New thought healing made plain

Introduction

IN 1902 I wrote a book entitled ''Mental Healing Made Plain." Today, sixteen years later, I have written another, "New Thought Healing Made Plain." The earlier book compared to the later is a tiny mountain rivulet, while the later is like a deep, wide river that had its birth in the rivulet. The stream of my thought has, in the passing of sixteen years of meditation and experience, grown to larger proportions, and yet I find upon rereading the first book that I still hold the same ideas, but see them in broader perspective and in clearer light.

The later book contains very little of the subject-matter of the former. Here and there a phrase or a paragraph, occasionally a helpful illustration or incident, and that is all. On the other hand the latter book contains much that is not even hinted at in the former. I rejoice that I find nothing that I would contradict or unsay in my earlier writing, nothing that a larger experience would prove to be untrue, for this convinces me that I have uttered Truth, since Truth, like God, is not subject to change or shadow of turning.

Faithfully,

The Author.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. What is New Thought Healing? 9

II. Thought is a Force 22

Chapter One What Is New Thought Healing?

IF you are at all observant of life and its happenings, you will admit the fact that your thought aflfects your body for good or ill. You have discovered that worry, fear and anxiety lower your heart action, deaden your circulation, give you indigestion, headache, neuralgia and other ailments. It is said that a reiteration of worried thought beating on the same brain cells wears the cellular tissue so thin that finally it breaks, usually resulting in death. Even if the result is not so serious, a long siege of worry usually ends in a spell of sickness, which, by the way, is a preservative effort of Nature, as it turns worry into a new channel, so that it beats on a different set of brain cells, or, better still, stops worry altogether, for when one is very sick, the usual causes of worry do not matter much; in fact, nothing matters but the physical suffering and how to get rid of it.

This is a mere hint at the many ill effects of thought upon the body. We will not dwell upon them, but turn to the good effects of the healthgiving thought, and more especially of New Thought.

This brings us to the question — What is New Thought? I can think of no more perfect, full and complete definition of it than we find in those wonderful words of Schopenhauer — "Clear Vision of the World."

New Thought stands for a tremendous movement of the human mind toward the understanding of things as they really are. From the beginning of human life on this planet, from our earliest savage ancestors, it has been a long, hard voyage of exploration and discovery, without a chart to guide, except that of pain or pleasure. I believe that Man has always instinctively sought the Truth, but has encountered it veiled; hence his false beliefs regarding it. In the evolution of a germ of Truth existing in each false belief lies the advance to ''Clear Vision of the World."

We cannot imagine what this earth appeared to primal Man, but we know that it seemed under the dominion of grim, cruel forces, always arrayed against him in the struggle for existence.

Now, in his clear vision he sees those forces as beneficent, all working toward his highest evolution, all tending toward ultimate health, joy and general wellbeing. These states of mind and body cannot be laid on Man from the outside; they must be worked out from within, as a spider weaves its web out of its own substance. God does not confer Joy as an unearned gift upon Man. He brings it forth from him by means of the Divine Urge.

As Man's enlarging intelligence compasses more and more of creation he has discovered Thought to be a mighty though hidden Force. For that matter all Force is hidden, but in some instances the material means are evident, while in the working of Thought the mechanism is invisible and intangible.

How is it that Thought acts upon the nerves and muscles of your body, causing motion .^^ Who ever saw a Thought when it so acted on nerve and muscle.^ No one has ever explained this mystery, and yet we accept it as a fact, not wholly because physiologists tell us it is so, but because we know it through our own experience.

I see a book on the table. I think I would like to examine it. I am conscious of that thought. Then I think I will take it up. I am conscious of that thought also. Then I do take it up and I am conscious that in some mysterious way my thought has caused my hand to reach out to the table and draw the book toward me. Hundreds of nerves and muscles have been brought into play, and yet I do not know how it was accomplished. I may have it explained to me how muscles respond to nervous stimulus, how they contract and expand in obedience to it, and I may see that the entire network of nerves and muscles throughout the body is controlled by thought; but that is not seeing how it is done.

That, it seems, must remain a mystery. But for that reason do we deny it.^ Not at all. I know of no one who does not acknowledge that thought controls the body, that is, that his thought controls his own body.

