Saniel Bonder

A Formula of Correlation that's Destroyed Much More than Wall Street and Is Way More Threatening than Terrorism and Global Warming - Part Three

Parts One and Two of this long post set the stage for our exploration of a different kind of “formula of correlation” than the abstruse creation of back-office Wall Street quants. Here we go, an initial glimpse and first take on what it’s all about, with relatively recent illustrative tidbits from the daily news …                Go to Part Two      Go to Part One

Our last post only just stated this new, spiritual-emotional formula of correlation and responsibility:

“Conscious responsibility for sex and space precedes conscious responsibility for money and time.”

In coming posts we’ll wind our way back through some of those recent avenues of financial-economic news we toured here. I hope I’ll be able to give you a different way of, among other things, understanding what the categories of “sex” and “space,” “money” and “time” really, deeply mean for us. Not to mention that paradigmatic riddle, “conscious responsibility.”

Just to begin the consideration, “sex” in this context means the whole range of energetic and emotional as well as physical interchanges of attraction and aversion, penetration and reception, embrace and withdrawal, and also violating and being violated, that we are engaging in relation to one another all the time. And “space” must include profound appreciation for the psychic integrity and boundaries as well as the physical and virtual expanses in which we live, move, and have our being.

In presenting Multidimensional Money in an earlier post, I propose that each of us is always exchanging “currency,” or things and energies of real value, at many levels or in many dimensions of our total existence. And I suggest we are always, in every moment, involved in this kind of exchange with “all our relations,” all existing beings and forces.

Part of the reason all this sounds like so much New Age woo-woo to so many is that they have no sense of an actual reality to such concepts. They are myopic or plain old blind both to our interconnectedness and to the existence of multiple dimensions, realms, or qualities of our actual experience and participation, in the human, natural, and spiritual domains. Their feeling dimension is stunted, severely attenuated.

To go back and just for a moment review some of our top news items, Bernie and Jack are both, in their own ways, good examples. So is “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, the ruthless turnaround boss. And did you ever hear about the annual hedge fund party-celebration called “Predators’ Ball?” These folks and so many others like them all over the world are mostly super-specialists who intentionally cross-train for financial-economic murder, mayhem, and, well, rape.

The rest of their training remains conveniently minimal to non-existent in terms of cultivating understanding and skills that would confer maturity in the whole-being currency exchange. What do these people really understand and practice, in the realms of sex and space that I am referring to? And if they are as stunted and clueless there as they appear, how can we possibly expect them to manage their participation in the concrete realms of money and time with skill, heart, integrity, and self-restraining compassion?

This leaves us with situations like what the news now chronicles every day, the seemingly perpetual weaknesses in our total practice of responsible commerce and sane culture that Good-B is struggling to help bring to light, so we can correct them.

From this perspective, businesses, financial institutions, and the people who populate them are, in far too many cases, like idiot savants. But if that’s true, then they’re idiot savants with immense, savage, real-world power. Unfortunately, their blind spots and areas of often grossly retarded development of understanding and character allow them to wreak havoc on others, even whole economies and societies, in the ways they now, sure enough, actually have.

But even many people who are apparently well-developed in such wisdom and character don’t necessarily comprehend just how grave this correlation of human underpinnings suggests our predicament really is. It’s going to take all of the second part of this essay to attempt to explain why and how that is so. Thus, I’ll have to leave you here with what is in effect a riddle that may not make much sense yet.

Conscious responsibility for sex and space precedes conscious responsibility for money and time.

In FT on June 3rd, hey, some things were looking up. Even the sage, dour Martin Wolf was saying hurrah! over the apparent banishing of the fear of deflationary meltdown. A main headline: “Boost in car sales mirrors global rise,” with a subhead, “Strong performance from Ford.” But GM’s demise, front page news two days before, now got no mention there at all — yet that particular hurricane hasn’t even made landfall, in terms of its imminent real impact on hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of people, the whole American economy and the world’s too.

And let’s just take three separately reported items and put them together with something I learned from the same paper many months ago and mentioned in an earlier post.

In “World News,” we learned that Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary now in Beijing, is “confident of China’s support.” He was assuring the Chinese that their vast holdings of US dollar assets are secure. And with apparent reservations, they were receptive to that notion and to the necessity of America’s immense deficits until the crisis is weathered, after which the U.S. will “get growth back on track, and live within our means” (Geithner). The Chinese were quoted as wanting to see more proof of that dollar asset security and of how the U.S. is going to “restore fiscal discipline afterwards.” Geithner crowed about their “sophisticated understanding” of America’s situation and the primacy of the dollar as the world’s “principal reserve currency for a long time.” (Which, it must be noted, the Chinese have been openly grumbling about of late.)

