by: Debbie O'Meara

In his book "Prosperity", Charles Fillmore writes:

We all grew up playing games. In every game, there was a winner and a loser. For me to win, someone else (or lots of someone elses) had to lose. And it didn't stop when we left the playground. Did your teachers grade on a curve? Then every top grade had to be balanced out with a low one. How about getting that job, that promotion? There was a winner, and everyone else lost. Is it any wonder that we look at life as a zero-sum game, that every win comes at someone's expense?

When it comes to getting a given job, perhaps that's so. But Prosperity teaches us that that isn't the entire story. There is abundance, there is "winning," to go around for everyone.

The universe doesn't choose some of us for success, favor some of us over others, doom some of us to mediocrity and dissatisfaction. And you know, intellectually, that God loves us all equally, right? So why is it so easy to believe that we will never have enough, or be enough?

The concept of boundless abundance isn't one we grow up with. We learn early that resources run out. And as humans, we are finite. We can only create so much, deliver so much. So whenever we are relying on humans, we face limits. And our experience has taught us not to trust other people to fill our every need. But Fillmore doesn't ask us to trust humans to deliver our abundance. He tells us to trust God, to trust the Divine Mind, to provide for us always. Is God so limited that He has already made all there is to make, that His abundance is finite, that we can only have what we take from someone else?

IWe find it hard to have faith in abundance, because we haven't made it happen ourselves. If we know how to drive a car, it's easy to believe that someone else can drive a car. But we don't know how to create pure abundance in our lives, so it's hard to believe that it can happen.

But, as this quote says, that belief is "fundamental" to our ability to know that abundance. We must let go of the philosophy that we can only prosper by taking away from someone else, or that our prosperity means someone else's deprivation. The first brings us avarice; the second, guilt. And dwelling on avarice or guilt won't bring success-it will bring more avarice or more guilt! Only dwelling on abundance will bring it to reality in our own lives.