Mastery of Self for Wealth Power Success, Frank Channing Haddock [paper ebook reader .TXT] 📗

try to be reconciled. But it is not true. The belief prevails, and so prevents the real truth from appearing: that PERFECT HEALTH IS THE PRIMARY INTENTION OF THE NATURE OF THINGS FOR ALL. When we can believe this magnificent truth, we shall be able to see that right vibrations underlying the mental and moral personality must tend to reform wrong vibrations underlying the body. So long as the former conviction prevails, that disease is somehow a part of Nature, the better life contends with a double difficulty, the existing physical conditions and the false suggestion that the individual must continue to be ill in the nature of things or as the will of Deity. The false suggestion should be displaced by the affirmation and realization of physical health. Such a reforming suggestion, made effective by mental realization and proper regimes, tends to counteract the existing effects of previous wrong suggestions and positively to change conditions of ill-health, because fullness and harmony of the three kinds of ether-movements are the designed ideals of our lives and the laws of perfect well-being (what other design can we possibly imagine?), and the good suggestion operates to bring about that ideal.

Let us be rid of the notion that anyone is ill because a Divine Being wants him to be ill.

But we must remember that while these principles cannot be otherwise than true, every individual has behind him, at any present moment, two great forces—the past of his ancestors and the past of his own life. Let us be sensible, even while we insist upon truths which are among the most beautiful in the world. The past means much to all of us. Such is law. We cannot get away from law, whatever our theories or religious belief. To me all Nature’s laws are of the White Life and untellably beneficent. The idea that law is something hard and disagreeable is itself a false suggestion and a wrong thought. Law is good. The law that life is determined more or less by the past is a fine example of this goodness. If it seems to go against us in some cases, it surely goes for us in assisting a right past to make for a right future. When it seems to work hardship, the fact is the law is trying to face us about for a right time to come. That is the meaning of experience: it is law talking, to us out of our past. The law that our past and that of our ancestors must be reckoned with in all our efforts to reform the etheric vibrations in our personal fields involves the element of time, which element may be greater than we can control in the material life. This element of time is important because there is another law, that great real reforms in the individual require effort continued more or less in order that all laws involved may properly and fully operate. If the person who is a noble self in a weak body could add to his thought-life the sufficiently powerful affirming realization of physical health for himself and live long enough, I certainly believe the suggestion would ultimately prevail. For I do not for a moment accept disease as a necessary part of human life. Is disorder in your machinery a part of the machine? I cannot see how a continuously perfect self, starting with a sound body, could ever come to possess a diseased body. I must believe that the self, growing to the ideal, may bring into harmony a diseased body, provided its health-suggestion is strong enough and sufficient time is afforded for the full working of the law. The law does not, of course, cover such cases as broken bones, because treatment then calls for mechanical operations, which involve laws altogether distinct from those that govern harmony among the functions and organs of the body as underfounded by etheric vibrations within the physical, mental and moral fields.

The limits set to self-healing power we do not know for any individual case. The splendid general law is not overwhelmed, is not contradicted, by such limits, whatever they may be, because the limits are not set by the original intention of the nature of things, but by wrong living and false ideas running through centuries. As we may not know the limits in any case, and as the great law shines ever before us and is equally for all so far as it may be claimed, and not for a favored few of some particular religious or semi-religious belief, it is ours to seize all advantages afforded by the best medical science together with every atom of power in the white life affirming and realizing physical health at its best. You do not know your own limits; therefore lay hold upon the law, the universal, age-long law, for all you can derive from its beneficence. You are not required to turn your back upon any other advantage, but only to swing the law into harmony with that advantage.

Health-tone, then, is really a triune series of full and harmonious ether-movements within the personal field working together for a buoyant right self in a sane and truth-loving mind in a spiritually expressing physical organism. By so much as it is yours, by so much, in the nature of the case, must fear be an alien and courage the breath of your life.

We may now go on to the general consideration of

 

PHYSICAL TONE.

 

It would seem almost unnecessary to suggest the ordinary regimes for health of body. Nevertheless, I shall refer to these regimes because, first, their importance cannot be overestimated, and secondly because they involve certain laws of laws in relation to health which are seldom worked out in hygienic instruction.

What may be called the laws of laws of health would seem to be as follows:

1. Scrupulous Cleanliness of the Body, Without and Within, Makes for Royal Health-Tone. The law should be given rational, not slavish, obedience. Your body and your deeper self are in a constant state of interaction. Material uncleanness consented to contaminates that self. Uncleanness of the self also contaminates the body. The white life requires the clean dress of honored flesh. You are invited, therefore, to affirm always and practically,

This robe I wear of unsoiled flesh Keeps mind and spirit ever fresh.

