Principles of True Economy - Jeff Vander Clute

by Jeff Vander Clute

1 April 2020 (Rev. 27 March 2021)

The last time I was inspired to write about money and economy (See: Money Is Alive and Well) was two weeks before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic. Now that much of the world has shut down economically, with serious consequences for millions of people, the concept of humanity’s Great Transition has suddenly become very real. At the same time I have been receiving visions in meditation with a new level of clarity, and I have a sense that these “downloads” offer clues that can help us to navigate through this turbulent moment in history.

Here are two of the powerful questions that I have been meditating on:

• What is a true economy, and what are its principles?
• What is money, and how does it support a true economy?

Humanity’s answers to these questions, and our often-unconscious beliefs about money and economy, greatly influence how we relate to one another, to other life forms, and to life itself. Now that the world economy appears to be faltering, a window has opened up during which we can reconsider our foundational assumptions, definitions, and beliefs about value and how society is organized. This is a golden opportunity to source different answers to the above questions by listening to the wisdom that exists within us. The responses we receive can provide a roadmap for thriving in the post-Coronavirus world. As we listen deeply and upgrade our notions of money and economy, we will co-create new economic and governance models that are better suited for life in the 21st century and beyond.

What follows is a set of interconnected understandings that came when I went still and invited the most awakened version of humanity to be revealed through the lens of economy and money.

What Is a True Economy?

The most successful economy will be an awakened economy, in which businesses and individuals interact with unprecedented levels of consciousness and love. When I asked the question “What is an optimal name for such an economic system?”, the phrase that came to me was “true economy.” Then, as I contemplated the nature of a true economy, I could see and feel that it has certain characteristics:

• Activities that benefit all and harm none are naturally supported.
• People and communities have immense freedom to develop their creativity.
• Human communities and ecosystems are uplifted by economic activity.
• Businesses prosper without compromising the web of life.
• People are supported in realizing their true nature.

In addition, I received a set of 11 principles for co-creating such an economy.

11 Principles of True Economy

1. Anchor Assets: The foundation of economy for each community, and each bioregion, is the health of its ecosystems. Healthy ecosystems attract and sustain life.

2. Leveling Out: A true economy keeps value flowing, eliminates unhealthy inequalities, and ensures that everyone’s basic needs are met ongoingly.

3. Generosity: The participants in a true economy always give more of themselves than the minimum because it feels good to do so. This quality of interacting increases the well-being of all.

4. Value Yourself: When you appreciate your own immense value within the web of life, you can more easily appreciate the value of others and their contributions.

5. Do What You Love: In a healthy ecosystem, there is abundant energy available to create everything you need by doing what you love to do and sharing the results.

6. Life = Value = Life: Life is the source of value and life experiences are what people value. There are countless forms of value, and they all contribute to increasing the quality of life. (What does not increase the quality of life has no value.)

7. Measure Health: By continually measuring, tracking, and improving the health of nature, people, and communities, it is possible to incentivize human activities that increase true wealth.

8. Money Spirals: The circulation of money through webs of reciprocity and beneficial interaction stimulates people’s creativity, adds life energy to the economy, and lifts everyone with each iteration.

9. Cultivate Wealth (in a deep sense): Grow and nurture assets, intentionally, that rise in worth as the well-being of people and nature increases. Harvest the wealth, consciously, distribute it fairly, and continue the cycle.

10. Protect People and Ecosystems: Conserve, enhance, and celebrate the upward spiral of healthy interactions amongst the natural environment, the built environment, and humans.

11. Mutually Assured Thriving: The structures of a true economy strongly favor activities and interactions that benefit all and harm no one. The thriving of one requires the thriving of all, and a healthy whole requires healthy individuals.

What Is Money, and How Does It Support a True Economy?

In a future article, we will explore a multi-part answer that came in response to the question “What is money, and how does it support a true economy?” Here are the key points that emerged from the inquiry:

1. A true money system is an expression of our ultimate interrelatedness.
2. Money is an agreement to care for one another and life.
3. The nature of money is unenclosable. Money finds ways around borders and other limitations.
4. Money channels unlimited creative energy into manifestation.
5. Money is the relational consciousness of the planetary superorganism, under the supervision of life.

Acknowledgement

The articulation of the 11 principles has been greatly inspired by LOVE TO, a leading-edge incubator and funder of regenerative businesses and business clusters. The LOVE TO group of companies is quietly pioneering the implementation of the new economy with partners who have understood these principles for a long time. Special thanks to Tim Bennett, founder of LOVE TO, for his co-creative assistance.

