Self-Mesmerism is the abnormal condition of human beings. It is the result of their unbelief in the one and only Mind that is Omnipotent Intelligence, and the belief that each mortal has a mind of his own, a spirit of his own, an existence of his own. The testimony of corporeal sense can master every faculty of the human intellect and bring it under the belief of pleasure or the pains of the corporeal mind. Mortals are thus in Egypt, under the law of sin and death. Every crime against civil law, every form of disease, is possible under this condition of false belief. Such mortals are self-centered, and study cause and effect in the physical realm, so-called. Pride, with them, is ever the strong man who defends their house, and will unwittingly fight the Spirit of Truth that is ever seeking an entrance to despoil it and all the goods in possession, such as passion, fear, envy, deceit, hatred, and revenge. Such self-mesmerized mortals usually plume themselves in the thought that they are self-made, and always worship their creator,—self. They will love only those who are lovely to their sense, and especially those who flatter them and increase their vanity.
The belief that the body can give pleasure is but the subtle device of Malicious Animal Magnetism to enslave the victims in self-mesmerism and cause them to act as agents in drawing others into the snare. Mortals could not be won to Satan through the pains of the senses, which are the penalties of sin. Acute and chronic diseases are but penalties of mesmerism; they are but more positive forms of error that invert and pervert Divine law.
It is not uncommon to see companies of highly refined and intelligent ladies at an afternoon tea talking of their diseases, comparing symptoms, and discussing the merits of different physicians and remedies. They are the product of our schools, from the primary school up to the theological, medical, or State Universities, which are all teaching physical causation and physical effect in the study to preserve health and life, or bodily existence. This is "eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil," or studying the body instead of forgetting it. Jesus said, "Take no thought of your life,"—physical sense of existence. He never tells us the why, but Science reveals it as self-mesmerism. Jesus taught the Kingdom of Good, the absolute government of Infinite Mind. It is surely true that every other system than his is anti-Christian. Under the expression of the one divine Mind, all pure thought is legitimate and becomes a means to the new birth or the revelation of Christ, Truth, without which every human being is self-mesmerized, or a child of evil, and has yet to find "the Way, the Truth, the Life." He is "without God, and without hope in the world," —self-mesmerized. Such a mortal, by his intellectual capacity, may hold a senate in breathless silence for hours, but his is "the wisdom of this world which is foolishness with God," and he comes under the classification that Jesus made. I have known one of the grandest generals of the Civil War, and afterwards an eloquent senator, mesmerized by appetite until a time came in this process of self-enslavement where all that was real to him were the snakes entwined about his neck and arms.
