[139] The body builds the spirit
while in the flesh. The spirit is not
an entity separate and distinct from
the body as has been supposed. It is
not some perfect creation submerged
in matter and working its way through
matter. It is of the same substance
as the body, and sustains the same
relation to the body that the aroma
does to the flower. It is the finer
part of the body’s exhalations.
In short, it is thought.
Every moment we are adding to our
thought lives. Our thought lives are
far enough ahead of our bodily lives,
though all of the same stuff. They
are much more positive than the body,
and need not be subject to those
conditions which kill the body, and
probably are not subject to them. The
thought life, or spirit, is the
reservoir into which the body seems
to pour the imperishable part of
itself--that part which clings to its
own individuality and refuses to die
when the body dies.
The fact that this thought life,
or spirit, is not visible to our eyes
is no proof that it does not survive
the dissolution of the body, and no
proof that it is not a powerful
thing, since the most potent forces
we know of are entirely invisible to
us.
The difference between the body
and spirit is this: The body is
spirit fixed in certain forms of
inherited belief; while the spirit is
the progressive or constantly growing
idealistic part of the body, always
pressing upward to a higher
and nobler conception of itself. It
is my opinion that the spirit exists
after the death of the body. And I do
not base the opinion upon anything
that theology has ever formulated,
nor yet upon the claims of the
spiritualists, but upon the fact that
in the economy of nature nothing is
ever lost. As the thought of life, or
spirit, is the finest production
there is I cannot believe that it is
dissolved into unintelligible mist.
For I know that thought is a
substance the same as the body, and
it is the finer part of the body. It
is the part that flows forth in hope
and aspiration, unclouded, to a
certain extent, by doubt, and yet, on
the other hand, unfixed by
belief.
Being unfixed by belief like the
body, it must of necessity be
ethereal in form, drifting, perhaps,
and uncertain or unconscious of its
own power, though holding such
splendid material in abeyance. The
tendency of all thought is to become
fixed in belief. And it seems to me
that this thought life, or spirit,
being unfixed, must be attracted
toward a condition of greater
fixedness or stability. Therefore,
the doctrine of reincarnation seems,
at least, a plausible thing. It is
the nature of unfixed substance to
drift in the direction of fixed
substance. It is also in the nature
of Law that--given a certain
condition--we must conquer that
condition before farther progress is
possible.
Now death is not conquest. On the
contrary, it is a triumph of the
negative conditions--those conditions
called sickness and old age. Death
teaches us no lessons that can be
made practical and available in the
living. It is [140] simply a
renunciation of life; and that, too,
at a time when the spirit, or thought
life, has made no substantial or
fixed condition for itself by relief.
For it is a fact that the thought
life--that part of us which takes
cognizance of the ideal--does not
believe in itself except in a weak,
half-hearted way that cannot give it
the substantial appearance that the
body has.
Now, nature demands that this
thought life, or spirit, shall
establish itself in external or
visible signs. Our bodies are not to
become etherealized, but our spirits
are to become substantialized. The
earth is our laboratory and workshop,
and our hands and our brains are our
tools, and so are our thought lives,
or spirits. Indeed, our thought
lives, or spirits, are to be our most
fearless, freest and most powerful
agents in conquering earth conditions
and making them subserve our uses.
The effort of Mental Science is to
show that body and spirit are one,
and that the best results are
obtained by such recognition of this
fact as shall keep them one and
inseparable; thus bringing the power
of this tremendous unit to bear upon
every effort we can make for the
furtherance of our desires, as we
work our way to conditions for
greater importance and freedom and
happiness.
In a former lesson I said that
death was simply the breaking of the
magnet man into two parts, one of
which, being divested of its more
etherealized and vital substance, is
resolved back into its original
atoms; and the other part--the
thought life, or spirit--passes away,
no one knows with absolute
positiveness where.
But, on the assumption that all is
mind (and I know this to be true)
then the body is as essential to the
spirit as the spirit is to the body.
It is simply that part of the spirit
that is held or bound by certain
forms of belief. And these forms of
belief, though I have called them
fixed, are still so malleable as to
change with every change of belief.
