Wisdom Vault — onlinknow.co.za

than hinders its work. To make a useful and happy life dependent upon health, is to put matter before mind, is to subordinate spirit to body. Men of robust minds do not dwell upon their bodily condition if it be in any way disordered — they ignore it, and work on, live on, as though it were not.

This ignoring of the body not only keeps the mind sane and strong, but it is the best resource for curing the body. If we cannot have a perfectly sound body, we can have a healthy mind, and healthy mind is the best route to a sound body.

A sickly mind is more deplorable than a disordered body, and it leads to sickliness of body. The mental invalid is in a far more pitiable condition than the bodily invalid. There are invalids (every physician knows them) who only need to lift themselves into a strong, unselfish, happy frame of mind to discover that their body is whole and capable.

Sickly thoughts about oneself, about one's body and food, should be abolished by all who are called by the name of man. The man, who imagines that the wholesome food he is eating is going to injure him, needs to come to bodily vigour by the way of mental strength.

To regard one's bodily health and safety as being dependent on a particular kind of food which is absent from nearly every household, is to court petty disorders. The vegetarian who says he dare not eat potatoes, that fruit produces indigestion, that apples give him acidity, that pulses are poison, that he is afraid of green vegetables and so on, is demoralizing the noble cause which he professes to have espoused, is making it look ridiculous in the eyes of those robust meat eaters who live above such sickly fears and morbid self-scrutinies.

To imagine that the fruits of the earth, eaten when one is hungry and in need of food, are destructive of health and life is to totally misunderstand the nature and office of food. The office of food is to sustain and preserve the body, not to undermine and destroy it.

It is a strange delusion — and one that must react deleteriously upon the body — that possesses so many who are seeking health by the way of diet, the delusion that certain of the simplest, most natural, and purest of viands are bad of themselves, that they have in them the elements of death, and not of life.

One of these food-reformers once told me that he believed his ailment (as well as the ailments of thousands of others) was caused by eating bread; not by an excess of bread, but by the bread itself; and yet this man's bread food consisted of nutty, home-made, whole meal loaves.

Let us get rid of our sins, our sickly thoughts, our self-indulgences and foolish excesses before attributing our diseases to such innocent causes. Dwelling upon one's petty troubles and ailments is a manifestation of weakness of character.

To so dwell upon them in thought leads to frequent talking about them, and this, in turn, impresses them more vividly upon the mind, which soon becomes demoralized by such petting and pitying. It is as convenient to dwell upon happiness and health as upon Man: King of Mind, Body and Circumstance by James Allen 16 misery and disease; as easy to talk about them, and much more pleasant and profitable to do so.