Let's recap the key points in the first 6 steps, so that we may see the logical progression that connects two seemingly disparate processes: economic and spiritual transformation. Our confidence in being able to show the natural connection between the marketplace and our consciousness stems from the implications of Solomon's Proof, which explains how science and spirituality converge in the event of Singularity, i.e., a state of total unity.
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~bemorton/Neuroscience/Neurophilosophy/Singularity.jpg
While we agree with the concept of the universe being a torus,
the explanation and the drawing need to be corrected.
This is a single torus shown in its two iterations,
one that rotates in one direction and one that rotates in the other,
through the anomaly point in the middle,
which is alternately a black and then a white hole.
In this way, the continuous creation model of the universe
mirrors that a single quantum-torus,
which we discuss at www.solomonsproof.com.
In many ways, Singularity is the most generic and abstract concept in both science and spirituality. In scientific terms, Singularity is the first dimension, in which everything that ever was, is, or will be is present now, because the entire potential of the universe is contained in Singularity; in spiritual terms, the most generic form of deity is comprised of omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. As you can see, these two sets of descriptions--for Singularity and Deity--are essentially identical to each other. Einstein discussed his insights on this in a letter to his daughter.
The convergence of science and spirituality
On a more concrete level, the convergence of the social science of economics with a non-dogmatic spiritual practice is best illustrated by the story of Jesus using a whip to drive the money lenders out of the temple, calling them "Thieves!" These actions indicate that Jesus, or the author of this story, clearly understood that usury is a crime against humanity. If you don't believe it, consider the the oldest known testament, which escaped the editing process to which the New Testament was subject. In that ancient scroll, it says:
"If you have money, do not lend it at interest, but give it to one from whom you will not get it back." --The Gospel of Thomas (95). (The Gospel of Thomas and other texts found at Nag Hammadi [Gnostic Gospels] and Qumran [Dead Sea Scrolls] predate the texts [Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John] that were edited and synthesized by those seeking to separate Jesus and his teachings from Judaism, including the apostle Paul, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon [3rd Century CE], and the Council of Nicaea [4th Century CE], for the sake of Constantine's imperial exigencies [a means of controlling the masses], to form the core of what is known as the New Testament.)
Money, not capital: the prohibition of usury
Regarding interest, as we noted in Step 1 -- Exposing the story of money and usury, all three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) prohibit usury, and the reasons are obvious: interest is the antithesis of labor; it turns money from a measure of the value created by labor into a commodity (capital) that tyrannizes labor and necessarily results in the theft and devaluation of labor, which it turns into a commodity (human capital). So, in the preceding biblical excerpt, we see a spiritual figure in a religious setting taking direct action against economic behaviors that he considers to be both a crime against humanity (the devaluation of labor) and G-d (blasphemy).
If we are to transform the world from one that values capital (the golden calf, mammon, the almighty dollar, etc.) above all else into one that places people (labor) and their support systems (the biosphere) at the center, then we must reformulate our system so that money is a public utility; that is, money must be a tool to benefit the human race and its environment, rather than a commodity manipulated to enrich a few families and their lackeys.
Ending conflation of disparate forces and points-of-view
But before we outlined the economic and political framework for such a society, we first dispelled a number of logical fallacies that impede clarity of thought and prevent us from conceiving a proper definition of terms: In Step 2 -- Rejecting the false divisions of ethnicities, religions, political parties, and nationalities, we noted that it is important to separate the objectives and behavior of the international banking cartel from any particular nation, religion, or ethnicity because, literally, all these groups have been coerced into contributing to the problem. "We have met the enemy and he is us," says Pogo, the swamp possum and title character in Walt Kelley's famous syndicated comic strip (1948-1975). In the broadest spiritual and scientific sense, those committing the most heinous crimes on the planet are a reflection of our own shadows: our ego and our instincts untempered by that capacity which connects individuals to other people and living things, via the Singularity.
Shining a light on the power elite
This condition--the ascendancy of the shadow--holds true of all hostile parties in the Levant, as well as to those at the top of the power pyramid that we examined in Step 3 -- Transposing the money cartel’s point-of-view (and here, here, here, here, and here). For most of us, this may have been the most challenging of the 7 steps up until now, because it requires coming to grips with power beyond what we have imagined possible, all of which was enabled originally by private control over money creation. However, once past this hurdle, what we found intrinsic to those at the top of the power pyramid is a set of beliefs that fall outside of the moral boundaries to which most of us subscribe. The cure for this amorality, we discovered, is the transfer of power over money creation, and sovereignty itself, back to the public sector, by reestablishing money as a public utility to be managed in the public interest.
