This is an investigation into the Brane-Power enhancements and mental/emotional benefits that stem from coinology as a Zen Practice, apart from the obvious emotional benefits of calming, patience and intense concentration. Let’s look at the actual steps you’ll take to prepare a coin for market, on eBay or in a shop or at a fair or festival or outdoor market, or swapmeet, or Tupperware party in order to understand how it works. The specific brain-power increasing steps are: Bag It, Tag It & Flag It. We’ll look at each step in detail:
STEP ONE: BAG IT.
MOUNTING THE COIN IN A FLIP
Carefully remove the coin from the examination pad, taking care to add no further damage than that already imposed by the environment during the period of circulation of that coin. Holding the coin by the rim’s edge, place it into a cardboard “flip” face down so that the coin reads correctly to your vision.
Using only the approved archival sealing flip, seal the coin inside the acid-free, oxygen reduced, environment of the flip. The coin should now read rightside-up when seen from the front of the flip. Consult video or go to workshop for exactitude in this area.
STEP TWO: TAG IT
WHAT IS THIS THING???
Using a “fine” point Original Only Sharpie pen — believe me, this is important — write at the top right the date and mint mark of the coin.
Now add the type of coin on the upper left of the flip. There’s plenty of room if you learn how to adjust your writing to fit the area allowable. Again, consult the video or attend a coinology workshop to get mastery and certainty on this. You won’t believe the benefits that accrue to your state of being when you have mastery and certainty on any subject!
You will now add any other information about that coin on the mid-right, next to the coin window. All materials used in this special flip are totally coin-friendly and will not harm the coin in any way; they offer protection from additonal environmental atmospheric damage and, since they seal perfectly and securely and cannot be re-opened without leaving stereo-optical traces, and they carry your handwriting, they also offer some protection against fraudulent replacement with a coin of lesser value, called the “switcharoo” in the coin trade. Beware of this “modern-day rustling” when you buy a coin.
I protect all my sales coins in this way, and my handwriting is unique enough to be easily identified. It isn’t easy to copy, because copying slows down the hand, and I write horrifically rapidly and accurately, having been taught this by my writer/editor dad, Horace, who was founding editor of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine.
Final step in this process is to swipe the stickum onto the back of a COA label and stick it onto the bottom front of the flip, being careful to not obstruct the visual of the coin, and to avoid having it go off the bottom edge of the flip. You’ll note that my label specifies that the coin contained therein is authentic, genuine and in every way conforming to the description thereon, with a website to go to if there’s any problem whatever.
Labeling requires taking a bit of care, which adds to the beneficial mental/emotional effect by slowing you down just a bit and forcing you to confront the coin and the flip and the total effect of the coin inside the flip.
STEP THREE: FLAG IT
PRICE & NUMBER YOUR COIN
If you plan to sell more than one coin one time, you’d better think about a numbering system for your coins and for your sales trays.
I use a separate tray or “bin” for each decade of US pennies, for instance, and each denomination of coin gets its very own color of “bin”, red for pennies, gray for two-cent pieces, brown for three-cent nickels, orange for half-dimes, etc.
So now you’ll lay out the flips, orient them so the coin obverse — to civilians, that’d be “the face” — shows rightside up and reads correctly. Now turn them over by flipping them end-over-end VERTICALLY.
Once again, consult the video or get your butt to a workshop to gain mastery on this move, the single most important move (other than the French Drop) you’ll ever learn to make, and that includes anything you learned from watching youtube breakdance vids.
This move is beyond cool dating moves. It is the origin of the word “flip” to mean the cardboard coin holders we all use to keep our coins until they need additional protection and exhibition-style mountings. That’d be for really, really exceptional coins, the kind you’ll probably never even see, let alone own. Don’t give it another thought; there’s plenty of fun in low-end coins, meaning below $100 apiece.
Yes, Virginia, a $99 coin counts as “low-end”. Get used to humiliation when you go to a coin show where several trillion dollars’ worth of coins are being casually traded.
