Any war, market crash, or period of stress eventually ends. Jobs, inflation, interest rates, unemployment, civil unrest, and the whole economic system; when everything is stacked against you, at some point you realize that to deal with anxiety, you have to start looking scary things in the eye. So that’s the first thing. In these apocalyptic times, there is no Julie Andrews’ Switzerland, no USA, no safe haven, no underground bunker that is going to practically help you. Instead, you have to learn to watch, one by one, as the Von Trapp family singers get fewer. You have to chart a course by turning off the collective music. You can only do that by learning new ways of thinking and engaging enough to start learning not just economics, but a new social life by dynamizing your life perspective.

We are all economically active. Active throughout our lives. In a way we have to take back thinking authority from universities, media, think tanks and global institutions: firstly in the soul: I like to think these newsletters could become like intel for the little guys, a collective group of Davids against Goliath, where what we share here can grow into a force that changes perspectives.

1 Samuel (33-37) David’s training as a shepherd prepared him.

And Saul said to David, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are a youth, and he is a man of war from his youth.” But David said to Saul, “Your servant used to keep his father’s sheep, and when a lion or a bear came and took a lamb out of the flock, I went out after it and struck it, and delivered the lamb from its mouth; and when it arose against me, I caught it by its beard, and struck and killed it.”

What is “generosity,” and in relation to money in its deepest principle?

It is giving away as the sharing of your soul and spirit. The new life we enable by providing something for another that otherwise wouldn’t have been there. Broadly, we have called this “endowment.” In German, “Stiftung.” I will define it again here for us: “enabling new life for others through giving away money.”

The Fed has been hiding “money printing” behind Quantitative Easing for years now, back to 2008. Back then, we were aghast at QE 1, 2, 3. They are controlling the narrative more adroitly now: regardless of whether the Fed calls it “organic balance-sheet growth” or “RMPs”, or intervention to maintain stability, any systematic buying that expands the central bank’s balance sheet operates as a pseudo form of QE by pumping fresh liquidity back into the financial system.

Think of the roaring 20s parallel. It’s not an explicit re-run of 100 years ago. It’s more like a global expansion of those conditions, Germany to Europe, Israel and the USA as Britain and America; but now Asia, Africa, South America thrown into the mix that can only utterly skew parallels to the 20s Great Depression and the world wars.

So, we have to keep going and keep swimming with the facts as they arise.

During a recent cabinet meeting at Camp David, a press photograph caught a glimpse over the shoulder of U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Underlined on his notepad was a literal “To Do” list that read: “Buy Japanese Yen (JPY) $5-10 bil.” This then sends the markets into a frenzy. Now, just like in 2008, you can find dozens of macroeconomic specialists on YouTube explaining how and why the stock market is going to crash and how gold and silver will multiply their values by 10 or more.

⚠️ 1. The Trap of Never Ending Accumulation

In 2026: Gold has soared to historic highs around $4,587 per ounce (a massive 37%+ jump over the past year). Similarly, Silver has crossed the threshold to $69.61 per ounce, up over 82% from its previous cycle.

Vague confusion sets in like a fog.

Then the questions shift to real physical Gold and Silver, or to paper-based ETFs and Mining Stocks. Or Bitcoin, AI, and Robotics. But if this was you then over the 16-year period leading up to May 2026, your gold rose by approximately 278% while silver rose by approximately 318% in nominal U.S. dollar terms, and if you were smart enough to have cashed in this year  – what for?

A former acquaintance of mine, over the time I knew him, has been collecting silver and gold bars; leveraging them with plans for his future reich. He wasn’t 10% into gold as is sensible in an investment portfolio. He was 100% in. At the same time, he ran seminars where he would simply play YouTube videos and called it analysis.

Will he catch the market right and cash his winnings in?

Will he miss-time the next crash and correction and regret it for 20 years, anxiously watching the price. And what then: property, stocks, move to Argentina?

But none of this is the point. My argument here is for something very different. That the real driver of value in all this psychology is that you often treat your money, your life, and yourself as if you were dead. This is what makes a Goliath in the first place.

📈 2. Realities of the Current Market (And the Hoarding Illusion)

However many specialists advise the contrary, most people buy with the crowd at the top of the market and sell at the bottom, even when they know emotion should not overwhelm thinking. Swapping paper currency for gold bars or Bitcoin feels like escaping the matrix, but history shows that governments can change the rules. Gold confiscation. Or resetting it with a new basket of currencies as suggested before 2008 – at the last crisis – with SDRs (Special Drawing Rights).

