The Sixth Sense, Charles H. Brent [most important books of all time txt] 📗

When we turn to man’s conscious life and the relation between health of body and a healthy consciousness we are on more demonstrable ground. Experience has proved that our external and internal faculties work in sympathy with one another. If the body is distressed, the inner consciousness droops; if the inner consciousness becomes morbid or out of sorts, the body, though not always actually falling ill, loses in efficiency. Yet, let it be added, the body is less able to bear psychic illness than the inner self to bear physical illness. The body can never turn psychic suffering into nerve and muscle, but the psychic nature can weave malady into genius through the powerful operation of the Mystic Sense.

To be healthy is a commendable ambition. Being in good health, our desire is to become as immune as may be to disease, or being ill to give ourselves the best chance of recovery. Health is preserved by keeping body and mind in close relation to health-giving processes. It is not our concern to discuss in this connection questions of diet, sanitation, hygiene, exercise and similar aids to the promotion of health. Their value is of the first order and may not be ignored or discounted. But just now we are concerned with another part of human nature which has much to do in determining our condition of body—the sense which furnishes us with ideals.

The objective of an ideal is found in the idea flowing from the mind of God. It is as real to the Mystic Sense as a flower is to sight and smell. An ideal is the reflection of God’s idea and is distorted or true according as the sense which perceives ideas is healthy or diseased. The Mystic Sense relates us to ideas, and enables us to touch, test, see and hear them, as truly as our bodily senses enable us to touch, test, see and hear the world of matter, form and sound. A healthy ideal is a vitalizing force, an unhealthy ideal is an invitation to disease. Ideals are subjectified ideas.

In the course of the development of that most experimental of all sciences, medicine, not only has dosing been reduced to a minimum, but also the natural recuperative powers of the patient have been discovered and are relied upon. The physician tries to open, for the sick, doors into nature’s healthiest rooms. The patient being placed in a vitalizing environment is expected by the use of his will and Mystic Sense to respond to it. The physician alone can do but half the work. The will, and not only the willingness, to live, a mystical laying hold of the idea of health, is in all cases a valuable, in some an indispensable, factor in the process of recovery. The suggestion of health predisposes to health; the suggestion of disease is provocative of disease. Medicine may be both a material curative and a sacrament of health.

The habit of our day has been such as to create in us a marked pathological consciousness. The very process which, by slow degrees, has been driving disease to the wall, has produced in us a sensitiveness to the idea of disease that is inimical to health. The discovery of the causes of disease has peopled the imagination, even of those who have never looked through a microscope, with an army of hostile germs to the obscuration of those superior influences which conduce to well-being, until we have become chronically nervous of the hidden perils which beset our path. Insignificant pains are construed into the symptoms of the last disease discussed in the papers or the advertisement of a proprietary nostrum. Momentary fluctuations in health send us tripping with anxious brow to the doctor. Dabbling in pathology is an undesirable occupation, especially for the young. The wrappers of patent medicines, let alone the medicines themselves, have caused more agony than peace of mind and have been more provocative of disease than of health. Happily we are emerging from the patent medicine stage.

