Transcript
Note: certain portions of the lecture are unreadable due to the nature of the scan. These portions have been indicated by ---- marks, or [not readable].
A Lecture is the ----, July 6, 1936
by JOHN HARVEY KELLOG, M. D.
Fifty years ago, scientists told us that the universe was a self-propelled machine, that it was simply mechanism and that there was no intelligence in it; that there was no power behind it; that it was simply a self-propelling and self-developing and self-evoluting machine. As the present time scientists think differently. I do not know a single very eminent scientist today who does not admit the truth that was proclaimed with great eloquence fifty years ago by famous preacher of Boston, Joseph Cook, in the old church there. He used to say with a great deal of emphasis, “There is a power, not ourselves, that works for righteousness,” and this power, not ourselves, which works for righteousness works for everything else. It is the power that is behind all of the operations of Nature.
When we look a flower or look through a microscope and peer down at the minutest specks of life, we see evidence of an intelligence at work. We can not escape the great truth that there is a power behind, a personality at work, a great universal personality that is regulating things and controlling things.
—, for example, as Prof. — and the great Prof. Einstein say with a great deal of emphasis that we can not account for life. We can not account for the beginning of things. We want recognize the foot that back back of it all there is a great unknowable Intelligence at work.
Now, nowhere is this great intelligence so readily recognized and so definitely and positively at work as within our own bodies. When we move a hand or a finger, close an eye or perform any other bodily activities, for example, we exercise our will. We command and the thing is done. For instance, I wish to close my hand. I order the muscles of my hand to contract and they close my hand. Now, if I do not send an order to my hand it does not move but remains immovable.
The same thing would be true of the heart if it were not for the fact that there is another power within the body, another will, at work which commands the heart. The heart is a muscle like the muscles of the arm. It is simply a hollow muscle which makes a pump of it. … [not readable] ---. Now, every time the ehart beats, it has to have an order just as my hand must receive an order when it moves.
Suppose you try now to make your heart beat faster or you seek to make it beat slower. Can you succeed? Can you compel your heart to go faster or slower? No, indeed. The heart pays no attention to your orders. Suppose you say to your lungs, “Now stop acting” and you hold your breath. You can not hold your breath until you become unconscious, perhaps, but when you become unconscious your lung begin to act again. So it is impossible for a person to commit suicide by holding his breath. In order to commit suicide you have to have something around your throat to choke you so you can not possibly breathe, and so when a person wants to commit suicide he generally puts a noose around his throat, stands up on something high and jumps off, and then he is in a position where he can not retreat; or he jumps into the water so he is submerged and can not come in contact with the air and so he can accomplish what he desires; but he can not compel the lunge to … [note readable] ---.
The same thing is true of nearly all of the organs of the body. All the great internal organs, the heart, the liver, the stomach the lung and all the other internal organs act independently of the human will. So there are two wills at work within the body.
This power keeps the heart beating is known as the pacemaker. The physiologist recognizes this power that sends instruction to the heart every time it ought to beat, beat, beat, beat. If you listen to the heart you can hear it speak. Luff tup, luff tup, luff tup, that is the song of the heart. It goes on singing this song forever, but behind the heart there is a pacemaker. There is a power, a will, a personality behind the heart that tells it when to beat and how hard to beat. Physiologists now recognize this fact. A message is given to the heart. We have a means by which we can make that message visible. We have a little instrument called the electrocardiograph, and if you take the two electrodes in the two hands, one in the right hand and the other in the left hand, it will write down on a strip of paper that passes in front of the little opening the message that is being sent by --- [not readable]. This is what it looks like (illustrating). …[not readable] --- It travels down to the heart, first to the auricles and then it comes on down to the ventricles and it is distributed all about the heart, to every part of the inside of the heart, and by reading this electric record here we can tell just what is happening.
Sometimes it happens that an obstruction develops here. An obstructions is formed so that the message is interrupted and can not go down to the ventricles. I remember a case of that sort under my care some months ago, in which the message could only go this far (illustrating). This is the lower part of the heart (Illustrating), the ventricle, which exercises the greatest force and propels the blood all over the body. The auricles simply drive the blood into the ventricles below and then when they contrast they drive the blood out all over the body. This message was interrupted right there and the consequences was we did not see this… [not readable]. So we know that there is a personality talking to the heart, instructing the heart and telling it just what to do, and the same personality presides over the stomach and over every other organ in the body.
