Читать книгу Doctor Hudson's Secret Journal - Lloyd C. Douglas - Страница 8

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I WAS required to stop writing last night because of a summons to the hospital and now I find that I cannot go to bed without finishing what I had meant to say. This subject is not to be taken lightly and I hope to safeguard you against any misdirected experiments.

It is important that you should know how serious are the conditions to be met by any man who hopes to increase his own power by the way of the technique I pursued under instructions from Randolph.

I must mention them at this juncture, because it is quite possible these words may be read by some impulsive enthusiast who, eager to avail himself of the large rewards promised, may attempt experiments from which he will receive neither pleasure nor benefit; and, dismayed by failure, find himself worse off in mind than he was before.

Indeed, this was my own experience at first, Randolph having neglected to warn me that certain conditions were imperative to success. I learned them by trial and error.

It must be borne in mind, at the outset, that no amount of altruistic endeavour—no matter how costly—can possibly benefit the donor, if he has in any manner neglected the natural and normal obligations to which he is expected to be sensitive. Not only must he be just before attempting to be generous; he must figure this particular investment of himself as a higher altruism, quite other than mere generosity.

Every conceivable responsibility must have had full attention before one goes in search of opportunity to perform secret services to be used for the express purpose of expanding one's personality that it may become receptive of that inexplicable energy which guarantees personal power.

My own life had been set in narrow ways. I had had but small chance to injure or defraud, even had I been of a scheming disposition. There had been a minimum of buying and selling in my program. I had lived mostly under strict supervision—in school, in college, and as an interne—with no chance to make many grave or irretrievable blunders.

Once I began to discharge my obligations, however, it was startling to note how considerably I was in the red. For example: I found that there were a good many men, scattered here and there, who had been scratched off my books. Either actually, or to all practical intents, they had been told to go to hell. In some cases, there had been enough provocation to justify my pitching them out of my life, I thought. But, more often than otherwise, they were to be remembered as persons with whom I had sustained some manner of close contact—close enough to make a disruption possible. I discovered that almost without exception the people I had pushed away from me—consigned to hell, if you like—were once intimately associated with me... So far as I was concerned they had gone to hell taking along with them a very considerable part of me!

To lose a friend in whom one had invested something of one's personality was, I discovered, to have lost a certain amount of one's self.

The successful pursuit of the philosophy now before you demands that you restore whatever of your personality has been dissipated, carted off by other people. If any of its essential energy has been scattered, it must be recovered.

The original proposer of this theory, aware of the importance of insuring against such losses, advised that all misunderstandings should be settled on the spot. When an estrangement takes a friend out of your normal contacts with him, he leaves with part of you in his hand. You must gather up these fragments of yourself, by some hook or crook, so that you have at least all of the personality that rightfully belongs to you, before you attempt its larger projection.

In the next place: you may make the mistake of seeking far and wide for opportunities to build yourself into other personalities through their rehabilitation. A happy circumstance kept me from doing that. Strangely enough, the first really important service I was permitted to do, prefatory to experimenting with this mysterious dynamic, was for the daughter of the man who had shown me the way to it... I risked what small repute I had, and put a mortgage on whatever I might hope to acquire, by the performance of an operation that saved her life, and, quite incidentally, brought me three pages of comment in the next edition of the Medical Encyclopaedia.