Transcribed from a talk delivered by Guy Dauncey

First Unitarian Church of Victoria

April 20, 2008

What’s going on ?

Well good morning everyone, and thank you for inviting me to come and join you here. When I was cycling up Interurban Road to get here today and snow was melting into the creek, which was rushing along by the edge of Interurban, and the fawn lilies were sort of bursting out everywhere… You know we live in such a miraculously beautiful part of the world here.

I must admit if you’re a cyclist, you also notice the incredible garbage along the roadside – the toss-away McDonald’s stuff that’s been thrown out. If you’re a motorist you don’t see that, but if you’re walking or cycling you really see the disgusting garbage that we leave.

So there’s a duality to my theme here, which is the incredible need for us to be grateful, and appreciate the wondrousness of this planet we live on, and to pull a piece out of the prophet Job and say “what a shit-awful mess we’re making of things!”

What a shit awful mess we’re making

Whenever you go before the divine, you’re supposed to bring your heart clear and empty, and one way to do that is to show gratefulness ‘cause it gets the ego out of the way. Another way is to honour sins. I mean there’s a good old-fashioned tradition in the Catholic Church of honouring sins, because if you come and you’re holding onto that and you’re not honouring what you’ve done that’s bad and harmful and wrong, your heart can’t be open to receive grace, to transmit prayer, to be clear in any kind of giving. It’s a precondition of that contact with the divine to have that openness.

Some of the things we do are willfully obvious and blind. Others of them happen at a distance. And the analogy I found myself working with recently for us humans on Planet Earth is very similar to that of a child. When a baby is born, for the first year and a half or year of its life it lives in this world of yes. Its parents give it everything. It gets unconditional attention, love, the breast, the sleep, the food; it’ll do whatever it wants, and we say yes to it all the time.

On Planet Earth, for the last ten thousand years here, ever since we stopped being hunter-gatherers and started being settled agriculturalists, we have taken everything from the Earth. We’ve taken the topsoil, we’ve taken the forests, we dump our waste wherever we want it just as a one year old does and we expect Nature to clean up just as Mother cleans up. That’s the world you expect as a one year old.

And you live in a world of abundance, and that’s how it should be for a one year old! That’s what you need, ‘cause you’re ignorant of the ways of the world. You don’t understand how it all works. You look up at the adult world and it’s a mysterious thing, just as we look up at the stars and it’s a mysterious thing.

Me, Me, Me and Screw You

Then there comes that period when you’re beginning to become a bit more important, as a two year old. And you think “oh, I’m getting good ideas now, and I’ll take that and I’ll take this and I’ll take that” and your parents say “no, no! Put that down!” and “Put that back! No, no, don’t go there! Don’t, watch that!” and all that. That issue comes in and the child is entering the world of no, no, stop, stop; you all know that.

Now if the child is allowed to go on living in a world of yes after it’s crossed the barrier of no, and its temper tantrums are indulged, you’ve got a miserable eighteen years of parenthood coming up! And that child has got a miserable life coming up, because it grows up thinking it can always live in a world of yes. Everyone owes it everything it wants, whether it’s the forest, the water, the land, the fish; it’s entitled to take it.

The grim truth is that of the world’s major large fish – the tuna, the cod, the sharks (which have been around in our oceans for probably some six to eight hundred million years) – in the last fifty years, we’ve eliminated ninety percent of them. And by the year 2015, in about seven years time, a lot of them are going to be extinct. Because our fishing fleets are using modern, fancy equipment, we’ve taken the world of the endless yes to the depths of the ocean.

Land, Forests, Water, Air, Food – we’d grab it all if we could

An analogy I heard is that, if you have the Plains of the Serengeti in Africa, and you took two big tractor-trailer type vehicles and put them a kilometer apart and put a net between them, and you drove across the Plains of the Serengeti and put everything into a great big pile – all the lions, all the antelope, all the trees, the bushes, the shrubs, a big pile – and picked out the ones you wanted and left the rest to rot, that is what we’re doing on the floor of the ocean with our trawling practices.

So that we can fill our shops with fish, and our cat food and our dog food with fish, and stuff like that. That’s what trawlers are doing on the bottom of the ocean, ‘cause we have no legislation at all that guides what happens outside territorial waters.

It’s the same with the forests. (This is the Job in me coming out now.) You know, we’ve taken most of the old-growth forest on Vancouver Island – gone.

We’re treating the atmosphere like it’s just this invisible thing up there. The reality is that our carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels – and we take fossil fuels for granted, even our candles here, unless they’re beeswax…

That flame you’re looking at is ancient sunlight that’s two hundred million years old. Because the oils used to make the candles are the fossilized remains of forests that grew two hundred million ago, that stored sunlight from the sun, locked it up as carbon and became coal and oil and became candles. You’re looking at the sun that shone two hundred million years ago, in the release of that little flame.

Using in a second what took millions of years to form

And whenever we drive a car, that’s the energy we’re using. Every single year, we use a million year’s worth of ancient sunlight! All the heat over a million years is being put back into space.

And the blunt reality of that is that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere, which is absolutely essential for us to have warmth and existence… Mars has no atmosphere, no carbon dioxide; it’s minus one hundred and eighty-three degrees Celsius at night, on Mars, and plus ninety-three Celsius in the daytime. So like, you don’t want to live on Mars in a hurry.

But on Planet Earth we have this wonderful atmosphere, thanks to carbon dioxide and water vapour and methane gasses which create the right temperature.

But you put more carbon dioxide in there – ‘cause you’ve taken the energy over two hundred million years gathered in fossil fuels, and releasing them in two hundred years – you get a rise of CO2 levels from 285 parts per million, which is pre-industrial, to 385 today, to 450 by the year 2030.

The last time the Planet Earth went through the 450 parts per million barrier, (which is when it was cooling down fifty million years ago), at 450 parts per million, Antarctica became ice. So when we go the other way, past 450, Antarctica becomes water again. And there’s enough water locked up in Antarctica for an eighty-meter sea level rise.

Richmond is at sea level. Bangladesh is at sea level. Shanghai is at sea level. I’m talking eighty-meter sea level rise. And that’s within thirty years, that we’ll pass that threshold. It’ll take several hundred years for the melting to take place, of Greenland and Antarctica and stuff like that, but if we don’t change our behaviour that quickly, that’s what is coming for the future of this world.

And the scientists say they can’t get over that threshold point. James Hanson, NASA’s top climate scientist, said the threshold we need to aim for is not 450 parts per million, it’s 300 to 350, which is lower than we are at the moment. So we’ve got to cut back on all our fossil fuel use right now, and find ways to farm differently and forest differently to absorb the carbon back into the soils and the forests. We have a very, very practical, immediate agenda to cease using all fossil fuels by the year 2030.

And it’s possible and doable – I’m not going into all the details ‘cause I have other things I want to share now.

Get together to find group solutions

But one of the very practical things you can do as a church (‘cause your biggest carbon footprint as a group here, without doubt, is your traveling to get here) is to do a benchmark, and say “here’s how many car trips we have in April 2008; let’s reduce that by 20 percent by April 2009, by 40 percent by 2010, by car-sharing.”

By setting up a site on your website, anyone who’s willing to offer a ride or needs a ride can use a Google Map – a little Google Map symbol for everyone who’s willing to offer a ride or can share a ride – you can look at the map and see who lives nearby, click on the button and it tells you the phone number… to sort of collectively reduce that footprint.

And then by doing so, show how every other church in North America can do the same. When we do something innovative, it becomes a torch for everyone else and becomes a beacon for everyone else.

There’s a major conference of the churches in British Columbia happening a week on Monday, “The Fate of the Earth”, in Vancouver, which Campbell’s going to be speaking at, and all the Sikhs and the Christians and the Buddhists and the Muslims and the Jews are all gathering together to look at global climate change. Saying “what do we do, as spiritual congregations?”

Religions Unite

Now moving to the larger theme here, before I put that Job piece aside, ‘cause I can go on… Job can get quite a grip and there’s a lot that Job wants to say. But, if we look at the history of our religions, it’s interesting: almost all of our major religions have a story, which says that the Earth is a terrible place of pain and suffering and woe, and that if we just pray enough, or buy enough indulgences, or confess enough sins or meditate enough, we can escape Earth, and get enlightened and go to Heaven.

It’s a standard story! Even the Hindu faith, when you scratch it hard enough, that’s what it’s saying. The four ages of God, the four ages of Earth: the Golden Age, which degrades to the Silver Age, which degrades to the Bronze Age, which degrades to the Age of Metals, and there’s a great conflagration, a massive terrible disaster and everything gets destroyed and the world is made new again.

These religions were made, you know, two thousand years ago before anyone had any concept of “progress”, of “science”, of “development”, the fact that you can overcome patriarchy, overcome slavery, overcome child labour, overcome misery, overcome all that stuff. And since the Renaissance, we have had a new vision that actually, we can achieve miraculous stuff on this planet. And every generation since the Renaissance has hoped that their children will live on a better Earth. Our parents put up with terrible grinding work so that their children would have better lives.

For the first time now, we’re the first generation where the children are actually going to have a worse life, ecologically and materially speaking, than we are, ‘cause there’ll be less of everything – unless we go through this crisis and change things. Because every crisis is also a crisis of opportunity.

The key piece in here for me is actually our modern understanding of what evolution is all about. Because our science (which is our story to these days), our scientists are really telling us that evolution is a random bunch of genes trying to reproduce and going nowhere, doing nothing. It’s formally and officially random and meaningless. That is the formal, official science of evolution.

The wonder of human potential

My evolutionary theory includes the work or Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, and it’s that the whole of our consciousness is evolving toward a greater divinity. There’s a deeper unfolding, which I call the process of “syntropy”. All of life seeks wholeness. It’s a very profound thought.

Now have you ever found a human who says “I wish I had hemorrhoids!” Or “I wish I had a lousy marriage!” You will never find a human with negative ideals. Why is that? Why are we all programmed with a positive vision, with a hopeful vision? Why is that?

There’s something profound, biologically, because… science is not just about the material world. And very soon this great merging is going to happen, of science and spirituality. When science understands that, yes, consciousness is for real, that consciousness touches the world of the greater wholeness where prayer is operational, where meditation works, where healing is clearly something that works, and that we’ve got to understand that and link these things together.

