Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.
In my other life I’m a part-time DIY philosopher. So what follows is a short piece I wrote for Reality Sandwich (based on an earlier one I did for Blog Action Day- see video above) that deals with how think about poverty.
Reality Sandwich | Poverty (Un)Consciousness:
Sufficiency is a spiritual issue. Like the ideology of the capitalist system, are we always aspiring to a better, utopian future rather than being grateful for what we have? This is a core issues for well-being. I once participated in a “prosperity group,” which was a weekly gathering of friends (mostly folks from my yoga class) who wanted to read a “channeled” book, Creating Money, and to do the exercises together (it’s a great book, BTW). I realized rather quickly that most people in the group would never transcend their state of “poverty,” because they were spiritually impoverished. That is, they believed that their lives lacked sufficiency in that moment, and would always be trapped on the treadmill of negative thinking about their present state of being. I don’t mean this in “The Secret” kind of way in which positive thinking is your answer to wealth, but in the sense that we are constantly projecting into the world like a waking dream the innermost challenges at the core of our being. We constantly seek healing, and sometimes we externalize from our inner depths that which cannot be articulated by the egocentric mind.
