The Finger of God

The Finger of God: Lessons in Spiritual Healing
Thomas Parker Boyd, D.D., PhD.

Chapter 1

An Available God

"I am the Lord who heals you" is our guarantee of healing and our proof that we must credit all healing, by any means whatever, to God. He alone is life, and is the Source of all the energies of life expressing themselves in material form. In the vegetable world "He gives their fruit for meat, and their leaves for medicine." Life, sense and intelligence exist in all living things, because God is in all living things. Therefore God, who is all that really is, is the I AM THAT I AM, with whom any intelligence, in conscious union, may say, "I am."

God is the only Absolute Reality, and He is Spirit. All material things are relative reality, and are limited and temporal. He is the Omni — the All – all Being, all Life, all Intelligence, all Wisdom, all Goodness, all Love, Health, all Abundance. Because of this unity of life, every living thing lives and moves and has its being in God, and is inherently a partaker of all His Completeness.

Because God is Omnipresent, that is, equally present everywhere, He is Immanent. He is indwelling in every living thing. His immanence guarantees the inherent goodness of every living thing, for He pronounced everything belonging to His Creation as "very good," before some personalities chose to become evil.

Life expresses itself by certain definite movements, which we call Laws, and no movement of life is possible apart from Law. In the purely spiritual realm, the Laws of Expression are invariable and absolute. God is only good, in whom is no evil. God is Light, and "in Him is no darkness at all." He is strength, in whom is no weakness at all. He is health, in whom is no sickness, and abundance, in whom is no poverty at all.

The same reign of Law prevails in the realm of material things, which we call relative reality. The movement of Power in certain definite channels of expression, called Laws, causes all that occurs. Whatever happens does so by Law. Everything that has ever happened has done so by Power, operating in obedience to the Law of Expression. Anything that has ever happened may therefore happen again, when that we have obeyed particular Law of Expression. Any recorded event may happen again, if we obey the Law. If it does not happen, we have not found and obeyed its Law of Expression – or it never occurred in the first place.

Any individual vegetable, animal or human expression of life must obey the Laws of Life Expression. The number of Laws that it can obey measures the richness and fullness of its experience and expression of life. Obedience to the law of inertia gives rest, and to the laws of motion makes all life’s activities possible. Obedience to the law of exercise gives a strong, active body, and to the law of education gives a trained mind.

Obedience to the "law of life in Christ Jesus makes us free from the law of sin and death." Our absolute guarantee of spiritual and physical welfare in a world governed by divinely ordained Laws is "If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land."

Disobedience to the Laws may be active or passive. One may intentionally violate the Law, or simply fail to keep it. In any event, the failure to obey the Law causes a negative condition that in turn may become active and aggressive, as indicated in the scriptural expression, "the law of sin and death."

Failing to obey the Law of Light, we have the negative darkness. Failing to obey the law of heat, we have the negative cold. Failing to obey the law of education, we have the negative ignorance. Failing to obey the law of goodness, we have the negative badness. Failing to obey the law of health, we have the negative disease, and these acts of disobedience, repeated often enough, may become the agents of our undoing.

The good things of life are either infectious or contagious. Health is contagious, and goodness is catching. Cheerfulness, optimism, gentleness, mercy, love, warm and thrill us, like sunshine, and under their influence everything of potential goodness in us moves upward toward strength, as a plant pushes upward toward the light.

Obedience to two Laws will lead to the realization of all good. They are the laws of ignoring the truth of appearances, and declaring the Truth of Reality, which we may call the Laws of Command of Attention and Declaration.

We practice the Law of Command of Attention by actively directing attention to the Absolute Truth of Reality. Jesus announced the general Principle of the Law of Command in its most extensive intention when he said, "Let a man deny himself." This does not refer to self-denial, such as abstinence from the so called "harmless amusements." Command of attention redirects one’s perception of oneself as a being apart from the social, national and cosmic life overall, and especially from being separate from the Life of Him whose moral and spiritual image we bear.

The Law of Command always redirects attention away from separation, and back to the essential Unity of all Life in God. Many body ills, imagined grievances and mental irritation will disappear by simply asserting the Truth of Reality: "This is good."

We cannot feel two definite sensations in the same part of the anatomy simultaneously, but will feel and report the stronger one. A simple redirection of attention produced by pressure or other means, which creates a sensation stronger than the troublesome one, will, if persisted in, give temporary and often permanent relief. For instance, a rubber band wrapped tightly around the middle finger’s first joint for five or ten minutes will relieve eye strain. Pressing the thumb in the roof of the mouth will often relieve a headache in the forehead.

The mind cannot simultaneously hold two strongly contrasting ideas. Therefore, by redirecting the mind from its obsession or fixation to some strong, positive, constructive idea, will give sure relief.

Observing frequent rest periods puts this law of relief in operation by redirecting attention, both for the body and mind. The physical heart sets an example of how to do a prodigious amount of work, by beating two beats and resting before the next two. We can find the physical energies to meet the most strenuous and exacting task by frequently taking a few minutes’ relaxation. We can greatly enhance our concentration by redirecting attention to something uplifting, relaxing and beautiful for a few moments.

The Law of Declaration consists in redirecting attention from effects to causes, from material sensations to spiritual facts, from relative reality to absolute Divine Life. If we direct attention to the body and its sensations, images and experiences of pain and weakness and sin will fill our perception. The Law of Command directs the attention to those spiritual realities, which by steadfastly beholding it, will fill our perception with images of God’s health, strength, goodness, love, peace and abundance.

"Look unto Me and be ye saved" is a call to fix the soul’s perceiving powers upon the abundant good. To envision anything requires a perceiving power, an instrument, and an objective. Our perceiving power passes through the eye, rests upon some landscape, and an image of beauty and harmony rides back over the visual track.

If you allow the perceiving power to focus on the body and its sensations as an objective, you will fill it with experiences of pain and weakness. Yet if you command attention upward and inward to behold God, who is perfect Being, the energies and experiences of His perfect health and peace will ride back over the visual track.

We each have the power to assimilate the substance of our mental and spiritual perceptions into our experiences. Jesus’ disciples, who worked in contact with him daily, began to drop their dark unlikeness to him and took on his characteristics. After he was gone, they continued to portray his image of physical and spiritual perfection. As others mentally beheld this image, they unconsciously assimilated it into themselves, and "all men took knowledge that they had been with him, and learned of him."

The command of attention became the law of the highest spiritual attainment, in the words of Paul, "For we all with open face beholding as in a mirror the Glory of the Lord, are changed from glory to glory after His image by the Spirit of the Lord."

The untrained vision finds it difficult to perceive the Absolute Being. Yet we have an objective of physical and spiritual perfection in the Master’s life, upon whom we may fix our eyes, and both physical health and spiritual wholeness returns to us over the visual track of our faith. Steadfastly beholding the Absolute, wholeness comes from the region of perfect health, which laughs in every cell, and moral perfection that shines in every soul faculty.

By steadfastly beholding God, health and strength replace weaknesses and diseases. His abundance surrounds and banishes material poverty. The bright shining of His Perfect Being dissolves the darkness of worries, failings and anxieties. We transform our whole life, for "no man can see God" and live after his former state.

