Robert Collier – The Life Magnet Volume 4 of 5

1928

 

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 – The Secret of Matter

Chapter 2 – The Mystery of Life

Chapter 3 – The Elixir of Life

Chapter 4 – Pathways of the Mind

Chapter 5 – The Dangers of Living

 

Chapter 1

The Secret of Matter

”For He looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven. ”—Job 28:24.

“TELL me not in mournful numbers,” goes the first line of a poem we used to recite in my school days, and ends with—”and things are not what they seem.”

Truly, they are not. Not in these days of black rays and violet rays which give up the innermost secrets that Nature has concealed from man for so many thousands of years.

With the aid of the “invisible light” or “black light” of the ultra-violet ray, Dr. Herman demonstrated to the Illuminat­ing Engineering Society in Washington that many things were very far from being what they seem. Under the powerful ray of this lamp, things otherwise not distinguish­able to the human eye stood out as bodly as in black-face type. Counterfeit money took on an entirely different color. Otherwise invisible erasures were instantly seen. Even ink manufactured by the same company, but of slightly different age, changed its color entirely under the “black” rays. False teeth stood out like lumps of chocolate. False hair was easily distinguishable. Invisible ink became legible. It was even possible to read the printing on the opposite side of a newspaper.

To quote the New York Sun of October 3rd— “In a world that always has loved a good paradox, what more delightful one could be imagined than that of seeing things by invisible light? It has long been known that such light existed and that objects could be photographed in its rays, but it is only recently that investigators have discovered a way to make it reveal its presence directly to our eyes.

“During an electrical convention in Colorado Springs the other night the garden of a hotel, flooded with beams from powerful searchlights which to human sight seemed absolutely dark, was turned into a ghostly picture in which strange and unnatural colors glowed upon shrubbery, fountains and costumes of men and women amid an enveloping atmosphere of gloom.

“The invisible light employed in experiments such as this is the ultra violet. If the human eye be compared to a radio receiving set, the ultra-violet rays may be likened to short­wave transmission which the ordinary set is incapable of picking up. If our eyes were constructed differently we might see ultra-violet; as it is, this light is blackness to our limited vision.

“In noctovision, the invention of the Scot Baird, dark rays of a different kind are used—the long-wave indra red at the opposite end of the spectrum. Baird’s apparatus does not disclose objects in a dark room to the observer’s eye, but transmits an image to a screen which may be many miles away.”

For thousands of years, philosophers have been telling us that there are around us such entities as “things in them­selves”—things we could not see or smell or touch. Now we can believe them.

For the first time, actual pictures of the air are being made—by the Schlieren process, perfected in Germany. The study of air pockets, which have cost so many aviators their lives, is thus made possible. Air currents, air “holes,” all bow to this new method of research.

In certain German towns, the police have been furnished with ingenious devices which enable them to sound alarms unheard by any but each other. These devices are whistles which blow—not sounds, but ultra-sounds. Just as the ultra­violet ray produces light rays of such high frequency that they do not register upon the human retina, so the ultra­sound waves from these whistles produces sound waves of such high frequency that the unaided ear cannot detect them. Yet the Police Post with proper “detectors” can get them at once.

As Charles Lordman says in Le Matin:

“Our senses are tiny receptacles of very small dimensions, not adapted to hold all the vibratory riches of the surround­ing universe. An interesting tale, a la Wells, could be written—or several of them—about imaginary men provi­ded with sense organs whose limits of action were different from ours.

“If our ears were sensitive to ultrasounds and not to sounds, we should hear—if I may use the word—the ultra-whistles of the German policemen. If they were sensitive to ‘infra­sounds’—that is to mechanical waves slower than the lowest audible sounds, we should perceive at a distance the swaying of trees in the wind, the oscillations of barometric pressure and the slow movements of the earth beneath our feet.

“If our eyes were sensitive to the infrared rays, we should see and discern at a distance, even in the dark, other men and animals, and we could even distinguish many objects which emit only the heat-rays of the spectrum.

“If our retinas were directly sensitive to the Hertzian waves, life would become insupportable; for because of the formidable mixture of waves that unceasingly traverse the atmosphere, we should live in a chaos of sensation. We should have to blind ourselves to get any peace, or shut ourselves up in metal closets—metal being opaque to electric radiation. We should see a revival of the medieval knights in their steel shells!

“But if we could perceive the X-rays, and those alone, then indeed would the aspect of the universe become fantastic. In full daylight we should no longer see the sun; we should not suspect its existence from direct evidence. And in the darkened sky, we should see only certain of the stars and nebulae—those that send us the mysterious celestial X-rays of which we have recently been hearing.

“All is appearance. The universe is to us only what we are to it”

In short, when we say that we “see” something, we merely mean that waves of light of a certain frequency and length are beating against our optic nerves and our retina is able to detect them. Millions of rays of different frequency and different lengths pass by unnoticed. Just as, when a musical note is pitched too high or too low, our ear drums are not attuned to the sound waves and we fail to hear them, so the light waves have pitch (which we call color) and when the pitch is too rapid or too short, our optic nerve is unable to catch them.

So at last we are coming to agree with St. Paul that “Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”—1 Corinthians 2:9. Once the scientist said, in the same spirit as Job—”With God all things are possible,” but these are things “too wonderful for me, which I knew not.” Now it would be a hardy soul who would say that anything is impossible for God’s image— Man.

“Say not ye,” said Jesus (John 4:35), “There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest? Behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.”

Doubters scoffed at such a possibility then.

Doubters still scoff at the idea now. Yet listen:

“Recent experiments with combinations of daylight supplemented with artificial light,” says Floyd Parsons in Advertising and Selling, “proved beyond doubt that many plants can be grown from seed to maturity in a remarkably short time. Spring wheat has been brought to maturity in 38 days by using this method. A crop of clover was grown from seed to flower in 38 days.

“The possibilities for future experiments in this field are tremendous.”

He then goes on to point out some of the numberless opportunities in Nature all about us, which we have scarcely begun to use, and ends with—

“It all goes to show how slow we are to understand and utilize even the most common of Nature’s bounties.”

Dr. H. J. Muller of the University of Texas has shown through experiments with flies that it is possible to speed up the reproduction process, producing evolutionary changes or “mutations” 150 times faster by the use of X- rays. He expects later to put that discovery to practical use with plants and larger animals.

In past ages, in the immaturity of his mental development, man dealt only with things he could see or feel or hear or taste. His five senses were the only guides he trusted. If he could not detect a thing through them, it was not. True—he believed in a vague sort of way that there was a God—but He was high up in the heavens out of reach of mortal sense.

Today, in his more mature mental development, man is concerned with ideas. Ideas that cannot be seen or heard or tasted or felt. Yet ideas that are just as real as any object detectible by the senses—in many cases, more real. Like Plato, we have come to believe that ideas are the perfect immaterial pattern of which all material things are but imperfect copies.

This is the age of ideas. Through them, man is for the first time learning the infinite powers in his hands.

“And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth.”—Genesis 1:26.

Long before they had discovered all the known elements of matter, scientists knew exactly how many there were, what the missing ones consisted of, where they belonged. How? Through mind, through ideas.

Now science has penetrated the secret of matter in the earth and the stars, and can literally do for itself in a few days what Nature has been doing for us through ages. How? Through the product of man’s ideas—the X-ray. To quote Waldemar Kaempffert in the New York Times—

“It takes a million million atoms to fill the head of a pin, yet the X-rays indicate the position of every one. Atoms have ceased to be the smallest hypothetical units of matter. They have become as real as bricks—the architectural material of a new chemistry which is mimicking nature.

“Clutch a piece of iron. It seems substantial, dense, continuous, all that is implied by the word “solid.” Look at the stars above. How remote from us, how remote from one another! Stellar distances must be measured by light- years—so empty is space. Yet the piece of iron that you clutch is relatively just as empty. Magnify it to the dimensions of the solar system, and its atoms would be separated millions of miles. Hundreds of comets have swept through the solar system without colliding with a planet. A comet far smaller than an atom might theoret­ically swim through a seemingly solid piece of iron just as readily. Science has compelled us to modify the traditional conception of “solid” matter.

“With the introduction of the X-rays into the chemical laboratory we have crossed the threshold of a new scientific era. Suppose a metal is wanted that can be rolled out into a sheet or drawn into a wire without cracking. The chemist draws a space-lattice in which each atom is tied to three others on either side. Thereupon he indicated how that metal is to be produced. Thus the metallurgist of the future will literally compose in his mind, or on paper, alloys to meet specific industrial requirements.”

“If our planet were constantly covered with clouds,” said Flammarion, “we should know nothing of the sun, nor the moon, nor the planets, and the world system would remain unknown, with the result that human knowledge would be condemned to an irremediable falsity. Illusion forms the unstable basis of our ideas, our sensations, our sentiments, our beliefs.”

Illusion—yet we are beginning to lose some of it. The ultra-violet ray of understanding will dispel more.

“Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”—Philippians 4:8.

