The secret to attaining Prosperity

What is prosperity? I searched for the literal meaning and found this as the most apt definition — Prosperity is the flourishing, thriving, good fortune and successful social status. Prosperity often produces profuse wealth including other factors which can be profusely wealthy in all degrees, such as happiness and health.

Over time I have come to realize that eventually all our desires and the related activities funnel down to one thing — and that is happiness. We all want to be happy. We run after wealth, fame, success, good lifestyle, loving partners, and multitude of other material things that we think will give us happiness. We strive hard for these things, all our lives, but do we ever pause and reflect if these things are really making us happy?

You look around on social media. Your friends are buying new cars, new houses, some are vacationing at exotic locations, while others are just showing off their flamboyancy. And you think, “they are the ones really enjoying their lives. What am I doing?” Deep down it hits you in some ways and you yearn for those things. Social status takes precedence over affordability and just to satisfy your ego, you too buy those things out. If you can’t afford, you take a debt to buy and then make further future projections. Wealth earned or things bought gives you happiness, but it dies out sooner than you realize. And the next moment, you are in lookout for another thing. It goes on in a loop. Desires are endless and so is this loop. Thus, you are never content, never free, and never really happy.

So, comes the question — how can you attain prosperity and be happy.

And here is the one sentence answer -

You are prosperous if you can live within your income, spend less than what you earn, and are not fearful about what your future holds. If you have money, purchase things, if you do not have money, go without them. This captures the greatest wisdom in a nutshell.

This wisdom holds ground in the laws of prosperity, which stem from eternal spiritual truths. If you begin to feel and think lack or want, you experience lack. If you assert your abundance, then, as the shadow follows a person, abundance follows you. If you begin to desire, immediately you admit poverty. Desire is poverty. Desire is a feeling of inadequacy, and when you begin to desire, you are a beggar already. The moment a desire arises, just reject it. And then you will begin to experience that the desired object comes by itself to you. As long as you run after a thing, you cannot get it. The moment you turn away from a thing, it follows you by itself. This is an Eternal Law which has been proven in the lives of all those who have discovered it and applied it to themselves.

Once one unconsciously begins to affirm poverty by desiring, then poverty only becomes the law. To get free of desire is the secret of setting free the law of prosperity into motion. Why? — because of the eternal truth that all the plentitude is within you. Vedanta tells us that there is nothing that you lack, for you are Brahman or God himself, who is the source of all. In Him there is everything, and if you know that you are in Him, you have everything; you are in everything. And to affirm this knowledge, to affirm this fact of your ever being in Him is the master-key to make prosperity follow you like a dog following its master. After all, you are the master of the whole creation. You lack nothing. All-plenitude, all-abundance is your Self. Your true nature is plenitude. The more you begin to assert that, to affirm that, with perfect confidence, not as a thing to be, but as a fact that is — prosperity is yours.

Want or desire is the feeling of the mind. A millionaire, who is always wanting and in lookout to make couple of more millions, is really a beggar. A cab driver who is getting, say twenty or thirty dollars a day and says, “That is quite enough for me; my pocket is always full”, is always greater than the millionaire, He is richer than the millionaire for he has not the nagging feeling of lack and of want and the anxiety of running after desires.

So, the inner secret of the true law of prosperity is to affirm our plenitude, to affirm our abundance and live in that ever present condition of lacking nothing, of having God and, therefore, of having everything. This is the only way. This is the only secret, and the moment we start affirming it, we will find conditions changing, for our conditions are the product of our own thoughts. The ultimate vital factor that goes to make up all our lives is constituted by our thoughts. They are as much tangible and substantial as the bricks that pile up and become a mansion. They can build our whole life. They can create any condition in our life. There are multiple examples of people healing their diseases just by the power of their thoughts. The power of thought is something that stems right from us. The soul-force is beneath and behind all thought-force, and the affirmation of our true condition overcomes all conditions that are foreign to us, that are not natural to us.

To this end, contentment is the true secret of affirming our abundance. If we can feel abundant with whatever we have, there is nothing that can make us unhappy, and if we do not have contentment, nothing can make us happy. Thus, the secret of prosperity is to affirm our true, abundant nature which is complete — Purnatvam.

Reference reads:- “The path beyond sorrow” — by Swami Sivananda