Osho was teaching his vision of the New Man—an individual who could be in the world and dance through it like Zorba the Greek and, at the same time, be a buddha, a meditator. But it seemed to me that I had only two choices: to make money in the world or to be with my master. For a while, I seesawed back and forth between these two worlds: I worked until I had enough money and then went to spend as much
Finally, I discovered that what I really longed for was to be this New Man that Osho was pointing toward—to be able to embrace myself as an organic unity, not a separate body with a separate soul, not a person of either this world or that world. I wanted to live in this world as it contains that world and have only one religion—awareness—without any split. I remember the truth in his words calling out to me:
Zorba the Buddha is the answer. It is the synthesis of matter and soul. It is a declaration that there is no conflict between matter and consciousness, that we can be rich on both sides. We can have everything that the world can provide, that science and technology can produce, and we can still have everything that a Buddha, a Kabir, a Nanak finds in his inner being—the flowers of ecstasy, the fragrance of godliness, the wings of ultimate freedom.
The Diamond Approach uses the issues that arise in everyday life as a starting point to inquire into ourselves, becoming aware of the truth of our deeper, underlying spiritual nature and embodying it in the world.
So I started to lead Diamond Approach groups that focus on the esoteric and the practical aspects of money, demystifying that world and making it more understandable and approachable. My aim was to help people shift their perceptions and attitudes about money so that it could become a support for them rather than a stumbling block or a source of confusion or fear.
All kinds of beliefs, attitudes, and feelings around money surfaced. And it became apparent that all these issues were interfering with people’s capacity to be objective about the place of money in their life or about money’s uses and abuses.
How do I become more objective about money and my worldly dealings and walk a spiritual path at the same time? What method can bridge the gap between worlds and heal the split in my own experience? How do I balance my worldly and spiritual needs and desires?
It has become clear to me, as it has now to so many others, that the evolution of consciousness on our planet has entered a new phase. It is time for all of us to find our own divinity within and to become the unique expression of the Ultimate that every one of us is.
And because money is such an integral part of our daily existence, this unconsciousness ends up running our lives in way that we normally do not associate with money.
What percentage of your waking hours is involved, directly or indirectly, with money in some form? Are you aware of how much your money experience in your childhood home influences your money decisions today? Do you believe that money will bring you value, security, and happiness? Do you experience fear, deficiency, and scarcity in your money life? How is love related to money, and why is it important? How informed are you about finances in general and how to manage your own money?
First of all, most of us have never been taught how to deal with money on the practical level. Second, we have not been told that we can learn about ourselves through the medium of money. This book has been written to remedy both these problems, so that we can become more conscious about our money and, at the same time, become more conscious about ourselves.
money can be restored to its true purpose—not as a measure of success, or intrinsic personal value, or as a way to collect fame and recognition, but as a tool of support for who each human being truly is and as a reflection of the legacy each of us can leave for the planet.
Our human quest is actually the quest for freedom, for we won’t ever really be satisfied without being free. But we can have as much money as we want and still be in bondage. So it is essential to explore our relationship to money and to break down the barriers between financial and spiritual freedom.
It will be difficult to hide in the shadows of illusion and delusion, but all of the processes here will open up a rich exploration that is potentially life-changing. I can guarantee that if you engage in them with sincerity, you will see more clearly how who you have taken yourself to be is reflected in your money-related actions in the world.
We cannot become objective about the role of money in our lives if we do not understand what money means, how it functions, and how it is used.
working through the material with others include receiving support and encouragement when the going gets tough and gaining additional wisdom from the experience of people committed to the same goals.
using a journal to record your responses and insights as you do the practice exercises.
Money as a Spiritual Journey—Yours!
I often say to my students, “Imagine what your life would be like if all of your financial transactions reflected the greatest depth of your Being.” That is the ultimate right action.
In the innocence of not knowing, of merely following the thread of our desire to know and understand, we can enter a world of authenticity and truth about our experience. We have simply forgotten how.
Doing inquiry—which we can define simply as an open and open-ended questioning of our experience that leads us to a living understanding of ourselves—is the most natural and simple thing in the world.
Inquiry will lead us to recognize that all of our reactions and negative emotions contain elements of unresolved past experiences, which color and even obscure our perception and don’t allow us to clearly see the world as it is.
inquiry, we aren’t free to be an objective human being—that is, one who can appropriately respond rather than merely react. Thus, our journey is a matter of applying those same natural attributes of curiosity and openness that we had as children in order to see ourselves with more clarity now, so that we can wake up to what we are doing and how we are living. In moments of clarity, our consciousness is actually transformed. Over time, as more of those moments of awareness accumulate, we are transformed and become more of who we are. Ultimately, we have full access to our total potential, and we recognize directly the essence of who we are—which is the truth of our very Being.
That instead of trying to figure everything out, the mind needs to learn how to recognize and inquire into what is actually occurring, moment by moment. It means that our inquiry is not only a mental process but also includes our emotions and our somatic experience as well. Unless we include all three of these elements in our inquiry, we will have only a mental understanding that will remain unintegrated within our experience.
This inquiry exemplifies what can happen when you take full responsibility for what is happening in your life and in your relationships.
Once you see that your reactions and attitudes are reflections of your own issues, you stop blaming the other and turn your gaze inward.
