The Sun and The Rainbow

Money and the Spiritual Aspirant

SOME QUESTIONS AND REPLIES

(This correspondence between two sadhaks dates back to 1952 but the fundamentals of it hold for the present time also.)

The Questions

1.How is a sadhak to earn money divinely? What should be the attitude of the sadhak living outside the Ashram when he goes into the field of business to earn his livelihood? If one labours to earn money with the sole aim of offering all his earnings at the feet of the Mother when he goes to Pondicherry, the matter is quite different, but the difficulty comes in the case when money is required to be earned for the maintenance of our life on earth (and money is indispensable for this). This earning, I think, is not for the Mother. Till the time arrives when one can live in the higher consciousness and constantly feel the Mother within, I believe the earning is for the ego. One may say at any time that the earning is for the Mother within, but without the constant feeling of unity with the Mother, it would be false and dangerous to say so. And yet the incontrovertible fact remains that one has got to earn money for one's existence. So, with what aim, motive and attitude should one work to earn money?

2.When the days are hard — no earning, no income, useless efforts — what should the sadhak do? Could he pray to the Mother for removal of the monetary hardships and the

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consequent suffering and humiliation which one has to face in dire poverty?

3. Is it a fact that when a person takes to sadhana the Asuric forces who hold the money-power" (do they yet?) withhold their favours and deprive the sadhak of money and material prosperity?

Shyam Raj Sharma

The Replies

I don't think your problem is so very difficult to solve. Money of course, has to be earned — whether one earns it for offering it to the Mother or for one's own maintenance. What I don't agree with are the sharply divided alternatives you pose: the Mother or one's own ego. No doubt, they can fall apart, but they need not. As long as there is no constant feeling of unity with the Mother, the ego is bound to be at play — but certainly not at unchecked and absolute play. Here I may mention that even when one is settled in the Ashram the feeling of unity with the Mother is not always present: the ego is in some evidence even if one has mentally given up ordinary relationships and psychically turned towards the spiritual life. So, essentially, the problem can boil down to more or less the same thing whether one is in or out of the Ashram and whether one is occupied with earning money or with doing some other work. The problem in its ultimate terms is: How is one to act in order that the ego may not fall quite out of tune with the spiritual orientation in one's activity? The problem, therefore, is just that of Karma Yoga — at least to begin with.

The movement of Karma Yoga is in three steps. First, while one feels that one is the doer, one yet makes an inner offering of one's actions to the Divine, and gets inwardly detached from the fruits of one's labour so that failure does not depress and success does not elate one but one preserves a poise and peace vis-a-vis every result. Second, one tries to get detached from one's actions themselves and feel oneself

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to be merely watching what goes on by force of Prakriti or Nature. This deepens into one's becoming the witness Purusha, the individual Being who initiates nothing and only gives or withholds sanction to Nature's doings — and ultimately one realises the infinite impersonal Atman, the one World-Self standing aloof in divine tranquillity and disinterestedness while supporting or not supporting Prakriti's play. Third, through this attainment and through ever-increasing dedication of all one's works and energies to the Ishwara or Supreme Lord a divine dynamism comes down into one's nature-parts and the lower Prakriti is gripped and guided by the Ishwara's illumined Shakti, the higher Prakriti.

I have used traditional terms. We as Aurobindonians have to substitute our own appropriate ones of a Yoga in which the Mother is felt by us as the Divine embodied.

To practise Karma Yoga while engaged in earning money for the maintenance of oneself and one's family is the general solution of your problem. To this I would add a specially psychic bent — the inmost heart-and-soul's attitude of prayer to the Mother to be always with you and somehow so to guide you that the money you earn may go to the growth of her divinity in your life. The psychic bent should become stronger and stronger, mingling its drive of intense aspiration and deep devotion and passionate self-surrender with the urge of consecrated will that, along with the movement of dissociation, is usual to Karma Yoga.

Thus the whole business of money-getting outside the Ashram will be nothing entirely apart from spirituality. And, as a concrete physical gesture symbolising the interrelation, one should set aside a certain percentage as a direct offering to the Mother.

When the days are hard and there is no income, one may certainly pray to -the Mother for removal of monetary problems. There is nothing unspiritual in connecting her in the right manner with questions of money; it would be unspiritual to leave any questions unconnected in the right

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manner with her. But one should keep off nervous and mental disturbance on account of lack of money: one should not be upset if one gets poor. One should pray for the Mother's help and do everything possible to avert poverty, but in an atmosphere of inner calm. Then the help too comes most, by way both of directive inner inspiration and of changed outer circumstance.

Your suspicion that when a person takes to sadhana the Asuric forces which in general hold the money-power withhold their favours and deprive the sadhak of money and of material prosperity is not well founded in all respects. Of course the Asuric forces won't like the Divine's disciple to be rich, but they don't have the last word in the matter. If one proves a good medium of the Divine, one can earn more money than an ordinary man — especially when one is the practitioner of a Yoga which accepts the world and seeks to divinise life's activities instead of renouncing them and abandoning

Sometimes, however, financial difficulties come as a test and in order to increase one's spiritual intensity; they are not really punishments by Asuric forces but part of the working out of a Yogic development in one. God's workings are plastic and not single-tracked: they can use the absence of money no less than its presence as a step in their progression. If one meets the test in the correct fashion, the results wanted by the

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Divine take place — and the results may very well be more money. The chances of more money are at least as many as the opposite. There is no such fixed law as that the God-lover and God-follower invariably gets impoverished in worldly things.

But, of course, the mere fact of one's being a God-lover and God-follower does not automatically safeguard one against financial difficulties and mishaps. Foolishness and incompetence in financial matters may accompany the Godward turn, and ordinary nature brings a toll for them: to turn towards God does not immediately remove whatever foolish and incompetent traits one may have — traits which put one in relation to the common round of the Cosmic Ignorance and its retributive rules. God's grace, nevertheless, is ever about us, and a subtle "tact" of the soul can often get one out of the mess in which one may land oneself, even if one is not able wholly to avoid the mess.

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