Washington, D. C.

National Publishing Company, 1902.

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Contents

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

Lesson 6

Lesson 7

Lesson 8

Lesson 9

Lesson 10

Lesson 11

Lesson 1

I am now going to suppose that you know nothing of Mental Healing and have come to me to ask what it is and how it works. You say you cannot possibly understand how it is that the thought of one person can have any effect upon the body of another person, although you are ready to admit that your own thought has its influence upon your own body. You do not question that in the least. You know that your hand moves in obedience to thought, and so with all the members of your body. This has gone on so long and you are so accustomed to it that it seems a simple fact enough. It is, however, really a very complex and mysterious process. Merely taking it for granted does not explain it. What is thought, that it should act on the nerves and muscles of your body and produce motion? Who ever saw a thought when it so acted on nerve and muscle? No one has ever been able to explain the mystery and yet we accept it as a fact. Do we do this because physiologists tell us it is so? No. We know it through our own inner experience.

For instance. 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 know, or am conscious, which means the same thing, that my taking up of that book is the result of my first thinking that I would like to see the book, and afterward thinking that I will see it.

I know that my thought has somehow extended my hand toward the table and caused the fingers to close about the book and then my hand has drawn the book toward me. Hundreds of nerves and muscles have been brought into action, and yet I do not know how it was accomplished. I may have it explained to me how muscles contract and expand 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 shall therefore take it for granted that you will acknowledge that, but when I ask you to go a step further and accept the fact that my thought can act on your body I am not surprised when you shake your head incredulously and say it cannot be done.

But suppose I point to a hundred instances where it has been done. Again you shake your head and say — Coincidence.

Well, I am determined, if possible, to convince you. How shall I proceed? I want to prove that a more wonderful healing power has come to the earth than was ever vested in drug or other curative agent. All the drugs and healing agencies in the world have failed to give you perfect health, and that is why this new power is knocking at the world's door today. It has done more than that, it has entered but has not been hospitably received by all, and has been rejected by many who needed it most, and rejected because they could not understand, from a scientific viewpoint, how thought can produce the results in healing which are claimed for it.

I can well remember how hard it was for me to realize in the early days of my healing that I was accomplishing anything with my thought. It seemed such an airy, impalpable nothing. I could not see it going forth upon its healing mission, and it was not until the work was done that I had any proof of its having gone forth. Even then I was inclined to think it was a coincidence that the patient improved when I began treatment. It was only after many cures that I gave up the idea that the patient just happened to get well anyway. Finally, the coincidences became so numerous that there seemed a law in action, and I was at last convinced that it was indeed my thought that was doing the healing.

My faith in the transmission of thought from one person to another was often strengthened by a simple experiment. Perhaps you have tried it. If not I advise you to, for it is very significant. 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 that he shall find. Surround this person in a closed circle with joined hands, while all of you think steadily of the key in the place where it is deposited. After a time the blindfolded person, with slow and uncertain steps, will begin to move toward the key and will ultimately find it.

This is the sensation of the one blindfolded as I experienced it. First my mind felt utterly vacant. All thought seemed to vanish. Then in a few seconds I felt pushed as by unseen hands in a certain direction. So strong was the inclination of my body in that direction that I would have fallen had I not put out one foot to save 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 instead of veering away from it or going around it as I might have done, 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 reached the wall I felt a desire to stretch upward with one arm. I did so and touched the key where it hung upon a nail.

Now, had the action 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. It seemed more like a blind instinctive movement for which I could not account. I was impelled to move, I knew not why. It therefore seemed as though the thought acted directly upon my body without passing through the medium of my mind. Still, had it first passed through the mind it would have confirmed the fact of thought transmission. The position of the key would have been conveyed to my mind without spoken word and the thought itself must have been transmitted directly and without the usual medium of speech.

The law of telepathy or thought transmission is now accepted by scientific men the world over, but I am assuming that you do not know this and that the subject is entirely new to you; in which event you have a simple experiment at hand. It is easy to try it and convince yourself, for personal experience goes a long way toward conviction, in fact, conviction seldom comes without it.

There is a large hospital in Paris called La Salpetriere. It is one of the oldest and largest hospitals there, covering an area of seventy-four acres and consisting of forty-live large blocks. In that hospital the patients are treated almost entirely by the power of thought. The doctors there do not call it mental healing, however; they call it hypnotic suggestion, but thought power is the agent just the same. They do some queer things there which you would hardly believe did not the reputation of the physicians and the standing of the hospital back up the statements.

Now, hypnotic suggestion differs from mental healing in several respects, one of which I will mention. In hypnotic suggestion it is deemed necessary to throw the patient into a peculiar state of sleep which is called hypnosis. In mental healing we do not think that essential, for we believe it to be an abnormal or unnatural condition and would therefore avoid it if possible.

But let me tell you what is done to these patients while in the 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 is done ? Quite a mystery, is it not ? But being done by reputable doctors in a reputable hospital you cannot very well doubt it.

Then these doctors take a fly-blister and divide it into three parts, 1, 2, and 3. Number 1 they place upon a patient's right arm, number 2 upon the left and number 3 upon the arm of a person who is not in hypnosis. This done, the doctor says of number 1 that it will not draw a blister, and says nothing of number 2 or 3. The result is that number 1 does not draw a blister. They call that negative suggestion, which means that the blistering power is all taken away from 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 drawn out of number 1, but perhaps it is more correct to say that the skin of the patient is made positive against it. The flyblister becomes negative 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 effect produced by numbers 2 and 3.

What a wonderful power this is, to be sure, that can turn a drop of pure, cold water into a violent irritant, or a fly-blister into something as harmless as a postage stamp.

I could tell you of many other curious experiments that are performed not only in La Salpetriere, but in other hospitals, and by many physicians in their private practice. Dr. Charcot, whose standing at the head of the medical profession no one will question, is known to have used hypnotic suggestion largely and in preference to drugs, and the same is true of many of the most advanced physicians of the day.

I will now quote from the Medical Summary, of Philadelphia, which says editorially:

"A popular writer has said that 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 practice suggestion by taking with them the assurance of better things to come. A word of cheer, the reassuring smile, inspires hope — this, too, is suggestion. Rheumatic rings, magnetic healing, and divine healing all have their tap root in suggestion. Pain, sleeplessness, neuralgia, rheumatism, headache, etc., often yield to 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, and for my part I am not at all inclined to antagonize the profession as a whole, or indeed, at all. What if there are some illiterate physicians who are opposed to the new movement. They do not lead the van. There are others, more intelligent, who are in the lead, and the ignorant will follow. I have many regular physicians on my list of subscribers, who write me for instruction. Others who actually send their patients to me for treatment, and others still who take treatment themselves, who acknowledge the inefficacy of drugs, and ask for something better. One physician in New York asked me to go in partnership with him, and if the truth were known physicians as a whole are not so prejudiced as they are represented to be.

Of course, if we go in as cranks and order that the attending physician be turned out of the sick room, we naturally stir up some ill feeling. That is the mistake the Christian Scientists have made, as in the case of Harold Frederic, where the doctor was discharged and the patient died. If the Christian Scientists always saved their patients it would be quite another thing; they could then discharge doctors with impunity, but since they often fail, it were better not to attempt to carry things with so high a hand since it serves to bring discredit upon their movement. Mental Scientists, on the other hand, are more modest in their claims, more courteous to the medical profession, and rarely fail to heal their patients.

You see the world keeps moving on and no conservatism can stop it. One system gives place to another. Different schools of medicine have appeared, had their day, and vanished. Mental Healing is here now. It is having its day. When that day has passed it will give place to something else, but that does not concern us. While we have a power for good in our hands it is best to use it, and not go about vaguely seeking for what is to follow. When Mental Healing is on the wane it will be time enough to look for something better. And it is not on the wane, but steadily rising toward the Zenith.

When you realize that a drop of cold water, when used with hypnotic 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 alone can produce the blister and it has done so. On the other hand, thought alone can prevent a blister and it has done so.

Professor Wm. James, of Harvard University, says that tumefaction can be produced by thought in any part of the body. By the same principle, applied in the opposite manner, tumefaction can be removed by thought.

Dr. Elmer Gates has shown that blood can be sent here and there at will throughout the body by simply thinking it there. This he can prove to you beyond a doubt. Other men of science are giving out quite as remarkable statements and their word must go for something. You cannot shake your head forever and doubt everything and everybody. You accept a great deal on the evidence of chemists, astronomers and naturalists, and the evidence in favor of the power of thought in curing disease 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 that of another is that there does not seem to be any material agent of transmission, any 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 which we may not detect with our senses which nevertheless exist and this is one of them.

Electricity exists all about us, but we are unaware of the fact, and there was a time when we would have deemed it impossible that it should be pressed into service as it now is. If Edison lives long enough he will show us how to find and use it without putting up great electric plants and a lot of cumbersome machinery. Even now he is discovering a way to produce it direct from coal. We shall run our automobiles, light our houses and do all sorts of things with electricity minus the engine or dynamo. What an advance, but it only goes to show how the world is moving toward finer and finer agencies.

Who would have thought that we should be telegraphing without wires ? I confess that it is still a wonder to me when a transmitter is set up here in Washington and a receiver in Boston, that a message should travel without wires from here to Boston and not get lost on the way. But it gets there and so does thought when it goes from a healer here to a patient in Boston. The healer is the transmitter and the patient is the receiver, the message going straight and true from one to the other. And not only that, but from here to England, from here to Finland, from here to South Africa, from here anywhere wherever the receiver is set up in the form of a patient. It may take weeks for a letter to go to some of these places, but a thought goes in an instant, like an electric flash. We have discovered an electrical thought power, and we live in an electrical age. Great and still greater wonders are to be unfolded in the present century.

In my next lesson I shall say something of how thought controls the involuntary activities of the body, the beating of the heart, circulation of the blood, digestion, etc.

In the meantime, think over what I have said about this thought power, and you will be ready to admit that there is at least a of possibility its transmission from mind to mind. That once admitted, it will not seem so ridiculous or improbable that it should heal disease. If you believe that thought is a force, that it acts on the body and also believe that it can be transmitted from one mind to another or from one mind to another body, then it seems to me but a step for you to believe that it can either produce or cure disease.

Have you not noticed that the angry thought of another can make you ill, even though not a word be spoken? That simply goes to show how thought can produce disease. There is another quality of thought that can heal. We will speak of that later.

Lesson 2

In my former lesson I tried to make it clear that thought is a force, a silent force, that can act without the medium of spoken or written word, and that the thought of one mind can act on the body of another person. It can act for good or ill. It can make well or it can make sick. Since it is such a power it is wise to know something about it, and how to use it. That knowledge is open to anyone who will seek for it, and it is so well worth seeking that I feel like calling it — The one thing needful, to be desired above all things.

If you wished to run a locomotive you would certainly acquaint yourself with its parts; you would learn about its mechanism and how it worked, or you would be a very poor engineer, and probably have an accident on your first trip. You would go on having accidents until you knew more about your engine and how to control it.

Now, that is just what we have been doing. We have attempted to run a human engine of which we know far too little, and in consequence have had our mishaps, which we called sicknesses, and our engines have been in the repair shop far too much of the time. To be sure the mechanism of the human engine is much more complicated and difficult to understand than that of its iron brother, but it is possible to learn all that is necessary to know, in order to have it under perfect control It takes time, of course, and thought, and perseverance, but it is time and thought 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? To bring our powers, well evolved, to bear upon the vocation which we may choose is to make delightful work of it, and not painful labor.

We are placed in the position of the man who might attempt to run an engine without sufficient knowledge of it He must experiment, and so must we. He must find the motive power and learn how to use and control it; so must we. He must be able to increase that motive power; so must we.

