Wake Up and Live - Chapter 7 - Warnings and Qualifications

(Excerpt from The Strangest Secret Library – available on
Amazon.)
Audio Available: http://livesensical.com/go/wual-08/

Warnings and Qualifications - 1
Chapter 7
BEFORE going further, it may be well to issue a few
statements as to what this system does not include.
The advice is not to hypnotize yourself into success. This is
important to understand, for many people, and with some
reason, dread and fear anything that is based on hypnotism,
even in the form of self-suggestion. The work of the Nancy
school, with which Coué made us all familiar, is full of
excellent hints for self-management, and Charles
Baudouin's book, Suggestion and Auto-suggestion, can be
read to great advantage by many who do not follow him
with full agreement; and there are several small handbooks
on Coué's system which are worth studying. But it is not for
nothing that the fad which was once so widespread has
faded away. In spite of all warnings, too many of those who
attempted self cure ended by reinforcing the troubles they
set out to banish.
No, although a sentence from a chapter on hypnotism was
helpful in discovering our formula, the connection of this
procedure with hypnotism ends there. You are advised to
use, first, a minimum of will - just enough to decide to try a
new process. Then, as in the Nancy school, the imagination
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takes over until your mind is clear, cool, and "pleasant" in
tone; not confused, diverted, troubled or foggy.
The difference lies just here: in intensive auto-suggestion
there is a serious danger that the mind will get as out of
touch with reality in the other direction as it was in its
day-dreaming or depression; that it will become, as the
French say, exaltée, a word for which we have no exact and
satisfactory equivalent. But "extravagantly elated" is about
what exaltée implies, a state of mental intoxication as
dangerous as it is temporarily delightful. You cannot live on
those peaks; and if you could, you would, again, find
yourself unable to act effectively in the world of reality.
Without such action you are as far from success, as deep in
self delusion, as ever.
Confident, steady, freely flowing action is what we need.
Then safe delight begins.
The mind, cleared of its doubts, begins to expand and enjoy
its own activity; the rewards of satisfactory action begin to
show themselves. An elation which has nothing to do with
delusion or hypnotism naturally follows, and has no later
reaction to nullify it.
Report excerpted from The Strangest Secret Library

Second, the advice is not to make "affirmations" such as "I
cannot fail," "I am successful in all I do," and so on. This
procedure, which is helpful with many, has too much in
common with auto-hypnotism for those who do not
thoroughly understand the principle on which they are
working as they follow it. There is much to admire in the
philosophy behind those religions which use "affirmations";
that there is an ultimate Unity behind the duality or
diversity of the world seems an inescapable conclusion.
Nevertheless, we are "conditioned" (as both Behaviorists
and philosophers say) by the flesh, by personality, by the
concrete world; so we must at least act as if the constitution
of the world were dual, almost evenly distributed between
good and evil. Most of us are brought up short by prosaic
commonsense when we try to use the "affirmative" method,
and for one who can successfully make use of it there are a
hundred who feel ludicrous when doing so. There are others
who succeed for a while and then find themselves worse off
than before. There is no disapproval whatever for the
method when used by those for whom it is, we might say,
temperamentally suitable. But for skeptics of even a mild
order, it is likely to be more irritating than helpful.

Thirdly, the advice is not to dash out and impress others by
posing, pretending or downright lying about one's
successfulness. The only one to impress, at least at first, is
yourself, and that only to the extent of making for yourself a
congenial working-atmosphere.
The recommendation, once more, is simply this: Act as if it
were impossible to fail.
Then, above all, you are not advised to engage in still one
more fantasy about success, a somewhat more detailed and
circumstantial fantasy than you have pushed yourself to
before, but still bearing signs of its kinship to your former
day dreaming. In this case the use of the imagination is
quite different, and worth a little detailed scrutiny later.
Long before Freud made his contribution to modern
thought, Pico della Mirandola, in a treatise called De
Imaginatione - Concerning the Imagination - was
discriminating between two kinds of reverie: the one
retrograde, backward-turning, keeping the man from his
man's work, prolonging irresponsibility and mental
childhood; the other, the true imagination, was found in the
successful man.

