Chapter - 10

How To Get The Most Out Of This Book

You have attracted this book to you or you would not have it in your hands. What do you want it to do for you? It came to you in answer to a need of your own, or to help you help someone else in whom you are interested. If, while reading it you felt you'd like to give it to a certain person who came strongly to your mind, follow through. Serve as a channel and give that person a copy of this book. To do so will help to build your own self-confidence and self-respect and set up vibrations of love around you.

We—the world—must learn how to overcome fear or be overcome by it. We must learn how to get fear out of the consciousness of men before it kills all men. For fear is man's greatest enemy. Not bombs and nuclear warfare, but the fear that drives men to perfect and to produce fifty-megaton bombs as a defense against fear itself—this is our greatest enemy. The more we help others to overcome fear the less fear we will have to overcome in our own lives. This is important to us. Doctors tell us fear is "more contagious than the measles." And fear is at an all-time high around the world because desires for good are at an all-time high.

If you have read this far the book is for you. Why delay success? Let us get to work at once.

1. Set your stage for action.

Obtain a hard-cover, three-ring notebook and a good supply of paper to match to be used in Project, You.

2. Obtain your own copy of this book.

Many people borrow a book from their local library and read it only once. But the serious student, the person who truly desires to change his whole life for the better must mark and keep and make truly his own the book he studies. Never loan it out! For as you work with it on your own problems you will be building into your book invisible vibrations which will prove invaluable to you. You do not want the vibrations of others and their problems in your copy. If you think there is nothing to the vibration idea, I respectfully refer you to two case histories in my book, How to Use the Power of Your Word. One concerns a house built with evil money and what happened to those who lived there. The other concerns an American girl and her American soldier husband who had to live in a house in Germany formerly occupied by the Nazis. Get a book of your own and keep it for yourself alone.

3. Read the book several times before you start to work.

Don't expect to get the most out of this book with two or three readings. You do not change your life in a few hours or days. Allow time for growth. Use a pencil and mark lightly the passages in the book that have especial meaning for you. Each reading will show you new meanings that before escaped you. This is a guide for growth. You will want to erase some markings and make others.

4. Know where you stand.

Many people are fearful because they have false ideas about themselves. They compare themselves unfavorably with others without taking all points into consideration. Or they listen to unwarranted criticism and believe it. Paul Deutchler's parents (Chapter 4) convinced him he was sick, or different, and a less person than other boys his age even when he was very young. This was not true but young Paul believed it and it nearly ruined his life. Don't let this happen to you!

Taking an honest, frank inventory will place you where you actually stand and give you a starting point for improvement. Write out a history of your life. Let out all the rope. Underline your successes and failures, your fears and faiths, your good and bad habits, the positive and negative people in your life. You can be sure negative people have fear. Then subtract a negative from a positive until you have a final balance. Work with your facts until you place and really know yourself. Be sure to include your formal education, religious training, background of reading and your likes, dislikes, your search for truth, what makes you happy and what makes you sad. Get an accurate picture of the physical, mental, spiritual you. It will help you to imagine someone is asking you the kind of questions I ask my students. Or pretend you are writing your life story for me. Please do not neglect to make your inventory. You are not ready to start to work for a better future for yourself until you understand your past and present place.

5. Accept yourself as you now are.

Bad conscience makes cowards of us all, as witness the story of Mrs. Pollard in Chapter 1. She "lived with a ghost," she said. If there is anything wrong in your life, right it. But no matter what your inventory shows you, accept yourself as you are. Even if you have been to prison? Yes. Even if you have failed all your life? Yes. Don't quarrel with your present situation nor unduly condemn yourself for your past mistakes or failures. Just make up your mind to make good. Now.

