Do You Have a Bad Attitude Towards Money?

WEALTH AND PROSPERITY

"Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think."
~ Ayn Rand

Six Thoughts that Program Prosperity

In the last two posts, I talked about how old, engrained beliefs can sabotage fulfillment of our dreams. While we consciously take the attitude that we can have the thing we want, if we doubt that on the subconscious level, the deeper level of our mind will subvert those good intentions and bring us more of the same-old. Wealth creation is one area where this is particularly true, probably because most of us have been programmed to have self-defeating beliefs about money.

What is old programming really? It's a conscious attitude we've held long enough, recited to ourselves often enough, or felt deeply enough, that our subconscious mind has accepted it as true. When this happens, attitude becomes belief. It isn't enough that we want and consciously think we can have more money. We have to get past the surface attitude down to that level of engrained belief, and stir things up down there.

How to Do It

That means, really looking at our engrained beliefs about money. We must see what's been unhealthy in our thinking, perceive the illogic in the old belief, and replace it with abundance-embracing convictions. Take some time to do this, to sit by yourself and contemplate your old beliefs about wealth. Write down the negative thoughts you've been taught to believe in one column, leaving lots of space after each. Then think over each old belief, and in the second column, write down all the reasons next to each one why you now know that old thought isn't true.

When you do this, having new ideas about wealth to work from will be helpful, so we dedicate this week's newsletter to giving you some. Use the ideas below - only the ones that make sense to you - to explain things to the Doubting Thomas within. After you've worked through your old wealth-belief list, write down your current wealth beliefs on a new sheet of paper, and tear up the old beliefs. Next, refresh your affirmations.

Refresh Your Affirmations

After your belief housecleaning, write fresh wealth affirmations to replace any tired ones that haven't been working well for you. The new ones will be stronger and weightier with your subconscious, because you'll have written them after giving your programmed beliefs a listen.

Do you like being told what to do when you haven't been listened to? Neither does your subconscious. Make it a friend by explaining to yourself what's really true about money. When you're in one piece on the subject, in conscious and subconscious agreement, prosperity will become a reality (not just a word on your bathroom mirror).

Read your new affirmations to yourself when you wake up in the morning, before you fall asleep at night, and also whenever negative thoughts about prosperity creep in. Always read the list with real attention. Each time you do this you will remind your subconscious of the things you explained to it, and further fine-tune it to match your desires.

Mull Over This

Here are some ideas to contemplate during your mental "spring housecleaning" session. Use those that you resonate with, and add any ideas of your own:

