The beginning of every achievement must be in your consciousness. That is the starting point of your creative plan. In proportion to the intensity, the persistence, the vividness, the definiteness of your consciousness of the thing you want, do you begin to create in any line.
For instance, consciousness of power reveals power; the consciousness of supremacy is equivalent to supremacy itself; the consciousness of self-confidence is what gives us the assurance that we are equal to the thing we undertake.
What we are conscious of, we already possess. But we cannot come into possession of anything we are not conscious of.
That is, it cannot be ours until we become conscious of it. If you are not conscious of the ability to succeed, you can't succeed. If you are not conscious of your own superiority, you cannot become superior.
But if you hold in your consciousness the picture of masterfulness; if you hold in mind the thought of superiority, you are putting in operation a little law of mastership, a little law of superiority, and you begin to manifest these things in your life.
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.
Some time ago a friend of mine saw a small, delicate woman leap over a six-bar gate when frightened by the sudden approach of a cow which she mistook for a bull.
He said that this woman told him she could no more have done this under ordinary conditions than she could have lifted a corner of her house from its foundations.
But she thought her life was in peril, and, in her great extremity, she became for a moment conscious of the power within. Seeing the cow running toward her, and imagining that it was an angry bull, she had no time to allow her doubts and fears as to whether she could leap over the gate to control her.
It was the only means of escape in sight, and with the aroused consciousness of the latent power within her, she cleared the gate without difficulty. But when the imagined danger was past she lost the consciousness of her hidden strength and relapsed into her ordinary condition of weakness.
There are numerous instances on record where invalids and cripples, people who had been paralyzed for years, who did not feel that they could do anything whatever, have risen up from their beds when a fire or some terrible accident endangered their own lives or the lives of those dear to them, and then and there performed marvelous feats, in carrying heavy furniture out of a burning house, rescuing children, and doing other things that would have seemed miraculous even for strong men.
Again and again unusual emergencies give us a fleeting consciousness of our vast reserve powers and we perform prodigies that amaze ourselves, but we don't continue to make the demand on them and the consciousness that it is possible for us to do anything out of the ordinary slips from us and our measureless resources remain untouched.
Emerson says: "Every soul is not only the inlet but may become the outlet of all that is in God."
The consciousness of this great truth is the secret of all power. It is the full realization of our connection with Omnipotence, with Omniscience, with the Source of all there is that enables us to use the vast powers that are within us, always at our command, waiting to accomplish our ends.
The Creator puts no limit to our supply. There is no limitation of anything we need except in our own consciousness.
That is the door, which, according to its quality, shuts us off from, or admits us to, the great storehouse of infinite supply. The pinched, stingy consciousness never gets in touch with this supply.
It is the man who has faith in his own power to meet whatever demands life may make upon him, who spends his last dollar fearlessly, because he knows the law of supply and is in touch with a flow of abundance, that gets on and up in the world.
But the one who hoards his last dollar in fear and trembling, afraid to let go of it, even though he must go hungry, who always carries in his mind a vivid picture of the wolf at the door, never conquers poverty, because he never gets the prosperity consciousness.
A wonderful uplift and courage comes to the man who follows the aspiring tendency in his nature that bids him trust and look up, no matter how dark the outlook.
Faith in the Power that orders all things well tells him that there is a silver lining to the black cloud which temporarily shuts out the light, and he goes serenely on, feeling confident that his plans will succeed, that his demands will be met.
His is the consciousness that assures him, no matter what happens, that "God's in his Heaven; all's right with the world."
If you keep this one thing in mind, that we are always creating, always manifesting in our lives the conditions we hold in our consciousness, you will not make the mistake millions are making to-day, manifesting the things they don't want instead of the things they want.
When we realize that our enjoyment, our happiness, our satisfaction, our achievement, our power, our personality, all depend on the nature of our consciousness, the aim and direction in which it is unfolding, we will not deliberately build up a consciousness of the very opposite of all that we are struggling to attain.
On the contrary, we will hold constantly in mind the consciousness of our ambition, whatever it is, we will build up the consciousness of our heart's longings, our soul's desires; we will hold the truth consciousness, the God consciousness, the harmony consciousness, and the opulent consciousness, and then we shall really begin to live.
Then life will mean something more to all of us than it now does to most of us—a mere struggle for existence.
Chapter V.
Where Prosperity Begins
Whatever we visualize intensely and persistently and back by intelligent effort we tend to create, vitalize into form, to build into the life.
It is in the unseen world that man, animated and inspired by the consciousness of his partnership with Divinity, is beginning to find some of the secrets of the universe, — lifting the race from animalism and drudgery, changing the face of the world, pushing civilization up to new and more glorious heights.
Limitless wealth, inexhaustible supply to meet our needs, undreamed of possibilities, are in the great cosmic intelligence waiting the contact of man's thought to bring them into visible form.
The invisible world about us is packed with infinite possibilities, awaiting our thought seed, our desire seed, our ambition seed, our aspiration seed, our prosperity and success seed, backed by our effort on the material plane, to make them manifest in the forms upon which we concentrate.
There is no lack of anything we need on God's earth any more than there is a lack of sunshine. Who would think of complaining that the sun refuses to shine on him, that its rays will not rest upon him, will not bring his crops to maturity, will not warm and cheer his life?
There is no lack of sunshine, but we can cut ourselves off from it. If we choose to live in the shadows, if we go down into the dark cellar where the sun cannot enter, it is our own fault.
During his lecture tour in the United States, the great scientist, Sir Oliver Lodge, speaking on "The Reality of the Unseen," said: "Our senses are no criterion of existence. They were evolved for earthly reasons, not for purposes of philosophy, and if we refuse to go beyond the direct evidence of our senses we shall narrow our outlook on the universe to a hopeless and almost imbecile extent."
It is the most difficult thing in the world to convince people of the reality of anything they cannot perceive through the senses. Yet the realest things we know anything about are invisible; have never been seen by mortal eyes.
And right here lies the great difficulty for most people in changing undesirable-conditions;