Page:The Quimby Manuscripts.djvu/300

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296
DISEASE AND HEALING

disease yourself, in your sleep of ignorance.” This he cannot understand. So I will tell him how he has worked in his sleep and made this very edifice, heart-disease. So I begin to tell his dream by telling how he feels, in which he admits I am correct. Now when he was asleep, or ignorant of the feelings, that disturbed him, behold a spirit in the form of a doctor sat by him. And lo and behold, he called up from the dead a person with the heart-disease, as he calls it. “And he handled you, and your sleep departed from you, and your limbs became cold and clammy, and your pulse quickened. This excited your brain, and at last a figure of a person arose like unto the one you saw in your dream, and then you were afraid, and you awoke in a fright. At last the image became more terrible, till at length it over-shadowed you and became a part of yourself, so that when you awoke you looked, and lo! and behold the dream had become a reality, and you had the heart-disease. Now whose dream was it, the doctor's or yours? Did you catch the doctor's or did you create it yourself, by your own reasoning in your sleep or ignorance, according to the pattern set you by the doctor?

“I say you made it yourself. Now to cure you, or take down the building, is to show you that all the feeling you had at the commencement arose from a trifling cause, and that when I can make you understand it I have performed the cure.” Instead of giving medicines or going to work by guess to destroy the building, I commence by showing the patient how he framed it by his own hand. So I reason in this way: “You listened to the doctor to try and understand what caused heart-disease. He explained every variety of feeling or symptom, and you listened until you understood it. Now without knowing it you created in your mind the disease, as much as you would if an artist or mechanic had taught you how to draught a building, and you should carry in your mind the building and in your sleep create it. The only difference would be that one would please you, for it would contain wisdom, while the other would bind you, for it would contain fear and would threaten to destroy your life. Your trouble is the material with which to build the building. A chemical change in the fluids of your system takes place, governed by your belief, and you condense the changes into a phenomenon corresponding with your plan. Your ingenuity in manufacturing the disease has been the destruction of your happiness. To destroy the