Part Two In A Nutshell 10 страница

happy. "

Can you imagine a man who goes around shaking hands with porters and expressing

sympathy for the cooks in the hot kitchen-and telling people how much he admires their

dogs- can you imagine a man like that being sour and worried and needing the services

of a psychiatrist? You can't, can you? No, of course not. A Chinese proverb puts it this

way: " A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives you roses. "

You didn't have to tell that to Billy Phelps of Yale. He knew it. He lived it.

If you are a man, skip this paragraph. It won't interest you. It tells how a worried,

unhappy girl got several men to propose to her. The girl who did that is a grandmother

now. A few years ago, I spent the night in her and her husband's home. I had been giving

a lecture in her town; and the next morning she drove me about fifty miles to catch a

train on the main line to New York Central. We got to talking about winning friends, and

she said: " Mr. Carnegie, I am going to tell you something that I have never confessed to

anyone before- not even to my husband. " (By the way, this story isn't going to be half so

interesting as you probably imagine. ) She told me that she had been reared in a social-

said, " was our poverty. We could never entertain the way the other girls in my social set

entertained.

My clothes were never of the best quality. I outgrew them and they didn't fit and they

were often out of style. I was so humiliated, so ashamed, that I often cried myself to

sleep. Finally, in sheer desperation, I hit upon the idea of always asking my partner at

dinner-parties to tell me about his experiences, his ideas, and his plans for the future. I

didn't ask these questions because I was especially interested in the answers. I did it

solely to keep my partner from looking at my poor clothes. But a strange thing

happened: as I listened to these young men talk and learned more about them, I really

became interested in listening to what they had to say. I became so interested that I

myself sometimes forgot about my clothes. But the astounding thing to me was this:

since I was a good listener and encouraged the boys to talk about themselves, I gave

them happiness and I gradually became the most popular girl in our social group and

three of these men proposed marriage to me. "

(There you are, girls: that is the way it is done. )

Some people who read this chapter are going to say: " All this talk about getting

interested in others is a lot of damn nonsense! Sheer religious pap! None of that stuff

for me! I am going to put money in my purse. I am going to grab all I can get-and grab it

now-and to hell with the other dumb clucks! "

Well, if that is your opinion, you are entitled to it; but if you are right, then all the

great philosophers and teachers since the beginning of recorded history-Jesus,

Confucius, Buddha, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Saint Francis-were all wrong. But since

you may sneer at the teachings of religious leaders, let's turn for advice to a couple of

atheists. First, let's take the late A. E. Housman, professor at Cambridge University, and

one of the most distinguished scholars of his generation. In 1936, he gave an address at

Cambridge University on " The Name and Nature of Poetry". It that address, he declared

that " the greatest truth ever uttered and the most profound moral discovery of all time

were those words of Jesus: 'He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his

life for my sake shall find it. ' "

We have heard preachers say that all our lives. But Housman was an atheist, a

pessimist, a man who contemplated suicide; and yet he felt that the man who thought

only of himself wouldn't get much out of life. He would be miserable. But the man who

forgot himself in service to others would find the joy of living.

If you are not impressed by what A. E. Housman said, let's turn for advice to the most

distinguished American atheist of the twentieth century: Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser

ridiculed all religions as fairy tales and regarded life as " a tale told by an idiot, full of

sound and fury, signifying nothing. " Yet Dreiser advocated the one great principle that

Jesus taught- service to others. " If he [man] is to extract any joy out of his span, "

Dreiser said, " he must think and plan to make things better not only for himself but for

others, since joy for himself depends upon his joy in others and theirs in him. "

If we are going " to make things better for others" -as Dreiser advocated-let's be quick

about it. Time is a-wastin'. " I shall pass this way but once. Therefore any good that I can

do or any kindness that I can show-let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for

I shall not pass this way again. "

So if you want to banish worry and cultivate peace and happiness, here is Rule 7:

