Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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yourself an invalid when you see yourself ever as one. Don’t expect or fear sickness or pain for to-morrow, no matter what sickness or pain you have to-day. Expect nothing but health and strength. In other words, let health, strength, and vigor be your daydream. The desirable condition of mind is better expressed by the word “dream” than by the terms “hoping” or “expecting.”
“Dreamers” do far more than the world realizes. The “day-dream” of a person who may sit for an hour almost unconscious of what is going on directly around him, is a force working out results in the unseen and mighty kingdom of thought, concerning which we know so little. Only at present, he or she whose thought is so disengaged from the body as to make them for the time quite unconscious of its existence, having no knowledge of the power they are using, no belief that it is doing something, have consequently no faith in it; and without faith, most of the result must be lost to them.
If you know nothing of gold-mining, or of the formations in which gold is found, or the methods for extracting it from the soil, you may dig in rich gold-bearing earth for months, and cart it off to fill in sunken lots. With no knowledge of the treasure in your soil, you have no faith in it. We are, as regards our mental or spiritual powers, in an analogous condition. Yet every imagining is an unseen reality; and the longer and more firmly it is held to, the more of a reality does it make itself in things which can be seen, felt, and touched by the physical senses. Dream, then, so much as you can by day of health and vigor. The more you so dream of it by day, the more likely is your thought to enter the same vigorous domain at night, and so recuperate you all the quicker. But if you, dream by day of sickness or weakness, your thought at night will be the more apt to connect itself with the current of sick, weak, diseased thought, and you are, on waking, the worse for it. Ignorantly you may store gunpowder in your cellar, thinking it some harmless material. A spark may then destroy your house and your body. In an analogous manner mankind are now constantly bringing pain and evil on themselves through an unwise or ignorant use of their mental forces. As we most think, imagine, or dream, can we store up gold or gunpowder. A daydream, or reverie, is an outflow of force working results. The more abstracted the reverie, the greater is the force working separate and apart from the instrument, the body. When for a time you can forget, or lose consciousness of, your physical self and immediate surroundings, you are working your spiritual or thought-power possibly a hundred or a thousand miles away. All occult power, so-called, all the miracle power of biblical record, was wrought by this method. If thought can be concentrated in sufficient volume on an image in mind, it can produce instantly that image in visible substance. This is the only secret of magic. Magic infers the instantaneous production of the visible by such concentration.
The power of Christ’s thought concentrated on an imagining, or mental picture, could produce that imagining in visible substance, as he did the loaves and fishes. All minds have these powers and possibilities in embryo.
Faith is indeed as the “grain of mustard-seed” to which, as to growth, it is compared in the New Testament. But it can grow for evil as well as good, and, if for evil, may become a tree in which every foul bird of evil omen will come and build its nest. Your evil or gloomy imagining is faith in that evil. Your fear of a disease is faith in the perpetuity and increase of such disease. You have a slight derangement of stomach or kidney or other organ. So, having it for one day or a few days, you begin to expect it. You think of it only as an unhealthy organ. You never in mind see it as a sound organ. You may be then told it is in a dangerous condition. You have sa name possibly given to the ailment which is suggestive of great suffering, debility, and ultimate death. All this is help to faith in evil. The force of other minds may be added to yours which increases that faith. Friends and relatives may be anxious on your account, and fearful, and continually reminding you how careful you should be. Every thing tends to make you see yourself sick, weak, and enfeebled. You have not in your own mind an imagining of the part affected as sound or healthy. None send you their thought, or imagining, as vigorous and healthy. The spiritual thought-constructions sent you are all in the opposite direction. The spiritual force sent you is really all for evil. If your friend says he “hopes you may get well,” he says it with an accent and expression which says he fears you may not. And so your faith in an evil is constantly increased. You always get the “substance” of the thing feared or expected as well as hoped for. In this case you get the substance of evil. You get more disease, more weakness by the same law, or force, which can, otherwise directed, bring you health. You are taught to have more faith, or belief, in sickness than in health. “According to the faith,” says the biblical record, “shall it be given thee;” and accordingly you have given you sickness, because you have most faith in sickness.
Nature never really grows old as we understand that term. She is ever casting-off her worn-out physical envelopes, or forms of expression. We say the tree decays. But do we not see the new tree springing from the rotten stump of the old one? That is the same tree. In other words, it is the spirit, or force, of the tree we called old, materializing a new form of expression. That process has been going on through countless ages. That species of tree was far coarser than now in some far-off past. It has, through its successive regrowths, been growing finer and finer, and is to grow finer still.
In all animal and other organized life, we find periods of repair and recuperation preparatory to a certain newness of life, and renewal of organization, as when the crab or lobster casts its shell, the snake its skin, the bird in its moulting-season casting its old plumage, the animal shedding its fur. In all these organizations other changes go on, which we do not see. During these periods, the bird, animal, and fish are weak and inactive. Nature demands rest during this reconstruction. Such reconstruction is going on internally in the organization as well as without.
All natural law, as seen in the lower forms of organization, extends to the higher. This same law extends to mankind. There come temporary periods in every person’s life, when all the activities, forces, organs, and functions are more sluggish. We are then undergoing our moulting process. Nature is laying us up for repairs. If we obeyed her demands, we should come forth in a few weeks or months with a renewed life and a renewed body. All that Nature asks of us, is that we give mind and body the rest they call for while in the repair-shop.
We speak of people of “middle age” as having reached their greatest amount of power and activity. After this period, “it is inferred as the law of Nature,” that we decline gradually into “the sere and yellow leaf.” This faith in “old age” and weakness, by the same spiritual law makes old age and weakness.
The “turn” at middle age, or a little after, means that the physical body you have been using is giving birth to a new one; in other words, the old is being re-formed, and giving place to the new. During such process of re-formation, a great deal of rest is required. Your real, invisible, spiritual self is busy at work in the process of reconstruction. You should be no more overtaxed at this period than you were when an infant, or during childhood.
We do not grant this rest. We force the exhausted organization to work when it is unfit for work. We mistake our season for moulting, and consequent temporary weakness, for some form of disease. We then fix in our minds, through faith in evil, the idea of disease; so we construct a disease for ourselves. While Nature is trying to give us a new birth, rejuvenate us, and make us stronger, we defeat her purpose, and make ourselves weaker.
In the vast majority of cases, people cannot give themselves the rest Nature calls for. They must work on and on, from day to-day, from year to year, to “make a living.” That makes no difference as to the result. Nature’s laws have no regard for man’s systems. So fagged-out and ignorantly disobedient humanity fags on, and thousands “make a living,” and toil and suffer and wear out, and die in misery on respectable beds of sickness.
In cases habit is so strong that people cannot stop their work, or peculiar line of activity. They have no idea or capacity for resting spirit or body. They are miserable unless at work, and yet through growing weakness unhappy while at work,—like so many “house-wives,” always complaining of being worked to death, yet unhappy if not at work.
Could these people once have mind and body brought into a condition approaching that of real rest, they would possibly be alarmed, and fear their powers were failing. They might for a time become sluggish, inert, and relatively inactive. That