Chapter 1 : The Desire for Success
Whenever the question is asked: “What is the world seeking? What the world wants most to secure?” the answer will most likely be that the whole world is seeking happiness. No matter how diverse or obscure the backgrounds of the respondents may seem, they all lead toward this one point, and everything in life combines to make for this one emotion.
In order to be happy, people must determine on what terms success is defined. When we find out from an individual what that person calls success, we have mastered the secret of the thing which will make that person happy.
We may ask a hundred different people what they mean by success, and we will get a hundred different answers. Webster defines success as, “favourable results; prosperity,” and this is the definition which is generally accepted. Success, when rightly interpreted, means simply the power to do what we want to do. No matter what anyone else wants to do, or what that person might accomplish, that would not be our success. No one can really secure success except from one’s own plane of comprehension. There are those who look upon money and the power to amass it, as the only true success; they might have anything else the world can give, and yet they would feel unsuccessful and cast down. Another may want love, and he or she might win honor, fame, money, yet on missing love, the one thing that person truly wanted, he would be poor, unhappy, and unsuccessful. Success is a purely personal possession, and does not admit of a universal interpretation.
Granted that ... See more
Chapter 1 : The Desire for Success
Whenever the question is asked: “What is the world seeking? What the world wants most to secure?” the answer will most likely be that the whole world is seeking happiness. No matter how diverse or obscure the backgrounds of the respondents may seem, they all lead toward this one point, and everything in life combines to make for this one emotion.
In order to be happy, people must determine on what terms success is defined. When we find out from an individual what that person calls success, we have mastered the secret of the thing which will make that person happy.
We may ask a hundred different people what they mean by success, and we will get a hundred different answers. Webster defines success as, “favourable results; prosperity,” and this is the definition which is generally accepted. Success, when rightly interpreted, means simply the power to do what we want to do. No matter what anyone else wants to do, or what that person might accomplish, that would not be our success. No one can really secure success except from one’s own plane of comprehension. There are those who look upon money and the power to amass it, as the only true success; they might have anything else the world can give, and yet they would feel unsuccessful and cast down. Another may want love, and he or she might win honor, fame, money, yet on missing love, the one thing that person truly wanted, he would be poor, unhappy, and unsuccessful. Success is a purely personal possession, and does not admit of a universal interpretation.
Granted that Success really means getting what we want, and failure is the lack of power to do this, the next question which presents itself is, Why don’t all of us, in every walk f life, get just what we want, when we want it and for as long as we want it? Why are we all not successful according to our plane of desire? This is the vital point, and the vital answer to it is, we are successful or unsuccessful through our own unaided law.
Success can be arranged for in every life, just as simply as any other attribute of human existence can be.
It is an acknowledged fact that we have and express in ourselves just as much or as little as we have power to recognize and think possible of attainment. Success comes to us because we compel it. It does not wait around and then rush in without an accompanying effort on our own part. We achieve because we believe we can achieve, and we plan toward that end.
The physical world of competition is where some people look for what they call success and happiness, and on this plane many seem to be peculiarly subject to bad “luck.” They are always working, striving, and never attaining. They are always “out of a job.” If they go into business, they make a failure of it. If they take up any kind of occupation, they get sick and lose it. They are always poor. They live in lack, and every cell of their bodies evidences lack. The whole world is full of individuals who are always complaining of their “bad luck.” They are never successful. This is the worldwide expression of unfortunate people. They never get anything they want, and they have always lived as strangers to happiness. It has never occurred to them that the whole thing is due to their own errors of position. They do not know that if they would look at the whole world fearlessly in the face and ask for what they want and make no compromise, they would get it.
People who go at anything in a half-heated way, with the appearance and thought that luck is a against them, will always find that “luck” is against them; they make it so by their position toward it. No one will knowingly employ anyone who is a “has been,” a “dead beat,” or a “no good.” The successful business executive wants employees who are “lucky,” and whose zeal, courage, ambition, and belief in their own accomplishments make them a “mascot” for those who employ them. Every kind of work in the world is clamoring for “live ones,” but there is positively no commercial value for the “dead ones” who glut the market.
