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Can money and spirituality go together?

Money is not the problem. Psychological dependence on money is.
23 May 2026 by
Arnab Dutta

The question assumes they are separate domains. They are not.

Money is an object. Spirituality is the ego's relationship to objects. The question is not whether money and spirituality can coexist. The question is: who is handling the money?

If the ego is handling it — appropriating it as identity, using it to inflate the self-image, keeping ledgers of what it is owed through its accumulation — then money becomes another mechanism of ego-fattening. The spiritual seeker with a large bank account and a spiritual self-image is in the same structural position as the businessman with a large bank account and a worldly self-image. Both are clinging. The list of objects has changed; the claimant remains.

If the ego has thinned sufficiently — if money is handled without the backward linkage of desire and the forward linkage of anticipated fruit — then money is simply a tool. The person earns it, uses it, gives it away. No ledger. No identity constructed around it. No sense of ownership. This is possible. It is rare.

Money becomes dangerous when it stops being a tool and becomes an identity.

The framework's position is not that money is spiritual or unspiritual. Money is neutral. The operator determines everything. A thin ego can handle wealth without being corrupted by it. A fat ego will corrupt even renunciation into another form of self-inflation.

The real question you are asking is whether you can pursue money and pursue freedom simultaneously. The answer is no — not because money is evil, but because the pursuit of money and the pursuit of freedom are movements in opposite directions. One is horizontal. One is vertical. You cannot move in both directions at once.


If all comparison disappeared tomorrow, how much money would you actually need to live intelligently and peacefully?