Category: Conversations with the Muse

  • Is money evil?

    Conversations with the Muse

    In this discussion with the Muse, I pondered the question of whether money is “evil.” It came from a discussion I had with an old friend recently, where my friend mentioned the idea that, essentially, money is the root of all evil, that money is to blame for the situation developing in the US, and that we’d be better off with a system that does not operate on money. I found the take from The Muse quite interesting, especially when it pointed out that the real source of “evil” is our human idea that we often strive for some kind of “heaven-like” perfect situation, and in the process of trying to create that, create Hell instead. It makes the point that money is not the real problem; it is our distorted beliefs around money, and our allowance as a society for money to be so gamed and manipulated, that are the true sources of problems.

    Morgan: Is money evil? An old friend that I spoke to recently was taking this point of view: that money is the true source of our woes as a society. That essentially, money is “evil.” It is hard to ignore this point of view, given that it seems like the billionaires are in charge right now, leaving everyone else to struggle.

    Yet I don’t see a good alternative to money. It seems like a kind of “necessary evil.” Is there a different way of looking at this?

    The Muse: You collectively see money as something “hard and fast” in your lives, yet it is nothing but a concept representing an energetic exchange between people. For as long as people exist, you will never be rid of the need for “energetic exchange” and some way to represent that more flexibly than direct exchange of goods and services.

    This energetic exchange is a good thing – it is so much of what leads to growth, development, quality of life, the building of anything great, and more.

    If that is so, you may wonder, why do things seem so off the rails because of it?

    It’s because you’ve collectively allowed the system to be “gamed” far too much. By “gamed” it means allowing things to happen that are far beyond just an exchange for the purpose of building or creating or providing services.

    Those things include gambling in all its forms, and other monetary manipulations where people receive “something for nothing.” In the United States, this has become your national zeitgeist – the idea that you can and should get as much money as you can for as little investment of your energy, time, and attention as possible.

    This is unsustainable.

    There has developed a collective psyche of “I deserve it just because I’m X” where X can be replaced by all sorts of justifications for why you should get money in return for nothing but being part of some special category or group.

    The combination of this entitlement plus all the games that go on with money have distorted its core purpose almost beyond recognition. The present mess you perceive is a result of that. It is an opportunity to “reset” your relationship, at least to some degree, to get back to making money represent real exchanges of value between people or groups of people, not just something to be gamed, manipulated, and taken advantage of in asymmetrical ways.

    There is an inherent trend towards balance in all things, and your system of money is presently very unbalanced towards those who’ve become very good at gaming it. This unbalanced situation cannot be maintained forever; it will collapse under its own weight – it’s just a matter of time.

    Morgan: What about social security and programs like that, which are “entitlements?” If as you say entitlement is an unbalancing factor, then do we need to get rid of things like that?

    The Muse: No. There is a difference between claimed entitlements where there is no social contract, versus those where there has been developed a mass, agreed-upon social contract. In the case of Social Security or similar, this is where collectively enough of you have agreed that it is part of your contract with one another; it is not the same as the kind of entitlement that causes problems.

    It is more fundamental and less obvious. One of the big sources of this is the entitlement thinking that many people take on of “I worked hard therefore I deserve lots of remuneration.” There is an entitlement thinking that “hard work” is equal to “created value for other people.” It is just not the case.

    For example, you could go out in your yard right now, and dig a deep hole with a shovel. Then you could fill it back in. That would be hard work. Yet you would have created zero value for anyone. If you expected pay in return for that work, you would be expecting something for nothing – the nothing being the value created for someone else in doing the work.

    The example may seem far out, yet there are millions who take this attitude every day.

    It is inherent in the career ladder climbing mentality, which is ultimately about “I want more status and money because I have done my hard work gaming the system,” as opposed to “I want more status and money because I created more positive value for other human beings.”

    Not all career ladder improvement represents this kind of thinking – there are many situations where through maturity and skills development, you do create more value for others, which would naturally equate to more money flow in a system where things aren’t so often distorted.

    But when you have a society where you have psychologically detached your “work” from “creating value,” things are bound to get very out of balance, the effects of which you are seeing.