There is a lot of difference between people who are “hunting a job” and those who are looking for work. Lots of people would “like a job” if they thought it did not mean work for them. They are looking for a nice, soft, easy place, where they can draw their salary without much exertion on their part. Those who want work are not long without it. If they know how to ask for it, they can secure anything that they want and keep it until they get tired of it or outgrow it, and then they can find another position just as easily. They are always happy, for they know how to get and keep what they go after, and they know that no one can take it from them but themselves. But people who are only hunting for a job are frequently out of work after they get a job, unless someone is constantly helping them.
The thing that makes the difference between successful and unsuccessful people is simply a difference of recognition of existing conditions, seen and unseen, and their own relation to these conditions. We have within us a vital power against which everything else is powerless, if we know it and know how to use it. This center is the powerhouse of our being, and here we attract and accumulate force; it is ruled over by our thoughts and our will.
We can attract anything in the universe to us on which we set our thoughts; we can then will it into position for transference to us. Thoughts are things, and whatever we “can think” we can become. We can fashion our own material universe by the simple correct control of our own thinking.
We cannot hope to vitalize anything into a successful termination or continuation for ourselves or for others, unless the torch of intense throbbing life is burning within us. The consciousness of our own power lights the candle of the latent soul energy, and develops us along positive creative lines of application.
When we have thoroughly learned this lesson of our own power and control of the energy within, we become master over all external things. We have power then over all the negative forces in the universe. We are the highest expression of conscious power, and it is for us to command, they must obey.
People on the lowest round have within themselves the leaven of thought force that allows them to rise through their own increasing understanding. In concentration they have an open door nobody can shut. Concentration is not alone for those who are in specialized states of consciousness; it is the natural birthright of the laborer as well as the mystic. It is thought force centralized that produces form. Concentration creates not only the thing itself but the way by which that thing may be accomplished. There is nothing in heaven or earth, God or human, but spirit mind and spirit form. Through concentration we link ourselves with the true life, and from seemingly impossible conditions we can bring about the fruits of our powerful thinking and become lord ruler of our earthly domain.
It is our own fault if our lives narrow down to limitations, and our hopes to petty confines. It is our own fault if our work degenerates into the deadly routine of drudgery, in which we do always what others want us to do in order to build up their success, in which we can have little part. It is our own fault if we do not recognize our immortal birthright of freedom, but go on in paths where we hear only the death-knell of success and personal attainment.
It is not given to all to be equally great, or there would be no longer an expression of growth on this plane; but it is given to all of us to know the truth of our own latent possibilities and to develop them to the uttermost; to have high ideals and ambitions, and to work them out into the highest form of energy.
Chapter 2 : The Need for Concentration
The first step towards conscious power is CONCENTRATION. Without concentration a life cannot expect to pass along in paths of peace. When we wish to know the difference between the physical, mental or psychical development of nations, races, countries or individuals, we can easily determine it if we look at the difference in their power of concentration.
Greece concentrated on art and beauty until she became a world of artistic wonder. Part of a nation concentrated for liberty, and the feet of the Pilgrim Fathers trod New England shores. People concentrated for freedom, and the shackles of millions of slaves fell before them.
Concentration is the vital essence of all life, and without it there is no real purpose, no real control. Upon the power of concentration, more than upon any other one thing, depends our law of attracting, controlling and mastering life’s conditions.
Everyone is born into this world in some direct line of concentration. One is not born an American, an Englishman, an Irishman, a Jew, or a Chinese, by chance; everything comes by the laws of natural relationship. Each of us is just whatever we have made ourselves, through concentration, during our cosmic journey. We have built ourselves by the power of our own thought, and this thought energy is expressed in the objective conditions, in which we find ourselves.
Whenever we see an individual anywhere in life, whether successful or unsuccessful, from the Goulds, Vanderbilts or Rockefellers of the millionaire world to the common street-sweeper and rag-picker, we may be sure that they are, one and all, the direct result of their own creative energy, both inherited and acquired. We have a long line of millionaires on the one hand, and a long line of paupers on the other; we also have many lives that stand for success, power, and liberty of personal action. Besides these, there is a world full of failures and unfortunate expressions of lack. What has brought about these different expressions, and where did the division begin?
Long ages ago, when the thought or mind of these individuals began operating, the Law was there, as certain and unchangeable as life itself. We are all just the thing which our own concentration has made us, and it depends alone upon our own self whether we will go on, year after year, in paths that lead only to deeper and deeper lack; or whether we will face around, start new lines of powerful thought concentration which will lead us out from bondage into limitless freedom.
