From Philosophy to Practice: How Adrian Emery's Lifeworks Can Transform Your Life

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Choosing Happy podcast.

Speaker A: 00:00:05

I'm your host, Heather Masters, and in this episode, I speak with Adrian Emery, who is an author, an entrepreneur, and a philosopher.

Speaker A: 00:00:15

And we cover a lot, a lot of ground in this one, from spirituality through to the current financial system and a lot, lot more.

Speaker A: 00:00:25

It's worth staying around.

Speaker A: 00:00:26

It's a conversation I really enjoyed, and I recommend that you stay with me for the Choosing Happy podcast.

Speaker A: 00:00:47

Hello, and welcome to the Choosing Happy podcast.

Speaker A: 00:00:49

I'm your host, Heather Masters, and today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Adrian Emery, who is an author, an entrepreneur, a philosopher, and has devoted his life to creating a new philosophy called Lifeworks, which based on the understanding, the laws, the principles and the codes that make life work easily, effortlessly, and successfully.

Speaker A: 00:01:12

Welcome, Adrian.

Speaker B: 00:01:14

Thank you, Heather, and it's a pleasure to be with you and talking to your wonderful audience.

Speaker A: 00:01:20

I'm so looking forward.

Speaker A: 00:01:22

Could you begin by telling us a little bit about yourself, your journey, and what lifeworks is all about?

Speaker B: 00:01:30

From a very young age, I guess I had a bit of a trouble working out what life was all about, like a lot of people and feeling like I really didn't belong here on this planet and in this western system, which I now call a paradigm.

Speaker B: 00:01:50

And I used to look at, and I'm talking about a very young age, probably don't know, four or five.

Speaker B: 00:01:56

And I used to look at all of my parents friends that would come and visit to try and find a role model or someone that I thought, yeah, they got a good angle on life.

Speaker B: 00:02:04

I like that because there was something about the way that the western societies organized that just didn't gel with me.

Speaker B: 00:02:12

But I couldn't find a role model, and that only grew as I got older.

Speaker B: 00:02:20

And so I decided or determined that I wanted to create a new way of looking at life, a new philosophy.

Speaker B: 00:02:30

Now, obviously, as a young child, I couldn't really use all those words that I can use now as an elder, but I'm just trying to give a bit of an encapsulation of how the journey began.

Speaker B: 00:02:44

So as a teenager, obviously, when most teenagers are going through this tumultuous period of what is life all about, it only got more pronounced.

Speaker B: 00:02:56

And so I really started researching all the philosophies, religions, cultures that existed, trying to find one that made sense to me and for me, and again, never really finding one.

Speaker B: 00:03:12

So I pretty much decided to start from scratch and to try and create a philosophy that worked.

Speaker B: 00:03:20

Now, it was really important to me that I wanted a spirituality that I said worked.

Speaker B: 00:03:26

In other words, I wanted it to work in the here and now to make my life better today, not to give me promises of a hereafter or in another life or that.

Speaker B: 00:03:37

And I really didn't agree with that whole premise that we're here to suffer or to earn salvation or that life was a means of to an end in some hereafter.

Speaker B: 00:03:48

So that was sort of really what I was always looking for, that.

Speaker B: 00:03:52

So I wanted to build a bridge between spirituality and practicality because I really saw them as the same thing.

Speaker B: 00:04:00

And that's what I've devoted my life to.

Speaker B: 00:04:03

And that's why I call it life works, because I really believe.

Speaker B: 00:04:07

And if you look at the universe, if you look at anything, if you look at nature, if you look in the stars, if you look at the micro subatomic particles, life works everywhere and in every area.

Speaker B: 00:04:19

It's just that humanity who doesn't seem to be able to grasp this philosophy.

Speaker B: 00:04:25

I mean, what's an unhappy plant?

Speaker B: 00:04:27

What's an unhappy animal?

Speaker B: 00:04:29

I mean, you know, the universe is abundant.

Speaker B: 00:04:32

It's happy, it's free.

Speaker B: 00:04:35

It's pretty much all the things that we aren't.

Speaker B: 00:04:38

And so I figured that we were the one out of step, and we needed to get into step.

Speaker A: 00:04:49

Excellent.

Speaker A: 00:04:49

So many questions with that.

Speaker A: 00:04:53

You came up with the philosophy.

Speaker A: 00:04:56

Is there a structure to it?

Speaker A: 00:04:57

How does it work?

Speaker A: 00:04:58

How do you.

Speaker B: 00:04:59

Oh, definitely.

Speaker B: 00:05:01

It's actually quite detailed.

Speaker B: 00:05:04

And so I've written now a trilogy called the temple of understanding.

Speaker B: 00:05:09

It has three books.

Speaker B: 00:05:11

So the first one is called personal sovereignty.

Speaker B: 00:05:14

And it's the beginning of the structure, because I believe that we do create our own reality and that we need to be able to make decisions for ourselves.

Speaker B: 00:05:24

And I think this is part, if not the main part, of the problem.

Speaker B: 00:05:30

And if you think about it, that if most people have got a major decision to make, the first thing that they do is they go and talk to friends or they look for advice, or they ask somebody else.

