Suelo's TEDx talk & Transcript: GIFT ECONOMY: Domestic to Wild, Creation to Recreation, Immaturity to Adulthood
What is Giving, What is Receiving? What are you all doing here? Did you come here to get something or to give something? What am I doing here? I didn't know I was going to do this until two days ago. But did I come here to get something or give something?
These vultures at the carcass: Did they gather to get something or give something?
This fox: he's he's doing his thing in the meadow. Is he giving something or getting something? And the grass: is the grass receiving a service or giving a service?
These lions hunted this wildebeest: are they taking something or are they giving something. Are they benefiting the herd or are they depleting the herd?
And the yeast in your beer: Is the yeast having fun? Is it playing or is the yeast working? The yeast just likes eat things that are sweet, like carbohydrates and sugar, and then they pee! And we drink their pee!
01:22
Do we ever think about where anything comes from? Like a lot of the
goods that we use in America come from sweatshops. Do we ever think about that?
And this is the nature of money: Money causes us to be separated from the source of products. Money separates the consumer and production, so we don't think about where things come from.
This is my thing: in 2000 I gave up money for 15 years, until three years ago, when I began taking care of my aging parents. My dad passed away a couple of years ago, and now I'm with my mom. And I'm proud to say she's here. She's 90 years old.
02:26
I've had to think about these things a lot: Like, what is giving and what is taking? When you don't have money or possessions, and especially when you're on the road, you're very much in the receiving position and very dependent upon other people's generosity. And that's the whole point of this. It also puts me face-to-face with things that I'm dependent upon and people that I'm dependent upon. Sometimes people would pick me up hitchhiking and they would thank me afterwards, as if I were doing them a favor.
03:07
Is the hand selfish or selfless? When your right hand pulls a thorn from your left foot, does the hand expect credit? Does the foot feel debt? What if we saw the whole universe a
s one single body?
03:29
The word universe comes from unis versus, which means “one turning, one winding, one current.” There's one and no other.
Is there anything that can exist apart from anything else?
Perfect Justice is the Law of Physics
03:44
Then there's the law of physics:
To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction,
or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other
are always equal and directed to contrary parts.
So that means you reap what you sow, instantaneously!
Do we ever think about this? Is this really true?:
Perfect justice is the law of physics!
Everything is instantaneously paid for!
And this is something that we've lost touch with.
I feel it's money thinking that has gotten us out of this: what we once knew.
04:26
Now look at look at wild animals, like the ones I just showed you, such as this monkey. What tastes good is good! Does this monkey, or any wild animal, have to read a label to find out if it's healthy or not? Why is this?
Now look at any wild animal population on earth (not domestic animals--I'm talking about wild ones}. Take any random sample of a wild animal population. How many obese and how many malnourished, or how many chronically ill or mentally ill do you find in this random sample. Then take any random sample of a population in any monetary country on earth. Then ask yourself the same thing! Ask yourself how we believe we're so advanced medically, that we are advancing? Why is it, in our society, that what tastes good is often bad? Why is it that we overeat? Why doesn't a wild animal overeat? How do they know how to eat and take care of themselves? Why do we not know how to take care of ourselves?
Pay-It-Forward is the Law of Biology
05:50
So I was just talking about how payment is instantaneous. But there's also a “pay-it-forward” system in nature. This is how nature runs--wild nature, that is.
For example, a deer will eat leaves from a tree. The deer has no conception of pay back to that tree. It's a pay-it-forward system. The deer eats leaves then poops out food for the organisms in the soil, like the mushrooms. These organisms eat the deers poop.
Now the deer doesn't say, “Look at all the good I'm doing! I deserve credit! Look how I'm creating balance!”
No, it's a pay-it-forward system. Every step of the way see the deer is just doing what he likes to do. So are the mushrooms and the trees. If something doesn't taste good they're not going to do it! So, every step of the way, we're getting instantaneously paid, but we somehow think that we are above the laws of physics. We we don't realize that human interaction, social interaction, is also under the law of physics.
