Chapter 10 - Affirmations and Wheels

Mere repetition of “I Am Success” statements will avail little. One must think the thing he desires, and he must put his shoulder to the wheel.

But the person who is full of the sense of failure and defeat is more apt than not to put his shoulder to the wrong side of the wheel. He is so discouraged and preoccupied and worried that he thinks it doesn’t matter much where he puts his shoulder, the thing won't budge anyway. So he goes stupidly along drudging away with his shoulder in the same old spot -- the wrong spot.

But let that man make up his mind that there is a way to budge that wheel and he will find it; and you will see things move. That man will walk around that wagon a time or two, take in the lay of the land, pat his horses into willing humor, maybe back ‘em up a bit, ring out a cheerful “Gid ap,” and settle his shoulder to the right spot at the right moment -- and away they go. Or another team will pass just at the right time to give him a lift out.

The man who believes himself equal to any emergency which arises will be strong mentally and physically. His mind will be alert, full of expedients. Instead of pushing like a blind mule at one spot until he drops in his tracks, he will use his gumption and find another way. He will conjure up a lever of some sort to budge that load. If he can’t do it alone somebody else will come along in the nick o’ time to give him the lift he needs. He believes he will work it somehow, and he does.

The “I Am a Failure” man never has anybody come along in the nick o’ time. “Just my luck,” he whines, and keeps on putting his shoulder to the wrong part of the wheel, or tugging hopelessly and half-heartedly, or -- with inward rage that takes more energy than the tug -- keeps on until he has to give it up for the time.

To affirm “I Am Success” will not pull the load out of the mire except as it awakes energy to intelligent effort. All affirmations and all going into the silence are useful in waking mental and physical energy to intelligent action.

All chronic failures are such because they believe in failure and opposition and “malicious animal magnetism” and general all-around the-world-is-against-me-ness. This belief in failure fills the individual with an affinity for undesirable things.

The infallible cure, the only cure, for failure, is belief in success, belief in one's own power to turn even defeat to good advantage. The man who “doesn’t know when he is beaten” will never be beaten. The “lunkhead” who “didn't know he was a lunkhead” went to the top, while the lunkhead who knew he was a lunkhead stayed at the lunkhead end of the class.

One of our big pork packers once tramped across the continent because he hadn’t money to pay his way. After he arrived at his destination he said he saw on his tramp hundreds of places where he could have started in without a cent and in time made piles of money -- opportunities just crying to be developed. Only the thought of a bigger chance at the end of the route kept him from stopping in the very first town on his route!

But that boy had success in him and was on the alert for opportunities. He believed in himself and the world. The failure believes only in “bad luck” and his eye is out for “soft snaps,” which he is certain he’ll never get a chance at.

When a man is looking for trouble and defeat he finds them.

“As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.” That does not mean that a man may make a few affirmations of success, or profess new thought, and immediately become a success. The heart of man is the emotional center of his habits or instinct, the center from which radiate his instincts, his habits, as the nerves radiate from the solar plexus.

Instincts are habit thoughts, heart thoughts. And every instinct came into being through conscious thought and effort.

Follow your internal experiences while learning to play the piano and you will gain a clear idea of how instinct comes into being. At first your fingers are stiff and every movement is a voluntary one, every movement has to be thought about, directed by thought. But gradually you acquire the habit of handling your fingers in a certain way.

Gradually you cease to think at all about your finger movements; you “do it instinctively.” In other words you have trained your heart, your subconscious mind, to do the thinking for you. Henceforth, instead of thinking consciously about your finger movements you think about them in your heart, that is, sub-consciously.

Psychologists say that not more than five per cent of our mental processes are conscious, the remaining ninety-five per cent being under the consciousness. This means that at least ninety-five per cent of our thoughts are habit thoughts, or “instinctive” thoughts.

It is this instinctive part of us, this ninety-five percent of us, that is referred to in the Bible as “the heart.”

Now if this “heart” of us carries at least ninety-five percent of our mentality you can easily see why a man is what he “thinketh in his heart.” And you can see why a few affirmations of success, or even a good many of them, will not change the man sufficiently to make any great difference in his surroundings. And you can see why a mere intellectual conception of new thought is not enough to change him and his environment.

