Realizing True Wealth

Realizing True Wealth Before he wrote the book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith the father of capitalism, wrote another, as a framework for it, The Theory of Moral Sentiment

Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.
Henry David Thoreau

Realizing True Wealth by Americ Azevedo, Nov 24, 2014 We are born with true wealth, but constantly forget to realize the wealth we already have. Failing to acknowledge our true wealth we keep grasping for more, like hungry ghosts who are never satisfied while constantly eating! Thus, we go about despoiling the earth, corrupting relationships, and twisting societies into grotesque forms that promote needless suffering for ourselves, others, and the earth-at-large. Realizing true wealth leads to personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal fulfillment. Furthermore, the long term survival of life on earth depends upon true wealth realization. We need deep psychological and spiritual healing of individuals, groups, communities, nations and the earth at large. The bedrock of this healing is a return to this present moment, not in a selfish, narrow way, but in a way that includes the totality of what is here-there as well as past-present-future. It is nothing less then the ancient ideal of enlightenment of all sentient beings.

Health  is the greatest gift, contentment  the greatest wealth,  faithfulness the best relationship. Buddha

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth. Ernest Hemingway In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of. Confucius We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. Louis D. Brandeis

We may have money but little time. We may have time but no money. We may have love but neither time nor money. Coming to a point of balance between these factors is mastery of the art of living which is true wealth. It’s been said, "He who dies with the most toys, wins!" This is both true and not-true. Some say, “money does not matter" -- but quietly and privately we fear poverty. Fear of homelessness, hunger, and a drop in social status drives many to insane focus on money at any cost. If you are poor with a positive state of mind, you may still suffer a sense of emotion degradation just from the social stigma of poverty. Such fears are well founded in societies that fail to attain true wealth, since the members of those societies know they can and do fall into poverty. A world based on fear cannot be wealthy in any real sense. Our possessions can own us. Attach ourselves to our possessions and we immediately lose our sense of true wealth. The very desire for possessions not yet owned breeds greed and lust. We suffer endless rounds of grasping for the goods that will make us “happy and full”. We get “more”, but immediately need to get “more” again. There is no end in sight. “Business as usual” means a life filled with urgency, running to keep up, and without time. “Oh! If only I had more money, I would do the work I love.” Or, “If I had that big new house on the hill, people would respect and love me. My wife would stay with me.” Such conceptions of wealth are very childish. Many of the “richest” people in the world are always “hungry”. Much shopping is for useless trinkets which act as displacements for lack of meaning and love in life. Many a parent, for example, who has no time for talking with their children, will just buy toys. Most people identify with the stuff that they own as an extension of their personal ego. Consider automobiles and houses which function as symbols of wealth, but are also destructive to the natural capital of nature. True wealth goes beyond the concerns of the skin encapsulated ego. True wealth includes the social, political, and transpersonal levels. What about a friend or relative who needs help? What about broader environmental concerns? True wealth goes beyond the individual, and even national, egos. What you spend your money on, changes, impacts society. Buy an SUV because you like personal leg room, but consume the air and warm the environment for everyone else as well as yourself.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Henry David Thoreau

Time, Love, and Money An old man asked me, “With what do you buy your money?” I said, “With your life.” He said,“Right! I wish I had known that when I was young. I spent my life working for money instead of living.” Time, love and money are the three legs of truth wealth’s stool. The time allotted to your life is utterly fundamental; a finite constantly depleting resource. Have you loved enough? Have you made money, invested money, and spent money in a way that sustains life on this earth for seven generations to come? Most don’t think we have time for these questions. We can be occupied working for money that we buy cars, drive to places, buy food from thousands of miles away, thus depleting earth’s natural capital without noticing it. Many people will say that they are making good money, but have no sense of free time. They hope that someday in the future they will have time for the things they really enjoy like family and nature. Often that day never comes. I once worked at the headquarters of Standard Oil. My life had become the company. When I went home, my mind was preoccupied with Standard Oil. One day I awoke to realize that I worked in an environment that was loveless. I had money, but love and time where in short supply. What is money? It’s a symbol for value, it is information; it is abstract. Humans are driven by symbols to go to war and fight for abstract causes. Money, being utterly abstract, is often valued more for itself than for what it actually buys – it is the ultimate “field of dreams”. Individuals and societies measure self-worth by financial net-worth, but this devalues the deeper qualities of awareness and soul that are the true source of all value. Walking by a beautiful garden filled with iris flowers, someone might think: “I don’t own it, how unfortunate!” So they miss the simple of joy of the experience. You don’t need to own things in order to enjoy them. To really “have” something we must be present to it. Taking time to appreciate the existence of an object, a friend, or a place is really having that object before us.