One day, on a street in Boston, I saw an old woman selling papers. Her hair was gray; her skin brown and wrinkled; her clothing shabby, and only half sufficient for the chill of the hour. She was simply poverty-stricken, and her thin, piping voice trembled as she called her papers in an effort to compete with the crowd of newsboys around her. Many bought her papers, being drawn to her through sympathy and her evident need. I felt sorry that, with her gray hair, so near the grave, life should have only this to offer her. I sought a reason for it, and asked her to tell me her history.
She was the daughter of a minister. Her mother had been the proverbial meek little woman of history, perfectly fitted to be her father’s wife. Her grandfathers, on both sides of the parental tree, had been ministers. She gave me a graphic sketch of the long line of concentration into which she had been born and in wh1ch she had continued. There was a long line of concentration for lowliness of spirit; for grace; for the utter sinking of self; lack of demand for place or power; lack of self-righteousness; absolute submission; sown through generations, sown by her in her own life, and it had to bring forth its fruit. It did it in the form of that gray-haired, beautifully ragged old woman, who in the last days of her declining years, gathered her harvest on the cold streets of a rich city, underfed, poor and alone.
She was still true to her inherited concentration, for, while I questioned her, she said: “Health, money, and happiness are not for me. My family have borne the cross of poverty and sickness all their lives, and borne it nobly; and some day the Father will give us our reward.”
It is not hard to see where her mind was poised and where that of her family had been poised for generations; nor is it hard to see the inevitable result from such a cause as that long line of concentrated thought force. They could not escape the effect of the Law they had built for themselves, and they will go on kissing their cross for generations yet to come, for their every thought is delaying their own possessions. She said: “Someday the Father will give us our reward,” never knowing that the “day” was, by just that simple Law, put eternally beyond her, and that finally charity will feed her, clothe her, and bury her. All these are but the natural expression of the Law she set in motion for herself.
Then there is the story of the great composer Franz Liszt. His brother wanted to be a great landowner and own farm after farm, and scorned the musical inclinations of Liszt. Liszt would not share his brother’s ambitions and ran away time after time to follow his desire for music. In after years, when the brother had by constant attention become a large and wealthy farmer and Liszt was still a poor, struggling composer, the farmer called on Liszt and, finding him out, wrote upon a card, “Herr Liszt, Land Owner.” When, in the course of time, the composer returned the call and found his brother absent, he left his card with the inscription, “Herr Liszt, Brain Owner.” Here are two examples of acquired concentration. Each followed his own line, becoming what he desired, although born under the same inherited concentration. One wanted land, concentrated, worked for, and obtained it. One wanted music, and the world today pays tribute to his concentration.
On these stories hangs all the truth of the Law. Whatever we wish to become, we may become, because no one says no to us but ourselves. No one limits us hut ourselves. No one makes us pass along in paths of lack but ourselves. Whatever we have or do not have is a world picture, which we hang on our own life, and it tells everyone who runs and can read, the whole story of just how skillful or unskillful we are with the tools that were given to us in the very dawn of our existence.
We are living hourly in a world full of glorious opportunities, and full of a substance from which we can fashion our own environment. There is no limit set for us, save the one our own understanding places upon us. We may have and hold and use all that there is, in just the hour we awaken to our own natural power of creation.
Our conditions, both in environment and body, are simply the product of our own consciousness. The rag picker is only this and nothing more, because this is what he has fashioned for himself from the substance of his own thought world. He will remain a rag picker as long as he has only a rag picker’s vision. As soon as he recognizes something better for himself, and sets about fashioning it by the power of concentrated thought and action, he will receive it.
Our thoughts are our creators, and they must create for us just what we direct them to create. It is no one’s fault but our own if we set them to fashion a concentration of lack and limitation. The substance is always acted upon by thought force; and our homes, our friends, our bodies, our positions, everything, are only the outside picture of our inner self; and they are proof positive of the freedom or bondage of our own thought world.
We may be whatever we wholly desire to be, and our expression will follow us in form to the very limit of the power with which we plunge our consciousness.
The moment a life desires anything, it becomes related with that thing, and it has established the Law, which will bring it into union, if it knows how to fulfill the Law and then does it. Desire is the prophecy of its fulfillment, and when rightly directed, will bring to us even the things we have once called impossible, and then wisdom will make them our own.