Speaker B: 00:05:45

And that other may not even necessarily be a person.

Speaker B: 00:05:48

It might be a religion, it may be a philosophy, it may be an ideology, it could be any number of things that they go and seek to help make a decision, meaning that.

Speaker B: 00:06:00

And so one of the things that I say in personal sovereignty is that human beings are bad at making decisions and bad at making the right decision.

Speaker B: 00:06:11

So the structure begins with the premise that we need to find what is right for us, that we are all unique, we are all individuals.

Speaker B: 00:06:22

And what is right for us is not necessarily right for somebody else, and it may also not be right tomorrow.

Speaker B: 00:06:30

Therefore, you can't follow a set of rules, whether that's the ten commandments or anything, because change is the only permanent and abiding constant in the universe.

Speaker B: 00:06:41

Everything changes permanently.

Speaker B: 00:06:43

And so what is right and what is wrong changes as well, depending on the situation.

Speaker B: 00:06:50

Then the second book is called tuning, and that's the one that I'm just releasing now.

Speaker B: 00:06:54

So once you know where you want to go, in other words, once you've made your decision and figure out what your life purpose is, then you need to know how to do it.

Speaker B: 00:07:03

You need to know how to get to your destination.

Speaker B: 00:07:06

So dark tuning is all about the fundamentals, the techniques, and it's very, very detailed.

Speaker B: 00:07:12

It's a.

Speaker B: 00:07:13

I would, you know, it goes into a lot of how does one live one's life?

Speaker B: 00:07:20

Well, because basically, I am saying that life is abundant, life is beautiful, life is a joy, life is a delight, but you need to live it right.

Speaker B: 00:07:32

And I am basically saying that life is a skill.

Speaker B: 00:07:36

Now, if you think about it, and most of us have had approximately 15 to 20 years of education, we've never attended a course called life 101.

Speaker B: 00:07:47

So we've never really been taught how to live or how does life work.

Speaker B: 00:07:52

And life works is all about how life works.

Speaker B: 00:07:55

So it's very thorough.

Speaker B: 00:07:57

It's very detailed.

Speaker B: 00:07:58

As I said before, it's also very pragmatic.

Speaker B: 00:08:01

And then the third book in the trilogy is called becoming one, because I also believe that one needs to arrive at a oneness with oneself, at a oneness with others, and at a oneness with the universe, for life to flow, for one to be at peace, and for things to happen joyously.

Speaker B: 00:08:25

So there's a very detailed structure.

Speaker B: 00:08:27

Obviously, I'm not going to go into all the details right now, but, yeah, I put a lot of.

Speaker B: 00:08:31

I put.

Speaker B: 00:08:32

I've actually put 70 years into understanding.

Speaker B: 00:08:37

So my quest was, okay, how does life work?

Speaker B: 00:08:40

That's a pretty big question.

Speaker B: 00:08:43

And I really kept going until I was satisfied in myself that I had figured it all out very, very thoroughly and in a lot of details.

Speaker B: 00:08:54

And also not only figured it out, but then, like any scientist, used my life to.

Speaker B: 00:09:03

To calibrate and to validate the hypothesis.

Speaker B: 00:09:07

In other words, by really being very, very strict not only with myself, but in my observations of the, of the people that I came in contact with.

Speaker B: 00:09:17

And I did a lot of counseling, I did a lot of consulting.

Speaker B: 00:09:21

I've employed probably up to about a thousand people in my life.

Speaker B: 00:09:26

So I've always been watching, learning, validating and rejecting those parts that didn't work and, and honing the parts that did.

Speaker B: 00:09:37

So it's not only very detailed and very thorough, it's been, what's the word that, you know, like when you've got a hypothesis and then you want to, you want to test it over and over and over again to make sure that it is applicable, not just once, but also in many different situations with different people.

Speaker B: 00:09:58

Before you can say that, this is a principle of life.

Speaker A: 00:10:03

So you said it's taking you 70 years.

Speaker A: 00:10:08

Can you tell us a little bit more about, for instance, I know everyday life is a lesson, really, or it should be, if you're aware.

Speaker A: 00:10:20

And how did you, I know you said you've tested it, but how did you kind of formulate things?

Speaker A: 00:10:29

How did you decide, I'm going to try this, I'm going to try that.

Speaker A: 00:10:34

What was the kind of process you went through to pull that together?

Speaker B: 00:10:39

Well, there's a John Lennon line, I think it's in the song that he wrote to his son Julian.

Speaker B: 00:10:47

And the line is, life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.

Speaker B: 00:10:55

And when I, meaning Adrian, have to answer your question, have decided to do something, it didn't really ever work.

Speaker B: 00:11:04

But when I allowed life to lead me, to guide me, and when I flowed, then I always found it work.

Speaker B: 00:11:11

So the lessons came from life.

Speaker B: 00:11:14

I believe that life is a university.

Speaker B: 00:11:16

Yes, I do believe that the planet is a school, and we are here to learn.

Speaker B: 00:11:20

But your life, and this is where it is very important that each of us look at our own individuality and our own story.

Speaker B: 00:11:29

Your life is your curriculum.

Speaker B: 00:11:32

So your life brings you the lessons.

