Originally Published 1916 From a Lecture in 1914 at a Hotel Brighton, Washington, D. C.
Foreword
WORDS of Truth written or spoken from a consciousness of the absolute reality of the substance in them, do more than satisfy the intellect or the senses. They are God’s means of bringing to pass the very Good about which they are uttered. Therefore, Reader, read slowly and ponder these words in your heart. They will uncover the Rich Mentality, with which God has endowed you and open the Way to your perpetual Prosperity.
The author, herself, is a living demonstration of the Truth that she declares, and she knows that what has come to her is a free gift of God to all.
May this message be a fulfillment of the decree of the Author of all wealth “for it is He that giveth thee power to get wealth” . . respecting every word of Truth that He has sent forth through his consecrated Messengers: “For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth from out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and prosper in the thing where to I sent it.” Isaiah 55:10, 11.
Annie Rix Militz
The Rich Mentality
Thou shalt Remember the Lord, thy God, for it is He that giveth thee Power to Get Wealth.
I WILL take up tonight the second subject of my course, The Rich Mentality. The world is being educated, as never before, to recognize the truth, the whole truth, about prosperity. The world is demanding more today of the noble and ideal, of honesty in all financial dealings, than ever before. We are going through a very critical time and those who know most about the truth in connection with prosperity, success and kindred subjects will pass through this crisis with the least proportion of unrest and sense of loss. The more materialistic, those of the commercial world who must have money in order to feel rich, will suffer most from panic, the disturbance and pressure. But as we go through these critical times, we are purified and cleansed, especially if we try to think correctly of that which appears to our disadvantage. I would like to make a statement here at the very beginning and have you entertain it tonight in the silence, and plant this statement, this idea, in your heart as you would a seed, to grow. It is this: That the more difficult the situation is, the higher you will rise if you think correctly about it. Let us make a familiar and close communication with the heart of it, so that in the future when we may need to be strong under great pressure or temptation we may through this correct thinking about it be blessed and comforted.
SILENCE
This is an excellent rule and true of all our activities and especially of prosperity, that as you think correctly about a thing, you are master of the situation and no evil in it nor loss nor limitation can hold or bind you. But also you will have need to philosophize about what is the correct, the right thinking, or what the highest consciousness is about a subject. I believe that the only answer here must be to think as God thinks about it. We cannot go beyond this and to think about an experience as God thinks about it is victory.
Right thinking is health, joy, freedom, prosperity. Prosperity, as I said last night, does not consist in the things you possess in the money you have in bank. In fact, we might say from a very free standpoint, that if you absolutely understand prosperity you have no need of any bank account. Prosperity is a way, a mode, of thinking. So is poverty. You are poor if you class yourself this way, and you are rich if you can think rich thoughts, thoughts that are constructive, optimistic, unlimited these instantly crown you successful. The mentality must first be rich towards God rich in God-knowledge and consciousness.
I cannot think of wealth and prosperity and success as a lasting possession to those who are callous regarding the spiritual life. Dr. Bucke, who studied cosmic consciousness for over thirty years, states that in all his examinations of men and women he has never come across a single case of cosmic consciousness where the individual was bent on making money; whose whole conception of life was accumulation. This is a law. You cannot love God and love money. You cannot both work for a great ideal and work for selfish ends, for money or a living. It is a mistake to work for a living. To work this way is to be a slave under dominion to the laws of slavery. Never work for a living.
How can you gain a life? Life is! You cannot pay for it. You have no price to give in exchange for life, for your breath and your being. You are not here to work by strenuous effort to make life. You are here under the blessing of God to live a life of wholesome, loving kindness, of success and good will towards each other and the bringing out of your own nature, the divine self. God lives you every moment. If you are conscious that God is your very life and being you will not work to express it in the terms of mortal consciousness, in dollars and cents and salary.
