CONTENTS
You Travel When You Sleep
Where You Travel When You Sleep
The Art Of Forgetting
How Thoughts Are Born
The Law Of Success
How To Keep Your Strength
Consider The Lilies
Art Of Study
Profit And Loss In Associates
The Slavery Of Fear
What Are Spiritual Gifts
The Process Of Re-embodiment
Re-embodiment Universal In Nature
GOD
A Supreme Power and Wisdom governs the Universe. The Supreme Mind is measureless, and pervades endless space. The Supreme Wisdom, Power and Intelligence is in everything that exists from the atom to the planet.
The Supreme Power and Wisdom is more than in everything. The Supreme Mind is everything. The Supreme Mind is every atom of the mountain, the sea, the tree, the bird, the animal, the man, the woman. The Supreme Wisdom cannot be understood by man or by beings superior to man. But man will gladly receive the Supreme thought and wisdom, and let it work for happiness through him, caring not to fathom its mystery.
The Supreme Power has us in its charge, as it has the suns and endless systems of worlds in space. As we grow more to recognize this sublime and exhaustless wisdom, we shall learn more and more to demand that wisdom draw it to ourselves, make it a part of ourselves, and thereby be ever making ourselves newer and newer. This means ever perfecting health, greater and greater power to enjoy all that exists, gradual transition into a higher State of being and the development of powers we do not now realize as belonging to us.
We are the limited yet ever growing parts and expressions of the Supreme Never Ending Whole. It is the destiny of all in time to see their relation to the Supreme and also to see that the straight and narrow path to ever-increasing happiness is a perfect trust and dependence on the Supreme for the all round symmetrical wisdom and idea which we individually cannot originate. Let us then daily demand faith, for faith is power to believe and power to see that all things are parts of the Infinite Spirit of God, that all things have good or God in them, and that all things when recognized by us as parts of God must work for our good.
You Travel When You Sleep
You travel when your body is in the state called sleep. The real “you” is not your body; it is an unseen organization, your spirit. It has senses like those of the body, but far superior. It can see forms and hear voices miles away from the body. Your spirit is not in your body. It never was wholly in it; it acts on it and uses it as an instrument. It is a power which can make itself felt miles from your body.
One-half of our life is a blank to us; that is, the life of our spirit when it leaves the body at night. It goes then to countries far distant, and sees people we never know in the flesh.
Sleep is a process, unconsciously performed, of self-mesmerism. As the mesmeric operator wills another into unconsciousness, so do you nightly will yourself, or rather your body, into a state of insensibility.
What the mesmeric operator really does is to draw the spirit out of the body of the person he mesmerizes. He brings the thought of his subject to some focus or centre, as a coin held in the hand. While thus centered, the thought (or spirit) of the subject is put in such a condition that he can most easily affect it by his will. He wills then the person’s spirit out of his body. This done, he throws his own thought in that body. It is then as a house left open by its owner. The mesmerizer then takes possession of that body by the power of his own thought. It is not the subject at all who sees, feels, and tastes as the operator wills: it is the spirit or thought of the mesmerizer himself, exercised in another body, temporarily left vacant by its own spirit.
Thought is a substance as much as air or any other unseen element of which chemistry makes us aware. It is of many and varying degrees in strength.
Strong thought or mind is the same as strong will. Some persons are so weak in thought, as compared with the practiced mesmerizer, that they cannot resist him. Others of even stronger thought can give themselves up voluntarily to his control. You need not be overpowered by anyone in this way, providing you resist them in mind, and call upon the higher power to assist you, if you feel their thought overcoming you.
When we “go to sleep,” the spirit has been by its day’s workings sent widely scattered away from the body; with so little of its force left by it, the body falls into the trance state of slumber. As the mesmerizer draws the spirit away from the body of his subject, so has our spirit drawn itself away from our bodies by its many efforts during the day.
Your body is not your real self. The power that moves it as you will is your spirit. That is an invisible organization, quite distinct and apart from your body. Your spirit (your real self) uses your body as the carpenter does his hammer or any tool to work with.
It is the spirit that is tired at night. It is exhausted of its force, and therefore not able to use the body vigorously. The body is really then as strong as ever, as the carpenter’s hammer has the same strength when his arm is too weak to use it.
The spirit is weak at night, because its forces have in thought been sent in so many different directions during the day that it cannot call them together. Every thought is one of these forces, and a part of your spirit. Every thought, spoken or unspoken, is a thing, a substance, as real, though invisible, as water or metal. Every thought, though unspoken, is something which goes to that person, thing, or locality on which it is placed. Your spirit, then, has during the day been so sent in a thousand, perhaps ten thousand, different directions. When you think, you work. Every thought represents an outlay of force. So sending out force for sixteen or eighteen hours, there is not at night sufficient left in or near the body to use it. The body therefore falls into the condition of insensibility we call sleep. During this condition the spirit collects its scattered forces, its thoughts which have been sent far and wide; it returns with its powers so concentrated to the body, and again possesses it with its full strength. It is when scattered as so many scattered rills of water trickling in many directions. Put all these together in a single volume, and you have the power that turns the millwheel.
Could you call all of your spirit at once to its centre, and so collect its widely scattered forces, you could be fresh and strong in as many minutes as it now takes hours to rest you. This power was known to the first Napoleon, and sustained him for days with very little sleep during the crisis of his campaigns when his energies were taxed to the utmost. It is a power which can be acquired by all through a certain training.
It is done by first placing the body in a state of as complete rest as possible; stopping all involuntary physical motions, such as the swinging of limbs, tapping with the foot, or drumming with the fingers. All such involuntary movements waste your force, and, worse, train you unconsciously to a habit hard to break, of wasting force. The involuntary working of the mind, the straying of thought in every direction, — towards persons, things, plans, and projects, — the useless frettings over cares great and small, must be similarly stopped, and the mind for a few minutes made as near a blank as possible. Concentration of thought on the word ” in-drawing,” or ” drawing into self,” or the mind-picture of your spirit with its fine electric filaments reaching to persons, places, and things far from you, being all drawn back, and massed in a focus, is a help to do this; because whatso you image in your mind is a spiritual reality. That is, what you image, you are actually in spirit and by spirit doing. Every plan or invention clearly seen in thought is of thought-substance, as real a thing as the wood, stone, iron, or other substance in which afterward it may be embodied and made visible to the body’s eye, and made to work results on the physical stratum of life.
If a man thinks murder, he actually puts out an element of murder in the air. He sends from him a plan of murder as real as if drawn on paper; its thought is absorbed by others; so is this element and unseen plan of murder absorbed by other minds; it inclines them towards violence if not murder. If a person is ever thinking of sickness, he sends from him the element of sickness; if he thinks of health, strength, and cheerfulness, he sends from him constructions of thought affecting others to health and strength as well as himself. A man sends from him in thought what he (his spirit) is most built of. “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Your spirit is a bundle of thought; what you think most of, that is your spirit. Imagine, then, yourself as such a being, drawing in all these filaments, sent and placed as they are to so many things. The thoughts so passing from you in one minute could hardly be plainly written out in an hour. You gather them to a centre. You have then gathered in and concentrated your full motive power; then you can put all its force on anything you please. When the eye and mind are put on any single object that does not tax the energies, say a spot in the wall, the positive thought or filaments reaching out are drawn in to the common centre. Your absorption on any single thing loosens them from their near or far point of contact. Before such loosening, the spirit is as the expanded hand and fingers. When the thought is drawn in, the spirit is as the closed or clinched fist.
When thought is sent out to anything, you send out your force. When it is centered in a single thing, and so drawn in and kept from straying every moment, you are drawing in force.
The Hindoo “adept” becomes able, through a certain training of mind, to send his spirit or himself from his body. It is still connected with it by the fine unseen current of life known in the Bible as the “silver thread.” When that thread is snapped, body and spirit are completely severed, and the body dies. The “adept” has allowed himself to be buried alive. Rice has been sown over his grave, and sprouted. Seals were put in his coffin, and the grave carefully watched. He has so remained for weeks, and when dug up “came to life.”
The real man was never buried at all. It was only his body in the self-induced trance state, that was buried. Between his body and spirit, possibly miles away, the fine thread of spirit kept up the body’s life, or rather such supply of life as the body needed to keep it from decay. When the body was dug up, his spirit returned, and took full possession of it. He was able to do with his own body what the mesmerizer does with the body of his subject. He sent his own spirit out of it; the mesmerizer sent his subject’s spirit out. Before so sending out his spirit, the adept makes his mind a blank. Before drawing out the spirit of his subject, the operator causes the subject to make his own mind a blank ; in other words, he stops the resisting forces of the other person’s thought by turning all his thought to a centre.
Your spirit can, and does frequently, go from your body to other places during sleep. It is then still connected with it by this thread of exceedingly fine element. This can be drawn out to a great distance. It is as an expanding or contracting electric wire connecting your spirit with the instrument it operates, your body.
This power of the spirit so to leave the body accounts for the phenomenon of persons being seen in two places far distant at the same time. It is the spirit that is seen by some clairvoyant eye. It is the “ double,” the “ doppel ganger “ of the German, the “ wraith “ of the Scotch. The spirit may even be far from the body just previous to the body’s death. It is only the feeble supply of life sent it through the connecting thread, which causes the involuntary throes (so called) of dissolution. These are not as painful as they seem. The real self, the spirit, even then may be unaware of the “ death-bed scene.” It may go to some person, possibly at a distance, to whom it is much attracted; and thereby is solved the mystery of the apparitions, seen by distant friends, of persons whose deaths at or about the time of such appearances were not heard of until months after.
Sometimes people, during periods of sickness, fall unconsciously into a state where the spirit leaves the body, without snapping the threads of life. The body’s trance has then been mistaken for its real death, and it (the body) has been buried alive. The spirit has been compelled to return to its body in the coffin. The thread could only be severed after such return.
Your real being is ever sending out, with each thought, a fine electric ray or filament, representing so much of your life, your force, your vitality, and reaching to the object, place, or person to which such thought is sent, be it six feet or thousands of miles from your body.
Your thought is your real strength. When you lift a weight, you put your thought on the muscle that lifts. The heavier the weight, the more of your thought do you put on it. If, in so lifting, a part of your thought is turned in some other direction, if someone talks to you, if something frightens or annoys you, a part of your strength or thought leaves you. It goes to whatever has taken away a part of your attention from lifting.
It is mind, thought, spirit, that use the muscle to lift, as we use a rope to pull up a weight. There is no lifting or working without intelligence. Intelligence, thought, mind, and spirit mean about the same thing.
It does not matter, in order to give strength, whether the spirit, when once called together, be near the body or at a distance from it. So that it brings its forces (its thoughts) together, be it far from its body or near it, it is strong; and when it again takes possession of your body, and wakes it up, it is able to use the body with its full strength.
But the spirit may remain scattered all night. It may never be able to bring its forces together at any time. It may be living, as many now are, with its thought always in advance of the act it is now doing or trying to do. It is walking the body and sending out its force (its thought) to the place it hurries to. It is writing with the body, and thinking of something else. When it frets, it sends out force to the thing fretted about. These states of mind, acts of thought, and useless waste of force become at last so confirmed in habit, that the spirit may lose all power of bringing all its strength together. In this state it gathers no strength by night or day.
Sleeplessness comes of the difficulty of the spirit to bring itself to a centre and collect its forces. Insanity comes of the total inability of the spirit to focus its thoughts. The permanent cure for sleeplessness must commence in the daytime. You must drill your mind to put its whole thought on the act you are now doing. If you tie your shoe, think shoe and nothing else. Then you bring yourself to a centre, and collect your forces. If you tie your shoe, and think of what you are going to buy the next hour, you are sending needlessly half of your force from yourself. You are in reality trying to do two things at once. You do neither well. You are scattering your spirit on as manythings as you think of while tying the shoe. You are cultivating the bad habit of scattering your force, until such habit becomes involuntary. You are making it more and more difficult for your spirit to collect itself together. By so doing, you make it more difficult for the spirit to return with strength to its body in the morning, er to leave it at night. You can get no healthy sleep at night unless your spirit does withdraw from its body. Sleeplessness means simply that your spirit cannot leave its body.
If you fall into the dangerous habit of fretting, your spirit may fret as much on going from its body at night as when using it in the daytime. Or, if you are of a quarrelsome disposition, it may be quarrelling, fighting, and hating all night, and so return to its body without any strength to use it; because all quarrelling, if only in thought, is constantly using up force.
It is for this very reason dangerous and unhealthy to let the “sun go down on your wrath;” that is, to have in mind, just before the body’s eyes close in sleep, the recollection of the persons you dislike, and be then engaged in sending hating thought to them. The spirit will keep up the process after it leaves the body. To hate is simply to expend force in tearing yourself, your spirit, to pieces. Hate is a destructive force. Good-will to all is constructive : it builds you up stronger and stronger. Hate tears you down. Good-will to all draws to you healthy and constructive elements from all with whom you come in contact. Could you see the actual elements as they flow from them to you, in their liking for you, you would see them as fine rills of life feeding yours. Could you see the contrary elements of hatred which you may excite in others, you would see them flowing toward you as dark rays or rills of dangerous, poisonous substance. If you send out to it its like, the thought of hatred, you only add to the unhealthy force and power of that element, because these two opposed and dangerous elements meet and mingle, act and re-act on those who send them, ever calling on each to send fresh supply of force to keep up the war, until both are exhausted. Self-interest should prompt people to hate none. It weakens the body, and causes disease. You never saw a healthy cynic, growler, or grumbler. Their soured thought poisons them. Their bodily disease originates in their minds. Their spirits are sick. That makes the body sick. All disease originates in this way. Cure the spirit, change the state of the mind, replace the desire to make others feel disagreeably by that of making them feel agreeably, and you are on the road to cure disease. When the spirit originates no warring, hating, gloomy, despondent thought, no manner of unpleasant thought, the body will take no disease whatever.
You can only oppose successfully the hatred or evil thought of others by throwing out toward it the thought of good-will. Good-will as a thought-element is more powerful than the thought of hate. It can turn it aside. The “ shafts of malice,” even in thought, are real things. They can and do hurt people on whom they are directed, and make them sick. The Christ precept, “Do good to them that hate you,” is based on a scientific law. It means that thoughts are things, and that the thought of good can always overpower that of evil. By power is here meant power in as literal a sense as in speaking of the force that lifts a table or chair. The fact that all thought, all emotion, all of what is called sentiment, or qualities such as mercy, patience, love, etc., are elements as real as any we see, is the cornerstone to the scientific basis of religion.
What you call dreams are realities. Your spirit away from your body at night goes to and sees persons and places. To some of these you may have never gone with your body. You remember on the body’s awakening very little of what you have seen. What you do remember is mixed pell-mell together. That is because your memory of the body can hold but a little of what is grasped by the memory of your spirit. You have two memories, one trained and adapted to the life of your body, the other of your spirit. Had you known of the life and power of your spirit from infancy, and recognized it as a reality, the memory of your spirit would have been so trained that it would remember all of its own life and bring it back to you on the awakening of the body. But as you have been taught to regard even your spirit as a myth, so you make of its memory a myth. Were a human being taught from infancy to discredit the evidence of any of its senses, then that sense would be blunted and almost destroyed. Let all associated with a child for years deliberately set
to work and tell it that they could not see the sky or houses, fields, or other familiar objects at hand; and with none allowed to break the delusion, that child’s eyesight as well as its judgment would be seriously affected. We are similarly taught to deny all the senses and powers of our spirits; or, rather, the real powers of ourselves, of which the senses of the body are a faint counterpart, are persistently denied. Substantially we are taught that we are nothing but bodies. This is equivalent to telling the carpenter that he is nothing but the hammer he uses.
If in a so-called dream you see a person who died years ago, you see simply a person whose body, being worn out, could no longer be used by him on this stratum of life.
Where You Travel When You Sleep
There are senses of your body, and other senses of your spirit. Your spirit is an organization distinct from the body. It has eyes and ears, touch, taste, and smell. Its eyes can see ten thousand times farther than the eye of the body. Its other senses are infinitely superior. You are now using a very inferior set of senses. The eye of your body, compared with the eye of your spirit, is a mere peep-hole. The senses of the body are relatively coarse as compared with those of the spirit. They are for use in a relatively coarser stratum of life. You are better off in a coal-mine with a coarse miner’s suit than with one of silk or velvet. Your body with its coarser senses is for use in this, the coarser, level of life. Yet it may be for you a possibility to slip off this suit (the body), and go with your spirit (leaving for a time the coarse suit behind) to a higher and finer order of life.
You have now a clairvoyant eye and a clairaudient ear. But these are not opened. The clairvoyant eye is closed like those of some animals in very early infancy. In a few persons it is opened prematurely and in advance of the other spiritual senses. This is a premature ripening.
The clairvoyant eye is the spiritual eye. It is an eye put out at the end of a thought. Send your thought to London, and, if clairvoyant, you send that eye with it.
A clairaudient ear is an ear sent with a thought. Clairvoyance and clairaudience are not special gifts for particular people. They belong to all, and are in the germ in all.
Your spiritual senses have been so crippled from birth, through lack of exercise, that they are not in “ working condition.” When you leave your body at night, you are as a person in a dazed or bewildered state. You see without seeing. You hear without hearing. You are as one stunned by a sudden shock or blow. Then the spiritual eye may see, but it leaves no distinct memory of what it sees. You may in such state have a remembrance of a crowd of faces about you — but that is all. In a condition somewhat resembling this does your spirit roam about on slipping away from its body. You are as an infant just let out of doors. You go where a vague whim or fancy carries you. You have left the physical senses of sight, hearing, and touch, in the body. You have now only a set of totally uneducated senses to guide you. You have been taught al1 your life to deny the very existence of these senses. To teach a child unbelief, say, in its hearing or eyesight, from its earliest consciousness, will result in injury to its sight. The child educates itself gradually to use the senses of its body correctly. An infant has no idea of distance. It reaches out for things far from it, imagining they are near enough to be touched. It will walk off a precipice if left to itself. It learns by painful experience not to touch hot coals or hot iron. It requires years to educate it to a proper use of the physical senses.
Your spirit has its own senses, which are not even recognized. They are left year after year without any exercise or training. You do not see, in what you call dreams, with the physical eye at all, or hear with the physical ear. You see with the spiritual eye; you hear with the spiritual ear.
You are literally lost on going to sleep, when you go into your spirit life. You then grope about like an infant with its untrained physical senses. What idea of the senses you do have, you estimate entirely by those of your body which you have left behind. You then carry your real selves about under the impression that you are still living in the mask you wear in the daytime (your body), and estimating and judging all you see or sense by a set of inferior senses (the physical), which you are not using at all.
You are nightly, on passing out of the body, really in a spirit life; yet you are dead to this fact, because you are using the spiritual senses as you use the physical in the daytime. You are as one using a crutch, when you have two sound legs which need only practice to make you a good walker. Many people who are completely severed from their bodies are in precisely the same condition. You may go mostly when away from the body among these people. You may be attracted to them, because your spirit has in its uneducated state been so long in the habit of blindly groping among them. Your spirit has fallen into this habit just as it, when using the body, falls into ruts of habit, which are often extremely difficult to break off. You see men daily drifting about without aim or purpose, waiting, hoping for something to “turn up” to amuse them. A man without aim or purpose in life soon becomes inferior in intellect. Your spiritual self is in the same condition, from a similar cause. It is often surrounded by others out of the body without aim or purpose, and who know not what to do with themselves.
Fiction has never devised the picture literally realized every night among you. These thousands on thousands of blind beings freed temporarily from their bodies are straying, wandering, groping everywhere — in your houses, your streets, your fields — some near, some far away. They are neither asleep nor awake. They wander as if in a dream which is not a dream. Sometimes the spiritual eye opens, and they see acquaintance or stranger, scene familiar or unfamiliar. But the recognition is not always a satisfactory one. You have been unconsciously taught not to believe in the reality of what you see in this state. Therefore you do not accept it as a reality, and what the mind in any condition persistently refuses to accept as a reality will not frame itself to be held by memory as one.
