MONEY, SOULS, AND PSYCHOLOGY
MONEY is not wealth. It is one of the symbols of wealth. What, then, is wealth? Wealth is the ownership of something the world wants and for which it will exchange its labor, money, or property. In general, it means possessing something that is useful. Or it may mean having something which is not useful now but which can be made useful.
That is called potential wealth. Mines, oil fields, vacant land, water power, concessions, inventions, “undeveloped resources,” may become wealth, and have their value because you, yourself, and others have faith in them. The greatest wealth of America today lies in her undeveloped resources. Potentially there is enough to sustain ten times the present population.
There was a time when all the wealth of the world was only potential. It lay like a fallow field waiting for the seed. Economic wealth is the product of man’s mind and muscle united with the forces of nature. Wealth, therefore, is something that can be created.
There are many ways to get rich but it is important to remember that wealth can be “created,” that it must be something useful, and that the employment of the mind is essential to it.
The difference between savage races and civilized, between those who have potential wealth and those who have created wealth, lies in the mental equation. The natural resources are awaiting the mind of the thinker. The field must be seeded with psychology.
Brains are in demand. Thoughts are at a premium. The reaction requires a catalyzer. That catalyzer is mind.
That mind may be yours.
In considering how you may use your mind to acquire wealth, it is very essential that you learn to use it in the right way so that you may avoid failure and extract the greatest measure of results from the least effort. There is a right way and a wrong way to use the mind. There is a law of mind and we succeed or fail as we obey the requirements of this law.
Those who are ignorant of this law are handicapped by their ignorance.
Those who are acquainted with it possess an asset. It is interesting to note that a national training organization, doing all its teaching by mail, has increased the average earnings of its graduates by almost one hundred percent. That shows what the mental element may become in the attainment of success, for the student’s wealth is increased not by added material and economic capital but by drawing upon his undeveloped mental resources.
It is not our purpose here to teach the technique of business or vocation. That belongs to the schools or to experience.
Our purpose is to show how you may take yourself in hand, employ your present technical knowledge or material possessions, and by the addition of the new knowledge of mental law, increase your wealth. And this may be done without the sacrifice of your higher ideals but rather in perfect harmony with them.
In fact, it will be found that those who follow these principles will gradually develop deeper spiritual qualities because they are seeking to put all their forces into expression; and the mobilization of all your resources must of necessity include your spiritual forces.
And strange as it may seem, a large part of the failures in modern life, including business, vocation, health, and happiness, is due to ignorance of the deeper qualities and laws of our nature. Recent discoveries in the field of psychology, especially in psychoanalysis, have revealed the fact that a large percent of those who fail to “make good” owe their failure to ignorance or neglect of the fact that they have a soul.
One can imagine the howl of derision that would have greeted this statement ten years ago. The religious would have stigmatized it “prostitution,” and the scientific would have stigmatized it as religious.
As a matter of fact, it is now well known among psychological experts, including psychiatrists, vocational advisers, and psychoanalysts, that neurotics and failures owe their condition largely and often entirely to the fact that they are “misfits.” They are “not adapted,” not vocationally adjusted.
They are doing something for which they are not “naturally” fitted. The “self” or “psyche” is not satisfied; the mind is distressed by the constant effort to do something distasteful to it—and so the psyche “gets sick,” the body gets sick, and the business gets sick