Five Star Pieces, Quotes, SoundBites, and Columnists from the world press; Crop Circle Diary; Conversation tracks -- plus Monthly Reports and Updates sent to listmembers through 12/31/02
TheConversation.org had its start when 9/11 dictated that we were in a new world. At this threshold moment for humanity, when we must choose wisely to avoid what could be our annihilation, this site is dedicated to tracking the emerging intelligence that we need for our very survival, and to conversation in which that intelligence can be forged.
Let those who see beyond the idea of force imposing world order, to where we look to heal the causes of despair, meet here.
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Society deals primarily with cosmetic change, no matter how threatened the world is. But, the way we think got us into the mess we are in, and, unless we grapple with paradigm change, it's fingers in the dike. For this column, send your thoughts about what outside the box ideas might contribute to setting us on a better course.
Look at this chilling story by the great British journalist, George Monbiot, about the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. It concludes:
"...we have to stop calling it climate change. Using 'climate change' to describe events like this, with their devastating implications for global food security, water supplies and human settlements, is like describing a foreign invasion as an unexpected visit, or bombs as unwanted deliveries. It's a ridiculously neutral term for the biggest potential catastrophe humankind has ever encountered. I think we should call it 'climate breakdown.'"
If we knew that without intervention the world would end at a finite date, humanity would dramatically scratch its collective head. Short of a deadline to save ourselves, what could we do that might change our course? Here are some of my thoughts.
1. My #1 idea is to investigate the crop circle phenomenon. If we knew there was other intelligence, which the circles indicate, we would be one humanity in relation to 'the other,’ working together to solve planetary problems.
2. Promote a change of paradigm where getting the most money as the primary goal would be replaced by doing the most good.
Make a brilliant ad campaign: "Whoever Does the Most Good Wins!"
3. Have revered states people look out from TV and address the human core in everyone, urging us to think as a planet to solve the challenges we face.
4. President calls for a moment of silence perhaps noon in every time zone, for everyone to stop what they are doing and focus on one thing -- try to harness the power of thought. England possibly avoided WWII invasion that way.
5. Call for a truce worldwide, where wars end -- via inducements, including a clean slate for everyone. Even terrorists. Promise everyone universal health care, universal education and job training, and whatever it would take to give everyone the fundamentals of a decent life. Pay for it with military budgets.
6. Give ecstasy to people we want info from -- turn evil people into heart-connected ones.
7. Use plants for vision, a la shamans who use psychedelic substances for guidance.
8. Convene a new Twilight Club. "The Twilight Club was an organization founded in the late 19th century, with the intention to counter the moral decline by bolstering up the spiritual and ethical awareness of the society. Illustrious members were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Walt Whitman, Andrew Carnegie, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Mark Twain...From this club, service clubs such as the Rotary Club and the Lions evolved."
Omg, as they say, I just saw everything at a deeper level — everything that Occupy Wall Street is about, and everything that the movie THRIVE is conceptualizing. Like what’s really going on.
You HAVE TO watch this 7-minute video – big screen. It’s from last May, in the streets in Spain, and is a work of art that brilliantly captures an energy.
When I saw this, what sunk in deeper than before (see Charles Eisenstein’s commentary along these lines), is that although the people are protesting what “they” are doing and avowing that they can’t do it anymore, they is all of us — “we” no longer will go along with the deadening sadness of egos and superficiality that rule our world. And, I got it that it is our intention and our decision and our conviction, operating as one humanity, that will win the day.
Although the set-up in the video is as if the protesters have an enemy, in our dualistic way of seeing things we hardly know how to think any other way. However, there wasn’t going to be a march down the avenue to guillotines to cut off any heads. What’s going on isn’t about separating out some bad people; this is much bigger. No Davids, no Goliaths, but a passion to get out of our scientific materialistic rut of a worldview. The democracy we have fashioned has become a corporate one and no longer is for all the people, and only the people’s uprising could make it change course. Make sense?
After you watch that, this 11-minute clip is another mindbender.
The link I first saw was taken down – if this one goes, look for “The Power of RAW Cannabis.” This from the description:
“This is a must-watch video featuring some of the top researchers on the healing effects of Cannabis (Marijuana) in its raw form, eaten or juiced. Eating raw cannabis as medicine…Cannabis is a dietary essential that helps all cell types function more effectively…anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant…This plant can do phenomenal things…Cannabis is the most important vegetable in the world.”
I had no clue about this startling info. As one person comments, “This video has a Dr. who is chief of Oncology at a Major University Medical center…how much more credibility do we need?”
From 1960 to 1975, as a radical political activist, he helped shape history, inspiring what has come to be the best in our world. Open to daring escapades, he always sought the most provocative games, and I bow to his courageousness.
In fact, there’s nothing like heroism or creativity or love to inspire us. We leapfrog over one another as we tumble toward enlightenment – think torus, as in THRIVE, in everyday operation.
In light of Occupy Wall Street, hearken to this, where Bill was making this prescient reflection about the 60s even before the upheavals in Europe had come about:
“Capitalism was here to stay. Revolution, I realized, was an inappropriate offensive strategy; people who thought as I did lacked the resources to do anything by play defense. Even if the resource problem were overcome, we had no credible revolutionary strategy, nor did I see a way to create one. After much soul searching, I finally understood that it would not fall to my generation to make a revolution. We could do little more that resist, or make trouble for the worst aspects of capitalism.”
