nor are they without prophylactic and therapeutic power, for they provide strong psychic suggestions, whether in the form of a potato carried in the pocket, a little bag of asafetida worn about the neck, or a bit of bone or ivory, or even a foot wrenched from a dead animal.

It is a good think the carriers of such items are unfamiliar with the teachings from the Vedists and Buddhists. If they were aware of the potent negative energy which seeps into, then permeates their being to their very timeless souls, they would cast away such items, or encase them within a museum and never handle them again.

Buddhists practice a form of spiritual psychotherapy which recognizes that we must release ourselves from the past by acting in the present and thereby building better foundations for the future. Practitioners follow the general lines of today's Psychotherapists, and in some ways American "Faith Cure" healers, accomplishing astonishing results in the healing of many forms of disease.

They teach patients to practice "Right Speech," (which Occidentals call "Affirmation,") and sometimes Buddhist healers give healing herbal cakes to eat after they have been devoted, thus adding herbal pharmaceuticals to the whole transaction.

We Occidentals are mere children in the practice of psychic healing when brought into comparison with the Indian Vedists. Their whole framework of thought is steeped with many centuries of mystic teachings, such that their words are infused with the delicious, dreamy accents of the sacred; whereas our western healers are just entering the portals of the preparatory school of psychotherapy, Indian Yogis are well on in their post-graduate course.

In my library I have a handbook on the subject by Yogi Ramacharaka which is a marvel of conciseness and completeness as such. It does not pretend to enter the domain of philosophy but confines itself to a setting forth of the most approved methods of treating various diseases by psychic methods.

For centuries mental therapeutics has had a home in India's soil, as well as other nations in the East. It is said that in Bali, there are teachers who share the most powerful syncretic mysticsm thus far developed.

The methods so long in operation in these remote regions are beginning to have an influence today throughout the western world. Every day one reads of new methods of psychotherapy emerging from the salons of Europe which draw upon some principle or example from the ancients throughout the world.

Within America great ideas have often been imported. At times these ideas are brought by new waves of immigrants, at others they are found by explorers and carried home. Unlike the "old countries" from which these ideas come, the "new world" has always been a melting pot of peoples and ideas. While those lands which are the sources of various peoples, who are often reluctant to explore new foods and new methods. Americans delight in the finding the new, then absorbing, and eventually transforming it through grasp of principle and practice.

Perhaps the greatest contrast between the United States and the old countries is that Americans refuse to be governed by superstition or fear of knowledge. Whereas the British and Germans are still ruled by monarchs, and the Near East ruled by petty potentates who loot their lands while lording over their peoples with the support of decadent religions and sad superstitions, we are governed by our Constitution and the province of belief is personal and not appropriate for recognition by our government.

Thus these approaches to healing, both novel and ancient are freely explored without limitation.