Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (51 page)

Fortunately, there are people today who will give you money to do things that won’t create more of it. These are precisely the people (or organizations or governments) that follow the spirit of “right investing” described above. Of course, living off the charity of others is no solution if they have to work all the harder (at the
business of destruction) in order to earn the money they give to you. However, as I have observed, humanity possesses vast stores of wealth in many forms, the accumulation of centuries of exploitation, that can now be turned to other purposes, for example to preserve and restore natural, social, cultural, and spiritual capital. Doing this won’t create more money; therefore whoever is paying for it is ultimately giving a gift.

In other words, the key to “right livelihood” is to live off of gifts. These can come in subtle forms. For example, say you sell fair-trade products. When someone buys one, at several multiples the cost of a functionally equivalent sweatshop product, the cost difference is essentially a gift.
³
They didn’t
have
to pay that much. The same is true if your work is to install solar water heaters or build shelters for the homeless. Many traditional social service jobs, like social work, teaching, and so on, partake in the energy of the gift as long as they don’t contribute to the more efficient operation of the earth-devouring machine, for example by training children to be efficient producers and mindless consumers. The source of the money could be a buyer, a foundation, or even the government. What makes it a gift is the motive—that it does not aim to get the cheapest price or generate even more money in return. Traditional employment is the opposite: I pay you a wage and profit from your productivity (of salable goods and services), which exceeds your wage. Traditional employment assists in the conversion of the world into money.

In a subtle way, any endeavor that shrinks the money realm draws on gifts. If you offer reskilling courses, train holistic healers,
or teach permaculture, you are ultimately shrinking the realm of goods and services. Tracing the money you receive from such endeavors back to its origin, somewhere down the line someone has made a “bad investment,” violating the principle that governs money creation today: “Money goes to those who will make even more of it.” It is no accident that there is usually little money to be made in reversing the conversion of life and the world into money.

If you are partial to principles, you might say that right livelihood abides by two. It applies your time, energy, and other gifts toward something that enhances, preserves, or restores some aspect of the commonwealth, and the money (or other return gift) that comes in return does not require for its providence harm to nature and people. Or to put it simply, it benefits other beings and does not harm other beings. I, however, don’t live by principles; nor do I recommend it. Shall I attempt to calculate the relative costs and benefits of printing this book? It uses wood pulp from trees on the one hand; it might inspire people to create earth-sustaining systems on the other. People are adept at construing their choices in a way that aligns them with their principles; if the disconnect is too great, they alter their principles and pretend they held them all along.

Therefore, when it comes to right livelihood, I trust what feels good and right. What, you might ask, if it feels good and right to market toothpaste or work for a hedge fund or design nuclear weapons? I would say, then do it. First, because as your awareness of the world grows, such work may no longer feel good and right. Second, because you will condition yourself to trusting that feeling, it will continue to guide you when it comes time to quit that job and do something courageous. Third, because denying our inner yearnings for the sake of principle is part of the story of Ascent, of overcoming nature. The idea that our desires are evil, that we must
conquer them for the sake of something higher, is its interior reflection. It is the same mind-set that refrains from generosity, because what if I cannot afford it? The self-trust I advocate is inseparable from the basic premise of this book, laid out in
Chapter 1
: we are born into gratitude, born into the need and the desire to give.

In other words, trust that it is not your true desire to comply with the conversion of the world into money. Trust that you want to do beautiful things with your life.

In right livelihood, then, I suggest that we orient ourselves toward our need and desire to give. I suggest that we look at the world with eyes of, “What opportunity is there to give?” and “How may I best give of my gifts?” Hold that intention in mind, and unexpected opportunities arise. Quickly, any situation in which you are not giving your life gifts toward something that is good to you becomes intolerable.

It is OK if “what feels good and right” is merely feeding your family. The key is the attitude of service. If you attempt to guilt yourself into right livelihood, you will likely end up with its counterfeit. Some entire nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are but enormous vanity projects, elaborate ways to allow people to approve of themselves. That’s all ego. The purpose of right livelihood is not so you get to have a positive self-image. People who do it for that reason are quite obvious from their defensiveness, sanctimony, and self-righteousness. The purpose of right livelihood is to give your energies toward something you love. The concept should feel liberating, not like a moral burden, not another thing you are supposed to do right in order to be good.

To enter more deeply into right livelihood, bow into service each day. Trust your desire to give, remember how good it feels, and be open to opportunities to do so, especially when they are
just at the edge of your courage. And if they are beyond the edge of your courage, don’t torment yourself. The fears that block your givingness are not an enemy. They form a cocoon of safety. When we grow, the fears that were once protective become limiting; we become impatient with them and seek to break free. That impatience bears new courage. Today, this growth process is happening to humanity generally. The program of Ascent that once seemed good and right to us—pushing the frontiers of science, conquering the universe, triumphing over nature—seems right no longer, as the consequences of that ambition become painfully hard to ignore. Collectively we have entered a crisis moment, in which the old is intolerable and the new has not yet manifested (not as a common vision, though it has for many individuals).

