Chapter 9 - Spirit the Breath of Life

“My healer teaches that I must depend alone upon Spirit; that breathing exercises, foods, sunshine and air must not be made the dependence for health. He says, ‘Why, you can’t help breathing.’” That is tommyrot. Sunshine and air are spirit, and the plain truth of the matter is that if you don’t use them all your “dependence on spirit” will avail simply nothing. Try living in a north room with the windows shut, and see.

You “can’t help breathing,” but your breathing avails nothing unless by it you take in good fresh live spirit in the way of pure air and sunshine.

If we all lived under the sun and slept under the stars that healer's advice might be good enough. But we don't. We live in tight, dark rooms whence the spirit of life has fled, leaving only its cast off effluvia. We “can’t help breathing,” but what do we breathe? We breathe the dead air of close rooms.

Spirit is LIFE, and we live by breathing it. Spirit is in fresh air; fresh air is in spirit; fresh air and spirit are one. Dead air is air minus spirit, or life.

What good will it do you to say you depend upon spirit when you don’t; when you shut yourself away from the spirit of life and breathe death?

Pure air and sunshine are spirit specially prepared for your use. What good will it do you to pretend that you depend upon spirit when you shut yourself into rooms whence the spirit has flown?

If you live in close rooms you may “affirm” your dependence upon spirit until you are black in the face, and you may be “treated” every hour of the day by this healer and 10,000 more like him, and the result will be only sickness and death.

I know in my heart and soul and mind that this is true. And I have seen the truth of it demonstrated by hundreds of cases of people who failed to get well on “treatments” of any sort, and who afterward did get well on sunshine, fresh air and full breathing, along with mental treatment.

The Gospel of Fresh Air is more needed by human beings than even the Gospel of New Thought. If we understood and applied the Gospel of Fresh Air we should think right without trying.

It is in gloomy, unaired corners that evil thoughts breed -- because the spirit of life is not present there in such form that it can be appropriated by human beings. They get therein the Breath of Death, and generate thoughts to match -- distorted thoughts of death and evil and despair.

Come into the sunshine and breathe the Breath of Life, which generates in you the New Thought of Life, Love, Wisdom, Truth, Health, Happiness, and Success.

New Thought will not save you unless you live it, and a little observation and experimenting will prove to you that you can’t live it without breathing plenty of fresh air.

If “all is spirit” why does this healer tell you that to regulate your breathing, exercise, food, etc., is to depend upon something outside spirit?

The fact of the matter is this: He fails to realize that all is spirit. He is still tangled up with good and evil, spirit and not-spirit, God and devil. He does not see spirit in everything and everything in spirit; so he puts the Keep-Off-the-Grass sign wherever he does not see spirit. This will not prevent his pointing you to the spirit where he does recognize it. None of us are wise enough as yet always to see God in all his works. It is spirit which makes us breathe. When we shut ourselves away from the pure breath of life we shut away the power that makes us breathe.

And when we are too interested in doing indoor work the spirit finds it pretty hard work to make us breathe enough to keep us in good condition for growing. Close rooms and sedentary work defeat the spirit’s will to make us breathe.

So we, by working against the spirit, form a habit of breathing too little, thus robbing ourselves of the life, health, wisdom, power, joy which the spirit is trying to give us with every breath.

Now we find ourselves hampered by self-imposed habits which need breaking. So we set ourselves to work with the Spirit of Life. We throw open the window and let in the Spirit of Life.

We go outdoors and revel in the Spirit of Sunshine. We run and jump to make ourselves inbreathe the Spirit of Life.

Being too busy to spend hours every day outdoors we do stunts in our nightdresses to make us inbreathe more of the Spirit of Life.

And always, night and day, winter and summer, we take pains to leave our windows well open that the Spirit of Life be not shut away from us for one single moment. We are learning to depend wholly upon the Spirit.

We used to remember the Spirit only on the Sabbath day; now we remember it every day and all day and all night -- we remember to breathe it and eat it as well as think it. And verily we are blessed.