As I enter my final year of acupuncture school, a focus on practical success becomes more and more germane. However, I find that I haven’t moved very far from where I was when I wrote about this very topic last year. For the most part, school, relationships, and spiritual practice have consumed my attention. But it really is time to get down to business now.

Mental orientation is the starting point. I’ve been reviewing a few “success” books, some of which have interesting approaches that I can resonate with, such as Frank Channing Haddock’s books. Many of them write about generating a “mood of success.” Especially with the slightly psychic experiences that I’ve been having lately, I can directly experience the effects and qualities of particular thoughts, emotions, and moods that I hold in myself at any particular time, and so it’s quite evident to me that “positive thinking” and creating a mood of success can have a powerful effect.

But, at this point I still run into the same philosophical wall. I feel that even though I lack the experience, I have the willpower and the internal resources to eventually make a success of myself in this society. My hangup is that I’m not entirely certain I want success.

To me, success means getting ahead in whatever context you’re involved in. The problem is that success in the context of the modern economy has a rapacious connotation. The more “successful” I am in this system, the more monetary wealth I accumulate. At the same time, as I accumulate wealth, the system still allows there to be people suffering from lack. In some ways, then, I feel that my success comes at their cost. It’s a zero-sum game, and I’m not sure how to simultaneously work within it while rising above it.

One possible route could be to explore other socioeconomic systems, in the hopes that answers might lie there.

Communist or socialist approaches, for instance, institutionalize economic equality, which sounds great in theory. But from what little I know of political history, it seems clear that human flaws in those approaches can lead to catastrophic exploitation of people living in those systems, which ends up defeating the whole purpose, which is to benefit everyone. So they are not ideal either.

I suppose the only way I’ve heard of that still somewhat makes sense to me is something closer to the primitive anarchist end of the spectrum. That is, small tribes or villages, well integrated into the demands of the natural environment. But that is most definitely not the context in which I will be working. It may be in the future of humanity, but I can’t plan an acupuncture practice starting next year around that.

Ultimately, such explorations are fruitless for me at this stage in my life. Right now I have to work within this system, modern American capitalism, flaws and all. I suppose I have to accept that for now.

Still, there are personal ways of reorienting myself to best express my own values to the best of my ability, even in an unjust system.

One aspect of this is redefining success, which is something that Haddock actually does in his book, Power for Success Through Culture of Vibrant Magnetism. (I’ve tried to clean up a little of the language, as it’s a bit archaic — Haddock wrote in the 19th century.)

So these are some general statements about what success is and isn’t.

Nothing is success which does not develop selfhood toward its best.

First of all, success has to be a holistic thing within oneself. If you are successful in one area, say financially, but inside have a fearful miser’s heart, then that is not success, not by this definition. Success means a successful life, which has to encompass all areas.

Success … may be defined tentatively as achievement of best interests of self and of others.

Second, success has to be defined ecologically, which is to say that you cannot thrive at the expense of those around you — you can’t really be successful if your “success” causes others to suffer.

Success must be determined by the consciousness of the fully awakened individual considered with reference to conditions as they now are, not as they might be, and never with reference to the judgment of others …

If one is using his personal powers to the very best advantage for him, so far as he knows, that is success.

If one is seizing his opportunities in the best possible way for him, so far as he knows, that is success.

If one is endeavoring to fill his life-relations as well as he consciously can for him, that is success.

If one is honestly striving to adjust himself to his environment, and so striving to improve that environment in the completest measure possible to him, so far as he knows, that is success.

If one is industriously and intelligently endeavoring to make his present prophetic of a better future, doing as well as he can, so far as he knows, that is success.

Be assured then: These attainments or efforts constitute success, no matter what one’s mental depression, self-expectation, fanciful dreams, or the opinions of others may be.

Third, success is relative. It does not constitute keeping up with the Joneses. Success does not involve making a certain amount of money; you won’t automatically be successful by making $100,000, nor automatically unsuccessful by making $18,000. Success has to be judged according to each person’s capacities and strivings, and ultimately, the only person who can do that for a person is him/herself.

Okay. So far so good. But how do you inject this spiritually pure, abstract conception of success into the down-and-dirty modern economy? In other words, these statements helpfully define the mood of success, but what is the context of success? What’s the ecology of success?

This excerpt from The Kabbalah of Money, by Rabbi Nilton Bonder, speaks to that question.

The rabbis saw poverty as an unparalleled tragedy. in the Midrash (Exodus Rabbah 31:14) we read: “Nothing in the universe is worse than poverty; it is the most terrible of sufferings. A person oppressed by poverty is like someone who carries on his shoulders the weight of the whole world’s sufferings. If all the pain and all the suffering of this world were placed on one scale and poverty on the other, the balance would tilt towards poverty.”

