The Prosperity & Wealth Bible. Kahlil Gibran
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again, though he had been suffering from it for forty-five years.
If you had delirium tremens, and thought you saw pink elephants and green alligators and yellow snakes all about you, it would be a foolish physician that would try to cure you of snakes. Or that would prescribe glasses to improve your eyesight, when he knew that the animals round about you were merely distorted visions of your mind.
The indigestion that you suffer from, the colds that bother you — in short, each and every One of your ailments-is just as much a distorted idea of your mind as would be the snakes of delirium tremens. Banish the idea and you banish the manifestation.
The Bible contains one continuous entreaty to cast out fear. From beginning to end, the admonition “Fear not” is insistent. Fear is the primary cause of all bodily impairment. Jesus understood this and He knew that it could be abolished. Hence His frequent entreaty, “Fear not, be not afraid.”
Struggle there is. And struggle there will always be. But struggle is merely wrestling with trial. We need difficulties to overcome. But there is nothing to be afraid of. Everything is an effect of mind. Your thought forces, concentrated upon anything, will bring that thing into manifestation. Therefore concentrate them only upon good things, only upon those conditions you wish to see manifested. Think health, power, abundance, and happiness. Drive all thoughts of poverty and disease, of fear and worry, as far from your mind as you drive filth from your homes. For fear and worry is the filth of the mind that causes all trouble, that brings about all disease. Banish it! Banish from among your associates any man with a negative outlook on life. Shun him as you would the plague. Can you imagine a knocker winning anything? He is doomed before he starts. Don’t let him pull you down with him. “Fret not thyself,” says the Psalmist, “else shalt thou be moved to do evil.”
That wise old Psalmist might have been writing for us today. For there is no surer way of doing the wrong thing in business or in social life than to fret yourself, to worry, to fume, to want action of some kind, regardless of what it may be. Remember the Lord’s admonition to the Israelites, “Be still — and know that I am God.”
Have you ever stood on the shore of a calm, peaceful lake and watched the reflections in it? The trees, the mountains, the clouds, the sky, all were mirrored there — just as perfectly, as beautifully, as the objects themselves. But try to get such a reflection from the ocean! It cannot be done, because the ocean is always restless, always stirred up by winds or waves or tides.
So it is with your mind. You cannot reflect the richness and plenty of Universal Mind, you cannot mirror peace and health and happiness, if you are constantly worried, continually stirred by waves of fear, winds of anger, tides of toil and striving. You must relax at times. You must give mind a chance. You must realize that, when you have done your best, you can confidently lean back and leave the outcome to Universal Mind.
Just as wrong thinking produces discord in the body, so it also brings on a diseased condition in the realm of commerce. Experience teaches that we need to be protected more from our fears and wrong thoughts, than from so-called evil influences external to ourselves. We need not suffer for another man’s wrong, for another’s greed, dishonesty, avarice or selfish ambition. But if we hug to ourselves the fear that we do have to so suffer, take it into our thought, allow it to disturb us, then we sentence ourselves. ‘We are free to reject every suggestion of discord, and to be governed harmoniously, in spite of what anything or anybody may try to do to us.
Do you know why old army men would rather have soldiers of 18 or 20 than mature men of 30 or 40? Not because they can march farther. They can’t! Not because they can carry more. They can’t! But because when they go to sleep at night, they really sleep. They wipe the slate clean! When they awaken in the morning, they are ready for a new day and a new world.
But an older man carries the nervous strain of one day over to the next. He worries! With the result that at the end of a couple of month’s’ hard campaigning, the older man is a nervous wreck.
And that is the trouble with most men in business. They never wipe the slate clean! They worry! And they carry each day’s worries over to the next, with the result that some day the burden becomes more than they can carry.
The Bars of Fate
Fear results from a belief that there are really two powers in this world -Good and Evil. Like light and darkness. When the fact is that Evil is no more real than darkness. True, we lose contact with Good at times. We let the clouds of fear and worry come between us and the sunlight of Good and then all seems dark. But the sun is still shining on the other side of those clouds, and when we drive them away, we again see its light.
Realizing this, realizing that Good is ever available if we will but turn to it confidently in our need, what is there to fear? “Fear not, little flock,” said Jesus, “for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” And again — “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.”
If this means anything, it means that the Father is ever available to all of us that we have but to call upon Him in the right way and our needs will be met. It doesn’t matter what those needs may be.
If Universal Mind is the Creator of all, and if everything in the Universe belongs to It, then your business, your work, isn’t really yours — but the “Father’s.” And He is just as much interested in its success, as long as you are working in accordance with His plan, as you can be.
Everyone will admit that Universal Mind can do anything good. Everyone will admit that It can bring to a successful conclusion any undertaking It may be interested in. If Mind created your business, if It inspired your work, then It is interested in its successful conclusion.
Why not, then, call upon Mind when you have done all you know how to do and yet success seems beyond your efforts. Why not put your problem up to Mind, secure in the belief that It CAN and WILL give you any right thing you may desire? I know that many people hesitate to pray for material things, but if Universal Mind made them, they must have been made for some good purpose, and as long as you intend to use them for good, by all means ask for them.
If you can feel that your business, your work, is a good work, if you can be sure that it is advancing the great Scheme of Things by ever so little, you will never again fear debt or lack or limitation. For “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Universal Mind is never going to lack for means to carry on Its work. When Jesus needed fish and bread, fish and bread were provided in such abundance that a whole multitude was fed. When He needed gold, the gold coin appeared in the fish’s mouth. Where you are, Mind is, and where Mind is, there is all the power, all the supply of the universe.
You are like the owner of a powerhouse that supplies electricity for light and heat and power to the homes and the factories around you. There is unlimited electricity everywhere about you, but you have got to set your dynamo going to draw the electricity out of the air and into your power lines, before it can be put to practical account.
Just so, there are unlimited riches all about you, but you have got to set the dynamo of your mind to work to bring them into such form as will make them of use to yourself and the world.
So don’t worry about any present lack of money or other material things. Don’t try to win from others what they have. Go where the money is! The material wealth that is in evidence is so small compared with the possible wealth available through the right use of mind, that it is negligible by comparison. The great rewards are for the pioneers. Look at Carnegie; at Woolworth; at Ford! Every year some new field of development is opened, some new world discovered. Steam, gas, electricity, telegraphy, wireless, the automobile, and the aeroplane — each opens up possibilities of new worlds yet to come.
A hundred years ago, people probably felt that everything had been discovered that could be discovered. That everything was already known that was likely ever to be known. Just as you may feel about things now, yet look at the tremendous strides mankind has taken in the past hundred years. And they are as nothing to what the future holds for us, once man has learned to harness the truly unlimited powers of his subconscious mind.
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