Psychology of healing; one in a series of book on the fundamentals of practical psychology, covering the field of success, health and happiness

Front matter

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Preface

The very great advance made in the science of mental healing during the last half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century must be self-evident to the most superficial observer. However, both in conduct¬ ing classes and in giving private counsel all authorities come sooner or later face to face with what I believe impresses every unprejudiced person in the line of mental healing, namely, the wide variety of cults and the large number of teachers and organizations, each one thinking he or it has discovered the one and only true method of mind healing. To my mind this condition is one of the biggest obstacles the whole movement of the power of the mind to heal has yet to overcome.

There can be no single person, no single organization which has sequestered all of the healing truth. To think otherwise is to be circumscribed by one’s own narrow prejudices.

Anything is true that works. Call it what you may. Tabulate its manifestations in what fashion you will, designate it what you choose. It matters not what name you give it—if it works it is true.

On every side we see cults, organizations and teachers who claim they draw from the only fount of mental healing truth. This, alas, is reverting to type, going back to the prejudiced, bigoted, circumscribed methods of the dark ages.

PBEFACE

That there may be made available to the public a set of books on mental healing which demonstrates the power of mind from every angle—showing that one method may be trne for Smith, another for Jones, and a third for Brown— is my object in presenting herewith various successful methods of healing. The desideratum, to my mind, in all healing, study and experience, is the development of a breadth of mind which will be nothing short of cosmic consciousness. In such a domain all will be able to worship at one shrine, enjoy peace of mind, fraternize with their fellows or commune with God in any manner they choose, free from the dictates of any powers that be, untrammeled by the chains of prejudice of their own or others’ forging.

Never will the world come into a cosmic consciousness— the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man—until we are willing to acknowledge the good which is to be found in realms other than our own whether it he in mental healing, in religion or in the life of practical experience.

Hence, in dealing with the power of mind to heal, the purpose of this series is to present, all told, some twentyeight different methods of healing as operated by different cults, teachers, religions, organizations and psychological centers, all of which have proved variously successful as they have been employed to meet the needs of various individuals.

David V. Bush.

Part I Power Of Mind Over Body Imagination

After I had taken my first course in expression, had learned a few gestures in elocution and was ambitious to make a stab in the oratorical world, I went back to the little country town that gave me birth, in the foothills of Pennsylvania, and started my oratorical-stabbing-business in the little rural schoolhouses scattered over the mountains in my native state.

If you had seen me in those early days when I was trying to get some of the rough edges knocked off, and the country twang out of my speech and the marks of the sod from my manners, you would have seen that there was more truth in this stab¬ bing business than humor. I had to try it on the dog somewhere, and the easiest kind of dog I could find was the good country folk in the land that gave me birth.

I had bought a cheap phonograph on the install¬ ment plan of five dollars down and two dollars per. I expected to pay this per by money made in my trying it on the dog-stabbing-oratorical start in the schoolhouses, “far from the maddening throng’’ where the good, kind country folk live the even tenor of their way. What a shock it must have been to their “tenor,” and what an experience it was to my “stab”!

I had a picture of myself taken by one of the country photographers, to “adorn” the little folder I carried to announce to the good people what a great show they were going to see—if they came out. I got the picture, because it seemed to me that it was the customary thing, irrespective of the fact that, to get a good picture, one must have a good background. That didn’t seem to bother me in those days any more than it does now, for what’s in a name, anyhow, and what’s in a picture—provided you know how to pay to have it touched up a little?

There was a blank date space below this pic¬ ture in which I stamped, with one of these little pocket rubber lettered outfits, the date on which I and my phonograph were to appear. Which made the bigger noise it is hard to tell now. I almost think, however, that the phonograph had me beaten, for it was the first one that was ever made and there was plenty of screech to it, lots of the metallic sound, plenty of grating and, withal, oodles of noise. As I look back over the quarter of a century and more that has passed, it occurs to me that nothing could have been much worse than the record I had, and any one who heard the “show” would have thought noth¬ ing could he worse than the recitations I gave— when the people came out to hear them.

I was my own advance agent. I called upon the teacher and told him what a wonder I was, and that for fifteen cents a head I’d give a show in his schoolhouse some night the next week. I think I was to give the teacher enough money to pay for the coal and for lighting the schoolhouse —if I got it. The rest was to be my own—if there was any left.

So the teacher let me announce to his school of fifteen or twenty little country lads and lassies, big farmer boys and country misses, that David V. Bush would give an entertainment, the next Wednesday night. The tickets would be fifteen cents for adults and ten cents for children.

