Chapter 1

The Magic In Your Mind

Man is the most miraculous of all the living things on this earth! 

Yet despite this undeniable fact, you have powers within you that you have not utilized. 

You have within you the power to do anything you desire. You have the power to change your life so that you can accomplish all the things you want of it. You are the owner of a power that, when you begin to use it, will open up the road to happiness and health, to wealth and long life. 

Yes, you as a member of the human race are a part of that Godgiven miracle: man. 

While all other living creatures have risen to heights of “adaptation to environment” in order to survive, your ancestors outstripped this mode of living. 

Man  has  conquered  his  environment.  More  than  that—man  has continued to seek conquests as he discovers and utilizes the mysteries of life. 

You can make these discoveries and utilize these powers. These are powers which are vast—far vaster than you realize at this moment. And before you are through reading these pages you will see how great they are and how easily they are to be tapped for your advantage.

 So miraculous is this thing called man that—despite his great development as we have been able to trace it in history—he has hardly scratched the surface of his own abilities. 

Were we to draw a picture of comparison, it might be fair to say that man has penetrated no deeper into himself than the depth of his  own  skin.  Beneath,  and  yet  to  come,  lie  many  things:  the “flesh,” the “bones” and, finally the “heart” of the matter. 

The miracle that is man is no less a miracle than that of the mysterious  setting  in  which  he  is  found—the  universe.  The  resources that man possesses are as untapped as the unknown resources of the universe. 

Don’t let the picture get out of hand. When you think of the resources  of  the  universe,  you  conjure  up  a  picture  of  things  far beyond the ability of man’s powers so far.  

But the resources of man are near at hand. They are within himself. That self is YOU. 

Your resources are yours alone to utilize. Yet you probably have done nothing even to investigate what potential you possess. And this potential is so great that once you start to use it, there are no limits to what you can do. 

You have a Golden Gift.  You use it every day—but you do nothing with it. Does that sound impossible? Well, take, for example, a child with a pencil. Each day the child takes up his pencil and scribbles. He cannot write, he cannot  compute,  he  cannot  draw.  So,  while  he  uses  the  pencil every day, he actually does nothing with it.

What, then, is your Golden Gift whose powers you use so casually? 

Your Golden Gift is your brain. 

In your brain lies the power to make use of all your untapped resources. 

And your Golden Gift is more “Golden” and more of a “Gift” than that. Your brain not only supplies the power to use your potentialities—it also holds all the resources you possess. 

Your Golden Gift, your brain, your mind, is the most vital of all your possessions. It is your greatest asset. 

What the chapters that follow will show you is how to use this Golden Gift. You can use your mind and you can bring forth great powers from it. 

Your Golden Gift can bring you longer life, better health, greater wealth,  increased  happiness,  more  vitality.  In  short,  your  brain gives you the power to control all the essential aspects of a full life and full living. 

Before you jump into learning the secrets of using the Golden Gift, let us look back a great many centuries in a few short moments.

You have to understand the meaning of this power. You have to study just what man is and what his mind is. You have to discover where man comes from, and why he has a mind.  

There are many theories regarding man’s beginning. But to realize that man, of all the living things on earth, has the Power of Mind makes it plain that man is the work of some great creative force.

His  beginnings  were  purposive.  And  the  greatest  challenge  that faces man—the challenge you will take up as you progress from chapter to chapter in this book—is to discover what that purpose is and utilize the power of that discovery. 

The theory of man’s beginnings varies according to who tells it. Scientists trace this planet to its earliest days, each arriving at his own theory of how the universe we know came about. When it comes to the beginnings of life on our planet, however, most are agreed that the first faint stirring of life was a somewhat jellylike organic mass which floated on the waters of the sea. 

Those who take the Bible literally are faced with less of an enigma than the scientists. For them the issue is final: the opening words of the Old Testament relieve them of any uncertainty. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”  Thereby was God’s thought transmuted into fact.  The fundamentalist belief may not help us to understand ourselves as well as the scientific theory of the evolvement of man. But, in any case, man’s evolution is part of an Infinite Plan in which man either progresses or regresses by his own efforts, both individually and collectively. 

