On an all too regular a basis, since the word went out about my healing gift and coaching / teaching practice, I’ve been receiving notes from people saying they are contemplating suicide. It’s overwhelming and it fills my heart with sadness for the state of humanity. As people reveal what makes their lives so unbearable the # 1 factor is the money-centered society to which they can no longer relate, in which they cannot find their place, nor seem to find a way to “succeed” (some due to objective realities – disabilities, age, absence of salable skills etc., some due to despair from repeated economical “failures” and giving up on themselves). I already hear the voice of those who happen to be financially well-off that says “hey, if I could, they can do to, but they are lazy and stupid, therefore if they are in an economical hole, it’s their fault.”
Well, I would invite you be a bit more open minded to the fact that humans are humans, we are easily traumatized by events in our life that affect our capacity to play the game of “life and success.” Wounded by a family member’s death, break up with a love, health issues and other life events, some have lost the will to get on with life without help, and feel trapped in life. They find themselves like children caught on a train without a ticket or money to pay for it, confused about how they got on the train, and where the train is taking them, but they cannot get off the train… AND they never chose to get on that train in the first place…
The # 2 factor for fatal distress, as I see it from those letters, is expectations, a sense of unfairness… I gave him, her, them (…love / money / time / fill in the blank), but they didn’t return / give me … (fill in the blank)…
I was always confused by the concept “give to get”… When I was growing up (I grew up in a country during its age of socialism) “give to get” would be a formula for corruption. It’s a bribe, really… I remember times when neighbors would give just because someone needed what they had… not for any other reason…
I miss that time…
I also remember summers spent on my grandparents’ farm. It was a decent size farm, but hardly anything was produced for sale. We consumed what we grew, we bartered for things we didn’t grow, the rest we gave away…Cash was hardly ever used in that village… nobody knew about banks, really… Those summers, laying on the hay, betting with other kids on whether I can make a cloud disappear (hey, I won every time lol) were the happiest days of my childhood.
I miss that time…
2 decades later, after I left that country to live in the West (7 years in Canada and now a decade in the US) I see how my own mind is corrupted by an ideology that I find both ridiculous and sad… It’s a disease, a virus… Everybody is a carrier, but nobody knows it…
What brings the sadness is, I can’t see the antidote for it in a society that knows only the disease… And, there is sense of claustrophobia that the money-centered / profit-centered world brings… Can you feel it too?
It causes me to wish for a more simple life… to save my resources… spend time away from climbing any social (never mind corporate) ladders – which I see as manifestations imposed by media promotion of the disease…
Lately my mind has been quite occupied by the desire to find the vaccine… I find a money-centered world not only an unpleasant place to live, it’s also dangerous for an easily corruptible mind, poisonous for the soul…
Don’t get me wrong, I played the game for a long while… and for a while I really loved it. Moreover. I got really good at it. At the age of 23 I was earning 7 times the average salary in my country. I managed operations for others. I’ve also built a number of businesses, have some in progress, I even successfully exited some (nothing major, but it all contributed to a comfortable living). Yet, there is a danger in monetary driven society…Today, if there is something that causes me to quest, it’s that – the desire to find an alternative and share it with others…
The fundamental danger is the disease of expectations, and especially one particular expectation, the origin of which I find impossible to trace. It remains a mystery to me how it ever came to life. The disease had to be created by unconscious humans, supported by unconscious humans, absorbed into the mental DNA of every person who lives asleep, without questioning the fundamental nature of human interactions upon which human happiness and life depends. The name of the disease is the belief that the world always has been, always will be, and obviously (?!!!) always should be “reciprocal”.
Some will say, how could it be otherwise? Reciprocation is only fair. I am giving you a cookie, and then you better give me a cookie’s worth of something back, or, even better better a few cookies.
Ok, now let’s look together into what that creates. It creates a world in which we are damned to suffer! This miserable idea has contaminated the minds of 7 billion people to expect reciprocation. Expect!
What does it mean for you, for me, as the social puppets we’ve become? It means, what you already know – expectations become failed expectations, undelivered unspoken promises.
We create millions of closed loop expectations that routinely break, and don’t even question.
Our days are full of case studies of a miserable person who expects the world to give him or her what they are willing to give. We even praise it as the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It seems quote self-centric and flawed.
And… unfulfilled expectations lead not only to unhappiness of the individual, but to violence in all forms – verbal, psychological, physical.
Don’t you agree that violence is caused by anger and sense of unfairness? And that’s exactly what unfulfilled promise of reciprocation leads to… If I invested something assuming I will get a particular return, but for some reason the person is not offering what I expect, then I feel cheated, I feel there was unfairness. It causes desire to fight for what I believe is mine… I want you to pay what you “owe” to me, and often I will go a long way to collect the “debt”…
Have you not seen it happening? In relationship? In the boardroom? Don’t you see how many of your arguments have this at their very foundation?
