As industrialization grew, the priorities shifted from God to personal wealth.

“I’m feeling pretty ‘poor in spirit’”

Sounds like its time for a fast. Nothing solidifies the spirit more than praying and fasting. Not just food. Turn off the media. TV, Computer, radio, music, books. You and your prayer. Natural surrooundings can be helpful, or indoors so long as the room is symbol free.

No wonder Jesus throws over the tables of the money changers and predicts the destruction of the temple itself. They are the same. No wonder He only comes back at the End of the World, when all signs and symbols and great men are laid low.

Eckhart on this episode naturally explains the temple as the body and the money changers are then the aspects of ourselves which attempt to bargain with God.

This can be taken on a moral level, where we should not attempt to exchange anything with that which already possess ourselves and all we have more than we do.

On a deeper level, it is a metaphysical statment: there is nothing to be gained or lost, there is no exchange, all that we might desire we already have in our poverty. All that grasps and reaches, throw out, thow out all that hopes for the world to come. Why should we dream of the world to come? The blessing is NOW, and we cannot conceive of it anyway.

Eckhart and his followers, unlike most Christian mystics I’ve read, writes on multiple levels at once and reads the scripture on multiple levels at once. When rightly understood, the literal, moral and metaphysical levels are seen to be identical, or maybe more accurately, fundamentally inseperable.

what is interesting to me is that ever since the US has been off the gold standard (or any kind of standard) the value of it’s money is by fiat - in other words, belief in the power of Money is what now gives it value. (the fact that oil is only denominated in dollars and a there’s very large American military to encourage that belief doesnt hurt, though)…

The central characteristic of all “sin” seems to be a form of insanity where greater energy is consumed/appropriated than is needed.

I agree. The Christ never described his path as any but the “narrow path”. “Sin” is roughly equivalent to “pathology”, some process run awry. Whether it is from egomania or sulky self-hatred it is all obsessive self-ishness.

And boy is that self a bastard. Until one really tries to put him under, or set him aside, one has no idea!

Oyez, of course every one has seen: this kinda stuff, right?

The birds and flowers are provided for, so shall we be provided for.

I do not want to hide from money, but to disenchant myself of it! Fiat money has no intrinsic value whatsoever, it is the exemplar of an enchanted object, one which everyone treats in a particular way, a formalized, ritual way. We count it, make transactions, attend school for a decade and a half so that we can work for it.

Fotamecus? C’mon. Compare how tiny that servitor is compared to the international market, a real leviathan.

Our old pal Dollar is feeling the heat, lately, though. His intrinsic non-value is starting to catch up with him, too bad for us Americans. The war between him and his cross-the-pond cousin may lead to war in Persia.

There are too many specially-prepared dinosaur bodies buried in that holy land. Dollar has successfully positioned himself as the arbiter of who gets those buried treasures, but the Iranian oil bourse is going to boot him just like that.

All that ranting aside, it seems there might be a Hermes-Money connection, his “gatekeeper” role aligns with money’s fungibility.

Following the folks at anthropik.com, one can read civilization itself as one big unbalanced energy grab. And so, original sin, the explusion from the garden, really could be about the collective decision to take on civilization. Now, our preoccupation with maintaining civilization keeps us from the beautiful simplicity of the forager life, i.e. the garden.

So, maybe the problem with the unbalanced relationship to energy, e.g. greed, is that it is a feedback loop that requires constant maintenance, and tends to take one further and further away from the garden.

OK, I’m rambling now, so I’ll stop.

One thing, though (and it is, of course, my bias to lean towards politics in any discussion that includes both “money” and “religion”): the bit about the camel passing through the eye… the issue seems to be that amassing great wealth is evil, and the meaning of money makes it clear why. This is not the same thing as “money = evil”… it’s that the concentration of wealth, which is the same as stealing psychic energy away from a large number of other individuals for the benefit of one individual, is essentially evil. In this way, one can understand why gluttony is a deadly sin (unnecessary appropriation of energy from other life forms), lust is a deadly sin (unnecessary appropriation of chi from other humans), etc. And the Christian mythology of evil is that Satan is trying to steal your soul, i.e. appropriate your psychic energy.

The good/evil dichotomy is all very dualistic, and I’m aware of that. But even if you abandon that dichotomy in favor of a more Eastern/Buddhist approach, you are left with the idea that the over-concentration of energy to one individual (or small group) involves a failure of compassion and, as you say, mistaking the symbol for the source.