Money, Perception, and Natural Wealth
by Michael Chender
This article is based on presentations given to a group of leading businesspeople largely unacquainted with meditation, in Houston, Texas, in 1985.
Discovering Natural Wealth
One of our most common money problems is the sense of never having quite enough. I’m not talking about the very real issues of survival and feeding and clothing and educating our children, but the sense of continual lack that many of us have well after all the necessities are met. One way to better understand this problem is to look at how we confuse money and wealth. Jumping into questions of how to make more money, or even how to manage money better doesn’t go to the heart of the issue. I’d therefore like to start with a methodical look at the issue of wealth.
What is Wealth?
Dictionaries offer two distinctly different definitions of wealth. One relates to “a sense of well-being,” the other to “the accumulation of a quantity of money or other valuable things.” This is revealing in itself: we use the same word to mean both well-being and accumulation.
Accumulation as represented by money is something we all understand. I would like to suggest in accumulating, that there are three levels of well-being that we strive for. The first, most basic level, is simple survival. We need enough food and medicine to keep our bodies going, enough shelter to protect us from becoming ill from exposure the elements, and so on. The second level is the particular style of survival that we are accustomed to. Some people will say, “If we couldn’t live in this neighborhood, we couldn’t deal with life here.” It’s a manner of speaking, but it betrays our psychological dependence on the things that habitually make us comfortable. The third level, which is probably what we most commonly think of as well-being, is that we want not only to survive, and to survive in a particular style, but that we also want life to be satisfying, meaningful, and at least occasionally thrilling.
Chasing our Tails
Let’s look at what happens when we strive to achieve this third level of well-being. We are about to take that step that is going to finally make our life truly enjoyable, make it what we want it to be. Often we think of that step in terms of getting something—a promotion or a new car or a new relationship or a new hobby. However, a quite common experience is that when we get what we want, it is no longer quite enough. There’s a universal phenomenon, which we could call “shifting horizons,” where we finally achieve what we were hoping for and then, somehow, the world looks different form that vantage point than we thought it would. That particular thing that we were wanting so much becomes a small part of our landscape, and then we see broader possibilities in front of us.
If you remember back to when you were a child, this process becomes painfully evident. For instance, you may remember when you were hoping so much to have a bicycle, and that would be it. If you only could get that bike, you swore you’d never want anything else. You prayed to whomever you prayed to, “Please give me a bicycle, I promise to be good.” And then the bicycle comes and it’s great for half an hour, two days, maybe two weeks, and then of course something else comes up. If you take a moralistic point of view, you might conclude, “People are full of greed and ambition and are never satisfied.” Or from a more cynical point of view you could say, “That’s the point of life; whoever dies with the most toys wins. What else is there to do?”
Without taking either of those positions, let’s just look at this situation simply, and not call the acquisitive instinct either good or bad. It’s an observable phenomenon in most human cultures, at almost all stages of development. When you acquire what you want, you realize that thing is not at the end of the universe; the universe expands for you. If you don’t get it, nothing moves. This is a bit more dangerous because then you can always justify your discontent: “I’m unhappy because I never was able to get that.”
Let’s suppose we continue to get what we want in great measure. As each horizon opens up, we are able to move forward. We begin to feel that we are singled out by fortune and very intelligent, which is a big mistake in most cases. We feel that our project is going well, that we could actually secure our happiness. We could ultimately make our life extremely smooth and block out significant irritation. As time goes on, our sense of entitlement hardens. If we have the resources we can almost completely create our own world; we never have to deal with the groceries and the dirty dishes, with running out of gas, with standing on lines, or with annoying service people. As long as we have people we trust, we don’t have to deal with very much—except them, of course. We can create an island for ourselves.
In blocking out irritation, we are also deadening ourselves, and we find we need more and more powerful stimuli simply to feel the well-being of being alive. Of course ultimately we can’t totally block out irritation because our bodies are subject to aches and pains. We will get old and die no matter how much of a fortress and entourage we build around ourselves. We are also subject to a world that is unpredictable, with unpredictable market, wars, and natural disasters. In fact, as we build up more and more, it becomes harder to ward off insecurity. Ironically, our accumulation of wealth has only intensified a deep internal sense of poverty. We have to look over our shoulder constantly to protect what we have accumulated. We’re in a vicious cycle, in which the more we have, the more we have to protect. We’ve only got ten fingers and ten toes, so we can never successfully plug all the leaks and cracks in our dam holding back the sea of change. The anxiety that comes with trying to keep it all together ultimately ruins any sense of real pleasure.