If you have a serious conscience problem, or a simple one that bothers you seriously, then go through the ritual (given in Chapter 1, with Mrs. Pollard) of confession, repentance, and making whatever restitution you can and then accept God's forgiveness. Remember, God made you out of Himself. That means you were made out of pure love. But you have worked to the place of free will. If you used it in a wrong way to fulfill a good desire it will bring regret or fear or both. Mrs. Pollard's desire for love of her husband was good. Her way of fulfilling it was a mistake. Look at yourself and your mistake, if you have made one, in that light. Know God already has forgiven you even before you ask. But asking will help you. Forgive yourself. Forgive everyone else involved and, in prayer, ask their forgiveness. Then feel free, with a new life to begin.

6. Now set your new goal.

What do you want of life from here on? Write it out in your notebook. Start with what you want most, then your second most wanted desire, and on down. Make a "big bold list," as did the Barrows in Chapter 2. Your list will change from time to time. This will show your growth. Your over-all objective will be to raise your consciousness level. This will be taking place as you win point after point of daily needs and desires fulfilled.

7. List your fears by name.

You now know your desires. What seems to stand in the way of fulfilling them? Make a list of your current and long-range fears. Trace each fear to its basic desire group. Desire for life leads to need for money. Then the basic fear of not enough money is loss of life. Now you know how and where to work. Giving the fear the color, seeing the splotches of fears will help you to identify them quickly and overcome them.

8. Discard false modesty.

You have found yourself, set your goal, and named your obstacles. Now, reexamine your goal. Think about those people in Chapter 7 with a dream in their heart. Is your dream big enough? A big demand brings big supplies and heroic courage. Make a large and worth-while demand upon yourself. We live in that kind of age.

Many talented and capable people are held down by a false belief that they should try to appear smaller than they are. In Chapter 2 we saw this in the life of Jim Barrows, who thought of himself as "grasshopper size." And again, in Chapter 3, Edna Rigger felt her faith was only "penknife size." Many so fear the pain of failure that they never attempt to do the big things of which they are capable. Or they fear criticism of those close to them. You cannot overcome fear until you learn to value yourself, determine what you want of life and then go after it. The great teachers have always told us this. For example:

Emerson says: "Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right and all men acquiesce. The world . . . leaves every man ... to set his own rate. Hero or driveler, it meddles not in the matter. It will certainly accept your own measure of your doing and being whether you sneak about and deny your own name or whether you see your work produced to the concave sphere of the heavens, one with the revolution of the stars."

If your life history and your inner desires show you the makings of a hero, don't settle for being a driveler. Be as big as God intended you to be. Trying to reach for the stars of achievement will unfold your dormant faith as you go along.

9. Build your consciousness with new facts.

Finding new information, breaking up fear-thought habits, replacing them with fearless ones are the keys to raising the level of your consciousness. Your ultimate goal, remember, is that upper level of White-Light Faith, as seen in the story, "Land Beyond the Darkness" (Chapter 9). You must work at it. A definite change takes place. If you had a bucket of muddy water and continued to pour a stream of clean water into it, the bucket would soon contain only clean water. Just so you can fill your conscious mind with facts by reading, which go down into the subconscious and change fear to working faith. A good way to do this is to memorize affirmations. The rhymed jingles found in all my books (except this one) will help you. Copy those that help you most into your daily-work notebook.

10. Now you are ready to achieve.

If you already have the preceding five of my books in this series you are ready to go to work by using the nine steps of overcoming fear which are as follows:

Table of steps in overcoming fear as used in this book:

1. Analyze your problem for possible hidden fears. Or acknowledge and name the fear you have.

2. Analyze the fear until you have uncovered the false belief that gave rise to it.

3. Find new information, facts, truth that will set you free from fear. (The first three steps are found in Chapter 1.)

4. Live with a purpose, or set a goal big enough. (See Chapter 3.) This is what Edna Rigger had to do.

5. Learn quickly to trace, place and erase your fears before they start to develop fully. Naming them by the three primary colors will help you. (See Chapter 4.)

