On Embodied Souls in Business: Hinduism and Christianity

A man whose chosen Hindu name is Vridavanath spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025 on the plight and ultimate aim of an embodied soul as described in the Bhagavad-Gita. A conditioned soul/self (atman) that has entered the material realm and is thus subject to karmic consequences can come back to the divine source of all: the One that is in all. As material, embodied beings while alive, that is, as both biological and spiritual, we are prone to getting locked into dualities of attachment and aversion, which in turn play right into suffering. We forget that we are wearing material masks, and that our real identity (atman) is greater than our material roles that we assume in our daily lives. Through our actions, we bind ourselves by the law of karma. Before being born into the material realm, a person’s unembodied soul (atman) knew Krishna, but as embodied, the soul/self relates to other corporeal bodies rather than to other people as spiritual beings and thus in compassion. Why does Brahman or Krishna—the respective impersonal or personal notions of Absolute Truth—create the world with separateness from the divine included?  Furthermore, how is a devotee of Krishna to navigate working in business, given the separateness woven into the very fabric of our daily existence as material and spiritual beings?

Body, soul, and matter are the three fundamental elements in the created realm. Fundamentally, we are free beings but we are subject to attachments in the created realm. Honoring the free will of the soul, Brahman or Krishna creates separateness in Creation; it is not that conscious being or the supreme deity wants us to be in a condition of separation from the divine. Rather, the embodied soul is guided in part out of its inclination to live separately from the divine, and Brahman or Krishna use creative energy to accommodate the inclination and thus human free-will. It follows that not only goodness, but also passion and ignorance are the fundamental elements of the soul’s material (embodied) existence in the material world.

As the Supreme Soul, according to Vridavanath, Krishna leads embodied souls to goodness even though Krishna (and Brahman) transcends goodness. Similarly, liberation (moksha) is achieved when there is no longer any residue from good and bad karma. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard makes the same point: that the divine command that Abraham gets to sacrifice his son Isaac trumps the ethical verdict of murder (and even attempted murder, as Abraham is commanded by Yahweh to put down his knife at the last minute). From the standpoint of the (ethical) good, Abraham is guilty of attempted murder. Yet from a theological standpoint, the divine command is to sacrifice rather than murder Isaac. This can only be viewed as absurd to other characters in the story, for they do not have access to the divine command that is given exclusively to Abraham. The ultimate goal in a faith narrative is theological rather than ethical, for such a narrative lies squarely in the sui generis domain of religion, even if that of ethics is related.

In his talk, Vridavanath said that the ultimate goal of the embodied soul/self in the Bhagavad-Gita is to know Krishna, by using the faculty of buddhi, which is the enlightened use of the reasoning faculty of the mind to know the source of the created realm. However, does knowledge exhaust devotion? It seems that the former is better suited to Absolute Truth being impersonal than to it being assumed to be personal, as a Supreme Person. In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, "Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you sacrifice, whatever you give, whatever austerities-you-perform—do that . . . (as) an offering to Me. Thus you will be freed from the bonds of action (whose) fruits are auspicious (or) inauspicious. Released, (with) the self-yoked by the Yoga of renunciation, you will come to Me."[1] The goal thus surpasses good as well as bad karma, and thus ethics, as the world itself must be renounced in terms of being attached to it for a person to be liberated. This does not mean non-action, according to the Gita; rather, renunciation means non-attachment to consequences of actions. The embodied soul/self is to do one’s duty in actions without being concerned about the results. Krishna also advocates meditation, as well as bhakti-yoga, the path of offering love by infusing each activity with love of Krishna and all creatures.

The inclusion of "whatever you give" includes offering in devotion to Krishna the fruits of one's labor (i.e., monetary compensation) yet without being attached to the consequences of our actions, including whether there will be a monetary bonus. Rather than desiring wealth, being duty-bound to perform one’s job and giving of one’s compensation to charity in devotion to Krishna and compassion to other people is the way to avoid accumulating bad karma from being greedy and ultimately to return to Krishna, and thus be liberated from any future rebirth (samsara).

