I have never found anything more honest and equitable than money. If you let it, contemplating money culls unrequited shadow into light.
Talking about your relationship with money and your family or friends can help one identify the inequities which it is easy to turn a blind eye towards. Money is an external recognition of saved time which was earned by giving your life experience for a job. You can then take that saved time and spend it making the life you wish to experience, where people will serve you for the same reward. At the end of the day, I feel that money is in existence so the farmers can eat the whole year round.
Money isn't the most important thing in the world, but it is the most unrecognized common denominator. Please look around you right now and point at something which does NOT involve money. The sky, ground and wild critters are about all I ever find. Our inability to honestly assess money is one of our culture's greatest harbingers of suffering. Nothing would decrease suffering on this planet more than for the status quo to have a healthy relationship with money. A relationship where we recognize money as a tool to care for each other and create the lives we want to live. We go through the world creating both Wealth and earning money, but not recognizing the common values between the two.
Frankly, most people who I know who are at an integral altitude are very far away from having their money situation from being integral. Right Livelihood is a hard discipline to master and even harder as an employer. It's much easier to contemplate nothingness than how to create a system we can use to interact together in a healthy manner. Our current money system is sick. The money system itself can not be integral, so I think it is exceptionally hard for a person to be at an integral level of function with money. One can, however, take the current money system and quadrivically express each altitude of consciousness through its use.
Integral money will require multiple currency systems in place at once. This way when one system starts to get out of balance, the other is used more until the first system settles down. The money system should systematically induce this and other healthy behaviors as the best course of action for its users. Our current system induces greed and scarcity. If we didn't have both of these things, this system could not function; this is not, however, likely to create an environment where you benefit by being a Steward to the world around you. (check out Slow Money, which is a group working on this)
An integral relationship with money has not been created yet. One person might be able to provide for themselves and be at an integral altitude, this doesn't imply an integral understanding of money. One is integral in many areas, but not all. Money is frequently ignored when raising altitude because of the difficulty with the subject. Both sex and death are easier subjects to dialogue. Money changes how it is used every couple hundred years. Many think it has worked this way for time immemorial, but that is far from the case. When push comes to shove, humans figure out how to trade with each other very quickly, even if the medium is sick. We have only been conscious enough to design our own currencies for 20 years or so. There are thousands of currencies working in the world today. Unfortunately, none besides the sick current system can handle the macro-economic trading.
Another reason why it is nigh impossible to have an integral and especially turqoise/violet levels of function with money is because we have never recognized the only source of capital we have ever had and then tended to that capital: our planet. It is systemically impossible for this currency system to create sustainability. We have to keep building houses and creating mortgages or the currency will crash; this means we are required to constantly pull resources from our planet, at an ever increasing rate, to keep the system "under control" without having to recognize this impact. What I just said means that we will have to have a quantum level (8th order in SDi) of change to create a sustainable planet. People will resist this heavily because what I just said is more than a revolution, it is a fundamental shift in the way we will live and interact. The status quo doesn't want to give up the lifestyle we've created for ourselves but also don't want to recognize the fact that our gluttony is killing our grandchildren.
How does money affect living an integral lifestyle? I wish the money relationships had a greater impact. One may know that going to see a teacher costs money and adds wisdom to their lives, but I don't think that most people can conceive of an integrally functioning money. Right now people tend to think that there is only one kind of money and that it is value neutral, rather then realizing that it is one of the oceans in which we swim and there are more ways to utilize it and for it to function than we have found to date. We don't see the walls we have put around our Selves or recognize it as an external sign of our ignorance. Right now almost everyone still has their understanding of money held in their subjective nature of this is how it works, because of this lack of acknowledgement, and to be integral with money is to take the understanding of this subject, turn it into an object and then use the emerging subject to decide, consciously, one's relationship with money and the life experiences it enables.
Are you prepared to interact with a sustainable currency system? Can you conceive of it?
