Spirituality and Wealth

Spirituality and Wealth

There are many who interpret sacred works from great mystics as being universally in agreement that possessing great wealth is a certain bar to the door of spiritual wisdom. We must seek to dispossess everything in order to find our connection to the divine. This is a genuine problem for those who have become deeply enmeshed in material possessions and the satisfaction of desire that these provide even if only temporary.

After much thought I have come to the conclusion that wealth, like all of creation, has a divine origin, and therein lies the answer to the problem. When one is clear about reality one sees that nothing material is eternal, that all things must pass, dissolve, and return to their pre-creation energetic, disbursed, and invisible forms. Things, ideas, people, and institutions remain viable only so long as they are useful, serve some purpose in this world. And the most lasting things are not burned up in selfish use, nor are they ever truly owned. One may have the use of all the world’s wealth for a time, but eventually time and death will reclaim all that we suppose we possess.

The right attitude then, if one us wealthy, is to not see wealth as something one has, but as value entrusted to one for a time. Not owned, but in one’s care and to be treated with the intention of preserving its value and seeing it increase for the gain of all of creation.

If one is selfish or wasteful then the value swiftly declines. One suffers for having borne the illusion of possessing rather than shepherding wealth. Those who view wealth as a divine trust understand that their own lives will be judged at their ending by how they cared for creation, not for how much they thought they had only to lose it, as all do, at the end of life.