Abundance is possible for ALL

Then we can start looking at our future. Then we can start thinking – well, if on Planet Earth, we accept the nature of our two-year-old tantrum process, and accept the need for limits, the world of no, and accept that we need to manage the fish carefully… And by the way, we discover that whenever we create a marine reserve which is totally off-limits to fishing, the fish recover very quickly, and you can fish sustainably on the perimeters of the marine reserve for our needs. Not necessarily for our greed, but for our needs.

And when you farm organically, there’s enough food on the whole planet. When you stop eating meat, there’s eight times more food, because every kilogram of beef requires eight kilograms of grain to feed it. There’s no need for any food crisis in the world if we simply stop eating meat. And if you’re worried about the healthiness of that – I’m sixty years old; I’ve been vegetarian for forty years; I ran ten kilometers around Elk Lake this morning and then cycled up here and back.

I’m healthy; I’m strong on a totally vegetarian diet. And I don’t get sick, at all. (Helps being self-employed because no one pays you to get sick, but that’s another story!)

Work with Nature not against her

There’s an abundance available to us, if we cooperate with Nature. An abundance on the material level, and on the spiritual level. It’s like when the two-year-old discovers the joy of cooperation with its parents, you discover “what a wonderful childhood I can have!” What wonderful things we can do together, when we cooperate together.

There’s always fighting, and saying “mine, mine,” grab, grab, from the world of scarcity – when you think there’s not enough, you’ve got to grab it all.

When you look at the world of alternative energy, you say “how do we operate a whole planet with no use of fossil fuels?” I’ve done all the numbers, I’ve examined the whole thing; there’s a thousand times more energy than we need, when you take solar voltaics, solar thermal in the world’s deserts, wind energy, super-efficiency, deep-rocks geothermal energy, tidal energy, hydro power; all done within ecologically appropriate means.

There’s way more energy than we need. Including totally enough to run our vehicles on electricity, as well as to use far more busses and transit and cycling and ride-sharing and stuff like that.

The numbers add up just fine, and there are companies showing that it works out. I mean, Catalyst Paper, the one that runs the pulp mills, has reduced its CO2 emissions by 71 percent since 1990.

There’s a small town of Gussing, in Eastern Austria, where the whole town has reduced its carbon footprint by 93 percent in just fifteen years.

Apply Our Mind by asking HOW DO WE DO IT?

It’s just a matter of applying our mind with a positive approach to say “ok, how do we do it”? How do we systematically stop using carbon fuels, farm organically, forest sustainably, fish sustainably, and live within the limits of our Earth? And then turn our brains around so that instead of seeing the environmental message all the time (which is like “humans are a disaster, we’re a cancer on the Earth, we’ve got to stop doing this, we’ve got to stop doing that”, you know, it’s all negative, negative, negative), see it as a cooperative vision of where we’re going.

Once we get over this two-year-old tantrum crisis and learn to cooperate with Nature, to do green chemistry instead of toxic chemistry, eliminating cancer, and asthma, and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s (all of which come from our relationship to our lousy food and our toxic chemicals getting into our bodies) – all that can be gone! We can get back to healthy living for a good, hundred-year lifespan. We can live within the abundance of Nature.

And then, start asking the fundamental, deeper questions. Like, “ok, now that we’ve got over that crisis, what are we going to go for our next ten million years on Earth”? We’ve been walking around on two legs for seven million years quite successfully; why shouldn’t we have another seven million years? Planet Earth doesn’t go supernova for five billion years!

There’ll be historians around a million years from now, looking at this little crisis we went through with the age of fossil fuels, when we suddenly got the knowledge of science and technology and fossil fuels all at the same time, and what did we do with it? Did we use it to just indulge ourselves on flying to Hawaii, and getting a bigger truck, and a bigger house, bigger television and everything?

Or did we use it to do a transition; as a takeoff process to enable us to become a world entirely in harmony with Nature; as a baseline for a happy childhood? So we’re just about to enter our childhood on Planet Earth. As to what adulthood might mean, that’s so far beyond us, it’s like asking “what might God be?” Why should we begin to know that?

Humans are Phenomenal

But here’s another thought. The fact that every single one of us is alive today, with fingers and eyes and ears, is 100 percent proof that if you go back through your ancestors, right back through the human chain to the primate chain, to every single form of existence there’s been – every single one of your ancestors has had successful nookie and produced a new generation. Without failure! Not a single one of our ancestors failed or else we wouldn’t be here.

We have a genetic heritage that runs back, unbroken, to the very first bacterial cell division. Unbroken! It’s a phenomenal thing to carry in our beings.

The fact that each brain has one trillion – a thousand billion – brain cells in it is because Nature took that long to evolve such an incredible thing. And my belief is that every single step of the road, every cell was conscious. Even the atoms were conscious.

I’ll wind up with a much bigger thought here now, because we’re about to have a whole rediscovery of the integration of consciousness and spirituality into the nature of science, coming out of the interaction with healing and the way we know that healing works on our bodies.

Using our Consciousnes to Change the World

One of the interesting things here is around quantum theory, where it says there are positrons and electrons. Electrons have their causal origin in the past, but positrons have their causal origin in the future.  No one’s got close to finding them yet, but we know they should exist. And the reason we haven’t found them yet is that all consciousness, everything that has consciousness, everything we do has its causal origin in the future, through intention.

Every one of us set an intention to come here, and we acted on it and here we are. Everything we do is set on intention set in the future. And that may be the very nature of consciousness and spirituality in the atom itself, that it’s always moving. That’s how time is created, is we have future intentionality.

When we have negative intentionality we will get pain and suffering and grief.

You have negative thoughts about yourself or about the planet, that’s what you manifest. If you think you can’t win a soccer game, you’ll lose it. To be a beautiful choir, you’ve got to visualize that clear ringing note, those harmonies, and know you can do it.

As a planet, we absolutely have to visualize that clear, ringing, harmonious future, ‘cause in the process of science and evolving consciousness, that’s how it happens. When we can visualize it clearly, we can move toward it and make it happen. If we visualize fear and disaster and things going wrong, we get immobilized!

The people who are systematically denying climate change, the oil companies, are as harmful as the environmental communities who are stuck in negativity and defeat; who say that “the corporations are to blame, the government’s to blame, we can’t do anything”, and feeling hopeless and defeated.

Can you imagine Churchill feeling that way in 1939? I’ve been reading Churchill’s memoirs of the World War II and the analogies are really close. Because in 1939 Hitler had occupied the whole of Europe because no one had done anything about the Rhineland or the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, or about anything else, and let him do that stuff. The home army in Britain didn’t even have a rifle to hold!

The only thing the British had going for them – Hitler wasn’t even invading Britain – the only thing Britain had going for it was an absolute determination that they were not going to put up with that bully thug Hitler. They were not going to let him do that to the world. And there’s a point in Churchill’s memoirs when he first became Prime Minister, after Chamberlain handed over, he said to his Cabinet, “look, we’ve got nothing here apart from our own determination to go the whole distance and get total victory”. And he said in his notes “if I’d said anything different, they’d have tossed me right out the window”, ‘cause his whole Cabinet was so fully behind him.

We’re not quite at that stage yet; we’re in 1935 equivalent when it comes to these global ecological crises. Most people are still in denial, still thinking it’s not going to happen, we don’t need to change. And it’s really, really serious.

And yet out of that seriousness comes a whole new vision. Out of World War II came labour rights, came the welfare state – ‘cause after World War II they tossed Churchill out and brought in the first Labour Prime Minister, Atley, who brought in the welfare state.

So out of this upheaval comes a new vision of who we can be and what we are. And it’s really important not just to leave it to the ecologists who have just a narrow scientific basis and don’t include the spiritual dimension. ‘Cause it’s that understanding of how spirituality works that we get the power of our deepest vision from, and the power of our ability to manifest the beauty in our human interaction with the world that Nature has in its own interaction with the world.

So please ask your transportation committee to get organizing on ride sharing. Tell other people what you’re doing. And hang on to that deep belief that we’re going somewhere amazing on this planet. It’s not just an ecological disaster; this is the bumpy road we’re coming to. And we’re heading toward an amazing, amazing transformation”

Acknowledgements – Check out Guy Dauncey’s blog  Earth Future. This guy has some cool ideas

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Copyright is the result of our requiring money to share our gifts

A friend recently made a statement about  ’thieving’ words as she quoted some powerful words she’d found on another friends page. This thought of ‘thieving’  comes from a generally accepted paradigm that words, like skills and products are owned and can be exchanged for money.

Seeing this word has given rise to some contemplation about copyright and whether messages or indeed any of our gifts should be ‘owned’.   I am beginning to believe that there is no thieving.  This is not easy for I have made a living in the past from selling my words through self-help books.

We crave money because our basic needs aren't met. If they were we could use our gifts as TRUE gifts

Copyright and ownership and thieving are all restrictions and ‘abuses’ stemming from the love of the wrong god – the god of Money instead of loving God the All-One, All-that-is.

We feel guilty at ‘stealing’ another’s words and I too have felt a sense of ‘being robbed’, when my words weren’t credited to me. But that is because we have learned to use our ‘gifts’ as a means to supply us with our needs.

But I sense this is  my ego taking hold and I could learn, as we all could, that our creative gifts, including the good words that we send out  from our own channelling of what is right should not be copyright or used for selfish purposes.  And yet this goes against a paradigm in this world that who writes the words has ownership and that ownership can be used for personal commercial gain.  What a struggle this is…

And it’s a struggle because we need our basic needs to be met in order to survive.

Wouldn’t a truly self-less lover of humanity, and I am struggling with this, as an  ego-bound human, wish only for his or her words to carry the message and know that the message is more important than the messenger.  In other words, our gifts should not be gifts for us to selfishly profit from but  GIFTS TO HUMANITY.  And if our basic needs are met, we can truly use our gifts as gifts.

Breaking the circle of selfish concern

We are trapped in a circle of needing to meet our basic requirements, and having to use our gifts in exchange for ‘money’ in order to purchase those basic needs.   And we are trapped in a a mesmeric trance of believing we need more than the basics in order to be happy.    We learn that we can feel good when we buy a new pair of shoes, when we can purchase a planet ticket or buy gourmet food or anything beyond our basic needs.

Breaking the circle of gifts for money is one of the most challenging things we can do.

