monetary - Spiritual Blogs - Ashtar Command - Spiritual Community2024-03-29T02:33:33Zhttps://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/monetaryNature, economics and the free life.https://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/profiles/blogs/nature-economics-and-the-free2011-05-13T21:51:45.000Z2011-05-13T21:51:45.000ZPeaceful Warriorhttps://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/members/PeacefulWarrior<div>Money is an illusion that only has value because we believe it does. It’s just pieces of paper and numbers on a screen, it doesn’t represent anything in the real world. Since it is imaginary, it can’t control our lives. Money was originally created purely as a means of exchange. The concept of money has since evolved to now being considered to have intrinsic value in itself, not based on a foundation of anything with actual value. This means that it can cease to exist instantly, which it often does. If we all choose not to believe in it, it will be worth nothing and no longer exist.True wealth is soil, seeds, trees, clean air and water, generosity, caring reciprocal relationships and resilient communities. By nurturing these things we can create shared wealth for everyone, with no need for money.Owning money or assets gives us a false sense of security, even though we know it could all disappear at any moment. By letting go of our attachment to these things, and creating true security in the form of caring neighborhoods and healthy ecosystems that can provide for our needs indefinitely, we can create a world where everyone feels safe, and our own sense of security doesn’t require excluding or exploiting others.It is the fear of not having that causes us to selfishly hoard money or things, and makes us reluctant to share. This comes from our lack of awareness that everything we require to live well is freely available to us, which leads to a lack of trust in other people and the earth to provide. By sharing freely of ourselves we can in turn trust that others will treat us well, so we need never go without. We don’t need to be in control of every situation, as it will always sort itself out in ways that we could never imagine.By engaging in paid employment we are enslaving ourselves to this money system. Most people in employment don’t enjoy their jobs and find them to be meaningless and unfulfilling. Jobs are the main source of stress in people’s lives and can lead to heart disease, a range of health problems, and suicide. Two million workers a year die of occupational injuries and illnesses. Employment doesn’t lift people out of poverty. Just 5% of the work being done is sufficient to provide for our needs for food, clothing and shelter.Why work a job? There are much healthier and enjoyable ways to provide for yourself and your family, make use of your skills, and engage with the world. Your life is too valuable to waste on something you don’t enjoy, that will make you stressed, sick and probably kill you, while destroying nature and exploiting others. Create alternatives to employment, that are meaningful, fulfilling and do no harm.Let the economy die. The economy is totally dependent on its capacity to destroy nature, and this process has now reached its natural conclusion where there is nothing left to plunder. It will inevitably come to a screaming halt. Don’t be a statistic, another resource destroyed by economic growth. Create alternatives to this parasitic system and live in a world that you’ve created for yourself, where you’re free to do as you want, rather than in a machine that controls and consumes you.You can do so much more with your life than just survive. We live in an amazing world with so much possibility, why limit yourself? We are all innately creative, and everything we do is an opportunity to express ourselves creatively. Living a life of meaningless employment, shopping and passive entertainment stifles this to the extent that many of us never become aware of our potential, never think of how we could do things differently.Take responsibility for your own life, your problems and your future. Blaming other people or The System won’t change anything, and only make you miserable. By becoming independent of the structures or entities that you are blaming, you are free of their influence, and they cannot affect you. To blame or complain is to avoid taking on this responsibility.Traditional cultures don’t expect governments, jobs and money to provide for them. The people are only dependent on, and responsible to, each other and the land that supports them.School prepares us for a life of employment, but gives us no life skills, no preparation for living with unemployment. We are taught that we are not free to do as we choose, and not responsible for how we live our life. We need to learn skills so we can be effective and fulfilled through unemployment. Spending your unemployment searching for jobs just leads to despondency, which can become even worse on starting an fulfilling job. The idea that a person needs to change themselves to suit a job role means that to be part of the employment system you need to behave like you are part of a machine. You are not respected as a human being with intrinsic value, or allowed to live true to your values. You don’t owe anything to the economy. All it has ever done for you is to exploit your labour and make life difficult. Create a life where the economy is of no value to you, and let it become despondent.By choosing unemployment, you are demonstrating not laziness but responsibility. You are responsible to yourself, your community and the land that you live on. A free-living unemployed person, who acts with love and makes full use of their talents and skills, contributes so much more to the world than someone who works for the