In the following pages I do not offer any formulas for getting rich quickly or for discovering immediate solutions to all personal problems. What is explained are reliable, tested and verified ways to experience satisfying spiritual growth and live happily and effectively. My thesis is simple: for prosperity to be real or authentic, it must be based on an awareness of spiritual realities and on compliant cooperation with the principles which enable it to be experienced.
In 1994, a department of the United Nations published a progress report to provide information about global conditions and human affairs. It reported that, in comparison to conditions fifty years previously, more people had access to food and literacy levels were higher. Even so, almost two billion people, most of them in economically undeveloped regions of the world, were impoverished. Approximately one third of the planet’s human inhabitants were illiterate. The gap between rich people and poor people had widened. In some countries, the average annual income per person was less than three hundred dollars. Ten countries had nearly seventy percent of the world’s poorest people.
