Deadly Serious about Money - 10.20.09

Student Comment: What you said just a minute ago brought up something that I was reading last night about someone saying that what we do here is joy, and we’re without seriousness. And I used to think that this seriousness and lack of joy came from money, but now I’m starting to feel that it comes from something much deeper that can be, as we’ve said before, deadly serious.

Shunyamurti, spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us that we must learn not to be serious about petty things, and only be serious when it comes to serious matters. “But those serious matters are the matters of bliss, and joy, and love, and beauty.” But in Western industrial society we’ve placed all value on money rather than the things that really matter such as nature and the environment. And “money is a total fiction, but in this capitalist system, it is the only thing that’s real. Nothing else is real. . . . And they’re having anxiety about something that is completely fictional, while not thinking at all about the fact that the entire real world of nature is collapsing because we’re not paying attention to it. It’s an astounding situation that can only be called psychosis at a species level.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20, 2009.