Scarcity
One of the key threads of my life has been to understand money and value and its opposite, scarcity and lack. In the last 18 months, like many people, my relationship with money has been tested. Nothing like the Global Financial Crisis to get you to revisit your relationship to money!
One of the keys I have learned is to be sure that my heart is open and I am constantly working on giving, with energy, joy and love flowing out. And that I have a permanent attitude of gratitude. My mentor Buckminster Fuller, one of the great scientists of the 20th Century, practised living in this way. He demonstrated over 50 years of life that if he only lived for the highest good for the highest number of people, Universe would provide. He had sufficiency. It was his inspiration that had me start my own Guinea Pig C project.
When I contract, which is what happens when fear grips you, I shut down connection to Universe. Like a clam shell, nothing can get in. Sure, when we are open, it is risky, as everything can get in, but disconnection kills. It would be like a tree not allowing itself access to the sun.
For the most part, I have developed quite a healthy relationship with money. I treat money with respect, I make sure I have systems in place to monitor flow, I keep on top of incoming and outgoing, and I only spend what I can afford. I have learned the hard way that spending what I do not have keeps me living in the past and weighs me down, physically, emotionally and metaphysically.
However, I have noticed this little residue thought that seeps into my conscious awareness at times and creates a contraction. The thought is about lack or scarcity. About the inflow stopping. Which has got me thinking…how pervasive is this scarcity principle in my life, and in our community?
I have found myself re-reading Bucky’s book, GRUNCH of Giants. A small, relatively easy-to-read book, GRUNCH stands for Gross Universal Cash Heist. On this reading, 20 years after my first, I am seeing with new eyes.
One of the principles Bucky spoke of was that our economic system is built entirely around the propagation of scarcity. Like a fish breathing water, we do not even know that everything we do is built on reinforcing the scarcity principle.
We wake up in the morning to the alarm, and our very first thought is that we have not had enough sleep. Our second thought is that we have so much to do, we do not have enough time. It gets worse. Not enough weekends, holidays, not enough love, sex, money…I am not thin enough, fit enough, tall enough, happy enough.
Then it gets bigger. There is not enough food for all, not enough petrol/oil, not enough water…we fall back in bed having not done enough, exhausted again from not enough time and not enough sleep, only to get up and do it all again.
And the myth of scarcity is propagated by the media and advertising.
It is the very message of not having enough that gets us buying stuff that we do not need.
Finally, after a lifetime of not enough, the message to ourselves is that I am not enough. (This can happen by the time a child is 7 years old, saturated in the messages of not enough that are prevalent in our society.)
As we are dualistic human beings, the opposite of not enough is more is better. So, like greedy little caterpillars eating up all the leaves, we need more to feel better about not enough. We need more food, more holidays, more square feet in our homes, more cars, more TV’s, more shoes, more market share, more money, more gizmos…more, more more…
And the marketers are thrilled….the economy booms on the crazy, incessant unconscious response to our inbuilt scarcity beliefs. Our whole growth economy is dependent on the myth of scarcity thriving. The tragedy is that, like the fish in water, we cannot even see it.
And yet the scarcity principle directly contributes to the increase in depression, emotional and financial stress, and of course, a blown-out budget, be it our own or our country’s.
When I started to consider my own deeply embedded myth of scarcity, I recognised that to uproot it from my psyche would require really going against everything in our world designed to propagate it. This would require a level of vigilance and consciousness even more profound than just extracting a limiting belief. The extraction was an embedded worldview, backed up with a constant bombardment of reinforced messages.
Bucky was always the optimist. In GRUNCH, he outlines that from about 1970, humans in Universe had crossed a threshold where there was now the unprecedented ability to provide enough food, energy, water, resources for every human, and to allow a higher standard of living than had ever been experienced before, while phasing out the use of fossil fuels and atomic energy.
It no longer has to be either “you” or “me”, which is the root belief behind the scarcity principle; it is now possible to be both “you” and “me”.
However, he did caution that for this to be realised would take a few decades. And we would be tested as to whether we walked this path. This prediction is, of course, the opposite of what we read in the news.
The principal reason he gives for a sufficient Universe is due to what he calls progressive ephemeralization. Doing more with less. That human’s ability to use the mind allows us to constantly move towards doing more with less…ultimately, everything with nothing. The internet is an example of this. And that we have far more energy from the sun and all its interlinked weather behaviours, such as photosynthesis, wind, rain, waves, etc., than we will ever need.
Yet the noise we mostly hear these days is even more loudly proclaiming “not enough.” We are running out of oil (true), and our lives must change. (true). Because of this, we are spending billions on wars in countries that have the resources we deem as scarce. The machine of “not enough” is working overtime!
However, what is not being spoken about is the resourcefulness of humans and our ability to do more with less. And this is where our focus needs to be. We have the know-how and the technology. And we have the power of people, which is crucial. We simply cannot wait for our governments and leaders to make the changes. We have to rally. We get to choose, and we have the means to do so more than at any other time in history. Just like the movement, Move Your Money, has the ability to break the backs of the big banks in the USA, we, the people, can choose to challenge every message about “not enough” and focus instead on sufficiency. We are the ones to fuel the game change.
Enough with scarcity. We live in a sufficient Universe. And yes, we do need to change our ways, consume less, be exquisitely aware of the field effects of all of our actions, be comprehensively considerate of all that we think and do. But to run on fear of lack, this only increases the contraction and continues to enable the “you” or “me” scarcity thinking.
This article was inspired by Lynne Twist, author of Soul of Money
An update to this article, Germany has shown its commitment to an abundant universe by its commitment to renewable energy, last week getting 50% of its energy from the sun.
Written around 2010.
