What Is Sandy Telling Us? A Talk With John Perkins

Source: http://www.realitysandwich.com/sandy_john_perkins

Ken Jordan

Is Sandy an isolated, freak weather event, as much mainstream media coverage would have you believe, or is it something more? I spoke earlier today with John Perkins, author of the best-selling memoir, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, as well as a number of books about shamanism, including Shapeshifting: Techniques for Global and Personal Transformation. I was hoping to hear a different perspective from someone deeply familiar with indigenous shamanic wisdom. I was not disappointed.

Ken Jordan: Here in Brooklyn we've just experienced tropical storm Sandy. Hopefully, more people are rethinking our society's skewed priorities because of this awful disaster, in which so many lost their homes, their loved ones. I was interested in your perspective, because of your experience with indigenous shamanic teachers in Central and South America, as well as your broad knowledge of U.S. business and politics. Please share some of your thoughts about Sandy.

John Perkins: To start, in 1992 when Andrew hit I lived in South Florida, in North Palm Beach. We weren't hit very hard, because it landed just south of Miami. There was a huge sigh of relief where I lived because we were told that this was a once-in-a-100 years storm. We figured, well, we're safe for the next hundred years. But since then there've been a tremendous number of these storms. Scientists now say these same storms are now once-in-a-10 year storms. They may be even more frequent now. It's obvious over the last 20 years how much things have changed. 

The indigenous people have long been telling us that this is happening. I remember, around the time of Andrew, I led a group of people to visit the Andes. It was for a non-profit I founded called Dream Change. We used to go down and work with shamans, study with them and listen to their wisdom. One time, a woman on the trip asked a shaman woman what we can do to save mother Earth. The shaman responded - well, she laughed first - she said, "Mother Earth isn't in danger. We are, as as species, and so are a lot of other species, but not the Earth. To mother Earth, we're just like fleas. If we get to be too much of a nuisance, she'll just shake us all off."

KJ: You get the feeling that now the shaking is more pronounced.

JP: Exactly. But even at that time, the shaman pointed at the glacier up on the volcano near where she lived in Ecuador, and said that the glaciers are receding. Mother Earth -- Pachamama, she called her -- is twitching. She said the good news is that we understand this, and can respond. It's an exciting time to be alive, where we can actually listen to mother Earth and do something about it. Unfortunately, that was 20 years ago, and we haven't done much. I hope that Sandy will be a threshold event. 

It's interesting that Sandy hit New York, the power center. It impacted the whole North East, which controls so much of global economics and politics. In that way, it's different than hurricanes that hit Florida, the Gulf Coast, or New Orleans. I'm not negating the people that live in those place, but when Wall Street gets hit and is shut down, and when you shut down other huge business establishments, when the corportacracy is hit in its soul by an event like this, the event has a power far greater than when other places are hit. 

KJ: It's almost like mother nature is saying, I've told you this for a while, you had Katrina, now what must I do to get your attention? Target New York and you get people's attention. 

JP: Exactly. Shortly after Irene hit last year, I was in New Hampshire, where I grew up. The area was just devastated, especially Vermont. I've never seen anything like it. But the big power brokers are not in Vermont. This time they've been hit. The nation's most vital subway system was stopped, it's still not running completely. Millions of people without electricity. This is a potent reminder.

KJ: A reminder of what, in your words?

JP: It's a reminder of the power that human beings have -- a power that can be used very positively. Our technology, our wisdom, our commercial systems, can be used to get rid of pollution around the world. We can clean up the polluted rivers, lakes, oceans, air, and land. We can see to it that starving people have means to produce food more efficiently and store it and distribute it, and we can come up with better transportation and energy systems, and better banking systems. Or, we can continue to use that power destructively. 

Either way, we human beings are an extremely powerful species. We're in a unique position. We're the only species that has the ability to make huge changes on this planet. So while the shaman may have been right, that we're not going to destroy Pachamama, mother Earth, we can drastically alter her, at least on the surface, and therefore alter all life forms. We're the only species with that ability. We can do it in a good way, or in a bad way. There's a fine line between the two. The economic development we've had over the past couple of hundred years has probably been good, for the most part. There's a lot of exploitation, but we've had some major advances: getting rid of terrible diseases, living better lifestyles. But we've reached a tipping point where it's gone too far. We need to understand to this. 

I'll make an analogy. When it was introduced, the car was hailed as the end of terrible pollution in major U.S. cities. New York, Boston, Chicago were all inundated with horse manure. The fields around these cities were devoted to growing grains for horses. The horse was becoming a terrible nuisance. They were plowing horse manure into the East River in New York, and into the Charles in Boston. In the winters it was particularly bad. So when the automobile came along, it was regarded as a very clean substitute for horses. But now it's gone too far. Of course, the horse was not a problem in Colonial times, as long as towns were small. But all of these things reach tipping points, and it's important that we recognize there are tipping points. We have to see when they're coming and make changes accordingly. 

KJ: You've written about your experiences bringing people from this part of the world down to South America to work with shamans, connecting them to indigenous traditions, enabling them to experience spirit in a different, deeper way. For an increasing number of people, indigenous wisdom offers hope for a shift in consciousness. Do you see an opening here?

JP: Because of events like Sandy, people will engage more with these aspects of existence that mainstream society tends to ignore. Absolutely, I think this is an opening. I've been taking people to work with indigenous cultures since 1990, and continue to do so. I'm a co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance, and we do over a dozen trips a year. Mainly so the people will learn from these other cultures. They are teaching us a lot. Two major oil companies, one of them is Conoco Phillips, have just dropped out of Peru. They abandoned huge projects because the indigenous people have insisted that they get out. They finally said, "Yeah, I guess we have to."  

Indigenous cultures have much to teach us about sustainability. Incidentally, all of them have prophesized that this is a time when the opportunity for transformation is here. The prophesy of 2012 is just one of many. It's not a doomsday prophesy, like Hollywood leads us to believe. It's a prophesy that says we have the opportunity to change. If we don't, then it could be doomsday. But the opportunity is here, and we need to wake up to it. I'm taking a group to the Mayan people in Guatemala this December, on the big date of December 21, 2012, which is really just a marker. The Mayans tell us that this change has been happening for twenty years, and it will happen for another twenty or thirty years. 

I'd like to share a story that sheds light on this. I was working with the Shuar people, who live deep in the Amazon. I was a Peace Corps volunteer with them back in 1968, and I still go back often. This story took place about five years ago. I was hiking up to the sacred waterfalls with two young Shuar men, warriors. It's a long, hard hike, and we spent two nights up there doing ceremony by the waterfalls. On the third day we returned. 

As we approached the community where we'd begun the trip, the two Shuar men stopped and looked at this little plant beside the trail. They said to me, "This plant's sick. But when we went up three days ago, it wasn't sick." I looked at the plant and it didn't look sick to me. It had some brown leaves, but it didn't look that bad. We were in the Amazon, we'd walked by millions of plants, how did they pick this one out? But in any case, they called a meeting of the elders that night and explained what they saw. Other people stood up and said they had seen similar sick plants on other trails. The meeting lasted most of the night, and there was a lot of discussion. In the end, the decision was made that nothing could be proven, but there was a good possibility that this was a message coming from nature that the trails were being overused. The decision was made to stop using these trails. It was a huge sacrifice for these people. They don't have chainsaws. Cutting trails through the Amazon rainforest is not easy. But they were afraid that if they didn't stop using these trails, there would be a negative impact on their children and grandchildren. They were not willing to take that risk, even though they couldn't be sure that that's what was happening. I was so struck by this. 

A few days later, I was back in the United States driving home from the airport and listening to the radio. The U.S. Congress was debating climate warming. The crux of the debate was that even if climate warming was happening, can we prove that industries are responsible, should we change our regulations regarding climate change and the environment? The decision was "Absolutely not." Because we couldn't prove it. 

I was struck by how this indigenous culture, illiterate -- most of them can't read or write -- the supposedly uncivilized, uneducated people made the right decision, to take care of their  kids. And we, so civilized, so educated, made the wrong decision. I think that says so much about what we have to learn from indigenous cultures, that the right decision is always to protect the future. Even if you don't know for sure, if there's a suspicion that you might be causing problems for future generations, you need to change.

