Fear and worry make us attract the very things we dread.
The fear habit impairs health, shortens life and paralyzes efficiency.
Doubt and fear mean failure; faith is an optimist, fear a pessimist.
Fear in all its different phases of expression, such as worry, anxiety, anger, jealousy, timidity, is the greatest enemy of the human race. It has robbed man of more happiness and efficiency, has made more men cowards, more people failures or forced them into mediocrity, than anything else.
The effect which Halley’s Comet recently had upon the ignorant and superstitious people in all parts of the world was something appalling. Multitudes were completely prostrated and thousands made ill with terror; many became violently insane and scores committed suicide. A great many peasants in European countries were in momentary expectation that the comet would annihilate the earth, and in some towns messengers went through the streets blowing horns to awaken the people to the fact that the world was coming to an end.
The expectation that the earth would be burned up by the comet forced men to confess murder and other crimes of which they were not even suspected. Mothers poisoned their children. People ordered their coffins from undertakers in order to be ready for the terrible calamity. Several persons actually dropped dead at the first sight of the comet.
In the poorer sections of New York and other large cities great processions of people repeating their prayers paraded the streets with crucifixes in their hands, their terror-stricken faces turned toward the sky. Many were seen on their knees praying in the streets. There was great excitement among the negroes in the South, where all-night services were held in the churches, numbers professing salvation in an effort to prepare themselves for the fatal day when the earth would be destroyed by the comet’s tail. In numerous places the farms and fields were practically denuded of help, the hands positively refusing to work.
In Pennsylvania thousands of miners refused to go to their posts, while operations were entirely suspended in several mines. Similar instances could be multiplied by the thousands.
The comet gave an unusual opportunity for quacks to trade upon the superstitious fears of the ignorant. The officers of one of the ocean liners reported that a thriving business was being conducted in some of the West Indian Islands by selling “anti-comet” pills at a dollar a box. As these were very bitter they were supposed to be especially efficacious.
All this would not seem so strange in the Dark Ages when people were densely ignorant, but it certainly is lamentable in these progressive days that any large number of people, with all of the advantages of education and unlimited opportunities for enlightenment, should be so ignorant as to fear harm from a comet which has been visiting the earth periodically and harmlessly for untold centuries.
Despite all our boasts of education, environment, and freedom, and of the advantages which have come to us through many centuries of experience, vast multitudes of people are still victims of numberless silly superstitions and fears that enslaved their barbaric ancestors.
Tens of thousands of women believe, for instance, that if two people look in a mirror at the same time, or if one thanks another for a pin, or if one gives a knife or any sharp instrument to a friend, it will break up friendship. They believe that if a young lady is presented with a thimble she will be an old maid; that when leaving a house it is unlucky to go back after any article which has been forgotten, and, if one is obliged to do so, one must sit down in a chair before going out again; that if a broom touches a person while someone is sweeping, bad luck will follow; that it is unlucky to change one’s place at table, etc.
I know the wife of an editor of a prominent magazine who was completely upset by finding peacock decorations in a room where she was visiting. She predicted all sorts of ill luck for the occupants.
Think of a college graduate baseball manager refusing to go on with a game, when thousands of spectators were waiting, until two bats which were crossed were separated, in order to prevent a hoodooed game!
Years ago, a man took an opal to a New York jeweler and asked him to buy it. He said that it had brought him nothing but bad luck, that since it had come into his possession he had failed in business, there had been much sickness in his family, and all sorts of misfortunes had befallen him. He refused to keep the cursed thing any longer. The jeweler examined the stone and found it was not an opal after all, but an imitation.
In some communities it is considered a crime to rock an empty cradle, because it betokens that the cradle will always be empty, by reason of the death of the babies born to the owner.
Think of intelligent American women being made ill because they are obliged to remove their wedding ring, believing that “until death do us part” refers to the ring as well as to the couple, and that the severing of the ring from the finger betokens the severing of the husband and wife!
Multitudes of intelligent people are afraid to start on a journey or to undertake anything of importance upon Friday,—as though a mere arbitrary name of the sixth day of the week, adopted for man’s convenience should possess intelligence, force, or life!
Some time ago a bank failed in San Francisco because its president had followed the counsel of a medium as to his investments. He was foolish enough to believe in the advice of a dead financier with whom the medium assured him she had communicated rather than in common sense and his own experienced judgment.
