Paul Alan Weinzweig - Ten Commandments of Personal Power: Creative Strategies For Shared Happiness and Success

Personal Power Paul Weinzweig
Dr. Paul Weinzweig
THE TEN
COMMANDMENTS
OF PERSONAL
POWER
Creative Strategies for Shared Happiness and Success
©Paul Weinzweig, 1988.

Meridian Press.
ISBN 2-920417-27-4.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I THE PURSUIT OF PERSONAL POWER 3
PROLOGUE 4
Chapter I: THE NATURE OF PERSONAL POWER 7
Chapter 2: THE CHALLENGE 10
Chapter 3: SELF-CONTROL 13
Chapter 4: HARMONY 20
Chapter 5: IDEALISM 25
Chapter 6: THE EFFECT OF OUR TIMES ON PERSONAL POWER 32
PART II: HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR LIFE ENERGY 35
Chapter 7: STRESS AND SELF-AWARENESS 36
Chapter 8: THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, AND ATTITUDES 41
Chapter 9: THE LIFE ENERGY EXCHANGE 45
Chapter 10: THE LAWS OF NATURE 51
Chapter 11: CULTURE AND THE LIFE ENERGY 60
PART III: HOW TO FREE YOUR CREATIVE POTENTIAL 64
Chapter 12: THE PURPOSE OF WORK 66
Chapter 13: HOW TO DISCOVER YOUR LIFE'S WORK 70
Chapter 14: HOW AND WHY YOU DEFEAT YOURSELF 93
PART IV: THE POWER OF CREATIVE THOUGHT 103
Chapter 15: A CHALLENGE FOR THE MIND 104
Chapter 17: THE NATURE OF THOUGHT 122
Chapter 18: OBSERVATION AND DETACHMENT 134
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Chapter 19: SELF-CONFIDENCE 142
Chapter 20: OPTIMISM 149
Chapter 21: INTEGRATION 154
Chapter 22: VISUALIZATION, MEDITATION, AND DREAMING 162
Chapter 23: THE BODY'S WISDOM 167
EPILOGUE 170
REFERENCES 172
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PART I THE PURSUIT OF PERSONAL POWER
"Life is a search after power; and this is an

element with which the whole world is so satur-
ated, - there is no chink or crevice in which
it is not lodged, - that no honest seeking goes
unrewarded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Power"
(The Conduct of Life)
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PROLOGUE
Amidst the remarkable and perilous changes that are rushing at life in the
modern world, it is easy to lose sight of the individual. In an age of
organizations and systems, of social problems and institutional solutions, it is
commonplace to forget that individuals are the mainsprings of all problems
and all solutions. The casting of the social net has brought insights and
practical benefits but individual human beings too readily slip through that net.
The growth of mass society with its undisciplined freedoms and centralization of
functions has resulted in a decline in personal responsibility and, consequently,
of Personal Power. A system - be it a family, school, corporation, or govern-
ment - cannot succeed if the individuals within it are without creative thought,
self-expression, or practical responsibility.
All the industrial, technical, and scientific progress of the Twentieth Century
has not brought happiness to people. One is far more likely to find a genuine
smile on the face of an impoverished Ecuadorian farmer than on the faces of
shoppers on Rodeo Drive or of the attache' set on Wall Street. Rex Harrison, the
great English actor, who lived in both India and the United States, expressed his
amazement that a people as poor as the East Indians should appear so open,
generous, and happy while Americans, the richest people in the world, looked
insulated and distressed. Wealth and technical progress alone are no ticket to
personal satisfaction and fulfillment.
The industrial and technological revolutions have brought many wonderful

benefits to mankind but in certain crucial respects they have failed to
champion the deeper needs of individual human beings. Without the
development of our unique powers of energy and thought, creativity and
character, life will be lacking in lustre, distinction, direction, and meaning;
hopes and dreams will falter and be scattered in the wind. Personal Power is
that capacity not only to survive life's vicissitudes, but to turn them into creative
achievements.
The philospher Bertrand Russell noted that if, in the Seventeenth Century, a
certain hundred people had been killed in their childhood, the modern world
would not exist. If the Personal Power of one hundred people could make such
a difference to the world, what a beautiful future we could have if one billion
individuals had the learning, freedom, and self-control to develop their
inalienable powers of personal expression. We have the resources and
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technology to make this possible. We need only the will, imagination, and
heartfulness to implement it. The physical or mental enslavement of any
human being diminishes the light and threatens the life of all others. No one
knows the birthplace of talent and every individual has a unique contribution
to make to the welfare of others. The rights to wisdom and to personal growth
belong no longer to an elite but to all people. For them this book was written.
Each of us has a "dharma" - a path to follow, a mission in life. Most of our

unresolved problems stem from the failure to recognize our talents and to
realize our true potential. Only a few fortunate ones are aware of their destiny
and are fulfilling it. Those individuals are the ones with Personal Power.
This book provides the ethical principals and scientific know-how for
unlocking the code to your future, your happiness, your success. Personal
Power is the guarantee of individual and social achievement. Personal Power is
a practical formula for shared happiness and success which enables each of
us to make maximum use of our inborn talents. Here, for the "Me Generation",
are the TEN COMMANDMENTS OF PERSONAL POWER
1. BE MASTER OF YOUR DESTINY
2. BECOME SUCCESSFUL BY DOING WHAT YOU LOVE
3. MAKE A CONSTRUCTIVE CONTRIBUTION TO YOUR WORLD
4. BUILD LOYAL RELATIONSHIPS
5. FREE YOUR CREATIVE POTENTIAL
6. DISCOVER COURAGE
7. CARE FOR YOUR HEALTH
8. AVOID SELF-DEFEATING BEHAVIOR
9. APPLY THE POSITIVE POWER OF YOUR MIND
10.COMBINE MATERIAL SUCCESS WITH SPIRITUAL SATISFACTION
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Chapter I: THE NATURE OF PERSONAL POWER
"There is no meaning to life except the meaning

man gives to his life by the unfolding of his
powers."
- Erich Fromm
"Power" is a vigorous word with many shades of evocative meaning. People

in positions of power - financial, military, political, educational, legal,
bureaucratic - respect it. People outside such positions often suspect it.
Personal Power, however, is very different from other forms of power. Personal
Power can never be taken away by the whim of the voters, by revolutions, by
the fluctuations of the marketplace, by parents, teachers, police or by
bureaucratic decisions from higher up.
Personal Power and domination are two entirely different concepts.

Domination is a symptom of personal weakness because it is caused by
ignorance, fear, and isolating egotism. Personal Power, in contrast, is based
upon knowledge, courage, and cooperation. Personal Power is synonymous
with WISDOM: experience strained by the heart and crowned by intelligence.
Personal Power should not be confused with wealth, official power, fame or
the authority of office. Sometimes they are the same, but often they are not.
Many of the "walking dead" of this world occupy positions of official power in
government, business, education, and elsewhere. Any signs of Personal Power
which they may seem to exhibit are an illusion created by the prestige of their
office. Once they lose their wealth or leave their official positions of power, the
"walking dead" quickly lose the appearance of power because that is all it was
- appearance.
In the early 1920's, the paintings of a renowned Russian artist named

NIcholas Roerich were being widely exhibited in America. In one of the large
cities, during the tour, a wealthy art patron arranged a festive dinner in
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Roerich's honor. Everything was luxurious and on a grand scale and the most
prominent people of the city were present. The host and hostess, both elderly,
heartily entertained the guests. Many speeches were delivered. Everything was
beautifully and magnificently arranged. After dinner, one of the female guests
said to Roerich: "This is indeed a remarkable reception," and added
confidentially, "Probably this is the last dinner in this house." Roerich looked at
his companion in amazement and she, lowering her voice, explained that their
host was absolutely ruined and just yesterday he had lost his last three million.
Roerich was shocked. The lady added, "Of course, it is not easy for him,
especially considering his age. He is already seventy-four."
The incongruity of this revelation with the graciousness and calmness of the
host and hostess amazed the artist. After that conversation, Roerich began to
take a special interest in their fate. Three months after that grand dinner they
moved to their former garage. It seemed that everything was lost; but three
years later this businessman was again a millionaire and again lived in his
former palatial home.1
The demeanor of the businessman, (his graciousness, cheerfulness, and

buoyant self-confidence), during the party in Roer- ich's honor, was not altered
in the slightest by the news of his financial bankruptcy. Such conduct and the
subsequent return to solvency show clearly that the businessman's power did
not come from his wealth but that his wealth came from his considerable
Personal Power.
Personal Power is accessible equally to the poor and the rich; the schooled
and the unschooled; those in favor and those out of favor; women and men;
young and old; the physically attractive and the not-so-attractive; to people
of all nations, races, and creeds. BUT YOU HAVE TO EARN IT. Personal Power
cannot be conferred from without; it can only be created from within.
The Webster's Dictionary gives several definitions of power: "great ability to

do, act, or affect strongly; vigor; force; strength." The strength of Personal
Power resides not merely in the muscles. It lives primarily in the self-mastery of
the mind, in the depth of refined feeling in the heart, and in the wisdom of
experience retained by every cell of the body. Personal Power is a synthesis of
mind, heart, hands, and feet; a working together, in effective harmony, of
thought, feeling, and will. To refer to Power as Personal indicates simply that
the power belongs to the person and not to the surrounding circumstances.
Personal Power is accumulated in time and space but lives outside of both.
Personal Power is gathered in the course of life's encounters but grows
according to the desire, the will, and the imagination. Personal Power is hewn
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out of the bedrock of daily experience and built upon a foundation with four
pillars. These are: THE CHALLENGE, SELF-CONTROL, HARMONY, and IDEALISM.
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Chapter 2: THE CHALLENGE
"Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Fate"

There is an old adage about adversity that if it doesn't kill you, it will
strengthen you. Challenge is the touchstone of Personal Power. A warrior
without an adversary will never know or develop the true measure of his or her
skill and strength. Women and men without the help of the natural challenges
of life cannot develop Personal Power. Tamerlane, the great Mongol
conqueror, understood the value of adversity. He achieved one of his mightiest
victories by setting on fire the steppe behind his own armies. Being pursued by
fire, his armies rushed forward and destroyed the enemy, which was much
stronger than Tamerlane's forces. People are most swift when pursued.
It is not necessary to make an enemy in order to find a challenge. The

natural circumstances of life provide ample challenges close to home, often
under one's nose, and usually within oneself. A difficult marriage, an
unpleasant colleague or employer, a troublesome child, a boring job, poor
health, false pride, impatience, jealousy, irritability, or timidity - these are all
worthy adversaries. These are the real dragons to be slain and their familiarity
should not lull one into a deceptive tranquility.
Viewed from afar, the men and women of Personal Power seem like the
unblemished heros of a child's fairy tale. But if the truth were known, all human
beings - kings and cobblers alike - must wrestle with the same torments of
existence, weaknesses of character, and upheavals of life. Only the challenge
can create the hero within us. The word challenge comes from the latin root
"calumnia" meaning "a false accusation". The word challenge, therefore,
connotes something untrue, deceptive, or insubstantial and thus conquerable
(truth is stronger than falsehood). Nevertheless, the worthiness of a challenge
should never be underestimated. To be vanquished, the adversary must be
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approached with the finesse of a serpent, the courage of a lion, and the
candor of a child. Ignorance, self-pity, and false pride are easy victims for the
adversary.
Shakespeare said that many people would rather have a fool to make
them merry than experience to make them sad. Ease and diversion have their
place in the scheme of things but when they become an obsessive escape
from the deeper moments of life, Personal Power evades us. For Personal
Power is accumulated out of the daily experiences of life - more from a
constructive attitude toward sorrow, suffering and sacrifice than from
abandoning ourselves to merriment, contentment, and self- indulgence. The
former experiences, if they do not completely subdue us, evoke our courage
and resourcefulness and thus build Personal Power.
Prince Siddhartha, later to be known as Buddha, the Enligh- tened One, was
the son of a wealthy Hindu king who made every effort to shield his son from
knowledge of the evil and sufferings in the world. So the young Prince was
raised within the splendid isolation of the palace grounds where no adversity
was allowed to furrow his brow and where his every whim and need were
catered to with infinite care and grace. In this pleasurable isolation, the Prince
grew up and became a young man and was married to a beautiful and
refined princess. Not once in all this time had he stepped beyond the palace
walls. After the birth of his first child, the happy but curious Prince Siddhartha
managed, with the help of a servant, to escape detection by palace guards
and experience his first adventure beyond the palace walls. Outside, he
witnessed for the first time the ravages of earthly existence - suffering, disease,
old age, and death - which his parents had tried to hide from him. The sensitive
young Prince was shocked by what he saw and asked his servant about the
meaning of such distress. When he was told that such suffering afflicted all of
mankind, the Prince was so deeply moved that he could not bring himself to
return to the innocent and luxurious life of his royal birthright. He renounced his
possessions and left his palace determined to learn how to free human beings
from their sufferings. He travelled and experienced all the difficulties, joys, and
sorrows of existence and finally, from the irreducible wealth of experience and
reflection earned from the challenges of life, he achieved enlightenment.
Through wisdom and radiant love, Buddha taught the keys to truth and
freedom. For thousands of years, the Personal Power of Buddha has influenced
people in nations around the world. His father was a wealthy king but no one
remembers him or his kingdom.
In each of the challenges of human existence there is a vital personal lesson

to be learned and a Personal Power to be gained. Discover these lessons and
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you will have begun to master those challenges and earn your inner freedom.
The adored maestro of the piano, Arthur Rubenstein, described, in a poignant
vignette, how a lesson earned in adversity liberated his enormous love for life.
As a young man in Berlin, without money, barely enough food to live on, his
bills unpaid and his credit used up, and no money to seek concert
engagements, he was alone, cold, and hungry. His career had come to a
stop. As his only hope, he had written to a friend for financial help. After several
weeks without a reply, Rubenstein despaired and decided on suicide.
However, the attempt to hang himself with the belt from his old worn-out
bathrobe failed ludicrously when the belt broke and he crashed to the
bathroom floor utterly disconsolate but unhurt. He cried bitterly for some time
before crawling to his beloved piano where he played himself back to life.
Feeling hungry, he decided to go out for something to eat. Once outside,

he had a revelation or vision. Every mundane detail of his neighbourhood took
on new meaning and became animated. Life appeared beautiful and worth
living. His joust with death now caused him to feel reborn and a whole new set
of values came to the surface of his mind. He had found the secret of
happiness: in a phrase, "love life for better or worse, without conditions".
In his mid-eighties, Rubenstein called himself the happiest person he had

ever met simply because he had learned, on that fateful day in Berlin, to love
life unconditionally. He points out that most people place the conditional "if" in
front of their quest for happiness - "if" they were rich, or talented, or healthy, or
loved by someone. But then happiness is never achieved because it is always
conditional. Life, says Rubenstein, can take away our freedom, health, family,
friends, success, but it cannot separate us from our thoughts or our imagination
and the best things in life are free - nature, love, music, art, literature, and our
capacity to be passionately interested in everything. And so, a great man's
conscious love of life was born on the saddest day of his life.2
Our chances for victory in the face of life's challenges ("false accusations"),
depend chiefly upon our attitude. To love life unconditionally is to accept both
the easy and the difficult with equal understanding and appreciation. The
German poet Rilke said that "In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands
that work on us." When we look upon a challenge with a smile of gratitude
(sweet are the uses of adversity), the battle is nearly won. Learn to recall with
gratitude the challenges of your life because they helped you become
vigilant, resourceful, and self- disciplined. It is only through the realization of our
shortcomings, illuminated by challenges, that we permit the possibilities of SELF-
CONTROL to enhance our Personal Power.
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Chapter 3: SELF-CONTROL
"If a man can govern himself, what difficulty

could he encounter in governing a state."
"A wise one expects all from himself;

the mediocre one, all from others."
"An archer provides an example for a sage.

When he does not reach the centre of the
target, he searches for the cause within himself."
- Confucius
In their thirst for conquest, men have visited their power on their neighbours,
Mother Nature, and the fairer sex. Man's conquests have encompassed
continents, oceans, and outer space. People have been slow, however, to
bring their own nature under control and herein lies the history of human
blunders and tragedies. Schools and scholars have assembled great stores of
knowledge, but self-knowledge, which is the higher wisdom and the
foundation for self-control, is not taught in our institutions of learning.
Knowledge is power and knowledge of self is Personal Power. The pursuit of

Personal Power begins with an understanding of oneself. Of course, without
worthy challenges we cannot know ourselves. Challenges kindle the fire which
brings our hidden qualities - our potential strengths and weaknesses - to the sur-
face. Self-control is the bringing into conscious mastery and creative use new
and higher levels of our Life Energy.
Negative thoughts and feelings are entropic - they diminish our Life Energy
and our Personal Power. In the pursuit of Personal Power, self-control involves
the transmutation of our thought and feeling energies from the negative to the
positive and the controlling of those energies for specific and creative
purposes. It is through the transmuting of the negative and the channelling of
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the positive thoughts and feelings toward constructive ends that Personal
Power is accumulated. There is no time or place too inconvenient for the
practice of self-control. Every hour, challenges provide countless opportunities
for self- mastery: to turn irritation or anger into calm patience, envy into
admiration, meanness into magnanimity, cruelty into kindness, intolerance into
compassion, cynicism into hope, laziness into initiative ... the permutations are
limitless.
Once again, the critical ingredient is attitude. People often feel that self-
control is beyond their reach and even to begin would be futile; or they feel in
their untested "wisdom" that self is already under control. False humility and
false pride are equally handmaidens to inaction and to personal weakness.
The truths behind Personal Power are that the journey of a thousand miles
begins with the first step and that there is nothing that cannot be obtained by
persistence. Confucius said that "Each day I can bring a basket of earth, and if
I persist in it, finally I shall raise up a mountain". Through persistent and often
unconscious habits, people raise up mountains of obstacles for themselves and
for others. The giving up of old selfdefeating habits is a difficult but necessary
step toward the birth and growth of new and constructive habits. Self-
actualizing behavior creates the mountain of Personal Power which is the
reward of self-control.
The door to self-control is opened by three silver keys. These are courage,
compassion, and patience. Each of these keys contains the essence of the
others. The word courage derives from the latin "cor" meaning heart. Courage
resides in the heart. Courage is an act of the heart. Courage is inspired by love
(gratitude, devotion, trust, friendship). Courage is the capacity to feel the truth
and to act upon it. Courage is the ability - and daring - to leave behind the old
and useless for the new and useful. Courage is the determination to take risks
and to act upon conviction. Courage is the entrance into the future. (The
future is like heaven, wrote James Baldwin, - everyone exalts it but nobody
wants to go there now). Courage is the summoning up of intense feeling from
the heart for action in the future. Rationally channelled feeling is the impulse,
the moving force and drive, behind Personal Power.
For most people, the battleground for the testing of courage is no longer to
be sought in the bloodsoaked and limbstrewn fields of yesterday's wars.
Rather, it is to be discovered in everday life. The Roman writer, Seneca,
remarked, "Sometimes even to live is an act of courage". Where Personal
Power is concerned, there are no small thoughts, feelings, or actions. Small can
only be considered in terms of its consequences: a careless word, an irrational
feeling or a thoughtless action can bring in its train ruinous results which
14
deplete our Personal Power. On the other hand, it is the small stones of
courageous thoughts and actions which accumulate the mountain of Personal
Power.
Courage to preserve or to sever our relationships with others; courage to be

ourselves in the face of mass conformity; courage to be creative and original
in the midst of mediocrity and convention; courage to be patient in difficult
circumstances; courage to cut ties to the past; courage to move forward;
courage to dream; courage to change the world - these are all facets of the
crystal of courage through which we experience each moment of our lives. If
you feel too ashamed of your fears to summon the courage to meet life's
challenges, remember the wisdom of Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson:
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. Except a
creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave". True courage
cannot exist apart from selfhonesty. Only when you have faced your fear can
you call up your courage.
A few years ago, on a sandy beach on the the coast of Malaysia, an

international drama was enacted. The play consisted of one woman opposite
dozens of armed soldiers. The audience was made up of hundreds of Indo-
Chinese refugees clinging to decrepit boats battered by ocean waves only a
few hundred yards off-shore. The woman on the beach was Greek. She was
from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Geneva and she was
there to plead the case of the refugees. The soldiers were there to prevent the
refugees from landing. They were armed with rifles and official government
orders. The woman had no official status in Malaysia.
Might and the law were not on her side; but justice and mercy were. She was
armed only with her fiery Greek temperament (by no means an inconsiderable
weapon), and her voice, a powerful voice reflecting the courage of her
Personal Power. Arguments went back and forth for hours. Hundreds of lives -
men, women, and children - hung in the balance. It was the ancient Greek
story of Lysistrata re-enacted once again by a Greek woman. Finally, a
decision was made. The boats could land and the refugees would be allowed
into the country.
At a refugee camp in Thailand, an American official was processing a

number of the "boat people" for resettlement in the United States. Through an
interpreter, he was explaining to three children why a 19 year old boy could
not go with them. With bureaucratic stubbornness, the official repeated that
the boy was not a member of the family. It did not matter to the letter of the
law that the parents of the children had been drowned at sea and that the 19
year old had looked after the children to the extent that they regarded him
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with the security and affection of a parent. The children's pleas fell on
adamant ears. Then the Greek woman from the UN High Commission for
Refugees arrived on the scene fresh from her victory with the Malaysian army.
Against her Personal Power, the official power of the U.S. immigration agent
withered and disappeared. Yes, an exception would be made. The young
man could travel to America with the children.
The success of the Greek woman in these situations is a result of her Personal
Power. The power stems from her courage and her courage is fed by the
compassion she feels for these
homeless people from a war-torn land. Courage without kindness can result
in brutality. Kindness comes from compassion which is a sympathy with others.
Compassion is the second key to self-control. Compassion for people and for
all life unlocks within us a great reservoir of feeling which, if channelled through
courage and not sentimentality (false or superficial feeling), enhances Personal
Power to a significant degree. Once you learn to feel compassion for others,
you will be less likely to feel pity for yourself. The absence of self-pity does
much to clear the road for the pursuit of Personal Power. (An effective cure for
depression is to help someone else for two weeks).
There is an important difference between pity and compassion. Pity looks

down upon and humiliates its subject, offers no real help, and brings no solace.
It is a feeling Balzac understood well: "The response man has the greatest
difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it
makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weaknesses
weaker." (La Peau de Chagrin). In fact, pity can be the most deadly weapon
against an enemy. A friend, while visiting in Italy, completely disarmed a
ferocious dog the size of a small horse - a Neapolitan Mastiff named Tito - by
repeating over and over with a sickening pity, "Poor Tito ... Poor Tito". The dog,
which had been ready to devour my friend, lay down on the floor and just
whimpered.
Whereas pity creates a gulf between people, compassion builds a bridge of

understanding and helpfulness. Because compas
sion stems from a sympathy with rather than pity for another, it elevates its
object to your level. You can only truly feel for another what you yourself have
experienced. In this way, compassion becomes a feeling of the universal
equality of life. Whereas pity deprives the other of dignity, compassion confers
it. Without a measure of dignity, people are helpless in the face of adversity.
This is one important reason why our prisons are largely breeding grounds for
crime rather than nurseries for reform - they strip their inmates of dignity.
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Compassion contributes to self-control by tempering courage with kindness

and by providing the emotional rationale for the tolerance of other people's
behavior. Tolerance is based on compassionate understanding and places us
in control of our reactions to others thus increasing our Personal Power. Once,
while attending a conference on international affairs at a university, I found
myself at a table during the closing banquet seated beside a university
professor who was speaking enthusiastically about dreams, prophecies, and
other psychic experiences. A young and attractive woman sitting across the
table began interrupting the professor and arguing with him. She refused to
accept anything he said at face value and her skepticism was streaked with a
very unpleasant cynicism. In fact, I found her entire approach narrow and
negative. The more the argument progressed - or regressed - the more
vehement the woman became and the more unpalatable became my
dinner. By dessert, I was so disgusted with this woman, I could no longer eat. An
hour or so later, following an equally unpleasant dinner speech, I
approached the professor to commiserate. His buoyant mood had drooped. I
asked if he was still depressed from the dinner conversation. That wasn't the
problem, he explained. He had talked with the young woman after the dinner
in an effort to remove any rancor between them. In the privacy of their
discussion, she confided to him that she had had a dream of her six year old
son being killed by a car. Shortly afterward, the boy was, in fact, fatally injured
by a car outside their home. The accident had occurred less than two years
earlier and she was still filled with the foreboding of the dream and the
bitterness of her son's death.
My ruined dinner and the whole feeling of unpleasantness from the

encounter were based on false premises. From an inability to suspend
judgment grew the distorted tree of intolerance with its bitter fruits of false
assumptions, facile judgments, and unkind thoughts. How often does gossip
and presumption based on partial truth or ignorance of the truth obscure our
perceptions of reality and diminish our Personal Power? We seldom know the
whole story behind people's behavior. If we did, we would be less prone to
gossip or to prejudge (acts which deplete our Personal Power), and more
eager to ask why and to wait for an answer ... if, indeed, it is our business to
know.
In waiting lies the third key to self-control: patience. Self-control develops

like a blade of grass - you can't see it grow but you can see the results. Without
a modicum of patience, self-control is impossible and the cumulative goal of
Personal Power is out of reach. Patience takes the recklessness out of
courage and gives a measure of detached perspective to compassion.
Patience itself requires courage, tolerance, and compassion. In our electronic
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world of haste, of joggers and fast machines, of people in a hurry going

nowhere, patience is readily seen as weakness or passivity; or, as Ambrose
Bierce defined it in The Devil's Dictionary: "A minor form of despair disguised as
a virtue."
True patience, however, in the sense of endurance and perserverance,

requires a high degree of creative tension. Such tension is the fibre of Personal
Power. The old admonition to "Beware the fury of a patient man" (John
Dryden), speaks of the coiled power of patience. Patience, often the highest
form of courage, is an ultimate test of our resourcefulness. Patience requires us
either to go mad or to be creative with our time. Patience is hope and the
placing of our trust in the future. Patience is the winter of our feelings without
which spring's desires will bear no fruit.
Patience is nurtured by the responsibility which flows from love. A woman

friend lived alone with two young daughters. Her husband had abandoned
her and the children. One evening in a moment of deep despair, she went to
the medicine cabinet and took out a bottle of sleeping pills. Lying in her bed,
she swallowed a large quantity of them, intent on ending her life. Suddenly,
her younger daughter of four years walked into her mother's bedroom. She
had woken up inexplicably (perhaps sensing unconsciously the impending
tragedy). Climbing into the bed, she put her arms around her mother and said,
"I love you and I need you Mummy. Please don't leave me." So touched was
the mother by her daughter's sensitivity, love, and vulnerability, she ran to the
bathroom and regurgitated the lethal dose of pills. After that moment she
found the patience not only to live but to give her two daughters the nurture
and attention they needed. How often have people abandoned a
project, a relationship, a dream, a search, or even a life on the brink of
fulfillment (God's delay is not God's denial). A history of personal failures could
be written in the red ink of impatience. Much of the history of failed diplomacy
and of interpersonal, national, and international violence is nothing but the
story of man's impatience. Buddha said, with good cause, that it was more
difficult to find a patient man than one who has slain thousands in battle. The
reference to "men" and the exclusion of "women" in this context is not simply a
grammatical convenience. As mothers and dependents, women have had to
cultivate patience more than men. When the patience of women (an
important ingredient in their Personal Power), is freed from the confines of
domesticity, it will prove a blessing to the larger world.
Like a short-circuit cutting the power supply, impatience dissipates Personal

Power. Without Personal Power, we are no longer in control of our own lives or
of the circumstances surrounding us. Patience, self-control, and Personal Power
18
are connecting links in the chain of achievement.
The opportunities for practicing self-control - for exercising courage,

compassion, and patience - are limitless. One requires only purpose and desire.
Each effort made toward self- control accumulates energy for Personal Power.
Our success in meeting a challenge, whether it is a quality in ourselves, a
situation, or another person, depends upon the degree of our own self-control.
Ultimate success is governed not so much by the actions of others as by our
reactions. The quality of our reactions determines the extent of our Personal
Power. When our reactions are guided by the principle of harmony, then our
Personal Power is increased in accordance with the laws of nature.
19
Chapter 4: HARMONY
"All power is of one kind, a sharing of the

nature of the world. The mind that is parallel
with the laws of nature will be in the current
of events, and strong with their strength."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Power"

Harmony is the golden equilibrium between antagonism and submission.

Harmony is the balance between the mind and the heart. It is the personal
strength to resist the use of force in the solution of problems. Harmony is being
"in synch" or in accord with yourself, with others, with nature, and with "santana"
- the swift river of evolution which carries life inexorably forward to the new and
the better. Harmony is to Personal Power what a frictionless environment is to a
synchronized machine. By reducing discord within yourself and between you
and your surroundings, the flow of Life Energy is increased and Personal Power
is enhanced. Harmony magnifies Personal Power by making available the
cooperative energies of others. In a world ruled by force, competition, and
disunity, harmony becomes a discipline attainable only through self- control.
The word harmony comes from the Greek "harmonia" which means a fitting
together. In music, harmony refers to the pleasing combination of two or more
tones in a chord. Harmony does not mean "sameness". It implies, rather, the
peaceful co-existence (one chord) of diverse elements (different tones).
The qualities of harmony include balance, beauty, grace, and cooperation.

Of these, the centrepiece is balance. When we speak of the "delicate
balance of nature", we refer also to the delicate balance of all life -
biological, social, emotional, and mental. In balance is moderation and the
golden mean. Many virtues when carried to an extreme become vices. This is
20
the origin of fanaticism, the prime violator of the principle of harmony. The
extreme of caution is cowardice; of boldness, recklessness; of patience,
passivity; of a strong will, stubbornness; of sacrifice, martyrdom; of compassion,
pity and sentimentality.
The violation of balance, fanaticism, and the widespread use of force and
violence have their roots in the most unfortunate feature of our planet's history
- the subjugation of women and the stereotyping of sex roles. The duality and
balance of nature are a universal manifestation of the male and female
origins. The male and female principles are not the exclusive birthright of either
men or women. The two principles are manifested in all spheres of nature and
are equally attainable by men and women. The lop-sided development of
humanity has resulted from the fact that women have not participated
effectively in all aspects of life outside the home. The qualities inherent in the
feminine principle - care, love, nurturance, receptivity, grace, beauty,
spontaneity, sharing, sensitivity, intuition, patience, emotional understanding -
are sadly lacking in a world dominated by male values of reason, denial,
competition, authoritarianism, aggression, and elitism. The masculine principle
builds its bridges of achievement by stepping on bodies, hearts, and minds.
Achievements built on the violation of the rights of others will have a limited life
span. From the reference point of Personal Power, the predominance of one
principle over another is akin to being crippled. There is a saying in the East that
the Bird of Humanity cannot fly on one wing alone. For both wings to work
together, we must become more honest and less hypocritical in our attitudes
toward those qualities we exalt in our religious ceremonies but honor more in
the breach. "It has always seemed strange to me," says the character Doc in
John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, "that the things we admire in men, kindness
and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the
concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness,
greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of
success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of
the second."3
The historical sex role stereotyping of women and men is more culturally
conditioned than genetic, although the biological fact of motherhood may
incline woman toward a deeper capacity for love, care, and nurture.
Nevertheless, all human beings are born with the capacity to acquire the
qualities of both principles. This is not only possible, it is essential for evolution.
Personal Power blooms according to the degree of synthesis of both natures
within the same individual.
The subjugation and demeaning of women (partly forced and partly
21
voluntary), has wreaked a tragic irony. Women are mothers to us all. How
women are treated redounds directly upon child- rearing. Since the
identification process tends to be across sexes (boys to mothers, girls to fathers),
males born to subjugated women wind up paying dearly for the "sins" of their
father and their father's father. By treating women as dependents andchattels,
men have deprived themselves, as well as their female partners, of developing
the duality of their natures without which Personal Power is unattainable. The
"twin soul" which Plato wrote about refers to the male/female nature of
Personal Power residing in the elements of balance and harmony contained
within the potential of each individual.
The harmony of the individual, as well as that of the world, depends upon
the equal development of the male and female principles. Wars, with all their
tragic destructiveness, are created by men and signify the imbalance in the
male/female energies. The Nazi superman was not superman so much as it
was supermale. The Nazis glorified the male polarity characteristics of physical
strength, aggressiveness, dominance, harshness, and selfishness, untempered
by the female qualities of love, self-sacrifice, gentleness, and kindness. The
result was cruelty, lust, and egomania. The universal disorder and decline
which we witness today, the degeneration of so many nations, is the result of
this continuing imbalance brought about through the subservience and
oppression of women. By degrading woman, man degrades himself. Without
the revival of true chivalry and gentleness (note the root of "gentleman"), there
can be no peace, cooperation, or harmony in the family, the nation, or on the
planet.
The peace and equilibrium of the world depend on the complete equality
of the sexes, and ultimately upon the balance and synthesis within all
individuals of the male and female principles. For this, it is necessary for woman
to become an equal cooperator in the management of the whole of life, a
participant in leadership and government at all levels of society. Woman, who
gives life and who establishes the first foundations of education, also has the
right to create better conditions for those she brings into the world. Her
common sense and intuition and especially her heart will reveal to her many
correct decisions. If we examine the historical facts and true biographies of
many great people, we find that often the source of their inspiration and their
chief advisor was a woman. In her book, Knowing Woman, Irene Claremont de
Castillejo speaks of this subtle feminine quality of influence:
"When Eve uncovers on the salt sea bed a pearl,
22
She does not claim her ownership

Nor break it up to find the speck of sand within,
Spoiling its opaque loveliness,
But softly lets it fall in man's quiescent mind
To save it from forgetfulness;
And when one day it comes to light unsought,
She marvels at the pearly irridescence of his thought."4
To succeed, it is possible for women to emulate the virtues of men without

imitating their vices. For what the world most urgently needs are those female
attributes of tenderness, beauty, forgiveness, tolerance, and patience. These
are the qualities of the genderless heart, that great harmonizer of our Life
Energies. As surely as the mind divides, so the heart unites. What sage of
wisdom would not be a lord of love.
Humor is a balancing mechanism and a reflex of the harmonic principle. It is

no coincidence that the Jews, who have survived so long without a national
home of their own, are the world's most successful comedians. Centuries of
hardship and suffering have been countered with the foil of humor - resistance
with wit. Mental and emotional adaptability in the face of constant challenge
are the source of creative humor. Fanatical or rigid cultures are notably lacking
in humor except perhaps of a crude and malicious kind.
As it applies to harmony, the principle of balance cannot be reduced to a

mathematical formula. In life's experiences, the right balance is always
governed by the wisdom of the moment, the situation, the person, and the
place. Personal Power exists in our understanding of the harmonious tension
between the masculine and feminine polarities. Personal Power contains these
opposites. In this tension of awareness, is created the firmness (male principle)
and the flexibility (female principle) characteristic of Personal Power.
Firmness and flexibility are effectively and harmoniously combined in the

oriental martial arts. One has only to compare an adept in kung-fu, karate, or
judo with a professional wrestler or boxer. The former will easily subdue the
latter - and do so with swiftness and grace. The combative sports of the West
are founded upon a one-sided or male-oriented concept of "strength". The
martial arts of the East combine strength with fluidity, physical discipline with
mental self-discipline. The martial arts of the East give one the power to fight as
well as the power not to fight - that is, to resist provocation. They integrate the
"active" male and the "passive" female principles (karate means "empty hands"
23
and judo means literally "gentle way"), so that a maximum of effect is

achieved through an economy of effort. The harmonious synthesis of body,
mind, and spirit produces actions which can be as graceful as they are lethal.
Moreover, the oriental martial arts, as taught in the better schools, are founded
on a philosophy of harmonious non-violence and are designed not for
offensive purposes but for defense and for the development of a Personal
Power which can be put to use in other areas of life - in work, in love, and in
play. T'ai Chi, a less strenuous form of oriental exercise which also builds grace
and stamina, is constructed on the same harmonic principle.
It is characteristic of unenlightened people to associate harmony with

weakness. Exactly the reverse is true. Harmony, as the balance of opposites,
contains the highest tension and thus the greatest power. It is not so difficult to
be resolute; it is harder to be resolute and flexible at the same time. It is healthy
to be assertive; it requires more Personal Power to be both assertive and
tender. Thought without feeling produces the dry twigs of the intellect. Love
without rationality results in a tangled loss of perspective and judgment.
The discipline of harmony may be likened to the forging - in fire and water -
of the famous Japanese swords which lasted for centuries and were handed
down, as priceless heirlooms, through generations of Samurai warriors. A small
slab of iron ore is melted, pounded, cooled, and polished into 32,000 layers of
gleaming, matchless weaponry containing the very quintessence of strength
and flexibility combined. In the development of Personal Power, the sword of
one's character is forged in the passionate joys and chilling disappointments of
life until the capacity for balance and harmony can withstand all challenges
with equanimity, understanding, and humor.
24
Chapter 5: IDEALISM
"We are the ancients of the earth

And in the morning of the times."
- Alfred Tennyson
"Everyman takes the limits of his own field

of vision for the limits of the world."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
"The problems of the world cannot be solved by

skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited
by the obvious realties. We need men who can
dream of things that never were."
- John F. Kennedy
Destructive cynicism is the temper of our times. The cynic questions the
sincerity and goodness of others. Mistrusting others, he mistrusts himself. The
cynic looks at the worst in the world and takes it for the whole world. Cynicism
readily becomes an excuse for selfishness and isolation. It is the protective
armor of the coward who fears his own vulnerability and lacks the courage of
conviction. The opposite of cynicism is idealism. A person or a nation without
an appropriate and adequate idealism is without a vital principle or a reason
for existence. Nothing characterizes the absence of Personal Power so much
as cynicism, an attitude notable for its bankruptcy of ideas. The word "idea" is
the root of idealism and it is ideas which, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out,
shape the course of history. Ideas are a principle energy source for Personal
25
Power. An ideal is an idea which has become a powerful magnetic force

drawing one's creative energies into the future.
Idealism is a protection against adversity. In order to cross a swift-flowing

river and moor at a certain point on the opposite shore, every experienced
helmsman will advise: "Set the helm upstream, for you will be carried down
regardless". Thus, striving towards the highest ideals can protect one from many
adversities in life. Idealism is the basis of eternal youth, of the renewal of
energies. Without the guiding principle of harmony, idealism readily succumbs
to fanaticism and ultimately destroys the Personal Power which it seeks.
Idealism and the realm of the imagination are nourished chiefly by culture.
The absence of harmony, the nihilism, and ugliness of many of the
contemporary arts and media reflect the bankruptcy of ideas and the neglect
of idealism. Modern science has not fared much better since so much of it is
handmaiden to the military or to financial and professional self-interest where
truth and utility often take a back seat to profit and personal aggrandizement.
Idealism is the energy source which lifts us out of the dust of the past, freeing
us from the burden of outworn thinking for the pursuit of Personal Power.
Idealism is the capacity to perceive or originate more constructive possibilities
which will expand the Personal Power of yourself and others. The parameters
of Personal Power are determined by the limitations or scope of our
observations and perceptions.
It is the first day of a new school year and ten year old Helena Indra is
seated at her desk, window row, third from the front, gazing with hopeful eyes
at her new teacher and listening to the year's first instruction: "Write your name
and address in your exercise book". Helena picks up a newly sharpened pencil
and prints on the shiny sky-blue cover of the book:
HELENA INDRA
1173 WALNUT ROAD
TORONTO
She hesitates, then adds:
ONTARIO, CANADA
"There's more", she reflects and writes again with an expanding
smile:
26
NORTH AMERICA WORLD

