Gateway ceremonies

Let’s use the analogy of a bubble, an economic bubble. Every dream sphere is like a bubble that is full of scraps of paper with symbols on it [money], thoughts, and ideas. The bubble itself, the container of the dream, is the image.

An economic bubble, sometimes referred to as a speculative bubble, a market bubble, a price bubble, a financial bubble, or a speculative mania, is …

“ … trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values”. ~ Ronald King, , Vernon Smith, Arlington Williams, and Mark van Boening in “The Robustness of Bubbles and Crashes in Experimental Stock Markets”

Burst the bubble

To understand what makes it tick we have to get inside the image balloon. We can burst the bubble with an act of power, or let the air escape slowly. The slow release of the air is our ongoing pain. Once the balloon is deflated, we can get inside our systems to see what’s there.

We can pull out one closed symbol after another. These are the things we don’t want to look at. And we waste a lot of energy with our “not-looking”.

We can be tricking ourselves

“There can … be little doubt that … a deflation process is going on … Central Banks, particularly in the United States, have been making earlier and are more far-reaching efforts than have ever been undertaken before to combat the depression by a policy of credit expansion – with the result that the depression has lasted longer and has become more severe than any preceding one.”

“… all conceivable means have been used to prevent the readjustment from taking place; and one of those means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion … To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about …” ~ Friedrich Hayek, 76 years ago 🙂

Back to now. We are tricking ourselves into thinking that we are working really hard – we are busy with the bubble, aren’t we? – but we are throwing away symbols we don’t want to deal with, and with them, the opportunities for rebirth and growth. The symbols we throw away will aggregate again into yet another bubble. We humans are good at convincing ourselves we are okay when we are really in pain, at the effect of all our issues, and definitely not free.

Gateway ceremony for a healthy system

Gateway ceremonies are designed to burst our dream bubbles, and force us to confront some of our closed symbols. Such practices do not decrease our individual choice or freedom; they allow us to differentiate between preference and phobia. A real recovery is a process of discovery: it begins in pain and misery, and ends in prosperity.

How?

Investors figure out what their investments are really worth. Governments stop bailing out banks and businesses. Business people figure out how to turn a profit in a new, more local environment, with a new non-zero-sum game ethics in their backpacks. Households learn how to match their incomes against their expenses in a world where credit is less forthcoming and jobs are harder to find.

The faster these discoveries are made, the better.

But the first thing we have to realize is that we have been idiots

This story was written by Larry Hannigan in 1971 – The sole purpose was to explain the simple maths of reality and the current Banking System – that is – 100 plus NOTHING does NOT equal 105 – and that charging interest on something that is created out of nothing, makes it impossible to repay, giving great power to those who do create money out of nothing – ie the Banks.

Money is NOT a commodity, it is a system of debit-credit bookkeeping – nothing more. Mere scraps of paper with symbols on it. How can the poor owe the rich more when the banks, owned by the rich, fail, while the rich claim the right to earn more for their time and energy because they are “running more risks”?