YOU: A VISIONARY
I’m assuming your notepad has been in front of you for some time now, right? It’s time to take a couple of minutes and write down the things you choose to create in your life. If you can get them down, I’ll tell you how to achieve them. I want you to think harmonically, comprehensively, financially, relationally, mentally, physically, spiritually. What are the things you choose to create? Here’s the deal: I’m not asking you to write down what you think you can get but rather what you would dare to dream if you knew anything was possible. Get it down — now. If you want to keep it short and sweet that’s fine, you’ll have the opportunity to go more in depth later. But for now, please commit to answering the following questions.

ASSESS YOUR FINANCIAL WEALTH
• What’s your ideal annual income?
• What’s your dream net worth?
• How much do you want in your financial freedom account? (This differs from having a large net worth by carrying debt, like mortgages, since they’re tied to payments.)
ASSESS YOUR RELATIONAL WEALTH
• Do you spend quality time by yourself? Do you enjoy your own company?
• Do you treat yourself the way you want other people to treat you? Please describe.
• What things do you do that contribute to your feeling joyous and fulfilled?
• Do you give yourself enough personal time?
• Do you have a dream mate?
• Would you know your dream mate if you met him/her? How specifically would you know?
• Who do you have to become to attract your dream mate?
• If you have a mate already, do you make time for that relationship, just the two of you?

ASSESS YOUR MENTAL WEALTH
• How many books do you choose to read per month, per year? (I bet this number changes after you’ve read the Mental Pillar.)
• How many seminars are you going to attend each year to invest in your number one asset, your marvelous mind? Maybe there’s a course you’ve always wanted to take that you’ve set aside for a long time.
• Are you the master of your own emotions or do they master you?

ASSESS YOUR PHYSICAL WEALTH
• What’s your dream weight, dress size, suit size, body composition?
• How many days a week are you going to work out to stay in that shape? You know what that shape is. You know how you feel when you’re healthy. How flexible do you want to be? I guarantee an inflexible body is a reflection of an inflexible mind.
• Do you have all the toys you want — that home you’ve always dreamed of, that car you’ve always wanted to drive?
• Where do you want to travel and explore? Do you want to drink fine wine in Paris? Visit the Great Pyramid in Egypt?

ASSESS YOUR SPIRITUAL WEALTH
• Have you discovered that one-on-one connection with your creative source? How do you define that? Be specific.
• What inspires you? Inspiration comes from the Latin word inspiratu, meaning “divinely breathed into.” Are you inspired by great music, reading the classics, taking a walk in nature or a jog on the beach? Long baths with candles and incense? An evening at the Four Seasons in Maui? What would you want the divine to “breathe into” your life right now?
I promise, when your vision on the inside becomes more compelling and powerful than what you observe on the outside, the universe is at your command. So, be specific, make it real, and fill in your vision with as many sensory details as possible. If you had it, what would it feel like, smell like, sound like, look like, taste like? You want to be able to recognize your intention when you create it at last.

Think big — really, really big. Don’t censor yourself. I’ve shared this powerful strategy with thousands of people on all levels of the happiness scale, and the results are often seemingly out of left field and life-changing when people truly let go of what they think is possible and write down their soul’s desires.

Can you accomplish what you’ve just written down? It’s going to take a tremendous amount of power for you to create this reality — more than you currently have. You might say, “But James, you don’t know me, how can you say that?” I know it’s going to take more power than you currently have because you don’t have these things yet. If you had enough personal power to attract your goals into your life and create them for yourself, you’d already have them. But make sure and give yourself credit for writing down your vision — I congratulate you. If you’ve done the work so far, you’re already building up your power and energy with every page turned and exercise completed.

However, perhaps you’re one of those people who will look at this list and think, I just can’t answer these questions. Relax. I have a tactic created especially for you. As I said, I want your deepest focus to be on what you do want, but if you’re truly stuck, the quickest way I’ve found to erase any confusion or doubt about your heart’s true desires is to start with what you don’t want.