Our ancestors thought the earth was a fixed object. Our children today know that it moves, but only as they learn it from books. Our ancestors thought the earth was flat. We know it to be round, but only as it is proved to us. Our senses would still tell us it is a fixed body—in spite of the fact that it is rushing through space at a dizzying speed, the plaything of fourteen different movements, making a complete revolution every 24 hours.

We would never know from our five senses that the air we breathe has weight. We cannot sense the electricity all about us. We cannot detect more than a small part of the light or sound waves, or the odors, in the air around us. In short, if we depended on our five senses, we should be as ignorant of all that is going on about us as is the savage.

And yet people can still be found to say—I see a certain thing, or I feel a certain thing, or I hear a certain thing, so I know it to be so. Man, man, the things your five senses tell you, are the things you can be least sure of. They don’t know the hundredth part of what is going on around you— and least of all do they know the things they seem surest of.

What can your ears tell you of the music and lectures and reports that are being broadcasted all about you this very minute? What can your eyes tell you of the images that are being telegraphed past you in every direction through tele­vision, or the mirages that appear on a million light waves? What reliance can you place on your unaided sense of touch? Remember, in school boy initiations, how they “branded” you by first blindfolding you, then burning a piece of bacon rind under your nose, the while they clapped a chunk of ice against the place to be “branded”? And if you had no advance information of what was really going on, the ice hurt as much as a hot iron, for the sensation of intense heat and intense cold is just the same.

Or your sense of taste? Remember how they fed you—still blindfolded—a raw oyster, telling you all manner of dreadful things? And how readily your sense of taste accepted those suggestions?

To trust the testimony of your five senses rather than the testimony of your reason is foolish in this day and age. As far as the physical senses are concerned, today is the day of uncertainty. According to them, the moon is larger than the sun, and the earth is the center of the solar system.

Our new conception of the universe is based entirely on mind. According to the Einstein theory, we are not only somewhere in space, but somewhen. It is not events which are happening now, but our perception of them. If it takes years for light to travel from the planets to us, what we see through our telescopes is not what is happening there now, but what happened years ago. It is as though we had years ago been marooned on a remote island and a passing steamer dropped a 10-year-old newspaper giving us our first knowledge of the war. To us, with nothing by which to reckon time, that war would be now. To the world, it is past and gone.

More and more we live in a world of mind’s making. Just as, in many industries, the profits now lie in the things that formerly were thrown away, so the future of the race lies in the fields that heretofore have been not only unexplored but undreamed of. “For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”—Romans 1:20.

Quoting Floyd Parsons again—

“Although the most abundant of all nature’s elements, air still offers the inquisitive scientist unmeasured opportun­ities for investigative work. Oxygen is found in the air in a perfectly free state and yet we have not perfected a way to utilize this most common element on a large scale in concentrated form. Eventually cheap oxygen at a dollar a ton will revolutionize all of the metal industries as well as gas manufacture. Laboratory practices in chemistry and medicine will likewise be materially improved.

“For years science has discussed the possibility of the development of a safe explosive; one that would reduce the hazards of industry, be unworkable in the hands of assassins and yet would be abundant and low in cost. Liquid oxygen would seem to be the substance sought.”

Dr. J. F. Norris, President of the American Chemical Society sees the power in the atom changing our whole life. He sees the synthesis of food without the slow process of passing through the vegetable kingdom. He sees our knowledge of matter so broadened that what we know today is but the foreground of the great picture that is to come.

“Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath He set a taber­nacle for the sun. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it; and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.”—Psalms 19:4,6.

Dr. Umberto Pomilio, the noted Italian chemist, visions the emancipation of mankind from the use of coal and other energy-producing materials, and atomic energy heating the world.

An English engineer, John L. Hodgson, told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the internal fires of the earth could be made to supply fuel for the world’s needs for centuries to come, and proceeded to suggest a plan for utilizing this boundless heat.

“For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

“But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

“For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”—I Corinthians 13: 9-12.

Dreams wilder than the wildest of Jules Verne’s stories are becoming everyday realities now. Why? Because man no longer puts a limit upon himself or his powers. He knows that anything is possible to him, and thereupon proceeds to turn the seemingly impossible into everyday reality.

Remember, in The Mysterious Island, how Captain Nemo killed the pirates with a gun that used no bullets, but shot a mysterious ray, fatal to anything it touched? A wild dream of the imagination, we thought then. But Dr. Robert W. Wood of Johns Hopkins found that sound waves of a high frequency can be directed in a well-defined beam. And when testing them in the water, a fish happened to swim through the path of the rays. The next moment that fish was a dead fish!

In chemistry, they have what they call catalytic agents. Take a little potassium chlorate, as an instance. Heat it. Nothing happens. But add just a touch of manganese dioxide—and the chlorate gives up oxygen, while the manganese remains unchanged. The manganese is a catalytic agent. It releases the constituent parts of the potassium chlorate, while itself remaining unaffected.

Mind is the great catalytic, but we are only beginning to learn how to use it. It brings out the real from under all the forms which appear to our naked senses. It shows us the substance beneath.

Do you know where we get the word substance? From sub and stare—to stand under. Substance is the real that stands under all its visible forms. When you look at an object, you do not see the substance—you see only what corresponds to that substance to your eyes. You get only a small and unimportant number of the light rays it refracts.

“While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal.

—II Corinthians 4:18.

When you look at yourself in the glass, you do not see your real self—you see only your idea of it, the idea you have been accustomed to accept because it is all your physical senses have been able to grasp.

The real substance you have never seen.

The millions of protons and electrons of which it is made— each a miniature solar system—are entirely beyond the ken of our ordinary senses. The perfect image of God in which the real body is made—we can’t see this with our eyes.

These are mental concepts. They must be grasped mentally. They must be controlled mentally. But once we do grasp them, once we do control them, our body becomes the servant instead of the master—it becomes the image and likeness of its Creator.

It is only this real substance that matters. And it is to help you to find this real substance that “stands under” all the imperfect outer forms, that this book is written.

”I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. ”—Job 42:5

Chapter 2

The Mystery of Life

”So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; and male and female created He them.

“And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good. ”

—Genesis 1:27, 31.

IN THE northern part of Africa, near the rim of the Great Desert, there dwelt a Sheik named Ibn Ben Said. Ibn was rich. Camels he had by the score. Flocks of sheep and herds of asses.

In his youth Ibn Ben Said had been a mighty hunter so when, upon a time, his men brought in a young lion cub whose parents they had killed, Ibn determined to tame it. The cub was playful as any kitten, and its antics amused the Sheik through the long afternoons. Months passed, find the little cub grew from a prankish kitten into a powerful lion. But still he had the run of the tent. Still Ibn Ben Said fondled him and amused himself with him.

But it was getting more difficult to handle him. The herdsmen feared him—wanted a chain put upon him— begged the Sheik to set some powerful young fellows in charge over him. The Sheik laughed at such thoughts—was this not the cub he had trained and raised? What though it was no longer content with asses’ milk and scraps from the men’s supper? What though it must have juicy joints cooked especially for it? Was it not the Sheik’s pet?

One day the Sheik was away, and the joint was not forthcoming. The lion cub growled and roared, finally lost patience, pounced upon a young lamb and for the first time made its own “kill.”

That taste of blood was the beginning of the end. The cub ate and slept— then hungered for the taste of blood again. It would slink off, where none of these two-legged creatures could see, pounce upon a lamb—and feast its fill.

But the herdsmen had found the remains of the previous feast. And when the young lion slipped from the tent, there was the Sheik waiting for it, whip in hand. A lash, a roar— and the cub was gone forever. In its place stood the primitive terror of the desert, crouching over its kill. The taste of blood had been too much—the pet had turned and rent its master.

You see similar incidents every day. A man starts a business. It is his pet, his hobby. It grows—and he is master of its every detail. He delights in experimenting with it, gets the utmost pleasure from the management of it.

But after a while it reaches such proportions that it demands more and more of its owner’s time. Instead of a pet, it becomes the master. Until finally it grows so big and unwieldly that it crushes its owner beneath the load—and you read of another man gone the way of the nervous breakdown.

The Fall of Man

As I read the Scriptural narrative, the fall of man was in similar wise.

“God created man in His own image.” What is God? Mind, Spirit. He has not a body. He is not a corporeal being. If He created man in His image, then He created man as a spirit, as mind—”in the image of God created He him.”

That was the true man which God created, the image of Himself, the real substance of man. And He gave to this real man dominion over all the earth.

Then in the next chapter of Genesis we read how “God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”—Genesis 2:7.

First the mental image, then the material body.

Scientists are agreed that all matter is made up of atoms, and that the atoms in turn consist of minute particles of electrical energy called protons and electrons. So the simile of man’s body being made of the dust of the ground is in no wise farfetched, since the dust of the ground and the body of man consist of the same particles of electrical energy.

These bits of energy whirl round and round, the electron revolving around the proton with mathematical precision.

But whence comes the energy, and whence comes the intelligence that regulates it? For to keep the arrangement they do, these buttons of force would have to be able to count! That requires mind. Surely no one would contend that these minute particles of energy have a mind? So the Intelligence that regulates them, that supplies their energy, must come from without—must be the Divine Mind that permeates all of life. Back we come to God—the Creator.

