can harm you. Reason that fear is simply the sense of danger, and when you have perfect confidence in the great Creator’s purpose, when you trust it implicitly, there will be no cause for fear. If you have convinced yourself that there is only one great cause, that the opposite must be a delusion, you will gradually lose the sense of fear and gain the courage you desire.
Every time you feel a sense of fear come over you say: “I am absolutely fearless; there is nothing to fear; fear is not a reality; it is not the truth of being. It is only the absence of courage, based upon ignorance of the great cause.” Emerson knew the virtue of this philosophy when he said: “Nerve us with incessant affirmation. Don’t bark against the bad, but chant the beauties of the good.”
Stoutly determine not to harbor anything in the mind which you do not wish to become real in your life. Shun poisoned thoughts, ideas which depress and make you unhappy, as instinctively as you avoid physical danger of any kind. Do not entertain a discordant or an unhappy thought, or a thought of weakness and misery, but replace all these with cheerful, hopeful, optimistic thoughts. When you feel out of sorts, blue, discouraged, disheartened, if you form the habit of suggesting to yourself some agreeable or pleasant subject, to dwell upon or think about, or take up some word or idea which will suggest pleasure, happiness, and harmony, you will be surprised to see how quickly you can change the whole course of your thought, and when this is changed, the feeling will change also. You will increase your courage and confidence, and this is half the battle. You will soon find that your environment will begin to change. Hope will brighten, you will have a healthier outlook upon life. Then thought, instead of depressing your mind, will be a perpetual tonic of encouragement, and light will soon break and drive out the darkness.
All that you dream of, all that you yearn for and long to be, will be within your reach if you have the power to affirm sufficiently strong, if you can focus your faculties with sufficient intentness on a single purpose. It is concentration upon the thing you wish that brings it to you, whether it is health, money, or position. Constantly affirm that which you wish, hold it persistently in the thought, concentrate all the power of your mind upon it, and when the mind is sufficiently positive and creative the desired thing will come to you as certainly as a stone will come to the earth, when left free in the air, through the attracting influence of gravitation. You make yourself a magnet to draw the condition you wish.
Chapter XII.
Thoughts Radiate As Influence
Gaze thou in the face of thy brother, in those eyes where plays the lambent fire of kindness, or in those where rages the lurid conflagration of anger; feel how thy own so quiet soul is straightway involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and reverberate on each other, till it is all one limitless, confluent flame (of embracing love, or of deadly, grasping hate); and then say what miraculous virtue goes out of man into man.—Carlyle.
OUR thoughts, while most powerfully acting on our own lives, by no means exhaust their force there. They are not held prisoners within our minds or bodies. Potent with influence, they fly from us every instant, working for weal or for woe.
“Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world,” says Emerson. This must not be taken merely to mean printed thoughts, or thoughts spoken from pulpit or rostrum, or even thoughts spoken at all. Our most secret, unuttered thoughts go forth and affect the world, the people all about us.
Every man has an atmosphere peculiar to himself, pervaded by all of his characteristics, his ambitions and aspirations, absolutely determined by the thoughts that govern all his actions. The impression which he gives everybody who comes in contact with him partakes of his ideal. The quality of his ambition enters into his every voluntary act.
It is not what you say so much as the bearing of your thought toward others that forms their estimate of you. Do not flatter yourself that you are known only by what you say; that you are measured by what you choose to give people about yourself. You create in others the impression which you hold in your own mind. What you think about modifies and reaffirms others’ opinions of you. They feel the quality of your thought, they know whether it has power or weakness, whether it is clean, lofty, and noble, or base and low. They can tell by your silent radiations the character of your ideals, and they estimate you accordingly. In fact, this conviction which has come from their silent impression of you may be held firmly, even against your verbal protest to the contrary. As Emerson says, “What you are speaks so loud, I cannot hear what you say.” The atmosphere we radiate must, of necessity, partake of ourselves. We cannot radiate anything unlike ourselves. It does not matter what we pretend to be. People who know us take our real measure, not the pretended one.
We can best estimate the effect we produce on others by analyzing the effect other persons have upon us. We know our real friends by the bearing of their thought toward us. We know that they feel generous and magnanimous toward us, whatever our faults. They are constantly radiating themselves into our consciousness.
It does not matter how pleasant, agreeable, or considerate a man may be toward us, if he holds antagonistic thoughts, mean thoughts, if he carries a grudge, if he is not what he pretends to be, our instinct will penetrate beneath his pretence and unmask his real self, and while he thinks he deceives us, we feel instinctively what he really is.
How often one hears “I can’t bear that man; he gives me the creeps.” Yet the individual in question may have been doing his best to make a good impression, and thinking all the time that he was succeeding.
In the home and in the office, in every relation of life, radiation of one’s own thoughts plays an important part. No care and effort can be too great that make this radiating influence always helpful, uplifting, beneficent.
How much harm we can do in a single day by casting a dark shadow across some bright life, depressing buoyancy, crushing hopes, strangling aspirations—more harm than we can undo in years. We should be appalled if we could see pass before us in vivid panorama the wrecks of a lifetime, caused by cruel thought. A stab here, a thrust there, a cruel, malicious sarcasm, bitter irony, ungenerous criticisms, jealous thought, envious thought, hatred, anger, revengeful thought are all going out constantly from many a mind on their deadly missions.
A morose, gloomy, crestfallen mortal flings out his pessimism wherever he goes and poisons the atmosphere around him, surcharging it with heaviness, depression, and sadness. Success and happiness are not born in such an atmosphere. Hope cannot live in it; joy flees from it. No child can be happy in it. Laughter is suppressed; sweet, joyous faces become cloudy. We feel that life would be unendurable if we had to remain in it indefinitely. What a relief it is when such a person drags his depressing presence from us.
Some people make us feel mean and contemptible in their presence. They call out of us meanness which we never knew we possessed and make us almost despise ourselves. Marriage sometimes reveals undesirable qualities which neither husband nor wife suspected in themselves before.
Some people emit a sort of miasmatic atmosphere, which poisons everything that comes within its reach. No matter how generous and magnanimous we felt before, when these characters come near us we shrivel and shrink within ourselves and there is no responsiveness, no spontaneity possible until they go out of our presence. Like disturbed clams, we shut ourselves up as tightly as possible until we feel that we are out of danger. We cannot be ourselves when near such people. We try to be agreeable with them, but somehow everything is forced; we cannot be sociable with them. We seem ill at ease until they have departed; then we feel that a heavy weight is lifted from us, and we are ourselves again.
Other people act like a tonic or an invigorating and refreshing