The approach corresponds to the Christian social-ethic paradigm whose dominance replaced that of the one wherein having wealth is tightly coupled to greed, regardless of how the wealth is used.[1] That other paradigm is epitomized by Jesus’s saying that a rich person getting into the kingdom of God is like a camel getting through the eye of a needle (I have trouble even putting a thread through a needle’s eye). 

In the Gita, a devotee of Krishna can and in fact should fight in battle, and by implication, be a highly paid CEO of a company, but without being attached to the resulting fame and wealth, respectively. As in the “pro-wealth” (i.e., uncoupled) paradigm of Christianity, a devotee of Krishna does not have to renounce accumulating wealth, as long as at least some of it is given away in charity, in order to avoid serving two masters—Krishna and mammon. That Christian paradigm is, however, less strict because the Jesus-devotee does not have to be detached from the consequences of one’s work, including the prospect of getting a bonus. 

I submit, therefore, that the Christian “pro-wealth” paradigm is more suspectable to the onslaught of greed. This may be why Jesus in the Gospels is firm in demanding that the rich man give away all of his wealth to follow Jesus. It can be concluded that the susceptibility to succumb to greed is treated as higher in the “pro-wealth” Christian paradigm that in the Bhagavad-Gita.

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1. Gita 9.27-28 in Georg and Brenda Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), p. 199.
2. Skip Worden, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit and Wealth and God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth.

God's Gold through the Centuries

In the wake of the financial crisis that came to a head in September of 2008, people might have been wondering if sufficient moral constraints on the greed on Wall Street are available, even possible. The ability of traders to create complex derivative securities that are difficult for regulators to regulate, much less understand, may have people looking for ethical or even religious constraints. It would be only natural to ask if such “soft” restraint mechanisms really do have the puissance to do the trick.

Here’s the rub: the tricksters are typically the last to avail themselves of ethical or religious systems, and they the wrongdoers are the ones in need of the restraint. Blankfein said of his bank, Goldman Sachs, that it had been doing God’s work. About a week after saying that, he had to walk his statement back and admit that the bankers had does some things that were morally wrong. Although divine omnipotence is by definition not limited by human ethical systems, it is hard to imagine a divine decree telling bankers to tell their clients one thing (buy subprime mortgage derivatives) while taking the opposite position on the bank’s proprietary position (shorting the derivatives, beyond being a counterparty to clients). Divine duplicity seems to represent an oxymoron on a megascale rather than a justification for greed.
As the crisis erupted and was subsequently managed by public officials in government and new managers brought in to salvage AIG, I was researching the history of Christian thought on profit-seeking and wealth. I have since published an academic text and a nonfiction book, which develops further on the treatise on the topic. As the book is too recondite for sane people (i.e., outside of academia), I am writing a non-fiction book on the topic for a broader readership.
To whet the appetites of those of you who are waiting for something more readable that a recondite thesis, I present a brief account of my original research on the topic here. Most significantly, I found evidence of a gradual shift in the thought between Aquinas and the fifteenth-century Christian Humanists (mainly in what is now Italy). Whereas early Christian thought had tended to stress the negative attitude toward riches—the camel being in extreme pain in getting through the eye of the needle—in the Renaissance Christian theologians tended to argue that being wealth is necessary for a Christian to exercise the godly practical virtues of liberality and magnificence (particularly the latter, which alone permits gifts reflective of God’s majesty).
Something had happened in the dominant Christian attitude on wealth that made the religion less of a buttress against greed because it had become possible for a Christian to be both rich and to go to heaven. Cosimo de Medici is a perfect example of a banker who was assured by the pope that a career based on usury would not necessarily bar a banker from entering heaven (assuming he gave financially to the Church).
The various Reformers can be read as efforts to pull Christianity back from being so close to incorporating love of gain, or greed. I looked at the (Standard Oil) monopolist and devout Baptist, John D. Rockefeller, to get a sense of how efficacious the Reformation was in attempting to arrest and reverse the momentum of the pro-wealth Christian paradigm.
Having sketched the shift and subsequent reactions of the Reformers, I turned my attention to trying to explain both the shift itself and the efficacy of the Reformation. I believe the increasingly commercialized environment since the Commercial Revolution does not provide enough of an explanation; I contend that one must look at the religion itself to find the roots of the shift and the results of the Reformation as concerns the religion's theological attitudes toward wealth. In other words, Christianity itself must be examined. As you read through the book, you could do worse than ask yourself: is there something deeper in Christianity at work in the historical shift in thought on wealth and profit-seeking?  You will find my theory in the conclusion. Undoubtedly, you will develop your own as you reflect as you read.
The main question I pose through the treatise is whether religion itself, as a phenomenon touching the human domain of existence, can hold us back from ourselves even when we least want it to do so. If so, then a religion operating in the human domain can operate as a wholly-other mechanism by which sins such as greed can be reduced in force or perhaps even finally extirpated. To expunge the sordid stuff from our banks and corporations, human nature itself would have to be radically changed. Perhaps the question is whether it is possible even if not probable for religion operating through human beings to accomplish this task, given that religion cannot but interact with the world.

