THE SECRET OF HEALING - from a pioneer in the field of self-help writing and teaching (Excerpt).

A woman came to me one day and said,

" Mr. Sears, I should like to know what is the right thing for me to do."

I said,

" Have you been coming to all these lectures, lessons and public services for these many months, and ask that question? Haven't I told you again and again, in public and in class, that the thing we want to do is the right thing? "

" Well,"

she said,

" I don't know what I want to do;"

then I said,

"Until you know what you want to do, God himself can't help you, because when we do not know what we want to do, we are vacillating, weak, wandering, worse than a tramp meandering from place to place, and it is impossible for any one to help us constructively, when we ourselves do not know what we want."

We can put our hands on the other fellow's life, and say, " Here, you do this," but when we understand the law, we would not wish to put our hands on any one's life because we refuse to be- come responsible for any one other than ourselves. When we put our hands on another person's life and try to make it do what we want it to do, just that moment do we become responsible for the effects of the causes which that life sets in motion, and so, knowing this law, we refuse to do it. When we do not know what we want, we are carried back and forth from one thing to another on the objective plane. When we get our divine vision, when we allow the player, the divine mind, to get possession of this mirror, and then we get quiet and easy and let go all strain, all effort, all strife, and allow this divine self to get hold of us, we will soon know beyond the question of a doubt the thing we want to do, and the thing that would be the most constructive for us to do; but we go on day after day, killing out and covering up this divine self, this intuitional part of our nature, with our intellect

Intellect is good; it is a necessary thing to have, but there are two ways of using it, just as there are two ways of using anything else. The constructive way is to take the intuitions and inspirations that come to us from the divine player and use the intellect to work them out on the objective plane; the destructive way is to refuse to consider anything that does not at once appeal to our reason and logic and to say,

"It's all foolishness."

Had Edison done this we would never have had the phonograph; Bell would never have given us the telephone, nor Morse the telegraph.

Once, after healing a patient of sick headaches and stomach trouble, he came to me one day and said he had eaten something the day before which he thought "would not agree with him." He said,

" I knew that I would have my old stomach trouble again, so I went and lay down on the couch after lunch and sure enough, in an hour's time, it began to pain me."

He related this incident to me with a great deal of gusto, for he was so proud that his prediction had come true. I said to him,

" My dear man, you are one of the most intellectual men I have ever met; you are a man that in the world of intellect has few equals, let alone superiors, but you are the biggest fool I ever saw in all my life; you haven't an atom of sense; you don't know how to use your intellect. Did you know how to use it half as well as you know how not to use it, you never would have had a sick day in your life. Now, what did you do? Had you known one-tenth as hard, — had you been just one-tenth as sure that you would not have that stomach trouble, when you lay down on the lounge, as you were that you would have it, it would never have come back to you again."

He said,

"That is all in the imagination."

And I said,

"Yes, and what did you use your imagination for? What is your imagination? There never was a soul born that did not live in its imagination, in some way, every moment of its life, because that is where we all do our imaging, and you imaged disease, you imaged stomach trouble, and you got it.

Do you want some more of it? Then go on imaging it, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. You can use your intellect to destroy your body, should you so desire. No one has to suffer fop it but yourself. But when you want health, when you want harmony, use your intellect to image the thing you want, not the thing you don't want; that is why I say to you that you are the biggest fool I ever saw because, with all your great, wonderful, glorious intellect, you imaged the thing you didn't want."

He said,

"I see; my eyes are beginning to open; I am beginning to understand, and I see where I have been following the wrong path, doing the destructive thing."

That is what the writer of John meant when he said,

"The light (the soul, the God-consciousness) was in the darkness (the physical body) and the darkness comprehended it not,"

for there are none so blind as those who will not or cannot see.

What happens when we hold either the thing we want, or the thing we do not want, before this mirror of ours? Why, there is only one thing can occur, — that whatever the vision, whatever the imagination, whatever the image is, it is telegraphed back to the cells of our physical body and our environment, and they send out their calls into this great formless universal energy everywhere around us, for the material which corresponds with that image and harmonizes in its vibration with it.

And so whenever the image is for stomach trouble, we call the atoms from out the formless energy which make for stomach trouble; we relate with them through the energy we create in the physical body, according to the consciousness back of the energy.

F. W. Sears, M. P.
A series of Sunday Morning Lectures delivered by Mr. Sears in the New Thought Church, New York. 1918

Franklin Warren Sears was a pioneer in the field of self-help writing and teaching.

LIFE'S MAGIC STAFF

Peace, Power and Plenty,
Words that are heaven-born.
Say them, ye hearts that are weary
Till hope in your soul is born.

For words are things that will lift on wings
The one who believes them true,
And whatever you will when the mind is still You may call to the soul of you.
The Spirit Singing Henry Victor Morgan 1921