Wealth is a curse, when not used to serve humanity
Our world is now a world entirely dedicated to commerce. Business, which used to be the domain of a few merchants is now the de-facto way by which people become rich. There was a time when someone would be able to use their skills and talents in order to earn a lot of money, but that time is quickly receding into memory. We now only recognize business as the way to prosperity, while everyone else is being left behind.
Yes, I know there are still trades and professions that seem to pay well, but the disparity between those that make money for a living, vs those that do a job or perform a service and are compensated, is huge. Those who focus all their time simply playing with money in various ways trying to get rich are the only ones that can hope to become far wealthier than the average person. In other words, if you what you want is to make money, then make money. Don’t waste your time doing something in order to earn money, as earning money has become something that will consume your life, while giving you very little in return.
In case you are confused as to what I am saying, take a look at Wall Street, or other concerns like that, such as investment firms, banks, loan sharks and so on. These entities do not create anything of value, but simply play with the laws and regulations to ensure they can make money and keep as much of it as possible. We created these laws in order to govern a system of production, but ultimately, these laws have become disconnected from production altogether. At this point, there are entire professions dedicated simply to studying what money does and to increase it, without ever caring about exactly what the money is being used for. What used to be just a way to keep track of value, in the worldly sense, is now an end in itself.
The perversion of compensation
Picture your ideal life, for a second. Assume that you are wealthy enough to eat, sleep and be comfortable for the most part. What do you see yourself doing with your time? Do you see yourself simply hanging out, perhaps with beautiful women or men, engaging in pleasure all day? Does your ideal life include living on a beautiful lake, surrounded by gardens, wine and foods of all kinds? Perhaps instead, you see yourself creating something beautiful, like pottery, and just living a happy, contented life. Most people have an image that looks like one of those scenarios. In other words, a life of leisure and pleasure.
But there are some of you who wish to work. No matter how much money you have, you see yourself engaging in some type of enterprise. Perhaps you want to build a meditation center (like I do), or you want to start something fun, like a theme park. Or maybe you love story-telling and cannot imagine doing anything but taking pictures or making movies.
At the end of the day, leisure and pleasure gets boring. No matter how much pleasure you receive, you’ll find that it does not touch you deeply, because pleasure is rooted entirely in the physical body. Whether you are drinking a glass of wine, or enjoying music, the pleasure you experience begins and ends in the physical body. Every human being that experiences pleasure sooner or later gets tired of it and wants to go do something.
The reason we all want to eventually do something, is simple: there is a part of our body that is involved in creativity. Once pleasure is taken care of, energy rises to the next level, which happens to be where creativity functions in the human body. The center where this happens is exactly the same place that your body functions when you are trying to procreate, i.e. creative energy is the same whether you are making pottery or trying to make a baby.
In other words, it is natural for a human being to want to create something and to do so using the faculties of the human body. If this is the case, then why are people looking for compensation? Think about it this way: if, instead of receiving money, you received food, shelter, clothing and a way to continue working, would you accept? The vast majority of people would say “no”. Why? Because they want more. Not only do they want the luxuries of life, but also something extra they can put away for a rainy day.
And this is where the perversion begins. Despite having everything they need, people look at what someone else has and are convinced that they are not getting enough out of life. Nowadays, this kind of comparison is explicitly taught in schools—we assign every child a grade, a way to say “this is how good you are in comparison”. Competition is fostered at a young age and suddenly, a person is no longer interested in the welfare of all, but in getting rich and having more than anyone else.
But no one is taught to realize what they are receiving for free, which includes the most important things in life: love, sunlight, water, Earth, trees, wind, indeed life itself. When all these things are given to us for free, why then would someone seek compensation? In fact, what exactly is being compensated for?
Surrendering your most valuable resource
What you are being compensated for, is the very creative energy you need, to create a better life for yourself. Instead of conserving your creative energy, and using it to create a beautiful life for yourself, you give it away to someone who promises to give you money in return. The amount of money you receive is termed compensation and someone else decides how much you should receive. Well, the problem is that your creative energy is priceless. Once you give it away, you will not get it back. But it is this creative energy that is being co-opted by business people to create all kinds of garbage, most of which we absolutely do not need and then selling it right back to you, for money. Can you see the problem?
The reason our world is full of stupid products and useless services, is because finally, everyone has figured out that the way to make money is to exploit someone else’s creativity. Find a way to attract another person’s attention, then use their energy to create garbage and finally exchange that garbage for money. You are taxed twice: once when you pay attention or give yourself to a job, and again when you buy something with the money you were compensated with. Are you surprised that you are poor?
An intelligent human being would look at this system and try to get rid of it. Instead, most of humanity wants a better job, or one that takes away even more of your creative energy, while paying just a little bit more than a job that requires you to give less. It is for this reason that offices worldwide are filled to the brim with workers doing tiny little tasks. It shouldn’t take thousands of people in order to keep a bank running, but the point of all those people isn’t to do any kind of valuable work, as every white-collar office worker has experienced. Most of the time, workers spend their time doing the same repetitive tasks, which are often wrapped in a huge amount of conceptual packaging to make them seem important. Yet, the end result of all that is nothing more than you surrendering your creative energy to the company or organization in which you work, so that they can create huge profits, while you receive a tiny amount of compensation.
All this is true of blue-collar work as well (or the trades). The amount of energy being surrendered is huge compared to the amount of actual work being done. Most of the energy is simply used to create money for the system and routed to a few wealthy individuals through various channels. This is what’s going on in our world.
Non-participation, the right way
How do you change a system that is designed to take away your energy? By not giving it away in the first place. Let me give you an example.
