While many people who have heard of law of attraction hope to use this powerful concept to attract better financial conditions, others feel that it is wrong or even evil to want money. Is there a right and wrong way to view wealth?

Remember the saying “money isn’t everything?” Well, let’s consider that. You can’t live without money. We’d like to think relationships and our health take priority over money, but it’s really pointless to debate. Without money, we can’t live in today’s society, much less maintain health or an optimal love relationship, so the argument is rather circular.

Money plays a huge role in modern life. Until we start bartering fruits and vegetables for land, shelter and other necessities, that will remain the case. Our well-being, health, and relationship possibilities and stability, not to mention basic survival needs, all depend on our financial condition. Yet many don’t know how to manage their money. While companies no longer take care of even long-term employees’ retirement, few know how to invest for the future. Today we know we cannot lean on Social Security for retirement, and unfortunately, even if you become unable to work prior to retirement through disability or illness, it will be difficult to collect SSD insurance to cover your economic needs while you are unable to work. Ask anyone who has applied for SSDI.

Let’s refer to Wallace Walles’ philosophy on wealth, in The Science of Getting Rich:

"There is nothing wrong in wanting to get rich. The desire for riches is really the desire for a richer, fuller, and more abundant life; and that desire is praise-worthy. The man who does not desire to live more abundantly is abnormal, and so the man who does not desire to have money enough to buy all he wants is abnormal.

“There are three motives for which we live; we live for the body, we live for the mind, we live for the soul. No one of these is better or holier than the other; all are alike desirable, and no one of the three—body, mind, or soul—can live fully if either of the others is cut short of full life and expression. It is not right or noble to live only for the soul and deny mind or body; and it is wrong to live for the intellect and deny body or soul.

“We are all acquainted with the loathsome consequences of living for the body and denying both mind and soul; and we see that real life means the complete expression of all that man can give forth through body, mind, and soul. Whatever he can say, no man can be really happy or satisfied unless his body is living fully in every function, and unless the same is true of his mind and his soul. Wherever there is unexpressed possibility, or function not performed, there is unsatisfied desire. Desire is possibility seeking expression, or function seeking performance."

Today I agree with Wattles, although that was not always the case. I once believed that money did not have the power to affect my level of happiness in a particular moment in time. Because of life experiences, I now have the view that the more money available to you at that moment in time, the easier it is to maintain inner peace and happiness. And the optimum life provides for more than mere existence. Abundance will enhance your life and open the possibility of many positive experiences. So while you seek freedom in the spiritual realm, you may reasonably seek freedom in the physical realm. Inner peace and serenity is the by-product of your spiritual growth and transformation, and abundant conditions in the outer world will complement and enhance your inner sense of freedom.

Prosperity is a common desire and intention for students of law of attraction. When they fail to manifest prosperity, they may believe that law of attraction does not work for them. Sometimes conditions may even worsen. While law of attraction undeniably works and we easily manifest in other areas, we’re often left struggling with the issues most important to us, such as money.

The law of attraction states that all thoughts, conscious and subconscious, draw matching circumstances, and not just our positive intentions. This tells us that we are responsible for attracting our conditions, whether they are conditions of poverty, or conditions of wealth. So, examination of our beliefs should reveal that although we desire abundance, we don’t believe we can have it for one reason or another.

We can usually trace our beliefs regarding money back to ideas learned in childhood. While we routinely see images of the fun, comfort and luxury a life of wealth brings, most of us received conflicting negative messages, instilled a long time ago, both about acquiring money as well as having it. The set of learned concepts, along with our life experiences, provide the foundation for a set of  beliefs that form  "wealth consciousness" or "poverty consciousness." This determines the extent to which we can manifest prosperity in our lives.

If we observe children in action, we see that they usually believe they can have, and do, anything. They know what they want and usually believe they will get it! Any parent can testify to this. Instead of nurturing this zest for life and passionate desire for attainment, many parents, and later the school system, tend to quash it, to prepare the child for the "real world." Taught to work hard and not expect too much in return, the individual is well-trained for a lifetime of unsatisfactory labor!

