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There’s a word-based world out there that Werner Erhard used to call the “world of agreement.” We agree on what’s “in” for men and women this year. We agree on who the most valuable player in the NBA is. We agree on how a man and a woman should behave (or a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim, etc.).
When we navigate this world of agreement, because it isn’t heart-based but mind-based, we don’t deal in who we are as the presented Self. Instead we manage our image.
When abundance comes, I expect that a lot of people will lapse into managing their image. I was watching myself do it the other day. Would I buy a Jauguar XKE or one of those Mazda types of sports cars?
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In fact I’d buy neither. I want a used Volvo V70 XC station wagon, repainted in cobalt blue. Around 2007 probably.
I cannot even get up the motivation to buy new clothes. As long as I can keep my uniform of seventeen white T-shirts, blue jeans and a cobalt-blue fleece, I will.
In the natural or transformed space, above the line between conscious and unconscious awareness, I have even less interest in what shows up for me like baubles than I used to, which was practically nil anyways.
If I go shopping across the borders these days, nine times out of ten I come back empty handed and the tenth time, I’ve bought some nuts or candies. It’s gotten boring on what were previously exciting shopping trips.
Now all my enjoyment centers on the inner realm.
Nonetheless some of us will burst forth in a frenzy of spending and then that’ll be over with. And when it’s gone, come back, come back, come back. Begin again, as meditation master S.N. Goenka would say, with a quiet mind, a calm mind, a peaceful and equanimous mind.
I was saying earlier today that one of the things that was noticeable to me in the thirty-year-olds I was meeting is that, in them, the sense of mission seems to be in their DNA. They’re at work whatever they do and they’re creating, creating, creating.
We’re wanting to get back to the way things were, when people had disposable income, security and a bright future. They never knew these things.
If you find yourself buying objects designed to establish something about who you are – your glamor, status, strength, etc., let it go. If it still works now, it won’t in a short while into the future.
Your image has no future (it never did). It has no spiritual currency. Only who you are – and that is love – counts any more.
Image management has no truck or trade with love. Love is blind to things like that. Love seeks only itself and it knows only itself, and not counterfeit things like glamor, influence, or wealth.