You will no longer serve the old world conception of prosperity. What you do you will do with your might in the service of Principle, like Brother Lawrence he did not work for a living, he worked to express God by living in so attractive a way as to draw other men to the Divine Life? The kitchen of that monastery where he cooked was more magnetic than any other part of the whole concern. He was rich towards God and man, not like an ox driven by the duties demanded of him. He was a man serving a great Principle and he lived in security.
You are useful to God as you are emptied of self and keep from worrying, fearing and fretting about today, tomorrow or yesterday. Your life is inspired and inspiring all about you. Whoever comes in contact with an inspired soul realizes the beauty of it The Rich Mentality is the inspiration of life. I will say something about that presently, but for the moment I will affirm this, that the rich mentality is so full of awakened consciousness, so absolutely certain of the Truth, the Ideal and the Real, that it never fears poverty. It is not being hindered by any effort to fight poverty, or lack, or want. It is all love, all peace, because it is the love of recognized good.
Now the old life of poverty may be described as it is in Genesis, the curse, the old Adamic curse on man, that he shall work by the sweat of his brow, and the race has considered this law as springing from the great mind of God, the great Mind of Wisdom. But we recognize that this is not the design of the Most-High; it is an idea brought about through the mind of man, under the belief that he has fallen into sin and must be punished and, after utterly paying the price, enter into paradise. This is not the attitude as we find it in the quickened character. If you are realizing inwardly that you are the Son of God you will take the stand of Jesus Christ and throw off the yoke of the old curse and refuse to work by the sweat of your brow.
You know that the lesser laws are fulfilled in the great law that sets man in tune with the Infinite. Because he loves God first, his Divinity, he is set free from every law that limits.” It Is the only law that sets man really free to love with all one’s mind and soul and strength, and to exercise this love toward one’s fellow beings to love your neighbor as your God, or as your Divine Self. Thus is man introduced to himself as he finds the Man who is really rich. He begins to realize that he is not poor in spirit but rich in wisdom, God being his mind, his intelligence, his thinking power, arid he is governed and guided and controlled by the Rich Mentality. He does not groan and moan, and fear poverty. Nor does he prepare for a future that will lack anything good so long as he knows but one Provider, One Inexhaustible Presence. For that faith closely allies heart with this Great Spirit, active and living within him.
Therefore he goes not prepare for old age with its sorrow and lack so unattractive. He intends to become more attractive, for the older he grows the nearer he should be to the Great Center, and the Great White Light of Being. The rich mentality fears nothing, and he is free from the” burden and care that the world groans under. He is not under the law of wear and tear and exhaustion because this rich subconsciousness of him causes him to know that his good is inexhaustible! He is not serving a good “that is liable to cease, but his good is so manifold and widely spread that it might be accused of wastefulness. Think of all that the hills and mountains contain that has never been revealed or opened up to this age! The wonderful gems and jewels, gold and silver, that await future ages, already stored underground, and this is but the symbol of the greater storehouse of God.
The man of this vision exercises faith and he wants to exercise faith. In the rich mentality he never thinks that he can be lazy and never work anymore. He knows that he can convert Divine energy and force every moment and so he is active with great dynamic power. He uses faith every moment. It is his joy and incentive, and life is thoroughly interesting to the one who practically enters into an alignment with the rich mentality.
The rich mentality is supreme in this, that it believes absolutely in the good. You cannot persuade it that evil is a reality; it does not ask down to meditate on evil; it has no moments of malice or jealousy or Hate; it has no time for these, for its whole time is taken up on lines that are strong, powerful witnesses of the good. And it pays the one who exercises his mind in this direction, and he never consents to talk about evil as a reality. He knows that thinking about good is the rule and the standard which is his unfailing resource. He entertains it for his business life, for his social life; in his relations with men; with his own family and children.
Every relationship must be maintained in the recognition of the good and the good only. Thus he is educating himself, training himself as God desires him to live and to be happy.
