Spiritual Currency
Spiritual Currency
John Thomas "Kooz" Kuczmarski
© 2006
January, 2006
Money can be a pathway to luxury and comfort, or it can be the epicenter of great evil and distraction, fallaciously endowing people with a counterfeit power and unmerited respect. The wielders of financial money are held in such high regard not because they have generated things that matter - their personal integrity, spiritual tenacity, and expression, and intuitive awareness and initiative - but because they have accumulated many rectangular-shaped green slips of paper. While the world may revolve around this green slips of paper, spiritual currency carries much more certainty of validity. Spiritual money should be the source of respect because it cannot be stolen, cheated, swindled, haggled, or illegitimately earned because it comes from the individuals integrity and their spiritual passion. While the impact of financial currency may be, at times, glib, it does have an enormous impact on the globalized functioning, policy, economy, relations, and interaction. Ultimately, it is the balance of mastery in investments of financial and spiritual currencies that assures stabilized prosperity and joy.
Money is wielded as a power device. And being not a true source of power, but a superficial sham, financial money can come by people in myriad different ways, including luck, stealing, corrupt manipulation, or simple conniving. Spiritual money has no debts, “overdrafts”, or loans, on the other hand. It is instantaneous and completely clarifying and resourcefully certifying. It is an amazing source of resolution and passion and provokes tremendous certainty and conviction in the person who has it and verified respect. Any form of certifying respect should not be derived from something quantitative, something that you can accumulate, and something like currency. Spiritual currency can be generated in large amounts, but it is through cultivating one's qualitative energy. This is what generates the tremendous amount of dynamism, exuberance, worthiness, and energy from spiritual currency.
A person possessing spiritual currency is not praised because of how much of some item he or she has accumulated, but because the very cultivation of spiritual energy makes a person praiseworthy when you first meet them. Picture yourself meeting two people both dressed identically, both twins, looking completely identical from their haircuts to their facial hair but one has pursued financial currency - the fallacious power - and the other has pursued spiritual power - the authentic power. Without being told that you should respect these men because of their “monetary value” or “spiritual connections”, you automatically respect and are drawn to the spiritual man, more. Only after you are told that the other man is a billionaire do you respect him. Why? Because financial currency has no connection whatsoever with the person who hold is whatsoever, revealing nothing of their acquisition or lack of integrity, clarity, joy, happiness, or honesty.
Spiritual currency, on the other hand, is entirely reflective of the individual who possesses it; one cannot cultivate spiritual currency or energy without integrity of purpose, bountiful and authentic joy, happiness, and clarity, and deliberate honesty. So clearly spiritual money is the one to be most highly regarded because it cannot be synthetically created and is always authentic and always points to verifiable and “well-earned” respect in an individual.
What is even more interesting is how people recognize spiritual currency in you! I have had countless instances where I focused on generating spiritual currency - spiritual energy - and other times where I focused on creating financial currency and I was treated with so much more respect, was listened to more deeply, and things went so much smoother with spiritual currency. By smoother I mean the kinks were removed. Whenever I was traveling in some place, my mind was focused and clear and alive and no one said my I.D. was needed or that I couldn't use that specific credit card here, or any of the other bureaucratic nuances that make so much that of the financial life so “important” and burdening, simultaneously.
I have had countless instances where people simply renounce demands because of the presence of spiritual currency. An example was when I owed someone a hundred dollars for something that was half gift-half borrowing. In other words, the person could have just as easily not cared about the hundred as demanded it immediately. After doing things that generated peace for me, hence, spiritual currency, they completely said I didn't need to worry about the rest of the money. There is no way so many of the little annoying things would have been discarded without spiritual currency.
The fact that spiritual currency is great for eliminating annoying nuances, however, is fantastic, but this is simply a bonus compared to the real powers of spiritual currency. Spiritual currency opens up entirely new doorways in your mind, allowing you to create incredible masterpieces that reflect your deepest intrinsic truths and access incredibly illuminating compartments of personal validity.
This is not saying that spiritual currency instantly makes people respect you or “bow down to you” or any other ludicrous fantasies; it simply causes you to access your potential and intrinsic truths much more efficiently, quickly, and relevantly. You'll be able to open tremendous doorways to accessing your deep intrinsic talents and innate gifts that you were born to create. More importantly you'll be able to access that potential and those gifts extremely swiftly, so that if you need to access your passion for speaking (if that's one of your talents) and you meet a person you respect incredibly, you'll be able to instantaneously call upon that intrinsic talent of speaking if you have spiritual currency. Finally, it is such an amazing beacon of personal power because spiritual currency allows you to define and connect with your intrinsic talents and use them in a relevant situation. When you are sitting as an audience member in a theater, sometimes people might “access” their incredible passion for talking talent - not the best time to wield such a gift. With spiritual currency, however, every gift you access at that moment will be extremely useful, helpful, and incredibly vital to the present. In the audience member in the theater, for example, with spiritual currency, you would swiftly access an innate gift for listening deeply or critiquing the performance so you could get more out of it. In the end, because spiritual currency generates awareness of your talents and because it ensures the swift and relevant ability to access that potential, spiritual currency is what makes you glow and causes other people to respect you, let you off the hook more, and treat you with the respect that we all should receive - that we are all vibrant spiritual beings.
Spiritual currency is highly intelligent. It is so ingenious because it sorts out the right choice by weighing incomprehensibly complex statistics and dynamics of options. Intelligence and the fact that spiritual currency is so intertwined with your own personality, empowers you to make exceptionally precise and fulfilling decisions.