SOLAR SYSTEM
GALAXY
UNIVERSE
INFINITY
The continually expanding address of this ten year old student derives from an
imagination as yet unfettered by the mundane preoccupations of life or the
conventions of society. Should Helena Indra retain, as she grows older, the
vision of this address, she will be well on her way to the acquisition of Personal
Power.
Idealism is not idle dreaming; it is an involvement with a larger reality. It

need not follow, as in the Russian proverb, that "the toe of the star-gazer is
often stubbed". Personal Power is built equally upon attention to the details of
one's immediate surroundings as upon the capacity of the imagination. In the
ineffable concept of infinity is contained the limitlessness of possibilities. To be
without possibilities is to be without imagination or vision.
The larger the field of observation and perception, the greater will be the
potential for acquiring Personal Power. The energy source for Personal Power is
derived from the combinations and permutations available in your
environment. If you limit that environment to your job, your family, your
neighbourhood, or your own ego so will you restrict the energy available for
Personal Power. Small thinking, negative thinking, and chauvinistic attitudes are
extremely effective in curtailing Personal Power. On the other hand, positive
thinking and the broadening of consciousness comprise the "open-sesame" to
Personal Power. In the bright words of the American drama critic, Brooks
Atkinson
(Once Around the Sun): "Say `yes' to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves
the sky. Say `yes' to the universe and the planets become your neighbours. Say
`yes' to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia."
Personal Power is limited by selfishness or unenlightened self-interest. The

self-interests of most people are so narrow that they preclude involvement in
the larger ideas which feed our Personal Power. As someone remarked, there is
no smaller package in all the world than that of a person wrapped up in
himself. Selfishness or the preoccupation with ones's own needs severely
restricts the possibilities for Personal Power. Selflessness, on the other hand,
leads to the unlimited expansion of Personal Power. The relationship between
27
selflessness and Personal Power is caught in the saying that "he who would
gain his life must first lose it". The most powerful warriors have always been
those (like the Vikings and the Japanese) who were not afraid to die. The
biblical dictum that "It is more blessed to give than to receive" is an
understanding that the flow of Personal Power is to the giver and not the
receiver. The "potlatch" ceremonies of the Kwakiutl Indians of Canada`s West
Coast represent a profound appreciation of the Personal Power of giving. In
this ceremony, Personal Power accrues to the individual who can give away
the most possessions. Magnificent Obsession, the well-known novel by Lloyd C.
Douglas, is the story of Personal Power gained through anonymous generosity.
Underlying selfishness are attachment and fear: fear of losing one's

possessions, cherished attitudes, and habitual thoughts. Personal Power,
however, can never be built upon such fear or upon the inability to detach
oneself from one's possessions whether they be things, thoughts, or feelings.
The person who fears such loss identifies his very existence with his possessions.
But Personal Power does not fear the loss of possessions because it is
independent of them - recall the story, cited earlier, of the American millionaire
whose demeanor was unaffected by his financial bankruptcy. It is not the
amount or value of possessions that limits freedom but the attitude toward
them. A beggar may be more attached to his old hat than a king to his
palace. Or, conversely, a poor man may be magnanimous with his last dollar
while the rich one counts his pennies and ensures that each of his gifts is
publicly acclaimed and taxably deducted. The oil tycoon, John Paul Getty,
was worth billions of dollars but he complained that his great wealth had
brought him unhappiness (he had five divorces). Yet he installed a public
telephone at his British residence so that guests would not run up his phone bill.
Escape from selfishness is possible through love and enlightened self-

interest. In a world rendered intricately interdependent by modern
technology, we are all profoundly affected by one another: ideas and
images, customs and fashions, inventions and discoveries are exported
internationally and adopted almost simultaneously. National boundaries and
customs officials are meaningless to the winds and seas that carry chemical
pollutants to all countries and into outer space altering our weather and
poisoning our food and water supplies. The car manufacturer who decides to
increase his profit by using an inferior metal in a few bolts (multiplied by millions
of cars), jeopardizes the safety of the baker across the street who buys the car.
The baker, in an effort to improve his own earnings, uses an inferior quality of
flour in the bread which is eaten by the car manufacturer, undermining his
health. Profits go up but who prospers?
28
Enlightened self-interest is simply the expansion of your interests to accord

with the reality of your environment. Universalizing self-interest maximizes the
range of Personal Power. Looking out for "number one" is synonymous with
being your brother's keeper.
The scope of Personal Power is magnified by the qualities of the

imagination. The artistic imagination in the service of ideals has immense power
to transform character and to create a more enlightened world. Eloquent
evidence for the truth of this equation is revealed in a personal episode in the
life of Frank Capra, one of Hollywood's most gifted and successful film direc-
tors. Capra was a very ambitious man. More than anything, this Sicilian-born,
ghetto-raised American desired the fame and recognition which could only be
acquired by winning an Oscar. In just a few years, he had scraped and clawed
his way, with brilliance, brash and cunning, to become the top director of
Columbia Studios. But the coveted Oscar continued to elude him. Then,
suddenly and unexpectedly, less than ten years after he began his career and
his quest, Frank Capra's dream came true. His picture, It Happened One Night,
starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, won an unprecedented five
Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Writer, and most important of
all (for Frank Capra), Best Director for 1934. In the aftermath of this victory is
contained a fascinating and compelling story which Capra relates in his
autobiography.
After scaling the "Mt. Everest of Filmlandia", Capra got scared because,
having reached the top, all roads led downward.
Unable to face the prospect of failure, Capra began a secret campaign of

malingering, complaining of tiredness and encroaching illness. As if to
demonstrate the power of the mind over the body, he became progressively
sicker with rising fever, extreme fatigue and night sweats; x-rays showed a spot
on his right lung. But the doctors were puzzled because not all the symptoms
added up to a straightforward diagnosis such as TB. Capra's condition
worsened. He lost over thirty pounds and grew weaker each day. His powerful
imagination had turned his malingering into an actual physical malignancy
which baffled the experts.
Capra's only companion at this time, with the exception of his wife, was a
kind and soft-spoken friend named Max Winslow, a song-publishing partner of
Irving Berlin. Capra told Winslow that he was going to die. About the tenth day
of his illness, he was fading fast when Max came into his bedroom early in the
morning to say that there was a gentleman - a stranger - to see him. Capra
refused to see the man. Max insisted so Capra told him to bring the man in. But
29
the stranger refused to see him in bed.
Capra complained that he couldn't even stand up; but Max helped him out of
bed and pushed the furious Capra into the library.
When he met the stranger, there were no introductions. The stranger simply
told the dying film director to sit down and then added:
"Mr. Capra, you're a coward".

"A what?"
"A coward, Sir. But infinitely sadder - you are an offense to God. You
hear that man in there?"
Max had turned on the radio in my room. Hitler's raspy voice came
shrieking out of it.'
"That evil man is desperately trying to poison the world with hate. How
many can he talk to? Fifteen million - twenty million? And for how long -
twenty minutes? You, Sir, you can talk to hundreds of millions, for two
hours - and in the dark. The talents you have, Mr. Capra, are not your
own, not self-acquired. God gave you those talents; they are His
gifts to you, to use for His purpose. And when you don't use the gifts God
blessed you with - you are an offense to God - and to humanity. Good
day, Sir."5
The stranger walked out of the room and down the stairs. Capra never
discovered who he was or where he came from but, in those few seconds,
Capra's life changed. Tears of shame were followed by self-anger and
indignation. He turned off the radio, got up, got dressed, packed his bags and
took his wife to Palm Springs where he recuperated, gaining a pound a day,
until his strength, vitality, and will to work returned with a new creative fervor
and sense of responsibility to his art. Capra went on to make films which were
not only interesting and successful, they were also powerful and idealistic
commentaries on the human condition which influenced hundreds of millions
of people throughout the world: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, It's a Wonderful Life, Lost Horizon, and many more.
Capra describes the acute transformation in his character and in his art
resulting from his encounters with death and the stranger:
"When that unknown, faceless little man rescued me from

the river Styx, the few calm words he uttered served me as a
chrism to totally commit my talents - few or many - to the service
30
of man. ... Beginning with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, my films had
to say something. And whatever they said had to come from
those ideas inside me `that were hurting to come out'. No more
would I accept scripts hurriedly written and count on my ability to
`juggle many balls in the air' to make films entertaining; no more
would I brag about my powers to `shoot the phone book' and
make it funny. From then on my scripts would take from six months
to a year to write and rewrite; to carefully - and subtly - integrate
ideals and entertainment into a meaningful tale. And regardless of
the origin of a film idea - I made it mine; regardless of differences
with studio heads, screenwriters, or actors - the thought, heart, and
substance of a film were mine.
Was this a new form of arrogance, perhaps a superior

form? Many fellow workers thought so. But, believe it or not, it was a
change in the polarity of goals: from `using' films, to serving them;
from `what is good for Capra' to what is good for the profession...
Since I had been shocked into realizing that serving self is small
potatoes compared with the value of serving man, I had begun to
care about the dreams of others."(6)
Thus, an adversary disguised as success, a friend in the garb of a critical

stranger, and a self-induced illness flirting with death, worked together to
expand the range of Frank Capra's Personal Power from the small egotistical
circle of selfish glory to the universal orbit of responsibility to art and service to
humanity.
The four pillars of Personal Power are equally essential to its pursuit and
expansion. The challenge provides the push. Idealism supplies the magnetic
pull. Self-control, based on courage, compassion, and patience, is the
discipline necessary to govern the energies released by the challenge and by
idealism. Harmony is the quality that shapes our Personal Power in accord with
the laws of nature.
31
Chapter 6: THE EFFECT OF OUR TIMES ON PERSONAL POWER
"He who is being carried does not realize

how far the town is."
- Nigerian Proverb
The urban technocratic society and the discoveries of the Twentieth

Century have had a paradoxical effect on the growth of Personal Power.
Three revolutions have facilitated the pursuit of Personal Power. Broadly
speaking, these have been in psychology, physics, and gender roles.
In psychology, Freud liberated thoughts and feelings from the invisible

tyranny of the subconscious. An essential condition of Personal Power is self-
mastery which brings into conscious control thoughts and feelings which were
previously subconscious.
Secondly, in physics, Einstein demonstrated the interchangeability of energy

and matter; modern technology caused an explosion in the availability of
information and freed many from the drudgery of hard manual labor.
Information is energy and energy is the basis of power. Mind and matter,
energy and body are profoundly interconnected. Personal Power grows as our
Life Energy increases.
Thirdly,in society, the liberation of women and men from the prison of sexual
stereotype is beginning to bring a badly needed balance into the world. The
freedom of both sexes from gender stereotype and their equal and effective
participation in all aspects of family life, decision-making, and creativity will
help to bring into equilibrium the chaotic energies of a male- dominated
world. As women become more socially and occupationally independent,
their capacity for equal participation in all spheres of creative endeavor will
prove a boon to men and to society in general. With equal participation will
32
come the possibilities for men and women to acquire a share in each other's
nature and to augment their own Personal Power.
On the negative side of the ledger, conditions for Personal Power have
been depleted by the polluted and congested circumstances of big city life
including the decline in natural nutrition and the growth in drug dependencies;
by the enslavement of working people to the relentless rhythms of industrial
and office machines and the dreary conformity and mindless paper shuffling
which pervade white collar bureaucracies; and by the decline in cultural
standards witnessed in the growth of violence and vulgarity and the distortion
of values in the various media.
The ecological and health movements are beginning to deal with the first
set of problems. The technical and industrial problem areas are slowly being
absorbed by automation, computerization, and creative organizational
developments. The educational system has done little to meet the challenge
of declining cultural standards.
Before the advent of technological power, the North American Indian knew
intimately the nature of Personal Power. That is how he proved to be such a
formidable foe for those European settlers bent on conquest rather than co-
existence. In the struggle for physical survival, the Indian understood the
adversary. In the training of the hunter and the warrior and in the rites of initia-
tion, were earned the disciplines of self-control. Consuming out of need and
not greed, the Indian lived in harmony with nature. Idealism was generated by
a rich spiritual life. Had they cared to listen, the colonizers of North America
(and South America as well), could have learned the ways of Personal Power
from the Indians. (A few of them did. One was Edward Sheriff Curtis, an
American who spent a lifetime compiling a definitive collection of masterful
photographs and superb ethnographic studies of the "vanishing" tribes of North
America. In his photographs, Curtis captured their Personal Power).
Failing to appreciate the Native achievements in the realm of Personal

Power, North Americans became victims of their own successes. Cities shut out
the Life Energy of nature; wealth created poverty; the rhythm of human labor
was set by machines; and military technology devours the world's resources at
the rate of several billion dollars a day to produce an over-kill ratio that defies
both reason and imagination. (If Personal Power were used more in the art of
diplomacy and in international peace- building, it would not be necessary to
waste so much of our resources on military expenditures).
While wealth and modern technology have brought a certain ease and
33
comfort into the lives of many, these forces have also given people, especially
the young, the illusion of effortless and mindless living. People consume more
and produce less. They are prone to look outside themselves for life's direction
and for ready stimulation. The media, advertizing, show business, drugs and
alcohol provide much of this contemporary direction and stimulation. The
major difficulty today is that, without Personal Power, there is very little capacity
for discrimination, for deciding what is healthy or unhealthy, useful or useless,
constructive or destructive.
In our contemporary environment with its abundance of man- made

obstacles, inattention to the pursuit of Personal Power provides fertile soil for
personal self-destruction. By squandering the Life Energy through excessive,
indiscriminate activities and associations and in negating self-fulfillment by fol-
lowing inappropriate occupations, so many human beings become the
voluntary architects of their own self-defeat.
The dissipation of Personal Power creates insurmountable obstacles on the

path to achieving success and happiness. Lotteries are no substitute for income
earned from a labor of love. Pornography is a poor replacement for the
intimacy of a deeply shared loving relationship. Mechanical recitation of the
words of dead prophets and poets cannot satisfy the school child's thirst for
spiritual understanding or the dream of creating something from his or her own
imagination. Government, business, school, and the media are paid to provide
you with the appearance of things. But appearances do not satisfy the
deepest yearnings nor do they build Personal Power.
The pursuit of Personal Power is only possible where life's experiences are
genuine and profound. To be acquired, the treasure chest of Personal Power
must be pursued with the candor and courage of the heart, with the fullest
breadth of consciousness, and with the will of one's entire being.
34
PART II: HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR LIFE ENERGY
"Our LifeEnergy, is the source of our

physicaland mentalwell-being, of glowing
health,of the joyof living. Through out recorde d
history it has had many names. Hippocrates
called tthe Vis Medicatrix Naturae, the healing
power of nature. Paracelsus called it the
Archaeus; the Chinese, Ch'i; the Egyptions, Ka;
the Hindus, Prana; the Hawaiians, Mana. It is all
the same thing."
Dr. John Diamond (Behavioral Kinesiology)
Personal Power is the expansion of the Life Energy motivated toward a goal.
In the motivation is the incentive, the striving, the taughtly strung bow; in the
goal is the direction, the target. In the expansion of our Life Energy is contained
the capacity, force, and vigor necessary to propel the arrow to reach its mark.
The Life Energy which feeds our Personal Power flows into us through the food,
water, and air we consume; through our thoughts, attitudes, and feelings; the
nature and rhythm of our work; our social relationships; the shape and texture
of our physical environment; and through the colors, sounds, and ideas of our
culture. The extent of our Personal Power depends on how well and how wisely
we monitor this flow.
35
Chapter 7: STRESS AND SELF-AWARENESS
"The test of a civilized person is first self-awareness, and then

depth after depth of sincerity in self-confrontation."
- Clarence Day
Our Life Energy is a power we are aware of particularly on those occasions

when it is strong (accompanying feelings of joy, serenity, love, heightened
activity, or a sense of achievement), and when it is weak (we are sick, bored,
depressed, feel guilty or afraid). We all know from experience that certain
people, activities, and feelings rob us of energy - we feel drained or anxious;
just as other thoughts and associations give us energy - fire our enthusiasm and
fill us with a sense of purpose, vitality, and well-being.
It is common, however, for people to dismiss or to gloss over the knowledge

which comes from such experiences either because the details seem
insignificant in themselves or because they appear unimportant relative to the
effort to change a situation or alter a habit. These are the very details,
however, which establish the patterns that become the habits which deepen
or diminish our Personal Power. "Know to catch the smallest devil by the tail
and he will reveal the hiding place of his superior". This ancient Chinese
proverb points out the significance of the smallest details in the revelation of
the most important features concerning the development of our Life Energy.
Many of the answers to the perplexities of life do not come from doctors,
teachers, books or T.V. They stem rather from close observation and
perception of our own experiences. We can and should listen to and consider
advice from others (whether we accept it is another matter), but there is no
real substitute for the authenticity of self-conscious experience. Nothing is
wasted in life so long as we learn from experience. The key to this learning can
be found in the critical observation of reactions to our internal and external
environments. Being aware of our own thoughts and feelings and being aware
36
of our surroundings allow us to continually monitor and control those influences

which affect our Life Energy.
Contemporary understanding of the Life Energy has been advanced by

scientific findings related to research on stress. Our physical survival depends
on the circulation of the blood which brings the necessary nutrients, especially
oxygen, to the various parts of the body. It is well known that blood vessels
may contract under the influence of certain thoughts and feelings, as a result
of which the circulation is disturbed and the blood rushes toward some parts of
the body and flows away from others. A person who is prone to feelings of
anger, jealousy, and fear constantly disturbs his circulation, which in time
produces strong changes in the organism leading to hypertension, disease,
and pre-mature death. During powerful outbursts of emotions such as anger,
delicate blood vessels may break resulting in dangerous and even fatal
hemorrhaging. Hate and other negative emotions also cause paralysis of the
individual nerves by interrupting the stream of electric currents which flow
through them from the sympathetic nervous system. As a result, the glands
which produce the internal secretions of the body fail to receive the "electric
nourishment" which they require for their healthy functioning.
There are many causes of stress, but for human beings with their highly
evolved nervous systems, the most common source is emotional stimuli. The
origins of excessive stress may be either pleasant or unpleasant stimuli and
result from either deprivation or over-stimulation. The major physiological
symptoms of stress are enlargement of the adrenal cortex, shrinkage of the
thymus gland and lymph nodes and the appearance of gastrointestinal ulcers.
Stress or pressure is an inevitable and even desirable aspect of life. It is

necessary for the growth of Personal Power. (Complete freedom from stress is
death). However, when stress is prolonged and intense in either a negative
direction (distress) or a positive one (euphoric stress or eustress), it upsets the
body's balance or homeostasis ("staying power"), thus diminishing our overall
capacity to adapt constructively to life's inevitable challenges.
It was the Canadian medical researcher, Dr. Hans Selye, the world's leading
authority on stress, who did much to build the bridges between mind,
emotions, and the body's biochemistry. He points out in his book, Stress Without
Distress7, that the chief causes of stress (distress), are the negative feelings
which generate disharmony - hatred, distrust, disdain, hostility, jealousy, and
the urge for revenge. These moods violate the principles upon which Personal
Power is built. Such thoughts and feelings lower our Life Energy and diminish our
Personal Power. Dr. Selye found that the major defense against symptoms of
37
stress is in the positive emotion of love which includes gratitude, respect,

admiration for the achievements of others, goodwill, and friendship. In the
negative thoughts and attitudes which cause stress, we can find the
challenges which must be defied on the path to Personal Power. In love and
its correlates, we discover the emotional attitudes which buttress the pillars of
self- control, harmony and idealism, thus magnifying our Personal Power.
One of the characteristic symptoms of the biological stress syndrome is the

shrinkage or atrophy of the thymus gland. Now, the thymus gland may turn out
to be the most underrated organ of the Twentieth Century. The thymus is a
ductless, endocrine gland located beneath the front centre of the upper
chest. Conventional thinking and dictionaries alike, commonly describe it as
being of undetermined function and most prominent at puberty after which it
disappears or becomes vestigial. In the light of contemporary research,
however, this definition is erroneous and derives from the fact that information
about the thymus gland has been gathered historically from autopsies. Since,
as Dr. Selye and others have shown, the thymus is the first organ to respond to
stress (shock, injury, disease, depression, anger, fear), by shrinking, it is to be
expected that autopsies produced only atrophied thymuses. Far from being of
"undetermined function", the thymus is actually the key to the body's immunity
against infection and disease including cancer. If the thymus gland is
removed, there is a loss in effectiveness of the body's immune system (unless
the individual is supplied with thymus extract).
The thymus gland produces or activates special lymphocytes (the white

blood cells which recognize and destroy foreign cells and substances), called
T-cells which are the "killer cells" that seek out and destroy cancer cells, viruses,
bacteria, and other invaders. The hormonal secretions of the thymus are also
involved in the flow of lymph throughout the body. The lymphatic system
drains foreign matter, cellular debris and poisons from the cells and carries
them to the blood stream for disposal.
Some of the more recent and significant research into the functions of the
thymus gland is being carried out by Dr. John Diamond, an Australian-born
psychiatrist, medical practitioner and researcher. Dr. Diamond has been a
President of the Interntional Academy of Preventive Medicine and Director of
the Institute of Behavioral Kinesiology in New York State. He has published the
highlights of his findings in a book called Behavioral Kinesiology or BK for short.8
Dr. Diamond has discovered that the thymus gland, in addition to providing
the key function of immunological surveillance, is also the master controller
that directs the life-giving and healing energies of the body. It monitors and
regulates the flow of electro-magnetic energy throughout the body, initiating
38
instantaneous corrections to overcome imbalances as they occur so as to

achieve a rebalancing and harmonizing of body energy. Because it is the first
hormone-producing organ to be affected by mental attitudes and stress, the
thymus gland is the bridge between mind and body. The thymus is the seat of
our vitality, our life force, our Life Energy. The antiquity of this knowledge can
be gathered from the origin of the word itself. Thymus comes from the Greek
"Thymos" meaning life force, soul, and feeling or sensibility.
Dr. Diamond has developed a simple but effective technique to test the
impact on our thymus and, therefore, on our Life Energy, of various thoughts,
feelings, gestures, images, colors, sounds, foods, and environmental stresses
and stimuli. Using the relative strength of the shoulder's deltoid muscle (major
muscles are connected with various organs and the deltoid is linked with the
thymus), as an indicator of the state of the thymus gland, Dr. Diamond
demonstrates how different influences strengthen or weaken our Life Energy.
A strong thymus not only enhances our Life Energy, it also balances it to
create that condition of harmony which is essential for Personal Power. Under
conditions of excessive stress (either pleasureable or painful), there occurs an
imbalance between the left and right cerebral hemispheres. Left brain proces-
ses are concerned with analytical thinking, verbal activity, and the sequential,
"logical" or digital processing of information. The right side of the brain is
involved with intuitive, aesthetic and artistic activities, orientation in space,
analogical thought, and the simultaneous processing of information (holistic
perception). Under stress, one of the hemispheres becomes dominant and an
imbalance occurs resulting in a tendency toward extreme left brain activity
and perception (obsessional and intellectual - can't see the forest for the
trees), or toward extreme right brain functions and perceptions (escapism,
reverie - can't see the trees for the forest). When both cerebral hemispheres
are balanced and integrated, we are in peak condition for creativity,
problem-solving, and for experiencing life holistically without distressing
tensions.
Dr. Diamond has shown that the thymus gland and the symmetry or
balance of the two cerebral hemispheres work hand in hand, so that all the
activities which strengthen and stimulate the thymus also centre and integrate
the two hemispheres. Strength and balance are inextricably related. Here is the
physiological link between Life Energy, harmony, and Personal Power.
With the help of experimental evidence from Dr. Diamond, Dr. Selye and
others, we will examine various elements in ourselves and in our environment
which affect, either favorably or adversely, our Life Energy, cerebral balance,
39
and Personal Power.
40
Chapter 8: THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, AND ATTITUDES
"Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life;

love harmonizes it; hatred darkens life; love illumines it."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Certainly there are good and bad times, but our mood
changes more often than our fortune."
- Jules Renard
Dr. Hans Selye discovered that the greatest single contributor to

physiological symptoms of stress (adrenal enlargement, thymus atrophy, and
gastrointestinal ulcers), are negative thoughts and feelings. The major defense
against these symptoms he found to be in the positive emotions of love and its
many attributes of gratitude, goodwill, and so on. These conclusions are
supported by Dr. Diamond's findings: the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes
which activate the thymus and increase our Life Energy are benevolent love,
faith, trust, courage, and gratitude. Those which weaken the thymus and
reduce our Life Energy are hate, envy, suspicion, and fear. Moreover, thoughts
and feelings related to unpleasant associations, images, and experiences also
weaken the thymus. Pleasant thoughts and associations strengthen the thymus
and the Life Energy. The latter are termed "Homing thoughts" by Dr. Diamond. If
you need a lift, strengthen your thymus with a "homing thought" - think of
something uplifting or someone you love.
Our physical gestures which reflect our emotional attitudes are also
connected with our thymus and Life Energy in Dr. Diamond's experiments.
Affirmative nodding of the head strengthens the thymus; shaking of the head
weakens it. The "madonna" gesture of love - arms outstretched to embrace - is
a movement that instantly strengthens a weak thymus and has therapeutic
value when you are under stress, even if the gesture is only imagined (but with
feeling). Smiling is not only benevolent, it is also beneficial. The muscles of a
genuine smile are connected with and stimulate the thymus. The opposite
occurs when the mouth is sad or frowning. People (or their pictures), with
41
smiling or unhappy faces evoke in ourselves a strong and weak thymus

respectively.
A few years ago, a newspaper help columnist received a letter from the
night watchman of a large company. The man complained in his letter that
circumstances required him to greet, with a cheerful smile and a "good
morning", each of several hundred employees who filed past him at the front
gate each morning. After a long night at the plant, he felt that these morning
greetings went beyond the call of duty. He wondered what to do. The
columnist wrote back to encourage him to keep smiling and greeting; he was
performing an important service. After all, she advised, his was not only the first
but possibly the only cheerful smile to greet those employees in the course of a
day. It would seem that the night watchman was doing as much for his own
thymus and Life Energy (and keeping himself awake in the bargain), as he was
for each of the company's employees. Who knows to what extent the Life
Energy and consequent productivity of all those employees were stimulated
by the night watchman's morning smile?
Of the positive emotional attitudes which strengthen the thymus and

enhance the Life Energy, there are three which deserve special comment:
Love, Gratitude, and Trust.
Love covers a multitude of virtues: patience, kindness, forgiveness,

thoughtfulness, understanding, care, compassion, and courage. Like the
proverbial elephant described by seven blind men, love yields almost as many
interpretations as there are human motives. Yet love, that much misused and
misunderstood word, is the most simple thing, the key to all of life's obstacles.
The highest happiness is in giving love; and happier is the one who loves rather
than the one who is loved. The selfish and unloving person condemns himself
to a terrible loneliness and sterility of existence.
Love is built from simple acts of kindness. The desire to give and receive
personal love lives in the hearts of all human beings and is the foundation for
family life. National love is the impulse for nation-building and the stuff of
heroism in times of war and strife. Universal love is the message of all prophets,
saints, and holy men and women. Love is the inspiration behind all great art
and architecture, music and dance, literature and theatre, philosophies and
scientific discoveries. ("In order to create there must be a dynamic force and
what force is more potent than love". - Igor Stravinsky). Love is what people
most hunger for. Enlightened love is the spirit of generosity which does not seek
to possess but to liberate. Love is the key to our Life Energy. Impersonal love is
the sunlike centre of Personal Power.
42
Love and money make the world go around - but often in different
directions. A woman in one of my workshops told the story of her husband's
generosity. Every year on her birthday, he gave her a fistful of dollars and told
her to buy herself something nice. This austere ceremony repeated itself for
many years until one day the wife woke up and decided things were not quite
right. When the husband's birthday arrived, she went to the bank and withdrew
fifty fresh, crisp one dollar bills. She returned home and wrapped up the money
with pretty paper and tied it with a bowed ribbon. She presented this to her
husband on his birthday. He opened it and asked what it was supposed to
mean.
"I'm just returning the birthday favors," she replied.
"But it's my money," he answered. "I don't want my

money on my birthday."
"I don't want your money on my birthday either," she
replied. I want your thoughtfulness."
When the wife's next birthday came around, the husband went
to the most expensive fashion shop in the city and bought her a
designer dressing gown. I asked if she was pleased with the
result:
"It's a start," she said. "I could never wear it

though; it's the gaudiest thing I've ever seen. Still,
he tried - that's the important thing. Now I'm working
on his taste."
Our striving to Personal Power requires a balance between a discontent

with what we lack and appreciation or gratitude for what we have already
received. Both sentiments are equally necessary in the pursuit of Personal
Power. In the absence of discontent, there lies the stagnation of satisfaction. In
the absence of gratitude we have only discontent which, by itself, is the basis
for personal frustration not Personal Power. The castle of Personal Power is
reached by the roads of dependency and powerlessness. All human beings
arrive at the independence of adulthood only by way of the dependency of
infancy, childhood, and youth. Our independence and Personal Power are
wrung from the sacrifice of parents, teachers, and others. To feel a sense of
gratitude for the gifts we are born with, for the help we have received, and for
43
the opportunities which have been made available to us, is to keep open the
door to the treasury. Nobody values an ungrateful receiver. "Gratitude," wrote
the philosopher Jacques Maritain, "is the most exquisite form of courtesy."
Trust is confidence in yourself, your motives and ideals, in other people, and
in the future. Unfortunately, trust is a quality we are more likely to see and
admire in our family dog than in ourselves or our fellow human beings. Lack of
self-confidence, mistrust, and suspicion go together. To trust others, you must
first have confidence in yourself. A suspicious nature is one filled with secret
fears and insecurities. Co-operation, which is one of the building blocks of
Personal Power, cannot be founded upon habitual mistrust or suspicion. Trust
need not be blind or careless to be genuine and effective. Think of the
analogy of a good driver who is equally careful moving on a green light as
stopping at a red one. The laws of the road do not lull the competent driver
into believing that others will not make errors. He is courteous but vigilant.
Similarly, a good watchman need not be suspicious to be effective. He need
only be alert.
Trust is contagious. It inspires others with confidence. Trust is sometimes

disappointed but distrust is self-fulfilling and as contagious as its opposite. The
major cause of the turbulence in labor-management relations and in
international diplomacy is institutionalized mistrust. Trust is a quality based on
sincerity. Insincerity has something to hide and is, by its very nature, mistrustful of
others. Without a trusting nature, we are plagued by fears, doubts, and
insecurities, all of which weaken our thymus, steal our Life Energy, and inhibit
our capacity for courageous action. "Self-trust," said Emerson, "is the essence of
heroism." Trust in others, motivated by sincerity and informed by discrimination,
generates the cooperation which magnifies our Personal Power.
44
Chapter 9: THE LIFE ENERGY EXCHANGE
"A wise man associating with the vicious becomes an

idiot; a dog travelling with good men becomes a
rational being."
- Arabic Proverb
"He that's cheated twice by the same man is an

accomplice with the cheater."
- Dr. Thomas Fuller
There is a story about two psychiatrists, Morris and Manfred, who leave for
work together each morning. When Morris drives over to pick up his colleague,
both appear well-dressed, rested and relaxed, showered, shaved, and
refreshed. At the end of the day, Morris again picks up his colleague. At this
hour of the day, the contrast between the two psychiatrists is marked. Morris
looks as cheerful and fresh as he did that morning, his clothes still neatly
pressed, his voice confident, and eyes sparkling. Manfred, on the other hand, is
a wreck. His clothes are rumpled, his eyes glazed and bloodshot, the corners of
his mouth are drooped, and his voice is weak and colorless. Once, at the finish
of a typical day, Manfred, who had been painfully aware of their respective
before-and-after appearances, decided to break the silence and pose the
question:
"Why is it," he asks, "that each morning when you pick me up we are both
refreshed and happy and then at the end of the day you look exactly as you
did in the morning while I feel and look like a wreck? I don't understand. We're
the same age; we both have the same professions; we work the same number
of hours; we both listen to the same problems."
45
"Who listens!" replied Morris.
Men and women in the healing and teaching professions - doctors, nurses,
dentists, therapists, social workers, teachers, and the clergy - are sometimes
aware of the energy transference which takes place between themselves and
their students, clients, or patients. The more the sympathy or compassion, the
greater seems to be the outpouring of energy and the higher the likeli- hood
of burnout. Dr. Diamond has tested the thymus glands (using the deltoid
indicator muscle), of hundreds of doctors and found that 85-90 per cent of the
caring and sympathetic practitioners suffer (like Manfred), from underactive
thymus glands.
Nevertheless, it is precisely this caring sympathy which contains the greatest

healing power. The compassion, warmth, cheerfulness, and optimism of a
nurse or a doctor are the Life Energies which invoke the self-healing
mechanisms of the patient. Dr. William Henry Welch, the chief architect of
scientific medicine in America, acknowledged this indispensable doctor-
patient transference when he wrote about his father who practiced medicine
in Norfolk, Connecticut: "The instant he entered the sick room, the patient felt
better. The art of healing seemed to surround his physical body like an aura; it
was not his treatment but his presence that cured."9
Looking at the energy transfer in the general population, Dr. Diamond

discovered that the various manifestations of the Life Energy are "contagious".
The Life Energy of a "strong" person is diminished by his coming into personal
contact with someone with a weak thymus while the Life Energy of the "weak"
person is strengthened by such a contact. Moreover, during an interaction,
specific imbalances can be transmitted from one person to another. Moods
and thoughts are infectious. Folk wisdom has long known that a frown or a
smile, a dark or a cheerful mood, love or hate, can be contagious. The
research evidence from experiments with the thymus gland provides the
scientific foundation for our personal experience and intuition on this subject.
Dr. Diamond has also investigated the effects of the human voice on our
Life Energy. A person with a strong thymus and Life Energy has a therapeutic
quality in the voice which is transmitted and strengthens the Life Energy of the
listener. Anyone who has ever listened to the beautiful voice of a fine singer will
bear witness to the capacity of the human voice to affect our emotional and
physical energies. A friend of mine once planned to attend a concert of a
great coloratura soprano at Carnegie Hall. Just prior to the concert, he
became terribly ill from food poisoning following a seafood dinner at a local
46
restaurant. He became deathly white, began shaking from head to foot and
could barely stand. The people he was with tried to take him to a hospital but
he insisted on going to the concert. They practically had to carry him to his
seat where he waited, nearly unconscious, for the concert to begin. As the
soprano began to sing, the blood rose visibly in the neck and face of my sick
friend. Within a few minutes, the symptoms of the food poisoning had
dissapeared and he was in an exalted state.
At the other extreme, the voice of a person under stress (ill, angry, unhappy,
lying), loses its therapeutic value and transmits this stress to the listener. The
voice is a powerful instrument through which our feelings (sincere or dishonest,
calm or irritated, deep or shallow, are expressed and received. The world-
renowned dog trainer, Barbara Woodhouse, includes vocal tone (along with
touch and telepathy), in her recipe for successful dog training. If parents and
teachers were more conscious of the tone of their voice, their capacity to gain
the compliance of children would be remarkably enhanced.
The verbal expression of a loving thought or a compliment raises the other

person's Life Energy. Angry and unkind words lower the Life Energy of the
listener. Pythagoras, the philosopher of Samos, was a man of such immense
Personal Power that he humbled and awed all those in his presence. His
influence over others was so great that a word of praise from Pythagoras filled
his disciples with ecstacy, while one student committed suicide because the
master became momentarily irritated over something he had done.
Pythagoras was so moved by this tragedy that he never again spoke unkindly
to or about anyone.
When he was a boy, the Japanese-Canadian architect, Raymond

