That’s right. Hoarding money, making money to increase your bank balance is definitely not a Great Wealth practice and needless to say, it will neither bring you Great Health nor Great Wisdom. Those who slog day in and day out merely for the pleasure of seeing the number of zeroes on their account balance increase are living the fool’s life. This is the contemporary equivalent of the mythical Mr. Scrooge who shut himself off from all creativity in life just to multiply the bags of gold in his vault – essentially living a life of death, even before physically dying. Great wealth does not come of hoarding money and refusing to spend. Like Scrooge, that shows poverty of belief and vision. The other manifestation of this stance is the limiting belief that “I have enough money, I don’t need to work any more, I can just kick back my heels and relax.” Like I said above, Money is never enough if you have the Mahatman vision of Self Actualization – if you not just plan to fulfil your potential but thereafter give and leave a powerful legacy in the world.

So if accumulating money is not the end goal, what is? How can money help you become wealthy in the Mahatman sense? Only by being put to use, by spending in ways that will bring back Great Health, Great Wealth and Great Wisdom for you. So use your money to eat a nutritious diet or learn the Tango. Book yourself on a Yoga retreat or go on a mountain climbing expedition.  Likewise spend money on buying books, travelling and signing up for Self Improvement events which will help you gain Great Wisdom.

As far as Great Wealth is concerned, it can be earned when you use money as an instrument for wise investment. This is also what Tony Robbins indicates in his best selling book, Money – Master the Game. He exhorts readers to make the decision to become an investor and not just a consumer. He advises you to set aside a part of your income to put into what he calls the “freedom fund”. Don’t touch this at all – instead let the power of compounding make it grow to your advantage.

Truly wealthy people spend a lot but as asset investment – they do not spend on leisure and passive entertainment. If you are very rich but are spending on jewellery, private jets, luxury yachts, booze binge, paid sex and so on, you are not on the path to great wealth – it is likelier that you have a fat belly, cardiac conditions – in other words, lacking in Great Health. It is also possible that you are lacking in Great Wisdom since mindless consumption can make you prone to vanity, temper tantrum, belittling or even hurting others. On the other hand, if you spend money to achieve greatness in other three Mahatman pillars, you are Wealthy in the true sense of the word.

It is easy to misunderstand money when it comes easy to you – as an inheritance, in the black market or at the blackjack table. When you work to earn that money, you realize its value – you will not spend it on cheap entertainment but invest in further ways of improvement.

The bigger advantage of earning money yourself is knowing you can do it again. Stock market crashes, being cheated by somebody close and many other conditions can make you lose your money. If you have not earned it yourself, you can sink into depression, feel it is the end of the world. But when you earn it yourself and then lose it for some reason, you can dust off your pants and get back to the grind. You can earn it all again and even more!

Mahatman philosophy of money says there is no point in slogging for money. Instead, plan your work and finances in such a way so that you can make your money work for you. Something similar is explained by Robert Kiyosaki in  Rich Dad Poor Dad. In this book, Kiyosaki differentiates between liabilities and assets and based on this he divides Dads, in other words people, into Rich and Poor. The latter are those who accumulate liabilities like houses and fast cars and think that buying all that means being rich. What they don’t realize is that these are really liabilities which make you work increasing number of hours to pay for them or push you deeper into the debt trap. The Rich people are those who use money to buy assets like bonds, shares, businesses so that eventually these will make the money for them.

But Mahatman goes further and says that don’t even work for money. By all means money is important to pay your bills and assure you a decent standard of living but beyond that work to attain personal mastery. Work to learn the job and get so good at it that instead of you running after money, big bucks will actually follow you wherever you go.

Money – or rather lack of it –  is often cited as a reason for not striving to realize your plans and dreams. I say to you today that this is the familiar whine of slackers and cowards. Money should never be the excuse for you to give anything up. Plan your journey, identify the milestones and then work your butt off to achieve them. Along the way, money is sure to join you. This I proclaim from personal experience. Years ago, I landed in the US with nothing more than 20 dollars in my pocket and even that I lost it to a smart aleck limousine driver. The very fact that I could step foot in this Land of Opportunities was because of funding by educational and social trusts. Even today I believe that if I had not got the sponsorship I did, I would have got my funding from another source. Money happens along the way – but only to those who are already going the way!