Tag: capitalism

The Four of Pentacles, New Age Capitalists, and Buddha in an F-150 Pickup Truck

A look at the New Age fascination with money.

“I wanted to be able to help people financially.  If you have enough money, you can buy health.  A rich man can always find a woman.  If you have enough money, you can buy almost anything.” – Jerry Hicks

There is a very peculiar – and very strong – connection between the New Age/New Thought movement and good old American capitalism.

The Four of Pentacles shows a guy with his feet on money, holding money, and money on his mind, and that’s a LOT of the New Age movement and its leaders.

Mike Dooley, who is best known for his credo, “Thoughts become things,” was an international tax specialist for Price Waterhouse and his primary client was Saudi Freaking Arabia.

Prior to channeling Abraham, Esther Hicks was a business accountant and Jerry Hicks was THE leading Amway salesman in the United States.

Stuart Wilde made a fortune selling Mod clothing on Carnaby Street before he took up Taoism and made another fortune selling books about how spiritual it is to make a fortune.

Even the much beloved Ram Dass was born into a very wealthy family, never experienced a day of poverty or want, franchised his spirituality very successfully and died on his massive estate in Hawaii.

I have to admit that I was somewhat puzzled by the extreme emphasis on money and material possessions when I first stumbled into the New Age movement.  I started my spiritual journey as a young kid in a midwestern state, taking LARGE amounts of LSD, reading Tarot cards, and convinced that it really was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Racism, war and poverty would be eliminated.  We’d all live in peace and harmony and people would really and truly realize that love is all that matters.  Those were my dreams when I was a young man.

Duh.  I know.  It didn’t exactly turn out that way, did it?  Still, there was a nobility and a grandeur to the dreams that I think all young people should have. 

And so, when Mike Dooley talked about his dreams as a young man, I was a bit mystified.  “I wanted to make a million bucks, own my own private plane and travel internationally with a beautiful woman by my side.”

Or Stuart Wilde’s statement that, “Money doesn’t imply that rich people are spiritual but it does infer that poor people probably are not.”

Or the (I’m sure inadvertent but telling) juxtaposition in Jerry Hicks statement, “A rich man can always find a woman.  If you have enough money, you can buy almost anything.”

Esther and Jerry Hicks probably took the wedding of capitalism to spirituality further than anyone else.  Their basic position is that our desire for material goods – for the goodies in life – is what drives us into greater and greater spiritual growth.  In their view, we have a sort of an internal wish list that’s composed of things like boats, cars, money, houses. As we tell the Universe what we want, the Universe provides all of those things on the wish list.

BUT . . . as we fulfill one wish list, another list spontaneously arises and we want even more, which the Universe provides and then we want even more, and so on. 

Oddly, that very process is exactly what the Buddha described as the source of all suffering.  It’s the constant desire for more and more and more, without the realization that more is never enough to make us happy. One wish list will always be replaced by another.

What I eventually realized is that these people – despite being rampant, unapologetic capitalists – ARE spreading a lot of spirituality through the world, no matter how paradoxical that might sound. 

Here’s the thing:  American capitalism is the dominant force in the world right now.  And the lingua franca of capitalism is M-O-N-E-Y.  

Who are the people who are going to all of the seminars and retreats of the New Age gurus and buying all of the millions of books they produce every year?  They sure as hell aren’t Buddhist monks or old hippies.  

They’re business people.  Amway salesmen.  Used car dealers.  Advertising guys.  Executive secretaries and career women.  Their dreams aren’t about world peace or brotherhood; their dreams are composed of F-150 pick up trucks, big houses, ski boats, and, yes, all the women they can buy with their fabulous wealth.

The ironic thing about it is that as they’re attending the Let’s-All-Get-Rich rallies, they’re also getting a HUGE dose of spirituality.  What’s really behind the idea of visualization and manifestation is that the physical world is not at ALL what it looks like.  We really CAN manifest whatever we want, seemingly out of nothing.  Magic really DOES exist.  There IS huge abundance in the world and we can tap into it with the power of attraction.

These are exactly the same people who love to mock California woo-woos and think that psychics and sensitives are crack pots.  But there they are, hunkered down in their split level homes in Nebraska, Utah, and Kentucky, pasting together vision boards and writing out affirmations.

LOL – which is doing magic.  Plain and simple.  If you’re trying to make something appear out of nothing using the power of your mind, you’re casting a magic spell.  Surprise!

It’s all very bizarre and puzzling, but it’s an improvement.  It’s a definite improvement.

The Sun, the Moon, Julius Caesar, and Why There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

A brief look at the origin of the concept of time and its link to money, capitalism, and lunch.

