Money, Morality and The Habit of Wealth

If you turn on the television, power is represented by money and a gun. A while back, I was taking a walk and I had an information cluster (mentioned in a previous blog) about power. It was the spontaneous knowing that the individual is power. That is, you don’t acquire power, you don’t gain power, you don’t add to your power. You are power. It’s what you are. Even when you’re living tales of great woe, it’s you who’s doing the writing of the tale. You really can’t be powerless no matter how hard you try, but you can pretend you are, and the experience will be real.

One of the greatest fictions of our culture, and one that leads many to a sense of powerlessness and distress, is the idea that money is power. To add insult to injury, people often mistake financial prowess for morality. If you pay your bills, you’re supposed to be a moral person, so the idea goes, and if you don’t you aren’t. These ideas are untrue, but they’re taken as fact. And yet they are far from fact. They are simply stories where people attribute power to things outside themselves, and then those ideas become their experience.

Most people (and I consider myself most people) forget that the entire financial structure is pretend. It’s a convenient thing, but it’s made-up. Furthermore, it’s subject to change. In fact, monetary systems change all the time and will continue to do so because they’re fiction. As ideas change, so do structures. Thus, individuals are better off not investing too much of their identity in the idea that their morality is tied to their money unless they’re comfortable with a changing state of morality.

Unfortunately, lots of people don’t see it that way. The mythology of the power of money at this particular juncture in time is rife with superstition. Money has replaced the idea that god is the great provider. That is, individuals used to look to god as the source of health, sustenance, food, clothing, safety and freedom. Now people look to money for these things. People think that if you don’t have money, then you can’t have the level of health, sustenance, food, clothing, safety and freedom that you desire. This is, of course, nonsense. Money can’t give an individual anything. It’s the individual’s belief that money can give them something that gives them something. You get as much or as little of whatever it is you believe you can have. This applies to money as it applies to all other things.

I consider myself an expert on the topic of money. I’ve had no money, then lots of money, I’ve gone bankrupt, and now I’m on my way to having plenty of money again.  I’ve run the gamut of beliefs on this subject, and I’ve worked in the financial planning industry. I’ve seen a lot of people with a lot of money issues, and from it all, I’ve drawn this one conclusion: Money has nothing to do with money.

I’ve seen rich people lose it all, and poor people who lived like kings. I’ve seen millionaires who were scared stiff to spend their money, and people who spent so wantonly that they couldn’t hold any amount of cash in their pockets for a full day together. I’ve seen parents set up spendthrift trusts because of the fear of what their money would do to their children, and children of very wealthy people who gave up all comforts of their parents’ lives to live in some of the worst neighborhoods in the country and, in one case, to peddle drugs off the streets. In my opinion, money has absolutely nothing to do with wealth. It has nothing to do with quality of life. It has nothing to do with security. It has nothing to do with talent, abilities or morality. Money is like shoelaces—convenient, but just something that you use. It is really no different than any other object except that we attribute great value to it.

Money is just an object. Its value is the story we tell about it, and stories are fabrications. No one owns anything in reality. This is especially so when you come to terms with the fact that we’re living in multiple holographic universes, but it’s just as true even if you believe the universe is a singular, fixed entity. No one owns the earth or the minerals or the trees or the water or anything you see around you, including the houses and cars and clothes and machinery and so forth. That people write such declarations on little pieces of paper does not change the fact. Ownership is a game. It’s a structure designed to facilitate interaction. That’s all.

Money then is nothing more than a part of the game, a symbol meant to stand for value. The symbol itself has no power. It’s cotton bond paper with some pretty ink drawings on it or coins made from various metals or digital numbers stored on a server somewhere. The innate value of money is low. It’s symbolic power, however, is based on something else entirely. The symbolic power of money is entirely mental. It’s entirely belief-based. We give money its value by believing it has value.

That means that all the power that money wields is in the hands of each individual. Because you’re the author of your beliefs, it means that each individual is always as rich or as poor as the individual wants to believe s/he is. After all, we’re the ones who declare that things have value be it a piece of paper or a person. The individual’s ability to label things is very powerful.

In legal circles they say that the value of something is as much as someone is willing to pay for it. This applies to money as well. The value of money is as much as someone is willing to believe it’s worth. How much are you willing to believe money is worth? How much are you willing to believe you’re worth? The power rests firmly in your own hands.

Yet, even when you see the logic laid out, because of all the cultural baggage, it can be hard to remain clear on the topic. So, for those of you out there who have had a difficult time with money, here are some ideas that have helped me shake up my ideas about money.