It is established belief of the race
that a consciousness of individuality
belongs alone to the spirit, and goes
with the spirit at death, leaving the
body devoid of it. This consciousness
of individuality is the
“I”, the will power,
which does truly go with the
spirit--if it survives death--because
we know that it does not go with the
dead body, which immediately crumbles
to pieces; thus showing that the
centralizing agent which held it in
cohesion is absent.
But assuming, as I think it to be
true, that the will power, the
“I”, the centralizing
agent, goes with the spirit--what
then? Why this; it feels its weakness
simply from the fact that it has not
been fixed in certain forms of
belief, but has always been that
splendid and radiant creature which
has appeared phantasmal and visionary
simply because it was too fair and
too bright for us to clothe with
belief.
The spirit is the thought life;
and we all know how beautiful our
thought lives are; and we all know
that we do not believe in them simply
because they seem too lovely to be
true.
We are children of the earth, and
so far we have been rooted in the
earth and have drawn our substance
from her bountiful bosom. She herself
is the mother of our beliefs, and has
been the means of fixing these
beliefs in our present forms. Each
belief in its farther advance away
from her bosom into more free
conditions has been the parent of the
next higher belief, which has been
expressed in a higher and better
condition. In short, each belief has
projected from itself the next belief
higher than itself. And so evolution
on the mental plane has
progressed.
Belief is the fixing power. It is
belief that is the manifesting
factor. An idea is born from some
fixed belief, and after a time that
idea is accepted and believed in, and
a new function is added to the
creature. The creature having thus
acquired a new power projects another
idea, which in time becomes a fixed
belief, and another new function is
added to the creature.
[141] On the lower plane these
ideas that I speak of may have been
merely dumb, unintelligent desires;
but they were ideas all the same, and
belief fixed them in visible
attributes.
As I said before, the spirit, or
thought life, of a man has not been
clothed with his belief. As rapidly
as spirit, or thought, becomes
clothes with belief it is added to
the body as a new power, and does not
drift away from the body, thus
impoverishing the body in which it
had its birth.
The spirit, or thought life, of a
man cannot possibly be anything but
an external substance, because it is
a part of the man’s body. The
fact that it is invisible to our eyes
does not contradict this statement in
the least, since so many very
powerful agents are invisible.
The spirit, or thought life, must
not be confounded with the Law of
Attraction, which is forever
invisible. The spirit, or thought
life, is a recognition of the
invisible Law the same as the body.
It belongs to the external side of
nature the same as the body does.
There is a large body of thinkers
who believe that the thought-body, or
spirit, is--immediately after
death--ushered into a spiritual
heaven of inconceivable beauty and
happiness. Theologians are weaker on
this point than any other body of
thinkers. Theology claims that the
thought-body, or spirit, is
frequently tortured after death for
mistakes (called sins) which it
commits in this life; and, on the
other hand, that it is frequently
blessed by reason of the fact that it
has failed to make mistakes--as if it
were at all possible in this stage of
race growth for a single soul to
escape from making mistakes!
The spiritualistic idea of the
future of the thought-body, or
spirit, would seem more reasonable if
they did not claim to know so very
much about it. But if one is to
believe them, then our condition
after death is vastly superior to our
present condition. It is this latter
claim that I doubt. I see plainly
that there are two sides to the
question. We know that life in its
progress is a constant conquest over
ignorance. We also know that death is
not a conquest over anything, but an
abandonment of all effort to conquer,
so far as the visible world is
concerned.
Death is not a gain; it is a
retrogressive step; it is the last
slump into utter negation. Of course,
I speak from the standpoint of the
visible and the external. It is the
only standpoint I acknowledge with
absolute positiveness, because it is
the only one whose existence I can
logically prove, no matter what I may
hope for. I can shape as many angelic
spheres in my imagination for the
departed spirits as anyone, but I
cannot prove their reality after I
have shaped them. Therefore, I take
my stand on the terrestrial and am
justified in doing so by seeing what
an infinitude of subjects there are
for us to investigate and to master
right here before we are fitted for
joys that we have not reached in the
process of natural growth. Moreover,
I know that joys which we have not
reached in the process of natural
growth are not joys to us, any more
than the finest opera could prove a
source of pleasure to a pig or a
monkey.
Therefore, I look upon the death
of the natural body as the greatest
possible loss to the individual.
