The primitive mind-cure. The nature and power of faith; or, Elementary lessons in Christian philosophy and transcendental medicine

Front matter

dlatnell Hmttecsttg ffiihtarg

FROM THE

BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY

Chapter I. Page

What are Ideas, and What is Idealism? 1

CHAPTER n.

The Application of the Idealistic Philosophy to the Cure of

Mental and Bodily Maladies 10

CHAPTER in.

The Triune Constitution of man and the Discovery of the True

Self, 18

CHAPTER rV.

The Saving Power of the Spirit of Man, 29

CHAPTER V.

Happiness and Health, and Where they are to be found, . 39

CHAPTER VI.

The Real and the Apparent in Thought, or the Impossible and

Contradictory to Sense is True to the Spirit, ... 47

Viii CONTENTS.

CHAPTER vn.

PAGE

Disease Exists only in the Mind on the Plane of Sense, which is

the Region of Deceptive Appearances, .... 56

CHAPTER Vin.

The Deepest Reality of Disease is a Morbid Idea and Belief, . 63

CHAPTER IX.

The Science of Oblivescence, or the Art of Forgetting a Malady, 71

CHAPTER X.

The Incipient Idea of Recovery and "Whence Does it Come? . 79

CHAPTER XI.

What is it to be Spiritual, and, How may we Become sot . 90

CHAPTER Xn.

Spiritual Truth the Best Remedy for Disease, .... 100

CHAPTER Xni.

On the Triune Nature of Man, and the Freeing the Soul from

the Body, 109

CHAPTER XIV.

Executing Judgment upon Ourselves, or in Thought Separating

Disease from the Real Self, 117

CONTENTS. is.

CHAPTEE XV.

the Ideal, or th( Thought, X23

PAGB

The Creative Power of the Ideal, or the Externalization of

CHAPTEE XVI.

The Nature and Eight Use of the Will, 129

CHAPTEE XVII.

The Universal Life-Principle, and its Occult Properties and Uses, 136

CHAPTEE XVIII.

The Universal Ether of Science, and the JEther of the Hermetic

Philosophy, 142

CHAPTEE XIX.

The Mother-Principle of Things, and its Use in SeU-Healing, . 148

CHAPTEE XX.

The KabaUstic and Messianic Method of Healing, and the One

Practised by Jesus the Christ, 157

CHAPTEE XXI.

The Summit of Christian Knowledge, or the Mystery of the

Christ, and its Saving Influence, 165

CHAPTEE XXII.

The Eelation of Jesus to the Christ and to Man, . . . 176

Contents

CHAPTER yxrrr .

PAGE

The Kabalistic Justice and Paul's Eighteousness of Paith. Appendix. The Prayer of Paith that Saves the Sick, or the Healing Power of Spiritual Truth, 183

Chapter II

THE APPLICATION OF THE IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHT TO THE CUBE OF MENTAL Ain> BODILY MALADIES.

The pMlosophy of idealism as presented in the preceding lesson is to be applied to the cure of disease, as it was by Jesus the Christ. AU disease, so far as it has a material or bodily expression, must have had a preexistence in us as a fixed mode of thought, that is, as an idea. To expunge from the mind and obliterate from our soul-life the idea of it, is to remove the cause of it, and hence to cure the malady. How best to accomplish this is the problem to be solved by our transcendental medical science and practical metaphysics. To its solution we will now devote our best energies.

It is our aim to reproduce the system of cure practiced by Jesus, and adapt it to modern modes of thought and expression. Now Jesus was the prince of idealists, as Keshub Chunder Sen has said, and his religion is supreme idealism. {Oriental Christ, by P. C. Mozoomdar, p. 34.) Without a knowledge of the philosophy of idealism it is impossible to comprehend the profound truths of Christianity or any of the Oriental religions. "With Jesus, as with Gautama the Buddha, ideal things, existing in a sphere of being interior to the world of sense, were the only real and enduring things. All else was evanescent and ever changing.

"We have endeavored to find in the realm of mind certain fixed principles as fundamental, immutably true, and trustworthy as the principles of geometry, by which the mariner guides his course upon the pathless deep. In the New Testament doctrine of faith, as it was viewed by Jesus, and

Paul, and even Plato, we affirm that we have such a principle in its application to the cure of the diseases of the soul and the body. When properly understood we see why, as Jesus declared, it is ever unto us according to our faith (Matt, ix : 29) . This is a principle as certain in the laws of mind, and as reliable as that a straight line is the shortest distance between two given points, or the demonstrated theorem that in every right-angled triangle the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Faith may be defined to be the power of perceiving spiritual realities that lie above and beyond the range of the senses, and a confidence in those higher truths. This is essentially the definition of it given by the unknown Kabalistic author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Heb. xi : 1) .