That means everything that I do I'm going to get paid back, instantaneously! Not delayed! Instantaneously! This applies to both positive and negative. If I do something harmful, if I think something harmful, immediately I experience the consequences, Immediately I
understand that it's harmful. Whether it's good or bad, I know it inside. This is called conscience. Conscience is instantaneous payment. But we're so unaware of ourselves, unaware of our own conscience, that we we've lost touch with this basic l
aw of physics.
07:56
And we think linearly as a result. As I was showing you, nature runs cyclically in a pay-it-forward system. But we don’t have a pay-it-forward system. We work for our own credit. We work for our own rewards.
This is a principle every major religion in the world talks about: Give up the credit for your own work. Pay it forward. Work for the sake of doing rather than for your own credit. But our whole civilization, monetary civilization, is based upon working for our own credit.
We think of the world linearly. We don't recognize that every single step of the way we're getting paid. We're missing out on the blessings every step of the way because our focus is up here in the mind. Our payment is artificial and delayed. Our payment is not down here in reality but it's in symbols. Symbols are our incentive. Our incentives a
re outside of ourselves. Our incentives are extrinsic rather than intrinsic. We're not self-motivated. We're motivated from without.
The Fall from Grace
09:14
So, this is my big pet peeve. This is my big soapbox:
The fall from grace.
Thinking about these things over the years, I'm realizing more and more, I'm
very certain, that all these things came in one package, our fall from grace.
09:37
Grace means gratis. Grace and gratis come from the same root. Gratis means free. And
gratitude. When we believe we're working for things and we deserve them and we're entitled, working for our own credit, we lose our sense of gratitude. Grace. Gratis. If it's not free then we don't feel gratitude for it.
So money, agriculture, domestication,
linear religion, and linear science: I’m certain they all came in one package.
Wild vs. Domestic
10:10
I just want to show some stark contrasts, just to let it sink in.
Here's wild grasses. Here's domestic.
Wild grasses know how to take care of themselves, on their own.
They are cyclical. They are perennial.
On the other hand, this wheat field is not perennial. You have one one sowing and one reaping, and the whole thing has to be coaxed along by another species, a higher authority. On the other hand, these wild grasses have their own authority. They have the right to adulthood. They have the right to even reproduce on their own. Their reproduction isn't controlled.
10:55
I've got a picture of wild hogs here.
Wild hogs. Domestic
Do I need to say anything? Just look at this. This is our advancement in civilization. Can these hogs live by themselves out in wild nature? Are they adults?
11:10
This is something we don't think about with domestication. Studies have been done on animals that become domesticated, like some foxes in Russia. In the 1950s, a Soviet scientist, Dmitry K. Belyaev, decided to domesticate some foxes to see what happens, selectively breeding them among themselves, not with anything else.
As the fox generations became more and more compliant, domesticated, their tails started curling, their ears started flopping, and they started getting spots. (A Soviet Scientist Created the Only Tame Foxes in the World). You'll notice that's a characteristic of most domestic animals of whatever species, and that is also the characteristic of babies. The idea is to train species to become compliant, to never have the right to grow up!
12:05
Do we ever think about that this:
Why is it that we can't have a day go by when we don’t have to ask permission to some authority whether we can act or not?
How many of us can live out in the wild, on our own?
How many of us really are adults?
12:30
Consider sheep.
Wild Domestic
These domestic sheep are shorn. Shearing is another way of gaining authority over
another creature:
Wild Domestic
Wild Domestic
Wild Domestic
13:00
Adult Compliant
Wild Domestic
Wild Domestic
Cyclical vs. Linear World-View
13:20
So I've been talking about cyclical versus linear. Linear is business. You earn your own pay, you reap what you sow. Domestic. Owned. Authority without. Not self-sustaining. Not perennial.