“The world is going through the worst economic crisis in peacetime since the Great Depression. In around 150 countries, income per capita this year will be lower than in 2019. Many countries are less able to pay for vaccines or invest in their recovery – and are more indebted.

This is where a new SDR allocation comes in. It supplements countries’ reserves, using the collective strength of the Fund’s membership to make all 191 member countries a little stronger. It would provide liquidity support to many developing and low-income countries that are struggling, allowing them to pay for healthcare and support vulnerable people. All countries will benefit from a quick eradication of the virus. It is important to make sure they all have the financial resources to do that. IMF 7 Things You Need to Know About SDR Allocations. “

If we read carefully, this shows us something we all know intuitively well. Financial crises further agendas. Climate, Agenda 2020, 40. Carbon taxes. Vaccines and the Third World as pillars to keep such plans on track.

So, again, let’s learn to be cute: From modern emergency banking laws, to a total currency reset, if political turmoil hits or the digital grid fractures, your hidden gold or private crypto keys won’t easily buy you safety, health, or a plane ticket.

But there’s always the same question that triggers. What comes after the market crash and potential currency reset?

I once had a client who was Swiss pension fund executive preparing for his annual speech. He outlined something everyone in the pension industry kind of knew: pension funds were unsustainable. It’s like they’d all agreed to rearrange the chairs on the Titanic.

We are in fact surrounded by installed spokespeople demanding you save every penny for a far-off future. Advanced AI systems like Jump, FP Alpha, and Holistiplan are now standard tools firms use to scan tax records, and predict behavioral patterns (the feed tracks your every thinking whim).

These two quandaries about motivation and future orientation set up nicely; our first step through the veil: the need to undertake soul accounting.

Where have you become miserly not of money but of your very own soul? List the instances. Do an inventory. What joys do you shut down? What careful strategic position do you maintain to avoid meeting and learning new things? Look at yourself from outside with an uncompromising eye. What have you neglected to actually do, and more importantly, who have you neglected to be? When did you stop reaching out and being part of your own life as much as others’ lives, and where you have condemned others, what do you see of yourself mirrored in them? Where do you need to wake up to this emotional waste?

Now in your inventory of your soul, you’ll learn to see the two David and Goliath yous. The Good you – not before or after the crash or survival or battle you are protecting yourself from – but you free. And every time you buy the clothes, book the holidays, make the new connections you put off or disregard, you will learn to see the you and the others caring for their Goliaths.

These strikes at consciousness we have to do to ourselves: and they are about getting you out of your passive soul cage. We could even say there is a resentful version of you these global agendas would have you be.

⏱️ 3. Having a Spending rather than A Savings Plan

My acquaintance at £50,000 per ounce gold would say, “Hey, but I’m already rich, and will quite soon be getting even richer!” And sometimes I imagine a fantasy conversation with him at 92, where I ask him: “How much do you still need?” … Saving for the next incarnation? Where your feeling of safety is turned inside out, and you have to experience its opposite.

… But I guess at 92, he would still blankly say … time left for what?

As always, these letters are like a call, they start as a small seed, but we are learning to see the grain at the end of the deeds we do and don’t do.

Hebrews 7:7 And beyond all contradiction, the lesser is blessed by the greater.

Richard Cooper

What is it we see here? A sexual motive, a creative one, an elemental one? The Greeks and Romans did not see as we do. The coin is a Thracian Thasos silver stater, 510-490 BC. It depicts a naked satyr with a nymph. 20mm, 8.50g. Someone forged it. Not with a factory machine; not with tech and software. But with their hands, sweat, blood, fire, hammer, and tongs. The gaze is an I meeting another native I. The image still has power; and unlike our culture, its artist still knows how to make image and form organically powerful.

Where the Greeks had swords, conquests, armor, helms with crests, and communication with their gods, we have clicks, feeds, phones, images, documentaries, and shows. Do we realize how the natural world speaks, acts, and lives through us? What happens when we switch off, or when the sun breaks through the leaves, and the different greens entrance us; or when the smell of rain prompts us to prayer; or in crisis, when we feel that life, God, no longer adequately accounts for him or herself? Do we then still have the means to think, without falling into slumber? What’s left for the vital decisions of life: to act this way or not that? In countless ways, we pay for a vast array of new technologies and sciences. We have to learn by trial and error. We have to strike the iron of matter with concepts:

“Thinking is an element of such a completely dynamic nature that it is completely absurd to think that it needs any other activity to bring it into flux, or that it cannot itself set things in motion.” (…) “In thinking we have given to us that element which welds our separate individuality into one whole with the cosmos. Insofar as we feel and perceive (and also experience), we are separate individuals; insofar as we think, we are the all-one being that penetrates all.” Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (RS explicitly asked that “Freedom” in English translation be changed to “Spiritual Activity”, GA 4, 3. Thinking in the Service of Knowledge

