If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.
—MARK 9:23
I guarantee you that this will be the most unusual discussion you have ever read on the subject of prosperity. The central message here, as in the rest of this book, is on rethinking the beliefs you have been taught to treat as sacred. For a moment, put aside the beliefs you have acted upon throughout your life, and imagine in your invisible mind what it is you would like to see in your life. What is your ultimate image of prosperity for your life? How much money, how much total prosperity would you truly like to have?
Now, open your eyes and see what you have created up until now. That’s right, you have created your own financial picture, and it is precisely what you have acted upon. This is the hardest part for most people to truly understand. Most of us want to blame others or something outside of ourselves for the way our prosperity picture looks.
But you only need to look inside yourself. You can have all of the prosperity you are willing to believe in and create for yourself. St. Mark does not say some things are possible and others are impossible. He says all things are possible. Keep this in mind as you prepare to create miracles of abundance in your life. Try to imagine a state of unlimited possibilities as being possible for you.
James Allen, in the nineteenth century, wrote the following words, in As a Man Thinketh, which I committed to memory as a young man. I have them taped to my bathroom mirror and to the dashboard of my car so I can be reminded of them every day. One simple sentence that, for me, tells it all: “Circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him.” Read these words over and over again until you have them committed to memory. The message of this sentence is at the very core of your ability to achieve a prosperity consciousness rather than a scarcity consciousness.
You probably will not immediately agree with this notion of our present life circumstance revealing who we are. It is easier to blame our life circumstances and it only seems proven by the poverty all around us. We feel we would be cruel to say that the circumstances of the poor reveal who they are. Surely those people did not choose such undesirable circumstances.
This well-intentioned thinking, however, allows you to hang onto your scarcity consciousness, and to defend your misery and your inability to transcend your life circumstances. We mistakenly believe that we cannot be compassionate and concerned about those in miserable circumstances while also encouraging ourselves and others to uncover any beliefs that may be contributing to the situation.
Stop and consider for a moment the potential benefits of applying this message for those who are living in the worst of circumstances. Then also consider all of the people who have shifted from a life of scarcity to one of prosperity. When you examine what it was that made the difference, without exception it includes the invisible world of beliefs and attitudes.
A radio talk show host accused me of having a cavalier attitude toward the poor when I described my philosophy on his program. My contention was that being broke is a temporary state of affairs that afflicts almost everyone at one time or another, but being poor is an attitude, a set of beliefs that gets reinforced when we shift to blaming life circumstances for the condition of poverty. One of the incoming calls in response to this radio conversation was from a physician in Washington, D.C., who had grown up in a family of thirteen children in total poverty in Jamaica. He disagreed with the host, saying:
I lived in dirt-poor conditions all of my life. I mean hungry, starving poverty. But I always had a vision of myself as a doctor. I could not lose that vision, and I would always tell my grandmother about that picture in my head. She was raising all of us on practically no income, and she always told me to never, but never, let the picture become blurred. She told me about the value of that inner picture, and that if I always kept it, and believed in it, I would only have that picture to act upon.
As I got older and finished high school, I applied to several hundred schools in premed curricula, and I was rejected over and over again, but I could not shake that picture that my grandmother helped me to have as a ragtag little boy playing with the chickens in our little hut in Jamaica. Finally I was given a conditional opportunity to enroll in a premed program in Europe, and I worked my way there and all through school.
Today I am a physician with a thriving practice. Without that vision, without that invisible picture in my mind, I could never have escaped the life of poverty that continues today for most of my brothers and sisters and all of my friends there. They live in poverty and believe that life dealt them a stacked deck, and that I was lucky. But I know better. I am living the life I pictured for myself.
And Dr. Dyer, don’t you ever let anyone dissuade you from telling the truths that you know, because you are doing much more to help those in horrible circumstances than those who buy the big lie that their lives are beyond their own control.
I cannot stop telling those truths because I too am a living, breathing example of what I am writing about. I also left a life of scarcity behind me, and I too know the singularly powerful role that my beliefs within my mind played in creating a life of prosperity. Indeed, circumstances do not make a person, they reveal him, and I encourage you to suspend any erroneous belief that this may apply exclusively to Wayne Dyer and a physician in Washington, D.C., but has nothing to do with you.
It has everything to do with you. It transcends individual lives because it involves universal laws and principles that were here long before you showed up in your current physical form. I am just reporting on what I know to be true for myself and many others. If you want to experience prosperity at a miraculous level, you must leave behind your old ways of thinking and develop a new way of imagining what is possible for you to experience in your life.
FIVE ASPECTS OF A PROSPERITY CONSCIOUSNESS
Take an inner inventory and see if the following statements are a part of your consciousness.
• There is not enough to go around.
• You have to get yours or someone else will grab it before you.
• There are only so many fish in the sea.
• You never know if opportunity will knock.
If these and similar thoughts are part of your personal inventory then probably you were taught that you are living in a world of shortages. You have been raised to believe in scarcity. The concept of lack has been embedded into your belief system.
In order to develop an inner vision of prosperity, you will have to shed this old vision of scarcity. The following five essentials of a prosperity consciousness can help you make the shift.
1. You don’t need anything else to experience prosperity. Getting rid of a scarcity consciousness means changing the inner pictures that reflect a lack in your life. You already have everything that you need in order to experience a lifetime of prosperity. Truly you are not going to get “it” all, you are “it” all already. Prosperity is first and foremost a mind game. It is a set of inner invisible beliefs you carry around with you. You must know you have all that you need right now; you are lacking nothing to gain prosperity for yourself. I have always enjoyed the following story, which perfectly illustrates this principle.
A man who was ragged and appeared to be without anything in a physical sense came upon a road boss and said, “Can you help me? I need work.”
The road boss said, “Fine, take that large boulder over there and roll it up and down the hill. If you need work that will fulfill your need.”
The man said, “You don’t understand, what I really need is money.”
The boss replied, “Oh, if it is only money that you need, here is fifty dollars. But you cannot spend it.”
Again the man was perplexed. “You don’t understand, what I really need is food and fuel and clothing, not just money.”
The boss again replied, “If you are sure that this is what you need, then spend the money for food, fuel and clothing, but don’t eat the food, or burn the fuel or wear the clothing.”
The man was finally forced to look at what he really needed, which was a sense of security, peace and inner satisfaction. All totally invisible, all within the mind. All divine sustenance.
You are led to believe that the material things are reality and are providing you with what you need, while in fact they are only more matter, which is made up of more invisible space. What you need, you already have, and when you know it, and go within and create it in your mind, the divine sustenance you seek in the form of material things or money will be manifested in whatever amounts needed.
You must develop this new inner sense, and trust in the magic of believing. Your beliefs are yours, they originate with you, they are what you use (and all that you have to use) to carve out the circumstances of your physical reality. When you tell yourself otherwise, you are tapping into your scarcity consciousness and creating the very thing you most despise as your physical reality.