A therapeutic consciousness ought to be the normal consciousness. The forces which make for life are in excess of those which make for death. The universe would go into steady decline were not the dominant forces salutary, and life would flicker out like the wick of a candle guttered in its socket. There is an inexhaustible fund of vitality open to man and we are competent to draw upon it so that we shall receive a maximum rather than a minimum. Part of the function of science is to put man into such a relation to the nature outside of him as to place the wholesome and remedial at his disposal, preventing disease by immunizing him from it. It is the common laws of health which are the most important. With the curious inconsistency which characterizes many human beings, we frequently see men adhering to some vigorous regimen of secondary or doubtful importance, while all the time they are flagrantly disobeying some primary law of health. The unity between the outer and the inner necessitates not only an intelligent and scientific treatment but also that which is mystical and more or less mysterious. Prayer, which is at once an appeal to the Source of Life to let loose saving health in our direction and an opening up of our being for the reception of hidden and unknown aid, is a higher form of psychic effort than either suggestion or auto-suggestion in that it includes both, though not precluding the concurrent use of either. Auto-suggestion looks only for self-induced benefit to the patient by application to an impersonal ideal; prayer does not think merely to apprehend a passive or indifferent remedy, but also to be apprehended by healthful, forceful Personality, like but superior to our own. A prayer to the ether would have in its reflex effect a totally different influence on the petitioner from a prayer to what was conceived to be a personal God. Similarly the quality of the virtue which is the result of mere ethical culture is as different from that which is the product of correspondence with the Christian’s God as cotton is from linen. Nor is it that God is inactive until we pray. He is operating to the uttermost that our listless or passive or antagonistic personality will allow. The highest personality can do his best to the object of his love only when the latter adopts a responsive and co-operative attitude. The feeble spot in much, if not most, prayer, is that it asks without importunity, or importunes without appropriating. The Mystic Sense must reach up until it feels the hand containing the gift, and take the gift as its own. Auto-suggestion is a lame term indicating the application of the ideal to the defective. Suggestion is a similar application on the part of another to a companion. With a background of prayer, the insomnia patient can with profit watch the dream sheep go through the hedge, or lay himself in the cradle of old nursery rhymes, or welcome to his bedside the veiled legions of slumber as they troop forth on their silent errand from the presence of Him who giveth His beloved sleep.

Faith, which is simply the highest operation of the mystic sense, is as necessary to the complete work of healing as in the days when Jesus said, “According to thy faith be it unto thee.” It appropriates to the full the remedial contents of scientific agencies which, under its touch become sacramental, and clothes the life in the soft robe of unanxious peace and serene cheerfulness. It is easy enough for a well man to talk to the sick concerning the desirability and curative value of a therapeutic consciousness. The depressed soul resents the necessity of being called upon to act independently of the body and in opposition to it. Most patients, too, for the time being are inclined to count each one his own case unique. But the Mystic Sense is wonderfully elastic. Cheerfulness comes by being cheerful, hope by being hopeful, calmness by being calm, healthymindedness by being healthyminded. This is the work of the Mystic Sense living in the realm of vigor even when the body is in distress. When the Mystic Sense goes exploring in high altitudes it never comes back empty handed. Even when it fails to return with health of body, it holds in its grasp health of mind. A blithe spirit in a feeble body can accomplish more than a sluggish spirit in a robust body. There are two kinds of healthymindedness—temperamental and acquired. The latter is the most powerful and may be had by anyone who cultivates his Mystic Sense.

The extent to which the Mystic Sense works toward a cure cannot be formulated. It varies with conditions. Of this we can be assured. It is always salutary, frequently indispensable. Diseases caused or induced by an abuse or morbid use of the imagination cannot be banished without the aid of the Mystic Sense as the chief agent. The imagination must be cured before the sickness can be cured, and there are instances when the cure of the imagination is the cure of the disease. That is none the less a disease, the seat of which is in the psychic, rather than in the physical part of self.

Two things remain to be said. First, our day is laying a dangerous accent on the value of mere physical life in man. It tends to foster physical self-consciousness and is an aspect of degrading materialism. All the efforts being put forth in the direction of making it possible for the physically feeble to survive, are dangerous, unless followed up by commensurate efforts to make them lit as characters. Mere existence and mere longevity are false gods.

It is haply justifiable for men of low breed, who honestly think this life the only one, to grasp at all its available gifts, and struggle to retain it on any terms for as long a period as may be. But not so among those who have risen to a knowledge of the meaning of immortality, even in its lesser aspects, of the perpetuation of the nation and the race, and the persistence of a man’s work and influence among men after he himself has vanished. For such there is a higher food than mere life, beside which mere survival looks cheap and worthless.