He has made himself a negative magnet, he repels all the success qualities, and attracts only those of failure. He has lost his magnetic power to attract the forces which can extricate him from sickly, deadly environment.
How many people drag through weary years of self-imposed invalidism. They can never rise into the health atmosphere while they are contemplating the sickly ideal in the mind. Deep-rooted convictions of disease actually produce their physical counterparts.
The conviction, for example, that you have inherited the seeds of some terrible disease, such as cancer, and the fact that your physician has told you it is liable to show itself soon after the age of forty, keep you expectantly looking for the symptoms of this disease, and may develop an ordinary sore into an ulcer.
A young girl, delicate, sensitive to cold, has been told from her early childhood that she must exercise the greatest possible care because she has surely inherited a consumptive tendency from her mother, who died of consumption. This black picture of consumption and its fearful ravages in the system stamps itself indelibly upon the young life, and prevents healthful, buoyant growth or prompt physical reaction.
Dwelling upon these conditions ruins the appetite, disturbs digestion, cuts off the assimilation of food, until emaciation sets in as a result, and, as if this were not enough to discourage and dishearten the victim, everybody has to tell her how bad she looks, how she is growing thinner and thinner every day. Very often they say: “Now be careful, you know your mother went just by taking cold, by exposure to a draught.” They stuff her with cod-liver oil and tonics, but these are sorry compensations for the resisting power of the mind, of which they have cruelly robbed her; a poor substitute for the God-given power of self-protection, granted to every human being. They have disturbed the child's beautiful natural feeling that it is protected by the Almighty arm, that it is made in God's image, and hence God-defended, and that nothing can injure its reality. Many a beautiful life has been stifled by such inculcated fears and depressing influences.
What a pitiable sight to see a large proportion of the human race dogged through life by such hideous pictures, dragging this terrible load of expectation of being run down, overcome, crushed by some cruel fate, attacked by some awful disease, the consequences of the sins of our ancestors. This would be like sending a boy to prison or to the gallows because his father committed robbery or murder. The sooner we get this damnable philosophy out of the minds of the young, the better for the world. It would be just as reasonable to say that the sun casts shadows, that love radiates hatred, that harmony carries hidden discord in its very nature. To hold such beliefs is not only cruelly wicked, but also absurd. The Creator does not blight our lives and prospects in this way. These fearsome pictures are drawn by human artists; they have no divine origin. No matter what the conditions of our birth, we have the power of the Infinite to overcome them.
Chapter XI.
Affirmation Creates Power
“An affirmation is a statement of Truth consciously used so as to become the directing power of Life’s expression.”
ONLY he can who thinks he can! The world makes way only for the determined man, for the man who laughs at barriers which limit others, at stumbling-blocks over which others fall. The man who, as Emerson says, “hitches his wagon to a star,” is more likely to arrive at his goal than the one who trails in the slimy path of the snail.
Confidence is the father of achievement. It reenforces ability, doubles energy, buttresses mental faculties, increases power.
Your thought will carry only the force of your conviction, the weight of your decision, the power of your confidence. If these are weak, your thought will be weak and your work futile. Some people are incapable of strong, deep conviction; they are all surface, and liable to be changed by the opinions of everybody else. If they resolve upon a certain course, their resolution is so superficial that the first obstacle they strike deflects them. They are always at the mercy of the opposition, or of people who do not agree with them. Such people are shifty and unreliable; they lack strength of decision, positiveness of resolution.
What is a man good for if he hasn’t strength of resolution? If his convictions are on the surface, he stands for nothing; nobody has confidence in him. He may be a good man, personally, but he does not inspire confidence. No one would think of calling upon him when anything of importance was at stake. Unless conviction takes hold of one’s very being, there will be very little achievement in life. It is the man whose conviction is rooted deep and takes hold of his very life-blood, the man who is strong and persistent in his determination, that can be depended upon. He is the man of influence, who carries weight; he is above the influence of any man who happens to have a different opinion.
If young people only knew the power of affirmation, of the habit of holding in the mind persistently and affirming that they are what they wish to be, that they can do what they have attempted, it would revolutionize their whole lives, it would exempt them from most of their ills and troubles, and carry them to heights of which they scarcely dream.
We are always talking about the power of the will. Its exercise is only another form of affirmation. The will, the determination to do a thing, is the same as the affirmation of the ability to do it. No one ever accomplishes anything in this world until he affirms in one way or another that he can do what he undertakes. It is almost impossible to keep a man back who has a firm faith in his mission, who believes that he can do the thing before him, that he is equal to the obstacles which confront him, that he is more than a match for his environment. The constant affirmation of ability to succeed, and of our determination to do so, carries us past difficulties, defies obstacles, laughs at misfortunes, and strengthens the power to achieve. It reënforces and buttresses the natural faculties and powers, and holds them to their tasks.
Constant affirmation increases courage, and courage is the backbone of confidence. Furthermore, when a person gets in a tight place and says “I must,” “I can,” “I will,” he not only reënforces his courage and strengthens his confidence, but also weakens the opposite qualities. Whatever strengthens a positive will weaken the corresponding negative.
You can do a difficult thing only with a positive state of mind, never with a negative. Plus force, not minus, does things. The dominant qualities are all positive, assertive, aggressive, and they require a corresponding attitude of mind for their exercise and application. A man who has not these dominant qualities can never be a leader or independent; he must be a trailer, an imitator, until he changes his thought from negative to positive, from doubtful to certain, from shrinking and retiring to asserting and advancing. It is the decisive, positive soul that wins.
If you wish to amount to anything in the world, never for one moment permit the idea to come into your mind that you are unlucky, that you are less fortunate than other human beings. Deny it with all the power you can muster. Discipline yourself never to acknowledge weakness or think of mental, physical, or moral defects. Deny that you are a weakling, that you cannot do what others can do; that you are handicapped and must be satisfied to take an inferior position in the world. Strangle every doubt as you would a viper threatening your life. Never talk, think, or write of your poverty or unfortunate condition. Cut out of your life all thought that limits, hampers, dwarfs, and darkens it. These are ghosts of fear; the Creator never made them or intended them to haunt and torment you. He made you for happiness, for joy, for conquest over your environment.
Persistently affirm that the Creator handicapped no one; that our limitations are all our own. Resolve that, come what may, you will be an optimist; that there shall be nothing pessimistic in you; believe in the final triumph of the right, the victory of all that is true and noble. Affirm that you are one of the most fortunate beings. Congratulate yourself that you were born just in the nick of time, and in just the right place; that there is a define work for you to do that no one else can do; and that you are one of the most lucky persons in the world to have the opportunity, the health, the education, to