The Power of Knowing How Much is Enough

Here is a concept I first found in Joe Dominguez's Your Money or Your Life.  He argued that it is not true that money can't buy happiness.  When a basic need is met, you can indeed become happier.  But money and happiness often have a relationship expressed by a bell curve.  As long as you are meeting real needs, happiness can increase with wealth, but as soon as your real needs are met, the odd thing is that happiness begins to decline with increased material possessions and wealth.  As human beings, however, we are seldom wise enough to stop our feverish acquisition at what Samuel Johnson would call "a moderate fortune."



"Of all those things that make us superior to others, there is none so much within the reach of our endeavours as riches, nor any thing more eagerly or constantly desired. Poverty is an evil always in our view, an evil complicated with so many circumstances of uneasiness and vexation, that every man is studious to avoid it. Some degree of riches is therefore required, that we may be exempt from the gripe of necessity; when this purpose is once attained, we naturally wish for more, that the evil which is regarded with so much horrour, may be yet at a greater distance from us; as he that has once felt or dreaded the paw of a savage, will not be at rest till they are parted by some barrier, which may take away all possibility of a second attack.

....But it almost always happens, that the man who grows rich, changes his notions of poverty, states his wants by some new measure, and from flying the enemy that pursued him, bends his endeavours to overtake those whom he sees before him. The power of gratifying his appetites increases their demands; a thousand wishes crowd in upon him, importunate to be satisfied, and vanity and ambition open prospects to desire, which still grow wider, as they are more contemplated.

Thus in time want is enlarged without bounds; an eagerness for increase of possessions deluges the soul, and we sink into the gulphs of insatiability, only because we do not sufficiently consider, that all real need is very soon supplied, and all real danger of its invasion easily precluded; that the claims of vanity, being without limits, must be denied at last; and that the pain of repressing them is less pungent before they have been long accustomed to compliance."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 39

Inflation

One of the real dangers of spiritual manifestations is what Jungian psychologists call Inflation:  The encounter with the divine, instead of producing a healthy humility, puffs up the ego and produces a self-centered response to the divine instead of a God centered response.

Jean and Wallace Clift describe it in Jungian terms this way:

“In fact, a major danger at the times of encounters with the Self is that the ego may become inflated by identifying itself with the Self, instead of realizing the Other to be the ‘heavier body’ in the relationship.”
 

The opposite of inflation is described in much more powerful words by a believer, Thomas R. Kelley, an American Quaker-

“The sense of Presence is as if two beings were joined in one single configuration, and the center of gravity is not in us but in that Other.  As two bodies, closely attached together and whirling in the air, are predominantly determined by the heavier body, so does the sense of Presence carry within it a sense of our lives being in large part guided, dynamically moved from beyond our usual selves.  Instead of being the active, hurrying church worker and the anxious, careful planner of shrewd moves toward the good life, we become pliant creatures, less brittle, less obstinately rational.  The energizing, dynamic center is not in us but in the Divine Presence in which we share.”