Forget yourself by becoming interested in others. Do every day a good deed that will put

a smile of joy on someone's face.

~~~~

Part Four In A Nutshell - Seven Ways To Cultivate A Mental Attitude That Will Bring You

Peace And Happiness

RULE 1: Let's fill our minds with thoughts of peace, courage, health, and hope, for ' 'our

life is what our thoughts make it".

RULE 2: Let's never try to get even with our enemies, because if we do we will hurt

ourselves far more than we hurt them. Let's do as General Eisenhower does: let's never

waste a minute thinking about people we don't like.

RULE 3: A. Instead of worrying about ingratitude, let's expect it. Let's remember that

Jesus healed ten lepers in one day-and only one thanked Him. Why should we expect

more gratitude than Jesus got?

B. Let's remember that the only way to find happiness is not to expect gratitude-but to

give for the joy of giving.

C. Let's remember that gratitude is a " cultivated" trait; so if we want our children to be

grateful, we must train them to be grateful.

RULE 4: Count your blessings-not your troubles!

RULE 5: Let's not imitate others. Let's find ourselves and be ourselves, for " envy is

ignorance" and " imitation is suicide".

RULE 6: When fate hands us a lemon, let's try to make a lemonade.

RULE 7: Let's forget our own unhappiness-by trying to create a little happiness for

others. " When you are good to others, you are best to yourself. "

-----------------------------

Part Five - The Golden Rule For Conquering Worry

Chapter 19 - How My Mother And Father Conquered Worry

As I have said, I was born and brought up on a Missouri farm. Like most farmers of that

day, my parents had pretty hard scratching. My mother had been a country

schoolteacher and my father had been a farm hand working for twelve dollars a month.

Mother made not only my clothes, but also the soap with which we washed our clothes.

We rarely had any cash-except once a year when we sold our hogs. We traded our butter

and eggs at the grocery store for flour, sugar, coffee. When I was twelve years old, I

didn't have as much as fifty cents a year to spend on myself. I can still remember the

day we went to a Fourth-of-July celebration and Father gave me ten cents to spend as I

wished. I felt the wealth of the Indies was mine.

I walked a mile to attend a one-room country school. I walked when the snow was deep

and the thermometer shivered around twenty-eight degrees below zero. Until I was

fourteen, I never had any rubbers or overshoes. During the long, cold winters, my feet

were always wet and cold. As a child I never dreamed that anyone had dry, warm feet

during the winter.

My parents slaved sixteen hours a day, yet we constantly were oppressed by debts and

harassed by hard luck. One of my earliest memories is watching the flood waters of the

102 River rolling over our corn- and hayfields, destroying everything. The floods

destroyed our crops six years out of seven. Year after year, our hogs died of cholera and

we burned them. I can close my eyes now and recall the pungent odour of burning hog

flesh.

One year, the floods didn't come. We raised a bumper corn crop, bought feed cattle,

and fattened them with our corn. But the floods might just as well have drowned our

corn that year, for the price of fat cattle fell on the Chicago market; and after feeding

and fattening the cattle, we got only thirty dollars more for them than what we had

paid for them. Thirty dollars for a whole year's work!

No matter what we did, we lost money. I can still remember the mule colts that my

father bought. We fed them for three years, hired men to break them, then shipped

them to Memphis, Tennessee-and sold them for less than what we had paid for them

three years previously.

After ten years of hard, grueling work, we were not only penniless; we were heavily in

debt. Our farm was mortgaged. Try as hard as we might, we couldn't even pay the

interest on the mortgage. The bank that held the mortgage abused and insulted my

father and threatened to take his farm away from him. Father was forty-seven years

old. After more than thirty years of hard work, he had nothing but debts and

humiliation. It was more than he could take. He worried. His health broke. He had no

desire for food; in spite of the hard physical work he was doing in the field all day, he

had to take medicine to give him an appetite. He lost flesh. The doctor told my mother

that he would be dead within six months. Father was so worried that he no longer

wanted to live. I have often heard my mother say that when Father went to the barn to

feed the horses and milk the cows, and didn't come back as soon as she expected, she

would go out to the barn, fearing that she would find his body dangling from the end of

a rope. One day as he returned home from Maryville, where the banker had threatened

