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Book Review:
The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel February 24, 2018 |
Ten years ago, I participated in a sort of EST (Erhard Seminars Training)-like encounter group in which I learned about "The Law of Attraction" and books about it like A Course in Miracles, The Secret, and The Answer. I read The Answer and wrote this review of it in 2009.
I found the teachings about The Law of Attraction unsettling, disturbing, because I felt they crossed the line into Victim Blaming: if bad stuff happens to you, it's your fault; you brought it onto yourself through negative or incorrect thinking. The example used in the encounter group was, if a plane flies over your city and jettisons the contents of its septic system, if the poop lands on your house somehow it's your fault; you brought it on yourself.
I thought to myself, "Naaah, no way. That's nuts. You can't blame the inhabitant of the house for some random misfortune."
Sure, it makes sense that thoughts create things. Before a house is built, the architect thinks of it and draws it; and before the architect is hired, buyers think to themselves that they would like to buy a house. That makes sense. But I wouldn't go so far as to blame anyone for circumstances beyond their control. To me that is inhumane, unkind, and patently false.
But I can see why one might be tempted to do that. The point of The Law of Attraction teaching is to encourage people to overcome their circumstances, to reverse downward spirals and create upward spirals, to turn their lives around, to focus on what they can control (themselves and their own thoughts), and to work with the undeniable fact that thoughts do indeed create things. Everything that exists began as someone's idea.
In 2009, I also read Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Workweek, and became a follower and fan. Although I feel some serious reservations and concerns about Ferriss' morality and lifestyle choices, I do appreciate his independent thought, pursuit of excellence, and his promotion of Seneca's Stoicism.
As with all things, we have to clarify our Axiology, using it to chew meat and spit out bones. I find that while with Ferriss there may be an occasional bone here and there to spit out, most of what he offers is meat.
Now and then I'll check out his podcasts. On December 20 2017, I listened to his interview of Terry Crews. I've always admired Crews, especially for the hilarious role he played in Mike Judge's film "Idiocracy", and for his courageous involvement in the Porn Kills Love movement. In that interview Crews is all over the place, a very high energy guy full of creativity and laughter; but the most striking thing to me about the interview was that he says the one book that changed his life was an obscure, forgotten book written more than a hundred years ago called The Master Key System. I said to myself, "This I've got to read."
So I bought it that very day and read it in three weeks, from February 2 to February 22, 2018 . . . 102 years after it was written.
I found the teachings about The Law of Attraction unsettling, disturbing, because I felt they crossed the line into Victim Blaming: if bad stuff happens to you, it's your fault; you brought it onto yourself through negative or incorrect thinking. The example used in the encounter group was, if a plane flies over your city and jettisons the contents of its septic system, if the poop lands on your house somehow it's your fault; you brought it on yourself.
I thought to myself, "Naaah, no way. That's nuts. You can't blame the inhabitant of the house for some random misfortune."
Sure, it makes sense that thoughts create things. Before a house is built, the architect thinks of it and draws it; and before the architect is hired, buyers think to themselves that they would like to buy a house. That makes sense. But I wouldn't go so far as to blame anyone for circumstances beyond their control. To me that is inhumane, unkind, and patently false.
But I can see why one might be tempted to do that. The point of The Law of Attraction teaching is to encourage people to overcome their circumstances, to reverse downward spirals and create upward spirals, to turn their lives around, to focus on what they can control (themselves and their own thoughts), and to work with the undeniable fact that thoughts do indeed create things. Everything that exists began as someone's idea.
In 2009, I also read Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Workweek, and became a follower and fan. Although I feel some serious reservations and concerns about Ferriss' morality and lifestyle choices, I do appreciate his independent thought, pursuit of excellence, and his promotion of Seneca's Stoicism.
As with all things, we have to clarify our Axiology, using it to chew meat and spit out bones. I find that while with Ferriss there may be an occasional bone here and there to spit out, most of what he offers is meat.
Now and then I'll check out his podcasts. On December 20 2017, I listened to his interview of Terry Crews. I've always admired Crews, especially for the hilarious role he played in Mike Judge's film "Idiocracy", and for his courageous involvement in the Porn Kills Love movement. In that interview Crews is all over the place, a very high energy guy full of creativity and laughter; but the most striking thing to me about the interview was that he says the one book that changed his life was an obscure, forgotten book written more than a hundred years ago called The Master Key System. I said to myself, "This I've got to read."
