The Trick of the Monetary System
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” -Henry Ford
The unavoidable problem of money
For much of my life, I couldn't win at money, even though I really should have been able to. Being a generous but hard-working woman, someone with a lot of skills to offer, someone who experienced joy in working creatively with others, and someone who had good attitudes about money, abundance, work ethic, and savings... well, money shouldn't really have been a problem for someone like me after I finished university and got a job and got busy with normal, adult life. I embarked upon adulthood at the age of 22 with this sparkling potential.
And got ripped off. I got ripped off by landlords and roommates, auto mechanics and dentists. I got ripped off by employers and coworkers, family members, lovers and friends. I got ripped off by Mormons (for God's sake).
I learned about creating abundance and clearing my money karma. I learned about basic personal financial management techniques. I learned how to expand my creativity in earning money and about how to creatively simplify my needs so that I needed less money. I became rather good at money.
And still, I got ripped off.
So, in the normal fashion of one with a normally-functioning mind, I made up a belief about money:
"Money is fine, but people are jerks."
From there on, my major challenge in life was to find a way to live in community without being completely screwed over. Let me assure you, this is a precarious approach to life. As I've striven to set everyone around me straight so that there is as little ripping-off going on in my life as possible and with as much material security as possible, I have come to the point of exhaustion many, many times.
Thank you to the Internet. Over the past few years, there have been some really good educational videos about how money and the monetary system work. These five are my favourites:
I'm grateful to have had these opportunities to learn how the money system really works... because I had been operating from a false premise about money, and a false premise about people.
What most people believe about money:
Money is a medium of exchange. It's impractical to trade a boatload of fish for ten years' worth of sugar. Money is the agreed-upon marker by which our society can exchange value, without having to find someone to be a purchaser for the rotting fish who also happens to be a supplier of a mountain of sugar. Money is a social resource, because it's a promise made by members of a society to pay and accept real value from one another. This is why so many of our relationships have a major monetary component. It is how we exchange energy with one another.
When you spend money, you convert money to value. When you get money, you convert value to money. The more money you have, the more choice you have of goods and services you can get, so having lots of money is a good thing.
One way to get money is to sell things that belong to you. Another way is to buy things and then sell them for more than you paid for them. You could take something from nature, improve upon it in some way, and then sell the finished product. Or you could do something that someone else doesn't want to do or can't do.
You could get money from someone now with a promise to pay that money back to them later, and in exchange for them doing you this favour, you then do them a return favour such as giving them a share in your profits or just giving them extra value (called "interest") when you repay their money.
You could also get money by stealing it from others or tricking (defrauding) them into giving it to you, but then you'd be breaking the law and risking punishment if you got caught.
The "economy" is the sum total of all the buying and selling that goes on and all the money that circulates between people in society. The global economy is the sum total of all the money circulating in the world.
Raw goods trade for value to create the primary economy, which is Nature direct: wood, water, fish, ore, oil, stone, grain...
Labour and services create the value in the secondary economy, which turns the extracts from Nature into consumeable, "value-added" products that you see on the store shelves: labour, manufacturing, processing, construction...
The way to be comfortable in life is to contribute to your society in some way and to be compensated with money; this generally means either working a job or being self-employed. Your value contributed is traded for money, a portion of which you will spend on living (home, food, enjoyment of life, raising a family), and a portion of which you will put aside to spend later when you're old and don't want to work anymore. You might also benefit from growth in the economy by lending your money out to society ("investing") and getting a larger amount back (because of interest) in the future when you'll need your saved money to live on.
What most people either don't know or ignore about money:
The tertiary economy is money that is made from the shuffling around of other money: religious tithing, stocks, debentures, bonds, derivatives... all of which in some way boils down to lending and borrowing at interest. This is what investing is. The tertiary economy is made up of interest on loans. Through the mathematical compounding effect of interest, the quantity of money increases.
