our yearnings, our legitimate desires should be satisfied, that our dreams should come true. It is our ignorance of the law that would bring our own to us which keeps it from us.
When you were a boy experimenting with your little steel magnet, didn't you often try to make it pick up wood, copper, rubber, or some other substance different from itself?
And, of course, you found it would not, because it had no affinity for things that were unlike itself. You found that it would pick up a needle but not a toothpick. In other words you demonstrated the law that — Like attracts like.
Not a day passes that we do not see this law demonstrated in different ways in human life.
Sometimes the demonstrations are very tragic. Only a short time ago a little eight-year-old girl, the daughter of a Pennsylvania farmer, died from fright in a dentist's chair, where she had been placed to have a tooth extracted. Although the child knew nothing about the law, it worked just the same; and, Like Job, the thing she feared had come to her.
By the operation of the same law that draws to us disease and death, we draw to ourselves poverty or opulence, success or failure. The mind at any given time is a magnet for something.
It is a magnet for whatever thought, whatever convictions dominate the mind at the time, and the blessed, glorious thing about it all is that we can determine what the mind shall attract, what sort of a magnet it shall become.
Now, you may attract to you that which is not good for you, that which will damn you, that which will pain and humiliate.
By concentrating upon and working for it you become a specialist in that line and the law of attraction brings it to you.
If you have a prosperity mental attitude, if you have a vigorous faith that you are going to get away from poverty, that you are going to demonstrate prosperity, abundance, and strive intelligently and persistently to realize your vision, you will do so. That's the law. If you obey the law you will get good results.
If we could only see a picture of the mental processes of whatever is held in the mind, pulling the things which correspond to our thought; if we could see more failure, more bad business, more debts, more losses starting towards us because we have contacted with these things in our thought, we would quit worrying about the things we don't want and think the things we do want, attracting more instead of less, attracting abundance instead of poverty, prosperity instead of failure.
Oh, how often we make our mind a magnet to attract all sorts of enemy thoughts, poverty thoughts, sick thoughts, fear thoughts, and worry thoughts, and then somehow we expect that a miracle will be performed, and that out of these negative causes we will be sure in some way to enjoy positive results.
No miracle could perform such a change as this. Results correspond with causes.
Before we can be conquered by poverty, we must, first of all, be poor mentally. The poverty thought, the acceptance of a poverty-stricken environment as an inevitable condition from which you cannot get away, keeps you in the poverty current and draws more poverty to you.
It is the operation of the same law which attracts good things, a better environment, to those who think abundance, prosperity, who are convinced that they are going to be well off, and work confidently, hopefully, toward that end.
Not the things we long for most, not the things we wish for, but our own, that which has lived in our thoughts and mind, dominated in our mentality, in our mental attitude, that is what the law of attraction brings to us.
It may be that this law has brought us the very things we hated and wanted to get rid of, but we have dwelt upon them, and, because they formed the mental model, the life processes built them into our lives.
The law of attraction often brings us hated bedfellows, but they have lived so long in our minds, that they must become a part of our lives, by the very law that like attracts like.
Until recently many of us did not understand what Job meant when he said, "The thing which I greatly feared has come upon me." Now we know that he expressed a psychological law that is as inexorable as the laws of mathematics.
We know that the things we fear most, the things we have a horror of and want to flee from, we are really pursuing by our very fear of them. By predicting them and visualizing them in our minds, we are attracting them to ourselves, and when we do this we are turning our backs upon the very things which we long for most.
The time will come when the law of attraction will be known as the greatest power in creation. This is the law upon which all successes, all characters, all lives are built.
Mental attraction is the only power upon which we can build anything successfully.
It is an inevitable law, an inexorable principle, that everything attracts to itself everything else like itself, that all affinities tend to get together, and when you make your mind a magnet it will attract according to its quality, according to your mental vision, your thoughts, your motives, your dominant attitude.
The saying "Money attracts money" is only another way of stating the law, — "like attracts like." The prosperous classes think prosperity, believe in it, work for it, never for a moment doubt their right to have all the money and all the good things they need, and of course they get them.
They are living up to the very letter and spirit of the law of attraction. A Rockefeller, a Schwab, uses this law in a masterly way to amass a large fortune.
The newsboy uses the same law in selling his newspapers, running a news-stand and climbing gradually to the mayoralty of his city or town. We all use this law of attraction no matter whether we know it or not.
We use it every instant of our lives.
Many people wonder that bad men, wicked men, vicious men are successful in business, at money making, in amassing a fortune, while the good man, the upright man, doesn't seem to be able to make any headway.
They haven't the knack of accumulation in the way of making money. Good things do not seem to come to them. If they make an investment they almost always lose; they buy in the wrong market, or sell in the wrong market.
Now, a man's morals do not have anything specially to do with his money-making faculties, except that honesty is always and everywhere the best business policy. It is just a question of obeying the law of accumulation, the law that like attracts like.
A very bad man may obey the law of accumulation, the law of attraction, and accumulate a vast fortune. If he is honest, his other defects and immoralities, his viciousness, will not hinder the working of the law. The law is unmoral — it is neither moral nor immoral.
Multitudes of people are attracting the wrong things because they do not know the law. They have never learned that the great secret of health, happiness, and success lies in holding the mental attitude which builds, which constructs, the mental attitude which draws to us the good things we desire.
They have never learned the difference between building and tearing down thoughts; the difference between success and failure thoughts; in fact, they do not know that whatever comes to us in life, in our undertakings, great or small, is largely a question of the kind of thoughts we hold in the mind.
We can attract the thing we desire as easily as we can attract the thing we hate and despise and long to get rid of. It is simply a matter of holding the image of the thing in the mind.
That is the model which the life processes will build into our environment and which we will objectify.
Like attracts like, failure more failure, poverty more poverty. Hatred attracts more hatred, envy more envy, jealousy more jealousy, and malice more malice.
Everything has power to attract its kind. The feeling of jealousy or hatred is a seed sown in the great cosmic soil all about us, and the eternal laws return to us a harvest the same in kind. What we sow we reap, just as the soil will return to us exactly what we put into it.
Nothing has the power to reproduce anything but itself.
There is no exception to this law. The law cannot pity or help