For such reason, Paul the apostle advised people not to be "unequally yoked together in marriage." Why? Because he knew that of any two persons living constantly together, yet occupying different worlds of thought, one would surely be injured; and the one most injured is the highest, finest and broadest mind, which is loaded down, crippled and fettered by the grosser thought absorbed from the inferior.
If you are in active business sympathy or relation with any person who is nervous, excited, irritable, destitute of any capacity for repose, always worried about something, and on the rush from morning till night, though you are separated by hundreds of miles, you will, when in the receiving state, have that person's mind acting injuriously on yours, and you will have thereby sent to you much of his or hercruder thought-element, which, agitating and disturbing your mind, will, in time, work unpleasant results to the body.
Your only means of avoiding this is to cease such relation and common sympathy and effort with them as soon as possible,--to put them out of your mind,--to fix and interest yourself in some other diversion or occupation whenever your thought goes out to them. For every time that you so think, you send out your actual life and vitality in their direction, and thus doing you may transmit a current of life and force which will give them relative success in many undertakings, a success that you may lack, for you are transferring your capital stock of force, while you should use it for yourself. The cruder minds can only appropriate a part of this. The rest is wasted. They may be kept alive by it and prosper, and in return send you only element which brings on you disease, lack of energy and barrenness of idea.
Proper association is one of the greatest of agencies for realising success, health and happiness. Association here means something far beyond the physical proximity of bodies. You are literally nearest the person or persons of whom you think most, though they are ten thousand miles distant.
If you have been long in association with a person, so absorbing thought-element inferior to your own, you cannot, if you sever the connection, immediately free yourself from the inferior thought-current flowing from him to you, though thousands of miles may intervene. Distance amounts to little in the unseen world of thought. If such a person is much in your thought, his mind still acts on yours, sending you grosser and injurious element. You must learn to forget him if you wish to escape injury. That must be a gradual process. In so forgetting you cut the invisible wires binding you together, through which there have been sent elements injurious to you.
Does this sound cold, cruel and hard? But where is the benefit of two persons being so tied together in thought or remembrance, if one or both are injured? If one is injured so also must be the other in time. But the superior mind receives more immediate injury, and many a person fails to attain the position where he or she should stand, through this cause.
Through this cause also there come disease, lack of vigour, corpulency and clumsiness. The cruder element so sent you by another, and absorbed by you, can materialise itself in physical substance, and make itself seen and felt on your body in the shape of unhealthy and excessive fat, swollen limbs, or any other outward sign of disease and decay. In such case, it is not really your own unwieldy or deformed body that you are carrying about. It is the inferior body of another person sent you in thought; as year after year this process goes on, the cumbrous frame which you so carry becomes at last too heavy for your spirit, and then it drops off. You are "dead," in the estimation of your acquaintances, but you are not really dead; you have simply tumbled down under a load which you could no longer bear.
Even a book in which you are greatly interested, which draws strongly on your sympathy, and has much to say on the mental or physical distress of the person so drawing on your sympathy, can, if you read it in the negative or receiving state, bring to you some form of the physical or mental ailments alluded to therein. Such a book is the representative of the mind of the individual whose history it contains, acting on yours, and bringing to you in thought-element all that person's morbid and unhealthy states of mind, which for a time settle on you and become a parasitical part of you. In this way great harm may be done to sensitive people through reading novels and even true stories full of physical or mental suffering.
If a character to which you are stronglyattracted is described as being confined for years in a dungeon, suffering physical and mental pain from such confinement, and in the pages of that book if you follow such life and become absorbed in it, you do actually live therein. You will, if so reading such history day after day, and getting thoroughly absorbed or merged in it, find your vitality or your digestion affected in some way. The law operates, though you may never dream that the cold which you have taken more easily, through lack of vitality, the headache or weakness of digestion, is owing to a mental condition brought on you temporarily through living in the thought of that book while in the receiving state of mind. These are unhealthy books; and so are plays which work strongly on people's emotions in the dramatic representation of scenes of horror, distress and death. The health of thousands on thousands is injured through attracting and fastening on themselves, while in the negative or receiving condition, these unhealthy currents of thought and their consequent unhealthy mental states.
While eating, one should always be in the receptive condition, for then you are gathering material element to nourish the body; and if you eat in a calm, composed, cheerful frame of mind, you are receiving a similar character of thought. To eat and growl, to argue violently or intensely with others, to eat and still think business and plan business, is to be positive, when of all times you should then be negative. It is like working with your body while you eat. You send, while so arguing or grumbling, that force from you which is needed for digestion. It matters little whether you grumble or argue in speech or in thought.
There is also injurious result to you when any person at the table is for any reason--any offensive habit, any peculiarity of manner or mood-unpleasant to you, and you are thereby obliged toendure instead of enjoying his company, for all endurance means the putting out of positive thought-- in other words, working in mind to drive off the annoyance. Especially the dinner in the latter part of the day should be the day's climax of happiness--a union of minds in perfect accord with each other--the conversation light, bright, lively and humorous--the palates appreciative of artistic cookery, and the eye also regaled with the appointments of the table and the dining-room. In such a condition and in such receptive state you absorb a spiritual strength, coming from the thought of all about you as they will absorb yours. But if you eat in a social dungeon, in the barrack of a restaurant, where only material food is given, in an unhappy family, full of petty jealousies and complainings, in a boarding-house manger, you may exhaust yourself in resisting or enduring annoyances, thereby lessening the power of digestion and assimilation of your food; and you absorb also more or less of the discontent or moodiness of those about you, and so carry away a load worse than useless--a load which is the real cause of an imperfect digestion, of consequent physical weakness and mental unrest, or irritability.
When you are much alone, you attract and are surrounded by a quality and current of thought coming from minds similar to your own. It is for this reason, that in moments of solitude your thought may be more clear and agreeable than when in the company of others. You live then in another and finer world of ideas. You may deem these ideas but as " idle thoughts "; you may not dare to mention them before others; you may long for company, and may take such as you can get, or you may have it forced upon you. With it your ideal world is shattered, and seems possibly absolute nonsense. You enter into your neighbours' current of thought, their line of talk and motive. You chatter and run on asthey do; you criticise, censure, judge and possibly abuse others not present; when you are again by yourself, you feel a sense of discontent with yourself, and a certain vague self-condemnation for what you have been saying. That is your higher mind, your real self, protesting against the injury done itby the lower mind--or not possibly so much your lower mind as the lower thought which you absorb while in that company, and which for a time becomes a parasitical part of you, as the ivy-vine may fasten itself to the oak, from the root to the topmost branch, drawing its nourishment in part from the oak, giving it poison in return, and at last so covering it up that the tree is concealed and is eventually killed thereby.
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