Trust in the power of your mind, in the knowing I have been writing since page 1 of this book,, in that divine guidance that is readily available to you, and you will have reached the first step toward manifesting the miracle of prosperity for yourself.
2. You cannot create prosperity if you believe in lacks. When you have mastered the ability to become a spiritual being as outlined in the first part of this book, you will begin to understand that who you are is located in that invisible, dimensionless realm that we call your thoughts. You have no boundaries and no limits. Understanding this means knowing that you lack absolutely nothing—all that you need for your life is already here, and was within you when you first arrived here in the physical world.
When you say to yourself, “I don’t have enough money,” or, “I don’t have enough education, talent or strength to experience prosperity,” you are operating in your mental world from a position of lack. Hence you are unable to go into the world of real magic.
To overcome this way of thinking, you will have to reeducate, or better yet, dehypnotize yourself from the lie that has been foisted upon you by every strand of our Western culture. Everything that you need, you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.
When the time arrives for you to depart this physical world, you cannot say, “Wait a minute here, I’m not ready, I am still in training, I have more schooling to attend to, I am building up my strength, I have to collect more money.” You will leave your body, and it will still weigh the same. Your life is not that body, it is not in those boundaries and those limitations. It is invisible and weightless. It lacks absolutely nothing.
Whatever you have created for your physical body in the way of material things is the result of that complete invisible mind of yours. The irony of all of this is that when you know you are already complete, you begin to motivate yourself in a totally different way.
What you have become accustomed to is called deficiency motivation. That is, you assess all of the things that are missing or deficient in your life, and then you set up a plan to repair all of those deficiencies. “I need more money, more strength, more power, more beauty, more possessions,” and so on. “When I get those things, I will have prosperity.” Thus, you set your goals and go to work at becoming prosperous. But this is a gigantic trap. You can never experience prosperity from this mind-set, because you will always be suffering from the disease of more.
When you get the money you thought you needed to be prosperous, your mind-set hasn’t been satisfied. Your mind-set is focused on more—on striving, not arriving. Thus you upgrade your number, and continue to struggle and suffer and even deny yourself in the pursuit of more. This is a common theme in our culture. Prosperity is simply impossible with deficiency motivation, in which the thought is, “I don’t have enough,” or, “Something is missing.” A central theme of this book is, “As you think so shall you be.” If your thoughts are centered on what is missing, then “what’s missing,” by definition, will have to expand. That will be your experience of this material world. What’s missing will be your trademark and your experience of your physical reality.
There is another kind of motivation, called growth motivation, and this is the trademark of the individual who experiences real magic in the area of prosperity. With growth motivation, you simply change around the inner thinking, and decide to do your living within a framework of completeness. The inner dialogue goes something like this: “I am whole, complete, total, fully alive in this moment. This is it! I am it all, I need no more to be happy or fulfilled. Yet I know that I will be different tomorrow. My physical reality is always changing. The molecules that made up my material self yesterday will be replaced by new molecules. The physical body that I had ten years ago is completely new in a physical sense today. But I am also something other than a mere physical collection of molecules. I am divine necessity that reaches beyond the physical. I will grow. I will become something new and grand, but no grander than I now am. Just as the sky will be different in a few hours, its present perfection and completeness is not deficient, so am I presently perfect and not deficient because I will be different tomorrow. I will grow and I am not deficient.”
With this kind of thinking, lacks are impossible. You begin to be motivated in your life by your own bliss, by your dreams, to live the life that you imagine to be your calling, your divinely specialized mission for being here, and prosperity becomes your very watchword. Abundance rains into your life. The universe begins to provide precisely what you need, and it is not doing so to fill a lack of anything; it arrives in your life in the precise amount necessary to help you fulfill your dreams. When you no longer feel you are lacking something, you can live the life you know is perfect for you, and then, more and more of the symbols of prosperity (money, stuff, power, and so on) seem to arrive in your life. A simplified summary of this is: More is less, less is more.
3. You are not separated into categories. You are at once the seer, seeing and the seen. To know true prosperity, you must learn to stop dividing yourself up and separating yourself from your prosperity.
There are not three of you in this world. There is not the observer, the observed, and the act of observing. What you observe is within you. Your observations are within you, and so is the entire process of observing. This is all you. Prosperous thoughts are yours, they are you. So too is what you observe as prosperity within you. And finally, the concept of being prosperous is all located within you as well. This may sound confusing, but it is crucial for you to grasp your oneness in all of this if you are ever going to know and become prosperity yourself. Ken Wilbur, in his fascinating book No Boundary, describes it like this; let these thoughts in as you prepare yourself for miracles in this dimension of prosperity:
The split between the experiencer and the world of experience does not exist, and therefore cannot be found. Initially this sounds very strange, because we are so used to believing in boundaries. It seems so obvious that I am the hearer who hears sounds, that I am the feeler who feels feelings, that I am the seer who sees sights. But, on the other hand, isn’t it odd that I should describe myself as the seer who sees the seen? Or the hearer who hears the sounds heard? Is perception really that complicated? Does it really involve three separate entities—a seer, seeing, and the seen? Surely there aren’t three separate entities here. Is there ever such a thing as a seer without seeing or without something seen? … Our problem is that we have three words—the “seer,” “sees” and the “seen,” for one single activity, the experience of seeing.
You must learn to go beyond your hypnotized state, which has convinced you that here is first you the thinker, then you the doer, and finally the concept of what it is that you are thinking and doing. All of this is actually one and the same.
This is how prosperity works for those who live it each day. All of what you have previously divided up as prosperity thinking, prosperous behavior and something called prosperity that is located “out there,” must be thought of as one. And that one can be you if you elect it! When you understand this, you will stop looking for prosperity as if it were something that you can wrench from its hiding place. You stop saying to yourself, “All I have to do is think prosperous thoughts, and it will come to me.” You stop setting goals for your own conduct that will lead you to this elusive thing called prosperity.
What you replace this triumvirate with is a singularity of thought and action, which reflects your understanding that you are prosperity if you believe in it. What you need for a prosperous life, you already are. It is all you, there are no boundaries despite the fact that we have invented different words to describe various facets of how we have chosen to perceive it. Wilber sums up the insanity of this boundaried thinking with this example: “We might as well describe a single water stream as ‘the streamer streams the streamed.’ It is utterly redundant, and introduces three factors where there is in fact but one.”
Now, take this awareness and implant it in your consciousness. You are not going to find prosperity. It will flow into your life only when you grasp this notion of your singularity. When you know it, your actions will reflect it. The very same thing may be said of scarcity. If you think scarcity thoughts, and act in scarcity ways, your life will be scarcity. You are what you think about, since that is all you have to act upon.
