Back in the 80s? 90s? There was a movie with the underlying precept: time is money. Or money is time, in that case. In that movie, everyone was born with the same amount of time. They died when they ran out. Time was currency. In that story, the focus is on a boy who is very enterprising. Young in life, with his savings habit and ambitious work pursuits, he is already well ahead of most people time-wise. He often sees this rich beautiful woman in a big car that he will get newspapers for, for the extra bits of time.

Time marches on and eventually he is a young man, and his mother is running out of time. He has 300 years extra but there is no way to ‘transfer’ this time. He journeys to the city far away, to those who would have to give permission, and he asks to gift his own 300 extra years to his mother. They point out that nobody has asked to ‘give’ time in eons, in part because people are just not generous like that. The main decision maker is very moved by the young man. He is ‘wise and good’.

At the same time, the rich beautiful woman from his childhood — who still looks just the same — sees him, and tells him that she has arranged an investment opportunity for him that will cost him exactly 300 years, not by coincidence. It will give him the chance to truly move out of the poor world and into the world where you always have enough time. The decision maker tells the young man he will give permission to transfer the time to his mom. The beautiful woman tells him that his mother would want him to have this opportunity, instead.

At the end of the movie, he is back in his neighborhood, and the rich woman gives a string of pearls to his two cousins, who promptly fight over them (a white-trash moment) and they end up breaking and as the guys are scrabbling in the dirt for them, the young man and the beautiful woman are driving away in her big car, and she says sadly, “We all start with the same amount.” The movie was essentially a statement on how, no matter what the currency is, you are going to get rich and poor people, and it isn’t really what you’re born with that matters.

It was not a great movie, but it caused me to think about it quite often over the next few years, the concepts involved with it, which I suppose made it worthwhile no matter the cinematic detail.

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The other night we went to see that movie ‘In Time’. The actors are the current hot young thangs hired for looks or current commodity, not worth mentioning much except the cop, who is Cillian Murphy, also seen in Inception and the Dark Knight, and may very well be the only person in the movie who can truly act (aside from his coworker with a bit part, and Matt Bomer also with a bit part). Fortunately, the movie is not demanding, so it’s somewhat ok… consider it entertainment, not dramatic entertainment.

In this movie, again, time is money is time. The people in charge are not wise and good, they are evil. “For a few to be immortal, many must die,” is the understanding of the rich. Time is like every stock and commodity on the market and treated exactly as so. People are locked into “time-zones” they cannot afford to get out of. The prices are controlled completely in the timezones, so overnight inflation can go up radically. Everyone has precisely 25 years to live and then 1 year of time that kicks in on their birthday. Then they die. Assuming they can make their time last even a year in the economy. Every single day is a struggle to get enough time to get all the way through it, never mind have enough until the next morning. The merciless economic hardships and fluctuations of ‘the market’ which is really just a matter of a lot of very rich people managing a world they are immortal in, is a constant struggle.

I won’t detail the happenings as that would give the movie away. Suffice to say there are parallels between the two movies but a very different, more dystopian element in this one.

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I stood on the sidewalk along the dark parking lot alone, after the movie, as it was midnight, I was waiting for the cab and the girls were in the theatre (mine and the next door neighbor’s teen I took with us). Something triggered me at the very end of the show, maybe the somewhat haunting credits tune, and I felt very intense and quiet.

I started thinking about money, and then about time. And it sort of hit me like an epiphany that is tough to put into words (or, you can, but it just sounds stupidly so-what when you do), that everything in our world, in our reality, in our body, in our universe, comes down to only one currency in the end: energy.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how true it was, until I got to the body, and realized (somewhat startled) that this is what human death is: it’s running out of energy. Literally.

