| bytheword.com |
| Excerpts from O. S. Marden's book, "Prosperity: How to attract it": "Now, if you are living in pinching poverty, in a narrow, cramped, limited environment in which there seems to be no hope, no outlook for better things; if you are not getting what you want, though working hard for it, you are just as foolish as the prince who, believing that he was poor, lived like a pauper in the midst of his father's limitless wealth. Your limitations are in your mind, just as the prince's were in his. You are the child of a Father who has created abundance, limitless wealth, for all of His children, but your pinched, limited, poverty-stricken thought shuts you out from all this abundance and keeps you in poverty. Everything in man's life, everything in God's universe, is based upon principle-follows a divine law; and the law of prosperity and abundance is just as definite as the law of gravitation, just as unerring as the principles of mathematics. It is mental law. Only by thinking abundance can you realize the abundant, prosperous life that is your birthright; in other words, according to your thought will be your life, your supply, or your lack. Your mental attitude will be flung back to you, every time, in kind. A poverty-stricken mental attitude will bring only poverty-stricken conditions to you. We are creatures of our convictions. We cannot get beyond what we believe we are; what we believe we have. Hence, if we think that we are never going to be strong or well like other people, or to be successful in our calling, we never will be. If we are convinced that we will always be poor, we will be. You can't get away from poverty when you don't expect to; when you don't believe that you are going to. It is not so much what you do with your hands as what you do with your mind that counts. Everything that has been accomplished by the hand...of man had its birth in the mind. A hard-working man who longs for prosperity, but is headed in the other direction mentally, who doesn't believe he is going to be prosperous, is neutralizing his hard work by his negative destructive thought; he is standing on the hose that connects with his supply. When you limit yourself in your thought, you are limiting yourself outwardly in a way which corresponds with your mental attitude, because you are obeying a law which is unchangeable. You will notice that the man who puts a nickel in the contribution box, is not only stingy, close, and mean in his money matters, but his face, his whole person, has a cramped, worried, pinched look. He is forever saving pennies, watching out for little things and never doing big things. No matter how much natural ability he has, his narrow, limited, poverty thought dwarfs him and cuts off his stream of supply. He cannot do big things because he never thinks big things. His warped mind will admit only a pinched supply instead of the big flow that is literally at his command. We often wonder why it is that certain people, in apparently no better circumstances than we are, get so much better things than we do; why they always insist upon and receive the best of everything. We never see them wearing cheap things-never see cheap things in their homes, or any pinching anywhere. They buy the best food, the best fruits and vegetables in the market, and everything else in accordance. We think they are extravagant when we compare what they pay for things with what we pay for things of the same kind, and we pride ourselves that we are economizing and saving what they are wasting. But are we? How does our manner of living compare with theirs? Does the enjoyment we get out of life measure up to what they get? Do the few dollars we save compensate for the great lack in our lives-the lack of good food, of proper clothing, of the little pleasure trips, the social enjoyments, the picnics and various diversions which make life pleasant, healthful, and above all, much more productive for the neighbors whose extravagance we condemn? As a matter of fact, our skimped, pinching policy leaves us poorer in the end. There is no changing the principle of the law of supply. Whatever your business, your profession or occupation, or your circumstances, your mental attitude will determine your success or failure...and gauges the flow of your supply." Return to main page |