Affirmation · “The Subconscious Says Yes”
Evans's Cure by Changed Belief
To cure or relieve disease by deliberately withdrawing belief from it and fixing the conviction of health, on the idealist premise that disease is first a wrong state of mind.
Evans’s changed-belief cure in 4 lines: Disease is first a fixed belief, not just a body-state. Deliberately withdraw belief from the disease — refuse it the status of unchangeable fact. Calmly fix the opposite conviction: health is the truth of your being (“according to your faith”). Catch and re-correct the disease-thought all day until wholeness is your resting belief. (Adjunct to medicine, never a replacement.)
What it is
Warren Felt Evans — a Methodist minister turned Swedenborgian, and a patient and student of Phineas Quimby — wrote the first books of the mind-cure movement.
His foundational method is the cure by changed belief: since (in his idealist view) disease is at root a wrong state of mind that has externalized into the body, you heal by deliberately withdrawing belief from the disease and fixing the belief of health.
This is the seed-idea every later New Thought “treatment,” affirmation, and denial grew from. Evans states it plainly: “we can never get well until we stop thinking we are sick,” and the work is “to break up the confirmed habit of thinking that we are diseased.”
The Method
Drawn faithfully from Evans’s three healing books:
- Grasp the premise first. For Evans, “a man. in health or disease. is only the expression or external translation of his thoughts and ideas” (Primitive Mind-Cure). Belief is causal; the body is downstream. You are not lying to yourself — you are correcting the prior mental cause.
- Identify the disease-belief. Notice the fixed conviction “I am sick / this is incurable / my body is failing.” Evans treats this settled belief, not the tissue, as the thing to dissolve.
- Deliberately deny its reality and necessity. Evans teaches that “in sickness, it is possible to think. that the disease does not belong to the class of truly existing things” (Primitive Mind-Cure). You consciously refuse to grant the disease the status of an unchangeable fact. (This is the ancestor of the New Thought “denial.”)
- Fix the opposite conviction — health as the truth of your being. Replace the withdrawn belief with the settled idea of wholeness. Evans anchors this in “it is ever unto us according to our faith” (Matt. 9:29), which he reads as a law: experience follows conviction.
- Hold it with feeling, not strain. Evans is clear that mere words are weak; the belief must be received as true, calmly and confidently, the way one accepts any obvious fact. The aim is a changed inner conviction, not forced repetition.
- Police the habit all day. Because disease is a “confirmed habit of thinking,” the cure is sustained vigilance: catch the disease-thought when it returns and re-fix the health-thought, until the new conviction is the resting state of mind. (Sourcing note: all bracketed-phrase quotes above are Evans’s own wording from the 1869–1885 texts, attributed. Connective explanation is faithful paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889) studied with Phineas P. Quimby, the mesmeric healer who is the fountainhead of New Thought, and fused Quimby’s practice with Emanuel Swedenborg’s spiritual idealism and a Berkeleyan “matter is idea” metaphysics. → (id evans warren felt).
The Mental Cure (1869) is generally counted the first New Thought book. Everything downstream — Eddy’s Christian Science, Hopkins, the Fillmores, Cady, Holmes — inherits this changed-belief premise.
Evans predates them all, so this file is the root form of the technique, before it was systematized into formal “treatments.”
Common refinements
Denial-as-suppression. Evans’s “the disease is not a truly existing thing” is a metaphysical claim about ultimate reality, not a license to pretend you have no symptoms. Used as ordinary denial it becomes dangerous avoidance.
- Word-chanting without conviction. Evans warns the belief must be genuinely received; rote repetition with an unchanged inner conviction does little.
- Forcing it. Strained willpower against the disease-thought tends to fixate on it. Aim for calm reassignment of belief, not a fight.
- Refinement: pair the withdrawal of the disease-belief (this file) with the positive identification of the well self — Evans uses both halves together.