With the ever present increase of insanity, it is not only interesting but
important that the subject of insanity should be studied from all
view-points, and anything which can be contributed that will help in
controlling or curing it, should be accepted as good material.
It is an apparent fact that the multitude knows very little about the
cause of insanity and less about the cure. Investigation has in the past
been directed to the physical side of the disease, and many of the insane
hospitals are examples of physical comfort and perfect physical attention,
but they are also living examples of the fact that to house, feed and
clothe the demented does not necessarily mean a cure, and a call for
deeper understanding is imperative.
Civilization needs each individual as a unit in the great working force of
life, and those who need to be taken care of by a State take away a
legitimate support and add just that much more to the burden of the State.
A civilization which can increase the independence of the individual and
lessen the responsibility of the State is one to be directly desired.
Insanity calls for a closer study than has ever been given and only
through a deeper realization of its cause, can a cure be brought about and
individuals rendered of value to themselves and the country.
Insanity is nothing more or less than disassociated states of mind and
need not in reality be any more serious than errors of refraction of
vision, faulty locomotion or lack of coordination. It comes because
individuals know nothing of the psychology of themselves or their own
minds and is the result of over-intensified mental and physical activity
and loss of poise, physically, mentally and psychically. The insane are
not capable of understanding themselves, and up to the present day there
are very few who are able to understand them.
The nurses, matrons and physicians of a great asylum are powerless to
assist them because of their own ignorance of the true laws of psychology.
The cases which simple, natural, physical methods will assist, are cured,
but thousands of others are allowed to drag along with the dreadful
stigmata of "hopelessly insane."
Insanity is increasing because civilization is changing, and conditions
are changing. As conditions change the minds of men change and today
subjective states of mind in the individual are becoming intensified.
Instinct, reason, emotion, intuition, revelation and prophecy are all
struggling for expression; unrelated and misunderstood they become
disease; related and understood they can be made to bring forth a new race
with new extensive reaches of intelligence.
There are few people so stupid but that they can testify to the
conflicting states of emotions within themselves and there are many people
who are perfectly familiar with states of consciousness with which many
other people are entirely unfamiliar.
Wherever we go we are continually confronted with what the world calls
"freaky" or "eccentric" people, and these people are found in all degrees
from the slightly odd folks to those filling the asylums, and strange as
it may seem, no matter how queer they may appear to other people, they
never seem so to themselves.
There are many families with members whom the rest call irrational,
irresponsible or "black sheep." Again, there are many families who have
one child who, from the time of its birth, has called for methods of
management entirely different from those used for the other children.
There are many little sensitive creatures who are afraid of the dark and
who have queer ideas and odd ways, and there are delicate little people
who have bodies so finely organized that they are nearly broke into pieces
with the natural things which the other members never notice. They are
born sensitives and remain sensitives to the end of their lives, and only
as they can be taught the truth about themselves can they be rescued from
some form of mental disturbances.
These people as they grow older, become what is termed "psychics"; they
are over-intensified in some of their deeper states of mind. They are not
alone the product of civilization, but the product of race evolution. Many
of them pass on in semi-normal states of self-support, but they are a well
known class, and they are more or less unsuccessful in supporting
themselves along natural lines of labor, and if they inherit wealth they
run into vagaries and often degenerate lines of living; they squander
their all and die in charity.
The common business world is full of psychics and it is correspondingly
full of failures for this is not a faculty that makes for success or power
with material things.
Psychics who are only slightly disassociated are always a source of
annoyance to their friends, and often looked upon as irresponsible, and
have to be looked after by some one who has patience enough to be with
them, and often they are passed along as having an artistic temperament.
As long as their peculiar development does not interfere with normal
action they are unmolested by the public. It is only when deeper states of
mind become so over-intensified that they lose their normal relationship
to normal things of the world that they are put under control. They are
called paranoics, melancholics, demented and insane. A correct mental
training would teach them to re-associate their mind and to live a
moderately normal life, at least. All drunkards and drug fiends are
psychics; degenerates are also psychics. These conditions are simply the
result of loss of polarity of normal mind centers, resulting in the
conflict of states of consciousness within themselves.
There are also many psychics in the ignorant and undeveloped classes. The
witch women and seers, and many of the colored races are psychic. In the
past, these people were looked upon as witches and their words and works
were known as "witchcraft."
There are many psychics who are also great geniuses. Lord Byron and the
"Mad Painter" of Belgium were psychics. History is rife and galleries of
art and temples of literature stand as testimonials to some of the
constructive productions of their minds, but beside them run dark stories
born of their psychic uncertainty.
