NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

If you had years before in that place, the reputation of being weak, or vacillating, or impractical, or intemperate, and you returned to the people who knew you as such, although you may have changed for the better, you are very liable in their thought and recollection of you to have this old self pushed back on you, and as a result, you may for a period feel much like your former self.

You return to such place after a long absence. You have during that absence changed radically in belief. You bring with you a different mind. You are in reality a different person.

But the old "you," the old self of former years will rise from every familiar object to meet you. It will come out of houses formerly inhabited by your friends, though now tenanted by strangers; you will find it in the village church, the old schoolhouse, the very rails and fence posts familiar to you long years before. More than all it will come out of the recollection of people who only knew you for what you were, say twenty years before; every such person strengthens with you this image of your former self. You talk with them on the plane of that previous life or self. For the time being you ignore yourself as it now thinks and believes; you put aside your newer self, not wishing to obtrude on your friends opinions, which to them may be unpleasant, or seem wild and visionary; you meet perhaps twenty-five or thirty people who know you only as your former self, and with all these you act out the old self, and repress the new, This for a time makes the old dead self very strong, but you cannot keep this up; you cannot warm the old corpse of yourself into life. If you try to -