Introduction: You are living in a limitless ocean of abundance and possibilities as evidenced by the abundance of air, water, vegetation, and sand on the seashore and deserts. Your conscious thoughts form the mold through which Divine Intelligence, wisdom and the vital forces of your subconscious can flow.
What is Poverty?
Poverty is a condition of perpetual lack and insufficiency in the essentials of life such as food, health, clothing, housing, money, and education, a condition often brought about by a mental condition. We may therefore redefine poverty as a condition of perpetual lack and insufficiency caused by a way of thinking.
There are different kinds and levels of poverty which include borderline, transient, dynamic, extreme, or abject, and absolute poverty. There is also individual, collective, group, and institutional poverty. We shall not elaborate on these for the reasons given below.
What To Know About Poverty.
Poverty is hardly worth studying besides knowing just enough to defeat it and get out of its humiliating and devastating effects. Its impact is so visible worldwide that it needs no explanation. This article exposes just enough about poverty to get you angry and determined to defeat it in your life permanently.
`The first thing to know is that poverty is a disease of the mind which is also curable from the mind with right thinking. Being a disease, it is contrary to nature and God’s plan for humanity which is so evident in the abundance of everything seen in nature. The inexhaustible supply of air for man and vegetation, the unquantifiable sand of the seashore and the deserts, the uncountable stars, the abundance of water of the oceans and their inhabitants, the vast expanse of land, and the greenery of earth’s vegetation. These all point to the fact that God intends for humanity to have and live in abundance.
The second thing to know is that your response to poverty determines your relationship with it. If you embrace it, it will embrace you and you will continue to wallow in poverty, but if you reject it, it will also reject you, enabling you to develop in you a desire to terminate it in your life. It behaves just like a pet which will cozy up to you if you cuddle it and will keep its distance from you if you always kick at it.
Thirdly, the number one cause of poverty is ignorance and the failure to think. The mind is the Creator’s gift to mankind to control his life and his environment. He, therefore, gave mankind a mind for thinking his way out of adversities. From poverty to affluence, failure to sickness, and sickness to health. Nobody is poor or having a hard time but the ignorant, the lazy, or the incompetent. Harsh but true for many poor people.
The desire NOT to be poor is universal until personal ignorance and oppressive systems inherent in some societies lead to hopelessness and helplessness resulting in people normalizing poverty. This situation is exacerbated when all everybody sees around them is poverty, leading to a sense of generational poverty in which families, tribal groups, and nations live in swinish slums, never thinking about breaking out of the cycle of poverty. Such a poverty mentality keeps people poor beyond redemption.
The Rich Poor:
The poverty of the poor is a disease of the mind that results in the poverty of the wallet. The poverty of the rich on the other hand is a disease of the mind despite a full wallet. The poverty of the poor is caused by ignorance while the poverty of the rich is caused by covetousness. The rich consider themselves poor because their wallet is not full enough and he is forever coveting what other people have, which is a kind of disease.
Reason Not To Study Poverty
What is there to study about poverty anyway? It has no attraction, and nobody desires it other than the ignoramus. So, why study something that no one likes, needs, or wants to be?
John Edward’s story is emblematic. John Edwards was John Kerry’s Vice-Presidential candidate for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. He was one of the richest and most successful trial lawyers at the time. After John Kerry lost to incumbent president Bush, Edwards accepted a position in the Law & Poverty Studies Institution in North Carolina. Within five years, and through a strange combination of circumstances, he had lost his wealth, fame, and influence and only narrowly escaped jail. You not only become what you think about but also what you study. Of course, studying is thinking.
To Get Out of Poverty
We know from the way the mind works that whatever the conscious mind does not believe or accept as possible/reasonable can never be accomplished by the subconscious mind however hard we try. The conscious mind passes on only what it believes possible to the subconscious, which is the doer of everything. The subconscious does everything for us through us. Therefore, to get out of poverty, do the following:
1. Reject poverty, hate it with a passion, and refuse to normalize it.
2. Desire to be rich specifically.
3. Get an education, formal or informal. Determine to learn from every exposure you have. Let the world be your classroom and be a life-long student.
4. Don’t think or talk about poverty. Never talk about how poor your parents were, or your miserable childhood because your subconscious will revive and re-live the poverty scenes. You would simply be reopening a healing or an already healed wound in your memory. Instead, talk of the better times ahead.
5. Expose yourself to affluence and the good life. It doesn’t matter whether it is in real life, in glossy magazines, or movies. By doing this, you create a mold for your subconscious mind to fill. The idea is to plant those images as possibilities in your subconscious firmly enough to make it start working on accomplishing those realities in your life.
If you will take the time to understand how your mind works, and take these five steps seriously, you could find yourself on your way out of poverty before you know it. Remember, to think is to create. You determine what you create by what you think.