling of your thought and that of your exalted spirit friends. Such mingling nourishes the growth of all your spiritual senses, until at last they will ripen into that state when they will take complete hold of a spiritual existence. As your thought attracts wise and powful spirits, so they are thereby enabled to work that which will the quickest make their life blend with yours in every way.
Any powerful spirit (that is, one with knowledge and power to control nature’s forces) could make certain forced or artificial conditions by which it could approach you and be tangible to your physical senses, providing that your thought in fineness of quality to some extent resembled and blended with theirs. But this, in the end, would not be well for the spirit or you. It would be an unwise expenditure of the spirit’s strength. It would be sort of hot-house condition or growth for you. All artificial growths are unnatural. They are not self-sustaining. The hot-house flower is unable to sustain itself in natural conditions. It cannot, like the flower native to the forest and the climate, endure the changes of the weather. It is not self propagating, but is dependent on man’s care to increase of its peculiar species.
So it is with the growth of man’s spiritual powers. Let them grow naturally and in concert and balance, and the growth is solid. There will be no reaction. But no matter how great the power of the spirit, should it make certain forced conditions— analagous to those of the hot.house for the plant in order to satisfy all your longings, there would come a time when again the severance would be total. The hot-house condition and result cannot last forever. The plant so reared reaches at last, through its forced and artificial growth, a stage beyond which it cannot pass. “When this stage is reached it can no longer maintain itself. Disease attacks it. An insect life peculiar to it is bred out of itself and feeds upon it. So in all vegetation artificially reared by man and dependent on his care do we find periods of blight and disease. The artificial conditions he has made fail to bring healthy natural growth.
It is not so with natural growths. The oak, the pine, the spruce, the wild vine and flower take care of themselves, and when the parent trunk or stem decays it is succeeded by a healthy growth of its own kind. The same law holds with all artificially raised animals. Through concentration of care, peculiar food and selection of peculiar and fine types in breeding, man raises a so-called superior sheep, or cow, or horse, or dog. But these animals are relatively helpless. They cannot sustain themselves as in the wild or original state from which their ancestors were taken. Eemoved from man’s care and either they perish or revert to the wild type of their kind. We say then the species has ” degenerated.” Oould the species speak for themselves possibly they might say that their condition was improved. For they would then be independent of man, and subject neither to captivity nor the diseases generated, because of artificial conditions.
But our race ridicules the idea of bird or beast having rights of their own. We may not always do so.
The law and its results in the visible world is a sure and certain index to the correspondence in the invisible realms of Nature. All growth and development to produce the most lasting and happiest results must be natural. They must be in accordance with the laws of God, the Infinite allpervading spirit, and not to subordinate laws or imitations of the natural law made by man. The artificially raised plant or animal is in reality an inferior copy of the original. It may more please our eye or serve our comfort in some way than the original, but as an organization it is weaker. So would it be with us were our spiritual sight, hearing and other senses brought out before their due time (as they could be by spirit power). It would be an artificial spiritual condition. Such artificial condition cannot be maintained save at loss in some direction. Even the vegetation raised in the ground subject to continual artificial fertilization has neither the flavor nor nutritive properties of that raised on virgin soil.
Our nearest friends, on the other side, might, through certain artificial methods, cause themselves for a time to he physically tangible to us. But this, delightful as it might be, could not last.
Their supply of material necessary to effect such results would give out. Or the care and attention necessary to keep up such forced conditions would prove to them ultimately a burden.
A caged canary is a delight at times, but it is a care. Better far the free bird in the tree. In such artificial spiritual conditions you would be as the caged canary. You might too soon be associated with beings of a type finer far than any on earth and lose all relish for earth associations. You might so become entirely dependent on them for your comfort. You would be as the bird fed artificially, and through being so fed would lose all capacity for feeding yourself. Because in such condition your own spiritual senses would not be opened. You would only sense the beings apparent to you by your physical senses, because they had placed themselves in a state tangible only to those senses. These conditions could not be maintained. The time would come when you would be obliged to return to your original state—revert to the original type and commence where you left off in your natural state. You would so return weakened by an artificial life and training as a bird is really weakened by its artificial and caged life, and with
your capacity for living and growing healthily retarded.
Perhaps you may say on reading this: “The hope here given of realizing this communion with our unseen friends is rather vague. And it may require eternities for such realization.”
Why should it require eternities when everything for the better is moving ahead at such rapid pace on this planet? You that have lived fifty years must look back with wonder at the progress made in the conveniences of life in art and material science since you were ten years old. When you were born, the railroad was in its infancy. The telegraph was hardly known. The ocean steamer was hardly accepted as safe. The electric light was undreamt of. The sewing machine was still in the brain of its inventor. In architecture the elegance of that time is now commonplace. The medical practice of that time would not now be tolerated. The current religion of that era was harsh, bitter and unmerciful. Sect was quarreling with sect. The drama of 1840 tolerated a coarseness of verbal expression which to-day no respectable theatre would countenance. We have better houses. There is far greater personal cleanliness. We have three times the variety of vegetable foods. There is more time for rest. The hours for labor are being shortened. There is more temperance in all things. New ideas are more hospitably entertained. But detail of the changes for the better in the physical world within fifty years would fill a volume. Are these to stop here? No. Is it not the new and unexpected that is always coming? Is physical sense to be the limit of our powers? No. We are ever going ahead. We cannot stop going head. We are ever growing and advancing day by day toward the spiritual being and the spiritual life so far exceeding the material in beauty and happiness. Who shall set the time when this spiritual life is to burst from the material as the bud bursts from the tree? It is said that the day of the Lord shall come as a thief in the night. The Day of the Lord means for us the time when a grand spiritual life is to come to this planet—when all things shall be changed very quickly for the better—not through disturbance— not through bloodshed and revolution—not by man’s law and legislation, but by the mightier force of a great wave of spiritual element and spiritual impulse, which shall clear men’s eyes and quicken their understanding, so that all things shall regulate themselves even as in the heavens the myriads of planets are moved in the intricacies of their orbits without clash or disorder.
Uses Of Diversion
Copyright 1890, by F. J. Needham
Man will endure heat, cold, hunger, thirst, or any other form of physical inconvenience far easier when his mind is strongly bent on some aim or purpose. Without such aim or purpose the suffering from these causes will be much greater. So long as his mind is on that purpose his thought is diverted from the action of heat or cold, or any other cause of pain to the body. As he ceases to think of these things he ceases to feel them.
People will rush through fire while in a state of excitement and scarcely feel it, though the flesh is burned and blistered. Their minds drawn in another direction did not allow the body to sense any pain from the action of heat upon them.
People at the theatre will sit through a thrilling play and feel no inconvenience from a heated stuffy atmosphere. Absorbed in the drama, their minds are temporarily diverted from the thought of the unpleasant atmosphere about them. I mean that their minds are diverted or drawn from their bodies in the most literal sense. Their minds then as one form of element and their bodies as another have at such times but the smallest channel or thread of connection. The mind is then blended with that of the actors. The body is in a seat with just enough of spirit acting on eyes and ears to make them perform their functions.
Soldiers have sometimes received wounds in battle and knew nothing of them until the conflict was over. Their minds were in the excitement of the fight so much diverted from their bodies as to make those bodies insensible to the entrance of the bullet.
The spirit can be so completely drawn or diverted from the body as to cease to think of or remember it has a body, and when it forgets the body, the body ceases to feel pain from any cause.
A person when hypnotized has his spirit drawn or diverted from his body. In this condition the body feels neither cut of knife nor puncture of needle.
The body of itself feels nothing. It is the spirit which really feels every so-called physical sensation. Divert the mind from the body and it becomes an almost senseless mass of matter.
Alcohol, morphine and ether are more spiritualized material substances. They act on the spirit, not the body. They lift, for the time, the spirit above its usual thought atmosphere. When the spirit is so diverted from the body by these agencies, it ceases to act on the body. When the spirit ceases to act on its machine, the body, all sensation ceases through the agency of the body.
Have you not at times when ill or ” out of sorts,” or very much fatigued, had all these disagreeable sensations chased away by conversing with some new and interesting person? Have you not for a time after such conversation felt ” as light as a feather?” Why? Because the mind in such conversation had been diverted from the thought of fatigue or other unpleasant sensation. Your mind in connection with that of the other person had brought another thought current to act on you. Flowing to you such current had brought newer and fresher element. Then your spirit has literally been refreshed. Bear in mind it is always the spirit and not the body that is refreshed, lifted up or weighted down.
The spirit never is wholly within the body. It acts on and stands in the same relation to it that the wind does to a sail. The wind swells and shapes the sail. But it is not generated in the woof and web of the sail. Neither is your spirit generated inside your body, nor is its force at all times within your body.
Death, we say, frees the body from pain. So it does, for the spirit is then drawn entirely from the body. But it does not free the spirit from pain. It carries still the thought of pain with it. The sick on this side of life are still sick when they pass over to the other. For when the spirit passes from the body it carries with it the same mental conditions it had when it was severed from the body. A mind weighted down here with the thought and belief in sickness does not throw that sickness off when it leaves a body.
If you accept the, scriptural record with any faith you find in it mention of those called dead, who are by no means at rest or free from evil in some form.
Freedom from pain attained temporarily by artificial methods can be realized permanently by a natural and healthy spiritual growth. One result of such growth is an ever increasing power for diverting or turning the mind, so that when we are disturbed physically or mentally we can forget the disturbance.
We cannot so divert our thoughts at once from the seat of pain. But we can now commence a mental exercise which will continually increase this capacity. This exercise lies simply in the thought of diverting the mind from the body and fixing it on something else.
We find this principle illustrated through life in many ways, by which the mind is diverted from any centre of physical pain, and so long as diverted there is less pain. Even the raging toothache ceases when we approach the dentist’s door. The mind ceases then to centre on the tooth, and is centred on the thought and dread of the greater pain of its extraction.
No matter what sickness may attack us, we need to keep it ever in mind that such sickness, be it a cold, a boil, a fever or a colic, is the result of some mental condition affecting the body disagreeably. You say often of a cold, ” I caught it because I sat in a draught, last night. Or, I exposed myself to the night air.” Now you have sat in draughts or exposed yourself in other ways supposed to be productive of colds, scores of times, without taking any cold. You say likewise of a colic or other stomach disturbance, “I got this because of eating this or that article of food.” You have eaten of the same kind of food before and will probably again without such disturbance. It was due to some condition of mind you were in at the time of eating or exposure. Perhaps you had recently been associating with some poor mentally diseased creature, who sees coughs, colds and colics in everything and never takes a bite to eat without harrassing mind and stomach with the thought whether it will agree with him or her. You have from that person absorbed such thought and it materializes for you a colic. Or you have been much in the thought atmosphere of some person who sees a cold in every fresh breath of air and consumption flying in at every opened window. Some one, who could they build a world of their own, would have it roofed in, steam heated, and every gale and breeze perpetually barred out. You absorb a dose of such person’s thought, and you absorb the stuff that colds and rheumatism are made of. In the future, instead of sayiug, ” I caught cold from sitting in a draught,” you will say, ” I caught my cold or cholera morbus from Mr. or Mrs. Sickspirit, whose mind is a perpetual orgie of disease, whose sick thought is contagious, and whose sick mind I temporarily carry about with me, with all its attendant physical disturbance.”
The thought of others is ” catching,” be that thought healthy or unhealthy. The contagion from minds full of belief in disease and who dwell in the thought of disease is a subtle poison.
For this reason above all others do we need to be careful with whom we associate.
Some particular article of food may never agree with you. That is because you made up your mind that it never should agree with you. You may have long ago absorbed the thought of such disagreement as above mentioned from some one else. Tou have never made a protest against such thought. You accepted such thought and have been adding to it all these years. You may say that such disagreement is ” constitutional.” Of course it is constitutional. You have made it constitutional. You have of thought, built and fashioned a stomach specially adapted to disagree with that special food. For your prevailing mood of mind shapes your features, your form, your stomach and your gait. If you walk with a shamble you are walking out and expressing a shambling thought or mood.
Can you cure at once the shamble or the constitutional hostility of your stomach to warm biscuit, cucumbers, or late suppers at night? Probably not. You have been for years carefully, though unconsciously, arranging your digestive machinery for these disagreements. Some time is necessary for your altered mood of mind in this regard, to rearrange and reconstruct these organs, so that in this land of freedom you may enjoy a little interior liberty as to what you may eat and drink. For neither Congress nor the Constitution of these United States can provide against the many internal tyrannies of the stomach.
Now the mood of entertaining the idea that all physical ailments are primarily owing to some state of mind, and next the idea that the permanent cure can come by getting your thought away from that ailment, will be a great aid to any medicine you may take, and it will help any doctor you ma) have the more quickly to cure you.
You can commence this training for throwing the disturbance out of the part affected simply by keepin your mind, so much as you can, the thought of diversion. Demand also of the Supreme Power ability to so turn your mind quickly from one thing to another. You are then commencing to get power to throw your mind off of what is injurious for it to fasten on. You have also commenced gaining power to divert from yourself an injurious current of thought. Eemedial thought element commences then to flow in on you. Marked favorable results may not come at first, because your mind is slow and feeble to act in this new direction. You have unconsciously for years taught yourself to dwell on whatever ailment affects you. Your thought at first moves slowly in the other direction. Your mind at first is as a rusty hinge unmoved for years. Your mind is working with medicine, when you say ” I am taking this remedy to cure or ease my mind and not my body. I take this medicine as an aid to divert my mind from the part disturbed. For it has fastened on, say the stomach, as a thought there of pain. I take this as a help to the spirit to throw that thought off.”
Herbs and minerals now used as remedies, and many that have not yet found their place as remedies, do have certain specific spiritual qualities for the relief of certain ailments, and the relief of certain organs and parts of the body when disturbed. Nothing material is outside the domain of spirit. Every plant and mineral has some certain specific spiritual quality and power of its own. We are not at war with medicines. They are, when properly administered, great aids to the spirit.
In any sickness it will benefit us greatly to pray or demand something to divert the mind from the part affected. It is the constant thinking of an ailment that increases it. The sick are often aided by well-meaning friends to do nothing, but lie still and think of their sickness. All effort about them should be with the intent to make them forget it. This is not done by the sight of anxious faces, vials of medicine and the sound of whispered conferences as to the patient’s condition.
Demand diversion for your spirit of the Supreme, and you will the sooner have varied material agencies, surroundings, individuals brought to you, or such thought current will literally carry you to different scenes and surroundings. These also are aids for diverting the mind out of moods from which it cannot detach itself unaided.
A person builds up a cold or other disease by constantly thinking of it. I would not say to you, however, ” Get your mind off that cold or other complaint. Cease to think of it.” That might be requiring of you an impossibility at present. It would be as unreasonable as to require of you the performances of a trained acrobat, supposing you are not one. For mind like muscle is susceptible of training, and with training comes more and more power to control it. Indeed muscle training is but another form of mind training. Behind the muscle lies the mind of its owner. That is the element which he sends into the material part. He becomes more and more skilled in so sending it. He sends in thought the image or picture of what he would do with arm or leg or other part of the body. So sending that thought into the machinery to be trained as he exercises from day to day, such thought not only animates the muscle or muscles, but builds and shapes them to the use he requires of it.
