When Solomon was asked what single wish he would be granted, he answered: “Give me wisdom that I might judge Thy people properly.”

Because of his propensity toward good, his prayer was heard. The Lord was obliged to give Solomon riches, fame, honor, everything, because Solomon had asked for the cause of all good things.

We all know how beneficial wisdom and perhaps positive thinking are for us, but no one as yet has shown us how we may achieve them without kidding ourselves.

A sort of pseudopositive thinking ends when we close an inspiring book, or perhaps it lingers for a while after we listen to a lecture. So we spend more and more time on drinking in good thoughts, which are all too soon washed out by one good emotional upset.

Conversely, the truly positive state of mind effortlessly influences conditions, and adversity builds its strength.

The salesman cannot close a sale if he reacts to his customer; the customer must respond to the salesman. If you go through life being influenced by others, you cannot be positive.

True positiveness is the effect on life that comes about simply through not being affected by it. This beautiful thing comes to pass by discovering a relationship with our Parent Self.

If we let the Presence within affect us more than our environment, we remain calm—less and less affected by stress.

Because we lack this alignment, most of us react negatively to pressure.

Because of this compulsion to respond, we spend so much time finding ways to relax and release guilt, worrying about how to overcome life and analyzing everything, that it drains us of the energy we need for successful living.

"When we remove the foundation

of pride and struggle,

our problems wither away."

Our tense minds become so clouded we cannot concentrate, and we make so many foolish decisions that we are afraid to face life.

A positive state of mind comes about only when we are no longer affected by such confusions. Doctors agree that many diseases stem from needless reaction to stress.

It has been fairly well established that emotion brings about abnormal changes in the body, changes that lead to illness.

Tense people may become sick because of reaction, and then worry themselves into more illness. The smoker, the alcoholic and the compulsive eater all worry about their problem, but the more they think about it the more they feed the problem.

The more they try to abandon their habits, the more they are reminded of a growing, unsoothed agony of tension. The harder they try to overcome it, the more strongly it resists their efforts.

This is an example of the law of reversed effort, found in all man’s personal problems.

What we fight we give power to evolve, so that through our struggle we compound the problem we are fighting, the very problem that we ourselves originated.

Nothing can live without its sustaining factor. This is true also of sickness and disease— when we remove the foundation of pride and struggle, our problems wither away.