The author I quoted in the last post has a book out, which is available to read free online, called The Ascent of Humanity. I’ve been read the chapter on money and economics, which is very enlightening to me because finally someone’s talking about money the way I’ve been feeling about it.

First, he writes about money essentially as a manifestation of the way we experience ourselves. Money is a fairly universal thing; it is neutral, blind, anonymous. One dollar bill is no different than another. Money represents private property, and private property relies on the existence of a private self that is defined by a differentiation between self and other.

The urge to own arises as a natural response to an alienating ideology that severs felt connections and leaves us “alone in the universe.” Shorn of connectedness and identity with the matrix of all being, the tiny, isolated self that remains has a voracious need to claim as much as possible of that lost beingness for its own. If all the world, all of life and earth, is no longer me, I can at least compensate by making it mine …

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I came across an essay called Money and the Crisis of Civilization, by Charles Eisenstein, which describes the ambivalence about money that I’ve been blogging about, with greater sophistication. I’m excited; not too many people talk this way.

If I babysit your children for free, economists don’t count it as a service. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt: I cannot go to the supermarket and say, “I watched my neighbor’s kids this morning, so please give me food.” But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a “service”. GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier.

The same is true if I cut down a forest and sell the timber. While it is still standing and inaccessible, it is not a good. It only becomes “good” when I build a logging road, hire labor, cut it down, and transport it to a buyer. I convert a forest to timber, a commodity, and GDP goes up. Similarly, if I create a new song and share it for free, GDP does not go up and society is not considered wealthier, but if I copyright it and sell it, it becomes a good. Or I can find a traditional society that uses herbs and shamanic techniques for healing, destroy their culture and make them dependent on pharmaceutical medicine which they must purchase, evict them from their land so they cannot be subsistence farmers and must buy food, clear the land and hire them on a banana plantation — and I have made the world richer. I have brought various functions, relationships, and natural resources into the realm of money. In The Ascent of Humanity I describe this process in depth: the conversion of social capital, natural capital, cultural capital, and spiritual capital into money.

Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a “service”. And we are the richer for it. Right?

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The topic seems apt given my recent posts.

If my health could have handled it, I would be spending the next few months in India at the Acupuncture Institute and Free Community Clinic of Ananda Nagar. An acquaintance of mine spent several months there and learned so much. But I talked to him and he said that they eat a lot of rice and bread there, and being located in a remote rural area, it was difficult to get any other kind of food. And being hypoglycemic, where a single meal of carbohydrates can knock me down, there’s no way I could last.

But anyway. We were talking about poverty, and I just found an article by an Indian writer for Newsweek, who wants people to know that despite Hollywood endings, there are still slums.

Man Bites ‘Slumdog’
By Sudip Mazumdar

On the way to see “Slumdog Millionaire” in Kolkata, I had my cabdriver pass through the slum district of Tangra. I lived there more than 35 years ago, when I was in my late teens, but the place has barely changed. The cab threaded a maze of narrow lanes between shacks built from black plastic and corrugated metal. Scrawny men sat outside, chewing tobacco and spitting into the dirt. Naked children defecated in the open, and women lined up at the public taps to fetch water in battered plastic jerry cans. Everything smelled of garbage and human waste. I noticed only one difference from the 1960s: a few huts had color TVs.

I still ask myself how I finally broke out. Jamal, the slumdog in Danny Boyle’s award-winning movie, did it the traditional cinematic way, via true love, guts and good luck. People keep praising the film’s “realistic” depiction of slum life in India. But it’s no such thing. Slum life is a cage. It robs you of confidence in the face of the rich and the advantaged. It steals your pride, deadens your ambition, limits your imagination and psychologically cripples you whenever you step outside the comfort zone of your own neighborhood. Most people in the slums never achieve a fairy-tale ending.

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When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.

- Mark Twain

My parents grew up in rural Taiwan, part of an ethnic group that was marginalized first by occupying Japanese and then by invading mainland Chinese. Their families were poor and struggled to make ends meet. I hear stories about how my father had to get up at three in the morning to climb up a mountainside and cut bamboo to sell in the market, before going to school. How my grandmother made great sacrifices to buy my dad the microscope that was required for medical school. How my maternal grandmother went door to door the day of school enrollment, desperately trying to scrape up enough money for the enrollment.

