Living Without Chaos

The main feature about spoken suggestion it is that it is personal and therefore stronger. I may look at a shop window, admire the goods, think of buying something and pass on. But if a friend comes up whilst I am looking, he may urge me to make a purchase, and the silent suggestion is matured by a personal appeal.

Educational suggestion follows close on the heels of the medical, that is, as to its operation. The word educational is not here used in a narrow and restricted sense; we mean education in the schools, and concentration in business, for business. How is suggestion used in these departments? It is used to overcome difficulties in precisely the same way as the physician uses it to overcome maladies. A boy who says he cannot do his sums is taken in hand and quietly shown the how and why of decimals, or equations; and, instead of being allowed to think these things are difficult, his mind is made to reflect on their interesting qualities; he is told that he can; and he is asked to tell himself he can.

A man in business, with adult intelligence may train  his mind in the same way. The difficulties ahead are real enough; but if he allows his mind to dwell on them he gets the negative suggestion that he cannot overcome them. He must tell himself ten times a day he can; and when he feels that he can, he will. The scientific basis is this: Every thought, affirmed and reaffirmed, tends to become an action.

If every morning and evening you tell yourself you look and feel ill; and if, in addition, you assume the attitude of a sick man, holding your head in your hands, complaining to your friends, and taking physic, you will appreciably reduce the tone of your system and actually become ill. The same law holds good the other way. Think success, dream success, believe it, speak it, act like it and, behold, successful things come your way.

There is a difference between the practice of auto-suggestion and that of mesmerism or hypnotism. To suggest a purchase to any man is not to mesmerize him; because to do that you would have to deprive ‘him of normal consciousness and Will-power; he would have to be entirely under your control; but in making suggestions to yourself for your advancement you do so without interfering in the least with the normal operations of the mind; indeed, you are fulfilling one of the mind’s great laws, namely “every thought, persistently held, tends to become an action.”

The action may not be an, external deed, in the ordinary sense. For instance, the thought that a specific form of illness is going to attack us clears the way for its advent. We think ourselves into an illness, and that kind of thinking is fear-thinking.