Health & Fitness
Listen to episode 499 of the Inspirational Living podcast: Overcoming a Poverty Mindset| Law of Opulence. Edited and adapted from Peace, Power & Plenty by Orison Swett Marden.
Inspirational Podcast Transcript: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. Don’t forget to check out our collection of inspirational fashion and gifts at BookofZen.com. Each item features one of my own original thought-provoking sayings inside a zen enso circle. Thank you. Today’s reading was edited and adapted from Peace, Power, and Plenty by Orison Swett Marden, published in 1909.
The worst thing about poverty is the poverty thought. It is the conviction that we are poor and must remain so that is fatal to progress in life. Holding the poverty thought keeps us in poverty-stricken and poverty-producing conditions.
Poverty is an abnormal condition. It does not fit any human being's constitution. It contradicts the promise and the prophecy of the divine within us. The Creator never intended that we should be a pauper or a slave. There is not a single thing in the wonderful human mechanism that indicates we were created for a life of poverty.
There is something larger and grander for us in the divine plan than perpetual slavery to the bread-winning problem. None of us can do our best work — bring out the best within us — while we feel want tugging at our heels, while we are hampered, restricted, forever at the mercy of pinching circumstances.
The very poor (those struggling to keep the wolf at bay) cannot be independent. They cannot order their lives. Often they cannot afford to express their opinions, or to have individual views. Poverty in its extreme form is narrowing, belittling, contracting, ambition-killing — an unmitigated curse. There is little hope in it, little prospect in it, little joy in it. It often develops the worst in us and kills love between those who would otherwise live happily together.