Desire is the first out-reaching of the Law; it is the God-push within us trying to get us into relationship with the things, which the ALL LIFE has always had in store for us, waiting the hour of our unfoldment.
When we once learn the truth of the power of our own workmanship, the next step is to decide just what we wish to express and then set about fashioning it in consciousness. We are all discoverers, creators and unfolders. We must use all our tools to express ourselves. We first discover the plan of our life, and relate it with the Universal life. We must know what we want and know that it is ours, just as soon as we can manifest it. We always get our own on every level of consciousness. No Law can take our own away, because our own is whatever we have created for ourselves, and it belongs to us by the great cosmic law of having discovered the plan.
Once we have discovered the plan, we must then create it mentally. As conscious creators, we must always create the form in which we can express just what we want, and just how we want it, and then to .create it in this form. The next step is to go on unfolding finer and finer expressions of the form; thus fulfilling the Law of constructive living.
Before we can discover, create, or unfold conditions to persist, we must first win control over our own minds, and consciously manipulate our own thought tools. We can never hope for an expression of power as long as we cannot control, direct and understand our own beings.
The unsuccessful lives are the non-concentrated lives. The sick minds are the abstract minds. The utterly helpless multitudes, that are always the object of charity, are those who have no concentration. They have fixed ideas of negativeness; and the puny plans they have discovered for themselves plunge them into constant relations with creations of lack, limitation and failure.
When thinking has not been passed into form, it is of little value in life; and when thinking doe pass into form in our life through unconscious, negative concentration, it can ruin us; but when thinking is consciously passed into a fixed power and used for a powerful purpose, it can become the pathway to the very center of universal wisdom, and open the portals to divine discoveries and creations, which become the foundation for wonderful expressions in our life, and an aid to generations yet to come.
The first step on the path of Concentration is to own our own field of consciousness. Only about half the world does this. The entire sick world, the entire failure world, is owned by its own and other people’s negative thoughts. It is interesting to notice how few there are who are really in control of their own minds. The field of consciousness is open to every kind of random, drifting I thought forms; and many carry around minds that are ready to receive every negative thing that is projected into them either by individuals or conditions.
Often a thought will get possession of a mind and stay with it. Thoughts will pour in just as they please, bringing what they please, and the mind must accept them unless it is master of itself.
People will lie awake all night long, muse and brood all day over an unwelcome thought that possesses them, instead of owning their own field of consciousness and banishing the things which are only making them miserable.
The concentrated mind owns itself. It is the divine thinker of its own thoughts, and it declares just what kind of food the mind shall feed upon; it sets a guard upon its field of consciousness and win not allow a thought that is less than constructive to enter in. It pick up the thoughts which will reveal to it a perfect plan of life, then projects a perfect image of that plan and, standing firmly by its Own creations, it fashions them again and again with increasing skill, until the whole structure of the self is brought into harmonious at-one-ment.
Our thoughts are tools, and the life substance is shaped with these tools. Every hour we can stand before our half-formed self and with tools a thousand times finer than those of the finest craftsman of the physical plane, we can cut, from our own thought atmosphere, forms of exquisite perfection, until body, environment, friends, even our whole life, is a world picture of peace, power, love, joy, health and wealth, limitless and free.
Thoughts must be taught to centralize in ideas; we must first pick out the thing we wish to fashion. If we want health, we must get the idea of health; we must think health thoughts and shut out the thoughts of disease by simply displacing them with the strong, positive idea of health. We must keep this thought of health before the mind until it becomes impossible to think disease. We fill our field of consciousness with the thought of the well, the strong, the powerful; the HEALTH of life. We force the pictures of hospitals, sanitariums, and sick people out of our minds. We create health in consciousness until the energy set in motion manifests in form. No matter how we appear, we look at ourselves, and we see only the perfect self; we hold this idea; we do not let a thought of anything else enter. At the start, other thoughts will attempt to enter, for we have not yet learned how to completely close the door in the face of unwelcome ideas; but as we go on centralizing in thought, we come to where we can hold the thought of whatever we wish as long as we wish; lay it down when we wish and take it up again when we are ready. Then we no longer fear the old thoughts when they do return, for under the power of concentration, no old thought can return more often than we can replace it with a new one of health and power. After a while the old negative ideas give way, having exhausted their own vitality, and are easily displaced forever by our new positive thought creations.
