{"id":3396,"date":"2023-08-06T10:52:45","date_gmt":"2023-08-06T09:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/?p=3396"},"modified":"2023-08-06T11:17:42","modified_gmt":"2023-08-06T10:17:42","slug":"some-musings-about-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/some-musings-about-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Some musings about money"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been thinking about something for quite a while now.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I was much younger and had just started working with people and writing, I had very little money, and the people I worked with at the time for some reason found it impressive how I seemed to not care about it at all \u2013 I would wear torn clothes, buy a used computer somewhere and work with it, drive a shitbox, and seem not to perceive the entire material sphere, instead focusing on spiritual realities and energy work.<\/span><\/p>\n

What troubles me there is that they thought this was a good thing, that it\u2019s fine for \u201cspiritual people\u201d to be poor, that it\u2019s somehow a positive status symbol of spirituality or whatever. It\u2019s not. They saw that I don\u2019t care about matter but they were wrong \u2013 I didn\u2019t care about it while I was working with them, because they were the priority. The entirety of my focus was placed on trying to get them to overcome their limitations and get the taste of transcendence, so to speak. However, when I was alone I had rent and bills to pay, groceries to buy, car to service and fuel, and not enough money to cover almost any of it. I didn\u2019t wear ragged clothes because I didn\u2019t care about my appearance; I wore them because I had no money, and I truly didn\u2019t care about my appearance when I was doing more important things, so they kind of made a flawed conclusion that this is how things are supposed to be, and anything else represents a spiritual downfall.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course I cared about money \u2013 I had constant problems caused by the lack of money, that I could never truly solve. However, the fact was that people I worked with tended not to have money, and the people with money tended not to care about me, and my priority was to focus on people most receptive to what I wanted to teach, not teaching people who could be of most material use to me. Sure, I made some compromises, namely continuing to work with some people whom I would otherwise have sent away sooner due to them showing no perspective, due to them \u201cbankrolling\u201d my work with talented but broke people, and in only one instance this turned out to be a bad idea because the person in question turned out to be coercing and manipulating others with money and created a really toxic atmosphere that made everybody\u2019s lives more unpleasant and difficult. The concept itself isn\u2019t bad \u2013 you see, anything else makes an implicit assumption that the teacher himself should bankroll the entire operation so that he would be independent of any kind of financial pressure or free from financial concerns that could otherwise bias his selection of students and general approach, or that money is such a bad thing that you should never give it to good people who are doing useful things, especially if you\u2019re not the only one incurring benefit. The concept that people with money should support things that are of spiritual use not only to them, but to other people who might be better positioned to benefit from it than themselves is perfectly rational. Furthermore, people who support good and useful things with money incur a karmic benefit.<\/span><\/p>\n

But to return to my situation \u2013 I had very serious and persistent financial problems, but I did not allow this to influence my choices and work to any great extent. I never rejected a poor but qualified student, or spent less time with them than was needed to produce optimal outcomes. It\u2019s just that I allowed some more affluent, but unqualified people to hang around, thinking no harm can come from it, and they might pick up useful things in the process and acquire spiritual benefits. You see, it wasn\u2019t that I really had that many options. I could have abandoned the whole thing, returned to software engineering, made a career in that and have no problems with money, however I felt this would have been a waste of life, because I felt I had to contribute to the world in the most meaningful way I am capable of, not merely in the way that people would pay the most money for. The result was that I was poor for decades, but, in hindsight, I can say that I did the best I could and followed the line of righteousness that made me essentially immune to all kinds of karmic attachments and backlash that normally destroys spiritual people.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, no, I wasn\u2019t poor because that\u2019s a good thing. I was poor because people with money didn\u2019t give a fuck about what I did, and even some people I did work with thought poverty suited me just fine. Of course I could have used a car with air conditioning back then, and a computer that is actually capable of editing a book cover 600 DPI TIFF, and has a screen bigger than 15\u201d. The thing is, good things tend to be owned by people who have the money to buy them, not the people who need them the most. However, that\u2019s not the part that irritates me. What I found really, truly humiliating is the attitude of some of my then-students, who sincerely thought that good things were too good for me, and shitty things are just right, and liked the feeling of being financially above me. Of course I could se that in their minds, it was more than obvious, and this truly pissed me off, because it reeked of contempt and disrespect.