The financial slowdown has forced people across the globe to acknowledge that their security — financial, physical, emotional — is fragile. Those struggling to make sense of their lives, faith and relationships have begun to look for answers above and beyond conventional wisdom. This is why while some sectors struggle to survive, the depression has a very positive impact on the spiritual marketplace.

Spirituality is up for sale in many different ways — astrology, tarot readings, pranic healing, reiki, aura and chakra, books on metaphysics and personal development, music, incense, candles, yoga and meditation classes, wind chimes, crystals.

Happiness — however loosely defined — carries a greater premium today than ever before. Logically, the economic slowdown and fear of terrorist attacks should be a huge opportunity for human evolution; it should help us tune in to a higher frequency, a more evolved state of awareness. Except for one fundamental flaw. People continue to embrace materialism despite its visibly destructive face.

The common belief that the fulfilment of material desires helps secure a feeling of happiness and wellbeing is misplaced. The truth – the liberating truth – is that the two have nothing to do with each other. Our most glorious dreams are like quicksand. Far from making us happy, most desires, even when fulfilled, are often a burden that we are then forced to carry.

The evidence is overwhelming. The world’s richest, most talented, intellectual and beautiful people have been known to be severely depressed. According to a study, famous writers are particularly prone to chronic despair (72%), but others also suffer high rates of depression, notably 42% of artists, 41% of politicians, 36% of intellectuals, 35% of composers and 33% of scientists.

Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, King George III of England, Vivien Leigh who starred in ‘Gone With The Wind’, authors Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Ernest Hemingway, poet John Keats, famous opera singer Gaetano Donizetti and American president Abraham Lincoln belong to the long list of successful people who were known to be disturbed from ‘inside’.

Those with no pretensions to greatness also have desires, perhaps still more preposterous ones — a good spouse, children, loving friends. But even after they marry, have children and have a fulfilled life, they continue to feel incomplete and alone, plagued by the nagging thought that they still haven’t found what they are looking for. When pleasure is experienced through the material world, it is so fleeting that grief at its loss quickly consumes the joy.

This is because most people never care to explore the fact that life is only about what you give rather than what you can take. If we live like beggars, in a state of tireless neediness — wanting love, admiration, respect, entertainment and material benefit — what could any of us possibly have to give? Essentially this means that it is only our strengths and our own generosity that makes our individual world beautiful.

Clearly, it makes more sense to expand this infinite and eternal potential for joy and perfection, rather than trading it for external pleasures. Strangely, even those who have been ravaged by the deceptively alluring face of desire rarely caution others about the path of futility. Perhaps, they mistakenly believe that this beautiful fairy tale that we all love to dream may somehow come true for someone else. Or perhaps, they understand that it is best left to each to discover the truth for themselves.

A fairy tale comes true only when we become the hero rather than the victim, waiting for rescue. The biggest, most meaningful discovery is that our lives can change only when we realize that each of us is the creator of our own world. People and situations are there because we have put them there. We sustain them. They feed on our energy. If we turn our back on them, they cease to exist.

The world is a reflection of our choices. If we love, we will receive love; if we are respectful of others, we too will be respected. It is pitiful to seek solutions to life’s crises from those who themselves are troubled or confused. If astrologers and selfstyled mystics could fix our lives, would they not fix their own?

This, of course, is not true of all mystics and saints. Millions of people continue to seek the spiritual wisdom of long-departed saints such as Kabir, Sai Baba of Shirdi, Bhagwan Nityananda and others who never owned anything and yet continue to give endlessly of themselves.

Magically, the number of devotees at Shirdi, where Sai Baba used to live, or Ganeshpuri, Bhagwan Nityananda’s ashram continue to swell despite the fact that Sai Baba left his body in 1918 and Bhagwan Nityananda left his in 1961. There is no adequate explanation for the potent and baffling mysticism that makes this possible.

And most of us continue to remain doggedly loyal to our pitiful desires, underlining our reluctance to accept the obvious, liberating truth. We continue to want. Even when the fulfilment of desire fails to establish that elusive emotion called happiness, we simply move to another. The great truth that desire creates a web that leads to misery is clearly too simple for most of us to accept. It must be accompanied by hardship and suffering to become believable.

Meanwhile, so-called spiritual warehouses and spiritual gurus thrive on the ever-rising tide of human despair, trading in the business of desire. Sometimes, new-age gurus hint that true bliss comes from relinquishing desires rather than accumulating them. But, predictably this is never the focus.

This is because only a true spiritual master can free us from this cycle of wanting and having. Only the one who is beyond desire can show us that it’s best to seek liberation from desire rather than seeking to satiate them.

Our best bet is clearly to stop lusting after things that rather than fulfilling us will only waste us — and to realize that we are little better than beggars sitting on a beach of gold.

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October 19, 2009