E3. Mental Medicine.

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The first step toward both preventing and curing any form of disease is to get out of your mind the belief and error that your mental force is growing less or can grow less. That is impossible. It may seem to grow less because of the severity of your trials and afflictions. Bodies may go to waste but the unseen Force or mind using those bodies never wastes or decreases. It may not be able to act on the body. It may through ignorance and lack of training in mental control be scattered as it is scattered in thousands of cases where people’s thoughts are drifting all about with no power to fix those thoughts or that power on any one thing for ten minutes. But the scatterbrains power or thought is all fastened to and radiates from a center. Only, he or she lacks power to call it to that center. The source of all strength lies in power of massing your thought or force entirely on one thing.

 

The truth that you are a growing mind or Force and must be an ever growing Force, and that this Force can be self applied to strengthen the body can never leave you. The presentation of this idea to you is for you a great spiritual power. It may at times be buried up and seemingly forgotten. You may at times waver and doubt and get discouraged. Yet this truth will always come up again and assert itself, and reassert itself with greater and greater power, and finally proofs will come with such assertion and reassertion—proofs at first small but ever growing more convincing and ever increasing in number and importance— proofs as you find your maladies and weakness by degrees improving—proof as you find you do not take colds as readily as in years gone by.

 

The next step is to realize that the mind is the seat of all disease—that whatever thought is painful to the mind is a pain and cause of weakness to the body. If you are frightened your body feels the fright and is made weak. If you are angered your body shakes with that emotion. If you are in suspense or are hopeless or discouraged, the muscles do not feel or act as when you are bright or hopeful. Now you may for years have had fear or anger or suspense or discouragement acting on your body and it has weakened the body by degrees, and that weakness has affected some organ—eye, ear, stomach, lung, liver.

 

Resist in mind all that gives you pain or discomfort. Don’t say in thought “It’s too hot” or “It’s too cold, I can’t bear it.” When you say that, in thought you surrender to the elements and their power over you and the pain they will bring your body is greater than ever.

 

Say in your silent thought “It is true my body shrinks from this cold or this pain. But in my mind I will not shrink. I oppose the force that brings pain to my body. I defy it.”

 

You are then ever building up a power to resist the effect of the elements on your body. Every moment you so in mind oppose heat or cold, or any pain or inconvenience whatsoever, is so much clear gain. Every thought you so put out is as real a resisting power as lies in the muscles of your arm to hold at bay a savage dog. Every such thought is an additional stone in the structure you are building up to protect yourself against evil.

 

Oppose then in thought the Devil in any form and he will flee from you. The Devil is in whatever tries to master you. If you do not so resist, he will temporarily master you. You will never find a climate to suit you. It will always be too hot or too cold, or too something. You will find without such opposition the close, stuffy, overheated room still more uncomfortable. You will be borne down and overpowered by smells, by sights, by atmospheres.

 

It is by no means here implied that you must remain where surroundings or elements are unpleasant any longer than is necessary. It is not implied that you should martyrize or torture yourself simply for the sake of enduring. It is not implied that you should force yourself on what is unpleasant to mind or body. It is only implied that you should aim to master what is unpleasant, and so prevent its mastering you. There is no good gained by self‑inflicted torture of any kind. That is often the mistake of the ascetic who deprives himself of all pleasures—of the hermit, who would make a merit of complete solitude—of the Hindoo, who gashes his flesh with knives or swings impaled on hooks. This is simply resistance carried too far. Because one can endure is no reason why they should endure, when endurance is no longer necessary. That is expending strength which might be used to far more profit in other directions. The ascetic in any form is as much enslaved to the idea of deeming pleasure a sin as the devotee of any single appetite is enslaved by that appetite. Self conquest means simply self control. It is right that the body as the instrument of the spirit should administer any form of pleasure which does not injure the spirit. It is not profitable that the body, as the instrument, should be able to enforce any demand upon the spirit. The spirit is only safe when it can control and enforce its demands upon the body at any time, any place, and at any height of physical pleasure. The spirit is free only when it can do this.