Sit, relax your body, quiet your mind and calmly repeat these declarations to yourself: "I am one with the Absolute Life, who is perfect health and peace. God who is perfect Being, in whom I live and move and have my being, and who lives and moves and has His Being in me, of whose life I am a part as my finger is part of my hand, fills every part of my body with His Health, every department of my mind with His Peace and my whole spirit with His Love, making me perfectly well and whole." Repeat the treatment often.

Chapter 2

The Mechanism of Thought

The Absolute Being is behind all life expression. This life is self-existent apart from all material expression, and is the principle in all the individual forms of expression. Absolute Being is the all-knowing, the all-wise, the all-loving, the all-powerful, and the all-good being.

Absolute Being, in its differentiation in countless material forms, finds the beginning of adequate expression of all that it knows itself to be. Being the Life Principle of all living things, to them it imparts all the qualities held in eternal perfection in itself. This Infinite Intelligence reveals its motive in creation as love, beauty, and goodness.

We, as individual expressions, are inherently partakers of all the qualities of the Absolute, which is our Source. We do not create any of the qualities the Source expresses, but are distributors. We cannot create Power, or Love, or Beauty, or Goodness, but can distribute them and express them in variable form, according to our willingness and purpose to carry them up to their utmost variety of application by our power of choice, our imagination, and our persistence.

We, as individuals, hold a dual relation to Being. We relate our Life Principle or "self" to the Absolute Being of whose nature we partake, whose character we may express. We are related to the eternal Causative Power and we become Causative Agents in the world. Our bodies are partakers of relative reality, partake of its nature, and are subject to its laws, and stand in that classification of relative reality called "effects."

With this dual equipment, we may choose to identify ourselves with the great Cause until our capacity to express causation matches the Master’s declaration: "All power in heaven and earth is given me," which leads us to exercise and experience the Love, Beauty, Health, Life, and Abundance of God. Or we may choose to act in the world of effects, surrender ourselves to the sway and play of sensation, and the influence of circumstances until we become a conditioned circumstance, which leads to the domination of the senses, the presence of disease, which is the absence of health, the torment of fear, which is the absence of love, and the experience of death, which is the absence of life.

Yielding ourselves obedient to the Law of Spirit, we end in life abundant, or lending ourselves to the law of matter, we become obedient to the law of sin and death. Destiny therefore hinges upon our choice of masters. We either act upon the body and become its master, or react to the body and become its slave.

To understand the fundamental unity of mental, physical, and spiritual acts and states, we must necessarily define certain terms, which are so often used interchangeably that confusion arises.

Spirit is the original Life Principle in the first living cell, from which has evolved all the countless individual expressions of life. Spirit is the fundamental entity in every coordination of cells called the human body, and ensouled the first cell from which any single individual being has developed. The Life of God is Spirit, expressing in material form, and evolving to attain personality. Every cell brought the qualities and characteristics of its Divine Source with it into this incarnation, and by the law of cell growth, it assumes the character of its parent cells. The Life Principle extends with the material cell’s division, so that each new cell is endowed with the experiences of all its ancestors. As the Life Principle thus extends itself and passes through countless experiences, memories clothe it, from which a new form of activity arises.

The soul is the original Spirit, plus the accretions of all past incarnations that endow it with instinct, intuition, desires, classifications of experiences, and other forms of activity, subconscious, conscious or superconscious, in which stage of development we may call it the mind.

Mind is the soul plus the developed power to act — consciously, subconsciously, or superconsciously — upon its own inherited memory impressions or the sense perceptions of the objective world, making for ends, known or unknown, the result of which operation we call personality.

Personality is the mind, conscious or subconscious, in its threefold form of action, called Cognition, Feeling and Will, which in their ceaseless interplay upon each other, and their action upon the material world with the resultant reaction, produces the fixed qualities of being called character.

Character is the highest attainable climax for the individual life of the Spirit. Character objectively demonstrates the possession of qualities that the Spirit knew that it had before it left its Source in God, which it cannot forget. This individual expression of the Life of God, exercising practical freedom of choice and independence of action, uses the physical body as its instrument of separate expression, but it is the real entity, the egoic or self consciousness.

The physical body is always first in manifestation in the evolutionary process, and afterward the spiritual. However, we must ever keep in mind that the Spirit was before its material instrument and will continue afterward.

The argument for the soul’s immortality is that it is an essential part of the Life of "God who only has immortality." I am not a body with an immortal soul to save, but a Divine Life incarnating itself for a time in flesh, which it uses as the instrument of its personal unfolding.

The Six Senses are so many different channels through which our perceiving power moves out to act upon material objectives and, in turn, is acted upon by the impressions that move inward over the visual, auditory, and other sense pathways. Yet perception is not limited to the five sensory channels, for we may so extend the soul’s perceiving powers to exercise a seventh sense.

This seventh sense enables the soul to see Nathaniel around a material corner, the angels ascending and descending upon the unseen ladders of space, the horses and chariots of the Almighty, and other spiritual realities not perceivable through the normal activities of the eye or ear. We develop this seventh sense by constantly extending the perceiving powers beyond the normal range of the six senses. This is superconscious mental activity, through which the soul is in touch with all its past, including its ancestry with God, being elevated above the plane of consciousness so that it reports and registers its knowledge as objective knowledge.

The great Teacher, speaking of certain people of dim spiritual perception, said, "They have eyes to see which see not, etc." He further enjoined those who listened to him, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear," all of which referred to the activities and perceptions of the inner spiritual individuality rather than to the physical body functions.

Understanding is that soul power that enables it to classify and formulate the reports of the six senses, all its past memories, and the higher perceptions of the seventh sense into an orderly method. It brings the spiritual realm’s ever present realities into view, enabling the soul to act instinctively toward ends that it does not objectively know, intuitively from the grounds of whose nature and reason it is unaware, and rationally by careful analysis of all known and classified facts. This is the psychological explanation of prophetic function in every age.

Thought is an inner perception toward a truth or fact that later takes on objective form through conscious mental action. Thought is an unuttered speech. Intensive thinking often results in spasmodic action of the vocal organs that seek to obey the mental stimulus to expression, which the will inhibits. Thought may originate from (1) some stimulus coming through the six channels of perception, from (2) some stimulus arising from the vast storehouses of memories, which the subconscious ceaselessly recombines, or the stimulus may arise from (3) the spiritual perception of truth as it is in the Divine Mind, which the self constantly contacts through the mind’s superconscious phase.

The nervous system furnishes the point of contact for communication between the self and its instrument, the body. The nervous system is dual, composed of the cerebrospinal and sympathetic systems.

The cerebrospinal system is composed of the brain and the spinal cord with its branches, composed of a series of ganglia that center in combinations called plexuses. We often call the principal one, the solar plexus, the abdominal "brain." The cerebrospinal system is the instrument of cognitive thinking and volition, while the sympathetic system is largely the instrument of feeling and reflex movements. Thought is the beginning, while expression is the ending of all life processes. The nervous system stands between this alpha and omega as the instrument of achievement.

For instance, say the self holds the thought of moving a finger. This thought is a vibration in the spiritual nature that reaches the antennae or fine little fibers of the brain’s gray matter. From there it passes to centers in the white fibers, which classify and shift it to a motor center. From there it travels as a motor impulse down a nerve to the finger, where the vibration distributes to many nerve divisions, which ramify the muscle, causing it to contract, and the purely mental conception of motion ends in its material expression.

