This article is taken from Dr. John-Roger’s book Wealth & Higher Consciousness.

Have you ever wondered why misers have money?
They hang on to it. We have a classic image of the miser as a little old man huddled up, holding his money close, counting his coins on the table, one after another, and checking them off on paper. A greedy person, all pinched in. I’m sure this image doesn’t fit many of the people who have a tremendous amount of money, but we can still ask, “Why do some people pull money to themselves while others don’t?” There is a theory that if you took all of the money in the world and distributed it equally, in ten years you would find the money grouped again in the hands of a few people. They would have or control most of the money. Why would this happen? Luck? No. It’s because these people focus their awareness, most of the time, on money. I encourage focusing attention on spiritual things to get to Spirit; they often focus on money as a kind of god, and they pull it to themselves. Is it possible to experience spiritual abundance and financial abundance simultaneously? Yes.

Let’s look at the Bible as a reference point. Jesus said that “the kingdom of God is within you.” [Luke 17:21 (King James Version)] There is another law in which we take a certain percentage of our money and give to the God within us. An ancient mystical society called this the Law of Amra, which is giving to yourself.

We give back a portion of what we make to God, as a form of humility and as a way of acknowledging God as the source of our supply. If God’s kingdom is within us, then that’s where God is residing within a consciousness—not as a total being, but as an essence. If this is true, you should be paying 10 percent to yourself. You work hard for your money, very hard. Then, when payday comes, you may pay everyone else first. You pay your taxes and your bills, and if there is anything left over, you get it. Yet 10 percent of that should go to God first—not 10 percent of what is left over, but the first 10 percent of that which you receive.

When you give to yourself (after you have tithed to the source of your spiritual teachings), you then take 10 percent of your check and pay yourself first—in cash. Don’t write a check because that is a symbol, and you have to have the actual cash. Paying yourself is paying to the God within, and this takes care of the spiritual. You can still give money to the church, but keep it separate: “This is the church fund, this is the car fund, this is for food, this is the rent, this is the clothing fund, but first this is the fund that goes to me.” You pay yourself before you pay the other bills.

You might ask why you can’t write a check like you do for everybody else and just know that you are going to get paid first. It doesn’t work that way. Like attracts like. Money attracts money. There’s an old saying, “The poor get poorer, and the rich get richer.” Why do banks attract more money? It’s almost as if they have a magnet there because money is a magnet. You can establish your own money magnet by tithing to yourself, in cash, every time you receive money, whether it’s a paycheck, a bonus, or a gift. Tithing to the source of your spiritual teachings and to yourself is part of the process of prosperity that is your heritage.

To understand how this works, let’s look at how the subconscious mind (or the basic self or lower self ) perceives money. In comes the paycheck, and the subconscious mind sees you (the conscious self ) getting this money and tithing 10 percent of the gross to the spiritual organization of your choice and also putting aside an additional 10 percent into your own private money magnet. In tithing, you recognize that all things come from God, and the money magnet contribution is a reward for yourself. The subconscious thinks, “That 10 percent is for me! You mean I’m going to get something? You are really going to pay me now? Me! Mine! I’m going to bring more in; I’ll open my consciousness!” You can be walking down the street, and there will be a five dollar bill. The subconscious will say, “Get that five dollar bill! I get 10 percent of that; that’s 50 cents. You can do whatever you want with the rest, but 50 cents goes to me.”

You have to make your subconscious feel worthwhile by keeping your agreements. You may have betrayed it before by saying you’d do something and then going back on that. Then it may say, “You’ve promised me a lot of things but have given me nothing.” It takes a concerted effort to reverse these feelings of betrayal. When you keep a money magnet—always putting 10 percent of what you get into the money magnet, in cash—the subconscious mind will learn that it can trust you. It can trust that it will get its portion, its 10 percent, and so will work diligently to bring in money to you.

Keep the money magnet where you can actually touch it. If you put that money into the bank, the bank gets your money magnet. As far as the subconscious mind is concerned, putting the money into the bank takes it away. You have to be able to go to that money and pick it up and hold it or count it. You keep 10 percent at home, and it will pull more money to it. Once you have your money magnet going, don’t use it for any other purpose. Don’t spend it. It is a magnet; if you spend it, you have lost your magnet. Don’t borrow from your money magnet; if you borrow from it, it’s gone. Put 10 percent in the magnet. This is important. Don’t put in 11 or 12 percent, and don’t put in 9 percent. Put in 10 percent; there’s something “magical” about it.