13:35
There we go: linear. We can't see in a cycle. We can't see that everything returns. There's one time sowing and one time reaping. This is why I'm saying that I feel the idea of money and investment comes in the same package as agriculture. All of a sudden we've gained control over another species, and we work for our own credit.
14:05
Here is an illustration of the process:
The blue arrows illustrate how we see payment: We see only one direction, dominant, possessive provider. But we don't see the repayment simultaneously coming in the opposite direction. We are unaware of the equal, simultaneous payment happening every step of the way (which is why I am calling it recessive, here). [This alludes to the male and female hierarchical relationship, as a result of our monetary thinking, but this is a subject for another talk].
14:27
We are unaware of the equal return from what we view as the receiver (red arrows) because we have subjugated it into the domesticated, the compliant.
But the combined red-and-blue diagram on the right shows the reality. The action and repayment both happen every step of the way, simultaneously. Two cycles are happening simultaneously, in both directions.
But this is how we see it in our worldview. We just see one one line: sowing and future reaping. We see incentives for the future, which are artificial, not coming from within.
15:00
Yes, let’s look at our philosophical and religious worldview. Mircea Eliade was a famous mythologist. He wrote The Myth of the Eternal Return among a wealth of other works.
He pointed out that in so-called “primitive” cultures, like native cultures, there's not an idea of history. Each year's rituals are on an eternal return to the mythic age. It's a constant returning to the beginning. But here we have linear religion. I'm not knocking religion. I would like us to think about our own religious traditions and how, underneath, they're cyclical.
But we've made them into linear religion, linear philosophy, with
One beginning, one end,
Separated.
One creation, one destruction,
separated.
Employment and reward,
separated.
Work and play,
separated.
One sewing and one reaping,
separated.
Motivating force outside of ourselves,
separated, far away.
Intrinsic authority, extrinsic authority,
separated.
Divine and natural,
separated.
Heaven and earth,
separated.
16:33
This is a chart I grew up with. This chart was on our wall, above the kitchen table. It's called a Dispensational Chart.
The Dispensational Chart was invented in the 1800s by John Nelson Darby, one of the founders of the Plymouth Brethren church, the beginning what we call Christian Fundamentalism. Darby divided history into one single beginning and one single end, one Genesis and one Apocalypse. It comes out seven dispensations, or ages, modeled after the seven days of creation.
This middle part right here is called “the Church Age”, consisting of seven smaller ages within the larger seven dispensations.
It is represented by seven lamps, or candlesticks. This is from the book of Revelation in the Bible (Revelation chapters 1 to 3).
17:10
Something I noticed is that Darby and his Fundamentalists overlooked that the seven candlesticks of Revelation are modeled after the Jewish menorah, which shows that it's not linear, it's cyclical. Everything branches out of a center candlestick, the seventh day, the Present. Now just imagine this menorah being under the ground, buried so we can only see the linear on the surface. This is how we see time.
But what if creation is happening continually?
What if, in our own tradition, creation is happening right now, continually, perpetually? What if work, the six days of work, are one with the central Day of Rest, which is the Beginning and the End, the Eternal Present? This is another whole talk. I could talk on this at four hours.
18:00
Basically I'm not blaming us for having this linear worldview. There was a time most of us saw the horizon as a flat flat earth. But, as our consciousness expands, our linear worldview turns into cyclical. Our horizon expands.
18:26
Creation is work.
Recreation is re-creation!
Re-creation is recreation!
Is there a difference between work and play,
like, for the yeast in the beer or for the vultures on a carcass?
Redefining "God"
18:46
No body part can truly take credit, price, praise for anything because no body part
exists apart from the whole!
What if we see everything as the Whole?
What if we redefine our idea of God to mean the Whole?
Our words credit, price and praise all refer to money lingo.
All credit to the Whole!
All price to the Whole!
All praise to the Whole!
(Prize and price and praise come from the same root)
Whole equals health equals holistic equals holy.
Holy is from the same root as whole.
All praise to the Whole:
Hallelujah!
I feel intense gratitude toward all of you as my own body parts.
So thank you.
