This essay is from the website, which itself is a clarified revision of my blogpost of October 10, 2010. It's critical that I re-publish it here. Banking is not the root of all evil, but it is a manifestation of the root of all evil within our own thinking. This is about a simultaneous ending of both what's inside us and its outward manifestation. This is Occupy Your Heart and Occupy Wall Street, simultaneously. Both must happen, simultaneously.
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To state the obvious: people all over the world are dealing with endless debt, slaves to banks, slaves to their own promises. I get lots of emails from folks wondering what they can do. Debt puts us asleep to reality and blinds us to gratitude, compassion, and abundance.
It begins with freeing our minds of debt
Debt is attachment, sense of guilt, grudge, sense of vengeance: otherwise called consciousness of credit and debt, which physically manifests itself in the world as banking and commerce. Obviously, I'm saying nothing new here: We can never be forgiven of debt if we cannot forgive others. We cannot forgive others without simultaneously forgiving ourselves.
Thus, before reading on, do a mental inventory of everyone you hold a grudge against. When you can find forgiveness for each and every one of them, when you completely let go, you've cut this noose around your neck. Then you can come back and read the rest of this, about banking. Why? Because then you will see that banking is unreal, an illusion, and what I say will confirm what you already know.
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We must be responsible.
We naturally have a sense of responsibility to pay our debts.
Banks take advantage of our natural sense of responsibility, and this is how we get under their control.
But if you understand the nature of banks, you understand to whom you are truly responsible.
If you asked me for a loan and I wrote you a bad check, would you be obligated to pay me "back"?
Yeah, let your mind go wild: imagine you asking moneyless me for a loan to buy a house! I then write you a bad check for $200,000 and tell you to not only “pay me back,” but with interest! Sounds unbelievably absurd, huh? But this is the very nature of fractional reserve banking and fiat money. But the absurdity doesn’t stop there. If you don’t “pay me back,” I get to “re-possess” the house you buy with the “loan.” Ha! “Pay me back,” as if I ever lent you anything! Ha! “Re-possess,” as if I ever possessed the house in the first place!
Funny how it sounds not only bad, but totally stupid, if I, as an individual, write you a bad check to buy a house, huh?
An individual who counterfeits a few dollars one time is guilty of felony, a federal offense, and will go to prison. An institution that counterfeits billions of dollars every day is called a bank, and its CEO and board members even get to be in the halls of government, as they are this very day! They get to be the government!
But this system has been the foundation of our civilization for centuries, so it must be okay, huh? It's tradition, after all!
Let's look at simple reality. You never had a debt to me in the first place, and I never gave or even lent you anything but a bad check! Ask yourself this: how can it be moral to even consider paying me “back”? But you must also consider it was foolish to ask me for a loan in the first place. You must now find out what responsibility and reality is and to whom you’re really supposed to pay back.
We've known these principles since civilization began
The ancient religions (Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam) and philosophers did not talk about reducing interest. They spoke of abolishing interest! They saw the obvious: making profit on nothing is criminal. It will invariably evolve into fractional reserve banking, counterfeiting, as is rampant right now.
I'm not talking any hidden conspiracy theories here. Every banker and economist knows, logically, mathematically, that your loan did not come from any bank. Your loan came from the backs of the working class, from the poor, and it came from your natural environment. If you erase the illusion of money and simply look at goods and services, this becomes crystal clear.
Let me state it more simply:
You did not borrow any goods from the bank. You borrowed goods when you purchased goods with the bad check given to you by the bank. You traded nothing for something.
Thus, this is your responsibility: you must pay back your loan to those who have less than they need.
Forget money and banks, which are literally nothing, and simply look at reality:
Anybody in the world who has more stuff than they need is in debt to those who have less than they need.
Forget money and banks, which are literally nothing, and simply look at reality:
Anybody in the world who has more stuff than they need is in debt to those who have less than they need.
When you accept the reality that you own nothing, then your debt is gone.
This is the Reality: you are defaulting on the loan you took from real, living beings when you pay anything "back" to a bank. A bank is not a living being. It is a fiction and lent you fiction. How can you default on a "loan" from the bank when the bank lent you absolutely nothing?
Excuse me for stating common sense:
it is totally irresponsible to rob the poor to pay the rich.
It is totally irresponsible to rob reality to pay illusion.
This is sacrifice to idols (illusions).
All our ideas to heal the world, our social programs, and our activism are futile, in the bigger picture, if we continue to practice interest banking, either as lender or borrower! It makes no sense to fight the dragon while secretly feeding him at the same time, unless you enjoy perpetually fighting the dragon.
The proof has been all around us for centuries: interest banking causes goods to flow from the workers to the non-workers, from the poor to the rich, and is the cause of the bulk of world poverty, debt, environmental degradation, and mental anxiety that you are likely experiencing right now. Just your own mental anxiety is proof enough, if you don't have eyes to see the world system.
