So, what keeps us stuck in the money bubble, rather than the greater consciousness, the tao? Or in other words - what lies beyond money? Or: how do we burst the bubble/pierce the veil?
I have found burning money to be a particularly effective form of Psychomagic to answer the question, what happens when we get rid of money. As recommended by Jon Harris and his Church of Burn, it's important to not expect or ask for anything back with the act - to not be intending to 'buy' anything, but purely giving it back to spirit (or tao...).
He has a lot of very interesting thoughts on money.
Love the idea of money as energy (vs treating it as a static asset).
Seems like yet another idea that got too static, maybe because of left hemisphere dominance in modern society.
But I must admit that seeing world more in terms of flow, relationships, fluent energies is much harder than perceiving it with the left hemispheric division of the world on static objects and numbers - similarly as much harder is the modern physics with its fields and probabilities in comparison to the newtonian mechanistic descriptions.
Still I am wondering that maybe the core issue is not the graspability of the ideas but the approach to them.
Maybe instead of trying to pinpoint and close them in the simple linguistic descriptions, it's more about "attuning" and "feeling" them, whatever that means.
I also see here interesting analogy to how Cedric Chin was describing building expertise in ill-structured domains - instead of trying to extract abstract, universal principles (left hemisphere world again), one needs to focus on observing use-cases, instantiations of the idea and then build an expertise intuition on top of that.
That sounds to me a lot like "attuning" and "harmonizing" with the ideas, instead of trying to close them in the verbal boxes.
Think in this context, the fastest way to tune to your issues around money is there a feeling. What really hurts you, what really triggers you. That shows you the thing you need to walk towards. Probably.
So interesting: I was 10 weeks premature and stuck in an incubator for 20hrs a day. I often wonder... but how can we ever know and when does it matter? So tough.
There is a writer called 'Peter Koenig' who writes on the intersection of spirituality and money.
Here is thesis number 10 from his article "10 theses about the state of the world"
Thesis Nr. 10
"Money is the (still) hidden treasure in consciousness development. Through the relation to money and the reclamation of parts of the Self that are unconsciously projected into money it is (still) possible for individuals and humankind as a whole to make the largest leaps in consciousness that have as yet occurred."
Can't vouch for his work as i haven't gone deep into it but it fits your current interest too well to omit.
in the hope of still contributing something to the serendipity machine, im going to point to the article 'Ancient Rivers or Money' by Venkatesh Rao, which is not about spirituality but provides a very right-hemisphere metaphor for money which might also shed some light on the 'Where's is all the money in personal transformation?' question.
I would need to refresh my brain. But the intersection of money and spirituality reminds of christianity, especially Calvinism.
That God somehow rewards the diligent, the entrepreneur, this has a blind spot and kind of "others" the exploited, including the source of wealth, the ecology of extraction.
I'm interested in the "de-entrepreneurship" but haven't thought it through yet.
You are right, there are thinkers which have traced the genealogy of modern capitalism back to various forms of protestantism. Famously Max Weber and more recently Walter Russell Mead.
But seeing money itself as something numinous strikes me as rather heretical from that perspective.
For example you seem to project a lot of 'wrongness' onto money, (extraction, fossil fuels) yet if one would be a master of cash-flow redirection incredible regenerative projects could be funded (similarly as one can use fossile fuels in excavators to reshape landscapes and increasing their regenerative capacity)
I actually work in "regenerative culture" as a day job/vocation, and we talk about rewilding/composting cash from investor all the time.
We are increasingly seeing investment from the private sector into our projects and similar projects. Also the crypto kids seem keen on pushing investment towards us.
I think the time is really ripe for more and more energy to be devoted to offline projects. Prioritising the physical embodied experience, and keeping that apart from the super quick mental electricity of online information flow, will - slowly! - become more important, and also appreciated. Word of mouth is indeed by far the best form of marketing there is, and it means you don't have to engage in any dishonesty (I think people are kidding themselves if they believe its possible to do marketing without in some way either lying outright, or at least being selective with the truth, but this is so normalised that it's easily ignored).
