YOUR WORDS HAVE POWER

The Introduction suggested that you not practice any of the exercises on first reading.

The following is an exception; try it right now. Bring all of your imagination to bear on it Let’s consider the implications of this.

Imagine that you are standing in your kitchen holding a lemon that you have just taken from the refrigerator.

It feels cold in your hand. Look at the outside of it its yellow skin. It is a waxy yellow, and the skin comes to small green points at the two ends. Squeeze it a little and feel its firmness and its weight.

Now raise the lemon to your nose and smell it. Nothing smells quite like a lemon, does it? Now cut the lemon in half and smell it. The odor is stronger. Now bite deeply into the lemon and let the juice swirl around in your mouth. Nothing tastes quite like a lemon either, does it?

At this point, if you have used your imagination well, your mouth will be watering.

Let’s consider the implications of this.

Words, “mere” words, affected your salivary glands.

The words did not even reflect reality, but something you imagined. When you read those words about the lemon you were telling your brain you had a lemon, though you did not mean it. Your brain took it seriously and said to your salivary glands, “This guy is biting a lemon. Hurry, wash it away.” The glands obeyed. Most of us think the words we use reflect meanings and that what they mean can be good or bad, true or false, powerful or weak. True, but that is only half of it Words do not just reflect reality, they create reality, like the flow of saliva. The brain is no subtle interpreter of our intentions—> it receives information and stores it, and it is in charge of our bodies. Tell it something like Tm now eating a lemon," and it goes to work. Now it is time for what in Mind Control we call “mental housecleaning.” There is no exercise for this, just a determination to be careful about what words we use to trigger our brains. The exercise we did was a neutral one—physically, no good or harm came of it But good as well as harm can come from the words we use. Many children play a little game at dinner. They describe the food they are eating in the most nauseating possible terms: Butter is mashed bugs, to choose one of the less colorful ones I remember. The object of the game is to pretend not to be nauseated by these new perspectives on food and to push someone else beyond his ability to pretend. It often works, with someone’s appetite suddenly dulled. As adults we often play this same game. We dull our appetite for life with negative words, and the words, gathering power with repetition, in turn create negative lives, for which our appetites become dulled. “How are you?“60 “Ah—can’t complain,” or “No use complaining,” or “Not too bad.”

How does the brain respond to these dreary views?

Is it a “pain in the neck” to do the dishes? Is it “one big headache” to balance your checkbook? Are you “sick and tired” of the weather we are having? I am convinced that proctologists owe a large part of their income to the words we use. Remember, the brain is no subtle interpreter. It says, ‘This guy’s asking for a headache.

Okay. One headache coming up.”

Of course, every time that we say something gives us a pain, a pain does not immediately result The body’s natural state is good health, and all its processes are geared toward health. In time, though, with enough ver- bal pounding away at its defenses, it delivers up the very illnesses we order. Two things add power to the words we use: our level of mind, and our degree of emotional involvement with what we say. “My God, that hurts!” spoken with conviction offers warm hospitality to pain. “I can’t get a damned thing done around here!” said with deep feeling becomes a truth which adds seeming validity to the feeling. Mind Control offers effective defenses against our own bad habits. At Alpha and Theta our words have enormously increased power. In earlier chapters you have seen how, with amazingly simple words, you can preprogram dreams and transfer from words to your three fingers the power to take you into Alpha. I never laughed at Ernile Coue, though in these sophisticated times many do. He is famous for a sen- tence which nowadays evokes laughter as reliably as the punch line of a joke: “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” These words have cured thousands of persons of grimly serious illnesses! They Your Words Have Power I 61 are no joke; I respect them and I regard Dr. Cou6 with awe and gratitude, for I have learned priceless lessons from his book Self-Mastery Through Autosuggestion (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1974). Dr. Cou6 was a chemist for almost thirty years in Troyes, France, where he was born. After studying and experimenting with hypnosis, he developed a psycho- therapy of his own, based on autosuggestion. In 1910 he opened a free clinic in Nancy, where he successfully treated thousands of patients, some with rheumatism, severe headaches, asthma, paralysis of a limb, others with stammering, tubercular sores, fibrous tumors, and ulcers —an amazing variety of afflictions. He never cured anyone, he said; he taught them to cure themselves. There is no doubt that the cures occurred—they are well documented—but the Cou6 method has almost entirely disappeared since his death in 1926. Had this method been so complex that only a few specialists could learn to practice it it might be alive and well to- day. It is a simple method. Everyone can learn it The heart of it is in Mind Control. There are two basic principles:

1. We can think of only one thing at a time, and
2. When we concentrate on a thought the thought becomes true because our bodies transform it into ac- tion. Therefore, if you want to trigger your body’s healing processes, which may be blocked by negative thoughts (conscious or unconscious), just repeat twenty times in succession, “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” Do this twice a day and you are using the Cou6 method. Since my own research has shown that the power of words is greatly amplified at meditative levels, I have62 made some adaptations of this method. At Alpha and Theta levels we say, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better, better, and better.” We say it only once during meditation. We also say—and this too is Dr. Coup’s influence—“Negative thoughts, negative sugges- tions, have no influence over me at any level of mind.” These two sentences alone have produced an impres- sive number of concrete results. Of particular interest is the experience of a soldier who was suddenly shipped to Indochina before he could complete more than the first day of the Mind Control course. He remembered how to meditate and he remembered these two sen- tences. He was assigned to the unit of an alcoholic sergeant with a fiery temper, who singled out the new arrival for special abuse. In a few weeks he began to awaken dur- ing the night with fits of coughing, then with attacks of asthma, which he had never had before. An exhaustive medical examination showed that he was in perfect health. Meanwhile he grew more and more tired; he began to perform poorly at his job; and he attracted even more unpleasant attention from his sergeant Others in his unit were turning to drugs; he turned to Mind Control and these two sentences. Fortunately he was able to meditate three times a day. “In three days, I had complete immunity to that sergeant. I did what he told me to do, but nothing he said could reach me. In a week I stopped coughing and my asthma was gone.” If this had been told to me by a Mind Control gradu- ate, I would have been pleased, as I always am with success stories, but not strongly impressed. We have a number of more powerful techniques for self-healing, which I will help you learn in later chapters. What makes this man’s experience particularly interesting is Your Words Have Power I 63 that he knew none of these techniques, but used only the two sentences he learned that first day. Words are astonishingly powerful even at levels of mind far deeper than we use in Mind Control. A nurse- anesthetist (and Mind Control lecturer) in Oklahoma, Mrs. Jean Mabrey, puts this knowledge to use to help her patients. As soon as they are “under”—in deep anesthesia—she whispers in their ears instructions that can speed their recovery, in some cases save their lives. During one operation, when profuse bleeding would normally be expected, the surgeon was amazed: There was only a trickle. Mrs. Mabrey had whispered, ‘Tell your body not to bleed.” She did this before the first incision, then about every ten minutes during the oper- ation. During another operation she whispered, “When you awaken you will feel that everyone in your life loves you and you will love yourself.” This patient was caus- ing her surgeon special concern. She was a tense, com- plaining woman to whom every pain was ominous—an attitude that could slow down her recovery. Later, as she awakened from the anesthetic, there was a new ex- pression on her face, and three months later her surgeon told Mrs. Mabrey that this once-anxious patient was “transformed.” She had become relaxed and optimistic and quickly recovered from her operation. Mrs. Mabrey’s work illustrates three things that we teach in Mind Control: First words have special power at deep levels of mind; second, the mind has much firmer command over the body than it is given credit for; and third, as I noted in Chapter 5, we are always conscious. How many parents brusquely pop into a sleeping child’s room, quickly adjust the covers, and leave, when a pause for a few positive and loving words would help make the child more secure and calm during the day?64 So many Mind Control graduates report improve- ment in their health, sometimes before they have even completed the course, that I once found myself uncom- fortably close to being in trouble with the medical pro- fession in my home town. Some patients told their physicians that we had cured their health problems, and the physicians complained to the District Attorney. He investigated and found that we were not practicing medicine as the doctors feared. Fortunately it is not illegal for Mind Control to be good for the health or there would be no Mind Control organization today.