WOW! Lots of New Finds About People Who Do Not Use Money!
(See, I am not crazy : p Just in a small minority (so far) Ha!)
First, there is the Website run by Mark Boyle, here. What a great site, and what a great guy! On his blog Mark introduces three people (with more on the way) who gave up using money. What is most amazing from the Hare Krishna point-of-view is that we have here three phenomena -- people who are becoming free from the "mine" aspect of false ego. Not only do these people stop using money, they stop being consumers. In other words, they are living very consciously: conscious of how things impact their own lives, conscious of how their behavior in relationship to things affect the planet and others, and conscious of the needs of their fellow human beings.
One of them, Heidemarie Schwermer, is a a 68 year old German woman who has been living free from the chains of money for the past 15 years, and is featured in an upcoming movie "Living Without Money." Here is the trailer below. For the entire month of April, 2011, Living Without Money will be available to screen publicly for free! Click here if you’re interested in sharing the film and debating the issues. And see more about this endeavor here.
And more people are taking notice. It seems Mark is going to give a TED talk sometime soon. Sorry I lost the details of that in all of my rambling over these pages. So Please check these people out. There is a shift happening in this world, one which is very unexpected, in which very ordinary people are challenging the status quo of get and spend.
And, they are not even Hare Krishnas! Ok, no surprise there since most Hare Krishnas are totally behind the curve on this one despite the fact that I have shown them, in their own philosophy, that that is how Krishna tells them to live. Yawn. That's the reaction I get from most. Well, I am excited to be finding people of my own ilk who realize that money is not needed to live, and that one can live much better without the stuff than with it. Get the story directly from these people who have lived it, and then think again about how you are living. Maybe you want to dig deep into the annals of this blog and find one of the original posts where I explain the spiritual side of money-less living, also known as, the gift economy. Keep digging, it's down there somewhere.
Tomorrow we are off to visit one of our Gitagrad communities -- New Indraprastha -- about 150 km east of Lugansk, Ukraine. The residents of that community are walking the talk, and becoming wealthy on less than $2 a day. I'll write more from there...
