A Teacher
Frederick W. Bailes
Mental-equivalent healing through wholly inward Science-of-Mind treatment
The transmission
Frederick W. Bailes (1889–1970) was one of the most popular teachers of Science of Mind in mid-century Los Angeles. Originally trained toward medical missionary work, he became a close associate of Ernest Holmes, serving as Assistant Dean of the Science of Mind Institute and leading what was for a time the largest Religious Science congregation of its day.
His best-known book, Your Mind Can Heal You (1941), set out his distinctive, highly systematic approach to spiritual mind treatment for healing. Bailes’s contribution was to make treatment a precise, wholly mental discipline.
Where popular New Thought often blended prayer, feeling, and affirmation loosely, Bailes taught that healing work is done entirely inside the practitioner’s own consciousness: the task is to build and hold a clear “mental equivalent” of perfection for the person treated, removing every inner picture of sickness, rather than acting on the patient or pleading with an external deity.
He codified this into a memorable seven-step sequence (the seven “R’s”), giving students a repeatable inner procedure.
What they gave
Seven-step treatment: codified spiritual mind treatment into the seven “R’s,” a clear inward procedure.
- Mental-equivalent doctrine: taught that the whole work is building a perfect inner picture, done entirely in the practitioner’s mind.
- Systematised healing: turned diffuse New Thought healing into a teachable, step-by-step mental discipline.
- Mass teaching: spread Science of Mind through a large congregation, radio, and Your Mind Can Heal You (1941).
In their words
Man’s inner world of thought is translated into his outer world of things.
Deeper mind is habitual mind. Whatever we entertain often enough and vividly enough in our surface mind — whether by conscious, deliberate choice or by choice made so rapidly that we are not aware we have made it — eventually passes into deeper mind, where it continues to act automatically.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Ernest Holmes and Science of Mind; Thomas Troward; the wider New Thought healing tradition.
Influenced: Religious Science practitioners; later mental-healing and treatment teaching.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- Your Mind Can Heal You1941
- Hidden Power for Human Problems1957