Another way we deflect wealth is through the unrecognizable belief that it’s not really okay to have money. Just as some people are prejudiced against the poor, some are prejudiced against the rich.
I support the Occupy Wall Street movement, because over the last few decades there has been a systematic dismantling of the appropriate guarantees of economic justice in the United States. But I noticed, among a few of the Occupiers I met, that their passion seemed to be less an enthusiasm for the rights of all people to participate in the engine of economic prosperity and more a knee-jerk criticism of anyone who does. This then leaves the movement open to all kinds of erroneous criticism—that supporters of Occupy are anti-rich, and so forth. That’s hardly the case. The message isn’t that people shouldn’t be able to get rich in America; it’s that the playing field should be so level that with enough hard work anyone can! And money should be able to buy a lot of things in America; it just shouldn’t be able to buy our government.
As long as we’re making money righteously, we’re not only receiving a blessing but also extending one to others.
No matter how much we struggle for financial abundance, we’ll have a hard time attaining it if we disapprove of those who have it. If we’re saying one thing but thinking another, we’ll always end up with confused results. Many people set themselves up to lose, working hard yet giving an ambivalent message to the universe about whether or not they really want money.
Thoughts like “I want it, but I shouldn’t want it, so I guess no, I don’t really want it; but actually I do want it, but I don’t want to admit that I want it” indicate ambivalence. This confusing mix of thoughts inevitably brings forth a confusing mix of experiences. Many people fail to manifest money because on some deep level they don’t think they should.
Having been taught that poverty is holy, perhaps they think that rich people are therefore not holy. Having been taught that wealth is a finite resource, some people think that to manifest money for themselves is, by definition, to take money away from someone else. Whatever their reason is, many people don’t think it’s okay to desire money. And if you disown the desire, you literally disown the money.
THIS BOOK DEALS not only with how we attract miracles, but also with how we deflect them. Judgment is one of the biggest barriers to our own miraculous breakthroughs. If we judge someone else for having wealth, then we’ll subconsciously sabotage our own. If we have the idea that somehow it’s more pure to be poor, then that’s most probably what we’ll manifest.
I once received a letter from a woman named Judy, who ran a business called Café Joy. She told me she was despondent because her café was getting ready to close. She owed her landlord money, and a neighboring business was making an unfair play for her space. She wrote:
We’ve been working hard for four years to keep this place going. This place is so special, and I would be devastated to lose it all. Not only do we serve healthy food, but we created what many people say is a beautiful, peaceful place. We also created a community and supported and brought together artists, as well as neighbors and colleagues, . . . becoming a very special, important place to people in our neighborhood. It was never a venture for money—the importance was always on fellowship and good health—so I’m feeling sad and confused about why it’s being taken from us . . . and especially upset to lose the space to people who are simply able to pay more.
When Judy and I spoke, I loved her passion and vision for the café, but I also noticed that she had some interesting attitudes about money, business, and capitalism in general. As a business owner, she needed to make a profit in order to stay afloat, yet she said things that made it clear she didn’t respect the effort to do so. She spoke of profit with a subtle disdain. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, as an operator of a small business she was a capitalist; yet she also seemed to project onto all capitalist ventures that they’re an unethical rip-off of the 99 percent!
Judy was giving mixed messages to the universe, her conscious mind saying one thing and her subconscious hearing another. In talking to her further, I learned that she had both a degree in social work and a background in the nonprofit world, as well as excellent business skills. Integrated, her past experiences could have been a marvelous marriage of values and material aptitude. But those things were at war with each other inside her. Judy was operating in conflict with herself: she was a business owner, yes, but it was almost as though she was ashamed of the fact. It was like she didn’t want to admit to herself that the business had to make money in order to survive, because somehow that would make the venture unholy or impure.
Judy’s challenge was to make peace with the fact that her café required a profit. And she could do that only by looking more deeply at why she’d ever thought it shouldn’t.
