are not willing to experience such results, now is your time to put away the book.
If, however, you decide to proceed with the reading and study of this book, we have several suggestions to make to you. You need not expect to master this instruction at the first reading. There is much solid food contained in it—many things requiring careful mental mastication, digestion, and assimilation. You will need to read the book several times, from start to finish, with intervals between each reading. Yet the instruction is quite simple, and at each reading you will acquire many important facts, principles, and methods.
The proper way in which to read this book for the purpose of study—in which to extract from its pages that which is condensed in them—is to start by reading it carefully, from beginning to end, but without trying to memorize any particular portion, or to impress any particular detail upon your mind. Then lay it aside for a short time, while you think over its teachings in a general way. In this mental rumination try to classify the several most important topics and divisions of the general subject, but without direct reference to the book itself. Having done this, take up the book again, and this time carefully absorb each and every phase and feature of its instruction. Take your time in thus rereading and restudying it. You will find something new in this book each and every time you take it up—no matter how many times you have previously “gone over it.”
Finally, you are not asked to accept as true the instruction contained in this book merely because we have asserted it to be true. You have at your disposal the means of testing and proving the truth of our assertions—the test of actual application, experiment, and experience. If you will earnestly and persistently put into practice the principles and methods set forth in it, you will find yourself actually manifesting and demonstrating the results logically flowing from them.
All that you are asked to do is to accept at least tentatively— as a “working hypothesis”—the general principles announced in this book, and to adopt as a “working plan” the methods it presents to you. Reserve for yourself the right to accept or to reject either principles or methods, or both, after you have subjected them to an earnest, faithful, diligent, and persistent trial in actual life and work. If you will do this, you will, in all probability, need no further argument to convince you of the truth of the underlying principles of this instruction, and of the efficacy of the methods suggested in it.
Here is the prophecy: If you will recognize, by means of your intellect, the Fundamental Principles of Personal Power; and will realize them in your feeling; then will you be able to manifest and demonstrate them in your everyday life and work, by means of the methods herein indicated, or by similar methods devised by yourself but based upon the same general principles. The principles are basic and fundamental; the methods are designed merely to enable you to apply effectively the principles—you are at liberty to adapt or to modify the latter to suit your own individual requirements.
If you attain the first two of the above stages, then assuredly you will attain the third stage—the stage of manifestation. These first two stages may be attained by any person of average intelligence, provided that he will faithfully and earnestly apply himself or herself to the task. You are hereby challenged to test the truth of this prophecy by such a trial and experiment: but that trial and experiment must be made in good faith, in an earnest, serious spirit, and must be pursued with diligence, persistence, and insistence.
II
YOUR MASTER SELF
The active agent of all of your conscious experience is, of course, YOURSELF. The centre of your conscious experience is that “YOU” element of your being—that self-conscious Something or Somewhat, the actual existence and presence of which you assert when you say “I AM I.” This “I AM I” element of yourself is the one fact of your existence of which you are always absolutely certain, and concerning which you can never compel yourself to entertain any doubt.
Every time you say, or think, “I,” you assert the existence of your Self, and its presence in consciousness. No power of argument, no weight of evidence, no sophistry, no casuistry, no fallacy, can ever really convince you that your “I” does not exist; nor that it is not present in being at that moment of consciousness. You cannot truthfully assert, “I am not in existence, here and now”— for, even when you attempt to make such a denial and negation, you are conscious that it is the “I,” itself, making the attempt, and uttering the statement. Thus, even your very attempt at denial and negation is transmuted into an affirmation and assertion of your selfexistence, and of the presence of Yourself at that particular time and place.
This conscious certainty of the existence and presence of the “I” is the axiomatic basis of all philosophy. It is the one indisputable, incontrovertible, irrefragable fact of your thought and consciousness—the one fact that cannot be gainsaid, denied, refuted or overthrown. It is the one point concerning which you can feel absolutely sure and certain. Even the most acute metaphysical or philosophical argument will fail to shake your belief in your own existence, and your presence in being.
You are always able to declare in the face of all arguments, “I AM I!” You may doubt the evidence of your senses—but you can never doubt this consciousness of your own existence as a conscious being. Here, at least, you feel that you are standing on the solid rock of certainty. Your uncertainties begin only when you start to ask yourself “What and why am I?” and
“What else really IS?” But both of these questions imply your assurance that you, Yourself, are present in existence at that time and place. When you say “now,” you mean the particular period of time or duration which YOU are then experiencing. When you say “here,” you mean the particular position in space or extension which You are then experiencing. You must always say and think “I AM I, Here and Now!” but the Here and Now are relative to Yourself, and have no other meaning to you.
If you think that we are here “making much ado about nothing,” and that we are telling you something which everyone knows without being told, we will answer you by saying that upon this very point philosophers and metaphysicians have earnestly disputed from the beginning of human thought— this, because they realized that this one point, if absolutely established, furnished man with his one solid rock of reasoning; his one certain point from which he might chart and diagram his world of experience. That they have reported—as they have been compelled to report—its certainty and essential reality, is an indication of its ultimate truth. For they have made every attempt to undermine or to surmount it: they saw the folly of merely “taking it for granted.” They knew that too many things which men “took for granted” are illusions or delusions—the flatness of the earth, or the stationery position of the earth, for instance.
Moreover, those great minds which for thousands of years have been investigating the subject of Personal Power, long since discovered the fact that before one can hope to exercise any phase of Personal Power he must first arrive at a clear, distinct, and fundamental consciousness of HIMSELF— his “I AM I”—as a reality transcending all of his mental and physical instruments; and that upon the degree of his actual consciousness of the independent existence of this “I AM I” centre of his being depends the degree of his ability to manifest Personal Power.
So, you see, we are not wasting your and our time in telling you something not needing telling. Instead, we are endeavoring to awaken in you the actual and vivid conscious perception of a fundamental truth, without which you cannot hope to manifest or demonstrate Personal Power. Omitting this basic and fundamental instruction, there would be no reason for presenting the rest of the subject to you.
This Ego, Self, “I,” or “I AM I,” which stands at the centre of your conscious experience,
