Chapter VIII: Part 8

_Tell the children what to do._ All thoughts are composed of sense impressions, therefore impress the _proper_ senses. I may watch a blacksmith for a lifetime, yet cannot make a horseshoe until my sense of feeling acquires the proper memory. Three senses must be affected to form a comprehensive thought.

[Sidenote: As to fraud]

Can a man remain in business and sell goods which he fails to deliver? Can a merchant who has no goods to deliver accumulate money enough to establish himself in the respect of business men? Can the manager of an opera house afford to pay fifty dollars a night expenses for a week, and allow a man who has no goods to deliver to occupy his house? Can an established printer for a one-third cash payment afford to print an entire order, if the party he is printing for has no goods to deliver in order to pay his bills? Can a man with no goods remain in a state for a year, in a town for a week and earn a living? _Prima facie_, whose word carries the most weight, the proprietor of a store or one of his cheap hirelings? Many of my hirelings have exposed (?) me. During my first two years on the road it was a common occurrence every time I refused to raise salaries for somebody to expose (?) me. To date, two of them are in the penitentiary for life, another a paralytic; or, in other words, those who made the alleged exposés were _all_ degenerates. Why is the word of the employé having nothing at stake, taken in preference to that of the proprietor, whose money and reputation are at stake? It is not, except by the degenerates, who are prone to believe everything “bad.”

[Sidenote: My New York expose(?)]

After my New York City engagement, the most sensational exposé (?) was effected. The fellow who did so thought I had then left for Lansing, Michigan. I met his first attempt, which was a failure. After I did leave, he succeeded in furnishing the New York papers with some sensational stories. The exposés (?) were made as to the sleeping act (hibernation). The first proof of the falsity of his statements is that he never made a sleep for me. Only these sleeps were made during my Eastern tour, viz.: In New York, Kilmer; Hartford, Conn., Stevenson; New Haven, Conn., Slinker; Meriden, Conn., Leonard; Bridgeport, Conn., Kilmer; Willimantic, Conn., Mahoney.

[Sidenote: Heart does not control the circulation]

My advent in New York was as follows: I arrived in New York City with some six subjects, and opened in the Herald Square theater one afternoon, before about six hundred doctors; demonstrating with my subjects many things that were contradictions to what the medical profession taught, particularly the three different rates of pulsation, simultaneously. The subjects were stripped to the waist, allowing no possibility of trickery, and this test done some three or four times with each. Some of the doctors claimed that the subjects were trained. Even now, I will admit that for the sake of argument, but it still proves my point, that the heart does not control the circulation; _otherwise it could not be trained_. Just so, some people say the subjects are not hypnotized. Still, if they were not hypnotized they are in a condition, and whatever that condition is, I call it hypnotized. I will not fight for the term, words mean but little.

I then opened at Hammerstein’s Olympia theater. My managers informed me that when people in New York City visited the theater, they went to see a show, not to take part in it; that volunteers were impossible; that I had better get some subjects. I put an advertisement in one of the papers, had many applicants, and on a Sunday afternoon I hypnotized some sixty, put them to work and picked out the better ones, to whom I paid one dollar a performance. Now, if they were “fakers,” they demonstrated themselves to be more clever than any actors in New York City, and they should have been drawing three hundred dollars per week; but, through the “fake,” or whatever you want to call it, I possessed the ability to make great actors out of this raw material in one hour, and at one dollar per night. You, gentle reader, say, “Ah, you are clever.” No, when you claim that you say I am a fool, because it is certain that if I could so teach people, Manager Frohman would hire me at an enormous salary as a stage manager to furnish him with _actors_ at one dollar per night. I am very certain that if I am so clever, and could rehearse and teach these subjects to do as they did in the brief time I had, the schools of acting in New York City would pay me a large salary to either work for them or to keep out of the business.

This degenerate, who made the alleged exposé, was the chum of a Bowery professor then giving exhibitions in a dime museum in Fourteenth Street. His chum failed to teach him to take on hypnosis. After thirteen hours, an hour each day, I succeeded in teaching this fellow to take on hypnosis, after which he proved to be a clever subject. I took him on the road with me, and in two of the cities we visited, had to send him out of town to prevent his being arrested. To-day, the police of Bridgeport have, pigeon-holed, a criminal warrant against him.