In order to combat this universal enemy, which has both natural and human components, the rabbis developed the concept of yishuv olam, the effort of “settling the world.” Derived from Genesis 2:15, where human beings are assigned the task “to till and tend” the land, this concept states that we should constantly try, while maintaining an honest relationship with the world, to increase the overall quality of life. It is the duty of every one of us to expand wealth — and not only our own — into the world around us. Let us define wealth as the highest level of organization possible to the environment in such a way that everything alive and everything essential to life exists without scarcity. In other words, the more abundance we create for a given human need, without generating the scarcity of another need, the better. This is every person’s duty: to improve the quality of life around him or her.

This is consistent with the above definition of success. Wealth is not merely monetary, but seen with an eye toward the ecology of the surrounding system.

I really like this idea of ecology — and not just ecology, but of caring cultivation of one’s environs — as an analogy for the growing of an ethical business.

It’s a fascinating analogy: We cultivate wealth like we cultivate food.

There are in fact many ways to cultivate food, to “settle the world.” In the Torah verse above, Genesis 2:15, the author of the book uses the translation “to till and tend” the land, implying plowing, implying agriculture, a specific set of food cultivation methods. But in examining the surrounding text, we find the story is that God created man, created the Garden of Eden, made things grow out of the ground, and then, according to this translation,

Genesis 2:15 God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch it.

Which is less specific. And that could be significant.

Interestingly, the Eden myth is significant for primitivists in that Eden can be readily identified as a metaphor for idyllic hunter-gatherer life, whereas the Fall symbolizes the onset of agriculture and civilization and the accompanying dissociation from primal union with the wild and the Divine. Indeed, it is only after the Fall that God says this:

3:17 To Adam He said, ‘You listened to your wife, and ate from the tree regarding which I specifically gave you orders, saying, ‘Do not eat from it.’ The ground will therefore be cursed because of you. You will derive food from it with anguish all the days of your life.

3:18 It will bring forth thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the grass of the field.

That’s exactly what primitivists say about agriculture. Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

But Genesis 2:15 does imply some kind of work on the land, nonetheless. Moreover, for my purposes, growing a business in an ecological sense is not a wu wei, do-nothing kind of thing. If not agriculture, though, exactly what kind of “work” needs to be done?

At this point, it’s important to take a step back and briefly examine what is meant by agriculture versus other forms of cultivation. Jason Godesky of Anthropik illustrates it thus:

A few years ago, my mother began gardening in her backyard. She grows tomatoes, zucchini, and other vegetables, as well as herbs and spices. She grows stevia, dill, aloe, and a host of other plants. She’s far outdone whatever meager knowledge I’ve scraped together as a gardener, and I could hardly be more proud. But she’s also heard more than a few of my rants about agriculture, and so when she started on this endeavor, she loved to tease me: “Want to see my farm?” She insisted on calling it her “farm,” and herself a “farmer,” mostly because my face turned such a lovely shade of red.

Of course, it was funny precisely because we all immediately recognize that there’s a very real difference between “farming” and “gardening.” The images the two words conjure in most of our minds could hardly be more different. What color is farming? Brown. Gardening? Green. What do you farm? Wheat. What do you garden? All kinds of things. Farming is back-breaking labor; gardening is recreational. We could go on, but the point is clear—the colloquial understanding of farming is very different from that of gardening.

Gardening is horticulture, not agriculture. What’s the difference, other than the casual images he evoked?

In my uneducated mind, I have only ever thought of food cultivation as one thing: agriculture. That is, you plow an area, you plant stuff, it grows, you harvest it and eat it. And you make damn sure nothing else grows on there but what you put there. Actually, something similar happens on lawns and yards all over America (with the — embarrassing? — exception of my lawn), where only grass grows, and never past a certain length, or else.

Places where agriculture is happening are impossible to miss, you can see the cleared fields when they start and the even rows as the plants are growing. Places where agriculture isn’t happening is, well, everywhere else. And that’s the way it is. Right?

It turns out that ecological cultivation can be a lot more subtle, intimate, and sophisticated than that.

I’m reminded of the famous tracker Tom Brown, Jr., talking about his beloved Pine Barrens. There’s a primitive camp in that wilderness where his school is located, and he and the community around his Tracker School caretake and guard carefully. He likes to brag that it’s the only place left in the civilized world where you can drink river water without worrying about illness, because of the careful way they’ve tended the land, because of the tannins in the oaks that cleanse the river waters. What he’s bragging about is creating a harmonious environment, but by cooperating with the land, not fighting it.

And this: Somewhere I read that when some Australian aborigines were driven out of their territory, they warned the whites that if they didn’t caretake the land, it would begin to die. The whites didn’t listen, and sure enough, there was overgrowth and drought. The boundary between aboriginal territory and white territory was actually obvious from the air: On the white side there was drought and death, on the other side, everything was thriving.

It’s commonly assumed that before European invasion, Native Americans didn’t alter the land, and it was left pristine and fully “wild.” However, growing evidence shows that this probably wasn’t true. Books like Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus talk about the New World as having been altered dramatically by humans, with many North American tribes setting regular fires to flush out game, to the extent that many plants actually evolved to take advantage of periodic burning. And though disasters probably did happen, much of this was done without ecological collapse.

