What is the right relationship to money?

J Krishnamurti

AW: In this question answer session J. Krishnamurti focuses on right relationship with money. According to him the mind should not be continuously occupied with money or for that matter with anything else. The occupied mind wears itself out.

Regarding money there are two types of conditionings in the field of spirituality. One glorifies poverty terming money to be the source of evil. The other wants to seek abundance in all forms. I think a balance is necessary. 

Poverty per se has very little to recommend it. In absence of resources it is very difficult to focus on a truly religious life. Too much wealth is also a barrier as the mind is focused too much on material resources and has little time for anything else.

If we achieve a balance between the two extremes we may have sufficient resources and ample leisure to focus upon spiritual pursuits.

Transcript:

4th Question: What is the right relationship to money? If you haven’t any you have no relationship! (Laughter) Like the speaker, it is very simple!

But to be serious, (laughs) what is right relationship to money? Why has money become so important? Just let’s enquire into it. We are not the Delphic Oracle, or laying down the law, or telling you what you should think or do, but we are trying together to understand the problems of life, which are very complex, which need deep examination impersonally, objectively, sanely.

So this is one of the problems, money. Why has money become so important? Is it because we have become worldly? ‘Worldly’ I am using in the sense, attached to the things that thought has put together.

That is the first question I am asking. It is a complex question, we will go into it. Is it because money gives us freedom? You can travel if you have lots of money, you become powerful, become Lord this and that. If you have money you have a status, you are respected, you are looked up to. This is happening.

If you have money you can do almost anything – go against all the laws. You see this everyday. Money is not supposed to be transferred from one country to another but if you are wealthy you have a secret account in Switzerland – you know all this – or transfer great wealth to America and so on. And if you have money you can enjoy yourself.

So money has become extraordinarily valuable in all those senses. And without money you can’t do much either. If you want some clothes and so on you must have some money.

But the question is really: why has money in our life, apart from buying necessary things or having something which is pleasant: nice picture, or a nice vase, or some beautiful ornament, apart from all that – or a beautiful garden if you are lucky – apart from that why do we lay such emphasis on money? You answer it please.

I do not know if you realise what religions have become, organised religions: vast wealth, they are really business organizations in the name of god. This vast wealth of the gurus, incredible wealth, which all of us – not all of us, some of us have given to these gentlemen. And so money has become important. And when you go to the temples and so on, there is always money being asked.

Are we so occupied with money? Naturally the poor man who has no money, he is naturally thinking about it. But those of us who have a little money, are we occupied with it? Is our main concern or occupation money?

That awakens another question which is: why are our minds perpetually occupied? – occupied with something or other. If you are occupied with meditation when you are talking about meditation, then you are occupied with it – god – you follow? Everything from the housewife to the highest religious authorities are occupied – why? You understand my question?

This is not an irrelevant question, it is relevant because our occupation with money or with sex, with this or with that, indicates the state of our own minds, our own hearts.

To be occupied with something. Does it mean that this occupation with business, with money, with sex, with god, with the guru, with the politician and so on, so on, keeps our brain full? You understand my question? Is it that we are afraid not to be occupied? Please look at it.

Look at ourselves, which is: am I occupied from morning till night and when I go to sleep the brain is also occupied, with dreams, with all kinds of sensations. So there is never a moment when the brain is not occupied. Is that so? And when the brain is so occupied there is no space – you understand? – and so the brain becomes more and more shallow.

You can see this happening. Is it because we are frightened of not being occupied, therefore having no space, the brain having no rest at all, therefore wearing itself out. Right? The wearing itself out is a part of senility. Right?

So is there a possibility of not being occupied? Merely to look, to observe, not be occupied with observation. Just to look, to observe so that the brain has a rest, not to record because our brain is all the time recording.

I don’t know if you are following all this! If it interests you. Then your brain becomes extraordinarily alive, pliable. If you have ever observed without a single thought, have you? – to observe a tree, to observe the water, a sheet of water, the light on it, to observe a woman or a man without all the consequences of that observation, the sensations, so that your mind is really free from occupation.

