LITMIR.BIZ

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or systematic recitation. Do not let this disturb you, however—all this will be taken care of as you proceed; order and arrangement will establish themselves almost automatically when the proper time arrives. The main thing at this stage is to get all of your stronger desires into the list. Be sure to exhaust your subconscious mine of strong desires—dig out of that mine anything and everything that has strength in it.

      The next step is that of the cold­blooded, ruthless, elimination of the weakest desires, with the idea and purpose that in the end there will be a “survival of the fittest” on your list. Begin by running over your list, striking off the weaker and less insistent—the mere temporary and passing—desires, and those which you clearly recognize as likely to bring you but little if any permanent satisfaction, continued happiness and lasting content.

      In this way you will create a new list of the stronger desires, and those having a greater permanent and satisfying value. Then, examining this list, you will find that some of the items will still stand out from the others by reason of their greater comparative strength and greater degree of permanent value. Make a new list of these successful candidates, including only those possessing the greatest strength and value to you, and dropping the others from the list. Then continue this process of elimination of the weakest and the least satisfying until you reach that point where you feel that any further elimination would result in cutting away live wood.

      By this time you will have become aware of a most significant and important fact, namely, that as your list has grown smaller, the strength and value of the surviving desires have grown greater. As the old gold­miners expressed it, you are now “getting down to pay dirt”—getting down to the region in which the nuggets and rich ore abide. When you have reached this stage, you will do well to stop work for the time being; this will give you a needed mental rest, and will also furnish your subconscious mentality with the opportunity to do some work for you along its own particular lines.

      When you again take up your list for consideration, you will find a new general order and arrangement of its items pictured in your mind. You will find that these remaining desires have grouped themselves into several general classes. Your subconscious mental faculties will have performed an important task for you. Then you will be ready to compare these general classes, one with the other, until you are able to select certain classes which seem stronger than the others. Then you will be ready to proceed to the task of eliminating the weaker general classes, making a new list of the stronger ones.

      After working along these general lines for a time, with intervals of rest and recuperation, and for subconscious digestion and elimination, you will find that you have before you a list composed of but a comparatively few general classes of “wants” and “want tos”—each of which possesses a far greater degree of strength and value than you had previously suspected. Your subconscious mind has been working its power upon these classes of desires, and they have evolved to a higher stage of strength, definiteness, clearness and power. You are beginning at last to find out “just what you want,” and are also well started on your way to “wanting it hard enough.”

      General Rules of Selection. In your task of selection, elimination, “boiling down,” and chopping away the dead wood, etc., you will do well to observe the three following general Rules of Selection:

      I. THE IMPERATIVE REQUISITE. In selecting your strongest desires for your list, you are not required to pay attention to any fears lurking in your mind that any of the particular desires are apparently unattainable—that they are beyond your power of achievement, and are rendered impossible by apparently unsurmountable obstacles. You are not concerned with such questions at this time and place—ignore them for the present. You are here concerned merely with the question of whether or not your “want” or “want to” concerning a certain thing is felt “hard enough” for you to sacrifice other desirable things—whether you feel that the particular desire is of sufficient value for you to “pay the price” of its attainment, even though that price be very high. Remember the old adage: “Said the gods to man, ‘Take what thou wilt—but pay for it!’” If you are not willing to “pay the price,” and to pay it in full, then you do not “want it hard enough” to render it one of your Prime Desires.

      II. THE TEST OF FULL DESIRE. We have told you that, “Desire has for its object something that will bring pleasure or get rid of pain, immediately or remote, for the individual or for some one in whom he is interested.” Therefore, in passing upon the comparative strength and value of your respective desires, or general classes of desires, you must take into consideration all of the elements of Desire noted in the above definite statement—the indirect as well as the direct elements of personal satisfaction and content.

      You must weigh and decide the value of any particular desire, or class of desires, not only in the light of your own immediate satisfaction and content, but also in the light of your own future satisfaction and content; not only in the light of your own direct satisfaction and content, but also in the light of your indirect satisfaction and content derived from the satisfaction and content of others in whom you are interested. Your future satisfaction and content often depend upon the sacrifice of your present desire in favor of one bearing fruit in the future. You may be so interested in other persons that their satisfaction and content has a greater emotional value to you than the gratification of some desire concerned only with your own direct satisfaction and content. These Desires­values must be carefully weighed by you. If you leave out any of these elements of Desire, you run the risk of attaching a false value to certain sets of desires. You must weigh and measure the value of your desires by the use of the standard of the full content of Desire.

      III. SEEK DEPTH OF DESIRE. You will find it advisable to omit from your list all purely superficial and transient feelings, emotions and desires. They have but a slight value in the case. Instead, plunge into the deep places of your mental being or soul; there you will find abiding certain deep, essential, basic, permanent feelings, emotions and desires. In those regions dwell the “wants” and the “want tos” which when aroused are as insistent and as imperative as are the want of the suffocating man for air; the want of the famished man for food; the want of the thirsting man for water; the want of the wild creature for its mate; the want of the mother for the welfare of her child.

      These deep desires are your real emotional elements—the ones most firmly and permanently imbedded in the soil of your emotional being. These are the desires which will abide when the transient, ephemeral ones have passed and are forgotten. These are the desires for which you will be willing to “pay the price,” be that price ever so high in the form of the sacrifice and relinquishment of every other desire, feeling or emotion. Measure your desires by their essential depth, as well as by their temporary weight. Select those which are embedded so deeply in the soil of your emotional being that they cannot be uprooted by the passing storms of conditions and circumstances.

      THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. You are now approaching the final stages of your discovery of “just what you want.” You now have a list of Insistent Desires—the survivors in the Struggle for Existence on the part of your many desires and classes of desires. If you have proceeded earnestly and honestly in your work of Self-Analysis and Selection, you will have a group of sturdy Desire­giants before you for final judgment. By a strange psychological law these surviving candidates have taken on much of the strength and energy of those which they have defeated in the struggle; the victors will have absorbed the vitality of those whom they have defeated, just as the savage hopes to draw to himself the strength of the enemies killed by him in battle. Your Desire Power has now been concentrated upon a comparatively small group of desires, with a consequent focusing of power.

      You will now find that your “wants” and “want tos” have arranged themselves into two great classes, viz., (1) the great class of those desires which while different from other desires, or classes of desires, are not necessarily contradictory to them nor directly opposed to them; and (2) the great class of those desires which are not only different, but are also actually contradictory and opposed to other desires or classes of desires.

      The merely “different” classes may abide in mutual harmonious existence and relation with or to each other, just as do light and heat, or the color and odor of a flower. But two contradictory and opposing classes of desires cannot

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