Giving It Away

I'm extremely irritated right now. I was just chastised, on a free and open forum discussing spiritual issues, by someone for not giving away for free my knowledge and experience, in the form of my original writing about my own life. The chastisement arose because I signed my writing, and used the copyright symbol and dated it.

It was implied that only charlatans earn their income from selling their teachings. (Even though I posted this on a forum, for free, with no expectation of anyone even reading it.) It was implied that only a "controlling teacher" would use the copyright symbol. It was implied that I was a bad person for not simply giving away, for no recognition, no cost, no signature, all my hard-earned writing, knowledge and experience. It was presumed that my use of the copyright notice, after posting my own writing, somehow meant that I was trying to force people to believe what I had to say, that I was a running-dog capitalist, and that nothing I said could possibly be of any merit because obviously I was preaching my word from on high!

This is utter bullshit.

And this is what Harlan Ellison has to say about that, which I completely and utterly agree with. (I've posted this before, but apparently even some writers need to be reminded of it.)



Harlan Ellison is exactly right: Why do people assume that writers don't need to be paid? or even given credit, in the form of a proper citation after a quote, for their work?

I'll tell you what I think: Since these implications about my being bad and wrong happened on a forum about spirituality, and since many people involved in searching for an alternative to establishment religions are incredibly dysfunctional about their expectations in terms of their training and search for knowledge, I can make educated guesses about the thinking behind the person who tried to chastise me for daring to sign and copyright my own work.

This person had previously made a comment, later reversed, that there are no real shaman anymore in the world, only charlatans and wannabes. The assumption being that, for example, anyone who pays some expedition leader to take them to have a shamanic experience in the wilds of some tribal culture;s homeland is throwing their money away to charlatans and con-men. Although this person later reversed their opinion that there are no real shaman left in the world, after called on it by a couple of others, myself included, it's clear that he operates under the usual assumption that money can only taint spiritual seeking. That money is inherently evil, and spirituality is inherently good only if kept free of the capitalistic sins of the flesh. Therefore, all books on spirituality which the author got paid to write, and collected royalties upon, are tainted by definition, and therefore all such authors are charlatans. It's perfectly true that some are—but not all, and not for those reasons.

It was further assumed that I was speaking from a position of a teacher who wanted to control the knowledge I was dispensing, merely because I used the copyright symbol. Since I wasn't dispensing knowledge, but only telling my own story, this assumption is ludicrous. The actual pieces of my writing in question are some fragments towards an autobiography, written a few years ago, which are entirely about my own experiences, that tell no one what to think or believe, and are in no way a set of organized teachings or doctrines, and require no one to believe in what I wrote. In fact, the tone of the essay is searching, diffident, hesitant, and vulnerable: a writing in which I felt quite nakedly self-revealing in my honesty about my own life-experiences. To be labeled a "controlling teacher," because I included the copyright symbol when I cut and pasted this writing from my website onto the forum in question, is extremely offensive. I only cut and paste it, rather than linking to it from that forum, because I was encouraged to do so on the grounds that the forum's owner preferred it that way, as he knew that many folks would not exercise themselves to follow links, and it was better to have the contents at hand, for discussion. Had I linked, I doubt I would have been chastised for using the copyright symbol on my own website. (Or on this blog, for that matter.)

At the same time, the person who chastised me (not the forum owner, but a moderator) has repeatedly copied and pasted copyrighted material onto this forum, with no attributions, and no credit given. Even when he openly admits its not his writings, but someone else's, we are not told who that source was.

His rationale is that all spiritual teachings are free and open to all, and should not be controlled. Nowhere does he seem to understand I actually agree with him about spiritual teachings being free and open, and that in fact all that is copyrighted is my words, my own story, my version of the teachings, and my written experience, knowledge, and individual content. Of course no one can control and cage a teaching—the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, everyone knows that already—but my particular translation of the Tao, in my words, is an artistic product that I can take enough credit for to expect to be attributed, and/or compensated.

