Are you convinced that you are poor or at least short of money? This belief will certainly not help and most likely even restrict your possibilities to change that. So what can you do?
Being rich is mostly associated with the possession of money, but it has become abundantly clear that money cannot buy you real love, joy, happiness, self-esteem, freedom, etcetera. By saying you need money for that, in your mind, you are making all of it depend on whether you have the money or not, and that creates a kind of mental poverty.
Most people consciously or unconsciously believe that money can buy them happiness, but money can only buy you things and services. This belief that money can bring us all kinds of happiness is learned at an early age by the example of the people and society we grow up in, but the so-called pursuit of happiness is nothing less than a contradiction in terms. You can’t reach happiness because you can’t ‘have’ happiness. You can only ‘be’ happy. It’s an internal state. Not something that grows on a tree or can be bought in a store.
Rich truths
Truth number 1: It isn’t really about the money, because behind the money is the ‘idea’ of what money supposedly offers you. Maybe for you that is safety, joy, or freedom, but it’s not the money itself, so money is just a means to an end.
Truth number 2: All those sensations of safety, joy, freedom, etcetera are happening inside of you, yet most people believe that they need to look outside of themselves for all of it. We are so accustomed to saying this or that or he or she makes me happy, that few people realize that we actually do that within ourselves.
Truth number 3: Because of truth number 1 and 2, any sensation of happiness, freedom, safety, etcetera will be temporary and conditioned if we believe it depends on money.
The importance of freedom (Part 1)
Especially a sensation like freedom is not really served by such a dependency, but if you look closer to many of the other sensations, they are in fact all related to freedom. Unsafety, unhappiness, and many other un-somethings represent different forms of ‘un-Freedom’, or limitations if you will. Freedom is, therefore, a central piece in this puzzle, but for real freedom, we cannot depend on outer circumstances. Instead, we have to look inwards.
If you believe that all wealthy people are happy and feel free, think again. The truth is that many rich people are not living a particularly joyful life. Many feel threatened all the time because they have much more to lose than you and I, and therefore much greater need to protect what they believe to be theirs. They can even feel a prisoner of their ‘fortunate’ situation. Others may feel like they still need more because there is no such thing as enough when your life depends on it and there is always more to want. It’s a useless, endless and destructive search because we don’t actually understand what we’re looking for.
Rich without money
Warning: What follows is not about the ‘fake it till you make it’ method. That would just be more of the same because you would be projecting your joy, happiness, safety, and freedom as something to be achieved or reached in the future, which would make you a prisoner of the ‘here and now’ that (in your mind’s view) is not yet as it should be. This is about something else, namely finding the origins of what you, until now, may have been trying to solve or achieve with money. By finding the origins, you will be able to tap into that source directly.
In the ’90s when I was visiting India, there was this rickshaw (tricycle) driver living outside the gate of the hostel where I stayed, sleeping under a piece of construction-plastic he called home. The man had no actual home, and he probably had no more than the minimum pension to look forward to. He was missing his two front teeth and some molars, so even eating wasn’t always easy for him.
He had to work hard every single day to earn a living, dragging (fat) tourists around town with his rickshaw by the strength of his sinewy body, going up and down hills, while trying not to get his customers or himself killed in the chaotic traffic of New Delhi.
This scenario and the attached prospect of a not so great retirement would probably hunt most western people, even though the rickshaw driver still had work and a rickshaw to earn an income with. But at some point, his body would not have the physical strength anymore and he will probably have lost the rest of his denture within the next decade or so.
Strangely enough and against all odds, this rickshaw driver was one of the happiest people I had ever met in my life! (Note: this was the rickshaw driver in the photo you see.) He was always full of joy, ready for what the day would bring and as clean as the circumstances permitted him to be (which is actually no small feat in the capital of India). I can assure you that, despite his circumstances, he did not feel poor or less worthy than anyone else.
Poor with money
Right after I came back home, it struck me how sincerely unhappy all the people in my neighbourhood looked. Despite their cars, houses filled with loads of ‘stuff’, schooling, opportunities, children, dogs, cats, supermarkets, holidays and more, they looked as if they were unjustly imprisoned. At the time it occurred to me that the difference between them and the rickshaw driver was their perspective.
I blamed this difference in perspective solely on their difference in surroundings and circumstances, which is true and not true. Of course, our basic perspective is formed by our upbringing and culture, but that means that most of it is learned so it can be unlearned as well. Or we could have been taught something different, so maybe we should revise our ideas about how to educate children, although…
— R. Steiner (Founder of the Waldorf School and Pedagogy)
Self-education sounds exhausting and difficult
Now you know the truth about that: You have been self-educating all your life, though mostly unconsciously. This is partially due to another belief that most people carry with them all their lives, which is that their circumstances and life situations educate them instead of us educating ourselves with our circumstances. The other part is that you can only learn what you have previously prepared yourself for.
