Sweet Mother, what does “a Couéistic optimism” mean?
Ah! Coué. You
don't know the story of Coué? Coué was a doctor. He used to treat by
psychological treatment, auto-suggestion, and he called this the true working
of the imagination; and what he defined as imagination was faith. And so he
treated all his patients in this way: they had to make a kind of imaginative
formation which consisted in thinking themselves cured or in any case on the
way to being cured, and in repeating this formation to themselves with
sufficient persistence for it to have its effect. He had very remarkable
results. He cured lots of people; only, he failed also, and perhaps these were
not very lasting cures, I don't know this.
But in any
case, this made many people reflect on something that's quite true and of
capital importance: that the mind is a formative instrument and that if one
knows how to use it in the right way, one gets a good result. He observed – and
I think it is true, my observation agrees with his – that people spend their
time thinking wrongly. Their mental activity is almost always half pessimistic,
and even half destructive. They are all the time thinking of and foreseeing bad
things which may happen, troublesome consequences of what they have done, and
they construct all kinds of catastrophes with an exuberant imagination which,
if it were utilised in the other way, would naturally have opposite and more
satisfying results.
If you observe
yourself, if you… how to put it?… if you catch yourself thinking – well, if you
do it suddenly, if you look at yourself thinking all of a sudden,
spontaneously, unexpectedly, you will notice that nine times out of ten you are
thinking something troublesome. It is very rarely that you are thinking about
harmonious, beautiful, constructive, happy things, full of hope, light and joy;
you will see, try the experiment. Suddenly stop and look at yourself thinking,
just like that: put a screen in front of your thought and look at yourself
thinking, off-hand, you will see this at least nine times out of ten, and
perhaps more. (It is very rarely, very rarely that one has in the whole day, suddenly,
a dazzling thought about what is going to happen or the state one is in or the
things one wants to do or the course of his life or world circumstances – it
depends, you see, on your preoccupation). Well, you will see, it is almost
always foreseeing a bigger or smaller, more or less vast catastrophe.
Say you have
the slightest thing that is not getting on quite well; if you think of your
body, it is always that something unpleasant is going to happen to it – because
when everything goes well, you don't think about it ! You will notice this:
that you act, you do all that you have to do, without having a single thought
about your body, and when all of a sudden you wonder whether there isn't
anything that's going wrong, whether there is some uneasiness or a difficulty,
something, then you begin to think of your body and you think about it with
anxiety and begin to make your disastrous constructions.
Whereas Coué
recommended… It was in this way that he cured his patients; he was a doctor, he
told them, “You are going to repeat to yourself: ‘I am being cured, gradually I
am getting cured' and again, you see, ‘I am strong, I am quite healthy and I
can do this, I can do that’.”
I knew someone
who was losing her hair disastrously, by handfuls. She was made to try this
method. When combing her hair she made herself think, “My hair will not fall
out.” The first and second time it did not work, but she continued and each
time before combing the hair she used to repeat with insistence, “I am going to
comb my hair but it won’t fall out.” And within a month her hair stopped
falling. Later she again continued thinking, “Now my hair will grow.” And she
succeeded so well that I saw her with a magnificent head of hair, and it was
she herself who told me this, that this was what she had done after being on
the point of becoming bald. It is very, very effective. Only, while one is
making the formation, another part of the mind must not say, “Oh, I am making a
formation and it is not going to be successful”, because in this way you undo
your own work.
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