A Spiritual View of the Economic Crises I was at a mediation and guidance session the other night that was led by my friend, Pratima Freeman, who has been receiving guidance higher consciousness during meditation for many years. Not any particular being, but a transmission from a source of wisdom. See her website, Gifts of Guidance. She told me on the way to the evening she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to teach on. Apparently during the meditation, she got the message that she was supposed to teach on joy, but had a lot of resistance to that. With all that was going on in the world, why joy? But that’s what we did, and it led to a very interesting evening about women and their role in the ending of the patriarchy. What I understood, is that we all need to stay connected to our joy. I am not talking about happiness here. Joy is experiencing everything without judgment or concern. It is a state of beingness. Whereas happiness requires that “this” happen and “not this”. There is a vast difference between them. Joy is inclusive, while happiness is exclusive. Another example (mine) is that when we say abundance, we don’t mean the being state of feeling gratitude for the beneficence of existence, of consciousness and experience that flows through our lives, but rather we mean money. So it is joy that is needed is for there to be a grounding in being while the world enters into [...]
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Sustainable World
The Great Turning Laast Sunday, January 3rd, in Mill Valley, CA I spent the afternoon at Awakening The Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium which was created by The Pachamam Alliance. Apparently this symposium has 2000 trainers that share it around the world in more than 40 countries on six continents. This alliance was created out of a call for partnership from one of the world’s remote indigenous dream cultures, The Achuar of the Amazon rainforest that was anwered by a small group if people, that included Lynn Twist. Lynn wrote the book, The Soul of Money, which I love and supports the movement as I do from the chase from “more is better” to sufficiency. This is how she says the Achuar put it: “We need to change the dream of the North, the dream of the modern world, a dream rooted in consumption and acquisition, without any regard to the consequences of the natural world or even our own future.” The mission of the Pachamama Alliance is to bring forth as environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence on earth. The symposium was organized around four questions: Where are we? How did we get here? What is possible for the future? Where do we go from here? They have a book called the Sustainable World Sourcebook which we should all have which gives detailed answers to all of these questions, which I can’t go into in detail here, but I would like to address. If we really look [...]
The Future is Now
Are Being Spiritual and Not Debting for the Future Contradictory? I received this email last week: “In an excellent post last April on credit card debt, you stated bluntly, ‘Debt steals from the future.’ I’m in full agreement, but I fear this line of reasoning falls on deaf ears to many debt-laden people who’ve imbibed spiritual literature over the years that emphasizes “present-moment awareness.” They don’t want to hear about the future, don’t want to think about it. For them, that 60s song by The Grass Roots, ‘Let’s Live for Today’ has been a lifelong mantra. Do you have any thoughts on how to overcome this resistance to the notion of focusing on the future? You hint at this when you write, ‘You will become more present, and not living in the bondage of your future’ by avoiding debt… but what exactly should someone tell himself or herself while climbing out of debt to ‘become more present’?” This is an excellent question, but not a simple one to answer. There are many levels on which to answer this question. I am going to approach it for the purposes of this post from two perspectives. Firstly from the perspective of Right Action. We are where spirit has materialized, so you cannot separate yourself from that which is physical or material. So being in the moment, in the now of our experience, does not negate the laws of relative reality, of physical manifestation. And there are patterns that manifest regarding money just [...]
Money and Fear
The Survival Instinct and Money One of the opposing forces in addition to the usual resistances and psychodynamic issues we have to contend with on our journey of realization are the animal instincts. They are powerful drives underneath our consciousness that want to preserve life on an animal level and are not concerned as consciousness is with the mysteries. But they often run us. And often without us knowing it. I am talking about the survival, social and sexual instincts. And all of them affect our relationship to money. For example, the social instinct can play out on the ego level as superficiality of relating, need for dominance and control, social climbing, status, image, the need for fame, or a dependency need. The sexual instinct can play out on the ego level as pleasure and compulsion. And fear, aggression, terror, worrying and obsessions are part of the survival drive. This last is the most primitive of the drives. Everyone wants to survive and live in some level of creature comfort. In fact, the majority of the world is dominated by this. You can easily see how our money is tied up in these. We don’t want to suppress the instincts as they are our life force- the expression of creative dynamism and not just the animal. We can’t be free of them, but rather want to free them to become a support and a protection for our spiritual journey. We do that by clarifiying them, liberating them from their [...]