Man is a magnet, at least ninety-five per cent of which is habit mind. Therefore by far the greater part of his environment comes to him by its affinity to his ninety-five percent habit or instinct mind, his under-conscious mind, of whose workings he is practically unconscious.

So it is no wonder he so often says, “I don’t see why this undesired thing should come to me.” He cannot see why it comes, because he is practically unconscious of that great ninety-five per cent of his thinking which draws them. He knows he does not consciously desire these unpleasant things and he can scarcely conceive the fact that he is conscious of only about five per cent of his thoughts and desires.

And, too, he is loath to acknowledge that the greater part of himself has no more sense than to bring such things to him! He feels more complacent when he lays the blame at the door of “environment,” or “wicked people,” or “malicious animal magnetism,” or a “God who chastens whom he loveth,” or a devil who got loose from God’s leading strings and goes raging about to pester good folks.

Man is a magnet, and every line and dot and detail of his experiences come by his own attraction. “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.” The preponderance of attraction comes through the instinct self, the “heart.”

And there is no use in trying to fight off, or run away from, the things which come to us. We only hurt ourselves by fighting. And to run away from the things we have attracted is to run into the arms of similar, or worse, conditions. We have to take ourselves along.

The only way to change conditions effectually is to change “the heart,” the habit or instinct mind.

This can be done with more or less ease, according to the degree of setness of character and the degree of will and enthusiasm brought to bear.

The key to all change of character lies with that little five per cent conscious mind, which with all its littleness is a sure lever by which to move the ninety-five percent ponderosity below it. For conscious thought is positive thought, dynamic; while subconscious thought is negative, receptive.

That little five percent mind has stronger compelling power than several times its bulk of sub-conscious mind, and there is not an atom of all that ninety-five per cent subconscious mind which cannot be moved by that little five per cent mind which lies at the top. The conscious self is the directing power. Just as it directed your fingers to change their fixed habits, so it can direct any change in other lines of mental or bodily habit -- by directing persistent, quietly insistent practice on the desired lines.

Insist upon right conscious thinking, and in due time you cannot fail to have right subconscious thinking.

To think good, peace, love, self-command, self-faith, success, long and faithfully enough will fill even the most set “heart” with-habits of good, peace, love, self-command, selffaith, success. And in proportion as the heart becomes filled with such habits the environment and experiences will change to match.

How long will it take thus to transform you by the renewing of your whole mind? All depends upon you. If your practice is fitful and half-hearted it may take another generation or two. If you go at it with a steady will, cutting off all distractions which sap your will and enthusiasm, practicing faithfully and diligently at the new mental habits you may make the desired change in, say, half a lifetime or less.

And if you can bring to your assistance a high spiritual exaltation and faith you can make the change in almost no time at all. For spiritual exaltation and faith and enthusiasm will literally melt the hardest “heart” and permit a quick re-formation. This is the secret of quick accomplishment in children; their hearts are clean and molten in the emotional fires of enthusiasm and faith, ready to receive deep and lasting impressions.

By [our being schooled in] reason we grown-ups have cooled and even quenched the heart fires of faith and enthusiasm; so it takes time and repetition to re-form us. This is the secret of miracles. Religious enthusiasm and exaltation are akin to the fires of youth; they melt the heart to receive higher impressions.

The rationalist must receive his new impressions by painstaking hammering in. Repetition and time will do for him what religious or youthful enthusiasm does quickly for babes and fools.

No, affirmations will not do the work of “putting your shoulder to the wheel” when the load is stalled. But they will transform you, heart and consciousness, so that you will attract better horses as well as wheels, better roads, more friends to happen (?) around in the moment of need.

And affirmations of the right sort will wake up your gumption so that you will not overload your horses or your personal energies to the point of needing a shoulder at the wheel.

Success is the natural result of intelligent direction of effort.

Affirmations of success, faith, wisdom, power, good, love, will wake your latent forces to more intelligent uses.

The more enthusiasm you can conjure into the affirmations the more quickly will you realize success.