No Way Amway, Guruji !

Want to know a secret of returning from Las Vegas with a small fortune?  
Go with a large fortune.

If you are a spiritualist (and a guru to boot), you must sit on your yogic mat, curl your toes and say – Whose fortune?

Fortune is for the underlings, what the gurus take is only a commission for services rendered. And who cares if the commission is bigger, maybe you do but that’s your own karmic problem.

Ultimately survival boils down to the chips and there are only two ways to play it — creaming the boss or bossing the cream.

Creaming the boss is about being a true Heterotroph. It started at the time of evolution when we discovered this labour saving methodology.The plants make and we eat what they make. Theft has been our primary talent.

But now we have become more cultured.

Bossing the cream is a recent evolutionary phenomenon. We have come to the conclusion that now, having become civilized, we have a birthright to becoming rich. So whatever we do or wherever we are we have a right to dip in our fishing rods. So what if the pond is your neighbour’s or belongs to your boss.

The graduation from corporate monogamy to polygamy is interesting. There are those who dip their spoons in their employer’s cream without a blink and others who do Side- Business on the sly and Amway on the high. It’s called Networking – which means ‘you net while your boss works!’

What is the analysis on the cosmic scale? The race is on for making money, or so say the Corporate Spiritualists. Because once you do that you can stop working and wasting your time, they say. And I have always wondered what we would all do if we created the time and we had no work to do?

(For which I am now held in contempt for utter lack of imagination).

Enough of this digression, getting back to the cosmic analysis of the Corporate Spiritualists. The saving of time creates more time and if that time is further saved  and  put into your  mutual funds investment one could even get immortal in the long run.

Richard Causton, a Buddhist exponent gives an interesting perspective. “How do we use the supposedly vast amounts of time that all the highly sophisticated artifacts of our society have managed to save for us? When Bob rushes home on the 6.16 from Charing Cross , what is it to do? Probably, just to eat something, put his feet up, then fall asleep in front of the television. Now, no one would want to deny Bob the time to rest for a bit — after all, he has probably been slaving all day at work over the latest and fastest time - saving computer – but his behavior and that of millions of others like him, does raise a disturbing question: has our society striven so hard and for so long to save us this apparently precious commodity – time – precisely so that we can indulge in the luxury of squandering it?” If the purpose of money is to create free time, then we have the problem of deciding what to do with it?

Luckily, there is always a guru to tell you what to do.

I am told that time comes in several types of packaging.

(For example most divorcees and working couples with kids subscribe to Quality Time while those in the fever of a love affair subscribe to Quantity Time).

But as most of us have become upwardly mobile, we prefer Designer Time .It is now available for sale. It can be bought from authorized sources with a warranty. And not buying it is foolish; one can waste a whole lifetime living life, rather than saving it. Or worse, working, which is now proved to be a complete waste of time.

Designer time is about performance, where the focus is on instant achievement rather than on the travails of learning. We no longer learn a trade rather we get an education that equips us for the tricks of the trade. We no longer want our children languishing in idleness of self discovery, not when we have aptitude tests that can discover their potential. Everything is a waste of time unless it provides instant gratification in some way.

Performance is also about doing away with breadwinning. Which has become a distasteful word. We envy the cricket champ who can retire in his twenties. Or the film star who earns in a few blockbusters what we earn thru a lifetime. The option of doing nothing is delightful and the choice of doing whatever we choose to do without the Have- To’s is even more exciting. The dreams of doing something more worthwhile than the daily grind or even those of being on a perpetual holiday are the common thread of humankind.

Excuse me, I still haven’t got an answer?  Working hard not to work hard is really hard work – so they say, but then I am not qualified for guruhood!

Copyright © 2014,Lima Sehgal
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