Charles Haanel

The teaching

Taught from his course The Master Key System (1912, printed 1916), with Mental Chemistry and The New Psychology.

The world within

Haanel's course opens on a principle: mind is creative, and the conditions, surroundings and experiences of a life are the result of its habitual or predominant mental attitude. We must be before we can do, and we can do only to the extent that we are, and what we are depends on what we think. There is a world within, of thought, feeling and power, and a world without, and the world without is a reflection of the world within. The law of attraction, as he states it, brings each person the conditions that correspond to their predominant attitude: not what they think now and then, in church or after a good book, but what they think habitually.

Two minds and the solar plexus

We are related to the world without by the conscious, objective mind, whose organ is the brain and the nerves of the senses, and to the world within by the subconscious, subjective mind, whose organ is the solar plexus and the sympathetic nerves, which preside over joy, fear, love, breathing and imagination. Through the subconscious each person is joined to the Universal Mind, the one consciousness that pervades the universe, and the secret of life, in his teaching, is to bring the two minds into conscious cooperation.

He calls the solar plexus the sun of the body, which radiates energy to every part and to everyone met; a person whose radiation is strong is called magnetic. He holds that every ill, of body, mind or circumstance, comes from an interruption of that radiation. That is his belief and no medical teaching; the house leaves illness to a doctor.

Stillness, then letting go

Each of the twenty-four parts ends with an exercise, and the first weeks build a foundation. Select a room where you can be alone and undisturbed; sit erect and comfortable, without lounging; let your thoughts roam where they will, but be perfectly still for fifteen minutes to half an hour, every day for a week, until you have full control of the body. Then, in the same room, chair and position, be still and try to inhibit all thought, which he admits can be done only for a few moments at first, and which shows how many thoughts are pressing to come in. Then relax, letting every muscle go until you feel quiet, restful and at peace. Then, relaxed, let go mentally of hatred, anger, worry, jealousy, envy, sorrow and disappointment, by deciding to and persisting.

Pictures held in the mind

The next weeks train the imagination. Picture a place with pleasant associations, complete with its buildings, grounds, trees and friends. Picture a friend as you last saw them, the room, the furniture, the conversation, and watch their face change as you talk. Picture a battleship, then follow it back through the foundries and the mines to the engineers who drew it and the thought from which it came. Take a seed in imagination and grow it into the flower you most admire, root, stem, leaf and bud. Draw on a blank wall, in the mind, a line, a square, a circle within it and a cone, and change their colour from black to white, red and yellow.

The later weeks hold an idea instead of a picture: harmony, insight, the unity of the self with the whole, the words of scripture that whatever things are desired in prayer are to be believed received. His rule for them is to concentrate without strain, as power comes through repose, and always on the ideal and not its opposite: to remove fear, dwell on courage; to remove lack, on abundance.

Mental chemistry

Mental Chemistry carries the course into a new image: as chemical elements combine to make new substances, so states of mind combine, and a change in the mixture of thought changes its results in the body and in affairs. The New Psychology sets the same teaching beside the talk of the subconscious and of suggestion that filled the 1920s. Both are his frame for one counsel, to hold the mind still, to choose its pictures, and to act on them with a hopeful attitude; the chemistry is an image, and the house teaches it as one.