On The Oprah Winfrey Show, I got the opportunity to work with a woman from the audience who said that she didn’t know what her deepest desires were or her purpose. She was frustrated. Oprah and I agreed that the woman’s dilemma was both “big” and common. Perhaps like you, she didn’t know the right questions to ask. Sometimes the most simple, most direct route to success is hidden from view.

Grab your notepad and write down everything you don’t want, everything you really don’t like about the life you now have: “I don’t want to be broke. I don’t want to be overweight. I don’t want to be alone” — whatever. Get it all down. Then use the Law of Polarity to your advantage. Just start down that list and ask yourself, “What’s the exact polar opposite of each statement?” Write it down as if you already have it. “I don’t want to be broke” becomes “I have financial freedom.” “I don’t want to be overweight” becomes “I am the perfect size and shape.” “I don’t want to be alone” becomes “I’m in the perfect, loving relationship.” If you do this exercise, you’ll get really clear on what you desire in your life.

YOUR “BEFORE” LIFE
Remember how you charted your growth spurts against the doorframe of your childhood home so you could actually see how much you grew from year to year? Now it’s time to gauge your current level of harmony on the five Harmonic Wealth columns. It just takes a few seconds. Rate yourself from 0 to 10 for each of the five pillars of Harmonic Wealth, with 0 being little or no satisfaction and 10 being the highest level of satisfaction possible. Drawing a straight line across the notches helps you rate your satisfaction levels and gain an immediate understanding of your level of Harmonic Wealth as it currently stands.

Now ask yourself the following questions:
1. Which areas need the most work in order to harmonize my life?
2. Why is this important to my overall success?
3. What do my pillars tell me about myself, my priorities, and my values?
4. What must I do differently to improve the strength of my columns?
5. If I had to choose one barrier to achieving harmonic wealth in all areas, what would it be?

Are you concerned that your pillars vary wildly in height? Again, no worries. Honestly, if they’re all perfectly “balanced” at 9 or 10, you could be fudging the numbers (or standing with a foot in the grave). But seriously, depending on where your values currently lie, everyone will want and need different-sized pillars — and those will change as your life changes.

If you weaken any of these five pillars, however, the integrity of the entire structure starts to fall apart, either all at once or by bits and pieces. You can’t strengthen the structure simply by reinforcing the strong pillars alone. Instead, you must attend to the weak ones, the areas of neglect. The key distinction is to realize that your pillars will never be equally strong all the time.

Realize that all five areas must have some attention all the time, but not all five areas demand all your attention all the time. Did you catch that? If you’re spending ten hours a day at work on a special project (remember our no-shower, three-day working binge example?), you’re not going to be able to spend the same amount of hours at the gym or in quality time with your kids. That would be impossible. We’ll cover how to handle these very real dilemmas in your everyday life, including how to make agreements with yourself and others, and planning for finite periods of focus and defocus but never total neglect.

Inevitably, by focusing on harmony throughout the chapters of the book, you’ll either see a marked “harmonic” improvement in each of the pillars, or have a more conscious, empowering awareness about which pillars need strengthening at different times when making your choices.

GRAB YOUR GEAR AND LET’S GO
Harmonic Wealth will challenge everything you’ve been taught. Facing these truths will radically change your life. I know that because I’ve been teaching this information to thousands of students a year for over two decades, and I’ve seen these truths in action, truths now validated by physics and just starting to get major airtime in movies like What the Bleep do We Know? and The Secret. There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when their “secret” knowledge will be accepted as the norm. But until that time, you’re about to get on the inside track. People will look at your life and think, My God, it’s magic. They’ll be right: You created that magic.

Excerpted from "Harmonic Wealth" by James Arthur Ray. Copyright (c) 2008. Reprinted with permission from Hyperion. All rights reserved.

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