Pink House

Traditions at Pink House
#1: Commensalism—When we eat at the large round wooden dinner tables at Pink House we practice commensalism, that is, sharing a meal together with no phones or other distractions at the table. Commensalism, derived from the Latin commensalis, means sharing a meal together with the emphasis on human togetherness and interaction.

“All time, past, present and future, is contained in the now." I heard the philosopher J. Krishnamurti say these words in Bombay in 1985. They were to be among his last words. Soon after, he was dead.

If we acknowledge that time is circular rather than linear, we can allow Tolstoy's wise hermit from The Three Questions (1903) to explain Krishnamurti’s beautiful, enigmatic words thus: "Remember then: there is only one time that is important - Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power."

Gandhi expressed the same idea as “means are the ends.” In other words, the why is contained in the how.

In answering the how we automatically answer the why.

However, pursuing the why, as we have in the West for the last two hundred and fifty years, makes us lose sight of the how. When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western Civilization he replied that it would be a good idea.

In Dickens’ great story, the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future take Ebenezer Scrooge on journeys through time and space. These journeys are journeys into Scrooge’s own life, past, present, and future. A journey into consciousness.

When Scrooge’s travels are over, it is Christmas day.

I spent the last four Christmases in the Philippines, a deeply religious traditional society. After Krista died I threw myself into community-building at Pink House out on our island. Each Christmas in the Philippines reminded me that all I knew was how, and that if I followed the how the why would be contained in it.

How we celebrate Christmas (or any religious holiday) is far more important than why we do so. Christmas (or any religious holiday) Is recognized by our consciousness as home.

Wishing all my friends near and far a happy and enlightening Christmas. May you all make it home.

PINK HOUSE
Christmas 2021

Try to relax a little...

Prayer + Meditation = Bliss

House Blessing of Pink House
August 18 2020

Pink House is a practical expression of my teaching. Besides being our home and meditation center it contains within its walls Pink Store which is an experiment in what I call commerce without capitalism. People within communities practiced commerce for centuries before the creation of capitalism. Historically, capitalism was an unnatural expression of commerce and had to be established with violence and force. Legislation that was created to establish capitalism led to the destruction of centuries-old patterns of reciprocity in economics. (1)

Pink Store seeks to reestablish reciprocity in economics in a theoretically rigorous and practically tangible way within the context of our community of about five hundred households on Bohol Island in the Philippines.

Capitalism extracts Surplus Value from work by paying people less than the value they create: people are simply paid a subsistence wage, that which is required to subsist. At Pink Store we have been using a principle that I call subsistence profit. Our margins are just enough to let us restock our shelves and buy our rice. (2)

At Pink Store we have replaced the Surplus Value of capitalism with the Dignity Value of commerce without capitalism. (3)

Our ice cream is delicious and costs about half of what it costs in the grocery store so we always sell out. Yesterday a delivery truck brought us Pink Store’s prized new possession: a giant ice cream freezer painted bright pink. We have tubs and tubs of ice cream, cones and sticks; lollies to love and sherbets to savor. So drop by sometime. Over ice cream we can watch the koi in our meditation pond grow.

Abhay (Aby) and Jane

Pink House

Bohol Island, The Philippines.

19 July 2020

Notes:

(1) See Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001, originally published in 1944. Polanyi was a great economic anthropologist and economic historian, mentor to my own mentor at Northwestern University, George Dalton. Dalton was an expert in economic reciprocity who sadly died two years after he started mentoring me. Also see Martha C. Howell’s Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 for an excellent historical discussion of commerce in Europe before the introduction of capitalism.

(2) To ‘buy our rice’ is a lovely expression in the local Bisaya language (distinct from Tagalog) of our island. Gandhi would have liked the expression very much I think. It means just enough to get by.

(3) See Abhay Ghiara & Matthew Goulish (2012) Four More Years of Economics #9 and #10: Homo Bulla – The ethics and aesthetics of failure, and after the Jungle – Murder mystery an economics and performance letter-writing project, Performance Research, 17:1, 21-32, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2012.651859. In this piece I introduce and explain my concept of Dignity Value.

Pink Store is now open! Pink Store is an experiment in commerce without capitalism. An experiment in give and take, the building of interrelationships.

Commerce, the densest of human activities, relates in the ancient Indian yogic tradition of my maternal ancestors with red, the first chakra or energy point. Red is energy, pure and undiluted. It is the material building block of a society.

Pink Store is a convenience store, with everything from rice to milk, pencils to razor blades, and of course, our bestseller—ice cream! Being the only vendor of ice cream in the neighborhood means that we are visited at all hours of the day by happy families with laughing children, and sell out as soon as we replenish our stock.

While Pink Store relates to the lowest, densest chakras, the meditation koi pond now under construction at Pink House relates to the highest, most subtle chakras: silver, purple, pink, and violet. Prayer and/or meditation are the oldest forms of relationship-builders in the realm of the subtle.

By combining a convenience store and a meditation center under one roof, Pink House is an experiment in integration; an experiment in creating interrelationships between the dense and the subtle.

Gandhi said that a group of people was just the masses. However, that same group of people with interrelationships, is a society.

Commerce (before capitalism) and prayer/meditation have always been the great agents of community building and at Pink House we hope for even more; we hope to build a society.

We invite all ice cream lovers—the entire community of neighbors and all of you into our fold!

Aby and Jane

Pink House

Tagbilaran, Bohol, The Philippines

Notes: For an excellent study of commerce before capitalism in the European context see Martha C. Howell’s Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.