CONTENTS
Woman’s Real Power
Love Thyself
About Prentice Mulford
Mental Medicine
Prayer In All Ages
The Attraction Of Aspiration
Cultivate Repose
Good And Ill Effects Of Thought
Buried Talents
The Power Of Honesty
Confession
The Accession Of New Thought
WOMAN’S REAL POWER
Copyright 1891, by F. J. Needham
This book deals exclusively with the spiritual relations of the sexes and the use of the two orders of thought or spirit which flow between them.
There are two grand divisions in the domain of thought (which is really the endless domain of universe). These divisions are the masculine and feminine.
The masculine and feminine thought exists and is blended in every possible form of life, be it man, animal, vegetable or mineral, and also in many forms of life not now realized by our physical senses.
The more perfect the blending between these two elements the more perfected the marriage. The principle of marriage exists in all forms of element.
In man and woman is this marriage capable of the highest perfection. Through the man and woman created for each other by the Supreme as their spiritual elements blend, a power between them will be more and more thoroughly organized, and this man and woman will be able to create more and more happiness for themselves first and others afterwards.
The aim and ultimate of marriage is a constantly increasing and expanding happiness through the rounding out and development of the spiritual powers of the man and woman destined for each other by the Supreme. Through the action of their thought on each other such marriage results in an ever-perfecting health and strength, entire freedom from disease, growing elasticity of limbs and muscle, perpetuation of youth, increasing mental power, increasing capacity to enjoy every phase of life, and the gradual and healthy growth of those powers outside the domain of physical sense. Neither man nor woman can accomplish these results alone.
Nor can they be accomplished save by the two destined for each other from the beginning, and the grand support and uplifting power of these two will be a constant demand of the Supreme for power and light.
These possibilities will be realized in the future of the race, as we grow from the present cruder to finer states of being.
The feminine thought has the peculiar quality and capacity of sensing or feeling more keenly than man, what exists in the world of spiritual things. Man’s thought has the most power to act in the world of physical things.
In the real and divine marriage the man acknowledges this power of woman, defers to it and is glad to profit by it.
Man’s body is formed in accordance with the peculiar character of the masculine thought, being coarser in fibre and physically better adapted than woman’s to lift, tug and carry.
He is more aggressive, and the Supreme Power has given him an inherent liking to cope and contend with the elements.
The physical woman is finer in fibre than man, because she receives and transmits to man a spiritual power of thought finer and more powerful than he can receive without her. This feminine force moulds her physical body in accordance with its inherent character.
The physical world and the spiritual or unseen world are as closely linked together as is the tree and its roots.
What we see, hear and touch in the world of physical things, is much the smaller part of the world in which we really live. Everything tangible to our physical sense on this Earth had its origin and commencement in the world of spirit. Not an event occurs in the physical world—not a war—not a discovery or invention—not a progressive movement but that is first wrought out in that world which to us is unseen and intangible—the world of spirit. The events of the physical world are as the shadows on the curtain, illuminated from behind. The spiritual world represents the real actors behind that curtain. The physical world is analagous to the shadows thrown on that curtain by the persons behind it.
The feminine thought element has the most power to penetrate this unseen world and sense rather than see what is going on there.
This peculiar feminine power and quality of thought as imperfectly known and recognized by our race goes by the name of ” intuition.” It has been spoken of as the inward teaching or knowledge of events beyond reach of the physical senses coming from within. But such knowledge comes from without. The feminine thought ranges and reaches out. It traverses distances ; material solidity is no obstacle to it. It senses an event by means and power not capable of explanation. It feels the acts or motive or character of persons. It feels a coming good or a coming ill. It brings its apprehension of things for good or ill back to the domain of its physical senses. Its power for reaching out and into the realm of the unseen or spiritual side of life is a power as literal as that by which you lift a heavy weight, and this power of woman’s mind is stronger than with man.
The masculine thought has similar powers, but lesser in degree.
Let us repeat that all things good or evil are acted out in the world of spirit before being acted out in the physical world. A man who steals or lies or murders does so in mind long before he commits the Dhysical act. He ” has it in his heart,” to use a common expression. Woman’s mind seeing farther and clearer than man’s into the spiritual life, sees or rather feels such tendencies in that man very quickly when brought into external contact with him. Her impressions are unfavorable regarding him. These impressions are not based on what we call ” reason.” ” Do you know anything of that man ? Have you any evidence that he is a bad man ? ” may be asked of her. ” No.” She has not. Simply she does not like him. Mentally he gives her a disagreeable sensation. Man is prone to call this ” the woman’s whim.”
It is the natural belonging of the feminine mind so to see clearer than man, exactly as in physical eyesight one person may see clearly at a much greater distance than another.
What we call ” reason,” or ” common sense ” is based entirely on cause and result as we think we see cause and result worked out in the physical world. But when we enter the spiritual world, we meet an entirely new system of cause and result underlying the physical, and the feminine thought has more perceptiou in this world than has man’s.
Women are more inclined to religious devotion than man in all denominations, because their farther sensing thought feels vaguely that great truths and realties do underlie all forms of religion, although their truths are often distorted, perverted and misrepresented.
Women bear trouble with more equanimity thau men, because of their greater capacity to draw a strength from the Supreme Power. Man in trouble is more prone to make a woman his confidant and unload his burthen on her. It is this same spiritual power which makes her the best nurse in sickness.
In the Infinite Mind the masculine and feminine element is equally blended. The Supreme Power is not all masculine nor all feminine.
Our whole religious system is to-day based on a masculine Deity as the exclusive ruling force in the Universe, and women are taught directly and indirectly to look up to such a God and humble themselves before it, when theirs the feminine principle is the other and equal half of the Supreme Power.
Man, ages ago, inferring from his greater physical strength, and unconscious that for such strength he was largely dependent on the spiritual force given him by the feminine mind, made Deity exclusively masculine. He inferred that because the masculine element asserted the most physical power, the masculine must be the leading and creative force in Nature. He inferred that man drew all his strength out of himself, and that beyond giving him birth, the feminine element had nothing to do with the perpetuation of either the strength of his body or the clearness and power of his mind.
Hence man has styled himself ” Lord of Creation,” as if in ” creation ” the feminine element was not as indispensable as his own. He has largely arrogated to himself governmental powers as ruler and legislator. He has interpreted, expounded and judged entirely through his masculine eye, and has derided the idea that a balanced judgment and a rightful interpretation could never be found until the feminine mind was called in as the indispensable factor in finding the happiest way of life.
But the current of feminine thought flowing ever toward him, is a vital part of his daily life. It is not seen, nor heard, nor felt in the physical sense, yet it is as necessary to his life and health as is the presence of the feminine element in vegetation to insure healthy productiveness, and this in the vegetable kingdom is as much a spiritual power as in our race.
The spiritual force of the feminine is the other half of the moving force in all Nature.
This force is blended and indispensable in all things and in all movements, civil, religious, political and commercial.
The force and effect of woman’s thought is not now, nor was it ever stamped out by masculine assumption. Man succeeds only in checking it on the plane of physical activities. This is not checking it at all. No man can tell of the direction which may be given his thought, or how he may be influenced by the half hour passed in conversation with a woman. He may absorb from her a thought not spoken at all, and that thought may alter the destiny of his whole life for good or ill. If the woman cannot be President, she may influence the President’s mind, though both may be unconscious of the action and result of these spiritual forces on each other.
Designing, crafty woman in courts and senates, have set floods of mischief afloat through their silent force of thought. France has been ruled by kings’ mistresses more than she ever was by her kings.
So much for woman’s power for evil when she has not demanded of the Supreme for wisdom in the use and direction of her thought or force.
Every woman who in her hours of solitude deprecates in human affairs what she cannot prevent, who regrets the folly and waste of war, who turns yearningly to some more gentle and loving management of affairs, who wishes that man’s turbulent and headstrong spirit could be swayed by softer impulses, is putting out that strong unseen subtle force which is working quietly its result. And such current of thought coming from her as she has drawn it from the Supreme, meets that of other feminine minds thinking as she does, and so meeting goes on ever increasing in volume and power. This is unconscious “prayer without ceasing.”” It is the spiritual element which is refining the world. It is not physically seen or heard. But it is felt. It is a literal power, but it works outside the domain of physical cause and result. It is the Supreme Power working for good through the finer feminine instrument, and working first through her in this way as it always has and always will work first.
If the feminine mind and sympathy were withdrawn from every man in any great city—if we should assume for sake of illustration that the whole feminine mind in that city should be placed exclusively on business, and man by them was regarded as if he did not exist, there would within a few years be a very inferior race of men physically and mentally in that city. Because in such case a spiritual force would be withdrawn, which gives men strength and vigor.
That force is as necessary to the man in his maturer years as the sustenance which the mother gave him when an infant. The sustenance given by the mother to the infant is a physical means for carrying her love to the child. The greater her love so carried the more vigorous will be the child. For real love—love in its highest sense is a life and force to give and perpetuate health and strength far greater than bread and meat.
The feminine thought element is as necessary to man in his maturer years as it is in infancy. Man does not realize this. He absorbs it unconsciously.
Men who in their households or places of business are much in the atmosphere of women, draw from them a spiritual force, which gives them life, energy and capacity for business. Women give it unconsciously, and men receive it unconsciously. Woman will grow more and more alive to the possession and use of her peculiar power. She cannot prevent this power from acting through her no more than we can prevent ourselves from thinking. But she can, when demanding guidance of the Supreme, direct its use and flow so that there shall result the highest happiness to herself. Now as she gives this force to man, it is often used by him without recognition or appreciation and wasted.
When we recognize a truth, and it forms part of our daily thought, its work as an unseen force acting on us and others has begun, and from that time that work goes on increasing and expanding in volume.
The truth then growing en the feminine mind that God, the Endless and Eternal Creative Force, is a blending of the two creative forces, the masculine and feminine, that this blending extends to all nature, that her peculiar power is to see spiritually farther than man, and that in so doing she brings a power to man, indispensable to him—all this an unseen element flowing to and acting on the masculine mind, not in hostility and anger, but as a gentle and loving demand for justice will change his mental attitude toward woman without his scarcely knowing it.
When a few women realize that feminine love and sympathy keeps men literally alive, gives them health and strength, furnishes them with impetus, energy and plan for business, they will have set in motion a noiseless force, which will change the whole masculine life. It will make men see that woman is a real partner in the business and pleasure of life, and not a partner to be used when convenience requires, and ignored at other times.
But this change is not to come with noise or sensation or be heralded by champions on the platform or attended with argumentation against man’s past attitude toward woman.
The Force of the Infinite comes to human hearts “like a thief in the night.” The Infinite does not ” vanquish”’error as the armed gladiator does his opponent. It changes opinion almost imperceptibly. It sends a force gentle in its action but impossible for the more material element to resist. It is as the Sun melting the glacier.
Would the chemist refuse to use some element hitherto rejected and despised, when he found that its use and blending with other material produced we will say a metal more perfect in temper, elasticity and strength, more brilliant in color, and better adapted for a thousand uses, than any before known T No more will the masculine mind refuse the help and strength to mind and body which it will receive when it recognizes the feminine force of woman’s peculiar spiritual power as indispensable to the coming, greater, broader and happier life.
It is not here to be inferred that the impressions or spiritual far seeing of every woman are of a high order, or to be taken by man as his guide to the highest success. Unless woman demands wisdom of the Supreme Power, she will receive thought and impression from a lower source, and going astray will lead man with her as now she does in numberless cases.
But as the feminine mind, or other half of the masculine has the greater power to sense the things of the spirit, so it follows that when that mind is placed on the Supreme, it draws knowledge and power from the Supreme more readily than man’s, and when man sees this, as in time he will, he will be very glad to receive from her what the Infinite has given her a peculiar power to get. There is for him no more inferiority involved in his dependence on her for this spiritual strength than is the hand inferior to the eye. Both have their uses. Both are glad of the aid each can render to the other. Neither can usurp the other’s function.
In the endeavor to state this truth man is not condemned nor censured for his ignorance of a law, no more than is the child who comes to school to learn reading and writing, blamed for not knowing the alphabet. The wisest angel is as ignorant to-day as the unlettered child, of things to be known in the future. Kevelation never stops.
This feminine foresight as it comes more and more into play will bring into the world, balanced wisdom. Balanced wisdom comes of harmony between things material and things spiritual. The masculine mind represents the physical world, the feminine the spiritual. This feminine spiritual force is the balance to man’s material aggressiveness, which still hold such sway. In all efforts to-day the tendency in man is to draw too heavily on his forces. In science, in politics, in business, in art, he works until he drops from exhaustion. He becomes absorbed and sucked in the thought current of some peculiar avocatioD. He is often heedless of woman’s oft-repeated admonition to rest and recuperate. And at last he loses the ability to rest and recuperate. The physical end is then not far oft.
As man is dependent on woman to give him of her peculiar spiritual force, so is woman equally dependent on man for a certain masculine force derived from him. Woman cannot exist without sending this force to man. Her love and sympathy demand something of the other element on which they may be placed. If her mind is not centred on an individual it will be on a masculine ideal.
As woman has a superior power in one direction, man has in another. In the more perfect blending of the masculine and feminine minds, there is no such thing as one having the entire control, leadership, or government of the other. It is a combination of woman’s spiritual far-sightedness and man’s strength for working out the result of her superior vision. The peculiar power of one sex is as necessary to the other as in the telegraph the wire is necessary as a conductor of electricity. Without the wire no intelligence could be conveyed; without the electric fluid, the wire for that purpose would be of no avail. Spiritually the sexes are in an analogous relation. Woman draws a force or spirit from the higher domain of thought. Man, as the wire, can best carry and use it on the more material planes of existence. When in this way in the future,-men and women recognize their peculiar spiritual powers and their proper relation and use to each other, far greater results for happiness will be realized.
To-day the tendency is still very strong for the masculine element to assert an entire independence of the feminine in all governmental and controlling movements. Women’s peculiar judgment and intuition is still held in contempt, although that contempt is gradually diminishing. Women themselves in many cases, absorbing from man and each other this thought of their inferiority, esteem themselves as inferior, and strengthen man in his inferior estimate of them. Whoever believes themselves inferior will for a time be inferior. But this condition of things cannot last. It cannot last, because the idea is founded in error. Every woman, be she silly and trifling as she may, carries in her spirit the divine germ of her superior intuition or power of seeing truth in the Supreme Mind sooner than man. Her present vision may be imperfect and distorted. Her present judgment in any direction may be of no value, but the germ’ is there. It may be but the faintest spark from the Supreme Light. It cannot be extinguished. Nor can it lessen. It may be covered and buried under the ashes of lower and material thought. But the sacred fire and qualities of truth is in duration eternal, and is ever attracting more of the divine fire to itself. It will shine more and more brightly. It burns away and purges itself of the dross which temporarily covers it.
LOVE THYSELF
Copyright 1891, By F. J. Needham
Christ’s precepts say: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Some people incline to forget the two last words ” as thyself and infer that we should love others even better than ourselves. So far has this idea been carried that it has led in cases to entire sacrifice and neglect of self so that good may be done to others.
There is a justifiable and righteous love for self.
There can be no true spiritual growth without this higher love for self. Spiritual growth implies the cultivation and increase of every power and talent. It means the making of the symmetrically developed mau and woman. Spiritual growth fostered by unceasing Demand of the Supreme Power will bring power to keep the body in perfect health to escape pain and disease—and will eventually carry man above the present limited- conditions of mortality.
The higher love of self benefits others as well as ourselves.
When we love a person, we send that person our quality of thought. If it is the aspiring order of thought it is for that person a literal element and agency of life and health in proportion to his or her capacity for absorbing and assimilating it. If we think meanly of ourselves—if we are beggarly in spirit—and are content to live on the bounty of others, if we care little for our personal appearance —if we are willing to get money by questionable means—it we believe there is no Supreme and overruling Power, governing our lives by an exact law, but that everything is left to chance, and that life is only a scramble for existence, we send in thought such beliefs to that person, and if our love is accepted it is only a means to drag down instead of a power to elevate.
How can we send the highest love to another if we do not have it for ourselves f If we are careless and unappreciative of the body’s great use to us— if we never give it a thought of admiration or gratitude for the many functions it performs for us—if we regard it with the same indifference that we may have for the post to which we hitch a horse, we shall send that same quality of sentiment and thought to the person we think most of, and the tendency of such thought on them will be to generate a similar disregard for themselves.
Either they will do this, or seeking light of the Infinite, they will find themselves obliged in selfprotection to refuse the love we send them, because of its coarser and grosser quality.
This is sometimes the error of mothers, who say: “I don’t care for myself so that my son or daughter’s welfare is assured. I give and devote my whole life to them.”
This means, ” I am content to grow old and unattractive. I am content to slave and drudge so that my children may receive a good education and shine in society. I am an old aud decaying weather-beaten hulk and can’t hold together much longer, and the best use I can make of myself is to serve as a sort of foot-bridge for them in the shape of nurse, grandmother, and overseer of the nursery and kitchen, while they are playing their parts in society.”
The daughter receives this thought with the mother’s inferior self-neglecting love. She absorbs and it assimilates it. It becomes part of her being. She lives it, acts it out, and thirty years afterward is saying and doing the same and laying herself upon the shelf with the rest of the cracked teapots for her daughter’s sake.
Ancestral traits of character as bequeathed and transmitted from parent to child are the thoughts of the parent absorbed by the child.
When in thought, desire and aspiration we make the most of what the Infinite has given us (inclusive of these wonderful bodies), we shall have continual increase, and such increase will overflow of itsown accord aud benefit others.
The highest love for self means justice to self. If we are unjust to ourselves we shall be unavoidably unjust to those to whom we are of the greatest value. A general who should deprive himself of necessary food and give all his bread and meat to a hungry soldier, might in so doing weaken his body, and with his body weaken his mental faculties, lessen his capacity for command, thereby increasing the chances for the destruction of his entire army.
What is most necessary to know and what the Infinite will show us as we demand, is the value we are to others. In proportion to our power for increasing human happiness, and in proportion a3 we recognize that power will the needful agencies come to us for making our material coudition more comfortable.
No man or woman can do their best work for themselves or others who lives in a hovel, dresses meanly and starves the spirit by depriving it of the gratification of its finer tastes. They will always carry the atmosphere and influence of the hovel with them, and that is brutalizing and degrading. If the Infinite worked on such a basis would the Heavens show the splendor of the Suns ? Would the fields reflect that glory in the myriad hues of leaf and flower, in plumage of bird and hue of rainbow?
What in many cases prevents the exercise of this higher love and justice to self is the thought, “What will others say, and how will others judge me if I give myself what I owe to myself?” That is, you must not ride in your carriage until every needy relative has a carriage also. The general must not nourish his body properly because the hungry soldier might say that he was rioting in excess. When we appeal to the Supreme and our life is governed by a principle, we are not governed either by fear of public opinion or love of other’s approbation, and we may be sure that the Supreme will sustain us. If in any way we try to live to suit others we never shall suit them, and the more we try the more unreasonable and exacting do they become. The government of your life is a matter which lies entirely between God and yourself, and when your life is swayed and influenced from any other source you are on the wrong path.
Very few people really love themselves. Very few really love their own bodies with the higher love. That higher love puts ever-increasing life in the body and ever-increasing capacity to enjoy life.
Some place all their love on the apparel they put on their bodies ; some on the food they put in their bodies ; some on the use or pleasure they can get from their bodies.
That is not real love for self which gluts and gormandizes with food or which keeps the body continually under the influence of stimulants. It is not a real love for self which indulges to excess in any pleasure to be gotten from the body. The man who racks and strains his body and mind in the headlong pursuit of pleasure or business, loves that business or art unwisely. He has no regard for the instrument (the body) on which he is dependent for the materialization of his ideas. This is like the mechanic who should allow a costly tool by which he is enabled to do rare and elaborate work to rust or be otherwise injured through neglect.
That is not the highest love for self which puts on its best and cleanest apparel when it goes out to visit or promenade and wears ragged or soiled clothes indoors. That is love of the opinion or approbation of others. Such a person only dresses physically. There is a spiritual dressing of the body when the mind in which apparel is put on is felt by others. Whoever has it in auy degree will evidence it in a certain style of carrying their clothes which no tailor can give.
The miser does not love himself. He loves money better than self. To live with a half-starved body, to deny self jrf. every luxury, to get along with the poorest and cheapest things, to deprive self of amusement and recreation in order to lay up money, is surely no love for the whole self. The miser’s love is all in his money bags, and his body soon shows how little love is put in it.
Love is an element as literal as air or water. It has many grades of quality with different people. Like gold, it may be mixed with grosser element. The highest and purest love comes to him or her who is most in communion and oneness with the Infinite Mind and ever demanding of the Infinite Mind for more and more of its wisdom. The regard and thought of such a person is of great value to any one on whom it is directed. And that person will of that wisdom be wisely economical of their sympathy for others and put a great deal of this higher love into themselves in order to make the most of themselves.
Some people infer from their religious teachings that the body and its functions are inherently vile, and depraved; that it is a clog and an incumbrance to any higher and more divine life ; that it is corruptible ” food for worms,” destined to return to dust and moulder in the earth. It has been held that the body should be ” mortified, that the flesh should be crucified and starved and subjected to rigorous penance and pains for its evil tendencies. Even youth with its freshness, beauty, vigor and vivacity has been held as almost a sin, or as a condition especially prone to sin.
When a person in any way mortifies and crucifies the body either by starving it or dressing meanly, or living in bare and gloomy surroundings, they generate and literally put in the body the thought of hatred for itself. Hatred of others or of self is a slow thought-poison. A hated body can never be symmetrical or healthy. The body is not to be refined and purged of the lower and animal tendencies by being made responsible and continually blamed for these sins—by being counted as a clod and an incumbrance, which it is fortunate at last to shake oft. Religion so called has in the past made a scapegoat of the body, accused it of every sin, and in so doing and thinking filled it with sin. As one result of this the professors of such religion have suffered pain and sickness. Their bodies have decayed and di ath has often been preceded by long and painful illness.
” By their fruits ye shall know them.” The fruits of such a faith and condition of mind prove error in it.
There is a mind of the body—a carnal or material mind—a mind belonging to the instrument used by the spirit. It is a mind or thought lower or cruder than that of the spirit.
But this mind of the body need not, as has been held, be ever at war with the higher mind of the spirit. It can through demand of the Infinite be made in time to act in perfect accord with the spirit. The Supreme Power can and will send us a supreme love for the body. That love we need to have. Not to love one’s body is not to love one expression of the Infinite Mind.
We are not inferring that jou “ought” to have more love for your body, or that you ” ought” in any respect to do or act differently from your deeds, acts and thoughts as they are at present. “Ought ” is a word and idea regarding others that we have nothing to do with. There is no reason in saying to a blind man “you ought to see.” There is no more reason in saying to anyone ” you ought not to have this or that defect of character.” Whatever our mental condition may be at present, we must act out.
A man cannot of his individual self put an atom more of the element of love in himself than he now has. Only the Infinite Mind can do that. Whatever of error in character and belief we have to-day, we shall act out to-day in thought or deed. But we need not always have that mind.
The Overruling Mind will as we demand give us new minds, new truths, new beliefs, and as these supplant and drive out old errors there will come corresponding changes for the better, in both mind and body. And these ever improving changes have no end. There is to these changes but one gate and one road. That gate and road lies in an unceasing demand of the Infinite to perfect us in its way.
