I went to Thailand and saw the Asoke communities that our friend Linda had tried to tell me about. One of the most interesting philosophies I viewed in practice there was that earning personal (spiritual) merit by doing good things in the community and in the world is more valuable to each individual than earning profit.

After all, it's the personal merit we earn - the good spirit in which we lived and how we are remembered by others - that lingers in the community (and possibly stays with us) after we are physically gone. When we limit our personal motives to earning profit, we leave too much out of the equation that can lead to happiness in life.

I don't think this means that profit needs to be completely driven out of the equation, but we need to readjust our perceptions of what we need, what is enough, and what is too much.

In Thailand, Linda also shared a video with me that another of our friends, Gayle had posted somewhere here but that I'd not been able to see on my Ugandan bandwidth. http://www.storyofstuff.com/ really drives it all home for me, in terms of rethinking our world and our individual roles in it.