In his exposé, he claims to have visited Europe; to have been used in exhibitions by Charcot and others. I doubt if he has been six miles at sea; and Charcot gave none but private demonstrations, and those with only inmates of the Hospital Salpetriere. He went to the newspapers and stated that he was not hypnotized; that he was “faking,” and asked the reporters to say to him, “Drowsy, sleepy, et cetera,” as Santanelli did; that he would go to sleep, stick pins into himself and become cataleptic. I can teach any subject to do this thing in three minutes, in fact, I can do it myself through a pre-inspiration, and at no time do I need to _thoroughly_ lose consciousness. Later on, he made a twenty-four hour sleep to show that he could simulate it.

Now, dear reader, did you ever wake up on a Sunday morning too late for breakfast and try to go to sleep, to lie there until lunch-time. I will promise that before lunch-time you will get up. You cannot lie _awake_ five minutes with your eyes _closed_. You cannot lie abed all day if you are well and awake. I will give a thousand dollars to the man who, free from hypnosis or drugs, will sit in a crowd for three minutes without _opening_ his eyes.

This clever lad told how the bed was full of tubes to supply him with _food_; how ham sandwiches were handed to him. Oh, no; I am too clever for anything like that, if I had wanted to feed him, would have given him food in capsules or tablets. Just imagine a man eating ham sandwiches lying on his back for seven days. If not digested, they would kill him; if digested, the functions must be active.

PLATE V]

Now comes the strange part. This clever (?) fellow, like the clever (?) public, told all about the eating, never once mentioning thirst. Man can go fifty or sixty days without food, but must have liquids. Being for seventy-two hours without water or liquids will always produce insanity, except through hypnosis. In these exposés nothing has ever been said as to the method used to give them water. Nothing has been said as to the emptying of the bladder. If food is taken into the stomach and digested, the secretions must be at work; if the secretions are at work, the bowels will move. These things were all overlooked in these exposés; the stories were told of tubes in the bed, as to procuring food, et cetera, but nothing was said of how the subject’s system was freed of the waste from the food given him.

[Sidenote: No desire for contradictory facts]

A story was told of his lying in a cage; this act I have never performed, but have proposed it, agreeing, if the profession desired such a test, to lay a naked subject on a sheet on a bed, put a cage over all, and seal it to the floor so as to demonstrate that nothing was passed to the subject; but the wise and learned medical profession cared for no test that demonstrated, through suggestion, the possibility of suspending hunger, thirst, bowel and kidney action; such knowledge they did not care to learn as it contradicted their teachings.

During the New York sleep, made by Kilmer, he was watched night and day by relays of students from Bellevue Hospital. When arrangements were being made, one student, who hoped to graduate that spring, insisted on having charge of the entire affair, which, finally, was agreed upon. I had nothing to do with the arrangements, which were made by my manager, whom I had only known a week. If it were a “fake,” it is strange that I should allow the details to be handled by a stranger. This would-be doctor took charge of the sleeper, stayed up some forty-eight hours, when off watch, hiding in a box to catch us _feeding_ him. On the Wednesday night when he stood before the audience and told them that the experiment was fair, and that I had done as claimed, he was very angry. When he took charge, he told his chums that he would _expose_ the fraud and thereby get a big advertisement for himself when he began practicing, but when he found out there was no fraud to expose, he regretted the loss of sleep and the time wasted; and later presented a bill to me for services rendered, which bill as yet is unreceipted.

The thought that a man with a “fake” would, could or dared to open at Hammerstein’s with the proposition that I made is ridiculous. The sleeper to be examined, weighed, and watched from being naked to putting on a sound pair of silk tights, a silk shirt, a pair of silk pajamas, to lie on a large mattress covered with a crumb cloth (all previously examined), and for no one but the committee to touch the subject, I not going nearer than five feet from him (giving my exhibition on the stage would bring me that close). The thought of it being other than genuine could only appear in the “mind” of an ignoramus, or some one looking for newspaper notoriety.

