Lots have been going on and I haven't had time to think about blog posts for a while. I've had quite a few visitors staying with me, lately.
Ried, Cap, & Spirit
I talked about Ried in my last post. He came back here from Boulder, Colorado with two more young, wandering moneyless chaps, called Cap and Spirit, and they camped with me for a week or so with their two dogs. They were grand fun (except for the dogs, I must admit). They seemed very committed to living without money and plan to continue their moneyless venture on the road. They went to their respective families for the holidays and then plan to hitch to the international Rainbow Gathering in Palenque, Mexico. It'll be interesting to see what happens with them.
Lynn
After they left, a 40-something woman named Lynn came from Maryland, and has been camping with me until yesterday, when we started house-sitting. She is more Bible-oriented than most who come, so we've been discussing Bible more. That's something I don't get to do often with people. It's hard to find folks who like to discuss the Bible and are, at the same time, not narrow-minded. Hard-hearted is the Bible's own word for narrow-minded.
Thinking about Ried, Cap, Spirit, and Lynn, I feel deep down that everybody who comes my way is my teacher, my guru, that guru-ship is actually a two-way process. If it's not, it becomes ego, idolatry. There is no such thing as one person on earth, ever, being a Guru. This is the misunderstood enigma of Guru-ship. The Guru is always between two or more people, and no Guru can exist as a single person, except as a realization that All are One and No Other. A single person as a Guru is a worthless, meaningless, useless icon, as the figure of Jesus has become. Jesus himself says, "Where two or more are gathered in my name, there, I Am, in the midst." Jesus is between two or more people, right here, right now (the same yesterday, today, and forever) but the deluded mind thinks he is a single human who lived 2000 years ago. No human who ever walked the earth can be worshiped except by the deluded. But we must bow to everybody in total reverence in the present. We bow to the Love between us. Love cannot exist, except between two or more people, and Love is the Only Guru. There is no other. And Love is the Name above all names, and it matters not what you call Love. There is absolutely nothing higher than love. Love ultimately cannot be spoken, only lived, between two or more folks.
Bear with me, because I'm continuing the same principle here, and show how it relates to male-female relations, economy, money, and commerce.
Male, Female, Giver, Receiver and Money Economy
While Lynn has been here we've been discussing the idea of the Giver and Receiver, which brings me to the concept of the Feminine Side of God (alluded to in Mark Sundeen's book), and how it relates to the moneyless life, are crystallizing. It's all coming together!
For anybody who read the The Man Who Quit Money, you might remember the epiphany I had, when I was young, questioning why females are veiled in many cultures, finding the Feminine side of God as I read the passage in the Proverbs in the Bible, here is how I normally saw it, as most people see it:
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| Is your focus on the Snake or on the Rock? |
Yes, four which I do not understand:
The way of an eagle in the air,
The way of a serpent on a rock,
The way of a ship in the midst of the sea,
And the way of a man with a maiden.
(Proverbs 30:18-19)
It dawned on me that we don't get it, because we focus only on the eagle, the serpent, the ship, and the man, and we overlook the air, the rock, the sea, and the maiden! We don't realize that the power is in the air, the rock, the sea, and the maiden! We focus on the male, not the female!
There are three things which are too wonderful for me,
Yes, four which I do not understand:
The way of an eagle in the air,
The way of a serpent on a rock,
The way of a ship in the midst of the sea,
And the way of a man with a maiden.
(Proverbs 30:18-19)
Incidently, the Hebrew word for maiden is ??????? [`almah], whose root is ????? [`alam], which means "to conceal, hide, be hidden, be concealed, be secret"!
Lao Tzu states this principle:
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
(Tao Te Ching 11)
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| Lao Tzu |
The spirit of the valley never dies.
It is called the mysterious female.
The gate of the mysterious female
Is called the root of heaven and earth.
(Tao Te Ching 5:6)
The large country is like the lowest river
The converging point of the world
The receptive female of the world
The female always overcomes the male with serenity
Using serenity as the lower position
(Tao Te Ching 61)
Not shown, therefore apparent,
Not asserted, therefore known,
Not boasted of, therefore of worth,
Not contentious, so enduring.
It's because the wise do not contend
That no one can contend with them.
When the ancients said:
�Bowed down and so preserved�
That was no empty saying.
(Tao Te Ching 22)Any Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or Buddhist will recognize this as the heart of their own religion. If they don't, they don't practice their own religion.
Yes, I saw the philosophy of the East (feminine) as the heart of West (masculine)! That which we have devalued and even called evil for thousands of years is the very heart of our own religion!
Now, how on earth does this relate to money and commerce and it's off-shoot, institutional "charity"?
Who Gets the Credit for Giving?
Who Gets the Debt for Receiving?
We think of the Male as the Giver (e.g. of semen) and the Female as the Receiver (and conceiver of the seed). So it appears. So it appears! But it dawned on me not too long ago that every True Interaction in nature is absolutely Equal Barter, and it is Unconscious Barter! For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Exactly simultaneously. Physics 101. What appears to be one-sided Giving and Receiving in our culture is absolutely not so! In True Giving, the Giver is the Receiver! The True Giver is Between the Giver and Receiver!
