Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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runs in currents as real as currents of water, and every peculiar order of thought joins its own peculiar current. When you are angry, you connect with the current of angered thought. It then runs through you, and acts on you. You become then a part of the chain for the conveyance of angered thought, as well as an additional battery on that chain for its generation. You are helping to swell the great current of anger; and you are also receiving from, as well as giving to, that current. You are also helping to make other people angry with greater ease, since the angered thought you generate increases the amount and power of all the other volume, from which is sent the element of anger to any person who attracts it by calling up the mood of anger.
In a similar manner will any mood of mind attract to it the same order of thought-element. Your indecision attracts from the great current of undecided thought, and makes you a way battery or station for both the generation and conveyance of that order of thought. You charge your mental battery with the element of fear; and, as it draws such element, it increases its amount and strength for drawing to you more fear.
A violent fit of anger calls that element to act on the body which racks and strains it. Hence the weakness of body felt after and even during anger, since the more healthful and strong order of thought, or force, is temporarily cut off or unable to act on the body.
If so you attract and drink in the thought-element of impatience or indecision or fear, you are quite as much unfitted for successful effort as if you drank alcohol; for, though it does not make you uproarious or stupid, it does wear out your body by degrees. Sudden fright sometimes kills the body instantly. Suspense (only another name for fear) makes the muscles weak and tremulous, affects the stomach, unbraces the nerves, and dazes the mind.
Could you see clairvoyantly a man or woman very much frightened, you would see two,—the body in one place, and the invisible self at a distance from the body, struggling to leave it entirely; and, when a man or woman faints, it is because, through pain or terror, so much of the spirit has temporarily left the body.
People very much frightened drink in or absorb this destructive unseen element, and its effects in shaking the nerves and paralyzing physical effort are as strongly marked as when a man drinks too much alcohol. But the element of fear or anger or indecision, taken in lesser quantities day after day, month after month, year after year, as when you are always fearing something in the future, or more or less angry, peevish, irritable, impatient, undecided, every-day you live, is a species of tippling with a dangerous unseen element, and wears your physical body out gradually and surely.
It is as cheap to invite, or think, the healthy unseen element of courage as of fear, of even temper as of anger, of decision as indecision; and you do this every time you think or say “Courage,” or “Decision,” or “Good temper” to yourself. The qualities you set your mind on you draw to you; and, for the timid or irresolute or ill-tempered, it is most profitable to spend on arising in the morning, if no more than ten seconds in saying, “Courage,” “Decision,” “Even temper,” or any quality in which they feel lacking; because in so doing you connect yourself with and draw courage or even temper or decision from the currents of this order of thought. You are also stronger so to draw in the morning than in the latter part of the day. All organized elements—plant, animal, man—are fuller of strength when the tide of the sun’s force bears directly on this planet. When it ebbs in the afternoon, there is an ebb of power, be that power in man applied to muscular or mental effort.
The mood of mind you are in on first arising is the mood most likely to last during the day. You may not feel the growth of more courage, decision, or even temper from this simple practice, at first. You will in time; and you will wonder at the change in yourself, and where your greater force, courage, decision, or other good healthful thought came from. If you call this trivial, ask yourself if you know any thing at all of the nature or cause or composition of a single one of your own thoughts.
The worst intemperance of to-day is that coming of hurry or impatience, or the desire and attempt to crowd the doing of so many things in an hour or a day. The hurried, impatient mood in which you may tie your shoe-strings, or put on your clothing, in the morning, you may carry into every act during the day. You, in so doing, have connected yourself with the current of impatient, hurried thought. You have then become a part of that chain of being, or order, of hurried mind; and, could you see your real situation clairvoyantly, you would see yourself linked by invisible wires to every other hurried, impatient, and consequently fretful, and more or less irritable human being. For hurry and impatience lead as surely to fretfulness, irritability, and ill-temper, as the river flows to the sea.
You are very apt to carry the hurried mood of mind in which you tie your shoe-strings into the writing of a letter which may involve to you the gain or loss of thousands of dollars. The hurried, impatient mood runs its wire of disorderly thought and slovenly act straight through from one act to another, and leaves its traces and its damage on all. And so when you have dressed in a hurry, eaten in a hurry, and rushed to the street-car in a hurry, if you do not carry hurry and neglect and forgetfulness into your business, you may still have the harder task to throw off this mood of mind, and get “into the more reposeful and deliberate one in which you pursue your business or occupation; and in trying to get down to your work, or, in other words, get up that interest and enthusiasm or enjoyment in your work, which you crave, and without which you cannot do it, you use up a great deal of force which might have been put directly in your work, and which you might the sooner have had, had you laid for it the corner-stone by tying your shoe-strings with a religious and devout carefulness in the morning, and in so doing have connected a religious, careful, orderly, and therefore pleasant and profitable mood of mind to every act done throughout the day. It pays in dollars and in health and in happiness to make well-formed letters in writing, for the mood which makes the well-formed letter begets the mood which makes the well-formed plan. And, although you may see men apparently successful who are always in a hurry, you will find on closer examination theirs is not a whole success; for, though they may gain in wealth of dollars, they are surely losing in the wealth of health, without which nothing that dollars bring can be enjoyed. That is not a healthy mind or body, either, which can enjoy nothing but the heaping up of money, the article which represents food, clothes, shelter, and all necessary and enjoyable things.”
The slower movement of body which characterizes the religious form, rite, and ceremonial of all faiths, and in all ages, had for its object, and was intended by a greater Wisdom as a first lesson, to teach man the use and profit and pleasure which comes of putting our thought, or as much thought or force as may be necessary, on the act we are doing now. It is a law of our beings, that, when the painter can put his whole thought in the handling of his brush; when the orator or actor puts his whole force on his method of expression, and allows none of that force to stray off in the self-conscious channel of thinking how A, B, or C may judge or criticise that method; when, as Shakspeare says, you “give to each proportioned thought its act” (that is, carry out the act as your thought has first shaped or planned such act), as when the athlete or gymnast or graceful dancer put their whole thought or force in the muscle needed for use, and expression at the instant,—there comes of this the careful religious concentrative mood or use of our force, always bringing pleasure to ourselves and pleasure to others; and the giving first of happiness to ourselves, and next happiness to others, through the proper use and expenditure of the forces belonging to us, is the great aim and use of the sentiment or quality we term religion.
Every impatient act, no matter how trivial, costs an unprofitable outlay of force or thought. Every impatient act is an act without a plan. You do plan a blow with a hammer before you make it: if you did not, the hammer would strike wide of its mark. You plan the proper intonation or accent of a word before you speak it. You plan the graceful movement before you make it. These things may be planned with the quickness of lightning or thought, but planned they are; and those acts bring pleasure to you and others from being well done. That is the reward of mental temperance, and there are much greater rewards, also; for the habit of so doing all acts brings you more and more power and health and strength.
When you tug impatiently at the knob of the door that won’t open easily, or pull impatiently at the knot that won’t untie, you are sending force or thought into that knob or knot with little or no plan as to its use or direction. You are sending, also, a great