Ensure That Your Work Supports Your Spiritual Progress

The Problem With Wanting To Be Rich First: When The Means Become The End

You have no doubt already heard a friend promise to devote themselves to others, but only once their own fortune is secured. This is a misleading line of reasoning, because it forgets that the path transforms the traveler. Your intermediate actions will profoundly reshape you, to the point of making you a stranger to yourself.

Wanting To Change The World After Being Corrupted By It Is A Pious Wish

To think only of getting rich for 10 or 15 years and then developing a philanthropic streak is at best naive and at worst entirely dishonest. Wanting to build an empire on twisted values and then play the good Samaritan is a lie that few people can believe. The business world is an ocean infested with sharks; to survive there without being devoured, you must learn to swim in murky waters and sharpen your own weapons. Faced with the sharks who dominate the business world, survival sometimes requires becoming a predator yourself in order not to end up as bait.
What should we then think of a person who, after becoming a wolf to deal with wolves and ultimately grow rich, would choose to give everything up and devote themselves to philanthropy? Actions have consequences, and there are weighty choices that even charitable deeds cannot erase.

Your Actions Can Leave A Nauseating Wake, As Indelible As The Smell Of The Tide On A Fisherman’s Skin

Today’s renunciations stain tomorrow’s soul with almost indelible colors. You may well play the benefactor ten years from now: your compromises can forever tarnish your soul. Your actions, what is called karma in Sanskrit, raise you up or pull you down spiritually. After years devoted exclusively to money, it is often illusory to want to pose as a sincere patron: you cannot teach generosity to a mind conditioned by gain.

Your Actions Matter More Than Your Profits

Do not measure your worth by the scale of your profits, but by the richness of your actions. Our thirst for perpetual victory is only the symptom of a society enslaved by calculation, because what can be counted can be controlled. But the soul does not speak the language of mathematics; it belongs to the realm of words and meaning. To nourish it, you must leave behind the dictatorship of results and learn to cherish the path you walk, independently of the destination.

You Are Your Efforts, Not Your Results

The only prayers that truly count are the efforts you make every day in a given direction, regardless of the results you obtain, for these do not belong to you but return to God. In the end, God will judge us not by what we have accomplished, but by the direction in which we have turned our hearts. The repeated actions of everyday life push us in one direction or another. Each day is a deliberate choice, made through our actions, to draw closer to God or not.

Do Not Let Yourself Be Trapped By Your Environment

Every culture tends to shape its people according to its own codes. If developed societies shine through their capitalist efficiency, they can also prove crushing, sometimes leaving the individual no other horizon than producing and consuming. Ultimately, these societies tend to atrophy the spiritual dimension of the individual. It is therefore everyone’s duty to tear themselves away from their native soil if it becomes an obstacle to their personal elevation.
Sometimes, the best protection is to leave. One cannot resist an environment or a system designed to control us, our actions as well as our thoughts, down to the smallest details. Some succeed, but at the cost of great suffering or extreme marginalization. Even Gandhi, to oppose the colonial yoke, had to withdraw to an ashram, living self-sufficiently according to his own codes, on the margins of society. If you manage to achieve this same defiance without leaving your current environment—perhaps thanks to the support of online communities—it is a true feat. However, such success remains the exception.

Your Soul Can Be Saved, But It Needs Time: The True Path Of Redemption

The most authentic redemption is lived in secret. When some seek to dazzle the world with great works of philanthropy, their intentions can legitimately be questioned. Salvation remains open to anyone who walks far from the spotlight, in a quiet dialogue with the Eternal. Human approval carries little weight: what matters is that your heart remains attuned to God, undisturbed even by the gaze of the powerful. Let your heart remain your only guide, so that your conversion may be genuine. For greatness of soul is judged more by the purity of intention than by the magnitude of the deed.