Money is a word that comes laden with human expectations, projections, hopes, dreams, pain, suffering, frustration, disappointment, lust, desire, greed, control, power, manipulation, wistfulness, loss, disgust, guilt, longing…

Onto the Spirit of Money lives the entire spectrum of human emotions. Plus broken dreams, starvation, death, and the highest orders of corruption. And love, freedom, entitlement, joy, excitement, expectation.

We think that with Money we can solve everything. A person with an incurable disease will tell you this is not so. A business that starts with too much Money is less likely to thrive than one that is built with far less. Through the constraint of less we often do more, approaching and maintaining a purer connection with the core DNA of the business we started in the first place.

Many people never take the time to understand Money. They live at the mercy of ignorance. Slave to a job, blind to the advisor, caught in an intractable system that brings the many to their knees by design.

Cultivating a relationship with the true essence of Money and her many forms of existence does enable a more prosperous life. Maybe not in the way the gods of excess and accumulation speak of prosperity…rather prosperity rooted in enoughness.

But to really know her we need to give up almost everything we think we know and have been told about Money. And we need to untangle ourselves from the emotions and stories that have merged us with Money in an unhealthy way.

The course of my life has asked me to study the nature of Money. How she evolved, how she is brought into existence today, how she is abused and misused, and most of all used as a weapon of supplication.

Yet this is not the nature of Money. This is the nature of Man.

The exact same coin will be used to bribe and corrupt..and then to feed the hungry.

Money is none of these things listed above. Money itself is neutral, agnostic, inert.

In its purest sense, Money is an opportunity for humans to engage in relationship that recognises the value that each of us has to bring. Inherent in Money is a promise.

When we use Money for other things, when we disconnect her from human engagement, she becomes a shadow of herself. When we invent a system that enables Money to create Money from Money with zero value in the exchange, we are building a world that denies the gifts that every human has to give, and instead makes paupers of us all. Money is not that. She cannot give birth to more Money absent of any human endeavour. This is the design of Man inflicted on Money.

Like any human reduced to the various forms of slavery we encourage in our world today, she is broken from her essence. She feels defiled, misunderstood, disgraced and shamed.

We blame Money for so much. She is the innocent one. The blame belongs to us.

Money simply wants to support us to thrive. She is not scarce, for indeed human productivity and genuine offering of value is not scarce. The capacity for us to offer our unique work to the world is not scarce. The capacity to build things that serve humanity is not scarce. To make great art, to till the field, to dance and teach…

Man’s imposition of scarcity on fellow man is not the fault of Money. We do that to ourselves. The irony is we do that to ourselves through our own lack, our own scarcity, our own absence of nourishment of spirit, esteem and generosity.

Money when expressed in her purest way is beautiful, elegant, and humble. She wants to partner. She wants to play. She wants to dance with us, drink the champagne, eat from the table of plenty. However she wants to do this in honour of the expression of beauty, productivity, art, service, value and love.

Next time you are handling a $20 bill, know that this is a representation of Money, just like your CV might be a representation of you. It is not you. That $20 could be replaced with a hand written note saying you are good for $20. And just like the hand written note, this may or may not be true..for when you go to collect, that $20 may not still be worth $20.

Money is sovereign, detached from the emotions and projects placed on her. She can be expressed in many forms, just as you can. We can create Money to partner with our projects at any time, in a thousand ways, from promises of time, energy, effort, in kind, to the exchange of a Sovereign representational form of Money/Currency.

The paradox is that the system we inhabit relies on human consumption in order for the accumulation of Money. Yet the truth is Money, or the illusion of Money, consumes us. If you doubt this, take time to record and measure how much of your daily existence is spent thinking about, worrying over, working towards, planning…the increasing accumulation of Money? Who is in charge here? You…or…??

Again, this is not Money, this is the system we have designed where we have placed Money as the central thesis of our lives.

Almost the entire human race, even bankers, are working in a world of illusion around the nature of Money. Our mobile technology is obsolete the moment we walk out the store door, but the system designed to purchase that mobile technology is hundreds of years old, and is rarely questioned.

We have to start asking better questions. It is time to unlearn all the BS we have projected on Money.

It is time we restored Money and our relationship to her to a whole and healthy place.