” There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.” In other words, we have a body of physical element which can be seen and felt, and we have another body (the spiritual), intangible to our physical senses. When we are able to love, cherish and admire our physical body as one piece of God’s handiwork, we are putting that higher love element not only into that physical body, but also into the spiritual body. We cannot of ourselves make this quality of love. It can come to us only through demand of the Infinite. It is not vanity or that lower pride which values more whatever effect its own grace and beauty may have on others than it values that grace and beauty. The higher love for the body will attend as carefully to its external adornment in the solitude of the forest as it would in the crowded city. It will no more debase itself by any vulgar act in privacy than it would before a multitude.
If God gives one personal beauty and symmetry in physical proportion?, should not he or she thus favored with a gift from the Supreme, admire it t Is it vanity to love and admire and seek to improve and increase any talent we may find in ourselves ? If God made man and woman ” in His own image,” is it an image to be loved and admired, or regarded with hatred and distrust ? Why the religious belief of less than a hundred years ago has actually courted ugliness, and inferred that it was more creditable than beauty. Had some of those solemn visaged professors been delegated to make an angel
after their own ideal, they would have turned out a duplicate of themselves.
The Infinite as we demand will give us wisdom and light to know what we owe to ourselves. People have been over-ridden with the idea of the ” duties ” they owed to parent, relative or friend. The road to heaven has been marked out as one full of sacrifice and self-denial for the sake of others, and with little good or pleasure for self.
If Christ should be taken as an example in this respect, we find a very different course inferred. When charged with lack of attention for his mother he asks, ” Who is my mother ? ” When the young man pleads as an excuse for not immediately following Christ, that filial duty demanded he should go and bury his father, the Messenger of a new and higher law said, ” Let the dead bury their dead.” In other words, ” if father or mother or sister or brother are steeped in a life-long course of trespass and sin—if their lives have been one continual violation of spiritual law, bringing the inevitable penalty of disease and pain—if they are hardened and fossilized in their false beliefs, and regard your opinions as visionary and impractical, you cannot without injury have fellowship with them. If you pretend for sake of peace to agree with them you, are living a lie, and when you act or live a lie you materialize it and put it in your body, where it is a breeder of pain and unrest. If others cannot see the law of life as clearly as you, and in their blindness go stumbling on and filling themselves with decay and disease, it is not in the line of the highest justice that you should be called on to nurse them every time they are sick, to absorb their sick and unhealthy thought, to give them your life and vitality (for this you do when you think much of any one), and to be dragged down with them. You are not responsible for their blindness. Nor can you open their eyes and make them see what is proven to you to be truth. Only the Infinite can do that. You do those who are in this lower and material current of thought no real good in ministering to them physically or spiritually. You may, having the stronger mind, bolster them up for a time, and throwing your mind in theirs give them your strength, but you cannot do this always, and when your influence is removed, as some time it must be, they will fall back to their old condition. What then have you accomplished ? You have taken so much force out of yourself that you owed to yourself, and you have taught them to depend on you and not on what every one must learn to depend—the Supreme Power. Let the dead then who are still above ground bury their dead. Give them a thought and wish for their highest welfare whenever you do think of them and leave them in God’s care.
But when you put the Higher Love into yourself —when you reserve your forces to raise yourself higher in the scale of being—when it is your aim and unceasing silent prayer to be raised out of the current of the lower and material thought into that spiritual condition’beyond the reach of physical disease—when you aspire to have every sense and faculty refined and strengthened beyond the present lot of mortals—when you begin to realize through the proofs coming to you that these are possibilities, then you are a real benefit to everyone. You are then proving a law. You are showing that there is a road out of the ills which afflict humanity, and when others, seeing these things evidenced in your life, ask how you obtain them, you can reply, ” I have grown, and am ever growing into a higher and happier condition of mind and body through knowledge of a law, and that law is as much for you to live by as for me.” You may be able to say, ” I believe in the existence of the Great Overruling Power which will show me ever the happier way of life as I demand wisdom of that Power. I had little faith in the existence of that Power at first, but I was prompted to pray or demand ability to see its reality. Now my faith in its reality is growing firmer.”
To throw our whole being, care and thought into the welfare of others, no matter who they may be, without first asking of the Supreme if it be the wisest thing to do is a sin, for it is an endeavor to use the forces given us by that Power as we think best. The result is damage to self and a great lessening of ability to do real good to others.
Between the Supreme Mind and ourselves there will exist a love which is at once a love of ourselves and a love of that Mind. We must love what we draw from it, since what we draw and make part of self is drawn from God and is a part of God. Every thought we give to the Supreme Wisdom enriches us and directs us in the lasting path ef happiness. Every thought we give to others not directed by that Higher Wisdom is unwisely bestowed. That Wisdom will direct our thought, love and sympathy to those on whom it can be bestowed without injury. To have our thoughts ever flowing spontaneously toward the Infinite Mind is to be one with God and a wise lover of self, as we feel ourselves more and more parts of God manifest in the flesh.
If we give sympathy and aid, material or moral, to others as they call for it and without reservation or judgment, people will take all we have to give and come opened-mouthed for more. They will keep this up until we are exhausted.
No outsider will put a limit to your giving. You must do that yourself. What is called “generous impulse ” is sometimes another name for extravagance and injustice to somebody. Those who fling money to servitors and overpay largely for trifling services often owe that money to others, or they may owe it to themselves. In the real spiritual domain of being, we find this injustice perpetrated on a still larger scale. Sympathetic natures sometimes give their whole lives to others. Giving thus their life and force to others becomes a fixed habit. They become unable to restrain or control their sympathy.
It overflows at everybody’s call. They deprive themselves of things really needed and take up with the poorest in order to satisfy a mania for the squandering of time, force, effort and thought on others. A widely spread idea prevails that we can never give too much or do too much for others. It argues that salvation is more readily attained by such reckless expenditure of self than in any other way. No matter how barren it makes our lives—no matter how much we deprive ourselves, it is to be made up to us ten-fold in time.
We deem this a great mistake. We believe there is a Divine Economy which orders that when we give even of our thought, we give only as much as will really benefit others. Reckless prodigality throws dollars to children when cents would do them as much good.
Reckless prodigality of sympathy (force) often gives ten times more to a person tuan that person can appropriate.
What they cannot appropriate is lost for them, and when you have sent it once out you cannot recall it.
Undoubtedly to some the idea of giving so much love to self will seem very cold, hard and unmerciful. Still this matter may be seen in a different light, when we find that i’ looking out for Number One” as directed by the Infinite is really looking out for Number Two and is indeed the only way for permanently benefiting Number Two. ” The gifts conferred by the Supreme Power are “perfect gifts” and a ” perfect gift” once received by us goes out and benefits many others. So soon as one person on this planet receives the ” perfect gift” of immortality in the flesh, involving perfect health and freedom from all pain and disease, that gift .will be contagious, for health is catching as well as disease. The corner-stone of all symmetrical growth and constant increase of mental and physical power is the reservation and care of our thought forces. This wisdom can only come as we demand it of the Supreme Power.
I am often asked ” How do you know what you assert V Or ” Have you proven these assertions to yourself?” I know what I assert to be true, because I have seen the beneficial results as regards health and condition in life proven me to an extent. Other proofs are constantly coming. But what is proven to me is really no permanently convincing proof to any other person. That kind of proof you can only get from yourself and by the exercise and growth of your share of power given you by the Infinite. In the physical world we can safely accept the statement of a navigator who asserts his discovery of a new island. The island looks the same to every physical eye. But on the spiritual side of life spiritual things do not appear the same to all eyes. There are so to speak spiritual islands, and spiritual realities which one person can see and another cannot see. You will see and get proof of these in proportion as you grow and very possibly when you tell these things to others,
they will call you a visionary or ascribe the material proof of such growth to some material cause. In the spiritual life every person is his 01 her own discoverer, and you need not be grieved if your discoveries are not believed in by others. It is not your business to argue and prove them to others. It is your business to push on, find more and increase your own individual happiness.
Christ said to those of his time “Though one rose from the dead you would not believe him.” In this respect the world has not much changed since Christ used a material body on Earth.
ABOUT PRENTICE MULFORD
Prentice Mulford was born at Sag Harbor, Long Island, N. Y., April 5th, 1834. He was the sole Author of the entire series of the White Cross Library publications.
He passed out on the 27th of May, 1891, while in his boat, which was anchored off Long Island.
There was nobody with him at the time, but there is evidence his passing away was during sleep and unaccompanied by pain.
He was reclining on his improvised couch in the boat wrapped in his blankets. The awning was properly fastened and everything was in order on the boat.
There was no indication of suffering on his face, nor was there any signs of previous excitement or agitation. He was cruising toward Sag Harbor. As has been said, ” If Prentice Mulford could have chosen the manner of his death, I think he would have elected to go as he did.”
The story of his life as a Journalist and Author, is told in his own words us follows:
HOW PRENTICE MULFORD DRIFTED TOWARD A LITERARY CAREER.
I drifted gradually into the occupation of a writer, and never wrote a line for publication until I was twenty-nine years old. I wrote because I couldn’t help writing. I found a pleasure in putting my thoughts on paper. It seemed an assistance to thinking more clearly. We may think more things in sixty seconds than we can write out in sixty minutes. The time occupied in putting our thoughts down on paper seems as a sort of governor to regulate the outflow of our mental steam or idea. If you could do this without the aid of pen and ink to keep from thinking too fast you might live for hours in an extempore poem, fancy or fiction of your own.
The first article I ever had published appeared in the columns of “The Union Democrat,” of Sonora, Tuolumne county, Oal. It was an account of the yearly fall spree held by the river miners when the Tuolumne rose in its wrath two months earlier than was expected five years out of six and swept away all our summer’s work, dams, flumes, wheels, sluices and other river mining machinery. It was not so much an account of the spree as of the results of it, and the feelings, mental and physical, remorse and repentance, contrition and headache, realized the day after.
The article struck a sympathetic chord throughout the entire county. Four-fifths of the population had been there themselves.
I wrote this sketch one Sunday afternoon under a big pine tree near my cabin. It was in a little gulch, and through the gulch flowed a little brook. A hundred yards distant the muddy current of the Tuolumne roared and rushed and howled through the Willow Bar and over a prosperous claim.
There came floating in its current a log or part of a flume or a sluice box or wreck of a water wheel, which the mad river tossed about as if in derision of man’s puny work, and perhaps flung it on a half submerged rock and crashed it to splinters. I know not why, but the picture of the birthplace of my first article has remained firmly imprinted in my brain.
For about three years between whiles of mining, prospecting, teaching school, running for office, lecturing and organizing gigantic mining enterprises, all of which perished prematurely, I wrote almost gratuitously for “The Democrat” over the signature of ” Dogberry.” By that name I became pretty well known in Tuolumne and the adjoining counties.
I had no ambition to become known as a writer. My highest aspiration was the possession of a gold claim which would pay four or five dollars a day. As such aspiration increased the daily income of such ” diggings” as I took hold of diminished. At last such income descended to the scale of seventyfive cents per diem. All my worldly goods were an old gun, a saddle, a pair of blankets, an enfeebled suit of clothes and a trunk with abundant room for many things not in it.
At this crisis in the early fall of 1866 I received an unexpected letter from Mr. Joseph Lawrence, publisher of “The Golden Era,” then the leading literary weekly paper of San Francisco, asking me to take a place on it. To San Francisco I went straightway, and a more forlorn, seedy specimen of literary impecuniosity never set foot in that city. Mr. Lawrence placed me at one of the leading hotels, where he lived, and by the agency of some fresh apparel made me in a measure presentable. I felt very much out of place among the stylish people with whom I found myself.
However I filled my position on “The Era,” I believe, acceptably. It was only at certain times, with a pen in my hand, that I felt raised above my average shabby, inassertive mental level. I was called modest and retiring. That was not it at all. I was cowardly, and thought almost every one I met who had a pretentious air was in some way to me unknown my superior.
Bret Harte had then a local California reputation. So had Mark Twain. I met both of these gentlemen frequently in “The Era” office. Charles Warren Stoddard, Ralph Keeler, who died so mysteriously in Cuba; Newell (Orpheus C. Kerr), Artemus Ward, Adah Menken and several other bright people were regular or occasional contributors to ” The Era.”
I remained on ” The Era” about a year. Mr, Lawrence went to the eastern states. I left the paper soon after his departure, and sustained myself on a meager income by peddling my contributions to various papers. I wrote a good deal for “The Dramatic Chronicle,” a theatre programme sheet about as large as a bandana handkerchief, and the seedling on which its publisher (Charles De Young) founded, in 1869 or 1870, the “San Francisco Chronicle.” De Young was always predicting that he would start a great morning paper. Almost every one laughed at the idea. But one morning he did start it. Then they stopped laughing.
One morning, while correcting my proof in the “Dramatic Chronicle” composing room the building commenced shaking. It shook and shook, and then shook harder. It generated a general tendency on the part of the printers and editors to steer rapidly for the stairway. I went with the rest, bringing up the rear. That was the great earthquake of 1808. I was the first to go back to the office. It looked as if it had been emphatically, industriously and elaborately struck by lightning. In about three minutes afterward a pale, scared compositor put his head in the door. Seeing me, he exclaimed: ” Great Gosh ! Did you stay here through it all 1″ Inadvertently I said no. With more presence of mind I might have said, ” yes,” aud gained a fine and fleeting reputation for courage.
In 18681 had a call to edit the “Stockton Gazette,” a Democratic campaign paper. I obeyed the call, ran the paper for five months, was well paid, but got tired of the job and retired to San Francisco, where I skirmished again on the ragged edge of a decent living by throwing in contributions wherever they would be accepted. In the latter part of 1872 an inspiration seized me to go to England to advance by writing and talking the good and glory of California. I raised about $500 from the business men of San Francisco by representing to them the profitable possibilities of ray self-imposed mission.
I raised it in about forty-eight hours. Ealston, the noted banker, handed me $100 in gold after a curt and crusty interview of three minutes. It was like bearding the lion in the big banker’s den, but the lion came down with the dust, and I left the den, shaky and perspiring with the agitation of the interview. But the five gold twenties were in my fist. “The San Francisco Bulletin” engaged also to take a certain amount of correspondence from England.
To England I went. I did there the best I could in writing and talking California wherever I found opportunity, in cities, towns and villages, and think I earned my $500 advance wages. I spent two years there.
One of my greatest troubles was the English chairman. One cannot give a lecture there without a chairman. The chairman must be somebody of importance also. The English cannot hear anybody without a chairman. The peculiarity and infliction of the English chairman is that he will make such a long speech in introducing you and telling the audience what you are going to say, so that by the time he is through most of the wind is taken out of your sails and the audience want to go home.
In 1872 the “Bulletin” made it an object for me to visit the Vienna World’s Fair. I staid there two months, and got back to London with four dollars in my pocket, thanking my stars that I had run the gauntlet successfully of the many languages I encountered at different railway stations, and had not by mistake got on some train which might have landed me penniless in Turkey or Siberia.
I returned to America in 1873, bringing only a wife and nine dollars. After some months of misery as an ” occasional contributor ” the ” San Francisco Bulletin” sent me as correspondent to the Centennial at Philadelphia. I forgot to say that I operated the preceding winter in New York as a weekly Sunday evening lecturer on divers and sundry descriptive topics, an occupation that brought me more fame than new shirts.
Once during this phase of my existence I preached from a Unitarian pulpit. But not acceptably. They never called for me again.
Destiny soon after this placed me on the editorial staff of the “New York Graphic.” There I suggested the condensed column of local and general matter under the title of ” History of a Day.” It was just what the paper wanted, for their illustrations took up so much room they had not much left for local news. Mr. David Croly was the managing editor, and a very good one, too.
One morning while on the ” Graphic” I found on my table a letter from the “Bulletin” asking me to serve as their Paris correspondent at the Exposition of 1878. In forty-eight hours I was on a French steamer.
Returning after a six months’ residence in Paris I resumed my former place on the “Graphic” as the head boiler down and condenser of news. I filled that position for six years, and left it in 1883 because of being thoroughly tired and sick of chronicling in short meter day after day the eternal round of murders, scandals, burglaries, fires, accidents and other events which people deem it indispensable to know and swallow after breakfast. I became so thoroughly saturated with the horrors consequent on civilization as to feel some mornings after I had stewed the preceding day’s miseries down into a small mess that I wanted to go for a dose of arsenic, a razor, a pistol or Paris green myself. So out of consideration for my sanity, if not my life, I left the paper, for they would not let me do anything else.
I retired then on a very small fortune, and built with my own hands a ramshackle shanty in a New Jersey wilderness, seventeen miles from New York. It cost $40 and was not an elegant piece of architecture. But it filled the bill. There I commenced writing my ” White Cross ” Library series.
I went to Boston in 1884. It was for some mysterious reason necessary to go to Boston to start any new idea or movement on this planet. There I started the White Cross Library. I had just money enough to print the first edition. I had no subscription list at all.
I had faith, however, in my ideas. I have more now, and expect to increase it in the future. That was in May, 1886. From that time means and agencies have come right along to further the business, which is and always has been, I may add, on a self-sustaining basis.
PRENTICE MULFORD.
(From the Union Democrat of Sonora, Cal., June 6, 1891.
Prentice Mulford, the well-known journalist, and who formerly edited the Democrat, has gone over to the majority. His body was found in a canoe at Sheepshead Bay, N. Y., last Saturday. The canoe contained provisions, cooking utensils, etc., showing that he had started on a cruise. Mulford was a shy, sensitive man, a fine genius, who never harmed one by deed or word, and whose memory will ever be kept green in Golden Land.
The following is from Judge Ferrall, in ” Union Democrat” of same date:
More than thirty years have come and gone since the writer first met and began a lifelong friendship with Prentice Mulford; we were both young, scarcely more than boys; one the teacher of a village school, the other editor ot a country newspaper. Both commenced writing for the press about the same time. There were many things in common between us. We belonged to the same political faith; loved the same friends; wrote for the same newspaper—” Union Democrat”—shared the same hopes and aspirations of journalism and life. Now, after so many years, upon glancing at a newspaper at the breakfast table, I read the telegraphic announcement: ” Prentice Mulford is dead.”
Prentice Mulford was a strange and peculiar man, in many respects. His early ventures in the field of literature are well known to the readers of the “Union Democrat,” whose hairs have silvered with the frosts of years. The nom de plume of ” Dogberry ” was as familiar in the Southern mines at one period, as that of ” Bill Nye ” to-day. But the style, the thought, the expression, the pathos, the humor, belonged to Mulford alone. After coming to San Francisco and connecting himself with the ” Golden Era,” published by his good friend Lawrence, he contributed over his own proper name. Pushing his fortunes Eastward, he wrote for the press in New York; he visited England and France as a correspondent, and finally became connected with the “White Cross” publishing house in the Empire City, remaining with it until death snapped the brittle thread of life. Brain and pen were always busy. He was a man of thought —a thinker—one who refused to take his ideas of life and death second-hand, but delved for himself in the mines of speculative inquiry; respected no creed nor dogma because of its age; rejected no doctrine, because it was the butt of scoffers and the target of ridicule. He believed this life but a few days’ journey towards a higher and better development. He had a philosophy and religion of his own,
recognized and shared by many at the time of his unexpected taking off. He believed in thought power as the controlling factor of human action. He sang with Bulwer: ” There is no such thing as death.” He felt with Shakspeare, ” Life is but a walking shadow.” Calmly and fearlessly he sought to read the mystery of the future beyond the grave. Death had no terrors for him. Just as the poor little worm changes from the mire and ugliness of earth to its bright-winged life as a bird of beauty, whose home is in the air and amid the perfume of flowers, so did Prentice Mulford anticipate the last great change from life through death, to that higher and brighter life, eternal in the heavens.
Prentice Mulford, in the ” White Cross Libary ” books, so full of original thought and peculiar force of expression, will live long after many of the famous men of to-day are forgotten.
Upon his recent visit to California, both before and after he had been up to dear ” Old Tuolumne,” I enjoyed the sweet satisfaction of his company on several occasions. I found my good old friend but little changed, outwardly or inwardly, so far as I could judge. Time had dealt kindly with him, and left untouched the merry twinkle of the eye, the quiet, pleasant smile, and genial laugh, so natural and infectious, that to hear it was to laugh again. Although he was a deep thinker, yet his honest, comely face was not ” sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” He had much to say of the old times, the old friends, and the brave, glad, joyous life of the early days in California, when the world seemed young and in its prime. His heart was full of the scenes and memories of pioneer days. The names of the living and the dead were often on his lips. 3To unkind recollections appeared to have an abiding place in his tender heart. All his words were words of pleasantness and peace.
Well, Prentice Mulford is dead. He has passed from earth; gone out with the tide in his little canoe; drifted away from us who loved him here to those who love him still in the world of immortality. Long had he looked forward to the great experiment, but never with a heart that faltered or a mind that doubted. He expected to hear cheery voices from the other shore, and look again into the honest eyes of the loved ones who had gone before.
Good-bye, old friend. May the breath of Summer sing to the stars of your goodness, and the snows of Winter fall lightly on your last resting place.
ROBERT FERRAL.
San Francisco, June 2, 1891.
FROM ELIZA ARCHARD CONNER.
If the late Prentice Mulford had singled out from all his writings one sentence that he wished to stand as a memorial of him and his work, it would have been this, “Thoughts are things.” There is in us and about us, interpenetrative of all the universe, a subtle thought ether, visible in veiled glimpses now and then to those whose clairvoyant eyes have been partially opened to ianer realities. On this ether ride the vibrant waves which carry thought, imagination, vision, to all mankind. If a man thinks, he forms and throws out beyond him on the thought either actual images, and things that float out beyond him are caught with other thought waves and images, and react on the man himself.
MENTAL MEDICINE.
Copyright 1891, by F. J. Needham.
The first step toward both preventing and curing any form of disease is to get out of your mind the belief and error that your mental force is glowing less or can grow less. That is impossible. It may seem to grow less because of the severity of your trials and afflictions. Bodies may go to waste but the unseen Force or mind using those bodies never wastes or decreases. It may not be able to act on the body. It may through ignorance and lack of training in mental control be scattered as it is scattered in thousands of cases where people’s thoughts are drifting all about with no power to fix those thoughts or that power on any one thing for ten minutes. But the scatterbrains power or thought is all fastened to and radiates from a centre. Only, he or she lacks power to call it to that centre. The source of all strength lies in power of massing your thought or force entirely on one thing.
The truth that you are a growing mind or Force and Must be an ever growing Force, and that this Force can be self applied to strengthen the body can never leave you. The presentation of this idea to you is for you a great spiritual power. It may at times be buried up and seemingly forgotten. You may at times waver and doubt and get discouraged. Yet this truth will always come up again and assert itself, and reassert itself witb greater and greater power, and finally proofs will come with such assertion and reassertion—proofs at first small but ever growing more convincing and ever increasing in number and importance—proofs as you find your maladies and weakness by degrees improving—proof as you find you do not take colds as readily as in years gone by.
The next step is to realize that the mind is the seat of all disease—that whatever thought is painful to the mind is a pain and cause of weakness to the body. If you are frightened your body feels the fright and is made weak. If you are angered your body shakes with that emotion. If you are in suspense or are hopeless or discouraged, the muscles do not feel or act as when you are bright or hopeful. Now you may for years have had fear or anger or suspense or discouragement acting on your body and it has weakened the body by degrees, and that weakness has affected some organ—eye, ear, stomach, lung, liver.
