Prosperity is not against spirituality and spirituality is not against prosperity.
When we say spirituality, we think it’s some woo-woo stuff. It’s not so.
India was at its peak of economic growth when spiritual awakening was very high. India’s GDP was one third of the world’s. When Lord Macaulay visited India, he said he travelled all over the country and he did not find one poor or one sick person in the country. That was the state of affairs when there was so much of heart, so much of service, and a sense of belongingness. When this started declining, when greed, anger, jealousy, and hatred took over society, economic downtown came very fast. There is a lesson to be learned from history.
We need to connect people from that inner core of our existence. From acting like robots, we need to come back to a position where we maintain our innocence and still be very intelligent. That is spirituality.
We are all made up of matter and spirit. Our body is made up of carbohydrates, proteins and amino acids. Our spirit, our mind is made up of truth, integrity, honesty, beauty, compassion, love, cooperation and creativity. Addressing these qualities is spirituality. This is part of our spirit.
Today in the world, when there is this huge menace of depression and lack of trust, or trust is being broken down, while fear and insecurity about financial and other aspects of life is increasing, it is all the more vital we place more emphasis on spirituality.
This means building up the spirit, the inner strength. Spirituality would bring back confidence in the humanness of our human society. Spirituality can turn our mind back onto compassion and love, which is the very breath of our existence.
From being mechanically driven, we need to lead lives full of enthusiasm, cooperation and humaneness. What spirituality is against is greed.
You can be prosperous. You move in life towards more prosperity. Spirituality never says be poor. There is enough in this world for everyone’s need, not for everybody’s greed.
Behind Corruption is Greed, Lack of Belonging
Because of greed, there have been so many scams. The dot com bust was because of that. Those who want to be prosperous unethically are bound to fail leading to lack of trust. Their success is short lived and their fall is bigger without ever being able to rise up from there.
Forgiving greedy scamsters cannot be easy. What is needed is grounding in ethical and spiritual values. Spirituality promotes humanism so frauds will cease to happen.
A big wave of awakening has to happen against corruption since corruption begins where the sense of belongingness ends. When you have a sense of belongingness, you’ll never be corrupt with those people. You will never take or give bribes to those whom you feel belong to you. When that sense of belongingness ends, corruption begins.
What can bring down your self-respect is your greed or your over ambitiousness. Your ambition can eat you. Self-respect cannot be snatched away from you by anybody other than your own greed.
Spirituality gives you contentment and self-respect. If you respect yourself, nobody can take it away from you. If you have confidence in you, let the whole world stand on one side and make fun of you. You will join them. You will say, “You want to make fun of me? You want to laugh at my cost? Okay, go ahead. I am happy for you being happy.” This indicates how much self-respect you have.
Business needs spirituality. So does education.
Holistic Education
Education has three key aspects. One is information, the second is observation, and the third is intuition.
Often when we think of education, we think in terms of information. Just gathering information is not enough. You need keenness of mind, a mind which is alert and which is sharp enough to absorb what’s happening around and what’s happening within.
Ethics is listening to the consciousness that’s deep inside and acting according to it when it comes to your social interactions. So, observation is a very important aspect of education, which has not been given much attention.
Spirituality is that which enables you to get in touch with your observation, your perceptual ability, and enhances your intuitive faculty
The third is intuitive ability. If you turn back and see in history, great scientists have not gone to college and obtained a degree. But they had developed an intuitive ability, whether it was Thomas Alva Edison or even Albert Einstein. They all had that intuitive ability which they had nurtured within themselves. Spirituality begins here.
Spirituality is that which enables you to get in touch with your observation, your perceptual ability, and enhances your intuitive faculty. When the mind is calm, it is able to perceive things better.
When the mind is disturbed, our perception is disturbed. The mind needs to be calm, then perception becomes better, observation becomes much clearer, and expression becomes more understandable. Perception, observation and expression are three ways to communicate with the world around us.
Business depends on communication. If communication breaks down, business breaks down. And communication can be better only when there is an element of spiritual awakening or spiritual power or force within each one of us.
Today when technology has shrunk the world into a global village, we can’t afford to have sectarian mindsets. We need to have that broad vision that the whole world is one human family. The lack of this has created much strife. Otherwise we will go back to the Middle Ages when we used to fight in the name of race, religion and language.
