§ 117
The question will at once be asked: first, how one can tell whether one’s unconscious imagination, which controls one’s acts and one’s physiological reactions, contains the picture of control or of lack of control, and, second, how one can change the lineaments of this pattern.
The first question is answered by saying that if a man show lack of erotic control it is proved that his unconscious imagination is thus, and not otherwise, patterned.
The second question requires a longer consideration.
If the unconscious is to be controlled at all, it can be controlled by conscious thinking only by means of substituting one pattern of action for another.
It is obvious that the unconscious mental processes that govern digestion, circulation, excretion, and the work of the glands of internal secretion, cannot be pictured at all in conscious terms, i.e., in visual or auditory or other images. No anatomist, histologist, or physiologist has a definite enough mental picture of what actually does take place in the blood stream upon the injection of the secretions of the various endocrine glands. Therefore the autosuggestionists give the most generic formula possible—simply: “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”
But in the conduct of the love episode this extremely generic formula is not sufficient. So we come to a more specific answer to our question as to how the unconscious can be controlled. It is controlled by impressing on it patterns of action from the conscious. There is no other way. The extraordinary and freakish accomplishments of Hindu fakirs are made possible by their picturing in their conscious minds the possibility of their living successfully through their months of awkward postures. If these feats were attempted by Occidentals the results would be fevers, congestions, and all manner of ills suggested to them by their environment.