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.
Your thought is an invisible emanation ever going from you. It is in part absorbed by your clothing; and if such clothing be long-worn, it becomes saturated with this element. Every thought of ours is a part of our real self. Our last thought is a part of our latest, newest self. If you wear old clothes, you re-absorb into your newest, latest self the old thought you have previously cast-off, and with which they are saturated. You may then re-absorb into your newest self of to-day something of every mood of anger, irritation, or anxiety, sent from you while wearing those garments, and sent into them. You burden, then, your newer self of to-day with your old dead self of last month or last year. You can be each day a newer man or woman than you were yesterday, and you want as much as possible to keep that newness and freshness unmixed with oldness. It is this sense of deadness felt by your spirit that makes the old coot or the old gown feel so uncomfortable. It is the same sense that makes new clothing seem grateful and refreshing to you. You are then putting on a new material, envelope, or skin not filled and burdened with the thought-emanation of last month or last year.
There is, then, only loss of power for you in wearing old clothes—in other words, putting on a part of your old dead self—for economy’s sake. Not even a snake will crawl into its old skin after casting it, for sake of economy. Nature never wears her old clothes. Nature never economizes after man’s fashion, in putting the plumage on a bird, the fur on a quadruped, the tints on a flower. If she did, the prevalent color of every thing would be that of old coats and pantaloons, and the hues of God’s firmament would be those of a second-hand clothing store.
It is healthy to live amid color, and plenty of it. What so pleases the eye, rests the mind; and whatever rests the mind, rests the body.
In dress, and the furnishing of our houses, there are ten new shades of color where there was one twenty years ago. This is one of the many indications of the growing spirituality of the age.
Spirituality implies a keener perception and appreciation of all that is beautiful. A dull mind sees nothing in the glowing, ever-changing hues of a magnificent sunset. Spirituality is entranced and fascinated by it. Spirituality means simply power of finding enjoyment in more and more things. It is but another name for that heaven which all human nature longs for and is eventually to realize,—the heaven of the mind, when every moment is one of pleasure, and all pain is eternally forgotten.
The varied colors of ladies’ wearing attire were all in existence forty years ago—all worn by some plant, some flower, some bird, some animal, but the coarser eye of that time had not detected them. When it did detect them, it desired next to imitate them. It did imitate them; and now the same spiritualized eye is at work detecting new shades and hues, and striving to imitate them. It will imitate them, because, whatever human mind sets its desire or thought upon to accomplish, that it will accomplish.
The same growing spiritualization and refinement of the race cause the greater diversity of garb and color, giving more play and freedom to limb, lung, and muscle, as now worn by men and women in recreative exercises, such as yachting, base-ball, bicycling, lawn tennis, and it is gradually bringing more freedom to the individual in his or her selection of the most fitting garb and color.
The phrase “wearing the mantle” of another person, as indicative of filling their place, or taking on their power, is something more than figurative. If you put on the garment of a really superior person, you may absorb something of their superior self or thought. If you wear the garment of a coarse, crude, vulgar person, you will surely absorb of such coarseness. There may be in clothes the contagion of low thought, as there may be in clothing the contagion of disease. Indeed, the contagion of diseased thought and the contagion of diseased germs sent from sick bodies into clothing merge one into the other, and mean about the same thing.
Our clothing can be rested as much as our bodies. When you put on the garment you have laid aside for a period of weeks or months, although it may not feel as one entirely new, still, in a sense, it does not seem quite so stale as when last worn. If hung accessible to sunshine and fresh air, it will cast-off more or less of your old thought; for thought in some forms has weight, though inappreciable by any material standard of weight. In proportion to its crudeness, does it, like any other heavy substance, seek or flow to the lowest places. There will be for this reason more evil or evil tendency in a cellar or basement than at the top of the house, and less independence and courage in a low, swampy country than among the dwellers of the mountains. The history of our race has proven this.
But when thought, through the growth of the spirit, reaches a certain point or quality, it ceases to be governed by the attraction of gravitation. In other words, it ceases to be drawn, or draw to itself, any of the quality or element of physical things. It comes then under the rule of another attraction, as yet unrecognized by scientists. We will here call it the attraction of aspiration. This sending thought to the higher or spiritual domain of being attracts also a similar element from that domain, which renders the physical body less and less governed by earthly gravitation or tendency. Through the working of this law, Christ’s physical body did not sink in the sea; and, for similar reason, Christ and the prophet Elijah ascended physically to another realm of existence.
