Sacrificing the material for immaterial benefit


What price are you willing to pay?

This one is a little late. I was going to finish up last night, but my nap turned into a night's sleep.

There is a game I've been playing lately called Cashflow. Yes, this is one of those "evil capitalistic" games sort of like Monopoly, but it does have it's differences. Bear with me and I will explain.

Cashflow is a two-tiered game. The idea is to get out of the rat race and onto the fast track, and then use the fast track to reach your dream. In the rat race portion, you do that by increasing the amount of cash you take home every paycheck, roughly measured as your income minus your expenses. Success is measured by cashflow, not by property owned or cash on hand. Since the game doesn't give you raises on your salary, you can only do that by investing or by reducing your debt. The rules are a little complex and I am not going to go into detail here. But I will point out that one of the key strategies is not to get too attached to your properties.

To move into the big leagues as it were, it's usually best to sell at the first opportunity as long as it is profitable. Otherwise you don't have the cash on hand to buy other things increase your cashflow. Selling a house can give you enough a fourplex. Selling a couple of fourplexes can give you enough to purchase a small apartment building. Selling a small apartment building can give you enough to buy a medium sized apartment building. Selling a medium sized apartment building can let you pay off all your debts.

Notice that this game treats money and property as the ability to do work rather than the thing we protect in our safes and banks. The money isn't the goal, the cashflow is. Borrowing money increases your debt load and decreases cashflow. Doodads and babies are compulsory and randomly increase your other expenses.

This game design teaches you not to get too attached to possessions. Even the ones that look really good or give you "status" only end up draining either your cash on hand or your cashflow. Even if something seems to be paying off now, that can all change with the roll of the dice or the whim of the market.

I've seldom seen the distinction between material and immaterial made in such a practical fashion while still staying focused on the immaterial. The (material) things around us aren't nearly as important as the (immaterial) cashflow.

And like all really good games, the rules don't just hold for that one game.

I mentioned that I have been researching what I call the Wounded Master. This is a reoccurring theme there too. Odin gave up his eye for wisdom, that is one of the more obvious choices. Sacrifice of what you hold valuable now can bring greater treasure down the line, even if you don't know what that might be.

One of my meditation touchstones is the Tarot. And here again we see the same demand to give up what we value. It starts as the Fool's Journey, and is reflected in the symbolism of some of the other Major Arcana cards. Each deck has it's own overtones and symbolism, so I'll leave it at that.

As valuable as the "rules of the game" can be, we have to recognize that those rules only apply to the people playing our particular game. Sometimes there are people, places, and things that aren't bound by the rules we recognize. That doesn't make them better or "stronger," just outside. I call this the Bombadil factor after the Tolkien character. No matter what the stakes, there's always going to be something outside the rules.

So has my meandering gotten us anywhere today? Maybe. It's let me glimpse a little bit of the pattern of the Wounded Master that I am looking for, and it's shown that sacrifice can bring reward. It's shown that sometimes our magickal ways of looking at the world have correspondences in the mundane and in literature.

Posted: Tue - January 31, 2006 at 04:57 AM
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