Wake up, stupid. That’s not to be read as “wake up stupid”. Everyone who finds themselves in the Work has come to it after a shock awakens them from robot life. By shock, I mean an electrical one. Sometime in the past, there was a shock, and that shock caused an initial awakening, an awareness of Being.
There are other ways of delivering that shock, not involving a joy-buzzer or a hairpin and an electric socket. We’ll explore one such way in a moment, but first, let’s assume that you did, indeed, receive an Awakening Shock, for some reason and in some way, however odd.
At first, you didn’t know what to do. All you knew was that you felt an empty ache — there was something you should be doing, learning, mastering, but what?
So there’s the yoga or t’ai-ch’i dojo or studio or a dance studio or a voice teacher or a violin teacher, or a guitar teacher or …
You’ve started on the Path, but because the culture doesn’t inspire or wish enlightened Beings to be wandering the streets and causing trouble, there’s no support, no information and no access to higher ideas, so you’ll knock about for some time exploring avenues, most of which are dead ends.
You may wander in the Bardos for quite some time, not really connecting, always feeling that gut-wrenching “I’m missing something here”, and you’d be right, dead right.
What you need when that awakening spark hits you is a school. I’d suggest a real school, but nobody really knows what that is, because the forms keep changing with the time, place and people, and you can’t read a book by its cover.
That, incidentally, was the first formulation of that idea, not the present form, “you can’t TELL a book by its cover”, but what the hell, everything gets bastardized and tweaked and twisted, and it’s just something that, after a few millennia on Earth, they say you get used to.
I never did.
So when that awakening spark happens, you have maybe a few months to at least START on the Path.
When you get to a school and start training for higher consciousness and more responsibility in the Great Work, you must guard constantly against the organic desire to return to normal life, whatever that means, anyway.
So if you’ve got that handled, the rest should be easy.
You’ll receive information on how to go about several quests, often called “Essence Tasks”.
The very first Essence Task is to TRY to sell some Spirit Coins. Even if you totally fail to sell a single coin, you’ll still be carrying out the Essence Task, which is to deliver an awakening shock by letting someone see the coin or coins you’re offering.
The sight of a World Leader or the Goddess Liberty skulled-out will send a thrill of shock and cause an awakening, if there’s anyone in there to awaken. More often than not, it’s just a robot with nobody inside.
Yes, that’s right, nobody inside. Of course, that’s not literally true — there’s a spirit inside every single thing both animate and inanimate, but most of them are content to sleep and let the robot do it all.
It’s an absolute fact that nobody needs to be home to say and do anything that humans happen to be doing nearby. It LOOKS and SOUNDS really convincing, but you’d be amazed at how easily human thought can be synthesized.
There are presently computers that can converse and consider in such a way that if you were online in a chatroom with that machine, you’d be convinced that you’re talking to a “real” person and, in a very real sense, you are.
People are machines, and they don’t like to be reminded of that, so learn to keep your mouth shut on the subject. Reminding them that “it’s always the same room, and it’s always the same day” doesn’t help a hell of a lot, either.
So how do you determine which people to whom you should show the Spirit Coins?
That’s easy. Show them to anyone who’s willing to look at them, even glance at them for a single moment.
Even if they don’t actually SEE the image and it doesn’t register in eyesight, it will deliver a shock, if they are open to it, ready for the awakening spark to change their life.
When you are the Bearer of that Awakening Spark, you earn Merit. This is an excellent way to earn Merit and get Experience Points, which you’ll need to pass to the next level.
“Behind every face there is a skull.”
Awakening, real Awakening, leads to a life DEDICATED permanently and forever and completely to the Work. There is little room for personal comfort or satisfaction, so if you’re interested in satisfaction, the Work would not be your first choice.
“Behind every face there is a skull” is what the average person will get out of what they see in the coin, but some folks will see that the skeleton or skull is meant to represent the living Spirit, and it’s those folks that you want to invite to Work Circle meetings.
They may end up studying and working here, or they may end up elsewhere — they should go where they are able to work and where they feel most at home in the community.
