Prentice Mulford - The Collected Works of Prentice Mulford

Ennui is sickness. When we don't know what to do with ourselves, when we try to kill time and everything seems " flat, stale and unprofitable, we have temporarily lost our hold of the Great Fountain of life, the Supreme Mind and Power. We are absorbing the wearied thoughts of thousands around us, who think the same thing from day to day and from year to year, whose minds in their play are treadmills, who are trying to get Life, exhilaration and variety entirely out of physical things.

The true and regenerative life cannot be obtained from material things. That is the reason why all that money can buy fails to satisfy. The monster of discontent and ennui rages as much in the palace as the hovel. Solomon was in the claws of this beast when he said: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." That exclamation is a libel on the Infinite Mind. It came from the Jewish king, because he was trying to get life and happiness out of wood and stone and metal, and flesh and blood and all things material. It cannot be done.

But when, through demand of the Supreme, you get new thoughts, the material thing of yesterday seems to you as a new thing of today. The very rock which you passed yesterday has a new idea associated with it today. It may not be an idea which you can put in words. It is something which you feel rather than think. Myriads of thoughts, coming at the physical sight of all material things about us, are so felt, but can neither be talked out nor written out.

The regeneration of the body comes in response to our increasing demand of the Supreme Power to be led in the path of the Highest Wisdom. It comes of a courage gained at last of persistent demand, whereby we shall dare to trust entirely to that power. This it is doubtful if any can do at present. We try to trust in God, but when the pinch comes and things look dark, we are tempted to adopt some of our worn-out material methods for averting the evil. But perfect trust in the Supreme Power can gradually come to us. When it does men will become more than mortal. Whoever attains to such perfect trust will be regenerated.

Demand then new thoughts, and an increasing nearness to the Supreme Mind, and in time you receive new life, and all things about you are, for you, imbued with new life or idea. You are then in the line of the regenerative process. Your spirit, as well as your body, is being born again and again. It is drawing to it ever new ideas, and becomes literally a new spirit, a new being. If the spirit is being thus renewed or regenerated, the body must be also.

As we become more spiritualised, as the material mind gives place more and more to the Spiritual Mind; in other words, as the regenerative process goes on, we shall, from time to time, find ourselves prompted to change many of our habits and modes of life. These changes will involve eating, sleeping, and association.

But we need not try to force these changes on ourselves. The regenerative process will involve the eating of less and less animal food, until we shall eat none whatever. But there would be nothing gained from ceasing to eat meat before the desire for It had gone.

The regenerative process will impel us at times to seek solitude, because when alone with Nature the spirit absorbs and assimilates a finer quality of thought. But to enforce on ourselves the solitude of the hermitage or cloister when there is no real love for it does little good, as is proved by the fact that hermit and recluse have physically decayed and died like the rest.

This regeneration of the body will come to no one directly from any system of forms, habits, or observances. It will come because of a time ripe for it to come. As this planet ripens spiritually all material things upon it partake of that ripening or development. The life of today, so different and superior to that of five hundred or a thousand years ago, is a part and a proof of that development. The earth ripened first from chaos to coarse development in the animal and vegetable kingdoms of ages ago, and then to its present relatively more refined condition. But this refining process is never to cease.

Perhaps you will say on reading this, "What has all this to do with me? What you say may be true. But it is all too far off, too indefinite. I want something to benefit me now."

This idea of the body's regeneration is for you a benefit now, if you can accept it. It cannot be displaced from your mind. It will first, as a tiny seed, stay there. It may for months or years show no sign of life and seem to be forgotten. But it will grow and have more and more of a place in your thought. It will gradually change the quality of your thoughts. It will gradually force out an old and false interpretation of life and bring in a new one. It will impel you to look ever forward to newer joys and make you cease groping among regrets and sad remembrances of your past, when you know that such thoughts bring decay and death to the body. We are built literally of our thoughts. When we realise that our regrets, our envyings and jealousies, our borrowings of trouble, or our morbid contemplations of subjects ghastly and sickly, are literally things, and bad things, actually put in our bodies, as such thoughts, materialising themselves from invisible to visible element, turn into flesh and blood, and that as so built into ourselves they bring us

pains, aches, weakness, sickness, wrinkles, bowed backs, weak knees and failing powers, we have a good and tangible reason for getting rid of them.