Money and Enlightenment
How I See What Spiritual Teacher Jed McKenna Has To Say and the Economic Crisis Are Related I have been reading Jed Mckenna’s Notebook which is the newest from Spiritual Teacher, although he would hate that title. I have read his other three books in what he calls his Enlightenment Trilogy: Spiritual Enlightenment The Damnedest Thing, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, and Spiritual Warfare. I have read and reread them all and loved them, even if he would regard me as someone waking up within the dream and not waking up from the dream. You can’t find him in Wikipedia; there is no picture of him on the website for Wisefool Press, his publisher (I would guess he is self-published); there is no mail or email address for the publisher- he does not want to be contacted it seems. But he definitely has something to say, that is necessary if you are at all serious about waking up. In his latest book, he also has some great things to say that is relevant to money and the spiritual journey, so I am dedicating today’s blog to quoting Jed’s book. Please enjoy. If you are intrigued, then by all means, order his books. they are the least thought provoking, and if you are open, life-changing. “Somehow everything has become flipped upside down. Not knowing of anything better, we have elevated the banalities of physical survival to the summit of human experience- eating, drinking, sensual pleasures, sex, mating, gathering- what pathetic consolations they are! [...]
Facing Limitation Is Being Human
The Economic Crisis as Human Growth in Conciousness As I spoke about in my last blog, the chase for more is better has been a defining characteristic of our culture for some time. One of the hallmarks of this is the resulting “ubiquitous frenzy , arising from the almost universal discomfort of being with oneself. Everyone involved in this chase has been exploiting the present moment as a stepping stone to new experiences or pleasures that will keep them from having to feel our discomfort. We have become attached to our escapes from ourselves. This has become such an expectation of our culture, that Obama and the present government administration has been trying to bail out the centralized money system in an attempt to let us keep the “American Way”. It’s failing. It was doomed to fail. And not just becuase of the economics involved. I do follow those. I have made reference before to those I trust on that front, for example Michael Hudson who wrote “The Financial War Against Iceland” and many other articles over the years of great insight and wisdom and also Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com. But the economics is not my job. My job is one of consciousness, and to bring that to our money. From my perspective, the bailout was doomed to fail because a new consciousness is necessary for the survival of the planet, and us. That means we can no longer run from our discomfort. If we had chosen a [...]
The Answer To Our Credit Crisis
The Antidote to Greed in the Economic Downturn In my last post I talked about leaving the chase for more is better and a sense of deprivation which fueled that chase and start living in a sense of sufficiency. I also said this would take a shift in consciousness. In the November 10 Newsweek, in the Article, A Darker Future For Us, by Robert Samuelson, he talked about how Americans have been “progress junkies”. That is part of what I believe allowed us to be asleep at the wheel around the greed, miscalculation and the subsequent economic ruin of many Americans, and maybe America itself. The recession will end, but it won’t be a recovery to previous rates of growth. People are going to feel poorer, because their “sluggish income gains (will) get siphoned off into higher taxes, energy costs, and health spending.He says the we are about to begin a time of what he calls “affluent deprivation” which he says is a state of mind. I believe that we can, and need to move from a sense that without growth we will be in deprivation. It’s costly to consume out of a sense of deprivation. We get caught up in wanting more-bigger-faster stuff and then have to go back to earn the money to pay for it. And we are not really satisfied. What we really want is rest, time., money and connection. Jacob Needleman talks about how our capitalist society creates ever new desires. And the ease of [...]