munny.

My dog loves to go outside, but because I’m afraid that he will run away I always put him in a little harness with a leash before we go outside. At this point he associates the leash with going outside. Once we go outside I lead the way, we go where I want to go and if he tries to go his own way the leash keeps him going the way I want him to. Inside our house he has the freedom to go anywhere he likes and we seldom stop him from going anywhere, outside he his forced to go where I want to go and for as long as I want to go there, he is outside but it seems to me that he has much less freedom. In his tiny dog mind the leash equals a kind of freedom, but in reality it is literally something denying true freedom.

Now lets talk about money.

We might laugh at poor Eddie because he doesn’t realize how bound he really is, but is he any less aware than the rest of us? So many of us look at money and we believe that if we have it (or enough of it) that we will achieve freedom as well. Freedom from fear, or want, or just the freedom to do “whatever we want”. But that kind of freedom is really an illusion, just like my dog if we want that sort of freedom then we have to wear the collar and the leash. We allow ourselves to be led where the money wants us to go.

Now, I understand that money is necessary in this world where we no longer barter chickens for fresh butter and such, and I’m not naive enough to think that we can somehow do away with a system which allows us to place value on our work and products, but I do come from a place of having once been so poor and so scared of what that would lead to that I looked at money as the answer to all the problems in my life. Lots of people do this and when that happens, well, that is when people get hurt, or killed. When you value something (anything really) more than a life (yours or another) and when you are so wrapped up in the belief in the sort of “freedom” that money offers then sooner or later you will do something that causes harm, suffering, or even death. People will risk a lot of the promise of freedom that money seems to offer, some will even idolize the vicious, sociopathic behavior that many “rich” people exhibit in order to get or remain wealthy.  Let me say again, I am not declaring that money is evil or that wanting it is evil or that we should all live in grass huts trading sticks for twigs, but there is another way to live with money than most of us do.

The fact is that in this society we need money to stay clothed, housed, and fed and yet we can do so without looking at money as our goal. It may be a cruel generalization but I must tell you that in my experience the people who are so greedy and focused on money are also some of the stupidest. I know because I was one of them. The more one time one spends on really living in this moment, in self-reflection, and in a real curiosity about the world the less they seem to be focused on “stuff”, it is the caveman part of us that wants MORE NOW and its the civilised part of us (you know, the one that makes art, science, and love possible) that uses money as a tool and not a savior. The bare fact is that when a desire for something (anything, not just money) get to the point where it is the only thing that drives you then everything , in my view, becomes tainted. Even if you get what you want at that point it has become so poisonous that you can’t even really enjoy the “freedom” you thought it would bring.

Before becoming a buddhist (and a lot of meditation and learning) I thought that money would fix all the things I thought were wrong with my life, I thought that true freedom from suffering would come if only I had enough loot. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I had spent 30+ years with that same idea and the only thing it had accomplished was to make happiness seem like something outside of me. Once stopped trying to get more and instead began fixing the million little things I was doing to sabotage myself a funny thing happened; I started to make more money! not the amount I once thought I “needed”, and certainly not enough for anyone in this wealthy part of the world to call “rich” but enough. I cant really say that I have taken off the leash since I’m still “on the grid” and using money, but unlike my little pal Eddie I have learned to stop mistaking the collar for freedom.

 

The three poisons: Greed

It has been said that all the suffering we endure in our lives comes from one of three causes, because they result in so much misery they have been called the “three poisons” by Buddhists. When I think of the word poison I picture a vial of some greenish liquid that sneakily and slowly kills or sickens whoever gets it slipped into their drink. Poison works deviously, almost imperceptibly at times, the way that a rabbit when bitten by a snake at first appears to escape, then slows, and finally dies. If you saw the rabbit moments after it was bitten you might believe that everything was ok, but the poison would be working its way through the rabbits blood stream whether or not you could see it and whether or not the rabbit was aware of having the poison inside of it.

While there are millions of individual reasons we suffer, they can generally be put into the broad categories of Greed, Aversion, and Ignorance.