to foreclose the mortgage, he stopped his horses on a bridge crossing the 102 River, got

off the wagon, and stood for a long time looking down at the water, debating with

himself whether he should jump in and end it all.

Years later, Father told me that the only reason he didn't jump was because of my

mother's deep, abiding, and joyous belief that if we loved God and kept His

commandments everything would come out all right. Mother was right. Everything did

come out all right in the end. Father lived forty-two happy years longer, and died in

1941, at the age of eighty-nine.

During all those years of struggle and heartache, my mother never worried. She took all

her troubles to God in prayer. Every night before we went to bed, Mother would read a

chapter from the Bible; frequently Mother or Father would read these comforting words

of Jesus: " In my Father's house are many mansions. ... I go to prepare a place for you...

that where I am, there ye may be also. " Then we all knelt down before our chairs in that

lonely Missouri farmhouse and prayed for God's love and protection.

When William James was professor of philosophy at Harvard, he said: " Of course, the

sovereign cure for worry is religious faith. "

You don't have to go to Harvard to discover that. My mother found that out on a Missouri

farm. Neither floods nor debts nor disaster could suppress her happy, radiant, and

victorious spirit. I can still hear her singing as she worked:

Peace, peace, wonderful peace,

Flowing down from the Father above,

Sweep over my spirit for ever I pray

In fathomless billows of love.

My mother wanted me to devote my life to religious work. I thought seriously of

becoming a foreign missionary. Then I went away to college; and gradually, as the years

passed, a change came over me. I studied biology, science, philosophy, and comparative

religions. I read books on how the Bible was written. I began to question many of its

assertions. I began to doubt many of the narrow doctrines taught by the country

preachers of that day. I was bewildered. Like Walt Whitman, I " felt curious, abrupt

questionings stir within me". I didn't know what to believe. I saw no purpose in life. I

stopped praying. I became an agnostic.

I believed that all life was planless and aimless. I believed that human beings had no

more divine purpose than had the dinosaurs that roamed the earth two hundred million

years ago. I felt that some day the human race would perish-just as the dinosaurs had. I

knew that science taught that the sun was slowly cooling and that when its temperature

fell even ten per cent, no form of life could exist on earth. I sneered at the idea of a

beneficent God who had created man in His own likeness. I believed that the billions

upon billions of suns whirling through black, cold, lifeless space had been created by

blind force. Maybe they had never been created at all. Maybe they existed for ever-just

as time and space have always existed.

Do I profess to know the answers to all these questions now? No. No man has ever been

able to explain the mystery of the universe-the mystery of life. We are surrounded by

mysteries. The operation of your body is a profound mystery. So is the electricity in your

home. So is the flower in the crannied wall. So is the green grass outside your window.

Charles F. Kettering, the guiding genius of General Motors Research Laboratories, has

been giving Antioch College thirty thousand dollars a year out of his own pocket to try

to discover why grass is green. He declares that if we knew how grass is able to

transform sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into food sugar, we could transform

civilisation.

Even the operation of the engine in your car is a profound mystery. General Motors

Research Laboratories have spent years of time and millions of dollars trying to find out

how and why a spark in the cylinder sets off an explosion that makes your car run; and

they don't know the answer.

The fact that we don't understand the mysteries of our bodies or electricity or a gas

engine doesn't keep us from using and enjoying them. The fact that I don't understand

the mysteries of prayer and religion no longer keeps me from enjoying the richer,

happier life that religion brings. At long last, I realise the wisdom of Santayana's words:

" Man is not made to understand life, but to live it. "

I have gone back-well, I was about to say that I had gone back to religion; but that

would not be accurate. I have gone forward to a new concept of religion. I no longer

have the faintest interest in the differences in creeds that divide the Churches. But I am

tremendously interested in what religion does for me, just as I am interested in what

electricity and good food and water do for me. They help me to lead a richer, fuller,

