The Prosperity Bible

We are all souls unfolding from different planes of consciousness, we are in different states of development, and like the child whose intellect is being trained we must first learn the simple rules of arithmetic before we are prepared to solve the more difficult problems of geometry and higher mathematics.

We have recognized that in our present state of development and unfoldment it is impossible for us to get hold of and play with the moon and we therefore change our “want” rather than bewail the “fate” which keeps the moon away from us. Great wealth may be just as far away from us to-day, in our consciousness, as is the moon and so for the time being we change our “want” and use a lesser ideal towards which we find it less difficult to develop our consciousness.

We never lose sight of the greater ideal, but with the lesser one—the one which seems possible for us to accomplish NOW—we go steadily forward, developing our consciousness with the affirmation that we have this lesser thing NOW and we find that it does not take us long to materialize it objectively. This gives us greater faith and confidence in the power of our own creative ability and we increase our ideal and begin our work of mastering the new one; as fast as each new ideal is reached a still greater one comes into view, there being no limitation whatever to their greatness excepting such as we put on our inspiration, intuition and revelation with our intellect.

He had no sooner donned the policeman’s uniform than he dreamed another dream and saw himself passing step by step until he became a police captain and that dream was not long in materializing.

Still he was not satisfied but continued to build his “air-castles” and to live in his dreams; he saw himself in the position of Marshal of that county, a place which paid in fees over $50,000.00 a year, with a four-year term without re-election. By the intelligent use of his intellect it was not long before that dream in turn was materialized.

Having reached the pinnacle of success in official life, so far as money consideration for services was concerned, his dreams turned in another direction and he saw himself agent for a great public necessity having an exclusive control of its product, and this dream was materialized at the completion of his term as County Marshal.

Through the profits acquired by him in his progress in the development of his money consciousness he accumulated several million dollars, and to-day is the president and one of the principal owners of the street railway system in a city of nearly half a million population.

Had this man attempted to at once bridge the chasm between the street car driver at $1.10 a day and the millionaire owner of the street railway system he would have failed, but by putting aside his larger vision temporarily—although never losing sight of it—taking up and materializing these lesser visions, he was finally able to materialize the apparently impossible vision of his street car driver days.

During all his onward progress he used his intellect to hold fast to the dream vision which his inspiration, intuition and revelation brought him, doing that which he found nearest at hand to do with all his might and, as each new dream materialized, his inspirational, intuitional and revelational faculties unfolded to him the possibilities of still greater things to be accomplished, still larger things to be done, and God—the great Universal Law—manipulated people and things in the unfoldment of that life—as He does in every life—in accordance with the visions created and which are held continuously and persistently in the thought world by the intellect.

The lily of the field has limited itself to being a lily and as long as it remains in that state of consciousness it will continue to be a lily, reproducing itself again and again, but the day will come in its evolution and unfoldment when it will have a consciousness of something greater, something larger, something better, and it will then begin to evolve into this new and greater ideal.

So with man. In the physical state of consciousness we go on relating with and reproducing our kind until through our evolutionary growth we become intellectual. Before that time we are unconscious or instinctive creators, we are in our Garden of Eden, our Paradise, but when we begin to use our intellectual faculty we become conscious creators and can create just what we may desire and are held accountable under the Universal Law for the causes we set in motion—the energy we generate—by the use of this new faculty—the intellect. It is the inharmonious, ignorant and destructive use of the energy by our intellect that drives us out of our “Garden of Eden” and causes us to lose our “Paradise.”

What we create and the extent and quality of our creations are determined by the faculties we use. When man lived wholly on the plane of instinct and only used that faculty he lived like the beasts of the field and roamed the country without home, clothing, or any of the things which civilized man calls the essentials of life.

As he commenced to use his intellect and develop the intellectual state of consciousness he began to use fires with which to warm his body and cook his food, clothing to cover his nakedness, and huts in which to sleep.

As his inspiration, intuition and revelation began to express he dreamed of more pretentious places of habitation, finer, better made and more comfortable garments to wear and, using his intellect intelligently, he realized and materialized these dreams.

Had he not been inspired with the idea of something better than the skin of animals for clothing, and tents, caves and huts for dwelling-places, and had not his intuitive and revelational faculties told him better things were possible, and had he not developed his intellect to where he could work out these dreams and visions in material form, he would still be in his instinctive state of consciousness and our civilization would not yet have dawned.

In studying and analyzing the history of the nations of the earth today it does not require a very deep thinking student to appreciate the fact that the people of the United States as a whole, have developed these five faculties more evenly and made their combination more harmonious than have the people of any other nation on the face of the globe.

It has required a most wonderful inspiration with great intuition and revelation, backed up by a powerful intellect, to work out into objective form the mighty buildings and the magnificent bridges, the great factories, the wonderful transportation facilities, the schools of learning, etc., which have been materialized here, and the colossal fortunes which have been accumulated in this country in the last half century.

The wonderful inventions of the past, such as the cotton gin, the sewing machine, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, wireless telegraphy, the airships, the various kinds of farm machinery, machinery for making shoes, for making paper out of wood, for spinning cotton by which one man now does the work better and in less time than several dozen men used to do under the old methods, and those wonderful leviathans of the machinery world in use in digging the Panama Canal by which one machine in twelve minutes does the same amount of work which formerly took several hundred men several days to do, all these are the result of the great wonderful inspiration, the intuitive knowledge, and the master revelations their inventors had and which were worked out and materialized on the objective plane through the intelligent application of the intellect.

Some forty years ago Jules Verne, the noted French author, wrote three books entitled respectively “A Trip Around the World in Eighty Days,” “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea,” and “A Journey to the Moon.” The world laughed and pooh-poohed and made fun of the great “crazy” imagination, as they called it, of Jules Verne and said that it was impossible to accomplish any one of these three things; but a trip around the world may now be made in less than forty days, and submarine boats are an accomplished and materialized fact.

Neither one would ever have been materialized had they not been built first in the consciousness—the thought world, the imagination, for that is where we do our imaging—of some mind through the power of its inspirational, intuitional and revelational faculties and then through the intelligent application of the intellect worked out into material form.

Some day the world will learn the great lesson that we must first “build castles in the air”—in the thought world, the imagination—before we can build them on the ground.

The object of calling attention to these things is that the world may see plainly the power of the inspirational, intuitional and revelational faculties when intelligently used by the intellect and how necessary it is for us to develop these faculties and learn how to use them constructively by the intellect. Without the combination working together harmoniously it is impossible to achieve great success along any line.

While we are developing and equalizing the development of these faculties in our own lives we may through a combination of individuals, each of whom has developed a different one of these faculties but all working together harmoniously toward the one great end, achieve wonderful success, but it is necessary to have all of these faculties in expression, either in a single person or in a combination of persons, in order to produce great success.