We can readily see that there are two personalities at work in the body because we find these two classes of organs, the voluntary organs and involuntary. Now, all of the voluntary organs are under the control of the human will, but the involuntary organs, the heart, the lungs, the stomach, the liver and parts of the nervous system, those are all under the control of another will, and the proof of it is the fact that when the human will retires, is asleep, for example, so that we are unconscious, still the heart goes on beating right along. That shows that there are two personalities constantly at work.
We have two kinds of motion, involuntary motion and voluntary motion. The work of the heart is an involuntary motion. All the involuntary functions are not under the control of the human will; they are under the control of the creative will. That is the personality that ---- of the heart and that regulates the heart. It is the same power that made the heart. The same power that created the heart takes care of the heart and keeps it going. It is like a delicate marvelous machine made by an engineer, and after the machine is made the engineer has to stay right by it to keep it running. Nobody else knows how to make it go. That is what happens in the body. The same body that made the body has to stay with it and take care of it.
You say that the body was created with the power to recreate itself and go on and so developing a race. But this is a mistake, my friends. There is a power, not ourselves, that is constantly at work building and creating, repairing and curing when disease threatens. This power is continually at work. We have the proof of it in what we see in the development of a human being. Starting with one little cell smaller than the head of a pin, this little cell divides and develops into an adult human being. It is not possible that the thing itself should accomplish this thing. There is a building process going on and if you can watch it through a microscope you can see movements in the cells and parts within the cells. They are moving back and forth with the precision of a body of soldiers They move in one direction, then another direction, by and by separate, then gather together in groups, and it is all done with the order of a body of soldiers that are on dress parade.
Now, this shows there is going on in the body this continual creative work. We see evidence of this in the blood, for example. We have in our bodies 25 million million red blood cells. It is the red blood that makes the cheeks rosy and the lips pink. It absorbs oxygen from the lungs and carries it everywhere throughout the body. It is the same power at work that keeps the heart going continually as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in his lovely little poem about the heart. “No rest that throbbing slave may have.” No rest! It goes on forever so long as life lasts. It is because the power that made it stands right by it and gives it its orders.
There 25 million million red cells in the body and a million million of them die every day because each cell only lives 25 days. In 25 days the entire mass of blood within our bodies, somewhere about one-fourteenth the total weight of the body, is made new. If we are 140 pounds, we have ten pounds of blood, and all this blood is made new every 25 days. That means a million million blood cells are created every day. That means eight million blood cells die every second of our lives and eight million blood cells are created to take their places. This is not a fairy tale I am telling you, my friends. It is simply the actual scientific fact. Every physiologist knows that the blood is being constantly created and that the same thing is going on with other cells all throughout the human body. It takes, in order words, the same power to keep us alive that it took to make the first man and to make us. That power continues at work within our bodies, building and rebuilding and repairing just as long as we live. That is why it is possible for a sick man to get well. Getting well is a process of reconstruction. It is making the old sick body over. The old sick body has to be torn down, carried away and thrown out and new body built in its place. This process requires the taking of food. We eat and supply material that has been lost, has died and been carried away. We have to eat our own weight every month, perhaps more than that. Many people eat more than that. I remember one man weighted after dinner and weighed five pounds more than before dinner. So I think it is a moderate estimate to say that we eat at least our own weight every month of our lives. We take this food into our bodies to take the place of portions of the body that have died and have been --- out. So this re-creating process is going on continually. This requires presence within us of an infinite personality that is constantly at work.
It is not extraordinary to conceive of an infinite personality. We can conceive of infinite space, or we try to. We can not picture to ourselves an infinite space, but we can recognize it as a fact that space is infinite. There can not be such a thing as a border to space because if we try to think of a border we immediately raise the question What is on the other side? What is beyond that? And yet we think there must be an end somewhere. There must be a limit to space somewhere. Then we try to conceive of such a limit we immediately think “What is beyond that?” So we see we can not think of such a thing. It is either a boundless space or a limited space. You can not conceive of either one. They are not within the power of our finite minds to comprehend.
The same thing is true of time. We believe time to be infinite. We can not imagine such a thing as the beginning of time. We try to think of it and immediately we think there must have been a beginning somewhere and we go back to that beginning and at once we think “What was before that?” And so with the end of time. We know there must be an end somewhere and yet when we try to think of that end there immediately comes the question. What comes after that?
