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THE CONQUEST OF FEAR: The Law of Attraction Guide to Overcoming Fear and Transforming it into Creative Power - Basil King(1921) · THE SECRET LAW OF ATTRACTION: Manifest Wealth, Success & Abundance

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  The Conquest of Fear by Basil King. Introduction by Henry C. Link,
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  pH d. Author of The Rediscovery of Man, The Return to Religion,
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  et cetera. There are many books which give some help to many people.
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  There are books which give a set of rules, or even one master rule
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  by which to meet the problems of life. This is not such a book.
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  It suggests no simple recipe for the conquest of fear. Instead, it
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  presents what all too few of us today possess, a philosophy of life.
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  Moreover, in contrast to the dominant thinking of our age, which is materialistic,
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  King's philosophy is spiritual and religious. Indeed, the ideas in this book
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  are so profoundly different from the commonly accepted ideas of our times that they will
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  come as a shock to many readers. One purpose of this introduction is to
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  prepare the reader for such a shock. I have said that the dominant thinking
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  of our age is materialistic, and by that I mean also physical. Let
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  me illustrate this broad statement with reference to the subject of fears alone. The
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  conquest of fear has gone on year after year, chiefly through physical means.
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  Physical pain has always been one of the great sources of fear. Now ether
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  and other anesthetics have eliminated the chief pains of major operations. Older people can
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  still remember their fear of the dentist when killing a nerve or pulling a tooth
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  caused excruciating pain. Now local anesthetics, even in minor troubles, have made
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  dentistry almost painless. We have not conquered these fears of pain. Rather,
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  their cause has been removed. Twilight sleep, the artificial sleep to alleviate the
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  pains of childbirth, is the perfect expression of the scientific and materialistic elimination of
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  fear. By a chemical blackout of the mind, a dimming of the conscious
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  self, the person is enabled to escape the necessity of facing and conquering fear
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  through his own resources. I am not condemning the physical alleviation of pain or
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  the progress of physical science. I am only describing a trend, and that
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  is the growing emphasis on the elimination of fears by science rather than on their
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  conquest by the individual. Illness has always been a great source of fear and
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  still is. The dread of cancer is one of the terrifying fears of our
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  time, and fortunes are spent in cancer research and education. The Conquest of
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  Fear was written as a result of the author's threatened total blindness. He faced
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  a fact for which there seemed no physical remedy, hence his great need for
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  a spiritual conquest of this great fear. And yet year by year, physical
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  science has been eliminating or reducing the dangers of sickness. Vaccines for the prevention
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  of the dread disease smallpox are now a matter of course, vaccines and specifics
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  against since the deadly tetanus against typhoid fever, diphtheria, syphilis, and other
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  fearful diseases have become commonplace. The fear of pneumonia has been almost eliminated.
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  Through the discoveries of the miraculous sulpha drugs. Science has done wonders towards the
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  elimination of such fears. A man need hardly conquer the fear of any particular
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  sickness. There is left for his conquest, chiefly the fear of dying.
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  In addition to physical disease, our civilization has now developed mental ailments of all
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  kinds. These include a large category of fears called phobias, claustrophobia, agoraphobia,
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  photophobia, altaphobia, phonophobia, et cetera. Free fields or professions other
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  than religion and philosophy have sought to deal with these fears, the psychiatric,
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  the psychoanalytic, and the psychological. The medical psychiatric profession has naturally emphasized physical
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  remedies, beginning with sedatives and bromides to induce artificial relaxation and ending up with
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  lobectomy, or the complete cutting off of the frontal lobes of the brain the
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  centers of man's highest thought processes. Between these two extremes are the shock treatments,
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  in which an injection of insulin or metrisol into the blood stream causes the
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  person to fall into a sort of epileptic fit, during which he loses consciousness.
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  Through a series of such shock treatments, some of the higher nerve centers
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  or nerve pathways are destroyed. By this process. A person's fears may also
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  be eliminated, and he may be permanently or temporarily cured. In short,
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  the person does not conquer the fears in his mind. The psychiatrist or neurologist,
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  by physically destroying a part of the person's brain, destroys also the fears.
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  How strongly. This physical approach has taken hold of people was made plain
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  to me through an article of Mind on how to Conquer fears. The emphasis
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  in this article was on how people could overcome their fears and worries through their
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  own efforts. Illustrate the opposite extreme. I mention the brain operations and shock
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  treatments by which psychiatry now often deals with fears. Among the many people who
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  wrote to me as a result of this article, the majority inquired where they
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  could obtain such an operation. To such extremes have many people gone in their
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  desire to eliminate fear by physical means, rather than conquer it through their own
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  spiritual powers. The psychoanalyst deals with a person's phobias through what seems like an
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  intellectual or rational process. According to psychoanalysis, phobias or fears are due to
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  some buried or subconscious complex. By daily or frequent talks with a psychoanalyst for
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  a period of six months or a year, a person's subconscious disturbance may be
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  brought to light, and if so, the fear is supposed automatically to disappear.