Here's where we get it messed up - and where those who stand to profit from our error make considerable effort to prevent us from getting straightened out: we think that when the quantity of money increases, that means that the overall economy has grown. The economy today is gigantic compared to a couple centuries ago. And, since we understand the economy to be essentially the total sum of value in goods and services (as represented by money), to most of us (economists included), this looks as though there are far more goods and services trading around. Here's an excerpt from the Library of Economics and Liberty website:
"Judged by the huge strides that people all over the world have made in overcoming poverty and want, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that little of economic consequence happened before the last three centuries. Before that, most of the world not only took poverty for granted, but also assumed that little could be done about it. Even the most optimistic early writers could not imagine that more than a few percent of the population would ever be well off; they thought that the best we could do for the masses would be to minimize their suffering on Earth. Growth, if it could have been measured, was probably not 3 percent a year but, at the most, only a percent or 2 per decade. Increases in the size of population were typically accompanied by declines in the average income. Yet the last few centuries have seen us banish starvation and famine from a large part of the Earth. In the most successful countries, the average citizen now enjoys a material standard of living that would have made the greatest king of two hundred years ago turn green with envy."
It is not true.
First are the more obvious lies in this passage about us overcoming the poverty that most of the world once "took for granted," starvation and famine having been "largely banished," more than a few percent of the population being currently well off, and the average citizen of today living a life enviable to a Medieval king. It is also untrue that the (overall) economy has grown 3 percent per year over the last couple centuries.
Neither the amount of sunlight falling upon the Earth, nor the biosphere or geosphere have grown during the period of time of human history, so the primary economy that draws from these hasn't grown. In fact, the primary economy has begun to deplete as colonization, extraction, forestry, fishing, and agricultural expansion each hit limits and went into decline.
The secondary economy has, with a seven-fold increase of the human population over the past couple centuries, created an approximately seven-fold increase of available labour; however, that seven-fold increase in population has multiplied the need for goods and services by a factor of seven... thereby cancelling out the increased value in the secondary economy.
The tertiary economy is once again a different thing, though. Through interest and investment growth, the tertiary economy has grown, and tremendously so. The money economy has grown at a minimum rate of 2-7% each year for about two hundred years. But this only means that the amount of money has grown: not the amount of value.
Value comes only from the primary and secondary economies. Money is "made" in the tertiary economy.
There is a profound difference between "abundance" and "money." Making them equivalent in our minds is the error. This is where the yucky feeling comes from, why we worry about having enough money whether we're on welfare or making seven figures. This is why we feel guilty because we can't manage to stop spending money almost as fast as we receive it. It's because we actually perceive money as being true value. This is a central cultural myth, right up there with "man has dominion over the Earth" and "humanity is flawed."
The tertiary economy is a positive (growing) feedback system that pretends to be a negative (balancing) feedback system. I'm talking about the "unseen hand" described by the 18th Century creator of the tertiary economy, the Reverend Adam Smith. To Smith and every smitten economist since him, the economy is about "making" money, which is dependent on magical dynamics of price change relative to supply and demand of things of real value from the primary and secondary economies.
The supply-and-demand "unseen hand" dynamic looks like a balancing (negative) feedback loop because price keeps balancing out as supply of valued goods and services goes up causing demand to go down which causes then causes prices to fall which causes supply to fall which causes demand to increase again. So price of valuable goods and services is kept constant over time.
But, as everyone who has ever enjoyed the benefits of investment returns or suffered the pains of inflation knows, that is not what money does. Money - that is, the tertiary economy - is a positive (growing) feedback system. The more you have, the more you make, because of interest. The tertiary economy continuously grows.
In fact, the tertiary economy must grow in order to work, because the only way to "make" money is to require people to give you back more than you loaned them. To make money, you have to extract more resources or add more value, beyond your needs.
Think about what that means.