2. Sweet, Sound and Early Sleep Gives the Universal Forces their Perfect Opportunity for Good. During sleep the Universal Thought strives to restore, as our conditions permit, harmony of vibrations between its manifests in matter within the body and its manifests in the non-material self. The degree of harmony is made less in all cases by centuries of wrong living, the effects of which are more or less accumulated by inheritance in every man and woman (right living, however, promising in the future perfect freedom there-from on earth), and by the disturbing power of individual wrong living. In order, then, to secure the best results of sleep, our waking thought should be kept in attune, by all practical as well as by all idealizing methods, with reality, truth, beauty and goodness. You are invited, for the reason suggested, to live during the day in such a manner that your last fearless thought at night may be,

“Let my soul walk softly in me, Like a saint in heaven unshod, For to be alone with Silence Is to be alone with God.”

3. The Utility of Nourishment Issues From Conformity to the Plan of the Universal Forces for Each Individual. For every human body there is a plan on which it is intended to be evolved and maintained. The individual plan is merely a variation of the general plan of our common human nature. That general plan provides for certain foods and kinds of drink, for the manner in which they are to be taken and digested, and for their utilization in building and sustaining the body. This general plan is varied for different persons in the primary intention of the nature of things. Your food and drink, therefore, should depend upon your own peculiar needs. The science of the matter investigates the kinds of nourishment which you in particular require and advises all items furnishing the material elements you demand. But some individual variations, in respect to questions of taste, usefulness and harmfulness, digestibility and adaptation, are undoubtedly results of restrained liberty and wrong thought-life in the past, either of your ancestors or of yourself. That degree of liberty, therefore, which ought to be yours, has perhaps, come to be more or less limited. It is possible for you to secure a desirable enlargement of freedom with regard to food and drink. Of course you have no liberty in the way of natural poisons and beverages which dethrone common sense. Aside from the limits set by Nature, you may acquire the largest measure of personal freedom in the matter if you will determine therefor in the exercise of sound reason. I have had my experience with things not liked and things harmful—apricots, chickens, salmon–and today I eat all that’s eatable by civilized man, and I drink whatever I choose to drink—alcohol tabooed because I want and need all the brains I possess. It is for you to bring yourself more nearly to the original plan for human bodies in this respect, if you will begin with your inner thought-life and proceed more or less in the following manner:

(a). By insisting upon a LARGER FREEDOM, not in the way of demanding one thing or another, but in the way of realizing in your deeper self the idea of power therefor;

(b). By endeavoring constantly to bring your thought-life more and more into HARMONY WITH THE WHITE LIFE IN NATURE;

(c). By affirming that the food and drink of which you partake will surely MAKE FOR HEALTH and buoyancy of the body; not merely stating the proposition, but, while so partaking, believing the truth and assuming it to be true—actual for you;

(d). By manifesting at all times the mood of blended COURAGE, HOPE, CONFIDENCE, HAPPINESS;

4. THE VALUE OF WORK AND PLAY IS THE OUTCOME OF BALANCING REACTIONS OR RESTORATIONS AMONG OUR PERSONAL ACTIVITIES. If we conceive of any individual as a “field” of vibrations in matter and the ether, induced by muscular and nervous action and by feeling and thought, we see at once that there ought to be an ideal “field” in which all such vibrations are in a state of harmony. The state indicated would be a condition of balance. When activities in one direction are over intense and unduly prolonged, all vibrations tend to a strain in that direction. Such strain— all in one direction—is not normal, because it signifies disturbance of balance. If harmony in the “field” is to be restored, the one direction-strain must be released so that all right activities may recur and all vibrations proper to the “field” may again take place. Always the ideal is general harmony throughout the personal field. Now, some of the activities of our life are normally those of work, inducing corresponding vibrations in the individual “field,” and some of them are normally those of recreation, which is a true word because it means recreation, that is, action or rest inducing corresponding vibration differing from those of work, running, so to speak, in different directions, and so restoring harmony. Work and recreation are, therefore, equally essential to the normal life. We have, however, built up wrong ideas of each of these important functions, so that most of us distinguish work as essentially different in its basic nature from recreation, and more or less an evil, and distinguish recreation as altogether and in itself a good. Both ideas are surely erroneous. I know that too much work, and work under certain conditions, cannot be regarded as a good in itself. Precisely the same is true of recreation. Neither, then, is to