Читать книгу The Prosperity & Wealth Bible - Kahlil Gibran - Страница 208

Purpose of the Lessons

The purpose of these lessons is to raise the mental and spiritual vibrations of the student to inspire hope, faith, courage to awaken larger thought within the mind, inspire greater plans and purposes and awaken the dormant energy in the life to fire the enthusiasm and call into active service hidden talent which the student, possibly, does not dream at his present stage of unfoldment, he possesses.

In short our purpose is to awaken men from mental slumber, show the unlimited resources in human nature, the unseen yet open doors to mental wealth first, then as a natural sequence to wealth in material conditions, and thus enlarge and ennoble the life as well as add to its material expressions.

The purpose of the true teacher who is ever the true physician as well must always be the “more abundant life” of which the Nazarene spoke and taught. To disclose that life, abounding life, in all its fullness and beauty and point out the laws by which it is gained, with wealth as a natural sequence, is the purpose of the three lessons on which we are entering.

A Prophecy of Results from These Lessons

Prophecies based on observation and experience, and knowledge of natural law, are exceedingly instructive and valuable. We predict most confidently that every student of these lessons will have after reading them and especially after their re-reading and study a larger store of information on the subject of Success in Life, brighter hopes, more enthusiasm, more “vim,” “grit” and “gumption” in business, and will attack his life work with such enlarged wisdom and such intense energy that hereafter his life will become in every way more successful and bring him into larger freedom, greater happiness and power and ampler resources financially.

In short, no one can apply the teachings of these lessons without his life becoming larger, nobler and purer, and more enjoyable in the possession of mental and material wealth. And the life that receives and applies these teachings will be like a fertilizing stream in the desert, making it bud and blossom like the rose.

The Reasons for This Prophecy

With absolute confidence I make this prophecy, because I shall give you not theories, spun from the imagination of the poet or novelist or from some dreamy philosopher in the seclusion of his study, or some penny-a-liner who is paid so much per page for his theories, but the actual results of human experience and a study of nature’s laws and especially of the laws of financial gain. I shall give you “the kernel” of the best teachings of a score of our ablest psychologists and new thought writers in concentrated form. And I shall give the personal testimony of those who have risen from poverty to wealth through discovery of the laws of financial success and their application to the life. The principles here laid down have been tested over and over again in the laboratory of life’s experiences and found correct and practicable.

Moreover I myself have proved them and I illustrate these principles and prove their value in my own life.

Another reason why we most confidently predict success to the students of , this course is the fact that the teachings are rational, being in accord with life and human experience, and based on laws that are now known and recognized as governing the accumulation of wealth. These is nothing of mystical charm, no miracle involved, nothing of the “cheap nostrum” order about them. Our method is simply reason amplified and set to work, energy awakened and employed, laws discovered and followed out with the one inevitable result: enlarged and ennobled character, mental and material wealth.

No Special Endowment Required for Money-Making

The way to competence, if not wealth, is open to every man of sound body and mind who will study and apply these laws. The fact that great riches belong to the few, and that some men seem to stumble on riches and others seek them in vain for a life time generally without knowledge of the law or application in the life has led some to suppose that a special endowment of nature is necessary to enable one to attain wealth. Doubtless a few men without a theoretical knowledge of the law have applied it in their lives, and unquestionably some few men seem to come into wealth by “chance” or “luck,” yet there is really no such thing as chance in a universe of law and the vast majority of men who have won wealth have either through their own mentality, or by the teachings of others, or by inspiration, come to know the law and apply it in their own lives.

Every man of sound mind and body, we repeat, can become master of conditions in his life in place of being enslaved, as the multitudes are, by these conditions. There is a pathway from poverty to wealth, from obscurity to fame, from weakness to strength, from the servile and pigmy condition of mind and life, to Kingship in mind and in estate. The door of opportunity is open or, at least, unlocked.

Nature Plans Abundance for All

Another introductory consideration worthy our attention is the fact that the evident plan of God as revealed in nature is abundance for all. Poverty is no part of nature’s plan but the very reverse is true: Nature designed abundance for all. Her provision for man’s wants covers not only his necessities but a super abundance is the law of Nature’s beneficence. The tracing of disease, poverty and suffering to the design of God was, indeed, a part of the Old Theology, which is now practically dead and superseded by the New Theology which traces all of these evils to ignorance and neglect of law.

As children of God we inherit not only the right to life, but to all that makes life worth living. But every life is “cabin’d, cribbed, confined” by poverty. In fact freedom, power, happiness, education, culture, travel, books, art, music, recreation the things that made life worth the living are really impossible without wealth.

Not only is our own life robbed of its full and happy expression by poverty, but man’s service of his fellowmen is limited on every hand by poverty. Men who possess in their own mentality great truths that would instruct and inspire the multitude, or great plans for reforming our deplorable social and economic system, or great purposes of charity toward the needy, or great reforms they would like to see realized find themselves hampered and hindered in all their noble work by “lack of funds.”

