12. Your answers lie inside you. Children need guidance from others; as we mature, we trust our hearts, where the Laws of Spirit are written. You know more than you have heard or read or been told. All you need to do is look, listen and trust.

I've been glancing over at this for a while this morning as I play hooky from yoga and bask in the silence and alertness of the morning. At first glance, it seems so ho-hum after the pounding of the others in this series. It reminds me of the "just do your best" from yesterday. Like, this is really easy, just pay attention. But when I was typing it in above, I was struck by how very difficult looking is, how little we really listen, and how little we actually trust.

Another LJ user tells a story about a woman from her church who just got caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She is an employee of a toy company and she was buying company toys with the corporate credit card and then selling them on eBay and keeping the money. I originally left a message saying that if she were an investment trader, it would be called leverage, and also wondered why she didn't just use her own credit card and take less money, but legally. She claimed she was "overwhelmed with debt." 

I have to admit that I am not particularly sympathetic to someone who is overwhelmed with debt, however nice a person she seems to be in church. Her story is echoed all over the country-- people who want more than they can afford, people who want it now instead of when they can pay for it, people who don't think they really need to live on what they make. The first time we went out to buy a house, I talked to an accountant. "We are paying $350 a month in rent," I told her (this was 1992.) "We have X to put down. What price of house can we afford and pay the same as our rent?" The real estate saleswoman we worked with tried hard to convince me we could afford more house than that. We resisted because we knew that we wanted the other things the monthly salary paid for as well as a house. What happened was that we found a whole lot of house owned by a woman who wanted to get out of that house. Fate and luck and trusting in my "House Fairy" found us the house we couldn't have afforded. This is about trust. Curtis's story from the other day is similar. When he realized he could trust in God if he got laid off, he stopped dealing drugs to get him through the lean times.

I erased my comment on my friend's blog when I read all the other comments and realized that mine sounded hard-hearted compared to everyone else's-- they were hoping the woman didn't go to jail and talking about how the church could help her out and feeling sad for her. We're going to hear a lot of stories like this one in the coming months, I fear. People turning to theft and dealing drugs as their fantasies dry up. The fantasy that the Big Bucks are out there and that we can leverage our way into them. The fantasy that we can have what we want, when we want it, as much as we want. The fantasy that there are no limits.

I'm reminded of a social criticism made by my friend Gene Marshall at Realistic Living. He says (and I can't find it written on his website, so you'll have to trust me on this one) that one of the worst illusions of our Western Civilization is this idea that there are no limits. This has given rise to corporations that pollute the planet, imagining there are no limits to what they can earn for their stockholders. And no limits on us as individuals. We can spend our way to weath and prosperity.

The last reflection I have on all this harks back to Point 5 and the whole discussion about Lessons. Point Five says that if you don't learn easy lessons, they get harder. External problems are a precise reflection of your inner state. Pain is how the universe gets your attention. That's the hard-hearted reaction to the pain of getting caught stealing from the company. Buckle down and learn the lesson, don't wallow in your poor little me drama of being overwhelmed with debt. The easy lesson here is: how can we cut back, slim down, go on rice and beans, raise chickens, grow a garden, find a job that isn't speculation and gambling, live on what we make? The lesson might even be: how can we create a community of people who work together so we can all live on what we make? 

Oops, the electric company is here and they want to cut off my electricity. [Update: Just to change the meter! My electric bills are automatically deducted from my bank account. I don't even have to remember to pay them. Ha!]