How to Attract Money

What if the key to wealth wasn’t in a bank account or a business plan—but in your own mind? In How to Attract Money, Dr. Joseph Murphy argues that prosperity is not a matter of luck or hustle, but of consciousness. He proposes that your relationship with money is an outward reflection of your inner beliefs about abundance, worthiness, and divine order. To transform your financial life, he insists, you must first cultivate what he calls a “wealth consciousness.”

Murphy’s approach belongs to the New Thought tradition—a spiritual and psychological movement that emphasizes the creative power of thought. Drawing from Scripture, Eastern philosophy, and modern psychology, he explains how the subconscious mind acts as a silent architect of your experience. According to him, money flows to those whose inner attitudes align with universal law—those who replace fear and resentment with faith, gratitude, and expectancy. Lack, by contrast, is a symptom of a blocked mental and spiritual circuit.

The Divine Right to Prosper

Murphy begins by rejecting the notion that poverty is virtuous. “Poverty,” he writes, “is a disease like any other mental disease.” To him, wealth is not greed—it’s a natural expression of life’s fullness. You were, he insists, born to succeed, win, and grow in every way. Because the universe itself is abundant and generous, you have a spiritual right to enjoy its resources. Denying this truth, or condemning money as “evil,” only cuts off the flow of supply. In fact, Murphy says, the biblical warning that “the love of money is the root of all evil” doesn’t mean money itself is corrupt—it means imbalance is. The obsession with money to the exclusion of other spiritual values leads to suffering. But rightly used, wealth is divine energy made practical.

Money as a Symbol and a Flow

To grasp Murphy’s view, it helps to shift how you see money. Money, he explains, is simply a symbol of exchange—“frozen energy” that enables circulation. When money flows freely, you’re in harmony with life; when you hoard or fear it, you block circulation and experience lack. Just as healthy blood must move through your body, so should wealth circulate through your life. This parallels Eastern conceptions of energy flow in Taoism and Hinduism, showing that stagnation—whether of money or energy—creates dis-ease. The key, then, is to regard money as divine substance, an instrument for good, and a channel for spiritual expression.

The Subconscious Law of Attraction

Murphy’s central principle is psychological: your subconscious mind accepts what you truly believe and feel. Idle affirmations like “I am rich” fail if you don’t actually feel prosperous. The subconscious only responds to the dominant emotion, so if fear or doubt outweighs confidence, it manifests as continued lack. His advice for beginners is to choose affirmations the conscious mind can accept easily—phrases like “I am prospering every day” or “My sales are increasing.” These build faith gradually until belief and feeling align. Once inner harmony is reached, results appear outwardly as opportunities, synchronicities, and “divine surplus.”

This inward causation echoes the philosophy of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which also insists that wealth-building begins with thought and belief. Yet Murphy emphasizes the spiritual source behind material success. He frames wealth not as manipulation of energy but as receptivity to God’s infinite abundance.

Faith, Imagination, and Divine Partnership

Dr. Murphy teaches that imagination is the womb of wealth. Whatever you clearly visualize and lovingly sustain will be impressed upon the subconscious and eventually take form—“the word becomes flesh.” One story tells of a poor janitor who dreamed nightly of a medical diploma bearing his name. Years later, through a series of uncanny events, he became a physician. To Murphy, this wasn’t coincidence but spiritual law in motion. The imagination, joined with feeling and faith, is how you co-create with the Divine Mind.

The Moral of The Road to Riches

The second major part of the book—“The Road to Riches”—extends these concepts using the biblical metaphor of turning water into wine. Water symbolizes your unconditioned consciousness, and wine your realized desire. Changing water into wine means transforming fear, lack, or confusion into conviction, supply, and satisfaction. Through examples—a bankrupt beauty salon owner who imagined being congratulated by her banker, a singer from Hell’s Kitchen who visualized global success—Murphy shows how emotional conviction molds reality. Prayer, he insists, is not begging a distant God but becoming one with your ideal through inner marriage of thought and feeling.

Why It Matters

Murphy’s message is timeless because it reframes both spirituality and prosperity as two sides of the same truth: you live in an intelligent, responsive universe that mirrors your dominant consciousness. By learning to see yourself as a creator rather than a victim, you gain mastery over your circumstances. The implication is radical: wealth is not something you chase, but something you allow. When you bless others, give freely, and keep your faith anchored in Divine abundance, you step into your “right to be rich.”

In the chapters ahead, we’ll unpack this spiritual science of prosperity: how releasing fear attracts flow, how imagination acts as spiritual alchemy, why resentment repels wealth, and how gratitude, balance, and faith make you a magnet for success. Ultimately, Murphy doesn’t just want you to have money—he wants you to understand that abundance, like love, is your birthright.

Murphy opens with a bold claim: “It is your right to be rich.” To him, this isn’t a moral suggestion but a metaphysical truth. You are an expression of the Infinite, and since the Infinite creates bountifully, your natural state is abundance. Money, in this view, is not a profane idol but a conduit for spiritual energy.

