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. You are healing yourself when you see yourself running foot-races. You are keeping 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.
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