The first image that you are always going to dwell upon and build within you is: There is no limit to my success. If this image increases, the subconscious trash that says, "I will always fail," comes out and burns away. Opposites draw each other and whichever opposite is stronger, that is the dominating force within you. That is one of the mental laws. Opposites draw each other. Whichever opposite is stronger, it controls the other and eventually eats it and annihilates it.
…There is no limit to my beauty, to my power, to my service. You are going to build this program. When you program yourself like that, it is impossible for you to fail because this mental programming has special powers.
A mental program is a magnetic disk, which draws from Space corresponding phrases, formulations, or programming. You become stronger and stronger and more successful because it is bringing more and more of those thoughtforms, of those thought energies that are related to your success, your beauty, and your victory.
Such a positive attitude has foundation because you are essentially a divine Spark in which all potentials are in existence. All that you need is to be aware of it and gradually release the giant sleeping within you. It must be gradual because your personality vehicles need time to grow, to transform, and to adjust themselves to the glory awakening within you….
…I will live a long, healthy, and happy life. In this category we have millions of self-defeating thoughts all the time. You become a little fat and you say, "I am dying." You lose twenty pounds and you say, "Ah ha, I am going to the other world."
What are you going to do? You are always going to think in optimistic ways. If you have a little pain on your nose, you think cancer is developing. Well, remember that you are putting that in the diskette. Always you are going to find a way not to admit that you are going to die, that you are going to be sick, that you are going to be in trouble because when your computer is programmed by the fear of dying prematurely, it is going to come. That is why they say, "Whatever you fear, it comes to your life." You have already programmed it. That is why it comes.
…I can find the keys of the treasury of wisdom. You are going to have faith in yourself and build an image that if the Teacher dies, if the books are taken away from you, if the lessons are taken away from you, you can still find the treasury of wisdom because the treasury of wisdom is God and that One is within you. You always have access to that treasury, but too often people become hopeless, discouraged, and they no longer search for the wisdom because the one who was feeding them disappeared or refused to continue.
All nature loves me, respects me, and needs me is the next one. Immediately you get a little down or depressed, you say, "Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me." Of course everybody is going to hate you because you are evoking that kind of reaction. On the contrary, you are going to develop the image that everyone is loving you.
…No slander, no treason will discourage me from my image, but I will learn great lessons from it and even be able to improve my nature. Any slander, any treason is an effort by other people to build within you a nasty program to destroy yourself.
What is gossip? What is slander? It is an image they are building to project into you and make you use it on yourself. Once you start believing what they are saying or thinking or imagining, you are already caught in their programming. Every morning you are going to say that these things are not going to affect you, and in the meantime you are going to be sensitive to what they are saying if there is a little truth in it. You can say, "Well, I know I made a few mistakes but that is nothing. I am going to correct myself." But you are not going to accept wholesale what they are saying because what they are saying is not the pure truth. There are malicious feelings, hatred, and destruction in the image that they send to you.
…I am formed by the image of the Almighty Creative Force so my possibilities are unlimited. You can notice that all these things you are programming are really true. They are not plaster. They are not artificial. They are true because, essentially, you are a Spark of the Almighty Spirit. Everything that that Great One created and all that creative power is within you, so you are not hypnotizing yourself. You are not even doing self-suggestion.
You are really opening your mind to the Reality that is within you. That is the difference you must see.
You can try to separate your daily image from the Eternal as follows. When you notice that you are caught in transient activities, forced by your glamors and illusions, stop a moment and remember your Eternal Image and try to act as if you were the Eternal Image.
…Really, I never have failed, but I have learned lessons. People sit and start crying, "I failed, it is finished, I failed." You have never failed; you have learned a big lesson. But can you stand in that programming? It is so serious. You are defeated, people really crushed you, and you are thrown into the prison. Your whole reputation and fame have gone and you say, "That is all. They defeated me." Can you stand there and say, "It was really a nice comedy. I learned so many things that I could not have learned in ten million years." Maybe that is true.