The Symbolism of Money

Money is a symbol of your faith in exchange and circulation. Like electricity, it’s neutral—it can light a home or destroy it. Murphy compares this to natural forces like fire or water: dangerous when misused, divine when rightly directed. The idea parallels the Stoic view (as in Seneca or Marcus Aurelius) that virtue lies in use, not in the object itself. Poverty, then, is a distortion of divine flow, a “mental disease” caused by fear, guilt, or the subconscious belief that scarcity is holy. Healing begins when you reintegrate wealth into your understanding of God’s creative order.

Condemnation as Repulsion

Murphy warns that condemning others’ prosperity—and money itself—repels wealth. Whatever you criticize, you drive away from your consciousness. If you call money “filthy lucre,” you subconsciously associate it with evil and exclude it from your life. He recounts stories of people whose resentment toward wealthy acquaintances created cycles of loss. The antidote? Bless others’ success. Rejoicing in others’ abundance affirms your faith in divine supply and multiplies your own opportunities. “What you bless,” Murphy says, “you multiply. What you condemn, you lose.”

Circulation and Mental Health

Just as a body’s circulation signifies health, Murphy claims that free financial flow measures economic health. Fear causes constriction; hoarding and anxiety are symptoms of spiritual blockage. He illustrates this with the story of a woman who stockpiled coffee during wartime, only to find herself robbed the same night—her fear literally manifested loss. The deeper lesson: life mirrors your expectation, not your intention. Fear of lack produces lack. Faith in abundance produces increase. This causal link anticipates modern “law of attraction” concepts but is framed by Murphy as a law of divine order rather than personal magnetism.

Recognizing money as divine energy frees you from guilt, envy, and superstition. When you understand money as life expressing itself through you, generosity and creativity replace fear and striving. Money is not a master to obey nor a moral test to pass—it’s a spiritual current to harmonize with.

Murphy anchors his prosperity system in the belief that your subconscious mind is a creative power that mirrors your inner convictions. Every image you impress upon it through repeated thought and emotion becomes externalized in your circumstances. This is not poetic metaphor—Murphy considers it a universal law as precise as gravity.

Training the Subconscious

The key to attracting wealth, therefore, is to train your subconscious consciousness by giving it consistent, emotion-charged ideas of abundance. Statements like “Money is forever circulating freely in my life” act as seeds sown in the soil of the mind. If you say them mechanically, they fail. But if you speak and feel them with conviction, they germinate. Murphy suggests beginning with affirmations believable enough that they don’t trigger inner rejection. Instead of “I am a millionaire,” you might affirm, “I am prospering daily.” As belief strengthens, larger visions take root.

Emotion as the Activator

Murphy compares your thought to a charged prayer: the power lies not in the words but in the feeling behind them. Like a garden, your subconscious grows whatever is planted and watered—whether fears or desires. Feeling of lack is the weed; feeling of gratitude is the fertilizer. He recounts a salesman who multiplied his sales by affirming “My sales are increasing every day.” Because that statement created no conflict in his mind, it produced confidence and results. Gradually, his subconscious accepted prosperity as natural.

Imagination as Evidence of Faith

Visualization, in Murphy’s system, is a scientific act. When you vividly imagine the end—like seeing yourself signing a lucrative contract or living debt-free—you “will the means” to it, as Troward said. The subconscious orchestrates ideas, events, and people to match your belief pattern. This is why Murphy cautions not to worry about how your good will come; your only task is to accept the desired state as real. The ‘how’ belongs to the deeper wisdom of life. Faith, in this sense, is relaxed conviction, not strained effort.

By mastering the laws of the subconscious, you draw wealth as naturally as plants draw sunlight. Wealth is first a state of consciousness—and only later a state of account.

While Murphy celebrates abundance, he warns against the obsession with materialism. The universe, he writes, “insists on a balance.” If you pursue money at the expense of health, love, or joy, you fracture your harmony and breed emptiness. This balance reflects the Hermetic principle of correspondence: the inner and outer worlds mirror each other. Excessive focus on externals impoverishes the soul, just as spiritual neglect can stifle practical success.

Living a Balanced Life

Murphy advises cultivating equal prosperity in all four domains: health, wealth, love, and expression. Lack in any one area signals imbalance. For example, a millionaire who’s sick or lonely is not prosperous. Conversely, a content craftsman who gives his talents joyfully may live surrounded by both peace and plenty. The lesson aligns with Emerson’s idea that “to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

Gratitude and Rejoicing as Correction

Whenever envy or frustration arises, Murphy prescribes rejoicing in others’ success. Bless the man who deposits more than you; celebrate growth wherever it appears. This mental act harmonizes your emotional world and aligns you with the abundance you praise. On a psychological level, this practice reconditions the subconscious to associate wealth with joy rather than resentment, thereby inviting its expression in your own life.

