Poor, Rich People
..and poor people who want to be poor, rich people

We’re talking about money, the power of money, and what money can do to us. People are led to believe that they never have enough, and so they desire more. This attitude is living in poverty: people who are rich, feel poor.

(Spiritual teachings can have the very same effect on us: we think that we do not know enough when our path is very actually simple – to recognise awareness, rest in that awareness, not just re-act, and exhaust the effects of karma. When we put theory into practice, we no longer have to practise!)

Money has two precious qualities…it allows us to have time and space. Time to be and space to be in, quiet and uncluttered.

Spending one’s precious time trying to impress others is a waste of time, especially when the people we are trying to impress are in turn trying to impress us….crazy! Do you remember when you were young and had little money, how happy you were? We made do.

I once spoke to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama in Nepal (name and place dropping!) who told me that Nepalese were so much happier before western ideals invaded their land. I saw this for myself in the poor country of Ecuador (name dropping!): great, slick American shopping malls in the capital, Quito, promoting the American dream. These malls were patrolled by machine-gun-toting police guarding the rich: the idea of wealth destabilises the mind.

As spiritual practitioners, we just need enough to get by. Milarepa (someone who achieved enlightenment in one life time) had a nettle bush outside his cave. His instinct was to cut it back, but then he reasoned “I could be enlightened in the next moment, so why bother with making everything perfectly neat and tidy?”

We don’t have to be so extreme as we are not Milarepa, but you get the idea! 😉

We have two tendencies: one is habitual and the other is unique. These are in conflict. We have an aspiration for something higher, which can express itself in a unique fashion – or we can retreat into the habitual. We have to recognise the difference. When working in a habitual capacity, our life goes round in circles. When we drop our habitual tendencies, obstacles fall away revealing our higher capacity, and our uniqueness naturally shines: primordial purity and wisdom free from elaborations – an unceasing expression of luminous awareness.

Time in this body is precious.
At every moment we can either create more karma
thereby live in a thicker cloud
or
Deplete that karmic cloud
realising pure vision.