Think about the messages you received as a child. Did you receive positive messages about work or career? Did your family treat work simply as something you had to do as a distasteful necessity? What about the alternative? Your mentors could have encouraged you to explore your interests and find your native gifts so you could enjoy your life’s work while getting paid.

It isn’t really those who work the hardest who acquire wealth, but many believe that a secure life necessitates hard labor. Limiting fears of not having enough keep them from finding and exploring their true passion, or purpose, thinking that it could not afford adequate income.

Purpose is the activity you would want to do whether or not it earns income. Since you need money to live, you are able to invest time doing that which brings you happiness. But, for many, natural interests and talents fell behind in childhood. Notice that the hobbies and interests you might have felt drawn to at one time provide someone else an income. While people continually resist exploring natural talents out of fear they cannot bring in a sustainable income, you can always see someone else making a living doing it!

Now, think about other messages you received about money. Did your church or your parents discuss the sin of wealth? Did you receive any messages about the value, integrity, or goodness of a person who was well-off? In what type of environment did you grow up? Did you have to clean every crumb off your plate? Were you warned not to leave a light on when you left the room? Did you worry about the supply of heat, water, air conditioning or electricity? While economic conditions within the family may have demanded budgeting, many people receive so much unnecessary negatively-charged information about money, they are set up for life to struggle with financial issues.

Unless you have put conscious energy into changing those default thought patterns, you probably have manifested a reality that matches those ideas. To stop your thoughts from creating a financially difficult life, you must gain control over your belief system. We cannot turn off law of attraction! It’s at work, whether we like it or not.

Many people attempting to manifest money easily find signs of money, read about money, or perhaps find small money, such as change. Few actually succeed in using law of attraction to change the big picture. Money encompasses many conditions, making it difficult to intend. If you received a large amount of money, your life would undergo vast improvement. Much stress would be removed and your freedom would increase substantially. Current law of attraction teachings neglect this, saying "there is no order of difficulty in the universe."

You may have to work on numerous issues before you see an improvement in finances. If it is part of your soul plan to work on other issues in order for you to grow, desirable conditions will not manifest that would remove those challenges. That means you’ll need to deal with painful issues that need resolution before you succeed in manifesting your financial abundance. In this way, law of attraction will not rescue you.

You must dedicate time, effort, awareness and energy to change your current beliefs. You need to examine what beliefs, conscious or subconscious may interfere with your ability to draw abundance. For some people, using tools like subliminals and affirmations, might suffice. If money really challenges you, you might have to do deeper work to look at the underlying issues surrounding areas of life relating to money.

I do not agree with current teachings that advise you to spend freely to pretend that you have already manifested prosperity. This may work for some, but it will not work for most. It will be destructive if it does not work, because you will have spent money frivolously you may later need, putting you in a state where you feel more deprived and fearful. "Believe it and you will see it" is a motto that must follow “know thyself." Know what you can achieve with your belief systems, and with some honest and aware scrutiny, your abilties, before spending resources you may need. If it doesn’t cause financial hardship, and the items you invest on provide you with motivation, then do it. Do not do this blindly, on someone else’s advice, or because they tell you that it will work. While a few testimonials may tell you this method worked, thousands more can tell you it did not.

I believe that it’s far more important to attain the prosperity mind-set or wealth consciousness, regardless of what is in your bank account, what clothing you wear, what car you drive, or whether or not you can afford a vacation. True healing and resilient change comes from within. In other words, you must feel lovable before you will be truly loved, you must feel capable and healthy before you will heal, and you must feel deserving and rich inside before you will attain wealth. Deeper healing requires removing feel-good illusions. Illusions often prevent people from authentically having what they desire.

Be prepared to commit the time necessary to change a lifetime of beliefs. With patience and awareness, you will get there. In the process of doing so, free yourself of restricting concepts that keep you from true inner freedom. When you’ve accomplished the inner work, your outer manifestations will be that much sweeter and more enjoyable!

