Excerpts from
Making
The Man or Woman
Who Can
by Wallace D.
Wattles
Order this book in
Adobe PDF eBook or
printed form for $8.95 (+ printing charge)
Book Description
Originally entitled Making the Man Who Can, and also How To Promote Yourself, this is a
special gender-inclusive ebook version of the original.
Foreword (by
Elizabeth Towne)
This
book is a Live Wire. Make the right connection with it and success is
yours. How shall you do it? By reading it long and often; by going back
to it every time you catch your confidence and purpose ebbing; and by
acting up to its teachings in every way you can think of.
The
Life of all success is The Spirit of Faith and Goodwill. Whenever you
feel your faith ebbing get back to this Live Wire again. Live with it
until its spirit is yours and you recognize yourself as THE MAN WHO
CAN.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 - The Powerful Life - Whence Comes the Power?
Chapter 2 - The
Business Attitude
Chapter 3 - What
You Desire
Chapter 4 - Becoming
What You Want to Be
Chapter 5 - Promoting Yourself
Chapter 6 - The
Advancing Thought
Chapter 7 - The
Law of Opulence
Chapter 8 - Man and Money
Chapter 9 - Talk
That Builds
The Powerful Life - Whence Comes the Power?
THAT there is a successful,
powerful
life; that it may be lived here; that it may be lived by anyone, we are
obliged to concede; and having conceded this we cannot fail to wish to
live this life, for rightly lived, it means health, wealth, power,
happiness and all round success in life. Those who read this series of
lessons are going to learn how to live it, and they need first to
understand a little as to what the power is and whence it comes.
We are just passing from the physical,
animal
or material stage of development to the mental and spiritual stage. We
are ceasing to be physical men and women and becoming mental and
spiritual men and women. To make this change is sometimes a matter of
considerable difficulty. The majority of people are not as yet making
it at all. They are still entirely material in their beliefs and
thought. They do not see the world of Spirit; they put their faith in
houses and lands and money and so on, and because they believe in these
things they are subject to them. The only powerful life of which they
conceive is a life of physical power.
New Thought people, they whose spiritual
eyes
are becoming opened; who begin to see the inner and finer world
penetrating the false appearances of the world of matter; who begin to
see Spirit as the cause of matter and of what is called natural
phenomena, these are they to whom Jesus referred in speaking to
Nicodemus; they have been born of the Spirit and they begin to see the
Kingdom of God. They get glimpses of a powerful life which may be lived
in the flesh and here on earth; occasionally they enter upon it and
live it for a time, but their great difficulty is lack of understanding
as to what the power is and how the life must be lived. This we are
going to find out.
The first step is to learn the great
truth
about the universe which is that all is one. All things are forms of
one Substance; that Substance is conscious and intelligent; it is
Spirit. In former articles and in my books I have referred to this
Original Substance under various names, as the supreme, the Thinking
Stuff, God, All-Mind and so on; but here I shall use the one word,
Spirit. Substance is Spirit; everything is Spirit; there isn't anything
but Spirit.
Before you can fully believe this great
truth
you will have to learn to disbelieve much of what your senses tell you,
and it is easy to do this when you understand how unreliable the senses
are. The physical man depends upon the senses for everything. To him
seeing is believing, and he accepts as real the appearances around him;
but in reality he is grossly deceived; he lives in an unreal world, his
whole universe is a deception, and not what it seems to him at all.
This man must believe that he lives on a
flat
world under a solid blue arch; the sun and moon travel over him and his
earth is stationary and the stars are small points of life. These are
the appearances of the physical world as given us by the senses, yet no
civilized person now really believes in them; we know that the earth is
round, that the sky is not solid, that the stars are very much larger
than the earth, and that the earth goes round the sun. No well informed
person believes what he sees as to these things; he looks through
appearances to the reality.
Take another illustration. Nothing
appears more
real than color and one can hardly doubt that the objects around us are
really of the hue they appear; that the grass is green and the robin's
breast is red and so on. But there is no color except in consciousness.
When an object appears to us to be of a given color, as red, it is not
really so. The "red" object reflects or refuses to absorb and receive
the red in the ray of light which strikes it and throws it back to the
eye; we see the color it rejects and not the color it is. Where there
is no eye to receive the reflection, color has no existence. So it does
not do to believe appearances to be true; we must look through them and
see the only reality and the only reality of all things is Spirit.
The first step to be taken by those who
would
lead the Powerful Life is to cease to be misled by appearances, and to
perceive truth; to cease to believe in what seems to be and to have
faith in what is. They must get to the heart of things, and instead of
trying to reason from appearances to realities they must believe
realities and disregard appearances.
