APPLIED FAITH
The third principle of Your Right to Be Rich is Applied Faith. This principle, along with definiteness of purpose and the mastermind, are the big three of the seventeen principles.
This principle is not steeped in any particular religious doctrine or denomination. As defined here, faith means an active state of mind in which there is a relating of the mind to the great eternal force of the universe. Faith is human beings sensing the powers that surround them in the world and trying to harmonize their lives with those powers as they feel them. In the final analysis, faith is the activity of individual minds discovering themselves and establishing a working association with the power referred to as the Universal Mind, the Divine Mind, or God. Dr. Hill refers to this power as Infinite Intelligence, the source of all life energy, the cosmic force of the universe we inhabit.
The word applied indicates action. This is an active, not a passive principle. The faith referred to is applied to the achievement of a definite major purpose in life. With faith applied, achievement will be the result.
If you had a definite major purpose, knew exactly what you wanted to do, had a mastermind alliance of people that could help you do it, and then had the sufficient faith to keep you going while you did it, that would be about all you would need.
Why do you suppose we need the fourteen additional principles? We need fourteen additional principles to induce you to make use of these three. You need personal initiative. You need imagination. You need enthusiasm. In other words, this philosophy is like baking a cake. When you bake a cake, you don’t put in just one ingredient. You put in a pinch of this, a pinch of that, a dash of the other thing, and then you put it in the stove and bake it. If you took out any one of those ingredients, you wouldn’t end up with the same kind of cake. It’s the same way with this philosophy. You can’t leave out any one of these seventeen principles. It would be like taking a link out of a chain. You wouldn’t have a chain anymore, you’d have two parts of a chain, but not a whole chain. The other fourteen principles are supporting principles of these three.
Faith is a state of mind that has been called the mainspring of the soul, to which one’s aims, desires, plans, and purposes may be translated into their physical or financial equivalent. There are the fundamentals of faith, but by applied faith, I’m talking about something vastly different from mere belief. The word applied means what? Action. It’s the action part of faith. Without action, faith is nothing but just daydreaming. There are a lot of people who believe in things but don’t do anything about them, engaging only in daydreaming. Applied faith is an active faith.
FAITH AND THE FIRST THREE PRINCIPLES OF SUCCESS
1. Definiteness of Purpose. Purpose is supported by a personal initiative and action, action, action—the more action, the better. That means continual action, not only on your part but also on the part of those that may be cooperating with you or your mastermind allies.
2. Positive Mental Attitude. A positive mind, free from all negatives such as fear, envy, hatred, jealousy, and greed, is essential. Mental attitude determines the effectiveness of faith. It’s a fact. The frame of mind that you are in when you pray will determine what happens as a result of that prayer. There’s no two ways about it. You can test it for yourself and find out.
I have no doubt that you have had the experiences that I’ve had, sending out prayers that didn’t produce anything but a negative result. Do you suppose there is anybody that didn’t have that experience at one time or another? When you pray, unless you have such absolute faith that whatever you are going after you’re going to acquire, and that you can see it in advance in your possession before you start asking for it, chances are the effect of your prayer is going to be negative.
3. Mastermind Alliance. A mastermind alliance convenes one or more other people who radiate courage based on faith and are suited mentally and spiritually to one’s needs in carrying out a given purpose.
ELEMENTS OF APPLIED FAITH
1. Every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent benefit; temporary defeat is not failure until it has been accepted as such. Do you know where the majority of people fall down in connection with their application of their faith? It’s when they’re defeated and they accept that defeat as being something they can’t do anything about. Instead of beginning immediately to search for that seed of an equivalent benefit that’s in every defeat, they become moody and broody, discouraged, and build up inferiority complexes. Instead, they could reverse the order and use defeat as nothing more than a temporary point from which to make another effort.
My saying that every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent benefit, that every defeat and every failure carries the seed of an equivalent benefit, wouldn’t mean anything to you unless I made application of it, and gave you illustration after illustration. If you examine enough illustrations in your own experience, you’ll see that it always works out that way. That’s why I want you to look closely at the adversities that come to you.
Do you know that your adversities are often your greatest blessings? Do you know the greatest blessing that ever came into my life? Of course, it was the loss of my mother. Ordinarily, the greatest catastrophe that could overtake a child would be to lose his mother at the age of nine years. Why do I say that was the greatest, greatest blessing? Because it brought me a new mother to take her place, one who is responsible for everything that I’ve achieved and everything that I shall achieve. Without her influence, I’d still be fighting rattlesnakes, drinking mountain liquor, and fighting feuds. My relatives are still doing that same thing, so there’s no reason to expect that I wouldn’t be. I’ve had a lot of other adversities, and I want to tell you that without some twenty major adversities I’ve gone through, I would never have been able to pursue the soundness of this philosophy—that there is a seed of equivalent benefit in every adversity.
Can you imagine any worse adversity to a man than to be informed that his son was born without any signs of ears and would be a deaf and dumb mute all of his life? Can you imagine anything worse than that? I’ll always be thankful that because of my contact with Infinite Intelligence, my deaf son was provided with a sort of hearing system that gave him 65 percent of his normal hearing and eventually 100 percent with a modern hearing aid. He learned to live a normal life and I got the greatest demonstration of my entire experience in the power of faith. I couldn’t have gotten it any other way. I couldn’t have gotten it secondhand, I had to get it firsthand.
