YOU CAN achieve whatever you want to achieve. You can be as successful as you want to be. You can pay your debts, get a new home, have more pleasant surroundings, more harmony in your home, a good car--whatever you desire. All the good things you desire are included in your prosperity--and God stands ready to give you prosperity whenever your faith opens the channel for you to receive it.

How does God give you prosperity? Of course, He does not cause a new car to appear at the curb in front of your house. He does not mysteriously set up a new bank account for you, with thousands of dollars for you to draw on. God does not do His mighty works in such ways--and actually, you should be glad that He does not. For He makes His good available to you in a much better way, yes, a perfect way; He opens His storehouse of infinite substance to you from which you can receive more liberally, more abundantly than you can visualize.

Instead of setting a new car in your garage, God tells you how to do that which makes possible the acquisition of as many new cars as you can ever usenot just one, but as many as you need and desire--not just this year, but next year, and all the years to come. Instead of setting up a liberal account for you in a downtown bank, God sets up an inexhaustible account on which you can draw for the knowledge, skill, and ingenuity necessary to do anything you want to do: sell vacuum cleaners, bake a cake, cultivate a field, write a poem, build a bridge.

"Ah!" you may say, "You are talking about ideas. When you speak of God's giving me whatever I want, you refer to something intangible, something I can't put my finger on. That's all very well, but I'm interested in something real."

And I say to you: "Yes, you are right: when I say that God will give you any good thing you desire, I mean that He will give it to you in the form of an idea. But mark this, and mark it well: there is nothing more tangible than an idea. You can't put your finger on an idea, but you can put your whole body and soul into it. You can take an idea and use it, and if you use it for all it is worth, there is no limit to the material good you will derive from it."

When you say you want something tangible, are you sure that you know the dictionary definition of the word "tangible?" True, there is the commonly-accepted definition: "Capable of being touched; perceptible to the touch; palpable." But read on: the next sentence reads, "Capable of being realized by the mind; substantial; objective."

By any definition of the word, an idea is tangible. You can feel an idea. Have you not had the experience of an idea "hitting" you? When you are deep in thought, searching for a solution or an original approach to a problem, the right idea comes to your mind--and the impact is, we say, "almost physical." Almost? It is a physical sensation; the exactly-right idea, at the crucial moment, has a thrilling, electrifying quality. It clears the cobwebs from your brain like an invigorating sweep of cool, clean air; it makes you feel alive, it makes you tingle; it brushes away fatigue like a good night's sleep.

Yes, an idea is tangible; it is perceptible, palpable. You cannot reach out and touch an idea; it reaches out and touches you. It reaches inside you and grasps you with mighty power and force. An idea is God touching you, speaking to you, telling you the earthshaking secret that you need to know in order to achieve, to do, to be.

Would you not gladly forgo all thought of today's bank account, no matter how large, if you had access to the magic power to build a bank account of any size, in any bank, at any time? You have access to that power, but it is not a magic power. It is the simple, ordered power of unfailing principle. Therein lies its everlasting value to you. It is law; it is principle; it operates surely and smoothly, without possibility of failure or "error factor" whenever you put it into practice.

God's fund of ideas is unlimited; unlike a bank account it has a nevervarying currency, and cannot be overdrawn. No matter if you claim and put to use today an idea that brings you a raise in salary, or a new job, or a new home, or any of the other desires of your heart; tomorrow God's fund is just as full of ideas that are just as potent. Drawing on His fund does not cause the fund to diminish; it only makes you better able to draw on His fund for more good.

It is essential that you fix firmly in your mind the value of ideas. Because, if you do not believe--believe, and not merely agree--that ideas are the gold coin of God's kingdom, you are likely to throw away a fortune. Ideas come to you almost constantly. The closer your contact with God is, the more ideas you will receive. But unless you recognize an idea when it comes and realize its potential value, you are apt to let it pass from your mind as effortlessly as it came--unused, wasted. You would never reject or forget an idea if you could see the infinite possibilities contained in it. Thus the first step in claiming the prosperity of God is seeing ideas for what they are: blueprints that show you how to build success, detailed maps that lead you to all the buried treasure of the ages.

If you accept this teaching as the Truth of God, which it is, what then? You believe that God is ready to give you the riches of the kingdom in the form of ideas--ideas that will show you how to make money, how to improve your environment, how to get along with your associates, how to choose the right wallpaper for the living room, for even in mundane matters the ideas of God are available and efficacious. You believe this; you have faith that an inexhaustible store of ideas, ideas that will achieve every good thing, is available to you. How are you to tap this rich store?