[Sidenote: Tests of no value]

[Sidenote: Feeling vs. hypnosis]

During the test of a twenty-four hour sleep made for the New York Herald (no test being of any value of less than seventy-two hours), the wise doctors who knew _nothing_ of hypnosis, tested this subject as to his _feeling_. For Heaven’s sake, what has _feeling_ to do with _hypnosis_? They stuck pins into him, they dropped water on his eyelids; they put him through all kinds of torture, but through pure fortitude (?) he stood it. When this is possible all laws of suggestion can be overcome. When “normally,” a man can control what the doctor calls his reflexes, he is worthy of more money than he got out of the alleged exposé.

[Sidenote: A good liar]

One wise (?) doctor called to him that there were rats in the room, and because the subject did not respond, said he was not in hypnosis, because the hypnotized subject responds to “suggestion.” Why, if the subject could hear and respond to him he would be awake, because that _is_ what constitutes the _waking_ state. The subject did not hear him, did not respond to him, thereby proving that he _was_ in hypnosis. After the subject was awakened, they asked him if he did not suffer severe pain _while they dropped water on his eyes_; and, like a good liar, he said, “Yes,” the answer being put into his mouth by the question asked. Why, if he suffered from the dropping of the water on his eyelids the reflexes would have acted, the doctors would have seen it, and the subject could not have endured it. But this subject knew what he was up against, that the doctors were not testing him as to hypnosis, but were simply there to prove their views as to suggested anesthesia, he taking the pre-inspiration that he would _sleep for the twenty-four hours and suffer no pain_, which he did. The wise (?) doctors named everything that he did and then asked him a question; or, in other words, they put the answers in his mouth, which he gave them, taking _his_ word for it that he could endure pain and suspend his reflex actions without hypnosis. These doctors knew this to be an impossibility, yet the desire for newspaper notoriety was so strong that they pretended to accept this degenerate’s word. Assuming that he could do so, proved nothing. Lack of feeling is not hypnosis. How can a man prove or disprove something which he knows nothing about? I, myself, could prove no hypnotist to be a fake; all that would be possible for me to do would be to force the hypnotist to produce a phenomenon that would be satisfactory to me.

I perform many operations on hypnotized subjects. The two severest are the stretching of the rectum and the cutting around the tender phrenum. With the first I always get a groan, with the other a very pronounced reflex action, and yet when the subject awakens he remembers nothing of it. The extent of pre-inspiration I do not know, but in my long years of experience, have met with but three, viz.: no feeling, rigidity, awakening.

These alleged exposés have all been good advertising, inasmuch as intelligent people are in no hurry to take the word of one who has nothing at stake against one who has everything.

[Sidenote: Poor man]

The wisdom (?) of the general public is highly amusing. If you want to feel sorry for mankind stand in front of a show window where a subject is asleep. A certain percentage of these know he is not asleep, “because he is placed there;” the next is certain he is not asleep because he moves (no man moves in his sleep); and some ladies are certain to go by and claim he is not asleep because he _breathes_. These three are the chief explanations as to why the subject is not asleep. Everybody asks how he is fed, and will he not be hungry when he awakens? No one appreciates the absence of thirst. If everything is a combination of attributes, a condition or combination must be produced in the subject that has these functions suspended. The suspension of hunger and bowel action are easily explained, but I have no explanation to offer as to the suspending of thirst and kidney action, knowing only that with a subject who has perfect confidence in me I can suspend the four functions for a period of seven days and longer.

My subject will awaken in a bright and strong condition; his bladder will be perfectly empty and the first drink of water he takes will pass through him within ten minutes. The subject is lying in hypnosis, with the thought that he will have no hunger, no thirst, no bowel or kidney action, and will awaken on the seventh day. This thought being locked in the “mind,” the action that is part of it is certain to take place.

This sleeping act was suggested to me in Xenia, Ohio, by a child asking about the picture of a bear sleeping all winter in a cave. It occurring to me that if a bear could “sleep” all winter, a man could sleep a week. I experimented and succeeded.

[Sidenote: Wise, curious or a fool (?)]