Balance, for Murphy, is not moderation but wholeness. When your mental, emotional, and spiritual states are in concord, prosperity flows without resistance. Inner equilibrium leads to outer wealth.

In the book’s second half, Murphy transforms the biblical story of Jesus turning water into wine into a coded guide for manifestation. To him, this is not a miracle of chemistry but of consciousness. Water represents your mind—formless, receptive, unconditioned consciousness. Wine represents fulfilled desire—the vivified, externalized result of faith. Thus, changing water into wine means transforming your thoughts of lack into conviction of abundance.

Resolving the Inner Quarrel

Murphy recounts the story of a bankrupt beauty salon owner who, through despair, learned to “change water into wine.” Instead of fighting circumstances, she quieted her mind each night and visualized her banker congratulating her on her success, her mother rejoicing at her prosperity, and Murphy himself uniting her with success in a “spiritual marriage ceremony.” Within weeks, her outer life rearranged itself—she met her future husband, regained abundance, and experienced peace. The lesson: the external crisis was only the shadow of an inner conflict. When the mind unites with its ideal, the outer world must obey.

The Marriage Feast of Thought and Feeling

Prayer, in Murphy’s system, is not petition but mental marriage—the union of idea (thought) and emotion (feeling). When faith and imagination agree, the subconscious conceives and brings forth the desired “child”—a healed situation, a restored fortune, a new opportunity. This mirrors Neville Goddard’s teaching that “assumption, if persisted in, hardens into fact.”

Sustaining the Mood of Fulfillment

Murphy cautions that your mental film—your internal imagery—must not be exposed to fear or doubt, or it will ‘overexpose’ and vanish. The key is to sustain the mood of answered prayer even amid appearances that contradict it. The moment of emotional conviction—when you feel your prayer already answered—is the moment water becomes wine. Once that conviction takes hold, the outer manifestation becomes inevitable.

To practice this alchemy, Murphy instructs you to relax into meditation, release all tension, and visualize your end goal with joy and gratitude. You don’t manipulate circumstances; you change consciousness, and consciousness changes everything.

The ultimate challenge in Murphy’s philosophy is staying loyal to your vision. He warns that many people “pray two ways”—affirming prosperity one moment and denying it the next by saying, “I can’t afford that” or “Money never goes far enough.” Every such contradiction neutralizes previous positive imagery. Faith, therefore, means consistency of mental marriage: remaining “faith-full” to your higher image of yourself, even while appearances delay.

The Captain Analogy

Murphy compares your role in prayer to that of a ship’s captain. The captain doesn’t jump ship when storms come; he holds the course. Likewise, you must hold your mental picture steady amid temporary setbacks. Emotional loyalty to your ideal steers the subconscious through circumstance until it arrives in the promised port. This metaphor parallels James Allen’s dictum from As a Man Thinketh: the soul attracts what it secretly loves, fears, or expects.

Casting Your Burden on the Inner Wisdom

Murphy illustrates surrender with a Zen story: a monk relieves his burden by putting down his sack—symbolizing letting God handle the ‘how.’ After prayer, your job is not to worry but to rest. This quiet trust invites intuitive guidance and synchronicities to orchestrate answers. Worry means distrust in divine timing; peace means knowing the outcome is guaranteed by spiritual law.

Faithfulness also extends to ethics. Misusing spiritual power for greed or harm “poisons” the wine, producing guilt and illness. True wealth blesses all whom it touches. As you hold your mind on constructive ideals—service, creativity, joy—you attune yourself with the universal rhythm of supply.

Murphy’s closing insight dismantles the illusion that wealth lies outside you. Riches are of the mind. The doctor who loses his equipment still retains his true wealth—his knowledge, skill, and inner power to serve. Likewise, your ideas, talents, and spiritual awareness are your greatest assets. Circumstances may fluctuate, but consciousness of abundance guarantees renewal. When you know you can always 'attract the symbol again,' you are forever secure.

Releasing the Inner Treasure

Murphy recounts a man who lost his fortune in 1929 but affirmed, “I can change water into wine—I can make money again.” Four years later, he became president of a thriving chemical company. This transformation occurred because he understood that the creative process begins internally. Your thoughts are blueprints; your emotions are the builders. Remind yourself daily: “God is the source of my supply; His riches flow to me freely and abundantly.”

The Everlasting Source

When you realize supply originates from Infinite Intelligence, fear vanishes. You see that the same power that feeds the birds and the galaxies sustains you. You are never cut off from Source—only from your recognition of It. True wealth consciousness turns this awareness into habitual living: gratitude replaces grievance, expectancy replaces worry, and divine partnership replaces struggle.

In the end, Murphy’s message is elegant and liberating: you already possess the kingdom. To attract wealth, open your consciousness to it. Believe, bless, and allow. When inner riches blossom, outer wealth follows naturally. The road to riches, he reminds us, begins and ends within.