It is self-evident, therefore, that auto-suggestion can be employed to great advantage for therapeutic purposes. Indeed, the power of self-help is the most important part of mental therapeutics. Without it the science is of comparatively little value or benefit to mankind. With it goes the power to resist disease,—to prevent sickness, as well as to cure it. The old axiom, that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," holds good in psycho-therapeutics as well as in material remedies, and he who obtains the power to hold himself in the mental attitude which enables him to resist the encroachments of disease has mastered the great secret of mental medicine. That it can be done by any one of ordinary intelligence, is a fact which has been demonstrated beyond question. The best workers in the field of Christian science give more attention to teaching their pupils and patients how to help themselves than they do to instructing them how to help others. And this is the secret of the permanence of their cures, as has been fully explained in other chapters of this book. The process by which it can be done is as simple as are the laws which govern the subject-matter.
The patient should bear in mind the fundamental principles which lie at the foundation of mental therapeutics,—
1. The subjective mind exercises complete control over the functions and sensations of the body.
2. The subjective mind is constantly amenable to control by the suggestions of the objective mind.
3. These two propositions being true, the conclusion is obvious, that the functions and sensations of the body can be controlled by suggestions of the objective mind.
The whole science of psycho-therapeutics is embraced in the foregoing propositions. They contain all that a patient, who undertakes to heal himself or to ward off the encroachments of disease, needs to know. The process of making a particular application of these principles is equally simple, and must be obvious to the intelligent reader. At the risk of repetition, a few general directions will be given.
We will take, for illustration, a simple case of nervous headache, and suppose that the patient resolves to cure himself. He must, first of all, remember that the subjective mind is to be treated precisely as though it were a separate and distinct entity. The suggestion must first be made that the headache is about to cease; then, that it is already ceasing; and, finally, that it has ceased. These suggestions should be made in the form of spoken words, and they should be steadily persisted in until the desired effect is produced. A constant reiteration of the declaration that the head is better will inevitably produce the desired result; and, when the effect is distinctly felt, the declaration should be boldly made that the pain has entirely ceased. If any remnants of the pain are felt, the fact should be ignored, and the suggestion persisted in that it has ceased. This should be followed by the declaration that there will be no return of the symptoms; and this should be made with an air, tone, and feeling of perfect confidence.
The only practical difficulty and obstacle in the way of success with a beginner lies in the fact that at first he lacks confidence. The education of his whole life has been such as to cause him to look with distrust upon any but material remedies, and there is a disinclination to persist in his efforts. But he should remember that it is the suggestions conveyed by this very education that he is now called upon to combat, neutralize, and overcome by a stronger and more emphatic counter-suggestion. If he has the strength of will to persist until he is cured, he will find that the next time he tries it there will be much less resistance to overcome. Having once triumphed, the reasoning of his objective mind no longer interposes itself as an obstruction, but concurs in the truth of his suggestions. He then possesses both objective and subjective faith in his powers, and he finds himself operating on a line of no resistance whatever. When he has attained this point, the rest is easy; and he will eventually be able to effect an instantaneous cure of his headache, or any other pain, the moment he finds himself threatened with one. These remarks apply, of course, to every disease amenable to control by mental processes.
It will be observed that in the process of applying the principles of auto-suggestion to the cure of disease the patient is not called upon to tax his own credulity by any assertion that is not a demonstrable scientific truth. He is not called upon to deny the existence of matter, nor does he find it necessary to deny the reality of the disease which affects him. In short, he is not called upon to deny the evidence of his senses, to assert a manifest impossibility, nor to maintain an exasperating absurdity as a condition precedent to his recovery. The fact that cures can be made and are constantly being made by those who instruct their patients that a denial of the existence of matter and of the reality of disease is a necessary condition to their recovery, is the strongest possible evidence of the truth of the proposition that the subjective mind is constantly amenable to control by the power of suggestion. For it is a fundamental truth in psycho-therapeutics that no cure ever was, or ever can be, effected by mental processes until the subjective mind of the patient is impressed with a belief in the efficacy of the means employed. It is obvious, however, that it is more difficult to impress a manifest absurdity upon the subjective mind of a man of common-sense than it is to impress him with a belief in a demonstrable scientific truth. Hence it is that, by methods now in vogue, both healer and patient are handicapped just in proportion to the tax laid upon their credulity. The point is, that in impressing a patient with a new scientific truth we should seek to make it as simple as possible, and avoid anything which will shock his common-sense. Christ enjoined upon his followers the simple scientific fact that faith on their part was a condition precedent to their reception of the benefits of his healing power; and he compelled them to believe, by publicly demonstrating that power. He would have had little success among the people with whom he had to deal if he had begun his treatment by telling them that they had no disease; that leprosy is a figment of the imagination, and has no existence except in the mind; or that blindness is merely blindness of the mind, and not of the body; and that the body itself has no existence except as a form of belief. He even resorted to material remedies, as in the case of the blind man, when "He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, and said unto him, Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam. He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing."[34]