Money

Money is a difficult thing for everyone to deal with. You can have too little, too much, not know how to spend or to invest your money. You can buy the wrong things with it and die young. All sorts of things surround the problem of money. So, I have come to see that money is not only power it is confusing at the very least how one should relate to it.

So, as a young man I was always very suspicious of people who were wealthy at any age (young, middle or old) and I found that I resented them almost universally, except for the very few I met who were generous and kind and generally not afraid of people. I noticed that most really spiritual people tended to be born poor or at the most middle class and so I sort of made a pledge to myself that I would not become rich unless I saw I was ready for the whole thing.

So, as a teenager my vow to myself was to become enlightened and to not become rich until I could be a good rich person. Or maybe that day would never come. I wasn't sure in my teens about all this.

So, as I went through life in the beginning money was never a problem for me pretty much. I always had a bicycle and my parents always had at least one car so we could always go anywhere we wanted to in our free time. So, because of this I always felt wealthy even though we mostly lived in 2 and 3 bedroom apartments while I grew up and moved from Seattle, to San Diego, to 4 different places in Los Angeles county between my ages of 8 and 21 years of age. In 1968 when I was 20 my Dad bought 2 1/2 acres out in the high desert of Yucca Valley up on the Mesa and started to build his retirement home so some weekends (especially when he poured the cement foundation or put on the roof) I went out to help him build his retirement home. My father was 6 foot 2 1/2 inches tall and strong and wirey and I was then 6 foot 4 1/2 inches or more and strong and buff from building houses while learning to be a computer programmer in college.

So, money really wasn't a problem for me until I was about 21 when my world crashed down around me when I was asked to leave my childhood church and broke up with my bride to be within about 6 months of each other. Then money was beginning to be a problem. Then at age 26 I married my live in girlfriend and we had a son money became more of a problem but my life was better because I loved being a Dad even though being a husband has never been my favorite thing. But, usually you can't have one without the other.

Then my first wife and I broke up when she was 26 and I 29 and then at age 32 I married again a lady with 2 kids from her first marriage and I was then raising my son who was by then 5 years old by myself. Since we were both financially supporting 5 of us money once again became more of a problem. But since we were very happy for the first 5 to 7 years of our marriage, things seemed to be getting better. But since we were trying to live an idealistic alternative back to the land kind of life, eventually we had to break down and take our kids out of the mountains and our remote 2 1/2 acres of land with an A-Frame on it that I built and buy a business back on the California coast back in suburbia and civilization once again. Since it is much more expensive to live on the coast than remotely we worked more but enjoyed our life less and I think this contributed to our eventual break-up in 1994. Then I married again in 1995 and had another daughter who was born in 1996 (my first daughter was born in 1989) and started off in a new marriage and relationship. In 1999 I got a heart virus and my present wife and my doctor insisted that I retire at age 50 rather than die so I did. This set up a chain of events to where I no longer had to worry about money anymore and answered a prayer I had been giving since I was in my early 30s and studying with Tibetan Lamas in the U.S. and India and Nepal. So I retired to (the leisure to practice). I had promised God that if I lived during the time doctors thought I would die for 7 months from fall 1998 until May 1999 that I would open a website to share all the many realizations and gifts he had given me my whole life. So, my first website was at Geocities.com which no longer exists. It was a free site from 1999 until about 2007 when I had to buy a site called:

dragonofcompassion - Home

But the end result is that since I recovered in May 1999 I have been retired and money has no longer been a problem nor likely will it ever be again. God has answered my prayers for the "Leisure to Practice" and so this allows me the free time to pray and contemplate and travel and write about what I sense is important for me and for mankind. Often I become a Muse in the process for writers of books and movies who might be much better writers than I and who need to make a living writing. So, in this way I help inspire writers of books and movies and often what you will read about and watch in movies are ideas inspired first by reading what I write. In this way I can help God inspire mankind by allowing him to write through me some of the inspirations he brings to us all.