If scarcity is a word that defines your life right now, understand that it is not something that was visited upon you, it is simply your way of processing your life. You have divided yourself up as a thinker and a doer, victimized by something outside of you called scarcity. But in reality, you are scarcity. The choice of prosperity begins with your refusal to further splinter yourself, and instead to see the oneness that exists as you.
4. You cannot experience prosperity if you believe that you don’t deserve it. As I’ve said many times already, you exist as a divine, spiritual being having a human experience. Your essence, your very life, is invisible and boundless. In this realm, there are no judgments to be made. There is no one in this universe, now or ever, that is any better or more worthy of anything. Those who were born of royal blood are treated as royalty because some human beings have decided to elevate them. But in a much larger sense, through God’s eyes, there is no “better” or “worse.” It is this kind of thinking that you must learn to employ if prosperity is to replace scarcity as your way of living.
If you believe that you are undeserving of prosperity, that is the thought upon which you will conduct your life. You will not attract prosperity by thinking that you are undeserving, any more than you attract love by viewing yourself as contemptible. Surrender the idea that you are inferior. You are neither superior nor inferior, you simply are. And what you are deserves prosperity!
How can one invisible thought be more or less valuable than another invisible thought? When you view yourself as a spiritual being, when you create a real-magic mind-set of yourself as a thinking being first and foremost, then you stop the incessant comparison that leads you to believe that others are more deserving of prosperity. You are in a partnership with all other human beings, not a contest to be judged better than some and worse than others.
Once again, you have to undo the hypnotized state that led you to this kind of attitude. It began in your schooling, and it continues today. Here is John Holt on this subject, writing in How Children Fail:
We destroy the … love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards—gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean’s lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys—in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.
There it is, that business of getting people to believe that they are better than others. You very likely have bought into this big lie in some areas of your life. How could you deserve to think of yourself as a special divine necessity when you didn’t measure up to the way others were performing or looking? You learned to compare yourself with others and even to believe that this is only human nature. It is the very thing that has not allowed you to develop a self-concept based upon being valuable, deserving and divine. On this subject of human nature, here is what John Stuart Mill wrote in Principles of Political Economy:
Of all the vulgar models of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influence on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences.
Indeed it is a vulgar model, one that teaches people to grow into adults who believe that it is only natural to compare oneself with others, and it is therefore only natural to learn to play dirty in order to get ahead of the other guys. And if some do not measure up in physical or material ways to others, that is an indication that they are not deserving. It is a vulgar, obscene system that contributes to the creation of large numbers of people who know no other way to assess their own value other than in comparison with others, and in so doing, it creates many who simply begin to think that they are not deserving of prosperity in any sense of the word.
A competitive culture endures by tearing others down. A cooperative culture evolves by helping each person to appreciate their own value and to feel deserving and spiritually valid. The choice is yours. Even if all those around you choose to be in competition with each other, you do not have to live by that model. You can see that you are just as deserving of prosperity as anyone else on this planet. With that kind of mind-set, you will no longer act in nondeserving ways.
5. Rejoice in the prosperity of others. When you feel contemptuous, or even a twinge of jealousy, toward the accomplishments or life-styles of others, you are harboring negativity, where love must reside. When you have only love within you, because that is how you choose to regard life, that is all you will have to give away. Thus, you can test yourself by checking how you feel toward people who have acquired a dimension of prosperity that is still eluding you. You cannot attract prosperity to yourself if you are filled with rancor, judgment, anger, jealousy, hatred, fear, tension or the like. This kind of negative inner mind-set keeps you from being on purpose. You cannot be fulfilled and envious at the same time.
If you feel satisfied and happy, that is what you have to give away. Foster an inner belief that anyone who has achieved prosperity is entitled to it, and that their success is not a reason for you to feel inadequate or wanting. Even if a person achieves prosperity through what you consider devious means, it is still not a reason for you to feel anguished and upset. Know in your heart that those who use others will be dealt with by a universe that works on purpose and harmony. But for the most part, those who have achieved their own measure of prosperity deserve only your love.
Try to shift your focus from what others have or don’t have to what you are going to do for yourself. Remember, when you evaluate and judge others you do not define them, you define yourself. Do you want to define yourself as a jealous, nonloving being if that is what will then expand in your life? Rejoice in the great prosperity that you witness in all others. Let go of the notion that it shouldn’t be that way. It is that way! That is all that you need to know. So too are you that way, whatever that way is in your life. Have a quiet acceptance of what is, send it love and then get on with the business of creating a full, prosperous, loving life for yourself.
These are the five factors that are most crucial for getting to a prosperity consciousness. Once you are working each day on developing this way of being, your higher self will begin to allow you to experience more and more prosperity in your life. This new consciousness will lead you back to that all-important dimension that is a central theme of this book: living your life on purpose.
PURPOSE AND PROSPERITY: YOUR TICKET TO REAL MAGIC
As you’ve seen throughout this book, you can only experience real magic when you get your life to purpose. When you are focused on learning through suffering or learning through outcome, you are using hindsight as your guide, and consequently you pay a heavy price in your everyday life.
In the area of your work, you may have been spending a great deal of time and energy doing things that you dislike, but telling yourself that it was absolutely necessary because you had bills to pay or a family to care for, or you simply had no other choice. Think about it this way, using numbers as a metaphor: If you are 99 percent invisible (thought and spirit), and only 1 percent form (the physical body that houses your soul), and you are doing something that you loathe, then you are essentially an inauthentic person. Your body is going through the motions, while you continue to think about how much you dislike the circumstances of your life. One percent is going through the motions, and 99 percent loathes the activities of your life. So if what you think about is what expands into action, the action or physical part of your life is loathsome and awful. You cannot experience fulfillment or the opportunity for prosperity miracles while you are living a life of loathsomeness. There must be bliss and harmony within in order for you to know miracles. Thus you must shift from suffering and outcome to purpose.
Getting to purpose in the work that you do, or the daily activities of your life, means knowing that purpose is about giving without concern for the results. When you are able to shift your inner awareness to how you can serve others, and when you make this the central focus of your life, you will then be in a position to know true miracles in your progress toward prosperity. There will be no limit to what you will receive in return for your giving and sharing, when giving and sharing are all that you have to give away.
Prosperity can be thought of as having limitless abundance in your life. You will never get to that point by hoarding, or focusing on what is in it for you. Remember, in a much larger sense, you cannot own anything while you are here, you cannot acquire anything—your life can only be given away. This is the area that you must learn to work on in order to be able to experience unlimited abundance and prosperity in your life.
