NET-WORTH AND SELF-WORTH
People have shown a great ability to bounce back, when unexpected turns of events made them lose all their wealth and status. When Jamie Dimon, Chief Executive of JPMorgan, was recently in India , he reminisced on his reaching heights of glory at Citigroup in the good old days and then being thrown out suddenly. He had to start from scratch. “My net-worth had gone totally but not my self-worth,” he said to reporters. There is something spiritual about such an outlook.
Maintaining high self-worth is a sign of good spiritual health. Time will tell, of course, if you had hypnotized yourself into it or you really had the strength born of the intuitive grasp of your own deeper dimension. When external assets vanish and when even the body and the mind get weak, the spirit can rise and show its powers. It will breathe new life into the mind first, and then restore the agility of the body. Before long, your material well-being also has to stage a comeback.
Are we saying people like Dimon are spiritual and we would place them on par with saints and sages? Of course not. This element of inner silence in the wake of a tragedy that empowers fresh thinking and involvement in a new venture (as he did with JPMorgan) is a sure sign of spiritual potential. With a few other requirements fulfilled, yes, such business icons can scale the heights of spiritual glory. Those requirements would be, among others, keen awareness of the limitations of all the worldly pursuits and love of the truth that shines behind the (gold lid of) word and thought. These are called vairagya and jnana by Adi Shankaracharya in his introductory remarks on the Bhagavad-Geeta, where he says these two qualities mark the nivritti–dharma (the discipline of renunciation). People like Dimon were destined to blaze a trail in pravrtti–dharma (the discipline of action in the world).
“Never say die,” is possible when you have an inkling of “who you are” deep down. The Vedanta repeatedly puts it in the words, “You are not the body, nor the mind; you are Pure Existence and Awareness.” Those who fully grasp this truth stride across this earth with no fear or worries. The purpose of studying the Upanishads is to awaken such Self-knowledge in us, and not merely make us scholars of philosophy. What prevents such an intuition is the loud noise of our own thoughts, which are – to make matters worse – the product of false conditionings. We are caught in the maze of memories, which not only play again and again bygone events before our mental eyes but also create an identity for us. This latter part (referred to as I-thought by Maharshi Ramana) is what mainly weakens our self-worth along with our net-worth.
Self-inquiry counters these memories and clears the smoke screen created by them. The thought, “Who am I?” removes a thousand thoughts of “Who I am” and, finally, itself disappears. The Pure Self is not a thought, while the ego is nothing but a bundle of thoughts.
Would you say, you never thought this way?
Swami Chidananda
Varanasi
Tuesday, June 30, 2009