A profound but unseen shift over the last two centuries
A true bill has the following qualities:
- It was created by a real human being
- given to another real human being
- to indicate a real exchange
- of something of real value such as "two oxen and a goat"
- for something else of real value such as "three ounces of silver"
Money, as long as it represents something of real, physical value, can be a medium of exchange. But we are wrongly educated to understand that this is all money is: a medium of exchange. We believe this because once upon a time it was true. A "twenty-dollar bill" was once upon a time issued by real human beings at banks to represent a note that could be exchanged for a real amount of gold which could be gotten at a real bank in trade for that twenty-dollar bill. This was the case in North America right up until the 1970's.
This is not how money is anymore.
All money now in circulation, whether as bits of paper or as numbers in ledger books, represents debt, not value. Remember, value means goods and services: the content of the primary and secondary economies. The tertiary economy - money - is entirely made of obligations to pay over and above the goods and services. Since there is not such thing as "over and above" goods and services, the obligation to pay is itself what money is.
Almost all money in the world - printed or just digital - is only promises to pay. We are trading other people's imagined future labour as though it can actually be eaten or it can actually set our broken bones or it can actually house and clothe us.
Imagine if I asked you to help me build my house, and you pitched in and worked really hard for a whole week. You and I had an agreement that I would pay you enough to pay your rent for a month. And then, at the end of the week, I tell you that Joe Schmoe down the road promised me a thousand dollars, so here's the piece of paper that Joe wrote that promise on. Have a nice day.
That is what money is nowadays.
When the bank loaned the money into the tertiary economy, there was no actual product or service sold in order to create that money. The money came into existence because, based on a signature of a real human being making a promise to pay, a bank entered a credit for that amount on its ledger and a debit for the same amount on the human being's ledger. The bank did not lend actual value. It created money out of thin air, simply because of the signature promising to pay. The promise to pay became value in and of itself, and became tradeable by the bank. From there, the bank traded with other banks, all through circulating money into the tertiary economy by lending it into existence.
Once upon a time, creating an obligation over absolutely nothing was called "usury." In the common-law, a covenant between human beings that we will not screw each other out of the means to earn a living (put into words in the 13th Century in the Magna Carta), usury was the word for tricking people out of their right to liberty and the necessities of life. It was considered fraud or extortion. In the common-law, human beings only harm one another when they are in conflict and societies only harm one another in war.
Enter the corporation.
Corporations were legal fictions created solely for the purpose of controlled, temporary usury in order to get a task done. Corporations are pretend-people, given the right to commit usury upon a society in exchange for performing an important task for that society, such as digging a canal or building a bridge. Allowing this usury to happen was the final nail in the coffin of our now-global society. It was the layer of additional complexity that caused the dissociation of the mass majority from an understanding of how society works, who we are, what our rights are, and how to make our living. The creation of corporations was the creation of the tertiary economy.
Corporations allowed human beings to get ahead of other human beings by getting money from them through usury. This happened over billions of transactions over a decades, ever so incrementally creating larger and larger amounts of money with which corporations could then offer more and more opportunities for "investment" to more and more people.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the son of an itinerant money lender and goldsmith who settled in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1744, specialized not just in clever accounting practices but also kept secret books and subterranean vaults in which he hid his wealth from auditors, lawyers and taxmen. His (mostly) lawful usury became more and more successful and his treasury became quite large. When his five sons were grown, he dispatched four of them to different European capitals to take advantage of the rise of capitalism (corporatism, and Adam Smith's magic supply and demand system) and the growth of international trade. Nathan he sent to London, James to Paris, Saloman to Vienna, and Carl to Naples, keeping the eldest, Amschel, at home with him in Prussia. Of these the two most important proved to be London and Paris, where the two main branches of the family developed a friendly rivalry, with the English branch developing the edge in business and the French in philanthropy, the arts and winemaking.
By the 1780s this family business, which grew from the humble beginning of selling rare coins, had become the prime moneylender to greedy governments across Europe, high on new wealth from colonial conquering. The brothers financed both sides in the Napoleonic wars and the Austro-Prussian war.
