Body Intelligence

Body Intelligence

Orison Swett Marden 

The author of that marvelously interesting book, "Cell Intelligence" says: "The cell is a conscious intelligent being, and by reason thereof plans and builds all plants and animals in the same manner as man constructs houses, railroads, and other structures."

Scientists now believe that the cells which constitute the various organs of the body,—the brain, the heart, the liver, the kidneys, the lungs, etc.,—have what is called "organ intelligence," and that these cells are susceptible to mental suggestion for the health or disease of their particular organ.

If, for instance, there should be a disease tendency lurking in any part of your body; if your digestive organs, your heart, your kidneys, your liver, or some other organ, should not be functioning normally, by sending encouraging, energizing, uplifting thoughts, the suggestion of health and wholeness, to the community cells, and by living rightly, you can neutralize the disease tendency and bring the organ back to normalcy.

The real basis of all forms of mental healing is the fact that the cells of the body are all alive and intelligent; that they respond to our thought, to our intelligence, to our suggestions to them. 

It makes a great difference to the mental healer to know that instead of sending his thought into a mass of dead cells, every one is not only alive, but is just as responsive to his mental attitude as an intelligent child would be.

Your discouraged, pessimistic thoughts have robbed you of energy and pep; demagnetized you for the very things you are trying to attract,—health and prosperity.

Mental healers simply changed the trend of the patient's mind, turned his thought from abnormal, diseased conditions to healthful, wholesome conditions.

The important thing is to keep out of the mind all enemy thoughts. The moment any of these gain entrance, and are permitted to remain, they begin to tear down and destroy. 

They play havoc with your efficiency, with your health and happiness. If anything occurs during the day to disturb your poise or your self-control, if you feel angry impulses rising within you, recollect yourself as quickly as possible and get control again, for nothing is more hurtful to the whole man or woman than mental inharmony of any nature.

Never allow yourself to think weakness, poverty or poverty-stricken conditions into them or want or limitation of any kind. You are God's child; think accordingly. 

Think in keeping with your immortal inheritance. Think big, because you are big. Think generously, because you are made to express generosity. You are not made for a tiny economy, but for largeness of living; you were made for the life abundant, not for the pinched, stunted, starved life.

Thinking health, thinking happiness, thinking truth, thinking power and perfection, prosperity, success, into the little cell minds of the body will, in the future, be a very important part of every child's training.

Right thinking, making the cells work in the right way, of construction instead of destruction, will banish from the earth two of the greatest handicaps of the race—disease and poverty.

Good Cheer & Prosperity

Good Cheer & Prosperity

Orison Swett Marden 

Good cheer is one of man's greatest benefactors. It has helped him from giving up to despair even when starvation has stared him in the face and all mankind seemed against him.

When a man chooses good cheer for his companion he never talks of hard times or carries a picture of poverty or want in his mind.

Have you never noticed that, as a rule, it is the cheerful, hopeful, optimistic people who succeed, and that it is the sour, morose, gloomy natures who fail or plod along in mediocrity, who never amount to anything?

More cheerfulness will help you all along the line of success. It will help you to bear your burdens; it will help you to overcome obstacles; it will increase your courage, strengthen your initiative, make you more effective, more popular, more helpful.

It will make you a happier, more successful man or woman; it will transform and beautify the humblest and homeliest surroundings.

Cheerfulness means poise, serenity, a sane, wholesome, well-balanced outlook on life. The cheerful man knows that there is much misery, but that misery need not be the rule of life.

He who has formed a habit of looking at the bright side of things has a great advantage over the chronic dyspeptic who sees no good in anything. Shakespeare says: "A merry heart goes all the day, a sad heart tires in a mile".

If we are cheerful and contented all nature smiles with us; the air is balmier, the sky clearer, the earth has a brighter green, the trees have a richer foliage, the flowers are more fragrant, the birds sing more sweetly, and the sun, moon and stars are more beautiful.