Faith is the source of aU spiritual power. The end and purpose of all education is, and will be of our present studies, the achievement of spiritual development and the attainment of a truly spiritual mode and habit of thought. In other words, our aim should be expressed in the comprehensive prayer, " Lord, increase our faith" (Luke xvii: 5). This implies that we already have faith in a degree, which only needs to be augmented and turned in the right direction. On this subject Mr. A. P. Sinnett very justly remarks : " One may illustrate this point by reference to a very common-place physical exercise. Every man living, having the ordinary use of his limbs, is qualified to swim. But put those who cannot swim, as the common phrase goes, into deep water, and they will struggle and be drowned. The mere way to move the limbs is no mystery ; but unless the swimmer in moving them has a full belief that such movement will produce the required result, the required result is not produced. In this ease we are dealing with mechanical forces merely, but the same principle runs up into dealings with subtler forces." Of the power which resides in faith, he gives as instances the marvels wrought by the genuine

12 THE PRIMITITE MDnj-CTJEE.

Oriental adepts. Their training is designed to develop the principle of faith. {Esoteric Buddhism, p. 12.) Read also on the same subject the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But every one will ask, "How may we get this faith ? " In this case the questioner is like the man who is anxiously hunting around the house to find his spectacles, but all the time has them on and is looking through them. We already have faith, and are perpetually acting under its influence and guidance, but have not learned its higher applications and uses. Faith is only that intuitive intellectual perception that Hes above the range of the sensuous plane of the mind's action, and which we call into exercise every time we correct the illusions of our senses, and judge and act contrary to their deceptive appearances. Whenever we judge, not according to appearance, but judge righteously or according to a divine rectitude of thought, we exercise faith. When I perceive that the reflected image from a mirror is not a soUd object behind the mirror, or that the earth turns on its axis, and that the sun does not rise and set, it is that higher form of knowledge which is caUed faith.

According to the ideaUstic philosophy, tliought and existence are absolutely identical and inseparable. This is a principle as universally true as that two straight lines which are parallel will never meet, however far they may be extended, or the proposition that the whole of a thing is equal to the sum of aU its parts. Bishop Berkeley, after remarking that time is nothing abstracted from the succession of ideas iu our minds, and that the duration of any finite existence must be estimated by the number of ideas, or actions, succeeding each other in that individual spirit or mind, says : "Hence, it is a plain consequence that the soul always thinks ; and, in truth, whoever shall go about to divide in his thoughts, or abstract the existence of a spirit from. its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task." {Principles of Human Knowledge, sec. 98.)

THE PRIMITIVB MIND-CUKE. 13

Pure thought is the summit of our being. It is the Kabalistic Crown, and is spirit ; and, by divine appointment, governs and controls all below it. It is the point where our individual existence flows out from the " Unknown." The attainment of the power to think spiritually and spontaneously, in contradistinction from the possession of a set of borrowed opinions, is the "crown of life." Since to think and to exist are one and the same, a man in whatsoever condition he is, whether in health or disease, whether happy or the opposite, is only the expression or external translation of his thoughts and ideas. He is the perpetual creation of his fixed mode of thought. The world and all the things it contains, including the body of man, having no thought in themselves, do not exist in and for themselves, but exist only in us, and as Schopenhaur has truly said, are to us only what we thinh and believe them to be. As thought and existence are identical, a change of thought must necessarily modify our existence. To think a change in our bodily condition, and not merely to think about it, will determine all the living forces toward that result, as certainly as a stream issuing from a fountain will flow in another direction when we change the direction of its channel.

If thought is the first act of our individual spiritual existence, and a perpetual concomitant of it, and is the primal force and most subtle energy in the universe, the question will arise, is thought free and subject to no law above itself? Can we think when and what we please ? In disease, can I think that I am well? In pain, can I think that I have no pain ? I answer unhesitatingly, I can. All things are possible to thought. I can (hink that five plus four is twelve, but may not be able to believe it until the thought is joined with feeling in some degree. A man may think that his dwelling is on fire when it is not, and he is affected by it ; or he may think that his house is not on fire when it is, and in the latter case he feels no alarm. In both cases