Speaker B: 00:11:36

And as you just said, if you're aware enough, once you start tuning into this concept, you become.

Speaker B: 00:11:42

It's almost like the lessons hit you as a two by four forefront.

Speaker B: 00:11:46

I mean, I'm not meaning that in any aggressive way, but it becomes very, very obvious.

Speaker B: 00:11:52

But I think the real answer to that question, Heather, is that you must be a scientist.

Speaker B: 00:12:00

And so when something happens, and unfortunately for most of us, it's usually negative, but it doesn't need to be.

Speaker B: 00:12:09

It's when anything happens, whether it's really good or whether it's something seemingly negative, you need to stop and ask yourself why.

Speaker B: 00:12:19

Because going back to your previous question, the fundamental premise of life works, and all the spiritual work that's coming through at the moment, is that we create our own reality.

Speaker B: 00:12:32

Full stop, no exceptions.

Speaker B: 00:12:34

That's it.

Speaker B: 00:12:35

So when something happens, I think the first thing that one must do is instead of immediately blaming somebody else or making an excuse or making a justification, which human beings are fantastic at, which basically exonerates us and passes the responsibility, oh, well, it wasn't my fault.

Speaker B: 00:12:54

You know, I was.

Speaker B: 00:12:55

It was just an accident.

Speaker B: 00:12:56

You know, it.

Speaker B: 00:12:57

They did it to me, you know, whether they is the government or my parents or my hereditary or the system or whatever it is.

Speaker B: 00:13:04

No, I did it.

Speaker B: 00:13:06

I created it.

Speaker B: 00:13:06

Now, why would I create that?

Speaker B: 00:13:10

And so that's such an empowering question, because when you just look 100% full frontal at what is going on in front of you and go, I created that.

Speaker B: 00:13:19

Fantastic.

Speaker B: 00:13:20

Now, if it's something really beautiful and positive in your life, take acknowledgement, take the praise, but also look at, well, how did I do that?

Speaker B: 00:13:30

What did I do?

Speaker B: 00:13:31

What steps did I actually take to get to this marvelous result?

Speaker B: 00:13:37

Similarly, if something really negative comes at you, you go, well, why would I do that?

Speaker B: 00:13:42

I mean, why would I want to create that?

Speaker B: 00:13:44

Why would I, for example, why would I want to create that inverted commas accident?

Speaker B: 00:13:48

Or why would I want to create that disease?

Speaker B: 00:13:51

Or why would I want to create that calamity?

Speaker B: 00:13:53

None of which are because if you're really honest and you look back at your life, you can really see that the.

Speaker B: 00:14:04

The best things that ever happened to you and the best learning experiences were at the time, the most traumatic.

Speaker B: 00:14:13

Or when you're right in the middle of it, you know, you think it's probably really, really negative.

Speaker B: 00:14:18

And the second part, the second answer to your question that I learned very easily is sorry, very early, is that when you learn to meditate deeply and you're facing something, and let's say you're in pain, emotional pain, psychological pain, spiritual pain, when you really go inside and as I said before, first of all, accept that you created it and then start looking at why you created it.

Speaker B: 00:14:49

The first thing that happens, and this is how you know you're on the right track, is the pain goes away.

Speaker B: 00:14:54

Because the pain is resistance.

Speaker B: 00:14:56

Something happens, you resisting it.

Speaker B: 00:14:58

Why did that happen?

Speaker B: 00:14:59

And, you know, poor me, you know, well, you know, why did that have to happen to me?

Speaker B: 00:15:02

And so there's a lot of resistance, there's a lot of fighting rather than going, okay, this is what, this is what is happening right now.

Speaker B: 00:15:11

I have to accept that.

Speaker B: 00:15:12

And because you can only change what you own.

Speaker B: 00:15:15

You can only give away what, for example, you can only give money away that you own.

Speaker B: 00:15:19

You can only change something that you own, meaning that you acknowledge it you recognize that you own that you have created it, and now I am the master of it.

Speaker B: 00:15:29

So therefore, the first thing that I noticed was that, as I said before, the pain goes away, the resistance goes away, and now I can start to mine, so to speak, the depth of this lesson and really find out why I did this.

Speaker B: 00:15:50

And in that is the change.

Speaker B: 00:15:53

So that if you are resisting, fighting, denying, exonerating, justifying, making excuses, you're not really going to get the lesson, you're not really going to get the benefit, and you're not really going to get the change, because.

Speaker B: 00:16:07

Bye.

Speaker B: 00:16:08

Passing the buck of responsibility, you're basically saying, well, I'm okay, I didn't do it, therefore, I don't really need to change.

Speaker B: 00:16:15

But when you accept 100% that you created it, you did it, then obviously, if you don't want to do that again, if it's something negative, you change.

Speaker B: 00:16:26

But similarly, if it's something really positive and you look at something that you've created and go, wow, that's beautiful.

Speaker B: 00:16:32

That's wonderful.

Speaker B: 00:16:34

How did I do that?

Speaker B: 00:16:35

Because I want to repeat that recipe, and therefore, I can make my life more successful by using the recipes that worked as opposed to using the recipes that didn't work.

