While both Freud and Jung dabbled with hypnosis, each ultimately abandoned it as a tool to explore and heal the human psyche. Each would go on to offer his individual gifts to psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, but their abandonment of the exploration of hypnosis closed an important door to an essential gateway to knowledge of the anatomy and dynamics of the soul.

In the mid-19th century, an informally educated American clockmaker and mesmerist from Maine, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, abstracted from his hypnotic healing work a metaphysical working model of the psyche. While practicing mesmerism, his fervently inquisitive mind discovered the role of telepathy and the power of thought in creating physical reality, particularly physical illness.

Quimby ultimately abandoned mesmerism and spent the later part of his life as a healer. He would just sit with patients, himself in semi-trance yet also consciously present, thus in two places at once. He would then connect to the subconscious mind of his patient and have revealed to him the beliefs that caused their affliction.

Invariably, Quimby would discover that the root of the problem lay in a powerful belief, which the patient was often quite unaware they held in their subconscious mind. Quimby also discovered that the subconscious mind automatically manifested that belief, both physically and psychologically, as expressed through the patient’s symptoms.

Quimby would then explain to his patient the validity of their current condition, whose etiology was the physical manifestation of their belief. Quimby was also able to show them the limitation of their current belief in defining the deeper truth of their being, which was one of health. Fully embracing this new positive belief often led to a physical healing, largely through the mysterious but definite action of mental thought upon the physical manifestation capacity of the subconscious mind.

Quimby determined that the psyche is filled with powerful beliefs either internalized from significant relationships in one’s life or generated by  conscious thinking. Thus, for example, if one believes that they should be punished or limited because of something they have done, they might experience some kind of physical paralysis. Once freed of this limiting or punishing belief one’s paralysis could be lifted.

Quimby came to believe that the power of suggestion was fundamental to the human mind, which he believed to be of divine origin. The conscious mind holds the key to creation through the power of suggestion, while the subconscious mind has the divine power to physically manifest these suggestions received from the conscious mind.

In fact, every part of human life is generated by this dynamic relationship. Though apparently wide awake, we live in a state of constant trance, manifesting physically, at every moment, what we believe to be true.

For Quimby, health was achieved by taking conscious control of suggestions, based upon the truth of one’s divine origin rather than on the errors of opinions or suggestions not in alignment with truth. Quimby emphasized the human power of free will to create either physical problems or health and success, all based upon beliefs.

Quimby discovered a core shamanic truth. For shamans, humans are energetic beings who mentally generate a physical existence through the power of intent, or the power of suggestion. Though our physical life is quite real, it would be an error to say that it is our ultimate truth. Ultimately, we are energetic beings, with unlimited possibilities of physical expression.

Shamans call our physical life an interpretation of energy. There can be many interpretations of that energy, as Quimby points out, that generate physical illnesses. We have the ability to change our belief, whereby interpreting energy in a new physical way, through the manifesting power of the subconscious mind.

Unfortunately, Quimby died young, at the age of 64, in 1866. At that time, he was treating upwards of 500 patients per year. I surmise that his early death was caused by the same technical error that uninformed shamanic healers often make in soul retrieval healings.

Often, it is the shaman that literally takes possession of their patient’s lost soul, which had been caught in the grip of an unhealthy suggestion. The shaman then takes on responsibility for reconciling the tormented part soul within themselves, which they then return to their patient, who is healed through this restoration of their wholeness by the shaman.

The side effect for the shaman, via sympathy, is to also experience the symptoms of their patient’s tormented soul, which takes its toll upon the healer’s health. Carlos Castaneda taught that, in modern shamanism, the shaman is a guide but does not assume responsibility for a patient’s troubled soul. That healing must be fully assumed by the patient’s personal process of reconciliation with their lost soul, in recapitulation, for instance.

Although Quimby died prior to the formal naming of the New Thought philosophical and spiritual tradition, his work is credited universally as the birth of that movement. The ‘new thought’ of New Thought is that human beings are an active part of divinity, evolutionarily destined to discover and exercise their own divine power, in alignment with the greater good for self and all. Thus, in the New Thought tradition, the life of Christ, and other Bodhisattvas and Old Testament prophets, is revisioned as a teacher introducing humans to their divine powers.

Our current world could be characterized as a flurry of divine errors that reflect human experimentation with the power of suggestion to the subconscious mind. These errors are having the effect of the breakdown of civilization, as we have known it.

On the other hand, new life, or new interpretations of energy, require a clearing of old beliefs that must give way for new divine possibilities to take root. The atrocities of now are real, but suggestions are coming so rapidly that nothing in this interim period of transition is likely to achieve permanence. On the other hand, our world is unlikely to ever return to the comfort of a familiar past.

The opportunity for now is for all of us to individually and collectively state suggestions that align with the greater truth and good for all. That is a sustainable interpretation of energy. That is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius that we all share in. It’s why we are here now, to assume divine responsibility for the world dream we are in the midst of dreaming forward. How momentous!

Do think this New Year forward, with New Thoughts of love, truth and wisdom.

Happy thoughts for this Happy New Year,
Chuck