A democratic economy and republic
We determined the keys to accomplishing this monetary transformation in Step 4 -- Making money a public utility through sustainable economics (and here and here), namely that private banking is not a business, but a weapon of war and an instrument of theft, and that only a publicly owned banking network operating without usury can provide a stable currency over the long term. Further, as we discovered in Step 5 -- Restoring democracy (and here, here, and here), such a public banking network is not, in and of itself, sufficient to guarantee a sustainable progressive society, but must be accompanied, at a bare minimum, by verifiable voting and decentralized media.
A return to rationality
Finally, as we noted in Step 6 -- Restoring law, science, and logic (and here), what the corporate-owned media and educational sectors hold up as rational and reasonable thought are--as is everything touched by the advanced stages of egoism and materialism inherent in world commoditized by capital--rife with logical fallacies that benefit private interests. Yet, despite the cartel's hubris in attempting to distort the framework and methodology of empirical reasoning, we know that models and hypotheses cannot "prove" anything, only venture to define processes supported by the given data, while additional data can invalidate any hypothesis or model, just as Einstein described when he said:
"The case is never closed."And ...
"Many experiments may prove me right but it takes only one to prove me wrong."
The marriage of uncertainty and relativity
The problem of scientific proof becomes even slipperier when Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is reconciled with Relativity; for example, take the quantum observation that the experimenter appears to affect the experiment (i.e., "When you look for the particle, you see the particle; when you look for the wave, you see the wave.") and, contra-positively, light is perceived as being a wave and a particle at the same time. How can light manifest two separate states of matter simultaneously?
This quandary led Heisenberg to go so far as to say:
"Perhaps it is not too rash to hope that new spiritual forces will again bring us nearer to the unity of a scientific concept of the universe ..."[1]; and"The advance from the parts already completed to those newly discovered, or to be newly erected, demands each time an intellectual jump, which cannot be achieved through the simple development of already existing knowledge."[2]
Pushing the envelope of logic
Einstein and Heisenberg were theoretical physicists whose realm is far beyond rocket science and brain surgery; their work pushes the envelope of logic as we know it--where Singularity, String Theory, Poincaire's Conjecture [3], and so-called imaginary numbers [4] comprise the vocabulary for describing the universe.
As noted at the top of this chapter, in this realm, the scientific concept of Singularity--everything that ever was, is, or will be--appears identical to the generic concept of deity--omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. This is the convergence point for science and spirituality: they both point to a state or dimension of the universe in which total unity is the only property. The bottom line is this: whether we choose to frame our world in scientific or spiritual terminology, the result is the same: everything in the universe was once (and continues to be via the 1st dimension) the very same thing, and that very same thing--Singularity or G-d--whatever you choose call it, is what engenders the infinite variations of the universe, including economics and spirituality. In other words, these two seemingly disparate fields are inextricably bound in the most fundamental of ways and, in particular, on the question of interest, as illustrated by the story of Jesus cleansing the temple of usurers.
From Homo Economus to Homo Spiritus
So, retracing the logical progression of our argument, we now have advanced our analysis from the most materialistic realm, that of money and economics, to that of the most sublime--that which we hold in our hearts and minds. While we submit that there are infinite possibilities for proving our thesis, we find precedence for our argument from an approach to the history of political science and philosophy as taught by Charles A. Drekmeier [5], now Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, who proceeded through the history of political thought in chronological order until it reached the 18th and 19th centuries, where he reversed the order of three key thinkers: Marx --> Hegel --> Rousseau.
Drekmeier's larger point is this: If we aim to make human evolution our objective, then we must understand our own hierarchy of needs (to borrow a phrase from Abraham Maslow) and the order in which to fulfill them.
The Hierarchy of Needs
Thus, after our step-by-step progression, advancing from Marx's social reality (Maslow's physiological and instinctive safety factors) to Hegel's psychological ideals (Maslow's love/belonging and esteem), we have arrived at Rousseau's existential questions regarding what Maslow calls humankind's self-actualization.