This is what in spiritual language is known as the 180-degree turn, or the great turning. If you have the courage to turn your attention back to yourself and sit with an inquiry, you can look underneath any thing that is happening in your world that is triggering you into an emotional reaction and discover…
Inquiry, however, is not about anybody else; it is meant to focus on how you yourself are reacting, so that you can gain a deeper awareness of the patterns that…
As I said earlier, inquiry is a natural process for human beings, so there is no question that you will…
As we continue, consider whatever is being said and how it might match your own experience. This is your journey of self-discovery. It won’t help to adopt what is written in this book and make it your truth. The world doesn’t need any more borrowed knowledge. You have to find…
That doesn’t mean you throw out the baby with the bath water when you run into difficulty or pain—and you will meet these along the way. Almost everyone is tempted at some point to discontinue the inquiry into money, but you can choose instead to find the pearls that reflect your own…
Barriers to…
Inquiry is not easy because it seems to be a basic human trait not to face or to value the truth. Some might say that this tendency is epidemic in a world preoccupied with whatever we think will give us a sense of our own value if only we could acquire it. But it is a misunderstanding to believe that we will lose what is desirable in the external world if we turn inward to the truth of our experience. Making contact with our Beingness never robs us of anything that has true value. As A.H. Almaas says, “You can be famous, rich, sexy, have a family, a career—all these things. And you can have them in the fullness of essence rather than always…
fact, when we are living according to our essence, it is possible to finally love our lives and…
But it is more than fear of loss that is responsible for this predisposition: It seems that truth in and of itself is threatening. When we are invested in our personal positions and who we take ourselves to be, then anything or anyone that challenges that is perceived as a threat. The ego is highly resistant to any challenge to its structures, which it believes were built to protect us from hurt. All kinds of beliefs, conditionings, patterns, self-images, deficiencies, habits, and residues of the past…
Our resistance is often the first thing that we run into when we begin to inquire: The mind will doubt or distract, the heart will blame, the body will feel numb or constricted, or we might simply get obstinate and complain that we “don’t want to.” In fact, sometimes we will even bounce right out of an…
But we don’t need to get stopped or stuck; there is always a way through. We can extend our inquiry by encompassing whatever we are sensing, including our feelings or experiences of resistance. We might, for example, begin to feel it as impenetrable layers of rubber or plastic, or as if we were encased in a suit of armor. Once…
Making contact and being with these layers of emotions and bodily sensations are necessary parts of inquiry. As we continue in the process, we will be surprised to find that the most painful thing about our pain may actually be our resistance to experiencing it. We can actually discover that once we make contact with a veiled hurt or deficiency or other experiences…
This entire subject of turning inward, of inquiring more deeply into our experience, can seem counterintuitive to our normal egoic self, which has spent its whole life…
we possess an instinctual drive toward experiencing pleasure and shielding ourselves from pain. The ego believes that this is the only way we can be happy; thus, we tend to spend a lot of our time planning and engaging in activities that will accomplish this. These escapes almost invariably include obsessively making more money or spending more money,…
So why would we want to purposely contact the pain of the past? If we need to ask this question, there’s something we haven’t yet understood: Unresolved pain never really goes away. Our personality incorporates a conglomeration of strategies to try to sidestep it or pretend it isn’t really there. But our pain keeps coming back to haunt us through repetitive, difficult life experiences that eventually become impossible to ignore. When we can’t push these away or go around them, we usually go to the next level of trying to cope with our pain. We believe that we need to change or fix…
the world. We don’t recognize that the past literally lives in our bodies and that the world will obligingly reflect that pain…
In order to transform our pain, and to ultimately fulfill our potential as human beings, we have to touch that pain with consciousness, be present to it and understand it. Knowing this, we can now consider the possibility that we may have to change our relationship to our pain. Instead of considering it an enemy or a threat, we…
Another barrier to inquiry is our predilection for doing. Our cultural bias is toward working hard and manifesting and creating our own reality through personal effort. We expect everyone to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and we judge those who don’t. This bias aligns perfectly with the ego’s propensity to constantly be in action. We probably…
The doer is a major part of the problem and can’t come along for the ride. An inquiry is an unfoldment that happens by making contact with our experience and our underlying Beingness, our true nature. And the spiritual journey as a whole is the unfolding of that Beingness into deeper layers of reality. So we can’t do it, we can only be it. This is one of the most difficult notions to grasp:…
As we travel the path toward our true nature, our deeper self, we soon run into the major false guide in our human journey—the inner critic, or superego. We have many defensive and repressive parts of our personalities, but this is the one that most consistently interferes with…
The False Guide: The…
Our inner critic (the superego, often referred to as the judge) tells us how we should behave, think, and feel. It criticizes us, puts us down, judges us, blames and shames us; it threatens, humiliates, and invalidates us. This superego has an answer for everything and is convinced that it knows what should happen.
When we start to notice how the inner critic operates, it dawns on us how much time we spend evaluating ourselves; in fact, we see that most of our internal dialog is the struggle with our inner critic. We also begin to notice that we never seem to be able to live up to its standards.
So we end up trying to get the inner critic to change its…
fact, the superego’s disapproval keeps us so focused on its criticism that it impedes our becoming more conscious about ourselves. In the process, we lose a lot of our energy that could be used for…
It is vitally important to learn how to identify this inner critic and defend against it. But before we can do that, we need to understand just what the inner critic is and where it comes from. How did…
When we were young—usually between the ages of two and five—we were taught the rules of how we are supposed to behave. There were things we could do and things we couldn’t do. Maybe it wasn’t okay to be angry with Mommy. She might have spanked you, or even worse, she could have withdrawn her love from you. Because you were trying to get the perfect love of your parents, you didn’t want to do or even feel anything that might upset them or that would make you feel…
We can see that the inner critic’s original job was to protect us. But we ended up internalizing our parents’ rules, and we still believe they are the key to how we are supposed to be. In addition, we internalized the moral standards of our culture and our family’s religion. The superego does a masterful job of taking the kernel of truth within these standards and somehow turning it against us. It is working all…
Obeying the commands of the inner critic keeps us locked in the past and takes us away from our pain instead of into it—even though, paradoxically, its tactics cause us further pain. And the superego’s strategies block us from being who we could be in the world…
Then your energy will be freed up for the inquiries that you will be making throughout the course of this book. And as you become stronger and more confident in disengaging from the inner critic, you will experience the joy…
Further, once you start to make contact through inquiry with the layers that are deeper than the habits, dictates, and early childhood conditioning that make up the inner critic, you will begin to discover an inner guidance system that is more grounded in reality and a part of your true nature. You will act from an…
Qualities That Support Our…
Openness Curiosity Tolerating not knowing Having no goal or preference Valuing the truth for its own sake Being present Lightness Compassion and kindness Determination…
