Manifesto
“Money is a promise: I will have what I need — even if I do not always bring value to others.”
“Money is a promise that we will have resources — formulated as a promise: You will be taken care of!”
— from my working notes
I don’t experience money as just a medium of exchange. I experience it as a promise — and the task of an integrated life, as I currently understand it, is to relate to that promise consciously.
Make the money, don’t let the money make you.
♫ As sung by Macklemore — “Make the Money”, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (The Heist, 2012).
I don’t think money is only a resource. I think it’s a developmental line — how I relate to it (in aversion, in worship, in fluent ease) tracks where I am developmentally, in an Integral sense, at least as much as my bank balance does. My notes name the aversion pole explicitly as a “Green allergy” to money — a real trap, not a virtue.
The people I care most about — purpose-driven builders, systems designers, people trying to do work that matters for a regenerative future — tend to be financially precarious. Not because the value they create is too small. Because the financial infrastructure around them is built for extraction, not for emergence. That’s not a personal failing on their part. It’s a structural bottleneck, and it’s the founding diagnosis behind SoFin.
The fix, as I currently understand it, isn’t to withdraw from money or renounce it. It’s sovereignty: staying in relationship and exchange with others, never captured by a single dependency, always keeping a way out. That’s the same move as psychological or political sovereignty — just applied to money.
My idea with money is that it is aligned with purpose. That’s the idea.
— from my working notes
Integral Money
This section is a living draft, not a finished doctrine. It’s compiled from an in-progress “Sovereign Money Handbook / Metamodern Essential Variation,” credited jointly to SoFin, an entity of EvoBioSys. Treat everything here as evolving musings I’m still working out.
Money. It is both a practical and profoundly symbolic force whose circulation affects almost every facet of our lives. It shapes our physical landscape of things and tools, our consumption and production habits, our desires and aspirations, our narratives of survival and success and even to some degree our spiritual evolution. The power of money is certainly not reducible to its quantitative utility but spans out to a multi-dimensional landscape of meaning we assign to it. Money or the absence thereof can symbolize security, freedom, power and worth or the lack thereof.
No matter if born into a rich or poor family, we are all from an early age shaped by money narratives. Our first encounters with money often leave deep imprints on our psyche, shaping how we perceive wealth, scarcity, and abundance. The absence of money can bring physical precarity and psychological wounding, fostering resentment and a demonization of wealth. Conversely, a super-abundance of financial wealth can lead to soulless transactional emptiness, suggesting the hollow core of excessive accumulation. Both extremes reveal the unhealthy polarities of our collective relationship with money.
Yet beyond these polarized archetypes lies a third pathway: a healthy and conscious engagement with the multi-dimensional lived realities of money as a developmental challenge essential to our evolution, liberation and initiation…
This handbook posits that cultivating a more holistic relationship with money is paramount to liberating our multidimensional potential as humans. By balancing the interplaying spheres of physical, social, aspirational, and spiritual dimensions, we can align our financial realities with our deeper values and visions. The ultimate goal is to initiate readers into an effortless flow of abundant creativity and purpose, fostering both individual sovereignty and collective well-being.
People hold tremendous gifts and potentials, yet the outfolding of these gifts is often inhibited by financial insecurity. It remains a fact that many of the individuals who hold the keys to a regenerative, flourishing future civilization live in precarious financial conditions.
— Sovereign Money Handbook draft, “Setting the Frame”
Four ways of looking at money
The handbook maps money across the four quadrants of an Integral/AQAL view — interior and exterior, individual and collective:
- Interior · individual
- Money wounds, self-worth, and what the notes call a “mindset of liberation” — my own psychological relationship to money.
- Interior · collective
- Family-of-origin money culture and the collective, cultural norms around money I inherited before I ever chose them.
- Exterior · individual
- The objective, behavioral, neuroaffective drivers of how I actually handle money day to day.
- Exterior · collective
- The external systems — monetary institutions, and what the notes call “systems for stewarding money.”
