Hoarding Wealth Will Never Be "Spiritual"

Hey, Instagram life coaches: Your greed is bad and you should feel bad

“She” glares at me with bulging yang sanpaku eyes, her irises so icy blue they’re almost white, making her pupils seem violently pointed as she lectures me through the phone screen about my ‘broke mentality.’

Who is She? A shamelessly money-hungry “spiritual teacher” whose online following grows by thousands every day.

There are many such coaches online, prancing around in fur coats (or barely-there bikinis), waxing Canva-poetic about how they “shifted their lack mindset” to “dissolve their money blocks to manifest wealth” and now “live in abundance” — and you can too, for the super-reasonable and not-at-all-exploitative price of $4,999!

But unlike those coaches, who sugar-coat their teachings with heart-manipulating sweet-talk, She goes for the desperation dollar.

She claims you cannot be “Awakened” unless you are rich — like she allegedly is.

She claims your net worth is an exact measure of your level of enlightenment.

And for a while there, I almost believed She was right.

Then the spell broke.

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Under the Influence(r)

I recently began rehabilitating myself from Instagram, my most addicted-to digital drug. “Rehab” may sound dramatic, it is no exaggeration. I haven’t used Instagram for weeks, yet I still find myself recovering from it.

I don’t mean the blue light exposure, EMF radiation, or any physical measure of smartphone harm. I’m recovering from the culture of Instagram. (And by “culture,” I mean less “shared social mannerisms” and more “petri dish experiment gone wrong.” 🦠)

My algorithm was an incessant cacophony of NewAge-y women blabbering about their wealth, like, “I’m filthy rich — much richer than you, so you should feel inferior to me — but I’m somehow also not rich enough yet, so give me all your money!!! (And don’t forget that I’m still more deserving than you… while being dependent on your money… somehow).”

Parasite logic, amirite? 🙄

Ohhhh, that’s what it is. That’s exactly what it is. The bottomless hunger for wealth and possessions is the same hunger of a tapeworm embedded in the bowels of its host.

The Gospel as an Antidote to Greed

Even when I was influenced to pursue wealth-for-wealth’s-sake, one thing remained constant, gently disturbing my conscience: the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Like a golden thread leading me out of a maze — like manna from Heaven, nourishing my soul — the Gospels kept me sane, kept me going, and kept me from becoming like the blood-thirsty vampires who masquerade as “helpful” spiritual teachers to procure more supply🩸.

It’s ironic that the spiritual charlatan mentioned earlier “lived rent-free in my head,” so to speak. (Rent-free?! ¡¿En esta economía?!)
I very much had her, and other like her, in mind as I wrote this:

Am I a bitter bitch, tired of trying to "figure out" how money works and clear my "blocks" or whatever? Possibly. But I AM also very, very good at observing people. Seeing through them. Hearing what they don't say. And the coaches who conflate wealth with worth? Who consider their financial status to be a measure of their spiritual status? At long last I see their naked greed, their parasitic hunger, endlessly infecting others into the vampire deathstyle with seductive pseudospiritual sales pitches.

Enlightenment?? Measured in net worth??? LOL!!!

Make money they can, but make fish and loaves appear out of thin air, they cannot.

Self-serving materialism is an absolute FAILURE to embody God's power, which FREELY gives life to all, deserving and undeserving alike.

Brag about how hard you worked for your hoards of gold, but I promise you it's harder work to give a thief your cloak.

Flex on your enemies by flaunting your wealth, but I promise you it's harder to kneel and wash their feet.

^{MATTHEW 19: 21} Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” ²² When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. ²³ Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. ²⁴ Again I tell you, it is easier for a [rope] to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

In God’s original design, everything was FREE.

Food is free. It grows out of the ground.
Air is free.
Water is free.
The materials to make shelter — like stone, wood, and clay — are free.
The materials to make clothing are free.
Medicine and exercise are free.
Joy is free, love is free, friendship is free, connecting with God is free.

