Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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power of the Infinite Spirit to do through you far more than what you are now capable of conceiving in mind. To say “Impossible!” is to set up your relatively weak limit of comprehension as the standard of the universe. It is as audacious as to attempt the measurement of endless space with a yard-stick.
When you say, “Impossible!” and “I can’t,” you make a present impossibility for yourself. This thought of yours is the greatest hindrance to the possible. It cannot stop it. You will be pushed on, hang back as much as you may. There can be no successful resistance to the eternal and constant betterment of all things (including yourself).
You should say, “It is possible for me to become any thing which I admire.” You should say, “It is possible for me to become a writer, an orator, an actor, an artist.” You have then thrown open the door to your own temple of art within you. So long as you said, “Impossible!” you kept it closed. Your “I can’t” was the iron bolt locking that door against you. Your “I can” is the power shoving back that bolt.
Christ’s spirit or thought had power to command the elements, and quiet the storm. Your spirit as a part of the great whole has in the germ, and waiting for fruition, the same power. Christ, through power of concentrating the unseen element of his thought, could turn that unseen element into the seen, and materialize food,—loaves and fishes. That is a power inherent in every spirit, and every spirit is growing to such power. You see to-day a healthy baby-boy. It cannot lift a pound; but you know there lies in that feeble child the powers and possibilities which, twenty years hence, may enable it to lift with ease two hundred pounds. So the greater power, the coming spiritual power, can be foretold for us, who are now relatively babes spiritually. The reason for life’s being so unhappy here in this region of being is, that as we do not know the law, we go against it, and get thereby its pains instead of its pleasures.
This law cannot be entirely learned by us out of past record or the past experience of any one, no matter to what power they might have attained. Such records or lives may be very useful to us as suggestors. But while there are general principles that apply to all, there are also individual laws that apply to every separate and individualized person. You cannot follow directly in my track in making yourself happier and better, nor can I in yours; because every one of us is made up of a different combination of element, as element has entered into and formed our spirits (our real selves) through the growth and evolution of ages. You must study and find out for yourself what your nature requires to bring it permanent happiness. You are a book for yourself. You must open this book page after page, and chapter after chapter, as they come to you with the experience of each day, each month, each year, and read them. No one else can read them for you as you can for yourself. No one else can think exactly as you think, or feel just as you feel, or be affected just as you are affected by other forces or persons about you; and for this reason no other person can judge what you really need to make your life more complete, more perfect, more happy so well as yourself.
You must find out for yourself what association is best for you, what food is best for you, and what method in any business, any art, any profession brings you the best results. You can be helped very much by conferring with others who are similarly interested. You can be very much helped by those who may have more knowledge than you of general laws. You can be greatly helped to get force or courage or new ideas to carry out your undertakings, by meeting at regular intervals with earnest, sincere, and honest people who have also some definite purpose to accomplish, and talking yourself out to them, and they to you. But when you accept any man or any woman as an infallible guide or authority, and do exactly as they say, you are off the main track; because then you are making the experiments of another person, formed of a certain combination of elements or chemicals, and the result of that person’s experiments, the rule for your own individual combination of element, when your combination may be very different, and differently acted on by the elements outside of it.
You have iron and copper and magnesia and phosphorus, and more of other minerals and chemicals, and combination and re combination of mineral and chemical, in your physical body than earthly science has yet thought of. You have in your spirit or thought the unseen or spiritual correspondences of these minerals still finer and more subtle; and all these are differently combined, and in different proportions, from any other physical or spiritual body. How, then, can anyone find out the peculiar action of this your individual combination, save yourself?
There are certain general laws; but every individual must apply the general law to him or her self. It is a general law that the wind will propel a ship. But every vessel does not use the air in exactly the same fashion. It is a general law that thought is force, and can effect, and is constantly effecting, results to others far from our bodies; and the quality of our thought and its power to affect results depends very much on our associations. But for that reason, if yours is the superior thought or power, and I see that through its use you are moving ahead in the world, I should not choose your character of associates or your manner of life. I can try your methods as experiments; but I must remember they are only experiments. I must avoid that so common error,—the error of slavish copy and idolatry of another.
The Christ of Nazareth once bade certain of his followers not to worship him. “Call me not good,” said he. “There is none good save God alone.” Christ said, “I am the way and the life,” meaning, as the text interprets itself to me, that as to certain general laws of which he was aware, and by which he also as a spirit was governed, he knew and could give certain information. But he never did assert that his individual life, with all the human infirmity or defect that he had “taken upon him,” was to be strictly copied. He did pray to the Infinite Spirit of Good for more strength, and deliverance from the sin of fear when his spirit quailed at the prospect of his crucifixion; and in so doing, he conceded that he, as a spirit (powerful as he was), needed help as much as any other spirit; and knowing this, he refused to pose himself before his followers as God, or the Infinite, but told them that when they desired to bow before that almighty and never-to-be-comprehended power, out of which comes every good at the prayer or demand of human mind, to worship God alone,—God, the eternal and unfathomable moving power of boundless universe; the power that no man has ever seen or ever will see, save as he sees its varying expressions in sun, star, cloud; wind, bird, beast, flower, animal, or in man, or in man as the future angel or archangel, and ascending still to grades of mind and grades of power higher and higher still; but ever and ever looking to the source whence comes their power, and never, never worshipping any one form of such expression, and by so doing making the “creature greater than the Creator.”
That power is to-day working on and in and through every man, woman, and child in this planet. Or, to use the biblical expression, it is “God working in us and through us.” We are all parts of the Infinite Power,—a power ever carrying us up to higher, finer, happier grades of being.
Every man or woman, no matter what may be their manner of life or grade of intellect, is a stronger and better man or woman than ever they were before, despite all seeming contradiction. The desire in human nature, and all forms of nature or of spirit expressed through matter, to be more and more refined is, up to a certain growth of mind, an unconscious desire. The god Desire is at work on the lowest drunkard rolling in the gutter. That man’s spirit wants to get out of the gutter. It is at work on the greatest liar, prompting him, if ever so feebly, that the truth is better. It is at work on people you may call despicable and vile. When Christ was asked how often a man should be forgiven any offence, he replied in a manner indicating that there should be no limit to the sum of one man or woman’s forgiveness for the defects or immaturity in another. There should be no limit to the kind and helpful thought we think or put out toward another person who falls often, who is struggling with some unnatural appetite. It is a great evil, often done unconsciously, to say or think of an intemperate man, “Oh, he’s gone to the dogs. It’s no use doing any thing more for him!” because, when we do this, we put hopeless, discouraging thought out in the air. It meets that person. He or she will feel it; and it is to them an element retarding their progress out of the slough they are in, just as some person’s similar thought has retarded us in our effort to get out of some slough we were in or are in now,—slough of indecision; slough of despondency; slough of ill-temper; slough of envious, hating thought.
Yet the spirit of man becomes the stronger