Do you have a vision where you’re going in life and what you want to achieve? If you could paint your life exactly as you wanted beginning today, what kinds of experiences and ideals would you choose?

If you haven’t framed out a life vision or set goals, you’re manifesting a default reality. Your subconscious programming determines these condtions. Without a guiding vision, you find that events and choices happen almost by accident. When you reflect back upon some major life decisions such as marriage, career choice, children, or where you reside, you may have a sense of wonder about how you chose a particular path because you cannot recall exerting conscious choice. Because of your own pattern of choice-making, or lack of it, you may fear life changes, as if some dreaded outcome awaits you after each turn.

A desire for change requires you to develop clearer vision. Setting a goal will activate your internal guidance system while a point of positive focus will fuel law of attraction to bring opportunities to you. Guided by your internal wisdom, with your cooperation by choice and action, you will move in the most expeditious way possible, towards your goals, visions, and ideals.

On a conscious level, goals help you plan and make choices on a daily basis. Think, for example, if you set a basic goal for a desired target weight. That goal provides a scaffold for meal and exercise choices. You may want to explore diets or exercise options, and thus set in place more specific goals, but you would have set a very general and needed framework for action to bring you to your vision of a healthier and slimmer body. You know if you choose to eat a certain type of food, say doughnuts, that your choice contradicts your goal. While you can eat a few anyway, you know that it does not support your vision, and if you do so repeatedly, you will not reach your goal.

When you have framed a goal, you can more easily make choices based on whether or not they bring you closer to that goal or keep you from attaining it. In the same way, a general long-term goal of sucess, achievement and happiness will provide a scaffold for intelligent choices and action. Success and happiness does not happen by accident.

Without a vision, you have nothing to move toward and no true direction. How can you make decisions when presented with choice? Random choice will bring you closer to the unknown.

Realize that you cannot receive guidance if you have not provided direction. You cannot ask for directions when you do not know where you are going. Your internal guiding system works hand-in-hand with you once you have developed a vision. If you want more active control of your life, you need to set a course. Have faith that you could not have a dream without the inner wisdom and ability to get there.

Vision marks the first step in the process of transformation. Once you set your goals, make conscious and intelligent choices to move toward them. Your intuition works with you in powerful ways even when you are not aware of the possible outcome of choices. You will find the more you honor intuition, the stronger that inner voice becomes. Law of attraction will bring amazing and synchronistic opportunity, but it cannot work alone to change your life. When you cooperate with universal law, you empower yourself to become a conscious creator. 

People once regarded the law of attraction as a concept that fell within the realm of spiritual or metaphysical study, but suddenly, people from all walks of life have been talking about it as though a well-guarded secret to the universe was just discovered. As much as pop trend wants to cast an air of mystique around the subject by suggesting that this information has been deliberately hidden, printed information has circulated freely on the subject since the early 20th century, when many authors of New Thought literature shared their knowledge and success using law of attraction. See the online library on this site for many of these classics. It was mentioned in the Bible, taught by eastern religion since the dawn of time, and revived in the latter part of the 20th century with the concept of the power of positive thought. These early works laid the groundwork for later teachings and also provided us with a good history of many who succeeded by using the methods that these authors detailed in their writings.

From 1963 to 1984, Jane Roberts channeled spiritual information, including law of attraction concepts, from an entity named Seth. Almost immediately following Ms. Roberts’ death in 1984, Esther Hicks channeled similar information, beginning in 1985, from a group of entities who referred to themselves as "Abraham." Hicks’ many books and tapes have been widely available ever since. Most recently, the release of the cleverly-titled DVD, The Secret, illustrated a rather seductive and magical presentation of the law of attraction. The release of this movie spawned a deluge of get-rich-effortlessly-and-quickly instructional seminars, CD-sets, books and e-books, targeted toward people easily wanting to reach their material goals. However, aside from those who directly benefit from the sales of these products, the manifested results are less than profitable!

