LECTURE 05: THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY MINDEDNESS -- PART 2

The Varieties of Religious Experience

Let me now pass from these abstracter statements to some more concrete

accounts of experience with the mind cure religion. I have many answers

from correspondents the only difficulty is to choose. The first two whom I

shall quote are my personal friends. One of them, a woman, writing as

follows, expresses well the feeling of continuity with the Infinite Power,

by which all mind cure disciples are inspired.

"The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or

depression is the human sense of separateness from that Divine

Energy which we call God. The soul which can feel and affirm in

serene but jubilant confidence, as did the Nazarene, 'I and my

Father are one,' has no further need of healer, or of healing.

This is the whole truth in a nutshell, and other foundation for

wholeness can no man lay than this fact of impregnable divine

union. Disease can no longer attack one whose feet are planted on

this rock, who feels hourly, momently, the influx of the Deific

Breath. If one with Omnipotence, how can weariness enter the

consciousness, how illness assail that indomitable spark?

"This possibility of annulling forever the law of fatigue has been

abundantly proven in my own case; for my earlier life bears a

record of many, many years of bedridden invalidism, with spine and

lower limbs paralyzed. My thoughts were no more impure than they

are to day, although my belief in the necessity of illness was

dense and unenlightened; but since my resurrection in the flesh, I

have worked as a healer unceasingly for fourteen years without a

vacation, and can truthfully assert that I have never known a

moment of fatigue or pain, although coming in touch constantly

with excessive weakness, illness, and disease of all kinds. For

how can a conscious part of Deity be sick? since 'Greater is he

that is with us than all that can strive against us.' "

My second correspondent, also a woman, sends me the following statement,

"Life seemed difficult to me at one time. I was always breaking

down, and had several attacks of what is called nervous

prostration, with terrible insomnia, being on the verge of

insanity; besides having many other troubles, especially of the

digestive organs. I had been sent away from home in charge of

doctors, had taken all the narcotics, stopped all work, been fed

up, and in fact knew all the doctors within reach. But I never

recovered permanently till this New Thought took possession of me.

"I think that the one thing which impressed me most was learning

the fact that we must be in absolutely constant relation or mental

touch (this word is to me very expressive) with that essence of

life which permeates all and which we call God. This is almost

unrecognizable unless we live it into ourselves actually , that

is, by a constant turning to the very innermost, deepest

consciousness of our real selves or of God in us, for illumination

from within, just as we turn to the sun for light, warmth, and

invigoration without. When you do this consciously, realizing that

to turn inward to the light within you is to live in the presence

of God or your divine self, you soon discover the unreality of the

objects to which you have hitherto been turning and which have

engrossed you without.

"I have come to disregard the meaning of this attitude for bodily

health as such , because that comes of itself, as an incidental

result, and cannot be found by any special mental act or desire to

have it, beyond that general attitude of mind I have referred to

above. That which we usually make the object of life, those outer

things we are all so wildly seeking, which we so often live and

die for, but which then do not give us peace and happiness, they

should all come of themselves as accessory, and as the mere

outcome or natural result of a far higher life sunk deep in the

bosom of the spirit. This life is the real seeking of the kingdom

of God, the desire for his supremacy in our hearts, so that all

else comes as that which shall be 'added unto you' as quite

incidental and as a surprise to us, perhaps; and yet it is the

proof of the reality of the perfect poise in the very centre of

our being.

"When I say that we commonly make the object of our life that

which we should not work for primarily, I mean many things which

the world considers praiseworthy and excellent, such as success in

business, fame as author or artist, physician or lawyer, or renown

in philanthropic undertakings. Such things should be results, not

objects. I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem

harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept

them I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in

their various development, these being mostly approved by the

masses, although they may be unreal, and even unhealthy

superfluities."

Here is another case, more concrete, also that of a woman. I read you

these cases without comment, they express so many varieties of the state

of mind we are studying.

"I had been a sufferer from my childhood till my fortieth year.

