The Price of Gold

Gold is still revered as the most prized commodity of all. Despite fluctuations in its value in the marketplace, the price is always worth the investment. No wonder in times of financial uncertainty the price of gold escalates, as those with most to lose pour all their liquid assets into the bullion trade.

With its ethereal reflection of light, gold has always been worshipped as something divine and highly desirable as a symbol of wealth and prestige. Many have become obsessed with its elusive charisma. The Greek myth of King Midas tells of how this fascination and desire for gold resulted in the God, Dionysus, granting the King his wish that whatever he touched turned to gold. After the first throes of delight in transforming every object in the royal chamber, when the daughter of the King entered and embraced her father she instantly turned into a gold statue. From delight came grief followed by fear; for whatever the King touched, from water to the food in his mouth, also turned to gold.

The avarice of the King came back to taunt and afflict him. In desperation he pleaded to Dionysus to undo the curse that his gift had now become. This was granted and after being told to wash in the river Pactolus, the King watched in astonishment as gold flowed from his hands. (The ancient Greeks were later said to have found gold on the banks of the river Pactolus.) Eventually all that he had turned to gold, including his daughter, was restored. King Midas, having been humbled and inwardly changed, became a just and noble ruler of his people.

Everything in existence has its price. From a spiritual perspective the price of gold, which is the knowledge of the truth of existence, is responsibility. Until an individual is able to respond to the challenges and purpose of life from a place of clarity, the forces of the world will keep the person bobbing on the surface of the world without being anchored to the ground of the being. The most treasured knowledge is the gold of self-knowledge, which is the wisdom of life gained from the experience of living, together with the spiritual intuition that perceives beyond the memorable knowing of the mind. This divine light is golden and shines through the flesh when in love or just being connected to the natural beauty of the earth. We recognise this golden essence whenever we see someone doing a good deed and not waiting to be thanked, or just in some act of kindness that affirms the spirit of humanity in the moment.

The price of being in existence is time. The cost of being in a body is that the effects of time gradually erode its appearance and physical performance. Finally everybody dies and this is quite natural. But what has happened is that the golden divine essence, the immortal part of our life’s experience, is rarely illumined to its full potential and splendour. To compensate, human beings seek desperately to identify externally, as did King Midas, with the reflection in form of the golden body instead of the direct knowledge of the reality within.

The true value of gold is love. Love is indeed golden and the most sublime quality of all. Acknowledgment of the good in the life turns the base elements of self to gold, the elixir of life that every alchemist seeks to transmute as the golden body within. The divine right of every man and woman is to be this exalted golden light; for it is the true essence of the being behind the form.