Through their lawful usury, made possible because of 17th-Century creation of the bills of exchange process in which people's promises to pay could be traded for value as though these promises were as real as silver or labour or timber, the Rothschilds created the world banking system of today, which has created all the money that exists. Nathan operated principally as an underwriter and speculator in the early 19th-century bond market. He and his brothers invented the government bond, which allowed investors, big and small, to buy bits of the debts (promises to pay) of sovereign states by purchasing fixed-interest bearer bonds. Governments liked this because they could use them to raise colossal sums of money. Investors liked them because they could be traded - at prices that fluctuated in relation to the performance of the issuing government - and shrewd investors could make big sums. Through the mechanism of corporations, it brought investment in railways, the industrial revolution and ventures like the Suez Canal.
The Rothschilds got a cut of everything. Nathan increased the family fortune 20-fold in a single usurious transaction: The Rothschilds had a network of agents throughout Europe who, using fast boats, coded letters, and carrier pigeons, got information to the family ahead of official sources. In June 1815, he encouraged rumours that Wellington had lost the Battle of Waterloo (between France and England) when he knew he had won. This caused thousands of Englishmen, who had hoped to make money by investing in the English king's government bonds promising great riches to all if the war came out well, to dump their stocks (promises to pay from other people). Nathan Rothschild bought up the stocks and made a fantastic profit when England reaped its benefits of winning the Napoleonic war.
It was a new kind of power:
"I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply,"
said Nathan Rothschild.
In 1932, a deal was struck in the Commonwealth. In the name of efficiency for the purpose of "making" money, everything became incorporated, including, as far as the Powers that Be are concerned...you. The government is a corporation, each ministry of the government is a corporation, each municipality is a corporation, as is every school, church and charity. The crown is a corporation, at the corporation of the City of London, which "owns" the corporation of Canada which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange... along with the corporation of the United States of America. And every "citizen" is a corporation, too, called a "person."
Yes, this was designed to trick you.
Modern economic theory is lies
Standard Economics 101 begins with something like this:
"Economic systems are the mechanisms through which a group of people allocate scarce resources. The growth and size of an economy is limited by its most scarce resources, and (at least in a free-market economy) mechanisms evolve to try to use relatively plentiful resources instead of scarce ones."
It is a biological and physical fact that there are enough material resources in this world for every human being. This is a known fact, because human beings are biological and physical things that cannot exist in the first place unless there is enough space, oxygen, water, carbon, food, heat, light and so on. But most of us don't understand this. Most of us see scarcity throughout human life and throughout nature. Most of us see a struggle for survival, competition for scarce resources, and survival of the fittest. A majority of us are in this race not to enjoy life, but in order to not get drowned.
The tertiary economy has now gotten so big that most people depend for it to meet their primary and secondary needs. a majority of the people on this planet are more motivated to get money than anything else because that's the only way for them to procure the necessities of life. Money has become what everyone wants, and the value in the primary and secondary economies: food, shelter, fresh water, warmth, security, love, health care, and sense of purpose have fallen much farther behind in priority.
I find this terrifying, because when the monetary system fails, people will starve on fertile ground, or freeze to death with empty houses nearby, or die of easily-treatable diseases or loneliness, while the abundance of Nature surges around them in lockstep with the collapse of industrial society. Right now in several African nations, millions of people are dying of poverty and not because they lack money, but because our global culture's mass belief in money allows power structures to exist that keep those millions of people from being able to access the primary economic value, while a horrendous dumbing-down process called "public education" (or lack thereof) prevents them from creating secondary economic value even if they could access primary economic value. Last year there was a widespread campaign for people in my part of the world to collect empty plastic milk bags in order to ship bargeloads of this rancid plastic to Haiti for children to fashion into sleeping mats.
Would you want your child to sleep on a mat made out of plastic bags?
Most people I know could, if they wanted to, procure a $100 lobster dinner at a restaurant... but wouldn't begin to be able to procure the lobster, milk, grain, spices, vegetables, and cooking energy that were the raw materials for that meal, nor know how to convert those raw materials into out-of-season lobster 2000 kilometres from its point of origin, smothered in butter, served with good bread and perfectly-seasoned side dishes cooked to perfection. Most people I know couldn't even figure out how to make a cooking fire, let alone make a cooking pot.
