As a child of God, you are inwardly abundant. External abundance is simply a reflection of who and what you are.
A spiritual economy is one in which abundance is a natural result of people actualizing their God-given gifts. True prosperity is the prospering of our spirits in service to love.
You are an idea in the Mind of God, and an idea does not leave its source. God is infinite and God is love; therefore you share in that infinitude and you share in that love. This is simply the truth of who you are.
The universe of which you are part is an all-loving field of miraculous possibility, not only in every instant but also moving through time. In physics terms, you’re not a particle but a wave. You’re not a static thing, but rather an ever-evolving emanation of the Mind of God. Spirit has great plans for you, because God’s Mind is an eternal wellspring of infinite love. This wellspring literally never runs out of ideas.
We feel it would be arrogant to think of ourselves as “God’s gift to the world,” yet in fact that’s exactly who each of us is.
Your awareness of these things helps right the universe on your behalf, lifting you above the effects of the fear-based thought system that dominates this planet. Your greatest source of power in this world is the knowledge that you’re not of this world. None of us are truly at home in this dimension, and—counterintuitive though it is—we dwell most comfortably within the world when we know that. Our true home lies beyond the veil of illusion, and we are here to shed the light of our true home into all darkened corners of the world. With that understanding we unleash the unlimited potential that lies within each of us to create the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Such are the gifts of the spirit that we carry within. We’re programmed for abundance because we are abundant. Financial prosperity is one of the many ways we receive the gifts of the world, as we deliver to the world the gifts we bring from beyond it.
Think what a different self-perception that is than the ego’s derogatory estimation of who you are. To the fear-based ego mind, you’re a clump of clay that has to compete in whatever way you can for the material resources by which to survive. To the loving heart, however, you’re a nonmaterial wave of energy, on earth with a spiritual mission. This mission acts like a magnet, making the forces of the world arrange themselves in a way that supports its achievement. No matter what you do, your abundance lies in dedicating your work to the purpose of healing the world. This is our common spiritual function, and it’s only in performing our function that we can be happy.
We’re not depressed because the economy is depressed; the economy is depressed because we’re depressed. And we’re depressed because we’ve lost conscious contact with the realization of why we’re here. We feel it would be arrogant to think of ourselves as “God’s gift to the world,” yet in fact that’s exactly who each of us is. It’s humble, not arrogant, to realize this truth; we’re not taking personal credit for the divine power that lies within us. Remembering that that divine power is there—in us, but not of us—is essential to the proper functioning of our mind and heart. Any thought or action that separates us from love separates us from our sense of meaning, our creativity and our joy.
You were created to live a life of abundance, with the support of the universe in carrying out your material endeavors. Nature itself displays economy, but not austerity. Yet many of us were taught—and by certain religions, no less!—to distrust abundance, leading us to subconsciously avoid or, at the very least, fail to develop the mental and emotional habits of an abundant life. We need to do more than eradicate our thoughts of poverty; we need to allow ourselves to proactively embrace, to the point of embodying, the energies of abundance. To the universe, it’s as easy to manifest six zeroes as it is to manifest two. As a child of God, all the abundance of the universe belongs to you, because it is you.
The idea that you must struggle in order to experience abundance—whether in the form of love relationships, money, or anything else—interferes with the natural magnetism that otherwise brings abundance forth. There is a difference between having to work and having to struggle. Work is creative effort, a righteous extension of positive energy that attracts abundance; struggle is a perversion of creative energy based on a misunderstanding of one’s basic relationship to the universe. Anxiety and struggle do not attract your good.
If you think you have to struggle, you’re forgetting your relationship to the universe; and the universe will then seem to forget its relationship to you! Your job is simply to be, joyfully expressing your own inner worth—and the universe will find a way to take care of you. But if you think, “I have to struggle, because otherwise I’m not taken care of,” then your core belief is that you won’t be taken care of—and you won’t be!
The universe is programmed to support your happiness, and one of the ways it does this is by arranging events so that you won’t have to worry about money. Why? Because you have more important things to do! That is the correct motivation for making money: so you simply don’t have to think about it except as a tool for the betterment of all things.
It’s difficult to open yourself to such thinking if you’re not open to the idea of your own internal magnificence. Recognition of your internal magnificence is not ego; it’s the acknowledgment of the spirit within you, which makes you no more or less valuable than anyone else. All of us are infinitely valuable to God.
Many of us were taught as children that we shouldn’t express ourselves too much. We should pipe down in some way. Such children often become adults who are in the habit of cowering, as though we’re afraid of taking up too much space. Our mind then comes into conflict with our soul’s knowing. Because each of us is the center of the universe, we are here to express ourselves, and on some level we know this.
There is no need to feel you shouldn’t take up too much room in a universe that is in fact all yours. You are here to fly at full wingspan, for the glory of the One who sent you. You give your greatest gifts when you are flying fully and freely. You’re actually withholding from the universe when you don’t.
If Mommy or Daddy or a teacher or a mate or anyone else you might have met along the way taught you for whatever reason that your job is to keep your head down, then bless them but know that they were misinformed. A Course in Miracles claims that those who have achieved the most in the world have achieved only a fraction of what each of us is capable of. And that means that you have as much achievement potential as any great artist, scientist, or anyone else who ever lived. Unlimited potential lies within you, just waiting to be activated by your own affirmative response to the idea.
Once you know this, you become a magnet for worldly success. You work from joy and the universe responds. You open your heart to love, and the way is made clear for you.
Love, in whatever form would serve us, is always coming toward us. Our job is not to go out and find it, but to allow it to find us. Money isn’t just something we “go out and make”; it’s also something we have to be able to “sit still and receive.” The ego doesn’t want you to believe this, but all you have to do is open your heart, and all the abundance you need will find its way to your door.
