Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
born with an actually mesmerized spirit linked to it, not that the spirit is within the child’s body. No spirit is actually enclosed in any human body. Its nucleus is there, but a spirit is an organization which reaches far out from the body. A spirit is wherever it sends its thought.
Send all your thought in revery to any place, and most of your real self will be in that place.
The body is an organization distinct and apart from the spirit. It is simply the instrument used by the spirit in the earth state of existence. Being in an earth-life, the spirit needs an instrument of earth in order to adapt itself to the requirements of the earth-life; as when you go down in a coal-mine, you need a coarse miner’s suit of clothes for use in the mine, rather than satin or broadcloth. In this sense the body is a protection to the spirit in its earth-life; and spirits who lose their bodies before reaching a certain stage of knowledge and consequent power feel and suffer much from such loss, because the spiritual body or spirit, obliged by reason of its immaturity to remain on the earth (as very many are obliged to remain), may feel and suffer intensely from the thought of the mortals about it. It is “sensitive” to a degree which can hardly be realized here. Any person exceedingly impressional, and so made to feel pleasant or unpleasant by the presence of others, according to their nature or disposition, may comprehend to some extent how weak spirits, drawn by an attraction they cannot resist towards certain people, may be made to suffer. The body with all its ailments, resulting through ignorance of spiritual law, is still a protection to our immature spirit against the power of evil thought.
It is simply, then, a new body for the spirit’s use that is furnished by the mother. Yet this body has a certain life of its own. It is analogous to the life of a plant. Like a tree, it has its youth, its maturity, and its decay. Were the spirit possessed of sufficient knowledge, it could arrest this decay, and keep its instrument so long as it desired, not only in a condition of maturity, but of ever-increasing vigor. It would do this by sending itself (that is, its thought) into the higher spirit life, and, through such line or ray of thought as a connecting link, draw to itself supplies of the life-giving element belonging to that region of spirit. One name for this process is “aspiration.” In other words, it is the desire or prayer or demand for the highest and best. This mental action is as much based on a scientific law as is the attraction of gravitation. It is the actual sending of a part of our real being (the spirit) to a place from whence it draws fresh supplies of life. The thought we so send upward is as much a real thing, though invisible, as a telegraph-wire, and, like a telegraph-wire, it is an actual conductor of life to us. It is also the wire sending us messages and knowledge of methods for increasing such life and power.
The spirit so linked to a new body is not a “new being.” It is the same spirit having a new instrument to work through, but it is still a spirit, in a sense asleep. The thought-power of the mother still remains upon it after the new body comes into the world; for it is influenced by all the mother’s thought, and her errors in thought, and the errors and ignorance in thought of all about it. It is still a spirit under the mesmeric influence of the operator or operators, these being the mother and those in close association with her. The mesmeric or thought-power of several, focussed on one person, is proportionately greater than that of one mind. All this is brought to bear on the spirit. It may in its last body have been a Catholic, a Jew, a Mohammedan. But if the mother and those about it be Protestants, it may also be Protestant, simply because the thought of all about it influences it to such belief.
While the body is very young the spirit can make but little use of it. In the year-old babe, it is in effect but a fragment of the old spirit that animates the new body. When it cries for food, or is annoyed by reason of any discomfort, it is as if you pinched or pricked the body of a full-grown person during sleep. There is just enough animation or spirit left in the sleeper’s body to protest with a cry or a movement akin to that of the child. Because, in reality, during sound, healthy sleep, your spirit, your real self, is not with your body. It is abroad, roaming about, seeing other spirits in other places, and only connected with the body by a link.
The spirit linked to the new body during the period called childhood is still mesmerized. It is not its real self. It cannot, to any extent, take advantage of its past experience; that is eclipsed by the wills of the operators. If it be a strongly marked spirit, and one having passed through many previous re-embodiments, it will, as it grows up, and comes more and more under the influence of other minds, begin gradually to show something of its real self. It will internally protest and antagonize against much of the opinion about it. It will have a thousand thoughts, which it soon learns not to express to others, because they will be termed “wild and visionary.” These are indeed visionary, but real visions. They are the promptings of the soul. They are the reachings out of the real self, the spirit, towards what is indeed true, despite the hamperings of the thought influence about it.
The new body given it may be an imperfect one. As the seeds of stunted plants produce other plants inferior in quality, so are bodies brought forth imperfect. The thought influence of those about it may aggravate such physical imperfection; that is, if the parents are always thinking disease, they show disease in the child. A mother dwelling on her complaints bequeaths those ailments to her child. The spirit is often actually mesmerized into the belief that it has a weak stomach or weak lungs. The parent who dwells even in the desire for alcohol will, in this way, bequeath the appetite for liquor on the child, though he may not drink a drop. This is the real cause of what are termed “inherited diseases.” They are not inheritances of the body. They are inheritances of the predominant thought of those most about it while young. Did the parents, though afflicted themselves with diseases, think health, and combat the tendency to think of their ailments, they would gradually cure themselves, and bequeath health to their children, despite the infant’s physical imperfection at birth, which is also a result thrown on it by the mother’s thought, or the thought of those about it.
So the spirit, thus furnished with a new body, may come again into the world to run its race, weighed down from the start with a new load of error. Not in a sense its real self, asleep, and insensible of the powers it may have used and proven for itself in a recently past existence; doomed to an enslavement of surrounding thought influence; habituated for years to such influence, till such habit chains it to a rut of thought; taught that it is nothing but the body it uses; educated to deride nearly all spiritual power, and spirit itself, as nonsense; cursed with appetites, possibly thrown upon it by the minds of others, in the manner stated above; the spirit and genius of a Napoleon, a Byron, or a Shakspeare may be dragged about by a wretched body, diseased, dissipated; a vagabond, living in what is literally a wretched dream. This dream may continue through successive re-embodiments, unless it can be brought under the influence of some thought which knows the truth. Even then the awakening to know and realize that truth may be difficult, so vast and complicated is the process of de-education to be undergone; so many are the false ideas it holds; so great is the tendency in all it thinks, to think away from the truth; so strong is the power of all the thought about it, so to put it in the wrong current of thought; so little does it know of the real laws and forces in nature; so incredulous must it naturally be of the truths we here attempt to tell; so absolutely fabulous to it must seem the fact, that what it has deemed its real self is not its real self, no more than would be your amputated arm yourself.
XIII.
RE-EMBODIMENT UNIVERSAL IN NATURE.
Thoughts are Things.
All forms of life are results of a continued series of re-embodiments in what we call matter. We may call matter the cruder form of spirit, so organized as to be visible to the physical eye.
Animals, birds, fish, and reptiles are re-embodied. To deny a spirit to one form of intelligence is to deny it for all forms, man included. The animal re-appears in a series of births, each birth giving to its spirit a new form. Each of these is a slight improvement on the last, if the animal is in its wild or natural state. Progression, improvement, and continual change from a coarse to a finer organization, are not confined to man.
In pre-historic ages there existed those immense clumsy beasts, birds,