KJ: In your books about shamanism you've written about shapeshifting, which implies that everything is energy, and that energy is continually changing its form. In what way would this crisis call upon us to shapeshift?

JP: That's a beautiful question. It is all energy. We need to shift our energy. Where do we put our energy? We have to remember that all emotions are energy. Sadness is a form of energy, or rather, it generates a form of energy that helps us. Guilt, anger. What's really important is not that we have these feelings, but how we act according to these feelings. Right now we should all feel a little angry at our leaders for having put us into this position, and at ourselves for allowing that to happen. But rather than beating ourselves up with this anger, or going out and breaking windows, let's direct this energy towards really changing. And have fun in that process. I think there's nothing more gratifying in the world than to do things that are going to create a better world for ourselves and our offspring, for future generations. 

So we need to direct our energy toward that shapeshift, to getting out of what I call a death economy, and death politics. Our politics and our economics are oriented toward war, toward ravaging the Earth, digging up the Earth, raping the Earth. Killing trees, killing plants, killing animals. It's really a death economy. We need to move toward a life economy. A life economy says what's important is creating a better world for future generations, and not just of human beings, but of animals and plants too. We need to move into that kind of economic and political system, one that emphasizes cleaning up pollution, making the planet a healthier place for everyone, getting rid of starvation, doing away with extremely archaic transportation systems, and banking systems, and commercial systems. There's so much room for change here. There's room for tremendous growth. It's just growth in a different direction, with a different goal. 

KJ: It's possible to see the energy of Sandy as a catalyst, pushing us to re-shape our consciousness. Would you consider that there's an energetic intention behind "super storms" of this kind? 

JP: I think that's entirely possible. At the risk of being considered a wacko, I would express an indigenous view: the Earth is a living creature, known as Gaia, or Pachamama, as many indigenous people say these days. As the Shuar shaman says, she'll shake if she doesn't like what we're doing, if we're getting to be too much of a nuisance. You could say, if you take that view point, that the Earth, perhaps consciously, is creating these great storms, these floods, droughts and fires, to send us a message. That same indigenous shaman woman said, you know, if we human beings fail, if we vanish from the earth, big deal. Our spirits will still be here. The dinosaurs were a failed experiment. They vanished, but their spirits are still here. That's why we're so fascinated by dinosaurs. They're in us. We all have a reptilian brain at the bottom of our skull. They're here with us. If we humans don't make it, if we really screw it up, as we seem to be doing, big deal. The earth will come up with something new. We'll be a failed experiment. 

But, she said, isn't it exciting to be in a position where we can make sure that we don't fail, where we really listen to the messages? Mother Earth is sending us these messages. Let's listen to them, and let's have a good time with this. Let's take satisfaction in the fact that we're smart enough to hear the warning and then take action to do something about it.

You can listen to this interview on our new YouTube channel, EvolverNetTV, by clicking here or on the video embedded below:

The End Of Their World

Source: http://submedia.tv/stimulator/2012/11/30/the-end-of-their-world/



See also:  The Coming Insurrection

Stone Builders, Mound Builders and the Giants of Ancient America

Source: http://cryptogon.com/



See also: 

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/11/dr-semir-osmanagic-regarding-pyramids_8.html

Undoing the Dogmas of Science: A Talk with Rupert Sheldrake

http://www.realitysandwich.com/undoing_dogmas_rupert_sheldrake

Gabriel D. Roberts

In his explorations for a better understanding of consciousness, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake challenges the mechanistic dogma of contemporary mainstream science.  He has recently released a new book, Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery, which addresses the ideas that have become dogmas in modern scientific thought, exposes their weaknesses, and offers intriguing solutions for a way forward.

Gabriel Roberts: Dr. Sheldrake, you are known for raising the public's awareness about morphic fields. What are they and what's the evidence to support them?

Rupert Sheldrake:  Morphic fields are the fields that organize the shape or form of living organisms, like plants and animals.  They are like the invisible plans that shape them. The idea of morphic genetic fields, or short form shaping fields, was quite well known in biology for a long time, over 90 years. That is not an original point of mine, it's a pretty mainstream idea. The key part of my theory is that there is a kind of memory in the field, and that each organism draws on the collective memory and in turn contributes to it. The evidence for that is the mysterious memory effects that occur in living things.  For example, if you train rats to learn a new maze trip in New York, then rats all around the world should be able to learn the same trick more quickly just because the rats had learned it already in New York. And there is actual evidence from experiments at Harvard, in Australia and in Scotland that this effect really happens.

How do morphic fields releate to the other discoveries you write about in your new book Science Set Free?  In the book, you discuss the Higgs Boson and the significance that it may have. What's the correlation? 

Well this doesn't have much to do with the Higgs Boson, which is a theory in physics about how things get their mass. But what the Higgs Boson does do is remind us of how little we understand about the fundamental nature of matter. After all, the Higgs Boson is supposed to explain why anything has mass. We take for granted the fact that things have weight.  If you buy a pound of fruit, it weighs a pound. We take weight and mass completely for granted. And yet it turns out it's completely unexplained in physics, and depends on this Boson that was detected elusively just a few months ago. Even then it leaves many questions unanswered.

One of the points I make in Science Set Free is that we  actually understand so much less than we usually assume we do. In relation to genes and inheritance, for example, people thought that the genome project would explain the vast majority of heredity.  It turns out to explain only about 5 to 10 percent in most cases, and there is now a crisis in the heart of biology called the "missing heritability problem."  It's not in the genes. I think that's because it's in the morphic resonance of the collective memory I was just speaking about.

That's interesting, because when I read that part of the book I kept thinking of people looking for their keys in the wrong pair of pants.

Yes. I mean frankly, the whole of biology, for decades now, is based on this assumption that it's all molecular and genetic. I share in my bookScience Set Free that hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested on the assumption that this genetic view of inheritance is the whole truth, or almost the whole truth. It turns out it's not, and there's been a vast waste of money -- public and private money -- on this project which has been a disastrous failure, as the Harvard Business school shared in a recently report.  

What kind of reaction have you received to the things you're bringing up? In your book, you lay out what the problems are, how science had turned into dogma, and you offer some solutions.  What are the main scientific presumptions that have been turned into dogmas?

In my book I deal with ten different dogmas.  One is that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same. Another is that nature is mechanical, or machine-like. Another is that heredity is all carried in the genes. These are three of the ten dogmas I address.

I said something just now about heredity and the genes, but take matter and energy, that the total amount is always the same, except at the moment of the Big Bang, when it all appeared from nowhere -- that's the usual assumption. Well, it turns out that physicists have discovered that there is a huge amount of so-called dark matter and dark energy. We don't have a clue what they are, but they now make up 96 percent of reality, and they've been added over the last 30 years. Now if the total amount of matter and energy is always the same, is the total amount of dark matter and dark energy always the same? No one has a clue. Actually, the total amount of dark energy seems to be increasing as the universe expands.

You know, the whole thing is in shambles, really. What we all learned at school and thought of as fixed laws turns out to relate to only to 4% of the matter and energy in the universe. And we don't know the relationship between that 4% with the rest.

I found that in many recent comments about the Higgs, scientists used the word "magic" to suggest, "Well, we put these things in here and just like magic it pops back out!" Which reminded me of the Terence McKenna quote,"Science just asks for one small miracle and then they'll be sure to take care of the rest." That was quite amusing.

That's a great quote of Terence's. Yes, that's it. Science requests, "Give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest." And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it from nothing at a single instant.

That's just a small miracle. 

Yes.

You've experimented a good deal with the sense of being stared at. This sort of thing seems so simple to the average person, and yet a scientific materialist might say, "That's just nonsense." Is this another example of the dogma you refer to? 

One of the ten dogmas I discuss in Science Set Free is that the mind is inside the head. The assumption of materialism is that the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain, therefore it is all inside the head. That means that when you look at somebody, your image of that person is inside your head, it's not out there in any way. So when you  look at somebody, you shouldn't be able to affect them.