I may, therefore, take it for granted that you acknowledge so much, although I cannot expect you at this juncture to go so far as to acknowledge that the thought of another person can act upon your body or upon your mind. Of course we know that the audible speech or written word of another will affect your mind and, secondarily, your body, but that an unspoken thought should produce such an effect is beyond your credence.

The law of Telepathy or Thought Transmission is now accepted by scientists the world over. Such men as Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes and Alfred Russell Wallace have tested this law and proved it to be a fact.

Or, if you seek proof nearer home, you can find it in the following simple experiment. Get together a few of your friends. Blindfold one and place him in the middle of the room, after having shown him a key or some other object which you intend he shall find. Surround this person by the rest of your friends, standing in a closed circle with joined hands, while all of you think steadily of the key in the place where it is deposited. After some hesitation the blindfolded person, with slow and uncertain steps, will move toward the key and will ultimately find it.

I will describe the sensation of the person blindfolded as I experienced it. First my mind felt utterly vacuous. All thought seemed to vanish. Then in a few seconds I felt pushed by unseen hands in a certain direction, although no hands were touching me. So strong was the inclination of my body in that direction that

MADE PLAIN IS

I would have fallen had I not put out one foot to balance myself. Then another push and another step, and so I gradually approached a chair on which the key had been placed. When I reached the chair my whole body relaxed, and I drooped over it with arms listlessly hanging until one hand touched the key. On another occasion the key was hung upon the wall, and when I touched the wall I felt a desire to stretch upward with one arm. I did so and grasped the key where it hung upon a nail.

Now, had the force of those minds been directed to my mind I might have had a definite idea of the position of the key. I would probably have thought — The key is on the chair, or. The key hangs on the wall, but I had no such definite thought, nothing but a vague blind movement for which I could not account. I was impelled to move, I knew not why. It therefore seemed that the thought of the minds concentrating upon me acted directly upon my body without passing through the medium of my mind. To me this was conclusive proof that the thought of one person can act directly upon the body of another person.

There is a large hospital in France called La Salpetriere. It is one of the oldest and largest hospitals in the world, covering an area of seventyfour acres, and consisting of forty-five large blocks. In that hospital the patients are treated almost entirely by the power of Thought, but it is used as hypnotic suggestion. They do some strange things there which you would hardly credit, did not the reputation of the physicians in charge and the standing of the hospital back up the statements.

Let me tell you what is done to those patients while in a state of hypnosis. A drop of cold water is placed on the flesh, and the patient is told that it is boiling oil. It then draws a blister. Now, how do you suppose this effect is produced.^ Quite a mystery, is it not.^ But being done and testified to by reputable physicians in a reputable hospital you cannot very well doubt it.

They also take a fly-blister and divide it into three equal parts, 1, 2, and 3. Number 1 they place upon a patient's right arm, number 2 upon the left arm, and number 3 upon the arm of a person who is not hypnotized. This done, the doctor says of number 1 that it will not draw a blister, and says nothing of numbers 2 and 3, The result is that number 1 does not draw a blister. They call that negative suggestion, which means that the blistering power is taken out of the number 1 piece of fly-blister, while it remains in the other two pieces, numbers 2 and 3. I say the blistering power is removed from number 1, but perhaps it is more correct to say that the skin of the patient is made positive against it. The fly-blister becomes negative, therefore, to the skin of the patient, and produces no effect upon it, although it is a good, strong blister, as may be seen by the effects of numbers 2 and 3, of w^hich it was originally a part, the one fly-blister having been cut into three parts for the experiment.

This, then, is the power of Thought. It can turn a drop of cold water into a violent irritant, or a fly-blister into something as harmless as a bit of paper.

When you realize that cold water when used with suggestion can draw a blister, can you doubt the power of Thought over the secretions of the body? Moreover, the drop of water is not actually necessary in the experiment, for Thought without material aid has caused a blister, in the tests just quoted, and Thought alone has prevented a blister.

New Thought Healing is not Hypnotic Suggestion. I am only quoting the latter to prove the power of Thought.

The late Professor William James of Harvard said that tumefaction can be produced by Thought in any part of the body. On the same principle, applied in the opposite manner, tumefaction can be removed by Thought.

Dr. Elmer Gates of Washington proved to me conclusively that blood can be sent here and there through the body by simply turning the thought upon it and directing its current. This he showed me by actual experiment. Other men of science are giving out quite as remarkable statements, and their word must go for something. You accept a great deal on the evidence of chemists, astronomers and naturalists, and the evidence in favor of the power of Thought is just as convincing. No one who investigates thoroughly can doubt it.