Then I would sit down in a vacant seat behind one of those old desks made for two, get out my stamping outfit, begin to put in the name of the schoolhonse, the date and the price of my show. After stamping my stock announcement of the “show” on my little picture folder we handed these to the good children and they went on their way rejoicing to their homes.

When Wednesday night rolled around—if Wednesday nights ever do roll around—David V. Bush and his phonograph arrived. Some¬ times the schoolhouse was lighted and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes in the mid of winter there was a fire in the stove, and sometimes there was not. If not, I proceeded to light the lamps and start the fire. Then I would sit down and wait. We didn’t carry a circus ticket wagon with us, so I was my own ticket seller and cashier, as well as advance agent and date stamper. I’d wait until the hour arrived for the show to begin. Many a time the hour arrived, but no show be¬ gan—no one came out. Rather discouraging prob¬ ably, but there was something within my soul that cried out for victory; that I should not be out¬ done and that disappointment never should take my life and encase me in the coffin of failure. If

I didn’t make a go of it this Wednesday night, I’d try some other Wednesday night.

And so I did. Some nights I had as many as fifteen people out to hear me. I think on one occasion I took in as much as four dollars and fifty cents, and when I got hack to the place where I slept that night, I was so elated and so happy and so joyous and so hilarious, that sleep did not enfold me in her blessed arms that entire night. I law awake counting money again and again, dreaming of the future and planning what I was going to do when I should be able to get out of the schoolhouse-showsphere into the wide, wide world. Wasn’t I on the highway to success, fame and fortune? Hadn’t I made four dollars and fifty cents—in thirty days’ effort to get out a crowd—if I could do it once I could do it again. If I had failed six times and failure repeated itself, and now I had succeeded once, why wouldn’t success repeat itself? Thus I reasoned -ud thought, planned, dreamed, and by the time the cock—a most welcome companion—crowed in the morning to tell me that another day had dawned and all was well, I owned the world— in my mind, which is the best way to own it, anyhow.

With this capital of four dollars and fifty cents, I went to a blessed old aunt of mine, and told her that if I had a horse and buggy or cutter—for the snow covered the ground—I believed that my for¬ tune was made, and I could go throughout the country, fifty miles and more from the railroad, and return to her in the spring with not only money enough to pay for my horse outfit, but with enough to start out to buy the world. The dear old soul mortgaged her farm to put fifty dollars into my hands. It was ten years before I could pay hack that fifty dollars, hut what a wonderful aunt she was!

So I started out with my horse and buggy, thinking that probably I could get along once in a while with a buggy by shoveling through the snowdrifts, and that, should we have any bare spots, it would he hard to draw a cutter. I started out with my horse and buggy and a shovel, with my dear old aunt waiting for the news that the horse was paid for, but all that winter I never came across another four dollars and fifty cents in gate receipts for one night! The farther I went from the railroad, the more severe became the weather. The snow fell and fell and fell!

The wind blew and blew and blew! Finally I was stalled for several weeks because of the depth of the snow and the severity of the weather. I could not get out, even to make my own dates, and if I had been able to do it, the good people could not have come to my entertainments. The weather forbade.

Where Is It Cold?

If there is any place in this wide world, where it seems to me, it can be colder than any other, and you feel it, it’s in the mountainous country of northeastern Pennsylvania, where the dampness adds to the frigidity of the thermometer when the weather boss gets down to real weather bossing.

While thus held up, I stopped in a farmhouse where the usual wonderful rural hospitality pre¬ vailed. The good farmer had been at one of my entertainments. He invited me to his house. He knew I would be a great man some time and told me so. (Bless his good rural heart.) So I did “ chores’’ and odd jobs about the farm to pay for my board while thus snowed in. This helped to melt the Eskimo atmosphere considerably. The first night I slept in this farmhouse, they put me upstairs in a room through which ran a stove pipe from the room below. I had been in other country houses where this same way of heating the up¬ stairs was used, so that I felt very comfortable when I went to bed. In the morning I jumped up, tracked through snow on the floor to put down the windows and dress with teeth chattering and goose pimples pimpling.

