The Seven Laws of Mental Mastery
There is more practical information available today on how to achieve success in any field than there has ever been at any time. Yet, only 5 percent of the population are financially independent at the end of their working lives. Fully 80 percent of people working today would rather be doing something else, and 84 percent of them, by their own admission, feel that they are working below, even far below, their potential. Only 5 percent feel that they are producing at their full capacity in their jobs.
You may already know that there are two types of laws in the universe: man-made laws and natural laws. You can violate man-made laws, like traffic laws, and you may or may not get caught. But if you attempt to violate natural laws, you get caught every single time, without exception.
Mental laws are like physical laws in that they are in force 100 percent of the time. The Law of Gravity, for instance, works everywhere on planet Earth twenty-four hours per day. If you jump from a ten-story building, you will fall to the sidewalk with equal force whether you are in downtown New York or downtown Tokyo.
Whenever your life is going well, it means that your thoughts and activities are aligned and in harmony with these invisible mental laws. Whenever you are having problems of any kind, it is almost invariably because you are violating one or more of these laws, whether you know about them or not. Because they are central to your happiness, it is essential that you become familiar with them and integrate them into everything you do.
- THE LAW OF CONTROL
The Law of Control says that you feel positive about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your own life, and you feel negative about yourself to the degree to which you feel that you are not in control, or that you are controlled by some external force, person or influence.
This law or principle is widely recognized in psychology. It is called “locus of control” theory. It is generally agreed that most stress, anxiety, tension and psychosomatic illness comes about as a result of the person feeling out of control, or not in control of some important part of his life.
For example, if you feel that your life is controlled by your debts, or your boss, or your ill health, or a bad relationship, or the behavior of others, you will suffer stress. This stress will manifest itself in irritation, anger, and resentment. If not dealt with, it can progress to insomnia, depression or illness of various kinds.
You can have either an internal or an external locus of control. That is, you can feel that you are in charge of your own life, happy, positive and confident, or you can feel controlled by others, helpless, trapped, very much like a victim.
In every case, control over your life begins with your thoughts, the only thing over which you do have complete control. How you think about any situation determines how you feel, and your feelings determine your behavior.
- THE LAW OF CAUSE AND EFFECT
The Law of Cause and Effect says that for every effect in your life there is a specific cause. It is so important it has been called the “Iron Law of the Universe.” It says that everything happens for a reason, whether or not you know what it is. There are no accidents. We live in an orderly universe governed strictly by law, and this understanding is central to every other law or principle.
The Law of Cause and Effect says that there are specific causes of success and there are specific causes of failure. There are specific causes for health and for illness. There are specific causes for happiness and for unhappiness. If there is an effect in your life that you want more of, you merely need to trace it back to the causes and repeat the causes. If there is an effect in your life that you do not enjoy, you need to trace it back to the causes and get rid of them.
This law is so simple that it is baffling to most people. They continue doing, or not doing, things that are causing them unhappiness and frustration, and they then blame everyone else, or society, for their problems.
Insanity has been defined as “doing the same things in the same way and expecting to get different results.” To some degree, we’re all guilty of this. We need to face this tendency squarely and deal with it honestly.
There is a Scottish proverb that says, “It is better to light one wee candle than to curse the darkness.” It is better by far to sit down and carefully analyze the reasons for your difficulties than to get upset and angry about them.
- THE LAW OF BELIEF
The Law of Belief says that whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality. The more intensely that you believe something to be true, the more likely it is that it will be true for you. If you really believe something, you cannot imagine it to be otherwise. Your beliefs give you a form of tunnel vision. They edit out or cause you to ignore incoming information that is inconsistent with what you have decided to believe.
William James of Harvard said, “Belief creates the actual fact.” In the Bible, it says, “According to your faith [belief] it is done unto you.” To put it another way, you do not necessarily believe what you see but you see what you believe.
For example, if you absolutely believe that you are meant to be a great success in life, then no matter what happens, you will continue to press forward toward your goals. Nothing will stop you.
On the other hand, if you believe that success is a matter of luck or accident, then you will easily become discouraged and disappointed whenever things don’t work out for you. Your beliefs set you up for either success or failure.
- THE LAW OF EXPECTATIONS
The Law of Expectations says that whatever you expect with confidence becomes your own self-fulfilling prophecy. To put it another way, what you get is not necessarily what you want in life, but what you expect. Your expectations exert a powerful, invisible influence that causes people to behave and situations to work out as you anticipated.
