in the things they undertake.
Great artists, scientists, inventors, explorers, generals, business men, and others, who have done the biggest things in their specialty, have always held the victorious consciousness.
Success was the goal they constantly visualized, and they never wavered in their conviction that they would reach it.
Men fail, not because of lack of ability, but because they do not hold the victorious consciousness, the success consciousness.
They do not live in the expectancy of winning, in the belief that they will succeed in reaching the goal of their ambitions.
They live rather in the expectation of possible failure, in fear of poverty, and coming to want, and they get what they hold in mind, what they habitually dwell upon. The pinched, narrow, limited, poverty-stricken, fear-filled consciousness; the consciousness that expects stingy returns, that expects poverty and does not believe it will get anything better, is responsible for more poverty than any other one thing.
Our consciousness is a part of our creative force; that is, it puts the mentality in a position to attract its affinity, that which is like itself. A penury consciousness cannot demonstrate a fortune; a failure consciousness cannot demonstrate success.
It would be against the law.
If you are steeped in poverty and failure, you have no one to blame but yourself, for you are working against the law. You are holding the poverty consciousness, living in the thought of failure.
Perhaps you are wondering why you can't create something that will match your ambition, your longings when all the time you are filling your mind so full of discouragement, so full of black, gloomy, despairing pictures, that your whole life is saturated with the failure consciousness.
You feel, perhaps, that something, some invisible force, some cruel fate or destiny is holding you back. Something is holding you back, but it is not fate or destiny; it is your discouraged mental attitude, the unfortunate consciousness that you have been holding for years.
While you were trying to build on the material plane, you were neutralizing all your efforts by constantly tearing down on the mental plane. You have been obeying the negative law which destroys and kills, blights and blasts, instead of the positive law that produces; that creates, builds, beautifies, develops man's godlike qualities and glorifies his life.
All of life and its achievements, its possibilities, depend upon our consciousness, and we can develop any sort of consciousness we wish.
The great musician has developed a musical consciousness of which most of us are ignorant, because we are not conscious of this mode of activity.
Our musical consciousness has not been developed. The mathematician, the astronomer, the writer, the physician, the artist, the specialist in whatsoever line, has developed a particular consciousness, and he realizes the fruits of that consciousness. He manifests and enjoys a special power just in proportion as he has developed his specialty consciousness.
What sort of consciousness do you want to develop? What do you want to get, to do, to become?
Make yourself very positive on this point for the first step toward the development of a new consciousness is to get a thorough grip upon your purpose, your desire, your aim; to get a picture of it firmly fixed in your mind; to make it dominant in your thoughts, in your acts, in your life.
This is how the successful lawyer at the start develops a law consciousness; the successful physician, a medical consciousness; the successful business man, a business consciousness.
It is of the utmost importance to get started right, because whatever the consciousness you develop, your mind will attract that which has an affinity for it, will draw to you the material for your building.
The next thing is to establish the conviction that you can achieve whatever you desire. This is a tremendous step in the way of accomplishment, for conviction is stronger than will power.
That is, you may will ever so hard to do a thing, but if you are convinced that you can't do it, the conviction of your inability will prevail over your will power.
Your conviction is your strongest lever of accomplishment. This is what has enabled so many poor boys and girls to climb to high place and power in spite of all sorts of obstacles, and often contrary to the opinion and advice of those who knew them best.
They were so thoroughly conscious of their ability to do the thing they wanted to do, and so convinced that they could do it, that nothing could hold them back from their own.
The beginning of every achievement must be in your consciousness. That is the starting point of your creative plan. In proportion to the intensity, the persistence, the vividness, the definiteness of your consciousness of the thing you want, do you begin to create in any line.
For instance, consciousness of power reveals power; the consciousness of supremacy is equivalent to supremacy itself; the consciousness of self-confidence is what gives us the assurance that we are equal to the thing we undertake.
What we are conscious of, we already possess. But we cannot come into possession of anything we are not conscious of.
That is, it cannot be ours until we become conscious of it. If you are not conscious of the ability to succeed, you can't succeed. If you are not conscious of your own superiority, you cannot become superior.
But if you hold in your consciousness the picture of masterfulness; if you hold in mind the thought of superiority, you are putting in operation a little law of mastership, a little law of superiority, and you begin to manifest these things in your life.
We have unlimited power, boundless resources, in the great within of us, but until we awaken to a consciousness of this hidden power, those invisible resources, we cannot use them.
Some time ago a friend of mine saw a small, delicate woman leap over a six-bar gate when frightened by the sudden approach of a cow which she mistook for a bull.
He said that this woman told him she could no more have done this under ordinary conditions than she could have lifted a corner of her house from its foundations.
But she thought her life was in peril, and, in her great extremity, she became for a moment conscious of the power within. Seeing the cow running toward her, and imagining that it was an angry bull, she had no time to allow her doubts and fears as to whether she could leap over the gate to control her.
It was the only means of escape in sight, and with the aroused consciousness of the latent power within her, she cleared the gate without difficulty. But when the imagined danger was past she lost the consciousness of her hidden strength and relapsed into her ordinary condition of weakness.
There are numerous instances on record where invalids and cripples, people who had been paralyzed for years, who did not feel that they could do anything whatever, have risen up from their beds when a fire or some terrible accident endangered their own lives or the lives of those dear to them, and then and there performed marvelous feats, in carrying heavy furniture out of a burning house, rescuing children, and doing other things that would have seemed miraculous even for strong men.
Again and again unusual emergencies give us a fleeting consciousness of our vast reserve powers and we perform prodigies that amaze ourselves, but we don't continue to make the demand on them and the consciousness that it is possible for us to do anything out of the ordinary slips from us and our