money. I could never have written this book if my attention was focused on a full-time job.Not buying and not working is liberating rather than restricting. When you stop using money you find that we have more, not less. More time, fun, adventures, friends, skills, health, awareness, understanding, and a full life. You discover that giving is more satisfying than getting. Your ability to support your family and friends is enhanced, as you find that spending time with them is more valuable than spending time making money to buy them things. You gain access to things you will never get in the shops. You become more involved in what goes on in the real world. You feel comfortable in the knowledge that no harm is being done to support your lifestyle. You generate less waste, in terms of wasted time, food, water, energy, packaging, money, and your own potential. If a free-living project doesn’t yield tangible results, you’ve still gained a lot of skills and enjoyment through the process of exploring the idea. This is unlike trying to work with The System, which makes a point of wasting everyone’s time and resources, with nothing to be gained.When you live free, all your time is free time. Don’t allow yourself to be bought. If you sell your time away for money, you are selling your life away. What could you possibly buy with the money that would be worth the life you have lost? Days of War, Nights of Love – CrimethInc collective.When you do what you love, nothing needs to be thought of as work. Leave the work ethic behind and embrace an ethic of sharing and taking responsibility for your beliefs and actions.Consumption is a disease. You can choose to be a disease on the Earth organism, or you can choose to have a healthy symbiosis, and be a co-creator of nature.Work and consumption cause anxiety and depression, and stimulate fear and greed. Life should be lived with spontaneity, joy, and love, not strategic plans, budgets, and stress.Challenge your beliefs. Ask questions about everything. Just because an idea is commonly accepted doesn’t mean that it is the best way of doing things. There is always an infinite number of options. Never limit your choices.Spread the word. Share your skills and knowledge, your stories and ideas. Share homegrown and gleaned food, and demonstrate the possibilities to others. Listen to others’ stories and ideas, and new possibilities will emerge.Raise your children and treat your friends and family in a way that gives them maximum freedom. Choose not to judge anyone based on society’s expectations.Relate to other people as human beings, rather than as economic entities to trade with. This way we can form meaningful connections, and remove the fear of being ripped off or badly treated, and the guilt about treating others this way. Create a gift economy. Give freely without expecting anything in return. You’ll find that what does come back to you is worth so much more than money or things.Don’t contribute to the global economy. Boycott money completely. Be free!Tune in to your feelings. Be fully present in every sensation, even if it seems unpleasant. There is great satisfaction to be gained from being totally in the present moment. The joy of discovering something new, of seeing others practice a skill that you have taught them, of seeing things grow, of sharing, can’t be beaten by a life lived through TV, books or other people.As I become more attuned to nature, I find that the things I need will come to me at the right time. Sometimes I’ll be out walking or cycling, and feel a craving for a particular food: an apple, a block of chocolate, a leafy salad. Always within minutes exactly that thing will appear in front of me. Really. I found a sealed package of fresh salad on a roadside. It’s always exactly the food I was thinking of, never something else. A few days after it occurred to me that I need a printer, there was a printer with spare cartridges in my next-door-neighbour’s hard rubbish pile, with a sign on it saying “working, please take”. When I think of someone I need to talk to, I’ll run into that person on the street soon afterwards. With one friend I experience this quite often, and always in places that neither of us visit regularly.I start to take notice of the spaces between – the empty blocks, abandoned houses, road verges, dumping sites, patches of native vegetation, and wild places. To our culture these places are considered eyesores, or are invisible. As I move away from this paradigm I discover that these are places to explore and cherish, and the things intended to attract my attention and money – the billboards, shopping malls, bright lights and television screens– become invisible to me.We are part of nature, not separate from it. Talking about “the environment” as if it is something far away that we never come in contact with is ridiculous. No-one really knows what this Environment is, but every schoolchild know that we need to be friendly to it. And this friendliness tends to take the form of such activities as recycling cans, reading from the screen, and buying new lightbulbs and whitegoods when the ones we already have are perfectly fine. These activities are about as far removed from our natural surroundings, and the meaning of friendliness, as I can imagine.Let’s kill this idea of The Environment and start nurturing our world by living within it, rather than imposing ourselves on top of it, destroying it for our own ends. We are all animals. We can’t live in the illusion that the processes and cycles of nature don’t apply to us. To truly care about our environment we need to care for ourselves, everyone around us, and all living and non-living things. We must take only as much as we need, produce no waste, and share everything. We need to attune ourselves to the patterns and cycles of nature, and become dependent only on the resources that exist in our immediate surroundings.