Gravitas
“Then He Fashioned him and Breathed into him of His Spirit; and appointed for you hearing and sight and hearts. Small thanks give ye!” — {Quran, 32:9}
The subject of money is one that has captivated and entranced man for time immemorial. I wish to discuss it — not because I want money, but because I find it fascinating.
I, myself, desire money. Not for the money itself: stacking large sums of money for the sake of it is pointless, and only a moderate amount of luxury is desirable to me. For better or worse, material possessions do not make me happy. So long as I have quality food, nice-looking clothes, a warm bed, the people I care for, a comfortable roof over me, a car I like for ease of transport and the freedom to go wherever I want whenever I want, I am happy. So, you can say, I desire the trappings of money, in particular the freedom and security it gives, infinitely more than the money itself.
But I am fascinated by money, because it reveals how consciousness interacts with reality: it is a gateway through which the mental and material planes meet.
Eye of The Beholder
It is a commonly repeated epithet that money is power. But what money is varies according to who is observing. In a general sense, money is much more than simple power. For some, as we mentioned above, money is freedom and security. For others, it is fun. And for others still, it is success.
Of course, money in itself is none of those things. It only looks like them to those people.
They have faith that money can give them what they desire, so money becomes a proxy for that desire.
Even gold is not objectively valuable, but its conferred value is extremely stable.
Gold is rare, it impresses us and it does not tarnish. These very properties: beauty, rarity and permanence, are what make it valuable.
This begs the question, does objective value exist at all?
Many people do not believe in objectivity at all; however, there is at least a finite number of ways the world can be usefully perceived, and it cannot be denied that groups of people seem to coalesce around each particular Weltanschauung. In addition, as ideas become more and more complex, the number of ways they can be perceived grows smaller and smaller, and people’s viewpoints and experiences converge.
These functional perspectives also have various traits in common: value (and the basic principles that govern it) are constant. This is almost the same as objective value, but not exactly the same, as it means that value is wobbly, that no explanation of value can be given which is not, essentially, false. We may only offer explanations that are almost true enough, almost all of the time.
This is why something which is not apparently valuable (a piece of paper backed by nothing, for example?) can be made valuable. For a while, at least.
Money Between Past & Present
The bank notes of the past were backed by a standard value in gold (or at least so we were told). That is what created the gold standard, and from this gold, the dollar derived its value. Yet, this story begs another question:
What was the gold backed by?
What made the gold valuable? It was certainly not its utility. Gold is a fantastic conductor of electricity, but far too scarce and beautiful to be used solely for that purpose. Speaking of beauty, gold is lovely to look at, but not for very long. Perhaps the value is in its rarity?
This funny looking drawing of a disproportionate horse I made when I was 14 is far more rare. In fact, it is one of a kind. How much would you pay for it?
The Value Rabbit Hole
It is my viewpoint that gold is backed by all the resources, time and energy that people are willing to expend for it. But what, in, turn, are those backed by?
We will find, at the very bottom of this descending ditch to the root of value an answer along the lines of ‘the human will’. Not the will to survive, but to thrive, flourish and conquer. An energy that is uniquely and distinctly human. The force which animates.
That is what money is truly backed by, or rather, what money symbolises: it is crystallised force, pure untainted will trapped within a physical object. To the extent that one desires, money is valuable. If we all desired nothing, then money would be worth nothing.
That brings us to the question, what is this animating force?
Etymologically, the words ‘animal’ and ‘animate’ share a common Latin root: ‘anima’, which means soul or spirit. And it is here that rationality exits the conversation, being too weak to answer such a question.
The Quran and other Abrahamic texts teach us that God created Adam by breathing life into him: this is how Adam gains his spirit or soul. The word used for ‘spirit’ in Arabic is ‘rūh روح’. In Hebrew, similarly, it is ‘ruach רוּחַ’, which also means wind, breeze or breath. In the Koine Greek of the New Testament and the Septuagint, it is ‘pneuma πνεῦμα’, which also means spirit, soul or breath. This same link between breath and the soul is found in the word ‘inspiration’, which can refer to the process of being mentally stimulated, or inhaling. Similarly, expiration refers to exhaling and respiration refers to the act of breathing as a whole. All three words share the root word ‘spiritus’.
Hadith teaches us that Allah created Adam in His Divine Image (Bukhari 6227). I do not presume to know what this means, but it implies that, along with other things, humans have the ability to create, albeit in a much more limited and mundane capacity. And, indeed, we breathe our own spirit into our creations.
We created money. We named it and we gave it value and meaning.
