Generosity

The celebrity culture in America has fostered an unrealistic concept of what it means to be a generous, compassionate person in society. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are lauded as models of humanitarian philanthropy. Howard Hughes designed the model that billionaires follow. The medical Howard Hughes Foundation, appropriately founded by the psychosomatic, germ-phobic eccentric, was Howard's solution to avoiding paying personal income taxes. By placing his millions in a tax-exempt non-profit, Howard paid negligible personal taxes while he was alive.

If every citizen paid his/her taxes fairly and equitably, government could be transformed into a prospering organ for improving the quality of life for all citizens. If tax breaks for corporations and businesses were eliminated universally, the people would benefit. Corporate lawyers have developed slick machinery to rip off the public treasury over and over again with very little given back to the public and profits given to wealthy shareholders, who have lawyers to help them to avoid paying taxes.

Bringing generosity into the individual life is a matter of scale and common sense. Generosity isn't money or gifts. Generosity is a process of openness, fairness and spontaneous cooperation. Look around you right now. There is someone in your life who can benefit from your time or effort in some small way today. If you do this survey of your own life every day, you will find plenty to do to improve the quality of life in your own sphere of influence. You can change someone's life right now with a phone call or some generous action.

Our society is troubled. The economic times are difficult in part due to the selfishness and carelessness of people in the world of finance who thought of nobody but themselves. Our media has indulged the worst of us by focusing on violence and dysfunction in order to satisfy our curiosity and voyeurism. Negativity and alienation have blossomed. Staring at iPhones in public is the norm.

I try to acknowledge what I can do every day to improve the quality of my own life and the lives which touch mine. My capabilities require a small scale of generosity. I am not wealthy. I have some physical limitations. I accept these limits and move on with what I can do, without getting hung up on what I would ideally like to do or should do from a comparative perspective.

By planning carefully and using my time responsibly and efficiently, I am able to do something proactive and constructive most days. It doesn't leave much time for watching TV or staring at the computer monitor's buffet of distractions. I don't own an iPhone. It would take time away from my reading books, observing real life around me or helping a friend. My scale of generosity is humble indeed, but I take comfort in knowing that there are millions of people trying to do good in a similar way. My guess is that we are keeping the planet moving along in a positive direction just as effectively as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Money

Greed is the social motivator in current human societies. This is simply a reaction to the obvious deterioration of the planet's resources and human overpopulation. Animal, mindless responses, translated into complicated derivatives and securities.

There is little rational basis for hoping that this trend will let up, since the destruction of the planet's health is well under way at the hands of those who hold financial and political power. The only possible hope lies in the heart of each individual who sees the value of human life beyond consumer comforts and the accumulation of things. If this hope is allowed to grow and spread to others, there may be some hope for humankind.

The salvation of the human species does not lie behind a teller's window or on the trading floor of a stock exchange. The salvation of the human species lies within your single individual heart and mind. By adopting a mindful, compassionate and loving daily practice, which turns its focus from getting things to doing good, you may well be turning the tide of greed and destruction.

Money

Currency, money, is a contract. In the US we are seeing what happens when unscrupulous thieves break that contract to satisfy their own aggression and greed. They are reaping the product of unbridled greed and desire. No government should give them quarter. No conscientious person need be troubled by their fate.

If you practice daily deception and theft, your life will be subject to deception and theft. Feeding greed and desire inevitably leads to disappointment and pain.

Economics

The human economy reflects the folly of the human denial of the human condition. In general, human beings live their lives irresponsibly. This is grossly obvious in the state of the planet, which human beings continue to consciously pollute and abuse every day.

The vast ignorance and denial of the inevitable consequences of overpopulation among human beings of all social and educational levels is obvious in the lack of discussion of overpopulation by world leaders, scientists and educators. This too is irresponsible.

The economics of the human species are less science than manipulation of markets and money to perpetuate the power of the few at the expense of the many. The current turmoil in the global human economy is evidence of this reality.

Humans spend their lives trying to balance their conditioned denial and religious illusions with the reality of mortality and their own irresponsible attitudes toward their own species and the rest of the planet. These contradictions will not be balanced. By letting this farcical play fall apart, the human mind awakens. By embracing mortality and taking a determined path to make the world a better place with daily right action and right thought (practice), human Being can be happy Being, liberated from the pain of constant uncertainty and illusion.

Credit

The current news is flooded with stories about failed credit relationships between lenders and borrowers. This is the polite veneer of corporate capitalism in the modern world. All about the paperwork. A distraction from the human misery beneath.

The reality of credit is less dignified. Credit is an invention and tool of those who aggressively gather and horde society's resources for their personal use. It is not a blessing. It is not a civilizing influence. It is a vehicle for the rich to get richer at the expense of those with less. It is a cancer, which eventually increases the spread between the haves and the have-nots.

When government colludes with lenders (banks) by lifting regulation and oversight, as the US Government has done recently, the process of oppression and domination by the haves is accelerated. The historic remedies for this plundering have been catastrophic. Depression, starvation, war.