We need to break the circle of money, supply basic needs to all and enter the circle of gifts

I therefore declare that all words I put out are free to all to resubmit.  I do not ask for credit, but I do I ask that no one claims these words as their own or uses them to make their own selfish profit, but,  instead, uses them for the good of all.  The free Commons License states that the words may be freely passed on as long as they remain intact.   And even that should not be written in stone.

Sharing with Integrity for the Greater Purpose

If a particular message has been crafted, and changing it may change the original intent then it should remain intact, if the change is used to skew the intent in a way that it is NOT for the greater good.  If someone finds a way to pass on this message by changing the words I have used or using them as a basic jumping off point and by doing that they give greater power to the message, then, I must, if I am considering the greater good, be happy to have this happen.

Telling ourselves the complete Truth.

God knows the truth about us. Do we?

Granny Matthis, who is 97 and strives to be very pure said to me ‘God knows everything about us’  He knows all our transgressions and beyond that he knows when we are being really true. Humans are easily able to justify their actions through deeply seated personal lies that even we don’t recognize.

On our website we state that people may copy or use the words and we ask for a link back to us.  If I am to examine my motives I must recognize that while we would like people to go to our site and read the rest of our words, for we have some well crafted messages I also see a deeper motive.  We have affiliate links to products we like, so I know that my desire for that back-link is partly  based on our need to make the dreaded money.

And, like me, you have to live.   What is wrong here is the way we’ve been taught to ‘make a living’ versus ‘living life’.  We’ve been taught to pursue money to have a life, when living life in our true purpose is all we need to do.  And to do that we need to have our basic needs met.

This leads me to the philosophical contemplation of how I long to have no need to sell anything to make money and also to how I can regulate my acquisitoin of money so that ONLY AS LONG AS THE MONEY SYSTEM STILL EXISTS, I am directing it through who I am, to be for the greater good.

Embracing a simpler life is a small step towards freeing ourselves from the money system

We are in a transition phase from using money as the medium of exchange and all of us being focused on satisfying our own individual needs to a world where our basic needs are met and we can truly offer our gifts as gifts.  We must begin by simplifying our lives and working towards ensuring everyone has the basic simple gifts of life.

So right now I’m having to make do and do the best I can.

Praying for the minimum we need to live our purpose and share our gifts v praying for stuff

God, please give me only what I need to be able to freely share my gifts with the world

When I pray to God for ‘stuff’ I try not to ask for a car or a horse or ten dollars. I try to ask that God will give me enough that I may continue to live on this earth and be able to do the work I was put here to do in relation to the greater good.

This is something I am trying hard to be.. a servant of God of the Greater Force of this Universe… and of course, I have had years of ego training to the contrary.  I am praying that I will continue to develop this way of being.. and it is a struggle.. Life here on earth and living right is not easy… it is part of the evolution of humans into higher purpose non-egoic other-centered entities.

And we get greedy and live from selfish concern because we are biologically driven to have our basic needs supplied.  And in that drive, we’ve lost sight of what ‘basic’ means and struggle to acquire things so that we can feel good.  Yet feeling good should come from living a natural earth connected life.

WHEN WE SUPPLY THE BASICS TO ALL HUMANS – EVERY-ONE’S GIFTS CAN BE TRUE GIFTS

Air, Food, Shelter, Water, Love are humanity's basic needs and rights. Let us strive to achieve that

So how can we allow more and more of us to share our gifts freely?

It brings me to the theory I first learned from the Venus Project material and which is based on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of basic human needs.

Maslow saw that we have a hierarchy of needs and the diagram shows the most necessary at the bottom of the triangle and so on.   Our most necessary need are air to breathe, water and shelter from the elements as well as procreation.  Next in importance is security. We need to know that there will always be a place to lay our head and that we will be safe from predators. Beyond that, as human animals, we need social interaction and love . And beyond that we need esteem, we need to know that our gift is worthwhile and that it contributes to the world and that we have purpose.

If we were all guaranteed basic water, food, shelter and loving human fellowship, then any gifts we have whether it is one for spinning emotive words or building a cob oven, can be just that.. a true gift to the world.

Wow, my conscience and ego are already fighting this.. as I can imagine yours might also.

And this all comes from the one root of belief that dominates most cultures on earth today – we own our gifts and they can be used in exchange for money and thus for our own personal security.  We are all afraid of not having those basic needs as outlined by Maslow.  So we sell ourselves in order to find them.  And we become selfish.  We accumulate for us because we are AFRAID OF NOT HAVING ENOUGH.

What a paradise might we live in if we were so content with the basic needs that giving our gifts was not done out of necessity for those things, but because we are free to give them.. for we no longer need to sell them.

If you knew that you had a place to lay your head that allowed you to sleep well and be fit for the day to come and you had good healthy food and clean water to nourish you with sufficient energy to engage in the world and you knew you had companionship and social interaction… what else do you really need?   How much easier would it be for you to freely share the gifts that you previously sold to get more than you need?

When you take some time for honest inner contemplation you might find that you have been easily able to justify your quest for stuff and money and that you may be telling yourself lies by pretending that you are doing good works, when in fact you are actually satisfying more than your basic needs because you’ve been programmed through fear to think you cannot live without them.

We are in tough transition times and each and every one of us needs to take stock and start telling ourselves the deep honest truth about our own fear and our own greed…

Purpose beyond self and community

If, for example we desire to build an intentional community, we will probably be motivated from a need to meet our own basic needs.  We will come together with that community, in the same way we do with the nuclear family and kin and build a stronghold that will satisfy our community.   But if we don’t take count of the rest of the pattern, those without our walls, we cut ourselves off from the greater purpose of humanity as one unity.

When we can build that community with a focus on meeting our basic needs so that we can facilitate the entire community to release their gifts and that those gifts are used for the purpose of helping those beyond our little clique, then we’ve truly got it.

It’s a long hard road but we won’t survive in loving harmony and recreate the Garden of Eden if we don’t find a way to give all humans what they need to be able to freely share the gifts God gave us.

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Oooh as a revolutionary activist at heart, that got me good and proper.  This morning was filled with profound statements and stories about permaculture, what it is and what it means to us…

Ask most people who aren’t overly familiar with it, they’ll probably tell you it’s about ‘gardening’ and it is. BUT that’s just the surface of this design for life on earth.

Permaculture is a spiritual practice. And I don’t mean that we sit and meditate underneath the canopy trees or worship at the altar of richly mulched soil.   

Permaculture is a design for ethical living and perhaps the only thing that will save this earth from the crap we’ve inflicted on it.   Patricia, one of our lead teachers, suggested we start to call her ‘Earth’ leaving out the ‘the’.  As she pointed out Earth is a living being and deserves to be recognized as such.   

Chuck, our lead teacher with Patricia, and a 35 year-long permaculture activist and passionata, described it as

“An ecological design system for creating regenerative human habitats’.  He said that when he heard politicians using the world ‘sustainability’ he knew it was time to find a new word. Regenerative kind of works for me too.

One by one the teachers stood up and shared their definitions of this thing called permaculture. Each of them were obviously moved deeply by their passion.   I use the word passion a lot.  Passion for the earth, for the sanctity of human life drives these people and I can feel it welling in me as I sit there immersed in it.

Bob told us that yesterday he saw a tree on this land that he could hardly put his arms around. It was a tree that he planted here 20 years ago.    He’d tried living in different communities and somehow found himself back here in Georgia, homesteading 40 acres with his partner Isabel, because, as he put it, his mission was to ‘bring Permaculture to Georgia’.  I’m with you Bob…

Penryn talked of the land she’d inherited in Kentucky and how she’d realized that her mission was to bring this work to Kentucky….

A theme was developing that touched me deeply… we all have a duty to spread the word, at local level, no matter how tough the resistance.  That is what pioneers do… and in their own way, these people are all pioneers.  Again, I feel humbled to be part of this growing movement…

Another description that moved me was the idea of permaculture as a ‘design dance between people and the natural world’ an interaction of flow and motion rhythm, give and take.

Patricia described Permaculture as an ‘umbrella for all her spiritual beliefs’ and that echoed what my husband has been saying for years in reference to his love for the earth first manifest in the woeful cry of a twelve year old writing a poem about his beloved… His warcry is ‘It’s my religion’.   

That about sums it up.  Permaculture is the new religion.  Now I know that some people might consider this ‘sacreligious’ but it makes sense to me.  Eons ago when the principle energy of the world was feminine, Gaia or mother earth was worshipped, adored and taken care of… and then the male energy came in and we entered a long period of earth rape.

I’m not getting at men… it’s just a way of describing the difference between softly treading and harshly marching… And now,I sense that this female energy is emerging again in both men AND women and we are finding a new way to honor Earth.

The big difference now is that we don’t have time to waste dancing naked in the woods and adoring the earth in ceremony, sweet as that may be.  This lady is dying and we gotta get down dirty and give her CPR.  

Which was exactly what we did today in the mulching exercise.  I knew I was in love when I got down on the ground and dug my hands eagerly into the pig manure to spread it on the garden.   There’s something so alive about touching her body… this lady we know as Earth.   She’s so responsive…

We were presented with two young peach trees which had grass growing a little around them.  Various heaps of material were piled up, in the same way professional chefs on TV have those little white bowls of ready chopped ingredients that they just pop into the mix.

First off we learned that turning the earth with tractors or even spades was an absolute no no. It compacts the earth…So all Bob did was stick a pitchfork in here and there to aerate it. 

After that we shovelled on a heap of pig and chicken poop mixed with a bit of straw and other dirt which we spread in a 10ft diameter circle around the little peach tree.  Then we stuck in some blueberries.  And I literally mean, stuck in.  Someone dug a spade into the ground, pulled back the sod and in went the yummy antioxidant cuttings…

After that we covered the entire circle with cardboard [all tape removed] and a discussion ensured about pure cardboard, chinese cardboard, soy printed paper and more… Bottom line is if people are starving a bit of chinese cardboard is better than none!  But we were going for the full on organic thing here so we used pure cardboard.   Every single gap was covered and double covered. This Bermuda Grass is a greedy blighter and will peek it’s head up through even the teeniest gap.

