Love, Compassion, and Money
by Stuart Wilde
Most people can't get their head around the idea of money, love
and compassion being linked together. The idea that money can be
a symbol of love seems odd -- we are so programmed the other way.
Here's how they are linked; it will help you see it all in a
different light.
There's a psychological war that goes on in us humans between
self-hate and self-love. It's a part of another battle that
persists: the energy war between living and dying, building
energy and depleting energy. The two issues are wrapped up with
abundance and love, and they can very dramatically affect your
ability to earn money and pull abundance to you.
Here's the concept: You start pre-birth as an infinite spirit in
a spiritual dimension. There, the spiritual memory of what you
are is eternal, and so you have existed in some form or another
since the beginning of time. Suddenly, the spirit energy that is
the real you finds itself inside a little body, trapped there for
life, collecting new experiences.
The act of coming into the body is one of descending, leaving the
magnificence of a domain of spiritual Light and entering into
solidity and restriction. Physical restriction and emotional
difficulties; perhaps the restriction of a dysfunctional family;
poverty, disability, whatever.
It's a sacred and humbling act to accept such a learning
experience. It's an act of love, for the restriction will force a
consolidation of energy. It will force that spiritual energy to
go from hazy-wave to a solid-particle body, and it will have to
take on psychological impediments that will help it learn what it
is like to be a human.
Those impedimenta are not real to your spirit-identity. They are
borrowed from others who have lived before, they are part of the
global mind-set at the time of your birth, and so they are
imposed upon the spirit. They really don't belong. The spiritual
infinity within can't be shamed, dysfunctional, unwell, hurt, or
injured, for it is a spark of the Christ consciousness.
People often wonder why a God that is all love and compassion can
allow pain and suffering. But it's easy to see that the spirit --
the one you actually are -- doesn't "do" any pain and suffering.
It remains always in a state of grace, a state of complete
positiveness -- even if it is collecting painful memories that
the ego experiences.
By the time a child becomes a mature being, it has downloaded the
negative waves of its culture and the global mind -- the
collective mind, if you like. Your job, then, is to work your way
out of that and return to the real you, that spark of the Christ
consciousness within. That's the seminar -- transmuting the
negative into compassion and love. In other words, you are busy
re-creating your spiritual identity here in our slowish-particle
3-D world.
We start with shame. Early in our childhood, we are shamed when
people shout at us, get angry, admonish us for not using the
potty correctly, whatever. Later, we are shamed intellectually as
being stupid; or our actions and decisions are invalidated. Then,
perhaps shame kicks in as we discover that we are not
pleasing to other humans as a partner, or we are very
pleasing and are used by others. Sometimes abuse is forced
upon us in childhood. It's all very difficult stuff, this little
seminar called life.
Psychological shame kicks in as we deal with the peer pressure of
our teenage years. You have to be like this to be cool. And if
you aren't following the herd, you are ostracized. We are shamed
into conformity, even if the conformity is one of hooliganism and
drugs. There is conformity in rebellion and the counterculture,
as there is in tick-tock.
Now we're doing serious amounts of confusion and pain, and we
probably hate ourselves. We want to be something else. At times
in our dreams, we remember that we are eternal spirits, but it's
a distant memory. Right now we are humans who are insecure and
hate ourselves, and we're in various degrees of pain and anguish.
On top of all this, there is the other issue, that of living and
dying -- high energy and low energy. We have to fight our way out
of these fears and restrictions and return to our spiritual
identity. It dwells in a dimension of love. So we have to come to
love. First, it's a love of self -- not a narcissistic
egotistical love of self -- but more a physical, emotional,
psychological, and spiritual respect for self. Can we love
ourselves in spite of all we have been told, all the personal
defeats we have suffered, the shape of our face, our lack of
ability, or whatever? That's the journey.
Initially, the answer is usually no. Self-hate kicks in. We
anesthetize the pain via drugs, love making, and illusions of power. Or
we use overwork and alcohol to blot it all out, succumbing to our
addictions. We feel that if only things were different -- if only
we had more money, if only we had a different set of conditions,
or if only a certain person acted in a certain way -- then we
would be happy; people would love us, and things would be, just
fine.
That's the story of most people's lives. Self-hate gets in the
way of everything, including their moneymaking ability, because
eventually they lose the will to fight on. There's a fine balance
to the acquisition of money. It usually involves activity, and
that activity takes you further and further from your real self.
It burns energy and makes you less secure, not more secure.
The security you seek is within. It comes from seeing yourself as
beautiful. It's the act of self-love -- the acceptance,
detachment, and forgiveness of self. It's where you wake up and
remember that you are not the spotty-faced teenager who was
ridiculed and shunned; you are a powerful, eternal spirit, imbued
with the Christ consciousness, and here with a mission to fulfill
and lessons to learn -- a spirit of infinite honor and integrity
that has a connection to all the knowledge that exists.
Nobody out there is perfect. We're not trying to compete in the
perfection stakes. You can love yourself and be imperfect, as God
loves us unconditionally. I really like the image of the water
rat, this scruffy little rat that sniffles around on the edge of
muddy river banks. It doesn't look like much, but the little rat
is sitting there on a log by the side of the river, and he is
what he is. He isn't apologizing for being a water rat, but
simply stands inside a divinity and a spirituality that is the
animal spirit of "water rat."
You are what you are. You might be an Adonis in the making, or an
incredible goddess energy, or you might just be a little water
rat who stands in front of the bathroom mirror in the mornings
and says, "I'm a water rat and that's okay. I don't have to
convince people or act to please them. I don't have to work to
win their affection. I don't have to pay for them so they will
love me, because I love myself. I am what I am. I'm going to go
out today, I'm going to believe in myself, I'm going to be
honorable. I'm going to concentrate on people and treat them
fairly. I'm going to treat myself fairly, for by nurturing
myself, my energy will build and I will become secure. I know
that money flows to security, and away from insecurity. So by
being more secure, I will prosper."
