POVERTY When you live a few different lifestyles, one of the things you realise is that there are

pluses and minuses to all of them. Traditionally, people have been money minded and so 'the rich' are those with money and 'the poor' are those without. It's a bit different to that though in reality. There are some quite extreme poverties which go with being rich in the traditional meaning of the word. The first problem with being rich is that you have to stay rich. Because people are money minded, in the developed world anyway, if you have money, there is no shortage of people queuing up to take it off you. This then creates the first poverty of wealth, the poverty of needing to keep the wealth that you have. Another form of imprisonment or poverty is or are the airs and graces which go with being rich. You have to, as they say, keep or try to keep up the appearance that goes with being wealthy. So, this is two ways that wealth can actually make you poor. There are many others. For example, you might actually be low on trust. Because you can buy what you need when you have money, you can think, I'll have two of those and four of those and actually in a funny way, money makes you know the cost of everything but never see its worth. All things have a value beyond whatever it is labelled as financially. And so there is an impoverishment where folks can only see what a thing is priced as rather than what it is. On the other hand, if you are poor, as in monetarily poor, there is, somehow a freedom which goes with that. I mean, OK, you are not financially free, you can't necessarily go into a shop and say, I'll have four of them and nine of them, and can you have it delivered by 5 O'clock on Tuesday. Buy the thing about being poor is, well, in more and more cases these days, you have lost what you were in fear of losing and in so doing, you become free of it. I'm not saying it is easy, but just to say that when we talk in terms of rich and poor the idea that you are rich if you have money and poor if you don't really doesn't do justice to the tapestry of life. Money rich people often seem far poorer in a lot of ways. There is a song by Living Colour, I forget it's name, but it has the line, You call this place a slum but it it is my home and as such has a value that you can't measure or see, sentimental richness. People are denuded and blessed in different ways. It is not sufficient to say, that guy is rich because he has money, he might have no sense of humour, no joy of life and sometimes only friends that want him for what he has rather than who he is. That's poverty, is it not. The poor guy with no money, might have a wicked sense of hunour, a freedom of emotion, friends who like him for who he is and so on. So who is the wealthier in these two scenarios. So, Rich, Poor, dunno about that. I've had money and I've given it up. When I had it I was rich in some ways and poor in others. When I didn't have it, I was rich in some ways, poor in others. So there wasn't a whole lot to choose between the two scenarios. That was my experience of it anyway. If you have a money addiction, and lets be clear, making and desiring to make money is as insidious as any drug, because the addictive pattern is, make money, like making money, want to make more money and so it becomes an addiction. If you break a persons money making addiction, then they are going to have a rough time of it, because it is like going cold turkey, or it can be, depending on their experience. How will I survive if I run out of money is the usual foreboding question when people's recompense is curtailed. Life itself, however is bigger than bank accounts and that is important to remember. Being brought up in the 1980s it was taught that if you have a big bank account, you are rich, if you have a small bank account you are poor. When in Amsterdam, I stumbled across psilocybin and it in

conjunction with respiridone changed or should I say opened my mind to amongst other things, a broader concept of what rich and poor actually are. You can be rich in many ways and it is a disservice to only consider the wealthy to be those who appear in the Forbes 'rich' list. I find that the way I look at things now, you are not simply a rich person or a poor person, but rather, it is a question of how are you rich and how are you poor. So, the question is not really "are you rich" or "are you poor", it is a question of "how are you rich and how are you poor?". Whatever you have, you will be paying for it and that includes money in the bank. Our lacks, whatever they may be, cover our excesses. So, rich, poor, we are all both. The arrogance of it when we say, "a poor farmer in the 3rd world" such people are rich in altruism, compassion, generosity, kindness, need I go on? The deception when we say, "a rich banker", need I say more. It shows how slanted the mind is to see one as exclusively rich and the other exclusively poor. In some ways we are each rich and in some ways we are each poor. Necessarily, therefore, "The Rich List" doesn't actually really mean anything very much. I wouldn't go so far as to say that any one of us is richer than the other. Even someone who falls asleep at a young age in death would be found rich in righteousness or rich in honour. And some people take a look at the world around them and do actually choose that path. Likelihood is, a person that makes it into old age cannot be found either of these things, righteous or honourable, and can therefore be banned, forever, from the hall of righteousness. I'm not saying it is 'bad' to make it to old age, it's just not very righteous, that is all, when others have fallen honourably in youth. Back to the "Rich List" as defined by Forbes. Because in the eyes of many nothing has value unless it is to do with money, the Rich List exists. The way the scam is played is to miss out adjectives which describe what is meant by the rich-list exactly. So, therefore could we not have a plethora of rich lists, what a business opportunity? We could have the financial rich list, the emotional rich list, the altruism rich list, the ... you get the idea. How you measure it is another question of course. People go through their lives looking at these rich list phonies and thinking, "That guy is richer than me". It causes mental health problems when people look at the peers like that. It makes them think, "That guy is richer than me" which simply isn't true. As I say, it's a question of how is he rich, how is he poor. If you had a morality rich list, for example, where would some of these 'rich people' come on that list. Are they higher than anyone else, no. Are they lower than anyone else, no. There, sorted. None of us need to feel good about ourselves as such, we have probably learnt to do without

