Each year, May 1st marks International Worker’s Day. It is recognized as a national holiday in fact, in more than 80 countries. In the year 2012, tens of thousands of people around the world are taking to the streets to make their voices heard, more perhaps than ever before on this day. Why so? Because as more and more people awaken, or at least look with conscious eyes at the state of the world, it is clear to see that something is gravely out of balance when it comes to work, money and business.
Amidst the global shift in consciousness, days like this are now being treated more seriously where people want to make their voices heard. Many marches, protests and even revolutions have been springing up around our planet, especially in these past few years. For example, the Occupy Wall Street movement mobilized many people and workers who have had enough of a system that is not serving the greater good. Since its inception, some have seen this movement as something long overdue, while others scorned the actions of this movement. Some saw the people involved as courageous renegades, while others saw them as lazy troublemakers.
However you may feel about these types of actions or “movements” and whatever your thoughts are about the current economy; the way money is made and traded in the world; the way business is run; and the working conditions of those in both developed and underdeveloped countries, something should be quite clear if you allow yourself to see the big picture with consciousness infused eyes. Something isn’t quite right. There is a serious imbalance in how the world’s resources are divided, a crisis in how the world’s resources are used, and a breakdown of the human experience, which currently revolves around money.
And so today, no matter where you are and what your financial situation is, I invite you to consider two serious reflection questions for your personal life: “Who are you working for?” and “What are you working for?” The alarm bells that have gone off on this planet to get our attention about these topics are not going away any time soon. At least not until something significant changes. They will continue to become more obvious in each of our lives, in one way or another, so that we may re-examine our personal approach to work, money and the current state of the world.
The State of World Affairs & Economies
The average person today, living in the industrial countries, leads a very predictable life. Most people wake up in the morning, tired due to not having gotten enough sleep, and head off to work, where they will spend the majority of their day. Upon coming home in the evening, drained and tired, they have a few hours with their family, chores and television. On the weekends, malls and stores are the most densely populated places, as cash registers and credit cards do their whimsical dance. These cycles play out day after day, and year after year, summing up as the “work, buy stuff and pay bills” dance of life.
But is this what the human experience is all about?
I won’t pretend to be an expert on world economies or the details of its financial affairs. But I can share some basic facts with certainty. Constant growth of any system or organism is not only unsustainable, it is also unrealistic. It is no surprise most people, families and countries are in serious debt. Next, giving life and death value to paper and metal items, that for the most part are completely illusory isn’t a viable way to live. And finally, paying interest on artificial money that actually doesn’t exist is nothing short of absurd. And yet, we are allowing this to happen daily as we give our full participation to it.
During university, I took one class in economics. It was painful to say the least. It didn’t help that I simply wasn’t interested in how the business world or money supply works. As I entered the working world as an adult, I equipped myself with the basic tools to be a “good citizen” and basically know the basics of the game. Make money, pay your bills and buy stuff. Like everyone else, I played the money and working game never questioning the logic, or deeper foundations that this system ran on. Sure, there was a painful twinge when I saw how much was deducted off of each paycheck, or how much interest was being charged on the mortgage. But as every other good citizen, I played the game, for what else is one to do? This is how it works after all, isn’t it?
It was alongside my personal spiritual awakening that began about 6 years ago, when my eyes opened, and wide, to everything. For the past few years I actively engaged in understanding how the working and monetary system *really* works, and I was shocked, to say the least, as to what I learned and found out. This was definitely not what the economics classes in schools teach. From feelings of anger to betrayal, those of you who have looked into these things yourselves, know very well what I am talking about. It is nothing short of criminal as to how the current monetary system is run, making many slave relentlessly without end, while a tiny few gain more wealth than any one human being would ever need.
Again, many people reply with hopeless expressions as to what else can one do? To keep one’s house, we *have to* pay our mortgages. To buy our food, or any other necessary or pleasurable items, we *have to* present some form of accepted currency. There is no other way around it whether we like it or not. Or is there?
See the best thing about waking up and growing in consciousness, is realizing first and foremost that we ALWAYS have a choice. And right now the best choice as I see it, is simply how little or how much are you willing to participate in a system that is in one way or another hurting every human being on this planet.
Who Are You Working For?
The answer to this question is two-fold. Directly, who are you working for, as in what company; and indirectly, as in who are you really working for at the end of the day. While we are going to focus on the latter part here, I invite you to consider for yourself both approaches to this question. As more of us awaken, we all too often realize that the company or organization we are working for is completely out of alignment with our personal values, or does not represent who we are and what we stand for. I know I faced this situation myself a few years ago, as has my husband. It is not easy to wake up one day and realize that the very place which “makes you a living” is operating in a way that is in complete opposition to your personal values.
At that point, it is clear there is a decision to be made. Without attaching judgement, we know that many choose the safer path and try to look beyond who they work for, focusing rather on the comfort of having a job and secure paycheck. However, others of us are unable to turn our heads or bury them in the sand, ignoring the facts. Many people each day are leaving jobs, companies and corporations which their heart and soul can no longer allow them to support, or invest their personal energy in. When we consciously consider the harm that is coming from many of these, it is hard to look the other way. Therefore there is no better time to ask yourself if who you currently work for is supporting and creating a better world for all, or doing the very opposite in what they produce, and how they treat the environment, their employees and the people of this planet due to the products and services they provide. And may we not be fooled either, as it is not enough today to just “make a donation to the right cause” that offer solutions, while being a direct cause of the very problems to begin with.
