Todays Dhamma: Money, Guilt, and the Machine. (Excerpt from a lecture with the same title) So this goes very deep into us. It goes deep, deep, deep into a problem we have about guilt. I wonder often if theres any relationship between guilt and gold - that the love of money is the root of evil. Its a very true saying. Because you see I was saying yesterday that the difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. And there are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that, that kind of work because of mechanization. But if you do a job, if you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd. Because if money becomes the goal, and it does when you work that way, you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness - or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a whole handful of crisp dollar bills and practically water your mouth over them. But this is a kind of person who is confused, like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell. It goes back you see to the ancient guilt that if you dont work you have no right to eat; that if there are others in the world who dont have enough to eat, you shouldnt enjoy your dinner even though you have no possible means of conveying the food to them. And while it is true that we are all one human family and that every individual involves every other individual... while it is true therefore we should do something about changing the situation. (~ Alan Watts) Lecture here: youtu.be/ssDY74nLuLg
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 16:12:35 +0000
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