Prosperity and Spirituality

Money was created in order to make things fair. I have a pig and you have chickens; we trade. One year, my pig dies but I still need your chickens, so I offer you a token to promise that next year I will give you two haunches of pig instead of the usual one, as long as I can still have the eggs.

That’s it. That’s all that money is; an agreement of trade between two people. So why do we fear it so much?

Our fear over money works in the same way that we fear God. We think we’ll get shouted at for letting the pig die in the first place and then, when we’ve continued having the eggs for an extra year, we resent giving the second haunch of pig.

The ‘God bit’ needs to be dealt with. If you prefer to call it ‘The Universe’ then go ahead; just remember that it is exactly the same thing and it is actually all about the Law of Cause and Effect: what you put out, you get back.

Align ourselves with that law and good will come to us; disobey the Law and we get uncomfortable. The Law is written throughout our holy texts; it is very clear and very simple. There is no blame or retribution attached to it. It just is.

If we fear or hate the idea of God then we will also fear or hate money for exactly the same reason. Fear attracts exactly what is feared so if we focus on lack we will create it but if we focus on prosperity we will create that instead.

When people leave conventional religion for the New Age, or leave a ‘real job’ to set up on their own, their finances often take a terrible tumble—because of a deep inner belief that they cannot do what they love and prosper. This comes from the falsely taught conviction that ‘truly spiritual’ people are poor. If you want to demonstrate that you are good, you have to struggle. It’s the hair-shirts and bread-and-water syndrome; beat yourself up physically and mentally; live in the humiliation of not being able to pay the bills and the soul becomes cleansed. To quote Stuart Wilde, if you were God, you’d fall over laughing at that one. On second thoughts, you’d probably cry; particularly as you had set out all the rules to create prosperity so carefully in all the world’s religions and people still couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

I once saw a woman therapist climb out of a window to get away from a workshop because she was so challenged by a prosperity video saying it was okay to be spiritual and wealthy.

You are the co-creator of your life with God. Every thought you think and every word you say creates. It is the Law of Cause and Effect. That is where your prosperity comes from—or not.

So how did we get so mixed up?

For people who have been raised with the New Testament as a guideline, the most popular remembered phrases about money are ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.’ And ‘Money is the root of all evil.’

The first quotation is fairly rammed down our throats. It appears in three Gospels—Matt 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18.25—but, even so, it is totally unrepresentative of Jesus’s prosperity teachings. Most of those are about trusting in today and allowing God to give us wealth.

The second is a misquotation. Paul of Tarsus wrote in his letter to Timothy (1:10): ‘For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.’

That may well be true: covetousness for money as for anything else is not a good idea; in fact it is daft. Money is purely an impartial means for exchange, nothing else, and to make it a god is foolish in the extreme. Even worse is to hate it and despise those who have it—that's just another form of avarice. Money as a balanced aspect of prosperity is a different matter.

Prosperity is not only about money but our attitudes towards abundance and lack—as represented by money—will affect every other aspect of life.

There is one other important reason why people resist financial prosperity: most of us fear being built up and knocked down by our friends and the media in the same way as other people who are ‘no better than they should be’ are attacked in gossip and magazines. We fear being judged as we have either judged others or observed them being judged. You only have to see the media’s attitude towards a new ‘star’ to see our pattern. The ‘star’ is created by the people and loved by the people and then we start to chop away at them; we buy magazines which show them looking unkempt, too skinny, too fat or with too much cellulite with banner headlines sniping at their imperfections.

It is true in this ego-ruled world that you may be envied if you to prosper, you may even be accused of being un-spiritual; but ask yourself this. If you are poor and un-wise in the ways of wealth, how can you help anyone else to prosper? How can your poverty help them? It cannot. Only by understanding and applying the spiritual laws of prosperity can you help to spread much-needed abundance throughout the world.

The whole of the Bible is a prosperity work-book. The Old Testament Patriarchs and Matriarchs were very wealthy people and Jesus of Nazareth never lacked a thing—including the cash to pay his taxes. Jesus, Mohammad and Buddha were not poor men; they had everything they needed and, had they needed cash to pay the mortgage, the gas bill or the window-cleaner, they could all have manifested that money with hardly a second thought.

We could all learn from them and maybe it is time to do so.