It starts out as not wanting to share good news too soon because plans might fail. Then it becomes not wanting to share good news with people who are jealous because they will seek to crash your plans so that they fail. Later on it progresses to not wanting to share good news at all because you cannot tell who is jealous and who is capable of making the plans fail.

One of the burdens of prosperity is visibility. Visibility exposes the good and the bad. It shows and highlights the aspects that make a person attractive to others in terms of collaboration, corroboration and connection. However, the visibility of prosperity also incurs what is called the “evil eye” – the contentious watcher(s). However, one cannot exist without the other. Just as a hero does not mature without his shadow, prosperity does not endure or bear fruit unless it accepts the forces that oppose its existence.

We are subject to the laws of opposition. Once you desire something that has to be obtained through a filtering process you set yourself up in opposition to whomever is competing for the same thing. When you have romantic interest in someone across the hall anyone who shares your interest is now your opponent. Hence, scarcity. Just like romantic favor, prosperity is a scarce phenomenon. It is won genetically by inheritance, fortuitously by random opportunity, and deservedly through diligence. You can add fraud, exploitation and conquest to that but the capacity for those (negative as they are) is also rare but hence the next point.

Exposure can be a disinfectant to your image or the perception of your work that invites the pressure to do away with anything that tarnishes it. If you do not tackle the negative aspect exposure reveals or at least acknowledge, you may suffer a fate from loss of sales, popularity and even business failure. But this part is not what most people are truly scared of.

The average fear of prosperity, much like that of public speaking, is the fear of exposing a brilliance that will be envied and thus attacked. Several brilliant people spend time in hiding because they have not yet mustered the courage or faced the furnace of disapproval to know that it is also a surmountable. We see several celebrities go through public humiliation when they sexual secret gets exposed, the gambling addictions, their past dating snafus, financial mishaps and even past felonies. However, the gravity of this exposure is made more prescient by their fame. The very fame that just may put them in a position to survive the dip public favor. However, several people without a rap sheet and without even the scale of ambition of your average celebrity and rotting away in obscurity for fear of not being able to recover from a negative comment, or worse an invasive request from a loved one they deem too loyal to decline.

Truth is many prosperous people have been taken from us due to the envy of a loved one or a stalker so the fear of exposing one’s prosperity is not unfounded. However, deterring one’s progress on the fear of the negative aspects of prosperity may be more destructive than it appears. Many of us carry dreams loaded with solutions for the lives of others. Fates are waiting to be changed on some of the dreams we are afraid to pursue or act upon. Of course prosperity is not guaranteed on every venture but some of the people with the least confidence have the most potential.

It is fitting to beware of the evil eye but it is even more fitting to not succumb to the fear of the evil eye. The evil eye cannot be controlled or stopped. A lot of times, it is not powerful enough to ruin our prosperity to the extent that we think. When prosperity becomes a part of our reality it is incumbent on us to learn how carry it and all that comes with it. It may come with the evil eye but it also comes with inspiration and opportunity. Most of all, it comes with the satisfaction that our alignment and commitment to a line of work or passion is as rewarding as we need it to be. To deter such a feeling on account of the evil eye is a betrayal to oneself; a denial of divine providence and an aversion to the will of God.

by Julian Michael Yong