"Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities.
. . . I got back from my student years in Europe three weeks before the Wall Street crash. . . I'd earned several thousand dollars--which was a lot in those days--and that was what I had until it disappeared. I didn't make another cent for five years. I found that, if you had no responsibilities, you could live wonderfully without any money. In fact, I thought anybody who worked for money was a fool. I took a vow never to do anything for money. Now, that does not mean that when I do something for somebody I don't ask for money. I want as much as I can get, but that's the secondary part of the game. My life course is absolutely indifferent to money. As a result, a lot of money has come in by my doing what I feel I want to do from the inside. If you do that, you are doing things that attract money, because you are giving life and life responds in the way of its counterpart in hard coin.
Being as I was, and given the field I was interested in, I had a certain disdain for people who gave their lives to making money. Now that I have made money, in dealing with it I've had to be in touch with people whose business is money, whose whole life has been in that field, and I've had an interesting and surprising experience: I've met some magnificent people.
Money experienced as life experience is indeed a meditation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the lives of others. There's a beautiful thing that can grow out of a life devoted to money tha surprised me.
In the living of life today, money is a facilitating energy source. With money in the tank like gasoline, you can get places you other wise couldn't go.
. . . From what I have seen in the history of the arts in New York, when money is poured on something it flowers. With money there has to be a flow. I had a beautiful experience of a man with money when I was a trustee of the Bollinger Foundation, which was founded by Paul Mellon, an enormously wealthy man. He and his wife had been in analysis with Carl Jung when the war came and they had to leave Switzerland. They asked Jung what they could give him in the way of a gift to express their gratitude for what he had done. He suggested they establish a foundation for the interpretation and study of symbols. That's whay they did, and it is an example of a lot of money being put to the right use. The influence of that Bollinger Series on on the literature and science of America has been enormous.
. . . When you put the money in the wrong place, it can be devastating. Where is the money [and its associated intent to prioritize, value, attend to] going and where is it coming from in the economy of a nation, the economy of a city? You can turn a flowering culture into a desiccating culture just by wrong channeling. What factor in your own consciousness are you going to favor in the spending of the money? For instance, I have a seventy-five-dollar book coming out. Some people will say that is expensive, but those same people will spend one-hundred-and-fifty dollars to have dinner in a restaurant with another couple. So, is the money going up here in your mind or is it going down there in your stomach?"
- from Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, edited by Diane K. Olson
This is a companion blog for longer excerpts to cite transcriptions from books. The main blog on inspiration, imagination, innovation, improvisation, creativity, and the Call is over at Crossroads Dispatches by Evelyn Rodriguez. Since, I mentioned Campbell in this one, you may also be interested in the art, myth and alchemy blog called Fertile Verge.
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