I see that’s happening all the time… Do you know how many times I saw men demanding from women sexual favor just because a man offered to a woman some “sweetener” and she was naïve enough to accept it? Demanding, often so persistently that accepting the favor seemed like a favor of its own, to make a giver feel good about giving. But the giver had an agenda of reciprocation, interestingly, often in a particular form, despite the fact that it never was articulated before “the deal” of giving / receiving was offered…
Now imagine a loyal employee, was working hard for your company for years, and then being laid off as the company goes though financial crisis. There is nothing personal in it, yet the laid off employee makes it so. He feels he has given to you – the founder and to his boss so much of his time and efforts! Yes, he was paid, but his expectations consist of “but I want more”… I want your undeniable loyalty, commitment for keeping me secure etc… And so people feel justified to destroy company assets, attack employers etc…They are responding to what they believe is unjust and want to get back what’s owed to them…
There are so many examples of dysfunctions caused by the concept of reciprocation…
Now, if every day of this person’s life he or she claims that all they want is peace and happiness, yet if the reciprocal world is a default to which they have subscribed, then let me ask you a question. When the person looks in the mirror, which part of the person can we call intelligent?
We are a part of a society that is designed for violence, not for peace; for hate, not for love. We create it… I create it. You create it. We ARE it.
Now if you see the nonsense of your choice, choose the opposite.
How? Simple. Drop all ideas that you have learned from those who store their brains up their butts.
If one by one, we see as invalid all expectations of reciprocal behavior, if we unlearn and stop expecting, the violence (many forms it takes) will dissolve.
- If I love you, I just do it with all my heart. That serves me and it’s not connected to whether you love me back. And, if you love someone else? Wonderful. (This example is not easy to comprehend… As we come from a society where even “relationships” are based on reciprocity… But with that comes misery… With that people we break up with often become enemies. Don’t believe me? Check stats on domestic violence and ugliness of divorce cases… I myself went through some of it in the past… sense of abandonment is just an unfulfilled expectation of reciprocity… It carries the seed of pain in it, and often hurts more than one person…)
- I bought you a gift. I did it only to make you feel happy. I have no expectation you remember my birthday. That’s ok. Ideally you will gift attention to someone else and make another human being happy.
So, can we live forward, paying it forward, not just to reciprocate, but to give without expecting anything in return? Can we redesign the society that would live forward, give forward, love forward, so an ultimate freedom can be experienced, through free flowing actions that arise spontaneously from the creatively giving heart, not from the ever-wanting, manipulative and pretentious, demanding mind?
But how to function in the world of bills to pay, obligations to fulfill? Is there another form of “society” that can be created?
I wish to live in the world that allows me to serve not only those who can pay me, but those who need my work (knowledge / healing) the most… Yes, volunteering is an option today, pro bono work that is a parallel solution to running a business… But it is not a substitute, it’s a parallel solution… which means one needs to put long hours into making the business financially sound and sustainable, and then put long hours into pro bono work…
It’s all doable, and need not be a problem but it is, so people lie and cheat to get out of the cycle, to beg, borrow and steal their way out of economically burdening reality, yet we dig ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole…
And the fact that so many people that I serve come to me with that particular struggle – a desire to make sense of it all and find the way to handle both, demands of the monetary world and demands of the heart – all that shows that the societal structure is flawed… on so many levels…
Is there a model of the world in which entrepreneurship can turn into freepreneurship?
If only I never needed to charge for my time… I know how much happier I would be… how much more my heart would be open… How so many lives could be touched by my gifts… I bet, at least once you’ve thought the same about your work, your time, the gifts you could share more freely… if only…
Yes, there are some freeconomy and “pay it forward” movements, yet they are so localized, so partial…
Great beginnings though…
Just imagine…Imagine 7 billion people on this planet doing good for the sake of good itself. They give to give, not to get; they love to love, not to get love back.
Just imagine how much love the world will be expressing, when our hearts stop fearing not being loved back, if our lips stop being afraid they won’t receive smiles back or kissed back.
You can do that. Even if only you and me…Oh dear, my love can burn down a castle of lies, so can yours.
Just live forward, give forward, love forward.
Only… what might this new world look like? How can the world corrupted by reciprocal insistence be turned from its head back onto its feet?
How can we plant the garden in which we can authentically blossom and our lives can be lived from the heart, where giving is happening without “because”… without a cause…?
What are YOUR thoughts about what this world would look like? How can the new garden be planted? What alternatives to a money-centered society do you envision and how do they function? What leap has to be taken to get from where the world is now to get “there”? What “non-traditional” communities are out there that you have experienced? I would so love to hear about your vision and experienvces, my friends…
Much Love to you, open hearts… 🙂
