My husband and I just took a road trip from here is the San Francisco Bay area up through Oregon, Washington, Vancouver, Vancouver Island, and camped on the way home down the coast. What was remarkable was the amount of obesity we encountered.  Some of these encounters were more memorable than other. On a ferry, we saw an overweight couple eating ice cream and feeding a young child under one year its own ice cream cup. Another at a rest stop was seeing a family arrive in two vehicles because they couldn’t fir in one vehicle- not because of numbers but because of size. My husband once exclaimed “look at that poor tiny woman!” which caused me to turn around and see this very small-boned woman with a giant belly protruding and an apron of fat descending.

In the San Francisco Chronicle pink pages( Sunday Datebook) from yesterday, a question to movie critic Mick Lasalle included “Do you think movies reflect their times not only in their content, but in the way they’re produced? For example, too many of us eat too much, drink too much, spend more than we can afford. And too many of today’s filmmakers seem to think that if they just throw money at a film it makes up for lack of craft.” Mick LaSalle’s response included ” Your question introduces an idea I’ve never considered, that the bloat in our films is related to the bloat in our people”. He goes on to add that when he travels outside tha Bay area he is astounded by how fat American are these days (like 60, 70 or 80 ponds overweight).He suggests “if they are related, that means they are springing from a single cause (or at least share a cause in common).” and concludes with “I think you might be on to something”. I agree.

My friend, Geenen Roth’s latest book, Women, Food and God, is wildly successful and should be. It has been top of the new York Times and Amazon best seller list for weeks now and she has recently been on Oprah, not once, but twice. She doesn’t have the new best diet or fad solution. Those just address symptoms. In my view,  the phenomenal success of her book is based on the fact that she is addressing underlying causes for people  and is bringing consciousness into the equation. Her book, which is the culmination of thirty years of work in the field, is coming at the exact moment that people are being called to wake up. Every American should read this book. Even if you aren’t overweight, you have been over-consuming.

We have been living on the surface of life in out-of-control consumption, and this is reflected not only in our size, but in the state of our economy. Some believe not just the American economy, but the whole world consumer-driven bubble has crashed because it is not sustainable. So, not only has our physical health been demolished, but so has our financial health.

We have been chasing “more is better”, not only in food, but in everything. The world economy has been based on American and their consumption. We used credit, not to get something for serious needs, but to satisfy all our superficial desires. And we’ve had a diminishing quality of life experience. We could HAVE everything and BE nothing.

Jacob Needleman says it like this in his book, Money And The Meaning Of Life:

“Plastic credit cards, masses of debt, enormous rates of interest, equaling massive inflation impersonal finances, continuous production of ever new and superfluous information  exactly like the continuous production of new consumer goods that satisfy artificially created needs, easy credit, borrowing money, electronic transfers of millions —ALL ON THE SURFACE OF LIFE.”

We want to be fulfilled, but this consumption never gratifies us. Our animal lust, is part of our survival instinct,  has an intense desire for food, sex, objects and  its activities align with the body for pleasure. When that animal part of ourselves is separate from our beingness, our spiritual self, lust becomes excessive and focused outside of ourselves. We have been we defining ourselves by external and financial achievements rather than who we are, our depth, our relationships, our love. Rather than fulfillment we have been trying to fill our deficiencies.

Imagine if we had angelic lust rather than animal lust. That we could find pleasure in truth, meaning, depth and profundity. Wholeness comes from balance. We need beingness, not more stuff. What we really want is connection with the earth, with other, with our own deeper underlying true nature.

Assessing the causes of this separation between our inner and our outer, our spiritual and our humanness is interesting. There are macro and micro causes. On the spiritual level, you might take it as far back as the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Or the 4000 years of the partriarchal denial  of the feminine, which is really the creative force that brings spirit into matter. The miracle of each fetus, each baby is that it is the embodiment of spirit. So the loss of the feminine has created financial systems separated from our humaness. Or, as Jacob Needleman makes a great case for in his aformentioned book, the cultural impact of the history of the our western church.

Regardless of the cause, what is important is for us to recognize what is needed is a movement toward our beingness.  The solutions are not going to come from solving world problems externally. That is still a focus outward.  Wholeness requires a different kind of movement.Imagine if we had angelic rather than animal lust. Imagine if we took more pleasure in love, truth, meaning, depth and profundity.

Our mass consumption has been built based on the loneliness and hurt at the bottom of our ego structures. Instead of trying to fill that hole with more stuff, if we feel the underlying pain and hurt of the human heart, it will open into love. And when we have experiences of that, we will recognize that is what we have been longing for. What it  requires is for each of us to look inward, and be with that pain and hurt. That is the beginning. That is the doorway to new spiritual responsibility that we are all being called to.

I really like this guy , Matt Taibbi, who writes for the Rolling Stone magazine.  He again has a great article this month on the continued  betrayal of the American people.  The article is called “Wall Street Strikes Back” and the table of contents description on Page 5 tells a lot of the story: “Congress looked serious about financial reform until the country’s biggest banks unleashed an army of 2000 paid lobbyists”.

In the body of the article, Matt talks about the watering down of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act and ends with a few points that In feel are important to mention here. On the positive  side, the bill will curb some of the predatory lending I have spoken a lot about. But the more important issues the bill was supposed to address, like  breaking up large risky banks, requiring financial giants to set up a fund to pay for their own bailouts, and probably most importantly, forcing the derivatives market to be more transparent, won’t happen in any meaningful way. So the $600 trillion derivatives market will continue to work without the light of day, and that in my mind is criminal.