Resist In Mind allthatgivesyou pain or discomfort. Don’t say in thought ” It’s too hot” or ” It’s too cold, I can’t bear it.” When you say that, in thought you surrender to the elements and their power over you and the pain they will bring your body is greater than ever.
Say in your silent thought ” It is true my body shrinks from this cold or this pain. But in my mind I will not shrink. I oppose the force that brings pain to my body. I defy it.”
You are then ever building up a power to resist the effect of the elements on your body. Every moment you so in mind oppose heat or cold, or any pain or inconvenience whatsoever, is so much clear gain. Every thought you so put out is as real a resisting power as lies in the muscles of your arm to hold at bay a savage dog. Every such thought is an additional stone in the structure you are building up to protect yourself against evil.
Oppose then in thought the Devil in any form and he will flee from you. The Devil is in whatever tries to master you. If you do not so resist, he Will temporarily Master you. You will never find a climate to suit you. It will always be too hot or too cold, or too something. You will find without such opposition the close, stuffy, overheated room still more uncomfortable. You will be borne down and overpowered by smells, by sights, by atmospheres.
It is by no means here implied that you must remain where surroundings or elements are unpleasant any longer than is necessary. It is not implied that you should martyrize or torture yourself simply for the sake of enduring. It is not implied that you should Force yourself on what is unpleasant to mind or body. It is only implied that you should aim to master what is unpleasant, and so prevent its mastering you. There is no good gained by self-inflicted torture of any kind. That is often the mistake of the ascetic who deprives himself of all pleasures—of the hermit, who would make a merit of complete solitude—of the Hindoo, who gashes his flesh with knives or swings impaled on hooks. This is simply resistance carried too far. Because one can endure is no reason why they should endure, when endurance is no longer necessary. That is expending strength which might be used to far more profit in other directions. The ascetic in any form is as much enslaved to the idea of deeming pleasure a sin as the devotee of any single appetite is enslaved by that appetite. Self conquest means simply self control. It is right that the body as the instrument of the spirit should administer any form of pleasure which does not injure the spirit. It is not profitable that the body, as the instrument, should be able to EnForce any demand upon the spirit. The spirit is only safe when it can control and enforce its demands upon the body at any time, any place, and at any height of physical pleasure. The spirit is free Only when it can do this.
You may fear an event or an individual, and if you do not in mind resist that fear it will in some way wear on the body. You may in mind resist it for days and feel no change. Yet be sure that persistent attitude or attempt to bring courage kept up in your darkest, most depressing moments, when you seem to have no heart to meet anything, and it is hard to assert yourself even against the impertinence of a child—be sure that at last strength will come—a mood of mind will come in which you may see the thing you fear in a new light; you may see how needless was your fear, how much imagination magnified it, or you may see how puny are your opponents, and when in mind you feel above them, you are above them and must conquer them. You war in these states of timidity and depression far more with the unseen than the seen. You have working on your mind the Powers of Darkness, or, in other words, mischievous, annoying intelligence of the unseen side of life, who desire to defeat your purpose, who play upon some over sensitive chord and so contrive to make a difficulty where none exists. Why are they allowed to do this ? Because you must grow a force sufficient to overcome them. You cannot always be protected or you would have no force of your own. When through a prolonged struggle with some depressed or timid state of mind force and strength at last comes to you, that force and strength is all your own. It can never leave you.
If your mind is in disorder, if you are thinking or trying to think of half a dozen things at once you want to do—if you don’t know what to take hold of first and try to take hold of half a dozen things first, then your room will be in disorder, your desk and papers in disorder, and if this is a prevailing mood of mind your body will also suffer from some form of disorder, because the Force that does literally bind your body together is scattered. You are a bundle of sticks untied.
You can commence to tie them by setting in order a square inch or a square foot of your room or your desk—a corner of the room.
Don’t try to do too much at once. Don’t look at all there is to do. If you do it will give you that feeling of disgust for it all, weariness of it all, that is really a sickness of the mind and surely leads to sickness of body. If your eyes get a little weak don’t run immediately for spectacles. Let the eyes rest a few mouths. No organ of the body is so strained as is the eye in the endeavor to read our fine print. The printer’s limit for eye power is just as much as it can make out to see without spectacles. That is on the same basis as if you were given a load to carry which taxed the utmost power of your muscles to lift.
Make up your mind firmly that your eyesight must be as good as ever it was. In taking immediately to spectacles thousands unconsciously make up their minds that because the natural sight has failed, it has failed for the remainder of their lives. AVhen you take to glasses you take to crutches for the eye. Then of course you use eye-crutches for the rest of your life. You do not reason or act in this way with a strained leg or foot. If you do seek the help of a crutch or cane you are continually in mind wishing to do without that cane and trying from time to time to walk without crutch or cane.
The eye can be made weak by some weakness of the body and this weakness of the body was caused by some kind of trouble of the mind—either grief or worry or anxiety—about something, for all these states of mind exhaust the force of the body.
Rest enables an overtaxed stomach to recuperate itself. Rest enables an overtaxed muscle or limb to become as strong as ever. Why should not rest restore an overtaxed eye ! It is the same unseen force that gives strength to all the body’s organs. You do not rest the eye in wearing glasses. You do over stimulate it through putting on an artificial lens for concentrating the light to make you see which the natural lens has failed to do. It is an artificial stimulation for that organ as much as is the alcoholic artificial stimulation for the stomach to give it a temporary tone or get up an appetite, and you train your eye to lean and depend on the artificial stimulation. Of course, if you must read the fine print aud in all shades of light, and your business compels you to, you must have the artificial aids, the glasses. But your necessities make no difference as to the result. A man can ruin his health as quickly in earning an honest support for his family as he can by imprudent exposure to damp air in highway robbery. The Law of Health is not even a respector of motive and if you dash into a burning house to rescue a family, you may be as badly burned as the robber who dashes in with you for plunder.
If you have a slight deafness, keep your thought always against deafness. Can your mind you ask throw out an obstruction in the ear an accumulation of the secretion peculiar to the ear ? Your force or spirit throws off in time the outer covering or scab of a sore. It throws off continually the dead outer skin. When the mind can no longer use the body or the body as we say dies, there is no longer such casting off of dead matter from different portions and organs. Any sore that grows is because of lack of power or life in the body to bring to it life element or power. If you are educated to think a disease must increase it will increase, becansu then your mind is working its force not to help its body but to encourage the idea that the body is falling to pieces. Your mind then feeds the disease.
More disease comes of lack of rest than any other cause. Rest means rest for your mind as well as body. Whatever rests the mind rests the body. One means of rest comes of deep breathing or taking long breaths with a second’s interval between the inhaling and expelling of the breath. The Cornish miner practices this when at each blow with th sledge hammer, he makes the ejaculation ” ilati!” The sailor practices this when hauling or hoisting one utters a certain ejaculation at the point where he has inflated his lungs to the greatest possible extent, and then pauses a second before expelling it with an exclamation. All working with him time their lung exercise in accord with the leader. The pause between the inhaling and expelling the breath when you are doing no physical work at all, rests the mind, because its tendency is to bring your thoughts to a focus or gather to one centre, and this, if only for a second, when continued for a number of seconds brings your thoughts, your real self, more and more together.
The other and material benefit of occasional deep and measured or reposeful breathing is that it brings more air into the lungs. Air is food as well as grain. You increase the capacity of the lungs to take in this food and you create a better habit of breathing.
You are now suffering all manner of evil in unseen element, singly and alone. You are awakened to the truth that the action or attitude or state ot your mind can benefit your health. But you can receive great help from other minds acting co-operatively and at the same time and in the same place. If one mind can send in thought element a force to drive some form of disease from a persons body, ten minds in unison can send a far greater force. These ten minds in concentrated silent force are as one mind or a unit, acting together on the patient.
You benefit your friend very much when you talk him over with another or others and wish him well and keep his good qualities in the foreground and his defects in the background. You then out of your minds send him a current of element as real as a current of electricity which affects his body beneficially and makes his brain the clearer to see his own faults.
In the future and possibly the very near future, when your friend is dangerously sick or afflicted with some painful lingering malady, you will with a few others, having sufficient Faith and apprehension of this Law, meet together in some quiet room where the sun enters with the fresh force it sends to this planet in the morning, and clad in your newest and freshest garments and there for an hour, you will either send your best thought in silence to that person, or if moved speak of them, or if any among you have the gift of song you may in tbat way express, sentiment and good will for them and be sure you will come to know that in this way you generate and send a power, a constructive power and element to help that person. If practitioners or people are immediately about them under whose care and influence they are and whose methods are different from yours, you will not in spoken or unspoken thought antagonize them. You will send only the thought and earnest desire that all having nearest access to the patient have their minds cleared] as much as possible as to the right course to purstfe, and””you are in this peaceful co-operative attitude of mind sending the strongest of all the forces to the patient and those about him, for you have put yourself in the line of action with that High and Divine and powerful realm, and current of thought and intelligence which produces the most power.
It is to be known in the near Future by the wiser of the race that there is no gain in fighting for the Truth. Blows can in thought be sent in the air and they can do bodies harm. But when you have harmed a body by a blow, either of muscle or a blow from a silent antagonistic thought, what have you done to change the state of the person’s mind whose body you may have destroyed? Nothing. If people’s methods seem to you wrong and stupid, there is no gain but only harm in abusing the people or their methods. You bring on yourself in so doing the counter current of hate and antagonism. Prove the wrong by showing a better way.
If I have a better house than yours, I do not prevail on you to copy my house by abusing you for building such a house, or abusing your house. It’s better to invite you to come into my house, look at it, and if you can see its superiority over your own, you may copy it, and if you can’t see such superiority no further effort of mine can make you see until your eyes are wider opened.
Fatness comes through lack of Force to throw off an over secretion on the same basis as there may not be enough Force to throw off the callous skin which Nature puts on to protect the foot from the friction of a tight shoe. But the callous skin may become as great a burthen or annoyance as an excrescence, as the wearing leather it is meant to protect against, and your spirit or force may not be strong enough to throw it off. This causes the corn, which as a remedy provided by Nature becomes at last a source of more pain to the very part it is intended to protect. A corn is a scab which your spirit has not force enough to throw off If you cut this abnormal growth you only stimulate it to grow again, exactly as you stimulate the fruit tree to grow by trimming it of superfluous branches. You concentrate on the trimming process whether in the tree or the corn more of what force there is to renew branch or corn.
Of course you can reduce fat by reducing the amount of food. But the permanent cure comes of calling for force and exercising that mental force to Hirow off the cumbrous secretion and bring you into symmetrical proportion. If you simply desire to get rid of fat and care little for symmetry of proportion so that you are rid of a burthen, you will not get rid of it so rapidly. Because your desire is not based on the highest motive, and the higher the motive the greater is the thought power brought to act on you. The higher and more powerful motive in this case is the innate love of physical symmetry as an outward expression of your mental conditions or Spiritual Symmetry. If you reduce fat by a mere course of starvation with little or no call for adding force to your spirit, not only to keep it down but bring you into symmetry, you effect but a temporary relief as when you cut the corn, and your life will be a continual course of semi-starvation and painful denial to keep the fat down, as was that of Lord Byron’s, whose existence was one continued series of alternations betwixt leanness and fatness through fasting and excess, because his desire for personal symmetry was based on a relatively low motive. As a material means to bring the body into proportion, dieting is useful. But no person throws off the cumbrous load permanently unless there is a strong spiritual aspiration, and many people’s aspirations are stronger than they realize themselves.
During the youth of the body your spirit acts with most force on that body. So wounds heal quickly and all dead useless matter is more quickly thrown off. The body like a vegetable has a growth and life of its own, apart from your spirit or mind. But it is a limited life—It has its growing, material youth like a tree—its physical maturity or ripeness hke a tree and theu its decay like a tree, because your spirit has not grown to sufficient power when your body’s maturity is reached to call ever for power to replenish that body with living unseen element. You have not even known this was a possibility. The proofs of this possibility are that men of active fertile minds and strong wills do unconsciously in their desire and determination to live as long as possible, call such power to themselves and such men do live longer than the average lives. If they so live as long as they do, why should not human life be longer when this Law is recognized, and consciously and more intelligently exercised.
Magic implies results obtained without the use of physical agencies. Did we see more clearly we should find that all things done in the physical world are done through this power. Men and women having the stronger element of thought move other men and women of lower and less powerful thought to their will. It is a power which no person can give or really teach another. It must by the individual be grown to even as in the physical world the infant grows to the strength of maturity. True, one person may as to this power give another somesuggestions and some little knowledge regarding its use. But if your knowledge in this respect is based and depends on what you may have received from others, then you have not struck the main source. That lies entirely in yourself. It needs but the persistent desire of two things.
First, to be in the path of exact Right and Justice to all, including yourself.
Second, to be able to believe in the Supreme Power as a reality from which you can by simple but imperative demand draw ever more and more of power (new ideas) to you and add it to you.
The sum and substance of all we have put out in these books is based on these two truths.
“Magic” is an intelligent use of the thought forces belonging to us and about us exactly as the element of electricity not long since quite unknown is to-day utilized for many practical purposes.
Thought can be accumulated and stored by the individual or a group of individuals. One method of so storing it we have indicated in the ” Use of a Room.” Its quality and power can be continually increased by the individual or a group of individuals. Its power to bring material tilings to pass depends upon its quality. The quality of one person’s thought may be far finer and more powerful than that of another, and in proportion to such quality will be his or her power to control everything in the material world. The quality and power of a person’s thought can be adulterated and weakened by mingling it with that of an inferior mind. The power of the thought of the Christ of Nazareth and of others before his time enabled Him and them to perform seeming miracles. These ” miracles ” were simply results obtained through knowledge, knowing how to use this fine element. Such use and knowledge come as much within the domain of ” science ” as the knowledge of the use of steam or electricity.
This knowledge is open, not to all, but to those who can receive it. It is open to all who will Dot set their minds stubbornly against new ideas. Those who are so stubborn cannot be blamed. Their minds in their present condition cannot at once be changed to receive new ideas.
There can be no secrets to such as can receive. Nor can any secrets regarding this science be kept from such as are open to the truth. As you grow in spiritual knowledge new methods will be constantly opening to you to increase the power of .your thought, to prevent its escape, to prevent adulteration and to use your power to the best advantage, first, for your highest good, next, that of others.
PRAYER IN ALL AGES.
Copyright 1891, by F. J. Needham.
In all ages, and in all religions and among nearly all races, so far as human history extends, do we find some form and expression of prayer, and this among peoples widely and always remote; an argument, we think, favoring the thought that prayer is an instinct, a law, a principle in human nature.
“What do we pray to?” may be asked. May we not all unite in agreeing that boundless universe is filled with boundless spirit, mind, intelligence, power—and that of this there are myriad grades, varying in degrees of power and intelligence, extending in such power, intelligence and wisdom beyond our capacity to comprehend? Call this power “God,” or the “Infinite,” or like the Indian the ” Great Spirit.” Call it as we may, give it what name we may, its full comprehension will always escape our grasp. As we grow toward it, so its growth, its full realization is ever growing more and more beyond us. We pray to that Power.
Call prayer if you please desire, a quality coming out of the combination of elements moulded into our bodies, minds and spirits. Call it desire to get good so far as we can see. Prayer is demand—is mind concentrated on demand, and the demand may be for greater or lesser good. A man desires strongly to be rich in money. His desire is an unceasing prayer. He prays for good so far as he can see. If he prays in the spirit of money-making the probability is he will act out his prayer in deeds. He will probably get rich. Perhaps one says: “But this is praying for evil.” Why not call it prayer for mixed good? Or imperfect good? Wealth brings temporary good. The mistake lay in his deeming money the most enduring source of good. The clearer mind would desire, would pray for qualities instead of gold; would desire, would pray for more courage, patience, purity, gentleness, more power to do, more mental vision to see, more capacity to enjoy. This is the prayer of the greater wisdom. Such desire we think is referred to in the Bible as that of “seeking the Kingdom of God,” or in other words, seeking the best and most lasting happiness—.the aim of life. We hold that prayer, desire, is a great law in nature; that it extends from what we call nature’s crudest forms up to the highest; and that all desire if persevered in brings one at least nearer the thing desired; brings somewhere nearer the ideal, though that ideal be a low one or a high one. Call then the most useful prayer, the wisest prayer, the wisest desire or demand. We may be obliged to pray first to know for what we shall pray. That implies the open, the receptive mind, the frame of mind willing to hear, willing to be taught, the mind which unlocks all its doors and windows and throws them wide open to whatever may enter.
Prayer we believe to be based on the instinct of desire, of demand, seen in so many forms in all nature. It extends through every form of life—in plant growth — in animal growth—in what the scientist calls the Law of Selection — the desire for the best, up to the highest cultivation yet seen of human mind. The desire implanted in the dog’s mind (I grant a degree of mind also to the dog), the animal having the qualities of affection, memory, love, hate, fear, courage, all leading features of mind, the desire implanted through human influence in the dog’s mind to run swiftly makes the dog through successive generations anatomically shaped the best for running, the result of desire implanted in the canine nature.
Perhaps one asks, “Do you mean that the dog prays?” I believe that the principle of prayer, the instinct of desire, is implanted in the animal and in the vegetable up to man, and that this principle has a thousand grades of demand, and ten thousand grades of expression. And as for the dog, when he looks up into my face and puts his head on my lap, his is as fervent a prayer for my sympathy, kindness and caress as ever went up from any pulpit, and the care, the anxiety, the love of the animal mother for its young is to me a sacred emotion, a sacred desire, a sacred prayer for its young one’s safety.
We hold that prayer is a necessity of human nature. Call it if you please a scientific necessity, is there any reason that Science and Religion be divorced?
We believe that spaceless universe is replete with life, that it pulsates with life, that life exists in the dust under our feet, and that Death is the one word in the language which represents an impossibilty. The very process of vegetable, animal or mineral decomposition is movement, is life, is element, pulling itself to pieces and rearranging itself into new constructions.
Yet Earthly Science, so-called, seeks to-day for the ” Origin of Life,” while before its eyes, mineral in solution, crystallizes into form and solidity, arranges itself into a precise form and order, while the planet it calls dead whirls itself around its orbit and on its axis with mathematical accuracy. This very so-called dead planet seems out of itself to originate myriad forms of life.
Abraham was told that if ten righteous men could be found in one of the cities of the plain, that city would be saved from destruction. Was this because the mere existence of ten righteous men in that city would save it, or that it was a mere whim of the Superior Mind that exacted this condition?
May it not have been that the united desire of ten relatively pure and exalted minds, reaching up into the higher kingdom of spirit, might have served as the connecting link, the channel by which the necessary conditions for helping that city might have been effected?
This city, we are told, was steeped in wickedness. Wickedness, low, degraded lives, always involves both mental and physical impurity.
The Materialist will admit that certain concentrations of physical impurity beget spontaneous combustion. Some, who have made this subject a study, aided by suggestion given from the world of spirit, believe that places may so reek with low, degraded thought, as well as low physical emanation, that combinations are begotten, resulting at last in the spontaneous generation of that element at once destructive and purifying—fire.
Because, what we call miracles —that is, the operation and result of laws to us unknown, may work both ways for what we call evil, as well as good.
The prophetic vision of the ancient seer (whether that seer was in the flesh or spirit), may have foreseen the growth of these dangerous combinations which was to destroy that city by fire. The merciful spirit of Abraham prayed to spare the city. The higher knowledge, wisdom and power of the spirit was willing to answer Abraham’s appeal, could he but effect the necessary conditions.
And what were these conditions?
The united force, desire of ten minds whose current of thought lifted upward above the cruder elements about them and into the regions of refined and powerful spirit, should serve as the link, the channel, the highway, to bring such aid from the higher world of spirit as should dispel or negative the conditions threatening this city. This we believe. This is as far as we can represent the matter. This we hold may to the intuitive mind furnish a clue and a key to the meaning of the texts and assertions. “The prayer of the Righteous availeth much.” “The prayer of Faith shall heal the sick.”
But where is to-day the prayer of Faith f I mean the Faith that does not sunder Divine Law from what we call”” Natural Law.”
Think you mine a wild speculation as to the origin of the flames that destroyed the cities of the plain? Within the last twenty years extraordinary periods of conflagration have happened in American cities and towns, which all ordinary means have been powerless to check, and in which brick, stone and iron have gone down like tinder. Suppose we put out the thought that concentrations of moral rottenness and physical rottenness have through the operation of Law we are yet to learn, worked destructive miracles ? We are now told, and from some pulpits, and I have heard the opinion expressed by some sound orthodox minds, that much of Biblical History (that is found hard to believe) is but allegory. Perhaps when our two worlds, the visible and invisible, are again united and the knowledge of the one is supplemented by that of the other, even Orthodoxy may readily see at once Divine Law and Natural Law, Divine element and Natural element to be the same so as to account for the pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, the overthrow, of Jericho’s walls by seven united series of shoutings, the receding of the Bed Sea was by something more than the happening of wind and tide favorable to such result. There is great Power to work evil as well as good—great knowledge to work evil as well as good—great intelligence seen and unseen to work evil on the earth plane of both physical and spirit life. Only this to us encouraging truth crowns the dark picture, and that is, that even one single, prayerful, earnest, consecrated man or woman may serve as the connecting link, the channel between the Higher Powers of spirit and this earth life to effect great results, and that the superior knowledge and Power of Light must even in the end prevail over that of darkness. Prayer is the greatest of necessities to such as have grown away from the world and its current motives and purpose. The wisest prayer will ask for the greatest wisdom, the greatest purity, the greatest soul elevation, the greatest power, and the greatest charity. The utterance of these wishes is the utterance of high and lofty thoughts. Beinember our thoughts are things, and by the frequent putting out of these ” things ” we create for ourselves our thought atmosphere about us, and this thought atmosphere attracts a power to effect results in proportion to its quality.
As such thought comes from us it attracts to us the Invisible Mind in unison and sympathy with your own, who are thereby enabled to come closer to us and give support and strength, cheer and courage.
We think that the Prayer—Demand Desire—of the greatest Wisdom will always be based on the sentiment, ” Thy Will be Done.”
A Higher Wisdom and Intelligence than ours sees what is really best for us. It may see that what we pray for would, if attained, prove an injury and a misery rather than a blessing. It may fee and deny our wish—hard as this may be temporarily for us. It may give what we cry for if we are importunate, refuse to wait and rush on with reckless desire for our individual happiness. Or It may withhold for a time, but promise when a fruition is attained that which may give us the greatest good.
It matters little what we term this Higher Intelligence. Orders of mind exist in the universe far higher in power and wisdom than we c*an conceive of. The mind that lifts itself toward them brings to itself their aid, their guidance and their help just so far as they feel justified in extending aid and guidance to the individual, whose lesson must also be to depend as much as possible on him or herself.
Of this the illustration in its cruder form is here among us. In many things the parent knows best what is good for the child. In proportion to its weakness or helplessness does it restrain the child with authority. But as infancy “merges into youth, and youth into maturity, does the wiser parent gradually relax care, knowing that the child must in time do for itself, and that it is doing it an injustice not to give it opportunity to learn to take care of itself.
The wisest parent is but a child. And perhaps in the awful and unending immensity of universe, there is no order of mind but must feel from time to time an inferiority, dependence and need of guidance from some order of mind above it.
The more finely organized we are, the more sensitive, the more impressional to all about us of the seen or the unseen. The more will we need this constant uplifting of the thoughts toward the purer, the unselfish, the beautiful and the sublime. By so doing we create such a thought world about us. All people live in their worlds of thought. The man whose life is devoted only to buying and selling lives either when alone or in company in a world of buying and selling thought. The gambler lives alone or in company in the excitements of his pursuit, and if not playing with the material cards often does so with the imaginary ones.
