Greed - Two Facets of

Greed is an ‘I’

Greed is an ego or an ‘I’, just like many of the others, and just like the others it has many ways of manifesting itself. There is the greed of time and there is the greed related to material things such as money, precious metals and stones and objects in general.

Greed is curiously one of the 7 capital sins, mentioned by Dante.

Definition

If we are going to define greed we would say that greed is a desire to have 'the more'. In nearly all of those cases the more is actually more than what we need. Greed is the desire for the excess. The very strange thing with greed is that within greed the desire to have more is seen or presented as a need. The illusion of greed resides in that false need being seen as a real authentic legitimate need.

Post Outline

What I am going to do here is outline the greed related to both of these facets, that is the greed related to time and the greed related to money and objects.

Distinguishing Line

We have in relation to this topic - the greed of time, a certain line that distinguishes between hard work and yearning combined together and the plain greed related to time. The key to find out which is which is to examine at our motivations.

Greed Related to Time

Greed related to time. Time unlike money and precious objects is something that is intangible, meaning we can not touch it, we need our mind to perceive or to determine how much is left and how much is not left. When we look at the clock we just see some numbers though it is our mind that gives it meaning. It is our mind that says I’m late or I’m early and I still have time left for example. The greed related to time is very much an intellectual issue. It can make us very obsessive and it can make us very uptight rushing everything and working vey physically hard.

Cramming

In the greed related to time what we want to do, is to do as much as we can in the shortest space of time or in a certain amount of time that our mind assigns to it. That greed wants to cram in as much as it possibly can. The interesting thing is that when we are cramming, the goal is no longer the quality of the tasks being completed the focus becomes just getting it finished. Getting as much finished as possible, what we do starts to lack feeling and consciousness. We become devoid of awareness and real authentic concern, we just get the job done and that is all that we care about. When it comes to people it is terrible, actually because where we use to give them our attention and care we no longer do.

The other problem with the greed of time is that we create goals that are unrealistic in many ways, we want to get things done that we can’t really get done. There is also that process that creates so much for us to do.

Our Own Creation

We actually create for ourselves this greed of time by creating with our mind so many things for ourselves to accomplish. We usually create this greed because we have too many things to do and they may well be very silly. The thing is that our mind creates all of these things. If we can stop our mind from creating all these things and only doing things that we need to do we can stop ourselves from creating this greed or at least strengthening it. Or the other way is to only allow ourselves to do a moderate amount of things taking our time doing it with a lot of quality, in other words with consciousness and understanding.

Takes us Outside of Ourselves

This greed of time is quite bad as it can take us out of ourselves and we become totally focussed on things outside of ourselves, which are the fulfilment of these tasks. The best is to concentrate on ourselves and carry out the tasks with consciousness. To limit our activity is also very good as well, which is something that we have to do as well. To simplify our life is very good. 

What it Teaches Us

One thing that this greed of time teaches us to do, is to do things in a balanced and conscious way, we may always be active doing something consciously not just sitting there dreaming or lying there dreaming. This is to have a conscious life. To do what we can in a balanced way with awareness and consciousness. So what we can do is to eliminate from our lives the dead times, and the time wasting activities. That is the lesson of the greed of time. And of course it is to be consistent in the task that we do, because as the ego is like that we end up going with the greed of time and then going with its opposite wasting time because no ego in us is constant.

Greed Related to Money

The greed related to money is another aspect of greed that is quite important, it of course wants us always to go for the more. It is something that actually is contradictory where we of course want more money and so it gets interested in all these get rich schemes that pay out money and so we invest and the result is that we end up loosing a lot of money. Mind you we can also earn a lot of money as well (this depends mostly on our dharma). This greed keeps us believing in all these fake schemes and fascinated by the amount of money they can bring to us.

Why the Fascination with Money

What are the reasons why we keep believing in all these money making schemes? It is because our values are in the personality which is the physical world, the common values of society and matter.

The Best Investments

What is the best investment? Isn’t it to do with the spirit? Isn’t it the best investment because it lasts forever? Why do we want money? If we can answer this question honestly we we will see that the answer is because we value all those things that money can buy or are associated with money, such as power, prestige, respect, importance, authority, control etc.

Our Use of Money

We always use money for psychological reasons, why do we want money. This is a question that we must ask ourselves quite often. What is the motivation as to why we want money.

We can just end up thinking about money all the time and nothing else. It can grow to be so big that it swallows up all our mental space. However, what is funny though is that it is all about dreaming about quantities of money that we don’t have.

Greed loves to dream and calculate what we are going to get. When we organise the money we have, it is more or less conscious and it is not about greed fantasising.

Conclusion

The objective of this post was to make the reader aware of these facets of greed and to pass on some advice about how to curb these facets. Observe them in action in daily life and the key is really the values underlying these facets. If we change our values we will not desire all these things related to matter, and if we do things more consciously and with less desire we will not fall into the greed of time. If we just do the best that we can always we see our limitations, feel satisfied and not be creating unrealistic expectations of cramming so many things into such a short time.