It is a fact that some people on the death of the body still think they have their physical bodies. They may remain in this state for years. They go about, eat, sleep and live in every way in that grade of existence which, though unseen by us, is all about us. Because everything we see, hear, touch, handle, smell or taste has on its grade its correspondent or spiritual counterpart, and can be used exactly as it is here. There are no sudden transitions of any sort in Nature. People on passing from the physical body do not enter on any glorified condition of existence, unless they In Mind are living such existence on earth. They go where everything is in strict correspondence with their daily thought. Friends in the unseen world may on their first arrival receive them as guests in their houses. But they are only guests, and cannot remain in those circles unless in spirit they belong to them. If their thought be lower, they must, after a time, return to the order or stratum of thought in which they lived on passing out of the body. They cannot commence building upward on that. You Must build your “mansion in the skies” yourself. You can commence consciously building it here in the body to greater advantage than to commence after you lose your body. That you must build it yourself is the law of nature. It is not because any individuality, however wise and powerful in any of the advauced stages of existence, says you must. All of these, up to orders of mind beyond our power to comprehend, have been and are now the builders of their temples (themselves). What most they want of us is to build in like manner our own and with the same blissful results. Because such building is simply the building of our own individual happiness into grander, broader and ever-broadening proportions.
Your first error on passing from the body in the state known as sleep lies in thinking that you are moving about your physical body. You must educate yourself out of that mistake. You must fix it in your mind before going to sleep that if you wake up in what you call a dream you are not then using your physical body. You will fix in your mind before going to sleep, so far as you can, your conception of yourself as a spirit — or, rather, as the unseen organization which during the day uses your body.
The last thought before going to sleep is the one most likely to remain with you on leaving the body. If persisted in, you will find it mingling itself with what you call your dreams. That is, it will be the first clue towards the recognition of your real self when you are away from your body.
Keep this fact then, this recognition of yourself as a spirit, in your mind, and it will be a great help to your unseen friends in the other life to get near you and waken you to the knowledge of your real self.
The wiser and more powerful order of spirit’s, who may be able to give you much of their thought in the daytime, or while you are using the body, may not be able to give you so much of it during your escape from the body, owing to the condition above spoken of. Instead, therefore, of going into a higher region of thought at night, you descend, through blindness and mere force of habit, into a lower one. You may be, while using the body, educated up to and enter into their higher realm of thought by day. Yet at night, being so educated in part in the school of physical sense, you cannot carry that education with you. You walk with the spiritual eye and ear, thinking these the physical eye and ear. All this results in a confusion which no language can fully express, because no similar condition in this life can be clearly realized or illustrated.
You want to give your powerful unseen friends a clue by which, on passing from the body, they can come nearer to you and help you to wake up, find your real self, and go where you belong. The thought of yourself as a spirit, as a being distinct and apart from your body, will serve as this clue. A thought is as real a thing as a telegraph-wire. It will be the telegraph-wire ‘twixt you and them, because they will not stay permanently with you in your gropings on the cruder stratum of life. They could if they wished; but they want to draw you up to their abodes, — their country, their realm, — where all is more beautiful and fairy-like than ever pen or picture realized here; where, in part, at least, you may now belong. To bring back of this the remembrance to the daytime while your spirit uses the body, would be to bring the celestial life to earth. It would be as a temptation in the right direction to leave off the coarser pleasures for the sake of realizing and living in the higher. Because all self-denial has really but this one purpose: that of cutting loose from fleeting pleasure that leaves a lasting pain, to obtain a far greater pleasure that leaves no pain at all.
As persistently you fix on going to sleep this idea in your mind, that you are no longer using the body’s senses, you will after a time, in what you have called the dream, find yourself recalling this fact. You will find yourself saying, “This is as real as my body or day life. I am only in a different state of existence.”
Your present life of the spirit, away from the body at night, is very often one that exhausts more than it refreshes. Unconsciously you may drift toward persons and scenes repulsive to you. You are carried to them by lower currents of thought. You drift into these tides as an ignorant child wades into the stream, and is carried beyond its depth and off its foothold by an outer and stronger current; knowing nothing of the fact that thought does move in currents, and that the lower one of inferior or evil thought is most powerful near the earth, — nothing of your powers and senses as a spirit, you are as helpless as a babe nightly on passing from your body.
Could you get a start in the right direction toward the upper and superior regions of thought, — could you ascend through the current of dark and crude thought, which everywhere surrounds you,:— you would find yourself in a land of beauty, sunshine, and flowers; of grand scenery and fairy landscape. You would associate there with the people you most wish to see, and to whom you in spirit belong. You would repose in a luxurious languor, yet still be able to note scenes of indescribable charm by the eye.
You would be conscious of life, and still be at rest. You would drink in life with every breath. You would return with this life to your body in the morning. Your night of bliss would be both as a rest in thought and a healthy stimulation to your life in the body. Your spiritual senses would open in this elevated thought-atmosphere. You would be freed from what is now a nightly slavery. Your connection with the higher regions of thought would become permanent, and you could attain the power of returning to them at any time to refresh yourself when overcome by the cruder thought which now surrounds you.
Every low place of resort, every saloon filled with hangers-on more or less under the influence of stimulant, every and any place, no matter what its conventional character, if it be a place of deceit, of trickery in trade, is an actual spring of low thought. This thought flows from it, as real, though unseen, as water from a spring. In any great city all these are as so many thousands of springs of filthy thought-element, near together. It is not a live, rapid current. It is more like a slowly moving bed of filthy ooze, in which you are mired and slowly borne along. Every tattling, gossiping, scandal-mongering group of people is an additional spring of such thought. So is every family where disorder, sour looks, cross words, and peevishness or petulance reign. Good society, as well as that called inferior in the social scale, can contribute to this inferior thought-current. The purest spirit cannot live in this thought-current without being unfavorably affected by it. It requires continual outlay of force to resist it. You become mixed and entangled in it, blinded by its obscurity, weighed down by the burthen it brings. You may have noticed how much of inordinate desire you are freed from on getting in the open country far beyond the city limits. Mountains are more free from this thought. It is an element which conforms to the law of gravitation. Low thought runs to the lowest places, as does anything heavy, crude, and coarse. Trade, commerce, and manufacture unfortunately demand cities to be built on low levels, either at the seaside or river-bank. In the coming higher civilizations, the making of the most perfect men and women, and the discovery and making of real and permanent pleasures, will be the chief pursuit. Cities will then be built on hills or mountains, so that all the cruder emanations, seen and unseen, shall readily drain away. With so much of this injurious unseen element about you, you may see an additional necessity for forming groups of people who are naturally aspiring and more pure, who shall frequently come together, and by conversation and silent communion generate a current of purer thought. The more of this they make through such co-operation, the more power is given each individual of the group to keep himself, whether in the body by day or out of it at night, from being unfavorably affected, and perhaps overwhelmed, by these prevailing destructive tides. You are then forming a chain of connection with the higher, purer, and more powerful region of thought. The more you earnestly seek to form such connection, the stronger will be the chain. You do not realize the strength of these “powers of darkness ” all about you, or the odds against you in trying to stem this dark tide alone.
The thought brought to and made by a very few persons, who so meet in concert, and who are so alive to its benefits as to love to meet, is of a value you cannot overestimate. It is the more powerful thought. It is in part the thought and, with the thought, the force of wise, powerful, and beneficent spirits who will be attracted to your group, and who come with every desire to aid you. It will clear your brain, make stronger your body, drive out disease, and give you new ideas and plans for every kind of legitimate business. You do not now realize how much you are kept from success and on a lower level of life through unconsciously absorbing and being swayed or partly blinded or confused by the low thought-current about you. You accept conditions in life as a necessity, which, were your intellects keener and sharper, you could avoid. You may absorb timidity from others. You may so absorb inertia and lack of energy. Your periods of lack of confidence and indecision may be results of absorption of this lower element. You may not know how blind you are, and what a different man or woman you might be did you see more clearly what could injure and what could benefit you. Your generation of the more powerful thought, through meeting in a concert of pure motive, inquiry for truth, and desire to benefit others as well as yourselves, would clear your intellect, increase your energy, lead you away from errors and stumbling-blocks, improve your health, and build you up into a force which would bring to you every material good thing. It is the way for “seeking first the kingdom of God,” ” when all these things shall be added unto you.” They are added because the force you create in yourselves through these meetings as a family and fraternity will be as an actual strong magnet, attracting all things which your wisdom says will benefit you.
The “New World” rediscovered by Columbus is a small affair as compared with the one lying at our very doors, and into which we unconsciously enter every night. We look with the eye of the body across our rooms, our streets, our fields, saying there is nothing between us and the walls, the house, the forest, or the mountain, but ” empty air;” when that space may be crowded with structures, with people, with the unseen copies of all we see about us.
The visions produced by the use of opium and hasheesh are realities. They allow of a more complete escape of the spirit from the body. The spirit receives an artificial strength through the elements taken from the poppy or hemp. Aided by this, it can travel farther, and is stimulated to go out of its habitual ruts when the body sleeps. It does go into higher and more sublimated regions, and sees in them glories never realized on earth. But it is in this way forced into elements too fine for it (the spirit) to retain and bring back to the body. It cannot hold them, and so returns to the body with no strength. Hence the re-action and ihisery of the opium eater or smoker, when the effect of the drug is off. You would soon be in a condition somewhat similar, were the higher spirits to carry you (as they could) to their own country, before you had spiritually grown up to it. The elements you would absorb there would be too fine for use in this stratum of life. Yet continued aspiration can make your spirit fit to receive of these elements, and appropriate them, on its return to earth. Your whole organization would be finer then than now. You would be an inhabitant of the two worlds, the physical one about you, and that grade or stratum of the spiritual where you naturally belonged. This is to be the life of the future on this planet. This is the “New Jerusalem” let down to earth.
More men and women in the world’s history have awakened to this life, and lived in it, while using their bodies, than is generally known. Paul speaks of being ” caught up to the third heaven, and there seeing unutterable things.” Swedenborg was in close relationship with this world. There have been many others during the ages; but they were discreet enough to keep their knowledge to themselves, knowing their story would not in their time be credited, and that to tell it would bring on themselves unpleasant results.
The time for such secretiveness is now over. More minds awakened and able, at least, to entertain these truths, are now on earth than ever before. These are re-embodied spirits who have entered on another earth life, with a partial knowledge of these truths, and who will recognize them so soon as they are boldly put forth.
The age for materiality to crush out spiritual truths has passed. The age wherein spiritual truth shall assert itself, and rule materiality, has in reality commenced. It matters not how small is the apparent nucleus or group of persons alive to these truths. A pin-hole can reveal a vast landscape. The point of contact where the rope is made fast to the ship, to pull her off the shoal, is but a few inches wide, but that is all the space required to bring the force to bear on the vessel; and so the relative few who now can receive these things will be the power to raise the many upward.
The Art Of Forgetting
In the chemistry of the future, thought will be recognized as substance as much as the acids, oxides, and all other chemicals of Today.
There is no chasm betwixt what we call the material and spiritual. Both are of substance or element. They blend imperceptibly into each other. In reality the material is only a visible form of the finer elements we call spiritual.
Our unseen and unspoken thought is ever flowing from us an element and force, as real as the stream of water we can see, or the current of electricity we cannot see. It combines with the thought of others, and out of such combinations new qualities of thought are formed, as in the combination of chemicals new substances are formed.
If you send from you in thought the elements of worry, fret, hatred, or grief, you are putting in action forces injurious to your mind and body. The power to forget implies the power of driving away the unpleasant and hurtful thought or element, and bringing in its place the profitable element, to build up instead of tearing us down.
The character of thought we think or put out affects our business favorably or unfavorably. It influences others for or against us. It is an element felt pleasantly or unpleasantly by others, inspiring them with confidence or distrust.
The prevailing state of mind, or character of thought, shapes the body and features. It makes us ugly or pleasing, attractive or repulsive to others. Our thought shapes our gestures, our mannerism, our walk. The least movement of muscle has a mood of mind, a thought, behind it. A mind always determined has always a determined walk. A mind always weak, shifting, vacillating, and uncertain, makes a shuffling, shambling, uncertain gait. The spirit of determination braces every muscle. It is the thought-element of determination filling every muscle.
Look at the discontented, gloomy, melancholy, and ill-tempered men or women, and you see in their faces proofs of the action of this silent force of their unpleasant thought, cutting, carving, and shaping them to their present expression. Such people are never in good health, for that force acts on them as poison, and creates some form of disease. A persistent thought of determination on a purpose, especially if such purpose be of benefit to others as well as ourselves, will fill every nerve with strength. It is a wise selfishness that works to benefit others along with ourselves. Because in spirit, and in actual element, we are all united. We are forces which act and re-act on each other, for good or ill, through what ignorantly we call “empty space.” There are unseen nerves extending from man to man, from being to being. Every form of life is in this sense connected together. We are all “members of one body.” An evil thought or act is a pulsation of pain thrilling through myriads of organizations. The kindly thought and act have for pleasure the same effect. It is, then, a law of nature and of science, that we cannot do a real good to another without doing one also to ourselves.
To grieve at any loss, be it of friend or property, weakens mind and body. It is no help to the friend grieved for. It is rather an injury; for our sad thought must reach the person, even if passed to another condition of existence, and is a source of pain to that person.
An hour of grumbling, fret, or fear, whether spoken or silent, uses up so much element or force in making us less endurable to others, and perhaps making for us enemies. Directly or indirectly, it injures our business. Sour looks and words drive away good customers. Grumbling or hating is a use of actual element to belabor our minds. The force we may so expend could be used to our pleasure and profit, even as the force we might use with a club to beat our own body can be employed to give us comfort and recreation.
To be able, then, to throw off (or forget) a thought or force which is injuring us, is a most important means for gaining strength of body and clearness of mind. Strength of body and clearness of mind bring success in all undertakings.
It brings also strength of spirit; and the forces of our spirits act on others whose bodies are thousands of miles distant, for our advantage or disadvantage. Because there is a force belonging to all of us, separate and apart from that of the body. It is always in action, and acting on others. It must be in action at every moment, whether the body be asleep or awake. Ignorantly, unconsciously, and hence unwisely used, it plunges us into mires of misery and error. Intelligently and wisely used, it will bring us every conceivable good.
That force is our thought. Every thought of ours is of vital importance to health and real success. All so-called success, as the world terms it, is not real. A fortune gained at the cost of health is not a real success.
Every mind trains itself, generally, unconsciously, to its peculiar character or quality of thought. Whatever that training is, it cannot be immediately changed. We may have trained our minds unconsciously to entertain evil or troubled thought. We may never have realized that brooding over disappointment, living in a grief, dreading a loss, fretting for fear this or that might not succeed as we wish, was building up a destructive force which has bled away our strength, created disease, unfitted us for business, and caused us loss of money and possibly loss of friends.
To learn to forget is as necessary and useful as to learn to remember. We think of many things every day which it would be more profitable not to think of at all. To be able to forget is to be able to drive away the unseen force (thought) which is injuring us, and change it for a force (or order of thought) to benefit us.
Demand imperiously and persistently any quality of character in which you may be lacking, and you attract increase of such quality. Demand more patience or decision or judgment or courage or hopefulness or exactness, and you will increase in such qualities. These qualities are real elements. They belong to the subtler, and as yet unrecognized, chemistry of nature.
The man discouraged, hopeless, and whining, has unconsciously demanded discouragement and hopelessness. So he gets it. This is his unconscious mental training to evil. Mind is “magnetic,” because it attracts to itself whatever thought it fixes itself upon, or whatever it opens itself to. Allow yourself to fear, and you will fear more and more. Cease to resist the tendency to fear, make no effort to forget fear, and you open the door, and invite fear in; you then demand fear. Set your mind on the thought of courage, see yourself in mind or imagination as courageous, and you will become more courageous. You demand courage.
There is no limit in unseen nature to the supply of these spiritual qualities. In the words “Ask, and ye shall receive,” the Christ implied that any mind could, through demanding, draw to itself all that it needed of any quality. Demand wisely, and we draw to us the best.
Every second of wise demand brings an increase of power. Such increase is never lost to us. This is an effort for lasting gain that we can use at any time. What all of us want is more power to work results, and build up our fortunes, —power to make things about us more comfortable, to ourselves and our friends. We cannot feed others if we have no power to keep starvation from ourselves. Power to do this is a different thing from the power to hold in memory other people’s opinions, or a collection of so called facts gathered from books, which time often proves to be fictions. Every success in any grade of life has been accomplished through spiritual power, through unseen force flowing from one mind, and working on other minds far and near, as real as the force in your arm lifts a stone.
A man may be illiterate, yet send from his mind a force affecting and influencing many others, far and near, in a way to benefit his fortunes, while the scholarly man drudges with his brain on a pittance. The illiterate man’s is the greater spiritual power. Intellect is not a bag to hold facts. Intellect is power to work results. Writing books is but a fragment of the work of intellect. The greatest philosophers have planned first, and acted afterwards, as did Columbus, Napoleon, Fulton, Morse, Edison, and others, who have moved the world, besides telling the world how it should be moved.
Your plan, purpose, or design, whether relating to a business or an invention, is a real construction of unseen thought-element. Such thought-structure is also a magnet. It commences to draw aiding forces to it so soon as made. Persist in holding to your plan or purpose, and these forces come nearer and nearer, become stronger and stronger, and will bring more and more favorable results.
Abandon your purpose, and you stop further approach of these forces, and destroy also such amount of unseen attracting power as you have built up. Success in any business depends on the application of this law. Persistent resolve on any purpose is a real attractive force or element, drawing constantly more and more aids for carrying out that resolve.
When your body is in the state called sleep, these forces (your thoughts) are still active. They are then working on other minds. If your last thought before sleep is that of worry, or anxiety, or hatred for anyone, it will work for you only ill results. If it is hopeful, cheerful, confident, and at peace with all men, it is then the stronger force, and will work for you good results. If the sun goes down on your wrath, your wrathful thought will act on others, while you sleep, and bring only injury in return.
Is it not a necessity, then, to cultivate the power of forgetting what we wish, so that our current of thought attracting ill, while our body rests, shall be changed to the thought-current attracting good?
Today thousands on thousands never think of controlling the character of their thought. They allow their minds to drift. They never say of a thought that is troubling them, “I won’t think of it.” Unconsciously then they demand what works them ill, and their bodies are made sick by the kind of thought which they allow their minds to fasten on.
When you realize the injury done you through any kind of troubled thought, you will then commence to acquire the power of throwing off such thought. When in mind you commence to resist any kind of such injurious thought, you are constantly gaining more and more power for resistance. “Resist the devil,” said the Christ, “and he will flee from you.” There are no devils save the illy used forces of the mind. But these are most powerful to afflict and torture us. An ugly or melancholy mood of mind is a devil. It can make us sick, lose us friends, and lose us money. Money means the enjoyment of necessities and comforts. Without these we cannot do or be our best. The sin involved in “love of money” is to love money better than the things needful which money can bring.’
To bring to us the greatest success in any business, to make the greatest advance in any art, to further any cause, it is absolutely necessary that at certain intervals daily we forget all about that business, art, or cause. By so doing we rest our minds, and gather fresh force for renewed effort.
To be ever revolving the same plan, study, or speculation, or what we shall do or shall not do, is to waste such force on a brain treadmill. We are in thought saying to ourselves the same thing over and over again. We are building of this actual, unseen element, thought, the same constructions over and over again. One is a useless duplicate of the other.
If we are always inclined to think or converse on one particular subject, if we will never forget it, if we will start it at all times and places, if we will not in thought and speech fall into the prevailing tone of the conversation about us, if we do not try to get up an interest in what is being talked of by others, if we determine only to converse on what interests us, or not converse at all, we are in danger of becoming a ” crank,” or ” hobbyist,” or monomaniac.
The “crank” draws his reputation on himself. He is one who, having forced one idea, and one alone on himself, has resolved, perhaps unconsciously, to force that idea on everyone else. He will not forget at periods his pet theory or purpose, and adapt himself to the thought of others. For this reason he loses the power to forget, to throw from his mind the one absorbing thought. He drifts more and more into that one idea. He surrounds himself with its peculiar thought, atmosphere, or element, as real an element as any we see or feel.
Others near him feel this one-ideaed thought, and feel it disagreeably; because the thought of one person is felt by others near him through a sense as yet unnamed. In the exercise of this sense lies the secret of your favorable or unfavorable “impressions ‘ of people at first sight. You are in thought as it flows from you always, sending into the air an element which affects others for or against you, according to its quality, and the acuteness of their sense which feels thought. You are affected by the thought of others in the same way, be they far or near. Hence we are talking to others when our tongues are still. We are making ourselves hated or loved while we sit alone in the privacy of our chambers.