But here the analogy ends, for, while the power of an engine has a limit, ours has none.

I once saw a slender, delicate little fellow who had been without food for a week perform a feat which would have shamed a Sandow. He had been thrown into a hypnotic sleep in a public hall and kept under constant surveillance during the seven days of his fast, and at the dose he was placed in a chair and held down in it by six strong policemen. At a signal from the man who held him in hypnotic control the little frail creature sprang up and threw off those powerful men as though they had been insects which had settled upon him. Now, where did his strength come from ? It was certainly not resident in his flabby muscles.

I have seen many exhibitions of this kind, and it all goes to convince me that we are open on the inner, mental side to a great reservoir of strength, which can pour into weak muscles and strengthen them on the instant. Once, before the Society for Psychical Research in Boston, I saw two hypnotized subjects impersonate Bill Nye and a political speaker. The operator 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 pseudo Bill Nye was irresistibly droll, and his eloquence flowed in a steady stream to the end of his long address. The stump-speaker was just as good in his role, and to me it was remarkable that each should so excel in his oratory, for certainly the operator could not have given more than a suggestion for each to carry out. If he had given to either speaker his discourse word for word he must have been a remarkably fine orator, while to give two such addresses simultaneously to the two speakers would have implied more ability than I for one moment could have believed him to possess.

What, then, was the alternative? Each speaker must have tapped for himself the source of inspiration. In some inscrutable way the suggestion to the one that he was Bill Nye must have brought him in touch with Bill Nye's current of thought, while the suggestion to the other that he was a stump speaker must have connected him with that current.

These instances and many others of a similar character have led me to think that back of each one of us is this great reservoir containing all that it is possible for us to express of strength, of vitality, of health, of harmony, of beauty, of all that we can imagine, of all that we would be. We have but to open the channel and let it flow through.

There stands the engine on the track, a motionless thing awaiting the touch of the engineer's hand. The throttle opens 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, and of greatest importance to you and me; for power, or life, is let loose in us exactly as it is in the engine. It is done by knowing how. Complicated as the human machinery certainly is, it is not so difficult to understand and control as it would seem.

If you expect to run an engine you will save yourself a great deal of time and trouble by accepting without question the instruction which an experienced engineer can give you. Don't stand and argue with him about it, but go ahead and do what he tells you to do. He is able to run an engine, and run it satisfactorily; therefore, he is a good man to listen to at the start. You may improve on his methods later on and get more speed out of the engine than he can, but you cannot do it now; and you are likely to make a mess of it if you try. Put in practice his ideas now and evolve some of your own after a time.

For the same reason I shall ask you to accept and act on my statements, because they have served me well in running my engine and because I know they will also run yours. You may need something to suit the particular adjustment of your machinery, to get the very best out of it, but that will come to you afterward easily and naturally from your own thought and experience.

Human engines, although differing greatly in detail, are all run on the same general principle, and it is only that which I am giving you. The detail you will work out for yourself.

All railroad engineers use water for the generating of steam. They are of one accord in that respect. One does not use water and another vinegar and another molasses. They all use water. Why? Because it is the best for the purpose. There are reasons why vinegar or molasses are not as good, but if you attempt to argue with an engineer and ask him why they are not as good, a look in his eye will pronounce you a fool for your pains, or he may say, brusquely, "Better go along and try 'em."

The engineer is a practical man, you see. He has good, sound, solid sense. He does not stand mooning about the "why" and the "wherefore," as too many of us do, but straight away goes ahead and does something and gets somewhere.

Now, the using of water in the engine is a general principle. Something not to be questioned, but put in practice. And so of the general principle which I would give you and which I ask you to accept on trust. It is this:

In running the human engine you must turn on a certain current of thought, and that current is yours to command.

When I hear people say that they cannot control their thought currents I know better. I know they have not tried long enough or in the right way.

And I want to say another thing to you which I hope you will accept on trust until you can prove it for yourself. I want to say that there is nothing but the Water of Divine Truth or True Thought which will serve you well in your engine. You can let in currents of thought which correspond to vinegar or molasses, but you will get from them only corrosion or stickiness instead of motive power.

There is a True Thought concerning yourself, and there is also a False Thought. The False Thought is nothing but an illusion, and yet while it is in your mind it seems real, and you act from it as such. You think of yourself as weak and you act so, but you are no more weak than was the hypnotized subject who threw off six strong policemen. How did he do it ? Because for the moment his real strength was revealed to him. You have often seen the quotation — "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." That applies to the case in hand. This man thought he was strong, and in consequence he was so.

The same principle applies to disease of any kind. You may have some internal trouble, and you may think it is a cancer. If you think so strongly enough it will be a cancer. Or, on the other hand, you may actually have a cancer and if you can be made to think strongly enough that you have not one the cancer will go away.

But, how are you to be made to think you have not a cancer when you have ? Ah, but have you? That is the point. It all depends upon what you regard as you. If you are your physical body, why then you have the cancer sure enough. I shall not deny it. What I do deny is that you are your physical body, and I declare instead that you are a birthless, deathless spiritual identity, having the power to put on many envelopes of flesh which you will call your body. No one knows how many of these envelopes you have had already. No one knows how many you will have in time to come. The one you have now is continually hanging,

and if it has a cancer now, it need not have three months hence. The length of time required to heal it will depend upon the control you have over your body.

Now listen— When I say THE CONTROL YOU HAVE OVER YOUR BODY, does it not sound as though you were something above and superior to your body? Else how can you control it? As long as you think of yourself as your body, or your body as yourself, you cannot establish any claim of superiority over any of its states or activities or be able to bring them under control.

When you say of the real self, which is you, that it has not a cancer you are speaking the truth, for the more you know of this real self the more strongly you will realize that it cannot have cancer or any defect or disease and, as you realize this, your thought takes on a positive character because IT NOW IS THE REAL THING and not subject to illusion. It is now THINKING THE GOD TRUTH, IS FIRED WITH THE DIVINE ENERGY AND CAN HEAL YOUR BODY.

And what is true of healing disease in the body is also true of healing the mind of its worries, its troubles, its apprehensions, its griefs, its weariness and all its woes.

I can feel within myself how it is that the true self is not touched or hurt by any of these things, but the difficulty is to make my thought clear to others. Just as I was thinking how I might best express myself on the subject I came across the following, which seemed to throw a high light on my thought. It is from an article by M. E. Carter in The Humanitarian, originally published in Mind:

"Some years ago, while at Greenacre, Eliot, U. S. A., I saw a picture that impressed me deeply. It was painted by an idealist, a girl only nineteen years of age. The picture represented a beautiful head, the face being perfect in outline and color; but the large, dark eyes seemed to be looking far away, seeking with a hungry, unsatisfied expression something apparently unattainable. The face was inexpressibly sad, with all its beauty and earnestness. Close beside this head, with a cheek almost pressed against it, was another head — the face perfect in serenity and a study in its calmness and peace. Both were beautiful; but one left on the beholder a sense of hunger and anxiety, while in the other there was nothing to desire. The picture interpreted itself as one looked upon it. There in graphic outline was the oft-repeated story of the human being not yet awake to its divine Self — hungry, anxious, sad, yearning for it knows not what; and all the time the divine Self, the real Self, the true being, close at hand, waiting for recognition ! It is this true Self of each one of us with whom, sooner or later, we must become acquainted, and whose presence we must learn to realize every moment of our lives thereafter."

Now, if you begin to argue and question the possibility of there being two selves and get involved in a lot of metaphysical perplexities, you will be like the man who spends a lot of time questioning whether vinegar or molasses will do the work of water in his engine. Don't waste time over that foolishness, but turn on the water and go ahead.

Seek the real self, and if you do not find it, or even get a glimpse of it, or feel a vitalizing sense of its presence, if a great peace does not come over your spirit while your troubles melt into thin air and your diseases fall away like the old plumage from a bird in the spring — why, if all this does not happen, and much more that is good, then you can go back to metaphysical discussion, but in my opinion you will never need to go back to it, for you will have found something so much better. Instead of theorizing about the KEAL THING you will have found it.

It will help you very much to see in mind the painting just mentioned with the two selves so well portrayed. One restless, sad, unsatisfied, hungry, anxious and longing for it knows not what, the other perfect in its serenity and a study in calmness and peace. And remember that Other Self, that Great Self, is so close, so close!

The little self compared with it is as a wave on the surface of the great ocean. It rises, asserts itself, then seeks again its source and is one with it. Some writers call this the loss of identity. I call it the finding. The wave is not lost when it mingles with ocean, for does it not come forth again?

Lesson 3

In my second lesson I intended to speak of subconscious action, but in leading up to it I covered so much space that I concluded to defer the topic to this lesson.

Various writers use the term, subconscious, in different ways. With some it seems to indicate, what I should call instead, the superconscious, or what Emerson called the Over-Soul.

That is not what I mean by the subconscious, for I would use it to denote a mental power governing what is known as the involuntary action of the body, such as the beating of the heart, the circulation of the blood, digestion, or any process not immediately dependent on or controlled by the will. The act of walking is largely subconscious, while the direction in which one walks is generally dependent on the will, although it often happens that when one goes in the same direction daily the feet will seem to turn corners of their own accord while the mind is fully occupied with other things.

The subconscious mind is a bundle of habits, and habits of long duration, at that. The subconscious mind contracts habits of disease, that is a part of it gets to moving in a wrong direction and keeps on so moving to the disturbance of the general harmony until something happens to set it right, or all the other parts adjust themselves to the erratic action and establish a sort of truce among themselves, compromising as it were for the sake of temporary peace, though not for the greatest good of all concerned.

It is well known that the different parts of the body will change position to make room for a misplaced organ, and though they could perform their work much better in their own proper places, after a little grumbling and complaining they settle down to business in their new quarters and get on quite amicably, though there is always a lingering element of discontent. They seldom break out in open riot, but simply make the owner of the body in which they are ensconced fell somewhat uncomfortable. He knows something is wrong with the servants in his inner chambers. He cannot see what it is, but is made to feel that something is not as it should be, and there is discord in his house of flesh.

The subconscious mind is really subordinate to the conscious mind, although it has a way of asserting itself and going off on its own hook just as all subordinates will do at times.

One writer has ingeniously put it that the human organism maintains itself by holding in leash lower forces that are always struggling to get away and gain their freedom. It certainly looks like it, for no sooner does the spirit, which holds the body intact, take its departure than the wildest anarchy ensues, every atom hurrying to get away from organic control.

It may be mere fancy on my part, but I cannot help thinking that if we treated these atoms with a little more consideration we should get better and happier service from them, but that is a mere thought in passing.

We have accepted the fact that somehow the physical economy is regulated with intelligence, but have not been so ready to believe that the regulating intelligence dwells within the organism itself. That it does is one of the strongest points in our healing philosophy, and in proof of this let me quote from one of my own articles on the subject:

"The body is like a clock which has been wound up at some time in the past, and death is the running down of its mechanical action. The conquest of death then is the winding up of that clock and the process is simple when once learned.

Let us see if this is not true.

Long ago in the early beginnings of life on this planet that little protoplasmic form, the amoeba, had a desire for food. Impelled by this desire it floated here and there until it came in contact with the object of its desires when it folded itself about that object, absorbed that which it could assimilate and released the balance. As time went on its desire grew stronger and stronger, and its need for more varied food greater, so that instead of letting its prey go quickly it held on to it, so as to extract, if possible, still more sustenance. This resulted finally in a settled contractile effort which converted the flat surface of the amoeba into a tube-like formation, the first nucleus of a stomach.

