Last month I wrote about the importance of drawing up money priorities and its impact on individual health. There were other thoughts on money I wanted to share. I promised to do so in my next column, so here goes. I grew up believing money is unworthy of notice. How that happened I’ll never know. Maybe I always knew that I had my family to fall back on and could afford to be disdainful towards mammon. As long as I had enough to get by, I never cared to save or give a thought to the future. Perhaps because of this mental make-up it was always important for me to keep a job or business alive rather than worry about bottom lines. I instinctively knew that if I kept my overhead expenses low, my business would keep going. That also gave me the liberty to spend occasionally on whatever my heart fancied if there was extra cash in my wallet at any given point of time. However the day of reckoning came when in the course of running my organic foods business, one fine day I sent my office boy to draw Rs.5,000 from the bank and he was sent back empty handed because there was a mere Rs.187 balance in my account. Surprisingly the bank had allowed the balance to drop below the Rs.500 minimum required to be maintained. That was a turning point in my life and in my attitude towards money. It was then that I decided to set myself a few monetary goals. Not because I needed material goods or couldn’t meet my basic needs. I think on that day I learned that even if one’s needs are simple, money is power. Power that can be used whichever way one decides to use it. It is neither evil per se nor a necessary evil, but simply a medium of exchange which heavily influences the life of every individual. But the importance you accord money, is entirely upto you. In India there is a schizophrenic attitude towards money. On the one hand we pray to goddess Lakshmi for material prosperity, and on the other perhaps because of the pervasive poverty that surrounds us, there is widespread guilt about it. It reminds me of what a wise cousin of mine says, “Money cannot buy happiness but there is no happiness without money.” How true. In this connection a quotation from an insightful book Omni Reveals the Four Principles of Creation by John L. Payne, (Soul Zone publications) is revealing: All things in your physical world are representative of the non-physical… Money is in a triangle of association with power and love. If you associate money with power and see power as dangerous, as something you are not to be trusted with, or as something that is harmful or lacking in love, then money will find it difficult to bless your life with its presence. There are many powerful beliefs in society that have embedded themselves deep within your consciousness. You have sayings such…
