Goines had recently recommended night-time affirmations, or auto-suggestions, to his friend Lane, who was plagued almost every morning by a morass of dark and troubling thoughts. Such auto-suggestions (or self-commands) had helped Goines avoid that same sort of morass, time and time again, for years, whenever Goines felt the need. And it helped Goines think of solutions to problems as well. The “trick” was simply to convince himself (his subconscious, although he wasn’t exactly sure what that was) that it would do whatever might be necessary to wake him up in a good, or “positive” frame of mind, or to come up with an idea.
