Desire is behind all progress. Civilization rests upon it

No matter how unfortunate your environment, or how unpromising your present condition, if you cling to your vision and keep struggling toward its realization, you are mentally building, enlarging your ideal, increasing the power of your mental magnet to attract your own. Never mind opposition, never mind criticism, never mind if others call you a fool or a crank—they called the Christ the same—be true to the mysterious message within, the divine voice which bids you up and on. No matter what other things you have to give up, no matter what sacrifices you have to make, let everything else go if necessary, but cling to the ideal which haunts your dreams, for it points to the star of your destiny, and if you follow it you will come out of the darkness into beauty and brightness. Your highest ideal, the vision of your life work which you long to make real, is your best friend. Keep as close to it as you can, stick to it, and it will lead you to your goal. You may not understand why the star has been put so high above you and why so many mountains of obstacles and difficulties intervene, but if you keep your eye on the star and listen to the voice of your soul which bids you climb on, you will reach it. Many a man has never been able to explain his success, or how he was able to wring it out of such a black background, such iron conditions and seemingly impossible surroundings, as those in which he found himself at the start. But he kept pegging away, never losing sight of his ideal, which became his guiding star, his success angel, which ultimately led him through the dark valleys of difficulty and opposition, up out of the miasma of the stagnant swamps of discouragement to the heights, where the atmosphere is pure, the outlook clear, where excellence dwells. It led him out of the darkness into the light, into freedom, into success. Just because you are struggling on a farm or in a factory, doing something against which your whole nature rebels, because there is no one to help you support your aged parents or an invalid brother or sister, do not conclude that your vision must perish. Keep pushing on as best you can, and affirming your divine power to attain your desire. Hundreds and thousands of poor boys and girls with poorer opportunities than yours have done immortal deeds because they had faith in their ideal and in their power to attain it. It is by the perpetual focusing of his thought upon the solving of scientific problems, added to his faith in his ability to solve these problems, that Edison has attracted to himself the forces which have made him the greatest living inventor. His mind has always run ahead of him, visualizing the invention he was trying to bring out into objective reality. He was always picturing himself a little higher up, a little further on, and his success has followed his vision and his faith. Suppose Edison had lost faith in his vision; suppose he had allowed obstacles to discourage him and had said to himself, “Thousands of men have been thinking along these lines, trying to solve these problems for a long time, and have failed, and how can I expect to succeed? Why should I waste my time and energies in trying to do what they found impossible?”—do you think he would have become the power he is? Of course, he would not,—he couldn’t, any more than Marshal Field could have become a great merchant if he had listened to those who tried to discourage him. Doors always open, opportunities always come, to the man or woman who trusts and works, but nothing comes to the weak, doubting heart, the faint endeavor, nothing comes to those who do not believe in their divinity, their power to overcome. No matter how black and forbidding the way, just imagine that you are carrying a lantern which always advances with you and gives you light enough for the next step, and although it looks very dark and discouraging a little distance ahead, when you arrive there the light will arrive also. All the light you need is for the next step, to know that you are going in the right direction. In other words, you must have faith, trust. The divine plan that has created us, given us a part in the plan of the great universe, will bring things out better than we could if we will only do our part. Look back upon your past lives, you self-made men and women, and see how miraculously the doors have opened out of the blackness ahead of you, so that you were able to enter into the Eden of your dream, to accomplish the thing you so long dreamed of! Goodyear was a dreamer and a seer of visions long before he was able to vulcanize rubber. Morse was a “visionary” or we might not have had the telegraph. Cyrus W. Field had a wonderful vision of an ocean cable, and had he not gone on dreaming of his cable in spite of his disappointments the nations of the world might still be dependent on ships to transmit their messages from one to the other. Had Eli Whitney not been a seer of visions the colored people of the South might still be picking the seeds from cotton by hand. But for the dreams of Marconi’s youth, wireless telegraphy might have been postponed for a century. Had it not been for the dreams and longings of Alexander Graham Bell we might not even yet be talking over the wire. Had Elias Howe not dreamed of a sewing machine women might still be slaves of the needle. Had it not been for Phillips’ and Garrison’s and Lincoln’s dream of freedom, millions of our countrymen might still be in slavery. All of these people—every inventor, every discoverer, every uplifter of