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Mind Over Matter

ACOMMON WITTICISM on the concept of mind over matter is if you don’t mind, it don’t matter. This is usually said in a deprecating manner, indicating that anyone who believes in the power of mind over matter is delusional or gullible. Of course, if you are facing a firing squad and your only defense is to use your mind to alter the direction of the bullets, mind-over-matter thinking is not going to help you.

In everyday life, however, the principle of mind over matter can be very effective and is not for the gullible or delusional at all. As with any universal principle or law, you must understand the dynamics of the principle in order to effectively achieve the results you seek.

The first recognized teacher of the principle of mind over matter in North America was a successful self-made business leader and entrepreneur from St. Louis, Missouri, named Charles Haanel. In 1912, he created a course called The Master Key System, which he sold as a mail-order course in twenty-six installments for ten cents an installment. The Master Key System was a major success. One of the early readers of the mail-order course was a journalist named Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill went on to write the most popular book ever published on the topic of generating and maintaining wealth, titled Think and Grow Rich. This book is still in print, with more than seventy million copies sold since publication. The Napoleon Hill Foundation is still going strong and releases multiple titles annually by individuals and organizations that espouse the effectiveness and importance of mind over matter in generating financial abundance.

As authors, we applaud the success and contributions of Haanel and Hill in bringing awareness of the importance of a proper mind-set and attitude to creating wealth, health, and happiness. In this book, we are expanding on the principles and techniques of mind power to add the even stronger soul power in causation and manifestation. In future chapters, we will explore soul over matter in depth, with specific examples on how soul generates mind reality. In this chapter, we want to help you understand the logic of mind over matter and demonstrate the correct interpretation of this basic yet powerful principle.

On the simplest level, mind is primary to matter because you cannot create any product or service until your mind has imagined it first. With the exception of the entertainment industry, the world of work and money is not in the practical sense a world of make-believe or wishful thinking. (Of course, money itself is a commonly agreed-upon fantasy about the value of certain pieces of paper and the concept of currency itself. We will discuss more about that in the next chapter on the history of money.)

A misunderstanding of the original work of Charles Haanel and Napoleon Hill has engendered the association of mind over matter with wishful thinking. In The Master Key System, Charles Haanel developed the principle of the universal mind, from which all mental images are derived. Haanel explained how, through meditation, it was possible for anyone to access the universal mind, and he gave concrete examples of how he did it himself. In The Master Key System, Haanel also developed the concept of the law of attraction. The original formulation of this law was that the positive energy you emanated drew positive energy to you, including good health, good relationships, and financial abundance. In the popularization of Haanel’s work in movies and books such as The Secret, the impression was given that you merely had to visualize what you desired and you would attract that object to you. In terms of manifesting wealth, creative visualization is a helpful tool and technique, but not a primary causal process. It is true that if you are unable to imagine success or visualize a positive outcome in your business dealings, you are much less likely to manifest success. Creative visualization alone is equivalent to removing a blockage that might prevent success, but it is not an action that will actually create your success. As the late, great baseball player and homespun philosopher Yogi Berra stated, “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” Lack of belief can derail you, but belief alone is rarely sufficient.

Since you are reading a book that purports to provide modern and ancient practical techniques and wisdom to create unlimited abundance, you of course want to know what is needed to manifest. The full answer will be revealed in the following chapters that explain the role of the soul, but the initial answer is quite simple. Within your mind you have access to the tools, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge that have the potential to create unlimited abundance. This is not conjecture. This is fact. Millions of people with no more knowledge, education, social standing, or desire than you have become multimillionaires and enjoyed lives of material abundance. Each self-made millionaire/billionaire and those who inherited wealth and grew rather than squandered it followed his or her own unique path, but all of them used their minds and not their bodies as their primary resource for creating wealth. Stories of how people with imagination and visualization have transformed their existence to become much more joyous and abundant in many ways abound. One of the author’s associates was born to a tenant farmer living in Caruaru in northeastern Brazil in the late 1940s. His parents were illiterate, and at the age of six he started working in the fields. He was able to learn basic math from other illiterate farmers whose lives focused on growing and selling vegetables, but he never went to school and never learned to read or write.

But this young man was extremely industrious. He worked hard and realized he could help the other tenant farmers by renting a wagon and taking their produce to market along with his own. This saved the other farmers’ time and allowed them to spend more time in their fields cultivating and harvesting more crops. They were delighted to pay this young man a small commission on the sale of their produce. Word spread about the young man and soon he was focusing full-time on buying and selling the crops of all the tenant farmers in his district. Being observant, he noticed there was a boom in the prices for coffee, so he encouraged his farmer friends to plant more coffee. In a few years, he became the largest provider of coffee beans to one of France’s premier coffee brands. When overexpansion and poor financial management prevented the French company from paying their debt to their supplier, this illiterate Brazilian became the owner of the coffee company. Concerned that he might be overinvested in coffee, he looked around and saw that beef prices were rising. Within five years, he became the largest cattle rancher in the entire state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil.

There are many similar rags-to-riches stories that have occurred all over the world. Our goal is not to inspire you to abandon what you are doing to seek a quick road to riches. Our young Brazilian friend worked for more than twenty years before becoming a multimillionaire, and, in his fifties, he did finally take the time to learn to read and write. Your road may be long or short, and the role of your soul will determine the length of your journey to riches. Our goal is to help you understand that the path to financial abundance will always have thinking prior to action. Whatever your present life circumstances, a proper mental attitude can potentially lead you to unlimited abundance.

One of the primary principles of both mind over matter and soul over matter is that you must have a “why” in what you do that benefits others. The more you serve others, the more you are likely to receive. The more you serve others unconditionally, the greater your likely reward. The financial benefits may not come immediately, but they will come. Although we may all question it at times, the universe is ultimately fair. Good deeds and good thoughts are rewarded. The universe is also infinitely abundant. There is no lack in the universe; there are enough atoms and molecules, enough time and space, for every living creature in the universe to enjoy the fullness of their being. Any scarcities you perceive are man-made situations, the majority of which can be resolved through man-made actions and inventions. To create these inventions, it is quite helpful if you can access the universal mind. It will also be necessary at the present time to understand the dynamics, history, and role of money, which we will explain in the next chapter.