The Secret of One Man’s Success
(As related by Mr. C. A—)
I was born in Benares, India, in 1867 of Irish-English parents. My father was a surgeon in the English Army stationed at the time in India. My early childhood differed probably very little from that of any other child born in America and of it I recall practically nothing. The first incident in my life that impressed itself upon me with any marked degree and that, by the way, still stands out in my memory as the turning-point in my life, occurred one day when I was about fourteen years of age. On that day, I recall, I had gone down to the Ragaro, (what we would call a public square or plaza in this country), and there I discovered a great number of gurkhas, swami and yogis (holy men of the different religious sects), who had just come in from the surrounding mountain and jungle country on their annual religious pilgrimage. Instantly they attracted me, these strange men in their motley array of quaint costumes and filthy rags mingled with the occasional withered arm or palsied hand or the marks of self-flagellation across bared shoulders—fanatics or penitents, I found, self-immolated upon their religious fervor.
I was fascinated, hypnotized, drawn irresistibly toward them. Day after day and on every excuse and pretext I slipped back to the square to hang on the fringe of the concourse and stare my boyish eyes out in wonder. I studied them as you would study a strange new type of animal. They were different beings to me, from another world, and I never tired of watching them.
I found that they would often sit in silence for hours, heads bowed, bodies rigid, utterly insensible to my presence, utterly unconscious of the world about them, their eyes fixed in an unwinking stare upon bits of shining rocks and fragments of crystal while about them rolled and eddied thin clouds of bluish, pungent smoke drifting from weird incense burners scattered at random.
CLAUDE ALEXANDER CONLIN
Mahdi The Magician Edition
PDF | 182 Pages
Alexander & The Magic Crystal, is your initiation into the secrets hidden in The Lost Library of Alexander.
C. Alexander’s story starts in Benares, that ancient and mysterious city where he discovers the secret of the crystal. The hidden knowledge that he will use to astound millions around the world as The Crystal Seer and The Man Who Knows.
This is a compilation of books that Alexander created to help his audience develop their intuition, master their mind, and silently influence the world around them.
Bonus: Alexander’s Astrological Readings
Boy-like in my restless energy, I could not understand this power of fixation; could not adjust myself to this uncanny ‘stillness’ and I would watch with a constantly increasing tension for the first sign of a movement, the first indication of a ‘break’ until it seemed I would have to scream or do something equally futile and desperate. I would even stealthily gather up a pebble between my toes, slip it into my hand and prepare to hurl it at the nearest figure merely to see him wince, but each time I did so it seemed that some invisible Force, some disembodied Power reached out and gripped my arm and held me helpless, frightened, humble.
I remember that just when it seemed I could stand no more of this ‘creepy’ stillness and must surely turn and run back to my father screaming, one of the pilgrims,—generally the oldest—would suddenly rise and burst forth in a tirade,—a lecture or incantation, couched in a dialect I could not understand and as abruptly sit down while the rest of the congregation would rock their bodies back and forth to the accompaniment of a weird, unintelligible chant which after an hour or two, what with the horrible rhythm of their bodies, became as unbearable to my childish mind as their former silence had been and I would stumble away from the place choking with a nameless dread and mumbling some senseless rigmarole to keep my spirits up while I cast fearful glances behind me,—only to come back again the very next day, a victim of their magnetic attraction.
Of course all their ceremonies were a closed book to me. Their words meant nothing but their actions counted enormously and it was these action, or at least a specific act that so indelibly impressed me, and as I said before, supplied the turning point in my life. It came on a day when I had been particularly wrought up by the fascinating monotony of their maneuvers and at first I had no inkling of its importance. I saw merely that an old Hindu had suddenly risen and stepped into the circle much as I had seen others do before him and I was only mildly interested, but when he suddenly drew from beneath his robe a coil of grass rope probably thirty feet long and an inch in diameter, and tossed one end straight up into the air where it remained rigid and suspended in nothingness, one end touching the ground and the other end as perpendicular and taut as though gripped by some invisible hand, I was, to say the least, immensely intrigued.
I knew the thing before me couldn’t exist. There were no buildings within three hundred feet of the spot and no trees within a mile from which a wire might have been strung to hold the rope, and yet there it stood as if inviting me to step up and touch it. I gasped and swallowed my Adam’s apple and fidgeted. Someone threw fresh incense upong the braziers and the aromatic smoke swirled and eddied while the whole group swayed and chanted to the rhythm of pulsing tomtoms and the strange shrill music of unseen pipes.
Suddenly a little, greasy Hindu boy of about twelve, clad in nothing but a loin-cloth, rushed from nowhere into the center of the ring, grasped the rope and climbed nimbly upward.
It must have taken him three or four minutes to make the ascent and I watched his every movement wide-eyed. Then, just before he reached the top, he turned directly toward me, smiled a sickly simpering smile, waved his hand and—slowly vanished into space! I was stunned. I remember that my tongue was cloven to the roof of my mouth and when I finally managed to tear my gaze away from that rope and look about, the whole world seemed changed and uncanny.
