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.
§ 118
The Succession Plan of the love episode is, however, no freakish Hindu proposition. But it is a perfectly possible pattern which involves the application of psychical (hypersomatic) imagination to a course of action that in animals is entirely physical and in humans takes on more and more the psychical characteristics, as men gain more and more insight into the influence of the hypersomatic over the hyposomatic portions of the mind-body combination.
It is obviously impossible in this book, however, to be more specific than to recommend that the man having become fully cognizant of the fact that other men have done, and are today doing, what is not generally done, should say to himself, “I will retard here, I will observe there, I will not hurry or allow myself to be hurried but will take everything as it comes and reap the full measure of satisfaction before advancing a single step farther, knowing full well that whatever acceleration is urged will only defeat its own purpose.”
Each man should fill out the details of this pattern which in a book cannot be any more specific; but above all he should know that he can acquire control over his own passions—indeed, that he must, in order to be able to give them the fullest play later, and that their fullest play is not an iota less than they should have for the health and happiness of himself and his life partner.
§ 119
The fetishism of the single sense quality is an important consideration here. Harvey O’Higgins in The Secret Springs shows how even a part of the person or a phase of the woman’s personality may take on an overplus of emotional tension in the mind of the man, such as to make him think he has found the paragon of all the virtues in the first woman he sees having this peculiarity.
If his mother’s hands were especially beautiful, it is likely that beauty of hands will play a big part in his unconscious selection of a life partner, and that homely hands will repel him in a girl otherwise eminently fitted to be his mate.
The deep emotions experienced by a little boy in seeing his mother in evening dress in the ruddy glow of a red lampshade in the drawing-room gave him a depth of response to that one vision that made him twenty years later fall suddenly in love with a girl whom he saw illuminated by the red hall light in her father’s house.