{"collection":"nth","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/nth/tsoa/tsoa26.htm","path":"nth/tsoa/tsoa26.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/nth/tsoa/tsoa26.htm","text":"The Secret of the Ages, by Robert Collier, [1926]\nThat is what the American Bankers Association found when it took one hundred\nhealthy men at 25 and traced them to 65.\nThese hundred were healthy to start with. They all had the same chance for success. The difference lay in the way they used their MINDS. Ninety-five out of one hundred just do the tasks that are set them. They have no faith in themselves\u2014no initiative\u2014none of the courage that starts things. They are always directed or controlled by someone else.\nAt 65, where will you be? Dependent or independent? Struggling for a living\u2014accepting charity from someone else\u2014or at the top of the heap?\n\u201cI am the Master of my fate.\u201d\nUntil you have learned that, you will never attain life's full success. Your fate is in your own hands. You have the making of it. What you are going to be\nsix months or a year from now depends upon what you think today.\nSo make your choice now:\nAre you going to bow down to matter as the only power? Are you going to look upon your environment as something that has been wished upon you and for which you are in no way responsible? Or are you going to try to realize in your daily life that matter is merely an aggregation of protons and electrons subject entirely to the control of Mind, that your environment, your success, your happiness, are all of your own making, and that if you are not satisfied with conditions as they are, you have but to visualize them as you would have them be in order to change them?\nThe former is the easier way right now\u2014the easy way that leads to the hell of poverty and fear and old age.\nBut the latter is the way that brings you to your Heart's Desire.\nAnd merely because this Power of Universal Mind is invisible, is that any reason to doubt it? The greatest powers of Nature are invisible. Love is invisible, but what greater power is there in life? Joy is invisible, happiness, peace, contentment. The radio is invisibles yet you hear it. It is a product of the law governing sound waves. Law is invisible, yet you see the manifestation of different laws every day. To run a locomotive, you study the law of applying power, and you apply that law when you make the locomotive go.\nThese things are not the result of invention. The law has existed from the beginning. It merely waited for man to learn how to apply it. If man had known how to call upon Universal Mind\nto the right extent, he could have applied the law of sound waves, the law of steam, ages ago. Invention is merely a revelation and an unfoldment of Universal Wisdom.\nThat same Universal Wisdom knows millions of other laws of which man has not even a glimmering. You can call upon It. You can use that Wisdom as your own. By thinking of things as they might be instead of as they are, you will eventually find some great Need. And to find a need is the first step towards finding the supply to satisfy that need. You've got to know what you are after, before you can send the Genie-of-your-Mind a-seeking of it in Universal Mind.\nThe Acre of Diamonds\nYou remember the story of the poor Boer farmer who struggled for years to\nglean a livelihood out of his rocky soil, only to give it up in despair and go off to seek his fortune elsewhere. Years later, coming back to his old farm, he found it swarming with machinery and life\u2014more wealth being dug out of it every day than he had ever dreamed existed. It was the great Kimberley Diamond Mine!\nMost of us are like that poor Boer farmer. We struggle along under our surface power, never dreaming of the giant power that could be ours if we would but dig a little deeper\u2014rouse that great Inner Self who can give us more even than any acre of diamonds.\nAs Orison Swett Marden put it:\n\u201cThe majority of failures in life are simply the victims of their mental defeats. Their conviction that they cannot succeed as others do robs them of that vigor\nand determination which self-confidence imparts, and they don't even half try to succeed.\n\u201cThere is no philosophy by which a man can do a thing when he thinks he can't. The reason why millions of men are plodding along in mediocrity today, many of them barely making a living, when they have the ability to do something infinitely bigger, is because they lack confidence in themselves. They don't believe they can do the bigger thing that would lift them out of their rut of mediocrity and poverty; they are not winners mentally.