A morose, gloomy, crestfallen mortal flings out his pessimism wherever he goes and poisons the atmosphere around him, surcharging it with heaviness, depression, and sadness. Success and happiness are not born in such an atmosphere. Hope cannot live in it; joy flees from it. No child can be happy in it. Laughter is suppressed; sweet, joyous faces become cloudy. We feel that life would be unendurable if we had to remain in it indefinitely. What a relief it is when such a person drags his depressing presence from us.
Some people make us feel mean and contemptible in their presence. They call out of us meanness which we never knew we possessed and make us almost despise ourselves. Marriage sometimes reveals undesirable qualities which neither husband nor wife suspected in themselves before.
Some people emit a sort of miasmatic atmosphere, which poisons everything that comes within its reach. No matter how generous and magnanimous we felt before, when these characters come near us we shrivel and shrink within ourselves and there is no responsiveness, no spontaneity possible until they go out of our presence. Like disturbed clams, we shut ourselves up as tightly as possible until we feel that we are out of danger. We cannot be ourselves when near such people. We try to be agreeable with them, but somehow everything is forced; we cannot be sociable with them. We seem ill at ease until they have departed; then we feel that a heavy weight is lifted from us, and we are ourselves again.
Other people act like a tonic or an invigorating and refreshing breeze. They make us feel like new beings. By the inspiration of their presence they stimulate our thoughts, quicken our faculties, sharpen our intellect, open the flood-gates of language and sentiment, and awaken the poetic within us.
These diverse effects come from the radiation or expression of personality, and we ourselves are producing such on others all the time. We radiate what we feel and believe, our fleeting moods and our deep-seated convictions. What we think most about and strive to become, we radiate to others in our every letter, in every conversation, in our manner, in our life. Spirit is contagious, and will be quickly perceived or even taken on by those with whom we come in contact. If the mind is in harmony and peace, if it is strong and healthy, we radiate health, peace, and harmony wherever we go.
On the contrary, if you are in doubt, if you are discouraged and disheartened, you will communicate discouraged thoughts. How can a mind always filled with self-depreciation, distrust, and the dread of failure radiate the confidence which is necessary to insure credit and assistance from others? If you hold mean, contemptible thoughts, if you harbor revenge, jealousy, and envy, you reflect these thoughts to those about you.
If you are selfish, you cannot help radiating the selfish thought. Everybody about you will feel your meanness, and will measure you accordingly.
If you are a miser, if you are greedy and avaricious, you cannot get away from your greed, but you must pay the penalty of your aim. You cannot radiate magnanimity, if you are mean and stingy. If the attitude of your mind dwarfs and stunts all that is beautiful in life, if the tendency of your mind is to hinder, you cannot give out the opposite to the world. If you think blighting, chilling thoughts, you will radiate the same. Your aspirations and longings, whether for money or for fame, or real helpfulness to others, will determine the character of your radiations.
As we can only communicate the quality of our thought at the moment, how important that we control these thoughts, and make them clean, pure, true thoughts, instead of foul, demoralizing, doubtful ones.
Servants have actually been made dishonest by other persons perpetually holding the suspicion that they were dishonest. This thought continually held by people who are naturally suspicious, suggests the thought perhaps to the suspected for the first time, and being constantly held there takes root and grows, and bears the fruit of theft.
It is simply cruel to hold a suspicious thought of another until you have positively proved its authenticity. That other person’s mind is sacred; you have no right to invade it with your miserable thoughts and pictures of suspicion. You should keep your wicked thoughts at home; but, as this is impossible, you should not harbor them, any more than you would allow yourself to hold thoughts of sin or crime. Many a being has been made wretched and miserable for years, depressed, despondent, and borne down by the uncharitable, wicked thoughts of those about them.
Many people scatter fear thoughts, doubt thoughts, failure thoughts, wherever they go; and these take root in minds that might otherwise be free from them and therefore happy, confident, and successful.
Be sure that when you hold an evil thought toward another, an unhealthy thought, a discordant thought, a disease thought, a deadly thought, something is wrong in your mind. You should call, “Halt! about face!” Look toward the sunlight; determine that, if you cannot do any good in the world, you will not scatter seeds of poison, the venom of malice and hatred.
Always hold kindly thoughts, charitable, magnanimous, loving thoughts toward everybody; then you will not depress them, and hinder them, but will scatter sunshine and gladness instead of sadness and shadow, help and encouragement instead of discouragement.
Be one of those who are always radiating success thoughts, health thoughts, joy thoughts, uplifting, helpful thoughts, scattering sunshine wherever they go. These are the helpers of the world, the lighteners of burdens, the people who ease the jolts of life and soothe the wounded and give solace to the discouraged.
Learn to radiate joy, not stingily, not meanly, but generously. Fling out your gladness without reserve. Shed it in the home, on the street, on the car, in the store, everywhere, as the rose sheds its beauty and flings out its fragrance.
When the world learns that love thoughts heal—that they carry balm to wounds; that thoughts of harmony, of beauty, and of truth always uplift, beautify, and ennoble; that the opposite carry death, destruction, and blight everywhere—it will learn the true secret of right living.
Chapter XIII.
How Thinking Brings Success
He who dares assert the I,
May calmly wait
While hurrying fate
Meets his demands with sure supply.
—Helen Wilmans.
A STRONG man hypnotized into a belief that he cannot rise from his chair is actually powerless to do so till the spell is removed. A frail woman, nerved by necessity for saving life, can carry a person heavier than herself from danger by fire or flood. In both cases the mental attitude, not the physical ability, determines the result, yet both acts are only work for muscle. When a task to be done consists largely or wholly of mental acts, as do most kinds of success winning, how much greater must be the determining power of the thought and mental attitude I The conquerors of the world, whether on battlefields, in trade, or in moral struggles, have won by the attitude of mind in which they went at the work they had to do.
I wish it were possible to impress upon the minds of the young the tremendous power which right thinking has to bring about success. Realization of our inherent capacity for great things, conviction that we are intended to succeed, and that it is a positive sin to spoil the plans of our Creator by failing, would revolutionize our lives and abolish most of our ills and troubles.
The belief in limitations, the conviction that we cannot rise out of our environments, that we are the victims of circumstances, is responsible for a weakening of achievement faculties and an undermining of executive ability which cause untold tragic failures, a large part of the poverty and wretchedness of mankind. Such belief is abnormal, and it produces abnormal conditions. Dominion was man’s birthright, but he has adopted weakness and limitation. He has claimed poverty, wretchedness, and slavery in place of riches, happiness, and freedom, and how can a man rise