So you see it is impossible to conceive of infinite things. They are beyond us. They are outside of comprehension and the same thing is true of the infinite personality. We can not form any conception of its shape or its size or any limitations of any sort because it is infinite. Now, perhaps that is a difficult idea for you to take in and the difficulty of accepting this idea is the fact that we have not a clear idea of personality. We think of personality as connected with form.
I will tell you of a little experiment I made that convinced me that was not true. Sixty-one years ago I was in a physiologic laboratory making experiments with animals, studying their tissues microscopically and also making various experiments to study the functions of the human body. One day the Professor gave me an experiment to do which distressed me very much. He gave me a large frog and pair of ---. “Now,” he said, “you must take these --- and cut off this frog’s head. ” That was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.
I had an unsual experience some years before when I was a boy about ten years of age. I was one day driving the cows to water and I had a whip in my hand with a long lash and I used to crack the whip occasionally to encourage the cows. I did not whip the cows, but encouraged them with a sharp crack of the whip. On passing along the road I saw a robin sitting in a big tree. I said to myself, “I will see how near I can come to it.” Of course I had no idea of trying to hit it. So I gave my whip a turn and cracked it loud. The cracker at the end of the whip hit the little robin in the head and it fell over dead. I was smitten with such remorse and distress I think as I never experienced in my life before. I fell upon the ground and sobbed and sobbed and on my knees promised God I would never kill another thing as long as I lived, and I have not. I even walk around the cockroaches. I confess I had to kill one or two mosquitoes, but even that I hesitated about.
To cut that frog’s head off was the hardest thing I ever did.But by shutting my eyes I cut it off. The Professor said, “Lay the frog on the table.” So I laid it on the table and to my great surprise the frog behaved as though it were alive. It sat up. I felt obliged to it. The frog sat upon the table just as well as though it had a head. The Professor said, “Hit the table.” So I hit the table and the frog leaped out into the middle of the room. It was quite a large room and fell upon the floor on its back. It immediately turned over and sat up again as before, apparently as live and happy as when it had its head on. The the Professor said, “Stamp upon the floor,” which I did, and the frog jumped. The Professor said, “Stamp again,” which I did and the frog jumped again and continued jumping until it reached the side of the room. I continued attempting and every time I stamped it leaped against the wall, butting its bloody headless body against the wall. I can see the red spot it made on the baseboard this very moment. Well, the Professor then said, “Bring the frog back to the table,” which I did, and laid it on its back. Now the Professor said, “Rub a little acid on its stomach” and gave me a bottle of acetic acid. I rubbed this on the frog’s stomach, and immediately it brought up its --- feed and began rubbing its stomach as hard as it could to wipe it off. The Professor said, “Put the acid on its left thigh.” I did it and the frog brought up the right foot and rubbed it off the left thigh. Then the Professor said, “hold down the right thigh.” Well, I wondered what this frog would do when I held it down. I expected to see it struggle to get away, but instead, to my great amazement, it simply rubbed its left leg with of its left foot, rubbed the acid off its left thigh. Think of a headless frog performing an act like that. If I had had my hat on I should have taken it off. I said, “Here is something very surprising.”
This experiment followed me for many years. How could such a thing happen, a frog with its head off and without a brain performing all these ingenious acts? I could not understand that phenomenon until many years later when I read in a very learned German work on general physiology by Professor Fehrborn, an eminent physiologist, referring to the experiment I have just described (it is a classical laboratory experiment). “This experiment proves that the frog has personality in its spinal cord.”
It gave me a new conception of personality. Personality does not mean a person, a man or a woman. It does not mean that sort of thing at all. It means the possession of the power to will and to do and to think and to plan. That is why the Professor recognized the presence of personality in the spinal cord because these acts showed the frog was adapting itself to an emergency. It was doing something perhaps, it had never done before. I can not imagine that frog had ever used its left leg in the way it did. It certainly was an extraordinary adaption of means to an end.
Now we see that the essence of personality is not form or shape, but it is the expression of will, of design, of a plan. Go into the woods and you wind a nest. You know behind that nest there is a builder somewhere. The nest would not be there if there had not been a builder to plan the nest and to make the nest. So when we see a human body we know that behind it there is a personality and this personality is working in harmony with the human personality. We are dual beings. Our bodies are controlled by a human personality and a creative personality, the power that made us, the infinite personality, if you please.
