The greatest obstacle I find in trying to get sick people to get well is their lack of persistent application. I will give a few facts of my personal experience, and you can draw your own conclusions.
As a boy, I was trained to believe in the usual set of ideas regarding the body and its possible diseases. Some of these are as follows: Most of our environment is inimical to health. There is danger in a draft. There is danger in water, food, climate, and also there is a liability to contagion from other people who have been “taken sick” from cold feet or some similar indiscretion.
When anyone succumbs to one of the manifold dangers that always beset him, he tries the efficacy of whiskey, hot water, castor oil, herb tea, sweating, etc., and then send for a doctor who administers further purges and pukes. The doctor’s idea is that if he can guess the right “specific” for that particular malady, he can counteract the disorder.
(At one time, doctors were giving me six kinds of medicine an hour.)
When I was twenty years old, I was the representative of the culmination of past beliefs. The logical result of uncertain and haphazard thinking had manifested in almost extinction. I was thought to have no possible chance to ever be able to be “up and around” again. A discharging abscess from my right lung, complicated with a stomach disorder that caused me to reject the food, was the situation for five years.
For the past fifteen years, I have been a strong, healthful, successful man. I have worked hard mentally and physically all this time, and am apparently as young and have as great expectations of life as ever. This transformation was brought about by changing my beliefs.
I studied Mental Science.
I studied the power of thought.
I LIVED with the suggestion of MASTERY
I got well. I had tried the doctors. They had failed. I had tried deep breathing. It only produced severe hemorrhages.
So, when I began the mental work, I put into it all my waking moments. This gave an unconscious impetus even to the subconsciousness that operates during sleep, and by a reflex action, all the time.
To illustrate the need of thoroughness: A boy of about my own age was dying the same as I had been. He was bedridden and spitting pus from an abscess. I tried to imbue him with new hope. He was weak and lethargic, consequently felt no impulse to effort. But he was dying and wanted to get well. He had twenty-four hours a day to use. The world’s beliefs and the beliefs of his whole past life were to be nullified if he was to get well.
The perfunctory suggestions made during an hour a day will not be an antidote to all that has been imbibed during years of accepting opposing suggestions.
The man died. He breathed the same air, ate similar food, and had access to the same reservoir of power as myself.
If you want results, you must be thorough in your mental work.
By A.Z Mahorney (The Nautilus 1912)