the race, all those who have lifted civilization up from the Hottentots to the Lincolns and the Gladstones, have clung to their vision in spite of incredible sufferings and obstacles. Nothing could turn them from their purpose or shake their faith in their power to make their vision a reality. This was why they won out. Men succeed in proportion to the fixity of their vision and the invincibility of their purpose. If you can find out a man’s quitting point, the place where he gives up, turns back, you can measure him pretty easily. The man who conquers is the one who moves, steadily, persistently, everlastingly towards his goal, unmindful whether the goal is always in sight or not, unmindful of obstacles, of difficulties, of discouraging conditions. He moves ever forward, just as Columbus did when he wrote day after day in his log boat, undaunted even when his sailors mutinied, threatening to put him in chains and to throw him overboard: “This day we sailed west because it was our course.” This was his daily record, because there was nothing else for him to do but to sail west. A man with such a mighty purpose as Columbus’s wouldn’t have turned about if his crew threatened murder every day, because he was invincible. Nothing but death could have stopped his onward course. What could have stopped Farragut from going into Mobile Bay past the enemy’s torpedoes? What could have stayed a man with such a mighty purpose, such invincible determination that he lashed himself to the mast, lest if he was shot or wounded he might fall overboard or be captured in his perilous run past the torpedoes! Washington showed his invincibility of purpose and fixity of vision at Valley Forge as few men have ever shown it. In fact, this grim courage in face of difficulties, this fixity of vision and inflexibility of purpose have been characteristic of all the great men of history, in which spiritually Srila Prabhupada the top most, to whom the world has built monuments. Science tells us the eagle’s wings developed in response to the eagle’s desire to fly, to soar into the ether. Your longings, your yearnings for something higher and grander, your aspirations, backed by an invincible purpose, will call out your wings, will develop your latent power, so that you will rise above your mediocre environment to the full measure of your possibilities. If all our youth were taught to keep the soul vision inviolable, never to tamper with that sacred something within which always points heavenward if left alone, that something which, no matter how poor or iron our environment, bids us look up and not down, aspire and not grovel, civilization would advance with marvelous strides towards the millennium. The limit of your faith in your vision and in yourself is the limit of your achievement. Faith is the greatest magnetic power we know of for the attraction of the things that belong to us. A great faith, a sublime self-confidence was the magnet which attracted to John Wanamaker that which made him a merchant prince. When young Wanamaker was delivering his first order of clothing in a pushcart in the streets of Philadelphia, he did not keep his mind fastened on his poverty and limitations, and fear he would never get past them. On the contrary, he thought of a great future, and when he went past the big rich stores he pictured himself as a great merchant, and felt confident that the time would come when he would have a bigger and richer store than any of them.

[THE MIND DESIRING TO CLIMB MOUNTAIN] Where self-faith is weak, the will is weak. Most people do not exert their will in overcoming the obstacles in their way, because their resolutions are weak, wishy washy. They are not possessed by their vision, and so they cannot bring to their aid the vigorous determination, the resolute will, the compelling affirmation, that wins out in spite of all opposition. They are not backed by the intense desire to realize their vision that forces one to work and to sacrifice for it. Desire is at the bottom of every achievement. It has ever been the great molding, shaping force in civilization. Desire is prayer. Our prayer is behind and at the bottom of all our achievements. Desire is behind all progress. Civilization rests upon it. Our cities are the representations of the desires of those who built them. Every railroad train is a bundle of desires, of inventors’ discoveries, of mechanics’ desires. Our homes are manifested desires. Our libraries are made up of multitudes of desires of the authors who wrote the books. Our schools, our colleges, our universities are nothing but desires fulfilled, objectified dreams of those who have built them. Every institution rests upon desires. Our lives, our homes, our friends, are all manifested desires. All great achievements, great discoveries and inventions began in longings and desires. The success of every poor boy and girl who have pushed to the front began in longing, in indefinite yearnings, which they had the faith and the courage to nurse and back up until they realized their dreams. There is a great difference between the yearnings of the body, the workings of bodily desires and passions, and the yearnings and longings of the soul. The soul longings are really the God urge in us, the expressions of the divinity within, of the cosmic intelligence. They open the windows of the mind and give us a glimpse of the realities that were prepared for us at the foundation of the world. They are not empty imaginings, but the substance of hoped-for things, the realities of unseen things, the precursors of the things themselves.

