Wallace D. Wattles - A Powerful Life - Rare Collected Works
Review Score: 9.10 of 10

It breaks our hearts to give the guy who wrote The Science of Getting Rich, anything less than a perfect 10, but the truth is, Wattles lived and wrote 100 years ago and that’s pretty obvious from some of his examples and his writing style.  Who are we to say it’s a flaw, but his male-centric perspective—completely understandable given when he lived—can be a hurdle even for men. It’s one you just have to get over, however, and to be honest, once you get into it, it’s not even that hard.

Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich happens to be the book Rhonda Byrne got from her daughter to pull her out of her depression, making her creation of The Secret, not only possible, but inevitable. Unfortunately, The Science of Getting Rich is not included in this resource!  While this discovery was a little disappointing to us, the disappointment soon gave way to euphoria as we discovered what IS included in this little treasure trove.

This one little book—A Powerful Life—is extraordinarily comprehensive, and to tell you the truth, pretty much everything that comprises The Science of Getting Rich is folded into A Powerful Life in a clever little section called How to Get What You Want. 

The great thing about Wattles is his sense of purpose.  This is a guy who lived to tell the truth, and he told it in as easy to understand a method as any we’ve run into.  Most of what he writes includes some kind of step-by-step formula that makes application easy.  The one occasional snag is that the language of it is pretty antiquated (though not difficult) and the world Wattles makes reference to is LONG GONE in many respects. 

For example, in a piece about Jesus in which Wattles laments that Christ has been painted as a humble, passive, ineffectual man, he says that if President Taft resigned this very night and named Jesus as a successor, there would be a run on the banks within minutes, indicating a complete lack of consumer confidence in a world run by such a poor, underachieving man like Jesus.  President Taft!!

But that little Jesus story also brings us to another point— Wattles is a first class de-bunker.   

He’s not willing to take the opinion of the status quo on anything.  From Wattle’s perspective, just about every story we’ve been told has been reshaped by the powerful to keep us little people oppressed, poor and ineffectual.  But while conspiracy theorists will LOVE Wattles, you don’t have to be one to love him just as much as we do.

There’s a ton of truth in what Wallace D. Wattles wrote 100 years ago, and it’s Universal truth, so it holds true forever.  Still, the truth is not enough.  It has to be useful, relevant and personally meaningful too. 

We guarantee you’ll find something in the writings of Wallace D. Wattles that you find useful, relevant and personally meaningful.  In fact, we believe that his piece on “Attaining Cosmic Consciousness” alone—essentially everything on pages 35-43 of A Powerful Life—is worth the entire price of this resource.

But now for the big test:  Does Wallace Wattles’ A Powerful Life support your Divine Connection or is it a Distraction?  You be the judge; here’s Wattles on “Man’s Relationship to God”—

“There is… One Spirit who is all the power there is, all the life there is, and all the intelligence there is; and this Spirit has children, who are of the same substance as Himself, and who have power to think independently, and to separate themselves in consciousness from Him.

And the power to think independently implies the possibility of thinking erroneously; if man separates himself in consciousness from God, he is sure to fall into error, for he can see only an infinitesimal portion of the truth.

Man’s life, mans’ power and man’s wisdom decrease in exact proportion to the extent of his separation in consciousness from God.”

In some respects, this is a tough one for us.  We are in agreement at Spiritual Resources Review that this piece offers absolute clarity—no distraction.  But we can also see how for some people, this would be a mental knot from which someone might never get untied. 

We’re all big fans of Wattles, but ultimately there’s so much in Wattles that you can get lost in, we’re compelled to issue the tiniest warning with this one:

If you are consciously using Wattles’ writing to foster your Divine Connection and you make sure that you never lose track of that goal, this resource will help you foster your Divine Connection.   However, if you don’t keep in mind that your goal is a deeply felt experience of the Divine, the work of Wallace Wattles will lead you there by a sometimes problematically detailed route. For the most distractible among us, Wattles is sometimes a little too fascinating for his own good.

Format:

178 page eBook—A Powerful Life— with index

Bonus Materials:

52 page eBook—A New Christ: Interactive Internet Study Version

24 page eBook—An Annotated Checklist of the Writings of Wallace D. Wattles

21 page eBook—Lessons in Constructive Science: The Missing Articles

85 page eBook—As a Grain of Mustard Seed

Rating Specifics:

Quality and Quantity of Material (9.5/10)

It’s all eBook—no audio or video—and there is a fair amount of it for the cost of the resource.  Everything is easy to read and nicely indexed.  There’s also a lot of very-well-thought-out bonus material, (though the last one is rather an antiquated little snoozer.)

Practical Application (9.5/10)

This resource is all very practical; in fact Wattles is famous for boiling just about everything down to the science of “how it all works.”  Success, to Wattles, is predictable and dissectible and can therefore be broken down into steps that can be replicated by any “scientist” (that’s you) among us.

Understandability (8/10)

Let’s face it; people don’t write like they used to.  Ultimately everything in this resource is understandable, but you may have to read a few things over more than once to really understand it, just because the writing style is a little antiquated.

Technical Simplicity/Clean Transaction (9.5/10)

No matter what speed internet connection you have, you can download all of the course and bonus material to your computer in less than 5 minutes.  Each resource requires Adobe Reader, which can be downloaded for free on the web.  Purchasing A Powerful Life doesn’t get you signed up for anything extra, and the follow-up email communications are few in number and high in value.

Focus on Divine Connection without Distraction (9/10)

This is really the hardest one to measure for A Powerful Life.  It’s got some of the clearest Divine Connection content we’ve found, but there is also so much in Wattles to fascinate the mind, that we just can’t give him full marks here.  Bottom line on this one is that it’s well worth the price, and the amount of time and quality of Divine-Connection-focus you’ll commit to it is up to you.

Click HERE to visit this web site and check out the books by Wattles.