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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Robert Collier's 'The Secret of Power' is a seminal work in the realm of self-improvement and personal development literature. Collier's writing style is characterized by its clarity and straightforwardness, making complex concepts easily digestible for readers. The book delves into the power of the mind and the law of attraction, providing practical advice and techniques for harnessing one's inner potential. Written in the early 20th century, 'The Secret of Power' reflects the optimism and self-help culture of the time, drawing inspiration from the New Thought movement. Collier's emphasis on positive thinking and visualization has continued to resonate with audiences seeking to improve their lives. Robert Collier's own experiences with overcoming adversity and achieving success likely influenced the themes explored in 'The Secret of Power'. His work as a businessman and self-made success story adds credibility to his teachings on personal empowerment. I highly recommend 'The Secret of Power' to readers interested in unlocking their full potential and manifesting their desires through the power of the mind. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Secret of Power
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Table of Contents
“I am the owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, Of Caesar’s hand and Plato’s brain, Of Lord Christ’s heart
INTRODUCTION
What is the strongest political trend in the world today?
After the last war, it was towards democracy. But somehow democracy failed the average man. When the depression came and he found himself unable to provide food and shelter for his loved ones, he demanded something more than equality of opportunity. He demanded SECURITY from want.
To answer that demand came “Strong Men,” so-called, Mussolinis and Hitlers and Antonescus and Francos and the like, and Fascism was born. Men achieved security, of a kind, but they bartered their freedom for it. And soon they learned that power feeds on power, and the only end of dictatorship is war, which destroys all.
So today the trend is to the other extreme—to Communism. All over the world you see signs of it. China has largely embraced it. All of eastern Europe is engulfed by it. France and Belgium are trending in that direction. Even here in the U. S., some labor unions are strongly Communistic, several political groups are dominated by it, it has its disciples in high places and for a time Democrats feared that their party would be taken over by the Communists.
And the reason ? The same reason that has impelled man since time began—the longing for security, security for the home, security against want, security for old age.
Since time began, the search for security has been one of the strongest urges in all of nature. You see it in the animal in the way it conceals its nest and tries to make it safe from predatory creatures—man or animal. You see it in the records of early man in the caves he dug into the sides of the mountains, in the tree huts, in the cliff dwellings. You follow it down through the ages to the walled cities, the turreted castles, the inaccessible mountains in which men made their homes.
Throughout history, you see this search for security as one of the dominant characteristics of all human kind. And now that the common man has realized his power, you find him all over the world banding together to take over all property, to the end that he and his may find that security from want that he has so long worked for.
What he does not seem to realize is that the mere redistribution of property never has and never will solve his problem. It will provide him with temporary supply, yes—but supply is a continuing problem, and when his small share of the general distribution is gone, he will be worse off than he was before, because production will have either ceased or been greatly curtailed.
Redistribution is not the answer. It has been tried repeatedly, and always failed. You must go farther back than that. You must start with the source of things. And that is what we shall try to do in the following pages.
“Know this, ye restless denizens of earth, Know this, ye seekers after joy and mirth, Three things there are, eternal in their worth— LOVE, that outreaches to the humblest things: WORK, that is glad in what it does and brings; And FAITH, that soars upon unwearied wings. Divine the powers that on this trio wait, Supreme their conquest, over time and fate.
CHAPTER 1. THE CREATIVE FORCE
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor: He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, And recovering of sight to the blind, To set at liberty them that are bruised,To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord”
“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God.”—St. John.
What is a word? A mental concept or image, is it not? In originating language, words were coined to represent certain images or objects. The word horse, for instance, calls to mind the image left upon the retina and the brain by what one has seen of that quadruped.
But what if there were no horses? What if one were called upon to create a horse, with no previous knowledge of such an animal? You’d have to build up a clear mental image of him first, would you not? You’d have to work out a mental picture of every part of his anatomy, every physical outline. You’d need a perfect mental concept of everything that is comprised in the word horse.
And that was what happened when God created the world. In the beginning was the “Word,” the mental concept, the image in God’s mind of what He planned. “And the Word was made flesh.” It took on shape and substance. It grew into an habitable world. It developed creatures like the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the beasts of the field. And finally man.
To every one of these creatures, in turn, was given a certain amount of creative power. The Creative Force of the Universe was working through them, and it did not look upon them as a completed job. It was and is still creating, still improving. The horse, for instance, was not originally the powerful animal we see today. It was little larger than a fox. It developed its present proportions and qualities as the need for these arose.
All life originally came from the sea, for in the beginning the waters covered the face of the earth. As volcanic action raised certain portions of the earth’s surface above the waters, and as the moon’s attraction caused the waters to rise or recede from the shores of these sections of dry land, certain creatures of the sea were left high and dry periodically.
