Natural Wealth
The Forthcoming Book
By Freyja Theaker
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A warm welcome to this part of my website that I am using as a research centre for my next book 'Natural Wealth', to compliment my existing book 'Naturally Being', now available on Amazon here. In Naturally Being I present the understanding of the recognition of true nature and indestructible wholeness. In Natural Wealth, I present thoughts about how this inner revolution affects our views of wealth, money and society as a whole.
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In this section you will find the core messages of Natural Wealth that I share in the live dialogue sessions.
I welcome your comments, feedback and links to any useful resources you feel would be helpful for my work. I thank you in advance for any contribution made. Please email me at freyja@naturallybeing.one with this information.
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Spiritual Beginnings
Brought up by a politically minded father and a mother who is a spiritual medium. I joined a Japanese Buddhist organisation at the age of 19. The fundamental premise of Buddhism made complete sense to me, namely that reality consists of what we may call a singular consciousness. Open minded to this idea already, I embraced Buddhism with gusto and became a senior youth leader in that organisation throughout my 20’s and into my 30’s. I always saw material reality as a means to serve spiritual understanding. I am very grateful for the profound philosophy and spiritual encouragement I gained from that organisation; however, by my late 30’s I had left it as my spiritual understanding took me beyond organised faith. At that point the other aspect of my enthusiasm took hold in a significant way.Societal Innovation
At the same time as joining the Buddhist organisation I started my degree in Economics and Social Science. From here I wrote my undergraduate thesis in 1986 about ‘Holisitic Economics’ which is available to read here. I embarked on a career as a teacher then radically shifted to work for a decade as an IT consultant in the City Of London for The Lloyds Reinsurance Market and The Bank Of New York. As I left the Buddhist organisation by my late 30’s I also left my corporate career to pursue life as a social entrepreneur. From here I formed an international project headed by myself and thought leader in alternative economics, Dr Hazel Henderson to create an organisation we called Via3 which was an online community currency platform to help non-profit organisations. Following this project I formed another enterprise with the support of Body Shop founder Dame Anita Roddick to supply eco-friendly office services to the UK.
Bringing It All Together
Following a decade working on these projects I retired from social entrepreneurship to become a Human Givens psychotherapist in my 50’s and worked with a UK based charity to support army veterans who had been heavily traumatised using the remarkably powerful techniques of modern psychotherapy and in particular the Human Givens ‘Rewind Technique’ for trauma. During this time I experienced a powerful and life-changing glimpse of true nature, and from here I brought together all the strands of my experience in non-duality and social psychology to form Naturally Being. -
Natural Wealth is an educational workshop that provides a space for us to explore our understanding of wealth and our relationship to money, from the perspective of recognising our true nature as the impersonal aware reality reading these words.
Although money has emerged in human society as a beautiful tool to help it function, all too often it has become one of the leading causes of stress.
Understanding this issue is one of the most pressing topics of our age. It goes to the heart of our materialistic, growth-centred way of living.
As acknowledged by leading central bankers, the financial industry also has a vital role to play in protecting the environment and helping develop society by assisting people to establish a balanced and healthy way of living that liberates us rather than confines us.Individually, we can also take responsibility for achieving this directly. By understanding the nature of ourselves and addressing our inner sense of lack and fear, we can do much to help our relationship with money, which may trigger anxiety.
The Core Message Of Natural Wealth
1. Reality Is One And Conscious
2. Patterns Of Survival Reflect Conscious Reality
3. Patterns Of Society Reflect Conscious Reality
4. Money Is A Gift To Support Wealth
5. Wealth Depends On How We View The Self
6. If We Identify As A Separate Self, Our Innate Capacities Function Self-Destructively
7. The Belief To Be A Separate Self Distorts Our View Of Wealth And Relationship With Money, Both Individually And Institutionally
8. We End Up Using Money To Control, Avoid And Suppress In Contrast To Supporting Our Healthy Expression
9. Wealth And Money Becomes About Power Over Existence Rather Than Flowing With It
10. How Money Is Created Reflects This Materialistic View Of Wealth
11. This Form Of Money Distorts The Healthy Balance Of Society And Turns Value On Its Head
12. The Institution Of Money Becomes A Global Religion To Solve Fear
13. It Borrows From Humanity’s Need For Transcendental Meaning To Lend Itself Credence, Whilst Not Honouring The Debt
12. Is All This Working? Statistics Are Not Conclusive
13. Money Worries Certainly Remain One Of The Leading Causes Of Stress
14. All Too Often Organisations Are Burning Individuals Out Due To Their Own Financial Pressures.
15. The Demand For Economic Growth Is Putting Enormous Pressure On Our Earth’s Resources.
16. Can We Accept That The Strategy Of Trying To Find Happiness Through Material Wealth Is Making Us Treat Money Like A Drug Rather Than The Useful Tool It Can Be?
17. Using Ancient and Modern Wisdom We Can Understand And Reconnect To Our True Nature That Is The True Life-Affirming Source Of Wealth
18. As We Recognise The Innate ‘Natural Wealth’ Of Our True Nature, We Break The Addiction To Misusing Money As A Solution To Fear and Instead Trust That Abundance Appears Without Fail And Our Lives Naturally Achieve Balance.
19. Could This Understanding And Experience Of Our Innate Wholeness Be The Next Evolution In Helping Us Understand Wealth And Use Money Intelligently At All Levels?