The Underlying Instinct
Nevertheless, according to the Shambhala tradition, the instinct that drives accumulation contains wisdom at its root. It arises out of our basic sense that life is more than what we think it is. This understanding provides the only hope of being fully human and not simply vegetating or endlessly spinning within a small, constricted version of ourselves. The energy behind accumulation is not only not a problem, but it is basically good, from the point of view of people’s spirituality or self-development. It is the impulse to expand and grow, to move into the world, to enjoy the world, to engage in it and to make oneself magnificent and splendid. What is problematic is that this desire, mixed with our own unexamined ideas about who we are and how things work, tends to lead to a certain pettiness of mind, which then gives birth to all the ills that we well know. We have confused accumulation with wealth, which is in itself an expression of a poverty of outlook and understanding.
So how do we prevent that impulse from falling into the kind of self-preservation and aggrandizement that is not only unnecessary, but ultimately fruitless? As part of the project to make our lives comfortable and ward off threats and irritation, we can end up using this energy to build a walled fortress around ourselves. Our ability to understand how this happens and how we can prevent it from happening is what essentially determines whether we can enjoy ourselves immensely and experience tremendous richness—with money or without money—or whether we are going to be trapped in a prison of our own making, bounded by anxiety and paranoia, regardless of how financially successful we are.
It is a tautology to say that whatever we are striving for already exists within us. If it didn’t there would be no way of looking for it. It would be impossible to know what we wanted if we hadn’t experienced it. Often we think back to some experience we had that was wonderful and try to figure out how we are going to recapture or recreate it. For instance, perhaps when you were a child you visited an uncle’s farm in the summer. It was late afternoon, the ground was dappled with shadows, and it was very quiet. You sat outside on a bale of hay and for a moment everything was perfect. You thought, “This is how life should be forever.”
All of us have probably had moments like this—moments when we felt fundamentally wholesome, alive, and good, moments of total well-being. Usually those moments happen quite unexpectedly. All of a sudden, for no reason, the world is right, you are right, and anything is possible. These are the moments that tend to inspire us in almost anything we do. There’s a sense of well-being we can look back to and touch into. However, as hard as we try, it seems we can’t recreate those moments when we try.
Natural Wealth
But actually, you can get back to that quality of experience. According to the Shambhala tradition, that uplifted state of mind is not as unusual as we might think. In fact, that is the ordinary state of mind. Experiencing the world as vivid and clear and bright, and experiencing oneself as being without struggle and enjoying one’s life is the ordinary human state of mind. It’s all the usual craziness that we go through that is extra-ordinary. We’ve had to work hard, albeit not consciously, to get ourselves as confused as most of us are. It’s taken a lot of ingenuity to twist our minds around to be so confused.
This state of fundamental well-being is the experience that we are ultimately trying to recreate with money and other types of wealth accumulation. We can call it “natural wealth” because it is the deepest source of our own reference points of wealth. However it cannot be mechanically recreated or manufactured because it only happens when our mind is relaxed. So rather that trying to achieve it by working hard and trying to heroically manufacture something, as we’ve all been trained to do, it is a matter of learning how to relax and to accept the fact the quality of wealth we seek is already with us.
This is not a religious idea, particularly. It’s not like saying, “Count your blessings; at least you have your arms and legs,” as my Jewish grandmother might. Rather it’s based on realizing that we could never find any entertainment more satisfying than sitting still and looking out the window—when our mind is actually relaxed and our perceptions open to the fullest. Seeing the vivid colors that are always around us, hearing the sounds of the world, tasting, touching…. this is a display of natural wealth. It’s said that people only use 10 percent of their brains. We probably don’t use our senses to even one percent of their potential because our minds are racing around so much. We spend so much effort trying to figure out how to place ourselves that there’s no time to enjoy the extraordinary display of this world we live in.
Natural wealth is not just in us; it is in the world. It is in mountains, lakes, beautiful music, gold, rain. Certain sights and sounds attract us; they capture us and stop our mind. They have the power to cut through our usual preoccupations and actually touch us. But what they touch is our own perception. In other words, they resonate with something in our own systems. We don’t necessarily need to buy more paintings or spend more time in resorts so we can get away from this grimy world and experience real beauty. Rather, our perceptions constantly remind us that we have that wealth in ourselves, and we can wake it up.
How do we evoke and strengthen that feeling of personal magic that we’re calling natural wealth? How do we bring that out in our lives, so that magic exists in peeling potatoes, in brushing our teeth, in our work at the office? In the Shambhala tradition, basic sitting meditation and meditation-in-action are how we wake up natural wealth. When that waking-up begins to happen, everything becomes a source of richness because we see it that way. And then, money becomes a real dance partner and a real tool. Rather than being the master, it becomes the servant. At that point we can experience richness with money, and we can experience it without money. We can use money as a vehicle of tremendous benefit without any danger of being enslaved by it.
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Michael Chender is chair of Metals Economics Group, a leading strategic consultancy in the worldwide mining business, and president of Coemergence, a competitive intelligence software firm. Michael entered the business world thirty-five years ago, shortly after starting an intensive Buddhist practice, and has been involved in a number of initiatives exploring how the wisdom and compassion pointed to in the Buddhist and Shambhala meditation traditions can be developed in the life of the larger society. He is founding chair of the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership.
