About Money

If one has to find one driving force that seems to dominate and cause so much human action and the possession of, and hunger for which causes so much human conflict, it is money, or perhaps more accurately, the money force.  Money, like all forces, is, however, an aspect, a form and force of the Divine.

The process of our human evolution created in us a sense of separate self-hood, or ego.  The ego has the illusion that it is self-propelled, but doing an inner yoga we come to witness it is motivated and moved to action by forces over which we often have neither knowledge nor control, unless we are fully conscious beings.  And yet the rules of the game are that we have to make choices which may either further our progress or even end up damaging or destroying us.

Money exists for the realisation of the Divine’s Will for the earth and all its life forms.  In our life in the Ignorance (of the Divine’s nature and action) we seize money for ourselves and for the satisfaction of our desires. We try to possess it.  We undertake all sorts of appalling actions in order to get it, to keep it, and prevent others from taking it from us.  We create a whole world of falsehood in order to achieve this.  We are mean as hell when it comes to using it for the general good, or the good of others who may be in genuine need.  As someone said, “Meanness is the cancer of the soul”.   But we cannot take it with us when we die.  We know the possession of it doesn’t actually make us any happier.  Why do we do it?

If we only used money to fulfill our own basic needs and to ensure that it was distributed according to the true needs of all, we would be a lot happier.  But our self-interest and our current global values compel us to accept an attitude that it belongs to us.  We invent political philosophies that justify our meanness.  We elect our political parties to create a society that justifies courses of actions dominated by satisfaction of our petty little egos that result in consequences that are self-destructive to all of us and to the planet.  Why?

It appears to be universally true that, as the journalist George Monbiot has written, immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it. He quotes a worker at a British private airport telling that every day jets built to take 174 passengers, would take off carrying a single passenger, having filled up with 25,000 litres of fuel. 

What some of the seriously wealthy have done is to put ‘their’ money to causes that will help to make the world a better place. Of course, many charitable people seek to donate their excess wealth to charities and causes that alleviate the suffering of the poor and problems of society.  But whilst this may mend things broken in our society, it generally does not address the causes of the poverty or suffering.  Andrew Carnegie (1835 – 1919), the Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist and one of the richest Americans in history who, in pursuit of his aim to use money to create a better and more just society, founded schools and built libraries, tellingly said, “The man who dies rich dies disgraced”.  He believed that it was wrong for the rich to leave their wealth only to their family.

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, believes that one  should seek out the causes of the world’s problems and address those, using one’s own wealth, skills and experience in the process.  As for the poor, Sri Aurobindo says that “to come to their help is good, provided that it is not a vain ostentation of charity, but it is far nobler to seek a remedy for poverty so that there may be no poor left on earth.”  Sri Aurobindo saw behind appearances to the dubious inner reality of much charitable action: “The existence of poverty is proof of an unjust and ill-organised society and our public charities but the first tardy awakenings in the conscience of a robber”.

The aim of Auroville, its function as an experimental city, is to find and support the means of changing human nature to manifest a higher consciousness liberated from the ego’s illusions and division.   Ultimately Auroville’s purpose is to be the cradle for a new type of being that may be the next step in evolution.  To aid the realization of this aspiration by donating to its work is a valid cause for all those emerging from the delusion that money belongs to them. But money is still mainly in the control of individuals and a system entrenched in a falsehood and inequality that fiercely resists its conversion to the service of the Divine.  Auroville itself, notwithstanding its true purpose, is not immune from the struggle. 

Despite all appearances to the contrary, the evolution on earth is a progression to an ever wider and truer consciousness.  As humanity becomes more conscious, its relationship to the money force will change from the sense of ownership to awakening to the reality that we can only ever be the stewards, the custodians of money, and that its function is to serve the Divine’s work on earth.