Mental and Emotional Influences

Our mental and emotional conditions exert a most powerful influence upon the inflow and distribution of vital force.  The author of The Great Work [The Great Work:  The Constructive Principle of Nature in Individual Life, by John Emmett Richardson {1853-1935}, Indio-American Book Company, Chicago, Il. 1907.] has described most graphically in the chapter on Self-Control how fear, worry, anxiety and all kindred emotions create in the system conditions similar to those of freezing; how these destructive vibrations congeal the tissues, clog the channels of life and paralyze the vital functions.  He shows how the emotional conditions of impatience, irritability, anger, etc., have a heating, corroding effect upon the tissues of the body.

In like manner, all other destructive emotional vibrations ob-struct the inflow and normal distribution of the life forces in and through the organism, while on the other hand the constructive emotions of faith, hope, cheerfulness, happiness and love exert a relaxing, harmonizing influence upon the tissues, blood vessels and nerve channels of the body, thus opening wide the floodgates of the life forces, and raising the discords of weakness, disease and discontent to the harmonics of buoyant health and happiness.

Let us see just how mind controls matter and how it affects the changing conditions of the physical body.  Life manifests through vibration.  It acts on the mass by acting through its minutest par-ticles.  Changes in the physical body are wrought by vibratory changes in atoms, molecules and cells.  Health is satisfied polarity, that is, the balancing of the positive and negative elements in harmonious vibration.  Anything that interferes with the free, vigor-ous and harmonious vibration of the minute parts and particles composing the human organism tends to disturb polarity and natural affinity, thus causing discord or disease.

When we fully realize these facts we shall not stand so much in awe of our physical bodies.  In the past we have been thinking of the body as a solid and imponderable mass difficult to control and to change.  This conception left us in a condition of utter helplessness and hopelessness in the presence of weakness and disease.

We now think of the body as composed of minute corpuscles rotating around one another within the atom at relatively immense distances.  We know that in similar manner the atoms vibrate in the molecule, the molecules in the cell, the cells in the organ and the organs in the body; the whole capable of being changed by a change in the vibrations of its particles.

Thus the erstwhile solid physical mass appears plastic and fluidic, readily swayed and changed by the vibratory harmonies or discords of thoughts and emotions as well as by foods, medicines and therapeutic treatment.