Again, this is typical of the dysfunction of many contemporary seekers after the truth: it's all free and open, and no one has to pay for anything. That commonly arises from a quite valid rejection of the hypocrisies of many organized religions, which are forever demanding tithes while offering no spiritual sustenance; and it is the lack of spiritual certainty that drives many seekers away from the organized religions they were raised in, to go off and seek something else, something better. We indeed live in a time of the rule of the Pharisees. So it is quite common for many seekers to automatically equate any form of tithing as a rip-off, and furthermore to equate any whiff of named service as automatically coming from a minion of Control. The irony of course is that it was the founders of many of the world's organized religions who equated the accumulation of wealth as being a sin, forever missing the point that it is the attachment to accumulating wealth, not wealth itself, that sours the milk. We take the exhortation to poverty of spirit too literally, and require it to be poverty of flesh, to be saintly. It's amusing how many followers of the new age take this very Christian assumption about the inherent evil of money with them wherever they spiritually travel.

So let me clarify this for you right now: when you offer a white scarf to the Dalai Lama when visiting him, when you offer tobacco to a Lakota elder before a sweatlodge that elder is leading for your healing, you are giving symbolic payment—an exchange of energy—for their accumulated years (or centuries) or wisdom and experience. You are honoring their practice, their accumulated wisdom and knowledge: you honor their knowledge, wisdom, and experience by giving them a symbolic or literal offering. To not so honor one's mentors is to show extreme ingratitude for their teachings, which means that you don't really value them, and probably won't learn anything from them. You wouldn't expect a lawyer to give you the benefit of their years of wisdom and experience for free, so why would you expect that of a spiritual elder? Both may have spent their entire lives in their training and practice, and you went to them precisely because they have done so.

So frak the idea of giving it all away.

Don't ask me to give it away. Don't require me to give it away. If I give it away, it's because I choose to do so.

The choice is mine. How dare you try to take that choice away from me? How dare you try to coerce me into your value and belief system by criticizing mine?

And I won't give away everything I have, or know, for free. For one thing, that dishonors the process of learning I went through to acquire whatever wisdom I might have attained. (Little enough, some days.) Some of it was earned the hard way, through experience. Some of that will not be given away, because I paid a high price to earn it; and giving it away cheapens it.

There's a principle of energy exchange discussed in Reiki training, which I have to come to believe is absolutely necessary to honor, and practice, for the sake of the Reiki work itself at a fundamental level: You cannot and must not give it away, because when someone gets it for free, they don't value it in any way, and they won't get any benefit from it. If you do a Reiki session for someone, and all they can give you is one dollar as a payment, it is essential that they give you that one dollar. Because if they give nothing up, they can easily dismiss what has happened to them, and will not value it, or their own healing process, and so they will not be healed. If you do not honor the healing you have received, and the training lineage of the healer, how can you expect to be healed?

It took me some years to understand this. I used to give it away. I don't anymore. I have lived poor for many years, and many of my friends who wanted a Reiki session from me had no more funds than I. In some cases, we bartered a payment; in others, they were also Reiki practitioners, and we traded Reiki sessions. Other than with other certified Reiki Masters and trainers, I won't do that anymore. It feels like dishonoring my teachers to just give it away; it feels like dishonoring Reiki itself. Let's be absolutely clear about this: If I do a Reiki treatment for you, you must pay me. Period. It can be a tiny amount, and you must still pay me, otherwise there is no energy exchange, and no healing will happen. Paradoxically, the charge for healing is to make sure that the client takes it seriously, rather than goes merrily on their way as though nothing had happened; which they are likely to do if there is no energy exchange.

As a freelance artist, designer, writer, and illustrator, I have sometimes seen the work I did for clients rejected, because they did not like the finished results. (The issue of their unwillingness to work with me, to change it towards what they wanted, is a separate issue; and in several instances, it's because they never told me what they really wanted in the first place, and I was forced to guess, and therefore guessed wrong.) In more than one instance, I had to point out to them, that they are free to throw away everything I did for them, but what they are paying me for was the time and effort I put into their project. They were paying me to work for them, period. They were paying me for the hours I put in on their project, and the skills I spent many years learning—skills they didn't have themselves, because they did not have my training and experience. Which is why they hired me in the first place.

