I’ve been wrestling with Mara for the last week of writing this stack. Last Saturday I met a synchronicity in the shape of an American man sitting in a Mexican café writing with pencil in a paper scribbler. All around us were computers sitting on the small tables, into which the young coffee sippers were tapping their transient words of busy busy-ness. And I was there to put words into my computer too, with support from a large matcha latté. My unique busy busy-ness was disguised as my next, and most important, stack essay ever. (It is about blood transfusions, transhumanism and maybe iron as proof of intention.)
Mark, it turns out, is an expert on how to raise capital for environmental health related projects. (See Vegan Launch.) Interesting, because I am in the process of exhausting my monetary capital and am looking to get some ‘healthy’ or health-based monetary wealth. To that end I am organising a four day silence retreat in April, situated about a twenty minute drive outside the beautiful city of Oaxaca in a rural ‘colonia’.
It is great that necessity is directing me to expand my self outside of my samskara self-comfort rut. I’ve recently learned that ‘comfort’ is one of the characteristics that creates suffering. And with this knowledge, and now with enough calmness in my mind and nervous system, I am able to more sharply and clearly look at why this tired tract, this samskara of scraping by after a lifetime of working, is still here. And now that I am calm enough, I am being presented with the synchronicities that assist in that investigation of my Self, wondering, like David Byrne, how did I get here?
It turned out that Mark and I have a similar proclivity to be open and honest. Perhaps that is just one bonus about getting older: the learned life experience that false masks are more easily recognised as empty and enervating. Perhaps it is also because we have both walked down a spiritual path, and know that truth and honesty are key foundations to develop the joy and growth that comes with the intimacy of experience with the people around us.
So we shared with each other some life details and learned that we have similar twists and turns in our life experiences. One of them being liquidity. So we talked candidly about our ‘comic’ cash situations. We both smiled and laughed. And shook our heads.
We explored what might be at the root of this karma after a lifetime of otherwise intelligent behaviours. I told him that in 2016 I became aware that I was in fact an addict to my destructive financial behaviour. And at that time began to take steps to change it. And yet, here I am still cash poor after another six years of working at reasonably well paying engineering jobs and being aware of the addictive nature of my attitude towards money. Choosing to forsake my job to avoid the experimental genetic injection a year ago is really creating a pinch now.
And so I explained to Mark, without the detail below, that I was born into an extended family that was traumatically conflicted about money. My parents routinely emotionally flagellated themselves and their children with the oft intoned mantra that money was the source of all evil. After all, everyone knows the unequivocal Biblical truth “That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:23-4). (JC really has a great way with language!) On top of that, if topping that admonition is possible, we were inculcated with money’s evil twin, power, because, as everyone also knows, power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely and that money is power, and yada yada yada.
Hmmmm. Interesting that my spiritual journey is, at a pretty high and deep level, about claiming, or perhaps reclaiming, the power entrusted in me by the Universe at the time of my birth. Are those ideas an early psyop designed to keep us disconnected from and disenchanted with our natural human vitality and its expression?
With these core beliefs it is no surprise that our family didn’t have a lot of money despite both my parents being extremely intelligent and my father musically talented. Claude and Terry, my parents, were mostly unhappy about the lack of freedom associated with the situation. I didn’t know, then, that we were poor. And verily I remember the food-like substances for breakfast comprised of puffed wheat and dried milk for what seemed like endless weeks. And oleo instead of butter, the thought of which, even now, prompts from me a gag reflex. At the very worst we didn’t actually go stomach hungry at any time. And, other than the poor breakfast substitute, we had ‘proper’ and mostly nutritious food for lunch and supper. I think the puffed wheat breakfast purgatory lasted for less than a year and of course has almost completely displaced all memories of the good hot oatmeal with real milk and homemade bread and lots of brown sugar that we had most of the time. Butter was reserved for special occasions only.
Yet my grandfather had gold fever and spent his retired life and savings looking for gold in the area of the Barkerville gold rush of the 1860s. He dragged his sons and daughter to the area to help him pursue his el dorado. Likely because I was quiet and had an attention span long enough to allow him to be a teacher, I was the only one of his nine grandchildren who he took with him as he explored the wilderness. From him I learned how to read the land for signs of gold, how to pan for gold and how to use tools when fixing engines. And with him I spent time with a few other peaceful placer miners in remote one-room cabins seemingly content to live by themselves with hissing kerosene lamps, sweet black coffee, cigarettes, well warn playing cards for solitaire or, when they had rare company, cribbage. And it was here that I learned to be a good cribbage player.
And I remember that Claude built a homemade model pyramid after being inspired by so-called new age readings about the power of pyramids to sharpen razor blades and do other magical things. He would reverently place a lottery ticket inside it in order to help raise us up and out of poverty and, presumably with hindsight, down and out of heaven.
Did he and Terry wonder at that? Did they actually wonder if the hell – it wasn’t really that bad – of being broke today was more odious than the possible hell of eternity? I suspect that they were both unconscious of that odd monetary hypocrisy and that the fear of hell was dominant in their unconscious.
Well, for the boy who had taken on, in shape only, the physical form of a young man, Guy began a practice of book reading. And in the early 80s that boy-man read several of the wonderful new age misandristic ideological tracts that comforted him by affirming the beneficence to humanity of his having been emasculated in childhood. This well executed emasculation had conferred into the post-pubescent boy-man that he could with good conscience defer all monetary authority to his older female partner.