The answer is simple: You get ideas by thinking. If you have a sure, abiding faith in God, and a conscious realization of what ideas can mean to you, you have only to start thinking. No conditions, you ask? None; God never conditions His promises or qualifies His laws. The only conditions to their fulfillment are in the mind of the person praying. Jesus said, "All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive." Once you know what you want (ideas), know the source of what you want (God), and are resolved to use what you get for good, just pray, believing, and begin to think. God's ideas will come to you.

Will the ideas you need come instantly? Perhaps; turning to God in faith often brings about instantaneous solution to the knottiest problem, immediately-useful ideas that serve to accomplish the desired result in a matter of hours or minutes. Sometimes your subconscious mind does the necessary work while you sleep. If the desired idea does not come to your mind instantly, that does not mean that God has turned down your request, or delayed your answer. It means, rather, that the early developments in what you are seeking to achieve are taking place in a way that you do not yet perceive, that God is causing certain necessary things to happen before the results are apparent to you.

God's promise to give you the ideas that will prosper you is not a conditional promise; but it is possible to set up conditions that will make you more receptive to His ideas, more cognizant of the potentialities of the ideas that come. The most helpful condition is quietness--not an isolated, withdrawn silence, but an inner quietness that emphasizes the voice of God--the serenity and balance that Peter spoke of as "the imperishable jewel of a gentle and quiet spirit." Another New Testament writer, James, remarked that "the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable."

A time of silence is desirable; it is in fact essential, to every Christian. When you begin consciously to seek the ideas that will make over your life, you may find it necessary to withdraw to some quiet place to do your thinking. Certain periods of withdrawal will always be helpful; but as you gain experience in claiming God's ideas and putting them to use, you will become more adept at turning to Him under any circumstances or in any surroundings. You will learn how to be quiet within though the clamor without and about you be ever so great. Such inner quietness provides the condition of highest receptivity to God's ideas.

Another condition that makes for receptivity, and that you can establish, is that of harmony. You cannot receive new ideas if your mind is cluttered with old ideas of dissension, envy, and jealousy. You will have to stop wondering why your neighbor's home is nicer than yours if you expect to receive the ideas that will make possible a finer home of your own. You will have to stop asking, "Why did he get that promotion?" if you want God to tell you how to get a promotion of your own. When God sees that you have attuned your mind to His and are concentrating on your own good instead of jealously comparing it with your fellow man's good, He will begin to pour into your mind the marvelous currency of good ideas.

Any negative condition that you allow to affect you impedes the flow of ideas between God-Mind and your mind. Thinking about your present lack leaves you no time for the thinking that produces ideas leading to prosperity. Fixing your thoughts on last year's failure keeps you from concentrating on tomorrow's promotion. Worrying about the debts you owe sets up a mental block that interferes with your receiving ideas that will enable you to pay those debts.

As in every application of Truth, the process of claiming God's ideas involves denial and affirmation. You must deny the limiting thoughts of lack, failure, and disharmony; you must affirm that ideas have tangible, useful power to change your life, that all the ideas you need are instantly available in Divine Mind, that you can get and use the ideas you need without straining or striving.

I invite you to try this method. It is not a formula; it is much too simple to be called a formula. It is just a way to achieve--God's way, the only sure way. The wonderful thing about the method is that you can use it. Without any previous experience whatsoever, with nothing to your credit but faith in God, you can get the ideas that will change lack to abundance, failure to success, poverty to riches, inharmony to harmony, a dull, humdrum existence to an exciting, thrilling, new way of life.

Try it. Try it right now. Use whatever affirmation you wish to turn your mind to God: "God the good is all there is," or "God is," or "Thy will be done." Once you are free of the little, inconsequential, conflicting fragments that habitually pass for thoughts in the minds of most of us, apply your real thoughts consciously to whatever you want to achieve. Perhaps you will get a brilliant, thrilling idea within a few minutes. Perhaps the idea you confidently seek will spring into your consciousness tomorrow morning, after your subconscious mind has put in its work tonight.

All you have to do now, all you ever have to do, is to start thinking, with faith that you are attuned to the infinite mind of God. When you do this you cannot fail; you can only succeed; you can go in only one direction--forward; your life will know no more of lack, but only prosperity; you will exchange disharmony, worry, envy, fear, and all the other troubling, upsetting emotions for the perfect balance of a life that is in divine order and adjustment. All this you will achieve, because God's ideas are yours.