The One thing we forget about money || Acharya Prashant
Video Information: 30.06.2022, GL Bajaj Institute of Technology & Management, Greater Noida
Context:
~ Is money important?
~ How much money should one earn?
~ How to earn right livelihood?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Context:
~ Is money important?
~ How much money should one earn?
~ How to earn right livelihood?
Music Credits: Milind Date
~~~~~
Transcript
00:00 What shape the economics of a place takes depends on the value I accord to this object
00:17 or that object. For example, jewellery. Why do you go after jewellery? I am not talking
00:30 of those who look at gold or silver as investment. But why do most people rush after diamonds
00:41 or rings or necklaces or precious stones or whatever. It's a subjective decision, right?
00:48 And so what happens therefore, the price of a stone rises greatly and you work very hard
00:58 to one day to come to a situation when you will be able to afford that stone and it's
01:04 just a stone. Now does the stone intrinsically carry that much value? Does the stone have
01:14 something inside of itself, something innate to it that is very valuable? Hardly anything.
01:22 It's your own subjective value system, it's your own conditioning that's telling you that
01:27 you must have that stone and to have that stone you'll hop jobs, you may even take a
01:34 loan, you may save for a long time so that ultimately you may have that stone. Spirituality
01:45 tells you what exactly is valuable in life. If you are a spiritual person, you are unlikely
01:54 to attach great value to just a metal or a stone. And can you imagine how much hardship
02:05 can this wisdom save you from? Otherwise you can spend your entire life running after things
02:14 that just do not matter. Good spirituality is therefore good economics. If you are not
02:24 a spiritual person then you will make all economically unwise decisions in your life
02:30 as people do. We do not know what to purchase, we do not know what really is valuable even
02:36 in the material domain. I am not merely talking of courage or compassion or wisdom or relationships.
02:44 I am talking of something very material and tangible. How do you decide for example which
02:49 car to purchase? How do you decide whether you need to rent a house or buy it? Tell me
02:55 please. Isn't it a subjective decision? Isn't it a thing of your own wisdom? And if you
03:03 are not wise enough then you will end up buying a house where a rented thing might have sufficed
03:12 and you very well know what's the duration of the home loan EMI, 20 years. Now for 20
03:18 years you are in bondage. It will look like a financial transaction. A certain amount
03:26 is deducted from your bank account every month. But what has happened is actually a spiritually
03:33 unwise decision. You didn't know whether that house is really of great utility to you
03:40 and why didn't you know that? Because you do not know who you are and therefore what
03:45 you really need. When you do not know who you are and what you really need then you
03:49 just start asking for things that everybody in the society is going after. You will say
03:57 oh everybody is buying a house so I too need to buy a house. You didn't really need the
04:02 house but you bought the house. Even decisions concerning relationships have great financial
04:13 impacts. Don't you know that? Now you do not know who you are and therefore what's the
04:19 purpose of your life and you get married. And you get married to a guy who says you
04:24 will have to quit your job if you marry me. You will have to relocate to another city
04:28 and if you want you may find a job there. Now don't you see that a spiritual decision
04:35 is having definite financial repercussions? A spiritual or an unspiritual decision because
04:44 there was no spirituality probably involved in your decision to get into a relationship.
04:49 Similarly the decision to have a baby. Do you understand the kind of economics that
04:55 are attached to adding that little member to your household? It's not merely a biological
05:03 or emotional thing. It's a big huge financial project to give birth. But we do not know
05:15 and when we do not know what to do with life then we keep on taking stupid decisions that
05:21 ruin us even in the financial and economic sense. See why do people go bankrupt? It's
05:32 not necessarily because they didn't earn. Mostly it is because they didn't know where
05:40 to spend. They also never had their priorities clear in life and to have your priorities
05:48 clear in life is a spiritual thing. If you are not spiritual how will you know what to
05:53 do in life? Now you all are here and pursuing a professional course and it's possible,
06:06 it does happen. I hope it doesn't happen here. That a girl like you gets a decent job
06:17 in a far off city and the parents because they come from a conservative mindset and
06:23 they don't have their minds clear. They just don't allow her to go that far away
06:29 to work. Now don't you see that conservatism has had financial costs. The girl could have
06:40 gone somewhere, earned for herself and probably also brought some prosperity to the house.
06:47 But lack of spiritual clarity has prevented financial gains. You look at the stock markets
07:00 for example. Why do people lose so much there? The primary reasons are fear and greed. You
07:15 invest much more than you can really afford and when things don't go your way you start
07:24 panicking and then you book losses. Let it be very clear that spirituality and worldliness
07:36 are not two separate domains. Even to succeed in the world you need to be spiritual and
07:45 that's the reason why spirituality is so essential. If you are not spiritual the punishment
07:52 will not be that you will be denied entry into some heaven. Heaven etc anyway don't
07:58 exist. The punishment of not being spiritual is that you lead a very bad, a very ruined
08:09 worldly life and that includes an economic life, a ruined economic life. The fellow just
08:18 does not know what to do with material objects. Instead of spending 300 rupees on a book he
08:29 would rather buy a pizza and this is a financial transaction right? You can spend 300 rupees
08:35 on a book or you could buy a pizza. But you do not know what to give a higher priority
08:45 to. Therefore you just splurge your money, waste it just anywhere. Even to be smart with
08:56 money matters you require spiritual insight and that applies at the micro level also at
09:06 the macro level. You look at nations. The finance minister for example presents the
09:12 budget. Now what do you give a higher priority to? Subsidizing electricity or taking care
09:28 of education and health. If the fundamentals, the inner spiritual fundamentals are not clear
09:40 then you will present a budget that will give freebies to your constituency, your voter
09:51 group instead of putting the money in the right place. So it is not merely the person.
10:03 Even nations, actually the entire world suffers when the one making the economic decision
10:10 is spiritually bankrupt. There are countries that spend an unbelievable proportion of their
10:22 annual budget in just procuring arms. North Korea for example. Now people there are starving
10:31 actually. The standard of living, the quality of life is very low. But all the money is
10:39 being spent in being battle ready. Do you see how an unwise person can ruin the economy
10:54 itself? Are you seeing this? The mistake that we make is we think that to learn spirituality
11:08 we have to go to one person and the world and its matters are an altogether different
11:14 thing. So to succeed in the worldly domain we have to listen to other people. That's
11:23 just not right. Spirituality is there to tell you exactly what to do in this world, which
11:36 object to give value to, which object to discard and give no value to. There are objects that
11:44 you should not bring home even if they are available for free and there are objects that
11:51 you should bring home irrespective of how costly they are. And that kind of thing only
11:58 spirituality can tell you. What is it that you must always value and what is it that
12:04 you must never spend your money on.
12:07 [Music]