There is an old Chinese saying “may you live in interesting times ” and is it not true, that we are definitely living in such times? And I believe that such times are here to wake up our consciousness. My experience is that some of the questions these times are waking us up to are: How do we stay grounded and focused on what we are here for and on what we really are when the outside world or at times our inner world feels so chaotic and beleaguered? How do we be in the world and not of it? How do we deal with all the pain inside and outside when we look at how people are treating each other, the lack of respect and love?
Since this is a money blog and my view of what is happening is through the lens of money, we are going to look at these times through that lens here today.
The Global Landscape.
Our recent political landscape has grown our awareness of the 1% as brokers of influence, power and privilege. So we are increasingly waking up to the fact that something is really wrong with money system. We are beginning to recognize that our money system has contributed to alienation, scarcity, competition and greed and has undermined community.
As we delve deeper, we can see trends that are a result of the economic growth model that is probably meeting a consummate end as we run our of ecology. So we are at the point of an urgent need of finding more connected, sustainable, ecological way of being, or the very planet we inhabit may not be able to sustain us. The evidence is all around us if we care to look.
For example, we are in the middle of a mass extinction. We can see fallout from this in such things as the demise of many small countries, the increase in wars, fundamentalism, and terrorism and a fear of perhaps the global collapse of the banking system.
Current world events like the immigration crisis and cascading political and war disasters such as in Syria, to the atomic energy disaster in Japan, and global climate change evidenced by this years snow disasters in Germany and Austria with avalanches and trapped farm animals dying in droves, to the California wildfires with unprecedented loss of life and homes, and the devastating hurricanes in the Southeastern US and Puerto Rico.
Perhaps all of these events made you more aware of our interdependence and oneness. Those affected are people, just like us. These disasters could actually be seen as reflections of the spiritual oneness of our Being, that as human beings, we all share. We are not separate human beings, but part of greater whole Being. Yes, we are differentiated and unique individuals, but we are not separate.
With money, we forget this understanding, and act from self-centered ego that is so habitual we rarely see beyond it. The illusion of separateness and the belief we are all separate individuals is a major factor in greed, competition, and polarization. It leads to the perception that there is an “other” to get from or “it” will take from us!
What we don’t know in our hearts is that at our core our being is not separate from the infiniteness of God, Being, or our True Nature. We are not defined by the boundaries between self and other. When we address separation, we can begin to value life, not money.
Since it seems our consciousness is waking up to being more global, today we are going to talk about our global conditioning that contributes to separation. This is a part of the money subject that can make you feel overwhelmed. It can feel like there is no possibility of freedom from such forces, and so addressing them is pointless. But bringing light into the darkness is always the first step. Darkness cannot ultimately trump the frequency of light, even if it seems so, and like it can seem in the world right now. By bringing awareness to what is happening, we can start the process of freeing ourselves from bondage and servitude.
The belief of being a separate entity that we have reminded you about above and also in more detail in a previous blog, that the world is made up of competing individual selves, has contributed to a societal consequence that we might not have realized.
Charles Einstein describes it thus:
The privatization of our shared resources, the very air, water, land natural resources, we all share. This privatization has led to commoditizing of our world and the sale back to its citizens. Our very necessities have been stolen and sold back to us. We are at the point that there is really nothing left to convert. This is an economic and global consequence of this identity. There is no more capital – whether social, natural, or cultural.
Commoditizing is almost complete in America and the next step is globalization without an accompanying social or political process.
So globalization could be seen as the stripping of assets from the developing countries to feed to money systems that need to grow in order to be maintained or survive as a reinforcement of our separation. Our money system has been literally liquidating our world – and unfortunately turning it into cash in order to separate us from our being and each other.
Cultural Conditioning and Descrimination
In the past, I have addressed other aspects in addition to the belief that we are separate selves, and those are two aspects of global conditioning: the History of Western Religion and the Patriarchy. The polarization of the world along religious lines and the rise of the #Me Too movement from the recognition of the imbalance between the masculine and feminine are two examples of the relevance of these forces in the world.