Suppose this spiritual self holds the thought of warmth for the finger. The thought vibrations of warmth pass through the same processes, first of the gray matter, then the white and thence to the various centers for classification and the impulse is automatically switched to the vasomotor centers for the arm and travels down the blood vessels’ walls. Acting under this motor stimulus, the blood vessels dilate and they increase the flow of warm blood, and in a short time the thought of warmth in the mind is expressed in the sensation of warmth in the finger.

Thought is the method by which we may hold any purely mental or spiritual conception clearly in mind, transmit to any part of the body, and express it in material form.

The mind’s creative power and method of changing and reconstructing the body, or of regulating any functional activity therein, is unlimited. Conscious thinking may pass downward into subconscious activity for the body’s welfare, and to reform and regenerate the life and character. All the formative processes of truth in our characters, such as, "in the image and likeness of" and "we shall be like Him," depend on the soul’s superconscious functioning power.

The action of outer stimuli influences the body, as do those arising within. For instance, the eye waters freely under the stimulus of a cinder, yet grief or another emotion will open the fountain of tears more effectively than any material stimulus. Similarly, certain medicines may quicken or slow the heart’s action. We may slow it by percussing the seventh cervical vertebra, or quicken it by the same action on the first and second dorsal vertebrae.

Still, the most effective stimulus for the heart arises in the emotions, as anyone knows who has experienced the emotion of a great love or a great fear. Great joy or grief often so arouses the emotional reflexes that the organ cannot respond and the subject dies of a "broken" heart.

We find the same parallel of action in the stomach, the liver, the kidneys and all the organs. Certain organic changes in the body cause blood pressure, yet emotions more powerfully affect it than by any material cause. The mental and emotional states that we allow ourselves to indulge are the most potent energies for influencing the body’s condition for good or for ill. They furnish a vitally sound reason right thinking as the supreme cause of good health, and happiness and Godlikeness.

Since each of us has the power to direct our thinking, we have only ourselves to blame if we allow worry, fears and thoughts to fill our body with disease. We have ourselves to thank if we hear the Divine Voice within and obey it by filling our mind and emotions with ideals of love and beauty and service. We thereby clothe our body with the perfect health of God, keeps our mind in the calm and peace of God, and clothe our Spirit with the Love and Harmony of God.

After reading this lesson, practice as follows, twice daily for the month, finding time morning and evening to sit or lie down, relax the body, and hold this thought:

"My mind is an individual expression of the Divine Mind. God’s perfect Health fills every part of my body. God’s perfect Peace holds my mind in the poise of perfect self-mastery. God’s perfect Love keeps my spirit, soul, and body in perfect harmony and health."

Chapter 3

The Power of Constructive Thinking

Thought is the beginning of every constructive process, and things are the ends of the same. Humanity was a thought before we became thinkers. The material universe was a thought in the Mind of God before it became a thing of perfect mechanical adjustment.

In the span between thought and thing rises a constructive process called growth. Growth is a process by which the Creative Impulse in all life moves forever upward to full expression. As life grows, it meets material obstacles, whose tendency is to retard and crystallize movement into certain definite forms, which is the law known as conformity to type.

The life energies refuse to be bound by these fixed types of expression, and are constantly finding new variations of expression that produce new species. Botanists have produced the thornless cactus and other varieties by taking advantage of this law. The same principle is effective in producing better varieties of the human plant.

The introduction of some new qualities in a given type of life has caused every movement up from savagery to civilization. Those movements are mostly by chance in plant life, but they are largely by choice in human improvement. The natural energies can furnish life, but the body’s growth, strength and beauty will depend largely upon an intelligent choice of diet, exercise, rest and climate.

The growing life in us can furnish us with an embryonic mind. Yet our choice of thought material, our application of mind in solving the problems of truth determines whether we remain a mental child, or gradually put away childish things and think as an adult. The savage is concerned primarily with food, clothing, and reproduction, all of which are elements of the law of self preservation. A culture can develop the arts and sciences only after it passes this stage of growth. As we move from egoism as life’s supreme motive to altruism, our regard for others’ welfare develops such spiritual qualities as love, sympathy, hope, and faith.

The altruistic spirit leads to the discovery of those principles of cooperation and of compensation from which the Kingdom of Heaven or harmony develops. When love begins to reach these higher forms of expression, the impulses that started in the Divine Mind, before the material creation was begun, bear fruit. The life of God in nature moves forward in blind obedience to its laws of unfoldment, but God endowed the life in us with the power of intelligent choice. These distinctions reveal something of the Divine Purpose in us.

As nature is the organism through which we understand the qualities of the Absolute Being, we are the instruments that will make known the character of the Absolute Reality. In nature is passive obedience to the law of life, in humanity, active cooperation in applying those laws to higher ends. What nature adjusts by unconscious obedience to life impulse and vast periods, we must adjust by intelligent choice in a short period.

When the psalmist asked, "What is man that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou visitest him," he answered his own question by saying "Thou hast made him a little less than God, and crowned him with glory and honor." In that moment he had a vision of humanity made in the image of God, partaker of His nature. The psalmist understood that God had given us the honor of working with Him to bring our individual lives to their highest possible expression. It is our province to discover the laws of nature, and to find new variations in applying them to reach an ever higher mastery over them.

The primitive mind, discovering that wood is lighter than water, used wood to build ships. Studying the law of displacement and other variations of the law of flotation, we began to make iron float, although it was heavier than water. Knowing nothing of the law of construction, primitive proto-humans dwelt in a cave or in the branches of trees. Yet we, finding new methods of applying such laws as gravity, cohesion, and resistance, dwell in palaces.

Everything that belongs to life begins in thought and ends in things. Thought arises from the state of consciousness, and the mind cannot go beyond the state of Absolute Consciousness, nor does it need to. The ideas of life, love, goodness, order, harmony, and beauty that arise in the Absolute Consciousness, move outward to create an environment and an instrument through which to find expression.

All that we know as the world of relative reality was a state of consciousness in the Absolute Mind before it became a thing. Therefore we, being made in the image of God and partaking of His nature, follow the same law and order of expression. All of our wonderful achievements were thoughts before they were things. The artist’s landscape is a state of consciousness, whose lines of perspective and harmony he clearly perceived from within before he objectively expressed them. Music is not in the organ, but in the soul of the player. All of our wonderful works are ideas growing from our state of consciousness.

Everything that happens in our complex life, which results into a tangible effect, was first a state of consciousness, and this rule applies to our material condition, mental states, and character. The human body was an idea in the Divine Mind before it became a temple for God’s indwelling.

The mind is not a function of our body as some materialists suggest. The mind is our real soul’s faculty, whose instrument the body is, who built the body, repairs it and maintains it.

Our subconscious builder within has never forgotten the ideal with which it started from the Mind of God. Yet the influence of our experiences in building bodies during our various progressive enfoldments has influenced, dimmed, and often changed that ideal pattern. While it faithfully reproduces some memories as fragmentary parts, which have no known functional duty in the body, the great Divine Ideal has driven it forward, constantly finding new variations of form and function and embodying them in the building called the Temple of the Spirit.

