Wealth and Goodness

The very same inquiry that concerns you also captured the interest of the ancients, including the writers of the Psalms.

They asked, "Why do the wicked prosper and the good so often suffer in poverty?" And why do "the good" often "die young"? Unfortunately, they had no answer, and their god Jehovah also had none.

With spiritual discernment, however, we can see the outworking of karma in every life: Many lives alternate between terrible poverty and great riches. So, if you are "too rich" in one life due to greed, grasping, and craving, you will be born in utter poverty the next time around. And many, especially those who embrace "voluntary holy poverty," are born into a society such as we have in the U.S., where almost everyone possesses the necessities of life.

But a person's material possessions are the least desirable among life's blessings. The very poor, or those who have never had enough, assume that a life of riches solves all major problems, and even brings bliss.

But sudden lottery-winners deny this, as do the wealthy of all history and all cultures: Money cannot buy happiness. The possession of money might not always be any kind of "blessing" from the cosmos, as we so often assume; it might also be a major karmic test or exam.

God is Love, not money. So, the cosmic Mind does not use money as a "reward" for goodness. No, It is much more sophisticated than that shallow illusion. It rewards people with much more profound and lasting "treasures," such as kindness, Love, compassion, goodness, high selfesteem, intelligence, artistic sense of beauty, the gifts of words, and similar interior blessings.

Often, but not always, the spiritual person is, in fact, contrasted, by mysticsages, with the wealthy. For the rich have already found their "god," and have named it "money."

Jesus said, "It is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a sewing-needle than for a rich person to inherit the Kingdom." He referred to the interior "Kingdom" of Light and Love. Riches are not in themselves bad, but they become bad when they take timenergy away from concern (Love) for other people. To the rich, a dollar is often more important than a life. It is this horrible distortion that the masters of every culture warned against.

But it is undeniably true that the crooked and evil benefit from the world's economic systems. Indeed, their greed is part of their overall evil. Good people, by contrast, often use time to serve others.

The rich like to say, "Time is money." But they are wrong; time is much more valuable than money. It is the "gold" and "platinum" of the universe.

You can say anything that you want about yourself, but it is how you actually spend your time that proves or disproves the quality of your character.

Brother Francis, the famous mysticsaint, went so far as to glorify and recommend "Lady Poverty," for he knew that the rich (including his own bio-father) had not enough time to serve others. So, their loss was great, and terrible.
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Lazarus and the rich man

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The parable of the rich man and Lazarus contains many hidden messages. This is to be expected precisely because it is a parable. The only "sin" of the "'rich man" appears to be that he was indeed rich; this might have reflected the deeper sins of selfcenteredness or a certain lack of compassion; perhaps he actively as well as passively abused Lazarus, the poor man.

Jesus' point was to show that if we are too concerned with wealth, we will suffer in the afterlife. We will accrue negative and difficult karma. And let's realistically remember that, to be "rich" in the poor land of first-century Palestine was not the same as being "rich" in twenty-first century America. A "rich" man, in those days, and in that culture, owned his own tiny house and his own donkey, and little else!

Let us, then, exercise generosity at every opportunity so that we do not suffer the travails of "hell states" after this life.

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America the Beautiful and America the Terrible

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I grew up in America the Beautiful, a country that was part idealization.

But it was a system that respected international law and order. It was a massive, mighty, many say "blessed," country that would never, under any conditions, stoop to invading a third-world country whose "soldiers" are often twelve-year-olds. And it would never have engaged in this nightmare of mass-murder of women and children for the evils of oil and greed.

I love America. But I do not always love or embrace her behavior under the tyranny of ignorant and greedy men. I do not respond with "shock and awe" to the slaughter and massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent women, children, and men in a single day. This is the evil twin of America the Beautiful; her name is America the Terrible.

In America the Terrible, it is a place where elections were fixed and dishonest. In both twenty hundred in Florida, and in twenty-oh-four in Ohio, hundreds of thousands of valid votes were disenfranchised-- mostly votes of native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans. Huge boxes of their valid votes were simply thrown away.

Why? Because they did not want the government to be led by men who trashed personal rights and civil liberties. They were rejecting a government that practiced regular torture and mass-murder. They turned away from a government that spied on its own citizens, and took away civil rights and freedoms. In short, they insisted on a simple democracy, which the U.S. claimed to be exporting, while in reality, it was suppressing here at home.

The rulers of America the Terrible were the pygmy-puppets of corporate America. They stood by the greedy and destructive corporations while they ruined the environment, and defended their absolute greed even as they poisoned innocent citizens. And when opportunities arose to help people-- whether senior citizens, children, students, or the common person-- the leaders stood squarely opposed to programs that could assist. This was done not once, but over and over again. America the Terrible believed in war-- even in starting it, and in the defense of pollution; and "anything for a buck" was its guiding philosophy.

In America the Terrible, an unqualified man could, with the aid of his father, "buy" the highest position in the land, and end up in the White House even if the citizens did not want him there. He could buy his way to power by becoming a weak puppet of vast wealth, again, mostly corporate. He could then reverse laws that the wisest people had developed for decades. He could not only start a nightmarish war, but could threaten the beginning of another-- this time, nuclear. By simply ignoring the poor and supporting the rich, he could come dangerously close to eliminating the middle class-- the traditional strength of America the Beautiful. In sum, everything that could go wrong in America the Beautiful did go wrong in America the Terrible.
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