Night Stand
For the last week I've been mucking around in this little magazine I picked up in a junk shop somewhere. The thing is called Reason, and it's subtitled "A Monthly Journal Devoted to Psychic Science, Education, Healing, Success and Social Reform." Come now let us reason, it says on the masthead. The issue I have is from March 1915, and it's a grab bag of the usual whack metaphysics of the time, including articles on auras, astrology, spiritualism, guardian angels, and the power of positive thinking. It's also full of wonderful advertisements for such indispensable products as "spiritualist's aluminum trumpets," "schemes in dirt" ('Tells how YOU can make a good living in your own yard'), "Eager Colon Cleanser," and "Dr. Hector McLain's Astral Ozone Inhalent."
As odd and anachronistic as Reason seems on first glance, and despite its amusing quirks and obvious quackery, actually reading the magazine's contents serves as a sometimes startling reminder of how little the obsessions of the middlebrow American fringe have changed in 90 years. In the pages of this odd little journal --published out of California-- we find, to paraphrase Lou Reed, the beginning of a new age. Or, rather, the new age. Reason's contributors and advertisers are the clear forebears of today's bowel obsessed and endlessly questing Chicken Soup for the Codependent Inner Children of the Women Who Run With the Wolves crowd. There are also obvious connections to the sorts of offerings you're likely to encounter on the magazine rack at your local coop or spiritual boutique.
In Orison Swett Marde's "The Life Attitude Furnishes the Life Pattern," the author tells us that what we think, we must become. "Your mind becomes impressed with your self-estimate," Swett Marde writes, "and your convictions govern your actions. Your small estimate of yourself will make a pygmy's impress upon your conviction, and you will be barred from doing the work of a giant. You must think yourself a giant before you can do a giant's work." God knows, I know full well the discomfiting --not to mention discomforting-- feeling of having a pygmy's impress upon my conviction, and I'm willing to admit the sound logic of the rest of the author's assertion, and thus am willing to follow him or her the rest of the way: "If your life is ever transformed, it must be by your own mental effort, your own glory --the glory that comes from within, not from without."
I also appreciate the advice W.T. Stead offers in a meditation entitled "After Death":
But Sometimes is it best kindness to punish?
Yes, I know you are quite right in thinking that there are times when it is necessary to punish evil-doers; but as you punish, love! And remember that punishment without love is not of God. Have, then, a list, long or short, of the people you dislike, and run over them lovingly.
Can do!
In the marvelously titled "The Persisting Thought of the New Thought," Dr. J.M. Peebles wisely counsels that there are prudent limits to the sort of seize-the-day bliss that is so often the sole goal of new agers and Grateful Dead fans. "A New Thought leader, and an esteemed friend said to us not long since: 'I live, I think and enjoy the now, the eternal now, and that is enough!'" writes Dr. Peebles. "A lazy old ox, lying under a shade tree in a hot June day chewing his cud, could have said as much, but if there were infused with his front and top brain some moral intelligence and aspiration, he would naturally reach out beyond the now towards a well-filled manger, when the ice and the snow of the northlands mantled the fields in zero weather."
Elsewhere in the pages of Reason Ella Wheeler Wilcox poses the million dollar question: What Are We Living For In This World? Ms. Wilcox, of course, has an answer at the ready: All of our political and industrial systems, all our straining after financial and social honors and successes, all our educational institutions, are for one purpose: To enable us mortals to find happiness with those we love; to give happiness to those we love, and enjoy their association.
If only people could truly learn to live with this higher purpose in mind, Wilcox believes, "not one in one thousand would descend to the plane of the grafter, the robber and the sensualist." She's absolutely right about that, of course. She couldn't possibly be righter, the poor woman.
2:01:49 PM 
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