How can a brain that is occupied ever observe? You understand my question? How can a mind – a brain rather – that is always occupied with something casual, daydreaming, with the kitchen or with god, they are all the same, all occupations are the same, they are not superior occupations or inferior occupations, we are talking about occupation per se. Such a mind is really the most bourgeois mind in the world, including the Communists.

Is chattering part of this occupation? – talking, talking, talking, endlessly, you follow? Now are we aware of this occupation, and experimenting with ourselves to see if it stops?

Then to find out whether there is fear and pursue that fear – you follow? Go to the very end of it and end it. As we talked about it at previous talks. Then see what happens to this brain which has space, which has quietness, which is not occupied.

If you say, ‘How am I to do it? Tell me the steps, the method how not to be occupied’, then those steps, those methods become your occupation, you are back in the cycle. But if you see the consequences of occupation, and see the fact of it, you move away from it.

So if one is occupied with money, why? Either you are poor, which is natural, then you have to be concerned about it, but even if you are poor to be occupied eternally from morning till night, and the man who is very rich is also terribly occupied, how to keep the money, increase it – you know the whole business.

So the real question is: can the mind be free from all occupation? If I may repeat some incident: we were in the Himalayas once far away from all noise and in a cottage, and a group of monks, sannyasis came rushing into the cottage to tell me something. They knew who I was, the person who was occupying it. So they came to see me and they said, ‘We have just come from a man who is far away in the hills who is full of knowledge. And we have just come and we are filled with that knowledge.’ And we said ‘What is that knowledge?’ And we went into it.

At the end of it we discovered the solitary person living in the Himalayas was really not solitary at all. He has carried all the world’s knowledge up there and so he is never alone, never quiet. He is full of that knowledge and can therefore perhaps can never experience something totally original.

A mind which is occupied can never experience something original. It is only the mind that is free, if I can use the word, empty. We were talking with a scientist some days ago and we were saying that emptiness is very important in life, not vacuum, not being just vague and daydreaming but really a mind that is not occupied has space and is totally empty. And we were saying that such a mind is full of energy. 

And the scientist agreed. He said ‘Where there is emptiness it is not empty, that very emptiness is energy’. I am telling you something. So let us… you think about it, you know, look at it.

 

New Seeds of Contemplation

New Seeds of Contemplation

Thomas Merton

There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who.”* He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am.”

The only One Who can teach me to find God is God, Himself, Alone.

The creative and mysterious inner self must be delivered from the wasteful, hedonistic and destructive ego that seeks only to cover itself with disguises.

I am born in selfishness. I am born self-centered. And this is original sin. Even when I try to please God, I tend to please my own ambition, His enemy.

Even the desire of contemplation can be impure, when we forget that true contemplation means the complete destruction of all selfishness—the most pure poverty and cleanness of heart.

In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself, and in order to live I have to die.

People who know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world.

They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all.

They can only conceive one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and other men. They do not know that reality is to be sought not in division but in unity, for we are “members one of another.” The man who lives in division is not a person but only an “individual.”

I have what you have not. I am what you are not. I have taken what you have failed to take and I have seized what you could never get. Therefore you suffer and I am happy, you are despised and I am praised, you die and I live; you are nothing and I am something, and I am all the more something because you are nothing.

And thus I spend my life admiring the distance between you and me; at times this even helps me to forget the other men who have what I have not and who have taken what I was too slow to take and who have seized what was beyond my reach, who are praised as I cannot be praised and who live on my death….

When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless.

The pleasure that is in his heart when he does difficult things and succeeds in doing them well, tells him secretly: “I am a saint.” At the same time, others seem to recognize him as different from themselves. They admire him, or perhaps avoid him—a sweet homage of sinners!

The sweet warmth of pleasure becomes the criterion of all his works. The relish he savors in acts that make him admirable in his own eyes, drives him to fast, or to pray, or to hide in solitude, or to write many books, or to build churches and hospitals, or to start a thousand organizations.

Once he has started on this path there is no limit to the evil his self-satisfaction may drive him to do in the name of God and of His love, and for His glory. He is so pleased with himself that he can no longer tolerate the advice of another—or the commands of a superior.

