Precariously Taking Three Giant Steps Past All the Elephants Sitting Daintily in the Room

The line that matters most is the bottom one.

In the sphere of jurisdictions embracing market-based economies, this structural support is unyielding.

Universal/Natural/Cosmic Laws don’t conform to manmade precepts. It’s usually the other way around.

Guess who loves them some Universal Laws?

Honestly. Anything or anyone that says f@%k the bottom line immediately gets my attention.

Firstly, the reduction of any or part of individual and/or collective humanity to a ratio of currency value as a measurement of benefit debases the human experience and existence. You don’t have to look far to see the seedbed results of money first, money second, and money last enriched soil for every tainted produce crop from black market body parts and sweatshop labor to political corruption and human trafficking.

Wealth in all of its financially evaluated forms is a societal construct, which means that from the concept of community's inception, people chose what was of value and what was not, this varying from country to country, region to region.

It is not an abstract, immaterial force that has brought 21st-century jurisdictions the world over to this destination. How ironic that such a clear-cut historical lesson be lost on the very species that enacted it.

Barcoded from cradle to grave for tax purposes. Insurance purposes. Data information purposes. All purposes leading to a place within a so-called civilization that eagerly awaits your contribution to the economy by the time you are 16…18…21yrs or whatever age your income is required to qualify as revenue.

Moving away from home with my children, I felt crushed when my eldest, a teenager in high school at the time, asked, “Mom if I start a part-time job, will I have to pay taxes?” It was never something I had to think about at that same age.

If as Oscar Wilde stated in 1889 that “life imitates art,” the sheer paradox of the human species in a repetitive feedback loop of surrealist financial flux is telling. People often place more value on what they can contribute, what they have, and what they can do rather than who they are.

The litmus test of pandemic-induced lockdowns from countless inhabitants living in longstanding fiscal policy-based governments triggered pervasive self-doubt, inadequacy, and feelings of worthlessness indicators.

How could members of the species responsible for the Great Pyramids of Giza, the formation of semiconductors, unraveling the structure of DNA, and the development of organizations saving and protecting endangered wildlife so quickly become a liability?

Secondly, there is a definitive historical timeline of what has been deemed currency over passing centuries. Global financial markets are a testament to the rise and fall of substances, services, and commodities that have held humanity dear.

The Great Depression of 1929 to 1946 was a sobering reality check that the elaborate house of cards so painstakingly constructed by numerous localities was still, in the end, only a house of cards.

Life in a predictably inert, invariant world could offer some consistent financial-based returns but I don’t think it would make for a thrilling life, and science more than intimates that there would be repercussions for such a drastic global trade-off.

Change.

Attributed to Heraclitus is the quote, “The only constant in life is change.”

Whether literal or figurative, running around shouting of possible impending financial cataclysm is not something that should scare the natives. They should know better.

Let us not forget that money is in fact a piece of paper given value by those who created it, and it is sustained by those accepting terms of use. And while volumes can be written on its practicality in daily life, it is still a societal construct like all other societal constructs whose power rests with the people.

It was an enlightened being, in Emmanuel’s Book II: The Choice for Love, who so aptly stated that

“Money doesn’t stand in the way of anything. Fear will make itself known through money concerns…If money were not such a useful place to put your fears, you would find something else. The oxen would have sore feet, the horse would break a leg. Or the winter would be extra severe.” —Emmanuel

Which brings up the last and biggest elephant trying desperately to get comfortable in this room and failing miserably.

Fear.

This self-perpetuating seemingly endless source of driving emotional energy is at the root of many financial worries. Haven’t enough of us at some point walked by the homeless or destitute whether physically or through the lens of a screen thinking, Glad that isn’t me, instead of There but for the grace of (insert deity here____) go I.

Fear unchecked spreads insidiously faster and has more lethal potentiality than any pathogen. Fear gives that bottom line an almost infinite array of hiding places and worst-case scenarios:

How will I be able to feed, clothe, and shelter my children?

If the firm goes bankrupt, I could lose my job.

I’m sorry Sir, but your overdue unpaid balance will go into debt collection.

My losses will be reflected in the faces of everyone who knows me around town.

Won’t this ruin my credit?

I’ll lose my car, my mortgage, my life insurance policy!

Embezzlement? I could be sent to prison!

And the list goes on…

It is the microcosm of the macrocosm. Transactions taking place on greater and more complex platforms.

I do not propose to have all the solutions. But I do know that business as usual is no more a viable strategy than a Hail Mary pass in the final seconds. Fear isn’t going to turn around and just walk away. It must be banished. Sometimes repeatedly because it senses openings for readmittance.

If fear in this instance was a person (and of course sometimes it is), what would cause it to run away screaming?

Reality. Truth. Experience. Knowledge.

The fact of the matter is that every single one of us was born butt naked with nothing but the innate ability to suck, alarm for loud noises, and fear of falling. No bank accounts or diversified investment portfolios and yet here you are reading this personal opinion article over the internet. How did that happen?

There are things that you expect to occur because of deeply ingrained beliefs and intentions set. They may presently seem no more miraculous to you than sliced bread but look for similar frameworks regarding financial mindsets.

Have there been many individuals who were born with nothing yet became millionaires? Were those same individuals limited only to people of education? Certain social standing? Age? Privilege? Are there those in the world who never worry about insufficient finances? Is there some reason why you can’t be one of them?

Restriction and limitation of resources is a manufactured concept. Mother nature’s abundance is extravagant. You won’t get one seed you’ll get fifty with the 99.99% guaranteed potential for more seeds ad infinitum. Manmade infrastructures are limited and confining. They are concerned with numbers and dwindling resources and the cost-benefit ratio.

The planet can, as the adage indicates, support “enough for everyone’s need but not everyone’s greed.”

No one is being asked to return to prehistoric living conditions, just to acquire sufficient context to banish fear from the room, which was never really helping anyway, it was hurting. Here fear is illogical and obtuse. It does not serve. It enslaves, trapping us in a cycle of nothing ever being enough, and then sadly, we aren’t enough either.

Science teaches us that we are made from the stuff of stars. So the question becomes, in your once only life ride, are you going to be forever restricted and reduced by accounting ledgers, or are you going to expand and shine in immeasurable brilliance, shoving that effing bottom line into a black hole?

Just so you know, I’ll be waiting for your answer in the other room free of elephants.

References:

Rodegast, P. and Stanton, J. (1989) Emmanuel's Book II: The Choice for Love. New York: Bantam Books.

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