In this episode of “5 Minutes,” Dr. Robert Svoboda explores the goddess Lakshmi and her significance in Hindu tradition.

Many people identify Lakshmi with money. Vimalananda would become apoplectic when people would do this because he said money. Very dirty thing. Love of money is the root of all evil. And he used to like to say that do you know what happened to the guy who invented money Crassus, the king of Lydia? He had molten gold poured down his throat. That’s the Karma he got for creating money. So Vimalananda emphasized again and again that Lakshmi is not about money.

Lakshmi is about material prosperity, and that material prosperity will come to you to the degree it is meant to come to you for the job that you need to do in this world according to your dharma So if you follow your dharma, you will. Be in a position to obtain automatically the proper amount of prosperity. If you start running after money, you’re going to regret it because as Vim and Vimalananda pointed out. Lakshmi is she does not stay with anyone forever.

She will be with an individual or a family for a period of time, and then she will move on if you try to hold onto her, you’re going to create problems for yourself. And this applies also to people who attempt to accu deliberately accumulate a large amount of Lakshmi because when you go past the amount that you know how to digest the weight of that money, the weight of that abundance is going to be ruling your life instead of you managing it.

So Vimalananda emphasized repeatedly that when you think about Lakshmi, you have to think about Lam Beeja. LAM is the beeja mantra for the earth element. So Lakshmi is the earth element. You want the right amount of the earth element in your life, but you don’t want too much of the earth element because it will generate Tamas. And that tamas will make you dull and you will not be able to see anything other than. You what you have accumulated and you will try to keep accumulating.

So we should be absolutely thinking that moving in the direction of prosperity is a valuable thing to do, because especially in the modern world, we need prosperity in order to function. But it’s good to look back at the original meaning of the word Lakshmi and the original meaning it’s like lakshmana and Luksha. It means a token, an indication a sign. So you can have the Papa lakshmi, which is a sign of bad fortune, and you can have the Punya Lakshmi, which is a sign of good fortune.

So eventually what happened is people thought about signs of good fortune and they conflated a sign of good fortune with the actual good fortune itself. By the time we get to the Vedas and the Shri Supta, where Lakshmi is mentioned is in, in the appendix, the Khila of the Rigveda. The focus is not so much on Lakshmi as it is on Shri. Which is all around general prosperity and that’s not just accumulation of food grains and animals and, family and so on and it’s definitely not just the accumulation of money, it’s the accumulation of the general energy of prosperity in your reality.

And an important phrase in the shree suktam is “Lakshmi unupagamana.” “Un”, meaning not and upagamana. So it means that the one hand, on the one hand, that Lakshmi, that will not depart from me. Upagamana means death. It will not I, she will not die out in my life. But it also means that lmi, that is not going to kill me, that Lakshmi, that is not going to be so much that it will overwhelm me that I will not be able to digest it.

So it’s always essential when you are working with any kind of prosperity that you be able to digest it and then you and Lakshmi are working together. You can invite her in please be present here and when it’s time for her to go, you need to be ready to let her go and never try to hold on to Lakshmi any longer than she wants to remain. You are her steward. You are not her owner. You are protecting her while she is with you, and then you were making sure that she goes to the next person who needs her assistance at that time.