We need to be open in order to see the truth, to allow whatever comes up, without taking any position or having a preference about it. This means that we have to…
If we think we know the answer, then we…
Similarly, having a goal, preference, or desired outcome in mind means that we think we know where our inquiry should lead, which will block its natural flow. We may be tempted to have a goal of alleviating the particular suffering or pain that we are experiencing when…
might also find ourselves orienting our inquiry in a specific direction that we believe to be desirable. Doing any of these things implies that we think we know better than God, true nature, existence,…
The truth of what is unfolding directly in our experience is more important than our comfort, our beliefs, or what we want to have happen. When the love of the truth is not our highest value, our inquiry is not authentic…
Remember that the truth you discover via inquiry will never be a conceptual truth or a set of facts; it will be the living truth of who you are. The truth will set you free, but for that to happen, it has to become the most…
Being present also requires us to start exactly where we are—with whatever is happening right now. It is not about what…
As we meet our resistances and defenses in the process of inquiry, sometimes the investigation can become heavy. To balance this heaviness, we need to bring a lightness to the…
Being kind and not rejecting ourselves does not mean indulging in false compassion. What I mean by “false compassion” is our attempts to feel better by trying to take away the pain. Whether we do this to ourselves or to others, it is a disservice, because it takes us—and them—away from the truth of what is happening and the…
When we are kind and compassionate with ourselves, our hearts can be open, making us more intimate with ourselves, more vulnerable, and more able to feel secure. We can allow ourselves to be exactly where we are, even if it…
First, start with where you are. You are the one who is responsible for the money in your household, and you feel resentment about that. Curiosity arises, and it brings up the questions, “Why am I the one who always takes care of our finances, and why does that make me feel so bad?” You stay present with the feeling of resentment, with no goal, in openness, not knowing what is going to be revealed. Images or other sensory remembrances of your family history with your alcoholic father arise, including specific memories of how his words, actions, and attitudes affected you emotionally. You know directly that your belief about your husband comes from this family situation because you feel the truth of it, and you now understand the connection between your past and
your present in relation to this issue. You have the courage to allow yourself to feel in your belly the pain that this belief has caused, even though it feels scary. The inquiry continues as you follow the thread, and your initial questions shift to, “What is this fear?” As you stay present with the fear as it arises, you continue to follow the thread. Even though it feels difficult to stay with the fear, you find that you are able to remain in touch with the most powerful motivator for your inquiry, your deep love of the truth. You trust yourself to move through the process in your own way, at your own pace, and are rewarded with an experience of expansiveness and possibility. You recognize that you have other options that were not apparent to you before. As a new sense of freedom opens up, you realize that you had the strength to move all the way through your inquiry as well as the compassion to hold yourself gently as you experienced painful memories.
Whatever occurs at each step leads to exactly what you need to experience. So every inquiry is successful. No matter what happens, it will bring you closer to the truth of who you are.
Inquiry is an extremely powerful tool for penetrating the layers of our defenses and resistances. In our example, inquiry opened up the realm of the experience of fear to reveal spaciousness and potentiality. When we become willing to dive into the middle of our money issues, feel the pain and discomfort of our emotions, reactions, beliefs, and whatever else arises, we will be rewarded with the truth about ourselves.
Our past, and the pain itself, can serve us by becoming the food for our journey. As we meet our feelings, ideas, and beliefs and experience them being transformed, we become more and more of who we truly are—which is not our suffering but our Beingness, our true nature. The process of inquiry removes the power we have given to our unconscious and makes these feelings, ideas, and beliefs transparent so that the difficulties they have been creating in our lives can begin to disappear. This is transformation.
Your Own Practice #1: Letting Inquiry Find Its Own Path
Whatever is revealed, moment by moment, stay present with that. In other words, let the inquiry follow its own path. Remain with your experience until either the pain subsides or you have a recognition (seeing a piece of a pattern) and perhaps even an understanding (seeing a whole pattern and how it plays out in your life).
When Inquiry Gets Stuck
Below are a few questions that you can ask yourself when you are triggered by a reaction or a negative emotion and don’t know what to do. What am I experiencing emotionally right now? How is that affecting my body? When else have I experienced the same or a similar emotional reaction? How often? How far into the past do I remember that happening? Whom do these feelings remind me of? Is it someone from my past? Someone I am connected with in the present?
is ultimately possible to follow your own thread of inquiry into the Absolute Beingness of everything, which is not different from who you are at your core.
some point, you will begin to experience that you are love and joy. These are neither fleeting feelings nor states that you can work to acquire—they are the essence of who you are. When you are in touch with that truth, the things and experiences that you may be seeking outside of yourself will pale in comparison.
Chapter 2 What Is Money?
What is money? Dictionary definitions vary, but they generally run along the lines of “something accepted as a medium of exchange, measure of value, or means of payment.” The root of the word “money” derives from the Latin moneta. In the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins, John Ayto describes the root as follows: an epithet used in ancient Rome for the goddess Juno was Moneta… also applied to her temple in Rome, which contained a mint. And so in due course, moneta came to mean ‘mint’… then ‘stamp for coining’, and finally ‘coin’—the meaning transmitted via old French moneie to English money.
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First, because our money is worth nothing in and of itself, it only has value when it can be changed into, or exchanged for, something else more tangible; thus, we are still reliant on others to provide what our money can purchase. Second, because the value of money is continually changing, we are forever dependent on the economics of our societies to determine the valuation of our currencies.
The Illusion of Separateness
Money is a fascinating medium of paradox. During periods when our economic stability is threatened, it can seem to be a source of pain or fear or even terror. But those conditions also invite us to use the situation to our best advantage—to advance consciousness on the planet.
The good news is that economic crises challenge the egoic notion that we are autonomous individuals who can exist without one another.
In fact, most of us spend every day entrenched in the mantra “me, mine, my.” The belief in our separateness contributes to both the competitiveness in our money system and our suffering with regard to money. And it feeds the perception that the other guy is either someone to get something from or someone who might take something from you.
I believe that at our core, each of us is not separate from the infiniteness of God, Being, true nature. At the most basic level, we are not defined by the boundaries between self and other. We all manifest from the same core. This leads to a fundamental question: What does it mean to have a personal identity? If we all share the same Beingness, how can we understand the distinction between our individuality and our oneness with the whole? The paradox is that each of us is—and all of us are—ultimately one, inseparable from the whole; at the same time, every one of us is a unique eye for the whole of existence. Our uniqueness expresses itself in the specific ways in which we manifest the deepest part of ourselves, our true nature. We can describe our potential as the capacity for individual expression, freed up from believing and acting as though we were separate entities. This is a major shift from our ego identity as a separate, bounded being.