Overcoming the tyranny of the instincts and ego
Stepping outside of western philosophy and psychology and looking at this from an eastern point-of-view, the challenges we face in fulfilling our hierarchy of needs and achieving self-actualization involve our ability, individually and collectively, to develop a conscious state free from the tyranny of the instincts and the ego.
Conscious spiritual evolution
In our first book, Solomon's Proof--A Psycho-Spiritual Journey to World Consciousness, written under the pen name of Rashan Barcusé, we advanced our framework for the final theory, which defines the next step in human development as "conscious spiritual evolution," as well as devoted an entire chapter to a dialogue concerning selected eastern and western (yoga and psychology) approaches to such self-actualization.
What is to be gained from the convergence of spiritual practice and psychology?
The idea of combining eastern and western approaches to the liberation of consciousness and the evolution of human behavior has been around ever since the Orient and the Occident first interacted, in much the same way as the two hemispheres of the brain interact to mix acausal [6] and causal reasoning; that is, combining space and time into one concept. Of course, such four-dimensional alchemy does not guarantee a useful synthesis of ideas as a springboard for human evolution. For that, we must make a concerted effort to cull the intellectual and spiritual wheat from the chaff.
Where we stand
However, before we do that, let's revisit the present gap between our objectives (the ultimate measure our success) and our present state:
Step 1 -- Exposing the story of money and usury: While there is a growing public banking movement, the public banks that do exist remain under attack worldwide by the private banking cartel. As noted in our fourth chapter, the cartel is seeking to prohibit public banking through a variety of means, including treaties, such as TPP and TTIP, which would also make the private banks and their corporations sovereign over nations and states. In addition, the corporate controlled media and educational system almost never discuss economics outside the box of a privately owned system of money creation. Thus, the corporate-owned state reinforces the status quo, including an emphasis on ego, self-interest, and materialism.
Step 2 -- Rejecting the false divisions of ethnicities, religions, political parties, and nationalities: Creating and exacerbating divisions between different groups of human beings remains a key strategy for the cartel, because it fulfills many of their objectives at once, including war profiteering, population reduction, and struggle-for-survival as a distraction from the root cause of global dysfunction (private control over money creation). One of the standard tactics to create animosities is to use agent provocateurs, dupes, and "Manchurian Candidates" to perform violent acts for which one side or another is blamed. The cartel is also willing to spend a little money to maintain strong, misleading brand identity; for example, gay rights (an important issue) have been adopted by the blue party, whose constituents confuse equality with freedom, not seeing that equal slaves to the cartel is still inequality and certainly not freedom.
Step 3 -- Transposing the money cartel’s point-of-view: While the modus operandi of the cartel is slaughter on a vast scale, it is important, in attempting to take an evolutionary step, that we do not fall for the notion that revolutionary violence will get us there. As an alternative, we should look beyond the various political revolutions of the past to a revolution of human consciousness and behavior. Consider the great novelist and social reformer Charles Dickens. Of all his great works, his personal favorite was "A Christmas Carol." In this story, Dickens chose to frame his antagonist/protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, as a usurer from the City of London, the independent political body run by the world's largest banks in the heart of the British empire. While Scrooge is generally remembered for his scornful disposition--"Bah, humbug!" and "If they (the poor) would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."--in fact, it is his personal transformation (epiphany) that is the climax of Dickens' story.
And what was it that got Scrooge to evolve? Four ghosts, each of which focused on specific events past, present, and future in Scrooge's life.
This is not to say, even if massive numbers of people stood in witness to the crimes of the banking cartel, that the individuals at the top of the power pyramid would suddenly gain insight into their own sociopathic behavior; nevertheless, such a strategy is an important part of a larger effort. It is we, the people, who play the role of the ghosts. This is why the powers-that-be violently shut down Native American ghost dances in the late 19th Century--out of fear of their own subconscious guilt. It is these subconscious ghosts of human conscience that we must summon to the fore.