GOD MADE EVERYTHING THAT’S GOOD FOR US, FREE.
FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE.

It was perfect… until we fucked it the fuck up.

How did everything become so damn costly? How did we fall so far from that Edenic, paradisiacal bliss of true freedom?

Money was Invented by Vampires

You see, money is debt. Straight-up. We can delude ourselves all we want about how “money is energy,” or “money is a medium of exchange,” but this misses the blatant fact that money was born from the first conception of scarcity.

It seems evident that humans are biologically inclined to live in accordance with the flow of their environment, by:

• only taking what we need, when we need it (instead of self-torturously imagining insane future scenarios of scarcity that you can neither prove nor prepare for anyway);

• eating what’s in season (rather than forcing nature to produce things out of order);

• migrating when the weather gets too harsh (instead of forcing preferred environmental conditions)

• living as if we know God will provide, because He always has and always will

• living in the Eternal Now. Eden.

There has always been enough. There is currently enough. There will continue to be enough.

But as soon as we started wondering, stupidly, “What if, one day, there’s not enough?” — or, even more stupidly, “What if right now there’s not enough?!”
that’s when money entered the picture.

When we transitioned away from living-in-flow and into Agriculture, we transitioned into having excess.
Having excess meant having a perceived advantage. One’s hoard could be used to bargain with, bribe, and belittle others. The Hoard became a tangible delineation between the “haves” and “have-nots.”
If someone wanted access to what was in your hoard, but they had no hoard of their own to trade from, then they had to use a symbol to stand-in for the value of what would be traded: that standardized symbol was money.

Now here’s the problem. Whereas the value of, say, a pomegranate is intrinsic and self-evident (it nourishes you, it tastes good, etc.), the value of a coin is not. So we have to make a collective agreement that the coin has value… and that’s the only value it has.

But money’s original function as a stand-in symbol for value that can be exchanged for real value became so mesmerizing, that people began hoarding money too!

So then slavery became a thing. (← I wrote that intuitively before learning that Encyclopedia Brittanica agrees, by the way. Agriculture/excess creates the conditions that lead to slavery.)

If someone had neither physical possessions nor money to trade, they could trade time and labor for either of the first two. And the parasite — I mean slave driver — I mean employer — could convince the slave employee that their labor generated the equivalent of $10, when it really generated the equivalent of $500 — but the employer was a sneaky dishonest creep who kept the extra $490 for himself.

Through this severe imbalance of distribution, social castes were enforced in a way that people mistook for a spectrum of human worth — with “people who have less money” being perceived as low-worth, and “people who have more money” being perceived as high-worth. This is how the devaluation of the working class is enforced.

But really, anyone who buys into the idea that a dollar amount can adequately convey the value of a person’s time, energy, talents, skills, etc. is putting his faith into the illusion of money’s value — and all the ego-hooks that come with that, like having prestige and status in the eyes of men. He thereby becomes mentally inverted, perceiving the wealthy as more valuable based on the amount of imaginary monetary value they have accumulated.
Ironically, the wealthy one is the one in debt. Money is a stand-in symbol, after all. It literally denotes that something isn’t there. So to accumulate more money is to accumulate more of less.

I repeat: Money is debt.

“You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”

~ Jesus in Revelation 3:17

Supply Chain Human Centipede

Speaking of hierarchies, it’s a total inversion that ultra-greedy people are “at the top” of some economic pyramid. They’re at the bottom, actually — they are the “bottom feeders” they accuse poor people of being. The working class is depleted through exploited labor, and as their lifeforce drains out of them (literal “blood, sweat and tears”), the wealthy lie in wait below, lapping up that lifeforce secondhand… exactly like how intestinal worms eat shit.

Of course parasites want you to think they’re “on top!” But never, ever, ever forget this: The slave driver is the dependent one, in that he cannot function without his slave providing a steady stream of lifeforce to him. Project all he wants, but he is the real slave: a slave to his own hungry-ghost greed, helpless without someone to generously, mercifully, compassionately, feed him.

