PREFACE
The
demand during its first two years for nearly an edition a month of "
Peace, Power, and Plenty," the author's last book and its
re-publication in England, Germany, and France, together with the
hundreds of letters received from readers, many of whom say that it
has opened up a new world of possibilities to them by enabling them
to discover and make use of forces within themselves which they never
before knew they possessed, all seem to be indications of a great
hunger of humanity for knowledge of what we may call the new gospel
of optimism and love, the philosophy of sweetness and light, which
aims to show how people can put themselves beyond the possibility of
self-wreckage from ignorance, deficiencies, weaknesses, and even
vicious tendencies, and which promises long-looked-for relief from
the slavery of poverty, limitation, ill-health, and all kinds of
success and happiness enemies.
The
author's excuse for putting out this companion volume, " The
Miracle of Right Thought," is the hope of arousing the reader to
discover the wonderful forces in the Great Within of themselves
which, if they could unlock and utilize, would lift them out of the
region of anxiety and worry, eliminate most, if not all, of the
discords and frictions of life, and enable them to make of themselves
everything they ever imagined they could and longed to become.
The
book teaches the divinity of right desire; it tries to show that the
Creator never mocked us with yearnings for that which we have no
ability or possibility of attaining; that our heart longings and
aspirations are prophecies, forerunners, indications of the existence
of the obtainable reality, that there is an actual powerful creative
force in our legitimate desires, in believing with all our hearts
that, no matter what the seeming obstacles, we shall be what we were
intended to be and do what we were made to do; in visualizing,
affirming things as we would to have them, as they
to
be; in holding the ideal of that which we wish to come true, and only
that, the ideal of the man or woman we would like to become, in
thinking of ourselves as absolutely perfect beings possessing superb
health, a magnificent body, a vigorous constitution, and a sublime
mind.
It
teaches that we should strangle every idea of deficiency,
imperfection, or inferiority, and however much our apparent
conditions of discord, weaknesses, poverty, and ill-health may seem
to contradict, cling tenaciously to our vision of perfection, to the
divine image of ourselves, the ideal which the Creator intended for
His children; should affirm vigorously that there can be no
inferiority or depravity about the man God made, for in the truth of
our being we are perfect and immortal; because our mental attitude,
what we habitually think, furnishes a pattern which the life
processes are constantly weaving, outpicturing in the life.
The
book teaches that fear is the great human curse, that it blights more
lives, makes more people unhappy and unsuccessful than any other one
thing; that worry-thoughts, fear-thoughts, are so many malignant
forces within us poisoning the very sources of life, destroying
harmony, ruining efficiency, while the opposite thoughts heal, soothe
instead of irritate, and increase efficiency and multiply mental
power; that every cell in the body suffers or is a gainer, gets a
life impulse or a death impulse, from every thought that enters the
mind, for we tend to grow into the image of that which we think about
most, love the best; that the body is really our thoughts, moods,
convictions objectified, outpictured, made visible to the eye. "The
Gods we worship write their names on our faces." The face is
carved from within by invisible tools; our thoughts, our moods, our
emotions are the chisels. It is the table of contents of our life
history; a bulletin board upon which is advertised what has been
going on inside of us.
The
author believes that there is no habit which will bring so much of
value to the life as that of always carrying an optimistic, hopeful
attitude of really that things are going
to turn out well with us and not ill, that we are going to succeed
and not fail, are going to be happy and not miserable.
He
points out that most people neutralize a large part of their efforts
because their mental attitude does not correspond with their
endeavor, so that although working for one thing, they are really
expecting something else, and what we expect, we tend to get;
that there is no philosophy or science by which an individual can
arrive at the success goal when they are facing the other way, when
every step they take is on the road to failure, when they talk like a
failure, act like a failure, for prosperity begins in the mind and is
impossible while the mental attitude is hostile to it.
No
one can become prosperous while they really expect or half expect to
be always poor, for holding the poverty-thought keeps them in touch
with poverty-producing conditions.
The
author tries to show the person who has been groping blindly after a
mysterious, misunderstood God, thought to dwell in some far-off
realm, that God is right inside of them, nearer to them than hands
and feet, closer than their heartbeat or breath, and that they
literally live, move, and have their being in Him; that man is mighty
or weak, successful or unsuccessful, harmonious or discordant, in
proportion to the completeness of his conscious oneness with the
Power that made him, heals his wounds and hurts, and sustains him
every minute of his existence; that there is but one creative
principle running through the universe, one life, one truth, one
reality; that this power is divinely beneficent, that we are a
necessary, inseparable part of this great principle-current which is
running God-ward.
The
book teaches that everybody ought to be happier than the happiest of
us are now; that our lives were intended to be infinitely richer and
more abundant than at present; that we should have plenty of
everything which is good for us; that the lack of anything which is
really necessary and desirable does not fit the constitution of any
right-living human being, and that we shorten our lives very
materially through our own false thinking, our bad living, and our
old-age convictions, and that to be happy and attain the highest
efficiency, one harmonize with the
best, the highest thing in them.
O.
S. M. (December 1910.)