We’re not in the business of accumulating followers, so we really don’t care where they decide to carry on their work, just so long as it’s SOMEWHERE.
Your job is to just make that initial contact. All the rest of it, selling the coin, inviting them to a group meeting, talking about the ideas, all these are EXTRAS, not demanded at all of you, but you might be able and willing to perform those extra tasks as well, and you’d be welcome to try.
Just show the coins or coin to someone and let the spiritual nature unfold by itself. You need do nothing. No persuasion, not even a comment. Just show the coins or coin.
I say “coin”, because your circumstances might not allow you the freedom of carrying a sheet or portfolio of Spirit Coins, so you’d do okay with just one, if it were the right one.
Offhand, I’d say you have the best chance with the GhostWalker, the Walking Liberty Half-Dollar with the skeleton carved into it, which is the hardest of all the coins to do, by the way, and the most time and energy consuming.
Now, these coins sell for a LOT of money. Most people are NOT aware that coins are collectibles and that some coins, even recent ones, can sell for many millions of dollars, and $100,000 coins can be found by the tens of thousands on eBay.
They’re not making those numbers up. There’s a Blue Book of coin prices, and they are official. It’s easy to tell how much a coin is worth if you’re able to “read” the state of the coin, meaning the GRADE, which is determined ENTIRELY on the back, or reverse side, of the coin.
The front of the coin is the DETAILS side, and it has little to do with the value of a coin, except for the “desirability” issue, one of the three things that determine the value of any collectible:
- DESIRABILITY — This determines how many people are potential customers for this coin, and can profoundly affect the total collective value.
- SCARCITY — How few of these are there floating around? You can quickly find out by checking the “population” of a given state of that coin, and the grading systems will often compare grades, as in 1/3, meaning that this particular coin holds the top position in the grading, with a total population of three similar coins.
- CONDITION — Ah, here’s the germ of the secret. The real serious dealers in the business will tell you, “Condition is Everything.” Believe it. The rarest coin, if it’s a wreck, will be worth far less than a coin in excellent condition. I can get a 1916d Mercury dime for less than $300, but it’ll be almost totally flat and featureless. The same coin in even a slightly better condition could bring upwards of $10,000.
When I’m ruining a coin with one of my skulleries or skellies, I don’t pay much attention to those factors, but I certainly DON’T carve a coin that has more than the usual attributes, meaning that higher-grade than XF-AU are off-limits, and of course I don’t carve toned coins.
Before I even venture to carve a coin, rest assured that I have had it under a loupe and checked it for any Mint Errors. That having been done, I check the coin against my rare and unusuals, and if it passes those tests, it’s a candidate for carving.
I’ve reduced the types of carvings that I do to just two — full skeletons on the Walking Liberty Half Dollars, and skulls on all the rest, including ancient Roman, Greek, Indian and more.
I’ve included Early Americana coinage as a canvas for my carvings, and they look ab-fab, which translates in post-sixties language as “the shit”, a loose translation of “Absolutely Fabulous”, which was the original point, but then, when “shit” means “fabulous”, then it’s “shit, shit, shit,” all the way.
I try to keep up with the times, but I’m centuries ahead of it already.
I currently offer one complete coin-catalog page with 20 examples of all the various Spirit Coins that I do at this time. I’m not sure how much to ask for something like that, but I’ll base it on the cost of the coins, not the value of my work, in order to get you into the Spirit of the Spirit Coin.
That means “hit the street, bud”, and this means you.
It doesn’t matter which form of the Sangha you consider yourself to be “in” — it’s all the same, and these coins will definitely deliver the Waking Shock, Ab-Guar, which of course with the same reasoning applied above, would roughly translate out to something like “Absolutely Guaranteed”.
They are absolutely guaranteed to deliver the Waking Shock, just as if the person were touched by the Guru.
Do this once and you’ll be hooked for life.
You may even want to join the tens of thousands of coin-carvers around the world in creating some coinage of your own, and it need not be to copy what I do, although you are more than welcome to try your own hand at any of “my” designs.
My designs are so old, the patents expired before this universe was formed.