By obvious appearances, the Giver is Dominant and the Receiver is Recessive. Recessive is receptive. We even name the genes in our DNA as dominant and recessive. The male Y Chromosome is dominant while the female X Chromosome is recessive. When the Y (male) and the X (female) are together, it is called male, because male is dominant. When there are two together, XX (female), and there is no male X with it, is it called female, because the female is recessive. In our genetics, YX is male and XX is female. In our traditional culture, the male and the female together are called by the male's name. This isn't just invented culture and religion, but a reflection of our biology. Male and Female together are called Adam, in our biology. And for this reason, because we became superficial pricks, we began to think the one who gets the attention, the male, is the superior one. Little do we realize that the X is the life of the body, while the Y is more of a marker. The human body absolutely cannot live without the X chromosome, but it can live without the Y. |
| Giver and Receiver are One |
The root of a plant, unseen, under the ground, is the plant's power, and survives through winter and summer. When the root is exposed, the whole plant dies. When giving is done in secret, it is powerful. When seeds are hidden in the ground, they grow into full glory. When prayer and meditation are done in secret, they are our power. When we hide our evil deeds, they, like seeds in the ground, grow and overpower us. When we expose them to the light, confess them, they die.
This is bothersome in a culture that values the dominant and devalues the recessive, that values the male and devalues the female. A culture that devalues the recessive devalues and destroys nature. But, as Taoist philosophy shows, it is the recessive feminine that holds the power. It is the empty space that makes the cup or the house useful.
In our deluded culture, we give credit to the giver and debt to the receiver, not realizing that the receiver is the deeper giver, that both are equally giver and receiver, and that the True Giver is between the "giver" and "receiver" and deserves all credit, all praise, all price. In our deluded culture, we value the "rich" and devalue the "poor", not realizing that those who do so live in the true poverty, poverty of self.
There is one who makes himself rich, yet has nothing;
And one who makes himself poor, yet has great riches.
(Proverbs 13:7)
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| Picking, without sense of credit and debt |
Stark Evidence: the Example of Nature
I'm always bringing up the model of the raspberry bushes in Alaska, where I realized the true nature of nature's economy. On my trek, I noticed the raspberry bushes near the trails were plumper, redder, and sweeter than those in other parts, meaning the bushes actually wanted creatures to take their berries. And the berries I camped near and ate from became plumper, redder, and sweeter than other berries. They literally were telling me, "Eat me!" So what's really going on between the raspberry ("giver") and me ("receiver")?
This was my epiphany I will repeat again: the berry bush demanded nothing of me for taking its berries and I took with zero sense of debt toward the bush or toward anybody. How does the bush get what it needs in return? Is there an accountant sitting by keeping tabulations of who owes what to whom? All of nature works this way, and it is balanced. Our accountants obsessively keep tabs, we have PhD economists, and, after all this, what nation on earth can balance its budget?
Any bicycle rider, tight-rope walker, dancer, or marshal artist knows that if you even think about balance, you lose balance. Balance only happens when you stop trying to balance, when left stops worrying about right, and vise versa. Don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Walk, right-left. Breath, in-out, without control, without possession of air, share the atmosphere freely, else it is not healthy breath. Thought of credit and debt is knowledge of good and evil, our fall, our separation from the Grace of Nature.
Pay-It-Forward or Barter Economy...
Or Both Simultaneously?
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| Balance Happens, without our Control |
Now I thought of this as a Pay-It-Forward economy, meaning, the bushes "give" to me, and I "take" from them. I digested those berries, pooped them out later somewhere else, meaning I later "gave" poop food to micro-organisms in the soil as well as planting new raspberry seeds, propagating new plants! For the longest time, because I was looking only at the obvious Giver (male) and the obvious Receiver (female), I could not see Giving and Receiving happening simultaneously. Until recently, I saw nature only as a Pay-It-Forward economy, where the service and the payment for the service are delayed. In other words, you pay me, then you get paid later, and I pay something to somebody else later.
But when our eyes are tuned into the feminine recessive, not just the masculine dominant, we see that Giving and Receiving are One. It's both pay-it-forward and exact, simultaneous, unconscious barter!
How so? By taking the raspberry, I am providing a service to the bush right as I take the berry! And I am receiving a service from the bush right as I take the berry! If I see a "homeless" man and feel pity and give to him thinking I'm helping him, I am living in delusion. But if I give to him as an equal, and my giving is sharing, not really giving, then we are both receiving a service absolutely equal, an absolutely equal barter in the same moment: then I am living in Reality, not delusion! This is why "charity" has gotten a bad name, because it is delusion. Our "charity" is condescension, not equal sharing. In true charity (charis, grace, gratis) there is no giver and receiver, really; there is nobody who deserves credit, really, except the Giver Between Us. All Credit, all Praise, all Price, all Glory to the Giver Between Us, the Unseen Throne between the Two Cherubim!
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| Balance Only by focusing on the Center. Stray not to the Right or Left. When one Covering Cherub takes focus off the Center and worries about the other Cherub, he falls from Heaven. He is Lucifer becoming the Devil: Father of World Commerce [See Pre-Christian Judaism's, Roman Catholicism's and Protestantism's traditional Biblical passages on the fall of Lucifer (Heylel): Isaiah 14:12 & Ezekiel 28:13-18] |
In sum, the Law of Nature:
the Infinite, Moneyless World
Creating without claiming,
Doing without taking credit,
Guiding without interfering:
This is the Primal Virtue.
(Tao Te Ching 51)
Walk away from the delusion of commerce (Canaan)
and Give credit where credit is due:
All Credit to the All:
Hallelu-Jah
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