The dire predictions of quack fortune-tellers are responsible for infinite misery and a great many deaths. Scores of people have committed suicide under their influence.
It is incredible that intelligent people should be so mentally warped and unbalanced by astrologers, palmists, mediums, and fortune-tellers that many of them order their entire lives by their advice. Of course, many of the things which the fakers predict do happen, especially when the whole mental attitude of the gullible victim is turned toward the prediction and all his faith centered in it to bring it about. Mental concentration, faith and conviction, as a matter of fact, are what make things happen everywhere.
The minds of children often get an unfortunate twist, which later in life proves fatal, from having their fortunes told at some fair or place of amusement, or from the superstitious ideas impressed upon them from infancy by ignorant mothers or nurses.
It is a terrible thing to fill a child’s susceptible mind with senseless superstitions, because many people never outgrow their influence, and their whole lives are shadowed by them.
What a curious contradiction of human nature it is which causes people to put so much emphasis upon the great power of destiny or fate, but makes them believe they can circumvent or get around it by resorting to such silly devices as carrying rabbits’ feet, wishbones, or horse-chestnuts in their pockets! Think of intelligent people bearing the stamp of divinity doing such insane things as spitting on the right shoe before putting it on, picking up every hairpin and hanging it upon the first rusty nail they see; picking up every pin that is pointed toward them, in order to ward off misfortunes!
We often hear intellectual people say that superstitions are harmless; but nothing is harmless which makes a man believe that he is a puppet at the mercy of signs and symbols, omens and inanimate relics, that there is a power in the world outside of Omnipotent Intelligence working in opposition, trying to do harm to mortals.
While many great men have had superstitions, they would have been much greater without them, for superstition tends to weaken the mind. Anything which makes us believe in or depend upon any force or power outside of the Omnipotent Creative Power, of which we are a part, or to believe that there is a force that can circumvent or interfere with the regular order and law which govern the universe, lessens our self-confidence, self-respect, and power by so much.
Common-sense people may smile at you when you parade your superstitions, but they will think less of you while they are doing it, because their confidence in your good sense, your level headedness and ability will be shaken.
Everywhere we see people doing little mediocre things who are capable of doing much better, and would do them but for the fact that they are held back, tied down, by the bonds of silly superstition.
If you are ambitious to make the most of your ability, cut the cords of superstition. Get rid of the chains which enslave you, which cripple your self-reliance. No one can do great things until he gets mental freedom from the slavery of fear and superstition.
Everywhere we see splendid ability tied up and compelled to do mediocre work because of the suppressing, discouraging influence of fear. On every hand there are competent men whose efforts are nullified and whose ability to achieve is practically ruined by the development of this monster, which will in time make the most decided man irresolute; the ablest man timid and inefficient.
Fear is a great robber of power. It paralyzes the thinking faculties, ruins spontaneity, enthusiasm, and self-confidence. It has a blighting effect upon all one’s thoughts, moods, and efforts. It destroys ambition and efficiency.
Not long ago a publication interviewed twenty-five hundred persons and found that they had over seven thousand different fears, among them fear of loss of position, fear of approaching want, fear of contagion, fear of the development of some hidden disease or of some hereditary taint, fear of declining health, fear of death, fear of premature burial, and multitudes of superstitious fears.
There are plenty of people who are simply afraid to live, scared to death for fear they will die. They do not know how to dislodge the monster fear that terrifies them, and it dogs their steps from the cradle to the grave.
With thousands of people the dread of some impending evil is ever present. It haunts them even in their happiest moments. Their happiness is poisoned with it so that they never take much pleasure or comfort in anything. It is the ghost at the banquet, the skeleton in the closet. It is ingrained into their very lives and emphasized in their excessive timidity, their shrinking, self-conscious bearing.
Some people are afraid of nearly everything. They are afraid of a draught; afraid of getting chilled or taking cold; afraid to eat what they want; to venture in business matters for fear of losing their money; afraid of public opinion. They have a perfect horror of what Mrs. Grundy thinks. They are afraid hard times are coming; afraid of poverty; afraid of failure; afraid the crops are going to fail; afraid of lightning and tornadoes. Their whole lives are filled with fear, fear, fear.
There are many people who have a dread of certain diseases. They picture the horrible symptoms, the loss in personal attractiveness, or the awful pain and suffering that accompany the disease, and this constant suggestion affects the appetite, impairs nutrition, weakens the resisting power of the body, and tends to encourage and develop any possible hereditary taint or disease tendency.
