Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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as many persons as heartily wish you success, and they hear your plan, and talk it over with you, always in earnest sympathy and good-will, you are having their co-operation in making for you a silent force which will aid you more than can any thing else. You will then the quicker find persons who are in sympathy with your purpose. People will come to you, or you will be led to people, who will-wish to aid you. They will be the persons who will need what you have to give. If you have a new knowledge, or a new truth, or a new invention, or a new device in art, or an improved wagon, or a chimney, or any thing in any way making life more comfortable and more happy, you will, through the power of co-operative demand or prayer, be the sooner brought in contact with the people who can aid you,—the people whom you need, and who need you. Your co-operative ill-wish is a co-operative curse,—there is power to harm in a curse. A curse is an ill-wish,—a prayer for evil. Prayer is simply thought sent out to a certain end or purpose. A curse or ill-wish is a force for evil. It works through a law which is merciless in its operation.
If three or four persons commence ill-natured gossip about another who is absent, and comment sarcastically concerning that person’s character or acts, they send them through the air an actual force or element which does the person of whom they talk harm. The person of whom they talk will feel the power so generated in some way. He will be made either despondent or captious, angry or irritable. All such states of mind in some way injure the body, unless the person talked of sends out constantly toward his enemies the thought of good-will. His good-will is the stronger force, and will turn aside the weaker force of their ill-will. That is the reason that the Christ advocated loving your enemies. The thought of good-will is the stronger power. We want power. We lose power when we send out to another any kind of ugly thought.
It is the peaceful non-combative thought in Quakerism that made the Quakers prosperous. Peaceful thought is constructive power. Ugly thought is always destructive power.
Christ discouraged all resort to blows or weapons, because he knew there was in the elements a more powerful force which could conquer, and that this power could be generated and used by the mind.
If you wish that your success in any business should involve an equal success for others, your thought or prayer has then the greater power for a real success than if you desire success for yourself alone, with little regard for others. A real success in life means, besides money enough for our needs and tastes, health, and the capacity to enjoy what money wisely expended may bring. A wise selfishness or self-interest will desire or pray heartily that all associated with us shall be equally as fortunate as ourselves. We do not want that our friends shall remain poor while we get rich. You do not want to see your friend obliged to reside in a hovel while you live in a palace. You do not want to see your friends in rags while you are decently attired. Neither do you want that your friends shall be dependants on you,—pensioners on your bounty. You want them equals with yourselves—equals with you in ability to hold their own—to “hoe their own row.”
We are, as members of society, all members of one body. If any member of that body is diseased in mind, or diseased in body, all the other members must in some way suffer. The more health of mind and body or relative perfection around us and near us, the more healthy and perfect shall we become.
There is a certain fascination in watching the working of a powerful steam-engine,—in seeing tons of iron, that a hundred men could with their hands barely lift, rise and fall with the elasticity of a rubber-ball, or in watching the never-ceasing pour of the waters of a Niagara. That is because it is in human nature to love force. Our spirits, in so contemplating such exhibitions of force, connect themselves closer with the element of force and draw then and add eternally to themselves more of this element; and this fascination and admiration of power is, at the same time, your prayer or desire for power, which is immediately answered. And there is great profit in watching for an hour the heave and roll and wash of the ocean-billows against the rocks. And that certain repose and quiet and dreaminess you may feel when in the ocean’s company, is because you are then actually absorbing of its element of force; you are then taking in a spiritual quality—force; and when you go away, you have gained more force to use in any way you choose,—in business, in some form of art, or the management of a family. And when at night, if but for a moment, you lift your eyes toward the countless stars, and try to realize that these are all suns with other earths wheeling around them; and that all the combined force of all the rivers, Niagaras, and oceans on our own little earth is, as compared with the force going on in what we see above us, but as the feeble might of a fly’s wing,—then you have spent another profitable moment in the actual absorption of that much-needed element—force. That is one way of getting force. You are then praying for force; for all intense admiration is true worship, and all true worship is prayer or demand for the quality admired in that which is worshipped.
VI.
THE DOCTOR WITHIN.
Thoughts are Things.
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” If you keep-in your mind an image, or imagination, of yourself in perfect health, and full of strength and activity, you keep the forces working to make you so. You are constructing out of the unseen substance of thought a spiritual self (the healthy self hoped for); and this spiritual self will in time rule the material body, and make it like unto itself. If your stomach is weak, refuse in imagination to see it a weak stomach: see it only a strong stomach. If your lungs are weak, see in your mind’s eye your lungs as strong. If your body is weak and sluggish, see yourself in imagination as you were when a boy or girl, when your limbs were full of activity, and you took delight in scrambling over fences and climbing trees. You are then putting out the “substance” of the thing or condition of body “hoped for.” As you continue to see yourself thus, the gradual change in your physical condition for the better will increase your faith that this law is a truth. Keep to this thought of yourself as strong, active, and vigorous, week after week, month after month, year after year, and you fix more firmly in mind yourself as free from all disease. It will be a confirmed habit, or, as we say, “second nature,” for you so to imagine yourself.
What you think or hold most in mind or imagination, that you have most faith in. If you imagine a bugbear, much of the time you will make a reality of such imagining. The “confirmed invalid” sees himself in his “mind’s eye” only as sick. He puts out, or imagines, the wrong image, or imagination. He is unconsciously working the same law. The invalid who always sees himself as sick, is in reality constructing a sick body. You can make a weak stomach for yourself by always in imagination seeing your stomach as weak. The great trouble and error of to-day is, that, so soon as any organ is a little overtaxed or strained, its possessor is apt to think of it only as weakened and diseased, and in thought dwells only on such weakness: in this, unfortunately, he is too often assisted by others. As all thought put out is substance, the result is, there is by such means made for him, first, spiritually, a stomach, or lungs, or kidneys, or other organ, more imperfect; and this imperfection is embodied and expressed in the material lungs, stomach, kidneys, or other organ.
It cannot be told too often, that all material things are the outgrowth or product of spiritual or unseen forces. Whatever you think of is made at once in unseen substance. So soon as made, it commences at once to attract its like order of substance to itself: so, no matter how weak you are, when in mind you see your body active, strong, and vigorous, you have really made the spiritual body so. That spiritual body is drawing, then, the elements of health and strength to itself. Always in mind see yourself well when your body is sick. This is a simple process, but it involves a wonderful and wonder-working law. When in mind you see yourself diseased, though your body may be so, you are working this law the wrong way.
The imagining of a fresh, sound, vigorous body, is in actual substance, though unseen, a fresh, sound, healthy, and vigorous body. It is a spiritual reality. The material body must grow to be like the spiritual reality. If your body is weak, do not see it in your mind’s eye as weak. See yourself full of life and playful vigor. Don’t see yourself as an invalid propped up in a chair, or confined to the house, though for the time being your body is in such conditions.