Mental operation

“ Every conscious, voluntary movement that you make, and you are making thousands of them every hour, is a distinct example of mind activity causing bodily action. In fact, the very will to make any bodily movement is itself nothing more nor less than a mental state. ”

“ We have long known that we have to do with a definite organ, the brain; but only beyond the brain, beyond the morphological basis do we reach what is important for us—the mind; as indefinable as it ever was, still eluding any explanation, no matter how ingenious. Former ages, endowing the mind with substance, and personifying every incomprehensible occurrence in nature, regarded mental disorder as the work of evil spirits; the patient was looked upon as one possessed, and the methods of treatment were such as fitted this conception. ”

“ The sane part of me, which fortunately was dominant, subjected its temporarily unruly part to a sort of scientific scrutiny and surveillance. From morning till night I dogged the steps of my restless body and my more restless imagination. I observed the physical and mental symptoms which I knew were characteristic of elation. An exquisite light-heartedness, an exalted sense of wellbeing, my pulse, my weight, my appetite—all these I observed and recorded with a care that would have put to the blush a majority of the doctors in charge of mental cases in institutions. ”

“ Such persons should enter upon a daily and systematic course of physical training, and their labor should be in the open air, in order that the system may be invigorated and freed from disease.
831. The moral feelings exert a controlling influence over the functions of the muscular, digestive, and respiratory organs. They also exert an influence, perhaps, more powerful upon the nervous system. While fear and anxiety depress, hope and the enlivening emotions, facilitate the functional activity of the brain, and increase its power for mental exertion. ”

“ It is, therefore, the physician’s object to lift the patient out of this low form of mental activity to the higher types of rational, personal life in which the patient can rise above the perturbations of life, above the pettiness of existence with its worries and fears. ”

“ Is it skilful or scientific surgery to take no heed of mental conditions and to treat the patient as if she were so Mental conditions to be heeded much mindless matter, and as if matter were the only factor to be consulted? Had these unscientific surgeons understood metaphysics, they would have considered the woman's state of mind, and not have risked such treatment. ”

“ The reason of man, then, may be well able to convey clear instructions to his own residual consciousness, and send it to associate with, and work upon, some other residual consciousness. And if the instructions conveyed, and the work done, concern the curing of some ailment, a case of mental healing will be the result.
Let A be the healer and B the patient; let a and b represent the residual consciousness of each of them; further, let A1 be the rational intellect of A, and B2 the seat of B’s disease. ”

“ The physician can start these patients off anew after improving their physical condition, if he can only bring them to see how much their concentration of mind upon themselves is the cause of their symptoms.
It has been well said, though to some it will doubtless seem an exaggeration, that we human beings are a regular boiler factory of sensations which, fortunately for our sanity, mental and physical, we have learned to neglect to a great extent. Wherever our clothing touches us, wherever the air touches us, wherever shoes or belts constrict us, there are definite sensations. ”

“ All professional biography teaches that to win lasting distinction in sedentary, in-door occupations, which task the brain and the nervous system, extraordinary toughness of [142] body must accompany extraordinary mental powers. ”

“ Any one may readily work out for himself the application of the theory to the explanation of the power of the operator’s suggestions to control movement, to induce anaesthesia, hallucinations and delusions, and to exert on the organic processes an influence greater than can be exerted by mental processes in the normal state of the brain. ”

“ It appears, then, that having a perfect nervous apparatus, certain special materials must be supplied to it from or by which to manufacture mental and nervous action. Excessive mental action and powerful and continuous emotions produce, as everybody knows, physical prostration. ”

“ When he learns that in practically every set of muscles requiring nice adjustment for function like difficulties may occur, that in every action requiring careful co-ordination of muscles there may be a similar disturbance, and yet that in most of them careful mental discipline, especially training in self-control, proves a source of relief, he takes new courage to face the struggle necessary to overcome the self-consciousness which is the root of most of these troubles. ”

“ In other words, for man to be able to exercise such high [Pg 502] mental processes there is need to postulate incalculable ages of specialization in the nervous apparatus, and in psycho-physical adjustment, of a kind which has thus enabled the psychical power to express itself to such a supreme degree in the realm of mind and matter. ”

“ Along with correct ideas about such matters as digestion, sleep, and fatigue, I give, so far as the patient is able to understand, a comprehension of the rights of the denied instincts, the ways of the subconscious, the fettering hold of unfortunate childish habits, the various mental mechanisms by which we fool ourselves, and the ways by which we may make better adaptations. ”

“ The cure must come by and through the individual possessing the nerves, and by and through the individual's power of will and mastery of the mind.
Get the mental equipment right. Let the mind master the body. Let the nerve sufferer get hold [Pg 36] of himself and fill his brain with faith-thought instead of fear-thought, with courage instead of cowardice, with strength instead of weakness, with hope instead of despair, with smiles instead of frowns, with occupation instead of sluggishness, and wonders will appear. ”

“ The voluntary muscles indicate their participation in this energy, and, indeed, the whole organism is exalted by the influence of the mental faculties. They oppose the tendencies of Feebleness, Relaxation, and Derangement, and modify their proclivities to Disease. The will is the servant of the intellect, emotions, and propensities, and the executive agent of all the faculties. When the volitive faculties are in excess, they may overdo the other functions, prematurely break down the bodily organs, and, by overtaxing the system, subject it to pain and disorder. ”