And I think that bringing our actions back into alignment with much longer cycles of time than the capitalist (and especially online) consciousnesses tend towards, is really radical. IE, don't panic - even whilst not turning away from the urgency of certain actions - andstart thinking long term (which also means beyond ourselves, for many generations down the line), rather than as if time ('is money') is highly scarce and a source of anxiety. Like Tyson Yunkaporta says, the seeds we plant now won't become old-growth forests for another 1000 years...
I just received a grant to build a seed library for East Coast Scotland. To develop landrace and climate hardy crops. To given away free.
I have spent my entire life submerged in art, food growing, martial arts, spirituality, communes. So my current project of de- entrepreneur is really a culmination of the story so far.
My network is vast, much bigger than I ever imagined.
Exiting the internet will leave a trail for others to follow.
I just received a grant to build a seed library for East Coast Scotland. To develop landrace and climate hardy crops. To given away free.
I have spent my entire life submerged in art, food growing, martial arts, spirituality, communes. So my current project of de- entrepreneur is really a culmination of the story so far.
My network is vast, much bigger than I ever imagined.
Exiting the internet will leave a trail for others to follow.
I haven't thought it through at all. Usually what happens is that the idea comes and then the details reveal themselves.
Its connected to an artwork and brand I am working on called "There is no outside"
I was trained in Fine Art and built a habit of reversing things to see what happens.
So it will be to do with unlearning. Part of it is my moving towards erasing any online presence, giving up all tech, buying land in Italy and going off grid, and building a community totally off line and E tech free.
I had a similar reaction to 'Busting Loose': how could someone so obviously insightful about the way things work be so narrowly focused on 'give me the stuff I want'? I didn't like the style of the book either.
If you are planning to have more conversations about money, I recommend talking to Arthur Brock from the Holochain project. He calls money 'a current-see' because it represents a current of value that one sees, see? He's a fan of biomimicry and probably secretly rather woo. He recommended the book 'Seeing Nature' by Paul Krafel which fits together very well with your curiosity/attractor piece.
Oh that sounds FASCINATING what a great tip. I'm glad you got a similar vibe from Busting Loose. There's something cool there, but also something a bit disconnected.
I really like this, and will listen to the podcast episode. I have a slightly different take to the "flow" framing. Or rather, it's more of a "yes and".
I think that money is sort of the distributed mechanism by which society realizes what is relevant to it. As with the relevance realization machinery within a person, it's possible for society to find maladaptive things relevant. Moreover, the very machinery that makes you prone to self deception is the same machinery that makes you capable of acting adaptively. I suspect that you can generalize this from the level of the individual to the patterns of interactions for cultures and societies writ large.
In thet same vein, giving and receiving money is an opportunity for an individual to shape what they find relevant/irrelevant. If they act aligned with wisdom and compassion, that tends to flow outwards from them.
Another lens I like is that money is an abstraction over the underlying metabolic processes within living organisms. Ultimately, all money results in physical and metabolic changes in the world. This lens isn't perfect but it allows us to connect money with the work Evan Thompson has done w.r.t enactive approach to cognition. His textbook Mind in Life is an excellent read.
Excited to read this. And I like the JV relevance realization frame. I think money is an INDICATOR of what's relevant, and maybe even a way the universe rewards you. But if it is the only thing you focus on: if you pursue dead, abstract things rather than the Tao your life becomes dead and abstract.
Yup I think we're on the same wavelength. But creating currency allows us to create more abstract representation of what's relevant in addition to all the other signals we get from our environment.
As Taoism gets mentioned here it's probably worth giving a heads up to a living Taoist sage who we can actually talk to. This is Taoist gold right here under our nose.
I was thinking about Taoism as it seems to be a theme here. Taosim is typically seen as an Eastern practice or philosophy and that has problems due to translation nuances.