God gave man “dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Surely his own body was no exception. His body is made of electrons and protons whose every revolution is directed by Mind. And man’s mental self is the image and likeness of God. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the real man was given control of everything about the bodily man.

You have seen pictures in the newspapers that had been telegraphed from distant places. Look at them under a magnifying glass and you will see that they are made up of an immense number of dots. Use a powerful glass and the dots seem so far apart that it is hard to get the outline of the picture.

That, in effect, is what your body is like—an infinite number of dots, each dot representing a whirling mass of protons and electrons. Can’t you imagine the fascination of playing with such an aggregation of energy, of making it into different forms and then bringing it back into the Divine mold, the mental substance that stands under all the different forms?

But like the young lion or the infant business, this body grew beyond the control of Adam. He ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil—he came to delight so much in this material body of his, in its pleasures and sensations, that he presently lost control of it. Instead of a plaything, it became the master. Instead of a pet, it turned and devoured him. He forgot his power over it. He became so lost in bodily sensations that his Divine self—the image and likeness of God—was completely overwhelmed and forgot­ten in grosser, fleshly pleasures.

That was the serpent which tempted Eve. That was the apple from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with which she did beguile Adam. That was the Fall of Man.

Jesus came to this earth to reveal to man anew his sonship to the Father, to redeem him from subservience to the body. “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. That which is born of the Flesh is Flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”—John 3 :5-6.

We must put off the carnal mind, as Paul tells us, and go back to the mind which has dominion over all things—the mind which is the image and likeness of God. “It is the spirit that quickeneth,” says Jesus (John 3:63), “the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.”

To put it another way—His words must be spiritually discerned, but, so discerned, they are light and life to us.

“To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”— Romans 8:6. Throughout His earthly career, Jesus adjured His hearers to seek first the Kingdom of God—and all things else would be added unto them. And He told them that this Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven was within them!

If they wanted to get back to the Garden of Eden, if they even were looking for happiness, and health, and plenty, let them seek it at the source—in the Kingdom within, in the realm where God gave man dominion over all things. “Call unto me and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.”—Jeremiah 33:3.

At the meeting of the British Association for the Advance­ment of Science last September, the veteran Sir Oliver Lodge expressed a strong disbelief in any doctrine of materialism.

“I do not think that life is a form of energy which can be transmuted,” he said. “There seems to be a guiding principle ad extra—from the outside—which interacts with the material universe yet is not of it. Physical science is not comprehensive of all reality.”

Heretofore, scientists have pictured the universe as being like a clock which will eventually run down. What if it did, asked Sir Oliver. What would happen? In his opinion, the same Intelligence which wound it up originally would wind it again. Obviously, that Intelligence is outside the material universe, apart from and above it.

We are all wound up, and that we ever run down is our own fault for not keeping in touch with that same Intelligence, for not using the dominion He has given us.

Every cell in our body is an entire organism in itself, a little storehouse of energy, capable of performing all the complex functions of life—eating, reproduction, excretion and motion.

“Under the microscope,” says E. C. Wheeler in the Popular Science Monthly, “a single cell may be seen at its most important task—that of renewing and perpetuating itself. This it does, by dividing to form two complete cells where one was before. These in turn divide. And so the life force continues its process of renewal.

“That is how every living thing grows.

“The invincible power of the life force was demonstrated in a recent experiment by Dr. Chambers. His subject was a single egg cell from the sea, less than a thousandth of an inch in diameter. The cell began the process of division, creating within its own substance two opposing streams in the form of tiny whirlpools. As it did so, Dr. Chambers caught up the opposite sides of the cell with extremely fine needles and stretched them out in an attempt to arrest the whirling motion of division. But the tiny unit of life would not be denied.

“Instead of surrendering, it tore itself viciously away from the needles which held it, and so fulfilled its destiny.

“One important significance of these discoveries by Dr. Chambers is that they tend to bear out the fascinating theory that the basis of all life and all matter is electricity.”

But back of all that energy is Intelligence—the Intelligence which first wound up things, which first released the energy. When you find your life energy beginning to run down, go back to that same Intelligence for rewinding.

You have seen boys with little magnets of steel, picking up pins, bits of iron and the like. After they have been used for a time, the magnetism gradually dies out of them and they no longer attract even the weight of a pin.

What do the boys do then? Throw away the useless magnets? No—they rub them against stronger magnets or re-magnetize them with an electric current and their power is completely restored.

That is what you must do with your body. Mind is the source of all power. Go to it—set your mental power-house to work reconstructing in your body the perfect image of it that is in Divine Mind.

The real you, the substance underneath all this outer layer of body or energy, is the image and likeness of God, one with Him, endowed with the same power—a God-given dominion over all things.

Use this power to do your own winding up, your own recharging. Get back the control over your body which was yours in the beginning, which Jesus came to redeem for you. Know that the image in which you were made was perfect then, is perfect now. Know that the substance which God made is the same now that it always was, and that it is this substance, this mold, on which you must model the perfect body which should be yours.

Know that you have that perfect mold, that real spiritual substance, underneath all the outer forms, then forget the body that you know and proceed to rebuild along the perfect lines imaged in the mind of the Father.

“He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.

“Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall:

“But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

—Isaiah 40:29-31.

Chapter 3

The Elixir of Life

“For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord: wherefore turn yourselves and live ye.”

—Ezekiel 18:32.

“THROUGH the wisdom granted to the world through the first man, namely through Adam and his sons, who received from God Himself special knowledge on this subject, in order that they might prolong their life, God most high and glorious has prepared a means for preserving health and for combatting the ills of old age and retarding them.”

Thus, in part, reads the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, the greatest mind produced by the Middle Ages. The part quoted refers to the so-called Elixir of Life, and was translated by Dr. Robert Bell Burke, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania.

“There is a medicine,” Bacon says, quoting Aristotle’s Book of Secrets, “called the ineffable glory and treasure of philosophers, which completely rectifies the whole human body.”

This medicine is supposed to have been discovered by Adam or by Enoch and secured through a vision} and Bacon goes on to give a number of instances in which it was successfully used to prolong life for a hundred years or more.

One of the men so benefited is said to have stood before Augustus Caesar, who marvelled to see that although more than a hundred years old, he was strong, robust and active.

But Bacon fell into the common error of his age in thinking that this “ineffable glory and treasure of philosophers” must be a material medicine, a tonic or a physic, and he thereupon proceeded to outline a formula that can be compared only with the gland-diets of today.

“If what is tempered in the fourth degree,” his formula reads, “what swims in the sea, and what grows in the air, and what is cast up by the sea, and a plant of India, and what is found in the vitals of a long-lived animal, and the two snakes which are the food of the Tyrians and Ethiopians, be prepared and used in the proper way and the minera of the noble animal be present, the life of man could be greatly prolonged and the conditions of old age and senility could be retarded and mitigated.”

What is tempered in the fourth degree is gold. What swims in the sea is the pearl. What grows in the air is a flower. What is cast up by the sea is ambergris. The plant of India is aloes. And what is found in the vitals of a long-lived animal is the “bone” in the stag’s heart.

Truly a noble concoction, but not much more ridiculous than the eating of monkey glands today, which forms the basis of some modern rejuvenating systems. Primitive man was no more foolish when he tore out his enemy’s heart and ate it to add to his own that enemy’s strength.

There is an Elixir of Life, but it is not put up in bottles. Neither will you find it in the glands of a monkey or the vitals of a stag. Bacon was right when he said that “God most high and glorious has prepared a means for preserving health and for combatting the ills of old age and retarding them.” But he should have known from a study of Jesus’ works that God never had recourse to drugs or medica­ments to cure His children or to keep them well.

Do We Live Longer Than Our Forefathers?

Much has been written about the increased span of life in these days of modern hygiene and preventive medicine. Since 1855, the average age increased from 39.77 years to 58.32 in 1924—a gain of 18.55 years. But this does not mean that the middle-aged man of today can expect to live 18.55 years longer than his father or grandfather. His increased expectation is only two or three years. The place where medical science has brought up the average is at the other end—in decreasing the enormous death rate among children.

But don’t let that discourage you. Two or three years extra may be all you can expect from the help of medical science, but there is another Source which is not so niggardly.

Life’s battle is generally thought to be fought in the morning. The youngster of twenty-one, starting in business or the profession, feels that he must make his success by the time he is forty—or his case is hopeless. And the man of forty, with nothing accumulated and seemingly little done, looks back at his life and feels that he is through—a middle-aged failure.

People have the idea that success belongs to youth, that if you can’t grasp it while still in your thirties, you might as well give up trying. And most business houses seem to foster that idea. Read the want ads—”Man wanted for important executive position. Must be under forty.”

As if youth were a matter of years! Most men don’t hit their stride until they are forty. It takes the majority of us that long to get the background of experience and sound judgment necessary to successfully carry on a modern business. At forty, a man should be just starting on his most productive work.