There are people who still maintain a human level in their interactions and behave on social media as they would in life. No matter what they post, whichever photo, or whatever they appear to do, you feel you know them, because you have sufficient strength of I not to be overwhelmed by the digital images and the being of the technology we know is simply like a window. Now there is also a whole spectrum of experience that comes through social media that shows the opposite inclination, where the context of social media is not held upright enough with the I, and the ego instead twists it. Ask yourself this, which happens so often on social media that we overlook it: How would it be if I were to meet a person in real life, in a park for example, and that person would immediately call you a name and run away and hide behind a tree?

Trolls don’t like bridges. In social media, the action of a “troll”; if we transpose it back into reality, gives us the impression that this is the behavior of a human child. A naughty boy. Or a wayward girl. But the term troll cleverly reminds us of elemental beings. Social media simply creates a new marketplace for valuing, devaluing, and pricing each other, much like bourgeois life used to assess the ladies and gentlemen promenading – but now with an added spiritual element. Or, consider this: when social media becomes spamming and unsolicited advances, we might picture a member of a gang of boys in a park, for example, seeking to intimidate people. Boys hanging around, seeking a cheap thrill from being rude or threatening passers-by. Or if it is an individual targeting us, are they actually wanting to speak to other human beings, but shy to engage in conversation, like emotionally eight years old, hiding behind their mother or father’s legs? 

We know these impressions from real life. These are just imaginative pictures of what many adults do on social media. Reality is slowly splitting, fragmenting; borders and thresholds are becoming porous; and this has been going on for more than a while.

When this place we write and display and perform upon is our marketplace to trade, to present ideas, and to awaken interest, does it unduly surprise us to call these economic considerations? 

In relation to money and economics, John Maynard Keynes’ brings our attention to the illusory aspect of any assertion that economics be a strict or disciplined science. Without understanding that economics is inextricably linked to social psychology and its esoteric drivers, we overlook what lies somewhat unconsciously in the soul, like a huge sea (which is why the Greek Poseidon, we can now intuit as a former reflection on Ahriman, shapeshifting and powerful). Keynes called the aspects of ourselves we need to learn to recognize in relation to economics our gut feelings or “animal spirits”, our motivations or drives that manifest socially. With words and gestures, written or symbolic, we signal where we are at in terms of a certain kind of energy; a relation to a wider economic sea of unconsciousness. 

“This means, unfortunately, not only that slumps and depressions are exaggerated in degree, but that economic prosperity is excessively dependent on a political and social atmosphere which is congenial to the average business man. (…) In estimating the prospects of investment, we must have regard, therefore, to the nerves and hysteria and even the digestions and reactions to the weather of those upon whose spontaneous activity it largely depends. (…) We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.” John Maynard Keynes (2012) [1936], The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Snowball Publishing, p.161-3.

Rudolf Steiner spoke positively about economist John Maynard Keynes in 1920, specifically praising Keynes’s book The Economic Consequences of the Peace for its realistic critique of the Treaty of Versailles; which engineered the consequence that a second world war would arise out of the first. Not least, one senses between them, one in Germany one in Great Britain, a shared appreciation of the soul and its implications for the root of historical change in economics. The “sentiment,” Keynes speaks of, is also the shared sentiment that most people in public life of the time were not thinking of much at all: besides business as usual, and they were servants of materialism, or as Steiner famously stated, people of responsibility unable to exercise any responsible steering of humanity because they “sleepwalked” through world historical events. 

Perhaps the only two of their time to publicly and professionally attempt to draw the necessary media attention to a relation to the consequences of decadent relations to money?

Animal Spirits and Elemental Instincts

Most of the time, we use the name Ahriman, and we do so by habit. Ahriman and Angra Mainyu are the exact same figure. Angra Mainyu is the original name in the ancient Avestan language, while Ahriman is the later form of that same name in Middle Persian (Pahlavi). But taste the letters and read their meaning, and you will discover something. In the earliest Zoroastrian scriptures, like the Avesta, Angra Mainyu means destructive or evil mind. The name evolves into Ahriman through its use and pronunciation over time.

