Have you Ever been Swept Off Your Feet? - Meconomics

This blogpost is a continuation to:
Reality in a Bubble – Meconomics
Inflating Reality Much? – Meconomics
Do You Know the Stakes of the Bets you Place? – Meconomics







In the previous blog we started looking at the different stages we move through when we inflate things in our reality:

1.    the start/onset,
2.    the process of inflation,
3.    the popping of the bubble.

We ended off our discussion of the start/onset of the inflation bubble with the following:

“You have to remember, we’re slowing things down here – in those moments, it all happens in a blink of an eye. You ask your partner about the toothpaste – he says he forgot – and next thing you’re already saying ‘Gee, you’re such an ass!!’. Everything that we looked at here, happens in that tiny fraction of a moment between hearing he forgot the toothpaste and speaking to him in response. Because it all moves so fast, we often don’t realize how it is in those fractions of moments that we’re actually busy creating/starting an inflation bubble. Yet, it’s in those fractions of moments that the first point of responsibility lies: you interpreted, you chose, you made a bet – and went forward with it.

What do I mean with ‘and went forward with it’. Once you’ve interpreted your partner’s forgetfulness as meaning that ‘he’s an ass’ – then that is how you see him, how you will speak to him, how you will approach him. In other words – you’re actually no longer speaking to your partner as the person standing in front of you, you’re speaking to your own interpretation of who you perceive your partner to be. This is the moment where you’re creating a shift/rift in your reality – from remaining grounded in the physical reality – to entering a ‘bubble’.”

So, let’s move on to the next stage:

2. The Process of Inflation

The process of inflation is that section of the event where things just escalate more and more and kind of start getting out of hand. The start/onset was merely, you acting on the interpretation of what a person did. In the example we used, the start/onset was exemplified by the saying of the words ‘Gee, you’re such an ass’.

Now – any person can see that these words (Gee, you’re such an ass) are not ‘neutral words’, they are charged words. Words are charged when we speak them with a particular energy. We charge our words positively when we speak words with for instance love or hope, (eg: I know you can do this, honey!) and we charge words negatively when we speak words with for instance anger, annoyance or frustration (eg: how many times must I tell you this!).

These energetic charges are key to understanding the process of inflation, because generally speaking, something interesting happens when we speak words that are energetically charged. You can see it for yourself by looking at any memories where a person spoke to you and their words were energetically charged: how did you feel? You might not be able to name the exact experience you had, but you definitely felt ‘something’. That ‘something’ is your energetic reaction to another’s words.

So – when we speak within energy and our words are charged – the person we are speaking to is more than likely going to now have their own energetic reaction to that. If they then speak in that moment while they are having this energy moving inside themselves, their words will also be energetically charged. What happens then? Well now, we are going to react again upon hearing these energetically charged words. Are you starting to see how this works? You get a back-and-forth argument as every time a person speaks, the other reacts and ‘wants to say something back’. As this back-and-forth argument continues, what happens inside each person? Each one’s energy levels are increasing and more and more the energetic experience becomes the driving force in each one’s words and actions. In other words – the argument gets more and more emotional and less and less rational.

Dependent on whether the initial charge of the words were positive or negative, you will start creating a bubble between you and the person you’re speaking with that is either filled with positive energy or with negative energy.

When the initial charge of the words spoken was negative, then the other person is likely to respond with a negative energy/experience and their words will also be negatively charged. That is the case in the example we’re working with. The initial words spoken (let’s say by person A) were “Gee, you’re such an ass”, which are words that are negatively charged. The other person (call it person B) will react negatively in return, and their words will also be negatively charged. The negative energy that person A is receiving from person B is now intensifying and supporting person A’s original negative experience, and so it gets bigger. Each time person A or person B speaks with negative energy, they are in essence ‘feeding’ the negative energy within the other. So, both are now being swept up in a cycle of negativity that builds and get bigger. That is the bubble that is being inflated. Inflated with what? With negative energy.

The same dynamic can take place with positive energy. If a person speaks while experiencing positive energy like excitement, their words will be positively charged and the person they are speaking to will probably experience a positive experience in return (this is what is referred to in sayings like ‘her enthusiasm is rubbing off on me’). In the same way, this can lead to a back-and-forth conversation where the positive energy just builds and builds more and more. Have you ever heard teenage girls screeching and shouting with high-pitched voices in absolute excitement – well, this is how they ‘get to’ that state. The only difference is that the bubble they created was inflated with positive energy.