We believe in infinite space and in infinite time. Why should not we believe in an infinite personality as well? We have the same proof for one as we have for the other. We know space exists because we can measure a portion of it. We are in contact with it and we have evidence of its existence. We know time exists, infinite though it may be and beyond our comprehension and yet we know that time exists. We believe in time. We recognize it and this is also true with reference to the infinite personality. We know that this personality exists because we see the evidence of its work. In every flower, in every tree, in every cloud, and in every sunset we see evidence of the existence of this infinite personality with an infinite power to work with an infinite sense of beauty and of artistic taste. We see all of this exhibited in nature all about us.
Perhaps some of you are wondering what these remarks have to do with our subject. But first of all I think it is important that we should recognize the fact that there is a personality behind, a power that works not only for our moral welfare, but for our physical welfare as well as that our lives depend upon the working of this being. We have infinite evidence of it in every flower, in every living thing, animal or vegetable. In all the inanimate world about us we have proof of the existence of this infinite creative power continually at work. Dr. Milliken tells us that even matter is being created continually.
The important question to the average man who thinks about spiritual things and the here and hereafter in a serious way is Does this great personality have anything to do with me personally? Is it interested in me? If I am in trouble is there a place where I can go for help? That is a great question, I am sure, for serious thinking people. Perhaps you have been so brought up you would never entertain any apprehension on this point. You never had a doubt. You are fortunate if you are. There are a great many frivolous people in this world nowadays and they are spreading throughout the world a spirit of unbelief and a spirit of skepticism. I think the number of people that are in the habit of praying today is much smaller then it was when I was a boy. When I was a boy there were family prayers every morning and every evening in almost every home. Today I think the family prayer is rather infrequent in homes and the number of people who believe in prayer at the present time is, I fear, comparatively small.
I was talking with a lady the other day and she was in great despair. She had no hope she was ever going to be better. She had been ill a long time. She thinks she is never going to get well. I think she will. She was afraid she would not. I asked this lady if she was a church member. “Yes,” she said, “I belong to the Episcopal Church.” The next question was “Do you pray regularly?” “No,” she replied, “I don’t pray. I gave up praying a long time ago.” “Why did you give up praying?” “Because I found it did not do any good. I did not get my answers to my prayers.”
That is a very great mistake and the thing I want to show you tonight is that every one has had very definite and very positive answers to prayer and that there is a source to which you can go and be sure of getting an answer if there is an answer.
I must begin by telling you of a little incident that occurred in my experiences several years ago. I was sitting in my study at work alone. It was rather late twilight, just beginning to be a little dark. A sudden very shrill sound came in the window, a very shrill shriak, very high pitched, almost beyond the limit of hearing it was so very shrill, and then another and another and another. My man, who was sitting near me, seized a staff and ran out and found a blacksnake several feet long swallowing a tree frog. It had one of the frog’s hind legs in its mouth. The little frog whirled around and seized the ---head and was hanging on and shouting with all its might for life. It was astonishing how loud a noise so small a creature could make. My man put the staff upon the snakes head and opened its mouth and the little frog hopped off three or four inches and remained quiet there, evidently recognizing the feed that help had had come and that it was no longer in danger. After resting a little while it hopped off in the grass happy.
That little frog was praying. That cry of distress was a prayer just as much as any prayer ever uttered. But you say that it was calling other frogs to come to help it. Did you ever see frog help another frog? Frogs don’t know enough to help one another when they are in trouble. That frog was calling to its maker for help. It was not calling to my man for help. It did not know my valet was sitting in my study with me. It had never heard of him. It was simply calling for help, obeying an instinct.
Every creature that has a voice calls for help when it is in trouble. Did you ever think of that? The more you think of ti the more you will be sure it is a fact. Every creature that has a voice calls for help when it is in trouble. It utters a cry of distress. You recognize the cry when it comes. You know the creature is in trouble. If a dog barks in the night you know by the nature of its bark whether the dog is in trouble or whether it is making trouble. If it is making trouble it has one voice and if ti is in trouble it is another voice altogether.