You can apply this same mental force in diverting your mind from any organ that is affected. Did the physical athlete know this law, his muscles would not begin to grow stiff and refuse duty with advr.n :ing years. But he gives way to the idea of coughs, colds, or other ailments as he feels them. His mind has no skill to throw them off. He goes on in the old-fashioned way, thinking of them, building on them, adding to them, and as the years go on, each successive attack, come in what form it may, is stronger and stronger. Weakness and decay come. His body is no longer able to obey the demand of his spirit. For it is the spirit acting on the body that runs and jumps, turns on the bars and flies from the trapeze. It is the spirit acting on the body that enables the acrobat to turn a double somersault. He performed that feat in mind many, many times before his spirit had sufficient power to make his body do it. He was always in the mood of so doing and ever seeing himself turning double somersaults. That unvarying mood was really the greater help to him than all his physical practice. You can use the same law in always picturing yourself to yourself as healthy, strong and agile. You need not in mind put any limits to your health, strength and agility either. It is as cheap to see yourself jumping twenty feet as ten. This mood of mind builds up health, strength and agility. The same force (which we call imagination) inverted, builds up rheumatism, dyspepsia and consumption.
The spirit of the athlete is as strong at seventy as it was at twenty-five. Why then does his body have the ” weakness of age V Because while he trained it to act on a few muscles, he was not training it to divert it from the thought of disease. On the contrary, in ignorance he was training it when affected by any malady to add to the force of the disease. Had he known that every disease or feeling of weakness is a thought acting on the body, and that such thought (or thing) can be diverted and thrown oft as he would throw off a venomous snake, the result to him would have been very, very different.
When a disease has become ” chronic” (rheumatism for instance), it is because the thought of it has with the patient become chronic. Such patient has industriously hammered the idea of rheumatism into himself and probably been assisted by those about him. There has been little diversion from such thought. Even if he travel, he packs the idea of rheumatism with him. He meets others at some ” Springs ” or ” Health Resort,” who are also packing it. And the query, the watchword, and reply, day in and day out, week in and week out, at home or abroad, is, ” How’s your rheumatism?” “Any better?” ” Eheumatism,” ” Cure for rheumatism;” ” Eheumatism, Eheumatism, Eheumatism!” He goes to bed with the idea, sleeps with it, gets up with it, eats breakfast with it, talks about it to others, and trades misery with other rheumatics. Especially is this the case at the health resort where people try to get well by talking and thinking disease.
What the demons of rheumatism, dyspepsia, or other disease want is eternal study, talk and reflection on rheumatism, dyspepsia, or other disturbance. What they need for one thing to be cast out, is a pic-nic, where they shall not be heard of, thought of, or talked of. What thousands of sick people need, is to be carted to some place where sickness is thought of as little as possible, and where people try to make every day a new day. But what sickness does not want is any change. It wants to remain in a perpetual dress rehearsal of its own misery. So far from casting the sore or ulcer out of its mind, it wants to look at it every half hour to see how it is getting along.
After sweltering and agonizing through the heat of summer, praying fervently for cooler weather, you will probably soon after cooler weather comes wake up some morning with your fall or winter’s cold. You expect one cold at least during the winter, and of course you get it. Now begin directly to divert your mind from such expectation. Say ” I do not expect a cold this winter.” That thougbt alone is for you the commencement of a great mental reformation. Still the cold may come. You can’t expect immediate freedom from disease when you have been courting it all these years and transgressing, possibly, every spiritual law in the universe, as all of us have done. If you wake up some morning stiff in the joints, sluggish in body, sore in throat or lung, watery in the eyes and nose, and irritation in the throat, you can, in addition to the thousand other remedies prescribed for a cold, try the thought of diversion. Do, if you can, something different from the routine of your daily life. Get one meal away from home, sleep in another bed, wear your best clothes, smoke a cigar if you have never smoked one, take a new route home from the office or workshop, soak your feet, drink tea where you have coffee, or vice versa, take a sweat and eat something you never did before. You need not try all these alterations of habit in one day. Do anything you are not in the habit of doing, providing you can do so with a clear conscience. All these, and many things I have not mentioned, serve as helps to divert your mind from your physical disturbance. The principle is useful in all other troubles, mental and physical. Now this thought of diversion and its grand use is never to leave you. It may be hidden and buried up for periods, but it will come out again stronger than ever. It may apparently go to sleep at times, but for each successive waking it will assert itself to you with more and more power. You will find yourself gliding imperceptibly into greater diversity of life and habit. You do not want to force yourself into diversion. You do not want to make it mechanical. You do not want to write a list of the different things you are going to do each day, something as some of us have done in our youth, when we made those grand and spasmodic attempts at the beginning of the year on goodness and regular habits, with the lengthy catalogue written out and hung up in the bed-room of our home for retiring and getting up in the morning, and the time for this study and the time for that, and other things we were going to do, and many things we would never do again, all of which was faithfully observed from thirty to ninety days, after which we fell into the bad old ways. ” For the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” But if the spirit is willing and it once gets hold of a truth it never lets go of it. It will act on that truth from time to time and prompt the body to its observance. The spirit cannot be mechanical. It is a creation of impulse. It does nothing but that it realizes pleasure in the doing. On the contrary, the body with its material mind insists on set times and seasons for prayer and praise, impulse or no impulse, emotion or no emotion. That makes so much of what is called religion a mere form and a mockery. One’s worship of God is no worship at all when there is no feeling or impulse in it. Nor can we force such feeliug or impulse. It must come spontaneously or it is not genuine. It may come through, but a spark at some unexpected moment—when at your desk, in your workshop behind your counter. That spark is worth a million perfunctory observances. Pray that you may have it oftener, and you will have it. That is your part and belonging of God ” made manifest in the flesh.” God never asked of man that he should set times and seasons for touching human hearts with the living fire of the spirit.
Go to a family where there is the least diversion, where the routine of life is the same from day to day, as if moulded in cast iron, and you will find a sick family. All the sick are not in their beds. Indeed, the majority of the sick are out of bed. Sickness covers a great deal of ground. It takes in irritability, fretfulness, bloodless and sallow complexions, gloomy imaginations and all weakness and decay. As thus far we have all fallen short of the glory of God, or in other words fallen short of the glorious destiny intended by the Infinite Spirit for every man and woman, it follows that we are all more or less sick in body or mind. I know this assertion may seem very unreasonable to the hale, hearty, vigorous man of twenty or thirty, but if he accepts the idea that in forty or fifty years more his body must wither and decay, then he has in his spirit (not bis body), the thought seed of sickness, and it will, if retained, most assuredly bear its baleful fruit. It costs nothing to try and throw such seed out of one’s mind, and if we cannot believe otherwise than that decay and death are the common lot, there is a Power which can aid us to see things in a different light.
I am not implying here that diversion is the sole panacea for removing disease and re-creating the body. It is one factor to these ends and a most important one. Many other ways will be shown those who get on the right track, and shown not so much by others as from within, the only place where the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Eternal life and self derived knowledge is located.
Thousands of people walk the streets, having at some period of the day some disagreable physical symptom. It may be a slight headache, or a feeling of heaviness, or some one of the hundred ways that the stomach has of making itself disagreeable, or some form of mental depression. Such feelings are apt to come on at a certain time of day and are often associated with certain habits and surroundings. Get off the track of such habit or surrounding and the symptom often disappears, because you break then those mental conditions building up the ailment. You break those cobwebs of thoughts being spun around you, which eternal routine converts into cables binding you to a monotonous walk around of life, and the disease coming with it.
Never varying habit brings a positive hostility to any change. It makes eternal sittings in chimney corners. It puts oft and puts off your proposed call or walk or ride, or the doing of anything to vary your life. It makes stronger and stronger a disagreeable mental sensation as you think of your intent to vary. Break through this. Visit the museum, the park, the locality, the family you have so long had in view, but did not visit, because you knew not why, except that when you could do so some trivial objection always sprung up to keep you in the old rut, and pass more hours in that semi-lethargy of domestic dullness, when people (even husbands and wives) yawn or feel like yawning in each other’s faces, and long for something new, while hugging the chains of connubial monotony.
The universe abounds with a never ending variety of things to give us happiness. The more spiritualized and refined we become the greater our power to sense, feel, appreciate and use these endless stores. The more we learn to trust the Supreme Power for good, the more are we moved into variety and diversity of life. The man who becomes blase, who imagines that he has seen it all, and that life has nothing new in store for him, is a man who senses only the material part of things. He is wearied of life, because believing only in the material, his physical senses become jaded and worn for lack of any quickening and recuperation through the spiritual. Let us then so set our minds as to grow more and more into the mood of ever demanding of the Supreme Power all ways, all means, all wisdom, all knowledge, all faith, all power to make of life what it should be, an Eternal Paradise.
Regeneration; Or, Being Born Again
Copyright 1890, by F. J Needham
We do not yet know the full meaning or value of life.
The commonly held idea of existence runs thus: to be born—to grow from infancy to youth, from youth to maturity, from maturity to old age, from old age to death. During these stages to gain possibly fame or fortune, but ever at the end to weaken, sicken and die.
Man’s real and ever-growing life is a condition so unlike this present existence, that there is scarcely a possibility of any realization thereof by comparison between the two. If you had never seen anything of a tree but its roots in the dark, damp ground, could any one by means of words convey to you a realization of the beauty of its foliage and blossoms in the sunlight?
Our physical existence is the root, from which in the future is to come an indescribable beauty and power.
Some speak lightly of their bodies, call them incumbrances and entertain glowing anticipations when being rid of them of a blissful life, entirely in the spiritual realm of existence.
This involves an error.
Because a certain physical life with ever refining physical senses is in every stage of existence a necessity to the fullest completement of our lives.
The Christ of Judea spoke of the necessity of ” Regeneration.” ” Ye must be born again,” He says.
Re-incarnated we all have been many times. Eegeneration is a step beyond re-incarnation.
Re-incarnation means the total loss of one physical body and the getting of a new one through the aid of another organization.
Regeneration means the perpetuation of an everrefining physical body without that total separation of spirit and body called death.
The cruder the spirit, the longer were the intervals of time between its getting for itself a new physical body through re-incarnation.
As the spirit was quickened and gained power, these intervals became less in duration, numbering years in place of centuries. With still greater increase of power the spirit will seek the regenerative instead of the re-incarnative process of perpetuating its life, of the physical senses.
A spiritualizing and refining power has ever been and ever will be working on this planet. It has through innumerable ages changed all forms of being, whether mineral, animal or vegetable, from coarse to finer types. It works with man as with all other organizations. It is ever changing him gradually from a material to a more spiritual being. It is carrying him through his many physical existences from one degree of perfection to another. It has in store for him new powers, new lives and new methods of existence. That spiritual power has given him in the past new inventions. It illuminated his mind to see the uses of steam, electricity and other material agencies. But far greater illumination is to come. A time is coming when he will need neither iron nor steam nor electricity to promote his convenience or enjoyment. New powers born out of his spiritual life will supersede the necessity of many of his present material aids.
There will come in the future a more perfected life, when for the few at first, and the many afterward, there will be no physical death.
In other words, every spirit will be able to use both its spiritual and physical senses, through the continual regeneration of its physical body.
Such making over and over again of the physical body will come of successive changes of mind. There will be continual separations from one old state of mind after another and entrances into new. We shall ever be through regeneration born into new individualities.
Regeneration will supersede re-incarnation, because of our coming into a higher order of life, or receiving and being built of a higher order of thoughts. The spirit will then be ever changing, the physical body for one still finer and more spiritualized.
This is the process referred to by Christ as being “born again.” The principle has been before intimated in the White Cross Library series in the books entitled “The Uses of Sickness,” and ” Immortality in The Flesh.”
Indeed, the whole aim and scope of all these writings is the endeavor to show what life really means; how the spiritual life rules the physical life, and how we are all growing from cruder to finer forms of life.
Life is an eternal series of regenerations. The spirit is regenerated when it shakes off the old physical body. It shakes off an old body because it is tired of carrying an instrument it cannot express itself through. The old man or woman of decaying powers has as much mind or spirit as ever. But that mind cannot act on its body. It Is cut off in a sense from that body. It is receding from that body and will finally quit it altogether. It recedes, because through ignorance it has been drawing for years inferior thought and a monotonous round of thought to the body and endeavoring to make it over again with old rotten material. It is like trying to repair a leaky roof with rotten shingles. This is the degenerative process of to-day and the cause of decaying physical power and death of the body.
But the more enlightened spirit will find out how to act on and replenish the body with newer and newer thought. This makes the body ever newer and newer and so keeps up the necessary connection between spirit and body.
We do not part with life in the loss of the physical body. But we do lose thereby one kind of life, and a most important agency for the fullest enjoyment of life.
“We lose in what is called death, the use of that set of senses we call the physical. “We lose the power of living, in a close connection with the world of physical things. It is most desirable to maintain a connection with the physical world, and the spirit on losing its body contrary to general belief laments the loss of such body and desires eagerly to have the possession and use of its former physical senses. Failing in this it uses so much as it can by a pschyological law the physical senses of those having bodies, whom it can influence or control.
Every living man and woman has such influence brought to bear on him or her from the unseen side of life.
The ” dead,” as they are falsely called, resume imperfectly their lives on earth, through aid unconsciously given them by the living, or more properly speaking, by those living with physical bodies.
If we do not wish to find out the new—if we Instantly reject what some may call “new fangled ideas “—if we want to go on in the old way as our fathers, then we invite the company and mind of spirits as ignorant as ourselves, who will only help on the decay of our bodies after getting from them all the use they can.
These are ” unregenerated spirits.” They have drawn to them little new thought since losing their bodies. They will by reason of the same ignorance through which they lost the last physical body be drawn into another re-incarnation, and perhaps another and another, until at last gaining with each life more knowledge, they will know how to regenerate their bodies.
This regeneration will not come of any material medicines or methods. It will come of changing spiritual conditions. These spiritual conditions will cause the adoption of new habits and ways of life. But to adopt these habits before the spiritual conditions prompts or demands them, will do little good.
We have a life of the physical senses. We have another of the liner or spiritual senses. We live during the waking hours by the physical senses. We live another life during sleep by the spiritual senses. When these two lives are properly adjusted they feed each other healthfully.
With such proper adjustment the physical senses receive certain necessary supply of element from the spiritual while trie body sleeps.
The spiritual being receives also from the material condition certain vital supply. If your spirit loses its body these sources of mutual supply between body and spirit are for a time cut off.
The more perfected or regenerated life of the future means the consciousness of existence by both the physical and spiritual senses.
The life of the physical senses and that of the spiritual senses are necessary to each other. When they are joined together and we become conscious of the use of both, life is relatively perfected, and the spirit attains a degree of happiness not now to be imagined.
During all the centuries which have passed since Christ’s time, can we point to any instance of this new birth or regeneration? If such regeneration is owing to a higher Faith and higher Law, can we say that any person, no matter what may have been their reputation for piety or uprightness whose bodies have finally sickened and decayed have lived up to the Highest Law?