Criminals of certain types are psychics with no power of physical control
and they pass into subjective control and live and do the things that are
given them to do from the psychical mind and are often ignorant of their
own condition.
Those whom the medical profession call paranoics are simply psychics,
over-developed in the subjective faculties--a prey to all the disembodied
forces of the subjective plane, and also to every floating thought on the
physical plane; they are obsessed by ideas from within and without and
their actions bear witness to this statement. Some very meddlesome women,
and those who are the terror of a quiet community, are nearly always those
who are in the control of the slower psychic forces and unable to
consciously direct their own normal states of mind.
In science the psychics are called diseased. Science gives all actions a
physical basis, but it is time to know that abnormal states of
consciousness, that are only changes in the functional side of the mind
and which have no apparent physical basis, are found in thousands.
Neurasthenics and psychasthenics present the mildest picture of disordered
states of mind. All neurasthenics and psychasthenics are psychics and
their diseases can only be fully understood by the psychologist. The
scientist has long ago exhausted his knowledge of the cause and cure of
these diseases and this is why all branches of metaphysical healing are
overcrowded.
To understand this abnormal thing called "insanity," one must fully
understand the normal, called "sanity." There are four distinct states of
consciousness in every individual; these must be kept co-related and all
of them manifest through the common everyday mind. These four states of
consciousness are _instinct, reason, emotion_ and _intuition_.
These four states of consciousness are _functions_ of the normal
mind. When a patient becomes over-intensified in either one of these parts
of the mind, mental disease results. The psychic is over-intensified in
the emotional and intuitional functions of his mind, thus rendering his
common sense states _uncommon_, and according to the degree of
over-activity, he is either a "freak," a creature of "temperament," a
"genius" or a "dementia."
The ordinarily insane individual has lost all relationship with his
natural, instinctive and reasoning mind. He is disassociated. Reason,
instinct, emotion and intuition are all in conflict within him. The
emotional and intuitional faculties overfunctioning distort his common
understanding. His idea centers are not able to distinguish between the
real and the unreal in thoughts. He becomes possessed and obsessed by
ideas born of emotion and intuition that have no foundation in fact, and
as time goes on, he loses complete control of his idea centers.
Every individual has definite idea centers within his own brain, and it is
through these centers that ideas are coordinated, received or rejected. As
over-intensification of feeling and emotion goes on, the normal action of
the idea centers is interfered with and the individual has superinduced
emotional and intuitional states which are no longer guarded by reason and
thought. The emotion senses a purely imaginary condition and the idea
centers have no power to reduce it to truth. As time goes on, all power of
association is lost and the individual passes along, the plaything of his
subjective states of mind. As he becomes more and more intensified
subjectively, he opens the deep psychic currents both within and without
himself, and loses his connection with his common mind and his physical
body, and becomes a prey to all the psychic currents.
There are lives everywhere open to subjective thought currents, and all
unknown to themselves they are allowing themselves to become disintegrated
by the daily and hourly response they are giving to the stimulus of a
plane they should master instead of allowing it to master them.
The psychic plane may become a pathway to power, or it may become the open
doorway to a body and mind full of disease, insanity and absolute loss of
power and poise.
There are many patients confined in the asylums today, who would never
have been there, and who would be released and cured, if those in charge
fully understood the truth of this unnaturally natural development and
directed their attention to its control.
The first truth is, people are born into what is to them natural
relationship with this psychic plane and go on for years misunderstood,
pained and repressed, unable to rescue themselves from what they do not
understand, and in the end the physical body does become diseased by the
continual inroads of strain and repression; functional disorder and
anatomical changes result. The farmer's wife loses her mental balance
through repression of the fine emotional, intuitional side of her mind
which finds no expression in the dull environment of the farm. The
over-worked mother loses her mental poise; disassociation follows
over-stimulation of the practical and repression of the artistic; and in
emotional patients exaggerated states of feeling go on into greater
disassociation for lack of strong sensible thought control.
And the second truth is, that many are born so close in relationship to
the unseen plane and in such psychical correspondence, that some slight
thing which weakens the will-power--sorrow, a disease that devitalizes the
physical, some shock, or some prolonged or strained mental condition,
breaks down the remaining law of separation, and the life is astray in the
psychical world, manifesting abnormal, physical laws.
There is one great connecting link between the physical and the psychical
through which all abnormal conditions can be corrected, and this is will
power. When this power of will is broken, the life must become a
manifestation of error, according to the generally accepted idea of normal
relationship.
