How did the Money Meditation go for you? Did you notice things about yourself you may not have been aware of before? Did you notice anything about money you had not considered before? Did you find your relationship with the pieces of paper change any? Perhaps nothing changed for you. There is no right or wrong here, there just is your awareness of yourself that is the most crucial thing.
Ponder this for a moment if you will. Say you are walking down the street and you see a penny on the ground. What do you do? Why do you do that? If you left the penny on the ground, what were your real reasons? Was it not worth your time since it was only a penny? Or did you leave it because it didn’t belong to you?
Now imagine it was a dollar coin or a five-dollar bill. Did you leave it or did you pick it up? What were your reasons for doing whichever action you chose? If your actions changed between the two instances, what was the cause for your change?
If you were like most people you would leave the penny, mostly because it isn’t worth your time to pick it up; it is only a penny. However as the denomination of the money increases the number of people who will pick up the money also increases. By the time it is a five-dollar bill or a twenty almost all people will pick it up.
It is interesting how money will change our actions and our motivations. It is also interesting how many excuses we are able to generate for not observing the precept of not taking what is not given to us, or not taking what is not ours.
Money is a very powerful thing indeed. But how powerful is it? I think that depends upon a variety of factors, one of which is certainly how great our need is or how great our desire is. But what is this thing we call money?
Fundamentally money is nothing other than a social contract we have entered into which says that something that is worth almost nothing we will treat as worth a great deal more. We agreed to assigned values for tokens, and these assigned values are supposed to be exchangeable for goods and services. We are paid with a token, which we can then exchange for a product. Everyone along the line agrees to honor the arbitrary value society has assigned, to what really amounts to an almost worthless piece of metal or paper.
Things used to be a bit different when precious metals or gems were used, as they at least had some rarity. Still however, the value was not fixed and was agreed upon by society, so there still was this social contract.
In the Lotus Sutra it is interesting to note the numerous references to wealthy individuals who were not royalty. In fact most of the parables are about working people or merchants. This reflects the rise in the merchant class both their rise economically, socially, and also the amount of influence they had on society. With this rise in the merchant class it became increasingly necessary to have more liquid forms of trading and acquiring wealth. Goods and services were moving in a multitude of directions, whereas previously wealth only moved within nobility or royalty.
In the Lotus Sutra we have stories of a wealthy man who has enough money to own a dilapidated house which we presume he didn’t actually live in. Sadly his house caught fire, though his sons who were playing inside did escape. We had a merchant who wasn’t always wealthy but managed to amass quite a fortune and he wanted to leave it to his son whom he hadn’t seen in ages. We have the example of the son traveling around looking for work, so he was mobile even though no matter where he went he couldn’t find work. We have a wealthy guy sewing gems in his friend’s robe, neither of whom are nobility or royalty. We have a group of people who want to travel to another place because of economic opportunities. Before the rise of the merchant class people didn’t move around so much because wealth tended to stay in one place.
History marches on and we come to ourselves. Today most people spend time at work producing only a part of a product, or even no real product at all. People work in factories or even fast food restaurants and perhaps only do one small part of the over all larger job. It may be a cashier who takes the order and collects the tokens which pay for the food someone else has prepared. Or it may the person sitting at a computer at a desk who manipulates information so the information can be then sold or utilized by someone they don’t even know. Or, it might be what I used to do when I worked for the bank; moving what amounted to basically imaginary money around from one pocket to another thus creating false wealth (yes it was legal).
Money is time represented or effort represented by these arbitrary tokens we have assigned value to. So money has replaced our effort or time and made it something we can then give to someone else for different time or effort.
Our next part of Money Meditation is propose will be an active form of meditation. For this part of the meditation I would like for you to calculate how many minutes it takes you to earn one dollar (or what ever the lowest paper currency is in your country). Now firmly fix that in your mind so that you can easily calculate how much time it takes you to earn all of the various denominations of money you might come into contact.
One difficulty you will have with this meditation is the use of plastic cards such as charge cards or debit cards, because for many of us money doesn’t even exist anymore. Even the arbitrary value we assigned to almost worthless tokens have been replaced by something that we haven’t really adjusted to and has no set value.
Ok, here is the actual mediation or practice. For the next week try to the best of your ability to translate the cost of the things you purchase, yes everything, into time spent earning the money you will spend. For those of us who don’t make any money, or who are retired and living off money previously earned come up with a reasonable approximation. The real challenge will not be how much you actually make but doing the calculations.
I expect it to be tedious, and you may find yourself resisting doing it. Try to ask yourself why you might be resisting if you are. Is it too much trouble? Is it making you aware of the real cost of things? What are your feelings? And as you do it see if anything changes in you? Are you looking at things you buy in a different way? Are you considering the value or worth of something differently?
Give this a try for the next week at which time we will check back in with each other.
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Now it’s your turn. Please feel free to add your thoughts.