Moriyama, was advised by his father: "You should speak on only two occasions
- to give information and to make people happy." In the light of Dr. Diamond's
research findings, we can appreciate the wisdom of those words. Dr.
Diamond's work in behavioral kinesiology opens up a new branch of
knowledge - the science of the exchange of Life Energy - which provides a link
between biochemistry, personality, society, and culture. His findings have
tremendous implications for people in pursuit of Personal Power. Such
implications must be understood wisely and applied with discrimination. One
cannot avoid contact with people of a low Life Energy; but being aware of
the energy interchange, one can be discriminating in relationships. More
important, the stronger is an individual's Life Energy, the more that person can
resist the effects of the low Life Energy and cerebral imbalances of other
people and the more he or she can contribute to the Life Energy of others.
Individuals with a high Life Energy and Personal Power are a benefit to their
47
family, friends, co-workers, community, and country.
The energy exchange which takes place with the reciprocal thymus
relationship means that as long as an individual is a member of society, that
person bears responsibility not only for his own Life Energy but also for the Life
Energy of others. John Donne wrote that no man is an island. John Diamond
has demonstrated how the currents of Life Energy wash upon each person's
shore the treasures or debris of the thoughts and feelings of our fellow
travellers. Here we have the basis for a true science of ethics as well as a guide
to Personal Power.
Dr. Diamond's investigations of the thymus gland and its relationship to our
Life Energy also encompass the media and its effects. Our Life Energy is raised
or lowered not only by the people we meet but also by the faces, images,
symbols, words, and voices which we assimilate through television, radio, films,
newsapapers, books, and magazines. Insofar as these media reflect the
negative and stressful aspects of our world - the violence and disasters, the
greed and dishonesty, the ugly and the cruel, the superficial and the cynical -
and do so with an exploitive eye for profit rather than a benevolent search for
truth, they may weaken the thymus gland and Life Energy of the viewer,
reader, or listener.
The falsehoods, distortions, and negative suggestions of advertizing and

other media information manipulated to fascinate us and rivet our attention
are highly successful in weakening and causing imbalances in our Life Energy.
By the age of fourteen, the average child in North America has seen several
hundred thousand commercials and witnessed over 10,000 television murders.
Victimization surveys show that the public perception of crime - especially
violent crime - greatly exaggerates crime statistics and that the widespread
fear of walking in one's own neighbourhood at night is a reflex less of real
experience with crime than of vicarious participation in the violent media.
Of course, the opposite is equally true. If we are exposed to vital

personalities delivering messages that are sincere, truthful, and meaningful, our
Life Energy and Personal Power are raised correspondingly. Since the
opportunities to be influenced by the (mostly negative) media are infinitley
numerous, it requires a considerable degree of self-restraint and discrimination
to shape the selective intake necessary for the advancement of Personal
Power. Once we become consciously aware of the interchange of our Life
Energy with the media in our environment, we are free to avoid those
influences which diminish, unnecessarily, our Personal Power. Or, where
physical avoidance is not possible, we can adopt mental visors to screen out
48
those negative aspects which weaken our Life Energy. Mental visors were
effectively employed by a woman whose husband was in the habit of
regurgitating to her the grim news of the world. Each day, after he returned
from work, he immediately entered the kitchen where his wife was preparing
the family dinner and related to her a history of the day's disasters and
misfortunes from work and from the four corners of the globe. By the time he
had finished his impromptu newscast, the dinner was ready, the husband was
hungry, and the wife, having listened with a compassionate concern to all
those troubles, was ready to collapse from acute depression. This ritual went on
for many married years during which the wife, a normally vibrant, cheerful, and
vigorous woman, suffered from inexplicable fatigue from dinner until bed time.
One evening, the couple attended a party where the wife overheard her
husband confide to a male friend: "By the end of the day, I've had it. I feel
terrible. But as soon as I come home, I unburden myself of all the awful things
that bother me and afterwards I feel wonderful." As soon as she heard this
priceless piece of conversation, the woman donned her mental visor. Now her
husband returns home, enters the kitchen and unburdens himself of the day's
disasters. The wife, meanwhile, prepares dinner as always but no longer listens
to him. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it worked for this woman because she
had decided that it was easier to change her attitudes than his habits.
People have a pathological addiction to bad news. Perhaps there is a

perversity in human nature which, especially in troubled times, finds relative
comfort in the misfortunes of others. Or, perhaps, it is a feeling of guilt
assuaged, in part, through vicarious emotional participation in unhappy events.
The predilection of young people for horror films, pornography, and other
violent film and video programming may reflect their frustrated needs for
emotional and kinesthetic experiences that are denied in school and family
settings which often lack genuine emotional content and real physical
challenge.
The useless involvement in the problems of other people may also be a

convenient, subconscious tactic for avoiding one's own problems - one's real
challenges. Whatever the cause, the consequence is unhealthy. The usual fare
of bad news (including film, video, and print stories which exploit human
weaknesses for profit), offered up to us by the media may be likened to a false
stressor, artificial adversary, or useless challenge. A false stressor is a stimulus in
our environment which needlessly creates in us the symptoms of stress such as
anger, lust, fear, or depression, along with the physiological symptoms of dimi-
nished and imbalanced Life Energy. The challenge is artificial and
nonproductive because stress-filled news and stories are normally something
we have no control over, no genuine interest in, and no inclination toward or
49
opportunity for personal intervention. Such vicarious involvement, on a habitual

basis, in the world's real or invented misfortunes produces no good for others
and does actual harm to ourselves. Moreover, when our own Life Energy is
weakened by repeated exposure to the images and stories of man's
inhumanity to man (often romanticized for popular consumption), we actually
lose that very Personal Power which would enable us to help others and to
improve things in some part of our troubled planet. Here is a situation where
less is more.
Much of the advertizing and many of the films and television programs,
motivated more by profit than by love or truth, beam at us a steady diet of
negatively charged stimuli designed to arouse our basest instincts and
appetites - lust, fear, anger, greed, cruelty, and so on. These negative stimuli
are handsomesly packaged, incorporating the latest psychological techniques
of arousal combined with skillful artistic wrapping. The clever packaging and
smooth public relations puts the consumer off his guard so that these mental
and emotional pollutants are imbibed indiscriminately, creating the
appropriate stress syndrome, lowering of our Life Energy, and weakening of our
Personal Power. (They also distort our values by making us, for example,
cynical). If people filled their machines with the same quality of energy their
senses take in from the media, we would find that our cars, washing machines,
typewriters, and satellites would shut down in protest. It is indeed strange how
sensitive people can be to the needs of their inanimate machines and how
insensitive they are to their own mental and emotional nutrition.
50
Chapter 10: THE LAWS OF NATURE
"When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no

longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh
and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic
outlaw, having neither the completeness nor integrity
of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity."
- Henry Beston
A certain amount of stress makes life interesting and provides the

challenges necessary for the growth of Personal Power. Too much stress or the
wrong kind of stress lowers our Life Energy by, among other things, weakening
the thymus gland. It is the thymus which produces the special lymphocytes
(white blood cells) called T-cells that give the body its resistance to infection
and disease, including cancer. Monitoring and regulating the stresses in our
environment, therefore, is the most effective kind of preventive medicine and
the way to good health.
In 1635, an Englishman, named Thomas Parr, was invited to London by

Charles I because the King had learned that "Old Parr" was 152 years of age.
Shortly after being wined and dined, "Old Parr" died while still in London. An
autopsy revealed Parr's organs to be healthy. His death was attributed to
surfeit and to the pollution of London's air.10 Much of the distress of contem-
porary life flows from the urban technological environment. In this crowded
and polluted setting, with its emphasis on quantity rather than quality in both
production and consumption, people work at jobs they do not enjoy to pay for
an over-abundance of goods and services many of which they have been
manipulated into desiring and consuming. The greed of the few establishes the
pace for the many so that big city people live a hurried and harried life style.
In shutting out so effectively the rhythms, textures, and Life Energies of

nature, cities have deprived men, women, and children of a refuge from the
51
chaotic, money-mad, artificial, monochromatic, hard-surfaced city

surroundings. A measure of the deprivation can be found in the traffic on the
highways leading out of our cities during long weekends and at the beginning
of summer and other vacation periods. People literally flee from their jobs and
their concrete surroundings to where the sun and the wind move freely over
water, sand, and trees. The craving which most city people feel for the
elements of nature is created by the need for the Life Energy and cerebral
balance lost in the city and so readily restored in nature.
Perhaps the most distressful environmental factors of modern urban life are
overcrowding and the absence of sunshine, fresh air, and clean water. The
polluted air of our cities is responsible for many forms of illness and infection
including hypertension, diseases of the circulatory system, and cancers. The
pollution lessens our vitality and inhibits our capacity for clear thinking. Oxygen
and glucose are the essential ingredients in cellular metabolism and body
energy. Without an adequate supply of oxygenated air, neither the body nor
the brain function properly. Any person can experience this by leaving a busy
street filled with exhaust fumes and walking in a park; or by poking his head
outside a smoke-filled room and taking a few deep breaths. In both instances,
a sense of vitality and clarity of thought are restored. Pollution, by destroying
negative ions, is responsible for the positive ionization of the atmosphere (also
particularly noticeable before a storm when the barometer is low). An unfa-
vorable balance of positive ions has a pathological effect on human beings
producing tension headaches, depression, anger and irritability, fatigue,
confusion, and slowed reaction time.
The loss of adequately oxygenated air results in large part from hermetically
sealed work and school environments, cigaret smoke, exhaust fumes, and
other chemical wastes from motor vehicles and industries. Carbon monoxide,
in particular, interferes with the absorption of oxygen. If cities had grown more
in balance with nature they would have retained much larger areas of trees
and plants which absorb atmospheric poisons and breathe out life-giving
oxygen. The increasing use of plants and flowers in homes and offices does
more than please the senses; it contributes to the Life Energy of people in
those environments. Trees, similarly, are as essential to the life of a nation as
shelter and sanitation. Trees are the skin of the earth. Their wholesale
destruction without proper replenishment jeopardizes the air we breathe,
erodes the top soil which produces the food we eat, and alters the patterns of
weather world-wide.
Sulpher dioxide and nitrogen oxides from smelters, coal- burning generators
and automobiles return to earth as acid rain and snow killing thousands of
52
lakes and rivers, and endangering the forest and fishing industries as well as the
agricultural community. Millions of man-made chemicals have been
introduced into our environment; few of these have been properly tested to
determine their short and long term effects on people and nature. Many of
them have poisoned our air and land and water supplies. Fresh water, once
one of the most abundant of nature's life- giving gifts, must now be bought by
the bottle in the grocery store. Many of the polluting chemicals, by themselves
or in combination, cause cancers and genetic mutations. These chemical
toxins are absorbed into our agricultural products as well as consumed by the
fish, fowl, and animals which are eaten by human beings.
The high rates of miscarriages, birth defects, and cancers near chemical
dump sites and in and around polluting industries offer grim testimony to the
irresponsible desecration of nature caused by greed, stupidity, and neglect. It
is unlikely that nature will reveal a miracle cure for cancer to hypocritical
societies that spend billions of dollars on medical research on cancer causes
and cures while making billions of dollars with cancer-creating industries. The
economic science of the future must build its profit and loss equations upon a
more profound and compassionate understanding of human existence.
Human beings cannot cut themselves off from the Life Energy of nature
without also diminishing their own Life Energy and the Personal Power which
derives from it. Our concern for the future must become no less real than our
preoccupation with the present or our nostalgia for the past. Personal
Power is cultivated in solitude and in the context of constructive interpersonal
relationships. The crowd depletes Personal Power. Scientists have known for
some time that there is a close correlation between population density, stress,
and human pathologies, though the exact nature of that link has often been
based upon speculation and upon inference from studies of animals under
crowded conditions. In 1950, ethologist John Christian presented evidence to
show that the increase and decrease in the population of mammals are
controlled by physiological mechanisms that respond to density. As numbers of
animals in a given area increase, stress builds up until it triggers an endocrine
reaction that acts to collapse the population. This hypothesis was strengthened
by his observations of the build-up and die-off of the Sika deer population on
James Island, 280 acres of uninhabited land in Chesapeake Bay just off the
coast of Maryland. When the deer population, breeding freely, reached a
density of about one per acre (280-300), over half of them suddenly died off in
a three month period during a cold winter in 1958. The following year, more
deer died and the population stabilized at around 80. The sudden death of
almost 200 deer in a two year period was not caused by starvation because
there was an adequate food supply. (Aside from being dead, the carcasses
were in apparently excellent condition with shining coats, well-developed
53
muscles, and fat deposits between the muscles). Autopsies showed that the
dead deer had developed greatly enlarged adrenal glands. The adrenal
glands regulate growth, reproduction, and the level of the body's defenses.
When animals (and humans as well), come under stress - in this case, cold and
overcrowding - the adrenals become overactive and enlarged to meet the
emergency. The deer had died, not from starvation or infection, but from
shock following severe metabolic disturbance as a result of prolonged
adrenocortical hyperactivity (emergency secretion of adrenalin in response to
real or perceived danger).11
Another ethologist, John Calhoun, was able to observe closely the behavior
of rats under crowded conditions. In a series of experiments, Calhoun observed
that as the population density increased, so did the level of social
disorganization and pathology. Under crowded conditions of what Calhoun
called the "behavioral sink", the sexual behavior of the rats was disrupted
resulting in aggressive male symptoms of pansexuality and sadism. Rearing of
the young was almost completely disrupted. The social behavior of the males
deteriorated, becoming violent and unpredictable, and the females became
particularly vulnerable. As with the Sika deer, the "sink" hit hardest at the female
rats and the young. The death rates of females in the "sink" was three and a
half times that of the males. Of the 558 young rats born at the height of the
sink, only one-fourth survived to be weaned. Among pregnant rats, the rate of
miscarriages increased significantly and females started dying from disorders of
the uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes. Tumors of the mammary glands and
sex organs were identified in autopsied rats. The kidneys, livers, and adrenals
were also enlarged or diseased and showed signs that are associated with
extreme stress.12 "Escaping the rat race" is no idle metaphor! In the
biochemistry of stress, the body's balance, equilibrium, or homeostasis is
disrupted. The stressor (such as overcrowding, aggression, injury, fear, anger,
infection, cold, drug or alcohol stimulants including caffeine and refined
sugar), excites the hypothalamous (a brain region at the base of the skull), to
produce a substance that stimulates the pituitary gland to discharge the
hormone ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone), into the blood.
ACTH stimulates the adrenal cortex to secrete corticoids. The resulting
physiological reactions include adrenal enlargement, shrinking of the thymus
gland, and increased production of blood sugar. These stress symptoms occur
in animals and humans alike. We have already examined the loss of Life
Energy associated with adrenal enlargement and thymus atrophy. The
increase in blood sugar also has serious consequences. All sugars and starches
are converted by the digestive juices to a simple sugar called glucose or blood
sugar. Blood sugar is the body's main and readily available source of energy. It
54
is used as fuel by the tissues of the brain, nervous system, and muscles. A
portion of the glucose or blood sugar is converted to glycogen and stored by
the liver and muscles; the excess is converted to fat and stored throughout the
body as a reserve source of energy.
The biological stress syndrome (the hypothalamous-pituitary- adreno-

cortical system), causes the production of blood sugar to deal with the real or
apparent increased energy requirements of the body. The stronger or the
more repititious the stressor, the greater the production of blood sugar and its
conversion into energy. If the supply of blood sugar becomes too depleted or
is exhausted, the body loses the energy necessary for the muscles, brain, and
nervous system, and the animal or person goes into shock. At the same time,
the release of blood sugar reserves causes the pancreas to secrete an excess
of insulin. The viciousness of the downward spiral is exacerbated as the excess
insulin (a hormonal blood sugar regulator which converts glucose into energy),
removes too much sugar from the blood, producing an abnormally low blood
sugar level.
As the body reacts to stress, the increase in blood sugar creates an

adaptation energy to help the body resist danger (real or imagined). This
reaction is followed by a depletion of blood sugar and a loss of energy which
lowers the body's resistance to infection and disease. Constant stress depletes
the blood sugar causing hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). The Sika deer on
James Island died from hypoglycemic shock caused by incessant stress
(overcrowding) aggravated by an extremely cold winter. Symptoms of
hypoglycemia or low blood sugar include not only weakness, fatigue, and
various physical ailments but also mental imbalance and emotional disorders.
Among the rats in Calhoun's experiments, crowding caused inordinate
competition, aggressiveness, and sexual aberrations. These behavioral
symptoms themselves increased the stress levels resulting in a population
collapse due to lowering of the fertility rate, increased susceptability to
disease, and mass mortality from hypoglycemic shock.
The ductless or endocrine glands (which include the pituitary, thymus, and
adrenals) influence practically everything in the body. The endocrine glands
constitute a delicately balanced chemical control system which is extremely
sensitive to both our internal and external environments. The system is
influenced by our thoughts and emotions as well as by the foods we eat and
the sounds, colors, textures, and people in our surroundings. In the endocrine
system can be found the biochemistry of Personal Power.
The issue of overcrowding is not simply a physical problem. Cultures like
55
Japan and Canada vary in their tolerances of social densities. However, there
is also a moral or ethical aspect to social density. If we distinguish between
moral/ethical space on the one hand and physical space on the other, we
may come to an easier understanding of the problem. Physical space can be
measured in metres and centimetres and in terms of the capacity of a given
population to meet its physical needs such as food, water, elimination, etc.,
within a specifiable territory. Ethical space refers to the field of values and
emotional attitudes. If we can imagine a small or large group or even a whole
society governed by cooperation and kindness, tolerance and thoughtfulness,
honesty and sincerity, gratitude and generosity, we could characterize this
group or society as being relatively unlimited in ethical space (low density).
Simply put, there is plenty of goodness and good feelings to go around. On the
darker side, a society (nation, city, or family), filled with competition and
cruelty, intolerance and thoughtlessness, dishonesty and insincerity, ingratitude
and selfishness, could be described in terms of moral scarcity or limited ethical
space (high density).
The concept of ethical space was employed by the American

anthropologist Ruth Benedict who used the term synergy (from the Greek
"synergos" - "working together"). Societies and institutions high in synergy
minimized aggression and maximized cooperation. They show less
competitiveness, more trust, less centralization, and more delegation of
responsibility. The psychologist, Abraham Maslow, notes that societies with high
synergy (the cooperative ones), "have social orders in which the individual by
the same act and at the same time serves his own advantage and that of the
group. ... Non-aggression occurs (in these societies) not because people are
unselfish and put social obligations above personal desires, but when social
arrangements make these two identical."13 In low synergy societies, on the
other hand, an advantage for one man becomes a victory over the other. In
high-synergy societies wealth and power tend to be diffused, while in low-
synergy societies they tend to be funnelled or concentrated.
Maslow points out that low-synergy institutions reflect an assumption of

limited resources (psychic as well as material). This does not necessarily mean
that the resources in question are actually scarce by some external criterion,
but only that the 1 institutions follow such an assumption. Maslow illustrates his
concept with academic grades - a perfect example of a low-synergy
institution if grading is done or is seen to be done on a curve. Each person's
good performance detracts from the rewards available to the next. This can
easily be converted into a high synergy institution, of course, simply by
changing the rules. The larger the class, school, or college, the more likely will
be the assumption of scarcity of ability and the more likely will grading be
56
done on a curve. On the other hand, smaller groups of students and low
student-teacher ratios foster more recognition and praise of individual effort
and more plentiful distribution of rewards. Smaller schools according to Roger
Barker produce happier and more productive, socially conscious, responsible
citizens. In smaller schools, students participated more, related more
meaningfully to their activities, and were more tolerant of others. They formed
closer and more lasting relationships, were more effective in group processes,
could communicate better, performed six times more in responsible positions,
were absent less often, were more dependable, tended to volunteer more fre-
quently, were more productive, were more articulate, and found their work
more relevant.14 Small is not only "beautiful", it is also bountiful.
In the light of the researches of Dr. Hans Selye on stress and the adrenals
and of Dr. John Diamond on stress and the thymus, we can better appreciate
the impact of overcrowding - both physical and ethical - on our Life Energy
and Personal Power. From the investigations of these two medical scientists, we
have learned that thoughts, feelings, and attitudes are contagious; that
negative ones generate stress symptoms that weaken our Life Energy and
cause cerebral imbalance; that positive ones have a therapeutic effect on our
being, strengthen our Life Energy, and integrate our logical and imaginative
thought processes. Dr. Diamond's studies have shown that people's strengths,
weaknesses, and specific imbalances are transmittable and are registered by
the thymus - the first organ in the body to react to stress. City people have,
literally, thousands of interpersonal contacts daily. Some of these are primary,
involving family, friends, and close work associates; many are secondary -
fellow pedestrians, transit riders, motorists, neighbours, shoppers, clerks, etc.;
and many more are tertiary - contacts via television, radio, newspapers, film,
and so on. What is the state of the people we contact in these various
contexts? Reconstruct or imagine an ordinary day in your life, recalling only the
highlights in the high density urban environment.
You have woken up with your clock radio and assimilated a parade of bad
news and negative weather reports even before you sit down to a rushed
breakfast which you eat with your mind on yesterday's poor stock showings
printed in the newspaper raised like a shield of armor against unsolicited family
intrusions. Soon, you walk to the bus station feeling unloved because your
spouse did not pay sufficient attention to you. (A small incident that launches
you on a road of similarly small but causal events). You try to smile at the bus
driver but he ignores you because he is preoccupied with catching up to his
schedule delayed by the rush hour. Then you sit down beside a young lady
who is reading, in cold, stony silence, the morning newspaper. Her mood is
distant and uncommunicative, so you adopt, unconsciously, a similar attitude.
57
You look over her shoulder at the page she is reading and come face to face
with the usual gruesome crime reports. Your mind begins to imagine details of
the sordid events and your breakfast turns in your stomach. You arrive at your
stop and walk the last two blocks to work trying to shake off the newspaper
story. An attractively dressed mannequin in a shop window catches your eye
and briefly reminds you of the clothes you can't afford to buy for yourself or
your family. You drop into the washroom before arriving at your office and
notice some pornographic graffitti on the freshly painted wall and this irritates
you. Coming up to your office, you feel anxious because the heavy traffic has
caused you to be later than usual. Your secretary smiles at you, bids you "good
morning", and asks how your family is. You return the smiling gesture
automatically and answer unfeelingly because by now your endocrine system
has sent your body so many depressing messages that you are numb from the
morning's emotional roller coaster ride. You sit at your desk and begin to read
a technical report which you must summarize for your boss before the day's
end. The eyes locate the words but the mind cannot register their meaning -
your brain is starved of blood sugar and your Life Energy is diminished and
unbalanced from a weak thymus. And your day has hardly begun. It is 8.45
a.m. and you can't tell a hawk from a handsaw.
And so it goes in the behavioral sink of our cities where there is much to
delight but, unfortunately, a great deal to depress. In terms of the biochemical
reactions of our endocrine system, the assimilation of a steady stream of
negatively charged stimuli is the equivalent of imbibing small doses of poison
throughout the course of a day. Voices, gestures, moods, attitudes, images,
words - all react upon us to a significant, though often unconscious, degree.
When our Life Energy is vital and our Personal Power is strong, we are relatively
resistant to the negative and the ugly. When our Life Energy is low, when we
are already under stress from our job or family, from an illness or a nutritional
deficiency, a loud noise or an unfriendly word can undo us, paralyzing our will.
Up to a certain point, the stresses of the city provide the challenges

necessary for the pursuit of Personal Power. Beyond that point, the stresses
become counter-productive, setting in motion the downward spiral of
diminishing energy fed by negative stimuli. Until we reach the watershed of
diminishing returns, we can pursue Personal Power through self-control by
monitoring our reactions to others and by exercising courage, compassion,
and patience. Finally, with the wisdom of discrimination, we can employ
selective perception of our environment, screening out the useless and
uproductive and absorbing the useful and constructive.
When the adversaries have overtaken you and the stresses have upset the
58
homeostatic balance (which Dr. Selye calls "staying power"), you may find
refuge with Mother Nature in whose bosom our recuperative powers are
magnified. In nature are to be found the therapeutic sounds and landscapes,
the healing touches of wind and water and sun, and the restorative silence
and solitude of space.
59
Chapter 11: CULTURE AND THE LIFE ENERGY
"The value of culture is its effect on character. It

avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that.
Its use is for life."
- Somerset Maugham
When culture - the realm of the arts and ideas - is generated from a source
of Personal Power, it has the capacity to ennoble, to enlighten, to inspire, and
to strengthen character. When the Life Energy of the creator of an idea or art
form is strong, this vigor is passed on to the audience through the vitality of the
particular medium (drama, music, painting, etc.). When the Life Energy of the
creator is low, the cultural product will tend to depress the Life Energies of
others. In the absence of Personal Power - of real challenges, self-control,
harmony, and idealism -the realm of art and ideas serves only to weaken
character, negate principles of existence, depress the Life Energy and
frequently shock the sensibilities into states of stress.
All too often, passing fads of a decaying civilization are confused with
culture. We will understand the distinction better if we examine the true
meaning of the term culture. The word has two roots: "cult" meaning care or
cultivation and "ur" which is a Sanskrit word meaning light or the creative
principle of the universe. Culture, then, means literally the care and cultivation
of the creative and life-giving principle. Culture, in its true sense, is the very
essence of the Life Energy.
Unfortunately, many of the contemporary arts have departed from the life-
giving concept of culture and have sunk to the level of vulgar fads. They
affect the heart rate but not the heart. They provoke the senses but not the
mind. They coarsen rather than refine thought, emotion, manners, and taste.
Often, they are construed without love of their audience. Though bankrupt of
ideas they are deceptively packaged in technical brilliance. Their ugliness,
masquerading as originality, is designed to shock and destroy. (The
60
entertainment sections of today's newspapers frequently look like a pastiche

from Dante's Inferno or the hells of Hieronymous Bosch). Much of
contemporary music, for example, is actually painful to listen to and causes ear
damage and other physiological disorders. (The tonal tantrums of grown-ups).
Just as the military has designed and built noise generating devices to produce
high frequency sounds of an intensity so outrageous so as physically to tear
apart materials, animals, and men, so some contemporary composers and
musicians, acting out some kind of guerilla theatre, have declared war on their
audience. In a flash of candor, the "avant-garde" composer, John Cage, was
quoted as saying: "I am going towards violence rather than tenderness, Hell
rather than Heaven, ugly rather than beautiful, impure rather than pure."15
Dr. John Diamond in his book, Behavioral Kinesiology, reported that certain
rock music has a rhythm which is the opposite of the rhythm produced by the
human heart and arterial system. This kind of rock music with a stopped or
anapestic beat has a weakening effect on our muscles. In one medical study,
doctors tested hundreds of people on an electronic gauge and found that 90
per cent registered instantly a significant loss of muscle strength when they
heard the anapestic beat. Since every major muscle of the body relates to an
organ, this means that our organs are adversely affected by a significant
amount of the popular music to which we are regularly exposed, voluntarily or
involuntarily. This music whose rhythm is opposite to that of the human body
can be accurately described as anti-life. In addition, the weakening beat
causes switching - the loss of symmetry between the brain's two hemispheres -
which produces many subtle perceptual difficulties and other initial symptoms
of stress. These problems were not associated with the music of the Beatles or
of the older rock and roll music when the hard beat of the "rock" was softened
by the "roll". Not only the rhythms of much contemporary music but also the
words and gestures are anti-life, embodying themes which are ethically
degrading and physiologically destructive. Much of the violence and vulgarity
in current art forms have been drug induced. The hard rock music, in particular,
with its negative symbology, cave man chauvinism, and anti-heroic promoters,
has been influencing an entire generation of young people throughout the
world turning them cynical and mindless. Through their music and associated
life style, young people are under continuous stress ("the disease of the
eighties"), either hyped-up or depressed.
Music and other art forms which are high in "adversity" but low in self-control,
harmony, and idealism produce symptoms of stress that weaken our Life
Energy. On the other hand, art forms and ideas which embody the principles
of Personal Power magnify our Life Energy and fortify us against depression,
disease, infection, and even death. The power of culture, as the care and
61
cultivation of the life-giving principle, to strengthen not only the human will but
the human body as well is dramatically illustrated in the following story of
George Faludy, the expatriate Hungarian poet and author.
After finding himself in conflict with the Hungarian Government, Faludy was
put into a concentration camp in 1950 along with about 1300 other inmates of
various political and religious persuasions most of whom had been sentenced
to hard labor on trumped-up charges. The inmates were isolated from any
outside communication - no letters, parcels, books, newspapers, radios, or
visitors. They cut stones from morning to night every day of the year on diet of
1,200 calories a day.
In the beginning, they returned to their barracks every night, too exhausted
to do anything but fall asleep on rotten straw sacks. But in this bleak and
seemingly hopeless scenario, Faludy met several young friends who had
missed out on a university education during the war. "You can lecture us in the
camp," they said, "and we'll get our university education that way." Initially only
four but eventually twelve prisoners gathered around Faludy's straw bed each
night for an hour or two. They recited poems; and Faludy's lectures on history,
literature or philosophy would be discussed by everyone. Faludy was not the
only prisoner to teach. A former government official knew Hamlet, and a
Midsummer Night's Dream by heart and recited both to an appreciative
audience. There were lectures on Roman law, on the history of the crusades,
narrations of large parts of War and Peace, courses in mathematics and
astronomy. There was even a former military officer who whistled entire operas.
All were eagerly listened to sometimes by men who had never gone beyond
primary school. Those who lectured ransacked their memories to keep alive a
culture from which they were hopelessly severed.
Now, there were prisoners who looked upon all this with disdain, arguing
that the teachers and students were crazy to waste their sleeping time in
lectures when death was surely the fate ordained for them all. These other
prisoners, determined to survive physically, withdrew into themselves,
becoming lonely, merciless with others, excluding thought and speech.
By the second winter of their incarceration, a strange thing began to

happen. Once, twice, or even three times in the space of a day, a prisoner
would suddenly stop work and stagger off through the deep snow. After 20 or
30 yards, he would stop running and collapse. In every instance, the person
would die within a day or two, usually without regaining consciousness. Those
who died in this manner, were always the prisoners who had been most intent
on physical survival, who worried only about food, sleep, and warmth.
62
Faludy, witnessing this remarkable repetition of die-offs, was unwilling to

face the obvious. Having been reared in the Western tradition of scientific
pragmatism, he would not admit that something so immaterial as a good
poem or a Socratic dialogue could fortify the spirit and prevent the body's
collapse. Until an incident drove home the truth. One evening, a strong youth,
a former government official, approached Faludy to say that he would not be
at the lecture that night. He wanted to survive and was going to sleep and not
talk; he wished, he said, to live like a tree, to vegetate. He waited there as if for
an objection but Faludy was so exhausted he could not respond and when he
realized he must dissuade him, the youth had left. A few days later, that same
young man suddenly stopped work, began to run toward the trees and then
fall down in the snow. He also died. "His death," reported Faludy "has been on
my conscience ever since. But without exception, all those who lectured, and
all those who listened, survived."16
From George Faludy's dramatic tale, we can see how the life- giving
principle of culture can become the critical factor in physical survival itself. It
was the Life Energy derived from culture which enabled the survivors of the
Hungarian concentration camp to resist the stresses that caused the die-off of
their fellow inmates just like the Sika deer on James Island. Culture, mediated
by thought and feeling, acted upon the endocrine glands, including the
thymus, whose secretions strengthen the will and fortify the body against illness
and disease and the the distresses of the environment. It was the vital ideas
and beauty embodied in culture which intervened in the biological stress
syndrome giving those inmates, who made the effort toward culture, the
Personal Power to overcome the fiercest challenges. Culture refers to the care
and cultivation of the life-giving or creative principle. In the capacity of culture
to refine, to ennoble, and to inspire is the power to enhance our Life Energy.
Culture is the realm of beauty and knowledge. Through beauty, the ugly
adversaries of earthly existence are transformed, our Life Energy is harmonized,
our cerebral hemispheres are balanced, and we become imbued with grace,
poise, and courage. Through knowledge, we open ourselves to the infinite
universe of thought and ideas which stimulate our imagination and
resourcefulness and magnify our Personal Power.
The thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of other people and the media and
our mental and emotional reactions to them influence the hormonal
secretions of our ductless or endocrine glands to make us either resistant or
vulnerable to the biological stress syndrome which is the critical process
determining our susceptibility to infection and disease and death itself.
Negative thoughts and feelings weaken us. The positive emotion of love and its
63
many attributes strengthen our Life Energy and enhance our Personal Power.
Self-awareness concerning the exchange of Life Energies enables us to

monitor and to regulate the stimuli and stresses in our environment. The lack of
ethical and physical space in the city can be balanced by the spaciousness,
tranquility, harmony, and healing energies of nature.
Good nutrition, proper sleep, and moderate exercise nourish our body
and fortify our Life Energy. But it is culture, the care and cultivation of the
creative and life-giving process, which nourishes our thoughts and
feelings, our minds and our hearts. A society whose measures of
productivity do not include the scope and quality of cultural
development will find itself ultimately impoverished and ineffectual.
Culture, the realm of beauty and knowledge, is the golden key to the
biochemistry of Personal Power which maximizes our Life Energy.
64
PART III: HOW TO FREE YOUR CREATIVE POTENTIAL
"Far and away the best prize that life offers

is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."
- Theodore Roosevelt
"Resolve to be thyself: and know that

Who finds himself, loses his misery."
- Matthew Arnold
Personal Power is attained through the unfolding and realizing of our true
nature - our potential. The human being is a vast storehouse, an infinite
repository, of potential creative energy. When this energy is locked up
(unrealized), we are without Personal Power and of little use either to ourselves
or to others. In this state we are simply idle beings taking up space. There is an
old proverb that a stick of incense, no matter how tall or thick, is no use until it is
burned. So it is with human potential - unused, it is useless.
When our energy is freed, it may be used either to create or to destroy, to

enhance ourselves or to defeat ourselves. Energy which is destructive (such as
guilt, hostility, cynicism, or fear), undermines Personal Power and diminishes its
energy source. Energy used for creative purposes (such as love, cooperation,
or constructive work), magnifies our Personal Power and deepens the well from
which our energy is drawn. To free our creative potential is to open the
floodgates to the reservoir of infinite Personal Power.
65
Chapter 12: THE PURPOSE OF WORK
"They, believe me, who await

No gifts from chance, have conquered fate."
- Matthew Arnold
The word energy derives from the Greek "energeia" and means, literally, "in
work". In the rhythm of creative labour is contained our most significant source
of energy. With the concept of work, we have arrived at one of the most
important keys to self- realization and Personal Power. However, since work has
become maligned in the popular parlance, it must be redefined in the context
of Personal Power.
Many people are working at the wrong jobs, for the wrong reasons, and
with the wrong attitudes. Psychological surveys show that levels of job
dissatisfaction are remarkably high. (An often covert but potent force in rising
wage and benefit demands). The symptoms tell the story: absenteeism and
lateness, poor quality in goods and services, theft and sabotage, strikes and
slowdowns, alcoholism and drug abuse. Almost every sort of worker is affected
from clerks and carpenters to doctors and lawyers. There are ample reasons
for these symptoms of worker distress. Many work environments are physically
hazardous because of toxic chemicals, high noise levels, poor lighting, bad air,
and improper temperature settings. In addition, workplaces are often
physically ugly and depressing to the human spirit. (Studies have shown that
esthetic considerations - paintings, colors, living plants - stimulate worker
morale, product quality and productivity). Many jobs are poorly designed,
endangering health and draining energy, lacking purpose, freedom, and
responsibility. Often attitudes are at fault. If management is exploitive and
insensitive and treats workers like mischievous children, workers will respond to
the challenge and the attitude of management will become self- fulfilling.
66
Many people, considering their work a necessary evil, bring their worst to their
job.
Motivation is also a factor. People who enter professions of service, such as

teaching or medicine, for money, power, security, or prestige rather than out of
love for children or compassion for the sick, should not be surprised to find their
work overly frustrating, under-paid, and disappointing. Not a few are
compelled toward well-paying but personally unpleasant or unsatisfying jobs
to subsidize high living and credit spending. Many individuals have been fast-
talked into the wrong jobs by ignorant, though often well-meaning, parents,
vocational counsellors, and personnel managers. Many of the standard testing
procedures for determining job suitability and career direction are misleading
and inaccurate. Robert Thorndike and Elizabeth Hagen reported on a study of
several thousand men who were given similar sets of psychological tests by the
armed forces in the U.S. and followed up over a ten year period. The reported
conclusion was that the predictions were no more dependable than tea leaf
readings.17 A book called Epitaph For Vocational Guidance describes the
great majority of vocational/aptitude tests as having a built-in 40 per cent
margin of error.18 This is only slightly more reliable than flipping a coin.
Frequently, people drift into jobs taking the line of least resistance and stay
indefinitely in quest of a pension which will evaporate with inflation. Others,
with low self-esteem and insatiable egos, will break their necks to land a
"glamorous" but unfulfilling position seeking even the bubble reputation in the
canon's mouth. No wonder that in the world of work so many are so unhappy!
In A Summer Night, Matthew Arnold wrote:
"Most men in a brazen prison live,

Where, in the sun's hot eye,
With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning task give
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall."
Every man and woman comes into the world with unique gifts, abilities, and
capacities. When these are not properly used, life is frustrating and unfulfilled.
Much of the restlessness, confusion, and disharmony which we witness about us
exist because men and women have not found their life's work, their true
vocation. Many of the problems of youth today can be attributed to their
alienation from the world of labor and the poor fit between school and work.
People are plagued by doubts and fears when their hands and minds are
67
unoccupied and their hearts are without commitment to their work. Daily
labour merely to provide creature comforts is not enough to satisfy the
marvellously boundless consciousness within us. Our faculties, powers, and
abilities yearn for full use and creative expression. It is in their hobbies, at least,
that men and women often most closely touch upon their true vocation. In
their hobbies, people do what they love. (The word "amateur", for example,
derives from the latin word for love). What greater blessing is there than to be
able to work at (and be paid for), a labour of love.
The chief obstacles on the road to discovering and performing our life's
work lie not in our stars, only partially in our society, and mostly within ourselves.
Ultimately a person's own character is the arbiter of his or her future. Character
is destiny. One of the main assumptions of Personal Power is that every
individual is the architect of his own success or failure. The many obstacles of
life are stepping-stones not stumbling- blocks in the pursuit of Personal Power.
Adversity is but the downward pressure of the pump required for the upward
effort of achievement. Someone once defined God as pressure. There is no
momentum for achievement without tension, challenge, or pressure. Such a
tenet runs contrary to two deeply ingrained tendencies in human nature: to
blame others for one's misfortunes and to expect life's difficulties to be
alleviated by fate, chance, luck or the deus ex machina of one's choosing. But
God helps those who help themselves and chance is nothing except an illu-
sory wisp of the gambler's mind. The opportunities of life often arrive when least
expected and not only because they are desired but also because they are
deserved. Effort and reward always meet - not always when, where, or how
we want, but they meet. When individuals can accept responsibility for, and
recognize the power of, their own thoughts, desires, and actions, they will have
cleared some major hurdles on the path to achieving valued work and
Personal Power.
People who gamble, who expect lotteries to alleviate life's frustrations, are
sadly misdirected. The nearly impossible chance of winning something free
diverts us from the practical reality of earning something through effort.
Besides, unearned financial windfalls, especially if they are large, often bring
more problems than solutions. Big time lottery winners are frequently beset and
besieged by new troubles (e.g., mistrusting people's motives). Lotteries promote
greed and the idea of getting something for nothing. They take hard-earned
cash from the people who can least afford to gamble - the poor - who readily
become addicted to this form of gambling, using money for food and other
essentials to support their addiction. Government involvement in lotteries is
particularly reprehensible because governments lend an aura of legitimacy
and popularity to a practice that is both unethical and irrational - the odds of
68
winning anything substantial in a big-time lottery are about equal to being hit
by light- ening. Gambling and financial speculation in general are physically
unhealthy because they heighten nervous anxiety, a major contributor to stress
and illness. Mark Twain, whose speculations brought him only sorrow and
misfortune, remarked: "There are two times a man should not speculate: when
he can afford it and when he can't." Nature's worthwhile gifts are all earned.
In their hearts, people yearn for a useful and creative labour which
challenges the mind, busies the hand, and fulfills the heart's desire. But how
few people have realized their heart's desire or are even aware that it exists!
How many individuals know themselves - their powers and abilities - and are
striving to develop and exercise their gifts?
People who are ill-suited for or are unhappy in their jobs generate a great
deal of distress for themselves, their families, friends, coworkers, and
community. We have already seen how high stress levels, of which
unemployment, welfare, and ill-fitting jobs are prime causes, weaken our Life
Energy and lower our resistance to infection and disease. One of the chief
reasons of distress is frustration over the inability to utilize one's capacities and
to reach one's goals.
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Chapter 13: HOW TO DISCOVER YOUR LIFE'S WORK
"No man is born into the world whose work

