Just to go back to asunthatneversets' earlier contributions which I'd forgotten about when I posted yesterday - Myself and the last post-er seem to find them all relatively interesting {I see the thread has otherwise continued in the OP's apparently lighthearted spirit
, and don't wan2b a party-pooper; I just tend to 'hone in' on certain sorts of questions as a thinker, and prefer my banter IRL&IRT despite my condition.} Anyway, it's been (to me) convincingly shown that a lot of inaccurate and overwrought thinking about the world rides on the back of unacknowledged envy and resentment (which I hope I'll be forgiven for pointing out directly on a Buddhist forum, and which should be expected in a thread on wealth in any case), so although I find the main thrust of that argument convincing, I have some points to add:
asunthatneversets wrote:First come to know your own mind, and then you'll know the mind of the billionaire and the mind of the person without a dime to their name. When you understand yourself you understand everyone else, emotions, reactivity, nuances, projections, behaviors are universal and the same for everyone. The functioning of the mind is like a science, when you thoroughly understand the structure of the science then you see it playing out in everyone you meet. Ignorance of oneself means ignorance of all, knowledge of oneself means knowledge of all. The billionaire's mind is no different than yours. And in truth the billionaire is no more wealthy than the person without a dime to their name.
Good, but it's more a question of loosening your own boundaries to sense the expansiveness of a billionaire's mind, rather than 'shrinking' and strait-jacketing your imagined billionaire's mind to fit your own boundaries, since a billionaire's mind is likely (though not certain) to function within a broader ambit than yours. I'm speaking in relative terms here, as I sense that the ultimate capacity of mind
as a phenomenon is unlimited and that all minds are more-or-less equivalent when viewed from this perspective, whatever the extent and manner to which circumstances, personality, and [moral] character fill it out and tie it down with specific content (i.e. the 'crystallised' contexts and mediums through which the desires and fears of samsara are actualised).
I hope you're right to imply that successful meditation should bring us to a point where we instantaneously feel through, unfazed, any and all of the wonders and terrors of the multiverse past, present, and future, based on a working-out (like running a computer model I guess-?!) of their potential as it exists already in our own minds. Attached by innate habit to a set of specific contents, the mind of an ordinary sentient being like myself (however weird I may seem) has to take much of this on trust, much like anyone else who begins an endeavour in which others have been successful.
Moving on,
asunthatneversets wrote:What are you supposed to be earning?
Enough to maintain yourself and provide for whatever family you have that can't do the same. The situation in several European countries, in which people have children they can't afford to raise properly is a clear violation of the 2'nd lay precept, since the tax that provides the benefits westerners make use of is never something that is freely 'given' - only taken by force of Law.
asunthatneversets wrote:I wasn't advocating moving onto something else
Subsistence and Barter economies are becoming more necessary all over the world, given the economic situation. This is something no1 should 'advocate' for, as it always seems to go hand-in-hand with the catastrophic collapse of the societies affected.
asunthatneversets wrote:just saying that money is merely a symbol which lacks innate value, so a billionaire is really no different than anyone else. Putting a billionaire on a pedestal is ignorant. It surely happens this day in age, but only due to the subconscious compulsion to equate money with true wealth and value.
The ability to earn money seems to be a very rough measure of the degree of positive karma one has inherited, and thereby (atleast in the kind of meritocracy our civilisation seems to have come closest to around the 1990s) a similar measure of the RELATIVE wealth and value of that configuration (along with the self-mechanism that results). I can't see a valid counter-argument here, apart from caveats such as that the creation of certain fresh negative karmas (e.g. earning jail time or neurotically under-estimating oneself) lowers one's earning power, or that the pattern of [effects of] karma inherited at birth cannot fully account for the effects of less-meritocratic economies.
asunthatneversets wrote:Money rules everything, many of us have been reduced to hamsters running on a wheel, chasing paychecks to get by.
It's ignorant -in the Buddhist sense of self-deception- to equate the type of managerial work that earns the big bucks these days with a repetitive physical action - One of them pushes the brain (and thereby the whole body) to fire on all cylinders, 'all systems go'; the other amounts to the same for a young human/animal as sitting all day in an armchair does for a middle-aged one - There's a reason why most stockbrokers 'burn out' in their 30s! I may be missing some of the metaphor, but I can't see how an activity with as much potential as the exercise of power can be seen as meaningless. Given the truth of impermanence, the surest way for a being to destroy itself and invert all the positive karma it has inherited is to do
less with its mind-body complex, meditation being a kind of 'exception that proves the rule'.
asunthatneversets wrote:Within that structure, monetary abundance is associated with freedom from that rat race. So we exalt those (the rich) who have escaped the bondage of slavery enduced by money, and most aspire for that pseudo-freedom themselves. In truth, however, the wealthy haven't escaped from suffering, they've only done so symbolically by winning some degree of financial freedom and are therefore liberated from the false structure of financial burden.
As I've said, wealth brings the freedom to treat money and its acquisition as the unusually fulfilling game it really is; the rich tend not to 'sit on their laurels' in this age or in most others.
asunthatneversets wrote:Money has no value apart from that which is assigned to it. Money has value because we all collectively agree that it does, the whole structure exists solely within the mind.
Truism; I guess money derives much of its power and function from the fact that most people don't see it as such, seeing it instead as ultimately real - hence its pre-depression-era association with precious metals.
asunthatneversets wrote:So winning monetary abundance means that one has conquered the system enforced by the collective mind of man. It isn't true freedom, you see many of the world's "rich" people still suffering, depression, loss etc. True freedom is won by seeing through the game, disavowing it and not allowing oneself to be governed by it. And the truest liberation is the freedom won through true knowledge
I think fulfillment, not happiness, is the point here; dukkha literally means 'bad axle-hole' (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukkha" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) and thereby seems to cover the absence of both. The condition of a self-made billionaire with depression is vastly better AT ALL LEVELS than that of a depressed layabout; this may be unpalatable to some, but I'd struggle to see it otherwise unless I'd heard an argument I really hadn't thought of. Buddhism does, on first appearances, seem weaker on fulfillment (the shade of happiness most touted in western civilisation) than on other matters, until one reflects on the scenario that we've all been civilised, fulfilled, and -yes- happy 'alpha dogs' in previous lives without our mind-streams seeing any permanent benefit.