The Fear Of Not Being Good Enough Is The Cause Of All Poverty

Keep The River Flowing

During my frequent travels to some of the most underdeveloped regions of the world, I noticed time and again that some of the poorest of people had the most genuine love for their children, their parents and for each other. Their faces glowed with joy and peacefulness, despite their hard lives of constant struggle and strife. What perhaps astonished me more than anything was that they had a lot of time just to be, as if time didn’t exist. By contrast, the rush of modern life in order to get everything a modern person thinks they need to own, has left many without time to even think, reflect, or be quiet. In modern cities, we see far more stressed faces than we do relaxed ones. So I came to the conclusion that true abundance cannot be measured by how many possessions you have, or even how much wealth and power you have accumulated, but by how good you feel about yourself, about others, and about the world.

There is no real pressure or stress from the condition of being poor; the pressure only arises when being poor is interpreted as a sign of not being good enough. That is when the river of true abundance stops flowing. Like a river, obstructed in its flow by the wall of a dam, our perception of lack even more assuredly stops the ever-present potential stream of personal abundance from flowing. The pressure that builds up in us, as in the case of the dam, is what we experience as stress and not having enough time to do all the things we think we need to do to keep the abundance flowing. Yet in order to really know and master the flow of abundance, we may first need to fully experience the pressure and anxiety that comes from the feeling of never having enough. There is that inner void, that disconnectedness, which we try to compensate for by filling our lives with pleasures that have no lasting effect, except to further increase our feelings of emptiness. And this is how it needs to be. Our acceptance of this feeling of lack, void or emptiness (or whatever words we may choose to describe our dissatisfaction with life), and embracing it for all its worth, is an indispensable step toward allowing more abundance into our lives. This total acceptance completely removes the block that holds up the stream of abundance.

Many of those who were born with a ‘silver spoon’ in their mouth, and those who have made it to the top by their own means, may need to lose all their possessions and wealth in order to feel what it is like to have nothing at all, and be at the mercy of the government to receive their daily bread. This was one of the main reasons, why the masses co-created the Great Depression in the 20th century, affecting lives everywhere. The Great Depression then laid the basis for a giant wave of affluence that spread all over the globe. The experience of mass poverty at that time was a portal to a new era that brought freedom and greater possibilities for so many and prepared the way for the spiritual revolution now taking place.

The Poor Wealthy and The Wealthy Poor

Strange as it sounds, wealthy people often feel incomplete and empty because they have no real reference of knowing what it is like to have nothing. In the same way as shadow defines light, poverty defines wealth. For a Nepalese man who lives out in the country, an income of eight dollars a month may be the normal average. If he comes to town and sees others earning as much as $100 a month, he considers them to be rich. By contrast, however, Americans would regard themselves as below the poverty line if they made $1,000 dollars a month. In turn, they would see someone with a monthly income of $5,000 being well off. Yet many of those who make that amount and more feel they have nothing to spare when they see a homeless person in the street who may collect even less than the Nepalese man in the countryside.

So those born into very wealthy families, with free access to everything they could ever want, may not be able to appreciate their wealth at all. It may in fact become so meaningless to them that they spend it on things they really don’t need or even enjoy, except perhaps for a fleeting moment. Yet they are often very reluctant when it comes to giving part of it away to help those in need, except occasionally as donations that are tax deductible. They find no real purpose for what they own.

By contrast, many people born into very poor families learn to appreciate small things as great gifts, and have a better grip on using their wealth wisely when they step into the flow of incredible abundance. They are more likely to remain humble and receptive and put their wealth to good use, both for their personal benefit and that of society. They know that poverty at an early age helps them to appreciate their life, their family, and their world.

For others, the reaction to having a poor start in life could be different; they might feel so inferior that, in desperation, they choose to try to get out of their poverty dilemma by acquiring wealth no matter what. This extreme anxiety shows that they weren’t able to accept, and therefore live with, poverty. Instead, they will fight against it and will do almost anything to avoid it, even if it means the use of unlawful methods, such as theft or trickery. Their fear of lack is so strong that they can never find enjoyment in whatever they have, even if it is more than they need. Driven by the incessant urge to accumulate and hoard wealth, they gain no satisfaction from it. Inevitably, at some point, their Higher Self nature will put them face to face with poverty again, until they free themselves of the fear of not being good enough – which is the cause of all poverty.

The fear of poverty manifests poverty. In most cases they will, for example, gamble their possessions away on the stock market or in the casino, go to jail if they acquired them illegally, or become depressed and resort to drugs or alcohol in order to lose them all again. And even if they manage to hang on to their assets, they will still feel poor at heart, because ‘feeling poor’ is what they hate and fear so much. Poverty for them represents ‘unworthiness’ which puts them outside the stream of true abundance and locked in their fear of lack. Stockpiling wealth for wealth’s sake is just a reflection of their insecurity, fear, distrust, and low self-worth. These persistent, nagging, inner feelings of insecurity compel them to devote their lives to accumulating ‘things’ (money, property, possessions, power and influence) to try to alleviate their fears. (You may sometimes have experienced these tendencies yourself to some degree.) Even though this incessant drive to have more sentences them to relentlessly living in fear, the thought of being without the comfort of the motivation to be running faster and faster on the treadmill like a rat in a cage terrifies them to death – literally.

In the realm of duality, every state of extreme excess must be balanced by a corresponding state of extreme lack. So wealthy people aren’t necessarily living in abundance. They may indeed be poorer than those who own very little but are filled with the richness of love, kindness and a trusting knowingness that somehow their lives are always taken care of. In this, as with most situations in life, the true meanings remain hidden and unrecognized by the vast majority of people. The fact is that the only truly abundant people are those who have accepted nothingness in their lives, they have no more fear of lack or poverty in them. But fully accepting nothingness does not mean that they cannot have or enjoy all the finest material things in life. Quite the reverse. What happens is that they are automatically provided with whatever they need and much more because their desires are rooted in the fullness of knowing that they are worthy of receiving the support of the entire, ever-abundant universe.

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This is an excerpt from my book LIFTING THE VEIL OF DUALITY