D

FOREWORD

URING the fifteen years that have elapsed since the author of this volume published his first work on mental suggestion, many books on the subject have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, and many theories have been advanced to account for the transformations consequent upon a rational dynamic appeal to the subliminal consciousness. Despite conflicting theories to the contrary, he has seen no reason for modifying his opinion of the Bible doctrine of man's constitution, exploited in his Hypnotic Therapeutics (1908), as conditioning the results he has obtained. Nor has the added experience of the last seven years changed his view that sleep is Nature's most suggestible state. This has long been a contention of the author's, and to-day he retains the incontestable conviction that the controlling immaterial part of the man can be best reached when the brain and senses have temporarily closed their accounts with the phenomenal universe, and the subjective being becomes mysteriously accessible, plastic, and

willing to accept the constraint of a wise, wellworded impulsion. Hypnoidal states do not suffice for mental and moral transfigurement. In normal waking life there is no conscious rapport with a transcendental world.

The facts presented in the following pages are based on twelve thousand intimate experiences with the subconscious mind in extra-planetary life. Psycho-physicians should record and make public such experiences, inasmuch as there are so many failures, and so much misunderstanding and misrepresentation exist regarding psychotherapeutics. Hypnotherapy is trivialized by many medical men, who know nothing of its philosophy and possibilities, and who have never witnessed its uplifting effects nor its establishment of physical, mental, and moral control. These are they who, in that prevailing spirit of opposition to any radical departure in the treatment of disease, oppugn this most important advance in the healing art, relegating its practice to illiterate mountebanks, religious fanatics, "new-thoughters," and mystics. And what is equally deplorable, the country is flooded with books on suggestion and its psychology by authors who have never practised it themselves nor ever seen it practised, but who derive their theories entirely from a heavy-footed imagination. The erroneous impressions disseminated

in this way are a direct menace to a proper understanding of medical psychology and a consequent deterrent to unhappy sufferers whose only hope lies in its dynamogenic power. Persons without experience of the subconscious mind cannot intelligently discuss its nature and forces.

The strongest of all arguments for the efficacy of suggestion is the argument from experimental knowledge, that subjective conviction which springs from a personal communion with intelligences gifted with supernormal energy and force, that actual sense of their subliminal life and responsiveness to appeal which stands upon the same firm foundation as the certainty of one's own existence. There is no illusion, no imagination, no obsession about such certainty. The facts of practical psychics can no longer be misrepresented nor passed over in contemptuous silence.

The questionless importance of psychotherapy in the treatment of mental and moral abnormalities, for which there is no other remedy, must figure as an excuse for the publication of this volume; my object is to interpret the true mission of the suggestionist, and to make clear what this higher spiritual work really is, and what it is accomplishing in the control of disease, the transformation of character, and the evocation of esthetic sensibility and moral force.

Beyond this, it deals with telepathy, prescience, and transcendental psychic phenomena. It closes with a presentation of the psychologic proof of immortality.

The book is given to the world in the hope that it may prove a source of inspiration to those who wish their fellows well or are themselves searching for spiritual freedom.

NEW YORK, April, 1916.

J. D. Q.

There are times when the most worldly rise above themselves and view life from a higher standpoint, and see it for a moment as God sees it, in its true proportion.

FORBES ROBINSON.

Cosmic consciousness is not simply an expansion of the selfconscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition of a function as distinct from any possessed by the average man as self-consciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of the higher animals.

Dr. R. M. BUCKE.

The spiritual life justifies itself to those who live it.

J. TREVOR.