The religion of any people is the law governing and shaping such people’s lives. It expresses itself in all their habits, manners, and customs. Such religion, or law of life, may be a relatively low or high one; and it will also be a law for some as this planet matures and ripens, always increasing and widening in the methods and paths leading to higher and higher states of happiness .
All religions and all religious form, rite, and ceremonial, be they of any faith or at any period of the world’s generally known history, have been instigated and established through a higher wisdom and more powerful order of mind, not seen or generally known of men; and such rites and formalities have had for their object the teaching to man of methods of life which would bring him more lasting happiness. The priest in ancient and modern faiths is, or should be, the chief aspirer,— the man so highly developed as to be the most powerful in prayer or aspiration: the visible medium betwixt the lower and higher, the seen and unseen worlds.
In all known ages, the priest, whether officiating in the temples of the ancient mythology of Judaism, or Bhuddism, or Catholicism, has worn a garb peculiar to the priestly function. It is a garment consecrated to a certain use. It is not to be worn in public or in promiscuous throngs. If it were, it would absorb of the lower thought emanating from them. If worn by the priest at all times, it would also be permeated by all of his peculiar moods. For priests, like other men, have their lower moods,— their periods when the higher self is temporarily overcome by the lower,—as all other men and women have and must have. But when the priest puts on the dress meant only for the sacredness and gravity, or rather the repose and serenity, of mind proper for the altar or pulpit, and used only when he wishes for and invites this mood of mind or order of thought,— that dress, being only used for such purpose, contains and is permeated only by that peculiar order of thought associated with his priestly ministration.
Following this same law, we find great use and profit in wearing changes of apparel suitable for certain occupations. An actor feels more his part, and the phase of character he portrays, when he wears the costume adapted to such part, especially when he has played in it many times; because then such costume becomes saturated with the thought peculiar to such part, and he does literally put on a part of his characterization. If you put on the rags of the beggar, you will, for the same reason, the more feel the cringing, crouching, mental condition of the beggar. If in the study or practice of any art you wear a certain dress (and a tasteful one), you will the better prosecute such art, for you have then a dress saturated with the thought of such art, and through such saturation, unseen beings, skilled in such art, can come nearer to you, and impress their skill upon you. If you put on clothing used in every sort of work, and which is worn by you among turbulent, sordid, and low mental atmospheres and surroundings, you place thereby a thought barrier betwixt you and them, which renders you less accessible to them.
There is the germ of a truth in the idea of the amulet or charm, or relic of saint, or bead blessed by the pope, possessing a certain power or virtue. Any material substance once worn or touched by any person will absorb a certain part of that person’s thought or self, and such thought can be absorbed by the person to whom it is given; and, if it is the thought of good, it affects you for good. When you look on the ring given you by a friend, and one whose thought is ever sending out good-will to you, you are reminded of him or her, and in being so reminded you send your thought to him or her; and, if he or she does really wish you unmixed good, you will receive a current of his or her thought back, and it is a help to you.
There is great profit in putting on a fresh change of apparel for dinner or the theatre or opera or any social gathering for recreation; and recreation all should have in the latter part of the day. If you wear your business-suit at dinner or the opera or party, you are bringing, in that clothing, a part of your business self to a place where all business thought should be temporarily laid aside and forgotten, in order that business shall be the better done next morning. You are bringing to dinner or the theatre in that business-suit more or less of the thought it has absorbed of pork or beef or codfish, or bargain or sale, or leases or rents, or other care, fret, worry, or anxiety, which, as a really religious man, you want for the time to be rid of. Your business-suit, so full and infected by the business thought, and possibly iniquity, in which you have been moving and mingling, will throw off this element, besides actually rendering it more difficult for you to rid yourself of business care and anxiety. And such element and condition of your own mind may affect unpleasantly those near you, who are highly sensitive; and though they may not know the cause, yet in the privacy of their souls they may not find you so agreeable as you may wish them to find you.
