Mountain man
The Santa Monica Mountains near my mentor’s California crib, where we took a lovely hike and shared a magical moment. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
I don’t know anything. As Socrates defers, “All I know is that I know nothing.”
Sometimes, I fool myself into thinking that I know things. Fortunately, there are plenty of wise ones in my life who speak their truth in love to me and are down to pipe up to help me remember what I don’t know.
One of the wise ones is a former pastor I call my mentor, but he’s so much more. Depending on the mood and moment, he’s also my homey, friend, big brother, fun uncle, stern uncle, protective uncle, and surrogate father rolled into one slim, spry, 65-year-old body that still evokes his days as a hardwood hero when he was the point guard and floor general of his college hoops team.
He served as the de facto general of the 12-person crack team that monitored me around the clock for three days during my Dark Night of the Soul and kept me alive when I couldn’t care for myself. He showed up for me even though we’d only known each other for a few months at the time, and his command post was 2,000 miles away in LA while I was going through it in Minneapolis.
I believe this man was my dad or something like it in another life. In this one, we met as middle-aged men, and it’s like we picked up where we left off and haven’t missed a beat. He’s soul family, and I love him.
We talk frequently about everything from sports to sons to spirituality. Recently, during one of our talks, I launched into my go-to sermon about our society being organized around money, and this time my mentor pushed back on the notion. He said we’re organized around making connections and nurturing relationships, not money, and I got the vibe that he sometimes thinks I have a gloomy outlook on things.
I’m with my mentor that we should organize society around love and light, manifested as a tapestry of connections tied together by relationships. Buddha and Jesus taught us everything we need to know about how it could and should be.
But when we look around with discernment, nonjudgment, and objectivity, what we see—not just with our eyes, but another kind of sight—is a society mostly organized around greed and money. Money is the driving force behind how most of us make decisions, including whom we connect and build relationships with.
For most of us, money supersedes everything. Sometimes, the impulse to put money first is subtle, but it’s still there. Try paying attention to how often money drives our decision-making and see what happens.
What we may find is that instead of asking ourselves, “What’s the right thing to do?” we usually ask ourselves, “What’s the profitable thing to do?” For most of us, we unconsciously default to thinking that the profitable thing is the right to do.
Someone I admire said we can’t unlock new possibilities without first accepting what is.
How things are in this reality we’re sharing is that the U.S. gets to be the world hegemon of a hegemony built on the backbones of black chattel slaves, taking land from the locals via attempted genocide, exploiting humans around the world for money, consolidating 99% of the money in less than 1% of the population, and controlling the money with an iron fist. That’s facts.
Most of the non-Western world takes these facts and concludes that our version of democracy is a sham, and I feel the global vibe on a soul level. I’m going with Team World, and I’m all about scrapping the current societal model for a new one.
We can pick up any history book, even the ones at college where they be lying all the time and don’t even know it, to get a sense of what’s coming down the pike. History tells us everything we need to discern that American hegemony is at an inflection point, and things are about to get megaduper weird. I’m a mystic empath, and I feel it coming like The Weeknd coming off a bender.
Things are gonna get so oppressive and off-the-wall outré with Trump and all these low-vibrating nationalists around the world coming to power that folk are gonna rise up like it’s Alexander Hamilton times on a global scale. A sage described it as a necessary purification, a great purge of all not in resonance with the radical shift in consciousness being born inside us.
The New Earth birthed from the purge will be magical, eco-friendly, futuristic, and fun. Like a cross between Atlantis and Star Trek from the Picard canon universe. I’ve tuned into that version of reality, and I hope our timeline accelerates so we can smoothly shift into it, and I can experience heaven on earth as an embodied soul in this lifetime.
But unless a critical mass of us humans radically accepts that the way we’re organized is mostly trash, and that we need an urgent reset given how our trash is unsustainably polluting people and the planet, the road to the New Earth is gonna be a slow, and potentially bloody process. Again, pick up a history book to see how things usually unfold.
Talks like the one I had with my mentor about money make me think it’s more likely than not we’re headed for slow and bloody.
Change is scary. Especially when you’ve worked hard and made sound money decisions in this money-driven world like my mentor has and you get to be a ca$h money dance millionaire with all the perks that come with that.
I enjoy my creature comforts and adventuresome, bougie lifestyle, but I get the vibe on a soul level that there’s no value in preserving the status quo when it’s on terminal life support. The jig’s about up. That’s why I didn’t vote for any of the human candidates for president and instead went with Love.
Just stroll down MLK Boulevard in your town—and if your town lacks an MLK Boulevard, stroll downtown in your town these days—open a newspaper, or turn on the news, and you’ll see what I mean. The masses won’t abide the over-the-top, inequitable outcomes our money-driven society produces for much longer. The fabric that holds our fragile structures together is already starting to unravel.
My mentor and I often share our different viewpoints, find the delta between our views, reflect on it, and then come back together to explore it. More often than not, we come back to each other with more refined, nuanced views colored by the other’s. And we always have a deeper respect for the other’s willingness to be vulnerable by sharing and daring to be open to the notion that we might not know everything.
When my mentor and I came back together via text after our money talk, I texted him that before we fold into a New Earth where we’re all about relationships and connections, folk would have to wake up and experience some pain.
His wise response signaled he doesn’t think I’m such a gloomy trooper anymore.
As he put it and where we’re leaving it for now:
“Most of us don’t drink water until we’re thirsty. If we have never walked out of the valley, we have no idea how beautiful it is from the top of the mountain.”
