Millionaire gives away fortune which made him miserable

[katty]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/7190750/Millionaire-gives-away-fortune-which-made-him-miserable.html

EXCERPT:

"My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come."

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck.

His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America, but he will not even take a salary from these.

[grasswire]

1. I noticed the wife is not quoted.

I wonder if she's with him in this.

[Juche]

6. That was my first thought

[Uncle Joe]

2. It sounds like he connected.

Thanks for the thread, katty.

[GliderGuider]

3. I so get where he's at.

I did something very similar.

In 2001 I had $2.5 million made on high tech stock options. I had no kids, a 540 BMW, a 3500 square foot home for two in an exclusive neighbourhood, ate at the best restaurants, went to 5-star resorts, did luxury travel in Spain and Chile, and drank 30 year old single malt whisky from closed distilleries. I had a stereo that cost over $100,000. Like Mr. Rabeder, I even flew gliders.

I was dying inside.

Today I don't have enough money left to retire on (I'm 59), live in half a rented duplex in an ordinary neighbourhood, take the bus to work, make my own wine, eat very simple food, and my big vacation last summer was a three-day solo vision quest in the woods with a blanket, a mat and a jug of water. I have never been this happy in my whole life.

The key to it all has been a shift of values, just as it was for Mr. Rabeder. As I connected with myself, with a sense of the sacred, with human values and other people, I realized that all the stuff was a barrier to where I needed to be. In big shifts and little ones, it all went. A divorce and a subsequent separation took care of a lot of it, the BMW was traded in on a Jetta TDI, the stereo gear was sold at a huge and very satisfying loss. At each step a little more daylight came into my life. I've learned to meditate, found out the value of my own soul, and started on a spiritual path that connects me with everything.

Here's to you, Karl Rabeder. You get it. You're going to have an amazing life.

[greenbird]

4. What an intriguing story.

[Joe Chi Minh]

5. A very heartening read. I remember a long time ago on here, or Salon, or PolicyCom,

a young man from a wealthy background who found living and mixing with non-monied folk was made him happier than he'd ever been in his life.

[Juche]

8. What was the shift, and what brought it about?

How did you determine what you needed in your life to match your inner personality, and what brought about the changes? Were they voluntary, or due to circumstance (the divorce and the tech industry bursting)?

[GliderGuider]

9. Since you ask :-)

It was a combination of things. I didn't determine what I needed and then go do it, in many ways I just lucked out. The stock market collapse put a cap on my financial fantasy and my ex-wife's mother died and triggered a lot of abandonment trauma for her which led to the divorce, but I soldiered on like a good consumer for about 5 more years. My unconscious mind was screaming at me that I was in spiritual distress, but it just manifested as an obsessive fascination with Peak Oil, 9/11, ecological collapse and the end of civilization as we know it.

Finally my current ex-partner convinced me to try a 3-day transformational workshop called The Inner Journey. Despite my resistance that program blew me wide open, gave me some objectivity about my inner workings and broke the deadly stranglehold of doom that was threatening to suffocate me.

Following that experience I got involved in a lot more of the programs developed by the same teacher who designed The Inner Journey, and I'm still working with him today. His programs are all centered around connecting with your true self through psychological healing. The programs tend to be a very clever mix of experiential work, body and breath work, inner inquiry, family of origin work and meditation, with a variety of flavourings from Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, the work of a contemporary Indian mystic named Osho, depth psychology a la Jung and Freud, and object relations theory. They're also deeply informed by the work of a Kuwaiti man named A.H. Almaas though a teaching he calls The Diamond Approach. And of course there's a some Eckhart Tolle in the mix too, with living in the Now and psychological pain body work.

I did the Inner Journey seminar two years ago, and I've been doing this work on my own and in groups ever since. It's quite a shift from the person I used to be, as you can read in a recent article I wrote: Reflections on a Non-Theistic Spirituality.

[Juche]

10. I've seen that website before, ironically

A few months ago while trying to find ways to calm my superego (the voice inside that tells me I'm not good enough, that I screwed up, etc) this was the only website with any in depth info I could find.

http://www.ahalmaas.com/Glossary/s/superego.htm

I even looked for his book 'Work on the Superego' but couldn't find a copy. I remember this part being pretty insightful.


Completeness and the superego

The superego does not usually attack you because Brilliancy is missing. Your superego doesn't know about Brilliancy, so it attacks you about whatever sense of deficiency it finds in your experience. Under normal circumstances, there is a misinterpretation of the hole, or lack of Brilliancy; it is not seen as the absence of a certain manifestation of your Being. Instead, your superego attacks you, saying you’re too short, your nose is crooked, you're dumb, you say things wrong, you never know which foot to put first—that kind of thing. That is the way your superego picks on you: It finds those little incompletenesses and attacks you for them. But when you understand that incompleteness has nothing to do with these things, you will have a deeper handle on your superego. Completeness happens by confronting and completely tolerating the incompleteness. So your superego, by attacking you for feeling incomplete, is really preventing you from getting closer and relaxing into your own true nature, which is complete.




never studied the diamond approach in any depth, but his website was the only one with good info on the superego I could find. I couldn't even find scientific psych papers on the superego, ironically.

[GliderGuider]

12. You might want to try "Soul Without Shame" by Byron Brown

It's specifically about the superego (our inner critic or as my teacher calls it, our inner Supreme Court). Brown apparently uses Almaas' teachings and the rating is 5 stars, so it's probably worth a shot.

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-without-Shame-Liberating-Yourself/dp/157062383X/ref=pd_cp_b_0

[Stuckinthebush]

I'll be honest. I'd like to give it a shot

Give me the millions and let me see for myself how miserable it can make me.

I bet I can stay happy with the right priorities.

[Stuckinthebush]

7. I'll be honest. I'd like to give it a shot

Give me the millions and let me see for myself how miserable it can make me.

I bet I can stay happy with the right priorities.

[GliderGuider]

11. Keeping your priorities straight and your values clear is a tough job.

Especially if wealth comes on you very quickly. My fling with it brought me a lot of pleasure, but not too much joy. If I'd had then the values I have today maybe things would have been different. I can't tell, and it doesn't matter. We are all exactly where we are, and nowhere else.