But today, I want to speak about one that has really been dividing the world and has deepened the belief in the separateness of human beings. Particularly in America, and the world has been watching, evidenced by such things as the Trump Immigrant Wall, the incarceration of children at borders, the dismantling of planet and animal protections, and the decreasing of taxes for the 1% at the expense of a declining middles class.
And that is how our cultural conditioning impacts that self. We are raised within families, groups, communities, and society and this conditioning becomes a part the self that identifies with certain categories and groups in a society. And what I mean by identity here is how you experience yourself within society.
In North America, where I live, these categories of discrimination include gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and politics, and I am discovering personally also these days, age. Perhaps where you live, there are others you could add to this list. When we identify with one of these groups, we can have a sense of belonging to a group, but at the same time we separate ourselves from other groups. We end up looking at our differences, rather than our sameness as human beings. Not the unique individuality that each human being soul has, but rather arbitrary differences.
The problem is that these groups, these tribes if you will, have helped to create oppression through a history of colonization, religious missionaries who decimated the indigenous population, and also the slave-trade, to just name the most obvious ones that have been sanctioned by earthly society as a way of life. And it doesn’t take a great intellectual leap to recognize these institutionalized differences have deeply impacted our money system and have contributed to economic oppression. I actually look at it a bit differently – that our money system causes the identification by individuals with these societal groups, rather than as a symptom of this identification. And this money-driven separation has devastating effects. For example, after the second world war, in the US only white male military veterans were allowed the housing and education benefits voted on by the government, while black veterans were denied. Thus the black population was prevented from joining the middles class in America, and instead what was created was a situation of a widening socio-economic gap between black and white. One consequence of these racial policies and attitudes is the mass incarceration of African Americans, which further affects the racial achievement gap. I see this as a continuation of the history of world slavery perpetuated by money.
We need to become aware of these types of oppressive behaviors and the impacts they have had in our lives and make our choices from this awareness. We cannot truly be free to be what we each are – unique human beings, but also equal citizens of planet earth unless we expand our awareness of our collective consciousness.
A belief that Lynn Twist in her book, The Soul of Money, points to, that I believe, is a direct consequence of our social conditioning is that globally those with money wield the most power and feel entitled to do so. This leads to resignation of those who are not in this class of oppressors – which is becoming more and more familiar to and affects the behavior and mental/emotional state of more and more of us. We actually believe those with more are smarter and more able, even more, valuable and that we are helpless in the face of that. And we surrender to the power those groups appear to wield. In succumbing to those beliefs, and feeling helpless and hopeless, we abandon our human potential and the possibility of thriving, in a healthy, equitable world.
Barack Obama recently said (perhaps speaking of himself in the last line as I am discovering):
“Each time we painstakingly pull ourselves closer to our founding ideals, that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights; the ideals that say every child should have opportunity and every man and woman in this country who’s willing to work hard should be able to find a job and support a family and pursue their small piece of the American Dream; our ideals that say we have a collective responsibility to care for the sick and the infirm, and we have a responsibility to conserve the amazing bounty, the natural resources of this country and of this planet for future generations, each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege.”
What if we had different belief systems? Imagine if everyone were experiencing enough, what would our society look like? Imagine how we would treat each other? The planet? Ourselves?
Imagine a paradigm of abundance and prosperity of creation where competition was replaced by collaboration, where a sense of enoughness creates sharing and cooperation. Instead of the 1% there could be an equitable distribution of money allowing the potential of actualization of ALL humans. Where there could be a government not only for the wealthy, but rather in service to each other, all of humanity and life on this earthly planet.
This could open the possibility of a new society not based on money or greed, but rather one that lifts the veil, the illusions of humanity we have been living under. A society that awakens our hearts and makes us want to work on our spiritual potential and see that potential in everyone. To lead us to acknowledge each other as equals.
The Teachers of Light channeled by Tomar Levine have said that we ALL ultimately serve the same plan, the divine plan of liberation, of perfect freedom, truth, and oneness in the heart of Love.
Can you not imagine if that happened we would want to work with each other to make the world better? Our money system could be transformed into what it was intended to be- support for each person to become their unique individual expression of the Creator, God, Source, or whatever you want to call the depth of our Beingness. This would open the door to experience our human mutual value and our spiritual oneness, which is the inverse of the material wealth that has been running the world. What a magical world that could be.