Didja ever notice that we tend to discuss time in almost exactly the same way that we discuss money?

Consider some of these phrases:

  • We spend time.
  • We save time.
  • We waste time.
  • We invest time.
  • We say that we’re running out of time.
  • We tell people that we don’t have enough time.

And, of course, the one that really lets the cat out of the bag:  “Time is money.”  

In other words, we’ve made time into a commodity.  We assure ourselves that we don’t have enough of it, but we trade substantial portions of it to our employers in exchange for money, which then allows us to take vacations when we’ve stacked up enough moolah, because we, “need some time off.”

Now, there are moments in human history when we, as a species, have made such monumentally stupid decisions about something that they amount to an evolutionary wrong turn and scar us forever.  I discussed one such moment in my previous post, “Happiness, Capitalists, Yellow Rocks, and Radical Meditators.”

At some point in ancient human history, a person picked up a piece of gold and said, “I have a yellow rock and you don’t.”  The appropriate response would have been to say, “Dude, what good is it?  You can’t eat it and you can’t fuck it.  Get over yourself.”

But, instead, we said, “I want one, too.”  What followed was centuries of murder, pillaging, and decimating native cultures, all in the name of determining who had the most yellow rocks.

In much the same way, there was a point in human history when some idiot asked, “What time is it?”  We have to imagine that the person standing next to him replied, “It’s day time.  What are you blind?  The sun’s up there in the sky and you can see your hand in front of your face.  It’s day time.”

“No,  I mean, exactly what time of the day is it?”

“Who cares?  If it’s day time, we get up.  If it’s night time, we go to sleep.  Who cares what part of It’s-Get-Up-Time it is?”

“Well, if we don’t know precisely what time of It’s-Get-Up-Time it is, how are we supposed to know when to have lunch?”

“Oh . . . shit . . . I never thought of it that way.  That’s an important point.  I don’t want to miss lunch.”

“I know what!  Let’s build a sundial!  Then we’ll know exactly how much time we’ve got in each day and when to eat lunch.”

Thus was born the concept of time as a commodity.   Something that could be measured and therefore controlled.

This form of insanity became SO popular that by 46 BC Julius Caesar said, “You know, we’ve actually got too much time going on and we need to get it under control, so I invented . . . the calendar.  From now on, there are exactly 365 days in each year.  Well . . . I mean, except for every fourth year when there’s an extra day and we’ll just throw that one in during February so no one notices.”

It seemed as if we finally had time under full control and everyone knew exactly when to eat lunch, when suddenly, 1600 years later, in 1582, Pope Gregory said, “Actually, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that there are  365.2425 days in the year instead of 365.25.”  And thus was born the Gregorian calendar, which we use to this very day.

Hurrah!

Now, let’s be honest.  If we had a friend or a relative who was terribly, terribly, TERRIBLY worried about whether there are 365.25 days in the year or 365.2425 days, we’d say, “You know, that guy’s plumb nuts.  He actually stays up at night worrying how long the year is.” 

Really, there are only two natural measures of time here on the Earth school. The first is the number of times that the Moon gets full.

And the second is how many Full Moons occur while we rotate around the Sun.

It gets light and then it gets dark and that’s night and day.  We have more dark in the winter and more light in the summer and those are the seasons.  The, “shortest,” day of the year is right around December the twenty first, so the, “new,” year starts right around December the twenty second.  Easy peasy.

We can see that more natural approach to time with the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest.  They had one month that was called, “the time to catch salmon.”  Another month was, “the time to gather berries.”  Another month was, “the time to catch eels.”  My favorite was February, which was, “the time to do nothing,” (probably because of that pesky extra day that Julius Caesar discovered.)  They didn’t have any concept of weeks or months or hours in the day and were totally amazed at our obsession with watches and clocks and calendars.

So where DID this need to measure and control time come from?  We can get a very clear picture on that when we consider the origin of the word, “calendar.”  It was, “Kalendorium,” which was defined as, “A book in which the interest on loans (due on the first of the month) was recorded.  An account book.  A ledger.”

So the concept of time wasn’t invented to be sure that we all had lunch at the right time.  It was invented to be sure that we paid back our loans on time.  

Basically, the guys who had collected all of the yellow rocks said, “I’m going to loan you this yellow rock because all you have is copper rocks and you can’t even buy lunch with that.  BUT . . . in exchange for my giving you one of my yellow rocks, you have to pay me back TWO yellow rocks.  Unless, of course, you hold onto my yellow rock for longer than the period of the loan, and then you have to give me THREE yellow rocks.”

And thus was born capitalism.

