It’s not based on money. The super-rich will find it very difficult to acquire. So will the very poor. Rest of us have a chance if we work towards it.
What is wealth? It is variously described, in broad terms, as valuable possessions, plentiful supply of desirable things and, in narrow terms, as money and physical assets or property. What is the ultimate goal of acquiring wealth? Most people would probably agree with the following response – “the goal of acquiring wealth is happiness”. We implicitly work to acquire wealth so that we can be happy. Happiness is The Goal. Or that is how many might rationalize their effort. After all, what’s the use of working to acquire wealth if the result brings unhappiness? Regardless of how wealthy a person is, he strives to acquire more if he implicitly thinks the outcome will make him happier. So, the real thing we are looking to acquire is not money or property but happiness. This argument is not unusual. To many, it would be obvious.
So how about this: the ultimate wealth one can acquire is stable and enduring happiness, or what I have called “true happiness” or “unconditional happiness” in other articles in this website. This happiness would elude people who are extremely rich, or extremely poor. Rephrased, people with too much money or too little money are less likely than others to be “unconditionally happy”. Why would these folks be unlikely to experience it?
Let us start with the super-rich1 (in the rest of this article, I call them “rich” in the interest of making this piece more readable). As I have explained in my earlier article, desire is the root cause of human suffering. Further, as explained in another article, happiness does not flow from fulfillment of desire. Quite the opposite – desires multiply when they are fulfilled. This phenomenon paradoxically leads to the rich having more raging desires than others. They invariably have more stuff to get attached to. And each stuff creates even more room for attachment – as explained in this earlier article. They are more likely to get disturbed by absence of material benefits that many of us are blissfully unaware of, let alone attached to. These attachments are barriers to enduring happiness. Under such entrapment of desires, a person will live life waiting for the next sense-gratification. With many more such attachments, the rich have many more formidable barriers to enduring happiness than the others. Unfortunately, there is not much self-awareness on this point. Seeking sense-gratification like a person in a blazing desert keeps looking for water and chasing mirages, a sense-attached person would never reach a quenched state of happiness. On the other hand, glimpses of true happiness would flow naturally from spiritual experiences such as meditation using an effective technique that progressively spill into normal daily life. Then, a person finds bliss within his mind that does not depend upon the conditions outside his control. With practice, such happiness becomes stable and is not held hostage to the ups and downs of life’s events.
Now let’s come to the very poor. Tragically, they often face a daily struggle to survive. Faced with excruciating challenges including starvation, even the biological development needed for the mind and body to function well may not come to them. The dreadful result is that they are less likely to be able to have the physical and mental grounding needed to perform the demanding yoga practices that help us achieve true happiness. And even if they do, their daily struggle for survival leaves them with appallingly little space for spiritual advancement.
In between these two extremes lies a sweet-spot where people have a fair chance of achieving true happiness. In this zone, people have enough to meet their needs. But they see themselves in various states of material-deprivation or relationship-deprivation compared with others. Often looking at the rich and fretting about luxuries absent from life, they can make-do with what they have and can easily “give up” what they don’t. Once a disenchanted person sees the need to reconcile with unfulfilled desires, his mind becomes a fertile ground for spiritual wisdom to take root. In the minds of the rich, this mental soil usually becomes a barren desert under the searing heat of far too many desires that keep unsettling the mind. The less well-off are unable to fulfil simpler desires and so have a much smaller number of them to overpower. And even these smaller number of desires provide imagined pleasures rather than concrete experiences, thereby making them easier to counter mentally.
Closing note: Counting our blessings
Not being super-rich is a blessing in disguise. In the face of our daily struggles this may be a very good disguise and the “blessing is only a fleeting opportunity. As mentioned in my earlier article, to convert this blessing into happiness, a person needs to work – just as a farmer needs to work to covert a fertile land into a rich crop. One place to start could be this article. Without conscious spiritual-work, a normal person would spend his life being trapped away from unconditional happiness, just like the very rich and the very poor.
Footnote
1: The bible quotes Jesus as saying “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”. To me, seeking the Kingdom of God, as advised by Jesus, appears to me to be not very different from the feeling of unconditional happiness that can be experienced through spiritual experiences such as deep meditation. So, unconditional happiness that must present in heaven does not come from attachment to the senses (i.e. attachment to what our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, or skin relay to our brain) but by transcending the senses so as to not make happiness conditional upon them.
