"Greed is another of the undesirable weeds which we can root out of our consciousness through the use of the mantram. I use 'greed' here to stand for selfish desire in all its varied forms: the greed for personal power, for prestige, for profit, for pleasure; the belief that we can find abiding happiness in pursuing our own selfish satisfactions regardless of the cost to those around us.

"Let me stress that what I am deprecating here is not desire, but selfish desire. An unselfish desire to alleviate the suffering of those around us, or to contribute to the welfare of those around us, is the highest of human motivations. Mahatma Gandhi, who worked with no thought of personal power or prestige or profit, was once asked by a European reporter, 'Don't you have any ambition?' He replied, 'I am the most ambitious of men: I want to reduce myself to zero.' In other words, he wanted to eliminate all selfish desires completely. A selfish desire for my own personal profit, for example, can be transformed into a selfless desire to see that everyone has shelter, clothing, and enough to eat; it is just a matter of spiritual engineering. So when I use the word greed, I am referring to selfish desire.

"Action motivated by greed is not likely to be in our own best interests, or in the best interests of others, and in the end it will leave us unsatisfied and alienated. When we are driven by greed, it is as if we go through life wearing blinders which enable us to see only through a little slit. The man who is driven by greed for money, for example, looks at the world through a slit shaped like a dollar sign; when he looks at a sunny meadow all he is thinking is, 'I could make a mint building a subdivision here.' "