by Bart Kennedy.
The Illustrated London News, March 22, 1919.
It sweeps the cobwebs out of your mind. It makes you sit up and take notice. You’ve been wondering why you were always a day behind the fair. The fact that you have invariably come in a good last—in whatever race you have entered for—has puzzled you and made you feel sad.
Everybody, or nearly everybody, gets ahead of you. All your life you have been in the also-ran class. You have never shown any sign of getting out of it. But—well, you mustn’t give up. There’s a chance for you.
Pelmanism!
That is the new broom that will brighten and smarten and brush up your mind. No, it won’t make you a genius; but it will serve you a turn that is a good deal better. It will enable you to use effectively the actual brain that you have under your own individual hat.
You must never forget that being a genius isn’t all beer and skittles. Often it happens that such a person can’t earn a living. What you want to be is a bright, up-to-date yourself. You want to get rid of the useless mental lumber that gets in the way of the alert working of the faculties you were born with.
The trouble with you is that you have let yourself fall into what is practically a perpetual sleep. You have become so slow that you are unable to grasp the passing opportunity by the front lock. And therefore, it is that you invariably find yourself left out in the severe cold.
Pelmanism!
You don’t have to have a ’Varsity education to enable you to reap the full benefit of its teaching. All that is required of you is to be able to read and write—and to follow faithfully the course laid down.
If you won’t follow faithfully and exactly the instructions, then you mustn’t have anything to do with the course, for you will only waste your time. If you take up the course, you must stick to it without deviation.
It may be that you are one who is well off. It may be that you are one who has more money than is good for you. And—as often happens in a case like this—you are bored, you don’t know what to do with yourself.
- You find that money of itself hasn’t the magic in it that many people think it has.
- You drift aimlessly through life—a moneyed nonentity.
- You find that money of itself won’t pay your way in this mysterious world of ours.
- You feel that you are not really in it, that you are out of things.
- You have eyes that can’t see, ears that can’t hear, a brain that can’t get a proper hang of the things that surround you.
—This being the case, there is but one thing for you:
Pelmanism?
If you will follow the lessons contained in the twelve "little grey books":—
- Your mind will become clear and sharp and bright.
- You will find yourself able to see and appreciate the wonders in this wonderful life of ours.
- Your sympathies will grow and enlarge.
- The heavy dull veil that is always in front of you will be dissipated.
- You will be another person.
- Or, to put it more exactly, you will be a youth with your faculties developed and sharpened.
Again, you may be a man who has never had a chance, or you feel that you have never had a chance. You want to rise, to get on in the world; but you are not able to do it. Things are against you, people are against you! But the truth is there is nothing against you at all.
The world we live in is a busy, hustling world, and it takes people all their time to mind their own individual p’s and q’s if they are to manage to get along in it. And as for things or fate against you—why, it is nonsense. I’ll admit, however, that you have an enemy.
But you don’t have to go far to find him. He is yourself! You are the person who is responsible for your not getting along. And don’t you go and forget it. The blaming of things and this blaming of other people is silly. It would be better to ignore it. What you have to do is to get your mind tightened and braced up. When you have done this, you will find things different.
But perhaps you are the one who has really never had a chance. It may be that environment is against you. Well, if this be the case, this course will help you. It will make your mind keener and more alert. You will be able to grasp the chance when it does come along. It is as well to face the fact.
In this world the race is to the swift and the battle is to the strong. This may not be so in absolutely all cases, but it is near enough for all practical and working purposes. You must make yourself as fit as you can. Then you will have a chance in the struggle. The lessons that are contained in these little grey books will help you.
- They will give you a command of yourself such as you have never thought to be possible.
- They will enable you to use the power that lies buried within you.
Minerals and ores that lie in the earth are of no use to man if they are not brought up to the light. If coal is not brought up from the dark depths of the mine it might as well not be there.
It is the same with the human mind.
Often there are possibilities of power lying within it even as precious ores lie within the seams of the rocks. And these possibilities are allowed to be buried and dormant. No use is made of them. And a man goes out beyond the great Divide without ever really knowing what he had in him to accomplish.
Don’t misunderstand me.
I am not saying that Pelmanism is a something that works wonders and miracles. To say this would be to say the thing that is not. No, it contains no master secret. It is simply an intelligent and systematic and individual method of education. The essence of it is that it enables you to teach yourself.
The trouble with education in general is that it is stereotyped. It is too often but a pain-giving endeavor to run minds into a common mold. That is the main reason why healthy children revolt against it so often. All things in nature are different. Even for every leaf there is, so to speak, a different mold.
Schools and colleges are run too often on rule-of-thumb lines. Quite often the best and most effective minds are those that have not been run through the usual educational mill.
Another thing. The system in the school and the college is in itself not sound. The herding together of pupils—to be taught by a teacher at exact and stated intervals—is against the individual development of the individual mind.
In fact, our whole system of education seems to be based upon the theory that it is an excellent thing to put the human mind into a sort of mental strait-jacket.
As I suggested in the beginning, Pelmanism doesn’t pretend to give anyone a new set of brains. What it sets out to do—and what it actually does do—is to enable people to get the best out of themselves. That it does this is proved by an overwhelming mass of evidence—evidence, I may remark, that comes from those who have gone through the course themselves.
There are piles and piles of letters coming from all sorts and conditions of people. And these letters all say the same thing that the writers thereof have benefited very much mentally from having gone through the exercises that are contained in the twelve books.
It is the most effective system of mind-training that has appeared in history. And doubtless the reason for this is because it has no axe to grind in the sense of endeavoring to train minds so that they may be the more easily subjected to the wishes and aims of arrogant ruling cliques.
Too often has this been the fatal flaw in systems of education. The aim of the educationalists has been to make slaves of those that they taught. Too often have teachers thrown dust in the eyes of their pupils.
This is not the case with Pelmanism.
- It teaches human beings the way to get the best out of themselves.
- It endeavors to inculcate no bias.
- It has no scheme of domination to forward.
- Its motto is that splendid motto that is at once old and new: Know thyself!
The end.
Remember, What matters most in your life is YOU and what you do with your life.
Pelmanism is an authoritative message to taking Action—the Pelman Course reveals, in simple terms, that all action in life is preceded by THOUGHT.
To start reading this rare and unique course, simply scroll to the top of the page and click on the 15 Lessons link in the navigation bar.