This thought atmosphere will serve us as an armor as the greatest protection against Unseen Evil.
There is not, I think, sufficient estimate, or knowledge among us concerning the evil, which may be done us by minds out of the physical form. Paul alludes to this in saying: “We war with Powers of Darkness.” Minds unseen by us, people, men, women, spirits, strongly moved as ever by appetite and passion, full as ever of hate, envy, jealousy, revenge, or full of pure love of mischief, possibly for some cause our worst enemies are here all about us, seeking in many ways to do us harm. These are most subtle ways, and the more dangerous from their subtlety. These can vibrate the finest chords of emotion; can play upon our weakness, our vanity, our tendency to envy, to jealousy, to suspicion, to fear; can operate also on our besetting sin as regards any appetite.
Give this element opportunity to work on the mind, and it can soon weaken and injure the body. Play yourself daily upon a man or woman’s suspicion, envy, jealousy, pride, and mark the result on the physical. Just as a company of children love to tease, annoy, torture one of their own age who has some marked defect, physical or mental — just as in the lower grade of human nature do we see the love of causing fear or fright to one easily frightened, just as in the spirit in which silly and cruel practical jokes are played, just so will the evil unseen about us delight in annoying us, misleading us.
If we are very impressional, if we are easy of approach to spirit thought and influence, we are easy of approach remember to evil as well as good and evil seen and unseen, predominates on the earth region of spirit as well as what we term physical life. We hold that our only safety from these dangers (and we hold these as great dangers), lies in prayer—not regular set form of prayer, though that is not to be despised when one feels it to be a help), but the cultivation of the silent prayer, which desires only charitable, tender, merciful sentiment, which asks for ability to shut out all noise and degraded thought, all morbid fancies, all persistent dwelling on that which excites antagonism, dislike, hatred. We hold that such prayer, desire (or call it the cultivation of such frame of mind), will if persevered in at last free us of those agencies for evil who may here beset us, torture us, and covertly instill into our mind all manner of fear, doubt, suspicion and apprehension ; who delight in making us miserable and who may if over much listened to bring about the very disasters we fear, through the weakening of our intellect and the clouding of our minds.
When such evil agencies at last see they can no longer affect the mind they have tortured, when through prayer that mind has permanently lifted itself into a world they care nothing for, and also into a strength and confidence that resists all their effort, they will cease longer to fasten on and harass that mind. Their entertainment is over. When prayer to the highest and to an ever ascending highest, prayer for the most enduring good—and good ever becoming greater—when such prayer becomes habitual, involuntary ” second nature,” it is then a life may become a never ending prayer, a joyous prayer, a poem without end of gratitude for joys and goods received.
Aspiration, demand, desire, prayer, all are concentrated in the wisest and purest effort, and this effort (not a forced and laborious one), will lift the body above physical ills and the soul above worldly troubles, and still be the very means of making both mind and body fully competent to take hold of all life’s business with marked ability.
And what then do we pray to ? ” Our Father which art in Heaven.” Not our father, a stern, cruel, avenging, personal Deity, but ” Our Father,” the ” Great Spirit,” the ” Infinite Spirit,” pervading all the Eternity of space, and whether represented by intelligence organized into individual mind—ministering spirits or intelligence unorganized in the elements, of which we are a part. ” God working in us and through us, God in whom we live and move and have our being”—still ” Our Father,” full of joys and blessings, to be given us when-we are prepared to receive them, when we are wise enough to use them rightly. A Power so vast, so infinite in resources, so varied in expression, teeming with elements and laws governing elements, sweeping planet around its sun, and farther on sweeping systems of planets around their unknown centers; so minute in exactness, form and beauty in fashioning the atomic feather of the butterfly’s wing, so prodigal of beauty, that every snowflake is fashioned a symmetrical crystal, so awful, so incomprehensible, without beginning, without ending, so that feeble mind staggers at the attempt to carry such weight of comprehension. Can we then vaguely, realizing all this, take such name on our lips without reverence ? Should it not be hallowed ? It is to that Power that all life, all element in unending space, consciously or unconsciously prays.
” Prayer” has been misused, miscomprehended and perverted. The word brings with it a cluster of association born of ignorance. It is redolent to some of cant, to others of bigotry or superstition. We hold that prayer is a quality born in us, a belonging of our natures and beings, just as much as to mineral belongs the power of re-arranging itself in certain crystalized forms, just as much as to the plant belongs the desire to grow toward the light and away from darkness.
We will remember that prayer which has for its sole aim the attainment or possession of any object with no other regard for self or others save that object, may not bring the highest result or the happiest result. Our best prayer will always be qualified with the sentiment ” Thy Will be Done!” The more the spirit of prayer, the spirit of desire, of demand for the higher and purer is cultivated, the nearer it brings us to the higher and happier unseen world. The more it is cultivated the better do we know what to pray for. The more the mind is led into the habit of so dwelling in the highest and purest thought, the less mechanical in a sense does the effort for prayer become. It merges at last into a delight and a never ending poem whose sentiment is the reflection of all that is best, brightest, purest in creation.
” Thy Kingdom Come.” The kingdom of new and newer and ever increasing joys and glories, the kingdom of justice, the kingdom of higher joyous life ever being kindled and stimulated into more joyous life, the kingdom of ever coming new revelations, new bibles, new laws.
THE ATTRACTION OF ASPIRATION.
Copyright 189], by F. J. Needham.
Why may we not maintain a level serenity of mind ? Why are we so subject to periods of depression?
It is because, no matter how well-positioned you are in accord with your ideal of living, you are still to a greater or less degree affected by the discordance which reigns about you. Are you gentle and humane toward the animal creation ? The wild b’rds, your free pets who come and build their nests in the grove, are murdered for sport or gain before jour eyes and you are quite helpless to prevent it. You live amid a scene of incessant cruelty and (laughter. The animals fostered by man’s care are bred under artificial conditions, and thereby developed into unnatural and really unhealthy growths for his amusement or profit. This refers to all manner of ” fancy breeding.” Nature when left alone does best for bird or animal, and the bird or animal have their individual rights as well as man. A strained and morbid taste will grow an enlarged and diseased liver in a goose to make thereof a certain dish. Your race are so growing disease all about you. Disease means mental as well as physical unhappiness. Directly and indirectly this unhappiness aflects you.
The finer your organization and the more open is it to a finer life, the more easily annoyed is it here by the many ills about it. You can hardly go abroad without suffering mental or physical pain. Your houses, cars and boats in winter are overheated and full of noxious vapors from the fuel used, as well as emanation from the human bodies packed in them. You may be obliged to sleep in rooms where this unhealthy heat is partly relied on to warm you, when at rest. You must breathe it when in the unconscious state of recuperation, and awake with it incorporated into your being. You are liable to eat staleness and decay at the best of your public tables. You are pained by scenes of cruelty, brutality and injustice. That is the predominant thought active in the atmosphere of the crowd, and it affects your thought.
There is thought, or if you please so to call it, mental action embodied in every material thing about you, and the brightness or darkness of the thought depends on the condition of the material thing. The eating of stale fruit or vegetables may iudirectly give you the blues. The live fresh fruit gives you life. Decay is the disorganization of matter. You want to feed on the perfect organization, neither over nor under ripe. You want it, if possible, when the article fed upon is at its fullest stage of life, so that you may receive that life.
You violate ignorantly, unconsciously, and even for the time of necessity, many laws of physical and mental health. Relative to food, air warmth as spoken of above,you may always have been dependent on artificial props. Yon were born so dependent. You may have come into the world with a body, the partial development of artificial and improper food, and an artificial life brought down to you through the blood of many generations.
This artificial life must in some way bring pain. Your alcoholic stimulant brightens for the moment, but leaves a much longer period of pain behind it. But the evil of alcohol is really small as compared with scores of causes for human ills in daily actise operation about you in places crowded with people, and all the more dangerous from being quite unknown.
You. ask, why even in solitude you cannot maintain a certain evenness and serenity of mind of which you realize sufficient to long for ?
Assuming that in the past you have been diseased physically, and of course mentally, do you expect to be instantly cured of such a long illness ? Certain habits of thought cannot be otherwise than gradually removed. So with certain habits of body consequent on such habits of thought, such as the habit of hurry, the habit of worry, the habit of laying undue stress on things not the most needful for the hour; the habit of trouble borrowing and many others, which permeate and influence every act of life. Their combined effect is exhaustion, and exhaustion is the real mother of most of the ills flesh is heir to.
Whatever exhausts the body, be the motive for effort of good or ill, benevolence or selfishness, lessens the power to resist these many causes for pain and consequent depression of spirits.
So long as earthiness or grosser spirit has the ascendancy, we see mostly on the earth side. We sense mostly the repulsive in the individual. We are slow to see the good. We can like but few. We dislike many. But when spirit gains the ascendancy, this is reversed. We see then clearly the good in all. We are thereby attracted more or iess to all. And as we find the good in all, we get good from all. We cease then to be so strongly repelled by individual prejudices. We love more than we hate. While earthiness prevails we hate more than we love. We see more to loathe and detest than to admire. We are blinded to the good and top sensitive to the evil. Seeing and feeling then more of evil than good, we are injured by it. To hate, to be strongly prejudiced, to be unable to hear mention of the loathed person’s name without a thrill of indignation or disgust, is to be continually inflicting wounds on self. To be able to admire, to have the clear sight to detect the good in the lowest nature and to keep the evil out of sight, u a source to us of strength, of health, of continual increase of power. Love is power. You are always the stronger when in a condition of admiration.
Attraction is the Law of Heaven, repulsion that of Earth. Spirituality is attracted to what it finds of itself anywhere. It sees the diamond in the rough, though embedded in the coarsest mould. It sees the germ of superior quality in the coarsest nature. It can fix its eye on that germ, and hide from itself the coarser elements. In so doing it throws its power on that germ, and warms it into life. The basest nature mounts to its highest level in the presence and under the influence of the higher. There is little need for the true missionary to preach in words. He or she exhales an atmosphere of divinity which is felt by all. Precepts need to be felt more than heard. The prejudiced against the sinner is only a spiritual porcupine. He stings all he touches.
So long as we feel that strong repulsion, through seeing only the defects in another, so long are we ruled by such sentiment. We are in fetters. We are in his or her presence so full of hatred as to be unable to assert the better part of ourselves. All our own evil is called out and comes to the front. There is only the clashing of opposing wills. In such case, we, though in reality the more powerful party, become the weaker for the time being. We are obliged to allow the pupil whom we should teach by example to domineer over us. Cynicism is born of repulsion and personal prejudice carried to its extreme. The cynic ends by finding everybody unbearable and at last hates himself. No cynic was ever in good health. Cynicism is blood poisoning. The cynic is ever hunting for the ideal without. He should find it within. This when once found would be ever creating ideals from all without. His own loving spirit would graft and build itself on all with whom he came in contact. Divinity is also contagious. That would be a poor Divine Plan which allowed only evil to be infectious. Goodness is catching. In good time the world will learn that health is also. But hitherto mankind have so much feared and even admired the devil, as to have accredited evil only with inoculating quality, while all manner of good is supposed to be drilled into poor human nature by painful and laborious processes.
‘ There cannot be the highest health and vigor without aspiration and purity of thought. Pure thought brings the purest blood. Impure thought, despondent, hopeless, repining, fault-finding, fretful, slanderous thought, is certain to make the blood impure and fill the system with disease. Without aspiration your best care for the body will be relatively of little help. You may as to garb and person be scrupulously clean; you may pay the utmost attention to diet; yet after all you are but cleaning the outside of a vessel which within is ever filling up with uncleanliness.
With an ever increasing purity of thought, cleanliness and care for the body will come as a natural result. The vessel will clean itself. Proper care for the body in all respects will be a loving effort for that body. Bathing will not be an enforced task but a recreation. Diet will be regulated by the natural demand of appetite. Taste or relish will be the standard for acceptance or rejection. Excess will be impossible, so watchful will be the healthy palate to regard the first faint sign of sufficiency as the signal to cease any kind of indulgence. It- is this aspiration for the highest and best that in time causes an actual new birth of the body—a total “reformation” throughout in the quality and composition of flesh, bone, blood, muscle and sinews; a change in the material organization corresponding to that of the spiritual. The flesh by it is spiritualized that is made up of finer elements. In all to any degree of aspiring mind is this process going on. The rule of spirit over flesh brings perfect immunity from disease, intensifies every power, gives far greater capacity for eftort in any field, and at the close of the Earth life ensures a painless passing out of the spirit—a simple falling to sleep of the earthly body and a waking up on the other, the spiritual side of life.
The pith of self-healing lies in the calling for the elements of health and strength, to drive out disease. That is you pray for such elements and they come to you. Strength or vigor is an element of spirit or more refined matter. The more often is your will exercised in praying for it, the quicker will it come. This is the secret for the perpetual maintenance and increase of vigor or any other desired quality. When sensible by signs quickly detected of lack of power, call, pray, desire more. Its rapport with the elements causes such power immediately to flow in upon it. You may become weary. Your will put thus in operation causes an immediate influx of strength, so soon as it places itself in certain conditions for such inflowing. Say you arise in the morning weak, languid, with no physical or mental energy. Keep your mind so much as you can from dwelling on your ailment. Keep it so much as you can on the thought of strength, vigor, health, activity. As aids to erect this frame of mind, fix it as much as you can on illustrations and symbols of Nature’s force and power, on storm and tempest, on the heaving billow and majesty of the Ocean, on the Morning Sun rising in all his glory to refresh and invigorate man, animal and vegetation. If there be in prose or poetry any illustrations of this character which affect you strongly, recur to them. Eead them aloud or in silence. Because in so doing you are setting the mind in the right direction to receive strength. In brief think of strength and power and you will draw it to you. Think of health and you get it. Let your mind dwell on weakness, on never getting well, on the dark side, on everything of discouragement, gloom and darkness and you draw to you the contrary and hurtful elements. As decay attracts and generates decay in the things we see, so does any weak decaying order of thought attract its like of the things we do not see. Unconsciously many sick and ailing people nurse their complaints more than they nurse the bodies carrying such complaints. They are always thinking of them and talking of them. They actually crave sympathy for the hurt more thau for the body afflicted with it. And the sympathy so brought out from surrounding friends, actually nourishes the injury and increases the ail
ment, when the thought of patient and friends should be placed on a strong healthy body for the patient. The more of such thought concentrated on the patient from those about him or her, the more of drawing power you have to bring vigor to the one afflicted.
Bear in mind it is not here argued that such relief can always be immediate. A mind long unconsciously set in the opposite direction of dwelling on its bodily ailment and thereby ever drawing to itself weakness, cannot immediately reverse its movement and set itself iu the contrary and strength drawing direction. It may have become so habituated and trained to dwell on the dark side as to be almost unable to fix itself on any other. But as the attempt is made and persisted in, more and more power will come to put it in the desired strength attracting frame. The effort must be made. It may take time, but every atom of effort so made is an accretion of strength which can never be lost.
Do not demand arbitrarily or despotically that any member of your body get well of a hurt, that any organ or function become stronger. Your body is as a whole an individual separate from your spirit and with a peculiar physical life of its own. As a whole it is an organization made up of a number of other organizations, each charged with a specific duty, as the eye to see, the ear to hear, the tongue to taste, the stomach to digest, the lungs to breathe. Each of these are iu a sense individual organizations. Each is open to the enlivening, cheering effect upon it of the element called ” love,” and that element you can send it. Bandage a hurt, lovingly, tenderly, and the element not only inspires the careful, tender treatment, but it goes into the hurt. It acts as a salve and a strength. It gradually binds and unites the ruptured parts. Bind it with indifference, bind or wash it as an irksome task and the sentiment inspires not only a careless and even rough treatment, but fails so to salve and strengthen it with the needed element—love. Bind it with actual hatred and you are self-poisoning the part affected. Hate is the element of poison, Love of healing.
The same principle and process applies to the weak eye, the deafened ear or any ailing or weak organ. Will at times your affection direct to the ailing member, and in that spirit ask it to recover its strength. Be not deterred by the apparent simplicity of this statement, but try it. If you are impatient or angry at eye, or ear, for not being perfect in their office, you do but throw that element of impatience in those organs. You fret and annoy them in their efforts to do their best. There is as yet no such thing as a relatively perfected life among our race. Because such a life means a life and a body without disease or pain, and also a life without the present form of death to the body. A relatively perfected life means a life whereby a mind or spirit has grown to, or gathered so much power by simply asking or praying for power; or in other words, setting that mind as a magnet in the proper attitude to attract power, that it shall be able constantly to recuperate or make over the body with fresher, newer and finer material, and also to put this body on or take it off, materialize it at pleasure, as did the Christ immediately after his crucifixion. The Jews had only destroyed his material body. The spirit of Christ had power to reclothe itself with a new body. Of this another recorded illustration is the prophet Elijah’s translation to Heaven. That which his companion Eliassaw was Elijah’s spiritual or finer body, the counterpart of his material body, and this body was of such fine element that it had come into the domain of and could make use of an attraction not yet recognized by our scientists—the attraction or power which draws upward the opposite of the attraction of gravitation which draws downard or toward the earth The Attraction of Aspiration.
Every thought or desire of ours to be nobler, more refined, more free from malice, ill will to others, and to do others good without exacting conditions is a thing, a force of unseen element which does actually tend or draw upward, or in other words, away from the earth or any form of that cruder type of spirit seen of the physical eye, or apparent to the body’s touch that we call matter. This the aspiring order of thought you draw from the higher realms of spirit or element every time you wish, pray, or desire it. You are drawing to you then, that of unseen element which incorporates itself with your body and spirit, and it then commences literally to draw you toward the realm and element of greater, broader, purer life existent in zones or bands about our planet. It will, as you persist in this aspiring thought, make you stand more erect. The phrase ” the upright man ” or woman implies that the eftect of this unseen element so brought you of aspiration makes you physically as well as spiritually upright. It lifts every physical organ into place. It is the thought current drawing from above the mood of impure or immature thought, the mood of unwise or personal selfishness which seeks only personal gratification without thought or care of others. The thought or mood of gloom, discouragement, self depreciation comes of the overruling attraction of earthly seen or physical things.
When you are ruled by the attraction of gravitation, or, in other words, the attraction of material things, it will tend to make your shoulders rounded and stooping, your head bowed and your eye downcast. Your heart will also in some way be literally bowed down through grief, or worry, or anger, or some form of immature thought or attraction coming of seen things or cruder forms of spirit. Every organ of the body will be similarly displaced and tend toward the earth. Because there is always between matter of seen element or unseen element, between things substance and forms material and things substance and forms spiritual, an exact and literal correspondence. The shape of every man and woman’s body, the expression of the face, their every gesture and mannerism to the crook of a finger, and their physical health, is an exact correspondence of their spiritual condition or, in other words, of the state of their minds. It is a duplication in seen matter and movement of what they are thinking in unseen matter.
As you are ruled more and more by the attraction of aspiration, the desire to be more and more of a God or Goddess, the determination to conquer all the evil within you, which is the only way to conquer any and all evil outside of you, your form will in accordance grow more upright, your eye will be more open and uplifted, your heart will be ” lifted up,” your cheeks will bloom with fresher color, your blood will fill more and more with a finer and powerful element, giving to your limbs strength, vigor, suppleness and elasticity of movement. You are then filling more and more with the Elixir of Life, which is no myth but a spiritual reality and possibility.
Our race hitherto has been dominated by the attraction of physical things or seen element. It has said there is nothing in existence but what can be seen or felt of the outer inferior or coarser senses, and consequently there has been nothing to us. A man may perish of thirst surrounded by springs of cool water, and if he know not of such springs there are none for him. Our condition has been analagous to that.
With the more perfected race of the future on this planet there will be no painful death of the body as at present. Every such painful death is the direct result of sin and transgression of the Law of Life. The ending of the body of the future will be the birth or development of a new physical body for which the old one shall serve as a shell or envelope- until the new one is ripe and ready to come forth in a manner analagous to the development of the moth or butterfly from the cocoon. Such growths and transitions will take place at lesser and lesser intervals, until at last the spirit will grow to such power that it can, will and attract to itself instantly out of surrounding elements a body to use so long as it pleases on this stratum of life. This is the condition foreseen by Paul when he said, ” O Death, where is thy sting ? Oh! grave where is thy victory ?” And again where he writes, ” The last great enemy which shall be overcome is Death.” “We quote Paul, because no ancient teacher has more plainly foreshadowed these possibilities than he. Undoubtedly they were known to others, both of the recorded and unrecorded human history of this planet which stretches back to periods far more remote than those inferred of the Mosaic creation.
These truths, these possibilities for avoiding decay, death and pain, and growing into and takiug on a newer and newer body, and newer, fresher and more vigorous life, vitally affect us of to-day. We must not regard these statements as aflecting only a comiug race of people of some far distant future. They affect us. They are possibilities for us. We have belonging to us the powers for bringing to us new life and new bodies. If you are not told of these your powers how can you ever use them ? You are then as a pauper having, unknown to yourself, a thousand dollar bank note sewed up in the lining of your ragged coat. This knowledge is for you the ” pearl of great price.” You cannot sell this pearl. You cannot trade it for that of your neighbor’s. You cannot accumulate your neighbor’s powers; you can only grow and use yours and yours alone.
You wonder perhaps and say, ” Can these truths, these marvels belong to our common-place age and time?” But ours is not a common-place, or prosaic age and time. It is only our lack of seeing clearly which may make our time seem common-place. We live surrounded by the same elements, and we are in possession of the same powers to greater or lesser extent, whereby the three young Jews passed unharmed through the fiery furnace — whereby the Prophet Daniel, through exercise of the superior force of human thought, quelled the ferocity of the lions in the den; whereby Paul shook off the serpent’s venom; whereby the Man of Nazareth performed his wonderful works. *’ Was not this God’s power ?” you ask. Yes, the power of God or the Infinite and incomprehensible spirit of Eternal Good working in and through these His children, as the same power can work in and through us the more we call it to us, demand ft, importune it and depend upon it. It is simply the power of the higher mind over the lower or cruder mind. All seen element, or as we call it matter, is expression of the lower or cruder mind. Rocks, hills, clouds, waves, trees, animals and men, are all varying expressions of the lower cruder mind. The power of mind over matter means the power of the higher mind over all these the expressions of the lower mind.
The aspiration, the earnest prayer or demand to be better, to have more power, to become more refined, will bring more and more of the finer elements and forces ; that is spirit to you. But the motive must be the natural heart-felt zealous wish to impart what you receive to others. You cannot call the fullness of this power to you if you intend living only for self. You may get it to a degree and accomplish much by it. Your demand if living only for self may bring to you houses, wealth and fame. But the demand based ou the selfish motive will in the end bring only pain, disease and disappointment.
CULTIVATE REPOS
Copyrighted 1891, by F. J. Needham
Repose is a quality. It may be cultivated and gradually attained by allowing the mind to dwell upon it. Fix the word in your brain. Paste it up there figuratively. Paste it somewhere about you literally. You want the thought in your mind. You want to plant it there so it may grow. It will then take root and grow. As it grows, you will, despite ten tbousand failures, find yourself on the gain. You will correct yourself many, many times in hasty doings,but each correction will bring you though ever so little nearer the mark. If you are. annoyed at your failures so much the better. That shows you know your defect.
