PERSONAL POWER (Complete 12 Volume Edition). William Walker Atkinson
time being. This permission, however, is conditioned by the fact that there must not be too many of such sets occupying the front seats of Desire at the same time. The tendency should always be in the direction of concentration and focused energy; you should beware of scattered power and energy arising from a great diversity of desires and aims.
If you discover that there are too many strong “different” desires left after you have reached this stage of selection and elimination, you should carefully weigh each remaining set, subjecting it to the tests of memory, imagination, association and rational judgment, discarding all that are not found profitable and sufficiently advantageous. If you find that any of your desires cost you more than you get out of them; get rid of all those which do not pay for their keep.”
Continue until you have left only a comparatively few sets of desires, all of proved value and superlative emotional strength and depth. These should be recognized as well worth the price which you are prepared to pay for their maintenance and support. Treat in the same way any new desires which arise within you. Test them just as you have tested their predecessors, and insist that they prove that they are “worth while” before you decide to keep them. If they cost you more than you get out of them, discard them. Insist that they shall “pay their keep” and yield you some emotional profit beside. Run your emotional and desire establishment on business principles.
You have now finally reached the stage in which you have on your list nothing but your Dominant Desires—the survivors in the Struggle for Existence—the Survival of the Fittest. These Dominant Desires must thereafter rule your emotional realm. Any new comer must prove its worth by a test of strength with these Dominant Desires—if it shows its strength, and is able to hold its place, very well; it may be added to the list. Those going down in defeat must be eliminated. This will require strength and determination on your part—but you are a strong and determined individual, or at least are becoming one.
The process of Self-Analysis and Selection which you just considered will furnish you with two classes of reports, viz., (1) it will demonstrate to you your strongest classes of desires—your Dominant Desires; and (2) it will cause you clearly and definitely to picture and form a strong idea of each of such Dominant Desires. In both reports it will cause you to “know exactly what you want,” which is the first requisite of the Master Formula of Attainment.
VIII
WANTING IT HARD ENOUGH
ACCORDING TO the Master Formula you must not only “know exactly what you want,” but must also “want it hard enough,” and be “willing to pay the price of its attainment.” Having considered the first of the above stated three requisites for obtaining that which you want, we ask you now to consider the second requisite, i. e., that of “wanting it hard enough.”
You may think that you “want it hard enough” when you have a rather keen desire or longing for anything, but when you compare your feeling with that of persons manifesting really strong, insistent desire, you will find that you are but merely manifesting a “wish” for that for which you have an inclination or an attachment. Compared to the insistent “want” or “want to” of thoroughly aroused Desire, your “wish” is but as a shadow. The chances are that you have been a mere amateur—a dilettante—in the art and science of “wanting’ and “wanting to.” Very few persons really know how to “want” or “want to” in such manner as to arouse fully the elemental forces of Desire Power.
An old Oriental fable illustrates the nature of Desire aroused to its fullest extent. The fable relates that a teacher took his pupil out on a deep lake, in a boat, and then suddenly pushed him overboard. The youth sank beneath the surface of the water, but rose in a few seconds, gasping for breath. Without giving him time to fill his lungs with air, the teacher forcibly pushed him under once more. The youth rose to the surface the second time, and was again pushed under. He rose for the third time, almost entirely exhausted; this time the teacher pulled him up over the side of the boat, and employed the usual methods to restore him to normal breathing.
When the youth had fully recovered from his severe ordeal, the teacher said to him: “Tell me what was the one thing that you desired above all other things before I pulled you in—the one desire to which all other desires seem like tiny candles compared with the sun?” The youth replied, “Oh, sir; above all else I desired air to breathe—for me at that time there existed no other desires!” Then said the teacher, “Let this, then, be the measure of your desire for those things to the attainment of which your life is devoted!”
You will not fully realize the measure of Desire pointed out in this fable, unless you employ your imagination in the direction of feeling yourself in the drowning condition of the youth—until you do this, the fable is a mere matter of words. When you can realize in feeling, as well as recognize in thought, the strength of the desire for air present in that youth, then, and then only, will you be able to manifest in expression a similar degree of Desire for the objects of your prime “wants” and “want tos.” Do not rest satisfied with the intellectual recognition of the condition—induce the corresponding emotional feeling in yourself to as great a degree as possible.
Varying the illustration, you will do well to induce in yourself (in imagination) the realization of the insistent, paramount desire for food experienced by the starving man lost in the dense forest in midwinter. The chances are that you never have been actually “hungry” in the true sense of the term; all that you have mistaken for hunger is merely the call of appetite or taste—the result of habit. When you are so hungry that an old, stale, dry crust of bread will be delicious to your taste, then you are beginning to know what real hunger is. Those men who, lost in the forest or shipwrecked, have tried to satisfy intense hunger by gnawing the bark of trees, or chewing bits of leather cut from their boots—these men could give you some interesting information concerning hunger. If you can imagine the feelings of men in this condition, then you may begin to understand what “insistent desire” really means.
Again, the shipwrecked sailors adrift at sea with their supply of water exhausted; or the desertlost man wandering over the hot sands with a thirst almost inconceivable to the ordinary person; those men know what “insistent desire” means. Man can live many days without food; but only a few days without water; and only a few minutes without air. When these fundamental essentials of life are withdrawn temporarily, the living creature finds his strongest and most elemental feelings and desires aroused—they become transmuted into passions insistently demanding satisfaction and content. When these elemental emotions and desires are thoroughly aroused, all the derivative emotional states are forgotten. Imagine the emotional state of the starving man in sight of food, or the thirstcursed man within reach of water, if some other person or thing intervenes and attempts to frustrate the suffering man’s attainment of that which he wants above all else at that time.
Other examples of insistent desire may be found in the cases of wild animals in the mating season, in which they will risk life and defy their powerful rivals in order to secure the chosen mate. If you ever have come across a bullmoose in the mating season, you will have a vivid picture and idea of this phase of elemental desire raised to the point of “insistent demand.”
Again, consider the intense emotional feeling, and the accompanying desires experienced by the mother creature in connection with the welfare and protection of her young when danger threatens them—this will show you the nature and character of elemental desire aroused to its fullest extent. Even tiny birds will fight against overwhelming odds in resisting the animal or man seeking to rob their nests. It is a poor spirited motheranimal which will not risk her life, and actually court death, in defense of her young. The female wild creature becomes doubly formidable when accompanied by her young. “The female of the species” is far “more deadly than the male” when the welfare of its young is involved. The Orientals have a proverb: “It is a very brave, or a very foolish, man who will try to steal a young tigercub while its mother is alive and free in the vicinity.”
We have called your attention to the above several examples