Now we are all after that, are we not? If we could find one word to cover our aspirations tonight, could we find a larger word, or that is more inclusive than joy or happiness? I do not mean that happiness which the world so defines to us a limitation that fritters away and is liable to be lost. I mean the lasting happiness the happiness that is secured to the individual by fidelity to principle. Infinite Mind made you for happiness; it made you capable of a supreme bliss, able to enjoy as you little dream today you can enjoy life. You will begin to smile the moment you actually believe this and do away with the wrinkled thoughts, the troubled thoughts. You will grow perpetually young through the inspiration of the Almighty penetrating to the innermost realm of your heart, and you can keep it there and it is bound to make you strong and beautiful.
The rich mentality maintains a cheerful attitude which can smile pain down, and sorrow away, and seeming trouble into nothingness. It minimizes instantly that which the world feels to be oppression and loss and in harmony, and feels the mastery over it. It is a wonderful capital!
A man once came to my door in Alameda and wanted to sell me some shoestrings. You know the kind of a man who sells shoestrings. He is a man who does not smile very much. If he smiled very much he would be selling something else than shoestrings. He does not have the rich mentality towards life and well being; he does not have the right attitude towards the law of success. And he came all bent over, although a young man in years, and begged me to buy a shoestring. He looked so lugubrious, complaining of every resident of my town, declaring that nobody was kind and nobody would buy. So he had to get a lesson and this was the lesson: He was told to go away and instead of looking so mournful that nobody wanted to open the door, he should go forth with a smile and with faith in himself and in the kindness of those with whom he should come in contact. He said: “Will that pay? And will it sell my needles and shoestrings?” He was assured that it would, far better than the attitude he had taken. In a few days he came back and told me he had taken my advice and that he had sold more in that afternoon than in a month, and his business had picked up and was growing. That is what the smile does. And the world needs your smile; it is the smile that heals the world. It is the smile, not the groan, that makes for a spiritual life and for success. Then it should be your part to contribute these to the world and help others who are bestowing smiles upon the world to redeem it.
The rich mentality can smile because it knows. It is sure of some things, because it is absolutely certain of others worthwhile. It knows God as tenderness and Love; as the All-Providing Presence and therefore it smiles with an inner smile of good cheer and certainty and strength.
The rich mentality does not love money, it loves God. How could it love God supremely and love money? It does not divide its forces foolishly, for it sees readily that those who love money become metallic, their eyes are metallic, their souls are metallic, and the strength of muscle and brain lessens daily, being sold in one who serves money. The rich mentality is master of money, does not serve money, and, being its master, money feels attracted towards that one.
In here is a certain intelligence in money. It wants to be used by those who are able intelligently to keep it in circulation, for circulation is the very spirit of money. If it is hoarded or put away, it corrodes and dies, but as it is kept in motion, it is kept in life. Therefore it is not the accumulation and the grabbing of money that constitute wealth, but the giving and letting it go forth freely. To the rich mentality money is a blessing. But to the poor mentality it is a curse. It is not that money is the source of evil, but the love of money. Pain and sickness and sorrow would vanish if we would renounce the love of money, and love God as our Provider, Success and Life. “The earth is the Lord’s and The fullness thereof.” As you decide to stand by the principles of Truth in your success and prosperity, you no longer work under the false idea of economy, because many people are only economical through a belief in poverty, not from the standpoint of prosperity. Their prosperity is only beggaring them. You have seen people that deny themselves the luxuries and comforts of life, the things that make life beautiful, although they have much property and money aplenty but not the right thought. It is then a matter of thinking, of contacting this great white Truth. Ignorance or knowledge? Moses is an example. His great riches were inexhaustible; so magnificent were they that after he had taken the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, he fed them by a self-conscious, working miracle-law for forty years with a strange bread known as “the manna in the wilderness.”
