The Religion of Money

And the Cult of Modern Western Civilization

Many people appreciated my recent post, ‘Fuck Money.’

Others expressed confusion about apparent contradictions in my views on money.

So I wanted to write a follow-up post to bring further clarity to this matter. 

The Essence of My View

Money is a subtle, tricky, multidimensional topic. 

I could easily write an entire book about my journey with it. 

For now, I want to start by distilling the essence of my total current view on money. Here are 51 principles, statements, and aphorisms that encapsulate my view:

1. On one level, like all of Creation, money is simply energy. 

2. On the level of energy, like all of Creation, money is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ It just *is*. It’s neutral. 

3. Money is a useful tool that can be utilized skillfully or unskillfully — wisely or unwisely — benevolently or malevolently. 

4. Money tends to flow from those who value it less and are less educated about it, to those who value it more and are more educated about it.

5. Money also tends to flow from those with a lower sense of self-worth, to those with a higher sense of self-worth. (Of course there are plenty of exceptions.) (Edit: This one is complicated; I made it sound too neat-and-tidy. Striking it out for now.)

6. Money is deeply woven into the DNA of our current civilization. Very little gets built on Earth without money. 

7. In order to acquire land and build New Earth communities or healing centers or other large projects creating “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible,” large sums of money are needed. 

8. It is wise to start saving 10+% of the money you earn, build up a ~6-month buffer of savings, then start investing all additional savings into opportunities that will allow your money to “work for you” and multiply itself.

The Dark Side: The Religion of Money

9. On another level—a more down-to-Earth, systems level—money in its current form is not at all neutral.

10. Money in its current form is inextricably bound up with our current economic system. Without being overly dramatic, it’s fair to say that this system is not working well for vast numbers of people. 

11. In its current form, the dominant global economic system depends on vast millions of people being in debt, feeling a sharp sense of scarcity, and toiling away their best years for dreadfully low wages. We can roughly say that it is a “pyramid scheme” designed to siphon money from the 99% and ship it to the 1% of wealthiest people, who own a preposterously large portion of the world’s assets. 

12. Those 1% of wealthiest people have a huge vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

13. As such, these wealthy people created a religion of money. Consciously and unconsciously, the wealthiest and most powerful people, especially in the past 150 years, have used the immense power of advertising, psychology, propaganda, and “education” to indoctrinate the global populace into the most successful religion of all time: The religion of money. As Kanye West once rapped, “They made us hate our self and love they wealth.”

14. The religion of money is an extremely powerful fear-virus. From an early age, most of us are taught to deeply fear a life without money. We deeply internalize the idea that money is the path to status, success, luxury, happiness, and the life of our dreams. 

15. As such, money gets its hooks in us early on, then it runs us—in a thousand subtle ways. The sheer quantity of soul-level truth that is being sacrificed at the altar of money, is staggering. Billions of people are (unconsciously) choosing to labor for the favor of the money-god, rather than to live the unadulterated truth of their own souls. This is poisoning us en masse. It affects us all.

The Systematic Traumatization and Indoctrination of the World’s Children

16. The effectiveness of the religion of money is greatly bolstered by the systematic traumatization of the world’s children. Common norms of birthing and early-childhood parenting—e.g. over-medicalized hospital birth, circumcision, non-breastfeeding, “sleep training,” sending infants and toddlers to ‘daycare,’ and immersing children from conception in an energy field of trauma, non-presence, and stress (the norm in our civilization)—are implanting core wounds of rejection and abandonment into the sponge-like primordial psyches of our children, en masse. 

17. These primordial traumas create a deep void in most of our hearts—a deep innate sense of unworthiness—that then makes us highly susceptible to the indoctrination of advertising, mass media, and “education,” all of which teach us that this void of unworthiness can be filled by becoming (financially) “successful” in the eyes of the world. 

18. Advertising, mass media, and the mass ‘education’ system deeply indoctrinate the general populace into a life of sacrificing one’s own soul-truth in favor of pursuing glamor, “success,” status, ego-enhancements, and the things money can buy. 

