What was it gave us the submarine, the aeroplane, wireless, electricity? Imagination. What was it that enabled man to build the Simplon Tunnel, the Panama Canal, the Hell Gate span? Imagination. What is it that makes us successful and happy, or poor and friendless? Imagination — or the lack of it.
It was imagination that sent Spanish and English and French adventurers to this new world. It was imagination that urged the early settlers westward — ever westward. It was imagination that built our railroads, our towns, and our great cities.
Parents foolishly try to discourage imagination in their children, when all it needs is proper guidance. For imagination forms the world from which their future will take its shape. Restrain the one and you constrict the other. Develop the one in the right way, and there is no limit to the other. Uncontrolled, the imagination is like a rudderless ship. Or even, at times, like the lightning. But properly controlled, it is like the ship that carries riches from port to port. Or like the electric current, carrying unlimited power for industry and progress.
Do you want happiness? Do you want success? Do you want position, power, and riches? Image them! How did God first make man? “In his image created He him.” He “imaged” man in His Mind.
And that is the way everything has been made since time began. It was first imaged in Mind. That is the way everything you want must start — with a mental image.
So use your imagination! Picture in it your Heart’s Desire. Imagine it — daydream it so vividly, so clearly, that you will actually BELIEVE you HAVE it. In the moment that you carry this conviction to your subconscious mind — in that moment your dream will become a reality. It may be a while before you realize it, but the important part is done. You have created the model. You can safely leave it to your subconscious mind to do the rest.
When Jesus adjured His disciples — “Whatsoever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye RECEIVE it,” He was not only telling them a great truth, but he was teaching what we moderns would call excellent psychology as well. For this “belief’ is what acts upon the subconscious mind. It is through this “belief’ that formless energy is compressed into material form.
Every man wants to get out of the rut, to grow, to develop into something better. Here is the open road — open to you whether you have schooling, training, position, wealth, or not. Remember this: Your subconscious mind knew more from the time you were a baby than is in all the books in all the colleges and libraries of the world.
So don’t let lack of training, lack of education, hold you back. Your mind can meet every need — and will do so if you give it the chance. The Apostles were almost all poor men, uneducated men, yet they did a work that is unequalled in historical annals. Joan of Arc was a poor peasant girl, unable to read or write — yet she saved France! The pages of history are dotted with poor men, uneducated men, who thought great thoughts, who used their imaginations to master circumstances and became rulers of men. Most great dynasties started with some poor, obscure man. Napoleon came of a poor, humble family. He got his appointment to the Military Academy only through very hard work and the pulling of many political strings. Even as a Captain of Artillery he was so poverty-stricken that he was unable to buy his equipment when offered an appointment to India. Business today is full of successful men who have scarcely the rudiments of ordinary education. It was only after he had made his millions that Andrew Carnegie hired a tutor to give him the essentials of an education.
So it isn’t training and it isn’t education that makes you successful. These help, but the thing that really counts is that gift of the Gods — Creative Imagination!
You have that gift. Use it! Make every thought, every fact, that comes into your mind pay you a profit. Make it work and produce for you. Think of things — not as they are but as they MIGHT be. Make them real, live and interesting. Don’t merely dream — but CREATE! Then use your imagination to make that CREATION of advantage to mankind — and, incidentally, yourself.
Chapter 20 — What Do You Lack?
Do you know why it is that the Bolsheviki are so opposed to religion?
Because religion, as it is commonly accepted, teaches man resignation to conditions as they are — teaches, in effect, that God created some men poor and some rich. That this unequal distribution is a perfectly natural thing. And that we must not rail against it because it will all be made right in the next world.
Napoleon, in his early Jacobin days, denounced religion for that very reason. But when he had won to power, when he planned to make himself Emperor, then he found he had need for that religion, and re-established the Church in France.
For, he reasoned, how can people be satisfied without religion? If one man is starving, near another who is making himself sick by eating too much, how can you expect to keep the starving one resigned to his fate unless you teach him it will all be made right in some indefinite future state?
Organized society could not exist, as he planned it, without some being rich and some poor, and to keep the poor satisfied, there must be an authority to declare — “God wills it thus. But just be patient. In the hereafter all this will be different. YOU will be the ones then to occupy the places of honor.”
Religion, in other words — as it is ordinarily taught — is a fine thing to keep the common people satisfied!
But Christianity was never meant for a weapon to keep the rich wealthy and secure, the poor satisfied and in their proper place. On the contrary, Christianity as taught by Jesus opened the way to all Good. And Christianity as it was practiced in its early years was an idealized form of Socialism that benefited each and all. No one was wealthier than his neighbors, it is true — but neither was any poverty-stricken. Theirs was the creed of the Three Musketeers — “All for one, and one for all!”
“Ask and ye shall receive,” said Jesus. “Seek and ye shall find.” That was not directed to the rich alone. That was to ALL men.
Providence has never made a practice of picking out certain families or certain individuals and favoring them to the detriment of other people — much as some of our “leading families” would have us believe it. It is only man that has arrogated to himself that privilege. We laugh now at the “divine right of Kings.” It is just as ridiculous to think that a few have the right to all the good things of life, while the many have to toil and sweat to do them service.
To quote Rumbold’s last words from the scaffold — “I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.”
There is nothing right in poverty. Not only that, but there is nothing meritorious in poverty. The mere fact that you are poor and ground down by fear and worry is not going to get you any forwarder in the hereafter. On the contrary, your soul is likely to be too pinched by want, too starved and shriveled to be able to expand.
“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” to me that means that Heaven is here and now. That if we want any happiness from it we’ve got to get it as we go along. I’ve never been much of a believer in accepting these promissory notes for happiness. Every time one of them falls due, you find you just have to renew it for another six months or a year, until one of these days you wake up and find that the bank has busted and all your notes are not worth the paper they are written on.
The Cumaean Sibyl is said to have offered Tarquin the Proud nine books for what he thought an exorbitant sum. So he refused. She burned three of the books, and placed the same price on the six as on the original nine. Again he refused. She burned three more books, and offered the remainder for the sum she had first asked. This time Tarquin accepted. The books were found to contain prophecies and invaluable directions regarding