And here’s how the book ends:
“It will fall to future generations to create a society fully committed to those ideals. It fell to mine to keep them alive so that someday they can. I hope the fire of our commitment, however bleak the times we lived through, will help inspire future activists to erase the injustice and poverty that need no longer have a place in our world. What I learned along the way is that performing good works, political or otherwise, with no expectation of recognition or reward, was for me the secret to leading an honorable and happy life.”
Stand on Bill Zimmerman’s shoulders by reading his book. And it’s for everyone, not just the young folk. I am the older generation, and it has inspired me.
Wow, to all my loved ones, this video really pulled together so many random thoughts and feelings I’ve had. I wanted to share it with you. Watch to the end even if you think you’re not going to be interested. It’s really profound to contemplate.
Well, a big yes from me. Charles Eisenstein seems to be everywhere in my world these days, and what I discover about him gets better and better. I so love this clip. It is such a clear articulation of what we most need that we might think is too far out to achieve, but Charles makes it seem doable. Related to my track, if the crop circles would get us to rethink reality, what Charles is describing is what we could be moving into. Ah bliss!
This is a piece from a feature film in the works about the Occupy movement, called Occupy Wall St – The Revolution is Love. (There’s more about the film and its fundraising efforts, at http://occupylove.org.)
What can kick us over the edge of this reality into the next one? That’s the worldview where greed is supplanted by compassion as the m. o. We’d all feel for the world and strongly identify with being part of the large whole. Think indigenous tribes – something like that. In fact, we’ve made saints out of those rare characters who embody that perspective. What different dialogues would be taking place if that were the track we were on. Our 24/7 news would be bubbling with how we were making the world work.
Occupy Wall Street is adding a huge burst of energy to what has been building up in the widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo. (Look at this heartwarming aspect of it: We are the 1 percent. We stand with the 99 percent.) The 60s were the beginning, where the Ozzie and Harriet world sprung holes. The human potential movement and our quest for self-awareness came next, as we began to get the idea of how we needed to develop ourselves in the new model that we touched via psychedelics. Psychological awareness of what makes us tick led to spiritual explorations with some of those sainted figures who were the gurus we followed en masse. Spiritual awareness sans figures to worship was in the mix, and carried us beyond homage to outer divinities into recognizing our own. So, here we are, stoked for dealing with the steady march of capitalism where rugged individualism has led to dog eat dog exploitation and we’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
The forces of fundamental change are mysterious and elusive, although progressing cyclically along the lines of the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis: a worldview becomes unworkable as things that don’t fit in it emerge, until there is a reordering where the unfitting parts get integrated into a new worldview – and the cycle starts again. Antithesis is well along now, and shoving it over to synthesis is the head scratcher. It could spontaneously occur, like the Berlin wall coming down or the Soviet Union collapsing – somehow it “just happens” when the contradictions to the status quo get too great for the center to hold. Are we at that point? Who knows? But anything we can do to evoke the new crystallization is worthy pursuit.
Thanks to John Stephenson, who had me on his weekly radio show, Thresholds Into Other Realms, talking about crop circles, I’ll be doing a segment with him regularly. Outside the Box will be about contemporary occurrences or situations that don’t fit in ordinary reality. As I’m looking to expand my playing field to other things that make us rethink reality, “scratch our heads to open our minds” is the idea.
Here is the info I posted throughout the web, I talked you up everywhere
Also, once it airs it’s picked up on ITunes and about 100 different podcasting sites worldwide. Plus we are a featured show on The UFO Paranormal Radio Network, which also is worldwide.
Don’t miss this Sunday’s “Thresholds Into Other Realms.” We are very pleased to announce that the one and only Suzanne Taylor (the Crop Circle Queen) will be starting her new segment on our show this week! It’s called “Outside The Box” and it will cover all the wild, weird, unusual and downright strange news of the world.
And for Netflix to carry it, we need more Netflix subscribers to ask for What On Earth? in their queues. Here’s the direct link for the request: http://bit.ly/pbkqgG.
Footnote:
I am so moved by this extraordinary situation of OWS spreading throughout the world. Either the help crop circles can offer for opening people’s minds will be unnecessary, or perhaps it could be more useful than ever. This is a comment I just made on Reality Sandwich to Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough, by Charles Eisenstein, and the intelligent comments that followed it.
After all the smarts above me — and I bow to them – as a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of NYU I have smarts, too, about how crapped up we’ve made the world and about the incredible OWS movement. But how to get it to achieve any objectives? There’s the rub.
The forces of fundamental change are mysterious and elusive, all fitting into that old Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Antithesis is well along now, and how to shove it over to synthesis is the head scratcher. It could just emerge, like the Berlin wall coming down or the Soviet Union collapsing – somehow it “just happens” when the contradictions to the status quo get too great for the center to hold. Are we at that point? Who knows? But if there were anything to do to evoke the new crystallization wouldn’t that be wonderful? Of course. So here’s my offering.
If it were ascertained that the crop circle phenomenon is for real and that we are being visited by other intelligence, that could be the peaceful shock and awe that could do it for us. All of a sudden, all human beings would be in relation to an otherness – all of us in one curiosity, buzzing together to make sense of what is greater than we are. Buzzing together, we could rethink everything — a consummation devoutly to be wished for, as Willie the Shakes would have said.
No need to argue here about whether there is a mystery to the phenomenon, which no one can know for sure – am just advocating that attention be paid. There is data to be scrutinized, and making that inquiry could turn out to be a very very good thing to do.
