A number of years ago I attended a theater where the emcee introduced a hypnotist and asked the audience for volunteers to come up onstage to be hypnotized. The hypnotist spoke to each person briefly, then dismissed the majority of volunteers, leaving only four people. When the emcee asked why he had dismissed the others, his reply was, “I cannot hypnotize anyone. I just throw out some suggestions, and the volunteers either accept them or reject them.”
The hypnotist put the four volunteers under a mesmeric trance and had them do silly things that amused the audience. Then he dismissed three of the volunteers but retained one man. After again putting the man in a trance, the hypnotist told him and the audience that he was going to have the worst toothache he would ever have. Immediately the man’s jaw started to swell as if he had a ping-pong ball in his cheek. He started to run around the stage screaming in pain, with tears running down his face, while the audience laughed uncontrollably.
The hypnotist motioned for silence and said, “You think this is very funny, don’t you? This man couldn’t have a worse toothache if he really had one!” He then snapped his fingers, and the man’s jaw went back to normal. The hypnotist told him he would not remember a thing, thanked him for his participation, and asked him to return to the audience.
This experience made me think of a passage in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Next to the marginal heading “The evil of mesmerism,” Mary Baker Eddy writes: “We say that one human mind can influence another and in this way affect the body, but we rarely remember that we govern our own bodies. The error, mesmerism—or hypnotism, to use the recent term—illustrates the fact just stated. The operator would make his subjects believe that they cannot act voluntarily and handle themselves as they should do. If they yield to this influence, it is because their belief is not better instructed by spiritual understanding.… The involuntary pleasure or pain of the person under hypnotic control is proved to be a belief without a real cause” (p. 402).
Some years later my teenage son developed a toothache, and a swelling on his jaw protruded out. He asked me to pray for him as we are taught in Christian Science. We were talking about his true likeness to his Father-Mother God, in whom is no pain, swelling, or discomfort of any kind, when I suddenly remembered the hypnotist’s theater performance. I told my son about the man on stage who was mesmerized into believing he had a toothache, and how the man’s body responded with the typical symptoms. But the toothache wasn’t true; it was just a suggestion the man had accepted. The audience laughed because they knew it wasn’t true.
I told my son, “We need to see that this aggressive mental suggestion of a toothache is just as false as it was for the man on the stage. We have to laugh at it, just as the audience did, because we know it’s untrue. God never made you mortal or material, but spiritual and perfect.”
I shared with him a statement Mrs. Eddy makes in Science and Health: “Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual,—neither in nor of matter,—and the body will then utter no complaints. If suffering from a belief in sickness, you will find yourself suddenly well” (p. 14). A half hour later the swelling had gone, my son’s jaw looked normal, and all pain had vanished.
How wise Mrs. Eddy was to include in the Manual of The Mother Church the By-Law titled “Alertness to Duty”: “It shall be the duty of every member of this Church to defend himself daily against aggressive mental suggestion, and not be made to forget nor to neglect his duty to God, to his Leader, and to mankind. By his works he shall be judged,—and justified or condemned” (p. 42). My son’s healing proves that obedience to this By-Law keeps us from being unwitting volunteers to suffer disease.
Rochester Hills, Michigan, US