It is well known that during an epidemic, even before any physical contact by which the contagion could have been imparted to them was possible, people have developed the disease they feared, simply because they allowed their minds to dwell on the terrible thing they dreaded.
In 1888 there was an epidemic of yellow fever at Jacksonville, Florida, and a very extensive epidemic of fear throughout the Southern States. The latter disease, a mental malady, was much more contagious than the former and much less amenable to treatment; it visited every little town, village, and hamlet in several States, and many victims died of it.
There are many cases in medical history of prisoners who were so terrified when they came in sight of the guillotine or the gallows, that they died before they were executed.
Many soldiers in battle who thought they were mortally wounded have died, when, as a matter of fact, they had not been touched by the bullets or shells and not even a drop of blood had been shed. Violent fear has been known to bleach the hair in a single night, and terror of some great impending doom or danger to take years out of a life.
A medical journal reports the case of a German physician who when riding over a bridge saw a boy struggling in the water and rushed to the rescue, and when he pulled the lad to shore, found it was his son. His friends did not know the man next day; his hair had turned completely white.
It is well known that when Ludwig of Bavaria learned of the innocence of his wife, whom he had caused to be put to death on suspicion of her unfaithfulness, his hair became as white as snow within a couple of days. When Charles the First attempted to escape from Carisbrooke Castle, his hair turned white in a single night. The hair of Marie Antoinette was suddenly changed by her great distress. On a portrait of herself which she gave to a friend she wrote, “Whitened by affliction.”
Authentic instances of the hair turning white in a few hours or a night through fear or sudden shock could be multiplied indefinitely.
This power of fear to modify the currents of the blood and all the secretions, to whiten the hair, paralyze the nervous system, and even to produce death, is well known. Whatever makes us happy, whatever excites enjoyable emotions, relaxes the capillaries and gives freedom to the circulation; whatever depresses and distresses us, disturbs or worries us, in fact, all phases of fear and anxiety, contract these blood vessels and impede the free circulation of the blood. We see this illustrated in the pale face caused by fear or terror.
Now, if terror can furnish such a shock to the nervous centers as to whiten the hair in a few hours, what shall we say of the influence of chronic fear poison, worry and anxiety poison acting upon the system for many years, thus causing a slow death instead of a quick one?
How suicidal chronic anxiety is! Few people realize that the system is kept continually poisoned by it. It is a strange thing that after all the centuries of experience and enlightenment the human race has not learned positively to refuse to be perpetually tortured by enemies of its happiness,—fear, anxiety, worry. It certainly would seem as though the race could have found some way out of this needless suffering long ago. But we are still frightened by the same ghosts: worry, anxiety; from the cradle to the grave we are the victims of these mental enemies, which we could easily destroy, neutralize, by simply changing the thought.
Who can estimate the fear and suffering caused by the suggestion of heredity? Children are constantly hearing descriptions of the terrible diseases that carried off their ancestors, and naturally watch for the symptoms in themselves.
Think of a child growing up with the constant suggestion thrust into his mind that he has probably inherited cancer or consumption, or something else which caused the death of one of his parents and will probably ultimately prove fatal to him! This perpetual expectancy of disease has a very depressing influence and handicaps the child’s chances at the very beginning of his life.
Children who live in a fear atmosphere never unfold normally, but suffer from arrested development. Their stunted, starved bodies do not attain their normal growth; the blood vessels are actually smaller, the circulation slower, and the heart weaker under the influence of fear.
Fear depresses, suppresses, strangles. If it be indulged in, it will change a positive, creative mental attitude into a non-productive, negative one, and this is fatal to achievement. The effect of fear, especially where the fear thought has become habitual, is to dry up the very source of life. Love that casteth out fear has just the opposite effect upon the body and brain. It enlarges, opens up the nature, gives abundant life-cells and increases the brainpower.
Fear works terrible havoc with the imagination, which pictures all sorts of dire things. Faith is its perfect antidote, for, while fear sees only the darkness and the shadows, faith sees the silver lining, the sun behind the cloud. Fear looks down, and expects the worst; faith looks up and anticipates the best. Fear is pessimistic, faith is optimistic. Fear always predicts failure, faith predicts success. There can be no fear of poverty or failure when the mind is dominated by faith. Doubt cannot exist in its presence. It is above all adversity. A powerful faith is a great life prolonger, because it never frets; it sees beyond the temporary annoyance, the discord, the trouble, it sees the sun behind the cloud. It knows things will come out right, because it sees the goal which the eye cannot see.
