9. Profit and Loss in Associates.

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Thought being unseen substance is absorbed by all. If you absorb another person’s thought, it mingles with your own. Then in part, if not in whole, you will think that person’s thought. You will to some extent see, feel, judge, and form opinion, as does that person. You are to greater or lesser extent swayed and influenced by the person. His or her thought, or spirit, has mingled with yours. You are not then wholly yourself. You are in part that other person.

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This is as much a mesmeric power thrown upon you, as that thrown by the mesmerizer on his subject. It works by the same law. If you associate a great deal with another person, are rarely by yourself, and see few others, you will be constantly taking in that person’s thought. If it is in motive and refinement higher than your own, you will be benefited by it. If it be in motive, taste, and refinement lower than yours, you will be injured. Your taste, your refinement, your motive, and judgment, also will be tinged with the thought of the inferior person. It is in this way that “evil communications corrupt good manners.”

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Through this cause, you may see in mind very keenly in one direction and very blindly in another.

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To be closely associated with a person thinking much of the time his or her lower thought, is for you to absorb this thought. You imagine, then, the views you take and opinions you form are your own. They are not wholly your own. Were you to leave that person’s association for any length of time, you would find many of your old opinions changing, because you would then be out of reach of that person’s lower and less clear thought.

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To be much of the time with a gloomy or despondent person, or one fretful, or easily angered, or cynical, or sceptical, or in any way thinking evil or injurious thought, is for you unsafe. Be you as confident, determined, and courageous as you may, you will still absorb some of their despondency, irresolution, or cowardice, and be affected by it. It will be a blur on your judgment. It will be so much extra load of cowardly or irresolute thought to tax your courage or resolution. Of whatever evil quality that person’s thought is, it will infect you more or less with that quality.

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You need never be influenced, swayed, or controlled by another’s thought, if you earnestly desire not to be. Such desire is a prayer. Prayer is the demand of your spirit to be free of every thing that can cripple its power and happiness. Power and happiness mean the same thing. Power means ability to drive off every thing that troubles you. Power means ability to keep your mind in the mood or frame of happiness. When that power is gained, and you rule your mood and do not allow the mood to rule you, every thing on the material plane of life will shape itself and come to you in accordance with your mood. The law of correspondences between spiritual and material things is wonderfully exact in its working. People ruled by the mood of gloom attract to them gloomy things. People always discouraged and despondent do not succeed in any thing, and live only by burdening some one else. The hopeful, confident, and cheerful attract the elements of success. A man’s front or back yard will advertise that man’s ruling mood, in the way it is kept. A woman at home shows her state of mind in her dress. A slattern advertises the ruling mood of hopelessness, carelessness, and lack of system. Rags, tatters, and dirt are always in the mind before being on the body. The thought that is most put out brings its corresponding visible element to crystallize about you, as surely and literally as the visible bit of copper in solution attracts to it the invisible copper in that solution. A mind always hopeful, confident, courageous, and determined on its set purpose, and keeping itself to that purpose, attracts to itself out of the elements things and powers favorable to that purpose.

 

If you think corruption, you will breed corruption in your body. You will have sores or boils or eruptions, or some disease coming of “bad blood,” which is the real cause of all disease. The blood is made impure by the spirit’s impurity. The spirit is the life of the blood. The spirit is your thought. What you think, comes of your spirit. What you think, you are ever building into your spirit. Impure or corrupt thought means far more than licentious thought. It means as well the ugly, hating thought, or dislike of others. It means the thought of gain, at any cost to others. It means all fretting, discouraged, despondent, and hopeless thought. It means long‑continued grief at any loss. It means any thought that weighs down the spirit. What weighs on the spirit, will always injure the body. To grieve at the loss of a friend, will “pull one down,” as well as what are called specially “immoral practices.” The injury done the body may be quite as great. Therefore the sin is as great. People who fret are great sinners. They are creating a fretting spirit. They are solidifying their fretting into a habit which becomes more and more difficult to break off. This tears the body to pieces, and will eventually kill it. These people, then, are as guilty as the victim of some loathsome disease caused by vice, so called. Any habit which injures is a vice. True, some diseases are more respectable than others. Consumption sounds better than delirium tremens. Yet both kill the body. Both come of violations of the law. Both are penalties paid for such violation.

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Every thought of yours has a literal value to you in every possible way. The strength of your body, the strength of your mind, your success in business, and the pleasure your company brings others, depends on the nature of your thoughts. Every one of your thoughts is a part of yourself. It is felt by others as a part of yourself. You need not always speak, to be agreeable company. Those near you will feel your thought pleasantly, if yours are pleasant thoughts. You need not always speak, to be felt disagreeably. Your disagreeable thought will also be felt. A person’s “magnetism” is their thought. Magnetic power or influence is simply thought felt by others. If your thought is despondent, gloomy, jealous, carping, cynical, it repels. If cheerful, hopeful, and full of earnest desire to do the most good possible to any one you meet, though but for a single minute, it attracts.

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Too much association with any one of lower thought may lessen your natural power to attract. You may carry a part of their selfish, cynical, gloomy, or other evil thought with you wherever you go. You put it out with your own. It is felt as a disagreeable alloy with your own.

