deceit, treachery, and venom, needs your pity and help of all the most, for that man or woman, through generating evil thought, is generating pain and disease for himself or herself.
You find yourself thinking of a person unpleasantly from whom you have received a slight or insult, an injury or injustice. Such thought remains with you hour after hour, perhaps day after day . You become at last tired of it, yet cannot throw it off. It annoys, worries, frets, sickens you. You cannot prevent yourself from going round and round on this same tiresome, troublesome track of thought. It wears on your spirit; and whatever wears on the spirit, wears on the body.
This is because you have drawn on yourself the other person’s opposing and hostile thought. He is thinking of you as you are of him. He is sending you a wave of hostile thought. You are both giving and receiving blows of unseen elements. You may keep up this silent war of unseen force for weeks, and if so, both are injured. This contest of opposing wills and forces is going on all about us. The air is full of it.
To strive, then, to forget enemies, or to throw out to them only friendly thought, is as much an act of self-protection as it is to put up your hands to ward off a physical blow. The persistent thought of friendliness turns aside thought of ill-will, and renders it harmless. The injunction of Christ to do good to your enemies is founded on a natural law. It is saying that the thought or element of good-will carries the greater power, and will always turn aside and prevent injury from the thought of ill-will.
Demand forgetfulness when you can only think of a person or of any thing with the pain that comes of grief, anger, or for any cause. Demand is a state of mind which sets in motion forces to bring you the result desired. Demand is the scientific basis of prayer. Do not supplicate. Demand persistently your share of force out of the elements about you, by which you can rule your mind to any desired mood.
There are no limits to the strength to be gained through the cultivation of our thought-power. It can keep from us all pain arising from grief, from loss of fortune, loss of friends, and disagreeable situations in life. Such power is the very element or attitude of mind most favorable to the gain of fortune and friends. The stronger mind throws off the burdensome, wearying, fretting thought, forgets it, and interests itself in something else. The weaker mind dwells in the fretting, worrying thought, and is enslaved by it. When you fear a misfortune (which may never happen), your body becomes weak; your energy is paralyzed. But you can, through constantly demanding it, dig out of yourself a power which can throw off any fear or troublesome state of mind. Such power is the high road to success. Demand it, and it will increase more and more, until at last you will know no fear. A fearless man or woman can accomplish wonders.
That no individual may have gained such amount of this power, is no proof that it cannot be gained. Newer and more wonderful things are ever happening in the world. Thirty years ago, and he who should assert that a human voice could be heard between New York and Philadelphia would have been called a lunatic. To-day, the wonder of the telephone is an every-day affair. The powers still unrecognized of our thought will make the telephone a tame affair. Men and women, through cultivation and use of this power, are to do wonders which fiction has not or dares not put before the world.
IV.
HOW THOUGHTS ARE BORN.
Thoughts are Things.
As in combinations of elements or chemicals, new substances are-formed, so in the combination of thought-substance, as it flows and mingles from mind to mind, new thoughts are-formed or born.
The character and quality of your thought are shaded, and to a greater or less extent changed, by every person with whom you associate, as theirs mingles and forms a new combination with yours. You are, to an extent, a different person through conversing an hour yesterday with a, than if you had interchanged thought with b. You have then grafted on you a shade of a’s nature, or quality of thought.
If you are much with the low and degraded, the thought in you born of your thought chemicalization with theirs, will be, despite your greatest endeavor and aspiration, weighed down with their grossness. So “evil communications corrupt good manners.” If your associates be refined, pure, lofty, aspiring, the thought born of such commingling and chemicalization is lofty, pure, aspiring, and powerful.
Associations with the low and impure lessen the power of your thought. What weakens the mind weakens the body, and also lessens the power of your thought to accomplish results afar from the body, on any business.
If there is constant association and mingling of the thought of a broad and generous mind with one low, ignoble, narrow, and mean, the force of the higher spirit or thought may be exhausted in repelling the lower. Thousands of finer natures are, to-day, physically sick, because their spirits are saturated with the lower, grosser, more narrow thought of those about them.
New thought or idea brings strength to body as well as mind. For this reason, the real, active intellect of the world lives long, like Victor Hugo, Gladstone, Beecher, Bright, Bismarck, Ericcson, and others. True, there is a sort of fossilized life and intellect which may exist many years, but it enjoys little and accomplishes nothing. Increased knowledge of the laws of thought (that great silent force in nature) will, in the future, enable the spirit to use its body, not only in full, but ever-increasing possession of its mental and physical powers so long as it pleases.
People’s bodies decay and lose vigor through thinking continually the same set of thoughts. Thought is food for your spirit as much as is bread food for the body. Old thought is literally old, stale substance or element. It does not properly nourish the spirit. If the spirit is starved, the body will suffer. It will become either a semi-animated fossil, or, if the spirit be sufficiently strong to assert its demands caused by the gnawings of its hunger, there will be perpetual unrest, uneasiness, and some form of bodily disease. From such cause are thousands suffering to-day. They “grieve the spirit.” That is, their worldly education, or rather that portion of their spirit trained almost unwillingly to conform to the opinion and life about them, resists the intuition or pleadings of their spirits which they often deem foolish whims and fancies.
New thought is new life, and renewal of life. A new idea, plan, or purpose fills us with hope and vigor. One secret of eternal life and happiness is to be ever pushing forward toward the new, or “forgetting the things which are behind, and pressing forward to those which are before.” Eternity and endless space are exhaustless of the new. Senility comes through ever looking back and living in the past. You have nothing to do with the person you were a year ago, save to profit by that person’s experience. That person is dead. The “You” of to-day is another and a newer individual. The “You” of next year will be still another and a newer one.
“I die daily,” says Paul. By which he inferred that some thought of yesterday was dead to-day, and cast-off like an old garment. In its place was the newer one. When our spirits are growing healthfully, we have done forever with a part of ourselves at each day’s end. That part is dead. It is with us a dead thought. We have no further use for it. To use it will injure us. It is cast-off as our bodies daily cast-off a certain portion of dead skin. To him or her, who has increase of new thought, a new world is lived in daily. As regards happiness, it does not matter so much where we are, so that we can bring to ourselves this daily inflowing of new thought. We can so bring to ourselves happiness in a dungeon when people closed to new idea are miserable in palaces. We are, then, on the road to an independence, almost complete, of the physical world. Independence means power. So long as we are in any way dependent on a person, a food, a drug, a stimulant, or any condition of things about us, are we to that extent the slave of these things. So perpetual inflowing of new idea makes a way for escape out of the dungeons of material and spiritual poverty. You may be rich in