However we don't need to look very far within our own culture to find Taoist masters, living ones that we can literally talk to and learn from.
Two that spring to mind.
Byron Katie & Eckhart Tolle
Both wildly successful on many metrics.
These two alone will take you all the way.
But there are many more. We have never had it so good.
Moving away from the raw analysis that, Money is Fossil Fuel.
I twirl the jewel and look into another facet for another story.
Money is one of the worlds great symbols of inequality. Some have it, some do not.
Currently in our world a very small percentage of the people have most of the money, while the great majority live below the poverty line.
Often religious and spiritual people believe money is how the universe rewards you. Bad luck for the majority of the world then (sinners), and Elon Musk must be the chosen one.
Money and business. The rule of money and business is to spend as little as you can on your product, wages, materials, and charge as much as you possibly can for your product. This is seen as good business sense. You do it because everyone else does it.
Money and emotions. Humans only have two emotions, Love or Fear. There are subcategories of theses, but basically our emotions are either loving or fearful, usually a cascade of both.
Money can be used as way of looking at how we want to be separate from everyone else. That separation can come from being wealthy or poor or somewhere between the two.
Money can help us look at our unconscious guilt. Most folks with a bit of cash and an ounce of sense realise that their money is derived from extracting valuable natural resource usually through grim means. This produces unconscious guilt.
Most folks with a bit of sense know that their wealth is driving climate change, this produces guilt, again often unconscious.
People with a bit of cash unconsciously know that they have it because it was stolen. This is what colonialism is all about, obviously.
This brings us full circle the need to spiritualise money, to psycho analyse, the psychologise money, to quantum physicize (new word) money and so on. This is done in order to not really look at the root of money, and make us feel good about our stash or desire for cash.
But, money is built upon the brutal extraction of natural resources which are destroying our ecology, possibly bringing about mass extinction of species.
By looking at the source of money we can begin to look at our desire to be separate and not joined.
Money is an expression of how we want receive more than we give. Who doesn't like to boast about a bargain, even if it's only privately to ones self.
The reason money does not make people happy is because they secretly know it was stolen, either via some kind of fancy financial product or at it material source. This theft makes for guilt.
Money tells us that some win and some lose. We can't all make money on the stock market, we can't all bet on the same horse, otherwise the system would collapse.
I have I said anything of value here, I doubt it. Other than money is a great opportunity to look at our unconscious guilt, accept it without judgement, forgive it and move on.
As a side not I experimented with living without money a couple of times, I was young, it was exciting, and it was illusory as I was able to live in communes and trade my labour for food and shelter.
But I went to a lot of parties..and slept in wild places..and pretended to be a Taoist.. I did learn that the universe is super abundant and I did overcome the fear of having no money which persists today.
Coming from an anesthesiologist - just a clarification on anesthesia and infants.
There is a big big difference between not getting pain medicine during surgery and not getting any anesthesia. Anesthesia is the magic sauce that unlinks your higher brain functions during surgery. Anesthesia is what makes you unaware of what is going on during surgery.
The infants received an anesthetic. But they did not receive pain medication, which is still barbaric and came from the belief that their nervous system was underdeveloped.
It's not a Rumi quote, it's from A Course in Miracles..
Chapter 16 - The Forgiveness of Illusions
"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is necessary to seek for what is false. Every illusion is one of fear, whatever form it takes. And the attempt to escape from one illusion into another must fail. If you seek love outside yourself you can be certain that you perceive hatred within, and are afraid of it. Yet peace will never come from the illusion of love, but only from its reality."
Money is fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are running dry.
Our civilization is contracting and we have a front row seat.
How a quote from one source gets effortlessly attributed to another source, and then a new context is thrust upon it. How much of life is like this..we live in illusions.
I would say that rather than 'money is fossil fuels', the debt-based eternal growth economy is fossil fuels, because with interest on every unit that is created, we need perpetual growth and that is only possible with increasing energy production.
