Chapter VIII
SUGGESTION AND AUTO-SUGGESTION
W. John Murray
Mental
Medicine
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1923.
[144]
Speaking of suggestion and auto-suggestion, Mr. Coue' says: "It is a
method which every one should follow--the sick to obtain healing, the
healthy to prevent the coming of disease in the future. By its practice
we can insure for ourselves, all our lives long, an excellent state of
health, both of the mind and of the body." Whatever biased physicians
may say, there is abundant evidence to prove that Mr. Coue' has
accomplished marvelous results by suggestion, and that he has also
taught those who have come to him to heal themselves by their own power
of auto-suggestion, which he declares is the secret of all the healing
that he has ever accomplished, for it is his opinion that unless the
patient "believes" and acts as if he believed, [145] there will be no
lasting benefit; if indeed there will be any benefit at all.
Has it not
been said of One greater than Coue' that "He did there no mighty works
because of their unbelief?"
There are
those who believe that the sick can be healed regardless of their
belief or lack of it, but this is as foolish as it is to believe that a
person can communicate with another person over a telephone whether or
not he takes down the receiver. There is as much law back of the
communication of a sanative idea from one mind to another as there is
back of a conversation over the telephone between one person and
another. Any suggestion that does not become an auto-suggestion is
valueless on the same principle that any truth spoken by one to
another, which does not become an accepted truth,
is as nothing; for it is as true now as it ever was that, "Ye shall know
the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free."
The
numeration table is a suggestion to the child-consciousness of the
basis of mathematics [146] which he is taught to memorize long before
he knows what he is doing, and frequently before he is reconciled to
the necessity of it, for the child would much rather play than memorize
numeration tables and alphabets. What is the object of memorizing if it
is not to impress the subconscious mind of the child with the truth of
mathematics, or rather the basis or foundation of it, so that it will
have something to build upon as it advances in understanding? In the
child's future use of the science of numbers, instead of having to look
up in the written or printed numeration tables the relation which one
number bears to another, he will have it at his "finger tips," nay, it
will be closer, for it will be in his "heart" or subconscious mind.
When we learn a thing "by heart" it simply means that we have impressed
it upon the subconscious from which it will spring forth spontaneously
as occasion requires, so that we shall do almost automatically, what
once we did through conscious effort.
[147] A
suggestion to a patient from another, or an auto-suggestion by the
patient to himself of the truth of his being, so that he will say when
he is to all appearances very ill, "I am well," may have as little real
meaning for him as the suggestion has for the child who says to himself
"three and two makes five," during his period of memorization, but the
fact remains that he is nevertheless memorizing a truth, as time will
reveal in both cases, if the suggestion is persisted in.
Educators
have not generally known this; therefore, when the child has said
petulantly, "Why should I repeat this over and over again?" the reply
has been, "You cannot learn it in any other way." Of course this is
true, but it is not all of the truth and the child is no more
reconciled than he was before. It should be explained to the child, as
it is by teachers who are students of the new psychology; for they are
teaching their little pupils that every time they repeat the numeration
table, an impression is being made upon something inside of them; just
[148] as every time they strike their lead pencil against a sheet of
white paper a little black mark is made, which will be added to by
another black mark with each successive strike until a patch of black
will be the result.
Modern
teachers of the languages are now realizing that students are impressed
more by what they hear than by what they see; and so instead of having
them study dry and difficult verbs in silence, words and phrases are
memorized as children memorize them by speaking or reading them aloud.
In this way a vocabulary is evolved, small to be sure, but always on
the increase until this vocabulary can be used to ask questions and to
give answers. Rules of grammar and syntax come later, as they should,
when they will not bewilder and confuse, as they so often do when the
cart of verb conjugation is put before the horse of memorized words and
phrases.
Let the
student of a foreign language be able to ask for what he wants, no
matter [149] how simply; then there is an incentive to go on; but with
a head full of the grammar of it and a heart filled with fear of giving
expression to it, he is more helpless than the infant who can make its
wants known in a language which has been acquired by a purely
subconscious method of absorption.
As a result
of suggestion or auto-suggestion the plastic substance of the
subconscious mind receives our mental pictures and returns them to us,
much in the same fashion that echoes result from sound. Not
infrequently we mistake our own for the thoughts of others, as children
are apt to think that the echo of their own voices are the voices of
other children in the far-off hills from which the sound seems
to come. Until we learn that the origin and the remedy alike of all our
ills lies within ourselves, our maladies seem to proceed from other
sources than our own thoughts and emotions. It may not be pleasant to
discover that our difficulties are largely, if not entirely, of our own
creating; but there is vast compensation in the discovery [150] that
the same power of thought which made us ill, will make us well again.
The same power which will make a motor car go forward, will also make
it go backward. What reversal is to the motor car, suggestion is to the
man. It is indispensable then for us to suggest only such things to
ourselves and others as will make for health and happiness.
Man's body
and his affairs generally are as sensitive to thought and imagination
as the mercury in the thermometer is sensitive to atmospheric changes,
the difference being that the thermometer cannot resist while man can
and should.
Chapter
9