6. Face the worst that could happen. Name it, examine it.

7. Be willing for the worst to be so, or happen or continue. (These two steps, six and seven, are seen at work in Chapter 5. They are worked out in example in Chapter 8.)

8. Trust God to take you through. (See Chapter 7.)

9. Be one on whom God can count, by trying earnestly to become a better person. (See Chapter 8.)

Success is a circle. The thought, desire, belief and asking go out from you, collect after their kind and come back to you. After you consciously work with spiritual laws for a while, you will begin to see this process actually taking place. Like Edna Rigger you will be able to say, "I name it. Life brings." Both the good and the bad. The keeping of a record of your trials, successes and failures in your living notebook will help you to watch your growth and this will greatly encourage you. Be sure to have a section in your notebook marked: Answered prayers. Turn back to that list when the going gets rough. It will help to increase your faith instantly.

If this is the first of my books you have ever read:

You may need some background work in order to get the most out of this book and in working with Project, You. So with humility and good conscience I present to you a bit of material which I feel certain will help you in your life-changing program.

This is the first of my books without a preface or message to the reader. Knowing something about the author and why I write books should prove helpful to you.

Born and reared in a good Christian home—Methodist —I had a very childlike understanding of the Christian religion, which I lost in college. I did not know it then, but I threw out the baby with the bath water in giving up all religion and church. But later, in 1926, my life was saved through prayer; a little later still, I was saved from being a cripple as the result of the accident which nearly took my life. In gratitude, and wonder, I set out to learn the truth about the power of prayer, to find God, to determine what was the truth of the Christian religion, and what to teach children as a way of life. For one thing, I had been taught that higher education was the answer to all human ills. But in college I learned this was not so and it took me years to recover from the shock of the kind of people I met in college. I did not know such people existed. A good education without the knowledge and daily use of spiritual powers and laws can lead to utter frustration, demoralization, sin, crime, sickness and all manner of evil. Life must have meaning, purpose, or there is no reason to live.

So I set out to learn. Part of the learning—experiences in working with my own problems and the problems of others—became a series of articles published in Unity Monthly, a magazine of the Unity School of Christianity. These enlarged, later became my first book, Change Your Life Through Prayer, published in 1945 by Dodd, Mead and Company.

Unless you already know a great deal about scientific prayer I respectfully suggest that you get this book. It lays down the foundation for the life-changing process. It shows why prayer works sometimes and seems not to work at others. Actually there are twelve parts, or tenets, of the law under which the power of prayer works. For prayer is a power and all power is locked in law. Our necessity is to learn to use the power within the laws of its nature. Otherwise, it will not, cannot work for us.

Dr. Alexis Carrel said:

Prayer is the most wonderful form of energy that one can generate ... the only power in the world that seems to overcome the so-called laws of nature.

Charles P. Steinmetz said:

Some day the scientists of the world will turn their laboratories over to the study of God and prayer and the spiritual forces . . . when this day comes the world will see more achievement in one generation than it has in the past four generations.

Anyone who is trying to change his life and the world through prayer is helping to bring that day closer. Learning about prayer is both a duty and a privilege. The twelve parts of prayer are not all given in that first book. They are put together for the first time in Book V, How to Live in the Circle of Prayer, along with the "Circle of Prayer" chart with instructions for use. But Book V should not be studied first by the starting Truth student. They should be taken in the order in which they have been written.

Book II of the series is Change Your Life Through Love. This is where Edna Rigger (in Chapter 3) had to work and it is where the whole world will have to work and learn and live—or perish. The law of love is the highest of the spiritual laws as Christ stated and the outcome of our using the powers God has given us, and our free-will choices in life all hinge on whether we have worked within the law of love or against it. With our free will we can bring evil upon ourselves just as easily as we can bring good to ourselves, as many of my case histories in this book will prove. For example, read the story of the woman whose grandson, aged eight, had been placed in a mental institution. Her story showed me generations of hate and evil, broken laws of love. The boy was the "sole heir" to two tremendous fortunes. Sins are visited upon the third and fourth generation unless someone knows enough to stop them. Be sure to learn the law of love before you start a prayer program.

