Part I: The Aphorism Inverted
We begin with a familiar piece of wisdom that has guided Western civilization for centuries: Benjamin Franklin’s “A penny saved is a penny earned.” This maxim seems so obviously true that questioning it feels almost sacrilegious. Thrift equals prosperity. Saving equals earning. The equation appears mathematically sound.
But what if we’ve been reading the equation backwards all along?
Consider this inversion: a penny spent is more than a penny saved. Why? Because the entire purpose of saving is to enable better spending. No one saves money to admire it, to caress the texture of bills, to listen to the clink of coins. We save in order to spend—whether on necessities, pleasures, or legacies. The spending is the consummation; the saving is merely preparation.
Yet even this insight doesn’t penetrate deeply enough into the nature of our existence. There’s a more fundamental currency at play, one that makes money look like a derivative instrument—which, in fact, it is.
Part II: The Moment as Primary Currency
Here’s the recognition that changes everything: you never actually earn money. What you do—what you’ve always done, what you can only do—is spend moments to acquire money. You spend moments to save money. You spend moments to spend money. The transaction is always, invariably, irrevocably the same: moments going out.
Think about this carefully. When you “work for eight hours,” what’s really happening? You’re spending 28,800 seconds of your existence. These moments flow out of you like water from a burst dam—unstoppable, irreversible, irretrievable. The paycheck that arrives later isn’t earned; it’s the residue left behind from your spending of moments.
This isn’t just a clever reframing. It’s a fundamental recognition about the nature of reality. Moments possess a quality that no other currency has: they can only be spent, never saved. Try to hold onto this current moment. Try to save it for tomorrow. Try to put it in a vault for your retirement. The impossibility of this action isn’t a limitation of your will or skill—it’s the fundamental structure of existence itself.
Part III: The Double-Spending Problem
Now we encounter a peculiar phenomenon that breaks the integrity of our experiential economy. In blockchain technology, double-spending refers to the critical flaw where the same digital currency gets spent twice, destroying the system’s trustworthiness. Consciousness, it turns out, faces the same vulnerability.
Every moment is already being spent simply in the act of being here, being aware, being alive. This is the primary transaction—clean, complete, requiring nothing from you. The moment spends itself through you, as you, perfectly.
But the mind, clever and anxious, attempts something impossible. It tries to spend the same moment twice. While the moment is being spent in simple existence, the mind simultaneously tries to leverage it for a future outcome: “I’ll do this to get that. I’ll spend this moment working to secure my future. I’ll experience this to create a memory.”
Picture trying to pay for coffee with a dollar bill while simultaneously using that same dollar to buy a newspaper. The transaction breaks down. Neither purchase completes properly. This is exactly what consciousness does when it tries to be present while reaching for the future—the integrity of the experiential transaction fractures.
Part IV: The Accumulation Illusion
Let’s deepen this understanding. While you’re spending moments—the only thing you can actually do—various accumulations gather in other domains. Money accumulates in bank accounts. Memories accumulate in neural patterns. Skills accumulate in your body. Relationships deepen. Even your cells divide and grow.
Here’s the radical insight: these accumulations exist in what we might call the “inconsequential domain”—not because they don’t have effects (they clearly do), but because they’re consequences rather than the primary reality. They’re the residue of moment-spending, not the spending itself.
Consider memory, that most precious of accumulations. We treasure our memories, build our identities from them, use them to navigate our world. But what is memory really? It’s the residue left behind from spent moments, like ash from a fire. You can examine the ash, analyze its composition, even make art from it—but you cannot burn it again. The fire has already consumed the wood.
The same applies to money. Your bank balance is just a numerical record of moments already spent. You cannot retrieve those moments, relive them, or respend them. The money is just ash with exchange value in the social system—useful, but not alive like the moments that were spent to accumulate it.
Part V: The Prediction Machine’s Dilemma
Now we must confront an uncomfortable truth about our own hardware. Neuroscience reveals that our brains are fundamentally prediction machines. Every neural circuit, from the simplest reflex to the most complex thought, is essentially asking: “What happens next?” This isn’t a feature we can disable—it’s the core operating system.
Here’s where we encounter a fundamental mismatch between our biological hardware and reality’s operating system. The brain evolved to predict, but reality only allows present-moment spending. It’s like having a computer that can only run future-modeling software trying to interface with a reality that exists only in READ PRESENT mode.