When you hear a man, if you will listen a moment you know whether he is praying or whether he is quarreling or whether he is exhorting. You know his voice. And this cry of distress has characteristic sound. When you hear a little baby cry you know whether that baby is sick and suffering or whether it is having a tantrum. It is an entirely different sound. And so this voice of prayer, my friends, is characteristic. It is the call that is made by every creature when it is in trouble. It is not calling on other creatures to come to help it. It might be a man and a man might make such a call, but if there is no human being about and a man is in trouble and distress he cries out just the same.
I will illustrate this principle by a circumstance which occurred in the London zoo. A little chimpanzee became a mother and when she saw the little baby chimpanzee lying on the floor she was terribly frightened. She fled to the remotest corner of her cage at once chattering with fear until the little one cried. By and by the baby whispered. Down came the mother with a great bound and placed the little one to its breast and mothered it in real human fashion. To whom was that baby crying, when it whispered? To what was it speaking? To whom was it appealing? It was appealing to its maker. When the mother heard that cry the mother instinct was aroused instantly and instantly she responded. That was the call of prayer.
You will perhaps remember the story of Hagar when she took her little son and went out into the desert because Sarah was jealous of her and Abraham cast her out. The little boy was crying and she could not bear to hear him cry, so she laid him down behind a bush. She found a bush. She was hunting for water in the Sahara desert where I have traveled many miles myself, so I know just what it looks like. It is a great sea of sand, nothing but sand. Where you see a bush you know there is water. Never a blade of grass grows anywhere unless there is water, a spring of water from some source. So when Hagar saw the bush she knew there was water. She came to the bush, but could not find the well. She knew there was a well there somewhere, but she could not find it. Why? Because the wells in the desert are dug down, some of them, very deep and they are covered with a flat stone. Otherwise they would fill up with sand which is continually in the air. There are whirlwinds which lift up the sand in the hills until enormous dunes are built and make waves like the waves of the sea. A flat stone is put over the well and sand drifts over it. Hagar was hunting for the well. If she had not laid the little one down behind the bush she would not have found the well. While she was roaming about trying to find the well she hit her foot against the stone that covered the well. She brushed away the sand and there was well. “And God heard the voice of the lad,” not Abraham’s prayer or Hagar’s prayer.
When one cries out for help he is obeying instinct. Every creature in trouble calls for help. My friends, that instinct is within us. Whether a man believes in God or does not, when he is in trouble he cries out. He may not cry for God to help him. He cries out in distress and it is the cry of distress that appeals to his maker. “God heard the cries of the lad” the Good Book says. That is the way it is with all of us when we are in trouble. When we cry out for help we are appealing to our maker.
I can point out to you the very mechanism within our bodies through which prayers are heard and answered. As I told you little while ago, demonstrated, I think there are two personalities within the body. The human personality presides over voluntary acts.
I am going to ask you a question. I should like to have some of you answer this question if you can. Where do ideas come from? Where do we get our ideas? Where do ideas come from? I asked a professor from Columbia University some time ago that question. He said, “We make them, of course.”
“Well, now,” I said, “Professor, I am very short of ideas today and it would be of great assistance to me if you would make a couple of good ideas for me. I should appreciate it very much.” So the Professor begun looking for ideas. He looked about the room and all around and by and by made a movement with his hand and then with both hands and by and by perspiration was just standing on his brow, but he did not find a single idea. He did not make one. So I finally said, “Professor, you can not make ideas. Ideas are new creations and you can not make an idea any more than you can make a flower.” Ideas come into our brains already made. Don’t you say, “An idea hit me”? Don’t you say, “An idea popped into my head”? I have heard people use that expression sometimes. Don’t you say, “An idea just occurred to me”? Don’t you hear people say, “Where did you get that idea”? “It came out of the blue.” What does it mean? It came from somewhere outside of my consciousness. I think everybody recognizes the fact that ideas originate outside of the consciousness, but not outside of us. Ideas originate in the part of the brain known as the sub-conscience. There are certain ganglia that are found at the base of the brain that are connected with the sensorium. That is where ideas, memories and pictures of our experiences all are stored. They are all stored up in the sensorium, and these ganglia sends little threads of nerve fiber into all parts of the sensorium so they are in touch with everything that is around up there. This is the subconscious. This subconscious is the place where unconscious thinking is done.
