This post will be the first part of a series of posts I’m going to write on one very amazing and overlooked book that happens to nicely express my own intuitions on moneyenergy which helped me form the idea for this site. The author is a psychologist, and no doubt explains psychological mechanisms much better than I can, or would even have the patience for!

Warning: This is a really dense book that is not immediately accessible. It doesn’t reach out and grab your salacious imagination of making it big or generating some easy or quick cash. You have to think and work to really follow what this book has to offer. For that reason, it might not be great public transit reading if you need a quiet space for concentration. It’s also a workbook, and full of exercises that you can do - and should do, in order to get the most out of it - but for which you’ll need a notebook and a pen. I confess, I’m fifty pages into it and have not been doing these exercises. I want to go back to do them, however. In fact, I think I had even picked this book up once before and skimmed through it in a bookstore but for some reason still wasn’t ready to buy it at that point (it probably looked too dense and not immediately rewarding). So I made the mistake that I bet others have made: you’ve probably overlooked this book, too.

There’s so much in here, in fact, that I don’t think I could review the book in one post. So I’m just going to do a series and talk about it in bits and pieces. It’s one of those books that is really probably four-books-in-one. To even say that this is a book about the psychology of money is probably a big understatement.

Something that makes this book different from usual books on personal finance or even the psychology of money (stuff like Think and Grow Rich) is the overall context in which the author is working. She draws upon theoretical physics and the tradition of Western philosophy in order to explain her own theory about how we bring money into our lives (and in fact, how we bring anything into our lives). No, it’s not a prototype of The Secret, even though it was written in 1999. It’s not fluffy or wishy-washy. It’s a book for people who like to think and who aren’t full of superficial skepticism.

One idea that Nemeth expounds is that people are conscious conduits of energy (we move energy, in the form of ideas, from the metaphysical realm into the physical realm in the form of actions taken for realizing those ideas). Because of this, whenever you do something that increases your personal power, you’re doing something that can increase your ability to manifest your ideas into physical realities. It’s obvious why and how this can include financial abundance. What is one thing that increases your personal power? Maintaining your integrity. I’ll give you a bit of an excerpt from one of her discussions of personal integrity:

Who you really are, at your core, is compelled to look at areas in which your integrity is not complete. Incompletions pull life’s energy to them. After all, it takes a lot of energy to push down even low-level anxiety or dread. This energy leak only makes it harder to get your goals and dreams with ease. As you connect with and express your genuine values, your true nature, as you become conscious of who you truly are, you can no longer remain in the dark about your self-limiting ways. It becomes almost impossible to avoid taking the actions that will transform your relationship with the energy of money…the Impetus Toward Integrity [is] a phenomenon that can help you identify and seal some of the leaks that drain money’s energy. To see how it works, take a look at the diagram below, a circle with a piece missing. You recognize it as a circle because as humans, we have a strong natural ability to see the whole, even when a part is missing.

Do you notice that your eyes keep returning to the gap in the circle? That’s another part of our wiring. Your eyes are drawn there by the tension of the incompletion… If you keep in mind that your integrity is your own wholeness, it’s easy to understand why once you see it, you also see places where it might need to be patched or filled in. Until you restore that wholeness, you remain in a state of tension…if one of your Standards of Integrity is being trustworthy, every time you don’t follow through on the promises you make to yourself and others, you’ve sprung an energy leak. Until you keep the promise, your attention…is drawn to it, no matter how much you’d like to focus on your goals and dreams (71-72).

The idea here is that in order to get ahead, we need to repair all the gaps between our own personal standards and our actions. Nemeth goes on to discuss how to set proper goals, and one of the criteria for picking and creating proper goals is to make sure that your goals meet all your standards of integrity. Otherwise you won’t and can’t possibly be successful with them. I might say more about this goal-setting in another post, because she’s got lots of gems of insight there, too. But for now, I just want to leave you with the idea that every time we maintain the standards of our own integrity, our personal power (the ability to manifest our ideas into physical reality) grows. It’s about being able to trust ourselves. If you have integrity, it means you can trust yourself. In fact, that might be one interesting way of defining personal integrity: the degree to which you can trust yourself to follow through with the guidelines of your higher (or better) self.

Suggested task: Do you owe anyone any money? Pay them back as soon as possible, or at least start an installment plan. This might apply to credit cards, too. There are many reasons not to pay off debt right away, but this might be another reason why you should. It could help repair your own money integrity and stop up one of those “moneyenergy” leaks.