IN SEARCH OF TRUTH 139 



for you must sleep or suffer while it is gone, it will be a source of joy 

 to her. It may plead your cause for you in a way which protoplasmic 

 bodies can never imitate. That this is not imagination or illusion 

 we have abundant testimony, if the word of man unverified by instru- 

 ments of precision is convincing to you. Thought and ideas, we are 

 told, may be ' impressed on consciousness in solid chunks without wait- 

 ing for words or clicks or other means of expression or for a lightning 

 train to convey them/ and there are thousands of records to show how 

 this is done. 



" But you do not stop with the expression of your power over the 

 ether and the astral messages it is the function of the ether to carry. 

 You may exert control over matter itself. Mind is matter's king. 

 Matter is the vassal of mind. Then under the force of mind, matter 

 will change or vanish. Eecent experimenters claim that by gazing 

 at a photographic plate in the dark, an impression can be made on it. 

 This is the mind flashing out through the human eye. Then whatever 

 is in this ' mind's eye' should appear on the sensitive plate of the 

 camera. But greater deeds than these were done long ago, as our 

 honored president once pointed out, and to my mind they are told in 

 records better authenticated. The sagas tell us that Odin wished to 

 secure the golden mead of the giants that men might drink it and be 

 strong as they. After great labors he came to the mead. He found 

 that the giant Suttung had concealed it in a great stone house, to which 

 Odin could get no key. So Odin and his friend the giant Bauge sat 

 down before the house and gazed at its walls all day. By this means 

 they made a small hole in the rock, and changing himself into an 

 angle worm Odin entered the hole and at last carried the golden mead 

 away in triumph. The influence of this golden mead is, no doubt, still 

 potent in Odin's descendants whose glances have marvelous power. 



" There was once a California nurseryman who had a good business 

 and was making money, as the phrase is. So he put aside all the fruit 

 trees which would sell and devoted himself to making others which 

 would not. Each year he trimmed his plums and apricots and lilies 

 and poppies, taking away the pollen which nature had provided and 

 putting it on flowers to which it did not belong. Each year he planted 

 thousands of seeds of many kinds, and when the plants came up, he 

 pulled up nearly all of them and burned them in a great bonfire. 

 Meanwhile he made no money, and lost little by little all that he began 

 with. Then men began to see that all fruits and nuts and flowers 

 changed under his hands. The plums grew very large and very juicy, 

 red, blue and white and more on the tree than men had ever seen before. 

 The lilies and the poppies and all the other flowers grew larger, the 

 cactus lost its thorns and the onion its odor, the chestnut bore its fruit 

 with its second crop of leaves and all things which he touched turned 