Do you know at what age you are most valuable? Not twenty. Not thirty. Not forty. But sixty years of age! The average age of the men who head the leading business and industrial organizations of the country is sixty years!

Youth and health and enthusiasm are wonderful things. Properly directed nothing can hold them back. But they need direction. They lack experience, and the mature youth of forty with health and enthusiasm, can begin to cash in on an asset far greater than money—the sound business judgment acquired from his years of experience.

For it is not the number of years you have lived that make you old. It is how you have lived them. You will find them —men and women of sixty, seventy, eighty, with skin as smooth, faces as un-lined as a youngster of twenty. You will find men and women of thirty with skin as sallow, faces as drawn as though they were in their dotage.

Youth and age are states of mind. There is no physiological reason why you should grow old. The cells of your body can continue renewing themselves forever.

Why Do People Die ?

Fifteen years ago, Dr. Alexis Carrol of the Rockefeller Institute decided to ascertain how long a piece of the heart of a chicken (still in the egg, unborn) would live if left to itself except for care and feeding.

So he cut out this piece of chicken heart, put it in a glass jar and surrounded it with proper nourishment.

The cells continued to multiply themselves exactly as when in the embryonic chick—in fact, distinct pulsations of the heart could be detected under the microscope for months. Then the cells began to multiply so fast that they overran everything. Left alone, they would now be an enormous mass, for they double in size every forty-eight hours! But each two days they are trimmed and the excess thrown away.

In the fifteen years, thousands of generations of cells have

formed, generated and passed on. Yet they keep perpet­uating themselves at as lively a rate as ever. To all intents, they are immortal.

If these cells, with proper care, can live forever, why does a chicken die? Why do we grow old and die?

So far as scientists can see, there is no principle limiting life. There are numberless reasons why people die, but no physiological reason why they must die. If their bodies could be taken at intervals, washed free of poisons and properly nourished, they might live forever!

The reason they die is because the complete bodily machine even of a chicken is far more complex than any one set of cells. And it is this complexity which spells its doom. One set may be injured, or another may fail in its duties, bringing poisons into the blood that play havoc with the whole machine. Post mortems have repeatedly shown that even in deaths from old age it is only a few sets of cells that have atrophied or given away. The rest seemed good for an indefinite period.

In short, science has proved that our bodies are made up of potentially immortal cells. It is merely the organization of them which is faulty, letting one or two sets bring the whole to an untimely end. How then can we improve the organization?

How would we do it if the organization of cells in our body were a factory, each cell a worker, each group a gang with a definite job? We would look to the head of it first, would we not? We would ask why it was he was letting one or two groups ruin the work of all the others. We would insist upon better direction upon his part, more active manage­ment. We would urge him to get behind the lagging groups, hold before them the perfect model on which to pattern their work, give them the personal attention necessary to spur them on. And there is no reason why we cannot do the same thing with our bodies.

When Lord Clive was a young Captain in the Indian Service he at one time commanded a small force garrisoning the town of Arcot.

Suddenly the enemy came down upon him with an army twenty times the size of his own, and laid siege to the town.

The walls were old and offered little resistance to the cannon of the besiegers. Whole sections were levelled every day. But every night, as soon as darkness fell, Clive’s indefatigable garrison cleared away the debris and built new and stronger walls behind.

For fifty days the enemy kept up the siege, massing their troops in heavy attacks against the breaches, only to find the new walls more impenetrable far than the old. And at last, after a score of repulses, they drew off defeated and discouraged.

Just so it is with your body. Every day the enemy tears down millions of cells, effects great breaches in your defenses. Every night, if your commander is of the right sort, your garrison cleans away all the rubbish, rebuilds the walls stronger and fresher than ever. The forces of disease can rant and rave and attack in massed formation, but so long as you keep the torn down walls cleared away, so long as your commander puts up a smiling confident front, they will have nothing to mount upon and will be driven back defeated and dispersed.

How long do you suppose Clive would have lasted had he felt like that? How hard would his garrison have fought for him, slaved for him?

Doctors are agreed that old age is simply the failure of the body to eliminate waste and worn-out tissue. Arteries become clogged, the fresh cells can no longer get through and the patient gradually weakens and dies.

And the reason? Not years, but a state of mind. A man reaches forty, or fifty, or sixty. He thinks he has passed his prime. So he lets down. Gradually he ceases to look forward—that way only death seems to lie. And spends his time instead bemoaning the glories of his “vanished” youth.

Ceasing to look forward, he ceases to be of use in the business world, ceases even to be value to those around him. He is relegated to a life of inactivity. His mind and all about him becomes torpid. Presently the life-giving cells, lacking incentive, lacking any urge to keep on, give up the struggle. People think that is when this man dies. It isn’t. He has been dead a long time. He died, when he lost his forward look.

Choose Your Age

A man is never old until he stops growing. When he no longer looks forward to bigger, better things, when he feels that he has done his best work, you might just as well call the undertaker. He is through.

But he need not be. As long as he has an active interest in life, as long as he can look forward confidently each day to bigger, greater accomplishments than on the previous day, he is young—he is growing.

Look out for such an one—he will do big things.

Too old to learn? That myth was exploded long ago. You are never too old to learn. Too busy—yes. Too lazy—often. Too “sot’—if the truth were told.

Experiments made with groups of adults between 20 and 24, and others between 35 and 50, showed that both learned new languages (an admittedly difficult subject) more rapidly than did children.

Other tests have repeatedly shown that adults learn many subjects faster than children of 12 to 15 years, though heretofore that has been thought to be the age at which we learn most readily.

Professor Thorndyke of Columbia University recently stated that no man or woman under 50 years of age need be discouraged from trying to learn anything he wants to learn, from fear of being too old. The basis of that old saying about being too old to learn was more in lack of opportunity than lack of ability. Even in men and women of advanced age, the ability to learn decreases so slightly each year (less than 1 percent.) as to be scarcely worth noticing.

“I certainly never heard of an old man forgetting where he had hidden his money,” says Cicero. And he added that the aged remember everything that interests them. They retain their faculties as long as their interest and application continue.

There is no giving up point. When George De Saulles was appointed to the Canadian Senate at the age of 79, many of his colleagues protested that he was too old. He is still there—and on September 27 last he was 100.

Gladstone became Premier of Great Britain for the fourth time at the age of 80. Cato began the study of Greek at 80, and Plutarch started Latin at the same age. Tom Scott at 86 took up Hebrew.

At 96, Titian finished a famous painting. Michael Angelo was still busy at 89. At 103, Chevruel was adding new laurels to his crown as a scientist. Right here in New York is a woman of 93, Mrs. Catherine Stewart, who started painting at 75 and is still getting more pleasure and profit out of it every day. There is a steamboat captain on Lake Champlain still plying his trade at 97. While in the New

York Sun some months ago I read an Associated Press dispatch telling that Zaro Agliz, 150 years old, of Con­stantinople, was finding the work of porter too heavy for him, so the Prefect of the city had appointed him doorkeeper for the Municipal Council!

As Chauncey Depew put it, It is all in finding an interest in life. “I have always found life filled with interesting things,” he says. “Every day there is something new—in spite of the fact that I am 93. Every day I take a mental inventory. ‘Chauncey,’ I say, ‘how do you find yourself this morning? What’s on the good side? What’s on the bad side?’ And I find, somehow, I always come out on the optimistic side.”

The reason so many men’s minds seem to stop where they are at 45 or 50 is not lack of ability to learn more, but lack of willingness to readjust their mental furniture. Their mental furniture is so firmly screwed down to the flooring of their mind that to bring in radically new ideas would require a ripping up of the whole mental structure, and this they are too complacent or too lazy to chance.

“I will Restore to You the Years that the Locust Hath Eaten.”—Joel 2-5.

One of the youngest men I know was born 70 years ago. He came to New York recently to take a new position—the kind of job he had been longing for ail his life, but never before had the courage to tackle. Now he is not only making good at it, but he is happier than he ever has been, with a fresh grip on his youth that should last him for years. With Viscount Cowdray, he can say that it is not the end of the journey, but the traveling that makes life worthwhile.

It is a law of mind, you know, that whatever a man fixes his attention upon is drawn toward him. If he fixes it upon senility and decay, he will get it. But if he fixes it upon some active accomplishment, he will get that.

When you feel yourself slipping, when the ideas no longer seem to come as readily as of old, start something new. Take on a bigger, harder job. Forget yourself and forget your years in your new work. There is no biological reason, you know, for dying at 70, or 80, or even 100. The animals live to five times their adolescent period. The least that can be expected of you is to equal the record of the animals.

The elephant comes of age at 21 and lives to be 100 or more. Turtles frequently reach 300. The swan reaches 70 years and frequently tops 100. Alligators live several hundred years.

It is not as though there were any Biblical warrant for our present short span of years. There is not. In the sixth chapter of Genesis, you will find—”And the Lord said— My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh. Yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” And the Patriarchs of old surpassed that by even more than our occasional centenarian surpasses the average run of mankind today.

