Author’s Introduction
Author’s Introduction
Everyone may and can live abundantly. The business of life is to live and to live well and adequately and abundantly. But this age knows almost everything about life except how to live it. It is not enough to know about life—we must know how to live life. “I have lived through everything except life,” said one disillusioned son of this age. We can pick life to pieces and explain its constituent parts and then fail miserably to put it together again in such a way that it becomes a coordinated, harmonious whole. We are long on analysis and short on synthesis.
The reason is not hard to find. We have dissected life and desiccated it in the process. We have picked the flower of life to pieces, petal by petal, and have lost its beauty in the procedure. We have handed the body over to the doctor, the mind to the psychiatrist, and the soul to the minister, treating these three parts as separate entities. They are not separate. Life is a whole. You cannot affect one part without affecting all three.
Doctors vary in their estimate of the percentage of people who pass on mental and spiritual sickness to their bodies. In a group of doctors at a medical school, a psychiatrist said that 40 percent of the cases that came to their clinic were mental and spiritual in origin. But the surgeons present insisted that the percentage was probably 60 percent. A pastor friend of mine, while being examined by a very able doctor, remarked, “Doctor, I wish I had the equipment for dealing with people that come to me as you have for dealing with those who come to you.” The doctor replied, “Forty percent of the people who come to me should not have gone past you.” While he put the percentage at 40 percent, an outstanding neurologist put it at 80 percent, and another able doctor put it at 85 percent, with only 15 percent physical. The American Medical Association officially approves of the statement of Dr. C. Raimer Smith in Hygeia (June 1931), that the percentage is about 50/50.
Here, then, we have estimates varying from 40 percent to 85 percent of people who are passing on their mental and spiritual sicknesses to their bodies. But what of those whose mental and spiritual disharmonies have not yet affected their bodies in any obvious way? The human body is often very tough. It can resist and throw off not only microbes but also noxious mental and spiritual attitudes. Although these mental and spiritual disharmonies may not break the body, they do disrupt the personality and render it ineffective and unhappy.
A successful management engineer, a man who takes hold of sick businesses and puts them on their feet again, said to me that 95 percent of the difficulties in a sick business are not in the business, but in the persons concerned: They get snarled up in their lives and pass on their inner snarls to their outer circumstances. They cannot get along with themselves and hence cannot get along with others. The spirit dies out of the business, for there is no real cooperation. The business cannot be straightened out until the persons are straightened out. Hence this man often sits till past midnight talking with executives and heads of departments on how to get oneself unsnarled. As they talk, they are driven to the necessity of religion, the need of some higher Power to believe in and get resources from in order to win release and victory. When I quoted the above to the personnel man of Bethlehem Steel, he thoughtfully replied, “You are absolutely right in saying that 95 percent of the difficulties in business are in the persons concerned. I’ve found it so.” Dr. Irving Fisher, the economist, claims that of 5,000 failures in business that were investigated as to cause of failure, 2,500 were found to be personality failures. These 2,500 were sufficiently obvious to be traceable, but what of the personality failures so hidden that they could not be traced? They are nonetheless devastating.
Then what of those who, while not at open war with themselves and not failures outwardly, are nevertheless living under par? Someone has described the sharecroppers as “submarginal people living on submarginal land.” But the submarginal people are not all on submarginal land; many of them are in the fashionable suburbs of our great cities—dwarfed souls living in mansions. “I have learned how to make money, but I have not yet learned how to live,” said a very successful businessman with a sigh as the organ recital in his home came to an end—a recital that had momentarily lifted him up out of himself. He had accumulated physical resources to meet any outer emergency, only to find that life had reached behind his physical armor and had dealt him a staggering blow on the inside. There he had no resources with which to protect himself; he was unprotected at the vital spot.
But perhaps my readers are about to throw up their hands, saying, “Don’t open our wounds any further. We know them too well, and they are now raw and sore. Tell us how they may be healed. Tell us how.”
That last statement echoes a letter I received: “I don’t know how to find God in the way that he gives me spiritual uplift and strength. How . . . how do I find that?” Note that she says she wants to find God as something beyond a concept or belief; she wants to find God as a working way to live, as Someone who gives strength to live by.
This book will attempt to put the “How” into abundant living. The “ladders” I shall use have grown out of thousands of personal interviews I have held with baffled and defeated souls in the West and in the East. The ladders have been corrected and added to by the American Ashrams, where for two weeks groups of 150 selected people entered into a corporate disciplined quest for abundant living.
The arrangement of this book will follow the one used in Victorious Living, to which it is a sequel. Since that writing I have been led to see, in a clearer way, the intimate connection between states of mind and soul and physical health, and have tried to expound that connection in my book Is the Kingdom of God Realism? This book is intended to be the applied side of that one. I take the background of that book and apply it here for daily living.
As in Victorious Living, I try to supply a threefold need. First, there is the need for a daily devotional book to be used in the Quiet Hour, a page a day. Second, I have gathered up the discussion into units of a week, one subject having at least a seven-day treatment. This makes it possible for the book to be used in study groups on a weekly basis. Third, I have written it as an ordinary book that can be read straight through. In other words, I have carried one theme, “abundant living,” right through, beginning at the lowest rung of the ladder and going on to the application of the theme to the social relations of life.
If I begin far down and make my latchstrings low, the mature Christian must be patient with me. For I am persuaded that we who have lived out our lives in a Christian atmosphere do not realize how utterly illiterate are many otherwise intelligent people when they are faced with the problem of the meaning of the Christian faith and how to get hold of its power. I start where the “pagans” live—many of these “pagans” are inside, as well as outside, the church.
The socially minded must also be patient with me if I begin with and lay a great deal of stress on the personal in the first part of the book, for life begins with the personal. Later I will deal with the social, perhaps too much for some to follow. Not that I would separate the personal and the social, for they are one; but for purposes of treatment I begin with that which comes first. Perhaps my position can be summed up in these words: “Christianity that doesn’t begin with the individual doesn’t begin; Christianity that ends with the individual, ends.”
One word of caution before we start on our quest. This book is dealing with abundant living in its total phases—physical as well as moral and spiritual and social. In dealing with the physical, it recognizes the function of the science of medicine and surgery in producing health. The techniques given here for healthful physical living are not intended to supplant but to supplement the work of doctors. If it is true that we pass on our mental and spiritual sicknesses to our bodies, it is also true that the body passes on its ailments to the mental and spiritual. They intertwine. If, therefore, some of my readers are in doubt as to whether their ailments are rooted in the mental and spiritual or in the physical, it might be well to have a thorough physical checkup by a competent doctor. They may discover a physical basis for their under-par life and lack of contagion. We believe that God heals the body in one or more of these ways: (1) by medicine; (2) by surgery; (3) by scientific nutrition; (4) by climate; (5) by mental suggestion; (6) by deliverance from underlying fears, resentments, self-centeredness, and guilts; (7) by the direct action of the Spirit of God upon our bodies; and (8) by the resurrection. Some ailments may have to wait for that final curing, the resurrection, for we live in a mortal world where the body is bound to break down sometime. In that case, we can not merely bear the infirmity, we can use it. We can take it up into the purposes of our lives and transmute it into character and achievement. If, therefore, you have a bodily infirmity, you have these alternatives: God will cure you through one or more of the first seven ways; or, if not, God will give you power to use it, and to make it contribute until the final cure in the resurrection.
But this preface must not end on the physical, for the purpose of this book is abundant living in the total person and in the total society.
E. Stanley Jones