THE REALITY OF AUTO-SUGGESTION

I wish to say how glad I was to come into personal contact with the great American public on their own side of the Atlantic. And at the same time I could not help feeling just a little embarrassed. I had an idea that people on that continent expected from me some wonderful revelation, bordering on the miraculous, whereas, in reality, the message I have to give is so simple that many are tempted at first to consider it almost insignificant. Let me say right here, however, that simple as my message may be, it will teach those who consent to hear it and to give it fair thought a key to permanent physical and moral wellbeing which can never be lost.

Autosuggestion disconcerting in its simplicity. To the uninitiated, auto-suggestion or self-mastery is likely to appear disconcerting in its simplicity. But does not every discovery, every invention, seem simple and ordinary once it has become vulgarized and the details or mechanism of it known to the man in the street? Not that I am claiming auto-suggestion as my discovery. Far from it. Auto­suggestion is as old as the hills; only we had forgotten to practice it, and so we needed to learn it all over again.

Think of all the forces of the Universe ready to serve us. Yet centuries elapsed before man penetrated their secret and discovered the means of utilizing them. It is the same in the domain of thought and mind: we have at our service forces of transcendent value of which we are either completely ignorant or else only vaguely conscious.

Power of auto-suggestion known in the Middle Ages. The power of thought, of idea, is incommensurable, is immeasurable. The world is dominated by thought. The human being individually is also entirely governed by his own thoughts, good or bad. The powerful action of the mind over the body, which explains the effects of suggestion, was well known to the great thinkers of the Middle Ages, whose vigorous intelligence embraced the sum of human knowledge.

Every idea conceived by the mind, says Saint Thomas, is an order which the organism obeys. It can also, he adds, engender a disease or cure it.

The efficaciousness of auto-suggestion could not be more plainly stated.