The Seven Day
Mental Diet
(Pg. 4 continued)
by Emmet Fox
This then is your prescription.
For seven days you must not allow yourself to dwell for a single moment
on any kind of negative thought. You must watch yourself for a whole
week as a cat watches a mouse, and you must not under any pretense allow
your mind to dwell on any thought that is not positive, constructive,
optimistic, kind. This discipline will be so strenuous that you could
not maintain it consciously for much more than a week, but I do not ask
you to do so. A week will be enough, because by that time the habit of
positive thinking will begin to be established. Some extraordinary
changes for the better will have come into your life, encouraging you
enormously, and then the future will take care of itself. The new way of
life will be so attractive and so much easier than the old way that you
will find your mentality aligning itself almost automatically.
But the seven days are going to be
strenuous. I would not have you enter upon this without counting the
cost. Mere physical fasting would be child's play in comparison, even if
you have a very good appetite. The most exhausting form of army
gymnastics, combined with thirty mile route marches, would be mild in
comparison with this undertaking. But it is only for one week in your
life, and it will definitely alter everything for the better. For the
rest of your life here, for all eternity in fact, things will be utterly
different and inconceivably better than if you had not carried through
this undertaking.
Do not start it lightly. Think
about it for a day or two before you begin. Then start in, and the grace
of God go with you. You may start it any day in the week, and at any
time in the day, first thing in the morning, or after breakfast, or
after lunch, it does not matter, but once you do start you must go right
through for the seven days. That is essential. The whole idea is to have
seven days of-unbroken mental discipline in order to get the mind
definitely bent in a new direction once and for all.
If you make a false start, or even
if you go in well for two or three days and then for any reason "fall
off" the diet, the thing to do is to drop the scheme altogether for
several days, and then to start again afresh. There must be no jumping
on and off, as it were. You remember that Rip Van Winkle in the play
would take a solemn vow of teetotalism, and then promptly accept a drink
from the first neighbor who offered him one, saying calmly: "I won't
count this one." Well, on the seven day mental diet this sort of thing
simply will not do. you must positively count every lapse, and whether
you do or not, nature will. where there is a lapse you must go off the
diet altogether and then start again.
Now, in order, if possible, to
forestall difficulties, I will consider them in a little detail.
First of all, what do I mean by
negative thinking? Well, a negative thought is any thought of failure,
disappointment, or trouble; any thought of criticism, or spite, or
jealousy, or condemnation of others, or self condemnation; any thought
of sickness or accident; or, in short, any kind of limitation or
pessimistic thinking. Any thought that is not positive and constructive
in character, whether it concerns you yourself or anyone else, is a
negative thought. Do not bother too much about the question of
classification, however; in practice you will never have any trouble in
knowing whether a given thought is positive or negative. Even if your
brain tries to deceive you, your heart will whisper the truth.
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