Part 14 (2/2)

”The flag an extra express train, with the general superintendent and others on board, co full fortythere, and if he did not receive orders to keep out of the way of the extra My brother told him that he had not received orders, and did not know of any extra train co; that we had both exa the station The train was then backed to the station, where it was found that no orders had been given”[38]

[38] _Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_, vol xi, p 416

Incidents such as this are of not infrequent occurrence By the superstitious they are regarded as weird and uncanny, and savoring of the spiritistic In reality they are only exceptional exe place in all of us There is no one who does not, every day, perform acts which he cannot consciously account for, and which, if closely inquired into, would be found similarly to take their rise in unnoticed subconscious impressions For the matter of that, it is possible to train one-self to subconscious attention to selected impressions, even in sleep

A familiar illustration is the mother who, undisturbed by other sounds, awakens at the least cry of her infant The same phenomenon is observable in the case of the conscientious medical nurse, who, no matter how profound her sleep, responds instantly to any movement by her patient And, in the course of conversation not long ago, a physician said to me:

”As you know, my house is on a car line, and, besides the cars, there is e part of the night Nothing of this breaks my rest I sleep so soundly that a thunderstor, and I am out of bed and have the receiver at ”

I have ood many other people, found it possible to make the subconscious do the work of an alar to bed, I mentally determine to wake at a certain hour, I invariably do so, and this although I am one of the deepest of sleepers

It matters not what hour I select, nor how late I retire the previous night, the uard punctually notifies oes to show, of course, that the subconscious is, to a certain extent, at any rate, amenable to conscious control and direction

That such control is highly desirable is evinced not merely by the facts reviewed above, but by others which we ether different import For if, as we have seen, the subconscious is in many ways a docile and helpful auxiliary of the upper consciousness, it also contains within itself dire possibilities of unhappiness, suffering, disease, and even death

CHAPTER VII

DISSOCIATION AND DISEASE

The subconscious, I repeat, does not always exercise a helpful influence; there are times when it may impose upon us indescribable misery

It is able to do this by virtue of the inti between the mind and the body At this late day it is scarcely necessary for me to undertake to dereat deal to do with the health of one's body What is not so generally known, and what all of us ought to know, is the further fact thatmental states, and in such cases usually to subconscious hts and ee The saard to ether physical, and the causes of which one would naturally expect to find physical, likewise

Indeed, ignorance of the tremendous role played by the subconscious in the causation of disease, has in the past been responsible for s Nor is the situation as yet , thanks chiefly to the labors of a little group of scientific investigators known as psychopathologists, or ists, who have made it their special business to ascertain the different ways in which the subconsciouswith mentally caused diseases

Theseany war on raduates of the bestin their profession, and seeking, above all things, to increase the usefulness and precision of un only a few years ago, they have effected nuly miraculous character; but always they have effected the natural lahich they have discovered by the rigorous processes of scientific experi these laws is one known as the law of dissociation It otten s depend on the interesting circumstance, to which attention has previously been drawn, that ideas which have faded from the conscious memory persist in the subconsciousness As Pierre Janet, the distinguished Frenchists, has tersely phrased it, ”Nothing that goes into the human mind is ever really lost”

No matter how remote, past experiences, as I have shown in earlier chapters, can be recovered and recalled to , or other psychologicalthe subconscious” Obviously we have here no absolute loss ofoff, or ”dissociation,” fro consciousness

Nohile thehidden in the subconscious usually exercise no appreciable effect other than in the e, etc, there are conditions under which, in the case of persons predisposed by circuive rise to all manner of mental and physical ills

A person, for instance, experiences a sudden fright Tiotten, or, at uely rely peculiar, symptoms of disease appear The victie obsession or ”fixed idea,” or froeneral ”nervous breakdown,” or froan, or froerowths

Whatever the sy malady is always the same There has been an abnorinal shock, although subotten--remain vividly alive in the subconscious, to act as perpetual irritants of the nervous systeive rise to the appearance of the symptoms of which the sufferer complains Often, indeed, the dissociation is instantaneous, and the appearance of the disease symptoms equally rapid

In either case, the resultant in, and can be cured only by psychical, not by physical et at the dissociatedmemories--and reassociate them with the upper consciousness, or root theestions”

skillfully applied