” The wages of sin are death,” says the Bible. We would prefer to say the result of an unperfected life is the death of the physical body.
The body of every weak, shriveled, trembling old man or woman is to-day the result of sins committed in ignorance. Those sins lay iu their thoughts. Out of such thought as it attracts the spirit builds first its spiritual body. The physical body is a material correspondence of the spiritual body. If the spirit believes in error it builds that error into the body. The result is decay.
For this result no blame can be imputed to those who suffer. They have lived up to all the light and knowledge they had. With more growth there will in some condition of existence come to them more knowledge. They will then see new methods of living and avoid the mistakes of the former less perfected life.
Charity comes of the knowledge that all people live up to the best light they have. God alone can light up the darkened chambers of our and their minds. When we, leaving the faults of others alone, ask that our minds be illuminated so as to see and avoid evil, that illumination alone will help all about us.
People weary of existence, because they think year after year the same set of thoughts and ideas over and over again. Eternal life and happiness comes of a perpetual flow to us of new thought and idea. Thought is food for our spiritual beings. Our physical bodies are not nourished on one monotonous kind of food from year to year. Feed the spirit with the same thought (or try to) from year to year and it becomes sick. The sick spirit makes the sick body.
The Law of Eternal Life will not allow this repetition to go on. The Law says to us : ” You were not made to run in ruts and grooves of fixed habit. You are not as John Smith or John Brown to be an eternal individuality without change, like a post rooted in the ground. You are to have a new mind for this period, and a superior mind with increased powers of perception for the next period. You are ever by drawing to you and adding to you new thought to be as so many different individuals as you live on, and as this process of regeneration goes on you are born or changed into successive types of being, each one being finer than the last.
The regenerated life with a physical body means an ever increasing life. It means a fresher capacity with each day’s waking to sense that beauty in Nature which exists all around us. It means a new glory in each day’s sunshine. It means a repose and restfulness whereby we can sit still and feel the spirit which animates the tree, the leaf, the ocean, the rivulet, the star, the flower and every natural expression of the Infinite Mind. It means the daily flow to us of new thoughts which shall fill us with new life. It means that we shall rejoice in the realization and firmly grounded faith that we have in us the possibilities for development into numberless new lives. It means that power of so losing our material self in any effort we may make that all sense of time shall vanish and ennui and mental weariness shall be destroyed. It means power to live without drudgery of mind and body, or that anxiety which is even worse than drudgery. It means at last the getting of enjoyment from all things. To get enjoyment from everything is to get life from everything. To get life from everything is to get power from all things. To get power implies a control of all physical elements. This includes a power of ever holding an ever refining physical body.
Ennui is sickness. When we don’t know what to do with ourselves, when we try to kill time and everything seems ” flat, stale and unprofitable,” we have temporarily lost our hold of the Great Fountain of life, the Supreme Mind and Power. We are absorbing the wearied thought of thousands around us who think the same thing from day to day and from year to year, whose minds in their play are treadmills, and who are trying to get life exhilaration and variety entirely out of physical things.
The true and regenerative life cannot be gotten from material things. That is the reason why all that money can buy fails to satisfy. The monster of discontent and ennui rages as much in the palace as the hovel. Solomon was in the claws of this beast when he said: ” Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” That exclamation is a libel on the Infinite Mind. It came from the Jewish king, because he was trying to get life and happiness out of wood and stone and metal, and flesh and blood, and all things material. It cannot be done.
But when through demand of the Supreme you get new thoughts the material thing of yesterday seems to you as a new thing of to-day. The very rock you passed yesterday has a new idea associated with it to-day. It may not be an idea you can put in words. It is something you feel rather than think. Myriads of thoughts coming at the physical sight of all material tilings about us are so felt, but can neither be talked out or written out.
The regeneration of the body comes in response to our increasing demand of the Supreme Power to be led in the path of the Highest Wisdom. It comes of a courage gained at last of persistent demand whereby we shall dare to trust entirely to that power. This it is doubtful if any can do at present. We try to trust in God, but when the pinch comes and things look dark, we are tempted to adopt some of our worn-out material methods for averting the evil. But perfect trust in the Supreme Power can gradually come to us. When it does men will become more than mortal.
Whoever attains to such perfect trust will be regenerated.
Demand then new thoughts and an increasing earness to the Supreme Mind, and in time you receive new life, and all things about you are for you, imbued with new life, or idea. You are then in the line of the regenerative process. Your spirit, as well as your body, is being born again and again. It is drawing to it ever new ideas and becomes literally a new spirit, a new being. If the spirit is being thus renewed or regenerated the body must be also.
As we become more spiritualized, as the material mind gives place more and more to the Spiritual Mind; in other words, as the regenerative process goes on, we shall from time to time find ourselves prompted to change many of our habits and modes of life. These changes will involve eating, sleeping and association.
But we need not try to force these changes on ourselves. The regenerative process will involve the eating of less and less animal food, until we shall eat none whatever. But there would be nothing gained from ceasing to eat meat before the desire for it had gone.
The regenerative process will impel us at times to seek solitude, because when alone with Nature the spirit absorbs and assimilates a finer quality of thought. But to enforce on ourselves the solitude of the hermitage or cloister when there is no real love for it does little good, as is proven by the fact that hermit and recluse have physically decayed and died like the rest.
This regeneration of the body will come to no one directly from any system of forms, habits or observances. It will come because of a time ripe for it to come. As this planet ripens spiritually all material things upon it partake of that ripening or development. The life of to-day, so different and superior to that of five hundred or a thousand years ago, is a part and a proof of that development. The earth ripened first from chaos to the coarse development in the animal and vegetable kingdoms of ages ago, and then to its present relatively more refined condition. But this refining process is never to cease.
Perhaps you will say on reading this, ” What has all this to do with me? ” What you say may be true. But it is all too far off, too indefinite. I want something to benefit me now.”
This idea of the body’s regeneration is for you a benefit now, if you can accept it. It cannot be displaced from your mind. It will first, as a tiny seed, stay there. It may for months or years show no sign of life and seem to be forgotten. But it will grow and have more and more of a place in your thought. It will gradually change the quality of your thoughts. It will gradually force out an old and false interpretation of life and bring in a new one. It will impel you to look ever forward to newer joys and make you cease groping among regrets and sad remembrances of your past, when you know that such thoughts bring decay and death to the body. We are built literally of our thoughts. When we realize that our regrets, our envyings and jealoussies, our borrowings of trouble, or our morbid contemplations of subjects, ghastly and sickly, are literally things, and bad tilings, actually put in our bodies, as such thoughts materializing themselves from invisible to visible element turn into flesh and blood, and that as so built into ourselves they bring us pains, aches, weakness, sickness, wrinkles, bowed backs, weak knees and failing powers, we have a good and tangible reason for getting rid of them.
The body of a person given over to melancholy will be literally built of gloomy thoughts materialized into flesh and blood.
When a girl realizes more and more clearly that jealousy, peevishness and pettish pouting moods will spoil her good looks and complexion, she will make efforts to rid herself of such thoughts. They will destroy her body. The Infinite Power for good wants all things and all people to be beautiful, healthful and symmetrical, and intends ever to increase this beauty, health and symmetry. It works through a continual process of regeneration to keep them so. If it cannot effect such perpetual life and beauty with one physical organization, it mercifully lets it go to pieces and gives the spirit another.
When a man realizes that his angry mood or his covetous mood, or his grumbling mood represents so much material put in his body, and that such element will give his body pain and make it sick he has a good strong reason for having some care as to what his mind runs on and for making the ” inside of the platter clean.”
Let us remember so much as we can that every unpleasant thought is a bad thing literally put in the body. Are some people unpleasant to us? Do their airs or affectations, or their stinginess or dishonesty, or their domineering manners, or their coarseness and vulgarity offend us? Well, let us try and forget them ! Why talk them over for an hour, holding the while all their disagreeable traits in our minds and think of them, may be for hours afterwards, when we know that these unpleasant images we carry in mind are things which are being literally put in our bodies to affect them injuriously and degenerate them. All such thoughts we must get rid of.
Such riddance is the commencement of getting a new body. It is in the way of a literal regeneration. If through long habit we find we cannot by our own endeavor keep out of these injurious moods, if we find ourselves from time to time drawn into the current of tattle, or greed, or envy, we can cease all endeavor of our own and ask help of the Supreme Power to give us new and better thoughts. That Power, through our demand, will give us a new mind. The new mind will bring the new body.
“LIES BREED DISEASE; TRUTHS BRING HEALTH.”
Copyright 1890, by F. J. Needham.
What is it that thinks? one asks.
There is thought in everything. The force we call thought is not man’s exclusive property.
The sun is an expression of the Infinite Mind, and every ray it sends the earth is full of thought, life and intelligence. Planet, star and man are similar materialized expressions of that mind.
So are trees, plants, birds and animals.
The same mind and intelligence are in the rocks and soil. There is mind wherever there is life.
There is more of this force in a plant than in a stone—more in the animal than the vegetable— more in man than in the animal—more in some men than others—more in the angel than the mortal.
There is life and mind in things we call ” dead.” Life, force, movement, mind or thought pervade the illimitable universe. It had no beginning. It has no ending.
It had no origin unless eternity had an origin. It is God,—” The I Am and I Am of tbe Biblical Eecord.”
Lies Breed Disease; Truths Bring Health.
An idea called ” death ” exists in men’s minds. It exists nowhere else.
The idea of death came of man’s incapacity to see further than the ending of one materialized expression of the Infinite Mind. A tree ceasing to put forth leaves, and its veins to run with sap, he called it ” dead.” But life, mind and motion remain still in the wood of that tree. That life, mind and motion are slowly taking the wood to pieces—man calls this decay. It is, on the contrary, the almighty, all-pervading thought working to put itself in a different form of expression, in order to realize in that form a still greater degree of happiness.
The same life or mind takes a man’s body to pieces when he loses it. If that body was literally dead, it would remain forever as when the breath left it.
The idea of Death is the first great untruth.
The wild oak is one true expression of the Infinite Mind That mind in the oak plans the shape and color of its leaves and wood. Mind in the flower plans its shape and color. Mind in the flower seeks and finds the elements which give it color.
There is in every expression of the Infinite Mind, be it animal, bird, fish, tree, plant, rock, fluid, air or mineral, a mind, force and intelligence which man can no more originate, create nor comprehend than he can originate or create himself.
This wisdom and force comes of the Infinite Mind. In the wild plant or flower it is working out one of its innumerable expressions of happiness in that plant or flower. In the wild or natural animal it is working out another.
Plants, animals, birds, and all things in their wild or natural state have a pleasure of their own in existing. They are true expressions of the Infinite Mind. When man interferes with them and forces their cultivation, he interferes with a truth, lessens their sustaining power and lessens their happiness and his own.
Plant, animal and bird have a pleasure in living free of any one’s care, save that of the Infinite Mind which works through them.
When so working they are true expressions of the Infinite Mind. When man interferes with them they cease for a time to be true expressions. Then they become untruths.
Nor does man really improve any tree, plant or animal he cultivates or domesticates. True, he makes them to suit his comfort and convenience, regardless of the truth that as expressions of the Infinite Thought they have a right to their liberty, happiness and natural life.
In their natural state the plant, the fowl, the animal are self-sustaining. They do not need man’s care. The wild goose, for instance, is stronger, swifter and more symmetrical in shape than the domesticated fowl of the same species. It rears its young without man’s care. It knows when and where to seek the warm or colder climate.
That is because in the wild state it is left free to live according to the dictates of its own spirit or inherent intelligence. That intelligence and foreknowledge of the wild bird comes directly from the Supreme Mind. Men call it ” instiuct.” It is the Highest Wisdom and truth acting through that particular expression of the Infinite, and when it is left free to act, brings the greatest happiness to that expression.
Therefore, the wild bird or animal enjoys its life far more than when domesticated. When animals or birds are taken by man and bred for a few generations they become weaker; in cases actually deformed, and are subject to diseases from which in their natural state they were free.
As fashioned by the Infinite Mind the bird or animal is an expression of the truest method of realizing the most happiness for itself. They are expressions of the highest truth. The highest truth brings the greatest happiness in whatever form it works.
When man tampers with any expression of the Infinite Mind and attempts to rule such expression, he robs it temporarily of the happiness which the Supreme Wisdom would confer upon it. He makes for bird, plant or animal and himself an unnatural life. He diverts temporarily some physical expression of the highest truth from its true purpose. That purpose is happiness for itself.
The symmetrical, swift-flying, self-sustaining, wild goose is a truth. It is one expression of the Infinite Mind for bringing to itself happiness.
The clumsy, helpless, domesticated goose, bereft of power of flight and unable to care for itself, is a lie. It represents only what remains of a truth after man has meddled with it.
Your canary is doomed to certain death if it escapes from its cage. All self-sustaining power has been bred out of it by man. In its wild state it was a truth. Man has tried in vain to improve that truth.
The hog, in its natural state, is not an unclean beast. It is agile, not clumsy. Man has made this animal “hoggish” in making it a fat breeding machine. Man sees perfection in breeding it so highly that the prize pig’s legs can scarcely support its body.
The hog has then become a sample of man’s management of a truth.
All man’s endeavors to improve upon the divine and natural order of creation are errors.
When man would fashion the wild bird or animal to his purpose, he interferes with a materialized thought or truth from the Infinite Mind whose purpose is the working out of the greatest enjoyment for itself. That purpose man for a time retards. The animal or bird domesticated by man is crippled and its whole enjoyment lessened. It becomes then an error, a materialized untruth.
An untruth is a truth turned aside from its true purpose. It can only be turned aside for a time. The Infinite Power for good goes straight on and pushes aside the error. It will have its own way. All things which man has made artificial (including himself) must in time become natural a true expression of the Infinite.
Becoming more natural is not returning to barbarism. The Infinite Mind (not man) brought this planet and man with it from chaos and crudeness to its present more refined condition. That mind in ways we cannot understand is going on with that refinement, and making man also more gentle and refined.
The Infinite Mind and Wisdom insists on making everything happy. Nothing is left out. The more of the element force or thought of happiness sent out by bird, animal, or plants in their natural state the more will man absorb and feel it. In time to come when man learns to let these natural expressions alone—when he ceases trying to convert them into untruths, he will live literally on this thought of happiness as so put out by every natural expression of the Infinite. It will be to him the Elixir of Life. It will give him power to live without slaying bird, fish or animal for food, without even turning plants aside from their natural life to give him grain.
The purpose of life in plants, animals, birds, man, and all things as directed by the Infinite Mind is happiness for each and everything. The more of such happiness felt and put out by each thing, the more is felt by all things. The Infinite intends to fill and saturate its creation with an atmosphere of happiness. Not an orgie, but a beautifully organized current of pleasurable sensation ever flowing through us. When we interfere with the Divine Law in any way, as when we imprison or cripple the power of bird, beast, plant or ourselves, we lessen temporarily their happiness and our own. We must feel in some way the pain we put on them. We are then reminded by pains and penalties of some sort that we are out of the current of true thoughts. The test of true thoughts as we demand them, and they act themselves out through us is lasting happiness. The sign of an untruth as drawn to and temporarily acting on us is some form of pain. To demand earnestly true thoughts is to connect ourselves with the Supreme Power or be ” One with God.” To be as one with the Supreme Power is to be ever seeing more and more clearly ways, means and methods for bringing us permanent happiness.
