This
week we continue with our series of five (5) prosperity messages for
the month of August, 2014. (The Monday-Friday radio programs are
also devoted to Prosperity for August) As we read and study the
differing perspectives on how to create an increase in prosperity in
our lives, I believe that everyone who desires to do so, will find
their own unique expression of the spiritual principle of prosperity
that will open the doors of opulent increase of financial prosperity
as well as prosperous love and joy and peace and enthusiasm for life.
I believe that so many
of us have been conditioned since birth to accept that poverty or
financial struggle are a "fact of life." And it is
this "mold of morbidity" that we must loose from our mind if
we are going to experience the measure of prosperity our hearts
desire.
I will always remember a
counseling session I had with a woman in my Beverly Hills office many
years ago. She had achieved her financial wealth through
marriage. She had married extremely wealthy men, five times.
Each time she had come away from the marriage with money and property.
And each time she had struggled to sustain her wealth. When she
came to my office she was still what most of us would consider wealthy
... but she was feeling the fear of Job that she would lose what she
had. In my initial interview with her I asked her what she
thought was the basis of her struggle with wealth. And she told
me in simple language, "Honey, I was born on the wrong side of
the tracks and I was told as a young girl that if I was ever going to
have anything, I had better marry for money." And that was
what she did.
This woman had conditioned her
mind from a young age to the morbid thought that she would have to
depend on someone other than herself. With time and spiritual
understanding she came to the awareness that she could prosper from
her own intelligence and creative abilities. And rather than
live in fear of her wealth diminishing, she found her way to effect
the Divine increase through faith in the power that indwells her.
Any firmly held belief that
denies the power of G-d within us to be self-reliant is part of the
morbidity that causes lack and limitation in our lives. And
there are so many morbid thoughts that have conditioned our mind since
birth; i.e. the religious teaching that we are "born in sin"
... that a heaven and a hell exist as the finality of life's reward
and punishment.
Let's
look at this changeless truth from Paul Ellsworth's 1914 book
"Direct Healing": "Poverty,
which includes lack of wealth, health and love, is rooted in the
subconscious-ness. It consists of a race idea (world belief),
built into the very matrix of every man's soul, that he is a creation
instead of a creator. As long as you believe that you were
formed by an exterior power and that your life is directed and
surrounded by manifestations of that power, even if you call it
"God," or the "Infinite Spirit,' you are going to
express in all that you do and all that you are this false idea.
Poverty is the logical working out of a lie..."
Ellsworth is taking us into a realm of spiritual reality that so few
are prepared to accept as truth; that is, that we are creators, even
if we are not conscious that this is so. This reminds me of a
statement from Ernest Holmes in the classic Science of Mind, that
whether we are conscious of it or not, we are always using the Law.
And this Law is a law of faith and belief. It takes a great deal
of mental work to see through the mists of world belief to the
spiritual reality. The Master Mind Jesus called his followers to
do just that when he said, "be in the world but not of the
world." Our belief and even our faith sometimes in poverty and
financial loss is validated by the world's belief in these things and
so many of us have become mesmerized by them.
Let's
go a little further with Ellsworth:
"But
poverty exists; in city and country, here and across the seas, the
poor we have always with us,' someone says. Apparently this is
true, but in reality it is not. About us are people who are
closing themselves, unconsciously, of course, to that inflow and
outflow of spirit which is typified by breathing. Spiritually
they are "shallow breathers," but when the disagreeable
consequences of the lack which this brings with it have permeated
their inner consciousness, they will relax from the tension of fear or
avarice or dislike which now grips them and will draw in freely the
infinite substance. You would hardly pity the poverty of a man
who lived in a great storehouse wherein were all the good things of
life, but who kept his fists tight shut and refused to use any of the
riches about him. ... So the problem of the cure of poverty,
with which all the civilized world is wrestling in one form or
another, reduces itself to the question, "How shall a man express
and make manifest the abundance which is now and always has been
his?" And the answer is simple: First, by realizing
intellectually that he desires to express this perfect life and that
it is natural and easy for him to do so; second, by permeating and
transforming the subconscious-ness with this realization; third, by
practicing the science of dynamic and formative spiritual thought,
which is possible only to the man who has purged his conscious and
subconscious mind of fear and hate and ignorance."
Ellsworth certainly gives us something to think about and for those
who are willing, something to do ... transform our mind ... renew a
right spirit within us ... and reason ourselves into thinking,
speaking and acting as though we are "in the world but not of the
world." As we loose the morbidity of life, we shall create
prosperity and we shall prosper abundantly.
AND
SO IT IS!
Keep
the
faith!
Rev.
Henry Bates
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