Money as a Force of Consciousness and Manifestation

What is money?

It sounds like a silly question, but what is money, really? Most of us would answer without hesitation: coins, banknotes, bank accounts, stocks, or digital numbers on a screen. Yet the deeper we look, the more elusive money becomes. Its physical forms change from age to age—shells, gold, paper, electronic records—while its influence over human life remains remarkably constant.

Nowadays, especially on social media and within spiritual circles, the provocative idea that money is not merely a thing but an underlying dynamic principle or universal power, energy and force, has gained increasing attention. In this view, money is understood as a power of exchange, organization, and material manifestation that shapes individuals, societies, and entire civilizations. What we ordinarily call "money" is seen as more than banknotes, digital entries in a bank's computer system, or an abstract convention invented to facilitate trade. Rather, it is regarded as the visible expression of an underlying force or energy that has become deeply entangled with human desires for power, security, status, and control.

It sounds like the typical New Age woo, but the idea isn’t new.

The oldest antecedent is probably the Indian deity Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity. Wealth was never understood merely as accumulated goods but as a manifestation of a cosmic power. The Sanskrit term Shakti means energy, force, or power. Wealth was viewed as one expression of this universal energy.

In the Politics, Aristotle had a much more secular approach, drawing a distinction between two kinds of “wealth-getting.” Money has the function of acquiring goods to satisfy natural needs, using money simply as a medium of exchange to facilitate trade for necessities. This is what he called oikonomia (household management). This view sounds very much in line with our everyday perception of commerce.

However, Aristotle also pointed out that this function should have a natural limit, since human needs are finite.

Aristotle regarded it as unnatural, using money to make more money, and as an end in itself, Chrematistics (the art of acquisition, especially through trade and moneylending). He argued that money is meant to be a medium of exchange, not something that breeds more of itself. Interest, in this view, is money born from money rather than from any natural process— that is, the most unnatural way of getting wealth. Because this conception of money has no inherent limit; the desire for money accumulated for its own sake can grow without bound.

And this is where the modern homo economicus diverges: we live in a time when the pursuit of unlimited growth, together with a kind of Darwinian assumption that living beings are driven to expand endlessly and exponentially, has become a deeply ingrained conviction.1 Aristotle would have argued that interest rates and debt are among the causes of economic disharmony. Because he saw money as having a proper function: facilitating exchange, not generating more money by itself. While an economy organized around debt and interest tends to produce the endless pursuit of accumulation, where money becomes an end in itself rather than a means toward human flourishing.2

Many medieval Christian thinkers had a different but potentially complementary view: they regarded wealth as a trust from God. For example, in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas argued that property could be privately administered but existed for the common good and ultimately that external goods belong first to God. Thus, wealth imposed responsibilities on its holders.

The notion that one is a trustee rather than an absolute owner clashes with modern understandings of economic wealth. Your money is yours, and you can hoard it indefinitely or do with it whatever you want—even if it goes against the interests of the collective.

While, the Tao Te Ching—the classical Chinese text attributed to Lao Tzu—does not explicitly discuss money in the way modern texts do, but its teachings offer a perspective on wealth, materialism, and attachment to possessions. Throughout the Tao Te Ching, excessive accumulation is repeatedly criticized. Hoarding is viewed as contrary to the natural circulation of life. Wealth is perceived as a “flow” of a more subtle psychological force rather than an accumulation of static material objects.

This is echoed in the 20th-century in Rudolf Steiner’s view of money as a living social organism. Money should circulate and serve cultural, social, and spiritual development. Steiner explicitly criticized hoarding and argued that economic life becomes healthy only when money flows through society in service of human development.

At the same time, Indian mystic and poet Sri Aurobindo, along with his spiritual partner Mirra Alfassa, also known as “The Mother,” expressed a similar understanding of what money and wealth truly are. They saw money as a universal force—ultimately the expression of a Divine Shakti—whose purpose is to support the unfolding of life, consciousness, and human evolution. We should restore its role as a means, an instrument serving truth, beauty, knowledge, human flourishing, and spiritual realization. In this vision, the highest mastery of money lies not in possession, but in directing its force toward the creation of a more conscious and harmonious world. The central problem, however, is not money itself but humanity’s relationship to it. Greed, possessiveness, prestige-seeking, and fear transform wealth into an instrument of division and suffering.

But if this is so, the question arises: if money has the function of serving divine purposes, why does it flow so easily toward the satisfaction of desires, prestige, power, and not so divine intentions, yet far less readily toward spiritual transformation or the advancement of consciousness? The problem runs deeper and reveals a fundamental duality in the nature of money: in its origin, it is a divine power, yet in human affairs, it has acquired a profoundly detrimental function twisting its original purpose. A recurring theme in the teachings they left us is the idea that the power of money has fallen under the influence of hostile or “asuric” forces—adverse beings that, in modern terms, might be described as “demonic forces.” These anti-divine forces stand behind tendencies of greed, domination, selfishness, and materialism that divert wealth away from higher purposes.

Yet, in its origin and essence, money remains a divine force, a sacred energy imbued with the potential to serve higher purposes. Its true power lies in its capacity to support and amplify the creative forces that seek a genuine, beautiful, and harmonious ordering of the world. When aligned with these higher principles, money can become a tool for guiding humanity toward a divinized future. It should be given for the divine Work and divine life on earth.

Whatever the case may be, the common theme connecting all these viewpoints is that money is neither inherently bad nor good. The conquest of money-power does not mean acquiring more wealth but liberating it from the (human, and non-human) forces that misuse it. In this sense, money resembles other natural forces. Just as electricity, light, or water can be used constructively or destructively, money is morally neutral in itself. Its value depends entirely on the consciousness of those who handle it. Money is healthiest when it circulates. Human beings are merely trustees or temporary custodians. Today money may be in one person's hands; tomorrow it may be elsewhere. The moral question is not ownership but stewardship.

Therefore, many of the social media influencers who preach about the “law of attraction,” the “abundance mindset,” the idea that “money is energy,” or the belief that we should “trust the universe and allow money to flow” are most likely unaware of the deeper origins of the intuitions underlying their ideas and personal experiences. They may not realize that such notions are not merely products of a contemporary self-help culture but have appeared, in different forms, throughout the history of human thought, religion, and esoteric traditions. They are intuiting, though in a clumsy and often superficial manner, a much deeper metaphysical truth: that money is not simply a neutral material instrument of exchange, but is connected with fundamental forces of human consciousness, social organization, and the manifestation of values in the world. This intuition, however imperfectly expressed, is paving the way toward a post-material conception of the economy, life, and ultimately, reality as a whole, where the true meaning and purpose of money and wealth will be conquered back and finally restored.

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