To be successful in anything is to have the ability and power to do the thing we want to do when and where we want to do it, or to have what we want, when we want it and as long as we want it. Success is a thing which we can build for just as surely and scientifically as the architect plans and builds the skyscraper or the engineer the wonderful tunnels and bridges of modern times.

The Laws which make for success are just as natural although less generally understood as are the laws which the architect and engineer use in their work. A New York paper, in a recent editorial on Declaring War on Poverty, among other things said, Why then, does not the war begin?

There is no reason save the lack of organization for such a crusade. Then men who want to abolish poverty, who know that it can be abolished and are able to abolish it, have not yet found a common standard around which to recruit their forces.

No, and they never will find a common standard until they learn the great truth that everything begins and ends in consciousness in the thought world, the imagination, for that is where man does all his imaging and that until the individual gets rid of a poverty consciousness, a poverty image, he will never be free permanently from a poverty environment. Within each life lies the causes of whatever enters into it.

Man is building his own world every moment of his life. He creates from within the energy which attracts from without. The thoughts he thinks are his own private property and they generate the power with which he builds from within and attracts from without. Like builds like and like attracts like. Man must first have castles in the air before he can have castles on the ground.

It is true that the man or woman who is kept busy at good wages and given a pleasant and comfortable environment has the external things and conditions which will help them create a consciousness or image of abundance, but until they have established the fixed habit of thinking constructively, they will not continue to stay out of a poverty-stricken environment indefinitely.

Was the giving of a pleasant and comfortable environment to man and providing him with continuous employment an insurance against poverty the solution would be simple, easy and sure of quick accomplishment. But we know that such a remedy has never effected a permanent cure; that something more than employment and environment is necessary.

We know many men and women who have started out in life with everything their hearts could wish in both of these things, but the day came when their employment was gone and their environment poverty stricken. What was it they lacked? What is that something more which is so necessary to the peace, happiness and success of man? We have called it bad luck, or rather the want of good luck heretofore, but it is neither. In the 9 past we have been of the belief that success along any line was largely a matter of chance, or luck, but we know better today. We know that there is no such thing as either chance or luck, good or bad, in the universe.

Good luck is simply the effect of constructive and harmonious causes we have unconsciously set in motion sometime previous to its occurrence, while bad luck is the effect of destructive and inharmonious causes we have just as unconsciously set in motion and which we have not yet learned how to antidote or displace.

Today we know that success is the consciousness of the abundance of supply and the recognition of our oneness with it. We may believe in the truth of this but until we know it beyond any question of a doubt it is impossible to materialize the belief at all times and under all circumstances. We know that the things we have called luck, accident, chance, etc., simply seem so on the surface on the external side of life because we have only looked for their causes on the objective side; but when we look back of the external and go deeply into the energy which produced them we learn that all these so-called accidents, chance, luck, are the natural effects of natural Laws; that these Laws are as simple and easily understood as is the law that one and one makes two.

Before a spade is stuck into the ground in excavating for one of our immense skyscrapers the building has been entirely finished, even to the last coat of paint on the walls, in the consciousness the thought world, the imagination of the architect. Before even one screw, nut or bolt was made for the engines which generate the power on our ocean greyhounds the entire engine was completed in the consciousness the thought world, the imagination of the engineer who drafted the plans.

Both architect and engineer built castles in the air first, before their air castles could be materialized in objective form. The engine which generates the steam does not know for what purpose the energy is to be used, and the masses have no greater knowledge of the use to which they will put the energy they create than does the engine; they work as unconsciously and as ignorantly of the effects of the energy they generate as does the engine. Man, however, can become a conscious creator while the engine cannot, and in the consciousness or knowledge of this power does man have the advantage.