What happened to them? Did they die? In the beginning, yes, but as this regular movement of the waters became perceptible to the rudimentary intelligence of the sea animals, certain of them began to use the Creative Force working through them to enable them to survive. Where they had only gills to breathe with in the water, they developed lungs that enabled them to breathe when left on dry land. And where the rough waters of the surf rolled them over and over on the rocky beaches, bruising and killing thousands of them, they developed calluses or shells, just as your feet or hands will develop calluses where they are subjected to hard wear.
Life then, as now, was a continually developing process. Those early forms of life were threatened by every kind of danger—from floods, from earthquakes, from droughts, from desert heat, from glacial cold, from volcanic eruptions—-but each new danger was merely an incentive to finding some new resource, to putting forth their Creative Force in some new shape.
To meet one set of needs, the Creative Force formed the Dinosaur; to meet another, the Butterfly. Long before it worked up to man, we see its unlimited resourcefulness in a thousand ways. To escape danger in the water, some forms of Life sought land. Pursued on land, they took to the air. To breathe in the sea, the Creative Force developed gills. Stranded on land, it perfected lungs. To meet one kind of danger, it grew a shell. For another, it developed fleetness of foot, or wings that carried it into the air. To protect itself from glacial cold, it grew fur. In temperate climes, hair. Subject to alternate heat and cold, it produced feathers. But ever, from the beginning, it showed its power to meet every changing condition, to answer every creature need.
Had it been possible to stamp out this Creative Force, or halt its constant upward development, it would have perished ages ago, when fire and flood, drought and famine followed each other in quick succession. But obstacles, misfortunes, cataclysms, were to it merely new opportunities to assert its power. In fact, it required difficulties or obstacles to stir it up, to make it show its energy and resourcefulness.
The great reptiles, the monster beasts of antiquity, passed on as the conditions changed that had made them possible, but the Creative Force stayed, changing as each age changed, always developing, always improving.
When God put this Creative Force into His creatures, He gave to it unlimited energy, unlimited resource. No other power can equal it. No force can defeat it. No obstacle can hold it back. All through the history of life and mankind, you can see its directing intelligence rising to meet every need of life.
No one can follow it down through the ages without realizing that the purpose of existence is GROWTH, DEVELOPMENT. Life is dynamic, not static. It is ever moving forward—not standing still. The one unpardonable sin in all of nature is to stand still, to stagnate. The Gigantosaurus, that was over a hundred feet long and as big as a house; the Tyrannosaurus, that had the strength of a locomotive and was the last word in frightfulness; the Pterodactyl or Flying Dragon—all the giant monsters of pre-historic ages—are gone. They ceased to serve a useful purpose. They stood still while the life around them passed them by.
Egypt and Persia, Greece and Rome, all the great empires of antiquity, perished when they ceased to grow. China built a wall around herself and stood still for a thousand years. In all of Nature, to cease to grow is to perish.
It is for men and women who are not ready to stand still, who refuse to cease to grow, that this book is written. Its purpose is to give you a clearer understanding of your own potentialities, to show you how to work with and take advantage of the infinite energy and power of the Creative Force working through you.
The terror of the man at the crossways, not knowing which way to turn, should be no terror for you, for your future is of your own making. The only law of infinite energy is the law of supply. The Creative Principle is your principle. To survive, to win through, to triumphantly surmount all obstacles has been its everyday practice since the beginning of time. It is no less resourceful now than it ever was. You have but to supply the urge, to work in harmony with it, to get from it anything you need. For if this Creative Force is so strong in the lowest forms of animal life that it can develop a shell or a poison to meet a need; if it can teach the bird to circle and dart, to balance and fly; if it can grow a new limb on a spider or crab to replace a lost one; how much more can it do for YOU —a reasoning, rational being, with a mind able to work with this Creative Force, with energy and purpose and initiative to urge it on!
The evidence of this is all about you. Take up some violent form of exercise, and in the beginning your muscles are weak, easily tired. But keep on a few days, and what happens? The Creative Force in you promptly strengthens them, toughens them, to meet their need.
All through your daily life, you find this Force steadily at work. Embrace it, work with it, take it to your heart, and there is nothing you cannot do. The mere fact that you have obstacles to overcome is in your favor, for when there is nothing to be done, when things run along too smoothly, the Creative Force seems to sleep. It is when you need it, when you call upon it urgently, that it is most on the job.
It differs from Luck in this, that fortune is a fickle jade who smiles most on those who need her least. Stake your last penny on the turn of a card—have nothing between you and ruin but the spin of a wheel or the speed of a horse—and the chances are a hundred to one that luck will desert you.