Money itself has very little to do with happiness. Some of the most wretched men and women I have ever known anything about have been very rich. They could have everything that money could buy, but their money didn't bring them happiness; it didn't bring contentment or harmony into their homes.

Epictetus, the pagan philosopher, proved in his life the truth of his own words — "A man can be happy without wealth, without family, without office or honor, without health, without anything that the world seeks after."

Rich people are no happier than poor people. With them it is largely a question of shifting anxiety and worry to other things.

The man who smiles and sees the best in everything and everybody is the man who draws the best out of others. He attracts others and wins out in life, while the gloomy, sour face repels everyone.

Cheerfulness is a medicine. It promotes health. The habit of cheerfulness lubricates the human machine and it greatly increases and sharpens every one of the mental faculties. It improves every function of the body.

Cheerfulness keeps one young; it is one of the secrets of eternal youth.

One who admits to himself and others that he is sick is indeed sick; but one who declines to make such admission, and cheerfully goes on as if he were well, conquers many an ailment, which if he had succumbed to it, might have proved serious.

The Positive Versus The Negative Man

The Positive Versus The Negative Man

Orison Swett Marden 

Never fear failure; don't visualize it; don't picture poverty or have a horror of it, for this tends to make it a reality and keeps away from you the very things you desire.

These negative thoughts and assertions permeate the atmosphere of most homes and chill the youthful ardor of the children with the result that their ambition sags, their ideals shrivel, and, having no great life incentive, they drop into a humdrum routine and fall far below the level they might have attained.

It is criminal not to correct the tendency to negatives in a child's mind. It is not very difficult to cultivate a positive habit of thinking and acting if undertaken when a child is young.

With the adult it is not so easy, but it is possible.

Whatever you do, don't set up in your mind and in that of others, a picture of yourself as a weak, ineffective, negative personality.

If you are constantly depreciating yourself, other people will think there is a reason for it, that you are not worthy, that there is something about you that they do not know about as a basis of your own judgment. Why should not others think meanly of you if you do yourself?

If you carry about with you a negative mental attitude yours will be a negative life. You cannot act negatively without getting negative results.

Negative people do not start vigorous, positive vibrations; they are so passive and so susceptible to the influences about them that their negative minds take off all of the negative vibrations from all the cross currents from other negative minds.

It is perfectly possible to make our mentality so vigorously positive that, no matter what conflicting currents or vibrations from other negative, discordant minds strike us, they find no response.

Living in the stronger thought makes us stronger. People with a vigorous, positive mental attitude, people with a strong, firm decision, people with great faith, have a much stronger mentality than do negative minds, because they habitually live in a more vigorous mental attitude, and a positive mental attitude makes for growth, for mental enlargement.

We all know the negative man, the man who never has any opinion of his own, who is always asking other people's advice and depending upon others.

The negative character is always a weakling. The negative man in any community is the nobody. It is the positive, vigorous mentality that does things, that makes things move, which puts things through.

It is the positive man who does his own thinking; who dares to step out of the beaten path and blaze his own way; who dares to have opinions of his own and dares to express them. This is the sort of man who gains the respect and confidence of mankind.

A lot of people go through life doing little things, because their negative thought paralyzes their initiative; they do not dare undertake anything important. The negative mind, the man who is afraid to act, who is always deliberating or hesitating, never accomplishes much.

One of the most pathetic sights in the world is the man who never has any opinion of his own,—the backboneless, shiftless, slovenly, negative man, who never differs from you, whose only opinion is assent to the one you express.

We want leaders and originators more than we want followers or imitators. We have enough, and to spare, of those who are willing to lean on others. We want our young people to depend on themselves.

We want them to be so educated and trained that their qualities of leadership, their originality and their individuality, will be emphasized and strengthened instead of obliterated.

Do not forget that the force that is going to project you to the success and prosperity goal is actually inside of you. Do not look to others to push you, to give you a pull or to use their influence. Your resources, your assets, are right inside of you; they are nowhere else.