And yet, the monetary system has gone past the point of maturity and is beginning a rapid collapse. There are people in this world who will commit suicide because their business fails. What happens when we can't even figure out how to put together a meal because the grocery store is empty, or keep ourselves warm because the natural gas supply had a shortage?
Less immediately frightening, but more pervasive and sinister, is the fact that, having become dependent on the monetary system, which is dependent on growth, which is dependent on money being "made," each of us is essentially forced to be a mooch upon everyone else we encounter. We are prevented, by our lack of knowledge and by legal mechanisms, from living strictly within the primary and secondary economies and trading only in real goods and services. And this means that we have to make money, which means we have to take more than our daily needs from the environment, from our labour, or from others. The poorer our skills, health, or self-confidence, the more we'll have to mooch from Nature or other people or both.
The financially richest people in this world are the biggest moochers of all. They do not do an ounce of work for their physical sustenance. All their money comes from the labour of others and from extraction of excess value from Nature.
This is how the monetary system makes us all compete with one another. Because it isn't the goods and services that are scarce. It's money that's scarce. It doesn't exist unless it is "made"... by mooching.
Approximately 20% of North Americans are indoctrinated and conditioned to be the administrative and operating class of this glorious civilization. In the business of managing the other 80% of us in innumerable ways. Psychologists, teachers, lawyers, social workers, doctors, accountants, sociologists, mental health workers, clergy, all government workers... all "work" (mooch) toward the same end: maximum profitability for a corporate-based state.
The psychologists who've prescribed permanent medication schemes to 1/4 of the population see what they do as necessary. The doctors who enable the profitable blackmail practiced by the medical industries see it all as part of the most technologically-advanced medical system in the world. Teachers are happy to have control of their classrooms, even though that means that one in six of the kids is on Ritalin. True democracy, if it ever existed, is dead. What we've got in its place is one giant, ever-merging global corporate system masquerading electronically and digitally as nations called "America," "Germany," or "Nigeria."
Even if some of what you do is environmental cleanup or alternative medicine, that is a reaction to the monetary system, and therefore a result of it. It's still part of the financialization of consciousness. And, of course, you don't expect to work for nothing.
This financialization of our consciousness has become all we know and that's why we fear its loss. But we've become like latter-day Easter Islanders, making taxpayer offerings to the money god so that banks will not die and let all that money wink out of existence. We dare not let corporations die; they feed us; they entertain us; they give us chemotherapy. Corporations occupy two thirds of the waking hours of our lives, either directly or indirectly.
Most of us will never make any significant material or lifestyle choices of our own. This creates an insatiable need to differentiate and protect ourselves from others, because of the scarcity of money and the resulting moochery. But this is in direct conflict with our primary human social need of belonging to a tribe, with guaranteed cradle-to-grave support no matter what. And as a result, so, so many of us have what is called "mental illness."
This is the great trick of the monetary system. It has screwed generations of humanity - billions upon billions of human beings - out of their birthright, which is to be able to exist as a child of Nature, contributing value and receiving value in exchange and being able to live from a place of trusting that we will not have to struggle every moment of our existence.
The monetary system today
No longer is the tertiary economy owned by the Rothschilds. Every possibility for corporatization and usury has been exploited, and the tertiary economy is now owned by corporations in general.
Making money depends on human beings paying back interest. People have to attempt to create real value in the primary and secondary economies over and above their physical needs. This was financed by and fueled the Industrial Revolution, in which our collective use of energy surged by a factor of hundreds.
That is, until the 1970's when the interest on all that debt began to be equal to and then started to exceed the principal. Not coincidentally, the primary and secondary economies have began a contraction at that time, first visible as American peak oil. Suddenly people were starting to talk about "complexity" and "limits to growth." The music stopped in the tertiary economic musical chairs game, and since then there's been a mad shuffle to fit on a smaller and smaller number of chairs.