Matt’s conclusion foretells the continuing impact on the American people- “a war the once looked winnable will continue to drag on for years, creating more havoc and destroying more lives before it is over”.

So the results of the financial fiasco keep getting put back onto the shoulders of the American people.

I was at a meditation evening with spiritual teacher, David Spero, last week, on Memorial Day weekend. His comment as I remember it was that all the veterans who died for this country would rise up out of their graves with pickaxes and descend on Washington if they could.

Let’s talk about the lives that are being “destroyed”.

I heard a program on Solari.com where John Willams who has the website,  shadowstats.com, revealed that the real unemployment rate in the US right now,the rate not manipulated by government, is actually more like 23%, the worse since the great depression. And the myriads of self-employed people who are struggling right now, are not even included in these statistics.

We are being told the situation is improving, but our personal experiences are telling us it is not. Here are some of my recent ones:

The residential real estate market is continuing to tumble. I know many self employed people in my county such as contractors, real estate agents, architects who are out of work, had to close their offices, and are wondering how they can survive. Home suppliers are suffering and closing their retail  and wholesale spaces- many of whom have been around for decades. The next tier in real estate,  the  commercial  market, is being deeply affected. There are several families in my neighborhood, whose husbands are being laid off, and there is no other work for them available. I ran into a realtor friend at the farmer’smarket yesterday who has been in the business for 30 years, and she was in shock.

I had a facial last month, and my facialist’s business is way down. The stories of her clients include upside down mortgages and  overextended credit.  My doctor last week was asking me if I thought things were on the upswing because her experience is that it is not-her friends, many of whom are professionals like her, are either upside down too, or have lost a large percentage of their original downpayments. On my way to her office, I was amazed at the number of empty store fronts along one of the main streets of that city.

One of the most poignant story I heard was from a friend, who was working in a food line in another state, and a woman driving a late model Lexus arrived for food. In conversation with her, my friend discovered the woman had lost her job, her home, and was now living out of her car, which if they could find it, would be repossessed.

These are  the anecdotal results of a history of predatory lending and us being good consumer citizens. These tales are not just outrage at the information about what has happened, but rather it all coming home to roost with each of us in its own way, or  where the rubber meets the road.

So what we can see from this is the chaos is landing. We are being forced to take responsibility. We are being forced to turn inward. We are recognizing there is noone who is going to help us. We are going to have to help ourselves.We are going to have to face our fears, our limitations, our expectations, our desires, our anger, the whole range of human feelings, as well as our animal instincts , including the  survival instinct

This entire subject of turning inward, of inquiring more deeply into our experience, can seem counterintuitive to our normal  self, which has spent its whole life trying to move toward pleasure and away from pain. We have believed that happiness comes from avoiding pain and moving toward pleasure; in fact, we have spent most of  our time planning and engaging in activities in order to do just that. These activities have  include obsessively making more money, or spending more money, since most of us have believed that having more money or more possessions will give us greater happiness.

We believe that we need to change or fix something external to ourselves in order to be okay, so we try to do something “out there”-change our circumstances, change the other person, change the world.It doesn’t mean we don’t need to take appropriate action. But what we haven’t understood is that in order to transform our pain, and to ultimately meet our potential as human beings, we have to touch that pain with consciousness, be present to it and understand it. Knowing this, we can now consider the possibility that we may have to change our relationship to our pain. Instead of it being an enemy or a threat, we can recognize it as a friend on the spiritual journey and as a beacon to awakening.

We can use this time to transform our relationship to ourselves and to others. To what is more essential than pleasure. To make contact with something that right now is unknowable. We are all faced  right now with with not knowing in many forms-  but not knowing  is the doorway to something new. That is the spiritual opportunity of our money pain.

I heard a joke the other day, that might have been funny if it weren’t so close to the truth.

“The last will and testament of the Icelandic financial sector requested their ashes be spread over Europe”. I loved what my husband’s friend said in response to hearing that: There was a special bequest to England who replied “We said cash not ash”.

But this is what is happening not just around Iceland debt, but debt in general all over the world. The debtors are being blamed, and the creditors have been given cash. The US government bailed out the banks- who were responsible for  making bad loans, but gave nothing to the debtors. In effect, the bankers have been paid for their bad loans.

As our economy is shrinking, these same creditors are grabbing as much as they can and in the process making the debtors feel guilty. The creditors are more guilty. They supported predatory lending- lending knowing that  the debts could never be paid. It is another chapter in  the wealth grab.

The 10,000,000 Americans who are probably going to lose their homes didn’t cause the problems, but they and the American people whose taxes funded the bailouts are going to be left holding the bag.

The economist Michael Hudson  has likened the American democracy at the moment to an Oligarchy. He said that 25 years ago, 1% of the American public owned 27% of equity income, meaning interest, dividends and capital gains. Five years ago, that amount was 57% and now it is 67% or 2/3. It has never been this unequal, this out of balance. In his view an oligarchy is last stage of democracy before aristocracy. If he is correct, then we are entering a period of neofeudalism.

I heard him say, he expects our standard of living to go down 50%.

What is interesting about the bailed out banks, is that they have come back for more. They have no shame.