If you feel paralyzed by the very responsibility of deciding things, beginning things of your own accord, make up your mind that if you ever are to amount to anything in the world you must strangle this habit.

The only way to do this is to form the counter-habit of starting out every morning with the grim resolution not to allow yourself, during the day, to waver, to wait for somebody to show you the way.

One of the first signs of deterioration in many minds is a tendency to be negative; to hold the discordant, belligerent, envious, jealous mental attitude. This is just as abnormal as is chronic melancholy, gloom, and despondency.

These indicate an abnormal or diseased condition of the mind. Try to see things from a large, generous standpoint; hold a large consciousness.

Show everybody that you have a great faith in humanity, in your calling, and in yourself. Resolve to keep the negatives out of your life. You are too large for jealousy or envy, too big for worry, or to be anxious about your career, or about your future.

Making yourself positive to everybody and everything you contact with in life is what counts. This is the key to mastership, to success and prosperity.

Yes, You can Afford it

Yes, You can Afford it

Correct Your Beliefs about Money

Orison Swett Marden

The idea that riches are possible only to those who have superior advantages, more ability, or those who have been favored by fate, is false and demoralizing.

Don't deceive yourself by going through life patronizing cheap things, wearing cheap clothes, looking seedy, with the belief that you are doing the wisest thing. Remember that your appearance will largely determine your status in society. The world accepts or rejects us by the evidence of our personality, the impression we make.

The feeling that you can't afford this and you can't afford that; always dwelling upon something cheap, cheapens your life, cheapens your mentality, limits and narrows it, dwarfs your personality and makes anything but a favorable impression.

Wise, thrifty, and often generous expenditure in the thing which helps us along the line of our ambition, which will make a good impression, secure us quick recognition, and help our promotion, is often an infinitely better investment than putting money in a savings-bank.

Some people never get out of the world of pennies into the world of dollars. They work so hard to save the cents that they lose the dollars and also the larger growth, the richer experience and the better opportunity.

Multitudes of people think too much about poverty and economizing. They dwell upon the "can't-afford-it" philosophy, and continually feel the pressure of the rainy-day idea, which has been dinned into their ears from infancy, until it stunts and dwarfs the whole life.

Many families live constantly under the shriveling influence of the stinginess consciousness, the lack and want consciousness, the conviction that the good things of the world were intended for others but not for them.

As a result they have never been able to demonstrate anything else but lack, want and limitation. Multitudes of children are reared in this poverty atmosphere, and in time become so convinced that they can't afford things that others have that they never do have them.

Their poverty conviction shuts off the supply. They think the little thought and they demonstrate littleness.

Getting along with little and being half-satisfied to continue doing this, generally means that we shall have to get along with less, for it is not a creative mental attitude, not an attitude which attracts plenty and builds success.

I know people in fair circumstances who live so completely in the poverty conviction that they are always hunting for bargains, are always buying cheap things,—cheap food, cheap clothing, cheap furniture, cheap everything.

The result is that nothing they have wears or lasts any length of time. While they pinch and screw on prices and think they are saving, they really spend more in the end for poor cheap stuff which is always coming to pieces than they would need to spend on good things, because these would last so much longer than the inferior articles, to say nothing of the infinitely greater satisfaction they would give.

Bargain hunters are nearly always victims of false economy; and women are special offenders in this respect. They will waste hours of precious time, sometimes most of a day, and suffer much discomfort in chasing around from one store to another, looking for bargains and trying to save a few cents on some small purchase they wish to make.

Success attracts success. Money attracts money. Prosperity attracts prosperity, and it pays you to get with people who are prosperous, who have honorably won out in what they attempted.

If you are thinking and constantly saying, "I can't afford to do this," or "I can't afford that," "We must make this do," "Money is so scarce," you are sowing the seed which will give you the same kind of a harvest. Your poverty thought will make your future as narrow and limited and poverty-stricken as your present.