Even though the focus of my posts has been on consciousness, there's no escaping the link between success and money. Few people would consider themselves a success if they had little or no money (even though figures like Jesus, Buddha, and Socrates ventured very different ideas on the subject). The ability to manage money, allocate assets, and increase wealth plays a major role in the economy, as well as the lives of each person. Let me deal with the subject from the perspective of consciousness by offering five ideas that will feel quite new to anyone who approaches money strictly from a naked desire to make as much as possible or from the opposite desire, to escape debt and impoverishment.
#1 Money reflects who you are. It mirrors your psychological makeup.
#2 The highest use of money is to increase happiness.
#3 The circulation of money is a symbol for the circulation of ideas.
#4 To be free of money woes, expands your consciousness.
#5 Money equals success if you can handle the previous four ideas.
I'll fill in each idea a little to make clear why it's important.
#1 Money reflects who you are. It mirrors your psychological makeup.
The first idea is a core truth, and many branches grow from it. It says that money is never truly objective. The psyche, with its abundance of fears, wishes, hopes, and desires, is always coloring how each of us views money, to the extent that the great economist John Maynard Keynes considered all markets to be psychological in nature. What you think and believe will be automatically reflected in how you manage your money. There are hoarders who cannot tolerate the slightest risk, gamblers who can never save their winnings, along with free spenders, philanthropists, and so on.
Since money reflects the psyche, including its unconscious drives, people are secretive about their money in order to hide themselves. Few of us want to be entirely seen or known by others, and at a deeper level we are afraid to know ourselves completely. Yet the more you can accept yourself, the easier it will be to deal with money and the less anxious it will make you. There’s no objective formula that works for everyone. Even so, you need to spend enough time to know yourself that you find a formula that works for you, i.e., that allows you to not obsess over money, fear its loss, or take risks you cannot tolerate. Don't assume that your ability to manage money is the same as the people around you, and don't try to live up to the life story of some billionaire. The path to money, if that's the path you want to walk, begins inside.
#2 The highest use of money is to increase happiness.
The psyche is complicated, and once you know yourself, there is still room for confusion, because money has to be turned into action. Which part of your mind should you follow, the emotional or rational? Is greed something to ignore or follow? Should you mainly focus on earning, saving, or investing? It takes years of experience to untangle these issues - and many more, besides - but the most helpful guide is to use your money in the service of being happy. Rich but miserable is no way to spend your days, either now or after you retire. What will make you happy? Long-term fulfillment is built on short-term fulfillment. In other words, to be happy in the future, pay attention to your happiness today.
Does this mean that all those rich people who endured massive stress, who obsessed over building wealth, who cut corners and schemed, etc. were wrong in their approach? "Wrong" isn't the right term. The real issue is whether stress, greed, obsession, and amorality are enemies of happiness. One book on the secret to becoming a millionaire found that the common factor is simple: Be a stingy bastard. No one has ever written a book calling this the formula for happiness.
#3 The circulation of money is a symbol for the circulation of ideas.
The usual framework for managing money uses terms like earning, spending, investing, etc., which is an objective vocabulary. Since there is no true objectivity in regards to money, there needs to be an alternative vocabulary that hits closer to the truth. Your life, like everyone else's, is rooted in sensations, feelings, images, and thoughts - the contents of your mind, in short. The stuff of the mind makes life better when it is dynamic, open, free of fear, and creative. The stuff of the mind makes life worse when it is rigid, closed, stuck, and fearful.
Therefore, let your money reflect the mind's ability to make life better. Money circulates around ideas because money symbolizes ideas (as well as beliefs, hopes, wishes, and fears). As much as society worships money, it gets misused when two of the mind's most primitive drives - fear and greed - are placed in charge. This happens all too often, unfortunately, as front-page stories about Wall Street constantly inform us. Look at how your own mind works, and favor those aspects that make your life more dynamic and creative. Then your management of money will follow where your mind wants to go.
#4 To be free of money woes, expand your consciousness.
Life is like water. It stagnates if it doesn't flow. If your mind is tight, worried, and stuck on the same themes year after year, it will stagnate, and so will your money. There are rich people who can't find happiness in their wealth because they haven't learned how to connect it with personal growth. But if you expand your awareness, money becomes the representation of how you are evolving. This follows from the core idea that your money reflects who you are.
As your mind expands, you stop holding on to the conventional labels that we all use to define ourselves. Rich and poor are two such labels, and millions of people obsess over them, just as they obsess over labels of gender, nationality, religion, and so on. At its best, money mirrors a mind that is freeing itself from labels. In that way, instead of being at the root of all evils - anxiety being the primary evil - money can help you feel free, which is the ultimate good.
#5 Money equals success if you can handle the previous four ideas.
The goal at the beginning of this post was to link money and success in a better way than simply adding up your bank account. By absorbing the previous four ideas, success comes to fruition. This isn't a moral argument. Money is a mirror, and mirrors are neutral. They show you what is. The one advantage that money has over a bathroom mirror is that is magnifies what is. This becomes a source of misery if your money magnifies greed, insecurity, and egotism. It's a source of satisfaction if your money magnifies your highest aspirations and best intent.
I'd call this the dividing line between success and failure, not the amount of money you earn or even how much you give away. In a material world, the most important things - purpose and meaning - are immaterial. Instead of standing for materialism itself, money can stand for the invisible inner world on which every life is built.
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