If a man thinks sickness, poverty, and misfortune, he will meet them and claim them all eventually as his own. But he will not acknowledge the close relationship—he will deny his own children and declare they were sent to him by an evil fate.
Poverty is the hell of which most modem Englishmen are most afraid. —Carlyle
Poverty is the open-mouthed hell which yawns beneath civilization. —Henry George
Wealth is created mentally first.
The stream of plenty will not flow toward the stingy, parsimonious, doubting thought.
Holding the poverty thought keeps one in touch with poverty producing conditions.
No man has a right, unless he cannot help himself, to remain where he will be constantly subjected to the cramping, ambition blighting influences and great temptations of poverty. His self-respect demands that he should get out of such an environment. It is his duty to put himself in a position of dignity and independence, where he will not be liable at any moment to be a burden to his friends in case of sickness or other emergencies, or where those depending on him may suffer.
It is the poverty attitude, the narrowness of our thought that has limited us. If we had larger and grander conceptions of life, of our birthright; if, instead of whining, crawling, grumbling, sneaking and apologizing, we were to stand erect and claim our kingship, demand our rich inheritance, the inheritance which is an abundance of all that is good and beautiful and true, we should live far completer, fuller lives. We should not be so poverty-stricken but for the narrowness of our faith, the meanness of our conception of our birthright. There are plenty of evidences in man’s construction and environment that he was made for infinitely grander and superber things than even the most fortunate of men now possess and enjoy.
Almost every wealthy man in this country will tell you that his greatest satisfaction and happiest days were when he was emerging from poverty into a competency; when he first felt the tonic from the swelling of his small savings towards the stream of fortune, and knew that want would no longer dog his steps. It was then he began to see ahead of him leisure, self-development, self-culture, or perhaps study and travel, and to feel that those whom he loved would be lifted from the clutches of poverty. Comforts were taking the place of stern necessities and blunting drudgery, and he realized that he had the power to lift himself above himself, that henceforth he would be of consequence in the world; that he might have pictures and music and books, luxuries for his home, and that his children might not have to struggle quite as hard for an education as he had. Then he first felt the power to give them and others a little start in the world; felt the tonic of growth, the little circle about him expanding into a larger sphere, broadening into a wider horizon.
There are plenty of evidences that we were made for grand things, sublime things; for abundance and not for poverty. Lack and want do not fit man’s divine nature. The trouble with us is that we do not have half enough faith in the good that is in store for us. We do not dare fling out our whole soul’s desire, to follow the leading of our divine hunger and ask without stint for the abundance that is our birthright. We ask little things, and we expect little things, pinching our desires and limiting our supply. Not daring to ask to the full of our soul’s desire, we do not open our minds sufficiently to allow a great inflow of good things. Our mentality is so restricted, our self-expression so repressed, that we think in terms of stinginess and limitation. We do not fling out our soul’s desire with that abundant faith which trusts implicitly, and which receives accordingly.
The Power that made and sustains us gives liberally, abundantly, not stingily, to everybody and everything. There is no restriction, no limitation, no loss to anybody from His abundant giving.
We are not dealing with a Creator who is impoverished by granting our requests. It is His nature to give, to flood us with our heart’s desires. He does not have less because we ask much. The rose does not ask the sun for only a tiny bit of its light and heat, for it is the sun’s nature to throw it out to everything which will absorb it and drink it in. The candle loses nothing of its light by lighting another candle. We do not lose but increase our capacity for friendship by being friendly, by giving abundantly of our love.
One of the great secrets of life is to learn how to transfer the full current of divine force to ourselves, and how to use this force effectively. If man can find this law of divine transference, he will multiply his efficiency a million fold, because he will then be a co-operator, co-creator with divinity, on a scale of which he has never before dreamed.
When we recognize that everything comes from the great Infinite Supply, and that it flows to us freely, when we get into perfect tune with the Infinite, when the brute has been educated out of us and the dross of dishonesty, selfishness, impurity, burned out of us, we shall see God without these scales, which make us blind to good; we shall see God, (good,) and we shall know good, for only the pure in heart can see God.
When unfairness, a desire to take advantage of our brothers and sisters, is removed from our lives, we shall get so close to God that all of the good things in the universe will flow to us spontaneously. The trouble IS that we restrict the in-flow by wrong acts, wrong thoughts.
Every vicious deed is an opaque veil, another film over our eyes so that we cannot see God (good). Every wrong step separates us from Him.
When we learn the art of seeing opulently, instead of stingily, when we learn to think without limits, how not to cramp ourselves by our limiting thought, we shall find that the thing we are seeking is seeking us, and that it will meet us half way.
John Burroughs beautifully expresses this in his poem “Waiting”:
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For, lo! my own shall come to me.
I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.
Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.
What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
And garner up its fruit of tears.
The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder height;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delight.
The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.
Do not be forever apologizing for your lack of this or that. Every time you say that you have nothing fit to wear, that you never have things that other people have, that you never go anywhere or do things that other people do, you are simply etching the black picture deeper and deeper. As long as you recite these unfortunate details and dwell upon your disagreeable experiences, your mentality will not attract the thing you are after, will not bring that which will remedy your hard conditions. The mental attitude, the mental picturing, must correspond with the reality we seek.
Prosperity begins in the mind, and is impossible with a mental attitude which is hostile to it. We cannot attract opulence mentally by a poverty-stricken attitude which is driving away what we long for. It is fatal to work for one thing and to expect something else. No matter how much one may long for prosperity, a miserable, poverty-stricken mental attitude will close all the avenues to it. The weaving of the web is bound to follow the pattern. Opulence and prosperity cannot come in through poverty-thought and failure-thought channels. They must be created mentally first. We must think prosperity before we can come to it.
How many take it for granted that there are plenty of good things in this world for others, comforts, luxuries, fine houses, good clothes, opportunity for travel, leisure, but not for them! They settle down into the conviction that these things do not belong to them, but are for those in a very different class.
But why are you in a different class? Simply because you think yourself into another class; think yourself into inferiority; because you place limits for yourself. You put up bars between yourself and plenty. You cut off abundance, make the law of supply inoperative for you, by shutting your mind to it.
And by what law can you expect to get what you believe you cannot get? By what philosophy can you obtain the good things of the world when you are thoroughly convinced that they are not for you?
The limitation is in ourselves, and not in the Creator. He wants His children to have all of the good things of the universe, because He has fashioned them for His own. If we do not take them, it is because we limit ourselves.
One of the greatest curses of the world is the belief in the necessity of poverty.
Most people have a strong conviction that some must necessarily be poor; that they were made to be poor. But there was no poverty, no want, no lack, in the Creator’s plan for man. There need not be a poor person on the planet. The earth is full of resources which we have scarcely yet touched. We have been poor in the very midst of abundance, simply because of our own blighting, limiting thought.
We are discovering that thoughts are things, that they are incorporated into the life and form part of the character, and that if we harbor the fear thought, the lack thought, if we are afraid of poverty, of coming to want, this poverty thought, fear thought incorporates itself in the very life texture and makes us the magnet to attract more poverty like itself.
It was not intended that we should have such a hard time getting a living, that we should just manage to squeeze along, to get together a few comforts, to spend about all of our time making a living instead of making a life. The life abundant, full, free, beautiful, was intended for us.
If we were absolutely normal, our living-getting would be a mere incident to our life-making. The great ambition of the race would be to develop a superb type of manhood, a beautiful, magnificent womanhood; man making, man building, instead of dollar making, as now.
Resolve that you will turn your back on the poverty idea, and that you will vigorously expect prosperity; that you will hold tenaciously the thought of abundance, the opulent ideal, which is befitting your nature; that you will try to live in the realization of plenty, to actually feel rich, opulent. This will help you to attain what you long for. There is a creative force in intense desire.
The fact is, we live in our own worlds, we are creations of our own thought. Each builds his own world by his thought habit. He can surround himself with an atmosphere of abundance, or of lack; of plenty, or of want.
God’s children were not made to grovel but to aspire; to look up, not down. They were not made to pinch along in poverty, but for larger, grander things. Nothing is too good for the children of the Prince of Peace; nothing too beautiful for human beings; nothing too grand, too sublime, too magnificent for us to enjoy.
Why should we not expect great, grand things, if we are made in God’s image and are His children? We are heirs of all that is His, all that is beautiful and opulent in the universe. The very holding of the mind open toward all the good things of the world, expecting and appreciating them, will have everything to do with obtaining them.
