Examine what possesses you to
understand how impoverished your really are!
All of us have been trained to
calculate our net worth basis our material assets – property owned, gold lying
unused in lockers, investments in stocks, insurance policies, vehicles, cash in
the bank. If you think you have enough, all your thinking is focused on how can
you protect your net worth, as viewed by you, from eroding and ensuring it
actually appreciates in value. And if you think you want some more, and what
you already have is not enough, all your thinking centers on amassing more
assets – everything is about property, money, stock markets and investments. In
either of these scenarios, you are being possessed by something you are not.
And that makes you, very, very, very poor in Life’s scheme of things!
The truth is you are not your bank
balance, not the property you own, not all the assets that your accountants
total up to declare your net worth. You are Life, the Universal energy, in its
purest form, and you imagine that you are a few pieces of paper and metal or a
few measures of this earth, that which you cannot take with you in any case,
when this human form of yours dies! As long as you are possessed by what you
think you own, you are not living. You merely exist.
I met a friend recently, who, by
his own admission, has plenty saved up in his bank accounts for his next two
generations of family to exist comfortably. Yet, for several months, he
confesses, he has been ‘grieving and suffering, often spending sleepless nights’,
fighting to recover a sum of money owed to him by someone. Since that person has
changed his address and is not traceable, a court order that my friend has
secured stating that the party pay up cannot be served on the latter. My friend
therefore has embarked on a pilgrimage to rid himself and his family’s path of
all the obstacles that prevent them from recovering what’s due to them! In
principle, there is nothing wrong in fighting legitimately for what is yours.
There’s no harm in undertaking a pilgrimage too. But in either situation and
effort if you are going to be ‘possessed’ by your desire to want the money desperately
or by the fear that you may not ‘get what you want’, then are you not a slave?
Of what use is all your wealth if at the end of the day you are enslaved by
what you think you possess?
Do what you think you must do to
earn your incomes, protect your wealth and grow your asset bases. Just don’t
get possessed by your material wealth.
In Life’s book, net worth is judged
not by how much you have, but how much you give. Give freely. Give food to the
hungry, give clothes to the homeless and cold people this winter, give your time
and attention to your family that perhaps doesn’t nag but pines for you, give
your love and compassion to a harassed colleague at work or give a helping hand
to a stranger struggling to cross the road or load heavy bags on to a cart at
the airport. Give without expectation __and you will feel you have gained something.
You will feel enriched. You will realize this simple truism about Life – that when
you give, you rejoice, you exult, you feel happy and blessed. When you want,
you feel tormented, depressed, fearful and always unhappy!
In reality also, all that you want
can be robbed from you __ Life can take away your power, position, prestige,
money and all your material assets. But no one, not even Life, can take away
what you can give, unless you want to give it yourself. Like your love or your
time that you choose to give someone – without any expectations of anything in
return.
Think about it! Making a difference
to someone’s Life can enrich you. Just making money for yourself actually
impoverishes you! It is the difference between making
a Life and making a living!
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