The law of attraction states that what you create in the inner world, or your conscious and unconscious mind, will crystallize in your outer world. The visions and thoughts that you impress upon the creative energy in the universe, through the process of your thinking, will manifest in your reality. This creative energy is also known as universal divine energy, or God. At first bite, this concept is usually difficult to grasp, but quantum physics tells us that science supports this concept. So your thoughts have a force that create your outer world. This suggests that everyone is already creating their reality, whether or not they are doing so deliberately.

This premise is based upon only a fragment of spiritual truth, a fact that current teachings don’t factor in when they tell you that you can achieve all that you desire. For this reason, most people do not achieve any predictable success using law of attraction. So, while the teachers tell you that everyone has total responsibility for their life, they can’t begin to answer why they, or others, don’t really have the ultimate control they tell you is possible. You may believe that you haven’t learned enough, or put into proper practice the principles they teach. Did you detach enough? Were you grateful enough? Positive enough? Did you put emotion into your intention? You may feel that if you attend some seminar, watch the movie again, purchase a CD-set, or another book, you might learn the real secret to making this work.

What is the point and purpose to these elaborate teachings of a fundamental universal law that is actually amazingly simple? Perhaps the only point is to manifest prosperity–not for the students, but for those who teach the principles! So, then, we might need to validate the teachings. We might want to see whether the teachers manifested wealth prior to, or aside from, creating and selling the information. We might ask to what extent they manifest other desirable conditions or situations in their lives. Clearly, if we are honest, we have to admit that while appealing, the law of attraction does not have the ultimate power that this current trend suggests.

As knowledgeable and experienced spiritual leaders know: it works for a while, sometimes, and then it doesn’t. As point in fact, some of the published authors who had acquired wealth using the principles, later found themselves in hardship or even destitute. So we need to understand the limitations in order to understand how it can help us.

As spiritual beings, first and foremost, our lives depend upon the demands of the soul, also called the soul plan. Our lives are neither at the mercy of whim, karma, luck nor chance, but neither are they entirely controlled by our conscious, or even unconscious, desires. Common sense, ancient wisdom, and experience tells us this. Spiritual masters have told us this. Health, wealth and the happy and fun life are, like it or not, expendable items, until we take care of the business of growth at hand. This means that sometimes we find ourselves in difficult life circumstances, which greatly contradict our positive intentions. These conditions are in place for the sole purpose of bringing us toward wholeness, light and freedom. Difficult times should be temporary conditions, and the sooner we "get" the lesson, the sooner we move to a higher and clearer level, more empowered to create a positive reality.

The content within our mind presents another challenge for us. The subconscious mind always has the final say-so on which conscious thoughts or desires have creative force. This is based on what ideas the subconscious, or unconscious mind, perceives true by virtue of prior learning and experience. Deliberate creation requires clear intent, free of any opposing thought, in either the conscious or subconscious mind.

Next, the universal consciousness, or "one-mind" restricts us. In the highest spiritual sense, we are all one, despite having separate physical bodies. We cannot escape the belief systems of this group. Tribe consciousness refers to the beliefs of the smaller groups we belong to, such as family, gender, or ethnic.  No matter what we may personally believe with even absolute conviction, we will be limited by the beliefs of all of these groups.

Developing a practical approach that takes into account all these considerations will yield far better results than attempting to use law of attraction in an unrealistic way. Wishful thinking will not make it so.

Nothing outside of yourself will prevent you from attaining abundance, love, health and happiness. There is no soul plan that denies anyone this. Rather, it is every soul’s urging that we grow to accept all this and more. Your success in attaining your goals depend upon you cultivating commitment and patience, as well as a postive mind-set. Your spiritual progress, ability to let go of core negative beliefs and programs, and your ability to eliminate destructive habits of negativity, anxiety and fear will largely determine the results. While you may encounter blocks when attempting to influence elements outside of yourself, law of attraction works infallibly 100% of the time on internal shifts and goals. In other words, what you think you are today, you will be, tomorrow.