Yet almost everybody has the experience of knowing when you are being looked at from behind, when you turn around and someone is looking at you. Or you look at somebody and they turn around.  So that suggests the sense of being stared at is real. It's found all over the world. I've interviewed surveillance officers, private detectives and so forth, and they all take it completely for granted. It's taught in the martial arts; you can train this ability and get better at it. I've done lots of experiments, and so have many other people, that show this is indeed a real phenomenon.

This is no surprise to most people, because they have experienced it and so have most of their friends and family. The phenomenon is well known, yet there has been an almost complete systematic denial of its existence in science for a hundred years because, if the mind is inside the head, it's impossible. It ought to not happen. Therefore the evidence was dismissed as illusory.  There are still organized groups of skeptics who take that line and try and just explain it all away as coincidence.  Yet the science we gathered does show it's real, and if it's real, then something about our mind reaches out to touch what we are looking at.

I think in fact our minds extend far beyond our brains. They're a bit like cell phones, in the sense that cell phones have an electromagnetic field which is inside the phone but which extends far beyond the cell phone. That's why cell phones work, because of this influence that stretches out beyond them. What I'm suggesting is that our minds are a bit like that. Of course they are in the brain, but they stretch out far beyond the brain, far beyond our bodies in the very act of perception. Every time we look at something with an intention, when we have an intention to do something, that intention reaches out. For example, if I have an intention to make a phone call to somebody, my intention precedes me making the call. What often happens is that people start thinking about someone for no apparent reason, then that person calls and they say, "That's funny, I was just thinking about you." I think that's because they pick up the intention before the call is actually made. It's in fact a kind of telepathy.

That's another of the dogmas I talk about in Science Set Free, the dogma that psychic phenomena are illusory. They are impossible because the mind is in the brain and therefore they cannot happen. In fact, they do happen. Telephone telepathy, which again for a hundred years was denied by so called skeptics as just coincidence, turns out to be a real phenomenon. About 80% of the population has experienced it, so it's no surprise to most people.

I have an automated telephone telepathy test running in the US, so I can invite any listener to do it themselves. This is something you can actually try yourself. Go to my website, sheldrake.org, and you'll find the online experiments portal. Simply register  to do the test. You put in your own name and cell phone number, and the cell phone number of two friends or family members. Of course you have to check with them first, because they have to be available to answer the phone. Then the computer picks one of the two people at random and sends a text message. If you were the sender, you would get a text message saying, "This is Rupert's telephone telepathy test, please call him at this LAN line number." So you call the landline number, which is in fact the computer and it puts you on hold. Then the computer rings me, and my cell phone says, "Telephone telepathy test" in the caller ID field.  When I answer, it says "This is your telephone telepathy test. One of your two callers is on the line right now, please guess who it is. Press 1 for Gabriel, Press 2 for Toma." So you make a guess. Then the line opens up and you get to see whether you're right or wrong.  So it's a fun, easy-to-do test that is now running automatically in the United States. These tests are showing above chance results.

You've spoken publicly about shamanism and how shamans enter other realms and bridge the gap between them. Can we apply a scientific analysis to these kinds of phenomena?  

Dr. Sheldrake:  As I was saying, I think that the mind extends far beyond the brain. With every perception it stretches out. In addition, I think we also have access to collective memories. I think that mystical experiences of various kinds, shamanic and otherwise, involve our mind contacting other mental realms or mental realities -- which are not inside other people's brains or even inside animal brains. Well, they are inside of them, but they stretch out beyond them. Psychic abilities like telepathy and mystical experiences have all to do with extensions of the mind, and contacting other minds. Mystical experience, I think, has to do with contacting higher forms of consciousness in the world. I think that the Earth itself has a mind, that the sun has a mind, the whole solar system -- the whole galaxy.  We live in a living world and there are many levels of consciousness.

The materialist worldview, the one I criticize in Science Set Free, says that we live in an unconscious universe -- that matter is made, matter is unconscious.  It says that, for some unknown reason, matter becomes conscious in the human brain, but otherwise the rest of the universe is just unconscious. We are the only conscious beings, except for perhaps some other species of animals, and maybe little green men on other planets.  Materialists claim that we live in a little, unconscious universe. That, I think, is profoundly wrong. We live in a universe that's alive and full of minds and consciousness . That's what people have thought traditionally all over the world. It's what Christians thought in the middle ages, it's what shamans think, it's what Buddhist thinks, what Hindus think. It's what virtually all people think all over the world, except for people who have a materialist education.

In the book, you talk about Francis Crick and the discovery of DNA.  Many people have commented on his use of lysergic acid, and I've wondered how he could have experienced something like LSD and still maintained such a staunch materialist, mechanistic view. 

Obviously some people do, and Crick's one of them. LSD for many people is a really mind-opening experience that shows them some other dimension to consciousness. But if you are a materialist and a committed one, as Crick was -- he was deeply committed.  He was a militant atheist turned into an evangelical materialist all his life, well at least his adult life. It was a huge part of his motivation to try and remove any mystery from life or the universe, to show it's all just science. I suppose that for materialists, if they take any LSD and it works, then they can be amazed by the experience, of course. But then, when they come around and try to think about it, they will say, "Well, that just proves materialism, because it's a chemical molecule and a chemical molecule can have this huge effect on consciousness. Therefore consciousness is just chemical."  You can see how basically an experience induced by LSD, or any other psychedelic, or indeed by any method that induces mystical changes -- experiences, breathing, exercises, fasting or whatever -- one can say, here are these chemical influences on the brain that cause changes in consciousness.

Some materialists will take that as proof of materialism. But what we have to do is recognize that consciousness depends on a kind of interaction between a mental dimension and the brain. Obviously, the brain has something to do with it. Brain damage can lead to a loss of memory, it can lead to unconsciousness, and so forth. Clearly consciousness involves the brain.  But that doesn't prove it's nothing but the brain. If I tinkered with your TV set, I could alter its tuning so it doesn't get some channels and is always stuck on others, but that wouldn't prove that all the programs you are seeing on TV are generated inside the TV set. The effect of LSD and other psychoactive drugs on the brain changes the brain's tuning system so that different kinds of consciousness are accessed. It doesn't prove that consciousness is at all generated inside the brain.

See also: http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/05/april-2012-ghmb-community-interview.html

Modernity Bites

Source: http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/11/modernity-bites.html

By James Howard Kunstler
on November 26, 2012 9:05 AM

There is surely a correspondence between an exhausted culture and a populace devolved so far into mental dullness that it can't recognize its predicament. We don't seem to get how much the industrial production spree of the past 200 years has just plumb worn us out, not to mention the ecosystem we were designed to dwell in. My general sense of things for at least a decade is that we are closing this chapter of history and heading into something smaller, slower, and simpler, and that we could either go there willingly or get dragged there kicking and screaming by circumstances.

It interests me to reflect that the way things are temporarily is the way people define normality, and think things will always be, so that if you are living in a big city like New York where so much remaining wealth is concentrated, and you are dazzled by the whirr and flash of things, including all the pretty young people drilling into their iPhones, you might expect a longer arc to the moment at hand.

Out here in the provinces it's a different story. The exhaustion is palpable. I dropped into the mall at mid-day on Sunday to take the pulse on the ballyhooed post-Thanksgiving ritual shopping frenzy and the place was like a ghost town. The sparse stream of supposed "consumers" had the dazed, beaten-down look of people pushed beyond the edge of some dark threshold, like displaced persons in a low-grade war zone. 

Their behavior seemed ceremonial, though, mere acting-out as opposed to acting. They were not carrying bags with purchases. I saw almost nobody actually shopping, that is, fingering the merchandise, in either the two department stores I passed through or the smaller shops lining the corridors. There were strikingly few clerks in either the big or little retail operations and you got the feeling that these stores were now expected to run on automatic pilot, with a skeleton crew of employees because the margins just aren't there anymore. They are going through the motions of being in business, and when Christmas is over some will not be there anymore. America has had enough, notwithstanding the latest YouTube videos showing crazed mobs fighting over worthless plastic crap at the "Black Friday" WalMart openings elsewhere around the country.

