Fear of Money

By Terence Ward

So I choose not to accept that giving is tax-driven. Instead I subscribe to the law of attraction tenet that generosity begets generosity, and figure that fear keeps it from working better, or at least keeps people from believing that it works in the first place.

Fear is pretty strongly linked with money when you think about it. We fear that:       

• wealth will change us.
• we won't be able to make ends meet.
• we will make less than our spouses.
• people will judge us if we don't own stylish things.
• people will judge us if we do own stylish things.
• the love of money is the root of all evil.
• money is used to keep the oppressed, oppressed.
• if we spend all of our money we will never get any more.

There are a lot of fears about money, and they can be contradictory. It's not easy to have a healthy relationship with the stuff. Obsessive love and revulsion are par for the course, rather than peace and understanding. Money is given the same sense of exotic naughtiness as pornography and recreational drug use -- we crave the stuff but hate what it does to us. Not a healthy relationship at all.

The fear and loathing we link to money is what keeps the law of attraction from working well, or from working in more mysterious ways. Maybe we need to have government-encouraged charitable giving, not because people aren't generous, but because the fear of poverty otherwise impedes charity and the government moves in to fill the void. Perhaps it's not a fear of poverty at all the stays our hand -- maybe maybe some people are afraid, deep down, that being too generous will bring too much abundance into their lives!

Money's a scary thing, no doubt about it. Maybe it's so scary because it can be solid, which makes us feel like we understand that stuff. I'm sure we didn't actually "invent" money; we tapped into the laws of the Universe to find a way to turn a day's work on the farm into a tankful of gas. It may look very mundane, but there's something very magical about a force that powerful.

Terence Ward's blog, Pagan Filter, can be found at http://www.paganworldview.blogspot.com/.