is a commonly agreed-upon fantasy about the value of certain pieces of paper and the concept of currency itself. We will discuss more about that in the next chapter on the history of money.)
A misunderstanding of the original work of Charles Haanel and Napoleon Hill has engendered the association of mind over matter with wishful thinking. In The Master Key System, Charles Haanel developed the principle of the universal mind, from which all mental images are derived. Haanel explained how, through meditation, it was possible for anyone to access the universal mind, and he gave concrete examples of how he did it himself. In The Master Key System, Haanel also developed the concept of the law of attraction. The original formulation of this law was that the positive energy you emanated drew positive energy to you, including good health, good relationships, and financial abundance. In the popularization of Haanel’s work in movies and books such as The Secret, the impression was given that you merely had to visualize what you desired and you would attract that object to you. In terms of manifesting wealth, creative visualization is a helpful tool and technique, but not a primary causal process. It is true that if you are unable to imagine success or visualize a positive outcome in your business dealings, you are much less likely to manifest success. Creative visualization alone is equivalent to removing a blockage that might prevent success, but it is not an action that will actually create your success. As the late, great baseball player and homespun philosopher Yogi Berra stated, “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” Lack of belief can derail you, but belief alone is rarely sufficient.
Since you are reading a book that purports to provide modern and ancient practical techniques and wisdom to create unlimited abundance, you of course want to know what is needed to manifest. The full answer will be revealed in the following chapters that explain the role of the soul, but the initial answer is quite simple. Within your mind you have access to the tools, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge that have the potential to create unlimited abundance. This is not conjecture. This is fact. Millions of people with no more knowledge, education, social standing, or desire than you have become multimillionaires and enjoyed lives of material abundance. Each self-made millionaire/billionaire and those who inherited wealth and grew rather than squandered it followed his or her own unique path, but all of them used their minds and not their bodies as their primary resource for creating wealth. Stories of how people with imagination and visualization have transformed their existence to become much more joyous and abundant in many ways abound. One of the author’s associates was born to a tenant farmer living in Caruaru in northeastern Brazil in the late 1940s. His parents were illiterate, and at the age of six he started working in the fields. He was able to learn basic math from other illiterate farmers whose lives focused on growing and selling vegetables, but he never went to school and never learned to read or write.
But this young man was extremely industrious. He worked hard and realized he could help the other tenant farmers by renting a wagon and taking their produce to market along with his own. This saved the other farmers’ time and allowed them to spend more time in their fields cultivating and harvesting more crops. They were delighted to pay this young man a small commission on the sale of their produce. Word spread about the young man and soon he was focusing full-time on buying and selling the crops of all the tenant farmers in his district. Being observant, he noticed there was a boom in the prices for coffee, so he encouraged his farmer friends to plant more coffee. In a few years, he became the largest provider of coffee beans to one of France’s premier coffee brands. When overexpansion and poor financial management prevented the French company from paying their debt to their supplier, this illiterate Brazilian became the owner of the coffee company. Concerned that he might be overinvested in coffee, he looked around and saw that beef prices were rising. Within five years, he became the largest cattle rancher in the entire state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil.
There are many similar rags-to-riches stories that have occurred all over the world. Our goal is not to inspire you to abandon what you are doing to seek a quick road to riches. Our young Brazilian friend worked for more than twenty years before becoming a multimillionaire, and, in his fifties, he did finally take the time to learn to read and write. Your road may be long or short, and the role of your soul will determine the length of your journey to riches. Our goal is to help you understand that the path to financial abundance will always have thinking prior to action. Whatever your present life circumstances, a proper mental attitude can potentially lead you to unlimited abundance.
One of the primary principles of both mind over matter and soul over matter is that you must have a “why” in what you do that benefits others. The more you serve others, the more you are likely to receive. The more you serve others unconditionally, the greater your likely reward. The financial benefits may not come immediately, but they will come. Although we may all question it at times, the universe is ultimately fair. Good deeds and good thoughts are rewarded. The universe is also infinitely abundant. There is no lack in the universe; there are enough atoms and molecules, enough time and space, for every living creature in the universe to enjoy the fullness of their being. Any scarcities you perceive are man-made situations, the majority of which can be resolved through man-made actions and inventions. To create these inventions, it is quite helpful if you can access the universal mind. It will also be necessary at the present time to understand the dynamics, history, and role of money, which we will explain in the next chapter.
2
A Brief History of Money
NO ONE KNOWS for certain when money was first invented. We know that money is a man-made invention. No animals have ever created a system of barter or trade that involves money. Although there are instances of animals hoarding food, there is no evidence of animals trading foods or goods. Animals for the most part live in the present moment and are not primarily concerned about the future. Money is mostly about the future.
Money is a marvelous invention. It allows human beings to not just barter and trade but to create and plan. Physical goods and resources can be magically transformed into storable, durable, lightweight currency in its myriad forms: paper, checks, credit cards, electronic transfers, bitcoins, and so on. This magical ability to set aside resources for future needs without creating additional work was a breakthrough without which modern societies could not have evolved.
Of course, once money was created, human ingenuity took over and numerous ways of utilizing money were devised. Money experts emerged and, along with them, the concept of banks, and eventually our present economic systems evolved. Capitalism today favors those with large sums of money at their disposal. Money itself under capitalism generates money whether or not the owner of that money contributes to the production of goods and services. To some extent, this has always been true from the beginning of moneyed societies, but never to the extent of today’s modern capitalism. In many ancient societies, it was considered immoral to charge interest when lending money. Money was considered a tool and a mechanism to benefit the entire community and to ensure trade and commerce, but not to create tiered societies in which some groups controlled a disproportionate percentage of the wealth of their community. One of the clearest demonstrations of a society that valued economic parity is documented in the indigenous potlatch ceremonies in the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States, where every year the wealthiest village members would hold festivals during which they shared or even gave away the majority of their possessions, in effect trading material goods for social standing and prestige.
In the majority of primitive civilizations, people had few possessions and little ability to store possessions for future needs. Even today there are Amazonian tribes who move with the seasons, carrying all of their possessions with them and recreating living quarters from whatever plants and trees might be growing around them. These and other nomadic peoples barely recognized the concept of private property. When hunters caught a wild boar or other animals, everyone shared the meat. When the hunt was especially abundant, there would be festivals and celebrations, and neighboring tribes would even be invited to share their bounty. Oftentimes these invited guests would become allies and share their bounties, creating a safety net against less abundant times.
Individual tribe members had differing statuses, but these distinctions were based on inherent abilities and not on accumulated wealth. A skillful healer would be venerated