    Morgan: What about my friend’s statement that this always happens with money?

    The Muse: This is a sort of statement that could be said about any human endeavor, i.e., that “such and such tragedy always ends up happening.” The statement is tautological, due to the cyclical nature of humanity. Each new generation – and each individual human – must face their own challenges.

    There is this very false, imagined state of perfection that could be achieved, a sort of finished, heavenly state where everyone is wonderful and everything is great. Worse, it is imagined that once this is achieved, it will persist.

    It is just not so. Imagine a forest: at all times, trees are growing then dying. Animals are being born and dying. Nothing static is going on. Fires may sweep through and eliminate most of the trees. Seeds then sprout, to rebuild the forest. Each generation of trees faces its own “challenges” and there is no “heavenly state” of perfection.

    Your human idea that such a state can — or should — be achieved is one of the big lies you’ve bought into. It is the source of more Evil — as you’d call it — than monetary exchange is. That’s because, in trying to achieve this perfect state, this ridiculous nonsensical ideal (whatever that may be), people will justify all sorts of malfeasance in its name.

    That is happening at this very moment in the US.

    Because of your skewed, manipulated monetary system, a large number of people have ended up feeling “left behind.” This produces anger, which energy is then translated into an ideal of a new kind of “heaven on earth” where all the supposed causes of their misery are wiped away.

    The problem is, any time humans have attempted to create such a “heaven,” they have just created a hell. They end up creating something that is antithetical to the very nature of the reality you live in: something static, fixed, and “perfect.”

    Money exists as a flow of exchange; it is not a static entity.

    So when you try to create static situations with it or about it, you are working against yourself. You are working against reality.

    The problem is not the money (exchange); the problem is the set of skewed beliefs that distort your relationship with it, making it seem that “money is bad.” When you buy into that, you weaken your ability to participate in money’s true purpose, which is to facilitate effective energetic exchange between people.

    To “fix” the problem, you, collectively, will have to shift your attitude towards what money is. And even if you manage to do so, you have to realize that any such fix is in the here and now, and will not last for all people everywhere. It will not be a perfect solution for all time. It will only be a fix for that time, place, and people.

     

    **This article was hand-written, with light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.

  • Waking up from war and violence into our true nature

    Conversations with The Muse

    In this thought-provoking dialogue, Morgan and The Muse explore the idea that all experiences, even the most painful and destructive ones, serve a greater purpose in human evolution. Using historical examples like World War I, The Muse explains how societal learning is often non-linear, shaped by cycles of violence and change, due in part to a lack of deep, experiential memory. The conversation delves into the challenges of societal stagnation, resistance to change, and the dangers of clinging to material power and possessions. Ultimately, The Muse suggests that humanity is being called to “wake up” to its true nature—beyond physical attachments—through self-inquiry, contemplation, and conscious awareness, as the only path to true safety and transformation. (AI Summary)

     

    Morgan: I get the idea that all learning is optimal, i.e. that we are all presented with the ideal opportunity for our advancement, but boy, it sure can be tough. One example comes from the movie 1917 that I watched recently. It depicted the brutality of World War I, in which millions were killed. It was often a “no holds barred,” vicious war. It seems so pointless, and led to so many deaths. How can that be for learning and growth to have millions die in a war like that?

    Muse: Sometimes the “learning” is a societal one, leading to an overall bigger picture advancement necessary for the species’ survival, so that others can come here in the future for their learning, growth, and evolution. Evolution is sometimes not pretty. If you think of the idea of the lizard jumping from tree to tree who is evolving towards wings, there will be many fatal falls along the way. The same is true of your societies – there are bouts of violence, with that example you mentioned being one of the brutal ones.

    And indeed, it is those brutal bouts of violence that help you as a species slowly move away from it – though it is never a linear progression. Nothing is as linear as your rational brains would like to make it out to be. Yet in that specific case, that war was so bad, that it did modify the approach towards war to some degree. It was unfortunately not enough to prevent the next war, but, after that second World War, it did cement in all the generations alive that that scale of war was to be avoided in their lifetimes.

