Contemplation and Suggestion : Part 5

The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today
by Evelyn Underhill

(Page 8 of 15)

We must now go on - and indeed, any psychological study of prayerful experience must lead us on - to the subject of suggestion, and its relation to the inner life. By suggestion of course is here meant, in conformity with current psychological doctrine, the process by which an idea enters the deeper and unconscious psychic levels and there becomes fruitful. Its real nature, and in consequence something of its far-reaching importance, is now beginning to be understood by us: a fact of great moment for both the study and the practice of the spiritual life. Since the transforming work of the Spirit must be done through man's ordinary psychic machinery and in conformity with the laws which govern it, every such increase in our knowledge of that machinery must serve the interests of religion, and show its teachers the way to success. Suggestion is usually said to be of two kinds. The first is hetero-suggestion, in which the self-realizing idea is received either wittingly or unwittingly from the outer world. During the whole of our conscious lives for good or evil we are at the mercy of such hetero-suggestions, which are being made to us at every moment by our environment; and they form, as we shall afterwards see, a dominant factor in corporate religious exercises. The second type is auto-suggestion. In this, by means of the conscious mind, an idea is implanted in the unconscious and there left to mature. Thus do willingly accepted beliefs, religious, social, or scientific, gradually and silently permeate the whole being and show their results in character.

A little reflection shows, however, that these two forms of suggestion shade into one another; and that no hetero-suggestion, however impressively given, becomes active in us until we have in some sort accepted it and transformed it into an auto-suggestion. Theology expresses this fact in its own special language, when it says that the will must co-operate with grace if it is to be efficacious. Thus the primacy of the will is safe-guarded. It stands, or should stand, at the door; selecting from among the countless dynamic suggestions, good and bad, which life pours in on us, those which serve the best interests of the self.

As a rule, men take little trouble to sort out the incoming suggestions. They allow uncriticized beliefs and prejudices, the ideas of hatred, anxiety or ill-health, free entrance. They fail to seize and affirm the ideas of power, renovation, joy. They would be more careful, did they grasp more fully the immense and often enduring effect of these accepted suggestions; the extent in which the fundamental, unreasoning psychic deeps are plastic to ideas. Yet this plasticity is exhibited in daily life first under the emotional form of sympathy, response to the suggestion of other peoples' feeling-states; and next under the conative form of imitation, active acceptance of the suggestion made by their appearance, habits, deeds. All political creeds, panics, fashion and good form witness to the overwhelming power of suggestion. We are so accustomed to this psychic contagion that we fail to realize the strangeness of the process: but it is now known to reach a degree previously unsuspected, and of which we have not yet found the limits.

In the religious sphere, the more sensational demonstrations of this psychic suggestibility have long been notorious. Obvious instances are those ecstatics - some of them true saints, some only religious invalids - whose continuous and ardent meditation on the Cross produced in them the actual bodily marks of the Passion of Christ. In less extreme types, perpetual dwelling on this subject, together with that eager emotional desire to be united with the sufferings of the Redeemer which mediæval religion encouraged, frequently modified the whole life of the contemplative; shaping the plastic mind, and often the body too, to its own mould. A good historic example of this law of religious suggestibility is the case of Julian of Norwich. As a young girl, Julian prayed that she might have an illness at thirty years of age, and also a closer knowledge of Christ's pains. She forgot the prayer: but it worked below the threshold as forgotten suggestions often do, and when she was thirty the illness came. Its psychic origin can still be recognized in her own candid account of it; and with the illness the other half of that dynamic prayer received fulfilment, in those well-known visions of the Passion to which we owe the "Revelations of Divine Love."

This is simply a striking instance of a process which is always taking place in every one of us, for good or evil. The deeper mind opens to all who knock; provided only that the new-comers be not the enemies of some stronger habit or impression already within. To suggestions which coincide with the self's desires or established beliefs it gives an easy welcome; and these, once within, always tend to self-realization. Thus the French Carmelite Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus, once convinced that she was destined to be a "victim of love," began that career of suffering which ended in her death at the age of twenty-four. The lives of the Saints are full of incidents explicable on the same lines: exhibiting again and again the dramatic realization of traditional ideas or passionate desires. We see therefore that St. Paul's admonition "Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things be of good report, think on these things" is a piece of practical advice of which the importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it deals with the conditions under which man makes his own mentality.

Suggestion, in fact, is one of the most powerful agents either of self-destruction or of self-advancement which are within our grasp: and those who speak of the results of psycho-therapy, or the certitudes of religious experience, as "mere suggestion" are unfortunate in their choice of an adjective. If then we wish to explore all those mental resources which can be turned to the purposes of the spiritual life, this is one which we must not neglect. The religious idea, rightly received into the mind and reinforced by the suggestion of regular devotional exercises, always tends to realize itself. "Receive His leaven," says William Penn, "and it will change thee, His medicine and it will cure thee. He is as infallible as free; without money and with certainty. Yield up the body, soul and spirit to Him that maketh all things new: new heaven and new earth, new love, new joy, new peace, new works, a new life and conversation." This is fine literature, but it is more important to us to realize that it is also good psychology: and that here we are given the key to those amazing regenerations of character which are the romance and glory of the religious life. Pascal's too celebrated saying, that if you will take holy water regularly you will presently believe, witnesses on another level to the same truth.

New York, E.P. Dutton & Company
Copyright, 1922 BY E.P. Dutton & Company