The book teaches that everybody ought to be happier than the happiest of us are now; that our lives were intended to be infinitely richer and more abundant than at present; that we should have plenty of everything which is good for us; that the lack of anything which is really necessary and desirable does not fit the constitution of any right-living human being, and that we shorten our lives very materially through our own false thinking, our bad living, and our old-age convictions, and that to be happy and attain the highest efficiency, one must harmonize with the best, the highest thing in them.
O. S. M. (December 1910.)
Chapter I.
The Divinity of Desire
And longing molds in clay what Life carves in the marble real,
Your ambition, not your worded prayer, is your real creed. —Lowell.
No joy for which thy hungering soul has panted,
No hope it cherishes through waiting years,
But, if thou dost deserve it, shall be granted;
For with each passionate wish the blessing nears.
The thing thou cravest so waits in the distance,
Wrapt in the silence unseen and dumb
Essential to thy soul and thy existence,
Live worthy of it, call, and it shall come. —Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Whatever the soul is taught to expect, that it will build.
Our heart longings, our soul aspirations, are something more than mere vaporings of the imagination or idle dreams. They are prophecies, predictions, couriers, forerunners of things which can become realities. They are indicators of our possibilities. They measure the height of our aim, the range of our efficiency.
What we yearn for, earnestly desire and strive to bring about, tends to become a reality. Our ideals are the foreshadowing outlines of realities behind them—the substance of the things hoped for.
The sculptor knows that his ideal is not a mere fantasy of his imagination, but that it is a prophecy, a foreshadowing of that which will carve itself in “marble real”
When we begin to desire a thing, to yearn for it with all our hearts, we begin to establish relationship with it in proportion to the strength and persistency of our longing and intelligent effort to realize it.
The trouble with us is that we live too much in the material side of life, and not enough in the ideal. We should learn to live mentally in the ideal which we wish to make real. If we want, for example, to keep young, we should live in the mental state of youth; to be beautiful, we should live more in the mental state of beauty.
The advantage of living in the ideal is that all imperfections, physical, mental, and moral, are eliminated. We cannot see old age because old age is incompleteness, decrepitude, and these qualities cannot exist in the ideal. In the ideal, everything is youthful and beautiful; there is no suggestion of decay, of ugliness. The habit of living in the ideal, therefore, helps us wonderfully because it gives a perpetual pattern of the perfection for which we are striving. It increases hope and faith in our ultimate perfection and divinity, because in our vision we see glimpses of the reality which we instinctively feel must sometime, somewhere, be ours.
The habit of thinking and asserting things as we would like to have them, or as they ought to be, and of stoutly claiming our wholeness or completeness—believing that we cannot lack any good thing because we are one with the All Good,—supplies the pattern which the life-processes within us will reproduce.
Keep constantly in your mind the ideal of the man or woman you would like to become. Hold the ideal of your efficiency and wholeness, and instantly strangle every disease image or suggestion of inferiority. Never allow yourself to dwell upon your weaknesses, deficiencies, or failures. Holding firmly the ideal and struggling vigorously to attain it will help you to realize it.
There is a tremendous power in the habit of expectancy, of believing that we shall realize our ambition; that our dreams will come true.
There is no more uplifting habit than that of bearing a hopeful attitude, of believing that things are going to turn out well and not ill; that we are going to succeed and not fail; that no matter what mayor may not happen, we are going to be happy.
There is nothing else so helpful as the carrying of this optimistic, expectant attitude—the attitude which always looks for and expects the best, the highest, the happiest—and never allowing oneself to get into a pessimistic, discouraged mood.
Believe with all your heart that you will do what you were made to do. Never for an instant harbor a doubt of it. Drive it out of your mind if it seeks entrance. Entertain only the friend thoughts or ideals of the thing you are determined to achieve. Reject all thought enemies, all discouraging moods—everything which would even suggest failure or unhappiness.
It does not matter what you are trying to do or to be, always assume an expectant, hopeful, optimistic attitude regarding it. You will be surprised to see how you will grow in all your faculties, and how you will improve generally.
When the mind has once formed the habit of holding cheerful, happy, prosperous pictures, it will not be easy to form the opposite habit. If our children could only acquire this one habit, it would revolutionize our civilization very quickly and advance our life standards immeasurably. A mind so trained would always be in a condition to exercise its maximum power and overcome in harmony, unkindness and the hundred and one enemies of our peace, comfort, efficiency, and success.
The very habit of expecting that the future is full of good things for you, that you are going to be prosperous and happy, that you are going to have a fine family, a beautiful home, and are going to stand for something, is the best kind of capital with which to start life.
What we try persistently to express we tend to achieve, even though it may not seem likely or even possible. If we always try to express the ideal, the thing we would like to come true in our lives, whether it be robust health, a noble character, or a superb career, if we visualize it as vividly as possible and try with all our might to realize it, it is much more likely to come to us than if we do not.
Many people allow their desires and longings to fade out. They do not realize that the very intensity and persistency of desire increases the power to realize their dreams. The constant effort to keep the desire alive increases the capacity to realize the vision.
It does not matter how improbable or how far away this realization may seem, or how dark the prospects may be, if we visualize them as best we can, as vividly as possible, hold tenaciously to them and vigorously struggle to attain them, they will gradually become actualized, realized in the life. But a desire, a longing without endeavor, a yearning abandoned or held indifferently will vanish without realization.
It is only when desire crystallizes into resolve, however, that it is effective. It is the desire coupled with the vigorous determination to realize it that produces the creative power. It is the yearning, the longing and striving together, that produce results.
We are constantly increasing or decreasing our efficiency by the quality and character of our thoughts,