[Details of ill health are given which I omit.] I had been in

Vermont several months hoping for good from the change of air, but

steadily growing weaker, when one day during the latter part of

October, while resting in the afternoon, I suddenly heard as it

were these words, 'You will be healed and do a work you never

dreamed of.' These words were impressed upon my mind with such

power I said at once that only God could have put them there. I

believed them in spite of myself and of my suffering and weakness,

which continued until Christmas, when I returned to Boston. Within

two days a young friend offered to take me to a mental healer

(this was January 7, 1881). The healer said, 'There is nothing but

Mind; we are expressions of the One Mind; body is only a mortal

belief; as a man thinketh so is he.' I could not accept all she

said, but I translated all that was there for me in this way,

'There is nothing but God; I am created by Him, and am absolutely

dependent upon Him; mind is given me to use; and by just so much

of it as I will put upon the thought of right action in body I

shall be lifted out of bondage to my ignorance and fear and past

experience.' That day I commenced accordingly to take a little of

every food provided for the family, constantly saying to myself,

'The Power that created the stomach must take care of what I have

eaten.' By holding these suggestions through the evening I went to

bed and fell asleep, saying, 'I am soul, spirit, just one with

God's Thought of me,' and slept all night without waking, for the

first time in several years [the distress turns had usually

recurred about two o'clock in the night]. I felt the next day like

an escaped prisoner, and believed I had found the secret that

would in time give me perfect health. Within ten days I was able

to eat anything provided for others, and after two weeks I began

to have my own positive mental suggestions of Truth, which were to

me like stepping stones. I will note a few of them; they came

about two weeks apart.

"1st. I am Soul, therefore it is well with me.

"2d. I am Soul, therefore I am well.

"3d. A sort of inner vision of myself as a four footed beast with

a protuberance on every part of my body where I had suffering,

with my own face, begging me to acknowledge it as myself. I

resolutely fixed my attention on being well, and refused to even

look at my old self in this form.

"4th. Again the vision of the beast far in the background, with

faint voice. Again refusal to acknowledge.

"5th. Once more the vision, but only of my eyes with the longing

look; and again the refusal. Then came the conviction, the inner

consciousness, that I was perfectly well and always had been, for

I was Soul, an expression of God's Perfect Thought. That was to me

the perfect and completed separation between what I was and what I

appeared to be. I succeeded in never losing sight after this of my

real being, by constantly affirming this truth, and by degrees

(though it took me two years of hard work to get there) I

expressed health continuously throughout my whole body .

"In my subsequent nineteen years' experience I have never known

this Truth to fail when I applied it, though in my ignorance I

have often failed to apply it, but through my failures I have

learned the simplicity and trustfulness of the little child."

But I fear that I risk tiring you by so many examples, and I must lead you

back to philosophic generalities again. You see already by such records of

experience how impossible it is not to class mind cure as primarily a

religious movement. Its doctrine of the oneness of our life with God's

life is in fact quite indistinguishable from an interpretation of Christ's

message which in these very Gifford lectures has been defended by some of

your very ablest Scottish religious philosophers.(52)

But philosophers usually profess to give a quasi logical explanation of

the existence of evil, whereas of the general fact of evil in the world,

the existence of the selfish, suffering, timorous finite consciousness,

the mind curers, so far as I am acquainted with them, profess to give no

speculative explanation. Evil is empirically there for them as it is for

everybody, but the practical point of view predominates, and it would ill

agree with the spirit of their system to spend time in worrying over it as

a "mystery" or "problem," or in "laying to heart" the lesson of its

experience, after the manner of the Evangelicals. Don't reason about it,

as Dante says, but give a glance and pass beyond! It is Avidhya,

ignorance! something merely to be outgrown and left behind, transcended

and forgotten. Christian Science so called, the sect of Mrs. Eddy, is the

most radical branch of mind cure in its dealings with evil. For it evil is

simply a lie , and any one who mentions it is a liar. The optimistic

ideal of duty forbids us to pay it the compliment even of explicit

attention. Of course, as our next lectures will show us, this is a bad

speculative omission, but it is intimately linked with the practical

merits of the system we are examining. Why regret a philosophy of evil, a

mind curer would ask us, if I can put you in possession of a life of good?