Man draws now to a limited extent on true expressions of the Infinite for giving him happiness. Does the poet go to man’s works for inspiration? He has sung most and ever will sing most of the mountains and lakes, the forest and sky. Because, directing his mind on these divine materialized thoughts, he draws from them a literal element which gives him force and inspiration. Going to them in kindness and sympathy, he draws from them literally their intelligence and thought, and adds it to his own. But from this source of pleasure for him he has scarcely begun to drink.
In time, man being a greater expression of the Infinite Mind, will learn to copy tree, bird and animal the lesser expressions of that mind, and do as they in letting that power work through him.
He will see very clearly that a wisdom far beyond his own has charge of him and insists on having charge of him, to carry him to higher and higher states of happiness. He will in spirit hear the Infinite Mind saying to him, ” You cannot make truths. I alone can do that.”
All the plants, animals, birds and fish—all things as I made them are good. They are truths. When you meddle with them you divert them temporarily from their true purpose. That purpose is happiness. You make of them untruths. Untruths bring only pain.
Take truths then as I give them to you and they will carry you to a happiness far beyond your present power to realize.
Your ways and methods of life, your slaughter, enslavement and crippling of birds and animals, your inventions, your machines, your so-called wisdom, your civilization, prove, after all, errors, for they fail to bring what you seek—happiness. You are making your lives more and more artificial and unnatural. Your modes of cultivation are taking life from the soil, putting little back, and will ultimate in famine.
You pollute the rivers with your factories and sewage. You make an atmosphere in your great cities unfit to breathe. Your struggle for existence grows harder and harder. Your business methods craze men with excitement. Your merchants and statesmen and others snap the thread of their physical lives through the tension in which they live. You are trying to live on untruths, and untruths can only bring unhappiness.”
An untruth cannot endure. It cannot forever go on adding to itself ever increasing misery, be the misery that of man, animal, bird, or plant. As man goes on with what he calls the ” improvement” of breeds and species, the Supreme Wisdom puts more and more difficulties in the way. Disease and epidemics attack the domesticated animals and birds unknown in their natural state.
The fruit and grain growers have a constant struggle with destructive insects bred, as it were, from his artificially cultivated vegetation. The highly bred animal becomes more and more difficult to raise and a greater tax on man’s care. At last a point is reached where all so-called improvement of the species stops, because the animal loses the power entirely of having its unnatural life sustained by man’s unnatural methods. The materialized untruth cannot go on any farther.
When this point is reached man is obliged to go back to the original type of the animal, bird or plant (or as near as he can get at it), to replenish his artificially raised species. The breed of fancy rabbits, for instance, must, from time to time, be replenished from the wild of their kind to give them vigor. So even with plants. The more vigorous and natural grape vine of America replenishes the exhausted vineyards of France. Man is obliged to go back to a truth or natural expression of Infinite Force to get power to sustain his untruth a little longer.
When his care and breeding of bird or animal ceases, they become in a few generations wild, original and natural. That is the untruth returns to a truth. Left to itself it reverts to the current and care of the Higher Wisdom which alone can create it and sustain it. An untruth of any kind has constantly to be nursed, and with all its nursing grows weaker and weaker. If we tell one lie we have always in some way to bolster it up with another, yet our position grows weaker and more liable to exposure with each lie. Divert bird or animal from the fashion, and life intended for them by the Infinite and our methods necessary to sustain their unnatural life, become more and more forced and unnatural. Your highly bred horses and cattle must be well housed, their food prepared for them with great care, yet they are far less hardy than the animal left to forage for itself.
These methods are untruths committed by man in the vain endeavor to bolster up the first untruth which consisted in diverting the bird, animal or plant from the life the Infinite intends for it.
It is the nature of a truth to be self sustaining. The wild trees of the forest and the wild bird and animal being true expressions of the Infinite Mind, prove themselves to be truths, because they rear themselves without man’s care from age to age.
We shall in time see clearly how this same law applies to us. When we get, as we shall, the courage to trust to the Infinite Wisdom which insists on making us living truths instead of errors, all things will be done for us. All things necessary for happiness will come to us, as the elements come to the flower to give it its beauty and happiness.
We are not the makers of true thoughts, or, in other words, of the Infinite Wisdom. We are the reservoirs or channels for true thoughts to flow through and work their expressions of happiness through. We shall learn that in the true life there is nothing to do but to keep ourselves open to true thoughts, remain otherwise passive and let these thoughts do their work. They will give us no idle, sluggish life, but one full of happy activity. They will force us to act happily in art, in poetry, in music, in business, in countless ways we cannot now realize.
A bird does not make its music. It holds itself open to the Infinite Mind, and that mind pours music through it. That is what we shall learn to do to receive inspiration and power for any effort.
It is our great privilege to do this more intelligently than bird, tree, animal or any other limited expression of the Infinite, and therefore, to get results for happiness far greater and quicker.
The spirit is made of the thoughts it draws to itself. These thoughts it sends and builds into the body. As the spirit aspires or demands true thoughts it makes its physical body of true thoughts.
Only true thoughts can be forever built into our spirits. An untruth, however, can fasten on it but only for a time.
The spirit cannot retain it. It casts it off. It will not build into itself forever anything but truth.
Whatever pain, sickness, unrest and trouble you may have comes of your spirit’s endeavor to cast out or throw oft some lie or error which like a parasitical plant has fastened itself upon it. It will not receive that lie.
But you may not know what that lie or error is. All of us are believing to-day more or less in lies or errors we have not yet found out.
We cannot find out these errors all at once. As we earnestly demand truth the spirit will send it proportionate to our needs, and as it comes the errors must go one by one. As they go the new element of thought forms newer and finer flesh and blood for the body. In this way is the body regenerated.
The pain we experience, be it of mind or body, is the spirit’s way of telling our material selves that something wrong is trying to incorporate itself into our eternal beings. The spirit will not recognize that thing as proper building material.
It is a great help to your spirit, if you will but entertain a truth, though you may not at first be able to believe it. We cannot absolutely believe in new truths when they are first presented to us. This should not be expected of any one. We may credit them. We may wish to believe in them. But absolute belief means acting out and living up to an idea without doubt or uncertainty, and with the same confidence that the navigator has in his compass, charts and chronometer. This we cannot do until any certain truth is literally incorporated and becomes a part of the physical body.
It becomes then literally a part of our flesh and blood. When it does it acts with the greater force.
We do not make a truth, nor do we make it act. On the contrary, a truth comes to us already made. It acts on us and creates results for us. Ideas coming to poet or inventor and built from the spirit into the body, force spirit and body to poetry or invention. So, when the truth of perfect health, regeneration and immortality in the flesh become parts of both spirit and body, they compel belief, and belief compels you to perfect health, regeneration and immortality.
When a truth becomes a part of our material self, a literal belonging of our flesh and blood, we cease trying to believe it. We do not try to believe that our stomachs will digest our food. That power of belief is a part of our flesh and blood, and acts because such belief is literally in the body.
The body and spirit of the Christ and others who performed miracles were in such correspondence that the power of their spirits could be expressed through their flesh. That flesh, then, became a conductor or medium for the expression and action of their thoughts.
A true thought is a living, moving, acting thing or force, and it may become so strong that it can clothe itself and act in a physical form without the aid of hands. We would call that a ” miracle.” It is only the working of a law we now know little about.
As our spirit draws and builds more and more of true thoughts into itself, the more sensitive and alive is it to all untruths. It rejects them the more quickly, exactly as a healthy stomach will reject food unfit for it. This for a time may cause with the individual more physical disturbance, for the spirit fully alive to error and reinforced ever by true thoughts, is continually driving off the untruths he may have unconsciously held for years.
The reason above all others why we should not lie, is that the habit brings sickness to our bodies and misery to our minds. Lying does us the greatest wrong. So does any other sin we may commit.
When we tell lies either by word of mouth or by implication we make those lies or crooked thoughts a part of our bodies, exactly as when we receive true thoughts we make them literally parts of our bodies. If we put only untruths in the body they will destroy it.
The lies we may tell becoming literally parts of the body, act themselves out in the body. In the order of the Infinite Wisdom a lie or untruth cannot endure. It kills itself. If the whole body is a living mass of untruths, then that body being a lie cannot endure.
The more lies we tell the less are we able to see truths when they are presented us. The habit of lying grows so with some that they cannot even tell when they are lying or when speaking the truth, because their flesh is actually composed of lying thoughts. They can no more for the time help being deceitful than a fox can keep from being “foxy.”
Lying is not confined to false statements by means of words. We can tell lies without speaking a word. We can welcome people to our houses when we wish they would not come. This is a lie. We can smile when we are neither entertained nor amused by others. That smile pretends that we are entertained. It is a lie. It has in it the thought of a lie. We can pretend an interest in people’s welfare or comfort because they have money we hope to get. That pretension is a lie. We dare scarcely own the real motive to ourselves. We may connect ourselves with churches partly to gain a position in society or help our business. That act is a lie. We may speak from platform or pulpit things which do not satisfy our internal convictions. That is lying. We may say that things are pleasant to us when they are unpleasant. That is a lie. Half consenting to a thing, the consent which says “Yes” when it means “No” is a lie.
These lies, told in various ways, are so common that we often forget they are lies. But they work their evil results on the body exactly the same as if we knew we were lying. This unconscious lying brings evil to the body faster than conscious lying.
It is as poison unconsciously taken into the system, and when a person is blind to the fact that he is indulging in an injurious habit, there is little present hope for him. The habit of lying may fasten on us a spiritual blindness which cannot see the truth. When we are unconscious of the lying habit, we are all the faster building up for ourselves a physical body of untruths, so that at last the material part of us can only see untruths and believe in them. This brings sickness and at last death to the body. Because untruths cannot last, and it is in the Divine Law that if our physical body gets filled with them and represents only a mass of untruths, they will destroy that body so that its spirit may get one more suitable to its purpose. So the Higher Law uses what we call evil to bring good.
The habit of lying attracts one to lying and liars. For this reason a ” confirmed liar” will believe another liar quicker than he will one who is truthful. The “sharper” in one kind of business is often deluded by the “sharper” in some other kind of business. Being made of lies physically as well as spiritually, they attract each other. In all nature like attracts like.
The person built of lies and the more truthful person are unpleasant to each other. The invisible element and force each puts out antagonize and creates for each an unpleasant mental feeling, while in each other’s presence, for truth and error cannot dwell together.
But our known and conscious lies form but a small part of the lies we may unconsciously believe in. If we believe them we act them and live them. If we act and live them, we tell them constantly to ourselves and others.
All lies and errors materialize themselves on the body. Any error or untruth held by the spirit makes its expression in the flesh, exactly as the mental condition of a brutal person puts brutality on that face, or that of a despondent person puts gloom on his face.
Gray hairs, wrinkles and all signs of age on the face or body are materalized signs of error. They are signs that a false belief has for a time fastened itself on the spirit. One false belief is that the decay of the physical body is inevitable, and by no possibility to be avoided, and that the Infinite Spirit has decreed this decay and made it an immutable and never changing law. This is a lie. It is a parasitical growth of untruth. This untruth is held by all our race. It is believed in so firmly that it is rarely thought of and never questioned.
Our minds do literally feed our bodies with the thoughts in them. All thoughts are things sent, from the mind to the body where they are crystallized or materialized into the visible substance of the body. Your body is a thought expressing in visible substance the mind that makes it. If our minds in ignorance try to build an untrue thought into the body it cannot last. It proves itself an untruth by decay. When true thoughts are sent from spirit to body they will prove themselves by making life everlasting for the body, as life is everlasting for the spirit.
The way out of all these mortal troubles and untruths is so simple and yet so wonderful. Ask for true thoughts. Ask for power to believe them when they come. Ask for power to be able to believe in a Supreme Wisdom, not in a half believing way, but as literally as you believe in the existence of the Atlantic Ocean. Ask persistently and importunately. Don’t ask it as a favor of the Infinite of whom you are a part, to send you what that Power insists you must have and shall have to increase the sum total of His and your happiness. If you make a thing for a man which will ennoble and elevate him and you at the same time, and that thing can only be used for such purpose by that particular man, do you want him to come to you begging, supplicating, cringing for it?
In the Infinite Mind there is neither beggary, supplication nor dependence. These, then, are untruths. The Infinite can hold nothing but truth. The Infinite Mind insists that our quality of thought shall be as near as possible its quality. That is drawing nearer to God.
Getting nearer to the Supreme is becoming more and more like the Supreme. Your spirit of earnest demand implies no lack of reverence. Earnest demand is not insolent or insulting demand. The more you realize of the Supreme Wisdom the more you must reverence it. But supplication or begging is not reverence. The beggar does not reverence you when he asks of you a shilling. He does not reverence you when he gets it. The Infinite likes and responds to that spirit which says, “I demand to be a whole man or a whole woman. I demand to know the right way.” That is your right. The Infinite Mind wants you to know your rights and assert them. It says: “These goods are yours. Why, then, should you beg or supplicate for them?
Lies Breed Disease; Truths Bring Health.
GOD’S COMMANDS ARE
MAN’S DEMANDS.
Copyright 1890, by F. J. Needham.
Life is a science which has no end. There is no stage in existence when we can say: “We are finished.” The thing we imagine we comprehended and understood to-day may have to the awakened and ever awakening mind a new meaning and interpretation to-morrow, and will have still newer and newer meanings and interpretations in the future. The thing bringing us evil to-day may bring good to-morrow. That depends upon our knowledge of its use. Gunpowder is dangerous in the hands of a boy. It is not so dangerous as used by a skilled blaster. Again, the thing we think to be for good to-day we may find an evil to-morrow.
The word to which we attach a certain meaning to-day may have an entirely new meaning tomorrow. Ideas cannot be expressed merely by the sound of certain letters and syllables. As our mental vision grows clearer and clearer every word in the language will have a new meaning for us. These meanings cannot be found in the dictionary. There is a language of idea which words can never fully express, and no dictionary can keep pace with it.
It is impossible for man to ask of the Infinite in the tone of an abject beggar or a groveling suppliant when he realizes that he is a part of the Infinite. As a part of the measureless whole he can demand. As a part he cannot command that Power which has no beginning, no ending and is not compassable by any human mind.
But to get more and more of God in us—to be a greater and growing part of the Supreme—to get true knowledge from all things about us, we must have a mind ever in the attitude of demand.
The word “Demand,” as often used in the White-cross Series, does not imply calling on the Supreme Power in the tone of the robber who demands “your money or your life.” It implies no insolence or lack of reverence. It does imply an imperative call on our part to be “one with God,” the Infinite, so vast that the mind reels when it vainly endeavors to comprehend the power which has no ending in space.
