current; knowing nothing of the fact that thought does move in currents, and that the lower one of inferior or evil thought is most powerful near the earth,—nothing of your powers and senses as a spirit, you are as helpless as a babe nightly on passing from your body.
Could you get a start in the right direction toward the upper and superior regions of thought,—could you ascend through the current of dark and crude thought, which everywhere surrounds you,—you would find yourself in a land of beauty, sunshine, and flowers; of grand scenery and fairy landscape. You would associate there with the people you most wish to see, and to whom you in spirit belong. You would repose in a luxurious languor, yet still be able to note scenes of indescribable charm by the eye. You would be conscious of life, and still be at rest. You would drink in life with every breath. You would return with this life to your body in the morning. Your night of bliss would be both as a rest in thought and a healthy stimulation to your life in the body. Your spiritual senses would open in this elevated thought-atmosphere. You would be freed from what is now a nightly slavery. Your connection with the higher regions of thought would become permanent, and you could attain the power of returning to them at any time to refresh yourself when overcome by the cruder thought which now surrounds you.
Every low place of resort, every saloon filled with hangers-on more or less under the influence of stimulant, every and any place, no matter what its conventional character, if it be a place of deceit, of trickery in trade, is an actual spring of low thought. This thought flows from it, as real, though unseen, as water from a spring. In any great city all these are as so many thousands of springs of filthy thought-element, near together. It is not a live, rapid current. It is more like a slowly moving bed of filthy ooze, in which you are mired and slowly borne along. Every tattling, gossiping, scandal-mongering group of people is an additional spring of such thought. So is every family where disorder, sour looks, cross words, and peevishness or petulance reign. Good society, as well as that called inferior in the social scale, can contribute to this inferior thought-current. The purest spirit cannot live in this thought-current without being unfavorably affected by it. It requires continual outlay of force to resist it. You become mixed and entangled in it, blinded by its obscurity, weighed down by the burthen it brings. You may have noticed how much of inordinate desire you are freed from on getting in the open country far beyond the city limits. Mountains are more free from this thought. It is an element which conforms to the law of gravitation. Low thought runs to the lowest places, as does any thing heavy, crude, and coarse. Trade, commerce, and manufacture unfortunately demand cities to be built on low levels, either at the seaside or river-bank. In the coming higher civilizations, the making of the most perfect men and women, and the discovery and making of real and permanent pleasures, will be the chief pursuit. Cities will then be built on hills or mountains, so that all the cruder emanations, seen and unseen, shall readily drain away.
With so much of this injurious unseen element about you, you may see an additional necessity for forming groups of people who are naturally aspiring and more pure, who shall frequently come together, and by conversation and silent communion generate a current of purer thought. The more of this they make through such co-operation, the more power is given each individual of the group to keep himself, whether in the body by day or out of it at night, from being unfavorably affected, and perhaps overwhelmed, by these prevailing destructive tides. You are then forming a chain of connection with the higher, purer, and more powerful region of thought. The more you earnestly seek to form such connection, the stronger will be the chain. You do not realize the strength of these “powers of darkness” all about you, or the odds against you in trying to stem this dark tide alone.
The thought brought to and made by a very few persons, who so meet in concert, and who are so alive to its benefits as to love to meet, is of a value you cannot overestimate. It is the more powerful thought. It is in part the thought and, with the thought, the force of wise, powerful, and beneficent spirits who will be attracted to your group, and who come with every desire to aid you. It will clear your brain, make stronger your body, drive out disease, and give you new ideas and plans for every kind of legitimate business. You do not now realize how much you are kept from success and on a lower level of life through unconsciously absorbing and being swayed or partly blinded or confused by the low thought-current about you. You accept conditions in life as a necessity, which, were your intellects keener and sharper, you could avoid. You may absorb timidity from others. You may so absorb inertia and lack of energy. Your periods of lack of confidence and indecision may be results of absorption of this lower element. You may not know how blind you are, and what a different man or woman you might be did you see more clearly what could injure and what could benefit you. Your generation of the more powerful thought, through meeting in a concert of pure motive, inquiry for truth, and desire to benefit others as well as yourselves, would clear your intellect, increase your energy, lead you away from errors and stumbling-blocks, improve your health, and build you up into a force which would bring to you every material good thing. It is the way for “seeking first the kingdom of God,” “when all these things shall be added unto you.” They are added because the force you create in yourselves through these meetings as a family and fraternity will be as an actual strong magnet, attracting all things which your wisdom says will benefit you.
The “New World” rediscovered by Columbus is a small affair as compared with the one lying at our very doors, and into which we unconsciously enter every night. We look with the eye of the body across our rooms, our streets, our fields, saying there is nothing between us and the walls, the house, the forest, or the mountain, but “empty air;” when that space may be crowded with structures, with people, with the unseen copies of all we see about us.
The visions produced by the use of opium and hasheesh are realities. They allow of a more complete escape of the spirit from the body. The spirit receives an artificial strength through the elements taken from the poppy or hemp. Aided by this, it can travel farther, and is stimulated to go out of its habitual ruts when the body sleeps. It does go into higher and more sublimated regions, and sees in them glories never realized on earth. But it is in this way forced into elements too fine for it (the spirit) to retain and bring back to the body. It cannot hold them, and so returns to the body with no strength. Hence the re-action and misery of the opium eater or smoker, when the effect of the drug is off. You would soon be in a condition somewhat similar, were the higher spirits to carry you (as they could) to their own country, before you had spiritually grown-up to it. The elements you would absorb there would be too fine for use in this stratum of life. Yet continued aspiration can make your spirit fit to receive of these elements, and appropriate them, on its return to earth. Your whole organization would be finer then than now. You would be an inhabitant of the two worlds, the physical one about you, and that grade or stratum of the spiritual where you naturally belonged. This is to be the life of the future on this planet. This is the “New Jerusalem” let down to earth.
More men and women in the world’s history have awakened to this life, and lived in it, while using their bodies, than is generally known. Paul speaks of being “caught up to the third heaven, and there seeing unutterable things.” Swedenborg was in close relationship with this world. There have been many others during the ages; but they were discreet enough to keep their knowledge to themselves, knowing their story would not in their time be credited, and that to tell it would bring on themselves unpleasant results.
The time for such secretiveness is now over. More minds awakened and able, at least, to entertain these truths, are now on earth than ever before. These are re-embodied spirits who have entered on another earth-life, with a partial knowledge of these truths, and who will recognize them so soon as they are boldly put forth.
The age for materiality to crush out spiritual truths has passed. The age wherein spiritual truth shall assert itself, and rule materiality, has in reality commenced. It matters not how small is the apparent nucleus or group of persons alive to these truths. A pin-hole can reveal a vast landscape. The point of contact where the rope is made fast to the ship, to pull her off the shoal, is but a few inches wide, but that is all the space required to bring the force to bear on the vessel; and so the relative few who now can receive these things will be the power to raise the many upward.