Lots of clients don't understand this very important point: You are not paying for results, you are paying for your freelancer's effort. They are probably as highly trained and skilled as you, and they may have put many hours into the work they did for you. You must pay them for the work they did for you. Period. What you do with that work afterwards is irrelevant, to them, and it should be to you as well.

Paying someone for the work they do for you amounts to expressing gratitude to them in the form of an energy exchange. Many ungrateful managers don't realize how much more their workers would give to them if they expressed simple gratitude, much less respected the worker enough as a person to try to make a fair energy exchange with them.

This is one of the spiritual laws of the Universe: Gratitude is essential. Giving thanks is not something you do once a year, but something you do every moment of every day. Giving thanks comes back to you in so many ways that manifest as many forms of abundance. This was the very simple lesson offered to Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens' A Christmas Carol: Give thanks, or die. Gratitude is what sustains life.

Love is not what makes the world go around, self-esteem is. Without self-esteem there can be no genuine love. And without gratitude, there grows in no heart any genuine self-esteem. It's really very simple: saying Thank you can save a life. It's saved mine, on more than one occasion.

When you hire someone for their knowledge and skill and experience, don't assume they'll give it away for free. Don't ask them to give it away. Don't require them to give it away. Don't make assumptions about their ability or inability to give it away for free. Let them choose, and be grateful for whatever they give you, even if it's not useful to you. Do you respect them only if you can use them? What does that say about your own ethics?

Many writers are nice people, and will give you much more than you asked for, essentially giving you something for nothing, if they like you, and if they like working on your project. But if they give you that extra lagniappe, let it be on their offer, and let it be their choice. Don't assume it, and don't demand it, and don't require it of them. "Mandatory overtime" is an oxymoron.

And for the gods' sakes do not insist that they cannot use the copyright symbol to mark their work, where it's appropriate to do so. Especially if it's one hundred percent their work, and they're sharing it with you. And for the gods' sake give credit where credit is due. Even if you can't pay them for it, don't tell them they can't copyright it.

This is an issue of ethics, honor, respect, and wisdom. Don't pretend it's about anything else. And if you don't think it's about all these things, then you yourself need to ask yourself about your own ethics, honor, ability to show respect, and whether or not you've earned any wisdom, so far, in your own sad, miserable existence. Your actions will give the truth or the lie to all of that.

So, what do you do for money?

Following the spirit road, wherever you are led. It’s a job without a portfolio, resume, or job description. Don’t bother mentioning it to most people, who simply don’t get it.

Scenario: Somebody asks a group of poets: So, what do you do for money?

For me, the most interesting part of this question is not the list of jobs and careers I've had, which is an extensive one—I seem to collect skills and experiences the way some people collect books—but that through it all, nothing has been able to keep me from being creative. Most of the "wrong" decisions I've made in life, from the viewpoint of livelihood, social and family expectations, and cultural attitudes, have been because I felt I had no choice: I had to make the decisions I made, because the alternative was to sell my soul, and die inside. This took no innate courage; it seemed plainly necessary, no more. The choices I've stumbled into have led me towards mostly not making a living, or at least not in any coherent, consistent, stabilized manner. I have the perfect "writer's resume," from the era when you used to read about all the odd jobs that writers would do to collect experience, before publishing their award-winning novels, plays, or poetry. Pfah. Whatever. That and a slice of bread will give you an open-faced sandwich. There's no question that all the "wrong" decisions I've made have had their consequences, mostly negative, with regard to having a stable career, regular promotion or advancement, or any other form of normative social expectations, not excluding familial incomprehension and occasional estrangement. All through this, a process of learning to keep my word and live in integrity with my spiritual callings and my creative daimons, I have steered a manageable if occasionally obscure path; but the truth is, I have no clear idea where I'm going, or what to do next, only where I've been and what I've recorded.

