The Way Toward Health - April 8 and 9, 1984 Suggestions and Health

Chapter 5: Suggestion and Health

April 8, 1984

Suggestions are usually statements directed toward a particular action or hypothesis.  To a large extent, suggestions are tied into conscious thought processes, following the dictates of reason.  For example: “If thus and thus be so, then thus and thus must follow”.  There is no magic connected with suggestions – but repeated often enough, and believed in fervently, such suggestions do indeed take on a deeply habitual nature.  They are no longer examined, but taken for literal truth.

They are then handed over to the more automatic levels of personality, where they trigger the specific actions that are so strongly implied.  Many such suggestions are “old-hat idioms”.  They belong to the past, and again they escape the questioning and examination that are usually given to new ideas.

These suggestions may be remarkably long-standing, therefore, and consist of beliefs received in childhood.  Accepted now in the present, noncritically, they may still affect health and well-being.  Such suggestions can be beneficial and supportive, or negative and detrimental.  Here are some examples that should be quite familiar to many people.  They consist of suggestions given to children:

“If you go out in the rain without your rubbers, you will catch cold.”

“If you are too talkative or demonstrative, people will not like you.”

“If you run you will fall down.”

There are many variations, of course, such as: “If you go out in rainy weather, you’ll get pneumonia”, or: “If you tell a lie your tongue will turn to stone”.

These suggestions and others like them are often given to children by their parents with the best of intentions.  When they are young, the offspring will accept some such suggestions uncritically, coming as they do from a revered adult, so that the suggestions are almost interpreted as commands.

A suggestion like: “If you go swimming too soon after lunch, you will drown”, is extremely dangerous, for it predicts behavior of a disastrous nature that would follow almost automatically after the first act is performed.  Obviously, children who go into the water right after eating do not all drown.  The suggestion itself can lead to all kinds of nervous symptoms, however – panics, or stomach cramps – that can persist will into adulthood.

Such suggestions can be removed, as we will explain shortly.

There are other kinds of suggestions that involve identification.  A child may be told: “You are just like your mother, she was always nervous and moody”.  Or: “You are fat because your father was fat”.

These are all statements leading toward a certain hypothesis.  Again, the problem is that often the hypotheses remain unquestioned.  You end up with structured beliefs unexamined, that are then automatically acted upon.

April 9, 1984

The suggestions we have given so far are predictives; they actually predict dire events of one kind or another, following a given original action.

There are many of these, dealing particularly with age also.  Many people believe fervently that with approaching age they will meet a steady, disastrous deterioration in which the senses and the mind will be dull, and the body, stricken with disease, will lose all of its vigor and agility.  Many young people believe such nonsense, and therefore they set themselves up to meet the very conditions they so fear.

The mind grows wiser with age when it is allowed to do so.  There is even an acceleration of thought and inspiration, much like that experienced in the adolescent years, that suddenly brings a new understanding to the aged individual, and provides an impetus that should help the person to achieve greater comprehension – a comprehension that should quell all fears of death.

Thoughts and beliefs do indeed bring about physical alterations.  They can even – and often do – change genetic messages.

There are diseases that people believe are inherited, carried from one generation to another by a faulty genetic communication.  Obviously, many people with, for example, a genetic heritage of arthritis do not come down with the disease themselves, while others indeed are so afflicted.  The difference is one of belief.

The people have accepted the suggestion uncritically that they will inherit such a malady do then seem to inherit it: they experience the symptoms.  Actually, the belief itself may have changed a healthy genetic message into an unhealthy one.  Ideally, a change of belief would remedy the situation.

People are not simply swung willy-nilly by one negative suggestion or another, however.  Each person has an entire body of beliefs and suggestions – and these are quite literally reflected in the physical body itself.

All practical healing deals with the insertion of positive suggestions and the removal of negative ones.  As we mentioned earlier, each smallest atom or cell contains its own impetus toward growth and value fulfillment.  In other words, they are literally implanted with positive suggestions, biologically nurtured, so to that extent it is true to say that in a certain fashion negative suggestions are unnatural, leading away from life’s primary goals.  Negative suggestions could be compared to static sounding on an otherwise clear program.