Speaker B: 00:16:49

I'm not sure if that answers your question.

Speaker B: 00:16:54

No, no.

Speaker A: 00:16:55

It's.

Speaker A: 00:16:55

It's.

Speaker A: 00:16:55

It's fascinating.

Speaker A: 00:16:58

There's this something you said.

Speaker A: 00:17:00

You said it's about flowing with life.

Speaker A: 00:17:04

It's about taking full responsibility because we create our reality.

Speaker A: 00:17:11

Where does.

Speaker A: 00:17:12

In terms of flowing with life and with connecting with life, where does the decision making come in?

Speaker A: 00:17:20

Because I think, and I could be wrong.

Speaker A: 00:17:23

I think sometimes, especially in spiritual areas, our decision making skills are eroded because we're expecting the universe to give us an answer rather than us making a decision.

Speaker B: 00:17:35

Yeah, that's a great question.

Speaker B: 00:17:37

I struggle.

Speaker B: 00:17:38

Not only did struggle, I do still struggle with that.

Speaker B: 00:17:43

I think it's a real, very fine line, and I think there are probably three octaves of that answer.

Speaker B: 00:17:55

And so I need to introduce the concept of what I call the corporate structure of consciousness.

Speaker B: 00:18:02

So most of the time, and you and I are verbally communicating.

Speaker B: 00:18:09

So we are using our left brain, linear, logical language, consciousness.

Speaker B: 00:18:15

We're using rationality.

Speaker B: 00:18:17

And unfortunately, humanity has got stuck there.

Speaker B: 00:18:21

We are in the paradigm of rationality.

Speaker B: 00:18:26

Everything has to be proven.

Speaker B: 00:18:28

Everything has to go through logic.

Speaker B: 00:18:29

Everything has to.

Speaker B: 00:18:30

You know, this whole western paradigm is based in logic and rationality, and it's a very, very small and limited part of our consciousness.

Speaker B: 00:18:43

We also have intuition, which is the right side of the brain.

Speaker B: 00:18:47

We also have gut feeling.

Speaker B: 00:18:49

We also have gestalts of awareness.

Speaker B: 00:18:51

We also have our higher consciousness.

Speaker B: 00:18:54

So there are many, many parts of our consciousness, which is I call, which is why I call it the corporate structure of consciousness.

Speaker B: 00:19:01

And so quite often we're going, God, tell me what to do.

Speaker B: 00:19:07

You know, rather than understanding that it is our higher consciousness.

Speaker B: 00:19:14

And so when one develops, as I said before, when you develop the ability to go deeply into meditation, you're actually touching other parts of you.

Speaker B: 00:19:26

It's still you.

Speaker B: 00:19:27

It's your soul, it's your higher self, it's your spirit.

Speaker B: 00:19:32

And but to sort of just let me put something else in there that might sort of make it a little bit easier to understand is that part of the rationality and the paradigm that we live in has put God out there somewhere else.

Speaker B: 00:19:52

So coming back to your question, going, God out there somewhere else, please tell me what to do, rather than understanding, and not in any blasphemous way that I am goddesse, because God is everything.

Speaker B: 00:20:06

You know, I'm no more God than a grain of sand or a plate of grass or whatever.

Speaker B: 00:20:12

But so when we're asking that question, what we really want to do is contact our divinity and, and be guided, as I said before, in that line, you know, yes, if you, if you're coming from your ego, if you're coming from your petty self, the decisions won't be good.

Speaker B: 00:20:32

But I teach people rather than going, God, please tell me what to do.

Speaker B: 00:20:37

Because then you're opening yourself up to a lot of mythology and error.

Speaker B: 00:20:43

You need to be able to go within and contact your own divinity to guide you.

Speaker B: 00:20:49

And that will come from your intuition, from your gut, from your guest of awareness.

Speaker B: 00:20:56

But they'll all be in harmony.

Speaker B: 00:20:58

And also it will sit well with your rationality as well because it will be good for you.

Speaker B: 00:21:04

So there won't be any split.

Speaker B: 00:21:06

Whereas if we look at the paradigm that we live in now, there is always this split between what I want to do and what I should do, between spirituality and physicality, between, you know, there's always, well, I shouldn't be doing all those things because they're wrong.

Speaker B: 00:21:24

I shouldn't really be enjoying myself, you know, so.

Speaker B: 00:21:28

And that's why the third book is because is called becoming one.

Speaker B: 00:21:31

Because once we embrace this wholeness and we understand that the whole of life is divine, all of us are divine.

Speaker B: 00:21:42

Everything is divine.

Speaker B: 00:21:44

There is no more separation.

Speaker B: 00:21:47

There is no more good and evil.

Speaker B: 00:21:50

And, you know, because if you're going to ask goddess to give you an answer, then you're also putting a lot of belief in the opposite, which we call the devil or Satan or whatever you want to call it, evil.

Speaker B: 00:22:04

And so you're really accentuating that polarity, which does exist, but it exists in a duality.

Speaker B: 00:22:12

It's a polarity within a duality.

Speaker B: 00:22:15

So it's still a wholeness, a oneness.

Speaker A: 00:22:21

Okay, very good.

