Money, we’ve all heard, is the root of all evil. This piece of folk wisdom is due, no doubt, to the fact that so many people mistakenly imagine that money is the source of all good! For when we expect too much of anything, we eventually find, as with idol worship, that the object of our dependence is not competent to answer our prayers, nor capable of fulfilling our expectations of it.
Perhaps, then, that ancient saying should be amended to read, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
After all, money is not evil in itself, any more than dynamite is evil. Dynamite can be used constructively to build roads, or destructively to demolish buildings. Money, similarly, can be used to do wonderful things. It is human greed that so often directs money toward evil ends.
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 - ultimately, as an expression of our energy.
Developing money magnetism depends to a great extent on understanding how to use money properly.
Using money properly depends on realising 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 others’, highest good.
For it is a law of life that when we waste any resource, we encounter a time finally when we can no longer replenish it.
Think of the vast numbers of forests that have been cut without thought for replanting; of farmland that has been exhausted because its soil was never replenished.
Think of the many stories of movie stars who, instead of using their money discriminately, squandered it until, at last, they were left penniless.
What is wealth? Most people equate it with investments, with savings, with income, with real property.
Yet we’ve all known people who got by quite happily on very little money. I’ve known others, by contrast, who seemed barely able to scrape by, even though they may have earned several times as much as the first group.
The strange thing is that those who get by on very little often manage to obtain more of this world’s goods, to go on more vacations, and to do a great deal in other ways that others with more money never seemed able to do.
Who among these, then, was the more truly wealthy? It isn’t merely a matter of how much you have, but rather of how well you know how to use what you have.
You know the song from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, “I got plenty o’ nuthin, an’ nuthin’s plenty fo’ me”? In the last analysis, one is as wealthy or as poor as he thinks himself to be.
Wealth cannot be equated with some fixed quantity. If one is wealthy in his mind, or in his spirit, he may require very few material possessions to be perfectly satisfied with life.
Swami Kriyananda is a living disciple of Paramhamsa Yogananda. He is also the founder of Ananda Sangha with nine communities around the world