The will-power of an individual is dependent upon his ideation. Weaken his
power to carry an idea, and his will grows correspondingly weak; the
_will_ must _follow_ the idea; it is not a separate entity--_will_
only exists in _partnership_ with the _idea_.
_Ideation, willing_ and _motion_ are the great human trinity
from which everything else originates. When we inspect our minds, we find
that a voluntary motion is always preceded by the idea of that motion. The
idea is first and the will follows the idea. Ideas have definite sensory
centers in the cortex of the brain and conscious ideation may be induced
to produce a particular form of willing. All voluntary action depends,
first, upon the ideas of action, then the willing to do, then the doing.
The will-power, in its accelerating and restraining impulses, is modified
by the degree of the intensity of the idea. Grief, fear, worry, anger,
despondency, anxiety, hate, resistance are all negative ideas that weaken
the idea centers and produce weakness of willing. These ideas persisted in
at first produce indecision and after a while absolute inaction because
the patient has lost the perfect co-relation of his idea centers, which
associate instinct, reason, emotion and intuition.
In order to get complete control of the will we must get complete control
of the idea centers and induce strong, positive ideas which the will
cannot refuse to follow.
When we associate all states of consciousness--instinct, reason, emotion,
and intuition, in one strong, centralized idea, it is impossible for
physical expression to do anything else than follow this idea.
When one has come into certain conditions of negativeness in any part of
his mind, and continues in it for any length of time, it takes more than
his own power to modify these intensified conditions and bring about an
inhibiting power of mind which will crowd them out, and allow the idea
centers to receive a new thought-form and intensify it so that the will
can pass it into action.
The abnormal individual is always weak in obeying his ideas and carrying
out his impulse because there is a dissociation of idea centers and his
mind becomes mixed in its responses and he cannot make for a true,
harmonious expression on all of the planes of mind within himself--this is
the condition of the neurasthenic and psychasthenic, and he needs some
mind stronger than his own to hold his ideas true to what he knows to be
true.
The first lesson for the diseased mental patient to learn is that if he
wants to keep his mental balance or restore it, he must first inhibit all
negative ideation and refuse to allow himself to be driven into wild
bursts of psychical or mental energy along any one line. He must force
himself to interest his mind in other things and to inhibit the
over-active states of thinking. This is best done by a complete change of
environment, and often a change of friends. Friends and environment, more
than any other things, have the greatest power of keeping the mind
intensified in its old thought ruts.
There is little hope of receiving a new ideation and acting upon it, when
one allows himself day after day to drag through the same central
sensations and receive the same nerve impulses, and register the same
responses. By removing to a new environment, and substituting new mental
and psychical vibrations the old states of consciousness are allowed to
rest while a new unworked state of mind begins.
Psychical development is not a disease; it is an attribute of individual
growth; no one is to blame if he has it or has it not; all that anyone
needs to know is the truth about it and just how to control it and direct
it. Subjective hearing and vision come just as naturally to us as life and
death--they are a part of the great plan of unfoldment.
In teaching man to co-relate his many states of developing consciousness
into one powerful state of mind, we use our everyday common sense. We give
him a place of mental power and after such training he opens or shuts his
mind to suit himself; he can live in either extension of consciousness at
will and extending his understanding into the transcendent side of his own
mind, he can become the modern mystic or seer. He can function in the
purely material side of himself or he can become an intensified psychic or
mystic by simply suspending and intensifying different centers within
himself.
Concentration, centralization in ideas, conscious mental substitution,
creation of strong mental ideas, and psychic displacement of the negative
with the positive, both by the patient within himself and from the
attendant or physician without, will bring insanity under control.
When men fully understand their own mind's scope, they will find that what
the world calls un-natural states of consciousness, are only cerebral and
psychic disassociation.
The greater freedom of the race, and the cure and control of insanity will
be found in the deeper study of _all_ levels of mind rather than the
one or the few. Only as physical science unites with metaphysical, and
these both unite with scientific psychical investigation, will humanity
pass toward a solution of its insanity problems. Insanity, delusions,
hallucinations, the so-called mental diseases will pass just because they
have been naturally displaced by our higher scientific preventive
psycho-therapy.
The asylum doors will only open as a place of refuge where men and women
will be taught the psychology of the self; there will be _schools_
not _cells_. Outside the asylum doors there will be an ever
increasing crowd of intelligent men and women psychologists, who will be
awake to the first hint of psychic disassociation in an individual. With
keen insight and scientific direction, they will teach the beginning
paranoic, melancholic, neurasthenic, clairvoyant and psychasthenic the
truth about themselves and the first hint of disassociation will be
replaced by association, and rest homes, asylums and sanitarium doors will
close forever!