Yes, that worked very well for Guy and his partner. It was part of the dynamic that kept them together for thirty-seven years because one of the ways that she expressed her significant trauma was by addictive shopping. Voilá, the perfect expression of Life as practical joker! We were comfortable, almost always in debt, never rich, and I didn’t have to stand up with my shoulders back and confront our mutually hurtful behaviours for many years. Ah such sweet pain.
And way back then I thought that I would write to make money. I loved playing with words and I even successfully completed a respected writing course. And I struggled to understand why I couldn’t follow through with getting anything published. At the time I hadn’t yet digested the hurtful money beliefs I had been exposed to as a child and so the evil that money had been painted to be remained a hidden power-belief that kept me safe from the all-corrupting epitome of evil. Unconsciously I had, like so many of us do, been enacting my parents’ unconsciousness in a bizarre effort to keep me and them happy in truth.
One day, many years ago, after a particularly acute episode of publishing-block frustration and monetary lack, I sat down with a strongly focused self-help intention. I did a deep journal dive to find the root of that blockage and got a crystal clear answer: I am not motivated by money. I kind of laughed, at the time, because I had been whipping myself to publish my writing, and even to write, in order to make money.
Ah, such sweet freedom self awareness brings! The perfect freedom to fall into a freedom trap disguised as something true. Having become consciously aware that I wasn’t motivated by money became maybe the biggest spiritual bypass in my life. Its obvious truth allowed me to smugly abdicate all responsibility for money’s manifestation and dissemination in my life. Sure, I was often frustrated and annoyed that my ‘hard’ earned lucre was being wasted on trivialities. And I would repress that by buying and reading more new age bullshit kumbaya niceness and swallow that frustration by eating my anger into obesity. I was stumbling along like the blind man who mistook an elephant for a tree. And I was happy living my truth and unable to see enough to actually deny that it was a false truth that allowed me to lie to myself. And I did not see that I was obese even when buying xxx shirts!
And now, here I am, many years later, much younger now than I was then and somehow maybe wiser as well as thinner and more aware of being alive in life. And still with cash flow issues! Fortunately I am now laughing about the lunacy of my beliefs in this life, and how they were made manifest in the craziest ways.
And, speaking of insanity, after covid craziness freed me from my job and inspired me to flee Canadian fascism, isn’t it the craziest thing that I find myself writing on a computer sitting cross-legged on a floor in a one room cabaña on the side of a mountain near the end of dirt road in rural Mexico? Beside me is a glass of delicious flannel filter drip Oaxacan coffee. Outside are scores of dogs barking. In the morning I’ll hear roosters and donkeys, birds and merchants selling their wares. A little earlier tonight I listened to Zoë Keating playing ‘Lost’.
Before that Jane Sibery’s ‘Map of the World’ and now The Penguin Cafe in a compilation in which Simon Jeffes, synchronistically just now, describes himself as a [musical] refugee.
To say I hadn’t seen any of this coming would be an understatement. And here I am. Just this is it!
So, what’s the point? The point is that the time has come for me to seek to ameliorate my financial grinch pinch by embracing money as my friend and not my enemy. To embrace words as power that can overturn the corruption of money-mad power and that money is an energy that empowers truth and light as much if not more than it empowers mendacity and darkness.
For a couple of years now I have been doing gratitude exercises to express my joy and ease with monetary wealth. Seven years ago a theta healer helped ease the tightness of the dollar sign samskara that was uncomfortably squeezing my heart. And in more recent months I’ve been working with Ho’oponopono self identity practices. And maybe, just maybe, the time has come that I have left the evil of money behind me and can safely ask you, the readers who have so wonderfully come to read my ideas, to help support my adventures in the wonderland of living in the time of covid with its heightened opportunity for freeing the mind seeing deeply into the nature of our black holed histories. And, perhaps more importantly, to see how those holes are expressions of my own black holes, black holes being made smaller with the exercise of living now, exorcising fear and expanding curiosity.
To everyone who has come to my writing and subscribed, I am grateful. Thank you for your support. And for those who can and want to, you now have the option to help support me in this monetary way as well. And as I write that, this act of me asking for help, marks my shift into the now of ‘just this is it’.
“Just this is it,” Dongshan (Dogen/Tozan), the founder of Soto Zen, was told by his teacher Yunyan. “You are now in charge of this great matter. Be thoroughgoing.”
Yes. Yes, I am in charge of this great matter. I am being thoroughgoing. Thank you.
I recognize so much of myself in your words. I recently read Electric Body, Electric Health by Eileen McKusick, which I believe I've mentioned to you before. She briefly addresses money and the energetic relationship we have with it. She suggests exploring Ken Honda's work, Happy Money, for anyone wanting a deeper dive. I have not read it yet, so I can't say that I've found it to be helpful, however Eileen's work is excellent and I'm excited to read it. I just looked at the cover this morning, actually. I thought I'd pass it along, as the synchronicity seems evident.
Cheers to releasing ancestral trauma, familial patterns, and personal baggage that are no longer serving you. I always enjoy your musings, thank you.
Funny you should remind me about Mara. I am flirting online with a woman named Mara. She seems a good deal more sensual than my nominally ascetic self. Also, I have never cared about money, making as much as I need and no more, all of my adult life. Suddenly though I am all about silver coin, and making a LOT of money from 50-60, and then go back to making as much as I need and no more,,,