In his article in Rolling Stone Magazine in April 2010, Matt Taibbi talks about the “basic battle plan of banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburg to Athens. And even if the regultors manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine ad move on to the next scam. This isn’t capitalism. This is nomadic thievery.” (Bold is mine)

But there was an even more telling statement he made in the same article. “We live in a gangster state and our days of laughing at other countries are over. It’s our turn to get laughed at.”

David Wiedemer, in his recent book Aftershock : Protect Yourself and Profit From The Next Financial Meltdown, which you can get from Amazon books, is warning us that we haven’t seen the last of the bubbles. There are two more to come that are inevitable as the falling bubbles start to cascade and that is the stock market bubble and discretionary spending bubble. A friend of mine who has been a stock market trader since the 1970s  says in his view all the indicators are there for  a falling stock market, but it’s just not happening. Yet.

So we are not out of the woods. Despite the announcement I heard last week that the recession is over. Don’t believe it. The failed bubbles we had been living in my whole adult life have nothing in them to restart them. We are no longer in a cyclical economy, but in an evolving economy. And that doesn’t mean evolving upward, it means into more reality. Where companies are valued on their price/earnings ratio and not on hype. Where tangible assets have more value than virtual ones.  The crash we recently experienced was just one of a series of concentric circles that are going to hit us over the near future.

So, it’s not time to go shopping.

So what does this have to do with money as a spiritual practice? Let’s find out.

Our apparent autonomy and independence as human beings has been  supported with  financial developments in our history such as the development of coinage which took us out of bartering, and then the concepts of borrowing and lending which was a significant step in the evolution of money. Then there was the creation of banking,  and the bond and stock markets. More recently, we have had  fractional reserve banking, derivatives, credit cards, and  a whole range of other creative financial instruments, some of which were also destructive, like mortgage backed securities.

The current economic crisis has made us realize that not only have  we been living in a delusion of autonomy and independence, but in fact globalization and the worldwide impact of the chinks of our money system has made the world more interdependent. It has also made us aware of the illusion of separateness. We are all in the same boat, and so any leakiness affects us all.

Recognizing we are interdependent beings also challenges the ego notion that we are separate individuals with our own autonomy. In fact, it is more than a notion, but a belief under which we live our lives. It seems obvious that we have our own bodies, our own minds, our own histories, our own likes and dislikes, our own jobs and our own bank accounts.  In fact we spend everyday in the mantra of “me, mine, my”. This belief in our separateness contributes to both the competiveness in our money system and our suffering around money. When we believe we are separate, then the other is either someone to get something from or to be afraid of.

If at our cores, we are not separate from the infiniteness of god, being, true nature whatever you want to call it, then where can we end?  And at the deepest level, we share all share that same beingness. We all manifest from the same core. We are literally all one.

If this was an understanding we all could share,  then we would no longer work at odds with each other trying to cut up abundance as if it were a pie, and  instead live in a world where truth had more value than greed and where economic return is based on mutual benefit. Not only would we be living in a more enlightened society, but we wouldn’t be at the mercy of gangsters.

At the core of all great spiritual teachings is the recognition that as human beings we have two natures. In Hindu, this is talked about in terms of Shiva and Shakti. In Buddhsit Mahamudra, it is the union of luminous clarity and emptiness (Shiva) and Phenomenon. In Dzogchen, it is the union of awareness and phenomenon. In Tantra it is the Masculine (Emptiness) and Feminine (Form). In Christianity, it is the Father and Holy Ghost (Shiva) and the Son. In The Diamond Approach, it is the Absolute and the Logos or Realization/actualization.

The shakti/phenomenon, form, the Son and actualization all point to us as human beings incarnate, as embodiment. So what is implied is that human life has meaning only insofar that we consciously and intentionally occupy two worlds, the spiritual and the human,  at the same time. And that meaning appears at the place where these two worlds meet these two worlds- in the relationship between the two worlds. In our secular world, where we have not recently (I mean in terms of a few centuries) by and large not paid attention to that relationship, that meaning has largely been lost.

I thought this was a good subject to cover today, because we have just passed Easter, where  we have been reminded of the divinity of Jesus and hopefully also, of our own spiritual nature. So, let’s begin by looking at the symbolism of the cross. We have a horizontal and vertical segments meeting at the center where they cross, where they overlap.

I am using the symbolism of the cross, as our western history is so tied to the history of the church. But other ancient cultures also used it as a spiritual symbol. For example, there is evidence from crosses sewn into an ancient  Siberian shamans clothes that they were birds, symbols of the shamans spirit flight into non-ordinary reality. I have read that there is evidence that even the Neanderthal people may have used it.

From the spiritual point of view, a  way to look at this is to consider the outer nature of man as a secondary nature- secondary to our spiritual nature. So the challenge of life is to make our life serve our spiritual realization or at least have them in balance. Instead , what has happened in our society is that the our life has become a runaway secular horse with no tempering by  consciousness. The loss of that relationship is echoed in the mass loss of integrity  in our money.

Our secondary nature usually resists the spiritual realization-Einstein Wrote ” Great Spirits Are Always violently opposed by mediocre minds”- in the form of all of our  conditioning, beliefs, self-images etc, this resistance does not hinder in our development. Rather,  as I have spoken about earlier, when we inquire and understand our resistances they actually support our spiritual growth, and in fact are the food for our journey. In other words our  human nature can actually serve our spiritual realization.

