For ages, humanity has struggled with the question of who is wealthy. What constitutes true wealth? In addition, how do we know whether we have found it? Today I will talk not just about Great Wealth in the Mahatman sense but the difference between being just rich and being Wealthy.

Therefore, what is Great Wealth and how is it different from riches?
Great Wealth is the ability to experience life while being rich merely owns a fat bank account. You might say that these billions of dollars will help the rich person to live large – like, moving around in an Italian sports car, buying gold watches, partying in private islands. In this case, the person is merely a big spender. Where is the stretching of body and mind, the pushing of physical and mental boundaries that make one life fully? Has the rich person learnt the centeredness that comes from mindfulness or the adrenaline that rushes through the bloodstream that skydiving brings? Is he able to achieve the insane mental focus that comes with perfecting the Pungu Mayurasana or attained the golden mean of non-attachment that rises above the painful extremes of attachment and detachment?

All these are just some of the many examples of living a full life – and each of these takes much more than dollars to experience. You have to own a certain mind-set to be able to live fully – the mind-set of Mahatman that encourages expansiveness, exploration and eventually leads to Self-Actualization. My point is that wealthy people have this mind-set but the merely rich people do not.
Now that we are talking about the mindset, let me explain in a little more detail what it involves. Any dream or goal worth reaching involves two conditions: the necessary and the favourable.
The necessary condition is that without which the first step to the dream just would not happen. For example, consider my dream of travelling to Japan to see its ethereal temples and shrines. I have to have the passion, nay the OBSESSION, to put this in motion – in other words, I have to be fired by the love of travel, be in the necessary physical shape to make the trip and the mental calm to cope with the many ups and downs that come with travelling to a foreign country.
The favourable condition is that which aids my action – in other words, money. However, as I have said in the blog on Mahatman Philosophy of Money, if your goal or dream is driven on the waves of your obsession, money will happen. You may not know yet from where and from whom, but it will come.

Being Generous is being powerful.
Philanthropy is all about having the ability to give from a position of strength and power. Ever so often giving is seen as a sign of submissiveness or even foolishness. How many times have we been told not to “Give in” to unjust demands made by someone else? Alternatively, in order to get something, you have to “give” something in return. Mahatman on the contrary believes that Giving can take place only from a position of power, not from a position of weakness. The very concept of giving implies that you own and possess something that someone else wants or needs. Indeed, in the Mahatman Philosophy, I argue that it is this spirit of generosity that marks out the truly wealthy from the merely rich. Best of all, Philanthropy from this perspective solves the problem of poor self-esteem – the more generous you are, the better you feel about your wealth, your purpose and the social regard you receive.

Do you work all the time in a day and put yourself on hold wondering there will be plenty of time later? Do you think that work is never-ending and that if you are not working all the time, you are slacking off?

You have heard the saying “Time is Money” but I say time is not money
It is WEALTH!

Time is an important ideal in everyone’s life and preserving it becomes much more important. Time is a non-renewable resource; it is infinitely more valuable than money because we can always make another buck, but we cannot make more time. When one works hard in the available time, he may eventually attain the happiness of wealth.

True wealth is far more than just financial success. Real wealth comes in the form of how much time you have available. It is the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want and however you want. Money is only a means to the end, but time is what defines our wealth. The more discretionary time we have in our hands to spend time doing things that we want to do, the more true wealth we possess. Ultimately, time (not money) is the real equalizer. If we all think of time as true wealth, we all are born equally rich. We all would have the same 24 hours a day and how we spend that time shall differentiate between us.
We all have equal opportunities in life and are faced with them every day. What matters is how we make use of all the 86,400 seconds in a day in attaining our goals. The catalyst we require is immensely hard work to convert time into wealth. Hard work not only in the form of grunt work but engaging in something with a pure passion helping you to transform into better individuals. MAHTAMAN philosophy advocates working hard with passion and a mission. You have to put in your efforts that make things happen- HARD WORK. The only miracle that is going to help you in the long term.

For ages humanity has struggled with the question who is really wealthy? What constitutes true wealth? And how do we know whether we have found it? Today I will talk not just about Great Wealth in the Mahatman sense but the difference between being just rich and being Wealthy.

Great Wealth is the ability to fully experience life while being rich is merely to own a fat bank account. You might say that these billions of dollars will help the rich person to live large – like, moving around in an Italian sports car, buying gold watches, partying in private islands. In this case, the person is merely a big spender. Where is the stretching of body and mind, the pushing of physical and mental boundaries that make one live fully? Has the rich guy learnt the centeredness that comes from mindfulness or the adrenaline that rushes through the bloodstream that skydiving brings? Is he able to achieve the insane mental focus that comes with perfecting the Pungu Mayurasana or attained the golden mean of non-attachment that rises above the painful extremes of attachment and detachment. All these are just some of the many examples of living a full life – and each of these take much more than dollars to experience. You have to own a certain mindset to be able to live fully – the mindset of Mahatman that encourages expansiveness, exploration and eventually leads to Self Actualization. My point is that the really wealthy people have this mindset but the merely rich people don’t.

Now that we are talking about the mindset, let me explain in a little more detail what it involves. Any dream or goal worth reaching involves two conditions: the necessary and the favourable.