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another thing that pissed me off were the people who arrogantly criticised me as being materialistically disposed and trying to personally benefit from others by charging money for my books. Putting those books on the market was hugely expensive for both me and my students, in both money and labour. It was a significant sacrifice to make those books available to a wider audience, and it came with a spiritual blessing that was to awaken the presence of God in people, that would grow and overcome everything else if they chose to allow it. What I expected in return was that they buy the books, so that the financial load on my students would be reduced, and, possibly, that I could pay the bills without being a burden on them at all; it looked like a karmically beneficial thing, a way to spread both the benefit and the load. What I got instead was an opportunity for all kinds of worthless assholes to denigrate and humiliate both me and my work, and this made me very angry, especially since some people made it a point of pride for themselves to offend me for making the effort. It made me so angry I withdrew the books from the market and physically destroyed all the available copies, and I also withdrew the blessing. No, the books are not available for free in the digital form now because I\u2019m more spiritual now or anything. They are free because of my contempt. You see, I earned substantial amounts of money in the payment industry, by charging a percentage for a service of navigating through the maze necessary for supposedly high-risk businesses to get a merchant account in order to sell their goods and services online. It was frequently some highly questionable stuff, such as the online dating sites, but I always had a feeling of a clean and transparent business transaction. I was never insulted or humiliated for any of it \u2013 quite the opposite, I was the respectable businessman and a gentleman who provides a valuable service to others. The only time I was exposed to deliberate ridicule and humiliation and treated as if I\u2019m defrauding the naive and doing it all for money, and called a worthless and stupid poor person who wants to get rich by scamming others, was when I made the choice to endure financial hardship in order to provide the greatest benefit to others that I was capable of. This truly traumatised and offended me, and I feel that this is a mere shadow of God\u2019s cold rage directed at those who offended me then, because what I did was expose the presence of God in this world and make it available, and all the contempt was in fact directed at and felt by God, and God didn\u2019t like it one bit, let me tell you that. All the contempt, ridicule and abuse hurled at me went straight to God. All the thoughts of how shitty stuff is good enough and just right for me went straight to God, and let me tell you something: I am very glad God isn\u2019t that angry at me.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, at this point I live in a place that\u2019s too good for what those people would wish for me. I drive a car that\u2019s much better than they would let me have, I wear a watch that\u2019s much more expensive than they would approve for me, and write this on a computer they would deem much too powerful and good for what I need. Fortunately, nobody really gives a fuck about their opinion any more.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s another implicit premise the worthless people assume \u2013 that if a man of God works for God, he should be paid by God, not by them. No, that\u2019s not how things work. A man of God is the presence of God in this world, and God doesn\u2019t actually like you or think you\u2019re worthy, because He knows what you are, and you need to pass His tests, because that\u2019s how things work \u2013 you don\u2019t test God, or place demands God should meet, because you\u2019re not the ones in charge and nobody asks you how things should be done. No, God tests you<\/em>, to see if you show promise. God tests you by taking something that is a known absolute quality, such as His own tulku<\/i>. A test for you is for this person to be presented before you, and you have to decide what it is, and how you will treat it. Basically, it\u2019s like having two places presented to you, and you need to decide which is heaven, and which is hell, and then of course you go to heaven of your choice. God tests you by showing up among you every now and then, and you have to decide what that is, and how much it is worth to you. And then you go to a heaven that\u2019s created for you by your choices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been thinking about something for quite a while now. When I was much younger and had just started working with people and writing, I had very little money, and the people I worked with at the time for some … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-money","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3396"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3405,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396\/revisions\/3405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danijel.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}