Did you think that an interfering God had given this blessing to the Israelites? It was the direct work of the mind of Moses, the God in Moses. He knew how to produce and reproduce and to keep it up indefinitely. He knew how to strike a flint rock by which it would spring forth a refreshing stream. Repeatedly he did this and it was but the forerunner of great things to come, the symbol of a consciousness-of- providing, that is close at hand, so close” to you and to me as to be “nearer than our breath” and yet we may pass through this incarnation without recognizing or receiving any benefit from it if we close our eyes to its Presence, or our hearts to its reception. It needs that we understand that God is Prosperity, and every blessing proceeds from the infinite, inexhaustible Resource, the Mind of God. We want to know more and more of this wonderful law and how to apply it in life so that it shall quickly bring to us our own inheritance.
The rich mentality is always original. You are original because God made you so. I say you are original, but do you insist upon it? Are you even willing to be original? I question whether you are willing to be as God made you. How splendid and royal and kingly, if everyone would be willing to be original! To be original is to be a God-man It is to be well and to be at home. When you do not feel at home it is because there is too much pretense. I mean that we are too willing to go with the crowd, that we would rather be a counterfeit than the genuine self that God made us.
There would be a great transformation if you would take the stand that God never made two exactly alike. We are all independent, and yet beautifully interdependent independent in one way, and from another standpoint, interdependent. If we realized this there would never be selfishness and discord. It would be the Bellamy plan come to fruition. Every man would find his work, his place, and we would all be doing what we enjoy doing. That would indeed be the Golden Age. Insist upon originality and resources will come to you when you are pushed or cornered. You will be the resourceful one that God made you. God will impress upon you the new way and means to take.
I have a cousin in the West who is an original thinker, who never insists on doing things as other people do. He has ideas of his own because he dares to think with God and to let God think through him. He believes that if he should lose all that he has he could easily regain it through this consciousness. In talking to some club friends one day he affirmed that, if given a nucleus, even though it appeared useless, that he would make it produce something without the use of capital. The friends took him up and he promised to try it out. Looking about for some nucleus they saw a pile of scrap tin which was about to go into the garbage wagon. It certainly looked useless and impossible. But the friends said, “There it is” and they left the shop laughing.
He felt almost vanquished by his nucleus, but he looked at it and concentrated his mind upon this tin and he said: “This tin will tell me what it can do, what is can shape and form and what can come out of it.” Presently there came into his mind the picture of a little matchbox. And so he began to cut and bend and pretty soon he had shaped a little matchbox. He called a boy passing along and asked him to take the matchbox out and try to sell it for twenty-five cents; that, if he did, he would give him ten cents of it for selling it. The boy came back delighted a little while later, having sold the matchbox for twenty-five cents, and receiving the ten cents promised. So with this capital of fifteen cents my cousin invested in some paint with which to decorate the match boxes.
The boy being so happy with his sale, soon brought several other boys, who also wanted to sell matchboxes, and so in the course of several weeks he had quite a capital as a result of that scrap tin. And he proved there is a law within us that we need never remain cast down or crushed if we will not believe that we are crushed or cornered, but keep our eye on the original way out.
We have had such false teaching about prosperity from the pulpit. Yet the Churches and Cathedrals stand as monuments of prosperity, though the ministers have declared that Christ was poor and that in some strange way his followers should also be poor. Jesus Christ was not poor. How can you think that he was poor, or is poor? Why, we are all poor compared to him, as we are manifesting today. If you know not of what wealth consists, are you not poor as a Vanderbilt who on his deathbed cried out, “Poor and needy indeed,” because his wealth consisted of things which he could not take with him, and his mind an empty void. Jesus Christ was the wealthiest man who ever trod this earth. He needed not to exercise any effort to maintain himself. He sent his disciples forth, telling them not to provide two coats, or shoes, or to take scrip with them, for, he said, “The man I send forth is worthy of his hire,” that is, he will be maintained by a Divine Law. After a time he said to them, u When I sent you without purse and scrip, lacked ye anything?” and they said, “Nay, Lord, we lacked nothing.”
