Prentice Mulford - The Collected Works of Prentice Mulford

You can only oppose successfully the hatred or evil thought of others by throwing out toward it the thought of good-will. Good-will as a thought-element is more powerful than the thought of hate. It can turn it aside. The “shafts of malice,” even in thought, are real things. They can and do hurt people on whom they are directed, and make them sick. The Christ precept, “Do good to them that hate you,” is based on a scientific law. It means that thoughts are things, and that the thought of good can always overpower that of evil. By power is here meant power in as literal a sense as in speaking of the force that lifts a table or chair. The fact that all thought, all emotion, all of what is called sentiment, or qualities such as mercy, patience, love, etc., are elements as real as any we see, is the cornerstone to the scientific basis of religion.

What you call dreams are realities. Your spirit away from your body at night goes to and sees persons and places. To some of these you may have never gone with your body. You remember on the body’s awakening very little of what you have seen. What you do remember is mixed pell-mell together. That is because your memory of the body can hold but a little of what is grasped by the memory of your spirit. You have two memories, one trained and adapted to the life of your body, the other of your spirit. Had you known of the life and power of your spirit from infancy, and recognized it as a reality, the memory of your spirit would have been so trained that it would remember all of its own life and bring it back to you on the awakening of the body. But as you have been taught to regard even your spirit as a myth, so you make of its memory a myth. Were a human being taught from infancy to discredit the evidence of any of its senses, then that sense would be blunted and almost destroyed. Let all associated with a child for years deliberately set to work and tell it that they could not see the sky or houses, fields, or other familiar objects at hand; and with none allowed to break the delusion, that child’s eyesight as well as its judgment would be seriously affected. We are similarly taught to deny all the senses and powers of our spirits; or, rather, the real powers of ourselves, of which the senses of the body are a faint counterpart, are persistently denied. Substantially we are taught that we are nothing but bodies. This is equivalent to telling the carpenter that he is nothing but the hammer he uses.

If in a so-called dream you see a person who died years ago, you see simply a person whose body, being worn-out, could no longer be used by him on this stratum of life.

Table of Contents

There are senses of your body, and other senses of your spirit. Your spirit is an organization distinct from the body. It has eyes and ears, touch, taste, and smell. Its eyes can see ten thousand times farther than the eye of the body. Its other senses are infinitely superior. You are now using a very inferior set of senses. The eye of your body, compared with the eye of your spirit, is a mere peep-hole. The senses of the body are relatively coarse as compared with those of the spirit. They are for use in a relatively coarser stratum of life. You are better off in a coal-mine with a coarse miner’s suit than with one of silk or velvet. Your body with its coarser senses is for use in this, the coarser, level of life. Yet it may be for you a possibility to slip off this suit (the body), and go with your spirit (leaving for a time the coarse suit behind) to a higher and finer order of life.

You have now a clairvoyant eye and a clairaudient ear. But these are not opened. The clairvoyant eye is closed like those of some animals in very early infancy. In a few persons it is opened prematurely and in advance of the other spiritual senses. This is a premature ripening.

The clairvoyant eye is the spiritual eye. It is an eye put out at the end of a thought. Send your thought to London, and, if clairvoyant, you send that eye with it.

A clairaudient ear is an ear sent with a thought. Clairvoyance and clairaudience are not special gifts for particular people. They belong to all, and are in the germ in all.

Your spiritual senses have been so crippled from birth, through lack of exercise, that they are not in “working condition.” When you leave your body at night, you are as a person in a dazed or bewildered state. You see without seeing. You hear without hearing. You are as one stunned by a sudden shock or blow. Then the physical eye may see, but it leaves no distinct memory of what it sees. You may in such state have a remembrance of a crowd of faces about you—but that is all. In a condition somewhat resembling this does your spirit roam about on slipping away from its body. You are as an infant just let out of doors. You go where a vague whim or fancy carries you. You have left the physical senses of sight, hearing, and touch, in the body. You have now only a set of totally uneducated senses to guide you. You have been taught all your life to deny the very existence of these senses. To teach a child unbelief, say, in its hearing or eyesight, from its earliest consciousness, will result in injury to its sight. The child educates itself gradually to use the senses of its body correctly. An infant has no idea of distance. It reaches out for things far from it, imagining they are near enough to be touched. It will walk off a precipice if left to itself. It learns by painful experience not to touch hot coals or hot iron. It requires years to educate it to a proper use of the physical senses.

Your spirit has its own senses, which are not even recognized. They are left year after year without any exercise or training. You do not see, in what you call dreams, with the physical eye at all, or hear with the physical ear. You see with the spiritual eye; you hear with the spiritual ear.

You are literally lost on going to sleep, when you go into your spirit life. You then grope about like an infant with its untrained physical senses. What idea of the senses you do have, you estimate entirely by those of your body which you have left behind. You then carry your real selves about under the impression that you are still living in the mask you wear in the daytime (your body), and estimating and judging all you see or sense by a set of inferior senses (the physical), which you are not using at all.

You are nightly, on passing out of the body, really in a spirit life; yet you are dead to this fact, because you are using the spiritual senses as you use the physical in the daytime. You are as one using a crutch, when you have two sound legs which need only practice to make you a good walker. Many people who are completely severed from their bodies are in precisely the same condition. You may go mostly when away from the body among these people. You may be attracted to them, because your spirit has in its uneducated state been so long in the habit of blindly groping among them. Your spirit has fallen into this habit just as it, when using the body, falls into ruts of habit, which are often extremely difficult to break off. You see men daily drifting about without aim or purpose, waiting, hoping for something to “turn up” to amuse them. A man without aim or purpose in life soon becomes inferior in intellect. Your spiritual self is in the same condition, from a similar cause. It is often surrounded by others out of the body without aim or purpose, and who know not what to do with themselves.

Fiction has never devised the picture literally realized every night among you. These thousands on thousands of blind beings freed temporarily from their bodies are straying, wandering, groping everywhere—in your houses, your streets, your fields—some near, some far-away. They are neither asleep nor awake. They wander as if in a dream which is not a dream. Sometimes the spiritual eye opens, and they see acquaintance or stranger, scene familiar or unfamiliar. But the recognition is not always a satisfactory one. You have been unconsciously taught not to believe in the reality of what you see in this state. Therefore you do not accept it as a reality, and what the mind in any condition persistently refuses to accept as a reality will not frame itself to be held by memory as one.