I never accepted that affliction of that child, not even before I saw him, and not even after I saw him. I never accepted it. His relatives accepted it. They wanted to put him in the school of underprivileged where he’d learn sign language and lip reading. I didn’t even want him to know there were such things. When he was old enough to go to school, I had a fight with the school authorities every year just as regular as a clock, because they wanted to send him to a school for underprivileged children, to mix with the other children and see their afflictions. I didn’t want him to know there were such things. I taught him from the very beginning that his not having any ears was a great blessing—and he believed it. Compassion led people to do things for him they wouldn’t have done otherwise. He got a job as a salesman for the Saturday Evening Post and he led every salesman throughout the United States. He’d often go out with five dollars’ worth of merchandise and come back with ten dollars in cash. He did that many times. People would look at him and say, “Why that poor little fellow with no ears is out selling papers. I guess his parents are poor.” They’d give him a dollar bill and when he’d try to give them their change, they’d say, “Oh, sonny, you just keep that.” So he’d often get a dollar apiece for the Saturday Evening Post. Not at all conscious today of any affliction, he’s living a perfectly normal life because I taught him that an affliction, any kind of an affliction, can be transmuted into a benefit.
2. Applied faith requires the habit of affirming one’s definite major purpose in the form of a prayer at least once daily. The subconscious mind only knows what you tell it, or what you allow other people to tell it, or what you allow the circumstances of life to tell it. It doesn’t know the difference between a lie and the truth. It doesn’t know the difference between a penny and a million dollars. It accepts the things that you send over, and if you send over predominating thoughts on poverty and ill health and failure, that’s exactly what’ll you get. No matter how much faith that you may have later on, you’ll find out the subconscious responds to the mental attitude that you’re maintaining during the day. It’s necessary for you to affirm over and over again the objects that you are going to attain in life until you educate your subconscious mind to automatically attract to you the things that are related to what you’re aiming to attain in life. You’ll find that your mind is like an electrode magnet and once you charge it with a clear picture of what you want, it’ll attract to you from the highways and the byways the things that you need to carry out that purpose.
3. Recognition of the existence of an Infinite Intelligence that gives order to the vast, entire universe. You are a minute expression of this intelligence and as such your mind has no limitation except those accepted or set up in your own mind. Let me repeat that statement. Your mind has no limitations whatsoever, except those that you allow to be established there or that you deliberately set up in your mind or accept. That’s a pretty broad statement. However, the achievements of men like Mr. Edison, Mr. Ford, Mr. Carnegie, and Napoleon Hill (if you please) definitely support the idea that there is no limitation except that which you set up in your mind.
If I had ever wavered for one second in my belief of what I would do, from the time that I started with Mr. Carnegie up until the time I gave this philosophy to the world, I would never have done it. How did I do it? Do you have any idea what played the strongest part in what I’ve achieved? It wasn’t my brilliancy and it wasn’t my outstanding intelligence. I have no more brilliance than the average person and no more intelligence than the average person. But, I believed that I could do it and I never stopped believing it. The harder the going was, the more I believed I would do it. If you can take that attitude toward yourself, throwing yourself over on the side of yourself when you’re overtaken by adversity, or when people are against you, and not go against yourself, then you’re using applied faith. You’ve got to do that.
Do you know there are testing times for people? Nobody is permitted to attain a high state in life and stay there without being tested. Nobody is allowed to go into a well-managed business or go to a high position and stay there without being tested at lower positions until, step-by-step, he earns the right to be up on the top. I don’t know how the Creator runs his business entirely, but I can catch a pretty good idea of how he does it from observing that part which I can understand. Of course, there’s much more that I can’t understand, but I can definitely see that he allows nobody to attain to a higher stage of life without giving him severe testing.
One of the most outstanding things that I found in my research was that the men of great achievement in all walks of life, and throughout the ages, were great only in proportion as they had been defeated and as they met with opposition. What an outstanding thing. It couldn’t be a coincidence that every one of these outstanding men was exactly great in proportion as he had been small and as he had been opposed and as he had had to struggle.
I used to tell of my early struggles and tell some of my defeats. My business manager said it wasn’t a good idea. I think it’s a fine idea, because if you knew the amount of the major defeats that I have met, recognizing how I still kept my head above water and still live to deliver this philosophy, you’d say, “If Hill can do it, I can do it too.” That’s the only reason I ever spoke of it.
I don’t mind what terms you use: God, Jehovah, Buddha, or Muhammad. You can call it anything you want to. No matter what you call it, we’re all talking about one first cause. There aren’t two first causes, there’s only one. There couldn’t be two. There’s one first cause that’s responsible for this great universe we’re living in—for you and for me and for everything that’s in the universe. I call it Infinite Intelligence because I have students of all faiths and all religions all over the world and Infinite Intelligence happens to be a neutral term nobody can object to.
But unless you not only believe in that, unless you can prove to yourself, and absolutely put down on paper evidence that there is first cause that you can draw upon, you’re not going to be able to make the fullest use of a definite plan.
One of my students asked me about my concept of Infinite Intelligence and if I meant the same thing as God. I said, “Yes I do.” “Well,” he said, “can you prove the existence of your concept of God?” I replied, “Everything in the universe is the finest evidence of Its existence, because of the orderliness of the universe.” Everything’s orderly, from the electrons and protons in the smallest part of the matter, up to the largest suns that float through the heavens. Everything’s in orderliness: no chaos, no running together of the planets. There’s more evidence of a first cause than there is of anything that I know of. And, if you don’t believe that, if you don’t accept it, if you don’t see it, if you don’t feel it, and if you don’t know it, then you won’t know that you are a minute part of that Infinite Intelligence being expressed through your brain. If you recognize that, then you recognize the truth of what I said—that your only limitations are those which you set up in your mind, or permit somebody to set up there, or let circumstances establish there for you.
Careful inventory of your past defeats (and adversities from it) shows that all such experiences do carry the seed of an equivalent benefit.