The physical condition of our so-called towns (many of them just "facilities" smeared carelessly over the landscape) is something else. We are not taking care of our property in part because we don't have the money, but also because so much of it is obviously not worth caring about, was not designed and built to be cared for - and anyway, there is the lure of the narcotic flat-screen television within to distract anyone with a fugitive thought of opposing the pervasive entropy of these times. The disgrace of this nation - I mean it quite literally - is now total, from our bodies to everything around us. We are entropy made visible.

Variations on this exhaustion are playing out in other parts of the "advanced" world, Europe and Japan, where all the money-related parts of the modernity machine have gravel in their gears and are grinding into self-destruction. China will get to the same event horizon soon, too, despite the fact that so much of their stuff is brand-new - after all, what use is a set of new super-highways if Brent crude prices remain above $110?
What if we just accept the reality that the industrial spree was a self-limiting adventure and now we have to move on? What do we give up? What do we actually do with our time and effort?

There's a clear trend to give up on the gigantic nation-state, at least in its current corporatist configuration, most recently in Spain with separatists winning this week's election in the northern province of Catalonia. Perhaps greater Spain will now join the defunct entities of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR. There are rumblings of "secession" here in North America now, where a certain moron-inflected cohort favors a replay of the Civil War, largely for sentimental reasons instilled by TV. What Dixieland doesn't seem to grok is the unraveling of its own Sunbelt miracle economy which was, in effect, a suburban development bubble, and which will land them back in a ditch with a sack of turnips like Jeeter Lester's family in Tobacco Road.

Here are some trends we would benefit from getting comfortable with:
Globalism is withering and will end with a whimper (sorry, Tom Friedman). The economy of North America will become much more internally focused in the decades ahead. If you are young, think about getting into the boat business on the continent's magnificent inland waterway system. There will be no more trucking to move stuff around, and at the rate we're going the railroads will never be fixed.

National chain retail will be dying as its economies-of-scale vanish. WalMart and everything like it will be gone. No more Black Friday toy riots. Sorry. If you are young, think about getting into some kind of local business that will play a role in your rebuilt local economic network. There will be plenty of work for you, but not so much new cheap plastic crap to hassle with. Lots of opportunities for the business-minded!
Farming comes back to the center of economic life. Hard to believe, I'm sure, if you live in an iPhone fantasy-land of apps and tweets. Forget all that stupid shit. The electric grid will certainly fail, or at least fail to be reliable enough to matter, in the next couple decades, and the real value in human existence will be using the land to produce a living. Lots of opportunities for young people who like to work outside. Also, some chance of political revolution to expedite changes in land tenure. 

Farewell to the auto age and hello again to real communities. Hard to believe, I'm sure, as you read this in traffic on your iPad, but your commuting days are numbered. Indeed the whole car thing comes to a rather stunningly abrupt halt - though we are certainly doing everything possible now to prop it up. The old Herb Stein formulation will apply here: people do what they can until they can't, and then they don't. The implications in this for how we inhabit the landscape going forward are rather huge. Find a nice small town on a waterway surrounded by farmland and get ready to have a life.

In the meantime, as these circumstances roil in the background, you can be sure that the people running things will campaign strenuously to keep the current set of rackets running. The results will be sad and possibly terrifying. Be brave and seek opportunity in these epochal changes. Modernity has nearly put us out of business. Leave the exhausted enterprise behind and be human for while. Enjoy the time-out from techno-progress that is at hand. It will be something to be grateful for.

A National Geographic special adapted from Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond 

Mankind must go green or die, says Prince Charles

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mankind-must-go-green-or-die-says-prince-charles-8347524.html

Environmental damage left unchecked would be ‘suicide on a grand scale’, Prince warns

The Prince of Wales has warned that mankind is on the brink of “committing suicide on a grand scale” unless urgent progress is made in tackling green issues such as carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, intensive farming and resource depletion.

Adopting uncharacteristically apocalyptic language, the Prince said the world was heading towards a “terrifying point of no return” and that future generations faced an “unimaginable future” on a toxic planet.

In a pre-recorded speech broadcast in acceptance of an lifetime environmental achievement award, the Prince said green views that had once seen him written off as a “crank” were now backed by hard evidence.

He told the gala ceremony for the 7th International Green Awards at Battersea Power Station in London that fossil fuels and supplies of fresh water were under pressure while the stability of weather patterns was threatened and “vast amounts of CO2” were still pumped into the atmosphere. “Humanity and the Earth will soon begin to suffer some very grim consequences,” he said.

“It’s therefore an act of suicide on a grand scale to ride so roughshod over those checks and balances and flout nature’s necessary limits as blatantly as we do.

“The longer we go on ignoring what is already happening and denying what will happen in the future, the more profoundly we condemn our grandchildren and their children to an unbearably toxic and unstable existence. We simply have to turn the tide.”

The Prince has been criticised throughout his life for getting involved in public affairs, writing to ministers and airing his views on contentious subjects ranging from architecture to alternative medicine.

His most controversial intervention came in 2010 when a £3bn scheme to redevelop the Chelsea Royal Barracks was dropped after the Prince lobbied the Prime Minister of Qatar over the sustainability of the project describing it as a “gigantic experiment with the very soul of our city”. The Prince said that the lifetime achievement award was an acknowledgement for what he described as his “rather inadequate efforts” to create change.

“All those years ago when I began to see that this could be so, I found myself labelled with every term that describes a crank,” he said.

“I don’t actually recommend it as a pastime but, extraordinary as it may seem, nowadays … that intuitive feeling has been backed up by a mass of scientific evidence in every possible field confirming that our predominant approach is having a very adverse effect on nature.”

However Dr Benny Peiser, director of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the Prince’s views were still out of step with mainstream thinking.

“He is really a good representative of the environmental movement as such and it is not a personal issue,” he said. But he added that the “extreme alarm and extreme concern” was “over the top and not helpful to the debate”.

“It doesn’t convince any governments or any ministers and in the end it is over the top and won’t be heard.”

See also:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2011/09/birth-of-post-petroleum-human.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/02/decisive-ecological-warfare.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/02/derrick-jensen-and-mike-ruppert.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/02/fight-of-century-by-richard-heinberg.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/07/technological-slavery-collected.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/05/canadian-tar-sands-refused-us-access-so.html

Oliver Stone on the Untold U.S. History from the Atomic Age to Vietnam to Obama’s Drone Wars

Oliver Stone and I share something in common in that we both served with the 25th Infantry Division, U.S. Army, albeit during different eras. He drew from his firsthand experience in Vietnam with his directing of 'Platoon', highly recommended.  I also highly recommend 'JFK'.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, along with the Reichstag Fire, are a few historical antecedents for 9/11. This is how Empires justify themselves, they have to invoke some form of an external existential threat to justify the inequality, the slavery, the absence of civil liberties at home.

Some things never change.

About the bombing of Japan, the intent was to test the technology and serve as a warning to Soviet Russia, which was expected, justifiably (the rest of Industrial Europe was reduced to rubble), to emerge from WW2 as a rival to U.S. hegemony. The Japanese were thoroughly defeated and were readying the surrender terms. All the talk about the necessity of the bombing to reduce U.S. casualties that might have been incurred during a land invasion is pure fabrication.

What also needs to be mentioned is the massive firebombing of Japanese civilians that preceded the dropping of the atomic bombs.

See also: 

Happy...

...Fuck An Indian In The Ass Day!

And fuck the Palestinians in the ass too!

Settler Colonialism style!

For "Freedom and Democracy"!

The indigenous, in this particular instance the Massachusett, helped the English colonists survive an initial harsh winter so that they could turn around and "democratize" them in return. (liberate them from their landbase and the physical realm).

Only 30+ million "democratized".

But that was necessary to allow Corporate Capitalism, Progress, to flourish!

To make the world safe for "Democracy and Freedom"!



And now, the Israelis are democratizing the Palestinians from their landbase with billions of dollars worth of US tax-payer funded armaments!

But no, we need to reduce welfare spending and social programs to address the Empire's massive fiscal deficit! Austerity! Can't have any talk of reducing "Defense" spending. We must keep the world safe for "Freedom and Democracy"!

