Most people can't get their head around the idea of money, love and compassion being linked together. The idea that money can be a symbol of love seems odd -- we are so programmed the other way. Here's how they are linked; it will help you see it all in a different light.

There's a psychological war that goes on in us humans between self-hate and self-love. It's a part of another battle that persists: the energy war between living and dying, building energy and depleting energy. The two issues are wrapped up with abundance and love, and they can very dramatically affect your ability to earn money and pull abundance to you.

Here's the concept: You start pre-birth as an infinite spirit in a spiritual dimension. There, the spiritual memory of what you are is eternal, and so you have existed in some form or another since the beginning of time. Suddenly, the spirit energy that is the real you finds itself inside a little body, trapped there for life, collecting new experiences.

The act of coming into the body is one of descending, leaving the magnificence of a domain of spiritual Light and entering into solidity and restriction. Physical restriction and emotional difficulties; perhaps the restriction of a dysfunctional family; poverty, disability, whatever.

It's a sacred and humbling act to accept such a learning experience. It's an act of love, for the restriction will force a consolidation of energy. It will force that spiritual energy to go from hazy-wave to a solid-particle body, and it will have to take on psychological impediments that will help it learn what it is like to be a human.

Those impedimenta are not real to your spirit-identity. They are borrowed from others who have lived before, they are part of the global mind-set at the time of your birth, and so they are imposed upon the spirit. They really don't belong. The spiritual infinity within can't be shamed, dysfunctional, unwell, hurt, or injured, for it is a spark of the Christ consciousness.

People often wonder why a God that is all love and compassion can allow pain and suffering. But it's easy to see that the spirit -- the one you actually are -- doesn't "do" any pain and suffering. It remains always in a state of grace, a state of complete positiveness -- even if it is collecting painful memories that the ego experiences.

By the time a child becomes a mature being, it has downloaded the negative waves of its culture and the global mind -- the collective mind, if you like. Your job, then, is to work your way out of that and return to the real you, that spark of the Christ consciousness within. That's the seminar -- transmuting the negative into compassion and love. In other words, you are busy re-creating your spiritual identity here in our slowish-particle 3-D world.

We start with shame. Early in our childhood, we are shamed when people shout at us, get angry, admonish us for not using the potty correctly, whatever. Later, we are shamed intellectually as being stupid; or our actions and decisions are invalidated. Then, perhaps sexual shame kicks in as we discover that we are not pleasing to other humans as a sexual partner, or we are very pleasing and are used by others. Sometimes sexual abuse is forced upon us in childhood. It's all very difficult stuff, this little seminar called life.

Psychological shame kicks in as we deal with the peer pressure of our teenage years. You have to be like this to be cool. And if you aren't following the herd, you are ostracized. We are shamed into conformity, even if the conformity is one of hooliganism and drugs. There is conformity in rebellion and the counterculture, as there is in tick-tock.

Now we're doing serious amounts of confusion and pain, and we probably hate ourselves. We want to be something else. At times in our dreams, we remember that we are eternal spirits, but it's a distant memory. Right now we are humans who are insecure and hate ourselves, and we're in various degrees of pain and anguish.

On top of all this, there is the other issue, that of living and dying -- high energy and low energy. We have to fight our way out of these fears and restrictions and return to our spiritual identity. It dwells in a dimension of love. So we have to come to love. First, it's a love of self -- not a narcissistic egotistical love of self -- but more a physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual respect for self. Can we love ourselves in spite of all we have been told, all the personal defeats we have suffered, the shape of our face, our lack of ability, or whatever? That's the journey.

Initially, the answer is usually no. Self-hate kicks in. We anesthetize the pain via drugs, sex, and illusions of power. Or we use overwork and alcohol to blot it all out, succumbing to our addictions. We feel that if only things were different -- if only we had more money, if only we had a different set of conditions, or if only a certain person acted in a certain way -- then we would be happy; people would love us, and things would be, just fine.

That's the story of most people's lives. Self-hate gets in the way of everything, including their moneymaking ability, because eventually they lose the will to fight on. There's a fine balance to the acquisition of money. It usually involves activity, and that activity takes you further and further from your real self. It burns energy and makes you less secure, not more secure.

The security you seek is within. It comes from seeing yourself as beautiful. It's the act of self-love -- the acceptance, detachment, and forgiveness of self. It's where you wake up and remember that you are not the spotty-faced teenager who was ridiculed and shunned; you are a powerful, eternal spirit, imbued with the Christ consciousness, and here with a mission to fulfill and lessons to learn -- a spirit of infinite honor and integrity that has a connection to all the knowledge that exists.

Nobody out there is perfect. We're not trying to compete in the perfection stakes. You can love yourself and be imperfect, as God loves us unconditionally. I really like the image of the water rat, this scruffy little rat that sniffles around on the edge of muddy river banks. It doesn't look like much, but the little rat is sitting there on a log by the side of the river, and he is what he is. He isn't apologizing for being a water rat, but simply stands inside a divinity and a spirituality that is the animal spirit of "water rat."

