Living The Abundant Life

Let's talk about wealth and living the abundant life. In the last message we discussed health and how to begin to use the power of God's Law to heal our body, our mind and our lives. Now we will turn our attention to perhaps the most misunderstood area of human life - wealth and abundant living.

In many cultures, notably in the US, there is a very conflicted attitude about wealth. Everyone seems to want it, our society glorifies the "good life" and the American Dream which includes a comfortable, happy life, but many disdain those who have wealth as unworthy, greedy and uncaring of others. While there are certainly many examples of wealthy people who fit that description well, there are also many, many more who spend much of their time giving a great portion of their wealth away to good and noble causes.

I believe that our problem with wealth lies with us being a predominantly Christian nation that has often misunderstand the Bible and what it has to say about wealth and the wealthy. As children we were spoon fed Bible tales that seemed to say that to go to Heaven you must be meek and poor. We have an idea that goodness and money are mutually exclusive. Few people plan to be a bad person, so its no wonder that we seem to make poverty somehow noble and fine and it is anything but! We often hear the phrase "money is the root of all evil" spoken in churches across America and in many other cultures and countries. The Bible does not say that money is the root of all evil.

What the Bible actually says is that the love of money is the root of all evil which is certainly true! To place your focus on money as an end and take your attention and focus off of the Creator of the Universe; the Indwelling and Most High God, is to miss the entire point of your existence on this planet. You were not put here to see who could die with the most toys and have the most money in the bank. I have never seen a luggage rack on a hearse, have you? You were put here to learn to love unconditionally and to enjoy the abundant life while learning unconditional love. It is very possible to do both at the same time.

Remember, money is a tool, nothing more. To love money is error thinking; it is a bit like the carpenter falling in love with his hammer. He may value the hammer as the instrument of his work which allows him to make a good living, but he understands that taking care of his family and himself is the goal and the focus - not the hammer. So it is with money. Money is a tool that allows us to be comfortable and to give comfort and pleasurable experiences to those we love. Money gives us choices and freedom of action and as such is a gift from God. God wants us to be free to choose the life we wish to live but living without a dime makes this pretty difficult. The freedom to thrive economically is vital to living the life we are all born to live-the abundant life.

Without economic freedom, there is no real freedom - the Founding Fathers of the United States knew this very well and that is why they enshrined the sacred right of acquiring and protecting property as a pillar of the American way of life. This does not mean that money should ever be the focus or center of your life. Living a money centered life brings emptiness and the nagging feeling that there must be more and indeed there is.

Without the peace of knowing that you are God expressing as you, that there is no separation between you and God; how does it profit you to be a billionaire? But with the peace of God, with the knowledge of who and what you are; with wealth you can be of service to your fellow human in ways that can make a lasting difference and perhaps change the world.

The great Truth about material wealth is that poverty is a state of mind and not a state of your bank balance. Poverty is optional and if you like poverty you have a perfect right to it. This is what Jesus meant when he said that the poor will always be with us. Some people would rather live in lack than learn the lessons and make the deep changes in thinking that are necessary to truly get out of poverty or the state of "just enough", which is the state of being in which so many of us spend our lives.

Are you ready to move from not enough or just getting by to the Abundant Life? To do this you must first change your thinking and speaking about wealth and the people who have it. Do you believe that you cannot be a spiritual person and be wealthy at the same time? Do you believe that you must "sell your soul to the devil" to become abundant? Do you believe that people of wealth are less worthy or less good? If you have these beliefs you will never be abundant! What you are inside and what you believe at your core of being is what you create as your life. You cannot change your life in any meaningful way until you change you from the inside out.

Why do so many live in poverty if abundance is just a change of mind and heart away? Our beliefs imprison us in the state of mind we inhabit right now. If you live in the mind state of poverty, you can struggle all you want and you will remain poor. Even if you inherited or won riches, you would find a way to get rid of the wealth in short order because you cannot inhabit a state of poverty thinking and be wealthy. You mind creates your reality. You must change your belief in the nobility of poverty and that somehow it is better to be "poor but honest". This belief implies that to be wealthy is to be a dishonest, deceitful and a crook..

There are thousands and thousands of wealthy men and women who are wonderful people who help millions directly and indirectly with their wealth and their love. Have you ever considered that the poor have only their labor to give and thus can only make a limited impact on the world? A billionaire can, and often does, change society, fund a cure, create wealth for others through employing thousands. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, T. Boone Pickens, John Templeton - this list is endless of these modern day "angels" of prosperity.

Your poverty thinking will keep you scraping along with just enough all of your life.
Get over it! Remember poverty is a state of mind, not a financial fact. Mike Todd, the famous movie producer and first husband of Elizabeth Taylor, led a millionaire's life one year and flat broke another. He was a classic risk taker, a throw the dice and let it ride kind of man and he made no apologies for it. He is quoted as saying "I have been broke many times in my life but I have never spent a day poor". He may have not had a dime in his pocket but in his mind he was wealthy and what the mind believes tenaciously and consistently will always come to pass.