Greed can be obvious and I thought I knew pretty much what greed was without having to think very hard about it, but the very nature of poison is that it is easily mistaken for something less dangerous. I could clearly see that desiring too much money or sex or power or fame lead to all sorts of problems whether or not I achieve any of them, in fact the achieving of them just seemed to lead to even more greed, pretty clear cut, right? Not so fast though, what if the desire to not be greedy was also the poison of greed? Buddhism is not about being “good” and not “bad”, it is about looking deep enough to see the causes of suffering in anything, even supposedly beneficial things! The problem is not that greed arises in us, it is that when we don’t see it for the bottomless pit that it is, we keep taking the poison over and over and never knowing why we suffer.

I’ve met many Buddhists who were “greedy” for enlightenment (whatever that is) and plenty of well-meaning people who were greedy for the power to save the environment, even a particularly modest person can be greedy for things even if it’s just to give them to others. Do these folks with their “nice” greed suffer any less than some slimy businessman who is greedy for more mundane things like money and power? In my experience  they both experience the same dissatisfaction, the same looking outward for “more” , and the same inability to appreciate what the currently are experiencing.

Greed is also so dangerous to our freedom from suffering because it is impossible to really satisfy it. It’s hard to believe that winning the lottery or meeting Mr. or Ms. “Right” wont make us happy, and yet time and again people when given everything they believed they ever wanted are sooner or later (usually sooner) confronted with the depressing realization that they are still not very happy. Even with a billion dollars, and even with sex and money and power the thirst is still there demanding more, like Audry II insisting that Seymore “Feed me!“

I have a theory as to why rich, powerful, and famous people seem to go crazy at a higher rate than the rest of us and it’s because of greed. If  are Mr. Poor and find yourself  living alone in a shitty tenement then money and fame seem like the one thing that could take away your suffering. It might never happen but you can at least have that dream hat some day, maybe, you would hit that powerball, get that dream job, meet that “special” someone and then you would be free of that terrible lonely feeling, that worry about where the rent money was coming from that concern that nagging feeling that you are doomed! But what if you are rich and/or powerful? Then you wake up just as miserable as anyone else and you don’t have the luxury of thinking “if only I had money/power/a beautiful lover then I would be happy”, they often wake up in possession of all three and still cant bear to face the world!

According to the poor guy Mr. Successful should be super happy, content,  and at peace with all those basic concerns taken care of and yet they almost never are! CEO’s already drowning in money cheat the stock market for another million bucks, people whose spouses are on the top 10 sexiest list of some magazine cheat on them with hookers and druggies, politicians get caught cheating on their spouses and taking bribes over and over when Mr. Poor would be satisfied with 1/10th of Mr. Succesfuls life. Kurt Cobain becomes a rock star and a father and still kills himself. They have “it all” and suffering still gnaws on their souls as viciously as the rest of us.

Why? Because where there is greed there is suffering, and greed is endless. If you win the lottery tomorrow its only a matter of time until you begin to feel that little itch that says “not enough! more!”

The solution can not be to eliminate greed because its only human to want more and the solution will not work if it ignores basic human design. What the Buddha taught, then,  was not a way to destroy greed, it was a way to see it as it really is. To label the poison bottle before we accidentally take a drink of it! To learn to recognize it before it has slipped into our life and begun to do its deadly work.In meditation we learn to be aware of what is in this moment, to witness the arising and fading away of all sorts of crazy shit from our brain, including the greed for ms.sexypants or a new lexus and seeing it clearly for what it is does an interesting thing, it ruins it. Greed only works because we believe that the promise of whatever that thing we thirst for will satisfy everything, so when you see it arise as it has throughout our life and we begin to see it as the same thirst we have felt over and over without it ever being satiated we simply begin to refuse to play its game.  You don’t stop desiring or wanting to improve your life, but you do stop believing that something “out there” can ever really end your suffering. We begin to accept that getting our satisfaction is going to have to come from within ourselves if its going to happen at all.