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  Even if true, this process is a highly materialistic one, at least
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  in the sense that only people who can spend thousands of dollars can afford such
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  treatment. The psychologists, as well as some psychiatrists who have studied normal psychology,
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  regard many fears as normal experiences which the individual can cope with, largely
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  through his own resources and with very little help in the way of visits or
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  treatment. The trouble arises in the case of those people who have no personal
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  resources to draw on their lives, are so lacking in spiritual power, or
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  so full of intellectual skepticism and distrust that they cannot help themselves. They have
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  no religious convictions or certainties by which to obtain leverage in their struggles. They
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  have no firm philosophy of life on which they or those who would help them
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  can lay hold. They are putty in the hands of the fears and forces
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  that beset them from without. The psychologist and the psychiatrist both find it difficult
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  to do much to help such a person, and yet this is the kind
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  of person our civilization and education tends increasingly to produce. By the physical elimination
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  of the causes of fear, we have gradually undermined man's inner resources. For
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  the conquest of fear. This materialistic trend has received a new impetus from the
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  fields of political science, economics, and sociology. A dozen years ago,
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  economic disaster threatened to stampede the nation. Millions who had lost their jobs began
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  to fear penury and want Millions who still had jobs feared that they would lose
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  them. Other millions began to fear the loss of their money and possessions.
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  Rich and poor, becoming afraid that the country was going to pieces, rushed
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  to the banks to withdraw their savings and brought on the nationwide bank closings.
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  Those were days when everyone knew paralyzing fears. History will record the fact that
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  these fears were met not by conquest, not by drawing on the moral resources
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  and inner fortitude of the American citizen, but by a collection of wholesale materialistic
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  schemes. These schemes included such devices as inflating the dollar, raising prices,
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  expanding the government debt, paying farmers not to produce crops, government housing projects,
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  and many others. The fears of unemployment and poverty in old age were
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  to be eliminated wholesale through a planned economy, a new social order by an
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  elaborate system of bookkeeping called social security. A whole nation was to win freedom
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  from want and freedom from fear. But while we were building our smug little
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  house of social security, the whole world was crashing around us. Instead of
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  achieving local security, we find ourselves now in the midst of worldwide insecurity.
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  Far from having eliminated the economic causes of fear, we now find these causes
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  multiplied many times. To the fear of losing our money is now added,
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  the fear of losing our sons. To the fear of losing our jobs is
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  added, the fear of losing our lives. To the fear of depression and
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  inflation is added the fear of losing the very freedoms for which the war is
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  being fought. At last, we see, or are on the point of
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  seeing, that materialism breeds worse fears than it cures, That economics and sociology
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  create more social problems than they solve. That science makes it possible to destroy
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  wealth and lives much faster than it can build them. It took years of
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  science to achieve the airplane and to eliminate people's fear of flying. Now suddenly
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  the airplane has become the greatest source of destruction and of fear on the globe.
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  Cities which were decades in the building are blasted out of being in a
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  night. Millions of people must regulate their lives in fear of these dread visitors.
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  This is the background against which the Conquest of Fear presents its philosophy of
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  courage and of hope. It is a philosophy diametrically opposed to the dominant beliefs
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  and practices of our materialistic age. One hesitates to use the words spiritual and
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  moral because they have become catch words. Nevertheless, kings fellowilosophy is a spiritual
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  and a moral one, and the reader will gain from it a clearer concept
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  of what these words really mean. When I remember my reactions to the first
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  portion of this book, I can readily picture the impatience and even scorn of
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  many intellectuals and pseudo intellectuals. Because of its emphasis on the religious nature of
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  the universe and on the spiritual power of the individual, it may seem to
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  them naive. Because of its consistent condemnation of mammon, of materialism and the
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  economic sociological interpretation of life, it may seem to them old fashioned. Actually,
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  the book is highly sophisticated and is more novel today than the day it
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  was written, because since that time we have strayed twenty years further from the
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  truth. One day I was having luncheon with a man who, during the
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  course of the conversation, remarked, I want to tell you how much I
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  enjoyed your latest book, as almost any writer would. I pricked up my
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  ears expectantly. Yes, he went on, I got a great deal out
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  of your recent lithook. But the book which helped me more than any I
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  have ever read is a book called The Conquest of Fear by Basil King.
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  Do you happen to know it? Know it? I exclaimed, I not
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  only know it, I am just on the point of writing an introduction to
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  a new edition of the book. Would you mind telling me how it helped
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  you? He thereupon related how, at a certain period of his life,
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  he had left an excellent position to take a new one which seemed more promising.
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  It soon developed that the difficulties of this position were such as to make
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  his success seem almost hopeless. He became obsessed with the idea that the people
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  with whom he had to deal with out to get him. His fears of
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  the job and of his associates grew to the point where a nervous breakdown seemed
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  inevitable. One day, his daughter told him that she needed a book in
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  her school work, which he remembered having packed in a box that had been
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  stored in the attic and not yet opened. When he opened the box,
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  the first book which he picked up was The Conquest of Fear. It was
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  evidently one of those books which had somehow come into the possession of his family,
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  but which he had never read. This time, however, he sat
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  down in the attic and began to read it. During the course of the
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  next year or so, he read it carefully, not once, but four
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  or five times. It marked the turning point in my life, he told
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  me. It enabled me to conquer the fears which were threatening to ruin me
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  at the time, and it gave me a philosophy which has stood me in
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  good stead ever since. A philosophy which marked the turning point in his life,
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  and which has stood him in good stead ever since. The Conquest of
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  Fear offers such a philosophy not only to individuals suffering from fears peculiar to them,
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  but to a world of individuals suffering or about to suffer from the collapse
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  of world wide materialism. In this day of chaos and uncertainty. Here is
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  the modern version of the parable of the man who built his house upon a
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  rock instead of on the sand. And the rain descended, and the floods
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  came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell
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  not, for it was founded upon a rock. H. C. L.