Psychology in Service of the Soul

The very fact that we want to pray means that we are penitent, and instead of praying for forgiveness we should accept forgiveness, and concentrate the mind, not on the depths to which we have fallen in the past, but on the heights to which we are going to rise by God's grace in the future.

There are many troubles having all the appearance of physical disability which are not only psychological, but spiritual. Their origin is a disharmony of the soul (a refusal to accept the idea of forgiveness, for instance).

THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF HYPNOSIS

It will seem strange to many that there can be any connection between hypnotism and religion, for hypnotism is regarded in so many quarters as suspect. Men still shrink from it as from one of the black arts. This is not to be wondered at when one knows its history. It has been exploited and misused by the magic-mongerer and the organizer of crude exhibitions in village market-places and the like, until it has come to be regarded almost as an unholy thing. This attitude to it has been the more readily taken because the subject is so little understood. One of the tasks of modern psychology will be to rescue the practice of hypnotism from this degrading position and show it to be, in skilled hands, a normal way of making an examination of the unconscious mind, and of suggesting to that mind ideas which afterwards will be realized by the personality to the great benefit of the latter. As one patient said to a psychologist, 'when I came I thought I was going to be doped. . . . Now I know that I have lived for years in a cellar, and that you have lifted me out and liberated what was in me.'

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In conclusion, though hypnosis is not to be regarded as a method to be used where other methods would suffice, yet with proper safeguards, and in skilled hands, it will yet come into its own as a useful method of making an examination of the unconscious mind in the search for those hidden and repressed complexes which do so much to disturb the harmony of so many lives, and as a means of getting into the mind those suggestions of confidence, strength, well-being, and courage which in many cases can alone bring about the health of the soul. Leslie D(ixon) Weatherhead  ~ Psychology in Service of the Soul ( 1930 )