It is a training also where the school is ever by you. It can be practiced so soon as you arise in the morning, in tbe putting on of your apparel, in your walk, in your eating, in your opening and shutting of doors. No act is beneath it. No act is above it. Each act so done lays up for you its little quota of capital—until at last the habit becomes “second nature,” and the forced schooling merges into an involuntary one.
There is a law which causes the sound sleep of childhood. There is another law, governing the unsound sleep often common to middle age, if not sooner. A law governs everything. A law governs the decay of a building; the decay of a body; the decay of a tree as well as the healthy growth of a tree.
We do not at night lay our real selves down to rest. We lay down only the body, the instrument you use in the material domain of expression to be recuperated. If the spirit gains renewed force while away from the body, as it should, it will return with such force to act on the body in the morning, if we realized the highest condition of sleep.
There are two kinds of sleep. There is a sound healthy sleep, which strengthens and refreshes the body, and an unsound, feverish, restless sleep whereby the body awakes with very little strength. When you are awake, your spirit or thought is acting on the body or using it. If it so acted all the time, it would soon wear out the body as sleeplessness does wear it. When you sleep, your spirit or thought still acts, thinks, works, but apart from the body. It can so act in a healthy or unhealthy realm of mind. If in a healthy realm of mind, it will send the body healthy element in thought to repair or recuperate it. If it goes to an unhealthy realm, it will send the body only unhealthy element. Whether it goes to a healthy or unhealthy territory of spirit depends entirely on your condition of mind before retiring. If the “sun goes down on your wrath” or irritability or hatred of others your mind during the night will send your body still the unhealthy elements of wrath, hatred or irritability. Or if your spirit is discouraged, despondent and hopeless, it will send to the body the same order of element.
You are working or making effort whenever you think. You do not want to do work of any kind when you go to bed. In some cases when we lie down, the mind becomes more active than ever and fills immediately with plans and schemes or anxieties or worryings. That tires the body and causes restlessness and tossing and wakefulness for hours. The mind is then more active, because it is momentarily diverted from any bodily effort.
You will make up your mind to dismiss all thought whatever on retiring, aud think only of repose. Keep the word “repose” in your mind on going to bed. The word brings the idea of rest. This will gradually change the attitude or direction of your thought, and connect you with the element of rest and repose. You may not be successful at first in bringing immediate sleep. You may have this mental habit of brain working for years to conquer. You will by degrees change your mind to the reposeful condition as you persevere. It may require months before you see any change for the better. But when once you have conquered wakefulness, you will never have your work to do over again. You cannot at once change any mental habit, the growth possibly of years all at once, no more than you can at once change a habit of body, a mannerism or peculiar gesture, or a peculiar walk, or a peculiar manner of speech.
If your mind is from any cause very much disturbed during the day, it sends to the unconscious body or unconscious physical existence the same disturbing thought element at night. What mood your mind is most in during your waking hours that mood is your mind in wh^n the body sleeps. The mind never sleeps no more than electricity sleeps—no more than the element which the sun sends us (the cause of light and heat after reaching this planet)— sleeps. The child is a spirit coming into this physical life again with a new body. The memory of all its troubles in its previous existence is fortunately blotted out. It is well in this our incomplete state and with so little power to rule our minds and turn them from the unpleasant that we may not know what we may have suffered in a past existence. If we did, we might begin at the age of two years with the troubles we had at three-score and ten of the last life.
Up to a certain age the child has a perfect trust in its parents to supply it with food, clothing and shelter. When it is obliged to provide for itself the trouble begins—the trouble and work it carries when grown up to bed with it. Then it trusts hardly anything. That may be the cause of all our trouble, wakefulness included.
It means really little or nothing to say ” Trust in God,” and little wonder, for it is said so much by people who do not trust in God, but in their own relatively weak physical efforts—or in the weak or imperfect reason that is based entirely on physical surroundings.
When the Christ showed the little trusting undisturbed child to the probably worrying, fretting and possibly sleepless Elders of Judea and said ” Unless you become in mind as free from care as this child and learn to trust for all you want to an Infinite All-Pervading Force or Fatber, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven (which is an entirely mental kingdom), he meant that the human thought when fixed persistently on a thing or purpose sets in motion the unseen force to accomplish that purpose, and that this is the Infinite Force or God working through us.
He meant that if you have an earnest desire to do anything which will with yourself benefit others or to be anything in the domain of Art—whether orator, actor, writer, painter, inventor—one of the world’s movers in some way—that earnest, persistent desire is the great unseen Force, evolving out of yourself as a part of God or the Infinite Power which rules all things—to push you on to success, and the more you trust to this desire, and after making all reasonable plan and effort toward material support you leave off worrying and fretting as to that material support, the stronger is the Force for accomplishment that is acting for you. He meant when he said, ” Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” come to me as one representative of this great and incomprehensible Law of Nature. He would say if here to-day as illustrative of this Law: I have in mind a certain thing to do. I trust to that strong desire to do it. I ask or pray for wisdom to direct my doing. I use my body in the doing as my spirit leads or impels me; and if I cannot see the way clear, still I trust to the desire or power of the Infinite, a part of which I am, knowing that the Force I have set in motion is working for me night and day; and so when I lie down to sleep I do so with as perfect a trust and Faith that this Force will somewhere and in some place have put me further ahead toward my accomplishment by to-morrow, as this child has that its parents will provide for it to-morrow, and in such trust and Faith the spirit leaves the body and goes to some realm where there is even greater trust, and Faith, and knowledge, and proof, and apprehension of the Laws, and sends from that realm by the thought link connecting it with the sleeping body more and more in thought element of trust and Faith, and power, and rest.
When we gain this trust and Faith, as we can and shall through more and more proofs of the reality of the power on which it will be based, we have gained the most important factor for sleep, and healthy sleep. And the incessant desire or aspiration to have such trust will bring it.
The element the Sun sends us is the force giving life to all forms of what we call organized matter on our planet. Acting on the life of the seed in the earth it brings it that renewal of Force, which starts it into renewed life.
Our bodies have the most Force in the morning, because then the tide of the Sun’s Force is coming toward us. Our spirits absorb that Force and the strength so given the spirit is communicated to the body. ln the afternoon and evening that portion of the Earth on which we live is turned away from the Sun Force. It no longer meets and affects us as in the morning. For this reason there is less strength and vigor of mind and body in the latter part of the day. For this reason is the tendency in most birds and beasts to rest their bodies at night. Night is the time for repose of the body, because of the absence of that element sent from the Sun, which is the great stimulator to life of all things on this planet.
We are most in the line of Natural Law when we do the work requiring most exertion in the morning. We have then the most benefit of the Force coming to the Earth. In the evening it is better to let the mind dwell on light and harmless recreation, to reverie if so we are inclined, to easy effort which does not tax the faculties to the utmost. And in such state of mind we are enabling it the easier to cease acting on the body when we retire.
People do work in various ways in the evening and accomplish a great deal. But they pay a heavy price at last. They so fix their thought on one business or one line of effort that they cannot get their thought out of that groove. Their minds run in the same rut be the body asleep or awake. You rest most in turning thought from one line of effort to another. Carrying any business or study in the mind all the time, day and night, morning and evening, does not really advance that business so much as forgetting it at intervals and letting the mind rest, as you allow your muscles to rest after any physical exertion. Mind allowed to rest gains new ideas and new Force to carry out ideas. A new idea is worth waiting for. But if now, as is so often the case, business and work are darried into the latter part of the day as well as far into the night, the mind, even when the body is laid down to rest, cannot readily if at all detach itself from that train of thought, and even when it does and the body’s physical senses become unconscious, still the other, the finer or spiritual senses, are working still on the same line of action. We gain thereby little or nothing. We send back to the body only old worn out second-hand ideas, which is second-hand life. We take up the body again in the morning for use, with only the same old set of thoughts, views, plans, and worries we had yesterday, because when the body became unconscious, our spirits went into the same thought element, a realm whither we directed them when the weary eyes closed.
What is the remedy ? More recreation. More variety of occupation. More variety of color in our lives. More selves in our one self. To attain the highest and happiest life we need to have two and possibly three, if not four lives in one—to be merchant in the morning and artist or yachtsman or something else in the afternoon, and in the second life forget for the time all about the first, and in such forgetfulness rest the first life or set of faculties, recuperate them, refresh them, and go back to business, or art or science, or any occupation next day with more force, plan, idea, thought to put iu it, as do many of our most successful men of business, who leave their offic/es”-at iin early hour of the afternoon and may be seen dvivlng-pn the Boulevard or otherwise recreating themselves/..”- …
If you sleep with another person whose mind is more disturbed than yours, who is worried, fretted* despondent, or irritable, your thought beiug/)ritfpe or less set on that person, so your spirit will-“be., attracted or drawn at night to that person’s lower province of mind. Tou are then dragged down on the lower level of that person’s night life. Your spirit does not tlien absorb such healthful element as it would did you sleep alone. It sends then to your body the other person’s more disturbed thought element. Your spirit also returns to its body in the morning adulterated more or less with the element it has absorbed of that other person’s thought, and has far less power to act on its body.
The harm that comes to the young person sleeping with an old one is when the older person’s mind is letting go of life, taking less and less interest in things about it, erroneously deeming it too old to learn, believing that because the body is wearing out all life is worn out. What life the younger person gains through going to a fresher domain of thought is to an extent absorbed by the older, who thus unconsciously appropriates the younger one’s stimulation.
Bear in mind that our real youth is not dependent on the age of the body—that youth implies never-ceasing vigor and activity of mind and more and more interest and effort in human affairs, more and more aspiration, and it is among the certain possibilities of the life coming to this planet that this state of mind once fixed on will constantly re-invigorate, re-cuperate and re-juvenate the body.
The body ‘has a certain life of its own separate from-, the spirit, whose instrument it is. Like a plant has its youth, maturity and decay. Its physical life in its earlier existence is an aid to the life and vigor of your spirit. That youthful physical life is an aid to your spirit, as any material remedy may bring a certain force to aid the spirit throw off disease or weakness. But the body’s aid in this respect only lasts for a certain time if not renewed by the power of mind or spirit, and if there is no knowledge of such power to renew, the body as a material construction like auy other material construction, must fall to pieces.
There is a great deal of unconscious belief in untruths. You will find from time to time that you have during all of this physical life believed implicitly in some falsehood. You have never questioned its truth, never thought of questioning it. You may be surprised at the number of errors so credited by you as they continue to crop out. Your unconscious unquestioning belief made these untruths as regards their effect on your life all the stronger. If you live firmly believing in an error, that error will bring a blight of some kind in your life. It is this firmly held belief in untruths that causes every kind of sickness and trouble for our race. The ” truth says the Bible shall make you free,”—free from all pain and trouble.
As soon as we commence to question any of these long held untruths, their reign is over. Disturbance commences. That is because it is being kicked out of your mind.
You may when a child have been taught to believe in a Bug a-boo of some kind. You may have feared in consequence to go alone in the dark. You believed it for a time implicitly. Then with years you doubted, you ceased finally to believe it in the form it was first presented you.
When you believed firmly in the Bug-a-boo the thought of it when alone in the dark caused you u npleasant physical sensations. Your flesh ” crept” or your hair rose on end, or you became weak and trembling. That is, it made you to a degree sick, by the thought of a thing which had no existence.
If some thoughtless person had simulated to you in the dark the Bug-a-boo or ghost, your body might have been still more strongly affected. The physical disturbance would have been greater. You might have been ” scared to death ” or scared into loss of reason, as children have been under similar circum stances. That is, you might have lost your body or your reason, through the idea of a tiling which had no real existence.
The Bug-a-boos held firmly in belief by grown up persons act on the body in precisely similar manner. Misconception as regards an effort of the spirit to regenerate the body makes of that effort a Bug-aboo, which finally works on the mind to destroy the body.
The spirit demands rest of the body. It wants all its force used in building it anew. It makes such demand of the stirring man of business, who has been actively engaged for years. The demand may come in the form of a sluggishness or inactivity of some sort.
As the regenerating process goes on we shall become in our habits and modes of living more natural. In all natural things in the animal and vegetable, undisturbed and uncultivated by man, do we flud the most perfect expression of the infinite mind, although these are not perfected expressions. Nothing in universe is perfected or finished. Everything is growing ever to increased perfection. And this growth must be as the Infinite Mind wills, and not as man wills. Wherever man tampers with the natural he makes imperfection and deformity.
Between the wild and tamed bird, we see the difference between the artificial and unnatural, and the natural and healthy life. The wild bird is as God made it. As man has meddled with it, he deprives the bird in time of strength, agility, beauty, and a great deal of intelligence.
Intelligence, instinct and spirituality mean the same. They imply a knowledge coming not from books but from the Infinite Mind. This knowledge in greater or lesser degree is in all forms of matter. It is in the mineral, the plant, the worm, the animal to man. It is not in all men alike. It is in no man to-day as it will be in the man of the future. It will be given to the man of the future so that he will be an immortal. That man will realize a happiness and peace of mind so vainly sought for to-day, so seldom found. He will realize a happiness undreamt of to-day.
He will realize this increasing happiness, because of seeing clearly that there is an exhaustless force, mind and wisdom moving in everything, himself included, and that all he has to do to attain lasting and ever increasing happiness is to commit himself to this power for good, trust to it, and be carried from one condition of pleasure to another.
Have all our inventions and advance in civilization made the race any happier or healthier ? Is not the struggle for existence about as hard as it was one hundred or one thousand years ago ? Are not disease and suffering still rampant f Is not loss, bereavement and disappointment met on every side? How many can say, ” My life is free from care, or anxiety, or jealousy, or discontent? My life is a dream of content and bliss. My life from the sun’s rising until its setting is a series of pleasant moments. And more, I know that my days of pleasure will not only continue, but that my quiet internal content will ever increase. I have no anxiety for the morrow, for I have proven this great power. It has made my past days pleasant, and I am equally certain it will my future.”
Trusting, then, to this power, and carried by it, man, becoming more than mortal, will have no occasion to sow or reap, or invent machinery—no more than does the. wild bird unhampered by such incumbrances. His spiritual growth will give him powers which shall do away with these present necessities.
In this regenerating process our spirit or higher self will demand of the body more sleep. It will demand that the night be devoted wholly to sleep.
Because when daylight prevails that is the time best adapted for physical expression. The material world is then most moved by the material force coming from the sun.
When that force is withdrawn and darkness prevails another power prevails. That is a spiritual power which can feed the material when the material activities are quiet.
When you retire at night with a desire to be free from the mood of anger or anxiety, and with a silent demand of the Supreme Power that you shall be led into the way of the highest wisdom and happiness, you are in the way of having that quality of sleep which shall most benefit you.
Healthy repose at night will give healthy repose by day. Repose is the mental condition most needed by our race. Repose is not sluggishness, inertia or laziness. Eepose gives pleasure in the doing of all things. Repose brings more strength in the doing of all things. Repose casts out exhaustion. Repose makes all work agreeable. Eepose frees all labor from irksomeness. Repose means the steady nerve and hand, whether that of the draughtsman, the marksman, or the rigger working from the dizzy height of the ship’s mast.
Repose does all things with an elaborate and loving care.
Repose will ultimately make you lose all sense of time. It is that weariness born of exhaustion which makes men and women sometimes say: “What shall we do to kill timef’ How tedious are the hours!”
Repose is a healthy, quieting stimulus ever flowing from the spirit near the Supreme Mind to the body. It gives permanently that mental rest which men seek and get from alcohol and opiates. But the pleasure derived from those agencies is transient, often spasmodic, and liable to that reaction which carries down to gloom as high as it has lifted to bliss. Repose keeps you on a serene level of happiness, and as you continue to invoke the Supreme Mind, carries you gradually to a condition still higher and happier, and so ever on and on.
Repose makes you company for yourself, welcome always to yourself, agreeable always to yourself. When that is your prevailing mood, you are always agreeable to others as are they to you. You cease then to be dependent on others for company. But in so ceasing you draw the best from others, give them of your best, and therefore never lack for company.
Repose brings plan and idea for enduring success and force to accomplish it. Success means far more than mere money getting. The success of to-day often brings wealth and fame without happiness. Is that a success when a man can call an empire his own, and bis body, the only instrument by which he holds it has not ten years life in it ?
I do not assert here that merely retiring early would prove a panacea for all the ills of the race. Nor that turning night into day is the cause of all the ills of the race.
But I do assert that an unhealthy spiritual condition tends to turn night into day, and that as the spirit becomes more healthy and natural, it will prompt us to sleep, while Nature, drawing the veil of darkness over the material world, signals thereby to the material world the time to cease from material activity.
Repose opens more and more the spiritual faculties, the finer perceptive powers, the faculty of seeing beauty and use in the many neglected things about us.
GOOD AND ILL EFFECTS OF
THOUGHT
Copyrighted 1891, by F. J. Needham
Beauty of face and beauty of form from head to foot is the right of every human being. Every face like every flower that blooms should please its own and others’ eyes and in the future every face will so please. Beauty is a gift most generously bestowed in nature’s myriad expressions, from the form of every leaf or bird’s feather, or falling flake of snow which close inspection shows to be crystallized into countless forms of fascinating symmetry and proportion.
It is worth repeating over and over again that your health, your fortunes, your success in any undertaking depends entirely on your predominant mental condition or frame of mind. If that continual frame of mind is hopeful, buoyant, courageous, always looking on.the bright side and toward success, never desponding, or if so inclined, fighting off despondency, then you are certain of ultimate success, for then you are sending out the force which attracts success.
The more you cultivate and live in this frame of mind, the stronger will your faith become in these silent and hitherto almost unrecognized thought forces, which will bring you health, peace, happiness and success, for as this silent power with you increases, as increase it must when held to, you will receive more and more proofs and ever stronger proofs of what it can do for you.
But certain conditions must be observed to keep in this the successful mood of mind, which is the strongest force—indeed the only force for drawing to you all of the best this earth can give and that without much other effort save what is pleasing in the exercise of your business, art or profession. For when you hold persistently to the successful mental state, you become a magnet drawing ever people to aid you as you in return can aid them. But if you are much of the time despondent and gloomy, you become the negative magnet driving the best from you, and attracting the worst. You will then, if aided at all, be aided only as an ” object of charity,” which is really no aid at all, for if you cannot be useful or valuable to others, you are, (be your station or rank in society where it may), only endured—not needed.
The greatest obstacle towards the realization of your continual serene, cool, deliberate self-composed and peaceful frame of mind (which is the mood and source of power), lies in promiscuous and •_nwise association with all manner of people whose thought is on a lower level than your own. If you associate ever so little with the frivolous, the aimless, the cynical, the grumbling, the despondent with those who have no faith in these spiritual laws, which underlie and are the only moving powers for affecting all material results, you will absorb some inferior thought and this will shackle, weiyh down and cripple your power and injure your health. If you go into families, where there is a despondency or cynicism or peevishness, a belief only in things material be they ever so friendly with you, you come out shorn of some of your power, especially if you are moved to give them sympathy. Every thought of sympathy represents so much force taken from you and no force of yours demands more discretion in its outlay.
Having a defined purpose in view, the atmosphere of thought you carry with you in your dealings with others is a power stronger to aid you than your spoken words. Because all so coming in contact with you will feel this atmosphere. If you have confidence in your ability, if you are honest to the core, they wiWfeel that confidence and honesty after you leave them, and as you persist in your purpose they will feel it more and more, for that power ia always acting on them.
But if even though having all this confidence and ability, you are in association with the dishonest, aimless, skeptical, desponding or dependent order of mind, you will absorb of these qualities of thought. You must then carry more or less of this atmosphere with you. Then those with whom you deal feel it and the impression you make and leave on them is less favorable to your interests.
You can make an atmosphere a power of thought to carry with you as literally as you can build a house or make any material thing, and such atmosphere or power can be made only through association with mind on the same level as your own. If you cannot find such mind here embodied, you will make it in seclusion whereby you give mind in purpose and motive like your own opportunity to have access to you and generate the same power.
If you are always mixing and mingling with a large circle of acquaintances and you give to each one your sympathy, if your company is desirable and pleasant; if you bring, on calling on them, a certain strength and exhilaration, you will as a result, when absent, and even at a distance from them, have their minds fixed on yours, and their thoughts ever flowing toward you and meeting and mingling with yours. If these friends live in the same world of thought as yourself—if their aims, purposes, aspirations are equal with yours—if they believe as you do, and try to live up to such belief—their flow of thought to you will be of great advantage. It will strengthen your mind and body. It will aid to prevent you from falling into the despondent or unsuccessful frame of mind. It will aid to keep you in the peaceful, cheerful, equable mood, which is the mood of success. It will aid to keep you in uninterrupted communication with the higher or Supreme Power or current of elevated and powerful thought on which, when once you are fairly launched and committed, you will be carried onward to ever increasing happiness and success, as the current of the Mississippi carries the shallop to the sea.
But if the minds so fixed on yours are not on your mental level—if the thought so flowing to you from a distance is lower than your own—if these acquaintances like you for your company, but have little or no faith in what they may call your ” peculiar ideas,” or even if they like tor the time being to hear you talk concerning them, but their faith does not prove itself by their works, then if still you continue to cultivate them, their minds fixed on yours—their thought coming to you from distant places is a damage to you. It will mingle with and muddy your own. It will prevent you from seeing clearly and acting wisely in your undertakings.
It will cut oft your mental communication with higher and more powerful minds as well as from the higher and constructive thought current. It will inject into your mind unaccountable periods of depression, gloom and peevishness. It will color your ideas and plans for material advancement with the dark shade of discouragement. It will lessen your moral courage to assert yourself and stand up for your rights. It will bring you that immense waste of force which comes of indecision. It will make you cowardly before understrappers and pigmies. When you keep in such mental rapport with this class of mind, their moods become more or less your moods. You become them in part through such mental communication. You think their thoughts as they so came to you and thinking them, are the more disposed to act them, and if they are in any way on the down grade in health or fortune, you will have a tendency also to go on the down grade in health and fortune.
It has always been received as a truth, that it is our duty to give ear and sympathize with every unfortunate or suffering person. This is a mistake. To many it has proved a fatal mistake. When you give of such sympathy, you give of your real force. Jf you give thus unwisely and receive nothing back of a quality of thought correspondent to your own, you will in time have nothing yourself to give. You will be weakened in spirit and if in spirit you must be in body. Some warm-hearted and sympathetic ministers who have thrown their whole souls into every movement made by their congregations, the Sunday School and the Charitable Society, who have visited the sick and condoled with the bereaved and conformed to the many demands made upon them, have found in time their own strength, energy and inspiration to fail. If a man like Beecher has the living truth in him, it is quite enough for him to stand up once a week and give of that truth. He has done a great service to thousands and he has done enough.
For any such person every other sympathetic impulse and outflow of force or thought should be most carefully considered and guarded. He can have kindness for all, but when his thought rushes out in volumes of sympathy, now on this individual, then on that, he is in danger.
If among a crowd of inferior people you submit tamely to some imposition, outrage or insult because you are afraid to speak out before them, then you are ruled by the inferior mind of that crowd.
If you fear in filling occasions to speak your mind openly to any person, that person’s mind dominates and rules yours, though such person may be greatly your inferior. If you are much with that person that mind will rule and influence yours, though your bodies may be far apart. You will then absorb and partake to an extent of that person’s passions, appetites, prejudices, and even ailments, besides being ruled by them and thwarted in your aims.