But I got a glance at the stove pipe, so that I put on my duds in almost normal comfort and ease. Why should I be cold when the stove pipe was heating my room from the floor below? So my teeth stopped chattering and my goose pimples stopped pimpling. When I had finished dressing and went over to the stove pipe to place my hands near it for a final warming before going down¬ stairs, lo and behold! my hand touched the pipe and it was ice cold! Instantly I became frigid from the roots of my hair to the ends of my toes. While I thought the stove pipe was heating my room, I thought I was warm; but the instant I discovered I was in a room under which was a stove with no fire in it, I became as cold as a totem pole in Alaska. My teeth started chattering again, my goose pimples pimpling again, my fingers be¬ came numb and red and I went downstairs shiver¬ ing like a maple leaf in a North Dakota blizzard.

When imagination pictured a fire in the stove below and the heat from the pipe above, I was very comfortable. When the cold facts faced me, imagination took wings and fled and reality being no longer overcome by fancy, I saw things as they were in cold facts—in physical reality.

The important thing, however, is to get the real facts in mental reality. We can virtually imagine a world of reality or a world of fancy. The man who uses fancy and builds the structure of his career and happiness with the bricks and mortar of constructive and healthful imagination, is the man who may be able to live above his environ¬ ment, oblivious to the discouraging and unhappy conditions around him, irrespective of social standing, misfortunes, and conditions in a world made real to him by imagination.

The chamber of imagery may be so filled by the happy thoughts of success, health, and happi¬ ness that the material reality of lack, limitation, sickness, poverty, and failure is only the dis¬ carded human cocoon on the material plane from which you have evolved and are evolving to a permanent world of success, health, and happiness made possible by imagination—the weaver of man’s destiny.

Coue says imagination is the only way mind heals. Coue is only partly right as those who follow the various methods of healing which we have presented in this book and others in the series can prove. But the fact remains that the condition of the mind has as much to do in making and keeping one well as in making and keeping one successful and happy.

It is the purpose of this volume to adduce enough evidence from great medical and scien¬ tific men, as well as from the author’s own experi¬ ence, to assure the reader that there is more power in the mind to heal the body and keep it well than there is in drugs and poison.

Frank F. Moore, in “A Journalist’s Note Book,” tells the following amusing and significant story of the influence of imagination upon health. “A young civil servant in India, feeling fagged from the excessive heat and from long hours of work, consulted the best doctor within reach. The doctor looked him over, sounded his heart and lungs, and then said gravely, ‘I will write you to¬ morrow.’ The next day the young man received a letter telling him that his left lung was gone and his heart seriously affected, and advising him to lose no time in adjusting his business affairs. ‘Of course, you may live for weeks,’ the letter said, ‘but you had best not leave important matters undecided.’ Naturally, the young official was dis¬ mayed by so dark a prognosis—nothing less than a death warrant. Within twenty-four hours he was having difficulty with his respiration, and was seized with an acute paint in the region of the heart. He took to his bed with the feeling that he should never rise from it. During the night he became so much worse that his servant sent for the doctor. ‘What on earth have you been doing to yourself?’ demanded the doctor. ‘There were no indications of this sort when I saw you yester¬ day V ‘ It is my heart, I suppose, ’ weakly answered the patient. ‘Your heart!’ repeated the doctor. ‘Your heart was all right yesterday.’ ‘My lungs, then.’ ‘What is the matter with you, man? You don’t seem to have been drinking?’ ‘Your letter,’ gasped the patient. ‘You said I had only a few weeks to live.’ ‘Are you crazy?’ said the doctor. ‘I wrote you to take a few weeks’ vacation in the hills, and you would be all right.’ For reply the patient drew the letter from under the bedclothes and gave it to the doctor. ‘Heavens!’ cried that gentleman as he glanced at it, ‘This was meant for another man! My assistant has mixed up the letters.’ The young man at once sat up in bed and made a rapid recovery. And what of the pa¬ tient for whom the direful prognosis was intended? Delighted with the report that a sojourn in the hills would set him right, he started at once, and five years later was in fair health.”

Mind Healing

An extract from editorial in the London Lancet of June, 1885, by Buchanan, Prof, of Surgery, Glasgow University, says:

There can be no question that faith-healing is a fact. The brain is not simply the organ of the mind; it is also the chief centre or series of centres of the nervous system, by which the whole body is energized, and its component parts, with their several functions, are governed and regu¬ lated.

Who says that the Scotch are not up and a-coming? Even a Ku Kluxer can 0. K. in the open this medical endorsement without his Ku Klux garb.

