Saniel Bonder     

The Spirit/Money Split

Are You an “Olympic Athlete” of the Spirit/Money Split?

Every couple of years nearly everyone on Earth pauses at least a little from daily concerns to contemplate the great ceremony we call the Olympic Games. We celebrate competitive physical demonstrations of human excellence, diligence, talent, perseverance, discipline, sportsmanship, teamwork, and the will to achieve greatness in the realm of athletics.

In this post, while the Summer Games are on in Beijing, I want to draw on the many meanings of what it takes to be like an Olympic athlete—to reach that kind of focus, excellence, and achievement in any area of life. We’ll explore it along lines of the main theme of this column: “the Spirit/Money split.”

For years I’ve been helping people heal an all-encompassing chasm in consciousness and life, and continually addressing it in myself too. I call it “the Spirit/Matter split.” One of my main books is titled just that: Healing the Spirit/Matter Split.

I’ve typically referred to champions of one or the other side of that divide as its “Olympic athletes.” These are people who awe the rest of us with their astounding dedication, discipline, and talent for excelling in either spiritual or material pursuits—hardly ever in both. Except that the amazing capacity to devote all their energy, attention, and life to just one part or sphere of a total human existence leaves huge gaps that drastically limit and often distort their contributions. Like Michael Phelps describing his entire life as non-stop training with three activities only: “Eat. Sleep. Swim.” Great for his brief competitive time as the world’s top swimmer. But what if he were to do just that and nothing else for the rest of his life?

To my view, the “Spirit/Money” formulation of that more general Spirit/Matter split is one of its most pernicious, endemic forms in our psyches and our world. It can wreak a lot of havoc—and does. The argument can be made that the Spirit/Money split is at the root of our current financial crisis, in the U.S. and globally.

Recent news and commentary clips might illustrate what I’m getting at:

• John Cassidy's "Economics" essay in the July issue of Condé Nast Portfolio, "Happiness Is ... a Big Fat Paycheck," reported that certain economists are now discovering definite connections between having money and being happy. (Sorry, but duh. Reminds me of the Gary Larson cartoon where the scientist dog says something like, “Yes, there’s increasing evidence that humans actually have emotions!”) But economists and columnist both either disregard or simply make no room for core spiritual features of human well-being. Of the happiness factors mentioned—"maintaining stable families and friendly communities, reducing joblessness, providing adequate health care, and guaranteeing more personal freedom”—not one in the entire article addressed religious and spiritual needs. Yet articles in the popular press suggest well over 90% of American adults believe in God or a divine principle. And about 20% admit to being “Spiritual Not Religious,” according to a book by that title. They have a passion for a spiritual connection to life and reality but don’t identify with sectarian religious belief systems and their often dogmatic moral and personal codes.

Maybe people like me, a pragmatic spiritual teacher, counselor, and life coach, ought to be in serious dialogue with those happiness-scanning economists. Most of “us” (my type) are tone-deaf to the esoteric intricacies of economics. And “they” seem color-blind to key nuances of spiritual well-being. Maybe if we could graft the left sides of their brains onto the right sides of ours, and vice versa, somebody could see straight! At a time when clear, big-picture vision is so desperately needed.

What we may have here is a Spirit/Money split so pervasive among us it’s like the atmosphere before we figured out it was dangerously polluted. As the Chinese leaders figured out about Beijing not so very long ago. The economists have been super-specialized, super-outstanding paragons of the “Money” side of the split. Olympic champions. I’ve been rabidly focused most of my adult life on the “Spirit” side. So have many of my colleagues. Most all of us are so ill-informed about one another’s disciplines and understandings, we often act as if they don’t exist—or if they do, they’re secondary if not irrelevant to life in our own (to us, the only) “real world.”

• A statistic in that same Condé Nast Portfolio practically screamed aloud for the kind of cross-disciplinary, outside-the-box encounters I suggest here for us “half-a-whole-human” experts. It leaped off the page from a seemingly unrelated article, "Arming the Drug Wars." There we learn, “The U.S., with less than 5% of the world's population, consumes MORE THAN HALF of its drugs." (The author’s or magazine’s capital letters.)

Take those numbers in. Less than a 20th of the world’s population consumes more than half its seriously addictive drugs. And that doesn’t even touch our dependencies (not wanting to use the “A-word”) on pharmaceuticals. Right here in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

What does this say about the spirit, the wealth in happiness and well-being, of our to date still richest-in-money of nations? Especially when you add into the mix our high-level financiers' participation in the recent boom-and-bust unrealism and irresponsibility that Jesse Eisinger took the gloves off on in, still in the same magazine, his "Wall Street" column, which he aptly titled, "Bank Job." And which now has the whole world reeling—jittery at best, teetering on the edge of economic collapse at worst. If not already plunging.