The subconscious builder, which we call the subsoul, follows largely the plan of the past until birth, although it is true that the mother’s state of consciousness has much to do in determining many new variations and betterments from the original type. Yet the subconscious tendency is to conform strictly to type and reproduce it faithfully.

At birth, a new activity of the mind, called objective consciousness, begins to develop, a mental functioning by which the self can act upon the objective world and be affected through the channels of the six senses. This development of the consciousness brings powers of perception, reflection, reproduction and classification of experiences and of their values. New elements enter the materials for the body: Soul perfects new plans for body building, creates ideals of consciousness for living, and introduces new ideals of efficiency to enhance the health, utility and durability of the Temple of the Spirit.

In this twofold mental activity of consciousness called conscious and subconscious, the relative function is that of both architect and builder. The conscious mental life’s function is to form ideals, to discover the laws of construction, to find new variations in their application, to discover new materials, to detect their food values, chemical affinities, mechanical preparation, and to gauge their proper proportions. The subconscious function is to carry these through the various mechanical and chemical changes incident to digestion and assimilation, to make them into blood and to feed the cells individually and the body as a whole.

The architect’s plan must include not only the foundation, which determine largely the building’s form and capacity, but also the character of the material entering it. The architect must carefully work out every detail, or it is left to the builder’s chance whim. Just as the material in a house determines its appearance, utility, durability, and general value, so does the material used as food for body building determine the texture and quality of the flesh and the beauty, strength and endurance of the body.

The conscious architect must furnish the subconscious builder with the right amount and proper combination of food compounds to insure the health of the cells, and renew their energy. The conscious architect must give the ratio of food compounds (fats, protein and carbohydrates) proven to furnish a safe basis for health. Likewise the architect must give the builder the right amount of food, whose known energy will replace that used in functional activity, and the ceaseless demands of our daily work. This calls for about twenty-five hundred calories or units of food energy for one of sedentary habits, and thirty-five hundred or more calories for one doing manual labor.

No "accident," but an overuse of sweets overloads the body with heat energy and covers the skin with acne or rashes. It is not an "obsession of the devil" when one eats twenty or thirty percent of his food allowance in proteins (meats, etc.), and finds his liver and kidneys diseased, his body filled with rheumatic twinges. It is not a mysterious "dispensation of providence" that one who fills his body with fats, finds his body cushioned with layers of useless, disfiguring blubber.

It is not an "error of mortal mind" when we take in 1500 calories of food energy and use up 2500, and thus deplete the body energies, weaken its resistive powers, destructive processes get a foothold, and make headway. These are all legitimate results of a lack of intelligent thought application growing from a state of consciousness that is out of harmony with the consciousness of the Absolute, and so their building ideals and processes do not obey His Laws of Expression.

We can trust the fidelity of the body’s subconscious builder and of character more intelligently when we study the results produced in nature by the great principle of mimicry. Innumerable illustrations are apparent, such as the polar bear, which is white to correspond to its surroundings, the arctic fox, which is white in winter and brown in summer, adjusting to the change in seasons, the striped tiger, which adjusts to the jungle shadows. Countless insects, animals and birds have the power of assuming the form and color of the leaves, bark, and other objects of their natural environments.

Two people, by constant association and similarity of ideals and interests, will become so much alike that one does not see one of them without thinking of the other. A curious example of this principle of mimicry is found in Jacob determining the color of the next season’s calves by the color of the rods placed before the eyes of the cattle at the water troughs. Confidence in this power of mimicry to influence the constructive processes in body and character building has caused thousands of prospective mothers to surround themselves with objects of beauty, fill their minds with beautiful thoughts, listen to exquisite music, and kindred visioning toward high ideals with the very purpose of endowing the unborn child with gifts and graces that he might not otherwise have. We carry the same principle into the highest realm of spiritual activities, where we sum the entire process up in clearly perceiving the Divine One, and being unconsciously assimilated into His Likeness.

We may firmly hold and steadily insist upon any ideal for the body or mind or the spiritual life until it becomes a material reality. We must first attain the state of conscious oneness with the Absolute Life. Let us accept fully and without question, the corollary that whatever belongs to the Divine Nature is inherently in us, ready to move up to full expression just when we attain full Divine Consciousness. We cannot think of God as being sick, neither should we think that God in us is sick, but inversely, God is perfect health, therefore God in me is perfect health. God is perfect love, not fear, therefore God in me is perfect love that casts out fear. God is perfect peace. Therefore, God in me is perfect peace, relieving me of all worry and anxious care. God is absolute abundance, in whom is no lack, therefore God is abundance in me. These are ideals to hold, steadily insist upon, think about as if they were now realities. Declare them with all certainty, and slowly and surely the laws of growth will make them take expression in us.

Practice daily one or more times, relaxing, slowly repeating this thought: "I behold myself as one in the mind and heart and purposes of the Absolute. God’s Divine Life Energies are steadily building up in me the Divine Ideal of a perfect physical body, a perfectly poised mind, and a spirit filled with love, making me whole and complete."

Chapter 4

A Sovereign Remedy

The Master said, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Truth is the power to emancipate the sons of men from every form of material bondage. Jesus said, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and life." In Scripture it is said, "He sent His word and healed them." Emancipation through the truth is a cardinal teaching that applies not only to spiritual states, but to physical conditions as well.

We immediately ask, "What is the truth that holds so great a power?" We must find the answer in the Master’s own statement, "the Father and I are One." "The words that I speak are His." "The Father in me does the works." This "truth as it was in Jesus," offered to humanity, is the beginning from which all the privileges of the sons of God proceed.

Every field of research suggests the unity of all life. We naturally ask, "What is the difference in the life of the vegetable, the animal, and human kinds?" The life in them seems to manifest in the same general way, grows to maturity, fruits, and declines. They bear the same marks of cell life and growth. The same food compounds, proteins, fats and carbohydrates feed them. We discover the difference in the simple fact that any given life form’s ability to obey the laws of life is the measure of its volume, experience and expression of life. The clod can obey the one law of inertia, and it has rest. God endows all living things with three powers.

First is the power of nutrition, the ability to respond to stimulus, and the power of reproduction. These three endowments vary. A plant obeys the three and little more. A worm adds motion to its expression. Birds obey still other laws and add flight, song, vision, hearing, maternal instinct, nest building, migration and other experiences. The rule arises into sight that the more complex the organism and so the greater number of laws of life expression it can obey, the richer and fuller its experience and expression of life will be. Humanity is the most complex of all organisms, and we can obey more laws of life expression than all other forms. So we rise into those experiences of life about which the lower forms know nothing, or only in the most elementary way.

If we should ask, "How much better is a man than a sheep?" We find the answer here, through our superior equipment for obeying the laws of life expression. Then we rise into the dignity of personality, which is the fixed form of being, embracing within itself the independent power to know, to feel, to choose, and to know itself as a rational being, and to realize character from this functioning. The sheep, having no such complex equipment, is unable to rise to personality, and therefore to permanence of individual expression of life. When a sheep dies, its life drops back into the great volume of cosmic life, while we at death carry our personality intact as a spiritual being with all capabilities of activity and unfoldment.