A crank often becomes a martyr, or thinks himself one. There is no absolute necessity for martyrdom in any cause, save the necessity of ignorance. There never was any absolute necessity, save for the same cause. Martyrdom always implies lack of judgment and tact in the presentation of any principle new to the world. Analyze martyrdom, and you will find in the martyr a determination to force on people some idea in an offensive and antagonistic form. People of great ability, though dwelling in one idea, have at last been captured by it. The antagonism they drew from others, they drew because they held it first in their own mind. “I come not with peace,” said the Christ, “but a sword.” The time has now come in the world’s history for the sword to be sheathed. Many good people unconsciously use swords in advising what they deem better things. There is the sword (in thought) of the scolding reformer, the sword of dislike for others because they won’t heed what you say, and the sword of prejudice because others won’t adopt your peculiar habits. Every discordant thought against others is a sword, and calls out from others a sword in return. The thought you put out, you receive back of the same kind. The coming empire of peace is to be built up by reconciling differences, making of enemies friends, telling people of the good that is in them rather than the bad, discouraging gossip and evil speaking by the introduction of subjects more pleasant and profitable, and proving through one’s life that there are laws, not generally recognized, which will give health, happiness, and fortune, without injustice or injury to others. Its advocate will meet the sick with the smile of true friendship, and the most diseased people are always the greatest sinners. The most repulsive man or woman, the creature full of deceit, treachery, and venom, needs your pity and help of all the most, for that man or woman, through generating evil thought, is generating pain and disease for himself or herself.
You find yourself thinking of a person unpleasantly from whom you have received a slight or insult, an injury or injustice. Such thought remains with you hour after hour, perhaps day after day. You become at last tired of it, yet cannot throw it off. It annoys, worries, frets, sickens you. You cannot prevent yourself from going round and round on this same tiresome, troublesome track of thought. It wears on your spirit; and whatever wears on the spirit, wears on the body.
This is because you have drawn on yourself the other person’s opposing and hostile thought. He is thinking of you as you are of him. He is sending you a wave of hostile thought. You are both giving and receiving blows of unseen elements. You may keep up this silent war of unseen force for weeks, and if so, both are injured. This contest of opposing wills and forces is going on all about us. The air is full of it.
To strive, then, to forget enemies, or to throw out to them only friendly thought, is as much an act of self-protection as it is to put up your hands to ward off a physical blow. The persistent thought of friendliness turns aside thought of ill-will, and renders it harmless. The injunction of Christ to do good to your enemies is founded on a natural law. It is saying that the thought or element of good-will carries the greater power, and will always turn aside and prevent injury from the thought of ill-will.
Demand forgetfulness when you can only think of a person or of anything with the pain that comes of grief, anger, or for any cause. Demand is a state of mind which sets in motion forces to bring you the result desired. Demand is the scientific basis of prayer. Do not supplicate. Demand persistently your share of force out of the elements about you, by which you can rule your mind to any desired mood.
There are no limits to the strength to be gained through the cultivation of our thought-power. It can keep from us all pain arising from grief, from loss of fortune, loss of friends, and disagreeable situations in life. Such power is the very element or attitude of mind most favorable to the gain of fortune and friends. The stronger mind throws off the burdensome, wearying, fretting thought, forgets it, and interests itself in something else. The weaker mind dwells in the fretting, worrying thought, and is enslaved by it. When you fear a misfortune (which may never happen), your body becomes weak; your energy is paralyzed. But you can, through constantly demanding it, dig out of yourself a power which can throw off any fear or troublesome state of mind. Such power is the high road to success. Demand it, and it will increase more and more, until at last you will know no fear. A fearless man or woman can accomplish wonders.
That no individual may have gained such amount of this power, is no proof that it cannot be gained. Newer and more wonderful things are ever happening in the world. Thirty years ago, and he who should assert that a human voice could be heard between New York and Philadelphia would have been called a lunatic. Today, the wonder of the telephone is an every-day affair. The powers still unrecognized of our thought will make the telephone a tame affair. Men and women, through cultivation and use of this power, are to do wonders which fiction has not or dares not put before the world.
How Thoughts Are Born
As in combinations of elements or chemicals, new substances are formed, so in the combination of thought substance, as it flows and mingles from mind to mind, new thoughts are formed or born.
The character and quality of your thought are shaded, and to a greater or less extent changed, by every person with whom you associate, as theirs mingles and forms a new combination with yours. You are, to an extent, a different person through conversing an hour yesterday with A, than if you had interchanged thought with B. You have then grafted on you a shade of A’s nature, or quality of thought.
If you are much with the low and degraded, the thought in you born of your thought chemicalization with theirs, will be, despite your greatest endeavor and aspiration, weighed down with their grossness. So “evil communications corrupt good manners.” If your associates be refined, pure, lofty, aspiring, the thought born of such commingling and chemicalization is lofty, pure, aspiring, and powerful.
Associations with the low and impure lessen the power of your thought. What weakens the mind weakens the body, and also lessens the power of your thought to accomplish results afar from the body, on any business.
If there is constant association and mingling of the thought of a broad and generous mind with one low, ignoble, narrow, and mean, the force of the higher spirit or thought may be exhausted in repelling the lower. Thousands of finer natures are, Today, physically sick, because their spirits are saturated with the lower, grosser, more narrow thought of those about them.
New thought or idea brings strength to body as well as mind. For this reason, the real, active intellect of the world lives long, like Victor Hugo, Gladstone, Beecher, Bright, Bismarck, Ericcson, and others. True, there is a sort of fossilized life and intellect which may exist many years, but it enjoys little and accomplishes nothing. Increased knowledge of the laws of thought (that great silent force in nature) will, in the future, enable the spirit to use its body, not only in full, but ever-increasing possession of its mental and physical powers so long as it pleases.
People’s bodies decay and lose vigor through thinking continually the same set of thoughts. Thought is food for your spirit as much as is bread food for the body. Old thought is literally old, stale substance or element. It does not properly nourish the spirit. If the spirit is starved, the body will suffer. It will become either a semi-animated fossil, or, if the spirit be sufficiently strong to assert its demands caused by the gnawings of its hunger, there will be perpetual unrest, uneasiness, and some form of bodily disease. From such cause are thousands suffering Today. They “grieve the spirit.” That is, their worldly education, or rather that portion of their spirit trained almost unwillingly to conform to the opinion and life about them, resists the intuition or pleadings of their spirits which they often deem foolish whims and fancies.
New thought is new life, and renewal of life. A new idea, plan, or purpose fills us with hope and vigor. One secret of eternal life and happiness is to be ever pushing forward toward the new, or “forgetting the things which are behind, and pressing forward to those which are before.” Eternity and endless space are exhaustless of the new. Senility comes through ever looking back and living in the past. You have nothing to do with the person you were a year ago, save to profit by that person’s experience. That person is dead. The “You” of today is another and a newer individual. The “You” of next year will be still another and a newer one.
“I die daily,” says Paul. By which he inferred that some thought of yesterday was dead Today, and cast off like an old garment. In its place was the newer one. When our spirits are growing healthfully, we have done forever with a part of ourselves at each day’s end. That part is dead. It is with us a dead thought. We have no further use for it. To use it will injure us. It is cast off as our bodies daily cast off a certain portion of dead skin. To him or her, who has increase of new thought, a new world is lived in daily. As regards happiness, it does not matter so much where we are, so that we can bring to ourselves this daily inflowing of new thought. We can so bring to ourselves happiness in a dungeon when people closed to new idea are miserable in palaces. We are, then, on the road to an independence, almost complete, of the physical world. Independence means power. So long as we are in any way dependent on a person, a food, a drug, a stimulant, or any condition of things about us, are we to that extent the slave of these things. So perpetual inflowing of new idea makes a way for escape out of the dungeons of material and spiritual poverty. You may be rich in this world’s goods, yet very poor in not being able to enjoy them. You cannot long remain poor in the worldly sense, if you are spiritually rich. But spiritual richness asks for no more than it can use and enjoy for the hour and the day. It will not hoard in bank vaults.
Daily inflowing of new thought brings new power. To him or her who so daily receives, a fresh force is added, pushing their undertakings farther forward toward success. The silent force of your mind then keeps up its steady pressure on other minds who are consciously or unconsciously co-operating with you.
In the higher realms of mind are those who are ever joyous, cheerful, and confident of future success and happiness. They have lived up to the Law, and proven it. With them “faith is swallowed up in victory.” They know that by keeping the mind in a certain state, properly controlling their thoughts, there is brought a constant inflowing of happiness and power. Because power and happiness must move together. So must sin, pain, and weakness. They know, also, that their every plan (the Law being followed) must prove a success. Hence, life with them must be a constant succession of victories. Of this their faith or belief is as certain as is ours that fire will burn, or that water will extinguish fire.
We can, by earnestly and persistently desiring it, connect ourselves with this order of mind., and draw from them new life and force-giving element. We clear the way to such valuable connection by the endeavor to drive from us all envy, gloom, quarrelsome, or other impure thought. Any thought doing us harm is an impure thought. Lifelong habit may make this at first a difficult task. Constant effort or aspiration will drive such damaging thought away with more and more ease. All impure thought is as rubbish or uncleanliness about us, preventing the near approach of the higher order of mind. A thought to such a spirit is as real a thing as is a stone to us. To them in thought we may be literally covered with garbage — or flowers.
A great poet, artist, writer, general, or other worker in any department of life, may have had a large share of his greatness due to his mediumship for unseen intelligences to work through. He may have been more the mouthpiece for them than the originator.
A man may be small, mean, petty, vain, and the victim of inordinate passions, yet at times give elegant expression to the most exalted sentiments. A small part of this man’s intellect responded to these sentiments. But his defects, his passions, his vices, are greatly in the ascendency. In certain moods he soars to sublime heights; in his ordinary mood he is relatively a small man. We have had poets whose sentiments, as given at different times, are almost contradictory. They express at one time purity; at another, the reverse. Their known lives have been low, coarse, and groveling.
Such natures are used at favorable moments for a higher grade of unseen intelligence, to express their thought through. It is an absolute necessity for an intellect overflowing with richness of thought, with visions of the grandeur and beauty of life’s possibilities, to give expression to that thought. This necessity is a law of nature. Such minds are as pent-up springs, which must burst forth. It is not for such a duty, in the ordinary sense of that word; it is a necessity. If you are rich in thought, you must give out of such thought wherever you find opportunity. You are as a tree overloaded with ripe fruit. When the fruit is ripe, it must fall; when the thought is ripe, it must come forth. If there be none near you to hear it, you must go where it can be heard; you must go from the necessity of self-preservation. You cannot with safety keep a gift, a talent, a truth, a capacity for doing anything well, all to yourself.
As spirits grow in richness of thought, as they even become oppressed by their own weight of richness, do they seek in every direction to give out this richness. They may find an impressional organization on the earth stratum of life; they can to such impressional come singly and give of their thought; or, through a certain co-operation, a number of such minds united in purpose and motive, may come in a troop to the individual; they may, for a period, surround him or her with their own atmosphere of thought. Such atmosphere will act on the individual as a stimulant. It raises him in thought far above his ordinary level. He sees all things for the moment, in the light of a life higher and purer than any lived about him. In this mental condition, sentiment of an exalted order is impressed upon his mind; in other words, this co-operation of higher minds enables them to bring of their thought an actual substance, and keep it longer near the impressional on earth. He absorbs it, and feels its powerful influence. He is, in fact, “inspired” by it; that is, he breathes it in. He is exhilarated, almost intoxicated by it, because refined and powerful thought is a stimulant, whose influence on the individual is in proportion to the fineness of such individual’s organization, his impressionability, or his or her capacity to receive of such thought. Such stimulation is but another name for “magnetic influence.” You have in this the secret of the attraction one person may have for another. The person attracted is actually stimulated while near the other, by the thought absorbed from the one who attracts.
In the condition of mind above stated, a poet may give expression to the thought so brought to and surrounding him after his own taste or tendency as to rhythm and measure. Or the poem in question may be actually dictated to him.
Under similar mental states brought about by the causes above mentioned are novels written and inventions dropped into minds. Artists and sculptors may work under such inspiration. Generals have been similarly prompted and aided in military operations. In the world of business and finance the same law is at work. It is operating on every grade of purpose and motive, be it low or high. There is no great result effected in any department of life, no great effort of thought, no great invention, that comes of the unaided agency of any single mind. We are all parts of the same whole. We are all members of the same body. We can do nothing without co-operation, and the human unit who thinks it does is so thinking in the simplicity of its ignorance.
The poet who has so written under the inspiring power of another or other minds may pass away with a great name. Yet he may not have deserved all the reputation he gained. His writings are largely the result of the thought concentrated upon him by a co-operative association of unseen intelligences. They unloaded their thought upon him, partly to relieve themselves. So relieved, they were then able to climb higher, and absorb of newer, finer ideas. So fast as you give out to others of your present thought and idea, so fast will you receive of the new. If you hold back, you prevent for yourself the absorption of the newer thought. If you are a medium for any of the forces of the universe to pass through and be transmitted to others, you must be careful that nothing prevents the free passage of new thought through you. The moment you hold back any truth, any plan, scheme, or invention, with the idea that it is exclusively your own, you are clogging up that mediumship.
You will be made poorer in every sense by such holding back. If you give freely you will increase in richness, and out of your overflowing richness you can easily retain enough to bring you every needed material aid. The text, ” Freely have ye received, freely give,” is based on a scientific fact in the unseen kingdom of thought.
There are re-embodied spirits Today on the earth, who, during a former and quite recent existence, had a great reputation in some field of effort. There are on earth Today poets who enjoy but a tithe of their fame in a former existence.
One reason for this is, that much of their source of inspiration has passed away. That is, the troop of spirits who in the former existence came to them of necessity to unload of their richness of thought, no longer labor under such necessity, so far as the mediumship of the impressional is concerned. These intelligences still have need to give of their thought in some place. But the thought they now absorb may be too fine to be received by any on earth.
With some, idea is organic. They are creators as well as absorbers of thought. These are they who try to live up to their highest ideal, and in the greatest variety of life and occupation. When one sees the necessity of doing this, he brings to himself all that is best in the universe that he can appropriate. He is an absorber of spirit from every side. He puts out this same spirit again, colored with his or her individuality. Every such individual is as a glass reflector tinged with some peculiar shade. The light within, shining through such shade, spreads rays of the same light on every side. The light represents the spirit. The globe or reflector represents the individual the light shines through. The oil in our lamps may all come from the same source. The lights in a series of lamps may be of as many different colors as there are globes stained of different colors. So in a series of individualized persons, though each is fed of the same spirit, yet each reflects a peculiar light of his own.
We can be creative and original as we absorb of any spirit, and make its expression original. You see and admire the method of an actor or artist; then you absorb of his thought. But you will not be a mere copy of his method. His thought combines with your own. There is an actual chemical operation of unseen element. There is a combination of his thought and your own, resulting in the formation, of a new element — your own original idea. The purer your thought and motive, the more unselfish your purpose, the greater the rapidity of such combination, the more original and striking your thought. By such means is thought born in you. The qualities of justice and unselfishness are themselves elements and scientific factors in such birth.
The selfish spirit is content with being the mere borrower. If it appropriates another’s thought or idea, without ever crediting such idea to its rightful owner, or the desire so to credit it, it will always remain a borrower. But people to borrow from will not always be at hand. There Must come a time, in this life or another, when such a spirit will be left entirely to its own resources. It will then find itself poor. It will be crippled by the habit of borrowing. It will find that this habit prevents the chemical assimilation and birth of the new element, or, in other words, original or individually shaded idea. You have simply taken another’s property, and passed it off as your own. You have not been a manufacturer. You have been only a receiver of another’s manufactures.
It matters little whether you absorb idea in this way, and use it as your own, from minds whose bodies are visible to you or invisible. You still remain the mere borrower. You hurt thereby the power of making your own peculiar shade of individuality of light.
If spirits finding an impressional organization thrust their thought continually upon it through their own desire for expression, make it a perpetual mouthpiece, talk or write through such person continually, they may do a great injustice and injury. No matter how high or useful their thought, yet this pouring of ideas continually through one mind begets habit and desire of doing nothing else but talk, write or act, or perform someone thing continually. This will cause the person to grow all on one side. The balanced mind, the harmonious and organized adjustment of qualities necessary for the begetting of more and more originality, must come also of seeing and participating in all possible shades and kinds of life, as well as pure and unselfish motive. You need to mingle and sympathize with all manner of people, all manner of employments, all manner of professions, to make your own conceptions characterized by the greatest originality. You will then (unselfish motive being implied) not be a patchwork of borrowed bits from all with whom you come in contact ; but a mosiac, of which every idea taken from others and grafted on your own has an individuality peculiarly your own.
The Law Of Success
Success in any business or undertaking comes through the working of a law. It never comes by chance: in the operations of nature’s laws, there is no such thing as chance or accident. The so called accidental tumbling of the stone from the mountain-side is the result of forces which have been acting in that stone through countless ages.
You and your fortunes are no more the things of chance than is the tree from its earliest growth. You are the product of the elements, and that product through the working of a law. You can, as you find out the law, make of yourself whatever you please.
Your thought, or spirit, and not your body, is your real self.
Your thought is an invisible substance, as real as air, water, or metal. It acts apart from your body; it goes from you to others, far and near; it acts on them, moves and influences them. It does this whether your body be sleeping or waking.
This is your real power. As you learn how this power really acts; as you learn how to hold, use, and control it,—you will do more profitable business, and accomplish more in an hour than now you may do in a week. You will continually increase this power by exercise. This, and only this, was the basis of the miracles, the magic or occult power of ancient times.
Your prevailing mood, or frame of mind, has more to do than anything else with your success or failure in any undertaking. Your mind is that amount of thought-substance which has come together during countless ages, and after using many physical bodies. The mind is a magnet. It has the power, first of attracting thought, and next of sending that thought out again. You do not, of yourself, make your thought: you only receive and feel it as it comes to you.
What kind of thought you most charge that magnet (your mind) with, or set it open to receive, it will attract most of that kind to you. If, then, you think, or keep most in mind, the mere thought of determination, hope, cheerfulness, strength, force, power, justice, gentleness, order, and precision, you will attract and receive more and more of such thought-elements.
These are among the elements of success. These qualities are of thought-element as real things as any we see or feel. The more you set the magnet in this direction, the stronger it grows to attract these elements.
Whatever of thought you think or receive, you send from you again, an invisible substance to act on others.
Your own thought is now in the air, acting on and attracting to you of its kind the thought of others, whose bodies you may never have seen. The people you are in the future to meet, who may help or damage your fortunes, are those whose thought in like manner sent far from their bodies has already met and mingled with your own. That attraction tends to bring you together in the body. It will certainly bring you together in some form of existence.
When determined thought meets determined thought, and unites on a similar purpose, a double power for success comes of such union, be the bodies used by such thought, mind, or spirit, in the same house or a thousand miles apart. But if you are thinking most of the time discouragement or anger, or any form of ill-temper, you are sending hundreds and thousands of miles away from your body this thought-element of discouragement, hopelessness, or anger, literally a part of your unseen self. It attracts, meets and mingles with the same thought element similarly sent out by others (parts of such people). So it attracts you to them, your partners in misery. You hurt each other’s health and fortune.
A thought attracts thought of like kind. Keep any thought fixed in your mind, say the thought of strength or health, and you attract to you more and more of the thought-element of strength and health. Keep in mind the idea of force, “go-ahead,” push, and you attract to you in element that which gives you force, push, and go-ahead.
So long as you are in a confident, determined, serene frame of mind, having some special aim in view Based On Eight And Justice, so long are you moving in this way the strongest silent power of your thought is attracting to you the persons you need to co-operate with. If your aim is not based on right and justice, you will still move this silent power of your mind, but it will not affect results so beneficial to you as your thought based on your highest idea of right.
If you wish to gain through deceit and craft, you can do so. You will attract, by the same law and method, deceitful and dishonest thought in advance of its body. You will then work with the dishonest in the body. Dishonest mind herds together through a natural law. The dishonest are certain to injure each other at last in some way.
A thought, be it good or bad, is a thing or construction of unseen element as real as a tree, a flower, a clock. It is already made before you think or receive it, as your mind through its mood, frame, or attitude attracts it. As you think it, you put it out again to act, move, or influence others. But your thought spoken or whispered in the privacy of your room is put out with more force so to act on others than if you merely “think it.” And if two or more persons talk together without wrangle or disagreement on a common purpose in any business, they send out a proportionately greater volume of force to work on other minds relative to such business. If your company so putting out thought-element or force do not agree, if they are angry and wrangle with each other, the force so sent from them is injurious to that business. If they talk peacefully, and will set aside individual preferences or prejudices in order to work out the common purpose in view, the thought or force they generate is constructive, and acts favorably on other minds far and near to advance that business.
