I’m a little bit horrified at myself.
I was reading last night about the concept of nonattachment, and in chewing on that, I started to realize how the process of attachment to the contents of my daily activities, of identification and losing myself in the roles I play, has really been corrupting me.
The majority of my daily life is geared toward the activity of healing people and making money. They are not separable, the way I am doing it—which is to say, the same way that just about every other health care practitioner in a capitalist society does it: Health care for financial return.
The fact that it’s consumed my energy day after day has meant that, step by step, I’ve started to align myself with the needs and concerns of a business owner. I remember one distinct step I took was when I was searching for an office to lease. I developed a schema for “For Lease” signs, and now I see them everywhere, and they remind me of the state of the housing market, etc. Or, having a machine to take credit cards, I’m now aware of the fees vendors pay Visa and Mastercard in exchange for the privilege of taking customers’ credit cards, which makes me more keenly aware of the effect I might have on a store’s bottom line whenever I myself use a credit card.
Those are the more innocuous things. What is not as innocuous is a gradual but profound shift in a direction of being powerfully concerned with money in the course of my days. Oh, my main concern is still the health of my patients, but in some ways it’s inseparable from the financial state of my business—one depends on the other.
This has led to me gradually adopt a position of alignment with, well, just about everyone else around me who’s in a position of needing to be concerned about money. Then I find myself being hard on myself when I didn’t make enough or if I spent more than my budget allowed. And then, I find myself turning that outward and beginning to look down on people who aren’t as financially successful.
And I just woke up from that, literally, like, yesterday. It horrifies me, that I can begin to see people in that way. But I understand it a little better now, and can have a little more sympathy for those who were very hostile and not understanding of my time spent learning primitive skills—a field that certainly has, at least among the people I encountered, a proportionally higher population of lower-income and lower-class individuals, and which, moreover, will never lead one to make much money unless they manage celebrity status a la Tom Brown, Jr.
Nevertheless, such a position is not right, and not real. And, you know, I do understand that people who make more money and become familiar with and secure in themselves about it can afford to be more generous and have more power and money to distribute and donate to those who need it. And I do understand that many people without money are also those who cast themselves in the victim’s role, or simply do not have the time or energy to expand their consciousness beyond putting food on the table. But this isn’t really about that. It’s about the sense of moral superiority, that one state or another is morally or even spiritually better for some reason.
I develop such a moral hierarchy in order to make sense of what would otherwise be a deep sense of terror in a world that demands an esteem of money or else you lose. So I grip tightly and learn the rules of the game, and as I do so I insidiously begin to internalize those rules until I begin to judge people who don’t play by those rules, or people who aren’t winning according to those rules, as inferior.
I can’t speak for others. I just know that, for myself, coming from a past of having valued other people more fully simply for what truth they could speak, to find in my mind the beginnings of a contempt for those less fortunate than I is disturbing. And really speaks to the contempt I hold for myself for not being more economically successful (yet), a contempt reinforced (perhaps subconsciously) by people like the presenter at the recent seminar I attended and blogged about.
As I wake up, I remind myself that this is not what it’s all supposed to be about. My worth is neither in my wealth nor in my status nor in my success or lack thereof.
The problem is that the worth that others attribute to me is dependent on those things. So I have to be clear and strong in my purpose if I am to withstand the influences of others.
And what is my purpose? Well. That’s the question. What has ever been the purpose of a deeply spiritual path? Encapsulate it in a word, if you will, something like enlightenment, or heaven. It still lacks the succinctness and concreteness of, “I want to make a million dollars.” There’s an earthy ferocity to such a statement that more people can connect to than can relate to nirvana. So to set that aside and aim for something seemingly more ethereal is like fighting a tide. And it’s aiming for a distant star that I can’t even name. It’s opening and trusting. It’s a lot of things, see, that can’t be boiled down to a mission statement.
All I know is that I violated that purpose by internalizing the rules of the financial game I’m made to play. So this is the dangerous temptation of avarice and the existential anxiety from which it came: that playing the game to survive degenerates into playing the game for the sake of the game.
This is not what I’m here to do. I’m meant for greater things. We all are.
Hi David,
Boy, do I hear you on this one! In our house we struggle all the time with rampant monetization of everything. The forces compelling us to see ourselves as economic units are so strong. Constant conscious resistance is necessary but wearying. And it’s the sort of thing that is hard to talk about with most people.
You’re right: we are here for greater things. And we need to keep trying to remember that and talk about with people we can trust.
Dammit. I was hoping for an easier answer!
