Money Unveiled – Finance and the New Mysteries

An evening lecture / presentation contextualising the following day’s workshop. It will aim to give a sense of humanity’s relationship to finance, past and future, as a mirror of consciousness and path of modern initiation. Special attention will be given to the significance of the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ and the possibility that a landscape beyond it can be conceived based on Rudolf Steiner’s idea of monetary differentiation.

That we live in ‘an economic age’ hardly needs reiterating – but what do we mean when we say that? No one today can do without ‘money’ and everyone is concerned with it in different ways. It was not always so. Whereas economic responsibility, and hence concern with ‘money’, previously lay with an initiated elite, today that responsibility belongs to us all. Do we need to give ourselves a conscious training to learn to act economically or should we, like our forebears, be seeking ‘divine inspiration’ in monetary matters?  The ‘old mysteries’ provided the foundation upon which civilisation was built but like the kings in Goethe’s fairy tale, they are fast crumbling. From the ‘new mysteries’ we can conceive a modern understanding of money and therefore the arrangements that will lead us into the future.

The global financial crisis has not only presented humanity with a conundrum but created an impasse – notwithstanding the carefully constructed but illusory return to business as usual. To resolve the conundrum clear thinking is needed and when we understand our circumstances we travel ‘beyond’ the impasse. A new economic dynamic is needed based on the co-ordination of will. Is the time now at hand?