William Walker Atkinson book discussion

 Checking in for this week: I've started formatting The Master Mind and have gotten up to chapter 4 now.  This book lacks an introduction, and also seems to have been written as a book from the get-go, as opposed to The Power of Concentration, which started as a correspondence course.

One thing I noted last year in Memory was his extensive use of quotation, and in this book he doesn't even list a last name as attribution, preferring to say, "a well-known psychologist," or "an authority on the subject."  Some of these Google can find ... but there are some it can't, except for in Atkinson's books.  I am tempted to go on the supposition that Atkinson - writing as Dumont - quoted his earlier books that were written under his own name.  It's certainly possible, and I'm sure quite a few of us have seen people do the same online.  This does not invalidate the quotes - those stand or fall on their merit for how well they've held up over the past century.  Atkinson may or may not have been a con man, but I think he was no charlatan.  He had some real knowledge of magic.

What makes the previous assertion so humorous is the first paragraph of The Master Mind:

Hey, Billy boy, pull the other leg while you're at it ... I think this is the proverbial wink-and-nod to those paying attention.  Then again, I've only read up to chapter four so far.  Chapters 3 and 4 slowed me down quite a bit, mostly because they left me with the feeling that there is more below the surface of what is written.

Oh, related to the topic of large quotations is a name Google and Wikipedia are giving up next to nothing when searched: Reuben Post Halleck.  In particular is a book he wrote called Psychology and Psychic Culture, which Atkinson loves to quote.  I've found a birth year and a death year for him, and a list of other titles he wrote, and the abstract of one academic paper on him and one of his contemporaries who published a book on neurology within a year of his book on the subject ... but as far as any kind of biography goes ... nada.  Anyone know anything about him?

 It's been more than a hot minute since I started formatting the Power of Concentration, but I am now finally finished.  While I've corrected the places the pdf was not-quite-readable to my clipboard and Wordpad program, and a couple egregious spelling errors, I have not corrected all the sentence fragments or overuse of commas.  I made the remark to hubby, "After having written books for a good fifteen years, you'd think his writing would have improved with practice."  At least he wrote well enough to get the ideas across that he was trying to convey.

Well, mostly.  He hints in the introductory that not everything is explicitly laid out:I will take him on his word, and work from the assumption that perhaps words are not able to express something he is hoping to convey.

A minor irritation (yes, already) is in Lesson 2, where he mentions his previous book, The Master Mind, as beneficial to have already worked through.  I guess that will be my next book to format and skim through.  

Perhaps I should take a minute to describe how I intend to work through these: as I format them into Wordpad, I am skimming over them as an initial read-through, then after I print up a hardcopy, I read through more thoroughly with a brand-new red ink pen in hand to take notes of things that look promising for themes for meditation.  I hope to post weekly, or more if inspiration seizes me.

For those needing or wanting a bit of a pep talk and encouragement, there is quite a lot of that throughout the entire course.  One thing Atkinson was very good at is giving motivational pep talks.

Let the fun begin!