14 THE PEIMITrVE MrND-CtrEE.

his thought modifies his existence. A man may think he is dying when he is not ; or, when he is passing through what the world calls death, he may both think and feel that it is only a higher form of life, and that there is no death. In sickness, it is possible to think, and even believe, that the disease does not belong to the class of truly existing tilings, but is only a phenomenon or appearance, a false seeming, an illusion. This thought maintained will vindicate its right to be called the Crown hj transforming all below it into its expression. Thought may be subject to certain laws or fixed rules of action, as may be predicated of the Divine nature itself, but is absolutely free ; for the laws of its activity arise from its own essence. It knows no higher law than itself. Pure thought is the first emanation from God, as is seen in the Kabalistic scheme of the Ten Sephiroth. It is not a mere attribute or faculty of spirit ; it is spirit itself. We cannot abstract thought from spirit any more than a smile can be separated from a human face, and left as an entity in empty space ; and the spirit as the first emanation from God, as the Kabala affirms, is the Son of God. And as the Father has life in himself, so he has given to the Son (or the spirit) to have life in himself ; and he gave him authority also to execute judgment because he is also the son of man. (John v : 26, 27.) The essential characteristic of spirit, and which inheres in its very essence, as Hegel has said, is freedom and spontaneity. It originates action or motion, as Plato teaches. The essential property of matter is passivity or fatality. Thought is not lUie the vane on the church tower, turning in every direction from the action of a force existing outside of itself. But the spirit is a wind or breath of God that bloweth where it listeth. (John iii : 8.) It chooses its own direction in which to act. There is nothing above it but the "Unknown God," out of whom it perpetually springs. As the sun is never separated from any of his rays, but acts as one

THE PRIMITIVE MIND-C0RE. 15

■with each and all of them, so the " Father of spirits " always approves and sanctions the action of pure spiritual thought. For pure thought is the Protogonos, the first begotten, the son and perpetual offspring of God, and from him it is never sundered. If thought and existence are identical, then it follows that to think rightly is to be well and happy. All matter including the human body exists only in mind, which is the only substance. It exists from thought and in thought. Hence, the body is to me, and for me, what I think it to be. This is an absolute and irrepealable law of our being, as much so as that all right-angled triangles are equal to each other, or that every circle, great or small, contains three hundred and sixty degrees. How soon a change of thought and feeling, as in passing from melancholy to cheerfulness, translates itself into a bodUy expression ! So when doubt and despair give place to hope and the fuU assurance of faith, the change expresses itself immediately in the face, which is the index of our interior states of mind and body. Behold in this the creative omnipotence of thought and feeling. Thought and feeling are the Elohim, the Dii Potentes, the creative potencies in our microcosm or lesser world, as they are in the macrocosm or greater world of ideas, and they are continually saying in us, " Let us make the body after our image and likeness." In the above short sentence, as in a casket, lies the golden key which unlocks the mysteries of health and disease.

That which we most need is to develop into consciousness our inner and higher life, and to give to it what rightfully belongs to it: — an absolute sovereignty over aU below it. It should be our aim to elevate the principle of thought above the plane of the senses, and free it from their distorting influences. " This elevation above sensual things was known to the ancients, and their wise men said that when the mind is withdrawn from sensual things, it comes into an interior light, and, at the same time, into a tranquil state, and into

16 THE PBIMITITB MIND-CUKK.

a sovt of heavenly blessedness. Man is capable of being yet more interiorly elevated ; and the more interiorly he is elevated, into so much the clearer light does he come, and at length into the light of heaven, which is nothing else but wisdom and intelligence from the Lord." (Arcana Celestia, G313.) As thought becomes more internal, or elevated above the body and the external senses, it becomes more potential. This is the true meaning of healing ourselves or others. It is tbe emancipation of the soul from material thraldom. And, when the soul is saved from its illusions, the body can well be left to take care of itself. Says Paul :

TO Si <l)p6yrifji.a tov irvevfi.a.TO'; ^ui') koX elpr/vrj, the thought of the

spirit is life and peace ; but the thought of the fleshly mind (or the habit of thinking on a level with the body) , is death. (Rom. viii : G, 7.) This passage contains, in a small compass, the true philosophy of salvation in the full sense of the word. It will be our work to develop this living germ and fruitful seed of truth into a tree whose leaves shall be for the healing of the nations.

We encounter at the outset in our instruction a great evil, and one that has served to hold humanity down and prevent its rising from the plane of sense to the life of faith. I refer to the fact that the church, Catholic and Protestant, has claimed a monopoly of the principle of faith. They have connected it with certain dogmas which are, to many intelligent minds, unreasonable, absurd, and incredible. They have enclosed the divine and saving principle of faith in what looks to many as an unseemly wrapper, like the precious goods of the merchant in coarse paper, and they refuse to deliver the merchandise unless you take it in the unsightly wrapper. The invalid or sinner (as the case may be) desires to be healed or saved, and works himself into a wUlino-ness to take the standard theological medicine as the less of two evils, but he cannot avoid saying (or at least thinking) with Whittier : —

" I trace your lines of argument ; Your logic linked and strong I weigh as one who dreads dissent, And fears a doubt as wrong.

