The biggest lie ever to be told to any person, is that they do not already have whatever means they need by which to be happy in life. This is to be told that their salvation is not with them, where they happen to be, with whatever means they have, but somewhere else and in another form. The worst belief one could ever conceived is that they cannot depend on themselves for their own happiness.
From a very young age, we are taught to accept that happiness is defined elsewhere outside of ourselves, and we grow to believe that the most valuable things in life are those which we need to acquire from elsewhere, such as money and education. We then move around to places where we would find these things, and after many years of exerting ourselves in trying to meet the conditions set for their acquisition, begin to consider ourselves worthy of them.
Even though it is ever clear to us that we need to have money, none of us ever knows just how much of it we should be looking for. So, without a target, we go all out to amass as much as we can. We work hard to earn it; we steal it; scam others; gamble for it; counterfeit it; inherit and even squander it. We essentially spend most of our waking time, physical and mental effort engaged in activities that are geared towards acquiring this money.
The question that may then beg to be asked is; why do we need so much money – to a point where we are even willing to sacrifice our health, betray our friends and neglect our children and loved ones just to have it? The answer goes back to the very lie that we grew up to believe – that all the solutions we need in life are not with us, but with other people., and the reason we ever need all these hoards of money is to buy from other people the solutions we believe we cannot provide by ourselves.
The people from which we seek the solutions to the issues of our lives are not only those who are physically the closest to us, such as family members and friends, or those who might provide them for free, but include among others, the local grocery store; the pharmacist; the taxman, the marriage counsellor many others who would charge a fee to avail their solutions to us.
With the many problems that we each need solutions for, we would then need a lot of money as a way to pay those who provide us with solutions, and very often, for as long as we live. The result is that our lives become more about other people resolving our problems while all we need to do is make enough money to pay these people with, instead developing our minds and using our bodies and the things we already have around us to sustain ourselves. In that way, depending on which solution we use, our own capacities or those of others, our demands for money would either decrease or increase accordingly.
We often go to the gym and exercise as much as we can and become physically strong. However, at the weekend when we have to move some rocks from one part of the garden to another, we would rather pay someone else to do that work, even when we already have the strength to perform that work. We tend to justify this by calling it, ‘creating employment’, which essentially means letting someone else do for us the work we know we can do for ourselves.
What we know as ‘the economy’ is sustained through denying ourselves the ability to create the happiness we need and being self-sustaining. For as long as one is not willing to develop the internal capacity to resolve their own problems, they remain distrustful of their natural abilities while continuing to perpetuate their dependency on other people, for which they use money as compensation.
Our ability to assume personal responsibility for our lives, stems from understanding how we create our own problems and how, by virtue of being the closest people to them, we are also the best placed to resolve them. Any problem in life is best resolved by the person who understands it better, and no one would understand a problem better than the one in the middle of it, who would understand not only its symptoms and the pain it causes, but also its root cause.
To sustain ourselves in life is therefore to resolve problems from their root causes, instead of just easing the symptoms the way we do when we ‘borrow’ bought solutions from other people. It is for that reason that the person who finds themselves in the middle of a problem is also the best equipped to resolve it, only if they trust themselves enough to be that solution.
The phrase, “money is the root of all evil” does not necessarily mean money is bad, but only points to how we have come to find it acceptable to prolong our suffering while waiting for money to be available and save us even when there is already so much that we could already do by ourselves to alleviate this suffering.