People of long lives have a strong faith; it may not quite agree with our own expression of faith religiously, but they have faith as a perpetual companion assuring them that things will come out right in the end.
Worry has disqualified many a man from paying his debts by sapping his energy, ruining and impairing his productive capacity.
Faith keeps a man from worrying and enables him to use his resourcefulness, inventiveness, to infinitely greater advantage.
The man who is paralyzed through fear is in no condition to make the best of what he has. If he is in a tight place, all of his faculties should be intact. If he worries, he only incapacitates himself from doing his best. The calm, balanced mind gives assurance, confidence.
No matter what your need is, put it into the hands of faith. Do not ask how or why or when. Just do your level best, and have faith, which is the great miracle worker of the ages. Chronic worriers are always deficient in faith. The man who has a vigorous faith that a Power infinitely wiser than he is directing and guiding the affairs of the universe, and that everything is progressing towards the grand consummation of the omniscient, omnipotent Planner, that all discord of every kind will ultimately be swallowed up in harmony, that truth will finally triumph over all error, that everything in the universe, however it may seem to be contradicted, is tending towards the final consummation of a race—plan so superb, so beneficent, so magnificent, that no human mind could comprehend it,—such a man does not worry. When disappointments, losses, reverses, catastrophes, come to him, his mental balance is not disturbed, because his faith looks beyond misfortune and sees the sun behind the clouds, the victory beyond the seeming defeat. No matter what happens, he knows that “God is in His heaven and all’s right with the world.”
Many people fail by constantly stopping to wonder how they will finally come out, whether they will succeed or not. This constant questioning of the outcome of things creates doubt, which is fatal to achievement.
The secret of achievement is concentration. Worry or fear of any kind is fatal to mental concentration and kills creative ability. The mind of a Webster could not concentrate when filled with fear, worry, or anxiety. When the whole mental organism is vibrating with conflicting emotions, efficiency is impossible. The real suffering in life is not so great, after all. The things which make us prematurely old, which wrinkle our faces, take the elasticity out of our step, the bloom from the cheek, and which rob us of joy are not those which actually happen.
An actress renewed for her great beauty has said: “Anybody who wants to be good-looking must never worry. Worry means ruination, death and destruction to every vestige of beauty. It means loss of flesh, sallowness, telltale lines in the face and no end of disasters. Never mind what happens, an actress must not worry. Once she understands this, she has passed a milestone on the high road to keeping her looks.”
What a good thing it would be if the habitual worrier could see a picture of himself as he would have been if his mind had always been free from worry! What a shock, but what a help it would be for him to place beside it another picture of himself as he actually is—prematurely old, his face furrowed with deep worry and anxiety wrinkles, shorn of hopefulness and freshness, a picture of a man appearing many years older than in the other, where he would seem vigorous, optimistic, hopeful, buoyant!
In nearly all forms of religion fear has played a great part. The priesthood in the Middle Ages found it most effective to draw the ignorant masses to the churches and to control their acts. Ignorance is so susceptible to fear that in all periods of the world’s history the temptation to take advantage of it has been very great.
Who can estimate the terrible effects of the fear of a physical hell; of eternal punishment? This doctrine has for centuries cast a gloom over the human race.
The central idea in the origin of churches was to furnish a way of relief from fear in all its various forms of expression. In other words, it was an effort of human beings to furnish relief from the things which trouble and worry, from the heart-aches of mankind. And yet these very churches have unconsciously encouraged the development of fear by using it as a weapon to whip people into church attendance, the performance of church duties, etc!
What a terrible thing it is for a human being, made in the Creator’s image, to live in perpetual fear that something terrible is going to happen to him, here or hereafter; that he is a mere puppet of circumstance; that a cruel fate is likely at any time to appear in the guise of some dread disease or calamity!
How can one learn to develop the highest ideals of life while he holds in the mind the constant fear of death; the dread of possible momentary dissolution; the possibility of having all his life plans strangled, snuffed out in an instant? Nothing enduring, nothing permanent or solid can be built with these nightmare fears in the mind. The doleful, perpetual preparation for imminent death is abnormal and fatal to all growth; fatal to achievement; fatal to happiness.