<a href="http://storiesofcreativeecology.wordpress.com">http://storiesofcreativeecology.wordpress.com</a></div>Who Will Collect the Garbage??https://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/profiles/blogs/who-will-collect-the-garbage2011-05-10T21:27:04.000Z2011-05-10T21:27:04.000ZPeaceful Warriorhttps://www.ashtarcommandcrew.net/members/PeacefulWarrior<div><p>By Charles Eisenstein</p><p> </p><p>I had a conversation today about the beautiful world that I believe will be born out of the converging crises of our age. One characteristic of this world will be that each person will have recovered a very basic, simple birthright: to wake up in the morning excited and happy about your work for the day. We will be in love with what we do; in other words, we will all be artists. Everybody has probably experienced this feeling at one time or another, the feeling of being passionately involved in a creative project. That passion is the sign of what might be called authentic work, true work, or soul work. The human spirit rebels at doing anything we don’t truly care about. The rebellion is closest to the surface in the young: hence, the sullen, resentful, rebellious, angry teenager. As we get older and the spirit crumbles, we come to accept that life is “just like that.” Working in drudgery for external rewards so that you can live your real life during your “time off”.<br />Think of the assumptions built into that phrase, “time off”. Time off from what? If we enjoy freedom only on the weekends, vacations, and evenings of our lives, then what does that say about the rest of life? It is slavery. What about being free all the time? That is what you are, when you do something you love. You are free.<br />I am not just speaking of the obvious drudgery of the working class here. Even among the elite, many occupations are not rewarding on their own merits. One corporate executive told me that his job consisted of “lying to the customer.” Another told me that his job was to scare customers into buying computer security systems that they didn’t actually need. And imagine if your job were to promote Colgate over Crest, or Pepsi over Coke, or any brand over any other, essentially identical, brand. Or if your job were to write software to help someone else do that. Or to provide the financing or insurance for someone to do that. Something in you would say, “I was not put here on earth to sell soda. I was not put here on earth to lie to the customer. I was not put here on earth to make children learn standardized testing curricula. I was not put here on earth to push a broom. I was not put here on earth to fill out medical billing statements. I was not put here on earth to collect garbage.”<br />The nature of work-as-we-know-it—tedious, routine, degrading to self or others, unfulfilling to the spirit—has very deep roots. One root grows from the Machine, with its requirement for standardized, replaceable parts and processes. Another grows from the mentality of domestication, laboring today for the sake of a future harvest. Ultimately, all originate in our sense of self as discrete and separate. More for me is less for you. The true artist never does anything merely “good enough”—good enough for the grade, for the customer, for the boss. The true artist keeps working and working on a project until he or she can look upon it with satisfaction. Then, and only then, is it ready to give to the universe. The true artist might receive money for her work, but the work is not done for the money because no amount of money is sufficient. The real motivation is elsewhere. True art is beyond price.<br />My conversation partner asked, “But in such a world, who will collect the garbage?” My short answer was, “In a more beautiful world, we are not going to produce very much garbage!” Now I would like to give a longer answer.<br />Both the question and the answer were spoken on two levels, the first literal, the second metaphoric. On the literal level, we can envision an economic and monetary system that structurally discourages waste. When all costs are internalized, a huge incentive is created to produce goods that are fully reusable or recyclable. This is a return to the very recent past. My ex-wife recalls that in her childhood in rural Taiwan, there was no such thing as a garbage truck. Food scraps were composted or fed to the pigs. Newspaper, metal, and glass were all recycled. Food bought at the market was taken home wrapped in bamboo leaves. Containers were refilled by local distributors or producers. Another friend of mine recently returned from a visit to Cuba, where she was amazed to find that an entire village of several hundred people only filled one garbage can a week.<br />Ultimately, to make an object beautifully requires that we consider its entire history and future. The artist-engineers of a more beautiful world will incorporate reusability and sustainability into their design specs. They will do so for beauty’s sake, for their own joy and satisfaction, and they will have an economic incentive to do so as well. Products that generate waste will be more expensive. Beauty and money will no longer be at odds. If you are curious to know more, read the economics of Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins, as well as Chapter 7 of The Ascent of Humanity.<br />But really, the question was about more than just garbage. Generalized, it might go something like this: “There are a certain number of unpleasant, tedious, degrading tasks that have to get done in order to have a modern society. Who will do these tasks in a world where everyone insists on work that is rewarding?”