The moment that you realize that giving is the key to your own abundance, you will also see that prosperity is readily available. It is not that difficult to give yourself away. Or is it? For some, they do not perceive the irony here. They want a life of prosperity, but concentrate exclusively on what is in it for them. Consequently they work, and struggle, and set goals, but they never seem to arrive, they never have enough. But, when you study highly successful people in all fields of endeavor, you find that they are not truly focused on the results that will accrue to them personally. Here is a perfect example, as reported in Srikumar S. Rao’s June 1991 article in Success magazine titled, “The Superachiever’s Secret”:
One day, Mehdi Fakharzadeh, Metropolitan Life’s top agent, went to see a policyholder who suffered from heart disease and was filing a claim. There was no prospect of selling him more insurance. Most agents (striving for their goals) would have just handed the man a form and left. Not Mehdi, who had “surrendered to the process” of helping people. Mehdi filled out the form for him. When he found out the man also had policies with other insurers, he got forms from them, filled them out, and made sure the refunds came through.
The man pressed payment on Mehdi, which Mehdi politely declined. But a few days later, Mehdi received in the mail a list of 21 of the man’s friends and relatives: names, dates of birth, number of children—with a personal introduction to each. Mehdi sold millions of dollars in insurance to them.
When you constantly remind yourself of the overriding spiritual, social or loving purpose that drives your work, you will find your entire state of prosperity shifting. Uppermost in your mind is how you can serve the needs of those around you by focusing always on their needs and their quotas. Being on purpose generally means that you are at peace with yourself, and that peace is what you have to give away.
My experience writing and speaking throughout the world and my personal contacts with thousands of people have led me to believe that this is the one secret shared by those who are experiencing prosperity miracles in their own lives. What goes around truly does come around. The more you give away and do everything that you do in the service of others, the more that seems to come back. And when it comes back, since you are not interested in hoarding or owning it, you are more inclined to give that away, and the cycle of real magic takes root.
This lesson of prosperity applies to all fields of endeavor. An airline business, for example, which is focused on serving its travelers, will prosper most greatly when the entire fabric of the organization is based on serving others. When that sense of serving is neglected at any level of the business, the entire organization suffers. Boarding an airplane early one time, I overheard the sarcastic voice of a flight attendant say, “Here come the animals.” I knew it was only a matter of time until that organization would perish from a scarcity of passengers. Sure enough, they have gone into bankruptcy. Employees need to know in their souls that they are privileged to serve those who are willing to give of their own incomes to use the service. The customers are responsible for their having jobs, and they should be valued and coddled and appreciated. The total emphasis needs to be on serving, forgetting about how convenient or inconvenient it is for the servers. This applies to whatever it is that you do. When you work in a dentist’s office, your goal is to serve and help others to improve the quality of their lives. If it is to make money, to get the patients in and out as fast as possible, the entire office will experience scarcity, not prosperity.
But I am not writing this book to an organization, I am writing to you, dear reader. You can shift your consciousness all you want, but you must also shift the emphasis of what you do from outcome and results in your own life, to purpose. Try it! Shift for a one-month period of time, and see if miracles don’t start showing up in your life.
Being on purpose in your life activities is simply a matter of changing around your own inner beliefs. You do not necessarily need to change positions or move to another location, for it is in the giving that you will experience this real magic. In the Bhagavad Gita, God’s words to Arjuna, the mighty warrior, are quite simple in this regard: “Strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world; by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life. Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind.” Notice that the emphasis is on what you have “in mind.” God’s final words to Arjuna are as follows: “The ignorant work for their own profit, Arjuna; the wise work for the welfare of the world, without thought for themselves.”
While this may seem like too lofty a notion for you, I assure you that the benefits of this way of thinking are available for you right now. You do not need to memorize a set of lofty principles. Rather, you must simply get in touch with your higher self, which is always with you, and allow this natural part of you to take over. It turns out to be a very easy and fascinating way to live, and it comes not from trying harder but by relaxing and removing the pressures from yourself.
The less you need to force this new way of being on yourself, the easier it becomes to let it be the guiding principle of your life. A quick look back at the characteristics of a spiritual versus a nonspiritual being shows you that this is more a mental exercise than a physical one. It is about allowing your natural self to flow peacefully and knowing that fulfillment comes from giving, not getting. Letting yourself just flow is a concept that you will want to become quite familiar with as you begin to allow the prosperity that you desire into your life.
GETTING TO “FLOW”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Flow, studied superachievers—including executives, top athletes and artists—who have gained a life of prosperity. He describes the principle of flow as an investment in ourselves to our limits, in which we experience complete joy in our working present moments. He says that “once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to achieve it.”
Earlier, in Part 1, I discussed how everything seems to work perfectly in our lives when we are inspired. Flow is that kind of an inspiration, one so powerful that all obstacles seem to be removed and we are in love with what we are doing so much that it seems to just flow without any effort from us at all. You can experience flow in virtually anything.
I experience this effortless perfection when I am so involved in my presentation on stage that time seems to stand still, and hours go by in what seems to me to be minutes. Also, when I am totally involved and inspired in my writing, the typewriter seems to almost smoke as I fill page after page without any effort. Sometimes I feel as if I (the invisible me) am actually watching someone else writing, it is all flowing so perfectly. You have very likely known this feeling during an ecstatically divine lovemaking experience, in which time literally stood still and you knew complete joy. You can also get to flow in your work and in your daily activities, without waiting for those magic moments to appear as if they were directed by someone other than yourself.
Getting to flow in your life means achieving a state of concentration so total that everything else becomes nonexistent. People who experience prosperity in their lives know how to achieve this magnificent state, wherein their activities, instead of being a tedious set of chores to finish, become more like a meditation, only they are active and involved rather than sitting quietly. Flow has a great deal to do with purpose in your activities. When you are able to suspend your physical body as well as your ego, and allow your invisible self to emerge totally into what you are doing, your higher self is directing and producing and your body is merely going through the motions without any judgment from you. When you are in this state, you experience in your body a kind of unattached bliss that is saying to you, “This is why you are here, this is what you are supposed to be doing right now. You are fulfilling your grand mission and nothing else will be in your way.” You are literally watching your body do things that are incredible, you are experiencing magnificent joy or bliss, and nothing can get in your way. You are on purpose, and you are having the kind of peak experience that others can only dream about.
There is a way to get to this state of flow. While Csikszentmihalyi describes this process in detail, Professor Rao of Long Island University summed up the process in the Success article I’ve already referred to. His summary points reflect what I have been writing about in this book. They are not only the secrets to becoming a superachiever in the workplace, they are the secrets for producing genuine miracles in your life. Following is a discussion of the five points involved in getting to the state of flow.
1. Have an overriding spiritual goal that gives meaning to your work. This means forgetting about yourself and shifting your total energy to how you can best serve others. Make your work a meditative experience, and instead of seeing yourself as doing a particular task, you actually, in your mind, become the task. You shift from a human doing to a human being. You literally become the ball in a tennis match, you become the report that you are working on, you become the book that you are writing, you become the meal that you are preparing. There is no separation, you and the task are unified, all in the name of that overriding spiritual objective to give of yourself in a purposeful way.