While lecturing in New York City, as a rule I concluded my lecture by giving some demonstrations with a subject, and also having a subject pre-inspire himself with the thought of “no feeling,” and stick pins into himself, demonstrating my claims as to the so-called Auto-suggestion of the alleged exposers. After doing this at a lecture one night, an old “horse” came upon the platform and informed me that he could stick pins into himself. While I was getting my wraps, the president of the society for whom I was lecturing wagered this young man that he could not do so. The young man did and won the money. What is the use of trying to teach the people anything? After you read this book, I am afraid that you will know but little more than you did before you started, as it is impossible to put in through one sense what “nature” intended to put in through another. It seems that the president of this society, although seeing the demonstration made, was not satisfied until he had lost a five-dollar bill. The same with you reading this book unless you take a subject (providing you are capable), and demonstrate to yourself the truth I have told, you have simply absorbed a lot of words, which, of themselves, mean nothing. I know one very brilliant man who, notwithstanding he acknowledged that expression was the result of thought, that there could be no expression without thought, turned around and asserted that he believed a subject could “fake.” What to do with such people, how to convince them I do not know. Man’s comprehension is only to the extent of his experience. Try to simulate and see if it is possible; try to laugh and put the real ring into it, and see if you can; try to cry and see if you can get the tone.

I spend months conceiving a condition possible to be produced in a subject, sometimes doing much experimenting to find the proper inspiration to give him to produce the result desired, and any hypnotist who will have the inspiration taken in shorthand, can repeat the experiment, stealing the result of my thought, yet they never give me credit for any of my originations. I did the sleeping act a year before any hypnotist ever dreamed of reproducing it. In fact, until they had taken subjects who had traveled with me and had learned how to give the inspiration, they were doubtful as to its being accomplished, and, with the general public, believed it to be a trick. They are welcome to the inspirations, yet it is no more than just that they should give me credit for them.

[Sidenote: I know a law]

In the Middle States, many wise (?) doctors are every day expecting me to kill some subject with my crazy (?) experiments. They wonder how I have continued so long without doing so, failing to appreciate that I possess knowledge of a law, and am not, like them, working in the dark; that my physiology is correct, and neither myself nor the subject I am experimenting with are taking any chances.

I direct the temperature of a subject so low that an ordinary clinical thermometer will fail to register it, thus proving that the accepted theory that combustion produces the heat of the body is wrong. When I reported this to a certain hospital, the wink was passed around, none of them daring to contradict me, inasmuch as they knew I had always succeeded in making good my claims. It happened the night that one of the internes, who was quite a clever amateur, had begun his vacation, and he accomplished in twenty-four hours what I did in twenty minutes; yet I had to conceive it was possible to do so. Our physiologists are wrong from beginning to end, and I state this unreservedly.

In New York, when I explained that “no feeling” was produced by the sympathetic nerves closing over the cerebral nerve-ends and insulating them, it was declared, “Very ingenious, but very unscientific.” Thank Heaven for that! All drug anesthesia is produced by congestion, by forcing the Sympathetic System to _insulate_ the cerebro-spinal nerve-ends or centers, and I challenge the scientific (?) world to _demonstrate_ otherwise.

[Sidenote: Read and reread]

Dear reader, a superficial reading of this book is time wasted; read and reread, and every time you will find more truths. Can you comprehend them, now they are offered you? The simplest of words have been used, my best has been done to comprehensively correlate the thought offered; yet you must keep referring back, and if you persist, some day the entire philosophy will dawn upon you, and you will say, “Oh, how simple (all truths are simple), why did I not comprehend at first?” Because a new set of attributes has had to be separated so that you could perceive, then conceive, and, lastly comprehend them.

[Sidenote: Comprehension]

Comprehension—look it up in the dictionary; and, if you can _comprehend_ the definition, you can do more than I. What is comprehension? It is the comparing, realizing, having memories to be aroused _with which_ to compare those of which I am writing. If our memories are slight, our comprehension will be correspondingly slight. To understand or comprehend anything, its attributes must be parted and associated with those of our _sense_ impressions. The larger the number of the attributes “appreciated,” the greater our comprehension. We have been taught Law of Nature, Hand of God, Free Agency, Responsibility, Will Power, all of which are incomprehensible, inasmuch as we have no sense impressions with which to compare them; consequently, they are but incomprehensible _words_.

