Prentice Mulford - The Collected Works of Prentice Mulford

You can commence the unloading process now, by resolving, with the aid of the Supreme Power, to fling off the remembrance of everything in the past that has annoyed you, everything you regret, everything you have mourned over.

God never mourns or regrets. You as a spirit are made in His image. God it eternal life, joy and serenity. The more of these characteristics you reflect the nearer are you to the Infinite Spirit of Good.

Have you buried your dearest on earth? You do them no good by your sad thoughts concerning them. You place bar twixt their spirit and yours in thinking of them as "lost." You may in so doing not only increase and encourage in them a sad mental condition, but bring their gloomy mental condition on yourself, as many do in grieving. The greatest good we can do them is to think of them as alive like ourselves, and to fling their graves, tombstones, coffins, shrouds and ghastliness out of our minds. If we cannot do so of ourselves let us demand help of the Supreme Power to do it. We often make those who have lost their bodies feel dead when we think of them as such. If we do this they will throw back their thoughts of deadness on us.

Keep out of graveyards. It may seem to some that I am cold and unfeeling to say thus, but the truth, as it presents itself to me, says that the graveyard where your loved ones do not lie, is spiritually a most unhealthy place to visit. They are full of the thought of regret, death and decay. When you visit them you incorporate such thought into yourself. It is hostile and killing to youth, vigour, elasticity, cheerfulness and life.

Our graveyards are full of lies, We place a stone over the cast-off body of a friend. We place on that stone the word "died." That is not true. Your friend is not dead. It is only the body he used that lies there. But that grave is planted in your memory, and your friend in your mind lies in it. Do what we will, try to believe what we may of the eternal prolongation of life and the impossibility of anything like death in the universe, we cannot help making for ourselves when we think of that grave or revisit it, an image of that friend as dead and decaying in his or her coffin. This image we fasten in our minds, and in so doing we fasten on ourselves the thought of gloom, death and decay. The thoughts of decay and death are things and forces. When we keep them so much in mind we add elements of decay to the body.

We need as much as possible to fasten our thought on life and increasing life—life greater in its activity than any we have ever realized. That is not gained by looking backward. Look forward.

Every regret, every mournful thought, takes so much out of your life. It is force used to pile on more misery. It is force used to strengthen the habit of regretting. It is force used to make the mind colour everything with a tinge of sadness, and the longer you use force in this way the darker will grow the tinge.

Also, when we are ever going back in memory to the past and living in it in preference to the present we are bringing back on ourselves the old moods of mind and mental conditions belonging to that past. This feeling constantly indulged in will bring on some form of physical ailment. The ailment belongs to a condition of mind which we should be done with forever. If we are looking forward we shall shake it off and be better in health than ever. If the predominant mood of our minds is that of looking backward, the ultimate result will be serious to the body.

In the world's business your active, enterprising pushing man of affairs spends little time in sad reminiscence. If he did his business would suffer. His thought is forward. That thought is the real force which pushes his business forward. If he spent it in "sad memories" of the past his business would go backward. He works his success (so far as he does really succeed) by this spiritual law, though he may not know it.

You may be saying: "I have failed in life and shall always be a failure." That is because you are ever leaking back, living in your failure and thereby bringing to you more failure. Reverse this attitude of mind; work it the other way and live in future success.

Why do you say: "I am always sick?" Because you are looking back, living in your past ailments and thereby bringing more on you.

I have heard the expression used: "When the earth was young." As if this planet was now in its dotage and going to decay! In the sense of freshness, increase of life, refinement and purity in every form of life, be that of man, animal, vegetable, and farther on, this earth never was so young as it is today. Youth is life, growing and increasing in beauty and power. It is not the cruder commencement of life.

The so-called "barren rock" contains elements which will help to form the future tree and flower. Is that part of the rock which enters into tree and flower increasing or decreasing in life? It changes only into a higher and more beautiful expression of life. So do we from age to age. The rock crumbles that it may live in this higher form. The old mind must crumble and pass away to give place to the new, and make of us the newer spiritual being. As the old mind crumbles so will the old body, for the spiritual change must be accompanied by the physical change. But if you live in the understanding and spirit of this law you need not lose a physical body, but have one ever changing for the better. As you live in spiritual belief, as the old life goes out the new comes in.

Nothing in Nature--nothing in the Universe is at a standstill. Nothing goes backward. A gigantic incomprehensible Force and Wisdom moves all things forward toward greater and higher powers and possibilities. You are included in and are a part of this Force. There is of you in embryo the power of preventing the physical body your spirit uses from decaying, and the power also of using it in ways which even the fiction of today would discard as too wild for the pages of the novel.

For your spirit youth and ever growing youth is an eternal. heritage. If your body has "aged" that is no sign that your spirit has "aged." The spirit cannot grow old in the material sense, anymore than the sunlight can grow old. If your body has "aged" it is because that body has become the material likeness and expression of a false self or "shell" which has formed on your spirit. That false self is made up of thoughts prevalent around from an early physical age and those thoughts are untrue thoughts. A large proportion of that thought is regret. Regret is an inverted force--a turning of the mind to look backward when its natural and healthy state is to look forward, and live in the joys that are certain to come when we do look forward.

In the new life to come to our race, when we have learned to be ever looking forward to the greater joys to come and cease to look backward and drag the dead past with us, men and women are to have bodies far more beautiful and graceful than those of today.

Because their bodies will image or reflect their thoughts, and their thoughts will ever be fixed on what is beautiful and symmetrical. They will know that what is to come and what is in store for them out of the richness of the Infinite mind must exceed anything they have realized in the past.

Today with the great majority of people their attitude of mind is directly the reverse. Owing to the little trust that they have in that Power the theologian calls "God," they are ever in their minds saying: "There are no joys to come for us like our past joys. Our youth has fled. Our future on earth is tame and dull. It is as dust and ashes."

The truth that life does not end with the death of the body makes slow progress in fixing itself firmly in our minds. The kind of life a man may be living here at seventy does not end in the grave. It continues straight on.

The "old man," as we call him here, wakes up in the other side of life after losing his body an old man still. If he is one of those old men who have "outlived their day and generation," who live in their physical past and look back on it with regret--who have become "too old to learn," and think they have got through with it all, he will be just such an old man in the world of spirit. There is no sudden transformation into youth on the death of a worn-out decrepit body. As the tree falls so does it lie for a period, even in the hereafter.