THE LAW OF LIFE

It is astounding and sad to see the many thousands of people whose mental machinery keeps delivering to them the very effects they say they do not want. They bewail the fact that they are poor, but that doesn’t make them richer. They complain about their aches and pains, but they keep right on being sick. They say that nobody likes them, which means they don’t like anybody. They aren’t bold, they aren’t aggressive, they aren’t imaginative; mentally they quiver and quake and are bound to negative delusions. It simply doesn’t matter what the picture in your mind is, it is delivered nonetheless, with the same amount of faithfulness and promptness if it is a picture of poverty or disease or fear or failure as it would be if it were a picture of wealth or health or courage or success. The law of life is this: all things both good and evil are constructed from an image held in mind.

A tightrope walker edges swiftly out on his elastic and minuscule support. High in the air, wavering, suspended on a thin black line, he seems to transgress all normal laws of behavior. What is astonishing is not that he is able to do this thing so well but that he dares attempt it at all. Yet what he is doing is an inescapable result of mental law. Long before he set his first uncertain steps on the taut wire, he made a picture in his mind. Throughout his early bumbling attempts the picture persisted. He saw himself, agile, balanced, adroitly crossing the swaying wire, and this vision sustained him through all early failures, now he flaunts his skill and courage in the very face of death, nonchalantly, as the spectators gasp. He is sure, poised, confident, delivered of all fear and mishap by the sustaining picture within.