Use your remaining money for other areas and other funds. You might want to have a fund set aside for your wants—not for what you need, but for what you want. It might not be a big fund at first, and you might have to limit your wants quite a bit. But as your money magnet pulls in more, your “want fund” may also grow.

When you start, your money magnet may be very small. just keep putting 10 percent in there. Pretty soon, you will have a thousand dollars. It starts pulling rather rapidly then, and your other funds—your want fund, your food fund, your fun fund, your car fund, your clothing fund, and so on—start building rather rapidly, too, and they may start building up more than you thought possible. In the meantime, the money magnet fund also keeps growing, and you can look in there and think, “Oh, look at all that money.” It’s not a greedy consciousness because you’re not trying to take the money with you, but while you’re here, you’ll have the pressure of the environment lifted.

If you are a homemaker who doesn’t have outside work, you might start a money magnet with the money that you have put aside for household items, the money you use to take care of the home. That’s your “salary,” and you put 10 percent of that into a money magnet. Your husband may say, “Honey, 10 percent of my overall check is the money magnet;” then the money that you use for the house should go for expenditures and not into a money magnet. But if he doesn’t do this, then you can take 10 percent of what he gives you and start a money magnet.

You need to have an understanding with your partner about how you’re going to handle this. If both the husband and wife work, they can create a money magnet together. They can both put their money in together and say, “That’s more me.” His subconscious is saying, “That’s mine,” and her subconscious is saying, “That’s mine,” and they will both be building.

After you have put the money in your money magnet, get it out periodically and count it. A lot of people sleep with it under their beds, in their pillows, by them. Do you know why some people collect coins? Do you know what they are always doing with their coin collections? They are always looking at them and admiring how beautiful the coins are. They can say, “I really have a rare one. It is brilliant, uncirculated. And look at the date on it. They have made a mistake on this one.” This type of attention, this type of focus, pulls more coins to them.

What do you do when you get ten thousand dollars in your money magnet? That ten thousand dollars will pull in more money than a thousand dollars will pull in. What if you need that money in some other area of your life? You won’t need it because the money magnet will pull more money to you. All you have to do is keep putting 10 percent in there and use the other 90 percent in other areas.

There is one catch here. You may think, “With all that money, I’ll load myself down with responsibilities. I’ll buy a house here and a house at the beach and a house in the mountains. And that means I am going to have three different roofs, three sets of plumbing, three gas bills, etc. Do I really want that?” The money isn’t there for you to load yourself down. It’s there so you’ll get what you really need. A key is to keep your need here in the present.

Most people desire fantastic things: the best clothing, food, cars, houses, and so on. You can eat the best food and end up with gout or stomach trouble, or you can just eat to fulfill your need (nutrition). You can live in a house that fulfills the needs of what you are accomplishing. Anything else that you get is a gift, and perhaps you should give deep thanks for that. Deep thanks can be sharing this consciousness of creation with other people to help them lift.

You can’t enter into this consciousness by saying, “All right, I’m broke and I’m going to magnetize myself for a hundred dollars. I need it tomorrow, which is Saturday. This will be interesting; I’ll just see what happens.” Nothing happens, and you say, “I didn’t think it would work.” That’s right. There’s no need to watch and place an expectation when it can’t possibly take place. It can take place through the money magnet.

As you get more money, if you aren’t careful, there can come the fear of losing it, and that fear can be difficult to work with. If the money is yours, you can’t lose it, and if it is not yours, it’s going to go-—one way or another-—so there’s really no need to be fearful. It is a good idea, of course, to keep your money magnet in a safe place in your home, and if it makes you feel better, you can split it up and put it in different places in the house. The important thing is to be careful not to institute a fear pattern. If you do, you may not be working with money as a spiritualized medium of exchange (used for upliftment); instead, you may be in a consciousness of hoarding. Nobody can take “spiritualized” money. They simply can’t take it. That is yours.

A money magnet is to be recognized and relished in its physicality. You could also invest it in something like real estate, where you can walk on the property and know it is yours. This is different from putting it into the bank. With property, you can physically be there and say, “This tenthousand-dollar lot is mine.” It will start pulling in more of the same. If you buy a house or land to build upon, you can be there on it and know, “This is mine to do my work.” But if you buy a boat to ride around in, you have to think, “Is this to do my ” work?” If it’s not, then use your “fun fund” to buy your boat, but don’t use your money magnet.