So I bought it that very day and read it in three weeks, from February 2 to February 22, 2018 . . . 102 years after it was written.
Many would find this book impersonal, unapproachable, off-putting and abstruse. It is written with correct grammar that I love, but that many would find alienating.
It contains no pictures, chapter headings, or sub-headings. The chapters are simply numbered, as are the paragraphs within them. In this way, it's arranged like the Bible or Martin Luther's 95 Theses. You can't ascertain anything about the book by glancing at chapter titles in a table of contents because there are no titles to skim; there are only numbers. The only way to understand what's in the book is to dive in and read it. It's definitely Old School.
It wasn't originally designed to be a book. It was designed to be a six month correspondence course divided into twenty-four weekly pieces. The author meant to pace the delivery over a six month period, allowing time for the reader to digest, exercise, and reflect. (By reading it in only three weeks, I wonder whether I may have missed out on a necessary digestion process.)
Because it was designed to be a twenty-four week, six-month course, it's necessarily repetitive. There's a lot of review, re-emphasis, and re-enforcement of key ideas. In this review, I am going to try to cut through the repetition and distill the book into a short list of things anyone would find useful. I'll also try to filter out a few more speculative metaphysical things some might find debatable today, and focus on what's both inarguable and useful.
It contains no pictures, chapter headings, or sub-headings. The chapters are simply numbered, as are the paragraphs within them. In this way, it's arranged like the Bible or Martin Luther's 95 Theses. You can't ascertain anything about the book by glancing at chapter titles in a table of contents because there are no titles to skim; there are only numbers. The only way to understand what's in the book is to dive in and read it. It's definitely Old School.
It wasn't originally designed to be a book. It was designed to be a six month correspondence course divided into twenty-four weekly pieces. The author meant to pace the delivery over a six month period, allowing time for the reader to digest, exercise, and reflect. (By reading it in only three weeks, I wonder whether I may have missed out on a necessary digestion process.)
Because it was designed to be a twenty-four week, six-month course, it's necessarily repetitive. There's a lot of review, re-emphasis, and re-enforcement of key ideas. In this review, I am going to try to cut through the repetition and distill the book into a short list of things anyone would find useful. I'll also try to filter out a few more speculative metaphysical things some might find debatable today, and focus on what's both inarguable and useful.
Key Take-Aways
(in no particular order)
(in no particular order)
- The book affirms Universal Absolute Truth and refutes what I call Radical Individualism. Thus unlike Oprah who encourages people to speak "their" truths, (as if you get to have your version of truth and I get to have mine, and if they're different that's okay), there is no such thing as "your truth" or "my truth." There is only THE truth, that we share. It's a kind of Commonwealth or infrastructure like roads, parks, trails, traffic lights, or math. Nobody gets to own it, brand it, or make up their own personal version of it. It's a public good, not a private one. Anything less is opinion or perspective or something, not Truth. Truth passes the three-fold test of the Vincentian Canon: that which is so for everyone, everywhere, always. (On Christmas Eve 2014, I wrote a poem about this called "Agree to Disagree.") A part of The Master Key System is to accept this and focus on learning The Truth, that it might liberate and empower us. When we retreat into false "truths" that are really mere opinions or even delusion, we alienate ourselves from our source of light, power, and life. When we plug in, we light up, live, and thrive.
- Life is an inner game, but most people focus on externals; on symptoms or effects instead of causes. The solution is within you, not "out there." "All growth is from within. This is evident in all nature" (5). Seeds grow into plants. Embryos become people. Etc.
- Peace, quiet, and stillness are important for everybody, not just introverts. It's necessary to hear one's self think and receive inspiration. It's necessary to hear "The Still Small Voice." "Omnipotence itself is absolute silence; all else is change, activity, limitation" (107).
- Concentration. Like Jay Papasan's book The One Thing, this book also refutes "multitasking" and instead champions concentration. The first paragraph of the first chapter compares and contrasts an "accumulative" versus "scattering" consciousness, and makes a distinction between thinking and daydreaming. Thinking gathers; daydreaming scatters. " . . . develop the power of concentration which will enable you to exclude all thoughts except the ones which are associated with your purpose" (32). "Imagination is a good servant but a poor master" (82). ". . . refuse to concentrate or think of anything except the things we desire" (114).
