“God redeems humanity, but nature needs to be redeemed by human alchemists, who are able to induce the process of transformation, which alone is capable of liberating the light imprisoned in physical creation.” ~ Stephan Hoeller.
The grip of money and its use in the modern world has had a long and gritty history up unto the present day. The glint of treasure in the gluttonous eye has transmuted into an illusionary form of currency, but perhaps one that is much more dangerous and accountable for our burning the candle at both ends in the global economy and the resources of this planet.
The history of money has many twists and turns but the latter part of the American Dollar can be summed up as follows.
After a few decades of instability before the turn of the century with people’s reliance on gold causing hoarding and distrust in the system, President Roosevelt created the Federal reserve, which attached gold more securely to paper money, or the dollar, and, despite its bumpy beginning with the Great Depression, ‘successfully’ allowed the government to pay its debt in dollars and not gold, where the true value lies.
Though convenient and stabilizing at the time, this has created a huge problem; a huge deficit and concerns for foreign governments that the dollar could no long be backed up in gold.
The gold standard was in fact officially dropped making the US dollar the global currency and giving the states a huge advantage in the global economy as the only country officially able to print dollars.
The World Bank and the Bretton Woods Agreement took steps to balance out the power, but with China overtaking the US as the world’s largest economy in late 2014, money continues to create inevitable tensions between nations and distrust on a global scale.
The question comes into being; why do we as a race rely almost entirely on this strange but scarily powerful entity called MONEY, and is there any solution or alternative? We all know that it is the lust for gold that has turned many a lighthearted path astray and blackened the hearts of many men, but what is it about this essentially illusionary currency that motivates the dark stirrings within ourselves?
On the macrocosm of global societies then, we are as we know wildly out of balance and are consuming to our maximum, the only way out being to embrace these more feminine ways of being, which takes guts but appears to be happening nether-the-less.
Those who have become ‘rich’ in the material sense have probably mastered the law of attraction and are able to create wealth without attachment to it, though their winnings will be short-lived if they don’t know when enough is enough.
Is it the opposite of the natural order; coveting something from without ourselves that is a necessary lesson put in place for all of us to overcome? Can we imagine a world without money, or does it have its questionable status as a thing of greed for a reason?
As Lao Tzu says; ‘Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’
Is money the universe’s devils advocate – luring us away from simplicity and reality in order for us to find our way back to it?
Money certainly does appear to run its race with the sensual; masculine energies of individualism and gain, where the lack of money has much more place with feminine energies; of silence and community; slowing down and reaping from the abundance of what is already there.
“Better to stop short
than fill to the brim.
Oversharpen the blade
and the edge will soon blunt.
Amass a store of gold and jade,
and no one can protect it.
Claim wealth and titles,
and disaster will follow.
Retire when work is done.
This is the way of heaven:
(Tao Te Ching 9)
Despite the convenience of it, money offers another spiritual trap. In becoming more and more illusionary; existing in our minds as a future victory, adding up numbers in our bank accounts whilst not actually sitting there, money is the ego’s seal.
That which is always slightly out of reach yet will grant us the status and peace of mind that is as illusionary as the supposedly material form that wealth now takes. It is a distraction from the Now.
So what to do about it? How do we cut out the middle man? Is this just an idealist’s whimsical fantasy or a doable and concrete goal for the future?
As Naomi Klein says, ‘Only mass social movements can save us’, and “That the present capitalist profit system itself is incompatible with climate and environmental stability.”
Something HAS to change, and what recent times have told us, that we actually do hold the power to make the changes needed, if we still may be lacking the gall to put it into practice.
The more we are able to learn to first whittle down our true requirements, re-acquire the skills to fix what ain’t broke and live on the essentials the better. This will come from enriching our lives with the spiritual, and reacquainting ourselves with nature.
Saving water, storing food, using the materials that are already in abundance around us are beginnings. The movement has us already increasingly buying local, making our own home remedies and considering things like home schooling where once these lifestyle choices may have seemed ‘kooky’ or odd.
Self sufficiency has already become the individual’s goal for the foreseeable future, and people are slowly but surely realizing the ease of this switch. The glitches in the path are all in our heads; carefully crafted there by the very companies whose best interests are to keep us hooked to their products and way of life. On the grander scale then, comes spreading the word.
The more of us that step off the grid and begin to live independently of the system, the more corporations will panic. The whole of the modern world seems to have been running on the assumption that the common man feels powerless and so doesn’t even raise a finger to stop his own demise is slowly crumbling. The veil is lifting and we are beginning to wake up.
People, alongside having a huge revolution of the soul, need a re-evaluation of what really matters. Luxuries, traditional ‘mind fodder’ such as celebrity news and current fashions that have cluttered up our natural receptors and the American dream – otherwise known as the illusionary goal of a perfect life – need to be put aside for the individual to truly go beyond illusion and see reality for what it really is.
This will take an enormous amount of courage for all of us, but the more we see others achieving it, the more ‘realistic’ we understand it to be. Money has its biggest links with perception, but the changes implemented by the new paradigm are already well underway, and we are all well aware of the inevitable shifts that are occurring.
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