    Now, the challenge is that you do not yet have sufficient societal memory, nor do you have sufficient outlets for that kind of destructive energy, so you do run the risk that large scale violence can happen again. It becomes more of a risk as those previous generations that vowed to not do that again fade away. That does not make it inevitable, but as the societal memory fades, it is not impossible either.

    Morgan: What do you mean we don’t have sufficient societal memory?

    Muse: There are several aspects to that. The first is that you teach people “history” in terms of data and facts, rather than in any way experientially. The closest you come to experiential is with a movie like the one you watched. Yet even that does not convey it at a deep enough level for most to really get it. It is too easy for someone to watch a movie like that, and dismiss it as a sort of past that wouldn’t happen again. It is often seen as “entertainment,” not something to be concerned over “how did that happen and could it happen again?”

    In biological evolution, there is a strong memory of past experience — and the responses to that experience — carried in the DNA. In that way, once a past problem is overcome, it is generally not revisited by a species. You do not have enough of a similar “hard coding” of memory into your society. Therefore, each generation that has not experienced such atrocity is at an increased risk of repeating it.

    You will need to evolve further – likely from additional experiences of some kind of violence (it does not have to be as brutal as it was in WWI/WWII), in order to decide that you need to create some kind of deeper societal memory system. It would involve a deeply experiential way of new generations learning what tendencies to hate and aggression can lead to, even if held or allowed in only a portion of the population.

    You will have to develop new structures that, while allowing your natural freedoms of expression, do make sure that such tendencies are redirected.

    Morgan: Is that what you mean by “not having sufficient outlets?”

    Muse: Yes. In times like you are in, there is a slowly brewing anger and frustration at the system on the part of some people who envision and want something very different than what it is. That, combined with general malaise on the part of most people about the system as it was constructed before almost anyone alive was born, leads to a sort of “tipping point” where the anger and frustration can take hold and spread.

    One of the great mistakes that cause this to be worse, is that when you build systems of government and society, there often sets in a very “preservationist” approach to governance and operation. Once a system – a bureaucracy – gets created, it is nearly impossible for you to un-create it, even if it grows old, inefficient, and dysfunctional. In the business world this happens more readily. Businesses that no longer serve efficiently, shut down – unless protected by some kind of political action. But in the world of government and academics, it is much more difficult to remove layers of bureaucracy, rules, laws, and administration. As these persist, the resentment grows.

    It is not just the administrative structures that persist, it is the distribution of power that persists. Those groups who gain power become extremely reticent to give any of it up when their time has passed. They cling to past structures that maintain their power, well beyond the natural lifespan of the power, or of the structures. This breeds widespread discontent – not only among people who are outsiders to that power, but even amongst insiders. The insiders become increasingly locked into struggles over how the power is divvied up — and the outsiders are just resentful of that they don’t have the power. Nobody likes it, and this discontent grows. At the level of consciousness — it is going to lead to forced changes.

    Your societies do not have any “constructive” ways of allowing this to happen, so it typically happens with some kind of violence. By violence, we mean it is uncontrolled and can hurt people, but it is not always physical violence, as you are seeing so far in the current bout of destruction.

    Morgan: Where does individual consciousness come into this – and societal consciousness?

    Muse: That is the where the real core of the issue is. Because most of your world has become so entranced, so hypnotized by the persistent illusion of physicality, you have come to ignore consciousness as the primary source from which all physical experience arises.

    So you all cling to physical things. You get great Ego based attachments to the way things are – whether it’s to the environment being a certain way, the buildings being preserved, to the stuff that you own and enjoy, or to the power (including money) that you have had.

    While Ego in its innate form can be mildly inflexible, the way you train and raise people, it leads to a thickening and “stubbornizing” of the Ego. While this has broken down in some segments of your society, with people now who don’t so strongly associate their Ego with a “job for life,” there is still far too much deep seated attachment to “things” over “meaning,” and “quality of experience.” That is the real source of all the troubles.

    This is the real thing that is going on in your present time. You are being faced, as a species, with the consequences of your overly physical focus — one that is mostly ignorant of consciousness — so that you can potentially shift into more awareness.

