Publisher’s note: On a Wednesday night on a late summer evening, I overcame my usual resistance and made my way to the West Village for a look see at a couple who held gatherings in a studio there once a week. Originally I had told their friend, who had contacted me with the idea of doing an article about them a month or so earlier, of how many friends of teachers, gurus, facilitators, therapists, etc. with the newest approach or the heaviest credentials, had come knocking at my door offering nirvana and available time for an interview. I told him that although I appreciated his effort, I was not interested. I don’t recall what opened my mind. I had been in therapy for most of the year and had felt frustrated that such a commitment of time and money and self-exploration had produced very limited results. That wasn’t the first time. The idea of jumping into another process seemed pointless. But I had a pleasant talk with Shya one night and my interest was piqued. I must say I’m not even sure why. Perhaps it was the way that he listened to my words with such care and gave me his time without a sense of time limit, anyway, I decided to attend a Wednesday evening gathering. I didn’t know it then, but I was at the beginning of the end of years of working on myself. A lot of time has come and gone since then. I have been going back every Wednesday night when I’m in town, doing a workshop now and then. I know I have found something here that is very precious to me. Fresh air is what comes to mind. Complete love is what my heart says.
Paul English
Free Spirit: I’ve written down some questions about money, but let’s talk as if it’s an unknown or new subject, for the sake of extra-terrestrials, or whoever might not know what money is.
Shya: Well, you could say that money is a means of exchange. It’s a way that people barter services and goods for something that they’ve set up arbitrarily, artificially as of value. Basically, I see that people’s relationship with money dictates their relationship to life. And how you are in your dealings with money is very much a reflection of how you are in relation to your life. Most people look to see if they can afford something, via their money and their wealth, rather than to look and see if it’s what they truly want. So most people’s lives are determined by whether or not they can afford to, rather than is this what they want in their life. I’ll give you an example. Fifteen years ago, Ariel and I were studying in Europe and we had a few thousand dollars left in our savings. We saw these Rolex watches, and spent every penny we had, and maxed out our credit cards to get them. Sounds very irrational to do that, but we really liked them and really wanted them. So we stepped outside of our reality around what we could afford in our lives.
Ariel: And we bypassed what we thought we were worth. See, there’s an idea that we have in this society that works two ways. There’s one idea that “more is better.” More money is better, more things, more objects
Shya:. And there’s a reality called “less is better.” A lot of people, especially in the New Age, are caught up in the idea that to have less is nobler, is better. So if you have less, if you struggle, if you’re the starving artist, that’s better than to have life support you, and have affluence in all aspects of your life. So, if you have a lot of money, you don’t really let people know it, otherwise they’ll think less of you. There are two things that really drive people crazy, sex and money. Money is tied in with survival, the survival of the organism. So is sex.
Free Spirit: That’s true, but sex is biological, and money is somehow…
Shya: Money is equated to food, which is also biological. People equate money to survival. So, they may have it, but they won’t spend it on themselves. Other times they don’t have it in reaction to somebody else having it, like their parents.
Ariel: We know a man in Los Angeles whose parents are both doctors. He’s a house painter, when he works. But he lives on the level of poverty. And not that he couldn’t do more because he’s quite brilliant. It is that he won’t. This definitely gets the attention of his family.
Free Spirit: How much did he consciously decide about how he lives his life?
Ariel: This person may not have consciously decided to live his life in opposition to having money. He may have decided “I’m not going to be like them!”
Shya: It may have been a decision he made about his parents at an early age. It’s no longer appropriate for a man of forty years to be operating out of a decision a five-year-old child made, but part of the mind’s mechanism is to forget the decisions you’ve made. I grew up in a family where the idea was that money was hard to come by. I remember the axiom that money didn’t grow on trees. My mother lived as though we were in poverty and when she died we discovered that she had about a million dollars stashed away.
Free Spirit: My grandparents were sort of in the same bag, and it’s carried through to my parents’ generation as well, that the Crash in the thirties really made an incredible imprint– “If you don’t have it in your hands, then forget it.” And it seems like that way of thinking is an inheritance that sort of keeps on going.
