CHAPTER 6

The Potency of Desire

My own experience confirms the fact that the desires toward which I have been most unflinchingly persistent, have been the first to manifest objectively. Take, for instance, my desire for financial success. When I came into Mental Science I found that this was my leading desire. To be sure, I had many other desires that were very imperative; I desired youth and its symbols, health and its accompanying results; but I really desired money more than anything else. Why? Because I had been under the pressure of poverty so long that money represented a certain phase of freedom to me, without which no amount of health, strength or beauty could be enjoyed to any great extent. In other words, money did at that time promise a greater measure of freedom for my thoughts and for my body also, than any other thing. Therefore, the desire for money was my leading desire. I was a slave for the lack of it. Every thought of my life was chained to it, and could not escape. How could my spirit (thought-life) try its wings in the clearer atmosphere of the ideal under such circumstances?

I remember—as if it had been but yesterday—the very hour when I paused in my work and in my thinking, and made a compact with myself something like this: “I will have money, first of all; without money I can not move a step in the discovery of the mighty power latent in the human brain. This thing must go as I direct it, and I will submit to no dictation from any external source.”

I spoke these words aloud and they have never wavered in their force. In speaking them I created a power in that line which went forth to its own accomplishment. Looking down within myself I came across the mental record of these words, and they seemed absolutely invulnerable—a sort of impregnable fortress that nothing could disrupt or weaken. The record of other resolutions faded or weakened at different times, but this never did. I had borne poverty until I simply would not bear it any longer. Disease, old age and death might come; but not poverty. It had been the monster which held the best part of my intellect in dreadful bondage, and I was done with it at all hazards.

This resolution received the emphasis of every atom of my body and mind, and no power on earth could break it down. No power on earth or in heaven ever does break down such a resolution. There was no wavering in it; there was no “God willing” in it; there was no “if it is for the best” in it. It was clear-cut positiveness, unblurred by a single flaw of irresolution. I had reached a point in mental suffering where life was not worth a straw to me unless I could have it on my own terms. So I stood up before “the powers that be,” and made a statement of my terms. There was nothing to reject them (a thing I did not know at that time); so the statement stood for all there was in it, and it is standing yet.

As for my other desires, I have never come into so forceful a position with regard to them. I have been satisfied to see my health gradually improve and my mental powers gradually strengthen; and I have this same feeling yet about them. I can wait the slow development of time. With poverty, however, I could not wait. I would not. And I did not, for my resolution acted like the magician’s wand, and efforts which I had put forth long before, rushed suddenly into success. Money enough came to release my thoughts from the eternal dollar, and to banish my fear of poverty. I did not want very much, because it easily becomes a burden, and enslaves the higher thought quite as much as its absence. What I wanted was freedom, and that was what I realized.

It is an inconsistent thing, while all growth is through accumulation, that society should place a ban upon the accumulation of wealth. Wealth is as necessary to our existence as the air we breathe. It is true that while we can manage to drag out meager, stinted lives without much wealth, still the lives we live are not in any way the lives we desire. We find ourselves in positions where our aspirations are shorn of their ascending power; our condition does indeed become sordid, simply because our faculties—so grand in their possibilities of expression—are tied down to a contemplation of the source from which our next meal is to come. There is nothing that can belittle a human brain so rapidly as this; nothing that can confine it to the contemplation of things unworthy of its scope; nothing that so soon will lead it into those mistakes which the world punishes as sins.

Why not abandon the effort on the brute plane—it is on the brute plane alone where the effort to accumulate seems sordid—and study the Law of Accumulation? There is a Law that governs it, and he who knows the Law well enough to practice it has put poverty under his feet forever. When I tell people this they say, “Oh, if I could only put poverty under my feet what would I not give?” They do not say, “Oh, if I could only understand the Law.” Scarcely one of them cares for the Law; they want the results of understanding it while they remain indifferent to it. This is not a state of mind where anything valuable comes. The first thing to want is an understanding of the Law. “Give us wisdom” is the first demand, and in fact it is the only one. With wisdom, all other things flow in. Without wisdom, that is, without an understanding of the Law—there is no successful accumulation. There may be a spasmodic power to accumulate, but it is never to be relied upon. It may desert one at any hour, and it always deserts sometime. But the power to accumulate under a knowledge of the Law of Attraction never fails in even the smallest particular.

I am just as much assured of wealth to-day as if I had millions under lock and key. Why? Because I understand the Law by which our wants are supplied. What! Are you operating this mighty Law? you ask. Yes, I am operating it every day. I am building houses with it and operating it in improvements of use and beauty. I am accumulating wealth just as fast as I use it. If it seemed necessary to use it faster it would come to me faster. People have said to me, “Why don’t you put your money out at interest?” My answer to this question is ready. To put money out on interest would clearly indicate that I have more confidence in money than in the power of the Law that brings it to me. It is a position that would wreck me. It is not my business to think of money except as one thinks of a tool with which to work. My business is to constantly seek a greater knowledge of my own power under the Law; for it is this knowledge alone that brings money. To put your trust in money is a sordid thing, and it brings its own reward in disappointed hopes. But to put your trust in yourself, knowing your relation to the Law, will actually put you in the way of accumulating everything that is necessary to make you a free man.

Let me not mislead any of my readers. The power of which I speak under the Law performs no miracles, but works itself out through the ordinary means lying thick about you. This power is simply a revelation to you of your own mastery. It gives you wisdom to carry your own faculties into external expression, and in doing this to obtain the reward that waits upon the doing. A knowledge of the Law of Attraction ingrained within you, will give you the power to carry any ideas of your own into practical success. Are you a drummer? Then you can sell twice as many goods as you could before you understood the Law. Are you a mechanic? It is in this department above all others that it reveals its might; it develops your constructiveness from one point to another until you see that there is no limit on this line. Are you a lawyer, a singer, an artist? It makes no difference what you are or what you desire to be. It is in this field of your operations that a knowledge of the Law of Attraction, as revealed by a study of Mental Science, will enable you to succeed.

This knowledge of the Law is something that can be learned easily and more inexpensively than the medical student learns his textbooks and masters the secrets of the human organism. Many persons have declared that it can be learned more easily than this; others have said that by “following the spirit” a man would come into a knowledge of it. But this is nonsense. The knowledge of this mighty thing requires intellectual application of the closest kind, and time for the mental ripening of the many facts it has to impart. Of course a slight knowledge of these facts will give the student some power in conquering the impediments that beset his path. Perfect conquest requires perfect knowledge, and there are no men—yea, and no gods—who can jump into this position at one bound. It requires work, study, and a testing of the knowledge as it slowly matures in the mind.

But suppose it does require a long time and unflagging effort; what is there in all the world so worthy of it? What else is there that bestows power to create in every direction and in every field of thought and action? I, who write these thoughts, am absolutely fearless. Neither time nor circumstance has any terrors for me. Poverty shakes his skeleton wand at me without producing a tremor. I am his master; not because I have houses and money in banks, but because I have the self-confidence—fully tested—that enables me to evolve the positive thought and to speak the positive word which externalizes my demand.