Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion

SUGGESTION AND AUTO - SUGGESTION WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON First published 1909 " (...) No one is compelled to accept a suggestion — no one is prevented from rejecting one. On the contrary every person has the power to choose and decide between the impressions coming to him from the outside world, and to accept or reject as he wills. By the proper mental attitude one may cause adverse suggestions to fly from him as the bullet is deflected from the steel armor of the battle-ship. And by turning the attention toward the kind of suggestions he wishes for, he may discover them and select them as his own from amidst the mass of impressions of the contrary character. One draws his own to him — he finds that for which he seeks. As Kay says: “When one is engaged in seeking for a thing, if he keep the image of it clearly before the mind, he will be very likely to find it, and that too, probably where it would otherwise have escaped his notice.... Truly we may say of the mind, as has been said of the eye, that ‘it perceives only what it brings with it the power of perceiving.’” And as John Burroughs has aptly illustrated: “No one ever found the walking fern who did not have the walking fern in his mind. A person whose eye is full of Indian relics, picks them up in every field he walks through. They are quickly recognized because the eye has been commissioned to find them.” And the mind may be commissioned to find the things needed and sought for, as well as may be the eye..."