This is one of the aspects of the mystery of the cross. The cross is an  intersection of two opposing directions. This represents where the human being meets its spiritual form. At that intersection there is great struggle, great suffering on the physical plane that can be an avenue for transformation.

The church itself may have been to blame for the separation of the material and the spiritual. As Jacob Needleman talks about in his book Money And The Meaning Of Life. He talked about how originally the ethics of churches was to prevent humanity from giving too much of himself to his outer nature, but at the same time, to respect it and satisfy its legitimate needs. Unfortunately, distortions ended up degrading these ethics and one of the biggest distortions was the condemnation of the “lower”  nature of man- his physical needs and desires. So these normal needs of man became not only secondary, but actually split off and evil. Included in “evil” was sex and money. In fact, as money took a greater and greater place in society, it became one of the chief objects of distrust. What was not recognized at the time,was that we can lust after God, just as we can lust after a sexual object. We can be just as avarice about salvation as about wealth or money. It is lust and greed that are the issue, not money or normal human needs of being in a body.

As Jacob Needleman points out, the reaction to this hypocrisy is known as Protestantism. It brought a new attitude into the world- that led to new attitudes toward the “lower” nature of people. This new idea was that humanity should be free from obedience to any institution, but instead could be guided by the light of their own reason.  A person’s life was seen as his proper calling and his role in the world as sacred as any priest’s. So in effect, the human material desires became separated from the influence of Christian teaching and therefore the spirituality of the time with the advent of Protestantism.

Our economic system as well as the ascendancy of science in our culture, can be seen as springing in large measure form this secular world view. At this point in our civilization, money is the chief representative of this outer world.

If it is true that authentic human experience requires the presence of both worlds, the higher and lower. Or another way of saying it, the inner and the outer, than to exist in one world alone, is not to be a complete human being.

We need to bring our awareness to the intersection of the two worlds, inner and outer and their seeming incompatibility, before there can be a question of these two worlds becoming one. Our understanding of our relationship to money can actually become one of the harmonizing forces between these two potentials in man, an actual harmonizing force in our own lives.

The spiritual master, Osho, talked about bringing this balance back into our lives as “the New Man”- an individual who could be in the world and dance through it like Zorba the Greek and at the same time be a Buddha, a meditator. To bring back the balance between our two natures. As Osho said:

“Zorba the Buddha is the answer. It is the synthesis of matter and soul. It is a declaration that there is no conflict between matter and consciousness, that we can be rich on both sides. We can have everything that the world can provide, that science and technology can produce, and we can still have everything that a Buddha, a Kabir, a Nanak finds in his inner being-the flowers of ecstasy, the fragrance of godliness, the wings of ultimate freedom.”

So we need to put money back where it belongs,  not as a means in itself, but as a tool in our aim  of realization of our true nature.  Money is unique because it sits right exactly in the center of the cross. Because money is embedded in everything we do, it is a reflection of our values, and whatever is our level of spiritual realization. The question becomes- “Who can reach for what transcends earth, while still remaining on the earth? It is a place only for humanity, a center that is solely the destiny of humankind”

The Rolling Stone March 2009 issue had an article by Matt Taibbi called Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle in which he likens the financial crisis bailout to a street con and makes a very good case of it, taking us step by step through the con game led by Goldman Sachs. In the article he makes a case that the big banks aren’t just pocketing the trillions that were given them to rescue the economy, but that they are engineering another crash so that they can continue to feed at the trough.

There is one paragraph that is such a concise summary, it is worth quoting:

“Take massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at even more inflated prices,- and then, when all else fails, start driving toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economies”.

He goes on to say, that” con artists have a word for the inability of victims to accept that they have been scammed. The call it the “true believer” syndrome.”

It is time to quit believing that someone else- the government, the banks- are going to take care of you and will have your best interests at heart. It is time to wake up, smell the coffee and take responsibility. This is the  theme of the new consciousness phase that humanity is entering into, that we are each responsible for our lives, our personal growth. But it is also the beauty of the new consciousness, that each one of us is a unique  expression of the ultimate beingness, true nature, God, the Beloved, Unity, whatever you wish to call it. In order for each of us to realize we are an individual reflection of the divine, we have to start with where we are, and that means taking responsibility. It is not a moral thing, but a spiritual one.

There is another saying about cons: every con is based on the mark’s own greed.

I don’t feel like that is the basis upon which the majority of Americans have been caught, however. It seems to me the underlying motivation was fear. That if I don’t get on this train of “more is better” I am going to fail and if I fail, I won’t survive. This is very tied into the instincts that I have spoken about earlier and a feeling of deprivation. Don’t get me wrong,  greed was inherent in the field and was a motivator for many people who wittingly or unwittingly joined the ranks of the perpetrators in the giant Ponzi scheme that was called the economy.

It was costly to consume out of a sense of deprivation. We got caught up in wanting more-bigger-faster stuff and then had to go back to earn the money to pay for it, or even worse what most of us did was go into credit card debt and mortgaged our futures for unbridled consumption. And we were not really satisfied. Are you happier? What we really want is rest, time, and connection- beingness.

Fear is not a crime.  But if we don’t use the zen stick of the financial crisis to wake up, then we are also being willfully ignorant, and that is suicide. And that is a crime against humanity.

