23. When you cannot sleep six consecutive hours; 24. When the saliva is bitter, and your eyes settle vacantly upon the air; 25. When you fret and borrow trouble, and harbor resentment, and exalt and blister your mind with super-irritation—when you are obstinate in trifles, and violent on small occasions, and harsh and undignified in the presence of others; 26. When there is a prostration and degeneration in the organs of procreation, or enervation and ejaculation among these organs, either with or without hysterical or hypochondriacal symptoms; 27. When you are excited with groundless fears of being poisoned, or become unaccountably suspicious of the integrity of those long your best friends; 28. When you start and tremble at the slightest unexpected noise or intrusion; 29. When there is a change in your bodily and mental habits, accompanied with discontent and misanthropical impulses; 30. When you believe that the Infinite Good is forever balanced in the universe by the Infinite Evil, and that there are at this moment millions of persons once on earth suffering the ineffable agonies of an everlasting hell; ** 31. When with exemplary fortitude you bear the losses, embarrassments, and bereavements of your neighbors, but disturb the whole community and overtax the patience of your relatives when similar trials become your own; 32. When you conceive a passion for acquiring suddenly an immense property by speculation in stocks, lands, bonds, etc., and feel an uncontrollable impulse to buy freely and largely, and to not pay your debts; 33. When you find yourself with a laborious digestion, yet constantly gormandizing, and consigning inordinate quantities of solid * So long as this Oriental mythology is entertained and preached simply as a theory in religion, it may be paid for and held as harmless, and need not be denounced as a powerful cause of hopeless melancholy, insanity, and suicide. But it becomes dangerous to human mental health the moment it becomes a profound conviction in any sincere mind; hence it is not too much to say that all who sincerely believe such a doctrine are either now inmates of lunatic asylums, or are being this moment prepared by their sorrowing friends for a speedy trip to such a deplorable destiny. food to your distended stomach: once or twice a week noticing that you experience slight confusion of ideas, vertigo, chaotic thinking, thoughts flying swiftly, or jumping about from one thing to another without order or motive, loss of memory at intervals, and occasional debilitation or indifference to exertion among the reasoning faculties; 34. When late in the afternoon, or during the early hours of night, you feel unaccountably cheerful and social and chatty, retire in good humor, and sleep soundly for three or four hours; then habitually wake up all over and cannot go to sleep again; next morning oppressed with unaccountable melancholy, rapt in self-contemplation, egotism, and self-feeling, with a world of superlative misery resting upon your soul; 35. When you notice that strangers and acquaintances alike contrive to avoid you; 36. When you notice that your mind is no longer instinctively delicate concerning duty, propriety, decency, immorality, rape, murder, and criminal conduct; 37. When you fancy yourself exceedingly gross and dirty (that is, if you are not unusually so); that you are afflicted with leprosy, full of corruption, a walking stench in your own nostrils, with desperate determination to resist food in order to become purified and thoroughly refined; 38. When you fancy that you know more than anybody and everybody else; that you are soon to be ordained by heaven with a worldimportant mission; that your wealth and greatness will surpass kings, emperors, and presidents; that your position and magnificent office are equal to or greater than any prince or messiah you ever dreamed or heard of; 39. When your mind is disposed to repeat, over and over, again and again, the circular counting of figures, or the audible speaking to yourself of a monotonous lingo of meaningless words; 40. When you hear voices * in the wind, intelligent words in footsteps, voices suggesting crimes or whispering lustful hints, or in the * Mediums, when listening to voices of visitors from the Summerland, may be distinguishable from insane auditors by the sense communicated. It is not true that any class of spirits are sometimes engaged in tantalizing, blasphemous, or lustful conversa rattling of a door or window you seem to hear subdued conversation and plans laid to involve yourself; 41. When you seem to smell the corruption of mankind as noisome exhalations from vaults and catacombs, affecting all you eat and drink with offensive odors, which seem to contaminate clothing and furniture, and seeming to render yourself disgusting to everybody who approaches you; * 42. When you see sparks of fire and flashes of light while in darkness you suddenly shut or open your eyes. This may mean either development in clairvoyance, or sub-acute insanity of the optic nerves as in delirium tremens, when the entire seeing functions are so disordered that the judgment itself is misimpressed and deranged; 43. When you suddenly see flies crawling on the wall or bedclothes, or small dark objects floating and weaving through each other in the air, or fiends or devils with either the faces of strangers or resembling departed friends in the atmosphere; † 44. When, finally, things and persons about you seem to have been changed, and do not appear and impress you as they used to, causing you to feel and to assert most positively that they, and not you, have undergone the alteration which you openly deplore and from which you privately yearn to escape. Faithfully I have.followed my impressions in bringing the foregoing mental storm signals before the eyes tions; and yet when the auditory nerve-cell is insane, the person seems to hear just what is affirmed. * It is understood, of course, that your body has been and is kept commonly wellwashed and decently free from the "diseased magnetism" described in the fore part of this work. † Again it must be affirmed that imperfect mediumship is full of these optical imperfections and illusions. These optical misimpressions depart when the medium's perceptions become clear and orderly. Spiritualists should exercise the most exalted common sense in dealing with a subject so ineffably delicate as holding converse with individuals stripped of earth and its multitudinous errors. An insane seer of sight "declares a stranger to be a relation or friend, or declares a near relation is not the person but somebody else says her husband is not her husband, but a stranger, yet, possibly, asks after all at home-says the men in attendance are women, or the women men, or calls the medical attendant by the name of some former friend." of my readers. Thousands, by heeding these admonitions, can comprehend their own bodily and mental states, preventing in themselves the incubation of hereditary crime-eggs, and arresting the development of temporary insanity from whatever cause. These "beacon lights," by illuminating at safe intervals the whole sea of life, may strengthen your understanding, harmonize your personal habits, relieve alarmed and bewildered feelings, and make available your own selfhealing energies through their prime-minister, Will. MEDICINES FOR MALADIES OF BODY AND SOUL. TWENTY-ONE years ago I embodied in a volume* what I was most thoroughly impressed to term the only true and divine medicines which, by operating magnetically upon the body through the spiritual principle, can unfold and advance individual health and happiness; and these medicines, which should be regarded sacredly as agents and elements emanating from the fountain of universal Nature, are: DRESS, FOOD, WATER, AIR, LIGHT, ELECTRICITY, AND MAGNETISM. Of these seven remedial agents, breathed from the inspiring Spirit of the universe, I need not again write. (The work referred to, also the "Harbinger of Health,” are filled with prescriptions for the physically and mentally insane.) With these unchangeable principles, comprehended and administered as medicines, I yet more firmly believe that it is possible to "Fetter strong madness with a silken thread, Additional medicines, however, may be here presented; to be administered upon principles already made * Reference is here made to the author's first volume of the Great Harmonia, entitled The Physician, p. 263 et seq. |