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Limiting beliefs, just like positive, empowering thoughts, provide a foundation for our experiences and what we demonstrate. Old beliefs can leave us behind ' and are often stale, lingering ideas left-over from our childhood experiences or from other areas of life that no longer carry any useful meaning. Abandoning negative assumptions about lack opens room to develop an abundant mindset. We can do that by setting a new mental equivalent that resets the dial on our trust channel ' the channel we listen to that tells us to trust that we already have everything. A belief system must change in order to create a new reality.

Emmet Fox, a 1940's New Thought minister and author, stressed the importance of setting a mental equivalent to create an abundant life, borrowing the term from chemistry and physics. For example, engineers must work out the equivalent of heat in order to determine how much energy it represents in the form of another energy. They can determine how much fuel it takes to drive an engine and how much processing energy it takes to produce the fuel. A mental equivalent is a wonderful metaphor for how we are perfectly capable of instituting positive change in our lives and world. Like engineers, we can create the equivalent of every experience or object in the physical world by changing the thought to which it corresponds.

Scientifically, we've accepted that one kind of energy translates into another to produce that same effect. Everything on earth is energy anyway. All matter, when it's broken down into sub-atomic particles, is energy. This article is energy, the dog is energy, you are energy. The same is true for the energy of thought. To attract goodness, you must set a mental equivalent of goodness by accepting you are worthy of receiving good, visualizing it, and feeling the goodness coming to you. If you want prosperity, wealth, happiness, that is where you must spend time mentally, not once a week, but all the time.

Emmet taught that whatever you want in life - a satisfying job, healthy body, friends, or opportunities, you must first set a mental equivalent to attract it. If you have something you want to get rid of - ill health, strife or poverty - then first get rid of the mental equivalent by striking the belief that those ideas and experiences must be part of your world and the world at large. Shed your old mental equivalent skin. Then you will begin to make change, not just for yourself but for others around you.

Feel what you want with tremendous emotion, be grateful, rejoice in the abundance of everything. Notice joy and prosperity everywhere, be thankful to be part of an incredible, spiritual universal equation of such magnificent complexity that you are humbled by its awe. Think gigantic. Set the bar as high as you want - there is no reason to feel limited because your true nature makes that impossible anyway. Don't be fearful of living, of failure, of the future - you already know how unproductive fear can be, as our collective consciousness has translated fear over the millennium into a belief in lack, poverty, and illness.

Emmet's concept of mastery included two key principles he called clarity and interest. An abundant life is derived from the ability to mentally straddle the line between clarity, or knowing exactly what you want and believing you are already in receipt of it, and interest, or the emotional feelings you have about what you want. People generally have a problem with clarity. There's an old saying, 'If you don't know where you're going any road will get you there.' In other words, by not knowing exactly what you want, or how you define your success and dreams, you can take any path and wander indefinitely. You'll receive exactly what you've asked for, and that is a nebulous vision of success and dreams. First homework assignment in Manifestation 101: ask for what you want. Visualize it clearly and revisit the idea often.

An error people frequently make is articulating what they want in great detail, but they lack the passion or belief in the idea. If you want to use part two of Emmet's abundance formula, then you must be sincerely interested in what you want, and emotional about seeing yourself within the idea. You must absolutely love what you want, love your vision passionately, feel it deeply, embrace it, live and breathe it. That is how something becomes part of you. It's how you claim it as your own.

Your experiences, as well as what physical objects you manifest, are effects of your thinking because they are all tempered by your belief system. Greed, selfishness, war, lack, bad economic conditions, or struggle can be manifested because they flow through a belief system, or your outer layers. We are always told not to judge by appearances. Why? Because the appearance has no value in itself. Nothing is what it seems on the outside, meaning, the effect has those attributes that you give it and nothing else. When we look behind an appearance, we look through it to the truth that lies behind it. As soon as the spiritual truth is evident to us, the appearance changes. This is the mental world that Fox spoke of, not the material world.

Abundance is a deeply spiritual lesson because it is about knowing that the presence within you constitutes your supply, which is your true source of power. Attune to your true self and channel the energies you need to create the life you desire. You can do it!