I realized that my rather half hearted effort to ‘mulch’ our bit of growing land was pretty inadequate.. sheets of cardboard and a scattering of yard mowings won’t cut the mustard here.  And our gratitude to the Deputy Sherrif [our neighbor] who cut and turned the land with his huge tractor is somewhat diminished.. but as they say ‘bless them for they know not what they do’ and the generous intention is well appreciated].

The cardboard was watered down and then some..

After that we shoved on heaps of straw, fully covering the cardboard.   Then we planted some irises around the circle of the tree, after Brendan, the lead gardener of the community, had placed some plastic pots around the base of the tree to protect it. 

We used knives, trowlels and whatever was on hand that would cut the cardboard.  Bob showed us how to make a slit in it and just laid the iris with its root on top.. after that, we just shovelled a little bit of soil starter to give it a booster. and tucked it up in a bed of straw.  

Bob reminded us to plant the annual foody stuff where we could reach it. Irises don’t have to be picked but taters and onions do! 

So here we have this little permaculture plot with a peach tree, blueberries and annual such as potatoes and onions.   Seed potatoes grown up North were used.  And we’re doing this in the beginning of February… Tthe temperature outside here in Southern Georgia was up in the late fifties and delightfully warm so God blessed our planting today.

A hole cut in the cardboard, the potato was simply laid on top and covered in straw. Bob assured us that it would be enjoying a period of growth while the cold was still with us and would give around 6 – 10 potatoes per one planted.   

The onions were planted in triangular form… we used green onions… and again a little hole dug, in the cardboard, pop in the onion, shove on some soil starter and spread the straw around it and finally we heaped piles of pecan shells onto the top. Because people come to visit here and like it to look nice, we also placed circles of bricks around the garden.  

A little part of me and all my fellow permaculturists in waiting will be left in this wonderful place.  Perhaps like Bob, we’ll return in twenty years and with tears in our eyes look at the little bit of garden that we were responsible for starting.  

I loved every moment of it, from picking up handfuls of piggy poop to spreading straw..digging holes in cardboard and putting in blueberries.   And as I remarked to one of our group… these things are like weeds down here yet we still pay $3.99 for a pathetic punnet that’s probably travelled a few hundred miles.  Not for long. 

Somehow everyone just mucked in and did their bit… There’s something so satisfying about getting down in the dirt.. and even more exciting for me was that I’d actually done something practical and that for many years down the line,  people will be eating luscious berries from those little shoots that we stuck in ground today.

After that we engaged in the planting of a number of yummy foodstuffs in our stomachs.. including the hog that was slaughtered this week.  Quinoa pilaff, broccoli and cheese, I can’t even remember what we ate only that it was downright divine…Of course Earthy Girl is pretty versed in giving her lovers a great time!!!

The afternoon was taken up with patterns, led by Zev who talked earlier about how nature’s cuisine is different everywhere populated by species that want to be there.   I thought about my husband and his affinity with patterns and wished he could have been there to see it..

I studied something called NLP for many years. NLP is about modelling what works and adopting strategies for success. Permaculture is Nature’s NLP… It takes what works, uses patterning and reapplies it to create edible gardens using strategies tried and tested by nature herself.. But as we learned earlier, this stuff goes way beyond gardening… It truly is a design for living…More of that later.

We in the West are well aware that we won’t be able to live the way we do for much longer.. The Cubans didn’t have a choice. When we embargoed them and Russia collapsed they were left with nothing.   Our bedtime movie was all about how, through dire need, they learned to permaculture the entire country…

But it truly is bedtime now and I’m ready to hit the sack.. and despite the sunshine today it’s pretty cold right now… and tomorrow is another day….

And I leave you with the thought that, as we were told today…

It’s time to put the ‘nature’ back into ‘human nature’.

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Everyone no matter how ‘evil’ they appear has the seed of an epiphany inside them.  If we can find that seed, we can nurture it until it is so strong it just has to burst out.

When that seed bursts out it is an epiphany.

Have you seen the film Ironman?   If u have you’ll get this, and if not here’s a brief story…

The Ironman Epiphany Metaphor

Tony Stark, zillionaire arms manufacturer and techno-electronic genius is an evil, self-centered powermonger.  On a sales trip to the middle east he’s captured by terrorists, using his own weapons, and put to work to build them a weapon.

Instead Stark builds the Ironman suit, breaks out of his prison and returns to the world, determined to use his wealth and power to right the wrongs he perpetrated.   

Tony Stark is a kind of ‘whistleblower’ except that he’s one of those who blows the whistle on himself and thus all his shady colleagues.   There are real ‘Tony Starks’

Iron Man (Ultimate Two-Disc Edition + BD Live)

John Perkins who wrote ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman’ is another self whistle blower who in the process reveals some very ugly things..after having had an epiphany and devoted his life to shamanic teachings and helping peruvian jungle tribes survive and thrive.

Hoodwinked: John Perkins a Former  Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded–and What We Need to Do to Remake Them

John Newton was a powerful slave ship captain who recognizing the folly of his ways becomes a humbly living preacher and from the agonies of his own darkness he creates one of the world’s most stirring pieces of music  ‘Amazing Grace’

We know there’s a Tony Stark [or few] out there waiting for his or her epiphany.   And that’s where Epiphany comes in.

Epiphany – an experiment in seeds, genes and memes

It’s a game of creativity, imagination and people readiing skills.  It’s designed to spread around the world, with everyone coming up with creative epiphany and post epiphany stories for real people who need to have an epiphany.

Here’s how ‘Epiphany’ works

Take one celebrity, politician, industrialist or any really rich and powerful person in today’s arena or in your own community. 

Taking into account their fundamental skills and abilities, create a new role for them in which they fight the evil forces using their power where they can make the most impact for the greater good.

Who would you like to see have an epiphany and howcould they use their power to make an extraordinary difference.  Take the board of directors of NonAmo Satan –  what could they do to feed the world?  What about someone like the most famous bad ass celebrity/politician or the head of an Imafa syndicate or the equivalent of Homer Simpson’s Burns in your community.   [Change names if you need to!!]

How could they turn into superhero es/ines? 

or

Who do you think is right on the edge and how could they be persuaded to take the leap..?

Richard Branson could be on the edge.. he’s reaching out.. but he’s not there yet.   What could he do with his island, his planes, his money busines to really change the world?  You have your own examples of ‘on-the-edge’ celebrities, politicians, who are all doing something but could do masses more..

You can begin to create the future now by doing what we call ‘holding the space for someone to emerge’….

Please share your epiphanies in the comments…

and please pass this on to someone you know.. imagine if we all start thinking of how people can be turned.. and put it out there.. they won’t be able to ignore it..it will niggle at them little by little..

HEIRLOOM SEEDS ARE IN DANGER and so is your freedom

These seeds may be the gold of the future

And if you like what we do and you are thinking of buying seeds for your garden or food forest, please read this information first

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

A community forest garden is a vital cog in the wheel of transition, that we must inevitably spin into. It is a transition from oil based consumption and materialistic lifestyles and emerge into simple satisfaction, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, local sustainability and smaller group inter-dependence. 

There’s no doubt that big changes are pushing their heads above ground and that we must begin now to prepare.  If we do we WILL ride this wave and emerge refreshed and renewed.. landing on new shores of potential. 

To us, as long time observers of the social shifts, it does seem that we, today, are present to a crumbling of ‘what was’ and an emergence into a new way. 

As information spreads and things seem to happen much much more quickly [people can connect, share ideas, start groups, research through the internet] more people are aware.   Ideas are beginning to synchronize like women who live together experiencing their menstrual cycles synching with each other.  

We are being pushed towards finding creative alternatives for our basic needs which are safety, shelter, food, wellness and connection to other from intimate, family, friends, neighbors into the community and beyond.

And it seems that the place to begin is really at grass roots, one or two people, adding more as the idea spreads, neighbor to neighbor, neighbor to community, community to other communities…and our role exists within our individual community yet as part of the entire whole…ain’t that cool!

 Forest Food Gardens are one part of the great web of emergence.  It is one [jolly good]  way of ensuring abundant, localized community  food and wellness.

Natural Building methods and all the variants thereof offer effective, localized, low cost and resource friendly solutions to providing shelter for all

Shared Land in the form of people offering parts of their land for community shelter/food growing spaces knowing that they will be supported and helped by the community as their generosity melts the divide between have’s and have not’s..

Shared Labor in the form of people working on projects and knowing that they will be fed and sheltered as they help create an abundant world for future generations not just for themselves.

Free energy solutions from those who are fascinated by experimenting with solar/wind, magnetic, water and whatever power.  Like this we can step over the  spirallingly expensive grid electricity and gas-fuelled transportation.

Connection to Other and Community  is the spirit that fuels us to come together and pool our resources, ideas and skills. It is also the spirit that connects one community to another and thus springs the spider network of local communities, trading, bartering, sharing, caring helping….

Living v Working to Live.  In living we bypass the ’middle man’.   Instead of going to work for someone to earn ‘money’ to pay for heat, light, food, entertainment, transport and keeping up with ‘them’, we will expend our energy on living.  

We forsee that there will be a shift towards people using their ‘time’ to dig, plant and tend food forests, collect herbs and concoct tinctures, preserve and prepare food, collect wood, tend the fires, build homes, care for the livestock, school the children…..

This alone would consitute a good enough ‘work’ day. The fruit of your labor is the home, the eggs,the warmth, the nutrition, the healing and the children delighting in playing in ‘secret’ hidey hole under the large fruit bushes. 

We are going to have to learn to make do with less, be more independent and self-sustaining, become more hardy and resiliant and come up with creative ways to utilize what we do have in abundance.

And thankfully, something we humans have in abundance is the ability to transcend through adversity via creativity and soar to heights of magnificence and when we pull together.   The evidence is there.

Past Evidence of the Great Human Spirit

A friend’s mother who grew up in the Great Depression of the 30′s said to us the other day ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about the ‘great depression’ and how people had to live – that’s the way we’d always lived.    Rural folk know how to survive, how to adapt, make-do and use the natural resources. And they know how to pull together as a community from taking food to bereaved neighbors to sharing the surplus of their gardens with those less well off.   They had no other choice.  It was live off the land or die!  And they had a sense of caring for their community.

Anyone in the UK who knows someone who is in their 80′s will have heard tales of how they managed in the 40′s WW2.   Food shortages, nightly bombings in big cities, people being made homeless in an instant were all part of their everyday reality.  A woman recalls how living rurally they had lots of orchards. During WW2 her father dug up the orchards, by himself with the help of a neighbor’s son and planted vegetables that he gave away to locals so that they would have fresh food to eat.