But this little stomach could not digest all that it stowed away and would probably have had a severe touch of indigestion had it not in time gotten rid of that portion of its food which could not possibly be assimilated, therefore ducts or channels were formed for liquid and solid matter to pass out of the little organism which no longer needed them. These ducts were primitive bowels and kidneys. To supply other needs, eyes, ears, heart, lungs and other organs were formed.

These organs owe their origin and growth to conscious action on the part of the individual projecting them. No matter how low the form of life, if it has any knowledge of external objects it possesses consciousness, for to be conscious means simply to know, the word "conscious" being from the Latin conscius, from con and scire to know. The amoeba was conscious, because it knew of the presence of its prey, and it had volition because it willed to grasp that prey. It acted then with conscious volition and in this way it projected the organs which it afterwards developed.

But as its desires grew apace it dropped the control of the first established activities, because it could do so by virtue of mechanical law. If you set a ball rolling it is carried forward by the momentum given by your hand, which is the agent of your conscious volition, and the ball rolls on until the force transmitted is spent. By the same law the mechanical action which was set up at first in the body by conscious volition continues until the force imparted to it is exhausted.

In this way our bodies are running as the result of an action set up long ago. As we go from childhood to old age we get farther and farther from the original impelling force until finally the mechanism runs down, just as a clock would with no hand to wind it.

But just so surely as a clock can renew its action just so surely can the human body do the same and escape that cessation of activity which we know as death.

What we must learn, then, is how to wind the clock and also how to regulate its machinery."

I will tell you how to do this.

The machinery in the subconscious mind is not like wood or steel and so you regulate it with different tools. The tools you must use are words either in thought or spoken. You can also use emotion, which is sometimes utterly without words.

If people understood this better they would know why a Mental Healer tells a patient that he is well and strong when he is evidently sick and weak. If the subconscious mind were not under the control of the conscious it would not do the slightest good to make such an affirmation. It would produce no more effect than a pebble thrown against a stone wall.

That it does produce an effect is due to the fact that the subconscious mind is sensitive, vibrating substance, mind substance, and when it is touched by a living word it moves in accordance with that word.

Living words are words of health, words of success, words of good cheer and the subconscious mind responds to them by producing better circulation, better heart beats, better muscular and nerve action, better sight, better hearing and better digestion.

On the other hand, dead words, such as: "Oh, I am so sick, so miserable, so poor, so unfortunate and so hopeless," all have a depressing effect and lower the tone of the whole system, producing in every detail the very opposite of the live words.

Not once alone in the history of the world was the Word made flesh, but every day and every hour and every moment is it occurring.

The Word is always being made flesh and happy he who chooses the living Word.

If I tell you that you are well when you think you are as sick as you can possibly be and live, it will seem to you like a baseless and unreasonable assertion, but it is not, and why?

Well, it is not baseless or unreasonable from the fact that I am not talking about that physical mood which constitutes your present state. If I see you in a rage at a certain moment and yet know you to be naturally a person of equable and sweet temper, shall I pronounce you a savage brute ? Shall I take this ephemeral state to be you ? You know I would not.

Very well, your sickness is just as much a passing mood of the body, and I take my firm stand on what I know to be true of the real you. I speak from that standpoint, and thus my statement is true.

You know there is a real you, which is back of all moods, all experience and all change. You feel it to be so.

I know that much, and I know something more, something of great importance to you, something that will serve to lift your head above many a trial, many a sickness, many a loss.

It is this: The real you is a Great Self, as glorious as an angel, as radiant as the sun. Some have called it The Shining One, and I think that a very beautiful name.

But why does anything so perfect find difficulty in expression, and if it is so great and glorious, why does it manifest all these scars and blemishes, these deformities, diseases and sorrows?

For the same reason that a shadow encompasses the earth when clouds get between it and the sun. The sun shines just the same, though the earth knows it not.

There is a state in consciousness which corresponds to the earth in shadow. In that state we do not see The Shining One. It does not penetrate the clouds. It cannot manifest where the atmosphere is not a good medium, but it still shines on, pure, serene and perfect.

It is hard to prove in so many words that which the soul knows to be true, but there is no truth of which I am more fully convinced than that of the Perfect Indwelling Self as a radiant centre of life. I am also convinced that this Perfect Self, acting on the conscious mind and through it on the subconscious, will dissipate the clouds of disease, of trouble, of poverty and all that offends, leaving only that which is beautiful and sweet and good as the bodily expression of The Shining One.

I said in the preceding lesson that I must ask the student to take some statements merely on the strength of my assertion, not that I would be dogmatic, but because I know so much time is wasted on metaphysical argument which might be at once utilized for practical ends. I cite again the case of a man who would be an engineer, and say that he must in the beginning accept and act upon the instruction of an engineer of some experience.

All I ask is that you who read these lessons shall try the effect upon the subconscious mind of vigorous, positive, living words. Even though you are in the midst of poverty, sickness and sorrow, affirm the opposite. Say with all the earnestness you can muster, I am rich, I am well, I am happy. Say it again and again, though all things conspire to give the lie to your words. If you do this faithfully, just as sure as you live, the words you thus utter will fall into the subconscious mind and become there a power to work for good in all your conditions.

If you throw bicarbonate of soda into an acid you correct that acid. By a law as certain and unvarying you can sweeten by affirmation the sourest states of mind, body or environment.

I have proved this over and over and over again in my own life, and in that of others, and, knowing what it has done for me and for them, I ask you also to see what it will do for you. It will cost nothing but a persistent effort on your part and that effort is good for you. You have therefore nothing to lose in the attempt. You risk nothing and you have so much, so very much to gain.

Lesson 4

In my last lesson I said something of the subconscious mind and its processes. In this lesson I wish to say more about it, for it is a most important factor in the production or cure of disease. To most people the term "subconscious mind" conveys but scant meaning, and even psychologists know very little about it, but we know, or at least a little reflection will lead us to the conclusion, that there are mental activities which seem to be carried on without direct volition, or any consciousness that they are occurring.

When you were a little child, just learning to walk, you had to balance yourself very carefully on one foot while you lifted the other and took a step forward. Sometimes you did not succeed in maintaining your balance, but after many trials it became easier and soon you were able to walk, but even then you could not run, or play leap frog. Those were later accomplishments. The first effort in walking led up to these later efforts. In the meantime the first effort had become a habit, a something which could be done without constant care and supervision.

Now you can walk and think about something else all the time. If every day you go to business by the same route, after a while you will not need to think about your course, for you will turn corners unconsciously, and finally bring up at your office, hardly knowing how you got there. Possibly you may have been deep in thought all the while. Your walking, as mere muscular activity, was subconscious, and that which sent your steps in one direction was also subconscious.

Life is made up of these subconscious activities. They start in the conscious mind and pass thence to the subconscious. Prof. James, of Harvard, in his Psychology, says something to the effect that art would be impossible were it not for these subconscious processes. And you can see for yourself that this is so, for if the mind had always to busy itself with every detail in art which at first it apprehends with care and precision, there would never be free, bold strokes, or graceful outlines. All would be cramped and labored, like the writing of a child. The free sweep comes from the earlier detail.

And what is true of the subconscious in the study of art is true of it in all study, even in the study of bettering our physical and mental states.

This brings me to what I have to say. I want to show you as simply as I can how it is that thoughts of health produce health and thoughts of success produce success. I mean holding in mind a thought in the form of an affirmation.

For instance, in our Success Centre, which is composed of those among my friends who believe with me that man has his centre in Divinity, and continually radiates from that centre, we express our belief in this formula:

"I am open on my inner side to the inexhaustible ocean of Divine Love and Power. I flow forth from it and am one with it. All success is mine through the working of this Power. I shall succeed in all my undertakings.'

Now, what is the advantage in holding this in thought day after day and month after month? What, I ask, is the advantage ? And what does it mean? Is it a sort of hocus-pocus, magic or witchcraft ?

I will tell you what it is — A simple, healthy, hearty and perfectly natural observance of a law of mind, the law which I have just been trying to explain, the law by which a thought held persistently in the conscious mind ultimately descends into the subconscious area and sets up an activity there.

In my early study of the piano, I was an impatient pupil. I could not understand why I was kept on scale and arpeggio when I thought I could learn to execute them just as well by taking them as they occurred in a piece of music. My teacher knew better, and he said — You must make these things a habit so that you execute them unconsciously, for after a time, when you have other things to consider, you cannot, at the same time, give your thought to technique in detail. Later I saw the necessity for this, but I could not understand at the time.

If you wish to be healthy and carry about with you the magnetic aura of sweetness, goodness and power — in other words, if you wish to be a "radiant success" shining with the joy of accomplishment — you must hold in mind the thoughts that make such attainment possible. A fleeting thought will have but little effect in converting you into the ideal that you would be, but a thought held, and held, and held, in time becomes a part of the living you. If the thought is true and noble the subconscious mind moves to the measure of truth and nobility. If the thought is crafty and mean, the subconscious mind moves to that measure. As it moves it keeps registering its processes in the glance of your eye, the turn of your head, the movement of your hand, the tone of your voice, and in many another form of your expression.

At the same time the subconscious mind is creating your physical conditions to the measure of your thought. It does this so silently, so secretly that you have no idea of what it is doing. You will understand better how this can be when you realize that you can pursue a long train of thought and be so absorbed in it that you will not be conscious of yourself as thinking. That consciousness will dawn upon you when you "come to yourself/' when you get to the end of the train of thought. You were working all the time, and that work was in the mind, still the mind was not conscious of its own work going on within.

It is in something such a way that the subconscious mind pursues its activities without our cognizance. It is also far-reaching and extends beyond the bounds we have set for it in our ignorance. It reaches out and works for our good or ill, according to the nature of the thought which we have set in operation.

And now let us see how it is that the formula used in our "Success Centre" can be of use in bringing about more satisfactory states of mind, body and surroundings.

In the first place we say: "I am open on my inner side to the inexhaustible ocean of Divine Love and Power. I am one with it, and flow forth from it." This affirms that limitations are swept away, that man is no longer to be considered as a little, separate something, made just so big and no bigger, created once upon a time and not to be re-created. It means instead that man is a flowing life, always flowing forth from the great Eternal. It means that he can be re-created every day, every moment. It means that as the ocean of Divine Power is inexhaustible, man's life or power is the same. This affirmation takes the mind out of the old sense of limitation into a new sense of freedom. It makes one breathe more freely and realize his own boundless possibilities.

To affirm it once or twice will not change mental habits fully, but to affirm it day after day and month after month makes the mind all over new. The subconscious mind then takes hold of the new habit of thought and weaves it into every tissue. Change and improvement is wrought everywhere throughout the body. Not only that, but the subconscious mind, which works, as I have said, in broad areas of which the conscious mind knows nothing, begins to reach out and open doors and make opportunities so that the unfolding self may have room for expression. When the sense of limitation is gone the germ of power within the human soul is ready to push out and make itself known and felt in the world of externals. The conscious mind plants the seed (of affirmation) in the soil of the subconscious, and there it develops. The seed is the thought of freedom, of constantly renewing life, and the seed brings forth that which is like itself.

Then the formula goes on to affirm: "All success is mine through the working of this Power. I shall succeed in all my undertakings.

This hardly needs an explanation, for it follows that if man is constantly flowing forth in a stream of life and power he must have success in whatever he undertakes. As I have often said — to be here at all, just to live, means success. So far as it goes, even though it may not be very far, it is achievement. It may be a negative sort of success just as 20 degrees Fahrenheit is not 60, and yet the 20 is not Zero.

There are some strange laws of mind which we are just beginning to know something about. One of these laws is — We can be what we wish to be — and another — We become what we wish to be by affirming that we are it already.

