But I Digress

If some of the previous posts seem to be off-topic, my apologies. All will be clear anon.

So what might a world without money look like? For it to work we'd all have to start taking care of each other, mindful that we ARE our brothers' keepers. Remember in the Bible what the first incidence of competition was like? That's right, it was Cain and Abel. To refresh your memory, Cain is a herdsman and Abel is a farmer. They both offer some of their produce to God, but God likes Abel's stuff best. (What does that say about the merits of vegetarianism?) So Cain gets jealous, kills Abel and tries to hide the body. God shows up and says, "So, Cain, where's your brother?" Cain says, "I dunno. Am I my brother's keeper?" And God says, "You bet your sweet bippy you are! And I'm gonna make the rest of your life miserable as a result!"

Okay, so I paraphrased a bit.

You might say that we invented money so that we could get away with not taking care of each other, and by that I mean that we were trying to assure that individual transactions were "fair". First of all, "fair" is dualistic. "That person over there should get as much value as I do over here." Now that there's self-and-other in play, the next step is fear: "What if he's got more than me? How will I survive?" From there we move right into greed: "I need to make sure that I get more than him so that I'll be safe."

So now fair was not fair enough, and we ought to be making a "profit" on every transaction. You can see where that led. Some folks have been able to get away with not delivering full value for the money, so some folks got richer and most other folks got poorer, because it's too arduous to try to figure out if every transaction is fair.

What if we suddenly all remembered that we are all connected, all in this together? Now it makes sense that Jesus passed out only two commandments, and the second was "Love thy neighbor as thyself". Because he is! You want to take care of yourself, don't you? Well?

If we were devoted to taking care of others-as-self, we'd make sure that everybody we encountered was doing okay, had enough. And we would trust that we would be treated the same. How would we do that? By giving away the fruits of our labor and receiving freely-given fruits of other peoples labor. Economists will gleefully point out that barter is clumsy: a bushel of apples doesn't equal a banjo. (I have friends who would say that the person who got the apples got the better deal, but that's another story.)

But we're not talking about barter here. There's a principle here, and it is "to each according to their needs; from each according to their abilities." I can hear the cries of "Socialism!!" all the way over here. More about that in another post. For now imagine that currency suddenly disappears and that we smart enough to keep on doing exactly what we've been doing all along. Truckers drive trucks, therapists do therapy, presidents preside, etc. The difference is that when we go to the store to get something, it's free. Need flour? It's free. Need a new car? It's free. Need to fly to Timbuktu? It's free. Need lumber to do your carpentry? It's free.

Now somebody is going to object, "But people will just quit working and hoard stuff!" Not if they're conscious of non-separation they're not, and it's going to take everybody remembering that for this society to even start. That's what the Shift is all about. You'd feel bad if you weren't contributing something, and you'd feel bad if you were taking more than you need and that some folks might not get their needs met as a result. So contributing your energy will be what gives you satisfaction in life. Love feel much better than guilt or smugness.

Let's look at some side affects: doctors would doctor because they love doing it, and insurance companies would disappear. Farmers would farm because they want to, and they would be able to revive small farming because the "economics of scale" would disappear. Small crafts people would be able to replace factories, because quality would replace cheapness. Banks will disappear with the rest of the financial industry. I'll be doing a lot of posts on what will change, but feel free to chime in here anytime....

Now the objection will be raised "What about all those factory jobs that will be lost?" Jobs? There's no such thing as a job anymore. Wow! Think about that! You can spend your time doing something you love and giving it away. What's going to be rewarded here is quality, and you can't produce quality if you don't love what you're doing. So how are you going to build houses? You get a contractor (who by the way gets immense satisfaction from what s/he does) to round up all the needed workers and gets them to commit to building a house for you. Now you really appreciate all the great work this person has done for you, so you recommend him or her to all your friends that need housing. Word gets around that he delivers quality (because all his workers love what they do), and suddenly the contractor has plenty of steady work for the whole crew.

So what about the chores that nobody wants to do? Hard manual labor, jobs with a high distaste factor, like cleaning toilets? Who's going to love those jobs? Will the entire infrastructure collapse?

Stay tuned....

Fear

The more I look around me, the more clearly I see that it's all about fear. And what we fundamentally fear is death (FOD). Why are we so afraid of death? All the evidence from science, religion, and everywhere else points to the startling fact that death is an illusion, an illusion resulting from the illusion that the separate Self is real. As Wei Wu Wei put it,

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself--
And there isn't one.

So we're afraid of anything that might result in our death. If we could realize No-Self, we would fear nothing. As it is we've created a society/culture where that FOD, since we're unwilling to actively confront it, manifests itself in lots of smaller fears, all of which are bulwarks of and reinforcements for the Illusion of a Separate Self (ISS)

We're afraid of Not Getting Enough (NGE) and that if we don't get enough for long enough, we will surely die. But if we could realize No-Self, we would see that since Everybody Else is co-extensive with us, we would take care of each other as a matter of course. Love your neighbor as yourself (because that neighbor IS yourself).

The Not-Getting-Enough plays out as "I gotta make sure I get My Share." This leads us to guard and protect My Share. Even little children's first projection into NGE is "That's Not Fair!". See how early this sense of lack is conditioned. Prior that is the learned sense of "Yours and Mine". Again it's ISS.

The habit of NGE is institutionalized as Money. Money is there to make sure that each one of us Gets My Share. So NGE also points back to ISS. The first crime outside the Garden of Eden was Cain slaying Abel because he thought he wasn't getting his share. Envy and Jealosy are manifestations of NGE. NGE combined with these emotions translates to a new fear: I AM Less Than You (LTY) because I HAVE less than you. If I am LTY than it's natural to fear you--more ISS.

The fear of LTY plays out in a variety of ways. I can suck up to you to keep in your favor. That's institutionalized as feudalism. Or I can try to get more stuff than you so that I'll be more powerful than you. That leads to a Warlord mentality.
Our modern version of this is corporate power. If I have more employees and more profits than you, I have more power than you. I am not LTY, therefore I don't have to fear you.

So we have made Stuff (which is essentially neutral) merely a pawn in the game. Greed, too, is a manifestation of the fear of NGE. Looks like I'm going to implicate all the Seven Deadly Sins, doesn't it? Okay, let's look at the rest of them. The Seven Deadly Sins are Anger, Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Envy, and Gluttony. We've already covered Greed and Envy. Anger protects ISS, and so it points back to FOD. Pride is a cover for it's opposite fear: LTY. Lust is a manifestation of NGE, but it's really an artifact of our monogamous, post-agrarian culture. More on that later. Gluttony is clearly NGE, but the fact that we label it as one of the Seven suggests that it can be extended symbolically as Acquisitiveness, also an artifact of our monogamous, post-agrarian culture.

Sloth is a secondary sin. The real message of Sloth is "If you don't do your share, then you'll get some of MY share. So I'll be NGE and That's Not Fair." Contrast it with Gluttony where the message is "You're taking more than your share." Translation: "You're taking MY share."

That was easy, wasn't it? All this behavior is a manifestation or result of ISS, and to reiterate, if we see through, awaken from ISS, we would really see that our neighbor is ourself, and making sure the my neighbor is taken care of, has enough, becomes our default behavior.

Look for future posts on Lust and Stuff.