Materialist Goes Transcendental
Physically, the move involved loading a big truck in Houston, driving to New Mexico, and unloading it there. Psychologically, it was more complicated. I was leaving fundamental aspects of my identity – like home, city, work, career standing and reputation, and, as it turned out, even family - behind. I might have wondered (but didn’t) whether I would even recognize myself in these novel circumstances.
What I left behind were vestiges of identity, signs by which I knew myself and others knew me. They remain with me, as history and experience, and as nutrients for new growth. I now needed a new range of people, places, connections, contexts, and concepts to grow into. I was wide open to big change, and feeling the setting, immediately and intimately, as a vital part of self.
I trusted the old ego to buy into the idealistic dream of a rural nirvana and pull me through to it. And it has (though I’m living in the city now). But I’m learning that, with focused effort, ego can (and must) be subjugated to spirit. When it runs into a snag, when it’s going down a dark trail, contends with tough decisions, a higher level of consciousness is badly needed. A higher, broader perspective, more attuned to nature and universal spirit, can restore the wholeness of the big picture. On the surface, I just kept putting one foot in front of the other; but beneath the surface, my fundamental assumptions and ideas were changing as radically as the scenery.
I spent the largest part of my career as a full-fledged workaholic. I pursued typical materialistic goals and objectives, like comfort, security, and fun for my family and self. On this path, like most working adults, I lived primarily in the ego, that instrumental, goal-directed aspect of mind that reckons with business and mundane affairs, pays the bills, and seeks to get ahead.
This is the basic, default level of consciousness, the part focused on obtaining what we need and want, enhancing and protecting our status and well-being, and minimizing costs and pains in day-to-day affairs. It’s also the part that worries, fears, and ruminates over threats and challenges, the part that inflicts sleeplessness, negativity, and desperation when ruminations arouse anxiety. It’s this part that needs the time-out to let spirit in to do its restorative stuff, which, given half a chance, it will.
Through reading and meditation, I’ve learned that, with effort, this transition can be willed into process, to arrive at a level of consciousness in which a very direct connection with nature and the infinite puts life in more holistic perspective. This realization has dawned on me slowly, semi-consciously, but inexorably.
When I arrived in La Joya, my career was still in process of winding down, as I was still active at the editor’s desk. I was fortunate to have the continuity of working as co-editor of the Journal of Retailing for most of the first year I was in La Joya. The editorial office simply moved with me to the bank of the Rio Grande. That was a first for the oldest journal in the marketing discipline, but very few even knew about it. Everything came through Elsevier’s online platform, so you could do it from anywhere. I’m not sure my co-editor Murali, back in Missouri, approved, but all he expressed to me was incredulity that anybody would make such a crazy move as the one I had. It surprised me that it surprised others so, but my road was well set by then, and I didn’t think twice.
As in so many things, I was very privileged and blessed to be able to do what I was doing. On average, it took two to three hours a day to manage the review process and write decision letters. It rarely seemed like work and entailed travel benefits to conferences representing the Journal. The ten months that I had the Journal in New Mexico took me to Australia, the Netherlands, New York, and San Francisco from my outpost on the river. I believe it was also that year that I traveled to Houston for Tim’s wedding and New York for Sara’s graduation from Brooklyn College. Not long after that (though after my editorial term) I spent three weeks vagabonding in Spain.
Since the pandemic, however, I’ve only travelled within the state. I don’t much miss the airplanes and hotels. I’ve put on a lot of miles within the state in six plus years. There are many places of interest, and quite a few that have particular resonance and periodically call me back.
Place matters in consciousness. Mesas, deserts, mountains, forests, ethereal light, and texture of landscape bless time with a sense of wonder and proclaim the glory of the hour. Growing up and exploring in Arizona tuned my perceptual sensors to desert landscapes. I didn’t realize how badly I missed them until I got to New Mexico. They affect me with what old-timer locals here call querencia, that feeling of connection, approaching oneness, with special places.
In still deeper reflections, this juncture marked a profound personal and psychological shift, a different way of thinking about and approaching life. Until then, I had never questioned materialistic assumptions about or approaches to life. I pursued them both practically and professionally. As an academic pursuit, marketing is as materialistic as a discipline gets, and that’s where I was headed.
At the very outset of my academic career, I chose marketing, largely from practical considerations. From calling on business schools as a sales rep, I knew the job market in that field was robust, and likely to stay that way. I was only hoping it would hold up until I was through the Ph.D. program and into a good tenure-track position. My practical experience would be an asset.
Once in the program, at the University of Texas at Austin, I quickly understood that several “mother disciplines,” primarily economics, psychology, and statistics (and to a lesser extent, anthropology and sociology) underlay the cutting-edge research being conducted in marketing. I was delighted over this for the breadth and depth of research topics and approaches it invited. I read the psychologically grounded work appearing in the Journal of Consumer Research and thought “wow, you can do that and be in marketing?” I thought that on so rich a playing field, it should be easy to find something interesting to work on. And it was.
A large segment of marketing scholars holds that research has little merit unless it informs practical decision-making. I was never of that belief. I found the behavioral questions worthwhile to the extent that they provide societal insights into how markets work and how people behave in marketing and consumption contexts. Marketing is entwined in the lives of all, and these questions are profoundly substantive. I was far from being the most materialistic of researchers in the most materialistic of scholarly disciplines, but we all represented degrees of the same orientation.
I studied topics like intra-organizational competition and psychological climate and their effects on work performance and job attitudes, how advertising messages are processed and evaluated, and how emotions affect job attitudes and performance. I’m pleased that the work has had an impact in marketing and organizational psychology, as cumulatively it has now been cited well over 20,000 times (per Google Scholar).
