When is thinking a bar to accomplishment?

Mental consciousness has the two attributes – the power to understand and the power to will. In mind, the capacity to know and the will to act are separate and can work in isolation from each other. The Secret emphasizes the importance of mental will. It does not insist that we know how to achieve the goal we set for ourselves. It even suggests that we may be better off not exercising our minds on the question of ‘how can I accomplish it?’ But it does insists that we make a firm unshakeable decision of the will to achieve it.

Some critics object that people who accomplish do not simply wish for things. They argue that understanding how to accomplish is as important as willing to accomplish. Successful people formulate clear plans as to how they can achieve their goals. This is certainly most often the case and is a practice advocated by many self-help programs, such as The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, which urge practitioners to translate their goals into detailed plans of action.

How can we reconcile this view with what is spoken of The Secret? Is understanding a help or a bar to accomplishment? This dilemma can be resolved by the following principle: Wherever we have the capacity to mentally formulate a means of achieving the goal, visualizing the means adds conviction and power to the mental formation.
The experience of Jack Canfield supports this view. Having decided that he wanted to raise his income from $8000 to $100,000, he tried to imagine some conceivable way in which that might be possible and came up with the idea that it could be achieved if his book were written about in National Enquirer. A month later a free-lance reporter who writes for the Enquirer approached him. Canfield used his mental imagination to supplement and reinforce his mental will.

The only question is whether the visualization of ‘how’ is always essential and always beneficial. Experience confirms that it is not. Those in whom the physical mind is prominently developed, usually have difficulty imagining how to achieve a goal that is very far removed from present realities. There is a proverbial story of a man who got lost while driving in rural upstate New York and stopped to ask a farmer for directions to his destination. The farmer replied, “There is no way to get there from here!” That is often the understanding of the physical mind. If so, it is better not to listen to it! A person earning $8000 a year may be able to realistically envision $18,000 but will feel the effort to formulate a means of earning $80,000 is pure fantasy. In such cases the inability to imagine realistic possibilities or the personal sense of smallness become a bar to higher accomplishment. Countless stories can be cited of people who fail to take advantage of magnificent opportunities that are offered to them, just because they cannot imagine themselves achieving at a much higher level.


For further explanation on this and similar topics, see http://humanscience.wikia.com/wiki/The_Secret_Project