Every sentence in the Lord’s Prayer has in it the character of demand. Such phrases as “Thy kingdom come,” “Give us this day our daily bread,” “Lead us not into temptation,” and ” Deliver us from evil,” are imperative.
The phrases “Give us,” ” Lead us,” “Deliver us,” have not the tone of abject supplication. They have the tone of demand. They are in accordance and consistency with the Christian precept, “Ask and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be opened unto you.”
The words of Christ, ” Thy will be done on earth as in Heaven,” do not beg of the Infinite as a special favor that His designs and plans be carried out on earth as in Heaven. They were earnest demands on Christ’s part made to a Power and Wisdom which he recognized as infinitely greater than his own.
When a soul is thoroughly awakened and cries out, “What shall I do to be saved?” that question is past the bounds of supplication. It is in the spirit of earnest demand. That is the spirit the Supreme Power requires of us before it can give us what It insists on giving us and what the Supreme Mind knows we most need. When you would do an individual a genuine good you want that person to thoroughly appreciate the value of what you have to give and to be keenly alive to the good it will do him. His is then an earnest demand for such favor. The Infinite requires of us the same mood of earnest demand for the good He will do us.
Does it imply lack of respect for us to say: ” As a part and belonging of the Infinite Mind, I demand of that exhaustless whole all the wisdom and power that I can receive and appropriate for the hour. I demand still higher and more God-like qualities, for in proportion as God makes better and happier the part I express of Him, the more can I, that limited yet ever growing part, reflect back such glory. I must act out and express whatever of the Infinite I am.”
There is no supplication in the word must.
In the working of what are called miracles, when Christ put forth in words a force or thought for their accomplishment, he did so in the spirit of demand. “I say unto thee, arise!” were his words in raising the dead. To the elements, when he calmed the storm, he says, “Peace, be still!”
Ages before Christ, results accomplished seemingly without the domain of natural law, came in response to the imperative demand of certain individuals. Moses demanded the waters of the Red Sea to retire and make a passage for the Israelites. He smites the rock and demands the water to flow from it. Joshua says imperatively, ” Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon !” Read the history of all these results, and you find them coming with the imperative or demanding thought of the individual through whom they are done.
We repeat again the words “the individual through whom they are done.” A miracle comes of a force or thought working through an individual as through a channel. It is not done by the individual, but by the force or thought coming from the Supreme and acting through him as steam acts on the engine. The locomotive of itself does not draw the train. It is only a machine for the power of steam to act on and through. We stand in somewhat similar relation to the Supreme Mind. As we demand power of that mind, power will come to us, and work results through us.
A thought has power to work results in proportion to the amount of demand putin to it. The Supreme Power puts such force of demand into it—not we. The more of truth in the thought, the more is there of the Supreme Power in it, the more is there of the quality of demand and the greater are the results coming of such thought as it acts and works through the individual.
The inspiration which invents or accomplishes great things or what is called Genius, comes of the force of demand. It is an imperative thought, or force, acting on the individual and compelling him to write, to invent, to act or do in some way what never was done before.
Such thoughts or forces acting on Shakespeare compelled him to write and express ideas in a material form. He, of himself, did not make those thoughts. They came to him ready-made. Nor could he tell how they were made. They came knocking imperatively at his door demanding admittance and utterance in words. He would have been miserable had he been denied the pleasure of writing them. His works came of the same power which has accomplished all miracles, ancient or modern. That is the power of an idea acting on the individual and demanding expression in some material form. Such thoughts give the individual no rest until he commences working them out. They forced Watts and Fulton to recognize and apply the force of steam. They forced Franklin and Morse and Edison and others to work out the miracles wrought seemingly by electricity. Such thoughts have forced every inventor, every discoverer, every poet, every writer, every artist, to those inspirations and results which are as much miracles as are those told of in the Mosaic and Christ record. They are the commands of the Illimitable Mind in the limited intelligence, and such commands come in response to the demands of the limited or human intelligence.
A greater force of thought than ever is coming to this planet. It is in its nature demanding and imperative. It will show man a new life, a new meaning in life and a newer and better way to live. It will abolish very much of what we now deem indispensable to our comfort and convenience, for it will show us a better way. When the railway came with its thirty miles per hour, it demanded the abandonment of the stage coach with its ten miles per hour. The railroad is the better way until something superior to it comes.
The more we become channels for the Supreme Power to act through, the more will be done through us. We may become more and more such channels by simply keeping in mind the idea that we are such channels and demanding of the Infinite Mind to work more and more through us.
In healing ourselves, for instance, we need to demand of the Infinite Mind that a positive, imperative thought of health act on us. But we must not of ourselves try to manufacture such thought, or make it imperative. That is the business of the Supreme.
If we make such attempt it is the individual who is vainly trying to usurp the functions of the Infinite. We have nothing to do but keep quiet and receive what God sends us.
We say in substance to the Infinite Mind: ” I demand that your will be done with me. I demand to be made whole mentally and physically, for wholeness (holiness) is the characteristic of the In finite, and I, being a part of that vast whole, demand wholeness. But I do not prescribe or direct the Infinite how I shall get perfect health. I will not say I want my limbs, or my stomach, or any special part of me made well immediately, for the wisdom far greater than mine acting on me may, for some purpose I cannot now understand, seem to retard the recovery of parts I deem so essential, knowing that much else must be done before perfect health is realized. I demand of the Infinite to take care of me. I surrender myself up to that care as I would obey the suggestions of a skilled physician in whom I had perfect confidence. I do not demand of the Infinite to be cured by the method I think best. I do demand to be cured in such way as that Higher Wisdom thinks best.”
A thought like this is an imperative force for health acting on you. It comes as demanded of the Imperial Power ruling this universe. Can you, the smaller part, make it as imperative and powerful as the measureless power of the Infinite?
A demand like this taps the exhaustless source of all thought and wisdom. It puts you in connection with the measureless wisdom. It brings then from time to time other imperative thoughts to act on you for perfect wholeness and a never ending health. And as so brought one after another and they become parts of you and your eyes are opened to see clearer and clearer, you may be amazed t > look through those new eyes with your new mind and see what foolish things your self of the past has tried to command God to do for you.
A thought and the act accompanying that thought to accomplish results must be positive or imperative. You cannot drive a nail properly in an undecided, halting, hesitating frame of mind. You cannot send the hammer with any force straight to its mark unless your mind goes to that mark first with similar directness of purpose. You must demand that it goes there with such directness. You pray that the hammer should go in such manner. You pray in every positive act of your life, great or small, and when you pray you demand. If you pray like a beggar, fearing that in using the hammer it won’t hit the nail unless the Deity sees fit that it should, the chances are that you miss that nail many times.
The element or thought called down in the old time Methodist revivals, which wrought such peculiar physical results on the participants, came in response to imperative demands made by many people at once, such as these: ” O, Lord, come now! ” ” Send down Thy power now !”
This co-operate demand made by hundreds at once did bring to them temporarily a different thought element or atmosphere from that in which they ordinarily lived. It stimulated them. It filled them with excitement. .It swept over those assemblies a great spiritual wave. It prostrated men, women and children. It sent some into trances. It filled some with the deepest grief. It filled others with a frantic joy. It was a real thing or force brought to them by means of the power of the demand they put out.
Nor did this power or element so generated come until the abject tone of supplication with which the meetings often commenced rose from begging to entreaty and from entreaty to the positive demand of “Lord, come now! ” ” Lord, come quickly! ”
It was the cruder working of a spiritual power. It was the same power as that manifested at the Pentecost, when those gathered together in an upper room, ” all with accord in one place,” heard a sound as of a mighty rushing wind while cloven tongues as of flame sat upon each of them and they commenced speaking in languages not their own.
This power comes not of culture or learning. It came to the Methodist camp meeting of fifty years ago to simple uneducated people.
To-day these manifestations or ” outpourings of the spirit” are not so common. They are not popular. The strong emotion, convulsions and outcries of the old revival meeting are not encouraged. The religious revival of to-day must be kept within certain bounds; the outpouring is checked and regulated to propriety.
The more staid and less emotional sects never can bring this force down to act on them because they do not ask for it positively. They do not importune for it, and we find in the history of modern religion that when the sect originating in this enthusiasm and fervor grows away from it, it becomes formal, cold and dead. We find that the vitality of the churches has from time to time to be restored and drawn from some new sect, always coming of the less cultured and more emotional element, which goes back to a spirit akin in fei-vor to that of early Methodism, and demands imperatively with cries and shoutings for the spirit to be poured upon them.
Such spiritual outpourings come only in response to the call of earnest demand.
The spirit of demand is a Divine law. It acts on all created things, to make them finer and better. It has brought this planet and all things on it from the chaos and crudity of countless ages past up to its present degree of refinement. It cannot be checked. When you would force it back it returns with more power and in a different form.
A great and silent demand is to-day going out from millions of hearts. Those hearts are silently saying : ” Our religion does not satisfy us. It does not heal the sick; it does not give us sound bodies; it gives us nothing tangible concerning a future existence ; it makes no new revelations. No signs and wonders accompany the preaching of the word. Our friends go one by one. The grave closes over them and when we ask of them, we get in reply only the stereotyped generalities.”
This great, silent demand of many thousands is going out night and day. It is a mighty, unseen force, working, acting, and bringing results whether those who make such demand keep it always in mind or not. Forgetfulness for a time of the thing demanded does not lessen the working power of the demand to draw to us the thing demanded.
This demand is in many who would not dare tell it even to themselves. We often try to beat back thoughts and longings which come to us. But they do come again and again. They will not be beaten back. They are imperative forces knocking and asking for admittance. They may so come for years before they are expressed in words to others. Perhaps our first verbal recognition of them is when we hear them talked out or written out by another and then we say in surprise, “Why, I have been thinking those same thoughts for years.”
This silent demand is to give a higher meaning and interpretation to all forms of present religious beliefs. These beliefs are founded in truth. But truth never stands still. It is ever broadening, widening and “making all things new.” Religion, or the Law of Life, is not as a post in the ground rooted to one set interpretation of the Word of God. It is as a tree eternally living and ever putting forth new branches and leaves.
Silent demand works more powerfully than if spoken. The mood or frame of mind which makes it, never ceases, though it may at times be out of the material memory. The individual does not create this imperative thought acting on him, nor does he operate it. It comes to him a creation, a force from the Supreme Power. It works on him and will re-create him in time. The Infinite is ever sending thoughts to this planet which change it and the people on it into newer and still newer beings and happier beings. They are forces which will not let people fossilize on any tread-mill of belief.
ABOUT ECONOMIZING OUR FORCES.
Copyright, 1891, by F. J. Needham.
As now we live our forces are constantly leaking from us in many ways of which we may not be aware.
There is a Higher Economy than that pertaining to money. This Economy when known will cause us to stop these leaks and so save our forces. The result of this will be constant increase of mental and physical strength, which has not only a money value but a value above money, for it will for one result bring a prolongation of life which people dare not now hope for.
In this Divine Economy of our forces, which no one of our race has ever realized, every act, be it of mind alone or of mind acting on the body, will be a source of recreation and increase of strength. Our walking, our physical work about the house 01 field, our mental exercise or art will give us pleasure and leave with us its gain of strength. It will enable us to make pleasing effort of mind or body for much longer periods than we are able now to do, since we shall gain force in any effort faster than we put force out.
One great source of our present waste of force lies in the mood of impatience or mental intemperance. Every movement of the slightest muscle expends force and thought. It is expended in the crook of a finger, the wink of an eyelash, the least movement of any limb. All this is God’s force as well as our own, since we are a part of The InfiniteIt is the Law of the Infinite that this force must be used to bring us the greatest and happiest results.
If not used as the Infinite intends it shall be, it begets pain and unrest of some kind. Pain of any sort is the message from the Infinite Mind, telling us that our forces have gone astray.
Suppose you had an automaton, moved by a certain power made or purchased at considerable cost, which could for you open and shut drawers, lift the sheet of paper on which you have been writing, dip your pen in ink, button your garments or your gloves and do for you many small physical acts, which every person must do for him or herself, no matter how many servants they have at command.
If the fuel or whatever the motive power for running this machine cost a dollar per pound or quart, as the case might be, would you not be careful in its use T Would you not think for a moment before turning it on whether the act to be done would justify the power to be expended T
Would we in the use of our automaton domestic let on the force moving it in a spasmodic, jerky manner, and in quantity altogether disproportionate to the service required, so as to rack and strain its machinery? Even as we may do in the use of our bodies when we tear a sheet of paper or open a window or snatch a garment from its hook, or rush for some small article across the room, expending in these acts a far greater amount of strength than is necessary.
When this mood is carried into the hundreds of 60-called trivial things, we are obliged to do daily, there is a constant putting out of force and none received in return. These incessant depletions bring weakness, disease and death of the body.
Count, if you can, the different movements of body, limbs and muscles you may perform on the first hour after rising in the morning. Think of the varied movements of muscle required in putting on your clothes, and in moving about your room, and remember that in every one of these movements an outlay of your force is required. Apart from these movements, every thought which comes into your mind requires force for its thinking.
The automaton represents our body. The force or thought we call to us in lifting a feather comes of the Infinite Force and Mind. Money cannot buy it. It is beyond all standard of mercantile values. Its sacredness and value is never lessened by the nature of the act we do. It is as sacred in pushing the needle through the garment we are mending, or in wielding the pen with which we write the smallest note, as in anything else.
In the Higher and Coming Economy this force as to outlay will be so regulated as to draw more, just as when you put out a dollar in business you expect that dollar to gain more. That result comes of a reposeful mood carried into every act. It can come to us only through demand of the Infinite Mind.
There is far more of our force expended through impatience in the doing of what are called small things than great ones. We may stoop to pick up the scissors which have fallen on the floor and in that flurried impatient act send force enough from us to lift fifty pounds. But when we have a heavy weight .to lift we take more time to concentrate our force upon it. We increase gradually our lifting power against the resistance of the weight.
When we snatch for the scissors or the paper fallen on the floor, which oppose little resistance, there is far more force sent out than is necessary for that particular act. We lose then that amount of force. When a person is constantly in the mood and habit of doing things in this way they are as constantly draining themselves of their force. The result of such drainage is exhaustion, and exhaustion means some form of disease.
When the real value of our force is realized, we find that all acts in every-day life are of equal importance. The power we expend in buttoning a garment costs as much as that used in delivering a sermon. When we slur over one act we are calling to us the mood or thought current for slurring over all acts, however important we may regard them. When we button our coat in feverish haste, expending thereby a great deal more force than is necessary, we are liable to carry that mood into what we may consider the most important business of the day.
These constant leakages of force make the mood or frame of mind, rendering it the more difficult to concentrate our thought on the business of this minute. The business of this minute may be the drawing up of a contract which involves many thousands of dollars. We want no flaws in it. The mood of haste and waste of force tends to put flaws in everything we do. It brings wandering wits, absence of mind and lack of tact and address. It is the mood far from success.
