If we believe this to be true, we should be able to take a good look at one of the illusions inside this great illusion, our economy.
Oh boy, that is a touchy subject right now isn’t it? That word is practically on par with The Boogie Man. Many people see the economy as this out of control monster that is coming to get us and is making our lives miserable. As if it has a life of its own. But it doesn’t. Not really.
It is a set of agreements we all made, consciously or not, as an exchange of energy. I’ll give you this and you’ll give me that – and that is a fair exchange. Somewhere along the line it got away from us. Our collective agreements added up to something we don’t quite recognize and are more than a little afraid of.
Think about it this way, when we created money, it was a representation of something we gave value to, such as gold. This amount of gold was worth this amount of paper with these markings on it. It was a little more solid and “real†at that time. But then it got more interesting and complicated. Instead of gold, something we could hold and felt real, we gave value to things like “shares of a company.†Hmm, that’s a bit trickier to hold onto. I get to own a small part of a company and it’s worth this much money. Ok, still not lost yet.
We also created credit and loans. You need more money so I’ll lend you some of mine to use, but you have to pay me back a little more at the end – and that is what we’ll call fair. So now we were spending money we didn’t actually have and having to pay back more of what we didn’t have in first place. This is sounding a little crazy. But we kept it up. And we kept deciding things were more expensive based on how many people wanted it. If more people want this, then we can charge more. Ok, fine.
At some point this got completely out of control. We actually just started printing more money, not backed up or based on any solid thing we call valuable. Then the value of our money went down because there was too much of it in circulation. Does anyone else remember learning about “imaginary numbers†in grade school way back when? I think our whole economy is now based on imaginary numbers.
My point in putting this all down in terms that sound a little like a Monopoly game is to show that we are making this all up – and we have from the beginning. Now we have become victims of our own illusions. Everything about our economy and how money is handled in our society and around the world was started by decisions by us as individuals and agreements by us as a collective. We have turned it into a monster that feels completely out of our control. Like Godzilla rampaging Tokyo. I believe that by taking a step back and looking at what our higher selves may be trying to tell us at this time is a healthy response to the craziness all around us.
In this time of change, our illusions are breaking up. We are no longer able to hold them together – and I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. I know it is difficult and feels very real if you have lost your job, but feeling like a victim is never an empowering place to come from. If we can look at our economy as the self-created illusion that it is, it will cease to have the power of fear over us. We can see that it is a collection of decisions made by us as a collective, and it has been draining our energy and pulling us further and further away from out deeper spiritual truths.
Perhaps our higher selves are using this financial crisis to show us the folly of buying into our own illusions too deeply. A Course in Miracles says, “What God creates is eternal. What the ego creates is not.†If we all take a step back out of the fear we have generated with our collective illusion, perhaps we can change it, shift it, heal it – and ourselves.