Wealth is transpersonal because it is “beyond the personal”. Everything that we do to accumulate wealth depends on past human efforts; as well as the Earth, the solar system, and the cosmos at large. You are not your own source of supply. Companies create private wealth by extracting resources from nature as if nature is "free" and unlimited. Water, for example, was always free. Industrial pollution turns water into another commodity with price barriers for the poor and helpless. This situation creates transpersonal poverty. There can be a wealth of time. Societies can make time for living, for singing, for family, for just sitting and watching. This wealth is greater than the focus on consuming goods and working to pump up the "gross domestic product". A man can become homeless and starve to death in a big city filled with apartments, hotels, and food. It is not just lack of money that brings us to the homeless state. Depression, lack of faith in life, lack of friends, and lack of family ties can bring one to this place. Call it lack of love. We cannot be truly wealthy in such societies with extremes of poverty and riches. The expansive homes of the few wealthy are beautiful, but the society is really poor and ugly. So many become restless and debased is such a society. I cannot relax in a mansion without security systems and insensitivity to the disparity around me. Just like the Buddhists who say they cannot become enlightened until everyone is enlightened, you and I cannot be truly wealthy until all are “wealthy”. Clearly, a new meaning of wealth needs to emerge for the culture at large.

Balanced Wealth Portfolio An investor will diversify her assets into different categories of assets so as to balance out risk with the changing tides of market fortunes. The seeker of true wealth balances the assets of time, love and money across the dimensions of personal, interpersonal and transpersonal – thus optimizing abundant life for themselves, neighbors, future generations, and Earth. A balanced wealth portfolio can be attained by disciplining the ego and personal pride. This spiritual practice has ramifications for self, society, and life on earth. Portfolios are lists of assets by categories. We could begin by playing with lists of “assets”. One simple list of categories for grouping our assets would look like this: 1. Personal-money 2. Personal-time 3. Personal-love 4. Interpersonal-money 5. Interpersonal-time 6. Interpersonal-love 7. Transpersonal-money 8. Transpersonal-time 9. Transpersonal-love These categories are not absolute; they are starting points to help us on the road to true wealth realization. Make up your own categories and lists. Begin from where you are, and expand to include larger dimensions of wealth.

True Wealth Realization Practice Wealth is usually defined by external measures: affluence, millionaire money levels, ownership and control of companies, and influence over people. Look deeper; and, there is the feeling of being wealthy or poor more or less independent of external wealth measures. Work with that feeling so as to become more independent of the strictly personal illusions of money-wealth and poverty.

Remember who you really are. This means giving yourself the time to contact your own ultimate wealth: the soul. Your own soul is your own ultimate wealth. As you begin to be wealthy in yourself, you will be able to extend your sense of wealth to include others and reality at large. Every soul is the same soul – only covered by different personality, history and circumstances. I could have been any one of the other people that I see everyday. To awaken to this very moment is truth wealth. This moment is in truth all we really have and own. Everything else is just on loan; we must give it all back in the end.

This article, written by Americ Azevedo,

was originally published in What is True Wealth & How Do We Create it?

Edited by Verna Allee & Dinesh Chandra. Indigo Press, New Delhi, India. 2004. Pages 124-130.

One day a father and his rich family took his young son on a trip to the country with the firm purpose of showing him how poor people can be. They spent a day and a night in the farm of a very poor family. When they returned from their trip, the father asked his son, "How was the trip?" "Very good, Dad!" "Did you see how poor some people are?  the father asked. "Yeah!" "And what did you learn?" The son answered: "I saw that we have a dog at home, and they have four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of the garden,  while they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lamps in the garden, and they have the stars.  Our patio reaches to the front yard, they have a whole horizon." When the little boy finished, his father was speechless. His son added, "Thanks, Dad, for showing me how poor we are!"

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money...  they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination. Alan Watts

Money Pink Floyd

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© 2014 MU-Peter Shimon

Natural Values

or For What It's Worth

Natural Values For What It's Worth It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge. Caleb Carr

"The means by which we live have out distanced the ends for which we live.

Our scientific power has out run our spiritual power.

We have guided missiles and misguided men."