It is this mood of mind becoming habitual which makes us mislay, lose and forget. We put the thing down we have been using we know not where, and hunt in vain all about the room for it. We find, on getting in the street, we have forgotten umbrella or purse or latch key, and must expend more strength to return for it. We hurry when there is no need to hurry, for this mood opens our minds to a hurried, flustered, semi-insane current of thought, acting on thousands, and increased in volume and power by these thousands, each individual in that thought current serving as an electric thought battery to send such mood to the rest in his particular thought circuit.
People in this mood go out to shop and buy recklessly, buy what they do not need buy and what does not suit them on returning home.
When we lift an arm, brush our hair, or write a single word, we draw the strength for so doing from the Infinite Source of strength. That strength is not generated within the body. When we do these acts in the mood of desiring that of the force so drawn, a little shall be left over, we are constantly laying up as in a bank a balance in our favor of strength. “We cannot make this mental condition ourselves. We must demand of the Supreme to make it for us.
Then we shall get profitable exercise in the doing of every small act. The picking of the scissors or paper from the floor will confer more and more a physical pleasure in the motion of muscle, and a pleasure also in the knowledge that the act has laid up for us its little quota of power. Then in every movement of muscle we shall be storing up strength for other effort, and for one result walk our five miles out of doors with an elastic spring, pleasure and profit. Then our gymnasium may be partly iu our room, and our gymnastic exercise commence with the first physical movement we make on arising in the morning and end with the last one made before retiring.
Such gain of force brings also clearness of mind, keenness and clearer judgment, for strength extends into every department of mind or body and has many applications other than in muscle.
The slow measured reverential movements char, acterizing all religious rites of nearly every creed and race, have for their spiritual purpose, the cultivation of repose and economization of the Infinite Force coming through man, that it should work the best results for him.
It is the half frantic dusting of corners, the spasmodic sweeping, the impatient snatching or pushing aside of unexpected obstacles in the room, the hurrying and skurrying up stairs and down cellar, that aids to exhaust the forces of so many women. It is not that the acts or work exhausts. It is the mental condition they are continually in that makes so many old and haggard at forty. It brings «a mental condition which makes some take ten times as many steps as are necessary in washing their dishes. Because waste of these forces begets lack of judgment, lack of foresight and lack of economy in every day-life. Our wits are not so clear when we are more or less exhausted. After a weary scramble to the mountain top there is little if any strength left to enjoy the. landscape, be it ever so beautiful. Many people ex haust all their forces in flurry of mind and body, and so have none left to put into calculation or foresight. Such mood of mind keeps thousands poor in purse. When the force by which we use our bodies is brought under control, and repose succeeds flurry, the mind works quicker and clearer to economize in the most practical matters. One is in no condition to do business rightly while chasing a horse car.
The semi-frantic mood may prevail as much at the office desk or in the store as in the kitchen. Over many a prosperous merchant’s grave there could be properly written ” killed not by his business but by waste of force in his business.” The skurry in which business letters are sometimes written with their half formed letters advertises for him who writes them a mood ever drawing away force.
But one says: ” Why I could not get through
with half my daily business if I should set about doing things in the way you suggest.”
Perhaps not. But in the mood you or I may be doing things the leak of our force goes on all the same, and that will certainly bring weakness and decay.
Place the sentence, ” I ask of the Supreme Power for the reposeful mood,” or ” I ask that I get recreation in all doing,” where you may see it on arising in the morning.
A whole day’s eflort may be influenced for the better by the thought first brought us at the day’s commencement. Many a woman gets into the thought current of irritability for the day through a burned finger or an upset coffee pot while cooking breakfast. The burned finger or overturned coffee pot came because ” Hurry up!” was continually before her mental vision.
When through demand of the Supreme Power we have the thought current of this Higher Economy acting on us, we shall have instead of care for the act, love for it.
When we have, love for the doing of all acts, there is nothing irksome in the doing. The billiard expert, the skilled base ball player, the graceful dancer find nothing irksome in their efforts. They love the doing. All effort in time will be made in this mood. Care is a word, and idea born and bred of the earthly or material mind. In the Higher Eealms of existence all care is transmuted into love.
Love naturally and without a forced training economizes these sacred forces of ours, even as in our physical world the skilled woodsman economizes his force in the use of his axe, swinging it into the tree by its own momentum, and making play of his work.
The artist, the writer, the worker in any calling which absorbs and interests them are sometimes impatient to get into the spirit of their work. It has for them an intense fascination and stimulation. They are eager once more to realize this stimulation. Every other of the minute and necessary details of life are irksome. The clothing may be hurriedly adjusted, the breakfast hurriedly eaten and every other act similarly performed. The result is that when pen, pencil, brush or other instrument is taken in hand, there is no inspiration or ability to work. Why? Because, the artist has wasted his force in the mood he has been in before going to his special work. Economy of our forces begins way down to the A B O’s of life. These are the corner stones which many who would build pass by unconsciously or reject and despise.
True, men of great mental power have been careless and slovenly in the small acts of life, yet have accomplished what the world calls great things. Had they saved their forces they would have accomplished far more. Their incessant depletions of force weakened their bodies, placed them on beds of sickness, and caused at last those bodies to become unfit instruments for their spirits to use in the material realm of life.
Economizing our forces means eternal life for the body. Not eternal life for the same body, but eternal life for a physical body ever changing, renewing and refining as the spirit draws new power from the Infinite Source of Power.
Small acts or small expenditures of our force are the small things we must be faithful over that we become masters over many.
This waste of force in the use of the body affects injuriously its internal mechanism. For the lungs, heart, stomach, the circulation and all other functions work in accordance with our prevailing mood of mind. If we live in a hurry, those functions are also performed in a hurry, and very imperfectly. If we won’t take time for doing things properly, neither will the stomach do its work properly. And all the other organs will work in accordance with the stomach. One part of the machinery cannot be out of order without affecting all the other parts.
Waste of force begets impatience, and the breathing of the impatient person is short, gaspy, flurried. The habitually impatient person cannot breathe healthfully.
As we demand the mood for economizing our forces of the Supreme, our breathing will naturally become deeper and more reposeful.
There is a spiritual breathing as well as a physical breathing. When our spirits are in the thought current of the Higher Economy, they will send to the body a certain life. This life is taken in with every breath, and will of itself prompt deep reposeful respiration.
This life does not come from the Earth. It comes from the domain of spirit. It comes in proportion to our aspiration. Aspiration is demand of the Supreme to be raised into higher beings and above mortal infirmities and pains.
Hatred is the wildest extravagance in the use of our force. It injures the body sadly to hate anything.
But is it not right to hate evil oppression and injustice ! This is not a question of right or wrong, as right or wrong is measured by the common standard. It is a question of a mood or condition of mind which is to bring us good or evil results. To see imperfection in everything and to be in a constant antagonism with manners, customs, laws and people, is to bring to and fill the body with a destructive thought element. People hate themselves into disease and death in what is deemed a “good cause.” The eloquent speaker, full of invective and sarcasm against the oppressor, sometimes
goes early to his grave. He gets into a thought
current of antagonism against a certain enemy. It is not easy to get out of it. It is a sword that cuts him also who uses it. Those who live by such swords perish by them.
In the Higher Laws-in the Divine Economy and in the new mind which the Supreme Power will give us, we shall save all this force, for we shall see nothing to hate. We shall see only the good in man and in Nature. To see only the good is to put out a great force of thought to bring more good. The Supreme Power will, as we demand, show us how much more of good there is in all things than we have imagined. We shall be amazed on finding how much of beauty, symmetry and order there is in the Universe.
Man’s law and custom says we must fight a wrong. But when we put out fight in thought, we get fight in return. In our order of aftairs, one part of the community is in a perpetual crusade against another part to put down some evil. Hard words and bitter words are spoken. Denunciation and condemnation are thundered from pulpit and platform. Bitter feeling on both sides is engendered. Laws are made to put down an evil, which fail to put it down. We have been going on in this way for ages. Has it been a success? Is the Great Overruling Spirit really invoked in all this? Or is it not that man endeavors to take the reins in his own hands and trust overmuch in himself to governT
When we are in that mood of mind where things we deem indispensably necessary to be done, present themselves one after the other in endless procession (as so often they do to the over-worked housewife), we need to demand of the Supreme Power a wisdom that shall make us know which is the thing to be done, that is for our individual self most necessary and profitable. We need also that wisdom to make us know when we have reached the limit of our strength, for many are constantly and unconsciously working far beyond that limit.
Our forces are used when the body does nothing. They are expended with every thought, every plan, great or small. We may see in our room the shelf which needs dusting, the toilet table which needs regulating, the drawer whose contents are in confusion. ‘The plan we have to put these things in order, though we do not carry it out physically, uses some of our force. If we look at these undone things a dozen times a day, resolving to do them, we expend each time some of our force. At last the sight of these undone things becomes irksome to us. That is because the mind is wearied with carrying these little burdens. We expend our force just as much as if we were doing them. Indeed we expend more. Every time we see the thing not done the irritation at the sight increases.
Sympathy or love wrongly bestowed drains away force. If our love or sympathy is placed much on persons whose quality of thought is inferior to our own, we send them the more valuable element and get nothing equivalent in return. The Law of Life demands that there be an equality in interchange of thought where parties are in close alliance. We become literally parts of the minds we are most drawn to. Being linked to a person in spirit is not a metaphor. It is a real connection—far more real and close than walking arm in arm with another. If you are in close sympathy with an inferior mind disposed to hatred or hurry you will from such mind absorb hatred or hurry, or other defect, and with these mental conditions the physical ills they cause.
Hence came the Apostle’s injunction, ” Be ye not unequally yoked together.”
Worry and grief greatly exhaust force. But we are born with the elements of grief and worry in us, and will continue to grieve or vex ourselves more or less over the trouble of to-morrow, which may never happen, until through demand all this lower thought is driven out and gradually replaced by the higher thought current, which recognizes that religion or the Law of Everlasting Life is for no one special day or service, or act, but is a spirit or mind which permeates every fibre of our beings and sees in the crook of a finger an act coming of the Infinite Mind and Force, and by that Mind and Force be made to give its action of pleasure and permanent profit to us. Such thought current makes at last the new man and new woman, seeing in all things sources of good. In this way the Infinite wipes grief, worry and tears from all eyes.
Our forces are not confined to physical acts, nor to the influence we may have on others through talking or writing to them. Our minds meet and mingle with other minds, and the physical body has nothing to do with such meeting and communion. Our forces or thoughts are working while the body is at rest. There is a realm of spirit, an almost ” undiscovered country,” where the greatest enterprises known to the material world are planned, discussed and furthered, while the bodies used by those minds are unconscious in their beds. These bodies are the instruments to be taken up in the morning by those minds and used in the world of material things. A man’s mind absorbed in some great enterprise never by night or day ceases working. It is only his body that stops effort for seasons in the domain of life seen and felt by the physical senses.
If our forces are wasted in the physical world, they will be also wasted in the spiritual world. The depletion goes on both sides. . If we go to sleep in anger, our spirit roams at night in the current of anger, and returns to the body, when we wake freighted with more of the destructive element of anger. The habitually impatient and hurried mind acts also, while its body sleeps in the world of impatience and hurry, consorting with those in the same mood and thought current, and feeding and filling the body with the destructive thought element of impatience.
It is the force saved in these and other ways that give the East Indian ” adept” powers, which many of our race will not believe in, and others deem ” supernatural.”
There is nothing in the universe or nature beyond the natural, but there is a great deal in nature and in ourselves of which we are not aware.
All of us have probably been in the lifelong habit of wasting in some or all of these ways our forces.
We do not point out these evils in the spirit of saying, “You must reform these habits immediately.”
Because we cannot reform them immediately. We of our individual selves cannot reform them at all. Demand of the Supreme Power only can give us new minds free fram these habits.
We cannot stop these leakages at once; the habitual, jerky, spasmodic hurried effort of years will require time to alter for the more reposeful strength-filling and giving mood. Improper associations cannot be cut off at once even when we are awakened to the force they cause us to waste. Our minds prone to hatred or violent prejudice or envy of others cannot be changed in a day.
It would be wrong to say to ourselves: “I must correct these hurried habits at once.” The effort so to do would be forced and unnatural. It would result in injury to the person who should attempt it of their individual will and strength. It would bring a trained and artificial condition, as we sometimes see in persons who ape the manner and address of others. These conditions are unnatural and unhealthy. They bring a great strain and tension on the body. The self trained condition cannot last. The God-given condition lasts forever.
The body accustomed to spasmodic, jerky movement for 30 or 40 years has in every bone, muscle and sinew that jerky, spasmodic mind and thought materialized in physical substance. It can only be removed by degrees as replaced by the newer mood.
We err in ignorance. In so doing we are not blamable or “miserable sinners.” We are to grow out of these errors. As our eyes are opened, we may see every day some fault we have been in. We shall be thankful that the Supreme has shown us that fault. So to see these defects is a proof that we are growing from the cruder to the finer being.
Man cannot make for himself this Higher Economy. But when aware of the waste of his forces, he will demand of the Supreme the new and more reposeful mood. It will flow toward him, filling him with a new life, giving him new ideas relative to the saving of his forces and literally incorporating such ideas into his body as flesh and blood, bone and muscle. That makes him a new being. As such the practice of this Economy becomes as easy and natural for him as it is now to breathe.
The Infinite Mind and wisdom as thus called upon will remove these obstacles quietly, without disturbance. We shall change into newer beings, having new surroundings, conditions, habits and associations so quietly as barely to be aware of the change ourselves, even as the sunset sky changes from hue to hue, that we forget the last splendor in admiration of the present.
Thus it is that the Kingdom of Infinite Good comes to the world of every mind like a “thief in the night”
GOD IN THE TREES; OR, THE INFINITE MIND IN NATURE.
Copyright 1891, by F. J. Needham.
You are fortunate if you love trees, and especially the wild ones growing where the Great Creative Force placed them, and independent of man’s care. For all things we call ” wild ” or ” natural” are nearer the Infinite Mind than those which have been enslaved, artificialized and hampered by man. Being nearer the Infinite they have in them the more perfect Infinite Force and Thought. That is why when you are in the midst of what is wild and natural—in the forest or mountains, where every trace of man’s works is left behind you feel an indescribable exhilaration and freedom that you do not realize elsewhere.
You breathe an element ever being thrown off by the trees, the rocks, the birds and animals and by every expression of the Infinite Mind about you. It is healthfully exhilarating. It is something more than air. It is the Infinite Force and Mind as expressed by all these natural things, which is acting on you. You cannot get this force in the town, nor even in the carefully cultivated garden. For there the plants and trees have too much of man’s lesser mind in them,—the mind which believes that it can improve the universe. Man is inclined to think that the Infinite made this world in the rough, and then left it altogether for him to improve.
Are we really doing this in destroying the native forests, as well as the birds and animals, which once dwelt in them? Are our rivers, many of them laden with the filth of sewage and factory, and our ever-expanding cities and towns, covering miles with piles of brick and mortar, their inhabitants crammed into the smallest living quarters, honeycombed with sewers below, and resounding with rattle and danger above—are these really ” improvements ” on the Divine and natural order of things?