More Americans Will Use Food Stamps For Thanksgiving This Year Than Ever Before

And the Obomber opined on the War Crimes against Humanity being committed, with full U.S. backing, on the Palestinian civilians in that open air prison, Gaza:

“No country on Earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,” Says Man Who Regularly Bombs Pakistan and Yemen

And now, with no "pristine and uninhabited" land (Columbus' description of the Americas) left to "democratize" and "make safe for Freedom" the grand irony is that this self-destructive culture, whose analogy in Nature could only be cancer, now consumes the land of its most stalwart ideological supporters, the land of McMansions and clown cars, America. This is poetic on multiple levels. Historic in that this is the fate of all empires, and Biological, in that all forms of cancer eventually attack vital organs, brains, livers, kidneys, with the inevitable end result the grisly death of the host, in Petroleum Man's case, the Planet. 

The late Russel Means couldn't have summed up the poetic irony any better. 

"Welcome to the reservation".

If Humanity survives the confluence of crises it is confronted with, it will be because it consciously chooses to design fractal relationship patterns congruent with the laws of the Universe; principally starting with a basal paradigm defined by compassion and empathy.

Eckhart Tolle is right, Industrial Civilization is most certainly an manifestation of our collective ego, and left unrestrained all egos, with insatiable hunger, can and will destroy their host body.

Whether or not Humanity chooses to address its ego problem remains to be seen and is by no means the only possible outcome.

Extinction is our present path.

Maybe Man is an evolutionary dead-end and will be edited out of existence. Either way, and I have said this before, I am not re-incarnating into Human form until it gets its act together. Although there is no such thing as a Utopia...

WE CAN DO WAY BETTER THAN EMPIRE.

Mass Extinction or (r)Evolution of Consciousness? 

Planetary Initiation

Reposted from REALITY SANDWICH

By Daniel Pinchbeck 

The following article presents notes from a speech delivered on Saturday, November 3, at the TedX at the La Calaca Festival in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Last week I was in New York City, my home, for Hurricane Sandy. At 7 pm that night, I walked to my corner and saw the floodwaters rising toward my block. I hurried home, grabbed a few things, and set out for a friend’s house on higher ground. As I was hurrying away, I heard muffled explosions and saw eerie lights in the sky. It was the Con Edison plant blowing up.

Once-in-a-century super-storms and “Frankenstorms” are now annual events, regular occurrences, and quickly growing worse.

Sandy supports what I have been writing and saying for years about this time as one of intense transformation and planetary initiation. I wrote a book and made a film about the Mayan calendar and the year 2012. I believe that we are seeing the fulfillment of prophecy — based on the precise understanding of cosmic cycles held by the ancient cultures of MesoAmerica — in the transformation of planetary culture and consciousness. At the end of the process, we will either have transformed as a species and reached a new level of consciousness, or we will be on our way toward extinction. The choice is ours to make.

In tribal cultures, initiation is the necessary ordeal that turns adolescents into adults through accessing extrasensory perception, visionary states, and by transcending or subduing the ego. Through this process, the initiate becomes a full-fledged member of the tribe and takes responsibility for it.

As we undergo our planetary initiation, we are going to transcend individual ego and local boundaries to identify ourselves with humanity as a whole, becoming one global tribe. We are on the cusp of realizing ourselves as one species organism, in symbiotic relationship with the planetary ecology as a whole. Once we make this leap, we will share resources equitably, adopt cradle to cradle and no waste manufacturing practices, and shift from competition to cooperation as our basic paradigm. We will go from acting like a parasite or a virus on the earth to becoming the earth’s immune system.

As Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman write in Spontaneous Evolution, “Science suggests the next step of human evolution will be marked by awareness that we are all interdependent cells within the super-organism called humanity.”

As an analogy, we can look at the process of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn’t just sprout wings. Its entire body melts down into a biotic goop. The code for the transmutation of the organism is held by a handful of “imaginal cells” that start to propagate as the caterpillar dissolves. Although attacked at first by the dying caterpillar’s immune system, the imaginal cells install the program that produces the butterfly. Our modern civilization is now in the process of melting down and decomposing, and we have to become the imaginal cells engaged in the process of its transmutation.

Climate change is clearly accelerating, as the vast preponderance of climate scientists warned us it would. Glaciologists found that “roughly half of the entire warming between the ice ages and the postglacial world took place in only a decade,” with a temperature increase of 9 degrees during that time. Our continued tinkering runs the risk “of producing a runaway change — the climatic equivalent of a squawk on a sound system,” writes Fred Pierce in With Speed and Violence.

In The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock predicts “an imminent shift of our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell: so hot so deadly, that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.” According to Lovelock, a maximum of 150 million people will be left alive at the end of this century.

Is this true? Do we have a say in what happens? Can we cooperate to co-create a rapidly different outcome?

In nature, we see the sudden emergence of radical new forms at higher levels of complexity during junctures of crisis. According to the principle of emergence, at a certain level of complexity, entirely new forms appear that could not be predicted by the nature of their parts. Can the same thing happen to our global civilization as a whole?

. . .

Initiation is not just a marker or a rite of passage. It appears to have a biological purpose. It activates the higher function of the prefrontal cortex by forcing a “mutation of awareness” — a leap of consciousness. The prefrontal cortex is the most recent brain structure, emerging 40,000 years or so ago. It is the structure that allows us to become aware of awareness, to differentiate qualities, and to use symbols.

When the prefrontal cortex is functioning properly, it does other things as well: 

Self-Consciousness (Awareness of Awareness)
Ethical Judgment
Capacity to Defer Pleasures and Wants
Responsibility for the Community
Transcendence of the Ego (the realization that “The soul is not in the body, but the body is in the soul.”)

Western civilization rejected or lost contact with initiatory practices and disciplines some time ago. We thus failed to create a system that induces higher functioning of the prefrontal cortex. What this means in practice is that the mass of people in modern society can’t rise above their lower impulses and sexual compulsions, or their greed for material things. In fact, consumer society depends upon keeping people fixated in this state. We have made a world for “kidults,” trapped by ego-based desires.

For a human community to endure, initiation is not optional.

The initiation process has a number of stages:

Separation from the Community
Undergoing the Ordeal
Integrating the Vision
Returning to the Tribe: Celebration and Homecoming
Sharing the Knowledge 

I believe that modern humanity is unconsciously bringing about a self-willed cataclysm to force its own transformation. How else do we explain how it is possible to ignore the overwhelming data on climate change, the risk posed by genetically modified organisms, or the obvious danger of nuclear plants, and so on? As an aside, if the Indian Point nuclear reactor was in the direct path of Hurricane Sandy, I wonder if we would have fared any better than Japan. I kind of doubt it.

If enough of us undergo a conscious process of initiation, our civilization may be spared the worst. When we make this inward mutation, we can then use our intelligence, skills, and resources to awaken the others and redirect society as a whole.

Individually, we can use tools like meditation, yoga, vision quests, ayahuasca shamanism, and so on. But these can quickly become new forms of spiritual materialism. We are being called upon to push beyond our comfort zones by sharing what we learn and by sacrificing our ego-based desires for the sake of the planetary community.

Consciousness is revealed, not in words, but in deeds. Seeking to overcome the inertia of modern civilization to bring about its transmutation is a powerful initiatory path for our time.

How can we make this rapid change? We need to apply a design science approach in all areas of life and look at our society from a whole systems approach. We can work both from within and outside of the system to bring about its transformation. Some crucial areas include: 

Media
Business
Economy
Social Technology
Art

1. Media

The primary function of media is not to convey information but to coordinate behavior. The mass media coordinates the behavior of the global multitude. When behavior is learned, it becomes habitual and subconscious.

Mass media, today, functions as as instrument of indoctrination. Media can be used as a tool to liberate rather than dominate the mass mind, and to rapidly alter our species’ behavior patterns, instilling new habits that enhance resilience, community building, and sustainability.

2. Business

The corporation is an artificial life form. The development of the corporate form was a great evolutionary advance for humanity. We created an entity out of legal code, financial data, brand insignias, and ideas and injected it into an artificial game called the stock market. The corporation is the most powerful tool for transforming matter and energy that the human mind has created.