I am not a fan of declaring things FACTS that are nothing of the sort. Nor do I believe the truth requires this offputting missionary zeal, it stands on its own.
Agree with TM that declaring something a 'fact' is not optimal. You might as well say 'money is light', or 'money is energy' - what doesn't depend in some way on those things? Does love depend on fossil fuels? Art? Did art exist before we started taking fossil fuels out of the ground? Did money?
I am struggling to name one thing that isn't produced or mediated by fossil fuels, and by extension money, which serves as a symbol of fossil fuel exchange.
ermm…. what makes you think I’m ‘angry’? I said it was ‘not optimal’ and politely disagreed with your point, because I don’t think it’s a ‘fact’, although you are right that a great deal of modern society does depend on fossil fuels. But you’re claiming that ‘money’ is ‘fossil fuels’, and I am disputing that.
Great piece; here’s to increasing woo thresholds
Amen
So, what keeps us stuck in the money bubble, rather than the greater consciousness, the tao? Or in other words - what lies beyond money? Or: how do we burst the bubble/pierce the veil?
I have found burning money to be a particularly effective form of Psychomagic to answer the question, what happens when we get rid of money. As recommended by Jon Harris and his Church of Burn, it's important to not expect or ask for anything back with the act - to not be intending to 'buy' anything, but purely giving it back to spirit (or tao...).
He has a lot of very interesting thoughts on money.
https://churchofburn.org/
https://youtu.be/L9SzDFGbsFI?si=slGHvE-4yNAlc7Pl
Remember when KLF burnt a million. That was a hoot.
In my world to give is to receive. Giving is receiving.
If I want peace I have to give peace.
What ever I want, I have to give the thing I want.
But I'm only interested in what I need not what I want. So I give what I need, to receive what I need.
Never fails...
Love the idea of money as energy (vs treating it as a static asset).
Seems like yet another idea that got too static, maybe because of left hemisphere dominance in modern society.
But I must admit that seeing world more in terms of flow, relationships, fluent energies is much harder than perceiving it with the left hemispheric division of the world on static objects and numbers - similarly as much harder is the modern physics with its fields and probabilities in comparison to the newtonian mechanistic descriptions.
Still I am wondering that maybe the core issue is not the graspability of the ideas but the approach to them.
Maybe instead of trying to pinpoint and close them in the simple linguistic descriptions, it's more about "attuning" and "feeling" them, whatever that means.
I also see here interesting analogy to how Cedric Chin was describing building expertise in ill-structured domains - instead of trying to extract abstract, universal principles (left hemisphere world again), one needs to focus on observing use-cases, instantiations of the idea and then build an expertise intuition on top of that.
That sounds to me a lot like "attuning" and "harmonizing" with the ideas, instead of trying to close them in the verbal boxes.
Think in this context, the fastest way to tune to your issues around money is there a feeling. What really hurts you, what really triggers you. That shows you the thing you need to walk towards. Probably.
You did it again, Tom.
https://johnstokdijkgmailcom.substack.com/p/mild-anxiety
So interesting: I was 10 weeks premature and stuck in an incubator for 20hrs a day. I often wonder... but how can we ever know and when does it matter? So tough.
There is a writer called 'Peter Koenig' who writes on the intersection of spirituality and money.
Here is thesis number 10 from his article "10 theses about the state of the world"
Thesis Nr. 10
"Money is the (still) hidden treasure in consciousness development. Through the relation to money and the reclamation of parts of the Self that are unconsciously projected into money it is (still) possible for individuals and humankind as a whole to make the largest leaps in consciousness that have as yet occurred."
Can't vouch for his work as i haven't gone deep into it but it fits your current interest too well to omit.
Your instincts are perfect: he and Nadja are very close.
in the hope of still contributing something to the serendipity machine, im going to point to the article 'Ancient Rivers or Money' by Venkatesh Rao, which is not about spirituality but provides a very right-hemisphere metaphor for money which might also shed some light on the 'Where's is all the money in personal transformation?' question.