Step 4 -- Making money a public utility through sustainable economics: As we show in this chapter, a progressive society and sustainable economy is only possible through a national (and eventually, international) network of public banks, creating and regulating money, based on the value created by labor and its adjuncts (machines, computers, robots, and artificial intelligence under certain controls and circumstances), and doing so without turning the accounting for labor (money) into a commodity (capital); that is, by enforcing the prohibition of usury. As it stands today, despite the success of public banks, particularly in Switzerland and Germany, the cartel continues to make inroads (via war and subterfuge) in privatizing other public banks, in Japan, New Zealand, BRICS, as well as nascent activity in U.S., Canada, and elsewhere. (Note: This trend was somewhat reversed in 2020 with the passage of a public banking act in California, perhaps signalling a shift by the top financiers toward the German and Swiss models, with the central bank remaining private, supplemented by a few regional, state, and local public banks to improve infrastructure and move towards sustainable energy production.)
Step 5 -- Restoring democracy: WWIII is taking place right now. It is "the endless war on terror," which is more accurately described as the endless war of corporate-state sponsored terrorism, as well as an information war, wherein the cartel uses its hegemony over mass media, polling organizations, state legislatures (to promulgate gerrymandering and voter suppression), and the Congress (to promulgate limitless campaign financing) to create the illusion of neck-and-neck elections, which are then stolen via electronic voting machines.
Five companies control the mass media in the U.S.,
which in turn are owned by the banking cartel (see here).Step 6 -- Restoring law, science, and logic: The cartel uses its control over the corporate and governmental sectors, including intelligence and military services, to extend its reach over thought--including law, science, and logic--by dictating the limits of public discourse and education. For example: laws that violate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are enforceable only because the judiciary is owned and operated; so-called climate scientists (subsidized by government and corporate grants that are disbursed with the quid pro quo that the results adhere to the Party line) draw a direct cause and effect relationship between the use of fossil fuels and the database of global warming statistics without ever considering the complicity of intelligence and military services via manipulation of the database, as well as through the big white elephant in the room--the use of weather as a weapon to create drought, floods, and catastrophic events (which we documented in Step 3).
Integrating meditation and psychology to strengthen our resolve
So, in the face of a seemingly monolithic force that uses its considerable resources to block every substantive initiative that threatens its power, we find that we must integrate spiritual practice and psychology to strengthen our resolve to continue to educate and initiate actions that challenge the cartel's affront to human potentiality and to the evolutionary forces intrinsic in light itself, of which the universe is comprised.
Beyond dogma and logical fallacies
There are those who deny such a through line to the universe, either out of servitude to the cartel, or out of a lack of comprehension of the data before us, including the adherence to various dogma and systems of logical fallacies, as we have evidenced in the first six steps.
Leaving these obsolete patterns behind clears the way for many models, past and present, particularly those of indigenous tribes, that exemplify sharing and other conscious evolutionary behaviors; for example the African philosophy of Ubuntu, which declines to exclude any member of the group from the success of the whole. Perhaps this is why the sociopaths who control the majority of the world's resources have made such a concerted effort to wipe out native and aboriginal societies--because, without enforced scarcity and consumerist addictions based on the tyranny of the ego and instincts, their control over the planet would dissolve.
So, given the contextual status of our first six steps, what is the next step in human evolution?
While a number of actions are needed by massive numbers of people, our next step begins with each of us having some form of spiritual practice. We call it spiritual because it involves activating our higher selves; that is, self-actualization: a qualitatively different state of being compared to where most of us find ourselves today.
What is spiritual practice and what are its parameters?
A spiritual practice can be as simple as taking a deep breath and counting to ten before speaking or acting, or as involved as the eight limbs of Yoga, but the objective of any bona fide spiritual practice is overcoming the tyranny of the instincts and the ego and learning to share. Any practice which fails to accomplish these basics condemns its practitioners to the state we find our rulers trying to justify today in order to maintain the status quo--that of greed, self-interest, and profiting at the expense of our neighbors.
Be the change
As all the spiritual masters through the ages have taught, we must be the change that we envision. Non-violent protest to persons (not property, which in a capitalist/fascist system is, primarily, ill-gotten gains) is, of course, permitted and even encouraged as we have iterated in Steps 5 and 6, but the foundation for the new world that we seek is not in present institutions; it is in alternative solutions that we are creating, first inside of ourselves, by pulling ourselves up by our own spiritual bootstraps, and second, by extending this consciousness into the world. These are the bridges to that new world, which is alive and growing as we speak.
