(An excerpt from The Strangest Secret Library available on Amazon)

Chapter 5 Righting the Direction

In spite of the will to fail, in spite of the rewards of failure, success is the normal aim of man, his proper objective. Energy is correctly used, not by spending it to hold ourselves inactive, nor by spurring ourselves to unproductive sterile activity, but only when it is at the service of the maturest and most comprehensive idea of ourselves that we can arrive at.

What this highest idea is will vary from individual to individual, and will expand with growth. No outsider can dictate another’s private definition of success. It may, it often does, include some recognition from one’s fellows, and greater financial rewards; on the other hand, it may not. Many a researcher in the sciences would consider himself fully successful (and would be right), if he added one minute fact to the mass of accumulating details on which science must proceed, if he took one item out of the realm of hypothesis and speculation and placed it in its proper relation to the mass of known truths. His name might never be known by those outside his science; it might be quite obscure even within his own field. He would nevertheless have attained the goal for which he was working if he accomplished that which he himself set out to do.

The actress who reaches the top of her art is as successful as the mother who raises a large and healthy family – but not more so. A priest or minister immersed in the care of his parish lives as successful a life as the genius whose name is known by most of his contemporaries. Another’s ideal of success may have so little in common with our own that we are quite blind as to what he can see in the career he has chosen, but unless we are totally unimaginative we know, when we see him living responsibly, effectively, usefully, happily, making the most of his advantages and gifts, that we are dealing with a successful man.

To offer too circumscribed a definition of success would defeat the purpose of this book. Much of our distrust of the word, as it is, comes from not realizing the infinitely extensive range of possible “successes.” Each of us, usually by late adolescence, has a mass of knowledge about himself, which – if we took the counsel “Know thyself” seriously – could be examined and considered until the individual’s ideal of the good life would emerge from it plainly. It ought to be part of education to see that each child should understand the necessity of finding this clue to his future, and be shown that it is sometimes thrown into confusion by hero-worship, or by the erroneous notion that what is an item in the success of one must be present in the success of each of us. Still, in spite of confusion, false starts, the taking over of the ambitions of a parent or teacher for ourselves instead of finding our own, most of us do arrive in the early twenties knowing what we are best fitted to do, or could do best if we had the training and opportunity.

It is worth noting carefully that unless you have allowed yourself to overestimate your character grossly, your own success-idea is within the region of those things which can be brought about. Usually, far from overrating our abilities, we do not understand how great they are. The reason for this under-estimation of ourselves will be considered later, but it is well to realize that few except the truly insane believe themselves suited for careers far beyond their full powers.

The next point to understand is that in these pages we are not talking about success of any secondary or metaphorical sort. Your idea of what is success for you is not here to be replaced by another high-sounding, “idealistic” compromise. You are not being exhorted, once more, to lower your hopes and then find that you can easily reach the simpler standard. Such programs are only temporizing with failure. On the contrary, the more vividly you can present to yourself the original picture of the goal you once hoped to be able to reach, the better your chances are of attaining it.

Now, having examined the currents in our nature which lead us to acquiesce in failure, understanding that, if we allow it to happen, we can be carried unprotestingly down in the deathward direction, let us see what is operating immediately to keep us from the healthy efforts we must make to succeed.

To do so we must turn to a subject which is in some disrepute today: hypnotism. For many reasons, some excellent but others suspiciously weak, hypnotism is a subject which is seldom studied nowadays. If you have never had occasion to read a sound book on the subject, it may seem to you that some of the feats claimed for hypnotized persons cannot possibly have been done. There is some likelihood, however, that you have read at least one book on auto-suggestion, the method of healing which was so popular about a decade ago, and auto-suggestion is one of the by-products of the nineteenth-century study of hypnotism.

But few readers today know of the work, for instance, of Esdaile in India in the middle 1800’s: of the surgical operations he performed painlessly on hundreds of patients, of his comments on the rapid recovery of those who had felt no pain during the operation – an early contribution to the theory of the deleterious effects of “surgical shock.” The work of Braid and Bernheim is almost unknown, and Mesmer, who combined a fantastic theory with a mass of arrestingly effective experiments, is now looked on mainly as a quack.

There is no doubt that hypnotism is in its present disrepute partly because its early practitioners could not refrain from premature and fantastic theorizing, and because it became connected in the minds of the public with such subjects as “spirit-rappings” and “slate-writing” mediums, many of whom were later exposed as tricksters.

Possible experimenters were alienated from the subject because it was offered to the world with such unnecessary accompaniments as the hypotheses about “odic fluid” and “animal magnetism” – explanations which explained nothing. In addition to these prejudicial theories, experiments in anesthesia by the use of chloroform and ether were proceeding in the same years. Insensitiveness to pain reached by hypnosis was uncertain and presented many difficulties: not everyone was hypnotizable, and, even more important, not every physician was able to hypnotize. Inevitably, the more certain form of attaining anesthetization through the use of chloroform and ether was the practice which became accepted.

The study of hypnotism, which many acute observers of the middle and late nineteenth century believed to be the first step towards the freeing of mankind from physical suffering, as well as the overcoming of many temperamental difficulties and the cure of many vices, fell into a decline. With the emergence of the psycho-analytic theory, the defeat of hypnotism – at least for our day – was cemented.

Now, although the formula that we are about to consider has in it no trace of auto-hypnotism, it is still possible to learn from the despised procedure what it is that defeats us in our efforts to be effective. Consider for a moment the successes of a good hypnotist with a good subject: they sound utterly beyond nature, and for that very reason we have not learned from them all we might garner. One man, ordinarily suffering from vertigo at even a slight eminence, when hypnotized can walk a very narrow plank at a great height. Another, looking light and delicate, can lift a dead weight. A stammerer can be commanded to give a fervid oration, and will do so without showing a trace of the speech-defect which hampers him in his normal state.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable cases is one cited by F. W. H. Myers in his chapter on hypnotism in Human Personality: a young actress, an understudy, called upon suddenly to replace the star of her company, was sick with apprehension and stage-fright. Under light hypnosis she performed with competence and brilliance, and won great applause; but it was long before she was able to act her parts without the aid of the hypnotist, who stationed himself in her dressing room. (Later in this same case the phenomenon of “post-hypnotic suggestion” began to be observed, and the foundations of the Nancy school of auto-suggestion, of which Coué is the most famous contemporary associate, were laid.)

In the same chapter in which he quotes the remarkable case of the actress, Myers made a theorizing comment which is of immense value to everyone who hopes to free himself of his bondage to failure. He points out that the ordinary shyness and tentativeness with which we all approach novel action is entirely removed from the hypnotized subject, w