For me the spiritual path is one that I hope leads me to knowing the truth of who I am. Along the way I test my tools, but ultimatlely without some form of “attachment” we would have no goals, large or small, or dreams. Living in the moment is something to be aware of and strive for. I’ve written some on nonattachment, but still run that around in my own mind. If we can avoid the attachments that lead to fear and envy then we are closer to our path. Thanks for sharing your ideas. I’d love your feedback on mine.
Blessings, Sherry
Daily Spritual Tools
True, but there are nuances in the concept that allow for gradations along the spectrum of attachment and nonattachment, within which there’s so much to explore. And right now we’re so used to just living within a very narrow band of that spectrum, is my point.
Thanks for the link, I’ll check out your blog soon.
[...] acupuncturist, a former oil executive who makes almost million a year doing acupuncture; and then, the realization that I had insidiously come to hold some of the more contemptible attitudes of the [...]
Dave-
I’m going to throw something out for you to consider. It might go better as a long talk over coffee and it doesn’t sit well with people who have a Disney view of nature. Consider this:
Free Market Capitalism has been the most powerful force for the common human good in all of history.
Gasp, horror… maybe… but think it through. It is the first worldview ever (and still the only workable one) that sees people outside of the tribe as anything other than enemies or potential resources. It allowed us to see people of different castes and ethnicities as potential trading partners instead of potential converts or slaves or people to be killed and take their land. Trade, and trade alone, made peace more profitable than war.
You have to know how many works. It is not a zero-sum game and rich people do not keep a big vault of gold like Scrooge McDuck. They invest it, which gives others the chance to try to become wealthy (neutral in my opinion) but also to experiment in new ways, new businesses, new ideas, new health technologies… on and on. Very, very good in my opinion.
The leaps and bounds in standard of living are recent. Until the idea that employees were also customers, serfdom was practical for the powerful. The capitalist view of the world allowed that to change and allowed those places that chose capitalism to vastly out produce those that rejected it.
The math is good. People do not spend their lives working hard or sharing new ideas if they will only be exploited. By having a natural mechanism that rewards what other people value, society drifts towards what the people themselves consider the common good, rather than be forced that way (by a tyrant, whether a dictator or the soft tyranny of a ‘people’s government’ or party).
Trading centers have always had a higher standard of living than other places– as well as being more cosmopolitan. New ideas and languages and arts came with the trade goods. The trade paid for the spread of artistic styles; the spread of artistic styles was never able to pay for its own dissemination, much less carry along food and goods and technology.
There are ethical and unethical capitalists, David. And there are profoundly ethical and unethical idealists. I don’t think this path you are slipping into is, at all, inherently wrong.
Rory
Rory,
You missed my point. I’m not interested in a debate of ideology or abstract economics. Maybe I opened myself up to it when I used the word “capitalist,” but I feel like you got mostly concerned with that and didn’t really absorb the rest of the post, and I’m not sure why.
I don’t agree with all of what you said but I don’t disagree with it all either. It’s really beside the point to me.
My main concern is that, from occupying my life in economic activity, and filling my mind with those concerns, I’ve begun to see and relate to other people according to their degree of economic success. And I find that absolutely appalling.
That’s it.
David,
I understand a bit where you’re coming from. My inability to let the economic part of my life become the predominant area in my life is what let me to leave the corporate world. I’ll be happy if I never go back.
And as Dave Parkinson notes, it is constantly wearying living in a world where the predominant worldview is an economic one. When I’m at a party and someone I meet asks “what do you do?”, I want to scream “I’m a husband, a son, and a brother. I train in the martial arts because I enjoy it. I’m a sometimes musician. Occasionally, I like to sit and just think. I spent an entire summer once watching sunsets. And I try to live a good life.” But most people just want to hear that I’m a teacher.
And the worst part is that I’m afraid to say what I just wrote. I’m afraid of what they’ll think of me. Will they think I’m crazy? Or is “crazy” something that is socially defined, as I read recently, and in a different world I’d be totally sane? Hmmm…
Sorry if this came off as a bit confessional-sounding. I was berating myself a bit for not having a solid, concrete, quotable point; but then I realized that perhaps the sharing of my own experiences and thoughts is its own point.
James,
Honestly, I think those fears are justified, because many people really aren’t looking for that level of depth, or don’t know what to do when confronted with it. Cast not your pearls before swine, and all that.
I’ve also had the experience of being at the opposite end, where I asked someone what she did and was annoyed when she said, “Live.” It’s a tough call, because many people do define themselves according to what they do, so it’s a convenient shortcut to ask that question when you’re genuinely trying to find out more about someone.
But those are details, which wouldn’t matter so much if we were clear in ourselves. Which is really the problem; I’m not. At base, in this world I feel like I am how successful I am, by whatever arbitrary measure I choose. Not knowing how to resolve that, I just project it outward and measure everybody else by the same standard. And the cycle continues.