Money is “the consolidation of the loving living energy of divinity.” It’s very creative to think of using money as a means to support and strengthen the good, and there are any number of ways you can do this.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way with new eyes. So, stay with us, and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is the spiritual use of money. Before we begin, I would like to give credit to Alice Bailey, the founder of the Lucis Trust organization that sponsors this show. All of the dialogue that you’ll hear on this show emanates from the works of Alice Bailey. She wrote twenty-four volumes of literature, and that’s the essence of all that we talk about on this show, as is this thought: “For just as money has been in the past the instrument of men’s selfishness, now it must be the instrument of their goodwill.” I always think of money as the symbol of my energy and I also think that oftentimes we get caught up in valuing money for more or less an intrinsic worth. Probably more appropriately we should look upon money as something we make as a result of doing something we love, and if we love doing it then the money will just happen anyway. Why is money so often used for selfish purposes?
Sarah: I’m not sure, but I think one reason might be that people think of it as finite, that there’s only so much money available in the world, only so much available to them. I suppose it feeds the sense of scarcity that makes people want to corner the supply of money for themselves and the people they care about; that if you don’t grab as much as you can for yourself, it will be taken by everybody else. So, it’s probably fed by this idea that it’s limited rather than seeing money as a kind of a river of abundance that should pour throughout the world for the meeting of all need everywhere, and that each of us would take what we need but not feed our greed and our selfishness.
Dale: Yes, I often think that money is acquired for selfish purposes because there are so many selfish people in the world. They’re still focused at that level where they are more concerned about what they can acquire than what they can pass on and what they can give and share. I think that’s where it gets right back to a basic attitude of self-centeredness and greed, as you mentioned.
Sarah: We’re certainly seeing all of that played out in an incredibly discouraging way these days with the revelation of corruption on the part of the accountants Arthur Andersen and the Enron scandal. Now WorldCom is the latest scandal. All of these and many other examples have to do with a few people — probably just a few — having absolutely no sense of responsibility to the company, much less to their employees or to the larger humanity, just wanting to grab all they can for themselves and doing everything they can to make that happen.
Dale: We have to realize what selfishness does because when selfishness rules one’s life there is a danger of being actually taken over by the impulse, being possessed in a way and imprisoned by material things. One may think that he owns all of this money or all of these things, but in fact it’s the other way around.
Sarah: Your stuff owns you.
Dale: That’s right! (laughter) You are owned by all this stuff and by the money, and you can’t be released or get away from it until you begin to exercise some detachment within yourself. It’s like being released from a prison when you get the burden of all of these material things off your back.
Sarah: Maybe that’s why that fellow I knew years ago kept all his worldly possessions in two bags. He could pack everything he owned into two suitcases. Maybe that gave him a sense of freedom.
Dale: I would think so.
Sarah: (laughter) It’s strange, but you could certainly say that he was ready to change his life at the drop of a hat. I suppose it gave him a sense of liberation from being possessed by stuff, and that’s not so preposterous as it sounds.
Dale: We’ve talked about the discipleship path and the path back to God, and I think one of the early tests on this path concerns the attitude and the handling of money and wealth. It deals with the most basic sustenance that we have, the money and the material wealth that we accumulate, and if it accumulated for the self, then there may be painful consequences along that path. These are lessons that have to be worked out, and the corporate managers that you mentioned earlier are just now finding this out–terrible, painful lessons of wealth accumulated in a selfish way.
Sarah: I wonder why it is that people who have a great deal of wealth don’t always want to share it. Some do, some don’t, but there doesn’t seem to be any particular law or principle that governs how they will respond to that wealth. Some people who are very wealthy use it in a way that enables them to benefit and support causes that they believe in; other people keep it for themselves. A couple of years ago, for example, I read about the housing industry on Long Island, where there’s a great deal of building going on. People have a lot of money in this country and particularly in this part of the country, and are happy to buy these homes on Long Island. I read about this contractor who said he couldn’t make the homes lavish enough, that the more lavishly he could finish them, the better: for example, if he could put in an eight-thousand-dollar shower head, that really helped the house sell. That stuck in my mind as something that I just find incredible — an eight-thousand-dollar shower head! Why would you need that? I don’t know what a shower head costs as I haven’t bought one recently but I bet that you can get one for one hundred dollars so why an eight-thousand-dollar one? But if he could put those in the houses, that made them sell better, so the object for him was not to keep the price down, but to actually keep it up.
