THE MIRACLES OF RIGHT THOUGHT. Orison Swett Marden

      The Power that made and sustains us gives liberally, abundantly, not stingily, to everybody and everything. There is no restriction, no limitation, no loss to anybody from His abundant giving.

      We are not dealing with a Creator who is impoverished by granting our requests. It is His nature to give, to flood us with our heart’s desires. He does not have less because we ask much. The rose does not ask the sun for only a tiny bit of its light and heat, for it is the sun’s nature to throw it out to everything which will absorb it and drink it in. The candle loses nothing of its light by lighting another candle. We do not lose but increase our capacity for friendship by being friendly, by giving abundantly of our love.

      One of the great secrets of life is to learn how to transfer the full current of divine force to ourselves, and how to use this force effectively. If man can find this law of divine transference, he will multiply his efficiency a million fold, because he will then be a co-operator, co-creator with divinity, on a scale of which he has never before dreamed.

      When we recognize that everything comes from the great Infinite Supply, and that it flows to us freely, when we get into perfect tune with the Infinite, when the brute has been educated out of us and the dross of dishonesty, selfishness, impurity, burned out of us, we shall see God without these scales, which make us blind to good; we shall see God, (good,) and we shall know good, for only the pure in heart can see God.

      When unfairness, a desire to take advantage of our brothers and sisters, is removed from our lives, we shall get so close to God that all of the good things in the universe will flow to us spontaneously. The trouble IS that we restrict the in-flow by wrong acts, wrong thoughts.

      Every vicious deed is an opaque veil, another film over our eyes so that we cannot see God (good). Every wrong step separates us from Him.

      When we learn the art of seeing opulently, instead of stingily, when we learn to think without limits, how not to cramp ourselves by our limiting thought, we shall find that the thing we are seeking is seeking us, and that it will meet us half way.

      John Burroughs beautifully expresses this in his poem “Waiting”:

      Serene, I fold my hands and wait,

       Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;

       I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,

       For, lo! my own shall come to me.

      I stay my haste, I make delays,

       For what avails this eager pace?

       I stand amid the eternal ways,

       And what is mine shall know my face.

      Asleep, awake, by night or day,

       The friends I seek are seeking me;

       No wind can drive my bark astray,

       Nor change the tide of destiny.

      What matter if I stand alone?

       I wait with joy the coming years;

       My heart shall reap where it hath sown,

       And garner up its fruit of tears.

      The waters know their own and draw

       The brook that springs in yonder height;

       So flows the good with equal law

       Unto the soul of pure delight.

      The stars come nightly to the sky;

       The tidal wave unto the sea;

       Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,

       Can keep my own away from me.

      Do not be forever apologizing for your lack of this or that. Every time you say that you have nothing fit to wear, that you never have things that other people have, that you never go anywhere or do things that other people do, you are simply etching the black picture deeper and deeper. As long as you recite these unfortunate details and dwell upon your disagreeable experiences, your mentality will not attract the thing you are after, will not bring that which will remedy your hard conditions. The mental attitude, the mental picturing, must correspond with the reality we seek.

      Prosperity begins in the mind, and is impossible with a mental attitude which is hostile to it. We cannot attract opulence mentally by a poverty-stricken attitude which is driving away what we long for. It is fatal to work for one thing and to expect something else. No matter how much one may long for prosperity, a miserable, poverty-stricken mental attitude will close all the avenues to it. The weaving of the web is bound to follow the pattern. Opulence and prosperity cannot come in through poverty-thought and failure-thought channels. They must be created mentally first. We must think prosperity before we can come to it.

      How many take it for granted that there are plenty of good things in this world for others, comforts, luxuries, fine houses, good clothes, opportunity for travel, leisure, but not for them! They settle down into the conviction that these things do not belong to them, but are for those in a very different class.

      But why are you in a different class? Simply because you think yourself into another class; think yourself into inferiority; because you place limits for yourself. You put up bars between yourself and plenty. You cut off abundance, make the law of supply inoperative for you, by shutting your mind to it.

       And by what law can you expect to get what you believe you cannot get? By what philosophy can you obtain the good things of the world when you are thoroughly convinced that they are not for you?

      The limitation is in ourselves, and not in the Creator. He wants His children to have all of the good things of the universe, because He has fashioned them for His own. If we do not take them, it is because we limit ourselves.

       One of the greatest curses of the world is the belief in the necessity of poverty.

      Most people have a strong conviction that some must necessarily be poor; that they were made to be poor. But there was no poverty, no want, no lack, in the Creator’s plan for man. There need not be a poor person on the planet. The earth is full of resources which we have scarcely yet touched. We have been poor in the very midst of abundance, simply because of our own blighting, limiting thought.

      We are discovering that thoughts are things, that they are incorporated into the life and form part of the character, and that if we harbor the fear thought, the lack thought, if we are afraid of poverty, of coming to want, this poverty thought, fear thought incorporates itself in the very life texture and makes us the magnet to attract more poverty like itself.

      It was not intended that we should have such a hard time getting a living, that we should just manage to squeeze along, to get together a few comforts, to spend about all of our time making a living instead of making a life. The life abundant, full, free, beautiful, was intended for us.

      If we were absolutely normal, our living-getting would be a mere incident to our life-making. The great ambition of the race would be to develop a superb type of manhood, a beautiful, magnificent womanhood; man making, man building, instead of dollar making, as now.

      Resolve that you will turn your back on the poverty idea, and that you will vigorously expect prosperity; that you will hold tenaciously the thought of abundance, the opulent ideal, which is befitting your nature; that you will try to live in the realization of plenty, to actually feel rich, opulent. This will help you to attain what you long for. There is a creative force in intense desire.

      The fact is, we live in our own worlds, we are creations of our own thought. Each builds his own world by his thought habit. He can surround himself with an atmosphere of abundance, or of lack; of plenty, or of want.

      God’s children were not made to grovel but to aspire; to look up, not down. They were not made to pinch along in poverty, but for larger, grander things. Nothing is too good for the children of the Prince of Peace; nothing too beautiful for human beings; nothing too grand, too sublime, too magnificent for us to enjoy.

      Why should we not expect great, grand things, if we are made in God’s image and are His children? We are heirs of all that