Thank you! I actually encountered this in writing the article: I think SVS linked to it in the viral tweet (or someone did). It’s great stuff.
i should have known that i can't beat the collective intelligence of a viral twitter thread :)
I would need to refresh my brain. But the intersection of money and spirituality reminds of christianity, especially Calvinism.
That God somehow rewards the diligent, the entrepreneur, this has a blind spot and kind of "others" the exploited, including the source of wealth, the ecology of extraction.
I'm interested in the "de-entrepreneurship" but haven't thought it through yet.
You are right, there are thinkers which have traced the genealogy of modern capitalism back to various forms of protestantism. Famously Max Weber and more recently Walter Russell Mead.
But seeing money itself as something numinous strikes me as rather heretical from that perspective.
For example you seem to project a lot of 'wrongness' onto money, (extraction, fossil fuels) yet if one would be a master of cash-flow redirection incredible regenerative projects could be funded (similarly as one can use fossile fuels in excavators to reshape landscapes and increasing their regenerative capacity)
Exactly: transcend and include. Money isn't bad, it just needs to be used in service.
Money is a useful tool to look at our desire to be separate from others and the ecology of our planet.
Money is neutral we push meaning onto it, its a screen and we are the projector, and the story teller.
The jewel turns another facet another story, twirling into the void...
I actually work in "regenerative culture" as a day job/vocation, and we talk about rewilding/composting cash from investor all the time.
We are increasingly seeing investment from the private sector into our projects and similar projects. Also the crypto kids seem keen on pushing investment towards us.
Interesting times..
still curious to hear an outline of "de-entrepreneurship" even if its not fully formed!
De-entrepreneur.
The basis of de-entrepreneur is to participate in the hospicing of modernity.
It will be place based and product.
Off grid and off line. Any online activity will only be generated by those that engage with the project.
The project itself will not have an online presence.
It will be a simple small holding refuge in Italy. The main activity will be growing food, processing food. Maintenance of property.
There will be simple accommodation for guests who may wish to retreat from modern life and get their hands dirty.
We will work together, play together, create together.
The product part of things will be a carefully curated selection of things under the brand... "There is no outside"
These objects will have no marketing. No online footprint, except by those who wish to show off their purchases.
IL Rifugio and the brand will be only accessible through word of mouth.
Ironically reading back through the above, one can imagine how successful a project like this will be.
Please do it
I think the time is really ripe for more and more energy to be devoted to offline projects. Prioritising the physical embodied experience, and keeping that apart from the super quick mental electricity of online information flow, will - slowly! - become more important, and also appreciated. Word of mouth is indeed by far the best form of marketing there is, and it means you don't have to engage in any dishonesty (I think people are kidding themselves if they believe its possible to do marketing without in some way either lying outright, or at least being selective with the truth, but this is so normalised that it's easily ignored).
And I think that bringing our actions back into alignment with much longer cycles of time than the capitalist (and especially online) consciousnesses tend towards, is really radical. IE, don't panic - even whilst not turning away from the urgency of certain actions - andstart thinking long term (which also means beyond ourselves, for many generations down the line), rather than as if time ('is money') is highly scarce and a source of anxiety. Like Tyson Yunkaporta says, the seeds we plant now won't become old-growth forests for another 1000 years...
Thanks. You got it.
I just received a grant to build a seed library for East Coast Scotland. To develop landrace and climate hardy crops. To given away free.
I have spent my entire life submerged in art, food growing, martial arts, spirituality, communes. So my current project of de- entrepreneur is really a culmination of the story so far.
My network is vast, much bigger than I ever imagined.
Exiting the internet will leave a trail for others to follow.
It's all art.
Peace
I highly recommend https://peasantryschool.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
For a really heartfelt exploration of what opens up in gifting food
Thanks. You got it.
