Emotional Intelligence for the Greater Good

The Einsteinness of Eisenstein   

This blog has been on my mind for a while, and centers around the theme of money.

Ideas had been batting around my head for some time, and then I listened to a wonderful talk by Charles Eisenstein recently, where he so eloquently voiced many of the concerns I had been contemplating.

So I want to share a few of my thoughts, mixed with a large dollop of his wisdom.

Why is life centred around money?

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself this question? 

• Why is it, that in our modern world, we can barely do anything without money?
• Why is it we have become enslaved to money?
• Why is it we can barely afford to live even if we work full time?
• Why is it that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer?

These are questions which have been consistently on my mind for some years, primarily since the cost of living, in particular rent, has increased exponentially over the past 15 years, and I find myself living precariously from week to week.

In the recently-aired 'Greater Reset' online summit, where a number of thought-leaders from around the world gathered to share how we can bring productive reformation to the current crises (pleural) in the world, Charles Eisenstein spoke on the need for monetary reform... and a lot more. 

The following are excerpts from his presentation, and then I will come back at the end to how this relates with emotional intelligence. 

WHAT IS COMMUNITY?

Community is about being placed in space, and relationship to people, and other things like soil, water, landscape… that is what it is be at home, to belong. When we lack that experience, we can never feel secure, and then we crave more money, more power, more dominance… because we’re not in community.

"People need community. It’s missing from people’s lives. Community is when you can look around and feel ‘I need you and you need me’.

It’s not about individual freedom, but about relationship. Relationships that are not mediated by government, global markets or big tech.

Community is about being placed in space, and relationship to people, and other things like soil, water, landscape… that is what it is be at home, to belong. When we lack that experience, we can never feel secure, and then we crave more money, more power, more dominance… because we’re not in community.

In our current economy we don’t need anybody because we can pay for it. So we’ve gone down this track of more and more independence from each other, but actually it’s more dependence.

How can we transition the dominant economy so that the money system is no longer the enemy of community and nature?"

MONEY AS A STORY, AN AGREEMENT 

So much of life has migrated into the money realm. We have a money system which relentlessly pushes for economic growth which requires economic growth. That economic system is called usary - it’s called debt - where money is created as interest-bearing debt.

"Money itself is simply an agreement, a story, the meaning we give to symbols. Most of it isn’t even real or physical. Only 3% of transactions are cash now. Even gold and silver are not actually that valuable outside of the agreement – yes you can make jewellery out of it, but how much jewellery do you need? Two thirds of all the gold ever mined in history is sitting in vaults right now! If it were useful it wouldn’t be sitting in vaults!

Money is a story, an agreement, and we can make a new story. Before Covid we were told we don’t have the money for healthcare, free higher education, guaranteed basic income… but now all of a sudden 3 trillion dollars of stimulus is available. Where does that money come from? There’s an unlimited amount of money when we understand it is an agreement.

By the same token the national debt is an agreement. Everyone’s personal debt is an agreement.

You can’t measure community in normal economics. You can’t measure the value and benefit you get from knowing the people around you in local community, from having full relationships, from knowing your neighbours, feeling needed, eating food grown by someone you know… to be able to feel free to enact values that don’t make sense in dollars but make sense to the heart.

The new economy is about shrinking the (conventional) global economy’s domain, and reclaiming some of our life from money.

So much of life has migrated into the money realm. We have a money system which relentlessly pushes for economic growth which requires economic growth. That economic system is called usary - it’s called debt - where money is created as interest-bearing debt".

MONEY AS DEBT

There’s more to life than what can be monetized, and when we try to monetize too much of life, and ‘account’ for everything, we lose all of the things we can’t account for.

"Any true reset must address debt, and by that I mean cancel it.  Any system that keeps debt on the books is not a reset.

It’s not right to hold a debt over someone’s head forever. A lot of debt is illegitimate. The majority of Americans have to borrow just to live, to live the same standard of living as your parents or grandparents – student loan debt, credit card debt… people are working harder now to have the same standard of lifestyle as a middle-class family in the 1950’s.

The old story that if you get a good education and you’ll do well no longer holds water. People are not experiencing this.

