From: shava@hermes.oit.unc.edu (Shava Nerad Averett)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: Money for Magick?
Date: 13 Apr 92 18:39:52 GMT
Organization: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In article <1992Apr9.021720.28845@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu> miss059@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu (Pug) writes:
>This is what usually happens with money. You end up being worried about
>it and what it can do for you. How to get more, how to keep it, etc. I
>feel that the more adept of the magickians aren't as worried about this
>than they are about spiritual gain. I could be completely wrong, but
>they seem to be conflicting ideas to me.

But they only can possibly conflict if you give them both valence.
You can have money and not be overly concerned about it, just as you 
can have sex and not let it tie you in knots of anxiety, jealousy,
whatever.

So you are right in that an adept should not be worried about money,
but I think you are wrong in the idea of a conflict between material/
monetary and spiritual ends.

People can get just as tied up in knots over spiritual ambitions as they
can over money...

Someone else in this thread mentioned that a competant magickian would
always end up with what s/he needs.  There are two comments on this:

	(1)  This is easy to do if you have perfect control over your
		needs.  i.e. I need no more than I have at any particular
		moment.  This is a pretty good way to live if you can
		manage it.
	(2)  If you can manage to not get restricted by need, but can
		still deal with money, then part of the magick involved
		in maintaining how much money you have probably involves
		acts of will interperable as magickal acts for which you 
		are remunerated.  For example, I seriously believe that
		I apply my skill in magick to being a campus network
		manager (and can't imagine anyone doing it without,
		sometimes)

The real question here is one of *seeming*.  Does a competant adept 
find it within ethics/pragmatic to sell services which are mundanely
identified as magickal?

I don't sell tarot readings, but I do bring my skills in character
judgement to my dealings with vendors for my work.  I also use my
intuition to help me diagnose network problems.  Anyone who works with
networks competantly learns to rely on "hunches" when obvious analysis
doesn't come up with a fast answer.  Much of my job depends on my 
maintaining good personal and political relationships with scores and
scores of vendors, departments, users, and organizations.  Much of my
job depends on my maintaining a remarkably complex database of reference
material (or pointers to reference material, more like) on hardware,
software, protocols, and all sorts of stuff.

Incidentally, I have no degree, but a reasonable publications list in
the field (actually, more in software tools, and nothing really recent,
but enough to get me established...).  My first computer job was in 1978,
as a data entry operator.  Now I'm one of four engineers running the UNC
campus networks.  The money's not great (I'm still making about $5K less
than I was in Boston...) but I can't complain.  I have a lot of fun, most
of the time!

I'd surely make less money selling tarot readings.

In addition, I find I have the money I need for the things I need.  I 
often find myself strapped for time (time=$?), which if I were not 
working as a computer nerd I would have more time to spend writing.
However, what I also find is that this is teaching me to *make* more
time in the course of a day, and to "thrive on chaos" in order to make
all the pieces of my life work as well as they have to...  So here, again,
I have what I need.

When I finish my book, though, I am not going to give it away to a 
publisher because it is a magickal thingum.  However, I doubt if I'm going
to make a reasonable hourly rate either.  And whatever I do with the
money, it will probably qualify as "plowing it back in" to my magickal
interests.  However, my magickal interests encompass a so much of my
life, that's really hard to avoid...

The entire question is a conundrum.  My attitude is, that I don't mind
getting paid by a person who benefits from the fruits of my labor.  However,
I hate working for non-techies who suspect my every twiddle of their
computer, and I wouldn't want to do tarot for pay for people who might
be thinking I was trying to bilk them.  It's just not pleasant.

Much of the reason I stopped doing consulting, even though it was *LOTS*
more money than I'm getting now, is that I like having a friendly relation-
ship with the folks I'm working with, and the folks I'm working for.  In
consulting, most of the people you are working with are resentful because
often enough they know you're making more money than they are, you're an
outsider, and you aren't worth investing a lot in personally, because you
are going to be leaving in some fairly well-defined short amount of time.
The people you work *for* don't trust you because they "know" you have no
long term investment in being up front with them, and they "know" all
consultants overcharge, and most of the time they are hiring a consultant
because they don't have the local expertise -- which means that they have
no way to judge your work and figure out if you are playing them for
a fool or not.

If you aren't overly concerned with the money, why put yourself in this
kind of situation?  I can think of only a few reasons:  

	(1)	it gives you access to technology and facilities
		otherwise unavailable to you
	(2)	you derive enough pleasure from the work to ignore the
		politics
	(3) 	you are working toward an end which you believe justifies
		the hassles

Work out the parallelisms yourself...


-- 
Shava Nerad Averett				shava_averett@unc.edu
/*  all materials (c)1992, Shava Nerad Averett, and have nothing significant
    to do with the University of North Carolina, a mostly owned subsidiary 
    of the NC Legislature, a mostly owned subsidiary of the DOT.      */
Newsgroups: alt.magick