Are you hoping you can change your life the easy way? If someone offered you a quick fix, perhaps some power mantra, magical chant, a charm you could wear, a release point you could press that would remove all bad luck or inner subconscious issues, or perhaps some yoga position you could assume once a day, would you try it?

We hope for a magic formula, because the longer we remain in a life that doesn’t work for us, the more desperately we seek a quick fix. Unfortunately, there really is no easy fix, but there will always be someone willing to offer one in exchange for money.

In truth, our challenges would go immediately with our surrender. While we cling to our problems with tight fists, we hope that some quick fix will chase them away. We avoid the path of change and growth until the pain becomes too great. Pain precedes change, and eventually drives growth.

Our lives are designed in such a way as to facilitate our spiritual healing, at the expense of our mental, physical, and emotional peace and well-being. This design includes challenges and pain–learning to let go, learning to reach out, learning to love, learning to forgive–and through it all, becoming greater, and so much more than we had been before. Our only real purpose is growth.

Our soul’s growth is primary. We don’t want to hear this. Modern-day societal expectations don’t mesh with a concept that implies we must endure some pain and spend time and attention on ourselves doing spiritual work.

Spiritual healing presents an unchangeable course. It has not responded to our demands of an instant fix. A loving and unprejudiced creative energy moves us toward wholeness, via our own growth, whether we like it or not. Because we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and not simply bodies having a life, we must tend to the needs of spirit.

If we knew how to manage life from the outset, change and growth would be so much easier. In a society more sensitive to our spiritual needs, perhaps mandatory early reading would include a guidebook for living an abundant and healthy life. We now know that the map for success lies within our own thinking and belief systems, which develops at an early age.

“What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.”

The contents in our mind determine our health, our life circumstances, how well we function, and our emotional well-being. But, when you consider that major medical insurers would not cover mental health therapy until late in the last century, you can see how slow progress has been in appreciating this important concept.

The idea that thoughts, belief systems and feelings affected our life, was neglected. Those seeking therapy or emotional healing were labeled weak, needy, or thought to require too much attention. Now we know that attending to mental health needs is more than a privilege. Forgotten memories are not forgotten problems; we know that traumatic events, especially those repressed, and even those that occur at too young an age to remain in conscious memory, have great impact on the quality of our lives. They impact our relationships, our productivity, our health, and our level of happiness. We now know, as of the 21st century, the importance of what occurs on the mental plane. We still have much to learn.

The spiritually-aware have a greater advantage. The spiritual seeker accounts for what happens at the soul level, as well as on an energy level. This expands and facilitates our ability to heal. We have many tools available to us in our healing work, as opposed to standard counseling. 

In alternative/spiritual healing, we might discover some pre-birth or other lifetime issue to be a block. Does standard therapy help this? There are methods that can help us when we hit a stick-point in our work. When we have committed to the spiritual path and surrendered to our growth, we will always be led to the next step in our progression. We must let go of the blocks, the people, the beliefs, or lifestyle, that keep us rooted in unhappiness. When some thought pattern remains, we can consider that a healer working on the right level can help us progress.

A painful condition or life experience has led to miraculous healing for many. Extreme emotional pain–either caused by life circumstances or threat of a painful or fatal physical illness–was the common thread. Does a shift require extreme pain? I don’t think so, but for most people, pain does seem to be the impetus to growth. Some of us need harder knocks to break through our excuses, rationalizations, and the hugely defensive ego. Perhaps some of us ignored the pain till it became so great that it erupted in a huge tidal wave.

If you would like to learn some healing method or try some system or process that someone has developed from his/her own healing journey, remember that each person’s journey is individualized. Do not rely upon it as the answer for you, or consider yourself a failure if that method does not succeed for you.Take what you learn and modify it to your own needs. Develop the inner guidance you need to follow through on your path.

Life presents no challenge for which you do not also have the inner knowledge to overcome. And each and every challenge is a gift that ultimately leads to freedom and joy.

