Personal Gain and the Gift of Existence
In the concluding chapter of his book, Dr. Needleman converses with a businessman whose views and vision made a deep impact on his understanding of our relationship with money.
What I have tried to do in this book is to call for the inclusion of the money problem in the search for a consciously regenerate life. This means to include in our search all that we usually judge as evil, selfish, violent, and harsh. The other world, the “higher” world, is, as Rilke tells us, this world consciously experienced.
The following is the gist of another conversation I had with the businessman I spoke of in the Introduction.
“Tell me,” I asked him. “You yourself have been in business all your life. What’s your secret? I don’t mean the secret of making a lot of money, but how have you managed to make being in business something that’s really what you call ‘interesting’? What does it mean to you, when you say that making money is interesting? I’m sure you mean more than piling up material things or having people envy you.”
“Outer life,” he replied, “can support the inner work when the demands of life are taken as a challenge to one’s attention, as a reminder that one needs to cultivate the question of who I am and what in this moment is devouring my attention, taking more of me than I need to give it. In this world we live in, nothing brings that challenge more often and more dependably than the adventure of money.”
A long silence followed.
I then spoke to him about my plans for writing this book. He listened to me in a way that made me feel I was being weighed in a balance scale.
“The problem of writing about living,” he said, “or even speaking about living, is that it makes it sound too easy.”
Slowly and semiautomatically, I nodded yes.
“Of course,” he said, “as you know, the subject of your book interests me very much. Because the money question is the only thing that wakes people up these days. You remember the conference you invited me to in Wisconsin some years ago—what was it called?”
“‘Money, Power, and the Human Spirit,’” I said.
“Yes; money, power, and the human spirit. By coincidence, one of the people who was at that conference wrote to me last month. You probably wouldn’t remember him—he wasn’t one of the speakers. He was in the circle of spectators and he didn’t participate much. It seems that something I said touched him and stayed with him all these years.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Well, do you remember when that young woman who had worked in Central America mentioned the fairy tale about the fisherman’s wife?”1
“I remember it very well,” I said. “She was using it as a symbol of American capitalism and you finally lost patience with her characterization of all wealthy people as greedy and selfish.”
“Apparently, what touched this man was my interpretation of the fairy tale.”
“Not only him,” I said. “It struck me, too. You interpreted it as a story about the need to know what one wishes from life. You said, if I remember correctly, that greed is inevitable in the absence of an inner aim. You said that greed in one form or another tends to usurp the place of the inner wish to understand, and that almost every vice in human life represents a lower function trying to imitate the work of an undeveloped higher capacity within man.”
“You have a good memory,” he said.
“Not good enough,” I replied. “I remember ideas, but in the midst of a life situation, especially when money is involved, ideas don’t help, they’re not there, I forget.”
“Because,” he said, “the inner wish is not an idea. It’s a force.”
I took that in.
“Is that what you meant when you said that speaking or writing about these things makes them sound too easy?”
Another silence.
“I agree,” he said, “with your main thesis—that in modern society money enters into every aspect of human life. That means that it enters into every aspect of ourselves, yes? Every impulse, every perception within ourselves is related to the money factor—or, to be more exact, the principle of personal gain. That follows from your thesis, doesn’t it? Personal gain, or the ego principle, is expressed through money in this society—I think that is what you’re writing about, isn’t it?”
He went on:
“When you say that in other cultures money was not as pervasive as in this society, you’re surely not saying that in those societies men and women were less dominated by egoism, are you? You are saying, as I see it, that it’s through money that the ego manifests itself most centrally in our culture. And that the ego is more, far more, than just vanity in its obvious forms. It’s the belief in one’s power to do, to be safe, happy, and fulfilled by one’s own efforts—without the help of a higher influence, yes?”
Again, I nodded. “But the question,” I replied, “is, how to remember in the midst of a money situation that there are higher purposes and forces within ourselves.”
“No, you go too fast. If you put it that way, you are lost. To put it that way only brings the whole spiritual quest into the realm of the ego. Of course, you can speak like that, you can even write books like that. But the fact is one forgets. There is no method that works. Money is just too powerful, life is just too powerful. I will be very interested to read any book you write about this, if you ever actually write it, but I am sure that after people put down your book, they will still be devoured by money situations. It will be good if you can help people come to a new attitude toward money; it is indispensable as a first step. But the question you are now bringing goes beyond change of attitude.”