Speaker A: 00:22:26

Do you actually have courses?

Speaker A: 00:22:28

Do you coach people, teach people?

Speaker B: 00:22:30

Not anymore.

Speaker B: 00:22:31

I did a lot of counseling, and I've run a lot of businesses.

Speaker B: 00:22:36

My courses were really.

Speaker B: 00:22:38

So going back to what I said before about, I found that my businesses were my laboratory, and where I, you ask me, you know, how do you, how did I, it wasn't so much that the lessons came.

Speaker B: 00:22:52

Well, it was because as an entrepreneur, it's very important that you know, particularly if you want to be in business.

Speaker B: 00:23:01

And I must paraphrase that by saying that when I was very young, I thought, it's very easy to be a capitalist, and it's very easy to be a mystic, but I wanted to be a mystical capitalist or a capitalistic mystic, meaning I wanted to run businesses from on a spirit with spiritual principles, because I believe that that's the only way that we can build a new society.

Speaker B: 00:23:31

So the marketplace pretty much determines the lessons, and it's probably best if I give you an example.

Speaker B: 00:23:41

So my first business was a vegetarian restaurant.

Speaker B: 00:23:45

It was actually the first vegetarian restaurant in Australia.

Speaker B: 00:23:49

But I could see, and this was within very early days, within a few weeks, I could see, even though we were using the best ingredients, healthy ingredients, probably not organic back in those days, we're talking about the early seventies, but certainly we were trying to use whole foods.

Speaker B: 00:24:08

But I could see this energy from, from us in the kitchen going into the food.

Speaker B: 00:24:14

And this is before, like, water for chocolate and before putting love in the food.

Speaker B: 00:24:18

So this is very early days, and as anyone who's ever worked in a kitchen knows, they're notorious as pecking orders.

Speaker B: 00:24:26

There's a lot of conflict, there's a lot of tension, because services is quite intense.

Speaker B: 00:24:32

And I thought, hmm, okay, this is no good, because on the one hand, we've got all these pure ingredients, but on the other hand, we're putting all of this negative energy into the food.

Speaker B: 00:24:40

And so that was my first, that was my real.

Speaker B: 00:24:43

Aha.

Speaker B: 00:24:43

Which was, okay, how does one get a group of people to work harmoniously, joyously, creatively, and in love for what they're doing?

Speaker B: 00:24:58

That was a, that was really, that was the beginning of my quest.

Speaker B: 00:25:02

So that also answers your question, where do the lessons come from?

Speaker B: 00:25:07

That was like, wow, that's, that was a huge, and I was 20 years old.

Speaker B: 00:25:13

And as I said, that was before.

Speaker B: 00:25:15

I'd never heard of putting love into the food.

Speaker B: 00:25:17

It had never, ever been said.

Speaker B: 00:25:20

But I had read that in the Zen monasteries, only the highest monks were allowed into the kitchens because they realized that the vibration of those monks went into the food.

Speaker B: 00:25:34

Whereas in the west, back then, in the early seventies, kitchens were a lowly job.

Speaker B: 00:25:39

You know, we didn't see it.

Speaker B: 00:25:41

There weren't, there weren't celebrity chefs back in those days.

Speaker B: 00:25:45

So, yeah, it, life gives you the lessons that you need to learn, and then, and then you need to solve them.

Speaker B: 00:25:57

I think that that's the only way that, that I can put it.

Speaker A: 00:26:03

So working with businesses, and you touched on businesses, especially small businesses, are likely to create the new economy, if you like, going forward.

Speaker B: 00:26:18

I agree.

Speaker B: 00:26:18

I think they will.

Speaker B: 00:26:19

I mean, if you look at it the.

Speaker B: 00:26:23

And again, I don't like using the word evil, but most, well, we can say pretty much all of the pollution comes from multinationals.

Speaker B: 00:26:33

I mean, it's, it's only since humanity has created the corporation and we have these huge multinationals.

Speaker B: 00:26:42

I mean, Milton Friedman said the only purpose of a company is to generate profit for its shareholders.

Speaker B: 00:26:50

I mean, that is just such an absurd statement.

Speaker B: 00:26:54

If you go back to the pre industrial revolution, you had artisans, you know, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.

Speaker B: 00:27:03

You had small businesses.

Speaker B: 00:27:05

Medium to small businesses are still the backbone of the economy, are still the backbone of the middle class, and are still the backbone of a capitalist system.

Speaker B: 00:27:16

That is why I don't want to get too distracted here.

Speaker B: 00:27:19

But it's important for people to understand that.

Speaker B: 00:27:22

That is why there is such a push on at the moment, to destroy the middle class, because that will destroy capitalism and democracy.

Speaker B: 00:27:32

And we will go back to a feudal type system where these have these huge corporations and the serf class.

Speaker B: 00:27:40

d Economic Forum has said, by: 2030

Speaker B: 00:27:44

That is a feudal system.

Speaker B: 00:27:47

In a spiritual economy, you will be, you will revert to an artisan because you will be doing what you love.

Speaker B: 00:27:56

You see, it's incredibly important to understand that if we look at the whole modus operandi of this system, one goes to work.