I think perhaps the greatest obstacle to our believing that Thought can pass from one mind to another is that there seems to be no material agent of transmission, no vehicle for travel. But there is. It is a refined matter in the form of ether, and on this ether Thought travels. There are things we may not detect with our senses which nevertheless exist, and this ether is one of them.

Who would have supposed, some years ago, that today we should be telegraphing without wires .^ A transmitter is set up in New York and a receiver in Boston, or any other two points, and the message goes straight from one to the other.

Why then may not a message travel on the ether from healer to patient .^^ The healer is the transmitter and the patient the receiver, the message going straight and true from one to the other no matter how great the separation between the two. A telepathic message goes from here to England, Finland, Australia, South Africa, or wherever the receiver, in the form of a patient, is located. It takes weeks and months for letters to go to those distant points, but Thought goes in an instant, like an electric flash. We have an electrical Thought Power, and we live in an electrical age. Greater wonders still are to be revealed in the coming years.

It is not the message sent from healer to patient that heals. It is not the thought of the healer that heals. What is it, then.^ It is the Spirit of God dwelling within the patient himself.

And why does it not heal without the intervention of a healer.^ Sometimes it does, and again it needs to be called into expression by the faith and reaKzation of another mind, such as the mind of the healer, — one that has superabounding faith in the power of spiritual healing.

While the Spirit of God is all-powerful, it must flow through certain channels in order to do its work, and those channels are mental processes. For that reason we formerly used the term "Mental Healing," but have discarded it, as it does not suggest the spiritual principle at work. Mental processes are dead and automatic unless infused by the life of the Spirit, as I shall show you in the next chapter.

Spirit is formless, but it takes upon itself form when it creates a tree, a flower, a planet, a man or an insect, yes, or a thought, for thoughts have form, although invisible to the physical eye, as are myriads of other forms in the universe, being of flner matter than the retina of the eye can register.

Thought-Forms are ensouled with life and intelligence and they perform a wonderful work in healing disease and unhappiness. When I said that the thought of the healer does not heal the patient, I should have added that it has an influence for good upon the patient in that it calls forth its correspondence in the mind of the patient, as, for instance, thoughts of courage and hope call into being thoughts of courage and hope in the patient, and these thoughts are conducive to health and happiness. Thoughts of faith going from healer to patient arouse faith in the patient, and that is instrumental in healing, so in that way the healer is an agent in the cure, but what I wish to impress upon your mind is the fact that you are as close to the Di\ane Healing Power as the healer, and that when you learn to open the channels of your thought to its influx, it flows straight from God through you. The true healer is, therefore, a teacher, both consciously and subconsciously, teaching consciously by means of lessons and subconsciously by means of thought transmission, by the sending out of thoughts of Truth and Love.

Suggestion is not hypnotic control of necessity, but is merely thought transmission. The Medical Summary of Philadelphia says editorially: ''Suggestion is the moving power in the treatment of disease. Experienced practitioners habitually employ it to advantage of the patient. Prudent friends and callers at the bedside practise suggestion by taking with them the assurance of better things to come. A word of cheer, the reassuring smile, inspire hope — this, too, is suggestion. Rheumatic rings, magnetic healing and divine healing all have their tap-root in suggestion. If, with ability to diagnose disease, and without the aid from coal-tar sedatives and opiates, the physician can relieve such maladies as headache, lumbago, sciatica or the anguish of rheumatic joint, duty imposes the obligation to do so."

This shows the trend of the more advanced and liberal in the medical fraternity. They, with us, are coming into a "Clear Vision of the World" which involves the seeing of finer curatives than we find in drugs.

You see the world keeps moving on, and no conservatism can stop it. One system gives place to another. Different schools of medicine have put in their claims, had their day, and vanished to give place to more effective ones.

New Thought Healing is here now and is y;^ having its day. If it proves to be what the world is seeking, it will keep its hold. If not, it will give place to something better. That, however, does not concern us, for, while we have a power for relieving the sickness and sorrow of humanity, it is best to use it to the uttermost instead of vaguely seeking what may possibly follow. When it is on the wane will be time enough to look for something better. It is not now waning but steadily rising toward the Zenith.

