Several ‘Prosperity pundits’ come onto the screen (one or two of whom I knew slightly from the days when I lived in California in the 70’s and 80’s) and in a somewhat evangelical  and ‘Californian’  kind of way,  tell us how living this law has changed their lives. To give an example,  Jack Canfield, the author of a successful book , tells us how he used to be poor, how his family mindset was one of scarcity, and how , by applying this law and ‘thinking big’, he now lives in a three million-dollar mansion ( a picture of it  replete with swimming pools, flashes up on the screen), has ‘A wife to die for’ and  frequently takes his whole family  on  expensive safaris to Africa! The message is: you too, can be successful like me - live the ‘good life’ -  if you just apply the law!

 

The whole idea behind the film is that we must focus – with passion – on what we want, and if we do, it will come to us. We just need to send these positive thoughts up to the universe and the universe will arrange abundance for us, be it wealth, success, fantastic relationships with wives to die for, or whatever.  The idea is that  God has it in mind for each of us to be prosperous, so we can attract whatever we want. We should never talk about not having enough money as that energises that condition. Rather, we should just visualise cheques coming to us, imagine money coming easily and frequently.’ In Napoleon Hill’s book ‘Think and grow rich’, we are advised to ‘Magnetize our minds with intense desire for riches until the desire for money drives us to create plans to acquire it.’

 

I came across this ‘Prosperity Consciousness’ movement , when, as I said, I lived in California, and I always had certain problems with it then. I have a few more today.

 

But first, let me be clear. In no way do I deny the validity of this law of attraction (Jesus, after all, told us that ‘As a man so thinketh in his heart, so he is’). I am sure many people, like Jack, have had financial success in the way described. Nor do I see anything  at all wrong with being financially successful. Indeed, I celebrate it. There are many  hugely wealthy people around who do incredibly good things with their money, notably Bill Gates whose Foundations give away millions to important causes such as AIDS research. If a  new and better world is to come into being, billions of pounds will be required to finance it, and  much of this money will need to come from enlightened entrepreneurs who are awakening to a higher consciousness and who are thus  being motivated to utilise their money in new and wiser ways. Indeed, I see money as being just another ‘energy of God’ that we are being asked to work with in as conscious a way as possible, and  I believe one of our great challenges  today is to  learn how to integrate our  spirituality with our materiality.

 

So I am grateful to the film for reminding me  generally about abundance and drawing my attention once more to this great law. Yes, I feel we are  all born in a state of original blessedness, not fallen-ness, and that God does intend the very best for His Creation. In the words of the great Bulgarian Master Peter Deunov:’ The love of God brings fullness of life.’ For many years  now, I have been conducting spiritual retreats helping people bring a greater spirit of joy and fullness into their lives.

 

 That said, I am disappointed with  this film primarily on two grounds. The first is that applying this law is not as easy as  it is made out .(It is one thing to be aware of ‘the secret’,  quite another  to realise it!) In actuality, some people have extremely difficult karmas around well-being and prosperity of any kind, and a film like this which gives the impression that having wealth and success  is easy if only we  were to ‘apply ourselves’, can  actually serve to deepen an already existing sense of worthlessness and failure on  the part of those who cannot seem to.

 

The second thing that I do not like  is the way the film is so commercial.    I think it mixes  up love of mammon with love of God. Yes,  I agree, God has it in mind that we be prosperous and abundant, but this needs to be seen first and foremost, at a soul level, as we learn increasingly to align ourselves to a higher will and open our hearts to a diviner love, and not  simply in terms of the placation of  our excessive egoic requirements! Indeed, at a time when our addiction to conscious consumption has never been greater (the effects of which now threaten our  very survival), the film continually hints that if we want to be happy and prosperous, we need bigger houses, perpetual safaris, the latest model of sports car, and wives to die for!