Money is Not Wealth

Money and wealth are two different things. Here’s how I define wealth. Wealth is the feeling that you have an abundance of love, health, well-being, safety, freedom, comfort, interest, challenge, and interaction with the world at large. Wealth is a healthy respect for your own value. With wealth, no matter how much money you have in your pocket, your life will reflect abundance. You’ll have just as much of whatever it is you want, and you’ll know that you can accomplish any aim that you set your mind to accomplish, and sometimes that will mean lots of dollars and sometimes it won’t. The amount of money you have won’t matter to you if you’re wealthy because you will feel secure, as if you belong in the world. You will feel as if there is no impediment to anything you desire.

In that sense, you can’t quantify wealth with a number. Just as having a certain number of shoelaces in no way reflects the quality of your life, the amount of money you possess says nothing about your wealth. How you feel about the amount of money you have, however, says quite a bit about your wealth. The person who appreciates what s/he has is rich beyond measure.

Making Room for New Ideas About Money

It’s hard for most people to expand their ideas about money because most people have heavy value judgments associated with finances. They’re tight with their ideas, and so the ideas don’t change easily. Here are a few tricks of mine to loosen things up.

Just for one moment acknowledge the fact that even in a fixed universe, you’re not the almighty owner of anything. You’re on a lending program. Since, under those circumstances, no one owns anything, not even their own ideas and inventions (for at one time all of these things will pass on to others) then why not throw out the rules entirely and imagine that everything you see around you is yours? If you rent, imagine that you own every square inch of the house, the ground, the air, the street, the cars, even the people around you. You’ve drawn all of it into your experience and, in that sense, it is all yours. Like actors who are taught to “own the room,” you “own the universe.” This is an entertaining exercise to do as you walk or drive around, and it’s pretty easy. Very small children do it naturally. They act like the world is their oyster because they’re still in touch with how things really work.

If you want to ratchet it up a notch, try this one. I invented a game where the bank was a big, plastic, Playschool toy. So when I went in to do some banking, I imagined that all the tellers were kids, and that their pens were made of hollow yellow plastic, and that all of the tools surrounding them were similar—giant, plastic, and fake. When the tellers punched up accounts on the computer, it was like a toddler who punches the colorful buttons on a pretend computer. By the time I got to the counter and said that I wanted to cash my check, I almost felt like winking. It took the seriousness out of the endeavor. If you think about it, this is a more realistic approach to banking. After all, what’s a bank? It’s a building with some people in it who do stuff. It’s no different than when kids get together and make up games. Banking is a game. One of many financial games.

The Invisible Origin of Money & Your Invisible Value

I’ll say it again: Money is a unit of value that we’ve made up. It is a part of a larger game called “ownership.” Like any game, it can be fun. But to take the superstition out of it, you have to remember that the origin of money is invisible. It’s in the value that you, as an individual, assign it. This same logic applies to the way you value yourself, too.

If each individual creates the value of money, then you create the value of yourself in relation to money as well. You’re the one that says that you can have money or can’t have money, that you’re rich or poor, that you can have what you want or can’t have what you want. All of that labeling is invisible. It’s mental. It has nothing to do with whether you have the pieces of paper or coin or digital numbers that we associate with money. It has to do with ideas. You’re in total control of your ideas, so you don’t have to wait for money to pop into your experience to be rich. You don’t have to earn it first. You don’t have to look for it. You don’t have to plan for it. You have to do one thing only: you have to tell yourself different stories. You have to use your authoring abilities.

If a piece of paper with written numbers on it can have value or digital numbers on a server, then so can you as a physical being. You, in your human form, schlepping around the house can be, in an instant, a person that has plenty of these pieces of paper and digital numbers. All you have to do is start telling yourself that you’re a person who has lots of money. You have to practice these stories. You have practiced, for many years, telling yourself that money has value. So now use that same technique and tell yourself that you have value. Just as the value of those dollar bills and digital numbers is reflected in groceries or rent or a car payment, so too can your value as a being be reflected in more dollar bills and digital numbers.

Money isn’t really about money, you see. It’s about the ideas we attach to money. The choices are endless. Culture pushes a small slice of the infinite pie. You might want to kick back and look at more of what’s available.

For me, money is only really a worthy pursuit when it’s about true wealth. And wealth is about habits. It’s about the habit of believing that you have value. It’s about the habit of believing that you can accomplish anything you desire. It’s about the habit of believing that you’re safe and free and unobstructed. It’s about the habit of seeing your skills, abilities, and opportunities. It’s about the habit of knowing that you have interests and desires and challenges that make life interesting. The wonderful thing about habits is that you’re in total control. The habits are already present and available. It’s whether you choose to express them or not.

To sum up, money, and the institutions that cater to money, do not control you. They do not determine what you can have. They do not have power. You do. All it takes is a decision to tell your self some different stories.