ESSENTIAL LAW OF PRACTICAL SELF-MASTERY
[Sidenote: _Option and Opportunity_]
_External objects excite sensory impressions, but the perception of
them is purely at the option of the mind._
This is of the greatest practical importance. Consider its
consequences. It means that sense-impressions and your perception of
them are two very different things. It means that sense-impressions
may throng in upon you as they will. They are the work of external
stimuli impressing themselves upon the sensorium as upon a
mechanical register. You are helpless to discriminate among them.
You cannot accept some and exclude others. You are a perambulating
dry plate upon which outside objects produce their images.
[Sidenote: _Prearranging Your Consciousness_]
But, and this is a vital distinction, perception is an act of the
mind. It is initiated from within. It permits you to discriminate
among sensations in the sense that you may dwell upon some and
ignore others. It enables you to definitely select, if you will,
the elements that shall make up the content of your consciousness.
_Perception as an independent mental process thus enables you to
predetermine what elements of passing sensory experience may be made
the basis of your conscious judgments and of your feelings and
emotions._
[Sidenote: _How to Definitely Selects its Elements_]
Bear this in mind when you think of your environment and its
supposed influence upon your life. Remember that your environment
is no hard-and-fast thing, an aggregate of physical realities. Your
environment, so far as it affects your judgment and your conduct,
is made up, not of physical realities, but of mental pictures.
_Your environment is within you._ Get this conclusion clearly in
your mind.
Hold fast to the point of view that, _Environment, the environment
that influences your conduct and your life, is not a chance massing
of outward circumstances, but is the product of your own mind_.
[Sidenote: _An Infallible Recipe for Self-Possession_]
Think what this means to you. It means that by deliberately
selecting for attention only those sense-impressions, those elements
of consciousness, that can serve your purpose, you can free yourself
from all distractions and make peaceful progress in the midst of
turmoil.
[Sidenote: _Using "Unseen Ear Protectors"_]
"In the busiest part of New York, a broker occupied a desk in a
room with six other men who had many visitors constantly moving
about and talking. The gentleman was at first so sensitive to
disturbances that he accomplished almost nothing during business
hours, and returned home every evening with a severe headache. One
day a man of impressive personality and extremely calm demeanor
entered the office, and noticing the agitated broker, smilingly
said: 'I see that you are disturbed by the noise made by your
neighbors in the conduct of their affairs; pardon me if I leave
with you an infallible recipe for peace in the midst of commotion:
_Hear only what you will to hear_.' With this terse counsel he
quietly bade the astonished listener adieu. After his visitor
had departed, the nervous man felt unaccountably calm, and was
constrained to meditate upon his friend's advice, and no sooner
did he seek to put it into practical use than he learned for the
first time that it was his rightful prerogative to use unseen ear
protectors as well as to employ his ears. Six or seven weeks
elapsed before he saw his mysterious visitor again, and by that
time he had so successfully practiced the simple though forceful
injunction, that he had reached a point in self-control where the
Babel of tongues about him no longer reached his consciousness."
[Sidenote: _How to Avoid Worry, Melancholy_]
Herein lies a remedy for worry, with its sleepless nights and
kindred torments; for melancholy and despair, with their train of
physical and financial disaster.
How? Simply by shutting off the flow of disagreeable thoughts and
substituting others that are pleasant and refreshing.
You are master. You can change the setting of your mental stage
from portentous gloom to sun-lit assurance. You can concentrate your
thought upon the useful, the helpful and the cheerful, ignore the
useless and annoying, and make your life a life of hope and joy, of
promise and fulfilment.
[Sidenote: _Putting Circumstances Under Foot_]
You will not question the statement that what you do with your life
is the combined result of heredity and environment. At the same time
you doubtless possess a more or less hazy belief in the freedom of
your own will.
The chances are that in any previous reflections on this subject you
have magnified the influence of outside agencies and wondered just
how a man could make himself the master rather than the victim of
circumstances.
You now realize that your environment is an environment of thought,
that your material universe is a thing your own making, and that
you can mold it as you will simply by the intelligent control of
your own thinking.
[Sidenote: _Running Your Mental Factory_]
In Book I. you learned that--
I. _All human achievement comes about through bodily activity._
II. _All bodily activity is caused, controlled and directed by the
mind._
In this volume you have added to these propositions a third, namely:
III. _The mind is the instrument you must employ for the
accomplishment of any purpose._
Acting on this third postulate, you have begun the consideration
of primary mental operations with a view to evolving methods and
devices for the scientific and systematic employment of the mind
in the attainment of success. You have concluded your study of
the first of the two fundamental processes of the mind, the
Sense-Perceptive Process, and have learned to distinguish between
seeing or hearing or feeling on the one hand and perceiving on
the other.
[Sidenote: _Acquiring Mental Balance_]
Realizing this distinction and applying it to your daily life,
you can at once set to work to acquire mental poise and practical
self-mastery, the essence of personal efficiency.
There never has been a moment in all your life when sense-impressions
were not pouring in upon you from every side, tending to disturb
and annoy you and interfere with your concentration and progress.
Heretofore you have struggled blindly with these distracting
influences, not knowing the elements with which you had to deal
nor how to deal with them.
[Sidenote: _Dissipating Mental Specters_]
But the mask has been torn from the specter of distraction, and
hereafter when irrelevant sights, sounds and other sensations
threaten to interrupt your work, just stop a moment and consider.
So far as you and your actual knowledge are concerned, nothing
exists in substance and reality outside your mental picture of it.
So far as you and your actual knowledge are concerned, all matter
is simply thought, and you have never doubted your ability to
dismiss a thought. It is for you, then, here and now, to decide
whether you will harbor sensory pictures that impede your progress
and allow them to harass and dominate you and interfere with the
achievement of your ambition, or whether you will ignore these
intruders and thereby annihilate them.
[Sidenote: _How to Control Your Destiny_]
Success is a variable term. In the last analysis, it means simply
getting the thing that _you_ want to have.
Whether you succeed or fail depends altogether upon your own
attitude toward the external facts of life.
You have within you a living Force against which all the world is
powerless. You have only to know it and to learn how to use it.
Learn the lesson of your own powers, the secret of controlling the
selective and creative energy within you, and you can bring any
project to the goal of accomplishment.
In the closing volumes of this _Course_ we shall instruct you in
practical methods by which the selection of those elements of
experience that are helpful may be made absolutely automatic.
Transcriber's Note:
Some illustrations have been moved from their original positions,
so as to be nearer to their corresponding text, or for ease of
navigation around paragraphs.
Duplicate chapter headers have been removed from the text version
of this ebook and hidden in the HTML version.
The word 'prearranging' appears both with and without a hyphen.
This variance matches the original text.