ill-health, or even disease. Allowing the thoughts to dwell upon
morbid things is a sure way to sickness and invalidism.

Man is not only made ill by his own negative thoughts and emotions,
he is also under the hypnotic spell of the race mind. "The God of
this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not." We are
all under the spell, more or less, of a huge illusion. The evil,
disease, sickness and other imperfections that we see and experience,
have no reality, _in reality_, but have an _existence_ in _unreality_.
[7] Although they are not real in a real sense, yet they are terribly
real to this present limited consciousness. By realizing the truth,
and by thinking and living in its light and power, the hypnotic spell
becomes broken, not completely, else we should not grow old, but to
such an extent that a state of greatly improved health can be enjoyed.

  [7] For a fuller explanation of this metaphysical statement see
      Science of Thought Text Books, Nos. I. and II.

We are also hypnotically affected by suggestion, which reaches us
from a thousand different sources. The conversations of friends and
acquaintances, affect us adversely. Their belief in disease and
sickness as realities, and in its inevitableness, colours all their
conversation, and, unless we guard against it, this unconsciously
affects us. Newspapers, magazines, books, all steeped in the same
error, also influence us unless we have become too positive to be
affected. From innumerable sources it is subtly suggested to us that
disease, sickness, infection are realities that cannot be evaded,
and to which we are prone. The effect of all this, putting it in
simple and elementary language, is to divert the life power into
wrong channels, thus producing disease and ill-health in place of
perfection. The normal state of health has to give place to an
abnormal state of disease or sickness. The normal health-state is,
however, restored when Truth is realized, and the life lived in Its
light and power. Absolute Truth and Perfection stand behind all the
illusion and imperfection of the sense life. It is by realizing the