I’m a strong believer in keeping our word. This is why I don’t believe in making promises, because making promises is a guarantee that we will break our word and become liars. Making promises is boasting for tomorrow, the work of ego. When we make any kind of promise we put ourselves in debt.
However, if we do make promises, we must keep them if it’s in our power. But sometimes we simply cannot keep our promises.
Are there situations in which it is not only okay, but mandatory, to break our promises?
Let’s use an extreme example to drive home a point. Sometimes people make promises in an irrational fit of vengeance to do something horrendous, like a mafioso or gangster swearing vengeance upon somebody in a blood oath. If you promise to kill somebody, is it a “sin” to break your promise?
We in modern culture are making promises in an irrational fit of faithless anxiety and fear, faithlessness that everything we need is not in the present. We are making promises to a Mafia.
Both the "conservative" and "liberal" American public are finally waking up and seeing this, after years of being pitted against each other by this very Mafia that doesn't give a gnat's ass about liberal and conservative, religious or non-religious. The profiteer cares not where profit comes from.
1. We must establish that it was bad judgment to take out a loan in the first place. We lost faith that everything we needed was available in the present, as it has been for zillions of years in nature's balance.
2. We must acknowledge that we made a promise to pay back what we borrowed, and we want to be responsible and keep our promise.
3. We must also acknowledge that our promise was more than a simple “yes” and “no," because we signed a contract promising we would pay back our debt. We must realize that going beyond a simple yes or no comes from a corrupt mind and reasoning. A lie is a lie, and to sign a contract is to water down truth. How is telling a lie "under oath" any different than telling a lie not "under oath?" Both the mind that requires us to sign a contract and the mind that signs the contract are equally corrupt: both are lost in faulty, irrational thinking. Now that we've acknowledged this error, we forgive ourselves and move on.
4. We must now ask ourselves where our loan came from so we can pay it back. Again, every banker and economist knows that a bank does not lend us what belongs to the bank. The bank wants you to think it is lending to you from its own reserves, but it is lending nothing. Not only that, the bank has the audacity to charge you interest on nothing, creating more illusion of something from nothing. Every banker knowingly practices this deception. But every bank justifies itself, not because it does not know that what it is doing is deception, but because what it does is tradition, and all of commercial civilization depends on this tradition! The bank, however, does deceive both itself and us into thinking life will end if it does not practice this deception. Faithlessness is belief that everything real will fall apart unless you practice a lie. Faith is belief that everything real will succeed if you are completely real, totally true. Faithlessness is pretense. Faith is sincerity.
It is true that everything that is false, the bulk of commercial civilization, would collapse without interest banking. And it must collapse if we and other living beings are to survive.
5. On realizing we have entered into a knowingly-deceptive contract, our contract is invalidated, freeing us from any responsibility to the contract. The fact that most all the world uses deceptive contracts does not validate any of those contracts. It is, in fact, irresponsible to hold to a corrupt contract in the same way it is irresponsible for a mafioso or gangster to hold to a blood oath to his peers!
6. We must not stray from our integrity, from our responsibility to pay back our debt! Thus we must ask ourselves where our loan truly came from! When you erase the illusion of money and simply look at goods and services, reality becomes clear. In the greater world economy, we see, obviously, that goods and services flow from workers to non-workers, from the poor to the rich, from the creative to the non-creative, from the productive to those who produce only illusion, from the givers to the moochers. The bankers take, and do not borrow, from the world’s workers and creators, and they pay nothing back. By doing any business with the bank, you have become an accomplice to theft and you must reconcile it. You have taken an illusion, fiat money, from the bank, and used it to trade for actual goods created by the world’s poor, causing goods to flow from the poor to the rich, from those who need to those who do not need.
The bank may turn you over to a collection agency. But if you have already returned your stolen goods, the bank has no more power over you. Perhaps in many countries the bank can jail you. This is where you must have faith in the Power of Truth, giving you joyful power to shine through Persecution, as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Jesus demonstrated.
We could talk about regulating crime, reforming crime, or we could talk about ending crime altogether, refusing to do any business whatsoever with crime.
Some people in the world are talking about reviving the ancient concept of Jubilee. Jubilee is a concept in the Torah, where Israelites would forgive each other's debts every seven years and every 49 years.
But let's go back to me "lending" you a bad check to buy a house. Now how can we talk about me forgiving your debt? It’s like asking a rapist to forgive the victim. It's like talk of getting banks to blow themselves up.
Jubilee was created for families, friends, and neighbors. People lend to family, friends, and neighbors with zero profit motivation. But the very nature of a lending institution is profit from nothing. A lending institution simply cannot be moral and simply cannot look out for the good of the borrower, despite appearances. It cannot forgive and cannot be forgiven, not in this life or any life to come. A bank runs on unforgiveable sin (debt). Its very nature and lifeblood is willful sin (debt). To end willful debt is to end banking.