When someone opposes his desires he folds his hands humbly and seems to accept it for the time being, but in his heart he is saying: “I am persecuted by worldly men. They are incapable of understanding one who is led by the Spirit of God. With the saints it has always been so.”

Having become a martyr he is ten times as stubborn as before. It is a terrible thing when such a one gets the idea he is a prophet or a messenger of God or a man with a mission to reform the world…. He is capable of destroying religion and making the name of God odious to men.

True solitude is the home of the person, false solitude the refuge of the individualist.

Without a certain element of solitude there can be no compassion because when a man is lost in the wheels of a social machine he is no longer aware of human needs as a matter of personal responsibility.

Go into the desert not to escape other men but in order to find them in God.

Mere living alone does not isolate a man, mere living together does not bring men into communion.

There is no true solitude except interior solitude. And interior solitude is not possible for anyone who does not accept his right place in relation to other men. There is no true peace possible for the man who still imagines that some accident of talent or grace or virtue segregates him from other men and places him above them. Solitude is not separation.

God does not give us graces or talents or virtues for ourselves alone. We are members one of another and everything that is given to one member is given for the whole body.

Saints are like doctors and nurses who are better than the sick in the sense that they are healthy and possess arts of healing them, and yet they make themselves the servants of the sick and devote their own health and their art to them.

A man becomes a saint not by conviction that he is better than sinners but by the realization that he is one of them, and that all together need the mercy of God!

Be content that you are not yet a saint, even though you realize that the only thing worth living for is sanctity. Then you will be satisfied to let God lead you to sanctity by paths that you cannot understand.

Perhaps he cannot feel love because he thinks he is unworthy of love,

One is loved by God although unworthy—or, rather, irrespective of one’s worth!

You will never find interior solitude unless you make some conscious effort to deliver yourself from the desires and the cares and the attachments of an existence in time and in the world. Do everything you can to avoid the noise and the business of men. Keep as far away as you can from the places where they gather to cheat and insult one another, to exploit one another, to laugh at one another, or to mock one another with their false gestures of friendship.

There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they are in such haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves.

Attachment to spiritual things is therefore just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else. The imperfection may be more hidden and more subtle: but from a certain point of view that only makes it all the more harmful because it is not so easy to recognize.

How many there must be who have smothered the first sparks of contemplation by piling wood on the fire before it was well lit. The stimulation of interior prayer so excites them that they launch out into ambitious projects for teaching and converting the whole world, when all that God asks of them is to be quiet and keep themselves at peace, attentive to the secret work He is beginning in their souls.

The mere absence of activity does not ipso facto turn you into a contemplative.

One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is how to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.

A serious obstacle to recollection is the mania for directing those you have not been appointed to direct, reforming those you have not been asked to reform, correcting those over whom you have no jurisdiction. How can you do these things and keep your mind at rest?

Renounce this futile concern with other men’s affairs! Pay as little attention as you can to the faults of other people and none at all to their natural defects and eccentricities.

Renounce not only pleasures and possessions, but even your own self.

New Seeds of Contemplation 

There is No 'I': How the Brain Creates the Narratives of Your Life

 

 

Your brain creates all the narratives in your life, from fear to loneliness to anxiety, etc. But it's possible to train your brain through mindfulness to transcend its innate urge to storify everything. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a respected medical researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, explains what years and years of study have taught us about the taming of the brain.

Transcript

Jon Kabat-Zinn: If you put people in a scanner and tell them to just do nothing; just rest in the scanner; don’t do anything at all, it turns out that there’s a region in the midline of the cerebral cortex that’s known as the default mode network that just lights up, that all of a sudden gets very, very active. I mean you’re told to do nothing and then your brain starts to use up energy a lot. A lot of ATP in this, you know, activation in the medial frontal areas. 

And that’s called the default mode network because when you’re told to do nothing, you default to activity in this mode and when you inquire what’s going on there, a lot of it has to do with my wondering and just daydreaming. And a lot of that has to do with the self-referencing our favorite subject, which is me of course. 