We need to dress as neatly and tastefully in the privacy of our houses and families, our chambers and working-rooms, as we may do, or attempt to do, in public. There can be a neat and tasteful dress for every employment. It is most profitable to wear such dress. For if we feel ourselves becomingly attired, we shall carry on our faces the impress and result of such dressing. When you feel tastefully attired, it is your spirit and not your body that so feels such pleasure; and as it so feels and also thinks pleasurable thought, so it will be drawing to you that of thought-element which will shape your face in accordance with such feeling. So the expression of your face improves through persistent tasteful dressing at all times; for the whole body moulds its shape according to the moods or mental states of your spirit.
You feel disagreeably a torn gown, a shoe run down at the heel, a seedy hat, a soiled collar. Soiled and long-worn under-clothing becomes irksome. Your spirit participates in the sensation of annoyance. The mind is as much affected as the body. This disagreeable sensation is thought. You are ever putting out such thought-element. It imprints its peculiar expression on your features.
If our garments are slovenly in arrangement two-thirds of the time, we can never dress with that certain neatness and elegance pleasing to the eyes of others, though they may not be able to tell exactly what it is that pleases. If slovenly habit of attire predominate, slovenly expression in some form will mould itself on the face, because the face will shape its expression in accordance with the prevailing mood of mind. A man scared at something two-thirds of the time will have a scared look all the time. A continual slipshod mood of mind, which ties shoestrings negligently, brushes the hair with “a lick and a promise,” and is never carefully buttoned up in any direction, will carry a slipshod face. If we feel always neatly and becomingly dressed, both as regards the clothing that is seen and that which is not seen, be it dress for sleep, for work, for the kitchen, the parlor, or the studio, we are then cultivating and drawing to us the thought-element of order, of neatness, of grace; and such elements will build themselves more and more into us, become parts of us, and the face will show more and more in pleasing expression the result of such incorporation of higher thought.
Tasteful arrangement of clothing for the body must come from within. It is the spirit that dresses the body. The disordered mental states of the lunatic show themselves in disordered or fantastic attire.
The more you invite the thought or moods of order, neatness, grace,—in brief, the “doing of all things well,”—the more of such thought will flow toward you. With the thought always comes the capacity for such doing. Such order of thought must express and prove itself more and more in every act. Order, neatness, taste, will prevail, not only in the arrangement of your clothing, and the selection of fitting colors, but in all you do,— in your handwriting, in the packing of your valise, in your walk, your speech, your general bearing. The “grace” of the God in yourself is a principle. It colors, influences, affects, your whole life. It is “grace” in its literal and more common meaning, for “grace” is a Godlike quality, and grace of movement, and grace of bearing, whether seen in the actor, the orator, the danseuse, or the true lady, is born of order, of that attitude or condition of mind, which with electric rapidity plans beforehand what it executes, and plans almost as it executes, be such execution placed on the graceful bow or the accentuation of a sentence which shall convey an idea or emotion too fine to be carried by mere words. In the “kingdom of God,” there are no trivial things. Religion, or the law of life, or the doing of all things well, involves the use, outlay, and application of force; and force is thought, and all thought is infinite spirit; and as we learn better and better how to use and apply this, better and better are the results coming to us from such use.
Colors are expressions of mental conditions and qualities. Despondency, mourning, hopeless grief, chooses black. Our nation, which at heart believes in death,—in other words, regards the sundering of spirit from body as the end of all communion ’twixt their own and the mind which previously used that body,—puts on black, an appropriate badge for hopelessness and lack of clear idea concerning the whereabouts and condition of very near departed friends. The Chinese, who interpret death only as the loss of a body to a spirit, for similar cause wear white, indicative to them of a temporary sadness, tempered by the certain knowledge that such friend, though not seen of the physical eye, is still as near them as ever. Dull, lustreless black is the color of stagnation and decay. It is the color most prevalent when the life, light, warmth, and cheer of the sun are most shut from us. As now so much worn among us, it is symbolical, and an actual result and outcome of lack of spiritual sight,—in other words, lack of life, light, and valuable knowledge. True, we have systems of education which teach a great deal of what is called knowledge. It is a question how much they teach is worth knowing, and how much is not. How much of our modern “finished education” gives power to accomplish results?
