Bridging the Material and the Spiritual

"If it's not a paradox, it's not true."

Wow. Being 10% more evil inspired a lot of feelings in many of you (if you missed it, it’s in my conversation with Phil Stutz on Pulling the Thread: “Activating Your Life Force”). Phil is down for a Zoom with this community about this and Universe 1 and Universe 2; I’ll come back to you with dates. In the interim, I’m going to host a Zoom for paid subscribers on Saturday, April 19th at 10am. It will be an Office Hours—unscripted and unstructured—to answer questions about the creative process, writing, and marketing. Earlier this week, a friend who I met online when she was just starting out dished back some of the advice I had given her when we recorded her podcast; it was a good reminder that we all have the answers, but usually think they only apply to everyone else. So, if you’re interested, you’ll find the link to sign-up behind the paywall below!

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Like many, I have a lot of stories about money. I’ve made some of them conscious*, but most still ride shotgun in my mind, dictating my behavior without much awareness on my part. Because they’re not conscious, I can’t see what I’m up to, which makes it extra-tough to let them go and replace them with stories that might be more helpful, or more true in their stead. This is where therapy, good friends, and people like Anne Emerson come in—sometimes you need someone to hold up a mirror. (Anne will be on the podcast on Thursday talking about limiting sub-conscious beliefs. She is a hoot!)

(*Here’s one of my now-conscious stories: If I accept money from someone, I feel like they own me. Also, if you like this type of work, excavating stories is core to my workbook for On Our Best Behavior, which comes out in July: It’s called Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness and may I just say that it’s excellent? (“Pride.”) Courtney and I have a whole bunch of powerful exercises for “Greed.”)

Yesterday, I did a session with the brilliant Mark Horn—his readings are $125, and more profound than an hour of therapy. (You can hear Mark on the podcast here (“The Mystical Roots of Tarot,” or read about him here.) Mark helps you finesse a question and then he pulls Tarot cards in the shape of the Sephirot, which is the Jewish Tree of Life in the Kabbalistic tradition. (Tarot and Kabbalah go way, way back.) Unsurprisingly, my question was aligned with my solo podcast last week (“Are You Holding Yourself Back?”). It was something along the lines of: “What would it look like to accept support for growth?”

This was the top of my Sephirot.

As always, the synchrony of the card pull felt wild, and the general instructions made sense: Yes, you need support; yet, there’s no rush, be patient and considered.

As part of this, the cards also reflected back to me one of my most deeply held stories about money—I’m conscious of this story, and yet I still can’t put it down. It’s one of those stories that also becomes inflamed whenever the world becomes more terrifying and more chaotic.

So here’s my story: Money is not spiritual.

(After all: How about those tariffs? It is giving me perverse satisfaction watching the billionaires who got Trump elected twist in despair and dismay, even though I recognize that cataclysmic economic events hurt us all, the poorest the most. (To that end, I’m too scared to log on to check my 401K.) But moments like this make me ground down in the (unhelpful?) belief that people with too much money are largely corrupt, base, spiritually eroded, cruel, lacking in empathy, yadiyadayada.)

ANYWHO, the cards gave it back to me. In the third position, Binah (“Understanding”), Mark pulled the Three of Pentacles for me. It’s an image of a courtesan, an architect, and a monk—a trio—conferring on plans for building a shared vision.

The Three of Pentacles

This is what Mark said:

“This is an image of three people who have come together to build something of value that will last a long time—and it’s of spiritual value. You know what you want to build and you want to create, but there are other people out there who you need to help you do it. Here’s an important thing to understand about the pentacles: In an earlier version, they were called coins, with the image of a gold coin. But when they redesigned the Rider-Waite deck in 1909, they kept the disc, but encoded it with the five point star. This is because the spiritual is not different than the material—they are two sides of the same coin. How we earn our money needs to be aligned with our spiritual values. And how we spend our money needs to be aligned with those values as well. And what we build in the world needs to both reward us spiritually—but also be rewarding materially for you and for others.

“There’s a great deal of depth and beauty to this card. It’s the card of spiritual architecture. It’s on you to bring a plan. It needs to be thought about. There needs to be an architecture and a business plan. What does it need in terms of investment? What will it build? What will the rewards be, both spiritually and materially, for people who do the work.”

Huh.

He went on to underline that this is one of the key dualities of the Western mind: We try to keep the spiritual as far away from the material (or mundane, etymology: mundus, Latin for world) as possible. It’s in much of our theology* and it’s part of our patriarchal culture (the mind, rationality, and money over the heart, feeling, emotion)—because of this, a belief that the material and spiritual are distinct is hard-wired into our minds.

(*Unless, of course, you subscribe to the Prosperity Gospel and think God rewards good people with health and wealth.)

This feels like a paradox, and as my friend John Price, a Jungian therapist in Houston reminded me when we convened for a recording of his podcast, The Sacred Speaks, yesterday afternoon, if it’s not a paradox, it’s not true. (This concept is credited to Shunryu Suzuki, and in ANOTHER fit of synchrony, I had been pitched his new book only hours before. He’s the author of the Buddhist classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Shunryu Suzuki died in 1971, but they are posthumously publishing lectures and audio tapes that have never been publicly available before in July: It’s called Becoming Yourself: Teachings on the Zen Way of Life.

I asked him for advice on integrating this duality, as it feels like such a block for me, and he reminded me of some profound facts: The sorcerer and the shaman know the same spells. One uses them for good; the other for evil. Psychologists, who are supposed to tend to people’s souls—psyche is Latin for soul—conferred with the government on torture techniques, including how to exact maximum mental and emotional suffering.

On a cognitive level, I understand that money is neither bad nor good; it’s neutral. It’s a currency, i.e., an energetic current—and how we use it in the world gives it meaning. But my heart doesn’t feel it quite yet. Intuitively, I know that I need to integrate my ambivalence and resolve what feels like a binary, before I’ll be able to effectively move forward; but as the cards also told me, it’s okay, there’s no rush. I’ve spent my whole life upholding this story—it might take me a bit more time to put it down and choose something else instead.

See you all next week!