It’s really a different life nowadays, but I’m proud of what I did back then – and grateful to my mentors, students, and colleagues for their generous contributions to my career and life experience. The energy and spirit invested in the work lives in our contributions to theory and practice in the research record. It’s gratifying how the growing citation count indicates ongoing contribution, years and decades after initial publication. Much of the work is holding up very well.
But now in retirement I see much in the practice of marketing that I believe pernicious, to our environment and orientation to the earth, and our development and growth as conscious human beings. In marketing theory, customer orientation and customer satisfaction are the goals and hallmarks of practice, but actual practice, as often as not, subordinates these to sales and profit maximization. The ends are entirely materialistic, concerning acquiring, promoting, selling, and consuming stuff (and of course services). Superfluous spin prevails, and higher values rarely play a significant role.
It is important to understand market phenomena as well as possible, in the interest of efficiency and effectiveness in satisfying needs of individuals and institutions. But it’s also true that this materialist orientation, reflected in the deepest assumptions of the discipline and our culture, treats the bounty of earth as though it exists merely for our use and benefit.
The root of this goes back to the admonition from on high in Chapter 1 of Genesis to subdue the earth and have dominion over it and all its creatures. A thorough transcendentalist might consider this the original sin, right there on the first page of the Hebrew bible.
That idea, of human exceptionalism, would lead us directly to where we stand facing climate change. But the oil industry keeps throwing dirty money into motoring down this doomed path, and damn the earth. How cruelly ironic that the natives of North America and other regions, who have been subjugated and disregarded throughout our colonizing history, are so much our superiors in sustainability and respect for our mother earth. We have so much to learn from them (if only there were time and the will to do so).
Primitively, we retain the same essential philosophy as buffalo hunters on the plains, plundering natural resources for private good without respect for our eternal dependence on them. Despite universal awareness now of climate problems, political will on the requisite scale to solve them is universally lacking, and natural disasters proliferate and intensify, to the point where vast regions are rapidly becoming uninhabitable. Political disasters, rooted in the same mindset and ubiquitously in evidence, don’t help.
I see little to nothing in marketing scholarship that has slowed, or is likely to slow, the degradation. Food and beverage companies already sell the keys to obesity and diabetes very effectively and then drug makers provide the effort-free but very expensive chemical treatment. Materialistic assumptions about the conduct and meaning of life are worn deep into the psyche through lifelong experience and come as naturally as breathing.
My adopted view is Platonic, Kantian, and inspired by Emerson and his coterie of transcendentalists, and, lately, by New Mexico’s own twentieth-century transcendentalist, Frank Waters. The common voice I hear from them, through my own filters, emphasizes direct physical, mental, spiritual interaction with nature and the importance of stepping out of ego to a higher level of consciousness. The new realizations that dawned on me were not merely cognitive, but also grounded in the feeling of taking in the essence of earth and atmosphere, as palpable sustenance for body, mind, and spirit.
We are of the same stuff as earth and all the universe, and an integral part of the whole, not in any way separate from or above it. The same energy that moves the wind and radiates from the sun animates our thoughts, chemistry, and movements. We interact with the natural energy surrounding us through the unseen and unmeasurable reality of the “virtual body.” I’m referring to the Hindu concept of chakras, a concept with rich, ancient, and widespread agreement behind it.
Through these chakras, conceived as spinning energy centers aligned vertically from the crotch to just above the crown of the head, we imbibe strength and energy from the surrounding environment. Just as music energizes body, mind, and spirit, so does a beautiful vision, pleasant fragrance, light breeze, or kiss of sunshine. The chakras are the medium through which these exchanges occur. Energy thus imbibed has strengthening, healing power. It is only our hyperactive egoistic instincts, worked up constantly by pressing personal and sociocultural motives, that close our sensors to this realization.
The chronically challenged ego sees myopically. It tends to exaggerate ephemeral threat or challenge and underestimate available tools, options, and resources for coping. It also underestimates the importance of the collective and common good. When life corners the ego with a seemingly insoluble dilemma, escape to a higher perspective relieves the myopia to reveal a more promising and panoramic reality.
When I pay conscious attention to my thought stream, I can hear various levels of consciousness passing through it, like voices representing aspects of character, low to high. I can virtually personify the voices, and find it instructive to do so. I have a curmudgeon, a preacher, at least one loud, toxic cynic, a miscellany of others, and, when I remember to climb the ladder of consciousness, a very judicious master voice that silences the petty, trite, cowardly, and derogatory with the reminder that we are inter-related with everything, and the sublime lies within us. That voice is most like a wise and sober judge, divinely inspired, which I identify with Emerson’s conception of the Oversoul.
Some voices in the stream are identifiable as others who matter to me, individually or as an aggregate type. They make their opinions known, even when they’re not present. I’ve internalized their influences this way, and they offer counsel regarding social ramifications of the decisions I make. They censor thoughts and actions, shame or encourage outrageously, and occasionally give some good advice.
I find that it pays to think about these voices, to differentiate and contrast them from the master voice that subordinates and judges them. That voice provides righteous perspective and authority over the cacophony of jaded ones. The extent to which I tune into and abide by this highest voice is the strength of character by which I’ll be known. I am late coming to this, and have a long way to go toward abiding by the highest voice, but that is my intention.
What’s in us, if we could take full inventory, is greater than doctors and medicine, politics, social norms and opinions, family, status, wealth, and utterance of any person. It’s God within, urging complete openness and straightness with self, and walking a worthy, courageous self-determined path, as an indomitable spirit warrior, moving forward with power within.
You know more than you know, and have more power than you imagine, to get and stay right with yourself and the world. Your very surroundings energize your thoughts and steps and foster harmony of body, mind, and spirit. Amen!
