WE do not yet know the full meaning or value of life.
The commonly held idea of existence runs thus: to be born, to grow from infancy to youth, from youth to maturity, from maturity to old age, from old age to death. During these stages, to gain possibly fame or fortune, but ever at the end to weaken, sicken, and die.
Man's real and ever-growing life is a condition so unlike this present existence, that there is scarcely a possibility of any realisation thereof by comparison between the two. If you had never seen anything of a tree but its roots in the dark, damp ground, could anyone by means of words convey to you a realisation of the beauty of its foliage and blossoms in the sunlight?
Our physical existence is the root from which in the future is to come an indescribable beauty and power.
Some speak lightly of their bodies, call them encumbrances, and entertain glowing anticipations, when rid of them, of a blissful life, entirely in the spiritual realm of existence.
This involves an error.
Because a certain physical life with ever-refining physical senses is in every stage of existence a necessity to the fullest completement of our lives.
The Christ of Judea spoke of the necessity of "Regeneration." "Ye must be born again," he Says.
Reincarnated we all have been many times. Regeneration is a step beyond reincarnation.
Reincarnation means the total loss of one physical body and the getting of a new one through the aid of another organisation. Regeneration means the perpetuation of an ever refining physical body without that total separation of spirit and body called death.
The cruder the spirit, the longer were the intervals of time between its getting for itself a new physical body through reincarnation.
As the spirit was quickened and gained power, these intervals became less in duration, numbering years in place of centuries. With still greater increase of power the spirit will seek the regenerative instead of the reincarnative process of perpetuating its life of the physical senses.
A spiritualising and refining power has ever been and ever will be working on this planet. It has through innumerable ages changed all forms of being, whether mineral, animal, or vegetable, from coarse to finer types. It works with man as with all other organisations. It is ever changing him gradually from a material to a more spiritual being. It is carrying him through his many physical existences from one degree of perfection to another. It has in store for him new powers, new lives, and new methods of existence. That spiritual power has given him in the past new inventions. It illuminated his mind to see the uses of steam, electricity, and other material agencies. But far greater illumination is to come. A time is coming when he will not need iron, steam, and electricity to promote his convenience or enjoyment. New powers born out of his spiritual life will supersede the necessity of many of his present material aids.
There will come in the future a more perfected life, when, for the few at first and the many afterwards, there will be no physical death. In other words, every spirit will be able to use both its spiritual and physical senses, through the continual regeneration of its physical body.
Such making over and over again of the physical body will come of successive changes of mind. There will be continual separations from one old state of mind after another and entrances into new. We shall ever through regeneration be born into new individualities.
Regeneration may supersede reincarnation, because of our coming into a higher order of life, or receiving and being built of a higher order of thoughts. The spirit will then be ever changing its physical body for one still finer and more spiritualised. This is the process referred to by Christ as being "born again."
Life is an eternal series of regenerations. The whole aim and scope of all these writings is the endeavour to show what life really means; how the spiritual life rules the physical life; and how we are all growing from cruder to finer forms of life.
The spirit is regenerated when it shakes off the old physical body. It shakes off an old body because it is tired of carrying an instrument through which it cannot express itself. The old man or woman of decaying powers has as much mind or spirit as ever. But that mind cannot act on its body. It is cut off in a sense from that body. It is receding from that body and will finally quit it altogether. It recedes because, through ignorance, it has been drawing for years inferior thought and a monotonous round of thought to the body and endeavouring to make it over again with an old rotten material. It is like trying to repair a leaky roof with rotten shingles. This is the degenerative process of today and the cause of the decaying physical powers and death of the body.
But the more enlightened spirit will find out how to act on and replenish the body with newer and newer thought. This makes the body ever newer and newer and so keeps up the necessary connection between spirit and body.
We do not part with life in the loss of the physical body. But we do lose thereby one kind of life and a most important agency for the fullest enjoyment of life.
We lose in what is called death the use of that set of senses which we call the physical. We lose the power of living in a close connection with the world of physical things. It is most desirable to maintain a connection with the physical world, and the spirit on losing its body, contrary to general belief, laments the loss of such body and desires eagerly to have the possession and use of its former physical senses. Failing in this it uses, so far as it can. by a psychological law, the physical senses of those having bodies, whom it can influence or control.