True, such persons may seem your friends. They may even believe they are your friends. But there are in the world thousands of unconscious tyrants and tyrannies in the name of friendship—people who call and believe themselves friends only so long as you do what they wish, only so long as you give them your society, and you allow them to drag you in their direction, who are sore if you do not call on them so often as they desire, or if you seek other association. If you tolerate- and endure this tyranny —if they enjoy their way and you only endure their way, then you are not only their slave but you are being injured in body, mind and fortune through the absorbtion of the inferior thought element, you are continually receiving as you think of them.
Through long mental habit you may feel abject, crushed and humble before that certain brutal, bulldog, domineering, brow-beating order of mind which tries to bring every one in subjection to its will. Before them personally even your body may feel weak. You hesitate in speech. Your tongue cannot obey the desire of your mind. So strong is the action of their will on your mind or spirit that it actually drives the better part of it away from your body and therefore it can not control or use your body. You cau by degrees remedy this weakness and rise above them by asserting yourself when alone. Speak to them in mind when alone as you cannot now when in their presence. See yourself when alone as often as possible able to cope with them. You are then building yourself up into more and more courage. You are then getting rid of your cowardice and nothing fetters and prevents success more than moral cowardice.
To get to and own this mental condition the greatest aid is a total cutting from all cowardly association. To be intimate with cowardly mind is to absorb cowardly thought unless you are positive or on the defensive to repel it, and if you are, the continual strain supposing you are continually exposed to such thought will over-tax you in some way.
There is but one way out of these mental tyrannies and injuries. You must cut off all inferior associations and occupy yourself in some way so as much as possible to forget them.
You may say that such manner of life dooms you to perpetual solitude. You ask, ” Must I cut off all association with mankind I”
Not at all. In so doing you are only preparing the way for association with the best of your kind, who can bring you aid for all your undertakings, and whose thought is worth absorbing, for its quality will strengthen you in every way. You will also through such temporary solitude build up a world of your own, in which for times and seasons you can happily live. You will, through cutting off the muddy currents of thought from inferior minds, see more and more in familiar things and find sources of enjoyment in things which before were uninteresting and barren. You will as so centred in yourself make yourself stronger and stronger as a magnetic power to draw to you what most you need to carry out your purposes.
People who cannot live save with crowds—people who must have company, no matter what the company are composed of—people who will gossip with their servants if there be none other to gossip with have little power, or if they possess power waste it in so doing. One real friend who sees with you ” eye to eye and face to face ” is worth all others in the world who meet you only in part. Such a friend is worth the waiting for years. Such a friend will come to you through the inevitable law of attraction if you desire him or her, providing you prepare the way as has here been indicated.
Solitude so-called does not necessarily involve loss of company. There is company for you everywhere and that of the best and finest, so that you cultivate the proper mental condition to receive it, feel it, enjoy it and communicate with it. There is also a Supreme Power, a Supreme Force or current of thought in the universe which as the mind or spirit grows in power it will finally be able to reach and draw strength from for every trial or emergency. It is in the possibilities for this power to prevent the body from being injured through any physical or earthly cause. It was this Power as called down through silent mental prayer or desire whereby all the so-called miracles spoken of in the biblical records were accomplished. It is a Power unexplainable and mysterious. It cannot be analyzed or accounted for by any of the methods of earthly science. We know simply that it exists and that it can cause results and tremendous results, when we through the observance of certain conditions place ourselves in its line of operation. It is as powerful now to work these results as it was thousands of years ago. No jot or tittle of any law or element has changed since that time. Sunshine and darkness, rain aud snow, vegetable life and animal life, the winds and the tides were the same in their workings then as now, and so to-day are those deeper and less known forces of which some among those ancient peoples knew relatively a little, but of which we know next to nothing. These were at the basis of the-“Lost Arts,” and those “Lost Arts” involved the accomplishment of results and so-called wonders wrought on higher or lower planes of motive through the knowledge and exercise of mental or spiritual laws.
As we learn to fling ourselves back on this power in any emergency—to rely so much as we may upon it in time of sickness or trial—to try and rely solely upon it and not upon any earthly aid or our dearest and most powerful earthly friends, so shall we gradually grow nearer to it, and bring ourselves in closer and quicker communication with it. It can help us in the so-called little trials of life. Call upon it when you desire to sleep and cannot, when little physical ailments beset you, when low spirits depress you, when unaccountable fears paralyze your energy. When you have done your best in any effort, cease to rely at all further upon yourself. Stop trying to do of yourself. Become passive, and commit yourself to this the Supreme Power. Because in the words of the Apostle, ” Of ouselves we can do nothing.” With this Power we can do everything, when once fairly in its current. We are then, as some express it, *’ in the line of the Divine Mind.” Once in this line and solitude and loneliness no longer exists with us. We have then in ourselves and outside of ourselves, company everywhere and peace everywhere.
We are then also becoming more free from the desire of seeking promiscuous and injurious association which will enslave, fetter and injure us. We are on the road then to meet our true friends and real relations, who can benefit us in every way. Because when you can for periods stand alone and enjoy yourself through this communion with the Supreme Power or Divine Mind, your are not only strengthening both spirit and body, but making yourself more attractive and more useful to those whom you are to meet. You will appreciate and enjoy the more what they have for you.
They also will be in communication and draw from the same Power. Unless they can they cannot be your associates. If you so “walk with God,” you can have permanent association only with others who so walk. You and they are then in rapport with the Holy Spirit or “Holy Ghost,” promised by the Christ of Judea.
This is in no sense a “sentimental religious idea. For as you change the daily attitude or state of your mind you attract to you literal elements in conformity with such state. If you have faith only in things material or what you can see, hear, touch or feel, you will attract only the weaker power coming of such material. What we so sense is but a fragment of the forces about us. If we do not rule these forces they will rule us to our injury. The means for such ruling by us lie entirely in the attitude of our minds.
If you have any special purpose or undertaking to accomplish, your motive being to benefit others as well as yourself, and having done your best in the matter you still find obstacles and annoyances in the way, cease doing anything save what is absolutely necessary. Desire earnestly that your mind cease to plan, fret or worry over the affair. Rely then on this mysterious power to remove the obstacles for you. It can and will do it, providing you place yourself in the proper conditions to give it access to you. The principal condition lies in seclusion from all who are not in your world of thought. Live so much as you can alone, eat alone, sleep alone. You bring yourself then more and ‘ more in the current of the Supreme Power. Where it is necessary to act to accomplish your aim you will then carry this power with you. You will be surprised at what it will silently accomplish. Unexpected means and agencies will open to you. Where you expected opposition you will find favor. Regarding your aim, remember this power is always at work pushing for you, when you hold to your purpose and are not vacillating or mingling with lower association. Do not recede from the position you have assumed. If you do, so much of its past force in so working for you is wasted.
But if you go gadding about; if you must drop in to see this or that friend, simply for sake of company or gossip; if you must call on this or that family simply to pass away the time, or have about you some special associate who has no faith or a weak and uncertain faith in these truths, you will cut the line connecting you with the Supreme Power. You will connect yourself with the inferior thought current and inferior power. You will not accomplish a tithe of what you would from taking the other course. You descend then to the material stratum of thought, motive and action. On that stratum the forces are too strong for you. When you are on the higher plane, they are powerless.
It is a fearful mistake for men or women to indulge in promiscuous and intimate associations for mere gratification. Nothing so much fetters the superior mind of the two. It adulterates and infects it with inferior and baser thought, cuts it off from higher spiritual sources of supply, cripples energy and courage and fills the body with weakness and disease, generally.attributed to other causes.
The same results follow those unions called ” marriages,” which are based on material considerations or fancies which in so short a time prove delusions. In either case they tend toward those mental tyrannies by which the more sensitive, finer and really the most powerful mind of the two becomes blinded to its power, enslaved and ruled by the inferior and, if a giant is blind, is he not at the mercy of any weakling who leads him ?
Being in thorough communication with this, the Supreme Power which is the Power of Truth, and you are a king or queen in the empire of mind. ” The truth shall make us free.” You can then no longer come under control of any mental tyranny.
BURIED TALENTS.
Copyrighted 1891, by F. J. Needham.
A girl has a distaste for ” housework,” if she has no aptitude for washing, scouring, cooking and sweeping, if she does not evidence the ordinary signs and proclivities for filling the position, the world accords to so many girls that of the ” good housekeeper;” let her alone. Be sure that some power within her needs time and rest to grow. You do not make matters any better by forcing her to occupations for which she has no inclination. You are probably making matters much worse. You are developing an indifferent “house-wife,” and starving possibly the soul of a woman of great ability, in some direction.
Rank heresy! Nonsense! you cry. ” Every girl should be taught to bake, brew, boil, sweep, scrub and how to ” keep house.” She should not be brought up in idleness.
Very good, drive your idle child to work, vex her soul with pots and pans. Ten or fifteen years hence, look upon her and see if she is an honor to your strict training. Many are the broken down creatures to-day who might have ” amounted to something,” had the talent or talents given them have been allowed time and rest in which to grow, and be recognized and fostered when they put forth their first buds of promise. You cannot drive a quality, a power, a talent in upon itself, without risk of dreadful results. Would you attempt to hammer back the apple bud and insist that it be a pear blossom ? That is the rule of the world in thousands of cases. The bud of the youthful artist is discouraged, the rising genius repressed perhaps by the parent. Why ? ” Oh artists are such a poor lot. They do not, save in exceptional cases, make money.” True. And for such reason it is sometimes the parents that takes the child’s talent and buries it for him, or her.
Power and talent grow in repose. The solution of mineral producing the finest crystallization needs to be kept perfectly quiet while the new combination is forming. The best fruitage of mind whether of invention, art, science or sentiment, must form under similar conditions. Your ” original thinker” develops best while he is apparently idle. ” Industry ” in what is called ” literary work,” often makes ” hacks ” of race horses. Every man and every woman contain in themselves the elements and powers in embryo of entire self reliance. Every individual should so base himself in his mind. You should say continually to yourself, ” though I have not the power to carry out my design to-day, still I am evergrowing up to that power. If I lean or depend for help to-day, still it is my aspiration to be independent of such dependency as soon as possible.”
Dependency on somebody or something is one of the unconscious errors in thought most prevalent to-day. Theology has taught that we are ” nothing without God.” So we are. But God or the Infinite Spirit of good and power is everywhere, and we have the glorious and, as yet, unappreciated power of ever calling to us and adding eternally to ourselves more and more of this spirit or element.
God or the Infinite Spirit of good ” works in us and through us.” We are all parts of God and each individual as such part is ever glorifying God by gaining more and more Godliness. That is, more and more power for doing. We must hold the thought in our minds that we have more of this power to-day than we had yesterday. We must cut loose more and more from the idea of a dependency on any one or any power, save the power we can ever call to ourselves. Every individual is an empire ever increasing in power.
“But are we not dependent on others in every phase of life ? ” may be asked. ” How should we live did not others prepare our food, build our houses, wash our clothing, and minister to our many needs T ” We answer, it is a law of nature that the more we wisely try to help ourselves, the more do we help others, and thereby get help from them. Wisdom makes effort to gain perfect health and a balanced mind. The mere possession of these alone is a benefit to all with whom we come in contact and many more. If your spirit is powerful and healthy it will send its invigorating forces to people far from you. A spirit which has reached the consciousness that it is through prayer or the laws of demand ever calling to itself new forces from the exhaustless source of force, and never losing an atom of that force, so called to it, is a benefit to thousands it may never see with the physical eye.
It is sending of its force to every person of whom it thinks. It is as a sun warming into life all on which it shines, even as our sun begets life out of the rugged rock on which its rays fall.
As you increase in patience, in exactness, in decision, in method, in neatness, in self-control, in all that goes to make of yourself a relatively perfect organized being, do these qualities flow from you to others, and as they increase in these will they flow back from those they benefit to you. If you send this quality of thought to them from the impulse of love or desire to help, so will they respond in time and send the same quality back to you through the resistless impulse of love and gratitude. You cannot help others without being helped yourself. You cannot send out helpful thought to others without getting from them in return helpful thought so far as they have ability to give it. You cannot injure others without being injured yourself. You cannot send any shade of evil thought to others without injury to yourself. If those to whom you send such character of evil thought meet it and turn it aside by the thought of goodwill to you, your thought will return to you. Self dependence brings to you the very result unwisely sought by dependence. The person who leans on you and depends on you for everything must tire you out at last. You will see eventually how great an injustice it is to allow any person so to “depend. It cripples their own capacity for independence. It retards the strengthening of that power through exercise by which they could call to themselves more of any quality out of the elements, or, in other words, out of the boundless realm of Infinite Spirit or Force. You are offering yourself as a crutch to a person who has sound limbs. To encourage dependency in another is to strengthen their delusion in their own weakness. It is teaching them to be everlasting borrowers when they have a bank of their own. It is often as the lending to them of means which they cannot wholly appropriate or use to best advantage while others might be greatly benefited by such means and repay you a far better interest.
It is right to expect return for what we give. It is right because it is a necessity. If you are ever giving another of the richness of your superior thought; if you are always planning and working for the entertainment and pleasure of some person who takes all you give and has for you little or no power to entertain you in return, you are injuring yourself and that other person. You are giving your bread and getting stones in return. You are teaching and encouraging that person to give only stones. You are encouraging a life of selfishness and stupidity. You are preventing another sun from shining, another God or Goddess from maturing. You may likewise through over-much absorbtiou of that person’s inferior thought being weighed down by it, crippled by it, and oppressed by an inertia or lack of energy not your own. You are swayed by their thought, and sometimes made to say and do things you would not were you freed from it. Your legitimate plans and schemes for your own advancement are retarded or crippled because your own thought, element of ambition, aspiration, courage and energy is adulterated aud alloyed with the inferior thought of self-dependency which is slavish. That mental slavery which is internally content to depend entirely on another has always in it the elements of cowardice and selfishness.
So if yours is the superior thought, and consequently you are the wiser person, you are in this case the greater sinner and wrong-doer. Dependency is blind. It Must be taught how to depend on itself, and ” work out its own salvation.” Will you then (who can see) allow the blind slave of dependency to travel on and on without ever calling on its own rightful powers, without which it can never gain permanent happiness ?
The cultivation of self independency and self reliance must commence in your own mind and by yourself.
Have you your rights to assert before an unjust person, or a reasonable request to make of him which you may imagine he will consider as audacious? Is it a person of whose past injustice you can speak freely before friends who sympathize with you, but when before him, the one of all ones who should hear, you are silent ? Why ? Because you are afraid to speak.
Deny in your mind at home, in the privacy of your chamber, that you fear that person. See yourself in mind making to him a fair, calm and cool statement of your case, and that without flurry or loss of temper. Make this mental statement in the sentiment and full desire of justice for botli of you. See yourself in what you call imagination as one who only wants what is right and nothing more.
When you do this you are actually doing your work. Your mind, your thought, as an unseen element traveling through the air is at that very moment acting on that person’s mind. As you have in mind presented your case in all justice and equity to him, so will your thought present itself as it flows from you to the person in question. You are then at that moment arguing your case with him and arguing with the element of thought, which is always the most powerful—the thought of justice of good-will, which desires not revenge for wrong, but only redress.
But very many people who think of a wrong done them by another think what they dare not say to that person face to face. They may think in the spirit of revenge, of ” getting even,” of causing some loss or suffering to the person in question because he has not done right. This process of thinking is the process of sending the thought element of some form of ugliness to the person thought of. It is the ugly thought of dependency – the slavish cowardly thought which puts out what it dare not put out in words before the person to whom such thought is sent. As so sent this thought element reaches the person in question. It irritates and annoys him. His thought of you is unpleasant. If in thought you see yourself as in fear of that person, so will he see, or rather feel you. This with a large class of mind arouses contempt. That works against your case. If by yourself you place yourself in mind as one who is not afraid of him, yet is not revengeful—as one who justice being done, is desirous afterward only of helping him, you are then sending him in thought the most powerful plea for yourself.
The “sense of justice” is not a mere metaphor. It is a quality in every person’s nature as real as earth or air. In some it is more alive than in others. When you send out just calm, cool thought, it acts on that sense in another as light acts on your eye. It makes that person hear your just plea. He cannot avoid hearing it. When you place yourself in mind before yourself according to your highest ideal of manhood or womanhood, you are so placing your higher self before the person to whom you send your thought. If so, you send yourself out in thought, you send out the strongest power.
The independent mind and life mean the freed mind. The freed mind is that which thinks no thought annoying to itself. It puts out then no element of thought save what is pleasing to it and others whom that thought reaches. The mind so originating and sending out such thought to others is ever building itself up on a basis of independence of which the material (the thought of good-will) is gladly given it by others. When others so send it, their thought of good-will, they send also of whatever talent they possess. Tour improvement in music, in painting, in any art or science will be quicker for the thought sent you by proficients in such art, who are friendly to you. Because as thought is element, the quality of their talent comes in their thought to you, is absorbed by you and is grafted on you so far as you have capacity to receive it. Your capacity to receive it depends on your freedom from all jarring of evil thought and your good-will and unselfishness. Selfishness will close you to the absorption of such thought. Unselfishness will open for you the doors to it.
It brings to you ever more life to think of things full of life, health and vigor and, so far as convenient, have such things in physical form before you. Such as children in bounding health, trees and flowers, birds and animals not caged but in their native condition, water in motion, surfs, rapids and cataracts, moving clouds, and breezes. As either imaged or made in mind or sensed materially the thoughts they suggest bring to you the current of live healthy thought, and this acts and enters into your body, building into it like material. Any verse or description of this character is a very healthy sentiment to dwell on, and if it recurs frequently to your memory it is a very healthy sign, for every time it does so recur it is bringing a literal solid and lasting good to mind and body.
Not only do these live healthy thoughts rest and clear the mind and strengthen the body, but the live strong thought current which you connect yourself thereby with and which enters with them into your mind, sweeps away from it images of decay and death, cleanses it of unhealthy mordid imaginings, and as this clear, vigorous current gains more and more access to your mind, it will bear away wholly and for ever all the spiritual dust, cobwebs, vermin and uncleanliness which may have lodged there and caused you great pain.
As you grow more and more into this mental condition you will not only see but Feel more and more life in the many expressions of nature about you.
Of whatever brings an emotion of fear or of rest or pleasure there must be something, some element to cause such emotion. The power we call spirit expresses itself in many forms. It binds together the tree in the shape we see it this month or this year. It changes the shape of that tree and increases its girth and height next year. The same mysterious force so forms and changes the shape of bird and animal up to the period of maturity. It is the moving power of the ocean of water below and the ocean of air above.
We, with our physical senses, only see or feel the physical part of the tree which spirit is so shaping. Those physical organs do not sense the real, the growing moving power of the tree, bird, animal or of ourselves.
But we have in embryo or latent a set of senses far finer and far more powerful which will when ripened, sense, see and feel the real, the growing power of the tree, and of all live growing things. Those senses are already awakening and stirring when we get pleasure in the thought of live, vigorous things above spoken of. They »are then literally going forth absorbing of the life or spirit of tree, bird, animal, wave, wind, and flying cloud, and bringing such life to us.
By this means or this mental condition, we may get the life or growing power of the tree, bird, or animal in ourselves. We get in the thought of the billows, the surge, the cataract, the breeze, the gale, their power in us. We may so get the youthful life of plant, bird or animal. We want their life in its youthful stage or up to maturity. That is their constructive period when they are building up their forms, or rather when this spiritual power is building up the material into such forms.
I do not mean that we should endeavor to force ourselves to the contemplation of these things. Forced contemplation is no contemplation at all. It is an attitude of mind having no power to absorb this life or spirit. It will only do harm. But if you are alive to the value of this kind of thought and desire it, it will come to you easily and naturally. You will then have more and more in your mind some image expressive of real vigorous life— the sun, a flower, a forest, an ocean beach, and such mind images will in no wise interfere with the power and force of your thought in your business or art—no more than your occasional glance at the flower in your buttonhole, a reminder of the affection of your wife who placed it there turns your thought from its proper course in the day’s affairs.
This kind of thought awakens into life our now latent spiritual senses. The more these are so exercised and awakened, the more power have they. The more power they gain the more of this life can they bring from all these forms of material life to repair, reconstruct and rejuvenate our bodies. For in reality it is mind or spirit that must be first so built before the body can be. When the spirit is so attracting to itself healthy or constructive spiritual elements, these must in time assimilate and express themselves in the body.
Spirit is also at work on all decaying forms of material organization. It is simply taking them to pieces. It is as a tearing down of the house and out of its materials building a new. So the decomposed matter and its portion of spirit also enters into the composition of the new and growing plant to build that up.
But we do not want this power of spirit to act on us. We do not want to absorb of the tearing to pieces or decaying power. Therefore, we will turn our minds from the destructive to the constructive spiritual forces, from the dead animal to the live one, from the weakness of material age to the force and fire of growing youth, from livid fungi in cellars and caverns to green, healthy growths in the sunlight, from stagnant pools to clear flowing brooks, from pictures of grief and gloom to pictures of joy, from sickness to health, from anxiety, seriousness and sullenness to cheer, liveliness and gaiety.
A lively strain of music brings to you the mind sentiment or spirit of the person at the time of composing it. It brings also the spirit of those who are performing it. This is one great aid in bringing life. In the education of the future, music for every person will be deemed as necessary as is reading and writing at present, for it will be clearly seen that it is a most powerful means for bringing life, health and strength.
Many more persons have ” music in them” than is generally imagined, and all of these can bring that music out of them on some instrument, or with the voice, even if unaided by others.
Music is inherent in every human spirit, and all spirit and some of our liveliest and most care dispelling melodies came without teachers direct from the sunshine of the negro’s heart while in captivity.
You do not need in order to get and absorb of their life or spirit to be always in the material sight of trees, waters or the country. If it come easy and convenient so to be among these things— if you can step from your door in nature’s heart or survey it from your window so much the better. But to take long walks in field or forest for sake of exercise or for sake of the fresher element you suppose you may absorb in so doing is, in some cases, a means of injury. If the body is in any degree weak you may, in so doing, give out more strength than you receive and return weaker than before. If the body is relatively strong and the weather is harsh or bitterly cold, you may expend more strength in resisting the elements than you will gain. You are not then always placing your mind as a magnet to attract to itself the real force or element, of which all in forest and field is the outward or seen, covering. You may be among those seen coverings of tree, plant, animal and other things nearly all the time, and attract nothing of their force. If so much of your mind is expended in moving your body about, you may not keep it in the state to attract and receive of that spirit. This is the mental condition of many a farmer who is at fifty rheumatic, complaining and almost broken down. He may have lived amid the most beautiful scenery, but little of his mind was appreciative of it. Therefore he could not draw from it. He saw in the tree chiefly firewood, cut it down without a shade of regret, and valued nature chiefly as a marketable commodity. So in a measure is it right and necessary for him so to do to gain his subsistence under our present material system of life. But in seeing only in nature what he could turn into cash, and in feeling so little of its spiritual meaning force and use, he cuts himself off from a source and supply of actual life.
But you, having a pleasure in the thought of these things, can draw their force or spirit to you in the city room, though the tall buildings about you almost shut out the sky; they cannot shut the forest, the breeze, the white-capped wave out of your mind. Nor can they prevent their spiritual force from coming to you and recuperating you in mind and body. For whatever you open your mind to, that it must attract.