What is fear? Whence comes its power to strangle and render weak, poor, and inadequate the lives of so many? It has absolutely no reality. It is purely a mental picture, a bogy of the imagination, and the moment we realize this it ceases to have power over us. If we were all properly trained and were large enough to see that nothing outside of ourselves can work us harm, we would have no fear of anything.
I differ from a physician who has recently stated that the emotion of fear is as normal to the human mind as that of courage. Nothing is normal which destroys one’s ability, blights self-confidence, or strangles ambition. This physician evidently confuses the faculties of caution, prudence, and forethought with the fear thought which blights, destroys, and kills. The former were given us for our protection, to keep us from doing things which would be injurious, but there is not a saving virtue in fear, in the sense in which the word is ordinarily used. Its presence cripples the normal functions of all of the mental faculties. The Creator never put into His own image that which would impair efficiency, cause distress, or destroy happiness. The exercise of every normal faculty or quality tends to enhance, promote, and strengthen the best in us, otherwise it would not be normal. We might as well say that discord is a good thing as to say that fear is normal.
As a nation we are too sober, too sad, and take life too seriously. Our theology and our creeds have too much anxiety and fear, too much sadness and seriousness and too little joy and gladness; too much of the shadow and too little of the sunshine of the soul in them; too much of the hereafter and too little of the now and here.
Fear benumbs initiative. It kills confidence and causes indecision, makes us waver, afraid to begin things, suspect and doubt. Fear is a great leak in power. There are plenty of people who waste more than half of their precious energy in useless worry and anxiety.
We can neutralize a fear thought by applying its natural antidote, the courage thought, the assuring, confident, faith thought, just as the chemist destroys the corrosive power of an acid by adding its opposite—an alkali.
Men cannot get the highest quality of efficiency and express the best thing in them when their minds are troubled and when worry is sapping their vitality and wasting their energy. The worried, angry, troubled brain cannot think vigorously or clearly.
Worry is but one phase of fear, and always thrives best in abnormal conditions. It cannot get much of a hold on a man with a superb physique, a vigorous mentality, a man who lives a clean, sane life. It thrives on the weak—those of low vitality and exhausted energy, and especially on people who live vicious lives.
Worrying about disease produces disease.
The great desideratum is to keep one’s physical, mental, and moral standards so high that the disease germ, the worry germ, the anxious germ, cannot gain a footing in our brain. Our resisting power ought to be so great that it would be impossible for these enemies to get into the brain or body.
To keep ourselves perfectly free from our worry enemies, everything we do must be done sanely. No matter how honest we may be or how hard we may try to get on, if we are not sane in our eating, in our exercise, in our thinking, in our sleeping and living generally, we leave the door open to all sorts of trouble. There are a thousand enemies trying to gain entrance into our system and attack us at our vulnerable point.
It is the cool, calm, serene man, who when away from his work shows that he is a big enough man to leave business affairs to business hours; shows that he does not need to go home and make himself and everybody else miserable with his gloomy, long face; shows by his mental poise and calmness that he is master of the situation.
All fear is based upon the fact that the sufferer feels weak because of his consciousness of being separated from the Infinite Strength, Supply, and when he comes into consciousness of atonement with the Power that made and sustains him, when he finds that peace which satisfies and which passeth all understanding—then will he feel a sense of the glory of being; and having once touched this power and tasted the infinite blessedness, he will never be content to roam again, never be satisfied with the flesh pots of Egypt.
It is a pitiful thing to see strong, vigorous men and women who have inherited God-like qualities and who bear the impress of divinity, going about the world full of all sorts of fears and terrors, with anxious, worried faces, as though life had been a perpetual disappointment. These are not the children God intended.
A millennium will come when fear in all its hideous forms of expression is eliminated. Then man will rise to the majesty of perfect confidence, of sublime self-faith; a consciousness of security and freedom of which he has never before dreamed, and his power and efficiency will be multiplied a hundredfold.
Our sense of fear or terror is always in proportion to our sense of weakness or inability to protect ourselves from the cause of it. When conscious of being stronger than that which terrorizes weaker persons, we have no sense of fear.
We are told that Hercules was not haunted by the fear of other men. The consciousness that he possessed superior power lifted him above anxiety or fear that others might injure him.
There is a slave whose name is Fear,
A trembling, cringing thing;
There is a king whose name is Will,
And every inch a king.
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