 

 I say that given  all the many crises we face today, including the escalation of global warming, surely  transformed states of consciousness leading one to wish to live a simpler lifestyle and to honour the fact that small really can be very beautiful, are what is required today. If we  are to see ourselves as being genuinally on a spiritual path,  then surely our thinking needs to be directed not in the direction of bigness in a quantitive sense but rather qualitatively ;  surely we need to work more   towards exploring how we can be increasingly content with what we already have, and  how, to quote Buckminster-Fuller, we can  obtain ‘More out of Less.’ Isn’t it more relevant today to  try to magnetize our thinking in the direction of how we can become wiser,  inwardly freer, more soulful, less ego-bound, bigger-hearted,  more enlightened,  and how increasingly  to become a part of those forces that restore and heal  and bring balance to our planet, and from that place, think of drawing more money towards us to finance a new vision?  I say that that is the way towards abundance. In Gandhi’s famous words: ‘The world provides for our need but not for our greed.’

 

That said, let me return to the issue of the so-called ‘ease’ of manifesting  money which all these pundits seem to advocate. I remember in the 80’s, attending a lecture by one of these ‘money gurus’ and being told how rich he was and how rich we too could be if we were only to follow his example: (he was no fool; he charged a lot for his information!) I went with a  friend who was an astrologer and he stood up and asked the man when his birth date was,  and where and what time he was born. On being told the answer my friend did one or two calculations and later said to him:’ It is interesting that you should be talking about wealth, because all your planets are in the house of financial success. You are naturally good with money and  money is  very important to you, perhaps overly important. Where you are most challenged, is to find your deeper soul nature and not to become overly obsessed with the material. So please do not think it is as easy for all of us in this area, as it is for you. Some of us have our  planets in other houses and our dreams lie  more in other directions!’

 

The lecturer looked visibly stunned by his words which I think were very true. Financial success is easier for some  than for others. There are many reasons for this , the two main ones being that with some people,  there is a greater natural thirst propelling them in that direction - they have a stronger will and determination, and perhaps most important,  they have fewer blockages standing in the way of being successful or prosperous. The film  passes over this issue completely and presumes we all possess the same ‘manifestable’ capacity. We don’t!

 

Again, do not get me wrong. I have nothing against making money or against the 'power of positive thinking’ which is basically what  underlies a lot of the thinking behind this ‘prosperity’ movement. Indeed, most mornings when I get up. I try to visualise myself having a good day and achieving everything I wish to achieve. I try to greet whatever confronts me during my day with as good a heart as I can muster. And I can do this  relatively easily, only because I have also, over the years, done a lot of confronting of my  inner demons - looked at aspects of myself that are not so positive and tried to see why I have ‘run’  the particular  patterns that I have done. Without having engaged in this inner work, this would not be nearly as easy.

 

This is why   I think that for many people, positive thinking is, of itself, insufficient. Alone, it may not always be able to counteract certain  powerful, unconscious negative proclivities which some of us  may possess very strongly, often without having the faintest idea of their existence. Let me give you a few examples:

 One may have grown up in Hollywood, as an old client of mine did, and seen the worst excesses of rich people and so have developed the belief that  having wealth equals a degenerative lifestyle. Thus, one may wish (unconsciously) to ‘fail’ in this area  in order to avoid degeneracy oneself! Conversely,  one might have grown up in such abject poverty, with parents who were so terrified of money , that the belief that  ‘wealth is not for the likes of me’ can have become very deeply ingrained in one’s unconscious. Or one might have had such an abusive childhood, and suffered from  such toxic shame as to render one  feeling wholly undeserving of anything good ever  happening to one. Similarly, one might  have a fear of money – perhaps of abusing the power it gives us , or a terror of the kind of responsibility   that it might entail. Some people hold a spirituality/materiality split and believe that  money really is ‘bad’ and that  to be ‘really spiritual’, one should live as St Francis, namely, in abject poverty!

 

All of these blockages can be deep, and  can serve to prevent the law of attraction operating in our favour. Unless recognised and worked through, these kinds of patterns will not necessarily melt fluffily  away at the first onslaught of positive affirmation.