Think about what happens when you see a red apple. Your brain doesn’t passively receive red light wavelengths and conclude “apple.” Instead, it predicts “apple” based on partial information, then uses incoming sense data mainly to correct errors in its prediction. What you “see” is your brain’s prediction, slightly adjusted by reality. You never experience the apple itself—you experience your brain’s predictive model of the apple.
This extends to everything, including time itself. Your experience of the “present moment” is actually your brain’s prediction of what should be happening now, updated by error signals. The present you experience is already processed, already interpreted, already one step removed from whatever is actually here.
Part VI: The Stability Addiction
Why does the brain predict so relentlessly? Because uncertainty registers as threat. Prediction errors trigger alarm systems honed over millions of years of evolution. To minimize these errors, the brain attempts to make the future as predictable as possible.
Enter accumulation—evolution’s strategy for reducing uncertainty. If I accumulate enough food, I won’t starve. If I accumulate enough allies, I won’t be abandoned. If I accumulate enough knowledge, I won’t be surprised. In our modern world, this translates to accumulating money (financial security), memories (psychological security), and achievements (social security).
But notice the tragic irony: the very act of trying to create stability through accumulation creates the instability of the double-spend. We become so focused on securing predictable futures that we fragment the only actual stability available—the simple, complete spending of the present moment.
Insurance perfectly crystallizes this absurdity. We spend present moments earning money to spend that money on insurance against futures that may never occur. We’re three transactions removed from actual moment-spending, lost in a hall of mirrors where security always seems one more accumulation away.
Part VII: The Mithya Recognition
Here we must make a leap that shatters our entire framework—even the framework we’ve been building in this essay. The ancient Indian philosopher Adi Shankara used the term “Mithya” to describe the status of the phenomenal world. Mithya doesn’t mean unreal—it means dependent reality, apparent reality, neither absolutely real nor absolutely unreal.
Remember how your brain constructs the “present moment” from predictions? This means even your experience of the present—the very thing we’ve been trying to save, spend, or optimize—is Mithya. It’s a construction, a model, a prediction masquerading as immediate reality.
Consider what this means: when we try to “be present,” we’re using a prediction machine (brain) to construct a model of what “presence” should feel like, then comparing our experience to that prediction. We’re trying to use Mithya to escape Mithya—like a dream character trying to wake the dreamer.
The moments we’ve been talking about spending? They’re not even real currency—they’re counterfeit bills printed by a predictive brain, spent in an imaginary economy of constructed time. No wonder something always feels off, always slightly missing. We’re trying to make transactions with simulated money.
Part VIII: The Three Levels of Reality
Vedanta philosophy describes three levels of reality that perfectly map onto our investigation:
Pratibhasika (Subjective Reality): Your personal predictions, memories, and temporal constructions. Your individual brain’s unique model of past, present, and future. This is obviously constructed, obviously personal, obviously limited.
Vyavaharika (Empirical Reality): The shared predictive model we call “objective reality.” Science, language, mathematics—these are collective prediction machines creating consensual reality. More stable than individual predictions, but still Mithya because still constructed by prediction machines, just coordinated ones.
Paramarthika (Absolute Reality): What Vedanta calls Brahman—that which exists before, during, and after all predictions. Not located in time because time is a prediction. Not located in space because space is a construction. Just pure IS-ness before the brain divides it into was, is, and will be.
Think about deep sleep. The prediction machine goes offline. No past, no future, no present. Yet you don’t cease to exist. Something remains—formless, timeless, thoughtless, but undeniably present. This isn’t unconsciousness but consciousness without the predictive overlay.
Part IX: The Impossible Liberation
We’ve arrived at a devastating and liberating recognition: we cannot use the brain to reach ultimate reality because the brain can only create predictions, and ultimate reality is precisely what exists beyond prediction. Every spiritual technique, every meditation method, every attempt to “be present” is still the prediction machine creating models of what liberation should look like.
It’s like asking a flashlight to illuminate its own batteries, or asking a knife to cut itself. The very tool we’re using prevents us from reaching what we’re seeking.
