Gross Domestic Prostitution? - GDP

What does it profit a man if he gains the world and loses his (awareness of) Soul?
What world is it that is had in exchange for a truly felt and shared presence?
Materialism is not merely a lifestyle choice or consciously held identity preference - so much as the return on a current investment - albeit running as a default mentality below the level of so called consciousness.
Moneylenders in the Template. Nothing new here. Perhaps what can be more widely understood today is that the template is the level of idea that dictates or determines the structure of our experience.
To go forth and multiply is simply the Nature of Consciousness. If one replaces a Soul-integrated consciousness with a segregated and conflicted sense of disconnected consciousness, then one receives the experience one has in a sense asked for.
But to go forth from and multiply or propagate a sense of lack, or dissonance, or scarcity, unworthiness, inadequacy, and  disconnection, then such will be the pattern of its growth.
Regardless of how anyone approaches it, there is something in getting priorities the right way round. When first things are first - all else follows. But to maintain a false premise acquires a huge burden of exhausting struggle and deception.
The nature of Consciousness is closer than our face - and yet we look away from it to a world that distracts us with its endlessly mutating problems - but we have not in a sense 'gone anywhere' because everything we see and feel and experience is being experienced in Consciousness - although our personal filters may not recognize this and define it otherwise.
When one is 'painted into a corner' and used up any remaining wiggle room from re-brandings, PR  spin or changing the furniture around, there is an un-masking or exposure of that which was presumed real but turns out to be ideas that do not have currency.
This is a real opportunity to accept an 'adjustment' of not just markets - but of consciousness itself. To come back into true relation from a bubble of forgetful distraction.
Curiosity and discovery is innate to our very presence. But the thinking inside the box is designed to ensure that we keep thinking inside the box. As long as we listen to such thinking, we are not actually paying close attention to what we are in effect choosing.
Only by owning our choices can we release them and allow in and embody new choices - from a fresh perspective and as a current relevance. The Call for a fresh perspective is a call for inspiration but if we are invested in old structures of identity, the Call is unheard and so is its Answer.

Common sense may be defined negatively - but it is of course a native intelligence of the heart within the strictures and limitations of the mind- which substitutes its own thinking and fails to actually check in.

Has GDP outgrown its use?

By David Pilling
Governments and the media obsess about it while statisticians endlessly fiddle – but what is the real point of GDP and can it ever be accurately measured?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/dd2ec158-023d-11e4-ab5b-00144feab7de.html#axzz36oL03PSu

Giving sweets to suckers

I also wrote the following to a comment on the page:

There are those who encourage booms and profit from the bust. In popular terms it was a crash - but it was actually a consolidation of power. Giving out sweets of whatever nature, pulls in the suckers. Once the crop is sown or the parlour filled, it is simply a matter of harvesting or milking.

I suggest that the big brains were fooled as to the timing - as well as by their addictions.

There are those who are willing to act out the roles of STUPIDITY on the big stage to maintain the popular perceptions. Do ruthless corporates mellow into public servants on taking office?

The term that comes to mind is 'wolves in sheep's clothing'.

The idea of stealing a living inheritance to indulge one's self-specialness divorces from the true source and identifies within a prodigal script or indeed a Faustian pact.

I must be considered an illiterate in economic terms - but I can still feel the nature of a coercive scam from a real relationship. A debt tree fruits more debt - but there are those who use access to cheap 'money' to exert leverage and strip out assets or dominate emerging markets.

One way of looking at behaviour that fruits negative experience is to ask "what would one have to believe in order to have such experience?". These beliefs, definitions and currency of accepted idea are the template - regardless of the persona who happen to embody them.

The standard of living of the developed world has been very largely at the expense of the undeveloped world - enforced by many kinds of coercion and deception. Once production and services have been automated and outsourced, the population at large no longer has any function - nor the power to threaten the established order.

"Standard of living" has been very much materially defined - not least by pulling the working classes into a consumer culture of corporate design and feeding illusions of freedom and self-specialness.

Any renewal of culture has to embody a clear presence that communicates an integrity. The old world order is deeply committed to the dark arts of manipulating perceptions - perhaps seeking to place themselves in a material advantage in hope of continuity of power through a portal of fundamental change.

I don't write to refute anything you say - it was some of your points that stirred my additional comment. There are many perspectives on the same thing, perhaps all of them are valid as a basis for having an experience. If we shift our perspective we may open our experience to new possibilities.  Grievance and vengeance refuse to shift. But are these a prison others condemn us to - or are we in fact free to feel it, release it and move on?