But my main criticism, from a spiritual viewpoint, is, as I said,  that the film primarily emphasises external and  tangible expressions of abundance and presents these things  as if they were the source of  our happiness. We all know that this is not true. If any of those prosperity pundits had said  to us that the deeper aim must be to find inner abundance, inner peace, inner happiness, and  that from a deeply soulful place inside us, we might  then try to manifest more external goodies that we feel  are lacking in our lives, then the film  would have had more meaning for me. But none of them stressed that. And for this reason the film gives out the wrong message and suffers from the Narcissism that  a lot of spirituality today suffers from and needs to address. The film had no real depth, no  real soul to it.  It was unadulterated, New-Agey spiritual materialism.

 

The further point is that putting too large an emphasis on  just manifesting financial success,  can  make for imbalance in our lives and in certain cases, may actually  diminish us, give us  false airs and graces, take us away from ourselves - away from our humility and humanity.  We can over-develop money-making skills at the expense of evolving other, more human attributes . Also, because we can get too comfortable (at a material level), it can militate against our making real efforts to discover who we  really are. Jesus understood this  only too well, suggesting that it was ‘Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to Heaven’, that is, enter the deeper spiritual worlds.

 

 Indeed, the true abundance that  lies in these worlds and which all the great spiritual teachers have talked about since time immemorial,  and which may be experienced through hard work and determination to begin with, and later, through surrender, forgiveness and letting go, is barely mentioned. In fact I found very little  real heart in ‘The Secret’ and I think that possessing this mysterious element is an indispensable component in our ability to experience deeper abundance.

 

As we learn quietly to open our hearts, we begin to experience the world around us in a  more loving and compassionate way . The beauty and magic and mystery of life that is always there, only which we cannot ordinarily perceive,  now begins to  open up for us,  even - and this is an important point - if our outer life may be having  the hiccups. From this new place, the desire for big mansions and stimulating safaris and the like, becomes  increasingly less relevant . (We don’t need to repress our desires so much as they begin melting away of their own!) In other words, all the glamour that the film tells us is required if we are to live the ‘good life’, is only necessary to the extent that  we don’t lead a good life, because our hearts are not  sufficiently open to allow us to  experience the real abundance that is all around us and within us all the time..

 

I would like to suggest  then, that there is a much  deeper secret needing to be uncovered , and that  is the secret of becoming more and more who we truly are as we learn  increasingly  to align ourselves  with our deeper destiny pattern and actually ‘play out’ , in our lives, the role that our souls have intended  for us in this particular incarnation. The more we   do so and develop our ‘being nature’, the  happier we are and the less  we feel inclined  to define ourselves through what we possess. In other words, the more  depth we discover, the less we experience lack and the less we are moved to  want to acquire things to  try to fill the empty spaces!  In Jesus words again:’ Those who are able to connect to this source or to ‘Drink of the  holy waters of life, will not thirst…… ’

 

I stress again: so long as we remain disconnected from our true ground of being, there will always  be an ache, a feeling of dissatisfaction, which  no amount of large mansions and safaris will ever fill. From this ’lack place’, the more we have, the more we  will still want; it is easy to become fixated in the belief that  only more is beautiful, only more will rescue us, and therefore become  transfixed on the treadmill of continual activity  to try to acquire things. I think  one of the  great spiritual challenges  facing many of us Westerners today, is to learn to break free of our painful addictions to things which have little intrinsic value. This can only occur as we discover  how to feed ourselves from within and thus allow our deeper heart-being-life to  begin to flower.

 

Again, I am not suggesting  there is anything wrong with  having large houses and  going on safaris. If we have them, let us celebrate them and use the space to allow others to celebrate  them  along with us. What I find distasteful is the subtle message that there is something wrong  with not having them and that if we can’t manifest these goodies, then we will be separated from what is indispensable to our happiness. This illusion only persists because we do not know how to receive the abundant wealth omni-present in  each moment. If we do know how, it becomes much easier to be grateful for all the many blessings that we already have and to realise that we already are rich, whether or not we possess mansions or  fast sports cars.