Every living man and woman has such influence brought to bear on him or her from the unseen side of life.
The "dead," as they are falsely called, resume imperfectly their lives on earth, through aid unconsciously given them by the living, or, more properly speaking, by those living with physical bodies.
If we do not wish to find out the new--if we instantly reject what some may call "new-fangled ideas"--if we want to go on in the old way of our fathers, then we invite the company and mind of spirits as ignorant as ourselves, who will only help on the decay of our bodies after getting from them all the use they can.
These are "unregenerated spirits." They have drawn to them little new thought since losing their
bodies. They will by reason of the same ignorance through which they lost the last physical body, be drawn into another reincarnation, and perhaps another and another, until at last, gaining with each life more knowledge, they will know how to regenerate their bodies.
This regeneration will not come of any material medicines or methods. It will come of changing spiritual conditions. These spiritual conditions will cause the adoption of new habits and ways of life. But to adopt these habits before the spiritual condition prompts or demands them will do little good.
We have a life of the physical senses. We have another of the finer or spiritual senses. We live during the waking hours by the physical senses. We live another life during sleep by the spiritual senses. When these two lives are properly adjusted, they feed each other healthfully.
With such proper adjustment the physical senses receive a certain necessary supply of element from the spiritual while the body sleeps.
The spiritual being receives also from the material condition a certain vital supply. If your spirit loses its body these sources of mutual supply between body and spirit are for a time cut off.
The more perfected or regenerated life of the future means the consciousness of existence by both the physical and spiritual senses.
The life of the physical senses and that of the spiritual senses are necessary to each other. When they are joined together, and we become conscious of the use of both, life is relatively perfected and the spirit attains a degree of happiness not now to be imagined.
During all the centuries which have passed since Christ's time, can we point to any instance of this new birth or regeneration? If such regeneration is owing to a higher Faith and higher Law, can we say that any persons, no matter what may have been their reputation for piety or uprightness, whose bodies have finally sickened and decayed, have lived up to the highest Law?
"The wages of sin is death," says the Bible. We would prefer to say that the result of an unperfected life is the death of the physical body.
The body of every weak, shrivelled, trembling old man or woman today is the result of sins committed in ignorance. Those sins lay in their thoughts. Out of such thought as it attracts the spirit builds first its spiritual body. The physical body is a material correspondence of the spiritual body. If the spirit believes in error it builds that error into the body. The result is decay.
For this result no blame can be imputed to those who suffer. They have lived up to all the light and knowledge they had. With more growth there will, in some condition of existence, come to them more knowledge. They will then see new methods of living and avoid the mistakes of the former less perfected life.
Charity comes of the knowledge that all people live up to the best light which they have. God alone can light up the darkened chambers of our and their minds. When we, leaving the faults of others alone, ask that our minds may be illuminated so as to see and avoid evil, that illumination alone will help all about us.
People weary of existence, because they think year after year the same set of thoughts and ideas over and over again. Eternal life and happiness come of a perpetual flow to us of new thought and idea. Thought is food for our spiritual beings. Our physical bodies are not nourished on one monotonous kind of food from year to year. Feed the spirit with the same thought (or try to) from year to year and it becomes sick. The sick spirit makes the sick body.
The Law of Eternal Life will not allow this repetition to go on. The Law says to us: "You were not made to run in ruts and grooves of fixed habit. You are not as John Smith or John Brown to be an eternal individuality without change, like a post rooted in the ground. You are to have a new mind for this period, and a superior mind with increased Powers of perception for the next period. You are ever, by drawing to you and adding to you new thought, to be as so many different individuals; as you live on, and this process of regeneration proceeds, you are born or changed into successive types of being, each one being finer than the last."