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Your value and charm for others, as a companion, depends far more on what you think, than on what you say. If your thought is all pure, clean, bright, confident, and courageous, you are a value, and an increasing value, wherever you go. People will always be glad to see you. When you bring yourself (your thought), you bring an actual pleasure to people. You bring also a power and strength to them. Your thought helps to strengthen their bodies. They feel better for seeing you. You are as a fountain of health and pleasure wherever you go. You can disarm the sourest temper, and the person most opposed to you. When you can say in mind, “I refuse to look upon any person as my enemy,” you will have no enemies. When we talk of “having enemies,” and keep on, in thought, looking on certain people as enemies, we are making them enemies, because such people feel that order of thought coming from us. It is an element flowing from you to them. It affects them disagreeably. If you are ever sending out the thought, “I am not your enemy. I do not wish to feel disagreeably towards you. I want to like you better than I do,” they will soon feel this thought. They cannot resist its power. The thought of good is always stronger than that of evil. This is a law of nature.

 

The corner‑stone in the power and charm of a person’s thought is this, expressed in words, “I want to help you in whatever way I can. I want to help build you up. I want to help you to better health, to better business, to the place where you really belong, to the position where your talents may most shine.” If this thought is sincere, it carries immense power. It will always be drawing more power to you, because every additional person’s good‑will you so draw and fasten to you is an additional unseen rill of life feeding yours. It is a rill of substance, though unseen,—as real as the elements we do see. Good‑will of others is constructive thought. It helps build us up. It is good for your body. It makes your blood purer, your muscles stronger, and your whole form more symmetrical in shape. It is the real “elixir of life.” The more of such thought you attract to you, the more life will you have. You draw, then, the best elements from all with whom you associate. If you send out a contrary order of thought, you draw to you from them the poisonous and destructive elements. These will hurt your body. Persons in this way are literally hated to death. The ill‑will of many people fixed on one man can injure that man’s health. It has killed many. It can injure no one, if they oppose it with the thought of good‑will, and the desire to do justice, which must always go with good‑will. Nothing else can successfully oppose it. If you persist in the thought of good intent to all, you are connecting yourself with the higher and more powerful order of thought element. You are then receiving of that thought from minds, and from a world of greater power than you can now realize of here. You are connecting yourself with a world which does nothing but build up, whose inhabitants are gods in power, and whose creations at will are beyond our wildest dreams. All that so‑called fable or fancy has conceived of are realities in the higher worlds of mind. When, by the thought of good intent to all, you so connect yourself with that world, you are receiving of their powerful thought. You are then absolutely safe against all enemies.

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This is no myth of sentiment. It belongs to the same system of law whereby the sun gives heat, the winds blow, the tides move, the seed grows. In whatever mood you set your mind, does your spirit receive of unseen substance in correspondence with that mood. It is as much a chemical law as a spiritual law. Chemistry is not confined to the elements we see. The elements we do not see with the physical eye outnumber ten thousand times those we do see.

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So to do good, is to bring to yourself all the elements in nature of power and good. To do evil, is to bring the contrary destructive elements. When our eyes are opened, self‑preservation will make us stop all evil thought. Those who live by hate will die by hate; that is, “those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” Every evil thought is as a sword drawn on the person to whom it is directed. If a sword is drawn in return, so much the worse for both.

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Thought being substance, can, when very powerful, be so concentrated as to be made visible in physical forms.

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Your power to feel people’s natures is always proportionate to your freedom from any evil thought. Purity means power. Steel is at once the purity of iron, and the power of iron. Highly refined spirit comes of the purest thought, and is the most powerful thought.

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If your thought is the superior, there may be many persons to whom you can do only a certain amount of good through association. They can only receive a small amount of your thought. They give back in return, and you absorb a large amount of their inferior thought. It is as if you gave them gold, and got back iron. You may from them get more iron than is good for you. You give them a great deal of gold they cannot absorb. In this way, both of you are injured.

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You will therefore associate most where your thought is most appreciated and also used. Then both of you are benefited mentally and physically. You are not “unequally yoked together.”

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If your superior thought merely entertains people, and they get no good from it save a pleasure for the moment, you may be of use to them and so are they to you. But the use is relatively small. They may value you most as an entertainment, and but little as a use. If they improve very slowly through the thought absorbed from you, you cannot afford much close association with them. They are your distant spiritual relations.

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If they improve rapidly through your association, if they take the truth you give, and try to act and live up to it, you can longer remain near them. They are your near spiritual relations. If they improve very rapidly, they make with such improvement a certain life or quality of thought peculiarly their own. This will be absorbed as a nourishment and strength for you. You are then giving and receiving to advantage.

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If yours is the superior thought, there may come seasons when some time is needed by the other to assimilate what you have given. There may then be certain periods of separation.

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Both of you, on again coming together, will be the better and stronger for such separation. You then come together to give to each other of new elements of thought gathered elsewhere. There are no eternal separations for those who are building up their spirits of similar elements of thought. They grow ever closer and closer together. They build into each other’s hearts. They are always enriching each other. They separate with the assured certainty of meeting again. They will meet only to find more and more in each other. They find that the law which at first they thought so hard, harsh, and cruel, is only a source and means for permanent peace and happiness.

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Q's note:

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The last paragraph is Beautiful! – Incredibly Beautiful!!  I don't know if it means a lot to you, but it truly means a lot to me – very Deeply!!

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Alone times are much needed to re-nourishing our soul and filling our heart with Love and Light!!  Rejuvenating our Self with Physical Vitality, Emotional Stability, and Mental Tranquility will bring us to a Whole New Level of Being – not just simply existing!

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How will One feel with this level of Transformation? – FREEDOM!!  CLARITY!!  And A  Long Lasting Peace and Calmness that One's never felt before!  

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What will One attract with this State of Being? – ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES!!

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