 

Many years ago, I underwent a severe crisis in my life where, in the space of a few weeks, I lost a woman I was very fond of, a great deal of  my money, as well as finding myself with a life-threatening disease. Pretty ‘un-prosperous’, one might say, from the kind of perspective offered us in the film!

 

But at a soul level, this multi-levelled crisis was one of the most important and meaningful things that have happened to me, for out of the depths of despair, my heart began to open for the first time. I realised I had become habituated to  my life  being  relatively easy and  to things ‘going my way’,  to  being a kind of ‘lucky Jim’, to my work going well,  to women liking me and my health and finances being good,  and all his  happening without much effort on my part. And as a result I’d developed a rather self-satisfied, ‘cocky’, holier-than-thou mentality. I talked the talk but didn’t really walk it. This was not prosperity. And the gift of this mega crisis was to shatter my complacency, change the ground-rules upon which I operated  and in so doing, break open  many of my old identifications and  let me see how essentially me-centred I really was! It is only when we can see some part of ourselves truly the way it is, that we are motivated to do something about it and try to play the life game at a different level.

 

In retrospect,  then, I realised that this  crisis was one of the most ‘abundant things’ that had ever happened to me. Though I of course suffered, it was what I later referred to as ‘beneficial suffering’, for out of it came  a  big gain, a transformation, a new level of self awareness, allowing me, I think,  to join the human race for the first time! I was able to see that the real ‘good life’ was about trying to be a real person, endeavouring to be humble and kind to others and  to  seek to live from that place.  While I haven’t  been particularly good at actualising this realisation, I am very, very slowly trying to move a bit more in that direction.

 

I want to conclude by telling you about a hero in my life, a man who has  probably touched me more than anyone else. His name is Deepak. I met him fifteen years ago when I went to Luknow in India to study with a Master. Deepak’s role was to look after the people who were staying in the various houses dotted around this Master’s ashram. He worked very hard, cooking for us, cleaning our shoes, tidying up the houses. I became friendly with him.

 

And what I learned was that in no way did Deepak feel he was doing an inferior work. He  felt neither inferior nor superior. I observed that he lived  all aspects of his life with grace, precision and gentleness. ‘I love cooking and being with you all,’ he would tell me,’ And I live in a beautiful house. I am so lucky. I want for nothing’. One day, he took me  to visit his tiny dwelling and  to meet his wife and six children .The space was so clean and shining, I felt I was visiting a  vast palace of love. I was bountifully welcomed. Although materially, he had so little, he shared his choicest food with me. The generosity of  his spirit  was awesome . 

 

When I was about to leave to return home, I left Deepak a Western-style tip. He saw it, took up the  money and pressed it to his heart. ’Serge, I thank you for this, but it is too much.  Keep it. I do not need it. My family and I ; we  already have such treasures; we have all that we require. We  are so blessed by God.’ And he was. Angelus Silesius, a Renaissance Christian mystic put it like this:

‘God whose love and joy are everywhere
Can’t come to visit
Unless you aren’t there,’ ( that is, unless the ‘Narcissistic us’ that  defines itself by  our needing status and big  mansions, is  increasingly out of the way!)

 Deepak was quite empty. That is why his being was so  abundantly full.

I think he was one of the few truly sufficient people I have met and  I believe that the reason our planet is not in a worse state than it already is, is due to men and women like him who  feed it love,  purity, harmony and balance.  They should be an example to all of us. I felt I had been privileged to have encountered a real man.

 

Our world situation is very serious today. I think it is  about time  now that more of us committed to a depth spirituality, and devoted our efforts to magnetizing enlightenment as our goal and , operating out of that context, then worked at trying to create greater sufficiency in those areas of our physical, financial, emotional or mental lives where it might be lacking.

 

(c) Serge Beddington-Behrens 2009