1890
Moreover, something is or seems,
That teaches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams,
Of something felt, like something here,
Of something done, I know not where,
Such as no language may declare.
To all who have a desire for a life of purity in mind and life in the human soul; to all who desire to live above the animal; to all who have found their human soul and understand that the “ still, small voice11 is the Lord of their being— I come to such with these few words of help. Thought is the creative force of the world. Between the two pillars of Thought and Understanding you find the doorway to the I am of the world.
M. L. M.
In this day and age of humanity the cry goes up from untold numbers: How are we to live? How can we sustain life ? Where shall we learn the lesson of patience and charity for the many evils that exist?
The struggle of humanity has become the nightmare of our sleep and the curse of our waking hours. Unless we understand the law, we shall go mad. If Karmic Law is the answer to the suffering, then and only then are we answered, How far the law of Karma can enter into the law of being should be our pleasure to seek in every heart for our answer. If I offend one, then let me bear the penalty. If I find an answer to my question, then make me most generous with those who are following in the path I have passed with painful steps. Can I reach a hungry heart by these few words, then do I feel most grateful. If I am able to guide one soul into light, then may I find pleasure even in shadow.
The Law of Life seems to be, to live right is to think right. First let us understand that evolution of spirit and matter is the first step; that we have lived a million times before this life is no new doctrine; that every life is one step taken, one experience that the human soul needs for its growth; that thought is a garment we weave for a covering for this soul; that food is the loom, and the purity of our lives is the shuttle that weaves rapidly this web. To be free from animal appetites, then live beyond the animal soul. To do this means to put aside all desire for flesh for food, and even cooked food gives unnatural thirst. We should live on fruit and soon as possible make our living simply sun-cooked food. Witness the struggle of the poor to provide food, when flour is ruled in price by the howling demons of the Board of Trade. Can any human being sit in the gallery and hear their yells and not compare them to the spirits of evil? You listen and then turn away and cry out, My God! how long shall we suffer this? From the languid, satisfied air of plenty and luxury let the spirit’s eye rest upon haggard want and pitiful purity looking from out the eyes of childhood. The pleading face, full of questioning the why of all this, chills my heart’s warmth and numbs my very soul, unless I can rise in my strength t ohelp them bear the penalty and lift their eyelids from the mental sleep of a thousand lives. Could the diamond be known as a frozen tear of an angel whose pitying eye had looked into the soul’s misery, and while little children looked up for help the eye of the Over Soul had gathered the tears and dropped them to earth, they had glistened long in the heaving bosom of earth, and now they throw back reflections of the coloring given by pain. Every thought or deed, good or bad, produces a corresponding effect in the unseen world. Swedenborg, the seer, has truly said, “ Evil punishes itself.” Mental healing teaches only a part of what the ancient wisdom teaches, namely, if we live in the animal soul subject to its desires and penalties that follow, that come in the form of disease and discontent, we shall never be happy, but if we rise out of the animal and into the human soul, we become free from these desires and penalties and acquire divine power to heal ourselves and others. It has been stated that we can heal and keep healed without any reference to what we eat, but this is a fallacy which those who have not learned will learn.
“We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart throbs.
He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.”
Enter into thy closet (within thy physical senses), and when thou hast shut the door, pray to thy Father (thy divine soul) which is in secret (above thy human soul, in thy inmost), and thy Father (or divine soul), which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.
Let your prayer be to the powers above you to crush out all desire for flesh for food. Can a more repulsive sight be found for spiritual eyes than a table laden with flesh of fowl and beast, where being dragged to the slaughter-house, have yielded their life to satisfy man’s appetite for blood? Think you that little children eating such food, and parents also can be free from the animal desires and passions that possessed the animal just eaten?
“Kill not for pity’s sake and lest ye slay The meanest thing upon its upward way.” – Light of Asia.
“Take not away the life you cannot give, For all things have an equal right to live.”
“To say that animals are not immortal shows the greatest ignorance; to say they have no soul, and that God teaches so, is lunacy. The sages of antiquity and the sages of today are unanimous to the contrary. All that lives has a soul. True, not a soul of equal rank, for there are vegetable souls, animal souls, human, spiritual and divine souls, and those strong souls that have reached Divinity or Christhood and have acquired a memory of their past incarnations, know and affirm that the Ego, the self, of every entity descends from the Absolute, and if not too weak ascends to it again through the one path that leads through the seven kingdoms of nature, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, the human, and the remaining three kingdoms, practically known only to the Christs and to those to whom in their good pleasure they reveal them.” Hence all life is sacred. “ Thou shalt not kill.”
Jesus reached Christhood, and hence he knew the past incarnations of those with whom he came in contact and foretold his own future incarnation, as Job had foretold his ages before.
