BY
ARTHUR CHANDLER, D.D.
BISHOP OF BLOEMFONTEIN
PRAYER AND MENTAL HEALING
By the Bishop of Bloemfontein
This paper is concerned with Mental Healing; its object is to suggest, in a tentative way, how Mental Healing may be effected by Mental Prayer. But, in order to do this, it is necessary (at the risk of repeating what may have been written by others) to refer to certain premises leading up to the conclusion which I wish to draw.
(1) In the first place it is coming to be recognised that ‘consciousness’ must be understood in a far wider and more general sense than we have been accustomed to associate with it. Alongside of the active work of the intellect with which, e.g., we study mathematics or pursue our profession, there is a large, dreamy, half-conscious tract of mind, not sharpened to a single point, like the active intellect, but consisting in a multiplicity of mind-centres (mental ganglia, as we might call them) diffused throughout the body. We knew before that our body was a microcosm or an epitome of the world in which it was found, and now we are learning that the same is true of our minds. Primitive kinds of consciousness have been carried up with us in our ascent from lower grades of being, and survive, dormant but real, over against the intellect which is the palmary achievement of our race. This residual consciousness (the consciousness which exists outside of the rational intellect) consists largely of instincts and capacities which regulate the lives of other animals, and which were employed by man in his primitive state, but for which he has no use in his present-day existence; modes of receptivity and reaction, which were natural to him in his dreamy childhood, but which are discarded by him in the aggressive, self-assertive, wide-awake condition in which he now lives. Mr. Myers, in his ‘Human Personality,’ gives a very attractive and convincing account of this inheritance from our ‘lowly ancestors.’ But probably we have to go deeper still to account for parts of the consciousness which we thus inherit. The rooted attachment to home, and the blind tenacity with which, in the teeth of reason, men cling to life, exhibit a more primitive mode of consciousness than that of animal life. Here we will quote some very suggestive words of Professor Stewart:
‘Transcendental feeling I would explain genetically as an effect produced within consciousness by the persistence in us of that primeval condition from which we are sprung, when life was still as sound asleep as death, and there was no time yet. That we should fall for a while, now and then, from our waking, time-marking life, into the timeless slumber of this primeval life is easy to understand; for the principle solely operative in that primeval life is indeed the fundamental principle of our nature, being that “vegetative part of the soul” which made from the first, and still silently makes, the assumption on which our rational life of conduct and science rests—the assumption that life is worth living. When to the “vegetative” the “sensitive” soul is first added, the Imperative (Live thy Life) is obeyed by creatures which, experiencing only isolated feelings, and retaining no traces of them in memory, still live a timeless life, without sense of past or future, and consequently without sense of selfhood. Then, with memory, there comes, in the higher animals, some dim sense of a self dating back and prospecting forward. Time begins to be.’
This, then, is our starting point; that besides the single, supreme, rational activity, which we call intellect, there exist in us other forms of consciousness similar to those which accompany the growth of the plant or the life of the animal; and that this residual consciousness, however much we may discard or disown it, continues to live and work, and does things which the proud intellect is unable to do. On the other hand, we must not forget that these forms of feeling and instinct, of perception and reaction, which we regard as our heritage from lower grades of life, are enormously modified by their juxtaposition with a rational intellect. The unity of nature which comprehends both the intellect and them, makes itself felt; this lower form of mentality is still the mentality of a rational being; and the general position may be described by saying that there exists a decentralised consciousness, diffused through the organism, ‘irrational, but capable of sharing in reason, and of listening to it,’ as Aristotle would say, and manifesting itself in a power of receiving impressions, manipulating them, and reacting upon them, which in our present state of ignorance we describe by the convenient word ‘abnormal.’
(2) Because the residual consciousness is thus diffused throughout the body, it can exercise control over the various parts of the body, just as the central intellect exercises control over the body as a whole. As the reason can set the body in motion by commands issued through the brain and travelling down the motor nerves, so the departmental consciousness can initiate changes and disturbances in the various nerve centres with which it is associated. This, we take it, is what happens in all cases of mental healing. The phenomenon is physical as well as psychical; it consists not merely in the inhibition of the feeling of pain, but in such a modification of the nerve tissues as removes the cause of the pain. A real cure is effected, and it is effected by the action of the residual consciousness upon that particular part of the organism.
(3) This decentralised, residual consciousness can work best when the rational intellect is quiescent—when, we may say, the central office is closed. At such times man ceases for the time to be an argumentative, striving creature; the placid, vegetative, ruminative life, the life of growth and instinct, asserts itself; submerged modes of consciousness begin to stir and act, like fairies dancing when the sun has set.
And as sleep is the typically quiescent state, it will be specially in sleep, natural or induced, that these lower modes of consciousness will exhibit their activity.