Unfortunately, we programmed it to behave destructively because we set its single-minded goal to maximize profit for shareholders — so that is what it does, monomaniacally. By its nature it must corrupt or evade costly environmental restrictions, and keep people in a state of insatiable desire craving the products it makes, whether plastic toys or anti-depressants.

We need to change the underlying program. We see efforts in this area, such as the B Corporation, which seeks to make companies environmentally and ethically responsible. But that won’t be enough. We also need to change the financial system — the mechanism through which value is exchanged — to support sustainable behavior.

Immature ecosystems are characterized by competition, and mature ones are characterized by cooperation and symbiosis. As we realize our unity as one planetary super-organism, we can reprogram the corporation to be extremely beneficial instead of destructive. Corporations are like nascent organs in the collective body of humanity: an energy company is like the blood in the body, a media company is like the perceptual mechanisms of our collective organism. When we reprogram corporations to be consilient and to help us coexist with the biosphere, they will be a great tool for conscious evolution.

3. Economy

Ultimately, what is capital? Capital is a social agreement. The gigantic hyper-complex cathedral-like edifice of the financial system is designed to hide this simple fact.

The current financial system enforces competition and artificial scarcity through interest and debt. We need to disseminate new tools for exchanging value, complementary currencies, that create different beliefs and behavior patterns. For instance, the economist Bernard Lietaer proposes instituting a global trading currency with a negative interest so it loses value quickly. This would lead to sharing rather than hoarding of the resource when you have it. Local Credit Clearing Houses — consortiums of local manufacturers and service providers — can issue zero interest loans to local enterprises.

Tribal cultures were largely gift economies. Eventually we can return the gift to its centrality. We see this starting to happen on the Internet through websites like Couchsurfing.com.

4. Social Technology

Social networks are proto-political and have extraordinary implications for the future of society. We can design social networks to facilitate cooperation, resource sharing, group decision-making, and direct democracy. Clay Shirky writes, “Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it.” Networks for voluntary participation can replace functions of a centralized government, which will soon be incapacitated by the increase of natural disasters and economic issues in any case.

5. Art

The planetary emergency requires us to become conscious of what we are doing and to take responsibility for the fate of the earth. We will need to shift our belief systems and behavior patterns in order to serve the community of planetary life. Art has a new role in our changing world. Art can provide a model for recreating our society on humane, egalitarian, and regenerative principles. Art is an infinite game where there are no winners or losers. Your enjoyment of a painting or song doesn’t take away from my enjoyment – if anything, it enhances it. A society based on creative expression is the opposite of a Zero Sum game.

Two thoughts from an Imaginal Cell

“Civilization, in the very real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants. This alone promotes real happiness and true contentment.” –Gandhi

In a state of Enlightened Anarchy, “each person will become his own ruler. He will conduct himself in a such a way that his behavior will not hamper the well being of his neighbors. In an ideal state there will be no political institutions and therefore no political power.” –Gandhi

We face the inevitable collapse of our current civilization. Rather than a traumatic meltdown, we can intelligently redesign our current social systems to rapidly advance global civilization toward the ideal state of enlightened anarchy — the rule of all by all. We can instill a new ethos of participation, self-sufficiency, and cooperation in the global multitude. However our time to accomplish this goal is limited.

The first thing that we need to do is think about it.

Living With Contradictions

Reposted from Alternet

Last week I sat down for a telephone conversation with Joseph Chilton Pearce, an author who has had a big influence not only on my work, but on the way I have raised my children. He alerted me early on to the damage that hospital birthing, day care, television, and modern schooling do to the developing brain. A World War Two veteran, he could be considered one of the elders of the human potential movement, although he brings to it a sobriety bordering at times on pessimism. His books include The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Magical Child, and many more. His most recent is The Heart-mind Matrix: How the Heart can Teach the Mind New Ways to Think.

Charles Eisenstein: I just wanted to tell you, your work has had a huge impact on me. 

Joseph Chilton Pearce: Oh, thank you, thank you. It has me too. (Chuckles)

CE: I often feel like things I write are from a place that I haven’t arrived at yet, and that they’re coming from a field, and the writing of those works is what pulls me to that field, even if I’m not there yet when I write it. Do you ever experience that? 

JCP: Very, very much so. Something very similar to it. In fact one of the things I have found most surprising is to pick up my last two or three books and re-read them, and be so surprised at what I had said. I think, my god, where did this come from? It’s as though it was the first time I’ve heard that, whatever the particular thing is. In fact, I think the business of memory…I’ve been wanting to do a paper on memory and duration. I think we need to expand our term “duration” to include an awful lot. Its a great extension and far more creative than our notion of the Akashic Records. And there really is something very similar to the Akashic Records. And that is involved in duration. Duration is really the source of all creativity. What I’ve been calling duration. We have no real term for it….If I could I would certainly try to get that little essay down about creativity and duration and what duration really means.

CE: I have just been looking at your book, Heart-Mind Matrix. I’ve been reading your books for decades now, and there are always two feelings I get that are somewhat contradictory. One is the tremendous possibility and latent potential that is in all of us, and when I tap into that, I have the feeling that everything is possible. On the other hand, there is kind of a feeling of doom around your writing: nature’s plan has gone awry, humanity is degenerating, we have lost the capacities we once had, and these trends are, if anything, accelerating. I wonder, what about you? How do you resolve this contradiction? Do you just live with this contradiction? How do you feel about it now, personally? 

JCP: My feeling for most of my life has been that we have an absolutely unlimited possibility within us, and an equal amount of self-imposed limitations. For every possibility, we have a self-imposed limitation. This is the story of our species; we have infinite potential, and yet we also have incredible impositions just blocking everything. From about ages 5 to 7, I had the idea that the sky was the limit, but then all of a sudden school came along, and with it came this enormous weight of restriction. Again, that’s kind of the general story of our species.

My dear friend and great supporter Michael Mandisa had an essay about just that, infinite potential and self-imposed limitations. All the things that limit us are imposed from within. I’ve mentioned that in states of total suspension of fear and anxiety, I’ve been able to accomplish things that ordinarily would have been totally impossible. That’s gone on for a long time, but in short amounts, because with the great weight and limitation of public opinion and the limitations of within, we backtrack, chicken out. Then, it comes in kind of a sweep and we realize who we really are, what we are really about.

My big concern in recent years has been the living earth, which is just fact now, there’s been too much excellent, excellent research on it to ignore. We have betrayed the earth to the point that all of it is now, little by little, getting out of balance. Not that the earth is out to punish us, it doesn’t have that kind of intelligence, but we’re throwing it so raggedly out of balance that earth is going to be a very difficult place to be in the future. I’m thinking of the mountain top removal, the great, huge damage to the Appalachian mountains in search of cheap coal. There was a big article in one of the major magazines that put together all the damage ever done to this earth, but nothing can equal the damage that’s happening right now to the Southern Appalachians as they remove whole mountains that have seams of coal. We don’t seem to realize that the living earth itself is seriously damaged by all this.

CE: So, do you think the potential or the self-limitation is winning out, or ascendant? 

JCP: Oh, the limitation is winning out. We simply give up on so many of our potentials because of the enormous pressure sustained from the public in general. That seems magnified everywhere I turn. I will finally say that I’m rather pessimistic.

CE: A few years ago, I listened to an interview with one of your elders, Pete Seeger, the singer, and he’s nobody’s fool. He’s no soft liberal; he’s really very radical. He said, on his 90th birthday, “Something is really different now. We’ve turned the corner, and I believe that the future is going to be much, much better.” That kind of stuck with me, and then just last year, I happened to have a conversation with one of his elders, Grace Boggs. She was an elder figure in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960′s. She’s almost 100 now, and I told her about Pete Seeger, and she said, “Oh yes, I agree. I’ve become in the last few years incredibly optimistic.” And again, she’s not somebody who is ignorant of the problems facing our planet and society. The fact that these two great beings were optimistic kind of told me, “Charles, you’re not crazy.” And I wonder if I can somehow transmit that to you, or what do you have to say about it? 