There are two kinds of thinking done in the brain. There is the ordinary thinking which simply takes ideas and juggles them combines them into sentences, plans, etc. That is the conscious thinking. Then there is the unconscious thinking, the creative thinking that is carried on in the subconscious. You have often had an experience that demonstrated this. You were thinking of something at night, some problem perhaps when you were a boy or a girl in school. You remember you worked hard on the problem and you were so sleepy you could not keep your eyes open any longer and went to bed and in the morning you woke up and had a solution to that problem which you could not work out the night before, but in the morning it was all solved. I wonder how many of you had an experience of that kind? Why, half the hands in the audience was raised. What does it mean? It means your unconscious mind, or the creative mind that works in the subconscious, had been working while you were sleeping. That is what it means. You have that experience, I am sure, every one of you. You have had social problems and moral problems you could not answer at night, but in the morning it was all clear.
These morning thoughts are so important I have many a time said to myself, “I am going to write down all my morning thoughts.” I have started to do it a good many times, but I have been kept so busy I did not keep it up, but I always have a tablet with me when I go to bed and every morning when I waken, if I had a refreshing sleep. I find my mind is full of ideas and I have to write them as fast as I can so they will not go away. I have practiced that for many years. The best ideas I ever got I got in the morning.
Now, what have we got to do with the subconscious? I have just told you one way in which you can make it work. When you go to bed at night think of the thing that you are interested in. Concentrate your mind upon it before you go to bed at night. That concentration is real praying. Prayer is not the words you say. Prayer, as the poet said, “Is the heart’s sincere desire.” This is what prayer is, “The heart’s sincere desire” whether you express it or whether you do not. Real need is prayer. That is what the creative personality recognizes, real need. You may call for something you do not need. I remember some time ago a men called at my kitchen and wanted a hem sandwich. Never a ham sandwich had been there. Never a ham had been there. The lady went to the door and said, “We haven’t any ham sandwiches, but we can give you something a great deal better”, and he had a Protose sandwich which he liked so much he came the next morning for another and was very much pleased to have a better sandwich than he had ever eaten before.
That is the way it is with prayer. We call for a thing we think we need. The thing that the creative personality takes recognition of, and that is the real prayer, is the thing that we need.
You say, “How are we going to make use of the subconscious”? Just one way. Concentrate your mind on the thing that is troubling you at night. Concentration is real prayer. I will show you how to make use of these principles in everyday affairs. Suppose you ask this question. You say, “I wonder whether this is right? I wonder whether I ought to do this or whether I ought not? I must think about that.” What are you doing when you say that? You are not making a decision. What are you doing when you are thinking? You are waiting. By and by the idea comes. Where does it come from? You do not make it. It comes from the subconscious. It comes from this power, not our human personality not ourselves, but outside of ourselves but working within our bodies. The same power that keeps the heart going is carrying on this thinking.
Our greatest psychologist, the late William James, a professor at Harvard, had this same idea. If you read his book “Some Religious Experiences”- I happened to run across it a short time ago - you will find that he recognized the subconscious as the seat of religious emotion because he recognized the fact when we say, “Now I wonder what is right?” that we are calling the subconscious into action. That is the same thing we do when we say, “Now I wonder what is the best thing to do about this? I wonder what I had better do?” and we wait. We are not making any ideas and we are not making the answer. Of whom do we ask that question? When we say, “How I wonder what I ought to do about that? What is best to do?” When you ask that question whom are you asking that question? You are not asking it of yourself because you know you do not know. You are conscious of the fact that you do not know and that it is why you raise the question, so you certainly are not going to a source you know does not know the answer. You are raising the question and asking it of the great source of wisdom. That is where you get your information. By and by the answer comes and it comes from the subconscious where the involuntary thinking is done, where the creative thinking is done, and that thinking is done by the power that made us, by the power which the Christians call God and the agnostic calls the unknowable. It is certainly the great creative intelligence we are talking to.
Let me give you the final proof of this thing which I believe you will recognize. First let me raise this question. How can we get help from this source? There is a very systematic and very efficient way of getting help from this source of wisdom that I have tried to place before you. It is by concentration. By concentrating the mind we open the door into the subconscious and we put a problem up to the subconscious to ask it to find a solution for us by concentration. So when we say, “What shall I do about this? What is the proper thing for me to do”? and we think intently about it, we set the subconscious to work out by and by the answer will come back. When we concentrate upon something, think of something, we open the door into the subconscious and put the problem in and get the answers back in the same way. We open the door into the subconscious. We open the door into this great treasury of knowledge and wisdom when we concentrate upon it.
