Awakening And The New Permaculture Economy

Dear Friends,

Aloha after a long time 🙂

Recently, I posted an article I wrote on a very friendly and much used, networking and resource website here in Ashland, Oregon, called Webspirit (www.webspiritcommunity.com). Michael has asked me to make the article available to the forum. There is a short intro to the piece which explains everything.

I just want to make a note here that I have used a certain definition of the idea of “ego” in this article which I feel is the most widely used and easy to understand for the purposes of what I wanted to convey. It is not necessarily the only workable definition of the term, and, actually, is not the one I have used in the past on this forum. Don’t get stuck on it.

Also, the term “God” is not meant to convey a masculine deity who lives in the sky and does things to us. The words Source, Spirit, Oneness, Presence, Dao,…are all the same in my mind. I’m just looking for truth here. We know what we are talking about.

Oh, one more thing. There is the idea of “awakening” (or “enlightenment”) and I often refer to that as “remembering”. Now, while there has been raging controversy between camps Daoist and Zen/Non-dual about whether the right destiny is to become “One” or to become “immortal”, I, myself, now see them as exactly the same thing. To return to the source and become immortal is to awaken to what we are. When the little self dissolves into the Big Self it is really just the Oneness waking up to itself through a human form – no loss of individuality at all, quite the opposite. (“Then, Face gazes upon face.” Kabala)

The piece comes from a heart-felt desire to see humanity rest in the arms of God and enjoy Peace on Earth, and contains what I know will be our final solution-in-action.

May You Be Blessed and Prospered in the Coming New Year.

Most Happy and Peaceful Solstice Time to You All,
Alexander

Awakening And The New Permaculture Economy

I have written this article in response to the view offered in an economic posting I read recently on Webspirit. It is meant to be a helpful and inspiring alternative to the view you may not want to have anymore about the future- a negative, closed-minded, widely circulated view which we seem to have a lot of trouble disengaging from and which I, personally, am particularly tired of hearing. It is also a reminder of what’s real- the premise that divine presence is awakening in us now, and that it literally is replacing thinking, strategizing and doing, and all that goes with it, as a way of life. Finally, it presents the only true, practical, and inevitable, solution to our current economic “problem”.

Here is the excerpt:

It is said that our conventional monetary system will not last long. This prediction is shared by almost every economist today: debt-based and interest-based money is an unstable system that is condemned to die…No one knows precisely when the big collapse is to be expected, but everyone agrees it will happen sooner than later. The current world wide monetary crisis, as well as the effects of monetary concentration, are one of those historic social alerts announcing the big crunch.

-http://livingmandalas.ning.com/video/the-future-of-money

There’s a lot out there lately about our proposed gloomy future and how we will have to save ourselves. Propaganda buzzwords like “collapse” and “crunch” excite the lizard brain into survival mode. We haven’t yet seen through this fantasizing about what has to happen as nothing more than the assertion of the human ego, each fantasy a somewhat different version of the same story in disguise as a “solution”. Why are these fantasies? Because “the future” does not exist. “The future” is a fabrication of the mind. I can show you the present but I cannot show you the future. Only the present is real. If we let ourselves leave the now to “plan” the future, we are fantasizing. If we are worrying, we are hallucinating.

The truth is: no one knows what will happen next, (and no one needs to), except that we will do something completely different from now on.

Another truth is that the life force, God, has power over everything, all of us, and our changing time, and it is in control of the whole thing, not us. And its agenda is to wake up through us. That is what really is making this change happen. If it weren’t for that, we would continue on forever in our glorified and dysfunctional feudal system.

If there is any question about how significant change can happen if we don’t (a) make it happen, and, (b) if “others” are against change how do we convince them to change, please understand that this is happening from the inside out, not the other way around.

When I say we are waking up, I mean that divine consciousness is becoming present within us now and taking the place of our limited sense of self and our beliefs. (We do not need beliefs to operate in reality.) Our subsequent behaviors will follow this new consciousness. But our old consciousness cannot understand this. To the mind this can sound like a new age fairy tale. It is in fact simply the natural movement of the evolution of spirit. We are spirit and are growing out of our egos which may be considered to have been a developmental tool.

Said another way, this change is not about rearranging the outside world to get things to fit the picture of how we think they should be. It is about remembering what we are, Presence, and allowing Presence to move into and through us so that It orchestrates things holistically and spontaneously. Housing this new consciousness means being it, thus acting in new ways – a complete departure from the old, not a new version of it.