The world sad to state estimates a man not by his knowledge, or his character, so much as by the size of his bank account. A public lecturer said recently in my hearing and was applauded in saying it he respected no man who did not have a good bank account.

Harsh as this may appear, we shall show there is at least a small measure of justice in it by pointing out that Poverty is essentially a Mental Disease, and that from the standpoint of character itself in this age of golden opportunities it is no credit to a man to be poor.

Our Desires Are Prophecies and Show the Possibility of Wealth

All students of nature and of man recognize that the possession of a desire within the soul for any real or supposed good, is a natural prophecy proving there is somewhere in Nature’s realm a source of satisfaction for that desire. If my student, then, believes in a Personal God as the designer of all things, can he possibly conclude that God intended to mock us by desires impossible of fulfillment? If so, as Helen Wilmans aptly declares, these desires implanted within us are simply “promissory notes on a ruined bank.” Again, if these desires for wealth are not true prophecies, man is destined as he emerges from barbarism to civilization, to increasing misery and suffering, since desires multiply and intensify as man advances along the upward path of evolution. All studies, therefore, of nature and the human soul tend to convince us that man’s life should have an abundance of temporal good in short that man should rule his conditions and not be ruled by them. We go still farther and unhesitatingly assert it is.

Every Man’s Duty to Make All the Money He Can Honestly

At first sight it might seem that inheritors of great wealth having no need of more money and no love of business or labor might be excused from the task of money making. Not so, however. Every man who enjoys the advantages of our wonderful civilization, who eats the food some toiler has grown, or wears the garments some toiler has made, who enjoys the protection which is freely granted to all, owes a personal debt to the world. Despite his large bank account and broad acres he is but a refined “pauper” if in some way he does not add to the wealth of the world.

And no man has enough wealth to supply, not only his own need, but to fully meet the claims of a world in sickness, suffering and sorrow, and to plan and prosecute the great living reforms of this age.

A man should demand of himself, of society, of his God, abundance of temporal good. The stream of abundance should flow with increasing volume into his life, and the stream of beneficence should flow with equal freedom out of his heart and life, to supply the higher needs of humanity. “Freely receive; freely give.” The ideal life is the one in which a liberal kingly income is assured and man in the royalty and beneficence of his nature should give like a king.

No life can reach its maximum of enjoyment, power and usefulness without wealth.

Is There Great Danger in Acquiring Wealth?

Undoubtedly but greater dangers still in the lack of wealth. The one great danger in acquiring money and in possessing it, is the danger of becoming a slave to gold.

This is one of the vilest forms of slavery and, perhaps, no other form of idolatry is quite so benumbing to all the higher and diviner qualities of manhood as avarice. The miser is of all characters most despised and illustrates the truth of the old proverb “Money is a good servant but a hard master.” No other type of character exhibits such unreasoning folly and seems so fully to merit the rebuke: “Thou Fool.” The one safeguard in the acquisition of wealth is the constant, unremitting cultivation of the human sympathies and the exercise of benevolence. Without this, the acquisition of money is generally attended by a freezing up of the moral nature and a growing love for money for purely selfish purposes, or for money’s sake, ending in avarice and the wretched condition of the miser. It is quite easy to see how the rigid economy many feel called upon to exercise in rising from poverty to wealth, and the constant mental habit of reaching out in desire and act for material gain, would in the lapse of years work a transformation of character, so that men who set out in life with an ambition to acquire a fortune for the uplift of humanity, find with the gaining of the fortune they have lost all benevolent desire. This is an unspeakable calamity to multitudes of men who become enslaved not by money, but by the love of money, and miss the grandest opportunity of a life dowered with the possession of money the privilege of using wealth to enrich themselves and their fellows with that increasing knowledge, happiness and virtue, that constitute the eternal riches of the soul.

Better a thousandfold for a man that he live and die under the disadvantages and limitations and hardships of poverty and retain the spirit of brotherhood and humanity in his heart, than to acquire the wealth of Croesus and shrink his soul up to the littleness, meanness and wretchedness of a miser.

A very good test of our own soul attitude toward money, a very fair indication of how we would use great wealth if it came to us, may be had in the serious answer of the question: How are we using the measure of wealth which is ours today? How much have we contributed to purely benevolent objects this past year?

A man should ever recognize his own kingship and demand a liberal income from the world, and it is his business to see to it that all obstacles in himself and his environment are removed which would hinder a generous flow of Nature’s great stream of Opulence toward himself. And then he should live like a king, and be as generous as a king, with his fellowmen.

We Seek to Intensify Your Desires for Wealth

In place of encouraging contentment with Poverty, we preach the Gospel of Discontent. We would whet your desires for wealth and intensify your love not of money but of the good things in life which money represents. It is a misinterpretation of life and of all true religion to deny either the vast advantages of money on the one hand, or the right and duty of all men to possess and use it in as large a degree as is consistent with honor and justice. The inherent desires of men, the demands of the world today upon us in our complex civilization, the Law of Opulence everywhere seen in Nature, all prove that men ought to conquer conditions and amass wealth.