Every human creation is like this, but I chose to highlight this with money for two specific reasons.
- Money represents nearly pure value. It is not the desire for a particular thing, but rather the desire for things in general.
- Money is quantified. What this means is that in money, we have condensed this force into a form which can be empirically observed and approximately measured.
Because of this, just as the leaves are able to show us what the wind is doing, money will physically map some currents of invisible psychic energy.
Perhaps this is why we call it ‘currency’.
Because money does this, we are able to observe the behaviour of this psychic energy directly and watch its effect on the world around it. This way, we may learn how it works, even though we are unable to see or detect it.
The Emanation
The stock market is already conducting this experiment. We need only observe it to derive the results, and what we notice when observing the stock market is that:
- Money is not the only investment made into a given entity. Psychic energy is another, arguably more important, one.
- The more psychic energy we invest into a given entity, the more manifest that entity becomes.
Entity is, of course, the correct term to use here, as corporations are people. To bet on a company is to bet on the people behind it, and as our condensed will is pumped into them, they become more powerful and gain an even greater ability to move mind and matter.
This implies exactly that we mentioned above: money is, indeed, a symbolic proxy between the seen and the unseen worlds. It is a gateway for a spirit which animates and gives life — for psychic energy, or will.
In the same way that money can be invested into companies, a portion of the human spirit has been invested into global currencies. As we lose faith in a company, we withdraw the dollars we have invested, and then we say the company has ‘lost value’. Likewise, as we lose faith in a currency, what begins to happen?
We withdraw the emanations we invested in that currency, and it loses value. The less faith we have in a currency, the less value that currency has. If we stopped believing in the dollar, the dollar would cease to exist.
Let’s call this energy ‘spirit’, because, as we’ve outlined above, the Greek word for spirit is pneuma, and spirit works pneumatically.
Like a pneumatic system, the economy and the stock market are full of centres which inflate and deflate, and just as air must always flow in and out of the body to oxygenate its cells and tissues, so too must money ever circulate. If not, the body will die.
In occult circles, the suit of coins is associated with wealth. From that deck, the ten of coins is arranged in accordance with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. And on the left side of the tree (remember, this is a mirror, so your left is the tree’s left) is an old man. The old man represents time and is associated with Saturn, the Roman deity of time, change, abundance and the harvest (notice he is wearing a cloak of green, red and gold).
The Gnostics associated Saturn with the Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, who was responsible for entrapping spirit in physical matter, and Samael, who taught man how to fashion jewellery from the different metals and about all manner of gems. If we observe the coins in the suit of coins, we find that each coin contains a pentagram, which have classically represented the five senses, or man.
Man, confined inside the coin. I do not take any of this seriously, but the symbolism is striking.
Through all this, though, you get a hint of what money does.
“Place your ear to a dollar bill and, if you can hear at all, you will hear the crackling of fire and the howling of the damned.”
The Connecting Bridge
Let’s retrace our steps a little. How does spirit become trapped in the dollar bills?
We already know that the perception of value in the dollar bill is an emanation. Jung refers to the emanating factor (or, as he calls it, the projecting factor) is the logical, sword-like masculine aspect of the female mind, or animus, in women, and the seductive, emotional, tendril-like feminine aspect of the male psyche, or anima, in men.
There again is that word anima.
It is my anima who emanates the appearance of value on the symbol ($). That emanation is a part of my mind, just as much as my stomach is a part of my body, and in the same way that my stomach can influence my consciousness, so, too, can the emanation.
It cannot make me do anything, but it can, does, and will try.
Three factors determine how powerful the emanation will be:
- How strong is my desire?
- How great is my faith in the emanation?
- How weak is my ego?
If all three of these factors align, then this emanation becomes very dangerous, because it is not conscious. Furthermore, its influence rivals the part that is conscious.
To ponder on whether this trapped energy is inside or outside of our heads. In important ways, it is both. The meaning is within, the object is without. To us, however, the two are not different. The unconscious and the outside world can never be meaningfully differentiated.
So, then, what is this force wielded by these emanations against consciousness?
When a large amount of matter is concentrated in one place, modern physics says that it warps space and time, generating what we call gravity. Likewise, when a large amount of psychic energy, or spirit, is concentrated in one place, it warps the collective unconscious and generates a force similar to gravity. For the sake of ease, let’s call this Gravitas.
This is a Latin term meaning heaviness. I believe this is fitting, as ‘weight’ is used in modern English to signify something of import. Likewise, in common parlance, a person with gravitas is someone important: someone with a presence, who is to be taken seriously.