James Whitcomb Riley wrote a poem about a man who had lived to three score years and ten, had the hang of it now and could do it again.

That is what you men of 40, 50, 60 and upwards must do. You have lived long enough to have the hang of it now, so start this minute to live your years over again. It can be done.

“Thine age shall be clearer than the noonday. Thou shalt shine forth. Thou shalt be as the morning.”—Job 11:17.

In the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica you will find, under “The Why and Wherefore of Death,” confirmation of the fact that the cells of the body are held to be potentially immortal, nothing like death being inevita­ble or inherent in them. Not even senescence, or old age, is a necessary concomitant of cellular life. It is because they are mutually dependent upon each other for nutritive material that when one or two groups die, the others follow.

Our problem, then, is one of management. We must keep each group so thoroughly alive, so actively alert, that none will ever act as a brake upon the others. How shall we go about it? What is the “means for preserving health and combatting the ills of old age prepared by God”?

First, by realizing that the source of all life is God, Mind. “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.”— John 1-4. And that the surest way of renewing your life forces is to turn to Him as the flower turns to the sun, or the small boy takes his magnet to the electric current for recharging.

Second, remind yourself often of the entire newness of your body. Every cell is constantly renewing itself, casting off the old, rebuilding anew. The very oldest part of your body—no matter what your years—is only eleven months old.

Third, go back to the perfect image of God, to the real substance of which you are made, for the model on which to rebuild. Hold that model ever before your mental eyes. Let it be the first thing in your thoughts of a morning, the last at night, and your subconscious cannot help but build as you direct.

Fourth, realize that you HAVE a perfect body now. That the substance which stands under the outer form, “the image and likeness of God,” cannot be other than perfect, else it would not be His image. Since the mold is perfect, it is just a matter of holding that mold before your mind’s eye until you can truly absorb it, and you will be perfect.

It is not necessary to wait for death and another life to realize God’s image. It is not even necessary to wait eleven months while your cells are being rebuilt. All of life is in the body now. “That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.”—Ecclesiastics 3:15.

You have the perfect image of God. You have the substance. You were given dominion over all the earth and over every creeping thing upon the earth. Use your dominion. Realize that you HAVE youth, you HAVE health, you HAVE the perfect image in which you were made. Believe that ye receive them and ye shall HAVE them.

That is the way to take your body out and cleanse it of the poisons and imperfections of wrong belief. That is the way you can steep it in proper nourishment. That is the way you can keep it everlastingly young and active.

Take it out daily—wash away the worn-out tissue of belief in age and decay—nourish it with the recollection of your God-given dominion of the immortal substance beneath that outer form, “made in the image and likeness of God.”

“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. And there shall be no more death; neither sorrow nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain. For the former things are passed away. And He that sat upon the throne said—Behold, I make all things new.”—Revelations 21:1,3.

Chapter 4

Pathways of the Mind

“That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him;

“The eyes of your understanding being enlightened ; that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.”

—Ephesians 1:17-18.

HAVE you ever been in the filing department of one of the great insurance companies? Millions of records—millions and millions of names—but all so carefully put away, all so thoroughly indexed, that you can find any record you may want from all those millions at a moment’s notice.

Just such a filing department is your brain. There are six billion compartments in it, six billion cells that will accept and retain anything you may file away in them. In all that mass of information, how are you to find what you want?

How do you find it in an ordinary file? Isn’t it by association? Take John Smith, as an instance. You have had certain dealings with John Smith which you wish to be able to refer to at will. How do you go about it?

First, you associate his name with the letter S. You put a folder in your file under the letter S, containing certain data

about John Smith. If your file is a large one, you make further sub-divisions. You divide the S file into Sa, Sb, Sc, etc. And you put your folder under Sm. Perhaps you even have a Smith sub-division, in which case you differentiate this Smith from other Smiths by the name John.

You have made it as easy as possible to refer to the record of John Smith.

But perhaps under the heading of Real Estate, or Accidents, or Law or some other title, there is matter relating to John Smith which cannot be moved into Smith’s folder. What do you then?

Put a note in Smith’s folder that under Real Estate or whatever title it is, there is additional matter relating to John Smith. And in the Real Estate folder, put a note reading—”For additional information as to John Smith, see his folder.”

Thus you get cross-references. Thus you get a pathway from Smith to Real Estate and vice versa. After a time, when you have made the trip often enough, you find yourself unconsciously going on to the Real Estate folder after you have finished with Smith’s. And whenever you think of Smith, you also think of Real Estate.

It is the law of Suggestion.

That is all memory is—association and suggestion. You wish to recall some event. You go back along the pathway of things associated with that event until you reach the event itself. It in turn leads you on to minor details, to people you met in connection with it, to things which happened in consequence of it.

What is a habit but a pathway worn so smooth to certain compartments of the brain that they function without con­scious effort on our part? Our daily habits are nothing more than paths of the mind—well worn paths which we can follow with our eyes closed. To change those habits, we must cultivate new paths. But we must do not only that— we must abandon the old entirely, let weeds grow in them until they are impassable.

When a man drinks to excess, he cannot merely cut down his drinking and become instead a moderate drinker. He cannot indulge only periodically and hope to become the master. No—he must stop entirely. He must let the briars grow so thickly in that old pathway that the sight of a drink will not set his mouth afire with thirst, his salivary glands watering with anticipation. On the contrary, he must open a different pathway. He must make the sight of a drink start in train the thought of how strong he is, what perfect control he has over his appetite, how fine a thing it is to have overcome all taste for, all desire for drink and to be able again to look the world in the eye. He must definitely lead his thought into this new path until it in turn becomes so well worn that he can follow it blindfolded.

Intemperance, immorality, sickness—many of the ills flesh seems heir to—can be traced to the pathway worn in our minds, by certain trains of events, by certain suggestions.

To the impure in heart, the saying that—”to the pure, all things are pure”—sounds ridiculous. Knowing the associa­tion of thought which certain words or events call up in his mind, he thinks the minds of others follow the same path.

Yet the same event may stir up quite different emotions in each of a dozen people. To one, it may mark a guilty per­son. To another, it seems the proof of innocence. All depends upon the path which the idea takes in the mind of each.

A draught of cool air blows through a window. To one, it seems a breath of fragrance from on High. To another, it suggests colds and chills and fever. The one gets from it health and strength. The other sickness. The air is the same—it is the paths their thoughts take that is different.

“It is not the things that happen to us which matter,” says some wise old philosopher. “It is the way we look upon the things that happen.”

When an epidemic is reported in the papers and its symptoms painstakingly described, people hundreds of miles away who could by no stretch of the imagination have been exposed to contagion, will come down with those symptoms—will even die from them. Why? Sugges­tion. Reading of the epidemic with a fearful mind, they start their own minds working along those same pathways of thought, with the inevitable result that it sets to work the forces which bring about the very conditions they fear.

Merely imaginary? Of course. But that is all any disease is—yes, though it carry with it every evidence of emacia­tion and travail and suffering. It starts in the mind. The mental image must be there before it can evidence itself in the body. Not only that, but whatever image is there will evidence itself in the body, be it sickness or perfection.

“You are wrong there,” people write me triumphantly, “for I had a growth or a rumor or a sickness I’d never even heard of—much less held a mental image of.”

Quite, quite true. You don’t realize the mental combinations which the trains of thought you suggest finally result in. No more than you realize the chemical reactions your mind figures out in the digestion of your food, and its assimilation into your blood. All you do is to put the food into your stomach. Your mind looks after the rest. But have you ever noticed how often you have put perfectly good food into your stomach, which agreed with everyone else, but which you feared you “couldn’t eat”—and your mind carried out the suggestion you gave it and caused you to lose that food?

It is not necessary to think of sickness in order to start such a train of thought. Anger or hate or envy often have the same result. The great Surgeon John Hunter once remarked that his life was in the hands of any rascal who chose to anger him. Some one did—and he died!

Fear, hate, envy, lust—all of them are mental states, but all are breeders of disease. And as long as such a condition which caused disease is present, what chance have you of curing it with drugs?

There was an article on this subject in Colorado Medicine of July, 1924, by Albert C. McClanahan, M. D., which was so good that I quote parts of it below.

“There is nothing occult,” he said, “about the physical effects of beliefs introduced into the mind by suggestion, and there is nothing imaginary about them. Few things are more familiar.

“Embarrassment dilates the capillaries of the face and causes blushing. Sudden fear contracts the facial capillaries, causing pallor; contracts the arrectores pilo- rum, causing the hair to rise; accelerates the heart; depresses the respiration. Grief congests the conjunctiva, stimulates the secretory activity of the lachrymal glands, and causes weeping. Surprise tinged with resentment will almost infallibly arrest an attack of hiccups. Conscious volition will move any voluntary muscle in the body.

“Now, what are embarrassment, fear, grief, surprise, resent­ment, attention, imagination and volition? They are mental states. If it is incomprehensible that an intangible mental state—a mere thought or emotion—can reach across the gap that separates the spiritual from the material and produce a physical effect, it is so only because we have made it so. There is no gap, so far as our experience is concerned, between the spiritual and the material.