But still my human hauds are weak

To hold your iron creeds ; Against the words ye bid me speak

My heart within me pleads."

But, at the present time, mauy people are beginning to feel that they can buy directly of the Christ " gold tried in the fire," and enclose the celestial and endui-ing good in their own theological envelope. Faith is a philosophical and scientific principle much older than even Plato, and belongs, by just right, as an exclusive property to no one sect, but to all mankind, as much so as the light of the sun. In these lessons we shall try and put you in possession of this ' ' pearl of great price," and leave yon to find your own casket. I can but feel that those persons in the various churches who have unselfishly devoted themselves to the practice of the faith, cure, and who include in their number many of the choicest spirits on earth, would find their success still greater if they could divorce more fully the saving principle of faith from un-Christian and mentally unwholesome theological dogmas. In other words, let us give allopathic prescriptions of pure religion, but infinitesimal doses of the popular theology. It is to be hoped this suggestion will be taken in the spirit in which it is given ; for, as one has beautifully said : —

"A bending staff I would not break, A feeble faith I would not shake.

Nor even rashly pluck away The error which some truth may stay, Whose loss might leave the soul without A shield against the shafts of doubt."

18 THE PEIMITrVE MIND-CDRE.

Chapter III

THE TRIUNE CONSTITCTIOK OF '""■'^ AND THE niSCOVERT OF THE TRDE SELF.

It is the object of these lessons to lead gradually, and by successive steps, to the development of the unexplored, and, in modern times, almost universally unrecognized, but really vast powers for good that belong to a truly religious and spiritual faith — a faith that perceives being in opposition to a mere sensuous and illusory appearance. There is a faith that perceives and consciously recognizes those truths and realities which lie beyond the grasp of the animal or psychical man or mind. In the Sanscrit language, in which is locked up the profoundest truths ever revealed to the human mind, the word for trutli is sat or satya, which is the participle of the verb as, to be. Hence, truth is that which is, in contradistinction from that which onlj' seems to be. It is the to ovrios ov, or truly existing being of Plato ; the amen of Jesus and Paul. Faith is the perception of these supersensuous truths, and says of them, "these are that which really is," and maintains this attitude of thought in opposition to the fallacious and deceptive appearances of the senses.

In order to reach this position of thought, we must first discover our true self. To him who would become spiritual this is of supreme importance. When we discover our real self, we find at the same time God, and health, and heaven. In the philosophy of the Vedas, which means real knowledge, all the ordinary names of God, as the Almighty, the Creator, etc., are laid aside, and the single name Atman, the Self, is used to denote the divine Being. This does not refer to the Aditi, the Boundless, the Absolute Being, which is nameless, but to the highest manifestation of the Supreme Divine Essence. It is the Self, or underlying, or inmost Reality, of aU that is. It is the Absolute Self, which includes our individual self in it. The Atman is the Self in which each individual self must find rest, must come to himself, must find his own true self, the immortal Monad, the spiritual and imperishable entity. AU this teaches the sublime truth of faith, that in our inmost being we become identified with the Divine Nature. The highest wisdom of Greece was expressed in the precept, "know thyself." "When we find our real self, everything afterwards in our path is easy. We must, in the outset, as the French would say, find our true East (s'orienter) , and fix our true position among created things. We must ascertain the direction in which we are to loot for spiritual wisdom, and the region of our being where alone it can be found.

In the Vedanta philosophy of India, the oldest religious philosophy of the world, it is said: "There is nothing higher than the attainment of the knowledge of the Self." Again : " Despising everything else, a wise man should strive after the knowledge of the self." This highest Self is called in the Vedanta, which means the end or goal of the Veda, the " silent thinker," as being thS inmost spring of all thought. It is also called " the one who knows," as it partakes of the Divine Omniscience. It is also the " old man within," who is identical with the Kabalistic ' ' Ancient of Days," "the holy elder," which means the inward sage, the source of aU true knowledge, and fountain of all true wisdom, for at this point it opens into that in which are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. This inmost self in us is a person only in the true sense of the word, as a mask that conceals and partly reveals the universal spirit. To discover our real self, and to find it included in the being of the manifested God, the Christ of Paul, is the Platonic idea of

20 THE PRIMITIVE MrND-CtlKE.

redemption, and is tlie summit of all spiritual knowledge. It is faith in its supreme sense.