Kings possess gravitas and, just like money, the reason a king has power is because a large group of people emanate power onto him.
Perhaps the most fascinating and important point here is that once this begins to happen, it likes to continue happening. This is because the more people who believe in these emanations, the more reality they possess. If a hundred people all do what a certain man tells them to, then he has some power. The more power he has, the more dangerous he becomes. The more dangerous he becomes, the more intimidating he is. And the more intimidating he is, the more power he has.
Gravitas, in this sense, is best defined as the capacity of an idea to alter reality. And it is an idea, because it is not the paper bills themselves that change reality, but the idea they signify. This is why another item, like a cheque, for example, can perform the same function as the bills.
Money, however, is only the most apparent illustration of this effect.
In a drug addiction, an emanation is projected onto a certain substance. This emanation is always the complement to the addict’s feeling of lack: if they are depressed, the drug represents happiness. If they are in pain, it represents comfort. If they are bored, it is novelty.
The emanation is then animated when the addict believes it, when he falls for the sales pitch and buys into it.
Beyond this metaphorical purchase, there is almost always actual purchasing involved with a drug addiction, and if we recall what we discussed earlier about what money truly is, we will realise that purchasing is a microcosm of ritual sacrifice.
Even if there is no exchange of money involved, the sacrifice of energy and time are usually sufficient. After all, time is money.
As this process of animation goes on, the thoughts concerning the drug become more and more autonomous and the addict’s ego becomes less autonomous. Increasingly, the drug thoughts take charge, the addict gives their life to the voice they hear in the drug and they do it by selling their soul.
By far, the most interesting effects of these emanations appear when they are projected onto people. If a large number of people project status and importance onto a certain man — which is to say, if many people respect, admire and praise him — strange things begin to happen:
Firstly, suggestible people will begin to obey and emulate him, regardless of whether or not they know why. Secondly, and more interestingly, his stress will diminish. His serotonin and endorphin levels will rise. His body will begin to produce more testosterone, causing his muscles to grow and his bones to become stronger. His brain will function better. He will be more confident, driven and focused, and he will be less anxious. He will sleep better and be less likely to fall sick. He will have more energy. Women will find him more attractive.
All of these things happen to people with high status: people in whom others have invested psychic energy.
Sceptics will argue that what I call ‘energy’ is simply a placeholder for a myriad of other factors. That what I am referring to when I call it that word does not refer to anything physical or specific.
Neither does the word dollar. Yet we agree to use the short-hand because the word is a perfect descriptor of what occurs. Dollars are not objects that exist in physical space. A dollar, as we have stated already, is an insubstantial unit of abstract motivation. It is only a method of referring to and programming a constellation of physical patterns. But we forget that, because it works so well.
The best example of a collective emanation with power is an attractive woman. Imagine a stunningly beautiful woman enters a room filled with men and begins signalling her availability — she becomes an object of motivation, and the fact that this is occurring on a large scale makes the emanation mimetic. As it spreads across the room, more and more men become potential suitors, and they begin to affirm the emanation, strengthening and stabilising it.
Because many men desire the woman, the opportunity represented by her availability is not likely to last. This urgency increases her desirability and her desirability increases the urgency. Additionally, the group’s belief that the woman is desirable makes each individual within the group more sure that she is.
The same thing is happening with money. If only a few people believe in a currency, its projected value is unstable and it is liable to dissipate. If many people, however, believe in its value, like gold, the value is stabilised.
What this reveals is that, as we synchronise our minds, we build channels through which invisible forces may travel and pass seamlessly, just as language does. Ideas, memes and emanations passing unimpeded between human minds.
It is important to remember, however, that interpretation is not done consciously. You do not have to try to understand the meaning of letters or words you know. The act of seeing them is the act of recognising them.
When you speak, you do not consciously move your lips to create the words: it just happens. Thus, most of both incoming and outgoing communication is handled unconsciously: body language is a perfect example of this, and there is probably an information exchange occurring all the time which is far more subtle and complicated than that which we notice.
Invisible forces, what some refer to using the simplistic term “mind viruses”, are using us as conduits to affirm their existence. Some of these are symbiotic, while others are parasitic.
This psychic ecology will always exist. The best we can do is not to let it control us, but to have a reciprocal and intentional relationship with it — to feed the forces sympathetic to humanity and starve the ones which are hostile.
Forces much larger than those we perceive are at play all around us and in what we do. But they are not simply confined to the unseen: they are right here, before our very eyes. They are made of our minds. The less we believe that, the less clearly we will see them, and the more vulnerable we will be to their suggestions and effects.