“The effect of mental states upon bodily conditions is all a part of an orderly universe.”

And he goes on to state that—”If a mere correction of judgment can cure organic disease when such disease is due to autosuggestion, what warrant is there for denying that a like remedy can effect a like result even where the organic disease is due to a physical cause? Recall again the quick congestion of the salivary glands at the mere sight of an expected feast; note once more the sudden pallor and the trembling hands of fright; observe the epidemic of irrepressible yawns evoked in any company by the first clandestine gape; observe the abounding, virile health of the young man accepted by the lady of his choice, and the dejected malnutrition of the victim of unrequited love; note once more the mantling blushes of the maiden shy and suddenly embarrassed, and be more hesitant to deny that an intangible mental state can produce a definite, visible, measurable physical effect.

“How often has the sound of water trickling from a tap proved an effective substitute for a catheter? How many toothaches have been cured by the mere decision to visit the dentist?”

Further in his article he gives the remedies usually prescribed for scarlet fever, rheumatism and typhoid, and while he thinks these remedies have properties which may be helpful, he asks if any one longer believes that any of them has ever cured scarlet fever or rheumatism or ty­phoid?

“Yet,” he writes, “the victims of scarlet fever, possibly of chronic rheumatism, certainly of typhoid fever, have got well under their administration—as sufferers from hundreds of other organic diseases have got well under the administration of thousands of other equally casual reme­dies. And before they got well under the administration of such remedies as these, they got well under the admini­stration of the dried viscera of strange reptiles and other messes weirder still. And before that the beating of a tom­tom by a highly decorated medicine man was the most effective means of restoring the pathologically altered organism to a state of health.

“What cured these sufferers? Vis medicatrix naturae is the answer that comes obediently to mind. They just naturally got well. But did they? The vis medicatrix naturae, once so successfully invoked by the beating of a tomtom, and later by the entrails of a lizard, notoriously failed to respond to these inducements after men became familiar with the magic of mercury and venesection and huge doses of nauseous herbs. These also lost their potency for persons whose faith had been intrigued by the higher potencies of the infinitesimal doses of Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann. And these at last went down before a faith that blandly denied the very existence of pathology for anybody who had been delivered from the thralldom of mortal mind.

“In all of these mediums of cures the thing that cured was the suggestion that went along with the medium. Analyze your vis medicatrix naturae, and you shall find that one of its chief ingredients is the confident expectation of getting well. Destroy that expectation, and nature’s power to heal will be as definitely crippled as if you had lowered the vitality of the tissues by insufficient nourishment, by extremes of temperature, by poisons, or by any other means. Fortify that expectation, magnify it, multiply it, and—if the history of therapeutics teaches anything—you will accomplish the cure of many diseases—even of many organic diseases—that would not ‘just naturally get well,’ and you may accomplish such cures .even under the administration of drugs or gestures that have no inherent power of their own to cure any pathological condition whatever.”

The effect of thought upon the health will be more fully covered in the next chapters, so let us turn here to the path­ways of ideas—those riches of the mind over which so many people think they have no control.

According to the English psychologist, Graham Dallas, a new thought or idea passes through four definite phases.

1st—Preparation. You have a problem to solve. You study everything relating to it that you can. You fill your mind with all the facts pertaining to the problem.

2nd—Incubation. You let go of the problem with your conscious mind. You pass it along to your subconscious and forget it—secure in the knowledge that the subcon­scious is weighing every phase of it carefully. Meantime you go on about your everyday affairs, attending to those ordinary duties which the conscious mind is capable of taking care of unaided.

3rd—Illumination. Those who do not understand the proc­esses of the mind tell you of the wonderful idea that suddenly dawns upon them, solving the problem they have been working over for hours or days or weeks. What actually happens is that their subconscious has weighed all the facts, come to its conclusion and passed that conclusion back to the conscious mind.

Spurred on by confident faith upon the part of the conscious mind, there is no question the subconscious cannot solve in this way. But so many of us make a correct solution impossible by interrupting the deliberations every few minutes with worry and fear, or by telling ourselves that we cannot solve the problem. Of course, when you tell the subconscious that, it doesn’t bother about the problem further. It accepts your judgment that it cannot be solved, and goes on to something else.

4th—Verification. When the conscious mind receives the conclusion (the good idea) from the subconscious, it an­alyzes it in the light of all the facts it has, to see if the answer is correct. It tests it.

Perhaps the answer is negative, because of the fear and worry of the conscious mind. In that case, the problem must be sent back to the subconscious with the confident assurance that there is a solution, that the subconscious HAS it and can speedily find it.

Perhaps the answer is incomplete, solving only one phase of the problem. Refresh your mind again with every angle and send it back for further developing. Don’t talk about a new idea too soon. Let it ferment until it is complete, until it becomes so strong it pops out of itself—full born and perfect. Steam has little power as long as it escapes freely from the spout of a kettle. But stop up the spout, and it will presently blow off the lid!

Thoughts have little power as long as they escape through your mouth as fast as they are formed. You must dam them up for a while, set them some definite task to do, before they generate real power.

The trouble with many people is that they do not appreciate the difference between remembering and thinking. You give them a problem and they sit down, go through their brain files and look over everything connected with that problem they can find. If one of these files happens to contain a record of the solution of a similar problem, they use it. If not, they wait helplessly for some one to solve it for them. That is not thinking. That is merely passing your memory cells in kaleidoscopic review before your mental eyes.

Real thinking—connecting all these related items of information, and drawing logical conclusions from them, is something entirely different. It is like holding two pieces of electrically charged wire close to each other, and letting a spark spring between them. It is taking two memory cells, holding them before your mental eyes and connecting them with the spark of a related idea. Of course, that is an effort—probably the greatest effort there is—and many people are too mentally lazy to make such an effort.

“Many a man has made the mistake,” says John Grier Hibben, President of Princeton University, “of not realizing that there are other functions of the mind besides memory. It is the creative function which is important. Happy is the man who has found the secret of life, the secret of delving deep into the well of knowledge.”

What is the creative function? It is to draw conclusions from the facts filed away in your brain cell files—to connect them together and make of them something greater than the sum you now have.

In other words, to take the 2 and 5 you find in your little file drawers, mix them together in such manner that you are able to deduce the unknown X, and make the total equal, instead of merely 7,14!

Women do it every day. They call it intuition. It is merely reaching out after the unknown quantity without stopping to reason it out—and finding it!

Every great scientist, every inventor, every writer, every successful business man, must do it every day. You can do it

Robert Louis Stevenson used to call the millions of little brain cells his “Mental Brownies,” and he would set them deliberately to work comparing notes, drawing conclusions, bringing him the sparks, the ideas he sought.

W. A. League of Richmond, Virginia, wrote me that the simile of these little Brownies has been of greater help to him than anything he has found. It rid him of worry. It gave him the courage to tackle difficulties which before seemed insurmountable.

“The first thing I saw after unlocking the door of my filing department,” he wrote, “was my own private office, nicely furnished with a big roomy desk. Immediately in front of my desk are two windows which afford me full view of the surroundings; on either side is a very efficient receiving apparatus, equipped with sensitive diaphrams that enable me to hear all that is said and done; just below the window is an automatic air intake which brings in fresh air at regular intervals; a little below is the speaking apparatus through which I can speak and explain the ideas as they are presented by my Brownies. There is nothing right that this organization cannot do.

“Immediately we set sail for treasure land. I am glad to report that, thanks to you, we are returning simply loaded with treasures—we have money, for example, in great stacks—enough to satisfy all those who have patiently waited; enough for charity of all kinds; and enough left to supply everything in abundance.

“The first problem I asked my Brownie to solve was a big one. The proper way to obtain financial independence. The next morning he informed me that we should push the sales of an educational service that I had been dabbling with for some time. Proper methods of approach, good sales talks, everything necessary for success were given men by the Brownies. For example: Saturday we closed a deal with $60.00 commission; Monday we earned $30.00; Tuesday $145.00.

“The customers are satisfied because they receive great benefits from their small investments; the house is satisfied because they do a big volume of business; I am satisfied and very thankful because it affords independence. We are just getting started and while we are not directly after the dollars—that is incidental —we are glad of the opportunity to serve.

“Thanks to you for presenting me with the key.”

Now about you—have you looked over your mental storehouse lately? Have you cleared new paths to take the place of old, careless habits? Have you blocked off those that were worn into ruts?

Let’s start now getting those Brownies busy on constructive work. They like it. The more you give them, the happier they will be, for it leaves them no time to be dull or listless or get into mischief.

Let’s first look over the job you have. Let’s try to look at it with the eyes of an outsider. Aren’t there things which could be improved? Aren’t there ways of doing things which would save time and money? Aren’t there short cuts you could use?

Put down on paper every way you think of in which methods or product or service could be improved. Then put your paper away for a few days and forget it. Go back to it at the end of a week, and see how much you can better it, how many more short cuts you have found.

But don’t take it to the boss even then. Remember, ideas are like a stream. They gain power by being damned. Dam yours for a little while until they are so big and so strong they carry everything before them. Then use their power to carry you on to advancement and success.

