Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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and the head of the family buries himself in his business cares, or his newspaper, and reads all the murders and suicides and burglaries and scandals for the last twenty-four hours; and the queen of the household buries herself in sullen resignation or household cares, then there are being literally consumed at that table, along with the food, the thought-element of worry and murder and suicide and the morbid element, which loves to dwell on the horrible and ghastly; and, as a result, dyspepsia, in some of its many forms, will be manufactured all the way down the line, from one end of the table to the other.
If the habitual expression of a face be a scowl, it is because the thoughts behind that face are mostly scowls. If the corners of a mouth are turned down, it is because most of the time the thoughts which govern and shape that mouth are gloomy and despondent. If a face does not invite people, and make them desire to get acquainted with its wearer, it is because that face is a sign advertising thoughts behind it which the wearer may not dare to speak to others, possibly may not dare to whisper to himself.
The continual mood of hurry, that is, of being in mind or spirit in a certain place long before the body is there, will cause the shoulders to stoop forward; because in such mood you do literally send your thought, your spirit, your real though invisible self, to the place toward which your power, your thought, is dragging your body headfirst; and through such life-long habit of mind does the body grow as the thought shapes it. A “self-contained” man is never in a hurry; and a self-contained man keeps or contains his thought, his spirit, his power, mostly on the act or use he is making at the present moment with the instrument his spirit uses, his body; and the habitually self-possessed woman will be graceful in every movement, for the reason that her spirit has complete possession and command of its tool, the body; and is not a mile or ten-miles away from that body in thought, and fretting or hurrying or dwelling on something at that distance from her body.
When we form a plan for any business, any invention, any undertaking, we are making something of that unseen element, our thought, as real, though unseen, as any machine of iron or wood. That plan or thought begins, as soon as made, to draw to itself, in more unseen elements, power to carry itself out, power to materialize itself in physical or visible substance. When we dread a misfortune, or live in fear of any ill, or expect ill luck, we make also a construction of unseen element, thought,—which, by the same law of attraction, draws to it destructive, and to you damaging, forces or elements. Thus the law for success is also the law for misfortune, according as it is used; even as the force of a man’s arm can save another from drowning, or strike a dagger to his heart. Of whatever possible thing we think, we are building, in unseen substance, a construction which will draw to us forces or elements to aid us or hurt us, according to the character of thought we think or put out.
If you expect to grow old, and keep ever in your mind an image or construction of yourself as old and decrepit, you will assuredly be so. You are then making yourself so.
If you make a plan in thought, in unseen element, for yourself, as helpless, and decrepit, such plan will draw to you of unseen thought-element that which will make you weak, helpless, and decrepit. If, on the contrary, you make for yourself a plan for being always healthy, active, and vigorous, and stick to that plan, and refuse to grow decrepit, and refuse to believe the legions of people who will tell you that you must grow old, you will not grow old. It is because you think it must be so, as people tell you, that makes it so.
If you in your mind are ever building an ideal of yourself as strong, healthy, and vigorous, you are building to yourself of invisible element that which is ever drawing to you more of health, strength, and vigor. You can make of your mind a magnet to attract health or weakness. If you love to think of the strong things in Nature, of granite mountains and heaving billows and resistless tempests, you attract to you their elements of strength.
If you build yourself in health and strength to-day, and despond and give up such thinking or building to-morrow, you do not destroy what in spirit and of spirit you have built up. That amount of element so added to your spirit can never be lost; but you do, for the time, in so desponding, that is, thinking weakness, stop the building of your health-structure; and although your spirit is so much the stronger for that addition of element, it may not be strong enough to give quickly to the body what you may have taken from it through such despondent thought.
Persistency in thinking health, in imagining or idealizing yourself as healthy, vigorous, and symmetrical, is the corner-stone of health and beauty. Of that which you think most, that you will be, and that you will have most of. You say, “No.” But your bed-ridden patient is not thinking, “I am strong;” he or she is thinking, “I am so weak.” Your dyspeptic man or woman is not thinking, “I will have a strong stomach.” They are ever saying, “I can’t digest any thing;” and they can’t, for that very reason.
We are apt to nurse our maladies rather than nurse ourselves. We want our maladies petted and sympathized with, more than ourselves. When we have a bad cold, our very cough sometimes says to others, unconsciously, “I am this morning an object for your sympathy. I am so afflicted!” It is the cold, then, that is calling out for sympathy. Were the body treated rightly, your own mind and all the minds about you would say to that weak element in you, “Get out of that body!” and the silent force of a few minds so directed would drive that weakness out. It would leave as Satan did when the man of Nazareth imperiously ordered him. Colds and all other forms of disease are only forms of Satan, and thrive also by nursing. Vigor and health are catching also as well as the measles.
What would many grown-up people give for a limb or two limbs that had in them the spring and elasticity of those owned by a boy twelve years old; for two limbs that could climb trees, walk on rail fences, and run because they loved to run, and couldn’t help running? If such limbs so full of life could be manufactured and sold, would there not be a demand for them by those stout ladies and gentlemen who get in and out of their carriages as if their bodies weighed a ton? Why is it that humanity resigns itself with scarcely a protest to the growing heaviness, sluggishness, and stiffness that comes even with middle age? I believe, however, we compromise with this inertia, and call it dignity. Of course a man and a father and a citizen and a voter and a pillar of the State—of inertia—shouldn’t run and cut up and kick up like a boy, because he can’t. Neither should a lady who has grown to the dignity of a waddle run as she did when a girl of twelve, because she can’t, either. Actually we put on our infirmities as we would masks, and hobble around in them, saying, “This is the thing to do, because we can’t do any thing else.” Sometimes we are even in a hurry to put them on; like the young gentleman who sticks an eye-glass to his eye, and thereby the sooner ruins the sight of a sound organ, in order to look tony or bookish, or as a chromo literary fiend.
There are more and more possibilities in Nature, in the elements, and in man and out of man; and they come as fast as man sees and knows how to use these forces in Nature and in himself. Possibilities and miracles mean the same thing.
The telephone sprung suddenly on “our folks” of two hundred years ago would have been a miracle, and might have consigned the person using it to the prison or the stake; all unusual manifestations of Nature’s powers being then attributed to the Devil, because the people of that period had so much of the Devil, or cruder element, in them as to insist that the universe should not continually show and prove higher and higher expressions of the higher mind for man’s comfort and pleasure.
II.
MENTAL INTEMPERANCE.
Thoughts are Things.
Temperance means the proper use of force. Intemperance means the improper use of force.
An angry man has made an improper use of his force, because the element of angered thought he sends from him to another may as thought hurt the other person, and it certainly does hurt the one who sends it.
An angry man is, temporarily, intoxicated as is the man we call drunk from over-much liquor, and for a reason quite similar. He has first called up in himself the element of anger; and this element is attracting of its own kind, as put out