There is another belief that is in operation in most of us- that there isn’t anything we can do to change the situation- it is the way it is. Globally this makes it so that those with the most money wield the most power and feel encouraged and entitled to do so. In that resignation, we abandon our human potential and the possibility of contributing to a thriving, equitable, healthy world.

Another belief that is in operation in us is that someone has to end up with the short end of the stick, Those with more are smarter and more able, even more valuable human beings. In other words, we are helpless.

But these are just beliefs, not the truth. Beliefs are a crime against ourselves, our potential, our capacities.

So we need to stand up, dust off our trousers, forgive ourselves and begin to do what Americans have done for centuries when faced with adversity, is to take stock and do what is needed. And in the process develop the muscles of personal responsibility and resiliency. It is not a call to arms, but a revolution of evolution. Let’s begin to apply intelligence and consciousness to the situation. And in that process you will find that you are not helpless.

One of the things we are going to have to tolerate is that there is going to be more financial volatility than there used to be.  So there will be less of the illusion of security that we believed money provided. The truth is, we don’t know what is going to happen in the next moment. The more we can sit in not knowing, the more we realize there really is no perch of security in the world, the more we will be able to tolerate the volatility. And then instead of fighting it, we will be able to allow the volatility to inform our decisions, about our financial life. We will be more conscious about our financial life.

So, how would this play our on a practical level. Here are some things to consider:

Remove yourself from dependency on the centralized money system which,  as I described  above, is leading us down the road of another con. Move your money to a local bank or credit union that is supporting your local community and gives loans to small businesses (ordinary Americans) and not just large corporations.

Lower your overhead as much as you can. For example, pay down your mortgage rather than putting more money away for retirement into the stock market which is part of that system. In this regard, there are some I know who are actually cashing in their IRA’s and paying the tax penalties, in order to pay off their mortgages.

Don’t debt and definitely don’t use your credit cards. The predatory lending through credit cards has fostered the dependence of Americans on the centralized money system. Also, credit card interest adds to  overhead and delays self-sufficiency. If you don’t understand this, see my blog on debt entitled “Debt is the New Bondage”.

When you reduce your overhead, you reduce your income needs. And that leaves you more flexible in dealing with different scenarios as they arise. It also can begin to lead to personal self -sufficiency which is in alignment with each of us taking more responsibility.

If you are investing, consider that diversification means global and local, and acres and hooves, not just different stocks and bonds which are all part of the centralized money system. Also consider investing in assets that do no harm. Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com uses “total economic return” as a basis for choosing investments- one that brings economic return to everyone, and not at the exploitation of anyone.

When you become more conscious with your money, you will realize that wherever you put your money,  it goes in your name, that is WHERE YOU ARE. If you practice financial intimacy, your goals and values will be tied up with what you invest in, what you bring into the world.

The bottom line is that we are our own money counselors and we need to take responsibility for our money and our assets. And since money is our expression of our consciousness in the world, it also means  taking responsibility for that consciousness, and that is the spiritual journey. Money as spiritual practice.

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 chaos.  Why chaos? According to Pratima’s guidance, that is the only way the entrenched patriarchy will be able to loosen it’s grip on the world.  When I say patriarchy here, I am not blaming the masculine. What that refers to is the imbalance between the masculine and the feminine that has been affecting the world for probably 4000 years, since the time of Egypt. The masculine and feminine have  been equally affected. But as women, because of our womb wisdom, we can more easily stay in joy when there is chaos.  So it is the work women can do during this time- stay grounded in beingness.

I found this very interesting, because this is not the first I have heard of chaos with respect to what is happening right now in the world.  We simply have to look around at what has been happening economically for the last two years,  and if we haven’t been personally suffering yet,  we know many who are. I know many people’s survival instinct alarms have been going off.

I see the upheaval the world is experiencing as a sign of the human spirit. In history, there has been chaos before the fall of every empire- in Rome, the British Empire,  and perhaps now the American Empire. And in each case, the fall was presaged by a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

I recently just read a book called Unplugging The Patriarchy by Lucia Rene. In that book she also talks about chaos in a similar vein. She sees chaos as the feminine and is actually the ability to surrender and let the Divine rule. Therefore,  implicit in chaos is divine order, but this is not as yet understood or valued by men.

In her view, the world is trying to move to the heart-based fourth chakra- to a new fourth dimensional world. Where one learns about unconditional love, where community collaboration and cooperation are organizing principles. Instead of a world where power is power over, where there is dominance instead of divine oneness.

So the paradox is that chaos is the beginning of a movement toward more balance.

This movement doesn’t say who will suffer and who won’t,  and it won’t necessarily seem fair to us who does or does not suffer, but it is for sure fortunes will be made and lost.

If we are looking outside of ourselves, into the world of ego, then the chaos and crashing that is happening will be a problem, a catastrophe. The ego will see negative factions and will want to blame.  Instead, we need to get out of our denial, stay with our negative feelings and face our fears within. It is only by seeing our illusions and unwise choices can  we begin to see a paradigm shift with untold opportunities for connecting with our self, our deeper nature, our beingness that is unaffected by the domain of the ego, the world.

It is only when we feel our brokenness that we can move toward wholeness.

If finances are much in your consciousness these days, then that is your path right now.  Perhaps it is about overcoming financial limitations to  find out how love, joy, truth beauty, all aspects of consciousness can manifest in your circumstances.

