The Law of Giving

The 12-Step programs tell us that that we can only keep what we have by giving it away. One of Deepak Chopra’s seven spiritual laws of success is the law of giving. Lao Tzu tells, “Man decreases those who need more than they have, and increases those who have more than they need. To give away what you do not need is to follow the Tao”. Christ said, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”

All of this sounds great, we all agree – right? Yet this is not ‘The American Way’. We live in this horrendous consumer society that feeds on itself like a voracious cancer. Mankind’s continuous demand for bigger, better, faster – more, more, more – has become the slow destruction of the world in which we live.

Now we hear about global warming, conserve energy, recycle, organic food, hybrid cars etc. etc., but we have outsourced ourselves to a point where we are used to getting “stuff” at relatively cheap prices. If we were to actually purchase American-made products, all organic etc. the price of our “stuff”, even the stuff we need to survive, would be priced out of existence.

What saddens me is that a large number of Americans (maybe even the majority) still believe that we need to have these huge corporations to “compete” (meaning ‘dominate’) in the world market. We make contributions to organizations like Oxfam as we head out to Wal-Mart to buy more stuff that has been made in some 3rd world country, by people who live on $2 a month, never realizing that Oxfam is working to improve the lives of those same people to help make them self-sufficient so that they won’t have to work for American corporations who hire them like the slave labor that they are.

How did we get here, and how do we turn it around? For all the emphasis put on living a righteous life, I do not see the evidence that we actually believe, “We can only keep what we have by giving it away”