Nipun Mehta appears as one of the most inspiring persons I have ever met. He and I met as guest speakers in the late 2000’s at a conference on the gift economy in California. I shared some ideas about collective intelligence and the coming of free currencies as a possible infrastructure for global generosity at a massive scale. Nipun came from direct grassroot practice of generosity and giftivism operating through wide networks of people. He had tons of inspiring stories to share, each of them seeding generosity in our hearts.

Small communities and trust networks rely on gift economy. In these human ecosystems we learn that what we give comes back to us. Games theory call it a “positive sum economy”. Hence gift economy plays a central role in the functioning of original collective intelligence since the dawn of time.

But when communities turned into big societies and civilizations built upon pyramidal collective intelligence, a different story happened. The market economy became predominant: “I give you this piece of exchangeable wealth at the condition you give something equivalent in return”. Money became the most convenient counterpart for any tradable wealth moving from one hand to another. Gift economy became marginal, or at least invisible for the mainstream money paradigm. In this paradigm, one of the beliefs says that if you just give things away, it will just diffuse and never come back. Don’t give, trade.

If you explore the true nature of the universe then you will start to see it as our ultimate community. The mind may still say “don’t give things away otherwise they will diffuse in the abyssal infinite and never come back“, but your deeper being knows that interconnectedness, generosity and providence operate at every moment. For many, it takes the heroes journey to build a concrete understanding how the universe operates as a gift economy. Those who surrender to generosity experience this law all the time. They just give, and life gives back, from another source and another time, not even as a direct counterpart. Don’t try to make plans, it just works. Like gravity.

Nipun has taken this path of radical generosity. He calls it giftism. He embodies it in every aspect of his being. This experience has turned generosity into rocket science with grounded empirical evidence, numbers and rationals. It works. It works better and more efficiently than conventional competitive market economy. And you know what? Bliss comes as the best ROI.

Go to ServiceSpace.org. You will meet a constellation of amazing inspired souls who walk the talk of generosity and giftism, like Nipun. I admire the work and projects they do. I feel inspired, my heart feels fed, and concrete ideas inseminate my mind.

Don’t miss this TEDx talk from Nipun. I feel the same emotion every time I see it.

Following the traces of Nipun, I wish free currencies will provide a global infrastructure for generosity economies and giftism to rise at a global scale.

Thanks Nipun!