So whenever you think, you are affecting your fortunes for good or ill; and whenever you talk to others, you are making a force still greater to make or lose for you health, friends, and money. Every thought of yours, silent or spoken, has a literal value.
If you receive (that is, think) the thought that you cannot succeed in any undertaking, that thought also goes out, meets and attracts other discouraged, despondent ” I can’t” thought, brings you nearer and nearer the hopeless, fretting peopled bodies it is in advance of, injures your health and all pushing business ability, and brings you at last in personal contact with people who only help to ruin each other.
You are working then your thought-power for nonsuccess. You can use this power to bring you good or ill results, as you can use the locomotive to carry your body on a journey, or to crush your body by throwing yourself before it.
Whatever plan or scheme of business you fix your mind persistently upon in the determination to succeed, it commences then as a thought-construction of unseen element to draw aiding forces to you. By “aiding forces” is meant first, ever growing fertility of mind to breed new plans for pushing your business; secondly, drawing to you the best people to aid you in your plans.
Do not waste your power in looking for such aiding forces with your body. Let silent, persistent resolve in mind do the work. It will do it if you persevere holding to this frame of mind. It is no new power, though possibly new to most of us. It is constantly, though unconsciously, exercised for good or ill all about us. Because your body is not the only power you have to work with. Your body is only the instrument used by your mind, or spirit. Your mind, your invisible self, uses your body in, say, cutting down a tree, or other work of hand, exactly as your body uses the axe. But when such force (thought) is not using the body, it is at work with greater power elsewhere.
To think persistent resolve, to think persistent push in your one aim and purpose, — to simply think it, and do nothing else, — will create for you a power as certain to move and effect results as the jackscrews placed under the heaviest building will move it upward. The power you so create of your mind and of unseen forces will work while you sleep. It will bring to you new devices, plans, and methods for moving your business forward. And as you get these plans, they will move your body to act. You cannot sit still when an idea that means business comes to you: such idea is for you power. But you can tire your body to such an extent that you will have no power to receive an idea when it does come. All successful business is based on a continual inflowing of new idea, plan, device, scheme.
Your spirit, or thought, acts and works on others while your body sleeps. It may do this with those whose bodies are also asleep. If you are angry or discouraged on going to sleep, your invisible self on leaving its body will probably be attracted to some other angry or discouraged nature. The better mood you are in on quitting your body at night, and entering on your other existence, the better the thought or person you will meet in that existence to further your purpose. If you have no purpose, you will then probably meet with another purposeless nature. To have no special purpose in life, to simply drift, is to have nothing on which to focus or concentrate your thought-power. If it is not so concentrated, but scattered, fastening on one thing Today, and another tomorrow, you will be restless, moping, and unhappy in mind. If unhappy in mind, you can never be healthy in body.
Spirit, or thought, is always active, be the body asleep or awake. When the body is unconscious in sleep, your mind then enters on its other phase of life and activity. You have only exchanged one form of existence for another. When you awake, you do literally ” take the body up ” to use for purposes on the earth-stratum of life.
Your thought acts on others, for or against you, far and near, while you are awake. But it acts more strongly on those to whom it is attracted when your body sleeps. It is then less distracted by the hopes, fears, prejudices, customs, and surroundings of its body-life. It is better, then, if you have any purpose in view, not to fix your thought too strongly when awake on such persons as you may think may cooperate with you, because your spirit, when out of its body, has a much wider range of acquaintance and action than when using its body. You may concentrate its force overmuch, while it holds the body, on some person less likely to help you than the person or thought to which it is attracted while away from the body. In such case its force is placed in two directions when it should be but in one. Talking your business plan or project makes force for or against you. A clear plan or idea by which you can make more money represents force. A muddled plan represents a lesser and imperfect force. A new invention is a new force. Talking your business with those who are really friendly to you, actively friendly, and without a shade of envy or grudge against you, adds their thought or force to your own for making clearer plans, and working on other minds, and enlisting them in some way in your favor. Sympathy is force. Any person’s good will is a real, living, active substance, flowing always to you as that person thinks of you. It has a commercial value in dollars and cents. Ill will is also an element sent from the person that thinks it, and works against you though that person never speaks or acts with the body against you. This you can only successfully oppose by putting out against it the thought-element of friendliness. The thought of good to others is the stronger unseen element, and can turn the bad (the weaker) aside. It prevents it from reaching or harming you.
Through the working of that same law, it is dangerous to make enemies, no matter how good or just the cause.
To talk your business at random, is not only to give your secrets to such as will tell them to others, but it is to send your secrets and plans in thought element flying far and wide in the air. Then they fall into other minds, and you may find your plan used by others before you. The air is literally full of supposed secrets. They herald themselves to thousands in the form of suspicion and impression.
Every disorderly meeting, every family quarrel, every discordance between man and man, sends into the air a wave of destructive and unpleasant substance. It affects unpleasantly minds thousands of miles distant. The thought so coining from some centre of turbulence forms a wave, or current. If you are by some trifle made angry, you then place your mind in the attitude of a magnet to attract and let in this hurtful thought-current. Your anger, peevishness, or irritation, caused at first by a trifle, is constantly fed from these currents. You must, for relief, turn your mind toward some more agreeable order of thought. Practice in so doing will give you more power, and make it more and more easy to change the character of the thought-element coming to you.
When interest, sympathy, and good will meet to present pleasantly their opinions or thoughts on any special subject to each other, for an hour, there goes from that company a wave of thought-substance, which strikes other minds, and awakens or renews interest in that especial business, art, or cause, in proportion to the sensitiveness or capacity of such minds to receive thoughts. The new thought coming suddenly to you, comes because somewhere it is being talked out or agitated. The wave so caused acts in unseen element precisely like that made by throwing the stone in calm water. The waves so radiate from the talk-centre; and they will continue to spread out in every direction, striking other minds, so long as the agitation of talk is kept up at that centre. No thought is, in a sense, original. The same idea, or parts or shades of that idea, may float into a thousand minds within an hour, when once started, through a few people talking it. Talk with others in friendliness about an improvement in machinery, a new invention, a new idea for man’s comfort, and through thought-substance so sent far and wide you awaken desire or interest for the thing talked of. The more people interested in a thing, the more will be attracted to you to aid you, or buy the thing produced.
Regarding your plan, purpose, and aim, all your discreet talk, your interest and persistent determination, represent for you so much actual outlay of force expended in attracting the thing desired to you. If you expend such amount of force for, say, three months, and then get discouraged, and give it all up, you abandon so much of a structure you have built up having this attracting power. You may not see where that power is operating. But it is at work, bringing to you the people in sympathy with you, or those who want what you have to give.
Quarrelling, angry argument, and grumbling put out the silent destructive force. Friendly discussion, and peaceful presentation of individual opinion, put out the silent constructive force. If you set your mind persistently in the desire for having the best people to talk to, and so aid you, they will come to you through this power of thought-attraction. Exactly the order of mind will so come you most desire. If you are not particular as to principle or honesty, this law will attract those not particular as to honesty.
There will always be a demand for a better article, a better effort in any art, or a better service of -any kind, than those before produced. When you are sure yours is the better effort, push it. Get it before people. Talent in art or invention is one thing. Talent for pushing that art or invention is quite another. You must, to be successful, have both. The world pays best those who push. Hundreds of inventors and artists fail because they do not cultivate the science of pushing themselves before the world.
You can learn the science of pushing by yourself. You will acquire it by peeing yourself in mind or imagination as asserting yourself courageously, fairly, honestly, before others, and making yourself agreeable to all. The more you do this in imagination, the more will you feel like doing it in reality. What you do in thought is a reality. What you live most in thought, you make a reality. You will find, after a time of such mental exercise, that you have more nerve, more courage, more tact, more address, more desire to mingle with all sorts of people, to take hold of the world, and make it give you what rightfully belongs to you.
Poverty comes largely of shrinking .away from people, and fear of assuming responsibilities.
See yourself always in imagination as diffident, bashful, shrinking, and by the same law you make yourself so. Reverse this process of silent mental treatment. See yourself courageous. You are always growing up to your highest ideal of yourself, and you reconstruct yourself by this process of silent thought. You cannot succeed and make money if you remain in a corner. You cannot do business with the world entirely by letter or by proxy. You must to an extent show yourself to others. When your spirit carries your body before another person, it carries the instrument for enabling your spirit to put out its fullest volume of thought-power on that person.
Thought being substance or force, you can pile up in your mind volumes of that force for or against you. To think of nothing but difficulties and possible troubles in business, is to set your mind as the magnet to attract only difficulties, first in thought, next in substance. This becomes with many a fixed habit hard to get rid of.
You have nothing whatever to do with a difficulty but to set your mind as a magnet in the direction for receiving force, ideas, and plans for overcoming that difficulty. If you have trouble with any person, and are always thinking of his injustice toward you, in the mood of anger or complaint, you are in thoughtelement making over again and again the wrangle or battle. You can use up in growling, scolding, complaining, and grumbling, be it thought out silently, or spoken to others, the same force or thought which would make a plan to get rid of the thing scolded or grumbled at. It is on precisely the same principle as the strength with which the mason builds his wall can be used in tearing it down, or in flinging about bricks’at random. If you will give your body all the rest it needs, your mental force will work far and near more powerfully for you. Your plans will be deeper, and, when carried out, more productive of results. If the body is always fagged out, much of the force of that spirit must be used up in keeping its hold on the body, — in other words, keeping it alive. It matters not whether you tire yourself out voluntarily, or are obliged to do so to get a living. The result is the same.
If you want more time in which so to rest, desire and demand it persistently. An opportunity will then at length come to you by which you can earn i enough for your present support without working the body at one employment so many hours daily. It will come by that mysterious law and attractive force which moves all things to all people according to their strongest desires and the persistency of such desire.
You can, through this same power (persistent desire), bring to you an evil as quickly as a good. The thing you are now strongly desiring may turn out an evil. If you desire or demand wisdom to know what will do you the most lasting good, you will, by the same law, bring to you the capacity to see what is really the best for you. Desire persistently a “clear head,” and a clear head will come to you. When your opportunity comes, granting you four or five more hours daily of leisure, do not pile on yourself any extra effort for the sake of the few dollars you may get by it. This opportunity may be your first step out into a newer life. Give yourself leisure. Don’t be afraid of enjoying yourself. Your mind will then breed plans for future success; and as such plans come to you, you will be inspired to act them out with your body.
A steady situation and good wages for life in any calling is not the road to any permanent or growing success. You are then but a screw in the great business machine, and, when worn out, will be mercilessly replaced by the newer screw. If in skill you are in your business at the top, and as to wages near the bottom, it is because, while skilled in your trade, you are not so in getting your just reward for that skill. You must aspire to manage a business founded on your skill. You must not be content to be managed by others who, taking advantage of your skill, get your industry and article before the public, and, with that, three-fourths of the profits. You must use this your power of thought, to get it and yourself before the public.
You must, to gain the greatest success, manage a business, or a department of a business, and be its sole governor without interference or hindrance from another. Responsibility alone can bring out your fullest power and its attendant happiness.
Otherwise you will, as a mere employee, be fettered by an employer’s demands, or by conditions made by others in which you will be obliged to work. You will see your best ideas imperfectly carried out, because you cannot fully control their carrying out yourself.
How To Keep Your Strength
A Principal means for holding and increasing both physical and mental strength lies in the training of the mind and body to do but one thing at a time; in other words, to put all the thought necessary for the performance of any act in that act, and to put aside all other thought whatever save what belongs to that act.
The body is but the machine used by the mind. If it be weak, the power of our thought may be largely used and almost uselessly expended in resisting its weakness. The mind is then the workman endeavoring to carry out his design with an imperfect tool. Eventually, this defective tool may derange and destroy entirely the workman’s power.
Strength of mind and body is the corner-stone of all enjoyment and success. The weak body enjoys little or nothing. Our bodies are reservoirs of force. Eating and sleeping are means for filling up with that force; in other words, for filling up with thought. When so filled up we enjoy our walk, our business, our effort of any kind. What is most desirable for all to know is, how to retain the most of that force during our waking hours and if possible to increase it; because this force has a commercial value in dollars and cents. The weak and exhausted body is neither the body for “business” or pleasure, and all business is best done when it is a pleasure to do it.
An old system of philosophy says, “What thou doest, that do with all thy might.”
Not the spasmodic, fleeting might of fury or anger. That is not might at all. That is waste of strength. It implies that every act of our lives, from the tying of a shoe-string, the forming of a letter, Or the sharpening of a pencil, should be done with the might of method, precision, exactness, care; in brief, the might of concentration. When a boy, I was doing my first day’s shoveling in the California gold-diggings. An old miner said to me, ” Young man, you make too hard, work of shoveling: you want to put more mind in that shovel.”
Pondering over this remark, I found that shoveling dirt needed co-operation of mind with muscle,— mind to give direction to muscle; mind to place the shovel’s point where it should scoop up most dirt with least outlay of strength; mind to give direction to the dirt as thrown from the shovel; and infinitesimal portions of mind, so to speak, in the movement of every muscle brought into play while shoveling. I found that the more thought I put in the shovel the better could I shovel: the less like work it became, the more like play it became, and the longer my strength for shoveling lasted. I found when my thought drifted on other things (no matter what), that soon the less strength and enjoyment had I for shoveling, and the sooner it became an irksome task.
Every thought is a thing and a force made of invisible substance. Thinking uses up a certain amount of the body’s force. You are working and using up this force even in what you call your “idlest moments.” If, while doing one act with the body, you are thinking of something else, you are wasting your strength and thought. Before you pick up a pin from the floor, you send from you, in thought, substance, — a plan for picking up that pin. That plan is force. You direct and use that force on your body, the instrument for picking up the pin. You should not mix that plan with one for doing anything else while the body is picking up that pin. Tf you do, you are sending your force — or trying to — in two directions at once. You mingle and confuse the plan and force for one act with the plan and force for another.
Every impatient act and thought, no matter how small, costs us an unprofitable outlay of force. If, sometime, when you are tired with walking, — that is, walking with your legs, while your brain has been working, wool-gathering, or worrying, planning, and scheming, — you will drive all such thought away and put all your mind, attention, and force in your limbs and feet, you may be surprised to find your strength return and your fatigue leave you. Because every physical act costs a thought, and every thought costs a certain outlay of force. Every step you take involves a plan to give that step direction. Plan involves outlay of thought. Thought means outlay of force. If you think of other things while walking, you are expending force in two directions at once.
Do you think that an acrobat could so readily ascend a rope hand over hand, did he not put his whole mind as well as strength on the act? or that an orator could thrill an audience, were he obliged to turn a grindstone while speaking? Yet in so many of our acts do we not unconsciously burthen our* selves by turning that grindstone, in thinking and planning one thing, while doing, or trying to do, another? If you are going up a hill and are continually looking with impatience toward the top, and wishing you were at the top, you will soon become tired. If you are near that hilltop in imagination, while your body is near the bottom, you are sending your force of thought to the top of the hill, leaving only enough in the poor, outraged body to drag it wearily upward. If you hold all that force to that body, and concentrate it on each step, you ascend far easier; because your power is then concentrated in those parts of your body (your legs) that most need that power. When you concentrate all your strength in each step, you make each step easier, you get a certain pleasure out of each step, and you forget also your trouble, — that being the impatient desire of being at the hilltop.
This law holds good in every act of life. Do you not wish you could forget your trouble, your disappointment, your sense of loss, through concentrating all your thought on something else, and becoming so absorbed in it, and enjoying it, as to forget all things else?
This is a possibility of mind, and is one well worth the striving for. It can be attained by the practice of concentration; or, in other words, the putting of one’s whole mind on the doing of so-called trivial things, and every second expended in such practice brings one nearer the result desired. Each effort brings us its atom of gain in increased power for putting either our whole volume of power or only the amount of power necessary to be used for doing the act in hand. This atom of increased power for concentration is never lost. You need this at every moment in your daily business. You need it to keep your mind from straying off on other things while you are driving bargains.
How long can we concentrate our whole thought on anyone act at once? Can you tie three knots in a string and put your whole thought in the tying of those three knots, letting no other thought intervene? You say, perhaps, “I can tie a knot just as well, and think of many other things.” Possibly you can; but can you tie those three knots and think only of knots? Or has your mind so fallen into the habit of straying off and over a dozen different matters a minute that you have lost the power of focusing it on any single thing for ten consecutive seconds?
Do not call this trivial. Train for concentrative power in the doing of anyone act and you train to throw your whole mind, thought, and force on all acts. Train to put your whole thought on each act, and prevent that thought from straying off on anything else, and we are training to throw the same full current of power in our speech when we talk, in our skill when we work with tools, in our voice when we sing, in our fingers when any dexterous work is required of them, and in any organ or function of our being that we desire for the time to exercise.
Perhaps you think, “Well that’s only another way of saying ‘ Be careful.'” True. Yet many may not know how to be careful or precise. Do we not see people every day rushing their legs along the street with the least possible amount of strength, while their minds are planning, wishing, working, hurrying far ahead of them? Yet these people wonder why they forget, wonder why they make so many mistakes, wonder why so many of the small details of their business are irksome: or they go on being so annoyed, and never get sufficiently awakened as to wonder.
Is not this practical philosophy and practical talk? Tomorrow, maybe, you are to have a trying interview on a matter vital to your interests, with a sharp, cunning, business-man, who is strong in will as well as knowledge, power, ways, and means to overreach you, to muddle your brains, to trick you, to frighten you. Do you not need every available atom of your force to cope with him?
When we cultivate this power of focusing all our force on any single act, we are cultivating also the power of throwing our whole mind from one subject to another. That means, also, that we can throw our whole mind out of a trouble into what may prove a delight, and forget a grief in a happy work. Grief, loss, disappointment, and discouragement injure and kill many people.
We may say to one so afflicted, “You shouldn’t think of this, that, or the other.” But do we tell them by what means they may turn their minds away from their trouble?
Children of weak minds, and idiots, are deficient in power of grip with their hands. In a certain training-school, such children are made first to grasp a bar above their heads with both hands, and draw themselves upward on their backs along a steeply inclined plane. It requires often many weeks of such exercise before they can do this. The weak mind has no power to throw all its thought or force on the hand, and do one act at a time. This lack may hold good to a great or lesser extent with all grades of weak minds.
Every impatient act, no matter how small, costs us an unprofitable outlay of physical and mental strength, — as when you tug and pull at the hard knot; or when you throw yourself with all your might of fury against the door that’s locked, and try to wrench the knob off because it won’t open readily.
If I turn a grindstone with one arm, I exhaust the force, after a time, in a set of muscles. If I stop turning it with the arm and turn it by a treadle, by foot, I rest the arm-muscles. Then they fill up again with force, and I can, without fatigue, turn the stone with that arm again for a period. A similar law prevails in all manner of mental effort. Say we are absorbed in some particular subject, plan, scheme, purpose: we dwell on it continually; we cannot stop thinking of it. Do we thereby always make it clearer to ourselves? Do we not thereby often get muddled in thought? Are we not turning that grindstone with our mental muscle (the brain) until it is exhausted, and only the same old set of thoughts relative to the subject occur again and again?
What is needed? Rest for this brain muscle.How? In one way, — by turning the whole force on something else for a time. Did you ever notice that if, when very much fatigued, you can sit down and have an hour’s chat with an agreeable companion, you are rested; and more rested, also, than if you had remained alone, though having no effort of any kind to make? That talk rested and recuperated you. Yet it was an outlay of force. All your thought (your force) was, for the time being, poured into the channel of that conversation. That conversation switched you off, as it were, from one track of thought into another. Our fearfully and wonderfully made organizations are self-recuperative and self-repairers. Give any of its departments rest after being used, and it sets immediately about the work of reconstruction, and that with finer and better material than before. The conversation proved the means of switching us on the other track of thought. Can we do the same occasionally without the help of another? Can we so switch off our whole train of thought from one subject to another? From one act to another? From considering how our house shall be built, to the proper sharpening of a lead pencil, without allowing a thought of the house to come in while sharpening that pencil? Can we sharpen a pencil for sixty consecutive seconds without thinking of something else? If we can, we have made great advance in concentrative power in doing what we have to do with all the might necessary, and reserving whatever of our might is not needed in the act for something else. If we can do this, we are possessed of a share of the greatest power in the universe, not only in making ourselves more and more happy, but also power for doing more and more of whatever we have to do, and doing it better and better. We then rule our minds. No one really rules until he or she rules him or herself.
