A question about judgment of stingy behavior.
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Dear Magdi, I feel that I judge people who seem to only take, people who expect others to do things for them. They are not appreciative and don’t offer to help or to pay. They attend functions and don’t contribute or are stingy, taking whatever they can. Never bringing anything. They only use others.
I tend to close off to them and I feel a resistance because they don’t do their part.
Just taking and not giving. But, with people who offer to help or offer to pay, I feel more giving towards them and happy to be with them.
Can you explain how to deal with this?
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Reply:
Money and identification with possessions is a vasana that runs deep and is very prevalent. The me-identity adheres tightly to money and material possessions and maintains itself via fears and concerns about money and worldly safety. This vasana is due to the belief that I am a material form, that I am the body mind. It is important for a truth lover to contemplate this vasana and to find a way to soften its hold and free herself from this sort of hypnotic fear-full obsession.

The main contemplation is to inquire into your true nature until you realize the fallacy of this sort of identification.
Ask yourself: Am I a mortal body mind? Am I a person? Am I an identity that is born and dies or am I the aware presence, that perceives, that is borderless, eternal and infinite?
The answer that comes from the mind is not sufficient. This contemplation must reveal the reality of your experience without relying on the past and should not lead you to a new spiritual belief system.
There is nothing spiritual about any belief, no matter how holy it might seem.
It is for every one to examine their attachment to money and to material forms, as this sort of attachment maintains the fear of dying.
It is for each truth lover to explore and live the truth of their understanding. If you arrive to a certain understanding and you do not apply it, if you do not live it, it is useless and will not lead you to the revelation of your freedom.
It is normal that you feel drawn to folks who live in accordance with the qualities of truth and freedom and less drawn to the possessive separate self. There is no harm in that.
Simply be careful not to engage in judgments as people are at different crossroads along the path. When you judge, you separate and in doing so, you feed the river of sorrow and maintain the illusion of separation.