Wealth, prosperity and abundance are words we mostly use about money. A wealthy person has a lot of it, a prosperous business makes a good profit, and abundance means more money than you could spend. Used that way, all three are amounts, and an amount can always be bigger, so whatever you have can look like too little. But each word carries an older and deeper meaning, and that might be key to understanding them and how we relate to them in our daily lives. So what did each word say before it was used for money?
Wealth and the list of wants
People mistake wealth for what they own. The word began as well-being, how well life is going. Wealth was built from the old word weal the way health was built from whole, and in the twelfth century it meant happiness and a good condition of life. Over time the money sense pushed the well-being one aside, but the first meaning survives in commonwealth, a well-being shared by everyone.
Read as money, wealth becomes an amount. A person can have a home, food on the table and good health, and still feel poor, because there is a car, a trip or a bigger house they want and don't have. What tells them they are poor is the list of wants they have not met yet. Read as well-being, the same home, food and health are already wealth for someone who can tell what they want from what they need.
Why no amount feels like enough
Money is value in physical form, with no good or bad of its own. Most people use it to satisfy wants, and wants run in a chain: satisfy one and the next appears. Take someone who has a car and wants another one that costs a fortune. They work for years to afford the new one, and by the time they can, a newer model comes out at almost three times the price. Or say they do buy the car they wanted. They drive to the shopping centre feeling on top of the world, leave the car in the car park and walk inside, where nobody knows what they drove. They look like everyone else again, and the search starts for the next thing that will set them apart. The chain is where the feeling of never having enough comes from.
There's nothing wrong in wanting more, or in wanting money. We are desiring beings, and that is a good thing: every advance people have made came out of wanting more. The trouble is that we don't always know the difference between what we want and what we need. Wanting more is how we expand, and having every desire fulfilled is a different matter, as King Midas found out. He asked a god for everything he touched to turn to gold, and the god granted it. His food, his water and his daughter turned to gold too, and he began to die inside his own wish until the god took it back. His story makes us wonder how it would be if our every desire was granted immediately.
Born rich, born with little
Midas asked for his gold. Some people are born rich, with far more than anyone could earn, and others are born with very little. From the human point of view that looks like an imbalance. On the invisible side, there is always balance: each person is born with tendencies, good and bad, to work through, and with debts of their own to settle. Money follows causes that began before the person holding it was born. A fortune built on harm travels with what was done to build it, and the heirs receive a debt to settle along with the money. Is it a prize or a punishment to be born into a family like that? Each person chooses, through frequency, the family they are born into, for what there is to settle in it, and that holds for someone born with little as much as for the heir to a fortune. Rich or poor, a person's true wealth is how well they live through what they came to settle.
When good people struggle with money
The same balance answers a question many people carry: why do so many good people, who spend their lives helping others, struggle with a lack of resources? The question assumes that helping others should bring money. What most of these people have is the minimum they need to keep going, which is what their work needs. Being good also leaves each of them with what they brought into this life to settle, the same as anyone else. And some of the people who did the most for others could have made money whenever they wanted. They knew they shouldn't make it, because the one that had to find its balance was the institution around them, with the people in it. Creating money beyond what the work needed would have meant interfering in all those lives without being asked, which harms a person's evolution, and the institution would have ended up even further out of balance.
Prosperity and where you look
Prosperity is traditionally traced to a Latin phrase meaning "according to hope", though the origin is debated. Hope is a kind of expectation, a word that comes from the Latin for looking out, watching for what is coming. In the esoteric view, prosperity is what corresponds to where you look: life answers your attention with more of what you are looking at.
Where you look is more than what you say. Someone can write "I am prosperous" hundreds of times, then sit in a restaurant and read the menu. Even with the money to pay for what they would like to eat, the feeling is mixed: I have the money, but I'll just go for the cheapest option, just in case. The sentence they repeated stayed in their thinking, and the feeling at the table shows where they are really looking. Life answers where you look, and it answers I am worth nothing as willingly as I deserve. Pushing hard against what you don't want is looking at it too, and what you look at grows.
Looking at the lack
Someone who spends the whole day complaining about the lack of money is living the lack of money. Of the two ends, having and lacking, they are looking at the lack, and feeding it. A thought repeated every day takes a form of its own, a thought-form, and lives on the attention it gets, so they feed the thought-form of lack and let the thought-form of having go unfed. To someone who only talks about illness, health is invisible. To someone who spends every day creating and feeding forms of hatred, the forms of fellowship and love are completely unknown, because they belong to another language. Prosperity is the same: to someone who keeps looking at what is missing, it is invisible.
What already exists tends to join whatever is similar to it. Let's say you are abroad, where everyone around you speaks a language you don't know. Their words pass over you without meaning. Then you hear someone speaking your own language, and you tune in to them automatically. Wealth works the same way. It passes by and it tunes in to whoever sounds similar to it. How would wealth happen to someone who doesn't know how to talk with it? The more they complain, the more it moves away.
Abundance and what you already have
The other way of looking starts from what you have. Abundance comes from a Latin verb meaning "to overflow", built on the word for a wave. Today it is mostly heard as a lot of money, but an overflow means more than a thing can hold, and each person can hold a different amount, in a different form. There is enough for everyone when each person lets abundance come in the form that fits them, and that form changes over a life. Life is already supporting you, because you are here, and that support continues even while you believe you are on your own. Abundance, in this sense, is having what you need when you need it. What you need now is already here, and the rest comes at the right time.
Read as amounts, wealth, prosperity and abundance always ask for more. Read in their older meanings, they describe how well life is going, where you are looking, and what comes to you as it is needed, and all three start forming the abundant, prosperous and wealthy life that belongs to all of us.
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