It is just the opposite with the Creative Force in you. As long as things run smoothly, as long as life flows along like a song, this Creative Force seems to slumber, secure in the knowledge that your affairs can take care of themselves. But let things start going wrong, let ruin or death stare you in the face—then is the time this Creative Force will assert itself if you but give it the chance.
There is a Napoleonic feeling of power that insures success in the knowledge that this invincible Creative Force is behind your every act. Knowing that you have with you a force which never yet has failed in anything it has undertaken, you can go ahead in the confident knowledge that it will not fail in your case. The ingenuity which overcame every obstacle in making you what you are, is not likely to fall short when you have immediate need for it. It is the reserve strength of the athlete, the second wind of the runner, the power that, in moments of great stress or excitement, you unconsciously call upon to do the deeds which you ever after look upon as superhuman.
But they are in no wise superhuman. They are merely beyond the capacity of your conscious self. Ally your conscious self with that sleeping giant within you, rouse him daily to the task and those superhuman deeds will become your ordinary, everyday accomplishments.
It matters not whether you are banker or lawyer, business man or clerk, whether you are the custodian of millions or have to struggle for your daily bread. The Creative Force makes no distinction between high and low, rich and poor. The greater your need, the more readily will it respond to your call. Wherever there is an unusual task, wherever there is poverty or hardship or sickness or despair, there this Servant of your mind waits, ready and willing to help, asking only that you call upon him. And not only is it ready and willing, but it is always ABLE to help. Its ingenuity and resource are without limit. It is mind. It is thought. It is the telepathy that carries messages without the spoken or written word. It is the sixth sense that warns you of unseen dangers. No matter how stupendous and complicated, or how simple your problem may be, the solution of it is somewhere in mind, in thought. And since the solution does exist, this mental giant can find it for you. It can know, and it can do, every right thing. Whatever it is necessary for you to know, whatever it is necessary for you to do, you can know and you can do if you will but seek the help of this Genie-of-your-mind and work with it in the right way.
To every living creature, God gave enough of this Creative Force to enable it to develop whatever it felt that it needed for survival. Behind and working through every living thing was this Creative Force, and to each was given the power to draw upon it at need. With the lower forms of life, that call had to be restricted to themselves, to their own bodies. They could not change their environment.
They could develop a house of shell in which to live, like the crustaceans or the snail or the turtle. They could use the Creative Force to develop strength or fleetness or teeth and claws—anything within or pertaining to themselves. But aside from building nests or caves or other more or less secure homes, they could not alter conditions around them. To man alone was given the power to make his own environment. To him alone was given dominion over things and conditions.
That he exercises this power, even today, only to a limited extent, does not alter the fact that he has it. Man was given dominion. “And God said—Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Of course, few believe in that dominion. Fewer still exercise it for their own good or the good of all. But everyone uses the Creative Force in him to an extent. Everyone builds his own environment.
“Don’t tell me,” some will say indignantly, “that I built these slums around me, that I am responsible for the wretched conditions under which I work, that I had anything to do with the squalor and poverty in which my family have to live.” Yet that is exactly what we do tell you. If you were born in poverty and misery, it was because your parents imaged these as something forced upon them, something they could not help, a condition that was necessary and to be expected. Thinking so, they used the Creative Force working through them to fasten those conditions upon themselves as something they were meant to suffer and could do nothing about.
Then you in your turn accepted those conditions as what you were born to, and fastened them upon yourself by your supine acceptance of them, by failing to claim better ones, by making no great or sustained efforts to get out of them.
All history shows that the determined soul who refuses to accept poverty or lack can change these to riches and power if he has the determination and the perseverance. The great men of the world have almost all come up from poverty and obscurity. The rich men of the world have mostly started with nothing.
“Always the real leaders of men, the real kings, have come up from the common people,” wrote Dr. Frank Crane. “The finest flowers in the human flora grow in the woods pasture and not in the hothouse; no privileged class, no royal house, no carefully selected stock produced a Leonardo or a Michelangelo in art, a Shakespeare or Burns in letters, a Galli Curci or Paderewski in music, a Socrates or Kant in philosophy, an Edison or Pasteur in science, a Wesley or a Knox in religion.”
It is the NEED that calls forth such geniuses, the urgent need for development or expression, and it is because these men drew powerfully upon the Creative Force within them that they became great. As the poet put it:
“There is Power within me which is Life itself; I can turn to it and rest on it; As I turn to it and rest on it, It helps me and heals me all the time.
“There is Wisdom itself within me which is Life itself; I can turn to it and rest on it; As I turn to it and rest on it, It helps me and heals me all the time.