Don’t let the sloppy atmosphere of a trade show fool you into thinking that anything about a coin show is casual. You wouldn’t believe the amount of hardware packed into that tiny space, hence the warning: PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON.
Coin dealers are most often also gold, silver and other bullion traders, which means that they’re used to protecting themselves just as a bank must do. Keep this in mind if you ever get the crazy notion to become a gold-trader.
Sure, you can advertise that you buy gold, but think for a moment. It won’t be just honest folks showing up at your door. With pennies, you’re probably safe, especially with low-grades, like what I deal.
Start getting into silver and gold and see what you get. First of all, the percentage is so tiny that you’d have to do millions of dollars in trade per month to make enough to live on.
Secondly, there’s lots of risk out for very little reward, although the reward is certain. The greater the risk, the less certain the reward will be, which is why when it does happen, it’s a lot more than the favorite horse would pay. Long-shots are gambles, but so is a favorite, just different levels of risk and reward is all.
BACK TO REALITY: FLAG THAT COIN NOW!!!
Ooops, sorry, allowed myself to get carried away there for a moment on the subject of trade shows, something we’ll definitely cover in our ICW live broadcasts each Saturday and Sunday morning at 6:30 A.M. PST. Why that weird time? Because more than half of our circle of friends lives on the other side of the planet, that’s why. Besides which, it’s my best time of day for energy and clarity.
So how do you “flag” a coin?
You’ll stick a round, green or red price tag on the upper left of the flipped back. The reverse of the coin will be showing rightside-up, reading correctly from your viewpoint.
After you’ve price-stickered the entire stack, you’ll turn them all face-up, and arrange them in date and the standard P-D-S mint mark sequence.
Now you will turn them face down, still in arranged sequence, and from front to back, earliest date to latest date, you will number them with two letters and a three-digit number on the lower edge of the back of the flip, as shown in my video and as presented in workshops. Once again, I recommend the video and/or a workshop to gain mastery here and to apply this practice to mental and emotional expansion.
You can now present these ready-for-retail coins anywhere at any time and under pretty much any circumstances, such as retauranting, traveling by public transport, walking up to a receptionist at a major corporation or talking to a friend.
It’s easy to store the flippered coins (flipped coins are coins you bought wholesale and sold retail without getting involved with the coin in any serious way) in a 3-ring binder, which can be plain or fancy, plastic or some sort of exotic leatherette material like Naugahyde. I don’t recommend leather for reasons beyond karmic, involving overdressing beyond your client by showing off with a leather thingy; not a good idea in retail sales!!!
Pages of flips in a binder is preferable to offering coins in a tray. You can easily see if a coin is missing or out of place.
It’s all too easy to use the French Drop to switch flips in mid-air. I demonstrate this “magician’s move” on my video, and every coin dealer and trader who attends a coin show should know what tens of thousands of sleight-of-hand ripoffs do at shows every single day of the year!
Labeling and numbering are repetitive actions, but numbering is interesting in that you will have to remember what number comes next, because you won’t have the previous number directly in sight. Your short-term memory can be tested and improved using this simple technique — again, it’s demonstrated in the coinology pro video which you get free when you attend any coinology workshop, including online attendees. Let me know in plenty of time that you’ll be attending, so I can have the work materials at your home before you need them.
All coinology workshops have specific study and test materials, so you need to make arrangements to attend or at least announce your intention to attend so I have time to assemble and ship your workshop materials to you in plenty of time. I don’t like to get crammed up against a deadline, do you? So be courteous, tell me now, not later, that I need to do this for you.
So you get Mastery and Certainty on three separate and distinct steps in the preparation of coins for the marketplace.
As you see, it isn’t about making money or trading stuff for better stuff or getting ahead or any of that, although all of those results could obtain from the action steps you’re contemplating taking.
What it is about is a way of using your attention in ways you’d never ordinarily do. I have crafted the practice to provoke higher consciousness if you follow the steps exactly as given.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby