The self or spirit of a man is encased in his mind, and, examined in a purely physical way, the brain is the most baffling organ of the body scientific man ever had to deal with. Much can be understood; all never will be. Judged as being the casing and instrument of the soul it becomes an even more delicate and intricate and baffling piece of work. You all know that mind is the generating-house for all your acts and deeds, but you do not fully appreciate the fact that every act and every thought is "booked"—is recorded.
You do not see the elaborate scheme of work which goes on in any of your large business houses, when you buy something and do not pay at once. It is booked and passes through many hands before the bill is sent to you a little later, and having paid the bill you forget it all, but the record of that business house has it still. So with the brain; an act or a thought, no matter what the quality, is recorded for all time. Settling will come after life, and when paid the "book" is finished with and troubles no more, though the record is still there. Now follow me. Mind and its work—thought— is the force that drives and creates everything on earth. It has all to be mental before physical or material. That you all know. Every building was conceived mentally before being built.
Thought is divided in itself into different types. There is the thought of your next meal which is of no particular interest, and there are the thoughts constructive and destructive. These are important. There are the purely personal thoughts. Sometimes advantageous and sometimes the reverse. Now, the all-important forms of thought are the constructive and destructive. The others referring to your meals, your clothes, your appearance, your anything you like, these are not of importance until they are allowed to hinder the flow of constructive thought; when they do this the character of these same thoughts changes and becomes destructive.
It is the material embodiment of destructive thought which causes most of the distress and misery in the world. The sum total goes on increasing, and will continue to increase, until mankind as a whole, and individually, will listen and try to understand a little more about himself beyond what is necessary for him
to know for the selling of his goods, and thus give fuller play to the beneficent action of constructive thought which alone can redeem and save the world.
CHAPTER VI MORE ABOUT INTIMATE LIFE
To a great extent the individual hardships of earth life are directly due to wrong thinking. I am fully aware that people are placed in many different positions right from birth. Some inherit unhappiness and difficulty from their parents, and their lot in life is harder and their pleasures are less than in the lives of those who are born in better conditions.
Accepting these differences of position and condition— one man a life of much hard work, another a comfortable and perhaps rather idle life—the same rule of thought applies. The man who has grown up under hard conditions is by circumstances forced into a groove of thought—a regular rut. He cannot help himself because there are no real attempts made by any to change his outlook; he may meet with material help from time to time, but he meets with little practical mental assistance. He is under the disadvantage of his lifelong earth conditions, and is in ignorance because
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he does not understand and has little opportunity for learning about these things; by his thought he adds to his difficulties instead of easing and finally removing many of them. The other man, who is comfortably settled and has no particular worries, does precisely the same thing. He trudges along in the same mental rut—stagnation, "Mental Stagnation," and the same results will fall to them both hereafter. They are both building up their future states.
Then there are people of keen intelligence, clever people, who use their brains to achieve material gain no matter the cost to others. These people are indulging in the most positive form of destructive thought. They are not like the other two—negative. They are very alive, alert and positive. They are at once using destructive and constructive thought. The latter is entirely misapplied, and when they come here the account against them will be much heavier, because they will have built up a wall of greedy thought which themselves have originally sent out and which they must settle in this next condition.
A thought—no matter the heading it comes under—that has come into your mind and which you have sent out, is an accomplished thing so far as your mind goes. Your physical act may or may not keep swift accompaniment with the thought; that does not matter from the point of view of what you are building up for yourself here. Once having had his thought it is done, so far as your mind is concerned, and, whether you follow it up actively or not, you have to make repayment for it when you come here. I am not speaking about the thousand trivial thoughts of every hour, but about those which I might describe as having personality.
You will say it is impossible to control every thought of the day, and I agree that it is, but if once you accepted for fact what I have said you would keep a sharp eye on your mental actions. They matter. You will find this very difficult to accept because it is indeed an intimate thing for each one; you do not know each other's thoughts whilst upon earth, therefore I have headed this chapter "Intimate Life."
Each of you will live to thank the person who is responsible for giving you this information if you act upon it, and those of you who hear and know but do not act upon the knowledge, will have one day to cast reproaches upon yourselves for this failure.
To realize oneself that one has failed is far
more bitter than the consciousness that others know it.
Think upon this and reason a little with your own inner self.
CHAPTER VII FIRST ATTEMPTS
Leaving the question of time out of it entirely, as I must, I want to write of my first attempt to communicate with the earth world. I know there is much dissatisfaction with the spirit world on account of the practical impossibility to give correct ideas of time-spacing. I would like to say a little about that before going into the main interest of today's writing. You must not be over-hasty in condemning us for this failure. On earth you all space your time by days and hours, etc., but those spacings are also based, or perhaps more definitely marked in your mental reckoning, on the habits of the day. You have always taken certain things at certain hours. You have a light sky and a dark sky; without a watch you know fairly accurately the time of day by your inclinations—fatigue or freshness, the need for food or rest, etc., etc.
Now, on this side of the grave we have no real necessity for rest or for food. We have
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no dark sky—only a light one, and we have, for the sake of the present illustration, an unlimited supply of energy. Consequently we are not able to break up time into spaces which correspond with earth-spacings. We do break up our time, but it is not your breaking, therefore we can seldom be accurate in telling when a thing did, or when a thing will,
happen. For that reason I am not able to tell how long I had been in this country before I made my first attempt to link up with earth again. To me I seemed to have lived in this land always. It appeared incredible to me that it could be only a few days since I arrived. I had not forgotten my family or my friends, but I felt peculiarly happy about them. I cannot think why, except that finding my earth knowledge so very correct I gathered strength in feeling that they too would understand everything was quite well with me, and that this little delay in writing was natural considering the new country I had come to.