What Getting Secretly Dosed with LSD and Money Have in Common
Lately I’ve been enjoying teaching MONEY: the course on wealth magic as an initiatory path with my friend Dave Burns.
We’re exploring working with the Spirit of Money, as a poison-medicine.
Today I wanted to take a moment to make explicit the kind of transformation that working wealth magic with the spirit of Money can induce.
First of all, there's a paradigm shift - you move from being stuck in the dominant materialist & moralistic stories about money...
... into a vivid perception of the way that money acts on you as a consciousness-altering pharmakon (drug, medicine, poison - by the way, pharmakon was also the term that Plato's Socrates used to describe written language - this is something we'll be exploring during the MONEY course).
From inhabiting this awareness of money-as-pharmakon, you can gain quite a bit more control over how your financial "trip" goes.
Consider this: with all psychedelics, set and setting (short for "mindset and environmental setting") make a huge difference in how much you enjoy or benefit from your trip.
Money is a very powerful psychedelic substance (i.e. it amplifies the psyche, especially contents that are usually unconscious), and almost no one in our cultural acknowledges this or works seriously with this fact.
But acknowledging the psychedelic power of money and working deliberately with it can make a crucial difference in how much fulfillment and wealth you experience in your life.
Imagine if you'd never before heard of LSD or anything like it, but one day the wicked barista at your local coffee shop drops 3 tabs into your mocha.
Suddenly you're tripping your face off, and you have no fucking idea what's happening, and what's more, you're in the middle of a busy downtown sidewalk.
It's really understandable if at this point you would start to freak out, get really paranoid, and experience a tremendously terrifying trip as your "I don't know what's happening, am I going crazy?" fear would dramatically color your whole experience of the world for about 6 - 7 hours.
You might get arrested, or end up in a psych ward.
After such an awful experience, if you came to your normal sober senses and figured out what happened - you might consider LSD to be "evil" and you would probably never want to think about it again.
Of course - LSD isn't evil. It's a very powerful substance that with the right set & setting can be tremendously empowering, revelatory, fulfilling.
Now think: the attitude of "I got secretly dosed with LSD and now I hate and fear the stuff" is very like most people's attitude towards money: they regard it as evil, suspect, dirty, burdensome, scary - and they don't really want to have to think about it, ever.
Either folks want to get rich so they never have to think about money, or they just try to think of money as little as possible, so they don't bother with trying to get rich.
This aversive attitude is very understandable, of course we feel generally yucky about money - and of course we don't really want to think about it - it's a very powerful psychedelic that we've been secretly dosed with throughout our lives!
We've all been stumbling around, tripping our faces off on the money-pharmakon, not even knowing that we've been dosed, with zero control over our set and setting, generally terrified.
It's no wonder that most of us have been having bad, bad trips with money and that we would much rather be finished with having to deal with it altogether.
Now imagine: what if you knew exactly how to gorgeously manage the set & setting of your life-long money trip, with shaman-level skill?
What if instead of cluelessly stumbling about, wracked with anxiety, you had a way of working beautifully and subtly with the money-pharmakon?
That's what we're be learning to do in the MONEY course.
It's a massive transformation, and it makes whole new giant vistas of experience possible. Like these ones that my co-teacher Dave and his clients have experienced:
- going from money being a constant source of worry to being a constant source of delight, insight and power
- transitioning from selling coaching or service packages for $100 or $1000 to $1 million or more
- moving from feeling trapped in cycles of spending everything you make into living with a beautiful balance of spending, saving, and investing
- discovering your unique personal brilliance with money magic, and escaping the paralyzing half-truths of "abundance manifestation" principles
- a pervasive sense of unworthiness melting into a deep knowing of personal worth and value