19. The mass ‘education’ system is not designed to nurture the innate genius of each human being; it is mostly designed to crush individuality and creativity to produce conformist worker-bees who are good at following orders and performing rote tasks to appease authority figures. It is an indoctrination system.

Collective Imprisonment and Sickness

20. When you really zoom out, from one vantage, our world looks a lot like a highly-sophisticated prison or slave plantation. Innocent babies are deeply traumatized from birth, programmed to feel unworthy and afraid, then indoctrinated into a life of sacrificing their own soul’s truth in favor of a life of debt, toil, self-loathing, “keeping up appearances,” worshipping the money-god, and padding the pockets of the mega-wealthy owners of the Earth-sized money-farm. 

21. To be honest, I sympathize with those who assert that our planet has long played host to multidimensional parasites—sophisticated ‘astral’ intelligences / ‘demonic’ otherworldly personalities that feed on the fear, negativity, and emotional ‘loosh’ of mankind—parasitic ‘controllers’ which have ‘possessed’ many of the global elite and subtly seduced humanity to transform Earth into a highly-sophisticated prison planet / farm for the production of ‘loosh.’ Before you dismiss this model in a knee-jerk fashion, feel into it and consider its explanatory power. I’m not overly attached to this model, but it does resonate with some of what I’ve seen and experienced here.

22. In any case, regardless of how we got here, this current state of affairs is making us all sick. ~65% of humans now have some kind of chronic physical disease—and this is really only a surface-level indication of the gargantuan quantity of psychic, emotional, and energetic sickness boiling in the underbelly of 21st-century man.

23. In the past century or so, this sickness is erupting to the surface in ways that are increasingly impossible to ignore. Mankind murdered 100+ million of its own species in the 20th century. Our gorgeous Earth-mother has been massively deforested, polluted, raped for anything that can be converted into money. Countless other tragedies and atrocities render our collective shadow increasingly glaring.

A Great Opportunity

24. This eruption of the collective shadow is a great opportunity. Man is being invited to look into the mirror. By “making the darkness conscious,” there is an opportunity for healing and transfiguration. We are all being invited to undertake the “Great Work” of alchemizing the sickness within ourselves—i.e. utilizing it as fuel for igniting the flame of Consciousness. 

25. We are being invited to hold everything within ourselves and within Creation in the Light of Neutral Loving Presence—the final medicine and alchemizing force. This is increasingly an ultimatum. Influxes of higher-frequency energy seem to be entering this realm at this time, pushing our collective shadow to the surface and catalyzing a momentous ‘watershed moment’—an archetypal climax. We either learn to hold Loving Space for ourselves and all of life, or we self-destruct, on both an individual and collective level. 

26. From the perspective of God—our deepest loving essence—all of this is perfect. It is the Divine Play of Lila. It is the tragicomic Cosmic Dance of forgetting and remembering, forgetting and remembering, ad infinitum. In our deepest essence, we chose to create this entire Dance of Creation, and on a soul-level, we have chosen to come to Earth at this time to learn challenging-yet-profound lessons and greatly catalyze our evolution. Each being is playing their perfect role in this unfolding drama.

27. Yet from the human perspective, when you first begin to notice the harsh realities I am describing, it is usually tremendously painful, heartbreaking, and terrifying. A great portion of grief and pain begins to erupt to the surface to be gradually felt and transmuted. For the vast majority of people, it is unwise to rush this process or to try to ‘quantum leap’ directly to Universal Love and Appreciation of the Great Perfection. If you do so, you tend to bypass a lot of your own unhealed shadows and traumas that then continue to run you in various ways. Give yourself space and time to heal and to process the immensity of grief and tragedy. Books such as The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, and Letting Go by David Hawkins can help you. 

28. All of this is relevant context for understanding ‘money’ in its current form. The religion of money and the current economic system are inextricably bound up with our broader collective sickness—and opportunity for healing—at this seemingly unprecedented historical moment. 