Related Resources

Money Is Alive and Well
Foundational Alignment: The Teaching of Money 

England's farmers to be paid to 'rewild' land

The water vole is one of the rare species to be helped by the schemes. Photograph: Mark Smith/Alamy

Farmers in England will be given taxpayers’ cash to rewild their land, under plans for large-scale nature recovery projects announced by the government. These will lead to vast tracts of land being newly managed to conserve species, provide habitats for wildlife and restore health to rivers and streams.

 

George Eustice, the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, said the aim was for wildlife and nature protection to run alongside food production as a matter of course for most farmers. He is expected to tell farmers at the Oxford Farming Conference on Thursday: 

 "We want to see profitable farm businesses producing nutritious food and underpinning a growing rural economy, where nature is recovering and people have better access to it. Through our new schemes, we are going to work with farmers and land managers to halt the decline in species, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, increase woodland, improve water and air quality and create more space for nature." 

To read the full article, CLICK HERE

By Fiona Harvey
The Guardian
Thu, 06 Jan 2022 07:00 UTC 

After the Coronavirus: A Vision

By Jeff Vander Clute, 17 March 2020

 Your species will live a very long time by sharing and prioritizing the well-being of all. 

This channeled piece offers a way to view the Coronavirus experience through positive, hopeful eyes. Let us keep asking ourselves, "How can this collective experience we are going through open the doors to an experience of humanity's higher purpose here on the planet?".

A few days after “A Message from the Coronavirus” began circulating, I (Jeffrey) read the following headline: “No one knows what the post-coronavirus reality will be like.” This motivated me to ask life itself for its perspective on where the world is heading. I figured that if life could speak – and it did! – it would have much to say about what is on the other side of the present global crisis. Once again I was heartened by the wisdom that came through in response. Breathe deeply and allow your entire system to be bathed by Love.

Humanity will survive and be stronger than before. You have a glorious future ahead of you. Seize this opportunity to evolve your ways of being together. Learn to be better stewards of the planet. Take time to meditate or rest in stillness. Your societies will restructure around different principles after this experience. Trust that the process has its wisdom, that life is here for you and is always supporting your highest good. To those who wonder whether the universe is friendly or not, I answer that it is a friendly place – the friendliest possible. That can be your experience on the other side of this moment of burning away and annealing. It is friendly to teach. It is friendly to strengthen. It is friendly to awaken the sleeping ones. I do this as gently as I can, out of love. The time has come for you to know a much more glorious reality.

1. The coronavirus situation is a healing crisis that marks the beginning of a new epoch of human development characterized by operating beyond the ego.1

Humans have reached an inflection point where you are shifting away from operating defensively out of fear of what might happen to acting in alignment with a growing sense of what is good for the whole of life. Naturally, the whole of life includes all humans and all of nature. So you are included. Do not be afraid. A growing number of you are realizing that what is truly beneficial, and that which truly works for the long term, is simultaneously good for the totality of life as well as for the individuals. It is rigorously true that there can be no trade-off between individual thriving and the thriving of communities and the natural world. The way that you can evaluate what will best serve the whole of life is through practicing methods of intuitive discernment. The transition from analysis (which separates) and individualistic behaviors to holistic perception and wise action (which arises from wholeness) is not an easy one; however, this is the transition that your species is now required to make, and you have all the support you need.

2. Peace will become a true priority.2

It follows from the principle that all must benefit and none may be excluded that peaceful co-existence is the true state of being within collectivity. Any other state is a fearful illusion. You have perhaps not sufficiently considered the extent to which this is a radical proposition. Your entire economy, and almost all of your interactions, are predicated upon the notion that there are separate “parties” that must negotiate very well in order to achieve outcomes that satisfy their own interest and desire to win at the expense of others. These are childish ways. You do not need to prove your worth by winning. Realize instead that the shared objective of all who engage in any form of interaction, not just financial exchange, is equitable participation and the fair distribution of life experiences. Your species will live a very long time by sharing and prioritizing the well-being of all. You will live with greater health and enjoy life more when your energies are directed toward the fulfillment of communal aspiration. In this way you discover the peace that always is. You would do well to enshrine peace as a design objective in your societies, and in your inner being. It is a compass heading that can be relied upon.

3. Through empathy, humans will arrive at the Remembrance of who they are.

Have you noticed that the experience of oneness replaces all prior ideas of yourself as a separate being who has to compete for your bread and butter? The state of peace enables you to more easily recognize the underlying unity that is at the heart of all human interactions. It is in your heart that you remember who you are from the standpoint of soul and the light that radiates through your individual body and mind. The Remembrance, with a capital R, is a relaxation into the certainty that you are held by life because you are life, despite all appearances to the contrary. You can relax because everything that you thought you needed to do to carve out an existence is moot. You exist, you belong, you are a shining human embodiment of the One, which you are now in the process of remembering. The empathy that so many of you are now feeling on account of the suffering of others is helping you to make the connection energetically with your heart, which, again, is where the awakening is already happening. Love one another, love yourself, grieve when loss happens, and also know that no one is ever lost. This stage of forgetfulness will soon be past, the threshold crossed, the new day begun.

