PNTV - Spiritual Economics by Eric Butterworth

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Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do one of my favorite books, a book called Spiritual Economics by Eric Butterworth, really good guy, unity minister from New York City back in the 20th century. And this is one of my favorite books in general and definitely one of my favorite books in the spiritual abundance, wealth creation, consciously genre. I just want to make a quick note, if you notice on the books page, philosophersnotes.com books I start with old school classics. Then we move to Positive psychology. Those are really the foundation, I believe, of all the wisdom. We want to pay attention to the old school classics and, and the positive psychology classics, the science of happiness, the stuff we know scientifically. Those two together are amazing. Then we move over to the 20th century classics. We have 10 old school, about a dozen positive psychology, 20 20th century and then 50 modern classics. You know, the Cubbies and the Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Esther and Jerry Hicks, all these great teachers. Then and only then do we move into the prosperity. For me, prosperity and abundance. Creation comes as a function of and a result of working on our consciousness. And that's why I've ordered it that way. And if I was going to suggest a way to read the books, frankly, it would be in that order. Now this book is awesome because he goes off on the importance of and he says the lead quote in the note. Of course, we've got the six page PDF philosopher's note here. The lead quote is that you shouldn't seek go after money and things, but you should seek to create the consciousness through which abundance in every sense naturally comes through you. So it's all about creating the consciousness that naturally allows for the abundance to flow through us. So really big distinction. Too often we're going to talk about it in a note, but too often we go after the things we want to have. The faster cars, the bigger houses, the more attractive spouses or whatever it is that we think is going to make us happy. We know we talk about all the time. That's no more than 10% of what leads to our happiness. 40% at least, comes from our thoughts and behaviors, how we're seeing the world. Our consciousness. Psychologists would say another half comes from our genetics. Whole other conversation point here being though we don't want to focus on the things we want to have and we don't even want to focus on things we want to do. Bucket lists are fine, but it's not really the essence of why we're here, I believe why we're here and what Butterworth says so beautifully is we're here to become. We're here to be all that we are in potential. We want to actualize that. We want to be as loving, as radiantly alive, as kind, as generous, as connected to source as we can possibly be, as creative as we can be. And as we seek those highest goals and we seek to see how we can create as much as we can in the world and give our greatest gifts and greatest service to the world, whether that means as a parent or a teacher, an entrepreneur or an artist or whatever it is. So it's being and then giving and creating and then the doing and the having come really as a byproduct of that process. But too often I think we start in the wrong direction, which he talks about a lot. So with that in mind, we'll look at a few great other big ideas he's got. First of all, he defines some words beautifully. I don't know if you knew some of these definitions, I didn't. But the word prosperity, for example, the word prosperity comes from the Latin root which literally means to go forward with hope. To go forward, hopefully. So to be prosperous in its deepest sense and a state of mind, it's not a condition in life, as Butterworth says. It's not a condition in life in terms of what our balance sheet says. It's an approach to life, an attitude to life. So we're truly prosperous when we go forward with hope and we're truly poor when we have no hope. Doesn't matter how much we have in the bank account, etc. So the word prosperity literally comes from the. The Latin word which literally means to go forward, according to go forward, hopefully. Awesome concept. The next word that he defines beautifully is affluence. So he says, you know, in modern society the word affluence is used to describe, you know, cars and houses and baubles of all kinds. He says, but the root of the word means in abundant flow. So affluence actually means abundant flow. Isn't that cool? An abundant flow. I love to think of money as basically like our blood in our body. It's always circulating. Oxygen comes in, it goes around, it comes out in carbon dioxide. There's this beautiful circulation process that exists. Same thing with money. I think it's impossible to spend money. Spending money kind of is like a zero sum thing. It's as if when I spend it, it's exhausted. It doesn't make any sense because the moment that I circulate, I like to think of wealth and money. I give it to someone in exchange for something I received, which I then do something with. Whether it's food that I digest and get vitality from or a book that I read or whatever. There's a process of receiving and then circulating. And the person who receives the money from us, well, they don't just eat it. If they did, they might get something out of it, but they actually take it themselves and then they circulate it. So wealth creation, affluence is an abundant flow. There's no finite end to it. See it as this beautiful, intricate, basically demonstration of the interconnectedness of our world. It's beautiful. The next word he defines is security. He says the word security literally means without care. From Latin. Again, to be without care. That's what security is. To be free from, from anxiety. That's what true security is. Now, you do not need X millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands or thousands of dollars in the bank to be secure. Again, it's a state of mind. It's to be without anxiety, to know that as you give your greatest gifts and greatest service to the world, you're going to be taken care of. Another big idea here. He says that your most important asset is the conscious control of your own life.

Byron.

Katie says the same thing. She says the greatest stock market you could ever invest in is yourself. So again, our consciousness, our conscious control of our own lives is our greatest asset. Not our stocks, not any other assets we may have, but our own conscious control of our own lives. Awesome stuff. He really challenges us to get out of mediocrity, to get out of being average, and to truly express ourselves extraordinarily. Some really cool quotes in here you can check out in the note. He also talks about syntropy, an idea we just recently talked about in the other 90% Philosopher's Notes TV video. This idea, there's entropy. Things tend to break down. Syntropy is things tend to perfect themselves. Really cool idea. Including us, obviously. There's this innate drive to perfect ourselves. He talks about the law of attraction, that we're magnets. He doesn't call it the law of attraction, but basically you're going to attract into your life that what you are. If you're a rude, callous, mean person, guess what you're going to find and you're going to attract and you're going to interact with people in such a manner that you're going to feel like everyone else is mean, rude. Callous etc. So if you're kind, generous, warm hearted, really giving, you're going to find that those same people used to think were mean, etc. Are all of a sudden much more kind, generous, etc. Really cool stuff. He talks about the importance of practicing and that the greater we become, whether it's in music or art or philosophy or whatever it is we do, the greater we become, the greater the need for practice. He tells some awesome stories about great musicians and other artists and performing and how they joke about how it's all about practice and people think that they're just a genius, as if they were born a genius. No one's born a genius. Genius is made, not born. As Michael Gelb says in his great book, how to Think Like Da Vinci, which we have a note on, which is awesome, highly recommend it. He talks about the importance of giving. And then in this world there are givers and there are takers. Takers are kind of those who feel entitled. They think that they should be able to take, take, take. They measure their life by how much money they make, how many things they acquire, how much they can take from life. The other orientation is that of the giver, who looks at life as an opportunity to give their greatest gifts and greatest service to the world. They're constantly seeking ways in which they can give, give, give. Huge difference. We talk about Nietzsche. He has a beautiful line. He says the masses want everything or something for nothing. Those who life made itself for, though, however, look at life and they say, what can I give? And he says we must give joy to the world. And if we want to enjoy life, if we want to enjoy life, we've got to give joy. I just love that. So that's a quick look at spiritual economics.

Again.

The essence here is to become that which we're destined to become. Let the physical stuff be byproducts of our own actualization, our own giving. That's what it's all about. This book is awesome. Highly recommend it. Hope you enjoyed the note and this episode. Look forward to sharing more with you. As always, have an awesome day to talk to you soon. Bye.

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