small children whom you wish to educate. You don’t want just barely enough to send them to college on, leaving yourself a broken down and poverty stricken slave in the end. Neither do you want to remain a hack worker in a mean position and have somebody die and give you money to school your children with -- whilst you keep on doing hack work. You want to be a MAN, so valuable to the world that you can command plenty of money as your RIGHT. You want to GROW in wisdom and knowledge until a more remunerative work will call you and be glad to pay for you. You want, say $5,000 a year, to come easily to you as a result of your own good and enjoyed effort. Then you can hold your head up and enjoy looking any man in the eyes -- kindly, as a brother and equal Then you will enjoy sitting straight and being still and happy.

Keep filling in the details of your Ideal and get just as enthused over it as you possibly can. But keep your muscles relaxed. Rise above the body and revel in your Ideal.

There is a reason for this ; -- when muscles are relaxed they:

are in condition to be filled with power from the Ideal held. Tensed muscles keep out the mental energy. Mind is positive to muscle, and relaxed muscles are receptive to mental power.

So loose the body and get enthused over the Ideal. Let your mental picture wake as much emotion as possible; for emotion is real creative force, and creates after the pattern held in mind:

If you hold a fearful picture in mind emotion creates it. Job said “I feared a great fear and it came upon me.” If you hold a beautiful picture emotion creates that. Fear and joy, and all intermediate shades of feeling, are the same force -- the soul-force out of which all creation is made.

So I tell you to do your best to get enthused and exalted over your Ideal. Keep telling yourself that your Ideal is you, and that in due time you will prove it in terms of matter. If it is not you what is it? Your Ideal exists within you, does it not? And therefore it must be you. And your poverty, or your work, your “conditions,” exist outside of you, do they not? Then they are not you. What exists within is you.

Of course your “conditions” have their mental pictures within you too, -- pictures which preceded the conditions themselves.