The Fortune Right in Front of You: Your Spiritual Assets

Almost everyone has heard some version of Russell Conwell's story of the South Asian farmer who ignorantly tossed aside many of the black stones he encountered in the soil on his property as he scratched out a living. After many years, he finally sold his farm in order to seek his fortune elsewhere. Little did he know that the black stones that peppered his fields and streambeds and that he considered a nuisance were actually raw diamonds. These acres of diamonds ultimately became the famous Galconda Diamond Mine, one of the richest mines ever, and producer of such crown jewels as the stunning Kohinoor diamond of England and the fabulous Orlov diamond of Russia.

"If only he were more observant he'd have become wildly wealthy," may have been your first reaction to this tale. Indeed, that's the lesson for everyone. Look carefully. You have your own acres of diamonds within you. Your spiritual assets are legion. Like the farmer did with the black stones, you may be paying more attention to the superficial appearance of what your life holds, rather than the truth that you have everything within you that seems "missing" to enable you to create wealth, happiness, fulfilling relationships, and more.

The Spiritual Asset of Creativity

You can be well paid to do what you love. You are at your most powerful when you follow your creative passion and let it inspire your choices and your path. Creativity is the spiritual asset that gives you the ability to imagine and respond to the great flow of life. When you let the creative energies flow, you become a shining channel for Spirit. You are often wonderfully amazed at what flows out of you.

Watch children at play. For them, a cardboard box becomes a castle, dolls become part of the family, and video games allow them to save the universe. Like children, we constantly are using creativity to invent our world.

Everyone, whether or not he or she acknowledges them, has a set of creative gifts-whether it is for doing fine art, making music, bringing people together, decorating with colors, cooking gourmet meals, solving numerical equations, playing or designing computer games, or cultivating friendships, and so on. What makes these spiritual assets so special is that they are as unique as the individual who possesses them.

The Spiritual Asset of Focus

The field of intentionality is why goal setting processes work in life and in business, and why on a particular occasion you may recall asserting, "When I really make up my mind that I want something, I get it!" But even the greatest intentions go nowhere unless they are activated by focus, because the field is responsive. It requires clear instructions to take a particular form.

The energy of the universe is pure potential, except when there is a thought. Focusing on a thought starts a reorganizing process in the field of intentionality that we share in common. Most startling is that, despite the multiplicity of the trillions of thoughts of the billions of people on Earth, our focused thoughts create order out of the seeming chaos. How can the universe support everyone's intentions at the same time? Because everyone and everything is part of a unified energy field, which is inter-dimensional, aware, and responsive to thought.

Focus is a spiritual asset. We often call it by other names: determination, attention, commitment, concentration, single-mindedness, and obsession are among them. These names speak to the degree of the focus that we are bringing to bear on the needs of the moment.

The Spiritual Asset of Intuition

Intuition is a knowing voice that originates from deep within us. We may hear this voice during meditation or contemplation, or receive messages from it through our dreams at night or while going about mundane daily activities. People experience their intuition in different ways, however there is nearly always a sense of "rightness" to intuition, a feeling of having penetrated beyond the obvious, surface layer of the world. An unexplained insight may hold a warning, such as, "If you walk down that street, you'll be putting yourself in danger" or, "These people are shading the truth about the product they are selling." Later on hunches like these are often proven to be correct.

One highly successful fund manager and technology company analyst, who describes himself as "essentially a right-brained person with a left-brained vocabulary," has an ability to assess the big picture in new situations so that his first instincts about what to do are uncannily accurate. He makes decisions based on his emotions, rather than logic, although he works in a businessmost people associate with provable facts and rationality. After he first consults his gut instinct, or intuition, he does his "homework," following through with due diligence to ensure that his initial feelings are supported.

On one occasion, this analyst evaluated a seemingly successful maker of ATM machines that had projected rapid growth. The day before he visited the company, he dreamed that its stock would unexpectedly drop 90 percent, so instead of buying, he was considering whether to warn his clients who held large positions in the company's stock.

Armed with the image of impending disaster from his intuitive dream, he kept digging and asking questions until he discovered that a large number of the company's orders were conditional and there would be a sharp, unannounced drop in their order rate. His dream information was accurate. Thus his intuition had enabled him to recommend his clients sell the shares, when all other analysts had made strong buy recommendations.

The Spiritual Asset of Guidance

Guidance is a message of wisdom that comes to us in some fashion from outside of us, usually when we are lost or do not feel entirely clear about what we're doing. Like intuition, guidance comes in many forms, including synchronicity, which has been defined as a coincidence that holds meaning for the person experiencing it. Guidance often puts someone in the right place at the right time to receive a message, such as by happening to hear the perfect snippet of an interview playing on the car radio, or to see the perfect article in a magazine at a supermarket checkout counter, or to sit next to the perfect person on an airplane.

People sometimes dismiss coincidences like these as being "fortunate accidents," when in fact the soul's greater guidance system is not limited to information, but includes chance encounters. Although these phenomena defy logic, they are widely recognized as real. By pointing to the presence of an underlying pattern in our lives and everything around us, both of these spiritual assets affirm our connection to the infinite intelligence of the universe.