the way for still greater supplies to flow in.
But you say, "I am short of money, I hardly know how to pay for
necessaries. What have I to give?"
The answer is that we must always start from the point where we are; and
if your wealth at the present moment is not abundant on the material
plane, you need not trouble to start on that plane. There are other
sorts of wealth, still more valuable, on the spiritual and intellectual
planes, which you can give; and you can start from this point and
practise the spirit of opulence, even though your balance at the bank
may be nil. And then the universal law of attraction will begin to
assert itself. You will not only begin to experience an inflow on the
spiritual and intellectual planes, but it will extend itself to the
material plane also.
If you have realised the _spirit_ of opulence you _cannot help_ drawing
to yourself material good, as well as that higher wealth which is not to
be measured by a money standard; and because you truly understand the
_spirit_ of opulence you will neither affect to despise this form of
good, nor will you attribute to it a value that does not belong to it;
but you will _co-ordinate_ it with your other more interior forms of
wealth so as to make it the material instrument in smoothing the way for
their more perfect expression. Used thus, with understanding of the
relation which it bears to spiritual and intellectual wealth, material
wealth becomes _one with them_, and is no more to be shunned and feared
than it is to be sought for its own sake.
It is not money, but the _love_ of money, that is the root of evil; and
the _spirit_ of opulence is precisely the attitude of mind which is
furthest removed from the love of money for its own sake. It does not
believe in money. What it does believe in is the generous feeling which
is the intuitive recognition of the great law of circulation, which does
not in any undertaking make its first question, How much am I going to
_get_ by it? but, How much am I going to _do_ by it? And making _this_
the first question, the getting will flow in with a generous profusion,
and with a spontaneousness and rightness of direction that are absent
when our first thought is of receiving only.
We are not called upon to give what we have not yet got and to run into
debt; but we are to give liberally of what we _have_, with the knowledge
that by so doing we are setting the law of circulation to work, and as
this law bring
|