Beyond Activism: Creating the New

29. Understandably, many people who begin to notice aspects of what I am describing, feel enormous rage toward money, ‘capitalism,’ and ‘the system.’ For many, “fuck the system” becomes a core mantra, and a highly rebellious phase of life ensues. I’ve certainly gone through my own version of this.

30. At a certain point, though, you start to realize that holding onto rage and resentment is like dripping poison to yourself, and that it won’t ultimately take us to where we wish to go. Anger can be a highly useful energy when channeled skillfully, yet holding onto it quickly becomes corrosive. When it arises, feel it, love it, and channel it skillfully, then let it go. 

31. Ultimately, “what you resist, persists.” By trying to “fight the system,” we often energize it. We end up in a dualistic ‘Us VS Them’ war-consciousness. We find ourselves hating and demonizing the system or the 1% or the elites or the patriarchy or whatever it happens to be. This hatred, separation, and war-consciousness ends up energizing the very entity we are attempting to uproot. (Radical) activism surely has its value and a role to play, yet at a certain point we have to move beyond it, to get to where our hearts truly want to go.

32. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete,” Buckminster Fuller wisely observed. 

33. Creating the New is first and foremost an “inside job”—a task of consciousness. It is a lifelong practice of releasing everything within yourself that is not Love. “If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place,” Eckhart Tolle notes. There are countless pathways to Love. In short, they all lead to gradually letting go of the past and future, living in the Eternal Here-Now, and holding all that appears in the Light of Neutral Loving Presence. The Power of Now is the top book I recommend on this path—the full audiobook is freely available on Spotify.

34. As you begin to uncover God’s Love—your own deepest essence—you increasingly let it guide you. You surrender to it and allow it to live you. You recognize it as your own deepest truth: “Thy Will is my will.” 

35. God’s Love guides each person differently, as we are all utterly inimitable geniuses with unique paths. It may guide one person to completely extricate themselves from the current civilization and live entirely self-sufficiently off-grid on a permaculture farm. It may guide another to ‘aikido the system’—i.e. to remain within the system yet lovingly harness the system’s own energy, resources, money, structures, and momentum to ‘flip it’ in a new direction. It may guide another to create a community in nature as a kind of “New Earth testing ground”—to experiment with ideas for building a new-paradigm civilization rooted in Loving Presence.

My Current Process: Uprooting the Religion of Money

36. When I wrote ‘Fuck Money’ a couple days ago, it was primarily a poetic fireball capturing the essence of a process I am presently experiencing—a process of more deeply uprooting the religion of money from my being, so that I may more fully allow God’s Love to live me. 

37. This has been a tumultuous, intense, and frightening process. Life has orchestrated financial difficulties for my family that have triggered deep layers of fear and attachment around money—layers I incorrectly assumed I had already dissolved. As time goes on, I see what a great gift this has been, as it is giving me an opportunity to bring the religion of money more fully into the Light of Neutral Loving Presence and expunge it from my system, energy, and body. God is good. 

38. This process has increased my awareness of just how insidious the religion of money truly is—how deeply its roots burrow into our psycho-energetic systems. For years I have been largely on the ‘aikido the system’ path, and while I still believe in the power of this path, I also believe most of us on this path are severely underestimating just how challenging it truly is to live within ‘the system’ and not be (subtly) corrupted by its immensely sophisticated mechanisms of control. 

39. The coaching, transformation, healing, and spiritual entrepreneurship space has tremendous potential. It is deeply needed. I do believe this. Yet the space at present overflows with tremendous amounts of bullshit. The promise of fast money and flashy IG-influencer lifestyles corrupts the vast majority of people in the space, to varying degrees. I can say in honesty that it has certainly corrupted and distorted my work in various ways over the years.

40. The transformational economy is far from alone in being corrupted. From where I’m standing, this is true of every sector and industry globally. Vast quantities of bullshit and ugliness masquerade as pure-hearted service. Every business or organization claims a noble mission, when in truth the Almighty Dollar is (subtly) twisting everyone’s arms and seducing virtually all of us to act (somewhat) at odds with the deepest inclinations of our hearts. 

