Happy New Year! After a recent reading of James Allen’s short but powerful treatise, “As a Man Thinketh” I watched the 1971 version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and discovered a striking resemblance. Simply put, the fictional character Willy Wonka (both in Roald Dahl’s original book and as Wonka was personified by Gene Wilder in ‘71) lives by a life philosophy that very much mirrors that of James Allen’s. Take for example the lyrics to Willy Wonka’s first song in the film:
If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and do it
Anything you want, just do it
Want to change the world…
There’s nothing to it.
There is no life I know
That compares with pure imagination
Living there, you’ll be free
If you truly wish to be.
What a marvelous way to view the world. What a magnificent and open minded sentiment—to believe that nothing truly holds us down, nothing holds us back from what we wish to achieve aside from our own minds. This is precisely what James Allen writes about in “As a Man Thinketh.” And so it is.
A woman is nothing more and nothing less than the whole summation of her thoughts. While she cannot always control the events that occupy her mind, she can control the way she reacts to them. A person’s circumstances reveal the true nature of their thoughts and is an immediate manifestation of his or her thoughts.
“Men think that thought can be kept secret,” James Allen writes, “but it can not. Thought quickly crystallizes into habit, which materializes as circumstance... Bestial thoughts crystallize into wanton drunkenness and sensuality…[while] thoughts of courage, self-reliance and decision crystallize into circumstances of success, plenty, and freedom.”
Does this not make perfect sense? We are attracted to that which we dream, and will always move toward that dream until we manifests our destiny. We MUST become our dreams. We must. It is our destiny—just as long as we remember that it is not easy, and that failure is a necessary station on the road to success. We must not be discouraged by disappointment, by cynical thoughts, or by the doubts and fears that invade us at every turn. These types of thoughts must be rigorously excluded for they serve no need whatsoever.
So why then does the world seem so full of doubts and fears? Indeed, at every stop along the tour of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, nay sayers jump at him with cynical thoughts and aspersions, claiming that their own eyes deceived them somehow. It was only through an immense feat of will power that Wonka was able to achieve all that he dreamed. Perhaps the finest manifestion of this idea is the final utterance of the movie.
You know what happened to the boy who got everything he ever wished for, don’t you, Charlie? He lived happily ever after.
So few movies are imbued with such a palpable sense of magic, of possibility, of wonder. So few actually foster that sense that anything could happen if you wish for it badly enough; if you truly believe it can happen and that you are capable of it.
And what a wonderful thing to inspire! I wish there were more messages like that in the world. God knows there are more than enough messages to the contrary, telling us we’re not good enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not thin enough, or pretty enough, or lucky enough to achieve the things we hold so dearly in our hearts.
"Cherish your visions, cherish your ideals. Cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts. For out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built."
Could not these very lines be spoken by James Allen or Willy Wonka?
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