Do not suppose this progression of the soul through innumerable incarnations to be a new doctrine. It was taught by Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epamarchus, Epedocles, Cebes, Euripides, Plato, Virgil, Cicero, Hippocrates, Galen, Plotium, Jambliches, Synesius, Origen, Marsilius, Ticinus, Cardan and Aristotle, and in later days Sir Henry Yane, Saint Martin, Joseph Glaswil, Kant, Schelling, Julien Muller, YanHelmont, the younger Jean Ernest Reynaud, Bulwer Lytton, Robert Southey, Herder, Lessing, Schubert and Sichtenberg favored it, not to speak of the ancient Italians, the Celtic Druids, the Scythians, aud the millions of souls who live and die in this knowledge and millions before the Christian era.
Understand, then, that 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. That kind of thought you most charge that magnet with, or open to receive it, will attract most of that kind to you. If, then, you keep most in mind the thought of determination, hojie, cheerfulness, force, strength, justice, gentleness or order, you will receive more and more of such thought element. The more you set the magnet in this direction, the stronger it grows to attract these elements. Whatever thought you think or receive, that you send out again to act on others for good or evil. “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Yonr thought at every moment is 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 you in your fortunes, accordingly as your mind has been for good or ill. That thought attraction tends to bring you together in the body. It will surely bring you together in some form of existence, either in this or a future time. When determined thought meets determined thought and unites in a similar purpose, a double power for success comes of such union. Whatever you think, that thought goes out and meets and mingles with the same element in thought of others; so it attracts you to them, your partners in misery or happiness, sickness or health; so you benefit yourself and others with wholesome thought or injure your fortunes and others also by evil thinking. Remember, always, that thought attracts thought of like kind. If you have a special aim in view, based on right and justice, just so long are you moving in this way the strongest silent power of your thought and the element of power in attracting to you the person you need to co-operate with. If you wish to gain by 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 dishonest thought in the body. Dishonest minds herd together through a natural law. The dishonest are sure to injure each other at last in some way. A thought, be it good or bad, is a construction of unseen element as real as a tree or a flower. It may shed peace and content or become a whirlwind of destruction. Every thought of yours, silent or spoken, has a literal value. You can use your thought to bring you good or ill, and will surely bring you in contact with people who will either bring you success or failure. Whatever plan or scheme of business you fix your mind upon in the determination to succeed, it begins as a thought construction of unseen element to draw aiding forces to you. Do not waste your power in looking for such aiding forces with your body; let silent resolve in mind do the work. It will do it if you hold to this frame of mind. It is no new power, though possibly new to most of us. Your body is only the instrument of the mind or spirit; now, let the best thoughts control this instrument, then you will live in continual harmony, and all good will come to you, “With all you get, get wisdom, and all other things shall be added unto you.” The power of the mind works while we sleep. As our physical condition, with most of us, causes the mind to work for benefit or our injury, I believe the food, which we eat to sustain life, gives thought, or puts our mental machinery in condition to accept the intelligent and pure universal thought of the world ; as we live only as high as we think, let us ask what food we should eat to make us fit for the purest thought.
A rather keen missionary that (Father de Smet) who says, “Alas, how helpless theology against a diet of bull beef.”
The “Successors” of the disciples of the Nazarene Christ have for centuries tried to establish a life according to his teachings, upon a foundation of beef, pork and alcohol. With what success witnesseth the inquisition, burnt witches, the wars, the standing army, the iron-clad navies, the crippled soldier, the wasted fields, the widows, the orphans, the national debts and the ever contending sects. Swedenborg, the prophet of the New Jerusalem, taught that when man became as fierce as a wild beast and fiercer, he began to kill and to eat the killed. He forgot to tell his followers that beef, pork, alcohol and tobacco make an unsteady foundation for a New Jerusalem. All these things inflame the animal in man.
Pure, living food is essential to him that would make progress in the path of life, because nature can form and build a fit abode for the soul in which, untrammeled by filth, lust and disease, development sure and rapid may go on.
Two-thirds of diseases prevalent are curable by abstinence from food of animal origin and by a temperate use of sun-cooked food, vegetables, grain and fruit. “If we could solve the problem of diet, it would amount to the re-discovery of Paradise.’’
That there is a difference between a body made from rotting flesh and lifeless vegetables (or cooked) and a body made from living fruit and vegetables (sun-cooked), photography demonstrates, for in the negative of a fruit-eater appear slight punctures, by the impurities thrown to the surface of the skin, whereas that of a flesh-eater appears full of large blotches, the skin of a fruit-eater being almost free from impurities.
I know of a Christ in the flesh, a Christ, I tell thee (meaning one who has attained the Divine Wisdom), who can duplicate every “miracle” of the Nazarene Christ, do more too ; a Christ because he has “overcome the world,” whose will is so strong, whose intellect is so great, that in comparison the will and intellect of thy Huxleys, Mills, Spencers and Darwins are mere babes in swaddling clothes, and he doth warn us against gluttony and flesh-eating.
