Faith prospers all

We’re familiar with the statement: Love conquers all. Seems equally true that faith – applied faith – generates prosperity…individually and universally. Let’s explore the truth that faith prospers all.

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I recently purchased a lecture series from The Great Courses: Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills, presented by Steven Novella, MD, from the faculty of Yale School of Medicine.

In his second lecture, Dr. Novella makes the point that the human brain is, in effect, a “belief machine”. Humans consistently and continually seek beliefs on which to base decisions, preferences, actions, and more. Novella maintains our beliefs come from emotional reasons. We cement those emotional reasons in our thinking by building rationalizations and justifications. According to Novella: Emotions provide behavioral motivation….

Consider how often our emotions motivate our beliefs and then our beliefs govern our actions. Haven’t we at some time felt (and so, believed) we did not have enough (money, love, security, happiness) and because we do not have enough we actually experience less and less? At other times haven’t we felt (and believed) the opposite: the good in our lives just keeps on getting better and better?

And so we’ve paid heed to

For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him. (Matthew 13:12)

Eric Butterworth in Discover the Power within You clarifies that passage from Matthew. Butterworth builds the beautiful analogy of a cup held beneath a running faucet. If our mindset (our emotions > beliefs > actions) is that we have abundance, we hold the cup upright, it fills with water until it overflows. If we feel, see, engage our lives as impoverished, we are in effect holding our cup upside down; no water can enter but only spills to the ground.

Joe Dispenza, known for his part in the movie What the Bleep…, has authored a new book: Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. He carries Novella’s premises to the pragmatic suggestion of changing our experience that we might change our emotions. By changing our emotions we change our motivating behavior. In effect, we can turn our cup rightside up, in whatever parts of our existence we feel less than prosperous. Here’s the shorthand version Dispenza’s formula:

• Get clear about what you want; then
• Change your actions to match your intentions, so that you
• Create a new experience, and this will
• Create a new emotion.

That new emotion teaches the body that we may understand and believe and act. That we may flip our cup to fill with prosperity.

Now, here is where faith comes in…

Believing we lack prosperity of any sort reflects an absence of faith in the miracle of abundance, which Butterworth so clearly expresses above.

If we have faith in the substance that God manifests, the substance that takes form from our thoughts, we do not know lack. We know abundance. We experience the water filling our cup to overflowing. It’s all expressed in the Third Principle of Unity:

We are talking about applied faith rather than pure faith. I remember learning the distinction between pure science and applied science in 7th grade science. The former is the science you think about and admire; the latter is the science you put to work to achieve results. That applies just as well to faith. Our applied faith is the faith we carry out in our daily lives, the actions we take, the behaviors we perform, the words we say, the prayers we share. You have heard the statement:

Couple that with Eric Butterworth’s premise that the wealth of the universe is yours to the extent that you can see it and see yourself using it.

I believe the simplest and most direct way to apply one’s faith is the power of blessing. We are blessed with such prosperity that we can in turn bless the prosperity we have and experience. When one expresses dismay at the lack of this prosperity (say, a replacement automobile) or that prosperity (say, a better job), the simplest question is, “Would you trade your sense of hearing or seeing for that prosperity?” Invariably, their answer is, “No! I would never give up the abilty to hear or the beauty of sight!” In other words, what we have is more valuable than what we want. I say, bless that prosperity rather than bemoan the lack. I say, turn the cup over!

Charles Fillmore, co-founder of Unity, says:

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