The biggest embrace of love you'll ever make is to embrace yourself completely.

Then you'll realize you've just embraced the whole universe, and everything and everybody in it. – Adyashanti

A little while ago I saw "Sacred Economics", a small film by and about Charles Eisenreich and his theses.

Now, he is not the first to speak this truth about our monetary system, our whole social system, but for some reason this video touched me more than other things I had seen before on this subject.

Maybe because Charles Eisenreich himself speaks and lets his personality work. Perhaps because he speaks of things that we can find in all spiritual teachings from East to West and back (yes, even in Ancient Europe and Egypt), namely that the idea of separateness is nothing more than a kind of "perceptual disorder": we believe we are separate from each other - and from nature, and thus logically from life. We believe that life is hostile to us, is against us, and that it is therefore a struggle, everyone against everyone and everything. A struggle for survival.

This, however, is the even greater error of thought that the majority of humanity has been making since the agrarian revolution: that nature, the planet and life itself are against us, are "hostile".

For those who believe that humans, in order to live and survive, need pills and IV injections and that "that with herbs and so" is pure humbug, I would first like to remind them here: please do not eat toadstool, or rowan berries or other plants known to be poisonous. This could have fatal consequences!

Still most medicines are very well based on the formulas of nature, chemically taken apart, separated (!) and modified and made into modern medicines. Even the computer we work on is made from materials found on earth, that is, in nature. And also the frequencies we use, electricity, radio and wifi, are natural part of the atmosphere.

Now, should a modern human make the mistake of eating a toadstool out of cluelessness, he or she may die.

What happens then? Then his corpse lies in the forest… and decomposes. Some animals will pick him apart for his meat, others will take care of the remains, and last but not least, bacteria will decompose him. And after a few years, you might find a few bones, and maybe the braces or plastic sunglasses.

The rest of the human body is completely absorbed into the forest ground. Now shrubs are growing... grasses... flowers... berries... maybe a few trees... an apple tree perhaps? Animals run around and feed on what they find there. Wolves... bears... deer... squirrels...

Recently I participated in a shamanic ceremony, here in Mexico. In this ritual, all the things we used were called grandmother or grandfather. Grandfather fire... Grandmother boulder... Grandfather smoke... Grandmother plant....

If one recalls the above scenario of the decaying carcass, I think one understands the profound not only metaphysical but tangible physical wisdom behind this form of ceremonial-spiritual reverence.

So man is part of nature, isn't he? With every cell and every bone - which also decays and perishes, if it is not preserved for a long time due to chemical processes in a grave, for example, and then after 2000 or 3000 years is found by chance by children playing, for example.

So man is part of nature with its polarity of night and day... ebb and flow... birth and death, becoming and passing away, just as the flowers sprout in spring, so they pass away again in autumn, and even in regions without four seasons there is this blossoming and fading, everything has its season and its rest. And also the intermediate tones, for example the dawn in the morning and in the evening, can always be assigned to one or the other and are effectively one or the other.

Unlike our fellow inhabitants on planet Earth, however, humans are the only species that (since the agri-cultural revolution after the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago) have to pay for being and living. Not even death is free, in Bavaria the cheapest burial method (anonymous cremation) has cost around 3000 euros in 2010.

Now money is something that people invented after they had the idea that we are disconnected, that life is a struggle, each separately for himself and against all others. This perception of life and the world naturally leads to fear, fear of the competitor and of life itself, as well as mistrust and jealousy, and thus logically the urge to want to control everything, and especially everyone else, becomes stronger and stronger.

At some point, this mentality, this mindset, was the normal state in the cultures that dominated the world today and throughout known history, and was considered natural or “God”-given.

But if we look elsewhere, we sometimes find even today that not all humans and their cultures fell for this idea. Most of these cultures no longer exist. But certainly a few still do, and in the stories of old people even a few more, and it's worth taking a closer look. Charles Eisenreich refers to these cultures in the video as "Gift Economies".

In my previous article I wrote a bit about this. Nature not only does not make mistakes - nature also does not demand payment. When we walk through the forest, or across the meadow, and suddenly stand in front of a bush of berries, or a fruit tree, we only need to stretch, and maybe not even that, to receive what is simply standing there.

It just stands there. It is the same with the stream, the air and the sunlight. It is simply there. We didn't work for it, we didn't work hard for it in school, and we didn't pay a penny for it.

It's just there. And the better you know nature, the more you will recognize than only berries and apples, and the better you will be able to help yourself.

A beautiful picture, isn't it? What would we do if we suddenly found ourselves in such a place? Probably, sooner or later, we would start learning more about our surroundings. What is edible and what is not, which ants are harmless and which burn, and, and, countless things we would learn over time. We would pay attention and watch closely, and go through the day with a certain mindfulness and alertness. And we would learn to give back so that the next season we would have apples again, for example. With apples, after all, it's quite easy; all you have to do is throw the rest of the apple with its seeds onto the meadow and see if a new little tree doesn't sprout next spring. I was always encouraged to do this as a child, for this very reason.

For thousands of years, that's exactly how our ancestors lived. And some people and whole cultures still live that way today, and other people "opt out" and return to that lifestyle.

However, this may not be necessary at all. What is necessary is a “mental opt-out”, that is, inwardly, and specifically an opt-out from the idea of being separate, and above all: being rejected, because that is what the idea of "hostile nature" means. We have to change our way of seeing and thinking, our attitude towards everything, nature, life, ourselves, yes, the whole cosmos. The changes in the outside will then follow by themselves.