As an example of making our faults positive and our effort to
conquer them negative, one very common form is found in a woman I
know, who has times of informing her friends quite seriously and
with apparent regret of her very wrong attitudes of mind. She tells
how selfish she is and she gives examples of the absolute
selfishness of her thoughts when she is appearing to do unselfish
things. She tells of her efforts to do better and confesses what she
believes to be the absolute futility of her effort. At first I was
quite taken in by these confessions, and attracted by what seemed to
be a clear understanding of herself and her own motives, but after a
little longer acquaintance with her, made the discovery, which was
at first surprising to me, that her confessions of evil came just as
much from conceit as if she had been standing at the mirror admiring
her own beauty. Selfish satisfaction is often found quite as much in
mental attitudes of grief as in sensations of joy. Finally this
woman has recognized for herself the conceit in her contemplation of
her faults, and that she has not only allowed them to be positive
while her attitude against them is negative; she has actually nursed
them and been positive herself with their positiveness. Her attitude
against them was therefore more than ordinarily negative.
The more common way of being negative while we allow our various
forms of selfishness to positively govern us is, first in bewailing
a weakness seriously, but constantly looking at it and weeping over
it, and in that way suggesting it over and over to our brains so
that we are really hypnotizing ourselves with the fault and
enforcing its expression when we think we are in the effort to
conquer it.
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