As You Think

Second Edition

James Allen

• Publisher: New World Library
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781577312840
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Experimental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In 1904, a relatively unknown Englishman named James Allen wrote a little book called As a Man Thinketh. The book has become one of the world's greatest self-help books — "self-empowerment" is a better term — for it not only reveals to us that the keys to success are within our own minds, it shows us how to use these keys to unlock the greatest fulfillment we can imagine.In this revised edition, author and publisher Marc Allen updates this classic, changing language that has become dated or obsolete, and honing the clarity of the message. He makes As You Think gender inclusive, showing how these principles are truly universal and apply to everyone, regardless of sex, age, race, beliefs, social class, or education.As You Think is a simple yet powerful reminder that "all we achieve and all that we fail to achieve is the direct result of our own thoughts." We are the masters of our destinies.

Two

The Effect of
Thought on
Circumstances

The human will, that force unseen,
The offspring of a deathless soul,
Can hew a way to any goal,
Though walls of granite intervene.

Your mind may be likened to a garden that may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild — but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.

Just as gardeners cultivate their plots, keeping them free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits they desire, so may you tend the garden of your mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts, and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts. By pursuing this process, you will sooner or later discover that you are the master gardener of your soul, the director of your life. You also reveal, within yourself, the laws of thought, and understand, with ever-increasing accuracy, how the forces of thought and elements of the mind operate in the shaping of your character, circumstances, and destiny.

Thought and character are one, and as character can only manifest and discover itself through environment and circumstance, the outer conditions of your life will always be found to be harmoniously related to your inner state. This does not mean that your circumstances at any given time are an indication of your entire character, but that those circumstances are so intimately connected with some vital element of your thought that, for the time being, they are indispensable to your development.

You are where you are by the law of your being; the thoughts that you have built into your character have brought you there, and in the arrangement of your life there is no element of chance, but all is the result of a law that cannot err. This is just as true of those who feel “out of harmony” with their surroundings as of those who are contented with them.

As a progressive and evolving being, you are where you are in order to learn and to grow, and as you learn the spiritual lesson that any circumstance contains for you, it passes away and gives place to other circumstances.

You are buffeted by circumstances so long as you believe yourself to be a creature affected by outside conditions — but when you realize that you are a creative power, and that you may command the hidden soil and seeds of your being out of which your circumstances grow, then you become the rightful master of yourself.

All people who have practiced self-examination and self-control know that circumstances grow out of thought, for they have noticed that the alterations in their circumstances have been in direct proportion to their altered mental conditions. So true is this that when you earnestly apply yourself to remedy the defects in your character, you make swift and marked progress and pass rapidly through a series of changes.

The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors — what it loves, and also what it fears. It reaches the height of its cherished aspirations, and it falls to the depth of its recurring, unexamined fears. Circumstances are the means by which the soul receives its own.

Every thought-seed sown or allowed to fall into the mind, and to take root there, produces its own, blossoming sooner or later into act, and bearing its own fruits of opportunity and circumstance. Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bear bad fruit.

The outer world of circumstance shapes itself to the inner world of thought, and both pleasant and unpleasant external conditions are factors that make for the ultimate good of the individual. As the reaper of your own harvest, you learn both by suffering and bliss.

Following the innermost desires, aspirations, thoughts, by which you allow yourself to be dominated, you at last arrive at their fruition and fulfillment in the outer conditions of your life. The laws of growth and adjustment apply everywhere.

A person does not end up in the gutter or a prison by the tyranny of fate or circumstance, but by the path of low thoughts and base desires. Nor does a pure-minded person fall suddenly into crime by the stress of any merely external force — the criminal thought had long been secretly fostered in the heart, and the hour of opportunity revealed its gathered power. Circumstance does not make the person, it reveals the person to himself or herself.

No such conditions can exist that lead us to descend into vice and its attendant sufferings apart from our own vicious inclinations, just as no such conditions can exist that lead us to ascend into virtue and success and its pure happiness without the continued cultivation of virtuous and successful aspirations. We, therefore, as the lords and masters of our thoughts, are the makers of ourselves, the shapers and authors of our environment.

At birth the soul comes to its own, and through every step of its earthly pilgrimage it attracts those combinations of conditions that reveal itself, that are the reflections of its own purity and impurity, its strength and weakness.

We do not attract what we want, but what we are. Our whims, fancies, and ambitions are thwarted at every step, but our innermost thoughts and desires are fed with their own food, be it good or bad. The “divinity that shapes our ends” is in ourselves; it is our very self. And so we are held prisoners only by ourselves: Our own thoughts and actions are the jailers of our fate — they imprison, if they are base; they are also the angels of freedom — they liberate, if they are noble.

We don’t get what we wish and pray for, we get what we justly earn. Our wishes and prayers are only gratified and answered when they harmonize with our thoughts and actions.

In the light of this truth, what then is the meaning of “fighting against circumstances” in our lives? It means that we are continually revolting against an effect without, while all the time we are nourishing and preserving its cause in our hear...