The regenerated life with a physical body means an ever-increasing life. It means a fresher capacity, with each day's waking, to sense that beauty in Nature which exists all around us. It means a new glory in each day's sunshine. It means a repose and restfulness whereby we can sit still and feel the spirit which animates the tree, the leaf, the ocean, the rivulet, the star, the flower, and every natural expression of the Infinite Mind. It means the daily flow to us of new thoughts which shall fill us with new life. It means that we shall rejoice in the realisation and firmly grounded faith that we have in us the possibilities for development into numberless new lives. It means that power of so losing our material self in any effort which we may make that all sense of time shall vanish and ennui and mental weariness shall be destroyed. It means power to live without drudgery of mind and body, or that anxiety which is even worse than drudgery. It means at last the getting of enjoyment from all things. To get enjoyment from everything Is to get life from everything. To get life from everything is to get power from all things. To get power implies a control of all physical elements. This includes a power of ever holding an ever-refining physical body.
Ennui is sickness. When we don't know what to do with ourselves, when we try to kill time and everything seems " flat, stale and unprofitable, we have temporarily lost our hold of the Great Fountain of life, the Supreme Mind and Power. We are absorbing the wearied thoughts of thousands around us, who think the same thing from day to day and from year to year, whose minds in their play are treadmills, who are trying to get Life, exhilaration and variety entirely out of physical things.
The true and regenerative life cannot be obtained from material things. That is the reason why all that money can buy fails to satisfy. The monster of discontent and ennui rages as much in the palace as the hovel. Solomon was in the claws of this beast when he said: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." That exclamation is a libel on the Infinite Mind. It came from the Jewish king, because he was trying to get life and happiness out of wood and stone and metal, and flesh and blood and all things material. It cannot be done.
But when, through demand of the Supreme, you get new thoughts, the material thing of yesterday seems to you as a new thing of today. The very rock which you passed yesterday has a new idea associated with it today. It may not be an idea which you can put in words. It is something which you feel rather than think. Myriads of thoughts, coming at the physical sight of all material things about us, are so felt, but can neither be talked out nor written out.
The regeneration of the body comes in response to our increasing demand of the Supreme Power to be led in the path of the Highest Wisdom. It comes of a courage gained at last of persistent demand, whereby we shall dare to trust entirely to that power. This it is doubtful if any can do at present. We try to trust in God, but when the pinch comes and things look dark, we are tempted to adopt some of our worn-out material methods for averting the evil. But perfect trust in the Supreme Power can gradually come to us. When it does men will become more than mortal. Whoever attains to such perfect trust will be regenerated.
Demand then new thoughts, and an increasing nearness to the Supreme Mind, and in time you receive new life, and all things about you are, for you, imbued with new life or idea. You are then in the line of the regenerative process. Your spirit, as well as your body, is being born again and again. It is drawing to it ever new ideas, and becomes literally a new spirit, a new being. If the spirit is being thus renewed or regenerated, the body must be also.
As we become more spiritualised, as the material mind gives place more and more to the Spiritual Mind; in other words, as the regenerative process goes on, we shall, from time to time, find ourselves prompted to change many of our habits and modes of life. These changes will involve eating, sleeping, and association.
But we need not try to force these changes on ourselves. The regenerative process will involve the eating of less and less animal food, until we shall eat none whatever. But there would be nothing gained from ceasing to eat meat before the desire for It had gone.
The regenerative process will impel us at times to seek solitude, because when alone with Nature the spirit absorbs and assimilates a finer quality of thought. But to enforce on ourselves the solitude of the hermitage or cloister when there is no real love for it does little good, as is proved by the fact that hermit and recluse have physically decayed and died like the rest.
This regeneration of the body will come to no one directly from any system of forms, habits, or observances. It will come because of a time ripe for it to come. As this planet ripens spiritually all material things upon it partake of that ripening or development. The life of today, so different and superior to that of five hundred or a thousand years ago, is a part and a proof of that development. The earth ripened first from chaos to coarse development in the animal and vegetable kingdoms of ages ago, and then to its present relatively more refined condition. But this refining process is never to cease.
Perhaps you will say on reading this, "What has all this to do with me? What you say may be true. But it is all too far off, too indefinite. I want something to benefit me now."
