Almost all you have is owned by a bank. Your car, your house, perhaps your furniture, your musical instrument, even your vacation: whatever you bought with a plastic card.
Don't worry, the rest of America is just like you. Banks even own the rich, because they too buy on credit. They just buy more expensive stuff. No one pays cash. Our economy is an empty bubble of debt. Every dollar is an IOU.
The bank that owns your home lent you the money because a bigger bank lent them the money. An even bigger bank owns that bank's debt. And so on in a Ponzi scheme of credit, a pyramid of debts with one single bank at the top, the Metabank. The Metabank controls the mega-banks that own the national banks that credit the local banks that rent us our houses, our cars, and our so-called "cash". The Metabank is an elite club of men who sit on the pyramid of global credit. The pyramid is made out of nothing, which means these men can fall further and harder than anyone. That is why, despite the fact that they own the whole pyramid, they are so grim. Their hearts are contracted and joyless.
A few of these men live in North America, a few in Europe, perhaps two or three in South America, one or two in the Middle East, one or two in China. I say "men" because, at that pinnacle of corporatism, you're not allowed to be female or black.
The Metabank is so elite, in fact, they can all sit in one room at a single conference table, which they do once a year in a place you and I could never locate on a map. It is not in New York, Paris, Hong Kong or Geneva. They refuse to meet in any nation, for that would place their meeting under the sovereignty of others, and they insist on being the world's only sovereign. So they meet at sea on a private yacht, more like a luxury liner. They own it. They own everything.
Would you like to attend their meeting now?
What do you think they are talking about? Are they friends? Do they laugh and joke together? Do they untie their neckties or un-stuff their ascots? Do they take their shoes off and put on sandals? Wear shorts? This is doubtful. These are the men who wear dark flannel suits even in the tropics.
Please visit them. They need, shall we say, your influence. Gaining physical proximity is out of the question. You can't get within five miles of their ship, either by air or by water or under the water. Their cruisers, jets, helicopters and skin-divers protect them: elite ex-special forces employed by a private security corporation whose name none of us will ever know.
But you can attend the conference by other means, and make a significant contribution....
You travel there through the portal in your own body. Descending through your breath, you ground your awareness in your chest, the area around your heart, which at the level of sub-nuclear particle physics is a powerful transmitter of high-frequency, quantum intelligence-waves that penetrate any material substance and travel any distance at a speed exceeding the velocity of light. Measurement has no meaning at this stratum of physics, so don't worry about the math. Instead, operate on the level of intuition.
Let your attention permeate the field of neurons around your heart, which you directly perceive as a cloud of tingling and warmth. But do not confine yourself to your body's outline. Centered in the heart, allow your awareness to expand beyond the limitations of the body-concept, the me-concept. Are there really any edges to "you" that cannot be dissolved into limitless space, the space of consciousness?
As you exhale from the heart-space, place your awareness on that ship, in that conference room, at that long mahogany table, where the Metabank is meeting. Become the space around the men who sit there. Become the air they breathe. The alveoli of their lungs inhale you. Choose to enter the breath of any one of these men and you will simultaneously influence all of them by mere
intention. At this subtle end of the energy-spectrum, intention is all that exists. Intention vibrates prior to material form. Intention creates and moves the world.
Flow through the capillaries of the man's lungs into his veins. Follow the bloodstream to his brain. You are now in the cerebral cortex of a man on a ship somewhere in the sea on a beautiful gleaming green planet that floats in the silence of infinite space, which is the space of your own consciousness. You can go anywhere. But your intention is to be here.
You are the electricity flickering through the man's neurons. You are a sparkling coolness that spreads through every fold of his brain, bathing and refreshing each synapse in fluid neuro-transmitters that express, through crystal sub-atomic strings, the vectors of your intention. Your intention mingles with his desire and creates electrons, that transform molecules, that manifest thoughts, that motivate words, that move bodies, that change the world.
Here is the crucial stage of your experiment. Create wisely. What intention will you bring to this man's brain? With what passion will you inspire him?
Do you convey a secret envy, resentment of his wealth, fear of his power? In that case, you will impart to him your envy, your fear, your own sense of lack. Whatever you feel reflects from your consciousness to his. Feeling your lack, he contracts more tightly into his own possessiveness. He senses a need to do the very thing you judge of him, to impound the livelihood of others. Do you consider this meta-banker your "enemy"? The more you fear him, the more you cause him to fear. The more you resent his power, the more you cause him to resent others. The more you judge his greed, the greedier he becomes. By your judgment of his wealth, you simply widen the terrible abyss between those who have and those who have not. The rich and poor are polarized by dread of one another and driven by one fear: the fear of lack.
