Speaker 1: Aim straight. Fear attracts as well as desire. Learn to
aim straight and aim at the right thing. Examples the bowler,
the bisclist and the car, the bicyclist and the post,
the boy and the marbles. Wisdom from the Babe. Look straight,
think straight, shoot straight. A strong desire or a strong
fear thought is an aim at the thing desired or feared.
And in proportion to the degree of desire or fear,
will we be carried toward the thing at which we aim.
Confident expectation is manifested in a feer thought as well
as in an earnest desire. And when we confidently expect
a thing to happen, we are carried toward it by
an irresistible force. It may seem strange to you to
hear that fear is akin to desire, but this is
the truth. It matters not whether we call it desire
or fear. The jest of the matter lies in the
confident expectation. A feint of hope and a lurking fear
have about the same attractive force. A desire coupled with
a firm belief in its realization attracts strongly, but no
more strongly than does a fear coupled with a feeling
of certainty of its realization. The thing upon which your
thought is firmly fixed or drawn toward will be the
thing you will realize. Therefore, aim strait. We have heard
much of the attractive power of thought as applied to desire.
I will now say something to you about the same
force called into operation by fear thought. It is far
more pleasant for me to speak of the bright side
of the question, but I would be neglecting my duty
towards you if I fail to direct your attention to
the reverse of the shield. When you thoroughly realize that
thought force works both ways, you will know how to
handle it, and will understand many things that have heretofore
been dark to you. You will learn to aim straight,
but will also learn to be careful at what you aim.
You will learn to avoid the aim inspired by fear,
and will hereafter use all your energies to pointing your
mental arrow at the bull's eye of happiness and success.
Let us take a few facts from the physical placeane
in order to illustrate things as they are on the
mental plane of effort. Life has its correspondence on all
its planes and by taking examples from one plane, we
will be able to more readily understand the workings of
the law on other planes. Some time ago I was
talking to a number of people about this subject, and
gleaned from each an illustration of the workings of the
law of attraction on the physical plane, and each example,
although on the physical plane, showed the power of mind
behind it. I will tell you what some of these
people said, and you can see for yourself just what
I mean. The first man was a printer who, after hours,
spent much time in bowling, and whull was looked upon
as an expert in that game. He said that some
time before he was playing a game, and at a
critical point, when he was taking aim and endeavoring to
put the ball in between one and two pins, especially
advantageous shot, his opponent spoke up and said, just watch
him hit the four pin. I do not know anything
about bowling, but it seems that to hit the four
pin is about the worst thing that can happen to
a bowler, outside of missing the pins altogether. Well, to
go on with the story With the remark of his rival,
fearthought entered the mind of the printer, and he couldn't
get the four pin out of his mind. He kept
on looking at the place he wanted to hit, but
his mind was on the four pin, and he feared
that he would hit it. To use his own words,
he got rattled and away went the ball, striking the
four pin fair and square. He concluded the story by saying,
and so in instead of making a ten strike, I
got only a split Maybe you understand those terms better
than do I, but at any rate, you will see
what a fear thought brought to this typographical bowler in
his little game of ten pins. Moral. When you wish
to place the ball energy between the one and two
pins of life, don't allow feer thoughts to switch you
off to the four pin, thereby giving you a split
in instead of the coveted ten strike. Another friend told
me that a few few days before, he had been
riding on the front bench of a grip car on
a Chicago cable line. Hearing the gripman break into the
vernacular in a vigorous style. He looked up and saw
a colored man on a bicycle trying to cross the
track on the bias, as the girls say, just ahead
of the car. There was plenty of time plenty of
room for the man to get across, but when he
reached the middle of the track, fearthought got hold of him,
and in spite of himself, his wheel turned and he
headed straight for the car. He headed straight for the
grip car, just as if he had aimed at it,
and the next moment he went bang right into it.
He escaped injury, but his wheel was wrecked. When asked
about it, he said that from the moment he got
afraid of the car, his wheel ran away with him,
right into the thing he feared. Moral. Keep your mind
fixed on the thing you want, not on the thing
you don't want. Another man to whom I related the
story of the man on the wheel, said that he
had the same trouble. When he was learning to ride
the wheel. He was getting along pretty well and could
manage to steer half away straight, although in a wobbly manner,
until one day he happened to see a certain telegraph
pole in front of the place where he was learning
to write. The pole seemed to hypnotize him, and from
that day he couldn't keep his front wheel away from it.
He couldn't keep away from that pole. He was afraid
of it. The pole seemed to have magnetic qualities, and
the result was pump. He remounted over and over again,
but the result was the same. At last he made
up his mind that he was going to get ahead
of that pole somehow, and he mounted the wheel with
his back toward the pole, but his mind was still
on it. And lo the front wheel described a semicircle,
and back to the pole. He went, morol, do not
let a pole hypnotize you with fier thought. Keep your
mind on the place to which you wished to go.
But the best example was given by a boy who
had kept his eyes open and his thinker working. Maybe
I had better tell you in his own words. This
is what he said, Just as he said it. Oh,
Pshaw said the boy, you're making a big fuss over nothing.