happier life. But religion does far more than that. It brings me spiritual values. It gives

me, as William James puts it, " a new zest for life... more life, a larger, richer, more

satisfying life. " It gives me faith, hope, and courage. It banishes tensions, anxieties,

fears, and worries. It gives purpose to my life-and direction. It vastly improves my

happiness. It gives me abounding health. It helps me to create for myself " an oasis of

peace amidst the whirling sands of life".

Francis Bacon was right when he said, three hundred and fifty years ago: " A little

philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's

minds about to religion. "

I can remember the days when people talked about the conflict between science and

religion. But no more. The newest of all sciences-psychiatry-is teaching what Jesus

taught. Why? Because psychiatrists realise that prayer and a strong religious faith will

banish the worries, the anxieties, the strains and fears that cause more than half of all

our ills. They know, as one of their leaders, Dr. A. A. Brill said: " Anyone who is truly

religious does not develop a neurosis. "

If religion isn't true, then life is meaningless. It is a tragic farce.

I interviewed Henry Ford a few years prior to his death. Before I met him, I had

expected him to show the strains of the long years he had spent in building up and

managing one of the world's greatest businesses. So I was surprised to how calm and

well and peaceful he looked at seventy-eight. When I asked him if he ever worried, he

replied: " No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn't need any advice from

me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end.

So what is there to worry about? "

Today, even psychiatrists are becoming modern evangelists. They are not urging us to

lead religious lives to avoid hell-fires in the next world, but they are urging us to lead

religious lives to avoid the hell-fires of this world-the hell-fires of stomach ulcer, angina

pectoris, nervous breakdowns, and insanity. As an example of what our psychologists

and psychiatrists are teaching, read The Return to Religion, by Dr. Henry C. Link. You

will probably find a copy in your public library.

Yes, the Christian religion is an inspiring, health-giving activity. Jesus said: " I came that

ye might have life and have it more abundantly. " Jesus denounced and attacked the dry

forms and dead rituals that passed for religion in His day. He was a rebel. He preached a

new kind of religion-a religion that threatened to upset the world. That is why He was

crucified. He preached that religion should exist for man- not man for religion; that the

Sabbath was made for man- not man for the Sabbath. He talked more about fear than

He did about sin. The wrong kind of fear is a sin-a sin against your health, a sin against

the richer, fuller, happier, courageous life that Jesus advocated. Emerson spoke of

himself as a " Professor of the Science of Joy". Jesus, too, was a teacher of " the Science

of Joy". He commanded His disciples to " rejoice and leap for joy".

Jesus declared that there were only two important things about religion: loving God

with all our heart, and our neighbour as ourselves. Any man who does that is religious,

regardless of whether he knows it. For example, my father-in-law, Henry Price, of

Tulsa, Oklahoma. He tries to live by the golden rule; and he is incapable of doing

anything mean, selfish, or dishonest. However, he doesn't attend church, and regards

himself as an agnostic. Nonsense! What makes a man a Christian? I'll let John Baillie

answer that. He was probably the most distinguished professor who ever taught theology

at the University of Edinburgh. He said: " What makes a man a Christian is neither his

intellectual acceptance of certain ideas, nor his conformity to a certain rule, but his

possession of a certain Spirit, and his participation in a certain Life. "

If that makes a man a Christian, then Henry Price is a noble one.

William James-the father of modern psychology-wrote to his friend, Professor Thomas

Davidson, saying that as the years went by, he found himself " less and less able to get

along without God".

Earlier in this book I mentioned that when the judges tried to pick the best story on

worry sent in by my students, they had so much difficulty in choosing between two

outstanding stories that the prize money was split. Here is the second story that tied for

first prize-the unforgettable experience of a woman who had to find out the hard way

that " she couldn't get along without God".

I am calling this woman Mary Cushman, although that is not her actual name. She has

children and grandchildren who might be embarrassed to see her story in print, so I

agreed to disguise her identity. However, the woman herself is real- very real. A few

