home, however humble.
Remember that a stream of plenty will not flow towards a poverty-saturated thought. A pinched, stingy thought means scanty supply. Thinking abundance, opulence, and defying limitations will open up the mind and set the thought currents towards greatly increased supply.
If all the poverty-stricken people in the world to-day would quit thinking poverty, quit dwelling on it, worrying about it and fearing it; if they would wipe the poverty thought out of their minds; if they would cut off mentally all relations with poverty and substitute the opulent thought, the prosperity thought, the mental attitude that faces toward prosperity, the change in their condition would be amazing.
The Creator never made a man to be poor. There is nothing in his constitution which fits drudgery and poverty. Man was made for prosperity, happiness, and success.
He was not made to suffer any more than he was made to be insane or to be a criminal.
Thousands of people have literally thought themselves away from a life of poverty by getting a glimpse of that great fundamental principle — that we tend to realize in the life what we persistently hold in the thought and vigorously struggle toward.
Don't think that by holding the constructive, creative thought only now and then, or just when you may happen to feel like it, that it is going to counteract the influence of holding the destructive thought most of the time.
Lots of people who treat for prosperity and opulence, hold the want thought, the lack thought too, and that is the reason their prayer is not answered. They get just the opposite, because that is the thought, the expectation which predominates in the mind.
Our conviction is much stronger than our will power. No will power can help you to do a thing when convinced that you can't. For instance, if you are convinced that a fatal disease which you believe you have inherited is overcoming you, this thought is infinitely stronger than your will to prevent it.
We cannot get away from our convictions. These are being built into the mind, being built into the life and character. If you are convinced that you are going to be poor, that you are never going to be prosperous, no matter how hard you may work, your convictions will triumph and you will live and die in penury.
A man will never be anything but a beggar while he thinks beggarly thoughts. If you are living in the thought of limitation, the conviction of lack and want, the fear of poverty, the belief that you can never become prosperous, you are holding yourself down, keeping yourself back.
You are sowing seed which must produce a harvest like itself. The boy who sows his wild oats seed might as well expect to get just the opposite harvest as for you to saturate your mind with poverty thoughts, lack, want, limitation thoughts, and expect a prosperity harvest.
If you are thinking poverty-stricken thoughts, saturating your mind with limitation thoughts, you must expect a corresponding harvest and you will get it whether you expect it or not.
In my youth one of the hardest things in the Bible for me to understand was the statement, "To him that hath shall be given." I couldn't reconcile this with the Bible. It seemed positively unjust.
But now I know that it illustrates a law. "To him that hath shall be given," because in getting what he has a man has made his mind a magnet to attract more. On the other hand, "To him that hath little, that which he hath shall be taken away," because he is headed in the wrong direction mentally.
He is closing the avenues of supply by his little thoughts, his doubts and fears. He is in no mental condition to get more, to attract more.
If you want to demonstrate prosperity, you must think prosperity; you must hold your mind everlastingly toward prosperity; you must saturate your mind with it, just as a law student must saturate his mind with law, must think it, must read it, must talk it, must keep with lawyers and in a law atmosphere as much as possible, to be successful as a lawyer.
It was intended that we should have an abundance of the good things of the universe.
None of them are withheld from us except by our poverty-stricken mental attitude. There is no more possible lack for a human being of all that the heart can wish for than there is lack of water or food supply for the fish in the great ocean.
The fish swims in the ocean of supply, as we swim in the great cosmic ocean of supply that is all around us. All we have to do is to open our minds, our faith, our confidence, to its reality, and use our intelligent effort to get all the good there is in it, — that is everything we need and desire.
Chapter IV.
Establishing the Creative Consciousness
The beginning of every achievement must be in your consciousness.
We have unlimited power, boundless resources, in the great within of us, but until we awaken to a consciousness of this hidden power, those invisible resources, we cannot use them.
The consciousness of power creates power. What we are conscious of, we already possess.
In proportion to the intensity, the persistence, the vividness, the definiteness of your consciousness of the thing you want, do you begin to create it, to attract it.
The Creator puts no limit to our supply. There is no limitation on anything we need except in our own consciousness.
The great trouble with those of us who are living in a world of unfulfilled desires and ambitions is that we do not hold the right consciousness.
Dr. Perry Green rightly says that Job's lament — "The thing which I feared is come upon me" — should be changed to "The thing 'which I was greatly conscious of is come upon me." In other words, it is the thing we hold in our consciousness that comes out of the invisible world of realities and takes visible form in our lives according to its nature, — poverty or prosperity; health or disease; happiness or misery.
The whole secret of individual growth and development is locked up in our consciousness, for this is the door of life itself.
Every experience; whether of joy or sorrow, of health or disease, of success or failure, must come through our consciousness. There is no other way by which it can enter and become a part of the life. You cannot have what you are not conscious of; you cannot do what you are not conscious of being able to do.
In short, it is an immutable law that, whatever you hold in mind, believe that you can do or get, is the thing that will manifest itself in your life.
The thing that Job held in his consciousness was the thing that came upon him. Joan of Arc saved her country, because from childhood she held the consciousness that she had been born to do that very thing.
This poor unlettered peasant girl knew nothing about the great law of mental attraction, but unconsciously she worked with it.
But for her consciousness of victory she never could have accomplished her stupendous work. It is the victorious consciousness that achieves victory in every age and in every field.
After many years' study of the lives and methods of successful men in every department of life, I have found that those who win out in a large way are great believers in themselves, in their power to succeed
