For health and illness are by no means the mere and exclusive consideration of the physical life. Health, in its complete significance, is mental and even moral, and involves, in its higher aspects, the entire question of the spiritual life. Health, successful achievement, and happiness are an indissoluble trinity, when interpreted in their full integrity and in their inter-relations. Ideally considered, they are in closest interpenetration. As a matter of actual fact each is often partially manifest,—good physical health without any special achievement; or a high degree of achievement with defective health; or both, without much resultant happiness; or happiness even, without outward success or physical health, resulting only from a deeper spiritual insight and recognition of eternal laws. Still, ideally considered, as this world goes, health should be the basis of successful achievement, and this achievement should rest on health; and the union of both should produce the inflorescence of happiness; for the true sense of all successful achievement is in that it makes for the forces of righteousness, and a successful swindler or criminal could hardly be included under these general definitions. And so, to have good health, and to achieve good and noble work, must produce a good degree of personal happiness as inevitably as that certain numerical combinations produce certain numerical results. So much we may concede. The question is then before us: How can we secure and hold unvarying, from day to day, from year to year, this basis of physical health on which the superstructure of all endeavor and realization must rest? Just how shall one be well and keep well?
It is certainly a question not restricted to the physician nor yet to the metaphysician. For health is not merely a physical condition. It is the question of the poise, the harmony of the entire psychical being.
Professor John D. Quackenbos has recently said of Hypnotism:—
"Investigations extending over many years have led me to a belief in the dual personality of man—that is, each human unit exists in two distinct states of superior consciousness. One of these states is called the primary or superliminal consciousness,—the personality by which a man is known to his objective associates, which takes cognizance through the senses of the outside world, and carries on the ordinary business of every-day life. The second or subliminal personality is the superior spiritual self, the man's own oversoul, which automatically superintends all physical functions and procedures, and influences mental and moral attitudes.
"It happens to be a fact of mind that in sleep—natural or induced—this subliminal or submerged self may be brought into active control of the objective life. My experiments have forced me to the conclusion that there is no difference as regards suggestibility between natural sleep and the so-called hypnotic trance. In the induced sleep the subject is in rapport exclusively with the operator; in natural sleep only with his own objective self, perhaps with a multitude of discarnate personalities, who think and feel in common with him, and, in case he be of superior parts, possibly with all well-wishing extra-human intelligences."
Here we have the basis of truth. That condition of vigor, poise, vitality, and harmony which we call good health depends on the degree of control exercised over the physical body by that "second or subliminal personality, the superior spiritual self, the man's own oversoul, which," as Doctor Quackenbos so truly observes, "superintends all physical functions and procedures, and influences mental and moral attitudes."
The problem, then, becomes that of bringing the psychical body into this receptive relation to the physical self? How shall the perfect spiritual supremacy be established? This question reveals, of itself, to how great a degree health is a mental and moral as well as a physical affair.
Perhaps the initial step is that of clearly realizing—of holding the luminous conception—of one's self as a spiritual being in the psychical body, temporarily inhabiting a physical body,—a spiritual being using as its instrument a physical body so long as it is at work in the physical world, or on the physical plane. One may thus conceive of his physical body as being really as objective as is the pen of the writer; the palette and brushes of the painter; the machine, or mechanism, or instrument used by any one. And the moment one learns to thus hold the physical instrument objectively, he thus brings it under the control of thought. He is no longer so a part of it; so entangled and involved in it that he cannot control it. The moment he holds this clear, vivid mental realization of it as his instrument, he is in command. This may be illustrated by an electric car and a motor-man. If the man were bound up and entangled among the cogs and wheels he could not guide and control the car; but in his place, free from all its mechanism, his hand on the motor, the course and the degree of speed obeys his mental direction applied through his control.
This realization of the true relation of the spiritual man to his body is the initial condition of health, and this involves as a matter of course the spiritual relations with the Divine Power, and receptivity to the infinite energy.