Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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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 to-day 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.
VOLUME II.
MAY 1887–MAY 1888
I. SOME LAWS OF HEALTH AND BEAUTY.
XI. THE HEALING AND RENEWING FORCE OF SPRING.
XII. POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE THOUGHT.
I.
SOME LAWS OF HEALTH AND BEAUTY.
Thoughts are Things.
Your thoughts shape your face, and give it its peculiar expression. Your thoughts determine the attitude, carriage, and shape of your whole body.
The law for beauty and the law for perfect health is the same. Both depend entirely on the state of your mind; or, in other words, on the kind of thoughts you most put out and receive.
Ugliness of expression comes of unconscious transgressions of a law, be the ugliness in the young or the old. Any form of decay in a human body, any form of weakness, any thing in the personal appearance of a man or woman which makes them repulsive to you, is because their prevailing mood of mind has made them so.
Nature plants in us what some call “instinct,” what we call the higher reason, because it comes of the exercise of a finer set of senses than our outer or physical senses, to dislike every thing that is repulsive or deformed, or that shows signs of decay. That is the inborn tendency in human nature to shun the imperfect, and seek and like the relatively perfect. Your higher reason is right in disliking wrinkles or decrepitude, or any form or sign of the body’s decay, for the same reason you are right in disliking a soiled or torn garment. Your body is the actual clothing, as well as the instrument used by your mind or spirit. It is the same instinct, or higher reason making you like a well-formed and beautiful body, that makes you like a new and tasteful suit of clothes.
You and generations before you, age after age, have been told it was an inevitable necessity, that it was the law and in the order of nature for all times and all ages, that after a certain period in life your body must wither and become unattractive, and that