Your houses, cars and
boats in winter are overheated and full
of noxious vapours from the fuel used,
as well as emanation from the human bodies
packed in them. You may be obliged to
sleep in rooms where this unhealthy heat
is partly relied on to warm your when
at rest. You must breathe it when in the
unconscious state of recuperation, and
awake with it incorporated into your being.
You are liable to eat staleness and decay
at the best of your public tables. You
are pained by scenes of cruelty, brutality
and injustice. That is the predominant
thought active in the atmosphere of the
crowd, and it affects your thought.
There is thought, or if
you please so to call it, mental action
embodied in every material thing about
you, and the brightness or darkness of
the thought depends on the condition of
the material thing. The eating of stale
fruit or vegetables may indirectly give
you the blues. The live fresh fruit gives
you life. Decay is the disorganization
of matter. You want to feed on the perfect
organization, neither over nor under ripe.
You want it, if possible, when the article
fed upon is at its fullest stage of life,
so that you may receive that life.
You violate ignorantly,
unconsciously, and even for the time,
necessarily, many laws of physical and
mental health. Relative to food, air,
warmth, as spoken of above, you may always
have been dependent on artificial props.
You were born so dependent. You may have
come into the world with a body, the partial
development of artificial and improper
food, and an artificial life brought down
to you through the blood of many generations.
This artificial life must
in some way bring pain.
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