First 7 sentences of Pt. 1 of the Master Key System
You are like me: Wanting to know what your purpose is in this world. This magnificent world is so full of possibilities and yet we suffer so. You have suffered quite a bit in your life as I have mine. Many days of darkness, going through the fire, and you finally see the “light” or a glimmer thereof. I see that light, too: it is in me, as it is in you. Through this study, we will be building ourselves up to to create the great and the good without.
As I stated in my original post, I will be exploring Charles Haanel’s seminal work, The Master Key System, to see whether it is true that we can manifest, create the kind of world we want to create. The assumption here is that we will be doing so for the good of ourselves, our families, and humanity. When we lift ourselves up, others will follow. The lifting up of ourselves means that we will lead others on the path of self-mastery with the great expectation that we will create a world in which human suffering will lessen. So, with all that in mind, let’s begin.
Haanel places his thoughts in numbered sentences. I am not sure if that is how I will proceed because I think paragraphs represents whole thoughts, so to speak. But we shall see. Since this is not a critique of his work, but an analysis, I will see what works best in thinking through what he has written. We will also move slowly, so tonight we will be looking at the first 7 of 45 sentences or thoughts. I will leave the questions at the end of the chapter for you to do. On Sunday, I will do a recap and set the step for the next part.
Haanel’s first proposition is that increase or loss continues along its trajectory. I think the first paragraph is a little opaque, but ominous: Don’t want to be in the loss category.
What we find in the first 7 sentences is Haanel’s thesis that we must become conscious of the workings of our minds. What does it do? What is it really? How does it bear on our lives and the world around us? Looking at sentence 4, working in reverse order, we see that he posits that what we think bears directly on who we are. Who we are determines our actions in the world. And what we do depends on our being. It seems to be a circular argument, but if we start with what we think, Haanel asserts that all derives from that. For example, if we think about how poor we are, then we will see ourselves as being without resources and we will not move in the world as if we have resources, or access to the same, at our disposal. In contrast, if we think that we are prosperous, we will see ourselves as having access to many resources and interact with the world from this perspective.
What does he mean in sentence 5 that we cannot express powers that we do not possess? He goes on to say: we cannot possess powers that we are not conscious of having. This means that knowledge of the mind’s power is available to all and for us to possess this power we must know about it. So, our first movement toward alleviating our own suffering and the world’s is to become conscious of the power of our minds and concomitantly the power of what we think, i.e., our minute thoughts. When we do so, as Haanel tells us, in paragraph 7, we discover the wonder of the mind and we can then act from a robust position of power. So, when we understand our mind, we “find the solution for every problem, the cause of every effort.” That is a great thing and worth the time and effort we will put into this study.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 13th, we will review sentences 8-15.
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