We are in a debt trap which is siphoning the wealth from the majority into the hands of the very few. During Covid American’s billionaires (America’s 1%) got 5 trillion dollars richer. Where is that money coming from? The global economy has shrunk, and yet the billionaires have got richer, and you’re probably feeling that.

If there’s going to be bailouts, let it be debtors bailouts, not creditors bailouts. What about bailing out the small businesses and people who owe mortgages and student loans?

What if we went on a debt strike? If the public repudiates it, it just becomes a symbol in a database. It has power only because of our agreements, and our agreements are wearing thin.

There’s more to life than what can be monetized, and when we try to monetize too much of life, and ‘account’ for everything, we lose all of the things we can’t account for.

This is what has happened in a growth-dependent economy: when the money system is based on interest-bearing debt (which is how money is created in our system – a bank lends money into existence), every time that happens new debt is created too, and because it’s normally at interest, there’s always more debt than money, which means we’re always in competition, which means that to pay back that debt, either you have a lot of bankruptcies (because there is more debt than money, and mathematically you can’t pay that back), or when the debt comes due, even more money needs to be created, to pay those debts...

There’s a reason every government in the world wants to grow the economy: it’s because it’s a necessity – otherwise the system stops working".

ABUNDANCE IS ALREADY HERE

We don’t need more and more. We need to share more.

"Is what the world needs right now more and more and more? No. Even though half the world is starving, we don’t need more food – there’s enough food in the world to feed everyone twice over. 

We have to consume more and more to keep the system going. This is a classic problem of capitalism. We don’t need more and more. We need to share more. We can have more durable goods than throwaway goods – we don’t need planned obsolescence. When workers are replaced by technology, we need to consume more and more so that everyone has a job.

Or the other option in a different kind of money system is that we work less, so that we produce less quantities of things, and turn more of our human creativity and labour to the meeting of qualitative needs: towards beauty, healing and life. This is what is possible with a great(er) reset.

We have reached maturity (in this regard) as a human species – now it’s time to grow another way. Just like a teenager reaches maturity, it doesn’t mean growing is done – there are other ways to grow 

It’s time for the growth to stop. We don’t need more any more, but we’re stuck in that because that’s the economic system. So let’s reset that, and reclaim life and beauty from the money realm.

That means finding a way to meet people’s qualitative needs.

To change things depends on how willing we are to rethink everything… how willing to recognize that money and debt are an agreement that can be changed.

If we direct our change capacity we could be living in a world so much more beautiful, healed and alive than what we have right now. All the technology is here".

Money, Emotional Intelligence and Wisdom Culture

Not long ago I wrote a blog on 'wisdom civilization', inspired by my Qigong teacher and the personal development lessons we learn in the life cultivation system of Ren Xue. 

I began the blog with a quote by Yuan Tze from a talk he gave during the early part of the Covid crisis:

"It is through the development of Jingshen (wisdom) civilization that we can get out of this mire: by recognizing the importance of our heart, and letting realization and wisdom guide our lives. A true civilization is a Jingshen civilization at the core, leading the material civilization. The material civilization serves the Jingshen civilization".

Emotional intelligence is about developing the heart along with the mind - having the capacity to listen to and use all three brains (head, heart and gut) in order to make wise decisions which are inspired by that part of ourselves we often refer to as our 'higher self'. Without being guided by this (higher) part of ourselves, we are instead ruled by our 'lower' ignorant personality self. 

The lower personality is run by unhealthy patterns of consciousness, which cause harm to self and others, whilst the higher self, in its innate wisdom, promulgates actions which are always beneficial to life. For example, greed is one of the 10 fundamental patterns of human consciousness which causes harm. And living from fear rather than trust causes humans to make decisions which put 'me' before 'we'.

What we can see in society in general today is a massive lack of emotional intelligence, combined with a collective ignorance and unhealthy patterns. We are so out of balance most people are not even aware of the level of imbalance we have reached, because it has become the norm. 

Learning to use our emotional intelligence, multiple brains, along with dismantling our unhealthy patterns of consciousness in order to lift ourselves out of our blind ignorance, is the way out and into a wisdom culture. Let us hope we manage to succeed.

Ready for Change?

If you want to learn how to increase your EI, browse the programs on the EAA site.

If you want to learn how to dismantle your unhealthy patterns of consciousness and grow into wisdom, check out the programs on my Tao Health website. 

Watch the full presentation