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See related essay: "Religious Sources of Business Ethics"

The non-fiction book: God's Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth. Available at Amazon. 

Pope Francis Excommunicates the Italian Mafia: How Tight is Christianity?

As though a lamb going into a lion’s den, Pope Francis journeyed to Sibari in southern Italy on the Summer Solstice of 2014 to castigate the Italian mafia, and more specifically the Ndrangheta crime group, as an example of “the adoration of evil.”  He added that “(t)hose who in their lives follow this path of evil, as mafiosi do, are not in communion with God. They are excommunicated.”[1] Presumably so too are the mafia families in other European states, and in the American states as well. As laudable as such excommunicating is, the fact that such murderous thugs have regarded themselves as Catholics, and, more generally as Christian, points to a more profound need for reform within the religion itself. In this essay, I draw on The Godfather saga to present this argument.

From: “Pope Francis Excommunicates the Mafia: Lessons from ‘The Godfather’”

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[1] Reuters, “Pope Excommunicates Mafiosi,” The Huffington Post, June 21, 2014.

Discipleship of Women: Jesus's Wife

A small fragment of papyrus with Coptic (Egyptian) writing referring to Jesus Christ and his wife, Mary, dates authentically back to at least the sixth to ninth centuries, and perhaps as early as the fourth, Harvard University announced after two years of study and scientific testing. Although by no means evidence or proof that Jesus was married and recognized his wife as one of his disciples, the text can give us moderns a glimpse of the diversity of Christian thought even in the early Middle Age (i.e., between Augustine and Aquinas). The sheer variety discovered by now of the various "schools" of historical Christian thought (e.g., The Gospel of Thomas, The Book of Q, etc.) may seem odd to the extent that a "one size fits all" status quo has been set as the default for "Christian." Accordingly, the more we discover of an antiquated perspective in the history of Christianity, the more we discover about the religion in our own day, and even our world itself.

(Image Source: The Huffington Post)

As it survives, the fragment is a bit of a puzzle. In quotes in the first line is the statement, “My mother gave to me li[fe.”  The next line, “the disciples said to Jesus, “ presumably includes the next line’s content, “Mary is worthy of it.“ Worthy of what? Lest we automatically assume the Mary here is Jesus’s mother, the reference could also be to Mary Magdalene.

Firstly, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene contains the line,  “Jesus kissed her on her . . .”). Second, accidentally discovered in Jerusalem in 1980, a tomb contained ossuaries (small coffins for bones) having inscriptions including “Jesus, son of Joseph,” two Marys, James, Joseph, James, Matthew, and “Judah, son of Jesus.”[1] In spite of James Cameron’s documentary detailing the scientific studies of the scant surviving DNA matter, the world seemed not to notice. Third, the next two lines in the fragment have Jesus saying “to them” (i.e., the disciples), “My wife” and “she will be able to be my disciple.”[2] Presumably Jesus is saying his wife is able to be one of his disciples, and his mother was worthy of it too.

