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January/February 2006 Living Now
5 Questions (and answers) about Creating Prosperity

A conversation with Steven Sashen, creator of Quantum Wealth:
Everything You Think About Money Is Wrong

1. I know money can’t buy happiness, but i also know i’d be happier with more money. What’s the real answer?
   A friend of mine jokes that while money can’t buy happiness, it can buy something really close. And that’s the problem; we hope that if we get enough money we can get close enough to true satisfaction. But it really works the other way around: we need to know how to find genuine, lasting satisfaction first. If we can’t do that, no amount of money will give us the peace we really want. Once we can find true satisfaction inside ourselves, then money can, in fact, add great value to the lives of our family, friends and the world. The amazing thing I’ve discovered is that we don’t have to do anything to find inner peace – when we know how to properly examine the very things that cause us stress, our mind/body naturally lets go of those and leaves us in our natural, satisfied state.
2. Are you saying we just need to find "inner peace"
   and our bills will magically disappear?
   Not at all. If you want to win the lottery, you need to buy a ticket. Just doing inner work isn’t enough. If you want to live a prosperous life, you need to do "outer" work as well. In fact, a truly prosperous life requires that you do both. One benefit of the inner work is that it frees up your creativity and opens up new possibilities in the outer world. I like to ask, "Which way do you think it would be easier to achieve some financial goal; convinced you have a problem and that your happiness depends on solving it, or free from that idea and simply taking the next step that presents itself?" Clearly freedom works better. And what’s shocking is how easily you can find that freedom, regardless of your actual financial situation.
3. Don’t you believe in "prosperity consciousness"?
   I say that there’s no such thing as prosperity consciousness. It’s impossible to think about "prosperity" without simultaneously, in some subtle way, thinking about "lack." Prosperity only exists as an opposite to lack, and vice versa. So every time you’re thinking "prosperous thoughts," you’re also reinforcing your "un-prosperous" thoughts. Also, I’m not crazy about the idea that prosperity requires having certain thoughts and not having other thoughts, if for no other reason than, in the long-term, we have very little control over the thoughts that do or don’t arise in our mind. One reason I call my work Quantum Wealth is that living a prosperous life doesn’t require things like "prosperity consciousness."
4. I don’t care how peaceful i am; i have a mountain of debt to deal with.
   That’s why Quantum Wealth doesn’t only address the inner world. It deals with the actual, physical world as well. In fact, debt is one of my favorite topics. At one point I was over $150,000 in debt, most of it on credit cards. I found ways to pay zero interest on my credit card debt and then discovered techniques to eliminate the debt in record time. I can show most people how to get completely out of debt, including car loans and a mortgage, in under seven years, without earning one extra penny more than they do right now.
5. Is the internet still a place to make money, or has the boom busted?
   As big dot-com companies were diving over cliffs, and taking their giant, expensive websites down with them, my friends and I continued to make money with tiny little sites that practically run on autopilot. The important thing is not "if" you can make money, but "how" you can make money with the least amount of effort. There are surprising and creative ways to earn passive income from the Internet, from real estate, from owning your own business, and from the stock market. I show you these business models not so you’ll rush out and do them, but to open your eyes to possibilities that you never knew existed. This will help you find your unique financial Holy Grail.

Radical Money Thoughts

• Nobody has ever had a problem with money; only with their thinking about money.
• Some people hear things like "Corporations making millions of dollars pay less taxes than you do," and they get angry. I think, "How can I be a corporation like that?!"
• Your financial "problems" are exactly what you need to find freedom… in fact, you can’t get there any other way.
• "The longest distance is the path between the pocket and the heart." –Jewish teaching
• Nobody really wants money… or even the things it can buy. We’re always only looking for safety, control or approval – and those can be found more easily than dropping a pencil from your hand.
• Money is like physics. In physics, when you look at the smallest bit of matter, you see the universe. With money, when you look at your thoughts and feelings and beliefs closely enough, you find the Divine.
• A great mystic was asked, "Who is truly rich?" He answered, "One who gets inner satisfaction from his success."
• The only way to get what you want is to stop resisting what you don’t want.
• Think you don’t have money issues? Try one of these: take a fifty dollar bill and throw it in a public trashcan, or; for no reason at all, ask for a 20% raise.
• Outer financial freedom means never needing an alarm clock.
• With many credit cards, if you have a $1500 balance and just make the minimum payments, you will never pay off the balance, even if you live forever.
• Thousands of years ago, Hindu mystics took the thing seemingly farthest from the Divine – sexual activity – and made it a spiritual path. If those mystics were alive today, they’d be talking about money.

Steven has taught with transformational visionaries Byron Katie and Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks. In addition to leading Quantum Wealth workshops, he maintains a private practice sharing The Work and Integrated Kabbalistic Healing. He's a teacher in a 400-year-old Zen Archery lineage and has practiced Vipassana meditation for over 20 years. In the "Outer" world, Steven founded a multi-million dollar software company, and is an interna-tionally known Internet marketing consultant. See ad in this issue for workshop in Portland in Feb '06, or visit www.QuantumWealth.com for details.