in that regard through life's challenges, but, just because we can go without does that mean we should? So, the way it works if we want to get a clearer idea of where we are at as individuals is to make a couple of lists. A rich list and a poor list. In the left hand column lists all the ways that you feel you are rich and the right hand column lists all the ways that you feel you are poor. Necessarily, this is subjective, but it least gives a yardstick to go on as far as understanding our own wealth distributions. Why not make a list of how you are rich and how you are poor. Everything will have a wealth to it in life, even if it is a wealth that you can't see. We even say, he has 'a wealth of knowledge', 'he has a wealth of humour', 'he has a wealth of compassion'. Or alternatively, 'he is poor of hope', or, 'he is poor of love' and so on. So, for each person, How I am rich I am time rich I am rich in altruism I am rich at morality I am rich in intelligence I am mentally rich I am rich of agro So, a list could be much longer than this. If you reduce something from your rich list, this makes the space for something from your poor list to fill it. I can only say in my experience, if I reduce one of my rich characteristics, stop reading, for example, then something from my poor list has to fill the vacuum, I find it easier to make friends, for example. The way it works is it is like a vacuum forming when you remove, for example, reading from your rich list. There is a vacuum and vacuums want to be filled. For example, I have found that by giving up TV and only having it as a special treat, so to speak, a whole load of interesting things have come along to fill its place. I don't through choice, have a TV and I have learnt a lot as a result instead of having TV time, I have time | | | | | | How I am poor I am emotionally poor I am lacking in common sense I am bad at Relationships I have poor communication skills

for other things instead. Without prejudice, if you give up or reduce one thing from your rich column then something from your poor column, what you lack, has to come in and fill it. So, for example, if you are very talkative, you are verbally rich, if you reduce it, talk less, then something will have to come in from the poor column into the rich column to fill the vacuum that has been left by the reduction, like an more open mind or a certain new feeling or whatever. Silence is golden, it's like saving money in a bank account. What you find, generally, is that those that talk the most have the least to say. Is that true, dunno, might be, might not I suppose. Now where people find this disconcerting, for example, is that you have no control over what fills the vacuum left as you give up your riches, but that something does is the law. As someone once said on their death bed, "All my possessions (rich list) for a moment of time (poor list)". It might not be what you want, exactly. You might give up reading and get loneliness in your rich column. But this is how it works, the space has to be there. Sure, if you go into a shop and pretend you are buying something, lest we forget, shops only buy money, then, the vacuum that is left within you as you give them your cash is what enables it to be filled again by the shopping you purchase. The Rich vibrant column sucks the life out of the poor column of disabled potential and suddenly, you have new skills. The more flexible you are, the more different aspects of life you will experience. I was in intelligent misery now I am a happy fool, this is how we can each transition around life's possibilities. If you are poor in soemthing, you might find it impossible, but what can you give up from your riches to get it? It may be your riches which are blocking something, in fact, it will be. I like thrash metal in my youth, a lot, everyday, without fail and consequently, I found it very difficult, because I was an extremist in that regard, to communicate even at all with women. I was rich of metal, poor of girls. Other guys were rich of girls, but poor of metal. To show me that this is how it works, as I have got older metal has slowly rescinded, still love it, but, just not with the same fanatical intensity and so it is that I have been able to at least talk to women and literally, I didn't before, but then I didn't really talk too much full stop. For their part most women just do not understand the ethos which goes with metal. Before my metal days, I had no such block. Can you understand that, metal is a very male, almost exclusively male thing, full of testosterone, just like girls are into flower, perfume and nail polish, so it creates a natural dichotomy making communication on commonalities very difficult almost like talking different languages. Some items in a poor column are intractably there, if you have a permanent disability, it might well be with you for life, but in general, the fluid things we can have some control over and that can be changed without miraculous intervention are what we are talking about here. Stop watching TV, for example and see how the space that leaves in your life is filled. This is a constant process of exchange, each of our lives are in constant fluid transcendence. What you can do, therefore if you don't like

