Greed is good...
#2 in the series of the seven deadlies
Michael Douglas (or more accurately Oliver Stone) first coined the phrase “Greed is good” in the 1987 film Wall Street.
John F. Kennedy said something similar, but more poetically in 1962 when he declared “A rising tide lifts all boats”.
Economically this is supposed to mean that accumulation of wealth is good for the economy. It creates jobs. After all, somebody has to make all those luxury items that the wealthy spend their excess money on.
The people in minimum wage jobs might not agree with this sentiment, but they’re rarely asked, and the rich do like a Get Out of Guilt Free card on their monopoly board.
Even in the spiritual realms, we can find the same justification. In their marketing, spiritual coaches justify charging really high fees based on the fact that the more they earn, the more their channel “expands” and the more wisdom they can bring through to their grateful subjects.
They’re not greedy, they’re just being a role model for “receiving”.
They usually channel somebody epic like Isis or Archangel Michael, and for a fee will produce some ancient wisdom to solve modern problems. I don’t know if Isis and Michael get some kind of intellectual property rights for this. It’s a bit of a murky area.
No one actually likes to talk about money because it feels weird. Instead of facing this awkward energy, we cover it in sugar and rebrand it as “wealth” or “abundance”. These are obviously more spiritual-sounding words.
But for me, the above concept was summed up most accurately in 1988 by Freddie Mercury when he sang “I want it all, I want it all, I want it all… and I want it now.”
You can always rely on Freddie to bring the really real.
Greed is the insatiable need for “More” … more money, more things, more status, more popularity.
The Church declared greed to be so bad it was named one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Religion was created when we were very firmly rooted in the either/or world, therefore if something was bad, its opposite was good.
Because greed (or having “more”) was “bad” then its opposite (having “less”) must be good, so Don’t be greedy… be frugal.
Flow doesn’t work according to the rules of duality. It comes from a state where things can be both/and. In the higher realms, how we feel on the inside (our driving energy) has more power than anything we do on the outside.
If we’re greedy for more, we probably feel a sense of lack. We think having more will take away this feeling of “not enough-ness”, but it doesn’t. As the saying goes… “You can never have enough of what you didn’t want in the first place”.
On the other hand, if we’re frugal, we probably feel resentful or arrogant in our moral superiority, so our frugality has the same effect as our greed. Both elicit negative feeling whirlpools… which block Flow.
Who knows how many good people lived lives of sacrifice, only to find there were no prizes at the end of the game. Flow only exists in present time. It doesn’t play “happiness later” it prefers happiness now.
Flow doesn’t want “more” it wants everything, because it “knows” itself to be part of everything. If we experience ourselves as that source then the feeling of “not enough” disappears and we can start being more reasonable with our expectations, and less absurd with our excuses for rampant consumerism.
I’m channeling Freddie Mercury now, so I know it’s true.