An aphorism of Joubert, which denies the fine name of
Imagination to the former type of reverie, is perhaps the
neatest definition that can be found, worth pages of
ordinary "distinguishing": "Fancy," he says, "an animal
faculty, is very different from imagination, which is
intellectual. The former is passive, but the latter is active
and creative."
It is the latter creative imagination which is to be called on,
and if that fact is kept fully in mind there will be no danger
of slipping once more into the bad old habit of dreaming the
world into a different shape while life slips away.
Remember again that "Success depends on a plus condition
of mind and body, on power of work, on courage." It is that
idea which must be held firmly in mind: that the test of
whether or not one is dreaming or imagining correctly is
whether or not action follows the mental work. Any mental
activity which turns backward for longer than it takes to
correct a mistake and to replace an unsatisfactory habit
with a good one, is minus, and cannot be continued if you
hope to lead a fuller life.
You set for yourself in advance the hours in which you will
work. Within those hours, and as part of that work, you first
clear and free your mind. When this has brought you to a

pleasant, confident, quiet state you are ready to get at the
work proper. The first part of the time is spent clearing the
decks for action. You clear the decks; you act.
Now, this is an age of alibis. We all know a little too much
about the Glands Regulating Personality, and the Havoc
raised by Resistances, and so on. Never since the world
began were there such good opportunities to be lazy with
distinction. It is perfectly true that many cases of subnormal
energy can be helped by the proper glandular dosage, but
how many of those who have spoken to you of being
probably hypothyroid ever went through the simple process
of having a basal metabolism test to see if that were really
the trouble? Of course they can claim that the situation is so
grave that they cannot even get up energy to start being
cured; there's no answer to that one.
But if you are really seriously handicapped by lethargy, you
can take your first success-ward step by consulting a good
diagnostician, if necessary. If necessary, mind; for there is a
fact which makes a good deal of the talk about glandular
insufficiency look like the alibi it too often is, and which will
be confirmed for you by specialists in glandular therapy if
you ask them: that if those who complain of lethargy

increase their habitual activity little by little the glands
respond by increased secretion. In short, very often this
condition can be cured by starting at the other end! You
may rest assured that you will have no consequent
breakdown in following this advice unless you deliberately
(and with intent to cripple yourself) leap from a practically
comatose state to one of manic activity.
As for Resistances! They are almost an item of dogma in the
current secular religion.
Persons who would never dream of going to the time,
expense, or trouble of a full analysis will tell you
complacently that they have "a resistance" to this or that,
and feel that they have done all and more than can be asked
of them by admitting their handicap. Remarkable cures of
resistances, however, have been observed in those who took
solemnly the advice to replace that word with our ancestors'
outmoded synonym for the same thing: "bone-laziness." It
is not quite so much fun, nor so flattering, to be foolishly
lazy as it is to be the victim of a technical term, but many
are crippled for knowing an impressive word who would
have had no such trouble if they had lived in a simpler and
less self-indulgent society. Those who are genuinely, deeply,
and unhappily in the grip of a neurosis should turn at once

to one of the well known therapies. Unless one is willing to
do so, it should be made a matter of social disapproval to
refer technically to such difficulties.
If the alibis of the age were in any way generally helpful, if
they were not excuses for remaining inactive, and if
inactivity were really a happier state than effectiveness,
there would be little harm in indulging in the contemporary
patter, even without the specialized medical or
psychological knowledge necessary for using the
terminology correctly. But before you decide that you are
the victim of uncooperative glands, or a villainous
Resistance, try a few of the suggestions for self-discipline in
a later chapter.
You may find them so much fun, your expanding powers so
much more rewarding than - well, your bone-laziness - that
you will not need the services of an expert, after all.

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