Is not born with him; there is always work,
And tools to work withal, for those who will."
- James Russell Lowell
"Do your work with your whole heart and you

will succeed - there is so little competition."
- Elbert Hubbard
"All work is empty save when there is love."
- Kahlil Gibran
An Irishman was asked once if he knew how to play the violin. "I don't
know," he answered, "I've never tried." In the wit of the Irishman's reply is
contained the wisdom of self-realization. You can't know yourself until you
have applied yourself. You won't know what desires sleep in your heart or
what abilities are dormant in your head and hands until you test them in the
fire of life. This means experiment, risk, and adventure. The men and women
who play it safe throughout life will never know themselves, realize their
capacities, or develop Personal Power. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Every individual has something unique to offer this world, some special form
of excellence. Let us begin with a few simple guidelines, suggested by the four
pillars of Personal Power, for discovering that work which will free your creative
potential and advance your Personal Power.
70
1). Idealism. In the ideals of a rhythmic labour, chosen freely, and applied
lovingly, are to be found a vital key to the meaning and purpose of life. Ideals
in work provide the necessary direction in life. "No wind favors him who has no
destined port," wrote the essayist Montaigne. With an ideal, there is a sense of
direction, and the winds of opportunity will bring you to your port of desire. The
higher the ideal, the stronger the wind, and the greater the destination.
If it is true that each of us is born with a mission to perform in life, then it

follows that our ideals are never far from us. Do not be afraid, therefore, to
take the time necessary to understand yourself and your goals. Through
experimentation and self-assertion, we learn about ourselves and our true
ideals. It is only necessary to be true to yourself, to be patient, and to project
your vision beyond the immediate horizon. Ideals are valued attitudes which
can make life more meaningful and enjoyable.
There is a story about the great English architect Sir Christopher Wren who
was passing one day by the beautiful new Cathedral of London which he had
designed. Watching the building progress, he was curious to know what the
workers thought of their task. He stopped several of them in town and asked
them all the same question: "What are you doing? The first man said: I'm laying
bricks". The second one replied: "I'm earning a few shillings." The third answered:
"I'm helping to build a great cathedral." It was the ideal of the third man
which concerned itself not with the smaller orbits of the physical task and the
monetary rewards but with the greater ideal of beauty and the welfare of
others.
In determining your ideals or goals, look inside yourself and to your own
experiences. Discover events, associations, heros and heroines which, in your
childhood or later years, gave you a sense of upliftment, satisfaction,
enthusiasm, or achievement. Look for the best in others, seek the best in
yourself, and strive for the highest ideals.
2). Harmony. Seek to be of service to others. No other quality so magnifies

the sphere of harmony as service. The desire to give to others and to help
others is the foundation for cooperation. In giving, we receive. In serving, we
enhance our Personal Power. Consciousness is the conduit for Personal Power
and a consciousness preoccupied with serving oneself provides a very
constricted channel for the flow of Personal Power. A consciousness
concerned with the welfare of others greatly expands the possibilities for
Personal Power. Moreover, in a genuine concern for and helpfulness toward
others, we find little time to worry about our own problems and, therefore, are
less prone to self-pity which, along with doubt and fear do more to undermine
71
our Personal Power than just about anything else. (Doubt, fear, and self-pity
grow in the swamp of people's worries. Most of these worries are baseless. Dr.
Thomas S. Kepler did a study of people's worries and found: 40 per cent of your
worries will never happen; 30 per cent concern other people's criticism of you;
12 per cent are over decisions you already made; 10 per cent are about your
health).19 True service lies in giving our best to others. In order to do this, we
must first find and draw upon the best that is in ourselves. In this way, service
provides the quickest vehicle for our own self-development and for the
advancement of our Personal Power.
Service must be understood in small things as well as in larger matters. Men

or women who wish to serve God, truth, or beauty but can't get out of bed in
the morning to serve their family breakfast or to help their spouse with the
household chores have missed the point of service. People who seek to serve
the planet or their country but show no patience or kindness toward children
who will be the leaders and guardians of the future, demonstrate a poor
comprehension of service. Like charity, service begins at home and in the
present.
At the other extreme is the situation of many women whose considerable

capacity for service is chained frequently to the egotism of the family.
Traditionally, women, who embody the ideal of self-sacrifice, have used the
volunteer sector as an outlet for their service abilities. Much of the
development in the arts and in education in North America owes its strength to
the volunteer services of women. However, with the movement toward their
independence and more effective participation in the larger society, women
expect and need to be paid for their services. As their capacity for service is
being freed from the narrow confines of domesticity, opportunities for service
on a wider scale are opening up in the community, the nation, and the planet.
A balance is being restored.
There is no limit to the ways in which people can serve. Begin with the small
and aim for the large. Personal Power accumulates from small but significant
acts of selflessness. To help others, you need to be resourceful. The more you
help, the more resourceful you become and the more bountiful and valuable
will be your skills and abilities to others - and to yourself.
In serving others, we maximize our contact with people. It is largely through

other people that opportunities open for our self-realization and for our
vocational advancement. Service is a two-way street. In helping others, we
help ourselves (but only if the motive is truly selfless). It is through our contact
with other people that the course of our life is changed.
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3). Self-Control is the discipline necessary to guide you through the maze of
experiences which lead you to your mission in life - your true vocation.
Courage, compassion, and patience are the ingredients of self-control.
The search for your true vocation is an adventure that requires a

courageous heart and the vigilance of a real explorer. People are most often
afraid to try because they are afraid to fail. It is usually more profitable,
however, to have a new experience than to stay in a rut and do nothing at all.
From a new experience you can learn and grow; from nothing comes nothing.
If we are earnestly seeking our ideal, every encounter and experience brings
us closer either by shutting a door to a fruitless path or by opening one to a
more promising avenue. An obstacle is nature's way of pointing to a better
direction, strengthening our resolve, or teaching us an important lesson. The
only mistakes are lessons unlearned.
Most people lack self-confidence. Fear of failure and fear of appearing

foolish are two mighty impediments on the road to success and to the
acquisition of Personal Power. Before it is driven out of them, children are
unafraid to try and to express themselves with the gifts of nature's endowment.
Rabindranath
Tagore, the East Indian educator, writer, poet, and Nobel Laureate, said that
every child brings the message that God is not yet discouraged with man.
Children feel no fear of following the whispers of their heart and the free play
of their imagination until they become discouraged by the critical words and
conventional thoughts of parents and teachers. Losing their self- confidence,
spontaneity, and individuality, children grow up to become submissive adults
lacking the courage to take risks, to explore and experience the adventures of
life. Their public behavior then becomes a reflex of the supposed opinion of
others. Looking always in the public mirror of convention, they seek to clothe
themselves in the respectful opinions of others. However, since such opinions
are more akin to indifference than admiration, conformity wins nothing and
leads nowhere.
A number of years ago, a young American playwright and his wife had their
first child - a baby girl. Unfortunately, the child was born with hydrocephalus
(fluid on the brain). The parents took the child to several doctors and each one
diagnosed the baby's condition as so severe that it was hopeless. They
concurred that the child could not be expected to live for more than a few
weeks. In desperation, the playwright turned to the spiritual teacher with whom
he was studying Eastern philosophy. He asked his teacher what could be done
to save their child. The teacher suggested that the young man go home and
73
pray that their child be healed and to offer himself in service to humanity
should the child recover. The playwright proceeded to follow this advice.
Several weeks later, he returned to see his teacher. With a broad smile he
told him that the child had recovered miraculously. The water had
disappeared from the brain. The doctors, though unable to account for the
sudden improvement in the girl's condition, gave the baby a clean bill of
health. The playwright was profuse in his gratitude to the teacher who
reminded the young man that he had to repay his debt to humanity.
"I'll do anything," he replied with tears of gratitude. "Well," said the teacher,
"you are a good playwright - why don't you use your ability with the dramatic
arts to tell your story in the theatre. The play would give inspiration and
courage to many people." "I'll do it immediately," the playwright answered
emphatically.
Months later, the teacher received a letter from his student saying that he
had finished the play, that it was to open in New York City and that he would
be honored if his teacher would attend the premiere with him. With keen
anticipation, the teacher attended the play with his student on opening night.
The play, however, contained every part of the story except the most drama-
tic episodes - the prayer and the miraculous cure. As a work of drama, the play
fell completely flat.
With chagrin and astonishment, the teacher asked his student why he had
omitted from the play the whole spiritual experience. He replied; "I thought
people might laugh at me." With disgust, his teacher answered: "You have not
only failed in your promise, you have missed the opportunity to write a
powerful and successful play which could have helped many people." Thus
a lack of courage - the fear of appearing foolish in the eyes of others -
undermined the career of a promising playwright.
Compassion, the second element of self-control, compels us toward service

along the broad path of kindness and helpfulness. Out of compassion for, that
is sympathy with, others, our sense of service will be genuinely motivated,
conforming not merely to the letter but to the spirit of the ideal. Sympathy with
others generates simple kindness and courtesy, two qualities notable for their
frequent absence not only in our service industries and in the service
departments of government but in the world at large. Without kindness or
courtesy, people are reduced to the level of robots or beasts and the social
fabric is easily torn. As we noted earlier, kindness and good feelings are
infectious and intensify our Life Energy. Give kindness and consideration to
74
others and these sentiments will come back to you (if such feelings are given
out of the goodness of the heart and not for thought of gain - motive is
everything). Kindness is disarming and compelling and will usually elicit what
force and fear fail to accomplish.
Compassion is a quality greatly needed in the work world as a counter-

balance to the rigid bureaucratic mentality obsessed with forms, credentials,
and statistics instead of personalities, motivations, and capacities. Standard job
application forms, for instance, were designed to assist in security checks
during World War I. They are motivated by paranoia (to detect weaknesses
rather than strengths, lies rather than truths), and do little, if anything, to
communicate the worth of a person and his or her value to a job or an
organization. Educational credentials are not much more reliable either. In
Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery, Ivar Berg presents research
studies and case histories to prove that increased educational achievement
does not lead to greater job effectiveness; rather, the important determinants
of work performance are to be found in other personality characteristics and
environmental conditions.20
Many schools and colleges, unfortunately, do not equip people for the real
world other than to provide them with misleading credentials. Their methods of
instruction, which are ponderous and archaic, are based upon false premises:
filling heads with pre-digested facts in a restricted and artificial environment
rather than guiding and inspiring hearts and minds to independent learning in
an atmosphere of trust, freedom, and applied responsibility in the real world. It
is no wonder that polls have shown that a high proportion of college
graduates, of all ages, had not read a book of any kind during the previous 12
months. School had made them sick of learning. Schools simply do not
prepare young people for the essential qualities needed for a full, active, and
adventureous life: courage, compassion, patience, ethics, values and ideals,
the arts of thinking and observation, self-awareness and sensitivity, creativity
and resourcefulness, and a love of nature and a respect for her laws.
If Albert Einstein, Claude Monet, and Rabindranath Tagore had succeeded

in school, they might each have disappeared into safe, non-descript jobs in
government or business, and humanity would have been denied their great
achievements.
The Wall Street Journal reported an interesting experiment concerning

educational attainments and job application forms in which information was
gathered on the backgrounds of great engineering inventors, including Henry
Ford and Thomas Edison, who did not have college degrees. Giving the
75
applicants' ages as 24, the information was inserted, with appropriate name
changes, into standard job application forms and in resume's and presented at
the employment exchange section of a national American engineering
convention. The data was received and processed by each of more than two
hundred personnel recruiters. Only one of the geniuses was offered an
interview, and the invitation said that, although his educational background
was weak, his experience warranted an interview but that only engineers with
a degree were being hired at the time.21
The quality of compassion cautions us not to pre-judge and enables us to

look beyond paper facts and figures and the opinions of others into the
hearts and minds of human beings. Frank Capra, who became one of
Hollywood's most creative and successful film directors (Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, Lost Horizon, You Can't take it With You, etc.), fell into movies in a
most unusual way - a way which demonstrates the power of compassion to
unlock the hidden talents of an individual.
In his mid-twenties, Capra, a graduate chemical engineer, had just spent

three years "bumming around" the American Southwest. He had arrived in San
Francisco and had just been offered his first job as a chemical engineer:
$20,000 if he would design some workable alcohol stills for the Sicilian syndicate
of bootleggers. With 17 cents in his pocket and no prospects for food, room, or
work, Capra was tempted. The head man from the syndicate was waiting for
an answer in a neighbouring hotel. But Capra, having refused $10,000 in
"pocket dough" (as a downpayment), which had been dumped in his lap by
the diamond-fingered syndicate man, decided to forego big money and
mafia orders in favor of poverty and freedom.
Unable to pay his hotel bill, Capra spent the night in the back seat of a Rolls
Royce in the hotel garage. The next morning, he was locked out of the hotel
and the garage until he raised $18 to pay his bill. A Haight District trolley car
rumbled by and, on an impulse, Capra raced after it and jumped aboard. The
car was empty except for the conductor who looked up from his morning
paper.
"How far do you go?" Capra asked.
"To the Park," said the startled conductor
"Good. Maybe it'll happen there."
"What'll happen there?"
76
"I don't know. But something's gotta happen."
Capra gave him a nickel and threw the last 12 cents out of the car door.
The conductor gave Capra his folded paper. "Here. This column is perfect for
guys like you. Read it." The column read:
" Great Week for Screwballs
Astrologers say the position of the 12 houses is

favorable for dreamers and long-shot players.
So for those who believe in the stars (pun
intended), Fireside Productions has announced
it is revamping the old Jewish Gymnasium at Golden
Gate Park into a Movie Studio. Dreamers, check
your horoscopes ..."
Capra got off at the end of the line and walked to the dilapidated old
building. Inside the cavernous gymnasium, all was empty, dark, and silent
except for a burning light bulb and a big man in a black coat pacing the floor.
This turned out to be Walter Montague who introduced himself as a
Shakespearean headliner in vaudeville. When Capra pretended he was from
Hollywood, Montague wanted to hire him on the spot to make a movie of
Rudyard Kipling's poem: "Fultah Fisher's Boarding House."
They played cat and mouse with each other for awhile , each one seeming
to play out a role to impress the other. Capra, after all, knew absolutely
nothing about film and movie-making but he was hungry and audacious.
Soon, out of this unlikely meeting, a film was born - an innovative film with
nonprofessional actors. Capra went down to the waterfront and hired derelicts
and ruffians, and a chorus girl to play the lead. Flying by the seat of his pants,
Capra directed his first film. The Ballad of Fultah Fisher's Boarding House, a
one-reel film, made by a chemical engineer, with no actors and a newsreel
camerman, at a cost of $1,700 opened at the Strand Theatre on Broadway,
April 2, 1922. The revues were ecstatic ("The picture has beauty, dignity and
strength"). The film was a hit. Capra was stunned: "The nutty little Montague
affair - a smartalec scrounging for a quick buck - had backfired into a
cockeyed success."
Afterwards, Capra felt compelled to make his confession: "Mr. Montague, I

lied to you. I know nothing about pictures. I've never ..."
77
"I know you've never lived in Hollywood. You were locked

out of the Hotel Eddy. You slept in garages and worked for a firm
that sold worthless mining stock. One of my sponsors, a prudent
attorney, had you checked out. Interesting, I said to him, but
unimportant. Art is born in the womb; with its own truths. I believed
in your initiative, your enthusiasm - the audacity of your creative
ideas - and not in a dossier of your misfortunes. You proved me
right."22
In the land of Serendip, according to the ancient fairy tale, people who
travelled unknown roads made wonderful discoveries when they least
expected to.
Compassion, sympathy, kindness, and consideration encourage others to

reveal themselves without fear, to speak and act ingenuously. How else can
the truth be known, ability and talent recognized, and the right individuals
fitted to the appropriate jobs? In the field of organizational development,
compassion and kindness will greatly facilitate the movement (both vertical
and lateral), of workers to more effective and self-fulfilling tasks. Moreover,
compassion generates true cooperation which magnifies possibilities for
achievement, swells our resourcefulness, extends our Personal Power, and
enhances organizational morale.
From our earlier discussion of the factors which nourish the Life Energy, it is
readily apparent that praise springing from compassion increases the Life
Energy of others and, therefore, strengths their abilities and the self-confidence
to use them. Mark Twain once said that he could live for three months on a
compliment. Criticism and negation, on the other hand, lower the Life Energy
and emphasize peoples's weaknesses. Criticism, unless it is constructive and
balanced by praise, threatens people, turning them inward and souring their
confidence essential for self-development and effective performance.
In their book, You Can Still Change the World, Richard Armstrong and
Edward Wakin describe, in a famous example, how the power of a
compliment can lead to vocational self-fulfillment. The story concerns Edward
Steichen who eventually won great renown as a photographer. On the day
he took his first pictures, only one out of fifty could be considered adequate
(two per cent by academic standards). His father suggested that Edward put
away the camera and try another hobby. But his mother was impressed by
one photograph of his sister at the piano and said that it more than made up
for the other 49. Steichen's mother had the imagination to see the spark of
excellence in the midst of failure and the compassion to point out a small
78
achievement rather than dwelling on obvious shortcomings. Instead of a

thoughtless put-down, she offered a gentle word of encouragement that led
him to stay with his camera and ultimately to become one of the greatest
photographers in the world.23
In their fragile efforts to try new things or to improve their performance,

adults are not less sensitive than children to praise or criticism. People's ideas
are so easily dashed; the fire of their enthusiasm so readily dampened. As
Charles Brower, the American advertising executive noted: "A new idea is deli-
cate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a
quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow."24
Compassion enhances not only our own Personal Power but the Personal
Power of others. Compassion gives others the freedom and confidence to be
themselves and, therefore, to discover and utilize their abilities and powers.
One of my students worked as a personnel manager for a large bank. During
one hectic three-day period she was interviewing many university graduates
for just a few bank positions. At the end of the second day, she found herself
exhausted and facing that day's final interview candidate. She suggested to
the candidate that she return the following day when she, the interviewer,
would be less tired and better able to give her a fair hearing. The candidate,
however, insisted on an interview then and there, replying: "You have a great
deal of responsibility in your job and a lot of people depend on you but who
can you depend on? There will be many times when you will be very tired just
like today and you will need someone to lean on. I'm that person. You will be
able to depend on me at all times and in any circumstances. I will never let
you down." The interviewer was so impressed with this candidate's sense of
responsibility and compassion that she hired her on the spot - even though her
paper qualifications were mediocre compared to other candidates. On the
job and working together, the personnel officer was never disappointed in her
choice.
Sometimes, an element of impetuosity is required to liberate oneself from

situations which are stagnant and frustrating. More often than not, however, it
is the quality of creative patience, the third attribute of self-control, which
brings one to the achievement of desired goals. As patience intensifies our
Personal Power, so does it deepen our search for, and development of, our
true vocation. Every individual has his or her own unique timetable for personal
development, acquisition of skills, and the discovery of self-fulfilling work. It is
pointless to compare yourself with others or to compete with them.
Competitive comparisons are odious and invidious. Select your heros and hero-
79
ines, admire them, imitate them, learn from them, but don't envy them - it
weakens your thymus and steals your Life Energy. Like Candide, it is better to
cultivate your own garden with patience and purpose. This is the only
productive way to proceed.
When he was a child, Yehudi Menhuin knew that he was going to be a

great violinist. He possessed the talent but it was the loving patience of a
perservering will that made him great. When the equally celebrated fellow
violinist, Pablo de Sarasati was called a "genius" by a famous critic, he retorted:
"Genius! for 37 years I've practiced 14 hours a day, and now they call me a
genius."
Henry Ford was 40 years old before he hit his stride and discovered his life's
work. Until then, he had done practically everything (with his fifth grade
education), moving from one job to another. Not knowing Ford's future,
someone could easily have called him (and probably did), a "drifter". But every
work experience he dabbled in before the age of 40 became an essential
ingredient in his creative genius with the automobile - its design, engineering,
mass production, and marketing.
David Ogilvy began his variegated job history in the kitchen of a hotel
restaurant in Europe and worked his way up to become an unsuccessful
farmer in Pennsylvania. At the age of 38, he thought he would try the business
world. With no credentials, no clients, and only $6,000 in the bank, he began
what became, in a generation, one of the biggest advertizing agencies in the
world - Ogilvy and Mather. Besides being a self-acknowledged "creative
genius", David Ogilvy had the courage to test his abilities in life's adventures,
the patience to accumulate varied experiences which served him admirably
in the advertizing field, and a compassion for others which enabled him to
attract into his organization people who were at least as creative as himself.25
The recognition of one's vocational mission may come early in life or it may
come late. If it comes early, all that remains is the steady hard work required to
crystallize the carbon of our native capacities into the brilliant diamond of
achievement. If the recognition comes later in life, it means that other obliga-
tions had to come first and there were additional experiences required to
strengthen our character and to refine our abilities necessary for the realization
and development of our vocational mission. It is a fundamental principle of
Personal Power that no effort is ever wasted.
It is not uncommon for people to wait until they are forced into retirement
at the age of 60 or 65 before embarking on a labour they love. It is sometimes
80
true that if you wait too long to cultivate your heart's desire, that desire will
smoulder into frustration and bitterness. However, if you keep alive the dream -
as a hobby or sustained aspiration - the spark of desire for self-fulfillment
through creative labour will be fanned inevitably by the winds of opportunity
which will enable you to realize your dream in a fuller sense and in a broader
context. The creative aspect of patience is the constant readiness,
preparedness, and vigilance to seize the opportunities. The golden bird of
success is swift and elusive. One must be quick and alert to catch her. The
other aspect of creative patience is that the longer we have to wait and
prepare for something, the more intense will be our desire for it and the more
appreciation we will feel for the eventual flowering of our capacities and their
transfiguration into achievements. The time-honored notion that youth is
wasted on the young embodies precisely this lack of gratitude combined with
a sense of entitlement in an affluent society which predisposes young people
to devalue that which comes too easily. The quality of appreciation feeds the
fire of Personal Power and leads to excellence in accomplishment. In our
peg-and-hole society, it is often those individuals with the broadest native
versatility who must cultivate the greatest degree of patience. Society will
tolerate and even reward excellence in any one specialized area of
endeavour. But versatility - excellence or merely capability in several fields -
generates envy and confusion in others. Sometimes, it is those individuals who
embody the broadest versatility with respect to their abilities that suffer the
most painful confusion in the search for their life's work. Nevertheless, during
periods of great change, versatility can render one more adaptable in a
fluctuating job market. The men and women who change jobs have the
daring to try different tasks. As a result, they learn many things which render
them a real asset to an employer. Unfortunately, employers don't always have
the foresight or flexibility to recognize and appreciate diversified ability. Too
often, they expect their employees to stay in one place for 25 years and then
wonder why these workers become obsolete - no longer any good to
themselves or their company. Organizations cannot sustain healthy growth
unless the individuals in them also grow and develop.
As a measure of self-control, patience is one of the most difficult qualities to

accommodate. And yet without patience, we can accomplish nothing
worthwhile. No one is a success overnight. Almost all successful people were
greeted with many closed doors an other discouragements early in their
careers. "Can't act. Can't sing. Can dance a little." - that was the studio report
on Fred Astaire's first screen test. Often people give up a promising
beginning only because of a lack of patience. They forget that all great tasks,
all personal achievements, are accompanied by difficulties. By avoiding those
difficulties, they condemn themselves, like Sisyphus, to a fatiguing and
81
endlessly repetitive course. The growth of character and the flowering of one's
capacities constitute a slow, sometimes painful, but always rewarding process.
Patience, supported by incessant striving, yields a rich harvest. Creative
patience and cheerfulness are the two wings of the worker.
4). The Challenge. Patience is steadfastness and conscious fearlessness in

the face of obstacles. Challenge appears as the inevitable ebb in the rhythm
of life's adventures, the necessary dip in the upward spiral, that enables us to
realize our potential, know our abilities, and transform our weaknesses into
strengths. Challenge is the mother of resourcefulness which compels us to a
course of learning. A challenge is a cross to those in search of comfort and a
gift for those seeking self-fulfillment. The biographies of famous, creative
people have a recurrent theme: adversity became the touchstone for their
good fortune. One often finds among these prominent men and women a
turning point in their lives marked by poverty, accident, illness, or some other
apparent misfortune, during which they looked into their hearts, reassessed
their goals in life, and embarked on a new adventure culminating in great
achievements. The American philosopher, scientist, and inventor, Buckminister
Fuller, experienced, in 1927, a colossal business failure which caused him to re-
examine everything in his life. Like Descartes, he resolved to abandon
completely all that he had been taught to believe. The experience of failure
led him to an intense spiritual striving and to a versatile and creative career in
the optimistic service of his fellow human beings.26
One of the most successful English writers of the Twentieth Century,

Somerset Maugham, converted his childhood disabilities into professional
strengths. His weaknesses gave him the direction to creative achievement. The
stammer that excluded him from the legal profession of his father and
grandfather facilitated his resolve to become a writer. The early death of his
mother and his miserable childhood furnished him with the material for his finest
novel. He was able to transform his feeling of isolation into the writer's
perspective of inquisitive detachment.27
Joe Jacobs is a greatly gifted sculptor. He is a Canadian Iroquois Indian

whose stone carvings are in many museums and private collections. Expressing
in stone the legends of his own Native heritage, Jacobs captures with subtlety
and power the infinite spectrum of the human condition from the divine to the
sinister. Jacob's talent grew out of tragedy. He was badly hurt in a construction
accident and informed he would never work again. (He had taken aptitude
tests and was told that he had an aptitude for nothing whatsoever). To pass
the time while recuperating, he began carving in wood and later in stone. He
82
and his wife disagreed on a reasonable price for his first two pieces. He said
$50, she said $20. So they left it to the customers and the works sold for $750
and $950. Ten years later, his sculptures were selling for $30,000. His amazing
talent came so naturally, that he thought all Indians were sculptors. After his
accident, Jacobs began to read the legends of his people. For the first time,
he came deeply in touch with his Native ancestry. Thus, he established his roots
in the natural soil of his spiritual heritage and the inspiration profoundly moved
his imagination and his hands to a high state of art: the creation of magnificent
sculptures. For Joe Jacobs, a physical defeat wrought a spiritual victory which
transfigured his life and brought success and fulfillment.
People can always find excuses for failing to fulfil themselves or realize their
cherished hopes. But where the fires of desire and determination burn brightly,
there are no obstacles which cannot be overcome. In the last century, A.I.
Kuinji, a simple shepherd boy from the Crimea, wanted to become an artist. By
incessant, heartfelt effort, he was able to conquer all obstacles and eventually
become one of the greatest and most successful painters in Russian history. On
three occasions, he tried to enter the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and each
time he was refused. The third time, 29 competitors were admitted and not one
of them left his name in the history of art. Only one, Kuinji, was refused. But the
young man was persistent and instead of uselessly repeating his earlier
attempts, he painted a landscape and presented it to the Academy for
exhibition. As a result, he received two honors without passing the examination.
He went on to become a great artist and a professor at that same Imperial
Academy of Fine Arts.
Professor Kuinji used to remind his students: "If you are an artist, even in prison
you shall become one." Once a man came to his studio with some very fine
sketches and studies. Kuinji praised them. But the man said that he was very
unfortunate because he couldn't afford to continue painting. With
compassion, Kuinji inquired as to the reason. The young man replied that he
had a family to support and he had a job from ten to six. Then Kuinji asked him
pointedly, "And from four to ten in the morning, what do you do?"
"When?" asked the man.
"In the morning," Kuinji repeated.
"In the morning I sleep," answered the man.
Kuinji then raised his voice and told him that he would
outsleep his entire life. "Don't you know that the best creative
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time is from four to nine in the morning?" And it is not necessary to work on
your art more than five hours a day." Then
Kuinji added, "When I worked as a retoucher in a photography studio, I also
had my position from ten to six. But from four to nine, I had quite enough time
to become an artist."
Sometime, when the pupil dreamed about some special conditions for his
work, Kuinji laughed, "If you are so delicate that you have to be put in a glass
cage, then better perish as soon as possible, because our life does not need
such an exotic plant. "But when he saw that his student overcame
circumstances and perservered through the ocean of earthly storms, his eyes
shone and in a rich voice, he shouted. "Neither sun nor frost can destroy you. ...
If you have something to say, you will be able to manifest your message in
spite of all the conditions in the world."
Kuinji was a renowned artist and teacher and a man of great Personal
Power. To his poorest students, he gave his own money anonymously. Once, in
the Academy, there was a student revolt against the Vice-President, Count
Tolstoy. Since no one was able to placate the anger of the students, the
situation became very serious. Finally, at the general meeting, Kuinji entered
and everyone became silent. Then he said, "Well, I am no judge. I do not know
if your case be just or not, but I personally ask you to begin your work because
you have come here to become artists." The meeting was ended at once and
everyone returned to their classrooms because Kuinji himself had asked. Such
was Kuinji's Personal Power - a power nurtured by the challenges of his
life.28
One of the more imaginative and creative architects of the century is

Raymond Moriyama whose outstanding works include the Ontario Science
Centre, the Scarborough Civic Centre, and the Metropolitan Toronto
Reference Library. Born in Canada to Japanese parents, Moriyama knew at
the age of four that he wanted to design things. He was already designing
model airplanes. A year later, he was building his own models and flying them
in the house behind the small hardware store his father ran in Vancouver. One
of the planes crashed on top of the old-fashioned stove in the kitchen.
Moriyama climbed a three-legged stool to rescue it, but slipped and pulled a
pot of scalding stew over himself. He was in bed for nine months with near fatal
burns. During this period, his mind wandered over many things, often just to
distract the feeling of pain. It was at this time, Moriyama recalls, that he
learned the art of thinking.
In 1941, within 48 hours of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour,
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Moriyama's father, a wise, kind, and educated man, was ordered to report to a
work gang of suspect enemy aliens. Moriyama's mother was pregnant and the
father refused to go. The RCMP interned him in a POW camp. The mother was
terrified and had a miscarriage. At the age of eleven, Raymond Moriyama
tried to take care of his mother and his two younger sisters. He also ran his
father's shop until his financial inexperience - he would ask $1.50 for a pocket
knife and only $4.50 for a refrigerator - led to bankruptcy. Everywhere the
terrified Japanese were selling out. Moriyama's family got $10 for their furniture.
Creditors took most of the money from the store merchandise. The
government custodian took the rest - all but $60 his mother had put aside.The
fatherless family moved into a bedbug infested horse stall on what later
became the grounds of the Pacific National Exhibition. Later, they were
transfered to a series of relocation camps in the British Columbia interior. They
spent one winter in a tent. The temperature dipped to 40 below. Moriyama
dug ditches and latrine pits for 5 cents an hour, half of which went to pay for
his board. Later, he made 7 1/2 cents an hour in a saw mill and was able to
keep 5 cents of it. There was no school. He and other boys spent their spare
time in the wilderness, tracking animals, watching birds, and learning about
wildlife in its natural environment.
"It would have been easy," Moriyama reflected, "to become

bitter and withdrawn over all this. Too easy. But I learned the meaning of
freedom only when I lost it. I began to see the heavy responsibility that goes
with freedom. I came to appreciate the honesty and directness of the loggers
and the heavy dose of raw experience in the mountains was good for me -
mountain climbing, cutting trees to make skis and rafts, making traps for rabbits
and gophers. To me, nature was a mystery; it was anything my mind wanted it
to be. Nature kept me sane during wartime. One incident I remember vividly. It
happened on a weekend when about five of us were mountain climbing.
While we were edging along a one-foot ledge about sixty feet above the next
plateau, the boy in front of me froze. In trying to get him to move, I lost my
footing and fell. Luckily, I fell through a forty foot evergreen and the branches
broke my fall. I lay flat on my back, feeling for broken bones and , gazing up at
the hole where the branches were, I thought, `I needed that tree to survive,
but it sure didn't need me'"
From the challenges of his childhood, Raymond Moriyama developed a

strong sense of ethics and social values, a capacity to think creatively, and a
sensitivity for the functional beauty of nature. He incorporated these qualities
into his architecture and urban and rural planning where art, nature, and the
public welfare blend harmoniously and economically. It is the imaginative use
of water, wood, plants, textures, colors, space, and the local environment
85
which gives Moriyama's structures a good deal of their appeal and

attractiveness. The genius of Moriyama's designs derives from his capacity for
creative thought which was nurtured originally in the aftermath of his tragic
childhood accident. As a philosopher, artist, and social scientist, he has
rendered his architecture not only beautiful but also eminently practical,
serving people's needs and enhancing their interests. The difficulties in the life
of Raymond Moriyama, experienced without bitterness or self-pity, became
the stepping-stones for his great achievements, his creative self-fulfillment as
an architect, and for his considerable Personal Power. When Moriyama
graduated from the university school of architecture, his professor predicted he
would fail professionally in six months because he was too young, there was a
recession, and he was Japanese. Moriyama's father, on the other hand, had
advised him: "My son, into God's temple of eternity, drive a nail of gold."
Moriyama listened to his father.
It is precisely the small and large challenges of life in combination with an

optimistic and constructive attitude which produce the chemistry for
resourcefulness and for self-realization. A dramatic example of how adversity
can stimulate resourcefulness is contained in an episode in the life of the great
virtuoso violinist Paganini who, for several years, had been confined to a
debtor's prison. While in prison, he somehow came into possession of an old
three-stringed violin on which he practiced incessantly to pass the time. When
he was released from his prison cell and appeared again in public concerts,
he played with an unparalleled intensity and perfection. His unbeatable
virtuosity electrified his audience. Paganini's unheard-of accomplishment -
breaking one string of his violin during a difficult piece and completing it on
only three strings - originated during his two years of imprisonment. Paganini's
loss of freedom was undoubtedly a distressing period of his life but his response
to the challenge was positive and creative.
Adversity, like necessity, can be the mother of invention compelling us to a

course of learning. Failure and defeat force us to be resourceful and to try
harder. The technological and economic successes of both Germany and
Japan following upon their defeat and devastation at the end of World War II,
attest, in part, to the power of obstacles to create the climate for in-
innovation and success.
These are challenging times of rapid, often cataclysmic, changes. The

changes that proceeded over decades a century ago now occur in months
or weeks. Yet change is the door to personal growth and to Personal Power. In
our economies and structures of work, change is almost a daily fact of life.
Technological changes brought about by computers and automation are
86
freeing men and women from many hazardous, boring, and uncreative jobs.
The resulting unemployment is due mainly to the rut of specialization and to a
lack of creativity and imagination on the parts of government, business,
industry, organized labour, and educational institutions.
As a result of specialization, men and women have been diverted from the
realization of the breadth and profound meaning of existence. Unemployment
is the consequence of individuals lashing themselves to the rushing ice flows
which are destined to thaw. We have entered an era of permanent, rapid
change where one-sided specialization is a handicap and where versatility,
flexibility, and mobility are strengths. Change means opportunity to test our
capacities in new and different situations and to grow towards greater self-
fulfillment. The rate of growth and technological change in the world will
require most men and women to change careers several times and to change
their jobs a great deal more often than that. Too often, people are terrified by
the necessity of change. Every change, however, is nothing less than a worthy
challenge, an opportunity, designed to magnify our Personal Power. Such
challenges should be heartily embraced and not feared. The new job
freedom will mean greater possibilities for men and women to develop and to
diversify their skills, to strengthen themselves as creative personalities, and to
evolve their own individual rhythms which will work in harmony with, not merely
in subservience to, the rhythms of machines and organizations. For their part,
organizations will have to meet the challenge of permanent change by
developing greater flexibility and sensitivity to the needs of individual workers,
by enriching jobs with more freedom, responsibility, and creativity, and by inte-
grating women, youth, and ethnic and racial minorities more fully and
imaginatively into the labour force. Thus, change and challenge bring many
new opportunities for both personal and organizational development.
One of the difficulties with occupational versatility, a quality which most

people possess to some degree, is that competence becomes separated from
enjoyment. An individual may be able to perform a number of tasks
competently but only one of these may be a labour of love. As Bernard
Haldane has pointed out in his book, Career Satisfaction and Success: A Guide
to Job Freedom, organizations hire people on the basis of surface ability and
pay little attention to the deeper feelings which motivate a person's skills and
capacities.29 Unlike children who do not distinguish between work and play,
adults often assume that if they enjoy doing something it isn't work and doesn't
deserve to be remunerated in the serious impersonal marketplace. If, however,
job seekers and employers could learn to discover motivated skills (tasks
people enjoy doing), among various competencies and extricate these from
the pompous prison house of job titles, there would be a much higher
87
proportion of satisfied workers and a greater fluidity and freedom in the

functioning of organizations.
Job freedom, flexibility, and enrichment will be facilitated by the

decentralization of large bureaucratic organizations into smaller units where
creativity is more readily encouraged and recognized and where relationships
are more humane and cooperative. As we observed in an earlier chapter,
large concentrations of people promote ethical scarcity and the stresses of
debilitating competition and jealousies in the absence of open and candid
communication. Smaller groups, on the other hand, tend to be high in synergy
- more psychic rewards, fewer stresses, more cooperation, higher group
morale, and individual satisfaction. High worker motivation enhances personal
responsiblity, improves both quality and quantity in production, and lessens the
need for direct intervention by management. The ideal manager is partially
invisible, facilitating and catalyzing with minimum intrusion. Moreover, in
decentralized, smaller-scale units of production, there is the possibility of
choosing other, more humane, and ultimately more productive, objectives
besides "efficiency".
There is an interesting example from France, cited by the architect

Raymond Moriyama, of a small group who decided they wanted to work
together for the common good and not just their private interests. In the 1930's,
Marcel Barbu, a successful watchmaker, tried to interest his workers in a more
constructive enterprise where the distinction between employer and
employee could be less obvious, or abolished altogether. They did not
respond, perhaps preferring that others carry the responsibility. So, he went out
and found a group of 24 like-minded people from many different occupations.
They drew up a simple statement of ethical principles they all agreed to live by
and set to work in a barn. In two years, they employed 90 people and were
leading the industry. At the same time, their policy was: "When enough has
been produced to ensure a good living, we use the time gained on
production to educate ourselves." The machines stopped in mid- afternoon
and the best paid instructors were brought in to give classes in literature, art,
music, science, and so on. In effect, they were being paid for their time in class.
Commenting on the high quality of his product, Barbu said: "They have to be
the very best because here production is not an end, but a means to
something important to us. ... We make watches in order to make men." During
the Nazi occupation of France, Barbu was sent to a concentration camp and
his workers went "underground". But after the war, he returned to find that they
had built a new factory which was already in operation. At that point, he
decided they had learned all he could teach them and it was time to move
on and try the experiment elsewhere.30 Respect for human resources lies at
88
the heart of what Alvin Toffler calls "The Third Wave". When we strive to
promote the Personal Power of employees in human scale settings, we foster
the optimum climate for productivity.
Despite the governmental, fiscal, and public attention lavished on large

corporations, big firms are not the major providers of new jobs for North
Americans. It is the smaller firms which generate the majority of new
employment. A study by a group of scientists at the M.I.T. Program on
Neighbourhood and Regional Change examined 5.6 million businesses in the
U.S. between 1969 and 1976 (from data in the Dun and Bradstreet files), and
discovered that two-thirds of the new jobs were created by (mostly young)
firms with twenty or fewer employees. (Similar findings pertain to the Canadian
economy). The small businesses providing new jobs are mainly providers of
service broadly defined to include all those private activities outside of the
"goods-producing" sector (manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and
construction). According to U.S. Government labor force statistics,
manufacturers as a group (representing about 13 per cent of the U.S.
workforce), had created only 5 per cent of the net new jobs in the 1970's and
the goods producers as a whole had accounted for only 11 per cent. The
other 89 per cent were in services of one kind or another.31
Just as in the Nineteenth Century, North Americans moved from an

agricultural to an industrial society, so in the late Twentieth Century we are
shifting from an economy based upon heavy industry and muscle power to an
economy founded upon information and service; that is to say, an economy
which requires greater use of mind, character, and personality - qualities of
Personal Power. In a service-based and information-oriented economy,
brain- power, character, personality, and creative education become the
paramount needs. Thus, the experiment of Barbu the watchmaker turns out to
be both prophetic and progressive as an example of future trends. The
philosophy of making watches in order to make men and the practice of using
company time for the general education of the employees represent an
investment in an organization's most valuable asset - its personnel.
It is the small firms which overwhelmingly generate new jobs in North