There is something wrong when multitudes of the sons and daughters of the King of Kings, who have inherited all the good things of the universe, starve on the very shores of the stream of plenty, of opulence unspeakable, which flows past their very doors and which carries infinite supply.
Our circumstances in life, our financial condition, our poverty or our wealth, our friends or lack of them, our condition of harmony or discord, are all very largely the offspring of our thought. If our mental attitude has been one of want, if we have dwelt much upon lack, our environment will correspond. If our thinking has been open, generous, and broad, if we have thought in terms of abundance, prosperity, and have made a relative effort to realize these conditions, our environment will tend to correspond. Everything we get in life comes through the gateway of our thought and resembles its quality. If that is pinched, stingy, mean, what flows to us will be like it.
When we see people who have been for years in a poverty-stricken condition, unless there has been much ill health or very unusual misfortune, we know that somebody has been sinning, has been in a wrong, vicious, mental attitude. We should very likely find the head of the house a complainer against fate for the sparseness of his supply, the littleness of his inflow.
If you are dissatisfied with your condition, if you feel that life has been hard and the fates cruel, if you are a complainer of your lot, you will probably find that, whatever your condition may be, in your home or business or social life, it is the legitimate offspring of your own thought, your own ideals, and that you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Right thinking will produce right living; clean thinking, a clean life; and a prosperous, generous thought followed up by intelligent endeavor to make your thoughts and your ideals real will produce corresponding results.
If we learn to trust implicitly the Great Dispenser of All Good, the source of Infinite Supply,—the Power which brings seed time and harvest, the Power which feeds, which supplies, the Power which bids us take no thought for the morrow but consider the lilies how they grow,—and do our level best to improve our condition, we shall never know what want is.
There is nothing which the human race lacks so much as unquestioned, implicit confidence in the divine source of all supply. We ought to stand in the same relation to the Infinite Source as the child does to its parents. The child does not say, “I do not dare eat this food for fear that I may not get any more.” It takes everything with absolute confidence and assurance that all its needs will be supplied, that there is plenty more where these things came from.
We do not have half good enough opinions of our possibilities; do not expect half enough of ourselves; we do not demand half enough, hence the meagerness, the stinginess of what we actually get. We do not demand the abundance which belongs to us, hence the leanness, the lack of fullness, the incompleteness of our lives. We do not demand royally enough. We are content with too little of the things worthwhile. It was intended that we should live the abundant life, that we should have plenty of everything that is good for us. No one was meant to live in poverty and wretchedness. The lack of anything that is desirable is not natural to the constitution of any human being.
Hold the thought that you are one with what you want, that you are in tune with it, so as to attract it; keep your mind vigorously concentrated upon it; never doubt your ability to get what you are after, and you will tend to get it.
Poverty is often a mental disease. If you are suffering from it, if you are a victim of it, you will be surprised to see how quickly your condition will improve when you change your mental attitude, and, instead of holding that miserable, shriveled, limited poverty image, turn about and face towards abundance and plenty, towards freedom and happiness.
Success comes through a perfectly scientific mental process. The man who becomes prosperous believes that he is going to be prosperous. He has faith in his ability to make money. He does not start out with his mind filled with doubts and fears, and all the time talk poverty and think poverty, walk like a pauper and dress like a pauper. He turns his face towards the thing he is trying for and is determined to get, and will not admit its opposite picture in his mind.
There are multitudes of poor people in the world who are half satisfied to remain in poverty, and who have ceased to make a desperate struggle to rise out of it. They may work hard, but they have lost the hope, the expectation of getting an independence.
Many people keep themselves poor by fear of poverty, allowing themselves to dwell upon the possibility of coming to want, of not having enough to live upon, by allowing themselves to dwell upon conditions of poverty.
The minds of the children in many families are saturated with the poverty thought; they hear it from morning till night. They see poverty-stricken conditions everywhere. They hear everybody talking limitation, lack. Everything about them suggests poverty.
Is it any wonder that children brought up in such an atmosphere repeat the poverty-stricken conditions of their parents and environment?
Did you ever think that your terror of poverty, your constant worry about making ends meet, your fear of that awful “rainy day,” not only make you unhappy, but actually disqualify you from putting yourself in a better financial condition? You are thus simply adding to a load which is already too heavy for you.
