THE ECONOMY OF
SIMPLICITY
~~~
The Luxury of Contentment
~~
A manual
for a frugal life
to help you cope with
changing financial circumstances
~
Passed
down to you by
A Simple Prophet
~~~~~
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 A Simple Prophet
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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You have taken a pay cut or maybe you have lost your job.
Now life here in the West is a little harder
But the sky has not fallen.
Take a deep breath
See, you still have the air to breath.
Your pockets have less weight
But you still have pants to wear.
You cannot afford pan fried monkfish in caper sauce
But maybe all you need is a bowl of rice.
Let us return to the basics.
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Recipe – Meditation Soup
4 eggs,
8 oz flour,
6 large raisins,
1 tomato,
4oz castor sugar,
2 fish.
Gather these ingredients on the worktop and stare at them for 25 minutes.
Then put them away.
Food is something no living being can do without. From the tiniest orgasm to the largest Whale – everything needs food to fuel its existence. They say we are at the top of the food-chain. Think of any creature living on the Earth and I guarantee you will find this creature on a menu somewhere in the world. I remember sitting down in a restaurant in an affluent western city some years ago and overhearing a man beside me ordering a Silver Backed Gorilla Penis with garlic bread and sautéed potatoes .
“Why are you eating this Silver Backed Gorilla Penis,” I asked the man when the enormous dish arrived.
“Because it is on Chef’s Special,” he replied, and pointed to the blackboard where sure enough “Silver Backed Gorilla Penis with garlic bread and sautéed potatoes” was the Chef’s Recommended Dish of the Day.
“Don’t you realise this creature is in danger of imminent extinction?” I asked.
“I’m not surprised,” said his female companion, eying the large dish and shifting uncomfortably in her chair.
It then became obvious to me that we stand on top of this so called food chain not because we must but because we can. People in the West no longer eat because they are hungry – they eat for a novelty, a taste, for fun or to be fashionable.
All my life I have eaten only rice, (although on an occasional dark winter’s morning I have consumed an unfortunate small reptile that has wandered into my rice-bowl). I have survived well on this simple and basic food. To eat too much has a negative effect on the functioning of our body and mind. Have you ever stuffed your belly with a large meal and then fallen asleep? Your body has to work hard to digest all the food. This leaves less energy for your brain. You feel worn out. It also makes you fat. And this leads to one of the great paradoxes of the western world:
You work hard to earn money to buy food to make yourself fat, and then you work harder to make more money to buy gym membership to make yourself thin.
When I am at home, people come to me and say “Please help me - I have nothing to eat?” but here people come and say “Please help me – I am fat”.
So let me address the question: Why are you fat?
Before I answer, I must ask you: Why do you eat?
For normal people the answer is – Hunger!
So I must ask – For what do you Hunger?
The answer is not as simple as you might think. It is true that the evolutionary purpose of hunger is to remind us to eat. but here in the affluent West, you might eat because you are tired or upset or drunk.
A man came to me recently and begged me to help him stop eating. He was really really fat, but during our conversation it became clear to me that the root of his problem was not his overeating, but his semi-psychotic desire to self harm. He has since lost all this weight and the last time I was cleared to visit him at the secure mental hospital I had him committed to, he cried and thanked me.
There are different kinds of hunger. Some people are hungry for money, some are hungry for fame and how often has someone told you they are hungry for love?
You constantly hunger for different things in your lives, but sometimes you have crossed wires and eat a box of chocolate chip cookies when you really want a hug. When your heart calls out for love do not mistake it for a rumbly tummy.
You cannot feed your soul with a hamburger.
I am not the first to formulate these thoughts. When I first visited the West, I heard similar sentiments expressed by popular American singer, Osca Chubble. I enquired about him and found that his work has great philosophical depths. In his song “Fat and Horny” he says:
I’m starving for lovin’,
And I’m feelin’ so randy,
But instead of your muffin
I’m here eatin’ candy
If you listen closely, many of his songs have a culinary theme:
Hey chocolate cake,
I wanna whip your cream,
Won’t you fry my steak,
In your cooking machine
Osca is a large man and his work explores the conflict between craving for food and physical desires. When I met him in New York in August 2010, he showed me some movies which further illustrated this point. He presented me with one of these DVD’s as a gift and this led to my arrest at the Library of Spiritual Development in Chicago where I unwisely used clips from it to illustrate my lecture there.
I would like to take this opportunity to fulfil the condition of my release and publicly apologise for this mistake.
I will discuss this case at greater length later in the book.
You need to simplify your love affair with food.
You need to understand that you eat to survive – not to stimulate yourself sensually or spiritually. You leer at your food. Sometimes when I listen to these cooks on TV I wonder if they want to eat their dinner or copulate with it.
I do not leer at my bowl of rice. I do not desire to copulate with it. I just want to eat it. It is just food.
A good friend of mine, a former president of the United States, once told me he would “rather have a dull meal with an exciting woman than an exciting meal with a dull woman.”
At night, after our meal, I could often hear him copulating until the dawn.
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Recipe - The Cocktail of Life.
Pure fresh water
An empty glass
Pour the water into the emptiness, stir, and imbibe.
How many different things are there on earth to drink?
Ten thousand different kinds of beer,
Ten thousand different kinds of soda,
Ten thousand different kinds of Tea,
Ten thousand different kinds of wine,
You might take a hundred years to name them all– but what is the only common and pure ingredient of them? The answer is the single most important element in the history of all human civilisation.
Water
You are very lucky in this part of the world to have so much of it, and yet you complain bitterly about the rain. You do not realise how fortunate you are.