In a way, you are always acting as a fortune-teller in your own life by the way you talk about how you think things are going to turn out. Successful men and women have an attitude of confident, positive self-expectancy. They expect to be successful, they expect to be liked. They expect to be happy, and they are seldom disappointed.
Unsuccessful people have an attitude of negative expectations, of cynicism and pessimism that somehow causes situations to work out exactly as they expected.
- THE LAW OF ATTRACTION
Many books have been written about this law, and many people feel that it is central to understanding the human condition. The Law of Attraction says that you are a living magnet. You invariably attract into your life people and situations in harmony with your dominant thoughts. Like attracts like. Birds of a feather flock together. Everything in your life you have attracted to yourself because of the person you are, and especially because of your thoughts.
Your friends, your family, your relationships, your job, your problems and your opportunities have all been attracted to you because of your habitual way of thinking in each area.
There is an example of this in music, called the principle of sympathetic resonance. If you have two pianos in a large room and you strike the note C on one piano and then walk across the room to the other piano, you will find that the string of C on the other piano is vibrating at the same rate of vibration as the C string on the first piano. By the same principle, you will tend to meet and become involved with people and situations that are vibrating in harmony with your own dominant thoughts and emotions.
As you look around you at every aspect of your life, positive or negative, you will see that your entire world is of your own making. And the more emotion you attach to a thought, the greater will be the rate of vibration and the more rapidly you will attract people and situations in harmony with that thought into your life.
- THE LAW OF CORRESPONDENCE
The Law of Correspondence is one of the most important laws of all, and is in many ways a summary law that explains many others. It says, “As within, so without.” It says that your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. This law declares that you can tell what is going on inside you by looking at what is going on around you.
In the Bible, this principle is explained in the words, “By their fruits, ye shall know them.” Everything in your life is from the inner to the outer. Your external world of manifestation corresponds with your internal world of thought and emotion.
Your outer world of relationships will correspond to the person you really are inside, your true inner personality. Your outer world of health will correspond to your inner attitudes of mind. Your outer world of income and financial achievement will correspond to your inner world of thought and preparation. The way people respond and react to you will reflect your attitude and your behavior toward them.
The car you drive and the condition that you keep it in will correspond to your state of mind at any given time. When you are feeling positive and confident and in control of your life, your home, your car and your workplace will tend to be well-organized and efficient. When you feel overwhelmed with work, or frustrated and unhappy, your car, your workplace, your home, even your closets will tend to reflect this state of disarray and confusion. You can see the effects of this Law of Correspondence everywhere.
- THE LAW OF MENTAL EQUIVALENCY
The Law of Mental Equivalency is also called the Law of Mind and could actually be considered a restatement of the previous laws. Essentially, it says that thoughts objectify themselves. Your thoughts, vividly imagined and repeated, charged with emotion, become your reality. Almost everything that you have in your life has been created by your own thinking, for better or for worse.
Put another way, thoughts are things. They take on a life of their own. First you have them, then they have you. You act in a manner consistent with what you are thinking most of the time. You eventually become what you think about. And if you change your thinking, you change your life.
Everything that happens in your life first begins and takes place in the form of thought. This is why thoughtfulness is a key quality of successful men and women. Becoming a skilled thinker in your own life means using your mental powers in such a way that they serve your best interests all of the time.
PUTTING THESE IDEAS TO WORK
Now, take some time, based on the action of these mental laws, to think about how your habitual modes of thought have created every aspect of your life today.
First, your relationships. What is it in your attitudes, beliefs, expectations and behaviors that is causing your problems with other people?
Second, your health. What are your ideas and beliefs about your weight, level of fitness, personal appearance, diet and rest? How do these beliefs help or hinder you?
Third, your career. How do your thoughts affect your position, your progress, the quality of your work and the amount of satisfaction you get from what you do?
Fourth, your level of financial achievement. What would you like to increase or improve? What are your beliefs and expectations concerning your material well-being? How much would you like to earn, and why?
Fifth, the quality of your inner life—your thoughts, feelings, peace of mind and happiness. What beliefs, attitudes and expectations are creating your world today? Which of them do you need to change?
If you are honest with yourself, you will find that you have self-limiting ways of thinking in one or more of these areas. This is quite normal. Honestly facing the facts about yourself is the starting point of rapid self-improvement.