You are fortunate when you grow to a live, tender, earnest love for the wild trees, animals and birds, and recognize them all as coming from and built of the same mind and spirit as your own, and able also to give you something very valuable in return for the love you give them. The wild tree is not irresponsive or regardless of a love like that. Such love is not a myth or mere sentiment. It is a literal element and force going from you to the tree. It is felt by the spirit of the tree. You represent a part and belonging of the Infinite Mind. The tree represents another part and belonging of the Infinite Mind. It has its share of life, thought and intelligence. You have a far greater share, which is to be greater still—and then still greater.
Love is an element which though physically unseen is as real as air or water. It is an acting, living, moving force, and in that far greater world of life all around us of which physical sense is unaware, it moves in waves and currents like those of the ocean.
There is a sense in the tree which feels your love and responds to it. It does not respond or show its pleasure in our way or in any way we can now understand. Its way of so doing is the way of the Infinite Mind of which it is a part. The ways of God are unsearchable and past finding out. They are not for us to fathom. They are for us only to find out and live out, in so far as they make us happier. There is for all in time a serenity and ” peace of mind which passeth all understanding;” but this peace cannot be put through a chemical analysis or the operation of the dissecting room.
As the Great Spirit has made all things, is not that All Pervading Mind and wisdom in all things? If then we love the trees, the rocks and all things as the Infinite made them, shall they not in response to our love give us each of their peculiar thought and wisdom? Shall we not draw nearer to God through a love for these expressions of God in the rocks and trees, birds and animals?
Do we expect to find God, realize Him more every day, appreciate the Mighty and Immeasurable Mind more every day, and get more and more of His Power in us every day only by dwelling on the word of three letters, G-o-d?
You laugh, perhaps, at the idea of a tree having a mind—a tree that thinks. But the tree has an organization like your own in many respects. It has for blood its sap. It Las a circulation. It has for skin its bark. It has for lungs its leaves. It must have its food. It draws nourishment from soil, air and sun. It adapts itself to circumstances. The oak growing in exposed situations roots itself more firmly in the soil to withstand the tempest. The pines growing thickly together take little root, for they depend on numbers to break the wind’s force. The sensitive plant recoils at the approach of man’s hand; many wild plants like Indians will not grow or thrive in artificial conditions.
Yet with all these physical resemblances to your own body, you deny the tree or plant such share of mind as the Infinite gives it? No, not that. The tree is a part of the Infinite Mind, even as you are. It is one of the All Pervading Mind’s myriads of thoughts. We see only such part or form of that thought as is expressed in trunk, root, branch and leaf, even as with ourselves we see only our physical bodies. We do not see our spiritual part. Nor do we see in the tree its spiritual part.
The tree is then literally one of God’s thoughts. That thought is worth our study. It contains some wisdom we have not yet gotten hold of. We want that wisdom. We want to make it a part of ourselves. We want it, because real wisdom or truth brings us power. We want power to give us better bodies, sounder bodies, healthier bodies. We want entire freedom from sickness. We want lighter hearts and happier minds. We want a new life and a new pleasure in living for each day. We want our bodies to grow lighter, not heavier with advancing years. We want a religion which will give us certainty instead of hopes and theories. We want a Deity it is simply impossible to doubt. We want to feel the Infinite Mind in every atom of our beings. We want with each day to feel a new pleasure in living and commence where we left off yesterday to find something new in what we might have thought to be “old” and worn out yesterday. When we come into the domain of the Infinite Mind and are ever drawing more of that mind to us and making it a part of us, nothing can seem “flat, stale and unprofitable.”
We want powers now denied the mortal. We want to be lifted above the cumbrousness of the mortal body—above the pains of the mortal body— above the death of the mortal body
Can the trees give us all this? They can help very much so to do when we get into their spirit; when we recognize and realize more and more the reality of that part of the Infinite which they express, and when we can cease to look on them as inanimate creatures.
If you can look on trees as fit only for lumber and firewood you get very little life from them. They feel then toward you as you would feel towards a person who regarded you as a thing without mind or sense and fit only to be sawed into lumber or firewood.
When we come really to love God or the Infinite Spirit of Good, we shall love every part of God. A tree is a part of God. When we come to send out our love to it, it will send its love back, and that love —that literal mind and element coming from the tree to us will enter our beings, add itself to them and give us its knowledge and power. It will tell us that the mind and force it represents of the Infinite has far better uses for man than to be turned into fuel or lumber. Their love will tell us that the forests piercing the air as they do with their billions of branches, twigs and leaves, are literal conductors for a literal element which they bring to the earth. This element is life giving to man, in proportion to his capacity for receiving it.
The nearer we are to a conception of the Infinite Mind—the clearer is it seen by us that this mind pervades all things—the closer we feel our relationship to the tree, bird or animal as a fellow creature, the more can we absorb of the vitalizing element given out by all these expressions of mind. The person who looks on trees as fit only for fuel and lumber, can get but little of this element, which to the finer mind is an elixir of life.
The mind only to see in tree, bird, animal, fish or insect only a thing lacking intelligence and fit only to destroy or enslave, for its amusement, repels from all of these a spirit or element, which, if recognized, would be received or absorbed, and, if absorbed, would bring a new life and power to mind and body.
We get the element of love only in proportion as we have it in us. We can only draw this element from the Supreme Power. We draw it in proportion as we admire every expression of the Infinite, be that expression tree, or shrub, or insect, or bird, or other form of the Natural. We cannot destroy or mutilate what we really love. The more of these things we really love, the more of their element of love flows to us. That element is for us life as real as the tree itself. The more of that life we are receiving and absorbing, the more will we realize a power in life, which can only be expressed as miraculous.
Destroy the forests, and you lessen temporarily the quantity of this element given out by them. Replace the wild tree by exotics or cultivated varieties, and such element is adulterated, and the vigor it can give is lessened. Cover the whole earth with cities, towns, villages and cultivated fields, and we interfere with a supply of life-giving element which the forests in their natural state only can furnish. Keep ourselves dead to the recognition of the tree as a part of the Infinite Spirit, and we are dead and unable to absorb of the Infinite Spirit working in and through the tree.
The trees are always giving out an element of life as necessary to man as the air he breathes. Man’s works so soon as finished are giving out dust and decay. In our great cities we take in dust with every breath. Nothing in this Universe is still or in absolute rest. Our miles of stone, brick and mortar are ever in movement, slowly and imperceptibly grinding to an impalpable dust. Cloth, leather, iron, and every material worn and used by man is ever wearing into dust. Look at the dust which in a single day accumulates in your room, on shelf and table, or fine garment, even when its windows are not opened. A gigantic ever-moving force is at work there taking everything to pieces in it. Let a sunbeam enter through a shutter’s crack and see the innumerable motes floating in it. Think of the myriads of these, too minute to rank even as atoms that you cannot see.
All this is second-hand element which is breathed and absorbed into both body and spirit. But trees and all natural things send out element full of life.
Our bodies also are ever throwing off through the skin matter they can no longer use. In the great city thousands on thousands of bodies are throwing out disused element too fine to rank even as dust. It is thrown off by sick bodies, and many are sick on their feet. This we breathe. We breathe each other over and over again.
This unseen cloud of matter pervading crowded cities is not life sustaining. It has in it a certain life as all things have life, but it is not fit for man’s growing life.
When we get eternal life, health and unalloyed happiness, the attitude of our minds will be entirely changed toward tree, bird, animal, and everything in Nature. We shall see that when we really love all these expressions of the Infinite Mind, tree, plant, bird and animal, and leave them entirely alone, they will send out to us in love their part and quality of the Infinite. It will flow to us a new life, and the source of a life of far greater power and happiness than the present one.
” But how shall we live,” one asks, “unless we cut down the tree for fuel and lumber, slay bird and beast for food? ”
Do you think there is no other life or way of life other than the one we now live? Do you think in the exalted and refined mental condition we call “Heaven” that there will be killing of animals, mutilation of trees and destruction of any material expression of the Supreme Wisdom? Do you think we can grow into that higher and happier state of mind without knowledge of the laws by which only it can be attained? As well expect to sail a ship around the world without knowledge of seamanship or navigation. We are not to drift into Heaven something as a cask rolls down hill.
We cannot cease immediately from the enslavement or slaughter of tree, bird or animal, nor from the eating of animal food. So long as the body craves and relishes such food, it should have it. When the body is changed by our spirit and belief to finer elements, the stomach and palate will reject meat of every description. It will not abide the taste or smell of slaughtered creatures. When the spirit settles these matters it does so definitely and forever. Man’s error in the past has often been that of endeavoring to spiritualize or change himself of his own individual will into higher and finer conditions. To this end he has enforced on himself and others fasts and penances, and abstinence from pleasures which his nature craved. He has never by such methods saved himself from sickness, decay and physical death. He has never by this method regenerated or renewed his body. He has lost his body eventually even as the glutton and drunkard lost theirs. The ascetic has not trusted to the Supreme to raise him higher in the scale of being, but in himself and his own endeavor. This is one of the greatest sins. Because it cuts such person oft temporarily from the Supreme and the life, the Supreme will send when trusted. There is no way out of any sin, any excess, any injurious habit, but through an entire dependence on the Supreme Power to take away the gnawing, the craving, the desire peculiar to that habit. Otherwise the man may seem reformed outwardly. He is never reformed inwardly. Repression is not reform.
The bigot of every age and creed has been the person thinking he could of himself make himself an angel. Such belief makes the man stand still in his tracks. The Supreme is always saying, “Come to me. Demand of me. Find me in all created things and then I shall be ever sending you new thoughts, new things, new ideas, new element which shall change your tastes, your appetites—which shall gradually take away grossness, eliminate gradually fierce, insatiate, lawless desire and hurricane of passion, and bring to you pleasures you cannot now realize.”
We shall see more and more clearly in time that when we get the higher, finer and more enduring life (to which all must grow), we shall have the greatest possible inducement to give the trees, plants, birds, animals and all other expressions of the Infinite their lives and their fullest liberty. We shall be compelled to love them. What we really love we cannot abuse, kill or enslave.
We cage a bird for our own pleasure. We do not cage the bird for its pleasure. That is not the highest love for the bird.
The highest love for all things is for us a literal source of life. The more things in the world of Nature to which we can give the higher love, the more of their natural love and life shall we get in return. So as we grow, refine and increase this power of recognizing and loving the bird, the animal, the insect or, in other words, the Infinite in all things we shall receive a love, a renewed life, strength, vigor, cheer and inspiration from not only these, but the falling snow-flake, the driving rain, the cloud, the sea, the mountain. And this will not be a mere sentiment, but a great means for recuperating and strengthening the body, for this strengthens the spirit with a strength which comes to stay, and what strengthens the spirit must strengthen the body.
We cannot make of ourselves this capacity for so loving and drawing strength from all things. It is our belonging, but must be demanded of the Supreme Power.
It is natural to ask, “But why did not the Supreme Power implant at first this higher love in us? Why has that Power so long permitted man to go on slaughtering and marring nature? Why are tempests and earthquakes and wars and so much in the forces of Nature and the forces of man allowed to go on and bring so much catastrophe and misery?
We do not undertake to answer for the Infinite Wisdom. It is enough for us to know that there is a road leading away from all we call evil. It is enough for us to know that the time is to come when as new beings with changed minds we shall forget absolutely that such evils ever existed. We shall see in the forces of Nature, be they fire or tempest, or aught else, only what is good and what can bring us happiness. We are not always to be of the material which can be injured by fire or tempest. The fiery furnace did not affect the three Jewish children who walked through it, nor was the tempest of any inconvenience to the Christ of Judea when he walked on the waters. What history has shown to be possible for some is possible for all.
Communion with Nature is something far above a sentiment. It is a literal joining with the Infinite Being. The element received in such joining and acting on mind and body is as real as anything we see or feel.
The ability so to join ourselves with God through His expressions in the cloud, the tree, the mountain and sea, the bird and animal, is not possessed by all in equal degree. Some are miserable when alone in the forest, plain or mountain. These are literally out of their element or current of thought. They can live with comfort only in the bustle of the town or the chatter of the household. They can find life only in artificial surroundings. Their spirits are covered with a parasitical growth of artificiality. This cuts them off from any sense of God’s expressions in the solitude of Nature. So cut off they feel lonesome in the woods. Nature seems wild, savage and gloomy to them.
Whoever can retire for periods to Nature’s solitudes and enjoy that solitude, feeling no solitude at all, but a joyous sense of exhilaration, will return among men with more power and new power. For he or she has literally “walked with God “or the Infinite Spirit of Good. The seer, the prophet, the miracle workers of the Biblical history so gained their power. The Christ of Judea retired to the mountains to be reinforced by the Infinite. The Oriental and the Indian, through whom superior powers have been expressed, loved Nature’s solitudes. They could live in them with pleasure. They could muse by rock or rivulet or the ocean for hours, almost unconscious of immediate surroundings, because their spirits had strayed far from their bodies, and were dreamily absorbing new ideas of the Infinite. You will rarely find a person who as ruler, soldier, inventor, discoverer, poet or writer left his impress on the race, but loved communion where God is most readily found. There inspiration is born. The poet cannot sing of the city laid out at right angles, with sewer beneath and elevated road above, as he can of the rugged mountain wrapped “like Jura in her misty shroud.”
We cannot train ourselves to this capacity for enjoyment among the natural things of earth or drawing strength from them. To assume a virtue when we have it not, is to be forced “gushy” and sentimentally silly. But when we demand persistently of the Infinite the new mind, which can find and feel God in the forest or on the sea, in the storm and tempest, and feel not only safety, but absorb power and strength, when Nature’s Forces seem in their most angry mood, that mind with that capacity will gradually take place of the old one, and with the new mind ” all things will become new.”
WHAT IS JUSTICE?
Copyright, 1891, by F. J. Needham
The realm of Infinite Justice is for no far-off place or time. It is here. It is all about us. It is working to-day as it has worked during all past days and generations. It metes out to all pain or blessing by a Law inconceivably exact. It is impossible to escape its judgment. It has nothing to do with man’s law. In its operation, the one declared guilty by man may be the more innocent, while the accuser receives its punishment. It declares many things to be offences which we may not deem as offences.
But the justice of the Supreme Power, though exact, is kind. Its aim is not to punish but to make more happiness for all. The Law of Life and happiness is as a straight and narrow path. The moment we turn out of it, we are met by an obstacle, a barrier, a pain. The more we try to turn aside the obstacle or remove the barrier, the more the pain increases. The justice of the Supreme says to us : ” You are out of the right road. In the way you would go and use your forces are pains and unrest. I have a safe path for you. Of that path you can see only that part you are to tread for the hour and the day. Do not try to plan out and map out your future. That is my business. Leave that all to me. Keep in the mood of demanding of me where you shall tread and how you shall Irve for the hour and the day. Keep in this mood until it becomes second uature, and I will send you wisdom to live aright for the hour, as the Sun sends to the plant enough of its warmth for the hour, and no more.”
Every pain, every uneasiness of mind or body, great or small, is a judgment entered up against us, but only with the aim of keeping us where we shall grow into ever increasing happiness.
“Punishment” and “penalty” are harsh ideas coming of man’s lower material mind. The Infinite checks us when we get out of the right road, and the check is often painful. But it is not ” punishment ” in the sense that man uses that word.
