THOUGHTS BECOME THINGS

What is going on in life is the evolution of the individual to complete oneness with the Secret Self. The universal being that lies behind creation has differentiated into finite form, taken disguise, so to speak, in order to work out the manifold sides of its infinite and eternal nature. Therefore the man who expands his consciousness is fulfilling the fondest wish of life. It is not necessary that we become saints to understand as much of the Secret Self as is necessary to use its power in our affairs. To know this law is enough: whatever we accept as a permanent mental image in our consciousness must manifest in our world, for we become in life what we are in consciousness, and nothing can alter that fact. It takes a great deal of courage to admit to yourself that if you are sick, frightened, frustrated, or defeated you have brought these conditions on yourself and no one but yourself can get rid of them. Occasionally someone so afflicted will experiment with the power of his mind to cure him, but will give it only the most cursory trial. If, for example, he is ill and in pain, he might say, “I visualized myself well and happy, but I hurt just as much as ever.” What he didn’t do above all things was visualize himself well and happy. He visualized himself sick and in pain. The moment he began to visualize himself well and happy, he would become well and happy.

This is not a law that works once in a while or part of the time or on auspicious occasions. It works all of the time and it works in the exact same way, and it is returning to you right now in the material world the images you maintain in your mind. You cannot escape them. They surround you, sustain you, or torment you. They are good or evil or uplifting or degrading or exalting or painful according to the vision that prompts them, and as long as you are alive, as long as you think and imagine, you are literally surrounded day and night by the images that predominate in your consciousness.

THOUGHT CONTROL

The startling power of the Secret Self is that it always makes manifest the image it beholds. Nothing illustrates this fact better than the current experiments with hypnosis. A man may be in such excruciating pain that even narcotics will not relieve him, but he can be put under deep hypnosis and told that there is no pain at all, and presto, there is no pain. He may have a deep and abiding fear of crowds, but under hypnosis it can be suggested to him that he likes crowds, and lo and behold, he enjoys them most of all. He can become stronger, healed of disease, smarter, more aggressive, possessed of endurance and indomitableness, all because these things are impressed upon his psyche as facts and the image in his mind grows from them.

“Aha!” the cry goes up, “find me a good hypnotist. I want to be smart and strong and successful and all those good things and to be rid of weakness and pain and failure.” And hypnosis can do it too, if you are willing to abdicate as the person in charge of your life. If you are willing that someone else run it every hour of every day throughout the whole of it, then you can turn your life over to a hypnotist and he can remake it in the image you outline. However, it will make small difference to you. You may still be in the vehicle, but you no longer will be driving. If effort and strife and the overcoming of obstacles are the spurs to growth that the Secret Self intends them to be, then surely you will have abdicated from life itself.

You need no hypnotist to put the power of the Secret Self to constructive work in your life. No hypnotist can overcome the negative image making of your mind unless he is with you twenty-four hours a day. You are the only one in constant rapport with yourself, and thus you are the only one able to police the thoughts and images you entertain. If you let the image be prompted by something outside you, then you exercise no control over your life. If you accept images only in accord with your desires, then life will deliver your inner goals. In any case, the magnificent promise of the Secret Self is this: you can change your life by altering the images in your mind, for what comes to you in the end is only that which you have been accepting in consciousness. Now there are many people who agree with this premise but are quick to point out that the images in the consciousness of most persons are projected there from the subconscious and are not of their own choosing. Most schools of psychotherapy apparently feel this way, for they propose a tedious and time-consuming treatment bent on expurgating from the subconscious memories of painful and bitter occasions which might prompt unpleasant images in the mind. Seven or eight years of this process have not noticeably emptied painful memories from the subconscious of most patients, and in any case, if a treatment is truly efficacious, it cannot possibly consume so long a time. The saddest thing about the modern “put the blame elsewhere” school of psychoanalysis is that the person undergoing it accepts it as justification for his failure to police his consciousness and thereafter expects such policing to be accomplished by having the neighborhood rid of criminals. If he achieves some semblance of a changed consciousness in the hands of the psychiatrist, he soon goes back to a world full of negative thoughts and ideas, and just because he does not police his own mind, they readily find acceptance there. You may not be able to alter the positions of the stars, to stop the earth from revolving, to cause the winds to blow or the sea to calm, but you can choose what you will think. You can think what you want to think. You can think only in response to an inner vision and a secret goal, and if you take your stand with a firm heart and a high resolve you will be successful and you will not be intimidated and you will project your image clear and true and its counterpart will return to you in the world.