Money Mixups: The Absolute (God) and the Relative (Caesar) 🪙

With inflation, with crypto, our free memberships, our Beyond Money Course, addressing all of this, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we relate with money. It takes me to a more general contemplation of how often we mix up “the absolute” with “the relative”. This can take many forms such as spiritual bypassing, thinking it’s more spiritual to be rich, or more spiritual to be poor. But, like Jesus famously said, let’s “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”. 

Render to God: The absolute, or non-dual truth, sees the “illusory” nature of money: When it comes to experience, “money” is a phenomenon of consciousness, like everything else—from a candle flame, to a thought, to morals, to an economic system. Like absolutely everything, there’s an undifferentiated data-stream of being-creativity that we separate in order to make sense of and interact with experience. Rendering to God is remembering the truth of this un-differentiation—that all the separations are illusory—and therefore staying in love regardless of any particular happening. In interpersonal relating this is similar to not taking others’ projections personally, or remembering a particular trigger is not true so you can let go of feeling mad/threatened and be compassionate to both of you instead.

Render to Caesar: Ignoring these illusory separations is a counterdependent mistake. If I’m dreaming at night, everything is dream-stuff. But even if I’m lucid dreaming of being taxed, I don’t fight it; I pay the dream-tax peacefully. I’d dream-brush my dream-teeth peacefully if that’s what was happening. I think this is what it means to render to Caesar. We learn to not make anything, money included, more or less spiritual than anything else. In letting it be what it is and not needing to push away from it, we can more easily use any reactivity to turn back to the source—our projections—and live much more compassionate and honest lives.

With love, Jordan