© 1988 Robert Crickett
© 1988 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
When you buy something you pay for it. You exchange your measure of worth for someone else’s measure of worth. You make your living by generating something of worth to others. The product you generate has its value set by the worth you give to it; you alone give it its value.
If you value your product, be it time or labour, at $70 and it takes you two hours for you to generate this product, then it’s going to take you two hours of work for you to be able to enjoy the benefits of someone else’s product if their product has been valued by them at $70. Accordingly it will take you ten hours of work for you to enjoy a product like a colour television which has been valued at four hundred dollars. When you buy a house which has been valued at $140,000 then you’re going to have to contribute four thousand of your hours. This of course is a costing of net money, after all of your running expenses and taxes have been accounted for.
If you value your own product at $20, and it takes you the same two hours to produce it, obviously you are going to have to contribute a lot more hours of work before you can enjoy the same benefits.
Most people generate the value they set on their product by having other people establish its worth. They are quite content on the one hand to take the security of a job which pays them $10 for every hour, and yet on the other hand they feel restless deep down because they sense that they are settling for second best. They genuinely feel that their product is worth more than the ten dollars an hour they are being offered for it. They cannot budge the situation though because their reality does not support a value beyond the $10. If they want to seriously take steps to increase their value for their product, and hence their quality of life, they have to change their very value system itself.
Changing your value system is done authentically in two ways: you realize the value of your product from your spiritual dimensions of Truth and Value rather than from the denial and poverty consciousness of non-spiritual reality, from which any increase in value is merely greed unsubstantiated by your entire being and life itself. And secondly, if you evaluate your product from your authentic spiritual Truth your product is going to change so as to accord with the value you are now generating in life.
Life is about value. Life is a continuous flux of change. Progress is the evolution in value, regression is the degradation of the present values. By nature God is an expansion in value and we experience this in our own spiritual development as we move into larger and more universally realistic and acceptable standards of behaviour. The dollar is not real. It is a token of the value we each place upon our reality.
Someone with true poverty consciousness will have little value for the quality of life and for him value is wholly contained within the actual coin. Someone who lives in the spirit and knows their value system from their spiritually earned and supported self worth is of course far better equipped to support and upgrade the quality for everyone else. As s /he attains greater spiritually derived value and contributes that to others their own spiritually derived value also increases and is returned to him/her in cyclic motion, ever spiralling in an ascension of values. The value you place on life probably differs vastly from that placed on your life by your Guardian Angel … because she has an enlarged view of your life and its meaning in the grand scheme of things. This enlarged view is available to each human as he attains the reality which can live from real and enlarged views … and that is a spiritual matter, a concern of your spirit.
If someone comes to you and wants to benefit from your product, and the value you place on it is $70 but the value your client has set himself is $20 for his product, the client will perhaps think that there is an inequality in this exchange. But this thinking is merely the result of their value system and evidences the actual integrity of their value system. The reality is that when you have authentically valued your product at $70 — because spiritually you have no choice — then this client is going to have his own life augmented as well as his value system. If he genuinely cannot afford to meet your value in money then have him contribute the balance of the value to others. If he can pay $20 then the balance for your product is $ 50 … or 2 of his hours. Let him agree to contribute 2½ hours to the happiness of others. This keeps the cycle of values in healthy circulation.
If in a week you generate 10 items of your product which net you your $700, consider contributing 108 of that to God. That means for every 10 items you market 1 of them is given away.
Who do you give it to? Your own value system will let you know that. It’s more than likely that your own spiritual value will select someone who will benefit by the bestowal of such a value. There’s a difference between giving away, in this instance, $70 to a poverty conscious person who cannot circulate its value in anything other than monetary form (they have a good meal or get drunk and the buck stops there with a good burp!) and a person who can use it to uplift their own value and in turn recycle that value back into life for the further upliftment and support of others. Just as the rich get richer, so too do the valuable get more valuable… and this is good because the invaluable could not possibly be responsible for life’s values, the valuable.
The natural law of spirit is that what is given is received back in increased measure; a single acorn when planted returns a hundred acorns. As you increasingly agree with the will of God you will find that your self worth is vitally important to others. Likewise the value of your product is equally important to others. The coin in your pocket is entirely a secondary matter, it is only a token gesture of your actual worth. So, it is good and natural to give to God — to consciously return to spirit that which is from spirit in the conscious recognition that you are returning that which is of spirit … value. Such practice is the direct expression of love … outgoing and incoming.
Robert Crickett, Melbourne