something in your life, is to figure out what you have got in excess and go about reducing it. If you have loads of time on your hands and not much to do, instead of clinging onto your time, let it go and allow it to be filled, for it will be and you will not know by what or how, that is where trust comes in. Another thing which it is important to realise is that life has a kind of natural CCTV system. Everything that happens is on CCTV, so to speak, and so if someone takes or has something without directly 'paying' for it in an overt way, like, "here's 5 quid", that doesn't mean that they get away without paying, ever. As each of us is half rich and half poor, if we gain something by somehow circumventing the system and without paying for it, even if it is just a good feeling, that would make that person more than half rich and that can't be, it'd the law. Perhaps we gain understandings, good feelings, houses, cars, all that stuff, but what are we missing in the process because simply, no-one has it all. This half and half mechanism is what means that things are on CCTV, so to speak. The camera can see what you have lost, so to speak and it can also see what you are gaining. This is real and it is a quite ambivalent mechanism. I just want to raise the flag on the fact that in the open source software world, a new mechanism has been introduced. Developers create software for free and give it away and so to the people that use it, pay us some cash if you feel like it or perhaps more importantly, if you can. In other words, you have a choice of paying cash, or not and then the trust mechanism comes in, to do with the fact that the CCTV camera will arrange approriate recompense from the individual and for the devleoper. Perhaps for example, the person that has put the work into developing the software gets an allocation of good vibes, for example. People on benefits get 'given' money, ask them whether they are paying for it though and how they are paying for it and you will get answers that fit this model loss and gain model. Perhaps a good thing is for everyone to cycle through the benefits system at some point in their life so they realise it is not a free lunch. There are many ways of paying in life and people should be keen to pay their financial taxes as it means that they are more protected from all manner of possible ailments, many mental and emotional enslavements and so on. You might therefore find in the above mechanism open source development models where businesses give people the choice if they want to pay cash or not that people would still want to, through choice, because the word would rapidly go around how you are gonna get a pretty tough time for it mentally and emotionally, because you still have to pay, you are just not paying cash, so to speak. This of course leads to the inevitable conclusion, what is giving, exactly. Um. Actually, what is taking. It's not an absolute question of giving or taking, rather, it is giving and taking, always, if someone 'gives' you something, they will be receiving in equal measure, measure for measure I think the good book says. There is a common wisdom, "It is a game of give AND take" and this is true. So, never be guilty for what you have got in life because your

credits have to be covered by your debts absolutely, 100%, always. Another way of looking at it is your profits have to be covered by your loses. You might think you are losing something, but what are you gaining as an equal measure? So, it is not a question of "are you beautiful?", it is a question of "how are you beautiful?". It is not a question of "are you ugly?", it is a question of "how are you ugly?". It is not a question of "are you clever?", it is a question of "how are you clever?". I'm just exposing this agenda here. The agenda has been to convince us that certain people are clever others are not, some are rich, others are not, but it is not like that. Most insidiously, this mind manipulation technique was used against the Nazis and the Jews. It was used in relation to the term master race. It wasn't a question of "are you the master race?" It was a question of "How are you the master race?" There are people on this planet who actually still go around thinking they are in absolute terms, poor, rich or whatever just as there were people who thought they were, in absolute terms, the master race. The human race is the master race, we just master different things, that's all. The "rich" do to the "poor" what they do, and, always have done mostly without mercy. If I have something you need, I am in a position where I can dominate you in that regard. If you have something that I need, you are in a position where you can dominate me. Mostly, life dances around like that, people taking terms to dominate and be dominated. Perhaps once you were happy, but often people trade that for other wears and that can be a problem. Smile, your on candid camera, the CCTV is always there. People trying to make a profit, what a laugh, we all have the same quota of wealth units, visible or invisible. Life is difficult, we don't think just because it is, you have been hard done by, it's the same for all of us, unless we choose to buy "easy life" credits, but then where would that get us? And always look at where your costs are, you can choose to have something in your life, but what is it costing you for it will have a cost, visible or invisible. Riches then are not to be prejudiced by what we like or find comfortable. You can be rich of angst or rich of grief and so on. All in all as we each balance what we have with what we lack, we get as much life experience as we possibly can. In a lifetime, the idea is to cycle through as many

experiences as we can which will necessarily include ones we 'like' and ones we 'don't like' If you only keep one form of wealth all your life, then you are limiting your experience right there. The statue of liberty has scales on it. One side of the scale represents riches and the other side poverty. That's not to say exclusively riches in the materalised sense, houses, cars, holidays, but also spiritual riches as well, knowledge, understanding compassion. The rich side balances perfectly with the poor and loss from the rich side is immediately balanced by gain from the poor, individually and collectively. All I would say in conclusion to this blog then is that there are a lot of rich, poor people out there and a lot of poor, rich ones, remember, you can't always see what a person is like on the inside. In life, you can focus on what you are losing, for we are all always constantly losing something, or you can focus on what you are gaining because we are all constantly gaining something. A child gains knowledge but loses innocence. A child is innocent and an old person is knowledgable. Can you regain your original innocence, who can say, but it will probably cost you something if you could, but it is said, with all due respect, the very old revert to childhood once again. The one thing I would say is to end this post is that we all have different forms of wealth and there seems to be this incessant squabbling over what wealth one person has and another doesn't. Can we not just accept that we are all equally wealthy but that wealth takes different forms. Some people seem to have this insatiable greed, it's just not enough and maybe their insatiable greed is a poverty of sorts. Well, thing is we all have to make sacrifices, so with that in mind it probably never will be enough will it. You can't have it all, the "I want it all I want it now" mentality. Even sleeping costs you. If you stuff yourself up on one thing, don't be surprised if you are lacking something else. What you once lacked, you now have in abundance and what you once had you now lack, life can sometimes play out like that.