Jesus Christ was not poor. Would you be poor if you could heal every disease that came to you? Would you be poor? Would you be poor if you could raise a dead man from the tomb? Would you be poor if you could turn weak water into rich wine? Would you be poor or would you be rich? Would you be poor if you could take two loaves and five fishes and feed five thousand Belgians today with all they want and have much left over? Would you be poor or would you be rich? Be sensible! Was Jesus Christ poor? Why he had the miracle working Mind . . the Mind that increases through rich thinking, rich knowledge. And so my Christ is not a poor Christ. I wish I were as wealthy. What were a million dollars in your hand to that power he possessed? Which would you take? Not one of you would hesitate a second if you are sensible. You would be wealthy with that knowledge. Paul says that whereas Christ was rich, he took upon himself poverty that we might be rich. That is, he took upon himself the appearance of poverty and he proved that having is not prosperity, but if one thinks richly he is indeed the wealthiest of men.
If you are working consciously with the great law of God, you are inspired. Ask yourself, “Am I inspired in the work I am doing?”
Do I put enthusiasm into my work? Or am I working as a slave man, driven and bound?” If the latter, heal yourself of these thoughts and become enthusiastic. The rich mentality does not scorn to work or scorn any character of work. It loves to work because inspired in all that it does. I said that no man could work for money only. A man demonstrated this once by hiring a man for three dollars a day just to take a brick up from a spot on one side of the street and place it in another spot across the street and vice versa all day long. At first the man entered into the job with clarity, but he soon grew weary, and the outcome was that he threw up the job, refused to work at it and said he would rather starve than to work one more day at such a terrible job as that. We are not here to work for anything less than to unfold our God nature, our Divine Self, and this is not possible when we concentrate on money alone. What is money? Why, you are the creator and maker of money. You put into it all that makes it of value and you can withdraw that and it is not worth any more than sand. God did not make money valuable; to him there is no difference between a pebble and a diamond.
You must give if you would get; the man who forgets to give, forgets how to receive. He closes the door of receptivity; he closes the door of life and is like a lake which, unless opened at both ends, becomes stagnant. Many people are planting disease, physical poverty and misery of all kinds through not maintaining the other half of the law of Prosperity. They want to receive only but the law is not a hemisphere, it is a sphere. It is only as you bring the two parts together and recognize that giving and receiving should be equal, that you can weld them into a unit and have the law work for you. “With what measure you give, it shall be measured back to you.”
This mind that is the Rich Mentality never takes offense nor receives an insult. Think about that . . it never receives an insult. It never feels hurt and is never discouraged; it is never jealous. It is never angry because anger is poverty of consciousness; no one gets angry until he thinks he is inefficient or is conscious of a sense of weakness. The rich mentality never knows malice; resentment never suggests itself to it. It is never doubtful of the Good and its possibilities. It never listens to words of ill report and therefore never repeats them. It does not gossip nor love iniquitous things because the rich mentality is LOVE. It has always words of praise for all who come within its presence. It has no enemies, is not self-seeking and knows no pride. “Let this mind be in you” and your body will become perfect, enduring, strong and beautiful, and your affairs full of delight and plenty.
The rich mentality does not look for flaws, is not complaining; never worries, frets nor fears; never anxious nor overcome; it never fights, resists, nor in cowardice turns its back. Hate is unknown to it and death has no terrors, while sickness is completely under its control. It is never sad nor gloomy; it never dwells upon evil for five minutes; it has no doubt of the power of good: does not condemn or judge, all because it is the Mind of God, the richest Mind in all Being.
Let us be silent for a moment and entertain these statements. Let us relax and open our hearts to the Greater Self, to the Self more abundant, to the One Self of us which is not duality nor multiplicity nor division, but One Self, radiantly beautiful and divine, the Self that is described only in deific terms.
SILENCE
I AM rich in God’s love.
I give my best to the world and the best the world has comes back to me.
I AM Prosperity. I AM Success. God made me so.
I claim my own freely and fearlessly.
My Prosperity is based upon the true foundation, therefore is changeless, is GOD, and the Spirit, overshadowing and indwelling, my one and everlasting good. Amen!
The End