Permaculturist Toby Hemenway writes in his article, “Beyond Wilderness,”

As researchers examine the Amazon more carefully, it appears that huge areas contain not only wild plants, but have been stocked with people-friendly cultivars of useful species. More and more, it looks as if the Amazon, like much of the Americas, was a carefully cultivated garden before the Europeans showed up and abused it into a thicketed wilderness. It appears that our idea of wilderness — black forest so dense you can barely walk, where people “take only photographs and leave only footprints” — is a notion burned into our psyches during an anomalous blip: the first two centuries following the Mayflower, in which the gardeners who had tended the Americas for millennia were exterminated, leaving the hemisphere to descend into an neglected tangle of “primeval forest.” It’s likely that this so-called intact forest had never existed before, since humans arrived here as soon as the glaciers receded and began tending the entire landmass with fire and digging stick. The first white explorers describe North America’s forests as open enough to drive wagons through. Two centuries later these agroforests had deteriorated to the black tangles immortalized by Whitman and Thoreau.

Wilderness may be merely a European concept imposed on a depopulated and abandoned landscape. The indigenous people of the Americas were master terraformers, using a hard-learned understanding of ecological processes to preserve the fundamental integrity of natural systems while utterly transforming the land into a place where humans belonged and could thrive. They were truly a part of nature, and likely did not make a distinction, as environmentalists do, between land where people belong and land where we do not. I’ll certainly agree that people carrying chainsaws and riding bulldozers don’t belong everywhere. But I’m beginning to think that gardeners, with gentle tools and sensitive spirits, have been and might again be the best planetary land managers the Earth can have.

Adherents to permaculture (a modern-day version of horticulture) say that “everything gardens.” Everything on earth cultivates their environment in some way to benefit themselves, but not in such a way as to drastically upset the balance of life. As humans, we have the capability to upset that balance more dramatically, and so it’s even more important for us to consciously develop ways to cultivate with nature, not against her.

According to Godesky, the difference between agriculture and horticulture, in a nutshell, is this.

What divides agriculture and horticulture is less a question of a particular technique or even the intensity of investment, but rather, the ecological effect of their strategies. Horticulturalists in the New World created the Amazon rainforest and the Great Plains. By the same token, the first farmers laid waste to the cedar forest that once covered the Middle East and turned the Fertile Crescent into a wasteland. So here we have a workable definition: agriculture is cultivation by means of catastrophe. Tillage emulates catastrophe, and the plow is a catastrophe-emulating machine. By contrast, horticulture is cultivation by means of succession. Fallowing allows succession to advance; the lack of tillage and the plow is merely the lack of artificially-induced catastrophe to set back succession.

Both of these, then, can be seen simply in terms of biological succession—the process by which ecological communities achieve maximal complexity and diversity, and then establish a sustainable, “old-growth” character. Agriculture is cultivation that relies on suppressing succession. Weeds, “vermin,” and constant tilling—the back-breaking work we intuitively associate farming with—is the constant labor necessary to keep succession from taking over. Horticulture, on the other hand, works with succession and helps succession along, though it channels succession into specifically human-adapted paths, favoring plants and animals that humans favor. Nonetheless, horticulture, to one degree or another, depends on succession taking place, while agriculture is a constant fight against succession.

Agriculture is based on catastrophe. It works against the natural order of things. Horticulture is based on succession. It flows with the natural order of things. And obviously, we should like to avoid creating catastrophes, let alone basing a system on regular catastrophes.

Let’s bring this back to financial sustainability.

If you’ll recall, Rabbi Bonder’s definition of wealth was “the highest level of organization possible to the environment in such a way that everything alive and everything essential to life exists without scarcity.” Agriculture, then, actually directly violates this definition: It propagates by generating scarcity (i.e. by plowing, by catastrophe). Horticulture, by contrast, exactly fits this definition of wealth: It cultivates an ecology within which “everything alive and everything essential to life exists without scarcity.”

Haddock’s definition of success, then, can be seen as one which assumes a “horticultural” context: the advancement of a harmonious ecology — the “achievement of best interests of self and of others.” Whereas conventional definitions of success are “agricultural,” in that they rely on the victory of some and the defeat of others.

I think perhaps this is a good starting point to the growth of an ethical business, even in a corrupted system. Nothing says that I have to do business “agriculturally.” The question is, how do I grow my practice and cultivate patient relationships “horticulturally”? How does that work, and what would that look like?

I’m not quite sure yet. But over the course of writing this post, I’m comforted by the realization that there are more ways to grow out into this society than the selfish, greedy, fearful, scarcity-centered approach I see so prevalent. I take heart and inspiration in that, and it fuels my conviction that my values can be actualized into this world, though it may be more difficult and less financially rewarding. But after all, the type of success that focuses only on finances is far from being true success. My goal is to be a completely, holistically successful human being, in the context of the present moment and the present society; and if I can find a way to act as a gardener in my business, then I think I will have taken a good step towards that goal.