The Soul of Money
Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life
C 2003 C Lynn Twist
W.W. Norton and Company publishers
page 18
Vicki Robin, in Your Money of Your Life, writes about people who, instead of making a living, more accurately "make a dying," or, in some cases, make a killing. The work they're doing is unfullfilling, perhaps even detrimental to their own or other's well being. Or perhaps they're embarrassed about their work. They hate it. They wish they didn't have to do it. They pretend that it doesn't matter, but in truth, their spirit - or someone else's - is being killed off..."
On her prejudice against rich people...
page 35
"... In her reply she admonished me, saying that while I had expressed my compassion for the poor, the sick, the faint, the weak, all my life, that would be a place where my self expression and service would easily flourish. The vicious cycle of poverty, she said, had been clearly articulated and is widely known. What is less obvious and goes almost completely unacknowledged is the vicious cycle of wealth. There is no recognition of the trap that wealth so often is, and of the suffering of the wealthy: the loneliness, the isolation, the hardening of the heart, the hunger and the poverty of the soul that can come with the burden of wealth.
page 36
"Mother Theresa's admonition and my subsequent fund-raising work with the very wealthy taught me that, surprisingly, wealth is no protection from human suffering. I would come to learn that people with excess wealth - not all of them, but many - struggle in lives disconnected from the qualities of the soul. They lived trapped in a prison of privilege in which material comforts are plentiful, but spiritual and emotional deprivation are real and painful. In that prison they loose touch with the values of the heart. They can become manifestation of money's dark side. For some, wealth only serves as a weapon that expands their capacity to do harm.