If in any condition of mental distress you can turn, if but for a second, your whole thought on the sticking of a pin in your dress, you are for that second relieved of your trouble; you have in that second gained an atom of concentrative power.
We are then on the road to absolute rule over our minds and moods. At present, with many, it is the mood that rules the mind. We are as weathercocks, — turned by every passing breeze. We are not sure of a good-humored, cheerful condition of mind for an hour. It may be turned any moment into a state of discouragement, despondency, or irritation, by an event, an obnoxious individual, an unkind word from a friend, a message from an enemy, or even a passing thought. Thousands on thousands would rejoice to be able to forget what is disagreeable. Dwelling on it, be it trouble of debt, trouble of personal animosity, trouble of the affections, trouble of any kind, weakens body and mind, and weakens the person’s power to resist the trouble. Troubled thought is as muddy water. What you need is the power to turn this muddy water off and let clear water in. Troubled thought, mind racked with suspense and anxiety, literally bleeds you to death of your strength. To be able to forget, to turn thought into some more cheerful mood, is to stop this bleeding and get strength again.
To sum up the advantages derived from fixing our whole force on the doing of a single act: —
First, when a nail is driven with all the might of care, exactness, and precision, it is pretty sure to be well driven.
Secondly, in driving it, you have rested some, or many other departments, and are thereby the better prepared to exercise them. You can the better saw a board in two, if you have not been thinking board while driving the nail. Or if, while sewing, you have had your mind on that sewing, you will the better cut your cloth when the time comes to put your mind on your scissors. But to sew and “think scissors,” or to cut cloth and “think sew,” is to put one on the road to blunders and misfits.
Thirdly, focusing all the needed strength for driving the nail, pushing the needle, or handling the scissors, has, if so employed but for ten seconds, been giving you increased training in the power of concentration, and added, also, its mite to your stock of that quality.
Fourthly, it has added to your capacity for getting pleasure out of the doing of any and all things, whether such doing be of mind or body. Putting mind in muscle, brings pleasure from the exercise of muscle. It is the secret of all grace in motion, all skill and dexterity in action. The most graceful dancer is he or she who puts so much thought in the muscles to be used as to forget all things else, and so become entirely absorbed in the act and the expression of sentiment or emotion involved in it.
We can, by such exercise, add continually to our mental power, our executive power, our will power, our mental clearness. We speak of universal love as the consummation of happiness. Must not universal love extend to things and acts as well as persons? and if there is any act tending to our, or others, real good that is irksome to me in the doing, am I not, by so much, out of the- domain of universal love?
We are fighting sin: but we can sin, too, when we fight. We can sin against body and mind, even when all their efforts are for the right. We can abuse body and brain, even in the performance of a benevolent act, just as much as in the performance of a wicked one; and the penalty is the same. Perhaps you say, “But I can’t carry out this idea in doing everything, I have so many things at home to hurry me.” This makes no difference as to results. The laws of your being and mine, have no regard to the number of things we have to hurry us.
But how shall we gain the power of concentrating thought on any and every act, if through years of unconscious damaging habit in the other direction, we seem to have lost it entirely.
Pray for it, wish for it, demand it. Concentration is a quality: it is in the elements. Open your mind to it, and it will by degrees come to you. Think at times, or at regular intervals, if so you desire, on the word “Concentration.” A word is the symbol of a thought. So placing, if but for a few seconds, your mind on that thought, and you connect yourself with the current of concentrative or constructive thought in the universe; and as so you connect yourself with it, you draw the desired element from it. Every atom or accretion so drawn, is an additional stone in the solid foundation you are laying. It can never be lost, though it may require time ere that foundation is apparent to you.
“Ask and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be opened unto you.”
You can ask when behind the counter. You can knock when walking on the street. You can make a genuine and profitable demand in a second; and seconds so employed are most profitable. If they do not bring the whole diamond, they bring diamond dust; and it is such dust that builds up the gem within.
Consider The Lilies
I Want to preach a sermon to everybody, from the text, “Consider the lilies of the field,” because it has nothing in it disagreeable to anybody. It is not a sermon of threat or of warning, but of hope. The world Today needs more hope. We are a hopeless lot. We are so, principally, because in so much of the past preaching we have been told how bad we are, and what would happen to us if we kept on in our badness. We are so little told that we have in us lots of goodness and power. We have been bad, largely because so many ministers have thought badly of us, and have so made us think badly of ourselves. People who think badly of themselves are pretty sure to do badly. Scripture remarks, ” As a man or woman thinketh, so is he or she.” It is when a man thinks poorly of himself, that he goes off and gets drunk, or does some mean thing. The pride that makes a man value himself is the pride that keeps from mean and degraded acts. Our race is now on the point of being woke up to the fact that every man and every woman are the possessors of more powers than now they dream of, and that, when they know how to use these powers, they will steer out of all evil into good. A lily, or any other plant or flower, grows and beautifies itself under the laws of the universe just as much as man or woman; and a man or woman grows and has grown all through the countless ages under such laws, just as much as the lily.
It is a grand mistake,— that of supposing that any man or woman of ordinary sense is the result of this one short life we live here. We have all lived, possibly, in various forms,—as animal, bird, snake, insect, plant. Our starting point of matter in existence has been dragged on the sea’s bottom, embedded in icebergs, and vomited out of volcanoes amid fire, smoke, and ashes. It has been tossed about on the ocean, and lain, maybe, for centuries on centuries embedded in the heart of some post-pliocene mountain. We’ve crept up and crept up, sometimes in one form, sometimes in another, always gaining something more in intelligence, something more of force, by each change, until at last here we are, and we haven’t got far along yet. The lily has a life of its own and an intelligence of its own. You may differ with me here, and I expect you to do so. Most people think intelligence is confined to human beings, and everything that looks like it in an animal or plant to be “instinct,” or some other name for nothing in particular. I believe that intelligence is as common as air, only in some forms of life there’s a great deal more of it than in others. Man, of all the growths of the earth, has the most of this article packed away in him. That is, he has the most of the article we call “thought” packed away in him. Thought is a highly rarefied and powerful substance, unseen and unfelt by the outer sense. The more of this article possessed by anyone, the more there is of life in him or her. Thinking people live the longest. I don’t mean by thinking people, literary people or bookworms. Of the worms, many of them don’t think at all. They live on the thoughts of others. By thinking people, I mean those who are always getting fresh, original thought out of themselves. That kind of life or thought (these being convertible terms) renews body and mind.
The lily has intelligence enough to start itself out of the seed when put in the ground and called upon by the sun to do so, as a man or woman has the same intelligence (or should have) to go out in the sun on a pleasant day, and absorb the life and power sent in by the sun. Those who do not, who remain five sixths of the time in-doors, are, as a result, weak and bleached like potato-vines growing in a cellar. The lily has also sense enough to grow in the sun. If you put it in a room, it will grow toward that part of the room where the light enters. That is simply because it wants the light: it knows it needs it, and it goes after what it needs, because it knows, or rather feels, that the light is good for it. We go after food for precisely the same reason, only we call our action the result of intelligence. The plant’s action we call instinct. A man goes to the fire to warm himself because he feels the fire to be good for him. It is pleasant to feel it on a cold day. A cat lies in the sun for the same reason. But the man calls his feeling “intelligence,” and the cat’s or plant’s feeling “instinct.” Where’s the difference? Where the lily gets ahead of us with its limited life and intelligence is, that it does not concern itself or worry about the morrow. It toils not. It takes of water, air, sunshine, and whatever of the elements are in these, just what it needs for the minute, the hour, or the day, just so much and no more. It doesn’t go to work laying up an extra supply of water or air or sunshine for Tomorrow, fearing it may be out of these supplies, as we toil and spin in laying up extra dollars against the poverty we fear. If it did, it would use up all its force in heaping up these extra supplies, and would never become a perfect lily to outshine Solomon in all his glory.
The robes of a lily, a rose, or any blossom are in beauty, fine texture, and delicacy beyond anything that human art can produce. It is a living beauty while it does live. Our fine laces and silks are relatively of a dead beauty. They commence decaying or fading just as soon as finished. Up to its highest blossoming point the lily’s beauty is always increasing. A cloth that would shine with a lustre Tomorrow more vividly than Today, and that would show similar variations of texture, would be eagerly sought for, even though it lasted but a fortnight, and the extravagant people, who really keep the mills going and the money in circulation, and pay the best for the best things, would have it. If the lily, with its limited intelligence, worried and fretted for fear the sun might not shine Tomorrow, or that there might be no water, or money in the house, or potatoes in the cellar, it would surely become a cast-down, forlorn-looking flower. It would expend the strength in worrying that it needs for gathering and assimilating to itself the elements it requires to become a lily. If any degree of mind or intelligence so worries and takes on itself burdens beyond the needs of the day, it will cut itself off from the power of attracting to itself what it does really need for the growth, the health, the strength, and the prosperity of Today. I mean here just what I say, and that in no metaphorical, allegorical, or figurative sense. I mean, that as the lily’s limited intelligence, or mind force if you please, when not burdened or taxed about something that concerns Tomorrow, draws to itself the elements that it needs for Today, exactly so would human minds unburdened with woe or anxiety attract to themselves all that was needed for the hour. The needs of the hour are the only real needs. You need your breakfast in the morning; you do not need Tomorrow morning’s breakfast. Yet nine out of ten among us are directly or indirectly worrying in some way about Tomorrow morning’s breakfast, and so subtracting from ourselves more or less of the strength necessary to enjoy, digest, and assimilate this morning’s breakfast.
Exactly as the unburdened, unfretted, unworried lily attracts power to grow and clothe itself with beauty from the elements about it, exactly so does the unworried, unfretted human mind attract to itself a thousand times more of what is necessary to carry out its plans and relieve its happiness. You lose that power the moment you commence to fret. I mean, here, power to carry on any kind of business, from preaching up to street-sweeping. Every man of business knows that he is in the best condition to do business when his mind can fix itself on the one plan, and shut out everything else. Every artist knows that he does his best work when his mind is wholly fixed, concentrated, and absorbed in the work of the minute. Because then it is able to use all its power, and, what is more, it is drawing then to itself more of power, and what is ever so attracting it is fastening to itself forever. I hear you say, “I can’t help worrying. Times are hard, wages low, living high; the family’s large, they must be housed, bed and clothed, and this is on my mind day and night. You talk of not worrying under such circumstances. It’s all nonsense.” You see, my friend, I have tried to give you the full force of your objection. If you want more, you may call me hard names in addition. It is all nonsense, too, to say you can’t stop worrying, at least for the present. But that makes no difference as to the result,— the loss of power through fretting, the actual damage to health, the weakening of mind through worry, the aging of the body, and, worse than all, the loss or cutting-off from yourself of the mind’s attractive power, which, if allowed free operation like the lily’s, would give you all that you can enjoy for the day, because you can enjoy but just so much for the day, though you have, or think you have, ten thousand times more. A man can eat and enjoy but one dinner at a time, though he has money enough to buy a thousand.
If you are in a crowd rushing in a panic you must go with the rest and perhaps be crushed. Life as now lived by thousands is as a crowd panic-stricken by fear of coming to want, or fear of something or other. Any fear from any cause brings loss of power. I don’t say .that people ought to stop worrying. There is no such word as ” ought” in my dictionary. People can’t help worrying. The habit is born with us. Our ancestors for generations have worried before us. But that makes no difference as to the destructive results of “taking thought for the morrow.” The law involved goes on working. It is merciless in its working. It is as certain to run over and crush you if you get in its way, as is the locpmotive if you step before it on the track. The best way is to take advantage of the law, and get on the right side of it. How? Think hopeful things instead of hopeless things. Think success instead of failure. Why, the habit of thinking hopeless, disagreeable things is so confirmed up here in New England, that if you remark, ” Its a fine day,” half of these grouty, croaking old shellbacks will growl, ” Yes, but it is one of your — weather breeders.” Just so sure as the universe is governed by fixed and immutable law, just so sure will that law be found to read, ” If you think bright things, you attract bright things to you. If you think dark things, you cut off the invisible wires with the bright things, and you make instantaneous connection with the ‘ ground circuit’ attracting dark things.” Perhaps you say this is simple or childish. Now, what is simple in this universe? The sprouting of a seed is called by some a simple affair. But nobody knows the real cause of its sprouting. It is only known, if you put it in the ground, where it can have a certain amount of the sun’s warmth and some moisture, it will sprout. The rising and falling of a tea-kettle’s cover over the fire gave Watts his first idea of the mighty force of steam. That is, he got there his first hint of the power in steam, or rather behind steam. That is heat. But then there is a power behind heat. What’s that? Don’t know. Simplicity, indeed! What in the world is there so simple?
The Art Of Study
There is an art of study. We were told in youth to study. We were never told properly how to study, or, in other words, how to get ideas. Committing to memory words, sentences, and rules, is not getting ideas. It is simply memorizing. It is simply using, exercising, and training that part of the mind which learns to remember sounds. If you commit to memory a great many words and sentences, you are simply overstraining a part or function of your mind. You are putting on it a burden to carry. As, if you gave every tack in your carpet a name, and thought it your duty to remember every tack by its name, would you have time or strength to think of much else?
Words are not ideas. They are only the signs by means of which, through the senses of sight or sound, a printed word or a spoken word may represent an idea to a mind. A word or sentence full of meaning or thought to one person may mean nothing to another.
The more that is committed to memory, the greater the burden placed on the department of memory. How many things of the hour can you easily recollect on going out to the day’s business? A dozen matters involving household cares, mixed with your own business, with strict injunctions from Mrs. A. “not to forget them,” is a load to carry. It frets, perplexes, and confuses you. So are children treated in our so-called modern system of education. They are burdened with a thousand “facts,” which they are told “may be useful for them to know.” This is like teaching you to shoot by strapping a load of rifles on your back. You may carry the rifles all your life without becoming a marksman.
The memory is useful only to hold what is grasped by the spirit. No amount of ” book-learning ” can teach a man to sail a boat well. He Must educate himself. When he learns, through practice and many failures, that the rudder must be kept in a certain position to counteract the force of the wind against the sail, his memory at last holds what such practice has taught him. Committing all the proper directions to memory, will not help him a particle. On the contrary, if he endeavors, while learning this art, to recollect the directions, his mind and strength are put upon a sentence instead of the business in hand, and his learning will be retarded instead of advanced. The remembrance of what memory holds through exercise teaches people how to drive, to shoot, to row, to swim, to skate, to dance, to paint, to carve, to weave, to sew, to do all things. But nothing is learned when you are taught rules before practice. Did you learn to dance by first committing to memory the rules for the guidance of your steps, and trying to remember and follow them? No, you received first the idea from someone who could dance. You absorbed that idea or thought. Then, once having the thought, your mind, your invisible self, taught by degrees the body to move in accordance with the plan in the mind.
Every person, to learn quickly, must learn to throw himself in a certain mood of mind. That is the mood of serenity and repose. It is exactly the opposite to the mood in which children often “study” their lessons. To “study” hard, or to “study” in a hurry, is a vain attempt to force memory to do a certain work in a certain time.
If you would learn any art, learn it in your own way. Learn in the manner your inspiration suggests to you. Don’t mind what is said to you about the necessity of being ” well grounded” in certain rules which must be taught you by others. It is true that you must so be “well grounded.” But that is exactly what your spirit can best and quickest teach you. The spirit will make its own rules. Left to itself, it will strike out new and original methods. Rules already made never taught Shakspeare, Byron, Burns, or Napoleon. They trusted to their interior power, the interior suggestions concerning methods. When astonishing results are attained, men call it “genius,” and then go straightway to work to frame from the method adopted by genius a new set of shackles to impose on all successors in the same art. Genius may use a certain method as we may a crutch. When it has served a purpose, we throw it away for something better to walk by. The methods of genius are ever changing. Napoleon revolutionized military science. His was a mind that could have re-revolutionized his own tactics. Genius alone can see the folly of always travelling the same path, even though it has itself made that path.
Don’t be over-anxious because you do not learn or advance in any art or calling as fast as you wish. Don’t fret in mind because attempt after attempt fails. Don’t hurry. When you feel in the mood of hurry and fret, stop! That is the state of mind most opposed to learning. That is the mood which wastes your strength.
You can learn anything if your mind be persistently set upon it. Then wait in peace. The art will come to you.
If you will, for fifteen minutes or half an hour daily, sit down with a box of colors, and idly daub and make play of trying effects in color by painting one shade over another, you will, if you desire to paint, see skies, mountains, and forest coming in those alternations of light and shade, as one coating of color is placed over another. A rugged, splintered rock will suddenly start out from a splash of paint. You will have it suggested to you how easily tree trunks can be simulated by a few straight or curved lines. A splash of blue will serve for a pond or lake, green markings on its edge will represent shrubbery; and, ere you know it, there is a landscape, — more beautiful to you with all its crudeness than the work of the greatest artist, because it is your own seemingly accidental creation, your own child.
This is the foundation of the art. In this it had its origin. From this it grew. A seeming accidental combination of light, shade, and color suggested to some mind ages ago the idea of so representing familiar things to the eye on a flat surface. From this was drawn the idea of perspective and of representing surface, round, flat, or indented, near or far; and every new pupil, teacher or no teacher, must begin where the first painter did, and tread in his footsteps. It is so in all art.
The more free the mind is left to follow its own teaching, its intuition, the guidance of the spirit, the greater the inspiration. If it is put into rules made for it by others, there are produced only imitators and copyists. A rule laid down, with strict injunction to the pupil never to transgress it, is a shackle, a bar to advance in new territory of thought and investigation.
The mood for study — that is, for finding out methods and remembering them — must be the mood of as perfect repose as you can attain. There must be no hurry, no excitement. If you grow too wild over a sudden success, a finding of something in your efforts you have long sought for, beware! or you will temporarily lose it. There must be no sudden startings of body or mind, nor impatience to hurry over any detail that is necessary. If a tool you are using breaks, or a chair is to be moved, or your pen needs cleaning, do it as though that was the only thing to be done for the day. Keep the body in as perfect a state of rest as possible. Be apathetic rather than strained or eager. When your body is in this state of repose, it is in the state best fitted to be used as the instrument of the mind, or spirit. It is then most ruled by your thought, your real self, your invisible self, your spirit.
Because when body and mind are in this condition, — when you suspend all faculties save those concentrated on the work, or when your mind is in the receiving state, — your spirit can best work for you. It can then reach out and bring back the idea, the effect, the method, the conception and means of carrying out that conception; and the more quiet the body, and more tranquil the mind, the sooner will it teach how what you wish to do shall be done. In schooling yourself to this condition, you become more and more the medium through whom new ideas can be transmitted. You then connect yourself with the more exalted regions of mind or currents of thought, and receive of their knowledge and inspiration. Your mind is then the tranquil lake, the clear well, reflecting everything above.
You study every day, often when you least think you are studying. You study as you walk the street in repose, and look into people’s faces, and are interested and amused by them. You are then learning more and more of the different varieties of human nature. Men and women then are books to you. You open and read them. You learn to recognize in an instant, by the look on people’s faces, how they feel and what are their dispositions. Involuntarily, you are classifying men and women, and putting their down in your mind according to their characters. One specimen so recognized serves as the type for one thousand, for a race. You set down this man as no gentleman, from the manner in which he looks at a lady. You see in this overdressed woman the low pride of mere money. You are studying human nature. Knowledge of human nature has a commercial value in dollars and cents. When you are accomplished in it, you may tell in five seconds whether you can trust a person or not. Trust in people is the corner-stone of all business success. Even thieves must trust to confederates in order successfully to accomplish a burglary.
Napoleon the First accomplished his great successes through this intuitive, self-taught knowledge of men, and for what they were best adapted. Christ chose the twelve best fitted to receive his truths, and teach them, to others, through the same intuition. Intuition means the inward teaching, and the inward teacher. This teacher resides in all of you. Give it free play, and demand also of the infinite Spirit wisdom, guidance, and suggestion, and it will grow into genius, and your genius. Genius recognizes diamonds in the rough, and the qualities for success in men and women, whether externally they be peer or peasant, cultured or uncultured, according to the worldly standard of learning. Genius may sometimes talk bad grammar, yet remove mountains, build cities, and put railway and telegraphic girdles around this planet. Culture may write and speak elegantly, yet not be able to remove a mole-hill. Culture often struggles and starves on ten dollars a week in an office, as the mere tool of an ungrammatical, uncultured, and inhuman genius, who makes his thousand to culture’s ten.