I just received a grant to build a seed library for East Coast Scotland. To develop landrace and climate hardy crops. To given away free.
I have spent my entire life submerged in art, food growing, martial arts, spirituality, communes. So my current project of de- entrepreneur is really a culmination of the story so far.
My network is vast, much bigger than I ever imagined.
Exiting the internet will leave a trail for others to follow.
It's all art.
Peace
I haven't thought it through at all. Usually what happens is that the idea comes and then the details reveal themselves.
Its connected to an artwork and brand I am working on called "There is no outside"
I was trained in Fine Art and built a habit of reversing things to see what happens.
So it will be to do with unlearning. Part of it is my moving towards erasing any online presence, giving up all tech, buying land in Italy and going off grid, and building a community totally off line and E tech free.
Will meditate on it and let you know.
The de entrepreneur thing arrived in chunks this morning.. I will try to arrange it for digestion... meanwhile this is nice .
https://youtu.be/3G4kCi_ldr8?si=AqW23n9pgqZu-KkX
I had a similar reaction to 'Busting Loose': how could someone so obviously insightful about the way things work be so narrowly focused on 'give me the stuff I want'? I didn't like the style of the book either.
If you are planning to have more conversations about money, I recommend talking to Arthur Brock from the Holochain project. He calls money 'a current-see' because it represents a current of value that one sees, see? He's a fan of biomimicry and probably secretly rather woo. He recommended the book 'Seeing Nature' by Paul Krafel which fits together very well with your curiosity/attractor piece.
Oh that sounds FASCINATING what a great tip. I'm glad you got a similar vibe from Busting Loose. There's something cool there, but also something a bit disconnected.
I really like this, and will listen to the podcast episode. I have a slightly different take to the "flow" framing. Or rather, it's more of a "yes and".
I think that money is sort of the distributed mechanism by which society realizes what is relevant to it. As with the relevance realization machinery within a person, it's possible for society to find maladaptive things relevant. Moreover, the very machinery that makes you prone to self deception is the same machinery that makes you capable of acting adaptively. I suspect that you can generalize this from the level of the individual to the patterns of interactions for cultures and societies writ large.
In thet same vein, giving and receiving money is an opportunity for an individual to shape what they find relevant/irrelevant. If they act aligned with wisdom and compassion, that tends to flow outwards from them.
Another lens I like is that money is an abstraction over the underlying metabolic processes within living organisms. Ultimately, all money results in physical and metabolic changes in the world. This lens isn't perfect but it allows us to connect money with the work Evan Thompson has done w.r.t enactive approach to cognition. His textbook Mind in Life is an excellent read.
Haha actually now that I have time, I think you've inspired me to write a substack post in reply to this one!
Excited to read this. And I like the JV relevance realization frame. I think money is an INDICATOR of what's relevant, and maybe even a way the universe rewards you. But if it is the only thing you focus on: if you pursue dead, abstract things rather than the Tao your life becomes dead and abstract.
Yup I think we're on the same wavelength. But creating currency allows us to create more abstract representation of what's relevant in addition to all the other signals we get from our environment.
And it's amazing and I hope it never goes anywhere. Just gets transcended and included in something smarter: attractor intelligence.
Eckhart Tolle on the Tao
Takes all the struggle out of conceptualising
https://youtu.be/fT9dK1tLTAQ?si=uUtj3NNjzGdS3hFN
As Taoism gets mentioned here it's probably worth giving a heads up to a living Taoist sage who we can actually talk to. This is Taoist gold right here under our nose.
Byron Katie
https://youtu.be/4uWB-Q1QZTg?si=1NkkQEwT0uM4E4ui
If you more flavours Eckhart Tolle, again living amongst us and contactable.
We have never had so good and so easy.
I was thinking about Taoism as it seems to be a theme here. Taosim is typically seen as an Eastern practice or philosophy and that has problems due to translation nuances.