JCP: It all depends on what extent to which we’re looking at this. I’m quite convinced that there will be a saving remnant among us, but its likely that the ranks will be pretty thin. There are certain movements now that cover the entire earth that we’ve never had to face before simply due to technology. There are certain problems our children are having that children have never had before, all because of technology. To my way of thinking, technology has brought with it far, far more damage to things than it has benefits. I’m not a lover of physical science, particle science, any of that stuff. The word itself simply means knowledge, but this knowledge is now based on particle science or material science; its become the new religion of material science. It rules our mind, and this religion has a very, very bad god behind it. Certain patterns of thinking are now being induced electronically over the whole earth.

I like business; I went into business. One of the things I was working on, it used to take quite a bit of time for bad news to get from one country to another. And now suddenly, take for instance 9/11 in this country, when that calamity happened it was immediately known all over the planet, and it caused great, strangely great, concern all over the planet. And all the things that happened with 9/11: the videos of it that kept showing over and over on the news and the reaction of people, even over in Australia. So we had a single negative reaction that affected the entire global population all at once, which is the great power, the tremendous force, that never could have happened before because the news would have taken too long to move from one place to another and would not have carried that force of unanimous action and emotion. There’s a great, huge power that emotional energy carries.

CE: Theoretically it could work for positive emotions too.

JCP: Well, of course. It could, but it just is not doing that, and the only ways in which this unanimous energy is ever positive are in ways that influence us, like in our buying habits, or our voting habits, or things like that.

CE: There is this disastrous trend of separation that is reaching its extreme. For anything to turn or change, it has to fulfill its extreme. The current ideology, the cultural story, that we live in has to finish its telling before a new story can be born. Perhaps the intensification of all the trends you have written about for decades that is happening now with technology, perhaps this intensification is kind of the extreme of yang before it gives birth to yin, and from the breakdown that is generated by all the things you write about — the social breakdown that’s generated from the cut-off of nurturing and child hood play, the environmental breakdown that is caused by our technologies of control — from that breakdown, when things fall apart, then the field is clear for something new to arise. That’s what I see happening.

Sometimes I meet people who, by all rights, should have no access to the more developed functions of mind you write about. From their prenatal experience on, they didn’t have any of it. They weren’t breast-fed, they weren’t held, they missed out on all of it, and their lives were therefore a ruin, but then at some point, something magical happened. They had some kind of spiritual experience, some kind of breakthrough. Despite having been bereft of all that nature intended, they have access to these hidden potentialities anyway. What do you make of that? Because really, I meet people like that all the time. What do you make of that kind of miraculous transformation and healing of all that was lost?

JCP: There’s no way you can ever account for the movement of the spirit. There is a healing spirit always in movement, and there’s no way to account for what can happen in that realm. In fact, I’m just reading about the idiot savant, Kim Peek. He has no left hemisphere at all, only a right hemisphere, no corpus callosum to connect, and as a result he has virtually no physical capacities; he can’t tie his shoes, or do any of that. And yet on the other hand, we find he has done a number of extraordinary things that he otherwise could not have done because the very hemisphere that’s missing would have gotten in the way of what he’s doing. The human being is of a caliber that nothing can really change the basic structure of a species, but I think that we can get it through some rather difficult periods in time. There’s no guarantee that we’re all, as a great marching unit, just going to waltz right through. When I look back on World War II and the unbelievable horrors that went on, and yet, we had incredible minds and incredible people emerge who did magnificent things against overwhelming odds. I take all that into consideration; a saving remnant is probably always there. We don’t make this thing up to begin with; this is our given. Life is given us by an incredible and as yet never really fully named power. There we get into some pretty spiritual aspects. Not religious, but spiritual. The same is true for our capacity as humans, but I don’t think as we are turning our forces now that we’re doing ourselves any good whatsoever. I feel rough times ahead.

CE: I think its undeniable that we have some rough times ahead. My perception is that its precisely these rough times that will liberate our untapped capacities. I’m thinking of one of your books, maybe 2 or 3 books ago, where you wrote about your episode of unconflicted behavior when you were just back from the war. The precipitating event for that episode, during which you were capable of what, from our perspective now, looked like superhuman feats, was receiving a letter that made your world fall apart. Perhaps these rough times we are facing are going to be the equivalent of that letter to people on an individual level where life just stops working, life just falls apart, and all of our operating assumptions, beliefs, and ideologies are revealed as being useless. This can work on a collective level as well. It’s almost like our culture, our civilization even, is receiving a letter like you received when you came back from the war. A letter from the cosmos, a letter from Gaia, a letter that’s not saying “I’m not in love with you anymore,” but is delivering some bad news. Could it be that kind of breakdown, that kind of dissolution, and nothing else, could be what enables us to turn the corner? Maybe not just remnants of us, but maybe this is the event that this millennia long course of separation has been leading up to? 

JCP: Well, of course, that makes for a perfectly good argument.

CE: But you believe it? 

I don’t know. I believe what I experience. I don’t believe much of what I hear. I believe what I experience. I limit my beliefs to that which I have experienced personally. That’s the only safeguard I can see. We had a gentleman here the other day, a neurosurgeon, who had came down with a rare form of spinal meningitis in his 40s. Very rare, especially as an adult, and very few people ever survive it. He was out completely; they kept him alive intravenously and all sorts of different ways. He had no reason for his body to keep going. It was a very strange affair. But after about a week of being out completely, he came to, and he had this incredible, magnificent story to tell of the experience. He had experienced pure, blissful eternity itself, just the most interesting thing you could imagine. The interesting thing was he wanted to tell that story and he loved to tell that story because, I could tell, every time he told that story, he relieved it. The first time I heard that story, I was very flattered because I could not help but think he was the most incredible human I’ve met yet. He’s gone right on, he’s gone right back to his medical job and so on and so forth. When he told me that story I was at a very, very low place, just one of my real rock-bottom times. I was only about half conscious when they brought him by my house. I was just flaked out in a chair and just trying to go along to be polite, but when he started telling his story, I began to see the most incredible play of color I’ve witnessed. And it wasn’t one color coming in from anywhere, it was what was happening inside him. I picked this up from his story; I felt a wave of color flooding into my system from his story. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve known.

CE: I would love to hear that story. 

JCP: Yes, and it occurred to me that he loved to tell it because through telling it, he was reactivating the entire thing. And at the same time, he was holding down his medical duties, and he had a family, but he had this other thing going on right there. To me, it was just wonderful to hear because it showed me the incredible capacities of a human being. Just awesome capacities.

CE: I think really, its going to be the stories that save our species. 

JCP: Oh indeed, there again, its people’s experience and the human capability. I think of my friend Bob Monroe down here. He journeys out of the body. You just can’t read things like that and hold to a narrow image of who we are. We are, again, unlimited potential. I find it all very exciting.

See also: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/11/05/near-and-after-death-experience-is-a-state-of-soul-consciousness-that-is-deepest-within-us-all/

You Can't Say That!

Source: http://www.postcarbon.org/blog-post/1306494-you-can-t-say-that

Posted Nov 14, 2012 by Richard Heinberg




In his November 14 press conference president Obama made a few brief comments about global warming:

“There’s no doubt that for us to take on climate change in a serious way would involve making some tough political choices and understandably, you know, I think right now the American people have been so focused and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth that if the message somehow is that we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anyone’s going to go for that. I won’t go for that. If, on the other hand, we can shape an agenda that says we can create jobs, advance growth, and make a serious dent in climate change and be an international leader, I think that’s something that the American people would support.”

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, almost everything.

Yes, the most effective way to slow climate change is to shrink the economy. That statement is inconvenient as hell, but it’s true. Sure, efficiency and renewable energy can nibble around the edges of our carbon emissions, but just three or four percent economic growth per year would be sufficient to cancel out any gains we’d be likely to achieve with solar panels and electric cars. Understandably, this makes the post-carbon transition a tough sell.

But here’s what the president didn’t say—and it makes all the difference in the world: Real economic growth will be elusive anyway. For the past couple of years we’ve been enjoying a species of faux growth based on massive injections of cash from the Fed and $100 billion a month in Federal deficit spending. Take those away and the anemic residue of growth we’ve been enjoying will go too (which is why so many analysts are frightened of the fiscal cliff). Indeed, economic growth has been waving a long, slow goodbye since 1980: in the past three decades, total debt in the US has expanded at three times the rate of GDP growth. We’ve been hocking our grandkids’ future for a little more spending money today. In recent years, the amount of GDP growth we’ve gotten per dollar in new debt has declined. Whether the debt-for-growth swap ever made sense, the fact is it’s succumbing to the law of diminishing returns.

