There is a science of getting rich, and it is an exact science, like algebra or arithmetic.
There are certain laws, which govern the process of acquiring riches, and once these laws are learned and obeyed by anyone, that person will get rich with mathematical certainty. - Wallace D. Wattles.
The first step to having wealth is to know what it is.
And few people know what it really is, in and of itself.
What is wealth?
What causes it?
What causes the cause of it?
Let us start with money, the world's symbol of wealth, and then move deeper.
Money is not real.
Money is merely legal tender, a form of exchange.
We use it to exchange value.
It represents value.
Money is the 'body' of value.
It is the physical representation of value that rises and falls in ourselves, within us.
Not within 'things' outside of us, but within us.
For without us, what can the value of a thing, such as a car, be to us?
Nothing, at least not to us. We the observers, that place value in the things.
In other words, it is we, the observers, that place value in things, but this value is really value in us - we give value to the material things. The material things have no 'money' value in themselves - we give that to them.
So, money is the external physical representation of a particular section of our internal value, within us, within you.
That is why a house or a block of shares valued at $1 million today can fall to a valuation of half a million dollars tomorrow when fear is introduced into the hearts of those involved.
The fear kills a portion of the internal values of the participants and that is reflected by the paper money, the 'body' of value.
Here is something else: physical paper money does not even represent money in full.
It cannot reasonably do that.
By some estimates (and this varies from nation to nation), only as little as 4% of the money in the banks exists as paper cash.
Imagine how much cotton, linen, pulp, and metal the world would need so as to make all the money everyone has in his or her bank accounts.
Imagine how much space it would take to store all this money in paper form.
If we were to stack only one million US$1 bills, it would weight one ton and be 361 ft high. Neither does money exist as gold reserves any more.
This is for exactly the same reason - we ran out of the reasonable ability to keep a gold standard in the 1970s.
So what does it exist as, the money that we are always talking about?
Well, it is one massive illusion.
It is all just numbers written on paper and computer storage devices, and assigned to people and entities such as companies and investments, or more accurately, further records!
To put it in another way, for every $100 or its equivalent in any other currency, only about $4 exists as printed-paper notes or coins, while the remaining $96 exists as numbers written on papers and computers in banks and businesses and other entities.
The only reason this system does not collapse is that we all believe in it.
The last time people stopped believing in it in a large enough extent was just before the Great Depression when large numbers of people rushed to their banks to withdraw their money and found that they could not all get it.
This is not what caused the Great Depression, but it in a large way accelerated it.
So, money is not real - something else is.
Money is just the shadow of that other something.
The first step to wealth is to know what money really is, or more accurately, what it represents.
Learn not to look at the money most of the time.
As we will soon see, it is very rare in a day that we should ever look at money as we know it today - the cash, the bank accounts, the costs, etc.
This is merely the shadow and not the real thing.
Looking at the shadow, the physical money, as we will soon see, is most of the time very unwise and unhealthy for you and your finances.
Look, instead, at the value within us and within people, and the flowing and exchanging of this value between people.
Our internal value, is what creates money.
Money is the shadow of our internal value.
Develop this internal value in ourself and in others and our external money and wealth will correspondingly rise automatically, without fail.
Know this however: Money represents an aspect of a person's internal value, but that does not mean that it represents a person's entire internal value. That is very important.
It is not about self-worth.
Money only represents an aspect of that internal value that pertains to wealth.
We cannot therefore say that a wealthy person has a higher self-worth and value than a poor person, but we can correctly say that in matters that relate and pertain to money, the wealthy person has a higher internal value in that aspect of value or that the person chooses to exercise a higher proportion of this internal value.
This section of internal value that reflects on the outside as money, when exercised, is called Wealth Consciousness.
It is available to all people equally and can be developed by and within all people equally.
Like everything else that is important to all of us alive, such as air, wealth consciousness is free to all.
But we can choose to develop it or not develop it, or to exercise it or not.
At any time, we can change our choice, and nothing outside of us can stop us.
We require nothing outside of ourself to increase your wealth consciousness, and therefore our money.
All we need is within us right now.
We may have forgotten it, but it is right there.
We will now remember it.
And the first step to that is to always remember that money is not real; it is the shadow of something else.
And here is another secret: Wealth consciousness is simply the expansion of our consciousness and awareness into the wealthy parts of our Self.
That is why all that we need to increase our wealth consciousness is within us already.
We are already wealthy, but we have been taught to choose to not experience our wealth.
This insight changes everything.
Like the wealthy people, we can now know how to and choose to start experiencing the wealthy us.
We have more wealth capability within us than we can possibly experience in a lifetime.
We need not worry that we have reached our limit of becoming wealthy in any way or because of any condition. Neither do we need to know how to convert wealth consciousness into paper cash money - as we will see, it will happen automatically.
All we need to do is expand our wealth consciousness and exercise it, act on it, be it, and the situations and opportunities for the equivalent conversion into cash money will present themselves automatically to us.
None of the extremely wealthy people today could have, at the time when they were not wealthy, possibly predicted and planned the exact sequence of events that would lead to their immense wealth.
They most probably had a set of goals and a plan, but any one of them will tell you that they met countless 'coincidences' and opportunities that 'joined the dots' for them in ways they could never have predicted.
Their goals were their own doing, but the paths that led to them coming into being, and exceeding them, we amazingly intelligent yet unforeseen.
We shall now see how to make them happen in our life - we may not be able to predict their sequence, but we can certainly make these 'fortunate coincidences' happen to us every day of our life.
By the way, it is not only paper money that is not real.
A lot of the things around us that we hold so real are really not real at all. We are about to embark on a beautiful, empowering and liberating journey that will show us exactly what our world is in a way that we have never looked at it before.
It is a journey that will open our eyes and free our wings. We are about to look 'under the hood' of the Life, we are about to learn how to customize our world to our liking.
We are about to attain Wealth Consciousness. Once we do, avoiding success and wealth will become very difficult.
Yes, you read that correctly. Once we have wealth consciousness, it will be very difficult for us to not have success and wealth.
Success and wealth will follow you automatically wherever we go.
We will not need to concern ourself with their quest, yet they will find you.
We will be free to experience other aspects of life that we may not have even dreamt of before, dimensions of Self and Life that are truly amazing.
The same goes with happiness, health and success as well.
Let us now get started on the real stuff, when you are ready.
This text was extracted from the book A Happy Pocket Full of Money