 

You may fear an event or an individual, and if you do not in mind resist that fear it will in some way wear on the body. You may in mind resist it for days and feel no change. Yet be sure that persistent attitude or attempt to bring courage kept up in your darkest, most depressing moments, when you seem to have no heart to meet anything, and it is hard to assert yourself even against the impertinence of a child—be sure that at last strength will come—a mood of mind will come in which you may see the thing you fear in a new light; you may see how needless was your fear, how much imagination magnified it, or you may see how puny are your opponents, and when in mind you feel above them, you are above them and must conquer them. You war in these states of timidity and depression far more with the unseen than the seen. You have working on your mind the Powers of Darkness, or, in other words, mischievous, annoying intelligence of the unseen side of life, who desire to defeat your purpose, who play upon some over sensitive chord and so contrive to make a difficulty where none exists. Why are they allowed to do this? Because you must grow a force sufficient to overcome them. You cannot always be protected or you would have no force of your own. When through a prolonged struggle with some depressed or timid state of mind force and strength at last comes to you, that force and strength is all your own. It can never leave you.

 

If your mind is in disorder, if you are thinking or trying to think of half a dozen things at once you want to do—if you don’t know what to take hold of first and try to take hold of half a dozen things first, then your room will be in disorder, your desk and papers in disorder, and if this is a prevailing mood of mind your body will also suffer from some form of disorder, because the Force that does literally bind your body together is scattered. You are a bundle of sticks untied.

 

You can commence to tie them by setting in order a square inch or a square foot of your room or your desk—a corner of the room. 

 

Don’t try to do too much at once. Don’t look at all there is to do. If you do it will give you that feeling of disgust for it all, weariness of it all, that is really a sickness of the mind and surely leads to sickness of body. If your eyes get a little weak don’t run immediately for spectacles. Let the eyes rest a few months. No organ of the body is so strained as is the eye in the endeavor to read our fine print. The printer’s limit for eye power is just as much as it can make out to see without spectacles. That is on the same basis as if you were given a load to carry which taxed the utmost power of your muscles to lift.

 

Make up your mind firmly that your eyesight must be as good as ever it was. In taking immediately to spectacles thousands unconsciously make up their minds that because the natural sight has failed, it has failed for the remainder of their lives. When you take to glasses you take to crutches for the eye. Then of course you use eye‑crutches for the rest of your life. You do not reason or act in this way with a strained leg or foot. If you do seek the help of a crutch or cane you are continually in mind wishing to do without that cane and trying from time to time to walk without crutch or cane.

 

The eye can be made weak by some weakness of the body and this weakness of the body was caused by some kind of trouble of the mind—either grief or worry or anxiety—about something, for all these states of mind exhaust the force of the body.

 

Rest enables an overtaxed stomach to recuperate itself. Rest enables an overtaxed muscle or limb to become as strong as ever. Why should not rest restore an overtaxed eye? It is the same unseen force that gives strength to all the body’s organs. You do not rest the eye in wearing glasses. You do over stimulate it through putting on an artificial lens for concentrating the light to make you see which the natural lens has failed to do. It is an artificial stimulation for that organ as much as is the alcoholic artificial stimulation for the stomach to give it a temporary tone or get up an appetite, and you train your eye to lean and depend on the artificial stimulation. Of course, if you must read the fine print and in all shades of light, and your business compels you to, you must have the artificial aids, the glasses. But your necessities make no difference as to the result. A man can ruin his health as quickly in earning an honest support for his family as he can by imprudent exposure to damp air in highway robbery. The Law of Health is not even a respector of motive and if you dash into a burning house to rescue a family, you may be as badly burned as the robber who dashes in with you for plunder.

 

If you have a slight deafness, keep your thought always against deafness. Can your mind you ask throw out an obstruction in the ear an accumulation of the secretion peculiar to the ear? Your force or spirit throws off in time the outer covering or scab of a sore. It throws off continually the dead outer skin. When the mind can no longer use the body or the body as we say dies, there is no longer such casting off of dead matter from different portions and organs. Any sore that grows is because of lack of power or life in the body to bring to it life element or power. If you are educated to think a disease must increase it will increase, because then your mind is working its force not to help its body but to encourage the idea that the body is falling to pieces. Your mind then feeds the disease.

