Our whole bodies are nothing more than the outward expression of our thought. Education teaches us we should have a cold or fever when we are drenched in the rain, so we have a cold or fever. We are told that something we ate is indigestible, and so we are immediately assailed with pains. We see another yawn, and we have the impulse to yawn as well. In the same way, when we hear of sickness all around us and visualize it in our own minds with fear, we too have it. Sickness doesn’t come, we create it.

The fear of these things brings them about through the mental suggestion sent to our subconscious minds. We have been educated in a medical age to think that most diseases are infectious or contagious. So the mere sight of a diseased person makes most of us withdraw into ourselves like a turtle within its shell. We fear that we shall catch it, when one of the greatest dangers of disease is the very fear of it. There are people in the midst of contagious disease without catching any because they fear not.
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Many people believe that anyone trapped in a mine or other airtight compartment would presently die of carbon dioxide poisoning causing lack of oxygen. But the great escape artist Harry Houdini proved that death from lack of oxygen is not necessary at all. He says that it is not poisoning by carbon dioxide but fear that causes the death of miners and others trapped in air-tight compartments. Houdini had himself sealed in a coffin and sunk to the bottom of a swimming pool for one and a half hours as proof.

There was no chance for outside air to reach him and according to normal scientific belief he should have been dead in four minutes. But when he was released from the coffin, he had no physical reactions from the test and said he only felt a slight dizziness. Houdini said that anyone can do it and the important thing is to believe that you are safe. That is the whole key of physical preservation all along. No matter where you are and how conditions are around you, the important thing is to believe you’re safe.

It is an irony that the nurse does more help in healing patient than doctor. The properly trained nurse surrounds the patient with an atmosphere of comfortable assurance. Through the process of instilling hope, confidence and comfort, she aids the patient towards speedy recovery. It is not really the medicine that heals the patient, but it is the environment and atmosphere of ease that removes the disease. Healing another person is simply the act of invoking that person’s mental processes into healing itself.

So many people today have become so wedded to their ailments. They enjoy poor health so thoroughly, that they are secretly proud of it. Take away their complaints and they would be lost without them. It is their suffering that allows them to play on the sympathy of others. It is how they draw attention and concern to themselves. They are not whole within and that is why they live in such unwholesome manner. They’re not ready to be healed no matter how much they need healing. They desire sick benefits.

Disease is a mere illusion. If you think a pin is sticking you, and you concentrate your thought on the pain, it becomes unbearable. Yet when you investigate, you find that no pin was sticking you at all. It was merely a hair, or bit of cinder lodged against the skin. How often have you had some fancied pain, only to have it promptly disappear when your physician assured you there was nothing wrong with you at all? It would be the same way with all sickness, all pain, if you understand that it is just suggestion.

Every organ you have is capable of withstanding any condition, given the right state of mind to direct it. The only reason that they succumb to sickness or disease or injury is because you tell them to. People have fallen from great heights without injury. People have taken the most deadly poison without harm. People have gone through fire, flood and pestilence with not a scratch to show. What they have done once they can do again. It shows that your body does not need to suffer injury from such conditions.

The only reason it ordinarily suffers is because your fear of injury is the thought you are holding before your subconscious mind, and therefore that is the thought that it images on your body. Bear this in mind when anyone tells you that certain foods are not good for you. Food is only energy and that energy is manipulated by your mind. You can eat what you like, if you do it in moderation. Remember that no matter what you may eat, if you relish it, if you believe it to be good for you, it will be good for you.

The subconscious mind is just as amenable to suggestion from those around you as it is from your own conscious mind. That is why babies and young children fall such easy victims to the fears of disease and contagion of their parents and those about them. That is why worrying over a seeming epidemic so often results in the children catching it, even when they have apparently been in no way exposed to the contagion. The one basic fact that covers all health is that Mind is all. There is no other cause.

All disease, all sickness, all imperfections of the human body are due to the one cause, which is your belief that your body is the master, that it can act, that it can catch cold, or become diseased, without the consent of mind. This is the procuring cause of all suffering. When you drive the belief in disease from your subconscious mind, you will drive away the pain and all the other symptoms with it. But if you will deny this belief of pain or sickness, your subconscious mind will speedily make that denial good.[/hidepost]