Every one of my Spirit Coins is signed IN THE COIN as well as on the “flip” in which the coin is contained.
You can carry acrylic capsules with you and when someone buys a coin — they aren’t all $1500, but none of them are cheap, so don’t expect a LOT of sales — you can offer to wrap the coin in a capsule for them, so they can carry it with them safely.
The acrylic capsules are specifically engineered and chemically compounded to be “coin-friendly”, so the coin will last a LOT longer than it would in a paper flip, although that’s not a bad way to store a coin, if you insert the flips into plastic catalog pages to protect them and keep them closed.
Yes, that’s right, closed. Those damn things have a tendency to open up at the damndest times, but in a plastic page, they stay shut. It’s best if they do take it in a capsule, but make sure your hands are DRY when placing the coin into the capsule.
My “Donner Party” carved death’s head Large Cents should be a cinch to market if you’re anywhere near Donner Pass, where the tragedy occurred, although I would think that a Pawn Shop in Vegas might want one or two.
The one pictured above is only $1250. The base price of the coin before I worked it is of no consequence. Just try to find another one like it. Even another of the same date will look very different from this one.
The fact is, they actually have facial expressions, the skulls do, and sometimes I can get an expression onto the face on a Walking Liberty Half, but that’s really rare — that face is really really small, only a few millimeters high and wide.
I’m taking a chance with the Large Cents. I accumulated a few of them recently, hoping to get enough to make a checkers set, but that’s not likely, unless I’m willing to pay upwards of $200 a coin to get what I want, and by the time the checkers set got together, it could be months or even a year for all the right dates to come in.
So I abandoned that idea, and sent them back, instead using my enormous collection of Post-Colonials, which I’ve been recommending to you for at least six years now, and it’s still not too late to get in on them, if you know how to do it.
Nevertheless, the coin has a fixed value as a coin, but has a wild value as the product of a Listed American Artist, Official White House Artist, Official IAJE Artist who is collected by the Smithsonian and whose artworks are in the collections of heads of state and art museums around the world.
That’s the only way you’re going to be able to market these coins at the prices I’ve put on them, and frankly, you never have to sell a single coin, in order to completely fulfill your First Essence-Task.
Merely showing the coin or coins will do.
Sometimes even just sort of threatening to show them the coins will do the trick. The mere presence of the Spirit Coins can be enough to trigger the Waking Shock in a very receptive person who is standing nearby, at a maximum distance of 9 feet, just shy of three meters.
I’m working now on a silver ring to hold the Merc Dime, my personal favorite for sheer personality and style. You can sail past someone or a crowd at lunchtime and never show it to anyone, but the result will be the same as if you had, but that’s only by WEARING the coin as a ring.
If you want a pendant, I can make that, with crystals to protect the coin, which will probably turn on you, or I can mount it in a silver or gold bezel, fancy or plain, to your style and taste.
The Merc Dime is small and unobtrusive. I have pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, halves, dollars, large cents, Canadian and British silver, and much, much more.
Why do I have all that in stock and on hand?
Because for over 35 years I sold coins in my galleries, that’s why, and I still have them sitting here, waiting to be carved up and sold as ART PIECES, not as coins.
The Merc Dime looks GREAT with a wide skull smile, and the price of the dime shoots up from about $2.75 to $225, and that’s the kind of profit margin that represents the art and labor, not the metal value of the coin.
The price of any artwork is a question of respect for the artist, something too often withheld, but the public doesn’t respect artists, because THEY ARE DOING WHAT THEY WANT AND THEY ARE GETTING PAID FOR IT.
That’s gotta piss off a factory or mine worker something fierce.
If you think the prices of my Spirit Coins are high now, imagine what coins carved by Picasso would bring on the market now.
Don’t let the retail prices scare you. When you send for your catalog or for a single coin or two, you will NOT pay for the art value, just for my actual cost in making the piece, with the understanding that you will not take advantage of this to acquire a full set of coins for almost nothing.
You must take a personal silent secret vow that you will at least TRY to show these to people. Only then will you have the right to acquire them at those prices.
All right, enough.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby