In the previous entry I quoted from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” in addressing the question of whether or not I am willing to work for the riches I desire.

Presently I am beginning a process that is intended to result, eventually, in the transformation of my self-diagnosed poverty consciousness into an enlightened state of money consciousness. To that end I go back to the same discussion about money from “Atlas Shrugged”.

In addressing the remark that money is the root of all evil, the character of Francisco d’Anconia explains that money is only a tool that will take you wherever you wish but will not replace you as the driver; that money will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but money will not provide you with desires.

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgement, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money…”

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue that was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it…”

On being poverty conscious
It is suggested by Napoleon Hill in “Think and Grow Rich”, that poverty is attracted to a mind that is favorable to it as money is attracted to the person whose mind has been deliberately prepared to attract wealth. Are you conscious of your need not to be poor, or conscious of your desire to make money? A consciousness of poverty is obviously rooted in negativity. In such a state something is undesirable, enervating, deflating, and depressing. Seeds planted in a poverty conscious mind can hardly be expected to grow.