Most of us are still using our old-fashioned, conditioned, thinking minds to try to predict what will happen based upon memories of the past and then trying to figure out how to make things work from that. (This is where most economic information comes from.) This is a bad habit, it is crazy, and it is dysfunctional, since things worked just fine before we started interfering with them. Also, it is unnatural, since this is not how anything new actually gets born. New things are born out of an “empty space” that has no reference to past or future, a space in which the divine can enter -and the ego is terrified of empty space.

But most importantly, approaching life through thinking is arrogant and implies that we believe that everything would just go crazy if we did not control it. We distrust the divine, which unfathomably created and brilliantly handles the everyday business of the entire Universe, let alone our simple, little mudball, the Earth, completely sans thinking. How are the planets doing in their orbits? Are we controlling them okay? How about gravity? Ha!

The memory of God can dawn only in a mind that chooses to remember and has relinquished the insane desire to control reality. You who cannot even control yourself could hardly conspire to control the universe….You believe that without the ego all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego all would be love.

-A Course In Miracles

No one knows what will happen next. And it is just too scary for most of us to go there. Yet, going there is exactly what we are called to do. We have no alternative left but to jump into the not-knowing and trust because deep inside we know that we have exhausted every single ego-devised avenue possible and they have all failed. Planning and controlling will now be replaced by following (guidance) and flowing. And this will actually work.

But where could knowledge capable of helping us live life without a plan actually come from?

Life is a lot simpler than what most of us expect it to be because we still listen to what our egos tell us, and the ego thrives on suffering and self-importance because the ego is a reflection of our limited understanding of ourselves. To exist, the ego needs problems, not peace. It needs differences to perceive and challenges to overcome. It needs to be either hero or victim, two different sides of the same face. We used this mind to make up the world we have now and that is why it is ending. Our entire civilization has been spawned from the idea that we are people. This is what “the fall” of humanity actually was. Let us be grateful that it is now dissolving.

It is important that we understand that we believe that we are our ego identities and that the mind, the ego’s tool, is trustworthy and infallible. These are fallacies.

The device of the ego is to flash frighteningly negative pictures about what might happen to convince us not to trust openness and love. It exerts all the force it can, including “adrenalin-izing” us, to drag us out of the moment (where there is almost never anything actually going wrong) and make us believe we have to hurry up and do something before something really bad happens. (OY!)

The result of believing this insanity is the made-up experience of separation from others and God, therefore a feeling of endangerment and lack. It is actually a state of psychosis. That is why the world often is referred to as an illusion -we cast it upon ourselves. This is our current experience.

Spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle:

The ego is a voice in your head which pretends to be you and never stops speaking.

It is a voice that speaks only from what it remembers of the past, what it is programmed to say and therefore wants to project into the future, and whose agenda is to keep things going the way they have been. It is the voice of shock. Is this the kind of voice we really want to continue listening to?

A different voice comes from a deeper place which is divinely guided and utterly loving. This place would never fantasize a negative scenario or “come to a decision” about what needs to be done. It does not use fear or even recognize its existence. It operates solely on the Unity principle and Its nature and ours is love. It is the voice of peace. Its “What for?” is always the same one thing- the highest good of all. This place is the silence within, the Oneness, the Presence.

Its kind of “problem solving” is beyond the abilities of the ego and anything experts can come up with. This kind of thinking is strictly divine, and it works because the Oneness sees nothing as being outside of Itself and therefore dangerous. (That is an ego assumption and it rules this world.) It recognizes no lack. (Another assumption derived from duality.) We are capable of hearing Its Voice when we ignore the ego chatter and enter the silence from which all things are created and sustained.

The root of all of modern man’s problems is the fact that he is incapable of sitting alone in a room in silence.

-Blaise Paschal, scientist/philosopher, 1600s

Now that we have come to the end of the competitive, materialistically-based era, we are rapidly awakening to the fact that we all are part of this Oneness and that there is nothing to be afraid of.

We are actually just one all-encompassing Being that is expressing Itself as the Human Family. As we remember the truth of what we are (rather than focusing on the “who” each of us is in this dream of separation) we will act in the only way a functional family can act. All our concerns about “the economy”, an ego-generated device, will disappear and we simply will start sharing everything.

Why not?

When we started using money it was because we had forgotten what we are. We went crazy with anxiety and made up the story that somehow we were no longer connected with our Source. (This is what all our myths are about.) We freaked out and invented a lot of unhappy dreams. (Modern “science” is one of them.) The use of money is an outstanding symptom of this insanity. Using money, using any medium of “exchange”, is completely unnecessary. What the use of money is actually saying is that we believe in our separation from the Source and that we have to prove that we have the right to exist. So now we have to earn a living. This is the myth of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Paradise.

The truth is that there is more than enough of everything right now and that hoarding resources and making people prove their worthiness before they can eat is insane. We deserve to be here.