Deaf

In one of my classes three doctors told of three people who heard, although one person suffered from punctured ear drums, another person had no ear drums at all, and the ear drums of the third person had been destroyed. Those people were actually able to hear sounds as though the ear drums and auditory nerves were normal. I won¬ der if that brought to your mind Beethoven, who was stone deaf and yet heard wonderful har¬ monies and wrote music that no other composer ever surpassed. Beethoven in his brain—in his mind—actually heard more harmony than ninety-nine hundredths of human beings who have nor¬ mal ear drums.

Wise is the man who does not shake his head, wag his tongue or beat the air “ag’in” mental science. All is mind. It is all a matter of how that mind is educated, how we are using it, how it is developed. The ordinary human has not developed one-tenth of his senses. We have not even reached the border line of mental science. We are out in the wilderness groping our way to a better understanding of the power of mind. The advanced thinkers, who are beginning to realize the efficacy of mind power, look up through the trees in our mental wilderness and get a glimpse of the ray of intellectual understanding from the sky of mental science above. The sun of the power of mind has not yet fully risen upon the horizon of intellectuality. Just a few beams of light are puncturing the dense forests of man’s mentality, but go on, brave soul, go on! You who believe in this are trail blazers. You are cutting the way in the forests of mental darkness, you are blazing a path for posterity to follow in your steps, you are leading mankind into the open wind-swept prairies of mental science. Ho the best you can. Plod on.

Continue to blaze the trail, and your children will rise up and call you “blessed.”

The inter-relation of the mind and body, while comparatively a new study, has been very seri¬ ously considered by many leading physicians and medical authorities for the last hundred years, until today I believe every up-to-the-minute physi¬ cian recognizes that in sickness and health, the mind has as much to do in effecting a cure as the body.

This, of course, has long been the burden of the gospel of applied psychology. While psychology treats primarily of the action of the mind and physiology of the bodily organisms and functions, yet the two are so closely related that physiolo¬ gists and psychologists ought to be extremely friendly. Of the two, however, i. e. mind and body, there is no doubt that mind is the more important. Therefore, it is the mind that we are primarily interested in, but every individual mind resides within, or at least expresses itself through the body. Hence, upon the preservation of that body and the proper functioning thereof, depend our health, our comfort and our lives.

It is the purpose of the author in this section of the Power of the Mind Over the Body, to adduce enough authority from the scientific world outside his own profession, to make it self-evident that the mind has power over the body to heal.

In this regard, Alfred T. Schofield, M. H., in the Unconscious Mind , says:

Sensations Psychical Not Physical

In entering npon this interesting and important sub¬ ject, let us clear the ground by emphasizing the suffi¬ ciently obvious fact that the special, and indeed all, sensa¬ tions are psychical, and not physical. The apparatus is physical, but sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and com¬ mon sensation are functions of the mind, not of the body; while the media which appropriately convey to the brain the various vibrations which the mind recognizes under these names, are all physical and material.

While Henry Wood in Ideal Suggestions Through Mental Photography comments as fol¬ lows :

Turning to therapeutic systems, mental causation is in substantial harmony with the highest and best thought of the seers and philosophers, from Plato down to the present time. It is only medical science, as it has gradually degenerated into a great drug prescription system, that seeks for primary causation in the inert clay of the body:

Inter-relation of Mind and Body

Still another great authority has this to say in regard to the inter-relation of mind and body:

To say that the mind controls the body presupposes that mind and body are distinct entities, the one belonging to a spiritual world, the other to a world of matter.

That the mind is master of the body is a settled prin¬ ciple of science. But we realize that its acceptance may require you to lay aside some preconceived prejudices. You may be one of those who believe that the mind is nothing more nor less than brain activity. You may believe that the body is all there is to man and that mind-action is merely one of its functions.

If so, we want you nevertheless to realize that, while as a matter, of philosophic speculation you retain these opinions, you may at the same time for practical purposes regard the mind as an independent causal agency and believe that it can and does control and determine and cause any and every kind of bodily activity. We want you to do this because this conclusion is at the basis of a practical system of mental efficiency and because, as we shall at once show you, it is capable of proof by the established methods of physical science.

Mental, Not Physical

In a great bowl shaped motordrome, in Newark, N. J., was held a bicycle race. The frenzied crowd was wildly cheering. Thousands upon thousands were watching with bated breath the riders whirl¬ ing by at the blinding speed of ninety-two miles an hour, when the motorcycle of one of the con¬ testants went wrong. It sped up the 28-foot incline like lightning, then hurled its rider over the rim to instant death. The motorcycle plowed into a deep-set iron pillar. Then this twisted chug¬ ging engine of death rebounded from the post and rolled over and over down the saucer to the lower level of the track.

