Money and the Human Being
Posted on Wed, Jan 28, 2009
Introduction to College Week 2009 at Emerson College by Chen Atid.
People in our time tend to separate their thinking, feeling and doing. For example, you feel you want to lie down on a beach somewhere in the sun all day but you think it is not a serious thing to do, that you should actually work and do serious things in your life. Practically you probably do neither of these things. In our daily lives, we sometimes do what we think we should not, such as eat or drink things that we think are unhealthy for us.
Therefore, we can say we are half-conscious of this separation. There is one field of life where this separation turns into an almost pathological disconnection and that is the field of money. There we are largely unconscious of what we are doing. When we go into a shop, how do we decide what to buy? Usually we think only about ourselves and the benefits we get from buying this or that product. But if we look at a piece of chocolate for instance, do we think of the farmers who grow it, the truck drivers who deliver it, the sailors on the ship who transport it, the factory workers who manufactured it, the people who work in the shop and put it on the shelf?
Hundreds of people with their own families and children have worked to make it possible for us to buy this product. Do we ever think or feel anything about those people? Today in economic life, we have to realize that there is no such thing as “my money”. We have to think of money in the same way that we think about the atmosphere that surrounds us. If you pollute the atmosphere in one place, you are not polluting only your own surroundings but you are influencing the whole world.
What I do with money is always a giving and receiving process. If I take more, someone else receives less. If I want to buy the cheapest product, it actually means that I want to give as little as possible and receive as much as possible. Somebody gets less.
As human beings, we always live in what we might call the “Big Cross”.
I am always moving between my ideas (spiritual world) and the manifestation of them (matter, material world) and between the world and myself. The biggest error we have made is the misconception that money equals freedom. As modern people, it is justified to strive for freedom and as young people, one way we do that is via physical possessions, acquired with money. However, true human freedom has nothing to do with money. Human freedom is connected to the spiritual realm. By equating money with freedom, we expose ourselves to the two most powerful forces, which work contrary to freedom in human beings; Egoism and Fear.
It is justified for a time, as a young person, to want as much money as I can get, and through money and materialistic self -determination, to establish myself as an independent human being. Nevertheless, there comes a time when this has to stop and one needs to start giving to others. If we want to have as much money as possible and believe thereby we will find freedom, we will slowly discover we are disconnecting ourselves from true and meaningful relationships to other people and the spiritual world. If, on the other hand, we fill our soul with fear and anxiety of not having enough money, we slowly find ourselves not trusting anyone or anything and again losing our potential to connect to the spiritual world.
If we deeply understand that true freedom can be gained, only through spiritual knowledge and spiritual experience (see Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom) then money would find its true place, which is to enable love to find expression, not self-love, but love for the other.
We alone determine what has value for us. It could be a car, a big house, or perhaps friendships, caring for other people, or appreciation of nature.
We should change the term “downturn”, to just turn; we are at a turning point in human evolution. In 1919, Europe was in a great downturn after World War I, but one person, Rudolf Steiner, was able to turn in freedom, and started the first Waldorf -school, gave the impulse for biodynamic agriculture, a new way of working with medicine and so much more.
In a crisis we can act according to one of the three F`s (Freeze, Fight or Flight ) as animals do ,or we can act as human beings by finding a fourth ‘F’ , freedom , freedom to look for a new meaning for ourselves and the world.
By Chen Atid