824 THE P R INC I P L E S 0 F PER SON A LIN T E G R I T Y
COMMENTARY
Many of Napoleon Hill's beliefs about the power of the mind that were con-
sidered unconventional in his time became part of mainstream medical and
psychological practice by the latter years of the twentieth century.
A number of seminal books on what is now commonly referred to as
"the body-mind connection" were published in the 1970s and 1980s. One
such book is Anatomy of an Illness, in which author Norman Cousins docu-
ments his use of laughter to help heal a painful and near-fatal illness. Other
books that speak to the power of laughter are The Laughter Prescription
by Dr. Laurence J. Peter, The Healing Power of Humor by Allen Klein, and
Laughter: The Best Medicine by Robert Holden."As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he:'
You cannot think fear and act courageously. You cannot think
hatred and act in a kindly manner toward others. And the domin-
ating thoughts of your mind-meaning the strongest, deepest, and
most frequent of your thoughts-influence the physical action of
your body.
Every thought put into action by your brain reaches and influ-
ences every cell in your body. When you think fear, your mind will
telegraph this thought to the cells that form the muscles of your legs
and tell those muscles to get into action and carry you away as rapidly
as they can. A person who is afraid runs away because their legs carry
them, and they carry them because the fear thought in the person's
mind instructed them to do so, even though the instructions were
given unconsciously.
In Lesson One of this course you learned how thought travels
from one mind to another, through the principle of telepathy. In this
lesson you should go a step further and learn that your thoughts not
only register themselves in the minds of other people through the
principle of telepathy, but what is a million times more important
for you to understand is that they register themselves on the cells