We find the thought of unity in the world of physics, the truth that every material form is reducible to molecules, then to atoms, to electrons, to particles. Beyond this, matter is reducible to such ethereally fine substance as to be more akin to Spirit than matter. In the world of chemistry all material forms are reducible to some ninety-two simple elements whose various combinations give us all the varieties of material forms of expression. These simple elements are apparently no longer reducible, and to account for them we hypothesize that they have come about through some process of condensation of an ultimate ethereal substance, the stuff from which God has made all things. We are prepared, therefore, for John’s statement (Greek text), "That which hath been made was life in Him," and for Paul’s statement that "the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear."

No matter in what direction we seek life’s origins, we eventually see that all life proceeds from a common Source, is endowed with the same nature, and can develop all the attributes of the Universal Life. Every individual expression of this life is an inseparable part of the whole, just as the bay is a part of the ocean, filled with its volume, its living forms, its heartbeat, whose value is measured by the amount of the ocean’s volume that it can contain. While the life that is in us is the life of God, yet we can express only in a limited way all that belongs to the life of God. We can no more contain and express the full volume of the Infinite than a gallon bucket can contain the ocean. Great as is the dignity of a human soul, its partaking of the divine nature and image of God, no soul, nor the synthesis of all living souls can express all of the Absolute. God is more than the sum of His parts.

Being individual expressions of the Life of God, and having in us potentially all the qualities of the Divine Life and character is one thing, but to become conscious of that is another thing. Every person is a child of God when he or she comes into the world. He is a Son of God. She is one with the Life is of God. Yet our soul’s supreme necessity is to become conscious of the fact of our relationship to God, to realize our oneness with the Father, to know that we dwell in God and God in us.

The Master called this rising into consciousness being "born from above." Paul called it the mystery hidden from ages, but now made known to us through the Apostles and Prophets, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." Religions have called this act of entering into conscious relationship with God, by various names in the church’s history, and defined it in various dogmatic statements.

The purpose of all religious ministries in sacraments and teaching and prayer, is to bring humanity to conscious unity with God, then to develop that consciousness to the form of perfection that it reached in the Master’s life. Scripture calls it the Christing, or Anointing, which a progressive development follows, first as a babe, then as a child, then as an adult in full stature, and finally to that stage of conscious oneness where one can say "I live and yet not I live, but Christ lives in me." Living this Christ life, we are ever aware that while we work out our salvation, it is God that "works in him, both to will and to do."

The thought of God’s Immanence in human life tends to draw our attention from the other truth of the Absolute Life, which is the Transcendence of God. We have lived centuries under the dogma and almost exclusive emphasis on the Transcendent thought of God, forfeiting the more immediate and effective thought of the Immanence. Modern thought tends to forget that "God is over all, through all, and in all." The two ideas are essential to a correct understanding of what God is and may be to us.

The pressure of the air from without exactly balances the pressure from within. We must remember the life of God outside us and keep it clearly in mind when we think of God dwelling in us. The outward movements of the Divine Life, which we call Providence, will be unavailable unless the movements of the Divine Life within us respond and cooperate with that Providence. Thus we may practically apply the truth of unity with God, which will make us free from the dominion of material things.

As we accept the truth of the oneness of our lives with Him, we pass from the consciousness of death into the assurance of life in Him, which carries with it the logical sequence that we have passed into all that His life means. God is Perfect Being, in whom is no sickness nor weakness nor worry nor fear. He is perfect health in us, perfect peace in us, perfect love in us. These are potential facts that become operative realities in our experience as the transcendent God outside us multiplies these divine qualities in us, who works in us both to will and to do. We multiply the truth in us though prayer, meditation upon the truth, and other spiritual exercises.

Faith in the Father sets into motion unlimited energies, which an intelligent will, in harmony with His will, directs to produce any state or condition that we may desire. For it is a specific promise that "You shall ask what you will, and it shall be done." The unity of life involves the fact that every experience of life, every function of mind and body, is a part of a Divine Life. As Paul said, "Whether we or drink or sleep or work or play, do all to the Glory God." To get the full benefit of this truth, we must accept the fact that oneness with the Father involves obedience to His laws of expression. In other words, doing His will in our business life, our social obligations, our family and personal relationships, and in the proper care of our bodies, the diversion of our minds as essential factors in a great spiritual ideal.

We sum this up in the words: My life is part of His Life as my finger is part of my hand. Because of my oneness with Him, His Love is ever expressing itself in my mind and spirit, keeping me in perfect mental poise. His Health is ever expressing itself in my body making me perfectly well and my body whole. His Abundance is ever expressing itself in me so that I have all that I can wisely use. He works in me, exceeding abundantly above all that I ask or think.

Chapter 5

The Master’s Methods

In dealing with every vital question of living, such as health, happiness and hope, we naturally turn for authority and sanction to the great Master Healer. No movement, cult, fad or organization of any kind can find so great excuse or honor for itself as to claim that he was its charter member. Such was his cosmopolitan character that institutions nearly always find some word or act of his by which to justify such a claim.

We must never lose sight of the thought that Almighty God, the Infinite Spirit is the ultimate Source and final authority on all things concerning life, health and salvation. Not for a moment is the healer or patient allowed to forget that no matter what may be used, back of these stand the changeless fact, "I am the Lord who heals thee." Exodus 15:26.

When the Master, Jesus of Nazareth, began his public ministry of showing men the Kingdom of Heaven and inducting them into its experiences, he announced that his mission was to minister to humanity’s physical miseries, as well as to preach. Luke 4:18.

He claimed to heal "with the finger of God" and "by the Spirit of God." Luke 11:20.

He clearly stated that the works he did and the words he spoke were not his, but the Father’s, and that the Father in him did the works. John 14:10.

Basing his work on this conscious oneness with the Father, he undertook and "healed all manner of sickness and disease." Matthew 9:35.

Since he used different methods with different people, and under varying circumstances, a study of his methods is illuminating.

Jesus asked questions of the people he healed. He took a blind man apart from the crowd, and after he had spit on his eyes and touched them, asked him if he saw. When he saw only dimly, he placed his hand on his eyes the second time and he saw clearly. Mark 8:23, 25. His question sought to learn just what the treatment’s effect was, and if he needed further attention.

With the demoniac child, he heard all the symptoms and asked how long he had thus suffered. Mark 9:16, 23. In this instance, he discovered the severity and duration of the case.

For the man possessed with a devil, he asked his name. Luke 8:30. By this question he learned the seriousness of the split in the stream of his patient’s consciousness.

In various recorded cases he asked the patient what he desired or expected him to do for him. Luke 18:40; Mark 10:51. These questions took on the nature of a diagnosis and furnished the ground for an intelligent prognosis and treatment.

Jesus prescribed in various ways for those whom he healed. In cases that suggested undernourishment, he ordered food for the patient. Mark 5:43; Luke 9:55.

Jesus required or assumed faith of those whom he healed. He said to the father of the epileptic, "If you believe, all things are possible to him who believes." Mark 9:2.

He said to the blind man of Jericho, "Receive thy sight, thy faith hath made thee whole." Luke 18.42. He had first asked him what he should do for him to call out his faith.