Again what we see, is that money is imbedded in everything that we do. So any movement in consciousness in the world will also mean a movement in money systems. If you pay attention to your relationship to money, you will become aware of the thread of your spiritual path. Our issues are the raw materials of our spirit. Like I heard the Michael channel say one day “If we achieved perfection, we would be spiritually unemployed”.

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 at “where are we? ” it is very sobering.

• 2% of people own 50% of the world’s wealth
• 50% of people share in 1% of the world’s wealth
• in North America we use more than FIVE TIMES what the earth can renew (our ecological footprint). In other words, we use five earths, Europe uses three, China and India so far only one.
• we are approaching the climate change tipping point
• we are approaching a mass extinction of species . One half of all species will be gone in 50 years

If you have difficulty relating to that personally, then let me give you something you can relate to. If you have food in your refrigerator, clothes in your closet and a roof over your head  (if you live in Mill Valley, California for example) then you are better off than 83% of the people in the world!

The Pachamama Alliance gives 7 foundations of a just sustainable world:

1. Economic Fairness
2. Comprehensive Peace
3. Deep Democracy
4. Social Justice
5. Simple Living
6. Revitalized Community

Bur we can’t change the world if we don’t change ourselves. Like I have been talking about all along here is taking personal responsibility for our choices.  We need to bring consciousness to the choices we have made and the underlying beliefs and assumptions that have been living our lives under. Check out some of these below and see if they fit for you. There are many more you can think of for yourself.

• The world is here to satisfy our needs
• Competition alone (without cooperation and compassion) is the fundamental law of nature
• My value is dependent upon my success
• We can throw things away eg; I recycle (Where do they go?)
• Growth is based on consumption (the GDP)
• We are separate people
• Money (income, financial success will bring me happiness)

When we challenge our beliefs and assumptions, and inquire into ourselves about whether they are really true, we can get freedom from them, and start to live and act as a more conscious human being. Without consciousness we will continue to act out of our belief systems.

I want to address the last two here today. As I have spoken about before, we have been trying to fill our holes, our sense of deficiency with money. That having enough money or things will make us feel whole. Wholeness comes from beingness not more stuff. What we really want is connection, with the earth, with others, with our own deeper underlying nature.  Our mass consumption haas been based on the loneliness and hurt at the bottom of all of our ego structures. When we quit consuming, trying to fill this sense of deficiency with more stuff,  we will feel the underlying pain and hurt, and the hunger of the human heart. And when we stay with that pain and hurt, it will open into love. And we will recognize it is that we have been longing for. I call that Angelic lust, rather than the animal lust of more is better (more money, more pleasure, more stuff).

The indigenous view of the world is that we are it’s caretakers. That we need to be in balance with it. That what we do that assaults the earth, we are doing to ourselves. We haven’t recognized we are in a global village, there is only one boat and a hole will sink us all. Part of the reason is that we believe we are all separate human beings. Our whole ego structures are built around this assumption.

Physicist Brian Swimme, talks about the universe story, how we all and everything came from a point of singularity. So how can we be separate? That is at the macro level and the micro level. All of manifestation comes from one point of singularity. And yet we all act as separate, that our happiness is won at the expense of others, even our very survival. It is this belief that we are separate from everyone and everything else that underlies the imbalance in the world.  It is this separateness of the human heart  that hurts us, others, the world. Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist spiritual teacher,  talks bout the belief  that we are separate is primary to the world’s and our own imbalance puts it like this:  that “to be” means to “interbe”

So we need to inquire into this belief of our separateness, to feel directly whether it is true or not. To turn the gaze inward and find out what is the truth of our human heart. And with this new consciousness we are discovering within ourselves, we will bring more conscious actions to the world, because it will be who we are as much as what we do.

As the Pachamama Alliance says, we need to merge the genious of the human mind to the wisdom of the human heart. They say there needs to be a great turning, to bring a new possibility into the world. They are focussing on the world, the macro level.  That “great turning” also has to happen within each of us, within each of our own souls. Where we begin to look deeply within take responsibility for our own consciousness and what we each bring personally into the  world.

One of the themes that I have continued to talk about is taking responsibility? It seems like an easy concept, but it is actually something very difficult to do. Mostly we like to blame- our mates, our parents, our investment advisor, the government, the economy, Bernie Madoff etc. etc.

What responsibility means is taking the 180 degree turn- instead of looking at the other, we begin to look at ourselves. This is the turn talked about in the spiritual journey- you can’t start until you begin to turn inwards. But it is not just those on the spiritual journey who need to take responsibility- we all do. It is required if the planet is going to survive- the argument about that has moved from “if” to “when”. There is no “other” that is going to do that for us. It is necessary that each one of us take responsibility for how we are living our lives and what we are contributing to the planet. If you confront yourself truthfully, you can know for yourself.

Of course, we are influenced by the culture we live in.  One measurement of  the mean responsibility (average) in your culture is the carbon footprint, which you, as an individual,  are contributing to. And the carbon footprint in the US is the second largest in the world. The only country higher is Australia, and that is because of the exportation of their natural resources, not because of their consumer consumption, which the US’s is a reflection of.

So, what does that mean practically to take the 180 degree turn? How can you practice that in a meaningful way? The answer to that is a method called inquiry which you can apply to yourself.

What is inquiry? It is an open and open-ended questioning of our experience that leads to a living understanding of ourselves. It is experiential, not conceptual.