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Anxiety about my ability to build a successful practice is beginning to build. I can flail around developing methods and strategies, but what it comes down to is a deep fear and distrust of the system in which I must exist. And that’s a problem, because that fear and distrust has no choice but to be expressed somehow in my practice. I’m reading advice like this, from a practitioner who sees 95 patients a day.

Most people who are attracted to this profession are quite liberal-minded, both morally and politically. This is good because it shows a good heart and a natural concern for other people and their welfare. However, this philosophy often brings with it the unwanted baggage of a prior dislike for powerful, successful people, and a uneasiness with making a great deal of money, and achieving financial success. This is unfortunate because it is this type of thinking, which will sabotage even great efforts in building a busy practice. One has to take a good honest look at themselves to see if this theme is operating in their life even subliminally. If it is, then it will probably be difficult to truly build a large practice.

But it’s not so easy to set aside these deep concerns because I can hardly even articulate them. So I have to turn to reading the words of others to try to express the ambivalence I feel about having and making money. Fortunately, I have a copy of Money and Power by Jacques Ellul, and he says this.

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So much for my latest martial art attempt. Having dabbled in Shaolin kung fu, I’m definitely quitting. Next week I move out of this area where my kung fu instructor and former classmate lives. I suppose others have continued to train long distance, but for me it is a relief to let go of this. I’m not sure I was made to learn a martial art in this lifetime.

Qigong, though, is a different story. A few weeks ago I finished the third of five medical qigong courses and am starting to feel more capable in treating patients purely with energy, although, to be sure, that brings its own can of worms that I would have to attend to carefully.

The main thing I’m taking away from this kung fu experience is the powerful qigong exercises, which I’ve incorporated into my daily practices and which seem to be more powerful than the ones I’ve learned in the medical qigong course. I had a final lesson a few days ago and trained in an exercise called One-Finger Shooting Zen, which is a powerful method for building energy and training it to flow down the arms and into the hands and fingers.

Some cool stories about it from Grandmaster Wong:

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I chose a path a long time ago. To be more specific, I was put on one, and I made it my own. That was the path of success, in a certain narrow vein.

I’ve been in school for something like 27 years. Preschool since I was 4 or 5. Like most middle-class Americans, it’s been a straight shot from kindergarten through college. Got all A’s until the latter half of college, and that was at Stanford so I still graduated with a feather in my cap. Even my year in the woods was not too different in a general sense — still trying to conform to an institutional sense of what was correct. And now, I just graduated from a master’s program.

The downside of being successful is that you get trapped in it. You never learn the value and joy of being unsuccessful. Or rather, you never really learn that life goes on whether you’re successful or not. You just keep going, racing anxiously against the fact that time’s against you. Then success becomes a burden rather than a joy.

I’m so tired.

What brings out in relief the type of fatigue is that I could have as much physical energy as I want. I have the tools now to build energy, and I could be flying around all over the place,, just by doing qigong a few minutes a day. But, I’ve stopped. Because I can’t find the motivation.

I can’t find it in me right now to build the energy to push forward because I can’t see the joy in it.

I’m tired of living up to someone else’s standards. I’m tired of it. I’ve been doing it for so long, I’m not even sure what my own standards are anymore. But I know that I’ve got to go play around and figure some of that shit out, otherwise I’ll never truly thrive. Before I go start up a practice healing people, I have to spend some time doing stuff that looks like it has no value to anybody else, just because I want to. I have to indulge.

Otherwise, what makes life worthwhile?

Surprisingly, I can relate to a couple of these details from my year in the woods, but for the most part I’ve never experienced this. It must be intense to be out on the margins of society like this.

Via Craigslist.

I won’t ramble too much. Most stories are the same. I just want to tell you what I notice now that I’m stable.

– Here’s me: At age 18 I was a drug mule and got busted on my first trip. My first time, but the amount (marijuana) was enormous and I got 4 years. First two years out, I had some bad luck with roommates; got robbed so much by my own roomies I had to move out but was then immediately hit by the back-rent no one paid. No one could be located except for — guess who — me.

– I had the apartment’s lawyers and the phone company chasing me for money. How’d you like to hire somone who has at least two garnishments you have to figure out for each paycheck? Also, would you like to lease an apartment to a guy who has an unpaid judgment from his last apartment? Don’t forget the convicted felon part.

So, I was homeless for about 4 years until the manager of a car dealership took a chance on me and now I am the manager of our detailing department.

Okay, so what are the things that I really appreciate?

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