Thursday 26 February 2015

Living Without Money? Who'da Thunk It?


 I came across this article today on the Organic Health website: http://organichealth.co/shes-69-and-hasnt-used-money-for-15-years-and-has-never-been-happier/   It concerns a woman who for most of her life enjoyed a quite reasonable level of affluence, which 15 years ago she turned her back on, deciding to live without money for as long as she could.  She is still apparently doing that and it makes a pretty interesting story.




This story got me thinking.

At first I thought "I would like to know this woman's secret" but then I realised that no I wouldn't.  I wouldn't particularly want to do the same thing.  Not that what she has done is wrong.   It is in fact quite commendable.  What she has done for 15 years is not scrounging.  She has given of her time and effort in order to receive her daily necessities.  However, we could not all do that in a society such as we have today.

But in a different sort of society?  What then?

Eventually we will all have to live without money and that day is closer than you might think.  I will be happy to be moneyless when that day arrives and I think, having spent many hours considering such things, I am well prepared for it.  Maybe not as well prepared as I could be, but nevertheless, better equipped than most.   And I am now retired and living on a modest income.

Many people are afraid of retirement because they can see no way that they could live without an income similar to what they currently enjoy.  I, myself was not a little apprehensive about that prospect too, but I find that I can live very well on less than a quarter of my pre-retirement income.  Furthermore, the cause of the majority of my current living expenses would simply disappear when money also vanishes. 

The expenses I am referring to are transport and rent. 

I still use a motor vehicle to get around, although I also have a bike (not a working one but I do own one nonetheless).  I don't travel far now and clock up only around 8-9,000km a year and some of that is related to doing things for other people.  The rest is for food shopping or to meet my societal commitments.  Well, I won't have any societal commitments after society collapses financially and money disappears and there will not be anywhere to go buy food, other than locally based swap-meets offering locally grown surplus food.

Consequently, under those circumstances, I will not need the services of my car.  It wouldn't run anyway for long, unless I found a horse to pull it (minus engine, transmission and much of the bodywork of course.  oh, wait, isn't that a cart?).

As for rent, along with the disappearance of money and all that goes with it, and the consequent societal storm that would follow (during which I would keep a very low profile and perhaps find a convenient safe shelter until it had all blown over), quite a large proportion of the populace would have also disappeared, including most of the property owners who would have perished under the mistaken idea of defending their indefensible properties from the marrauding, starving hoards of ...zombies?...   Well, perhaps not quite that, but certainly folk not in the right state of mind to observe social niceties.  And don't forget that the police and military would quickly go home to protect their own families as soon as they realised they had stopped being paid to put themselves in harms way for a society that had now let them down and in fact no longer existed in any meaningful way.

The picture I am trying to paint here is that I believe that I, assuming I am still around after all of the rocks stop rolling, should be able to move into or onto any nice property/accomodation that may take my fancy or have the appearance or potential for being defensible and productive for the purposes of growing adequate nourishing food, without having the need to ask anyone's permission or turf out any reluctant resident.  Of course, a better alternative would be to associate with a like-minded group of some sort, if one can be found.  But, folk being folk, that path is paved with just as many pitfalls as getting along with neighbours in the old world just passed away, and most people still remaining will have been suffering a fair degree of personal trauma and may not be for a while and perhaps never, the sort of stable, reliable persons that you may wish for as companions.  If you saw someone come sauntering down the road, openly talking to themselves, you would be best advised to remain hidden until they had gone by, instead of jumping out at the sight of another human and hugging them joyfully.  If you did that, your joy may not be long enduring, and at the least you may have saddled yourself with another harmless but useless mouth to feed.  Those times will not be the right time to practice lovingkindness or other forms of altruistic endeavour.

Since I am already used to living alone, with only occasional personal encounters with others, I think I would initially at least unless by force of circumstance try to make it on my own for a while and wait for the right companions to make an appearance at the right time.

So, for me, the lack or unavailability of currency in any form will not, all things being equal, be a problem.  Furthermore, anyone for whom it would have been a problem, largely people even partially dependent on services provided by the old system that had just crashed, would no longer be around to buy those services even if they could somehow be restored.

The only remaining necessity of life, with accommodation taken care of and the need for transport nullified, would be food and water.  I greatly pity any of the remaining population who would wish to continue consuming meat as part of their diet.  Unless of course they were formerly trained in or had practice in the field of butchery and/or animal husbandry/hunting.  I think most survivors would readily turn to edible produce that is either grown in the ground or on trees/shrubs.  That will suit me just fine and while I am no expert I do have some practice and already know many of the mistakes that can be made in that area.

I might even be persuaded to take up eating meat again myself in those circumstances.  Never again though would animals need to be industrially farmed, which is one of my current objections to the consumption of meat, but not the only one by any means.  I think it should be borne in mind that anyone who survives this period of upheaval will need to quickly learn to kill animals anyway out of necessity not to be eaten or at least potentially fatally harmed by them.  Consider the number of stray dogs, formerly pets, who would pack together to hunt anything that moved.  For a long time, until the problem was overcome, I think it would be a case of kill or be killed.  Who else is going to look after you?  And there could be worse predators than dogs.  Including human ones.       

