Gifting Circles And The Monetization Of Everything - Resilience
One aspect of the monetization of life that is proceeding nearly to totality in our time is that someone finds a way to commoditize nearly any movement or concept, even those that were explicitly anti-commercial in their conception. This was the fate of “cool”: what was once an emblem of African-American and Beatnik rejection of bourgeois values became a potent marketing device: buy this car, this sneaker, this album, and you will be cool, too.
The monetization of everything is profoundly dispiriting, because it reinforces the suspicion that, in the end, “It's all about the money.” We encounter someone espousing inspiring concepts about healing, transformation, or compassion, only to find that those concepts have been copyrighted and packaged into some kind of expensive program. We wonder whether maybe the whole thing is about the money and not the healing. Maybe these were just sales gimmicks. And so we develop a wariness and a cynicism that taints our view of life and, indeed, urges us to join the sell-athon.
The concept of gifting, and the spiritual value of generosity, is not exempt from cooptation in the service of profit. I remember as a teenager listening to televangelist called Pastor Mike who, invoking Mark 10:31, promised that God would repay any gifts to his ministry a hundred-fold. “Give till it hurts!” he said, and surely many people did, as he became a wealthy man. I once heard a story on Snap Judgment (my favorite radio show) from a man who had been childhood friends with Reverend Mike's son, and once come across boxes and boxes of old jewelry that people had sent him with heartrending notes to the effect, “This is all I have to give, we can't make ends meet...”
dious as Pastor Mike's methods may be, they would not be so effective if they were not invoking (and then redirecting) a truth with deep psychological resonance. We all desire – and fear – to enter fully into the gift, to let go of how our gifts will come back to us. When a person feels deeply supported by the universe, that person also feels at ease to be generous. Echoing Pastor Mike, New Age teachings claim the converse is also true: that by practicing generosity, one will receive the experience of being deeply supported by the universe; that is, one will experience abundance.
EDIT
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-08-22/gifting-circles-and-the-monetization-of-everything
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