While listening to the Shaltazar message It Just Doesn’t Matter, it occurred to me the great cosmic purpose behind COVID-19 and the global interruption to all that we know and have grown accustomed to as “normality” might well be by design as the cosmos works to realign our priorities.

We have become a planet beholden to economics where finances, money, profit, and greed are the driving force behind all we do.  We are conditioned to slog along like “happy idiots” (to quote Jackson Browne) on a merry-go-round of financial bondage, sentenced to spend our precious short time here trapped in a work/sleep/repeat cycle day-after-day, year-after-year, lifetime-after-lifetime.

This unconscious, drone-like mentality makes us the perfect targets for the incessant bombardment via ubiquitous media outlets by industries who wish to convince us they’re looking out for our best interests by making products we need to improve our lives.  In truth, the fundamental mission of any publicly held corporation is not the wellbeing of its customers, but its charter to grow shareholder wealth by increasing profits.

Working to earn a living has become the life’s purpose of much of the civilized world.  What began as a means to survive has mutated into something far more sinister.  We continue to breed generations of consumers possessed of an insatiable appetite for more – more money, more possessions, more food, more toilet paper.  We can’t get enough stuff in the form of the material factors which surround us and fill our homes and lives.  Not to sound Marxist, but we continue to hoard wealth even when we have all we need and sometimes more than we could possibly spend or use in this lifetime.  What started as survival instinct has degenerated into an embarrassment of superabundance.

I doubt this is what Source intended for humanity.  I’m reminded of the Native American cultures whose purpose was simply to live.  There was no commerce, no currency.  They supported each other as a community.  They worked together gathering… hunting… sowing… reaping.  Children were raised by the village, not solely by the child’s parents. They practiced cooperation instead of competition.  They believed in the circle of giving whereby anything given would be returned tenfold.  If your neighbor needed a horse, you would gladly offer him yours, even if it was the only one you had, knowing this generosity would be repaid in kind when you needed something.

There’s a lot of talk lately about life getting back to “normal.”  In this time of great spiritual awakening, I’m left to question whether that’s what we really want or need.  Is the purpose behind all this drastic and dramatic change to simply step backward into our old ways of materialism and consumption, or to move forward into a new paradigm of production, trust, and cooperation?

Perhaps it takes a pandemic to shake us from our slumber, disengage the autopilot, and shine the light of awareness on who we truly are and whether we’ve been living up to our full Divine potential.  One thing isolation has taught my family is everything which seemed so important, so crucial to our happiness, really isn’t.  We’ve come to realize we can get by on much less.  We’ve learned that the health of the economy isn’t the end-all, be-all of life on Earth.  Hopefully, we understand more profoundly that what truly matters is us – each other.  The pandemic isn’t a national problem, it’s a human problem.  By joining together as a community, as one world under God, we can embrace our cosmic imperative to be living instruments of Universal will and not mere slaves to commerce.

Jesus said to his apostles, “Are your ideals sufficiently high to insure your eternal salvation while your ideas are so practical as to render you a useful citizen to function on earth in association with your mortal fellows? In the spirit, your citizenship is in heaven; in the flesh, you are still citizens of the earth kingdoms. Render to the Caesars the things which are material and to God those which are spiritual.”

So yes – we must live within the constructs of modern society.  We must provide something of value to the world in exchange for having our daily needs met.  But it appears we are being challenged now to reconcile those two elements.  God made a contract with Abraham that in exchange for the faith and devotion of mankind, God would ensure our survival while we tarry here in human form.  Somewhere along the long road of human evolution, we forgot God’s promise and took it upon ourselves to place our trust in money and life’s material trappings instead of the Divine.

It seems we are being called to step forward and lay claim to our greatness as sons and daughters of the Infinite, and to no longer blindly serve as mere pawns in a self-serving economic paradigm which keeps us shackled to the spokes of the worldwide economic millstone.  There is a movement afoot to return to Spirit and cast aside that which is purely material. We are being pushed to restore our heart balance and to move through life with greater awareness, deeper faith, and a stronger connection to Source.

You who are reading this are members of a vanguard force of light workers tasked with bringing this understanding into the world and shifting the paradigm.  It’s up to us to bring new energy and awareness to what society could be, should be.  It’s up to us to be the change we want to see in the world.

As Shaltazar suggests, all that we see – the reality which until now we’ve considered so vitally important – just doesn’t matter.  What does matter?  In a word, Love.  It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Mark Layne

I’m gonna be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender
Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
To the heart and the soul of the spender
And believe in whatever may lie
In those things that money can buy
where true love could have been a contender
Are you there?
Say a prayer for the Pretender.
Who started out so young and strong
Only to surrender.

— Jackson Browne

Listen to a conversation between Jeffrey and Mark discussing the It Just Doesn’t Matter message from Shaltazar on Insight Timer

Check out the It Just Doesn’t Matter message