Acting In The Certain Way & Efficient Action
Wattles On The Certain Way
Thought is the creative power, or the impelling force which causes the creative power to act; thinking in a Certain Way will bring riches to you, but you must not rely upon thought alone, paying no attention to personal action. That is the rock upon which many otherwise scientific metaphysical thinkers meet shipwreck—the failure to connect thought with personal action.
We have not yet reached the stage of development, even supposing such a stage to be possible, in which man can create directly from Formless Substance without nature’s processes or the work of human hands; man must not only think, but his personal action must supplement his thought.
By thought you can cause the gold in the hearts of the mountains to be impelled toward you; but it will not mine itself, refine itself, coin itself into double eagles, and come rolling along the roads seeking its way into your pocket.
Under the impelling power of the Supreme Spirit, men’s affairs will be so ordered that some one will be led to mine the gold for you; other men’s business transactions will be so directed that the gold will be brought toward you, and you must so arrange your own business affairs that you may be able to receive it when it comes to you. Your thought makes all things, animate and inanimate, work to bring you what you want; but your personal activity must be such that you can rightly receive what you want when it reaches you. You are not to take it as charity, nor to steal it; you must give every man more in use value than he gives you in cash value.
The scientific use of thought consists in forming a clear and distinct mental image of what you want; in holding fast to the purpose to get what you want; and in realizing with grateful faith that you do get what you want.
Do not try to “project” your thought in any mysterious or occult way, with the idea of having it go out and do things for you; that is wasted effort, and will weaken your power to think with sanity.
The action of thought in getting rich is fully explained in the preceding chapters; your faith and purpose positively impress your vision upon Formless Substance, which has THE SAME DESIRE FOR MORE LIFE THAT YOU HAVE; and this vision, received from you, sets all the creative forces at work IN AND THROUGH THEIR REGULAR CHANNELS OF ACTION, but directed toward you.
It is not your part to guide or supervise the creative process; all you have to do with that is to retain your vision, stick to your purpose, and maintain your faith and gratitude.
But you must act in a Certain Way, so that you can appropriate what is yours when it comes to you; so that you can meet the things you have in your picture, and put them in their proper places as they arrive.
You can readily see the truth of this. When things reach you, they will be in the hands of other men, who will ask an equivalent for them.
And you can only get what is yours by giving the other man what is his.
Your pocketbook is not going to be transformed into a Fortunatus’s purse, which shall be always full of money without effort on your part.
This is the crucial point in the science of getting rich; right here, where thought and personal action must be combined. There are very many people who, consciously or unconsciously, set the creative forces in action by the strength and persistence of their desires, but who remain poor because they do not provide for the reception of the thing they want when it comes.
By thought, the thing you want is brought to you; by action you receive it.
Whatever your action is to be, it is evident that you must act NOW. You cannot act in the past, and it is essential to the clearness of your mental vision that you dismiss the past from your mind. You cannot act in the future, for the future is not here yet. And you cannot tell how you will want to act in any future contingency until that contingency has arrived.
Because you are not in the right business, or the right environment now, do not think that you must postpone action until you get into the right business or environment. And do not spend time in the present taking thought as to the best course in possible future emergencies; have faith in your ability to meet any emergency when it arrives.
If you act in the present with your mind on the future, your present action will be with a divided mind, and will not be effective.
Put your whole mind into present action.
Do not give your creative impulse to Original Substance, and then sit down and wait for results; if you do, you will never get them. Act now. There is never any time but now, and there never will be any time but now. If you are ever to begin to make ready for the reception of what you want, you must begin now.
And your action, whatever it is, must most likely be in your present business or employment, and must be upon the persons and things in your present environment.
You cannot act where you are not; you cannot act where you have been, and you cannot act where you are going to be; you can act only where you are.
Do not bother as to whether yesterday’s work was well done or ill done; do today’s work well.
Do not try to do tomorrow’s work now; there will be plenty of time to do that when you get to it.
Do not try, by occult or mystical means, to act on people or things that are out of your reach.
Do not wait for a change of environment before you act; get a change of environment by action.
You can so act upon the environment in which you are now, as to cause yourself to be transferred to a better environment.
Hold with faith and purpose the vision of yourself in the better environment, but act upon your present environment with all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.
Do not spend any time in day dreaming or castle building; hold to the one vision of what you want, and act NOW.
Do not cast about seeking some new thing to do, or some strange, unusual, or remarkable action to perform as a first step toward getting rich. It is probable that your actions, at least for some time to come, will be those you have been performing for some time past; but you are to begin now to perform these actions in the Certain Way, which will surely make you rich.
If you are engaged in some business, and feel that it is not the right one for you, do not wait until you get into the right business before you begin to act.
Do not feel discouraged, or sit down and lament because you are misplaced. No man was ever so misplaced but that he could find the right place, and no man ever became so involved in the wrong business but that he could get into the right business.
Hold the vision of yourself in the right business, with the purpose to get into it, and the faith that you will get into it, and are getting into it; but ACT in your present business. Use your present business as the means of getting a better one, and use your present environment as the means of getting into a better one. Your vision of the right business, if held with faith and purpose, will cause the Supreme to move the right business toward you; and your action, if performed in the Certain Way, will cause you to move toward the business.
If you are an employee, or wage earner, and feel that you must change places in order to get what you want, do not “project” your thought into space and rely upon it to get you another job. It will probably fail to do so.
Hold the vision of yourself in the job you want, while you ACT with faith and purpose on the job you have, and you will certainly get the job you want.
Your vision and faith will set the creative force in motion to bring it toward you, and your action will cause the forces in your own environment to move you toward the place you want. In closing this chapter, we will add another statement to our syllabus:—
There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe.
A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.
Man can form things in his thought, and, by impressing his thoughts upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.
In order to do this, man must pass from the competitive to the creative mind; he must form a clear mental picture of the things he wants, and hold this picture in his thoughts with the fixed PURPOSE to get what he wants, and the unwavering FAITH that he does get what he wants, closing his mind to all that may tend to shake his purpose, dim his vision, or quench his faith.
That he may receive what he wants when it comes, man must act NOW upon the people and things in his present environment.
Efficient Action
You must use your thought as directed in previous chapters, and begin to do what you can do where you are; and you must do ALL that you can do where you are.
You can advance only by being larger than your present place; and no man is larger than his present place who leaves undone any of the work pertaining to that place.
The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.
If no man quite filled his present place, you can see that there must be a going backward in everything. Those who do not quite fill their present places are a dead weight upon society, government, commerce, and industry; they must be carried along by others at a great expense. The progress of the world is retarded only by those who do not fill the places they are holding; they belong to a former age and a lower stage or plane of life, and their tendency is toward degeneration. No society could advance if every man was smaller than his place; social evolution is guided by the law of physical and mental evolution. In the animal world, evolution is caused by excess of life.
When an organism has more life than can be expressed in the functions of its own plane, it develops the organs of a higher plane, and a new species is originated.
There never would have been new species had there not been organisms which more than filled their places. The law is exactly the same for you; your getting rich depends upon your applying this principle to your own affairs.
Every day is either a successful day or a day of failure; and it is the successful days which get you what you want. If every day is a failure, you can never get rich; while if every day is a success, you cannot fail to get rich.
If there is something that may be done today, and you do not do it, you have failed in so far as that thing is concerned; and the consequences may be more disastrous than you imagine.
You cannot foresee the results of even the most trivial act; you do not know the workings of all the forces that have been set moving in your behalf. Much may be depending on your doing some simple act; it may be the very thing which is to open the door of opportunity to very great possibilities. You can never know all the combinations which Supreme Intelligence is making for you in the world of things and of human affairs; your neglect or failure to do some small thing may cause a long delay in getting what you want.
Do, every day, ALL that can be done that day.
There is, however, a limitation or qualification of the above that you must take into account.
You are not to overwork, nor to rush blindly into your business in the effort to do the greatest possible number of things in the shortest possible time.
You are not to try to do tomorrow’s work today, nor to do a week’s work in a day.
It is really not the number of things you do, but the EFFICIENCY of each separate action that counts.
Every act is, in itself, either a success or a failure.
Every act is, in itself, either effective or inefficient.
Every inefficient act is a failure, and if you spend your life in doing inefficient acts, your whole life will be a failure.
The more things you do, the worse for you, if all your acts are inefficient ones.
On the other hand, every efficient act is a success in itself, and if every act of your life is an efficient one, your whole life MUST be a success.
The cause of failure is doing too many things in an inefficient manner, and not doing enough things in an efficient manner.
You will see that it is a self-evident proposition that if you do not do any inefficient acts, and if you do a sufficient number of efficient acts, you will become rich. If, now, it is possible for you to make each act an efficient one, you see again that the getting of riches is reduced to an exact science, like mathematics.
The matter turns, then, on the question whether you can make each separate act a success in itself. And this you can certainly do.
You can make each act a success, because All Power is working with you; and All Power cannot fail.
Power is at your service; and to make each act efficient you have only to put power into it.
Every action is either strong or weak; and when every one is strong, you are acting in the Certain Way which will make you rich.
Every act can be made strong and efficient by holding your vision while you are doing it, and putting the whole power of your FAITH and PURPOSE into it.
It is at this point that the people fail who separate mental power from personal action. They use the power of mind in one place and at one time, and they act in another place and at another time. So their acts are not successful in themselves; too many of them are inefficient. But if All Power goes into every act, no matter how commonplace, every act will be a success in itself; and as in the nature of things every success opens the way to other successes, your progress toward what you want, and the progress of what you want toward you, will become increasingly rapid.
Remember that successful action is cumulative in its results. Since the desire for more life is inherent in all things, when a man begins to move toward larger life more things attach themselves to him, and the influence of his desire is multiplied.
Do, every day, all that you can do that day, and do each act in an efficient manner.
In saying that you must hold your vision while you are doing each act, however trivial or commonplace, I do not mean to say that it is necessary at all times to see the vision distinctly to its smallest details. It should be the work of your leisure hours to use your imagination on the details of your vision, and to contemplate them until they are firmly fixed upon your memory.
If you wish speedy results, spend practically all your spare time in this practice.
By continuous contemplation you will get the picture of what you want, even to the smallest details, so firmly fixed upon your mind, and so completely transferred to the mind of Formless Substance, that in your working hours you need only to mentally refer to the picture to stimulate your faith and purpose, and cause your best effort to be put forth. Contemplate your picture in your leisure hours until your consciousness is so full of it that you can grasp it instantly. You will become so enthused with its bright promises that the mere thought of it will call forth the strongest energies of your whole being.
Let us again repeat our syllabus, and by slightly changing the closing statements bring it to the point we have now reached.
There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe.
A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.
Man can form things in his thought, and, by impressing his thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.
In order to do this, man must pass from the competitive to the creative mind; he must form a clear mental picture of the things he wants, and do, with faith and purpose, all that can be done each day, doing each separate thing in an efficient manner.
Note From Mahdi
I provide this text for historical purposes so that we may see the evolution of the concept of thought and how it influences reality. I personally do not believe in, nor do I endorse this text.
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