 

More disease comes of lack of rest than any other cause. Rest means rest for your mind as well as body. Whatever rests the mind rests the body. One means of rest comes of deep breathing or taking long breaths with a second’s interval between the inhaling and expelling of the breath. The Cornish miner practices this when at each blow with the sledge hammer, he makes the ejaculation “Hah!” The sailor practices this when hauling or hoisting one utters a certain ejaculation at the point where he has inflated his lungs to the greatest possible extent, and then pauses a second before expelling it with an exclamation. All working with him time their lung exercise in accord with the leader. The pause between the inhaling and expelling the breath when you are doing no physical work at all, rests the mind, because its tendency is to bring your thoughts to a focus or gather to one center, and this, if only for a second, when continued for a number of seconds brings your thoughts, your real self, more and more together.

 

The other and material benefit of occasional deep and measured or reposeful breathing is that it brings more air into the lungs. Air is food as well as grain. You increase the capacity of the lungs to take in this food and you create a better habit of breathing.

 

You are now suffering all manner of evil in unseen element, singly and alone. You are awakened to the truth that the action or attitude or state of your mind can benefit your health. But you can receive great help from other minds acting co‑operatively and at the same time and in the same place. If one mind can send in thought element a force to drive some form of disease from a persons body, ten minds in unison can send a far greater force. These ten minds in concentrated silent force are as one mind or a unit, acting together on the patient.

 

You benefit your friend very much when you talk him over with another or others and wish him well and keep his good qualities in the foreground and his defects in the background. You then out of your minds send him a current of element as real as a current of electricity which affects his body beneficially and makes his brain the clearer to see his own faults.

 

In the future and possibly the very near future, when your friend is dangerously sick or afflicted with some painful lingering malady, you will with a few others, having sufficient Faith and apprehension of this Law, meet together in some quiet room where the sun enters with the fresh force it sends to this planet in the morning, and clad in your newest and freshest garments and there for an hour, you will either send your best thought in silence to that person, or if moved speak of them, or if any among you have the gift of song you may in that way express sentiment and good will for them and be sure you will come to know that in this way you generate and send a power, a constructive power and element to help that person. If practitioners or people are immediately about them under whose care and influence they are and whose methods are different from yours, you will not in spoken or unspoken thought antagonize them. You will send only the thought and earnest desire that all having nearest access to the patient have their minds cleared as much as possible as to the right course to pursue, and you are in this peaceful co‑operative attitude of mind sending the strongest of all the forces to the patient and those about him, for you have put yourself in the line of action with that High and Divine and powerful realm, and current of thought and intelligence which produces the most power.

 

It is to be known in the near Future by the wiser of the race that there is no gain in fighting for the Truth. Blows can in thought be sent in the air and they can do bodies harm. But when you have harmed a body by a blow, either of muscle or a blow from a silent antagonistic thought, what have you done to change the state of the person’s mind whose body you may have destroyed? Nothing. If people’s methods seem to you wrong and stupid, there is no gain but only harm in abusing the people or their methods. You bring on yourself in so doing the counter current of hate and antagonism. Prove the wrong by showing a better way.

 

If I have a better house than yours, I do not prevail on you to copy my house by abusing you for building such a house, or abusing your house. It’s better to invite you to come into my house, look at it, and if you can see its superiority over your own, you may copy it, and if you can’t see such superiority no further effort of mine can make you see until your eyes are wider opened. 

 

Fatness comes through lack of Force to throw off an over secretion on the same basis as there may not be enough Force to throw off the callous skin which Nature puts on to protect the foot from the friction of a tight shoe. But the callous skin may become as great a burthen or annoyance as an excrescence, as the wearing leather it is meant to protect against, and your spirit or force may not be strong enough to throw it off. This causes the corn, which as a remedy provided by Nature becomes at last a source of more pain to the very part it is intended to protect. A corn is a scab which your spirit has not force enough to throw off. If you cut this abnormal growth you only stimulate it to grow again, exactly as you stimulate the fruit tree to grow by trimming it of superfluous branches. You concentrate on the trimming process whether in the tree or the corn more of what force there is to renew branch or corn.