Book III, Change Your Life Through Faith and Work, takes up where Book II left off. The law of creating, or changing or acquiring, is simple enough. It has five parts: desire, asking, believing in faith, and receiving, or accepting the answer when it comes. Many never learn how to accept or receive. Since the answer to all prayer hinges on our ability to believe we will receive, this is the place where we must work. Our need is to get everything out of the way that keeps us from believing in utter, childlike faith. Christ taught us to become as "little children" in our relationship and dependence upon God the Father. He also taught about the powers within man and how to set them safely into motion. We can never get away from the laws involved. Work has become an unpopular word in our day. Yet to think is to work. We are working all the time whether we know it or not. Our need is to make conscious effort with a predetermined goal. Unless our work is in tune with our prayer we defeat our prayer project and then are likely to think God's answer was "no." Yet all scientific prayer is answered, just as the electric light will go on every time, if we have met the laws concerning it. The law cannot say no. We get instantaneous healings when we have all parts of our prayer in line with the laws under which it operates. We also get the evil that can destroy us, if we use scientific prayer for an evil purpose.

If anyone doubts this, let him read the story of Judith in my fifth book, How to Live in the Circle of Prayer in the chapter, "Prayer Outside the Law of Love Is Black Magic and Fraught with Danger." There are other case histories in my books which prove the same point. History is filled with such examples from life.

Those first three books were written to prepare the reader or the students (I no longer accept individual students) for the fourth book which probably is the most important of the entire set so far. It is titled How to Use the Power of Your Word. I insisted that my students get the necessary groundwork before trying conscious use of the power of their word. We are, of course, using it unconsciously every time we think or speak or when we feel strongly about a matter. We all come to earth filled with this power which we cannot turn off. We can learn how to use it correctly so that it will produce the good we desire and avoid the evil we do not want. To try to use this power without having learned the principles in the first three books would be like the child trying to solve problems in algebra without knowing his multiplication tables. Many people think that because they have always owned a Bible and have read it now and then they understand the spiritual laws. But results in their lives prove they do not understand. I have yet to receive a student who knew about the power of his word when he first came, and this includes seven ministers I have worked with, and many good fellow Methodists.

Do you think preachers do not have problems? In my Book III, on faith and work, you will find a case history of a preacher, pastor of a wealthy and fashionable church who had "lost his religion" long before he ever became a minister and nearly lost his health and mind but was saved by new information, truth (our point three in the nine steps, remember) that set him free from fears, sense of guilt, need for punishment, confusions and doubts.

Book V, How to Live in the Circle of Prayer—and make your dreams come true—contains the twelve parts of prayer as previously noted. Now it may well be that the reader knows a great deal more about the spiritual laws than the writer. I can only present what I know to be true, a proven way of life that leads to peace, plenty, happiness, success and Soul growth. While I know that these five books have helped thousands, I still do not want the reader to feel that he must rush out and buy them. I am not telling him to do so. The point is, many who write me, having read one of my books, report that there is no large bookstore nor library near them, and they cannot examine the other books. "What is in it?" they ask. "Should I get it for my studies?" I don't know. It all depends upon how much you already know. The most I can do here is to give enough information to help the reader make up his own mind. People write me their problems and ask, "Do you have a case history that covers my need?" All I can do is to make suggestions.
So: Everyone of my books contains a complete case history of overcoming problems of physical health and most of them have several examples with instructions.

The mental-illness cases that have proved helpful include the woman who spent a fortune pretending she was sick and wound up in a mental hospital but eventually "learned her way to freedom." Perhaps the most difficult and most detailed mental case I have yet reported, and one of the most successful in outcome, concerns Edward, told in How to Live in the Circle of Prayer. All my books have a chapter or teachings on overcoming mental illness.

