We all have seen
people achieve great ends effortlessly. We have seen others strive frantically
toward some goal only to consistently fall short. We are assured on all sides
that hard work makes the successful man, yet we discern almost immediately that
hard work sometimes fails of accomplishment while fortune often smiles on the
man who seems to make little effort at all. Shakespeare wrote, “There is a tide
in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” The story
is told of the man whose furnace refused to work and who subsequently called a
repair man. The repair man struck the furnace a blow with his hammer, and it
promptly resumed working. He presented a bill for one hundred dollars.
“Outrageous,” sputtered the irate householder. “I want that bill itemized.”
“All right,”
answered the repair man. He scribbled on the bill, “Striking one blow with hammer—one
dollar. Knowing where to strike—ninety-nine dollars.” It is not how hard we
work that matters, but what we get done. It is not the wailing and gnashing of teeth
that is the show, but the things that are built and accomplished. The knowledge
of the simple lever six thousand years ago might have saved a million hours of
backbreaking labor, and had television existed in the time of Christ a
different shape indeed might have been given the Christian Church. Knowing
where and when to strike, just as the repair man so aptly illustrated, is the
goal to be sought, and not the energy to run a million circles around a field
which does not need to be circled even once. Knowledge is the thing, not
physical effort; all things exist because of mental causes, have risen in the
physical world in response to ideas held in mind. Mind is first cause, and he
who is guided by this knowledge discovers the fountain of power.
Your Secret Self
is a giant self, dwarfing into nothingness your surface mind and ego. It is a
self without limits in space and time, and anything is possible to it. Its
manifestations on the human scene sometimes seem supernatural. It outcrops in
our geniuses in those with “second sight,” in our artists, our explorers, our
pioneers, our adventurers. Its presence may be intimately felt in the fields of
parapsychology, extrasensory perception, and precognition, clairvoyance,
thought transference. It stands behind all human endeavor and aspiration as the
guiding intelligence of evolution. Life is going somewhere high and lofty and
worthwhile, and the path by which the heights are to be scaled is safe and
secure and well-known. Only in partial knowledge is there confusion, and only through
the separate and incomplete view of the surface self are we rendered impotent
and afraid in a world that should be ours. The little mind that sits
immediately behind our eyes has not the horizons nor the expanded consciousness
to see the larger picture, the worthier and greater goal of the Secret Self.
All individual suffering, frustration, and failure stem from the failure of the
surface mind to find and properly identify itself with the Divine. In isolating
ourselves from the true roots of our being, we are thrown out of kilter with
the power and surety of the Supreme. By fancying ourselves to be sense-minded
only, we are like the severed tail of a snake, possessed of movement still, but
senseless now, without purpose or entity, helter-skelter, scratching out a
crazy pattern in the dust.
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