Negative Thinking Is the Opening to Disease You can control pain and reverse disease with your mind, but even before that, that is why you got the disease in the first place. You can be exposed to all different kinds of carcinogens, but you have to allow yourself to allow the breakdown to continue in your body. That may sound kind of hard or harsh, but that is a fact. You have to go along with say cancer, for instance. We notice that there are cancer personalities; people with a strong martyr complex are the people who are most likely to get cancer. They harbor all these hurts and angers, what have you, and it works against them. That is a negative kind of thinking and it helps to destroy them. In many cases, when a person says to himself over and over again, “I want to destroy my enemies, I want to hurt this person, I want to get even with such-and-such a person,” the subconscious mind is not able to make a distinction between me and you, I and thou. It just does not! It does not make that distinction! Any thought that you harbor of wanting to create harm to other people translates into a thought of wanting to harm yourself. The subconscious is just put together that way. There is just no argument for why it should be different or something like that. No matter how hard you try, it always comes out that way. The kinds of thoughts that you harbor always tend to come back to you. That does have anything to do with karma. That is the natural result of the kind of thought energy that you bring about. For instance, if you want to sell whisky, if you want to sell cigarettes, the kind of appeals you make to people is to their death instinct. And, indeed, in subliminal advertising, people use the techniques of using hidden death-heads and ghouls and expressions of horror hidden someplace in the advertisement they are putting forth. When you link up those negative kinds of hateful feelings with an ad, then that ad will sell more of that whiskey or bourbon or rye or whatever they are. Obviously, they are appealing to a self-destruct mode under those circumstances. Cigarettes are the same way. I have even heard a theory that the people who sell cigarettes worked hard, in an underground way, to get the legislation requiring the Surgeon General to say that smoking can be dangerous to your health because people who smoke are attracted to the danger aspect of it and to the self-destruct aspect of it. That has been proven over and over again by advertising. The ad which conceals more of those kinds of subliminals relating to death and self-destruction are the ones that sell cigarettes and whiskey. Most people who smoke cigarettes are aware that it is damaging to their health; it causes emphysema, many forms of cancer and so forth. Yet, even with this knowledge, they continue to smoke. They are obviously appealing to some self-destruct mechanism within the person’s self. For some reason or other, they have a sense of self-esteem, which has been damaged in some way so, therefore, they feel bad about themselves. Weird, but that is the way it works. That same kind of thinking itself can lead to cancerous conditions. Now, even though there is no dividing line between the subconscious and conscious, the midbrain functions without necessarily coming though the conscious center. It is there working all the time. As a matter of fact, all illness is created by negative thinking. If somebody stabs you, or something like that, then, obviously, we are not talking about that sort of thing, but maybe your kind of thinking attracted somebody to do that. Ladies who have to walk down dark streets in New York, at night, have always said that if you always walk with a very purposeful way like you were in perfect control, that you had no problems whatsoever with being able to defend yourself they were never bothered. But if you walk down the street looking like you are waiting to see if somebody is going to strike you from behind any door or alley-corner, or something like that, that attracts the muggers and the rapists. So even if you are out to be stabbed that still has something to do your attitude. Did you attract it or were you able to keep it away? Most like people do not like to think that they are that responsible for their environment just by what they think, but we are. Christ often pointed out that it is not just the act that we do which is destructive, but the very thoughts that we have which lead up to those acts which are destructive, because they are part of our attitude and they have a power. Our attitudes and our thoughts have power within themselves to control our immediate environment, which are our bodies. So think beauty, think happy, think life. That is what Christ kept saying all the time. There are a lot of unhappy people, but maybe they are unhappy first. Most people do not have the piece of information that you can make of your life what you want by the kinds of things that you think. They do not have that piece of information so it is closed to them so they feel that they are victims; that all these things are happening all around them and they are all acting on them in some negative way which makes them feel unhappy or sad or frightened. Why is it that people who are treating the contagious diseases very frequently do not get the disease? They are right there amongst it; in the midst of it. It all depends on what you believe about the disease. Germs are real. We can inject a laboratory animal with the germs of an active disease, in one animal, and another animal that it is injected into will come down with the same disease. So we know that that works. We also know that you are not likely to come down with smallpox unless you have been exposed to the smallpox virus. Why, of all the people who are exposed to the smallpox virus, do only a certain percentage get it? The germ theory is not complete at least so far as human beings are concerned because it does not take into account the power of Mind. Some people can die of a disease which they never contracted mainly because they were so afraid because somebody near them died of it. They will go through exactly the same phases and, so far as the doctor is concerned, all the symptoms are there, except the person never has the germ. Their fear brought them through the whole thing; the normal course of the disease which they have seen and, just like their friend, they die of it. But they never had the germ. Those are real systems that work within the body. Maybe those are extreme cases, but nevertheless they illustrate the point that we are more than just creatures just exposed to germs. Everyone one of us, walking around, has TB [tuberculosis]; everyone! At least 99% of people in this room have herpes; they got it from their mother when they were infants. But why does it show up in some individuals and not in others? Why do some people become tubercular in active ways and other people have formed nodules, which, if you investigate their lungs, after they died just of normal old age, see that they had tuberculosis, at one time or another, but it was all encapsulated and never became an active disease? We also have to add into that nutrition. People who do not have good nutrition have a hard time putting together a body without the building blocks necessary to sustain it. Presumably, even if you have all those things, nevertheless the Mind can kill. So be careful what you think.
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