THE NIGERIAN PROVINCIAL GUARDIAN Vol 2 No 3. Osogbo Saturday April 10, 1937
THE LITTLE I KNOW ABOUT
BY DR. FAJEMIROKUN
“Amid all the mysterious by which we are surrounded nothing is more certain than that we are ever in the presence of an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed,” said Daniel Welster.
When your thoughts go out from you, they don’t go into the “empty air,” as we often say, but into this infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed. There they take shape and materialize in your life according to their nature. The eternal energy or creative intelligence works in harmony with the laws of the universe and returns to you the fruits of your seed thoughts. Ignorance concerning he part that the mind plays in drawing to us the things that match our ambition is responsible for more dissatisfied, unhappy, discontented, poverty-stricken lives than any other thing. There are millions of round pegs in square holes, and millions living in poverty, who might be in the place for which nature intended them might be prosperous, happy and contended but for the unfortunate thoughts they are sending out into the infinite and eternal energy.
Most of us have no idea that thought has more to do with determining our conditions, with shaping our circumstances and environment, bringing us poverty or wealth, attaining our ideal or driving it from us, than any other thing. Every one of us could be prosperous and happy if we only knew the powers locked up in ourselves and learned to use our minds to back our efforts on the material plane. Someone says, “Dare to fling out into the great cosmic mind greater assurance about yourself; dare to have greater confidence; dare to believe in yourself and your missions. Have a great ideal, a noble aspiration. Some people are afraid to do, thy don’t dare to think well of themselves, to aspire to things that make them comfortable and happy. Hey think that poverty is a thing of providence; that they were poor and are destined to remain in poverty all their lives. While they help the Creator to help them in everything else, they thought that it wouldn’t be right for them to call Him for money because, they will contravene what the Bible says that money is the root of all evil.
Nowhere does the bible condemn money, or the right use it, but the inordinate love of it. We are all intended to live the life abundant and not pinched, starved, stunted lives of panpers. The father never meant his children to grovel in poverty, to spend lives in drudgery, lacking all that makes living comfortable and harmonious. The earth is filled to overflowing with the abundance of His riches and there is no need for anyone to remain in a degrading state of poverty. We have a right to our inheritance of all that is good and beautiful, all that is needful for our welfare, to enable us to do our best work free from limitations and embarrassments.
Dr. W. John Murray says “because we wish to have great prosperity and riches, in order not to live like fools but to live like Angels, blessing and benefiting others who do not realize the truth as we do. That’s the reason why we want money, we are not making prosperity a God, we are making it a divine assistance.”
Money rightly used is a blessing and not a curse. On the other hand, the poverty that condemns one to perpetual want has strangled more talent, blighted more aspirations, dashed more hopes, starved and stunted more lives than almost any other thing. That kind of poverty is not a decree of Providence but a disease, engendered by our own ignorance of mental laws. It is he poverty to which the Bible refer to when it says, “The destruction of the poor is their poverty.” It warps and twists the whole nature: it fills men and women with bitterness, discontent and unrest: it kills off ten of thousands of little children and drives multitude of people to crime, to insanity. It is responsible for human misery than almost anything else.No one need remain in such body and soul killing poverty as this. You can think yourself out of it, or your thoughts can keep you in it, just as you will. Of course this may be sure: you will never be anything but beggarly while you think beggarly thoughts, but a poor man while you think poverty, a failure while you think failure thoughts. The very hopelessness of such an outlook on life demoralizes efforts and kills ambition. You cannot succedd in anything, while your mind is filled with failure-thoughts. The man who would have the good things he desires must think success, must think abundance. He must think progressively, creatively, constructively, inventively, and above all, optimistically along the lines of his desires. If he thinks otherwise, negatively, destructively, pessimistically, no matter how hard he works, he will not succeed in attaining his object. A great many people defeat the end they have in view , because their mental attitude does not correspond with endeavour. While working for one thing they are really expecting something else. They drive away the very thing they are pursuing by holding wrong mental attitude toward it.
If all middle aged men and women who are down and out in the world , who are side-tracked, who believe that their opportunity has gone by forever, that they can never get on their feet again, and that about all they can do for the rest of their lifes is to keep their heads above waters; if they only knew that the greater power right inside them , they could easily, by the reversal of their thought, get a new start and revolutionize their condition.
The law of attraction is as exact, as inexorable as are the laws of gravitation and of mathematics. It will unerringly follow your thought, for it is the thought that sets the law in motion.
Whatever your dominant thought, your habitual mental attitude, towards your job, towards the world, that will be made manifest in your life. The law will bring to you every time that which is exactly like your thought, your belief, your expectation, your feeling, your habitual mental attitude. Prosperity and prosperity thoughts go together. Prosperity and poverty thoughts will never go together. That will violate the law that like attracts like. While a man’s mind is saturated with the poverty thought, the poverty expectation, while he continues to visualize poverty conditions, he can’t attract anything but poverty. If you draw a steel magnet through a lot of rubbish it will pull to itself the tacks and nails, the bits o steel, in whatever form, that may be there, but it will pull nothing else; no paper, rags, or other substances. In other words, it will attract to itself only that which has an affinity for it. What you get out of life depend on what you can attract with your mental magnet; upon how much of a magnet you make yourself for the thing you long to possess. Just keep the idea constantly before your mind that you are a powerful magnet, enveloped by the great creative energy of the universe from which all things proceed attracting to yourself the things which belong to you by virtue of your affinity to them, the things which match your thoughts, your motives, your ambitions, your desires, the longings of your soul. No matter how discouraging your environment , how distressing your condition, if you hold fast to this one idea you will be surprised how soon these things will begin to come your way.
There is no surer way of making and holding yourself a prosperity-magnet than by cultivating the consciousness of your oneness with the Source of all prosperity, the Source of all supply. When the pessimistic poverty thought tries to get hold of you, think of the abundance that is your father’s; think that you are heirs to his abundance, and say to yourself. “The Lord is my Shepherd, and I cannot want”. Hold that thought constantly in your mind, and fear, doubt, worry, anxiety as to the living problem, or your future can never again disturb your peace of mind.