The Doctor Within, Two

The Doctor Within, Two

Nature never really grows old as we understand that term. She is ever casting off her worn‑out physical envelopes, or forms of expression. We say the tree decays. But do we not see the new tree springing from the rotten stump of the old one? That is the same tree. In other words, it is the spirit, or force, of the tree we called old, materializing a new form of expression. That process has been going on through countless ages. That species of tree was far coarser than now in some far‑off past. It has, through its successive re-growths, been growing finer and finer, and is to grow finer still.

In all animal and other organized life, we find periods of repair and recuperation preparatory to a certain newness of life, and renewal of organization, as when the crab or lobster casts its shell, the snake its skin, the bird in its moulting‑season casting its old plumage, the animal shedding its fur. In all these organizations other changes go on, which we do not see. During these periods, the bird, animal, and fish are weak and inactive. Nature demands rest during this reconstruction. Such reconstruction is going on internally in the organization as well as without.

All natural law, as seen in the lower forms of organization, extends to the higher. This same law extends to mankind. There come temporary periods in every person’s life, when all the activities, forces, organs, and functions are more sluggish. We are then undergoing our moulting process. Nature is laying us up for repairs. If we obeyed her demands, we should come forth in a few weeks or months with a renewed life and a renewed body. All that Nature asks of us, is that we give mind and body the rest they call for while in the repair‑shop.

We speak of people of “middle age” as having reached their greatest amount of power and activity. After this period, “it is inferred as the law of Nature,” that we decline gradually into “the sere and yellow leaf.” This faith in “old age” and weakness, by the same spiritual law makes old age and weakness.

The “turn” at middle age, or a little after, means that the physical body you have been using is giving birth to a new one; in other words, the old is being re‑formed, and giving place to the new. During such process of re‑formation, a great deal of rest is required. Your real, invisible, spiritual self is busy at work in the process of reconstruction. You should be no more overtaxed at this period than you were when an infant, or during childhood.

We do not grant this rest. We force the exhausted organization to work when it is unfit for work. We mistake our season for moulting, and consequent temporary weakness, for some form of disease. We then fix in our minds, through faith in evil, the idea of disease; so we construct a disease for ourselves. While Nature is trying to give us a new birth, rejuvenate us, and make us stronger, we defeat her purpose, and make ourselves weaker

In the vast majority of cases, people cannot give themselves the rest Nature calls for. They must work on and on, from day to day, from year to year, to “make a living.” That makes no difference as to the result. Nature’s laws have no regard for man’s systems. So fagged‑out and ignorantly disobedient humanity fags on, and thousands “make a living,” and toil and suffer and wear out, and die in misery on respectable beds of sickness.

In cases habit is so strong that people cannot stop their work, or peculiar line of activity. They have no idea or capacity for resting spirit or body. They are miserable unless at work, and yet through growing weakness unhappy while at work,—like so many “house‑wives,” always complaining of being worked to death, yet unhappy if not at work.

Could these people once have mind and body brought into a condition approaching that of real rest, they would possibly be alarmed, and fear their powers were failing. They might for a time become sluggish, inert, and relatively inactive. That would be only because the strain being off mind and body, the spiritual power is using its force to recuperate and build anew. But you cannot work force in the outer, or physical, system, and the interior, or spiritual, system, at the same time. While one is at work, the other must stop.

Nature’s great source of recuperation is rest. The land lying “fallow” gathers new force for growing grain. The mother whose mind and body are least taxed during gestation, gives birth to the healthiest child. The broken bone requires rest while being knit together.

By rest we mean rest of mind as well as body. Mental rest is as necessary as physical rest. Thousands of our race have no conception of mental rest, or a mind at ease. With them, worry, fret, uneasiness, and anxiety about something is a fixed habit. Rich or poor, It makes little difference. All this leads to exhaustion, decay, and disease. All this comes because men and women cannot as yet believe that they, as parts of God, or the Infinite Spirit, have spiritual power, which, if cultivated and trusted to, will supply all their needs, grant them perfect health, and give them delights they do not now dream of. Man is to see the day when he shall know that when he says, “I will do thus or so,” and persist in that attitude of mind, that the thing he wills is being done,—that unseen forces are accomplishing the undertaking while his body sleeps, or, while awake, he is re‑creating himself.