20. Free Of Ideology, Or Trying To Change The World As A Means Of Creating Happiness, We Can Nevertheless Creatively Experiment With The Many Emergent Ideas Of Evolving Money Based On Love, Truth And Beauty In Our Freedom Of Expression.
If you would like to join me and others for my next online 3 hour dialogue session to discuss this message please book below.
Further Thoughts and Short Stories About Money and Consciousness
The Pot Of Grey Paint
The Cult of Money Think
Money has been part of human society since its inception. As human societies grew and it became desirable to build networks of trust beyond immediate groups, keeping track of exchanges through some form of accounting mechanism was a valuable way to facilitate exchange. This allowed people to specialise in their productive activities, which allowed society to grow and for people's lives to become more secure. Beyond the basic need for security, however, money systems also facilitated all other aspects of human activity, such as autonomy, building relationships, and even the search for meaning and purpose.
In today's society, money is governed primarily by an international network of private and government central banks. It is created and distributed into the community primarily through a debt system in public and personal loans. Private banks traditionally create most money in society for profit, although at times of national crisis, we may see government central banks step in and create money directly. To conclude, money is created as a loan to society, which must be repaid, including interest over time. This repayment process is never-ending as the only way the existing total debt can be repaid, including interest, is by creating more money. Therefore, as it stands, the financial system will always create more and more money in the form of more and more debt.
As financial systems evolved over hundreds of years to the present day, we have witnessed an ever-increasing financial wealth inequality. This is inevitable in an economic system that creates money in debt that has to be repaid at interest. The majority of people will always be in debt in this system, therefore paying interest to those who are not in debt and can earn interest. Although this system has helped society advance in some ways, the result is to distort the original purpose of money to help all people in society and more to see money as a system of power and control of the majority of people by the relatively few. This is now hampering the further development of society as the human creative potential of large swathes of society is diverted to the process of earning and paying money to an ever wealthy sector of society.
Materialism of wealth and the current financial system are bedfellows. We can view the financial system as an education system.The financial system creates an economic growth imperative which is, as we have seen, measured in simple monetary terms. This creates an imperative to encourage economic activity, whether it is needed or not, and a sure-fire way to achieve this is to promote people's inherent materialistic desires. The impact of gross materialism on people's lives creates many social, psychological and pressing environmental problems that we are witnessing in society everywhere today. All these, in turn, create yet more pressure for people.
With the financial imperative to keep on repaying never-ending debt, it plunges into crisis if we don't keep the global economy growing by at least 3% per year. The cost of this imperative to grow financially at all costs, fuelled by unnecessary materialistic consumption, has been to create untold environmental damage. This has led to the global ecological crisis we all now face. As the world population grows and more and more people consume, this further fuels the environmental crisis.
When the finance start-up Neyber commissioned research on the cost of employee financial stress in July 2016, it aimed to get employers to buy into its loan scheme for workers. The report, which surveyed 10,000 employees, showed that 17.5 million working hours were lost in the UK to money-related distress. 70% of those surveyed admitted to spending a fifth of their working hours worrying about finances, costing the economy 120.7 billion pounds a year.
The disparity of financial wealth between men and women is still significant. Research shows that women are in more debt than men as they have no choice but to borrow to live. Globally this could mean that women are paying men to live on planet earth.
The effects of our current financial system on human psychology are multi-layered. There are now widely recognised patterns of behaviour with money that arise from our internal neurology as well as the conditioning power of the financial system itself. Money is now recognised as the number one stressor in most people's lives and relationships. Common themes emerge that money is often used (or we could say 'misused') as a drug or even weapon or other external things that compensate for some form of lack of internal mental balance. This is not just a matter for the financially wealthy or extremely poor. It is a matter for us all. In addition, the financial service industry has not always helped people manage their financial affairs responsibly and, on the contrary, has often encouraged people to get into unsustainable debt. The overall effect is a vicious circle between inner psychology and a distorted finance system.
As a society, we need to find a re-frame our relationship with money and materialism to reverse the trend to make these things the most important things in life to become a supportive tool for our individual and social well-being. We need to turn the pyramid of power that money has created on its head. In the process, we can evolve a financial system based on economic principles that genuinely support the well-being of all people and protect the environment.
Recognising Inner Wholeness
Whose responsibility is this? In reality, it is everyones. Yes, there must be structural changes to the financial system far more significant than hitherto envisaged. Many organisations, groups, and governmental departments are working on this issue. At the same time, we need a form of social-psychological spiritual education that goes beyond simply educating people how to manage money well to empower people with more profound knowledge on how to make fundamental choices vital for their happiness and that of the community at large.
Modern neuroscience can empower people with simple and practical knowledge to break the over external dependence on money and take back control of their lives. Neuroscience and psychology, along with ancient wisdom, tell us that a set of innate needs drives our lives. Our natural mind-body systems have evolved to ensure these needs are met in balance. Achieving this balance is then the optimal state for human beings to live. This innate programming of the body-mind works optimally when we are abiding knowingly as our true nature and not identifying as it.
Naturally Being teaches that there is an inextricable link between people's inner and outer lives. It turns out the self and environment including the entire universe are one organism. By recognising innate natural wholeness this is simultaneously reflected throughout the universe.