Over the years, one of the applications I have used in my day to day life is using my awareness of these consciousnesses as an aid in certain types of decision making. More specifically, I use it regularly to make decisions around who I will and who I will not ask for certain types of help and assistance from in my life. I attempt to base such decisions on whether or not I view someone in my life as coming, is their essential philosophy of and approach to life, primarily from either scarcity consciousness or abundance consciousness.
There are many difficulties and potential traps with attempting to determine this. One must be very mindful with this pursuit.
First, it is my firm belief that there are currently considerably more people on the earth who are coming from scarcity consciousness as opposed to abundance consciousness. I believe scarcity as a personal life philosophy--whether it is conscious or unconscious--to be far more prevalent than abundance consciousness. I have done a number of informal, completely unscientific experiments over the years that seem to add at least some credence to those beliefs and imaginings.
I lived and/or worked in San Francisco for over a decade-- from 1999 to 2010. San Francisco, like many large urban centers in The United States, has a very large number of homeless people, street urchins and panhandlers of every stripe. I really did not understand the gravity of this until I visited several European cities and countries for the first time. In all the major cities I visited in Europe including London and Brussels, I saw far fewer homeless people. Likewise, once I started meeting European natives who had visited The United States, I invariably encountered stories of how shocked people were to discover how many homeless people there are in The United States.
I especially remember one cab drive late in 2008, the night of New Years Eve, in the city of Northampton, England. The cab driver immediately recognized my American accent and quickly shifted his conversation to what he believed would be of interest to me as an American. He reported that he and his wife took a holiday to the US every year and to a different major city each trip--yes, a cabbie in a small UK town an hour and a half distance from London who could afford to travel abroad every year with his wife! The year before, they had traveled to Las Vegas and he reported being shocked at how many "beggars" there were in Sin City.
But I digress.
One of the informal social experiments I would do in San Francisco would be to go downtown, sit relatively near a homeless person or panhandler and observe how many people did or didn't assist the person in some way. I did this on numerous occasions. Approximately 1 in 20 to 1 in 25 people would assist the person. I believe the ratio of people currently on the planet coming from a basic scarcity consciousness and life philosophy versus those coming from an abundance consciousness and philosophy to be roughly the same as the numbers I found in that experiment. So the first difficulty in attempting to choose only people who are coming from abundance consciousness when looking for assistance, especially financial assistance, I believe, is simply the numbers available to choose from in each group. The odds will be against you.
Second, I have discovered that things are definitely not what they appear with regard to this issue. Stereotypes cannot be strictly relied upon. For example, I have discovered that people who exude a perceived energy of deep warmth, kindness, compassion, caring and love are often people who are also coming from an equally deep scarcity consciousness. Conversely, I have also discovered that those who may appear to exude a cold, businesslike, unfeeling and self absorbed energy can easily be people who are coming from some of the most sincere and authentic places of abundance consciousness I have encountered. In general, it seems that people who come across as exceedingly "nice" all the time can often be people who may be literally putting on this face of kindness because they have a deep seated desire to be perceived as such. They have a deep need to also be liked. I have learned over the years to be leery of many such people. That being said, it has generally been my experience in my personal dealings with people, that the more financial wealth someone has, the less likely they are to assist me financially. Similarly, I have repeatedly, in this life, been shocked at how often someone who is just a half a step better off than myself is overwhelmingly the one who open- heartedly offers me assistance far more readily than those I know with deep resources.
As I have said in the original writing on this subject, extremely wealthy people can be coming from a place of abundance consciousness and people who are poor can be coming from a place of scarcity consciousness and visa versa. I have also learned that what could in reality simply be a finely tuned business acumen, a sharp business sense combined with a social and/or fiscal conservatism can easily be misconstrued as scarcity consciousness.
It can all be so confusing.
