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."
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.
My Thoughts on the Catastrophe in Tohoku-Kanto Area is such a moving communication by Masaru Emoto, about being in the earthquake and about how he hadn’t been able to get a go-ahead for working with water to predict them. If you know the beyond-the-beyond work Emoto has done, you will appreciate what he has to say and might want to respond to his call to help with his work.
1.The picture of water crystal before the quake
2. The picture of water crystal right after the quake
3. The picture of water crystal one day after the quake
Masaru Emoto has put out a prayer request for Thursday at noon in every time zone. One of the things I think about is that there may be real power in collective thought, and what a good idea it would be for every government to promote that when something has the world’s attention, so that massive participation would result. Just think of the impact it would have on our worldview if that produced results. It would be a new game – to be able to affect the world and to be working together to do it. With everything to gain and nothing to lose, how to get the world to try such a thing?
I was on Coast to Coast Tuesday night after an 11th hour phone call to book me when this crop circle turned up in Indonesia.
It was a good hour. I got to talk about my perspectives on the state of the world and how the circles could help wake us up to a bigger reality.
I hadn’t picked up on a report the AP put out about the new circle — the first in Indonesia if it turns out to be the real deal. I wish I had so I could have talked about it with George. How dare they say this, for which there is no evidence? Indeed, it could turn out to be human-made, but at this writing it still was undetermined.
Here’s what the AP report said:
Though clearly sculptured by humans — it looks like an intricately designed flower — the 70-yard-wide (70-meter-wide) circle has drawn so much attention that police have blocked off the area with yellow tape.
While the country’s officials from it’s nuclear and space agencies have briefly stopped by to take a look and declare it UFO free, what is quite possibly the most irritating is a press release from the Associated Press which states that the crop circle is “clearly sculptured by humans.”
I find this statement absolutely irresponsible coming from a news agency of it’s kind. Unless the article was a blog post in the opinion editorial section of the news site, there’s no reason that opinions should be drawn into an information article. I can get away with it because this is a public blog that offers news to its readers, but I am far from the level of the AP and these articles where I speak from my own heart, spilling my own opinions go into the opinion editorial category of posts.
That being said, the statement by the AP is just that, a representation of a statement by the agency itself, specifically since they did not include an author’s name, meaning that the agency owns the article and claims it as it’s own. While there is no real explanation so far for this crop circle in particular, let alone the hundreds of others around the world that still remain a mystery, to make a statement like they did is completely out of line and irresponsible as it misleads readers into thinking that it has been declared as such. News agencies from Indonesia and surrounding areas that have spoken with the country’s officials are reporting that there still is no explanation. Since it’s only the second reported crop circle ever to appear in Indonesia, the first being claimed and proven a hoax, officials are still investigating. The resources being spent on the investigation, including military aircraft surveillance and travel for officials from agencies around the country tells me that the government thinks there must be something curious about this formation or they wouldn’t be paying it any mind outside of local law enforcement imposing crowd control on the thousands of people that are showing up to take a peek themselves.
It is my honest opinion that the statement by the AP that placed judgment so quickly, is due to one of two things. The first is the ongoing discrimination against extraterrestrial UFO believers around the world which are actually increasing in numbers as our scientists continue to discover more and more potential habitable exoplanets, numbers of sightings and reports are increasing in mass and frequency, and the general public is starting to understand just how much their government has been lying to them all along so why should we believe their lies now? Of course there are other reasons that people are becoming believers in extraterrestrial UFO’s, but nonetheless, national polls are showing surprising numbers of believers of a subject matter that was taboo for a long time. Some still find those of us more outspoken believers to be a bit wacky, but surprisingly, more and more people are becoming curious more than anything else.
The second possibility, in my opinion, the AP would be so careless and irresponsible is government pressure. It has been no secret that our wonderful government controls a lot of what the media is actually allowed to discuss or say in spite of freedom of speech. Simply watching Canadian and UK news programs and archives can open one’s eyes to a world, events, issues and problems within our own country that we never hear about. Our news outlets have been almost completely saturated with diversions including sickening amounts of celebrity gossip. The Fox affiliate in Los Angeles spends more time in it’s early morning news program covering fashion, dining and celebrity topics than any legitimate news source should. No matter who is behind it, there is a powerful force pushing Americans farther into the shallow thoughts of wealth, personal appearance, celebrity happenings and buy buy buy, rather than caring for our fellow man or even recognizing our fellow man. Sadly, the majority of Americans have no real awareness of world events. It’s as if the planet IS the United States of America and no one else exists except for those pesky South Americans and the bad guys that are hogging all the oil.
That being said, the statement by the AP is just that, a representation of a statement by the agency itself, specifically since they did not include an author’s name, meaning that the agency owns the article and claims it as it’s own. While there is no real explanation so far for this crop circle in particular, let alone the hundreds of others around the world that still remain a mystery, to make a statement like they did is completely out of line and irresponsible as it misleads readers into thinking that it has been declared as such. News agencies from Indonesia and surrounding areas that have spoken with the country’s officials are reporting that there still is no explanation. Since it’s only the second reported crop circle ever to appear in Indonesia, the first being claimed and proven a hoax, officials are still investigating. The resources being spent on the investigation, including military aircraft surveillance and travel for officials from agencies around the country tells me that the government thinks there must be something curious about this formation or they wouldn’t be paying it any mind outside of local law enforcement imposing crowd control on the thousands of people that are showing up to take a peek themselves.