Up until a certain moment in life, patterns are hidden. Ways are blocked. Situations feel stagnant. There’s a park near me here that is constantly in construction. There’s a big pond, and it’s full of turtles. You aren’t allowed to swim in this pond. It’s probably dangerous, not only due to the quality of the water, but also because of all the trash and rusty old dangerous things dumped in it. Imagine going in; you might cut your foot on an old beer bottle discarded on some wild night. This is a picture for Scorpio in Venus, and the retrograde cycle drags up buried ghosts to be put to rest. But there’s another image here. The turtles. They swim about kind of oblivious to the darkness, the dirtiness; quite happily semi-floating around. The danger is that in life we simply go round in circles, relatively comfortable in old ponds.

However used to them we are, surprises of destiny and karma come to shake us out of our shells. Through decades, cycles of time, years and life phases, we often have no idea what was going on karmically until we get new keys of consciousness, and for those to be given, we have to wait on two things, one passive, one active; divine timing is an outer restraint, but inner reflection is always present to the degree we engage with it. For the spiritual student, it’s just not like normal life: we are crisis-prone.

It is a big step to realize that every personal life crisis is not at all cause for dismay, but a chance to open up spiritually.

Worn-out Consciousness

Painting at the end of the nineteenth century was like that. As if it didn’t know what it was anymore: because the human being didn’t know who he or she was anymore. The human being was on the road to becoming fake. And masks were all that would be left. The last cry of humanity before its descent into deeper darkness was reflected in a late 1800s painting in which spiritual scenes were like caricatures. To be a painter was to be a decorator of the Victorian lounge of the mind, a thoroughly bourgeois connection to the spiritual world. Like now but with seances and smoke-filled salons. Back then, paintings like Gustave Moreau’s of King David and the angel are symptomatic of pretend spirituality. King David fawns to the angel with a rose.

Finding the way from the spirits of Personality to the true Michaelic legacy of America for the Spirit.

Pictures and Images: Do we realize how much they influence us? Through the power of media, Hollywood, Amerikana? I remember a while back in the early 20 teens, a rather entertaining German alternative researcher, especially prominent in 2020. He had a specific way of speaking to the audience. He was ironically provocative. To audiences eager to wake up to geopolitical events, yet somehow passive, confused, and lacking insight into cultural hypnosis, he said something along these lines –“If you don’t start thinking, there are whole industries, massive amounts of money and resources poured into making sure you will be given the content that you think.” He had attended a Waldorf school and was vehemently scapegoated by the German mainstream media for what he did and publicly said in response to the 2020 pandemic.

Back then, as we shall see, he, like many others, lost his German citizenship and was forced to move to Switzerland amid a political witch hunt. Switzerland, at least for the time being, offered a (probably minimal) degree of independence from the more draconian geopolitical dictates, thanks to its traditions of neutrality. In contrast to the general mire of submission across the media landscape, we could admire his courage. Anthroposophists who spoke out were labelled “Querdenker,” which I’ll translate as “crooked thinkers,” rebels, and “outlandish.” Any idea that anthroposophy should, per Steiner, not be political was thrown under the bus. Back then, any doctor who refused to tow the official state line was struck off. Teachers were sacked, including many in Rudolf Steiner schools. Some had to leave the country.

But what to do?

There is a spiritual battle underway in modern times, beneath the surface of people’s lives. It is going on in the soul, and it is a spiritual battle. Now part of this battle is winning back from Ahriman the soul “ownership”, the use of the two-petalled lotus flower between the eyes.

To regain this, we can reclaim the experience lost in Ahriman’s realm. But most will say, “Hey, I didn’t even know I was lost in any “realm”!” But really, it should not be such a great secret at all. It’s been packaged for us as the Matrix, the Internet, now AI, and in all the sci-fi populism of the last 100 years. In the development of radio, communications, and consumerism. We don’t have to be dismayed by this. A vast amount of creative time and energy has indeed been put into building an electromagnetic network of psychological influence.

So, we can say that the incessant images of modern life, which fill the sentient body for entertainment, consumption, influence, suggestion, and control, all surround a central protagonist, “You,” within a vast, numerically programmed system of intricate layers and veils. Getting out and finding spiritual freedom within such a context seems so overwhelming. For it is emotionally designed this way. And yet, hopelessness and the brute survival of the fittest are the very symptoms intended by the system. But so too is the rise in the face of adversity.

The spirit of the phoenix. This should be a routine, obligatory spiritual step in modern life. With anthroposophy, we can, precisely in these times of challenge to a spiritual orientation to life, rise from so-called “occult” entertainment and hypnosis to a new spiritual experience.

Meditation and transforming of character

In meditation, we hold the two eyes with the gaze fixed at a midpoint between them. This is the position of the two-petalled lotus flower, the chakra at the bridge of the nose, extended before us in space naturally about 10 cm out.