That last statement seems to contradict itself, does it not ? How can one wish to be that which he is already, or how can one be already that which he wishes to be?

Self-contradictory on the face of it, but not so when you get at the real meaning. The "what you are" refers to your potential or unexpressed self, while the "what you wish to be" refers to the actual or expressed self.

You have it in you to be great in some walk in life, in some special calling, something for which you are peculiarly fitted, and you have it all in you now, rolled up like a bud waiting to be unfolded. That is "what you are." The unfolding of the bud into the flower is — "what you wish to be." Is not that clear enough ?

So you can affirm in perfect truth that you are what you wish to be, and this affirmation acts just as the sun does on the seed buried in the earth. The sun calls it to come forth, and it comes, not as the brown seed does it come, but as a new creature.

You can go on building and rebuilding yourself into new and varied life, by the power of affirmation, to the highest measure of your ideals. Then take heart, for the remedy for all your ills lies within you, and in you, because you are in God.

Lesson 5

There is a vast storehouse from which we draw our thoughts. It is as vast as humanity itself and open to every one of us. This storehouse was called by Emerson the Over Soul, and perhaps no better term could be applied to it, but for purposes of distinction I shall call it the Super Conscious Mind. I call it this because I wish to show you what I understand to be the difference between the Super-Conscious and the Subconscious Mind.

That is a somewhat difficult undertaking, especially as no one knows what the Super-Conscious Mind is. But, for that matter, we are almost as much in the dark concerning the Conscious and Subconscious Mind, although by observation and experience we do know something of their modes of action.

But we do not even know that the Super-Conscious Mind has action. Some occultists say that it has not, for it is the world of the potential or the unexpressed in contradistinction to that which is actual (actual) or expressed.

I shall not, however, sidetrack into any field of speculation, because I have found that a matter of this sort may be argued forever without getting at any practical result.

What we want to get at is this — Is there a Super-Conscious Mind? If so — How are we related to it? If it is a storehouse and we can draw from it — What can we draw, and how?

A thought comes into your mind. Where does it come from? Some other mind? Yes, possibly. But where did it come from in the beginning? A coin may pass from hand to hand in the course of its circulation, but originally it came from the mint. Still further back it came from a mine, and at one stage it may have been in the form of an ether; but at any rate, here it is in circulation. I hold a coin in my hand. It has come to me from another hand, and yet that other hand did not make it. It simply passed it along. Our thoughts pass from one to another in similar manner, but that does not account for their source. Where do they come from in the beginning?

Why, they come from the Super-Conscious Mind. What they are like before they are born into the Conscious Mind we know not, and it matters not. It only matters that we get these thoughts and that they prove to be the right sort of thoughts to work out our health and happiness.

We want something which shall feed the machinery of life and make it speed on merrily, singing as it goes, instead of creaking, groaning, and finally stopping entirely.

We have reached a place in intelligence where we know quite well what we want from the storehouse, but we doubt. if we can get it. The doubt paralyzes our effort and we do not try to get what we want. We know that thought pours in upon the mind in a steady stream, but it seems to come in "hit or miss" fashion. There does not seem to be any law about it.

Ah, there is just the mistake we have made, for there is a law about it. Every thought that comes to us is drawn as unerringly as one chemical atom is drawn to another.

A thought is drawn to the mind by the presence of something in that mind to which it is related and which attracts it. We will not go away back to a possible beginning and ask how the first something came there to attract the second something, for that would be getting too metaphysical. That would be asking why you are you and not somebody else, and, as Sothern would say — That is one of the things no fellow can find out.

No, we will just start where we find ourselves, with the mind just as it is, and see what it does with the Super-Conscious storehouse and its contents.

It draws on this storehouse and it draws that which is attracted to it by law.

If the thought is on art then it draws that which relates to art. If it is on music then that which relates to music, and so on. Whatever one undertakes to do and lets his thought dwell upon, to that is he continually drawing fresh stores from the Super-Conscious Mind.

The old idea was that each person had a certain amount of talent or genius, and that beyond that limit he could not go.

The new idea, and a blessed idea it is, too, is that there is no such grudging stint given out, while the balance is forever held away from him who desires it. No, the limit is swept away and man is coming to know that he stands at the open door of an Infinite Supply.

When I hear anyone saying — The desire of my life is to become an artist, but I am too old now to begin — I think of my mother, who began the study when she was about fifty, and became a very fine artist at the age of sixty.

If you desire intensely to do anything in the way of achievement, know that you can do it, no matter what your age or your drawbacks.

If the desire of your heart is to heal the sick, it shows that somewhere hidden in you is the power to do it. Just open your mind to the SuperConscious and let that flow in which is allied to you and which will unfold your power.

We are at all times open to the Super-Conscious, but we can increase our receptivity by an act of the will, by desiring to be receptive. We can also by an act of the will exclude from the mind all that is extraneous or foreign to our purpose just as one would weed a flower bed of all but that which he wished to cultivate.

The healing thought comes down from the Super-Conscious, hence the power of those beautiful words:

"Lo, the healing power descending from within, calming the enfevered brain and by spreading peace among the grieving nerves."

If you are suffering intense pain either of mind or body, repeat these lines and desire intensely that the healing power shall descend. Then wait and fully expect that it will. When it comes it will seem like a fine shower falling gently upon your fevered brain, while little rivulets of heavenly peace course their way along the troubled nerves and quiet their grieving.

I know this to be so from actual and repeated experience. My readers have only to prove it for themselves.

The Super-Conscious is, I believe, the realm of the Divine. How then does it happen that thoughts of worry, of hatred, of dishonesty come to us from that source ?

They do not. When a bright, new coin comes from the mint it is quite different from the same coin after being long in circulation and becoming worn and tarnished.

But the analogy is imperfect and I will not follow it farther. No material illustration can convey to you what it means to open the mind to the influx of the Superconscious. It means freshness, richness and fulness of thought. It means a rush of new purpose and a great tide of invigoration. It means everything good and delightful, my friends.

You cannot remain sick if you are thus renewed and regenerated. You cannot remain poor if you are open to the flow of Opulence. You cannot remain unhappy if you receive the inrush of Love and Joy.

Concentrate all your power on the one effort to draw from this Source of Supply. Pray if you will. Why not? Prayer is ''the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed."

You desire only good. If you desire anything less it is only a mistake of your growing intelligence which will soon be corrected. You desire only good and that exists for you in the Superconscious, awaiting your call. How can you think yourself sick and miserable with all life's richest treasures at your very door.

The New Thought is helping you on because it does not deal in the old hackneyed thought of passed ages, that is like old, long-used coin worn so thin as to be nearly valueless. It is giving out to you fresh coin from the mint, showing you new truth, for although truth is as old as the hills, and older, there is now a new presentation of it. It is telling you of laws hitherto undiscovered, by which you can improve and idealize your life in every particular. It is showing you how to apply those laws, and demonstrate results from their application every day. It is giving you clear vision of the world, and showing you that you have everything to live for. It is proving old age and death to be spectres of false belief, without a shadow of reality. It is removing, one by one, all the bugbears of life that have filled your soul with terror and chilled the blood in your veins. It is proving that you have unlimited power of achievement. It is doing all this, and more.

The New Thought is swinging the door leading into the Superconscious wide open, so that all who will may enter.

Do not then lie down at the portal like a beggar and whine. Get up and put on your purple and fine linen, for all are princes who enter the Kingdom of the Superconscious.

Lesson 6

When people ask me how mental healing is done, I find it as difficult to answer as though they had asked me how to execute Beethoven's Sonata Pathetique. Both involve so much. Both are built up out of details laid in orderly sequence, one upon another, and in an attempt to see what the building means, and how it is accomplished, one must trace the details.

In mental healing these details are mental states which follow one upon another until that state is reached from which the healing vibration can go forth. I am going now to outline some of those states, drawing on my own consciousness for the purpose, and observe, I am going to tell you how I do healing and not how someone else does it. I do not intend to stand sponsor for the profession as a whole nor for any branch of it, but simply for myself.

There is a knowledge that precedes experience which we call intuitional or transcendental, and there is the same knowledge after it has been verified and made practical by personal experience. It is the latter which I wish to give you in these lessons, and in order to give you my own experience from the beginning I am going back to the time when I first heard of mental healing.

It was in Chicago, at the time when the Eddy movement was first making itself known there. Many of my friends were interested, but I felt utterly indifferent, although I was in a wretched state, both mentally and physically. One day a Christian Scientist took luncheon at the place where I was boarding, and I sat in silent scorn during the entire meal while she made the best of her opportunity in trying to convert everyone at table. I think she succeeded with some, but she only aroused in me a thorough antagonism. Once or twice I caught her eye, if one can be said to catch an eye that has not a ray of human interest in its cold and staring surface. It was an eye that had no depths, and I was afterwards told that such was the effect when one withdrew entirely from the illusion of "Mortal Mind" and became one with "Divine Mind." This is not intended as a reflection upon Christian Science, but to show that some of its disciples are mistaken in their application of its principles.

But, as I said, I caught her eye, only to let it go again on the instant. I did not want to hold it, for it made me shudder, and I thought I would rather die than to be called back to health by anything stored behind that eye.

I also looked critically at her snow white hair and her wrinkles, not knowing enough of the principles of Christian Science to understand that she was in the pin feather stage of the Divine Manifestation. Somehow her words and her appearance were in such violent contradiction that I really felt the poor creature to be slightly crazed, but the incident made an impression upon me and had its use in my experience several years afterward when I became interested in the study of mental healing. I then remembered the uncanny influence of those eyes and determined never to get so far away from the human as to be devoid of sympathy. Naturally this drew me to the other extreme, and I gave out so much that I became depleted. My patients grew fat and rosy while I grew thin and pale. Then I saw my mistake, and little by little I learned how to let my heart go out in love and sympathy to the suffering, while at the same time my intellect saw clearly the illusory nature of that suffering, and that it had no place in true being.

But to go back to the Chicago incident, it was certainly one of the details necessary to the building of a state of consciousness in which it was possible to do mental healing. At the time it meant nothing to me but an unpleasant episode. Now, as I look back, it means much more. It was really my first lesson in mental healing and I did not know it.

Time went on and my health grew worse and worse until every resource having been exhausted I was persuaded to take a course of mental treatment, and slowly, very slowly, I found my way back to health and strength. Then my interest was thoroughly aroused and I determined to make a thorough study of the subject Observation soon taught me that healing was not confined to one school or one method, hence I inferred there must be some general principle underlying all and common to all. What was it? How should I find it? I studied on and on, ever hopeful and confident of the result, but often confused by the chaotic jumble of statements made by different teachers.

I went into Theosophy, not because of its therapeutic value, but because of its exposition of occult laws. Then I took up Hypnotism, Mental Suggestion, Faith Cure, Christian Healing, Divine Science, Christian Science, Mental Science, and, in fact, everything that had a possible bearing upon my one, all absorbing theme. So great was my enthusiasm that the days seemed too short for my purpose, and I pressed the long hours of the night into my service, and, strange to say, I found the wakeful hours of night more restful than those of sleep.

Finally there came a night which I shall never forget as it held for me a new and wonderful experience. While perfectly wide awake and thinking out a problem, I suddenly found myself standing in the middle of the room in what seemed a substantial body, while my physical form lay stretched upon the bed. My arms hung by my side and when I lifted and folded them I felt the actual resistance of my body and the pressure of my arms against it, so that I thought — What sort of a self is this ? Can it be a spiritual body? It certainly is not like what I have supposed spirit to be. Just then a three-tongued flame of a deep and beautiful red of peculiar color, such as I had never seen before, appeared close to my left temple. I then heard myself saying, not voluntarily, but as though something spoke through me— THIS IS THE HEALING POWER. As I uttered these words the flame came nearer and touched me on the temple. Instantly great throbs of something that seemed like electric fire coursed through me from head to foot. It was like a wave of life, of wondrous life such as I had never known, and I thought — This is Life itself — I have touched Life. I have been dead before and for the first time I know how life feels.

