Years ago, I encountered unspoken, and yet very obvious assumptions that money is spiritually corruptive. Personally, I never could accept the implicit logic behind it: essentially, if someone removes your financial limitations, and you start behaving like a madman, it’s more logical to assume that you were corrupt to begin with, and limitations prevented it from manifesting itself. Essentially, you can’t know what someone is made of if he never has the means to do what he really wants. But when that happens, is it really the lack of limitations that corrupted him, or did it only show what he truly was?

We have examples of all those Eastern gurus who come to the West and, exposed to the possibilities of power, sex and money, they go completely insane with their lifestyle. Were they corrupted? I say, it’s just that it’s easy to be a sannyasin when nobody has money, including you. However, try being one when surrounded with almost endless resources, with limitations removed from you, and when complete detachment is simply not an option, because you have to manage an organization with lots of people and with a significant budget. I find it interesting how I managed to figure this out the first time I ever thought of it, and most people just rehash the dogmatic phrases about the corruptive power of money. I realized that inner balance and spiritual foundations are the essence of what is popularly known as detachment or renunciation; it’s not about not having money, it’s about not projecting your fulfillment into the world, where money represents the lack of limitations on what you can do.

So, what does money do for me? First of all, I feel that it is good to have it, because the state of no limitations more closely resembles what I consider to be normal for me – not being limited, and being able to do whatever I want. Being confronted by things you cannot do on every turn is something I find spiritually damaging, because it keeps reminding me that I cannot truly be myself, that I am confined to an existence that is inherently incompatible with my true nature, and to me, this is actually more spiritually damaging than anything people can imagine being a result of enormous wealth. So, to me poverty is spiritually damaging, and wealth is something I perceive as normal. Wealth is when you can have a car that doesn’t break down because it’s so old it could almost vote, it’s when you can get the best tires for your car and not the most economical ones, it’s when you can get a really good computer and not the most economical one, it’s when you don’t have to dedicate as much time to the material things, because it’s much easier to just go get something you need, instead of making lists of cheaper alternatives and considering all the drawbacks and choosing what you can live with. Essentially, if your phone dies you just go get a new one, you don’t have to make a huge research to see what’s the most economical option out there because you need to budget everything very carefully. You take a look at the best options out there, just pick one you prefer and go use it. So, wealth in fact makes you think less about the material things, and more about what you want to use them for. You don’t have to think about the laptop or a camera you want to buy: you just get it and then proceed to writing books and taking pictures. You don’t just suddenly go crazy because you have money. Money itself doesn’t force you to spend it on whores and drugs. It just frees you to do the things you want to do. If you want to write books and take pictures, there you go. It doesn’t make you worse or better a person. It just allows you to actually do things instead of dreaming about them, and then we get to see the quality of your dreams. So yes, it can show that you’re a rich asshole, but only if you already were a poor one. Money can turn a poor asshole who pretends to be pure and untouched by the material things and reveal him for what he truly is, but it cannot take a truly spiritual person and corrupt him. That doesn’t happen. What it does is get you a truly spiritual person who has a nice place to live in, a nice car to drive, wears clothes that aren’t falling apart or look like shit, and so on. It improves the level of quality of the peripheral things. Money doesn’t make you go crazy, it just lets crazy out of the cage, if it was there to begin with.

I feel this is such a basic thing, completely trivial, absolutely intuitive and not even worth writing about for all its simplicity, to the point where I can imagine the audience rolling their eyes and saying “duh”. And yet, every single fucking time I see a fake spiritual person making a poverty show, people are gobbling it up like candy. That fake Pope Francis, or Mother Theresa, for instance. It’s almost as if the fakes have pretending to be a saint down to a science; just go down a list of poverty and misery worship items and you’re all set for the heavenly laurels. Even having to say that’s not the way to go about it makes me feel as if I’m explaining that 2+2=4, but people in general actually seem to be just that fucking stupid.

You’re not a saint if you don’t care about the material things. You’re a saint if your soul is so permanently absorbed in God, you only care about the material things to the extent where they are kept at the minimal level of interference with your spiritual focus. Essentially, if you are able to, you will get the best tool for the job and get on with it, you will not make a show out of getting the cheapest tool in order to show off your contempt for the material things. A show of poverty, humility and modesty is a form of manipulating humans, its only purpose is triggering a desirable response in others. It has absolutely nothing to do with spirituality, it’s a form of insidious power play. A truly spiritual person is as likely to be poor because he doesn’t care about matter enough to bother with becoming wealthy, as he is to be wealthy because he’s contemplating God who is freedom, power and magnificence.