“The building of a trans-continental railroad from a mental picture,” says C. W. Chamberlain in “The Uncommon Sense of Applied Psychology,” “gives the average individual an idea that it is a big job. The fact of the matter is, the achievement, as well as the perfect mental picture, is made up of millions of little jobs, each fitting in its proper place and helping to make up the whole.
“A skyscraper is built from individual bricks, the laying of each brick being a single job which must be completed before the next brick can be laid.”
It is the same with any work, any study. To quote Professor James:
“As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of working. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education whatever the line of it may be. If he keeps faithfully busy each hour of the working day he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out... Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragement and faintheartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes taken together.”
Remember that the only limit to your capabilities is the one you place upon them. There is no law of limitation. The only law is of supply. Through your subconscious mind you can draw upon universal supply for anything you wish. The ideas of Universal Mind are as countless as the sands on the seashore. Use them. And use them lavishly, just as they are given. There is a little poem by Jessie B. Rittenhouse that so well describes the limitations that most of us put upon ourselves that I quote it here: “I bargained with Life for a penny, And Life would pay no more, however I begged at evening when I counted my scanty store.
For Life is a just employer;
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.
I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have paid.
Aim high! If you miss the moon, you may hit a star. Everyone admits that this world and all the vast firmament must have been thought into shape from the formless void by some Universal Mind. That same Universal Mind rules today, and it has given to each form of life power to attract to itself whatever it needs for its perfect growth. The tree, the plant, and the animal — each one finds its need.
You are an intelligent, reasoning creature. Your mind is part of Universal Mind. And you have power to say what you require for perfect growth. Don’t be a niggard with yourself. Don’t sell yourself for a penny. Whatever price you set upon yourself, life will give. So aim high. Demand much! Make a clear, distinct mental image of what it is you want. Hold it in your thought. Visualize it, see it, and believe it! The ways and means of satisfying that desire will follow. For supply always comes on the heels of demand.
It is by doing this that you take your fate out of the hands of chance. It is in this way that you control the experiences you are to have in life. But be sure to visualize only what you want. The law works both ways. If you visualize your worries and your fears, you will make them real. Control your thought and you will control circumstances. Conditions will be what you make them.
Most of us are like factories where two-thirds of the machines are idle, where the workmen move around in a listless, dispirited sort of way, doing only the tenth part of what they could do if the head of the plant were watching and directing them. Instead of that, he is off idly dreaming or waiting for something to turn up. What he needs is someone to point out to him his listless workmen and idle machines, and show him how to put each one to working full time and overtime.
And that is what YOU need, too. You are working at only a tenth of your capacity. You are doing only a tenth of what you are capable of. The time you spend idly wishing or worrying can be used in so directing your subconscious mind that it will bring you anything of good you may desire.
Philip of Macedon, Alexander’s father, perfected the “phalanx” — a triangular formation which enabled him to center the whole weight of his attack on one point in the opposing line. It drove through everything opposed to it. In that day and age it was invincible. And the idea is just as invincible today.
Keep the one thought in mind, SEE it being carried out step by step, and you can knit any group of workers into one homogeneous whole, all centered on the one idea. You can accomplish any one thing. You can put across any definite idea.
Keep that mental picture ever in mind and you will make it as invincible as was Alexander’s phalanx of old.
It is not the guns or armament
Or the money they can pay,
It’s the close cooperation
That makes them win the day.
It is not the individual
Or the army as a whole
But the everlasting team work
Of every bloomin’ soul.
J. Mason Knox
The error of the ages is the tendency mankind has always shown to limit the power of Mind, or its willingness to help in time of need.
“Know ye not,” said Paul, “that ye are the temples of the Living God?”
No — most of us do not know it. Or at least, if we do, we are like the Indian family out on the Cherokee reservation. Oil had been found on their land and money poured in upon them. More money than they had ever known was in the world. Someone persuaded them to build a great house, to have it beautifully furnished, richly decorated. The house when finished was one of the show places of that locality. But the Indians, while very proud of their showy house, continued to live in their old sod shack!
So it is with many of us. We may know that we are “temples of the Living God.” We may even be proud of that fact. But we never take advantage of it to dwell in that temple, to proclaim our dominion over things and conditions. We never avail ourselves of the power that is ours.
The great Prophets of old had the forward look. Theirs was the era of hope and expectation. They looked for the time when the revelation should come that was to make men “Sons of God.” “They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
Jesus came to fulfill that revelation. “Ask and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.”
The world has turned in vain to matter and materialistic philosophy for deliverance from its woes. In the future the only march of actual progress will be in the mental realm, and this progress will not be in the way of human speculation and theorizing, but in the actual demonstration of the Universal, Infinite Mind.
The world stands today within the vestibule of the vast realm of divine intelligence, wherein is found the transcendent, practical power of Mind over all things.
“What eye never saw, nor ear ever heard, what never entered the mind of man — even all that God has prepared for those who love Him.”
Chapter 7 — “As a Man Thinketh”
In our great-grandfather’s day, when witches flew around by night and cast their spell upon all unlucky enough to cross them, men thought that the power of sickness or health, of good fortune or ill, resided outside himself or herself.
We laugh today at such benighted superstition. But even in this day and age there are few who realize