Through our spiritual practice, we begin to transform our individuality and to increasingly experience moments of union with our true nature. Now and then, we even get a glimpse of a fundamental truth: that if love is at every point in the universe, then we are not separate from it.
Money as Energy
But just as our deepest nature is not the superficial self, money itself cannot be fully understood from any conventional viewpoint. So let’s look beneath the surface.
Energy is more fundamental than matter. This is no longer merely a spiritual—or what some would call a New Age—principle. It is the actual underlying nature of all reality, and it forms the basis of the new field of quantum physics. If this is true, then we can see that money is a form of unfolding energy. A
simple example will make this apparent.
have heard that in the average life of a single dollar bill, which is said to be twenty-nine months, millions of dollars in transactions occur. That is quite a circulation!
Money is not just a thing, an object; it is a flow, an unfolding flow of energy.
On its own, money is, in a sense, alive, as fluid and energetic as anything else in manifestation, but it is attached to nothing. The meaning we assign to it and the energy we imbue it with are what give it power.
Each of us continuously radiates our energy all around us, impacting both the spaces we enter as well as whatever and whomever we come in contact with. We don’t need quantum physics to prove this; we have our own direct experience. You have probably said to yourself at some time, “I don’t like that person’s energy” or “I don’t like the vibe of this place.”
A “love” crystal looks much different from a “hate” crystal. Pure water appears in stark contrast with polluted water. Water exposed to the name “Satan” or the words “you make me sick” looks frighteningly different from water exposed to the words “angel” or “you’re beautiful.”
When we discover that we are composed of about 55 percent (in men) or 60 percent (in women) water, it certainly gives us pause to consider our potential vulnerability to all sorts of things that we are not normally aware are affecting us.
We are constantly bringing our hate, our love, our fears, our desires—in fact, the whole range of our human feelings, intentions, thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes—to our money. Money becomes an instrument of the energy we give it. And since we largely express ourselves in the world through money, it seems that our consciousness definitely has a role to play in how we continue to shape our world.
As A.H. Almaas says, “At the depths of knowing ourselves as true nature we find that energy and presence (our beingness) are inseparable. They differentiate in our experience for various reasons but they are ultimately not separate.”
It is important to remember that because money carries energy in the same way that water does, our experience of receiving it and giving it doesn’t affect only ourselves; our attitudes and emotions are transferred to others as well.
Money as a Mirror of Our Energy
In the last chapter about barriers to inquiry, we saw that our energy cannot flow if it is trapped in ego structures. Because we carry these same limitations into the domain of money, both our life energy and our money energy will flow more freely as these structures dissolve. These energies will then be more available for experiencing and expressing our creativity and our Beingness.
range of perceptions and feelings regarding money is huge—from oppression to freedom, from resentment to gratitude, from greed to generosity, and everything imaginable in between.
Your Own Practice #1: Identifying the Energy That You Give to Money
On a fresh page in your notebook or on your computer, list as many things as you can that describe what money means to you. Include your feelings about money, the characteristics of money as you observe it operating in the world and in your own life, and anything else that describes your relationship to the…
The Influence of Personal and Collective Beliefs One of the main energy sources that we bring to money is our beliefs. Beliefs are not just objects or energetic forms that are disconnected from who we are; they become part of our consciousness. Almost without exception, they limit our point of view, but we don’t know this because we are certain that they are the truth. We don’t recognize that when we enter the realm of belief, we are saying that we know how the universe operates.…
We all have a great many beliefs around money, and usually they…
Let’s look first at some common collective beliefs about money: There is a limited supply of money. You are responsible for replenishing your supply. You must protect your money. You must save for retirement. Money comes from somewhere else, and you have to go out and get it. You must work hard to increase your supply of money. If you want a larger share,…
Beliefs that are more personal might include any of the following examples: I can’t have everything I want. Other people are smarter and better than I am. Some people have the skill of making money, and I don’t. I can’t get something for nothing. I can’t make a lot of money and be spiritual at the same time. I have to settle for a job that I’m not…
Your Own Practice #2: Your Money Beliefs…
Look through the list of beliefs and attitudes about money that you will find at the end of this chapter. Notice which statements evoke a significant response in you. As you read each one, what are you feeling, both emotionally and in your body? What is your breathing like? Are you remaining physically relaxed, or are your shoulders and neck tense? As you take in each statement, do you feel surprised? depressed? relieved? anxious?…
When you have finished reading and working through all the chapters in this book, you might want to look at these statements again to see how our journey together has…
The Rules of the…
But when we no longer identify so completely with being a separate, bounded individual and when we are not so mesmerized by the beliefs that we carry about money, we can become more objective about how money is operating in our lives. And the experience of more freedom will be the result.
What can we understand about ourselves and our relationship to money that will illuminate our path toward becoming our true nature? For now, however, just begin to consider the possibility that you can be free of the realm of ego in your relationship to money. Ask yourself this: How would your relationship to money change if you understood that abundance, like love, is not a pie but an aspect of Being, our true nature?
Money and Parental Conditioning
By identifying our individual family histories, which have had a powerful impact on our ongoing experience of money, we will create a stronger foundation for our overall money inquiry. This will provide the roots to balance our wings on this journey.
By the time you came to know what money is, you were already steeped in your parents’ attitudes and beliefs, because these permeated the very atmosphere of the household in which you grew up. Inevitably, you brought these parental cues into your own early money experiences.
Because this early conditioning of your relationship to money greatly influences how you currently operate in the domain of money and finances, inquiring into your relationship to money in early childhood can be very revealing.
If you give yourself fully to the inquiry that is the focus of the rest of this chapter, it will offer you a direct taste of what we have been discussing here and, more important, a taste of the freedom that can be yours without those unconscious childhood influences at play.