Speaker B: 00:28:07

You know, we get up in the morning, we get in a car, we go to work, and generally we go to work to do something that we don't really want to do in order to make money to bring that money home and to generate, and we're on this economic treadmill.

Speaker B: 00:28:20

But if you're an artisan and you do what you love, you're doing what you want to do to create either a product or a service that does good for people, the money comes secondarily.

Speaker B: 00:28:33

In other words, you're not creating, you know, if you're a shoemaker, you're not making that shoe in order to make a profit.

Speaker B: 00:28:38

You're making that shoe because you want somebody to wear it.

Speaker B: 00:28:42

So goods and services usually come from a small to medium business.

Speaker B: 00:28:51

That is, I'm calling it an artisan.

Speaker B: 00:28:53

But, you know, it's a small business where someone, going back to what I was talking about in terms of the restaurant, is putting love into what they are doing.

Speaker B: 00:29:07

And it's that love which ultimately is good customer service, a good product, harmonious teamwork, you know, because you're all working together to create this whatever it is that you are creating.

Speaker B: 00:29:22

And so you get a lot of joy, you get a lot of reward, you get a lot of satisfaction from creating that product as opposed to generating a profit.

Speaker B: 00:29:32

Because if the profit motive is all there is, then you start cheating.

Speaker B: 00:29:36

You know, greed comes in, you start cutting corners, you start reducing costs, because obviously all you really want to do is maximize profit as opposed to optimizing the product that you want to create.

Speaker A: 00:29:53

Just thinking about where we are at the moment, as you say, in terms of kind of pushing out the middle class and closing small businesses down and making it really difficult for them, there are, I suspect, and this is only my mind read, a lot of businesses that are focused on money now because they're fearful they won't be able to survive.

Speaker A: 00:30:21

So how do you balance putting that love and maintaining that in an environment where there's so much pressure on financial systems and on keeping your business afloat with all of the taxes and costs that they're creating as well?

Speaker B: 00:30:42

I mean, that's what I keep saying.

Speaker B: 00:30:44

That is the whole point.

Speaker B: 00:30:45

I mean, we have created particularly, I think it's quite interesting.

Speaker B: 00:30:51

I mean, you're in England or Great Britain, and the industrial revolution started in England.

Speaker B: 00:30:57

I mean, I saw in the news the other night you have just closed down your last coal power station, and the first one was in England.

Speaker B: 00:31:08

So, you know, you're the first, first ones to start it and, and the first ones to stop it.

Speaker B: 00:31:14

But, you know, but you're also incredibly now wound up by red tape.

Speaker B: 00:31:23

And, you know, it's this whole woke world.

Speaker B: 00:31:26

It's a bureaucracy of, because we are just creating a whole class of people who are not really doing anything.

Speaker B: 00:31:37

You know, they're not really generating.

Speaker B: 00:31:39

They're not really creating a product or a service.

Speaker B: 00:31:42

They're just tying everybody else up in knots.

Speaker B: 00:31:46

And you're right.

Speaker B: 00:31:46

So it's creating, it's making it very, very difficult.

Speaker B: 00:31:50

And again, as I said before, that, you know, a pure market system, rather than calling it a capitalist because capitalism has now got a very negative connotation.

Speaker B: 00:32:01

But a pure market system doesn't really need a lot of regulation because the market does work.

Speaker B: 00:32:09

In other words, if you are a small business and you are not making a product that is either good or serviceable or competitive, then you are going to go.

Speaker B: 00:32:19

The market will, you will go out of business.

Speaker B: 00:32:21

So the market does keep people honest when they say now, well, the market, capitalism doesn't work anymore.

Speaker B: 00:32:29

It only doesn't work anymore because they have started tinkering with it.

Speaker B: 00:32:32

And we have these huge multinational corporations that are not really, they're not really working in a market anymore.

Speaker B: 00:32:40

They've created their, and, you know, I mean, I study it a lot.

Speaker B: 00:32:44

If you look at any of the really, really large, you know, the FAANG companies, for example, they all got to be there by buying out their competitors and by monopolistic practices.

Speaker B: 00:32:57

They didn't get there fair and square.

Speaker B: 00:33:00

They didn't get there in a true market economy.

Speaker B: 00:33:04

And most of them accrued the beginnings of their wealth fraudulently and then started, as I said, so it's a very predatory nature, whereas when you have a level playing field, which is much more a meritocracy, then you have to be good at what you do or you just won't survive because the competition, there's a lot of competition.

Speaker B: 00:33:27

So if my shoes are no good, someone's going to go and buy.

Speaker B: 00:33:30

And that's what happens in small businesses.

Speaker B: 00:33:33

You know, they come and go.

Speaker B: 00:33:34

Some of them fail, some of them go bankrupt, or some of them just decide they want to go and do something else.

Speaker B: 00:33:40

So it's a, you're right.

Speaker B: 00:33:42

I mean, we have created a paradigm of fear within which.

Speaker B: 00:33:49

But it's not even, I don't think it's even so much the fear of, well, I better make money now because they might close me down.