I don’t know how I got back to the Barracks where we lived, but I got there and when, once more amid old familiar surroundings, my sober second thought came back to me, something of the heritage of my cannie forbears was awakened within me and putting fear aside I determined to do a little quiet investigating before I surrounded completely to the evidence of my eyes.
Next day I dug about until I found one of the old-fashioned plate-cameras belonging to my brother, and armed with that I hurried back to the Ragaro.
In due time the old Hindu presented his phenomenon again and nervously I snapped one picture as the rope was thrown into the air, one picture when the boy was about halfway up the rope and a third just before he disappeared into thin air, and the fact that I was able to do this while still thrilling to the nameless, hair-bristling fear that the weird performance invoked in me gave me no little sense of satisfaction, I can assure you.
I carried my plates back to the little laboratory my brother had fixed up in one corner of the barracks, and there I developed them carefully. What was my surprise to find, when the work was done, that I had a very clear picture of the group of Hindus in the circle and also of the old fakir in the center, BUT there was no rope and no boy in either one of them! It stunned me. It mystified me more than ever. I had seen the urchin climb the rope and vanish into space above it with my own eyes and yet these pictures failed to reveal them. I thought there must be some fault with my camera and took it to pieces carefully. But there was no flaw there that I could discover and I decided that I must have made some error in my method of exposing the plates;—that I had failed to focus properly or to give the proper amount of exposure or perhaps there had been some trick of light and shadow. I decided to repeat the experiment before telling anyone and so, carefully reassembling my instrument and securing new plates, I made the trip to the Ragaro next day and with painstaking exactitude made a complete new series of pictures. I did this three times in fact before I was convinced that the fault was somewhere outside the realm of pure mechanics, for in every picture under every conceivable condition the result proved always the same. There was always the public square, the group of half-bowed and chanting fanatics, the blurred wreaths of blue-grey smoke and the old priest standing in the center, but there was no rope and no boy in any of them!
That evening I told my father about the whole thing and showed him the fifteen or twenty plates I had developed. I asked him to explain the mystery. He frowned solemnly as he pulled at his grizzled mustache and said brusquely, “You keep away from that Ragaro in the future. It’s no place for you. Those natives are dangerous men. They do things you’re not able to understand and they have strange powers which they exert to get control of the unthinking.” I asked him, astonished, what he meant and he pointed to the plates and said: “There is an example of their influence over you. There never was any rope. There never was any boy. They simply made you see them by willing you to do so. They concentrated their minds upon a rope and a boy and then projected that image into your mind. You never actually saw the things. You only saw their thought of them. You were influenced by the force of their concentration.”
I remembered then something that I had paid no particular attention to before,—how those religious fanatics had sat for hours staring at bits of shining rocks and transparent crystals, immovable, rigid, lost in a depth of thought the power of which I had no means to measure. It frightened me as I began to sense vaguely the terrific force and potentiality of that rushing river of dynamic mental energy pouring forth from a hundred separate springs of individual minds each focused on a single purpose and forming a raging torrent of Power that could sweep every obstacle of opposing thought before it and crush my will utterly. I trembled, for you see I believed my father utterly. In all his life he had never told me a falsehood and my faith in him was infinite. He was a stern man but a just one and whenever he said a thing we knew in our family that it was the truth and accepted it without argument. I remember once that I asked him about Santa Claus and he answered, “Son, there is no Santa Claus. It is fiction, mythology and imagination.” And for me from that moment there had been no Christmas saint. Another time I asked him about Hell and he replied, “There is no burning Hell as you understand it. It is only a figment of ecclesiastical imagination.” That settled the problem of a physical Hell for me forever and took a burden of fear from my boyish shoulders just as, through this same faith in his assurances, I had previously lost the childish fear of the dark and of ‘goblins’ and of all those bugaboos of childhood.
And so, as I have said, I believed what he told me about the natives and more than that, I obeyed him in keeping away from the public square. As in the case of all mysteries and superstitions, once explained it lost its interest for me and I put it out of my mind. At least I thought I did as I turned to other things, but a year later and more and more frequently in my later life I had occasion to realize how deeply the matter had impressed itself upon my consciousness, and how much the basic principle it involved—the principle of concentration of thought by the use of mechanical device like a shining stone or crystal—meant in my fortune and my well-being.
The following year, when I was fifteen, we were transferred to Madras, and I, like every other boy of independence, decided that during vacation I would get a job and earn a few annas and rupees that I could call my very own and that I might spend without the necessity of rendering an account to my parents.
Unearthed in Benares, India by Mahdi. Their marvellous powers have been the talk and wonderment of the whole civilized world. Uncut and raw.
