The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

A healthy body is healthy thought externalized.

Man's normal condition is that of robust health, vigorous vitality, tremendous power of endurance. The Creator evidently intended the human machine to run harmoniously, without friction, without weakness or disability of any kind.

The created is a part of the Creator, an indestructible part of Him. When we rise to a full consciousness of this we shall be victors over disease instead of victims of it; we shall be conquerors instead of slaves of conditions.

Nearly a century ago a celebrated German physician said that there is something in man which was never born, is never sick and never dies, and that it is this something, this omnipotent force within which in reality heals our diseases. No matter what we may call it, this something that repairs and renews is one with the Force that creates us. We may name it variously the God principle, the Christ within us, the divine principle, the omnipotent force or anything else we please; the name does not matter. All mean the same thing, that is, the creative, the all-sustaining Force that holds the universe in harmony.

There is something in you that is lord over your physical organs. There is a power in you, back of the flesh, but not of it, which dominates the flesh, and that is the real you. Your partner in that power is the Intelligence that created you. You are indissolubly interlinked with that Intelligence. You can no more be wiped out of existence than the Creator who made you, because you are an immortal expression of Himself. You are His masterpiece, and His work must partake of His qualities, of His perfection, of His omnipotence, of His omniscience.

The trouble with us is we do not rise to the power and dignity of our divinity. We do not half believe we are divine. We have a sort of vague theory that we are mere puppets, thrown off as separate units into space, without any vital connection with the Power that gave us life. This false theory is the cause of our sufferings.

The reason why we are such shriveled, scrub oaks of human beings is found in the dried-up, mean, stingy ideal of ourselves which we have been taught to hold. We have been reared to think of ourselves as "poor miserable worms of the dust," unworthy to come into the presence of our Father-Mother-God, even though we are fashioned in His image. Instead of carrying through life an ideal of our mental and physical perfection, we carry an ideal of a defective, diseased, physically and mentally imperfect, being. The mind being the molder of the body, the life-giving processes within us build the sort of body that answers to the model in the mind, the ideal which we hold of ourselves. What we really believe ourselves to be, we tend to become. We keep our minds filled with all sorts of discordant, sick pictures, and of course all of these mental images reappear in the body, react upon the life.

On the other hand, every time we affirm that we are one with the creative Force of the universe, that nothing can separate us from our oneness with the One, we tend to build our bodies into the ideal state of perfect health,—mental, physical, and moral wholeness. If we could hold continually the ideal of our wholeness, and visualize ourselves as perfect beings "even as He is perfect," and constantly try to live up to our ideal, any tendency to imperfection, to discord, to disease would be eliminated.

We are only just beginning to realize the tremendous import of the idea that we really fashion our bodies to correspond with our thoughts, that we are co-creators of ourselves with the Divine Power which is back of the flesh, but not of it.

A prominent surgeon in speaking of infantile paralysis says that the physician's mental attitude toward it has a great deal to do with its cure, and that he should hold firmly in mind the idea that the disease is curable.