Then suddenly I was back again in my physical body on the bed, but the same wave was passing through me. For hours I lay awake thinking over the strange experience, and during those hours all fear of death left me forever. Indeed, I seemed to have passed through what is called death, and to have come forth in my spiritual body, finding it more real than the physical.

This was not a dream nor a vision. It was an actual, living experience, and I was as wholly awake as I am at this moment while writing these lines.

Moreover, it was an experience which produced a change in my consciousness, so that I have never been the same since. It also changed my physical conditions. I felt like a new creature in both mind and body.

I have since discovered that these changes in consciousness take place at intervals all along the path of development and that it is as impossible, while in an earlier state to understand a later, as it would be for one of the primitive forms of life to understand or enter into the mind of a human being. The difference is not so great possibly, but it is very great, indeed, and each advance makes one feel as though suddenly lifted into a new order of being.

The strangest thing about it all is that one may go on blindly and mistakenly, following a road which seems to lead nowhere in particular, and yet, all the while be nearing the place of a higher unfoldment. If only the purpose be earnest and sincere, he who seeks will find.

It is these states of consciousness which come later which are difficult to explain to the beginner. There are states so high in their vibration that no word of healing need be spoken. Jesus was in this state at times, when the healing power emanated from even the hem of his garment. At other times he found it necessary to speak the word. When he was in the higher state he was in the Christ consciousness, and that state is not too high for any of us to attain, if we may believe his words: "The works that I do ye shall do also."

Do not think that because your mental sky is gray and leaden today, and because you may have been in this state for years, that it must continue always. Believe me when I say that you can enter new worlds one after another within your own mind, and find each one fairer and brighter than the one preceding.

In my last lesson I spoke of the healing power as descending like a cooling shower and in this I speak of it as a fire. This looks like a discrepancy, but it is not. I use the word fire, not to indicate heat as we understand it in a material sense, but as it conveys the idea of vitality, of life. Electric fire seems to mean something quite different from fire in the usual sense. An electric fire, for instance, might be intensely vitalizing, and yet fall like a cooling shower.

We are obliged to take literally from the material world the terms we apply to spiritual things, but the mind which is awakening to the inner life will always* transcend the symbolic term and know the thing itself in its true reality.

As you enter one new world after another in your consciousness you will look back upon this present state from which you will then have emerged, and wonder how you could ever have been held within its confines. Somewhere I have seen a pretty picture of a fluffy little chick looking down upon its broken shell and saying: "Did I ever come out of that?" The mental state which you are in now, will someday be to you the broken shell and you will look down incredulously upon it, saying: "Did I ever come out of that?"

Lesson 7

When I began the study of mental healing, I imagined it was something to be acquired after the manner of arithmetic, geography, chemistry or any other of the studies which we pursue in the ordinary course of education. I expected to get hold of rules such as one finds in grammar or mathematics. I procured course after course of instruction in order to discover these rules or some exact method by which healing was to be accomplished. Of course I was disappointed. The secret might be an open one, but nowhere did it seem revealed to my waiting eyes. Each writer in his or her fashion seemed bent on revolutionizing my ideas instead of giving me anything practical. This made me impatient, for I wanted to get hold of something as definite as a mathematical statement, which I could work out and prove as I would a sum.

I expect you are all seeking the same thing, friends, and I want to tell you right now that you will not find it. No one can tell you how to do mental healing by rule, as you would make a cake or put up a doctor's prescription, for it is something which cannot be done in purely mechanical fashion. In this sense it is more of an art than a science. To be sure, science is the basis of art and without it art would be impossible; still science is merely mechanical and coldly exact, while art is spiritual, creative and free. Bound only by laws of its own, it juts out over science in boldest abandon. Apparently without support, it has an inner force which counteracts gravitation and holds it well poised between earth and heaven without the danger of a tumble.

You may teach a student the mixing of pigments, the laws of perspective and the handling of the brush, but all this will not make him an artist, for, unless he has within him the spiritual and creative force, he will, with all your teaching, produce nothing but mechanical daubs.

It is on this principle that all the best teachers of the art of mental healing attempt to wake within you the spirit of the thing instead of giving you mechanical rules. They may seem to be accomplishing nothing, but they are doing the one thing needful.

If, for instance, you have ideas that are untrue concerning yourself and your relation to the world about you, those ideas must be changed. This unsettles you and you feel all torn up for a time. Your mental soil has been ploughed up for the planting of a new seed, and although the agitation may not be agreeable, it is certainly necessary.

The ploughing and the planting are the mechanical part, and that is where the science comes in, but a little later art springs up and creates as it will. If it does not, your seeds are dead, for until there is new life there is no proof that your ploughing or your planting have been well done.

Psychologists tell us that ideas organize themselves within the mind with a dominant idea as a ruler. This produces a certain state of consciousness. But, as in external government, every now and then a ruler is deposed, so it is with the government in the idea world within. The dominant idea gets deposed and a new dominant takes its place. This, as you can imagine, creates confusion and disorder for a time, but ultimately ends in a new order. This new order is a change in consciousness and with every such change there comes a new vibratory action. There is always an unseen current going out from each one of us and it is the sum of what we are. It changes as we change, and is as real as any part of us though it is invisible and intangible to all but the most sensitive persons who come in touch with it.

This vibratory current is called the human aura, as many of you doubtless know. Some time ago, when Mrs. Annie Besant was in this country, she exhibited photographs showing how this aura appeared in different mental states. In health, lines were seen going straight out from the body. In disease, these lines drooped and were entangled in a state of confusion and disorder. In anger, they looked like forked lightning and were of a lurid color. In peace and love, they were gently undulating and of a soft and beautiful rose color.

These photographs did not actually prove to my mind the existence of the aura, but it seemed reasonable to suppose that there might be something of the kind. Sometime afterward there came to me something in the way of proof. It came when I was looking into Spiritualism and it came in this way. I had heard of an excellent medium in New York City, and went with two friends to one of his seances. We were entirely unknown to the medium, and it was the first seance we had ever attended. Including ourselves there were just seventeen persons present and we sat in a semi-circle or a sort of horseshoe, the medium sitting at the open end. In giving his tests the medium designated each person by a number. He gave test after test, but none to our party, and I was beginning to think that the whole thing was prearranged by the medium and a number of confederates, in order to gather in the credulous, when, to my great surprise, my number was called by the medium who sat with his eyes tightly closed in a strong light throughout the entire seance. My number was called and I responded: "Is it I?" The medium answered: "Yes, I mean you. You help people through the mind. I see straight lines going out from you full of power. You carry about with you health, strength and joy, and they go out from you in any direction where you turn your thought. These straight lines remind me of the rays of the sun, they are so bright and full of life. You help people so much that everyone is glad when you come and sorry when you go. And you do not need to say a word, for your presence is enough in itself. Those rays go out and touch people with new life, even when you are silent."

This, coming from an entire stranger, who could not possibly know anything of my work in mental therapeutics, seemed to me a strong proof that our mental states do produce an aura which is felt by others even when it is not seen as it was by this medium.

Later, I had another proof, for these strong lines proceeding from my early enthusiasm were destined to lose their force and fall in chaos about me, and in the darkness of my despair I thought they had fallen forever.

It was when my husband died after a violent illness of three days. Apparently in vigorous health, he was suddenly prostrated like a strong tree in the path of a cyclone, and I, too, was swept from my feet by the same force, so that I could do nothing. This was a hard experience, for besides the loss of my husband my hold on mental healing seemed to have gone forever. I still believed in it, but I said — It is for others and not for me. I can never take it up again. Life was blank, and I had but one thought, one wish, and that was to get some word from behind the veil where my loved one was hidden. On this thought intent I went again to the medium in New York and had a private interview. His first words were: "O, heavy, heavy, heavy! If I could give you wings so that you could fly away from it all what a gift it would be, would it not?" He said nothing of straight lines, or rays from the sun going out from me, then. All was dark, heavy, discordant and depressing. This showed how my aura had changed, but it was not to remain so.

Shortly after the death of my husband a friend came in and asked me to treat her baby which had been poisoned by milk that had stood too long in the sterilizer. The child was vomiting a green slime, and in a very dangerous condition. I remember how I looked up at her with heavy lidded eyes and said: "0, how can you ask me? Surely I cannot help your baby when I have lost the one in all the world whom I would have saved if I could. No, I can never heal anyone again for I have lost the power."

But my friend persisted. She reminded me of what I had done for the child on previous occasions, and ended by saying: "If you will only make the effort, perhaps the power will return to you," and looking at me imploringly, with great tears in her eyes, she said: "O, do please try."

It ended by my putting on my hat and going with her, but very reluctantly. When I took the child in my arms I felt an utter deadness, not even pity for the poor little suffering thing, and that was strange, for my sympathies had always been quick and tender and by far the larger part of me. But way down under all this deadness there was a small, faint effort to help the child. This grew and grew within me until all of a sudden I felt a great rush of life and in that instant the healing power returned. In a few moments I placed the child back in its bed sound asleep and entirely healed.

The aura which I had lost and regained was as real a thing in the first instance as in the last and was not the outflow of mere enthusiasm. It really had its rise in what I had thought and experienced, but that thought and experience had not then been deep enough to make the aura permanent and abiding. I had not then reached the place in consciousness where I could remain calm and self-centered when disease walked into my very house and attacked one whom I held most dear. As it was said of the Great Physician: He saved others, himself he cannot save, so it may be said of those who heal at the present day. We, too, often save others, when ourselves, and those who are bound to us in the close ties of affection we cannot save.

But we must do it and we will do it. I have since proved that, for I have grown in power and demonstrated that power in healing my sister, several years ago, when the physicians could not help her.

But to treat successfully those who are closely allied to us we must become individualized. We must free ourselves and let our loved ones go free also. We must remove the yokes they have placed on us, and also the yokes we have placed on them. About the hardest lesson we have to learn is to let those we love live their own lives as they will and not as we will. We desire their happiness, but we desire it in our way, which is not always their way. Parents must, of course, exercise a certain surveillance over their children up to a certain period, but beyond that it should not be extended. You cannot always protect your child by the shield of your experience, for he needs an experience of his own. Let him go free, even though it be to wander forth as the prodigal son to feed on husks, for he will return some day to the good things of the father's house.

And all this loving espionage is born of a wrong belief, a belief that there is nothing beyond the personal mind that can take care of us and fill out our endeavor. But what is there that can do this? Why, a Something which we may as well call The Supreme Intelligence. Do you not see how it worked when my friend came to me and asked me to treat her child? Do you not see how she was moved to come to me and by that coming drew me out of my heart-sickness, disappointment and depression, into a life of usefulness, where my ideals were to be fulfilled?

Now, do not mistake me. I do not mean that this Supreme Intelligence is a thing apart and outside of us, but a something with which we are one. If it were not one with us, how could it be within us and act through us as it does?

And I do not like the expression that I so frequently hear — Man is a part of the Supreme Intelligence. A part of anything signifies, to me, a lack of wholeness, weakness, incompleteness, separation from the whole.

My spirit demands that — I shall be the whole thing. It also demands that — You shall be the whole thing. Whenever I accept anything less than this for you or for me, we both seem to shrink into pigmies. We grow so small and weak and helpless that I have no hope of our ever being or doing anything worth speaking of.

