#david loy

The consequence of this was that 'now the cosmic powers could be the property of everyman, without even the need to visit temples: you could now traffic in immortality in the marketplace.' This eventually led to the emergence of a new kind of person, 'who based the value of his life — and so of his immortality — on a new cosmology centered on coins.' A new meaning system arose, which our present economic system makes increasingly the meaning-system. 'Money becomes the distilled value of all existence ... a single immortality symbol, a ready way of relating the increase of oneself to all the important objects and events of one's world.'

If we replace 'immortality' with 'becoming real,' the point becomes Buddhist: beyond its usefulness as a medium of exchange, money has become modern humanity's most popular way of accumulating Being, of coping with our gnawing intuition that [the ego does] not really exist. Suspecting that the sense of self is a groundless construction, we went to temples and churches to ground ourselves in God; now we ground ourselves financially.

The problem is that the true meaning of this meaning-system is unconscious, which means, as usual, that we end up paying a heavy price for it. The value we place on money karmically rebounds back against us: the more we value it, the more we use it to evaluate ourselves."

Arthur Koestler’s own researches into this phenomenon led him to the following conclusion:

“All the biographical evidence indicates that such a radical reshuffling operation as occurs in “creative originality” requires the intervention of mental processes beneath the surface of conscious reasoning, in the twilight zone of awareness. In the decisive phase of the creative process the rational controls are relaxed and the creative person’s mind seems to regress from disciplined thinking to less specialized, more fluid ways of mentation.”

Koestler implicitly assumes the prevalent (although not unchallenged) “conscious/subconscious” model to explain “creative originality.” But if we take conscious reasoning to be thinking in which thoughts are linked together in a series, and if the “twilight zone of awareness” is a twilight zone (cf: “a dreamlike state”) because there is no sense of a self directing the mental processes, then this passage can stand as a description of nondual “prajñā-intuition,” from which the more familiar vijñāna [conceptual] processes derive. This differs from “the subconscious” in that prajñā-intuition can be experienced more consciously, although not self-consciously.

Unaware that our stories are stories, we usually experience them as the world. Like fish that do not see the water they swim in, we normally do not notice the medium we dwell within. We take for granted that the world we experience is just the way things are. But our concepts and ideas about the world, like the stories they are part of, strongly affect our perception of reality. In … practice, one learns, early on and then continually, the truth of my favorite bumper sticker: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

According to Walter Truett Anderson, anthropology's gift to the world — the realization that human beings create different kinds of cultures, which in turn create different kinds of human beings — is a deeply subversive idea, because if you absorb it you will begin to wonder who created it and why; you reflect on what it does to you, and you think about making some changes. 'And the more people there are working their way through some such inner thought process, the more culturally diverse, complex and unstable a society is likely to be.'"

In Buddhist terms, then, money symbolizes becoming real, but since we never quite become real we only make our sense of lack more real. We end up in infinite deferral, for those chips we have accumulated can never be cashed in. The moment we do so, the illusion that money can resolve lack is dispelled; we are left more empty and lack-ridden than before, being deprived of our fantasy for escaping lack. We unconsciously suspect and fear this; the only answer is to flee faster into the future. This points to the fundamental defect of any economic system that requires continual growth to survive: it is based not on needs but on fear, for it feeds on and feeds our sense of lack. In sum, our preoccupation with manipulating the purest symbol [money], which we suppose to be the means of solving the problem of life, turns out to be a symptom of the problem."