Need and Greed - (4077)

Notes

Some notes for the Need and Greed talk.

In many ways this talk is about setting down some guiding principles to do with establishing a useful relationship a person seeking a spiritual path can have with matter. With one of the most important  components of matter, being money.

Basically we have to know how to relate intelligently with matter. As the spiritual path is the development of the Spirit while in matter.

Needs

There are absolute and relative needs. This is good to know. Even though some needs are relative they are still needs. A need is somehing that we can not do without.

The absolute needs are three: food, shelter and clothing.

Relative needs are for example things we may need for our job, such as: a car, a phone, a computer etc. Because without those things we can do our job and earn money to provide food, shelter and clothing for ourselves.

Then there are things which we do not need and this is where we cross a line and enter into the zone of greed, of excess, of psychological dependence, of false needs etc.

Greed

Greed is anything that is impractical. Acquiring, accumualting, experiencing etc. that goes beyond the line of contentment or even the 'to capacity' line.

Each one of us has a certain 'feeling content line' and a 'full line'. 

We have to know these two lines in oursleves and be able to recognise when we are approaching them.

For example, when eating. When we eat, we can eat until the 'feeling content line' and we satisfy our body's needs for food and drink, and psychologically we are content - balanced - not feeling lack or excess. Then we can continue eating and we reach the full line. Then we can exceed the full line...

Usually reaching the full line is ok now and then, however exceeding it and reaching the full line all the time breaks balance and we then suffer consequences, namely our health suffers, diabetes, overweight etc.

There are many areas of greed, not only related to money. Wherever there is something that we can have, consume, experience, do, buy, sell, there is greed. There is greed with time, with energy, with food, with sleep, with possessions, with sex, with alcohol, with pleasure, with love etc. 

The contentment where there is happiness, which is the same thing as bliss, shows us where balance is. 

We normally learn balance by getting very unbalanced first. 

If we seek balance we relate correctly to all things. Balance is the intelligent combination of the two opposites to produce a third solution. Life is all about the third solution.

We buy things basically because of the psychological value that it has for us. Not so much because of the thing itself.

Money in itself is something nuetral. It is neither good nor bad.

We tend to use money psychologically. That is we use it to satisfy false needs. Acquiring money substitutes the absence of the authentic within us. The authentic happiness, the authentic richness of spirit, the authentic power, the authentic love etc. etc. 

These days we can buy everything, even things that don't have a price tag such as love, loyalty, life, a place in heaven etc. etc. This is all to make us believe that money solves everything and that our compulsion to acquire money is justified.

These things can not be bought with any dollar amount but they can be bought by dissolving the "I's" within us. Because we are so externalised we don't think about doing that.

We never think though of buying a place in hell. Because we all know deep down, that indulging in our egos is the way down there and that there will be a place for us down there granted to us for free.

Balance is at neither extreme. It is at the middle where both extremes are understood. As Dante wrote,  hoarders and spendthrifts are at war with each other because they don't understand each other. As soon as any hoarder or spendthrift moves to the middle they will understand the opposite side.   

So seeking the real bliss, contentment, and balance is to start to forge our path away from slipping downwards. 

Sorry about being so negative here. I just wanted to empahasise the truth that the path down is already made but the path up has yet to be made by us. We have to forge it.

A person could have several millions in his or her bank and be working on themselves quite well. Yet a person could be very poor and totally miserable and not ever work on himself. There could also be those who are very rich and don't ever work on themselves either and despite it all are very miserable and degenerated. It all depends on how attached we are to what we have.

End (4077).