Read Ebook: Mastery of Self for Wealth Power Success by Haddock Frank C Frank Channing

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And when fear vanishes, replaced by the WHITE LIFE, selfishness will die as impossible, and thought will no longer be false for the reason that only truth will be possessed.

If the whole world, then, would but thrust out fear and receive the spirit of courage, I do not know any "evils" that could endure a century.

And if you who read these pages will but swing up to the WHITE- LIFE harmony-plane, Health, Happiness and Power must be yours as surely as air rushes into a broken vacuum. If you ask, "What are the limits of this truth?" I answer, "I don't know." To speak otherwise would be mere speculation. I affirm the great truth: All things are yours. That YOU, if stricken through and through with dis-harmony, may be ABLE to receive ALL you crave, I may not affirm. Nevertheless, it is permitted to say:" Launch out! Launch out in the New Thought of Life, and receive, as you do so, whatever is rightly your own, as you are increasingly able to do so."

Man has banished many of his fears already. It is not a long run of the centuries since he quaked before the gloom of the forest, the solitude of the hills, the fog of the vast sea, and, creating innumerable gods and devils by that wizard of distortion, the imagination, lodged them in every object of existence under and in the heavens. He has gotten rid of these.

But when we observe the fear of water, the fear of tornadoes, the fear of lightning, the fear of fire, the fear of disease, the fear of accident, the fear of death, the fear of ridicule, the fear of public opinion, the fear of bankruptcy, the fear of self, the fear for self, the fear of others, the fear of failure, the fear of devils, the fear of a vindictive God, the fear of the future, the fear of a hell--Oh, then, we know that the sun of light is not at his meridian height. We can yet get rid of these also. This is one of the world's tasks. This is your task, if you would make the most of your self and life.

"There is yet very much land to be possessed." No one will possess all of that land in the present stage of existence. Some will be able to claim more than others, but they will err if they assume themselves to be favorites, and the "others" will do worse than err if they complain, "We, alas, are down on our luck." Be assured of one thing: all may be rid of their fears and the whole mass of distress induced by fears. All may acquire dauntless yet serene courage. In that state, if it be of the highest, as it may be, will come to them a peace, a happiness, an influx of buoyancy, a confidence, a sense of well-being, the like of which they have never known.

PRIME DENIALS AND AFFIRMATIONS.

You who now read this page are, thus, invited to begin our study by denying and affirming, as follows:

FIRST--THE DAILY REGIME OF DENIAL:

I deny the existence of error, so far as I am concerned. I deny disease to be my necessary portion. I deny the need of any of my fears. I deny the reality of any cause for fear. I deny that I am less than a king. I deny that ignorance is an essential part of my lot. I deny that poverty is decreed to me. I deny that I am low-born or of bad blood. I deny that I am "down on my luck." I deny by my life that others are my superiors. I deny that anything can hurt the essential ME. I deny a vindictive God. I deny that slavery is religious. I deny that I am not the friend of the White Life. I deny that I am mean, low or ignoble in morals. I deny that my best life depends on creeds. I deny that the Universe is not for me. I deny that health is not my rightful claim. I deny that I am unhappy or depressed. I deny that I am weak and a nonentity. I deny that I shall not unfold forever. I deny all that is opposed to my best welfare.

SECOND--THE DAILY REGIME OF AFFIRMATION. I affirm truth to be my desire and possession. I affirm health to be my rightful claim. I affirm fearlessness of that which I have feared I affirm cause and reason only for courage. I affirm that reason is independent of fear. I affirm my sovereign selfhood. I affirm that life is my perfect university. I affirm that I am success. I affirm that a part of the world's plenty is for me. I affirm myself the WHITE-LIFE equal of others. I affirm my real self impregnable to hurt. I affirm the Infinite Life to be my Friend. I affirm that spirituality is true freedom. I affirm myself the friend of the Infinite. I affirm that mine is the WHITE-LIFE. I affirm my independence of narrow creeds. I affirm buoyant happiness as my present possession. I am power! I shall live and unfold forever.

It may be that all this is strange thought to you, almost meaningless, perhaps. You are invited, therefore, to remember that thousands of people have felt similarly at first, have then caught a glimpse of the truth here and there, and finally have experienced a wondrous recognition of the New Dawn which has now surely come to the world. It is significant that these are saying, "There is nothing else worth while in the whole earth."

