Healing Methods: Argumentive, Absolute and By Decree

“… Phineas Parkhurst Quimby tried to explain all illness as linked to mind. He applied a therapy that purported to heal the body by altering the state of mind of the sufferer. He believed he as was flowing the practices of Jesus Christ.”

Healing Powers: Alternative Medicine, Spiritual Communities, and the State  By Fred M. Frohock 1995 pg 148

The Argumentive Method

This method is just what the word implies. It stems from the procedure of Dr. Phineas Parlhurst Quimby of Maine. Dr. Quimby, a pioneer in mental and spiritual healing, lived and practised in Belfast, Maine, about one hundred years ago. A book called The Quimby Manuscripts, published in 1921 by Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York City, and edited by Horatio Dresser, is available in your library. This book gives newspaper accounts of this man’s remarkable results in prayer treatment of the sick. Quimby duplicated many of the healing miracles recorded in the Bible. In brief, the argumentative method employed according to Quimby consists of spiritual reasoning where you convince the patient and yourself that his sickness is due to his false belief, groundless fears, and negative patterns lodged in his ailment is due only to a distorted, twisted pattern of thought, which has taken form in his body. This wrong belief in some external power and external causes has now externalized itself as sickness, and can be changed by changing the thought patterns.You explain to the sick person that the basis of all healing is a change of belief. You also point out that the subconscious mind created the body and all it’s organs, therefore, it knows how to heal it, and is doing so now as you speak. You argue in the courtroom of your mind that the disease is a shadow of the mind based disease soaked, morbid thought-imagery. _[1] You continue to build up all the evidence you can muster on behalf of the healing power within, which created all the organs in the first place and which has a perfect pattern of every cell, nerve and tissue within it. Then, you render a verdict in the courthouse of your mind in favor of yourself or your patient_.[2] You liberate the sick on by faith and spiritual understanding. Your mental and spiritual evidence is overwhelming; they’re being but one mind, what you feel as true will be resurrected in the experience of the patient. This procedure is essentially the argumentative method used by Dr. Quimby of Maine from 1849 to 1869.
subconscious
[1]Beliefs based on the race mind perhaps?
[2] Perry Mason proved the defendant innocent. Matlock raised reasonable doubt. Both have merit.
 The Absolute Method is like Modern Sound Wave Therapy
Many people throughout the world practice this form of prayer treatment with wonderful results. The person using the absolute method mentions the name of the patient such as John Jones, then quietly and silently thinks God and His qualities, and attributes, such as God is all bliss, boundless love, infinite intelligence, all powerful, boundless wisdom, absolute harmony, indescribable beauty and perfection. As he quietly thinks along these lines he lifted up in consciousness into a new spiritual wave length _[3], at which times he feels the infinite ocean of God’s love is now dissolving everything unlike itself in the mind and body of John Jones for whom he is praying. He feels all the power and love of God are now focussed on John Jones, and whatever is bothering or vexing him is now completely neutralized in the presence of the infinite ocean of life and love.
The absolute method of prayer might be likened to the sound wave or sonic therapy recently shown me by a distinguished physician in Los Angeles. He has an ultra sound wave machine, which oscillates at a tremendous speed and sends sound waves to any area of the body to which it is directed. These sound waves can be controlled, and he told me of achieving remarkable results in dissolving arthritic calcareous deposits, as well as the healing and removal of other disturbing conditions.
To the degree that we rise in consciousness by contemplating qualities and attributes of God, do we generate spiritual electronic waves of harmony, health and peace. Many remarkable healings follow this technique of prayer.
[3] Vibration
 A Cripple WalksDr. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, of whom we spoke previously in this chapter, used the absolute method in the latter years of his healing career. He was really the father of psychosomatic medicine and the first psychoanalyst. He had the capacity to diagnose clairvoyantly the cause of the patients trouble, pains, and aches.The following is a condensed account of the healing of a cripple as recorded in Quimby’s Manuscripts:Quimby was called on to visit a woman who was lame, aged, and bedridden. He states that he ailment was due to the fact that she was imprisoned by a creed so small and contracted that she could not stand upright and move about. She was living in the tomb of fear and ignorance; furthermore, she was taking her Bible literally, and it frightened her. “In this tomb,” Quimby said, ‘was the presence and power of God trying to burst the bands, break the bonds, and rise from the dead.” When she would ask others for an explanation of some passage of the Bible, the answer would be a stone, then she would hunger for the bread of life. Dr. Quimby diagnosed her case as a mind cloudy and stagnated, due to excitation and fear, caused by the inability to see clearly the meaning of the passage of the Bible, which she had been reading. This showed itself in the body by her heavy and sluggish feeling, which would terminate as paralysis.
At this point Quimby asked her what was meant in the Bible verse: Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto Him that sent me. Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me; and where I am, thither ye cannot come. JOHN 7:33-34. She replied that it meant Jesus went to heaven. Quimby explained what it really meant by telling her that being with her a little while meant his explanation of her symptoms, feelings, and their causes; i.e., he had compassion and sympathy for her momentarily, but he could not remain in that mental state. The next step was to go to Him that sent us, which, as Quimby pointed out, was the creative power of God in all of us.
Quimby immediately traveled in his mind and contemplated the divine ideal; i.e., the vitality, intelligience, harmony, and the power of God functioning in the sick person. This why he said to the woman, “Therefore, where I go you cannot come, for you are in your narrow, restricted belief, and I am in health.” This prayer and explanation produced an instantaneous sensation, and a change came over her mind. She walked without crutches! Quimby said it was one of the most singular of all his healings. She was, as it were, dead to error, and to bring her to life or truth was to raise her from the dead. Quimby quoted the resurrection of Christ and applied it to her own Christ or health; this produced a powerful effect on her. He also explained to her that the truth, which she accepted, was the angel or idea, which rolled away the stone of her fear, ignorance, and superstition, thereby, releasing the healing power of God, which made her whole.
 The Decree MethodPower goes into our word according to the feeling and faith behind it. When we realize the power that moves the world is moving on your behalf and is backing up our word, our confidence and assurance grow. You do not try and add power to power; therefore, there must be no mental striving, coercion, force, or mental wrestling.
A young girl used the decree method on a young man who was constantly phoning her, pressing her for dates, amd meeting her at her palce of business; she found it very difficult to get rid ogf him. She decreed as follows: “I release ………………… unto God. He is in his true place at all times. I am free, and he is free. I now decree that my words go forth into infinite mind and it brings it to pass. It is so.” She said he vanished and she has never seen him since, adding, “It was as though the ground swallowed him up.”
Thou shalt decree a thing, and it shall be established unto thee: and the light shall shine upon thy ways. JOB 22:28 Mental Movie MethodAct as though I am, and I will be. The Baudoin Technique (Charles Baudouin)A very simple way of securing this (impregnation of the subconscious mind) is to condense the idea which is to be the object of suggestion, to sum it up in a brief phrase which can be readily graven into memory, and to repeat it over and over again as a lullaby.“It is finished in Divine Order”. The “Thank You” Technique“Thank you, Father, for my wealth.”The Power of Your Subconscious Mind  By Joseph Murphy