The mood of repose, of unruffled and serene mind, is the mood in which all manner of discoveries are made, and ideas grasped or received. The eye on the lookout, ever strained and eager, does not at sea catch sight of the distant sail near as quickly as the one not looking for it. The name of the person temporarily escaped from memory rarely comes when we are “trying hard” to think of it. It is only when we cease trying to think, that the name comes to us.
Indeed, this trying to think causes an unconscious straining of muscle. We try to work our brains. We send the blood to the head in this effort. All this is an obstacle to the spirit. We set its force at work the wrong way. It is made then to pile up obstacles, instead of taking them away. Because, the more quiet is kept all that belongs to the body, die more force is added to the spirit, to use whatever of its own its interior senses and functions it would, to bring us what we desire. Our spirits have their own, their peculiar senses, distinct and apart from the sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch of the body. They are finer, more powerful, more far reaching. Your interior, or spiritual, sense of feeling can, when trained or brought out of its present dormancy, feel or communicate with the same sense of another person, whose body is in London or Pekin, and possibly is now doing so continually: for there may be a spirit whose body is now in London or Pekin, in closer alliance, relationship, and rapport with your own, than is any other spirit in the universe; and with such spirit you may now be in daily and hourly communication, through this interior and far-reaching sense which scorns the idea of distance as we interpret that word.
The profit of not over-working or over-straining the body is proven all about us in the every-day affairs of life. The most successful man in business is he of the coolest head,—the self-contained man, who has intuitively learned to keep his body free from fatigue, so that his spirit can work. Yet that same man may not know he has a spirit, or rather a power and a sense, which goes out from his body, and brings him plans and schemes and crafty ideas for his world of getting and gaining. Because spiritual powers can be used for all manner of purposes, no other power is used. Spiritual law is worked in the interest of craft, as well as for higher motive. But the higher motive, when it comes to recognize this force, and use it intelligently, will always command the greater power, the keener thought, and the highest genius.
Successful effort in every phase of life comes of the exercise of this power. It is “being led of the spirit.” If you have lost your way, you will find it much quicker by going very slowly, so keeping the spirit concentrated, instead of rushing the body about hither and thither, without aim or object. The experienced hunter puts himself in this frame of mind, and saunters through the woods; while the ignorant city boy, wild with excitement, rushes over miles of territory and sees no game. In both these cases, when the body is made to a degree apathetic, does a certain power, an unrecognized sense, go out and find for you your way. It finds the hunter his game. There is a great truth in being ” led of the spirit;” and it applies to all grades of spirit, and consequent motive, be it high or low, kind or cruel, gentle or harsh.
Sometimes you find yourself, without knowing why, in the self-contained, satisfied, contented mood of spirit. You are able to walk leisurely. You are in no hurry. No wild or unconquerable desire is upon you. You feel at peace with all the world. You have forgotten your enemies, your cares, your anxieties. It is then you most enjoy the woods, the skies, the passing crowd about you. It is then, when you are amused by them, that you most study them. You see peculiarities of person and manner which would escape you at other times. Your mind, quiet and undisturbed, is constantly receiving agreeable and vivid impressions. You wish such moods could last forever. So they can. This is the mood born of the concentrated spirit. Your spirit is then focused to a state of rest. It is holding its strength in reserve, only expending enough to move your body.
We are, when in this state, absorbing thought. To absorb thought is to absorb lasting power. But if, when in the act of such absorption, anything annoys or hurries us, this power of absorbing thought is instantly destroyed. Our spirit ceases then to be the open hand receiving ideas. It becomes the clinched list. It is then combative. It goes straight to whatever annoys or hurries it, and rages and frets around it. When we say “goes,” we mean our thought as an element literally goes out to the place we are hurrying to, or the person who troubles. It is a real thing so going out. It is our strength of both body and mind which is constantly leaving us. We cease then to study. Repose and serenity of mind means a condition of perpetual study; and, with such, a continual in-drawing of strength. We can discipline ourselves to such repose, until it will accompany and pervade all efforts, so that we shall rest as we work.
This is the mood of mind proper for study, work, or enjoyment. These three things should mean but one, — enjoyment. Without this mood, nothing can be really enjoyed; with its cultivation, everything becomes more and more enjoyable. It is the mood of construction. Our unseen forces are then massed together: so massed, they can turn their full strength on anything at a moment’s notice. It is the mood in which you want to walk into the office of the hard, purse-proud man who proposes to crush you with a look. Keep in this mood, and you are more than his equal. He will feel your power before you speak. It is the mood of mind which you need to deal with the wily shopkeeper, who makes you feel by his manner that he expects you to buy something, whether you wish to or not, and generally succeeds in making you do so. These people throw their thought force on you for this purpose. They are commercial mesmerizers. Their mesmeric control is as genuine as that shown at public exhibitions. They may not recognize it in this form; yet they work it on their customers, unconscious of the law by which they work.
It is in this mood that the spirit becomes as a magnet. As its forces are so drawn to a centre, their power of drawing to you ideas becomes greater. This power will increase continually by exercise. If you are so ever drawing to you ideas, you are drawing more and more power; you are drawing to you new plans, schemes, and inventions; you are sharpening all your faculties for any kind of work or business. Your spirit so massed is a power, either for resistance, or a power to draw in strength.
The trouble with many of us learners is that we wish to learn too rapidly. We have little knowledge of the power which really brings us all we do acquire, — the power which reaches out from us when the other faculties are temporarily suspended, and brings back not only ideas, but teaches the muscles how to carry out ideas. New invention comes to the mind which originates it when in this state, not when the mind is straining after its plan. You will make a perfect circle on paper with pen or pencil far easier when you do it idly, and care little whether you succeed or not, than if you are tremulous with anxiety to make one. When you are free from that anxiety, your real power has opportunity to act. That is the power of the spirit. It is the man who throws all thought of success or failure to the winds, who is most likely to accomplish the daring act at which others shrink, or, if they try, try with great dread of failure, which is mistaken for care. The best pilot through raging rapids is the man who has the power to forget all danger and see only obstacles. His spirit then possesses his real self. Self-possession means the power of the spirit to possess and control the body its instrument. The lack of it implies that the uneducated spirit, the real self, imagines it is nothing but the body it handles. It is as if the carpenter thought himself only a saw or a hammer. Self-possession forgets all about the body when it is using it. It thinks only on the use. The carpenter is not, while using his saw, thinking perpetually of the instrument. His thought is on the trained muscle which directs the tool.
Profit and Loss in Associates
Thought being unseen substance is absorbed by all. If you absorb another person’s thought, it mingles with your own. Then in part, if not in whole, you will think that person’s thought. You will to some extent see, feel, judge, and form opinion, as does that person. You are to greater or lesser extent swayed and influenced by the person. His or her thought, or spirit, has mingled with yours. You are not then wholly yourself. You are in part that other person.
This is as much a mesmeric power thrown upon yon, as that thrown by the mesmerizer on his subject. It works by the same law. If you associate a great deal with another person, are rarely by yourself, and see few others, you will be constantly taking in that person’s thought. If it is in motive and refinement higher than your own, you will be benefited by it. If it be in motive, taste, and refinement lower than yours, you will be injured. Your taste, your refinement, your motive, and judgment, also will be tinged with the thought of the inferior person. It is in this way that “evil communications corrupt good manners.”
Through this cause, you may see in mind very keenly in one direction and very blindly in another.
To be closely associated with a person thinking much of the time his or her lower thought, is for you to absorb this thought. You imagine, then, the views you take and opinions you form are your own. They are not wholly your own. Were you to leave that person’s association for any length of time, you would find many of your old opinions changing, because you would then be out of reach of that person’s lower and less clear thought.
To be much of the time with a gloomy or despondent person, or one fretful, or easily angered, or cynical, or skeptical, or in any way thinking evil or injurious thought, is for you unsafe. Be you as confident, determined, and courageous as you may, you will still absorb some of their despondency, irresolution, or cowardice, and be affected by it. It will be a blur on your judgment. It will be so much extra load of cowardly or irresolute thought to tax your courage or resolution. Of whatever evil quality that person’s thought is, it will infect you more or less with that quality.
You need never be influenced, swayed, or controlled by another’s thought, if you earnestly desire not to be. Such desire is a prayer. Prayer is the demand of your spirit to be free of everything that can cripple its power and happiness. Power and happiness mean the same thing. Power means ability to drive off everything that troubles you. Power means ability to keep your mind in the mood or frame of happiness. When that power is gained, and you rule your mood and do not allow the mood to rule you, everything on the material plane of life will shape itself and come to you in accordance with your mood. The law of correspondences between spiritual and material things is wonderfully exact in its working. People ruled by the mood of gloom attract to them gloomy things. People always discouraged and despondent do not succeed in anything, and live only by burdening someone else. The hopeful, confident, and cheerful attract the elements of success. A man’s front or back yard will advertise that man’s ruling mood, in the way it is kept. A woman at home shows her state of mind in her dress. A slattern advertises the ruling mood of hopelessness, carelessness, and lack of system. Rags, tatters, and dirt are always in the mind before being on the body. The thought that is most put out brings its corresponding visible element to crystallize about you, as surely and literally as the visible bit of copper in solution attracts to it the invisible copper in that solution. A mind always hopeful, confident, courageous, and determined on its set purpose, and keeping itself to that purpose, attracts to itself out of the elements things and powers favorable to that purpose.
If you think corruption, you will breed corruption in your body. You will have sores or boils or eruptions, or some disease coming of “bad blood,” which is the real cause of all disease. The blood is made impure by the spirit’s impurity. The spirit is the life of the blood. The spirit is your thought. What you think, comes of your spirit. What you think, you are ever building into your spirit. Impure or corrupt thought means far more than licentious thought. It means as well the ugly, hating thought, or dislike of others. It means the thought of gaiu, at any cost to others. It means all fretting, discouraged, despondent, and hopeless thought. It means long-continued grief at any loss. It means any thought that weighs down the spirit. What weighs on the spirit, will always injure the body. To grieve at the loss of a friend, will “pull one down,” as well as what are called specially “immoral practices.” The injury done the body may be quite as great. Therefore the sin is as great. People who fret are great sinners. They are creating a fretting spirit. They are solidifying their fretting into a habit which becomes more and more difficult to break off. This tears the body to pieces, and will eventually kill it. These people, then, are as guilty as the victim of some loathsome disease caused by vice, so called. Any habit which injures is a vice. True, some diseases are more respectable than others. Consumption sounds better than delirium tremens. Yet both kill the body. Both come of violations of the law. Both are penalties paid for such violation.
Every thought of yours has a literal value to you in every possible way. The strength of your body, the strength of your mind, your success in business, and the pleasure your company brings others, depends on the nature of your thoughts. Every one of your thoughts is a part of yourself. It is felt by others as a part of yourself. You need not always speak, to be agreeable company. Those near you will feel your thought pleasantly, if yours are pleasant thoughts. You need not always speak, to be felt disagreeably. Your disagreeable thought will also be felt. A person’s “magnetism” is their thought. Magnetic power or influence is simply thought felt by others. If your thought is despondent, gloomy, jealous, carping, cynical, it repels. If cheerful, hopeful, and full of earnest desire to do the most good possible to anyone you meet, though but for a single minute, it attracts.
Too much association with anyone of lower thought may lessen your natural power to attract. You may carry a part of their selfish, cynical, gloomy, or other evil thought with you wherever you go. You put it out with your own. It is felt as a disagreeable alloy with your own.
Your value and charm for others, as a companion, depends far more on what you think, than on what you say. If your thought is all pure, clean, bright, confident, and courageous, you are a value, and an increasing value, wherever you go. People will always be glad to see you. When you bring yourself (your thought), you bring an actual pleasure to people. You bring also a power and strength to them. Your thought helps to strengthen their bodies. They feel better for seeing you. You are as a fountain of health and pleasure wherever you go. You can disarm the sourest temper, and the person most opposed to you. When you can say in mind, “I refuse to look upon any person as my enemy,” you will have no enemies. When we talk of “having enemies,” and keep on, in thought, looking on certain people as enemies, we are making them enemies, because such people feel that order of thought coming from us. It is an element flowing from you to them. It affects them disagreeably. If you are ever sending out the thought, “I am not your enemy. I do not wish to feel disagreeably towards you. I want to like you better than I do,” they will soon feel this thought. They cannot resist its power. The thought of good is always stronger than that of evil. This is a law of nature.
The corner-stone in the power and charm of a person’s thought is this, expressed in words, “I want to help you in whatever way I can. I want to help build you up. I want to help you to better health, to better business, to the place where you really belong, to the position where your talents may most shine.” If this thought is sincere, it carries immense power. It will always be drawing more power to you, because every additional person’s good-will you so draw and fasten to you is an additional unseen rill of life feeding yours. It is a rill of substance, though unseen, — as real as the elements we do see. Good-will of others is constructive thought. It helps build us up. It is good for your body. It makes your blood purer, your muscles stronger, and your whole form more symmetrical in shape. It is the real “elixir of life.” The more of such thought you attract to you, the more life will you have. You draw, then, the best elements from all with whom you associate. If you send out a contrary order of thought, you draw to you from them the poisonous and destructive elements. These will hurt your body. Persons in this way are literally hated to death. The ill-will of many people fixed on one man can injure that man’s health. It has killed many. It can injure no one, if they oppose it with the thought of good-will, and the desire to do justice, which must always go with good-will. Nothing else can successfully oppose it. If you persist in the thought of good intent to all, you are connecting yourself with the higher and more powerful order of thought element. You are then receiving of that thought from minds, and from a world of greater power than you can now realize of here. You are connecting yourself with a world which does nothing but build up, whose inhabitants are gods in power, and whose creations at will are beyond our wildest dreams. All that so-called fable or fancy has conceived of are realities in the higher worlds of mind. When, by the thought of good intent to all, you so connect yourself with that world, you are receiving of their powerful thought. You are then absolutely safe against all enemies.
This is no myth of sentiment. It belongs to the same system of law whereby the sun gives heat, the winds blow, the tides move, the seed grows. In whatever mood you set your mind, does your spirit receive of unseen substance in correspondence with that mood. It is as much a chemical law as a spiritual law. Chemistry is not confined to the elements we see. The elements we do not see with the physical eye outnumber ten thousand times those we do see. The Christ injunction, “Do good to those who hate you,” is based on a scientific fact and a natural law. So to do good, is to bring to yourself all the elements in nature of power and good. To do evil, is to bring the contrary destructive elements. When our eyes are opened, self-preservation will make us stop all evil thought. Those who live by hate will die by hate; that is, ” those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” Every evil thought is as a sword drawn on the person to whom it is directed. If a sword is drawn in return, so much the worse for both.
Christ controlled the elements by the power of his own thought, and his connection with the higher and powerful world of thought. Thought being substance, can, when very powerful, be so concentrated as to be made visible in physical forms. It was Christ’s thought, and the power so exercised, that caused the so-called miracle of the loaves and fishes, and all the others.
Once, on a woman’s touching the hem of Christ’s garment to be healed, he said, ” Who hath touched me? Virtue hath gone out of me.” This was a woman full of evil thought. Christ felt immediately the contamination of her thought. It was to him as poison. Mingling with his own, it for the moment corrupted it. It lessened for the moment his power to control the elements. By virtue going from him, he meant power going from him.
Christ’s spirit was so pure and sensitive as to feel immediately the contact with any evil order of thought.
Your power to feel people’s natures is always proportionate to your freedom from any evil thought. Purity means power. Steel is at once the purity of iron, and the power of iron. Highly refined spirit comes of the purest thought, and is the most powerful thought. Christ felt the woman’s evil nature and its effects. But, knowing the laws, he shook off the evil by his more powerful thought of good-will to her. So he could have done had he been compelled to remain long in association with her. He would not have so remained save for some special purpose; because the resisting power he would have been obliged to put out to throw off the evil results of her thought, might have been expended with far more profit in other directions. If your thought is the superior, there may be many persons to whom you can do only a certain amount of good through association. They can only receive a small amount of your thought. They give back in return, and you absorb a large amount of their inferior thought. It is as if you gave them gold, and got back iron. You may from them get more iron than is good for you. You give them a great deal of gold they cannot absorb. In this way, both of you are injured.
You will therefore associate most where your thought is most appreciated and also used. Then both of you are benefited mentally and physically. You are not “unequally yoked together.”
If your superior thought merely entertains people, and they get no good from it save a pleasure for the moment, you may be of use to them and so are they to you. But the use is relatively small. They may value you most as an entertainment, and but little as a use. If they improve very slowly through the thought absorbed from you, you cannot afford much close association with them. They are your distant spiritual relations.
If they improve rapidly through your association, if they take the truth you give, and try to act and live up to it, you can longer remain near them. They are your near spiritual relations. If they improve very rapidly, they make with such improvement a certain life or quality of thought peculiarly their own. This will be absorbed as a nourishment and strength for you. You are then giving and receiving to advantage.
If yours is the superior thought, there may come seasons when some time is needed by the other to assimilate what you have given. There may then be certain periods of separation.
Both of you, on again coming together, will be the better and stronger for such separation. You then come together to give to each other of new elements of thought gathered elsewhere. There are no eternal separations for those who are building up their spirits of similar elements of thought. They grow ever closer and closer together. They build into each other’s hearts. They are always enriching each other. They separate with the assured certainty of meeting again. They will meet only to find more and more in each other. They find that the law which at first they thought so hard, harsh, and cruel, is only a source and means for permanent peace and happiness.
The Slavery Of Fear
The most common, yet most unknown, form of slavery is that where you are ruled by the thought about you. You may be in the employ of another person. You do your best to earn your money. You are conscientious, and desire to earn your wages. Yet you are troubled by a continual fear, that you do not give full satisfaction, or that you may be discharged. You live in continual fear of coming to want, if so discharged, or of being obliged to continue this mere struggle for the body’s existence under still harder conditions.
The reason for these unpleasant thoughts is, that some other mind is acting on your own. Someone is hostile to you. You feel that hostile thought. It is not on your part a “notion.” There are many persons Today, living under control of undecided minds, and dependent on them, as they think, for a livelihood. They may give that undecided mind much of their own inspiration, plan device, invention, and fertility of thought. They may give this unconsciously. Because, it is worth repeating many times, “Thought is substance, and is absorbed by one mind from another.”
The person so ruled may have the superior mind. Such a person may be indispensable to the fickle, and possibly unjust and tyrannical employer. If taken away, that employer would feel that a prop had been removed. Yet that superior mind may go on, year after year, in slavery; giving to the other idea, and seeing it but half carried out, or imperfectly carried out.
No shackles are so heavy as these. They fetter the spirit. In such position you are not doing your own work. You are not carrying out your own design. You may be trying to do the work of another, when that other person has no clear idea of the work he wants done for himself.
This is one of the heavy prices paid for dependency. If you have no other view in life, save that of being a servant, or an assistant on wages, you must pay more or less of this penalty. You will find it really less costly and less painful to start some business of your own, no matter how small the beginning. You will then be called upon to take responsibilities. If you fear taking them, you are always a slave. If you know that you are the brains of any business, though not the seeming head, demand a just price for your work. What do you fear? If you take the brains away, will the business go on successfully? If you feel that you are robbed, you are equally guilty with him who robs you, if you stand by tamely and see yourself robbed.
To work and live in fear of the poorhouse, is to be in the poorhouse. You would not feel so poor if you were actually there. To live in such continual fear, injures mind and body. Whatever troubles the mind, is certain in some way to injure the body.
You cannot think your clearest thought so long as you are in the slavery of any fear. Clear thought and plan have a value in dollars and cents.
If you come under the control of a whiffling, undecided weathercock order of mind, if you absorb the thought of such a mind, you will be whiffling and undecided yourself. You will affect those who come to you for orders, be the work what it may, as you are affected yourself. If your employer does- not know exactly what he wants, you will not know exactly what you want of others. As those under you, or in some way dependent on you, are so affected, so will they affect in turn others with whom they deal. If the head of an organization or business or movement is whiffling, whimsical, and uncertain, there will be uncertainty and dissatisfaction all along his line of control. You can never satisfy such a person, because that person is never satisfied with himself.
If you cannot find out what is really wanted of you, say so. Don’t try to do for any when they do not know what is wanted or needed to be done, themselves.
Stick by your own plan. If you see a good reason for any step, any detail, in it, no matter how trivial, don’t allow yourself to be argued out of it by another.
