Money is part of the scene.
What do I mean by the scene?
The scene is the moving frame of your unified life. And what is your unified life? What is UNITY?
UNITY, in this context, is the unification of all of your experience. This includes your five senses, your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, definitions, meanings, memories, the ideas of others or others themselves, the world or universe or space that is unseen to you, your senses of intangible or “subtle” things like time, distance or movement, the relationships between all of these things — everything that occurs in your “qualia.” There are no exceptions.
You may have a problem understanding unity if you make arbitrary exceptions for tough concepts like people (“The Other”), or the agency these people possess, or their memories or their influence or impact on your life. Other tough ones can include nature itself and your bodily health.
Nothing can be exempted. Nothing. OK? Nothing. Not even nothing itself.
Money is not something you can pursue or acquire. You are not in the scene.
You cannot possess it, anymore than it can possess you. You cannot separate, or divide, something without fundamentally changing its nature which is always whole.
Should you dedicate yourself to the acquisition of money, you have fallen off of your throne in order to become part of your scene, rather than the director of that scene. I call this fixation and some beliefs call it density. Other philosophies may measure it in terms of wisdom or a scale of harmony or balance you hold within as you become more actualized and are able to distinguish where you truly reside.
Once you become part of the scene, then the scene becomes your director and you have lost your power. The harder you commit to being part of the scene, the more entangled and dependent you will become. This entanglement hides the path to your true self behind layers and layers of stories from which you cannot detach without causing more explorations of time and delays.
What is the shortest distance between two dots? There is a classic example where it is not in fact a line, but folding the paper so there is no more distance.
When you draw a line — linearity — a singular immutable world or timeline (no forgiveness, no hope) — you are creating weights and entanglements from which you become bound. Your scene is the paper and “you” are the one folding the paper, or drawing the line. It is your decision whether to think in linear, point to point terms, or multidimensional, non-spatial terms (forgiveness, hope, faith, surrender.)
When you are able to fold the paper, you are able to allow your mind to hold two places at once and remove “yourself” from the conditions on how to bridge these points. This allows you to become “multidimensional.” When you know your destination and surrender to the flow of the universe, you do not have to follow a single path, a single timeline or a single world.
It requires great confidence and faith to be able to allow the universe to show you the next step while feeling no need to control where it may appear and having no idea where it may take you and yet the more you practice it, the more you will see how miracles can and do happen.
The more you practice, the more reality moves an inch closer to something like a dream and your life shall be a battle of moving yourself an inch at a time towards this dreamlike state (which is often described as high vibration, or low density, or higher dimensional.)
Once you have seen these things and experienced them for yourself, there is no way of going back to the old, linear way of being, much like being unable to forget how to ride a bike. Your soul intrinsically changes at a fundamental level.
So why is money such a wrench in the proverbial system?
Because money attempts to create a surrogate concept, vessel or “hijack” for what is effectively love, willpower, or the volitional force or momentum of consciousness itself. Money provides a fake apparatus or overlay on top of this intrinsic attribute of life, experience and reality in attempt to create a dominion over it, or mistakenly believe it can create a bypass to consequences.
It is understandable to want to build your life around money, because fundamentally your soul desires love — it desires willful command over its reality — and you want to use this power to create a dream life for yourself. And you want to do so in a way that is the most immediate, least painful and expeditious way you can manage. Money seems like the answer, right?
Fundamentally your soul knows, even if your waking consciousness does not (your ego, or scene/contextual-self), that it is the primal, foundational force of the cosmos. The true you which is the ultimate observer with supreme executive power is the one that creates all of reality. Only your ego, or “scene mind” — your contextual self — makes the mistake (or hurbris) of thinking that money is equivalent to this awesome infinite and omnipotent creation power.
Money becomes a “backdoor” into your own willpower that you can exploit upon yourself, or allow others to exploit you, as money, like all things, is part of the unified scene — so the true purpose of the concept of money is not, in fact, what you understand as currency, or cash, or buying power, but as an concept that is meant to create a substitute for your own will that can be “hooked into” like a credit card skimmer.
If you believe your true power should serve at the behest of money, beware, your wish will be granted. Creation itself is subservient to your actual omnipotent will — so to covet money is to place it above your own will (which is of course your free will decision to experience) which implies of course that your will is put underneath money and so money becomes more powerful than creation itself!
A clever trick, yes?
Money is inherently the ego’s desire — whether yours or the Other’s — to exert control over its own will that it already possesses (like asking a genie for a wish who is really just a middleman robbing you.) And via this sleight of hand, it creates a point of fixation that causes what we spoke about before — an abdication — a decision to draw a line rather than fold the paper.