Speaker B: 00:33:56

It's just that that's the world we live in, that we're not really, you see, because if you're, if you are going back to life works, if you're really attuned to your life, if you're learning your lessons, if you're enjoying your life, if you're having fun, if you're really attuned to your product and service and being creative, it making the most amount of money is, is irrelevant.

Speaker B: 00:34:23

You know, it doesn't, it doesn't come in.

Speaker B: 00:34:25

But in this society, with its acquisitiveness and with the negative ego.

Speaker B: 00:34:29

So you asked me a long time ago about the structure one needs to understand the negative ego.

Speaker B: 00:34:38

And the negative ego is all about acquisition, so it's all about accumulating more and more material possessions to bolster its own emptiness.

Speaker B: 00:34:50

And so this whole concept of wanting one of my favorite sayings is more is never enough.

Speaker B: 00:34:58

So we have billionaires on the planet who not only want, need more money, you know, we have these incredible elite who have so much power, need more power.

Speaker B: 00:35:10

So if you are an addict, more is never enough.

Speaker B: 00:35:15

So unfortunately, we now live within a paradigm.

Speaker B: 00:35:19

And I'm going back to the very beginning here, which is, this is all of what I could see as a very young child thinking, there's something wrong here.

Speaker B: 00:35:25

This is not working.

Speaker B: 00:35:26

This is not the way humanity was meant to live.

Speaker B: 00:35:30

Now, in the intervening 50 odd years, it's got a lot worse.

Speaker B: 00:35:34

But even then, I could see the beginnings, the embryonic beginnings of this whole road that we have traveled as a western society, as a western paradigm, which has exponentially gone berserk in the last 50 years.

Speaker B: 00:35:53

But somehow, as a child, I could see that it was the wrong way to go.

Speaker B: 00:36:00

And so going back to the negative ego, which is all about accumulation, so I need more.

Speaker B: 00:36:05

I always want more.

Speaker B: 00:36:06

I need more because more is never enough.

Speaker B: 00:36:09

So greed has taken over, and people are pursuing accumulation for accumulation's sake.

Speaker B: 00:36:17

Money for money's sake, you know, power for power's sake, rather than.

Speaker B: 00:36:22

And I think it's very, very important that one is wealthy, because if you are, as I said before, creating a product or a service that is creating benefit to people and delivering good customer service, you will make, you will make good money, you know, but it's not because you're focused on the profit, it's because you're focused on delivering what you really love to do.

Speaker B: 00:36:50

And you obviously, as an entrepreneur, need to price correctly, which is a big problem for spiritual people, because spiritual people tend to believe I shouldn't be making money.

Speaker B: 00:37:01

So therefore, you know, I'll set a price that's giving it away and I'll go broke, and then I won't be able to, you know, I won't have any viability, so there's nothing wrong.

Speaker B: 00:37:12

And this is going back to the very beginning when I said I wanted the spirituality that worked.

Speaker B: 00:37:15

There is nothing wrong with making a good profit.

Speaker B: 00:37:20

There's nothing wrong with being wealthy because we live in an abundant universe.

Speaker B: 00:37:26

And to have abundance, to create abundance is to be spiritual.

Speaker B: 00:37:31

Being poor is not being spiritual because you're a burden on somebody else.

Speaker B: 00:37:36

And going back to your point about the government, the whole problem now is that any time anything happens, people go, well, the government needs to fix it.

Speaker B: 00:37:47

But if the government is going to fix it, then we're giving them our power, and we have to give them their money, and we're giving them more and more responsibility in the GDP, which means that the government is now taking up more and more space within the economy, and there's less and less space for small to medium business.

Speaker B: 00:38:10

So if you think of big government, big business, it's a huge component of the economic system, squeezing out small businesses.

Speaker B: 00:38:20

So you're right.

Speaker B: 00:38:21

There is this, this almost, you know, join us or die type threat for small businesses.

Speaker B: 00:38:31

And as I said before, you also have the negative ego coming in as well.

Speaker B: 00:38:35

So it's a mess, you know, and that's why I agree with you that in the new spiritual society that is definitely coming, I think it will be based very much on, look, I tend to think that when we go through this quantum leap of consciousness that I am talking about, I think that you will find that multinational corporations will be outlawed.

Speaker B: 00:39:01

I don't think they will exist.

Speaker B: 00:39:03

Or if they do exist, they'll be based on a very, very different premise because most of them don't pay taxes.

Speaker B: 00:39:12

Most of them don't abide by any government.

Speaker B: 00:39:14

You know, they're, a lot of them are now bigger than most governments, and they just have become unwieldy and a law unto themselves.

Speaker B: 00:39:24

And of course, now most governments are beholden to big business.

Speaker B: 00:39:29

It's become a revolving door between big business and big government.

Speaker B: 00:39:33

And, you know, the, and certainly the little guy, you know, us, the people, we're irrelevant.

Speaker B: 00:39:41

Know, we're just the cattle fodder, you know, the grist for the mill, so to speak.

Speaker A: 00:39:50

There's so much to unpack there.

Speaker A: 00:39:52

But I think a key thing, and I think this is really crucial because I know I've struggled with it myself, is that because I worked in banking for a long time and was always wondering why I was so uncomfortable working in.