All this will fall aside as we remember what we are again. As sanity (love) returns, no one will be working for money in order to survive, and no one will be making millions from things which are mostly ugly, unhealthy or unnecessary, just for money. Crime will cease as people find they have ten times more than they need of everything important (including time and peace) because life, by its very nature, is superabundant and pure and self-replenishing. We will finally and truly relax and enjoy ourselves. Knowing the truth of ourselves, we will be free.

This will be the beginning of Heaven on Earth.

This is the true, self-sustaining permaculture of “natural economy” – a way based on trusting in our innate connection with the Source which put us here in the first place and not trying to make things happen ourselves. It will have nothing to do with anything mundane stemming from the old paradigm. It will only have to do with living as a Divine Family and the fact of having remembered.

When we stop listening to what our minds tell us we will have no more desire to figure anything out, have meetings to make decisions or make rules to control other people’s behavior because we fear what might happen if we don’t. The right “decisions” for everything will become obvious. The life force, Itself, will provide all the solutions the ego mind has determined it must in its attempt to be God. And all those solutions will be perfect because they will be created with everything in mind and with no agenda other than Love. And we will finally receive those solutions because we will have turned our backs on the voice of the ego and embraced the voice of truth. What a relief!

Now, let’s take a deep breath and imagine a world in which:

-we are worry-free about when the next bill is due or what would happen if we don’t get something done “on time”. (Yes!)

-we have power that is perfectly clean, quiet and free. (Yay!)

-a minimal amount of working together provides all the simple, friendly and fulfilling necessities of our lives. (Aaahhhh!)

-most of our time is spent in play, communing, creating or resting. (Yum!)

All this is already possible now and has been in suspended animation because of the inner agreements we have kept as a group. This becomes our current reality as we let go of our attachments to our ideas about how things have to be and who we are. Since it is more valuable to be happy and free than to be right and in control, resistance is supplanted by love!

Please don’t think about how this can happen – it already is, and it’s not under our control. The divine force expanding now on Earth is far greater than ever and its irresistible agenda is to coax us to relax, to let go, to remember and to trust. The only true control we have is to be willing to go with what is already happening, to say Yes.

And if you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe cosmic comic, Swami Beyondananda:

So those of you spiritual folks who’ve long envisioned a moneyless society, your patience is paying off. We’re almost there!

Fortunately, money isn’t wealth. In and of itself, it is worthless. If you doubt that, try this simple experiment. Eat your money. While high in fiber, paper money has little nutritional value. And here is something even more amazing. A hundred dollar bill has no more nutritional content than a dollar bill.

So here’s the real good news. As surely as the sun comes up every morning, we have more abundant wealth than we know what to do with. Wealth is energy, and how that energy is used. Not only have we been given solar energy to grow our food and power our lives, we’ve been given soul energy as well – to use and magnify our resources wisely. With the collapse of the house of credit cards economy, we can finally get real. We can use the two most underdeveloped resources on the planet, love and imagination, to re-grow our Garden and have a heaven of a time doing it.

And with regard to the new local currencies and other things being invented now to help along or to take the place of the old system- those must be fashioned and used only in the spirit of the new age, the spirit of play (play money!), as steppingstones needed by the personality in its transition from proving, hoarding, accounting for everything out of fear for the future to unity consciousness, love, sharing and trusting ourselves. For if we were to employ the new methods in the old spirit of !seriousness and urgency! about our survival we will do nothing more than recreate the problems we have now in another form.

Nothing outside of us, not a new president, a new economy nor a new gizmo will save us- we do not need to be saved. That is the voice of the ego that is calling for crisis intervention because it is dying along with the old civilization it fostered. Don’t listen to it! We are coming into the knowing and living of what we really are – divine, perfect, innocent, safe and loved eternal beings that are here to be just that. We are not our ego identities nor our beliefs any more than we are our cars or our clothing. We are One Being and we are God. Think with this mind of peace.

So I suggest that we welcome the next steps of our global awakening and keep these truths in mind, and that we take the advice awakened beings always have given us: Stay In The Moment. Refuse to get caught in reactions or strategizings. Don’t believe what you know. Be comfortable in the not-knowing and especially invite the spirit of life to flow through you and breathe. Start to share in new, unheard of ways with innocent, gleeful abandon, and expect that we will be supported for being what we are.

Love, peace and blessings will find us as we leave behind who we learned to be for what we came here to be.

Oneness,
Alexander Alexis

“When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that’s wisdom.
When I look outside and see that I am everything, that’s love.
And between these two, my life turns.”

-Nisargadatta

Please feel free to circulate this in its entirety. -AA