Every feller knows that you've got to think about a
thing if you want to hit it. And if you
think about the wrong thing, why you will hit the
wrong thing. If I fire a stone at a tin can,
why I just look square at the can and think
about the can For all I am worth, and the
can's a dead one shore. If I happen to let
my mind wonder to the cat what's on the shed
over to the left of the can well, so much
the worse for the cat. That's all. To shoot straight,
you've got to aim straight, and to im street, you've
got to look straight. And to look straight, you've got
to think straight. Every kid knows that, or he couldn't
even play marbles. If I get my heart set on
a beauty marble in the ring, I just want it
the worst way, and says I to myself, You are
my marble. Then I look at him, strong and steady like,
and don't think about nothing else in the world but
that beauty. Maybe I'm late for school, but I clean
forget it. I don't see nothing, nor think nothing but
that there marble. What I want as the piece in
my reader says, it's my heart's desire, And I don't
care whether school keeps or not, just so as I
get it. Then I shoot at the marble's mine. And
at school, when our drawing teacher tells us how to
draw a straight line, she makes two dots several inches
away from each other. Then she makes us put our
pencils on the first dot and look steady at the other,
and move our pencil towards it. The more you keep
thinking about the far off dot, and the less you
think about the starting dot or your hand, the straighter
you're going to get your line. Once I looked straight
at the far off dot with my eyes, but I
kept thinking about a red headed girl on the other
side of the room, And what do you think the
line I was drawing slandered away off in her direction,
although I had kept my eyes glued on the far
away dot and never even peeped in the kid's direction,
that she was sure that it's the thinking as well
as the looking. See. All of the examples above given
contain within them the principles of a mighty truth, a
working illustration of a great law of life. If we
are wise, we will profit by them. Many things are
happening around us every day from which we might gain
lessons if we would only think a little. And instead
of playing follow my leader and accepting other people's thoughts
ready made, we have gotten so accustomed to these hand
me down thoughts that we have almost forgotten how to
turn out thoughts for ourselves. The day has come when
we are required to do a little thinking on our
own account, and instead of humbly bowing before moth eaten
authority pershed upon a crumbling base. The time has arrived
when we must strike out for ourselves instead of following
a musty precedent which has seen better days. This is
the age of the individual. This is the time for
the eye to assert itself. I wish you would pay
attention to what the boy said. It is not the
first time that we have gone to the bay for wisdom.
Although a child has an imagination beyond our comprehension, he
at the same time is painfully and even brutally matter
of fact. He is continually asking why, and when we
grown ups are unable to answer him, he answers the
question himself, often better than we could have done. He
doesn't theorize, but gets down to business and works things
out for himself. This boy knew all about the thinking
part of the problems and had put it into practical
application while we were theorizing about it. He had discovered
that in order to get things, we must first earnestly
desire them, then confidently expect that we would get them,
then go to work to procure them. That's the true
philosophy of getting things. He tells us about the marble
that he first wanted it the worst way, and didn't
care whether school kept or not, just so he got
the marple. Then he looked strong and steadylike at the marble,
saying you are my marble. Then he shot, and the
marble was his. Can any of you describe the process
of getting things better than this? If we grown ups
would only put into our daily tasks the interest and
attention that the boy put into his game of marbles,
we would get the marble oftener than we have been doing.
Of course, it may be true that the principal joy
is in the getting of things rather than in the
session of them, that the game of life is like
the game of marbles in that respect, But what of
that that needed spoil the game? The boy knows enough
to enjoy playing for a few marbles that may be
obtained for a penny of fistful at the corner store,
but that fact doesn't bother him at all. He knows
that when he gets the marble it will not seem
half so beautiful in the hand as it did in
the ring, but he gets ready to shoot for the
next one was just as much zest and enjoyment. He
finds a joy in living, acting, doing expressing, growing and outgrowing,
gaining experiences. Take a lesson from the boy. While you
are in the great game, take a boy's interest in it.
Play with zest, play your level best, and get the marple.
The boy instinctively knows that the joy of life consists
of living, while we poor grown ups vainly imagine that
our pleasure will come only in the trophies of the game,
the glass marples of life, and look upon the playing
of the game as drudgery and work imposed upon us
as a punishment of the sins of our forefathers. The
boy lives in the now and enjoys every moment of
his existence, his winnings, his losings, his victories, his defeats,
while we, his elders and superiors in wisdom, grown at
the heat of the day and the rigor of the game,
and are only reconciled to our tasks by the thought
of how we will enjoy the possession of the marples
when we get them at the end of the game.
The boy sucks his orange and extracts every particle of
its sweet contents, while we threw away the juicy meat
and aim only to secure the pips. Oh Yes, the
boy not only knows how to get there, but he
has also a sane philosophy of life. Many of us
grown ups are now relearning that which we lost with
our youth. You will notice that the bowler, the bicyclist,
and the others got what they didn't want because they
were afraid of it and allowed it to distract their
thoughts from the object of their desire. To fear a
thing is akin to desiring it. In either case you
are attracted toward it or it to you. It's a
rule that works both ways. You must think think about
the thing you want, not about the thing you don't want.
For the thoughts you are thinking are the ones that
you are going to take form in action. As the
boy said, You've got to think about a thing if
you want to hit it, And if you think about
the wrong thing, why you're going to hit the wrong thing.
Watch your ideal, not your bugbear. Concentrate on your ideal,
fix your thoughts and gaze upon it like the boy
upon his marple, and don't allow your thought to sidetrack you.
Select the thing you want to be and then grow
steadily into it. Pick out the thing you want, and
then go straight and steadily to it replace your old wine,
I fear, with the new thought. Shout I can and
I will. Then you will experience and frustration of thought
taking form in action. Look straight, think straight, shoot straight.
In these three things lie the secret of success.