“I’ve never wanted to have more than the next person,” she told me, as though her having more than other people somehow made less abundance available to them. This picture of the financial world, in which we assume that there are only so many pieces of the pie and if I have a slice then there’s less available to you, is called a zero-sum game. If I feel that by asking you to pay me I’m ripping you off, of course I’ll feel guilty about charging you money! This will then confuse the universal programming and deflect my abundance.
But if I feel that I’m providing an honorable service, asking for an equitable and fair pay in return, then I can feel good about the exchange because I’m increasing abundance for both of us. Fair exchange is a spiritual, not just an economic, principle. As long as we’re making money righteously, we’re not only receiving a blessing but also extending one to others.
The spiritual universe does not operate as a zero-sum game. In the realm of spirit there is infinite abundance, and my creativity does not take from yours; in fact, it adds to yours. I provide energy through a service or product, and you provide energy through the money you pay for it. With an equitable exchange, both parties profit.
Judy told me she’d prayed to be released from any resistance she had to making money, and during our conversation we looked deeply at where the resistance came from. Deeply embedded core beliefs, when they cause a problem, aren’t magically removed for us when we pray that the problem be solved. Such beliefs are brought to consciousness when we pray; then it’s our responsibility to surrender them and ask that they be removed. The Holy Spirit will take from us only what we’re willing to release.
Judy mentioned that she had a habit of saying to her customers—she even had it written on the menu!—the words, “Thank you for your support.” I tilted my head when I heard that, asking, “Why wouldn’t you say, ‘Thank you for your business’?”
She began to recognize what her resistance was—namely, her unrecognized belief that there was something unfair or unrighteous about making money. On one hand, she needed to make money in order for the business to thrive, and she was well aware that she and those she employed worked very hard and provided a beautiful service to the community. On the other hand, she had ambivalent feelings about receiving money. The war raged within her, and so it raged at her café.
Once again, everything we experience in the world is a reflection of our thoughts. If you feel ashamed about celebrating money, don’t expect money to celebrate you. If your making money is a rip-off of others, an exploitation or unfair reach into someone else’s pocket, then as a righteous person you won’t feel good about it, nor should you.
But Judy’s café is what free-market capitalism should be. There is nothing there to be ashamed of. (Many people don’t realize that capitalism has different faces in different industrialized societies. A critique of unethical business practices is not an inherent critique of capitalism itself.)
I asked Judy why she felt the need to hold her clientele in such a pitiful light—as though they were orphans in Oliver Twist rather than abundant adults. Was that really doing them a service, almost infantilizing them in the name of economic fairness? As a social worker, Judy had come in contact with many people who were down and out and needed a helping hand; perhaps she had brought into her work as a café owner an energy that had been appropriate in her social work but was not necessarily appropriate here. Her customers weren’t coming to her for help; they were coming to her for her coffee!
The Law of Divine Compensation would bring about every miracle she needed: a way to settle righteously with her landlord, as well as a way to reopen Café Joy. What Judy needed more than anything was to align her thinking with the natural patterns of the universe, and for that we prayed. She adopted a different attitude and opened herself to new beginnings.
I’ve heard it said that prayer doesn’t change a situation for you so much as it changes you for the situation. It changes the effects in your life because it changes you on the level of cause. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that when the perceiver changes, that which is perceived then changes. The fact that Judy achieved a new attitude meant—literally, not just figuratively—that opportunities she would not otherwise have experienced would now appear.
If she’d stayed in “Ain’t it awful,” “I hate my landlord,” “Damn the owner of the business next door,” and “There’s no hope now,” simply adding the event to her “victim résumé,” the universe would absolutely have proved her right. If we convince ourselves that there is no hope, our subconscious mind edits out of the picture any evidence that might prove otherwise.