When you are insecure, it turns people off. To spend money,
people have to give away a part of their security. When they make
the transfer of money to you, they have to feel solid; they have
to feel they are getting something that will make them more,
because they are paying out and becoming less right now. If you
are solid and contained and secure, it helps them feel solid, so
they transfer their cash more readily.
That is why self-hate destroys your moneymaking abilities --
partly, as I said, because it's hard for you to include yourself;
and partly because you trigger insecurity in others and that
forces them to hang on and become tight.
By booming out life force, love, strength, and encouraging words
that support people, you express a compassion for people's
insecurity. In the process, you become stronger and more
abundant. You become a divine paramedic, offering people the
oxygen mask of life force, dolloping out goodness and strength so
they become less fearful. People will respond to that life force,
and it's up to you to figure out how you're going to bill 'em.
Money is a symbol of that life force, of its appreciation. Money
can be a solidified form of love. Through the transfer of money,
we facilitate love and communication with other humans. It offers
us a simple system of providing for and loving and nurturing
ourselves, and it is one way of expressing generosity and
kindness for the less fortunate.
Metaphysics
The energy war is a simple one to understand. We generate energy
and we burn it. Modern life and its psychic and chemical
pollution threatens us daily. The personality is perpetually
slightly off-balance, slightly scared. We are constantly pushed
from love toward fear, so we look for the life force to sustain
us. As we fret and worry, we burn more etheric energy and become
more edgy.
We imagine that making a pile of cash will help us, so we rush
out to seek our fortunes. Often we use work to avoid our fears.
When we are very busy, we don't have to look deep within our
selves. But soon our lives are real complicated, and it takes
loads of our vitality and ego power to keep things flowing. Our
energy drops, and we become victims of our own self-hate. We
become lost in the false ego-self, rather than resting in the
Infinite real self. Gradually we become numb, existing in a vapid
and lonely state.
It's scary, so we look for someone whose energy we can feed upon
to sustain us. But once we start trying to suck energy from
others, they're not going to like it. They will respond by
fleeing as fast as their chubby little legs will carry them.
So as you process your love of self, and as you work on your
security by nurturing yourself, you become more neutral, less and
less an energy vampire. Eventually you have surplus energy to
dish out, and that is how you will develop compassion and true
caring for the world and the animals and humans upon it.
Now tell me that money is not involved. Of course it is, for in
the getting and dispensing of money, you learn the fine balance
of manifestation. Through work, money, and commercial activity,
you see how there is an energy trade-off between activity and
security, and yet another trade-off between love and fear. Then
there is the money lesson in the balance of giving and receiving;
and the further fine balance between respect for self,
self-worth, and respect for others.
How you make money to buy the experiences you need in this
lifetime -- and how you handle the abundance that comes in --
will be very much a part of the final spiritual picture you
present when your eternal Self returns to its Infinite Homeland,
carrying back the memory of what you were in this lifetime.
Money, compassion, energy, heart, love, fear, wealth, generosity,
meanness -- they are all characters on the same great spiritual
stage. The trick is to align to the beautiful ones, step away
from the ugliness, and accept the gift of your Infinite Self in
the process.
Action
The action of compassion and money is the act of becoming
comfortable with life's situations and the state of your bank
balance. You have to be kind to yourself, and you have to keep
your ego in control and accept life. Otherwise, the ego will
yearn for things and force you to go to work for it, to buy it
stuff to make it feel better.
Once you are at one with yourself, you'll have compassion for
your Self. Then you will, of course, nurture yourself. But you
won't have to go shopping to distract you from your fears. As you
become more aware, you become more real. Then by discarding the
useless stuff and eliminating unnecessary obligations, you become
more balanced and settled, more silent and less manic. You'll
have less activity and stress, and you'll feel better. .. and so
onwards and upwards.
Do something for yourself every day, something compassionate and
kind. I don't mean buying yourself breakfast; I mean doing
something that is spiritually or physically nurturing: a massage,
a fast, a meditation, exercise, rest, play -- that kind of thing.
For it's in the quiet time that you'll see the great abundance of
this life, and you'll move from the ego's disquiet to the
spirit's wholeness, and you'll see that the things you worry
about are often not worth the worry. In the quiet time, you'll
see what has real worth for you and what is just fluff and hype.
Once you get real, all your energy can go toward becoming what
you really need and want to become. That transformation must be a
part of your story in this lifetime. Making money is not enough
-- you will have to do something that has meaning.
You will want to collect memories in abundant settings, but you
will also want to be surrounded by love and friendship; you will
want to be doing things that you want to do.
Yes, that's your story. Put aside the little nit-picky ego stuff;
start today to act, invoke, and energize the Grand Plan, for it
is yours by right. All you have to do is agree to step up and
collect. So accept yourself, and believe in yourself. Look the
world in the eye and say, "I am what I am, and by the way,
that'll be 30,000 bucks. Thank you."
This article is excerpted from The Little Money Bible, ©1998 by
Stuart Wilde.
Author and lecturer Stuart Wilde is one of the real characters of
the self-help, human potential movement. His style is humorous,
controversial, poignant, and transformational. He has written 14
books, including those that make up the very successful Taos
Quintet, which are considered classics in their genre. They are:
Affirmations, The Force, Miracles, The Quickening, and The Trick
to Money Is Having Some. Stuart's books have been translated into
12 languages. His latest book is Sixth Sense.
See Also:
Back To Article Index
Find More Related Articles
