Capitalism, at least in its current form, is working less and less for many people. Energy companies are raking in massive profits while many people can no longer pay their electric bills. What difference does inner money work make when things happen on the outside that I have no influence on and that affect me in such a profound way?
Well, I can’t pretend to have a real solution. However, my deepest belief is that our individual consciousness is the key to individual solutions to start off with, which will come into the collective. My bet has been ‘love and consciousness’ for the last 30 plus years, that’s where I’ve been focusing my energy. From that space, somehow the solutions and synchronicities that occur look like magic. Whether it’s going to be sufficient for the energy crisis and all the crises we’ve got going on right now, I don’t know. I’ve never experienced such a series of concurrent uncertainties, and I doubt anybody alive has. We’re in a really strong, volatile, uncertain period, affecting all of us and affecting everything.
A recent article in the Guardian talks about super rich ‘preppers’ who are designing mega bunkers with self-sustaining farms. One of their biggest concerns is “how do we keep the people that are now designing our security systems from overtaking the bunker when the apocalypse is happening?” Can their money protect them in the event of a systemic collapse?
My questioning around that is, what’s the quality of life and what’s the quality of life for these billionaires with these concerns right now? They’re spending all their time and their focus somewhere, I imagine in the desert somewhere in air conditioning, worrying about their future. If you can afford that sort of money, you can probably build that stuff. But does it create a happy life?
These preppers have fallen prey to a mindset that we’ve all been socialised into; this belief that if I only have enough money, then I can create all the safety, security, and creature comforts that I will ever want. But that’s the old mindset which you call the ‘normal regime’. Which different way to live life do you propagate?
It’s turning that on its head and starting by asking yourself, bottom line, why am I here, really? What was the purpose of my being on this planet to start off with? Getting in touch with one’s – what I call – ‘source’. That’s the source of your basic happiness, doing what you love in life and loving what you’re doing. And if you do that, you’re not focused on these fears.
There’s a way of life that you call the ‘natural regime’, a mindset in which we connect to our source and do what we love. This kind of world sounds very magical to many people because it’s so far removed from their actual experience. How would our economy change if we moved into this natural regime?
If you go to, as I have done, to the extreme, which is really what you’re asking, there wouldn’t be any money. There wouldn’t even need to be any money because you’d be so tuned in to yourself and to the collective that you would be doing what you love. At the moment you produced a product or a service, somebody would be there who would be needing it because we would all be so interconnected. That would do away with even the need for money. But we’re nowhere near that yet. Money is just the surrogate, and the market is just the surrogate to fill in until we have that level of connectedness and consciousness together.
The system we’re using right now, the ‘normal regime’, was only created 350 years ago. The underlying motivation for it is fear. Fear was used, I think, very consciously to bring people into the factories, to create linear line production and material products. If you ask people now, we have sufficiency, at least in the West, of material products. The needs change to immaterial things but we’re using the same system; working too hard to earn money to try and get peace and security – and that doesn’t work.
But if they follow what I call the ‘natural regime’, it does feel like magic. You can ask anybody who started up a new business and you’ll find out that they all start with a vision, with passion behind the vision, and they can tell story after story of the magic that occurs when they’ve got passion behind their vision. People show up that they haven’t expected, the resources arrive, it’s easy to get the bank credit.
In this more natural regime, where people are driven by their vision and by their purpose, what would organisations even look like?
Well, completely different to today. I’m talking about larger, medium sized or large organisations which are built for industrial production with a pyramidal organigram that was wonderful for linear production. We need to be very grateful for our recent ancestors, for all the material products that we all enjoy today, every day, including technology, solar panels, computers, and back to the railway engine. We all take these things for granted now, but they are the products of that ‘normal’ system. As we’re moving into the natural system, people are trying to flatten hierarchies. If you look at nature, nature is working on a cellular basis, fractal, and cellular basis. The most advanced organisations or companies, enterprises that I know are starting to move into that as a kind of model, creating cells, autonomous cells maximum 25 to 35 people in a cell. If you imagine some of the largest organisations now the question is: can they change sufficiently to adapt from the present structure into such a structure?
Of course, it’s easier for a start-up to go from scratch but I believe this is going to be the eventual challenge. These larger monoliths are going to break down or already are breaking down. They won’t be adaptive, innovative, creative, or autonomous enough to create the solutions capable of answering the big questions of today. It has to do with collective consciousness now and they can’t stop being pyramids until consciousness raises generally.
In the current state we’re still in, what do you feel is the role of organisations today? Where can they be part of a solution or help people move towards possible solutions?
I’m hesitating with the word ‘organisation’. We tend to give organisations and companies an idea that they exist like people and that Nestlé is a person and Novartis is a person and you move over to the United States, and you have Coca-Cola as a person. Legally they are treated as persons, my belief is that if you treat them like that they are like phantoms. What I look at is who is actually running the organisation? The person I call ‘source’. And the question would be: what can that person do? What kind of influence is that person holding? If there is a conscious source those individuals can do a lot with the people that they are influencing. And I’m talking not just about the people say collectively within what you’d call an organisation, the employees, for example, but in terms of the relationship to the customers, relationship to government, relationship to the whole collective. This is a whole different lens of looking at what’s going on in terms of collectivity which I think is more meaningful than trying to ask well, what can Nestlé do in the world?
It is unfortunately not always the case that the source is the most conscious person in the organisation. What can anyone currently working in an organisation do, even if their ‘source’ may not be creating the kind of environment they aspire to have?
You can still do your inner work. If you are rising in consciousness more than the person you’re reporting to, you will find that too limiting. What you will find yourself wanting to do is either develop the whole system, which could be your enterprise or organisation, or you will need to jump out of it to be able to spread your wings and start to realise yourself and create a new enterprise which is more related to what you love doing and ultimately to why you’re here. The bottom line for me, and I’m happy to find that more and more people are understanding this, has always been love and consciousness. That’s a better, bigger bottom line than money. Money tends to be the bottom line and that’s a trap. When the enterprise is less profitable – then everybody jumps on into the money. And that’s the real challenge, to remain focused on the bottom line of love and consciousness when maybe things are not going so well right now.
The bottom line for me has always been love and consciousness. That’s a better, bigger bottom line than money.
You said yourself that these are the most volatile times you have experienced. Where do you get your optimism from?
Well, I don’t know if I’m so optimistic. I actually do look at all the pessimism, I look at the seriousness of the issues that we’re facing. But I try to live what I’ve been talking about. In other words, to look at what am I here for? What do I want to do next? And I find that while I’m in touch with my own vision and my own next steps, I get resourced. My energy comes from that. It doesn’t come from anything else. So that would be my recommendation, for anybody to just find out what your personal vision is and just stay focused on that and the next steps, which don’t have to be big ones, they’re very often trivial ones.