    Experientially, what this could mean is that much of what you take for granted physically will end up being stripped away, so you are confronted with the raw, real truth: you are not primarily physical beings, you are primarily beings of consciousness, who are present in physical bodies.

     

    Morgan: Honestly, that’s disturbing. “Stripped away” sounds like a parent grounding a child for misbehavior, and taking away their access to their toys. Is it really so?

    Muse: No. This comes from another misunderstanding, often promulgated by some religions, that such acts are of a paternalistic nature. In other words, it is a great distortion that there is some other entity watching over you who will do things to you, “for your own good.” No, you do this to yourselves. But you do it at a level that your Ego is presently unaware of, and because it is so unaware, it seems like “someone else” is doing this to you. It is never someone else, it is YOU, the deeper, eternal (from your perspective), part of you, who chooses, always, evolution and growth over stagnation. That consciousness is alive, vital, and ready to learn.

    This sets up a natural conflict with the way your Egos are trained in your current world, a way that is relatively fixed, unchanging, linear, and completely ignorant of the consciousness part of you. While the Ego can prevail for a time, it never “wins” the seeming battle, because consciousness is primary.

    So in terms of “things being stripped away” – that is not a punishment, that is a deeper part of yourself saying to your Ego: “wake up! you are not just your body and your possessions! you are so much more!” The core of you does not want you to suffer through the loss of things and people you hold dear, but it recognizes that you have already lost a much more precious thing, which is your sense of who you truly are. This is true for many individuals, and largely true in a societal sense.

    Until you regain that sense, you will be adrift, clinging to physical things, to physical/monetary/political power, and at odds with the deeper core consciousness within yourself. If some or all of the things you cling to must be stripped away for you to “wake up,” then that is the likely outcome. You can prevent it at an individual level by “waking up” to the truth, then it is no longer necessary. Ironically, when you do “wake up” – the physical clinging becomes much less necessary for you. You realize that it is all ephemeral and illusory, so you can relax and enjoy it, rather than cling to it.

    Morgan: Wow, I have so much more to ask, but this is already getting quite long. So let’s end this session with a Q & A – what can a person do now to “wake up?”

    Muse: It is simple: begin the inquiry over who you really are, or if you’ve already begun that, continue to make forward progress in that. It is only when you remain ignorant to it, or in a case like yours (Morgan’s), your progress stalls out, that it causes an increasing friction between Ego and your inner core self, and it is that friction that causes external manifestations of problems.

    You do not need to go take psychedelic drugs or go on a spiritual journey to “wake up,” though there are cases where those can help. But it can also happen in much more mundane ways, through meditation, prayer, silent contemplation, journaling, extreme physical experiences, wilderness experiences, stargazing, and many more activities.

    However you do it, waking up to who you really are is the call of the time. It is the one and only way you can be truly “safe.”

    Morgan: Thank you, that was amazing. We will do more.

    **This article was hand-written, with summary and light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.

  • How to deal with it when things are going haywire?

    Conversations with The Muse

    Morgan: As I was having a late-night worry session, three words came to me: hope, love, detachment. It just seems like things are going haywire, and I wasn’t sure what to do with all that energy of worry. Those words, hope, love, detachment: how do they help, when it seems like it’s going down the tubes? How can I hope when it seems there isn’t much hope?

    Muse: Haywire. Crooked. Unexpected. It’s in the words here that the problem is. You expect that things that happened before will keep happening – at least to a large degree – and now things are going in seemingly “unexpected” directions that you didn’t expect or want.

    The ego has difficulty with this. The ego likes things to be predictable, because predictable is the stock and trade of ego. It’s currency is the logic of past experience, extended into the future, even if the past experience is not so great, it would rather be right — in the sense that it is correctly predicting where things will go and thus feeling safe — than it would like to have something unexpected, even if that’s much better than what it predicts.
    This is the definition of attachment: it is wanting to always be able to stay safe within the confines of the ego’s box-of-logic it has created for itself. Yet the real world does not comply.

    In “normal” times, you had a lot of “predictably bad” things going on. You knew that if you were going to interact with a bureaucracy — say the DMV just to pick on one — it would probably not be very efficient or pleasant. But at least it was predictable. Expected. Normal.