Casting about for the most attractive opening I wandered one afternoon, down to the Anglo-Indian Importing Company’s dock where I observed a number of half-naked natives loading and unloading cargo. This kind of work did not appeal to me. Moreover I knew I could not do it without losing caste as a white man, but just as I was turning away I noticed, beside the gangplank, a man of my own race sitting leisurely under a sun-shade, indolently watching the ant-like procession of laborers and checking a mark on a much-thumbed sheet every time a native passed him with a burden. Instantly I was intrigued. Here was the sort of work, combining the proper elements of ease and luxury, that I just knew had been invented for me. I determined that was the job I would apply for and I went home and told my father all about it, in order to gain his permission.
He listened to my glowing account soberly but when, toward the end, I began to lose confidence in myself as the magnificence of the prospect grew upon me, I began to falter and ask if he could help me in any way to get such a job, he looked at me solemnly out of his fine, stern eyes and said, “Son, when vacation comes you can go to work but you must not depend on anyone to help you get the position. Never in your life should you do that thing. What you can’t get for yourself you are not worthy of having and to depend on any influence outside yourself is only to confess and encourage weakness.”
I remember I nodded and swallowed but I could not speak, for his words had put a new aspect on life that almost frightened me. He must have followed the workings of my mind for he continued: “When the time comes go down and ask that dock-master for the position yourself, but remember, when you do so, that you must HOLD THE POSITIVE THOUGHT IN YOUR MIND that the position is yours, that you are capable of holding it and that you are GOING TO GET IT. If you hold a negative or doubtful thought you will impregnate the dock-master’s mind with the same negative and the same doubt and you will not get it. Now remember. Whatever you get in this world will be the measure of your confidence in yourself to obtain it. It is all up to you.”
Again I believed my father implicitly, remembering that he had never lied and in that memory his words made an even deeper impression. When I went into the house to tell my mother, solemn and awed before the vistas he had opened to me, I think I can safely say that mentally at least I had taken the first step over the threshold of manhood.
And Mother made this advance permanent when she said, “He is right, Son. If you hold a Positive thought you will be successful. You will be able to make others see and feel and think and do just as you do. It was the same thing exactly with those old Hindus back there in Benares when they influenced you to see a boy and a rope that never actually existed. Those old natives spend their lives out in the mountains and jungles training themselves in thought-projection by means of concentration on a given subject. They sit and stare at polished rocks and bits of bright metal and crystal until they are able to drive every other thought away but just the one thought until their minds become so powerful that they are able to project it into any other unconcentrated mind and make it seem real. Son, you’ll find this true all through life. If you think POSITIVE THOUGHTS in a concentrated, positive manner like those old Hindus, you can always influence and convince others, but if your thoughts are negative or half-hearted or doubtful you can never influence anyone. In fact, you will be the victim of every mind with which you come in contact that is more positive than yours.”
Between the two of them you can imagine what I did. A month before it was time to apply for the position I begged from one of our native servants a polished crystal rock brilliant from much handling, and I carried it away to some secret nook where I would not be disturbed, and every day I would sit for an hour at a time, legs crossed in my lap and head bent forward as much like the fakirs I had watched as possible and try the magic formula.
First I would throw my mind blank to every other consideration. The I would visualize in the crystal an image of that hard-bitten dock-master as I had last seen him, and then I would talk to him like a Dutch Uncle. I would tell him over and over “You are going to give me that position. You KNOW you are. You’re just anxious to give it to me. You’re waiting for me to ask for it. You wouldn’t have any other man on the job for the world. I’m the only man who can fill it,—the only man you can trust in it. It’s mine.” And immediately, in my vision, he would nod his head and meekly answer “You’re right. The job is yours.”
I didn’t make a game of it. I didn’t allow the sense of “fun” to enter. It was terrible—the amount of positive energy and sincerity I expended on the experiment, and on the very day that I was released from school I bounced down to that dock, tagged the master with all the assurance that I had stored up in that month of concentration—I don’t even remember what I said. Words wouldn’t have mattered anyways. I was a living, breathing, incarnate THOUGHT and wholly irresistible. Five minutes later I had the job and was sitting out under that sunshade checking a row of marks on a smeary paper while the endless procession of native wound endlessly before me. Concentration—with the help of that bit of crystal—had done it!
A month later I wanted a better position. My ambition had been awakened. It wasn’t so much the new job I craved as it was a new opportunity to test this power I felt had been awakened i me. I went through the same formula—and I got it!
From that day to this I have succeeded in everything I have ever undertaken and achieved every desire I could conceive of. In some cases perhaps not so rapidly as might always be desired, it is true, according to the thoroughness of my concentration on the single object, but in the end I have always won. And so it was that through the teaching and the example of those old yogis I learned patience and perseverance—and CONCENTRATION, and even though at times things have not come to me as promptly as I desired I have never allowed a negative thought or a doubt to enter my mind. As a result I can point to my life as being self-made since I was fifteen and as being a perfect example of success and happiness, for after all Happiness is a condition of the Mind and lies only in the fulfillment of the desires of the mind, just as Hell is also a condition of the Mind—the condition that comes from a realization of opportunities neglected.