The amount of money you possess tends to be either be a function of your fixation, or a function of your sovereignty.
You can be extremely rich and yet be totally bereft over all sovereignty of your own soul, because your fixation is so entangled that your contextual-self — the dream, life or qualia you experience — is an extension of the stories it requires to continue to make that richness believable and maintainable — like having having to take a bunch of prerequisite courses before getting to the class you actually want.
You might imagine a CEO who is so burdened by responsibilities, or so lost in hedonistic pursuits attempting to scratch long blown out and overloaded desires that they have become empty and produce no more novel experiences for themselves. For them, reality does not support them. Their support has to be constantly taken (like a vampire) or reinforced like a chore ; something decaying and waiting to fall apart or entropic.
“Cause you’re the son of a clerk and I’m not supposed to want to be you.”
Fernando Mondego in The Count of Monte Cristo
You can be extremely poor and yet have godlike sovereignty, because you understand that you are not “in” the scene and so nothing and no one — whether it is yourself, the Other, or any aspect of the scene and not even the threat of pain or death itself — may influence your ability to make decisions or remain situated on your “throne.”
You might imagine someone living in the wilderness without a penny, yet be totally harmonious with the flow of life. Their life is always novel and adventurous and so their inner-state is always fulfilled and overflowing. For them, reality seems to always support them with invisible hands like they are being cradled by the universe.
You can also be poor and still have poor sovereignty, or be rich and still retain your sovereignty. I leave it to your imagination on what these lives look like — it remains that money is a function of the scene you — the real you — have chosen and are choosing to render.
You are omnipotent in this ability to render your life — to choose the ingredients you put into your cauldron of life — but you cannot escape the consequences of your own omnipotence — the pot you have brewed so far — so you have a “shadow” or “buffer” that follows you around for which you must resolve. This is not karma, but simply the consequences of your own will that follow you without relent.
As the old adage goes, you cannot take it with you when you die …
You can never “take” the dream with you, including all the material possessions you accumulate. All you can take with you — is you. The real you that is beyond the contents of your dream, beyond time and space. And if you have done nothing to cultivate what you are — if everything you have is merely a byproduct of a dream that will someday end — then what are you but a dream to be forgotten?
The dream arises from within you — always. It will always do so and you will always be there at the top of it for all of eternity. You should take great care of what you decide to carry in your backpack.
And so to dedicate oneself to the pursuit of money implicitly boils down to a dedication to hedonism, as it is fundamentally a mistake of understanding where your true power lies. To believe in the “power” of money is simply believing in the power of your own desires to fulfill over your own will or power and so your desires become altars for which you WILL serve.
Your desires and pleasures will become your masters until your will is no longer yours, but a function of whatever or whomever can fulfill these desires for you — even existential desires for your starving soul for which you will seek teachers and saviors. And you will obey, because you are immortal and even if you have to suffer or die to reconcile with yourself (as in checking!), your will is always done. Reincarnation occurs when you give up all hope of creating balance.
And so, I say, money is part of the scene to make you understand that if you wish to be rich, you must be rich within. To be rich within is to follow the calling that is given to you by God, universe or your soul, no matter how hard or how far it may seem to you for nothing else — and I do mean nothing else — will ever fulfill you, but will instead only gradually drain you until you remember just how powerful you are.
You are so powerful that you can render yourself powerless to experience what it is like to have no power.
And so who is the best master but God, the universe or life itself? Then and only then can you never lose your power for you serve creation itself.
What is your calling? Well, of course, that is for you to decide.
This article is not about identifying what drives you. Passion and purpose are age old questions and they are not static, but changing, dynamic and — importantly — forever, because you are an immortal being that is always pursuing this never-ending calling.
That is why life is so beautiful, because it is a story that is always new, novel and eternal. A never-ending story …
How, then, should you think about money? You should not. Money is part of the scene, so you will always have what belongs there and you always belong where you are.
You should be focused on how to become the highest, best expression of yourself at all times and trust that the universe will catch you as you endlessly fall or fly. You should look to exalt life and seek out new and novel experiences and to become the master of either creating or finding these experiences.
You should trust that the universe will lay the bricks beneath your feet to make it happen, whether you decide to sell it all and travel across the world with nothing but a backpack or whether you become an entrepreneur and risk it all to create something no one has ever seen before. As long as you do it with just a little bit of exuberance and faith, the universe will always have your back.
I leave it to you.