Saniel Bonder

A “Prayer of Returns” for Congressional Republicans

I’m interrupting my planned sequence of essays on Multidimensional Money™ and The Whole-Being Currency Exchange™ and departing here from the deliberately non-partisan, serene tone and focus of this column.

Maybe, though, it’s not so much a departure from that sequence of essays as an occasion to illustrate their themes along with, as I’ve indicated in the title, a prayer of sorts.

“The Prayer of Returns” is a way of wishing for the speedy and most auspicious unfoldment of karma, or the universal law of action and reaction, incident and consequence. “Fructification,” the yielding of fruit, is a grand old-timey word that serves well in this context. I came up with this prayer not in any sense as a curse, but rather as a reality-check accelerator of blessings. It goes something like this:

“So-and-so, may you receive as you are giving! If you are giving wisdom, compassion, generosity, truthfulness, kindness, fairness, justice, blessings, etc., may you receive likewise, and all the moreso.

“But if you are giving or putting forth into the world ignorance, greed, intolerance, falsehood, manipulation, unkindness, unfairness, injustice, and mean-spirited selfishness, may you also receive likewise, and all the moreso — so that you wake up to the wrongness of your ways and are blessed with the insight and motivation to change them dramatically!”

In fair measure, I always like to level the playing field by including the same invocations for myself. If I’m the one seeing things with a wild skew, participating in some inappropriate, exploitive, unkind, etc., way, well, let me find that out swiftly and in no uncertain terms. Then I too can have the blessing of a clear opportunity to change my ways for the better.

Today I’ve been offering the Prayer of Returns for the Republican party members, most of them anyway, in the United States Congress.

Just to make it clear, I voted for Obama and, from New Hampshire’s post-primary speech on, I have viewed him as a truly extraordinary human being assuming responsibility as the U.S. President.

But I’m not a Democrat, though I lean mostly in their classic directions. I’m registered here in California as having no party affiliation. And I’ve elsewhere acknowledged that the closest description I’ve heard to my own stance is Gov. Schwarzenegger’s description of his “Arnold Republicanism”: “a fiscal conservative, social moderate, and environmental progressive.” I’d add to that “spiritual evolutionary,” and call myself a “Saniel Interdependent.” 

However … the Republican party continues to appear to me to have lost its moorings. A lot of what took place over the last eight years, yes, can be assigned to an astoundingly willful yet small-minded President who was in way over his head, and his exceedingly clever, equally willful, and brazenly arrogant colleagues. That’s old news.

But this is new news, and it can’t be pinned on the deposed. The much-ballyhooed rediscovery of the great spine and heart of the Republican party in opposition to the stimulus package put forth by the President and the Democrats would be stirring evidence of a regeneration of the party’s great historic strengths — except for the depressing small-mindedness of what they seem to be harkening back to: knee-jerk reflex, free market at all costs, no-spending, tax-cut, “government is the problem” Reaganomics.

I’m no expert on what the hell is happening in the national and global economy but apparently no one else is either — even the people paid to be experts. I do get the clear impression that this crisis is vastly bigger and, more spooky by far, vastly more complex than anything we’ve ever been through before. That includes the Great Depression.

I gather that the Clinton years largely continued much of the mindset and orientation established under Reagan’s free-market Wild West approach. What’s at issue here is not which party is right or wrong. What’s at issue is the utterly urgent necessity for pragmatic cooperation and collaboration.

Because what our Congress and President do right now has the potential to save not only the United States but the whole global economy from what could be the most excruciating financial collapse in history.

Period.

And nothing that anyone else, any group, any government or group of governments anywhere else on Earth could possibly do, has that power, that potential.

Period.

In my line of work we help people not be governed by automatic recourse to dogmatic party lines of their own minds and histories. We encourage development of a varied repertoire of moves. Instinctual resorting to the extremes of either “tax and spend liberalism” or “tax-cut, no spending conservatism” no matter what the macroeconomic moment is a kind of economic fundamentalism that will never, ever be sufficient. Never again, anyway. The whole world has become way too weirdly interconnected.

