Mystic Mantra: The value of money

Many people are earning money not because they need it to survive physically; they are earning money because that is the only substance which makes them feel like a somebody in the world. You are trying to earn “yourself” because somewhere you feel insufficient the way you are so you want to gather so many things and make yourself feel substantial. On the mental level, the emotional level and the physical level, you feel insufficient. You are such a small human being. Somewhere you believe that by gathering all these things, you will feel substantial, but still you don’t. You have gathered quite a lot but still you don’t feel substantial, isn’t it?

We must understand that money is only a means. Money by itself does not mean anything. If money by itself is something, you could print your own kind of money and keep it in your house. It will be just paper. Money has become valuable only because it is a means and an access — a way to get things in the world. But by itself it does not mean anything.

People who become very crude in their understanding start worshipping money. People worship heaps of money as Lakshmi. The crudest form of worship is money worship because money has no meaning except as a means to something else. It means something because it buys you things that you want in the world.

One big mistake societies of the world have made today is, economics has become the most important part of their lives, economics has become the most important part of the whole world. Not love, joy, humanity, art, music, not anything; economics is the most important part of life. Once you make economics the most important part of your life, you will naturally live a very crude life. You will not know any subtleness in your life and the finer things in your life will never enter you. But at the same time, unless your economic situation is well, you cannot finance the subtler things in life because the subtler things in life may come at a cost.

If societies become very poor they become very crude. If societies become very rich they will become vulgarly crude. Economics will become brutal when other things are no longer valued. Only if societies are well to do but not vulgarly rich will other things exist. So we have to hit a balance. A certain amount of importance has to be given to economics but other things must also be important in life.