"Actually, that reminds me…" I pulled out my phone and flicked through my notes. "There's this great snippet from Conversations With God. Hold on."
I have not said your values are wrong. But neither are they right. They are simply judgments. Assessments. Decisions. For the most part, they are decisions made not by you, but by someone else. Your parents, perhaps. Your religion. Your teachers, historians, politicians.
Very few of the value judgments you have incorporated into your truth are judgments you, yourself, have made based on your own experience. Yet experience is what you came here for — and out of your experience were you to create yourself. You have created yourself out of the experience of others. If there were such a thing as sin, this would be it: to allow yourself to become what you are because of the experience of others. This is the “sin” you have committed. All of you. You do not await your own experience, you accept the experience of others as gospel (literally), and then, when you encounter the actual experience for the first time, you overlay what you think you already know onto the encounter.
If you did not do this, you might have a wholly different experience — one that might render your original teacher or source wrong. In most cases, you don’t want to make your parents, your schools, your religions, your traditions, your holy scriptures wrong — so you deny your own experience in favor of what you have been told to think.
Neale Donald Walsch
"God strikes again," Zac said. "I think we all know that feeling."
"Yep. It's like I know I shouldn't care what other people think, but I care what other people think. And I hate that I care what other people think. Anyway… blah, blah, blah — I'll skip this bit. Okay, here."
These opinions, judgments, and ideas have run directly contradictory to your own experience, yet because you are loathe to make your teachers wrong, you convince yourself it must be your experience that is wrong. The result is that you have betrayed your true truth about this subject — with devastating results.
You have done the same thing with money. Every time in your life that you have had lots and lots of money, you have felt great. You felt great receiving it, and you felt great spending it. There was nothing bad about it, nothing evil, nothing inherently “wrong.” Yet you have so deeply ingrained within you the teachings of others on this subject that you have rejected your experience in favor of “truth.”
Having adopted this “truth” as your own, you have formed thoughts around it — thoughts which are creative. You have thus created a personal reality around money which pushes it away from you — for why would you seek to attract that which is not good?
Neale Donald Walsch
"Do you believe that?" Zac asked. "About money? About it being wrong?"
"No," I laughed. "I fucking love money! Money is choice and freedom! Money just makes you more of who you already are. If you're a lovely person and you have a lot of money, then money allows you to amplify your loveliness and be more lovely and do more lovely things. And if you're an asshole, then money just amplifies your assholery and allows you to be even more of an asshole. Money isn't good — people are. And money isn't evil — people are. The common denominator, then, is not money. It's people. And people are just consciousness.
That's why I find it strange when people say that money is the root of all evil. That's like saying a hammer is the root of all evil. You can use a hammer to build a bed for a homeless person or hit that homeless person in the head and kill them. The hammer isn't the problem.
But I guess my hangup with money is that I was raised with a protestant work ethic. My parents both worked very hard to give us a good life. Every morning Dad would get up at, like, four a.m. and go to work and get home late at night. He'd say to us at dinner, 'I've got to get up early and work hard so I can send you kids to private schools' because we lived in the country and the schools there provided pretty limited opportunities."
Zac smiled. "Preaching to the choir, Nikki. I went to school on the coast. One of the best decisions I made was getting out of that small town and seeing what lay beyond it."
"Yeah," I agreed. "Anyway, I guess I just had this belief system hammered into me that you have to be a martyr and work hard and suffer a bit to earn money, and if you aren't working hard, then you're lazy. So if I'm working on things that I love and am curious about, and I'm not earning money from them, then I'm lazy. And lazy people don't deserve money, because you have to earn it and work hard for it.
So you can see that it's just a bit of a knot in my neural network. It's like a piece of circular logic that I can't unravel unless I change a programmed belief somehow. I don't have a problem with working hard, because I can be a bit obsessive about work sometimes. But I do have a problem with working hard on things that I'm not interested in or inspired by. I think I have that to a higher degree than other people. If I have to do something I think is trivial, my mind will wander onto a question like, 'why does the mass of an object increase as time slows down?' or something like that.
I mean, in my mind, the importance of pushing pixels around on a screen or answering an email pales in comparison to figuring out this riddle. Actually, it's more than that — solving this riddle feels urgent. I don't understand why other people don't think it is urgent. We've got many problems in the world, and they aren't going to solve themselves. If we can just figure out the Truth of things, then surely that will go a long way to helping, right?"
Zac laughed. "What do your parents call it? You know... when you space out? The Nikki bubble?"
"Yeah," I smiled. "Everyone loves to laugh at it, but I can't think unless I tune out all the noise. If I don't erect a barrier that makes me oblivious, I just absorb everything like a sponge, and it's quite overwhelming."
Zac chuckled again. "Do you remember last Friday when we were out at King Street Wharf, and Brett and Bryce were sitting across the table from you as you spaced out. When you noticed them whispering about you, you were like, 'What?!' and Bryce said, 'We were just guessing what you were thinking about. I guessed that you were unraveling the secrets and mysteries of the universe'. And then you looked really awkward because he'd just read your mind."
"Well, someone had spilled salt on the table! I was wondering if there was a deeply hidden order within the pattern the salt made!"
"Like Jesus toast?" Zac asked.
"No. Just, like, what's the purpose of the pattern? Why that pattern? Why not another pattern? Nothing is random. I sit around watching everything, and I can't help but imagine people and objects as little electrons."
"Electrons?"
"Yeah. Like in Bohm's plasmas. All these people and objects are moving about the world in 'random' ways, but when you zoom out, it's like the universe is performing a highly coordinated dance. I just see order everywhere."
Zac stroked his stubbly chin. "Hmmm… deep questions."
"Anyway," I said. "Back to the money stuff. I guess, in a way, I'm getting a physical experience of my own consciousness. I believe I am spending time on unpaid work, so it would be shocking and confusing for money to just show up in my bank account for unpaid work. The prediction error would be too large-"
"Prediction error?" Zac asked. "Like what you talked about earlier this evening? Surprise?"