But it gets worse. The costs of climate change are mounting. With more record droughts and massive storms we’ll see those costs mushrooming to the point where they are equal to or greater than the amount of economic growth the U.S. has been clocking per annum. That’s right, if we decide to forget climate change in order to go for the growth, Mother Nature will make sure whatever growth we do see comes mostly from spending on disaster recovery.

So the real trade-off, the real choice we face, is not between climate protection on one hand and economic growth on the other. It’s between planned economic contraction (with government managing the post-carbon transition through infrastructure investment and useful make-work programs) as a possible but unlikely strategy, and unplanned, unmanaged economic and environmental collapse as our default scenario.

Mainstream environmental organizations don’t want to mention any of this because they don’t want to be pilloried as “anti-growth” or “socialist” by right-wing politicians and powerful free-market think tanks. The president won’t touch it with a forty-foot pole, for the same reasons.

Some of us are under no such constraint. We can tell it like it is—and we might as well do so. What do we have to lose, other than illusions?

Lifting the Veil

more:  http://www.metanoia-films.org/

Apocalypse etymology: Greek, lifting the veil, the unveiling. 

Dr. Cornel West: Obama is a "Black Rockefeller Republican" (Updated Again)

Cornel West describes Obama as a "Black Rockefeller Republican" and goes on noting how President Nixon was more progressive and left leaning than Obama.

It is high past time for a reality check for all of the die-hard Obama supporters.

Wait until he announces the plan to complete the Keystone XL pipeline.

NDAA?

Patriot Act? (he was given the opportunity to let it expire)

Perpetuating the ridiculous official 9/11 conspiracy theory, including taking credit for the assassination of someone who chronically ill, died in 2001?

The entire list is here. 

Cornel West and Tavis Smiley are also right to point out that no-one is talking about the massive poverty in this country. With a federal minimum wage that should be over $10 an hour, a full 1 in 5 on food stamps, a real unemployment rate of around 25%, massive homelessness, including this author, who as a combat veteran that honorably served sleeps in a tent in public parks while there are approximately 25 vacant, rotting homes for every homeless person in this country.

Over a quarter of homeless men are veterans, over 83% of whom having separated under honorable conditions.There are over 20k homeless veterans in Los Angeles alone.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/10/04/va-has-no-money-for-homeless-shelter/

This is deplorable and unsustainable.

The emperor has no clothes.

There is going to be a revolution, the Status-Quo is living on borrowed time. (both figuratively and literally, as in consuming the lives of the future generations)

Concerning the Presidential Election, I'd like to say that after recommending that everyone vote for a 3rd party candidate, preferably either Jill Stein of the Green Party or Rocky Anderson of the Justice party, that I actually voted for one of them but guess what?

I COULDN'T EVEN VOTE. 

Yeah that's right, you need an actual physical address to vote! I jotted in my P.O Box on the voter registration form online and 4 days before the Oct. 22nd cut off date received a notification via physical mail that a P.O. Box isn't acceptable, unfortunately I didn't check my mail until the 25th of Oct.

A COMBAT VETERAN WHO SERVED HONORABLY AND IS NOW HOMELESS HAS NO POLITICAL VOICE. 

...

In indigenous cultures, specifically Native American, those who horded material possessions and engaged in forms of slavery were reviled and eliminated. This relationship we all have with Corporate Capitalism is unnatural. It is why we truly do not enjoy life in this culture. Thought experiment: do you think birds, dolphins, or elephants wake from their sleep with an overwhelming sense of dread that they have to, through sheer will-power, force themselves to action? No, they LOVE LIFE, they naturally enjoy living. Concerning our mammalian relatives, Dolphins cannot survive captivity, and elephants are known to turn on their captors, facts that speak volumes to the inability of Man to survive captivity and our unconscious desire to engineer an unsustainable, fail-prone culture and long-standing rebellious tendencies.

What we have is an extreme minority of the species, gripped with psychosis, perpetuating an insane culture at the detriment of everyone else and all life, solely for their perceived benefit. Perceived in that, they are accumulating perceived forms of material wealth that, as it has been shown, beyond a certain point does not increase their level of satisfaction or happiness, all awhile depriving many if not most others from having even the basic requirements necessary for well-being.

My current situation is a case in point.

Einstein described insanity as doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting a different outcome.

We have signed the petitions.

We have had the peaceful protests.

It is time to respond to the slavery and oppression as though our very survival and well-being hinged upon its elimination, because it does.

FYI, I am not insane nor mentally retarded, but I am most certainly insufficiently programmed. A testament to the durability and self-propagating power of the Dominant Culture, any deviation from it is regarded as insanity or psychosis by its most thoroughly programmed members, yet the culture itself, from a truly objective perspective, is insane and deeply psychotic, suicidal even. This is a suicidal culture unconsciously seeking to facilitate its own demise by destroying the core requirements of life: freedom, a healthy environment, diversity and balance.

Those who, naively, believe they are free within the Dominant Culture would do well to view Human Resources. I will never engage in slavery or allow myself to be enslaved, not in this life, not in the next. I will choose death over slavery every time and will always fight against it.

I have a simple message for all the hard-core, racist, religious fundamentalist mother-fuckers who created and perpetuated a Feudalistic, Medieval Age, Plantation Slavery consciousness embodied in Corporate Capitalism:

KARMA CAN BE A BITCH. 

(As in spiritual karma, you are not doing "God's work", rape isn't "Gods' gift". If God is Love, I am most certain rape and economic slavery are not shining examples of it. )

Noam Chomsky: The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination 

See also: http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-center-cannot-hold-rekindling.html

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who (falsely) believe they are free. -  Johann Wolfgang Von Geothe

Human Resources

More: http://www.metanoia-films.org/

See Also: http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/05/thy-will-be-done-conquest-of-amazon.html

Dr. Semir Osmanagic Regarding Pyramids Found All Over the World

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

See Also: http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2011/11/fingerprints-of-gods.html

George Carlin: The Illusion of Choice

I cannot believe Prop. 37 was repealed.

God help us.

What a bunch of fucking morons.

This truly heralds the arrival of the Idiocracy referred to in the previous post, a society where people have become so dumbed down by Sodium-Fluoride ("It has what plants crave!"), Genetically Modified food, Chemtrails (a possibility but Chemtrails are most likely not-so-secretly being used as a Geo-Engineering response to Anthropogenic Climate Chaos by reflecting solar radiation back into space) and possibly certain immunizations and God knows what else, that they cannot discern fantasy from reality and vote for more "medicine" when given the opportunity.

Napoleon Bonaparte, aware of the power of mis-information, stated that "when it comes to ruling a people, the pen is mightier than the sword", and this dictum has stood the test of time.

The real trick, as Henry Kissinger put it, is getting people to enslave themselves.

If you want to perpetuate extreme inequality and slavery you have to diminish the intelligence of a people.

How do you accomplish this?

You put all manner or chemicals in the environment that are specifically tailored to diminish cognitive capacity while simultaneously promoting them as being beneficial to health. This also has the auxiliary benefit of creating a health crisis that can be capitalized upon. As with the "War on Crime" and the "War on Drugs",  "The War on Cancer" has proven itself extremely profitable to convince people to focus on addressing the symptoms and not the actual causes. This has the added benefit of diverting inherent human tendencies to strive for an improvement in the Human Condition, for without fabricated crises attention would inevitably fall upon the real issues: a permanent war economy, the rise of Fascism, massive inequality, ecological degradation and the threat of extinction.

It is truly amazing if you can actually grasp what is really going on, extremely sophisticated. But that is the thing, MOST HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING. And with cognitive impairment, from a subjective perspective, one doesn't really know that their judgment and critical thinking ability is impaired. Add massive amounts of cultural programming via television and all forms of media from the cradle on and voila, you have a large population of self-policing biological robots at your disposal.



http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/02/numbing-out-of-america-public-apathy.html