The Profits Lament.

The Profit's Lament.

How sad to look at every situation only in terms of it's profit. To mentally reduce the people we meet everyday to their capacity to add value to our bottom line. To further our 'interests.'


Greed is the mode of the land, and isolation and suffering are its harvest, for there can be no profit without loss.

And how bitter the loss is...

How we fight its arising.  And fortify our position in the attempt. And fortifications are costly, they require profit to pay for.

Much profit...

And so off we go, parsing our world into the profitable and the not profitable, taking our turn spinning in the hamster wheel of pleasure and pain.

But what if we were not so filled to the gills with the myth of profit?  How would it be to see this moment just as this moment, and this person just as this person?  To see ourselves as ourselves?

For me when I inhabit such a place, I find myself naturally curious.  What is this?  Who is this?  What mysteries are here?  And so there is the possibility for a fuller juice and texture to arise.

And also the possibility that the sum total of suffering and loneliness in the world may be decreased by just the tiniest amount.

But that tiny amount matters.  It matters so very, very much.

So perhaps the problem isn't so much in profit, as in defining what profit is in such a terribly poor and uncritically examined way.

What is true profit?  Is it really just another dollar squeezed out of this person to add to my quarterly report?  Or does it have to do more with suffering being lessened?  In theory these two link with a nice striaght line, but it's easy enough for me to see that the life we are all living in this moment will end.  Perhaps sooner than we think, or perhaps not until many long cycles yet to arise have come and gone.

And it is in the truth of our non-permanence that the flight of our true human freedom finds both its root and wing.  And yet we, held as we are in the sway of a false hope and image of ourselves, have chosen neither.

Instead we have enshrined our new God - Profit, and spend uncounted restless and fitful hours searching out the right ritual to enact, the right spells to cast and incantations to use to bend all things and people and situations to our will.

For our 'profit.'

And though we try even for an entire lifetime, we find ourselves unable to taste the ghost-feast that turns to dust at our very gaze.  And even then, still we can't imagine a world not tilted upon the axis of profit and loss.

Untill we but look with clear enough a gaze.  And I do mean clear enough.

Companies and institutions need to be profitable to exist - even the non-profit ones, and I get that.  I really do.

And lets not be satisfied with such a low standard as 'profitable,' when the true gold of non-suffering lies within our reach.