Last Monday’s post, Dear LOA: How Can I Stop Hating The Rich? focused on how to stop seeing those with money in a derogatory light. After all, as we LOA teachers are fond of pointing out, you can’t manifest money if you hate those who have it. Or can you?

The post sparked some interesting discussions and questions in the comments (which I do read, even if I can’t always answer there. Here’s your proof, puppies). Readers wanted to know why they had to raise their freaking vibrations to finally get the moolah when there are so many seemingly low vibe people with fat wallets running around. I mean, how did those assholes from Enron get all that money? How does a “greedy and evil” politician manifest all those bribes? And if they can manage to manifest all that cash while miserable, why the hell can’t we? What is it with all this “you need to get happy first” bullshit, anyway? Why do we have to do so much more work than they do? I’m paraphrasing here, but that was the general gist of the questions being asked, and I thought you guys made some excellent points. So, I’ve decided to swiftly write a follow up post focusing on precisely this paradox, today. I know, right? You want to pirouette through the Alps belting out “The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music”. Me too, puppies. Me too.

How do the rich bastards manage to get rich?

Ok, so let’s get right to the heart of it. How do those rich douchebags (not the awesome rich, as I described in my last post, just the ones that seemingly don’t deserve it) manage to manifest all that bling?

The problem with this question, is that it doesn’t make any vibrational sense. How does anyone manifest anything? They have to be a vibrational match to it. Let me give you an example that’s going to seem totally unrelated, but will help me to totally make my point if you just stick with me for a minute or two. This is not the time to go for a pee break, is what I’m basically saying.

Let’s say that you have a friend and she gets cancer. Chill out, it’s hypothetical cancer, ok? She’s the nicest person in the world, has a loving family and is even doing something she loves for a living. You can’t for the life of you figure out how this happy spirit could get such an awful disease. How, you ask, did SHE manifest cancer? She doesn’t deserve it. She certainly hasn’t been thinking negative thoughts. Her life, other than the illness, is amazing! What the hell?

The thing is, and this is the mistake that a lot of people (including many teachers) make with the Law of Attraction, manifestations aren’t that black and white. You don’t get cancer or any manifestation, because you do or don’t deserve it, because you’re thinking directly about it in some way, or as punishment for thinking bad thoughts.

It’s all meaningless. But don’t let that depress you

Your manifestations are nothing more than representations of energy. They are totally neutral all on their own. I know, I know, how dare I state that something like cancer is neutral. Let the hate mail commence. But the thing is, it’s ALL neutral. Nothing, no event or experience, has any inherent meaning. It’s YOU and your perspective that assigns it any kind of meaning. Let’s keep going with this example, and I’ll explain further.

Because meaning is assigned by the individual, and it’s always a very private thing, no one can discern that meaning from the outside. You can’t ever really know what a manifestation represents to someone else. Honestly, it’s hard enough to figure it out for ourselves, we should probably just leave everyone else out of it (would if we could, eh?).

Your friend’s cancer is an inherently neutral event. It can have a negative or a positive meaning, depending on her perspective. And yes, I deliberately chose a charged topic to make a strong point, because the concept behind this entire blog post is actually a really big one. Let’s look at both scenarios, the “negative” and “positive” possibilities:

A negative representation

Even though your friend is, by all accounts, happy and balanced, she will definitely still have beliefs that she’s not aware of. Unless, of course, she’s fully self-realized, but there aren’t too many of those kinds of people running around yet, so let’s assume she’s still on her way to total enlightenment. As a student of LOA, she begins by not freaking out about her diagnosis, knowing that nothing has gone wrong and that even when things seem tragic, there’s always a gift contained in each event, if you’re willing to look for it. So, your friend asks herself how this cancer feels to her. What is it bringing up in terms of emotions? The obvious answer is fear, but what kind of fear? She digs deeper and realizes (I’m going to just skip ahead here) that she’s always been afraid of taking after her own mother and not doing a very good job with her kids. And although she’s managed to overcome the fear to the degree that she’s been able to create a happy home, that belief still lingers and was recently triggered big time by her son’s angry outburst at school. Has she inadvertently passed on her family’s f*#@ed-up gene to her kids? The dread of it fills her often and has even caused her to lose some sleep, but she dismisses it. Logically, her son is just fine, her family is happy, and of course her baby boy isn’t going to grow up to be an alcoholic. She’ll make sure of it, because she has everything under control. Um, right?

Nope. Your friend’s fear and resulting sense of overwhelming responsibility to keep everything together may not be outwardly apparent (unless you really know what to look for), but it’s still a belief that’s not serving her. And her refusal to engage with it has caused this belief to manifest in bigger and bigger ways, finally resulting in an illness that feels exactly like that fear to her – something you can’t possibly discern from your outside perspective. The point is, you don’t know what someone else’s manifestation means to them. Incidentally, when your friend clears her fear, the cancer, having done its job and successfully delivered the message it was meant to, disappears. The doctors assume they misdiagnosed her, and give her a clean bill of health.

