Money and meditation

There are two types of people who pursue the act of seeking freely, without obligations or inhibitions:

1. Those who have made abundant money themselves and shaped their ideal life using money as a resource.
2. Those who have trained their minds to live and survive on the bare minimum with limited needs and desires.

Whether you are a monk or a millionaire, both lifestyles are extremely supportive in the pursuit of self-realisation if one wants to explore it as a goal.

Financial freedom offers advantages that go beyond the usual online notion of "not having to do a job." If you can deal with the frequent boredom, financial freedom provides significant benefits, but this applies to only about 1% of the audience. The rich are just as caught up in the competitiveness to make more money as the poor or middle class; only the spectrum varies.

Financial freedom allows you to strive for mastery, whatever the goal may be. If you are meditating, it grants you uninterrupted time to explore this without having to take phone calls from your immediate boss. If you want to build an ambitious project, it allows you that freedom too.

Personal experience

Let me share a personal experience to illustrate this connection. My rediscovery process began with meditation, and I wanted to create a product or service to share the benefits of this practice. However, I quickly realized that the market for meditation is very small and engagement is even more challenging because the value is not immediate or tangibly visible for most people. Most of us meditate only as a means to relax or destress, so the 1% market becomes 0.1% when I position meditation as a tool for self-exploration or discovery.

If I were under financial pressure, I might have forced myself to build a meditation-habit-building app, trying to make sense of the sunk cost, provide value for my lost time or answer to my investors. But because I was self-funded and independent, I had the flexibility to keep pivoting during the discovery process. This freedom made the process feel like fun and play, rather than a goal I had to achieve immediately.

Exploring uncharted problems

Working on interesting problems that the world has left unexplored due to a lack of immediate financial value is another significant advantage of financial freedom. When you are not constrained by the need for quick returns, you can deep dive into areas that others might overlook. This allows for innovation and breakthroughs in fields that require time and patience to develop. Financial freedom empowers you to tackle these challenges and potentially make substantial contributions to areas that have been neglected due to their long-term nature.

Overcoming money as a source of restlessness

Money is often perceived as a source of restlessness because many wealthy individuals remain unhappy despite their financial success. In that context, I've said that a day trader who can view their end-of-day profit and loss with equanimity, without any emotional turbulence, is as spiritual as a monk. With no disrespect, if you were to place a monk back into society as a householder for 30 days as an experiment, it would truly test their mastery over their spiritual practices.

A good test of your spiritual prowess or meditation can be determined by your ability to focus on improving your craft, regardless of its immediate potential to generate wealth or any other tangible value to the society or self.

Religion and religiousness

Though they sound the same, these two terms are totally different. When you have money, you can be relentlessly religious about the one thing that consumes you so fully that the rest ceases to matter. That pursuit, even if it is as simple as making paper origami, when done with religious dedication, can put you in a state of no mind. This state is the highest peak of meditation in its purest form.

After all the trials and tribulations, including exploring the idea of renouncing money and wealth, I have come to the following conclusion: dedicating yourself to great things and forgoing the mundane (distractions) to explore your highest potential is an excellent use of money. In that context, money can be an antidote to dopamine. It allows you to focus deeply on a singular pursuit without the constant need for external rewards or distractions, facilitating a state of true meditation.

Signing off,

K

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