Volume 4, Issue 12
We are at Mohonk Mountain House looking out over the lake from the terrace of our Victorian room. The crescent moon rises triumphantly over Mohonk Tower and reflects in the still lake.
Photo Courtesy of Mohonk Mountain House
When life is so good, why bring up downside scenarios? I guess it’s because I get so many emails announcing the collapse of the world economic order. What will happen when the U.S. can’t pay its debts?
Likely we will all sink into one of those depressing worldwide Depressions again. Everything is so linked globally that the sputtering main engine of growth and innovation will instantly cascade.
Those already at the bottom will suffer the most. Those in the middle will put away the dream of retirement, cut back on luxuries, hunker down and work smarter. Those who have been doing something that many other people find extremely useful will not suffer as much as everybody else, but everyone except the billionaires will feel it.
Probably we will waste a lot of time blaming each other for who caused it. Hate-jocks of the airwaves will redouble their audiences until the center gets the anger out of their system, then the ratings will shrink back to the hate core audience.
Most of the people we know will be in the same boat. A deeper camaraderie will develop. We’re all in this together. We’ll all take care of each other, as in a war front.
Hopefully there will come a bounce back in terms of the average person dealing with the situation courageously and putting aside distracting and counterproductive kneejerk chemical reactions inside oneself. This will make us stronger as individuals and thus as society.
The economic system that emerges from a widespread Flow state orientation, under the pressure of a worldwide Depression, will be more sturdy and less given to oscillation. Most of all it will be fair — a true win/win deal where the dissatisfied minority is extremely small and not necessarily rational.
This will come more from education provisioning than giveaways — or to put it another way, a system where lifelong education is guaranteed and is just as important as lifelong physical health. A way of bringing in the private sector to augment the education system, designed to be less painful for those who must and/or cannot get sufficient student loans to continue all the way.
Most importantly, an education system that focuses on bringing out* the gifts of each individual, from the start, and always involving work/study where one is earning something doing some level of real work from the earliest ages. In addition, children who learn about the charitable sector early in their lives, when their hearts naturally go out to other people, makes them more adult and maybe even brings them to Observer or Flow states.
In other words, we will get through it. Civilization will not collapse. We’ve dealt with Depressions before and we have learned something from each one that will help us here, if it indeed comes as it logically ought to. However, the future is being created by our thoughts, and we can still get more creative.
Dreading some specific future is a way of tuning it in to materialization. Dread is an attractive force, as elucidated in You Are The Universe: Imagine That.
Rising to the current and future challenges in the game spirit is a sign that one has “gotten it” about Life.
Best to all,
Bill
*The word “education” is derived from the Latin root “educare”. While education refers to collection of worldly facts, educare is to bring out from within. Education is for a living while educare is for life. ~ Sri Sathya Sai Baba (back)
My new book, You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available.
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