This review of the popular book Outwitting The Devil will also come with an important summary for those currently suffering from anxiety. I’ve read this book multiple times and I believe there are some important ‘gems’ within it that will super-charge your anxiety healing.
The book title ‘Outwitting The Devil’ will trigger some, and challenge others. The choice is yours on how to approach this vital read.
As I begin my important mental health book review I want to discuss one of the most important points this book points out early on, and that is the term ‘drifting.’ As Napoleon Hill interviews the Devil we learn that one of the most powerful tools that the devil possesses in its ability to control the minds of what he refers to as the ‘earthbound’ is drifting.
Think of drifting like a snowball that rolls down a hill picking up speed and size as it does.
Drifting is what human beings begin doing as they take in the conscious, subconscious, and subliminal messages coming in from the outside. They slowly begin drifting towards helplessness which leads to the inability to think for themselves.
Drifters believe they’re powerless.
The ones stuck in drifting become:
- addicted to self punishment
- easily controlled by others
- enslaved to their emotions
- fearful towards everything
- consumed by suppressed emotion and physical ailments
- stuck in a victim identity
Drifting is all consuming, leaving the person looking to materialistic and unhelpful things for temporary feelings of joy and escape. In the cycle of drifting a person cannot differentiate between a thought and a feeling, a feeling becomes a thought and therefore feelings are what are consistently acted on.
As feelings become the guiding force in a drifters life they give up all hope of thinking greater than any situation. If they feel bad, everything is bad. Generalizations become the norm, and that middle emotional ground between excitement and fear known as inner peace is rarely visited.
Napoleon Hill makes it clear to his readers that he isn’t completely sure as to how he’s interviewing the devil. It may have been through a dream, face to face, or maybe through his conscious imagination. This part of the book isn’t as important as the wealth of information he actually gains from the Devils words.
In Outwitting The Devil, The Devil lets us know that he has control of 98% of the ‘earthbound.’
This part hit me hard.
The Devil (who would rather be referred to as your majesty in the interview) controls 98% of the minds of all human beings, or so he says. Honestly, I believe him. When I look around the world, we as a collective are so very detached from true reality that we’ve become stuck in a system that has convinced us that this is the way life is.
We go about life never questioning who we truly are and how we got to this state in the first place.
In the book, the Devil lets us know that he uses parents, teachers, and even religious leaders to implant fearful suggestions into the minds of the young. How young you ask? Right at conception forward.
The vibratory messages that are being sent by mom and dad while the fetus is in the womb gets absorbed by the child. Talks of abortion, financial fears, and lack of love become the groundwork for later physical disease.
Disease is energetically and emotionally formed, but no one will tell us this.
As we continue on in the book the Devil lets us know of the 6 main fears that he is able to implant into the minds of 98% of people. They are:
- The fear of poverty
- The fear of criticism
- The fear of ill health
- The fear of loss of love
- The fear of old age
- The fear of death
This part of Outwitting The Devil was a real eye opener.
I saw this in me for decades in fact until I stopped to think how ridiculous it all really was. For the fear of poverty I slept on the streets for 3 nights just so I could see how bad things could really get. I met new people, made some cash, and felt freer than I had for years. That action led me to overcoming this silly fear.
The fear of criticism leads us to tippy-toeing around people hoping not to offend anyone.
Next thing you know we suppress our thoughts and emotions leading us down a path of disorders and disease. These diseases are actually fantastic wake up calls for some people as they recognize and begin changing their internal ways soon after.
The fear of ill health leads us to believe that we’re fragile and that the external world holds the key to our freedom.
A very sneaky trick by the Devil.
We came to this world free of this fear only to learn it along the way. The more we fear ill health the more we succumb to the authorities ways of how we must live. Everything begins to set us off, and we become addicted to fear and suffering leading to health anxiety.
The fear of loss of love makes us get into relationships we believe may complete us. We quickly realize that it’s not the relationship that completes us, because that part is in our own hands. We craved such love as a child rarely receiving our needs, and we frantically look to fulfill the need for love sooner rather than later as adults.
The fear of old age keeps us away from seeing aging as a gift.
Many people aren’t given the gift of aging, instead they die young. The Devil makes us believe that the older we get the smaller our worlds will become and the more useless we are. Nothing could be farther then the truth.
The fear of death, this one leads to such health anxiety that a person begins to fear living as much as dying.
The Devil makes us believe that we have one life. If we don’t get it ‘right’ this time, that’s it! We begin believing that we are a physical body, a name, or what we do, when in fact we’re none of those things. We are actually spiritual beings having a physical experience, think of it as renting the physical body temporarily until our next destination (this YouTube video explains).
These points are the main ones that stuck out to me in Outwitting The Devil. Do I recommend this book for people suffering from anxiety, or anyone for that matter? Absolutely 100%. When you go through it a few times you’ll take something new from it each time.
A pre-warning though:
This book will challenge everything you believe to be true. So if you’re not the open minded type who’s completely dissatisfied around coping with anxiety, managing life, rushing through the day, you won’t get much out of it. Be open minded, take in theses important teachings, and thrive into a new identity forever through this powerful read.
You wrote this out very well! I would love to talk about this with more people. I have visited this book at least 15 times and I still do till this day. There so much to grasp on it.
Thank you for your input.