Slaving for Savings

It can be fairly difficult to cut through centuries of compounded interest in keeping the almighty dollar as the central focus of our collective consciousness. Imagining a world free of money is not often on the radar screen for most of us, as we are busily trying to keep up with the process of making enough of it to survive and thrive. The answer seems to always be "make more money, save more money..." both for individuals and corporations alike. There never seems to be enough, and we can even find ourselves drowning in debt; a negative amount of money is a great motivator to work even harder in order to stay afloat.

I want to talk about an individual I have been speaking to and share his philosophy about the eventual creation of a society free of money based on community involvement and mutual cooperation. Michael Tellinger's Ubuntu movement is gaining a lot of traction in his homeland of South Africa as well as abroad. He outlines a plan in which small communities and towns can come together and create a people's bank that is free of the global banking families that have established central banks in almost every country in the world.

The basic idea is to create a grassroots movement that enables people to have a direct, meaningful impact on their community through implementation of their God-given skills, abilities, and passions. Rather than working for ever-depreciating currency, we can work for the mutual benefit of ourselves and loved ones within the context of a society focused on creating an abundance of resources rather than hoarding money.

The reason we think money is so vitally important is because it has been implicitly linked to basic survival on the most primordial level. "You need to make enough money to survive." This phrase seems almost unworthy of any examination, as it has become almost like a piece of wallpaper in our collective thinking. When we think of survival in a basic sense, money is like an all-pervasive middleman that allows the true necessities of survival to be commoditized rather than simply being made available.

We can't eat money, we can't drink it, and we can't use it to protect us from the elements. Indeed, "money" as an objective currency is on the decline. It is more and more being relegated to a digital quantity available only as an abstraction and representation of a person's accumulated wealth (or lack thereof). If money were equally distributed, it would actually negate its own necessity. If everyone had all the money they needed, we would collectively realize that we don't actually need it at all. The fact is, the only use for money is as a means of systemic manipulation and control. The majority of people spend the majority of their time worrying about their financial state while the elite simply manipulate the monopoly game in whatever way best serves them at the time.

The spiritual principle at the heart of this monetary mess is the oft-repeated and seldom acted upon fact that all men and women are equal. If this were truly realized by everyone, the world would look a lot different than it does right now. The reality we experience is more like George Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

The day to day reality created by the money system actually violates the main points in the Declaration of Independence, the unalienable rights to pursue "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." If you don't have enough money to act on your greatest passion and life purpose, your liberty or freedom will be usurped by the necessity to work and generate enough income to survive day to day as well as support the kind of life you ultimately envision for yourself. The very ability to live is directly curtailed by greed and a need for ever-more money. Many of us are seeking to live healthier lifestyles through improving diet and developing and implementing healthier technologies. Time and again we see reports on more efficient vehicles and potential cures for cancer, but the implementation of these things is greatly curtailed because they would impede the short-term profits of large corporations.

Why should the greed of a few people prevent everyone from thriving and excelling to their full potential? What good is money doing if it is not directly helping the greatest number of people lead the best possible lives? We walk around with endless thoughts and preoccupations related to our finances. It behooves us now to hold our governments accountable and stand up for our basic, unalienable rights wherever we feel they are being violated. The reason the "99%" has not been able to create change is because we are too busy competing with one another over what seems like a limited pool of money and resources. It is like playing a giant game of monopoly where one of the players also has access to the entire bank. The so-called 1 percent represents the darkest part of humanity's collective shadow, and it is only through unity, love, and true cooperation that we can begin to realize our sovereignty and create the kind of world that we all yearn for.