“A person hears only what they understand.”
— J.W. von Goethe
When growing up we start to self-educate automatically by imitation first. Later on, we start adding to that basic self-education by putting our minds at work, but by then the root beliefs about life and ourselves are already in place and unconsciously we let our lives be ruled by them. (Read also: “The One Shift that changes Everything”)
The main reason that self-education sounds difficult and exhausting is that we are trying to change something in our unconscious mind by means of our conscious mind. Unfortunately, our unconscious mind seems to work effortlessly while our conscious mind takes effort. This specific recipe is destined to taste bitter every time you try it, and the conclusion is usually that ‘it’s just the way we are’ and that it’s too difficult and exhausting.
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Go to the source
We have talked about people that feel rich without money, people that feel poor with money, the importance of freedom, and the need for self-education. But how does it all add up?. What does it mean to be rich and how do we re-educate ourselves to become it? Let’s do the math.
Money is just a means to an end, so having money does not make you rich and it makes you dependent. We found out that we are actually looking for an inner state and sensation of joy and freedom, but we are currently under the influence of the often limiting root-beliefs that influence us through our subconscious mind. We have learned that through our conscious mind we are unable to reeducate ourselves at the level of our unconscious root-beliefs, which is where we create real change.
The sum of that is obviously not to try harder, but to try differently. This means we have to go to the source of our sensations and inner state, which is our true Self. The thing we haven’t discussed yet is that your mind is also an external factor when it comes to your true Self and your state. (Attention: not your ‘state of mind’, but your ‘state of being’.)
“Your self-image and your real self are two completely different things. Your self-image is an idea and belief about yourself that reflects itself in how you see the world around you. Your real Self cannot be ‘looked at’ like the self-image, nor can it be told to others in a story about ‘your life’.”
—Samwell Newman (Taken from: ”You can be the Guru!” » “Self or self-image?”)
Are you ready?
A particularly persistent belief that people go through life with is that they are their mind. The mind gives us a false sense of self that has many people completely fooled about who and what they really are. Those who believe they are their mind can say “I am [their name]” instead of saying “my name is [their name]”, without ever feeling weird about it. I can’t. Not anymore.
To understand what I mean by that you will need to consciously ‘meet your Self’ for the first time. To get there a little bit of work usually needs to be done. Not only because it is completely new and different to what you have experienced up till now, but also because you have to prepare your current belief-system to get as far as to accept the possibility of it. You have to attach this new belief to your existing beliefs, or you will not be able to do experience your true Self.
Now or never
My book “You can be the Guru!” takes you through this process of aligning your current beliefs to the belief that a ‘true Self’ exists. It also offers indications on how to turn that into a path of reeducation and I am sorry that it exceeds the scope of this article, but perhaps you are already prepared enough to get a sense of your true Self. After all, unconsciously you are already experiencing life through your Self, though yet possibly filtered and distorted by the mind.
So let’s at least give it a try. Unlike the self-image in your mind, your real Self can neither be found in the past nor in the future. It lives eternally in the NOW, which is the only moment life can be lived and experienced. Eckhart Tolle explains how there are different ways to enter into the Now and simple sense perception is the easiest level of entry. For example, you should be able to feel your hands even with your eyes closed. Maybe you feel a tingling of sorts?
Most people can feel their hands while their eyes are closed and without having thoughts or images in their mind. Can you? At that moment you are experiencing life in your hands directly within your Self. That Self is the source of all your experiences like freedom, joy, and happiness. It is only in your mind that you have determined certain conditions on when to feel free, happy, safe, or whatever. This is how the mind has become a filter of what to experience in which situation.
The importance of freedom (Part 2)
The current functioning of most people’s minds makes them extremely manipulable and unfree, and earlier we saw that Freedom is a key element to an abundant and happy life. Giving our true Self its rightful place in our inner universe will change all that, and it’s easier and far more satisfying than trying to row against the current of the subconscious mind with the oars of our conscious mind.
Freedom is regularly misinterpreted as something that depends on our circumstances, but when you separate your real Self (consciousness) from your mind’s narrow view and narrative you will unequivocally find that it’s not. With your birth, you entered this world and your body as consciousness and only learned about feeling unfree after that, so that too can be unlearned.
— Eckhart Tolle
The title of this article indicated that this article would tell you how to be rich beyond your life situation. If you want ‘rich’ to mean ‘money’ then you automatically run into a contradiction with what is said in the title, because money or lack of it is part of your life situation. If you are capable of seeing beyond that, you will find that inner freedom is actually behind most of the desires that you have. Are you ready to let go of what makes you unfree and live a truly rich life?