Two men were scraping paint from a house preparatory to putting on. a new coat of color, One of them who had been helped back from mental unbalance, and helped solely by thought, broke a long silence and said: "This is the whole thing." He referred to the dawn of Real Life in himself.

It is because I desire every reader to get this perfect start in our study that I have indulged in the rather general outlook on the world's New Dawn. Hereafter our work will be more specific and adressed to the varying conditions of the individual man or woman.

FEAR--THOUGHT AND FEAR--FEELING.

The INTELLECT coldly reflects What Is: An icy, crystalline lake portraying earth and sky In shadows beautiful as death-- And void of pulse, or warmth, or music of good life. This is no Eye with which to view the world!

The SOUL reflects the universe With ECSTASIES of heat, of hue, of harmony! Its INNER gaze creating Life in Fact, So, robing sheer Reality in colors ravishing, Giving it Voice, forming within it Heart, And vitalizing All with Feeling--Being's blood. This is our Eye, viewing the world it builds.

Fear blurs that Eye, while Reason clears: Pure mind lacks Passion adding values to existence; Pure Feeling lacks in REASON, needing values, And, lacking so, fills Eye of Soul with fantasies, With wild distortions of imagination's lust. And always Fear feeds Feeling's grotesque growths Till Soul's Eye on its own creation looks As on eternal Truth. Then Truth and Nature, Deity and Man Evolve dread enmity and horrors multiple, And Soul flees terror-stricken on to Death.

FEAR AND REASON.

"In civilized life it has at last become possible for large numbers of people to pass from the cradle to the grave without ever having had a pang of genuine fear. Many of us need an attack of mental disease to teach us the meaning of the word."--William James.

We have all heard the seemingly discriminating remarks that fear is normal and abnormal, and that normal fear is to be regarded as a friend, while abnormal fear should be destroyed as an enemy.

The fact is that no so--called normal fear can be named which has not been clearly absent in some people who have had every cause therefor. If you will run over human history in your mind, or look about yea in the present life, you will find here and there persons who, in situations or before objects which ought, as any fearful soul will insist, to inspire the feeling of at least normal self-protecting fear, are nevertheless wholly without the feeling. They possess every feeling and thought demanded except fear. The idea of self-preservation is as strongly present as with the most abjectly timid or terrified, but fear they do not know. This FEARLESS awareness of fear--suggesting conditions may be due to several causes. It may result from constitutional make-up, or from long--continued training or habituation, or from religious ecstasy, or from a perfectly calm sense of spiritual selfhood which is unhurtable, or from the action of very exalted reason. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains: the very causes which excite fear in most of us, merely appeal, with such people, if at all. to the instinct of self-preservation and to reason, the thought-element of the soul which makes for personal peace and wholeness.

BANISH ALL FEAR.

It is on such considerations that I have come to hold that all real fear-FEELING should and may be banished from our life, and that what we call "normal fear" should be substituted in our language by "instinct" or by "reason," the element of fear being dropped altogether.

"Everyone can testify that the psychical state called fear consists of mental representations of certain painful results" . The mental representations may be very faint as such, but the idea of hurt to self is surely present. If, then, it can be profoundly believed that the real self cannot be hurt; if the reason can be brought to consider vividly and believingly all quieting considerations; if the self can be held consciously in the assurance that the White Life surrounds the true self, and is surely within that self, and will suffer "no evil to come nigh," while all the instincts of self--preservation may be perfectly active, fear itself must be removed "as far as the east is from the west."

This splendid conviction I earnestly commend to all readers.

These are the ways, then, in which any occasion for fear may be divided:

As a warning and as a maker of panic. But let us say that the warning should be understood as given to reason, that fear need not appear at all, and that the panic is perfectly useless pain. With these discriminations in mind, we may now go on to a

PRELIMINARY STUDY OF FEAR.

Fear is an impulse, a habit, a disease.

Fear, as it exists in man, is a make-believe of sanity, a creature of the imagination, a state of insanity.

Furthermore, fear is, now of the nerves, now of the mind, now of the moral consciousness.

The division depends upon the point of view. What is commonly called normal fear should give place to REASON, using the word to cover instinct as well as thought. From the correct point of view all fear is an evil so long as entertained.