What matter if we believe that man’s start was millions of years ago in the development of a single organic cell in the ocean or that he sprang full-grown from the mind of the Creator in some Garden

of Eden? Each theory recognizes the prime cause—a Creator. Each theory hinges on the fact that some power brought to this earth the first germ of life. The creation of this miracle is no less wonderful

regardless of the belief: whether it started in some lowly form of plant  life  and  developed  through  countless  ages  to  the  highest product of today’s civilization, or if the whole were created within

six days.

To understand better why we behave as we do, let us look at earliest man as we have been able to trace him. 

Our ancestors showed intellectual superiority over other animals that  roamed  the  earth.  The  early  man’s  ability  to  stand  upright made him better able to do many things. Primarily he was able to

put his forelimbs to uses no other animal could. Too, the height he thus achieved made it possible for him to see farther and over a wider area. He therefore was able to protect himself far more easily. 

Using his eyes rather than his more limited sense of smell to see dangers far away, he also was able to use his arms and hands to ward off and fight these dangers when they were close at hand.

Best of all, however, was the fact that his intelligence permitted him to make even greater use of his arms and hands. They became creative weapons and aided man in his fight for survival. 

Kill or be killed was the law of the primeval world. Man’s brain was in those early days necessarily motivated by greed, fear and anger. It was these things that made the instinct of self-preservation the first law of nature. Survival of the fittest became the primary driving force of human life. 

Why have I started out to show you the beginnings of mankind?

Simply because by looking at these beginnings you can see how primitive greed, fear and anger have left their mark on man. It is quite obvious that most of the mental and physical afflictions of modern man stem from these earliest conflicts. 

It is important to understand that these primary urges of survival are buried deep in our biological background. Note that I use the word “understand.” “Knowing” these things and “understanding” them are entirely different. We must understand and recognize certain basic facts if we are to utilize the power we possess.

  Learned men in the past, discovering that the human mind is capable of amazing potentialities, did not recognize them as coming from the brain. These powers were attributed to the soul. Man’s soul, according to the ancients, was in his solar plexus. We still have  in  our  everyday  language  the  reminder  of  this  belief.  The Greek word for diaphragm, the muscular section of the body that

separates the abdomen from the chest cavity (in front of which is the  nerve  center  we  call  the  solar  plexus),  is  phren.  Its  current usage  as  part  of  such  words  as  frenzy,  frantic,  the  no-longer

credited “science” of phrenology, and even schizophrenia, is evidence of this original meaning. 

We  know  today  that  the  inner  power  of  man—his  wisdom— emanates from the mind. 

Biologist Michael F. Guyer has stated that “man is an animal; but an animal with an analytical directing consciousness.” Man, however,  also  possesses  a  deeper  consciousness.  This  deeper  consciousness—the Supraconcious—has resources so astounding that they have often in the past—and even in this very age—been attributed to soul power or to so-called supernatural sources. 

Herein you will have shown to you, backed up with concrete evidence, that the power and wisdom that are man’s stem from his Supraconscious. The Supraconscious, the root of your mind’s power,

is a vast storehouse of memory from which you can tap uncalculated amounts of wisdom. It is the storehouse of what psychiatrist Carl Jung calls the “collective unconscious”—the sum total of all

man’s  knowledge,  wisdom  and  power  since  his  creation.  It  is  a storehouse you can easily enter; it is a storehouse of treasures you have the ability to use; it is a storehouse whose contents will give

you the power to do. 

Psychology, the science of mind, deals chiefly with the conscious mind, the so-called objective or analytical mind. But psychology sheds little light on the complexity of human impulses. It tells little

about the perplexities that are the impulses, the emotions and the feelings of the human. 

Psychology—or, as it should be called now, the old psychology— is an abstract consideration of human thoughts and behavior. For

your purposes, it is entirely too academic to be of real help. It cannot help you solve the practical problems you are called on to face every day in the complex situations of modern society. 

