Chapter 13- Religious Studies: Contraindicated

Activities Contraindicated:

• Profiteering from spiritual exploits
• Profiteering from hope
• Profiteering from alcohols or narcotics
• The eating of blue-veined cheeses
• Sociopathic social-climbing
• The indulgence in tabloid gossip

 
Profiteering from Spiritual exploits can mean many things from commonplace fortune-telling to the sale of spiritual truth. There are many points to this calamity, as regards the ruination of useful talents and serious causes, attributable to a monied attachment, however today we are reviewing the concerns of the individual themselves rather than the consequences of their actions in this regard.

Inside the thinking of most folk there has to be a way of qualifying the value and worth of everything around them. This is usual to a developing discernment. We are constantly reviewing the price and cost of our involvements, and by doing so we are reasserting our choices and commitments within the world.

It is natural for a man to wish to qualify his life this way, yet for many the way of this qualification itself may come to supersede what was to be the end intention or prize originally sought for.

For example: I may count the number of heads in church to qualify whether or not the church is “reaching out” to people as I would hope. My prize might be that a certain salvation is won there for them … however, the number of heads really has nothing to do with one or more being salved! It may tell me of something to do with numbers of attendees, and I may qualify it in my mind as being relevant to salvation, when truly it is not.

The whole ‘counting’ thing is overrated! – as far as spiritual discerning goes a quantity of numbers can never relate to actuality in toto. Statistics are indicative only of themselves, and not of any real assumption in stead.

Truth is not worth more because people will pay for it, nor is it to be weighed by the dollar. The miser will never find the comfort he seeks by accumulating his wealth. Statistics refer only to the past, containing no essence or foreknowledge of the future.

Here we can enter in to the subject of selling hope and question its vagaries. One can offer or, at times, give hope, but once there is profiteering involved the grace which is Hope departs immediately. 

You can witness this quite readily. Watch a man or a woman who is about to buy a product which they are being told will help beautify or fructify them. There is an excitedness, whilst also an illumination about them. Then, even before using the product, even before taking the package home, watch and see that illuminated quality dissipate from the point of the very transaction.

The hope expires when the individual believes they can purchase the promise for a fee. The fee has no basis in reality in relation to healing or enhancement. The link is broken immediately. Sadly it is often the hope which would have proved a good catalyst for inspiring the change which was sought for. Materially a product might be effective, but spiritually it cannot be received when money becomes involved. In this manner we can realize that medicines and foods are best given and received without monetary exchange.

Commerce, as a healthy animal, could be a most beautiful and useful beast. Eventually Mankind will feed from the milk from this creature – when it has matured. At present, commerce itself does not have the qualities that will one day spiritually imbibe it. It stops and starts – it is fixed in pockets which cannot or do not disperse as needed – and although it is young in the making, it has the constitution currently of an elderly and failing corpse. The heart is weak, the veins collapsed, the fat hangs heavy and the face sags at the prospect of yet one more greedy man. The infant Commerce is struggling with existence – malnourished and benign.

When folk are alarmed at the conservation issues within the natural world, they are intuitively also comprehending the condition of Commerce today. Generally speaking, the world issues to do with tree falls, wars and racial destitution are resulting from commerce in its present state of sickness.
True values do materialize wonderfully when folk work to counter these problems as best as they can. Yet spiritually speaking we have a system which of its own cannot qualify our life as well as it might – and is letting the whole of the complex world down.

The difficulty from the individual’s perspective of trying to profiteer, comes in the association immediately made real between themselves and the creature Commerce. Although we have a divine being in the making, at this point the corruption bleeds into any activity for which it is called to or involved in.

Added to this, when an individual, or corporation, becomes involved in the profiteering from alcohol or narcotics there is a further scoring upon the poor body of commerce – for when it is ill-used its failing does worsen. Equally this can be said for purchases and sales to do with any number of things injurious to man, however the entities associated with the ego-inhibiting substances fiercely and deleteriously afflict the creature Commerce. You can witness economic frailty within a race, country or institution in relation to its profiteering (not consumption) from narcotics or alcohol.