No matter how black the outlook or how iron your environment, positively refuse to see anything that is unfavorable to you, any condition which tends to enslave you, and to keep you from expressing the best that is in you.
By what philosophy can you expect poverty thoughts, thoughts of lack and want, to produce prosperity? Your condition will correspond to your attitude and ideals. These form the patterns which are woven into the life web. If they are slovenly, poverty-stricken, your life condition will correspond.
Suppose a boy should try to become a lawyer without expecting to be admitted to the bar, or while believing that he would never amount to anything as a lawyer. He would fail. We tend to get what we expect, and if we expect nothing we get nothing. The stream can not rise higher than its fountainhead; no one can become prosperous when they expect or half expect to remain poor.
The man who IS bound to wm believes he IS going to be prosperous; he starts out with the understanding with himself that he is going to be a successful man, a winner and not a loser. He does not say to himself all the time, “What’s the use? The great business combinations are swallowing up the chances. Before long the multitude will have to work for the few. I do not believe I shall ever do anything more than make just a plain living in a very humble way. I shall never have a home and the things that other people have. I am destined to be poor and a nobody.” A man will never get anywhere with such ideals.
Everybody ought to stand erect with face towards the sun of hope and prosperity. Success and happiness are the inalienable rights of every human being.
Every achievement has its origin in the mind, every structure is first a mental structure. The building is first completed in all its details in the architect’s mind. The contractor merely puts the stones, the brick and other material around the idea. We are all architects.
Everything we do in life is preceded by some sort of a plan.
Some people would like to make money, but they keep their minds so pinched, so closed, that they are not in a condition to receive an abundance.
The man who expects prosperity is constantly creating money in his mind, building his financial structure mentally. There must be a mental picture of the prosperity first; the building around it is comparatively easy. It does not take as great a man to place the material around the idea as to create the idea, the mental picture. This is not idle dreaming, it is brain building, mental planning, mental construction. Dogged imagination is often one of the most practical of faculties; the true dreamer is the believer, the achiever.
Let us put up a new image, a new ideal of plenty, of abundance. Have we not worshiped the God of poverty, of lack, of want, about long enough? Let us hold the thought that God is our great supply, that if we can keep in tune, in close touch with Him, so that we can feel our at-one-ness with Him, the great Source of all supply, abundance will flow to us and we shall never again know want.
The poor man is not always the one who has little or no property, but the one who is poverty-stricken in his ideas, in his sympathies, in his power of appreciation, in sentiment; poverty-stricken in his opinion of himself, of his own destiny, and his ability to reach up; who commits the crime of self-depreciation.
It is mental penury that makes us poor.
How few people realize the possibility of mental achievement, the fact that everything is created by the mind first, before it becomes a material reality! If we were better mental builders we should be infinitely better material builders.
A Morgan or Rockefeller mentally creates conditions which make prosperity flow to him. The great achievers do comparatively little with their hands; they build with their thought, they are practical dreamers; their minds reach out into the infinite energy ocean and create and produce what the ideal, the ambition, calls for, just as the intelligence in the seed reproduces the tree plan coiled up within itself.
To be prosperous we must put ourselves in the prosperous attitude. We must think opulently, we must feel opulent in thought; we must exhale confidence and assurance in our very bearing and manner. Our mental attitude towards the thing we are striving for and the intelligent effort we put forth to realize it, will measure our attainment.
Parsimonious saving by cheese-paring efforts does not compare in effectiveness with the results of obeying the laws of opulence.
We go in the direction of our concentration. If we concentrate upon poverty, if want and lack predominate in our thought, poverty-stricken conditions must result.
We must conquer inward mental poverty before we can conquer outward poverty.
Opulence in the larger sense in which we use it is everything that is good for us, abundance of all that is beautiful in life, uplifting and inspiring; abundance of all that is sublime and magnificent. Opulence is everything that will enrich the personality, the life, the experience.
True prosperity is the inward consciousness of spiritual opulence, wholeness, completeness; the consciousness of oneness with the very Source of abundance, Infinite Supply; the consciousness of possessing an abundance of all that is good for us, a wealth of personality of character that no disaster on land or sea could destroy.
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