Each of my books has a chapter on prosperity or working with the law of increase and abundance. Some of my best examples are in the fourth book, How to Use the Power of Your Word. Men seem to prefer it above the other three. It has more examples, references and cases than any other. It also has the best affirmations and more of them, than I have put in any of the others. Many readers find help in the rhymes and jingles, memorize them for constant, daily use. For example:

Showers of blessings are falling on me

I claim as my own all the good that I see.

This jingle enabled one man to see good where before he had not. The law says we may claim for our own as much as we can see—believe in our heart and accept in our consciousness. The man learned to overcome fear and turn seeming defeat into unusual success by sending out the idea that good was coming to him in showers. People began to admire him for his courage, to see worth in him they had not seen before. New opportunities "showered down on him," as he said. He came to believe what he said and so it worked for him. The above is from the book on using the power of your word.

Another jingle from the same book was used by a man who was trying to make his words become profitable servants:

I always have plenty to use and to give,

I will always have plenty as long as I live.
 
Saying it is already so is a very high form of asking, saying "let there be," as Mrs. Pollard came to realize (in Chapter 1).

Our objective ever is to fill the consciousness with the fact that good already has been received in idea form. Our firm word then becomes flesh, or reality, and dwells among us. The prayer is answered.

For the woman who thinks she is unattractive, or cannot win and hold good and honest love, or the woman who has led an immoral life and wants to change, or the woman who has a daughter who has "gone bad," I recommend the story of Jenny in Change Your Life Through Love. Jenny has become a classic. People write to me, asking about her, from all over the world. She was one of the most hopeless cases I ever undertook and one of the most successful in the end. No one knows how much a woman can do when she makes up her mind and works with the power of love.

If your fears have to do with Communism, "creeping" socialism in America, and welfare statism, you will probably find help in Change Your Life Through Faith and Work. A whole chapter is devoted to this modern problem and how the individual can handle it. From here on we are faced with the Iron Rule or the Golden Rule way of life. And the whole world is drawn up on one side or the other except those neutrals who have not yet made up their mind which side they will join. This fact was true when I wrote this book and I found it is still true when I made my recent one-woman survey. Both sides are trying to get the neutrals to join them. When this book was first published Roger W. Babson, known to millions for his business successes and inspired living, gave it a full-page recommendation saying he believed it would help to overcome Communism.

In defense of all that "bragging," I want to explain that it was the result of several years of intensive research on my part. I belonged to many freedom clubs, appeared on radio and television on behalf of freedom and mailed out thousands of folders to alert and inform a seemingly sleeping population. Well, they are not asleep today. Learn what to do, start to do it and your fears will vanish.

Finally, the first book of the series, Change Your Life Through Prayer, still outsells all the others and is now in its eighteenth printing. Perhaps it gives more help than the others. I don't know. Or perhaps people realize they should start at the beginning if they hope to change their lives and make their dreams come true.

One of the real helps for the earnest student, and especially the younger person starting out in life, are the many quotations in my books of what the great have said and done. Many of these bits of wisdom and records of deeds of greatness are now lost to the modern generation unless they know how and where to research for them and have endless hours to do so. Youth, I find, needs to feel that life has meaning—that they are going some place, for a definite purpose—and some instructions on how to be sure they are headed right. Why hurry, as long as you are on the wrong road? I believe the sickness of our age, so deplored, talked about, and written about, has no basis in itself. We have not trained our youth, have not instilled in them a big enough reason for living, have given them no heroes to follow. It is as simple and as tragic as that.

Well, we must close now. And so, dear readers, dear precious children of God, I leave you now with love. I still work in prayer every day for all my readers wherever they may be, whoever they are, known or unknown to me. Should I go home before you do, I feel certain I can do even better work for you from the other side. Students of life, searchers of truth, you are a glorious company and I am happy to be permitted to be with you.

So look up now. And let your heart be lifted up. There is nothing bigger than God!

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