The Practice of Autosuggestion Part 9

But as long as we look on autosuggestion as a remedy we miss its true significance. Primarily it is a means of self-culture, and one far more potent than any we have hitherto possessed. It enables us to develop the mental qualities we lack: efficiency, judgment, creative imagination, all that will help us to bring our life's enterprise to a successful end. Most of us are aware of thwarted abilities, powers undeveloped, impulses checked in their growth. These are present in our Unconscious like trees in a forest, which, overshadowed by their neighbours, are stunted for lack of air and suns.h.i.+ne. By means of autosuggestion we can supply them with the power needed for growth and bring them to fruition in our conscious lives. However old, however infirm, however selfish, weak or vicious we may be, autosuggestion will do something for us. It gives us a new means of culture and discipline by which the "accents immature," the "purposes unsure" can be nursed into strength, and the evil impulses attacked at the root. It is essentially an individual practice, an individual att.i.tude of mind.

Only a narrow view would split it up into categories, debating its application to this thing or to that. It touches our being in its wholeness. Below the fussy perturbed little ego, with its local habitation, its name, its habits and views and oddities is an ocean of power, as serene as the depths below the troubled surface of the sea.

Whatever is of you comes eventually thence, however perverted by the prism of self-consciousness. Autosuggestion is a channel by which the tranquil powers of this ultimate being are raised to the level of our life here and now.

What prospects does autosuggestion open to us in the future?

It teaches us that the burdens of life are, at least in large measure, of our own creating. We reproduce in ourselves and in our circ.u.mstances the thoughts of our minds. It goes further. It offers us a means by which we can change these thoughts when they are evil and foster them when they are good, so producing a corresponding betterment in our individual life. But the process does not end with the individual. The thoughts of society are realised in social conditions, the thoughts of humanity in world conditions. What would be the att.i.tude towards our social and international problems of a generation nurtured from infancy in the knowledge and practice of autosuggestion?

If fear and disease were banned from the individual life, could they persist in the life of the nation? If each person found happiness in his own heart would the illusory greed for possession survive? The acceptance of autosuggestion entails a change of att.i.tude, a revaluation of life. If we stand with our faces westward we see nothing but clouds and darkness, yet by a simple turn of the head we bring the wide panorama of the sunrise into view.

That Coue's discoveries may profoundly affect our educational methods is beyond question. Hitherto we have been dealing directly only with the conscious mind, feeding it with information, grafting on to it useful accomplishments. What has been done for the development of character has been incidental and secondary. This was inevitable so long as the Unconscious remained undiscovered, but now we have the means of reaching profounder depths, of endowing the child not only with reading and arithmetic, but with health, character and personality.

But perhaps it is in our treatment of the criminal that the greatest revolution may be expected. The acts for which he is immured result from nothing more than twists and tangles of the threads of thought in the Unconscious mind. This is the view of eminent authorities. But autosuggestion takes us a long step further. It shows how these discords of character may be resolved. Since Coue has succeeded in restoring to moral health a youth of homicidal tendencies, why should not the same method succeed with many of the outcasts who fill our prisons? At least the younger delinquents should prove susceptible.

But the idea underlying this att.i.tude entails a revolution in our penal procedure. It means little less than this: that crime is a disease and should be treated as such; that the idea of punishment must give place to that of cure; the vindictive att.i.tude to one of pity. This brings us near to the ideals of the New Testament, and indeed, autosuggestion, as a force making for goodness, is bound to touch closely on religion.

It teaches the doctrine of the inner life which saints and sages have proclaimed through all ages. It a.s.serts that within are the sources of calm, of power and of courage, and that the man who has once attained mastery of this inner sphere is secure in the face of all that may befall him. This truth is apparent in the lives of great men. Martyrs could sing at the stake because their eyes were turned within on the vision of glory which filled their hearts. Great achievements have been wrought by men who had the fort.i.tude to follow the directions of an inner voice, even in contradiction to the ma.s.sed voices they heard without.

Suppose we find that the power Christ gave to his disciples to work miracles of healing was not a gift conferred on a few selected individuals, but was the heritage of all men; that the kingdom of heaven within us to which He alluded was available in a simple way for the purging and elevation of our common life, for procuring sounder health and sweeter minds. Is not the affirmation contained in Coue's formula a kind of prayer? Does it not appeal to something beyond the self-life, to the infinite power lying behind us?

Autosuggestion is no subst.i.tute for religion; it is rather a new weapon added to the religious armoury. If as a mere scientific technique it can yield such results, what might it not do as the expression of those high yearnings for perfection which religion incorporates?