It isn’t about age, except that age causes us to increase our ‘energy loss’ exponentially, almost like a car that becomes less and less efficient over time. That varies based on genetics, the person, etc. It isn’t about disease, except that disease itself reflects a sub-standard amount of energy, an energy crisis that is system-wide but especially specific to one location; it is like a brown-spot on the leaf of a plant, or a withering of a branch, and the tree may survive if it can shed that leaf or branch, but may not if the core problem is in the roots instead. It isn’t about injury, except that if injury abruptly stops the ability of the body to continue cycling energy, it is promptly dead. Everything that sustains our liver cells is the same stuff that sustains the rest of us.

Which is also the thing that sustains the reality we perceive. Objects lose energy too, from the more obvious molecules at the surface that oxidate to rust, to the integrity of materials affected by weather and time, to the very maintenance of reality itself, by and through us and all the other energies we interact with. My slant-desk across the room from me is vibrating energy. If physicists knew how yet, a pop-gun could make that desk pop out of reality in an instant. (The same for a person, except that I believe some life forms more than others have a much broader spectrum of energy involved.)

I think I mentioned once, that I’d heard the idea that everything in our world is based on the Sun. That money could be thought of as little pieces of paper representing the Sun. Because it drives the possibility of everything that is. I realized that not only was this true, but more profoundly true than I had understood before, because the sun is energy, is the source. Much like I realized with a tarot energy recently–that he lives through me–the sun is the ultimate example of this.

It lives through us, through space, through planets, through rocks and rivers and trees and animals and microbes and humans and the gases in the atmosphere. It is akin to ‘The Holy Spirit’ as our old books would call it. The degree to which we are alive is the degree to which we are in resonance with and able to ‘contain’ that light, energy.

P

A long time ago I was reading something by Alan Watts (his writings were on Zen).  He was attempting to explain how everything OUTside you is just as much a part of you and INside you as your body parts. I just couldn’t get it. Yeah, intellectually I know what he was trying to get across. But no, I could not grok how that tree over there is just as much a part of me as my liver.

Recently on an archmed on Authority and Money (that turned out so cosmic I have no clear idea how it relates), instead of an archetype, I perceived:

…the entire thing was like a big visual ‘noise’ pattern as you’d say in graphics, and maybe 10-20% of that pattern glowed a little to show its nature as the problem. The part that immediately got my notice is that it wasn’t just around me. It went through me. It was like the whole landscape and me, my body, were all part of the same energy, and that pattern was everywhere.

The problem is an equal part of me, I thought in some surprise. It’s not a cohesive energy, a ‘thing’, it is part of the pattern of everything.

I was idly, in the back of my head kind of, thinking about this last weekend.

Then my thoughts shifted and I was having some unintentional half-dream/daydream where I heard myself telling someone, “Yeah, man, I destroyed my metabolism when I was in my early 20′s, and now I’m screwed!”

And my “perspective” suddenly radically shifted. As if everything stayed the same but I was jerked out to some completely different vantage point way above and to the left or something (figuratively).

And suddenly I said (out loud), but it was like some other aspect of me:

Oh that’s just retarded! That’s totally stupid! The body heals itself, DUH. How many times have you seen that, told Ry that? People can drink poison and recover. If the body survives the “acute” stage of anything, it CAN recover, given time and raw materials it needs. The body is a self-healing mechanism. Acting like something done in the past determines what is possible in the future is a weird, limited belief system. As if! As if you are “helpless” and it’s “pointless” and there’s no solution! That’s just RETARDED!

Well I guess now we know it was that aspect of me that says ‘retarded’ all the time…

I didn’t know where to go with that. If it CAN heal, the best researchers in the world don’t yet know how and neither do I. So I moved on to other thoughts and forgot about it.

Some time later, a sudden memory ‘fell into me’, of a past experience:

A ‘voice of understanding’ said to me, the solution to a problem is always lying dormant within the problem itself. The energies are not separable.

… The dynamic of the solution-shift had almost a physical feeling built into it, when it became, or grew, or “birthed” its own solution. Like something inside it all sort of “inverted and then bloomed.” There was an oddly geometric and internally-kinesthetic feeling inside me. Then I saw: of course my body feels it; because all energy including that problem is part of me, if it’s part of my reality.