It is also natural and simple. It is how we as infants began to orient ourselves in the world. It is how we learned. For example, like “how can I pull myself up to this table”, or “What is this like if I put it in my mouth”. These inquiries are  not  answered through concepts, but actually making contact with what is happening right where we are. So, inquiry is part of being human.

What I am talking about in this context, is applying that same natural attribute of inquiry to our consciousness, so that we can see  ourselves more clearly. So that we can wake up to what we are doing, how we are living.More importantly, it can wake us up to our underlying beingness. It can penetrate our layers of defenses, our resistances and opens things up so that we can see more clearly the truth of a situation .It opens things up within the realm of our personal experience. And we can apply this inquiry to our relationship to money.

Let’s take an example. Let’s say I am a married woman who takes care of the money in our relationship because I believe my husband has no capacity in this area. I feel resentment and wish I had a more responsible partner.As I feel into my resentment, it reminds me of my mother’s resentment. I begin to recognize that my parents’ experience  molded this belief in me. In this example, my mother had an alcoholic husband and I remember the fear in my belly,  and I feel like I need to control the money or I won’t survive.So  I begin to see how I have been blaming my husband instead of looking at me.This looking at your own experience and taking responsibility for what is happening in your life is the 180 degree turn.

With inquiry, you can find what is beneath a feeling or belief, and this takes us into deeper and deeper realms of reality. And if we apply this inquiry into our beliefs, attitudes and reactions to money, we are using money as a spiritual path. Inquiry is the defining method the the Diamond Approach in the Ridhwan Spiritual School.

There are qualities that support our inquiry and make it more effective.We need to have an openness to seeing the truth, to allowing whatever comes up without having any goal or position or preference. That means we have to be able to allow ourselves to experience not knowing . Not knowing is the doorway to something new, to new possibilities and is not normally valued in our culture.  Otherwise we stay in the realm of the known which does not take us deeper into our depth or the truth. If we think we know the answer, then we are not open. We can be truly surprised about what we find out if we remain open to what is being revealed in our inquiry.

You need to start where you are. It is not about what you think, but what you feel. So check in with your emotions and body sensations. Remember inquiry is experiential. You are not trying to figure it out with your mind. In inquiry, the mind’s role changes from “figuring it out” to curiosity and recognition of what’s true.

The world of truth  is approached through increased attention to oneself - to our consciousness in the midst of our world dealings. And this is the beginning of our freedom from it.

The issue confronting us is that money is such an enormous role in our lives yet we are generally unconscious about it.

So in order to free oneself from the thrall of money, we need to study ourselves in the middle of it. Not avoid looking at our money issues and hope it will work out for the best. We need to begin to see the causes and effects of our relationship to money and inquiry can help us do that.

So the process is to dive into the middle of our money issues, feel the discomfort energy fully, and recognize what truth we find for ourselves in the middle of it.

When you do this, it removes the power from a structure, a belief, an emotion, and makes it transparent, so that whatever it was creating in your life disappears. And at the same time opens you up more and more to who you really are.

And when you rest more and more in your deeper true nature, in beingness, even in the midst of the intensity of feelings that you experience around money, you will be able to respond more skillfully to your money situation. And you will have more wisdom about your relationship to money that you can apply to it. And equally importantly, as a result, you will contribute to the sanity of the planet.

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 as there are other patterns we have learned to see and understand. One of those patterns is the effect of debt on our present experience.

To be spiritual is not contradictory to material well-being. In fact, to bring our spiritual realization into the world is part of the spiritual journey.  There is realization of your true nature which  you could call vertical realization, and then there is the movement of this realization into the world. You could call this the horizontal integration of our realization, whatever state or level that is. That is bringing our realization into our lives.

This implies right action. If we don’t attend to impeccability and right action, then there is an insincerity on the path.

So we  need to become more aware of the actions we take. We need to know what is RIGHT action. The more we live our lives in a “correct” way, the more we integrate being/ our true nature into our lives.

It is an ethical question: when we align ourselves with  an ethical response, that is right action. And ethical responses are in alignment with being. If truth does not enter into our relationships with money, then it cannot enter into our lives.

This requires both integrity and responsibility.

The more mature a human being we are, the  more we have a feeling sense of integrity, the  more we have self respect and also respect reality. The less mature we are, the less able we are to consider the totality of any situation.

And when you are more able to see the totality of the situation with money, you will recognize the implications of debt. When I talk about debt, I am not just talking about money, but also talking about consciousness and waking up to the reality of your situation in the now. That is why I call this work I do  “money as a spiritual practice”.

The second perspective is that of Future Orientation.

The NOW is without the future in our experience of the present moment.

If you have an appointment tomorrow, or if you need to make travel plans, or if you need to consider the impact of debt, you do need to consider the future in that sense.  We do need to consider it for practical matters. But what does that have to do with the experience of yourself in the moment? Your experience of yourself can be in the now, even as you are making plans.

So we can be efficient and intelligent about the future, even as we reside in the present moment.

The problem is that we believe we have to jump into the future in order to plan. We can plan in the now. Our consciousness does not have to jump into the future, but for most of us that is what happens.

Most of us live in hope for a better future and we attempt to alter our experience to make a better future.  That means we believe in a future and we end up living for that future. So we end up in a future orientation missing the now. But what is there other than now?