To every thing there is a season. Sometimes it’s wisest to pull off the fetters and, making sure to post clear-seeing sentries, let the markets boom. Other times, it’s wisest to put the government into super-spending mode to pull our own economy out of cardiac arrest and hopefully help other economic systems worldwide as well.

This is the latter kind of time — like never ever before. 

Is anybody in Congress posturing? This is not the time.

Is anybody in Congress hedging bets? “Hey, let’s rally together, we can short the President and get away with it, this’ll set us up to win big in 2010 and take back the Presidency in 2012!”

This is not the time.

I realize clearly that many and maybe most people in Congress stonewalling on this stimulus program sincerely believe they’re doing the very best, most honorable, and wisest thing they can possibly do. I’m also pretty confident there’s a whole bunch of cynical positioning going on.

But even with a high sincerity factor, the problem comes back to a profoundly flawed and ill-informed reckoning with the immensely complex demands of this time. Reaganomics does not comprise the true heart of the Republican party’s economic value system. I am in no position to say what does, but I believe it has in part to do with values I also treasure: personal responsibility, entrepreneurial support of the American Dream as a reachable reality for those who take initiative and persevere, and so on.

In yesterday’s Financial Times, my daily Bible largely because it’s not a partisan American publication — and the columns sizzle with acuity every day — one writer opined that we could plunge from our current just after-crash “1929” to the horrific depressionary depths of a “1932” in far less than three years this time. Maybe only one.

In today’s edition, a major feature follows the front page main headline: “Asia’s economic heart attack: Unlucky for some, how the downturn’s speed and ferocity have surprised even pessimists.” That’s Asia — a group of the supposedly most robust, immune local economies on the planet.

On the streets all over America now on the evening news: job fairs that used to attract no one over 22 now pulling in thousands of middle-aged corporate downsizees willing to work for a tenth their previous incomes. People lining up on the streets for some kind of work, any kind of work.

We’re going to have to pull together in the most energetic, sustained, and often strange ways to get through this, folks. We would each and all be wise to wake up every day and recite: “An economic tsunami is just hitting and it is going to continue smashing over us all every day for months and maybe years to come — and along with everyone else, I am on the beach and it’s already here. I’ve got to take care of my own, yes, but look, there goes a drowning child … a woman clinging desperately to a tree … a man trying to swim in the rushing current. It doesn’t matter what they look like, whether they’re in my in-group or not — I’ve got to do everything I can to help, and I can’t just be thinking now of what’s best for me and mine!”

It seems to me there’s a grave misapprehension in Congress of its own real calling today to take heroic, concerted, united leadership for both America and the world. This is all taking place on a world stage. It’s being watched as closely around the globe as it is at home — maybe moreso in many places, where people are under no illusions about how much their fortunes, livelihoods, and the futures of their children and grandchildren are going be affected by what our own republic’s leaders do this week, next, and over the next few weeks to come.

Multidimensional Money, or things of precious value on many levels, is being traded here. The different forms of currency being exchanged all must contribute to an emergency global CPR that resuscitates not just financial bottom lines but the heart and soul of (among the most frequently used words in the financial news for the last year and more) our CONFIDENCE and TRUST.

So that’s why I offer the Prayer of Returns for our U.S. Congressional Republicans, especially — and for every single intelligent adult alive today, myself certainly included. May we all receive as we are giving. If our giving comes back to us as any kind of, to use another currently infamous phrase, “toxic asset,” may we get the karmic message of our actions. And on that basis, may we change our ways and make a new life together for everyone’s sake, especially our children’s children’s children, here in America and everywhere.

So be it.

© Saniel Bonder 2009. All rights reserved.  

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About Saniel: Harvard educated “destiny-empowerment” expert, Saniel is author of the forthcoming audio series, "Wealth Without Guilt," 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.