As long as you think, speak and act poor you will be poor. If you read our last message then you know that the same is true for health. Think sickness, speak of illness and expect illness and you will surely have it. Is it just happy talk or "positive thinking" that will make you rich? No, I am sorry to say that it takes much more than that. Here is how it can work for you.

You decide to change from the poverty state of mind to the abundance state of mind. OK, fine, that's a great start but you still won't wake up the next morning with a million in the bank. You have, however, ploughed the soil of your Mind and planted the seeds of abundance with your new thinking, speaking and new expectations. You have made a great start. Now what?

In your poverty mind, you would say: "things like that never happen to people like us", or "I could never have anything like that". And so it was. As you thought, so you were. Now you say: "I can see myself living in that lovely home - I belong there, I deserve to be there". Or "my children are going to go to that college, they are smart and they deserve to be there and I will make sure they can go" instead of "no one in my family ever went to college, who do you think you are?" This is poor folks talk and I heard it for 18 years as a teacher in inner-city Los Angeles. The only difference between the people in South Central and the people in the Valley (sections of Los Angeles) is that one section accepts their condition of lack and limitation and expects more of the same and the other section, even if they are working class people, believe that they can live the good life and that they will. Both areas have fine people who deserve the very best but to get it they have to learn to expect it, think abundantly and imagine it as done regardless of their current bank balance.

It is all about belief - "it is done unto you as you believe".

Here are the basics:

1.Think about where you want to go in life, never about where you are now.

2.Expect what you want in life, no matter what the "facts" are now.

3.Remember, today' facts are the results of yesterday's thinking and believing and today's abundant thinking will produce tomorrow's life of abundance!

4.Watch programs on TV about the life you want. Read books about the life you want. Spend time with the people who are living the life you want; watch how they talk, what they talk about, who they are inside.

5.Then, use the greatest gift God has given to each of us, and humanity alone, the power of imagination. Imagine yourself in the fine home, that nice car, those lovely clothes and your children happy and safe.

6.Imagine everything about the life you want - the sights, the smells, the feel of it. Make it real. Go see homes like the one you want. Go look at cars or boats or RV's like the one you want. Imagine yourself owning and enjoying these things.

7.Imagine yourself as God's deputy, licensed to have the abundant life. The fact that you are here on this planet means that you deserve abundance. It is your birthright, claim it!

8.Imagine yourself as One with the Infinite Mind of God, able to create your desires with Love and Light and ease.

9.Imagination is the portal to all of your life. Positive and negative - it is neutral; it works both ways so watch how you use this greatest power that you posses!


10. Fear not for I am with you always, God has promised you this, so no fear! Your greatest fears will come to pass! So will your greatest desires if you use God's Law of Mind Action.

Next time we'll explore the concept of happiness, what is it and how do we get it.

God loves your and so do I!

Rev. Dore' Jacques Patlian

Health, Wealth and Happiness

In our last post we discussed the ideas of reward and punishment and our deep cultural belief in them. I suppose it appeals to the "fairness" we all seem to seek in a world never designed to be fair. The world is just in the sense of karmic justice; what you put out in life you do receive, pressed down to overflowing. What you sow you surely will reap, but rarely from the same person or in like manner.

Let's carry this discussion of Universal Law, the Law of the Most High God and the Indwelling God, who are one and the same, into the realms of health, wealth and that most elusive of human conditions - happiness. Just as there is Divine Justice in returning to us what we sow in like or greater measure, so it is with heath, wealth and happiness. Let's look at health, that most important of the three because without it, wealth is meaningless and happiness is fleeting.

What we mean when we speak of health is really wellness. Wellness is an overall feeling of physical and mental well being. We in the West are finally making the first strides toward learning what the East has known for over 3,000 years - that the Mind is the cause all everything that exists in our world including the state of our physical body.

To separate the Mind from the body, as Western Medicine has done for 1400 years, is to see our body as a machine that operates independently from the Mind; a mechanical device capable of getting "sick" without any help or hindrance from the very Mind that animates the body. What an incredible idea - one wonders how such supposedly learned men and women could believe this foolish notion and prescribe remedies based on this error thinking with a straight face!

What about germs, you say! Don't we get sick due to germs? Isn't that proven by Science? Yes, and NO! There are biological beings we call germs, viruses and the like and they do carry the seeds of certain diseases, we all accept that truth as a great discovery of Western Medicine. However, why is it that one person will succumb to flu every time flu season comes around (you can see where the dis-ease is caused already if you think about the term "flue season") and another person in the same environment and same circumstances will not? If the germ is the causative factor, then why aren't all who come in contact sick?