A positive representation

How could cancer or any illness possibility be a good thing? Well, I just gave you one example. If your friend sees the illness as a messenger and shifts the belief it was there to point out to her, not only will she regain her health, but she’ll have a better life. She’ll experience a lot less fear, have closer relationships with her kids as they grow up (free from the need to control everything), and ultimately, love herself more, which would have repercussions in all areas of her life. That’s some pretty positive stuff, right there. But, just to drive the point home big time, cancer could also simply be a means to bring some awesome manifestation into your friend’s life. Let’s say your friend’s cancer is caught very early. She’s nowhere near death and the doctors are very optimistic. They recommend chemotherapy, but your friend, having a strong belief in holistic medicine, doesn’t feel good about that and goes the alternative route. She focuses on feeling good and lets her intuition guide her to some treatments that help to rebalance her body. The cancer regresses and her oncologist is amazed. He wants to know what she’s done, and begins some clinical trials using the methods that worked for her. Although he can’t include her entire protocol, and can’t talk about the energy aspect of it, his studies will help to bring these concepts more into the mainstream. Your friend, who is a healer at heart, has not only inspired her oncologist to a new life path, but ends up writing a book which ends up helping hundreds of thousands of people. She regularly tells anyone who will listen that the cancer was the best thing that ever happened to her (many people who have illnesses or disabilities do just that, by the way).

Again, the point is, it’s all in how you see it.

Why this may make you mad

Now, I can hear some of you arguing: “So, you’re basically saying that we should just look at all the crappy stuff in our lives and decide to see them in a positive way? If I’m poor, I should just be ok with it, and somehow, magically, it will go away? And if it doesn’t, then I should somehow decide that this is a good thing, anyway? Is that what you’re saying? Also, how does this answer the original question?” And don’t think I don’t hear the sarcasm in your voices, either. This is why I told you to hang in there. We’re covering a lot of ground today, and it’s not all going to be totally clear right away.

I get that what I’ve stated here in deliberately controversial way could make some of you mad. And that’s because you’re still not totally hearing me. You see, if you have a strong opinion about something, one that you don’t like but don’t think you can change, and then I come along and say “Choose a different perspective, just feel better about it”, what you may be hearing is “Choose a different perspective on your opinion, and just feel better about it”. In other words, you think that I’m asking you to keep the belief that doesn’t feel good, i.e., cancer is a horrific thing that no one deserves, and feel better about that. Or, being poor is awful, but you should be ok with it anyway. Yeah… that’s not going to work. In fact, it will feel awful to even try.

What I’m advising you to do is to find a different perspective of the event or experience – one that you can believe and which feels better. And yep, I understand how tough this is (until you really get it. Then it’s really not that hard). This is why I write so much and why I offer personal coaching. Teaching people how to really apply this stuff to the details of their lives can require a lot of explanation.

The most important thought to keep in mind is that you can get what you truly want, and that everything, EVERYTHING happens for a reason. Nothing is random. There is always an energetic cause and effect, but it’s a very individual cause and effect. There are no cookie cutter solutions here, and you can’t logically determine what your underlying beliefs are, much less someone else’s. You CAN figure it out, though. Nothing ever happens by mistake, and there’s always a positive reason for everything, even if you can’t see it. Embody this mindset, and your life will get tons easier, no matter what happens (and yes, stuff will still happen, although it will mostly stop sucking.)

You don’t have to be ok with being poor or ill, in terms of not wanting to be abundant or healthy. But you do want to understand that the poverty or illness or whatever is not indicative of anything on its own. Each manifestation carries a personal message for you AND ONLY YOU. Cancer will not mean the same thing to your friend as it does to someone else. And, wait for it, neither will money or the lack thereof.

YOU are placing a certain meaning on money. When you ask how a douchebag could become rich, it makes no sense. What does him being a douche have to do with his monetary status? That’s a bit like asking, how could a brown haired guy manifest a relationship. What?

Ah yes, I can hear you protesting now, “But you teach that we have to be happy to get money! Why can they get money without being happy?!”

Because, and this is the big point I’ve been leading up to all day: Money doesn’t represent the same thing to all people as it does to you. I teach that you have to be happy to get money, because money represents happiness to you. Period. If you said to me, “Money represents fear to me. The more of it I have, the more afraid I am. Can you help me manifest more money?”, I could theoretically advise you to shore up  the fear. Of course, I wouldn’t actually do that, because I’d get no joy from that, but you hopefully get my point.

What is it that you want?