So it is a paradox. The nowness of our experience is where our being, our essence, our true nature is. So we don’t want to live in a future orientation.

But that doesn’t negate the recognition and needs of manifest reality.We are human beings afterall.

Where there is paradox there is also truth. There is always both sides of any coin.

The masculine is what turns the soul  outward to affect the world. But in order for it to help us through the global crisis, which is really a wake-up all to humanity, it must escape the defining cultural influences to which it has been subjected for centuries. The forces of the old masculine approach ( what I call the patriarchy) are being challenged by a the arising of the feminine and a new masculinity that uses its strength to support and empower the community.

What I call the  patriarchy is really a  magnification and distortion of the true masculine qualities. True masculinity is about  achievement in the world, but not cut off from consciousness and in partnership with the feminine.

The old patriarch loves the rigidity of the law, the power of the hierarchy, and the tyranny of oppression. The difficulty is that old ways die hard and our institutions including banks, government, church, and corporations are still easily controlled by this mentality.  People who are in these institutions are not objective, because their own  interests are being served- so whether consciously or unconsciously, they are enmeshed in this mindset. You just need to look at the bonuses Wall Street keeps paying out  to see the truth of this.

These people have not reflected on their inner lives, and the values that would flow from such a reflection. Instead, they act through layers of rationalization, manipulation, greed, and hidden agendas which (I hope for the planet’s and humanities sake, not too late)  are no longer so hidden.

This distorted masculine has no  respect for individual autonomy, honest emotion, or thinking for oneself. American’s have stopped thinking for themselves, and instead adopt the latest sound bite as the truth. We are the object of  scorn and contempt in the world for our astounding lack of intelligent discernment.

Signs of this patriarchy way of thinking is seen everywhere in the west: in the forms of absolute control, war and oppression, logic without emotion, science without consciousness,  and “objectivity” without relationship. This has been going on for centuries, and even millennium. And it is not  allowing humanity to evolve.

For those of us who have been aware of the movements of the new masculine, which bring truth and honesty and integrity to their dealings in the world, there have been equal and opposing tactics by the patriarchy in order to attempt to maintain control. I believe this is the thrashing tail of a dying dragon , however, and won’t ultimately prevail.

In fact, “fighting” the patriarchy is not the movement that is needed: our energy, our time, and therefore our creativity is drained from us when we oppose something. What is needed is to move forward with the new.

But, this new masculine consciousness cannot exist without the feminine, nor vice versa. What is needed is an equal partnership with respect for each other. This is already beginning to happen at an increasing rate. I see it happening all around me.

I can give you some examples. You probably have many of your own to contribute.

I was recently at a wonderful shop like few you’ve ever visited, called Spirit Matters in West Marin, CA that has all kinds of spiritual crafts, books, music (what the owner Nonnie Welch calls “oddities and deities”). It was amazing seeing all the books on the feminine that are available right now. There are all kinds of group experiences for addressing  the issues of both the emerging masculine and feminine that you can find on the internet, and maybe in your neighborhood. Personally, I just got back from a retreat with Bernie Prior , a world teacher on the masculine and the feminine who calls his work SHE (Spiritual Human Evolution).This partnership of the masculine and feminine will begin to align individual, national, and global, concerns and provide the gateway toward greater human evolution of consciousness.

My husband and I first addressed what we felt was difficult in our relationship, but didn’t realize as a split between the masculine and the feminine several years ago, when we read the Toltec books, Unveil the Mysteries of the Female and The Quest for Maleness by Theun Mares which you can get on Amazon. Although I didn’t agree with everything in these books, it allowed the two of us enter into a partnership that totally changed our relationship and has endured. The biggest thing was that my husband started to really listen to me, my intuition, my depth, my groundedness in the forms of reality, my view of what was happening. I remember him saying to me  in the language of the Toltec books”You have been stalking me, but I haven’t been listening”.

“What does this have to do with money?”  you might be asking. One simple answer, is that if men had been in partnership with women, there couldn’t have been the financial instruments so cut off from actual reality. There would not have been derivatives, bundles  of debts with fancy names (the real estate bubble) , buying stocks without underlying real value (the dot.com bubble).  There would have been the values of the feminine including nurturance, community, respect for the other, love, and the conception of purpose in life, and therefore in equity, in assets- the world of money.

So how about now, how about you as an individual? The steps toward transformation are simple and humble. Start where you are.  A couple needs listen to each other and value what the other is bringing to the table, as equals. I was speaking to Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com who amongst many things helps with investing from this new mindset. I heard her say, that the voice of the wife, the feminine, has been a big part of her most successful stories of transforming the equity of her clients, out of the patriarchy and the centralized money system, and into a more sustainable reality.

Whether  as an individual or in a couple, it is important to see where you are. What that means practically is preparing  a monthly cash flow statement (”cash in” minus categories of “cash out”) to see where you have spending your life energy and whether, if you turn and reflect on your inner self, does where you put your money reflect  your values, or does it reflect the values of the patriarchy, like fear and greed. This will take radical honesty and a desire to know the truth.

But it will also support taking responsibility which I keep saying, is a necessary, from my view, the primary ingredient for humanity to continue evolving. If you start taking responsibility for your money, since money is imbedded in everything we do, it will lead to being responsible in all aspects of your life, and a step toward contributing to a consciousness shift in humanity.  We may feel helpless in personally fixing the system, but we can be part of the movement toward sanity.