Yes, I view 'the system' from outside the economists' tight little box. I haven't much liked the few economists I've met actually. Obsession with money makes people narrow and humorless in my opinion.

My practice includes a daily relationship with money, credit and ownership. I am not a monk, supported on the backs of devotees in a pastoral monastery. That is not my concept of practice.

My practice entails being as monetarily independent from lenders as possible in an urban world. I try to avoid paying interest. I do not participate in the corporate machine as much as possible. This takes a great deal of work. It becomes harder and harder to do, since I am a man of meager means.

I think the greatest threat of credit is its invasion of all levels of human interaction. Will we become a species of lenders and borrowers on all levels of interaction? Will we lose the social sense of sharing wealth through generosity and fair taxation, whereby those with more pay more proportionately? Will every good turn be seen as a credit and every human need seen as a debit? Will friendship be replaced by the exchange of debits and credits?

Fools

The purpose of mindfulness in practice is focus. Without the practice of mindfulness, distractions rule the human experience. Distractions bleed concentration away. Goals are not achieved. Evolution is sabotaged.

The purpose of materialism and capitalism is the distraction of the consumer's mind at all times. Fools give themselves over to this distraction without resistance. And fools and their money are soon parted by those distractions. Without a stable income and resources, one cannot pursue personal evolution effectively. Fools become slaves of the corporations which distract them into buying their unnecessary goods and services.

At the top of the financial pyramid of capitalism, wealthy shareholders live off the distraction of those who occupy the wide base of the pyramid. The poor buy the baseball tickets, cars, clothes, vacations, toys, prepared meals which fund the lives at the top of the pyramid. Those in the high financial brackets lavish themselves with luxury to no purpose or benefit other than comfort. The rare wealthy person uses his wealth to seek personal evolution.

Being a fool or being a person of self-evolving practice is an ongoing choice in the capitalist world. This is a key choice point each moment of each day.

Work

I recently heard a weeping defendant of illegal immigration here in the US on a radio talk show. She said, "We all work so hard. Americans wouldn't want us to leave if they saw how hard we worked."

Well, I think this says a lot about the current attitudes toward work and law here in the US. Work for wages is considered moral. Respect for the law is considered dismissible. This is the Reaganite message: Money is good; how you get it is irrelevant. Ronald Reagan's own administration operated this way in international and domestic politics. The end, as long as it supported corporate power expansion, ruled the means.

The Reaganite myth is about to be toppled, like a statue of Lenin or Saddam. As the corporate promise of prosperity for all as an outfall of greed of the few becomes revealed as a big lie, as the world economies crumble from within due to the drunken greed of the rich, the uselessness of sacrificing one's life to the dollar will become quite obvious to the most gullible.

The most valuable work in life is the work of liberation. Liberation comes from detaching oneself from obsession and aversion. This is the Middle Way. Letting go of material obsession, anger obsession, family obsession, sexual obsession. Letting go of aversion to labor, aversion to difference, aversion to responsibility, aversion to risk, aversion to selflessness.

This is the work of mining the heart, the mind, the spirit. This is the work of study, social engagement, curiosity and generosity.

Practice is work. Its basis is daily commitment to doing the work of liberation.

Work

The value of work is the work itself. My practice entails routine and planned work. Usually this work involves simple and routine maintenance of my environment. Weeding the garden, painting the fence, sweeping the stairs. Absorption in simple and regular tasks is meditative and curative. The idle mind, when not engaged in tasks, meditation or learning, is prone to negative influences and worthless obsessions. Too often, work is equated with the earning of money. The work of living well is more fulfilling than working for money.

Vietnam

The overwhelming stupidity of the current American policy in Iraq, including the support of Congress for another year's 'mandate', must be motivated by corruption and greed. I say this as someone who lived through the American involvement in Vietnam and paid attention and protested. Anyone who lived through the American mistakes there cannot possibly deny the growing parallels with this misery in Iraq. And what happened when American troops left Vietnam? Eventually peace happened. The same will occur eventually in Iraq, and that very peace is what the corrupt and greedy fear most. A peaceful, reformed Iraq, whether democratic or theocratic, would not threaten American citizens here in America. That is a big lie to promote American paranoia and submission to an out-of-control Rightist regime, which has reaped billions of dollars from this policy for its patrons. It would threaten big oil, Zionist collusion with big oil, and despots like the Saudis. A reconciled Iraq and Iran, under common Shi'ite Islam, is the great nightmare of corrupt governments in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. This concept scares the hell out of the Right Wing everywhere. Why? Because Shi'ite politics are far to the Left of any of the major players in the region at this time. It really is less about religion than it is about corporate control of all nations under one god. That god is money. And that god only smiles on the wealthiest ten percent of the world's population. My practice is to remain balanced and detached despite my anger over this bare fact. This practice separates me from the violent and the hopeless. I believe Truth and Light, the objects of man's earliest devotions, will eventually create balance and peace for all those who seek them.