To "the woman with an issue of blood twelve years, and had suffered many things of many physicians, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse," he said "Thy faith hath saved thee."

Four friends brought the palsied man and let him down through the roof. Mark records that when he saw their faith, he said to the palsied, "Thy sins are forgiven thee . . . take up thy bed and walk." Mark 2:5, 11.

He told the Syro-Phoenician woman that her daughter was healed because the mother had faith that she could be, and willed that she should be. Matthew 15:25.

These are a few of many recorded cases in which Jesus emphasized faith as essential to the cure. Not that faith in itself was the healing power, but it aroused and set in motion the spiritual energies, which alone can heal. Sometimes it was the patient’s faith, in others it was the faith of parents or friends, or the congregation’s faith. In some places he could do no mighty works because the people had no faith.

Jesus used material means in some cases. He spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle, and anointed the blind man’s eyes and told him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. He did, and came back seeing. John 9:6, 7. Whether the clay or spittle had any specific virtue, they were a powerful suggestion to his faith. By the time he got the sticky ointment scrubbed off his eyes, it renewed circulation and nerve action.

He took Simon’s mother-in-law by the hand and lifted her up. Mark 1:31. He touched the leper. Mark 1:41. He put his fingers in the deaf man’s ears, opened them, and touched his dumb tongue. Mark 7:53. He touched the blind man’s eyes. Matthew 20:32-4. He cured a surgical case by touching the wound. Luke 23:51.

In these typical cases he not only sought information and aroused faith, but he touched and used ointment on the seat of the trouble. Whether his material means had some virtue in them, or his hand some magnetism or vibration, or served to center their attention on the spot for healing, or were merely aids to arousing their confidence and cooperation, each must judge for himself.

Jesus healed by the laying on of hands. He laid hands on Jairus’ daughter and raised her from the dead. Mark 5:23. He laid hands on the sick and healed them. Mark 6:5. He laid hands on the crooked woman and healed her. Luke 13:3. They brought to him all who were afflicted with divers diseases and "he laid hands on every one of them, and healed them." Luke 4:10.

He gave the Apostles and their successors the authority to heal. He plainly stated that they should do the work that he did and even greater works should they do. John 15:12. He specified the scope of their healing work. He gave them "power against unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal all manners of disease." "Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the read, cast out devils." Matthew 10:1, 8.

Some methods he taught them are made clear in their practice. They laid hands on the sick. Mark 16:18. They anointed with oil and healed the sick. Mark 6:13. They looked the patient in the eye and had him look them in the eye, and commanded in the name of the Lord to be well. Acts 3:2.

They learned these methods from the Master. He clearly taught that forgiveness of sins and body healing goes together and is inseparable. Mark 2:5, 11.

He gave them the same Spirit of Power to forgive sins and diseases that he had. "Receive ye the Holy Spirit whose so ever sins ye remit, they are remitted; and whose so ever sins ye retain, they are retained." John 20:23.

Forgiveness of sin and healing went hand in hand. If they had spiritual perception to see people’s sins dissolved in his mighty Love, they also had the vision power to behold the spiritual health and command it to clothe the body. If they had power to do one, they had power to do the other. The fact that they could heal disease was the final test of their authority to forgive sins in the name of Christ. If they couldn’t do one, it was a sign that they could not do the other.

The Apostles and believers accepted the full commission. The sacred record tells that they healed sickness, forgave sins, cast out devils and exercised power over life and death.

Peter healed Aeneas of palsy. Acts 9:33. He raised Dorcas from the dead. Acts 9:40. At his word, death fell on Ananias and Sapphira. Acts 5:1, 11. Even the shadow of Peter fell on people and healed them. Acts 5:15. He and John healed a lame man at the beautiful gate. Acts 3:2, 11.

Ananias restored sight to Saul of Tarsus by laying and of hands. Acts 9:17, 18. James healed by anointing of oil and laying on of hands. James 5:14.

Paul healed a girl of a malicious spirit of divination. Acts 16:18. He brought to life a young man killed by a fall. Acts 20:9, 10. He healed Epaphroditus by prayer. Philippians 2:26. Elymas the sorcerer was stricken with blindness at his word. Handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched his body were carried to the sick a d they were healed thereby. Acts 19:12.

Documents of record by the great post-Apostolic leaders tell of the Church’s therapeutic triumphs. Tertullian (A.D. 197) devotes two chapters of his great "Apology" (Defense of the Christian Religion) to the Roman Emperor, to a discussion of the evil powers, telling how they inflict on the body disease and many grievous mishaps, and how they were healed through Christian believers.

Justin, Martyr (A.D. 138-150) gives the formula used by the Christian healers of his day. "Many of our Christian people have healed a large number of demoniacs throughout the whole world, and in your own city (Rome), exorcizing them in the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate: yet all other exorcists, magicians and dealers in drugs failed to heal such people." (Part of his letter to the Roman Emperor.)

Cyprian, Origen, Athanasius, Augustine of Hippo, and other great Bishops and leaders of the first three centuries give the formulas of healing: "In the name of the Lord." "In the name of Jesus Christ," and testify to the things done in the name of Christ of which they were eye witnesses.

This is the briefest possible sketch of the Master’s healing work and that of his disciples for three centuries. Certain things are evident:

(1) A fundamental and changeless principle every time is that the ultimate healing Power is Spiritual and Divine.

(2) Every formula and method is secondary to this ultimate Spiritual Power.

(3) The application of the healing Power to different cases called on a variety of methods.

(4) The ever present influence of moral and mental states is recognized, showing a reciprocal relation between sin and disease. The healing of the disease followed naturally the spiritual uplift to mind and emotions, caused by restoring the patient to harmony with God.

(5) The Master, his disciples and their successors practiced such exercises as fasting, prayer, spiritual communion in quiet places, and these enabled them to maintain conscious oneness with the Father, giving them poise of spirit, peace of mind and a resistless authority over disease.

(6) The outgoing of some subtle energy was evident in the touch of the Master and his disciples. "I perceive that Power is gone out of me." "Come ye apart into a desert place (into the mountain, across the sea), and rest awhile." These all suggest that in the physical touch and in the impact of one personality upon another, a Power moves from the healer that tends to deplete his vital energies.

(7) They healed some cases at a distance. Sometimes the patient received more than one treatment. In the parable of the healed demoniac, he suffered a relapse because he did not fill his mind and heart with right thoughts and his hands with useful service.

From this analysis of the Master’s healing works we may conclude: First, there are no limitations as to the kind of diseases we may treat and cure by the Power of spiritual energies. Second, we need to have a clear grasp of the changeless principles of health and well being, which are spiritual, absolute and impartial, working the moment we meet their conditions. Third, we must have methods adaptable to the variations in the patients’ personalities and the different manifestations of the disease. Finally, we must apply the remedy with a clear view as to the cause of the problem and the source of the cure.

Chapter 6

The Healer

Healing appears among the enumerated gifts of the Spirit. The only one of these gifts that is universal is the gift of tongues. The church has never suffered from the lack of this gift, but rather from the wrong use of it.