\n\u201cThe way always opens for the determined soul, the man of faith and courage.\n\u201cIt is the victorious mental attitude, the consciousness of power, the sense of mastership, that does the big things in\nthis world. If you haven't this attitude, if you lack self-confidence, begin now to cultivate it.\n\u201cA highly magnetized piece of steel will attract and lift a piece of unmagnetized steel ten times its own weight. Demagnetize that same piece of steel and it will be powerless to attract or lift even a feather's weight.\n\u201cNow, my friends, there is the same difference between the man who is highly magnetized by a sublime faith in himself, and the man who is de-magnetized by his lack of faith, his doubts, his fears, that there is between the magnetized and the de-magnetized pieces of steel. If two men of equal ability, one magnetized by a divine self-confidence, the other demagnetized by fear and doubt, are given similar tasks, one will succeed and the other will fail. The self-confidence of\nthe one multiplies his powers a hundred-fold; the lack of it subtracts a hundred-fold from the power of the other.\"\nHave you ever thought how much of your time is spent in choosing what you shall do, which task you will try, which way you shall go? Every day is a day of decision. We are constantly at crossroads, in our business dealings, our social relations, in our homes, there is always the necessity of a choice. How important then that we have faith in ourselves and in that Infinite intelligence within. \"Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established.\" \"In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.\"\nIn this ever-changing material age, with seemingly complex forces all about us, we sometimes cry out that we are driven by force of circumstances. Yet\nthe fact remains that we do those things which we choose to do. For even though we may not wish to go a certain way, we allow ourselves to pursue it because it offers the least resistance.\nNow, how about you? Are you taking active control of your own thought? Are you imaging upon your subconscious mind only such things as you want to see realized? Are you thinking healthy thoughts, happy thoughts, successful thoughts?\nThe difference between the successful man and the unsuccessful one is not so much a matter of training or equipment. It is not a question of opportunity or luck. It is just in the way they each of them look at things.\nThe successful man sees an opportunity, seizes upon it, and moves upward another rung on the ladder of success. It never occurs to him that he may fail. He sees only the opportunity, he visions what he can do with it, and all the forces within and without him combine to help him win.\nThe unsuccessful man sees the same opportunity, he wishes that he could take advantage of it, but he is fearful that his ability or his money or his credit may not be equal to the task. He is like a timid bather, putting in one foot and then drawing it swiftly back again\u2014and\nwhile he hesitates some bolder spirit dashes in and beats him to the goal.\nNearly every man can look back\u2014and not so far back either with must of us\u2014and say, \"If I had taken that chance, I would be much better off now.\"\nYou will never need to say it again, once you realize that the future is entirely within your own control. It is not subject to the whims of fortune or the capriciousness of luck. There is but one Universal Mind and that mind contains naught but good. In it are no images of Evil. From it comes no lack of supply. Its ideas are as numberless as the grains of sand on the seashore. And those ideas comprise all wealth, all power, all happiness.\nYou have only to image vividly enough on your subconscious mind the thing you wish, to draw from Universal\n[paragraph continues] Mind the necessary ideas to bring it into being. You have only to keep in mind the experiences you wish to meet, in order to control your own future.\nWhen Frank A. Vanderlip, former President of the National City Bank, was a struggling youngster, he asked a successful friend what one thing he would urge a young man to do who was anxious to make his way in the world. \"Look as though you have already succeeded,\" his friend told him. Shakespeare expresses the same thought in another way\u2014\"Assume a virtue if you have it not.\" Look the part. Dress the part. Act the part. Be successful in your own thought first. It won't be long before you will be successful before the world as well.