Prentice Mulford - The Collected Works of Prentice Mulford

It is a fact that some people on the death of the body still think they have their physical bodies. They may remain in this state for years. They go about, eat, sleep and live in every way in that grade of existence which, though unseen by us, is all about us. Because every thing we see, hear, touch, handle, smell or taste has on its grade its correspondent or spiritual counterpart, and can be used exactly as it is here. There are no sudden transitions of any sort in Nature. People on passing from the physical body do not enter on any glorified condition of existence, unless they in mind are living such existence on earth. They go where every thing is in strict correspondence with their daily thought. Friends in the unseen world may on their first arrival receive them as guests in their houses. But they are only guests, and cannot remain in those circles unless in spirit they belong to them. If their thought be lower, they must, after a time, return to the order or stratum of thought in which they lived on passing out of the body. They cannot commence building-upward on that. You must build your “mansion in the skies” yourself. You can commence consciously building it here in the body to greater advantage than to commence after you lose your body. That you must build it yourself is the law of nature. It is not because any individuality, however wise and powerful in any of the advanced stages of existence, says you must. All of these, up to orders of mind beyond our power to comprehend, have been and are now the builders of their temples (themselves). What most they want of us is to build in like manner our own and with the same blissful results. Because such building is simply the building of our own individual happiness into grander, broader and ever-broadening proportions.

Your first error on passing from the body in the state known as sleep lies in thinking that you are moving about your physical body. You must educate yourself out of that mistake. You must fix it in your mind before going to sleep that if you wake up in what you call a dream you are not then using your physical body. You will fix in your mind before going to sleep, so far as you can, your conception of yourself as a spirit—or, rather, as the unseen organization which during the day uses your body.

The last thought before going to sleep is the one most likely to remain with you on leaving the body. If persisted in, you will find it mingling itself with what you call your dreams. That is, it will be the first clew towards the recognition of your real self when you are away from your body.

Keep this fact then, this recognition of yourself as a spirit, in your mind, and it will be a great help to your unseen friends in the other life to get near you and waken you to the knowledge of your real self.

The wiser and more powerful order of spirits, who may be able to give you much of their thought in the daytime, or while you are using the body, may not be able to give you so much of it during your escape from the body, owing to the condition above spoken of. Instead, therefore, of going into a higher region of thought at night, you descend, through blindness and mere force of habit, into a lower one. You may be, while using the body, educated up to and enter into their higher realm of thought by day. Yet at night, being so educated in part in the school of physical sense, you cannot carry that education with you. You walk with the spiritual eye and ear, thinking these the physical eye and ear. All this results in a confusion which no language can fully express, because no similar condition in this life can be clearly realized or illustrated.

You want to give your powerful unseen friends a clew by which, on passing from the body, they can come nearer to you and help you to wake up, find your real self, and go where you belong. The thought of yourself as a spirit, as a being distinct and apart from your body, will serve as this clew. A thought is as real a thing as a telegraph-wire. It will be the telegraph-wire ’twixt you and them, because they will not stay permanently with you in your gropings on the cruder stratum of life. They could if they wished; but they want to draw you up to their abodes,—their country, their realm,—where all is more beautiful and fairy-like than ever pen or picture realized here; where, in part, at least, you may now belong. To bring back of this the remembrance to the daytime while your spirit uses the body, would be to bring the celestial life to earth. It would be as a temptation in the right direction to leave off the coarser pleasures for the sake of realizing and living in the higher. Because all self-denial has really but this one purpose: that of cutting loose from fleeting pleasure that leaves a lasting pain, to obtain a far greater pleasure that leaves no pain at all.

As persistently you fix on going to sleep this idea in your mind, that you are no longer using the body’s senses, you will after a time, in what you have called the dream, find yourself recalling this fact. You will find yourself saying, “This is as real as my body or day life. I am only in a different state of existence.”

Your present life of the spirit, away from the body at night, is very often one that exhausts more than it refreshes. Unconsciously you may drift toward persons and scenes repulsive to you. You are carried to them by lower currents of thought. You drift into these tides as an ignorant child wades into the stream, and is carried beyond its depth and off its foothold by an outer and stronger current; knowing nothing of the fact that thought does move in currents, and that the lower one of inferior or evil thought is most powerful near the earth,—nothing of your powers and senses as a spirit, you are as helpless as a babe nightly on passing from your body.

Could you get a start in the right direction toward the upper and superior regions of thought,—could you ascend through the current of dark and crude thought, which everywhere surrounds you,—you would find yourself in a land of beauty, sunshine, and flowers; of grand scenery and fairy landscape. You would associate there with the people you most wish to see, and to whom you in spirit belong. You would repose in a luxurious languor, yet still be able to note scenes of indescribable charm by the eye. You would be conscious of life, and still be at rest. You would drink in life with every breath. You would return with this life to your body in the morning. Your night of bliss would be both as a rest in thought and a healthy stimulation to your life in the body. Your spiritual senses would open in this elevated thought-atmosphere. You would be freed from what is now a nightly slavery. Your connection with the higher regions of thought would become permanent, and you could attain the power of returning to them at any time to refresh yourself when overcome by the cruder thought which now surrounds you.

Every low place of resort, every saloon filled with hangers-on more or less under the influence of stimulant, every and any place, no matter what its conventional character, if it be a place of deceit, of trickery in trade, is an actual spring of low thought. This thought flows from it, as real, though unseen, as water from a spring. In any great city all these are as so many thousands of springs of filthy thought-element, near together. It is not a live, rapid current. It is more like a slowly moving bed of filthy ooze, in which you are mired and slowly borne along. Every tattling, gossiping, scandal-mongering group of people is an additional spring of such thought. So is every family where disorder, sour looks, cross words, and peevishness or petulance reign. Good society, as well as that called inferior in the social scale, can contribute to this inferior thought-current. The purest spirit cannot live in this thought-current without being unfavorably affected by it. It requires continual outlay of force to resist it. You become mixed and entangled in it, blinded by its obscurity, weighed down by the burthen it brings. You may have noticed how much of inordinate desire you are freed from on getting in the open country far beyond the city limits. Mountains are more free from this thought. It is an element which conforms to the law of gravitation. Low thought runs to the lowest places, as does any thing heavy, crude, and coarse. Trade, commerce, and manufacture unfortunately demand cities to be built on low levels, either at the seaside or river-bank. In the coming higher civilizations, the making of the most perfect men and women, and the discovery and making of real and permanent pleasures, will be the chief pursuit. Cities will then be built on hills or mountains, so that all the cruder emanations, seen and unseen, shall readily drain away.