The War Within - Between Good and Evil, Bheemeswara Challa [books for 7th graders txt] 📗

Technology, as a medium of the mind,
has accentuated the evil that the love of money can do. Only the rich can afford
life-extension technologies, at least in the short term. From pocket money to
Money—Maya, Mara, and Moksha
297
pensions, making a living to standard of living, savoring good life to the joys of
philanthropy, obscene opulence to abysmal poverty, conspicuous consumption
to pragmatism, it is all about money.
Money creates problems when we do not have it, and yet, even more
problems when we do have it. Money has become a major test of human
character. How we ‘manage’ when we do not have it, and how we ‘behave’ when
we have it, speaks a lot about our moral mettle. Money makes us both master and
slave. Our power over money is real only inasmuch as we are able to understand
its power over us. For centuries, if not millenniums, man has sought to digest
the essence of money. Philosophers and economists, statesmen, writers, even
poets, have written about money. It has been acclaimed and cursed; dreamed
of and disparaged. Money is capable of creating and destroying, of uniting and
dismembering. Like God, if we have money in our corner nothing and no one
else is needed; for we can ‘get’ everything else with it. It can be exhilarating,
intoxicating, magical, and mesmerizing. It can make people both partners and
parasites and can impact the fate of individuals and whole nations. Here comes
the unfortunate bit: what was meant as a medium of exchange has turned man
himself into a medium—to make money. Those who possess money are in fact
possessed by it, overcome by the passion to multiply it by any means and at any
cost. And this change, unless corrected, could destroy human society. The crisis
in the global financial system is but a symptom. The time has come to face up to
the fact that any agenda for human transformation must include how to change
the way money is perceived, generated, and utilized. A great virtue of money as
a commodity is that it simplifies and facilitates one of the greatest requisites of
spiritual life: sharing and giving. If money is properly shared and spread, there
would, for example, be no extreme poverty in the world. When it comes to
rousing our conscience, statistics have lost their sting and pinch. Yet they provide
useful insights. The World Bank says that at least 80% of humanity lives on less
than $10 a day. According to UNICEF, about 22,000 children die each day
due to poverty. And they die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth,
far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek
and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.
And, according to Oxfam, the surge of $762 billion in the wealth of the world’s
2,043 billionaires, in the year 2017, was enough money to end ‘global extreme
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poverty seven times over’.13 Another shocking statistic is that only 5% of all new
income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60%. Grim and bad as
it might seem, it also offers a ray of hope. Never before did so many people need
so little to lead healthier lives, and never before could so few people do so much
for so many. Money’s very concentration makes it easier to diffuse it in the right
direction, with the maximum effect. What is needed is consciousness-change in
these billionaires.
Try as we might, it is hard to understand money’s grip and gravity; how
it came to be the building block of human happiness, the fulcrum around which
human life revolves. We can understand the lure of sex, or of power, or pursuit
of pleasure, or fear of death; all of which are somehow related to biology and
human nature. How could money grow to be such a sinister shadow under
which we spend all our brief time on earth and waste all our energy? It looks
as if money is the ultimate temptation to drag us down to our doom, to bring
to the surface our darkest instincts. Money plays the role of both Maya, the
Vedantic illusion—the euphoric feeling that with money we need nothing
else; and the Buddhist Mara—as it tempts us to follow the unrighteous path
to acquire, amass, and enjoy wealth. The truly intriguing, even exciting, thing
is that in this very area of darkness, it can be a source of liberating light. The
much-derided material wealth can also be a means for Moksha, not in the sense
of breaking an individual’s cycle of birth and rebirth or death to death, but in
helping each other to break out of their cycle of misery and dehumanization.
It is so essential, its absence can cripple life to such a degree, that providing the
means to acquire it to the truly needy can become transformative and benefit the
‘giver’ more than the ‘taker’. Although baneful in its effect on the mind, it can
also be a conduit for compassion. ‘Blessed are those who have money; for they
have the power to make the everyday lives of so many so much better’. John D
Rockefeller, one of the richest and most philanthropic men of modern times,
expressed it aptly: “God gave me my money… I believe the power to make
money is a gift from God, to be developed and used to the best of our ability for
the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it
is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make
for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience”.
This Rockefeller quote was described as a kind of partnership between God and
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Mammon. Mammon lords over the accumulating department, and God over
the giving and spending department. It also means that different rules govern the
two departments. Rockefeller himself was described as ‘money mad, money mad,
sane in every other respect but money mad’.14 He didn’t pay much heed to means
and morals while becoming very, very rich but channeled a good bit of it for
charity. How do we rate him as a ‘moral man’? Was the world better off or worse
off with Rockefeller as he was, lock, stock, and barrel? The fundamental fact does
not change: wealth righteously earned and shared generously can help lift many
lives; wealth, ill-gotten and unshared, is corrosive. Although we tend to conflate
the two, wealth is not another name for money. Wealth is fundamental and is
the stuff we need to live: food, clothes, houses, gadgets, travel, land, and so on.
