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Spirituality and Making a Living
August 3, 1999
Questions:
1. Where do you draw the line between spirituality and your need to earn
a living?
2. Does capitalism alter our beliefs? Should it?
1. As I see it, there is no need to "draw a line" per se. Spirituality
can, and is being practised in daily living. Having to earn a living
is no excuse for behaving (thus, being) "unspiritual".
Ideally, we should find a way to contribute to society in whatever way
we can while we earn a living. Scientists, Doctors, Engineers and
other professionals by and large, earn a comfortable living while
playing their respective roles responsibly as do most blue collar
workers and business-people in general.
As long as greed, unfairness and victimization are kept in check, we
can go about our business practising spirituality in daily living.
We can be kind to the people who work with and for us.
We can NOT add to other people's burdens/grieves if we can't help
to lighten them.
We can offer good and honest service in return for other people's
hard earned money.
We can charge reasonable amounts for our goods and services.
We can NOT contribute to the destruction of our environment and of
lives while we earn a living.
We can NOT enslave others in order to feed our own agendas.
2. No, capitalism need not alter our spiritual beliefs.
When exercised correctly, capitalism can aid in the "practising of
spirituality in daily living."
Money is a necessary "energy" or "qi" that can be put to good use.
Just because some people abuse this "energy", doesn't mean that we,
who know better, can't direct this "energy" well.
I recently read about a group of net savvy nuns who design web pages
to earn money for their keep. This should put to rest a lot of
nun-sense that the spiritual life is incongruous with earning a living.
Even spiritual people have bills to pay.
I have this to say ... if you are the inventor, creator or manufacturer
of a widely useful product; if you are offering a very useful service,
you should charge as low as possible so that the useful product or
service will be made available to more people instead of to just the
upper middle class. You may make less profit per sale but the increased
volume of business overall will still keep you in business for a long
time to come.
And lastly, here's something from Martin Luther King, Jr. for you to
think about:
"If you are called to be a street sweeper, you should sweep streets
even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare
wrote poetry.
You should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth
will pause to say: "Here lived a great street sweeper who did the job well.""
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