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Of course you can reduce fat by reducing the amount of food. But the permanent cure comes of calling for force and exercising that mental force to throw off the cumbrous secretion and bring you into symmetrical proportion. If you simply desire to get rid of fat and care little for symmetry of proportion so that you are rid of a burthen, you will not get rid of it so rapidly. Because your desire is not based on the highest motive, and the higher the motive the greater is the thought power brought to act on you. The higher and more powerful motive in this case is the innate love of physical symmetry as an outward expression of your mental conditions or Spiritual Symmetry. If you reduce fat by a mere course of starvation with little or no call for adding force to your spirit, not only to keep it down but bring you into symmetry, you effect but a temporary relief as when you cut the corn, and your life will be a continual course of semi‑starvation and painful denial to keep the fat down, as was that of Lord Byron’s, whose existence was one continued series of alternations betwixt leanness and fatness through fasting and excess, because his desire for personal symmetry was based on a relatively low motive. As a material means to bring the body into proportion, dieting is useful. But no person throws off the cumbrous load permanently unless there is a strong spiritual aspiration, and many people’s aspirations are stronger than they realize themselves.

 

During the youth of the body your spirit acts with most force on that body. So wounds heal quickly and all dead useless matter is more quickly thrown off. The body like a vegetable has a growth and life of its own, apart from your spirit or mind. But it is a limited life—It has its growing, material youth like a tree—its physical maturity or ripeness like a tree and then its decay like a tree, because your spirit has not grown to sufficient power when your body’s maturity is reached to call ever for power to replenish that body with living unseen element. You have not even known this was a possibility. The proofs of this possibility are that men of active fertile minds and strong wills do unconsciously in their desire and determination to live as long as possible, call such power to themselves and such men do live longer than the average lives. If they so live as long as they do, why should not human life be longer when this Law is recognized, and consciously and more intelligently exercised.

 

Magic implies results obtained without the use of physical agencies. Did we see more clearly we should find that all things done in the physical world are done through this power. Men and women having the stronger element of thought move other men and women of lower and less powerful thought to their will. It is a power which no person can give or really teach another. It must by the individual be grown to even as in the physical world the infant grows to the strength of maturity. True, one person may as to this power give another some suggestions and some little knowledge regarding its use. But if your knowledge in this respect is based and depends on what you may have received from others, then you have not struck the main source. That lies entirely in yourself. It needs but the persistent desire of two things.

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First, to be in the path of exact Right and Justice to all, including yourself.

 

Second, to be able to believe in the Supreme Power as a reality from which you can by simple but imperative demand draw ever more and more of power (new ideas) to you and add it to you.

 

The sum and substance of all we have put out in these books is based on these two truths.

 

“Magic” is an intelligent use of the thought forces belonging to us and about us exactly as the element of electricity not long since quite unknown is to‑day utilized for many practical purposes.

 

Thought can be accumulated and stored by the individual or a group of individuals. One method of so storing it we have indicated in the “Use of a Room.” Its quality and power can be continually increased by the individual or a group of individuals. Its power to bring material things to pass depends upon its quality. The quality of one person’s thought may be far finer and more powerful than that of another, and in proportion to such quality will be his or her power to control everything in the material world. The quality and power of a person’s thought can be adulterated and weakened by mingling it with that of an inferior mind. The power of the thought of the Christ of Nazareth and of others before his time enabled Him and them to perform seeming miracles. These “miracles” were simply results obtained through knowledge, knowing how to use this fine element. Such use and knowledge come as much within the domain of “science” as the knowledge of the use of steam or electricity.

 

This knowledge is open, not to all, but to those who can receive it. It is open to all who will not set their minds stubbornly against new ideas. Those who are so stubborn cannot be blamed. Their minds in their present condition cannot at once be changed to receive new ideas.

 

There can be no secrets to such as can receive. Nor can any secrets regarding this science be kept from such as are open to the truth. As you grow in spiritual knowledge new methods will be constantly opening to you to increase the power of your thought, to prevent its escape, to prevent adulteration and to use your power to the best advantage, first, for your highest good, next, that of others.

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Q's note:

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Pamper Yourself.  

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