A Happy Pocket Full of Money – Part 1 of 3

Money: An illusion, a shadow of something else…

The first step to having wealth is to know what it is. And few people know what it really is, in and of itself. What is wealth? What causes it? What causes the cause of it? Let us start with money, the world’s symbol of wealth, and then move deeper.

Money is not real.

Money is merely legal tender, a form of exchange. We use it to exchange value. It represents value.

Money is the “body” of value. It is the physical representation of value that rises and falls in ourselves, within us. Not within “things” outside of us, but within us. For without us, what can the value of a thing, such as a car, be to us? Nothing, at least not to us. In other words, it is we, the observers, that place value in things, but this value is really value in us – we give value to the material things. The material things have no “money” value in themselves – we give that to them.

So, money is the external physical representation of a particular section of our internal value, within us, within you. That is why a house or a block of shares valued at $1 million today can fall to a valuation of half a million dollars tomorrow when fear is introduced into the hearts of those involved. The fear kills a portion of the internal values of the participants and that is reflected by the paper money, the “body” of value.

Here is something else: physical paper money does not e ven represent money in full. It cannot reasonably do that. By some estimates (and this varies from nation to nation), only as little as 4% of the money in the banks exists as paper cash.

Imagine how much cotton, linen, pulp, and metal the world would need so as to make all the money everyone has in his or her bank accounts. Imagine how much space it would take to store all this money in paper form. If you were to stack only one million US$1 bills, it would weigh one ton and be 361 ft high. Neither does mone y exist as gold reserves any more. This is for exactly the same reason – we ran out of the reasonable ability to keep a gold standard in the 1970s.

So what does it exist as, the money that we are always talking about?

Well, it is one massive illusion. It is all just numbers written on paper and computer storage devices, and assigned to people and entities such as companies and investments, or more accurately, further records! To put it in another way, for every $100 or its equivalent in any other currency, only about $4 exists as printed-paper notes or coins, while the remaining $96 exists as numbers written on papers and computers in banks and businesses and other entities.

The only reason this system does not collapse is that we all believe in it. The last time people stopped believing in it in a large enough extent was just before the Depression when large numbers of people rushed to their banks to withdraw their money and found that they could not all get it. This is not what caused the Great Depression, but it in a large way accelerated it.

So, money is not real – something else is. Money is just the shadow of that other something. The first step to wealth is to know what money really is, or more accurately, what it represents. Learn not to look at the money most of the time.

As you will soon see, it is very rare in a day that you should ever look at money as you know it today – the cash, the bank accounts, the costs, etc. This is merely the shadow and not the real thing. Looking at the shadow, the p hysical money, as you will soon see, is most of the time very unwise and unhealthy for you and your finances.

Look, instead, at the value within you and within people, and the flowing and exchanging of this value between people. Our internal value, is what creates money. Money is the shadow of our internal value. Develop this internal value in yourself and in others and your external money and wealth will correspondingly rise automatically, without fail.

(to be continued)

- From “A Happy Pocket Full of Money ” by David Cameron