Thoughts Are Things

Thoughts are things. Mulford meant those four words as plainly as they sound. Not that thoughts matter, not that they are like things, but that a thought is made of something.

He gives the ordinary view to what he calls the material mind, the part of you that trusts only the senses. It “does not regard its thought as an actual element as real as air or water.” The wiser part of you, he says, knows better.

So picture thought the way you already picture air. You cannot see it. You take it for granted. And you would never dream of saying that air does nothing, because everything it touches moves. Mulford’s claim is that thought behaves the same way, and that most of us have simply never looked for it.

The claim is not mainly about your big, deliberate thoughts: the goals you write down, the prayers you mean. It is about the rest. The flash of contempt for the man ahead of you in the queue. The grudge replayed in the shower. The small dread about Monday humming under Sunday afternoon.

Mulford is specific. The spiritual mind knows that “every one of its thousand daily secret thoughts are real things, acting on the minds of the persons they are sent to.” Distance changes nothing, he adds: a thought reaches a person whose body is thousands of miles away.

That is the uncomfortable half of the sentence. A thought you would never say aloud has still been sent, and it still arrives.

What is Mulford actually claiming when he says “thoughts are things”?

• That a clearly pictured wish will produce the thing you asked for
• That a thought is a real, invisible element acting on body and people✓Correct answer
• That thoughts matter so much it helps to speak of them as objects
• That spoken thoughts carry force, while private ones stay harmless

He means it literally: thought is an element as real as air or water, and the thousand secret thoughts of a day count as much as the spoken ones. The wish-granting version misses his emphasis, which is that thought is working all the time, whether or not you aim it.

Mulford has a picture for how blind we are to this. Imagine children who have been told that the miller inside the windmill turns its great arms. Nobody has mentioned the wind. They would go on believing it, and never once look at the sky.

That, in his view, is our situation. Thought is an element all around us, as plentiful as air, and it is already turning the arms: this way and that, sometimes for good and sometimes for harm, blindly directed by people who have no idea they are doing it.

Notice what this does to the usual question. People ask how to start using the power of thought. Mulford’s answer is that nobody has ever not used it. The arms have been turning all your life.

In his essay on health and beauty Mulford reaches for the plainest comparison he can find. Every thought of yours, he writes, is as real as a tree, a flower or a fruit. You simply cannot see it with the outer eye.

His evidence is what a thought does to a body. Somebody cries “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, and people go weak and trembling. Perhaps it was a false alarm. Nothing burned. It was only the thought of fire, and it was enough to take the strength out of a whole audience.

That is the scale to keep in mind. The theatre is the dramatic case, visible to everyone at once. The ordinary case is the same force, smaller and slower, working on one body over years.

Here is his most practical example, and it is easy to recognise. You wake, you lie there, and you think with dread about the breakfast to be cooked and the rooms to be swept, or whatever your own version of that list is.

Mulford’s verdict is blunt. Anything done in mind spends as much force as if it were done with the body. As far as your strength goes, you are doing all that work right there, on your back, before your feet touch the floor. Then you get up and do it again.

The same holds for the hard conversation you rehearse all morning. What we put out in thought as unpleasant, he says, is an actual thing, and the longer we keep putting it out, the more force we add to it.