“Happy is tlie man that findeth wisdom, and the man that gerteth understanding.

“For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold.

“She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.

“Length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honour.”

—Proverbs 4:13-16.

Chapter 5

The Dangers of Living

Eat meat, and you’ll have apoplexy,

Eat oysters, toxemia is thine;

Dessert, and you’ll take to paresis ;

Have gout if you drink too much wine.

Drink water, and get typhoid fever;

Drink milk, get tu-b er-cu-lo-sis ;

Drink whisky, develop the jim jams;

Eat soup, Bright’s Disease—think of this!

And vegetables weaken tile system,

Cigars mean catarrh and b ad b reath ;

While coffee brings nervous prostration,

And cigarettes b ring early death.

So eat nothing, drink nothing, smoke nothing;

And if you would live, have a care,

And don’t b reathe at all, pray rememb er,

Unless you breathe sterilized air!

by James Courtney Challiss.

From Laughter Magazine,

THE American people pay more than $50,000,000.00 every year for cathartics alone. Their total bill for medical and hospital treatment is estimated at $2,000,000,000.00. What are they getting for all this money?

In The New Yorker a short time ago was an article which so well reflects the attitude of many doctors toward this vast expenditure, that I give you parts of it here. It purports to be a couple of doctors talking things over in one of the big hospitals.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this profession of ours,” said the first. “You fool around, and guess right every now and then, and save somebody’s life, and get to feeling all noble about it—then somebody comes in with a little bellyache, and you give him a pill or two, and the next morning you wake up to find he’s dead. You get to wondering whether you really cured that first guy, or whether luck cured him, and whether the best part about the medicine you gave him was that it didn’t hurt him any.”

“There aren’t but three medicines in the world,” answered the second medico, “castor oil and quinine and morphine— well, if you consider iodine a medicine, let that in, too. Every time you give a dose of anything else, you’re shooting in the dark. The better doctor you are, the less chance you take of bumping somebody off. The best you can say for most of the compounds is that they don’t do much harm.”

“But,” said the senior, “you grant that they have a psychological effect on the patient. Anybody feels better after a dose of some terrible stuff.”

“Sure,” answered the other, “good for his mind if his belly can stand it. I just mean to say, in the case of an ordinary sick man, you know there isn’t much you can do for him. If he is going to be cured, nature will do more for him than anything else. You give him a little medicine, hoping it will help nature out a little and trying to be sure it won’t hurt him. Study medicine for six years, and you find out that nobody knows anything about it”

Yet almost every magazine and newspaper is full of advertisements urging you to use more drugs, more remedies for this, that or the other imaginary ailment. As Spencer Vanderbilt put it in one issue of Advertising and Selling:

“It looks like a concerted policy on the part of many prominent advertisers to turn the good old easy-going American people into a race of hypochondriacs.

“It’s getting so you can’t look through the advertising pages of any of our better known periodicals without feeling queer all over. Every other advertisement, so it seems, asks you what’s the matter with you, and before you have a chance to reply, tells you what you need to correct just that condition. Are your teeth coated with film like scum in a stagnant pool? Is your breath such that people leave the room every time you exhale? Does the food you eat give you the vital nourishment you need, or do you eat just because it’s 6:30? Are you often constipated for weeks at a stretch?

”The other evening I was looking through a recent issue of a leading monthly magazine. At 9:11 when I began, I was in good health and excellent spirits; temperature and pulse normal. At 9:14, I felt the need of a little sodium bicarbonate. At 9:18, I staged a gargling act. At 9:20, I sprayed my gums with iodine, in defiance of the poison label on the little brown bottle. At 9:24, I tripped myself while trying to execute a difficult maneuver with a coil of dental floss. Meanwhile I was becoming feverish and my blood pressure had risen. At 9:45 prompt, I fell to the floor in a dead faint.”

We buy more nostrums and pay more money for health protection than any nation under the sun. Yet we are far from being the healthiest nation. Our average citizen loses 10 percent of his time through sickness, and half a million of our people die every year from diseases which doctors regard as preventable or curable.

The common cold is responsible for more illnesses result­ing in more unnecessary deaths than all other ailments put together. A simple enough ailment, surely, yet the drugs of today seem no more effective in preventing or curing it than did the “snail water” of our ancestors, or the “powdered Pharaoh” or dried entrails of a snake which were so popular a thousand years ago.

Why?

Is not the answer that the nostrums people took never did have any healing efficacy—that the good they did was merely in proportion to the physician’s and the patient’s faith in them?

Fear is the basis of all sickness—and fear is being ingrained in us through the schools, through newspapers and maga­zines, through the advertisements of every nostrum on the market.

Does a woman bring forth a perfect child? Beware! Have it X-rayed. It may be developing Ricketts. So-and-so’s preparation will make it right.

Have you a perfect digestive apparatus? Too bad! It is probably twenty-four hours late in performing its work, There is not enough yeast in your food—or iron—or what­not.

Are you feeling like a two-year-old, in tip-top shape, ready to grapple with anything the world may hand you? That’s all wrong! No man has any business feeling as good as that when any one of a hundred insidious ailments may be creeping upon you. Get examined! Learn all the things that are wrong with you. Join the Worry Club!

Soon we shall be as bad as the Annamites of Indo-China, who have taken hygiene so tragically that they refuse to eat strawberries, fish, oysters and various other foods for fear of possible contagion. They have worked themselves into a state of terror, worrying over ailments that seemed of no consequence until science taught them how terrible they are. They are depriving themselves of all joy in life —just to be able to keep on living.

Logan Clendening, M. D., contends that, with all our advances in medical science, the average life expectancy has been increased only one-tenth of a year in the past 75 years, and he strongly opposes the annual physical examinations which certain agencies are now urging so insistently.

“I have seen the plan in operation,” says Dr. Clendening, “and I have seen practically nothing result but grief and unhappiness. The number of people who supposed them­selves well and who were symptomless, and who found on examination a condition of disease which could be materially remedied—the number of people whose lives were lengthened—was so small as entirely to be minimized in the face of the dead load of meaningless sorrow entailed. What usually happens is this: Most of the patrons of such a system are men; most of them have considerable financial responsibility, and most people who have considerable financial responsibility are no longer young. Therefore a middle-aged man is the usual victim. In the great majority of cases, if such men have anything to be found wrong with them, it is a slight defect of the heart, some kidney change and a beginning of hardening of the arteries or hyper­tension.

“This report is handed to a man who believed he is in good health. He looks up things in an encyclopedia or medical book and decides he has received his death sentence. If he had not had the examination, he might have lived twenty- five years without a symptom.”

What many doctors forget—and what few people realize— is that the medical practice of today will be in the discard tomorrow and some entirely new theory the vogue.

Professor Simpson of Edinburgh University was asked to go to the University library and mark the medical books that were no longer worth keeping. “Take every text-book that is more than ten years old,” he directed the Librarian, “and put it down the cellar.” And many doctors go even further. A famous surgeon—author of several authoritative works—told me that most medical or surgical works more than two years old were of no more value than waste paper.

For 1300 years the fallacious ideas of Galen were regarded as the Law and the Gospel of medical practice. The science of medicine stood still all that time because it was content to accept, and people were content to believe, what had been handed down as truth.

Then came Harvey—the doubter—and proved Galen wrong, established the circulation of the blood. After him came Pasteur and Lister, to prove the old adage that cleanliness is next to Godliness.

For what is Godliness but God-likeness, perfection of body and mind? And of all the essentials to this, next to a clean mind comes a clean body.

Before the time of Pasteur and Lister, every wound was expected to fester, to suppurate. Why? Because no effort was made to keep it clean. These scientists discovered the importance of cleanliness—and modern surgery is the result.

What was the greatest discovery in the world war? Dakin’s Solution—a cleanser. It does not heal. It does not cure. It cleanses. And allows Nature to carry on its healing undis­turbed.

Medical science has practically rid the world of plagues, of typhus, of yellow fever, or a dozen old-time scourges of mankind. How? Not through drugs. Through cleanliness. Through purifying water supplies. Through sewage dis­posal and drainage systems. Until after the Civil War, our cities were cesspools where cholera and other diseases of filth took enormous toll of life. The air was foul with steaming abominations from the noisome liquids that filled gutters and pools. What did away with the plagues of cholera and the like? Not drugs—SANITATION!

What was the basis of Moses’ Sanitary Code, which brought the children of Israel through the wilderness without dysentery or typhoid or any of the attendant ills an army on such a march would expect today? Cleanliness!

Keep your body and your surroundings clean and Nature will attend to the rest.

Germs? What of them? What though there are billions all around you all the time? Seldom, if ever, is disease caused by germs alone. Germs are like dogs, which fawn upon you if you fear them not and devour you if you try to flee them.

As long as your health is good, as long as your body is clean and wholesome, you need pay no attention to germs, though the air be so full of them you can almost feel them. The trouble must start from within. Rome did not fall because the barbarians under Alaric or Attila were stronger than any of the hordes which had attacked the legions before their day. Rome fell because it was rotten within. And all the germs in the world will not hurt you unless your defenses give way from within.