Let me back up a little and explain a little more clearly why I have in fact made the decision to try to only ask for assistance in some of my life's more intense life challenges from people I believe are coming from at least a basic abundance consciousness life philosophy. I have found that when I have asked for assistance from those I now know to be people who are coming from scarcity consciousness, as opposed to those who are not-- the experience was so substantially and incredibly less positive that there was huge cognitive dissonance between the two experiences. I have been working with this energy so long in my life at this point it simply is not worth it and is completely counter intuitive for me to seek assistance from those I know to be coming from scarcity consciousness. I believe its similar to working for years in a sweat shop and then getting the opportunity to run one's own small business with all the support, love and incentives imaginable. In that scenario I believe it would be difficult for such a person to dream of returning to the sweat shop one day once they've experienced the freedom and benefits of the other experience.
What I have also found is that many people who are coming from a scarcity consciousness cannot easily escape the type of anxiety and general sturm und drang that is a strong byproduct of it. If you ask for assistance from such people, even if they assist you, they will bring that anxiety along with their assistance. If you ask them for money, they will be overly concerned with when they are going to get paid back, even if the terms of the agreement were clearly spelled out around that at the onset. It doesn't matter. They are about scarcity not abundance. If you ask them to assist with some project, they will consistently bring an energy of high anxiety around their time, concern about the duration of the project and perceived expectations around it all, etc. If you have an emergency and need to go to the hospital, for example, they eventually almost always find a way to make the whole exercise about them--how much time they had to spend, how their life was upended to help you, all the things they had to put on hold in order to help you, etc. If they don't share these things with you directly--and many at least have the common courtesy not to--they will certainly share it with people you know in common and it will eventually get back to you. The examples could go on and on.
I don't know if anyone reading this has any desire to like me, ask for assistance only from people you perceive to at least be attempting to be coming from a space of abundance consciousness. If you do desire to do such a thing, with all the difficulties I've outlined in accurately assessing such a person, you may wonder if its even possible to recognize these people in your life. There can be a very steep learning curve here, mainly because many of us are trained to believe that nice and kind also equals generosity and abundance consciousness. And as I've said, that's often not the case. I have learned to primarily go with my gut, instinct and intuition on this one. Still, I have some pointers. Here is what I have learned:
1. People who are coming from abundance consciousness tend to find some way to make themselves available to us even if it is not in the ways we requested. People who are coming from scarcity consciousness will often give us excuses or if they do assist us they will make it a point to inform us of all the other people they need to also help or all the other things they also need to do.
2. People who are coming from abundance consciousness may not always be the first to respond to any "cry for help" we've sent out. When they do respond however, it is usually in a concrete and helpful way. People who are coming from scarcity consciousness will often be the actual first people to respond to us, but not in a truly helpful way. They will more likely be quite anxious to tell us why they cannot assist us though usually in a superficially "nice" way.
3. People who are coming from abundance consciousness are generally people of action. If we have a crisis, they are the people who will most likely make a list of all the things we need to do, all the people we need to call and who is the best person/people to address each item on the list.
4. People who are coming from abundance consciousness do not make our crises about their ability to ferret out the real underlining issues, which are almost always presented as our inadequacies, our incompetence, our poor money management (unless that's appropriate and still it won't usually come across as their primary response to us about the whole thing), our flaws or our "incessant" dependence on others for assistance, etc.
5. People who are coming from scarcity consciousness will tell us very quickly why they can't help us with no other advice. People coming from abundance consciousness will process with us how they might be able to help us or how someone else might.
6. People coming from scarcity consciousness will remind us how they have helped us in the past and how that didn't really work out for them so well in their view (or they won't do this but they will tell this to other people in the form of complaints/gossip about us).
7. People coming from abundance say the word "yes" alot.
8. People coming from scarcity say "yes, but" alot.
9. Abundance consciousness people tend to have alot of contacts and tend to be very generous with those contacts.
10. Abundance consciousness people are constantly praying for us, sending healing energy our way and performing other rituals for our benefit either with or without our knowledge.
We are all learning and growing at our own perfect pace.
May All Beings Be Free.
The other installments in this series:
1. Questions for Sage: Scarcity and Abundance Consciousness
2. Scarcity and Abundance Consciousness (con't)
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