The Foundation for Lasting Prosperity
Part 3 of 12
A Practical Guide to Prosperous Living
J Douglas Bottorff
The truly prosperous life is not something you can acquire from the external world. It is something you must evolve from within yourself. Each one of us is endowed with a high calling, a calling that may not be presently apparent to us in any form other than a sense of dissatisfaction with our life as it is. Dissatisfaction is always a signal that you are not living life to its fullest available potential and that you are somehow thwarting the expression of a quality of experience you know instinctively you can and should have. Dissatisfaction is a path that, when traced back to its origins, will lead you both to your native soul and to an eternal set of values which eventually become a new basis for the life you know is possible.
The distance you must travel between the place you are now and the place you want to be may seem long and formidable and, at times, impossible to traverse. But if you build your foundation on the rock of eternal reality rather than on the shifting sands of appearances, your faith will be strong. When you experience the real and changeless, you will possess the courage to discard your surface-based self-image and your creative survival mode of living. You must transform your self-image to that of a spiritual being. Only then will you progress to artistic expression and begin to live as a satisfied, happy, fully-functioning human being.
This transformation is often a frightening and painful process, because, as you will see in a later chapter, it involves the death of the identity you have grown accustomed to. You will be tempted to turn away from this process many times. But this internal review, this sorting the real from the false, is the path to permanent prosperity and you will return to it when you have, to your satisfaction, exhausted everything of lesser value.