INSERCIÓN LABORAL DE PROMOCIONES RECIENTES

FIRST REMEDY: Improving the Body-Tone by Health-Thought. Undoubtedly one's courage-attitude toward things depends largely upon one's physical tone, for a low physical tone commonly means a weak action of the self in thought. “It’s all right to talk," said a ruffian, "but courage is a mighty curious thing, and nobody 's got it with him all the time (he was mistaken in the last statement). Take me on a sun-shiny day, full of good grub and with a couple of drinks under my belt, and I 'd stand up to a regiment and take my chances. But take me before daybreak, in the rain, hungry and cold, and I'd run from one Greaser if he was hunting me." But it is equally true that a low psychic condition depresses physical tonus, and so makes the entire

personality an easy prey to fear. In addition, then, to effort looking to bodily health through right living, you are urged to cultivate the assertive assumption of being now in physical vigor, which is itself a great inspirer of courage. Here we have a huge law running through all ages, utilized incompletely and confusedly by all peoples, the law that the human spirit is designed for sovereignty over its physical house or instrument. No individual or system has a monopoly on this law. Suggestion, mental healing, magnetic healing, miracles and Christian Science have merely in part exploited the universal and natural law of the great System in which we live. It is for every human to belt on to that law, so to speak, and, so doing, to assert for himself his own sovereign power and to draw to himself the universal forces of welfare.

The law is not a new, but is an ancient, law. The power to use the law and the force behind it, and the power of those forces, is no new thing. There is no new power in human nature, created in one age or another. All the power man will ever possess he now has; and the power of his almighty nature waits only discovery by the objective consciousness to do the will's command.

There is no new knowledge of truth essential to or in the nature of things. Of such knowledge the human spirit is already in perfect possession; the truth merely needs discovery as a reality which has always been in the possession of the subconscious self to be utilized for the betterment of the conscious self through the enfoldment of the subconscious self.

Progress in human life signifies, not new creations, but always merely unfoldments.

Only that which has always been in the soul can be unfolded in the soul's life. If man knows any essential truth today, or possesses any conscious power, it is because he has simply unfolded his own nature. We background on the Infinite, and "there is no limit to the knowing of the self that knows," no limit to the power of the self which unfolds.

The method by which health-thoughts may practically operate for improved and maintained physical tone are seen in suggestion, or a valiant faith in one's own physical power.

In suggestion, one asserts, quietly, yet emphatically: "This pain is nothing; this lassitude or depression is nothing; I am well and a-l-l r-i-g-h-t, and shall surely continue so to be." We say we throw off the condition; we do not; we throw into the condition those powerful movements of the soul which dispel the condition. I have demonstrated the truth numberless times. Elisha Kane, relates that in his early life a captain, dying of scurvy on shipboard in the polar seas, was told that there was mutiny on deck. Out of a comatose state the old sailor started with a call for his boots, and quelled the mutiny — and recovered. When your deeper self asserts its command at the suggestion of the conscious self, body inevitably tries to obey. And not only is the huge power of suggestion yours for the ills of flesh, but as well for a higher register of psychic tone and its permanent maintenance.

I know that there are some degrees of pain which may not be subdued, some conditions of the body which may not be handled, in this way. The facts disturb neither the reality of the law nor the possession of the power. They merely show that the soul has lost control of itself, and so is unable to seize upon the law and draw forth the power. But by so much as the self retains any self-control, by so much may it lay hold both on law and power.

It is to be understood that these affirmations require modification by another law — that present conditions are the outcomes of past suggestions and ways of living. In matter there are the laws of dirt, and if one lives in a dirty way, these laws of dirt will work themselves out. Nevertheless, it is not mere dirt which causes disease: it is after all the psychic under-life that makes dirt malevolent. Our psychic antecedents it is that have banked up against us the powerful evil of the past. One's physical state may be the result of years or of centuries of false living and thinking (we must recognize the facts), so that, in some cases, the law of suggestion, or of psychic power, may be invoked too late, not because the soul is not humanly sovereign, but because it is individually incapable of using its own powers. The ideal operation of the law may in all cases be far in the future. When health is thus destroyed, temporarily, or seemingly permanently, I hold it to be common sense to call in the trained physician and the demonstrated mental healer, meanwhile exercising all the psychic ability one possesses. What do I care for the theories of a doctor forbidding the mental healer? I am for health — especially my own — and I want help from any source, with any label. And what do I care for the follies of Christian Science forbidding the physician. I am for health, and the trouble is mine, not to be handled by a mere notion, even if that notion is religious and altogether sacred to some one else. As a matter of fact, the law of sovereignty cares for neither as against the other, but will obey the call of either or both if that call is or can be efficient or potent enough. And it is a perfectly dead law until the call becomes so efficient. The ideal in all this is freedom to utilize the psychic power of soul over body, by

