In my last article about money you noticed I stated that we don’t need the banks. We need currency, a measure of value but we do not need the bank. This is a radical idea and one that needs our scrutiny.
Banks are so everywhere that we do not really notice there might be life, even a really good life, without them. Imagine, will you please, a world without any poor people, an entire globe in a state of peacefulness where every human being is a fully actualized, functional, coherent, intelligent and entirely healthy individual, imagine the creativity that lies dormant within us waiting for a moment to spring forth. Imagine all national governments in our world, autonomously cooperative, serving their people with free education, free health care, participatory legislatures and continuing growing economies based on resource sharing. Imagine happiness for everyone; happiness that comes through freedom from fear and want.
In the state we are in which is the siege of survival, this sounds like an unachievable utopia. But is it? Did I say this is a radical idea?
If we need any kind of reason to empower us, remember Michael Jackson’s song?
‘We are the world. We are the children. We are the ones to make a better day so let’s start giving!’
Well, as part of my series about money, let us go a little further with this and see what turns up.
Sometime in the 80’s, I put myself in a seminar called “Millionaires in Motion” given by a rather short and entirely dynamic character by name John Kalench. His theme was all about multi level marketing but the content was really about doing life with gusto and for success, contentment, spiritual maturity, including a lot of fun and for making a contribution to ourselves, our families, our communities.
The second day of the event, first thing after lunch, he brought out 5 card tables for the 40 of us who were with him in the room. Instead of seating 4 like ordinary card games, we were arranged in couples around the table.
Once we were settled, he handed out game cards to each of the couples. My girlfriend and I took a close look at our card and read over the rules carefully.
So, what’s the Name of the Game?
Play to Win.
So, the room set to and played the game, and at the end of the time, my friend and I had made the highest score! Were we happy?
I stood up right away when we were given an opportunity to share. And I did just a little crowing. I was quite pleased with us as I explained how we had read the rules carefully and had broken through our former barriers. We were entirely okay with the idea of having made the highest score. Then, I sat down.
In the next ten minutes, I learned what I could not have known any other way a lesson that has come with me through my life. People in the room showed me a fantastic truth about playing to win! John remarked at the time: I have never seen anyone get off it so fast!
My reply: I am not committed to what will not work!
There are two ways to interpret the Rules of the Game!
The game we are all familiar with is run by the banks and its major stance is that of competition. We have been set against each other by the banking system to compete for resources that we have been led to believe are scarce. Their rules are set up for them to win at the game; their plan is never to allow us to win. Usury and debt are the tools of their trade against which they can be the only winners.
My friends in the room that certain day showed me a very much larger way of playing!
It turned out that if all 40 of us had cooperated together every one of us would have had a perfect score!
We had won the game, but our score was not perfect!
And, of course, I am writing this piece thirty something years later and the game is still on and it is still entirely the banks’ game. It is about endless war. It’s really difficult to recycle bombs and astronomical numbers of dead people (something in the order of 500,000 since World War II dead of war, and multiple more millions by famine, disease and poverty). It is observable even without authoritative authentic news that something is very hideously amiss and it is not anything about our choices in the matter.
Perhaps the most unwanted knowledge that must be grasped is that the world agenda is to enslave the worlds’ people to the banks’ agenda. Morpheus states it well in the Matrix movies, we exist to be batteries, energy that enriches those who we cannot see while we are enslaved and impoverished. But we have something that our shadowy oppressors do not have. Love. Kindness. Generosity. Empathy.
Without a spiritual understanding, our predominant emotion might well be one of despair. There seems nothing we can do to change anything. I’m here to tell you that there is a way. And when a way is found, there is always a better way!
The rest of the story goes something like this. One afternoon while sitting in a coffee shop in Vancouver, I encountered a very professional, very attractive young woman. During our conversation she told me about a group of her peers getting together on an annual basis to renew their education and their friendships at a seminar to which they invited other professionals to teach.
She said she did not have a problem with paying the leaders a fee of $2000 each but that after the event was over, she wished there was more.
As I sat with her, I related to her the cooperative game that John Kalench had taught us. And this is something of what I said to her:
“Each of you at your event is a highly successful professional commanding annual income upwards of $300,000. and you enjoy among you a very high degree of trust. You all know each other well. Imagine this: each of you commits to the circle a tithe of your annual incomes out of which the seminar leaders are paid their fee of $2000. The money contributed is pooled and placed in an investing escrow to accumulate during the year. Next year, the same thing: a tithe is invested by the group. Now, just for amusement, consider what that amazing accumulation of money might be used for using the trust, the consensus and the level of creative awareness that lives among you.”
Even a group of people of modest incomes in a neighborhood might participate cooperatively together in such a beneficial project simply by developing higher and higher levels of trust, learning skills of organizational consensus and by putting their innate creativity to work for mutual benefit. We already know we can share the wealth!
If you have become a little excited about the possibilities that are hinted at in this article, share it with all your favorite people. Give yourself an opportunity to simply discuss these and all the rest of your own ideas that will bubble up into the space when you talk about it. Within that assembled bunch of people is enough intelligence and creativity and the all important will power to achieve greatness. Imagine how much fun this might be and how much good can come of your cooperating together.
Whose world is this anyway? Play to Win.