Riding the Wave of Transition Together

So how do we begin to energize a transition wave in our community.   And before you get all scared about official stuff, there is none.   One of the pleasures of living in the rural South is that people just do things… they aren’t too fussed about what the officials think.    They don’t get all bogged down in ‘what about the codes’ or ‘you can’t do that’.  

Here are some initial guidelines…

1.  We have to find our bliss, the thing we love doing that fit into this new kind of living

2.  We may need to develop new skills or link together with others to pool our skills

3.  We have to work with the greater good in mind, knowing that we will be taken care of as long as we are genuine and doing the right thing

4.  We can’t just sit around talking, we have to start doing NOW.  We’ve talked a lot over the last year about how it is and what’s going on and now we are acting.  We went out into the world and connected and followed the leads and found the like-minded energies and we asked for connections, help, guidance…and it comes in

5. We have to be prepared for a bumpy ride as we shift gears, but we must also allow ourselves to experience the vision of living a more natural, earth-based, community centred life… and all the joys that it brings.   There really is nothing like good honest labor to have that feeling of being in the moment and alive. 

 The increasing research and talk around global warming, carbon footprints, oil running out aka post-peak oil combined with evident economic challenges [to use a mildly inoffensive word] and price-hikes everywhere is making a pretty LOUD statement.They are the result of people waking up and getting that we can’t go on living the way we do.

Across the globe people are preparing for transition. There’s even official transition sites and examples of what people in communities are doing to create a more earth-based less oil dependent life.

Forest Food Gardens are part of a transition initiative that is designed to help communities become less reliant on oil derivatives which includes all manufactured items, electrical goods, grid lighting and heating, truck/plane/rail transported food and more reliant on producing what they need for themselves within the community.

THIS is NOT THAT

Please don’t start to label this and compare it to any political movement.  It is not that way.  This is NOT that other ‘c’ word.  It is about human challenges, emergence, freedom and working together and finding creative solutions.

We don’t just need to create food, we need to find ways to harness free energy, build affordable or even free shelter, utilize our land for the community, share our labor and the fruits of that collective labor.  And NO this is NOT anything like the com****** word.    That was awful.   That system was heirarchical and worse still hypocritical. This is something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

This can and will become a global initiative.  The global initiative will not be orchestrated at global level.  It will consist of each individual playing the instrument they play best and all coming together in harmony with others to allow community initiatives to unfold.  We like to think of this transition as a harmonic emergence of humans, a return to earth.  H.E.R.E.

More on the topic of Community Transition

Transition 2 – The just do it’s 12 steps to creating a self-organizing community initiative coming soon

How to set an initiative in motion and avoid energy sapping bureaucracy whilst surprizing and then  inspiring the authorities with what you all achieve.

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

What is normal? Are you a mis-fit or a real-fit?

Misfit is the label given by society to those humans who don’t match the criteria for  ‘normal’ behavior, beliefs and desires.

Most so-called ‘normal’ people accept if they are to sport the ‘normal’ badge, they will be required to shape themselves into psychological, career and social boxes that we know deep down are not contoured to the freedom, spontaneity and genuine expression of the individual spirit.

The ‘normal’ illusion versus reality

In other words to become normal will most likely require us to deny or suppress our individual and unique human spirit.  And because this denial and suppression is SO  painful we are driven to opiate ourselves with TV and material goods to stop us becoming neurotic about not being real.    

The powers that be know that. They maintain control by forcing us to slave at the altar of money whilst hypnotically drawing us to all manner of stuff designed specifically to dumb us down.

Imagine all life on earth as being an integral part of a huge multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. All members of the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms are given a specific, unique structure and ‘shape’ that is designed to fit into the puzzle and complete the big picture. The fit is dependent on the unique structure of each part of the system maintaining it’s shape system.

However, the world hasn’t learned to work like that.   We aren’t taught to explore and realize our true role.

Are you trying to squeeze yourself into the wrong slot?

Instead most of us are forced to squeeze ourselves into a distorted shape to fit the illusory big picture thus creating a global distortion. It’s a bit like the ‘ugly’ sister trying in vain to squeeze her foot into the shoe designed uniquely for Cinderella.

When we assume our perfect, unique shape, and step into our own shoes, the entire world operates smoothly in harmonic orchestration, this is what we call REAL-FIT 

How to tell if you’re a real-fit

If you’ve felt like a mis-fit for most of your life, or wondered why the world is so alien to your way of thinking and being; if you sense that society is unjustly organized; that people’s spirit is suppressed and that money as the primary goal has become a self-looping addiction, then you’re probably a REAL-FIT.

You’ve likely refused to squeeze yourself into a shape that you’ve known is NOT you and you’ve paid their price for being real. 

Psychoanalyst and Social commentator, Dr Erich Fromm questioned the definition of normalcy in his paper ‘The Psychology of Normalcy’. He suggested that neurotic symptoms are not a ‘default’ on the part of the individual. Instead, they are a partial rejection of oppressive or alienating society?

So what the frack is considered normal in 21^st century society? 

As you read this list you will likely realize with gratitude just how abnormal [according to today’s standards] yet real [according to universal laws] you are.

 And, you will be reminded once more of the degree of perverted thinking that is gripping the majority of people in our so-called ‘civilized’ society.

In ‘normal’ society all of these behaviors are going on all the time and until now have been commonly accepted as ‘how life is’. 

The Real Mis-Fits

The Real Mis-Fits in the evolving world

Below are some of the things that we have been taught are how life is. They are mostly considered ‘normal’ and acceptable to the majority of society despite the fact that they go against the laws of nature and true humanity.    And most of you reading this, including the authors, will have bought into this normality in some way or another. 

• Land owned and fortressed by a few individuals rather than open and stewarded by all.
• Selfish-concern – I’m all right Jack and frack you, even if you are dying
• Walking past a homeless person, salving your conscience by giving them money yet secretly judging them for being lazy, good for nothings
• Believing that the Earth is an endless resource designed primarily for human consumption
• Signing petitions virtually to save dolphins or end landfills and thinking you’ve done enough
• Buying food and other items in disposable containers yet not repurposing them
• Burning second-hand tires that could be used to produce walls for Earthship houses
• Goods deliberately designed to fail or become obsolete to further profit interests of the manufacturers
• Eating factory farmed meat that is produced with disregard for animal life and poisons us with chemicals and hormones
• Eating food that is full of MSG because it seems to taste nicer
• Microwaving food for speed and ‘efficiency’ while totally destroying all the enzymes in that food
• Kidding ourselves that ‘all-natural’ means healthy when anything from uranium to deadly snake venom can be defined rightfully as ‘natural’.
• Allowing the destruction of rainforests to grow soybean to feed cattle to satisfy our addiction to burgers and other cheap meat products
• Big Corporates paying off law suits out of court with contingent ‘no publicity’ clauses so that they are still free to continue their ‘socially criminal’ activities.
• Justifying pouring huge amounts of money into military activities in the name of securing resources
• Being opiated by the media to the point of mental numbness
• One person driving a six-seat gas guzzling SUV
• Far greater percentage of corporate investment in new weapons technology versus sustainable energy facilities
• Harnessing natural, sustainable energy in the name of ‘green’ yet selling it at great profit to individuals
• People grubbing a living on $1 a day while others spend $$$$ to buy an additional home that they use no more than two or three weeks a year.
• Gated communities to protect the resources of the have’s and have-more’s
• Managed healthcare that is more concerned with making a profit than making you well
• Physicians recommending pharmaceuticals based on material rewards for them versus an untainted concern for what’s best for you
• Greed – more for me even if it means less for ‘them’
• Buying political influence for personal/corporate gain even at the expense of the greater good
• The right-wing rich using illegal immigrants as virtual ‘slave’ labor whilst promoting tougher crackdowns on immigration
• Persuading third world countries with offers of loans they can’t afford to develop huge infrastructure projects, which must be contracted to friends of the administration and result in huge debts and political and military blackmail
• Money printed and sold to the government for profit by a private organization
• Peddling drugs that don’t cure diseases but manage symptoms
• Prisons that punish rather than reform
• Using goods, gadgets and gaud to present a fake view of who you are to the rest of the world
• Expensive insurance that offers sweeping promises of security crippled by small print limitations and company profit policy that dictates paying out as little as possible
• Transference of blame by society to solely individual responsibility with a blind refusal to see our contribution to all of society’s ails
• Easy credit sold via ‘dreams can come true’ hypnotic marketing with a disproportionate mention of the downside
• Protecting corporate profit by preventing generic manufacture of drugs to make them financially available to those in need
• Buying designer and low cost clothes produced in inhumane sweatshops
• Treating workers like slaves because there are 2,000 other hopeful desperates waiting to step into their shoes
• Promoting of earthly resource pillaging such as coal mining in the name of ‘jobs for our people’
• Peddling food that is engineered to taste ‘better’ and thus becoming addictive and poisoning our systems
• Fear and mistrust of strangers – confinement of trust to small nuclear family  rather than embracing wider community
• Being able to win a law suit based on the default of having more money to throw at a lawyer regardless of whether the case is just or not.
• Letting people die on the streets because there is an inadequate welfare or employment system
• Media hypnosis that persuades you to buy things you don’t need but will dumb you down for a little while longer
• Giving up freedom/civil liberties because we’ve been corralled into the fear pen
• Believing the President of the US is the actually running the country
• Allowing Corporates to legally ‘purchase’ self-interest through campaign contributions.
• Your every online activity being open to monitoring by government agencies
• Children stuck indoors for hours playing video games as opposed to running around in the fresh air
• Creating compliance in the face of propaganda generated by ‘managed’  fear of a common enemy.  Nazi Germany used the Jews.  Make your own conclusions about the US
• Dumping litter in the national forest because you can’t afford garbage pick-up
• No-Scavenging signs on local dumps preventing people from taking one person’s discard to repurpose into something someone else can use.
• Marketing that has you sign up for a ‘one month’s free trial’ in the hopes that you’ll forget to cancel
• Snake-oil peddling of ‘get rich without lifting a finger’ schemes
• Bail-outs going to big corporates in the name of bolstering the economy while the taxpayer gets poorer
• Building codes that don’t take into account the viability of naturally built shelter homes.
• Preferring a manicured green bug-free lawn over a brown fertile food patch

And that’s just a few of the things that the majority of people in the Western world consider ‘normal’.