America. Though they have a relatively high failure rate, small and young
companies are also the most innovative. Indeed, failure is usually the mother of
innovation which requires experimentation and risk-taking. In the equation of
Personal Power, challenge or adversity is the spur to creativity. Failure is not to
be feared, only learned from and improved upon. It is interesting, as well, to
observe that, despite the vaunted role of governments and banks in job
creation, 80 to 90 per cent of the start-up and expansion capital for job-
89
generating small businesses comes from immediate personal sources: savings,

friends, and relatives.32 Thus, job creation, a truly creative aspect of the North
American economy, is significantly the result, not of bureaucrats, boards, and
committees, but of personal courage, cooperation, and ingenuity - that is, of
Personal Power.
Happy are those who dream dreams and are willing to pay the price to
make them come true. What price are you prepared to pay to enter the
game of jousting with the challenger to win the reward of your heart's desire?
Every dream worth pursuing, though it will bring its rewards, both tangible and
intangible, has its price. Do you have the humor and compassion to lose, with
equanimity, the conventional respect of others and to withstand the assaults of
detractors; the patience to move at a snail's pace toward an ideal on the
visionary horizon; the courage to undergo discomfort and material insecurity?
The realization of a dream entails some sacrifice, the nature of which may
differ from person to person. Though it is an idea that people often fear,
sacrifice is ennobling. The word "sacrifice" derives from the latin and means
literally "to make finer" or "to give up ... a valued thing for the sake of something
of greater value". We do not lose by sacrificing, we gain. (Unless, of course, the
sacrifice is motivated by a neurotic need for self-punishment - a sacrifice to
guilt. This possibility is explored in the following chapter. The other exception
concerns sacrifice for people or causes which are unredeemable: "Drown not
thyself to save a drowning man," wrote Thomas Fuller, the Eighteenth Century
English physician).
A woman earned her living by teaching creative dance in the basement of

her home. Although her classes trespassed on no one else's rights, some
neighbours complained to the municipality that the teacher was violating
zoning by-laws. As a result, the muncipality ordered her to stop her dance
classes. Deprived of her employment income but desiring to share her abilities
and love for music and dance, she offered her services as a volunteer in the
gerontology ward of a hospital. Her services were accepted and for several
years she taught, with great success, music and creative movement to the
elderly men and women in the hospital. She enjoyed this experience so
thoroughly that she wrote a book about it. The book became a best-seller and
the dance teacher became a celebrity. In the act of sacrifice - volunteering
selflessly her talent to the elderly - the dance teacher created for herself a
new and profitable career. If the motive is genuine, the sacrifice will always
reap a benefit and the person will be "made finer". Learning how to sacrifice,
you develop Personal Power. Success follows sacrifice. Indeed, success is
nothing else but the counterstroke of sacrifice. The success may appear in
advance of the sacrifice as a "loan", but the "loan" must inevitably be paid.
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The search for our life's work, our mission, our true vocation, begins in the
here and now. If you start by accepting where you are, give your best to
whatever you are doing and keep a vigilant eye and ear open to possibilities,
the next destination on your vocational adventure will inevitably arise. Most of
the time, it is not given to human beings to see around corners. But in our
striving toward an ideal, in offering ourselves in service, in exercising courage,
compassion, and patience, and in jousting nobly with the challenges along
the path, we anticipate and attract the opportunities which assuredly arrive.
Chiefly, do not be afraid of any kind of work which necessity and

circumstance bring to your doorstep. Labour is not demeaning. Refugees from
war-torn countries arrive in various parts of the world with doctorates,
professional licences, lost wealth, and forsaken power and many of them take
jobs as taxi drivers, dishwashers, chamber maids, and waiters with simple
gratitude in their hearts and happiness at being alive. Sam Levenson said that
when his father immigrated to America from the old world, he discovered
three things: 1). that the streets were not paved in gold; 2). that most of the
streets were not paved; 3). that he had to help pave them.
It is the emigrants and refugees from the old world who, fortified by
adversity and free from false pride, are the ones to build the new world. It has
been that way in the past; it will be like that in the future. The newcomers,
made resourceful by challenges, are able to think in new ways and are swift to
seize opportunities. They know how to knock and quickly learn how to open
the door. And this is the key to discovering your life's work, your true vocation,
which will free your creative potential. Ask and it shall be given; seek and you
shall find; knock and the door shall be opened. If the first door does not yield,
summon your courage to try another and another. An invited guest, finding
one door bolted, does not leave but goes all around the house and examines
all entrances. There are many doors in the house of dreams and each one is a
different shape and hue. And you cannot despair that all possibilities have
been exhausted until every door has been tried. One of those doors waits to
be opened by you alone and behind it is your heart's desire.
"I'd not give room for an Emperor -

I'd hold my road for a king.
To the Triple Crown I'd not bow down -
But this is a different thing!
I'll not fight with the powers of Air -
Sentry, pass him through!
Drawbridge let fall - He's the Lord of us all -
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The Dreamer whose dream came true!" (33)
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Chapter 14: HOW AND WHY YOU DEFEAT YOURSELF
"We do not what we ought,

What we ought not, we do
And lean upon the thought
That chance will bring us through;
But our own acts, for good or ill,
Are mightier powers."
- Matthew Arnold
"It is our less conscious thoughts and our less

conscious actions which mainly mould our lives
and the lives of those who spring from us."
- Samuel Butler
"There is no fear in love; but perfect love

casteth out fear."
- The Bible (I John iv, 18)
The pursuit of Personal Power and the quest for one's true vocation are
premised upon the common assumption that people want to succeed in life.
For many men and women, however, this assumption, however rational, is
false. Despite intelligence and their best conscious intentions, many individuals
seek systematically, though unconsciously, to defeat themselves at every
opportunity - to become, in fact, the architects of their own failure.
Self-defeatists choose partners in business and marriage who will continually

undermine them. They passively allow themselves to be victimized in
unproductive relationships and situations. Self-defeatists oppose and
antagonize employers, colleagues, and friends who could help them on the
ladder of achievement toward success and self-fulfillment. The self-defeatist
wastes his time and resources on unimportant and unfulfilling tasks but procras-
93
tinates endlessly in matters which are critical for success and self-realization. By
being overly concerned with perfectionism, by wanting everything or nothing,
the moon and no less, the self- defeatist undercuts his possibilities for realistic
achievement. Self-defeating patterns of behavior are rooted, like many
other qualities of character, in childhood experiences. Much, if not most, of
what we become is ingrained during the first seven years of family life. "Give us
your child 'till the age of seven," said the Jesuits, "and we will give you the
man." The family is the crucible of character from whose severe trials we
emerge either tested and triumphant or emotionally and mentally disabled.
From the adults in our childhood, we derive our sense of self-worth and
significance in the world. To understand, in retrospect, the dynamics of our
upbringing is not easy; but without such comprehension, we cannot know
ourselves, realize our dreams, or attain Personal Power.
One of the most difficult, demanding, and important jobs in the world is
parenting. Yet it is the only job for which there are no required qualifications,
credentials, training - or remuneration. It takes but a moment of desire and no
skill to procreate; it takes an apparent eternity and the wisdom of Solomon to
raise a happy, healthy, and creative human being to maturity. Lacking the
wisdom of Solomon or even the training of a journeyman, most parents must
fall back upon their native capacities for love and common sense. However, in
our world of intense competition, egotism, and fanaticism, the qualities of love
and common sense are in short supply.
The essential feature of the neurotic personality of the Twentieth Century is

the inability to love. The fundamental evil of our time can be found in the
absence of genuine warmth and affection. Love is the key to all obstacles and
the fertile soil in which children develop their confidence and capacities for
creative self-realization. In the absence or distortion of love grows the
malignant root of the self-defeating personality. The lack of warmth and
affection experienced by growing children derives from the parent's inability to
give it on account of their own neuroses. You can only love as you are. A
parent filled with repressed hostility, envy, ambivalence, competitiveness, or
possessiveness (qualities usually derived from their own childhood experiences),
will pass these negative energies onto the children. Neurotic tendencies are
transmitted, like genetic traits, from generation to generation until the chain of
negativity is broken by an individual with will, understanding, and forgiveness.
The family is a reflection of the society. A society infused with competition

and materialism produces a predominant family type characterized by
competition for love (ethical scarcity), and possessive love (an off-shoot of
attachment to material things). Mothers and fathers compete with their
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children for a place in the sun. Possessive or materialistic love is based upon the
ideas of ownership and manipulation whereby children are treated as
parental property and as extensions of parental egos. Whereas unconditional
love frees a child for self-realization and individuality, possessive love ties a
child's development to the neurotic needs of the parent and produces
passivity and conformity. Another aspect of the distortion of love is related
to discipline. Children have a strong sense of justice and decency which, when
violated, produces anger and frustation. True parental love involves steering a
middle course between over-restraint and under-discipline. (The balance
between firmness and flexibility is scarce in a society in which the male and
female principles are isolated from each other). Children see parental negli-
gence (lack of responsible involvement in their lives), as an absence of love.
Just as children lack the wisdom to defend themselves against the corrupting
influences of the larger society, so they are defenseless against parental
violence. Such violence, whether verbal or physical, can mark children with
scars for a lifetime. "A torn jacket is soon mended," wrote Longfellow, "but hard
words bruise the heart of a child." A positive suggestion, a kind word, or the
pointing out of a better way are usually more productive than negative
criticism or prohibitions. Children understand much more than they are usually
given credit for. If they are spoken to with intelligence and compassion, they
will respond rationally and humanely. Discipline which is balanced, just, and
loving requires patience, kindness, understanding, and resourcefulness. It is
difficult for children, or adults for that matter, to see their parents with
objectivity and compassion - that is, to see them as human beings with
strengths and weaknesses. Born in a state of utter dependency, children
commonly regard their parents with a mixture of fear and familiarity, love and
resentment. Being the source of daily sustenance and of life itself, parents take
on an aspect of gods and goddesses - terrible, benign, austere, loving, or
indifferent depending upon their personalities. However, unlike the
mythological gods and godesses, fathers and mothers are not usually so
singular and clear-cut in their characters. They are normally a me'lange of
strengths and weaknesses. Their attitude toward their children (often tainted by
resentment over parental responsibility, limitations on their freedoms, and their
own childhood experiences), frequently comes closer to ambivalence than to
unconditional love. Children, lacking the will and the wisdom to separate the
good from the bad, respond to a lack of love or to parental ambivalence with
outward conformity but with inward frustration and anger. Since children, and
especially females, are not often encouraged to express their (natural) anger
in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance and understanding, this repressed
hostility becomes the breeding ground for self-destruction. Moreover, in the
absence of conscious understanding and open communication, children are
prone to guilt - to blame themselves for everything that goes wrong in the
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family. Anger, guilt, and frustration are negative energies which, if denied a
creative or constructive form of release, are turned to destructive ends. The
relationship between repressed hostility and patterns of self-defeat has been
analyzed with convincing elegance by the American psychotherapist, Dr.
Samuel J. Warner.34 Where parental love is inadequate, conditional,
competitive, or possessive, children develop a neurotic fear of punishment and
the withdrawal of affection. Children are naturally curious, creative, original,
and inventive. If these qualities in a child are discouraged by a fearful, lazy, or
rigid parent who cannot be bothered to respond constructively or is hostile
towards or competitive with the child's sense of adventure, that child will
develop a neurotic anxiety (a nameless fear), associated with assertiveness.
This neurotic anxiety involves a sense of impending danger (fear of

withdrawal of affection or attention), and generates the stress syndrome
outlined earlier - release of adrenalin, accelerated heart beat, thymus
shrinkage, and depletion of blood sugar. In order to reduce the anxiety
associated with assertiveness or other "inappropiate" feelings such as anger,
the child engages in "security operations" - seeking acceptance through
conformity, trying to please a possessive or competitive parent at the cost of
denying the validity of his (the child's) sincere feelings and actions. In this way,
children trade their natural striving toward independence and originality for
dependency and conformity, losing in the bad bargain a quantity of their Life
Energy.
When a child's natural desire for self-expression is thwarted, when a child

fears the jealousy of a competitive parent, the disapproval of an overly critical
parent, the fear of separation from a possessive parent, or the neglect of a
seemingly indifferent parent, that child will compensate by seeking
dominance in covert and unconscious ways. In the absence of real love and
opportunities for genuine self-expression, children will seek power and prestige
to compensate for a poor self-image. In family games of power, the
advantage is only apparently with the physically stronger and more clever
parent. In actual practice, children have their own unique arsenal of weapons
constructed on the principle of default and designed to achieve the frustration
of parental wishes. By simply not doing what is expected (domination by
default), the child is able to express his aggression over what he or she regards
as a frustrating or unfair situation or relationship. Tardiness, many kinds of illness,
theft and troubles with the law, accidents, poor diet or indigestion, stuttering,
temper tantrums, asking unnecessary questions, are all common
power/prestige operations employed by children to gain the attention which
love will not provide and to rectify a sense of violated justice and decency. By
defeating himself, the child defeats the caring parent and, therefore, the
96
parental source of his anger and frustration. When these self- and other-
defeating patterns are carried into adult life, they become the deadly
weapons of the "tyranny of the weak".
The final link in the genesis of self-defeating behavior is guilt. What children
fear in the external discipline of a parent, they come to internalize as an inner
parent or conscience. When the disciplining parent has been severe, rigid, or
unjust, the child develops an authoritarian or unforgiving conscience. This is the
origin of most (unproductive) guilt. As the growing child seeks to express his or
her individuality in thought, feeling, and action, the silent voice of the
authoritarian conscience expresses its disapproval and the child (and later the
adult) experiences feelings of guilt.
Here we come to a critical juncture in the development of self-defeating

habits. Unconscious guilt is normally assuaged through suffering which often
takes the form of self-punishment. In this way, guilt becomes the chief instigator
of self-defeating behavior. The guilty person becomes his own judge, jury, and
executioner.
People, like laboratory animals, can be trained to seek pain if it satisfies

some essential need such as acceptance. Masochism, self-inflicted suffering, is
far more prevalent than is commonly supposed. Partly for this reason, the
official use of punishment and societal retribution against juvenile delinquents
and many other law offenders is often counter-productive. The offenders who
are most likely to be caught and sent to prison are usually from families where
violence and humiliation are commonplace. The consequent syndrome of
anger/anxiety/guilt generates a masochistic need for continued suffering -
which is why most offenders are not really content until they are caught.
The patterns of self- and other-defeat which children acquire in their efforts
to cope with less-than-perfect parents and bad family dynamics become
unconscious habits in adult life serving to undermine opportunities for
achievement, success, and self-fulfillment. Repressed hostility and guilt carried
over from childhood and directed against oneself become a major cause of
suicide (the ultimate revenge against a parent), illness (the majority of illnesses
are psychosomatic), depression, chronic fatigue and discouragement,
accidents, anorexia and overeating, workaholism, and drug and alcohol
addiction.
Self-defeating personalities have retained from childhood overpowering

feelings of inadequacy. Because of their tenuous self-image, self-defeatists are
afraid to test their abilities in life, to experiment, to take risks, and to experience
97
the full richness of life's adventures. Instead, they preoccupy themselves with
games of power and prestige to fortify their faltering sense of significance. The
self-defeatist is often a perfectionist whose compulsive "reaching for the moon"
hides a fear of falling short of some impossible level of achievement imposed
by a competitive or overly critical parent. The perfectionist creates castles in his
fantasies but in actual life is afraid to take the first modest step toward realistic
achievement.
Procrastination is a common trait of self-defeatists for if nothing is begun or

completed, they cannot be found wanting. The real absence of achievement
is masked by a false pride and superiority complex. The self-defeatist is highly
susceptible to flattery but afraid to face his own strengths and weaknesses in
an objective light. Unable to tolerate his own (or other people's) shortcomings,
the self-defeatist hides from self-knowledge.
Having failed to come to terms in a mature way with parental authority, the
self-defeatist typically has a problem with authority figures. Seeing a strict or
uncaring mother or father in a spouse, colleague, or employer, the self-
defeatist frequently engages in power games of default and failure, provoking
and antagonizing friends, relations, authority figures, and others.
The self-defeatist is actually afraid of success because it does not accord

with his low self-esteem. Thus, opportunities for promotion, advancement, and
achievement will be associated with anxiety and guilt. Every effort toward
originality, creativity, and self-realization will invoke the syndrome of anxiety,
guilt, and biochemical stress with the mechanical regularity that caused
Pavlov's dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. The anxiety and guilt provoked
by the quest for independence and the imminence of success will be
alleviated by self-imposed failure.
Herman Mankiewicz was a wonderful American screenwriter whose many

fine achievements included his script collaboration (with Orson Welles), on the
classic film Citizen Kane. All his life, however, Mankiewicz lived in fear of his
father - an austere and Germanic university professor. The father was not cruel
but his severe countenance and manner had an intimidating effect on the son
whose life became an incessant quest to achieve the real or imaginary
approval of his father. He internalized his father's stern image into his own
conscience and lived always in the shadow of shortcoming. He had
everything going for him - genius, opportunity, success, and a loving family. But
whereas he put only his talent into his work, he poured his genius into his life,
constantly socializing and impressing his talented friends and associates at the
famous Algonquin Hotel and other literary- social watering holes. As his
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biographer, Richard Meryman, has pointed out, Herman Mankiewicz had the
genius to bequeath to posterity a great legacy of dramatic literature but
instead he dissipated his best energies in an ephemeral social life, trading jokes
and anecdotes in an effort to earn the acceptance and approval of his
famous peers. His successes were followed inevitably by bouts of gambling
and drinking which jeopardized his health, his family, and his career and
eventually undid him entirely. He was forever unable to measure up to the
strict conscience derived from a neurotic fear of his father's disapproval. The
anxiety and guilt created by success were relieved through habitual patterns
of self-defeating behavior - gambling and drinking.35
To be free to succeed, one must be free to fail. But the self-defeatist lacks
sufficient self-worth to expose himself to the trial and error and uncertainty of
achievement. Full of self- pride, the self-defeatist fears the critical opinion of
others. Lacking courage of the heart, he readily bows to adversity. Forever
seeking revenge against the real or perceived injustices of parents, he lacks
compassion for himself and others. Experiencing anxiety with each challenge
and adventure, he is without the peace that nourishes the patience necessary
for true achievement. Constantly suffering to appease a guilty conscience, his
being lacks health and grace and his thoughts are incapable of embracing
the ideals of existence. Preoccupied with games of power and prestige, he is
cynical and unable to sustain cooperation with others. He lives in a state of
disharmony with himself and with his surroundings. The self-defeatist readily
ascribes his misfortunes to "bad luck" or to the malevolence of others. Indeed,
he will look for the seeds of failure everywhere but in himself.
The pursuit of Personal Power is the quest for perfectibility. This is only possible
through the realization of our imperfections. To face our weaknesses and
shortcomings requires self-honesty, humor, courage, compassion, and
patience. The most promising means for correcting imperfections in our
character and for rechannelling destructive energies such as anger toward
constructive ends are to be found in self-understanding, forgiveness, and
creative work. To change, to mature, to rid ourselves of self-defeating habits of
behavior, all this requires sincerity - freedom from pretense or deceit. One must
listen humbly and with childlike candor to the silent voice of one's heart. Self-
awareness and sincerity are the foundations for self-improvement. To
remember and to understand our past, to be aware of our motives, and to be
fully conscious of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, enable us to exercise the
will to master our destiny. Tennyson wrote:
"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,

These three alone lead life to sovereign power."
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Without forgiveness - the key to "self-reverence" - we cannot free ourselves

from the prison of the past. As long as we hold resentments toward parents
and others, we are emotionally in debt. Such debts are no less binding on our
future than the loans we incur at the bank or loan company. In the case of our
feelings, however, the interest rate is even more exorbitant and is paid in the
currency of suffering and failure. One evening, my nine year old daughter and
I were out for a walk. In a mood of conversational freedom, she suddenly
remarked: "Someday, I am going to write a book called: "I Will Forgive My Past".
(The time was not long after my marriage separation and, no doubt, my
daughter had felt guilt - as all children do - over the demise of her family). The
profundity of her words dawned on me slowly. Our feelings of guilt for past
deeds done and left undone (and even for events out of our control), are like
an iron gate closed and bolted against the luminous future. To open the gates,
we must forgive in our hearts not only our parents and others but ourselves as
well. Khalil Gibran noted that, "Should we all confess our sins to one another,
we would all laugh for our lack of originality". Through such forgiveness is guilt
dissolved; through such forgiveness are we relieved of the chief burdens of our
past; through such forgiveness can we begin to build a future of creative
achievements. In his diary notes, Markings, the former Secretary-General of the
United Nations, Dag Hammarskjo"ld, wrote:
"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by

which what is broken is made whole again,
what is soiled is again made clean."
Every child holds dear a dream to become unique and useful in the world
through a creative endeavour for which he or she is singularly endowed. Too
often is that dream - woven from the most delicate crystal threads of longing
and imagination - shattered by the negative circumstances of one's
upbringing. Few children are heros in their own home or classroom. Yet the
dream can always be recaptured by remembering the past, forgiving yourself,
your parents and teachers, and by channelling frustrations and resentments
into constructive work. The Life Energy is one. Insofar as it is locked into
unconscious resentments, it cannot be free for conscious achievement.
The neurotic needs for acceptance and approval are obstacles on the
path to developing and expressing the uniqueness of your personality in work,
in love, and in life. The ritualistic attachment to conformity is ultimately
dangerous and damaging. Many people think that they will find safety and
security in the crowd, but if the crowd is rushing toward an abyss, such feelings
of security are illusory. A friend of mine who lived in the country owned some
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chickens. Every few days, he would enter the chicken pen carrying a long stick
with a noose at one end. The chickens would squawk and flee in every
direction. However, my friend never had any difficulty in catching a chicken or
two for the evening meal. One day, one of the chickens flew over or slid under
the fence and proceeded to the balcony of the large old house where it sat
upon the white wooden railing with a squatter's determination. The chicken
stayed there all day and all night and the next day as well. My friend decided
that this chicken had moved, through an act of will and rudimentary imagi-
nation, up the evolutionary scale from a potential meal to a companionable
pet. The chicken was given a name - "Clarabelle" - and lived to a ripe old age,
dining alone on the choicest tidbits and receiving the blandishments of
admiring guests. Here was one chicken who knew that there was no security in
the crowd. The capacity for independent action, for originality, and for
creativity is nourished by love. Sigmund Freud once remarked that a child who
had received the whole-hearted love of a mother would never know fear of
failure. Two of the greatest fears which people hold fast to are the fear of
failing and the fear of appearing foolish in the eyes of others. Love mitigates
such fears by providing the foundation for faith in oneself, for confidence, for a
sense of self-worth and significance. Unconditional love is a powerful energy
which strengthens the thymus gland and fortifies the giver and receiver against
the roughest edges of adversity. Love (given or accepted), frees the individual
to be himself.
Arising from a lack of love and self-confidence, the compulsive needs to

impress others and to adorn oneself with the trappings of power and prestige
are self-defeating patterns of behavior that detract from the quest for
vocational self-fulfillment and undermine the pursuit of Personal Power.
Out of fear of opening old wounds of hurt, humiliation, and rejection

suffered in childhood, adults hide their hearts behind a facade of pride,
conceit, or submissiveness. But the heart is the source of courage and of desire,
the emotional dynamo which gives substance to our dreams and force to our
achievements. As long as the heart lies protected behind such facades, the
individual is impotent to realize his cherished goals and fulfill his life's work. For
the heart to be free, old hurts must be remembered and resolved. The heart is
the sunlike centre of one's individuality. Enter fully into this sun and you become
yourself. So often, people find it immensely difficult to simply be themselves
and to express themselves simply. "We are so much in the habit of wearing
disguises," said La Rochefoucauld, "that we end by failing to recognize
ourselves." Sincerity and self-knowledge comprise the only authentic source of
satisfaction and fulfillment in life. Know yourself. Be yourself. Realize yourself.
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It is sad to witness the wasteful efforts which adults make to justify

themselves in the eyes of parents. Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, self-
defeatists construct and pursue imaginary adversaries in order to vindicate
themselves from the ghost- like eyes of parents who should long since have
been forgiven, if not forgotten. (When the Swedish actress, Ingrid Bergman,
was asked by a journalist for the secret of her happiness, she replied: "A short
memory."). The battles won in the pursuit of old injustices are costly ones for our
character, Life Energy, and self-fulfillment. Over 2,000 years ago, Pyrrhus, the
King of Epirus, was continually fighting wars. Though he won many victo ries,
he is reported by Plutarch to have commented after one costly battle that
another such victory "would utterly undo him". In the end, he was killed in a
street skirmish. The quests for dominance and prestige terminate in the "Pyrrhic
victories" which sap the Life Energy required for creative achievement, self-
realization, and Personal Power. The needs for dominance and prestige
express themselves socially and sexually in the relations between individuals; in
the competitive ambience of the work world; and in the international arena
where politicians imperil the planet with their childish games. It is said that
"success is the sweetest revenge". But real success, not merely the external
appearance of it, comes only with the development of one's abilities in the act
of creative achievement through a labour of love.
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PART IV: THE POWER OF CREATIVE THOUGHT
"The highest possible stage in moral culture is when

we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts."
- Charles Darwin
"Our life is what our thoughts make it."
- Marcus Aurelius
"Great thoughts come from the heart."
- Vauvenargues
Thought is the master energy - the captain of the ship. The captain, if he is
trained, vigilant, and conscientious, can navigate your ship over treacherous
shoals and through violent storms. The captain can chart your course toward
the safest and most bountiful ports. If, however, the captain is untrained or
irresponsible, lazy or drunk, he will lift anchor, your ship will drift into shore, and
you will become a wreck. As a man thinketh, so is he. Many of the secrets of
"bad luck" can be attributed to confused or distorted thinking; to thinking
which lacks simplicity, clarity, precision, and honesty. The probable reason
some people get lost in thought, suggested one observer of the cerebral
landscape, is because it is unfamiliar territory to them.
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Chapter 15: A CHALLENGE FOR THE MIND
"A conclusion is the place where you got tired

thinking."
- Martin H. Fischer
In the 1920's, a French doctor named E'mile Coue', achieved international

recognition for his healing methods based upon the power of positive thinking
and autosuggestion. His book, Self- Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion,
became a classic in its time, bringing benefit to many individuals around the
world.36 One of those individuals was Robert Muller whose life was saved by
Dr. Coue''s book in a dramatic escape from the Nazis.
As an official with the United Nations almost since its inception, Dr. Robert
Muller has been active in the international struggle for peace and
cooperation. Among his responsibilities was the complex task of coordinating
the United Nations' specialized agencies and world programs. He was a close
personal friend of former Secretary-General U Thant and has performed
diplomatic missions all over the world. Later, he became Secretary of the
Economic and Social Council, one of the main bodies of the United Nations. I
have met him and he is a kind, optimistic, thoughtful, and cultured man.
Dr. Muller, the son of a hatmaker, grew up in Alsace-Lorraine. It was as a

member of the French Resistance in World War II that his life was saved by Dr.
Coue''s advice in a daring and miraculous escape from the Gestapo. Robert
Muller tells the dramatic story in his book Most of All, They Taught Me Happi-
ness.37 During W.W. II, while studying at the University of Heidelberg, Muller
became very good friends with another student, a Yugoslav named Slavko
Bosnjakovich, a tall, handsome, and aristocratic young man in his late 20's.
Returning to the University following a Christmas with his family in France, Muller
was saddened to learn that his friend was extremely ill from an advanced case
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of tuberculosis. He visited his sick friend in the hospital. Despite his deteriorated
physical condition, the young Yugoslav remained calm and optimistic.
Bosnjakovich asked Muller to go to the university library and find a book by Dr.
E'mile Coue' and bring it to him as quickly as possible.
The next day Muller found Coue''s book, Self-Mastery Through Conscious
Autosuggestion which he read in a few hours before bringing it to his friend.
Muller discovered that Coue', a French physician, had been internationally
famous for his successful healing techniques based on the confidence and
imagination of the patient. His prescription for health and well-being included,
among other ideas, the simple phrase which a person repeats to himself or
herself the first thing each morning and the last thing each evening: "Every
day, in every way, I am getting better and better". One can add additional
positive self-descriptions: "I feel wonderful", etc. These autosuggestions are
grounded in Coue''s ideas on the importance of self-reliance and optimism. To
the immense surprise of his doctors, Bosnjakovich recovered within a few weeks
and was released from hospital.
During the following year, Coue''s prescription became deeply ingrained in

Muller's daily psychological habits and saved his life on one memorable
occasion. In 1943, Muller was working under the fictitious identity of Louis Parizot
as an administrator in a French telecommunications center located in a former
hotel in Vichy. He was in an ideal position to infiltrate with members of the
Resistance and to warn them of imminent German inspections. Returning to his
hotel room one night, he noticed that someone had gone through his
possessions. It was barely noticeable but he sensed something was wrong. He
checked with the hotelkeeper who informed him that two workers from the
electrical company had been there. Muller was suspicious.
The next morning, he received a telephone call from the hotel guard who
informed him that three gentlemen wished to see Parizot about a friend
named Andre' Royer. Muller asked the guard to detain them and then let
them come to his second floor office. His heart beat violently when he heard
Royer's name because he had just learned that this old school friend had been
arrested by the Germans during a raid on the University of Strasbourg. Muller
told his secretary to receive his visitors, discover their intentions, and inform him
by telephoning a colleague in a neighbouring office where he would take
refuge. A call came shortly and Muller learned that the German police were
looking for him. He heard a man in a heavy German accent shouting at his
secretary: "If you do not tell me where Parizot is, I will have you shot." To win
time for thought, he decided to hide in the hotel attic. First, he sent a message
to a colleague in the Resistance who joined him shortly after and gave him a
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very pessimistic report. Muller was told that there was practically no chance of
escape. There were half a dozen Gestapos in the hotel who were
methodically searching every office seemingly assured of finding their quarry.
The hotel entrance was blocked and a prison van was waiting at the curb.
Muller was left alone to consider his apparently impossible predicament.
He suddenly remembered Dr. Coue' and reflected that, if ever there was a
test of that man's philosophy, it was now. He switched his thinking into a
positive and enthusiastic gear. He relaxed and became elated over his
adventure. What a thrill, he thought, if he could play a trick on them and slip
through their fingers.
Now, feeling positive and full of confidence, he was able to think serenely
and decisively without fear or thought of failure. He calmly examined every
option including capture and death. Having faced the worst scenario, he felt
free to examine his creative options. There is always a chance of escape,
however slim, he decided, and he began to concentrate on the Nazi psycho-
logy and their sequence of actions. Figuring they would expect him to hide,
Muller determined to do the unexpected and go straight to them. He
changed his physical appearance as much as possible by wetting his hair and
parting it on the side. He removed his glasses and lit a cigaret to feign a
relaxed posture. He put some files under his arm. He was ready. On the third
floor, he saw several Germans systematically inspecting offices. When he got
down to the second floor, he saw (though dimly without his glasses), an
assembly of officials who had been requested to leave their offices. In their
midst were German officers interrogating Muller's secretary. He walked straight
toward them. His colleagues caught Muller's intentions and talked more loudly
to create a diversion. He asked his secretary what the trouble was about. She
replied with composure: "These gentlemen are looking for Mr. Parizot."
Expressing surprise, Muller said that he had just seen him a few moments earlier
on the fourth floor. Immediately, the Germans ran upstairs.
Muller went quickly to the hotel cellar where he found an exit to a garage
full of bicycles. He took a sturdy one and rode to the house of a member of
the Resistance where he waited several days for the search to let up.
Afterwards, he joined an active Resistance group. He learned later that the
Germans had been so methodical that they had unrolled old carpets in the
attic. They even had a photograph of him.
From the thoughts, feelings, and actions of Robert Muller in the foregoing
episode, it is possible to reconstruct the four pillars of Personal Power. Dr.
Coue''s psychology of self-mastery through conscious autosuggestion, which
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has imbued Dr. Muller's successful and fascinating life, was presented to him
under conditions of adversity (meeting his sick friend). It was an optimistic
attitude toward a serious challenge (the appearance of the Gestapo), which
enabled Muller to test the validity of that psychology and to fix his faith upon it.
In the harrowing circumstance of his near-arrest, Muller demonstrated
consummate self- control. In the face of probable death, he summoned a
great reserve of courage which did not falter from the beginning to the end of
his ordeal. Muller's deep compassion for (sympathy with), other people helped
him to understand and estimate the motives and behavior of his adversaries
and to out-manoeuvre them. Similarly, through the silent language of
sympathy, he could communicate his intentions to his secretary and
colleagues which enabled them to play along and to camouflage Muller's
identity. Muller manifested his creative patience by refusing to panic and by
taking the time to think out his predicament and the alternative courses of
action available to him. The quality of harmony is apparent in the cooperative
relationships he enjoyed with others, in his ability to "keep cool", to show grace
under pressure, and in the balanced quality of his thoughts and actions - the
methodical, logical operations of the left cerebral hemisphere integrating
smoothy with the imaginative and creative operations of the right cerebral
hemisphere. As a self-confessed "dreamer" and as a member of the French
Resistance fighting for France's freedom, Robert Muller disclosed a strong
streak of idealism that helped him to face even the prospect of death with
equanimity and a touch of cheerfulness. These are the attributes of Personal
Power which eventually brought Dr. Muller to the centre stage of international
diplomacy.
Muller attributes his success to the optimism and self- confidence which he
discovered in Coue''s philosophy:
Ever since, and after several other instances when Dr. Coue's method saved
me from very difficult situations during the war, no one has ever been able to
convince me that optimism is not preferable to pessimism. Truly, my optimism has
often been challenged and resented as being contrary to the prevailing rules of
life, but I have never been given a solid reason to join the other side. The
complexity of world affairs demands that those who deal with them be confident
and strive to do their utmost even in the face of greatest difficulties. The sad chorus
of pessimists only makes matters worse. To be a human is to live on the positive
and sunny side of life that God has given us. Optimism, hard work, and faith are
not only in our highest self-interest, they are also the affirmations of life itself. To give
up, to see only hurdles and dead ends ahead is not the right attitude toward the
great privilege of life. I was fortunate that one of my compatriots from the wartorn
borderland of Alsace-Lorraine taught me this at an early age. It is perhaps in
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regions that have suffered the most that people acquire extra reasons to hope
and an iron will to cope with the obstacles presented in life. (38)
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Chapter 16: AUTOSUGGESTION, WILL, AND IMAGINATION
"Autosuggestion ... is the influence of the imagination

upon the moral and physical being of mankind."
"When the will and the imagination are antagonistic, it

is always the imagination which wins, without any
exception."
- Dr. E'mile Coue'
Fortunately, most people have not had to practice the power of

autosuggestion in the midst of the Gestapo. And yet daily life is a constant
struggle against boredom and depression, insult and injury, fear and anxiety,
bitterness and cynicism, ugliness and cruelty, illness, disease, and
disappointment and many other negative currents awash in the world. Our
attitude toward these adversities predetermines the measure of our victory
over them.
An attitude is a predisposition to think, feel, or act in certain directions. The

word derives from the latin "apere" meaning "to fasten" or "join". It is precisely
our attitude which fastens or binds us to our fate - to particular people, ideas,
situations, and outcomes. It was the attitude of optimism which gave Dr. Muller
the leverage - the courage and ingenuity - to free himself from an "impossible"
situation. Positive attitudes (such as love, optimism, and courage), contain the
power to liberate us from the prison of limitation. Negative attitudes (suspicion,
fear, doubt, or envy), hold an equal power to incarcerate our hopes and to
confine the range of life's opportunities to the smallest circles of Personal
Power. In terms of the laws of physics, with positive attitudes you become a
cause; with negative attitudes you become an effect.
Attitudes are extremely powerful forces determining the nature of our

experience in life. An attitude is like the rudder of a ship - whichever way it is
positioned, that is the direction in which you will travel. The major problem with
attitudes is that people are largely unaware of them. As long as attitudes
remain unconscious, we have no control over them. To extend the nautical
metaphor, the state of unconscious attitudes may be likened to a ship in which
there is no connection between the steering wheel and the rudder. The wheel
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represents our conscious thoughts, feelings, and actions; the rudder is our basic
attitude or orientation in the world. Without a conscious and honest awareness
of our attitudes, all efforts to turn the wheel of thought, feeling, and will are
fruitless. In the case, for example of the man or woman unconsciously bent
upon self-defeat to seek revenge against an unjust parent, no amount of
conscious effort toward achievement will bring success: the rudder is simply
fixed in the wrong direction.
Attitudes are rooted in the soil of suggestion and are nourished and
strengthened by the vital currents of autosuggestion. Parents, teachers,
advertizers, actors, doctors, friends, spouses, and employers fill us with
suggestions (both verbal and non-verbal), from the moment of our birth until
our demise. All too often, in a competitive society characterized by ethical
scarcity, these suggestions are negative and delimiting. Suggestions imbibed
from significant others become the fodder for autosuggestion. Once an
individual is told that his memory is unreliable or he is clumsy or dishonest or he
can't draw (a straight line), that individual begins to believe it and to suggest
unconsciously to himself such limitation. In this way, suggestions become
attitudes and attitudes become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you believe
something to be true, it will become true. Students assigned arbitrary IQ scores
in experiments reached levels of tested achievement, not according to their
actual IQ scores, but in line with the scores which their teachers believed to be
true. If someone should tell you that you look pale or tired, immediately you
begin to feel the appropriate symptoms. Recall the earlier story of "poor Tito",
the giant Mastiff, who was paralyzed by a man's pity. A sincere compliment, if
you accept it, makes you feel good. Our very thoughts, quality of gaze, and
tone of voice convey our attitudes to others. Suggestion and autosuggestion
are the bases for all learning, healing, and character reformation.
People frequently assume that suggestibility is associated with poor

intelligence. In fact, just the opposite association is true: the greater the
intelligence (sensitivity and imagination), of a person, the more effective are
suggestion and autosuggestion.39 It is useful to make a distinction here
between suggestion and hypnosis. Hypnosis is a process which places the will
of one person over that of another by removing conscious perception in the
person being hypnotized. Suggestion and autosuggestion, however, can place
the individual in fuller control of himself by making conscious formerly
unconscious processes. Whereas hypnosis tends to weaken the will, suggestion
and autosuggestion can strengthen the will.
Suggestion is simply an idea impressed upon the mind of one person by

another. A suggestion, however, cannot take effect unless it is accompanied
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by autosuggestion - that is the implanting of an idea in one's mind by oneself.