However we don't need to look very far within our own culture to find Taoist masters, living ones that we can literally talk to and learn from.
Two that spring to mind.
Byron Katie & Eckhart Tolle
Both wildly successful on many metrics.
These two alone will take you all the way.
But there are many more. We have never had it so good.
https://youtu.be/4uWB-Q1QZTg?si=1NkkQEwT0uM4E4ui
This guy is the business.
https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/paraphilanthropy-giving-money-its-freedom-papers
Moving away from the raw analysis that, Money is Fossil Fuel.
I twirl the jewel and look into another facet for another story.
Money is one of the worlds great symbols of inequality. Some have it, some do not.
Currently in our world a very small percentage of the people have most of the money, while the great majority live below the poverty line.
Often religious and spiritual people believe money is how the universe rewards you. Bad luck for the majority of the world then (sinners), and Elon Musk must be the chosen one.
Money and business. The rule of money and business is to spend as little as you can on your product, wages, materials, and charge as much as you possibly can for your product. This is seen as good business sense. You do it because everyone else does it.
Money and emotions. Humans only have two emotions, Love or Fear. There are subcategories of theses, but basically our emotions are either loving or fearful, usually a cascade of both.
Money can be used as way of looking at how we want to be separate from everyone else. That separation can come from being wealthy or poor or somewhere between the two.
Money can help us look at our unconscious guilt. Most folks with a bit of cash and an ounce of sense realise that their money is derived from extracting valuable natural resource usually through grim means. This produces unconscious guilt.
Most folks with a bit of sense know that their wealth is driving climate change, this produces guilt, again often unconscious.
People with a bit of cash unconsciously know that they have it because it was stolen. This is what colonialism is all about, obviously.
This brings us full circle the need to spiritualise money, to psycho analyse, the psychologise money, to quantum physicize (new word) money and so on. This is done in order to not really look at the root of money, and make us feel good about our stash or desire for cash.
But, money is built upon the brutal extraction of natural resources which are destroying our ecology, possibly bringing about mass extinction of species.
By looking at the source of money we can begin to look at our desire to be separate and not joined.
Money is an expression of how we want receive more than we give. Who doesn't like to boast about a bargain, even if it's only privately to ones self.
The reason money does not make people happy is because they secretly know it was stolen, either via some kind of fancy financial product or at it material source. This theft makes for guilt.
Money tells us that some win and some lose. We can't all make money on the stock market, we can't all bet on the same horse, otherwise the system would collapse.
I have I said anything of value here, I doubt it. Other than money is a great opportunity to look at our unconscious guilt, accept it without judgement, forgive it and move on.
As a side not I experimented with living without money a couple of times, I was young, it was exciting, and it was illusory as I was able to live in communes and trade my labour for food and shelter.
But I went to a lot of parties..and slept in wild places..and pretended to be a Taoist.. I did learn that the universe is super abundant and I did overcome the fear of having no money which persists today.
So it was liberating in some ways...
peace.
Coming from an anesthesiologist - just a clarification on anesthesia and infants.
There is a big big difference between not getting pain medicine during surgery and not getting any anesthesia. Anesthesia is the magic sauce that unlinks your higher brain functions during surgery. Anesthesia is what makes you unaware of what is going on during surgery.
The infants received an anesthetic. But they did not receive pain medication, which is still barbaric and came from the belief that their nervous system was underdeveloped.
This doesn't even scratch the surface but it kind of unpack the relationship of money and fossil fuels.
Let's be clear I'm only saying in our current civilisation, money is fossil fuels.
In the future in the past not so. But that's not where we live..
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/10-Reasons-Why-the-World-Cant-Run-Without-Fossil-Fuels.html
It's not a Rumi quote, it's from A Course in Miracles..
Chapter 16 - The Forgiveness of Illusions
"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is necessary to seek for what is false. Every illusion is one of fear, whatever form it takes. And the attempt to escape from one illusion into another must fail. If you seek love outside yourself you can be certain that you perceive hatred within, and are afraid of it. Yet peace will never come from the illusion of love, but only from its reality."