Money and Karmic Change, the Five Loaves and the 2 Fish

We are already in an age of Ahrimanic Clairvoyance. Back in the 1920s, Rudolf Steiner warned that the greatest threat not only to anthroposophy but to the future evolution of society and humanity was that the distinction would no longer be made between spiritual truth and what would come through subjective “visions”.

What one person would see, a second and a third would not see. Confusion would prevail and in spite of being made receptive to clairvoyant wisdom, men would inevitably fall into strife on account of the sheer diversity of their visions. Ultimately, however, they would all be satisfied with their own particular vision, for each of them would be able to see into the spiritual world. In this way all culture on the earth would fall prey to Ahriman. Men would succumb to Ahriman simply through not having acquired by their own efforts what Ahriman is ready and able to give them. No more evil advice could be given than to say: “Stay just as you are! Rudolf Steiner Lucifer and Ahriman, GA 191, 15 November 1919, Dornach.Lecture IV

Taking the image from the apocalypse of the Beast of the Seven Heads and Ten Horns who rises from the sea, we will look here at the dynamics of how the socio-spiritual relationship of modern man is tempted by the realities embedded in the very images of the astral world.

Depending on the inclination of the individual soul, Ahrimanic Clairvoyance can come to expression in one of three things. It can be intellectual-academic, it can be populist-sensational work, or it can be a mediumistic-channelled work, or, and this is the key, it can be a mixture, a compendium of the three (I will give prominent examples of the three as we progress).

The Ahrimanic Pricing of the Soul through the Socio-Spiritual Contract – Reclaiming spiritual territory from Ahriman for spiritual work in our own spiritual lives has to be done individually as much as socially. 

So uncomfortable as it may be to imaginatively behold it, the last hundred years from 1933 to now have seen a let’s call it, global Ahrimanic “coup”; a takeover of government and industry, the creation of new forms of intelligence services, new media and technology for societal control, but also perhaps most importantly of all, a spiritual conflict. This has arisen from those with awareness and initiation into the Ahrimanic mysteries. But for those uninitiated, those let’s say “outside the temple”, none of this is explained – far less understood, because it is a spiritual reality whose real managers and controllers are not even human beings as such. This we can say has occulted, hidden the possibility of a Michaelic impulse more broadly in society. Part of our work, therefore, has to be to recover what we could call lost ground. 

Lost spiritual ground for us means this: learning to really pose questions of our own lives, the lives of others, and the life of humanity in world history. We are at a time in history when these subjects will not be spoken of in school, and not consciously related to us in upbringing. So, we have to play catch-up, so to speak. We have to learn them in adult life through trial and error and study, while the world progresses in its more materialistic expression. “Ahriman” is, in layman’s terms, the devil. Michael, for us, in these processes of learning, is the details of learning the challenges he poses. Christ is the light that guides us through the darkness of things we have as yet not consciously understood. The I needs to find its relation to spiritual world history, down into the Will and karma, or it will simply be steered like one lost bee amongst the collective hive of humanity. When we say “reclaiming lost ground to Ahriman”, we are bringing our use of Money to consciousness. Because our will is facilitated, it is measured, taken on or denied, according to the money that drives our deeds or restricts our deeds. 

The Moral Implications of Human Discounts, and Our Economic System in Relation to the Blood of the Etheric Christ

I would like to first raise the concept before our spiritual eyes that might be a bit provocative, but is really something we should call to mind. We have all been, that means collectively and individually, across global society, through the twentieth century up to now, initiated into an instinctive way of thinking with Ahriman.

So this is the first question we have to ask ourselves in anthroposophy and outside of it:

Is the individual before me an Ahrimanic Being parasitically working through the outer husk of the personality I encounter?

We are often running multiple screens and windows on a computer or phone devices at any one time, and at the same time. This is a real experience. But it is also an analogy for how the compartmentalisation of the mind by Ahriman starts working subliminally. With practice, it is possible to see not only the moral state of the blood of another human being spiritually, but also the different forms of categorisation and experience they manage in their minds.

One may see another human being slip into cinema mode, supermarket mode, tax optimisation, and marketing mode in their minds, running in parallel the ideas and dynamics of the outer culture, and inner dispositions of character.

Call to mind the course of the twentieth century, and you will see a number of symptoms of this. There are obvious ones: cinema, geopolitics, binary codes and supermarkets, advertising and its socio-spiritual effects. These forms mirror and repeat and install their shapes in the etheric body, to activate the soul (its desire, its drive for this or that product or idea) or, on the other hand, put to sleep certain tendencies and qualities of the soul.

Post 1933: Along with the Etheric Christ a Fake Christ