In this mad shuffle, the monetary economy became the complete centre of our consciounsess, that which most everyone born in this time period depends on utterly in order to get goods necessary to life. Virtually none of us born after 1980 has been raised with essential survival skills. And so the primary and secondary economies have become a category to us, a sector of the tertiary economy called "the environment," and "cultural diversity," and we throw some support at these from time to time but most of our attention goes only to getting money. To even imagine an existence without it calls up visions of utter poverty, loneliness, and fatal illness. On average, we give away 80% of our life energy over to corporations. We compete with one another to try to make the other 20% fulfill our basic needs. Our consciousness is caught, again and again, upon the realization that all our effort, our 2-hour-per-night shortfall of sleep... often doesn't even guarantee us the lowest levels of Maslow's scale.
This shows itself as a middle-aged man who finally honours his calling as a talented street performer only after he's lived his whole adult life failing at jobs, schooling, and relationships, lied to and stolen from everyone who loves him, been tossed out on his own, cheated and got cut off welfare, and spends a winter living in a homeless shelter...
Or as an ageing hippie who viciously attacks holistic practitioners for learning how to market their businesses because of their "merchant mentality;" while having earned her own living through such avenues as dealing drugs, tricking organizations into giving her grant money, conjuring money using magick, and hiding her income and assets in order to get government assistance, an Earth-based religionist who doesn't even grow a garden...
Or a child's life ripped apart by years of vicious custody battle because whichever parent gets custody of him also gets the bulk of the assets and half the other parent's paycheque for the next fifteen years...
Or as several million people losing their homes when the corporate machinery of the banking system forecloses on loans as an automatic reaction to a shrinking tertiary economy, even though those same millions of people rescued that failing banking system in order to save that tertiary economy. A cascade of blaming begins a flurry of new political movements and a rash of new conspiracy theories about an unknown set of reptilian overlords...
Or hundreds of thousands of people heading out in the springtime to collect donations to find a cure for cancer, while those who have found the cure are vilified, stripped of their livelihood, chased out of their homes, jailed, and murdered...
Walking away
We can meaningfully differentiate our lives by owning our consciousness. Anyone who is brave enough can possess the freedom to discover real meaning and value in his life. We either wake up to life, or we don't. We're either in charge of our own awareness or we let someone else manage it by default.
I'd like to wake everyone up because I feel that we each have such potential, but I've learned that I only have the option of my own awakening, and from there, the ability to offer assistance to others. (Except for moochers) And so, I work on myself alone. I work on my life. To my profound relief, I am noticing many others doing the same thing.
Nevertheless, the monetary system makes us the most controlled people in history, especially with respect to controlling our own consciousness. And the control is tightening. I know it doesn't feel like that to most North Americans, but that's the proof: everything feels normal; everybody else around us is doing the same things. And at the first indication that you might do something from your own consciousness, alone, there will be someone, somewhere, who loves you and tells you to wait until you can join forces with others...
Do a thought experiment with me for a moment. Imagine yourself announcing to all the people closest to you that you are now going to stop using money to the best of your ability. You're going to quit your job, give up your rented apartment, and hit the road in search of a bit of land where you can earn your living directly. I know from experience what the people around you would say and do. It's as ugly as you know in your heart it would be.
This is called Stockholm Syndrome, when the prisoner identifies with the values of her captors, which in our case is the corporate state and its manufactured popular culture which holds our consciousness captive beginning in infancy. By feeling that such a life is normal, even desirable, we become helpless. So don't knock that uneasy feeling that you were meant to do something more with your life.
North Americans live in a parallel universe in which they are conditioned to see everything in terms of consumer goods and "safety" as defined by police control. We're conditioned (lied to) to believe we have the best lives in the world and in history. But what we've really got is competition with each other for money ("work" and "career status").