\nDavid V. Bush, in his book \"Applied Psychology and Scientific Living,\" says:\n\u201cMan is like the wireless operator. Man is subject to miscellaneous wrong thought currents if his mind is not in tune with the Infinite, or if he is not keyed up to higher vibrations than those of negation.\n\u201cA man who thinks courageous thoughts sends these courageous thought waves through the universal ether until they lodge in the consciousness of someone who is tuned to the same courageous key. Think a strong thought, a courageous thought, a prosperity thought, and these thoughts will be received by someone who is strong, courageous and prosperous.\n\u201cIt is just as easy to think in terms of abundance as to think in terms of poverty. If we think poverty thoughts we become the sending and receiving stations for poverty thoughts. We send out\na 'poverty' mental wireless and it reaches the consciousness of some poverty-stricken 'receiver.' We get what we think.\n\u201cIt is just as easy to think in terms of abundance, opulence and prosperity as it is to think in terms of lack. limitation and poverty.\n\u201cIf a man will raise his rate of vibration by faith currents or hope currents, these vibrations go through the Universal Mind and lodge in the consciousness of people who are keyed to the same tune. Whatever you think is sometime, somewhere, received by a person who is tuned to your thought key.\n\u201cIf a man is out of work and he thinks thoughts of success, prosperity, harmony, position and growth, just as surely as his thoughts are things\u2014as Shakespeare says\u2014someone will receive\nhis vibrations of success, prosperity, harmony, position and growth.\n\u201cIf we are going to be timid, selfish, penurious and picayunish in our thinking, these thought waves which we have started in the universal ether will go forth until they come to a mental receiving station of the same caliber. 'Birds of a feather flock together,' and minds of like thinking are attracted one to the other.\n\u201cIf you need money, all you have to do is to send up your vibrations to a strong, courageous receiving station, and someone who can meet your needs will be attracted to you or you to him.\u201d\nWhen you learn that you are entitled to win\u2014in any right undertaking in which you may be engaged\u2014you will win. When you learn that you have a right to a legitimate dominion over your\nown affairs, you will have dominion over them. The promise is that we can do all things through the Mind that was in Christ.\nUniversal Mind plays no favorites. No one human being has any more power than any other. It is simply that few of us use the power that is in our hands. The great men of the world are in no wise SUPER Beings. They are ordinary creatures like you and me, who have stumbled upon the way of drawing upon their subconscious mind\u2014-and. through it upon the Universal Mind. Speaking of Henry Ford's phenomenal success, his friend Thomas A. Edison said of him\u2014\"He draws upon his subconscious mind.\"\nThe secret of being what you have it n you to be is simply this: Decide now what it is you want of life, exactly what\nyou wish your future to be. Plan it out in detail. Vision it from start to finish. See yourself as you are now, Being those things you have always wanted to do. Make them REAL in your mind's eye\u2014feel them, live them, believe them, especially at the moment of going to sleep, when it is easiest to reach your subconscious mind\u2014and you will soon be seeing them in real life.\nIt matters not whether you are young or old, rich or poor. The time to begin is NOW. It is never too late. Remember those lines of Appleton's: *\n\"Where I had failed, he'd won from life, Success;\n Where I had stumbled, with sure feet he stood; p. 417\n \u00a0Alike\u2014yet unalike\u2014we faced the world,\n \u00a0And through the stress he found that life was good.\n \u00a0And I? The bitter wormwood in the glass,\n \u00a0The shadowed way along which failures pass!\n \u00a0Yet as I saw him thus, joy came to me\u2014\n \u00a0He was the Man that Once I Meant to Be!\n\"We did not speak. But in his sapient eyes\n \u00a0I saw the spirit that had urged him on,\n \u00a0The courage that had held him through the fight\n \u00a0Had once been mine. I thought, 'Can it be gone?'\n \u00a0He felt that unasked question\u2014felt it so\n \u00a0His pale lips formed the one-word answer, 'No!'\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0.\n \u00a0\"Too late to win? No! Not too late for me\u2014\n \u00a0He is the Man that Still I Mean to Be!\"\n399:* From \"Poems,\" Houghton, Mifflin Co.\n416:* From \"The Quiet Courage.\" D. Appleton & Co., New York.","title":"The Secret of the Ages: Volume Five: XV. The Master of Your Fate","type":"page"}