months ago, she sat in the armchair beside my desk and told me her story. Here is how

it goes:

" During the depression, " she said, " my husband's average salary was eighteen dollars a

week. Many times we didn't have even that because he didn't get paid when he was ill-

and that was often. He had a series of minor accidents; he also had mumps, scarlet

fever, and repeated attacks of flu. We lost the little house that we had built with our

own hands. We owed fifty dollars at the grocery store-and had five children to feed. I

took in washing and ironing from the neighbours, and bought second-hand clothes from

the Salvation Army store and made them over for my children to wear. I made myself ill

with worry. One day the grocer to whom we owed fifty dollars accused my eleven-year-

old boy of stealing a couple of pencils.

My son wept as he told me about it. I knew he was honest and sensitive-and I knew that

he had been disgraced and humiliated in front of other people. That was the straw that

broke my back. I thought of all the misery we had endured; and I couldn't see any hope

for the future. I must have become temporarily insane with worry, for I shut off my

washing machine, took my little five-year-old daughter into the bedroom, and plugged

up the windows and cracks with paper and rags. My little girl said to me: 'Mommy, what

are you doing? ' and I answered: There's a little draught in here. ' Then I turned on the gas

heater we had in the bedroom-and didn't light it. As I lay down on the bed with my

daughter beside me, she said: 'Mommy, this is funny-we just got up a little while ago! '

But I said: 'Never mind, we'll take a little nap. '

Then I closed my eyes, listening to the gas escape from the heater. I shall never forget

the smell of that gas. ...

" Suddenly I thought I heard music. I listened. I had forgotten to turn the radio off in the

kitchen. It didn't matter now. But the music kept on, and presently I heard someone

singing an old hymn:

What a Friend we have in Jesus,

All our sins and grief's to bear!

What a privilege to carry

Everything to God in prayer.

Oh, what peace we often forfeit

Oh, what needless pain we bear

All because we do not carry

Everything to God in prayer!

" As I listened to that hymn, I realised that I had made a tragic mistake. I had tried to

fight all my terrible battles alone. I had not taken everything to God in prayer. ... I

jumped up, turned off the gas, opened the door, and raised the windows.

" I wept and prayed all the rest of that day. Only I didn't pray for help-instead I poured

out my soul in thanksgiving to God for the blessings He had given me: five splendid

children- all of them healthy and fine, strong in body and mind. I promised God that

never again would I prove so ungrateful. And I have kept that promise.

" Even after we lost our home, and had to move into a little country schoolhouse that we

rented for five dollars a month, I thanked God for that schoolhouse; I thanked Him for

the fact that I at least had a roof to keep us warm and dry. I thanked God honestly that

things were not worse-and I believe that He heard me. For in time things improved-oh,

not overnight; but as the depression lightened, we made a little more money. I got a job

as a hat-check girl in a large country club, and sold stockings as a side line. To help put

himself through college, one of my sons got a job on a farm, milked thirteen cows

morning and night. Today my children are grown up and married; I have three fine

grandchildren. And, as I look back on that terrible day when I turned on the gas, I thank

God over and over that I 'woke up' in time. What joys I would have missed if I had

carried out that act! How many wonderful years I would have forfeited for ever!

Whenever I hear now of someone who wants to end his life, I feel like crying out: 'Don't

do it! Don't! ' The blackest moments we live through can only last a little time-and then

comes the future. ... "

On the average, someone commits suicide in the United States every thirty-five

minutes. On the average, someone goes insane every hundred and twenty seconds. Most

of these suicides-and probably many of the tragedies of insanity- could have been

prevented if these people had only had the solace and peace that are found in religion

and prayer.

One of the most distinguished psychiatrists living, Dr. Carl Jung, says in his book Modern

Man in Search of a Soul (*):

" During the past thirty years, people from all the civilised countries of the earth have

consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the

second half of life-that is to say, over thirty-five-there has not been one whose problem

in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that

every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age

have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not