This book, written in 1904, took me from poverty to abundance. For about twenty years, I said it was the best book I’ve ever read (now it’s number two; The Power of Now is number one). I put several phrases from the book, including the opening poem and the other poem in it, in big letters on my wall. These phrases, repeated hundreds of times, became imprinted in my mind, and to this day they spring to mind on occasion. They are powerful, life changing phrases — the most powerful one, for me, is this:

James Allen writes with a power and authority that affects some deep place within, and those two sentences of his have been life changing.

That and the two poems — they sum up everything I learned from As You Think. It opens with a short poem. There’s a tradition in some Buddhist books where the wisdom of the book is contained in the title. If you understand the title, you don’t need to read the book. Then there is a short opening poem; if you understand the poem, you don’t need to read the book either, for it contains all the wisdom of the book. Here’s the opening poem in As You Think:

“Content” in the second line, of course means “contentment”. And he uses “environment” in line three, and later “circumstance” very broadly — he means everything in our world, inner and outer, that we can possibly use as an excuse, as a reason we can’t “hew our way to any goal”.

Be not impatient in delay, he tells us, but wait and understand: When our spirit rises and dares to dream, and dares even to command ourselves to take the steps we can take toward that dream, then the whole universe rushes in to support us in realizing our dreams.

Here’s what I learned from this great little book:

You are far greater, far more powerful, than you may think. You are part of a limitless field of creative possibilities.

As Eckhart puts it, in the frontispiece of The Power of Now: