Money addiction – and how to solve it

I’ve been doing a study of money lately – actually, some of this testing and research has been going on for years. (It helps that I was working for a “non-profit” cult for years, and got used to low personal income levels.)

The point that money is actually a fiction, an invented substance that doesn’t occur anywhere in Nature – that doesn’t help us with the problem that our modern society is built to run on that commodity.

Most people, particularly in urban areas, are set to be completely dependent on this invented commodity. If they don’t work at some money-paying job, they can’t eat and lose their housing and even Internet access.

Research down this line shows that most money-advisors are telling you to simply pay off all your debt and cut down regular expenses. And there are tons of ways to avoid paying unnecessary taxes.

But philosophically, the main problem people have is that they are addicted to the concept of money, just as any other drug or out-of-control behavior (sex, rock-and-roll, politics, activist-lobbying).

If you’ve been following this blog or my other writings, you’ll notice that I refer to Lester Levenson as having sorted this scene out long ago. And I compiled that into a book “Freedom Is” as well.

The simplicity of getting over this addiction is to

1. Recognize it to be an addiction – which you can do something about.
2. Release your thinking, feelings, desires, and fears about it.
3. Start living to improve your own quality of life and that of those around you.

Now, since you are already working on #3, that’s relatively simple.

On #2, I’ve broken this down:

1. Let go of anxious thinking and worrying about money.
2. Let go of the feelings you have about the subject and anything connected with it.
3. Let go of the basic desires (wanting approval, wanting security, wanting control) below those feelings.
4. Ultimately, let go of any fear of dying or no longer being an individual (or having to be an individual).

And of course, releasing is all a different subject and gone over in more detail in that book.

The point here is that it can be done – and should be.

Money is simply a game. It really always has been. Games have goals. So if you simply take the goals data which Levenson, Burt Goldman, Jose Silva, and others lay out for you, then it becomes relatively simple to accomplish any financial level you want.

And yes, I’m still testing this out for myself, but there are numerous and varied approaches which work and you can apply. However, there are tons of success stories out there.

My point is that it is far more important to you personally to operate at a high level of natural peace, happiness, and joy than you can buy with any amount of money. Because improving your quality of life and helping people around you to do the same is all there really is. You already have these all within you, but it’s up to you to let these surface and start really operating from that native level.

You can do all the 12-step programs you want. And yes, a support group for any sort of form of self-improvement is very valuable for the fastest results possible. (Or you can take my approach and simply recluse yourself from most of the world and it’s fascinations, while simply using self-inspection to resolve all the multitudinous and involved machinations we’ve built up around ourselves.)

The point is that you work on getting yourself free, happy, and at peace all the time. Some self-help guru’s have run into this problem where they cherish money more than helping people (and end up losing it all.)

So if you get to this point of being able to have any amount of money you want, then take the next step beyond and simply start living without having to have money at all.

Then your life will really have that meaning you’ve been looking for.

Changing your life's mind isn't that difficult, afterall

(photocredit: linh ngan)

Mental Reprogramming Made Easy - 30 days to whatever new you that you could want...

Here's today's inputs:

• "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell;
• his quoted concept that it takes 10,000 hours (about 10 years) to master a new skill;
• another concept that it takes 28 days to change any habit;
• Google Reader as a method for changing your inputs.

One review of Gladwell's book (in a farming magazine, no less) says that a person's success (or failure) has been building up for a long time, that anyone suddenly hitting the popular wave as an expert in their field - well, they've been studying for this moment their whole life. Or at least devoting the last 10 years to it seriously.

Which explains the concept Napoleon Hill (and others) have said, that most life successes show up when the person is mid-life.

I've started taking my own advice and beginning to read my Google Reader daily. (One tip is to set it up to just read the headlines as a quick filter.) What I ran into is exactly what I thought - I didn't want to read a lot of this stuff, and so will have to continue to weed and prune my "garden". And there is a lot of other stuff I want to surround myself with.

The trick is to do what you really like to do in life. Things that bring you pleasure, that get you excited. And then do these in a flat-out fashion that really helps other people improve theirs.

After 30 days, you'll get an inkling of how to do it. And if you switch fields away from anything you really are already expert at - well, it's going to take ten years before you're really good at it. (So keep a part-time day job, or move in with family if you can stand it.)

But if you take stock of what you have always been successful at, and all your skills, you can probably figure out where you've been headed all this time - at least the general direction. Ray Kroc started McDonald's after a lifetime as a salesman. He was 40-something at the time, and stumbled onto a pair of brothers who really knew how to make french fries... Died rich and happy. Stories of Microsoft's founder's success show that he played a lot of poker - which enabled him to sell IBM an operating system for their new PC when he didn't even have one.

Anyway, you've been tooling around for quite a while and now you can do something about it. All this self-re-programming stuff is just installing a hopped-up carburetor on your factory-built engine - supercharge it.

1. Surround your self with stuff you are really interested in -
   
2. and look up your back-trail to see what you are already good at.
3. Then, find your "unique selling proposition" and go out to conquer the world! (Or at least a sizeably remunerative part of it...)