What would you add to the list?  

 As George Bernard Shaw said the world was never changed by reasonable people because it takes an unreasonable person to go against or beyond the ‘norm’.

 As more and more people wake up and begin to join together in movements that buck the system and the ‘norm’ we are on the dawn of a breakthrough.  It is time for the mis-fits to rise up and say as Peter Finch said in the film ‘Network’ way back in ’76.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more”

What can we do?   

Each person has to choose their way or mixture of ways knowing truthfully that this is the best way for them to help turn the rest of the world in the right direction.  Here are a few alternatives

• We can insinuate our ideas into the society, working from within the system under the guise of normalcy, spreading subtle awareness and rallying others to a new way of thinking by making steady progressive changes in our own lives.
• We can step out of society and reject the way it works whilst building a life and community that is more suited to what’s going on and a living example of how it can be.
• We can take legal action, rebel, protest, object to, disobey the rules, get thrown in jail as ways to bring public attention to the cause.
• We can play the system game to accumulate amounts of ‘money energy’ in order to plough it into changing the same system

Each person must choose the way that works for them.. and know that even if others’ methods aren’t right for us, they are our sisters and brothers in a vital time of human evolution and we must find a way to work together or we will fail.    

We are the vanguard. We are the pioneers. We are the guides.

To take this road requires great courage, and some of us may not survive long enough to see the results. The question we must ask ourselves of our every action is

Is this taking me closer to my intent and ultimately is it the right thing to do for the good of all life on earth, now and into the future?

Please add your suggestions in the Comments for real mis-fits. 

IMPORTANT  – HOW PREPARED ARE YOU?   If there is a gas shortage and the power goes out leaving you with no water, refrigeration or heat and stores with empty shelves, how will you survive.     If you are on the end of one of the worlds ever increasing natural disasters how prepared are you? How will you take care of yourself and your family?   Find out here www.alternativeresearchconsortium.org/beprepared.html and www.planetearthship.org

© 2009, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Clare Graves, a research psychologist, mapped the structure of the evolution of human emergence from the time of primitive man into a future beyond his own death. Not only did he explain how we got where we are today, but he offered a logical futuristic look at what will come next.

Graves was no Nostradamus. The ‘predictions’ in the model are not about what will happen but what’s the next logical shift in emergent human coping systems given where we are right now.

Harmonic Emergence is the name we give to what is happening as people evolve through the 3 latter levels of bio-psycho-social shifts that Graves outlined. Here’s a brief lowdown on the Graves’s model and how it can help us understand our current situation and what has to happen for us to truly evolve and emerge into Global Harmony.

Level 1 – Primitive Sole Survival

Once upon a time the earth was populated by primitive man struggling on his own with his mate against the elements on a quest to find, sustenance and shelter, scavenging like wild animals to merely survive. Everyone else was a predator, a competitor or an enemy.

There are still people on this earth who are surviving with this level of coping strategy and some of them are living right here on our streets.

Level 2 – Ritualistic tribal societies

Level 2 of emergence sees our primitive man, motivated by a desire for security and safety, emerging from a solo existence and banding together with others in an interdependent way.

At this level there is a fear of the sacred, spirits, things that are inexplicable and in shared ritual the fears are allayed. The individual contributes his or her skills to the group and feels safe knowing that others will pick him up when he falls, and vice versa.

It is the forming of basic tribe, sharing everything as we learn to trust but with a lack of knowing of how the world works, hence the fear of gods and the unknown.

Level 3 – Rebellion and Me Me Me

Level 3 of emergence is where caring and sharing breaks down where the individuals rise up and question the laws of the tribe or the rules of the family. That individual develops their own identity apart from the tribe and becomes more egotistical, competitive and self centered seeking instant gratification, stuff, land, oil fields. It is the beginning of the ‘private private private’ ‘me me me’ culture.

Level 3 is the culture of ‘greed war’ motivated by a desire to control people and or resources. World War 2 was Hitler’s Greed War. The Iraq War is ours. The level that emerges next, Level 4, is as are all levels of the model, a ‘knock-on’ effect from the previous stage. At Level 4, people band together once again to protect themselves from the rampages of the rape, pillage and greed of Level 3.

Level 4 – Rules, Regulations and Righteousness

Thus we witness the emergence of a ‘rule bound society’ where right and wrong appear crystal clear, the law is respected, extreme levels of behavior are suppressed and frowned upon and people live a structured routine life in their desire to maintain ‘order’ and ‘rightness’. And as it continues order slowly evolves into restriction and rightness becomes righteousness.

This was the kind of psycho-social culture that existed here in America and the UK immediately after World War 2 from the fifties onwards.   At it’s healthiest, level 4 thinking helped people recover from the traumas of war and turbulence by providing a structured cradle-like system.

Level 5 – Pioneer Entrepreneurs to Gordon Gecko Grab it all

As the individual begins to feel more bound and limited by the rules and regulations we see the devleopment of material ambition and entrepreneurship. This emergence often occurs from a situation of abundance where resources are rich,the living is easy and it seems as if the world is there for the taking as long as we are crafty, clever and ambitious enough to get to the party early.

Level 5 consciousness  also represents the invididual break away from the rule-bound group conformist thinking of level 4.

Level 5 consciousness was epitomized in the Reagan/Thatcher era with their ‘free markets’ ‘self motivation’ and survival of the sharpest. Capitalism was [and still is] the religion, profit is the Promised Land and bankers and lawyers are the holy men. And at it’s most unhealthiest, we are overstuffed with greed, extravagance and workaholism and a technology fest of ‘toys’ and ‘gadgets’ where status takes precedent to utility. And this is for the most part the prevalent paradigm that dominates the US today.

At it’s healthiest level 5 is the emergence of individual entrepreneurship and the ability for humans to break out of a paradigm.  And there is hope…

Level 6 – Caring Kindness Our Way

As more and more people start to get that their own riches don’t make them feel any better about world poverty, hunger, poor education and extortionate or non existent health care a more ‘other’ based caring consciousness emerges. This way of thinking slipped in as an anomaly in the hippie era, but sank back into obscurity as it was overtaken by Level 5 More for Me Capitalism.

As we move into a Level 6 consciousness, we notice what devastation we have created in our greed, destroying the natural bounty of the earth. Oceans are polluted from chemical wastes. Food has become toxic from irradiation, chemical fertilizers and genetic modification. The air we breathe is filthy and the water more polluted because we have cut down all our trees. And in our shame we get that we must give back some of what we have taken and so profited from.

Level 6 thinking is what gives birth to free medical clinics, food programs and the ‘green’ movement. The values are more other- considerate and spiritually based. Social responsibility is embraced with almost religious fervor as people rush to start groups, volunteer, give to charity, promote worthy causes, send out petitions and recycle plastic bottles.

We band together with others in internet social groupings such as Facebook and ‘tut-tut’ over films like An Inconvenient Truth, and join and form community and global action groups, like Save the Whales and Replant our forests.  There is a revival in in alternative therapies and spiritual movements. And somewhere in all this ‘peace and love’ we get a little lost..

At it’s unhealthiest the level 6 mentality deteriorates into preciousness about ‘my personal cause’ tendency towards a ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality with those who don’t join their groups or are not as politically correct as they deem proper.

This is the level of consciousness that has been building in small pockets around the USA.  The green  movement has become trendy and people talk about eco-this and eco that.  And that’s good and there is more. Even as level 6 consciousness expands, something else is cooking behind the scenes.

Level 7 – The Lone Spiritual Warrior

This very different kind of consciousness .  Until this level of thinking is reached, all the levels perpetrate a rejection of the previous paradigms.  At level 7 there emerges a recognition of each level of development as a part of a vital puzzle for saving the world. It is at this level that the human is able to generate new thinking and radically different ways of living.

At this level we see the emergence of the lone spiritual warriors, moving away from the pack to boldly go where no man or woman has gone before. Level 7 consciousnesses is emerging in tiny pockets from the current world of chaos where resources so abundant at Level 5 and 6 are rapidly depleting and despite well meaning efforts.

There has been an increase in poverty and depravation as we continue to gather resources for the rich few, leaving the poor poorer than ever while we  blatantly destroy the earth that harbors us… A need to right the imbalances in the current system is coupled with a strong integrity whereby someone at this level would rather go without than compromise or remain silent when they must speak out. Level 7 consciousness is apparent in those brave individuals who right now are daring to expose the horrendous machinations behind the scenes of corrupt political power through docu-info movies like Zeitgeist, Loose Change and more latterly Food Inc.

Through the appreciation of how technology interacts, the ability to hold different viewpoints and see the relationship between unrelated concepts and a fearlessness in approach to the world and it’s challenges  the level 7 consciousness is driven to seek unique and unusual global answers to the problems of our time .

And when the warriors return they begin to evolve into and spread a breed of individual thinking globally aware spiritual warriors, who will lead the way in these troubled times. History tells us that today’s whacko’s are often tomorrows spiritual warriors.

Level 8 – Peaceful, Free Flowing Global Community

These pioneering, innovative, warriors show us new ways of bringing all mankind together in truly global community where there are no boundaries and the land belongs to the people and we are free to roam our planet, treading lightly on her as we enter into a brave new world.

H.E.R.E. – Harmonic Emergence – Return to Earth

Harmonic Emergence is the process of consciousness evolving through the last three levels to true global unity.   And this will be the focus of many awakened people in the next few years. And as we do so we embrace the qualities of the previous paradigms including the ability to survive, create a safe environment, seize opportunities, create and follow system-aware rules, be abundant, get things done accept, develop and encourage others and think out of the box.

Return to Earth – When we return to earth, stripped back to basics, living simply we find the inner quietand groundedness necessary for us to put together all the pieces of the puzzle . Like this we harness the best qualities from each evolutionary level to generate a truly innovative global lifestyle where no one goes without and all life exists in symbiotic relationship to all that is. And like that true harmony reigns in the global tribe of We The People,All of Us, One Mankind

RECOMMENDED BOOK

Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change
is the clearest and most comprehensive reference for this model.  Not only will you understand why you focus on what you focus on but why others are irritating or why you are beyond all that,.. know who you are, accept it and know that you are evolving… knowing this stuff can speed it up.

