Prosperity Law No. 9: "Whatever we want for ourselves, we must also desire for others."

     If we are to prosper individually, we must see ourselves contributing to others - caring for, supporting, and encouraging them.  True prosperity comes from respon-sible, 'right' relationships with others.
Religious doctrine and metaphysical teaching have told us that it never works to attack, make others wrong, or win at another's expense.  A commonly accepted cul-tural ideal of right living in western civilization is to turn the other cheek when offended.  This action is based on an ideal of self-sacrifice and an altruistic concern for others.  Once we understand, however, that 'right living is also self-serving, prosperous living, we may be moti-vated to move even more rapidly and effortlessly toward that ideal.
This prosperity law of loving action is really a state-ment about who we are within our context: we are each part of a delicately woven whole.  Just as every living cell is a self-contained, self-satisfying world, yet interde-pendent upon many others, so we too are autonomous, self-willed, creative beings - yet one within a whole.
We all want to win at the game of life.  The emerging real truth is that the best way to do this is for us to love and promote the best in each other - not for self-sacrificing reasons, but for the most powerfully motivating factor on earth: self-interest.  When we catch on and play the game consciously, we all win.
The importance of this law is seen and felt in our global relations with one another.  It is easy to feel help-less and defeated in the face of world problems - yet the same laws of prosperity apply as much to a culture as they do to the individual.  What we do individually is a microcosm of what we as a society do.  Our individual thoughts act in synergy to form a mass consensus -a subconscious idea that we reproduce in physical reality.  Since our cultural consensus is a reflection of our indi-vidual thoughts and actions, we need to look inwardly at the direction of our thoughts.  Globally, it is obvious that what we need is drastic revision in the way we are using mind action.

Almost every situation in today's world is forcing us to seek a solution of balance.  The problems of ecology and pollution are good examples.  We are all on planet earth together - there is no escape.  So our only choice is playing the game of life from a 'win-win' or a 'lose-lose' position.
The time is over for thinking that our problems would be solved if only one group or another would cease to be a threat.  'The consumer is the producer when it comes to environmental issues.  The lines between capital and labor blur as each learns they must cooperate to avoid economic collapse when faced with the threat of depres-sion.  We see the broader view of our problems if we begin to ask how we can continue to produce without polluting the environment.  How can we defend without annihilat-ing each other?  How can we build without obliterating that which we already have?

How do we face these and other social issues, utiliz-ing mind action to prosper as an individual, as a nation, and as a world?

We can start with our own individual thought, for that is where the movement of all mass thought starts.

Our mass consensus is created out of our individual consciousness.  Each of us does make a difference.
     This has not always been obvious.  The pragmatists among us saw no ultimate social value in the personal growth movement of the 60's and 70's.  Efforts to increase individual consciousness through awareness of body and feeling states was seen as 'contemplating one's navel' - useless self indulgence.  Critics of this move-ment feared excessive attention on self would destroy concern for others and inhibit the work of the world.  They argued that if we drew attention away from the problems of society in favor of increasing attention to self-awareness of inner wants and needs, we would be-come a nation of self-righteous hedonists.  They pointed with alarm at boastful, self-centered personalities as prime examples of what happens with so-called 'self-love' taken to the extreme.
     The attitudes of these critics demonstrate the pitfalls of either/or thinking.  We are creatures who need to pay attention to both our inner and outer worlds.  Egotistical attitudes are not the result of increased self-love and self-confidence, but demonstrate the lack of any real self-esteem.  When we feel good about ourselves there is no need to boast and bluster.
     Our inner work supports our outer work.  We must go 'inside' to contact our higher self for regeneration, self-approval, and self-direction.  For that knowledge to be of real value, however, we must express it in the world as creative, loving action helping human kind.
     Far from being useless, spending time, money and energy on one's own self-awareness is the only firm foundation for ultimate solutions to world problems.  Guns and bombs create temporary 'solutions' which lead to ever bigger problems.  Becoming self-aware is a process of changing attitudes - of becoming more fully human.  Webster defines 'human' as: "Creatures able to understand, evaluate, choose and accept responsibility."
     The more fully human we are, the more we can un-derstand the condition of our oneness'.  The more we see through the peripheral actions to the essence of each other, the more loving we can be.  We come to realize that no one has ever done anything that we haven't at least thought of at one time in our life.  We therefore learn to forgive - the highest human faculty we have.
     Exploitive action comes from the mass thought that there is not enough - love, money, sex, energy, power, landd, water, food, time, health, opportunity.  Yet there is no shortage of any of these.  We have plenty of everything we need to be happy.  The only barriers to abundance are our beliefs about the inevitability of scarcity
     An example of the abundance in which we live is obvious in a quote from a recent "World Hunger Action-letter," published by the American Friends Service Committee.  They reported that $17 billion a year is the estimated cost of providing adequate food, water, educa-tion, health care, and housing for all the world's resi-dents.  This is about the same amount the world spends for arms - every two weeks." *

* As reported in Ms. Magazine, August, 1981.

     In spite of all evidence to the contrary, we somehow have come to believe that poverty and starvation are just a natural part of life.  Yet we have attained all the know-how we need to feed the world's population.  We are now beginning to overcome that belief system with the help of several influencial organizations such as Unicef, The Hunger Project, and the American Friends Service Committee.
     Ask yourself what beliefs you hold about scarcity in your life.  Make a list of everything that seems to be a scarce commodity.
     Almost everyone feels there is not enough time; yet there are still twenty-four hours each day - the same as always.  It is only our thoughts about structuring time that give us the impression of abundance or scarcity.
     Many yearn for love and feel there is not enough of it in the world.  I've heard many women and men express the feeling that there aren't many good people around to choose from.  There are plenty of wonderful people -both men and women - wanting to give and receive love.  Love exists in our minds.  We limit ourselves only because of our shields of fear, our shields against love.
     We hear so much about the energy crisis.  The only crisis we are facing is the challenge to create new forms of energy to use as our fossil fuel is burning up.  All that exists in the universe is energy.  There is no lack of energy, only lack of commitment to find new sources.  For exam-ple, the United States government, is spending more money on their military marching bands than they are on solar, wind, and other alternative sources of energy.
    Water itself is not scarce.  Clean water is scarce.  How we decide to use the bountiful supply of water we have is what determines its purity.  Those decisions are depen-dent upon our consciousness.
     Then there's money.  We own the bank that supplies our wealth.  It is the natural flow of our creative energy that overflows into money.  When we are living a loving, giving life, fully conscious of who we are and what we want, we have the ability to obtain all the money we need through our creative ideas.
     By observing, without a belief system of scarcity, we see that our universe isn't skimpy.  We are oversupplied in great abundance - with love.
     Coming from a new consciousness of abundance, we learn that winning is an attitude and happiness is a decision.  We can release and relax into our prosperity when we know, affirm, visualize, and experience the love of the universe through the abundance that sur-rounds us.  By expressing love for each other we are only paying back a little of that which we have already received.