But it is such a puzzle, is it not? How is it that I can be I and you can be you, and yet each one of us be all there is?

Well, you see, I am only I as I reveal myself in some way to the senses, and you are only you as you reveal yourself to the senses. What we are, back of the revealing, is quite another thing and it is just there and nowhere else that we are one. That is, behind the curtain, all is one, for it has not been separated yet, as it must be in order to express itself.

Suppose a great body of water were pent up somewhere without an outlet. Then it is all one. But give it an outlet here and there and each stream as it flows forth becomes separated from the whole, while at the same time flowing forth from that whole. If each stream could think, it would probably think of itself in two ways, one as being a separate stream, and the other as a stream coming from a source. If it were a stream with a merely perceptive tendency, it would only see the stream and not the source, but if it were a stream with a reflective tendency, it would cast its eye back over the current and see where it started from its source, and perhaps even look back of that and see the source itself.

We humans have both the perceptive and the reflective tendency and by the development of the latter we look further and further back into the very heart of being and it is there we see it all to be one. It is there that I am all and you are all.

Now, this ALL or The Supreme Intelligence projects itself into the world, into the material world. In fact, it becomes the material world and is in process of becoming it every day and every hour. It makes and unmakes its world continually. Sometimes it seems not to be doing it well, in times of catastrophe and sorrow, but that is because we only see a part of the whole. How can you judge of a beautiful painting by seeing a torn fragment of the same? And yet, let a psychometrist place that torn fragment on his forehead and instantly the whole painting presents itself to his vision.

I think we have glimpses of the Great and Beautiful Whole in some such psychic fashion, else our faith would fail us in times of sore trial. Why is it that when we see the part we postulate the whole ? Why is it that when we see imperfection we postulate perfection? We, who have never seen the whole; we, who have never seen perfection. Is it not that the whole which is in itself perfection lays its impress on the mind, thus moving it to work out in the external the beauty and glory of the life within? I believe it to be so.

I am trying in this lesson to cover a great deal of ground and hope I have made it clear that there is such a thing as an actual emanation or aura, which corresponds to every state of consciousness through which the individual passes. To know this makes mental healing seem more reasonable, because one can see how it is that thought does its work.

I have also, I trust, made it plain that one cannot grasp mental healing mechanically or in a coldly intellectual manner, although the steps leading to the healing vibration may be more or less methodical and, therefore, mechanical.

I have also shown by incidents in my own experience that failure should not discourage one even though it come when one has reached a height where success seems assured.

I have tried to give a word of encouragement to those who are treating members of their own families and are not succeeding as they wish. To all such I would say again — Do not be drawn into the swirl of another's life, whether it be that of parent or child, husband or wife. With the most loving heart you can stand aloof, calm and serene, in the clear consciousness of the All-Being. Unless you do this you will surely fail.

And do not feel that you have to do all things by grinding out methods in your everyday consciousness. Leave something for the Supreme Intelligence within you to work out. Be willing that your loved ones shall pass out of your sight and trust this same Intelligence to take care of them. Don't follow them with your anxious thought when they are away from home and your loving care. That anxious thought is a poison to them and to you.

I have felt for a long time that there is a first step essential to the art of mental healing and that is to get rid of the idea of weakness in ourselves, and I certainly do not see how we are going to do this so long as we place God out of ourselves. For this reason I seldom use the word "God," because it brings to my mind the old and mistaken conception which I held for so many years.

But with the new conception I am none the less religious, none the less devotional, for now God, the Supreme Love, God, the Supreme Intelligence, is to me the transcendent, but ever revealing Mystery, and this God I adore.

This is the God who is, indeed, a very present help in time of trouble. This is the God who heals our sickness and those who wait upon this God shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.

Lesson 8

I am now going to tell you of a very singular experience which I think will be of value, because it seems to give substance to much that has seemed intangible, for you know such things as thought, emotion, spiritual influx and inner experience have been to us very unreal compared with such things as flesh and blood, houses and lands, money and possessions. It was because of this unreality concerning the inner life and the undue value attached to possessions that the young man was so sorrowful when commanded to sell all that he had and follow Jesus. He seemed to be letting go his hold on reality and getting nothing in its place. He went away very sorrowful, for he had a longing for something better than he could find in his houses and lands and yet that something was not sufficiently defined to make it an object of pursuit. Being a young man of good sense, that had served him well in the acquisition of wealth, it would naturally seem to him unwise to cut loose from all that seemed so real and pursue a will-o'-the-wisp.

Doubtless if we could follow that young man's history we would find that as the inner vision opened the things of the Spirit became a reality, and it is of this reality as distinctly felt and known by myself that I would speak.

When reading with deep interest a book called "The Perfect Way," so great was the impression made upon me that I felt my spirit rising to a mighty endeavor. I was lifted out of my surroundings and into an entirely new thought atmosphere. The things of earth looked coarse and clumsy, and I seemed to see world within world of ever-increasing fineness and beauty. As I read on and on I lost all consciousness of self except in one particular, and that was a boring, grinding pain in the palm of each hand and through the arch of the instep in each foot. This was so marked and so continuous during the reading of the book, which I finished at one sitting, that I mentioned it to my sister. We both thought it strange but could not account for it. Sometime afterward in reading a book by Dr. Franz Hartmann, I found the statement that in extremely sensitive persons it often happens that with the birth of the spiritual life there are attendant signs. It is on record that nuns when in deep realization of the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross have had a facsimile of the crown of thorns appear in blood red marks upon the forehead and have, felt the anguish of the nails piercing the hands and feet. If I am not mistaken Dr. Hartmann spoke of these signs as indicating the birth of the Christ Child in Consciousness.

Psychologists would easily account for this phenomenon on the score of hysteria or hyper-sensitiveness, but to my mind that is not a good explanation, for while the mental condition in such an experience must be extremely sensitive, that need not of necessity mean hallucination or mental derangement. Indeed I know it does not.

Had I run across Dr. Hartmann's statement before reading "The Perfect Way" I might think the sensation of boring through the hands and feet the effect of imagination, or the knowing that it had happened in other instances, but I knew nothing of the kind. Medical students often contract the diseases about which they are studying, but this experience of mine was, so far as I then knew, wholly unprecedented, unthought of, unheard of, coming upon me as a surprise and as something for which I could not account.

It all seems simple enough to me now, for I can easily see the birth of the Christ to be the universal fact as well as the particular. I believe that there was a moment when the Christ was born in Jesus. I also believe that there is a moment when the Christ is born in each one of us and that it is really and actually a birth into a new life. When this birth occurs I think we first realize what immortal life means, for we then feel its vibrations which are quite different from those we have experienced in any previous state of consciousness.

The young man who went away sorrowful was seeking eternal life, but he could not find it because the Christ Child within him was as yet unborn.

All things are good whether they are of the inner or the outer world, but there are degrees of goodness, and I think the inner or the inmost good the best of all.

Let us learn more and more of this wonderful inner life of which we know so little, for the thinking, acting self which we do know something about is but a small part of the whole self.

I, for instance, am doing much more than I know. I reach people with my conscious mind, but I am recently led to believe that I reach many more with the unconscious mind, or that part of myself which is not brought under the eye of my mentality.

Not long ago I received an interesting letter from a woman on the Pacific coast. She wrote me that it had occurred to her that she might in sleep come in touch with someone who would help her, and so when she lay down at night her last thought was an invocation to some unknown person to give her strength. This went on for about two weeks, and she was conscious of being strengthened and helped in several ways. One day she went into a book store and the proprietor handed her a copy of The Radiant Centre. She seemed strangely attracted to it and fairly devoured its contents, then hurrying back to the book store she asked — What else has that woman written? Another work was handed her, which she took home and read with a strange feeling of familiarity. It seemed as though she knew what every page would contain before reading it. After she had finished she sat gazing into the fire, when a voice distinctly spoke to her, saying: Why not write to Kate Boehme? Write to her tonight. And at the same time there flashed upon her a conviction that I was the one who had met her in sleep and given her help.

Such is undoubtedly the case, for while the mind focusses on details I am convinced that THE WHOLE THING is acting in its own way through its auric sphere.

Do you not see how this can be? How THE WHOLE THING speaks a FULL SENTENCE while THE PART utters only a PHRASE? Suppose two people greet you with a "Good Morning." The same words are used by both, and yet how different the impression. Do you know what makes the difference ? It is what you receive in vibration from THE WHOLE PERSON back of each "Good Morning."

What you do and what you say is charged with what you are. You can say "Good Morning" so that it means a very "Bad Morning," or you can say it as the glorious sun does when he rises over a dark world.

I honestly believe that it does not make a bit of difference whether you are a Methodist, a Presbyterian, a Romanist or a Mental Scientist if only the Christ Child is born within, you can heal whatever the tenets of your belief. The Light will shine through you according to the color of your temperament, and that color belongs to you as surely as the shade of your hair or complexion.

Naturally I think the New Thought (which, by the way, is a New Birth of a very Old Thought) a short cut to the Light, and for that reason I walk in it. If someone else finds his own short cut I bid him God speed. It has been said that all roads lead to Rome, and it may also be said that all roads lead to the Centre if you follow them long enough, but I am weary of the long years in the wilderness and have found my way out. Those who will may join me. Bless them! Those who will not may go another way. Bless them just the same!

Whatever brings you quickest into a state of love toward all mankind is best for you, for only in that state can healing be accomplished in vourself and others.

Lesson 9

Some years ago I heard of a man who had chronic rheumatism. It was so severe that he was almost helpless, not being able to walk a step unaided or to get in and out of his clothes. Every morning he was taken out of bed and dressed by a member of the family, and every night he was undressed and put to bed like a child. One night after safely tucking him into bed the entire family left the house to attend Church, as was their custom. They had so left him on previous occasions and nothing adverse had happened, but on this night the house caught fire. He called loudly for help, but no one came to his relief. The smoke grew stifling and the situation critical. Nearer and nearer crept the flames, denser and denser grew the smoke, until in an agony of fear our invalid sprang from his bed, got into his clothes, dragged a sheet from the bed, pulled out bureau drawers, threw everything of value into the sheet, slung it over his shoulder and made for the street. Where was his rheumatism? Gone completely. And what is more it never returned. This story is vouched for by reliable people.

The man really had the rheumatism. He was not making believe. He was perfectly honest and sane. How was it then that his malady vanished like a dream or a figment of the brain ?

Well, I will tell you. The thought of FIRE and its accompanying DANGER filled the man's consciousness FULL. There was not a niche or cranny anywhere in it where the thought of RHEUMATISM could lurk. It was driven out. SOAKED OUT.

Then disease must be in the MIND, though it may AFFECT the BODY.

Still to SCARE a disease out is a good deal like some of the old methods of healing in which one disease was made to take the place of another.

Why not instead fill the consciousness full of something better than FEAR of ANYTHING.

Why you can fill your mind so full of HEALTH that disease (you notice I spell it in small type) will not have a shadow of a chance.

In Hypnotism there is an experiment which helps to prove that disease is in the mind. It is as follows: An Operator takes two subjects, one with a cough, the other without, and throws both into a state of hypnosis. He then transfers the cough from one to the other and wakes both from sleep, when the subject who had the cough is free from it while the other coughs violently.

The Operator accomplishes this by telling the subject with the cough that he is without it, and telling the other subject that he has it. Each subject being negative to the Operator's mind, receives the mental statement given him and an immediate effect is produced in the body. "As a man thinketh, so is he," from centre to circumference.

This is the Law and why not work with it?

I am sure you wish to but possibly you do not know how. That is usually the trouble.