Martin Luther King Jr

Will The Rigid Model Of Our Success Be The Cause Of Our Own Extinction? or Will We Find A Metaphysical Solution? Has Our Technology Over Run Our Wisdom? Since that old campfire over one million years ago (see Hominid Innovation), fire has made a good metaphor for our gift of intellect... illuminated or enlightened, we have learned a lot about a lot of things. A great many answers to "What?" Have we always been wise about only focusing on what? Then what about who, when, where, why and how we use our knowledge? A blade or a laser can be used as either a weapon or a healing tool. Easily sequenced DNA can help cure disease or it can lead to GATTACA. Ultimately it seems it is the wisdom of the wielder who decides, not the technology that determines how or why it is used. But apparently we are technologically inclined by nature. The latest research indicates we developed our digital dexterity before bipedalism. The research information for this comes from examining primate brain development. Dexterity not only demands motor skills, but a degree of intellect as well if used for technology. Our survival depends upon it. We value it a great deal. And speaking of value, perhaps if we pay a little more attention to our natural values, they can guide our nature more wisely. The sticking point, is wisdom. And... wisdom isn't the same thing as knowledge. You won't get it from a teacher, or cleric. No doctrine, dogma, media, internet or book can give it to you. It is a self-realization. No authority but yourself can help you with this. Today, many, many millennia since the days when our lineage gained fire, where is the wisdom in those that bear the name sapiens? Once our ancestors gained the knowledge of the use of fire, a technology that gave us a tremendous advantage, we continued to successfully hunt, to herd and we learned to farm. The abundance of farming gave rise to settlement, instead of movement and city-states became a center for exchanging wealth and knowledge. We learned to do things differently, efficiently. Eventually, very efficiently. Even killing each other, and every thing else on this planet. Our abundance of information now makes civilization and everything else possible. But have we used this headlong rush into information wisely? Is new or more, always better? And if you can do something, does that always mean you should do it? Is there no time for consciousness anymore? How often now do we reflect on what is best? Or even reflect on our definition of best? The answer to that will not always be economic.

Value in Use vs Value in Exchange In "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations", Adam Smith notes the differences in the concepts of value in use and value in exchange: "What are the rules which men naturally observe in exchanging them [goods] for money or for one another, I shall now proceed to examine. These rules determine what may be called the relative or exchangeable value of goods. The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called "value in use;" the other, "value in exchange." The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any use-value; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it." That was the paradox he presented. "The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it." Thus Smith disconnects the relationship between price and utility. In his view, price was a matter related to production and not the consumer. The labor theory of value took this as the resolution of the paradox of the diamonds and water. The labor theory of value however has since fallen by the way side in favor of the theory of marginal utility. We'll see if this really is a better measure of value, that is, if there is any virtue in it. Or if it too, will eventually prove to be of marginal utility itself. Perhaps a mix of labor and marginal utility is more in order. Another paradox appears...  There is one thing that increases with use... The use of wisdom does not diminish it. It can only ever add value.

Markets Must Have Moral Values Adam Smith said so himself in his first book, the frame for the second on capitalism. In order to decide what money should and should not be able to buy, we have to decide what values should govern various aspects of social and civic life. A market, "agora", is an assembly of people. Markets have a place but it's not necessarily in hospitals, daycare centers, schools, or families. In a society where everything is for sale, money can be used for political influence, superior medical care, safe neighborhoods, access to elite schools, and even the right to cut in line. Making certain things in life a commodity can corrupt those things themselves. Markets are not value-free. They are not some frigging invisible hand. They are people. On the contrary to the machine model, they don’t just allocate and consume goods, they express, promote and imbue them with certain human values... with every intercourse, with every exchange. Money is a secondary movitator, food is a primary one. Wisdom will tell you, you can't eat money. Perhaps it is the values that bear greater scrutiny. Not societal values, not market values, yours... Own them!

Value is not based upon cost but that costs are paid because of value.

Nothing But Flowers Talking Heads

Enjoy

© 2013 MU-Peter Shimon

Evolutionary Economics

Evolutionary Economics Or Was that Adam Smith's  Invisible Book of a Moral Market? "Anyone who believes in infinite growth on a finite planet is either mad or an economist." Kenneth Boulding