Everyday in building your new images you automatically, naturally destroy all negative, poor, miserable, and ugly images from your mind. By always dwelling in your positive images, you slowly destroy the images that you built in the past. If you do not like all your physical, emotional, and mental beingness, still you built them and it means that now you are going to build a different image.
Actually one of the great duties and responsibilities of the leader is to teach people how to build positive images for themselves. You can give them outlines but not details. If you give details to them, you may trap them in their own vanity and ego. They must build the image, but you will inspire them with the outlines.
Positive images are not built by hallucination, imagination, or by repeating words. How are they built? Your success image is built not because you imagine success, not because you hallucinate success, not because you read about success. Here is the secret: Success images are built by remembering over your whole life the smallest successes you have had and bringing them into focus. And remembering that God within is the source of success.
It is good to go back and find your successful experiences, but you are not going into the pit of the subconscious. You are going to go to your memory banks. Memory banks are not the storages of your subconsciousness. There is a huge difference between memory banks and the subconsciousness. Maybe we can say that the subconscious is like your hard disk, the memory is like your diskette.
The memory bank is in the etheric brain. Memories in this bank either slowly sink into the subconscious mind or are annihilated by various thought processes.
Often, people are taught to build a health image by imagining that they really are going to be healthy. This is positive and may help. But the best thing is to go to your childhood memory banks when you were running free and wild and climbing trees, jumping into the ocean, and doing every kind of fun thing to show that you were really healthy. Bring that image back into focus.
When you bring these things out of your memory banks and compile them, these compilations of success moments will be an image of success within you. This image has a basis, a foundation. It is real. But the memories were far apart from each other a million years, fifty years, ten years. They were not effective. Their effectiveness and influence increase in you when you collect them, put them closer together, and thus create greater and greater tension. Let them start controlling your life. Instead of closing your eyes and going on about how many people damaged you, hurt you, scolded you, cursed you, gossiped about you, slandered you, instead of falling into the trash, do just the opposite. Then you will find success.
Here is even a little deeper layer of what we were saying. Sometimes we mess the images that we made for ourselves by projecting bad or ugly images on others. When we gossip about and slander people or say bad things about them, we build an image in our mind, and this image contradicts the beautiful images that we were trying to build in ourselves. This must be understood.
For example, I am saying to this man, "You know, I am trying to be very successful, very beautiful, very healthy." Now I have built that image in me. Then later I turn to him and say, "You are a nasty, ugly man. You are really square. You are really going to fail in your whole life."
What am I doing? The things that I am saying to this man, I am saying first to myself. The beautiful image that I was trying to build in me is already messed up. That is why the religions and higher philosophies forbid us to speak evil and slander other people. When we do this to others, we first build a dirty image within ourselves. If we are thinking ugly things about others, we mess up the image we are building in us. Why? Because when we are building an image for ourselves, we are almost neutral, happy, and relaxed. Hatred, force, and willpower are not involved in it. But when we say to another person, "You stupid, you rascal, you failure, you defeated man," our thoughtform is filled with a tremendous amount of force. That thoughtform is overpowering and destroying our relaxed image that we built within us because the image does not have the same tensity of force, anger, fear, furiousness, obnoxiousness. These words are names of forces.
The thoughts that you think about others, these are the thoughts that affect your programming. For example, if you think that people are really beautiful, you do not damage the beautiful programming for yourself. But from the beginning of the day until midnight, people think evil about others, in the meantime thinking they themselves are so beautiful. Eventually it happens that they become the most evil and ugly persons. Continuously thinking evil about others makes you evil because before that image goes to them it is really impressed in your mind and in your diskette.
If you think about this very carefully, you will not spend so much money on doctors or asylums.
-Torkom Saraydarian
(from The Mystery of Self Image, pp. 115-139.)