Urban Sadhu Exploration January 2025
PYS 2.42 saṃtoṣāt-anuttamaḥ sukha-lābhaḥ
Meaning: When one is content, boundless happiness is attained. – Interpretation by Austin Sanderson
When I was a child in the 1970s, the film The Ten Commandments would air annually during the Passover/Easter season on one of the major US television networks. I can still remember the climactic scene in which Moses (played by Charlton Heston) ascends to the top of Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments from God. At the same time, at the mountain's base, the impatient Israelites construct an idol of a golden calf from the spoils brought out of Egypt. An orgy of wild hedonistic debauchery ensues as the Hebrews worship the golden calf, which symbolizes the pursuit of material wealth and earthly pleasures. The orgy of the golden calf is a metaphor for what would become the "seven deadly sins" – envy, greed, pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, and anger. Envy and greed are the root systems of the other five sins. The seven deadly sins emerge from a separation from God, which is the opposite of yoga (union).
After God informs Moses that the Hebrews have fallen into debauchery, Moses descends from the mountain. Enraged at the decadence, he deems the Hebrews unworthy and smashes the Ten Commandments upon the golden calf. The idol explodes, and the Hebrews are forced to wander in the wilderness for forty years as punishment. After the years of banishment, an elderly Moses leads the Hebrews into the promised land of Canaan.
A calf holds no spiritual symbolism to the average modern person; most of us have never been face to face with a calf. But gold is a different story; today, gold still represents wealth, extravagance, luxury, and riches. Gold can be associated with illumination and wisdom, but its negative traits are excessiveness, materialism, greed, vulgarity, and corruption. The most audacious current golden symbol of greed and corruption is Donald J. Trump's golden toilet.
Trump's golden toilet has roots in his well-documented taste for vulgar golden objects. The myth that Trump owns a golden toilet has been a topic of public fascination; it was perpetuated by the media in 2017 when artist Maurizio Cattelan offered his artwork housed at the Guggenheim Museum (a fully functional 18-karat gold toilet titled "America") to the White House after the museum declined a request from White House staff to borrow a Van Gogh painting for Trump's private quarters. Nothing in our modern times can represent the Hebrews’ golden calf more closely than Trump's mythical golden toilet.
Too many Americans have turned their backs on contentment to worship instead at the feet of an unethical orange demi-god of greed, who sits upon his golden toilet surrounded by a cesspool of materialistic zealots unhappy with their lack of gold and possessions. Filled by envy and greed, the zealots have tossed aside any moral compass that could guide them to a place of inner peace.
Envy and greed are like Siamese twins, conjoined at the hip. Envy is characterized by resentfulness and dissatisfaction aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities, or success, while greed is the intense selfishness around wealth, money, power, or food. After accumulating these at any cost, greed hangs on, fearing their loss.
Spiritual communities and practitioners are not immune to envy and greed. In fact, it is common in the modern religious and spiritual landscape to see "money manifestation meditations," "abundance rituals," and "prosperity theology," all designed to trigger the conjoined twins into action but masked with a veil of spiritual bypassing. Spiritual materialism still worships the golden toilet but with the added feature of a toilet bowl deodorizer hanging from the seat rim to mask the foul odor.
The only weapon a sadhaka (spiritual seeker) has to combat envy and greed is the spiritual practice of samtosa (satisfaction, contentment). The word samtosa is derived from two Sanskrit words: sam means “complete,” “whole,” “together,” and tosha means “contentment,” “satisfaction,” and “acceptance.” Samtosa is the elimination of envy and greed, a way of turning one's back on the cult of the golden toilet. The practice of samtosa is like the Serenity Prayer composed by the protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Samtosa is an austerity practice, but it does not mean we are complacent, lack ambition, or are uncaring. It is the willingness to be grateful for how we are, where we are, and what we have. Samtosa means being able to live without fear, jealousy, and anger; at the same time, we start recognizing that by going within ourselves, we can find internal abundance and wealth. The challenge is to practice samtosa in the face of an overwhelming capitalist consumer culture or in a society that celebrates wealth as a virtue. To overcome this, we can start by making an effort not to be envious of what others own or have achieved, and then we can be more generous with those around us.
In the story of the Ten Commandments, Canaan (the promised land) was a land of "milk and honey," a golden land of great wealth, but difficult to find. What if Canaan was not a physical place but a state of mind? Was this why the Israelites had to wander in the wilderness for forty years, looking for this golden land, because they were looking outside themselves? The Sinai Desert is not so big. Could the myth of Canaan, its prosperity, abundance, and wealth, be about looking inward, finding abundance and contentment within? Meditation allows us to extract ourselves from the external material world and move inward. When we detach ourselves from material envy and greed, we can Self-realize our true golden nature where nothing is lacking or needed, a place of contentment within and without.
Austin Sanderson, Urban Sadhu
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