Your Own Practice #3: Exploring Your Family’s Money Messages
Part 1 In your notebook or on your computer, answer the following questions. Your answers can be as long or as short as you like. Notice any tendency to want to skip or avoid entirely a specific question or questions. What were your family’s financial circumstances when you were born? Did these change over the course of your childhood? If so, how? How did this affect you? When do you remember first hearing about money? Who told you about it? Can you recall any impressions from that time? What was the emotional climate around money when you were young? For example, was there a feeling of abundance, of deprivation, of something in between? Did that climate often fluctuate? Under what conditions? What was each of your parents’ relationship to money? Were their views compatible, or was there dissension or fighting about money? Who in your family was responsible for earning and managing the money? Did the responsible person(s) do a good job? What were their attitudes about handling the family finances? What were the feelings of the other family members toward them? Was money talked about openly in your family or was it a taboo subject—or something in between? Was your relationship to money encouraged and supported by your parents? Was it ignored? minimized? Did you get an allowance? A savings account in your name? Were you given money for doing certain tasks at home? Did you have a job, such as delivering newspapers, or were you in some other way made responsible around money? Or were you just given everything you wanted? What early experiences with money seem most significant to you now? Part 2 This part can be done as either a silent interior monologue on your own or it can be done with a partner or friend, in which case your monologue will be spoken aloud, with your partner as a witness. When we are new to inquiry and don’t have the support of a partner, it can sometimes be helpful to do our inquiry in written form to stimulate our process. In addition, any of the qualities and capacities discussed in chapter 1 can be brought to bear to support this inquiry, so it will be helpful to look back at these and review them before you begin.
Orientation and Method
Even if some of the questions are uncomfortable to answer, inquiry can be such an exciting and revealing experience that you may find yourself approaching it each time with an increasingly positive expectation of coming to know yourself better.
Beginning the Inquiry Sit comfortably in a chair or cross-legged on the floor, with your back straight and your mind alert. To help you make contact with your body, sense your arms and your legs and connect with your breathing.
Now ask yourself the following questions. If you are with a partner, he or she can ask the questions in the second person, using “you” and “your.” What does my personal history reveal about my relationship to money today? What values and beliefs or judgments that I have about money are related to my personal history? Are these beliefs working for me or against me? How do I see these values and beliefs currently impacting my relationship to money?
If You Get Stuck If the flow of the monologue has stopped, you might ask yourself the questions again or review your answers to the questions in part 2. Remember, it is very important to meet your experience with kindness and compassion. This is a fertile place for the inner critic to jump in and hamper your investigation; having a nonjudgmental, patient attitude toward yourself will make it difficult for the superego to interfere with your process.
Summary
Money Beliefs and Attitudes
Place a check mark next to the statements that you agree with or that evoke a significant response in you, whether positive or negative. As you read each one, observe any thoughts, feelings, or physical sensations that seem important or that reveal something you were not aware of before. For more specific instructions, please review the section Your Own Practice #2 in this chapter. _____1. Don’t tell people how much money you make. _____2. People with money are better than I am. _____3. People who don’t have money aren’t as good as I am. _____4. Having a lot of money will make me less spiritual or pure. _____5. You should only buy things on sale. _____6. Having a lot of money is a big responsibility. _____7. There is always enough money to go around. _____8. Don’t be wasteful. _____9. Getting rich is a matter of luck or fate. _____10. Getting rich isn’t for people like me. _____11. Striving for wealth won’t allow much time for anything else in life. _____12. To be rich, you have to use people and take advantage of them. _____13. If I get rich, everyone will want something from me. _____14. We have to keep up with the Joneses. _____15. If I have a lot of money, it means that someone else is going to have less. _____16. Having excess money means you’re greedy. _____17. I’m not very good in the area of money and finances. _____18. If I get a lot of money, I might lose it. _____19. If I really strive for wealth and don’t succeed, I’ll feel like a failure. _____20. I have the potential for wealth; all I need is a break. _____21. This just isn’t the right time for me to start “going for it” financially. _____22. I have no concept of money. _____23. Money isn’t really that important. _____24. You can’t strive for wealth and be happy and fulfilled at the same time. _____25. Money can cause a lot of problems. _____26. It’s not right to make a lot more money than my parents. _____27. You can’t get rich doing exactly what you love. _____28. Trying to earn money is a hassle and a struggle. _____29. It takes money to make money. _____30. People should only have as much money as they need to live comfortably. _____31. Striving for wealth can cause stress and health problems. _____32. It’s difficult to get rich these days. _____33. Most good opportunities to make money through investments are gone. _____34. Given my past, it would be difficult for me to acquire wealth. _____35. I’m not intelligent enough to become wise about money. _____36. I’m not educated enough to be wise about money. _____37. I’m too young to get rich. _____38. I’m too old to get rich. _____39. As a woman, it’s much more difficult for me to be wise about money. _____40. It’s not right for me to be wealthy while others have nothing. _____41. I wish I didn’t have to deal with money. _____42. I don’t enjoy managing money. _____43. I don’t have time to manage money. _____44. I don’t need to manage my money because I hardly have any. _____45. A penny saved is a penny earned. _____46. A penny…
Chapter 3 Spirit and…
Since pure consciousness is the basis of the universe, consciousness is ultimately who we are. As human beings, we are being called to recognize this truth, even though we may have forgotten it. In fact, you could say…
A whole person is one who has integrated both spirit and matter. For the most part, humanity has separated the two and has been living a divided existence. In the West, many of us have been almost entirely focused on what we can acquire and accomplish in the world and have lost touch with the why and the who behind all that effort. We have become outwardly oriented and have neglected—in some cases,…
In its primary emphasis on the body and the material world, Western culture has made great scientific and technological advances and created an affluent society—at least for the more privileged classes. But in the middle of all this materiality are millions who feel lost despite their abundance. They suffer from boredom, dissatisfaction, and anguish, feeling disconnected from themselves and others in a world where…
In the land where the spiritual and the material are out of sync, money is king. Pursuits that can keep people in balance are sacrificed in the headlong rush to acquire more and more stuff, and money itself becomes inseparable from almost all objects of desire. This is how our wealth becomes a kind of poverty. Osho put it succinctly: “Nothing fails like success. Once you succeed in your so-called worldly matters—money, power,…
A life without depth is empty, a shell of its potential. So how do we reclaim a life that is both spiritual and material? How do we come to know ourselves as our depths, our Beingness, and how can we bring that awareness into the world so that we stop functioning solely on the surface of life? How can we…
The Separate…
In the creation of an ego, each of us lumps together a collection of pieces—including images, feelings, beliefs, and other people’s projections and values—to create a sense of self, an existential center. As soon as we create a self, there is an “other.” Our conditioned view of “otherness” implies both subject (me) and object (someone else…
The creation of—and our ongoing identification with—a separate self has been supported by our physical senses, which have been conditioned to perceive forms as being separate from one another, even though our senses can be expanded beyond the limitations of physical structure. You might recognize, for example, that you can “feel” the…
It would be enough of a problem to live with this distorted sense of self that we have created, but then we also judge that self to be unacceptable and reject ourselves.
We can change those ideas again and again throughout our lives, but the self-rejection remains. This only exacerbates the split.
We do not behave as though we were an integral part of the dance of life on this planet that we all share.
is important to understand that although none of us is separate from all other selves, we are still individuals. Each human being is born with a unique individuality and a unique destiny. We don’t have to deny our individuality in order to recognize and embrace the fact that who we are in our totality exists beyond those boundaries of personal Beingness. The problem arises only if we take our individuality to be primarily a means to enact our ideas and perceptions in the world in order to become “successful” and grab what we want—no matter the cost or consequences for others or ourselves. This type of autonomy disconnects us from everything and everyone we are a part of. We are truly autonomous when we take responsibility for uncovering the truth of who we are, so that the uniqueness of our Being, which is connected to the source of everything, has the opportunity to flower into the light of day.
Without this clear understanding of the difference between individuality and the illusion of separation, we end up constricted by all kinds of psychodynamic issues, beliefs, rigidities, attachments, and defenses, some of which we are going to encounter within ourselves and inquire into in this book.
The less a separate ego self is present, the more reality will be experienced without delusions, without fragmentation, which will give our realization of oneness the possibility of expression in the world.
The Influence of Our Western History
If we look at Western European history, we can chart a course from the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century as a reaction against the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, to the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, which saw rationality and science as the primary sources of value and authority, and then to the French Revolution, which heralded the separation of church and state and the spread of secularism. These developments have delivered us into the illusion that we need to rely exclusively upon rationalism.
Very few people consider money to be a spiritual as well as a material force; instead, it has become purely a secular medium that no longer reflects the divine nature of humanity. It has been cut off from any relation to our spiritual realization
When sex and money were no longer held in balance with our spiritual nature, they became split off, repressed, and even characterized as evil. Needleman observes that we can lust after enlightenment or God in the same way that we can lust after a sexual object, and we can be just as greedy about spiritual experiences (what he calls salvation) as we are about wealth or money. The problem, then, isn’t sex or money per se, but rather the underlying lust…
Our Animal…
A.H. Almaas refers to the animal nature of human beings as the realm of the animal soul. It is the part of us that is not unlike any of the other animals inhabiting the planet. We are, after all, a species of mammals. The motivation of the animal soul derives from the instinctual need for survival, sex, and social connection. This aspect of who we are is driven by a…
It is important to explore our animal soul because a tremendous amount of energy is tied up in that part of us. In fact, it is inseparable from of our life force. This energy cannot be destroyed, and it can’t be repressed for long. But it certainly can be distorted, and therein lies the difficulty. When we realize and accept that we need this energy…
Our animal nature views the world in terms of objects of gratification because it believes that they will help us to survive. It fixates on objects to the exclusion of the formless depths and dimensions of our Being. These powerful drives that operate underneath our consciousness want to preserve life; they are not at all concerned with the higher mysteries of being human. We become preoccupied with more superficial concerns, which dissociates us from our depth and masks our soul identity—we forget our deeper nature. The instincts of the animal soul end up…
In order to understand the play of our animal soul and its instincts, it is useful to recognize that the animal part of us includes the sexual, social, and survival instincts. These are hardwired in us, but they are also subject to our…
A distorted social instinct could manifest as dependency, superficiality, control, dominance, or the desire to achieve status or fame. The distorted sexual instinct can reveal itself in a chase after pleasure, in compulsiveness, or in addiction, sexual or otherwise. The survival instinct, when…
But it can be confusing when we try to get a balanced perspective of money because we do, in fact, need money to survive. The animal soul does not deal in dollars and cents—money is way too abstract a concept for it. But because human beings associate money with the possibility of unfathomable pleasure and the ability to…
This is an especially important consideration in our changing economic climate because fear and uncertainty are experienced by almost everybody, and we are all affected by what is in the collective…
When we live in the unfolding now of reality as a spiritual being, we recognize that uncertainty is inherent in life. Unknowability is part of the mystery; therefore, not knowing is natural. The only thing…
If you have been caught in fight, or flight, or freeze in reaction to a situation that feels overwhelming, you know how powerful these drives can be. But the more conscious you become of how your instincts operate, the more energy will be liberated for…
According to A.H. Almaas, when we liberate the energy from our distorted instincts through the practice of inquiry, we can align and harmonize that energy with our spiritual practice, and our instincts will ultimately be transformed from social, sexual, and survival drives into the spiritual depths of intimacy, union, and selflessness.…
We begin by accepting our life force and all of our drives and desires, recognizing that they form part of our normal human experience. This allows us to be exactly where we are, trusting that the process…
But the feminine can’t do this without the masculine. At their core, the masculine and the feminine principles are not separate—they are both part of the underlying oneness of Being—but differentiation is necessary for creation. It is the dance between the two that is…
The masculine and the feminine are really one…
I recently heard a talk by Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in which he observed that because we have not been recognizing and honoring the gifts of the feminine, we have been living in the shadow of matter, which is materialism.
maximizes the benefit to investors but ignores the need for sustainability, not to mention support for the farmers who grow our food and others who provide the necessities of life for all of us.
The individuals who run these institutions cannot be objective because they live within a distorted mind-set, whether consciously or unconsciously. They are not interested in becoming whole; as long as their own interests are being served, they see no reason to reflect on their inner lives. Rather than making decisions based on the values that would flow from such reflection, they act through layers of rationalization, manipulation, greed, and hidden agendas, which are beginning to be not so hidden. You only need to look at the astronomical bonuses that Wall Street keeps paying out in the midst of a recession and economic instability to recognize how true this is.
This means that opposing the patriarchy is not what we need to do. Fighting and resistance merely drain our life energy, resources, time, and creativity, and they crystallize the current split between the masculine and the feminine. Grappling with problems only externally will not yield the solutions the world is desperate for. What is needed is to come into balance within ourselves.
