~~ MONEY 3 ~~

First you can accumulate money like a madman, then one day you understand that you wasted your whole life. When you understand this you become afraid, but the old habit persists. You can give the whole and forget about it and escape, but you cannot share it.

If a man of understanding has money he shares it because money is not for itself, it is for life. If he feels that life needs it, love needs it, he can throw it away completely, but it is not a renunciation, it is again using it. Love is the goal for him; money is never the goal, money is the means. For people who are after money, money is the goal, love becomes just a means. Even their prayer is for money; even prayer becomes a means to money.

Money is a very complex phenomenon. Why do people get so much into it, and so many people at that? It has a certain appeal, a magnetic appeal. Money has a hypnotic appeal in it and the appeal is that you can possess it completely. Money is very docile, it becomes a slave. The ego feels very fulfilled.

Love is not docile, love is rebellious. You cannot possess love. You can possess a woman, you can possess a man, but you can never possess love. If you possess a woman, the woman has become money, a thing; if you possess a man, the man has become money, a thing, an instrument. A man is a man and a woman is a woman only when they are an end unto themselves, not a means to anything else. Money is the means, and to become obsessed with the means is the greatest foolishness that can occur to a man and the greatest curse.

Money should not become the goal, but I am not saying at the same time that you should renounce it and become beggars -- use it, it is a good means. I'm not against money, I have nothing to say against it. I am saying something about you and your possessiveness, not about money. Money can be beautiful -- if it is not possessed, if you don't become obsessed with it. It can be beautiful. Money is like blood circulating in the body: in the body of society money circulates, it is blood. It helps society to be enriched, to be alive -- but it is like blood.

You must have heard about diseases in which the blood stops and cannot circulate, clots of blood come into existence and they become blocks and the blood cannot circulate in the body. Then you are paralyzed, and if the clots happen in the heart you are dead.

If money circulates, moves from one hand to another, goes on moving, the more movement the better, then the blood circulates well, then life is healthy. But when a miser comes in, a clot has happened; somewhere somebody is accumulating, not sharing, and that is a clot in the blood circulation. The man disturbs, he does not live himself and because of his blocking he does not allow others to live. The money has stopped circulating. Blood circulating is life, blood stopped, blocked, is death. Money circulating is life, money stopped, blocked, is death.

I'm for a society where money moves fast, nobody clings to it, everybody uses it, and you remember that the simple law of money is: the more you use it, the more valuable it is. For example, we are sitting here. If ten persons have a hundred rupees in their pockets, and they keep it to themselves, then ten persons have only one thousand rupees, dead. But when those rupees circulate, if they make two rounds, ten thousand have become twenty thousand; if they make three rounds they have become thirty thousand; and if they make four rounds.... The more they circulate, the more money there is, because when one hundred rupees are kept by one man those hundred rupees are dead. If he uses them they go to somebody else, then they come to him again because others are also using them; now he has two hundred rupees, and again three hundred, four hundred, five hundred.... The more you use it, the more money floats and circulates, and the richer society is.