Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography · 27 of 34

XIX. I Rule the Body

There is no axiom plainer than that the higher should control the lower, and no one but a positive materialist can deny that man is above his body. The “fall of man” consists of his dropping into subjection to his animal nature. When the body rules, it soon becomes an unrelenting tyrant, but, if it occupies a secondary place, it is serviceable and beautiful. Man must assert his superiority. Spiritual victory must be achieved and old things become new. Desire and aspiration are laws of growth. Demand brings supply, and nothing in the universe can hold it back. Every soul is invested with a divine dignity and should reign in its own kingdom. Man is a prince, and to abdicate his heirship is to fail of his grand end. I will never surrender my God-given prerogative. I deny the rule of the seen, sensuous, and the material. I am surcharged with spiritual potency and life. I link myself to that which cannot be shaken. I ascend the mount of spiritual vision and realize divine sonship and rightful dominion. I rule the body and bodily mind.

Insight

The fall of man consists of his dropping into subjection to his animal nature — Wood is reading Genesis 3 inwardly, as Origen had in the third century and as the Christian mystical tradition would continue to do through Eckhart, Boehme, and the Quakers. The reading does theological work: the fall is not a single past event with universal forensic consequences but a continuous condition of misordered hierarchy in the soul. Plato had the same picture in the Republic IV — the just soul is the one where reason rules the spirited part and the appetites, and the unjust soul is the one where the order is inverted. The pastoral upshot is real: noticing which part of the human composite is doing the steering, moment to moment, is the actual practice. The metaphysical extension into total dominion over the body that the meditation reaches for at the close is the New Thought confidence at its highest pitch.