    In the “normal” times, hope is thinking it will sway to the positive side of the predictable.
    Now it seems like all bets are off. Things are not predictable. What is going on with your government is unexpected, and doesn’t fit any of the “boxes of logic” you grew up with. It is that fundamental unpredictability that is so frustrating and even terrifying to the ego.

    Hope seems impossible because there is no “predictable” to go to the positive side of.

    You can spin off into all those doom scenarios, or you can put your head in the sand and just ignore it all, hoping it will go away, narrowing your scope to just what’s in front of you.

    These will not make it go away. It is not healthy to pump all that news – which is often rooted in fear – into your mind. Yet completely ignoring what is going on is also not healthy, because then you can’t take responsibility for your part in what’s going on.

    Morgan: What do you mean by “my part”? It seems like what’s going on is far beyond the scope of anything I have any control over, so how can I possibly “take responsibility” for any of it?

    Muse: This is one of the primary fallacies of the human race at this time. You think that the “mental atmosphere” you create does not matter, since (most of) you think that it’s just some biochemical reaction isolated to your brain box that has no impact or reach beyond that.

    YOU ARE WRONG.

    Your mental atmosphere seeps out into the world. If it is a negative, fear laden atmosphere, you pollute the world around you with it.

    In gardening, if you plant a seed and hope it will grow into a beautiful plant, but all the time it is trying to grow, you are adding toxins to the soil, it’s not likely to grow. That would be obvious to any gardener.

    Why is it not obvious to you in the same way, that if you pollute your mental environment with fear, doubt, hate, and reactionary anger, that nothing good will be able to grow from that?

    This is how the universe is. Your mental atmosphere matters. It has a profound effect on which way things will go, and whether you are able to grow something positive, or whether it all just ends up being stunted, withered, and dying.

    And the only way you will get what you truly want – more hope, love, peace, is by growing it, nurturing it. These cannot come from reaction to all the stuff that is going on. Just imagine trying to “reactively” grow a garden when you get hungry. It’s impossible. You have to proactively grow a garden, before you get hungry.

    Now is the time to nurture the seedlings of what you want to see in the future. It is not easy, but if you want better, it is essential. It is paying attention to the mental atmosphere, and that is your part, each person’s part to play, if you want something positive to grow.

    This is where detachment is so critical. In its opposite, attachment, you have a strong “need” to have things happen according to your box-of-logic that you’ve contrived over what should happen — even if it’s far from what actually is happening. When there’s a disconnect between the “should happen” and the “is happening,” the dissonance that results prevents you from creating a positive mental atmosphere.

    This dissonance creates negative, reactive emotions, and they pollute the environment, stunting the growth of anything positive. In the gardening analogy, you become so focused on trying to get rid of weeds, that you fail to tend to your crop, so nothing good grows. This is what attachment does.

    Detachment is letting go. Detachment is knowing that your logic is never going to be adequate to capture what is happening or what is going to happen, and so letting go of trying. Detachment is bringing your focus back to what matters, which is creating the positive environment for growing what you want.

    It is not about ignoring problems or issues, or covering them up with some kind of fake positive thinking. It is instead, acknowledging the problems, and taking the responsibility to create something positive – in spite of the problems.

    It is, if necessary, taking action to manage the problem where and when there is something you can do about it. It is also knowing when you can do nothing about the problem, and in that case just focusing on nurturing that better mental atmosphere. That requires detachment.

    Now as you try to grow something more positive, hope is a weak mental atmosphere. Do you fertilize your garden with “hope?”

    Love is much more powerful. If you lovingly tend to your plants, they will grow better. The love is not only a much more positive mental atmosphere, it also leads to you taking actions that are resonant with that love, that make it concretely more likely the plants will grow.

    The same is true for your ideas of what you want in the world. If you want more peace, for example, lovingly tend to your idea, your vision, and then let your actions stem from that.

    This is how something that seems small, tiny, and perhaps impossible right now can be grown into something great and tall over time.

     

    **This article was hand-written, with summary by AI, and light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.