Not so bad, right? Hope-inducing? But we found also in “World News” a more sobering story. “Media censored on Tiananmen”: “In the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, China was censoring foreign media and the internet to an extent not seen since the crackdown that preceded the Beijing Olympics.” Those responsible for shutting down internet sites, big and small, and halting deliveries of subscription periodicals are the same central government decision-makers that were also giving Mr. Geithner such nice smiling welcomes and, well, the benefit of the doubt. For now.

And they are the same leaders whose trajectory since Tiananmen was explained on the op-ed page by Minxin Pei, author of “China’s Trapped Transition” and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Communist Party suffered what he called a “near-death experience” after Tiananmen in the face of world outrage, international isolation, and widespread shock and resentment in its own people. But the country has rallied to become a “new economic and political giant,” with the party’s rule all but unquestioned at home or abroad, and its leaders appearing “to believe that they have discovered the magic formula for political survival: a one-party regime that embraces capitalism and globalization.”

Now let’s peel back the surface to what we know of the Chinese people’s collective feelings about their place in the world. In an earlier post on the themes of hubris and humiliation in world leaders and populations, I ruminated on the significance of one of modern China’s mantras that its leaders have made popular among most of its 1.6 billion populace: “One hundred years of humiliation!” This is intended to stoke nationalistic fires of resentment and outrage at China’s treatment at the hands of Western powers dating from the Boxer rebellion more than a century ago. And it has worked really, really well.

Sex and space. Money and time. Somebody convince me that these people are never going to come to a “nothing personal, just business” decision about all that American debt they hold and those slippery American dollars. Somebody prove that they are not actually just itching to become the Morgan Stanley to America’s Kazakhstan. That they aren’t deeply looking forward to a day when they might let us find out what it has really felt like to be Chinese and at the mercy of Western powers and Japan much of the last century or so. One hundred years of humiliating violation. At least I can publish this essay on an American-based website. Can anyone in Beijing read it? On “May 35th” (Chinese couldn’t even use the date online, June 4th, so they came up with this among other ways of dodging the censors) they couldn’t even read Financial Times, except maybe in censored form. Tiananmen was and remains a news item very non grata.

If you think your average Wall Street financier or quant or American CEO is pretty shut off to even the possibility of a multidimensional understanding and life-practice in relation to money and whole-being currency exchange, how about your average Communist Party leader, bureaucrat, or business executive in China?

None of this, of course, even mentions what’s going on in the most collectively sociopathic, nuclear-armed personality cult on the planet, China’s next-door neighbor, North Korea.

We’ve got a long way to go. And I’ve only just opened the door to the sobering world of this formula of deep emotional and spiritual correlation, how we humans can optimally conduct our affairs taking it into account, and what, I predict, the consequences will continue to be until somehow people learn about it and embrace its formidable discipline:

Conscious responsibility for sex and space precedes conscious responsibility for money and time.

Next post, Part Four, will try to get way underneath the surfaces of what these terms all mean for us in our ordinary minds — hopefully to make it plain just how profoundly challenging it is for any current-day humans, never mind great numbers of us, to achieve the kind of conscious responsibilities called for in the formula. And why that level of conscious responsibility is so terribly urgent, even so.

P.S., almost forgot to mention: Felix Salmon concluded his March 2009 article in Wired on the Wall Street-smashing correlation formula with a coda that’s all the more eerie in light of current news on Chinese censorship. David X. Li , he wrote, has been “notably absent” from current debates about the cause of the economic convulsions. Why? Well, Mr. Li, who grew up in rural China in the 60s, moved back home a year ago to head up, guess what, the risk management department of a major Chinese financial institution. In a recent conversation, Li was hesitant to speak about his paper and the formula in question, saying he’d have to get permission from the PR department. Permission was denied, from then on. Li, the company’s press office later emailed, was “no longer doing the kind of work he did” at JPMorganChase, and would not be speaking to media.

I’m not your conspiracy theory type, though I’ve wandered in that direction a time or two. How can you not, in the age of “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The Matrix”? But this curious little nest of coincidences does make my skin crawl just a little bit. Especially when you hear one of the comments Li did make back in the day about his model:

“The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it.”

© Saniel Bonder 2009. All rights reserved.  

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About Saniel: Harvard educated “destiny-empowerment” expert, Saniel is author of Healing the Spirit/Matter Split, the provocative "White-Hot Yoga of the Heart," and many other books and programs. He hails from Sonoma, California where his unique blend of intellectual curiosity and spiritual wisdom is honed and nurtured. Saniel co-writes and co-teaches with his wife, Linda. Together they travel and teach “materiality and spirit” workshops throughout the US and internationally. His website is http://heartgazing.com/spiritmoney.