Because the body is the feeder of the
spirit--the spirit being nothing more
than the finer part of the man;
being, indeed, the entire body of the
man’s thoughts; going with the
man all through life; receiving
constant additions to itself by means
of the man’s increasing power
to think (if he happens to be a
thinker) and being with him and a
part of him always, whether the man
is a thinker or not; always ready to
receive any accession to itself even
if the accession fails to come; and
this, up to the very hour when the
negative part falls down in death, at
which time the finer part is
separated from it.
Now, the relation between the body
and the spirit has always been
reciprocal. The two are one. The body
is [142] father of the spirit, and
the spirit is the builder of the body
in its turn. Being one, the seeming
two were simultaneous in birth, and
should always remain together as
feeder and builder, and as builder
and feeder. In the breaking of the
magnet man by death, we know that the
part of the man more nearly allied to
the earth decays and passes into
other forms of life. No one pretends
to think of it as still living after
this event takes place.
“But,” we say, “the
other part still lives and has gone
up to higher conditions.”
What are higher conditions?
Remember that the visible world is a
mental statement, and that this
statement is only lifted to higher
planes of freedom and happiness by
the addition to itself of still
greater knowledge. The world--nay,
the visible universe--only grows,
only increases in power by the new
truths it learns. It is the knowing,
or the recognition of more truth,
that gives added power to the
visible; and man is a visible
creature all through and through,
body and spirit. Moreover, the entire
world (and universe) is a magnet
whose relations of positive and
negative are indispensable. The
negative feeds the positive and the
positive feeds the still more
positive.
But after the spirit of man has
dropped its denser and more fixed
condition, or beliefs, what is there
to feed and sustain it? Surely this
earth is the feeder of all the life
generated on it; and it seems to me
that when the spirit, or thought
life, is cut off from its body that
it no longer has access to its earth
supply. For, consider this fact; that
though the earth does not feed the
spirit, or thought life, directly,
yet it does feed the body, and the
body feeds the spirit, or thought
life. The body is the laboratory out
of which the spirit, or thought life,
is manufactured; and to be cut off
from its laboratory seems like an
awful calamity to me. For I am sure
that man must be fed constantly by
that great body of truth negative to
himself which the world contains in
the form of food, and that--whether
in the body or out of the body--the
spirit, or thought life, will always
require food to nourish it (the
individual). Man, as a laboratory for
the generation of thought, must of
necessity generate it in great
quantity, because thought is the
prompter to effort; and an effortless
creature performs no use; and that
which performs no use cannot endure.
This is the Law. In saying this I am
not saying that the spirit is not fed
and sustained by means adjusted to
the spirit-body. I am simply trying
to look on every side of the matter
in order to reach true conclusions. I
have my own views upon this subject,
which will not be touched in this
lesson, and which cannot properly be
said to belong to the subject of
Mental Science at all, being too
speculative for scientific
handling.
The food a man consumes is the
fuel in the engine that sets the
whole machine in motion--the machine
that generates the thought, or
spirit, which prompts to every form
of enterprise and discovery. This
machine ought to be enduring. It
ought to be self-regenerative, and it
would be self-regenerative but for
the fact of its own ignorance that
alone denies it this possibility. Let
the thought once more learn that
self-regeneration is possible, and
good-bye to death. And why good-bye
to death? Because the spirit, or
thought, so educated will communicate
the fact to the nerves, and the
nerves to the blood vessels, and the
blood vessels to the entire body. And
this will be the spiritual food that
will regenerate the body.
But to return. Reasoning from
certain premises--and we must look at
all sides of this matter--it has been
claimed that the spirit, or thought
life, may not be able to hold itself
together for any great length of time
after it has dropped its body. And
why? Because we gain nothing except
by conquest; and that which we have
not conquered is not ours. As we have
[143] not conquered death we are not
entitled under our present
understanding of the law, to life. If
the spirit has reached a higher
degree of understanding of truth by
simply shutting its eyes on the world
and all the wonders to be worked out
by it; by going away from it and
leaving its work undone; by an act
that is a virtual confession of
incapacity to cope with its
obstacles, then surely the road to
endless bliss is by letting go of all
holds and slipping backward into
death, instead of taking hold with
the spirit, or thought life, and
climbing forward into conditions of
still greater fixedness than those we
now enjoy.