Man has a multiple nature. Most of his mental processes do not take place in the realm of the mind known as the conscious. Therefore any interpretation of human thoughts and conduct that deals only with the conscious perception and the reasoning processes of mind is entirely too limited in scope of understanding to be of use to you in comprehending yourself. 

As the majority of your mental processes take place in the Supraconscious, the process of conscious reasoning alone will not enable you to understand fully the true motives of what you think and do. Much less will the processes of conscious reasoning help you to understand the effects that the “emotional” thinking of the Supraconscious has on your very health and well-being. 

Consciousness is only the end result of the hidden processes of the human organism. The true nature of these hidden processes usually remains unknown to you, or at least obscure in the mental realm of the Supraconscious. 

The idea that man is endowed with a brain that functions as if he were fashioned with a dual mentality is not new. This dualism of the mind has been a matter for speculation by philosophers through many ages.

The ancient Greek philosophers believed that the dual character of man’s mental apparatus represented a division of body and soul. Thus all mental phenomena were interpreted in terms of the so called supernatural, the powers of gods or devils. 

Victor Hugo seemed to grasp the real truth when he wrote: “I sense two  natures  within  me.”  Certainly  Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  the great literary genius, had a clear understanding of human nature when he conceived his famous novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

In the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, Saint Paul confessed that he seemed to possess a double nature. He wrote: 

“For  the  good  that  I  would  I  do  not:  but  the  evil which I would not, that I do.

“Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

“I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.

“For  I  delight  in  the  law  of  God  after  the  inward man: “But  I  see  another  law  in  my  members,  warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. “. . . So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” 

Several centuries before Saint Paul recorded his illuminating introspections,  Plato  likened  man  to  a  charioteer  driving  a  white horse and a black horse, one noble and the other ignoble. 

Man, then, does have a double nature. One part of it is emotional, or animalistic. The other part is spiritual, or intellectual. But while this has been accepted fact for centuries, it has only been recently

that scientists have started to discover the psychological and neurological significance of this multiple nature. 

As wonderful as has been man’s physical evolution, it has been surpassed by the growth of his mental faculties. 

Most  people  are  inclined  to  believe  that  man’s  conscious  mind represents his greatest mental advancement. There is no doubt as to the greatness of this. But in comparison to the vast development of man’s Supraconscious, the growth of the conscious is infinitesimal. 

For in man’s Supraconscious lie outstanding powers. Therein lies vast wisdom. And all these powers and this wisdom are there to be used. They need only to be tapped. You need only to realize that they are there and that they can be used. You will then find that these powers and this wisdom are yours to do greater things with, yours to achieve things you have dreamed of but you never believed possible. 

In your Supraconscious lies the key to success, the clue to happiness, the formula to health. 

Your Supraconscious mind contains a vast storehouse of “how to do it”—how to do anything you want to do. 

Your  Supraconscious  mind  is  even  more  than  a  storehouse  of knowledge, of wisdom and of power. It also is a transmitter and receiver of ideas from the Supraconscious minds of others. 

By opening the channels of your Supraconscious, you stand on the threshold of life as it should be lived. 

Living will take on new meaning, new wonder, new power, new belief, new health.

Your Supraconscious holds the secret of your new life. 

A DAILY EXERCISE TO GET TO KNOW THE MAGIC IN YOUR MIND

Every night before you fall asleep there are simple exercises which you can perform to help you open the channels to your own Supra-conscious:

  1.  Lie flat on your back and  relax every muscle in your body. Start with the ends of your toes and little by little work your way upward until you are completely untensed.

  2. Concentrate mentally on having a full night’s relaxed and peaceful sleep.

  3. When you have reached the depth of conscious relaxation and well implanted the idea of fear-free sleep, gently  move  into  the  position  in  which  you  normally sleep. 

If you have performed these exercises perfectly, you will find yourself falling into a restful, calm sleep almost immediately and discover that the next morning will present itself to you in a brightness you have never before known.