Speaker B: 00:40:07

Well, you would have seen that whole transition that I'm talking about.

Speaker B: 00:40:11

I mean, you think about it, when we were young, the bank manager was a very honorable honored person.

Speaker B: 00:40:19

You know, it was a great.

Speaker B: 00:40:20

You know, if you were a bank manager, particularly in a small village or community, you know, you were almost on the equal as a pastor or a priest or a reverend, because you could help people.

Speaker B: 00:40:33

You could give loans.

Speaker B: 00:40:34

It was a very.

Speaker B: 00:40:35

And also because those managers took their jobs seriously, they wouldn't give money to someone who they knew couldn't pay it back because they knew that they would be tying a noose around their head.

Speaker B: 00:40:50

Now you don't have bank managers anymore.

Speaker B: 00:40:52

I mean, you're pretty lucky if you've even got a personal representative.

Speaker B: 00:41:01

So.

Speaker B: 00:41:02

Yes.

Speaker B: 00:41:02

Sorry to interrupt, but you would have.

Speaker B: 00:41:04

You would have seen that whole transition, basically from banking to financial derivatives, you know.

Speaker A: 00:41:13

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: 00:41:16

But as a.

Speaker A: 00:41:17

As a business, as a spiritual business, that whole relationship with money, as you said, often underpriced.

Speaker A: 00:41:28

But at the same time, there's this element of feeling that money is evil, but then not understanding, because it is kind of a fine thing to really wrap your head around that the universe wants you to expand.

Speaker A: 00:41:43

So the universe does want you to be wealthy and have whatever the universe has for you.

Speaker A: 00:41:52

But there's that paradox.

Speaker A: 00:41:54

And I think it's never been as strong as it is now.

Speaker A: 00:41:57

Once you actually understand how the current system, the monetary system, is founded and that it is actually a complete Ponzi scheme and everything else.

Speaker A: 00:42:10

And so balance as we go through as well.

Speaker B: 00:42:14

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: 00:42:15

I mean, currency, you know, it's really no longer money, is it?

Speaker B: 00:42:20

It's currency.

Speaker B: 00:42:22

And unfortunately, you know, once Nixon took us off the Bretton woods gold system, really, it is now just a fiat currency.

Speaker B: 00:42:32

And so I think it is.

Speaker B: 00:42:35

I think it's very important.

Speaker B: 00:42:36

I'm very passionate about.

Speaker B: 00:42:39

And we.

Speaker B: 00:42:40

We come back to this, okay, spiritual people, or just, you know, because that even has negative connotations.

Speaker B: 00:42:48

But I think if you're aware, the first thing you need to understand is money and currency and the difference.

Speaker B: 00:42:59

And abundance and the difference.

Speaker B: 00:43:01

So those three things are all different because I can have a lot of currency and be completely in debt, and therefore, I'm not very wealthy.

Speaker B: 00:43:10

I can be very wealthy and have a lot of money, but not be abundant because I'm very mean and I can't enjoy it.

Speaker B: 00:43:17

So it's a really important concept, and try to get your head around is that the universe is abundant, but it's not mean, and it doesn't create that abundance at somebody else's peril.

Speaker B: 00:43:32

So the most important thing to understand is this zero sum game where we see, you know, it's the darwinist philosophy, again, going back to my concept of life works and why I'm calling it a philosophy is that darwinism basically says it's survival of the fittest.

Speaker B: 00:43:47

So therefore, if I win, you lose.

Speaker B: 00:43:51

If I, if I've got an extra $2 or two pounds, you've lost two pounds.

Speaker B: 00:43:56

I mean, it's a very zero sum game.

Speaker B: 00:43:58

And therefore, if I'm spiritual, I think, well, I don't want to be wealthy because I must be taking from somebody else rather than realizing that if I am creating, going back to my initial analogy of the shoes or whatever product or service that I am creating, I am creating more.

Speaker B: 00:44:17

I am creating wealth, and I should only be generating money or currency or whatever it is, reward via that productivity, not by merely, you know, derivatives or financial pieces of paper or the price of a stock on a stock exchange, which is all totally artificially inflated bubbles or buying something speculatively, because I know it's going to go up and therefore I'm going to make money.

Speaker B: 00:44:51

That's all irrelevant.

Speaker B: 00:44:52

If you want, if you house, for example, you should buy a house because that's where you want to live and raise your family and because you enjoy it, whether you enjoy that environment or that.

Speaker A: 00:45:05

Unfortunately, at this point, I lost Adrian.

Speaker A: 00:45:10

So what we're going to do is have another interview with him in the coming weeks.

Speaker A: 00:45:17

I hope you enjoyed what we do have, and I hope you look forward to meeting Adrian again soon.

Speaker A: 00:45:24

Thank you listening.

Speaker A: 00:45:26

Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this week's episode.

Speaker A: 00:45:31

If you enjoyed it or think it would be valuable to others, please do share.

Speaker A: 00:45:35

And if you really enjoyed it, please leave me a review.

Speaker A: 00:45:38

It really helps the podcast.

Speaker A: 00:45:40

All of the links are in the show notes and I look forward to seeing you next week on the choosing Happy podcast.

Speaker A: 00:45:55

It.