Before passing on to the next chapter think over what I have said about the power of Thought, and the proofs of its transmission from mind to mind. These two points admitted, you will not be long in conceding to Thought the function of either creating or healing disease, and later you will see how it is that New Thought heals disease.

New Thought heals because it, in its clear vision of the world, sees the Universe to be governed by Love and Intelligence, and therefore knows that nothing can go really wrong in these lives of ours. It sees in sickness, unhappiness and adversity angels in the night to be wrestled with until the dawn, when they will depart, leaving a blessing with the wrestler.

New Thought shows us that our power is WITHIN, that we are the temples in which the Holy Spirit dwells. It teaches us that God is not apart from us, sitting on high, and an avenging Deity, holding us under a curse and frowning upon our joys. We have said in the past that God is Love, but we have not had a clear vision of that Love, else we could not attribute to it cruelties that a loving human father could not inflict upon his children.

No mind can be at peace and no body can be healthy when dominated by a God of Love who is practically a God of Hate. As well might a growing plant strive to reach the light and air when held down by a huge block of granite. The block must be lifted or blown to fragments before the struggle for life and growth will count for anything with the plant.

New Thought is lifting this crushing weight from the human soul, hence its great beneficence and its healing power. No man can be really healthy who is oppressed by fear, or who thinks himself a weakling in a world of antagonistic Giant Forces. He must know himself to be the Giant, and the Conqueror, because of the God

WITHIN.

New Thought teaches that since God is omnipresent He must be within Man, in continual touch with his soul, in fact one with it; one in spiritual substance, even as the ray of light is one with the sun, so that it has been truly said, ''Closer is He than breathing, nearer than hands and feet."

Outside and inside, everywhere God and a God of Love, like the vision of the poet —

"Oh! the Httle birds sang East, and the little birds sang West, And I smiled to think God's greatness Flowed around our incompleteness — Round our restlessness, His rest!"

Chapter Two Thought Is A Force

THE Force or Energy that upholds, sustains and moves the Universe is silent and hidden. We only know of it through its expressions, which are many, and Thought is one of the finest and most powerful of these expressions, but Thought itself, although an expression of World Energy, is not sufficiently expressed (expressed or out-pressed) to become visible to the natural eye. It has form, but that form is invisible. It is unseen and unheard until it has ex-pressed or out-pressed itself in writing, printing or speech.

The fact before us is this — Thought is a Force, even when it has not found expression in written or spoken word, and Thought is an outflow from God or the Infinite and Eternal Energy. Thought is the essence of all things, that is, every living thing is an embodied thought, a Thought-Form clothed in matter. It may be said that Thought- Forms clothe themselves in matter.

Shall we then think lightly of Thought? Shall it be vaporous and unreal to us.^ Not if we have clear vision of the world, for we shall then see Thought as something more real than those

^mmW^MM material things we know as houses, clothes, food and drink. We who desire to work in Thought Substance must know something of its nature and possibilities, as the artist must know something about the mixing of colors and laying them upon the canvas.

If you wish to run a locomotive you must acquaint yourself with all its parts and learn their relation to each other. You must practise running your engine until you are expert in its management, before you are prepared to take out a train without accident.

On the contrary we have attempted to run a human engine of which we knew little or nothing, and naturally we have had our mishaps which we called diseases, and our engines have been in the repair shop far too much of the time. If the Master Engineer, the Universal Mind, had not occasionally given us a command or word of advice, there might not have been anything left of our engines to take to the repair shop.

The human engine is more complicated and diflScult to understand than its iron brother, but it is possible to learn all about it and to keep it under perfect control. It takes time and study and perseverance, of course, but it is time and study and perseverance well spent. In fact it could not be better spent.

Is there any study that can compare with it? I should say not. Indeed it may well be made the first of all studies, for without health, peace of mind, and the ability to master circumstances, what can we accomplish in any direction.^ Our u unevolved powers are greater than we can imagine, and to evolve those powers the acme of the New Thought ideal.

We are like the man who desires to run an engine and seeks to gain the requisite knowledge for his work. He must experiment, and so must we. He must find the motive power and learn to use it and so must we. He must be able to increase that motive power and so must we.

But here the analogy ends, for while the power of an engine has a limit, the human engine has no limit.

We are veritable giants when our powers are brought to the surface. They lie within us like seed germs awaiting the touch of life, as in the tiny acorn lies concealed the mighty oak.