• You may have a resistance to the words like "wealthy" and "rich." Perhaps they suggest to you things like excess and selfishness. There's nothing wrong with feeling you don't want to be one of the spoiled rich, living higher than the rest of mankind while others suffer in poverty. If that's what "wealth" implies to you, toss out that word in favor of a concept of well-being that's more in accord with your personal values. Many people find words like "abundance," "prosperity," "plenty" better describe what they want in their lives. If that's the case with you, your subconscious will better support your dreams if you word your intentions and affirmations with those more acceptable, less splintery, words.
• "Money is the root of all evil." How often have we heard that expression? But is it really true? First of all, the actual quote is, "Love of money is the root of all evil," and the person saying it was talking about an addictive relationship to money, not money itself. Money itself is no more evil than any other material thing. Money can do great good or great evil. It's all in how it is used. How would you use more money if you had it? Ask yourself if that would be evil or good. Would you be less dependent on others? Would the people in your life benefit? Would strangers benefit? If your answer to those is yes, how exactly would your having more money be evil, or contribute to evil?
• If the economy's got you down, and you're worried if it might "get worse," consider that even in the Great Depression, there was only a 25% unemployment rate. That means 3 out of 4 people were still working in the worst of economic times! We hear all the negative stuff about that era but rarely hear that part of it. Nor do we often hear the stories of many now-departed old-timers about how those years were the best of their lives. People were brought together during the Depression. They learned to be more neighborly and supportive. They grew more self-reliant and resourceful. They discovered that real abundance is not the number of dollars you have, because dollars can become worthless. They came to value more substantial concepts of wealth, like gardens and the ability to grow them, owning your home outright, and living without debt. In an economic downturn, people are prompted to think about what economic security really means, and this can prompt restructuring of spending, earning, and living habits to one's advantage.
• In any economy - booming, recessed, or depressed - people must produce and trade to live. As long as people are producing and trading, there is work, even if you have to create it. Identify the trades, services and industries that people will patronize in a slower economy, knowing that there will always be work in those sectors, and that you can find a place within them if you need to. Your current job is not a permanent fixture that you are glued to for life, and you don't die if your job does. Jobs are coats we put on and take off. Ask yourself if the coat you're wearing right now is right for the weather.
• Maybe you find it hard to really deeply believe you could ever have the dollar amount you list as a goal. But dollars aren't true wealth. Wealth is the things dollars buy. In themselves, dollars are pretty substantial. In Germany's Great Depression, dollars had so little value people papered their living rooms with them. Dollars are unstable, with values that fluctuate with the stock market. So if it's dollars you want, stop feeling they are priceless and mysteriously unattainable. Consider how banks make money. They literally create it, by typing numbers on a sheet of paper when people come in for a loan. For banks, making money is as simple as typing. If that's the only difference between poverty and wealth - a few typed numbers on a piece of paper - how impossible is it really for anyone to shift from one state to the other? Imagine your bank account statement with the numbers you want to see there. How hard is it for the universe to take 1,000 and add two or three zeros?
• Feeling undeserving is another old programmed belief that keeps many of us from enjoying the abundance we desire. Really look at this one. Why are you undeserving? Okay, so you've done some bad things you regret. Everyone has. Does that mean everyone should live in poverty? Would the world be better if everyone was poor? The fact is, we all are better citizens, better neighbors and more agreeable family members when we aren't struggling over our ability to make a living. Being poor benefits nobody. To the extent you are poor, you are dependent. Better to be strong in ourselves financially, if only for the good of the people we then don't have to lean on. Money isn't something we should have only because we deserve it. It's something we should have so we can hold up our own end of things and do good in the world. Don't we all deserve that?

Ask yourself what your old attitudes have been about money. Write them down as you think of them. Then really look at those old beliefs and ask yourself if they are true. As you rewrite your list and revise your inmost feelings about plenty, your openness to abundance will grow. When emotionally it feels as natural and good to you as the other good things in your life, abundance will be part of your everyday experience.

Next Week

Next week: visualization images and other strategies for money creation through the mind! Have fun reprogramming your wealth beliefs this week, and in the next newsletter, we'll send you some ripe seeds to drop into the plowed field of your subconscious, seeds that will grow prosperity.

Wishing every one of you unlimited abundance and happiness,

Richie. (Global Secrets)

Top Photo Courtesy of TW Collins.

Important Advice for Self-Help Folks...

The self-help world -- which embraces but includes far more than merely The Secret and its associated teachings -- is full of very helpful, encouraging and sage advice.

However, it's also full of things that aren't so great -- or, to be more specific and possibly more generous than we truly need to be -- it contains unconscious people with unconscious ideas which center around two things: identifying your money and then GETTING it, somehow.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the self-help field is overwhelmed by scam artists, liars, cheats, and folks who are out to get you. Yet I am saying that as you travel this path, you do yourself a tremendous service by being both alert and aware. That doesn't mean paranoid. It simply means, well, alert and aware.

You see, the self-help path -- regardless of the path that you're on, or the tradition or the school or the teaching -- is all designed to get you more in touch with reality. This is a subtle point to understand, because many people are in fact driven to the self-help field because they don't LIKE their reality -- and they want something better!

However, the core truth is, is that real self-help is about re-connecting you with reality itself; not the (bad) reality that you interpret or project out into the world and to other people, but the reality of your BEING. You had it as a small child -- all small children do -- but you lost it (as almost all adults to). Real self-help will always try and guide you BACK to yourself.

As such, you need to pay close attention to how you feel about things and whether it's taking you closer to reality or, paradoxically, sending you further and further away. Indeed, there are some -- and I won't mention names or products -- things to buy on the Internet that seem very self-help-friendly, and contain all kinds of great marketing (with a nice little price tag at the end!), but I simply don't feel that they're much at all -- they're more designed to get your money than to help you.