So we generate narratives. I wonder how long I’m going to be in this scanner and I’m feeling a little bit contracted, you know, because it’s claustrophobic. And these magnets are banging like crazy or whatever it is. 

You’re thinking in terms of your you — past, present, and future — and you’re developing narratives, where I’m going to go to lunch when this is over or whatever it is. And those narratives are a form of self-reference. And that’s called — as I said I mean it’s also called the narrative mode network or the narrative network. And it’s the story of me. 

When you train people in MBSR, you find that another area of their cortex lights up more lateral after eight weeks of training in mindfulness. And that that area is associated with a region called the insula and that doesn’t have a linear, time-based narrative. It’s just the experiencing of the present moment in the body — breathing in, breathing out, awake, no narrative, no agenda. 

And the interesting thing — and this is the study — when they put people through eight weeks of MBSR, this narrative network decreases in activity and this experiential network increases in activity and they become uncoupled. So they’re no longer caught together in such a way. 

So this one can actually attenuate and liberate you a little bit from the constant thinking, thinking, thinking — a lot which is driven, of course, by anxiety and, "What’s wrong with me?" The story of me is often a depressing story. And a fear-based story. We’re like driving the car with the brake on, with the emergency brake on. And if we learn how to just kind of release it, everything will unfold with less strain, with less stress and with a greater sense of life unfolding rather than you’re driving through it to get to some great pot of gold at the end, which might just be your grave.

 

Mindful Meditation

 

How-To Guide on Mindfulness Meditation from a Stanford Neurosurgeon

http://bigthink.com/videos/james-doty-on-mindfulness-and-how-to-tame-your-mind

Transcript

James Doty: I get asked this question of, "Geez, I haven’t meditated. How do I get started?" And it’s hard for many people because what many of us don’t appreciate is that — and I use the term in my book, a DJ, but it’s this internal dialogue and it is a dialogue that isn’t necessarily who you really are at all. It is a collection of events, experiences, commentaries from your environment that oftentimes you allow to define you. And not necessarily in a positive way. And as a result, you have an emotional response when you’re listening to these voices or this dialogue or the DJ, if you will. 

And the first thing that I recommend people do, and certainly as one of the bases or the legs of doing mindfulness or meditation, is to simply breathe in and out and be attuned to that. And as you get distracted if it’s really distracting, actually consciously think about the air going through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. And the very nature of that type of concentration distracts you from the dialogue. 

And once you’ve mastered that and you pay attention to the fact that oftentimes your muscles are very tense because again you’re carrying your emotions. And with intention, go through actually and say, "I’m relaxing the muscles in my feet, my legs, my chest, my abdomen," and so forth.

And sort of go through this process with intention doing each one of these things and with that intention it also distractions you from listening to that voice. And once you’ve done that for a period of time, then you suddenly realize the very nature of that action, the consistency of that; you’re no longer having that same emotional response or you’re not starting to listen to that dialogue. And that starts releasing you. 

And then the next step as you learn these techniques, the wonderful thing is you can actually change the dialogue. And change it to one where it is a supportive dialogue. 

One of the greatest challenges of people in the West is they have this negative internal dialogue and it’s the nature, unfortunately, of our society. 

In Eastern cultures — actually it’s interesting — it doesn’t really exist. And so when you, if you will, stop the DJ and then change the dialogue to one that is nurturing, supportive of yourself, the most wonderful thing that happens is your physiology changes and then the manner in which you react or interact with other people becomes completely different. 

And having been through this myself and seen this and taught this, it’s really quite extraordinary — the possibilities. Because when you take the time to do that breathing; when you take the time, if you will, to tame the mind; when you take the time to open your heart and recognize that not only are you suffering, but that everyone in some way or other has their own burdens. 

All of those steps then allow you to be much more thoughtful, kind, and interested because then you recognize that the other person is just like you. And when you recognize that key aspect, then what you do to others, you’re doing to yourself. 

And if you treat yourself with kindness, compassion, love, it’s so much easier then to give that gift to other people. And it changes not only that other person; it changes the entire environment around you.