SUGGESTION, THE

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II

DYNAMIC APPEAL: AUTOTHERAPEUTICS

RANTED supersensible power, immeasurable and universally applicable-accepted its latent residence in the superior spiritual or cosmic human self-how is it to be exploited for the relief of suffering and the expression of mental and moral quality? How can this abeyant efficiency be harnessed and made available in the workaday world? The answer is, through psychic channels by what is known as suggestion, and this is nothing more than an earnest, straightforward, dynamic appeal to the higher self in the hope to rouse it from apathy and so secure its resistless intervention in behalf of its own indifferent, aberrant, perhaps impotent soul.1

Thus suggestion, implying an interflow be

1 The subject of auto- and hetero-suggestion and the philosophy of the sleep state have been exhaustively treated by the author. in a previous volume, Hypnotic Therapeutics (Harper & Brothers, N. Y.). Repetition will be avoided here. Emphasis will be accorded to a few psychologic principles of superlative interest and importance to the general reader.

tween the two consciousnesses (objective and subjective), represents a definite means of accomplishing objects otherwise unattainable. Yet, in the hands of an intelligent physician, it does not reject other methods of cure, but reinforces their effects. Its object is to establish selfcontrol in physical, mental, or moral relaxation; to impart pluck, push, nerve, self-reliance to the mortal mind; to strengthen the will; to bring the personality into touch with the truth, which always emancipates. Suggestion makes efficient, and efficiency in a state of perfect action is happiness.

There is no subjection to the will of another in psychotherapy. Nobody but a fool would submit to such treatment, were this possible; and nobody but an unprincipled operator would practise, even for the relief of suffering, a method that makes a fellow-being his automaton. My subjects do what I urge them to do, not because I urge them, but because they are made clearly to see that the course suggested conjugates with right, truth, expediency, necessity.

In mesmeric states, when the will is apparently surrendered and the subject commits himself to outré beliefs and foolish actions presented by the operator, a subconscious comedy is enacted, to which the sleeper voluntarily lends himself as an actor. A mesmerizee cannot be impelled

to commit a crime, or to do anything posthypnotically out of harmony with principle, common sense, or even propriety. The subliminal personality is never deceived, constrained, or cajoled into objective expression at variance with what is wise, moral, wholesome, and true.

In every human being, as has been shown, there exists a store of unused force, which has been called. soul power or supernormal faculty; and the object of the suggestionist is to incite the action of this psychic force and impel the subject to exploit it. In other words, there is in every man something more powerful than the man we see and know-something that is not God. Appeal is made to this something. The patient is awakened to a consciousness of his own sufficiency, and in the light of a rational explanation is stirred to exercise power that inheres in him. There is no personal domination; yet the will of the sleeper bends and breaks before the force of impulse launched from the subliminal plane; it is the spontaneous absolute command of the objective man by the man subjective. No man's will can withstand such impelling force projected from his better God-like nature. The secret of suggestion is to stimulate that output of spiritual energy which overwhelms the antagonism of the will and which automatically compels in the intelligent creature adjust

ment to the law of right. Thus the theory that one man's will can be forcibly (that is, without his consent and approval) subjected to another man's will either in or out of sleep; or that his objective will can, in actual conflict, prevail against the divine potency in the man, is inconsistent with an exalted conception of the inherent moral excellence of human nature.

There is no such thing as a subconscious criminal. No court would listen to such a plea; police records are barren of such cases. No proof exists that a crime has ever been committed through the instrumentality of suggestion, which is valueless as an agent of temptation in the honest and clean. Criminal acts, if suggested, will not be post-hypnotically committed by persons of balance and principle. A pickpocket may be instigated to ply his craft, or a courtezan to invent new methods of ensnaring her victims, but virtue is unassailable in any subliminal state. Nothing but good can possibly result to an endormée en rapport with a pureminded operator. Rapport means intimate communion, a closeness of mental relationship in which neither party to the spiritual fusion can deceive or injure the other-in which the whole mind of the suggestionist is exposed before the sleeper. The slightest insincerity or indifference is instantly detected. A lukewarm, un