For as long as I can remember, I wanted my own business. The first version of that dream came straight out of Hollywood. Not a film business, but the life Hollywood sold: hot women, holidays, and power over other people. Most of all it meant being better off than the proverbial neighbour from number five. I can name it now: it was one-upmanship, keeping up with the Joneses, except I didn’t want to keep up, I wanted to get ahead.
The Hollywood version
Number five has followed me through this Journal. In Can You Buy a Gift for Someone, Without Expectation? the gift had to be better than theirs, and the price mattered more than the person. The business dream was the same contest on a bigger stage. A business wasn’t something to build. It was a scoreboard, and the only score that counted was how far ahead of the house next door I could get.
Look closely at what was on that list and there is nothing in it for anyone else. Women as a prize, holidays as proof, power as the point. It was a dream with only one person in it. And that was the version I wanted most.
It never worked out
It never worked out. For a long time that felt like failure, one more way of losing to number five. Now I see it differently. I believe someone up there watched over me, so I wouldn’t make even more bad karma than I already had.
That is my own belief. The Buddha’s teaching on karma, as the Theravāda texts keep it, doesn’t need anyone up there to work, but it still shows me why that failure was a mercy. He put it simply: “Intention, I tell you, is kamma” (AN 6.63). If my intention was power over others and being better than the neighbour, then a business built on it would have been that intention, multiplied. Every success would have planted more of the same seed. When I wrote about the “I” that needed defending in What My Knee Knows About “I”, it was the same “I” sitting behind this dream. Not getting what I wanted may have been the kindest thing that happened to that business.
The freedom warrior
Then I began personal and spiritual development, and the dream changed its clothes. Now it was a business as a “freedom warrior”. It sounded better. It used better words. But when I look at the motives honestly, they were still typically narcissistic and selfish. The neighbour had only moved. Instead of beating him with a car or a holiday, I would beat him by being more free, more awake, more spiritual.
That is the trap with growth. You can take the oldest wish you have and dress it in new language, and it still wants the same thing. The chanting and meditation I do every morning didn’t fix that by itself. What they did, slowly, was make the motive harder to hide from.
Who is my neighbour?
The turn, for me, sits inside a question someone asked Jesus: “And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29, KJV). The answer is the Good Samaritan, and at the end of the story Jesus turns the question round. He asks which of the three travellers “was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves”. The neighbour isn’t the person next door you measure yourself against. The neighbour is whoever shows mercy, and whoever needs it.
That changed what number five means to me. All my life the neighbour was the person to beat. In that story the neighbour is the person you stop for. I wanted to beat the neighbour. Now I want to help him, and anyone else in that position.
Business for dignity
Now I know business is meant to help me and others live with dignity. My hope is to show people who want to climb out of the deep dark hole the tools, teachers and paths that exist. And one day, I hope, those who are climbing out, or who are already out and want to help, could do that through volunteering and work at a meeting place.
The Buddha gave lay people a simple test for a livelihood. Right livelihood is part of the Eightfold Path in SN 45.8, and in AN 5.177 he lists five kinds of business a lay follower should not engage in: “business in weapons, business in human beings, business in meat, business in intoxicants, and business in poison.” It isn’t a list of ways to get rich. It is a list of ways not to harm while you earn. Jesus put the measure of greatness in a similar place: “whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister” (Mark 10:43, KJV). Great, in that line, means serving.
Money fits there too. I still see it as neutral, a means to help. I have little, but it’s enough to be happy. Volunteering in kitchens for homeless people has taught me patience and not judging, and those are the qualities a meeting place would need more than any slogan.
A meeting place that starts in Bradford
That is where the idea for Bee Mindful Together comes from: a spiritual meeting place that would start in Bradford and aim to grow nationwide. It is still an idea and a plan, not something open. The paperwork to register it as a community interest company is with Companies House, waiting for a decision. You can read where it stands on the Mindful Bee page.
The Tao Te Ching, in James Legge’s translation, says “The highest excellence is like (that of) water,” because water benefits all things and settles in the low place others avoid. That is the opposite of the Hollywood version, which wanted the high place and wanted to be seen there. A meeting place for people climbing out of the dark would have to sit low, where they already are.
A question for you
Jesus said, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21, KJV). For years my treasure was being ahead of number five. Who is the neighbour you’ve been measuring yourself against, and what would change if you asked how to help them instead?