Page:The Quimby Manuscripts.djvu/142

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138
LETTERS TO PATIENTS AND INQUIRERS

Miss B:

Yours of the 7th is received and I am glad to learn that I have relieved your mind by “my power,” as you call it. But you misunderstand my power. It is not power but Wisdom. If you knew as much as I do about yourself you could feel another's feelings; but here is the trouble. What people call “power” I call Wisdom. Now if my wisdom is more than yours then I can help you, but this I must prove to you, and if I tell you about yourself what you cannot tell me, then you must acknowledge that my wisdom is superior to yours and become a pupil instead of a patient.

I will now sit down by you and tell your feelings. You may give your attention to me by [mentally] giving me your hand. I will write down the conversation that I hold with you while sitting by you. You have a sort of dizzy feeling in your head and a pain in the back part of the neck. This affects the front part of the head causing a heaviness over the eyes. The lightness about the head causes it to incline forward, bringing a pressure on your neck, just below the base of the brain, so that you often find yourself throwing your head up, to ease that part of the head. This makes it heavy so it bears on the shoulders, cramps the neck, numbs the chest, so that you give way at the pit of the stomach and feel as though you wanted something to hold you up. This cramps the stomach, giving you a “gone feeling” at the pit of the stomach. Now these symptoms taken of themselves are nothing. But you have had medical advice, or have got from some one else an answer to all these feelings. You are nervous. You think you have the heart complaint. Your blood rushes to the head. . . . [If] all these symptoms together would not make your face red, what would?

Listen to me and I will give an explanation of all the above feelings. I must go back to the first cause, say some years ago. I will not undertake to tell just the cause but I will give you an illustration. Suppose I (the natural man) were sitting by you, and we were alone. If I should go and fasten the door, and go towards you and attempt to seize hold of you, and if you asked me what I intended to do and I should say, “keep still, or I will blow your brains out,” you would see that this would frighten you. I think your heart would beat as fast as it ever did. This explanation I do not say is true. For I suppose a case, [but a shock or] start contracts the