Robert: That’s interesting. What you were saying before about people looking at money as being finite was really a thought that stimulated my interest. If you think of Buddha and the well-known thought that he came out with, which was that our beliefs determine our reality, then perhaps the idea that money is finite causes it to be finite. Perhaps maybe a more appropriate thought would be the one you mentioned before, Sarah, and that is to think of the money as coming from a source and instead of being limited, look upon it as though you were taking water from the ocean or from a river. Would that be a more appropriate or a better way metaphysically of thinking about money — as being an endless supply?
Sarah: I think so. Obviously, you have to be practical and realistic about your financial obligations. If you have bills to pay, you have to have the amount of money that will enable you to pay those bills; you can’t just go out and hope for it to fall out of the sky. So, you have to be realistic but on the other hand, I think it really is true that money has a kind of an elastic quality to it. You would be surprised at how little you need to live on and to live happily on, and you would also be surprised at how you can quite literally “stretch a dollar”, to use a phrase that we’ve probably all heard. Somehow there is something that happens with money that when you begin to work with it in a spiritual and energetic way; it does expand for the meeting of need, not greed. I suppose that’s linked in with the image of the river.
Robert: How would money be an instrument of goodwill?
Sarah: Well, there’re so many ways. Some years ago, I heard a commentary by Roger Rosenblatt, the journalist, who was speaking about money as an agent for good and he expressed it so beautifully. It’s very creative to think of using money as a means to support and strengthen the good, and there are any number of ways you can do this. You can use it for philanthropical causes, for charities, for helping people you know, for supporting your community. You can think in terms that are farther afield and imagine using it to help people in impoverished countries. There are any number of ways it can be used to express goodwill.
Dale: Yes, and when it’s given to fill a real obvious need, I think it’s best to give while asking nothing in return. Then one can release it freely and there is no obligation, no strings attached or anything like that, because giving from an attitude of goodwill implies a certain degree of release from the hold on that material substance. So, I think if one recognizes a genuine need and gives of it freely and spontaneously — I’m thinking of the response after September 11th — there was a tremendous outpouring of money in this country. They literally took in close to a billion dollars, I think, and this was spontaneously given just to help the victims and their families. It was a tremendous example of the potential that lies out there, within the hearts of the people in this country. I think that’s something, a genuineness that cannot be overlooked.
Sarah: It’s not just in our own society. Maybe some of our listeners read on the front of the Times a few weeks ago about the Masai people in Kenya who had not heard about September 11th until just recently — they don’t have television and radio, they’re rural, pastoral people — but one of their own community came back from having been in America and told them about this disaster. He had a hard time explaining to them how people could fall from eighty floors. They couldn’t imagine buildings that high and it was very difficult for them to grasp, but when they realized what had happened, they gave their cattle to the people of New York. It so touched me because that’s their greatest wealth and without a thought or any deliberation, they turned over all their cattle to the people of New York. They emptied out their cow coffers, you could say. (laughter)
Dale: That’s what they use for money.
Sarah: Right, and they gave out of their own abundance without reservation. That’s how we should all share, but….
Robert: It was certainly their demonstration of love.
Sarah: Oh yes! It was, to me, a telling example of people giving from the heart.
Dale: Right, absolutely!
Robert: I was also thinking about what you and Dale were saying before, Sarah, about people who get very wealthy but their money ends up owning them, and that’s an interesting concept. I’ve seen that so often with people who can’t go to a particular place or do a particular thing or even set forth the most basic freedoms because they’re so immersed in their material possessions. More importantly, just to get back to our show, how does the Lucis Trust fund its work? Because here we are talking about giving and the energy of giving.
