by Gustavus Hindman Miller
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The same may be said of the animal kingdom. The mind is developed by vigorous exercise just as are likewise the muscles of the body. The more these are cultivated by drawing from their parental affinities in the macrocosm, the more knowledge or power they take on. Thus as a man simulates in thought and action an ape, a tiger, a goat, a snake or a lamb he takes on their characteristics and is swayed by like influences to enmity, meekness, covetousness and avariciousness. To illustrate further. If he is cunning he draws on the fox of the microcosm and becomes, in action and thought, like that animal. If selfishness survives, the hog principle is aroused from its latent cells in the microcosm and he is dominated by material appetites. In a similar way he may perceive the spiritual in himself. Nature's laws, with all their numberless and intricate ramifications are simple in their harmony of process and uniformity of purpose when applied to the physical and ethical developments of man.]
Possibilities for inner improvements or expansions rest with material man. If he entertains gross desires to the exclusion of spiritual germs, he will dwarf and degrade higher aspirations, and thus deprive subjective spirituality of her rightful possessions.
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Nature, in compounding the materials for the creation of the deaf man, inadvertently dropped the ingredient sound, hence making an imperfect being; and sound, being thus foreign to his nature, he can only be approached by signs even in dreams. Subjectivity uses nature's forces, while a normal person uses dreams to work on his waking consciousness. As it is impossible to use with effect a factor which a man does not naturally possess, a deaf man rarely ever dreams of sound, or a blind man of light.
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TWO DREAMS ARE NEVER THE SAME, NOR ARE TWO FLOWERS EVER ALIKE.
Whatever symbol is used to impress the dreamer is the one which is likely to warn him more definitely than any other. No two persons being ever in the same state at the same time, the same symbols would hardly convey identical impressions; neither will the same dream be as effective in all cases of business or love with the same dreamer.
A person's dream perception wavers, much as it does in waking hours. You fail to find the same fragrance in the rose at all times, though the same influences seemingly surround you; and thus it is that different dreams must be used for different persons to convey the same meaning.
Creation, confident of her power to perfect her designs, does not resort to that monotony in her work, which might result were the perception of man, or the petals and fragrance of flowers cast from one stereotyped mold of intelligence, beauty or sweetness. This variety of scheme runs through all creation. You think you have identical dreams, but there is always some variation, even if it be something dreamed immediately over. Nature is no sluggard and is forever changing her compounds, so that there is bound to be change in the details even of dreams. This change would not materially affect the approach of happiness or sorrow in different people, and hence the same dreams are reliable for all.
Persons of the same or similar temperament will be more deeply impressed by a certain dream than would people their opposite; and though the dream cannot be the same in detail yet it is apparently the same, just as two like flowers are called roses, though they are not identical.
If a young woman twenty-five and a girl of fifteen should each have a dream of marriage, the same definition would apply to each, just the same as if they would each approach a flower and smell of it differently. Different influences will possess them unconsciously, though the outward appearance be the same.
A young woman of a certain age is warned in a dream of trouble likely to befall her, while another of similar age and threatened trouble is warned also, but in different symbols, which she fails to grasp and bring back to waking existence, and she thus believes she has had no warning dream.
There are those in the world who lack subjective strength, material or spiritual, and hence they fail to receive dreams, however symbolic, because there is no power within them to retain these impressions.
There are many reasons for this loss, utter material gross-ness, want of memory, physical weakness uncoupled from extreme nervousness, and total lack of faith in any warning or revelation purporting or coming from the dream consciousness.