This idea of the body's regeneration is for you a benefit now, if you can accept it. It cannot be displaced from your mind. It will first, as a tiny seed, stay there. It may for months or years show no sign of life and seem to be forgotten. But it will grow and have more and more of a place in your thought. It will gradually change the quality of your thoughts. It will gradually force out an old and false interpretation of life and bring in a new one. It will impel you to look ever forward to newer joys and make you cease groping among regrets and sad remembrances of your past, when you know that such thoughts bring decay and death to the body. We are built literally of our thoughts. When we realise that our regrets, our envyings and jealousies, our borrowings of trouble, or our morbid contemplations of subjects ghastly and sickly, are literally things, and bad things, actually put in our bodies, as such thoughts, materialising themselves from invisible to visible element, turn into flesh and blood, and that as so built into ourselves they bring us
pains, aches, weakness, sickness, wrinkles, bowed backs, weak knees and failing powers, we have a good and tangible reason for getting rid of them.
The body of a person given over to melancholy will be literally built of gloomy thoughts materialised into flesh and blood.
When a girl realises more and more clearly that jealousy, peevishness, and pettish pouting moods will spoil her good looks and complexion, she will make efforts to rid herself of such thoughts. They will destroy her body. The Infinite Power for good wants all things and all people to be beautiful, healthful and symmetrical, and intends ever to increase this beauty, health, and symmetry. It works through a continual process ot regeneration to keep them so. If it cannot effect such perpetual life and beauty with one physical organisation, it mercifully lets it go to pieces and gives the spirit another.
When a man realises that his angry mood, or his covetous mood, or his grumbling mood represents so much material put in his body, and that such element will give his body pain and make it sick, he has a good strong reason for having some care as to what his mind runs on, and for making the "inside of the platter clean."
Let us remember, so far as we can, that every unpleasant thought is a bad thing literally put in the body. Are some people unpleasant to us? Do their airs or affectations, or their stinginess or dishonesty, or their domineering manners, or their coarseness and vulgarity, offend us? Well, let us try and forget them. Why talk them over for an hour, holding the while all their disagreeable traits in our minds, and think of them, maybe, for hours afterwards, when we know that these unpleasant images which we carry in mind are things which are being literally put in our bodies to affect them injuriously and degenerate them? All such thoughts we must get rid of.
Such riddance is the commencement of getting a new body. It is in the way of a literal regeneration. If through long habit we find that we cannot by our own endeavour keep out of these injurious moods, if we find ourselves from time to time drawn into the current of tattle, or greed, or envy, we can cease all endeavour of our own and ask help of the Supreme Power to give us new and better thoughts. That Power, through our demand, will give us a new mind. The new mind will bring the new body.
You travel when your body is in the state called sleep. The real “you” is not your body; it is an unseen organization, your spirit. It has senses like those of the body, but far superior. It can see forms and hear voices miles away from the body. Your spirit is not in your body. It never was wholly in it; it acts on it and uses it as an instrument. It is a power which can make itself felt miles from your body.
One-half of our life is a blank to us; that is, the life of our spirit when it leaves the body at night. It goes then to countries far distant, and sees people we never know in the flesh.
Sleep is a process, unconsciously performed, of self-mesmerism. As the mesmeric operator wills another into unconsciousness, so do you nightly will yourself, or rather your body, into a state of insensibility.
What the mesmeric operator really does is to draw the spirit out of the body of the person he mesmerizes. He brings the thought of his subject to some focus or centre, as a coin held in the hand. While thus centred, the thought (or spirit) of the subject is put in such a condition that he can most easily affect it by his will. He wills then the person’s spirit out of his body. This done, he throws his own thought in that body. It is then as a house left open by its owner. The mesmerizer then takes possession of that body by the power of his own thought. It is not the subject at all who sees, feels, and tastes as the operator wills: it is the spirit or thought of the mesmerizer himself, exercised in another body, temporarily left vacant by its own spirit.
Thought is a substance as much as air or any other unseen element of which chemistry makes us aware. It is of many and varying degrees in strength.
Strong thought or mind is the same as strong will. Some persons are so weak in thought, as compared with the practised mesmerizer, that they cannot resist him. Others of even stronger thought can give themselves up voluntarily to his control. You need not be overpowered by anyone in this way, providing you resist them in mind, and call upon the higher power to assist you, if you feel their thought overcoming you.
When we “go to sleep,” the spirit has been by its day’s workings sent widely scattered away from the body; with so little of its force left by it, the body falls into the trance state of slumber. As the mesmerizer draws the spirit away from the body of his subject, so has our spirit drawn itself away from our bodies by its many efforts during the day.
