Alter your life

There is no need to be unhappy. There is no need to be sad. There is no need to be disappointed, or oppressed, or aggrieved. There is no need for illness or failure or discouragement. There is no necessity for anything but success, good health, prosperity, and an abounding interest and joy in life.

That the lives of many people are full of dreary things is unfortunately only too true; but there is no necessity for them to be there. They are there only because their victims suppose them to be inevitable, not because they are so. As long as you accept a negative condition at its own valuation, so long will you remain in bondage to it; but you have only to assert your birthright as a free man or woman and you will be free.

Success and happiness are the natural condition of humankind. It is actually easier for us to demonstrate these things than the reverse. Bad habits of thinking and acting may obscure this fact for a time, just as a wrong way of walking or sitting, or holding a pen or a musical instrument may seem to be easier than the proper way, because we have accustomed ourselves to it; but the proper way is the easier nevertheless.

Unhappiness, frustration, poverty, loneliness are really bad habits that their victims have become accustomed to bear with more or less fortitude, believing that there is no way out, whereas there is a way; and that way is simply to acquire good habits of mind instead of bad ones--habits of working with the Law instead of against it.

You should never "put up" with anything. You should never be willing to accept less than Health, Harmony, and Happiness. These things are your Divine Right as the sons and daughters of God, and it is only a bad habit, unconscious, as a rule, that causes you to be satisfied with less. In the depths of our being people always feel intuitively that there is a way out of our difficulties if only we can find it, and our natural instincts all point in the same direction.

The infant, as yet uncontaminated by the defeatist suggestions of his or her elders, simply refuses to tolerate inharmony on any terms, and therefore demonstrates over it. When the infant is hungry he or she tells the world with a confident insistence that commands attention, while many sophisticated adults go without.

Does the infant find a pin sticking in some part of his or her anatomy? Not for him or her a sigh of resignation to the supposed "will of God" (it is really blasphemy to say that evil or suffering could ever be the will of God, All Good), or a whine about never having any luck, or a sigh that what cannot be cured must be endured.

No, the defeatist view of life has not yet touched the babies; their instincts tell them that life and harmony are inseparable. And sure enough, that pin is located and removed even if everything else has to come to a stop until it is done.

But "shades of the prison-house begin to close about the growing boy," and by the time the child is old enough to think rationally, the Race habit will have trained the child to use reason largely in the inverted way.

Refuse to tolerate anything less than harmony. You can have prosperity no matter what your present circumstances may be. You can have health and physical fitness. You can have a happy and joyous life. You can have a good home of your own. You can have congenial friends and comrades.

You can have a full, free, joyous life, independent and untrammeled. You can become your own master or your own mistress. But to do this you must definitely seize the rudder of your own destiny and steer boldly and firmly for the port that you intend to make.