Through the vehicle of autosuggestion, every human being has the power,
which he habitually exercises for good or ill, to convince himself of anything.
Conviction based on constructive principles is the backbone of Personal Power
- the armor of invincibility. In order for autosuggestion to be harnessed to the
service of Personal Power, two conditions must be met: autosuggestions must
become 1). conscious; and 2). affirmative.
There is a popular belief that people use only 10 per cent of their brain.
What is really meant by this statement is that only a tiny proportion of the brain
is involved in conscious perception and awareness. Most of the brain functions
unconsciously. The unconscious mind is the master regulator of all our functions.
The American scientist and philosopher, Buckminister Fuller, asserts that the
subconscious accounts for 99.9999 percent of our mental operations whereas
the conscious mind accounts for only 0.0001 per cent:
"As proof to yourself of this ratio of subconsciously operative action of

the brain, note that each of your millions of hairs is being individually pushed
out through your head in well-defined shapes and colors without your
conscious control or knowledge of why you have hair. When wounded,
your beautiful submicroscopic scaffolding cell crews go to work to repair
your locally damaged parts in ways you do not understand. When you eat
you do not pay conscious attention to how much of the food is going to be
assigned to skin functionings, how much is going to be blood and
consciously differentiate out the compounds to be dispatched to your
many separate glands and myriad hormone factories. There are
approximately two quadrillion times two quadrillion atoms operating in
superb co-ordination in your brain. You were not even consciously aware of
that let alone being consciously responsible for their co-ordinate
effectiveness. Thus we begin to realize the fantastic exquisiteness of the
complex functioning of our subconscious selves."40
In the unconscious mind is contained an infinite reservoir of creative powers

and possibilities. The unconscious is also the memory bank for perceptions and
experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant. The conscious mind of most
people perceives little and remembers less. But the unconscious perceives
much more and remembers it all. The impeccable powers of unconscious
perceptions are illuminated in an experiment conducted by Robert McCleary
and Richard Lazarus. Two sets of nonsense syllables were selected (e.g., "ZIFIL",
"GELAX"), and the subjects were conditioned to expect a mild electric shock
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when one series of syllables was shown, but not with the other series. The
emotional reaction to the syllables was measured by registering the perspi-
ration rate with electrodes (galvanic skin response). A tachistoscope (a device
which controls shutter speed), was used to regulate the exposure time to the
nonsense syllables. The researchers discovered that even when the exposure
time was so short that the subject could not possibly have identified accurately
what he was momentarily watching, he tended to respond emotionally when
exposed to the shock-conditioned syllables, as indicated by his galvanic skin
response. In other words, while he was unaware consciously that he was
looking at shock-conditioned syllables, his subconscious reaction (manifested in
his perspiration rate), indicated clearly that he registered the shock-associated
syllables. When the exposed syllables were not shock-associated there was no
similar tendency toward subconscious reaction.41
The brain researches of Dr. Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological

Institute suggested that every experience - sight, smell, taste, and touch - is
recorded as a particular pattern in the brain and remains there long after the
experience is consciously forgotten - like a built-in tape recorder. Dr. Penfield
performed brain surgery on patients who were conscious under local
anesthesia. Using a very weak electric current, he stimulated certain brain cells
during the operation. Every patient reported a word-for-word playback of
long-forgotten conversations, songs, jokes, childhood birthday parties, smells,
sounds, and other sensations and experiences.42 People often claim that they
have a poor memory. This is simply not true in the light of Dr. Penfield's findings.
The weakness of memory lies rather in the failure of conscious observation and
in the inability to access the subconscious memory bank.
Because so many of our observations, understandings, and experiences are

beyond the pale of our conscious awareness, they are often outside of our
conscious control. The more we can make conscious those perceptions and
experiences which were formerly unconscious, the greater will be our capacity
for self-control and for the acquisition of Personal Power. We have already
noted the damage which can be done by unconscious (or repressed) feelings
of hostility and guilt. The mind, which is mostly unconscious of its thoughts and
feelings, is like an unbroken and unbridled horse over which the rider has little
control. If an individual is to convince himself of anything, to suggest to himself,
for example, the qualities of gratitude, confidence, capability, and well-being
and optimism, he must persuade not only the tiny percentage of his mind
which is conscious but also the rest which is unconscious. Such a feat is
accomplished through the infinite powers of the will and the imagination. The
will affects chiefly our conscious mind; the imagination gives us access to the
112
vast unconscious.
There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome by the human will. Men and
women are endowed with free will. In the conscious, constructive, and
responsible exercise of that freedom is contained much of their Personal
Power. The human will can be harnessed to give force to any purpose: the will
to live or die, to love or hate, to create or destroy. Will is force; freedom is
choice. The unconscious will, however, being unaware of its motives, is not free
and is capable of perpetrating considerable harm. A conscious, ethical will, on
the other hand, is unlimited in its capacity for doing good - for oneself and for
others.
Whereas the will is the power to carry out conscious autosuggestion, the
imagination is the magnifier of that power using the vast energy reserves of the
subconscious mind. The will is a function of the linear, verbal, and logical
processes of the left cerebral hemisphere. The imagination derives from the
right cerebral hemisphere which coordinates the individual's relations with his
internal environment, operates holistically, and handles information in a gestalt
or multiple association pattern using images, feelings, symbols, sounds, and
colors. For autosuggestion to be effective, there must be communication and
harmony between the left and right hemispheres, between the conscious and
the unconscious, and between the will and the imagination. Dr. Coue' points
out that when the imagination and the will are at odds with one another, the
imagination always wins - without exception.
Dr. Coue' asks us to suppose that we place on the ground a plank 30 feet
long and one foot wide. There would be no difficulty in walking from one end
to the other without stepping over the edge. Now, imagine this same plank
placed at the height of a cathedral's towers. Despite every effort of the will,
the average person begins to tremble with fear and almost certainly falls to
the ground. The difference in performance, as any high rise construction
worker will attest to, is in the experience of the imagination. In the first case,
you imagine that it is easy to go across the plank and in the second case, you
imagine that you will fall. The will is powerless over a contrary imagination.
If you try to remember the name of a person which you have forgotten, it
often happens that, the harder you try to remember, the more the name
eludes you precisely because your first response to not remembering is to think:
"I forgot", which becomes a negative autosuggestion. However, if you
substitute in your mind the positive idea, "I will remember in a moment" for the
negative thought "I have forgotten", the name comes back to you of its own
accord without any effort. The unconscious mind, as evidenced in the
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researches cited earlier, has a tremendous capacity for observation and

memory. Positive autosuggestion and the imagination give us access to the
imperishable power of the unconscious or subconscious mind. People who
consume alcohol, take drugs, or commit crimes out of an inner compulsion
and against their own will, do so because they cannot imagine themselves not
doing such things. Free will is forfeited when individuals become puppets of
their subconscious and their imagination.
The key to self-mastery through autosuggestion is to bring the enormous

power of the imagination under conscious control. To tame and bridle the
unbroken horse of the unconscious imagination is to put the rider and not the
horse in charge. Human beings with their impressionable minds are the most
suggestible creatures on earth - a trait not lost to the manipulative personalities
in politics, advertizing, education, and religion. As long as autosuggestion
remains an unconscious and unenlightened habit, the individual will be merely
a victim of circumstance and of the wills of other people.
In an earlier chapter, we examined the unhappy fate of self- defeating

personalities. When a growing child learns, through the negative suggestions of
significant others such as parents and teachers, that he is inept, uncooperative,
or lazy, that child begins to suggest to himself (unconsciously), such qualities of
character. This is why negative criticism, no matter how genuine its motivation
to improve another person, so often fails. A negative criticism is a negative
suggestion which, when transformed into a negative autosuggestion, becomes
the spur to failure. When an individual's failures and weaknesses attract more
attention than his achievements and strengths (however modest), the
foundation for negative autosuggestion becomes established for a life-time.
Human beings can be trained through suggestion and autosuggestion to live
for pain, failure, and unhappiness or to strive for well-being, self-fulfillment,
achievement, and joy.
When a self-defeating personality has learned, in an environment of

negative suggestions, that pain, failure, and suffering reduce anxiety and guilt,
the habit of negative autosuggestion becomes impossible to break by means
of the will alone. Without retraining the imagination, the self-defeating
personality can never achieve success. Self-defeat is the habit of negative
autosuggestion fueled by a fertile but contrary imagination.
With a constructive will and a positive and creative imagination, we may

draw from and replenish continuously the eternal spring of Life Energy and
Personal Power. Working together, the will and the imagination can conquer
any adversary, harmonize relationships and situations, achieve self-control, and
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fulfill any ideal.
Imagination is not merely fancy but a veritable power to achieve the will's
desire. One writer (Gelett Burgess), said that "Imagination is like a lofty building
reared to meet the sky - fancy is a balloon that soars at the wind's will." The
Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defines imagination as:
"the act or power of creating mental images of what has never

been actually experienced, or of creating new images or ideas by
combining previous experiences; creative power. Imagination is
often regarded as the more seriously and deeply creative faculty,
which perceives the basic resemblances between things, as dis-
tinguished from fancy, the lighter and more decorative faculty, which
perceives superficial resemblances."
Unlike fancy, the imagination is a real power which underlies our success or
failure. Imagination is our creative power in science, art, and life.
The power behind autosuggestion resides in the mind's faculty for creating
images. If you create in your mind an image of yourself as confident, optimistic,
and capable and of doing things which you wish to do, and repeatedly
suggest such ideas and images to yourself, you will become confident,
optimistic, and capable (performing the activities you desire - within your
power), and the reality of your life will flow out of your renewed imagination. If
you are prone to fear, unkindness, impatience, or carelessness, you can banish
these by repeating positive autosuggestions and by imagining yourself as
courageous, compassionate, patient, and careful. In this way, you can nourish
your capacity for these qualities of character and develop consummate self-
control. If you are plagued and pursued by self- doubts, anxieties, irritations,
aversions, temptations, and other negative and unpleasant thoughts and
feelings, these will evaporate like an unsubstantial mist when you replace them
with positive images and with affirmative autosuggestions.
Autosuggestions should always be phrased simply, clearly, and positively.

They should be repeated (silently or out loud), several times each day
(particularly first thing each morning and before bed). Here are some
examples of autosuggestions which you can imagine and practice for yourself
as well as tailoring others to your own specific needs. (Smile when you say
them - it will strengthen your thymus):
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"Everyday, in every way, I am getting better and better."
"I am going to be very, very successful."
"I feel confident, happy, and full of joy and optimism."
"I feel calm and relaxed."
"I am strong and healthy in mind and body."
"I can accomplish anything I want to."
"I have excellent memory and recall."
"People like me."
"I forgive myself."
"I am realizing my dream."
"I am in complete command of my thoughts, feelings, and actions."
"Joy, joy, joy!!!"
Words, like music, have a power and a vibratory rate which affect our
being. In his book, Behavioral Kinesiology, Dr. Diamond demonstrated that
negative words and thoughts weaken our muscles, thymus gland, and Life
Energy. He found also that our thoughts, feelings, and attitudes are
communicated to others through our facial expressions, physical gestures, and
the quality of our voice. The reciprocal thymus relationship is a contagious one
whereby positive strengths and negative weaknesses are passed on to others.
One of the examples cite above - "People like me" - was recommended to a
woman who sold ladies' accessories in a large department store. The woman,
though pleasant and attractive, had retained from her childhood a deep
inferiority complex. She believed that people disliked and avoided her. This
attitud was reinforced by her experience on the job: a relatively small number
of customers came to her counter and her sales volume was low. For several
weeks she tried autosuggestion, repeating over and over the phrase, "People
like me ... people like me", until she believed it and imagined it. As she did this,
more and more people were attracted to her counter and her sales picked up
to such an extent that within six months she became the top salesperson on
her floor. People are attracted to others who are kind, self-confident, and rich
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in Life Energy.
Through the reciprocal thymus relationship we arrive at the magnetism of

thought and emotion. Thoughts and feelings have a magnetic power. The
stronger they are, the greater the magnetism. This is why fear is such a
dangerous thought and emotion. When fear grips the imagination, the person
is actually visualizing and suggesting to his mind the very thing he wishes to
avoid. The power of imagination holds the power of attraction. When your
imagination is filled with an idea, you are drawn irresistibly toward it, despite the
fact that your will may wish to go in the opposite direction. As Dr. Coue' noted:
"Every thought entirely filling our mind becomes true for us and tends to
transform itself into action."
The fears of injury, loss, illness, failure, etc., fill the imagination so that the
subconscious mind is drawn, despite the will, toward the object of its fear.
Moreover, the emotion of fear instigates the biochemistry of stress which
weakens the thymus and other endocrine glands lowering the body's
resistence to infection, disease, and accident. Fear also weakens the will and
the muscles; it causes asymmetry between the two cerebral hemispheres
which interferes with coordination and efficiency. Fears are ultimately self-
fulfilling.
If, on the other hand, fear is replaced with a positive attitude - courage, a
sense of adventure, self-confidence - and you are able to fill your imagination
with these positive ideas and images, then your thoughts and feelings become
a positive magnet in the service of the will. Strong thoughts which fill the
imagination contain the power of attraction, operating like a magnet with iron
filings. In the 1920's, the great American actress, Ethel Barrymore, starred in
Somerset Maugham's hit play "The Constant Wife", a comedy of marital
manoeuvres. When her brother, John Barrymore, attended a performance
and noticed that no one in the audience coughed, he asked Ethel about this.
"But I don't let them cough," she said. "You don't? And how is that done?" he
asked. Ethel replied: "I just turn on something inside myself and they don't dare
cough."43 (The English actor, Sir Ralph Richardson, once remarked that the art
of acting consists in keeping people from coughing). Although she had
experienced one of her worst nights of stage fright on opening night in
Cleveland, she was able to overcome this through positive autosuggestion by
`turning on something inside herself'. This gave her the self-confidence and
Personal Power to capture the hearts and minds of her audiences with her
powerful performances and to make "The Constant Wife" a smash hit which
ran for two years in New York and a year on the road.
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When people come to realize, through the practice of conscious

autosuggestion, the magnetic properties of thought, they will have a powerful
instrument at their disposal. They will learn also to be careful with their thinking,
to closely monitor their own thoughts as well as the environmental stimuli which
determine the quality of their thoughts. Much of what people call "bad luck" is
simply the result of bad thinking. Finally, the sense of responsibility for thinking
will carry over into a solicitude for others so that words and gestures will be
positive, affirming the strengths and goodness of other people.
In the modern world, words are thrown about with such flagrant, insincere,
and careless abandon that individuals have lost much of their sensitivity to their
meaning and power. But words - whether spoken or thought - are filled with
meaning and power especially when they spring from understanding,
conviction, and awareness. The more aware we become of the potential
power of words, the more power they will have over ourselves and others, and
the more careful and discriminating we should be in their use. Roger Caron
spent a quarter of a century in Canadian prisons, years interspersed with
criminal activities on the outside. One day in his solitary cell, he took a handful
of jelly beans and spelled out on the floor the word "pig". One of the guards
seeing this word on the floor, flew into a violent rage. The enormity of the
guard's emotional and physical response deeply impressed Caron with the
power of the written word. Three days later, he asked for a paper and pen
and began to write. His first book about his prison experiences (Go Boy),
became a big seller, won him a national book award, provided a creative
outlet for his previously destructive energies, and positively influenced the
course of prison reform in Canada. Conscious awareness is like a megaphone
which magnifies the meaning of our words, the purpose of our motives, and
the force of our actions. Deliberateness in thought, feeling, and action evokes
the full power of the will.
There is an old saying: "Seeing is believing." There is another saying, much

older and equally true: "Believing is seeing." We see ourselves and the world
through the tinted lenses of our beliefs, attitudes, faith, and motives. Faith is the
foundation for self-confidence and without self-confidence, it is difficult to
accomplish anything lasting or worthwhile.
Real faith is not blind but is based on the trust garnered from awareness and
experience. The problem is a bit like the "chicken-and-the-egg". You must
believe in order to perceive and you must perceive in order to believe. Trust
and experience and awareness walk hand-in-hand. If you believe a task will
be easy, it will become so and the ease of the task will confirm your belief.
Whatever you do (within reason), imagine that it is easy and trust that you can
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do it. Banish from your vocabulary the words "difficult", "impossible", "I cannot", "I
can't prevent myself from ...". Whatever you do, you will perform easily and
with vitality. Believe this and you will make it happen.
The golf star, Jack Nicklaus, attributes much of his success to autosuggestion
and imagination. He claims that only about 10 per cent of his golf game is
concerned with the actual swing. In his book, Golf My Way, Nicklaus says that
hitting specific shots is fifty per cent mental picture and forty per cent setup. His
technique involves concentration during which he tunes out the rest of the
world and, with the power of his imagination, makes a mental movie of the
entire shot, with clear, sharp focus, zooming in for occasional close-ups:
"I never hit a shot even in practice without this color movie. First, I
`see' the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high
on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes and I `see'
the ball going there: its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behavior on
landing. Then there's a sort of fade-out, and the next scene shows me
making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality."44
Norman Cousins, the American writer and former editor and publisher of the
Saturday Review, tells a remarkable personal story concerning the power of
autosuggestion in the process of self-healing: he literally laughed himself out of
an incurable disease. In his book, Anatomy of an Illness: As Perceived by the
Patient, Cousins described his hospitalization for a serious collagen disease
which he developed after an exhausting and stress-filled trip abroad. This is a
degenerative disease of the connective tissue (in the same general category
as arthritis and rheumatism). Collagen is the fibrous substance that binds the
cells together. He was, in a sense, becoming unstuck and had great difficulty in
moving his limbs. The doctors were pessimistic about his recovery. Specialists
told him that his disease was progressive and incurable. One specialist
informed him that his chances for a full recovery were one in five hundred and
that he had not personally witnessed a recovery from this comprehensive
condition. Cousins had the choice of accepting this verdict or of doing
something about it. He decided, in his irrepressible optimism, that he would not
accept the verdict and that he would not be a passive observer of his own
degeneration. This decision immediately switched on his own creative
problem-solving capacity and recuperative power supply: "Since I didn't
accept the verdict, I wasn't trapped in the cycle of fear, depression, and
panic that frequently accompanies a supposedly incurable illness."
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Working closely with his own doctor, he began a program "calling for the full
exercise of the affirmative emotions in enhancing body chemistry." He took
large doses of vitamin C (an important ingredient in collagen formation),
instead of pain- killing drugs with all their toxic side effects. He moved out of
the hospital with its poor nutrition, inadequate hygienic conditions, and stressful
routines, and moved into a nice hotel (at one-third the cost of the hospital),
where he could eat properly, sleep when he wanted to, enjoy serenity, and
laugh to his heart's delight at Marx Brothers' movies without disturbing other pa-
tients. Relying upon his body's own healing powers (the healing power of
nature), in a happy atmosphere of compassion, humor, and tranquility,
nourished by healthy food and vitamin C, Norman Cousins began to improve
immediately and the inflammation of the connective tissue gradually subsided.
His ultimately successful recovery is a vital testimony to the regenerative
powers of autosuggestion where the will and the imagination work coopera-
tively in a positive and cheerful environment. It is important to emphasize, as
well, that Cousins worked in complete harmony with his physician. Indeed, it
was the physician's full confidence in the self-healing powers of his patient
which played a significant role in Cousin's recovery.45 Suggestion in the hands
of a wise healer is a powerful medicine.
Conscious autosuggestion can be used successfully to improve

performance in sports, to learn faster and remember more, to give up smoking
or lose weight, to overcome grief or get rid of insomnia, to heal an injury or
cure an illness, to change a mood or solve a problem, and to be happy and
self-confident. If autosuggestion is such a simple panacea for human ills, why
isn't it used more often by more people. There are several reasons:
1). Autosuggestion is universally employed but more unconsciously than

consciously and more negatively than positively.
2). The modern "educated" mind, schooled in complexity and obscurity, is

suspicious of simple approaches. This suspicion is reinforced by the propensity of
certain professional specialists to mystify their subject matter in order to
conceal their ignorance, reduce competition, gain prestige, and increase
fees.
3). Many people do not want to change, get well, improve

themselves, or strengthen their performance. This is true for self-defeatists who
have become accustomed to making sacrifices to their guilt and to seeking
the rewards of dominance and significance through suffering, failure, or Pyrrhic
victories.
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4). Conscious autosuggestion is self-determined and is based on

responsibility for oneself. Many people have learned to relinquish personal
responsibility and self-determination by taking the apparently easier path of
giving over to others - doctors, teachers, parents, husbands, wives, television,
etc., - their will and imagination. Ultimately, the "easy" path turns out to be
false.
5). More people would use conscious autosuggestion if they had a better
understanding of thought processes - the mechanisms involved and the
techniques available. These mechanisms and techniques will be taken up in
the following chapters.
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Chapter 17: THE NATURE OF THOUGHT
"Believenot what you have heard said;believe not in

traditionsmerely because they havebeentransmitted through many
generations;believe not merely because a thingisrepeated by many
persons;...believenot conjectures;... believe not solely upon the
authority of your masters and elders. WHEN UPON OBSERVATION AND
ANALYSIS A PRINCIPLE CONFORMS TO REASON AND LEADS TO THE
BENEFIT AND WELFARE OF ALL, ACCEPT IT AND HOLD IT."
- Gotama Buddha
"Few people think more than two or three times a

year. I have made an international reputation for myself by
thinking once or twice a week."
- George Bernard Shaw
The thinking of the average person may be likened to a monkey: it jumps

and swings all over the place; it likes to play tricks; and it can bite and be
vicious. The development of Personal Power is possible only when we
recognize responsiblity for our thoughts and learn to control them for creative
purposes.
Thinking in the modern age has floundered upon a number of

misconceptions and entered into several cul-de-sacs. In a materialistic world,
thinking - because it is invisible and immaterial - has been given a secondary
role. Leo Rosten remarked that, "Many complain of their looks but who
complains about his brains." All too often, brawn has triumphed over brain and
machines have dictated to the minds of men and women. We take pride in
machines that think but react suspiciously to any human being who attempts it.
Nevertheless, thought takes precedence over all human functions. The art of
diplomacy, for example, is based upon the creative use of mental faculties to
find a constructive solution to human conflict (both interpersonal and interna-
tional), which will avoid humiliation and harm, destruction and death. Athletes,
like Jack Nicklaus, who use imagination and mental control, achieve
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performances superior to their competitors who rely more on muscle than on
mind. It has been pointed out that the overwhelming success of the Soviet and
East German athletes in the Olympics has been due to their extensive
programs in mind development involving autosuggestion, concentration, and
vizualization.
Since Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity, scientists have been
building elaborate and costly instruments to verify his calculations. But Einstein
himself relied on the creative power of his own mind. In a story, purported to
be true, the great scientist and his wife were visiting the Mount Wilson
Observatory in California. Mrs. Einstein, pointing to a complex piece of
machinery, asked: "And what's that one for?" She was informed that the
machine in question was designed to determine the shape of the universe. "Oh
really," she answered. "My husband does that on the back of an old
envelope!"
The most powerful and complex apparatus ever invented was designed not
by IBM but by Mother Nature. This is the human mind. It can be improved but it
cannot be replaced. The development of its infinite capacity depends upon
exercise. If people exercised their minds with at least a portion of the effort and
concentration that our vaunted athletes put into the exercise of their bodies,
they would aim higher and achieve more. If the goals of the broad jump, the
high jump, and the Olympic decathlon were applied to mental labours,
thinking would become more flexible, more daring, and more versatile. This
broadening of consciousness would solve many human problems and miseries,
and evolution would proceed to a happier, more fulfilling spiral of existence.
This should be the job of our educational system but most schools and
universities are bureaucratically designed to require rote learning and left brain
regurgitation. A headline in the New York Times Educational Supplement for
January 9, 1983 read: "Teaching to Think: A New Emphasis". That was 1983! One
is dismayed to recall what the old emphasis was, and is still, about.
Human thinking has become divorced from reality. The educational system
and the mass media have conditioned people to depend upon outside
"authorities" for their knowledge. This tendency has resulted in the partial
atrophy of the senses through which the brain apprehends reality. People
have lost much of their capacity to trust in and to use their own powers of
observation and interpretation. This has resulted in a loss of individualism and of
creativity.
People see the world through a glass darkly. The glass has been darkened
by the opaque film of convention, prejudice, ignorance, and generally
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outmoded ways of thinking. Children are born artists, scientists, and inventors.
The world they perceive is fresh and unique. They invent their life anew each
day. They love to experiment and they look with wonder at the world around
them. Their creative capacities are frustrated, however, by the conventional
opinions of others passed off as knowledge. Children, for example, have a
wonderful and true color sense until it is "schooled" out of them. They learn that
snow is white and the earth is brown. But under a clear daylight sky, the snow is
actually blue - reflecting the color of the sky. The earth is often heavily tinted
with purples and mauves. The value of great art is that it allows us to see reality
through the artist's unique perceptions which have not been filtered by
orthodox thinking. By relying predominantly upon what other people tell them,
children grow up denying the validity of their own sense perception and using
their unique powers of perception less and less.
People seal their fate by failing to use their native capacities for observation
and thinking and by believing uncritically in what is told to them by their
religious and political leaders, their parents and teachers, the members of the
media, and other self-appointed judges of reality. Though a thousand people
may agree upon a subject, if they have no authentic personal knowledge
about that subject, their opinion is of no value. Freedom and the pursuit of
Personal Power demand independence of judgement based upon personal
observation and comprehension.
In the fragmented world of segmental thinking, the unifying and holistic

nature of thought has been lost sight of. Thinking has become divorced from
action, from feeling, and from the physical organism. Thought has become
abstracted from behavior so that people think without the logic or conviction
that leads to action and they act without thinking about the cause or conse-
quence of their behavior. Much current thinking is self-centered, chaotic,
mean and dry, lacking power, clarity, and compassion. The separation of
mental and physical functions has diminished the power of the individual to
heal himself in injury or illness and has obstructed the holistic harmony of mind
and body which is needed for peak performance in all fields of achievement.
Thought is the master of all that we are or do. As a man thinks, so is he. In
India, the science of mental development is called Raja Yoga. "Raja" means
royal or governing power of the mind. "Yoga" means discipline. Raja Yoga is
the science and discipline of mental concentration, of achieving creative self-
mastery through mental control.
Thought (conscious or unconscious), is the original cause behind all actions.

It is mainly the lack of responsibility for conscious thought that has caused
124
thinking and acting to become divorced. Mental illness, except in cases where
there is an organic malfunction or chemical deficiency, is often the personal
abdication of responsibility for rational consciousness - and, therefore, for one's
actions.
Because the power of thought has not been fully appreciated, people feel
that it does not matter what they think as long as their public behavior
conforms to certain conventional standards. This represents a grave distortion
of reality. We have already demonstrated, through the researches of Dr.
Diamond and Dr. Selye, that negative thoughts alter our biochemistry to
create stress symptoms, to reduce resistence to disease and infection, and to
weaken others through transference. Alternately, positive thoughts intensify our
well-being, vitality, and resistance to disease and infection as well as
strengthening those around us. There is another significant component or
active ingredient in thought. The American poet and philosopher, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, observed that: "To think is to act." In this astute perception is
contained an important clue to the nature of thinking - namely, that thought
has the tendency to resolve itself into action. As a vapor is condensed to a
liquid, so thought seeks to condense itself into action. In our discussion on
autosuggestion, we examined the power of the imagination to influence
behavior: if there is a conflict between the will and the imagination, the latter is
inevitably victorious. When thoughts take over the imagination, they become
part of the subconscious over which most people have little control. This means
that emotionally-charged thoughts and motives which dwell upon dishonesty,
cruelty, fear, lust, greed, and other negative and destructive messages propa-
gated through pornographic and violent media forms have both the potential
and tendency to actualize themselves, via the subconscious, in the lives of
the viewers and readers - their wills notwithstanding. Similarly, thoughts
preoccupied with positive ideas and images such as love, beauty, and heroic
achievement will tend to condense themselves into actions which are kind,
beautiful, and heroic. Mental hygiene is the true basis of morality and ethics.
If, in the light of the foregoing discussion, we change the time-worn word of
morality to discrimination, we will arrive at a more objective and scientific
understanding of human thinking and conduct. Discrimination is based upon a
practical and personal knowledge of what is useful in the pursuit of Personal
Power - precisely, those ideas, personalities, situations, and activities which
increase our Life Energy and lead us toward self-fulfillment and achievement.
Mental discrimination is essential on the path to Personal Power. With mental
discrimination, supported by the four pillars of Personal Power, it is possible to
distinguish between the useful and the useless, the true and the false, the
beneficial and the harmful, the important and the unimportant.
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Thoughts without feeling are without force. The mind, no matter how
erudite, has no power unless it is fueled by the fires of the heart. The quality of
thoughts is determined by the quadrant of emotion which has two axes:
intensity and direction. Thoughts may be either weak or strong, negative or
positive. Thoughts which are weak and positive are like fireflies - they are fun to
watch but they hardly illumine the night. Weak and negative thoughts are like
fleas - they're small but they bite. The major effect of weak thoughts is to leave
the mind susceptible to confusion. Chaotic thinking is dangerous because it
leads to chaotic behavior. Also, confused thinking, lacking a strong velocity or
direction, is easily swept along by passing currents - fads, public opinion, mass
movements, and popular hysteria. Strong negative thoughts have the power
to destroy, to inflict harm on oneself and on others. Negative thinking is narrow
and self-limiting. Negative emotions adversely affect the thought processes by
causing disharmony between the left and right cerebral hemispheres and
between the mind and the body. There is an old Jewish saying that anger rusts
the intellect. Not only anger but also envy, fear, and other negative feelings
corrode our thinking. From our previous discussions on the adverse effects of
negative thoughts and emotions on the body's biochemistry, we can
appreciate that the term "rust" is not entirely metaphorical. Studies on the
mental effects of pornography show that the emotion of lust is so powerful that
pornographic images become chemically etched into the mind forming the
basis for obsessional and addictive sexual behavior.
Strong positive thoughts (ideals), are creative, constructive, and expansive.

They greatly enhance the Life Energy and lead to Personal Power and heroic
achievement. The mushrooming intellectualism of the Twentieth Century has
produced many technical advances. However, the industrial and
technological revolutions have not enhanced human happiness or wisdom
primarily because the thinking behind technical progress has not been
warmed by the human heart. Thought without compassion produces
knowledge that is often ineffectual or destructive. The fact that as many as
one-half of the world's scientists are engaged in military-related projects
indicates the degree to which knowledge has become divorced from the
heart. A high proportion of the remaining scientists are employed in the private
sector where the results of their work often conflict with the common welfare.
The scientific, artistic, and social achievements which have most benefited
mankind have been inspired by the powerful and universal thought of good.
Great thoughts come from the heart.
The mind disconnected from the heart produces thinking of unnecessary

complexity and obscurity which congeals reality behind a fortress of words. The
arcane languages of science, government, and academia have made
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communication a lost art and produced a vulgar backlash in the popular

commercial culture. Below is an abstract of a serious essay on romantic love
written by an American university professor for a scientific quarterly:
"ON ROMANTIC LOVE - AN ANALYSIS OF

OPEN SYSTEM ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR."
"Romantic love is characterized by a preoccupation with a

deliberately restricted set of perceived characteristics in the love
object which are viewed as means to some ideal ends. In the
process of selecting the set of perceived characteristics and the
process of determining the ideal ends, there is also a systematic
failure to assess the accuracy of the perceived characteristics and
the feasibility of achieving the ideal ends given the selected set of
means and other pre-existing ends.
The study of romantic love can provide insight into the general
process of introducing novelty into a system of interacting variables.
Novelty, however, is functional only in an open system characterized
by uncertainty where the variables have not all been functionally
looped and system slacks are readily available to accommodate
new things. In a closed system where all the objective functions and
variables must be compatible to achieve stability and viability,
adjustments to the value of some variables through romantic
idealization may be dysfunctional if they represent merely residual
responses to the creative combination of the variables in the open
system."
Though one may, painfully and after repeated assaults, glean from such a
fortress of convoluted information, that "love is blind" and that "the course of
true love is not smooth", such recorded thinking makes it impossible to derive
any practical or realistic understanding of romantic love. This example of the
intellect severed from feeling points to an interesting phenomenon: it is not
words which we communicate but understanding; that is, meaning and
conviction. The reader can only understand what the writer himself
understands. A simple test of this proposition can be found in the all-too-
common example of a public speaker whose mind wanders while reading
from a prepared text. The lapse in concentration is immediately relayed to the
listeners who will tend to lose the thread of meaning in the speaker's words.
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The obscurity and complexity of contemporary thinking is an important

reason why people experience so much distress while learning. Learning
should be a joy but few people find it so. If an individual truly understands
(thought informed by feeling), what he is communicating, the message will be
delivered with clarity and simplicity. Effective communication is essential to
success in all branches of life. A national survey conducted in 1980 by the
University and College Placement Association of Canada of 108 employers
(averaging 5,700 employees each), showed that, among the qualities most
valued in employees, the ability to communicate ranked number one in
importance among employers.
In 1978, 28-year-old Naomi James became the first woman to sail single-
handed around the world via Cape Horn - and in the fastest time ever. In
recognition of her heroic achievement, she was given the distinguished award
of Dame Commander of the British Empire. The daughter of a New Zealand
sheep farmer, newly married, and with only two years sailing experience
behind her, Naomi James had never handled a boat by herself before. Her
success can be attributed to her heroic courage and incredible strength of
endurance and to her deep faith in herself and her husband. It was her
husband, a professional racing sailor who taught her, in the briefest time, the
technical complexities and the art of sailing and charting courses. His love and
understanding (and concern for his wife's survival), generated the simplicity
and clarity necessary to convey a complex and technical subject in a
remarkably short time to a person with a minimum of experience and a
maximum of faith.46
Simplicity holds the power of attraction. Simplicity, clarity, and warmth of

feeling give Personal Power to our thinking. There is a Chinese proverb that
says, "The mind covers more ground than the heart but goes less far." The more
elaborate and "intellectual" becomes the treatment of a subject, the less that
is often conveyed. Thought divorced from feeling lacks conviction, direction,
and meaning. Only the heart can find its way through all the fissures of the
brain.
The separation, at the level of consciousness, of the physical and mental

processes has had the unfortunate result that people have relinquished
responsibility for their own health and bodily functions. They have given carte
blanche to the medical profession and turned doctors into gods. The situation
is both absurd and tragic. Each individual grows his own body and all the
bodily functions are under the master control of the subconscious brain. The
fact that these processes are controlled at the subconscious level does not
make them any less real or subject to our thinking and personal responsibility.
128
Earlier, we saw how thoughts and moods have far-reaching effects on the
body's organs and functions. Conversely, our physical habits of exercise, nu-
trition, and sleep affect the functioning of the brain.
Using the technique of autosuggestion, the imagination can be stimulated

to affect the subconscious brain which controls our physiological functions.
Suggestion and conscious autosuggestion are not substitutes for modern
medicine but essential companions to it. Suggestion and conscious
autosuggestion are an excellent means of preventive medicine and of
minimizing the use of drugs and surgery. Dr. E'mile Coue' achieved world-wide
fame for his successful methods based upon suggestion and autosuggestion:
"In order to understand the part played by suggestion, or rather by

autosuggestion, it is enough to know that the unconscious self is the
grand director of all our functions. Make this believed ... that a certain
organ which does not function well must perform its function, and
instantly the order is transmitted. The organ obeys with docility, and
either at once or little by little performs its functions in a normal
manner. This explains simply and clearly how by means of suggestion
one can stop haemorrhages, cure constipation, cause fibrous
tumours to disappear, cure paralysis, tubercular lessions, varicose
ulcers, etc." (47)
We have examined the capacity of the cerebral cortex to trigger

biochemical changes in the endocrine system (either positive or negative),
which strengthen or weaken the body's immunity against infection and
disease, including cancer. The power of the mind's influence over the body is
well-documented in medical studies of the placebo effect. The word placebo
derives from the Latin verb meaning "I will please". A placebo is an imitation
medicine (often a harmless milk-sugar pill designed to look like an authentic
medicine), used occasionally by doctors to placate patients and more
frequently by researchers to test the effects of a new drug. In his book on self-
healing, Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins examines the significance of
the placebo effect, reporting on a number of studies which confirm its power
in mind-over-matter healing. The key to the power of the placebo is in
suggestion and autosuggestion. In one study, a patient suffering from
Parkinson's disease was given a placebo but was informed that he was
receiving a drug. His tremors decreased. After the effects of the placebo wore
off, the same substance was put into his milk without his knowledge. The
tremors appeared again. In another experiment, patients with bleeding ulcers
129
were divided into two groups. People in the first group were informed by the
doctor that a new drug had recently been developed that was guaranteed
to produce relief. The second group was told by nurses that a new
experimental drug would be given but that very little was known about its
effects. Seventy per cent of the first group received sufficient relief from their
ulcers. Only twenty- five per cent of the patients in the second group
experienced similar benefit. Both groups had been given the identical "drug" -
a placebo. In a further study, placebos were 77 per cent as effective as
morphine in reducing post-operative pain.48
Placebos work because of the belief in their efficacy and because of the
faith in and perceived credibility of the doctors who administer them. The
foregoing studies testify to the powers of suggestion and conscious
autosuggestion in triggering the biochemical changes in the endocrine system
necessary to combat infection, disease, and pain. For example, there is a
group of hormones in the brain and pituitary gland called endorphins which
are chemically similar to morphine, heroin, and other opiates which relieve
pain. Through autosuggestion (and acupuncture as well), it is possible to
release pituitary endorphins which alter the perception of pain. Conscious
autosuggestion can be used effectively to control pain, to lose weight, to calm
and slow the heart beat, and to free the body from its addiction to harmful
chemicals. Self-mastery over the subconscious brain is the power behind the
well-known "super-human" abilities of some individuals to walk barefoot over
hot coals without pain or burns, or to pierce their bodies with swords and knives
without drawing blood or permanently injuring themselves.
Standing only five feet, two inches high and weighing one hundred and
twenty pounds, Hidy Ochiai is one of the most powerful men in the world. The
Japanese-born American teacher of the martial arts has won world renown as
a karate master. Raised in a Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan, he developed,
from an early age, the power of mental control over his body. His body-mind
training, aimed toward spiritual enlightenment, included many lessons in
patience, calmness, and service. His own teaching emphasizes, in addition to
self-defense and fitness, respect, confidence, inner peace, concentration, self-
discipline, harmony with others and control of body and mind. In one of his
widely televised demonstrations, Hidy Ochiai lies flat on a bed of long sharp
nails with several concrete blocks placed on his stomach. A man with a ten
pound sledge hammer shatters the blocks with a single blow. Afterwards,
Ochiai springs from the board of nails fully intact and unmarked. In another
popular demonstration (one that tests teacher and student alike), he slices an
apple in half that has been balanced on the throat of a student. He
accomplishes this feat blind-folded with a single, precise chop of a Samurai
130
sword.
The powers demonstrated by Hidy Ochiai are founded upon a holistic view
of the individual's mind, body, and environment. The holistic or "whole man"
concept of the human being and his environment derives from the principle of
harmony and from the conscious control over subconscious and intuitive
thought faculties. Modern man has become psychically crippled by specializa-
tion resulting in a lack of development of certain mental functions such as the
subconscious and intuitive powers of thought. In addition, he has experienced
a loss of harmony and communication among the various areas of the mind,
particularly between the conscious and the unconscious and between the left
and right cerebral hemispheres.
Intuition is a mental faculty which has suffered a low profile in western

technological society. It is often referred to in somewhat disparaging fashion as
a poor sister to man's rational, analytical capacity. It is also a mental power
frequently assigned to the female of the species - thus, we speak of "woman's
intuition". In fact, intuition is the higher mental faculty which underlies all
creative achievements. In their book, Flash of Genius, Professor Northrup and
Alfred Garrett report their studies of the personal letters, diaries, and family
records of a representative group of the world's greatest scientists. From the
intimate thoughts disclosed in these primary sources, the authors found that all
these great scientists placed intuition above everything else as responsible for
their unexpected discoveries. Next in importance was what they did
immediately after they had experienced their intuition; and thirdly, the
progression of steps in following up their intuitive insights. Though all people
experience intuition, it is the creative achievers who listen to their intuition and
act on it.
The Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defines intuition as "the immediate

knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning;
instantaneous apprehension." Intuition then is a direct and immediate knowing
without the intermediate steps of logic, conceptualization, or any of the other
secondary mental processes. Intuition belongs to the intuitive- creative-
imaginative right cerebral hemisphere as well as to the unconscious. The right
hemisphere of the brain perceives in a gestalt or multiple association pattern
which enables it to apprehend the whole of a situation immediately rather
than in the linear, sequential, and piecemeal modality of the left hemisphere.
The unconscious or subconscious territory of the brain represents those mental
functions of which we are not at the moment conscious. Intuition is the process
of bringing into consciousness an unconscious or semi-conscious perception.
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Children are naturally intuitive until their minds become so filled with
superstition, error, and unexperienced opinion that they stop relying upon their
superior intuitive faculty. Intuition is commonly ascribed to women and there is
much truth in the attribution because the intuitive ability is derived from the
"feminine" principle of receptivity. Intuition is unfiltered mental receptivity (right
cerebral hemisphere). The "male" principle of rational logic (left cerebral
hemisphere) imposes its concepts or filters upon reality. These concepts may
be useful or useless, right or wrong, but they always intercede between the
real world and the mind's apprehension. In the minds of many people, these
two cerebral processes - the intuitive and the logical - are antagonistic to one
another. However, the cooperative working together of both modes of
perception is the basis for personal integration and is necessary for the
development of Personal Power. The function of creativity also resides in the
balanced and harmonious interchange between the two cerebral
hemispheres.
Intuition is no mystical process but is the bridge between the conscious and
the unconscious. Intuition derives from the infinite capacity of the subconscious
mind to receive, process, and store information at rates which would dwarf the
largest computer. The American inventor, Buckminister Fuller, describes intuition
as the semi-conscious shuttle operating over the thre- shold between
conscious and subconscious.
Intuition is the result of a broader spectrum of experience and perception. A

common example occurs when we are driving on a highway with our
conscious vision directed straight ahead. A car changing lanes suddenly at the
lateral extreme of our perceptual vision will be recorded by our subconscious
as a threat and our intuition will jump into action to warn us of impending
danger. The not uncommon experience of opening up a book on the first
attempt at the very page which was desired or of finding some needed book
on a library shelf on the first try, is not chance or coincidence but the effect of
the perfectly coordinated subconscious mind unimpeded by conscious doubt,
preconception, or strained effort. Such experiences usually occur when we are
deeply involved in something we love and enjoy. In the process of intuition, the
heart plays a significant role. A mother will often know, without apparent
evidence, when something is wrong (or right), with her child. The mother's
intuition stems from the love, care, and responsibility she feels for her child. It
was Julius Caesar's wife whose intuition would have saved him from the
impending assassination. Ignoring her warning to stay home, the Roman
Emperor met his death on the floor of the senate. Women have excelled in the
intuitive area because they have cultivated their hearts. Love and compassion
lead to vigilance, sensitivity, and responsibility for others and for one's work.
132
Vigilance and sensitivity are the bases for observation and awareness from
which all knowledge is derived. Intuition then is a broader awareness and
sensitivity. Creative people who have a deep love for their work are usually
sensitive and observant. These qualities nourish the originality of their
achievements.
Creativity is the highest human function. Human beings are endowed with
free will and imagination. This freedom and imagination, if exercised with
responsibility, enables each individual to become a cause of the future and
not merely an effect of the past. To be a creative and positive cause in life is to
walk the path toward Personal Power. Creativity frees one from the prison of
regrets for past deeds done and left undone. Men and women were born to
be creative - this is their endowment, their birthright, and their destiny.
Creativity is the principle of renewal, the perpetual fountain of youth. Creativity
is an approach to life which renders fresh, original, and meaningful everything
we do, think, and feel. One can even wash a floor creatively. One person
broke the monotony of driving to work each day by writing down alternative
routes on separate pieces of paper, placing these in a jar and choosing a
different one each day. Thus, the simple act of going to work was turned into a
creative exercise in which an individual explored and enjoyed the city he lived
in.
In the most simple and mundane acts, we can exercise originality and reap
the benefits of each adventure. One can be creative with ideas, colors,
sounds, materials, food, human relationships, and spiritual quests. Through
creativity we utilize our unique capacities and express the originality of our
thoughts and our feelings in a constructive way. Through creativity, we reinvent
life out of life. In each act of creation we extend our Personal Power.
The art of thinking, the science of mental control, and the act of creativity
are interrelated processes which develop with practice and may be
significantly enhanced by several easily
adopted attitudes and techniques discussed in the following chapters.
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Chapter 18: OBSERVATION AND DETACHMENT
"Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but
thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry,
prophecy, and religion - all in one."
- John Ruskin
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are
really rearranging their prejudices."
- Edward R. Murrow
"None can be free who is slave to and is governed by his passions."
- Pythagoras
The capacity to observe ourselves and our surroundings using the senses
with which nature has endowed us, is the foundation for all learning and
personal development. Observation lies at the heart of art, science, and
education. It is the essence of all discovery, creativity, and achievement. The
quality and scope of our thinking is rooted in observation.
The capacity for observation is like a magical mirror in which we may

perceive our surroundings, ourselves, and the interaction between the two.
Self-awareness (self-observation), leads to self-knowledge, a cornerstone of
Personal Power. Mental control and creative thinking are enhanced through
our ability to monitor our own thoughts and to witness the cause-and-effect
process between ourselves and our environment. Observe the effects which
your moods, words, and behavior have on others and vice versa. Life is a book
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and every moment is a page filled with significance. The myriad opportunities
of life can be seized and the dangers avoided only if we are attentive and
alert to life's signs. The capacity for observation includes a broad consciousness
and alert awareness which allows us to respond to people and events not with
conditioned reflexes but with conscious co- measurement; that is, with
thoughts, feelings, and actions that are appropriate to the occasion. With this
advantage, we are not trapped by surprises or by our own unanticipated
(reflexive) responses to situations. Observation is the key to discrimination,
wisdom, and success.
The talent for observation grows with our sense of responsibility which
Ambrose Bierce defined in the Devil's Dictionary as "A detachable burden
easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbour. In
the days of astrology, it was customary to unload it upon a star." Carelessness,
lightmindedness, rashness, a lack of kindness, or the failure to observe a simple
courtesy can tear the delicate fabric of human relationships and result in
hardship and tragedy. In his book, The Abyssinian Difficulty, Sir Darrell Bates
relates how one of Victorian Britain's less auspicious imperial battles was
precipitated by a simple discourtesy and resulted in death and humiliation. The
story concerns Britain's powerful military invasion, in 1867-68, of the medieval
nation of Ethiopia in order to free about 60 European missionaries, artisans, and
consular personnel who had been imprisoned in a remote mountain fortress by
the Emperor Theodorus, "The Son of Solomon, the Slave of Christ, the King of all
the Kings of Ethiopia". The British military force was there to "punish" their captor.
The cause of this contretemps was royal rudeness - Queen Victoria's
disinclination to observe a diplomatic courtesy by not acknowledging a
friendly letter from Theodorus. The result was anger and embarrassment: the
prisoners, when released, were found by their hungry, sweaty, exhausted
saviors to be beautifully clothed and fashionably monocled and to have been
living in comfort, attended by several servants each. The Emperor, confused
and despairing, acknowledged the British victory by blowing out his brains with
a pistol inscribed to him by Victoria.49
The powers of observation grow with vigilance and practice. Shut your eyes:
can you enumerate and describe in detail the objects on your desk? In your
room? Are you aware of the colors, sounds, scents, and textures around you?
After you have met someone, can you remember the look in the eyes, the
timbre of the voice, the grace of the gait, or the firmness of the handshake?
Observation is the basis of memory, judgement, and future action. To some
people, all Chinese or Blacks look alike. Such ignorance results not only from
prejudice but also from completely undeveloped capacities for observation.
To be attentive is a function of sensitivity as well as desire and will. As it is said:
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there are none so blind and deaf as those who do not wish to see or hear.
Pay attention to first impressions. Observe as much as possible in yourself, in

others, and in your surroundings. Make up games for yourself that test and
develop your powers of observation and memory (recall). Observation leads
to independence of judgment. The more you can see for yourself, the less you
need to rely upon the opinions and judgments of others and the more self-
reliant you will become. Independent thinking increases Personal Power.
Attention to details in one's work leads to improved product quality and

success. Contemporary Japanese goods have an international reputation for
precision, reliability, and durability. The world-wide success of Japanese
industrial products owes much to the Japanese character trait of paying
attention to details. "Pursuing the last grain of rice in the corner of the lunch
box" is a Japanese saying which describes, a touch disparagingly, their
propensity to be overscrupulous. This trait translates into the ceaseless efforts of
managers and workers to attain "zero defects" in production. The Japanese
idea of quality means error- free operation. The pursuit of perfection through
the constant observation of details leads to success. Japan is a country where
a vast population must meet its needs in a small geographical area with
limited resources. The challenge of scarcity leads to meticulousness in
awareness and the optimum utilization of resources.
Love stimulates observation. If you love your work, you will be attentive to
the details of your labour. If you love nature, you will learn to delight in the
infinite variety of her forms
and functions. If you love people, you will enjoy observing their habits and
eccentricities. If you love life, you will consecrate its finest moments. The gifted
English actor, Alec McCowen, relates an anecdote about his grandly
eccentric father who savored the simple pleasures of life with the dramatic
flourish of a performing gourmet and the solemnity of a saint. Whenever he
observed something which struck him as wonderful, as especially fulfilling, such
as a beautiful scene in nature or a precious moment of family unity and
rejoicing, he would order a stop to whatever was happening and exclaim,
"THIS IS IT!" Immediately, everything and everyone would come to a sudden
halt - whether it was a country outing in the car or a family dinner - and
everyone present was compelled to observe and silently appreciate the
magnificent experience of that moment. Alec McCowen's father brought to
the observation of life a unique combination of immense humor, imagination,
and solemnity which inspired him to savor the most simple experiences and to
make precious the fleeting moments of existence.50
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The close relationship between love and observation shows that we

perceive not only with the mind but through the eyes of heart as well. What
we love and care for, we are more attentive towards. Love, sensitivity, and
observation are mutually reinforcing. Alert and conscious observation to the
"Book of Life" leads to knowledge, wisdom, and Personal Power.
When, through passion or possessiveness, the mind is attached to the object

of perception, it lacks the freedom and objectivity to see the truth and the
flexibility to manoeuvre.
Detachment does not mean lack of feeling or involvement but rather the
control of one's passions and the capacity to witness oneself in the midst of life.
"The trouble with most people", wrote Walter Duranty, "is that they think with
their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds."
When a person dives into the water, he does so (hopefully), with the
purpose of swimming and not drowning. So it is with human relationships and
endeavors. To enjoy life and to fulfill oneself, it is not enough to put one big toe
in the water - one must take the plunge. Detachment is that facility to look
before you leap and, once you surface, to keep your head above water. This
means to observe before you think and to think before you speak and act.
Observation and thought are the silver reins controlling our emotions. Without
this control, our words and actions are subject to compulsion, desperation, and
carelessness. Pythagoras said that "None can be free who is slave to and is
governed by his emotions." Passion provides the power for our actions but
thought controls and guides that power. Detachment is the finely tuned
balance between thought and feeling, the mind and the heart.
Detachment is a power which is decreased by competition, ambition, and

acquisitiveness. It is not necessary to compete in order to achieve. Whereas
ambition is dependent upon external rewards, aspiration seeks inner fulfillment.
Acquisitiveness is need inflated to greed. Greed is never satisfied; ambition is
imprisoned by external rewards missing the inner fulfillment of the process; and
competition seeks attainment at the expense of
the failure of others. Personal Power is advanced by detachment from
rewards or the need to win. When we do things out of impersonal love or from
necessity, we are free from dependence upon rewards, from the pitfalls of
pride, and from intoxication with success which carries one on waxen wings
toward the sun. Such dependence destroys detachment and weakens our
Personal Power. Over 2,000 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu
wrote, in a poem entitled The Need to Win, of the loss of Personal Power which
follows in the wake of competition, ambition, and acquisitiveness:
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"When an archer is shooting for nothing

He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or he sees two targets -
He is out of his mind!
His skill has not changed. But the prize

Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting -
And the need to win
Drains him of power."51
Two qualities of character which facilitate detachment are impersonality

and tolerance. Tolerance is open-mindedness and a willingness not to hold
oneself in judgment over other people. Intolerance, especially religious
intolerance, rooted in ignorance and the need to dominate, has been the
major cause of evil and violence in the world. One may evaluate the worth of
a religion according to its tolerance of and respect for other spiritual paths and
customs. The broader the tolerance, the greater
the religion. In the Bhagavad Gita, that wonderful pearl of the Eastern
scriptures, it is said; "Man comes to Me by various paths, but by whatsoever
path man comes to Me, on that path I welcome him, for all paths are Mine."
The acquisition of tolerance requires something more than the mere ability
to endure or to suffer others. Underlying the spirit of tolerance is magnanimity -
a nobility of thought and feeling which is capable of rising above pettiness or
meanness and is generous in overlooking injury and insult. The ancient Greeks
believed that their gods occasionally visited the Earth to live among human
beings. The Greeks, not knowing when or where one of their immortal gods
might appear, took the precaution of treating strangers as possible gods-in-
disguise and met them with kindness, respect, and generosity - that is, with
magnanimity. Just as the gods were the benefactors of the ancient Greeks, so
a complete stranger may be one's benefactor in a time of need. Even a
supposed enemy or "the town fool" may turn out to be your helper in a
moment of distress. All people have experienced magnanimity from the least
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expected quarters. Therefore, it is a wise policy - a reflex of magnanimity -

which looks upon each human being, regardless of appearance, language, or
religion, as a possible benefactor, a god-in-disguise. Magnanimity serves
detachment by helping us to rise above small prejudices which, like grains of
sand in the eye, obscure our mental vision.
Impersonality is a trait of Personal Power which protects one from being

unduly swayed by either criticism or flattery and from getting unnecessarily
entangled in the personal lives of
other people. When the "personal" (and particularly the romantic or sexual),
aspect of relationships spills over into times and places where it does not
legitimately belong, complications inevitably follow which interfere with the
detachment necessary for mental control and for the effective conduct of
one's work. To be easily flattered or offended by the words or gestures of
others is, likewise, to lose a measure of self-control.
Taken together, impersonality and tolerance enable one to suspend

judgment of others. Judgments readily become prejudgments or prejudices.
When we judge others, we not only "fix" them (ignoring the possibility of their
changing), we ourselves lose the capacity for objective observation and
detached understanding. Human beings are frequently offended by the words
or actions of other individuals who do not consciously intend an offense.
People are prone to many sorts of moods - even the barometric pressure
affects our temperament. A person subject to fits of anger (often derived from
unresolved childhood frustrations with parents), or other negative moods will
often strike out at any person in the vicinity. By not taking such outbursts
personally and by responding with compassion and understanding rather than
with anger, you keep detached and calm and clear- headed. If the other
person raises his voice in anger, lower yours in kindness (not pity!), and control.
This is an effective way to subdue the uncontrolled passion of an angry person.
One should be cautious in attributing motives to others. Shyness and

insecurity, for example, will often hide behind a mask of arrogance or
pomposity. Fear and anxiety may be masked by anger. (How often have
mothers threatened to "kill" their children out of fear for their well-being!).
Fatigue is responsible for many bad moods. People's private lives are filled with
all manner of physical ailments, sorrows, and worries. Usually, their offenses are
not personally intended but are simply reflexes of past experiences unrelated
to yourself or your situation. To over react to unconscious, unintended, or
misinterpreted rudeness or aggression is to chase a ghost in the mirage of a
desert. People would do well to keep two separate drawers in their filing cabi-
nets marked: "Enemies Real" and "Enemies Imagined".
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During difficult and stressful times, people become particularly sensitive and
are easily offended not only by the least disapproval (real or imagined), of
their conduct but even by simple advice (unless it corresponds with their
desires). The best way to bring about a change in others is to become, yourself,
a personal example of what you would want to see in another. Most of the
problems in the world are caused by attempts to force changes in other
people - in their beliefs, habits, and customs. At the present time, people are
especially tense and require a cautious, careful, and wise influence. One of
the important keys to cooperation and harmony is timing. What is impossible to
elicit from someone at one particular time, may be possible at another time.
Possibility (success), is a function of good timing and timing is a talent
belonging to patience. The patient person is detached and can guage,
therefore, the proper moment which will bring the most positive results.
One of the greatest enemies of detachment is the senseless condemnation

entailed in idle gossip. If the gossip is true, condemnation closes the door to the
possibilities of a person's change and development. However, not only is much
gossip unjust and untrue, it serves to fill the denunciator with those negative
thoughts and feelings which weaken the thymus gland and give rise to
symptoms of stress. To be preoccupied with the real or apparent weaknesses
of others, is to identify with those weaknesses. Alternatively, when you look for
and discover the strengths in other poeple, you simultaneously fill your own
consciousness with the positive energies associated with those strengths. Praise
and encouragement are mutually beneficial. Condemnation is mutually
debilitating. It is always healthier and more useful to light one candle than to
curse the darkness. Whenever you feel the impulse to disparage another
person, stop and seek instead some imperfection in yourself which requires
improvement. That will be a far more constructive exercise. There is nothing
noble, says an old Hindu proverb, in being superior to some other person. The
true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.
A concern for and striving into the future strengthens our detachment. The
fears, doubts, regrets, and grievances which imprison people are all related to
the past. The future contains all aspiration and the potential realization of all
dreams. Creativity belongs to the future. The more we direct the arrows of our
imagination, desire, and will into the future, the more freedom and
detachment we will experience from the difficulties of the present and of the
past.
Detachment enables an individual to preserve mental and emotional

equilibrium and tranquility in the sea of chaotic thinking and turbulent emotions
140
characteristic of modern urban life. The human consciousness is a boundless

ocean which, according to its depth and calmness, mirrors the reality around
us. When the surface of this ocean is tranquil, the consciousness contains the
power to reflect - that is, to perceive - truth and reality. When the ocean of
consciousness is made muddy or turbulent by chaotic thinking and
uncontrolled passions, the capacity for true and accurate perception is
distorted, greatly diminishing the ability to act and react wisely and
constructively. "Quiet minds", wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, "cannot be
perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private
pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm."
Detachment facilitates the calm which saves one from the danger of
acting out of panic or desperation. Hidy Ochiai, the great karate master, was
trained in the spiritual discipline of Zen Buddhism to preserve calm even under
the most harrowing conditions. He remembers, for example, an experience in
Japan when he was sitting with a group of monks in a mountain hut and was
telling them about his experiences in America. Suddenly, an earthquake
began to shake everything. They continued sitting there talking, occasionally
deflecting debris that fell in their direction. Finally, they quietly decided it would
be best to leave. They calmly got up and filed out one by one. As soon as the
last man left, the whole structure crumbled. Ochiai later noted: "This calmness
comes from knowing your existence. This is the spirit of Zen."
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Chapter 19: SELF-CONFIDENCE
"They do all because they think they can."
- Vergil
Creativity demands courage; mental control requires self- confidence.

When Hidy Ochiai said that "This calmness comes from knowing your own
existence," he was indicating a courageous self- confidence which permeates
every cell of one's being. Confidence in oneself is a trust, an assurance of mind
and heart in one's abilities and fortunes. Confidence is a self-reliant boldness, a
daring of thought, feeling, and action.
When Albert Einstein was developing his Special Theory of Relativity (which
he published at the age of 26), he had the daring to dismiss a good deal of
the work that was going on around him, because he knew - his intuition told
him - that the people doing it, as great as they were, had their minds riveted
on the wrong questions.52 The thinking of great achievers and creative
geniuses is marked, above all, by boldness - a courageous self-confidence.
The biggest obstacles to self-confidence are envy, self- doubt, and fear.
Envy is a feeling of discontent and ill-will because of another person's apparent
advantages. Like the rust which eats away at iron, envy consumes self-
confidence by way of negative comparison. From envy grows slander,
injustice, and crime. We do not build positive qualities of character from
negative feelings. The opposite of envy is admiration which frees one to
emulate what is attractive in another person. Self- confidence is strengthened
by positive mental association with (admiration of), the fine and heroic qualities
in other individuals.
Like envy, self-doubt wears away our inner purpose and resolve. Those who
have doubt in themselves also have doubt in everyone and everything else.
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Doubt is like a tear in a balloon. Doubt is a pocket full of holes in which nothing
precious can be kept. Doubt is hesitation, wavering, uncertainty. Faint-hearted
doubt dissipates the Life Energy and undermines self-confidence. Doubt gives
rise to confusion of thought and feeling. When doubt causes feelings to
become unlcear and thoughts to lose their crystalline integrity, Personal Power
is weakened. (Doubt is used here in the sense of a chronic lack of conviction in
oneself or in one's future. There is another kind of doubt, however, which can
be very useful. This is the occasional doubt prompted by conscience or
intuition. This sort of doubt is a warning: "When you are in doubt whether an
action is good or bad, abstain from it." - Zoroaster).
Doubt is contagious. If you have a project you want to undertake or a

dream you wish to fulfill, and you discuss your hopes with another person (a
parent, teacher, or friend), who doubts (even slightly), your ability to carry out
your plans, you will become infected by that doubt and it will undermine your
self-confidence. The best way to kill a project is to talk it all over town before it
is completed. A plan which is not disclosed to the disbelief of others gathers
the necessary power (self- confidence), for fulfillment. Once completed, a
project is unaffected by the doubts of others. Reveal your intentions and prog-
ress only to the most trusted ones who have complete faith in your abilities. If
there is just one person in the whole world who believes in you entirely, you
can accomplish anything.
Edmund Burke wrote that "No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its
powers of acting and reasoning as fear." As we have seen from earlier
discussions, fear not only weakens our Personal Power, it also attracts the very
thing it seeks to escape. (Animals are especially sensitive to the human
chemistry of fear, as any experienced animal trainer knows. An aggressive
animal will attack a person which it senses is afraid but will keep its distance
from a fearless individual). The magnetic force of fear resides in its capacity to
fill the imagination with the object of its dread. In any contest in which the will
and the imagination are opposed, the imagination always triumphs.
Fear and doubt are closely related because fear arises out of uncertainty -
the lack of self-confidence in one's ability to cope with real or imagined
difficulties. It has been said that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. It is,
indeed, this spectral quality of fear which fills up the imagination, freezing
thoughts and paralyzing the will. The ancient Greek philospher Epictetus
commented wisely that "It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the
fear of pain or death." By overcoming the fear of pain, the mind secures the
power to trigger the secretion of pituitary endorphins, the body's own natural
opiate, which inhibits the emotional response to pain and, therefore, to
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suffering.
People who have always been afraid to die actually become calm and
serenely accepting as they draw close to death itself. In 1892, Albert von St.
Gallen Heim, a geology professor at the University of Zurich, published his
classic scientific study of victims of accidental falls. His Remarks on Fatal Falls
was based on 25 years of experience on the mountains and hundreds of inter-
views with fall survivors: climbers, roofers, and various accident victims. In
almost 95 per cent of his interviews, he found that:
"no grief was felt, nor was there paralyzing fright of the sort that can
happen in instances of lesser danger (eg., outbreak of fire). There was
no anxiety, no trace of despair, no pain, but rather calm seriousness,
profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness and sense
of surety. Mental activity became enormous, rising to a hundred-fold
velocity or intensity. The relatonships of events and their probable
outcomes were overviewed with objective clarity. No confusion
entered at all. Time became greatly expanded. The individual acted
with lightning quickness in accord with accurate judgment of his
situation. In many cases there followed a sudden review of the
individual's entire past; and finally the person falling often heard
beautiful music and fell in a superbly blue heaven containing roseate
cloudlets. The consciousness was painlessly extinguished, usually at
the moment of impact, and the impact was, at the most, heard but
never painfully felt. Apparently hearing is the last of the senses to be
extinguished."
Professor Heim described one of his own mountain climbing falls (in which
he impulsively grabbed for his hat as it flew off during a descent of the
Fehlalp), when he dropped 66 feet and experienced a detailed recollection
of his alert efforts en route to remove his glasses and hang on to his alpenstock
for possible use in the rescue, worrying that he would miss his opening lecture
at the university, consoling his family in their grief.
"Then I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though
on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief
character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though
by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful without grief, with-
out anxiety and without pain. ... Elevated and harmonious thoughts
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dominated and united the individual images, and like magnificent

music a divine calm swept through my soul."
Heim added that the approach to death is more painful, at the time, to the
faller's companions. "Often the spectator, incapacitated by paralyzing horror
and quaking in body and soul, carries away from the experience a lasting
trauma," in contrast to the faller himself. "I must even testify that the memory of
a cow's fall is still painful for me while my own misfortune is registered ... as a
pleasant transfiguration ..."
The studies and reminiscences of "the ebullient if somewhat accident-prone

Professor Heim" were written about by Michael Kernan in a Smithsonian article
entitled "Remembrances of those who fell from the heights".53 Mr. Kernan's
contemporary description of fall victims, including those who have fallen out of
airplanes and survived, corroborates those effects of serenity and calm
acceptance of death noted by Professor Heim. Many of the messages of fear
and terror of death propagated by the modern media more truly reflect the
attitude of the spectators than of the victims themselves.
For many people, death casts the ultimate shadow of fear. But individuals
who have come close to death in war, in accident, or illness, and have
survived, tend to lose their fear not only of death but of almost everything else
as well. Studies by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Dr. Raymond Moody, Jr., and
others, report that patients who have had a death experience - and returned -
are never afraid to die because they realize that death is not the end but a
new beginning. Indeed, Kubler-Ross found that the more fully people had
lived, the less afraid they were to die. On the other hand, individuals who
showed the greatest fear of death were those who had been afraid to live
fully and adventureously.
My mother spoke to me about her own actual "death" while giving birth to a
still-born child. At the time of the delivery, her life signs had ceased and the
presiding doctor stood weeping over the loss of a friend and patient. Years
later, she reported to me that, at the moment of her death, her consciousness
was fully alive and was being drawn into a "circular, infinite space of beautiful
pink light." She experienced herself as "out of body and out of time." She said
that she felt a "total, inexpressible peace and a wonderful sense of
inevitability." Her thought, however, of the living son she would leave behind
prompted my mother to force herself to return to physical life. She regained
consciousness soon after "dying" and lived to become an accomplished writer.
The courage of her creativity grew out of her conquest of the ultimate fear -
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the fear of death.
It is impossible, someone once remarked, that anything so natural, so

necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed as an
evil to mankind. In the Talmud, the Jewish religious commentaries, death is
likened to a ship returning home to port after a long and hazardous journey.
For the many friends and relatives waiting at the harbour, the safe return of the
ship is a cause of joy and celebration. In contrast, the birth of a child is
compared to a ship leaving the safety of a port for a long, uncertain journey
full of dangers and difficulties. The departure of the boat is a subject of
concern and anxiety for friends and relatives left behind. Thus, are birth and
death regarded today in parts of the East: death representing the final
homecoming; and birth, the beginning of a perilous journey.
A large proportion of the world's population believes explicitly in

reincarnation and almost all people believe in the immortality of
consciousness. The law of reincarnation was a cornerstone of ancient religions
and was part of Christianity until its rejection in the sixth Century A.D. by the
Council of Constantinople whose members were preoccupied with the
weightier "spiritual" issues of whether woman had a soul and how many angels
could be placed on the head of a pin. In the world of modern physics, nothing
dies: solids turn into gases, matter into energy. The principle of the
interchangeability of matter and energy contained in Einstein's famous
equation (E=MC2), has been a tenet of all religions since the dawn of culture:
the transmutation of consciousness (soul, spirit, mind), into the physical being at
birth and back again at death. Individuals who have
faced death and lived to report about it, concur that behind the darkest door
may be the greatest light. By such testimony is the absurdity of the fear of
death dispelled.
The fears of pain and death are equalled, in people's imagination, only by
the fear of truth. The difference between self- confidence and egotism
(arrogance), is that self-confidence is based upon a true knowledge of
oneself, whereas egotism is a false confidence which fears self-knowledge and
distorts truth to protect a fragile self-image. Egotism represents the smallest
circle of Personal Power. Humility, in contrast, co-exists with true self-
confidence. Humility is not merely a practiced virtue but a genuine feeling of
universal brotherhood. The humble person sees himself in all things. The
opposite of humility is pride and haughtiness based on comparison with others.
True humility is the quintessence of individuality because it does not require
comparison for self-worth. Whoever is afraid to lose his individuality does not
possess it. Confidence is fearlessness. Humility is an openness to learning and to
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personal growth. Real self- confidence, like humility, is open and fearless
before the truth.
Children learn to fear the truth (in the family and in school), when their
weaknesses and failures are more noticed than their strengths and
achievements and if criticism and punishment take precedence over love and
encouragement. In order to preserve their dignity in adversity, children learn
deception and insincerity which soon become habitual ways of dealing with a
hypocritical and unkind world.
Contemporary civilization is so given over to ignorance,

superstition, and dishonesty, that truth often appears as a solitary traveller in a
desert of dissimulation. Much that is said or written today is either ignorance or
deliberate falsehood perpetrated for personal gain. In addition, people are
prepared to accept or advocate any falsehood as long as they don't appear
foolish in the eyes of others. But the denial and fear of truth are the worst form
of imprisonment. The biblical saying that "the truth shall set you free" is based
upon the Personal Power which accompanies integrity - that is, the total
integration of motive, thought, word, and deed. Sincerity is the foundation of
invincible self-confidence. Dishonesty, deception, and insincerity divide a
person, thus diminishing his Personal Power. Self-deception (when the
unconscious believes one thing and the conscious self another), is equally
depowering. The most harmful type of person, however, is the one who fully
believes his own falsehoods. "Nothing in the world is more dangerous," said
Martin Luther King, Jr., "than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
Adherence to sincerity and truthfulness in motive, thought, word, and deed
gives strength to a person's conviction. To be convincing is a reflex not only of
truth but of Personal Power as well. True self-confidence gives one the
freedom to be sincere. Practiced sincerity augments Personal Power by
underscoring our faith in our motives and actions and by permitting us to think
and act as whole individuals.
Honesty is the theme of Frank Capra's highly successful film "Mr. Deeds Goes
to Town". Capra describes the universal appeal of the character trait of
honesty: "How powerful is the quality of
honesty! Honest men, of any color or tongue, are trusted and loved. They
attract others like magnets attract iron filings. An honest man carries with him
his own aura, crown, army, wealth, happiness, and social standing. He carries
them all in the noblest of all titles: an honest man." The hero of the film, Long-
fellow Deeds of Mandrake Falls, was played by Gary Cooper. Capra said that
Cooper's innate integrity was so strong, so sincere, that it "surmounted bad
scripts, bad films, and directors who had to stand on curbs to look him in the
147
eye."54
Sincerity and simplicity are two powerful magnets. The great art of human
relationships is based upon them. This forgotten art which requires so much
sensitivity, vigilance, and harmony is essential for the growth of Personal Power.
Sincerity, derived from truthfulness, (however eccentric the truth may seem),
holds an attraction for other people. Somerset Maugham wrote a short story
called Jane about a plain middle-aged woman from the English provinces
who became the toast of London's fashionable social set simply by telling the
truth, a habit which made her the funniest and most convincing woman in
town. The truths which she spoke in her casual manner were perceived to be
so unusual that Jane's listeners regarded her as the most delightful and
humorous individual at their social gatherings. Plain Jane became a woman of
success and glamour and married into the aristocracy. The truth set her free.
Real simplicity (not simplemindedness), is the height of sophistication. Lacking
artifice and the need for embellishment, simplicity and sincerity speak
powerfully to others. These are pillars for our self-confidence which strengthen
the power of our thinking.
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Chapter 20: OPTIMISM
"Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up

under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irrestible way
through a thousand obstacles."
- Washington Irving
Optimism derives from the Latin "optimus" meaning best. Webster's

Unabridged Dictionary defines optimism as: "The tendency to take the most
hopeful view of matters or to expect the best outcome in any circumstance;
(the) practice of looking on the bright side of things". The opposite of optimism
is pessimism which comes from the Latin "pessimus" meaning worst. Pessimism is
"the tendency to expect misfortune or the worst outcome in any circumstance;
the practice of looking on the dark side of things."
"The mind", wrote John Milton, "is its own place, and in itself can make a
heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven." Clearly, human beings have a choice of
looking on the bright side or the dark side of life. If the attitude of optimism
sometimes gets knocked around by present realities, that of pessimism shuts
the door to all possibilities and so often dooms the individual to failure. It was
optimism which opened Dr. Muller's imagination to the possibilities for his daring
escape from the Gestapo Optimism is an openness and readiness which
embraces the new and is prepared for the unexpected. Optimism is fearless
and self-confident. Optimism is an indestructible armor against the challenges
of adversity and distress.
The qualities of openness and readiness characteristic of optimism lead one

to make unexpected discoveries and embrace new ideas. Creativeness is the
basis of evolution. Our creative powers are strengthened by cheerfulness. Joy is
a special wisdom and cheerfulness is a special technique. The enhancement
of our Life Energy arises out of cheerfulness and creativity.
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Optimism, cheerfulness, and joy are strengthened by autosuggestion and

by mental association with ideals such as truth, beauty, and goodness.
Pessimism, depression, and other negative attitudes and moods result from the
mental limitations imposed from the past. Two concepts can open wide the
vistas of the optimistic mind: the future and infinity. As truth surpasses the
imagination so is the future beyond dreams. The discoveries of modern science
astound the imagination - a hundred years ago the inventions of today were
beyond the wildest dreams of people. All creativity is directed towards the
future. All possibilities are contained in the future. It is our striving into the future
which gives meaning, purpose, and vibrant energy to the present.
The past is dead; the present is too fleeting to grasp; but the future is infinite.
The conquests of outer space have opened the eyes of men and women
to the infinity of worlds, forms, and possibilities. Simply to imagine with the mind
or to feel with the heart the endlessness of space, of suns, planets. and
constellations, is to release the consciousness from the fetters of limitation and
gravity. Imagine a string of pearls going out into space, past stars and galaxies
forever and ever and ever into the eternal reaches of the universe. Such
expansiveness of thought opens the mind to an infinitude of possibilities and
solutions. The feeling of infinity is like a massage for the brain, freeing it from the
tensions of limitation. In infinity, the word "can't" does not exist.
The heuristic value of the concept of infinity is that it removes the idea of
constraint from the perfecting of character, from the realization of
achievement, and from the evolution of existence. In the thought of infinity is
implied the Talmudic saying that every ending has a new beginning. From such
wisdom is born the courage of perserverance and the secret of patience:
"Never give up! If adversity presses,

Providence wisely has mingled the cup,
And the best counsel, in all your distresses,
Is the stout watchword of `Never give up'".(55)
Many of the space-travelling astronauts who glimpsed infinity, who saw the
"larger picture", affirmed that their consciousnesses were transformed by that
profound cosmic experience. They were privileged to have seen the incredible
beauty of planet earth sailing through space at 60,000 miles an hour against
the indigo cosmos draped in myriad stars. Their perception of the great beauty
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and harmony of the universe gave birth to a sudden expansion of awareness,

a shift in perspective entailing a sense of well-being and joy, a mellowness, a
feeling of universal brotherhood, and a deep caring for the future of all life on
earth - "Riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the
unending night - brothers who see now they are truly brothers." (Archibald
MacLeish). So far, only a few individuals have known the privilege of space
travel; but all people may, through the infinite universe of thought, travel
through the ether of the imagination into infinity to accomplish a rebirth of
consciousness, a renewed perspective, and an uplifting awareness of shared
life on "spaceship earth".
Unconditional love is all-embracing, the heart's echo of infinity. The beautiful

and sublime in art, science, and religion likewise transport the consciousness
into infinity beyond the boundaries of the mundane. The consciousness of men
and women is infinite in its potential for love, understanding, and creativity.
Through the realization of infinity, one becomes a citizen of the universe,
expanding to an endless degree the orbits of Personal Power and revealing
countless solutions to life's dilemmas.
Optimism harnessed to the idea of the infinite future stimulates mobility of

consciousness. In this mobility is contained our capacity for change, growth,
and resourcefulness. The more adaptable the consciounsess - that is, the freer
it becomes from the twin tyrannies of personal habit and public convention -
the richer will be the contexts of experience and the levels of meaning in life. A
genius has been defined (by the gifted Irish mathematician, J.W.N. Sullivan), as
a person "rich in recoverable contexts". Few individuals have combined so
powerfully and creatively the indomitable spirit of optimism with the universality
of thought and emotion as the German composer Ludwig Beethoven - a true
genius in Sullivan's sense. Suffering intensely all his life from unrequited love,
physical illnesses, poverty, and a growing, ultimately impenetrable deafness,
Beethoven developed an invincible optimism which is expressed so
magnificently in the heroic and sublime qualities of his music. Rare indeed are
such artists who are able to evoke in the human emotions such poignant
tenderness, depth of passion, or spiritual unity of feeling which resolves our
deepest worries and conflicts.
Beethoven suffered intensely as the difficult circumstances of his life

combined with a nature that was sincere, highly sensitive, and passionately
emotional. Sullivan, in his classic book on Beethoven, refers to the composer as
one of the very true poets of the heart:
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"This very intense and rich emotional nature was, in truth, very simple and
very pure. There were no feigned or borrowed emotions, and
nerve-storms never took the place of feelings. He had no need to
complicate his joy with bitterness or to distort his rapture with
cynicism. ... (He is) unique amongst composers not only for the
depth, importance and number of his inner states, but for his
power to realize them and to give them unambiguous expression.
... To sound such depths as Beethoven sounded one must not only
have the depths but also great integrity and a great feeling of
responsibility towards one's art."(56)
Like Einstein, Beethoven was not educable in the traditional sense. He

accepted none of the schemes of thought or conduct of his time: As one
musical critic observed: "Beethoven the composer stood upon his own territory,
followed his own tastes and impulses, wrote and wrought subject to no other
control." When Wagner referred to Beethoven as "a universe", he was pointing
to the power of his music to transport the listener's consciousness beyond the
realm of restriction into the infinite.
The immense Personal Power that imbues Beethoven's music grew out of
the strength of his self-confident optimism which expanded in direct proportion
to his suffering. Listening to the Eroica Symphany or to the Emperor Concerto,
one feels and is uplifted by his optimistic courage and sense of heroism.
Beethoven's suffering, self-honesty, and optimism filled him with a deep
compassion for all mankind which he expressed with intense, sublime, and
unifying joy in the theme of universal brotherhood in his Ninth Symphony.
Supporting the magnificent structure of Beethoven's life and work are the
four pillars of Personal Power. His courageous attitude toward life's challenges is
embodied in his resolve "to take fate by the throat" regarding his increasing
deafness as a young man. His creative patience enabled him to withstand
long years of adversity, remaining completely loyal to his own experience, and
to transmute the fear, frustration, and anger of his life into the courage,
optimism, love, and beauty in his music. His personal suffering gave him
compassion for all life which he expressed in his great responsibility toward his
art as a deep desire to uplift people. His creative genius transformed the
dissonance of life's experiences into the profound and unifying harmony of his
music. The more intense the challenges in his life, the more powerful became
his striving toward the highest ideals of heroism, beauty, and universal
brotherhood.
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Optimism is an irrepressible enthusiasm for life which kindles the fires of

achievement and nurtures the quest for Personal Power.
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Chapter 21: INTEGRATION
"The more a man is at one with himself and becometh of

single heart,so much the more and higher things doth he
understand without labour; for that he receiveth the light of
wisdom from above."
- Thomas a` Kempis
The universal appeal of Beethoven's music is its power to uplift and to

integrate. To integrate means to make whole, to unify. The power of
integration is the impulse at the heart of beauty, knowledge, and spiritual
quests - to be integrated within oneself and with all that exists. Integration is
related to the concept of harmony. Human beings who have forsaken in their
outer life the path of harmony and cooperation lose, in their inner life, that
principle of integration which stimulates healing and physical well-being,
improves memory and accelerates learning, gives grace and agility to our
movements, and brings calm and serenity to our existence.
Harmony, as one of the four pillars of Personal Power, is the key to

integration - to the synchronization and communication between the left and
right cerebral hemispheres, between the conscious and the unconscious,
between the head and the heart, and between the mind and the physical
body. The integrated balance and interchange between the different areas
of the mind and between the mind and the body underly the Personal Power
contained in the remarkable physical feats of the karate master Hidy Ochiai, in
the beautiful music of Beethoven, and in the courage and ingenuity of Dr.
Muller's escape from the Gestapo. In each example, the capacities for mental
control and creative thinking were enhanced by the principle of integration.
There are rhythms to our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions. There are
various rhythms or pulses in our body. All our atoms vibrate in rhythms. When
these various rhythms are consonant - beating in harmony with one another -
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the individual is functioning as a whole person. This holistic integration magnifies

