Tad Crawford - The Secret Life of Money: How Money Can Be Food for the Soul

This book was originally published in hardcover by G. P. Putnams Sons as a Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Book. It is reprinted by permission of the original publisher.

Tad Crawford 1994

All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and PanAmerican Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Allworth Press

an imprint of Allworth Communications, Inc.

10 East 23rd Street

New York, NY 10010

Cover design by Douglas Design Associates, New York, NY

ISBN 13: 978-1-880559-51-2

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-84662

Cover image: The image of the Fountain of Youth is from the reverse of a Swiss five hundred franc bank-note designed by Pierre Gauchet and first issued in 1957. In 1980 this note was called in, but is exchangeable at the Swiss National Bank until April 30, 2000. After that, the note will cease to be honored as money.

For Susan

I deeply appreciate my friends, family, and colleagues whose encouragement and insights helped bring this book to fruition. I would like to thank the staff at Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., especially Connie Zweig for her perceptive editorial suggestions. I am also thankful to have been aided in so many ways by the excellent staff at Allworth Press. Finally, I appreciate my agent of nearly two decades, Jean Naggar, who offered exemplary guidance for The Secret Life of Money as it entered the world of commerce.

O NCE UPON A TIME there was a man who prayed to a wooden idol, which he had enshrined in his home. He beseeched the idol to give him money and make him prosper in the world. But even if he had knelt until his knees ached and his muscles cramped, the idol would have given him no reward. In fact, with each passing day, the winds blew ill for this mans fortunes. He had less money; prosperity eluded him.

At last, the man was awakened by a terrible rage to have prayed so long and so hard to so little purpose. He seized the wooden idol and smashed its head to pieces against the wall. Suddenly, as if a magic key had turned in a lock, a fortune in shining gold poured from the idols broken head.

This ancient tale captures the paradox of money. To pray for money brings frustration and despair. Our fervent petition gives life to the wooden idol, as if the idol knows the secret way to make us prosper. But if we can shatter our ideas about how money has the power to be our salvation, often we will find wealth in places and forms that we would never have imagined, even hidden in what seems most familiar to us.

The Secret Life of Money is an exploration of why money is so much more than the useful tool we think it is. To understand money we must see its symbolic value. This book gathers together stories and myths from around the world, from the present and the past, that reveal money as a marker of issues of the human heart and soul. The subjects of the stories revolve around money, or sometimes gold or even food, but the themes are about our nature, our inner richness, and our connection to other people and to community.

This is not a book about finance. It does not tell how to earn more, balance a budget, play the stock market, or hide money in foreign bank accounts. Many books give practical advice about money; this book does not cover that familiar territory. And, emphatically, this is not a book about how certain spiritual practices might enable one to manifest divine favor in the form of money.

In this book the quest for money is not a quest for acquisition, but for understanding. We have to seek the origins of money if we want to know why it has the power to captivate our minds. When we understand these origins, we see that money speaks to us of life and death, of the fertility of the natural world, and of our own natures.

We deal constantly with money in our daily lives, so much so that money may seem too familiar to merit our curiosity. What can we learn from money? Its rules look so simple. If you have it, you can buy what you want. If you dont have it, you must either get it or suffer deprivation.

If we are literal-minded when we approach money, we may love money and want to possess it whatever the cost. It is this love, or attachment, rather than money itself, that is corrupting to us. But if we see money as a symbol, we may feel a deepening connection to others and a desire to express and share an ever-increasing inner richness.

Keeping the symbolic value of money firmly in mind, we can understand how inheritance may raise emotional issues that have little to do with the money and property we receive. We can gain a new view of debt, seeing it not merely as an obligation that must be repaid but also as a statement about how our inner richness will be expressed in the future. We become able to contrast the symbolism of money with the seductive symbolism of bank credit cards that rely on the creation of debt for profits. We can better comprehend why in the last hundred years we have seen the invention and widespread use of credit cards, changes in bank architecture, the growth of debt, and a dramatic transformation in the very nature of United States money.

We refer so frequently to money in our everyday lives that we forget how taboo a subject money truly is. Of course, we feel comfortable chatting about prices, bargains, and news stories about the wealthy. But how often do we dare ask how much someone else earns, has in the bank, has inherited, or owes? Inquiries like these violate boundaries of privacy about which we feel strongly. But we can only understand why we feel so strongly if we understand moneys secret life and symbolic value.

This book is titled The Secret Life of Money because it seeks to see beyond and beneath the usefulness of money and understand the ways in which money lives in our imaginations. It seeks to present money as a challenge, a door to a path on which we journey in search of greater knowledge of ourselves. If we do not go through this door, we risk losing our inner richness and our vital connection to family and community. Knowing the secret life of moneywhy, for example, In God We Trust appears on our bills and coinsmay help us find an inner richness that is certainly wealth, but not the wealth that money can measure.

I N THIS ERA of extraordinary inventions, many of our grandparents knew a world where horses reared at the first glimpse of an automobile, recordings of sound were a new marvel, airplanes realized the dream of flight, and radio, television, nuclear bombs, computers, and genetic engineering were obscured in the mysteries of the future.

But who, even among the eldest of us, can remember a time without money? Many believe that in an era of immense change, money is our North Star, the one reference we can trust to be stable and unchanging. We may have to worry about inflation, debt, and where the interest rate is pegged, but few people question whether we should have money. Checks, credit cards, electronic fund transfers, and automatic teller machines merely enhance the ease with which money is used. Money feels to us like language, a great invention whose date of origin is lost in prehistory. And like language, money can be translated and exchanged from one currency to another.