Just a little way behind the first racer flashed the second contestant, blind to everything except the frenzied speed that he could get out of his machine, knowing nothing of the tragedy just enacted, he came tearing along. The screams and yells of warning from the crowd went unheeded. The mind of the rider was closed to all sensa¬ tions but one. The terrified throng saw the com¬ ing of a second tragedy. The screams of warn¬ ing from the crowd turned into low moaning, into an involuntary hut impotent prayer for the mercy that could not come. The second motorcycle shot with a speed surpassing that of an express train into the wreck of the first machine, then leaped into the air. The body of its rider was hurled fifty feet over the handle bars and fell at the bot¬ tom of the track a mass of human wreckage, limp, unconscious. Within two hours, he was dead.

A dreadful spectacle of death such as this gives food for thought to the careful student of the mind. The mass of human beings in the grand¬ stand were filled with confusion, cries of fright and panic, sobs, hysteria and screams arose. Many women fainted. Many were afflicted with nausea. With others the muscles of speech contracted convulsively. Hearts stopped beating. Knees gave way. What caused this ? Had the whirling engine of destruction struck these people? No! Observe that all of these emotions were wholly and purely the effects of mind—reacting to sen¬ sations—of sight and sound.

The various emotional conditions were aroused without any conscious effort on the part of the onlookers. Their knees gave way, their muscles contracted, speech was lost, nausea ensued, faint¬ ing followed—all without the conscious mind of the individuals being cognizant of what took place.

So you will find that not only is your body constantly doing things because your mind wills that it should, but also is incessantly doing things for the simple reason that they are expressions of a passing thought.

One of the most demonstrable principles of human consciousness is that every idea tends to express itself in some form of bodily activity.

A newspaper in Chicago published the follow¬ ing: “Not poisoned, but dead because she thought she was poisoned, 99 was the singular ver¬ dict pronounced by Coroner’s Physician Springer today, after performing an autopsy on the body of Virginia Jackson, an aged negro woman and former slave. “This old lady thought she had been poisoned,” said Hr. Springer, “and it affected her heart to such an extent that it killed her. ’ 9

There is a well authenticated case of a butcher, who, while trying to hang up a heavy piece of meat, slipped and was himself caught by the arm upon the hook. When he was taken to a surgeon, the butcher said he was suffering so much that he could not endure the removal of his coat; the sleeve must be cut off. When this was done, it was found that the hook had passed through his clothing close to the skin, but had not even scratched it.

Mind Affects the Body

And Professor James, the greatest of great psy¬ chologists, has said:

The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness what ever, be it sensation, feeling or idea, which does not di¬ rectly and of itself tend to discharge into some motor effect. The motor effect need not always be an outer stroke of behavior. It may be only an alteration of the heartbeats or breathing, or a modification in the distribu¬ tion of the blood, such as blushing or turning pale; or what not. But in any case, it is there in some shape when any consciousness is there; and a belief as fundamental as any in modern psychology, is the belief at last attained, that conscious processes of any sort, conscious processes merely as such, must pass over into motion, open or con¬ cealed.

Sir B. W. Richardson, M. D., says:

Eruptions of the skin frequently follow excessive men¬ tal strain. In all these, as well as in cancer, epilepsy and mania, the cause is frequently partly or wholly mental. It is remarkable how little the question of the origin of physical disease from mental influences has been studied.

Bain has also said:

There have occurred many instances of death, or men¬ tal derangement, from a shock of grief, pain, or calamity; this is in accordance with the general law.

Speaking of the effect of the mind upon the body, the great Darwin says:

In protracted grief the circulation becomes languid; the face pale; the muscles flaccid; the eyelids droop; the head hangs on the contracted chest; the lips, cheeks and lower jaw all sink downward from their own weight. The whole expression of a man in good spirits is exactly oppo¬ site of the one suffering from sorrow.

Mind and Features

In The Force of Mind, Alfred T. Schofield, M. D.,* voices the same belief:

The general appearance of a man is largely a physical expression of his mind, and his character is more or less legibly stamped upon the body. The state of the mind unconsciously alters the poise of the head, of the shoulders, arms and legs, and trunk. A short time of trouble may make a man look many years older than before it com¬ menced. The eye will lose its brightness, the face will become withered, the brow wrinkled, and the skin harsh.

With regard to sensation generally, Hack Tuke asserts that there is no sensation—general or special—excited by agents acting upon the body from without, which cannot also be excited from within by emotional states affecting the sensory centres.