The kingdom of mind is full of tyrants. They want to have their own way, simply from love of power. Very possibly they are not aware of their own motive. To greater or less extent, all of us may be such tyrants.
You can ask with profit for information of many. You can ask with safety for opinion, especially regarding your own purposes, of very few. The most thoughtful, considerate, and just are the most careful in giving opinion. They will also take care to tell you that their utterance is but their opinion. Ignorance, conceit, and injustice are full of dogmatic utterance. Ignorance speaks as it feels at the moment. Don’t mistake utterance of this sort for information. If you do, you will absorb that conceited thought, that prejudice. You will then be ruled by that mind. You may be thereby led to abandon what would have been most profitable to you.
If you feel yourself the superior, and allow yourself to be thus over-ruled, or influenced in any way, by an inferior mind, you are crippling your own success. You derange most seriously the plans for your welfare of that order of unseen intelligence which can do most for you. You set in motion an order of forces contrary to theirs. In so doing, you oblige them to stop aiding you. They will not work for you, when they see their work thrown away.
The moment you allow the thought of another to influence you, against your own conviction, feeling, or intuition, that moment you lose your own best thought. You commence thinking in part with the other person’s brains. You may then commence thinking with brains below yours in motive, in judgment, in far-sightedness, in taste and discretion. You have muddied your own clearer intellect with a turbid stream.
The person so swaying you has an invisible following of minds like his own. When, unconsciously perhaps, you surrender your thought to him, you let in all his following likewise, to hang about, sway, and influence you. Worse, still; they will bar from you your own better, unseen counsellors. Because these can by this means easily be driven away. They are not driven away willingly, but their power with you may be limited. That power depends on the attitude of mind you keep toward them. If you, desiring to be all yourself, demand the wisest and best counsel in this endeavor to be yourself, you will get it. Keep up this demand. It will at last drive off any inferior unseen following.
Your own highest invisible friends can and will aid you in your endeavor to be yourself. They can and will throw chances in your way, in whatever field of effort you wish to work. They cannot work for you in this way, so long as you are Today absorbing the thought of some inferior mind, and acting it out, and perhaps Tomorrow the thought of another and acting that out.
If you want a ship built for you, you don’t give it in charge of a ship-builder Today, and the builder of a scow Tomorrow. Yet such, as to effect, is the condition of many impressional minds. Ignorantly taking in, or ruled by the thought of others, they are building after one plan Today, and another one Tomorrow.
You cannot speak out an unwelcome opinion in a circle of friends, so long as you fear such speaking will cost you a friend. So long as you have such a fear (and it be the time and place to speak that truth), and you are prevented by such fear from speaking it, so long are you under the rule of that friend’s mind. You value a friendship more than a truth. You barter a truth for the good-will of a person. Then you are no longer free or independent. Unconsciously, perhaps, that person is then ruling you. Yet, so ruling you, he neither respects nor values you so much for being under his dominion. There is in human nature an inherent love and respect for whatever is free.
Fear cripples the spirit, and diseases the body. Fear is everywhere, — fear of want, fear of starvation, fear of public opinion, fear of private opinion, fear that what we own Today may not be ours Tomorrow, fear of sickness, fear of death. Fear has become with millions a fixed habit. The thought is everywhere. The thought is thrown on us from every direction. Fear makes the tyrant. It makes the merciless master the inexorable creditor. “I fear,” says the man of millions, “that unless I exact my rents or dues, that I can no longer enjoy the mania for heaping up millions, which do me no good but the thought of owning them.” — “I fear,”” says his agent, “that unless I obey my master’s rigid orders, and collect his rents and dues, that I cannot live.” Because the agent has the rich man’s fear thrown on him. He absorbs that thought from him. He thinks the fear in and of the rich man’s brain. The agent must collect rent of the editor or the minister. He hands to them the fear he has caught of the rich man. They take the infection. “I cannot print this truth,” says the editor. “I cannot preach that,” says the minister,” because readers and hearers would leave, and then where would be the money to pay our rents?” This thought of fear and actual unseen substance, as real as any other element in nature, in this way dribbles and drains from the rich man’s mind, way down to the miserable tenant in garret or cellar. It ends with the thief. “I fear,” he says,” starvation also.” He puts his hand directly in his neighbor’s pocket, and pulls out a sixpence. There is no difference, save in method, between his act and that of the ruling spirit.
“I fear,” says someone commencing to learn an art, “the criticism of others on my imperfect methods in that art. I fear their ridicule.” Then you are ruled by them. You will never advance so fast as when you do not care for what they say. It is most desirable, then, to get rid of fear. It is the actual source of poverty of wealth, and poverty of health. To live in continual dread, continual cringing, continual fear of anything, be it loss of love, loss of money, loss of position or situation, is to take the readiest means to lose what we fear we shall.
Does, it help you pay a debt, to fear the creditor when there is no money in your purse? Does it help you make a living, to be ever in fear of want? Does it help you to health, to fear disease? No. It weakens in every way.
How shall we get rid of fear, and the rule over us of other minds crippled by fear? Attack in mind whatever you fear. Commence by seeing yourself in mind as brave. See yourself, in what you call imagination, as calmly defying whatever you fear, be it a man or a woman, be it a debt or a dreaded possibility. What so you figure to yourself in mind is a reality. Such thinking will give you strength. Demand for yourself more courage. Ask for it. Pray for it, and the quality of courage will come to you more and more, and what so comes can never be lost.
What Are Spiritual Gifts?
There is one spirit, one power, one force, in the universe, but its different manifestations or channels of operation are countless. It moves the breeze, the ocean, the avalanche, and the earth in its orbit. It moves the seed to grow, the plant to blossom, the flower to color itself with inimitable hues. It colors the bird’s plumage, and gives power to its wing. It works in the instinct, or lower reason, of the animal. Its highest known expression is in man, because in man there is concentrated the most of this force. In other and unseen orders of being, it is concentrated as to volume, and power, and varieties of power, as far above man, as man is above the mole.
It is a spiritual gift, which when matters look dark and squally, when debts are pressing, and friends seem to fall away, and business falls away also, that keeps your mind in a mood quite as buoyant and cheerful as when success shines on you; and when you have this gift, or, in other words, have grown to the power to hold continually such mood, you Command Success, and must have it; because then the silent force of your mind is felt by other determined minds, be your body sleeping or waking, and keeps them interested in you, and working in some way in your behalf. When so you hold the mood of confidence and determination, you are connected spiritually, or by unseen element, with all other confident, determined, and pushing minds. You become a part of such mind, giving to it of your own force, and receiving their force in return, and you are then, with them, moving forward to success.
Shrewdness in business is a spiritual gift or power. It involves a certain business prophetic faculty which knows when to buy, how to buy, and when to sell. It involves knowledge of human nature, — of knowing, or rather feeling, honesty and dishonesty almost at a glance. You have a sense which feels the thought of others, and gives you notice by such feeling whether their thought be good or bad, as by your sense of physical touch, you know the difference between a rough and smooth surface. That is a spiritual power in business which learns to economize time and strength, and thereby accomplish as much in an hour as others may in a day. Any great business success is gained by the exercise of a spiritual power. Spiritual power is used for all purposes, and is the only power used. It can be used on a high or low plane of motive.
Spirituality is not living in dreams, or living in the clouds, or having a pale face and languid air, as if the things of this earth were beneath one’s.serious consideration, and were rather endured than enjoyed. Spirituality means the greatest acuteness of intellect, the greatest foresight, the greatest amount of spirit or power gathered in a person, and the wisest expenditure of that power. It means the greatest governmental ability, be that ability exercised in the small empire of a household, or the larger empire of a nation. Spiritual gifts mean all talents, all powers, and all methods of using those powers.
That is a spiritual gift which finds out healing properties in plants, roots, and herbs. All nature expressed in substance, seen of the physical eye, is an expression also of mind or force; and every plant has its peculiar kind or quality of that force, and this, when applied, can help the individual spirit to drive out disease. But all seen things are expressions of the lower or relatively cruder form of mind or spirit, and therefore have a limited power; and, when any material remedy is applied, the main dependence should not be on that remedy, but on the power of mind, and, above all things, one’s own mind or force, to put the body above the reach of disease. I apply clothing to my body, as an external application of wool or cotton to protect that body from cold. But I believe in the power of mind to resist cold, and be comfortable, with much less clothing than the average wear. Your spirit can by degrees attain such power. That is no reason why I should lessen the amount of clothing in cold weather, before I have grown to or gathered that amount of force which shall so resist cold. If I think a medicine will aid what force I have to cure the body, or, in other words, to add its peculiar spiritual strength to my own spiritual strength, to act on the body, I think it better to take it. But for that reason, I should not fly to a pill or a stimulant at the first sign of pain or weakness, but turn on first my spiritual or mental force, and in any case rely first and last on that. The gift of thought healing is a spiritual gift. It belongs to all in proportion as their permanent flow of thought is pure, cheerful, determined, vigorous, decided, and abounding in good-will to others. That order of thought sent a sick person is a real element or force, and has power to give that person strength. If you give strength from so healthy a source as healthy thought, you drive out disease, or lack of ease to the body. Your own healthy thought aided by the healthy thought of others, is real substance, and has the power to build up any organ which is sore or inflamed, and wasting away through lack of some element necessary to it.
All pain is owing to an absence of life element in the part affected. The power is then lacking to send the blood through that part. Blood then collects and stagnates there. This you call inflammation. The blood is not the real life of the body, but only the conductor of its real unseen life, or spirit; and, when that is wanting, the conductor or messenger of this life has no power to travel. It collects in someone place, and the effort of the spirit to drive it from that place is too much force concentrated in that one place, or organ, which causes lack of ease, or pain; and lack of ease, or pain, implies that the unseen force or spirit is no longer equally distributed throughout the body, but is acting in excess on someone part of it, in which case every other organ or part feels the lack of this force, and is consequently weak.
Healthy thought can revive and put strength in sick bodies; and that is the reason that you, if sick, feel so much better from the visit of a cheerful, hopeful, vigorous person. Such a person gives, and you from him or her receive and absorb in thought, element life: and if people and friends about sickbeds, and in the houses of the sick, would at least try to make their thought hopeful, strong, cheerful; if they would keep in mind that the spirit of the sick person was as strong as ever, and that the throes of pain came only through the spirit’s effort to regain complete possession of its instrument, the body,— they would, in sending out hopeful, encouraging thought to that spirit, send it real strengthening element, and help it very much to make the body well again. They would then be using their spiritual power to aid another spirit in trying to repair a damaged body. If, instead of this, every one about the sick-bed is sad, dejected, and despondent, they send the struggling spirit despondent thought, or order of force, and make its work all the heavier. They’re using their combined spiritual power to make the struggle of the spirit all the harder. Then if ten, or twenty, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand friends of the sick person outside, far and near, are also despondent and hopeless as to that person’s condition, because someone has said there is no hope and the malady is incurable, they help to swell the volume of despondent thought acting on that patient’s spirit. They Work their spiritual power in the wrong direction, and that power is always the greater for good or ill, for the life or the death, of that person’s body, in proportion to the number of minds sending their force or thought to the patient.
The gift of healing can and should be used cooperatively ; and if, when the body of any strong and useful spirit is overcome by disease, all minds would direct on that person a current of hopeful, invigorating thought, — thought full of expectancy of life instead of expectancy of death, and desire also that when the spirit again controlled its body, that it might learn the cause of its disease, and so be on guard against any repetition of it,—there would then soon be longer useful lives, and vigor of mind and body prolonged to periods the world at present does not dream of.
That would be and will be the “prayer of faith;” and the “prayer of faith” shall save the sick, that is, faith in the power of a certain quality of thought element to bring strength, and repair a worn or racked or strained body, and in real though unseen element build it up again. That is the power of God, or the infinite spirit of good, working in and through us to cure ourselves and others; and this power is eventually to be accumulated by all of us in this or some other existence, so that it shall always keep our bodies in good repair, free from pain, and fuller and fuller of life and vigor. It will make our minds as healthy as Our bodies, and as free from hopelessness, gloom, dejection, or discouragement, or any other form of Mental Disease ; and this ultimate result is implied in the saying that ” God shall wipe all tears from all eyes.”
The world is steadily growing to this result, and medical’ science makes less and less use of drugs as compared with the past, for man is wiser than he realizes himself, and is alwaj’s growing more and more away from an entire dependence on the material, and leans more and more unconsciously on the unseen or spiritual, elements of Nature. Many a physician of Today, bright, hopeful, cheerful, and determined in mind, owes his successful practice quite as much to the current of strong, hopeful, cheerful, vigorous thought he sends the sick man or woman, as he does to the medicines he gives them.
There are two kinds of doctors. One nurses the maladies of the patient, the other nurses the patient’s body; one keeps the malady alive, the other makes the body alive; one keeps the malady in the body, the other sends it out of the body. Both doctors work their spiritual gift on the patient, but in very different ways and with different results.
That is a spiritual power or gift, which, when you have formed a plan or purpose in your mind, causes you to hold to it and not be led, swayed, influenced, cajoled, tempted, jeered, or ridiculed out of it by others. If you have resolved to be something, in art or business, greater and higher than you now seem to others, it will keep you to that resolve. The man or woman who succeeds must always in mind or imagination live, move, think, and act as if they had gained that success, or they never will gain it. Genuine kings or queens in the empire of mind will think as highly of themselves, and value themselves as much, when compelled temporarily to take what the world calls an humble place, as if upon their thrones. Those about them feeling this thought of self-appreciation will always pay them the respect due them. Such kings and queens will always by force of their spiritual gift gravitate to whatever station at or near the top they belong. They will do this through the silent force of mind, or the quiet mood of resolve firmly held to, more than by any use of the body The body is to be used Only when the spiritual forc«3 or clear sight sees the right thing, the right time, and the right place, in which or on which to use it, even as the carpenter uses his saw when he has measured and decided what to cut with it. If he sawed boards indiscriminately, he would “cut everything to waste” and build nothing, and that is what thousands of people do with their bodies. They put its force on little things, fret over little things; and when their industry for a whole morning has swept every atom of dust out of the room corners, scoured the bottoms of all the tin pans, fretted an hour because the letter he expected didn’t come, passed another hour over a desk full of papers to find another letter which amounts to nothing, what has lie or she accomplished save to fritter away their force or spiritual power for nothing?
You must be what most you live in thought, since it is your thought that draws its material correspondence to you. If in mind you abase yourself before another’s talent, or their grander style of living, or are over-awed by their pretentiousness into a sort of envious humility, or into that sinful self-depreciation which is ever saying, “I can never stand there,” you place the greatest of barriers to standing there. Look always on the best things the world can give as if they were yours, — not the houses, carriages, and finer clothes of others as yours, but others like unto them when you earn them; and earn them and have them you can, if you have sufficient faith in the spiritual law or mental condition of mind which brings these things, and is the only force which really ever brings them to anyone.
It is not” wrong to own and enjoy the best things of this earth. It is a necessity and a benefit that all your finer tastes should have what they demand. But there are just methods and unjust methods of getting the goods of earth. In other words, there are wise methods and unwise methods of getting what we need. Injustice is but another word for ignorance, or lack of wisdom. You will not walk off a precipice in broad daylight; you are very likely to walk off one in the dark. Neither will you commit any act, when you see more and more clearly it is going to harm you, or be unprofitable in some way.
It is no benefit, but an injury to you, to live in a hovel, or wear seedy clothes, or eat inferior food, or be compelled to live among coarse and vulgar people. The Christ never preached that it was a duty to live poorly. He did preach going without purse or scrip, and selling goods and giving to the poor; and in the very doing of this, he was inferring that perfect faith in the cultivation of that state of mind or order of thought which would bring all things as they were needed. He did in substance say, “Seek ye first to put your mind, so far as you may, in the line of correspondence and rapport with God, or the infinite force of good; and when you do this, there will come to you your share, and an ever increasing one, of spiritual power, which will bring you house and lands.” And I see no reason why there should not be included houses and carriages and vestments, and all that can best please eye or ear, or any of the senses. Splendor does not degrade. If it did, it would injure us to look on a gorgeous sunset. If you are one with God, or with the infinite and never to be comprehended power which governs endless universe, you are then in the line of the highest spiritual power. You cannot then be a pauper in any sense, no more than God is a pauper. And this infinite power, when diligently sought, gives “good gifts’-‘ to those who seek; and “good gifts” are neither moldy bread, nor moldy clothes, nor rotten houses.
Prophecy is a spiritual gift, and many more people have the gift of prophecy than realize it themselves. Your spirit, your higher self, has the power of giving you impressions as to proper methods of doing business. It sometimes warns you on your first meeting with people, that there is in them some defect of character which you need to be on guard against. You find if you despise this, your own self-prophesying, and are governed entirely by the counsel or the fear of others, that you are oppressed or kept down, and have neither that freedom nor independence of life you would have, and will have, when you learn to trust your own intuition, your internal teacher, the only reliable teacher you will ever have in this or any other existence, because that teacher is your own share and part and relationship with God, or the infinite power of good; and the more it is cultivated, the clearer will you see, and the more will it do for you. And when men or women believe in themselves, and have learned to trust to their own power to do anything, and, while accepting helps from others, regard always the helps as secondary to their own power for pushing things ahead, it means they have learned that they are really parts of the Infinite Power, and that, as parts, they have more or less of the qualities of that power for doing, for accomplishing, anything they may set about.
All minds are prophets to themselves, and in their own country, or would be were not the prophesyings so much despised, and the internal teacher so often cast out, so that at last your own prophet may lose the power to direct you aright; and you may give all the honor to someone who is directing you wrong.
Your mind or spirit lives in advance of your earthly or material life or sense. With its finer and superior senses, it may in an inconceivably short time do things, see things, and in finer element live in things or results accomplished, which it must accomplish, also, here on the coarser stratum of life, and with the cruder and coarser physical senses. There is this the real physical world about us, and there is also as real an unseen world of unseen element near us, which in all respects is an exact type of the world of thought, or ideal of every individual; and the worlds of two individuals living in the same house, and meeting daily at the same table, may be as different as the world of the tropic from that of the arctic zone. Every event in your seen world, which, as to your surroundings and manner of life, is an outgrowth of your thought, is preceded by a similar event in your unseen world; and it is the spiritual eye of prophecy which sees that event in the spiritual world sometimes ages, sometimes years, ere it happens here. It may see it for another as well as itself. It is for this reason, that sometimes, in the doing of a thing, you have a sudden flash of thought, that somewhere, and at some time, you were doing that thing before under precisely similar circumstances. You are carrying out in the physical what you have already carried out in the spiritual realm, and with your spiritual body, and among the spiritual bodies of the people you may not at that time know physically, but were to know physically in the future. If you regard your own spirit’s promptings and prophesyings as idle fancies or vagaries, or are guided largely by the opinions of others, you will not prevent the happier event or phase of life you are to realize in the future, — if not in this, in some other physical existence, — from happening. But you make it slower in coming. You can have your inevitable future happiness delayed through many causes. You can never have its possibility destroyed. The “you” of Today may use another body a hundred years hence, and the “you” of a hundred years hence will surely have more power than the “you ” of Today; and there is a time when every spirit will attain to a certain power, that it shall be able to look through, or rather call back, all its past physical existences, from its lowest up to its present highest, and see them all as one life, — the different bodies you have used during all these lives being analogous to the successive suits of clothes you wear in this one earth-life.
All things and all events do not have their origin here in this world, but in their spiritual world. Things here in material are as the shadows of the real thing in the spiritual, and as shadows relatively inferior. As the spiritual world advances, so do we catch the impulse and inspiration of that advance. It is our spiritual world that warms all things into life here, and builds them up here, even as the material sun sends us that element which warms into life, plant, animal, and man; and as the sun element through myriads of ages has been growing finer and finer, and as a result building plant, animal, and man into finer forms, so is the spiritual element or power ever acting on this planet, growing finer and more powerful.
The Process of Re-embodiment
The fact that one person may gain such a mesmeric control of another as entirely to absorb that other’s identity, and to make the individual operated on for a time subject to the will of the operator, seeing exactly as the operator desires him to see, tasting as he would have him taste, and being in imagination whatever he desires him to be, is a clue and cornerstone in getting at the mystery of re-incarnation, whereby a spirit is ushered into another life on earth in entire forgetfulness of its past existence or identity, even as the subject under control of the mesmerizer is for a period entirely oblivious of his own individual self and existence.