Discover your gift, develop it, and share it
All that this manifestation requires is for each of us to discover his or her unique gift, develop that gift, and share it with the world. This is what aligns us with the universe (the sole verse). Whether we represent this by words such as G-d or Singularity, or by some other symbolic form, it remains that everything in the universe comes from the very same thing. Sharing is the manifestation of this unity in humankind; that is, light (the quantum torus) is perfectly reflected via the heart.
Footnotes:
[1] Heisenberg, Werner, Philosophic Problems of Nuclear Science, Fawcett Premier Books, New York, 1952, p. 28.
[2] Ibid., p. 27.
[3] In lay terms, the conjecture now proves that all three-dimensional space is reducible to spheres and doughnuts, which makes it congruent to proving that all four-dimensional space is reducible to a torus (i.e., a four-dimensional sphere).
[4] Previously, imaginary numbers were defined as a class of numbers or quantity expressed in terms of the square root of a negative number (usually the square root of -1); however, just as we have discovered through Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, that light may be a particle and a wave at the same time, so then may the square root of -1 be both +1 and -1; i.e., not imaginary numbers, but integers.
[5] The author's advisor in Political Science at Stanford University.
[6] We use the term in the sense defined by Carl G. Jung's discussion in Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1952) and elsewhere.
Copyright, Robert Bows, 2015
# # #
[The above article is an excerpt from our new book, 7 Steps to Global Economic and Spiritual Transformation, which is now available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sites.]
If you would please, consider the effects of requiring sovereign debt to be backed with Commons shares.
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts are that Commons shares may be claimed by each adult human, one only, that will cease to exist on the humans death, shall be deposited in trust with local financial institution along with execution of a social contract.
In this way each human will receive equal interest payments from sovereign debt.
This establishes the sovereignty of each human.
As a sovereign entity, each individual would have access to sovereign debt for home, farm, or secure interest in employment.
In round numbers, a share with a value of $1 million would return about $1 thousand/month, if it all was borrowed, at a growth sustainable rate.
Current sovereign debt would return about $10/month, $20 if corporate government debt is included, (observing that corporations are governments subordinate to their charters) which would be significant in many parts of the world. Individuals could borrow a significant fraction, but maximum return would likely require states to borrow all remaining shares.
I suspect that a nation with 1 million residents could borrow the entire $1 trillion (equivalent) of resident shares as reserve cash and devise a plan to increase revenue by the $12 billion/yr (equivalent) required to pay the interest. The U.S. example of a $268 trillion debt, a $250 trillion treasury, and $3 trillion annual interest payment seems equally optimistic.
With all currencies tied to the Commons, and the proportional increase in wealth flow in all states, exchange rates and trade can stabilize.
The increased spending on basic needs will necessarily reduce the cost of providing them.
Since the spending of money is restricted by the availability of materials and labor, and “full employment” is restricted by the availability of money, recognizing and distributing the value of the Commons in this way would simply “fill the reservoir” so the world economic system may act more like a “Free Market.” This restriction, and most familiar others, would promote an orderly increase in money supply, with most new money in reserves and increased valuation.
Please consider the notion, and as you view the worlds problems, and crises, imagine how this would alter those conditions. The perspective change for each individual so enfranchised is critically needed.
Thanks so much for your kind indulgence,
Stephen
While the banks would like us to believe in the concept of "sovereign debt," that is, the debt owned by a sovereign nation, the fact is there are only five sovereign nations left on the planet--Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and Sudan. No other nations own their own central bank and currency.
DeleteIn an alternative system in which money is a public utility and all banks are publicly owned, the need for debt is greatly reduced, because we are no longer wasting a majority of the value created by our labor on interest and profiteering by the usurers on war, disease, and ignorance.
Because the use of machines, computers, and robots should reduce the necessity for the 40-hour work week, it becomes necessary to institute a form of Social Credit so that everyone has enough of the "circulating medium" (Thomas Jefferson's terminology) to obtain the basics (food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, etc.), defined by an economic bill of rights.
The key to such an economic and monetary system is to monitor locally the cost of these items, which in turn determines the amount of credit available, to maintain a steady proportion of the money supply to the goods and services in circulation. The motivation to pay off credit would remain the same as it is today--to keep a good credit rating for future borrowing.
There would be no need for interest, which is nothing more than a mathematical trick and does not by any means represent the cost of providing credit.
Bob
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