Stay alert and stay aware -- that's all you need. Self-help is not a fairy tale, nor is it somehow immune from the everyday laws of reality. Fire is hot -- you won't get "away" from that reality by reading books about how to "interpret fire in a more enlightened way." Similarly, ice is cold.

And a weird "deal" that wants to part you from your money is, more often then not, indeed a weird deal that wants to part you from your money.

Be alert, be aware.

Two BIG Reasons why Money Doesn't Buy Happiness

We've all heard the old saying that "money doesn't buy happiness."

But WHY not? I mean, what's the real problem here?

The real problem here has nothing -- at all -- to do with money. That's why we should totally leave money out of this old saying; what has money done? Money is not even alive. Why blame money? The problem is with people, not with money.

Really, the saying should be "people with money can't buy happiness" -- because, if nothing else, this puts the root of the problem where it, in reality, is: with people.

When people have excessive money -- or, at least, try to live like they do -- they start to do two things simultaneously; and unconsciously, too:

1. They start trying to solve problems with money when those problems would otherwise compel an increase in consciousness;

2. They start to view people as commodities -- "things" to be bought and sold, like anything else in a store.

Both of these things are simply against anything remotely connected to spirituality (and I'm not saying religion -- I mean spirituality, which is your intimate, divine relationship with your interiority).

Life will always give you challenges, regardless of how much money you have. That's the nature of life: to give you challenges to teach you different things. People with excessive amounts of money, however, unconsciously and automatically start solving almost EVERY problem with money -- and this is really, in many cases, a short-cut. Instead of solving the problem and deeply facing it, money can help numb the pain and in many ways avoid it entirely. It's like alcohol; except excessive spending is (rather absurdly, really) seen as a "good thing" that more people should do, whereas excessive drinking is seen as a real problem that needs treatment (and it is, and does).

That's why rich people are stunned -- truly, they're amazed -- at how problematic their life becomes after they "get rich." One core reason is simply that they stop looking at their real problems and just avoid them through money. If a job is frustrating, for example, instead of looking at it and seeing the subtle fact that problems "out there" in the world are often reflections of problems "inside," a person who has the financial means can just quit and get another job. Or another spouse. Or another house.

The problems, however, never go away because they're never dealt with. At even the merest sign of frustration or what would be called "depression," a wealthy person will almost always just spend their way to happiness; because they can -- and because other wealthy people expect them too live life that way.

The other aspect of the money-misery problem is just as real: a love of money becomes a lens of money, and that means human beings are reduced to inputs and outputs; to their value, in financial terms. That's why people really, deeply, dislike rich people -- it's not about their money, it's about the fact that rich people have a knack of making non-rich people feel dehumanized; about being nothing more than useful to a rich person's ongoing quest for wealth, or useless. If they're useful, then they are valued. If useless, they are not.

I'm not against wealth AT ALL. Wealth is fantastic. But it should be enjoyed consciously -- and not to simply avoid reality and live in a temporarily problem-free bubble, or just as destructively, to reduce people into mere commodities; into robots that serve a financial purpose or not.

Love, Self-Help Style

The word love appears in so many things -- including advertising for soap or songs about fish or whatever else -- that it's hard to accept that this word is without question the most powerful thing in existence.

Why? Why does love matter so much? Because quite simply: all we want to be is loved, and all we want to do is to love.

That's really it.

The millionaire that can't stop making money even though he has enough for 10 lifetimes? He's not "ambitious" or "successful" -- he's just some guy searching desperately for love. He figures that people will love him because of his money, and he figures that he might as well start loving money -- since people can be so unreliable. And so he goes on making more money than he knows what to do with.

He's looking for love; he's yearning to be loved.

When you sit back and try and "desire" what you want -- you would really save yourself a great deal of time and, possibly, of suffering if you really look deeply at what it is that you're after. Do you want a million dollars? Or do you want to be loved?

If you aren't clear and honest with yourself, then guess what: even if you get your million dollars, you'll end up in worse shape then you are today.

It happens all the time. We just don't like to see it :)