Well, you might say, one person's resistance to the dis-ease is stronger than an other's. Yes, that is true but why? What lowers the resistance? Our belief in the dis-ease and its inevitability in our lives is what sapps our ability to resist the agents of dis-ease that are all around us. This belief in disease programs the Mind to allow the carriers of the dis-ease into the body and allows the body to feel the symptoms of the dis-ease.

By now, you have probably noticed that I am writing dis-ease rather than than the usual disease. That is because disease is dis ease in the Mind - the Mind is not at ease and therefore neither is the body. Wherever the Mind goes, the body must follow. The body has no volition of its own, any one can see that. Without the Mind, the body can do nothing. It has no function other than to play host to the Mind. Do you realize that the Mind is NOT the brain? The brain is the electro-chemical organic computer that the Mind uses to communicate with it's host body.

Have you ever thought of the relation of your Mind to your body just this way? Think about it. No scientist knows where the Mind is located, the latest theory is that it is located in every cell of our body. I believe that the Mind is our Soul, they are one and the same. Our Mind is God in us, it's our Spirit, our Soul and it lives on after the body, the host, is no longer needed and is dust.

How do we maximize our health and well being using this divine principle of Mind Action? We stop thinking sick thoughts, we stop expecting illness at certain times of the year, (flu season, who declared that? Why the makers of cold and flue medicine, who else?) we stop talking about illness, sharing juicy stories of our operations and illnesses with our friends over lunch and begin to think wellness, health, well being.

Talk about how young we feel at 64, how amazing it is that even though we were once "sick" now we fee just fine. We use our Mind to heal our body, that is a gift given to every human on Earth by our Good Father. We all have the power within us to heal ourselves and others, if we so desire. Sometimes we cannot do this because we are too caught up in the symptoms of the illness to see the Truth. That is normal and is not to be seen as a failure or a sign of a lack of faith. You cannot expect the lobster sitting in the pot of boiling water to cure his condition - he may need a hand out of the pot. Sometimes, so do we.

We may want to seek help from a person who totally believes in our health, sees our health for us when we are too much in affect ( the symptoms of the illness) to see our wellness as Truth. These healing people in Science of Mind are called Practitioners and you could say they are professionals in healing the Mind which then heals the body. Through Spiritual Mind Treatment, our form of affirmative prayer, we see the Truth of our patient's Perfection, the Divine Truth of a perfect creation of a perfect being we call God. Prayer, properly applied, is the most powerful tool available for healing the Mind, Soul and Heart.

Oh, we do not deny the symptom, we just deny that it is our Truth. We say when we feel illness coming on, take a pill and a prayer! We do believe very much in using modern medicine to alleviate the symptoms while we heal the cause with prayer.

Illness is not who you are, it is only an experience you are having and it can be changed when you change your Mind. Your symptom of disease is a symptom of your belief in disease and illness. Once that is dispelled, so will be the illness. That is the power of so called "faith healers"; they induce absolute belief in the Mind of the one they are treating and thus the patient is often healed. They have no special gift other than charisma and the ability to transmit absolute certainty to another. You can do what they do when you learn how. The power to heal yourself and even others is your birthright but like any other great gift, if must be carefully developed and practiced. That is what we will teach here in this blog.

To be healthy, by all means take care of the physical body - do not induce poisons into it, eat well but in moderation. (by the way humans were designed to eat meat, be a vegetarian if you wish, but it is NOT our natural state, we are created to be omnivores - in other words we'll eat anything!)

Do all things in moderation - the Greeks knew it 2800 years ago and it is still the greatest truth there is. Most of all, fill your Mind, your Heart and your mouth with thoughts and words of good report. Think well, speak of wellness and good feeling, expect to be well regardless of all the reports of disease, flu other maladies. Be openhearted - shun resentment and bitterness; anger kills so be forgiving in all things. Remember that nothing and no one can make you happy. Happiness is an inside job, only you can make you happy and you are happy only when you believe that you are -regardless of the circumstances around you.

Happiness begets wellness. Sorrow, bitterness, anger kill the Spirit and with it destroy the body. Why do we have an epidemic of cancer in the world today? I believe the cause of cancer is sorrow, bitterness, resentment, unresolved anger and guilt. These very strong emotions turn the body against itself and that is the very definition of cancer. The location of your particular cancer will be the region of the body that harbors the anger, guilt, sorrow or the area of your abuse (smoking, drinking, gluttony).

This explains why the old fellow who drank a quart of whisky a day and smoked three packs of smokes every day, lived to be 96 in perfect health and a Mormon friend of mine who never drank and never lit a cigarette in his life, died of lung cancer at 49! One was happy, at peace with his world, even though he abused his body, his Mind was at peace. The other took marvelous care of his body but not such good care of his Mind,; guilt, sense of unworthiness, anger all took their toll on his well kept body.

Next week, we'll talk of wealth and material well being. Tune in for this one, it's always a favorite topic! Until then, may the God within you and the Most High God bless you, give you peace and make Her face to shine upon you!

Rev. Dore' Jacques Patlian