I was very good at my job, but it came with a price. In competing with men, I also became more and more like them, even to the point of losing the female curves in my body.
woke up to the realization that it was not the attributes of the feminine that were being valued in me in my chosen career but rather my capacity to be a clone of a man. Instead of bringing the balance of the feminine to my profession, my femininity was being subsumed.
The reassessment of goals and choices that then followed contributed to my turning inward and starting my spiritual journey. I began to understand that equality is not about conquering the other; it is about becoming the depth of my potential. I did not abandon my career but found new ways instead to be myself both as a woman and as a human being, inside and outside of the workplace.
The Symbolism of the Cross
How can we move ourselves back into a balance that honors both the spiritual and the material aspects of our human experience, without separating the two?
It is a popular New Age notion that we shouldn’t have to struggle. Our lives should be happy and easy, and if they aren’t, there’s something wrong with us. But as we have already discussed, pain is part of our human journey, and no one is exempt from having to contend with barriers and obstacles, including internal ones, such as our self-image, conditioning, and beliefs. We resist this understanding, and our resistance is profound.
our ego structures are invested in repressing them in an attempt to feel better. We have a lot of help doing just that: Our pharmacological society prescribes pills for every imaginable pain so that we don’t have to suffer.
To release the energy tied up in our structures, we must be willing to enter into our wounds. As paradoxical as it may seem, entering into our darkness and finding the truth about ourselves will lead to a healing and wholeness that nullify the previous, limited concepts of happiness that most of us have. There is no other way to wholeness. In fact, experiencing pain and suffering consciously is the journey into a finer and more luminous consciousness of Being. The moment you accept pain without rejection, your experience of it changes; its very quality seems to change. As Osho once said, “One cannot believe that suffering can be changed into ecstasy, that pain can become joy.”
Each time we meet our own pain with consciousness, we are part of the evolutionary force of Being. We become more and more open to the depth of Beingness, to the mystery of existence. Ultimately, the potential of all human beings straddling both worlds lies in the experience of totality, the oneness of Being. Then we not only see that our true nature is everything, we also know ourselves as that.
There is an engaged dialectic between the two that is dynamic and living, in which our depth of Being informs the manifest and vice versa. Authentic human experience requires our presence in both worlds, the inner and the outer, the divine and the manifest. When we exist in one world alone, we are not complete human beings. Our destiny is to be both spirit and matter, and our struggle is the means to that destiny. As Osho said, “It [our full humanity] is the synthesis of matter and soul. It is the declaration that there is no conflict between matter and consciousness, that we can be rich on both sides. We can have everything that the world can provide, that science and technology can produce, and we can still have everything that a Buddha, a Kabir, a Nanak finds in his inner being—the flowers of ecstasy, the fragrance of godliness, the wings of ultimate freedom.”
What they wanted were tips and quick fixes.
For most people, money is a thing that must be acquired rather than a meeting place of the spiritual and the material.
Our challenge, then, is to bring money back to the place where it belongs. This is not a question of taking a vow of poverty but of not making money the primary object of our desire and attention. We must bring money into balance with our spiritual nature. This requires a dramatic shift in attitude and point of view, which is not easy but is necessary—and it is possible.
Your job is not just about money. It’s not even about learning how to work with people, or impressing friends, or getting respect, or having security. Consider looking at your job as an opportunity to inquire and to know yourself. The difficulties you encounter, your attractions and aversions, your achievements and disappointments, all light the fire that you need to walk through in order to evolve your consciousness. From this perspective, instead of being a self-centered, competitive, ego-driven occupation, your work can become a spiritual practice, a meeting between the vertical and the horizontal—an integration of the spiritual and the manifest.
One way to begin to shift your perception of these matters is to close your eyes and visualize a two-dimensional image of the vertical and horizontal axes of the cross—which mirrors the split between the material and the spiritual.
Your Own Practice #1: The Spiritual and the Material
The form of the inquiry will be two monologues, either silent interior monologues on your own or else with one or two others, in which case your monologue will be spoken aloud with your partner(s) witnessing.
Give yourself a few moments to drop into your experience. To help make contact with your body, sense your arms and your legs and connect with your breathing. Now you are ready for the monologue questions. The monologues should be at least fifteen minutes each. How do you see your money issues in relation to the two worlds of being human—the spiritual and the material?
Include in this exploration your sense of how your relationship to money reflects or indicates a split between the spiritual and material worlds, as well as how it is a harmonizing force, both in your personal life and in the world around you. You might do this by looking at the various domains in your life, such as work, intimate relationships, social interactions, service to others, your financial life, and your inner life.
Your Own Practice #2: Animal Soul Distortions
Explore in this monologue your attachment to pleasure and material objects. See if you recognize in your attitudes and behaviors around money any distortion of the instincts of your animal soul, and identify for yourself what these are. How do the instincts of the animal soul show themselves in your relationship to money?
After each inquiry, take time to reflect with your partner on what you have seen or understood. If you are alone, you may want to journal your insights to help you focus the reflection.
Imagine if money were an expression of the deepest nature of reality for every human being. What would the world be like?
Chapter 4 Where Am I?
Without a willingness and a healthy capacity to take responsibility for our own lives, we end up blaming others. We make everyone and everything else—our parents, an unfair boss, our ex-husband or-wife, the latest crooked investment scheme, the government, even God—responsible for the things that we don’t like in our lives, as though we were victims or without choice. We become lazy and habitual in the actions we take, bringing little or no consciousness to them.
The first is that being spiritual is not contradictory to enjoying material well-being; it is in fact complementary. Second is the recognition that the way we manifest in the world as human beings is through our actions. So, when can we say we are being responsible? We are responsible when we care about the impact our choices have on the world.
It can be difficult for any of us to change our lives to accommodate unfolding insights and realizations on the spiritual journey. But none of us can afford to compromise what we know to be true in order to continue living as we have been. Otherwise, we are not respecting reality; we are being indulgent. Although it may not yet be fully clear why this is so, we actually hamper ourselves on the spiritual journey toward freedom.
So how do we become more aware of the actions we take? What is right action? Do we know?
