Managing Money and Awakening: Eckhart Tolle with Geneen Roth

Your latest book, Lost and Found. This is a very interesting challenge that came into your life not that long ago. The challenge was mercifully provided by one of your, or perhaps your most important spiritual teacher, whose name is Bhagavan Bernie Madoff. And he mercifully took away from you 30 years of savings, all their life savings, to help you experience the essence of who you are. However, you did not immediately experience the essence of who you are.

I'd say that was an understatement.

And you describe it in the book, how it starts, and that's wonderful. I believe it's chapter one or two beginning. The incredible amount of the reaction and the fear that comes when you lose all your life's savings. And you describe what it did to your state of consciousness, wonderfully explained and illustrated. I don't know if you want to talk briefly about it. And then something happened.

Yes. For those of you, those few of you who might not know who Bernie Madoff is, he ran a Ponzi scheme and actually all over the world and ended up stealing $65 billion of people's money. And as my husband is very fond of saying when he tells his stories, and not all of it is mine. So we had our. We did have our life savings in there. And we got a phone call, or I got a phone call one day my husband was away. We believed it was very safe. A friend of ours was friends with Bernie Madoff, whose father was friends with Bernie Madoff. And anybody could put in our particular fund, anybody could put anywhere from $600 or $1,000 to whatever amount you had in this fund. And we just kept on putting all of our money in there because our friend had been in it for 30 years. And also, as my husband says, that, you know, you start believing in gravity when every time you throw a ball up in the air, it comes down every time for 30 years. So we absolutely believed it was safe. And then it wasn't. And then we got the phone call saying it was gone. And I was shocked and in terror. I think first I was shocked and then hysterical, and then in terror. And then I called a couple of very dear friends and teachers who I would say, we've lost all our money. And this was very soon after the phone call. And two of them said to me, you've lost your money, but nothing of any value is gone. And I said in that moment to both of them, now is not the time to be spiritual. I was convinced, you know, like, don't give me that. We've lost our Money, what are we going to do? We're going to be homeless, we're going to be out on the street and what are we going to eat? And it was such a panic. And I started very soon realizing that it was going to be unbearable to live inside my mind, that I could not, absolutely could not live inside the mind that was telling me, what did you do? I can't believe you did that. What's the matter with you? How come you didn't diversify? Even a 4 year old knows to diversify. And I started blaming, of course, everybody, and then myself and the ranting and the raving was so intense that I understood pretty immediately within a day that unless I brought myself back to what I had, not what I had lost, to what I could find instead of the money, that I couldn't, what was already here, which is that animating aliveness or that indwelling aliveness that I've heard you speak of, unless I could bring myself back moment to moment to moment, every single time my mind wandered, then I was going to be lost. I was going to be living in abject terror. When I wrote Lost and Found and when I traveled around and went on tour about it, I found that talking about money was very difficult. Not for me at that point, because I became so interested in money after this that I would talk to people in the grocery store. So what do you think about money? And tell me about your relationship with money and how much money do you make and do you and your spouse talk about? I just became fascinated with it. Like I became fascinated with food as a point of departure, so to speak, or as a doorway into what we believe about scarcity and deprivation and what we're allowed to have and be. And when I first started talking about food, food, which was in 1978, people didn't want to talk to me. Except for those people who were willing to talk to me with the rollers in my hair, they were willing to talk to me. But most people, when I would say, it's not about willpower and it's not about force and deprivation, it's about using it as a doorway into who you are, really there was a no, it's about willpower and it's about calories and with money, I found that I was almost had turned back the clock 30 years and so that it was a similar. No, I'm not talking about money. Sort of like with me, there's spirituality and then there's money. So I'm wondering what you think about that just in terms of why money is such a difficult subject really to bring. Why people are more willing to talk about their sex lives and in great detail, mind you, and what they've eaten and not eaten and binged and not beaten, including things like stealing food and all of that, rather than talk about money. So I'm curious about what you think about that.

Well, it is true that for many people it, the mention of it can bring about an immediate loss of awareness. Even in people who otherwise have already embraced awareness in many aspects of their lives. And still there remains that there's a fear that coagulates around that money idea. And that's the fear, I would say, of survival. And there is also an egoic trait that's one of the most essential traits of the ego. Not enough. Not enough is one of the most deep seated ego traits. Every ego has that. And for many people the not enough refers to money. It could refer to many other things. Not enough food, not enough, whatever. The ego never feels it has enough. And that particularly manifests in the area of money. Because money can buy, is neutral, but it can become anything in the world of form almost. And so it triggers the insufficiency, the feeling of not enough of the ego.

Spirituality is fine. And then there's money.

Yes.

And also that awakening, so to speak, becoming fully alive to the aliveness was not possible for me in this lifetime. That's what I believed. I believed I could work at that. I would always be sort of like a little busy beaver. I would be working at it and efforting at it and I would be meditating. And even though I didn't really like meditating very much, I still wanted to be a good spiritual student. And so I'd keep on trying and trying. But that it wasn't. Even though intellectually I heard, yes, of course, it's your true nature. I still believed. Well, maybe it's not my true nature, maybe it's everybody else's true nature, but it's not true true nature because it's not really mine. And I think it took this to experience that, that aliveness, that indwelling aliveness is if I'm not aware of it, it's just a that of an eyelash away. And that it is possible for every human being. I always feel like if it's possible for me, it's possible for anybody. Because I feel like I've just about been as crazy as any of the people I've met who have come to my retreats and workshops for 30 years, who, I mean, I've done it all. And so I feel like, okay, then, all right, then what Eckhart has been saying is true. It's not just a line. It doesn't just sound pretty, it's true. Because here it is in this moment with no money, no, not a penny. Here it is.

Yes, I experienced that on the park bench. Often the intense happiness of simply the joy of being in that moment where the mind, if it had come in, and occasionally it did, just briefly it said, what are you doing? And shouldn't you be looking for some work or do something? But the thought didn't have any force behind it anymore. So I don't know, it didn't come. I could have remained that. In that case I would have become quite dysfunctional and still be happy. But after a while, then doing happened again. I was able to do and initiate things and respond to whatever the present moment brought. And then I became a normal person again, at least on the surface, on the outside, right?

Yeah.