… The point of it was that solutions are not found in “the topography of situational energy” but in the core. This has a translation: The solution is seldom found in the ‘logical’ part of the situation, the surface “presented-problem” as one would say in therapy, and that’s why some problems, as the saying goes, are such a tangle of hopelessness that we have no sword but laughter. They seem hopeless because their solution is not something logic can address. If it could, it probably wouldn’t have become that terrible a snarl to begin with.

You have to meditate on the whole thing together, to begin. “Let it be” inside you for awhile. While you do this, some part of you figures out the pattern of energy, just like how your eyes-brain subconsciously find the visual pattern in those 3-D magic-eye pictures. Accept everything. You have to, because the answer is always in the key of the problem and if you’re rejecting the problem, like you can’t even let yourself be honest about its existence and reality, then you’re not giving yourself the full energy pattern to work with. OK, so you’ve got it all inside you and some part of you is mapping out the whole situation, and the problem inherent, which in a truer energetic-sense is more like an impossible tangle-ball of what used to be a fine gold chain, and less like whatever surface-situational thing we think is the problem.

Then you have to “grok” — truly have faith, believe, understand, accept — that the answer IS actually inside there. It is a pattern within the pattern. A hidden picture, except it is energy that feels like it is inside your torso. You haven’t seen it yet consciously maybe but you have to totally trust that it IS there. The solution is creatively compiled *from* the problem+situation, so it cannot fail to be there, because there’s lots of energy and always enough to creatively compile a solution.

This is not about THIS problem, whatever it might be,  it’s about ALL problems, no matter what they are.

I wondered why that sudden memory had arrived, then shrugged, and I was about to relax maybe into a nap when my “attention was arrested” by the thought:

If the root of every problem holds the key to the solution, does the root of my being fat hold an answer to it?

Some part of me made me write it down on a laptop note and then I let go of it and relaxed again. Then the memory from an hour or more before dived back into me, like the idea was a living thing, a fleet creature leaping gracefully over a fence around me, and right into the pool of my inner thoughts.

It was like the whole landscape and me, my body, were all part of the same energy, and that pattern was everywhere.

And I had this ‘gut sense perception’, similar to the meditation noted above but more at the gut-level than visual, where I realized that the energy that makes up everything is everywhere.  It seemed like my body was a blend, but so was the world around me, and we looked almost the same from a distance except a difference in shade-hue. If it weren’t for that difference I would have blended right in. This got my attention a little and I pursued that line of thought. Analogy-time!

Are my fat thighs reflected in my reality?

They must be. Somehow.

Is my lack of a vehicle reflected in my body?

It must be. Somehow.

I pondered.  What else do I lack?

I lack the money I want. I have enough for raw need–barely–but nothing more and am often in crisis.

I lack a man to love. I have friends but not the deep-soul of romantic love and sex I hunger for.

I wondered if I could analogy those things into my body. If “merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream!” how would I “interpret this dream symbol?”

My lack of vehicle… fundamental, motive ‘power’, motion, ability to maneuver in the world . . . reflects the muscle strength, and exercise, that I lack.

My lack of a man… reflects a lack of ‘self-love’, lack of taking good care of oneself, lack of sex (seems like that point rather overlaps with both sides of the analogy frankly….)

Well ok so maybe I can analogy my reality issues into my body. What about my body’s issues into my reality?

My environment is over-cluttered and often messy. No matter how much money for housekeeping help I spend, no matter the efforts I make, the useful storage things I buy, the ‘parsing’ I do to get rid of stuff, it’s like some energy that just keeps recreating its own pattern, and I am stuffed-full cluttered and messy in my living space.

For awhile I just kind of sat there in the feeling of having grokked something very fundamental.

Then kind of out of left field I thought: I should meditate on the energy of my ‘resistance to spiritual evolution.’

That one wouldn’t be fun I bet.

P