whatever means, and signifies, therefore, absolutely no bondage, to medicine on the one hand, or to suggestion or religion, or "science" on the other hand. If you can swim at all, you can swim without a board — provided you have the ability to use your power; but if you lack just there a small board will help you swim when you otherwise would drown. If you continue to practice swimming without a board, you will ultimately require none. In the education of the soul for perfect self-mastery, anything that helps is legitimate. Whether or not the use of helps will develop helplessness depends altogether on the soul itself. The resolute soul shouts: I am at liberty to use these helps now, and do so, but, please God, tomorrow I shall have the larger freedom to ignore them; meanwhile, I am for health, whatever the means.

This book urges you, in the battle for health as against sickness, to take advantage of both physical science and spiritual laws.

And yet, although some cases of physical disability may seem defiant and incurable, I am unable to find any definite rule which must exclude suggestion as an efficient remedy. The physicians are constantly affirming cases to be hopeless which the mental healers are curing. Nor am I able to discover any principle which must bid us wait the slow improvement of centuries in the matter of psychic power before we can squarely bank on the soul's sovereignty. Though some facts seem to contradict the conclusion, I find it impossible to see that inability to recover physical tone by assertive suggestion may not and ought not in any and every case to be instantly successful. Clergymen will babble a law of God that all must die. But the God they talk about is the creator of Nature in which health is a phase of reality, and there is no God worth our thought who would or could create an evil Nature, and the real God of this Universe has no power to make disease and death parts of a system in a state of perfect harmony with itself and Him, or who has the ability to foist disease or death into an individual career living in a similarly perfect state of harmony. The law of suggestion, taken in its broadest sense, is merely an expression of tendency toward harmony. When harmony becomes perfect and universal, the God I worship will be very glad to see disease and death forever banished.

But suggestion, it should be remembered, is more than a mere statement of thought, at least in its higher form: it is the dynamic power of faith. True faith is a force, as real and effective, yet as law-abiding, as the force of gravity. The idea of faith cannot be given in a simple reference to belief, for belief may be defined as an assent of the intellect, while faith is an active state of the entire self. Observe one person as he expresses belief in present or future welfare. He is mild and negative.

Observe, now, a second person as he declares his faith: he may be very composed and quiet in the matter, but his whole attitude indicates confident energy. He radiates force. He is condensed power. The deepest phases of his personality are vibrant and expectant. The general difference between the two men is vital. Faith involves belief, but it then may become power in action. The activity is of the inner self no less than of the objective functions. There is in the prophetic soul a vital, profound, enriched, assertive and assumptive state of consciousness which exerts its own power, manifests its own law, amid the laws and forces of Nature. Such

conditions harmonize discordant elements in the life, induce favorable currents inward from large areas without, and actually establish the prerequisites of health and further development of power. The man of doubt is always, of course, losing the faith he has, while the man of faith is forever gaining more faith, because, beginning with assumption, he sets consciousness into harmonious vibrations or activities, manages to achieve more or less since Nature must respond to his call,

approximately right as it is, and so, in his hopeful feelings and his successes finds justification of past faith and ground for further faith.

In other words, health and ideal personality depend upon the amount of

appropriating consciousness one can throw over environment, over a very Universe, the territory one can cover by the overspread of his assumptive consciousness, the amount of a harmonious Universe one can absorb into his own personality. I know that this has a very large sound, but here, precisely, is the characteristic of true faith, that it thrives on great things alone.

If some of my readers suggest that such consciousness comes not of mere psychic assertion, but only from the study of books and the training of the schools, I reply that the greatest truths man has discovered and the noblest victories he has achieved have all resulted from the mighty faith-power of the human soul over and above the immediate influence of all the schools of the ages.

It is for reasons thus indicated that I urge the development within of the power of faith: faith in one's own body, faith in one's own psychic ability, faith in one's own faith, faith in and for present health, confidence in the possession of buoyancy and vigor, and thus faith — assertive assumption here and now — in physical tone and fearlessness regarding every object in Nature, seen or unseen. The faith and the assumption, in some eases, may at first seem almost impossible, and, if experienced, may be very feeble, indeed, but perseverance will show the task to be less and less difficult, and will render the confident expectation itself more and more

pronounced. Above all, these suggestions will as certainly unfold the tone of real courage as a law of Nature will bring man benefits when obeyed. We consider, then ---