Life seeking fuller expression
Why wanting more is not greed but growth, why competition quietly kills your power, and why the supply was never limited to begin with.
Every stage of growth demands the next
"Intelligence is under this same necessity for continuous increase... Every talent we cultivate brings to the mind the desire to cultivate another talent... We must get rich, so that we can live more."
Starts on an acoustic guitar. As talent grows, arrangement, audio engineering, and orchestration become the next desire, each requiring a studio, software, and acoustic treatment to actually express. Money isn't the goal, it's the material fuel for potential becoming real.
Deepening expertise in DNA-based health protocols requires investing in courses, lab tests, and real case studies to learn from. Without capital, that growth path simply stalls, regardless of how much talent or desire is already there.
The desire for riches is life seeking fulfillment
"The desire for riches is simply the capacity for larger life seeking fulfillment... That which makes you want more money is the same as that which makes the plant grow; it is Life, seeking fuller expression."
Wattles pushes further here than in the opening chapters. He's not just saying desire is natural, he's saying the desire for riches specifically is the same force that makes a plant grow toward sunlight.
The One Substance is alive, and everything alive wants to live more fully, not just survive. Since it wants to express itself as fully as possible through you, it follows, in his metaphysics, that it wants you to have the resources for a fuller life. He goes as far as calling this "the desire of God" — that a universal force actually wants your abundance, not merely tolerates it.
A seed doesn't apologize for absorbing water, sunlight, and minerals to become a full-grown tree. Your desire for a more resourced life is, in his framing, the human equivalent of that same growth instinct.
This is a genuinely bold theological claim, that God's will and your desire for wealth are aligned. It sits inside a specific early-1900s New Thought framework, not a position every religious or philosophical tradition would share, and is worth treating as a claim to weigh rather than a settled fact.
Real life touches body, mind, and soul
"You must want real life, not mere pleasure of sensual gratification... extreme altruism is no better and no nobler than extreme selfishness; both are mistakes."
Right after making his boldest claim, Wattles adds a crucial guardrail: wanting more isn't a blank check for any kind of wanting. A complete life, in his map, touches three dimensions without excess in any one of them.
Physical
Eating, drinking, rest, and bodily health. Denying these a healthy expression is not virtue, it's an incomplete life.
Mental
Knowledge, ambition, intellectual growth. Legitimate, but a life lived for the mind alone stays partial and unsatisfied.
Spiritual
Love, kindness, contribution to others. No nobler than the other two, and just as incomplete when pursued alone.
| Living style | Approach | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| All pleasure, no purpose | Wild spending on partying, luxury flexes, excess alone | Health breakdown, surface relationships, regret |
| All giving, no self-care | Giving everything away while neglecting family, health, rest | Burnout, resentment, inability to sustain the help |
| Balanced / harmonious | Eating well and resting (Body), reading and travelling (Mind), building community (Soul) | Sustained fulfillment, vitality, genuine impact |
Wattles explicitly rejects the idea that self-sacrifice is spiritually superior to self-development. "God requires nothing of the kind," he writes, of sacrificing yourself for others. The instruction instead is to make the most of yourself, for yourself and others simultaneously — arguing you help others more by becoming your fullest self than by depleting yourself for them. This runs directly against traditions, including strands within Islam, Christianity, and other faiths, that place real spiritual value on sacrifice and self-denial. Worth sitting with critically rather than accepting outright: he isn't wrong that burnout limits impact, but "self-development produces more generosity than self-sacrifice" is a philosophical position, not a proven law.
Create, don't compete for what's already made
"You must get rid of the thought of competition. You are to create, not to compete for what is already created... when you get it every other man will have more than he has now."
Because Substance is one thing, present equally in everyone, it logically cannot take from one person to give to another. Anything it does must increase the total rather than redistribute a fixed amount. From this, Wattles derives a strict rule: abandon competitive thinking entirely. Not "compete fairly," not "compete ethically" — stop competing. Create new value instead, in such a way that when you succeed, everyone around you ends up with more too.
Taking value from others
A landlord buying up affordable apartments in a small town, raising rent 50% without repairs, squeezing tenants who have no other options. Sharp bargains, undercut rivals, exploit labour, hoard the fixed pie.
Adding value to the system
An inventor designing modular, low-cost solar roofing. A profitable company, lower energy bills for homeowners, new green manufacturing jobs. Nobody loses so the creator can win.
The monster reptiles of the evolutionary process
"Men of the plutocratic type... are like the monster reptiles of the prehistoric eras; they play a necessary part in the evolutionary process... the same Power which produced them will dispose of them."
Wattles is addressing an obvious objection here: some of history's richest men got there through pure, ruthless competition, doesn't that disprove the whole theory? His answer is clever, though speculative. He concedes men like these operated on the plane of competition, but argues they were, without realising it, still serving Substance's larger purpose, organising and systematising industry in a way that would eventually benefit everyone once distribution caught up to production.
Oil — organised a chaotic, fragmented industry into national infrastructure.
Steel — built the physical backbone later industries were built on top of.
Banking — consolidated capital into a system capable of funding the next era.
Modern echo: early telecom giants built out fibre-optic infrastructure through aggressive market domination. Once the foundation was laid, the platform shifted to millions of independent creators, developers, and entrepreneurs using that same infrastructure creatively rather than monopolistically.
This section is Wattles doing some retroactive theological rationalising to protect his thesis from an inconvenient counterexample. It isn't really falsifiable, there's no test for whether someone was "unconsciously" serving a cosmic purpose, and his claim that these men were privately "the most abject and wretched of the poor" is an assertion, not something he demonstrates. Worth treating this passage as the most speculative part of the book.
Look past the visible, toward the limitless
"Never look at the visible supply; look always at the limitless riches in Formless Substance, and know that they are coming to you as fast as you can receive and use them."
Fear of scarcity drives panic, rush, and cutthroat tactics. When you believe resources are finite, you worry someone will "beat you to it," or that the market is being "cornered." Wattles asserts value originates in human thought impressed upon substance, and that new industries and new ideas constantly render old resource constraints obsolete. The specific trap he names: the moment you start believing supply is limited, you've dropped back into competitive thinking, and by his model this actually shuts off your creative power.
Whale Oil, 1800s
Fear that running out of whales meant the end of indoor lighting. Competitive thinkers fought over whaling routes, defending a fixed, shrinking supply.
Petroleum & Electricity
Creative thinkers looked beyond the visible supply and tapped into new sources entirely, producing thousands of times more light and energy than all the oceans ever held.
"There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe."
"A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imaged by the thought."
"Man can form things in his thought, and, by impressing his thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created."
Applied: worrying that "all the good clients are already taken by other coaches" is, in Wattles' framework, looking at the visible supply. The corrective move is trusting the pool of people who need what you specifically offer is not fixed, and continuing to create rather than competing for the ones already claimed.
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Mahroof CM
Mahroof CM is a biohacker, wellness entrepreneur, and software engineer, guiding people through health, mindset, and money using biology, behaviour, and timeless principles like the ones broken down above.
He is the first person teaching this subject in Malayalam — bringing Wallace D. Wattles' Certain Way, as carried forward by Bob Proctor, to the Kerala and Gulf Malayalam-speaking community for the first time.