Wealth is Ephemeral

 

Photo Credit: Intuition Cold Spring Harbor |

Wealth is Ephemeral

Swamiji says – “The power of wealth remains only till the wealth exists”. What kind of wealth is Swamiji talking about? To my understanding wealth could be – material, monetary, spiritual, it could literally be anything.

One of the greatest driving forces in the world is the desire to acquire wealth – if you look at India’s history, we have been plundered by the Mughal, the British, the French and the Portuguese over the last 1000 years – why? Just for our wealth – they plundered our gold and jewelry, but in spite of destroying India’s universities and temples they could not destroy the sanatan dharma and the values which the dharma instills in all those who are born in this holy land. Our cultural and spiritual wealth continues to enrich us even today. We are still united as one nation in spite of the hell that we have gone through – that is principally because our cultural and spiritual wealth is timeless and indestructible!

Let us leave wealth as we understand it today and try to understand true wealth in the spiritual sense. Baha’u’llah defines it as, “The essence of wealth is love for Me; whosoever loveth Me is the possessor of all things, and he that loveth Me not is indeed of the poor and needy. This is that which the Finger of Glory and Splendour hath revealed”. When interpreted it means that we acquire spiritual wealth when we work to develop virtues such as trustworthiness, truthfulness, assertiveness, compassion, honesty, honor, selfless prayer, selfless love and so on.

We spend our lives developing virtues, and when it is time for us to leave this material world, these developed qualities assist us in our next stage of existence. In the process of evolution of souls, we all keep gathering virtues in every birth till we reach our final birth where we meet our Satguru who guides us to go beyond Him and find out who we really are. When we reach that stage then we have passed the stage where material of financial wealth has any meaning, at this stage we acquire the wealth of universal consciousness and with that the power of wealth itself disappears because the meaning of wealth has now been transformed.

In the end, wealth loses its glitter and charm, and the only thing that will satisfy our soul would be the fact that we understood the true meaning of wealth and used our material wealth for the good of others. Like Swamiji distributes his wisdom and knowledge free of cost all over the world, we too should strive to attain that wealth after which there is nothing left to attain – but to distribute that which has been attained.