Everyone has in him or her the power to soothe and help and heal someone. This power is more marked in some than in others. Their very presence is soothing. They seem to exhale cheerfulness. Their faces shine from a state of inner radiance and serenity. Their words vibrate with hope and optimism, and their touch seems magnetic with healing virtues. These are mainly natural endowments and we say such a person has the "gift of healing."

Whether the gift is great or small, we must heed the injunction to "stir up the gift that is in thee." The failure of most people is not the meagerness of their endowment, but the lack of diligence in using what they have to the best advantage always. The world’s need waits for the one-talent person as surely as for the ten-talent one. The ungifted plodder arrives with results while the genius is admiring himself or his meteoric pathway. Take your gift, be it great or small, and offer it to God in the service of humanity, and you will be in line to hear the words, "Come, ye blessed."

First, the healer must know himself or herself. The ancient oracle said, "Know thyself," and the Bible says, "Know the Lord." The two are inclusive. We must know our self if we would know the Lord, for a good person is the latest information concerning God. We must know God before we can fully know our self, for it is only when we know the character, the motive and the purpose of the Absolute Being that we can fully grasp the purpose of our own life and destiny, and lend our self to the unfolding of that purpose.

We must see God as the Being of Absolute Life, love, beauty, power, health, and all that we can think life to mean. We must understand that the supreme motive for creation is that of finding expression for these qualities, which God knows Himself to be, and that the only way He can do it is to bring Himself from the general into the particular. In this process of expression, God finds His highest results in humanity, which is capable of intelligent cooperation with Him.

To be healers we must, therefore, see our self as the embodiment of the Universal Principles of Being, and must develop the consciousness of these principles until it is always present to us as a fact, without having to think about it, or declare it. Only this truth, clearly apprehended, will enable us to say "take up thy bed and walk," or "arise and go in peace, thy faith hath saved thee."

We develop this consciousness by prayer, by fasting, by meditation, in the silence, until we learn to contact the Absolute steadily. When we first begin, we are apt to ask, "What can I do?" Yet as we constantly use these means and answer every call for service, we will come to the place where we will ask, "What can’t I do?" The cultivation of God Consciousness can alone give us the sense of authority over disease and sickness, and all kinds of devils. Only this vital sense of Oneness in nature, spirit, and purpose with God can give us ground for faith that we can.

Only the realization that it is "the Father in me that does the works" can give us clear vision of the Source of Power, and clear understanding how we can achieve such marvelous results from causes that at first sight seem so inadequate. For to know God as He was known by Jesus Christ, whom He sent, brings us to see that the real powers are spiritual, the Source of power is not found in nor measured by material forms and standards, and the supply is spiritual and limitless.

As healers, we must learn that the growth in power is rather a growth in our capacity to express, than an increase in the volume of power itself. That never increases or diminishes. Our power and capacity to express ought to be ever increasing.

Here the Law of Growth waits on the application of three principles inherent in all growing things – Nutrition, Sensitivity and Reproduction. There can be no growth without food. We must feed daily on the bread of God, the truth found in the Bible, in nature, in all good books, and the experiences of good people. We cannot grow without the power to respond to stimuli from outside and from within. We must cultivate sensitiveness to every intimation of the Divine Spirit. Only this can enable us to say, "This day is salvation come to thy house," or "in three days," or "go wash," or whatever the Spirit "who knows all things" will tell us if we learn to hear and understand. This will bring a steady increase of power that will enable us to undertake still more difficult things and know that they shall be done.

As healers, we must believe not only in God, but must believe in our self as God’s agent, otherwise we cannot inspire the faith of others, and without which our work will be very limited.

We can learn by studying the Apostles’ examples. They received the commission to "heal the sick." They went and did so because they believed they could. They believed it because they had seen him do so, and had learned his methods. They had caught his spirit of going about it as the Father’s work, and learned his secret of power in constant communion with him. They had seen it done, they had his command with its implied promise, they went and tried it and it worked. As their perception of the Almighty Source grew through prayer, fasting and the exercise of their faith, they came at last to receive "all power in heaven and earth."

We must approach our task understandingly. We are dealing with beings made in the image of God. They are people with "like passions as Himself." The reason for their being here is the same as our own. They are here to achieve and express godlikeness, which their task and ours. We are to help them but not do it for them. We are not to call in upon them some external power to do it for them, but to call out some inherent power within them that will actually make them do it themselves by the power working within them.

Nothing can so impoverish a person as to give him something that he does not feel he has earned. As healers, we must not pauperize a person.

We must know, and make the person in need know that God in him is going to do the work, just as soon as he cooperates with God. We must lead him to see that the essential, dynamic capacity that dwells in him by virtue of his being the child of the Most High, whose nature and likeness he bears. We must lead him to know and keep the laws of his own being, which leads to health and wholeness.

In this way he will be healed, know how he has been healed, and how to keep well. He will not be constantly returning for further help, but will know how to go direct to "headquarters." A person who is permanently attached to a healer is but one degree removed from being permanently attached to a bottle of pills. As a healer, we have failed unless we have started the person in the method and habit of going directly to the Source of all healing potencies, without relying upon any material or human intermediary.

The healer must discover some motive that makes the person’s recovery a worthy incentive. Many fail to recover their health because nothing appeals to them as worth the effort. The healer and the one in need may lose months of work because they have not discovered an adequate motive. Whatever the motive for recovery is — some place in the family, social, or business life, some service to humanity — it must be greater than his state before he became sick. The more altruistic this motive is, the greater will be its power.

Allow the one who is in need to "tell it all," by going intimately into the details of his physical ills. Then forbid him to repeat it. Make a brief memorandum of his case so that he will not think you have forgotten what is the matter with him. Let him discuss every mental vagary, and note the distinctions between the things founded on fact and those that are fanciful. Discover the character of ideas that dominate him, whether he has any fixed ideas as to his own condition or the attitude of others or their acts. Discover whether he is open-minded to the truth, whether it is new or old.

A history of his educational advantages, his reading and thinking, and his present mental habits is valuable in determining his mental atmosphere. Find out his spiritual state, his early religious training, his present beliefs, and whether he is really getting anything from his religion or not. Wrong ideas of God, or of sin and forgiveness, or punishment, or fancied unforgivable sins, and a fixed form of faith, paralyze the power of initiative, more than anything else.

Occasionally it requires skill and a little time to drag forth the hidden trouble, but you can make no headway until it is done. Half the cases of illness from all causes and nearly all those of mental or spiritual origin begin to recover with a full confession of them to someone who has the wisdom to deal with them aright.

As a rule, the person’s tendency to want to talk about his symptoms characterizes those cases called "nervous" cases. Sometimes it takes him hours to get it all out of his system. Let him talk or write, whichever he may elect, but always with the proviso that he must not repeat it.

Most "nervous" people suffer from fatty enlargement of the Ego. They believe their case is different from all others, and delight in the fact that their doctor doesn’t know what is the matter with them. They will suggest that you don’t know either. If you don’t, they will easily discern that fact. If you hesitate, your case is lost.

Dealing with ultimate energies, you must have no questions. You must see the crooked arm straight, the blind eyes opened, the diseased flesh healed, and in fact you must clearly see always the essential health of the spiritual being in the person who is in need.

