As the current financial crisis or, as written Chinese allows, opportunity unfolds it deepens in complexity and broadens in scope. The layers of it lay bare to excavation as levels of snow lay open to observation in a snow pit, a stratified story of accumulated precipitation. Our story shows stratifications of greed (don´t jump to conclusions – read on).

First speculation, then subprime (junk) mortgages, then the credit collapse, then the financial implosion (happening big time now), and then the global impact which is generating more strata that we will be able to study in the near future. In the more distant future, the entire picture will change, but the nature of that change is being determined now and not in places that you might imagine, such as the Fed, Treasury, what is left of the financial sector, or central bank boardrooms. It is being determined in the intimacy of your own experience, clothed in the unique circumstances of your own life.

Every physical dysfunction has correlates depicted in terms of traumas, blood tests, MRIs, etc. Physicians assign these correlates the elevated title of “cause” but they are not ultimate causes. They consistently accompany symptoms and therefore appear as causal when perception is limited to the five senses. Large portions of the human population, now estimated to be six billion, are experiencing expanded perception, perception that allows them access to data the five senses cannot provide, and they are experimenting with it. CEOs of large and successful companies have always been known to be intuitive (although current events call that into question). Now hundreds of millions of individuals are realizing in their own ways and times that their lives are more than they thought, that they are more than minds and bodies, more than muscle and tissue, and their experiences are meaningful in significant and important ways.

These individuals no longer depend upon others to determine for them what is valuable and what is not, what is worth their attention and what is not. Often their new perceptions conflict with old values and perceptions – in other words, with fear. In that case neither priest, psychologist, parent, nor peer can ease their discomfort, the essential discomfort of needing to choose – and be responsible for the choice – between fear and love, competition and cooperation, discord and harmony, hoarding and sharing, and reverence for Life and exploitation of life. Our species is becoming “multisensory” (more sensory systems than one), aware of its creative capacity, of its place in a larger fabric of Life, and of its responsibility for what it creates. The choices between love and fear are becoming clearer. Competition, discord, hoarding, and exploitation are choices of fear. Cooperation, harmony, sharing, and reverence for Life are choices of love.

This brings us back to the excavation of our current financial circumstance. Each strata (speculation, junk mortgages, credit collapse, etc) is a construction of greed that rests upon previous constructions. But what is greed? It is a face of fear. Beneath greed lays the pain of powerlessness, the terror of not having, accumulating, or being enough, ever. (If “pain of powerlessness” sounds poetic or flakey to you, ask anyone in the derivative business if it is real or not.) Actually, you can ask yourself. Have you ever experienced the unraveling of a relationship that you thought you could not live without, or a business fail (oops, unnecessary question), or feared losing your home (a terribly painful question), or outliving your assets? Is that painful or not? If you are not aware of how painful it is, you have addicted yourself to over–eating, over–working, drugs, sex, alcohol, gambling, or other temporary anesthetics.

The collapse of the uncollapsable, ruin of the unruinable, and destruction of the indestructible in the financial sector and beyond (way beyond) is symbolic. An old order (not just economic) is becoming dysfunctional. It may be patched together enough (for example, “creative capitalism”) to enable it to function in decline, with periodic lapses, until it is finally replaced but the symbols are undeniable. Many of the possible futures that lie beyond the old order are inviting, although some are terrifying. Which will you choose in the intimacy of your own experience? You are not as powerless as you think.