Now I want to call your attention to the difference between an ordinary desire and a burning desire. I had a burning desire to force Nature to develop a set of hearing aids for my son, and I kept on the job until Nature did just that. That was so burning that it became an obsession with me. I would have paid any price to carry out the objective of that desire.
A burning desire is one wherein you have hypnotized yourself so definitely that you can see yourself already in possession of the object of that desire even before you start acquiring it. That is self-hypnosis. Do you think it is a dangerous word? If you do, perish the idea, because you are using it every day whether you know it or not. The majority of people go all the way through life under the influence of self-hypnosis, by which they have released poverty-stricken or sick or ill-health thoughts. I have never yet found an outstanding man or woman in any calling that didn’t have the power of instantaneous self-hypnosis. If you look up a great teacher, a great salesman, or anybody else, you will find a man who can very easily throw himself into the state of self-hypnosis back of any idea he chooses. But most people, instead of immunizing themselves to misfortunes, throw themselves on the opposite side by expecting them and finding them.
There are a great many things I might say to you over which I would admit that I am very proud, but there is one that stands out over all the others combined, and that is the statement that by the application of my own philosophy, I have put myself in the position where I don’t fear anything in the world—this world or any other world—nothing at all. I haven’t always been that way. There were times when I feared a great many things, and usually the things that I feared came upon me one way or the other. That was when I didn’t understand the working of the law of Cosmic Habit Force. I want to tell you, all my freedom of body and freedom of mind came ten years ago when this law of Cosmic Habit Force was revealed to me for the first time; and incidentally, the desire had been in my mind a great many years to discover what was missing that made this philosophy impracticable and inactive at certain times. I knew there was a missing link, and just right at this time this law of Cosmic Habit Force was revealed.
I was visiting in the mountains of Virginia, and a policeman from Detroit was there. He was a retired policeman by the name of Roy S. Baker. He had been a policeman his entire life, was not educated, murdered the King’s English when he spoke, and his manners were exceedingly bad. He was not a man to be greatly admired, but he did a very great thing for me for which I will always be thankful. He picked up one of the copies of The Law of Success books, thumbed through it for a few moments, threw it down, and said, “My friend, you have to dig further. You haven’t got the last word in this philosophy yet.” I remember so well what my reaction was—the same as yours would have been, perhaps. It was this: How in the world would you be able to judge that philosophy with your lack of background and your ill manners? How would you be able to tell me what’s missing? But back of it all I recognized he was speaking the truth, and that very day I made a super effort, an effort such as I had never made before. I will not call it an effort but a demand upon my subconscious mind to go through instantly and find that missing link. And there was not a day after that until the law of Cosmic Habit Force was revealed that I didn’t revitalize that determination. I didn’t even know what I was searching for; but I did know what I wanted, and I was determined to get it.
When the revelation came, it came almost instantaneously as the result of one of the worst business experiences I have ever had in my life. And in the middle of this experience, things became so confused, I said, “I am going to take today off and let my mind rest and clear my mind.” And I got into my car and drove to the State of New Jersey. I went to a spot where nobody could reach me by telephone. I just wanted to get away and give my mind a little rest. And do you know that on the way over there, before I reached my destination, my mind had commenced to tune in on the law of Cosmic Habit Force? And when it came to me, I called it the wrong name. I called it the law of hypnotic rhythm. When I came back to New York and presented this to my great friend and advisor, Francis I. Hubaugh, he instantly said, “You have come upon a great law that may be of more importance to humanity than anything Einstein has discovered in relativity, but you have given it the wrong name, the negative name. It would be the law of hypnotic rhythm in the negative, when you allow your mind to dwell on poverty and ill health and defeat and then nature applies the law of hypnotic rhythm and fixes them on you, carries them out.” Mr. Hubaugh said, “What you really want to do is give that law a positive name,” and we sat there and talked about it. And I said, “As a matter of fact, it is cosmic, a law that controls the physical universe and is the fixer of all habits,” and I said, “I have the name now—the law of Cosmic Habit Force.”
And he said, “That’s perfect—that’s the perfect application of this great law, the law of Cosmic Habit Force, through which when you repeat an idea over and over it is picked up and made into a mental record, so to speak, the needle of thought drops into that groove and begins to turn automatically, and whatever the nature of that groove it becomes deeper and deeper, and Cosmic Habit Force works on the ideas while you sleep.”
I recognize that you and I are workaday folks. We don’t aspire to become great scientists. We just want to get through life with peace of mind and good health and the things we need. But no matter what our aspirations may be, we need to recognize that we haven’t learned yet the last word in the control of the mind. We haven’t learned the first word.
In our own public school system, we study almost everything else. Perhaps it would be better if we were taught nothing in the public school system that is now taught and instead were taught to turn our attention within and find out what causes us to think as we do, what forms and enables out habits, and what goes on in the human mind.
I can appreciate what Plato had in mind when he forced his students to study and analyze the bones of a frog’s head. It wasn’t the frog’s head he was so interested in. He wanted them to learn the law of concentration. Students of the law of Cosmic Habit Force, students of this philosophy who learn to apply the law of Cosmic Habit Force, will learn that they can expect greater things than anything they ever imagined. They will have no difficulty in acquiring all the things in life they want and need. They can voluntarily put in the mind any idea they want to keep and bring it back until it is taken over by Cosmic Habit Force, and then they will have done the things that our conscious minds call genius through their achievement.
We have come to the end of our final lesson. Please use what you have learned to attain understanding, success, and peace of mind.
Source: Positive Influence by Napoleon Hill