You don't see images of ordinary families sitting around in the evenings making music together, or creating songs of their own based upon their own lives and from their own hearts, because that music cannot be bought and sold. It's feels safer, and so we prefer our "normal," expensive, Earth-destroying lives... over love and laughter with real people, making real human music and home and food together with other human beings, lifting our voices together, dancing and enjoying the world that was given to us... absolutely free... The collectivists are so wrong: we can't do a blessed thing. Only you, dear reader, can make the choices for your life. "We" only do things as aggregates of individual human beings each one coming to as difficult a personal choice as the other. There are answers to all the problems of our existence - but those answers have to be individually embraced by individuals, because collectives don't make choices. Individuals do.That's the big trick of the monetary system. We believe that we're all in this together and that we have created this and there is no "I," only "we." The only possible solution is to get everyone else to wake up first, before I can dream of stepping away. And so, we tell ourselves the Little Golden Book fairy tales - and that we, as individuals, are personally innocent of any of our government's horrific crimes. I vote properly and I am careful about which products I buy and which causes I throw my money at. But that's the indoctrination speaking, not the truth. If we honestly looked at the truth, we'd see the Self, and we'd see how lying to ourselves and others is the very fabric of the tertiary economy.
So it's a terrible kind of self-inflicted innocence that can come to no good. As the dear, departed Joe Bageant put it,
"We are a society of latch key kids babysat by an electronic hallucination, the national hologram."
When you do wake up, how do you escape the system?
In a word, service. Humble and thoughtful service to the world. Be Ghandi. Be Christ. Let the poor be your teachers. Keep your mouth shut, and your eyes and ears wide open. Stop trying to make the world happen the One Right Way. Stop trying to improve things outside your own mind-body instrument. Just look inward instead. Just let your consciousness be conscious of itself for once.
First you will experience boredom, then resistance in the form of irritation, and then something equivalent to panic attacks or the internal violence of anger... this is the experience of sitting meditation, as the layers of your conditioned mind peel away. Don't quit, keep at it, endure it, to the end. When you truly let go of your conditioning, you will find that deeply experiencing a non-conditioned reality changes things forever. What you have experienced will animate whatever intellectual life you have developed.
It's time to leave the hive. The hive is money. Disassociate and stop feeding it. Give it no power. That is money gone. Talk is cheap. Action is everything. Do it. Do a survival course if you have to. (I don't wonder why you didn't get taught that in school) Get lost on a desert island. And what state will you be in"? -Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
You will find a place of peace and money will no longer represent all the abundance and value of life that your mind and your body and your ego so desperately need just to exist. You'll be able to take an honest inventory of your financial situation, without attachment to the past or the meaning. You'll begin to experience how abundance actually flows, as the birds and the fishes and the deer and the insects and the fungi and the forests have always known. Once you feel safe and secure that you have the capability of receiving it, you'll be able to understand and ask for what you really need. Whether it comes to you through the mechanism of money or straight from others or straight from Nature by your own hand or by a combination of all of these will have become irrelevant to you, but it will probably come by a combination of all three.
In serious, intelligent people, experiencing non-manufactured reality usually gives lifelong meaning and insight to all the work we do after that. As any physicist will confirm, every particle and being in the universe is inextricably connected. We are bound by its every wave and particle. You can feel this too, by just owning your consciousness. When you do, you'll find that ownership and domination are both temporary and meaningless, while the animating spirit of the gods pervades us.
This is the meaning of life: coming to understand this... but shhhhh you're not supposed to. It would shatter the game.
So there you go, you know what to do. Once you've experienced the real meaning of life, you'll have seen that the healthy social structures we long for so much are already inherent in the psyche of humankind... you have just lived up till now as the unknowing captor of your own imprisoned wisdom.
Then you can tell the servant that the master is home.
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Lishui K. Springford, medicine woman
Lishui@mindtreehealth.net
Owen Sound, ON Canada
None of the information in this site should be construed as medical or legal advice. I'm not a doctor or a lawyer; I'm a mother busy saving the world. Copyright MindTreeHealth.net 2010-2011