If you feel that you must have medicine to fight off these germs, by all means take it. But don’t contribute your money towards that $2,000,000,000.00 which goes every year for drugs and medical treatment. Instead, use the medicine which God provided so abundantly—fresh air, sunshine and water. God is in them. Life is in them. So use them—absorb all you can of them.

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company had an advert­isement entitled: “Water—$10 a glass!” which told how some specialist had ordered a rich patient abroad to a water-cure. How he drank water—lots of it—no medicine —just water. Counting doctor bills, and steamship and railroad fares and hotels, he estimated that water cost him $10 a glass. But he felt it was worth it. He came back well!

A friend who met him at the pier laughed at him when he heard the story. Asked the reason, he explained that he had had the same trouble, had even received the same prescrip­tion, but drew his water from the family faucet and got the same results!

“There is probably no physician,” said Dr. Joseph Collins in the February Harper’s, “who has not seen patients whose disorders had resisted his efforts, restored to health by an appeal only to what is popularly called the mind. There is one medium in which Nature does her best work. It is fearlessness.

Apprehension halts Nature. Fear fetters her.

“One of the reasons why training in Psychology would be a valuable thing for every practitioner is that it would teach him that disease cannot be standardized—that the indivi­dual must be considered first, then the disease.”

When you realize that of all the beds in all the hospitals in the United States one in every two is for a mental ailment, you begin to see how important the mental attitude of the patient is. Just think—as many mental cases as all other kinds put together! And yet doctors can still be found who pin all their faith to drugs or diet, who disregard the mind as utterly as though it had no power whatever.

In experiments conducted by the New York Homeopathic Medical College and the Flower Hospital, fifty students were given capsules containing either plain sugar of milk or one of four slight poisons. Half were given poison, half sugar of milk, but no student knew which he had received.

The students then reported their reactions in sealed envelopes. Some, however, noticed such virulent symptoms that they brought them to Dr. Boyd’s immediate attention. What was his amusement to find that practically every one of these was a student who had received no poison at all!

What caused these virulent symptoms? Certainly nothing they had eaten, nothing physical that had been given them. Then what? Wasn’t it the mental suggestion that poison had been administered to them? And this mental fear was far more potent than the poison itself proved to be to those who received it.

What is it kills the victim of the witchdoctor? What is it gives power to the Voodoo priestess ? Fear—the suggestion to the victim that he has been marked for evil or death.

What is it ails most mental cases in the hospital? Fear—fear sometimes so subtle that they would have difficulty recog­nizing it themselves. Patients in hysteria relive highly emotional experiences of the past. Shell-shocked veterans relive the sights and sounds of the trenches.

And what is the cure? First, bringing those fears out into the open—recognizing them for what they are. Second, using the proper counter-suggestions to overcome them.

When a child thinks he sees some fearsome creature in the dark, you don’t try to drive away those bogies. No—that would confirm their reality in the child’s mind. Instead, you turn on the light and show him the nothingness of his fears. When a victim of delirium tremens sees green tigers and pink snakes about to attack him, you don’t try to kill these animals. You show him their unreality. When a sick person thinks he has something the matter with him, just as imagi­nary as green tigers, you don’t operate to remove the trouble from his body. You correct his mental picture.

Drugs, appliances—what good are they when the trouble is mental, as all trouble is? They may help to start a different train of thought, they may even provide a crutch upon which to lean for a while, but a real cure must go to the heart of the cause—the mind.

I remember one woman who wrote me: “I have been bothered with constipation for the past ten or more years— taking medicines, etc. Thence other ailments, such as eye­sight being dim and fainting spells, due to my taking medi­cine so strong. Then when I get used to one kind of pill, its supposed power dies only to take something stronger. I have paid so much money out to doctors, etc., that I am financially embarrassed. First they tell me to get my tonsils and adenoids out which was done, and then they extracted nine teeth, and people tell me I have such nice teeth, but at the roots acid condition appears to be eating the enamel— and lately I am afraid to look at the mirror—rather in it, because I see these defects. And another thing they tell me to do, is to wear glasses—which I have done. I don’t see why I have to contend with all these things. Physicians tell me all these things have come from the bad condition of my stomach. I am only a young lady 25 years of age, and discouraged now on this account.”

An aggravated case, of course, but don’t you and everyone of us know a dozen almost as bad—people who have started doctoring for one trouble, have been treated for every imaginable ailment, yet whose last state is far worse than their first? Drugs lead only to more drugs. Even though they seem to correct one condition, they bring about a worse.

If you bought a new automobile and some of the parts seemed to function improperly, what would you do? Take it apart yourself? Buy a lot of patent remedies and feed them to it? Of course, there are some people foolish enough to do that, but most have the good judgment to take the car back to the maker or his agents and have the difficulty adjusted by someone who understands it. We call that “servicing” a car, and anyone who buys a car expects a certain amount of such service.

The Hand that made your body is just as ready to “service” it as any automobile maker is to “service” his product. All you have to do is to appeal to Him just as confidently as you would to the auto manufacturer. He has not put any time limit upon His “service.” In fact, He has repeatedly invited us to bring our troubles to Him. “And it shall come to pass,” He promises, “that before they call, I will answer. And while they are yet speaking, I will hear.”

What many people and even some doctors forget is the ability of this body machine of ours to adapt itself to almost any circumstances. People worry about their foods and their surroundings and the pace of modern life. They don’t need to. Given the necessary mental support, this body of ours can adapt itself to any condition. As Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins says:

“A fundamental characteristic which is possessed by the living organism and lacked by the non-living, inorganic machine, is adaptability . . . ability to do something to meet any situation which arises in a manner which conduces to the continued survival of the doer.

“This adaptability is not confined to food seeking, overcoming material obstacles, finding a mate. It functions also in the internal workings of the human body, to prevent disaster—as when one kidney is removed, the other promptly increases in size to meet adequately the enlarged demand.”

Few people have even a faint idea of the wonderful biological powers of every organism in their body. Most have heard that a tonsil will grow back after being removed unless every vestige of it has been cut out. But do you know that such solid substances as bones can grow again?

Some years ago, Dr. Jas. R. Wood of New York removed the entire lower jaw bone of a woman, leaving only the periosteum or membrane, and putting in a framework to hold the teeth in place. Not only did the entire jaw bone grow in again, but as it grew the teeth resumed their original places in it!

“I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be forever.

Nothing can be put to it, not anything taken from it.”

—Ecclesiastes 3:14.

Dr. Ernest P. Boas, Director of the Montefiore Hospital of New York, says that the word “incurable” should be rem­oved from the dictionary. There is no such condition. “In the present state of medical knowledge,” he declares, “the pronouncement of the sentence ‘incurable’ on a patient implies a knowledge greater than the physician possesses.”

Every one knows that ignorance killed Washington. In his day the practice was to bleed a sick person. If the patient was not relieved, they bled him again.

Washington had a sore throat. The physician opened a vein and bled him. Next day, throat no better. Doctor bled him again. Throat worse. After the third bleeding, Washington protested. “But,” says Dr. William Mather Lewis, President of George Washington University, “the bleeding was continued right up to his death.”

Today we know that the loss of blood and consequent vitality hastened the death of Washington, as it did that of thousands of others. For doctors did not then recognize Nature as the supreme Doctor. But how do we know that the popular treatments and remedies of today won’t be just as thoroughly discredited a week or a month from now, especially when doctors themselves tell you that most medical books are worthless after two years?

“What is unknown about maintaining and perfecting the health of mankind is far greater than what is known,” says Dr. Chas. V. Chapin, President of the American Public Health Association. “The opportunities in the scientific field are as great today as before the days of Harvey, Lister and Pasteur.”

In medicine, as in all other learning, it is only your tyro who knows it all—who condemns everything that differs from his own school of thought. The greatest minds realize how little is really known, how much merely guessed at, what a vast sea of knowledge still remains undiscovered. There are plenty such men in the medical profession. Cabot of Harvard, Pearl of Johns Hopkins, Carrel and Loeb and others at the Rockefeller Foundation. You seldom hear sweeping condemnations of any new line of thought from such men as these. All they ask is to know—to have the chance to test and investigate, and get at the kernel of truth under no matter how many layers of prejudice. They have no fear of new methods leaving them out of a job, depriving them of their livelihood. They know that service such as theirs will always be in demand.

Such men will be the first to tell you that real health never came out of a medicine bottle or pill box. And never will. Nature is the only source of life. Nature is the only curative agent. And when I speak of Nature, I mean God—the Great Mind that is over all and in all.

Don’t give up your pills and your nostrums. Don’t give up your patent foods and appliances. Use them—as long as you have faith in them—as long as you think they are doing you good.

But when you have come to the end of these, when you have exhausted the remedies that human ingenuity can devise, then try the power of Mind, then go back to the methods the followers of Jesus found so effective.

“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath annointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor; He hath sent me to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”—Luke 4:18

 

Th End