It became more radical, of course, with the beginning of the industrial age when we saw the birth of the wage slave.  That’s when the people who had collected all of the yellow rocks REALLY dug in and took control of our time.

“Look here,” they said,  “I don’t have a lot of time because I’m busy counting all of my yellow rocks.  You, on the other hand, don’t have any yellow rocks but you have a lot of time, which, up until now, was free time.  Now, I’ll give you the dust in the bottom of my bag of yellow rocks in exchange for you using all of your time to work in my factory, and then you can afford to buy lunch.  I mean, if I decide to give you a lunch break.”

And thus was born the minimum wage.

 And that is how we came to lose our time.  Now we can’t afford to waste our time, because we have to spend our time, in order to invest our time because . . . well, we’re running out of time.

Time is money!

My ebook, “Just the Tarot,”  is still available on Amazon.com for less than you’d pay for three rolled tacos, even without guacamole’.  You really can’t afford to turn down a bargain like that.

Happiness, Capitalists, Yellow Rocks, and Radical Meditators

Most people who are on a Spiritual Path eventually come to hold beliefs which conservatives consider, “politically radical.”  It’s ironic, because most people who are on a Spiritual Path have very little interest in politics, except to casually observe it as another form of human insanity.

When I use the term, “radical,” I mean it in its original use from the latin word, “radix,” or root, as in, “the root of a plant.”  To get radical is to get at the very root of something, to get to the place that it all grows out of, so to speak.

Let’s take the example of the Six of Pentacles.  It shows a richly dressed man, scattering coins to beggars, and holding a scale so that he can measure exactly what he’s giving away.

You couldn’t ask for a better representation of the, “scarcity,” view of life that’s at the root of our society.  There simply isn’t enough wealth to go around and some people have it and some people don’t.  Those who DO have it, should share it with those who don’t have it, but they need to be very, very careful about not giving too much away, because there’s never really enough.

In real time, we see that happening with the gazillionaires who live in penthouses, fly around in private jets, take vacations on yachts, and are DESPERATELY WORRIED that poor people might be getting too many food stamps.  Having enough to eat without working for it at minimum wage jobs is bad for their character, doncha know?  Makes them lazy and dependent.  Pass the champagne, darling . . .

As we move into a deeper level of spirituality, though, we begin to understand that there’s another model for looking at life, which is the, “abundance,” view.  The Universe and Mother Earth seem to be richly, almost insanely, abundant.  There are enough seeds in one tomato to plant an entire farm.  There are enough sperm cells in one tablespoon of semen to repopulate the world.  Women’s bodies produce far more eggs than they could ever bear as babies.  And, yes, we could produce enough food to feed every hungry person in the world.

And we begin to realize that the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough, the problem is that some people are spiritually sick and want far more than their share of the abundance.  Even worse, they want to be sure that other people have less than THEIR share, because they believe in their hearts that wealth is scarce and if they have more wealth, they’re better than other people.

Eckhart Tolle talks about this quite a bit in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61)  In a nutshell, the Ego always wants more STUFF, because the Ego believes that the more STUFF it has, the more important it is.  And, as a part of that contrast, if you’ve got less stuff than I have, then I’m just that much more important!  If I drive a BMW and you drive a Honda, I’m better than you.  If you have a two hundred dollar computer and mine cost five thousand, then I’m better than you.  If I live in a McMansion and you live in a trailer, then I’m better than you.

And so we get hypnotized into this weird dance of thinking that our STUFF makes us, “better people.”  But, as Tolle points out, it’s just a sugar rush, not real nutrition.  Yes, the new computer (or car or house or jewelry) makes us happy for a while, but then it doesn’t anymore.  So we have to buy more and more and more stuff to keep getting that rush, but somehow happiness keeps slipping away from us every time.  

If we keep walking down the Spiritual Path we realize that the STUFF doesn’t really make us happy, not for long.  As we continue to evolve, we start to get a glimpse of happiness WITHOUT the stuff.  Maybe that revelation comes to us in our meditations or our dreams or journals, but we begin to get just a glimmer that the material stuff really has very little to do with happiness.  We can actually BE HAPPY anytime that we want to and we don’t need a new computer to get there.

And that, my friends, is a RADICAL idea!  That goes right to the root of our whole economic system and way of life.  It short circuits the entire capitalist system which is based on consumers being convinced that they need to keep consuming STUFF in order to be happy.  If we quit buying all of that crap that doesn’t really make us happy, then the gazillionaires who are selling us all of that crap that doesn’t really make us happy are going to lose a lot of money.  

Dangerous, dangerous thinking!  LOL – it really is.  It’s why they killed Jesus.  “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.”  WHAT????  Kill that guy!  Quickly!