Your body is not your real self. The power that moves it as you will is your spirit. That is an invisible organization, quite distinct and apart from your body. Your spirit (your real self) uses your body as the carpenter does his hammer or any tool to work with.
It is the spirit that is tired at night. It is exhausted of its force, and therefore not able to use the body vigorously. The body is really then as strong as ever, as the carpenter’s hammer has the same strength when his arm is too weak to use it.
The spirit is weak at night, because its forces have in thought been sent in so many different directions during the day that it cannot call them together. Every thought is one of these forces, and a part of your spirit. Every thought, spoken or unspoken, is a thing, a substance, as real, though invisible, as water or metal. Every thought, though unspoken, is something which goes to that person, thing, or locality on which it is placed. Your spirit, then, has during the day been so sent in a thousand, perhaps ten thousand, different directions. When you think, you work. Every thought represents an outlay of force. So sending out force for sixteen or eighteen hours, there is not at night sufficient left in or near the body to use it. The body therefore falls into the condition of insensibility we call sleep. During this condition the spirit collects its scattered forces, its thoughts which have been sent far and wide; it returns with its powers so concentrated to the body, and again possesses it with its full strength. It is when scattered as so many scattered rills of water trickling in many directions. Put all these together in a single volume, and you have the power that turns the mill-wheel.
Could you call all of your spirit at once to its centre, and so collect its widely scattered forces, you could be fresh and strong in as many minutes as it now takes hours to rest you. This power was known to the first Napoleon, and sustained him for days with very little sleep during the crisis of his campaigns when his energies were taxed to the utmost. It is a power which can be acquired by all through a certain training.
It is done by first placing the body in a state of as complete rest as possible; stopping all involuntary physical motions, such as the swinging of limbs, tapping with the foot, or drumming with the fingers. All such involuntary movements waste your force, and, worse, train you unconsciously to a habit hard to break, of wasting force. The involuntary working of the mind, the straying of thought in every direction,—towards persons, things, plans, and projects,—the useless frettings over cares great and small, must be similarly stopped, and the mind for a few minutes made as near a blank as possible. Concentration of thought on the word “in-drawing,” or “drawing into self,” or the mind-picture of your spirit with its fine electric filaments reaching to persons, places, and things far from you, being all drawn back, and massed in a focus, is a help to do this; because whatso you image in your mind is a spiritual reality. That is, what you image, you are-actually in spirit and by spirit doing. Every plan or invention clearly seen in thought is of thought-substance, as real a thing as the wood, stone, iron, or other substance in which afterward it may be embodied and made visible to the body’s eye, and made to work results on the physical stratum of life.
If a man thinks murder, he actually puts out an element of murder in the air. He sends from him a plan of murder as real as if drawn on paper; its thought is absorbed by others; so is this element and unseen plan of murder absorbed by other minds; it inclines them towards violence if not murder. If a person is ever thinking of sickness, he sends from him the element of sickness; if he thinks of health, strength, and cheerfulness, he sends from him constructions of thought affecting others to health and strength as well as himself. A man sends from him in thought what he (his spirit) is most built of. “As a man thinketh, so is he.” Your spirit is a bundle of thought; what you think most of, that is your spirit. Imagine, then, yourself as such a being, drawing in all these filaments, sent and placed as they are to so many things. The thoughts so passing from you in one minute could hardly be plainly written out in an hour. You gather them to a centre. You have then gathered in and concentrated your full motive-power; then you can put all its force on any thing you please. When the eye and mind are put on any single object that does not tax the energies, say a spot in the wall, the positive thought or filaments reaching out are drawn in to the common centre. Your absorption on any single thing loosens them from their near or far point of contact. Before such loosening, the spirit is as the expanded hand and fingers. When the thought is drawn in, the spirit is as the closed or clinched fist.
When thought is sent out to any thing, you send out your force. When it is centred in a single thing, and so drawn in and kept from straying every moment, you are drawing in force.
