Thursday, October 05, 2006

True Wealth

By Swamy Kriyananda

Money represents quite simply, a flow of energy. Harm results when money is loved and hoarded for its own sake. For in hoarding it, we block the energy flow.

A child once accompanied his parents on an outing to the mountains. With them, he drank cool water from a mountain stream. Loving its fresh taste, he filled a bottle from the stream and took it home with him. There, he would sip only a little water each day, wanting to make it last as long as possible.

What was his disappointment a few weeks later, then, to find that the water left in the bottle had become stagnant.

Money, similarly, grows stagnant when we “bottle it up” – that is to say, hoard it. To attract a steady money flow in our lives, we must learn to view money not as a thing merely, but as an expression of energy.

Using money properly depends on realizing that, in acquiring money, we don’t merely manipulate material forces in our favor. Still less is the acquisition of money a matter of luck. Rather, we attract money to us. The other side of that coin is that the failure to acquire money is essentially an act of repulsion on our part – unconscious, to be sure. We may push it from us even while we imagine that we are doing our best to acquire it.

Both of these concepts – learning how to attract money, and how to put it to the proper use – depend, finally, on understanding what truly constitutes our needs, that is, our own, and other’, highest good.