Why do children so love to watch the falling snow-flakes? Because the spirit in its new body feels more intensely the spirit and force of the snow-flake. Because that spirit is then more alive and keen as to its spiritual sense than it will be a few years later when it is, as it were, crusted over and blunted as to such keenness by the duller thought and error absorbed of the older people with whom it is in daily contact. When the Christ of Judea said to the Jewish elders “Except ye become as this child ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven,” he meant as the text interprets itself to us that with each new body used by a mind there was in its earlier life a power of the spirit to sense and enjoy these forces or the spirit in all things about it, and that the vigor and happiness of childhood came not as is generally supposed of the youth of the material body, but because the same spirit, having in the death of its last body cast off a load of erroneous thought it could no longer carry, in getting the new one, feels for a period its greater spiritual power.
This is precisely the mental condition we wish to bring to ourselves. We want also that spiritual force which the child does receive. That will keep us ever young. We want this power of childhood without its ignorance and helplessness. We want to be wise without being unattractive or decrepit. Greater wisdom must bring life and youth in every sense. Decrepitude and the decay of old age do not prove the highest wisdom They do prove ignorance. “The tree is known by its fruit.” A crop of weakness and failing powers proves defect somewhere.
Suppose that you should suddenly find you had some new organs and senses in you similar to your mouth, stomach, and sense of taste. Suppose also that in tree, plant, animal and all healthy and vigorous things you should find a new substance or element unseen and unknown to you before, and that your new mouth was capable of taking it in and causing it to assimilate with and prove a source of strength and refreshment to mind and body.
Now, exactly in this relation do your other and spiritual senses serve you, and exactly so do they take in and assimilate these spiritual elements to refresh and build you up. Only these powers analogous to the material mouth, taste and stomach are now in a relatively weak condition. They are like the weak infant stomach and limited capacity for getting sustenance and strength from solid foods during its earlier years. But like the infants, these spiritual organs or capacities must grow stronger by exercise and get more from what they feed on as they grow stronger.
It is this healthy, vigorous thought, the spirit essence and strength of nature and natural things that will not only benefit you, but also unfold your latent talents, making of you greater and ever greater beings. There are no finalities in the empire of thought.
THE POWER OF HONESTY.
Copyright 1893, by F. J. Needham.
The carrying out of any business undertaking as entirely based on the laws of thought requires a great amount of faith and patience. By patience is not inferred a painful waiting in suspense and uneasiness for events to happen. Patience in its higher meaning implies waiting with a fresh, hopeful, buoyant heart, amusing yourself meanwhile, keeping your purpose always firm, but not dwelling on it in anxiety and suspense.
Suppose you are a lecturer or an actor, and wish to draw profitable audiences. You must have first a faith and confidence in your capacity to interest and amuse your audience.
You are about making your first attempt before the public. What should first be done?
You should first gain the sympathy of a few earnest friends who really desire your success.
We have said many times that ” sympathy is force.” It is as proceeding from those minds a real element—invisible but very powerful, noiseless and subtle in its workings. As put out from such minds it operates to create an interest for you even when they sleep and when you sleep. Ten minds or five minds holding this mood of real friendship for you are working their thought for you all the time. They are worth to you more than ten thousand minds who may pretend an interest in you they do not feel.
In your mind hold people to you who can help you when you see plainly that mental contact twixt you and them is best for them. If you see a man or woman wasting their forces through ignorance and inability to use them to some purpose—if you see them suffering and going to ruin in consequence, you have a certain right to use them for a time. Because as under the influence of your mind and its following, they will receive the truth. They will be educated aright while serving you. They will get as much in spiritual power as they give.
These forces or thoughts of sympathy and good wishes from others for your special purpose must have time to ripen. Keep determined in that special purpose and they will ripen. Become discouraged and abandon it and their growth to a material result is blighted. When these forces so created are ripe, or in other words, when they ” come to a head” you will know it. You will know it through certain impulses which will move you to go ahead and take the next steps. It is these forces from other minds that create this impulse and make this step for you. The “step” will appear in the form of an offer or an opportunity. Then embrace it, concentrate on it and do your best for the time and occasion.
These forces may concentrate upou some one individual to work in your behalf—to approach you with a proposition or in some way to make a step for you.
You must not think that because certain eflorts you may make seem to bring no result that they are “failures.” They are not. They have only agitated more your name and created more desire to hear or see you.
Keep ever in mind that any physical effort you may make to further your undertaking such as seeing and talking your project to people, or any indirect effort you may make with such intent, is secondary and vastly inferior to your spiritual force, backed up and ever drawing from the Supreme Power. Keep That Power Behind Everything. Say in mind with every effort you make, ” I desire to be led rightly by this Infinite Force and Wisdom, operating through me,” I demand more and more that I may see clearly and know without a shadow of doubt that this Power is a reality, so that I may trust to it more and more in ease of mind. Ease and content of mind is the crowning proof that you are in the mood of perfect trust.
Sometimes an invisible following of individual intelligences may see spiritually farther than you, some step or act which it is necessary for you to take to ensure the largest and most permanent success. To this at first you may be blind or indifferent. In such case matters may seem to be delayed, when in reality, they are waiting until your mind wakes and is cleared to this necessity. It will come to you in time provided you hold your mind ever receptive and open to their wisest suggestion.
If you make effort to win people’s favor, to please them socially, to make tliem like you, don’t do so in the sole mood and intent of making it subservient to your purpose. Please them for the sake oi pleasing. Don’t carry your business intent always uppermost in your mind wherever you go. Don’t cultivate society wholly to help your business. Don’t regard your social qualities altogether as stepping stones to put cash in your pocket.
if you do you will in time be found out. Be you as pleasing, as fascinating as you may, people will feel something in your mind disagreeable to them. This will retard instead of advancing you to a permanent success.
Aim at the highest success and the broadest field for your effort. You may concentrate your force on some single and relatively small effort. But back of that and in your mind see yourself going much further. Some people in their minds can never get outside the small business. The small store, the little shop which gives only a bare Jiving. They become so involved in its cares and petty jealousies, its quarrels, as to leave no room in their minds for the higher, broader aim and aspiration. For that reason they always stay there.
A man may allow himself to put all his thought in the care and cultivation of an acre when it could be expanded on ten or a hundred. Don’t catch yourself saying m your mind: ” A mud-scow is all I can handle and navigate. Abler men than I must sail the big ships.”
When you keep planning, aiming and looking ahead to the greater undertaking, your mind will prophesy your future and prophesy truly, so that you desire the Eight and Justice for yourself and others.
In so seeing and planning you are making the conditions in advance for the future and greater success. A chimney-sweep whose mind never goes in aspiration beyond the half-dozen chimneys he may sweep in a day, never gets but of the domain of chimney-sweeping.
Sometimes as regards your undertaking everything seems to come to a standstill. You may have worked, have talked, have sought to lay your plans before others, and after all nothing seems to have come of it.
This discouraging aspect of affairs is only in the material world. It is only the appearance on the outside. But the spiritual and unseen forces which are the moving power to produce all physical results are full of activity. What is most required of you is to stick to your purpose and keep as much as you can from moods of discouragement.
Keep also out of the company of those who have no faith in these truths save when it is necessary to be with them.
The outside of the egg shows little sign of the growth of the chick within. The tree a month before it puts forth its leaves may be outwardly as bare as in December. But within these forms of seen matter is a very different condition of things from that of months previous. Because there was a purpose in the Infinite Mind to produce a certain result from egg and tree. It moves ever steadily on toward the accomplishment of tliat purpose. You, as a part of that mind, work results by precisely the same laws. The Infinite force stirs within all striving to accomplish the same result. It may be a good one, a bad one, a trivial one. No human being is out of the reach of this force. Something each and all must do.
Things, events or material methods by which the main result is accomplished shape themselves. Then do not in your mind insist that the desired result must come in a certain way and no other. Be elastic, be ready to go where the current bears you. While planning for a result in one place, it may happen in another a thousand miles distant. These spiritual forces have little to do with distance. Minds are one in working, be their bodies near or remote from each other, and the exact place where they focus a material result is not always easy to determine.
There is misery in cheapness. The most extravagant living is cheap living. A meal of cheap food is very apt to be a meal of poor food. A meal of poor food gives little or no strength to body or mind. Your strength of body and mind is your main stock in trade, -and has a value in dollars and cents. A steady diet on cheap and poor food may make you sick, prevent you from working, lose you your wages for many days and cost you a doctor’s and druggist’s bill besides.
Cheap things, when they are poor things, cost far more than good ones. Yon buy a cheap trunk. It bursts asunder in compliance with the desire of the baggage-smasher, betrays the lamentable secrets of your wardrobe.
You buy a suit of cheap, perhaps ready-made, clothing. There are many chances against your getting a good fit, though at first the dealer may make you think so. They look cheap to commence with, and advertise their cheapness wherever you go. In three weeks the gloss wears off. They are threadbare. In six weeks they are as much worn as a really good texture of cloth would be in four months. Good cloth would have lasted twice as long. You must then pay for two poor suits more than you would for one good one, and with these two you have neither the quality or style of the better, though more costly one at the start. When you have worn out the two poor suits you have spent more money and got far less for it. This is extravagance.
Economy does not mean the using poor things because they are cheap. It means the use of the very best things, so as to get the very best out of them. You may buy a lame or sick horse for very little money. He can’t carry you anywhere; he costs money to keep and try to cure; he is a care on your mind and an expense to your pocket, for which you receive nothing in return but worry.
Competition which seeks to lower the price of everything, is the death of trade. It cuts down lower and lower until at last no profit is left for anyone. Then the factory stops. The workman has nothing to do.
Competitive cheapness does not tend to make artists. It tends to make only imitators, copyists or counterfeits. A skilled needle woman, one who took an artistic pride in her work, said after a week’s experience in one of the great New York bazaars where one hundred dresses per day were turned out, ” There is no encouragement here for good, careful, painstaking work. The girl who can rush the most thread through the most yards of cloth and turn out the semblance of a dress is the one best paid and most praised by the employer.”
When you buy the cheap dress you encourage the making shams, of imitations, of counterfeits. You encourage work done without conscience and only for cash. You discourage honesty. You discourage work in which is put some brains, skill, conscience and time. That is another name for artistic work. You are helping on the fraud. You help rascality and oppose yourself to justice and honesty.
If you buy where you can buy the cheapest without regard to anything save getting an article for the least possible money you are encouraging fraud and injustice.
You complain that your own labor is illy paid. Yet when you hunt for the cheapest article and patronize the man determined to sell lower than all others, you are encouraging, helping and putting money in the pockets of the man, whose policy it is to cut down lower and lower the price of everything he sells. If you are making brooms for a living, and be sells them, it is his aim in some way to get brooms made for less money. His mind is ever at work to lower your wages.
The world of trade and manufacture is now engaged in making every one work for as little money as possible, to make as good an article as possible. When you are going into the manufacture of shoes or hats you set your wits to work to get people to work for the least possible money in making those shoes or hats. You want the work done and materials raised for you and brought to you for the least possible money. You don’t care whether A B and 0 who raises the article or prepares it or freights it to you get a fair price for their work or not. You don’t care how they live or whether they get enough to eat or wear. You don’t know them. You don’t want to know them. All you want is their strength, skill and intelligence for as little money as possible so that when all that strength and skill comes to you in the shape of a hat, a coat, a pair of shoes, a kettle, a shovel, a tin pan, you can get from six, eight or ten times as much more for the work you put on it in selling it than they will in getting it ready to sell.
If you buy a very good article at a very low price you congratulate yourself on having made a good bargain. Do you ask, “Was the man fairly paid for his labor who made this article? Or do you care whether he got a fair price? Are you this brother’s keeper?”
The opinion prevails, and has long prevailed in the world, that somehow in all business, dishonesty is more than a match for honesty.
On the contrary, absolute unswerving honesty carries the greatest power in the universe to bring us results, in business, in art, in all things.
This is a law in the science of life. The dishonest mind and the dishonest thought ever proceeding from that mind may gain through deceit and trickery a great deal of money. But that is only a partial success, for with such a gain there must come through the working of a law painful and fatal results to the individual. ,
Dishonest, tricky mind can never have the highest physical health. Trickery and deceit ultimately bring disease and death to the body. No gain in millions of money can compensate for a failing, decaying, diseased body.
There is a material honesty which prompts us to do what is right and just by our fellows in the world of material things. There is another, a higher, a spiritual honesty, which concerns entirely our dealing with ourselves, and whose results reach much farther than the honesty which refuses to steal and pays its bills regularly.
The higher honesty consists, first, in its ability to have an earnest desire to know the right way to live.
All people have not even the capacity to have this earnest desire. Their spiritual growth or evolution has not yet reached that point where they are capable of such earnestness. They are in that immature state where they are as weather-cocks turned hither and thither by every wind of opinion or influence which meets them. They cannot remain true to their higher self.
Absolute honesty involves far more than fair or unfair dealings in dollars and cents. If we profess a regard for another person that we do not feel we are not honest. When our manner of life is lived not in accord with our convictions of right and even of common sense—when we do as every one else does out of fear of being considered exceptional or singular we are not honest.
If in the family when the ” master of the house ” comes home, the manner, bearing and conversation of wife and other members is very different from that assumed during his absence,—if then their freedom of conversation is checked and as to matter quite changed, there is a great deal of deceit in that house. Yet through long habit the inmates may be scarcely aware of it.
When we see an evil in ourselves and will not own it to ourselves or to anyone else, we are not honest, and nothing helps more to get a fault out of ourselves than owning to it ourselves or confessing it (not to everyone) but to someone we can trust. A miserable pride born of the material mind wishes to keep up the delusion that we are perfect now and that everything we do is about right and cannot be improved.
If our lower or material nature is cowardly or thievish or murderous in inclination, it is far better to say thus: ” The lower part of myself is a coward. The higher is not, for it despises cowardice, my material part has murder in it, I own it, for if murder is there what good can come to me by denying it. But the God in myself would put this inclination out of me and in time will do so. My body has thievish tendencies. I am tempted to steal. My higher nature condemns this tendency, but it is sometimes overruled by the lower.”
Wherever a conviction is stifled there is dishonesty. That conviction comes of our higher self or the God in our self.
The lower or material self wars against it, opposes it and tries to forget it. We are then as two contending persons or a house divided against itself. The result is a struggle, and always with struggle comes pain or uneasiness. The higher part of our self sees a truth and tries to live up to it. The other the lower, the animal nature does not want to see it or live up to it, for it knows if the higher rules that its power will be destroyed—in fact the entire lower nature must be destroyed. It is then on the part of the lower self an aotual fight for existence.
If by word or act or in any way you constantly put out the thought of deceit you are drawing to your self the thought current of deceit. Whatever thought you draw to you materializes itself in your body. Your bone, blood, nerve and muscle are then literally a formation of this evil or crooked thought. You are then so to speak wrapped in an envelope (your body) which being a formation of deceit will compel you to see deceit only, think lies and act deceit even when you wish to speak, act or in some way assert the truth. It is this evil growth which makes it actually easier for some people to lie than speak the truth. The habit of lying has become fixed. They cannot part with it if they would. They can tell nothing without exaggeration. The lie slips out of their mouths ere they are aware of it. Or if not a spoken lie it is some form or assumption in life or manner, the real intent of which is to deceive.
As when people assume some form of religious observance to help maintain a position in society or business. That is an acted, not spoken lie.
We can at last become so covered up with a materialization of lies that we shall tell lies to ourselves and believe them.
Long contact with and practice of deceit will actually make the dishonest person think themselves honest. Their minds become skilled in evading the higher conscience and in making excuses for their dishonesty.
One and possibly the most frequent form of excuse is, “If I don’t do thus and so somebody else will.”
The Law which in its workings swerves not a hair’s breadth to right or left entails a terrible penalty for cultivating the mood of dishonest thought. It will so disturb our mental vision or spiritual perception as to make us believe the false instead of the true. It will cause us to be the more easily duped by the deceit of others. It will make the truth so unpleasant to us that we shall neither want to know it or believe it. Or it will make the truth seem ridiculous or false to us. Then if we are forced to believe the false, we must bring on ourselves all the sickness, pain and misery coming of false beliefs.
The more honest nature literally feels disagreeably the thought of the dishonest person when brought near him or her. It sees immediately through the dishonest person, weighs them, and is placed on guard against their wiles. So one power of honesty is to see and detect deceit, certainly a most valuable quality in any business.
We may do what seems right and just to us yet wrong to many other people and be far more honest than if we do only because others deem it the right thing. We are not on firm bottom when we accept other people’s standard of right and have none of our own. If we do the wrong thing, thinking at the time it was the best thing to do and with the highest motive, we shall soon be made to see our wrong. That is not the highest quality of goodness which is inspired by the motive of being thought good by others. In such case we may accept and live up to a standard made by our inferiors. This road leads to hypocrisy.
CONFESSION
Copyrighted 1892, by F. J. Needham
It is very injurious both to mind and body to live with the knowledge of our sins, or rather our immature tendencies, confided to no one and locked np in our own breasts. These thoughts (or things) if not talked out to some trusted friend, in full sympathy with us and in our vein of thought, will remain and generate more evil. The mind then fastens itself steadily upon them. We might say that it endeavors to draw nutriment from a food which it has eaten over and over again. This will eventually bring some form of disease.
The real food for both spirit and body is new ideas, new and newer conceptions of life, new and newer interpretations and meanings for all material things about us. We shall see things with a new eye every day. The thought, the plan, the opinion, the view we had yesterday are to be succeeded the next day by the newer thought, plan, opinion. When the mind grows to this state it is receiving its “daily bread ” of life, and this is new life for the body also. This constantly changing mental condition is constantly changing for the better the character and quality of the elements composing the body, and will prolong indefinitely the life of the body. In other words, when the ever-growing, ever-renewing spirit is able to give its life and idea to the physical organization and senses it will keep unbroken the link connecting it with the body, its physical instrument for expression.
” Old Age,” as it is called, sees things very much as it saw them fifty years before. Events, persons, objects, call up only the same train of association, the same old story told in connection with it hundreds of times. Such mind is fed with no new thought. It tries to live on the old. The result is the death of the body. Sometimes it dies suddenly —sometimes gradually. In other words, the spirit imbued by new idea has less and less power to sustain and keep its hold on the body. Failing memory, failing sight and hearing, tottering limbs and shrunken flesh are all signs that the spirit, starved from lack of its “daily bread” of new thought, is losing hold of the body.
To live in reality—to increase with years both in physical and mental vigor—to enjoy every phase of life more and more as the years roll on—to overcome the last great enemy, ” Death,” there must be a constant process of casting out the old thought when it has served its purpose in order to receive the new, even as your well to give the purest water must be cleansed of that which has long stood in it.
The old thought to be gotten out must be talked out, not to every one, but to the one person in whom we can put perfect trust and to whom we may tell every thought, every desire, every inclination, be it for right or wrong.
The only persons who can talk safely with each other and serve as mutual confessors each to the other, must be in the same current of thought. They must see things with the same eye. They must understand each other. They must divine or interpret each other’s motives and character through that intuition, or unspoken communion which always exists between kindred minds and by which a few words tell more than can be explained in an hour of spoken conversation.
The true husband and wife are the best confessors each to the other.
If we have a tendency to lie or steal or any other sin, there is lying and stealing element in flesh, blood and bone. When these thoughts are gotten out of the mind they will also leave the body, and the flesh and blood will be finer and better in their composition.
Any real sin held in the mind brings some form of disease or unrest to the body. All of us hold to-day more or less to injurious beliefs, prejudice and moods of mind of which we may be unconscious. We cannot have all our false beliefs revealed to us at once. The revelation must be gradual from day to day, from year to year. Nor are these errors to be revealed to us by others. The knowledge of self defect must come from within. Then it is clearly seen. That is God’s revelation to us. It is the spirit of the Infinite Mind working through us. It is the Supreme opening our eyes to rents, stains and sores on the mind which must be seen to be removed. Instead of being discouraged at finding in ourselves faults of which we were unconscious, we need to be glad—as the sailor is glad when he finds the leak which, undetected, migLt sink the ship. Our errors are then self-confessed. When we can confess to self and cease that foolish pride which refuses to see the leak or defect, we have made a great advance on the high road to eternal happiness. The Infinite Mind and Force will then send us the next vital need. That need is the proper person to whom we can confess.
That person will not be a babbler, and will be in communiou with and a drawer of new thought and life from the Supreme. Such person will also stand in the same need of making confession of fault as ourselves.
It is not the confession of the actual lie or theft or other fault that is of the greatest importance. It is the confession of the continual temptation or tendency to commit the fault.
When we say, for instance, .to the trusted friend, ” I know I have a tendency to lie or exaggerate my statements about events or persons. I don’t wish to do so. I don’t intend on commencing my conversation to do so. But often in the excitement of a conversation these exaggerations and highly colored statements are on my tongue and uttered almost before I am aware of it. My higher self does not approve of it, and in my hours of reflection and quiet reminds me how I deviate from telling the truth.”
Or one might say: ” I have a tendency to steal. I am not exactly a common thief, for there are other ways for stealing than open theft. But my higher conscience does not sustain me in these acts. I want to be rid of these tendencies.”
Or, ” I have feelings of envy and jealousy at sight of certain persons. Even the mere mention of their uames brings a thought of hatred and antagonism.”
Or, ” I hate the rich. I hate them as they roll past me in their carriages.”
Thoughts and minds like these injure the body and bring disease as surely as fire destroys wood. We are not rid of them when we try to feel differently. That is only hypocrisy to self. Of ourselves we cannot free ourselves from such mind. The better way is to look straight into self, acknowledge what we find there, and say, ” Yes, I do hate; I am envious.”
When thoughts like these are spoken out to the trusted friend in the earnest desire to be free from them and the acts they cause us to commit, they are literally made more physical than when held in the mind. Becoming more physical they are put into a shape, by means we cannot explain, to throw or cast them from us.
To have no one to talk to freely—to keep all our defects and secret errors to ourselves—tends to beget first lack of courage to own them to ourselves. It begets that false pride which is content to “assume a value, though it has it not,” and is satisfied to seem to be rather than to be. Such a mind becomes at last totally unable to say to anyone that it has any fault. At last it becomes totally blind to all defects of its own. It holds often unconsciously to the idea that it is perfection. It becomes supercilious, domineering, and ever dealing out judgment on others. It is fossilized in its own material belief.
The relief given by confession is working constantly in the every day life of men and women. We experience a sense of relief as if a burthen had been thrown oft when we tell our troubles to a sympathizing friend. Because on so talking them out to that friend the thought which did literally ” weigh on the mind,” is cast out. In giving you sympathy, the friend takes literally a part of your burthen. If you are the one so confessed to, you may afterward feel depressed and gloomy. Because you have absorbed the other’s troubled thought, and it is acting on you. You are bearing the other’s burthen.
We need to be very careful how we take these burthens of others’ troubles on ourselves. If we allow ourselves to become the recipients of many people’s troubles we shall eventually be borne down by the accumulation of their troubled mental conditions on our minds. We shall carry their depressions, their gloom, and even their physical sickness. We shall be swept into their troubled current of thought. The more people from whom we take these loads, the stronger will be that current. Your mind then is not your own. Your mind is at the mercy and is swayed and influenced by the depressed and unhealthy thought of those whose moods you have allowed to be poured into you. You may from these causes act differently in your business, and act injuriously to your interests, because in absorbing promiscuously the thoughts of others you may absorb also their lack of judgment. Many are damaged in health and fortune from this cause.
When you give your sympathy to another you give your force with it. You receive in return the thought and quality of the others’ mind. If their thought is inferior to yours—if their judgment is weak–if they are reckless, hasty and imprudent— if they lack energy—indeed, whatever may be their defects, you will absorb and for a time take on those defects. If you so take them on you will also act them out. When you give sympathy to another you graft that other person’s mind on yours.