In your dress, your spirit always chooses the colors, or combinations of color, most expressive of your mental condition. If your life is entirely without aim or purpose, you will wear “any thing which comes handy,”—parts of different suits, pitched on without regard to becomingness. You will dress in patchwork, and, even when you buy new clothing, you will allow the dealer to fit you out in patchwork. If you are verging on what is called “middle age,” and regard youth as a period forever past, and look at yourself as on the down-grade of life, bound for a domain of existence where all of life’s pleasures, hopes, and joyousness are to be gradually shut out, and that in a few years you are to become a decrepit old man or woman, you will probably dress in black,—possibly rusty black,—the color so much worn by men and women who seem to have turned their faces permanently toward the despondent and soured view of life; to whom the presence of youth, in its gayety and love of color, is disagreeable and a folly; and whose internal consolation seems to be that youth is fleeting, and must soon end in a life as hard, cheerless, and sombre as their own.
Our land is full of people, men and women, who in dress have “slumped,”—who have little pride or love for what they put on; who pitch at their bodies, in dressing, a hat, a bonnet, a shawl, a gown, or necktie, because custom and habit say it must be worn; who regard care, love, and scrupulousness as to their apparel as matters belonging only to a bygone youth.
These are signs of death. These people’s bodies have then commenced to die. They have “slumped,” because their spirits have “slumped.” For the proper and tasteful adornment of the body, the instrument here used by your spirit is one of the legitimate, pleasurable, and necessary occupations of life. It is the spirit’s outward advertisement of its internal condition. It is truthful in every story it tells in this way. A seedy coat, a soiled rusty gown, tell no lies as to their wearers’ prevailing state of mind.
Slovenly dressing means lack of love for the effort necessary in dressing, and choosing the fashion and color of dress; and whatever is done by the body with lack of love for, and in, the doing is an injury to the body; and, as viewed in this light, not even a millionnaire can afford to wear a rusty hat.
In what we call youth, there is the most of spiritual wisdom or intuition, because your spirit has then a new body; and up to a certain period the spirit is free from the old dead thought and opinion expressed in eternally followed custom and prejudice by the thousands of the middle-aged about it. Rejoicing in such spiritual knowledge and naturalness, youth is playful. It casts off care. It loves personal adornment. It revels like Nature as expressed in the vegetable kingdom in color and variety of color. In this it is right. In the unconscious wisdom of intuition, it is wiser far than so many of middle age, who, through ignorance of the law of life, have at once turned down the corners of their mouths, and turned out all hope of new joys and pleasures. It was for this reason that the Christ of Judaa commended to the solemn elders of Israel the little child, saying, “Except ye become as one of these, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” For with each new body the spirit feels, rather than sees, a glimpse of its future angelhood,—a glimpse so often and soon covered up through absorption of the worldly thought about it; covered, at least, for that one earthly life.
I hear some say in thought: How can we, on whom the burdens of life press so heavily, get our changes of apparel for different callings and different periods of the day? I answer, Yours is the possibility of getting them in this way: Set your mind—the force which is your eternal birthright, that magnet which will always draw to you the material correspondence of what you most think, or set it toward—in the direction of imperiously but in silence demanding these things, and in time you will see opportunities whereby you shall earn and have them honestly. Refuse in your thought to accept inferior clothes, inferior food, inferior apartments, save as a makeshift; and in time the superior will come to you. If you say, I expect I never shall do any better or have any better than I have now, and that, if any thing, my condition a year hence will be worse than now, you are setting in motion, and keeping in motion, that thought-force which will weight you down, press you down, and keep you down, and attract you to rags, and rags to you. Set your mind in the direction of having only second and third rate clothing, food, furniture, and surroundings; and the second and third rate only will you attract and have. Set the magnetic power of your mind persistently in the desire and demand of the best of every thing; and the best will, by an inevitable and unerring law, eventually come to you.
Set your mind persistently in the direction of second and third rate things; and by this same irresistible force will you be drawn into those crowds of seedy and semi-seedy men and women, who haunt auctions of old furniture,—there buying and carrying home creaky bedsteads; and ague-stricken bureaus, whose drawers won’t shut when opened, and won’t open when shut; old carpets full of the dust of ages, and worse; old clothes full of disease and diabolical thought; and old beds and bedding full of the corpse which died upon them. Get into this current, and you become an actual part of this second-rate life and second-rate being.