2. Focus, and close your mind to all distractions. Your mind is so powerful that it does not need to be continuously distracted by extraneous activities. You can train your mind to focus, and this is why I have been encouraging you to learn to meditate. Give your mind the same mental training that you give your body when you want your body to be in maximum physical condition. You need not be a slave to your senses. You can create an atmosphere in which your mind is clear and free of distractions, where you tolerate no interruptions.
I am writing in this very present moment while on Maui with my wife and seven children and their constant flow of playmates. However, I have chosen to create an environment for myself within this beautiful chaos that I also treasure. I have rented a tiny apartment for the summer. I have the only key. The phone is disconnected. I awake at 5:00 each morning, and after meditating I immerse myself in my writing and research. There can be no interruptions, no one knows where to interrupt me other than my wife (who also uses this space in the afternoons to concentrate on her writing projects). I can totally focus my mind and subsequently my physical output.
You can create this kind of atmosphere for yourself. You can train yourself to eliminate the endless mind chatter that fills your consciousness. You can reach that higher place within yourself and let all other distractions stay away. When you do, you will begin to know about flow, and you will also begin to see real magic appear in your activities. This can be done on the job, in your home or in a quiet place somewhere else. Focusing is your natural knowing within. You can either ignore it, or go there often.
3. Surrender to the process. You must resist your impulse to strive for what you want. (Does this sound familiar? I have been saying this from part 1!) In the system described in Flow, the world works with you, so you must be with the actual process and let go of your learned instinct to strive and struggle. Surrender to God, or your higher power, the invisible force that is always with you, that is beyond your five senses. You must let go and surrender to the actual process. Forget about the result, the reward, the money, the trophy, the accolades, and put your mind and your physical body totally into the experience at hand. It is not that difficult to achieve. Read what Robert Coram wrote in Political Inquiries back in 1791:
At every quarterly examination a gold medal was given to the best writer. When the first medal was offered, it produced rather a general contention than an emulation and diffused a spirit of envy, jealousy, and discord through the whole school; boys who were bosom friends before became fierce contentious rivals, and when the prize was adjudged became implacable enemies. Those who were advanced decried the weaker performances; each wished his opponent’s abilities less than his own, and they used all their little arts to misrepresent and abuse each other’s performances.
So, if you choose to stay with results rather than process, you can produce for yourself envy, jealousy and discord. If you make the shift, you can create flow, which leads to prosperity and the awareness of personal miracles in your performances. How do you surrender? Just let go! Don’t strain to achieve; instead, enjoy the process of the work that you are doing. The results will come independent of your striving for them. When your mind is on the result rather than what you are doing, you create inner discord that blocks any and all possibilities for miracles to show up. Prosperity is about process, not outcome. Process is about purpose. Purpose is about loving and giving.
4. Experience the ecstasy. This is the automatic result that will flow to you from following the above guidelines. You will know a kind of inner beatitude and bliss that will be unmistakable. It will sneak up on you and hit you over the head, so to speak, but nevertheless, you will know that glorious emotional peak experience if you get yourself to flow in your life.
It is the exact same feeling I described in the section on meditation in chapter 3. The reason it is the same feeling is because you are actually meditating your way through your work, and the automatic reward that comes without striving is that magical feeling akin to a warm shower running inside of you. It will lift you up and put you in touch with the inner knowing that you are finally on the right path. The ecstasy is its own miracle.
5. Watch as you see yourself reaching peak productivity without striving. Your state of ecstasy opens up new vistas of creativity and energy. This natural state of bliss is the key to improving your performance. This is the state that superachievers are able to create for themselves. The irony here is that this increased productivity is the result of having reached the state of ecstasy. The processes of surrendering, focusing and living at purpose lead to ecstasy. When you feel that inner bliss, you simply want more and more of it. The more of it that you are able to create for yourself, the more productive you become.
This is how it goes for me. When I am feeling that inner glow from being purposeful, and not focusing on the outcome, I want to write and write all day. Or I want to stay on stage and give and give, and when a talk is completed, I still want to stay with the people for hours and hours. Long after most speakers are back in their hotel beds, I am still talking to those who want to stick around and continue the process. The more ecstasy I am able to create through this method of flow, the more productive I become, and the paradox is that I am not the least bit focused on being productive and producing results.
I have used the following Thoreau quote in each of my last three books and I offered it as one of the secrets of the universe in my novel, Gifts from Eykis. It seems most appropriate to conclude this section with it once more. I cannot hear it enough, and I am trusting that you too want to be reminded of the real magical wisdom that is inherent in these words:
If one advances confidently in the direction of his own dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
This happens in that invisible place. The emphasis is on “dreams” and “imagined,” both of which are thoughts. Your thoughts create all of this ecstasy and ultimately all of the miracles that are going to come into your life in the form of increased prosperity. Your mind is very powerful in terms of what it can produce in your physical reality, as well as in the physical reality beyond your own borders.
USING YOUR MIND TO MANIFEST PROSPERITY
You are now on a path of working toward reversing scarcity consciousness to one of prosperity. This is largely a mental game. You must convince yourself that you and only you are responsible for the pictures in your mind. You must know how very powerful your picturing process is in creating the material world that you experience.
In sports, those who excel beyond their peers picture in advance how they want to hit, place and kick the ball. The mental part, the invisible part literally, and I truly mean literally, shapes the way the physical results are manifested. Rickert Fillmore, the son of one of the founders of the Unity Christian Church, was asked if this principle applies to the selling of real estate, and he responded, “If it works at all, it works everywhere.”
This is a universal principle. It does not work only on Sunday mornings or only for some people. This is a vital, alive factor of the universe that you are a part of and that is a part of you. Any area of inquiry by any human being is a part of this process. What you can conceive of as a picture in your mind, you can create in the physical world, provided you do not let go of the picture. The more you know this, the more you will see it manifesting in your life. Aristotle said it this way—“The soul never thinks without a picture”—ancient wisdom that applies today in your life.
In sales, the individuals who have their minds made up that they cannot consummate the deal will act on this invisible picture, and proceed to sabotage the closing. Sentences such as, “I’ve never been able to do this,” “I know I am wasting my time,” “They are not really going to buy this from me,” are all road maps etched within the consciousness leading to fulfillment of that very prophecy. If you shifted those sentences around to reflect your purpose of giving and serving that prospect, your mind would be repeating these kinds of inner sentences: “It is impossible for me to waste my time in helping another person” and “They will receive the fruits of my loving intention.” “If anyone can do this thing well, then I too have that capacity.” “The intelligence that runs through others runs through me as well.” The picturing process is the way to create a prosperity consciousness within your mind. No one can ever take that away from you.