<br />My answer generalizes too. Tasks like that will become much less necessary when industrial design consciously seeks, not to minimize costs, but to minimize drudgery, tedium, and waste. Secondly, our demand for endless piles of cheap, generic consumer items will diminish as we transition into a new conception of wealth and surround ourselves with durable, elegant material objects made with love. I believe that many consumer goods that are mass-produced today will revert back to local, more labor-intensive production. This is especially true of food, and also to some extent clothing, medicine, shelter, and entertainment. Thirdly, as new currency systems render money into no longer a scarce commodity, we will no longer support enterprises whose dominant motivation is to reduce costs and maximize dollar efficiency. We will desire goods and services produced by artists, not slaves. Such a thing as a garment made in a sweatshop will seem ugly and repugnant to us. To have a surfeit of such things is a strange concept of wealth indeed. To me, true wealth would be to live among unique treasures, not mass-produced uniform objects made with the crass motive of profit above all.<br />In a more beautiful world, we will not be comfortable eating at restaurants or staying at hotels or working in office buildings that depend logistically on masses of broken souls pushing mops, washing dishes, flipping burgers, and entering data. Nor will there be many people sufficiently broken, by training or poverty, to do such work. Any enterprise will have to make consideration for human dignity.<br />I believe there will still be such things as hotels and restaurants in a more beautiful world, and there will still be a limited amount of work washing dishes and chopping vegetables and pushing mops. These jobs are really only degrading and soul-destroying when you feel compelled to do them day in and day out, with no hope of anything better. For a teenager to do something like this a few hours a week for a year or two is a different matter entirely. One of the best jobs I ever had was in a cafeteria dish room in college. There are times in life as well, personal transitions for instance, where a period of mindless labor can be comforting. So there may always be a limited place for such jobs in even the most beautiful society. No one will feel that he is stuck there, though.<br />People will do many more things for themselves. It is degrading to clean other people’s toilets all day; it is not degrading to clean your own toilet, or even another person’s toilet out of love. I do not find it degrading to change my son’s diapers, or to physically care for an ill loved one. Such tasks are part of the richness of life, yet ironically, in this, supposedly richest society on earth, we pay other people to perform the tasks of daily living, converting them from richness to degradation. I think that the toilets in tomorrow’s office buildings will be cleaned by the people who work there.<br />All the same, it is nice to be pampered sometimes, and there are people who love to do that for others. A more beautiful world will abound in inns, restaurants, spas, massage clinics, and other places devoted to making people feel great. Inns and restaurants will operate on a smaller scale than today’s mega-hotels, and all the slogans about personalized hospitality will come true.<br />There are some who say that if everyone suddenly insisted only on rewarding work, and refused to compromise their dignity, then society as we know it would fall apart. From this assumption follows the whole regime of oppression and control, with the associated guilt of knowing that your freedom and fulfillment is based on another’s slavery and misery. Well, this way of thinking is correct about one thing: society as we know it would indeed fall apart. But that doesn’t mean a descent to barbarism. In fact, I doubt the transition would be nearly as difficult as you might imagine if, say, all the garbage collectors of the world went on permanent holiday. Your purchasing habits, your composting habits, and so on would change very quickly I am sure, soon to be followed by our production systems.<br />If all the mop-pushers quit, saying, “I’m too good for this”; if all the burger-flippers quit, saying, “I am too good for this”; if all the marketers decided that lying were beneath their dignity, if all the soldiers said, “I will no longer kill”; if all the manufacturers said, “I will no longer produce in a way that pollutes the air”; if everyone just refused to go along with anything that felt wrong, can you imagine the world we could create? Let us not be afraid to create a world in which no one is broken to be anything less than an artist.<br />I think we can all begin creating a world like that right now. We can become refusers ourselves, as much as courage allows, and we can encourage each other with the knowledge, “You are meant to do something beautiful here.” Most of all, we can see in every maid, every check-out cashier, every janitor, ever data drone, a divinely creative spirit that is much bigger than that role. See everyone as big. Never through word or deed imply that they are small. Every time you treat one of the lowest functionaries of our society with humanity and respect, you are committing a small, revolutionary act, because your respect contradicts what the system has made them. Even if they are 99 percent broken to their role, even if they accept with 99 percent of their being that life is just like this, even if they willingly comply with their own degradation, there is something deep down that refuses ever to accept it. No human spirit can ever truly be broken. Your humanity and respect will speak to that tiny, buried, and indominable spark of dignity and rebellion in every human soul.</p><p>//<a href="http://www.raiazome.com">www.raiazome.com</a></p></div>