Here’s the thing that I don’t understand: If you’re looking at some unhappy rich dude with jealousy, what exactly are you jealous of? Do you want to also be unhappy? What is it that you think he has that you want? Sure, you may be thinking that if you had his money, you wouldn’t do what he does with it. You’d be happy. But now you can’t compare yourself to him anymore. You’ve just declared that money represents something completely different to you than it does to him, and is therefore a completely different manifestation. Money simply represents energy, remember that.

When you see an unhappy rich person, you’re often seeing someone with great potential, a large energy, which isn’t being allowed to flow. The money they have in the bank – you know, the stuff that they could spend but aren’t, the stuff they could use to create happiness for themselves and others but aren’t, all that wasted and stagnated energy, is a literal, physical representation of what they are doing vibrationally. When you see someone who is incredibly overweight, you’re often looking at the same thing, by the way. The large amount of stagnant money is, in fact, often a way for the Universe to increase the pressure on the individual. Remember that money is an amplifier. So a rich guy who isn’t being Who He Really Is, may well feel the pain of that more the richer he gets.

If you’re focusing only on the money and not on what it represents, you’re missing the point. It’s a means to an end. It’s like coveting your neighbor’s photograph of a yacht, instead of the yacht itself. “If only I had that photograph, I’d sail around the world.” No, you wouldn’t. Because that photograph can’t bear your weight in the ocean (or that of your manly, muscley, oiled up crew.) Um, what were we talking about? Ah yes. What you really want is the yacht. But your neighbor doesn’t actually have a yacht. So why are you looking at him as an example? Why not go and find someone who actually owns a yacht and enjoys the hell out of it the way you would?

Money does not equal Happiness

This is precisely why I and other teachers are so adamant about the fact that you shouldn’t focus too much on the money. And yes, we know how annoying that is. It is merely a representation of something, and it will not represent the same thing to others as it will to you. If you must look at rich people for inspiration, look at the awesome rich, not the douchey rich. The douchey rich aren’t happy. They only have the photographs of the great life you want, not the life itself. If you’re going to say “I want to be like that. I want to have what they have”, why not make sure that they actually have what you want?

Stop striving for money. Strive for what you want that money to bring you, what it represents to you. At your core, that’s going to be happiness, because that’s what we all want. Sure, your desires can get a lot more specific than that, but that’s what it all basically comes down to. This is why I advise you to raise your vibration. I’m not here to make you rich, no matter what that means to you. There are people on Wall Street who have made that their life goal. When you make money your goal no matter what, it tends to turn out a little wonky (aka, the state of our economy today, business without consciousness, seeing the environment as an unlimited, free resource, there to be plundered, exploitation of others, etc.) Not only is it not sustainable, but it doesn’t work. All those people who think they can get happy by being rich, never manage to actually make enough money to reach that goal, no matter how many billions they amass.

What you want is to be happy. You can decide that you first have to get rich in order for that to happen, if you so choose, but I’d advise you to take the shortcut and just go straight to happiness. That way, everything that represents that happiness, including wads of cash, will float right into your experience.

Bottom line

Of course there are ways to make money other than by raising your vibration and letting it come to you, easily and effortlessly. You could work your ass off for years, doing a job you hate, if you believed that this will bring you money. I certainly did that for years. I made a lot of money at a corporate job that was slowly killing my soul (ok, not killing it, that’s not possible, but you know what I mean). I had a strong belief that suffering led to success, and the more I suffered, the more successful I became. I’m certainly not going to dedicate my life to teaching you how to do that. I’m here to teach you the easy way, the fun way, the way to happiness. I’m here to help you become a Happy Shiny Puppy, not a rich puppy, although abundance is certainly part of happiness and will manifest as a result. I’m here to offer one way of getting the life you want, but it’s certainly not the only way.

Sadly, I’m sure that if I offered a course on how to become a rich, unhappy bastard, it would sell out in minutes. But I’m not teaching that course. I don’t want to. I have no interest in creating more douchey rich. I want to create a whole lot of awesome rich, because the world I want to live in is populated by them.

I know, it’s so hard to hear – it’s really not about the money. The belief that you can’t be happy without money is deeply ingrained in all of us. But let me ask you this: If being wealthy is part of your picture of happiness, what makes you think that the Universe would bring you that happiness in all its forms, EXCEPT with money? Because that seems to be the big fear – “if I stop focusing on money, it’s like telling the Universe I don’t want any and then I’ll have to be happy without it forever”. As if happiness was conditional – “Yes, you get to have it, but only to a degree, and not in the ways that are important to you”. It’s only conditional if you believe that it is. You don’t have to settle for a life that’s less than you truly want and learn to be happy with that. You do have to be willing to happy no matter what, and then the life you want, in all its glory, will reveal itself to you. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.