The healer must challenge the power of initiative in the subject. "I’ve tried everything and failed" is a common report, and "I have lost the power really to try again." Meet this with the fact that all success comes in cans, but the failure comes in can’ts. Discover what the patient can start and carry out; show him that the same initiative can and must be applied to his case.

You must show him that his thought of being unable to get well does more to keep him sick than anything that may be really the matter with him. You must show him that he can choose his thoughts and acts. You must show him the moral responsibility of continuing to be sick when by right thinking and acting he can as easily be well.

As a healer, your bearing must be optimistic, authoritative, cheerful and poised. You must be free from indecision or confusion in an unexpected situation. This can be true only when you know the fields that you are undertaking to cover.

You must know the human body thoroughly both in action and in repose. You must know the laws of diet and hygiene. You must know the centers for nerve stimulation both by mechanical and emotional means. You must know psychology in a very thorough and practical way, to recognize at a glance the secret of much of the trouble.

The healer must know how to direct the needy one’s thinking in a positive, constructive form of activity, according to the working of his spiritual nature. You must understand the effect of mental and emotional states on the body and the mind and how to alter them to suit each case. You may know much of this by intuition, but you must study, to prove yourself a worker who needs not to be ashamed, rightly divining the word of truth so that the resident spiritual energies, multiplied by conscious contact with God, may be set to work to produce health in the one in need.

As healers, we must have breadth and depth of mind. You must recognize both Absolute and relative reality, and must know that whatever power for healing available in either is of God. You must recognize that the energy in a grain of wheat is no more divine than that in the Cinchona tree bark. One person can renew his energy by using cod liver oil, while another can get it by going direct to the maker of the codfish. One person can find health by the anointing with oil and prayer or by prayer alone, while another will get better results if a healer lays hands on him, wisely and well.

The healer therefore cannot be a bigot. You must be glad to use any and all means to cooperate with all agencies "being all things to all men if thereby he may heal" them.

Work with the physician who is trained in anatomy, physiology, pathology, and in the use of material potencies. Join hands with the adjuster of the spine and manipulator of the flesh, for this is often useful and frequently indispensable. Be in hearty accord with the psychologist who knows how to apply the laws of the mind in healing a distempered mind. Be glad for the work of any who any means help to relieve the world’s ills, but never fail to keep forever uppermost in mind the fact that whatever system practiced or means used, the remains the changeless fact, "I am the Lord who heals thee."

Chapter 7

Diagnosis and Prognosis

"What wilt thou that I should do for thee?" The Master directed this and other questions to those who came seeking healing at his hands. His questions served to get the patient’s mind and talk away from his symptoms and sensations and down to his actual need.

Their answers showed whether their mind functioned properly, and its ability or otherwise to come to the real issue at once. Their answers gave the healer ground for an intelligent diagnosis, of the problem’s nature and gravity, the particular form of treatment to be administered, and to give a reasonable prognosis or forecast as to the progress of the cure.

The Master’s questions during his healing work were like a confessional, and constituted in fact a self-revelation, essential to his healing work, and for that matter indispensable in all rational healing procedure. It resolved itself into a sort of primitive psychoanalysis, without which healing becomes, usually, a mere chance, with the chances largely against success.

Nervousness, under its various designations, has become a national disease. We can usually trace the various functional and nervous disorders to wrong mental habits, to shock, to strain of long, continued application without proper diversion, to prenatal influences, to repressed impulses and other similar causes.

These all leave a deep impression on the subconscious mind, and eventually, under conditions favoring them, they rise into an expression whose strangeness of form makes them unrecognizable, whose origin we forget. They assume large proportion and power through the very mystery with which the subconscious clothes them. Fixed ideas attend many cases, illusions, hallucinations of the senses, phobias of various sorts, chief of which is the fear of "going crazy."

To search deeply into the mental and emotional life, to discover the cause, sweep away the mystery, to show a rational scheme of cause and effect, relieving the sufferer of the common delusion and heresy that the Almighty is punishing him, will usually result in an immediate mental readjustment and he will start on the way to Wellville. If we can give a reasonable explanation, then it is easy to make him face the facts and adjust his thinking to the facts instead of the vagaries that have held him a prisoner. The healer can challenge his faith and initiative to cooperate, and his recovery is certain. The following are brief but exact histories of some cases.

A woman of forty-plus was in a highly nervous state, weeping and terrified with the fear that she was "going crazy." She thought so because she had the idea of a knife in her mind almost continually, and at times could visualize it so that it seemed to hang in the air before her. Her physician had examined her and pronounced her in perfect physical health. She was keeping a good sized business going in the face of considerable odds, was getting more than the usual help from the conventional religious observance, was happily married and thought the world of her husband, who had been exceptionally considerate and kind to her. She lived a normal life with about the right amount of diversion. Still, there was that knife, and the constant fear that she would go crazy and kill her husband.

By questioning, we found that she had never seen anyone attacked with a knife, had never seen any movies, read any stories involving that mental picture, or never seen any animals butchered. Then we asked about operations. Yes she had a kidney removed, the gall bladder, the appendix and most of the pelvic organs, and finally, the tonsils. The same surgeon had done all the knife work. He apparently had been unaware that the subconscious is peculiarly susceptible to suggestion during the state of anesthesia. She remembered that in her last operation, two years earlier, as she passed from consciousness, she heard him say, "I have operated on this poor woman," etc. Questioning the nurse present at the operation brought out the fact that the surgeon had dwelt upon the severity and shock of the frequent use of the knife.

Here then was the hallucination’s real source, which became so vivid that she saw the knife in a handsome frame hanging on the wall. The deep impression of the many operations, the surgeon’s talk during the anesthetic, and frequent reference to her operations afterward, all taken together furnished the stuff from which the subconscious formed and projected the "knife" image into her consciousness. With the complete explanation of its origin, freeing her mind of the fear of insanity, the hallucination disappeared, and she returned to normal mental and emotional states.

It seems easy, but in fact required several interviews to get all the facts from which to construct a convincing hypothesis. The mind will hide the real cause of the trouble as skillfully as a burglar hides his loot, although the cause in itself has no grounds for self condemnation. To get the facts, we must often approach what we suspect by an indirect route. We must often eliminate every other possible factor, and then surprise the person into a confession.

One person could not swallow water, and often spent hours to eat even a small portion of food. A solid hour of questioning failed to discover any adequate cause for the trouble, which her doctors said was purely functional. We finally asked her if she had ever screamed. She said, "no." We asked, "Did you ever see anyone killed?" She said, "I saw a man jump from the twelfth story of the Call building." We asked, "Did you scream?"

She answered, "No; I wanted to, but could not, and hit the ground before he did." Later she was riding in a street car and was in a wreck in which she wanted to scream again, but was knocked senseless before she could get it out. Very soon after this, she began to have difficulty in swallowing.

Her emotions had inhibited the reflexes in her throat, and she was suffering from repression of her natural impulse to scream. We gave her detailed instruction about how the mind automatically begins to readjust itself when the mystery is swept aside, and that nothing was the matter except the shadow of a suppressed emotion, which had long since passed. We gave her a glass of water, saying that she could swallow noprmal. This she did and began to eat and enjoy her food.

Some cases successfully hide the cause of the trouble, and we resort to the use of a blood pressure instrument to get a clue. Nothing will so surely affect the blood pressure as the person