So, when it comes to right livelihood or right investment, let us be gentle. For ourselves and others, let us trust the natural desire to give, and let us trust the natural growth process that propels us toward it. Instead of attempting to guilt ourselves and others into it (and generating resistance to our sanctimony), we can offer opportunities and encouragement to give, and we can be generous with our appreciation and celebration of the gifts of others. We can see others not as selfish, greedy, ignorant, or lazy people who just “don’t get it,” but rather as divine beings who desire to give to the world; we can see that and speak to that and know it so strongly that our knowing serves as an invitation to ourselves and others to step into that truth.

The question comes up again and again: How can I share my gifts in today’s money economy and still make a living? Some people who ask this question are artists, healers, or activists who despair of finding a way to “get paid for” what they do. Others have a successful business or profession but have begun to feel that something is amiss with the way they charge for their services.

Indeed, to charge a fee for service, or even for material goods, violates the spirit of the Gift. When we shift into gift mentality, we treat our creations as gifts to other people or to the world. It is contrary to the nature of a gift to specify, in advance, a return gift, for then it is no longer giving but rather bartering, selling. Furthermore, many people, particularly artists, healers, and musicians, see their work as sacred, inspired by a divine source and bearing infinite value. To assign it a price feels like a devaluation,
a sacrilege. But surely the artist deserves to be compensated for his work, right?

The idea behind the word “compensation” is that you have, by working, made a sacrifice of your time. You have spent it doing work when you could have instead spent it on something you want to do. Another context in which we use the word is lawsuits, for example when someone seeks compensation for an injury, for pain and suffering.

In an economy that deserves the adjective “sacred,” work will no longer be an injury to one’s time or life; it will no longer be a matter of pain and suffering. A sacred economy recognizes that human beings desire to work: they desire to apply their life energy toward the expression of their gifts. There is no room in this conception for “compensation.” Work is a joy, a cause for gratitude. At its best, it is beyond price. Doesn’t it sound blasphemous to you to speak of, say,
compensating
Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel or Mozart for composing his Requiem? No finite amount of money is sufficient in exchange for the divine. Of the most sublime works, the only appropriate means of offering them is to give them away. Even if, at the moment, few of us have access to the genius of a Mozart, we are all capable of sacred work. We are all capable of channeling, through our skills, something greater than ourselves. Something takes form through us, using us as the instrument for its manifestation on earth. Can you see how foreign the concept of “compensation” is to this kind of work? Can you feel the dishonor in selling a sacred creation? No matter what the price, you have sold yourself short, and you have sold short the source from whence the gift came. I like to put it this way: “Some things are too good to sell. We can only give them away.”

Questions immediately arise in the reader. Despite the foregoing,
you may have even caught yourself again thinking, “But doesn’t an artist deserve to be compensated for his work?” The intuitions of separation run so deeply! So let us rephrase it: “Doesn’t the giver of great gifts deserve to receive great gifts in return?” The answer, insofar as “deserves” means anything at all, is yes. In a sacred economy, this will happen through the mechanism of gratitude rather than compulsion. The attitude of the seller says, “I will give you this gift—but only if you pay me for it, only if you give me what I think it is worth.” (Yet no matter what the price, the seller will always feel shortchanged.) The attitude of the giver, in contrast, says, “I will give you this gift—and I trust you to give me what you think is appropriate.” If you give a great gift, and no gratitude results, then perhaps that is a sign that you have given it to the wrong person. The spirit of the Gift responds to needs. To generate gratitude is not the goal of giving; it is a sign, an indicator, that the gift was given well, that it met a need. That is another reason I disagree with certain spiritual teachings that say a person of true generosity will not desire to receive anything, even gratitude, in return.

Now let’s make this practical. After wrestling with this issue for some time, I realized that while it feels wrong to charge money for my work, it feels fine to accept money from people who feel grateful for having received it. The degree of gratitude is unique to each person. I cannot know in advance how valuable this book will be to you; even you cannot know it in advance. That is why it is contrary to the spirit of the gift to pay for something unknown in advance. Lewis Hyde illustrates this point most insightfully:

Accordingly, I have taken what steps I can to conduct my work in alignment with the spirit of the gift. For example, I make as much as possible of my writing, sound recordings, and videos available online for no charge and invite readers to give a gift in return that reflects their degree of gratitude. This gift need not go to me. If the gratitude is, for instance, toward the universe for making my work available, perhaps a more appropriate way of giving is to “pay it forward.”