You will not when daily demanding wisdom and guidance of the Infinite allow yourself to be confessed to by everyone or give your sympathy indiscriminately to those who ask it. Your sympathy is literally your life, your vitality, your vital force that keeps body and spirit together. The Supreme Wisdom will prompt you to put your hand up and restrain its flow to everyone that appeals for it. It will make it clear to you that in letting it go out to everyone whenever it is called for, you are draining yourself of your very life.
Confession has a far wider range than the telling our faults to auother. All Nature confesses by outward signs its sensations of pleasure or pain.
Theory of agony extorted by physical pain is a confession of pain. It bad better be uttered than repressed. Its utterance does give a certain relief, a fact to which many physicians have testified.
The exclamation of delight and the merry laugh is an external confession of receiving pleasure. Would not a great deal of happiness be prevented were we not allowed to give way to such expressions. They are necessary and vital to health and happiness. A household where these joyous confessions are repressed—where master or mistress frowns or sneers at what he or she may call frivolous, is not a happy household nor even a healthy one.
There is for us imperative need of an associate with whom we can be natural. We need at least one person with whom we can talk out and act out our moods—before whom we can take off our armor and not be continually on guard. We do not want to be always weighing our sentences so as to say the wisest and most correct thing. That is keeping the mental bow continually on a tension. It needs to be unstrung and often unstrung. We need at times the privilege and freedom of saying trivial things and possibly silly things without fear of being snubbed or criticised. We need privilege and freedom to act out the playful spirit. If it is always repressed, the capacity for expressing it will eventually be lost altogether. The body loses power to express it as in youth, and when this power is lost, health, vigor and elasticity of muscle are soon lost also.
We cannot get foolishness really out of us either unless it is talked out before some trusted companion. When we put out a thought in words we often see the error in that thought. Before being spoken we did not see that error. Why is it that when feeling irritable or peevish we make the tart or satirical reply we may have long had in mind to our friend, that so soon after being spoken we wish we could recall it. Why is it that when we discuss a matter with others in the friendly spirit, we see immediately on expressing an opinion of our own the error or defect in that opinion ?
We have unconsciously confessed that attitude. We have put the error into words. In putting the thought into words it is literally made more physical. Being more physical, our physical senses see its nature more clearly. An unspoken thought belongs to the domain of spirit. The spoken thought is so much spirit materialized or put into a certain physical organization.
Success in business is furthered through the principle of confession. Where two or more persons having a mutual interest in any undertaking talk out freely their views regarding it, and where each one is willing to acknowledge an error in judgment on seeing it, as one often will far quicker and more clearly on talking out in the spirit of concord, there is created a great force for success. Each one confesses his view of the matter. That is, each one in talking out his plan takes it out literally of the spiritual part of his being, and by putting it in words, that plan or thought is made more physical than when unspoken, and being more physical, whatever of it is defective or advantageous, is more clearly seen than before.
On the contrary, if at such a conference one or more of the parties do not talk out their views—if one of the partners pretends to agree with the others, and then when alone antagonize and put out thought of dissatisfaction with the plan agreed upon, there is a weakening of the force necessary to carry out that plan. Nothing is more injurious to the body, or retards more the growth of our powers, than carrying about dissatisfaction, which is never revealed to any one.
Thousands carry these thought burthens. They are in the heart of family circles.
Every thought demands its physical expression. That is, it demands to be talked out where we can safely talk. If thoughts are kept in we become shut up. We lose ability to open ourselves to others. This is an unnatural condition. It is analagous to a tree on which some power should be brought to prevent the growth of blossom buds and fruit These blossom buds and fruit are the expressions of that tree. If they are checked the tree will die. The buds and fruit have also a spiritual origin. They are the materializations of the mind existent in that tree. The spirit of that tree demands that all its spiritual part be expressed in some physical form. Exactly so do our spirits demand that all our spiritual selves be expressed or confessed in some physical form. Our thoughts are our spiritual part, and when put out in words or sounds they are expressed in physical form. They become then parts of the physical world around us, and act for good or ill more directly on the physical world than when repressed.
For this reason it is better if you have no one to talk to whom you can trust or before whom you dare say many secret things, to go to some retired place and talk them out in words. Say you are grieved or sick or lonely. Or you writhe in the grasp of some secret sin or habit. Or you suffer from envy or jealousy, or lack of system or order. Or you feel yourself a coward morally or physically. Talk it all out. Say what comes to your tongue to say. Get yourself accustomed to express your secret thoughts to yourself. You put your thoughts then into physical forms. You cannot get those thoughts out of you unless they are first put into physical forms. Then in such form they will go from you literally. They will be attracted to and assimilate with physical form or materialized thoughts of like order with themselves.
The Christ of Judea once drove from a lunatic an insane spirit. As this story is presented to us that spirit was not a personality. It was a mood, a current of insane thought acting on that man’s. It was immature thought. It had good in it but was, so to speak, unorganized. Christ threw from that man this current into a herd of swine. The hog as man has made it is a low, degraded animal. It is through man’s artificial and unnatural methods reduced from the grade it was in its natural state. The sickly unnatural thought thrown from the lunatic was in character and quality like the unnatural thought expressed in the swine. For every animal, every tree, everything physical that exists is an expression of some kind of thought. Thought of like quality is attracted to its like. The current from the lunatic was attracted to the swine. They served as magnets to attract it.
THE ACCESSION OF NEW THOUGHT
Copyrighted 1892, by F. J. Needham.
New thought is new life. When an invention, a discovery first breaks on the inventor’s mind, it fills him with joy, pleasure. The blood in his veins surges with a fresher impetus. The author or poet is lifted into ecstacy of emotion by a new conception ; I mean the relatively few creative authors and poets—not the many who, borrowing the fire of Genius, put it in their own lanterns and pass it ofl, often successfully as their own.
” A piece of good news,” as we term it in a period of gloom, depression, discouragement; the possible realization of a hope, the removal of an ill or danger, is but a thought after all—is but the picture in the mind of the thing desired—is not the thing itself, yet how it brings strength to the whole body.
An entertaining spectacle, a drama so perfectly acted as to absorb all one’s attention, an interview with one to whom we are strongly attracted, a pursuit, or exercise or art, which interests and fascinates—all these are as food and nourishment, stimulation to the body, and in the absorption or excitemerit of the moment, hunger for material food may pass away or be forgotten.
So we do not live by bread alone. But our natures demand ever new and newer food of thought. The play so charming when first seen may become tiresome through repetition. The air so fascinating when first heard, becomes worn through familiarity. There may even be longed for, a change from the quality of the thought of the mind most attractive to us.
I mean for all these a change, but only for a time. The play, the opera, the artist may in time be seen again and with increase of pleasure, either from the influence of former association, or from new growths and shadings in the artist’s rendering, or from new capacity in ourselves to see what we could not see before. Call, then, all new thought, and if you please new emotion, food, and food as necessary to make the relatively perfect physical and mental man or woman as is the bread we eat. We desire ever fresh food; we similarly desire and need always new and fresh thought.
Old thought—constant repetition of the same thought—involves decay, sluggishness of mind, sluggishness of body.
Suppose that we rose each morn with the absolute certainty that each day was to be a day involving to us more or less of the excitement of discovery in something useful and enjoyable, and also of similar use to others—something endurable for us and others—endurable for eternity—some unexpected branching out of yesterday’s truth, which for yesterday seemed fully grown—something telling us how life may be made still fuller of durable and harmless enjoyment; some great law or principle in Nature recognized possibly for the first time in some heretofore called ” little thing,” in the fall of a leaf, in the coloring of a leaf by the autumnal frost; in its almost equal vividness of color coming through the heat of Spring, in light shining out of decay.
In the myriad of suggestions which Nature is ever making, and which she will ever write and write so willingly—in the open mind, the receptive mind, the simple mind, whose pages not scrawled over with other’s opinions, or dogmatism or prejudice can be written upon, and after being written upon, have such writing read clearly by its own eyes.
What must be the pleasure to such mind to find to-day an increase of improvement in the quality almost despaired of yesterday—an increase of patience in doing the perplexing work—an increase of courage—an increase of perception to see beauty in what yesterday it passed by with indifference—an increase of power to control unruly appetite—an increase of power to drive away unpleasant and therefore injurious thought.
Would not such be encouraging, cheering, life-giving, health-giving thoughts? This order and accession of ever new thought knows no stop in any direction. It says: “Are you orderly to-day?” You will find some power and room and capacity to be more orderly to-morrow.” “Was your last effort in music, in painting, in composition, in acting, in oratory, your greatest triumph?” “You will find some way of making it more perfect to-morrow.” That will take nothing from the last effort. It is only a more beautiful and delicate tint for some already beautiful picture. The consciousness of such never ending growth of improvement is also food for the growing mind, other than bread. Yet it is bread. It is the ” Bread of Life,” and to be desired as ” Our Daily Bread.”
Would not also the thought each morning that a Great Power, an infinitely wise mind, was always ready to give more knowledge to help you through troubles—troubles from without and troubles from within. Would not such thought, and the trust begotten of it, be as food, strength, and healthy stimulation ?
Especially when the reality of this Power and its ability to aid had been proven to you many times, so that the hope had become a conviction ? Grant that new thought is healthy stimulation and also a necessary food to a more perfected life and the question arrives, ” How shall we get it ? ” In other words, ” How may we attune ourselves or how may we become more receptive to all that is beautiful and useful in Nature ? ” For in our religion the useful always implies the beautiful. It is almost farcical to answer, ” Live a pure life.” That implies so much; so much in so many cases to be done; so much of inherent tendency to be outgrown; so many difficulties to be met; so many conditions necessary for such life so difficult to make. The desire for accumulation seems a Law of our Natures. In its cnider working it accumulates money: in its higher form it would accumulate powers and qualities of mind. “I am $100 or $500 richer than I was this morning,” says, with satisfaction and pleasure at night, the money accumulator. That pleasant thought is to him a hit of the bread of life—but not of enduring life, or in the end, if at all healthy life.
” I,” may say another man at night, ” am richer than I was this morning by so much more patience, by a bit more of skill or dexterity in my art, by certain knowledge of which I knew nothing twenty-four hours ago.”
Are we yet fully awakened to the thought that we are receptacles for thought and with thought, knowledge, and with knowledge Power, and that our capacity for receiving all these may be limitless, and that the supply of knowledge, power, new thought in the Universe is limitless also, and that it is all ours to draw from, and that the Bank can no more break than Eternity can end.
There are thousands of things, events and scenes in your past life which it is more profitable to forget than to remember. By so forgetting you allow entrance for new idea, which is new life. By remembering you prevent the coming to you of such new idea and life.
By “forgetting,” I mean that you should avoid living in unpleasant past scenes and remembrances. Absolutely to forget or wipe out completely from memory anything it has once taken note of is impossible. For everything you have seen, learned, sensed or heard is stored away, and is capable under certain circumstances of being brought to view again.
In place of the term forgetting it would be better to say you should cultivate the power of driving from your mind and putting out of sight whatever makes you feel unpleasant or whatever you discover that is unprofitable to remember.
It is impossible absolutely to wipe out anything your memory has once written on its tablets, for whatever the scene, event or experience may have been, it has become a part of your real self or spirit. In other words, your spirit is made up of all its experiences and consequent remembrances extending to an infinite past. Of these some are vivid, some vague, and much is buried out of present sight, but capable under certain circumstances of being called to remembrance. To destroy such remembrance, if possible, would be to destroy so much of your mind.
All experiences are valuable for the wisdom they bring or suggest. But when you have once gained wisdom and knowledge from any experience, there is little profit in repeating it, especially if it has been unpleasant. You do actually repeat it when you remember it or live it over again in thought. This is what people are doing who brood over past misfortunes and disappointments.
It is what people are doing when they recall with regret their youth as bright and joyous as compared with the gloom of their middle or old age. Live in the pleasant remembrance of your youth, if you so desire. That will do you good. But do not set it in its brightness and freshness against a dark background of the present. Do not think of it in that vein.
Remember that the time of your infancy and youth, with all its freshness and newness, was also the time of some other people’s old age when the world seemed stale and joyless, when to them all that life seemed capable of yielding seemed exhausted, when nothing seemed to remain but to wither and die. Eemember also that to-day if the world seems less bright than formerly, if the sun seems setting instead of rising, it seems now to the boy and girl of ten or fifteen as it did to you at that age.
No person could hold his or her physical body and enjoy life who as they lived on lived in the past and refused to set or open their minds to the future. In so doing they accumulate more and more of the old and relatively lifeless thought, and this element materializes itself on the body. Their flesh, bone and blood then becomes an actual expression of the dead and inert spirit.
To live carrying such an ever-increasing load must result only in weakness and misery so long as the spirit can carry it.
But the mind rejecting the old which it has no use for and ever pressing on to the new, adds the new thought to itself, and this newness of idea will materialize a newer body.
You do actually make the “things before” pleasant or unpleasant for you according as you think of them in advance.
There is a class of people who, if in difficulties and any one suggests a way out, instantly raise objections and find difficulties in the plan proposed. When in thought we so find difficulties, we actually make them. To lay awake nights and brood, devise, turn over or invent possible coming troubles is force and industry ill employed in preparing the way for those troubles.
In all business we must press on in mind to the successful result. We must see in mind or imagination the thing we plan completed, the system or method organized and in working order, the movement or undertaking advancing and ever growing stronger and more profitable. To spend time and force in looking back and living past troubles or obstacles over again, and out of such living and mental action to conjure more difficulties or oppositions, is literally to spend time and force in destroying your undertaking, or in manufacturing obstacles to put in your own way.
Forgetting the things behind and pressing on to those before is a maxim having a thousand intensely practical applications. Every business success is founded on it.
Men who cease to live in old methods and press forward to new, achieve the greatest financial success. But men who having started out during their physical youth with the new, allow themselves with advancing years to hold on to what was new in their youth, but which is relatively old now, are really on the back track. Money may continue to pour in upon them, but their methods are really out of date, and a few more years will see their business superseded by the newer system.
If you were debilitated, weak or sick yesterday at any hour, do not commence to-day with living in thought in the same weakness or debility at that hour. Forget it, live away from it, and press onward to the thought of being strong, well and vigorous at that hour.
When you in mind look behind and live behind in the thought of the sickness, weakness or indisposition of yesterday, you are actually making the conditions for having the same physical troubles.
When you at the day’s commencement in thonght look before to the new thing, the thought of health and strength at the time your lack of vigor commenced, you are making the conditions for realizing such health and strength.
If it does not come the first day of such trial, try the next, and the next after that. The state you seek will come in time.
Perhaps you say to me in mind: But how can you prove these assertions ? They have not been realized in our time. “Decay and death at last overtake all.”
You can commence yourself to prove them. If you experiment with any of the methods here suggested for working thought to profitable result and you prove for yourself ever so little, you must thereby gain some faith in this law. If the law is by you proven a little, is it unreasonable to say it will prove more if followed in this direction ?
Unreasoning prejudices are bred out of this continual living in the past.
The man of sixty or seventy often lives in modes, usages and customs peculiar to his youth. He accepts these as the most fit and proper thing for him. He would probably regard with disfavor and prejudice the man who at his daily business should wear the knee breeches, stockings, waistcoat, ruffled shirt and cocked hat of the eighteenth century. Yet such style was common one hundred years ago. His great grandfather probably wore such a suit. Yet his great grandfather would probably have regarded with the same disfavor and prejudice the man dressed in the fashion of to-day. So a few years relatively have begotten these two unreasoning prejudices with the great grandfather and great grandson, founded only on the fact that they were fashions peculiar to the youth of each.
It is, of course, impossible for a person to fly in the face of popular custom or usage—to dress differently or in certain ways live differently without bringing on him unpleasant and even injurious results. For the action of many minds sending toward you ever the thought of prejudice, dislike or ridicule would tend to inj ure mind aud body.
But the sentiment which so sends toward another, who departs from any established custom this kind of thought, when that person affects in so doing no one’s peace or comfort, is a gross error. It is an unreasoning mental tyranny which so regards with hostile mind a man who should to-day adopt the costume of the ancient Greeks—a garb, by the way, more sensible and comfortable than oars.
Less than two hundred years ago such a sentiment mobbed the man in England who carried the first umbrella. This sentiment comes of that fossilized condition of mind which persists in living in the things that are behind and averts itself from such as are before.
Life is a continual advance forward. If we are advancing forward, it is better to look forward. And all are advancing, even the dullest, the grossest, and most perverse. A mighty, eternal and incomprehensible force pushes us all forward. But while all are so being pushed, many linger and look back. Unconsciously, they oppose this force. So to do is to court evil, pain, disease aud distress.
Whatever the mind is set upon, or whatever it keeps most in view, that it is bringing to it, and the continual thought or imagining must at last take form and shape in the world of seen and tangible things.
I repeat this assertion often in these books and in various forms of expression. Because this fact is the corner stone of your happiness or misery, permanent health and prosperity, or poverty. It needs to be kept as much as possible in mind. Our thought is the unseen magnet, ever attracting its correspondence in things seen and tangible. As we realize this more and more clearly, we shall become more aud more careful to keep our minds set in the right direction. We shall be more and more careful to think happiness and success instead of misery and failure. It is very wonderful that the happiness or misery of our lives should be based on what seems so simple a law and method. But so-called ” simple ” things in Nature on investigation generally turu out incomprehensible and ever deepening mysteries. What most concerns us is to know a cause or agency that will produce a given result. When we realize that we can and do think ourselves into what we are, as regards health, wealth and position, we realize also that we have found in ourselves ” the pearl of great price,” and we hasteu to tell our neighbor that he may seek and find in himself this pearl and power also, for no one is made poorer through his finding that which can belong to him alone, and all are made richer and happier as each finds his or her pearl, through the power it gives them to add to the general wealth and happiness.
Life is fuller of possibilities for pleasure than have ever been realized. The real life means a perpetual and ever increasing maturity. It means the preservation of the physical body, so that it can be used on this stratum of existence whenever the spirit desires to use it. It means the preservation of that body, not only free from pain and sickness, but free from the debility, weakness and decay of what we call ” old age,” which is in reality only the wearing out of the instrument used by the spirit for lack of knowledge to ever recuperate and regenerate it. Life means the development in us of powers and pleasures which fiction in its highest flights has never touched. It means an ever-increasing freshness, an ever-increasing perception and realization of all that is grand, wonderful and beautiful in the universe, a constantly increasing discovery of more and more that is grand, beautiful and wonderful, and a constantly increasing capacity for the emotional part of our natures to sense such happiness. Life is eternal in the discovery and realization of these joys. Their source is inexhaustible. Their quality and character must be unknown until they reach us. In the words of the Apostolic record, ” Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered the heart of man the things that God hath prepared for them that love Him.”
In so-called ordinary things we do not get out of our lives and our senses but the merest fragment of the pleasure they can be made capable of giving us. Our food is capable of giving far more pleasure to the sense of taste than it may now. We do not get near as much pleasure from the ear and eye as they are capable of giving. With bodies more highly developed and refined, food when taken into the stomach should act as a healthy stimulant and grant that impulse, vigor and bounding life it does to the young animal. The movement of every muscle, as in walking, can be made to give pleasure.
Through following the Spiritual Law, that peace of mind is in the future to come to many ” which passeth all understanding.” That it has not in the past been realized is no proof it will not be. Life, then, whether its forces are in activity or at rest, will be a perpetual Elysinm.
But millions of our race do not look forward to such joyous possibilities at all. They have never
heard of them. The great majority would not believe did they hear of them. They press ou in mind to what?
heard of them. The great majority would not believe did they hear of them. They press ou in mind to what?
To a belief which grows stronger with years that life is short, that old age and decay are absolute certainties and must come to all, that at a certain age of the body its powers must decrease, and that as weak and feeble old men and women now are before their eyes, so, in time, they must be, and that one great aim of life should be to lay up a store of money to ” provide for old age.”
These are not pleasant things to contemplate. The many do not contemplate them. They shut their eyes to these gloomy views of their future, but they believe in them just the same. They believe and dread. If they believe, they must in mind press on to such belief. It is this pressing forward that makes of the thing believed in a material or physical reality.
” Providing for old age ” makes the old age of the body, because the person so ” providing ” sees him or herself for years as helpless and decrepit. What the mind so projects for the future it is making for the future. A material thing (money) is relied on to secure one from ills, when all material things are quite powerless to prevent such ills. The rich man with an aged, worn, diseased body can only buy with his money a better room and bed to live in than the poor man. His money does not prevent disease and weakness. It cannot give him an appetite for the costliest food. In pain and anguish the Emperor is in all respects on the same level with the pauper, for in extreme misery a soft bed and numerous attendants give little or no comfort.
Now in all this, thought element worked in ignorance in the wrong direction proves that it brings a result, but a woeful one.
It is only the cultivation of the power of the spirit over the body that can prevent these ills. That power we first begin to cultivate and increase when we come to recognize and believe that mind or spirit is the power governing our bodies, and that whatever mind persistently images, thinks or imagines, it makes. Now, unconsciously, we image in the wrong direction. We think the old age or wearing out of the body must be, because, so far as we know, it always has been. We press on in imagination and unwelcome belief to gloom and physical decay. We hold these sad pictures ever in our minds. Having no faith in the brighter view, we do not look toward that view to life, and ever increasing life.
In the New Testament (the last revelation) we find the Christ and Apostolic teaching full of the sentiment of life, and life everlasting. Death is not argued or implied as an absolute necessity, but as an ” enemy ” which is ultimately to be destroyed.
It was never said or implied that the advent of ” greater revelations ” was not to be until millions on millions of years in the future. The dawn of such advent may be now. It is now, not because of any one man’s writings or assertions, but because many minds are now open to the reception of the greater revelation, which for centuries has been knocking at humanity’s door, but could not enter by reason of the obtuseness and dull ear of those whom it sought to arouse and benefit.
The only dead people in the Universe are the spiritually dead, those “dead in trespasses and sins,” who have not as yet learned to forget or rather to refuse to live in and depend on the relatively dead or inert element of earth instead of that drawn from a higher source.
Still the few in the vanguard pressing onward are crying out: ” Why, here under our noses is the greatest of all motive powers! Why, human thought is a real element, a real force, darting out like electricity from every mau’s or woman’s mind, injuring or relieving, killing or curing, building fortunes or tearing them down, working for good or ill, every moment, night or day, asleep or awake, carving, moulding and shaping people’s faces and making them ugly or agreeable.
Before you give so much of your thought to others, ask, in view of these possibilities, if some is not due to yourself. If you can build yourself up into a living power—if you can, with others, prove that physical health and vigor can take the place of old age—that all disease can be banished from the body—that material riches and necessities can come of laws and methods not now generally practiced, and that life is not the short, unsatisfactory, hopeless thing which at the best it now is, will you not to the world at large do a thousand fold more good than if you expended your thought in feeding a few hungry months or relieving a few physical necessities of others ?
Our richest men, our rulers, our famous men in art, science aud war, our professors, our ministers, our greatest successes, what is their end? Weakness, decay and disease. Our more thoughtful people admit that by the time they have learned something of life, it is time to die. The obituary from the living is at best an apology for the unsatisfactory ending of a human life.
Mankind demand something better. That demand, that cry has been swelling and increasing in volume for many centuries. Demand must always be answered. This demand is now being answered, first to the few, next to the many. New light, new knowledge and new results in human life and all it involves, are coming to this earth.
PRENTICE MULFORD.