All spiritual work, internal work, real work, boils down to one thing: trying to quieten the mind.

When you meditate and watch the noisy mind, what's it actually talking about? It's usually grumbling: going through a litany of complaints and resentments in order to reinforce its sense of self-righteousness. This is what Nietzsche called slave mentality. The slave silently grumbles at the master – he's full of resentments. The master, in contrast, has a quiet mind because he doesn't need to grumble – everything is under his control.

Hegel had a master/slave story. The master decides he shouldn't have to do menial jobs anymore so he buys himself a slave to do them for him. Because the master is not working he is getting weaker as time goes by, and because the slave is working, he's getting stronger as time goes by. So there comes a point when the slave overthrows the master. Now Nietzsche's big insight is: okay this happens, the slave may overthrow the master, but he will still have slave mentality, he will still have the noisy mind.

And this is what we are basically. We are masters of our lives in the sense that we have enough income not to have to worry about starving and other unpleasant things – we appear happy & content – but we still have the noisy mind. And you can see that to break this is different than just having more money to make life more comfortable. That sort of excess doesn't help at all.

The difference really between the slave mind and the master mind is that the slave is looking at the world and desiring. It's the whole market economy – capitalism is the slave mind in action. The master wants for nothing, so he can be himself, looking out and commanding his world. The slave is always looking at a world that is beyond it, moaning to itself because it can't have it. The slave thrives on envy. That's what we need to do something about.