I once saw a slender, delicate little fellow, who had been without food for a week, perform a feat that would have tested a Samson. He had been thrown into a hypnotic sleep in a public hall and kept under the strictest surveillance during the seven days of his fast. At the end of the week he was placed in a chair and held down in it by six strong policemen. Then the man who held him in hypnotic control gave a signal and the little, frail creature sprang up and threw off those powerful men as though they had been insects. Where did his strength come from.^ It was certainly not resident in his flabby muscles.

I have seen many exhibitions of this kind, but the one just quoted occurred in a small town and reputable citizens, among them several physicians, testified to its genuineness, while the policemen who figured in the test were the regular oflBcers of the town, so there was little or no chance for fraud.

When I was a member of the Society for Psychical Research in Boston I saw two hypnotized subjects impersonate Bill Nye and a political orator. Dr. Pfeiffer was the hypnotic operator and he simply suggested to the one that he was Bill Nye and to the other that he was on the stump in the interests of his candidate. The speeches began and continued simultaneously, and it was difficult for us to follow each speaker, but we heard enough to know that the pseudo Bill Nye was irresistibly droll and very original, his witty eloquence flowing in a steady stream to the end of his long address. The stump speaker was just as good in his role, and it seemed remarkable to me that each should excel in his own adopted style of oratory. Both men in their natural state of mind were very ordinary, hardly up to the mediocre in their degree of intelligence, and yet when under hypnotic control each excelled in his line, each differing diametrically from the other.

The operator could not have given more than a mere suggestion to each, for to have given to one speaker his discourse word for word, he must have been an unusually fine orator, while to have given the two addresses simultaneously would have been a feat to be undertaken only by an East Indian adept.

What, then, was the inference.^ Each speaker must have tapped for himself the source of his inspiration. In some inscrutable manner the suggestion to the one that he was Bill Nye must have brought him in contact with Bill Nye's current of thought; he must have tapped it, as it were, while the stump speaker must have tapped the current of stump oratory.

These instances and many others that have come under my observation have led me to think that under certain conditions we come in touch with other minds, and also with a great reservoir of Life and Mind containing all that we desire to express of strength, vitality, health, harmony, opulence and beauty, of even more that we cannot now imagine. We have but to open the channel and it will flow through us.

I would not advise the channel opened by Hypnotism, for that calls for an injurious negative etate, and brings many evils in its train. I quote Hypnotism for the purpose of illustration, but do not indorse its use.

To return to the simile of the engine. We see it on the track, a motionless, lifeless thing, awaiting the touch of the engineer's governing hand. He opens the throttle and away she springs, a creature of life and power. Is it a miracle? No, an everyday occurrence, and yet a matter of law, a matter of adjustment, a matter of scientific certainty.

Power and life are let loose in us in very much the same way, as a matter of law, of adjustment, of scientific certainty. Complicated the human machinery surely is, but it is not impossible to understand and control it with a master's hand.

The engineer uses steam or electricity to run his engine. The human engine is run by Thought, the amount of energy put into it being regulated by the character of the Thought. There is a current of Thought generated in Illusion that is weak and inefficient. There is another, based on Truth, that is strong and all-sufficient. As a man thinketh, so is he. If he thinks himself strong he becomes so, as did the hypnotized subject who threw off the six strong policemen. Although physically weak he had been made to think himself strong; strength was suggested to him by the hypnotizer, and he became as a giant. The suggestion opened the way to the Universal Energy, which flowed through him and made him strong in spite of his feeble body.

And the truth is — Strength is not in muscle and nerve but in the spiritual force that infills them, else how is it that flabby muscle can perform the work of a Hercules.^ Also, how was it that Jeffries lost the fight with Johnson? His trainer said he was physically fit, but he began to doubt his power several days before the fight and so he lost it, because, although really a giant, he was bound in mental chains of weakness. Again, As a man thinketh, so is he.

You may think it is demeaning to spiritual force to assert that it gives strength to the prizefighter. But why not.f^ God is no respecter of persons. He gives of His Power to all who know how to get it. He sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. God gives energy but does not stipulate how it shall be used, because

Man's will is free. He can use or abuse Power as he sees fit, but of course he has to bear the penalty if he misuses Power. That is a part of his education in the mysteries of life and the laws of his being.