The road to greater happiness--or
heaven if you will--is the same road
that leads to more positive
individualization; to a greater
manifestation of the will in the
overcoming of those conditions in
life that fetter us, and from which
we naturally want to escape.
But death is a partial
renunciation of will power, and
though the will survives death--if
the spirit, or thought life,
survives--it has registered its
conviction of powerlessness in the
fact that it has permitted the body
to die. Therefore, the will, as it
exists in the spirit, or thought
life, is a virtual confession of
weakness, the same as it was in the
body before death; and why should we
expect it to be ushered into
conditions very much happier than
those of earth when it has not earned
them? It is as if a child should
throw down his book in mental
arithmetic because it is too
difficult for him, and then expect to
be placed in the trigonometry class
for no reason except that he could
not understand the earlier lessons in
mathematics.
For a man to be all he must learn
all; and no spirit can endure and go
on his way of endless progression
unless he incorporates in his
personality the essence of an
unbroken life experience. At least,
this seems reasonable to me. He may
not skip a single step. He must
conquer every foot of the way. He
cannot get over an inch of ground or
a moment of time without conquering
that inch or that moment. Individual
life only proceeds by that conquest
which develops the will; for the will
is the man. The man whom disease, old
age and death has conquered has not
conquered disease, old age and
death.
That the spirit does exist after
death seems to be a well established
fact. It also seems logical to
suppose that the spirit, being a
certain expression of intelligence,
never loses itself in
indistinguishable nothingness. By
slow degrees the old belief in
reincarnation begins to assume form
in human thought. Who can say whether
it is true or not? It is not
inviting, but it is less dreadful
than the belief in extinction.
Moreover, there is a sense of justice
in it; and no logical reasoner can
admit any supposition as true that
leaves out the idea of justice. The
destruction of the spirit seems a
cruel thing. The deification of it,
and its transportation to realms so
high and blessed that it would
require centuries of human effort to
reach, seems to offer a premium on
death or negation, or the lack of
effort, too great to be resisted; so
great, indeed, as to cause every one
of us to cease our struggles after
saving truth, and go off and commit
suicide, provided no doubt at all
existed in the mind about it. That
thought concerning the spirits of the
dead which offers the least
obstruction either to logic or
justice is the belief in
reincarnation; not because justice
requires expiation of the sinner, but
because the spirit itself requires
and must have the experience of a
complete conquest over all negative
conditions, such as disease, old age
and death. It seems reasonable to
suppose that the Law of Being would
require that we should--in the most
thorough sense of the
word--be. Man to be an
unbroken magnet must be all. In order
to be all he must live all. No
skipping seems possible in this
life-building of the individual.
And yet we know so little of the
unseen that no one can speak of the
[144] spirit’s existence after
death with positiveness. One thing,
however, that I know to be true is
this: in order to save the spirit
beyond the peradventure of a doubt,
one had better save it in the body
right here in this world, and now.
And this is what Mental Science seeks
to teach the student to do.
Nearly all religions teach us that
the body is of very little
importance. Many teach that it is a
sort of prison house in which the
soul does penance. This idea leads to
the conclusion that we are better off
without our bodies than with them.
And, indeed, in one form or another,
this belief is almost generally
proclaimed in all religious
countries, and that, too, in spite of
the fact that in religious countries
especially, people cling to life and
fear death with great intensity, thus
demonstrating their intuitive value
of the bodies they have been taught
to despise.
I now want to say with all the
emphasis I can command, that the body
is infinitely more important than
anything we can gain a conception of.
The body is not only the body, but it
is the spirit also. I have said that
the thought part of man, which is his
spirit, is the positive part of him,
and this is so when we are
considering the two poles of him
separately. But in strict truth we
have no right to consider the two
poles separately, because they act
and react on each other in a way to
make one part as indispensable as the
other, and one part as important as
the other. And, indeed, it almost
seems as if the terms positive and
negative, as applied to the body, and
the thought generated by the body,
are interchangeable. The body in its
relation to thought, or spirit, seems
now positive and now negative, and
the same with thought or spirit, in
its relation to the body. This cannot
be otherwise, seeing that the two are
one.