Sarah: One of the amusing things about our name, Lucis Trust, is that quite often people assume we’re a financial trust and will call us in hopes of being able to get some money from us. It’s a little bit amusing because our work is conducted entirely by voluntary donation. We’ve been in existence since about 1921, so it’s been eighty years and we have always refused to charge for what we make available — our newsletters, our literature, our meetings, the training by way of a correspondence course that we offer through the Arcane School, the seminars, conferences that we hold — all of that is offered on a voluntary donation basis. Not because we don’t like money; we would love to have a lot more money because we could do so much more in our work. It’s because we believe that no price can be put on spiritual teaching, which is what we offer through our literature and our programs such as this radio program, which, by the way, happens to be extremely expensive because WOR is a very popular radio station. We don’t charge for spiritual teaching because, if you think about it, what price would you put on it? A million dollars for an awareness of the Plan of God or ten thousand dollars? You couldn’t put a price, but what we have to do is try to educate people to understand that if they want to support the principles of our work and if they can donate, that is how our work can go forward. We have always had to generate this sense of responsibility on the part of our co-workers and our supporters so that they can fund our work. We have endeavoured to work with the spiritual principles that govern the flow of money. It might surprise people to think that money is governed by spiritual law, but in fact it is. There is no aspect of the manifested world that is outside of spiritual law because all kingdoms — mineral, vegetable, animal, human — are expressions of God’s plan, and that includes the mineral kingdom and I suppose the vegetable kingdom from which money arises, thinking of money now as made of paper while before it was coins. Money is governed by spiritual law, and we work with that realization by working actively in meditation and encouraging others to cooperate in meditation for the redirection of money into the hands of those who would serve and share. In fact, we have a special meditation practice that many people throughout the world do as a group on Sundays for the redirection of money. It’s not a meditation to attract money into your own hands and is not used for selfish purposes and should not be. It’s a meditation that is used as a service to humanity with the realization that money is needed for the upliftment of human consciousness. This needs the focus of the group of people who are skilled in meditation, because when you think about it, the redirection of money is going to happen only when human consciousness is changed from the selfish, possessive attitude toward money, to an attitude of wanting to share abundantly, as the Masai people seem to understand intuitively. We have to work to help human beings see money as an “agent of the good,” to quote Roger Rosenblatt. So, the meditation that we do is for the distribution of money into the hands of those who would serve and share, so that there is enough for everyone, but no damning up of the supply in the hands of just a few, as is the present condition.
Robert: I like that little excerpt that you gave, too, and I found that interesting in the books about how attracting money is more of a matter of consciousness. I hope we can all evolve to that consciousness, but money is also “the consolidation of the loving living energy of divinity,” Alice Bailey said. What does this mean?
Sarah: That money is the consolidation of the energy of divinity; I find that a wonderfully inspiring thought, that the densest aspect of the mineral kingdom, which is money you could say, is a manifestation of divinity. That implies that the way in which we use that money is our means of serving God’s purpose. I think more and more we are coming to understand that, because the past century or so has seen the growth of philanthropies, of charitable giving. People are extremely generous when they are confronted with need, especially when it’s physical need. When there’s a disaster, an earthquake or fire or when there is a tragedy, like a famine or the September 11th experience, people give abundantly. What’s more difficult is to help people realize the need to give for spiritual growth. What I’m thinking of is efforts to educate to promote spiritual values, to distribute spiritual teaching. Those are much more abstract concepts, and that’s part of the challenge of our work to generate money for work that is really quite abstract, and yet we believe practical and absolutely needed.
Dale: And that’s where the energy of goodwill comes into play, because goodwill carries the energy of love and selfishness interrupts the flow of that love. So, we’re dealing with concretized energy of goodwill and love here in terms of money.
Sarah: There are many people who like to say a noontime mantram each day to remind them of the need of the world. It’s very brief; it says, “We know, O Lord of Life and Love, about the need; Touch our hearts anew with love, that we too may love and give.” That’s available on a card if people would like it. It’s a way of cooperating in this meditative effort.
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You have been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
(#101)