A mortal may mesmerize a spirit, and this may be done unconsciously. A woman, before and after conception, may dwell in thought much upon some real or ideal character, and this may attract to her that very character in spirit life. There are no ideals in the wordly sense. The ideal in thought represents some living type in the spirit. The highest character of which you are capable of conceiving has a representative in spirit, and your present highest conception may be relatively imperfect. Hence, your hero, your ideal, the actual reality in spirit life attracted to you, may still be incomplete, your incompleteness blinding you to his defects.
Such a spirit may be attracted to a woman before her child is born. It may be the spirit of someone who was very prominent in an earth life. It may have been a poet, a philosopher, a warrior, a statesman, a great artist. That spirit may be very unhappy. It may be seeking rest and finding none. It may, through its imperfectness, be unable to come near those very dear to it in the life of its former body. On earth, spirits of the body may come Apparently in close association. Much, then, may be inflicted by one and endured by the other’. One side of a husband’s nature may be harsh, unfeeling, inconsiderate, and tyrannical, when the wife is always gentle, considerate, and uncomplaining. In spirit life they cannot again unite, until the defects on one side or the other have been cured. Spirits cannot come into close and permanent association unless their relationship be real. It cannot be assumed.
The woman so dwelling much in thought on some person in spirit life attracts that spirit, and gives to it the only rest it can find. You will here naturally love to be where you are much admired and made to feel at home. It is precisely the same with the spirit. When you entertain some spirit in the thought of appreciation and admiration, when you read of their lives, or dwell on their deeds or utterances, and are thrilled by them, you are often thrilled by the presence of that very spirit. Because, as you have sent out your thought or spirit to him, he sends his in return, responsive to yours, and in proportion to the intensity of your admiration will be the concentration of that spirit upon yours, and the nearness of its presence.
The spirit in question so attracted to the woman at the period of which we speak, and able to find no other rest, may at last, through such concentration of interest, be absolutely, though unconsciously, mesmerized by her. It attaches itself permanently to her. It is unable to leave her. It comes at last to see through her eyes and hear through her ears. Its opinions are swayed and tinged by her opinions more and more, until at last it ceases to have any of its own. The condition of mind so thrown upon the spirit may be seen all about us in greater or less degree. Thousands lose more or less of their individuality through the influence of others. Unconsciously, they think another’s thoughts, hold another’s opinions, see with another’s eyes. Mesmeric control means only thought control. To be much with another person, to have little other association, to be dependent for one’s happiness entirely on one association, involves the danger of the mesmeric or thought control of that person; in other words, of thinking their thoughts and holding their opinions instead of your own. Such control may be held unconsciously by the other, or it may be held consciously. It is to be guarded against by variety of association and periods of solitude, whereby we may “find our real selves.”
So absorbed in the woman, the spirit’s mind drifts towards what most occupies her attention. That naturally would be the child she is to bring into the world, or in other words, the new organization forming within her. It becomes attached to it by a spiritual link. In effect, the woman has unconsciously gained a total mesmeric control of the spirit. She has sent that spirit into a mesmeric sleep or state. In such state the spirit has already forgotten itself and its past existence. It is in a sense but a part of the woman, doing and thinking as she wills. It is then linked by a spiritual tie to the child, because the woman’s aspiration may be for a child like her ideal, the steady flow of thought in such desire forming this spiritual link. A flow of thought means a flow of substance, as real as any we see and feel. A flow of thought between you and another person is an unseen link between you and that other person, no matter how far distant are your bodies.
The child body is then born with an actually mesmerized spirit linked to it, not that the spirit is within the child’s body. No spirit is actually enclosed in any human body. Its nucleus is there, but a spirit is an organization which reaches far out from the body. A spirit is wherever it sends its thought.
Send all your thought in revery to any place, and most of your real self will be in that place.
The body is an organization distinct and apart from the spirit. It is simply the instrument used by the spirit in the earth state of existence. Being in an earth life, the spirit needs an instrument of earth in order to adapt itself to the requirements of the earth life; as when you go down in a coal-mine, you need a coarse miner’s suit of clothes for use in the mine, rather than satin or broadcloth. In this sense the body is a protection to the spirit in its earth life ; and spirits who lose their bodies before reaching a certain stage of knowledge and consequent power feel and suffer much from such loss, because the spiritual body or spirit, obliged by reason of its immaturity to remain on the earth (as very many are obliged to remain), may feel and suffer intensely from the thought of the mortals about it. It is ” sensitive ” to a degree which can hardly be realized here. Any person exceedingly impressional, and so made to feel pleasant or unpleasant by the presence of others, according to their nature or disposition, may comprehend to some extent how weak spirits, drawn by an attraction they cannot resist towards certain people, may be made to suffer. The body with all its ailments, resulting through ignorance of spiritual law, is still a protection to bur immature spirit against the power of evil thought.
It is* simply, then, a new body for the spirit’s use that is furnished by the mother. Yet this body has a certain life of its own. It is analogous to the life of a plant. Like a tree, it has its youth, its maturity, and its decay. Were the spirit possessed of sufficient knowledge, it could arrest this decay, and keep its instrument so long as it desired, not only in a condition of maturity, but of ever-increasing vigor. It would do this by sending itself (that is, its thought) into the higher spirit life, and, through such line or ray of thought as a connecting link, draw to itself supplies of the life-giving element belonging to that region of spirit. One name fur this process is “aspiration.” In other words, it is the desire or prayer or demand for the highest and best. This mental action is as much based on a scientific law as is the attraction of gravitation. It is the actual sending of a part of our real being (the spirit) to a place from whence it draws fresh supplies of life. The thought we so send upward is as much a real thing, though invisible, as a telegraph wire, and, like a telegraph wire, it is an actual conductor of life to us. It is also the wire sending us messages and knowledge of methods for increasing such life and power.
The spirit so linked to a new body is not a “new being.” It is the same spirit having a new instrument to work through, but it is still a spirit, in a sense asleep. The thought power of the mother still remains upon it after the new body comes into the world; for it is influenced by all the mother’s thought, and her errors in thought, and the errors and ignorance in thought of all about it. It is still a spirit under the mesmeric influence of the operator or operators, these being the mother and those in close association with her. The mesmeric or thought power of several, focused on one person, is proportionately greater than that of one mind. All this is brought to bear on the spirit. It may in its last body have been a Catholic, a Jew, a Mohammedan. But if the mother and those about it be Protestants, it may also be Protestant, simply because the thought of all about it influences it to such belief.
While the body is very young the spirit can make but little use of it. In the year-old babe, it is in effect but a fragment of the old spirit that animates the new body. When it cries for food, or is annoyed by reason of any discomfort, it is as if you pinched or pricked the body of a full-grown person during sleep. There is just enough animation or spirit left in the sleeper’s body to protest with a cry or a movement akin to that of the child. Because, in reality, during sound, healthy sleep, your spirit, your real self, is not with your body. It is abroad, roaming about, seeing other spirits in other places, and only connected with the body by a link.
The spirit linked to the new body during the period called childhood is still mesmerized. It is not its real self. It cannot, to any extent, take advantage of its past experience; that is eclipsed by the wills of the operators. If it be a strongly marked spirit? and one having passed through many previous reembodiments, it will, as it grows up, and comes more and more under the influence of other minds, begin gradually to show something of its real self. It will internally protest and antagonize against much of the opinion about it. It will have a thousand thoughts, which it soon learns not to express to others, because they will be termed “wild and visionary.” These are indeed visionary, but real visions. They are the promptings of the soul. They are the Teachings out of the real self, the spirit, towards what is indeed true, despite the hamperings of the thought influence about it.
The new body given it may be an imperfect one. As the seeds of stunted plants produce other plants inferior in quality, so are bodies brought forth imperfect. The thought influence of those about it may aggravate such physical imperfection; that is, if the parents are always thinking disease, they show disease in the child. A mother dwelling on her complaints bequeaths those ailments to her child. The spirit is often actually mesmerized into the belief that it has a weak stomach or weak lungs. The parent who dwells even in the desire for alcohol will, in this way, bequeath the appetite for liquor on the child, though he may not drink a drop. This is the real cause of what are termed “inherited diseases.” They are not inheritances of the body. They are inheritances of the predominant thought of those most about it while young. Did the parents, though afflicted themselves with diseases, think health, and combat the tendency to think of their ailments, they would gradually cure themselves, and bequeath health to their children, despite the infant’s physical imperfection at birth, which is also a result thrown on it by the mother’s thought, or the thought of those about it.
So the spirit, thus furnished with a new body, may come again into the world to run its race, weighed down from the start with a new load of error. Not in a sense its real self, asleep, and insensible of the powers it may have used and proven for itself in a recently past existence; doomed to an enslavement of surrounding thought influence; habituated for years to such influence, till such habit chains it to a rut of thought; taught that it is nothing but the body it uses; educated to deride nearly all spiritual power, and spirit itself, as nonsense; cursed with appetites, possibly thrown upon it by the minds of others, in the manner stated above; the spirit and genius of a Napoleon, a Byron, or a Shakspeare may be dragged about by a wretched body, diseased, dissipated; a vagabond, living in what is literally a wretched dream. This dream may continue through successive re-embodiments, unless it can be brought under the influence of some thought which knows the truth. Even then the awakening to know and realize that truth may be difficult, so vast and complicated is the process of de-education to be undergone; so many are the false ideas it holds; so great is the tendency in all it thinks, to think away from the truth; so strong is the power of all the thought about it, so to put it in the wrong current of thought; so little does it know of the real laws and forces in nature ; so incredulous must it naturally be of the truths we here attempt to tell; so absolutely fabulous to it must seem the fact, that what it has deemed its real self is not its real self, no more than would be your amputated arm yourself.
Re-embodiment Universal In Nature
All forms of life are results of a continued series of re-embodiments in what we call matter. We may call matter the cruder form of spirit, so organized as to be visible to the physical eye.
Animals, birds, fish, and reptiles are re-embodied. To deny a spirit to one form of intelligence is to deny it for all forms, man included. The animal re-appears in a series of births, each birth giving to its spirit a new form. Each of these is a slight improvement on the last, if the animal is in its wild or natural state. Progression, improvement, and continual change from a coarse to a finer organization, are not confined to man.
In pre-historic ages there existed those immense clumsy beasts, birds, reptiles, and fish, whose bones now prove that they lived. These are the unwieldy parents of our present races of animals. The spirit of a mammoth living countless ages ago may now exist in the elephant, deer, or wild horse. It is the refined spirit, using a body lesser in size, finer in quality, more graceful, and more agile. It is the re suit of the unconscious tendency in all forms of life to the finer and better. When the spirit of the clumsy, wallowing, sluggish reptile or mammoth was using its body, it had always the desire for an organization or instrument which it could move about with greater freedom. It felt its tons of flesh and bones as an incumbrance. When that spirit had worn out one body and had found another, this desire still remained. Desire or demand will always shape the body in accordance with the ruling wish of the spirit. Such shaping is of course very slow, as we compute time. But time is as nothing in the growth of a planet and the growths on a planet.
Re-embodiment makes every animal trained by man more intelligent and better adapted to the use he wishes to put it. The spirit of the dog trained to the water, being given a new body, retains the skill and training it received from its master in the old one. If the desire of the dog was for fleetness, its body is shaped more and more through such desire for swift running.
The process of re-embodiment for the animal is the same as that for man. The spirit passed from one body is attracted to another organization in which a new body of like character is forming, and when that body becomes a distinct organization from that of the parent, the animal spirit comes in possession of it, — such possession becoming more and more complete as the body grows to maturity, and lessening after the maturity of the organization is passed.
The play and sportiveness of infancy and youth are due to the lightness and exhilaration coming of the spirit’s having a new body. It is for the same reason that you feel better in a new suit of clothes than an old one. The old suit is filled with your old thought, for thought is a substance which attaches itself to and permeates whatever is nearest he who thinks. Your old suit is filled more or less with the depressed evil or immature states of mind you have experienced in wearing it. When you put it on, you are putting on more or less of such low or despondent thought.
The animal passes from re-embodiment to re-embodiment, through periods compared to which that embraced in man’s known history is but a mere drop in the ocean. At last it reaches a point where the re-embodiment of its own species ceases. Its spirit is attracted to a finer and more complex organization. It is incorporated with, and becomes a part of it. That spirit organization is man.
In ages far remote from any known historical record, man’s savage instincts were but little above those of the savage animal. He was in reality but an animal, with more skill and ingenuity in the art of killing. His intellect had grown to that extent as to realize that a stick, a stone, or a sharp point on a stick or stone, could be used to let the life out of otheT animals. In this state the mother might attract to her the spirit of some more intelligent or highly developed savage animal. That spirit would then lose its identity as a quadruped, and re-appear in the body of a man or woman child. It might not be the only spirit re-embodied in the new being. The chief spirit might be that of some man or woman whose old body had died.
The supposed fables in the ancient mythologies concerning beings half men, half beasts, — such as centaurs, half man, half horse, or mermaids,—have their origin in these spiritual truths. Our race has been so developed out of the animal or coarser forms of life. Countless ages ago all forms of life were coarser than now. As these grew finer, man attracted and absorbed the spirit of the finer.
The spirit of an animal can actually be re-embodied in a man or woman, and its prominent characteristics will appear in that man or woman. Remember that, as to size and shape, the spirit of a horse need not be like the horse materialized in flesh and blood. Spirit takes hold of a mass of matter, and moulds that matter in accordance with its ruling desire, and the amount of its intelligence. An anaconda is but the faint spark of intelligence only awakened into desire to swallow and digest. Such low forms of life as reptile or fish have not even awakened into affection for their young. The reptile, as to spirit or intellect, is but a remove from the vegetable. Because spirit belongs also to the vegetable kingdom. Trees have a life of their own : they are gregarious, and grow in communities. The spirit of the old tree re-animates the new one. There is in the vegetable kingdom the unconscious desire for refinement, for better forms of life. For this reason is the entire vegetable kingdom of a finer tj-pe than ages ago, when the world’s trees and plants, though immense in size, were coarse in fibre, and in correspondence with the animal life about them.
The true evolution, then, is that of spirit, taking on itself through successive ages many re-embodiments, and adding to itself some new quality with each re-embodiment.
The “survival of the fittest” implies that the best qualities so gathered do survive. The lower, coarser, and more savage are gradually sloughed off. The best qualities in all animal forms of life eventually are gathered in man. He has so gained or absorbed into himself courage from the lion, cunning from the fox, rapaciousness from vulture and eagle. You often see the eagle or vulture beak on one person’s face, the bull-dog on that of another, the wolf, the fox, and so on. Faces hang out no false signs of the character of the spirit. Man, unconsciously recognizing this, uses the terms “foxy,” “wolfish,” “snaky,” and even “hoggish,” in describing the character of certain individuals.
No animal taken from its wild or natural condition, and trained by man through successive generations for man’s use, is really improved as an animal. It is only improved for man’s use or pleasure. An animal overloaded with fat, such as may be seen at an agricultural show, is deprived of agility and strength. The development of fat to such an excess is an injury to the animal. Man’s domestication of fowl or animal is artificial; it makes that fowl or animal entirely dependent on him for its support; it is then unable to sustain itself as in its wild or natural state. The domesticated duck or goose is a helpless waddler, almost unable to fly: its power of flight has been lost through generations of captivity. The bird or animal has a right to all the powers nature has given it. We rob it of those powers for the sake of its flesh, its eggs, or such use as we can make of it.
The spirit of the domesticated animal is absorbed into that of man. With it he absorbs the spirit of slavery, of dependence, of helplessness. He absorbs an unnatural, forced, and artificial product of spirit. This tinges his own spirit with that of slavery, dependence, and a certain helplessness. So the wrong he does the animal returns again to him.
Nature refuses at last to perpetuate forced or artificial conditions in any sort of life. The higher or finer the breeding, the greater the care required to sustain bird, animal, or vegetable, the more liable are they to disease. Our highly bred cattle must have warmer housing, and food requiring more care in its preparation, than the so-called inferior type. A Californian mustang, which is a near approach to the wild horse, will sustain itself and do hard work where the highly bred animal would starve. Eventually, a point is reached where artificial breeding can go no farther. The artificialized type grows more and more delicate, and requires more and more care. If that care be removed, and the animal can survive, it returns in a few generations to the original wild type, as is seen in the rabbit; which, if left alone, will in three or four generations revert to gray, the color of the wild species, and when it is gray is a hardier animal than when white or ” pied.” Nature, after all, knows best what to do with her own. Man makes no real improvements on nature. Let the spirit alone to its own impulses, let the spirit alone to its own direction, and it will do all things well. When we meddle with it, we bungle.’
All grains, fruits, and vegetables cultivated by man are natural types captured and enslaved by him. They are bred to forced conditions. They are dependent on man’s care. Remove that care and they cannot sustain themselves, as do the wild growths, or as did the parents of our present wheat, potato, apple, cherry, or other vegetable in their natural states. In consuming these artificial growths, man absorbs also their spirit of dependence, of slavery, and unnatural condition. All this tends to cripple and retard the growth of his spiritual powers.
All cultivated vegetable growths, like all artificially raised animals, are more subject to disease than the same species in their wild state. If neglected by man, they either disappear altogether or revert to the original type.
You may ask how could man have lived without the cultivated grains, fruits, vegetables, and animals? The answer is that man is not a body, but a spirit using that body; that had this spirit grown naturally it would have found other and better means for feeding and strengthening the body” than those now used; that a higher degree of spiritual power would have gathered, appropriated, or condensed out of the elements any food or any flavor of food desired, as did the Christ when he fed the multitude; that when man, ages ago in his blindness, feared to trust in this way to spirit, and trusted altogether in the material, — in flesh and grain for food and in artificially reared flesh and grain at that, — he cut himself off from his higher and better life and happiness, the life of his spirit.
The tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, and the ill effect of its fruit on two persons, is not fable. The garden was the earth in its natural condition. Adam and Eve were the ancestors of our present white races. They were brought to this earth by a superior power from another planet. They possessed an intelligence superior to the dark races then on the earth. The powers that brought them wished these two persons to depend on their own spiritual powers for support. They wished them to feed only on the wild fruits about them, so they should absorb only the natural and more powerful spirit of such growth. They did not wish them to enslave any form of spirit embodied in a material organization, and corrupt that spirit through any forced and artificial process. The tree of knowledge implied that there were ways and means for bringing about these artificial growths which it was not well for them to know. The superior wisdom wished them to learn their spiritual powers, as they do us. These would have done for them far more than the material, as they can for us. The spirit’s faculties, when cultivated, can enable people to leave their bodies, traverse vast spaces, and visit other continents, and even planets. It can make man entirely independent of the present cumbrous devices for locomotion. There would be no need for bringing any merchandise or product of one land to another when a few seconds could carry our spiritual body to those lands. Spiritual power would make all and any food desired out of the elements, at will. This would render unnecessary cultivation of the soil, and all forced and artificial growths of animal or vegetable.
Adam and Eve failed to trust in this power. The knowledge forbidden them was the knowledge for sustaining the life of their bodies through these forced and artificial states of animals and vegetables,
— through captivity of natural organizations, — through an unnatural development in such captivity,
— through a making of the animal what nature did not intend it should be, as well as the plant,— through killing and slaying, and renewing of the human body’s life by the unnatural life or spirit from another body.
” If ye eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge,” said to them the Higher Power, ” ye shall surely die.” They did eat or absorb the thought of this knowledge from some source, possibly from the lower races about them. They captured the wild animal, and made it, through artificial rearing, a creature nature did not intend it should be. They did the same by the plant. Then came the slaying of these animals, and the feeding of their own bodies with their blood. Twice is it repeated in the earlier chapters of Genesis, “Ye shall not partake of the life which is in the blood.”
In Eden the animals did not fear man; there was no need for their domestication. Even Today wild creatures in their natural state can be wooed by persistent kindness to thorough tameness.
But with captivity and killing and hunting, the bird and animal learned to fear man; Eden was over. The fear implanted in the animal is through eating of its blood, again transferred to man. So is every other unnatural or distorted quality, coming of artificial or unnatural growth. We absorb of the helplessness of plant or animal entirely dependent on man’s care.
Adam and Eve failed because of their inability to comprehend and trust to spiritual law; they would trust only to the material. The material is temporary; the spiritual is permanent. What we see, be it tree, animal, or any form of matter, is really held together by spirit. We should call the attraction of cohesion, the power of spirit to hold all matter together. To trust in material things and material law, as it is mistakenly called, is to trust to the engine that draws the railway train, instead of the engineer who runs it. The engine represents the material; the engineer, the moving and controlling spirit.