What is suggestion in Mental Science? Suggestion means any impression, physical or mental, through touch, sound, words, writing or direction to think or to do, which the subject can appreciate in a suggestible state or hypnosis; and hypnosis is a state more or less allied to sleep and its border-lands; its essential characteristic is not sleep but an induced state of susceptibility or receptivity of suggestion.

Bernheim says: "I take care to say that sleep is not essential; that the hypnotic influence, whence comes the benefit, may exist without sleep, and that many patients are hypnotised, although they do not sleep. If the patient does not shut his eyes or keep them shut, I do not require them to be fixed on mine or my fingers for any length of time; for it sometimes happens that they remain wide open indefinitely, and instead of the idea of sleep being conceived, only a rigid fixation of the eyes results; in this case, closing of the eyelids by the operator succeeds better.

"Passes or gazing at the eyes or fingers of the operator are only useful in concentrating the attention, and are not absolutely essential." To arouse, arrest and concentrate the attention is the main object in the induction of hypnosis—not sleep. Hypnotism, defined by Bernheim, means "the induction of a peculiar physical condition which increases the susceptibility to suggestion; but it is not the necessary preliminary; it is suggestion that rules hypnotism."

Perhaps at this stage the student may not be able to realize many of the points referred to above. He will be better able to appreciate them when he comes to the practice of human magnetism, which will be dealt with at great length in later chapters. But the foregoing is mentioned to bring into view the importance of suggestion in New Thought. It is the governing and directing cause of all experimental and therapeutic effects. The reader, ere he commences practice in these lines, has now two things to keep in view:

1. Either the suggestible state is natural, or it can be induced; if necessary, his first object will be to induce that state.

2. That state of receptivity being there, or induced, the current of the subject's thoughts is to be directed and strengthened by suggestion.

Having given suggestion, properly, to a subject in a suggestible condition, such suggestion cannot, or rather will not, be resisted. To give suggestions properly is, in the main, a matter of experience, confidence, ability, in which the intelligence (character, health) of the operator is an important factor.

The next and most natural factor is the character (intelligence and disposition) of the subject whose concentrated attention is to be aroused, educated by hypnotic processes and directed, in the first place, to some simple object with a view to modify ordinary intellectual activity and induce a receptive state.

The most important stage is the beginning stage, viz., the induction of the foregoing state. The rest is comparatively easy, and becomes more and more so as the hypnotist and the subject enter into a better knowledge of each other's ways—harmony or rapport. Another point to be considered. Suggestions have to be repeated in order to make a groove of their own in the mental structure of the subject. Drops of water wear away a stone; repeated suggestions wear away resistance and are finally accepted or appreciated by the subject. In ordinary education we appreciate the value of Attention and Repetition in fixing a sentence, lesson or idea in the mind. Even time is necessary to fix an impression, as all who have made a study of the phenomena of memory will duly appreciate. A sentence must be repeated over and over again to deepen and fix the impressions so that it will make its own special groove in the physical organs of the mind.

Attention and Repetition are the key-notes of successful suggestion. The attention of the subject must be aroused and kept, while repetition helps to fix the new idea—the change of direction to the current of one's thoughts which the repeated suggestions seek to establish.

The value and importance of several sittings and repeated suggestions will be more fully understood when we realize that the majority of persons suffering from disease, as well as the greater number who suffer from bodily complaints in consequence of wrong thinking and morbid fears have been and are constantly giving themselves false suggestions. They are affected by the vile literature of unblushing quacks, who care nothing about, and know less of, therapeutics; whose only object is to frighten people and line their own pockets. Morbid Fears of Contagion or Infection—selfish fears in a thousand phases—help to make them all and keep them so.

Persons knowing that one or other of their grandparents or parents have died from pneumonia, consumption, cancer, heart disease, kidney trouble, apoplexy or some other complaint—perhaps there has also been some form of mental disease or marked peculiarity of manner in one or other of their progenitors; it matters little what, but it is sufficient to know that these things have been; they dwell upon history, retail the facts to friends, express fear for themselves and say, "You know his father (or so and so on his father's side) died of------;

I am afraid of------; he has such and such symptoms;" or these people themselves get into their head that they are likely to get ill and die of one or other of the foregoing diseases, because it is in the family, until every feeling is distorted to fit in with the special trouble which is believed to be hereditary and must be theirs. These false suggestions, based on morbid fears do evil work.

All these erroneous suggestions as well as fixed ideas of an undesirable character have to be uprooted by counter-suggestions to give a change—a healthy change of direction to the mind. These new, correct and sympathetic suggestions will have double force:

(1) From the mind, intelligence, experience, personality or hypnotic influence of the operator; and

(2) From the suggestibility of the patient whose attention has been successfully concentrated upon some non-exciting and acceptable object or notion.

Then the healing or therapeutic suggestions are repeated and repeated, mentally rubbed in so as to deepen and fix them, giving a new and correct direction to the thought forces of the patient.

All diseases curable by medicines are curable by suggestion; brain and nervous diseases are more easily curable by suggestion than by any other means. Neuralgias, whether in the head or face or eleswhere in the body; rheumatism in various stages, various forms of headaches, whether arising from conditions within the brain or as reflexes from the body; neurasthenia—including the foregoing—hysteria, insomnia, hypochondriases, mental and moral perversions, dipsomania, drug and allied perversities, evil habits from nail-biting to positively demoralising and incorrigible weakness, theft and indecencies; excessive nervousness, sensitiveness, stammering, lack of moral fibre, strength of will, etc.; forget fulness, despondency, dyspepsia, constipation, self-consciousness, bashfulness, morbid fears of lightning, thunder, people, places, examinations and stage-fright, and more serious troubles, i. e., nervous deafness, blindness, paralysis, epilepsy, and in many cases insanity.

In many chronic and even functional diseases suggestion has proved an effective cure, when found intractable to medicinal treatment. It will therefore be found that suggestion—while not a cure-all—will cure diseases amenable to medicinal substances, and others which have not been amenable, and indeed cannot be cured by the practice of medicine.

This is the great value of suggestion in Hypnotism.

This section of the work (Part I) embraces the whole machinery of "New Thought Science" in any of its phases; the principles dealt with here should therefore be thoroughly studied and applied before the student can successfully step into the Practical Plane.