Good Business International co-founder Peter Ressler, a longtime executive recruiter for Wall Street, writes here about a much-respected financier who pioneered one of the ingenious lending instruments for early creative mortgages that preceded the current crisis. This man, now deceased, designed “win-win-win’s” to be wisely used and stewarded by all concerned: sellers, buyers, lenders. Yes, money was there to be made. But homes were there to be owned, at least eventually. Cooperation and helping hands to be offered. Financial confidence there to grow. Trust to be built, as well as credit. But, Peter said when telling me the story, at some point after that man’s passing, something else took over:

Greed.

Thank you, Gordon Gekko, and no thanks.

A grave danger gets released into human events when people create “esoteric instruments” (a phrase I’ve seen used for the CDOs, derivatives, and other arcane, super-sophisticated financial devices that recently took us all hurtling over the falls) but then manage them on the basis of, shall we say, “exoteric motivations”: crude, unconscious, unexamined, undisciplined, and very primal, powerful emotions and impulses such as greed, fear, lust, and insecurity.

This is as true on the Spirit side of the split as it is on the Money side. I’ve seen it again and again, been part of it and had to outgrow it myself, know the syndromes well, can almost smell them. I’m not preaching from on high here. I’m fessin’ up for my team’s side of the mess from “on low.” But it’s all around us:

• In a recent “Arts and Life” section of Financial Times there was a page-one write-up about a tremendously popular Indian spiritual master. This man, with a following of tens of millions worldwide, is said to be celibate, most likely doesn’t handle money himself though is, through his non-profit organizations, in effect extremely wealthy. His take on spirituality and enlightenment? He “disputes the idea that ‘to attain Nirvana, you have to go through torture.’ Rather, he says: ‘It takes as much time to pluck a flower from a tree as it does to find yourself. Vedanta says that all you need to blossom is already there. You just need to be hollow and empty.’” All that is required for personal and society-wide happiness, he claims, is essentially a simple practice of breathing and meditation that he imparts.

I respect the man’s sincere intentions and many good works. But honestly, to me, that promise that’s helped attract millions of hungry souls to his feet is the Spirit side of the split’s version of someone hawking boom-time, subprime mortgages to the poor. Or like the apostles of The Secret who, it could be argued quite irresponsibly, give people the overwhelming impression that all they need to do to get literally whatever they want in life, easily, is just be, think, intend, and visualize positively, avoid negative thinking, and it’ll all happen. (And if it doesn’t, you must be secretly negative after all.) For proof in their own lives, in many cases they point to expensive cars and houses they were able to buy. I’m not in any sense opposed to “manifesting” what we want in life. But where’s the leavening of service, the larger picture of a life dedicated to greater ends than either personal subjective states or objective possessions?

• Two pages into that same special section of FT, and there was Vaclav Havel, the hero of the Czech Republic, a man of politics and letters making astute spiritual points. The writer said Havel is “disappointed that ex-communist societies have followed the west in embracing globalisation and rampant consumerism.” He doesn’t imagine this is going to change. But, he said, it’s “a two-faced trend: on the one hand it brings people thousands of advantages and joys and pleasures; on the other, it is endangering the human race.” Havel doesn’t want to prevent people from using their freedom to go to McDonalds and to shop. However: “What I want to say is something different ... I get the sense that we are the first civilisation in the history of mankind that is completely atheist. Human existence now isn’t metaphysically anchored in any way in a code of moral conduct, from which we could then derive a legal code. … That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the delicacies I can buy at the local supermarket. ... What I’m talking about is the underlying atheism and anti-spirituality of our civilisation. We don’t know where it’s going to go from here and what it will bring for the human race.”
Says something, don’t you think? More than ever before, we now need “Olympic athletes” of the healing of the Spirit/Money split, and of the Spirit/Matter split in all its other forms too: regarding sexuality, the Earth, the environment. All our divisions interior and outward, in ourselves and between and among us and all the other living beings on this planet.
May the Olympic events now taking place in China infuse the ongoing visions, dreams, and industrious pursuits of countless people around the world, doing all kinds of equally worthy things for their own greatest expression and the betterment of all. And may those Games help motivate us to heal persisting, grave splits in our natures and become Olympic-level “athletes” of a new, truly unified, fully spiritual and responsibly material human being. Let us become people who ourselves and together can manage, among other things, the tremendous energies of money, with clarity, compassion, wisdom, both passion and self-restraint, and an always overriding desire to serve the common good. So be it!

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 About Saniel: Harvard educated “destiny-empowerment” expert, Saniel is author of the forthcoming audio series, "Wealth Without Guilt," the provocative "White-Hot Yoga of the Heart," and many other books and programs. He hails from Sonoma, California where his unique blend of intellectual curiosity and spiritual wisdom is honed and nurtured. Saniel co-writes and co-teaches with his wife, Linda. Together they travel and teach “materiality and spirit” workshops throughout the US and internationally.