Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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knot than is needed to open or untie. This is an intemperate use of force. This is the wildest extravagance, because it is expending force you cannot recall, in effecting nothing. It is expending far more power than if it had been deliberately planned, not only uselessly so far as this effort is concerned, but you are strengthening the habit of so uselessly expending or wasting force in the doing of all things. You are training your mind to this habit of extravagance, and this habit will bring you weakness and loss in every direction.
When you send your thought or force ahead of your body, and in the store toward which you are hurrying (as you actually do while hurrying to that store), the most of your real and invisible self goes to that store, and is in that store, uselessly expending itself, because it has not the body, its instrument, to work with. It has not the body’s senses to touch with, the body’s physical eye to see with, the body’s material tongue to talk with. You are really in that store, having only your finer or interior senses, and these cannot act on material things.
You are then as a carpenter would be who came to his work without his saw or hammer or other tools. Your thought, your invisible self, or most of it, in the store represents the carpenter. The saw or hammer represents your body, which you are dragging wearily on, with the little spirit or force left in it, five or six blocks away; and the force you expend uselessly, in dragging it, could have been better used in selecting the proper quality of cloth, or matching colors, or in seeing that you did not have some article forced upon you by the salesman, who knows just what you want, because you haven’t mind enough left in you, when you’ve got your body at last in that store, to know what you want yourself. Force means judgment and tact and discretion and taste; you know you part, temporarily, with most of these qualities when you are hurried and flurried and flustered and excited. It is when in this condition, that the salesman, who is cool and collected, and has all his wits, his force, his thought, about him, can throw his mind or thought into yours, and make you see with his eyes, and judge with his judgment; and as a result you may buy what you find, on getting home and pulling yourself (your mind) together, that you don’t want at all.
It is this habit of mind which causes what is called “nervous diseases.” When you send your thought, or force, away from your body to some place you are hurrying the body to, be it store, railway-station, ferry-boat, or the top of the stairs, you are sending away from you that unseen element of strength for which the nerves are the conductors through your body, as the telegraph-wire conducts from town to town a cruder form of the same force. When you fall into the habit of so sending it away, you are tremulous,—or, as we say, the nerves are shaken, for lack of this unseen vital power. Sudden fright may send instantly a great volume of this element from you. Hence the body has no strength left in it. In other words, your real self, your spirit, your force, has mostly gone from the body; and, when fright kills, it is because an actual end or link of unseen element, which bound spirit and body together, has snapped. Your invisible self is really an organized body of this force.
The more nerve or force you call to the body, or any part of the body, you would use, the more nerve you will have. The more nerve you get, the more you will attract to you. There is no limit to its increase. Your thought or force—so by habit set massed in a bunch, as it were—is a magnet, ever-growing in power to attract more force.
You can throw yourself, or your force, from the word you are speaking, or the idea or emotion you are trying to express, on the next word or the next emotion or idea to be expressed, even as you throw your force, or invisible self, from acting on your body to acting without the body in the store; and, when we do this, we slur our words and sentences. We run them together; and little or no effect is produced on our hearers, because we have in speaking them produced little or no effect on ourselves. You cannot make an audience really feel a sentiment unless you feel it yourself. Enthusiasm and earnestness are contagious. Enthusiasm means “God with us;” and God is not with us, and cannot be felt, unless we hold for the moment our whole share of the infinite force or mind on that part of the body with which we endeavor to express that mind. You train for the concentration of force in a syllable, in order to give it clear enunciation, when you train to pick a pin from the floor, and think for the moment only of the act, because you are then training to throw your force to any part of the body you wish to use at a second’s notice, and also to throw that force from any one part to another part,—organ, limb, muscle, lip, eye, forehead, nostril, lung, or tongue,—in that inappreciable flash of time, so rapid that not even the watch’s second-hand can measure its passage; and when you see and hear the oratory or declamation or expression of sentiment from the throat of the singer, or action of the danseuse, that thrills and compels your admiration, you are-acted on by so many flashes of power or mind, turned sometimes by a conscious and sometimes an unconscious discipline, to act on that part of the instrument, the body, it is desirable for the fraction of a second to use.
You are training to rid yourself of self-consciousness (only another name for the fear you may have for what A, B, and C may think or say of your body’s expression of an idea) when you train to throw your whole spirit or force, or as much of it as may be necessary, on the proper sharpening of a pencil; for the more-readily you can put what volume of power may be necessary to perform one act, the more-readily can you turn that power on the performance of any other act; and when you are self-conscious, or thinking of your audience in any way, you are expending just so much power or thought which should be turned on the expression of an idea.
A great orator, a great actor, may be a very slovenly man in other departments of life and action; he may be a very hurried man, and so let his power run to waste. He would have had far greater power in his special talent, had he so trained to hold his force in all acts. He would have lived longer. He would have had better health. He would not have used some artificial stimulant or strength to supply temporarily the force he wasted; for it is exhaustion only that begets a liquor appetite. A tree may grow up and take up a millstone with it. It would be a more symmetrical tree without the millstone. A powerful mind may shine despite its millstone, but the power placed to carry the millstone could be used to better purpose elsewhere. This unconscious wastage of force is as the millstone to many a mind; and the planet has not yet seen the fullest expression of mind, the genius it is yet to see, as mind learns how to cut loose from the many millstones it is now carrying.
If yours is the finest quality of thought, the thought fullest of fertility, of imagination, of invention, of activity, you have the most power for any purpose, mental or physical. But the greater your power, the finer and more subtle and more difficult to retain or hold is that element, or combination of elements, which has made your peculiar order or quality of thought; and, like some chemical combinations, the more explosive power they have, the more difficult it is to hold or keep them. For this reason, it often happens that the highest order of intellect is physically weak. It wastes its strength in some form of impatience. A high order of mind sends out many times the volume of force in a fit of irritability, that a clod would do in similar mood.
As to quality of thought, one mind may, as to power, be as gunpowder, and another, fulminate of mercury. A half thimbleful of fulminate has as much explosive power as lies in half a keg of powder; and the fulminate, whether of thought or substance, must be more carefully guarded than the common powder.
Your sudden cold comes often not because you sat in a draught, but because, through lack of force, sent in an impatient mood from the body, there was not enough left in it to keep open the skin pores, and keep them at work expelling invisible waste matter. The pores then closed up; the waste was re-absorbed into vein and artery, which then carried death instead of life, and made you feel “half dead.” It is the exhausted body which is most liable to take cold. You could have sat in that draught without taking cold had your full force been concentrated on the body, as you had sat many a time in a similar draught without injury.
People unconsciously get so mastered by the habit of sending their force or thought away from the body on the thing to be done, or the place they want to be in, an hour hence, or a minute hence, that at last they lose the ability to fasten their thought thoroughly on any thing. That means a “scatter-brain,” or a brain so fallen into the habit of scattering its force that it can do nothing but scatter. That means a weak intellect,—not always because such an intellect as a whole is really weak, but because it has lost the power of bringing its forces together and