ONE MORNING, I was picked up by a car service for a drive to the airport. I asked the young man who was driving whether he was new to the company, as I hadn’t seen him before.
“Yes,” he said. “I just moved to Los Angeles from New York.”
“Let me guess,” I said, smiling. “Actor?”
“Well,” he said. “Writer, painter—but I don’t know. I do a lot of things.”
I asked him what kind of painter he was and what kind of writer.
“I write dramas. But I don’t know . . . I think I need to write something else in order to get something sold.” He appeared to be struggling with his predicament.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Like horror films or something?”
He nodded knowingly and rolled his eyes. I wondered how he was going to attract a sale by writing something he didn’t even like to write.
“What I need to do is network,” he told me. “I lived here before, and I knew a lot of people.” He then rattled off some names of successful producers and directors, as though if only he had impressed them before, then he’d be living in Bel Air by now. “So I had the relationships, I just didn’t know how to . . .” He moved his arms around as though to say he didn’t know how to schmooze, to do the dance. He seemed to see this as the gist of his failure.
“But my real problem,” he continued, “is that I don’t know how to write a dramatic moment.” How we’d gotten there, I wasn’t sure. “I do have confidence in my craft, but I’m not confident in the art of it. I know how to write things technically, but I don’t know how to write that big dramatic moment. I have to figure out how to do that.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure you can ‘figure out’ how to write a big dramatic moment, because a big dramatic moment by definition doesn’t come from the part of the mind that can figure things out. That’s why it’s called ‘drama.’ It has less to do with a rational formula and more to do with a spontaneous burst of emotional truth.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess . . .”
“So for that,” I continued, “you’ll need to learn to access your own authenticity and feeling. Otherwise, how can you convey it to others? I don’t know how you can access your authenticity when you seem to think you should be someone other than who you are, wanting something other than what you really want, and doing something other than what you want to be doing.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said, sighing. “I just gotta figure out how to do all that.”
Oy. “Well, you’re sort of doing it again. Maybe there’s nothing to figure out here at all. Maybe there’s just some insight you might want to let in. Your subconscious mind will do the rest. The subconscious is a better organizer than your conscious mind will ever be.”
He is probably wondering, at this point, who the crazy lady in the backseat is. My cappuccino is kicking in now.
“The universe can organize itself. The embryo doesn’t need to figure out how to become a baby. Buds don’t have to figure out how to become blossoms. Nature has its plan figured out.
“Or you can look at it this way,” I continued. Poor guy. I’m on a roll now.
“Think of a pile of iron shavings. Now, what’s the best way to form the shavings into a pattern, using your fingers or introducing a magnet?
“Your internal self is like a magnet. Call it the Christ, or your Inner Light, or whatever; there’s a spirit within you that naturally attracts all the patterns and details that would form your most beautiful life. Look what it arranged for you this morning!”
I laughed, as we pulled up to the Los Angeles airport and I searched the signs for Southwest Airlines.
“Yeah, I was thinking that . . . ,” he said. “Now what did you say you do?”
“Oh, I just talk about this stuff a lot,” I smiled, as I got out of the car.
The universe had indeed self-organized that morning. The young man received information that might help him in his work if he was open to it; and I got a demonstration of how people hold themselves back by not remembering who they are, suggesting to me that I should include the issue in this book, thus adding to my work!
Yet neither of us would have been so served had we not been open-hearted and open-minded enough to engage in friendly dialogue with the person in front of us. He had introduced himself to me; I had asked him about himself. Those two things—seemingly meaningless moments of human connection—opened the door through which the universe could provide its gifts to both of us.
Neither one of us could get the gift, however, unless we made ourselves available to receive it. He could have been preoccupied and not at all interested in interacting with the client in the backseat, and I could have been preoccupied and not at all interested in interacting with him. These are the kinds of ways we turn down miracles all the time. We fail to realize that what we need is available to us at every moment. Most of the time, we block our reception of a miracle by believing it couldn’t be that easy. But do flowers not grow easily? We think we know what we need, and what we need to do to make things happen. But do we, really? Just try strategizing a miracle.
People have no idea what they miss in life by discounting other people and the gifts they bring. In a universe where all is designed to provide us with perfect lessons in every moment, there are lessons awaiting us in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you’ve made the mistake of thinking someone “wasn’t important,” discounting that person in some way, only later to learn that he or she was exactly the person who might have helped you. Sometimes we’re so consumed with “becoming successful” that we forget the importance of being successful human beings, of deeply listening to other people, of showing up spontaneously for whatever life has to offer. Those of us who have made that mistake have found that it wasn’t ultimately good for business. My father used to say frequently, “Proud days soon pass.”
There’s no way to rationally formulate or predict where our next miracle will come from. In almost every moment, we’re at the right place at the right time if we step fully into the moment at hand.
It’s amazing how much our ego would separate work from love. We seem to think that success depends on what we do, but not necessarily on who we are. And nothing could be further from the truth. Anything that deters the flow of love deters the emergence of our success.
One common way that people deny the flow of miracles is by rejecting relationships on the basis that “I’m too busy with my career.” There is no greater career than being a fully alive, fully present, and fully loving human being. Someone you’re turning away from because the relationship will “take too much time” might be the one with whom you could have the experiences that pave the way to the very miracles you wish for. The universe doesn’t categorize between “love” and “work,” because in reality everything is love and everything is work!
Never think that turning away from love is a smart thing to do, or any sort of good career move. When you stop the flow of love pouring forth from your heart, you stop the flow of love pouring forth to your door. That applies as much to the flow of money as to the flow of anything else. Let it flow from you, and it will flow to you. Always.