Self-Development and the Way to Power | Page 5

as his activity satisfies his original
desire a new one replaces the old and lures him on to renewed exertion.

The average young man beginning his business career, desires only a
comfortable cottage. But when that is attained he wants a mansion. He
soon tires of the mansion and wants a palace. Then he wants several--at
the seaside, in the city, and on the mountains. At first he is satisfied
with a horse; then he demands an automobile, and finally a steam yacht.
He sets out as a youth to earn a livelihood and welcomes a small salary.
But the desire for money pushes him into business for himself and he
works tirelessly for a competence. He feels that a small fortune should
satisfy anybody but when he gets it he wants to be a millionaire. If he
succeeds in that he then desires to become a multi-millionaire.
Whether the desire is for wealth, or for fame, or for power, the same
result follows--when the desire is satisfied a greater one takes its place
and spurs the ambitious one to still further exertion. He grasps the prize
he believes to contain complete satisfaction only to discover that while
he was pursuing it desire had grown beyond it, and so the goal he
would attain is always far ahead of him. Thus are we tricked and
apparently mocked by nature until we finally awake to the fact that all
the objects of desire--the fine raiment, the jewels, the palaces, the
wealth, the power, are but vain and empty things; and that the real
reward for all our efforts to secure them is not these objects at all but
the new powers we have evolved in getting them; powers that we did
not before possess and which we should not have evolved but for
nature's great propulsive force--desire. The man who accumulates a
fortune by many years of persistent effort in organizing and developing
a business enterprise, by careful planning and deep thinking, may
naturally enough look upon the fortune he will possess for a few years
before it passes on to others, as his reward. But the truth is that it is a
very transient and perishable and worthless thing compared to the new
powers that were unconsciously evolved in getting it--powers that will
be retained by the man and be brought into use in future incarnations.
Desire, then, plays a most important role in human evolution. It
awakens, stimulates, propels. What wind is to the ship, what steam is to
the locomotive, desire is to the human being.
It has been written in a great book, "Kill out desire," and elsewhere it is

written, "Resist not evil." We may find, in similar exalted
pronouncements, truths that are very useful to disciples but which
might be confusing and misleading to the man of the world if he
attempted to literally apply them. Perhaps for the average mortal "kill
out desire" might be interpreted "transmute desire." Without desire man
would be in a deathlike and dangerous condition--a condition in which
further progress would be impossible. But by transmuting the lower
desires into the higher he moves steadily forward and upward without
losing the motive power that urges him forever onward.
To transmute desire, to continually replace the lower with the higher,
really is killing desire out but it is doing it by the slow and safe
evolutionary process. As to crushing it suddenly, that is simply
impossible; but substitution may work wonders. Suppose, for example,
that a young man is a gambler and his parents are much distressed
about it. The common and foolish course is to lecture him on the sin of
gambling and to tearfully urge him to associate only with very proper
young men. But the young gambler is not in the least interested in that
sort of a life, which appears to him to be a kind of living death, and
such entreaty does not move him. His parents would do better by
looking more closely into the case. Why is he a gambler? He desires
money. He seeks excitement. He wants to live in an atmosphere of
intense life and activity. Very well. These desires are quite right in
themselves. It is useless to try to crush them. It is nonsense to argue
that he does not want these things. Clearly enough he does want them
and that is precisely why he gambles. Then do not attempt the
impossibility of killing the desire but change the objects of his desires.
Say to him: "You desire money and a life full of turbulence and
excitement. Well, you can get all that in a better and a legitimate way
and have the respect of your friends besides. You can go into politics.
That is a field within the pale of the