But hidden in this impossibility lies the ultimate liberation: if we cannot reach Brahman through prediction or effort or practice, then we must already BE Brahman, temporarily experiencing itself through the limitation of a prediction machine. The wave doesn’t need to find the ocean—it IS ocean, temporarily shaped as wave. You don’t need to find ultimate reality—you ARE ultimate reality, temporarily experiencing itself through a brain’s predictive constructions.
Part X: Beyond the Spending Paradigm
This recognition transforms everything we’ve discussed. If even the present moment is Mithya, then what is actually being spent? If time itself is a construction of the prediction machine, then what currency are we really discussing?
Perhaps the deepest surrender isn’t about spending moments properly but recognizing that there’s no real currency to spend—only Brahman playing the cosmic game of spending and saving, accumulating and losing, predicting and remembering.
Let the brain predict—it can’t do otherwise. Let moments appear to pass—that’s the nature of the construction. Let accumulation happen or not happen—it’s all in the inconsequential domain anyway. None of it touches what you really are: the awareness that exists before the first prediction and after the last, the consciousness that manifests AS the prediction machine while remaining eternally beyond its predictions.
Part XI: The Practical Joke of Existence
There’s an almost cosmic humor in our situation. Brahman manifests as brains that can only predict, then these brains spend their existence trying to predict their way back to Brahman. The ocean forms whirlpools that spin frantically trying to find the ocean. The very spinning prevents the recognition that they were never separate from what they’re seeking.
We spend our moments trying to accumulate moments (as memories, achievements, security), not realizing that spending IS the only accumulation possible—an accumulation that happens not in time but as time itself. We’re using Mithya to point to Brahman, using dreams to indicate waking, using the prison to describe freedom.
And perhaps that’s the only way it can work. The dream character can’t wake you up, but it can point to the fact that you’re dreaming. The prediction machine can’t reach Brahman, but it can recognize its own limitations so thoroughly that something else becomes obvious—the awareness that knows the prediction machine is predicting.
Part XII: The Final Recognition
As we reach the end of this investigation, notice what has happened. We started with simple economic wisdom about saving and spending. We progressed through the metaphysics of moments, the neuroscience of prediction, and arrived at the deepest questions of consciousness and reality.
Each level of understanding doesn’t negate the previous one but encompasses it. Yes, saving money has practical value in the relative world. Yes, being present is healthier than being lost in past or future. Yes, understanding the brain’s predictive nature can help us navigate life more skillfully.
But beneath all these practical truths lies the ultimate recognition: what you are exists prior to all accumulation, all spending, all prediction, all time. The Mandukya Upanishad states it with crystalline clarity: “Ayam atma brahma”—This Self is Brahman. Not “will be” Brahman after enough spiritual practice. Not “was” Brahman before the brain started predicting. IS Brahman, right now, even while the prediction machine spins its elaborate constructions of past, present, and future.
Epilogue: Living the Paradox
So how do we live with this recognition? How do we function in a world of apparent time while knowing time is construction, engage in saving and spending while knowing it’s all Mithya, plan for the future while understanding the future is just the brain’s current prediction?
We live it the same way water flows—naturally, without force, following the contours of the land while knowing it remains water regardless of the shape it temporarily takes. We let the brain predict because that’s its nature. We let moments appear to pass because that’s how the construction works. We engage with the relative world fully while knowing our absolute nature remains untouched.
The exhaustion so many feel—from trying to save the unsavable, predict the unpredictable, secure the unsecurable—might be Brahman’s way of wearing out the prediction machine. When prediction finally exhausts itself, when the brain gives up trying to create certainty, what remains?
What remains was always here: the simple, ever-present awareness that needs no past to define it, no future to complete it, no present to contain it. The real currency that was never spent because it was never in time to begin with. The wealth that accumulates not through saving but through the recognition that you were never poor.
This is what your life has always been—not a series of moments to be spent wisely, but Brahman playing the game of time, dreaming the dream of causation, dancing the dance of accumulation and loss, for the sheer joy of experiencing limitation and rediscovering limitlessness.
The penny saved is not a penny earned. The penny spent is not a penny lost. There are no pennies, no earning, no losing—only this vast awareness playing all the parts, spending itself as the appearance of moments, accumulating itself as the illusion of memory, predicting itself as the hope of tomorrow, while remaining eternally, joyfully, freely itself.
Welcome to the recognition. You are the currency, the spender, and the spent. You are what remains when the accounting ends.
Reinvent The Self! 