Whatever its manifestations, wherever its apparent location, fear is a psychic state, of course, reacting upon the individual in several ways: as, in the nerves, in mental moods, in a single impulse, in a chronic habit, in a totally unbalanced condition. The reaction has always a good intention, meaning, in each case, "Take care! Danger!" You will see that this is so if you will look for a moment at three comprehensive kinds of fear--fear of self, fear for self, fear for others. Fear OF self is indirectly fear FOR self--danger. Fear for others signifies foresensed or forepictured distress to self because of anticipated misfortune to others. I often wonder whether, when we fear FOR others, it is distress TO SELF or hurt to THEM that is most emphatically in our thought.

Fear, then, is usually regarded as the soul's danger signal. But the true signal is instinctive and thoughtful reason.

Even instinct and reason, acting as warning, may perform their duty abnormally, or assume abnormal proportions. And then we have the FEELING of fear. The normal warning is induced by actual danger apprehended by mind in a state of balance and self-control. Normal mind is always capable of such warning. There are but two ways in which so-called normal fear, acting in the guise of reason, may be annihilated: by the substitution of reason for fear, and by the assurance of the WHITE LIFE.

Let it be understood, now, that by normal fear is here meant normal reason--real fear being denied place and function altogether. Then we may say that such action of reason is a benefactor to man. It is, with pain and weariness, the philanthropy of the nature of things within us.

One person said: "Tired? No such word in my house!" Now this cannot be a sound and healthy attitude. Weariness, at a certain stage of effort, is a signal to stop work. When one becomes so absorbed in labor as to lose consciousness of the feeling of weariness, he has issued a "hurry call" on death. I do not deny that the soul may cultivate a sublime sense of buoyancy and power; rather do I urge you to seek that beautiful condition; but I hold that when a belief or a hallucination refuses to permit you to hear the warning of nerves and muscles, Nature will work disaster inevitably. Let us stand for the larger liberty which is joyously free to take advantage of everything Nature may offer for true well-being. There is a partial liberty which tries to realize itself by denying various realities as real; there is a higher liberty which really realizes itself by conceding such realities as real and by using or disusing them as occasion may require in the interest of the self at its best. I hold this to be true wisdom: to take advantage of everything which evidently promises good to the self, without regard to this or that theory, and freely to use all things, material or immaterial, reasonable or spiritual. I embrace your science or your method; but I beg to ignore your bondage to philosophy or to consistency. So I say that to normal health the weary-sense is a rational command to replenish exhausted nerves and muscles.

I do not say there is no such thing as fear. Fear does exist. But it exists in your life by your permission only, not because it is needful as a warning against "evil."

Fear is induced by unduly magnifying actual danger, or by conjuring up fictitious dangers through excessive and misdirected psychical reactions. This also may be taken as a signal of danger, but it is a falsely-intentioned witness, for it is not needed, is hostile to the individual because it threatens self-control and it absorbs life's forces in useless and destructive work when they ought to be engaged in creating values. Hence we state

THE FIRST GREAT PRINCIPLE OF FEAR-CONQUEST.

Timidity, apprehension, fear, alarm, fright, consternation, terror, panic, desperation, are all false imitations of reason's interpretation of the warning signals of Nature, to be displaced by reason itself, which may then determine whether the occasion be real or unreal, and always to be disregarded and overcome if evidently refering to causes which do not actually exist.

This principle is adduced in the interest of three things: peace, health, power. You are invited to note how vital these interests really are.

The truest peace, of which courage is a sublime bloom, is a growth solely of honorable living and robust self-respect.

Health is of the following realities: body, mind, soul--the deeper self. Health is soundness. A sound human is a triune wholeness. Physical soundness with weak intellect is often the athletic field of superstitions innumerable. Intellectual greed in an unsound body may breed the direst fears of life. A decayed soul is always a House of Fear. The ideal of human existence is--The white life in the sound mind in the vibrantly whole body.

It is because there are so many people who are in some sense sick, that fears abound in every direction. But--it is because so many fears are permitted and actually nursed as boons that so many sick people abound in every direction. If all our fears could be removed absolutely, we should no longer require physicians. This world would be a paradise in every respect. I do not know anything wrong with it that cannot be traced to a fear.

The causes of fear are weak reason, uncontrolled imagination, want of self-control, and ill-health. And the first three items are really phases of the last.

The ability to master and destroy fear depends, it would now seem, upon the following factors of our life:

The General Tone of the Individual; The Soul's Power of Will; The Development and Balance of the Reason.

Reason is demanded to distinguish between right and wrong causes for personal effort in self-protection, and to utterly ignore all wrong causes.

Will-power is demanded to banish fears and to utilize reason's dictates.

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