Spirit is Substance and all Substance is
Spirit. There cannot be two Substances. The moment we admit that there
are two Substances as Spirit and matter we are absolutely lost. If
matter is distinct from Spirit then it has powers and potentialities of
its own and may affect us for good or ill. So, if we believe this, we
shall become more and more tied down to matter which we can see and
have less and less faith in Spirit which we cannot see or can only
feel; and the Powerful Life will become impossible to us. We must see
that Spirit is Substance and that it is the only Substance. Nothing
exists but Spirit.
Next we must come to understand that
Spirit is
life, and that it is all the life there is. Nothing lives but Spirit.
Every thought of man, every volition of any animal, every unfoldment of
leaf or blossom is Spirit, acting in the thing that moves. Spirit lives
in the grass and flowers and
trees; in flesh and insect; in animals and men.
There
is no life but the life of Spirit. "He giveth life to all." "In
Him we live and move and have our being." Nothing has individual life
or life of its own. It is all the life of Spirit.
Again, all power is Spirit. Every
movement in
nature or art from the flutter of a leaf to the rushing of the giant
current through the dynamo formed by man is Spirit. And in it all and
through it all Spirit is working intelligently to some great purpose or
purposes of His own.
That there is intelligence through the
power of
nature is shown for one thing among many by continuity. Everything
works under the same laws, yesterday, today and forever. But suppose
one day the water pipes ran water and the next day gasoline; one day
you weighed one hundred and ten pounds and the next day half a ton, the
laws of gravity and chemistry working in contrary fashion; then you
might suspect that there were two forces in nature or that the one
force was an unintelligent one.
If you want to live the Powerful Life of
Samson, Napoleon, or of the evangelist, - and you do, you are reaching
out for more power. This is what we are all seeking. Whether we want
merely to become rich or whether we wish to excel in society or to rear
our children well or become benefactors of humanity, the only thing we
require is power and ability to lead the Powerful life.
At the close of this first chapter I
bring you
to this fact, which if you can grasp it fully, will give you the
foundation on which you must stand in leading the life, and if you go
on with the succeeding lessons will certainly enable you to lead it.
We live and move and have our being in
the
limitless ocean of intelligent Spirit from whom we draw our life and
power, physical, mental and spiritual. All power is in this Spirit. And
we may learn to so unify ourselves with Spirit that more and more power
shall be ours, in fact we may have all the power that He can trust us
with, and it is only then, a matter of making ourselves trustworthy.
Chapter 2
The Business
Attitude
LIKE
causes, under like conditions, produce like effects; business success
is an effect, and cannot be an exception to the law of cause and
effect. The cause of success is the person who succeeds; something in
them has been applied to their work, and has produced a certain result.
What is it in an individual which produces the result of success? It is
not physical strength, although physical strength may be a great aid;
all strong people do not succeed, however, and those who do have the
ability to so apply their physical strength as to make it assist in
producing the result of success. It is not intellectual ability, for
all intellectually able people do not succeed; those who do have the
power to so direct their intellectual ability as to make it assist in
the achievement of success.
The potency which makes the successful person, therefore, is the power
to so apply physical and mental ability as to produce results. This
power must be an attitude of the individual themselves. It is not a
special gift to a few, nor is it a rudimentary faculty which each may
develop; it is a position to be assumed. If their abilities and
energies are to be directed, it is the person themselves who must
direct them; and if they direct them they are the potency which causes
success.
Every human being has the inherent power to direct their own abilities
and energies; and everyone is conscious of having this power. It is
because a person has it that they are capable of growth and progress.
To make a successful person, it is necessary to make one who knows what
things result in success, and who will direct their energies to do
those things; and the first essential to this is that they should
assume the attitude of self-direction.
Every man or woman is either self-directing or directed by the
suggestions which come from their environment. The individual who can
is always a self-directing one; the one who is directed by suggestion
is the one who cannot. The individual who is directed by suggestion has
a "horoscope"; their destiny is decided by heredity and environment;
the self-directing person does not allow their thoughts to be dictated
by heredity, environment or the stars; they think what they want to
think, and if their horoscope does not suit them they make a better one.
Business success depends upon business policy; business policy can only
be formulated by thought; therefore, whether a person succeeds or fails
depends upon the way they think.
The directed man or woman only thinks the thoughts which are suggested
by their environment; and so they can only do what those around them
think they can do.
The self-directing man or woman thinks what they want to think, and can
therefore do what they want to do.
To become the man or woman who can, the first step is to take the
attitude of self-direction.
Receive and consider every suggestion which comes from your
environment, but do not act on the suggestion; act on your own
conclusions about the suggestion.
Digest and assimilate suggestions as you digest and assimilate food;
make them a part of your own thought before you use them, and learn to
reject any that are indigestible.
Making The Man Or
Woman
Who Can
by Wallace D.
Wattles
Order this book in
Adobe PDF eBook or
printed form for $8.95 (+ printing charge)
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