There is a favorite story that Alan Watts tells about money in times such as the present. He tells of a carpenter who one day went to work, and worked a full day, and came to work the following day to be told that there was no work, because they had run out of inches.
Watts points out that money is a figment of our imagination, a convenience to have taken over the exchange of value from the cumbersome transactions of barter. We have not actually changed so much in our capability to recognize and to offer significant value to one another since the “recession” of 2008.
Its just that we’ve run short of inches. The top 1/10th of 1% of the populace is hoarding 60% of them in yard sticks. And we’ve mistaken inch-hoards for actual wealth. This is a state of planetary hypnosis. How can we know how we’ve grown without inches? Maybe its by the size of our heart-minds (心)(xīn), which can become immeasurable.
©2011 Anthony S. Wright, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.
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