Let us say that you are a truck driver. Your job involves securing cargo, driving to a given destination and un-securing cargo so that it can be unloaded. You decide one fine day that you no longer want to waste your energy on this job, but don’t want to lose it either. What do you do?
Give up making an effort. The problem with all jobs nowadays is that they are mostly unnatural, requiring you to put in a lot of effort in order to make them happen. In this case, you have to make an effort to drive the truck properly, to make sure you stay in lane, follow all the traffic rules, and deliver cargo safely and on-time. There are some in the trucking industry who make more of an effort than is even legal, by driving over the speed limit, exceeding allowed hours of service, or drinking energy drinks just to push themselves to go faster and harder. All this contributes to a very unhealthy body. It also depletes you of your creative energy.
Instead, do only what comes naturally, making no effort to do the job or not do the job. If you cannot happily drive a truck naturally, don’t do it. If you cannot wake up in the morning and get going, don’t. If you want to take a break, just do it. Don’t ask for permission, don’t even apologize for what you do. Just do what comes naturally and stop pushing yourself. Only when you do that you will finally realize that you may be in the wrong job, so to speak. You will begin to realize that in fact, truck driving may not be for you at all. Once you no longer make an effort, you will definitely be taken to task by the world in which you live, because in order to survive, the system needs you to make an effort, to keep putting energy into it.
The problem with giving away your creative energy is not just unhappiness and poor health, but also problems like depression, anxiety and most importantly a lack of vitality. You will literally become infertile over time if you keep it up, as has been happening worldwide.
But can you survive this way?
You may, or you may not. This is the truth. The system we have created is so pervasive that you may not be able to survive by just doing what comes naturally. I have to tell you this truth, because I don’t want you to simply take my advice and assume that God, for example, will take care of you. You may have to make an effort and give away your energy for a long time, especially if you have people depending on you. This is why I am most interested in working with young people, especially those who are getting started and have not yet created dependencies in their life. If you have already married, for example, have children and have a lot of burdens on you, there is very little chance that you can do something about your life until you’ve given up all those things. This is why yogis always encourage you to be alone, to not take on a wife or a husband, but to first learn who you really are and what you really want in life.
It’s not as if young people can survive without a job, but starting on the spiritual path early makes you realize that you don’t need all that stuff that others have, that you don’t need to work at a fancy job, or to go to college to get a fancy degree or to live in a high-rise in downtown. You will not prioritize making a lot of money while you’re working on yourself, but will prioritize your time and energy so that you can discover who you really are. Eventually, you will realize—guaranteed—that the only worthwhile occupation on this Earth is service to humanity.
Wealth comes with consequences
The fact is that the rich and the powerful (socially) got there by taking more than they give. There is simply no other way on this Earth to become wealthy. When you make money this way, the negativity associated with that money sticks to you. Lottery winners often experience the negative consequences of receiving a large amount of tainted money—money given away by (usually) poor people who are suffering. There is a huge amount of karma associated with making money, but if you think that karma makes people poor, you would be mistaken.
Karma simply means action, but it also means what happens to you because of that action. There is no such thing as positive karma. Karma is simply karma, and it is all to be avoided if possible. Whenever you receive money that itself has been earned through nefarious means, say by criminal activity, exploitation and the like, you take on some of that burden. That’s karma. And that burden will make you see things less clearly than you would if you didn’t receive that money. In other words, bad money will blind you and cause you to chase even more of it.
Unfortunately, the world will only reward you with more money if you want it. It will continue to provide to you ways of exploiting the Earth as well others and burdening you more and more. This is why people who are rich lose all sense of what they’re doing and end up in small circles of similar people. As for the world, it will continue to enslave you further, making it impossible for you to live simply, or like a normal human being. This is the fate of all rich people, celebrities, even sports personalities and so on. Once you give yourself to the world to that extent, you will forever be enslaved to it. You will not be able to break free. Jesus made this very clear when He spoke about the rich being unable to get to heaven. Heaven isn’t necessarily some other dimension you experience after death—it is also a state of pure happiness that you can experience on Earth. If you are rich, there is no way you can get there. So what do you do?
Launder your money
The solution is to launder your money! No, I am not asking you to do anything illegal, immoral or unethical. I am asking you to give away your money in service of humanity. I don’t want you to simply throw money at charities and be done with it. If you really want to be happy, give your money away, but be with it and use it, along with your own time and energy to get involved in a worthwhile cause, whatever it may be. Don’t just pay people, but get physically, emotionally and creatively involved. When you work towards the welfare of humanity and give away your money, the negative influence of that money is literally washed away.
I myself have an idea for one of these things, but I cannot receive money directly from you (this is why there is no donation page on this site). I cannot accept money at all, in fact—it has to go towards the work. Sure, I need sustenance and such, but I am happy to receive it directly instead of being paid money. For instance, if you offer me shelter and food, I will happily work for free for the rest of my life, as yogis have always done when supported. I am happy to give up every single thing in my life as long as I can work for your welfare. To me, wealth is simply a tool, not an end. It does not give me any satisfaction to be wealthy.
Those of you who do have more money than you need: think carefully about what you want in the world. Do you really want to create yet another golf course? Can you not feel the pain of humanity and the suffering that is world wide? If you cannot, I am sorry for you, but if you do, then you must use your money, time and energy to help. I find a lot of entrepreneurs, for example, willing to put enormous amounts of energy into trying to solve some financial problem, but they balk at simply feeding the poor, say once a month, in their own communities.
You don’t all have to contribute to some grand project—it isn’t about you anyway. You must find something or the other you can do within your own communities that actually helps move the needle. Stop wasting your time trying to pleasure yourselves or trying to generate even more wealth and instead, put your energy into moving humanity forward. If you come to me, I will happily help you discover how you can serve, whether or not it involves my project. Make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