© 2009 – 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

Our ails are directly due to the fact that we are being sucked into the ‘humanivoros’ black hole of the current monetary system, struggling and mostly failing to ‘keep our heads above water’

Greed and Scarcity – Money by-products

Even if we have money we are often terrified that someday we won’t.   We envy those that have it. We feel sad if we do not.  We lust after it and betray our deep human values for it. We centre our lives on squirreling away resources so that if anything happens we’ll be OK, Jack.   

We keep more than we can ever need as we put up signs saying keep out, private, mine, mine, mine.    We separate ourselves into them and us and we bow to the credo of ‘the survival of those most able to pull in the money and let those who can’t perish’.  

Those of us that have want more and more laws to protect ourselves from those that don’t have whilst finding more and more loopholes so that those that do have don’t have to share it.

Fact is we have become a world of greedy self centred f**kerswho don’t care if they destroy the very world that sustains them as long as they are OK.   We are turning into a pack of Gollums, lusting after our ‘precious’, willing to destroy whatever keeps us from her.

What on Earth went wrong?

 How is it that such awesomely creative, high minded and sophisticated creatures have sunk so low.

We have evolved super potent technological capabilities and nurtured highly developed scientific minds that are capable of researching and generating facilities that can free humans from scarcity, drudge, envy and greed whilst still sustaining and nurturing all life on earth.

Yet the manner in which we use this potency suggests we have devolved to primitive, survival of the fittest, kill or be killed savages.  

 We have devoted most of our creative and innovative energy to finding ways to acquire and protect land, oil reserves and our precious Prada pants.   We go to war with other humans over stuff, resources and money.   We rape and pillage the Earth to provide more stuff, resources and money not caring that we are leaving Gaia half dead and bleeding profusely on the sidewalk of our existence.     

 We have become hardened to anything other than our own selfish needs.

 And in a way we’re not to blame.  For most of our lives, we have been mezmerized by masters of the hypnotic arts.

Deep Hypnosis  

As a hypnotherapist, I, Sunny, understand this process well.   We’ve been asleep in a world of illusion. We’ve  been fed stories of how life is meant to be for so long, so often and so seductively that we utterly believe in them with as much fervor as a muslim believes in the will of allah or fundamental christians believe that jesus is our only savior.   

Hypnosis is very powerful and unbeknown to most of us we have been trapped in  deep and seemingly tender hypnotic trance.  

But the times they are, once again, a changin’ with one big difference since Bob Dylan wrote that song.  Today change is happening exponentially much faster than it was.   

Even as we sleep in arms of the the matrix that feeds on us, we cannot completey switch off from the extensive waves of information and calls to new ways of living that are spreading across the planet.    Everywhere people are coming out of their trance.   In what seems to be a dark world, more and more tiny sparks of illumination are waking us up.    

We are slowly opening our eyes to the illusion and realizing that the way we are living our lives is both crazy, destructive, and utterly illogical.

The Tender Trap

Life is a paradox.   We spend our lives working to make money so we can have a ‘good life’ but we work so hard that we get stressed and are then compelled to spend spend spend to alleviate the stress thereby requiring us to work even harder and … so on.  

We are bombarded daily by mainly poisonous hypnotic thought memes that stealthily penetrate our consciousness on the news and in the raised volume adverts that appear between the syrupy content we are so spellbound by.    

They whisper sweet nothings telling us we will only be happy if we have the latest phone, car or home appliance.  They transport us to a wonder world  where life is oh so perfect as you stroll through life living the illusion that you one of the elite because of what you have.     

They lead you to believe that a $500 pair of shoes will make people sit up, respect and admire you.  And the more you indulge the more dependent your self esteem becomes on having stuff to the point that  you will radically defend your reasons for buying them even if you already have more than enough.  You say ‘it gives me pleasure, they’re better quality, I need retail therapy’… until you are so entranced that you believe it’s OK to spend like that when a billion people live on less than $1 dollar a day.   

They know we are stressed, economically challenged, overworked and depressed and they seduce us in syrupy, gelatinous voices like an over-doting mother ‘Oh sweetie, I know it hurts.  Let mommy make it better’  with Killudan, Diesoonillin, Zombitol and all those other high falutin’ sounding pharma names or credit scheme or dependencies they’re peddling.

And we nod our heads, falling into what sales people call the ‘yes’ set (That’s where the salesperson elicits your needs, getting  you to say ‘yes’ to something enough times so that when they make their move, it appers logical to say ‘yes’ to whatever’s on offer)

We say to ourselves ‘Yes, I am sick’! ‘Yes, I am depressed!’ ‘Yes I’ve got kids to put through college’ and ‘YES! I need help!   And you willingly enter their trance, forgetting that it is not their business to help you but to keep you sick or in debt so that you’ll continue to need their snakeoil.

We  sit in front of the TV feeding on rotten news whilst eating  junk, processed and microwaved food pretending that ‘all natural’ is goo.   We are literally poisoning ourselves in exchange for a moment or few of relief from world realities, the daily grind and our obsessive mind chatter.    

And every day the food industry feeds on our weakness, bombarding us with new offerings of food made tastier, prettier and easier with the help of  MSG, E-numbers, sugars, GMO’s and microwaves.   

Whoopee! Thanks to the deforestation of the Amazon there’s land to raise soy to feed the beef to make a burger that is cheaper than a head of broccoli.  DOH! But as we’re delighting in the burger, we need to wake up to the fact that without that forest, the earth will soon be unfit to sustain man, beef cattle and even that head of broccoli.

In school our children are being peddled lies about the past and how life works as part of the process of training them to conform, compete and function in the current system.    And, like good little soldiers they will emerge with a prolific desire for more money, stuff and power and a readiness to do anything to get it.

And day by day, year by year relentlessly the messages continue to insinuate into our sleepdaze…until a bell goes off..

System Failure Alert – Activate Escape

The good news is that they can’t keep us under for ever.   There are too many alarms going off all over the planet as the system begins to break down.   They are warning signs.  We can wait until it happens or we can wake up now and take action.   

Look at the patterns of the past.   People have been sounding warning signals about all sorts of things. People you know, the alternative researchers, even the traditional news agencies are amongst the few that get it.    Mark these words, in ten years, if we haven’t let go of our rapacious life style, we will not have a  life on earth, let alone a lifestyle.

It’s time to wake up and to the truth

The food, pharma, oil industries and the media are NOT here to help us.  Their disguised strategy is to hypnotise us, damp us down and keep us sick [most produced and processed food makes us sick therefore we need pharma].  Thus the circle turns. 

They addict us to their products thereby supporting a system that makes them very rich leaving us stressed, sick, depressed, angry, fearful and weak.

SO, what has to happen for us to begin to escape the trance, break the evil spell and step into a new way of living?

The Great Escape

• We will begin to escape when we make wellness our goal versus expensive pharmaceutically based health ‘care’. 
• We will begin to escape when we make the generation and delivery of free, sustainable energy a priority versus oil dependency.  
• We will begin to escape when we harness technology, science and nature to generate enough sustainable resources for all versus earth raping war mongering activities.  
• We will begin to escape when we take charge of the education of our children versus subjecting them to someone else’s propaganda
• We will begin to escape when we start making our own investigations versus taking news as reality
• We will begin to escape when we adopt a new attitude to nutrition, home or community grown seasonal food versus processed, junk and microwaveable gunk.  
• We will begin  to escape when we learn to repurpose existing goods versus always acquiring new
• We will begin to escape when we create open sharing community versus gated urban gaols. 
• We will begin to escape when we adopt natural building techniques versus building high rise steel and glass monsters.
• We will begin to escape when we realize that one human or nation is no more important than another versus the us and them sensibility of nationalism
• We will begin to escape when we allow people to share and build on our land versus fencing ourselves in
• We will begin to escape when we make wellness a focus, changing our diets and using natural remedies where possible
• We will begin to escape when we spend more time in close connection to the earth, camping in the forest, learning simple earth-living techniques
• We will begin to escape when we turn off the TV and selectively watch more meaningful movies or go for a walk in the forest
• We will escape as we move from ‘green’ activities to ‘brown living’ Natural, earth based lifestyles, simple and self-sustaining

And above all we will be well on the path to escape when we turn our consciousness outwards sensing ourselves not as an organism struggling for personal survival but as an integral part of the entire universe working symbiotically for the greater good.

Like that we are continually asking ourselves..

 ‘Is this the right thing to do for the greater good versus how it meets my personal needs.

Start Planning Your Escape NOW!

Time is running out.   We have maybe 3 years to begin the exodus and embrace a new way of living before the entire planet is wiped out by us.   Are you ready to move towards the Great Escape?

Help is at Hand

There are internet groups of activists and people all over the planet who have already gone far down the Great Escape Route and they are rallying for all of us. They are there to inform us, help us see another way, teach us how to move from green to brown and lead by example.   

Find out more in this directory of alternative activities and solutions for  creating free and sustainable energy , natural building techniques, land sharing, food production and nutrition, wellness, new forms of community  and viable systems of economy.

Coming Soon –  Life on Earth Part 2 – The Great Escape

Take a peek into our world     www.planetearthship.org

© 2009, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

This book could be our bible.   

The Last American Man

Excerpt from the book The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert

Eustace Conway created Turtle Island—the thousand-acre perfect cosmos of his own design—the ultimate teaching facility, a university-in-the-raw, a wild monastery. Because, after years of studying primitive societies and after countless experience of personal transformation within the wilderness, Eustace has formed a mighty dogma.

He is convinced that the only way modern America can begin to reverse its inherent corruption and greed and malaise is by feeling the rapture that comes from face-to-face encounters with what he calls “the high art and godliness of nature.”

It is his belief that we Americans, through our constant striving for convenience, are eradicating the raucous and edifying beauty of our true environment and replacing that beauty with a safe but completely faux “environment.”

What Eustace sees is a society steadily undoing itself, it might be argued, by its own over-resourcefulness. Clever, ambitious, and always in search of greater efficiency, we Americans have, in two short centuries, created a world of push-button, round-the-clock-comfort for ourselves.

