What We’re Really Seeking through Consumption
Once, not long after I was ordained as a Zen priest, I visited my cousin in Miami. An oral surgeon, my cousin is good at what he does and consequently rather wealthy. He is also quite enamored of cars. When he takes a fancy to a particular kind of car, he buys several so that he typically has a small fleet of the same model, in different colors and with slightly different features. On this particular visit, he was taken with the Chevrolet Corvette. Tentatively he asked whether I’d like to take a ride in one, and I said sure. He rolled the convertible top down, and we went speeding along in the wonderful warm south Florida weather. I was impressed with the automobile’s smooth handling and considerable power, and I enjoyed the ride thoroughly.
On our return, when I expressed my enthusiasm for the car, my cousin was surprised at my reaction.. He’d expected that, as a religious person, I’d disapprove of his conspicuous consumption. And maybe I did. But apart from any ideas I had about consumption, I told him, I could appreciate the actual experience of riding in the automobile. “In experiencing the material world,” I explained with all the didactic authority of a newly ordained priest, “there are always two elements at play: the material object — in this case the car, the highway, the scenery going by — and the sense organs and mind that apprehend that object. So-called materialists emphasize the object; so-called nonmaterialists, or religious people emphasize the sense organs and the mind. But we need both. The key point is, though, that if the mind and the sense organs are acute enough, even a fairly humble object can bring a great deal of satisfaction. This is how much money I save by practicing Zen: I can get all the satisfaction I need out of just one ride; I don’t have to buy the car!”
The truth is, what we call “materialism” isn’t really materialistic, it is idealistic. In other words, it is not the objects that we are after in our consuming; it is the ideals those objects represent.
Norman Fischer
from When You Greet Me I Bow; Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen