Chapter 25Wealth and Economics

Wealth and Government

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Money is not meant to make money, money is meant to make the earth ready for the advent of the new creation.

* It is to the Divine that all riches belong. It is the Divine who lends them to living beings, and it is to Him that they must naturally return.

* Wealth under the psychic influence: wealth ready to return to its true possessor, the Divine.

* A day shall come when all the wealth of this world, freed at last from the enslavement to the antidivine forces, offers itself spontaneously and fully to the service of the Divine’s Work upon earth.1

6 January 1955

* Give all you are, all you have; nothing more is asked of you but also nothing less.1

6 January 1956

* True wealth is that which one offers to the Divine.

* You are rich only by the money that you give to the Divine Cause.

30 January 1959

* You are richer with the wealth you give than with the wealth you keep in your possession.

* (Message for the First Annual Conference of the Sri Aurobindo Society)

The true fortune is to spend in the right way. You become truly rich when you dispose of your wealth in the best possible way.

February 1962

* 1 Distributed on the Feast of the Epiphany, which the Mother designated as “the festival of the offering of the material world to the Divine”.

Prosperity stays consistently only with him who offers it to the Divine.

* Unselfish prosperity: he who receives it abundantly, gives all that he has as he receives it.

* Generosity gives and gives itself without bargaining.

* Let money come and go in abundance for good works.

* To me any activity is more important than its cost to me, even if the cost is unreasonable. Money should never be the criterion for such decisions. If we say we can’t have something because of its cost, we limit our receptivity to the Grace and hamper its workings. Money is only a medium of exchange, it is all relative and the Divine resources are inexhaustible. Is this attitude a correct one?

You are quite right and I approve of your attitude.

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* * Never mix in your thought spiritual power and money because it leads straight to catastrophe.

* A gift made through vanity is profitable neither to the giver nor to the receiver.

* I wanted to make him understand and experience that the thought, the feeling and the force that is in a gift is much more important and valuable than the thing given itself.

* A practical problem comes up more and more often: should one who is preparing to do Yoga and has made it a general rule to offer You everything and depend entirely on You, accept gifts, in money or kind, coming from others? Because if he accepts, he is put under personal obligations and duties. Can a sadhak allow this? Can he say to himself: “The Divine has many ways of giving”?

What is to be done if a person begins to quarrel because one has accepted a gift in one case and refused in another? What is to be done to avoid such bitterness around one, provoked by repeated refusals?

“The Divine has many ways of giving.” This is the correct thing. One never has any obligation to anybody, one has an obligation only to the Divine and there totally. When a gift is made without conditions, one can always take it as coming from the Divine and leave it to the Divine to take care of what is needed in exchange or response. As for ill-will, jealousy, quarrels and reproaches, one must sincerely be above all that and reply with a benevolent smile to the bitterest words; and unless one is absolutely sure of himself and his reactions, it would be better, as a general rule, to keep silent.

6 October 1960

* People say, “God is the friend of the poor”, but it seems wrong and false. God is the friend of the rich. We do not know what place we have.

To the rich God gives money, but to the poor He gives Himself.

All depends on the poor giving more value to the riches or to God.

22 August 1964

* The financiers and businessmen have been offered the possibility to collaborate with the future, but most of them refuse, convinced that the power of money is stronger than that of the future. But the future will crush them with its irresistible power.

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* * In this material world, for men, money is more sacred than the Divine’s Will.

12 March 1965

* Greed for money: the surest way to decrease one’s conscience and to narrow one’s nature.

* I am not for getting interest on money.

* I dabbled in stocks and shares a little, but came a cropper. The speculation I carried on for a while has burnt quite a hole in my pocket. I really wish I hadn’t. Are you dead against speculation?

You ought to know that I do not approve at all of speculation — but what is done is done.

17 December 1939

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