Bringing God’s Love to Earth and Healing the Cult of Modern Civilization

41. And to be clear, again, the religion of money goes far beyond money; it’s more of a metaphor for the broader Cult of Modern Civilization that systematically traumatizes, breaks, indoctrinates, alienates, and makes addicts of every last one of us, to varying degrees. 

42. By allowing ourselves to see and speak about and acknowledge this corruption and sickness within our industries and within ourselves, we bring the illness into the Light of Consciousness and begin to heal it. The Light of God’s Love heals all. 

43. To actually be consistently true to God’s Love—one’s own deepest truth—requires an astounding degree of Presence and Self-Honesty. It is a lifelong practice that is never over; it can always go deeper. To be the Love that one truly is, is the task of a lifetime.

44. This is what is being asked of us at this time: To bring God’s Love to Earth. To become increasingly Christ-like. To “love thy enemies,” “love thy neighbor as thyself,” and “treat others as we wish to be treated.” We are being asked to learn to Love the Earth as our own body and to see every being as our own Self in another disguise. We are being invited to return Home, to the Love that we are.

So, How Best to Relate to Money As We Do This?

45. Where does that leave us with respect to money? Well, as I said, God’s Love moves each of us differently, so each of us will have a unique relationship with money. Given how deeply money is woven into this civilization, it’s safe to say that most of us are going to interact plenty with money in this lifetime. 

46. Again, on a profound level everything is neutral energy—not inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’—and anything can be used skillfully or unskillfully, wisely or unwisely, benevolently or malevolently. This is true of money, yet one should be very careful not to underestimate just how much Conscious Presence is actually required to interact with money in a skillful, wise fashion. To truly not be run by money—for money to truly become simply an energy/tool in service to God’s Love—is a Herculean task—and a task inextricably connected to the task of uprooting the Cult of Modern Civilization from one’s being. 

47. So, for myself, humility feels like a foundational practice in this domain. I want to be humble enough to never assume I have no more work to do around money (or anything). I intend for the ‘money question’ to remain an ever-open area of alive inquiry—one with which I am Presence-ing ongoingly. 

48. I do foresee myself continuing to ask for money for some of my services—and to endeavor to uphold fair, balanced, mutually-fulfilling exchange in doing so. In this lifetime I am a ‘householder’ and family man, and as such, not interacting with money does not seem indicated or pragmatic. Clearly, a large part of my karma in this lifetime is in learning to engage consciously with money, in service to God’s Love. 

49. It feels important to me to continue growing my awareness around all the subtle ways the religion of money hooks and misaligns us. I feel a curiosity to continue learning more about the design of our current economic system and why it seems to work so poorly for so many. It also feels important for me to continue imagining, visioning, and experimenting with new modes of money, exchange, and economy—to assist in beginning to map the territory of a new economic paradigm that would actually be in service to Earth / All / the Whole. 

50. In light of what I’ve shared about the religion of money and the “pyramid scheme” of the current economic system, it would be easy to fall into victim-consciousness and to assume “the system is rigged against us.” I do not recommend this view. Paradoxically, despite the nature of the system, each of us still possesses immense power to flourish and to create the life we are called to live. Especially when we align with the Love of God/Tao/Source and our own deepest Truth, we become unstoppable. That doesn’t mean our lives will look exactly how our egos expect. It means we will receive exactly what is needed to become who we truly are and to fulfill our destinies here. This may mean becoming a conscious steward of significant financial wealth, or it may not. If we do live true, though, the greatest wealth awaits: Our hearts will crack open, and we will be tremendously grateful for all of existence, accurately perceiving nothing other than God’s Grace in all directions. 

51. In sum, the ultimate task is to live truth all the way. Through my experience, I have come to see that this means becoming a clear channel for God’s Love to flow into this realm. The key question is not whether I am interacting with money (or anything); it is whether I am doing so with such Presence that I am able to be a pure conduit for Grace and Love. This is the task before me, and I feel ready to practice for the rest of my life.

Love,
Jordan

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P.S. Kudos to William Ursus for his great essay on “prosperity theology and money,” which partially inspired this post.

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