My wife and I are currently having our children take lessons from acknowledged masters in the art of meditating and learning to trust one’s inner vision. We do this not to give them an advantage over others, but for the purpose of their knowing that they have something within them that no one can ever take from them, regardless of the material circumstances of their lives. They are learning very early that their peace and tranquillity as human beings is dependent upon themselves, and that they have a special retreat within that is always available to them, once they have learned how to enter that special kingdom. They will learn what the title of a favorite poem of mine means, as they practice it in their daily lives.
The following five stanzas are from this poem, “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,” by the sixteenth-century poet Sir Edward Dyer (a spiritual relative?):
My Mind to me a kingdom is,
Such present joys therein I find,
That it excels all other bliss
That earth affords or grows by kind;
Though much I want which most would have,
Yet still my mind forbids to crave.
No princely pomp, no wealthy store,
No force to win the victory,
No wily wit to salve a sore,
No shape to feed a loving eye;
To none of these I yield as thrall:
For why? My mind doth serve for all.
I see how plenty surfeits oft,
And hasty climbers soon do fall;
I see that those which are aloft
Mishap doth threaten most of all,
They get with toil, they keep with fear;
Such cares my mind could never bear.
Content to live, this is my stay;
I seek no more than may suffice;
I press to bear no haughty sway;
Look, what I lack my mind supplies:
Lo, thus I triumph like a king.
Content with that my mind doth bring.
Some have too much, yet still do crave;
I little have, and seek no more.
They are but poor, though much they have,
And I am rich with little store;
They poor, I rich; they beg, I give;
They lack, I leave; they pine, I live.
While the rhyme scheme may seem a bit outdated to those of you used to more modern poetry, the message is indeed provocative. All the luxuries of life bring with them attendant suffering, unless you know that within you is the kingdom of serenity that can create all of the prosperity that you could ever want. You can translate the message of this poem to every single form of human activity. Your mind is that kingdom, capable of creating any picture that it wants. And once you know that the picture you want is one of prosperity, that is what will be attracted to you, based upon the actions that will flow from those images.
Two cooks in the kitchen follow the exact same recipe, item for item, following each and every detail in precise order and using the same oven. One has a cake that is grand and delicious, the other experiences something quite the opposite—a flop! Why? Their minds picture what they want to create. One has a picture in mind of a positive outcome, knows within that this is going to be a grand cake, and sees the result in advance, even if it is on an unconscious level. The other has a completely different mind-set, one of doubt and fear, and approaches the entire project from a scarcity image. Even though the second cook follows the recipe in exact detail, the cake is exactly what was predicted: “I am not good at this sort of thing, and I know this won’t turn out.” Sound like a fairy tale? It is impossible for different outcomes, you say, if both follow the same directions.
I have witnessed this type of thing in my own life over and over. Somehow I learned as a young boy that cooking and drawing were not my fortes. Even when I followed the instructions exactly, such as in painting by numbers, filling in every number with the exact paint that was indicated, my painting would turn out like a disaster and my brother Jim’s would end up being framed and hung on the wall. Jim knew that he could produce a masterpiece, Wayne knew that his would be a disaster. Same paint, same brushes, same numbers, same everything, except the knowing and hence the result. This was true also of my cake-baking episodes. I could follow the physical directions, but nothing could shake my mental picture, and my mental picture is what turned out to be the reality. Our beliefs are invisible ingredients in all of our activities.
There is a magic in believing that transcends logic. Prosperity in all things, including money, flows from those pictures. Yes, I am saying that we can actually affect the physical world and all of the circumstances of our lives by the way we use our minds. Money and wealth can and will flow into your life when you follow the principles of prosperity consciousness. It works in athletics, selling, cooking, surgery, taxi driving and even your own personal bank account.
Most of us believe that money-making is a game that is played with forces outside of ourselves, forces such as the economy, the stock market, interest rates, the Fed, government policies, employment statistics and the like. But as you move along the spiritual path and begin to get a taste of the power of your invisible self, you discover that money-making is merely a game that you play with yourself. Creating money is just like creating anything else in your life. It involves not being attached to it, and not giving it power over your life in any way. Authentic power does not come to you from the acquisition of money, because without the money you would then be powerless. Authentic power comes from your soul, that magical place that is always within you.
Prosperity in the form of wealth works exactly the same as everything else. You will see it coming into your life when you are unattached to needing it. You will see it flowing into your life when you are in flow and giving of yourself in a purposeful manner. Money—like health, love, happiness and all forms of miraculous happenings that you want to create for yourself—is the result of your living purposefully. It is not a goal unto itself. If you chase after it, it will always elude you. You will never have enough, and you will suffer enormously as a result.
There are examples everywhere of people who have large amounts of money but are purposeless in their souls. Famous actors and actresses plagued by drug habits, committing suicide at what others thought of as the peak of their careers. Hotshot businessmen plagued by fear, wracked with ulcers, and ending their lives because of business failures. Divorce rates among the very wealthy, skyrocketing along with painful courtroom squabbles over who gets what. Lottery winners plagued with alcoholism and ending up bankrupt or suicidal even though they are in possession of unimaginable bank accounts. When wealth is the reason for your activities, and the quality of your life is based on what you have accumulated compared with others, then prosperity is impossible. You will be back at suffering as your means of enlightenment.
When you are on purpose, doing what you know you are here for, and forgetting about what will come into your life in the way of money and wealth, then money and wealth arrive in your life in amounts sufficient to provide you with a life of prosperity. And this is real magic in action. I can say this because it has always worked for me. When I chased after money, I never had enough. When I got my life on purpose and focused on giving of myself and everything that arrived into my life, then I was prosperous.
Prosperity is not the result of following a strict set of gimmicks and strategies, it is a mind-set, a mind-set that is centered on your ability to manifest miracles. Whatever you have believed to be impossible, shift it around to create an inner prosperity picture.
What follows are guidelines that you can use as you start to befriend your own miracle-making potential. Scarcity can go right out the window, replaced by the abundance that you once believed was only available for those lucky others.
APPLYING PROSPERITY PRINCIPLES IN YOUR DAILY LIFE
Paramahansa Yogananda put it in these words:
Possession of material riches, without inner peace, is like dying of thirst while bathing in a lake. If material poverty is to be avoided, spiritual poverty is to be abhorred! For it is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.
To create a world of real magic for yourself, keep these words in mind. First and foremost, your objective is to create a kind of spiritual consciousness within yourself. Then allow the universe to take over in all of its perfection.
• Disdain all disbelief! Work out a system within your mind that allows you to imagine yourself living a prosperous life, with all the material things that are necessary. Send scarcity out of your mind and refuse to have those kinds of thoughts. When an old habitual scarcity thought begins to enter your consciousness, simply say, “Next!” That’s right, simply say to yourself, “next,” and it will remind you that the old thought is now finished, and you are entering a new prosperous thought process. Using “next” as a magic word will remind you to get on with the magic of believing, rather than the anguish of doubt. Commit to paper precisely what you would like to have appear in your physical life. By seeing it and reading it repeatedly you will plant that thought more firmly in your mind and you will begin to manifest that which you are imaging. I use this writing technique often, and I place the affirmation in a place that forces me to constantly read the words of the miracle I am in the process of manifesting.