In our present state of
understanding of truth concerning
ourselves, each one of us is as the
two arcs of a broken circle, from the
ends of which the life forces trail
off and are lost. Mental Science
joins the two arcs in one complete
circle, thus rendering it impossible
for the life forces to escape,
compelling them to a constant and
unbroken interchange. The man in this
condition has made the atonement, the
at-one-ment, and has become whole, or
holy. It is then in his power to live
forever without passing through
death. And yet, death in one sense is
the necessary adjunct of individual
life. Individual life implies
constant progression, and in order to
progress the growing, living man dies
daily to the grosser part of
himself.
The method of growth is as
follows: A man is a seed germ of
finite (though endless) possibility.
He is finite because he is an
individual, with no chance of ever
becoming the whole. His possibilities
are inexhaustible because they
consist in his power to recognize an
ever increasing amount of vital
power, or life, in the Law of Love,
or Attraction, which Law is infinite
in capacity and can never be
exhausted. It is the containment of
all things imaginable, and of more
than can ever be imagined, any of
which may be brought to light or be
externalized in the natural world by
individual recognition and belief. I
say this Law is the containment of
all possibilities, when in reality it
contains nothing, being a principle
inherent in all things, all things
being thought or mind, and thought,
or mind, being the substantial
realities we see everywhere about
us--in the trees and animals and
minerals and human beings.
No thought can be formulated or
imagined that is not in some
particular or other the manifestation
of some phase of the Law. It is as if
the Law were some subtle fluid and
flowed into each forming thought. And
yet this is not a good comparison,
because the Law is not a substance
that flows into anything. It is
already everywhere, and thought
simply makes its presence manifest,
or visible.
Thought is creative in the sense
of [145] making visible that which
was not visible. The Law is not
creative, and never created us.
The primordial life cells, each of
which is an externalization of the
Law on the lowest conceivable plane,
are themselves dual in the true and
only sense of duality--that sense
which perceives them to be both
interior and exterior, visible and
invisible, Law and the recognition of
the Law, just the same as all other
substances and differing from other
substances only in the fact of being
less complex than the substances
which are large enough to be
perceived by any of man’s five
senses.
These life cells, or life seeds,
being infused by the Law of
Attraction, or rather being simply
infinitesimal points of recognition
of the Law, and thereby filled with
the Law, attract each other and in
their coming together the Law, which
speaks in desire, becomes more
manifest in its attracting power, so
that individuals grow; they increase
in power; their desires multiply all
the time, and in seeking to gratify
their desires their intelligence
develops and expresses itself in
added members of the body, until a
very wonderful and complex animal is
here whose name is man.
And now to recapitulate. Nearly
all people consider the spirit a
distinct part of themselves--a
perfect being dwelling in their
bodies. And a sort of universal idea
prevails to the effect that when the
body falls away by death, the spirit
animating it is revealed--not to our
ordinary sense of seeing--but to a
spiritual sight that is possible upon
some higher plane of being.
To me this assumption has no
foundation in fact. I hold that what
is called the spirit is the thought
part of man; that it is not of
different stuff from the body, but
the product of the body, as the body
is its product; in other words, that
the body and spirit are one.
I hold, further, that when we
speak of a “man of
spirit,” which means a
courageous man, a man who dares, we
have reference to the thought life of
the man. The thought life being the
more emancipated part of the body, he
whom we call a man of spirit is more
influenced in his actions by his
spirit--the more free and fearless
part of himself--than the man who
lives in the heavier or more negative
part of his body, and who is more
fettered by his surroundings than the
man of spirit--the man who lives
higher up in the positive pole of his
being. For it is the positive pole of
the man that I call spirit; the
negative pole is the body proper.
The object of this lesson is to
establish the fact that the body and
spirit are one, and that any
sundering of this magnet cannot be
other than disastrous to the
individual. I do not mean to assert
that after the sundering of body and
spirit the spirit necessarily
disintegrates, but I do mean that it
sustains a fearful loss.
The earth is our dwelling place.