The necessary condition is that without which the first step to the dream just wouldn’t happen. For example, consider my dream of travelling to Japan to see its ethereal temples and shrines. I have to have the passion, nay the OBSESSION, to put this is motion – in other words I have to be fired by the love of travel, be in the necessary physical shape to make the trip and the mental calm to cope with the many ups and downs that come with travelling to a foreign country.

The favourable condition is that which aids my action – in other words, money. But as I have said in the blog on Mahatman Philosophy of Money, if your goal or dream is driven on the waves of your obsession, money will happen. You may not know as yet from where and from whom, but it will come.

The pinnacle of Great Wealth according to Mahatman is achieving Absolute Financial Freedom. This though does not mean that you hit the jackpot at Powerball or that you look for an heiress to marry. Financial freedom is the state where you don’t have to work for money or indeed for anyone else. It is when all your daily necessities are taken care of and you are able to afford your desired standard of living. After this stage is reached, you are able to make your money work for you while you work towards your own Self Actualization. How to achieve this and then go beyond that is explained in the Great Wealth section of The Mahatman Book as well as in Mahatman Philosophy of Money.

Tony Robbins in his bestselling book, Money: Master the Game similarly outlines a 7 step journey to Absolute Financial Freedom. This starts with the stage of Financial Security which is when you build your critical mass or portfolio that pays for all your basic needs. The next important phase is Financial Independence which is when your passive income can support your current lifestyle. Finally, the Absolute Financial Freedom happens when your dream lifestyle is supported by your investment income. While Robbin’s insight is highly useful, Mahatman goes a step further to claim that it is this stage of Absolute Financial Freedom that defines the wealthy from the merely rich. At this ultimate level, freedom is not just not having to slog at a nine to five job and not having to worry about meeting daily needs – the real freedom is from the compulsion to earn a living which frees up the wealthy people to do other things for a Mahatman life – reinvesting in an enterprise, in relationships and the community. Needless to say while the Wealthy are doing all this, the rich are putting in even more hours in a paid job, succumbing deeper to the whims of a boss from hell and still worrying about how they will finance their next vacation. So while the rich live a life of financial worries and anxieties, the wealthy live a life of Absolute Financial Freedom.

Finally what makes the wealthy people stand apart from people with just a fat bank balance is the practice of Giving. This too is explained at length in the Mahatman Book as one of the four fundamentals of the Great Wealth Pillar. The truly wealthy people do not stop making money but ensure that the fruits of their efforts are distributed to the community. They give funds to worthy non-profits, volunteer their time for important causes as well as share their knowledge and experience in the form of mentoring or coaching. The merely rich guys on the other hand will still be grasping and taking like its their last day on earth – they will take and take from their relationships, businesses, the environment – in effect their entire ecosystem without putting back a dime or an act worthy of a blessing. Such people, despite their private jets and luxury yachts are the real paupers of society since they suffer from poverty of vision and intent.

Indeed there are many ways to give and you don’t need a billion dollars in your bank to put this essential Mahatman Great Wealth tenet into practice. You can give your time and effort to your community or the less privileged. You can coach a poor student to pass his exams or mentor a subordinate to overcome a professional crisis. What’s more, acts of generosity have been repeatedly linked to better mental and physical health in scientific studies.

There is one danger though – that of sentimentalizing the act of Giving. Doing or bestowing something for someone should not be thought of as a sign of weakness or an excuse to stay poor. You can give only when you have enough yourself. You have so much love, resources and knowledge within your own self, that if flows out of you to others – in this way Giving becomes a form of Power for you hold within your hands – the power to change the lives of others and achieve your own Self Actualization. And this is power available only to the Wealthy since they know how and why to give. So whether you are a billionaire already or in the making, follow the Mahatman Great Wealth practices – not just to achieve Absolute Financial Freedom but to rise above the crowd of the rich and ascend to the peak of the truly wealthy.

I decided to introduce the Mahatman philosophy of Money with one of my core beliefs, since so many people down the ages have described Money in so many different ways. In Mahatman, Money is a powerful tool, one that helps you build all the three pillars of Great Health, Great Wealth and Great Wisdom. Money is definitely not the devil or the deep sea that some cultures have made it out to be. Indeed money is one of the greatest innovations of the human race – no other species has come up with a measurement tool like money that makes for the flow of commercial energy through multiple channels. After all, it is money which has built our mega cities, materialized path breaking ideas and powered the journey to outer space.

Never say no to money – the glamourization of poverty has had extreme negative impact on some societies. Mahatman says you can’t have enough money because there is so much to do, so many projects – on both personal and community levels. You cannot put a dollar figure on Great wealth. You cannot say such and such amount is the milestone of great wealth and I have to reach it. Instead Wealth according to Mahatman is limitless money, backed by pure effort and put to constructive use.

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!

The last time I googled Financial intelligence, I came up with 44,60,00,000 results in 0.53 seconds but none delved into ways of using money intelligently in the context of people. In this blog post I am going to discuss Money Intelligence as a surefire attitude to increase your probability of success. The following tips have been crystallized from a lifetime of experiences with money and people.