Embrace Prosperity

Money Represents Energy

While this story isn’t based on actual events, it does represent something else that is quite useful. Money is a symbol: it refers to life energy in different forms than you may usually recognize.

It is a symbol for the energy expended to build the hut, clear the field and make the sandals. It is also a symbol for the life energy expended to entertain people, to teach important information, to grow food, to solve problems and for a myriad of other things.

Money then can be understood as a storage place for life energy. The life energy in this money can be free, like cash or a savings account you can access at any time, perhaps from a bank cash machine. We can spend that money immediately for whatever we want to use it for.

Life energy can also be bound in money used to purchase a house or a car. That money is stored energy dedicated to a certain purpose and isn’t easily available to be transformed into something else.

Currently unavailable money holds stored energy that has the potential to be released later. It exists because of an agreement. It’s not accessible right now but will be later, like a payment that is owed to you for completed work. The promise of future retirement benefits also fits this category.

Of course, depending upon who is defining it, money is much more than these things.

How Authorities Define Money

Money is a current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes. Money is coins and banknotes collectively. Webster Dictionary

Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context. Wikipedia

Money is any good that is widely used and accepted in transactions involving the transfer of goods and services from one person to another. CliffsNotes

That seems to include coconuts, coins, shells, gold nuggets, ball point pens (in India in 1986 a ball point pen was worth 3 bananas), paper currency, and paper as well as electronic records such as bitcoins.

How Ordinary People Define Money

Laurie: As I was drafting this chapter, I decided to do some informal research about this question. So, of course I opened Facebook and asked for a quick answer to the question, “What is money?” There were 83 responses.

I also started asking people I encountered and tabulating their answers as well. I collected about 100 responses to this question. Here is a summary. The numbers add up to more than 100 because some individual’s responses fell into more than one category.