Shya: That way of thinking may have been around long before the stock-market crash, so this may not be the only reason that my mother hoarded money. If you think that money is hard to come by, if you think that money is difficult for you to acquire, if you think you’re not of a class that has money, then your life becomes about either proving that right, or proving that wrong. If you’re proving it right, you’re poor. If you’re proving it wrong, you’ve got money, but you’re still living as though you’re poor, because inside your heart you still think there’s a vacancy. A lot of it comes down to your willingness to be satisfied with your life as it is, in this moment. People are constantly trying to get away from where they are. They think something is going to make them satisfied or happy–money, material possessions. But, when you get money, you still have the same package–you. No matter what you have, you’re the center of the equation. If your life is a matter of fear for the future, then you’ll try to have money, which you think is going to protect you. Nothing will protect you. When your time comes, it’s over, and then the money that you’ve accumulated doesn’t do much for you.
Ariel: We are not saying don’t produce money or don’t try to get a better paying job. What we are saying is that making more money doesn’t automatically make you satisfied. We know some people who have approximately twenty million dollars, and they’re crazed that they don’t have enough. There’s still that insecurity that an amassed amount can’t fill. I saw an interview of Ted Turner once, with Barbara Walters, who was asking him about success. And, here is a guy who has many many millions of dollars, and has been very successful in the business community, and what he said was that success was basically an empty bag, that once you get there, it’s empty. There’s nothing there.
Shya: It’s the same thing with money. But you see, people have many judgments about money, both good and bad. People judge other people’s character by the amount of money they have. If somebody has a lot of money, they’re a better person than if they have very little money. That’s one set of standards. Now there’s the opposite set, which is that if you’ve got a lot of money then you must be a bad person. And poor people are really the salt of earth, and they are the wonderful people. There’s this nobility in poverty. There is no nobility in poverty. The amount of money you have is determined by your mind-set. Now this isn’t true in all cases, because some people inherit vast amounts of money–It doesn’t matter what their mind-set is. But for people who are poor, they generally have this reality called “It’s impossible to become affluent,” to have all the things that they want in their life. For people who have money, they think people who don’t are lazy. It’s got nothing to do with lazy. It’s got to do with the way you hold yourself, and who you see yourself being. If you see yourself as being poor, you’re poor. It’s like Ariel just said, we have these acquaintances who have practically twenty million dollars, but they hold themselves as poor. Now they have beautiful objects–they have beautiful cars and beautiful houses, but they’re afraid that they don’t have enough, and they never will. It’s like the person who was once fat, who has lost all kinds of weight and now is thin– they still hold themselves as fat.
Ariel: People have been taught an illusion that when you get money, it’s going to make you happy. I’ve heard that the highest suicide rate used to be dentists and psychiatrists, but now it’s Lotto winners. People think that once they have fulfilled their dream of having lots of money that all of their problems are going to disappear and then they will be happy but once they have gotten their dream, they quickly realize that the money that was supposed to change their lives doesn’t actually make problems disappear.
Free Spirit: So what is it that people want when they overtly are trying to acquire money?
Shya: Well, some people are trying to acquire money and some people are trying not to acquire money. You can’t make a generalization.
Ariel: It’s a pendulum swing of the same thing. On one end you try to acquire money, and on the other end you try not to. We spoke with a woman recently who really wanted to do something, but anytime she invested in a course, or went on a trip, or did something that her brother-in-law, who she holds in high esteem, felt was frivolous, she’d be very embarrassed and feel very foolish. Her whole life is run by not wanting to feel foolish around money. People don’t want to look stupid, foolish, or look like they’ve been conned or taken. So pressure–peer pressure, familial pressure, puts a tremendous stress on you, about how you should live your life. Money’s just this thing that exaggerates it. It makes it more visible, you see? Around the subject of money, people may be much more outspoken, but they put this pressure on you to conform in other areas as well.