External life is the only individual
life. (The spirit is external as well
as the body, though invisible to us,
just as a thousand other essences are
invisible because of their ethereal
character.) Man is to work out his
own salvation on the external, or
visible plane. The world is his
workshop, and it contains the tools
and the raw material out of which he
is to build himself and his
surroundings. Let him stop running
after the foolish soul-saviors who
infest society to permeate it with
the doctrine that postpones life to
another sphere, and who in doing this
are rotting the very foundations of
individual life and making disease
and death the only condition of
present existence. Let the student at
once and forever refuse all promises
of salvation that do not cover the
present needs. Let him say, “I
will be saved now, for now is the
only time I need saving. The attempt
to save myself in the hereafter is to
forfeit the now, because no one can
live in the present and the future at
the same time.” To attempt to
do this will be to not live at all in
the true [146] sense of the word. It
will be to drag out a lingering
death, just as the race is doing here
on earth at the present time.
To perpetuate this condition of
half living and half dying is the
infamous work of our present system
of religion; and there never was a
time before in the history of the
race when this same religion was
making more frantic efforts than now
to crush out the hope of the advanced
thinker, who knows its fallacy and
opposes it. There is open warfare
against us, as students, who are
trying to develop heaven from within,
and establish its harmonies on the
earth, and each one of us must buckle
our armor about us and meet the foe
valiantly. We must not permit
ourselves to be overwhelmed and
crushed by the opposing argument of
the enemy--argument, the folly and
injuriousness of which we have
demonstrated long ago. We must meet
it boldly by counter argument and
stand up before the world, as the
champions of the higher truth. Be
bold; be resolute; be vigilant; get
in as many words for truth as your
opponents get in for error--and one
more.
All things visible are a
recognition or a confession of the
Law of Attraction, and are one with
the Law. When we see a rock or a tree
we see a confession of the existence
of the Law of Attraction. Though
itself--the spirit of man--is as much
a recognition of the Law as anything
else. Indeed, it is the most vital
recognition of the Law that I know
of. As the Law is a principle it can
only be inferred by its
manifestation; but its manifestation
is one with itself.
The one hard point for the student
to comprehend is that mind, or
spirit, alone exists, and that it
exists as substance.
“Why,” says the student,
“substance is something that
can be seen and handled, so how can
it be mind, or spirit? Surely mind,
or spirit, is the invisible moving
power that exists in substance and
operates upon it.”
Now, do you not see that this idea
is the same old belief that has kept
the race out of its own inheritance
of power all these ages? Change the
word “substance” for
“matter,” and there it
is; a dead something acted upon by a
living something; the matter acted
upon by spirit--two separate
entities; the universe no longer a
universe, but a diverse. And
following this belief here comes the
same old sequence--a heaven and a
hell; good and evil; death and life;
and every other thought that divides
the race against itself, and makes
the pandemonium of the world’s
present condition.
Mental Science does not teach man
how he may strengthen the spirit
within the dead matter of his body so
that he may overcome it. It teaches
him that the substance of his body is
not dead matter at all, but every
atom of it is spirit, or mind, and
one with the highest he can conceive
of. It teaches him that he is a
spirit all the way through; or a
mind, if you prefer the word
“mind” to spirit. They
mean precisely the same thing. They
both mean something that thinks and
wills.
Now, the meaning of Mental Science
is this. It is the establishment--by
unimpeachable logic--of the fact that
all nature is the recognition of the
Law of Attraction; that every atom or
every combination of atoms is just as
much or as little as it has power to
perceive of the intense vital
principle--the Law of
Attraction--that permeates all things
and is inseparable from them.
The world, the universe, is all
mind, or spirit; and it is the
knowledge of this fact that shows the
man his wholeness; shows him that his
body is not a lot of dead matter to
conquer, but only a coarser grade of
mind than his thought, though all of
a piece with it. This knowledge is of
itself the reconciliation of what the
man had been taught to consider as
two separate and distinct parts of
himself. This knowledge shows him
that he is a unit, intact,
indissoluble. This knowledge alone is
his conquest over death. He [147]
sees that he is a unit. He must,
therefore, be either all mind, or
spirit, or all matter--which is a
dead substance. He knows he is not
dead substance, and, therefore, he
must be living substance. Living
substance is distinguished from dead
substance by its power to think. That
which thinks also wills; that which
wills is spirit. Therefore, a
man--because he thinks--is a spirit.
He does not have to die to become a
spirit. He is spirit now, all through
his organization; every bit of
him.
