Our best friends and worst enemies

"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody." MARK TWAIN

By Alex P. Vidal

LOS ANGELES, California – Our thoughts are our best friends and our worst enemies.

A thought can do us more good than a priest or a faith healer or a faithful friend. 
It can also do us more harm than a boxer’s lucky punch.

That many people are injured in health by their thoughts is well known, according to religious minister, Dr. Frank Crane. Many systems of healing are built up around the idea of the healing nature of what takes place in the mind.

Christian Science largely depends on our control of our thoughts, and the Coue system rests upon the same basis, he pointed out.

Many of us have known what a disturbing thought can do to us when we are trying to go to sleep. 
All of us have passed sleepless nights with bothersome thoughts. 
If we could have dismissed these kinds of thoughts and had the consoling kind we would have been able to have our desired rest.

Thoughts get between us and our friends. 
Many a quarrel and a grudge has been kept alive by the wrong thought, and if we could have got rid of it or laughed at it the quarrel would have disappeared.

ENCOURAGE

The object of all religions is to encourage us in the right kind of thinking, to fill the mind with the proper images. 
For when the mind is full of wholesome thoughts the body responds.

“We can see what influence a thought has upon us by concentrating our attention, for instance, on our hand or foot; in a short time the member which we think about will develop some kind of a disease,” Crane explained.

“Every great work of man has been the result of a thought. A tall office building was once merely a thought. The cathedral was once a vision of the mind. In fact, it is thought, after all, which eventually commands material and controls brick and mortar.”

Thoughts are the causes of war. 
There would be no conflict if one nation did not get into a state of mind in regards to another.

PEACE

Thoughts bring on peace. 
They are the greatest of peace makers, although peace-producing thoughts are not so plentiful as those which produce trouble.

One of the hardest things for man to learn is that he can control the visions of his mind.
When one has mastered this difficult art and can in a measure determine what he shall think upon he is on a road to health and sanity.

Crane stressed: “On the contrary, to think of thoughts as something inevitable, something over which we have no control, and to whose influence we are subject as to an unescapable tyranny, is the way to laxness and disease.”

Doubtless every suicide is a culmination of wrong thinking. Every other kind of crime is the outbreak of wrong thinking,

“If the control of one’s self is the greatest of goals, the control of one’s thoughts is a still greater, for what a man thinketh so he is,” suggested Crane.