4. Humanity will become a conscious superorganism.3

You are all my children. We are a family. This family has its own consciousness, its own destiny, and its own path of fulfillment. Because you are realizing oneness, you have growing access to the perceptions and agency of the human family as a whole. Imagine that you and your siblings can all see what I see, which begins with how beautiful you are. Imagine that you can focus the eyes of the world and see the distant shores of creation, and instantly perceive what is happening anywhere on the planet. From the individual perspective, and with your current world-view, this may seem improbable. When you experience this elevated beingness, however, you will not think to ask for proof. The analogy of your hands may be helpful here. Touch one fingertip to the keyboard and that is like the experience of a single human being. Place all of your fingertips on the keyboard and you feel the collective experience of many individuals. Practice typing and you will know the feeling of the orchestrated wholeness that easily produces great works of writing. Now know that there is a part of you that sails above what you thought was you. Allow yourself to rise to this perspective and see that all humans are like “fingers” typing on the “keyboard” of life. Or, if you prefer a musical simile, you are all playing the keyboard of the grandest piano. You are all music to my ears. The time has come to hear yourselves as I hear you.

5. Virtual interactions will facilitate connectivity on subtler levels of being.

It is a pleasure to share with you that the advent of virtual communication technologies is actually an evolutionary leap, even though it may feel like a retreat from real interactions. For you to sense and come to perceive the oneness of being directly, it is necessary to de-emphasize that which confirms your feelings of separation. When you engage with one another through a screen, additional capacities and senses are activated to compensate for the reduced input from the accustomed physical senses. Your new capacities and senses will serve you truly in the coming times, and will enable you to coordinate rapidly with the rest of the body, mind, and soul dimensions of humanity. Now, properly understood, your body is infinite. Finitude is an illusion, and as such there is only one body. This is why you will have no trouble with the superorganism. And when you know this, embodied experience will bring the bliss that flows eternally from the state of immortality, and you will find that physical death is a minor event. For the time being, the cessation of so much to-ing and fro-ing is bringing respite to Earth’s biosystems, and the trend of virtualizing your activities is healing you – yes – by enabling the conditions for you to experience a refined wholeness through newly activated senses. You will get your body back, and more!

Thank You

This has been quite a journey. If you will make a practice of connecting with me and asking how you can serve the whole of creation whenever you are uncertain, I can assure you that the quest that you are on together will get easier. There has never been a more auspicious time for you to awaken as a species. The circumstances of your world have rendered it all but impossible to remain asleep to the vaster implications of your being. Wake up now, dear ones, to the knowledge that we inhabit one indivisible field of aliveness. We are life. You are life. This is the new life that you have until now dreamt in secret. The fulfillment of this initial recognition is the healed world. Thank you for the service you are providing to me.

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Additional Resources

1 Jeff Vander Clute: “Navigating the Death and Transfiguration of the Ego”
2 Elisabet Sahtouris: “The Secret to Human Co-Existing”
3 Bruce Lipton: “Humanity as Superorganism: Our Hopeful Future”

Gregg Braden: Inspiration and Excitement for the World's Healing

"The sooner we can all agree that humanity, and Life as a whole, comes from a common, divine Creator, the sooner we can find ways to honor and live in balance with this sacred Life-force." 

Occasionally I'll come across a video that lights me up with inspiration and excitement for the world's healing. The following video is just that sort! Here is a compelling interview of Gregg Braden, "scientist, researcher and explorer" by George Noory, founder of one of the longest-running and most listened to radio shows exploring the paranormal.

Gregg Braden is a unique thought-leader. His roots are firmly in empirical science yet he couples these with a deep respect for the sacred and spiritual. his life-work has been a synthesis of the two. Trained in geology, he actually worked in the military-defense industry at the tail-end of the cold war between the USA and U.S.S.R.. Concerned that his work might be contributing more to the world's problems than to solutions he began a decades-long quest to seek out the wisdom-keepers of ancient spiritual texts in Egypt, Peru and Tibet to find knowledge for how to heal the many ills of modern society.

He has a highly attuned sense for pattern recognition and has used this ability in researching one of his latest books, The God Code, which brings together these disparate passions of his by exploring the corollaries between ancient spiritual texts and modern genetics. The message of this video will give you new hope that humanity can finally unite under the banner of our common origins and what it means if, as his research suggests, we are the result of some sort of divine consciousness' intentional creative act.

If you are a hard-core scientist/atheist, please don't be deterred by the spiritual, anti-orthodox nature of this video. There's something here for everyone!

Video's Title: This DNA Discovery Is Completely Beyond Imagination | Gregg Braden