To address the indirect answer to this question, I am sure we all realize to some degree, that at the end of the day you are not working for you….nor your employer….not even the government. So who are you working for then? I don’t want to give you answers that you would be better off finding out on your own, along your personal journey, but let’s just consider this…..what do you do with your money after you earn it?
If you are like 99.99% of people in the world, you put it in the bank or go buy stuff with it. So who is really getting your money? The banks and corporations. Now before we go any further, this is not going to turn into any kind of attack on the banks and corporations as we do not need to fuel any more duality in this world. Although many stage various fights against the banks and corporations, as long as we support these structures, how can we really blame them? Either way, I personally do not see the world through the eyes of victims and villains. As hard as it still is for many to believe or understand we really do create our own reality. External events and systems only have as much power over us, as we allow them to have.
So what is the solution? Again, I don’t claim to have the answers for you, only you can find and decide what is best for you. But when it came to me and my life, there came a point where I (along with my husband) decided that we were simply not interested in working for the banks and the corporations any longer. And so we said good-bye to our $300,000 mortgage (which can be considered an average normal today), left our jobs (for the most part), cut our bills by more than half and chose to create a different life. A much simpler way of life; one based on freedom, not working as slaves for other entities. One based on quality of experiences, not quantity of things. As my husband explains it to this day “we decreased our financial obligations, while we increased the quality of our life.” Everything we have chosen to do is in contradiction to what society would classify as achieving success, and yet we have never felt more successful. We simply came to the unshakable conclusion that we were simply not interested in playing the game of “more” any longer and working for others. We would much rather enjoy life, and make the most of this human experience. It has been one of the best decisions of our life, and since then instead of fighting against some system or organization, we simply continue to take action in making ourselves as self-sufficient as possible, reducing our reliance on a system we simply cannot continue to support.
The steps you may wish to take in your own life can vary in so many ways. The most important thing is to allow yourself to have an honest and authentic reflection period with yourself (and your family) as to who *you* are really working for, and if this represents your personal values, and the life journey and experience you wish to have in this lifetime. From there, the more you tune into your inner being, the more you will be guided in knowing what to do. Yes, some decisions will take courage. The first step of breaking away from either some job, or material item, or home that does not represent your highest good can be the hardest. But when done, it will open so many possibilities and pave the way for a new way of life that can be of most worth to your personal human experience.
What Are You Working For?
One of, if not the most, favorite topics for people to complain about always seems to be money, and not having enough of it. I often wish people would ask themselves the true, deep and honest question of “enough for what?” We seem to be caught up in this vicious cycle of the obsession with more that we never stop long enough to see beyond the madness. The truth is we need so little to be happy, and often as research has shown time and time again, having more is no indication of being more happy. In fact from all of my observations and personal experience, the more “stuff” one has, the more “problems” one seems to have, and the less of authentic happiness. Just the clutter of stuff alone in your life, can be detrimental to your levels of creativity and feelings of well-being. So many of us feel heavy and weighed down by life and all the obligations of it, not realizing how much of that is simply self-generated. And just like we put it there to begin with, we can remove it when we should so choose.
From a pretty young age when asked “why do people go to work?” kids confidently answer “to make money”. And then of course the question that follows as to why we need money, is answered with “so that we can have things” or “buy stuff.”
So is that really all what it boils down to? Stuff? Stuff that is more often than not hurting the very planet that we live on, hurting our personal health and the welfare of others. I don’ know about you, but something about that just doesn’t *feel* right. I just know we are capable of so much better. The biggest stumbling block for the human being thus far has revolved around the concept of acquiring money and goods. So just imagine if we learned to free ourselves from that, the potential our life experience here would then take on!
When we step back, and look with clarity and consciousness at our life, it is not hard to see that we are caught up in vicious cycles of trying to get and maintain “things”. And it would be one thing if those “things” really brought our life, happiness, meaning and purpose, but as anyone in touch with themselves even a little bit knows, they don’t. It may sound cliché to some, but more and more of us are learning daily that true happiness really comes from within. It is never about what we have accomplished, the labels we use to define ourselves, or what we have, but about the depth to which we know the potential of who we really are.
Therefore in questioning what you are working for, each person has to go through an honest inventory of their priorities and values, in order to choose what actions best represent what they really want out of life.
Closing Thoughts
Today, when I consider the physical world around me that I share with the collective consciousness, it is hard at times to look beyond the extreme injustice, disparity and inequality that exists on this planet. It is hard to believe we have allowed things to get to the point they have.
I realize very well that some of the above mentioned questions are going to be very tough for some of us to answer for ourselves honestly. Many of us are still heavily tied to our job descriptions, status of our financial earnings and/or the possessions we have acquired to date. But this is one of the challenges and opportunities of personal growth and evolution. When we make peace with the discomfort, we enable ourselves to shed what we have outgrown and what no longer serves us. In this way we free ourselves and enrich the quality of our human experience, as we move forward on our evolutionary path.
In the end, as I always mention we each must choose what feels most right to us at any given time. I know for myself, I choose not to be enslaved by a system that is working against my personal well-being and the common good of all. When we become the change we wish to see, we pave the way for a new way of life for all.