Have any readers of this ever considered these things?  Maybe you should.  At least a little bit.

-::-

Saturday 21 February 2015

Have You Been Here Before?

Featuring today an article that is both interesting and well worth a read: http://naturalcuresnotmedicine.com/4-signs-that-this-isnt-your-first-life-on-earth/

I personally believe in reincarnation but, like all belief systems, that is all that it is, a belief. We can never know (can never remember) for sure while living here, and should view with distrust anyone who tries to tell us otherwise or who claims to know they have been someone of importance or prominence in a previous life. That particular fantasy is merely a natural human tendency to gain a degree of ascendancy over others.

I haven't quite yet been able to mesh this belief with my other pet belief in the ancient records of a race of alien gods who genetically created us in their own image, based on existing bipedal planetary stock, as a servant or 'worker' race, a servitude that we have never really shaken off even though it has become quite apparent now that there are no longer any 'gods' around to lord it over us. But I don't hold that meshing of ideas, or lack of, as being of particular importance at this stage.

I don't believe in young souls and old souls as is mentioned and believed by some. I do believe that all souls are on their own personal trajectory of development, not necessarily and perhaps nothing to do with growth or betterment or advancement, which seems to be the goal or ideal of many. That smacks of competition and of gaining position or grade through virtue and effort. Such ideas have no place at all in my view of things, which tends to be more along the lines that we are all flowing through an eternal process, picking up things, traits, ideas here and there, to no apparent purpose as far as I can see, but to participate in and enjoy the journey, through whatever our lot is at any given point along the course or cycle or whatever it is.

If reincarnation means anything, then it means that we are all part of a spiritual oneness (spiritual because that is essentially what we are, not the solid or flabby creature that faces us in the mirror every day, and oneness because we are not capable of self-existence outside of everything else) and therefore were either brought into being at the same time or more likely we all have always existed and always will exist. Not as the person that we are now, or with the relationships with others that we hold so dear (or not) in this life. I don't consider the people we are now nor the people that we know now will be at all recognisable to us or have any special meaning to us in any other life. That would make a mockery of the whole point of reincarnation. But there is a special something, some inextinguishable part of us that carries on to other times and places in and in-between physical lifetimes.

Some people believe that we spend most of our experience in a physical body on a sort of cyclic wheel of life until we are fit to get off that cycle. I don't see it that way. I also do not necessarily agree with the Rosicrucian cyclic idea that claims that we spend a period of something like a thousand years between physical existences, absorbing the lessons of the previous and preparing for the next by setting goals and choosing parents. Neither of those regimented schemes satisfactorily explain the path or purpose of existence for me personally. But I would like to know just what does go on 'in-between' and how many lifetimes each of us may have experienced.

I read somewhere that someone has calculated that in all of human history there have been something like 150 billion separate human lives. I have no way of knowing how accurate that figure may be, but if we take it as a starting point for calculation, how many of those lives were mine, or yours?

There are some 7+ billion of us alive right now. In another 40 years or so there could be 14 billion simultaneously living humans, god help us if it ever comes to that. So, 7 billion now plus however many there are in the state of in-between, and let us suggest that there could never be more than 14 billion simultaneous lives ever, as a point of conjecture. So, on average, dividing 14 into 150, it seems that we may (with the parameters as stated) each have experienced a maximum of 11 different physical lifetimes, so far, over the span of human history.

Talking about the span of human history, if we tentatively take that to be a period of from a high of 2 million years to a low of 250,000 years as claimed by the Anunaki theorists of the alien god creators and meshing in well with the archeological history of homo sapiens, there has been an average mean time between lifetimes of somewhere between 182,000 down to 23,000 years. Neither of those period limits fit in well with either of the main cyclic theories of existence but, as I implied earlier, ancient knowledge carries no more validity than insights we may gain from what has been revealed through discovery in modern times up to today, and no-one knows anything about these things for sure.

It could be said though that as the human population grew from something in the order of 1 billion people to 7 billion over only the last two hundred years or so, that as more bodies became available, more of us could have reincarnated at any point in recent time, with the effect that the majority of those 11 personal lifetimes (as calculated) could have been enacted over the last two hundred years. They would have to have been mostly short lifetimes for that to be true, but when you consider the many millions of ourselves we have collectively killed through warfare and other means over that most recent period, a great many lives have indeed been on the short side.

 Oh, I think I may have accidentally discovered a thought linking between the reincarnation theory and the alien god theory in the previous two paragraphs.  What if our reincarnations only started since the time of homo sapiens 250,000 years ago, which links in with the mythic history of the alien gods getting fed up with doing all of the work themselves and deciding to make a 'worker' race, which turned out to be homo sapiens, us?  That is a positive link if it should turn out to be true.

There's something to think about.  But remember, it is only conjecture.  Don't be taken in by what seems to be bullshit to you.  But if this all seems too hard to think about, maybe you have spent too much time partying in this and previous lifetimes.  It seems that way of life is one of the possible choices that is open to us, until we are ready to move on but, given that life is precious, wouldn't it be considered a total waste to spend it partying?