When we pray we simply concentrate in the most effective manner. When we are in trouble and call out for help that is real praying. I am not talking now about ceremonial praying. It is wholesome, but it is not the kind of prayer I am talking about. That is not the effective prayer. Real prayer is when one finds himself at the end of his rope and cries out for help. I have had that experience sometimes. “What shall I do?” Whether you make that appeal in a personal way or not, whether you say, “God, what shall I do?” or whether you simply cry out for help, the results are the same because it is the need that is real prayer. It is your need. Your Maker is interested in you. You say “How do you know this?” Every mouthful of food placed in the stomach is an appeal to the Creator for help. Why doesn’t the stomach biggest itself? The stomach digests the things you put into it, things you never ought to put into it, such as an oyster’s stomach and everything else. Then why doesn’t it digest your stomach? Why doesn’t it digest itself? I am sure there is not a person here who can tell me. No physiologist can tell me. No man living can answer that question except in one way. He must admit the power that made the stomach stands right by it and takes care of it. If the gastric juice comes in contact with the skin it digests the skin, but it does not digest the stomach. If the gastric juice goes down into the duodenum it would be digest the duodenum and make a hole in it if it were not for the fact that the bile ours out and neutralizes it. The bile and pancreatic juice neutralize the gastric juice and destroy its power to digest and to do damage to the small intestine.
How are we going to get answers to prayer? How may we put the problem up to the subconscious It is just as natural as breathing, my friends. Praying is just as natural and just as physiologic as breathe. Everything that has a voice prays when it is in trouble. We do a great deal of praying which we do not recognize as praying. Whenever we raise that question, “What ought I to do?” that is a prayer. We are making the question not of ourselves, because we do not know, but we are making the question of the power that made us, and so the way to bring this function into captivity in to concentrate the mind. Concentrate upon the subject in which we are interested, and in prayer we have the most intense concentration, because we are in trouble and we have tried everything else and we do not know what else to do and now the stage of consciousness is empty, it is not kept active, it is all empty waiting for the answer. “What shall I do? What shall help me?” We make this appeal and if there is help for us that is the way to get it. I am not going to say that everything we call for we are going to get because it is impossible. The power that presides over us and within us, this power must be consistent. It must be consistent; hence if we ask for a thing that is inconsistent, that is unreasonable, that is likely to do us harm, we won’t get it. We won’t get help in that way. So, as I said before, prayer is simply intense concentration. I won’t say simply intense concentration because it is mroe. The more faith we have the more intense will be the concentration and the more certain we will be of getting results.
You say, “this is a new philosophy.” I do not know whether it is --- or not.” If there never had been any food would there be any hunger? Evidently there would not be. If there were no water and never had been any water would there be any thirst? Now, my friends, if there were no such thing as a great source of help to which we can appeal when in trouble would there be a universal instinct to call for help when we are in trouble? If there were no help would there be an instinct planted within us to call for help when we are in trouble? I am sure you can see, my friends every one of you, it is impossible there should be such a thing as a universal instinct to call for help when in trouble if there is no help upon which to call. You see that is an utter impossibility. So the fact that this universal instinct exists that every creature calls out with a voice of distress and appeal when it is in trouble that is absolute proof there is a source of help and that is the way to get the help.
Now, my friends, won’t you apply this to yourselves? Concentrate your mind upon the thought of help. You can help yourselves and this is the real mind cure, if you please. This is the real faith cure. The real cure comes in concentrating the mind upon the things that are likely to help us. Appeal for help. Call upon your maker for help. You may say, “I do not believe in your kind of God.” It does not make any difference at all about that. I does not make any difference whether you believe in an Episcopal God or Methodist God or Baptist God. The different conceptions of God make the difference in theologians. That is what theologians are quarreling about, the different conceptions of the Divine Being. It does not make any difference what kind of being you believe in. The fact remains the same that there is power for help. Cook said, “A power that works for righteousness,” that works for healing, that works for comforting worried souls, and the power we can call appeal to and we can be sure to get all the help there is.
I thank you.