The developmental map of money
| Stage / altitude | Monetary form |
|---|---|
| Beige · Survival | Barter — no money yet, pure exchange for survival |
| Purple · Tribalism | Commodity money (cattle, gold, shells, grain) |
| Red · Power | Metal coinage — coins as symbol of power |
| Amber–Blue · Order | Banknotes and centralized banking |
| Orange · Achievement | Fiat, electronic money, globalization |
| Green · Community | Decentralization — crypto, DeFi, distributed trust networks |
| Next / emerging | Integral, metamodern money that integrates rather than merely reacts against the stages before it — the handbook’s stated territory |
Toward a sovereign, integral money
The handbook’s prescriptive core centers on what it calls sovereign and aligned purpose-agents. Sovereignty here has a precise meaning:
Sovereignty, in this framework, means not blackmailable — still able to relate and exchange with others, but never dependent on a single source or group; a “conscious membrane” (as a cell has a wall that lets only certain things pass in or out) chosen deliberately rather than imposed.
— paraphrased from the Sovereign Money Handbook draft
A few of the other core ideas the handbook is currently working through:
- Universal Basic Requirements (UBR / SoUBR) — framed as an evolution of UBI: as long as you are sincerely working on a purposeful project, your essential physical requirements will be met. Nine physical requirements are referenced in the notes, though not yet enumerated in what I’ve drafted publicly.
- Patient capital for regenerative ventures — mid- and long-term financial growth above inflation, replacing short-term profit maximization as the constraint that matters.
- The six P’s (as cited from Mariana Bozesa’s Integral Investing): parity of people, planet, profit, passion, purpose.
- Waking up, Growing up, Cleaning up, Showing up — Ken Wilber’s four faces of development, applied specifically to money.
- A mini-guide to practical ethics — I can choose who I relate to financially; it doesn’t have to be an open market to everyone, and it can be conditional on values. As the notes put it: “only accept what is given freely and willingly (including because it was paid).”
Money archetypes
Borrowed from Karen McAlister and the Clear Sky Center, the handbook uses four generic archetypes for how people relate to money. There are also shadow or “red flag” forms, though the specific pairing varies by context:
Archetypes: Warrior, Magician, Creator / artist, Fool
Shadow forms: Innocent, Victim, Tyrant, Martyr
Where this comes from
None of this is invented from scratch. It continues a seed first gathered by an “integral youth” convening in 2024, and it explicitly positions itself as continuing Bernard Lietaer’s and Ken Wilber’s earlier work on integral money. The full lineage is in the reading list below.
Musings
Marginalia, not thought-leadership — short reflections pulled from my working notes, added to as I go.
The architects of a regenerative, metamodern future — the polymaths, systems designers, and purpose-driven agents — are trapped in financial precarity. Not because they lack value, but because our financial infrastructure is designed for extraction, not emergence.
— from my working notes
Money should not accumulate — it should move to where it enables the highest leverage.
— from my working notes
The final stage of the SoFin model is not wealth accumulation — it is wealth circulation.
— from my working notes
The time for passive speculation is over. The time for Sovereign Finance is now.
— from my working notes
SoFin
SoFin is the applied, organizational counterpart to everything above — the same diagnosis, operationalized. It’s a sub-entity of EvoBioSys, dedicated to gardening the integral monetary infrastructures for the next phase of human civilization, so that purpose agents can become resourced enough to focus on sharing their gifts with financial peace of mind.
It’s deliberately not framed as a UBI model and not a charity — it’s targeted, intelligent financial scaffolding built around four pillars: a baseline of Universal Basic Requirements (SoUBR), a vertical sequence from stability to personal comfort and regenerative growth to networked sovereignty, capital that moves to wherever it creates the highest leverage rather than sitting still, and wealth stewardship networked at civilizational scale.
This page is the personal why. For the organizational what and how, go straight to SoFin:
Reading List
The Integral Money musings above continue — and lean directly on — a small lineage of prior work. Not exhaustive, just where I keep going back to.
- Bernard Lietaer — An Integral View on Money and Financial Crashes (2005)
- Ken Wilber — Right Bucks: Money and Spirituality
- Hanzi Freinacht — Metamodern Values for a Listening Society
- Layman Pascal — The Metamodern Business Bureau
- Brian Massumi — 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value
- Mariana Bozesa — Integral Investing (source of the “six P’s”)
- John Fullerton — regenerative economics, Capital Institute
- Graham Boyd
- Colman Knight — Integral Wealth
- Karen McAlister, Clear Sky Center — money archetypes