• Keep a corner of your mind focused exclusively on your images of prosperity. Go there often and use the power of your mind to sharpen your images of prosperity. Get down to specific details about what is there for you. Remind yourself that you deserve this corner of freedom that is uniquely your own and that no one can take from you. Don’t think for a moment that you have to win the lottery or have some unusually lucky circumstance show up in order for you to have this miracle in your mind become your reality. Just stay with the picture, or that real-magic zone that you are creating. You will soon be acting upon those images as well as attracting prosperity to you. Here is an example of what I am talking about, taken from a fabulous book called The Magic of Believing, by Claude Bristol:
And this brings us to the law of suggestion, through which all forces operating within its limits are capable of producing phenomenal results. That is, it is the power of your own suggestion—that starts the machinery into operation or causes the subconscious mind to begin its creative work—and right here is where the affirmations and repetitions play their part. It’s the repetition of the same chant, the same incantations, the same affirmations, that leads to belief, and once this belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.
I have seen this work with my children over and over again. They repeat verbally, “I can do it, I can do it,” when they previously experienced failure. I am thinking of my daughter Sommer balancing herself on my hands and falling time after time, until she was urged to say those magic words out loud over and over. Then, after failing to balance herself twenty or thirty times, she suddenly experienced the real magic. Saying over and over again, “I can do it, I see myself standing on Daddy’s hands,” she had the power to make it happen. This is not fantasy. If it works anyplace, it can work everyplace. You must believe it, and have that real-magic zone within you that never permits doubt to creep in, and where you endlessly repeat the affirmation that will lead to belief that will lead to miracles.
• Study the world of matter, of all material possessions at the subatomic level. Begin to note that everything material is nothing more than empty space when viewed from a closer perspective. See the folly of making that material world your master. Just like your thoughts, the material world is limitless. It is without beginning and end, totally abundant and totally available to you if you know what your true purpose here is.
Remember, prosperity, like everything else, is experienced in your mind. If you are somehow able to think of yourself as prosperous, and no one or nothing outside of you can deter you from that belief, then in fact your life is a miracle of prosperity. It is not in how much you have accumulated, unless that is what you choose to believe. The great irony here is that when you see yourself as prosperous regardless of material possessions, and you act on that belief, then the material possessions will arrive in exactly perfect proportions for your well-being.
• Develop a trust in your intuitive inner voices. It has been said that those who are classified as lucky are essentially those who go with their hunches, rather than with what others have prescribed. If you feel a strong inner inclination to change jobs, or locations, or to be around new people, or to try a particular investment, then place more trust in that hunch. This is your divine guidance encouraging you to take a risk, to ignore the ways of the herd, to be the unique individual that you are. Prosperity will be your experience of life, if that is how you begin to process life inside. It is inside that counts the most. This is the residence of your intuition, your guiding invisible force that never leaves you. Learn to trust it, and allow your physical body to travel the path that you are feeling within.
My hunches have always guided me in my investments. I can honestly say that the only time I experienced a big loss financially was when I ignored my intuition and invested in “guaranteed municipal bonds” that were for the development of projects that I knew within me were inconsistent with my beliefs. I struggled with the decision, but since the yields were high and the bonds supposedly guaranteed, I went against my intuition. That decision cost me over $150,000 in defaulted bonds. My intuition told me to stay away from such projects and invest in only those things which I believed in strongly, but my lust for higher yields won out. It was a very powerful and costly lesson for me. I have since learned to go with what I am feeling inside, regardless of the advice I receive from others about the wisdom of my choice. I only invest in what I feel to be proper and moral, and that feeling comes from going within and trusting the guidance that I receive. Some call it a silly investment method, but I trust totally in my intuition—and prosperity is the result.
• Work at replacing thoughts within you that reflect a scarcity consciousness. If you elect to constantly tell the world what is missing in your life, and how you never can get ahead, it is because you are in possession of an inner space that believes strongly in lacks. Those thoughts of scarcity include hardship, losing, difficulty and so on. These may be the topics that you find yourself discussing and the ways in which you present yourself over and over to everyone that you meet. You can replace these inner slogans that have come to be the logos of your life with new thoughts that include abundance, plenty, bountifulness, profit, ease, sustenance and the like. When you see these thoughts as the way your universe is, and process your world in these ways, the words and concepts will be your way of presenting yourself.
The secret that sits in the center of your being and “knows” is that silent invisible soul that is yours to use as you like. You must begin to catch yourself when you are thinking in ways that subvert your own prosperity. You must monitor yourself all day long, and be sure to catch each and every thought that involves a scarcity consciousness. You can transform those thoughts, but only if you are willing to become your own monitor, and then do nothing more than transform the thoughts. Eventually, you will begin to act on the new thoughts, just as you previously acted on the old ones to create your life circumstances.
• Develop a conviction in your heart that prosperity truly belongs to you. To think about prosperity is a great beginning. But you must make those thoughts that you are entitled to prosperity into actual beliefs. You must cultivate this kind of mental conviction if you are to manifest prosperity. This is your intention at work. It is the process of living through knowing. Merely wishing for it is not enough, for nothing will be truly in your life until you reach a conviction within you that it belongs there.
While it may sound extreme to you, listen to these words of St. Mark (11:23–24) in terms of this divine principle, and see if you can grasp their significance for your own prosperity undertakings.
Whosoever says to this mountain, “be removed and be cast into the sea,” and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will come to pass he will have whatever he says … whatever things you ask whenever you pray believe that you receive them, and you will have them.
Those are the words of miracles. Yet in fact these are the very stepping-stones to your own prosperity in what you are capable of believing, knowing and intending in your life.
• Trust in the divineness that you are and that is the perfection of the universe. When you have worked on the above beliefs, monitor yourself for a day, keeping track of how many scarcity thoughts versus prosperity thoughts you have, then surrender and stop fretting about it. Trust in that invisible force that flows through you. Remember—when you trust in yourself, you trust in the wisdom that created you! And obviously when you doubt yourself, you question that same divine intelligence that brought you here! Know within that the universal laws of prosperity and abundance have not been repealed. Know that if they worked for others they will work for you.
Now surrender and relax about it, and you will know what to do. This is satori—instant awakening. You no longer have to worry; prosperity will indeed come to you, and you will be creating it in a magical way, just like the magic that you experience every time you create a thought out of nowhere. Trust in the miracle that you are. Trust that the universal force flows through you—if it didn’t you wouldn’t be reading these words in this moment. Then get on with your life in a purposeful way.