We are apt to think that what we do in the world, our life work, is purely a personal choice. But there is something inside of us, if we are honest and earnest, that is leading us toward our own, the thing we were made to do. The youth answers an advertisement, “Boy Wanted,” and gets a place which does not at all fit him, but the divine urge within haunts him until he changes. Again and again he may be a round peg in a square hole, but this inner urge—call it ambition, aspiration, a divine leading, what you will—keeps at him until he find his own, the place that fits him. We cannot believe that Abraham Lincoln found the White House by accident or by following a selfish personal ambition. No, he was led by the Spirit to the great work for which he was born, and for which all his previous experience had been molding him. And this same divine urge which led Lincoln out of the forest to the White House is active in every human being. There is a divine messenger detailed at every birth to follow the individual through life. This divine messenger acts as guide, is always pointing out the right road and cautioning against the wrong. If we follow the divine promptings, we shall come to our own. The poor boys who have shaped American history never dreamed when they left the farm in the backwoods, or the little village in which they were born, that they were destined to do great things. They simply followed their instinctive leadings without thinking much about, or really recognizing, their divine origin. The mysterious unrest in the great within of us, which is ever urging us on, is an expression of the divine principle inherent in every atom, in every electron in the universe; it is the God urge which is lifting everything up to a higher and ever higher plane. Everything in the universe is on the way to its highest possible expression, on the way to perfection, on the way to its God. We are here to do our part in raising mankind to a higher plane by giving expression to our highest ideal, by doing the best we are capable of doing. “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” Most people do not seem to think that they came into the world for any special purpose or that they are under any obligation to bear witness to the truth. They do not seem to realize that they are bound to deliver the message entrusted to them at birth, to realize the vision shown them in their highest moment. Many act as if they were sent here to catch and grab everything they can get hold of for themselves; that they are under no special obligation to anybody but their own families. In other words, few people realize that they came into the world with any particular purpose other than to gratify their own desires, to reap the harvest that others have sown without rendering anything in return. They regard the world upon which the open their eyes as a legitimate field, a sort of hunting ground for their own personal gratification, where they are welcome to whatever they can bag without cost to themselves. They have no appreciation whatever of the fact that billions of people who have lived in all the past have really been preparing the world for them; that they are the heirs of all who have gone before them, and that they are in honor bound to do their share in contributing to the inheritance of those who shall come after them. We of today have inherited the results of other people’s efforts. We are enjoying all the inventions, all the discoveries, all the luxuries that are the fruits of the struggles and trials, the sufferings, poverty and hardship of the inventors, the discoverers, the achievers who labored to improve the conditions of mankind. We were sent here to carry their work a step farther by bringing into the actual the vision of our divinest inspiration. The way to do this is to follow our inspiration, what our soul longs to do. You are always gravitating toward the vision you hold in mind. You will never make headway in any other direction than toward your dominant thought, your dominant desire, and your dominant motive. Visualization will sometime be found to be one of the great secrets of character building and achievement. Effort follows visualization as achievement follows effort. “Ye too are sons of God.” This had never been said before. But again and again the Savior assured His followers that the things which He had done, and even greater things, those who came after Him would do. “I and my father are one,” He did not refer to the fact of His own superiority, to the fact that He was more divine than others. He was always trying to convince His disciples that they could do what He did, that they were as divine as He was, and that the reason they did not perform what seemed to them miracles was their lack of faith in their divinity. We rise with our vision. All elevation, all progress, is first mental. It is based on faith in a visualized ideal. Everything starts with a vision, and the result always corresponds to the nature of the vision and our faithfulness to it. George Washington concentrated upon a vision of liberty and a grand democracy which would be a model for the whole world, and he never ceased to struggle until the vision became a reality. Every man becomes like his ideal, realizes the vision which dominates his life, and towards which he constantly struggles.