- (My observation: social media newsfeeds shred concentration. They're not really "reading." Along these lines I have reflected for years on the shredding effect on concentration of newsfeeds that we see on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many other kinds of social media. When we look at feeds like that, we may tell ourselves that we are "reading" because we are looking at print. But we're really not, if you think of "reading" as something that gathers the mind. Quite the contrary, feeds scatter it. They shred concentration. They're a kind of "un-reading." They turn us into a culture of scatterbrains. It's mentally injurious. From this injury, we have a lot of healing to do.)
- A human being is not a body with a spirit. A human being is a spirit with a body (117). Saint John of Kronstadt, who died in 1908, is quoted, “A strange illness has appeared in our days – the passion for distractions. Never before was there such a desire for distractions; people have forgotten how to lead a serious life for the good of others; they have no spiritual life and are bored. They exchange the profound content of a spiritual life for distractions! What madness! It is here that pastors must deploy their strength: they must re-introduce into life its lost meaning and give back to the people the knowledge of the true purpose of life.” This sentiment is echoed in Haanal's book. If Saint John died in 1908, and Haanel's book was published in 1916, this indicates that at the time, before the Internet and everything, people were struggling with distractions then. How much more severe is the struggle, and more relevant and helpful is the message, now??!!
- Mind is everything. God has an infinite, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent mind, we have little minds that are illumined, informed, and inspired by His through prayer. It's like connecting a dead wire to a live one, or plugging into a battery charger. The Master Key is Disciplined Thought. "Our lives are simply the reflection of our predominant thoughts" (104).
- Thoughts create things through a process of Idealization, Visualization, and Manifestation. The first step is not Ideation. It's Idealization. It's not about ideas; it's about ideals. Thus everyone who wants the Master Key must be an idealist. The ideal specifies the outcome. Visualization draws the picture that meets the specifications. Manifestation is the actual building or creation of the visualized thing, just as contractors build houses, drawn by architects, to customer and building code specs.
- Think Big. "Large ideas have a tendency to eliminate all smaller ideas . . . . This will remove innumerable petty and annoying obstacles from your path . . . . You also become conscious of a larger world of thought, thereby increasing your mental capacity as well as placing yourself in position to accomplish something of value" (104).
- Language must be impeccable because it expresses thought, on its way to becoming things. ". . . we must be especially careful to use nothing but constructive and harmonious language, which when finally crystallized into objective forms, will prove to our advantage" (74). ". . . accuracy in building words and sentences is the highest form of architecture in civilization (my emphasis) and is a passport to success" (75). The quality of language influences the quality of the things that it represents and that will result from it. Sloppy language leads to sloppy work, and vice-versa. Would you improve your work? Start with your language, because language shapes work as it's happening.
- Electrons are omnipresent, including within our own bodies. They're negative. They need a positive to activate them. That positive, the thing that completes the circuit, is the Mind. They govern our physical health. Hence the mind-body health connection. Thus electricity is not just a metaphor. It's a physiological fact.
- Health: the Mind-Body Connection. "These processes of the sub-conscious mind usually proceed without our personal knowledge or direction, and so long as we do not interfere the result is perfect. But as these millions of repair cells are all intelligent and respond to our thought, they are often paralyzed and rendered impotent by our thoughts of fear, doubt, and anxiety. They are like an army of workmen ready to start an important piece of work, but every time they get fairly started on the undertaking a strike is called, or plans changed, until they finally get discouraged and give up" (110).
- Harmony. The key is to bring ourselves into harmony with God. I call this "Getting With The Program" (GWTP). The idea here is that we become so skilled at working with forces of nature like electricity, gravity, and weather, and Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" of enlightened self-interest, that we become forces of nature ourselves. (My personal concern is that through Radical Individualism we've debased Truth, reducing it to Opinion, Perspective, or Delusion, thereby causing dissonance with God, just like creating dissonance by singing flat or wrong note in a choir. If you've ever enjoyed ringing a perfectly tuned chord, or suffered dissonance in a choir, you know what I mean.)