But all along, the real job has been one that's never fit comfortably on a resume, a job description, or an answer to that perennial cocktail-party question, "So, what do you do to make a living?" I attend few cocktail parties, although I'm comfortable traveling in many social circles. Are you a gentleman of leisure? a gentleman of poverty? living in a cave, monk-like, ne'er-do-well, adrift on the winds of change? a monk or a bum, and is there a difference? Was the difference between Merton and Kerouac merely the locus of monastery grounds? The difficulty is that "What do you do for a living?" is a question that most people equate with "Who are you?" Here, meet my friend—who are you?—I'm a doctor. No, really, who are you?

Every artist knows those are differing answers, and lives within the double-tension of that difference between lives and callings, work and soul, job and necessity—price enough to pay for following one's calling, perhaps. That tension between questions and answers leads me to ignore the question, most of the time, as simply the wrong question to ask. Far more interesting questions are, where have you compromised? where have you prostituted yourself? where been an ungrown child? where have you sabotaged your own excellence? where felt the victim? and where, if at all, incorporated and integrated these into yourself, the unfinished person? There are expected answers to the question, which I cannot give, because they don't matter; they're the fictions of a lifetime. The unexpected answers are far more alive.

What is the real work, then, if it’s not some job that you do to support your art and just pay the bills?

Let's try a re-phrase of an earlier statement another poet somewhere made, which was "every poem comes at a price," or something close to that in meaning. The meaning that that poet was going for was a Romantic idea of suffering for the sake of your art; which I objected to, and still do. Let's think about it this way, because I see this emerging from many of the personal stories of artists who work various odd jobs, and skip college or grad school, to pursue the art of living and gathering experience. I re-phrase the statement as:

It is not a price one pays. It is, rather, a sacrifice one chooses to make.

Some might pay a higher cost, in their given sacrifice, than others; but who is to say which cost is more dear, to the soul of an artist? And the element of choosing to follow one's muse, to follow one's path, which is in itself no determinant of ultimate success or failure, is a common enough thread that it's noteworthy. As is the element of not-choosing, in the same way. You cannot be a victim of circumstance as long as you retain choice in these matters.

The element of sacrfice herein is the choice an artist makes to pursue their art, regardless of other costs. And if there are other responsibilities, such as to family or children or other long-time companions, than there is a balance to be found, in life, between living and Making. Where the choices fall is what I think is interesting. There are also some choices that we accede to, rather than setting out to follow: choices that time and happenstance lay onto us, that we might or might not have deliberately chosen for our lives; in which case, choice lies in the arena of how we respond to those situations and events. Choices that we have to face because of, for lack of a better word, fate. But we still have a choice in how we respond to circumstances, and what we do with what has been given to us.

I have lived both sides of that choice, at various times in my life: making big bucks in the corporate design, marketing and advertising worlds—and not miserable while doing so. I may have lacked full time attention for art-making, but I still somehow managed to make art, survive as an artist. Occasionally I ran headlong into the conflict around selling my talents while trying to maintain my personal integrity, but I was usually able to find a balance I could live with; and there were a few occasions where I had to choose my integrity over the job, and move on. At other times, such as now, I have lived a very monk-like existence, and have to deal with both the anxieties and freedoms of being destitute and impoverished financially. As an old samurai saying goes, When you know you're about to die, you can do anything. There is a freedom to having nothing, even while there are limits to what you can do, in other ways. But again, finding one's place along that continuum can be a matter of choice, and what we choose to sacrifice, in order to follow our path.

But I can say, heretical and misunderstood for a poet to say, as it often is: the path I chose which led me to where I am, was ultimately a spiritual path. It was not in service to poetry, or music, or even creativity as a whole—although all of those are manifestations of the path. Those are both tools and products of the spiritual path. But my compass is Spirit, rather than Art, although Art is sure way of expressing Spirit. Perhaps they are not really distinguishable.