Don’t put all your money magnet into one area. You might invest in such things as a mutual fund, bonds, or a savings account. I am not a financial advisor, so don’t use this advice from that point of view. My emphasis is that if you get dividends from these, put 10 percent of those dividends back into your money magnet. I don’t suggest playing the stock market with money magnet funds because that involves an element of chance, but, if necessary, investing in a reasonably secure, lowrisk mutual fund might be an appropriate use of money magnet funds. If you do this, remember to keep the certificates of any investment where you can get to them and review them physically.

Most rich people have a vault or safe in their house, and they keep jewels, stock certificates, bonds, and money there. Stop and think about this for a few minutes, and you’ll know this whole thing makes sense. They are smart enough to know that thieves have a money consciousness, too. The theme of the movie, To Catch a Thief is that you need a thief to catch a thief. If you can put the money there, an unscrupulous person with a consciousness of money can also tune in to it. A thief who is adept at this can walk right in, pick it up, walk out, and leave everything else alone. Somebody says, “Inside job.” It sure was: The inner awareness was there. Some who are concerned about this open a safety deposit box in a bank and visit it frequently, not only to put in jewelry, certificates, and money but to actually count them.

You can invest money from your money magnet as long as you can keep it within your grasp, keep it close to you. And you also need to look at the reason it’s being invested in these areas. Are you doing this out of fear that somebody’s going to steal it, which could be a motivation from poverty consciousness, or are you going into it to multiply it, which is seeing money as a spiritualized medium of exchange? For example, you can buy land and walk on it and know that it has the potential to grow in worth. There are a lot of ways to handle this, but if you do it out of fear, you may lose. It’s harder to work with the Divine in fear patterns. If you create fear, that which you fear may come upon you. You set the patterns in motion and then say, “It didn’t work.” We say, “It worked all right, but not the way you wanted.”

If you are investing your money magnet out of fear, it might be more valuable for you to actually keep the money—rather than invest it—because that is your magnet. A number of people have accumulated a lot of money and invested in a house or a business and gone broke because their magnet was gone. Many business people will tell you to keep about 30 thousand dollars in reserve if you are going into business. They often think it’s there in case you have a bad time. Maybe; it’s also your magnet. If you understand this, you are going to have some doors open to you quickly, and you won’t have to be a miser about it. You’ll use your common sense in using these forces to pull wealth to you. A nice thing about this is that not one of you will go up the financial scale alone; you’re going to take at least a half-dozen people with you because that is also the law of spiritual attraction.

The consciousness of many people, when they start in spiritual or metaphysical work, is to use the spiritual energy to get money rather than to grow spiritually. When you grow spiritually, however, you learn how to handle the money through a spiritual consciousness, and you can become so wealthy that you almost can’t believe it. Once you know how to handle it, once you step into the spiritual and acquire money spiritually, it can’t be taken from you.

It can be hard to be spiritual when you are worried about feeding the children and putting shoes on their feet. It’s hard because you are worried and concerned about the physical; you are locking into the physical element. As long as you have one bill you can’t pay, just one, that’s the one you are probably going to worry about: They might attach your paycheck, or they might come after you. That’s the one you dread, and when you dread it, it controls you. When you are controlled, it’s harder to do your spiritual work. You have to be free in order to receive your spiritual gifts, and that means no attachment, no desires. You have the money there to be used whenever it’s appropriate. If you don’t need the money, you are free.

When we learn how to handle money in this way, we are really, in the larger sense, learning to focus our attention by bringing money forward. Humans seem to have an inclination to accumulate money, and when we have learned to do this, we can then focus our attention on other things to bring them into existence. Money is like a practice round.

What we are talking about is the idea of precipitation. The money magnet will pull money to you. Even more than that, you can also learn how to precipitate into your beingness those qualities that can enhance your life. The money magnet is like lifting weights. It’s getting you in shape to reach into the greater things and work within the higher levels. It’s a process of training the mind, training the consciousness, learning to place the desires and emotions where you want them. It is tuning in to those qualities you want and bringing them forward. Then you find out that you are able to tune in to an even greater frequency than the money magnet frequency, You’ll tune in to divine grace and manifest everything you need for yourself. You will learn to precipitate your happiness and your joy because you will tune in to it through your own joy within. Baruch Bashan.