“ Erroneous mental practice may seem for a time to benefit the sick, but the recovery is not permanent. This is because erroneous methods act on and through the material stratum of the human mind, called brain, which is but a mortal consolidation of material mentality and its so suppositional activities. ”

“ But it is not generally or sufficiently understood just how great is the effect of physical training on the development of the brain or upon the mental activities. With a strong, vigorous action of the heart there is a feeling of courage and general exaltation, whereas with a weak heart and enfeebled circulation, fear and impaired mental activity predominate. ”

“ Function has become the dependent accessory of its organs, the mind the dependent accessory of the brain. In modern mental therapy the mind has been the loser, whilst great progress has been made in cerebral anatomy; of the mind we know less than nothing. Current psychiatry behaves like a man who thinks he can unriddle the meaning and importance of a building by a mineralogical investigation of its stones. Let us attempt to realise which mental diseases show obvious changes in the brain, and what is their proportion. ”

“ That is to say, the mental healer, by whatever method he does his work, may always cause his treatment of a patient to redound to his own benefit, as well as to that of the patient, by the exercise of the power of auto-suggestion. It is [Pg 329] therefore impossible to say just how far suggestion enters as a factor in the production of untoward physical results from the exercise of mediumistic power. It is certainly traditional among the fraternity that nervous exhaustion ensues from its exercise, and the results are appalling. ”

“ Though only passing incidents, due to overattention to themselves and their ills, real or fancied, and the consequent lack of concentration of mind on a particular subject, the patients fear serious deterioration of their mental condition, or at least of mental control. The neuroglia theory of mental action throws a light on all these phases of mentality that serves to lessen the solicitude of patients and enable them to understand that, in spite of their fears, there is nothing but functional disturbance. ”

“ Fearing that I should become mad, and having hardly strength enough to drag myself along, I went with great exertion to the house of a physician, celebrated for his knowledge of the treatment for the prevention of mental maladies; I related to him all that had happened to me since a certain time, and I begged him not to abandon me to a state of mind worse than death.
"Tranquillize yourself," said the doctor; "your mind is disordered, but as you know the cause of the trouble that occasions your suffering, it is already in good train for early restoration. Give me in the first place your mirror ”

“ This line of investigation will lead us to a fuller understanding of the influence of the mental states upon the health or disease of the organs and parts. It will be seen that Mental Healing has a sound biological as well as a psychological basis of truth, and that it is not necessary to invade the fields of metaphysics or theology in order to find an explanation of the effect of mind over body. ”

“ Attitudes and the Mind.—With regard to the influence of the body on the mind, and the stimulating mental reaction that follows even a pose of well-being and good feeling, perhaps nothing affords more striking evidence than the effect of assuming the expressions and attitudes usually associated with various states of mind and then noting the results. If a man throws his shoulders back, and takes in long breaths of air, expanding his chest and stimulating his circulation, his whole body as well as his mind feels the effect. ”

“ The first part of our mental analytic therapy is to recognise the meaning of the neurotic healing tendency, the second, to convey our knowledge to the patient. The crowning point of our treatment consists in securing the spontaneous cooperation of the neurotic who, freed of his emotional inhibition, and now in harmony with himself, has, through his wider mental field of vision, a greater scope for the activity of his will power. Man can only desire what he knows. ”

“ BE OF GOOD CHEER AND COURAGE.—Recovery will be gradual, and not sudden; vital force is developed slowly from within. The object aimed at by medicine and counsel, is to aid and increase nervous and physical vigor, and give tone to the demoralized system. ”

“ In regard to the decay of bodily or mental faculties, much more can be done to prevent or retard them than is generally supposed, and some methods for this end which have been gained by observation or experience will be presented. ”

“ The established approaches to therapy and counseling, represented by social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and to a certain extent by some religious professionals, all focus attention on our mental-psychological dimension. Similarly, biofeedback, hypnosis, and meditation emphasize the central role of mental control. ”

“ Functional experience as an example for good and evil, in provisional guard for the welfare of digestion and healthy assimilation, is better by far than the theoretical tests of chemical analysis and the empirical counter-actives of the doctor, which only serve to exhaust vitality, distempering in the process protective mental power designed for the corresponding elimination of instinctive purity and goodness. ”

“ After studying in each patient all the non-mental disorders such as infections, intoxications, and the like, we can now also attack the problems of life which can be understood only in terms of plain and intelligible human relations and activities, and thus we have learned to meet on concrete ground the real essence of mind and soul—the plain and intelligible human activities and relations to self and others. ”

“ That they lead to acts is of course the most familiar of truths, but I do not merely mean acts in the sense of voluntary and deliberate muscular performances. Mental states occasion also changes in the calibre of blood-vessels, or alteration in the heart-beats, or processes more subtle still, in glands and viscera. If these are taken into account, as well as acts which follow at some remote period because the mental state was once there, it will be safe to lay down the general law that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change. ”

“ In proof of which may be cited the experiences of any medical man accustomed, in treating patients for nervous and mental troubles, to make use of modern methods—hyp255notism, hynoidisation, and so forth—for exploring the obscurer workings of the human mind. ”

“ Since the mental conditions that produce bodily effects are not limited to those mental conditions in which there is a conscious exercise of the will, it follows that the bodily effects produced by mental action are not limited to movements of what are known as the voluntary muscles. ”