We ” punish ” the man caught in stealing. But Infinite Justice kindly checks the successful man aa the world estimates success, who steals and is never by others detected. He checks him at last with some form of pain or unrest. The uncaught thief cannot escape Infinite Justice.
Eternal Justice says to us: “You shall have no other God but the improvement of your own being. You must put this aim above money. Your aim in life must be the possession of the best body, tbe best mind, and the growing and cultivation of the powers in you. You prove these through the promptings I will send you from time to time and ‘ all things needful’ will come to you.”
But when we put money first in our minds the Higher and Immutable Justice metes out no end of pains and penalties. Money first—three-fourths of our waking hours absorbed in its pursuit—our minds merged ever in its thought current, and we are in the well-worn, densely thronged road of care, disappointment, decay and death. Money first, and whether gained or not, the body ages. When gained in this mood the man is no happier.
Infinite Justice says: ” You shall not covet.” You may own a whole county or even a state by legal right. But you do not really own it. You really own no more than you can enjoy or appreciate. You may have several magnificent houses. You may have horses, carriages, conservatories, yachts, and all that men accumulate. You cannot enjoy nor use a tenth part of these. The rest prove to be cares. They bring in some way more anxiety than pleasure. Infinite Justice says : “You are trying to live against the law. You will not trust the Supreme to give you goods as you need them. You do not know your real needs. I do. You choose to take the matter in your own hands and heap up all you can get physical possession of for future needs. Of all this what you cannot use and enjoy will load you down with the thought of care, and that thought will draw away your strength. It will keep the higher thought element from coming to you which would fill your body with new life. So as you exhaust yourself with trying to carry this load of care your body will weaken and decay. You may even become a poor, rich man, senile and silly in his dotage, dead already to the world of business, his affairs cared for by others, while he ends near where he began materially—an aged baby.”
The case of the poor man is precisely the same. As regards results, it makes no difference whether ten dollars are gained or ten, millions, when that purpose is placed before the pursuit of Eternal Life. The poor man’s mammon and the rich man’s mammon are one and the same false god.
Money is most desirable. It is the agent for bringing much necessary for the refined taste and the refined spirit. Only it must not be placed before God. When it is, we place the cars before the engine and try to make them the pulling power. In such case millions bring neither happiness nor health. But when we recognize the Infinite as ahead of the train, we get far more out of thousands than the mere accumulator does out of millions.
Infinite Justice, when held to, keeps the stream of riches and blessings flowing to us like a river. Like the river also they flow away from us, so as to be succeeded by other and greater blessings. Our material minds, however, tend to dam the stream. We are afraid the Mississippi may diy up.
Infinite Justice makes us alive to the many little debts we may owe others. They are debts which cannot be paid in money. They can be paid in kind thoughts.
A tree is planted by the wayside in the desire that travelers may find refreshment in its shade. When on a hot day we stand in its shade and are refreshed, we owe a thought of gratitude to the man who planted it. When such thought goes from us spontaneously, it is a force put out which does us good. To feel grateful is a pleasure-giving sensation. It brings literal new life to the body, for our moods of mind bring the body either good or harm. The grateful mood is a re-creative and recuperative agency.
Our mood of gratitude is a force which goes to the man who planted the tree or placed the drinking cup by the wayside spring, or leaves in the fence surrounding his field a gap through which he may pass and shorten half a mile in distance. It matters not that we are not acquainted with the giver of these small favors. Our kind thought meets that man’s spirit, and that is the real man. Our thought does him a real and. lasting good. It brings him at some time and place a sensation of pleasure, though he may not know how or why or from whom it came.
Here the Infinite Justice awards good for the good put out by giver and receiver. As we mete it out to others so shall it be meted to us in return.
But when we use the man’s field or his tree without a thought of kindness or gratitude—when we do not pay the debt in this way, we lose the pleasant mental condition that the mood of good will to another brings. And the desirable things in life are the attainment of pleasant mental states of mind. Or in other words, of thoughts which shall bring us ever increasing health, strength, vigor, and far more.
And if we enjoy the little favor, saying in mind,
” Old Smith is abundantly able to plant a hundred trees, or give the town a wagon road through his field instead of a foot-path,” we put out an unthankful, envious, evil, unseen force. It leaves with us more or less its unhappy mood and feeling. It opens the mind to the thought current of envy and grumbling, laden with more and more thoughts (things and forces) of envy and ill will. These bring sickness to the body and unrest to the mind.
We shall suffer in some way from that mood. That suffering is the judgment entered up against us by Infinite Justice, and the intent of that judgment is to keep us out of such moods. If through long habit we cannot prevent such evil states of mind, we will demand of the Supreme the new mind and heart into which such evil thoughts cannot enter.
The world will do every one justice who is just to him or herself. A man who should spend all his time planting trees by the wayside to the neglect of his business would be unjust to himself. He is carried off his balance by benevolent impulse.
He needs balanced wisdom. Balanced wisdom can come only on demand from the Supreme Power. We are not exempt from pains and troubles attendant on violating the laws of life, even in doing good to others. We may sin in philanthropic effort, when we do not demand of the Supreme Wisdom for guidance in such effort. Benevolent impulse has not saved men from perishing in the flames who rushed in the burning house to save a friend. It has not prevented the philanthropic nurse from the contagion of fever or other disease and consequent death. The Supreme Mind will not allow us to judge through our individual reason how, when and where we shall expend our forces. That mind commands us ever to be in the mood of demanding and drawing from it that idea, thought and wisdom, whereby in doing the greatest good to ourselves we shall do the greatest good to others.
It is not our first mission to ” save the world ” or ” reform mankind.” It is our first mission to reform ourselves, save ourselves from disease of mind and body, and grow into new and newer lives. Then our light shines to some purpose, and even without word or any physical effort on our part, millions may be benefited. How? By the proofs coming through you possibly that there is an exact Law of Life; that such laws as lived up to brings only good and averts evil; that the law for each one comes bit by bit and day by day as demanded of the Supreme, and not from tradition, or book, or creed, or any other man’s preaching.
This is the ” daily bread” of life demanded by the Christ of Judea in the Lord’s Prayer. We scarcely commence to live before we get this ” daily bread.”
Justice to self is a matter lying entirely between ourselves and the Infinite Mind. It is found only in the privacy of our chamber. When we depend on any person, no matter how great that person’s wisdom to make this justice for us, we leave the Uulimited Mind of God for the limited mind of the individual.
Our thought if directed toward another, either in good will or ill will, flows to them an element or unseen fluid. So does the thought of others in good will or ill will flow to us. If the thought of two persons meets in ill will there is a destructive friction between these opposing fluids. This will certainly result in mental and physical pain to both. These opposing forces will in time destroy their bodies. The destruction of those bodies is not an Infinite Judgment in wrath against the former possessors of those bodies. It is the inexorable Law of the Supreme saying, ” My force must be used for ever increasing happiness and not for pain. Because it is used improperly it will of the power and wisdom inherent in it destroy the physical instruments or bodies of those who so use it.”
Infinite Justice commands that man shall recognize in woman a spiritual power distinct from his own, and in certain respects superior to his own. The feminine spiritual vision sees or rather senses farther than man’s. When this, woman’s greatest power, is recognized, and by such recognition brought more into play, man will gladly yield that belonging to her, and avail himself of it to save himself from many evils he now suffers. She is as the spy-glass to the sailor—seeing rocks, shoals and dangers before they come within the compass of man’s vision. Man has been hitherto unable to see and understand the feminine powers and real use which the one feminine mind the complement or completement of his own could be to him. Infinite Justice is to make him see that to realize a higher and far happier life than this, he must allow the feminine spirit full play. He cannot in coming ages make her place and command her to stay in it. In so doing he cuts off literally his own life. The Higher Justice inflicts pain and takes from him body after body through successive re-incarnations, until he sees clearly that the Supreme Power and Wisdom alone can order the place he or she is to fill.
But Infinite Justice has its lesson for woman. She will be more just to herself. Her sympathy is greater than man’s. This sympathy prompts her to yield so much demanded by man. Out of its excess she has given him place and precedence, done as he required without asking if it was the will of the Supreme, and accepted his estimate of her as an inferior and the ” weaker vessel.” She is to know that her strength is equal to his own, and that as her thought goes in love and sympathy to him, she gives and he absorbs an element which brings him renewed life for every department of being, provided they are in the same vein or current of thought.
Woman’s strength equals that of man’s, only it is exercised through different channels. Of this the trying functions of maternity are proof. Could these be transferred to man, be the man ploughman or prize-fighter, his opinion of the ” weaker vessel” might undergo a radical change.
Women are more to demand what is the will of the Supreme concerning what in mind and body they represent of the Supreme. The will of the Supreme is Exact Justice. In so doing they will confer more good on those they love. But when woman accepts the man’s will as her only guide of action she is leading herself astray and him also.
There can be but one head in a perfect whole. But this is not the man’s mind alone. Nor is it the woman’s mind alone. It is the union blending and interdependence of the two particular masculine and feminine minds who have been made and fitted by the Supreme Power for each other, and who cannot avoid or miss each other. Such union made by the Supreme, man can neither make nor put asunder.
Supreme Justice says: “You shall not kill.” This command has the fullest conceivable application. It does not apply merely to the killing of human beings by each other. It implies that a law is broken in the killing ot animal, bird, fish and insect. When the law is broken a pain is felt by those who break it. It may not come immediately. But come at last it does in some form of disease and weakness, which man attributes to other causes.
The pain or penalty coming of man’s indiscriminate slaughter of other forms of life lies in his present inability to rise into a more perfect being and avoid the pains and shackles of this present physical existence. Every animal, bird or insect in its natural state that we destroy has a certain lifegiving unseen element for us. That element as we grow into the more spiritualized condition would supply the place of our present foods. It is a part of the Almighty Mind expressed physically. Every part of the Almighty Mind as soon as recognized and loved will give us its element of life. When we destroy it we cannot have that element.
Man is to have dominion over the ” beasts of the field,” not by his physical power of enslaving or slaughtering them, but through his love for them. That love as it increases in the future will change their attitude toward him. That love is a force stronger than theirs. It will compel them to come to him, not to be yoked or trained, or killed, but to give him what is in them of the Infinite Mind to give.
The Supreme Power never authorized man to take justice in his own hands. If you accept as authority the Old or New Testaments, you find that Mind saying to man: ” You must leave vengeance to Me. You must not judge others.” The Supreme Power says to us: “You must be ever in the mood of demanding to know what Justice is. You have seen no better way to regulate Society than to hang and imprison and inflict penalties for such offences as you are aware of. You are making your laws all the time without thought or recognition of the Great Divine Law and Force which made the Universe, and which will eternally go on making it more and more perfect. Your laws are so numerous, so confused, so perplexing, so muddled, that they tumble over each other in your statute books. They conflict and contradict each other. Sour system of law is a Babel—a confusion, and, so far from promoting Justice, is the greatest of helps to enable craft and cunning temporarily to succeed.
Does that craft and cunning go on unchecked I
By no means. It does not in the true sense succeed at all. It is brought up in a few years by a sick mind and a sick body. Its powers, physical and mental, fail at last. It creeps down to decay and death, and at last vanishes forever. Forever ! Yes; so far as the material mind of such a man is concerned. But the real spirit which through ages is gravitating ever nearer the Infinite survives. Infinite Justice in this way is teaching it how to use its forces right, and right brings eternal happiness.
Why is it wrong to steal? Man’s law and justice says, because we wrong another in taking from him his goods. Infinite Justice says we do the greater wrong to ourselves. How? The Supreme says, “Demand of me all things, and all things that are really good shall come to you. Get things in any other way and they do you no real good.” We find it hard to believe this when we are pressed to the wall and in danger of starving. But the same power and force is in the Universe and all about us to-day which made the ravens feed the prophet in the wilderness and send manna and other food to the Israelites in their wanderings. This power always responds to the earnest persistent demand. In the case of the Israelites it responded to the demand of Moses and a few other earnest men in the same current of thought with Moses. The greater mass of the children of Israel were so aided by the power of these few men, for the Jewish host had little or no faith in the Supreme or the power of demand.
Infinite Justice does not inflict pain unnecessarily. Many a person ” dead in trespasses and sins” passes away easily and quietly. He may have wronged, cheated and tricked all his life. Infinite Justice saw that with his present body he was too gross, too material, too callous to be acted on and awakened by any higher thought. It allows that body and its physical faculties to become benumbed and stupefied. It would be time and force thrown away to try and arouse that man’s spirit with such a body. The clod is cast oft. That man’s spirit secures a new body. With that body he is to greater or less extent more open, more receptive to a higher order of thought which shall make of him a new man and a better man.
Often to our material eye the wicked seem to “flourish as a green bay tree.” But when we see a little clearer, we find their happiness to be no greater than that of others. They have cares and perplexities. They are not exempt from pain and disease. They weary sometimes of their lives, having tried all material pleasure and found it wanting.
But who are the “wicked?” Do we not all sin in some way? What business have I when breaking one of God’s laws to judge a person “wicked” who breaks another! Let us demand that spiritual eye which shall, so fast as Infinite Wisdom sees fit, awaken us to our own defects and diminish our tendency for prying and troubling ourselves about the defects of others.
And when awakened, as we shall be from time to time, to our defects, we are not to judge ourselves too harshly. That is as great a sin as the harsh judgment of others. Hard unmerciful judgment and castigatiou of self leads to hard judgment of others. Infinite Justice is infinitely merciful. What right have we then, belonging as we do to God, to sit in harsh judgment on the property of God? That has been the error of the recluse and devotee, who, repenting of a life of excess, think they make amends for it by a life of fasting, penance and abstinence from all pleasure. Pains self inflicted on the body do no good to the spirit. This is not dependence on the Supreme Power. It is only another form of depending on self to get nearer to God. It is the pagan’s self immolation and self torture to win favor of his Deity.
The Infinite says to us: “Give up to me unreservedly yourself to reform and I will give you a new being. I will make you forget all about contrition, all about repentance, all about expiation. I will make you realize, and you shall rejoice in the realization, that you are ever refining and growing from the lesser perfection of to-day to the greater perfection of to-morrow. Your repentance in sorrow shall change to the joy of knowing that your condition, your thoughts, your acts of your past were the condition, acts and thoughts of a cruder state of being for which you were not responsible. You have come out of that into a brighter, better, purer being. You are to be brighter, better, purer still. You will then not repent at all on finding that your condition of yesterday does not belong to your condition and mind of to-day. You will rejoice that you have found a better way. ln time that better way will change for one still better, and so on and on. The angels know no sin, because they see that the defect of yesterday was the result of yesterday’s cruder yet necessary state of mind. The angels ask forgiveness of no one, but rejoice ever as the Supreme Power leads them from the ecstasy of today the greater ecstasy of the future. They know that the Infinite Mind delights in praise. Their praise is rejoicing that is endless. Praise is not sorrow, nor contrition, nor dwelling over and living in the recollection of offences we have done, nor trying to expiate such offences by making ourselves miserable.
PRENTICE MULFORD