For instance — You have an awful headache and you say: "Now is my time to put in practice some of my knowledge of Mental Healing." Your head aches so that you can hardly think at all, but making a great effort you say: "I have no headache," and then in parenthesis (What a horrible lie for my head is just splitting). But recovering your hold you add: "I cannot have any headache, for my spiritual self is my true self, and that is perfect. It cannot have aches and pains. This headache is only an illusion of the senses and I will rise out of illusions into Reality. My headache is gone and I am well."

But it hasn't gone. It is worse than ever. The more you declare it gone, the more it stays with you. You are in the condition of a certain student who was in pursuit of the occult. His teacher had told him to repeat a given formula, but to be very careful not to think the word "Rhinoceros." The consequence was that he thought little else but "Rhinoceros." Finally in despair he said to his teacher — Why did you tell me not to think "Rhinoceros"? It would never have occurred to me if you had not put it into my mind, while now I can think of nothing else.

So you virtually think "Rhinoceros" when you think of that headache at all, even to deny it. Do not say or think headache at all, but get away from it in thought, something as the man got away from his rheumatism, only don't be scared out, if you can help it, lest your last state be worse than your first.

Right in the midst of your pain if your house should take fire or startling news be brought to you, the headache would vanish I am quite sure, but in that event you are very much like a piece of timber that is floating down the river and carried here and there by the tide, sometimes tangled with a lot of other driftwood, and sometimes skimming along smoothly, but all the time inert and acted upon by one thing or another, instead of being a strong swimmer, battling with the tide and going where you will.

Don't be driftwood for it is in you to be the swimmer.

But to go back to a consideration of how to get rid of your headache (and let the headache stand for any other ailment), it is quite possible that you will have to make a great many trials before you will be able to throw off the malady quickly and easily. In the matter of healing, as in everything else, practice makes perfect, and the best time to practice is when you are not sick. That sounds queer, does it not? But what I mean is that you should build your ark before the flood. Then you can get into it and ride the waters in safety.

As I look back over the ten years which I have spent in getting to my present status, I wonder that I did not give up in despair, for so many of my earlier efforts at self-treatment ended in failure. I will not go over a list of my ailments, but they were many, and neuralgic headache was one of the foremost and most difficult to vanquish. An effort at self-treatment usually ended in a dose of phenacetine or anti-pyrine. This was followed by remorse and a promise to myself to be truer to my principles on the next occasion, but when the next occasion came (shall I confess it?) history repeated itself.

Once I sat by the seashore and saw some thoughtless boys throwing sticks into the water and sending their dog after them again and again until the poor thing was so weary that he could hardly get to the shore, and I finally had to interfere in his behalf. The tired creature reminded me so of myself that it seemed an object lesson. The dog did better than I, though, for he secured what he went after and brought it to shore, while I, so far, had not and I wondered if I ever would. Still there was something within me that led me on and on in spite of failure and discouragement, and I now see that I was really advancing all the while, though I was not conscious of it.

Even after I began healing others I was subject to many a setback myself. I remember on one occasion I had been suffering all night with an attack of facial neuralgia, and one side of my face was swollen badly. On the day following a patient called and my first impulse was not to see her. That seemed cowardly, so I conquered the impulse and went down to the drawing room, though at every step I felt like turning and running the other way. The patient noticed the swelling, but she did not mention it till long afterward. She then said her heart went down at the sight of it and she wondered if I could help her when I was in such a state, but, strange to relate, I did help her. I gave a very strong treatment and shortly after that the swelling in my face went down completely.

For the moment it had seemed an untoward circumstance that a patient should come just at that time and find me in such a condition, but instead of that it was a means to an end, a hill to climb in the path of higher attainment. Even the swollen face had its meaning and good was to come out of the apparent ill.

But the most difficult of all to conquer was my tendency to hay fever which had afflicted me from a child. For a time I seemed to make very little headway, but after a while I noticed that each year it came a little later and left me a little earlier. That encouraged me to believe that in time it would go entirely, and it did.

But I must tell you a curious circumstance connected with the hay fever, showing again that disease is in the mind. At times when I was suffering the most, if friends came in who were particularly interesting so that my mind was completely taken away from myself, every trace of hay fever would disappear and I would suddenly be conscious of myself as perfectly free from every symptom, but they would all come back again when my friends left me and my thoughts centered again upon myself. t is said that hay fever is caused by pollen floating in the air at a certain season of the year. It is not probable that the pollen was abstracted from the atmosphere just while I was entertaining my friends, to be restored to it upon their departure. It is more reasonable to suppose that the pollen was present all the while and that I was sensitive to it in some mental states and not sensitive in others, or to put it more correctly — When the thought of hay fever was in my mind the pollen affected me, but when the thought of hay fever was crowded out the pollen was powerless and could not produce in me the same symptoms, although I was breathing it in and it was in contact with the mucuous membrane. Evidently then the pollen could not produce hay fever in me until its proxy, in the form of a correspondence (a thought) entered my mind.

I do not deny that material things have power to harm us, but I believe they are admitted or barred out by mental states, and for this reason I am convinced that we can fill the mind with something which will make us impervious to disease. I am also convinced that while disease is present with us we can drive it out, either all at once or by degrees, as the case may be, and that we can do this by filling the mind full with the very opposite of disease. Everyone has the power of imagination and every one can use it in picturing health. Everyone has known a comparative state of health for brief moments at least, and the recollection is sufficient to forma suggestion or pattern for a mental picture to hold in the imagination. Try it, dear friends, and you will be surprised to find how much you will accomplish.

And do not think because you are not well yourself that you cannot help another. Remember my experience with the swollen face and take courage. The more you try to help others, the more you will put out of mind your own ailments and finally they will disappear entirely.

I really believe that I owe my own perfect state of health to the fact that I am always treating others and totally forget my own physical state, except once in a while when I am recalled to myself and realize for the moment how well I am.

Lesson 10

In their effort to get away from too vivid a consciousness of material things some writers in the New Thought are inclined to depreciate or totally ignore the office of the external world in the evolution of spiritual life. They forget that were it not for external stimulus intelligent expression would be impossible. Shut a child away from all that acts on his senses and his life on this plane would become extinct. Shut him away partially and in proportion to that shutting away does he lack in expression. We need this touching on the outside to call forth that which is within us.

As Emerson says: "We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety."

That is the place to learn the secret, to stand where Being passes into Appearance and see both Being and Appearance; to stand where Unity passes into Variety and see both Unity and Variety.

To see Being and Unity only or Appearance and Variety only is to stand far off and not be present at the revealing of the secret.

This revealing is going on continually to him who stands before the secret and the revealing is the evolution of the spiritual consciousness, the seeing ever more and more clearly Being as it passes into Appearance, Unity as it passes into Variety.

I have said that mental healing is an art and that it, like all art, is built upon a foundation of Science. By this I mean that the mind must perceive certain fixed and unalterable truths. It must, for instance, see all Being as One and it must also see that One as the Continent of the Many, the Source of the Many, the Projector of the Many.

This is really the primal or basic truth upon which all other truths in mental healing are based. When the mind has grasped this it is ready for other statements. It begins to see a Perfect Whole, a Perfect Good, no matter how imperfect, incomplete and apparently evil the Appearance.

You are asked as a student of Mental Science to perceive that All is Good, but you say — How can I, when I see that a part of this All is Evil?  But let me tell you how it is. Can you not imagine a condition of pure white light in which there is not a shadow? Of course it is the "light which never shone on land or sea," for the moment it strikes the external world and shines on land and sea it becomes divided into light and darkness. The darkness looks like evil, is indeed symbolic of evil, but it is only a temporary separation of the pure white light, in which there is no shadow, as it passes out from its prenatal state of Being. When it is born into this world it becomes light and darkness, i. e., the light has the shadow in it and sometimes a very dark shadow it is. Often the light seems almost swallowed up in inky blackness, but the light shineth ever more and more unto the perfect day. From darkness to light is the evolution of the individual, from the darkness of ignorance to the light of intelligence, from the darkness of hate to the light of love, from the darkness of despair to the light of hope, from the darkness of sorrow to the light of joy.

To see, feel and know this to be true is a necessary step in attaining the healing state of consciousness. Then to act as though it were true strengthens that state and makes it permanent. To live the life is essential. In living the life, in acting and doing, in making manifest the light lies the Art of mental healing. It is as much an Art as Music or Painting, calling into play Emotion, Ideality, Imagination and that wonderful touch of transcendent genius which defies definition, that inspiration which comes from the Great Source.

They say that Truth heals and one feels like asking — What is Truth? If I tell you that a whole is the sum of all its parts that is Truth, but I venture to say it will not heal you.

A cold mathematical statement never healed any one. I must take that very statement and do something with it before it will heal you. And what must I do with it? I must let my thought, my feeling and my imagination play upon it until I see you as one of the parts of the Whole of Being. Until I see you as within this Whole and not outside of it. Being within it I see you as a part but not as a separated part, more like a finger on a hand.

Hold up your hand with the fingers extended and the palm toward you and you will see what I mean. The palm separates or diverges into fingers very much as the Whole of Being separates or diverges into external expressions. You are the finger on the hand of Being and its life is your life. The Whole is the sum of its parts, therefore I see every living thing proceeding from the Whole, as a part of the Whole and receiving the life of the Whole.

When I see this clearly it brings a great influx of life and it is that life which heals. It is that and not the dead bones of an anatomical statement, a mere skeleton of Truth. My statement then becomes — The Living Whole is the sum of its living parts. Science is thus infused by the living breath of Art. It is the Living Truth that heals, but to reach that Living Truth we must use Science as a stepping stone. By mechanical appliance we weld the cup for our Holy Grail.

There is a still higher truth which is based upon the one I have just given you. It is this — The Whole is not only the sum of its parts but it is its parts and its parts are it. When you get where you can see that, you have reached the highest truth of all. It is a truth so high that many stumble at it and will not, dare not see it as it is. But there is no hurry. Your mounting vision of Truth will overtop the obstacle, and you will know the highest, all in good time.

The day is coming, if not now, when you will see yourself as continually proceeding from the Father. It is in that sense that you are a child of God and not in the sense of a child body separated from its parent body. The ocean is father to the stream that flows forth from it and the sun is father to the ray of light. The ocean gives of itself to its stream, and the sun gives of itself to its ray. It is thus that God, the Father, gives of Himself by continual influx to His children. The only cutting off or shutting off there can be is in the non-recognition of this truth. We are only partially awake concerning ourselves, but a fuller awakening is just ahead of us and with this awakening will come a greater influx of life.

We are not independent of the external touch of the world about us. Human beings, circumstances and all things are ever touching the electric buttons which summon the light from within. Were it not for these touches God could not come forth and walk among men. Divinity could not manifest itself in Humanity.

You wish to learn how to do mental healing and to that end you study course after course of lessons on the subject. You follow definite instructions and rehearse your denials and affirmations until your mind feels like a treadmill and you, the weary creature who is making it go round and round. Are you getting anywhere? No. How could you on a treadmill? Is this the way to learn mental healing? No, indeed.

Charles Brodie Patterson very aptly asks the question — Has the

Metaphysical Movement found its soul? I answer positively — It has not. The Metaphysical Movement will find its soul when its teachers and adherents find theirs, and not before.

And what do I mean by soul? Well perhaps I can define it better by saying what it is not, or rather, where it is not. Science has no soul, Mechanics has no soul, Traffic has no soul, Mathematics, Chemistry, Astronomy are all without soul and the intellect alone is sufficient to compass them. Soul may be infused into them of course, but in themselves they may exist in the form of mere mental activity and be soulless.