What we now call “death,” is only the falling away from the spirit of the old body, before it has the power to put on the new one. Through ignorance and violation of spiritual law, our race has not yet given the spirit this opportunity. You cannot die. It is only your body that dies. You had a body in an existence previous to this. That died as others died before it. Your real life is the life of your mind, or spirit. You are not always to suffer the death of the body as in the past. A period is to come when your spirit will have so far matured its powers, that it can clothe itself gradually with a new physical body as the old wears away. Paul inferred this possibility when he said, “The last great enemy which shall be destroyed is death.”

When this law is known and followed, there will be results which would now be called miracles. Spirits (by which name we term all using, and in possession of, physical bodies) will have bodies for use on this stratum of life so long as they desire to use them; and such bodies being more perfect and symmetrical, will, as more perfect instruments, be better adapted to express such spirit’s ever‑growing powers. Your real self never loses any power. It is only because of the giving out of the machine, the body, that the spirit is unable to express that power, even as the most skilful carpenter can do little with a dull or broken saw.

Prentice Mulford,

Your Forces and How to Use Them

The Doctor Within

The Doctor Within

“ Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” If you keep in your mind an image, or imagination, of yourself in perfect health, and full of strength and activity, you keep the forces working to make you so. You are constructing out of the unseen substance of thought a spiritual self (the healthy self hoped for); and this spiritual self will in time rule the material body, and make it like unto itself. If your stomach is weak, refuse in imagination to see it a weak stomach: see it only a strong stomach. If your lungs are weak, see in your mind’s eye your lungs as strong. If your body is weak and sluggish, see yourself in imagination as you were when a boy or girl, when your limbs were full of activity, and you took delight in scrambling over fences and climbing trees. You are then putting out the “substance” of the thing or condition of body “hoped for.” As you continue to see yourself thus, the gradual change in your physical condition for the better will increase your faith that this law is a truth. Keep to this thought of yourself as strong, active, and vigorous, week after week, month after month, year after year, and you fix more firmly in mind yourself as free from all disease. It will be a confirmed habit, or, as we say, “second nature,” for you so to imagine yourself.

What you think or hold most in mind or imagination, which you have most faith in. If you imagine a bugbear, much of the time you will make a reality of such imagining. The “confirmed invalid” sees himself in his “mind’s eye” only as sick. He puts out, or imagines, the wrong image, or imagination. He is unconsciously working the same law. The invalid who always sees himself as sick, is in reality constructing a sick body. You can make a weak stomach for yourself by always in imagination seeing your stomach as weak. The great trouble and error of to‑day is, that, so soon as any organ is a little overtaxed or strained, its possessor is apt to think of it only as weakened and diseased, and in thought dwells only on such weakness: in this, unfortunately, he is too often assisted by others. As all thought put out is substance, the result is, there is by such means made for him, first, spiritually, a stomach, or lungs, or kidneys, or other organ, more imperfect; and this imperfection is embodied and expressed in the material lungs, stomach, kidneys, or other organ.

It cannot be told too often, that all material things are the outgrowth or product of spiritual or unseen forces. Whatever you think of is made at once in unseen substance. So soon as made, it commences at once to attract its like order of substance to itself: so, no matter how weak you are, when in mind you see your body active, strong, and vigorous, you have really made the spiritual body so. That spiritual body is drawing, then, the elements of health and strength to itself. Always in mind see yourself well when your body is sick. This is a simple process, but it involves a wonderful and wonder‑working law. When in mind you see yourself diseased, though your body may be so, you are working this law the wrong way

The imagining of a fresh, sound, vigorous body, is in actual substance, though unseen, a fresh, sound, healthy, and vigorous body. It is a spiritual reality. The material body must grow to be like the spiritual reality. If your body is weak, do not see it in your mind’s eye as weak. See yourself full of life and playful vigor. Don’t see yourself as an invalid propped up in a chair, or confined to the house, though for the time being your body is in such conditions. You are healing yourself when you see yourself running foot‑races. You are keeping yourself an invalid when you see yourself ever as one. Don’t expect or fear sickness or pain for to‑morrow, no matter what sickness or pain you have to‑day. Expect nothing but health and strength. In other words, let health, strength, and vigor be your daydream. The desirable condition of mind is better expressed by the word “dream” than by the terms “hoping” or “expecting.”