The point is that as we explore and grow spiritually, our values change and we become less and less in synch with society as whole.  We realize that, ultimately, what all of us want is love and happiness.  And we realize that love and happiness flow out of our hearts, not our possessions.  Possessions and materialism itself start to feel like a form of insanity, which it can easily become.

Consider the example of the genocide committed against Native Tribes in the United States.  We killed hundreds of thousands of Tribal Peoples in the Dakotas and Northern California because they were sitting on land that contained gold.

From their point of view, we were totally out of our minds because NO ONE HAD TOLD THEM THAT GOLD ISN’T JUST A ROCK.  Why kill someone over a rock?  Which, by the way, it IS just a rock.  You can’t eat it.  You can’t fertilize your fields with it.  You can’t make clothing out of it. Other than being pretty, gold is totally useless.

Except that somewhere, thousands of years ago, some asshole said, “I have this pretty yellow rock and you don’t, so I’m better than you.”  Since that original asshole, wars have been fought, untold numbers of people have been tortured and killed, and whole civilizations have been decimated, all because some people wanted to have ALL of the pretty, yellow rocks. 

 It really is monumentally nuts, when you think about it.

It’s my fervent hope that, as we move out of the ego-based scarcity model and into the new spiritual paradigm, we’ll see materialism begin to wither on the vine.  Contrary to their paranoia, that doesn’t mean we need to have a revolution and take all of the rich people’s stuff away from them. There’s plenty to go around and if their yellow rocks make them feel better, so be it.  

That’s abundance.

That’s radical.

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The Eight of Pentacles and the Death of Creativity

The Eight of Pentacles looks like a pretty happy card.  A craftsman sits at his bench carving away at one pentacle after another and seems to have several of them displayed, as if they were for sale.  My original definition of the card in my book, “Just the Tarot,” pretty much agrees with that:

Profiting from your skills.  Learning new skills that will advance your career.  Possible promotions or awards at work.

And, yet, as an artist and a writer, I have to say, “Ugh.”

And, “Yuck.”

In some ways the Eight of Pentacles is sort of the anti-creativity card.  Real creativity involves an interesting balance between competence and incompetence.

If you’ve ever gone through the pains of starting a new job or you’ve supervised someone who was new at their job, you know that there’s a definite learning curve.  For about the first six months you can count on a pretty high level of screwing up. The new employee has to learn new skills or – in some cases – unlearn what he thought he knew.  At about six months to a year, she’ll start to develop the abilities to perform the job and, after a year, it should be easy peasy.

We see a lot the same thing with artists.  Having a creative vision isn’t enough. The painter has to learn how to blend the colors and which brushes to use.  The wood carver has to know which chisels do what and what types of wood have smooth, tight grains that will take the details of the carving.

You study it, you practice it, and you learn it.  I used to refer to that as, “getting the knowledge out of my head and into my hands.”

But, the thing is, the second you’ve REALLY learned it, the second you can do it perfectly over and over and over again . . . you’ve stopped creating.  You’re just repeating.

That’s what I see when I look at the Eight of Pentacles:  a line of perfectly carved pentacles that are all exactly the same.  It would have been really cool if some of them were orange and some of them were purple, if there were a few folk art pentacles mixed in with some abstract pentacles.  

But there aren’t.

Henry Ford invented the assembly line in 1913.  It was a novel concept at the time: a product moving down a line, being assembled by a team of workers.  Each worker was highly trained in doing one separate part of the assembly, over and over and over. Doing exactly the same thing day after day after day until they retired or dropped dead from boredom.

It was a brilliant idea for a capitalist and an absolute soul killer for the workers.  Real creativity involves trying something new that you don’t actually know how to do perfectly.  It’s a meshing of your skill set with unknown territory that results in something unique and different AND increases your skills.

Unfortunately, we don’t see a lot of that in our work places.  We see people stuck in jobs where they do one or two things over and over again and are never challenged and never grow.  We actually give them awards for that and congratulate them on knowing how to do those one or two things better than anyone else, on accepting the concept that they should be, “good”, but not creative or different.

The Eight of Pentacle is a safe card, a card that shows that nothing bad is happening to that person.  But nothing particularly wonderful is happening to that person, either.  The real story is in the definition of the Eight of Pentacles Reversed:

 Employment problems that may involve a need for retraining or learning new job skills.  Possibly the questioners position being eliminated or some sort of a reshuffle of employees that will place him or her in a job requiring different skills.

In other words, THAT person is going to have to GROW.  It’s all really a question of choosing emotional safety or choosing growth.  Sit in the nest or jump out and learn how to fly.

Life is way too short to choose safety.