The Atman of the Vedanta, the highest Self, and the Christ of Paul, the Adam Kadmon of the Kabala, are the same as the "Over-Soul" of Emerson. He says of it: "The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere ; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all others." {Essays, First Series, p. 214.)

In another place, speaking of the Over-Soul, Emerson says: "Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtile. It is undeflnable, unmeasurable, but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know that aU spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, ' God comes to see us without beU ' ; that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God." {Essays, First Series, p. 216.)

The importance of finding this higher self, and developing it into consciousness, cannot be overstated. It is necessary to all spiritual growth. It has always been earnestly insisted upon by all who have written anything on the deeper philosophy of human nature. The celebrated Arabian philosopher, Muhammed Al Ghazzali, who was born A.D. 1056, wrote a work entitled TJie Alchemy of Happiness. It contains the principles of a profound spiritual science, the same that were taught under impenetrable symbols by the Alchemists of the middle ages. Al Ghazzali commences his work with these important words, which are the key to all spiritual science : " O seeker after the divine mysteries !

THE PEIMITIVE MIND'CUKB. 21

know thou that the door to the knowledge of God will be opened to a man first of all, when he knows his own soul, and understands the truth about his own spirit, according as it has been revealed. ' He who knows himself, knows his Lord also.' Again, in the books of former prophets it is written, ' Know thine own soul, and thou shalt know thy Lord ' ; and we have received it in a tradition, ' He who knows himself, already knows his Lord.' This is a convincing argument that the soul (or spirit) is like a clean mirror into which, whenever a person looks, he may there see God." This was written eight centuries ago. But thousands of years before this it was said in the Vedanta of India, "/There is one eternal thinker, thinking non-eternal though^ ; he, though one, fulfils the desires of many. The wise who perceive him within their self, to them belongs eternal life, eternal peace." (^India, by Max Miiller, p. 260.) /

That man possesses a triune nature, and is capable of living and acting on either of thi-ee distinct planes of being, or, as it is stated in the spiritual philosophy of Swedenborg, that there are three discrete degrees of the mind, is one of the oldest doctrines of philosophy, but is wholly unrecognized in our modern systems of metaphysics. It is a fundamental idea in the New Testament psychology, as also in the philosophy of Plato, and is the key to the theosophical system of the Christ. In the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, Paul gives the Platonic statement of this doctrine : "And the God of peace himself sanctify j-ou wholly, and may your spirit, and soul, and body be preserved whole (or entire) without blame at the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ." (I Thes. v : 23.) The body is here used for the lowest degree of the mind, the animal nature with the degree of intellect that belongs to it It is that which is called in the writings of Paul the carnal or fleshly mind. It is the Linga Sharira of Esoteric Buddhism, or what is called the astral body. It is of an etherial nature, but not immortal. It belonors to this material stage of our existence, and is that intermediate principle which connects the higher degrees of the mind or thinking substance with matter and with the body.

The lowest degree of our immortal nature is called the animal soul, and is the psyche of the New Testament, and constitutes what the Apostle Paul denominates the psychical man, which is badl^- translated "the natural man," which designation of it is followed by Swedenborg. It is the region in us of what is called external sense. It is also the seat of aU the animal appetites and passions. As such, it was denominated by Pj'thagoras thumos, and by the Buddhists is called kama rupa, or body of desire, and vehicle of will. By the Hebrews it was called nephesh, and is the serpent of Genesis, through the influence of which man fell from the spiritual state into which he was created into a sensuous or psychical condition. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness on the cross as the Kabalistic tree of life, so must the son of man, or the animal soul, be lifted up. (John iii : 14.) For though humanity, on this plane of mental being, is animal in its nature when compared with spirit, it is elevated above the correctly defined animal creation in every other respect. And though this region is called the animal soul, as it is the highest developed principle of the brute creation, it is yet susceptible of evolution into something far higher, by its union with the higher degrees of our being. {Esoteric Buddhism, by A. P. Sinnet, p. 25.)

To this region of mind belongs, according to Plato, what we denominate opinion, or the reception of the beliefs of others. Opinions may be founded on truth, or they may be false. When true, they come next to knowledge as a practical guide, and as near to genuine faith as the large majority of mankind ever come. Here, also, is what we call reason, which is a much less unerring guide than

THE PRIMITIVE MmD-CDEE. 23

instinct, which belongs to the animal soul, and which brings us to the boundaries of the next higher degree. Instinct in man and animals is the knowledge that we derive from the Universal Soul or Mind, of which our soul is only a personal limitation, or individual expression. The animal soul is the basement story of our immaterial, intellectual nature. It is the region in us of the evil and the false, of sin and disease ; and we must acquire the power of transferring our consciousness to a more internal plane of being.