It was intended that we should have an abundance of the good things of the universe.
None of them are withheld from us except by our poverty-stricken mental attitude. There is no more possible lack for a human being of all that the heart can wish for than there is lack of water or food supply for the fish in the great ocean.
The fish swims in the ocean of supply, as we swim in the great cosmic ocean of supply that is all around us. All we have to do is to open our minds, our faith, our confidence, to its reality, and use our intelligent effort to get all the good there is in it, — that is everything we need and desire.
Chapter IV.
Establishing the Creative Consciousness
The beginning of every achievement must be in your consciousness.
We have unlimited power, boundless resources, in the great within of us, but until we awaken to a consciousness of this hidden power, those invisible resources, we cannot use them.
The consciousness of power creates power. What we are conscious of, we already possess.
In proportion to the intensity, the persistence, the vividness, the definiteness of your consciousness of the thing you want, do you begin to create it, to attract it.
The Creator puts no limit to our supply. There is no limitation on anything we need except in our own consciousness.
The great trouble with those of us who are living in a world of unfulfilled desires and ambitions is that we do not hold the right consciousness.
Dr. Perry Green rightly says that Job's lament — "The thing which I feared is come upon me" — should be changed to "The thing 'which I was greatly conscious of is come upon me." In other words, it is the thing we hold in our consciousness that comes out of the invisible world of realities and takes visible form in our lives according to its nature, — poverty or prosperity; health or disease; happiness or misery.
The whole secret of individual growth and development is locked up in our consciousness, for this is the door of life itself.
Every experience; whether of joy or sorrow, of health or disease, of success or failure, must come through our consciousness. There is no other way by which it can enter and become a part of the life. You cannot have what you are not conscious of; you cannot do what you are not conscious of being able to do.
In short, it is an immutable law that, whatever you hold in mind, believe that you can do or get, is the thing that will manifest itself in your life.
The thing that Job held in his consciousness was the thing that came upon him. Joan of Arc saved her country, because from childhood she held the consciousness that she had been born to do that very thing.
This poor unlettered peasant girl knew nothing about the great law of mental attraction, but unconsciously she worked with it.
But for her consciousness of victory she never could have accomplished her stupendous work. It is the victorious consciousness that achieves victory in every age and in every field.
After many years' study of the lives and methods of successful men in every department of life, I have found that those who win out in a large way are great believers in themselves, in their power to succeed in the things they undertake.
Great artists, scientists, inventors, explorers, generals, business men, and others, who have done the biggest things in their specialty, have always held the victorious consciousness.
Success was the goal they constantly visualized, and they never wavered in their conviction that they would reach it.
Men fail, not because of lack of ability, but because they do not hold the victorious consciousness, the success consciousness.
They do not live in the expectancy of winning, in the belief that they will succeed in reaching the goal of their ambitions.
They live rather in the expectation of possible failure, in fear of poverty, and coming to want, and they get what they hold in mind, what they habitually dwell upon. The pinched, narrow, limited, poverty-stricken, fear-filled consciousness; the consciousness that expects stingy returns, that expects poverty and does not believe it will get anything better, is responsible for more poverty than any other one thing.
Our consciousness is a part of our creative force; that is, it puts the mentality in a position to attract its affinity, that which is like itself. A penury consciousness cannot demonstrate a fortune; a failure consciousness cannot demonstrate success.
It would be against the law.
If you are steeped in poverty and failure, you have no one to blame but yourself, for you are working against the law. You are holding the poverty consciousness, living in the thought of failure.
Perhaps you are wondering why you can't create something that will match your ambition, your longings when all the time you are filling your mind so full of discouragement, so full of black, gloomy, despairing pictures, that your whole life is saturated with the failure consciousness.
You feel, perhaps, that something, some invisible force, some cruel fate or destiny is holding you back. Something is holding you back, but it is not fate or destiny; it is your discouraged mental attitude, the unfortunate consciousness that you have been holding for years.
While you were trying to build on the material plane, you were neutralizing all your efforts by constantly tearing down on the mental plane. You have been obeying the negative law which destroys and kills, blights and blasts, instead of the positive law that produces; that creates, builds, beautifies, develops man's godlike qualities and glorifies his life.
All of life and its achievements, its possibilities, depend upon our consciousness, and we can develop any sort of consciousness we wish.
The great musician has developed a musical consciousness of which most of us are ignorant, because we are not conscious of this mode of activity.
Our musical consciousness has not been developed. The mathematician, the astronomer, the writer, the physician, the artist, the specialist in whatsoever line, has developed a particular consciousness, and he realizes the fruits of that consciousness. He manifests and enjoys a special power just in proportion as he has developed his specialty consciousness.
What sort of consciousness do you want to develop? What do you want to get, to do, to become?
Make yourself very positive on this point for the first step toward the development of a new consciousness is to get a thorough grip upon your purpose, your desire, your aim; to get a picture of it firmly fixed in your mind; to make it dominant in your thoughts, in your acts, in your life.
This is how the successful lawyer at the start develops a law consciousness; the successful physician, a medical consciousness; the successful business man, a business consciousness.
It is of the utmost importance to get started right, because whatever the consciousness you develop, your mind will attract that which has an affinity for it, will draw to you the material for your building.
The next thing is to establish the conviction that you can achieve whatever you desire. This is a tremendous step in the way of accomplishment, for conviction is stronger than will power.
That is, you may will ever so hard to do a thing, but if you are convinced that you can't do it, the conviction of your inability will prevail over your will power.
Your conviction is your strongest lever of accomplishment. This is what has enabled so many poor boys and girls to climb to high place and power in spite of all sorts of obstacles, and often contrary to the opinion and advice of those who knew them best.
They were so thoroughly conscious of their ability to do the thing they wanted