As with many of the theological shifts through the ages of Christian thought, the fragment here may reflect the Church in the context (i.e., time and place) in which the text was written. The place of women in the Coptic Church centuries after Christ may have needed some support out of the mouth of Jesus himself—vicariously, that is.

Similarly, our reading of the cryptic Coptic words cannot but be colored by our context in which women have been clawing their way back into clerical positions. The force of the Vatican’s initial reaction to the fragment—that it is a forgery—is itself an indication our times, and specifically how differently the fragment plays today than in the context of the author.

In short, the shifting sands of historical Christian thought, including its various uses of Jesus as a mouthpiece, should not be confused with historical evidence concerning those uses. Faith seeking understanding morphs into something else entirely once it seeks to capture empirical history for its own.

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[1] Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino, “The Jesus Family Tomb: The Evidence Behind the Discovery No One Wanted to Find” (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).

[2] Jaweed Kaleem, “’Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’ Papyrus Is Ancient, Not Fake, Scientists and Scholars Say,” The Huffington Post, April 10, 2014.

Quitting Money: Crazy in Christian Terms?

In 12 years, Daniel Suelo has not made a penny; neither has he spent one. In 2000, he left his remaining $30 in a phone booth (remember those?) and never looked back. He went on to live on public lands, foraging for food and accepting alms from others.  Mark Sundeen, who wrote The Man Who Quit Money about his friend, told an interviewer, “I assumed he had gone crazy or had some kind of mental breakdown. But that is not the case.”[1] The key to unpacking Suelo’s life-choice is to view it as a spiritual journey.

Throughout the history of Christianity, theologians have expressed various views on the relationship between greed and profit-seeking (wealth). Suelo’s path is in line with the strict anti-wealth school expressed in the writings of Tertullian, Ambrose, Jerome, and Justin, and demonstrated in the lives of Paulinus of Nola and Godric of Finchale. Godric was a merchant-trader during the first century of the Commercial Revolution of the High Middle Age. He believed that any profit or wealth were utterly incompatible with salvation, so he gave his buried fortune to the poor and lived for fifty years as a hermit. By modern standards, Godric’s choice looks bizarre—even crazy. The key to understanding Godric’s choice is to view it as part of a spiritual journey.

One question for us moderns is whether an established though by now rare religious take on whether profit-seeking and accumulated wealth evince underlying greed is nonetheless a sign of mental illness. Even within Christianity, the strict anti-wealth stand has been moderated (Augustine and Luther). More broadly, moderated and full pro-wealth positions have been expressed by the likes of Clement of Alexandria (a hybrid stance), Aquinas, Calvin, and the Christian humanists of the late Renaissance. In fact, Ficino, a priest in Naples during the fifteenth century, wrote that love of gain is justified because humans are gods on earth by virtue of the control we have over natural resources. In modern times, the prosperity gospel has preached material wealth for the true Christians. Clearly, Christian thought has spanned a wide spectrum on whether profit-seeking and wealth intimate the presence of greed.

Given the span of perspectives just in historical Christianity alone, Suelo’s choice can seem extreme and therefore as bizarre and at the very least unnecessary.  However, it could also be the case that what had been an ideal in early Christianity preached by Jesus has been gradually undermined by greed whose gravity tends in the direction of wealth. If so, what is seems normal today may in Christian terms be rather decadent—even sinful—and what seems bizarre might be truer to form. My point is that it would be rather unwise of us to rely on the societal norms of our day—as if deviance from them automatically means someone is crazy. Just as a religion can falter, so too can a society. In such a context, it is only natural to suppose that false criteria are true—as authentic and valid—and therefore to look at people like Suelo through lenses that we presume are clear yet are like a dark, smoky glass.

See related essay: “A Preface to Godliness and Greed”


1. “He ‘Quit Money’ and Is Still Living a Happy Life,” MSNBC, May 2, 2012.