Personal Power. When the rhythms or pulses of our mind and body become
unsynchronized because of a slowing down or speeding up of certain of these
vibrations, the integration of the whole is offset and coordination and effective
performance are diminished. When, for example, certain brain rhythms are too
slow (we are tired or lazy), or when the heart beat is too fast (we are fearful or
angry), then our capacities for clear thinking, creativity, and coordination are
weakened.
Earlier, we examined some of the effects of music on the rhythms of mind

and body. We saw how the rhythms of some forms of music are debilitating.
They weaken the muscles, thymus gland, and other organs as well as causing
"switching" - an upset in the balance or synchronization between the left
cerebral hemisphere governing logic, reason, and analysis and the right
cerebral hemisphere concerned with intuition, imagination, and creativity. This
imbalance gives rise to "one-sided" thinking.
Some forms of music have the power to transmit vigor, inspiration, and
balance to the listener. Music therapy is a well- proven method of healing
mental and emotional illnesses. The therapeutic value of music has been
known and respected throughout history among the Egyptians, Hindus,
Chinese, Persians, and Greeks. Pythagoras cured many sicknesses - mental,
emotional, and physical - by writing music particularly for the suffering person.
The Pythagoreans started and completed each day with songs - those in the
morning were played to clear the mind from sleep and inspire it to the day's
activities; those in the evening were meant to create the relaxing calm
conducive to rest. For thousands of years, people have sung lullabies to put
children to sleep. The composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, wrote the Goldberg
Variations at the request of the Russian Envoy, Count Kayserling to cure his
insomnia. Whenever the Count was unable to sleep, he summoned his
harpsichordist, Johann Goldberg, to play Bach's composition. The Count was
so delighted with the results that he rewarded Bach with a substantial gift of
gold.
Music contains powerful forces for integration. According to the great

violinist Yehudi Menuhin:
"Music creates order out of chaos; for rhythm imposes unanimity upon
the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed and
harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous. Thus, as
confusion surrenders to order and noise to music, and as we through
music attain to that greater universal order which rests upon
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fundamental relationships of geometrical and mathematical

proportion, direction is supplied to mere repetitious time, power to the
multiplication of elements and purpose to random association."(57)
Certain kinds of baroque music are being used as an essential part of

new learning techniques which expand the mind's capacity to assimilate and
retain information. Students using these methods have been able to learn and
remember a new language in several months - and enjoy the process in the
bargain. In their book Superlearning, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder
describe these learning methods (Suggestology, Sophrology, Autogenics),
which combine music, suggestion, and rhythmic breathing together with the
variable intonation of the teacher's voice to create a state of relaxed
concentration. This learning process integrates the left and right cerebral
hemispheres and opens new communication channels between the conscious
and the unconscious and between the mind and the body. By removing the
tension and unpleasantness with which most people respond to learning (the
result of negative suggestions), the music (combined with positive suggestion or
image therapy), liberates and integrates the mind and body for holistic
learning.
Researchers discovered that the slow movements of music by Bach, Vivaldi,

Telemann, Corelli, and Handel have a potent rhythm of sixty beats per minute
which slows the pulse, relaxes the body, and harmonizes the mind to eliminate
tension and fatigue. These new stress-free techniques create a happy
condition for learning: relaxed concentration and alert awareness - an
optimum state of integration. These learning methods, utilizing the rhythmic
powers of music are being used to teach languages, train olympic skiers,
control pain, and facilitate healing.
As a teenager on his first transatlantic boat ride to America for his first
concert tour there, the celebrated polish-born pianist, Arthur Rubenstein,
became aware of the integrating and healing power of music during a rough
sea passage. After several sleepless nights and repeated bouts of seasickness,
Rubenstein struggled out of the fetid air of his cabin and headed for higher
ground in the lounge and promenade deck. However, for reasons of safety,
the doors to the deck were locked so he stayed in the lounge and tried to
play the piano. He discovered that when he played a piece with a strong
rhythm, he would breath with that particular rhythm and not with the heavy,
irregular up-and-down movements of the ship. To further confirm his theory, he
stayed in the lounge so that the piano would be immediately available in an
emergency. An obliging and music-loving steward brought him food. Other
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passengers, looking like hospital patients following an operation, filtered into

the lounge and stayed to listen to Rubenstein play. They said that even
hearing the music made them feel better.
Music has been shown to be effective in improving learning and

performance in the workplace. In Behavioral Kinesiology, Dr. John Diamond
describes the successful application of music to industrial engineering. A
manufacturing and repair plant for sophisticated electronic equipment, where
concentration and clarity of thinking are essential, was playing a good deal of
rock music on its continual music broadcast system. It was recommended that
this music be eliminated. The management changed to a different, more
relaxed and less aggressive tempo and discovered an immediate increase in
productivity and an equally pleasing decrease in mistakes, even though the
employees protested over the loss of their favorite music. (A surgeon friend of
mine, however, claims that only vigorous rock music helps to keep him awake
during a complex and arduous nine hour kidney operation he is occasionally
called on to perform).
In an age of constant electronic distraction, it is timely to call attention to

the value of silence and solitude - favorite companions of thought. The
indiscriminate use of music as background to other activities contributes to
noise pollution. The General Assembly of the International Music Council of
UNESCO passed a resolution unanimously condemning "the intolerable in-
fringement of individual freedom and of the right of everyone to silence,
because of the abusive use, in private and public places, of recorded and
broadcast music." Wisely chosen music can be as important to the dying as
to the living. Researchers at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital used music to
soften the pain and ease the anxiety of terminal patients. The Montreal study
showed that by promoting muscular relaxation and altering the patient's
mood, it also changed the person's perception of pain. It even became
possible to stop using pain-killers completely. Music helped to reduce loneliness
and eliminate the conspiracy of silence that frequently surrounds the dying
patient. Most of the patients in the Royal Victoria Hospital study suffered from
intractable pain and others from extreme fear. A young woman who had
been dynamic and extroverted was plagued by overwhelming pain and
panic. She had an attentive family who cared for her every need but neither
their presence nor reassurance could ease the anxiety. Eventually, a music
therapist was called in to see the patient. She prepared a tape of musical
selections that was designed to induce relaxation. The results were remarkable.
In a short time, the woman became relaxed and fell into a deep sleep. During
the final days she asked again and again for the tape to be played.
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Another patient, an elderly Russian woman, isolated by a language barrier,

had been extremely difficult to handle. Her therapist obtained a recording of
musical selections sung by a Russian choir. While it was being played, the
patient became alert and in French talked to the therapist about her early
background. Music opened up new channels of communication in the last
days before death.
A 19-year-old youth with advanced cancer had begged to die rather than
suffer any longer. He also found some peace in music. During his previous
admissions, he had only wanted to listen to rock music. But he soon became
intolerant of the repetitive beat. His therapist changed the pace and added
Bach, Schubert, and Mozart. These composers became his constant
companions toward the end. Whereas dissonance increases pain, sounds of
consonance in a major key can reduce pain.
Music has a profound effect on the human organism. An effective way of

overcoming a common cold, changing a mood and lifting your spirits is to
conduct vigorously along with some beautiful music. Such an exercise attunes
the bodily rhythms to those of the music. The vital power of musical conducting
can be gleaned from the fiery energy of aged conductors. While the average
age of death of the American male is around 70, at that age about 80
percent of conductors are still alive and working.
We respond to sound waves not just with our ears but with our entire being.
A deaf person can learn to distinguish the nature and intensity of different
sounds. So it is with color which we see not only with our eyes but respond to
with our whole body. As a deaf person can feel sound so a blind person can
feel different colors. In physics, color and sound are simply different wave
lengths of energy.
Color, like music, has the power to play upon our thoughts and feelings, to
stimulate the imagination, and to enhance or diminish the Life Energy. Color,
like music, is an entire "language" in itself. The evocative power of the
language of color is contained in the following description by Somerset
Maugham of a painting by Paul Gauguin:
"Gauguin. A fruit piece in the Gallery at Christiana. These are fruits,

mangoes, bananas, persimmons, in which the colour is so strange that
words can hardly tell what a troubling emotion they give; there are sombre
greens, opaque like a delicately-carved bowl in Chinese jade and yet with
a quivering lustre that suggests the palpitation of mysterious life; there are
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purples horrible like raw and putrid meat and yet with a glowing sensual
passion that reminds one of the Roman Empire of Heliogabalus; there are
reds, shrill like the berries of a holly - one thinks of Christmas in England and
the snow and the good cheer and the pleasures of children - and yet by
some magic softened till they are like the tender colors of a dove's breast;
there are deep yellows that die with an unnatural passion into a green as
fragrant as the spring and as pure as the sparkling water of a mountain
brook. Who can tell what tortured fancy made these fruits? They seem to
belong to some Polynesian garden of the Hesperides. There is something
alien in them as though they grew in a stage of the earth's dark history
when things were not irrevocably fixed to their forms. They are
extravagantly luxurious. They are heavy with tropical odours. They seem to
possess a sombre passion of their own. It is enchanted fruit to taste which
might open the gateway to God knows what secrets of the soul and to
enchanted palaces of the imagination. They are heavy with unknown
dangers, and to taste them might turn a man to beast or god."(58)
The quality, tone, and intensity of the colors around us affect us deeply.
Color may soothe or incite, uplift or depress. Paintings created out of a
sensibility of beauty and harmony transmit this consonance to the viewer
providing the same integrating effect as harmonious music. Color can be
therapeutic. Paintings by Russian-born artist, Nicholas Roerich, were hung in
hospitals in Europe to enhance the healing of patients. The peace, harmony,
and vitality emanating from his color tones and compositions, comprising
themes from nature and the spiritual strivings of humanity, suggest states of
serenity and courage which facilitate the healing process.
Poetry, drama, and literature, like painting and music, have the power,
through their images and rhythms, to integrate the rhythms of mind and body.
Dr. Diamond found that the thymus gland is strengthened, the cerebral
hemispheres are balanced, and the Life Energy is increased by looking at
landscape paintings (which embody the harmonies of nature), and by reading
rhythmic poetry. The latter combines the verbal skills of the left cerebral hemis-
phere (reading), with the musical and rhythmical qualities controlled by the
right cerebral hemisphere. Music, painting, and poetry as well as other arts
constructed on the principle of harmony, have the power to inspire, invigorate,
and relax, to reduce stress and unhealthy tension, and to integrate the body,
mind, and emotions for greater control and creativity.
Out of the principles of harmony and integration comes the concept of

beauty: beauty in action, in feeling, in thought, in speech, and in creation. It
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has often been said that beauty cannot be defined because it exists only in
the eyes of the beholder. Studies of the effect of culture on the human
organism suggest that there are indeed objective standards of beauty. Beauty
embodies the integrative principle of harmony and the power of inspiration to
which the mind, heart, and body respond in a decisive manner, enhancing the
Life Energy and increasing Personal Power. Modern science is verifying the
practicality of beauty.
The means by which we choose to cultivate our imagination determines to

a significant degree our behavior. This is why the quality of artistic expression in
a culture is so crucial. The arts are the mold for the imagination. The power of
artistic beauty to alter positively human actions is contained in the Arabian
Nights Story of Mamun, Son of Harun al Rashid:
"In ancient Arabia, Mamun, son of Harun al Rashid, inherited

a city. When he came to take possession, he found it in disorder
and on the verge of ruin. Persian traders, falling into dispute with
the citizens in the markets, had found them weak and became
emboldened to pillage and violence.
The young prince was advised to set forth a new code

of law and enforce it. This he did; but with the result that disputes
multiplied, the lawyers enriched themselves, the citizens were
impoverished, and traders began to avoid the city. In despair Mamun
bethought himself of a device. He secretly brought together foreign
craftsmen, and enjoined them to work out in ivory and precious
woods the image of a surpassingly beautiful city, whose design he
gave to them. When it was finished, he rewarded them richly and
sent them away; and bore the image by night to the chief mosque,
concealing it behind a curtain.
Mamun then issued an edict that every traveller and

trader entering the gates must be brought to this mosque to
worship, and be pledged to silence. The image was there
revealed to them; and it became evident to the citizens by the
altered demeanor of these strangers that they had seen a noble
vision of which they could not or dared not speak. They
demanded to see it also which was what Mamun had desired:
they were accordingly admitted, one by one, on the same
conditions.
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Now it began to appear that the ruler of the artists

was more successful than the ruler of the lawmakers; for, changed
by the sight of the image, the people carried out their business in
peace. Order, gaiety, and wealth returned silently to the place.
And in its rebuilding, the city which Mamun inherited resembled
the city of his dream."
From this story it is possible to envision how the integrative power of art
- of beauty and ideals - acting upon the imagination of people, can
transform chaos into order, conflict into cooperation, poverty into
abundance, and despair into optimism and gaiety.
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Chapter 22: VISUALIZATION, MEDITATION, AND DREAMING
"Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the

privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an
escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it."
- Somerset Maugham
"If thou may not continually gather thyself together, do it

sometime at least once a day, morning or evening."
- Thomas a` Kempis
"Dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art

required to sort and understand them."
- Montaigne
The imagination is the key to creative power in art, in science, and in life.
Images and feelings are the language of the imagination (right brain),
reconstructed by the simple technique of visualization. The mind's capacity for
vizualization is limitless. You can invent or reconstruct a still or moving picture, in
black and white or color, of anything - a feeling of joy, a walk down a country
road, a work of art, a dinner party, or a desired occupation. The more you
practice visualization, the more adept you will become at creating images
that are autosuggestive and contain the power to resolve themselves into
action. The more detail and color you can evoke in mental images, the more
potent and realistic they become. Visualization helps to eliminate trial-and-
error operations. The more detail you can visualize, the more you can foresee
and anticipate. Visualization is a spur to creativity. You visualize what you
desire; you apply your will to your visual image; and you create what you will.
Vizualization is a key to the genius of Nikola Tesla - perhaps the greatest

inventor/scientist of modern times. Tesla invented the alternating current
system of power generation which enabled him to harness Niagara Falls and
introduce the age of electricty. His seven hundred inventions include high
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frequency voltage, the Tesla coil, the oscillator (the heart of radio and
television broadcasting), neon and fluorescent lighting, the electric motor,
remote control devices, and a planetary power system for inexpensive energy
designed to tap the earth's electromagnetic power field.
Tesla's powers of creative visualization were so remarkable that he could

construct in his imgination every one of his inventions down to the minutest
detail. He would place his invention in an imagined fully equipped laboratory
and turn on the device in his mind to see exactly how it would perform when
constructed. His machinists said that if he were inventing a solar engine, a new
turbine, or some type of electrical equipment, he would produce every single
measurement from his imagination, including dimensions down to ten-
thousandths of an inch. As a child in Yugoslavia, Tesla was trained by his
mother in games of visualization. This skill developed into a photographic
memory which enabled him to recall every detail of more than five thousand
experiments carried out for over half a century.59
Visualization is a link between observation and memory, between the

conscious and the unconscious. If you have lost something, for example, the
simple act of visualizing the lost item will invoke the full power of your
subconscious memory to help you locate it. Simply visualize what you wish to
find and give yourself the positive suggestion that you will find it.
Meditation is a simple technique for controlling the mind, harmonizing the

Life Energy, integrating the personality, and developing creative ideas.
Meditation can be practiced by any person without training, teachers, courses,
or fees. It requires only solitude, a short time, a quiet place and a comfortable
situation. Sit down in an easy position, close your eyes, and let go of all your
cares, worries, and mundane concerns.
Meditation serves to quiet the ceaseless chatter of the mind. Sometimes, it is

helpful to concentrate your attention on a chosen symbol or image. Visualize,
if you like, in your mind's eye (just between and above your physical eyes), a
candle flame or some symbol or sacred image which is calming, uplifting, and
close to your heart. You can use autosuggestion (the silent repetition of a
positive word or phrase embodying an inspirational thought), to help you
create a state of relaxation, a mood of serenity and detachment. The power
of words and of sound are implied in the use of the mantram in yoga - a
sound, word, or phrase which is repeated for a period of time. "Mantram" is a
Sanskrit word which, literally translated, means "instrument of thought". The
quieting of the mind may also be achieved simply by concentrating on the
breath. The length of time for meditation can be five minutes or forty-five
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minutes; time is not as important as the effect achieved.
By removing your inner self temporarily from the stress, hustle, and turmoil of
your surroundings, you gain a number of advantages: the calm, clarity, and
detachment necessary for objective perception; the inner harmony,
concentration and self- control which give rise to optimism and self-
confidence; a renewal of the Life Energy; and a receptivity to new ideas, solu-
tions, and possibilities. If you have a problem, take it into meditation and then
let go of it and the subconscious, in cooperation with the "neighbourhood
angels", will work to find a solution.
Meditation relaxes the body, lowers the pulse and blood pressure, and
heightens mental alertness and sensitivity. It serves to regroup and integrate
one's scattered forces and to create a sense of wholeness, a oneness of
thought and feeling and physical well-being. Meditation balances the left and
right cerebral hemispheres, synchronizes body and mind and opens up a
communication channel between the conscious and unconscious mind. In this
state, we are highly receptive to creative ideas and can readily find solutions
to many problems concerning our work, health, and human relationships.
In meditation, the consciousness becomes freed from its attachments to the

past, the trivial, and the mundane. The consciousness can then be catapulted
into the future and into infinity thus divesting itself of all sense of limitation. You
can send your thought like an arrow into the farthest reaches of the cosmos
simply by visualizing yourself, your thought, or an actual arrow flying through
outer space past myriad colored stars and galaxies until all feeling of personal
separateness is dissolved and you become one with the all-existing. Such an
exercise gives an exhilarating feeling of freedom and at-one-ment.
You can use meditation each day to eliminate your weaknesses and
negative traits by employing autosuggestion and by concentrating on eternal
and positive images and ideas: on the good, the peaceful, and the beautiful.
Take your greatest fear into meditation and measure it against eternity or the
courage and resourcefulness needed to improve the world.
Prayer is talking to a higher intelligence; meditation is listening. In

meditation, one can listen to the Higher Being of one's chosen religion, to
Cosmic Reason, to the Universal Mind, to the wisdom of your heart, to your
higher self. The Voice of Silence can always be heard where there is solitude
and serenity, a quiet mind and an open heart.
164
Dreaming is a necessary, productive, and creative human function.

Everyone dreams whether they remember or not. Dreaming is thinking in the
unconscious. Because the unconscious is our vastly superior mental faculty,
dreaming represents a significant proportion of our creative thinking. One-third
of human existence is passed in sleep when the creative unconscious is free to
labour. Dreams are a rich source of ideas, solutions to problems, and
premonitions of future events - including both warnings and opportunities.
There are several simple techniques for using and remembering dreams.
Before going to sleep at night, give yourself the suggestion (repeating it several
times), that you will remember your dreams. Keep a pad, pen, and a small light
or flashlight beside your bed. Before falling asleep, write the day and date on
the open page of your note pad. This also serves as an autosuggestion - a
mental readiness to record your dreams. Whenever you "catch" a dream, write
it down immediately or it may be lost in the morning. If you are too sleepy to
record the whole dream, write down a few key words - this will enable you to
recall it in the morning when you can write out the dream in full, remembering
as many details as possible. Dreams are highly elusive and if you don't capture
them at the time, they tend to evaporate back into the mist-shrouded regions
of the unconscious. One of the best times to access the creative unconscious is
on the borderline of sleep - going into sleep or waking up. At these moments,
we are completely relaxed and there is an open channel between the
conscious and the subconscious mind.
Dreams help us to understand the past and to create the future. They inform
us of important events, situations, people, and ideas. Of course, not all dreams
are creative or useful. Often, they are merely reflexes of the food eaten too
late at night, the movie that was watched before bedtime, or the drop in
barometric pressure that accompanies inclement weather. Nevertheless,
dreams can be revealing and creative. They have their own unique, symbolic
language - colors, animals, birds, etc. Through relection and research, one can
learn the symbolic language of dreams. Dreams in color are usually significant
as are dreams in which forms appear larger than life. Flying represents
freedom, attainment, the conquest of some adversity, the solving of a
problem. If you have a good dream, such as finding a buried treasure (usually
symbolic), keep the dream to yourself or share it only with a trusted friend. Like
hopes and plans, good dreams lose some of their power of fulfillment when
exposed to the doubts and jibes of skeptical people. On the other hand, if you
have a bad dream, relate it to someone and this will break its hold over your
subconscious ... and give you some useful feedback.
People can train themselves to find answers to life's problems in their
165
dreams. David Ogilvy, the creative genius of advertising, got some of his best
ideas from dreams. Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, fretted
over the problem of how to join needles, thread, and material. One night,
exhausted from false starts, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had been
captured by cannibals. Tied up in a kettle, the fire prepared, Howe realized
that he would be eaten if he failed to discover the sewing machine. While the
cannibals danced around him, he looked up at their spears. He noticed holes
at the tips. Howe woke up and suddenly understood that if he threaded the
needle at the point instead of at the opposite end, the sewing machine would
work. He did and it did.60
Dr. Norman Alcock, a Canadian nulcear physicist gave up a successful

career in physics to devote his life to peace research. While investigating the
influence of cycles (solar, lunar, economic, social, etc.), on human violence
(wars and revolutions), he began to experience a cycle of dreams - every 12
days - from which he awoke very early in the morning with some information
for his own research. The information generally came out in code words which,
after deciphering and ingeniously tracking down over the next few days, he
discovered to be answers to questions he was asking in his research. The
dreams occurred with such cyclic regularity that Dr. Alcock began writing
specific questions into his bedside dreambook before retiring. Inevitably, the
answers came always in code. Disturbed by her husband's early morning
dream recordings, Dr. Alcock's wife and coworker, Patricia, tried and
succeeded in joining the dream research with her own questions and answers.
Thus, they began awakening together, each with a research-related dream to
record.
To dream solutions to problems, suggest to your subconscious, before falling

asleep, that it work out a solution to the problem which you pose. Then forget
about it, relax, and go to sleep. The solution may come to you in a
remembered dream or several days or even weeks later while you are driving
your car, washing dishes, or walking the dog. The ability to program the
subconscious is evident in the common practice of setting your "mental alarm"
to wake up at a desired time. By trusting in the superior faculties of your
creative unconscious, it is possible to magnify your Personal Power through
creative thinking.
166
Chapter 23: THE BODY'S WISDOM
"If the mind, which rules the body, ever forgets itself
so far as to trample upon its slave, the slave is never generous
enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite its
oppressor."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The brain is a highly sensitive physical organ which is an integral part of the
body's health. The quality of our thinking, therefore, is closely related to our
state of physical well- being. Nutritional deficiencies affect our mood and the
functioning of our mental faculties. Refined sugar, caffeine, drugs and alcohol
tend to lower the blood sugar which is the major energy source of the brain.
These substances, with the addition of tobacco, also destroy the body's
vitamins especially vitamin B complex which may be the single most important
factor responsible for the health of the nerves - the brain's communication
network. When the nerves are weakened, mental control and creative think-
ing are obstructed. Vitamin B1 (Thiamine), in particular, is closely linked with
improved individual learning capacity. Known as the "morale vitamin", B1 has a
beneficial effect on mental attitudes. Chronic fatigue, sleeplessness and
unprovoked aggressiveness are often symptoms of vitamin B1 deficiency. A
balanced and nutritious diet, low in red meat and high in unprocessed, natural
foods, maintains the health of the nervous system and brain and enhances
mental control and creativity.
Dr. John Diamond has pointed out that poor posture causes an imbalance
between the two cerebral hemispheres. The mind is most alert when a person
sits straight and stands and walks proudly. Moderate and regular exercise
improves mental control and creativity by stimulating breathing and by
increasing the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the brain. Oxygen is the food of the
167
brain. People are not often conscious of their breathing excepted when it is
congested by illness or impeded by smoking and by inhaling the heavily
polluted air of the city. Yet we breath about five thousand gallons (35 pounds),
of air each day, about six times our food and liquid consumption. Aerobic
exercise, fresh air, and occasional deep breathing improve the oxydation of
the brain which, when a person is working in a sitting position, requires about
three times as much oxygen for normal functioning. The word inspiration comes
from the Latin "inspirare" meaning "to breathe into" and spirit is derived from the
root "spirare", to breathe. The animation of the mind and the breath of life are
deeply intertwined.
Breathing has a profound effect on the body's state of tension. Creative

thinking functions best when a person is relaxed but in a state of harmonious
tension. Creative tension derives from a sense of inner purpose and striving.
Stress- related tension, on the other hand, comes from confusion, anger, fear,
and fatigue. Conscious rhythmic and periodic deep breathing (from the
abdomen), is useful in removing stress-related tension. The breath, with the aid
of the imagination, can be directed to various parts of the body to remove
stress, fatigue, discomfort, or pain. On the in-breath (through the nostrils), simply
imagine the energizing and life-bearing breath being drawn to the distressed
parts of the body and, on the out-breath (through the mouth and nose),
imagine the tension, discomfort, fatigue, and pain flowing away and out of
your body. When the body is free of distress, the mind is free to think.
Water, also, has a relaxing, tonifying, and harmonizing effect on the body
and the mental processes. Swimming and bathing have a salutary influence
on the emotions and on the receptive, creative mentality. The common notion
of "washing off" a bad feeling or a distressing experience is literally true.
Showers (and waterfalls, generally), are particularly salubrious because of their
high production of negative ions (electrically charged particles), which have a
refreshing and harmonizing effect on the human energy.
"A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts
that come by walking have any value." Thus, spoke Friedrich Nietzsche. Many
of the best, most creative ideas arrive when the body is in motion. Aristotle and
his students (modern educators, take note), discussed and disputed issues in
art, science, and philosophy while walking in the Lyceum in Athens. Known as
the peripatetic ("to walk about"), school of philosophy, Aristotle and his
followers appreciated the stimulating effect of rhythmic movement on
creative thinking. A lazy mind is often the reflex of a lazy body. As instruments
for the liberation of ideas, drugs and alcohol are a self-defeating alternative to
exercise. Physical movement helps to energize the will and oxygenate the
168
brain. Many fears and nagging thoughts simply evaporate when we activate
ourselves, change rhythms, and engage our hands and feet. Exercise, in
whatever form, is a natural tranquilizer. Activity absorbs anxiety. To exercise the
limbs is to strengthen the will.
When it comes to mental creativity, a change is as good as, and often

better than, a rest. The alteration of mental and physical labours has a salutary
effect on creative thinking. The ancient tradition that the intellectual should
also be a craftsperson is based on the mutually beneficial relationship
between work with the mind and work with the hands. Manual hobbies,
housework, gardening, and other physical labours provide a stimulating and
necessary balance to mental work. The alternating rhythms of inner and outer
labour are essential to the total health of the individual. Many of the problems
of existence can be solved by changing the rhythms of activity from mental-
emotional effort to physical activity and back again. In addition, such changes
give the conscious mind a rest and allow the superior subconscious faculty to
work out solutions to life's problems.
169
EPILOGUE
Albert Einstein observed, at the dawn of the nuclear age, that "the
unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of
thinking." The task of the future will be to unleash the creative power of our
most sophisticated faculty - the human brain. This means, primarily, the
development of mental control and creative thinking. Responsibility for one's
thoughts and the freeing of the boundless creative force of consciousness will
bequeath to men and women untold riches in growth of character,
achievement, and Personal Power.
The first step will be to realize the power of and to practice positive
conscious autosuggestion. Perserverance in this leads to the perfecting of
character and physical well-being. All of the challenges of daily life can
become occasions to practice conscious autosuggestion if you meet each
obstacle and challenge with the simple, optimistic idea: "What a wonderful
opportunity to practice mental control and creativity." Then, like Dr. Muller,
invent a positive autosuggestion to suit the difficulty of the occasion and you
will discover the full powers of your self- control as well as a creative solution to
your challenge.
The art of thinking consists of observation and detachment, self-confidence,

optimism, and integration. It exploits the powers of the imagination and the
unconscious through dreaming, meditation, and visualization. Thinking prospers
with physical
vitality.
Strive for simplicity, clarity, beauty, and heart-felt warmth in your thinking.
Simplicity of thought and expression is the distillation and synthesis of life's
experiences transfigured through beauty. Do not disparage. Do not condemn.
The new does not destroy the old - but outlives it. The powers of creative
thinking are multiplied by cooperation with others. Mental control leads to
steadfastness in values and to loyalty in human relationships.
The new thinking will give men and women greater access to and control
over the formerly subconscious operations of the mind, including those which
govern the physical body. As human beings learn to strengthen their intuition
and make conscious more of their subconscious faculties, they will begin to tap
the unlimited resources of our greatest power and energy-saving device: the
170
mind. The mind is capable of embracing the most exalted, of creating the
most beautiful, and of inventing the most useful.
Thought is the fourth dimension which exists beyond space and time.
Creative thoughts are the wings of humanity which enable women and men
to overcome the gravity of negativity and limitation and to soar into the
unknown reaches of the universe. Creative thought is positive, striving into the
future and into infinity. Through love, through beauty, toward the future, into
infinity.
The true keys to life are simple indeed and they unlock the doors to the
future, to self-realization, to happiness, and to Personal Power. TO LOVE - TO
LABOUR - TO CREATE - TO ACHIEVE. These are the means and the ends of
existence. But there is no love without self-sacrifice; nor fruitful labour without
patience. Creativity requires, above all, self-improvement; and real
achievement is possible only with courage.
Through courage, compassion, and patience, sacrifice and self-

improvement, we reach the invincible stronghold of Personal Power which
opens up to a radiant kingdom of love, Life Energy, creative labour, and self-
fulfilling achievement. You need only a worthy challenge and a heroic ideal
and between these two you will succeed.
171
REFERENCES
1. Roerich, Nicholas. "Steadfastness" in The Invincible. New York: Nicholas

Roerich Museum, 1974.
2. Rubenstein, Arthur. My Young Years. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.
3. Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. New York: Viking Press, 1973.
4. Claremont de Castillejo, Irene. Knowing Woman. New York: Harper and

Row, 1973.
5. Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
6. Ibid.
7. Selye, Dr. Hans. Stress Without Distress. New York: J.B. Lippincott Company,
1974.
8. Diamond, Dr. John. Behavioral Kinesiology (BK). New York: Harper and Row,
1979.
9. Dubois, Rene'. "Introduction" to Anatomy of an Illness: As Perceived by the

Patient by Norman Cousins. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979.
10. Ibid.
11. Cited in Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday and Company, 1966.
12. Ibid.
13. Maslow, Abraham. "Synergy in the Society and the Individual". Journal of
Individual Psychology, 20, 1964.
14. Barker, Roger G. Ecological Psychology. Stanford, California: Stanford

University Press, 1968.
15. Tompkins, Calvin. "Figure in an Imaginary Landscape, A profile of John
172
Cage." The New Yorker, November 28, 1964.
16. Faludy, George. Convocation Address. University of Toronto, November 29,

1978.
17. Thorndike, Robert and Hagen, Elizabeth. 10,000 Jobs. New York: Wiley, 1959.
18. Ruth, Barry. Epitaph for Vocational Guidance. New York Teachers College,
Columbia University, 1962.
19. Cited in Armstrong, Richard and Wakin, Edward. You Can Still Change the
World. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
20. Berg, Ivar. Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1971.
21. Quoted in Haldane, Bernard. Career Satisfaction and Success: A Guide to

Job Freedom. New York: AMACOM, 1974.
22. Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title. Loc. cit.
23. Armstrong, Richard and Wakin, Edward. You Can Still Change the World.
Loc. cit.
24. Advertizing Age, August 10, 1959.
25. Ogilvy, David. Blood, Brains and Beer. New York: Atheneum, 1978.
26. Fuller, R. Buckminister. Critical Path. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981.
27. Morgan, Ted. Maugham. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.
28. Roerich, Nicholas. "The Teacher" in Shambhala. New York: Nicholas Roerich
Museum, 1978.
29. Haldane, Bernard. Career Satisfaction and Success. Loc. cit.
30. Moriyama, Raymond. "Can Your Life Become a Work of Art?" Rikka, vol. 2,
no. 2, 1975.
31. Birch, David. "Who Creates Jobs?" The Public Interest, No. 65, Fall, 1981
32. Ibid.
173
33. "The Seige of the Fairies". Quoted in Kim by Rudyard Kipling. London:
MacMillan, 1901.
34. Warner, Dr. Samuel J. Self-Realization and Self-Defeat. New York: Grove
Press, 1966.
35. Meryman, Richard. Mank: The Wit, World and Life of Herman Mankiewicz.
New York: Morrow, 1978.
36. Coue', Dr. Emile. Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion. London:

George Allen and Unwin,
37. Muller, Robert. Most of All, They Taught Me Happiness. New York:
Doubleday, 1985.
38. Ibid.
39. See, for example, Cornell Conference on Therapy, Vol. 1, edited by H. Gold
and others. New York: MacMillan, 1946.
40. Fuller, R. Buckminister. "The Artist-Scientist-Inventor" in The Arts and Man.

Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice- Hall; and Paris: UNESCO, 1969.
41. McCleary, Robert and Lazarus, Richard. "Autonomic Discrimination Without

Awareness". Psychological Review, Vol. 58, 1951.
42. Ostrander, Sheila and Schroeder, Lynn. Superlearning. New York: Delta,
1979.
43. Alpert, Hollis. The Barrymores. New York: Dial Press, 1964.
44. Nicklaus, Jack. Golf My Way. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974.
45. Cousins, Norman. Anatomy of an Illness: As Perceived by the Patient. New

York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979.
46. James, Naomi. At One with the Sea. London/Toronto, Hutchinson/Nelson,

Foster and Scott, 1979.
47. Coue', Dr. Emile. Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion. Loc. cit.
174
48. Cousins, Norman. Anatomy of an Illness. Loc. cit.
49. Bates, Sir Darrell. The Abyssinian Difficulty. London: Oxford University Press,
1979.
50. McCowen, Alec. Young Gemini. London: Elm Tree Books, 1979.
51. Merton, Thomas. The Way of Chuang Tzu. Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1965.
52. Miller, Arthur. Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1981.
53. Kernan, Michael. "Remembrances of those who fell from the heights."
Smithsonian, July, 1981.
54. Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title. Loc. cit.
55. Tupper, Martin F. Quoted in Lillian Eichler Watson, Light from Many Lamps.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951.
56. Sullivan, J.W.N. Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. New York: Mentor,
1956.
57. Menuhin, Yehudi. "Music and the nature of its contribution to humanity" in
The Arts and Man. Loc. cit.
58. Maugham, Somerset. A Writer's Notebook. London: Pan Books, 1978.
59. O'Neill, John. Prodigal Genius. London: Spearman, 1968.
60. Ostrander, Sheila and Schroeder, Lynn. Superlearning. Loc. cit.
175

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Personal Power Paul Weinzweig

Dr. Paul Weinzweig

©Paul Weinzweig, 1988.

PART I THE PURSUIT OF PERSONAL POWER 3

Chapter I: THE NATURE OF PERSONAL POWER 7

Chapter 2: THE CHALLENGE 10

Chapter 6: THE EFFECT OF OUR TIMES ON PERSONAL POWER 32

PART II: HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR LIFE ENERGY 35

Chapter 7: STRESS AND SELF-AWARENESS 36

Chapter 8: THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, AND ATTITUDES 41

Chapter 9: THE LIFE ENERGY EXCHANGE 45

Chapter 10: THE LAWS OF NATURE 51

Chapter 11: CULTURE AND THE LIFE ENERGY 60

PART III: HOW TO FREE YOUR CREATIVE POTENTIAL 64

Chapter 12: THE PURPOSE OF WORK 66

Chapter 13: HOW TO DISCOVER YOUR LIFE'S WORK 70

Chapter 14: HOW AND WHY YOU DEFEAT YOURSELF 93

PART IV: THE POWER OF CREATIVE THOUGHT 103

Chapter 15: A CHALLENGE FOR THE MIND 104

Chapter 17: THE NATURE OF THOUGHT 122

Chapter 18: OBSERVATION AND DETACHMENT 134

Chapter 19: SELF-CONFIDENCE 142

Chapter 20: OPTIMISM 149

Chapter 21: INTEGRATION 154

Chapter 22: VISUALIZATION, MEDITATION, AND DREAMING 162

Chapter 23: THE BODY'S WISDOM 167

PART I THE PURSUIT OF PERSONAL POWER

"Life is a search after power; and this is an

The industrial and technological revolutions have brought many wonderful

Each of us has a "dharma" - a path to follow, a mission in life. Most of our

1. BE MASTER OF YOUR DESTINY

2. BECOME SUCCESSFUL BY DOING WHAT YOU LOVE

3. MAKE A CONSTRUCTIVE CONTRIBUTION TO YOUR WORLD

4. BUILD LOYAL RELATIONSHIPS

5. FREE YOUR CREATIVE POTENTIAL

7. CARE FOR YOUR HEALTH

8. AVOID SELF-DEFEATING BEHAVIOR

9. APPLY THE POSITIVE POWER OF YOUR MIND

10.COMBINE MATERIAL SUCCESS WITH SPIRITUAL SATISFACTION

Chapter I: THE NATURE OF PERSONAL POWER

"There is no meaning to life except the meaning

"Power" is a vigorous word with many shades of evocative meaning. People

Personal Power and domination are two entirely different concepts.

In the early 1920's, the paintings of a renowned Russian artist named

The demeanor of the businessman, (his graciousness, cheerfulness, and

The Webster's Dictionary gives several definitions of power: "great ability to

Chapter 2: THE CHALLENGE

"Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Fate"

It is not necessary to make an enemy in order to find a challenge. The

In each of the challenges of human existence there is a vital personal lesson

Feeling hungry, he decided to go out for something to eat. Once outside,

In his mid-eighties, Rubenstein called himself the happiest person he had

"If a man can govern himself, what difficulty

"A wise one expects all from himself;

"An archer provides an example for a sage.

Knowledge is power and knowledge of self is Personal Power. The pursuit of

Courage to preserve or to sever our relationships with others; courage to be

A few years ago, on a sandy beach on the the coast of Malaysia, an

At a refugee camp in Thailand, an American official was processing a

There is an important difference between pity and compassion. Pity looks

Whereas pity creates a gulf between people, compassion builds a bridge of

Compassion contributes to self-control by tempering courage with kindness