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Money revealing shadow
Posted January 7th, 2010 by Jacob WagnerI have never found anything more honest and equitable than money. If you let it, contemplating money culls unrequited shadow into light.
Talking about your relationship with money and your family or friends can help one identify the inequities which it is easy to turn a blind eye towards. Money is an external recognition of saved time which was earned by giving your life experience for a job. You can then take that saved time and spend it making the life you wish to experience, where people will serve you for the same reward. At the end of the day, I feel that money is in existence so the farmers can eat the whole year round.
Money isn't the most important thing in the world, but it is the most unrecognized common denominator. Please look around you right now and point at something which does NOT involve money. The sky, ground and wild critters are about all I ever find. Our inability to honestly assess money is one of our culture's greatest harbingers of suffering. Nothing would decrease suffering on this planet more than for the status quo to have a healthy relationship with money. A relationship where we recognize money as a tool to care for each other and create the lives we want to live. We go through the world creating both Wealth and earning money, but not recognizing the common values between the two.
Frankly, most people who I know who are at an integral altitude are very far away from having their money situation from being integral. Right Livelihood is a hard discipline to master and even harder as an employer. It's much easier to contemplate nothingness than how to create a system we can use to interact together in a healthy manner. Our current money system is sick. The money system itself can not be integral, so I think it is exceptionally hard for a person to be at an integral level of function with money. One can, however, take the current money system and quadrivically express each altitude of consciousness through its use.
Integral money will require multiple currency systems in place at once. This way when one system starts to get out of balance, the other is used more until the first system settles down. The money system should systematically induce this and other healthy behaviors as the best course of action for its users. Our current system induces greed and scarcity. If we didn't have both of these things, this system could not function; this is not, however, likely to create an environment where you benefit by being a Steward to the world around you. (check out Slow Money, which is a group working on this)
An integral relationship with money has not been created yet. One person might be able to provide for themselves and be at an integral altitude, this doesn't imply an integral understanding of money. One is integral in many areas, but not all. Money is frequently ignored when raising altitude because of the difficulty with the subject. Both sex and death are easier subjects to dialogue. Money changes how it is used every couple hundred years. Many think it has worked this way for time immemorial, but that is far from the case. When push comes to shove, humans figure out how to trade with each other very quickly, even if the medium is sick. We have only been conscious enough to design our own currencies for 20 years or so. There are thousands of currencies working in the world today. Unfortunately, none besides the sick current system can handle the macro-economic trading.
Another reason why it is nigh impossible to have an integral and especially turqoise/violet levels of function with money is because we have never recognized the only source of capital we have ever had and then tended to that capital: our planet. It is systemically impossible for this currency system to create sustainability. We have to keep building houses and creating mortgages or the currency will crash; this means we are required to constantly pull resources from our planet, at an ever increasing rate, to keep the system "under control" without having to recognize this impact. What I just said means that we will have to have a quantum level (8th order in SDi) of change to create a sustainable planet. People will resist this heavily because what I just said is more than a revolution, it is a fundamental shift in the way we will live and interact. The status quo doesn't want to give up the lifestyle we've created for ourselves but also don't want to recognize the fact that our gluttony is killing our grandchildren.
How does money affect living an integral lifestyle? I wish the money relationships had a greater impact. One may know that going to see a teacher costs money and adds wisdom to their lives, but I don't think that most people can conceive of an integrally functioning money. Right now people tend to think that there is only one kind of money and that it is value neutral, rather then realizing that it is one of the oceans in which we swim and there are more ways to utilize it and for it to function than we have found to date. We don't see the walls we have put around our Selves or recognize it as an external sign of our ignorance. Right now almost everyone still has their understanding of money held in their subjective nature of this is how it works, because of this lack of acknowledgement, and to be integral with money is to take the understanding of this subject, turn it into an object and then use the emerging subject to decide, consciously, one's relationship with money and the life experiences it enables.
Are you prepared to interact with a sustainable currency system? Can you conceive of it?
Best,
Jacob Wagner
The Integral Finance Center