Dr. David Metzner

Does prosperity lead to happiness? The relation between the two is not so simple.  Researchers show that there is a certain financial threshold, any increase in income beyond this threshold doesn’t affect your happiness level. In USA the curve of happiness level vs. income saturates at $75000 annual income. Yet, our average employment income is $35,293, less than a half of the “happiness mark”. Despite all popular positive psychology teachings, it is very hard these days to be poor and happy.

The reason I am writing this article is the book that I read on a plane from Seattle after visiting my parents for Thanksgiving. The book was a present from my father, I guess he really wants me to be rich and happy.

Would you like to go to bed poor and wake up rich? Well, Dr. Joseph Murphy claims that this is an actual possibility in his book “The Power of your Sub-Conscious Mind.”

Murphy’s book focuses on, as the title suggests, what your sub-conscious mind can do, and apparently it is significantly more powerful than most people realize. For example, just thinking and imagining certain things can result in them happening.

Take the waking up rich idea from earlier. According to Murphy if you repeat the word “wealth” in an almost lullaby fashion as you fall asleep, you will soon find wealth coming towards you. It sounds a little unbelievable, but Murphy says it works.

It is all about envisioning the end goal. If your goal is to be wealthy then if you envision it, it will happen.

Murphy tells a story about a young boy he met in Australia once.  The boy wanted to be a doctor and for four months every night before he went to sleep he would imagine a medical diploma with his name on it. In the mean time he worked odd jobs for doctors’ offices such as cleaning inside or washing their windows. Soon, a doctor took him under his wing and began teaching him basic medical knowledge. He even employed him as a technical assistant for his office. Eventually he even sent the boy to medical school, paying for it himself.

The boy ended up achieving what he had imagined because he focused on it. In a way, he attracted to him everything he needed to fulfill his dream just as a seed attracts sunlight and water to it so that it may grow.

Murphy also offers a few other ideas to put into play with your lullaby-like repetition. Most of them revolve around thinking positively, for if you think positively your mind and the world will thus react positively in return.

For instance, he says to remove jealousy and envy from your mind that instead you should rejoice in the prosperity of others. As well, he says to stop creating excuses that explain why your results aren’t what you want them to be or as he calls them “blank checks.” These kinds of things prevent you from truly achieving what you want by preventing you from focusing on that desire.

According to Murphy, it is the right of everyone to be wealthy. If you link wealth with happiness, then your desire to be rich is really nothing more than a desire to live a happier, fuller life, which is something everyone desires and deserves. Again, according to Murphy, a lot of people tend to disagree with that idea because they think money is inherently evil. Because they think that money is evil, many people decide they want nothing to do with it, and thus they end up in poverty. Murphy considers that poverty is like a mental disease, people end-up in poverty because of their way of thinking and acting Murphy says that if there were something physically wrong with you, you would go to the doctor’s in an attempt to fix it. In the same vein, if you were not making money you would attempt to do whatever you could to fix that and if you don’t then something is wrong with your mind. This is obviously quite unorthodox view and rather an exaggeration, but this is what Murphy preached to his followers, many of whom actually become wealthy as a result of changing their mindset.

Murphy maintained that people tend to prevent themselves from being able to fix their poverty because they think of money in the wrong way. He suggests that they should get rid of all the superstitions of money being evil because you cannot attract things that you criticize. There’s proof of that in everyday life. You won’t be able to get your coworkers to become friends with you if you tell them they’re ugly or incompetent, for example.

Yet, if you think that your only goal in life is to make money than that is the only thing you will focus on and your life will become unbalanced because of it. You will end up with money, but realize that you want something more. This is easily avoidable, though, as long as you make sure to satisfy all the mind’s desires such as those of health and love.

By remembering and telling yourself that the reason you desire to be rich is so that you can live a happy life, you are likely to get rich and learn that money doesn’t guarantee happiness… Well, as you progress on your life path, you should be able to work on other aspects of happiness the same way as you did on trying to getting rich…