Metaphysical studies, like religion and other business today, has become profit-based. Since spiritual growth has turned into a business, we can’t always rely on the integrity of those providing a service or presenting information. When profit becomes motive, truth is expendable. It is only with truth that we effect real change and healing. So then, we must question the information, the service, or the healing method, by relying on discernment and common sense in order to evaluate the validity of the information.

True spiritual healing, by necessity, involves an awakening. We cannot remain unconscious until we become enlightened. The journey involves a conscious and willing agreement to seek awareness. When we look into the world with rose-colored glasses, it may boost our comfort, but we are hiding from truth. This is not consciousness. If we believe fiction because it feels better, that is not awareness. If we remain in illusion, we cannot wake up.

Science has proven the existence of some metaphysical concepts, thus bypassing the leap-of-faith requirement that standard religious teachings demand. However this does not prove a particular application of a concept, or law. When putting into practice some "proven" teaching, many students, when faced with failure, do not re-evaluate the validity of the teaching; instead, they believe that they didn’t have enough faith, didn’t know properly how to use the concept, or didn’t want the manifestation on a deep level.

If you have thought of checking with a psychic or reader for some advice, know in advance that they have adopted a standard disclaimer to cover a wide range of error: "free will." Although they may claim to 99% accuracy, free will is the reason they will tell you your reading did not play out as they had told you.

If you have gone to a healer and didn’t experience success, they won’t tell you that you are in the majority. They will point out the few testimonials of those who experienced success, whether or not those testimonials were authentic. They might suggest you didn’t really want the healing on some level. Free will prevails!

A student can spend a lifetime savings on courses, tools, teachers and healing modalities. Perhaps the next teacher who assures us they have "cracked the code" may know something no one else in history has learned. For good reason, we might need to believe that the DNA healer or the energy healer can resolve our health issues. With every product, modality, process, or method that claims success, we need to evaluate the credibility by reviewing our success. We need to remain biased towards our own perceptions. When we doubt ourselves and our judgment, we make ourselves vulnerable to mistruth, and thus, disempowerment. Placing faith outside ourselves removes our power and sets up a cycle of seeking and never actually finding. Today, seeking can be expensive!

This is not an insult to the intelligence of the faithful. Whether we desire to connect with spirit, improve our lives, or achieve wellness, we have a legitimate need. Whenever a need surfaces, business will exploit that need for profit, if we allow them. We can see that modern medicine exploits our natural desire for health. Some patients may continue in the medical system for years, visiting one doctor after another in search of a better answer or better care. One doctor may pass them to another, keeping them in the system. As doctors authorize more tests, more specialists and more treatment, it results in increased profits for the system and increased costs for the patient–who may not even find relief. Many people now educate themselves to make more informed decisions, rather than relying completely on their doctors.

In the same way, the spiritual and personal development field draws in those seeking to improve their health, their lives, or understand the spiritual realm. Unethical people will profit on those needs. Sometimes the healing they provide benefits only their own bank account! We should carefully consider their claims and evaluate fairly to determine which are worthwhile.

Trust yourself. True faith does not require ignorance and complete naivete. Be discriminating in whom you trust and what you believe. Spirituality does not require all-or-nothing blind faith. Although you believe in the existence of "god" as the energy in the universe, you do not need to believe some tool, person, or modality that claims to have captured that essence to heal you. You may believe in law of attraction, and indisputably, it does exist, but you can understand that the way it is presented in some popular teachings is not quite right. You may believe that there are angels or guides in the higher realms that assist us, but you do not need to believe that someone has channeled them or receives special information from them, whether or not they are profiting on the information–although, they usually are! You do not need believe that a book or teaching was channeled information, just because it was claimed. Complete belief is not a requirement for spiritual awakening, but self-trust is. A roadblock on the path to spiritual maturity is trust in self, before all others. In order to progress, you will need to graduate that course.

Be wise! It is not negative to use your intelligence and discernment. Wisdom, intellect, discrimination and discernment are our gifts, and our responsibility. It is our task here on earth to balance both our spiritual and human side–not to abandon one aspect of ourselves to embrace another.