• Now act prosperous! That’s right, act as if what you deserve in the way of prosperity were already here. The person who acts prosperous is very generous. Be that way right now. If you’re not generous when it is difficult, you won’t be generous when it is easy. You must be willing to give to others, even when your coffer is not full, for this is your purpose. Your purpose is independent of coffers. It is spiritual. Act in a spiritual way. Give at least 10 percent of what you see coming into your life to those who provide you with spiritual sustenance.
For me, this principle has always worked in creating prosperity. I have always been a giver, even as a little boy. It was always easy for me to give up what I had in my pocket, even if it was only a few coins. I loved buying things for other people, and helping others of my choice to have more abundance in their lives. I have been giving much more than 10 percent to those I choose to assist and it always comes back to me more than tenfold. It seems to be a part of that invisible law of the divine.
Living as if one is already prosperous is to be a generous person. Giving it away without any expectation is living according to your spiritual self first, and your physical self second. It is the most divine way that you can be, and it is the secret to manifesting your own miracles in this prosperity domain. Kahlil Gibran wrote the following inspiring words on this subject. Study them carefully—they reflect the prosperity consciousness I have been writing about in this chapter.
And there are those who
have little and give it all.
These are the believers in life
and the bounty of life,
and their coffer is never empty.
There are those who
give with joy,
and that joy
is their reward.
And there are those who
give with pain,
and that pain
is their baptism.
And there are those who
give and know
not pain in their giving,
nor do they seek joy,
nor give
mindfulness of virtue;
they give as in yonder valley
the myrtle breathes
its fragrance into space,
through the hands
of such as these
God speaks,
and from behind their eyes
he smiles upon the Earth.
When God speaks through your hands and smiles upon the earth through you, because you are an unconditional giver, a purposeful being, asking nothing of anyone, prosperity will be your reward.
• When you have mastered the art of giving to others, then practice the equally important art of giving to yourself. Take a percentage of all that comes to you in the form of money, and invest it in yourself. Put that money into a savings plan that is yours to monitor. See it as your miracle fund, and be rigidly firm about your contributions to this personal, fast-growing account.
I have been doing this for my entire adult life. I have put away a certain percentage of what comes to me into my own financial miracle fund. It is automatic with me, and I never ignore this principle. As a result I was able to make myself financially independent at a very young age.
You will be surprised at how quickly this fund will grow and produce income for you, a specific percentage of which goes right back into your miracle fund. If one does this from as early as childhood, one could be financially independent by the age of thirty. This is nothing more than a physical-world investment in your own prosperity. It is a fantastic policy to teach your children, and it will lead them in the direction of their own financial prosperity.
• Get rid of the polarity that you may have about money. You have perhaps seen money either as God’s blessing or as the archenemy of spirituality. Money has often been used as a battleground for matters spiritual and matters physical. Thus, if you have accumulated money, you may have come to believe that this is in some sort of conflict with your spirituality. Keep in mind that if your purpose involves providing things that require money for others and for yourself, and if you are uncompromised about your own commitment to your purpose, then money will show up in your life to assist you with your heroic mission. Similarly, if you believe that you do not deserve money and that it symbolizes all that is nonspiritual, then you will block its arrival into your life.
When you are committed to your own personal highest powers, then a great amount of authentic universal power will begin moving through you. It may in fact be symbolized by the arrival of money into your life, and then you will have to resolve any ambivalence that you harbor toward this money.
Thus, the denouncing of money is a trap. Instead, see it as that which is manifesting in your life to assist you with your purpose. Then, stay on purpose and use that money—and any other physical abundance that will begin showing up in your life in larger and larger amounts—to fulfill your commitment to your purpose. You can be spiritual and have nice things. You can be spiritual and have money flow into your life. But you cannot be a spiritual being if the arrival of that money is for the purpose of hoarding it, or using it to prove to yourself and others that you are in some way superior. Your authentic power comes from within, and you live in a physical body in a material world as well. Allow that physical world to be in harmony with your inner world, and you will have resolved your ambivalence toward money.
I view the money that arrives in my life as the energy that I can use to stay on purpose. It is a blessing and it is used in that context, and as a result it continues to flow into my life in sufficient amounts to meet that commitment of mine to being a spiritual being having a prosperous human experience and helping others to do the same.
• Realize that you will never get enough of what you don’t want. If money is all that you covet and you want it for the purpose of gaining power over others, then you will never get enough. Your goal is in the invisible realm, that place where you do all of your living. Money and other symbols of prosperity arrive in your life to assist you on that path. If you miss that message, you may see lots of money come into your life, but you will also experience it disappearing. Here is a perfect example of this mentality that you want to shed, expressed by Yogananda:
I once saw a cartoon drawing of a dog hitched to a small, but well laden, cart. The dog’s owner had found an ingenious method for getting it to pull the cart for him. A long pole, tied to the cart, extended forward over the dog’s head. At the end of the pole there dangled a sausage, temptingly. The dog, straining in vain to reach that sausage, hardly noticed the heavy cart he was dragging along behind him.
How many business people are like that! They keep thinking, “If I can make just a little more money, I’ll find happiness at last.” Somehow, their “sausage of happiness” keeps receding from their grasp. As they strain to reach it, however, just see what a cart-load of troubles and worries they drag along behind them!
• Avoid the trap of expecting your prosperity to arrive in your life through the efforts of others. You create your own life of prosperity. No one has to change in order for you to experience your own prosperity. This is an inner game, and you must leave behind your expectations of others. Even if you do manage to get others to provide you with the symbols of prosperity, it will all disappear quickly and you will be stuck with that infernal sausage ahead of you, always suffering from the disease called more. And then it will be a new cast of “others” that you will seek out, always striving and looking outward. Take responsibility for your own feelings about prosperity and you will eliminate any and all suffering that you experience in this context.
• Finally, meditate on your prosperity. Get pictures on your internal screen that reflect you as a prosperous individual. Refuse to let those pictures fade, despite whatever circumstances you may have created in your life. Your meditations will give you an inner script to follow. Use this valuable practice to manifest what you truly want to experience in the physical world.
Prosperity is something that I know can be achieved by anyone. If I can experience it, having come from my scarce beginnings, then it is hard for me to imagine that anyone cannot make it happen. Looking back on those early days, I realize that even then I embodied a prosperity consciousness. For prosperity is located within.
I have watched my children grow and flourish. They were all once in little baby bodies. Each of them would cry for a toy or some object of their immediate attention. Something as simple as a rattle that had caught their eye, or a toy that someone else had. They would cry until they received the toy, then they would throw it away and cry for something else.
We leave those baby bodies behind us, but many of us fail to leave that infantile thinking. We want something else to satisfy us. But we do not know how to be satisfied. We continue the relentless pursuit of more, chasing after prosperity as if it were something that resided in objects external to us. To know the secret of prosperity, know that you can never find it. Or to paraphrase Eykis, there is no way to prosperity, prosperity is the way.