The Hindoo “adept” becomes able, through a certain training of mind, to send his spirit or himself from his body. It is still connected with it by the fine unseen current of life known in the Bible as the “silver thread.” When that thread is snapped, body and spirit are completely severed, and the body dies. The “adept” has allowed himself to be buried alive. Rice has been sown over his grave, and sprouted. Seals were put in his coffin, and the grave carefully watched. He has so remained for weeks, and when dug up “came to life.”
The real man was never buried at all. It was only his body in the self-induced trance state, that was buried. Between his body and spirit, possibly miles away, the fine thread of spirit kept up the body’s life, or rather such supply of life as the body needed to keep it from decay. When the body was dug up, his spirit returned, and took full possession of it. He was able to do with his own body what the mesmerizer does with the body of his subject. He sent his own spirit out of it; the mesmerizer sent his subject’s spirit out. Before so sending out his spirit, the adept makes his mind a blank. Before drawing out the spirit of his subject, the operator causes the subject to make his own mind a blank; in other words, he stops the resisting forces of the other person’s thought by turning all his thought to a centre.
Your spirit can, and does frequently, go from your body to other places during sleep. It is then still connected with it by this thread of exceedingly fine element. This can be drawn out to a great distance. It is as an expanding or contracting electric wire connecting your spirit with the instrument it operates, your body.
This power of the spirit so to leave the body accounts for the phenomenon of persons being seen in two places far distant at the same time. It is the spirit that is seen by some clairvoyant eye. It is the “double,” the “doppel ganger” of the German, the “wraith” of the Scotch. The spirit may even be far from the body just previous to the body’s death. It is only the feeble supply of life sent it through the connecting thread, which causes the involuntary throes (so-called) of dissolution. These are not as painful as they seem. The real self, the spirit, even then may be unaware of the “death-bed scene.” It may go to some person, possibly at a distance, to whom it is much attracted; and thereby is solved the mystery of the apparitions, seen by distant friends, of persons whose deaths at or about the time of such appearances were not heard of until months after.
Sometimes people, during periods of sickness, fall unconsciously into a state where the spirit leaves the body, without snapping the threads of life. The body’s trance has then been mistaken for its real death, and it (the body) has been buried alive. The spirit has been compelled to return to its body in the coffin. The thread could only be severed after such return.
Your real being is ever sending out, with each thought, a fine electric ray or filament, representing so much of your life, your force, your vitality, and reaching to the object, place, or person to which such thought is sent, be it six feet or thousands of miles from your body.
Your thought is your real strength. When you lift a weight, you put your thought on the muscle that lifts. The heavier the weight, the more of your thought do you put on it. If, in so lifting, a part of your thought is turned in some other direction, if some one talks to you, if something frightens or annoys you, a part of your strength or thought leaves you. It goes to whatever has taken away a part of your attention from lifting.
It is mind, thought, spirit, that use the muscle to lift, as we use a rope to pull up a weight. There is no lifting or working without intelligence. Intelligence, thought, mind, and spirit mean about the same thing.
It does not matter, in order to give strength, whether the spirit, when once called together, be near the body or at a distance from it. So that it brings its forces (its thoughts) together, be it far from its body or near it, it is strong; and when it again takes possession of your body, and wakes it up, it is able to use the body with its full strength.
But the spirit may remain scattered all night. It may never be able to bring its forces together at any time. It may be living, as many now are, with its thought always in advance of the act it is now doing or trying to do. It is walking the body and sending out its force (its thought) to the place it hurries to. It is writing with the body, and thinking of something else. When it frets, it sends out force to the thing fretted about. These states of mind, acts of thought, and useless waste of force become at last so confirmed in habit, that the spirit may lose all power of bringing all its strength together. In this state it gathers no strength by night or day.
Sleeplessness comes of the difficulty of the spirit to bring itself to a centre and collect its forces. Insanity comes of the total inability of the spirit to focus its thoughts. The permanent cure for sleeplessness must commence in the daytime. You must drill your mind to put its whole thought on the act you are now doing. If you tie your shoe, think shoe and nothing else. Then you bring yourself to a centre, and collect your forces. If you tie your shoe, and think of what you are going to buy the next hour, you are sending needlessly half of your force from yourself. You are in reality trying to do two things at once. You do neither well. You are scattering your spirit on as many things as you think of while tying the shoe. You are cultivating the bad habit of scattering your force, until such habit becomes involuntary. You are making it more and more difficult for your spirit to collect itself together. By so doing, you make it more difficult for the spirit to return with strength to its body in the morning, or to leave it at night. You can get no healthy sleep at night unless your spirit does withdraw from its body. Sleeplessness means simply that your spirit cannot leave its body.
