“It takes a worried man to sing a worried song…”

The Carter family first recorded this sad song in 1930. As a boy I knew the classic 1940 Woody Guthrie version of it. He really sounded like the convict in chains! Today, it seems like the whole world is singing the “Economic Worried Man Blues” loud and clear. This is a hell of a recession we’re in, and it’s truly global.

I was out of work and went bankrupt during the 1980’s recession in Britain. I had to sell off my car, and I lived in a little basement apartment, supplied by a Bristol charity, in the St. Paul neighborhood that had experienced race riots the same year. Charity and the British welfare state’s provisions were my lifeline. I don’t need to wonder what my life would have been like without them—I know it would have been hell.

As we watch people throughout the world losing their homes, jobs, retirement savings, and personal pride, we become conscious that over one third of the world’s men, women, and children go to bed hungry every night, if they even have a bed. Yet the same economic system generates, at the other end of the global spectrum, mind-boggling wealth—for a relative few individuals.

Most, though not all of these immense riches do not come to the wealthy because they have actually made something that has benefited humanity. No, much of it comes from fees and bonus payments gathered by those “playing the market” who sell financial contracts, place informed bets in the currency and commodities markets, and the like. They do not work with bent backs in the rice fields, or labor for long days shelling cashew nuts, or trawl the waters off the coast of Australia day and night, so that others (like me) may eat and be satisfied.

So what can spiritual people do about it?

We must take the teaching of the Masters of the Spirit World to heart. They say * that the current crisis situation is not an accident. In fact it is much less haphazard than it seems. We who are souls living in human bodies at this time have chosen in advance the lessons that come with hunger, loss of jobs, homelessness, and, yes, also wealth and financial irresponsibility. The precise details of the experience we are having were not planned by us, we chose the lesson we wanted to learn, not how we would experience it.

This is not a spiritual escape system. Far from it. If we are an economist we may be able to help create a better world financial system. If we are a mother we may be able to stretch a slender budget to help a neighbor in terrible need. If we are wealthy we may discover a conscience. But at the heart of the matter is a simple fact. We do not really own wealth. We do not truly have power over other people. Life is not what it seems.

Powering the body- shell of the worried man singing his worried song is an independent, eternal soul having an experience—good or bad—a life-lesson. And when that lesson is learned, the soul goes on to the next lesson, and the next, until all the lessons it planned for this current life have been learned, and it is time to leave the shell of the worried man behind—and go Home. There are no accidents: we are here for a purpose, and the Masters counsel us to be grateful for the lessons that are made for us to deepen our wisdom about the nature of life.

*(The Masters Reincarnation Handbook – see our Literature page)