Nothing but matter is appreciable, as all impressions received or forwarded can act only through matter.

[Sidenote: Destruction an impossibility]

Space, eternity, beginning and end, destruction, are mere words. Destruction of matter is an impossibility, and what you call destruction is but the dissolution of _form_, nothing else.

Man is individual only as to form; all of which he is composed is from his environment, of which he is necessarily a part. The individual parts that compose his entirety to-day will be different to-morrow, for even our alleged scientists tell us of waste; we know in part of the supplies—food, yet we fail to comprehend the Law of Suggestion.

As we subsist on all lower (?) matter, gaseous, mineral, vegetable and “animal,” we surely are of all of them. As an individuality, our importance is no greater nor less than that of a grain of sand on the sea shore.

[Sidenote: Why should we live?]

_Why, then, should we live?_ We have never been dead, neither can we die. We have always been, are, and always will be, inasmuch as that of which we are composed has always and ever will exist. We are a part of the Universe (the matter) that for a time in this form will abide. Our so-called consciousness is not of itself greater than that of other “living” matter. We are simply a conglomeration of lesser form of life, and nothing more. By what right, through what sense proof, do we dare to place ourselves _above That_ of which we are; _That_, that gave us our parts, attributes; _That_, that continues to supply and relieve us, lest we disintegrate? How dare we claim to be other than of our environment; of the _whole_, the all, God, good?

[Sidenote: Spirit and soul]

We have no conception or comprehension of spirit, soul; they are but words. The soul, the spirit, if it be, must naturally be of the ALL. And yet we dare to assume it to be inherent in ourselves, and to be separate gods of our own. No, no, that cannot be; like Caesar we are too ambitious, and like Caesar, we will fall.

This may seem harsh; yet truth, though it hurts, never injures.

[Sidenote: A disturber]

He who comes among us with something “new,” is a disturber, and, therefore, should be crushed. The Nazarene was crucified, not by the Jews, although they were afraid of him. They said, “He is of us, and a disturber. We will suffer if He continues.” Pontius Pilate, representing the authorities at Rome, killed Him for disturbing the accustomed ways.

Gallileo was banished.

Jean Jacques Rosseau was pursued from hamlet to hamlet; yet were it not for him, there would be no United States of America, or Republic of France. He gathered the thought and gave it to the world.

Hahnemann was driven from pillar to post, yet the truth he discovered is and always will be.

[Sidenote: Like a broad highway]

Life is a broad highway where the masses follow; perhaps twice, and never more than three times in a century, some one strays _away_, out of the highway, and starts over the mountain. The moment he has gone far enough for the masses to see him, they call, “Come back, you fool, you will be lost!” and if he fails to turn, _they stone him_ “to attract his attention,” or to _kill_ him lest he be lost and die. The world, the masses, are kind (?), they want to protect the “fool” from destroying _himself_; they would rather destroy him. After the “fool” has successfully crossed the mountain, another “fool” follows in his pathway; soon more “fools” follow, and at last the masses go, each and every one saying, “I knew he would cross all right, he was too ‘smart’ a fellow to attempt crossing if he was not sure of getting there.”

This is history.

Why was this book written? I am a fatalist, believing that what is, was to have been; that our duty is to impart, to lead others over the path we have discovered, and if we can only make that pathway clear to a few “fools” who will follow as we have gone, I believe I will have responded to my suggestion. I believe myself to be blessed with at least “fair” conception, and to quote from Omar Khayyam:

“Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but ever more
Came out by the same door wherein I went.”

I love man, and, through my hypnotic experience, found that he _was not_ as described by our scientific thinkers (?), so began to study him in my unscientific way, and having learned somewhat of him, am forced to offer to the world this thought as to the Law of Suggestion.

First, place your subject, then give him the attributes. Reader, this book is written to _place_ you. Should more attributes be desired, they will be furnished you.

Man does not choose; he knows of no ill until he has conceived of good. He must be led; and it is the duty of man, after conceiving, _to lead_ his fellow man.

ALL RIGHT!