The basic needs of humanity—food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, transportation, and even sexual pleasure—no longer need to be personally labored for or ritualized or even understood. All these things are available to us now for mere cash. Or credit. Which means that nobody needs to know how to do anything anymore, except that one narrow skill that will earn enough money to pay for the convenience and services of modern living. 

But in replacing every challenge with a shortcut we seem to have lost something, and Eustace isn’t the only person feeling that loss. We are an increasingly depressed and anxious people—and not for nothing. Arguably, all these modern conveniences have been adopted to save us time. But time for what?

Having created a system that tends to our every need without causing us undue exertion or labor, we can now fill these hours with…?

Well, for one thing, television—loads of it, hours of it, days and weeks and months of it in every American’s lifetime.

  Also, work. Americans spend more and more hours at their jobs every year; in almost every household both parents (if there are two parents) must work full-time outside the home to pay for all these goods and services. Which means a lot of commuting. Which means a lot of stress. Less connection to family and community.

The Last American Man

Fast-food meals eaten in cars on the way to and from work. Poorer health all the time. (America is certainly the fattest and most inactive society in history, and we’re packing on more pounds every year. We seem to have the same disregard for our bodies as we do for our other natural resources; if a vital organ breaks down, after all, we always believe we can just buy a new one. Somebody else will take care of it.

Same way we believe that somebody else will plant another forest someday if we use this one up. That is, if we even notice that we’re using it up.) 

There’s an arrogance to such an attitude, but—more than that—there’s a profound alienation. We have fallen out of rhythm. It’s this simple.

If we don’t cultivate our own food supply anymore, do we need to pay attention to the idea of say, seasons? Is there any difference between winter and summer if we can eat strawberries every day?

If we can keep the temperature of our house set at a comfortable 70 degrees all year, do we need to notice that fall is coming? Do we have to prepare for that? Respect that? Much less contemplate what it means for our own mortality that things die in nature every autumn? And when spring does come round again, do we need to notice that rebirth? Do we need to take a moment and maybe thank anybody for that? Celebrate it?

If we never leave our house except to drive to work, do we need to be even remotely aware of this powerful, humbling, extraordinary, and eternal life force that surges and ebbs around us all the time?

Apparently not. Because we seem to have stopped paying attention. Or this is what Eustace Conway perceives when he looks around America. He sees a people who have fallen out of step with the natural cycles that have defined humanity’s existence and culture for milennia.

We are not alien visitors to the planet, after all, but natural residents and relatives of every living entity here. This earth is where we came from and where we’ll all end up when we die, and, during the interim, it is our home.

And there’s no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don’t at least marginally understand our home. That is the understanding we need to put our lives in some bigger metaphysical context.

Instead, Eustace sees a chilling sight—citizenry so removed from the rhythms of nature that we march through our lives as mere sleep-walkers, blinded, deafened, and senseless. Robotically existing in sterilized surroundings that numb the mind, weaken the body, and atrophy the soul.

But Eustace believes we can get our humanity back.

When we contemplate the venerable age of a mountain, we get it.

When we observe the superb order of water and sunlight, we get it.

When we experience firsthand the brutal poetry of the food chain, we get it.

When we are mindful of every nuance of our natural world, we finally get the picture: that we are each given only one dazzling moment of life here on Earth, and we must stand before that reality both humbled and elevated, subject to every law of our universe and grateful for our brief but intrinsic participation within it.

Granted, this is not a radical concept. Every environmentalist in the world operates on a philosophy based on these same hypotheses. But what sets Eustace Conway apart from every other environmentalist is the peculiar confidence he’s had since earliest childhood that it is his personal destiny to snap his countrymen out of their sleepwalk.

He has always believed that he alone has this power and this responsibility, that he was to be the vessel of change. One man, one vision.

We believe that everyone who has woken up, no matter how little, has a mission to inform others, to illuminate them and to inspire them to explore and re-establish their reconnection to earth.

If this inspires you you may be inspired by reading The Last American Man.

© 2009, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

If you think you’re enlightened you’re likely living an illusion!

What happens when you consider enlightenment not as a noun or something static, but as a movement, a verb, an ongoing process of waking up to reality and shedding the illusory defenses and pretences of our personalities?

The Rocky Road to Enlightenment is our path from life to death. Some of us live our entire lives in an illusion, unaware of anything other than the goals and desires of the materialistic illusory world.

Waking up – there’s no going back

And then something happens, a small spark, an awareness, an illumination. This is usually generated by a tiny nagging thought that occurs from time to time saying ‘there must be more’ or asking ‘this can’t be all there is’.

It can be sparked by something someone says, a line we read in a book or a blog like this or by an unexpected kindness or action on the part of someone else. The only real given is that once woken we cannot go back to sleep again.

And believe us, you will want to go back or you will know what we are talking about!

Waking up to reality is similar to the process of Neo taking the Red Pill and getting that life outside the Matrix is not so shiny shiny. We are so programmed to seek the illusion, and to draw comfort from it yet the illusion keeps us in a zombie like dream.

On the other hand living in reality allows us to be FULLY ALIVE.

How does the journey work?

Once started along the road, we will experience a series of small illuminations, often triggered by a ‘dark’ experience. And if we are waking up and aware then we recognize that frequently the darker and more traumatic the experience, the greater the illumination available to us. These illuminations become pathfinders, points of light that show us the next steps in our journey.

This journey is not about thinking spiritually or having a vast knowledge of spiritual texts or knowing the ‘how tos’. It is about having real experiences that face us with our egoic defenses and pretences and wake us up and engender a resolve to be and do differently. It’s about recognizing that these experiences, however uncomfortable we translate them to be, are showing us what needs to be addressed.

It is about seeing how we stop ourselves from more fully participating in honest and open relationship with our own thoughts, personality and subsequently with other people. It is about catching ourselves if we can and congratulating ourselves each time we do. It is about being humble, admitting our part in the game and respecting the other for facilitating in us this illumination, no matter how harshly it appears to cut you to the quick.

The steps are small, the path is uniquely yours and the road is eternal. Knowing how it works enables us to keep on track in the darkest of times.

Ram Dass’s Realizations

Ram Dass [Professor Richard Alpert] in ‘Be Here Now’ his classic book, gives some useful pointers to the process of spiritual waking up.

Ram Dass was a big spiritual guru in the 60’s and subsequently suffered a stroke in his sixties, prompting him to rewrite his latest book ‘Still Here’. The book offers profound hindsight into his own process and is endearing in the way Dass observes himself and his egoic moves with humor. What’s really cool and a lesson to all of us is that after the stroke, Dass realized his journey of spiritual growth was far from done.

The topography of the road to enlightenment [adapted from Ram Dass]

YOU ARE NOT ENLIGHTENED
Each stage one can label must pass away. If you think you’re enlightened, you’re probably not.

IT GETS WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER
The initial euphoria at waking up will often be followed by and leave a sense of loss or even a despair that may seem like the Dark Night of the Soul.

THE ROAD IS ROCKY
This process is NOT smooth. Each new height is followed by a new low and understanding this makes it much easier to ride the aves.

GLARING IMPERFECTIONS
As you get illuminations so your imperfections seem more glaring. Relax. You’re not getting more stuck in the illusion, you’re just more aware of it. But also take heart in the fact that, as the demons get fiercer the illumination get Sbrighter. Think of if as the sweet that comes after the medicine.

FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT
In the beginning you may see spiritual practice as something you do, like meditating for 40 minutes or giving to the poor or thinking abundantly. In time you realize mindfulness, being present and experiencing the moment IS spiritual practice. You can experience illumination as you pour a cup of coffee, wash the dishes or fire an employee. There is a Zen saying, “Before Enlightenment chop wood carry water, after Enlightenment, chop wood carry water.

THE ‘I’M SO SPIRITUAL’ TRAP
At some stage when you think you are being all good and spiritual you will get caught up in how ‘spiritual’ you are. In India this is called the Chain of Gold. The chain traps you in an inflated illusion of ‘oh I’m so spiritual’ that only exists up your own backside. We have to give up the illusion of total purity and holier than thou if we are ever to make progress.

AM I THERE YET?
Early in the journey you will I be probably wondering on a regular basis how long it will take or whether you have got it yet. and be saying to yourself ‘Oh if I do this course or read this book or meditate for x hours a day, I’ll get spiritual in two, three or four years’ As you progress you realize that where you are going is ‘here’ and you will arrive ‘now’.

LAUGH AT YOURSELF
You will also start to get really serious about it all. Give it up. A cosmic sense of humor about your predicament, your resistance and your journey is an absolute requirement

NOTHING’S HAPPENING – IS THIS SPIRITUALITY?
At some phase you will experience a plateau, a sense that nothing is happening, in which case just continue chopping wood and carrying water or whatever equivalent you have in your life. Sweep floor, make beds. Fix car, drive to work. Write blog! Just keep on doing whatever YOUR Zen is!

INSTANT ENLIGHTENMENT – NOT!
You may have been led to believe that enlightenment will come upon you like the flash that hit St Paul on the road to Damascus that your halo will sprout and everyone will notice your spiritual energy. Bullshit. This is very very rare. Most frequently it is just a slow peeling of layers, like an onion, only slower!

IN AND OUT
At times you will experience not just the up and down process but the ‘in and out’. You will feel the need to go inside and spend time examining and experiencing your own inner processes and sometimes getting just how yukky it really is in there [and how nice it could be]. And you will also feel the need to be out in the world, connecting with and experiencing yourself in relation to others. Both the in and the out are part of a total process and feed each other.

The rocky, stony road to enlightenment is full of challenges, obstacles and barriers that bring spiritual illuminations because it is in the facing of these and moving beyond them that we develop spiritual fortitude.

Enlightened people don’t have to sit on a velvet cushion, holding their fingers in om-cars, chanting mantras and getting into yoga asanas. They’re all great, but remember, enlightenment comes from being present in whatever life you life, no matter how ordinary.

And next time you scream at the guy who takes the parking space you were angling for or you think angry thoughts about your spouse, or you trip over something cos you’re not ‘here’… remember you’re human. We all are. Simply tell yourself ‘life happens… what’s next?’

WE INVITE YOU TO SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCES IN THE COMMENTS

What illuminations have you experienced along the road?

How did they come about and what changed for you as a result?

Sunny and Pierre Soleil

Harmonic Emergence – Return to Earth
H.E.R.E.

World Human Orientation
W.H.O.

© 2009, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes