Your Forces and How to Use Them

There comes a point in the inner life when a person stops asking what he wants and asks who within him is doing the wanting. Your Forces and How to Use Them stands at that threshold. Larson places the "I Am" above mind and body as the ruling principle, the true self that governs every faculty it chooses to direct. Individuality is this invisible, initiating self. Personality is its visible instrument, the form through which it acts in the world. To know the difference is the first step out of drift and into command.

Beneath waking thought lies a vast and trainable servant. The subconscious receives whatever is impressed upon it and returns it magnified, so that every habitual attitude becomes, in time, a tendency of character and a condition of life. Thought works through the deeper psychological field as well as on the surface, and its undercurrents shape outcomes long before the outer mind notices them. Man is as he thinks, not what he thinks he is, and he grows steadily into the likeness of what he thinks of most and loves best. Larson shows that persistent, deeply felt desire is the force that awakens dormant faculties, and that concentration, positiveness and constructive mental action are the right use of the mind.

The book is equally a discipline of self-mastery. Will and character stand against dependence, emotional excess and the pull of outside influence. Surplus creative energy, rightly transmuted, becomes ability, genius and personal magnetism instead of being spent and lost. Imagination and ideals give direction to the master mind, which is the mind that thinks what it wants to think. Speech carries a hidden power of its own: constructive words build, and careless words scatter the very forces one seeks to gather.

Above all these lies the superconscious, the sublime state from which the higher forces and every true inspiration descend. Larson teaches that each person holds limitless latent possibility, and that as these powers are awakened and used, humanity rises toward the superior race he sees approaching. The reader who enters here receives a working method and an invitation to become the one who directs his own forces.