After all, it is the life that tells; and mind cure has developed a living

system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous

literature of the Diätetik der Seele into the shade. This system is

wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism, "Pessimism leads to

weakness. Optimism leads to power." "Thoughts are things," as one of the

most vigorous mind cure writers prints in bold type at the bottom of each

of his pages; and if your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and

success, before you know it these things will also be your outward

portion. No one can fail of the regenerative influence of optimistic

thinking, pertinaciously pursued. Every man owns indefeasibly this inlet

to the divine. Fear, on the contrary, and all the contracted and egoistic

modes of thought, are inlets to destruction. Most mind curers here bring

in a doctrine that thoughts are "forces," and that, by virtue of a law

that like attracts like, one man's thoughts draw to themselves as allies

all the thoughts of the same character that exist the world over. Thus one

gets, by one's thinking, reinforcements from elsewhere for the realization

of one's desires; and the great point in the conduct of life is to get the

heavenly forces on one's side by opening one's own mind to their influx.

On the whole, one is struck by a psychological similarity between the

mind cure movement and the Lutheran and Wesleyan movements. To the

believer in moralism and works, with his anxious query, "What shall I do

to be saved?" Luther and Wesley replied, "You are saved now, if you would

but believe it." And the mind curers come with precisely similar words of

emancipation. They speak, it is true, to persons for whom the conception

of salvation has lost its ancient theological meaning, but who labor

nevertheless with the same eternal human difficulty. Things are wrong

with them ; and "What shall I do to be clear, right, sound, whole, well?"

is the form of their question. And the answer is, "You are well, sound,

and clear already, if you did but know it." "The whole matter may be

summed up in one sentence," says one of the authors whom I have already

quoted, " God is well, and so are you . You must awaken to the knowledge

of your real being."

The adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of

mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels. Exactly the same

adequacy holds in the case of the mind cure message, foolish as it may

sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence, and its

therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not be destined

(probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of many of its

manifestations(53)) to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the

popular religion of the future as did those earlier movements in their

day.

But I here fear that I may begin to "jar upon the nerves" of some of the

members of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you may

think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford lectures.

I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome of these

lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of the enormous

diversities which the spiritual lives of different men exhibit. Their

wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all vary and must be

classed under different heads. The result is that we have really different

types of religious experience; and, seeking in these lectures closer

acquaintance with the healthy minded type, we must take it where we find

it in most radical form. The psychology of individual types of character

has hardly begun even to be sketched as yet our lectures may possibly

serve as a crumb like contribution to the structure. The first thing to

bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico academic

scientific type, the officially and conventionally "correct" type, "the

deadly respectable" type, for which to ignore others is a besetting

temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena

from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in

anything like them ourselves.

Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic

conversions, and of what I call the mind cure movement seems to prove the

existence of numerous persons in whom at any rate at a certain stage in

their development a change of character for the better, so far from being

facilitated by the rules laid down by official moralists, will take place

all the more successfully if those rules be exactly reversed. Official

moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. "Be vigilant, day

and night," they adjure us; "hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink

from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent." But the persons I

speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure

and vexation in their hands, and only makes them two fold more the

children of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary attitude

becomes in them an impossible fever and torment. Their machinery refuses

to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.

Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by

innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti moralistic

method, by the "surrender" of which I spoke in my second lecture.

Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the

rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the

care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what

becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect

inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you

sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation through self

despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage

into nothing of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical

point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must

give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event

(as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic,

and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an

external power.

Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one

fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or

incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic

character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails

to cast doubt on its reality. They know ; for they have actually felt

the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.

A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found

himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught

a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for

hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a

despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches.

If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared.

As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the

everlasting arms receive us if we confide absolutely in them, and give

up the...