In both cases – whether the bubble was inflated with positive or negative energy – the participants in the bubble are being swept away further and further away from actual physical reality and start to see everything either ‘extremely negatively’ or ‘extremely positively’ – neither experience is grounded in reality – because the physical is neither positive or negative – it just is what it is.

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Do You Know the Stakes of the Bets you Place? - Meconomics

This blogpost is a continuation to:

Reality in a Bubble – Meconomics
Inflating Reality Much? – Meconomics

Read the previous posts for context.




I ended off my previous post with the following:

“When we start reacting inside ourselves (in the experiential reality/dimension) to what we hear/see in our physical reality, we change the way we perceive reality. If your partner forgot to buy toothpaste, then in physical reality, this means: your partner forgot to buy toothpaste. (Okay, that may sound silly, but it’s actually so silly that most of us don’t recognize how complicated we make our lives.) In your experiential reality, if your partner forgot to buy toothpaste, it can mean: “My partner doesn’t care about me”; “My partner is unreliable”; “I have to think of everything in this relationship”, “I do so much for him/her and he/she can’t even do this one little thing for me”.

So – we have this nasty habit of inflating something that happens in our physical reality through interpreting it and reacting to it in our experiential reality – making it seem bigger than it actually is. I’m sure you can relate to such moments, they occur so often that we have come to accept them as ‘normal’ – but let’s continue looking at them a bit further so we can really grasp and understand what it is we’re doing in such moments and how it creates a direct line of responsibility from ourselves to the phenomenon of speculative bubbles and the consequences they create in people’s lives.”

We can identify three stages when it comes to inflating things in our reality:
1.    the start/onset,
2.    the process of inflation,
3.    the popping of the bubble.

Let’s look at each of these stages in turn so we can really go into the nitty-gritty of how this works, what we participate in, how we actually create these bubbles. When it comes to meconomics – the better we understand ourselves, how these things work in our own personal lives on a small scale, the more empowered we are to understand and change how the same is manifested on a large scale in the economy.


1.    The Start/Onset of Inflation Bubbles in our Lives

We’ve looked at how we’re working with two realities or dimensions of reality – the physical reality and the experiential reality. We saw how, when something happens in our physical reality, that we pick up with our physical senses, we often INTERPRET these events to have a particular ‘meaning’. So – you’ve got your physical reality, you’ve got your physical senses like hearing, touch, smell, etc with which you take in information of what happens around you – but then – you also have an inner experiential reality through which the information is ‘filtered’ and where you add additional meaning and interpretations to what happens in your physical reality.

So, if we take the fictional example of your partner forgetting to buy toothpaste – what you pick up through your physical senses is just that: your partner forgot to buy toothpaste. But now – that information gets filtered through your inner experiential reality, which can be for instance all the memories of when he forgot to do something, or all the memories where you went out of your way to do something for him when he asked you to – and then together with that – all the experiences, emotions, feelings you’ve had in those previous memories. So – even though the information that is ‘coming in’ from your environment is: “your partner forgot to buy toothpaste” – what you end up experiencing and perceiving can be “he’s such an ass”.

(Little side-note: I’m here using the viewpoint of a female and the partner who forgot to buy the toothpaste as being a male to cut down on having to write him/her – but obviously, you can switch the roles and genders around, it goes both ways. So, if you’re a guy reading this, then just imagine the partner being a woman who forgot to buy toothpaste and the eventual experience being “she’s such a bitch”.)

What is interesting about this, is that it is actually a form of speculating. What is speculating? It is to “form a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence.” In this example, the conclusion or theory is that ‘your partner is an ass’ and that’s why he forgot to buy tooth paste. You don’t have any firm evidence, because you’re just using your own memories and experiences as a reference and assuming that they provide you with solid proof, but they don’t really. In terms of what happened ‘right now’, in that ‘that’ moment – all you’ve got is that your partner forgot to buy toothpaste, everything else that you think about it or feel about it, is based on speculation.

When it comes to speculating in the financial market, the same happens – you’re looking at different indicators and factors, what direction things seem to be moving in – from that you make assumptions about what will happen in the future and from there, you make your investment decisions. You have no certainty beforehand, you’re only interpreting data and trying to derive ‘meaning’ from it and then trying to project this meaning in the future to see where you would best invest. Speculation in the financial market is an investment with the hope of gain, but with a risk of loss – wherein your decision-making is based on assumptions/conjectures/guesses. In other words: you’re placing a bet, you’re gambling.