But perhaps you attempt to love and forgive this "enemy." You try to rise above fear and envy, to enfold this man with pity and compassion. You feel the pathos of his loneliness, his self-imposed weariness, the heaviness of his soul as he isolates himself with wealth, and weighs himself down with more capital than one man could possibly need. You are privy to his secret: he is depressed. These men are all depressed. They cling to money because they have no love.
Feeling all this, you attempt to practice
empathy. But honorable as this attempt may be, your pathos only magnifies the man's pain. Feeling sorry for him, you enfold him with Buddhic compassion, yet this only deepens the ocean of world sorrow. Why? Because you hold the concept of "sorrow" in your heart even as you attempt to heal it. You reflect the man's mental state from the mirror of your consciousness back into his brain cells. This may feel like Christian sympathy, but if you focus on his spiritual emptiness, his soul grows bleaker.
Is there another way? Yes: the outrageous way, the mad and foolish way, or so it may seem. This way is seldom recorded in the annals of healing and prayer. It is the way of Joy.
You are Joy. What else could you be at this level of pure energy, where all is uncreated vibrant golden light? Now you will become, in him, the perfect Joy you already are.
Breathe Joy into each particle and nerve, each heartbeat and motion of this man. The power of your Joy stirs an imperceptible wave of intention in the depths of his body's energy-field. The wave of intention vibrates from consciousness into matter. When it reaches the surface of the man's awareness, your Joy manifests in his thought, word and deed. Suddenly, in a moment of lightness, he doesn't quite recognize himself. He forgets his train of thought: his cloudy mind dissolves into the clear blue sky of joyously simple Being. It last only for an instant. Only for flash of a trembling silence have you infused your meditation into his mind. But that instant becomes a seed that will blossom, little by little, into a transformed life.
The man now senses a shift from his head to his heart, quite literally, in the body. A wave of feeling he hasn't known since early childhood rolls up and breaks upon his face as a tear, a smile. He looks down, embarrassed, wondrously confused.
In that instant he remembers a time before he was oppressed and verbally abused by his hopeless father, who was also oppressed and abused by a hopeless father, through a heavy paternal chain of centuries linking men of power to children of privilege in the withering crossfire of their fathers' blood, until the only option and hope for any one of them was to hoard the wealth of nations behind the stark gray turreted walls of the skull in a treasury of incommunicable private doom.
Now, by the grace of infused Joy, that ancient chain melts into gold, a garland of golden petals scattering in the faint breeze of your intention. In this man's transforming moment, the past dissolves like a mirage that was never anything but the shimmering gateway to the omnipresent Now. Each man in that room feels a melting at the core, a lifting breeze in the heart, a strange familiar blessedness. They loosen their ties and find that they have lost interest in discussing wealth. One by one, they stand and stretch, using the excuse that it is time to relieve themselves.
Now they go out onto the deck to watch the sun set over an azure sea. They can't remember ever doing such a thing. In small groups of two or three, they gaze in silence, then begin to talk about the beauty around them in voices they hardly recognize as their own, for the sound emanates from a different part of the body, a place that has been opened with a sigh. Now, excited as children, they point at the whale spouting and breaching the waves. For the first time in decades they laugh from their bellies. They share themselves, and like the taste of it.
For years to come these men will find comfort in returning to this new sense of the heart, the faint thread of Joy you have woven into the tapestry of their feeling. They will return as to an inner compass, inexplicably moved from within to share outwardly. To share and to share themselves again and again. Out of that moment when you infused your Joy, they will create a new economic order. For the mightiest institutions are born from fragile openings of pure intuition. And real power is rooted in Joy. Joy never contracts, never isolates itself. Joy expands. That is why Joy is the power behind economic growth.
Through the imperceptible shift of consciousness they experienced on this gentle evening, these men will invent an economy of
mutually assured abundance. An underlying safety-net of public service will provide every world citizen with basic rights to shelter, education, health-care and meaningful employment. Simultaneously, these thriving citizens will support thriving free markets that will soar above the safety-net of basic need to generate wealth and social diversity.
In mutually assured abundance, dualities of socialist-capitalist, left-right, public-private, dissolve in the light of fearlessness. We will regard Sharing, not as expenditure but investment, not as loss but gain, not as a duty but a means of generating the ultimate richness, Joy.
Perhaps in old age, one or two of these men will dream back and consciously remember this lovely evening at sea, when you secretly suffused them with a new possibility, and your intention changed the world. For after their interlude out on deck, they go back to the conference table changed. They never quite recover their old passion for dominance. They are done with the tiresome work of convincing humanity that the paper in our pockets and the plastic cards in our wallets could ever represent anything more than our debt to a few sad lonely men. They are done with the work of pretending that what they possess is actually theirs. They are done with supposing the fantastic lie that this sacred land, swelling and rippling over the planet in a sea of green and brown, incalculably beautiful in hills and valleys, forests and meadows, could possibly ever be owned by anyone but God.