After we have learned to concentrate until we can hold one thought as long as we desire and have played with our own thought world and find that we are really the master of our own ideas, our next step is to begin to create the image and pass our idea into form. As long as we have only the idea, we have only realization; but when we can pass this idea into a perfect thought form created from the indestructible thought substance of the universe, we are on the path towards actualization, and just a little more practice will make the things we have fashioned come from out of the absolute and cluster around us in physical embodiment.
In order to create an image we must see the thought picture of the idea. If we have an idea of health, then we must lift ourselves aloft in a thought form of health. We must stand out in consciousness whole, vital, radiant; we must work on this thought picture until we walk right out into mental space, our whole being—body, flesh, tissue—glowing, gleaming and quivering with a health divine that will rise in our consciousness before it can ever be actualized in flesh and form. We must work on this creation until it is perfect.
No matter what our desire may be, we pursue the same plan. Whatever we expect to manifest in form we must first discover, create and unfold in consciousness. If we want wealth, we must always see the perfected plan of supply. The moment we can centralize and hold the desire, we are creating it, and if we know how to persist in this conscious imaging of our own creation, nothing in the whole world of Laws can keep it from fulfillment. This is the one great Jaw, and it is too high for contradiction. As the Bible so well states it: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” and creation in consciousness is the reality of “thinking in our hearts.”
After we have centralized in thought, then concentrated, then created, our next step is to “let go” and simply hold this conscious image, feeling and knowing that this great Creative Energy of the Universe is flowing through it, pushing it into form. There is nothing in this whole visible Universe that did not first stand complete in the thought world. The building lives in the mind of the arch1tect; the song lingers in the heart of the composer; the acorn holds the energy that projects the oak; and humankind is no exception to the rule. But only as we know the power of the energy that creates can we become powerful in producing the things created.
When we have mastered the law of concentration we are lords of our own life. We then can be whatever we want to be. We are our own unaided law. We can soon learn to declare the Law under which our own life shall pass. Loss, failure, poverty, sickness and disease may indeed be real to the world around us, but they do not exist for us nor for those whom we can aid into the vision of the higher Law. We live to operate this Law for ourselves and for those who can comprehend it. Some lives turn away. They really do want health, wealth, love and peace, but the price of concentration and creation is too great; they want more to be undisturbed in their old thought habits.
Centralization in thought, concentration upon the thought, then creation in consciousness; this is the perfect Law of liberty. We can see ourselves and others in a new light. We begin then to pass the simple act of thinking into a fixed power, and we quit forever thought relationship with anything we do not want. We never spend one moment vitalizing into power anything that is not for our highest good. We pick out only the things which will make our life just what we desire, and we lift these things aloft in our thought world, projecting them consciously into form, and walk on serene and calm, undisturbed by any old thought force; knowing that our own must come to us, for we have created it for ourselves by our deeper wisdom. Negative things cannot exist for us in this new world of scientific spiritualized being.
This is not castle building; it is creation. In the old days, we built “air castles,” knowing they must fall. We built them to fall; but in our new understanding we create a new condition. We build these conditions into the very heart of the Cosmic Law, and we build them to stand, for we know now the eternal truth that “With what measure ye mete, it shall be meted unto you.”
We have an immortal birthright to freedom and an abundant supply of everything. It is only the perverted thinking of the minds of men that has externalized lack in any form. Humanity must learn now the truth that no one limits us but ourselves, and that we get our supply simply by our own understanding.
Under the old Law we drifted along without concentration, mere puppets, acted upon by every random thought and condition, never knowing that we were free or bound, rich or poor, well or sick, happy or sad, successful or unsuccessful, not by our external but by our internal conditions. In the old thought, the things outside ourselves seemed real and beyond our control, and never likely to yield to our puny efforts. But now we know that humankind was never meant to be anything but master of all this lower kingdom; that we are the highest expression of all life here and now; that it is for us to command, and externals must obey. This is the Law, and there is no appeal from it.
We come into our kingdom in the hour we withdraw from the thought of the limitations of external things and manipulate them with the higher power of our own unfolded consciousness.
Union with the power of the Cosmic Life is a possible thing for every, human life, and our personal expression is but the remote picture of our place in the Cosmos. Our concentration may become the very tree of life, and our conscious creations the fruit of our growing. We can choose this day what we will serve; the world is full of health and wealth and love.