The Diamond Approach teaches that right action is actually an ethical question: When we align ourselves with truth, we naturally have an ethical response to the situations and circumstances in our lives. Ethical responses are in alignment with Being, and thus with truth. So the more we live our lives in an impeccably truthful way, the more we will be able to integrate Being, true nature, into our lives.
And that is why any evolution—or revolution—must have its source in the individual, not society. As Osho said, “There is no idea of changing the society or the world, because there is no society. Only individuals exist. Society is an illusion.
Impeccability requires of each of us both integrity and responsibility. The more mature we are, the more we have a sense of what integrity is and the more we are able to bring what we know to be true into every action. Truth doesn’t compromise, and if we are sincere on our path, neither do we.
I am not interested in guiding you to give up all your possessions or all your money—that’s as much of an unhealthy extreme as unbridled materialism. Nor will I urge you to withdraw from taking action in the world, because, as we have seen, that is part of your physical experience, part of being human. Our work here is, rather, to bring your consciousness, your Beingness, into your money. If you approach your financial life from Being and let your inspiration come from there, you will maintain a balance between your spiritual and physical natures and enjoy both what you do and the fruits of your actions. The question is, how do we get there?
It is not easy. Making the necessary changes will often feel inconvenient and can sometimes mean sacrificing some of the things we may be most attached to, including how we spend our money, accumulate possessions, negotiate financial issues for ourselves and in our close relationships, and so on. It is also not easy because, until recently, the First World has celebrated indulgence. The “solution” to the 9/11 crisis in the United States, for example, was to go shopping.
Right Action
Money can be a channel for who we really want to be in the world or, more importantly, who we are capable of being. It can be a reflection of the unique gifts and capacities that we have within us. What if we could embrace a rich inner life and have our outer life express our spiritual realization?
We need the self-knowledge that will result from this exploration in order to see what taking appropriate action looks like in our journey toward wholeness and balance.
Before we go further, take a moment to notice what you are feeling right now as you anticipate taking these steps. Without judgment, simply observe: Are you feeling resistance? Are you open and curious? Feeling anxiety or even dread?
Since money is embedded in virtually all of our actions, our relationship to money lives right in that center. So anything you are feeling right now is exactly what you need to be feeling.
Before we go deeper into the question of what practical right action is in regard to money, I want to talk about a spiritual principle of financial management that is fundamental to having a sound relationship to money. That is: All manifestation belongs to the Absolute, the depth of Being. In other words, God owns it all. None of it belongs to us. On the spiritual journey, we begin to recognize that true will is not my will (attempting to push our own personal agenda successfully on the world) but thy will (being open to the flow of the movement of Being through us). It can be very difficult to live this, moment to moment, as we take action in the world. But if we do our best to align our will with what we know to be true, we will eventually recognize that our true will is that of the divine, our true nature, or whatever you want to call it.
What are some of the implications of this principle of nonownership? First, if money is not ours, then our responsibility for it is one of stewardship. The definition of “stewardship” on Thesaurus.com is “preservation.” Some synonyms are “conservancy,” “custody,” “guardianship,” “management,” “protection,” “safeguarding,” “saving,” and “supervision.”
every financial decision we make is a spiritual decision.
Every decision concerning what we spend, invest, save, lend, charge for our work, bequeath—or not—is at its core a statement about where we are spiritually.
When we realize this, we can also see that it is impossible to be spiritually impeccable if we are not truthful and in integrity in every area of our financial lives. We can’t skirt or make-believe responsibility. We cannot fake stewardship.
What counts is how you deal with however much is under your stewardship.
“I have been on a spiritual path and haven’t focused on money. As I got older, I suddenly recognized that I needed an opportunity to catch up, and he promised me a high rate of return.”
We can’t make joy happen, and it is not dependent on any external condition. Joy comes when our Beingness expresses itself through the heart. The more we are ourselves, the more joy is present. Once established, joy will naturally saturate all aspects of our lives, including our relationship with our money.
More likely, this seriousness is something more basic—a reflection of how trapped we are by the ego, by our sense of being a separate self, by our mind’s stringent control over our lives.
If our inner realization and outer life are to be unified, it is critical to look at our motivations for working at our jobs, professions, and careers. This is where we can best see how we manifest joy in the world.
It is human to want to be appreciated by others for the work we do, but ultimately, meaningfulness and fulfillment are a function of loving our work for its own sake. That is when work becomes creative, and our heart can be
Everyone is born with a unique individuality and destiny. If we don’t actualize this potential, then our lives are not original; they are imitations. It may turn out that our destiny lies in a life endeavor that is quite different from what we expect.
the willingness to tolerate not knowing, and valuing the truth for its own sake. When we live according to these perspectives, we allow our uniqueness to unfold and find expression in its own way; it is then that we live an original, creative, joy-filled life. Then whatever we do, work becomes more like play, an alignment with the heart, a harmonization with Being. The resulting fulfillment nourishes us on the deepest level.
Living the True Desires of Your Heart “You are a creator, and the subject of your creation is your joyful life experience. That is your mission. That is your quest. That is why you are here.” When you bring your joy into the world—and that also means into the world of money—then joy is not only an expression of Being but also a celebration of life. When the goal is no longer to make more money but rather to know the freedom of Being, it will become more apparent what right action is for you. And when you do what is right for you, you will experience enoughness, even prosperity. The answers to all of your money questions will become clear, and the money in your life will be more soulful, an expression of who you are at your present depth of being.
Only love and truth can bring us freedom, but that understanding must be lived to be deeply realized. The more awake we are, the more we are in harmony with the will of Being and the more our hearts will open and radiate love to the world through our actions. It is Beingness, coming through our individual consciousness and through our hearts as love, that is the creativity of the expanding universe.
There is no “right way” to move along this pathway. What is correct for you will be determined by your uniqueness, which will continue to unfold as your Beingness unfolds. This invitation to step into the uncertainty of the unknown is present every moment because the process of unfoldment continuously opens us to the mystery of Being. Remember that the unknown is the doorway, the only doorway, to the new. When enough people are willing to walk through this doorway in their own lives, love becomes the collective currency of our expansion, the crucial current of the evolution of consciousness. And since money is the currency of our society, there is no reason why money cannot be love.