God Or Mammon - Love or Profits
"The spiritual world and material world do not go well together." Srila Prabhupada
"The realer the world, the greater the misery. The realer the Self, the greater the joy." - Lester Levenson
"If the the time spent thinking about objects NOT the Self were spent inquiring into the Self, Self realization would be achieved very quickly." Ramana Maharshi
"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." - Jesus
[First, in my ignorance, I never knew what 'mammon' was. Finally, I looked it up. Mammon basically means wealth.]
Okay, I think you get the picture here. There is a very common approach going on now that says I want to enjoy the world and have total spiritual realization. That is not an impossibility, the difficulty is, most people are not ready for that. In other words, once you have recognized the complete illusory nature of the material world, and no longer have ANY attachments for it, can recognize that it is ALL God happening, then, and only then, can it really be enjoyed. But at that point, it will no longer be a material phenomena, it will also be GOD.
The other day, while in the garden with my son, he was looking out at the empty field and I asked what he was doing. "Envisioning abundant gardens," he said.
"Wonderful" I responded, "and the people?"
"No people, just plants."
Now, I love that he was envisioning abundance, but I also know that part of this (not all by any means) is to make a lot of money. Unfortunately, this is too often the case with people's interest in 'spirituality' - they want it to have a better 'material' life. "When I'm enlightened, then..." There are innumerable ego issues in here - control, fame, wealth, enjoyment, etc. etc. etc. You can have all the food in the world or all the money in the world or all the sex in the world or all the anything in the world, but if you don't have true knowledge of the Self, true re-cognition of Spirit, of God, of the Absolute, there will never be happiness.
Like our current economic crisis. The government is throwing trillions upon trillions of dollars away to try to save something which was a bust in the first place - a false economic lifestyle. I recognize that most people (nearly all) still believe that it is and should be salvaged. This is NOT the case. The entire economic system itself is a ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme. If you do not understand this, study it a little bit. Money=Debt. All this money is created by the banks, and every dollar they create is attached to interest. So how does this work.
The bank loans me $100
(It is understood that I now owe them $110 with interest)
In order to pay that loan back, I must go to other people who similarly got their money from a bank (to whom they owe a principle AND interest)
(Banks win, you lose)
Oops, now nobody has any money, so I borrow MORE money (from the bank) to pay back the original loan (with additional interest of course)
Now the banks have outstanding lots of money and lots of money supposed to come in. But nobody has any money, so they keep borrowing "money" from the banks who happily keep printing it up.
(Banks keep winning... you keep losing)
Now this is obviously a pretty simplistic explanation, but it gives you the idea. I recently read that if you had invested $1 at the year Zero A.D. that one dollar would now be worth (at normal interest rates) of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (One septillion dollars), which is of course more money than the world has ever seen. It is an impossibility. It is like trying to blow up a rubber balloon infinitely. At some point it has to give. It has to break. We are now at the breaking point. So even on the 'material' level, what we need is not money, not a change in economy, but a total reversal of the way we see and do things. The material world is NOT where it's at. We need to live in away that facilitates spiritual awakening and not material enlargement. Our purpose here is NOT (contrary to many people's opinion) to make more money, or to be happy and comfortable, but to awaken to who we are. You are either serving your ego, your selfish individualistic sense of self, or you are serving the One Self, God, the All. Even serving society or serving your family is a big improvement over simply serving the little self. So ask yourself, how much of my time is spent thinking about how to get more money (or ???) for ME? How much of your time is spent working toward helping others or toward Self or God REAL-ization? The answer to this question will give you a true assessment of how really successful you are!
"The realer the world, the greater the misery. The realer the Self, the greater the joy." - Lester Levenson
"If the the time spent thinking about objects NOT the Self were spent inquiring into the Self, Self realization would be achieved very quickly." Ramana Maharshi
"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." - Jesus
[First, in my ignorance, I never knew what 'mammon' was. Finally, I looked it up. Mammon basically means wealth.]
Okay, I think you get the picture here. There is a very common approach going on now that says I want to enjoy the world and have total spiritual realization. That is not an impossibility, the difficulty is, most people are not ready for that. In other words, once you have recognized the complete illusory nature of the material world, and no longer have ANY attachments for it, can recognize that it is ALL God happening, then, and only then, can it really be enjoyed. But at that point, it will no longer be a material phenomena, it will also be GOD.
The other day, while in the garden with my son, he was looking out at the empty field and I asked what he was doing. "Envisioning abundant gardens," he said.
"Wonderful" I responded, "and the people?"
"No people, just plants."
Now, I love that he was envisioning abundance, but I also know that part of this (not all by any means) is to make a lot of money. Unfortunately, this is too often the case with people's interest in 'spirituality' - they want it to have a better 'material' life. "When I'm enlightened, then..." There are innumerable ego issues in here - control, fame, wealth, enjoyment, etc. etc. etc. You can have all the food in the world or all the money in the world or all the sex in the world or all the anything in the world, but if you don't have true knowledge of the Self, true re-cognition of Spirit, of God, of the Absolute, there will never be happiness.
Like our current economic crisis. The government is throwing trillions upon trillions of dollars away to try to save something which was a bust in the first place - a false economic lifestyle. I recognize that most people (nearly all) still believe that it is and should be salvaged. This is NOT the case. The entire economic system itself is a ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme. If you do not understand this, study it a little bit. Money=Debt. All this money is created by the banks, and every dollar they create is attached to interest. So how does this work.
The bank loans me $100
(It is understood that I now owe them $110 with interest)
In order to pay that loan back, I must go to other people who similarly got their money from a bank (to whom they owe a principle AND interest)
(Banks win, you lose)
Oops, now nobody has any money, so I borrow MORE money (from the bank) to pay back the original loan (with additional interest of course)
Now the banks have outstanding lots of money and lots of money supposed to come in. But nobody has any money, so they keep borrowing "money" from the banks who happily keep printing it up.
(Banks keep winning... you keep losing)
Now this is obviously a pretty simplistic explanation, but it gives you the idea. I recently read that if you had invested $1 at the year Zero A.D. that one dollar would now be worth (at normal interest rates) of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (One septillion dollars), which is of course more money than the world has ever seen. It is an impossibility. It is like trying to blow up a rubber balloon infinitely. At some point it has to give. It has to break. We are now at the breaking point. So even on the 'material' level, what we need is not money, not a change in economy, but a total reversal of the way we see and do things. The material world is NOT where it's at. We need to live in away that facilitates spiritual awakening and not material enlargement. Our purpose here is NOT (contrary to many people's opinion) to make more money, or to be happy and comfortable, but to awaken to who we are. You are either serving your ego, your selfish individualistic sense of self, or you are serving the One Self, God, the All. Even serving society or serving your family is a big improvement over simply serving the little self. So ask yourself, how much of my time is spent thinking about how to get more money (or ???) for ME? How much of your time is spent working toward helping others or toward Self or God REAL-ization? The answer to this question will give you a true assessment of how really successful you are!