If you fall into the dangerous habit of fretting, your spirit may fret as much on going from its body at night as when using it in the daytime. Or, if you are of a quarrelsome disposition, it may be quarrelling, fighting, and hating all night, and so return to its body without any strength to use it; because all quarrelling, if only in thought, is constantly using up force.
It is for this very reason dangerous and unhealthy to let the “sun go down on your wrath;” that is, to have in mind, just before the body’s eyes close in sleep, the recollection of the persons you dislike, and be then engaged in sending hating thought to them. The spirit will keep up the process after it leaves the body. To hate is simply to expend force in tearing yourself, your spirit, to pieces. Hate is a destructive force. Good-will to all is constructive: it builds you up stronger and stronger. Hate tears you down. Good-will to all draws to you healthy and constructive elements from all with whom you come in contact. Could you see the actual elements as they flow from them to you, in their liking for you, you would see them as fine rills of life feeding yours. Could you see the contrary elements of hatred which you may excite in others, you would see them flowing toward you as dark rays or rills of dangerous, poisonous substance. If you send out to it its like, the thought of hatred, you only add to the unhealthy force and power of that element, because these two opposed and dangerous elements meet and mingle, act and re-act on those who send them, ever calling on each to send fresh supply of force to keep up the war, until both are exhausted. Self-interest should prompt people to hate none. It weakens the body, and causes disease. You never saw a healthy cynic, growler, or grumbler. Their soured thought-poisons them. Their bodily disease originates in their minds. Their spirits are sick. That makes the body sick. All disease originates in this way. Cure the spirit, change the state of the mind, replace the desire to make others feel disagreeably by that of making them feel agreeably, and you are on the road to cure disease. When the spirit originates no warring, hating, gloomy, despondent thought, no manner of unpleasant thought, the body will take no disease whatever.
You can only oppose successfully the hatred or evil thought of others by throwing out toward it the thought of good-will. Good-will as a thought-element is more powerful than the thought of hate. It can turn it aside. The “shafts of malice,” even in thought, are real things. They can and do hurt people on whom they are directed, and make them sick. The Christ precept, “Do good to them that hate you,” is based on a scientific law. It means that thoughts are things, and that the thought of good can always overpower that of evil. By power is here meant power in as literal a sense as in speaking of the force that lifts a table or chair. The fact that all thought, all emotion, all of what is called sentiment, or qualities such as mercy, patience, love, etc., are elements as real as any we see, is the cornerstone to the scientific basis of religion.
What you call dreams are realities. Your spirit away from your body at night goes to and sees persons and places. To some of these you may have never gone with your body. You remember on the body’s awakening very little of what you have seen. What you do remember is mixed pell-mell together. That is because your memory of the body can hold but a little of what is grasped by the memory of your spirit. You have two memories, one trained and adapted to the life of your body, the other of your spirit. Had you known of the life and power of your spirit from infancy, and recognized it as a reality, the memory of your spirit would have been so trained that it would remember all of its own life and bring it back to you on the awakening of the body. But as you have been taught to regard even your spirit as a myth, so you make of its memory a myth. Were a human being taught from infancy to discredit the evidence of any of its senses, then that sense would be blunted and almost destroyed. Let all associated with a child for years deliberately set to work and tell it that they could not see the sky or houses, fields, or other familiar objects at hand; and with none allowed to break the delusion, that child’s eyesight as well as its judgment would be seriously affected. We are similarly taught to deny all the senses and powers of our spirits; or, rather, the real powers of ourselves, of which the senses of the body are a faint counterpart, are persistently denied. Substantially we are taught that we are nothing but bodies. This is equivalent to telling the carpenter that he is nothing but the hammer he uses.
If in a so-called dream you see a person who died years ago, you see simply a person whose body, being worn-out, could no longer be used by him on this stratum of life.