The Butterfly Lit on the World Economy

I must confess that I have watched too many news shows covering the financial crisis. It is getting irritating and frustrating and after awhile I begin to lose all sympathy, until of course it begins to hit close to home with friends and family and OMG me! There are so many of us getting hurt who are so completely innocent of all wrong doing. We need to find those responsible, take everything they have, spread it around to their victims and perhaps a pie in the face for good measure.

We should all get a little angry. Perhaps it will energize us to make demands to get to the root of this mess, which must be big business and government. Now, governments will just have to save us. Better that they run up their credit cards with debts they cannot repay than us. I cannot put my finger on it, but somehow we all know that government and politicians had something to do with all this. Let them suffer!

I am getting more than a little bit scared! Who is to say that just because the economy has always turned around in the past that it will turn around this time? It seems like all the bets are being placed on this inevitable correction. What if they are wrong? What if this is not a traditional ebb and flow of economic cycles? What if this requires a much different type of correction?

It is encouraging to hear so many pundits pin down the cause of this global financial disaster, but it frightening that as soon as they say it, they move on to solutions that do not address the problem. The great economic minds today are all confessing that they completely underestimated the interconnectiveness and interrelationships of the world’s global economy. They could not foresee that just as the liver dies the body dies; that the part can bring down the whole. The problem was so much bigger than imagined because they were looking at the parts and not the whole. They were completely caught off guard.

Eureka! They got it! Focus on the whole and not the parts! Then why are all the solutions coming from countries employing their own initiatives to save their own economies. Why isn’t someone stating the obvious? If we want to get out of this mess we are going to have to start considering what is best for the world and not always what is best for us. This focus on self is what has us in this mess. If the problem is that everything is so intertwined with everything else that whatever happens to one immediately affects the others, then what other choice do we have. By the way, we are all not so innocent. We can blame the people who stole the most, but we cannot claim to be different. We are all putting ourselves first.

The Kabbalists saw this coming. They understood this as inevitable. The purpose of Creation is to learn to develop their altruistic properties over egoism. To give rather than to receive. It is the fundamental law of nature and our history of ignorance with respect to this law has progressed to this precarious predicament we now face. As physicists now understand the Universe is “one verse”. There are no separations. We are all cells of the one body. Everything affects each other. If a Butterfly sneezes on Mars it affects the weather on Earth. The Butterfly has lit on the world economy.

We don’t need a market correction. That won’t work anymore. We need a major correction in our world view. We need to fully understand the responsibility we have for each other. We need to establish a bond where we look out for each other more than we lookout for our self. This will balance our actions with the laws of nature. This is what Kabbalah is trying to teach us. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Kabbalah also teaches us that the Creator will continue to give us “beatings” until we understand and live in the principles of “Unity.” These beatings will only get more severe, unless we take actions towards altruism now!