“Dreamers” do far more than the world realizes. The “day‑dream” of a person who may sit for an hour almost unconscious of what is going on directly around him, is a force working out results in the unseen and mighty kingdom of thought, concerning which we know so little. Only at present, he or she whose thought is so disengaged from the body as to make them for the time quite unconscious of its existence, having no knowledge of the power they are using, no belief that it is doing something, have consequently no faith in it; and without faith, most of the result must be lost to them.

If you know nothing of gold‑mining, or of the formations in which gold is found, or the methods for extracting it from the soil, you may dig in rich gold‑bearing earth for months, and cart it off to fill in sunken lots. With no knowledge of the treasure in your soil, you have no faith in it. We are, as regards our mental or spiritual powers, in an analogous condition. Yet every imagining is an unseen reality; and the longer and more firmly it is held to, the more of a reality does it make itself in things which can be seen, felt, and touched by the physical senses. Dream, then, so much as you can by day of health and vigor. The more you so dream of it by day, the more likely is your thought to enter the same vigorous domain at night, and so recuperate you all the quicker. But if you, dream by day of sickness or weakness, your thought at night will be the more apt to connect itself with the current of sick, weak, diseased thought, and you are, on waking, the worse for it. Ignorantly you may store gunpowder in your cellar, thinking it some harmless material. A spark may then destroy your house and your body. In an analogous manner mankind are now constantly bringing pain and evil on themselves through an unwise or ignorant use of their mental forces. As we most think, imagine, or dream, can we store up gold or gunpowder. A daydream, or reverie, is an outflow of force working results. The more abstracted the reverie, the greater is the force working separate and apart from the instrument, the body. When for a time you can forget, or lose consciousness of, your physical self and immediate surroundings, you are working your spiritual or thought power possibly a hundred or a thousand miles away. All occult power, so called, all the miracle power of biblical record, was wrought by this method. If thought can be concentrated in sufficient volume on an image in mind, it can produce instantly that image in visible substance. This is the only secret of magic. Magic infers the instantaneous production of the visible by such concentration…

Faith is indeed as the “grain of mustard‑seed” to which, as to growth, it is compared in the New Testament. But it can grow for evil as well as good, and, if for evil, may become a tree in which every foul bird of evil omen will come and build its nest. Your evil or gloomy imagining is faith in that evil. Your fear of a disease is faith in the perpetuity and increase of such disease. You have a slight derangement of stomach or kidney or other organ. So, having it for one day or a few days, you begin to expect it. You think of it only as an unhealthy organ. You never in mind see it as a sound organ. You may be then told it is in a dangerous condition. You have a name possibly given to the ailment which is suggestive of great suffering, debility, and ultimate death. All this is help to faith in evil. The force of other minds may be added to yours which increases that faith. Friends and relatives may be anxious on your account, and fearful, and continually reminding you how careful you should be. Every thing tends to make you see yourself sick, weak, and enfeebled. You have not in your own mind an imagining of the part affected as sound or healthy. None send you their thought, or imagining, as vigorous and healthy. The spiritual thought‑constructions sent you are all in the opposite direction. The spiritual force sent you is really all for evil. If your friend says he “hopes you may get well,” he says it with an accent and expression which says he fears you may not. And so your faith in an evil is constantly increased. You always get the “substance” of the thing feared or expected as well as hoped for. In this case you get the substance of evil. You get more disease, more weakness by the same law, or force, which can, otherwise directed, bring you health. You are taught to have more faith, or belief, in sickness than in health. “According to the faith,” says the biblical record, “shall it be given thee;” and accordingly you have given you sickness, because you have most faith in sickness.

Prentice Mulford,

Your Forces and How to Use Them