If there is delay or surprise in attaining prosperity nationally or individually, it is not therefore a mistake, nor is there necessarily the requirement of suffering in the face of today's challenges.  For this is a period of learning and realization as sure as there is a necessity for this squeeze. 
 
It is one thing to have learned the secrets of some metaphysical truths, to have been taught, as students, how to attract blessings and abundance to you, how there is a correlation between thoughts, intentions and manifestation.  That is, you have been preached to and awakened thereby to the understanding that two plus two equals four.  It is now relatively common knowledge that there is a secret that can be employed and a method to be applied and suddenly all will be well and money will come rolling in.  So why, then, asks the student, is it not happening?  Why, then, am I squeezed and pressured?  Why do I look around and all these wise learners are corralled into the same boat, a boat which seems to be sinking?  Where is our life raft?  How can we save the day?  Why isn't the wisdom working?
 
Having put forth these questions, which are deep in everyone's mind, let us then bring you back to the classroom and focus attention upon the curriculum. 
 
It is not sufficient for the rational mind alone to gain understanding, to know that the will can be set in service of the desire and construct that reality which will bring gain to you.  No, for that is an intellectual exercise only, and that is not the point of Earth-life.  The point is to spiritualize matter.  You are matter.  You cannot spiritualize your journey through your mental faculties alone.  The heart must be engaged. 
 
The heart engages when the individual feels the pain of another.  Another's suffering must be identified as the same as one's own.  When you look around and see stress and fear on others' faces, and gripped in their muscles and contained in their body's cells, then you recognize that that is what you too are feeling.  Then your heart reaches out, and in that moment the secret becomes operable.  For it is dry and relatively useless until the energy of love is included.  And so the real secret to prosperity is to care.  To care what happens to others as much as you care what happens to yourself.  It is only in pressured times, in global suffering, in moments when the urgency is upon you to solve your crisis that you see, as everybody's crisis; that you become the master magician who can implement the power. 
 
And therefore, as you see, Student, you have only half-learned the lesson.  But be of good cheer and relax knowing that, even as you struggle, as do your fellow man and woman, so do you gain.  You are in perfect position to graduate from your classroom in due time, and all has been structured to perfection.  Love others as you would love yourself, and see in that the great empowerment that is developing.