PATH OF THE DRAGON

Money as Energy: From Extraction to Circulation

February 24, 2026Reading time: 4 min

From Extraction to Circulation

If spirituality never touches money, it stays decorative.

Money is not just a personal preference. It’s a social technology: a signal that coordinates behavior at scale. It shapes incentives, attention, and what a system rewards.

In the Entangled Firmament—the participatory field of reality we live in, money is one of the loudest channels of amplification. It can fund care, build capacity, and stabilize communities. It can also extract, distort, and turn humans into “resources.”

So the question is not, “Is money spiritual?”

The question is: What does money do to the system you’re in?

Money Is a Feedback Signal With Real Gravity

We can treat “money as energy” as a metaphor with a precise meaning:

  • Energy flows.
  • Energy can be stored.
  • Energy can be converted into action.
  • Energy can be hoarded or circulated.

Money behaves similarly in human systems. It is stored capacity to influence outcomes: time, labor, land, attention, risk, and opportunity.

That means money is never neutral in practice. It always changes the physics.

The Marketplace Has an Operating System

Every organization has an implicit OS:

  • What gets measured gets optimized.
  • What gets rewarded gets repeated.
  • What gets punished goes underground.

If the OS rewards short-term numbers at all costs, people will defect in subtle ways: hiding risk, spinning reality, squeezing the vulnerable, outsourcing harm.

If the OS rewards coherence (truth, consent, repair, long-term trust), people can cooperate without being naïve.

This is not a personality problem. It’s incentive architecture.

Structural Leverage: Why Your Role Changes the Physics

The book names Structural Leverage as built-in amplification created by role, money, status, or microphone. Your actions land louder than they would for someone without leverage.

If you hold leverage in a company—manager, founder, exec, senior IC—you are not “just another player.” You are part of the environment. Your nervous system becomes a weather system for the people around you.

This is why Part VI insists on Proportional Responsibility: responsibility scales with leverage. The more power you hold, the cleaner your hygiene must be, and the faster you must repair.

In marketplace terms: if you can fire people, set incentives, or shape culture, your ethics are not private. They are structural.

Extraction vs. Circulation

Extraction is a one-way flow:

  • value pulled out faster than it is replenished,
  • costs offloaded onto the vulnerable,
  • “growth” that is really depletion.

Circulation is reciprocal flow:

  • value exchanged with consent,
  • costs acknowledged and repaired,
  • capacity increased over time.

The Dragon’s question is simple: Does this system metabolize its own impact, or export it?

A Small Audit: Three Marketplace Diagnostics

If you want to keep soul inside corporate architecture, don’t start with affirmations. Start with diagnostics.

  1. Where is the hidden cost going?
    If profit requires someone else’s burnout, someone else’s silence, someone else’s health, the system is extracting.

  2. Can the system hear the truth?
    Are there clean feedback loops upward? Can people disagree without retaliation? Can the organization update when reality changes?

  3. Is repair real?
    When harm happens, is there a repair path (apology, change, restitution), or only PR?

You don’t need a perfect workplace. You need a workplace that can update.

Holding Soul in the Machine

You cannot control the whole marketplace. You can control your part of the circuit.

The diagnostics above tell you what kind of system you’re inside. The anchors below tell you how to stay coherent while you work within it.

Three practical anchors:

  • Keep the Serene Center online. If you lead from reactivity, you broadcast noise into the system. Regulate first, then act.
  • Make agreements explicit. Ambiguity is where extraction hides. Consent, scope, timelines, and ownership make the system legible.
  • Do Blast Radius Checks. Before you move fast, ask: who’s in range, what’s the likely impact, and is your containment strong enough to hold it?

Concrete example: your team is behind and pressure spikes. Extraction says, “push harder, hide the risk, make someone pay.” Circulation says, “name the constraint, protect the humans, surface tradeoffs, and update the plan in daylight.” Same urgency—different physics.

Soul at work isn’t an aesthetic. It’s disciplined coherence under pressure.

Where to Go from Here