Hopelessness and negativity could have led to many different things for Judy, none of them miraculous: depression, anxiety, bitterness, resentment, anger, an attitude of victimization, and many other forms of suffering. The landlord had been a jerk, after all; the neighbor had been unethical; and the customers at the old café had taken advantage of her. There were many places where she could have tarried, had she chosen; fear has many addresses.
But Judy wanted a miracle, and she was ready to receive one. In A Course in Miracles, it says that we can have a grievance or we can have a miracle; we cannot have both. Judy’s job was to heal her mind, no matter how difficult that task was, of false beliefs, anger, and resentment—and to remember, as it says in A Course in Miracles, that “there is no order of difficulty in miracles.” Those things she did assiduously. She looked at the mistakes she had made in the past, she was open to correcting them, and she was ready to move forward from a higher state of mind.
Another thing Judy was being asked to give up was her attachment to form. She had always been attached to the particular neighborhood and the particular physical space of her old café. But the universe will never support us in an attachment to form. Often we say, “I want my good to come in this specific way”—this money, that job, this place to live, that person, and so forth. But love is not form; it is content. God’s promise is not that we will always get what we want. It’s that in all things love will ultimately prevail.
As a reflection of the Mind of God, the universe intends that you self-actualize, and sometimes that means not getting what you want in order to realize that you’re fine without it—which counterintuitively then paves the way for you to attract that or something better!
The universe was invested not in Judy’s café, but in Judy’s enlightenment. Self-actualization involves detachment, not attachment to form; it acknowledges that form is limited, but spirit is not. And that is why we let go: we release our attachment to form so that universal substance can rearrange it. We pray, “Dear God, I surrender. I’ve tried to control this situation—I’ve worked as hard as I can—and now everything has fallen apart. All I have left is to pray for a miracle. Please guide my thinking to a higher place. Amen.” Spiritually, that’s not the end, but the beginning.
It’s almost amusing when doctors say, “We’ve done everything possible. All we can do now is pray,” as though God were simply our last resort, the one we go to when all the really powerful things have failed. After all, what’s the infinite power of the universe compared to our science and technology and so forth?
We activate our spiritual power by praying from the first moment that an idea presents itself:
Dear God,
May this business idea be of service to the greater good of all.
If it is not the best use of my talents, please cast it from my mind.
If it is the best use of my talents, please pave the way for its success.
Guide all my thinking and my actions.
Amen.
Pray each day that your work be of service to the healing of the world:
Dear God,
May this business be a blessing on everyone who works here and everyone it serves.
May it both bring and attract prosperity and love.
Amen.
Remember: You are not asking that a force outside of you magically change external circumstances; you are asking that a Divine Guide within you change the nature of your thoughts. And when something in your business goes wrong? Say this:
Dear God,
I know that You are bigger than my business problem, but by myself I cannot fix this.
Please guide my thinking, open my heart, and send me a miracle.
Amen.
Before Judy left my apartment that day, we walked out onto the balcony and looked at the view of the city below. Looking into the distance, we could see where her café was, but we could also see other streets and other neighborhoods. The point was obvious: God is not bound by form.
Then changes began to happen as the shifts in her thinking bore fruit. It wasn’t too long before Judy found a perfect new location for her café. She was able to make a decent settlement with her old landlord; a relative impressed by her hard work and positive attitude provided financing for her move into the new place; and other forms of support came “out of the blue.” All of this brought energy back to her personality, a smile back to her face, and form back to her beloved idea of a café that was in service to its community. Judy’s internal abundance—her willingness to work hard, her integrity, her love of her mission, her vigilance about her own thinking, and her faith—invoked the Law of Divine Compensation. What once appeared to be a lack in her life turned into an even greater good.
Our circumstances can shift, and they often do, but God’s love is fixed and unalterable. Love’s compensatory response to lack or limitation of any kind is built into the patterns of the universe. No matter what our problem is, the universe is on it. Judy absorbed her loss; or more specifically, the Holy Spirit absorbed it for her.