I fear that newfound wealth will magnify our vasanas (or core issues). (1) Financial advisers call it “sudden wealth syndrome.”
Michael said long ago that we had been using the delays in the Reval to get used to the idea of owning considerable wealth:
Archangel Michael: One of the benefits of what you think of as ‘delays’ is that you have been getting used to being an incredibly wealthy person. …
So it has given several of the key players the chance to do the adjustment. It is important that this is you getting used to your spiritual currency. (2)
Our spiritual currency is our sense of self-worth, the extent of the love we feel for ourselves and, after that, for others.
I hear: “With wealth comes fear. And with fear comes anger.”
Given that I know wealth will exaggerate my vasanas of fear and anger, I’m looking at the small actions, to watch this process adaptation.
For example: I ran out of coffee this morning. This would ordinarily be a routine matter, but I really looked at how I’d react and imagined myself being wealthy.
I felt anger. I noticed I routinely suppressed it. I “stayed within bounds.” I remained “reasonable.”
But now I was wealthy. Who gives a damn any more? I can do what I want.
Where is my coffee? My coffee?
Wealth can lead to a relaxation of suppression, just as drugs and alcohol do, and a rise of an already-present but deeply-buried feeling of entitlement. I have run out of coffee. I have run out of it. I.
Krishna described the process millennia ago:
Thinking about sense-objects [coffee]
Will attach you to sense-objects;
Grow attached, and you become addicted;
Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger;
Be angry, and you confuse the mind;
Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience;
Forget experience, you lose discrimination;
Lose discrimination, and you miss life’s only purpose. (3)
Why do we miss life’s only purpose if we lose our ability to discriminate or discern?
What is the purpose of life? To realize who we are. Who are we? God. When one of us realizes we are God, at that moment, God realizes God. And for that meeting was all of this created.
Lose the discrimination between the Real and the unreal, between the small “s” self and the Big “S” Self, and we lose the only purpose of life: To help us distinguish between the two so that we can realize God.
So when the suppression button is off, our entitlement becomes magnified. It now becomes a fatal flaw, an achilles’ heel, and we fall.
I’ve called this elsewhere the Hitler effect, after French historian Guillaume Pretty’s description of Hitler’s approach. The comment has stayed with me as a warning since reading it.
“I’d say that Hitler was a man trying to gamble and that, at the start, the fact that he neglects the whole dimension of strategic tactics, the type of ground logistical problems, all of these oversights don’t catch up with Hitler the war lord.
“And then, one day, all of these conditions for war, which should allow a war leader to grow, catch up with him, and from then on, all his bets systematically fail.” (4)
As long as Hitler could enforce loyalty to himself, he could continue to bet in larger and larger theaters without going through the necessity of planning, etc.
His hubris convinced him that he could merely kick in the Russian door and the whole corrupt edifice would come tumbling down. It did not.
Finally his lack of planning and dependence on brute force caught up with him. When his enemies converged on him on three fronts, none of his gambles paid off any longer.
Entitlement, hubris, pride goeth before a fall.
Getting over it is probably a hundred times more difficult when the restraints are gone than it is now.
I must handle it however if I’m to lead, manage, and shift several organizations towards the goal: A world that works for everyone. (5)
Footnotes
(1) See “Wealth Can Magnify Our Vasanas,” April 6, 2021, at a https://goldenageofgaia.com/2021/04/06/wealth-can-magnify-our-vasanas/.
Michael had this advice:
Steve: I worry that sudden wealth will magnify [my] vasanas [or core issues]. What to do?
Archangel Michael: Let us … begin by saying that this is one of the reasons why we have been speaking so much about being the steward, the leader, the wayshower, the participant observer.
As you assume profile – whether it is because of money or notoriety or political power or financial power, it matters not – it gives you a sense of being elevated. We would encourage you to take the elevator to the basement.
Start there. (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, July 22, 2016.)
(2) Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Dec. 11, 2013.
(3) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 42.
(4) Guillaume Pretty, “1942: The Year The Germans Lost The War | Hitler’s Lost Battles,” Timeline, at [youtube.com/watch?v=BuBIpe0f91w], in “Finding Blame is like Making War on a Person,” May 29, 2022, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2022/05/29/finding-blame-is-making-war-on-a-person/.
(5) The phrase originated with Werner Erhard.