2013: Moving Up and Beyond

Image via Treehugger.com

With news sources reporting around the clock about the devastating BP oil spill and reports that another unrelated leak has been flowing into the Gulf since April, Goldman Sachs fraud allegations, and wars abroad for weapons that don’t exist, at some point, you have to ask yourself what’s going on with the people in power. In his book, 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration, author Richard Grossinger discusses many facets of the world that are in dire need of a spiritual facelift come 2012, but perhaps no change at this point would be more greatly welcomed and perhaps even inevitable as a reconstruction of our understanding and value of money, power, and those who control both.

Grossinger writes:

The obscene amounts of equity beyond any possible need or use corralled by fund managers, athletes, movie stars, lawyers, and corporate executives speak to a complete lack of respect for the actual root of money or its symbolic power to transform matter, engender well-being, and sponsor socially productive endeavors.

Money, like language, is a code that we have collectively invented and agreed to use for interaction and enterprise across cultural and geographic barriers; that is, to convert necessity and desire into exchanges of value, commodity, resources, talents, work, and property, both locally and globally. We now honor those exchanges at the expense of every other principle and concern. This is why money is king. If money weren’t king, it wouldn’t be anything.

Without money, human activity and husbandry would grind to a halt, as value would be subject to constant dispute, reinterpretation, and bait and switch. There would be no economies and no basis for trade. Without money, the global community could not function, as commodities could not translate across borders; labor and craft could not be commuted into transactions and uses.

Yes, ancient bands and tribes found ingenious ways to convert and transfer value, even across linguistic fissures, but barter, potlatch, and “reciprocal generosity” are not applicable to a transnationalized, overpopulated, and armed planet.

With the magic of money, the meaning of each societal enterprise, relationship, and object is tied to a precise standard of measurement and system of intelligibility. Money is our only reliable totem for interchanging goods and energy and melding separate tribes and nationalities into trade partners. It is the only truce, the only agent of peace. As the primary symbol and agency of human interaction, it is also a singular expression of the cosmic mystery of number.

While money is clearly not an absolute good, it is an absolute symbol that cannot be renounced by anyone anywhere without the whole system of value and the societies that it binds together collapsing into chaos and then anarchy—something that a few survivalists have prepared for and assorted revolutionaries and anti-Western terrorists think they would relish, but that almost no one else in the game, even the majority of terrorists and revolutionaries, seeks because, without money, there is no game and no value to overthrow, let alone conquer and put under a caliphate. Commodities and geographical advantages lose much of their meaning without money—so everyone adores and protects capital, even the enemies of capitalism: China, Yemen, Iran, North Korea, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, etc., love money just as much as America, and they are proving it by the hour. Putin’s neo-Communist Russia is a throwback to the thug-controlled Wild West capitalism of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.

Otherwise, money is a chimera. And, if separated from its use and accumulated only for its own sake, it is financial pornography. In its negative state it rigidifies what should be fluid, maintains hierarchies of illegitimate and unethical power, and enforces inherited and class entitlements incidental to actual value or labor—all antitheses of its collective unconscious impetus.

Humans are constantly manufacturing and dispersing information and energy. We should probably step back for a moment and look at these pictures and recognize that spirit is forever shaping them, spirit is conducting them, that we are divine dudes at the same time as we are entrepreneurs. Gods, demons, and angels are creating the circumstances and shadows from which all fortunes arise.

Isn’t it a little late for Bernie Madoff to be joining the Native American sweat lodge in prison? Isn’t it just more facile accumulation by a zombie without a soul? He and the executives at AIG and Citigroup and Goldman Sachs should have practiced a major cleansing ceremony before they put themselves in the service of dangerous symbols; they should have been as responsible as Iroquois elders in witnessing their dreams and defusing the crimes in them before they became actualized. It would have been appropriate psychic hygiene at the right time. If they had had even the most meager degree of self-reflection, they would have realized that they were not getting wealthier or happier but were in the grip of a malign gremlin, engaged in acts of reckless excess that had no actual benefit to themselves— King Midas territory. They were gambling their lives and their sanity for a superfluous and fictive bounty.

And now they find themselves despised, imprisoned, and impoverished without the basic tools to understand their deeds or do teshuvah. They do not have the wherewithal even to fall on their symbolic swords. They have been cast, overnight, from the luxury of boardrooms and Cessnas into the outer darkness, petty crooks in lockup.

And for their troubles what exactly did they gain?

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The founding publisher of North Atlantic Books, Richard Grossinger has authored over 24 books on a variety of topics, and holds a degree in Anthropology. An ethnographer and self described psychospiritual explorer, he has studied psychic healing and intuitive wisdom for several years, receiving praise from notable figures in the spiritual/new thought community, including Daniel Pinchbeck, who contributed the foreword for 2013.

You can hear Grossinger talk more about his book and vision of the future beyond 2012 with radio show host Robert Phoenix on Free Association Radio [HERE].