Being The Banker Of Your Life
I need to get this off my chest. It is to do with the death of my son and the impact his death had on me and the soul searching and realizations that followed. One realization was of being the actor and then moving on to be the director and then the financier of my life. But now, I want to take a deep look at the possibility of being the banker, of having the money to finance life’s dramas. I want to know what it means, not only to direct your own life, but to own it. I want to see the shots you can call when you own your own life and what you can do with it. It seems quite an amazing journey.
This most recent inquiry began when Aingeal Rose spawned a chain of discussions on reality when she asked,
Does the mass consciousness create our reality and does it create birth, aging and death?
A discussion on the various planes of existence followed with the realization we create the planes of existence before life, the planes of existence during life, and the planes existence after death. And to explain it, I used the metaphor of the movies. I found we’re in the movie of life itself, acting it out on the stage of what we call reality.
Then I got myself promoted (as it were) to being a director. And then, over the following days, I moved into becoming the owner of the studios. I am now at the place where I am the financier of the movie of my own life. At this level I can dictate what goes in my life drama, what movies get made, and what doesn’t get made. I’m able to dictate orders, make policy, I choose locations, pay expenses, make income, control pricing, and more. All of that is very relevant to what goes on in the daily lives of the actors and actresses on the world stage, in the movie of life, immersed in the belief system of reality.
Ryan died at four months old, on my birthday. His death caused me to ask many questions; who am I and why am I here, why was he born, why did he die, where is he now, and could I have prevented his death?
What is death anyway? What’s the bigger picture that’s going on here?
Well, to place that into the analogy of the movies, to place it into this classic drama we call life, this fantastic illusion I’ve created, I found that everybody contributes to that illusion. Our children enforce, enhanced, and confirm the illusion for us. We confirm the illusion for our children. We confirm the illusion for our brothers and sisters, our friends, our coworkers and we confirm everything for everybody. Everybody confirms everything for everybody. That’s how fantastic this drama is. It’s how fantastic this illusion is, it’s how amazing this dreamscape is. It is how expert we are at making movies.
We are the best because we make it so believable that we believe it ourselves. But we forgot where the stage door is. We never get off the hamster wheel of life, we never step outside the door of reality. In this hierarchy of the actor, director, owner, financier, banker, we become increasingly distanced from what goes on in the script itself. Everybody will have their own personal understanding of this, but for me, when my son Ryan died on my birthday, the financier part of me didn’t know (or care) about grief and loss.
At the level of the financier they did not concern themselves with pain or suffering, or drama, or adventure, or excitement that was going on inside my movie theater life they were financing.
This might seem callous and distant, but when you think about it, we know at some level it’s all cellophane and illusion. So why concern ourselves over something that’s an illusion? The owner knows it’s an illusion, but I did not, because I believed the pain to be real. I believed the reality of the theater of my mind, but that is not the concern of the owner or the financier.
You can see how, as we go through these layers of hierarchy, how the director is concerned with drama — who lives who dies, where the action is, where the high points are, where the tension is. The owner can see the drama but is not concerned to the same degree. We as the owners of our own lives want to know there is excitement in this life, that there is something worth buying and selling, that there is something believable in it, that there is action, that there is a reality. But the owner is not concerned at the level of who said what to whom when. And when we get to the financier, not at all concerned.
At this stage, I want to step up another level. I then realized that what I was doing was creating new layers, or levels, or planes of existence. You do this all the time. I do this all the time. Everybody does it all the time, but we don’t know it. This is a plane of existence right here, right now — you reading this. The person next door does not know I exist because they’re not in the same plane of existence as we are. In this way, you can see how we’re continuing to create our own planes of existence.
How do we know this to be true?
Well, one person may have cancer and may have been given six months to live, you have no such illnesses. Another may have three children, you’ve none. Their lives, their culture is different to yours. They may believe in God A, and you believe in God B. They may adore this actor or celebrity, you admire someone else. They may be immersed in one political party, you support another. You may speak French and they speak Chinese. Everybody’s life is their own plane of existence.
In this grand experiment, I stepped out one more level and created the plane of existence where I was the bank. In that existence I was the one giving money (which is energy) to the financier so I can invest in the studio of my life, appoint the director, invest in the movie, and invest in the actors and actresses who will act out their own parts in my reality. As the bank, I own the money, so I call the shots. I found myself saying to that financier; I don’t want to finance you anymore; I want to finance this drama instead.
What does this feel like, operating at this level of creation? Imagine that we can now say, let’s create this life drama instead. Let’s put our money, let’s put our energy, let’s put our resources, let’s put our creativity, let’s put our potential into this reality instead.
It was at this stage I got excited about the possibilities. I got excited about the potential. I got excited realizing who we really are, and what we as humanity could do and be. As the banker of your life, you can feel the power and the freedom it gives you. You will find it life-changing when you enter that possibility. When you look at yourself, your life, and creation and realize that you are not only the banker, but you are the owner. You are the creator of your own life.
Originally narrated by Ahonu on The Honest-to-God Series, a podcast of practical spirituality in a changing world. You can hear the original here: http://honesttogodseries.com/episodes/5abf25a976380bf04c806d6a