One can have wealth without having money. Wealth is as old as human
history. Far older, in fact; even ants have wealth. Money in its current dominating
form is but a comparatively recent invention. Leave alone money, making wealth
is not the only way to get rich. In fact, for a huge chunk of human history it was
not even the most common way. Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of
wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the means to acquire
them were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Money gives the
false feel of easy access to pleasure, power, and pelf. It makes us feel ‘powerful’
and paves the path to possessing ‘power’.
The Many Faces of Money
The baneful influence of money on humanity was foretold in Hindu scriptures like
the Mahabharata, Srimad Bhagavatam, and Ramayana. In Srimad Bhagavatam,
for example, Sage Suka says, “In the Kali Yuga, wealth alone will be the criterion
of pedigree, morality and merit”. In the Mahabharata, Sage Markandeya tells
King Yudhishthira “… and wedded to avarice and wrath and ignorance and
lust, men will entertain animosities towards one another, desiring to take one
another’s lives”. While all that might have been true when money was not so
central to human life, it is no longer fully correct in today’s society in which
money is irreplaceable and indispensable for orderly life. Indeed what was once
said about the mind can now be said about money. The mind, it was said, is the
cause of bondage but can also be the source of liberation. Money dominates
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human life so much that, while the love of it can be the source of evil, its extreme
absence can cripple life and deny dignity, an essential attribute of the human
condition. DH Lawrence wrote “money poisons you when you’ve got it and
starves you when you haven’t”.15 Bob Dylan crooned “while money doesn’t talk,
it swears”.16 But its hypnotic spell also contains a silver lining. It has, on the
one hand, deepened the ill effects of ‘love of money’; no relationship, no moral
scruple, no sensitivity, is immune to its lure; no crime or sin is unthinkable. In
contemporary society, we have bestowed almost godly powers upon money, and
whilst money’s necessity makes it irreplaceable and universal, it is its deification
that makes it a ‘religion’. However in religious terms, ‘money’ and ‘wealth’ per se
are not always deemed bad or evil. In Hinduism, the consort of Lord Vishnu is
Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and money.17 The important point is that money
and wealth are viewed in a broader context than in pure monetary terms. They
are ‘sacred’ too and even God Vishnu needed wealth to get himself a wife on
earth and had to borrow it from Kubera, the God of wealth.
Apart from its magnetic lure, and because it is deemed so vital for human
life, money also attracts many superstitions. There are superstitions surrounding
every aspect of money, from getting it to saving it. Some rose from plain oldfashioned
common sense while others were rituals based on natural phenomena
that were seen to be omens, auspicious and ominous. There are even conflicting
superstitions, depending on the culture. In Argentina, finding money in the
street is considered extremely lucky. As long as you never spend it, it will bring
you more money. But in Trinidad and Tobago, finding money in the street could
bring evil spirits into your home. In some countries like Greece, it is believed that
money attracts money and so it is bad luck to completely empty one’s pocket or
wallet. The ancient Greeks threw coins into their wells to keep them from going
dry. In Japan, snakes are viewed as symbols of prosperity and therefore purses
made with white snakeskin are popular. The ancient art of Feng Shui advocates
several practices to make money. In England, putting money in new clothes is
supposed to bring good luck. According to Mexican tradition, making a cross
on the floor after picking up ‘found money’ will bring even more money. In
some countries even bubbles in a cup of coffee or tea are associated with money;
elsewhere, if a bee lands on your hand it indicates wealth is on its way to you or
if you write with green ink, profits will flow from your hand.
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The impact of money goes beyond what we can do with it, what it can
buy or procure; it defines life itself, feeds our ego, vanity and viciousness. Money
breaks all moral barriers. We might serenade à la The Beatles that ‘money can’t
buy me love’, but the fact is it is so vital for life, it could even prompt some to
take lives in its name. There is almost no crime without a money trail; all crime is,
in the end, crime for gain—personal, national, or international. There is growing
recognition that controlling money flow is the key to controlling crime. On the
other hand, it also became an easily available instrument to better people’s lives.
The good thing about money is that we do not need a lot of money to do good;
even small amounts, properly channeled, can make a significant difference. The
same amount can have a varied impact on different people; for some marginal,
and for some others life-saving. Properly channeled, money can be a powerful
‘compassionate’ conduit to alleviate pain, suffering, and misery in the world. It
can be a boon and a bane, a blessing or a curse, contingent on how we come to
possess it and spread it. One could even go the extent of saying that a person’s
moral stature is more enhanced if he makes every effort to earn lots of money
righteously than if he chooses to eschew any contact with money, even if it were
possible. But it is moot if the choice is between earning money unrighteously
and using it righteously, or not making any effort to earn any money and not
spending any money to help others.
We may fitfully fantasize about transforming human society into a
Shambala or Shangri-La,