“Okay sure, Alicen, I agree that the essentials in life are free. But we need some form of currency to denote the value of non-essentials, like airplane tickets, cars, smartphones…”

No. We do not.

Ladies and gentlemen and secret-third-things, I present to you:

The Excitement Economy

^ 4 years ago, I had an epic conversation with my bestie Mickey Z. (subscribe to him!). Our topic? “The Excitement Economy” — a hypothetical economic system where people pay each other with excitement.

In an Excitement Economy,

• you would never work a job you hate

• your self-worth would not be measured by your income

• you would be free to do what you loved doing as a child

• and so much more!

I implore you to check out the full episode. You can listen to the audio podcast or read the transcript. It’s well “worth” your time. 😉

The unavoidable fact is that our current economic system is contingent upon there being have-nots whom the wealthy can define themselves against.

For example: There is no good reason why airplanes can’t have comfortable seats for everyone onboard. Why the humiliation ritual of taking leg space away from people who can’t afford a first-class ticket?

And there is no good reason why housing costs are so high and so many houses sit empty while the homeless population grows… and grows…

Underneath the airy-fairy language about money, what “spiritual wealth coaches” are actually teaching their doe-eyed clients is How To

• be less compassionate

• leave the poor behind on your spiritual ascent, like they’re just some pesky inconvenience

• be okay with having a hoard of wealth and possessions for yourself while others have far, far less

• justify idolizing yourself above your brothers and sisters in Christ

• ignore the ominous feeling of being convicted of sin

Therefore, I am not ashamed to be “poor.”

If you’re like me, and you’ve ever felt ashamed for “failing” to ascend the class hierarchy, I have a word for you: It is not your fault that you can’t “figure out” how money works. Money is not meant to “work.” It is meant to fail you, and that is by design.

Thousands of years and many attempted economic systems later, we haven’t solved the problem of redistributing wealth…
…because wealth does not need to be merely ~redistributed~. It needs to be reimagined completely.

They’ll Never Take Me Alive

I really meant it when I said “the spell broke.”

As you may know, I’ve been talking a big game about Free Energy for years. Humans can fly! We can live without food! etc., etc.

But being under the spells cast by occultist wealth coaches made me question my values, to the point where I wondered if something was wrong with me for being content with what I already have. Was I failing to grow, spiritually? Was there something missing, that I was supposed to want? A fancier car, perhaps? A more prestigious job title?

I tried, in vain, to prioritize money-making while still preaching Free Energy. But, to quote Daniel Suelo, a Christian renunciate, “Free means no money.”

I simply can’t force “Free Energy” and “a vampiric economic system” to fit together. They are diametrically opposed. Mutually exclusive.
As long as I claim to yearn for God’s perfect Free Energy Empire, but continue to serve the Vampire Empire, I am a hypocrite, a sinner, a liar. Lost.

Recently, I have felt God calling me, daring me, to trust, that all my needs will be provided, as long as I point my eyes as high into Heaven as I can.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Starting now.

I’m beginning to de-center money in my life as much as I currently know how to, to uphold my commitment to Free Energy. Hence, I have now made all of my courses “Pay What You Wish.”

And all my music, too!

And I am detangling my creative offerings from any sense of obligation or indebtedness. Thus, you are free to support me in a variety of ways, some involving money, some not. You can:

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Thank you for reading, loveling. God be with you, all-ways.

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¹⁹ Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: ²⁰ But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: ²¹ For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also….

^{… 24} No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. ²⁵ Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

²⁶ Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

²⁷ Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? ²⁸ And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: ²⁹ And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ³⁰ Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

³¹ Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? ³² (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

³³ But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

~ Jesus the Christ

Further Reading

1. “Living Without Money” and Moneyless World — blogs by Daniel Suelo

2. The Treasure Principle — a book on radical generosity by Randy Alcorn