some may wish to simply go on a mild and continuous regime of exercise like an early morning walker. Others may wish to go on a gruelling and difficult training session just like a marathon runner. The fact is however, the choice is yours. I believe it is a good idea, and would really encourage everyone to start on some development program to exercise and use your inner strength. The degree to which you use it, whether as an early morning walker or as a marathon runner, is up to you.
What may be a sad fact of life is that for many of us the powers of our inner strength have lain dormant for many years as we have been busy with the other pressing needs of life. The sad fact is that if we don't use it we will never know what we could have done.
Before I go too much further, I'd like to also comment on another facet of this subject that fascinates me. It might fascinate you too. It is the question of why, in the very last years of the twentieth century, someone would feel the need to sit down and write a book about inner strength. The reason this fascinates me is the fact that human beings have known about the existence of inner strength almost since time began. The knowledge of inner strength is not confined to a particular culture, religion, philosophy or era. It is ancient knowledge to be found in the oldest literature and it is also modern knowledge to be found in contemporary thought.
I have recently come across the book called Psycho Feedback by Paul G Thomas, printed in 1979. It's a wonderful book for students in this area and is full of the scientific proof of the power of the subconscious and how we can use it. Here's a little of what he says about a Founding Father – Coué.
“Emile Coué was a French pharmacist who in 1870 became fascinated by the power of the mind and its relation-ship to health. Around 1880 he opened a free clinic at Nancy and effected many miraculous cures. He was an international celebrity in the 1920s but unfortunately far ahead of his time in USA. We now know that the significance of Emile Coué's work comes across the span of years like a clarion call.
“Coué's greatest insight formalised in his book Self Mastery Through Conscious Auto-suggestion was:
When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins. This law is as immutable as the law of gravity.
“And the corollary:
When the imagination and will power are harmoniously pulling in the same direction, an irresistible force is the result.”
This corollary is so important and it is the subject of my book Switch On to Your Inner Strength. Said in a different way, it could be – when the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, with positive self talk, are both working towards the same goal, the result will be achieved faster and easier.
So why the need to write now? Maybe it's because the subject is not recognised widely, maybe it's to help influence parents to demand that our children should be taught how to use all their power. Maybe it's to help us deal with change.
The rate of change, the acceleration, is enormous. I can remember being at Sydney University where the first computer in Australia was housed. It was referred to as “the monster”. It was a valve computer occupying a huge room. In 25 years it has come down to a desk top computer; in the next 10 years to lap top. I guess the only thing that is certain is change – and that can be scary.
I really think however, the need to write now arises from what has happened in Western culture over the last two hundred years or so. The most significant thing that has happened in Western culture has been the influence of materialism. This has been underpinned by the scientific and industrial age and has led to the rapid progress we have made in the physical circumstances of our lives. Whilst I speak broadly of Western culture, and come from a position within a Western culture, I believe that some of these trends have also been apparent throughout the world over the same period.
All this physical progress has culminated in our own time. It has resulted in paradoxical situations where our physical progress has caused us to lose contact with the physical realities of life. Just think of life in a city apartment block, or in an ordinary house anywhere in Australia. The dwellings are rainproof, windproof, insulated, heated, air conditioned, carpeted, mosquito proof and so on. The trains we take to work are smooth riding, sound proofed, and climatically controlled. When we get there our workplace is invariably enclosed from the sun, wind and rain and is air conditioned. Everything is controlled so we never experience the contrasting sensations of hotness or coldness, darkness or light, wind or sun, or the feeling of rain pelting in our faces.
Let me give you a tremendous example I read of in a recent Sydney Morning Herald. The fact is that it is now impossible to properly see the night sky from Sydney. The light given off from the city, the man made light that is, has swamped the incoming lights from the stars. Of the three thousand individual stars that should be visible with the naked eye from anywhere in New South Wales, only about 100 can now be seen from the centre of Sydney. Two things have happened here. Firstly, our progress has cut us off from the simple physical pleasure of seeing the stars. Secondly, and worse, we are now severed from the mental and spiritual ad-venture of staring up on a starlit night and wondering about the meaning of it all. We have lost one of the great physical prompts that made past generations think about eternity, constancy, beginnings, ends, purpose and spiritual meaning.
One of the problems of the twentieth century is therefore that we have lost touch with ourselves, our physical selves as well as our inner selves. The challenge for many of us is to redevelop contact with ourselves and rediscover the use of our inner strength.
This is not to say that Western culture as a whole has utterly lost its way on the subject of inner strength. Many institutions, groups, writers, artists and ordinary people have held instinctively to ancient knowledge about our inner strength. What it is to say, however, is that the consciousness of the powers of our inner strength has been on the backburner in our culture for a long time.
The history of human development has been patchy. Sometimes great advances are made in one area of human endeavour whilst other areas of achievement catch up later. The last 200 years has seen unparalleled advances in every aspect of our physical surroundings. Just think of the advances in public health, transport, electronics, manufacturing, distribution and power generation. The list goes on and on and it's indisputable that these things have dramatically improved our standard of living.
But in this period of physical advancement the use of many of our spiritual powers has languished. The reason for this is that it was quite natural, upon seeing the dramatic advances achieved by the scientific and industrial revolution, that people should think that all their problems could be eventually solved by material progress. In other times and in other cultures the opposite has happened. People have achieved great spiritual, philosophical and artistic advances whilst living in conditions of utter poverty when compared to the standards of living we enjoy today. Just think of the spiritual achievements of the English Mystics in medieval times, or the Aboriginal people of Australia, or the American Indians, or the great works of people like Shakespeare, Johann Sebastian Bach, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Michaelangelo and Beethoven. Their material standards of living can only be described as abysmal when compared to the standards we enjoy today. And yet they used their inner strength to achieve great advances for mankind.
But certainly, when we look at the patchy nature of human progress, we have been in a materialistic phase over the last several hundred years. We have believed that the answer to our problems lies in material solutions.
This belief is either breaking down or reaching a point where people no longer believe that purely material solutions are the answer to all their problems. An example of the breakdown of the idea that everything can be solved by physical solutions came with the work of Maxwell Malz, the author of Psycho-Cybernetics. He was a plastic surgeon who noticed that his repairs to people did not have any effect on the people themselves. In the