- Natural Laws exist. We need to learn them and learn to work with them. There are Natural Laws about Attraction, Growth, Love, Vibration, Success (the first of which is Service, followed by Integrity and Justice), Compensation (you only get what you give; to get more, give more) and more. "You can make a money magnet of yourself, but to do so you must first consider how you can make money for other people" (113). When we learn to work with Natural Laws, everything becomes easy because we're "with the program." GWTP presupposes and requires Humility, which is a large part of Wisdom.
- Scarcity is an artificial imposition. Nature is abundant, wasteful, and lavish. There is nothing conservative about it. If you just consider how a tree grows, it does not just grow one or two leaves or branches. It's a picture of exponential growth. So if we or our businesses are not growing like a tree, we're breaking some kind of natural law or laws. We need to get with the program (42). "We cannot obtain what we lack if we tenaciously cling to what we have" (73).
- Affirmation: "I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious, and happy" (43).
- Inductive Reasoning. Natural Laws are discernible from Induction, or The Scientific Method, originated by Sir Francis Bacon in 1620: the process of reasoning from the particular to the general. From Induction we enjoy most if not all modern conveniences including energy, communications, transportation, safety, and nutrition among many, many others.
- The Solar Plexus. "The sun of the body." Without getting too mystical or religious, we can all agree that the Solar Plexus, although we never see it, is the body's nerve center located behind the stomach. Thus it's one of those invisible important things that deserves more of our attention than we usually give it. In common slang we talk about "listening to your gut." Physiologically speaking, the Solar Plexus is this "gut." Haanel asserts that the Solar Plexus is the body's central energy distribution point, the seat of the subconscious, which accounts for 90% of behavior, the distributor and coordinator of the body's electrons, which can be activated or animated by the conscious mind which normally accounts for 10% of behavior. "The one arch enemy of the Solar Plexus is fear" (13). Insofar as the Solar Plexus is the seat of intuition, it, and not our brains, is our bodily connection to God.
- The Subconscious Mind. The Universal Mind is God, and the Subconscious Mind is God within you, all the electrons shimmering in every cell of your body, and centered on your Solar Plexus. The relationship between the two is a matter of degree. The latter is to the former as a drop of water is to the ocean. But they're of the same kind and quality, and they have a working relationship that you can master through prayer. "The real interest of democracy is therefore to exalt, emancipate, and recognize the divinity of the human spirit" (106).
- My observation: "Omphalopsychites." Many centuries ago, monks were criticized for "navel-gazing" or contemplating their belly buttons. Critics felt they were wasting time and branded them with the epithet or insult "Omphalopsychite" which means, one who contemplates his belly. In retrospect we can see that they were actually giving proper attention to the core of their being, the Solar Plexus that is the hub of the subconscious that governs most behavior. The point being, if you really want to improve, you need to descend from the head to the heart.
- Correct Thinking is when the conscious mind in the brain (what Daniel Kahneman calls "System 1" in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow) disciplines the subconscious mind (Kahneman's "System 2") in the Solar Plexus in such a way as to produce constructive, harmonious results. ". . . neither can you spend twenty or thirty years of your life building up negative conditions as the result of negative thoughts, and then expect to see them all melt away as the result of fifteen or twenty minutes of right thinking" (71).
- Infinite Resources. People who learn to think correctly and work WITH their subconscious find that they gain access to infinite resources. Worlds of unforeseen opportunity open to them. It is literally electric, magnetic.
- Power is in Repose. To hear the Still Small Voice, we need to be still. Some call this Meditation. Orthodox Christians call it Hesychia or ἡσυχία. Whatever you call it, it's the opposite of being Busy all the time, which is what our culture usually is. (In the West they say, "Don't just sit there; do something." In the East they say, "Don't just do something; sit there.") "Tension leads to mental unrest and abnormal mental activity . . . it produces worry, care, fear, and anxiety. Relaxation is therefore an absolute necessity in order to allow the mental faculties to exercise the greatest freedom" (15).
- Cleanliness. I call this "brain bleach" or "mental floss." Correct thinking requires mental house-cleaning; not just mental, but physical because of the mind-body connection. "Mental, moral and physical cleanliness are absolutely indispensable if we are to make progress of any kind" (22). It's kind of difficult to achieve great things when your house and your life are filled with dirt, clutter, and junk.
- Love is another word for "The Law of Attraction." "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."
Respectfully offered,
Kris Freeberg, Economist
[email protected]
(360) 224-4322