Money is fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are running dry.
Our civilization is contracting and we have a front row seat.
Enjoy the ride..
The alleged Rumi quote. This I find fascinating.
How a quote from one source gets effortlessly attributed to another source, and then a new context is thrust upon it. How much of life is like this..we live in illusions.
I would say that rather than 'money is fossil fuels', the debt-based eternal growth economy is fossil fuels, because with interest on every unit that is created, we need perpetual growth and that is only possible with increasing energy production.
Hey Guy,
Money is fossil fuels is just a fact. Not an interpretation.
That money could be something else in another time and place is also true.
I can't think of anything in our civilization that isn't underpinned and sustained by fossil fuels as a primary input.
Thus, money is fossil fuels.
I think that we don't like this fact but that's another story. It's too crude.
Let's try and name something in our civilization that isn't in someway underpinned by fossil fuels.
As a side note... If you want to really understand how we got ourselves into this situation, and how we get out of it.
The the Rumi, not Rumi quote from A Course in Miracles is good place to start.
A Course in Miracles will send the woo meter into oblivion.
Peace
I am not a fan of declaring things FACTS that are nothing of the sort. Nor do I believe the truth requires this offputting missionary zeal, it stands on its own.
Hey man, it's not my fact. Something's just are factual.
That fossil fuels underpins our every experience is what it is.
That fossil fuels are rapidly expiring, is what it is.
That fossil fuels are the economy is what it is.
Don't shoot the messenger..
Agree with TM that declaring something a 'fact' is not optimal. You might as well say 'money is light', or 'money is energy' - what doesn't depend in some way on those things? Does love depend on fossil fuels? Art? Did art exist before we started taking fossil fuels out of the ground? Did money?
Its not my fact that fossil fuels underpin our civilization.
Don't get angry with me.
Modern art is, as far as I can tell mediated to us via the harnessing of fossil fuels.
In fact BP used to be a major sponsor of the Tate until recently.
Love is underpinned by fossil fuels at least the expression of love, ie Christmas presents, clubbing, cosy nights in, holidays.
Obviously the essence of love will still be alive as our economy disintegrates due to the expiry date of fossil fuels.
It's natural to freak out when the resource base that underpins our life's is evaporating, but I stress this fact is not my fact. It's existential.
Fossil fuels underpinning most of western civilization is true. It being Money is patently not. And that's an important distinction.
How can you separate money from fossil fuels.
I don't understand.
Fossil fuels are the single and primary input of the global economy.
They are the bedrock, foundation upon which the global economy and civilization stand...for now.
Food, travel, clothes, shelter, culture, pensions, etc
I am struggling to name one thing that isn't produced or mediated by fossil fuels, and by extension money, which serves as a symbol of fossil fuel exchange.
Yours respectfully
ermm…. what makes you think I’m ‘angry’? I said it was ‘not optimal’ and politely disagreed with your point, because I don’t think it’s a ‘fact’, although you are right that a great deal of modern society does depend on fossil fuels. But you’re claiming that ‘money’ is ‘fossil fuels’, and I am disputing that.
Just because we don't think something is fact doesn't mean it isn't a fact.
I can't find one thing in society which isn't fundamentally dependant on fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are the elixir that gives rise to the whole economic system.
Money is currently just another way of saying fossil fuel activity.
Its not pretty, its crude (boom boom), buts that's what our civilisation is when you strip it right back..
To say money is anything else is make believe.
I have been trying find anything which isn't dependent on fossil fuels for a while and found nothing..
Apologies for saying you were angry, it was just a turn of phrase.
Respectfully yours
Perhaps the problem is that fossil fuels are a hyper object.
In that they are so big and saturated that we struggle to see it and it's effects.
https://izolyatsia.org/en/project/zazemlennya/hyper-object/