The Only Power
He who is looking for wisdom, power, or permanent success, will find it only within. Mind is the only cause. Your body is healthy or sick according to the images of thought you impress upon your subconscious mind. If you will hold thoughts of health instead of sickness, if you will banish all thoughts of disease and decay, you can build up a perfect body. Dr. William S. Patten of New York says, “To know and to understand the organization of mind and to recognize the action of mind is the first and the only requisite of a sound body.” For all disease starts in the mind. It may be in your own conscious mind, from reading of an epidemic or from meeting with circumstances which education has taught you will bring about disease. It may be suggested to your subconscious mind, as so frequently happens with young children, by the fears and worries and thoughts of contagion of those around you.
But whichever it is, it is FEAR that starts it. You visualize, consciously or unconsciously, the disease that you fear, and because that is the image held before your thought, your body proceeds to build in accordance with that model. You believe that disease is necessary, that you have got to expect a certain amount of it. You hear of it every day, and subconsciously at least you are constantly in fear of it. And through that very fear you create it, when if you would spend that same amount of time thinking and believing in the necessity of HEALTH, you would never need to know disease.
God does not send disease. It is not a visitation of Providence. If it were, what would be the use of doctoring it? You couldn’t fight against the power of God!
God never sent us anything but good. He never gave us disease. When we allow disease to take hold of us, it is because we have lost touch with God — lost the perfect model of us that He holds in mind. And what we have got to strive for is to get back the belief in that perfect model — to forget the diseased image we are holding in our thought.
Remember the story of Alexander and his famous horse, Bucephalus? No one could ride the horse because it was afraid of its shadow. But Alexander faced it towards the sun — and rode it without trouble. Face towards the sun and the shadows will fall behind you, too. Face towards the perfect image of every organ, and the shadows of disease will never touch you.
There is no germ in a draft capable of giving you a cold. There are no bacteria in exposure to the weather that can give you a fever or pneumonia. It is you that gives them to yourself. The draft doesn’t reason this out. Neither does your body.
They are both of them merely phases of matter. They are not intelligent. It is your conscious mind that has been educated to think that a cold must follow exposure to a draft. This it is that suggests it to your subconscious mind and brings the cold into being.
Before you decide again that you have a cold, ask yourself, who is it that is taking this cold? It cannot be my nose, for it has no intelligence. It does only what my subconscious mind directs. And anyway, how could my nose know that a draft of air has been playing on the back of my neck? If it wasn’t my nose that decided it, what was it? The only thing it can have been is my mind. Well, if mind can tell me to have a cold, surely it can stop that cold, too. So let’s reverse the process, and instead of holding before the subconscious mind images of colds and fevers, think only of health and life and strength. Instead of trying to think back to discover how we “caught” cold, and thus strengthening the conviction that we have one, let us deny its existence and so knock the props out from under the creative faculties that are originating the cold. Let us hold before our subconscious mind only the perfect idea of nose and head and throat that is in Universal Mind. Let us make it use the Truth for its pattern, instead of the illusory ideas of conscious mind.
Every form of disease or sickness is solely the result of wrong thinking. The primary law of being is the law of health and life. When you recognize this, when you hold before your mind’s eye only a perfect body, perfect organisms functioning perfectly, you will “realize the truth that makes you free.”
Farnsworth in his “Practical Psychology” tells of a physician who has lived on a very restricted diet for years while at home. But about once a year he comes to New York for a week. While here, he eats anything and everything that his fancy dictates, and never suffers the least inconvenience. As soon as he gets home he has to return to his diet. Unless he sticks to his diet, he expects to be ill — and he is ill.” As a man thinketh, so is he.” What one expects to get he is apt to get, especially where health is concerned. For matter has no sensation of its own. The conscious mind is what produces pain, is what feels, acts or impedes action.
Functional disorders are caused by certain suggestions getting into the sub consciousness and remaining there. They are not due to physical, but to mental causes — due to wrong thinking. The basis of all functional disorders is in the mind, though the manifestation is dyspepsia, melancholia, palpitation of the heart, or any one of a hundred others. There is nothing organically wrong with the body. It is your mental image that is out of adjustment. Change the one and you cure the other.
In this day of the gymnasium and the daily dozen, it may sound impractical to suggest that it is the mind, not the body, which needs the care. But I am far from being the first to suggest it.
There is a very successful physician in London whose teaching is that gymnastic exercise does more harm than good. He contends that the only exercise necessary for the perfect development of the body is yawning and stretching.
I would go farther than that. I would say that no physical exercise is essential to the perfect development of the body. That since the only cause is mind, the principal good of exercise is that when we go through the motions we impress upon our subconscious mind the picture of the perfect figure that we would have. And that mental visualization is what brings the results.
You can get the same results without the physical exercise by visualizing in your mind’s eye the figure of the man you want to be, by intensely desiring it, by BELIEVING that you have it.
You can win to perfect health by knowing that there is but one right idea in Universal Mind for every organism in your body — that this right idea is perfect and undying — that you have only to hold it before your subconscious mind to see it realized in your body. This is the truth that makes you free.
Chapter 11 — The Law of Attraction
The old adage that “He profits most who serves best” is no mere altruism.
Look around you. What businesses are going ahead? What men are making the big successes? Are they the ones who grab the passing dollar, careless of what they offer in return? Or are they those who are striving always to give a little greater value, a little more work than they are paid for?
When scales are balanced evenly, a trifle of extra weight thrown into either side overbalances the other as effectively as a ton.
In the same way, a little better value, a little extra effort, makes the man or the business stand out from the great mass of mediocrity like a tall man among pigmies, and brings results out of all proportion to the additional effort involved.
It pays — not merely altruistically, but in good, hard, round dollars — to give a little more value than seems necessary, to work a bit harder than you are paid for. It’s that extra ounce of value that counts.
For the law of attraction is service. We receive in proportion as we give out. In fact, we usually receive in far greater proportion. “Cast thy bread upon the waters and it will return to you an hundred-fold.”
Back of everything is the immutable law of the Universe — that what you are but the effect. Your thoughts are the causes. The only way you can change the effect is by first changing the cause.
People live in poverty and want because they are so wrapped up in their sufferings that they give out thoughts only of lack and sorrow. They expect want. They open the door of their mind only to hardship and sickness and poverty. True — they hope for something better — but their hopes are