Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Economic Turmoil

It's hard to remain optimistic when news comes out like we saw from Wall Street today. More financial bad news. On the heels of the Freddie and Fannie Mae crises, we now have a HUGE insurance company and a 2 major investment banks in danger of collapse and bankruptcy. We seem to have an avalanche of bad financial news that has continued for a seemingly endless length of time.

The sub prime mortgage crisis is seen as spurring much, if not all, of the current economic slide. The true answer goes deeper than that, however.

What we are seeing is the simple reality of consequences following action. The universe is always giving us feedback - individually and collectively, about the decisions we make and how we are living our lives.

We are currently getting a huge dose of universal feedback on the dangers of uncontrolled spending, insatiable appetites for the material, basing our sense of value or happiness on the size of our homes and expecting to 'have it all' without a lot of effort.

ALL of the current financial crises can be linked to greed and insatiable desire. Guess what... when we define our success, value or happiness by the size of our house or the car we drive, or we try to fill an inner void with material 'stuff' we get ourselves into trouble. Collectively as a country, we have gone done this path.

Corporations in their lust for profits have capitalized on that, taken advantage of it, and thus is born the credit crisis (deeply rooted in the horrifically predatory mortgages packaged and sold by banks and eagerly gobbled up by consumers who wanted homes they really couldn't afford.)

The bottom line in this mess, is that as individuals we need to get a grip on what is really important in our lives, work to reduce our insatiable appetite for material goods, and gain some balance in our lives. We need to want less and be happy with what we have. We need to get back to a mentality of working for what we want, rather than expecting it to simply land in our laps.

I'm a big believer, obviously, in positive thinking and visioning/goal setting as a way to manifest abundance. These spiritual practices, however, do not call on us to abandon our connection to reality! We can't wish away what is on our way to what we want. There are steps and procedures we must go through to transform our level of prosperity. The answer is not to do it on credit and wait for God to pay the bill.

There is more 'financial feedback' on its way from the universe. We are in for a bumpy ride. In the end, I hope we all (myself included) learn some valuable lessons from this experience and take some corrective action. All of us can learn from what is going on. It isn't pleasant. It isn't easy. It can, however, lead us to a brighter future and a more solid foundation!

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