DEVELOPING THE SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS: Page 69

hopes: the pitiable poverty-stricken condition of those dependent on you; the disgraceful passage through death into an even more hideous condition of life: the utter degeneration: the shameful existence: the haunting thoughts beyond. This method is the negative one. It is like the surgeon's knife used to cut out a cancer that threatens life. Desperate diseases require desperate remedies. This process is not advisable, except in otherwise hopeless cases. Rather use the positive method. As you sit up visualizing your ideal day after day, its attraction to you will be truly magnetic. Your heart shall go out to it in all its force. You shall want to embrace the ideal every moment of your life. Energy will come to you. Indeed your complaint then shall be: I have more energy than I can control, more thoughts than I can marshal up for serene action. Your thoughts have been energized by constant repetition. Now you must learn to dominate them: to command them to stillness: to relax the tension in which your mind is constantly putting itself: to save your brain from giving way under this surcharge of unmarshalled energy; to absolutely vanquish the waves of force that bubble up each time you think of your ideal; for it is intoxication-the irresistible spell of a "fixed idea." Says Swami Vivekananda: The organs are the horses, the mind is the reins, the intellect is the charioteer, the soul is the rider, and this body is the chariot.