“Right Bucks” Ken Wilber's Essay on Money, Feminism and Dharma 💸

This essay (part of the research for our Beyond Money Course) takes a developmental perspective on the relationship between spirituality and money. One of the fascinating claims is that being anti-money-for-spiritual-reasons goes hand and hand with being anti-woman. I believe Ken wrote this a couple decades ago and was addressing some pushback he was getting at the time, so at times he's too dismissive for my taste. I think the greater Relateful Coc ecosystem has a healthier relationship to money than whoever he was addressing at the time. But it's still a powerful, wide-ranging vision with great food for thought.

Here's a simplified gist, in excerpts; emphasis mine.

“The disgust with money was primarily and profoundly a disgust with manifestation, a hatred of samsara, and a desire to not “dirty” oneself with the gross realm: All of which the Nondual orientation would find utterly and profoundly confused [...]

as much as the Nondual traditions brought a revolution in the relation to samsara (to sex, food, money, body, earth, and women), nonetheless these traditions still arose on an agrarian base, and they remained, in many respects, steeped in the ethics and morals of what still amounted, in many ways, to an old boys club [...]

(At the same time, we don’t want to go to the other extreme; too many women’s spirituality movements end up being a merely Descending Path, emphasizing nothing but the body and the biosphere and Agape and compassion—without a clue as to real Eros and transcendence and Emptiness—and thus they end up endlessly emoting and parading a personalistic and egoic series of unending feelings, preferably on a full moon night, as if that were liberation). [...]

We will drag the Dharma, kicking and screaming, into the modern and postmodern world only when every single one of those “anti” stances (money, food, sex, body, earth, woman) is attacked simultaneously: they stand or fall together.”

With love, Jordan