Quotation Nation

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." 
Douglas Adams
Last Chance to See

Not So Funny Money

What is of interest, is how quickly conversations about money polarize into a zero-sum game. Zero-sum games are those where one person's gain is another's loss. A poker game is zero-sum. Those busy accumulating boat loads of money, try to hide its zero-sum nature by saying that the "pie" is getting bigger. Prosperity is not a zero-sum game, though "prosperity" is too easily associated with monetary wealth, which is not the same thing at all. Clearly, quality of life is not a zero-sum game - quite the contrary. All of the things that we might call "true wealth": health, enough to eat, shelter, meaningful work, diverse habitats and resources and beauty - none are diminished by all of us having more.

But, this is not true of money. If everyone had a million bucks, what would a million bucks be worth for instance? Money is a mask, it pretends to be wealth. And its pretension is backed up by force. Money has power because of scarcity, and the threat of scarcity. Without money I will starve and die, even if there is food around. Without money I will become homeless, sleeping in the rain and shivering in the cold. Therefore, when I say I need some dirty work done, you say yes. I say yes. We say yes.

Money seems like a natural and necessary part of the world, but, actually, it is neither. Few really understand money, and certainly no one, not even the governments that print money, control it, despite their best efforts. In some ways money is the ultimate pyramid scheme - its value is surprisingly sensitive to human attitudes. Others make money their god, their master. Being pragmatic, realistic; is the justification. "Money will win. Trust me. And either you are with the haves or you are with the have-nots." But how much "have" is enough? There seems no limit.

Julius Caesar borrowed large sums of money from his officers. Not only did this enable him to pay off his mutinous troops, but it insured that the future success and prosperity of his officers depended on his own. Money is a drug; if the right dosage can be found - printing just enough, not too much - it's like magic. As long as people keep buying things they don't need. As long as those in the business don't hoard too much - which is of course their only reason for being in the business. As long as the real resources don't dry up, the illusion of prosperity can be maintained with more and more IOU’s. To the future. To the earth. Like all stimulants, money steals from tomorrow.

Aristotle said that money was meant to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. He called the ability of money to engender itself usury, the birth of money from money; and called it the most hated sort of money making. In Africa especially, money is about poverty and the threat of poverty. It is poverty that gives money value. By threat of poverty, I must not only work - which people have always done - but I must work for money, even if that work has no value or is destructive. And money is about power - power backed up by guns and prisons. Poverty, power and prison are money's soul, flesh and bones.

It's a question of scale and edge; before money, subsistence level was the poorest one could be and was the way most people lived. Money has created a poverty below subsistence. Today some "earn" enough money in one hour to feed, and shelter, 100 people for a whole year; or to pay 20 000 people minimum wage. Perhaps the bottom of the scale is a better measure of the wealth of a society, than the gold and jewels at the top. Zen roshi Robert Aitken once said, somewhat enigmatically, that it is easier to practice "true poverty" if you own your own home.

Quo Vadis

Its not difficult to get sucked into a pessimistic, even nihilistic and apocalyptic view of things at the moment. At the same time, there is an enigma because everything that's happening is part of the universe, part of consciousness; and an aspect of what is emerging inside the mystery out of which we're coming too. Our presence here - just our very presence, without any thoughts or acts - is a response, a participation in something much larger that is invisible to us. Something that on some level, without having to posit extraterrestrials or interdimensionals, is connected and connecting to other intelligences in the universe and the intrinsic intelligence of the universe itself.

These realms are being informed by our situation in some way - again, remove any Gothic sci-fi images: we are receiving aid, advice and godspeed from them despite how things are going here, despite the fact that it looks as though morons and madmen and crime bosses are informing everything. That's the particular dialectic that we're in: things are a mess and inextricable, but we are alive and conscious and filled with the song and heart and yearning of the universe. So it's important not to over-focus on "fixing" things in the ordinary sense: politically, ecologically, economically. It's impossible. Yet on the other hand it's absolutely crucial that all of those matters of stewardship and right livelihood be tended to and remediated in exactly the mechanical and practical and moral ways that are called for. We must act. We must do the right thing. Service is absolute and non-negotiable.

Yet we are impotent against the scale of physical and financial forces. We can't plug the hole. And that's the least of what we can't plug or mend. It's like both are true and wrapped around each other: the apocalypse and the awakening. Only the apocalypse writes itself glowingly and brazenly on the face of our times; the spiritual awakening is deep and subtle, hidden inside our gestation in the universe, our pagan, untold initiation that is written in nature - the whole of nature - and in the sky. In our cells and atoms and electrons and quarks and chakras and auras too. Written but not yet transcribed, at least not at the same clarity as the darkness. We think and feel the universe - the deepest magus, angel, avatar, lover voice it has, and that has to be enough. It is enough.

This collective false human self is doomed, and no solution whatever from the consciousness of that collected false human self - however noble, however self-awake, and however righteous - is going to work. What we are looking at is an appalling, dreadful, ferocious, inescapable dark night of the species, which is going to get worse, very, very fast. That is the bad news. But there's good news within the bad news because when you understand through divine grace, and through the flicker of the divine evolutionary intelligence shining on your mind and heart, that this radical ferocious process is the sign of an enormous new potential struggling chaotically to be born, then you can begin to cooperate with that birth in two main ways.

The first is to really undergo ourselves - as rigorously and as ruthlessly and as abandoned as possible - a radical transformation which does not look like the ordinary mystical awakenings; which are essentially awakenings to transcendence alone, but is a real evolutionary mystical awakening which is destined to illuminate the mind, shatter the heart open, and start birthing the divine in the cells of matter. So we can pledge ourselves to the birthing transformation.

And the second thing that we can do, is through really fusing together the deepest mystical awareness with a commitment to unflinching divine action, we can midwife a birth through the chaos; and start in this atrocious dying, building consciously with others who are awake to the evolutionary potential of this crisis, the structures of the birth - cooperating with the evolutionary intelligence to build these structures of birth; in the hope that humanity may not be suicidally psychotic and on a death-trip, so intense that not even the pulsations of the divine will can save it from itself.

T-Shirt Of The Month Club