Now while soul transcends definition we all know it to something higher and better than mere mental action. It is the soul in man which enables him to lay aside personal interest and live for the good of humanity. It is the soul in man which makes him speak the truth to his neighbor and deal squarely with him in business relations. It is the soul in man, which, apprehending Truth, is stirred and uplifted by it. It is the soul in man which sends out a current of healing Love to the world. It is the soul in man which endeavors, not only to see the Ideal but to live it as well. The Soul is all this and more, far more than I or anyone can express.

Just look at the wonderful results that have been accomplished by the Fulton Street Noon Prayer Meeting of New York City. I do not know that it is now in existence, but years ago I knew of it and the wonderful cures that were wrought in response to the prayers there uttered. They were simple prayers no doubt, very likely illiterate and ungraminatical. Probably the mental statements of Being were quite mixed and unscientific, so that our latter day metaphysicians would have wholly scorned them, but they did the work, and why? Because they were alive with SOUL.

My desire is to simplify this work of mental healing. There is, to be sure, a deep Philosophy connected with it which those may pursue who have the time and ability, but, in my opinion, all students, whether making a limited or extended study of the subject, need a central truth to hold to. That truth I am constantly endeavoring to express in one way or another in my idea of "a radiant centre" of life and Being from which you and I and all things proceed. I have dwelt upon this thought so long that I can actually feel this great Centre of Energy back of all I say, or think or feel or do. Sometimes when I have a letter from a patient asking for advice upon some perplexing situation, it will seem to me that I have nothing to say that will be helpful, but I begin the letter. I put down the usual preliminary date and address, and then, for an instant, there is a blank. This is followed by a rush of thought, just to the purpose and endorsed by my judgment as the very thing that is best for the questioner. The need of the writer presses the electric button in my mind and quick along the wire leading to the centre runs the demand. In response to it out from the centre rushes the supply.

I believe in the power of words, or affirmations. They too press the button and bring the current from the centre to circumference, but word and formula are apt through repetition to become dead and meaningless. In taking a formula into the Silence it should not be repeated mechanically but used rather as a theme for meditation.

There has been much discussion of late as to whether the healer heals the patient or whether the patient heals himself. My answer is simple enough: — The patient is connected with the same source as the healer, but he does not know how to press the button so as to turn on the current and the healer does it for him. After a time he learns how to do it himself.

All life unfolds from within and every individual must grow, from within himself, his own health, his own prosperity and his own happiness. But, while thus unfolding from within, he is acted upon from without. Otherwise growth were impossible. Poverty, disease, ill luck are nothing but calls for the Power Within to come forth and manifest itself, and it is in this sense that they are good.

Elbert Hubbard says — We are all children in the Kindergarten of God. Yes, and we are all growing creatures in the Gymnasium of God, strengthening our spiritual muscle on the bars of circumstance.

As you hold to the idea which I have given you concerning your radiant centre of growth you will little by little pass out of your present state of consciousness and the knowledge of a larger self will come to you. This larger self will contain all that is best and highest and happiest in the smaller self while the little, selfish motives with their vanities and conceits will have passed away. The new consciousness will feel so clean and sweet and good that it will be just like moving out of an old musty house, falling into decay, into a fresh, bright, new one full of air and sunshine. And you will go on from one state of consciousness into another, each better than the last just as you would move into better and better houses as your circumstances improved. It is hard to realize that these changes are in store for you but they are. They are coming to me, and to others, and they will also come to you.

The Apostle Paul knew just what he was talking about when he said "Again I say unto you, rejoice." He did not say "Rejoice when something happens that gives you pleasure." No, for then you would not need the command. No one needs to be told to rejoice when everything goes well and he is pleased to his heart's core. Why then the command? Well, Paul was a learned man and probably understood metaphysics. People did in those days, for you will find the very highest metaphysics in the New Testament. Paul was an earnest man. He not only preached but he lived the life and he knew perfectly well that one can rejoice when there is not a thing to be glad over. He knew it and I know it, for I have tried it myself and succeeded. If the martyrs could smile and sing when in cauldrons of boiling oil you and I can rejoice in the midst of lesser ordeals.

Begin this very day to say within yourself: "I will rejoice, I do rejoice." The first effort may be a failure as first efforts are apt to be, but do not give it up. Day after day declare that you rejoice and after a time you will say it with power enough to bring a flood of joy all through your being. The time to try is when thinks look very dark and you are most unhappy. Then touch the button which sends the call to the radiant centre, where there is pure joyous life. The way is thus opened for joy to pour into your mind and it comes.

The Vedantists have a beautiful teaching that the Central Consciousness, which is synonymous with Being or Life, is Pure Bliss, and I believe that to be absolutely true. It appeals to my reason. I feel it intuitively and have reduced it to a working hypothesis.

The Swami Abhedananda in "The Way to the Blessed Life," says: "True Life or being or Blessedness is beyond time and space and is not bound by conditions of any kind. It is not subject to the laws of phenomena. It is independent and perfect, while the apparent life is dependent upon the laws which govern the world of phenomena, and is conditioned by time and space. True Life or Real Being does not need any help from outside. It does not require anything from beyond itself. It is self-reliant, selfcomplete, self-sufficient and self-loving; while the apparent life, being an imperfect reflection of the True life, depends upon the conditions of the environment, and represents imperfectly those higher qualities of selfreliance, self -completeness, self-sufficiency, self-love and independence, which make the True Life a blessed and perfect Whole.

"Unblessedness consists in the idea of the separateness of the part from the whole, and in the bondages of other imperfections arising from this mistaken notion of individual isolation. To be united to the Whole, to be free from the bondages of these imperfections, and to be perfect — is Blessedness. Each individual germ of life, which we have already called the apparent life, possesses an innate tendency toward the attainment of this Blessedness, and to freedom from the conditions of unblessedness. Our earthly life consists in a continuous fight with the environments which have kept us away from the Central Truth, or the Blessed Life. We are constantly struggling to expand the sphere of self-love, by breaking down the walls of limitation which constrain the apparent life to a narrow selfishness, and thus to be united with the True Life of Perfection."

There is in you the innate tendency toward the attainment of Blessedness. There is in you this True life of Joy and Blessedness which is called forth to manifest itself when the button is pressed in the "apparent life." In this True life you are without disease or unhappiness. They are only shadows of the "apparent lif e," and when the True Life appears, these shadows flee away.

Lesson 11

I have witnessed enough in genuine occult phenomena to convince me beyond a doubt of a Supreme Force which can manipulate so-called matter in an infinitude of ways as yet unknown to man. The immortal, indestructible and all-powerful spirit which builds for itself these bodies of ours, is looking to it that they shall be remodeled, beautified, cleansed and made plastic to the motions of that Spirit which is in itself Joy, Health, Perfection, Wholeness, Harmony, Beauty, Strength and in fact all, even more than our present ideals can compass. We sight but dimly the glory that is to be revealed in us, and yet that vision, faint though it be, is sufficient to call us onward, ever onward in the path of realization.

Does that path look long and hard and dreary to the disease racked and the heavy laden? Ah, yes, it must, but trust me, beloved, it is shorter, easier and happier than you think. The World-Illusion is holding your eyes that you cannot see, holding your feet that you can not walk, holding your hands that you can not do.

You are self-hypnotized by this Illusion while the Truth stands waiting to make you free.

I wish you could have witnessed with me some wonderful experiments in the integration and disintegration of matter, made by an Adept from Thibet, for then you would understand better upon what I base my hope for humanity and you would know with me that a self-hypnotic spell is binding man's atoms into the form of weakness and disease. With that lifted, the Spirit would instantly shape all to its own true, healthful and beautiful pattern.

The Spirit can break this spell if you will trust it, and you can, for it is Love, and you can always trust Love.

Go into the Silence and ask the Spirit to remove this spell which is binding you. The Spirit is Intelligence itself and it will hear. It is Love itself and it will respond to your appeal.

Relax your entire body and say — I now drop all my beliefs concerning myself and my present condition. I am plastic to the motion of the Spirit. Let it mould me as it will.

Tour first effort in this direction may not count for much, but it will count for something, for it will begin to loosen your bonds and persistent effort will free you entirely.

No one can claim more of the power of the Spirit than you can, although some may have called more of it into expression, and those who have can help you by the touch of their mental and spiritual vibration.

As I said in a previous lesson — You are acted upon from without. You are touched by other beings and by circumstance. This serves to call forth the Spirit that is within you. Others do not give you the Spirit, for it is not theirs to give, since it is free to all. It is yours and theirs as well.

If I go to your house and ring your bell it is a summons for you to present yourself, and you do so if you are at home and wish to see me.

The Spirit is always at home and it always wishes to present itself. It is always pushing toward expression.

Some people make you feel more alive. Do you know why that is? They have the subtle power of calling forth the Spirit from within you. Those are the people for you to seek. They do you good and help you on toward health and happiness. This does not mean that you are to lean on others or that others are to live your life for you. It only means that life is reciprocal and that no man liveth unto himself alone.

Those who think and talk most learnedly are not usually those who can help you most. It is those who have suffered as you are suffering, those who can feel deeply, those who can sympathize with you, those who send you the beneficent current of their love, those who with the eyes of true wisdom see your way out of all this suffering, who can give you powerful aid.

I receive many complaints from people who have studied Mental Healing for years and who have accomplished nothing. Upon investigation I generally find that such people are busying themselves with a lot of nonessentials. They are possibly trying to determine whether reincarnation be true, or discriminating between such terms as Soul and Spirit, or Spirit and Being, or Being and Non-Being, and while the intellect is abnormally active, health and happiness are at a low ebb within them.

In fact the mind may busy itself in this way forever and be no nearer the truth it is really seeking for the generation of more and happier life. I know this from my own experience, when for years I wandered about among details without grasping a central truth about which to organize a new life. I once thought I must be able to distinguish every element upon the astral plane before I could create upon that plane, but I know now that all this differentiation is not essential, the main thing being to get into rapport with the Spirit, to realize your oneness with it, and to feel it flowing through you to will and to do. This is happiness in itself. This is health in itself.

It is health and happiness ever increasing, and this once established, then you can differentiate if you will, then you can study life's problems at your leisure, for underneath and supporting your mind there is a solid basis on which you rest, a fulcrum upon which to place your lever.

"It makes no difference whether you call the Supreme Power by the name of Brahma, Zeus or God, to realize its Oneness is the first step in Occultism."

It is also the first step on the path to health of mind and body, for that is a path in Occultism, since the way is hidden and only to be revealed to him who seeks an alliance with occult force.

The fusion of the personal will with the will of the Spirit is also a step. It is the letting go of a lesser power to grasp a greater. The mistake of many is to suppose that it leads to deprivation and pain. On the contrary it leads away from both and brings one to the fulness of peace and health.

It is several years since I reached the place in my unfoldment where I could say from the depths of my being — My will shall henceforth be one with the will of the Spirit and I will know no other leading.

That instantly brought me Peace. Not stagnation, not inaction, but Peace, which means an activity based upon and proceeding from an underlying state of repose and harmony.

I will now draw these lessons to a close, not that I have uttered my last word on the subject, but because I have said enough to make the series complete.

In "Mental Healing Made Plain" I have endeavored to show you a short cut to that which you desire to attain, rather than to point out the way in detail, and in doing this, dear readers, my heart and soul is with you. May you find and realize in its fulness, "THE BLESSED LIFE."

I hope you enjoyed reading Mental Healing Made Plain by Kate Atkinson Boehme.

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Table of Contents

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4

Lesson 5

Lesson 6

Lesson 7

Lesson 8

Lesson 9

Lesson 10

Lesson 11