The body of a person given over to melancholy will be literally built of gloomy thoughts materialised into flesh and blood.

When a girl realises more and more clearly that jealousy, peevishness, and pettish pouting moods will spoil her good looks and complexion, she will make efforts to rid herself of such thoughts. They will destroy her body. The Infinite Power for good wants all things and all people to be beautiful, healthful and symmetrical, and intends ever to increase this beauty, health, and symmetry. It works through a continual process ot regeneration to keep them so. If it cannot effect such perpetual life and beauty with one physical organisation, it mercifully lets it go to pieces and gives the spirit another.

When a man realises that his angry mood, or his covetous mood, or his grumbling mood represents so much material put in his body, and that such element will give his body pain and make it sick, he has a good strong reason for having some care as to what his mind runs on, and for making the "inside of the platter clean."

Let us remember, so far as we can, that every unpleasant thought is a bad thing literally put in the body. Are some people unpleasant to us? Do their airs or affectations, or their stinginess or dishonesty, or their domineering manners, or their coarseness and vulgarity, offend us? Well, let us try and forget them. Why talk them over for an hour, holding the while all their disagreeable traits in our minds, and think of them, maybe, for hours afterwards, when we know that these unpleasant images which we carry in mind are things which are being literally put in our bodies to affect them injuriously and degenerate them? All such thoughts we must get rid of.

Such riddance is the commencement of getting a new body. It is in the way of a literal regeneration. If through long habit we find that we cannot by our own endeavour keep out of these injurious moods, if we find ourselves from time to time drawn into the current of tattle, or greed, or envy, we can cease all endeavour of our own and ask help of the Supreme Power to give us new and better thoughts. That Power, through our demand, will give us a new mind. The new mind will bring the new body.

Table of Contents Table of Contents The "New Thought" Works: Thoughts Are Things THOUGHTS ARE THINGS Table of Contents Chapter One. THE MATERIAL MIND V. THE SPIRITUAL MIND Chapter Two. WHO ARE OUR RELATIONS? Chapter Three. THOUGHT CURRENTS Chapter Four. ONE WAY TO CULTIVATE COURAGE Chapter Five. LOOK FORWARD! Chapter Six. GOD IN THE TREES; OR, THE INFINITE MIND IN NATURE Chapter Seven. SOME LAWS OF HEALTH AND BEAUTY Chapter Eight. MUSEUM AND MENAGERIE HORRORS Chapter Nine. THE GOD IN YOURSELF Chapter Ten. THE HEALING AND RENEWING FORCE OF SPRING Chapter Eleven. IMMORTALITY IN THE FLESH Chapter Twelve. THE ATTRACTION OF ASPIRATION Chapter Thirteen. THE ACCESSION OF NEW THOUGHT The God In You THE GOD IN YOU Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Chapter 1. POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE THOUGHT Chapter 2. SOME PRACTICAL MENTAL RECIPES Chapter 3. SELF-TEACHING; OR, THE ART OF LEARNING HOW TO LEARN Chapter 4. LOVE THYSELF Chapter 5. THE ART OF FORGETTING Chapter 6. SPELLS; OR, THE LAW OF CHANGE Chapter 7. REGENERATION; OR, BEING BORN AGAIN Your Forces and How to Use Them Novel: Swamp Angel Autobiographical Writings: Autobiography: Prentice Mulford's Story: Life By Land and Sea Sketches: The Californian’s Return: or, Twenty Years From Home French Without a Master