The Circle of Gold and the Pyramid of Money

"Earth's crammed with heaven." Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Years ago, Ram Dass's guru smirked and giggled as he scanned Ram Dass's future. "Women and gold!" he cackled. The part of the story about women can wait.

 But the gold part came waltzing into my life one day in Southern California where I lived in my palm frond hut by the beach. Dear friends that I considered to be very New Age, pure, and spiritual came through town with a magic "circle of gold".

This Circle of Gold confirmed what we all knew, which was that the universe was abundant with all good things, and all you had to do was ask, and you'd 'manifest' gold or whatever you wanted. Just send $50 to the first person on the list, and five names down the list, you would be inundated with money in the mail.

Ram Dass was in on this, so everyone knew it was cool, right?

True to the promise, a few short weeks later, I was showered with lots of letters containing fifty dollar bills, which was really cool! 

But soon after I began to hear back from those were the last ones to join this game and could not find anyone else to recruit, because everyone they knew already had bought in. We all looked around and sort of realized that endless growth might not be so unlimited. (Ram Dass had to publicly apologize to the community. See "Egg on my Beard", New Age magazine)

Recently I have seen that this pattern is in the whole world. Endless exponential growth may not be the only way to prosperity and well being.

 What has algorithms of endless growth? Our money system, with its need for relentless growth (to repay debt set to always grow a little faster), and the cancer cell. 

The time in nature for rapid geometric growth is early life, childhood. It is a phase of life, not a permanent pattern. 

We could structure our money system to favor conservation, sustainability, and care instead, by tweaking with interest, incentives, and other things. That would be more in harmony with the algorithms of our Shared Earth, more along the lines of a perpetual motion machine, as long as we don't destroy it in our childhood phase...(for more in depth discussion, see Sacred Economics)