Where I come from, it once did not rain for 2 years. The land dried up and the crops would not grow. The people were thirsty and prayed for rain, they partook countless superstitious rituals in the hope it might wring a single drop from the sky – but to no avail. We had to walk many miles to bring water from a deep well to quench our thirst and water our animals.
In the end it arrived on my brother’s wedding day. We had a terrible day and the photographs were ruined, but soon the crops began to grow again.
Every living thing in this world needs to drink. But the good news is:
This does not have to cost you a penny!
I see people buying water in the shop – seeking out the most expensive brand because they believe if it costs more it must be somehow better than normal water.
Water is called water!
When something is added to it, it is called:
Pollution
Your body needs and craves for the simple basic water that falls from the clouds in the sky, not the things you have mixed into it. Our ancestors drank pure water, but then, some smart guy thought it a good idea to tamper with it, perhaps a simple beer was created. Later, tea was discovered.
Look at you now – with your smoothies and mochas, energy drinks and lavish wines.
Drink water from the well. If you have no well, drink it from the tap.
“But,” you say, “the tap water is bad for me.”
This makes me so mad.
Water is the very basis of life and you say your drinking supply is poisoned - but you do not complain. You go to the shops and buy it instead.
Yet, if your favourite TV programme is on, and the signal suddenly cuts out, you will run to the phone and demand an explanation from your service provider.
My friend Lisa complains of having no money, while she hands over a handful of cash for a double espresso.
“Why are you buying a double espresso?” I ask her.
“It wakes me up” she says.
“Are you falling asleep?”
“No, but it gives me a kick.”
I offer to give her a kick for free.
I notice here, when people talk about “drink”, they are not referring to the quenching of their thirst, but to an alcoholic beverage.
When they say “Let us go for a drink,” they are not going to the well but to the Pub.
The abuse of alcohol is a social illness. This is common to all cultures. People do terrible things when they are drunk. They might fight, urinate in public, vomit or have sex.
I have never been tempted to try alcohol, but there are few in this world who have not been touched by an experience with it. My own brother came to rely upon it.
After his wedding day – which was destroyed by the freak rains – he became a drunkard. His wife soon left him and her brothers decided to kill him. He disappeared for many days but at last I found him, hidden high in the branches of a tree nursing a bottle of whiskey to help him forget his troubles.
I wanted to help him to see that life in a drunken state is not a life at all. It is like paying to go in and see a show and then closing your eyes when the stage lights up, or going to a concert and covering your ears when the music begins. It is hiding from reality in a state of detached numbness. I wanted to show him that life, and indeed fear, was not something to hide from but something to embrace. Sadly, his wife’s brothers had followed me and they shot him out of the tree before I had a chance to tell him these things.
Do not waste your hard earned money on drinks. If you want a kick, join a kung-fu academy. If you want to forget, lose yourself in a movie or a daydream or a good book.
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When there are bubbles in the water
Do the fish
Complain about the dry?
We all need shelter, whether it be from the beating sun or the driving rain. An Eskimo creates an igloo from snow and ice, an Ethiopian tribesman constructs a hut from cow dung and sticks, a Bantu warrior sleeps safely in a hollowed out tree.
One day last January, my good friend Dr. Albert Schwimmer and I were watching a severe winter storm. He had invited me to stay with him and his lovely wife in their new home in Canada. It was early in the morning and we stood in his kitchen observing the fierce winds whip the falling snow into a raging whirl of torment. Dr Schwimmer, still in his pyjamas and slippers, was sipping a cup of hot coffee when he noted that one of the new decorative tiles on his kitchen wall was not perfectly straight. He became angry about this and declared his intention to contact the workman and complain. Recognising an opportunity to instil a valuable lesson into him, I seized him by the collar, quickly opened the triple glazed glass doors, and flung him into the storm. I watched him roll in the snow, then fight the wind to scramble to his feet and struggle back to bang on the door. I smiled at him, and left him out there for twelve minutes.
When I let him back in, he experienced a great sense of wellbeing and understood for the first time the true luxury of shelter. A luxury that is not in the quality of the furnishing, the bathroom fittings, or the carpeting on the stairs – but a luxury that is in strong walls and a steady roof to protect against harsh elements and provide somewhere safe to sleep and eat for you, your family and friends.
Dr. Schwimmer appreciated his home for the splendid structure it was and never again complained about minor things like crooked tiles or poor joinery. He thanked me for this wisdom as he lay dying in his bed later that week. I only wish I could have imparted it to him when he was a younger man, perhaps if I did he would have enjoyed his eighty-five years on this earth just a little more.
As with so many things in the West, the simplicity of a necessary craft has accelerated into a commercial industry. Thus, when it comes time for a family member to leave the comfort of a parents dwelling, you do not gather together with love to build a home for him; you have a construction industry to do it for you. You have brick-layers and carpenters and plasterers and property developers and civil engineers who produce homes as though they were sandcastles. Then you have sales agents to convince you that this house is worth its weight in gold and you spend the rest of your life working like a slave to pay for it.
Do not bankrupt your life for a fancy shelter.
I am not advising to go into a nearby field and build a house out of rocks and tree branches; if you do this you will be in violation of planning laws and upset the owner of the field, but remember the words of my friend Mother Theresa, that saintly woman who gave up her life to provide shelter and clothes for the poor of Calcutta:
“A child is better off in a warm pigsty feeding on a sow’s tit than lying hungry on the cold marble floor of a rich man’s mansion.”
Mother Theresa did not actually say these words, but it is something I am sure she must have thought to herself when she went to bed at night.
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