Shya: There’s another aspect of it that a lot of people won’t like to hear. But I’m a firm believer in the idea–and I don’t know that “believer” is the right word–but I’ve observed that people have in their life what they want. If they don’t have money, that’s because they don’t want it. They may say they want it, but they don’t take actions commensurate to the production of it. Or, they deny it to themselves for some other reason. Like they don’t deserve it, or they’ve been bad in their life or something, where they actually are their own worst enemies, so to speak, and they won’t allow money to come to them. I’ve been noticing that I have very little attention on money these days. There used to be this madness in me about money, that isn’t there any longer to the same degree. It pops up from time to time, but I notice it and it drops away.
Free Spirit: I’ll use myself as an example because I know myself better than I know most people. My experience also had been that money was very difficult to get. It came and went. But then I found that an amazing break through happened. It wasn’t that I did things differently one day. Although there was a correspondence between when I did start to do well and when I invested in my first computer system.
Shya: But you see, you gave yourself the investment in that computer system. You said, “I’m worthy of having this.” and something shifted. It was a stretch to get that computer system, wasn’t it?
Free Spirit: Yeah, it took about all I had.
Shya: Right, exactly. It was a tangible expression of your commitment to yourself. And that’s what we are talking about. Ariel and I were virtually broke when we bought the Rolexes.
Ariel: Rolexes, of all the bizarre, frivolous, materialistic things. But what it represented to us was going and saying, “What do I want?” Since I’d never really heard of Rolexes before, it wasn’t like I was going for the name. I just picked out a pretty one. But it was a big breakthrough in allowing myself to have what I want. In my background, there’s a degree of not letting people know that you have the ability to spend money–People won’t like you if you spend money, or if you have money, so you have to pretend. Of course, we are not advocating spending money that you don’t have as a way of life. Very shortly after this time we went to work and paid off those credit cards and brought ourselves out of debt which is also an important part of the equation.
Shya: I remember when I lived in Maine, many, many years ago. I lived for five years in the backwoods, in a house that I built myself, with the trees off the land. I lived at less than poverty level. I raised my own foods, I grew gardens and I worked. I built houses and I did things to make money, but I was very poor. And I remember once, taking out a guy and his wife and my then-wife, and myself to a lobster dinner that cost fifty dollars. For about a month afterward, I felt bad that I spent fifty dollars on food, on one meal. And this goes back a long way, when fifty dollars was more than it is today. But nonetheless, it seemed like a huge amount of money to me. I felt terrible that I’d spent that money, because money was hard to come by. I look now and I see the foolishness of that. But at that time, it was the only way that I could see life.
Free Spirit: Well, most people, I would say, or quite a few, see life that way.
Shya: That’s right. And so there’s been a radical shift in the way I view my life. I see that if I’m here, I deserve to have what will support me.
Free Spirit: Well, what happens first? You make a shift–or a shift occurs, and then you relate to money differently?
Ariel: You have to be willing to honestly and impartially observe how you relate to money. If you watch yourself observing, and don’t make yourself wrong for what you see, then it can shift. We’ve got years and years, and generations of familial ways of looking at money. If you don’t see it, it’s a mechanical thing that runs you and your life.
(P.S. Our Rolexes are still two of our most prized possessions. They have traveled with us through lean times and times of abundance. Other investments in ourselves are less visible but no less real — such as a deep commitment to having life be as alive as we know how. Whether it is in the spiritual realms or the material realms, we encourage you to invest in yourself)
Ariel and Shya Kane are internationally acclaimed seminar leaders and business consultants whose revolutionary technology, Instantaneous Transformation, has helped thousands of individuals and companies worldwide. The Kanes’ best-selling book, Working on Yourself Doesn’t Work: A Book About Instantaneous Transformation, is available at local and online bookstores, via the Kanes’ website or by calling toll-free 800-431-1579. Ariel and Shya lead evening and weekend groups in Manhattan, dedicated to supporting people in living in the moment and having extraordinary, fulfilling lives. For more information, including dates and location, call 908-479-6034 or visit their website: www.ask-inc.com