Yes the economy is about money but business is all about people and innovation Wouldn't it be cool to live in a world where innovation like this is the rule and not the exception? Adam Smith's book The Theory of Moral Sentiment. It's what I found sorely lacking in today's practice of economics. I want my company to change that.  Here are a couple of 1st paragraphs  from the 1st two chapters; PART I Of the PROPRIETY of Action Consisting of Three Sections SECTION I Of the SENSE of PROPRIETY CHAP. I i SYMPATHY How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. CHAP. II Of the Pleasure of mutual Sympathy But whatever may be the cause of sympathy, or however it may be excited, nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary. Those who are fond of deducing all our sentiments from certain refinements of self-love, think themselves at no loss to account, according to their own principles, both for this pleasure and this pain. Man, say they, conscious of his own weakness, and of the need which he has for the assistance of others, rejoices whenever he observes that they adopt his own passions, because he is then assured of that assistance; and grieves whenever he observes the contrary, because he is then assured of their opposition, But both the pleasure and the pain are always felt so instantaneously, and often upon such frivolous occasions, that it seems evident that neither of them can be derived from any such self-interested consideration. A man is mortified when, after having endeavoured to divert the company, he looks round and sees that nobody laughs at his jests but himself. On the contrary, the mirth of the company is highly agreeable to him, and he regards this correspondence of their sentiments with his own as the greatest applause. This is the same Adam Smith. Amazing isn't? Doesn't quite fit the image we have of how business is done today. How did the greatest economic minds ever miss reading or understanding about the constraints to selfishness and the empathic nature of mankind? I have not seen much evidence that has been incorporated into past economics. A Shameless Plug This is why I'm starting MU-Peter Shimon Consulting Disruptive Digital Darwinism I will put together what I've learned of human science and consult based on evolutionary economics (I can't stop any Zen that might get in there) I want to disrupt the way we live and do business, to work at and promote the hell out of getting us to a good place. And I want it done with good science. Enjoy.

Jeremy Rifkin - Empathetic Civilization I have posted this clip before,  but it bears repeating (my thanks to GW) The Empathetic Evolutionary Economy Now supposedly, Adam Smith wrote the theoretical book on capitalism and economic philosophy as practiced today. But he also wrote another book seldom mentioned, called the Theory of Moral Sentiment. In it he asserts that it is in one's own self-interest and nature to empathize and care for his fellow man. That's the point, "the common good" that selfish free markets are supposed to have as a goal. Has no one read that one, I wonder? How did the economists miss it? Free markets must play within moral guidelines, even selfishness has enlightened self-limits. Maybe in the short term they may gain, but in the long run it's a losing game. Now here's where Darwin comes in. It's not only survival of the fittest. It's more like the race is won by the swiftest, first out of the gate, or sometimes its just luck of the draw, but it's almost always with something new. It can be a sprint at some points but mostly it's a long distance run. In nature it is also not always a race that one wins by knee-capping his competitor. Competition can be the engine of innovation under certain conditions. Most often in nature species don't evolve and become the dominant type by willfully or strategically wiping out all competition. it may happen, but not always the rule. Bio-diversity is a stabilizing force for all species in an eco-system.  Species can and do co-exist in spite of apparent competition and maintain an equilibrium. However this lack of ruthlessness can apply even in predation. It too has limits. Successful predators don't eat all their prey. A predator who whether by strategy or "selfish" instinct, eats all his prey only ends up left to eat himself to extinction. BTW, anyone ever seen the movie Soylent Green? I think it is no small coincidence that in the new digital world, many of the old business models and companies that don't adapt to the new social and information realities are called dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are the ultimate poster-child for extinction and like the dinosaurs we can see many have already gone and many are faltering. There is mass extinction awaiting those businesses that don't adapt quickly enough, including the long time dominant giants. Kodak is only one of many. There are things about what's going on in the world in which I can see parallels with what we see in the natural history of the planet. According to the theory of punctuated-equilibrium by Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould, events change the ecological landscape and mass extinction of the current players ensues for those not adapted to the new conditions. In their place spring up small upstarts, that were in what previously was a stable ecology, but relatively un-open to the small and or new. An unstable ecology of rapid change occurs, (maybe weather or asteroid) and opens up previously unavailable terrain, greater opportunities for new adaptive radiation come with that. There is competitive release and the survivors quickly gain ground, grow and in time become dominant, depending on how well they do in the new conditions. Bio-diversity will recover, but not the same critters as before. There is an explosion of new species with innovative adaptations to fill the niches. Succession forest are somewhat similar, they need sustained changes to gradually build up an environment that supports big trees. You don't immediately get forests on razed land without a succession of grasses, shrubs, small trees, a variety of r strategist and K . After going through different stages with different types of trees and other plants will there be the ecology that supports big trees. But really, aren't we familiar with this pattern in economics as well? Business markets, the way people make a living, have gone through boom and bust cycles throughout the history of human economic activity, disruptive ones usually due to technological or other innovations. In science, people in an environment fostering disruptive ideas often lead to those innovations.

© 2012 MU Peter Shimon