“The fact is,” he said, “it is only through forgetting that you can remember. Or, rather, that you are remembered, if you see what I mean.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“The point is,” he continued, “that money is modern man’s instrument of the personality, the instrument of his emotions, his adaptive thought, his action. Falling man is continually reinventing himself and modern man reinvents himself through the technology of money. Evolving man is discovered by himself; falling man invents himself. It’s like that, isn’t it?’
“Please explain.”
“What more can I say? Remembering the true self is not an act of the mind or the emotions or the physical body. The evolving self does not care for money or sex or time. But the ego invents itself out of money, sex, and linear time. If you can find conditions and companions among whom you can study how the ego continually invents itself, imagines itself, you’ll understand what I mean. You’ve studied ancient traditions, but no book can give you the direct experience of how the ego invents itself, how it uses material things and ideas and energies continually to imagine itself.”
He paused for a moment, and then continued:
“There is in man a wish that does not come from the ego. There is a wish that is not invented by the ego. It is an energy, a movement that exists outside of linear time. Only when you are ready to experience the complete breakdown of the ego without the slightest impulse to reestablish it again, only then will you experience the wish of the evolving self. It is a certain kind of suffering that is mixed with joy of quite a special taste. Money and linear time and sex all enter into everything that is of the ego and so one needs to have a very specific study of money, sex, and time.
“I say study, because truly to study oneself introduces into life an element completely alien to the ego, yet which the ego can accept. The ego has to become gradually convinced that what it wants—safety, happiness, existence—cannot be obtained through mechanical thinking, personal emotion, or instinctive action. The mind has to become convinced that the only source of its well-being is consciousness. The work of studying oneself introduces a motivation that is free of personal gain, egoistic gain. Study, without the impulse to change anything, motiveless study, choiceless awareness is like the breath of the true wish, the true aim of evolving man. Do you follow?”
Without waiting for my response, he went on:
“The fisherman’s wife is the desire of the ego, life in the absence of the wish for being. You know how the fairy tale ends?”
“The man and the wife are put back in their lowly shack.”
“And they live happily ever after?”
“I don’t believe the fairy tale says that.”
“Well,” he said, “it should. All fairy tales end with ‘happily ever after’—which is fairy-tale language for the state of inner freedom, freedom from the illusions of ego.
“In any case,” he went on, “and fairy tales aside, one needs to discover a wish that is stronger than the ego, and to which the ego can assent. And when you are willing to see how you compromise everything of real value because of the force of money, then it is possible to be remembered by the higher forces within. The point is that, since money has entered so deeply into the formation of the contemporary ego, then it is necessary for us to play the money game with our best abilities, but with a new intention.”
“How would you describe that intention?” I asked.
He paused before replying. I suddenly felt as though I were in a cathedral.
“There is an action, an allowing, a surrender within, that has always been the birthright of every man or woman. The ego experiences it as a kind of stoppage. It is a special quality of silence. In that moment, you know why you are on earth and you know that as you are you cannot serve. You know you must change your life and that this can only happen by searching for companions and conditions that will support the appearance of this moment of opening. On the basis of that moment, a new intention enters into one’s life, a new morality. It is the morality of the search. Whatever supports that search is good; whatever hinders it is evil. One begins to understand that it is only through that opening that one can love as one wishes to love and as we have heard of love in the teachings of the masters. Then, truly, the world and life in this world, with all its pleasures and pains, with all its obligations and difficulties—just this world that you and I live in now—this world becomes my monastery.”
1 From Grimm’s Fairy Tales, “The Fisherman and his Wife” recounts the story of a fisherman who catches, and then throws back, a fish who can grant wishes. The poor fisherman himself does not think to take advantage of this, but he and his wife live in a hovel and his wife asks first for a cottage to live in, then for a castle, then to be emperor, then to be pope, and finally to have power over the sun and the moon. Each time, as the man goes to make a new request, the sea is more and more threatening and the fish is increasingly annoyed. Rather than granting the last, ridiculous request the fish returns the man and his wife to their hovel, where they live to this day.