You are what you are. You might be an Adonis in the making, or an incredible goddess energy, or you might just be a little water rat who stands in front of the bathroom mirror in the mornings and says, "I'm a water rat and that's okay. I don't have to convince people or act to please them. I don't have to work to win their affection. I don't have to pay for them so they will love me, because I love myself. I am what I am. I'm going to go out today, I'm going to believe in myself, I'm going to be honorable. I'm going to concentrate on people and treat them fairly. I'm going to treat myself fairly, for by nurturing myself, my energy will build and I will become secure. I know that money flows to security, and away from insecurity. So by being more secure, I will prosper."

When you are insecure, it turns people off. To spend money, people have to give away a part of their security. When they make the transfer of money to you, they have to feel solid; they have to feel they are getting something that will make them more, because they are paying out and becoming less right now. If you are solid and contained and secure, it helps them feel solid, so they transfer their cash more readily.

That is why self-hate destroys your moneymaking abilities -- partly, as I said, because it's hard for you to include yourself; and partly because you trigger insecurity in others and that forces them to hang on and become tight.

By booming out life force, love, strength, and encouraging words that support people, you express a compassion for people's insecurity. In the process, you become stronger and more abundant. You become a divine paramedic, offering people the oxygen mask of life force, dolloping out goodness and strength so they become less fearful. People will respond to that life force, and it's up to you to figure out how you're going to bill 'em.

Money is a symbol of that life force, of its appreciation. Money can be a solidified form of love. Through the transfer of money, we facilitate love and communication with other humans. It offers us a simple system of providing for and loving and nurturing ourselves, and it is one way of expressing generosity and kindness for the less fortunate.

The energy war is a simple one to understand. We generate energy and we burn it. Modern life and its psychic and chemical pollution threatens us daily. The personality is perpetually slightly off-balance, slightly scared. We are constantly pushed from love toward fear, so we look for the life force to sustain us. As we fret and worry, we burn more etheric energy and become more edgy.

We imagine that making a pile of cash will help us, so we rush out to seek our fortunes. Often we use work to avoid our fears. When we are very busy, we don't have to look deep within our selves. But soon our lives are real complicated, and it takes loads of our vitality and ego power to keep things flowing. Our energy drops, and we become victims of our own self-hate. We become lost in the false ego-self, rather than resting in the Infinite real self. Gradually we become numb, existing in a vapid and lonely state.

It's scary, so we look for someone whose energy we can feed upon to sustain us. But once we start trying to suck energy from others, they're not going to like it. They will respond by fleeing as fast as their chubby little legs will carry them.

So as you process your love of self, and as you work on your security by nurturing yourself, you become more neutral, less and less an energy vampire. Eventually you have surplus energy to dish out, and that is how you will develop compassion and true caring for the world and the animals and humans upon it.

Now tell me that money is not involved. Of course it is, for in the getting and dispensing of money, you learn the fine balance of manifestation. Through work, money, and commercial activity, you see how there is an energy trade-off between activity and security, and yet another trade-off between love and fear. Then there is the money lesson in the balance of giving and receiving; and the further fine balance between respect for self, self-worth, and respect for others.

How you make money to buy the experiences you need in this lifetime -- and how you handle the abundance that comes in -- will be very much a part of the final spiritual picture you present when your eternal Self returns to its Infinite Homeland, carrying back the memory of what you were in this lifetime. Money, compassion, energy, heart, love, fear, wealth, generosity, meanness -- they are all characters on the same great spiritual stage. The trick is to align to the beautiful ones, step away from the ugliness, and accept the gift of your Infinite Self in the process.

The action of compassion and money is the act of becoming comfortable with life's situations and the state of your bank balance. You have to be kind to yourself, and you have to keep your ego in control and accept life. Otherwise, the ego will yearn for things and force you to go to work for it, to buy it stuff to make it feel better.

Once you are at one with yourself, you'll have compassion for your Self. Then you will, of course, nurture yourself. But you won't have to go shopping to distract you from your fears. As you become more aware, you become more real. Then by discarding the useless stuff and eliminating unnecessary obligations, you become more balanced and settled, more silent and less manic. You'll have less activity and stress, and you'll feel better. .. and so onwards and upwards.

Do something for yourself every day, something compassionate and kind. I don't mean buying yourself breakfast; I mean doing something that is spiritually or physically nurturing: a massage, a fast, a meditation, exercise, rest, play -- that kind of thing. For it's in the quiet time that you'll see the great abundance of this life, and you'll move from the ego's disquiet to the spirit's wholeness, and you'll see that the things you worry about are often not worth the worry. In the quiet time, you'll see what has real worth for you and what is just fluff and hype.

Once you get real, all your energy can go toward becoming what you really need and want to become. That transformation must be a part of your story in this lifetime. Making money is not enough -- you will have to do something that has meaning.

You will want to collect memories in abundant settings, but you will also want to be surrounded by love and friendship; you will want to be doing things that you want to do.

Yes, that's your story. Put aside the little nit-picky ego stuff; start today to act, invoke, and energize the Grand Plan, for it is yours by right. All you have to do is agree to step up and collect. So accept yourself, and believe in yourself. Look the world in the eye and say, "I am what I am, and by the way, that'll be 30,000 bucks. Thank you."