One of the most redeeming elements of spiritual currency is our ability to “spend” this currency on decision and make incredibly valid decisions. Here's an example of a decision that could not have been made so effectively, because the logic behind the choice was so counter-intuitive and complex, without the ingenuity of spiritual currency. I spending some time with two professors and had the opportunity to show them 2 out of four philosophy papers I had written. All four were extremely well written, structured, concise, and clear, but two of the papers I understood very well, while other two were difficult for me to communicate the concepts. Now, because I wanted to talk about the papers instead of being perplexed by them, I would have naturally, or “logically”, chosen the ones I was familiar with. However, I had run right before picking the papers, and “earned” some spiritual currency, so I picked the papers I was least familiar with. It turned out I would have been bored reciting the information from the papers that I completely understood, and instead of wasting an amazing opportunity to learn new insights into concepts I was extremely interested in, I picked the papers I was unfamiliar with and got incredible feedback that was not only encouraging but incredibly illuminating, allowing me to generate more awareness of my writings. The outcome making a “spiritual currency” decision was, obviously, that I understood four out of four papers, instead of two out of four.
There are four major reasons why spiritual currency can so easily and effectively tap into your source of validity. First, spiritual currency dissolves fear. Fear blinds you from seeing the best decision in the long run, prevents you from taking the extra step, and completely obliterates very viable and empowering options so that you don't even consider them. The elimination of fear is the most potent quality of spiritual energy because the skies are the limit and your strengths and potential are fully utilized without the blockade of hesitation and fear blocks your path. Secondly, spiritual currency “knows” you -- all of your quirks and idiosyncrasies included. It knows what you like and dislike, how you think, how you operate, your fears and concerns; it knows you more than any person ever could, enabling you to make incredibly personalized decisions. Thirdly, it operates with prescience -- an all-seeing, all-knowing perspective. From this “omniscient crow's nest”, spiritual currency is on constant “lookout”, gauging the weather of the conscience, and spotting storms or sunny skies in the emotional horizon of the future, deftly navigating you to the best decision. Fourthly, spiritual currency generates courage. Courage gives you the push into the right direction after you have made the best decision and motivates you with encouragement after committing to the decision. Spiritual currency generates courage because of its first three qualities - fear removal, self-knowledge, and prescience. By knowing yourself so well, removing fear, and seeing the future, you make the unknown much less known, and it is precisely this awareness of unknown, which generates courage in facing the mysterious or unfamiliar frontiers.
Without spiritual currency, you wouldn't have tremendous courage in decisions of the unknown. After you see all the possible options in front of you because of removing fear, eliminating the irrelevant options by “knowing” yourself best, and presciently observing the long-term outcomes of the decisions form the omniscient, all-seeing “crow's nest” of awareness, you simply need a boot out the door. Courage provides the momentum, motivation, to commitment for you to continue with the choice you have made. Spiritual currency, comprehensively clears the table to provide the options (with fear removal), narrows done the options to only relevant, personalized choices (with self-knowing), provides a way to foresee outcomes and pick the best option (with prescience), and motivates and encourages you to make and continue with that decision (with courage).
There is a key and completely essential distinguishing characteristic between financial currency and spiritual currency: you survive with financial currency, but you truly live with spiritual currency. This is not saying to discard financial currency because clearly, without basic survival needs you would be suffering. But so few people ever actually truly live - live their dreams, access their potential, and enjoy the articulation of their talents. A psychologist Maslow came up with the idea of self-realization, realizing your highest potential. In his analysis he defined things called D-needs, or deficit needs, that were basic buildings blocks need to construct a platform from which you could start your self-actualization process. The basic physiological health (food, nutrition, sleep, 98.6°F body temp.), only get you to the starting point from which you can start the self-realization process. To plug in financial currency and spiritual currency, you need financial currency to fulfill those deficit needs - the basic survival needs - so that you arrive at the oasis of self-realizations from which you can use spiritual currency to truly access and activate your dreams. To use an example, if the exploration of outer space our galaxy, solar system, and universe is truly living your life and discovering your dreams, which you do with spiritual currency, then breaking the surface of the earth's atmosphere is the purpose and the limit of financial currency.
But that's precisely the problem and the benefit of spiritual currency. So few people make it to the surface - fully satisfy all their deficit needs - and what's worse is that those few who are fully “surviving” - that is have all their basic necessities - rarely even consider trying to pursue the dreams with spiritual currency. Or the reverse happens, someone is adamant about spending spiritual currency, but they lack the survival necessities to break the surface. If they had enough financial currency to generate the necessary survival needs (food, health, loved ones, shelter, etc.), their mastery of spiritual currency would propel them far into uncharted “depths of their galaxy of dreams and potential”. The person who grasps financial currency but either neglects, is unaware, or simply is afraid or lazy of exploring life and using spiritual currency is the “Comfortable Obdurate”. That person is stubbornly only comfortable with their basic survival needs. The person who has the mastery, motivation, courage, and knowledge of spiritual energy to truly realize his or her dreams but lacks the financial currency understanding or resources to get to the plateau of self-realization, is the “Land-locked soul-seeker” or the “Imprisoned Celebrity”. This person seeks his soul but is land-locked by absence of financial currency awareness, or the person has the aspirations and dreams and no how to truly spiritually aligned and even famous, but they are imprisoned by their lack of financial currency and survival needs. This person is going incessantly going spiritually 60 mph in neutral.
The mastery of financial currency and awareness, courage, and knowledge of spiritual currency is the key to success in life. Those two “economies” are massive concepts, but comprehending and fulfilling them is, most certainly the simplest way to life fully. Understand and master those two areas and you will not only be successful to the world, but successful to yourself because your accomplishments will generate so much personal satisfaction, compassion, joy, sense of achievement, and happiness having grown from your creative, rich essence.