Animal food, when taken by a fruit-eater, causes a loss of self-control and will power. I do not state that scraggy people, hysterical and dyspeptic, have a strong will, or that every greasy Falstaff is weak- minded, for I make a distinction between the will of the animal soul (Nephesh-Psyche) and the will of the human soul (Ruach-Logos).
Bonaparte had a strong animal will and conquered animals; Siddartha had a strong human will and conquered self.
As stated, inasmuch as flesh is dead substance, it irritates, stimulates and creates thirst and unnatural hunger.
The flesh-eater is a slave, the true vegetarian a lord. I love freedom, freedom from lust, hate, anger, and desire, the passions that torment men; I love purity. To have to eat food, especially bread, into which dirty, diseased cooks have put their visible and invisible dirtiness and disease, is that freedom?
I love clean, sun-cooked food, a healthy body, a pure mind and a spotless soul. May I obtain it, may all women and men obtain it! Bear constantly in mind that the Edenic life means more than mere abstinence from cruelty and foul flesh. It means chastity, temperance, peace, unselfishness and aspiration in and a life in the human soul. Should you fail, blame yourself your lust and feeble will. The question before you is this, “ Shall I be lord, or slave?”
It is desirable to have a body that may, as the mystic said, be a fit temple for the Holy Ghost (the higher self), and you will begin to dislike the foul air of the city and its unpleasant admixtures; you will lose unnecessary and unhealthy fat; you will long
for the pure air of the mountains; you lose all desire for distinguishing yourself on the battlefield, in the prize-ring, and at the horse-race; you do not desire to stab, to shoot or mutilate fathers and sons of women you have never seen; you will let the politicians commit their own robberies and murders ; the temperature of your blood becomes normal; your hands, hitherto hot and clammy, become cool and clean; you do not require drinks, and saloons and breweries become a nuisance to you; you begin to dislike tobacco; your carnality abates; you can look upon a woman without committing adultery in your heart; you become disinclined to fill our overcrowded cities with beings whose future existence will necessitate fierce, inhuman struggle, disease and crime, sickly, demonish looking beings, future tramps, prostitutes, libertines, usurers, politicians, libelers, stock- gamblers, wife-beaters and monopolists. Byron says:
To give birth to those Who can but suffer many years and die, Methinks is merely propagating death And multiplying murder.11
If you are scrofulous, consumptive, rheumatic and dyspeptic; if you are afflicted with Bright’s disease, or a tendency to epilepsy or insanity; if your body is full of boils and sores, by pure air, exercise, bathing and fasting and sun-cooked food, cure yourself.
Our object is health, purity, freedom, a life in the human soul. We have arrived at a link in the evolutionary chain which turns upwards. We have hitherto been on a level with the beasts. Have we learned to eat and drink that we might be plagued with all diseases of the flesh? Have we learned to do business within the so-called legal bounds that we might overreach one another ? Have we learned politeness and good manners that we may use the same as a covering for our deceit ? Have we learned to sanctify marriage that we might, behind a show of holiness, live in unbridled lust ? Have we learned to sing praises to a God that we have created, who is always on the side of the heaviest artillery ?
But we are tired of this madness; of this insatiate, furious rush after unnecessary and unholy food: gold, flesh and dominion; tired of this soul starvation; we are tired of a life in the mere animal soul; we have begun to sigh for a life in the Human Soul. Yes, in spite of the bitter, stormy antagonism of our appetites, passions, and even our so-called friends, we have actually started in search of this soul. “ When you have found your soul you know the Lord (the Lord or divine ruler of your being), or that still, small voice that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Friends, be not detained by those who process to be rulers or servants by the grace of God. Do not loiter in sanitary institutions, halls of justice, but pass on. Make thyself a new body of pure sun- cooked food, pure air, pure water; pure thoughts will soon be the ruler of your being. Destroy that animal self by non-gratification of its desires and by passionless contemplation of the illusive and ever-changing things about you. For with Abijile, an Arabian alchemist, “ I admonish if that thou seekest thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without thee.”
In conclusion: The sun-cooked food is the true and only basis of economy, vitality, temperance, health, purity, mercy, chastity, peace, elevation of mind, soul groivth and blessed immortality
What more do you need?
Fraternally,
M. L. M.
While mankind remained in a state of innocence, there is every reason to believe that their only food was the produce of the vegetable kingdom.—Sir Everard Homes
Every element, whether mineral or organic, which is required for nutrition, is found in the vegetable kingdom.—Dr. Edward Smith
The vegetable-eater, pure and simple, can extract from his food all the principles for growth and support of the body, as well as production of heat and force, if he selects those that contain the essential elements.—Sir Henri/ Thompson
The End