If we bring this back to our personal lives where we interpret what happens in our physical reality by filtering it through our inner experiential reality, we’re actually placing a bet as well. It is a choice, for instance, to believe your perception and interpretation that ‘your partner is an ass’ to be true – you’re betting on it being true. And what are you placing in the balance? The future of your relationship.

You have to remember, we’re slowing things down here – in those moments, it all happens in a blink of an eye. You ask your partner about the toothpaste – he says he forgot – and next thing you’re already saying ‘Gee, you’re such an ass!!’. Everything that we looked at here, happens in that tiny fraction of a moment between hearing he forgot the toothpaste and speaking to him in response. Because it all moves so fast, we often don’t realize how it is in those fractions of moments that we’re actually busy creating/starting an inflation bubble. Yet, it’s in those fractions of moments that the first point of responsibility lies: you interpreted, you chose, you made a bet – and went forward with it.

What do I mean with ‘and went forward with it’. Once you’ve interpreted your partner’s forgetfulness as meaning that ‘he’s an ass’ – then that is how you see him, how you will speak to him, how you will approach him. In other words – you’re actually no longer speaking to your partner as the person standing in front of you, you’re speaking to your own interpretation of who you perceive your partner to be. This is the moment where you’re creating a shift/rift in your reality – from remaining grounded in the physical reality – to entering a ‘bubble’.

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Inflating Reality Much? - Meconomics

This post is a continuation to:

Reality in a Bubble – Meconomics

In my previous post we discussed speculative bubbles in the economy, where we saw how prices of assets increase through a process of speculation over and above the ‘real prices’ (which would reflect their actual value). We say the prices are ‘inflated’ (just like how you inflate a balloon or bubble) – and we looked at some of the major damage that those speculative bubbles can create, especially after they pop, where we looked at the example of the Greek economy.

How are Speculative Bubbles in the economy a reflection of bubbles we create in our personal lives?

Maybe let’s start with the following question: have you ever had an argument with a friend, family member or partner where the initial point of disagreement or the initial issue is blown entirely out of proportion? A conversation with your partner can start, for instance, with ‘did you remember to buy us toothpaste?’ and end up in a full-blown fight with shouting and tears. And then when you calm down, you realize you just broke up with your partner – you can’t remember how the fight started but suddenly your life looks very different. How does that happen? How do we do that?

We do it through a process of inflation – have a look, I twice used some form of the word ‘blowing’ in the above paragraph: blowing something out of proportion and full-blown fight – we blow bubbles and then they pop. Why is it inflation? Because there is no way someone is going to break up with their partner over forgetting to buy toothpaste – obviously something happened between the asking of that question and breaking up…

What we’re looking at is two ‘dimensions’ – you have the first dimension which is the ‘physical reality’, the actual events that take place or the reality we all have in common, and you have the ‘experiential reality’, which is how you interpret things that happen in your reality, how you become upset or sad over something, everything that you experience, that ‘takes place’ on an energetic level inside your own mind and body. I put the words ‘takes place’ in those little quotation marks, because the very nature of everything that happens in your ‘experiential reality’ is that it doesn’t really take up space – it’s not physical, you can’t touch it. We generate those experiences inside ourselves in moments, but they are not constant or stable.

When we start reacting inside ourselves (in the experiential reality/dimension) to what we hear/see in our physical reality, we change the way we perceive reality. If your partner forgot to buy toothpaste, then in physical reality, this means: your partner forgot to buy toothpaste. (Okay, that may sound silly, but it’s actually so silly that most of us don’t recognize how complicated we make our lives.) In your experiential reality, if your partner forgot to buy toothpaste, it can mean: “My partner doesn’t care about me”; “My partner is unreliable”; “I have to think of everything in this relationship”, “I do so much for him/her and he/she can’t even do this one little thing for me”.

So – we have this nasty habit of inflating something that happens in our physical reality through interpreting it and reacting to it in our experiential reality – making it seem bigger than it actually is. I’m sure you can relate to such moments, they occur so often that we have come to accept them as ‘normal’ – but let’s continue looking at them a bit further so we can really grasp and understand what it is we’re doing in such moments and how it creates a direct line of responsibility from ourselves to the phenomenon of speculative bubbles and the consequences they create in people’s lives.

Read More