I really like the first story. 

How can I use this/apply this concept to the sudden, traumatic loss of my belove kitten/cat who was my baby and my best friend?  I am having an extremely hard time functioning and coping with this loss.

Thank you.

Thank you, and I am sorry to hear about your mum.  I remembered I actually have the book Ask and it is Given - I bought it years ago - I don't know that I ever really read it.  So I looked for it last night and started a little bit.  I saw the post you wrote about Anita Moorjani.  I will have to look at it more closely/google her. 

What is it you found most relieving/helpful from these 2 sources?

Thank you

Edwin C. Barnes

"TRULY, ‘THOUGHTS ARE things’, and powerful things at that, when mixed with purpose, persistence and a burning desire for their translation into riches or other material objects. Edwin C. Barnes discovered how true it is that men really do think and grow rich . His discovery did not come about at one sitting. It came little by little, beginning with a burning desire to become a business associate of the great Thomas Edison. One of the chief characteristics of Barnes’ desire was that it was definite. He wanted to work with Edison, not for him.

When this desire, or impulse of thought, first flashed into his mind he was in no position to act upon it. Two difficulties stood in his way. He did not know Mr Edison, and he did not have enough money to pay his rail fare to Orange, New Jersey. These difficulties were sufficient to have discouraged the majority of people from making any attempt to carry out the desire. But his was no ordinary desire! He was so determined to find a way to carry out his desire that he finally decided to travel by ‘blind baggage’, rather than be defeated. (To the uninitiated, this means that he went to East Orange on a freight train.) He presented himself at Mr Edison’s laboratory, and announced he had come to go into business with the inventor. In speaking of the first meeting between them, years later, Mr Edison said, ‘He stood there before me, looking like an ordinary tramp, but there was something in the expression of his face which conveyed the impression that he was determined to get what he had come after. When a man really desires a thing so deeply that he is willing to stake his entire future on a single turn of the wheel in order to get it, he is sure to win. I gave him the opportunity he asked for, because I saw he had made up his mind to stand by until he succeeded. Subsequent events proved that no mistake was made.’ Just what young Barnes said to Mr Edison on that occasion was far less important than what he thought. Edison himself said so!

It could not have been the young man’s appearance that got him his start in the Edison office, for that was definitely against him. It was what he thought that counted. Barnes did not get his partnership with Edison on his first interview. He did get a chance to work in the Edison offices, at a very nominal wage, doing work that was unimportant to Edison, but most important to Barnes. It gave him an opportunity to display his ‘merchandise’ where his intended ‘partner’ could see it. Months went by. Apparently nothing happened to bring the coveted goal, which Barnes had set up in his mind as his definite major purpose .

But something important was happening in Barnes’ mind. He was constantly intensifying his desire to become the business associate of Edison. Psychologists have correctly said, ‘When one is truly ready for a thing, it puts in its appearance.’ Barnes was ready for a business association with Edison; moreover, he was determined to remain ready until he got that which he was seeking. He did not say to himself, ‘Ah well, what’s the use? I guess I’ll change my mind and try for a salesman’s job.’ But he did say, ‘I came here to go into business with Edison, and I’ll accomplish this end if it takes the remainder of my life.’ He meant it! What a different story people would have to tell if only they would adopt a definite purpose , and stand by that purpose until it had time to become an all- consuming obsession! Maybe young Barnes did not know it at the time, but his bulldog determination, his persistence with a single desire , was destined to mow down all opposition and bring him the opportunity he was seeking.

When the opportunity came, it appeared in a different form, and from a different direction than Barnes had expected. That is one of the tricks of opportunity. It has a sly habit of slipping in by the back door, and often comes disguised in the form of misfortune or temporary defeat. Perhaps this is why so many fail to recognise opportunity. Mr Edison had just perfected a new office device, known at that time as the Edison Dictating Machine (later called the Ediphone). His salesmen were not enthusiastic over the machine. They did not believe it could be sold without great effort. Barnes saw his opportunity. It had crawled in quietly, hidden in a queer- looking machine that interested no one but Barnes and the inventor. Barnes knew he could sell the Edison Dictating Machine. He suggested this to Edison and promptly got his chance. He did sell the machine. In fact, he sold it so successfully that Edison gave him a contract to distribute and market it all over the nation. Out of that business association grew the slogan, ‘Made by Edison and installed by Barnes’. This business alliance made Barnes rich in money, but he accomplished something infinitely greater: he proved that one really may ‘Think and Grow Rich’. How much actual cash that original desire of Barnes was worth to him, I have no way of knowing. Perhaps it brought him two or three million dollars. Whatever the amount, it becomes insignificant when compared with the greater asset he acquired, the definite knowledge that an intangible impulse of thought can be transmuted into its physical counterpart by the application of known principles. Barnes literally thought himself into a partnership with the great Edison! He thought himself into a fortune. He had nothing to start with, except the capacity to know what he wanted, and the determination to stand by that desire until he realised it. He had no money to begin with. He had but little education. He had no influence. But he did have initiative, faith and the will to win. With these intangible forces he made himself number one man with the greatest inventor who ever lived."

Last edited by Cherished (7/22/2015 6:40 pm)

"Caryn Johnson always knew she wanted to be an actor. In fact, she says her first coherent thought as a young child was, Man, I’d love to act . Even though she grew up in the New York projects, theater and what she called “pretending to be somebody else” was a big part of her life. This was back in the days when Joe Papp brought free Shakespeare to her neighborhood in Chelsea. She also watched lots of movies with her brother, Clyde, and her mom, Emma, who raised the two kids on a single salary. “When I saw Carole Lombard coming down some stairs in a long satin thing, I thought, I can do that,” she says. “I wanted to come down those stairs and say those words and live that life. You could be anything, up there in the movies. You could fly. You could meet alien life- forms. You could be a queen. You could sleep in a great big bed, with satin sheets, in your own room.”

By the time she was eight, she was acting for the Hudson Guild Community Center, a children’s day care/theater/arts program near her neighborhood. Her life took a detour in high school when her dyslexia caused her to get mistakenly classified as “slow, possibly retarded.” She dropped out of school, became a junkie, and forgot all about her acting dream. By the time she was 19, she was a single mom herself. The good news is she did kick the drugs. In fact, her daughter’s father was the drug counselor who helped her get off the junk. But the bad news is, he wasn’t cut out to be a father. He left a few months after their daughter Alexandrea was born.

Caryn was a high school dropout with no skills. In fact, the only thing she knew how to do was take care of kids. She took a job as a nanny and moved to Lubbock, Texas, with the friend who hired her. Eventually, the friend moved to San Diego, and Caryn and her daughter gladly followed. When the relationship went south, she found herself stuck in California with no money and no skills. She didn’t even know how to drive, a major hindrance in freeway- happy California. “I had no high school diploma,” she says. “All I had was me and my kid.” Oh yeah, and that Man, I’d love to act dream. During the day, she learned to lay bricks and went to cosmetology school. At night, she played around with an experimental theater troupe. For a while she did hair and makeup for a funeral home, supplementing her income with a welfare check, “worrying about how to get my kid more than one pair of shoes, or how to make $165 worth of groceries last for a month.” Through it all, she continued to believe that “anything is possible.” She continued to believe that she could be like Carole Lombard, floating down the stairs in satin. “Acting is the one thing I always knew I could do,” she says. Her unwavering belief finally unlocked the door.

In 1983, famed Hollywood director Mike Nichols happened to catch her performance in an experimental troupe in Berkeley, the Black Street Hawkeyes. He was so blown away by the characters she played that he signed her immediately for a one- woman performance, The Spook Show, on Broadway. Steven Spielberg caught that show and cast her as Celie in The Color Purple . By then, she’d changed her name to Whoopi Goldberg. “I can do anything. I can be anything. No one ever told me I couldn’t. No one ever expressed this idea that I was limited to any one thing, and so I think in terms of what’s possible, not impossible,” Whoopi said in her autobiography, Book . “I knew I could never turn water into wine or make cats speak French. But I also learned that if you come to a thing with no preconceived notions of what that thing is, the whole world can be your canvas. “Just dream it and you can make it so. I believe I belong wherever I want to be, in whatever situation or context I place myself. I believed a little girl could rise from a single- parent household in the Manhattan projects, start a single- parent household of her own, struggle though seven years of welfare and odd jobs and still wind up making movies. “So, yeah, I think anything is possible. I know it because I have lived it. I know it because I have seen it. I have witnessed things that ancients have called miracles, but they are not miracles. They are the products of someone’s dream. As human beings, we are capable of creating a paradise, and making each other’s lives better by our own hands. Yes, yes, yes— this is possible. “If something hasn’t happened, it’s not because it can’t happen, or won’t: it just hasn’t happened yet.”

This was such an interesting and uplifting thread - I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I hadn't given up on some things, or if I had made the leap even though it was scary. At the same time though I sometimes get weary about the frontier between unwavering faith and pressing on regardless of circumstances ... And just being delusional.

Is there actually such a thing as being delusional ? I mean anyone would say saying 'this is good' at a blown off thumb, a jail sentence or being kidnapped by cannibals who are picky and only eat 'complete' meals would call us delusional but then ... How would we know if we didn't try ?

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