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.
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. Florida’s St. Petersburg Times asked, "How Would You Fix the Economy?" Here's one answer:
Patriotic Retirement: There's about 40 million people over 50 in the work force; pay them $1 million apiece severance with stipulations:
1) They leave their jobs. Forty million job openings - Unemployment fixed.
2) They buy NEW American cars. Forty million cars ordered - Auto Industry fixed.
3) They either buy a house or pay off their mortgage - Housing Crisis fixed.
Much cheaper than the trillions being ineffectively spent on the financial industry…
3. Promote a change of paradigm where getting the most money as the primary goal would be replaced by doing the most good.
4. Make a brilliant ad campaign: "Whoever Does the Most Good Wins!"
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Give ecstasy to people we want info from -- turn evil people into heart-connected ones.
8. Use plants for vision, a la shamans who use psychedelic substances for guidance.
9. 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 at a later stage."
As someone on a soapbox trying to get the world to pay attention to crop circles, this little five minute video knocked my socks off. Although it was made in 2007, I didn’t know it existed until it was posted this week on YouTube. I had understood that the person talking didn’t do interviews, or I would have done one with him for my movie.
We’ve seen this information in print, where I think of it as testimony to how what is in front of our eyes can be ignored – like George Bush being our president when we saw that he hadn’t been elected. Well, the information on this video is off the printed page and out of the mouth of the person who did the lab work. Seeing this perhaps could make skeptics into believers.
There are lots of indicators of genuine as opposed to hoaxed crop formations, and my film goes into some of them. But, of all of them, the most definitive ones to our culture, which takes its truth from science, are the scientific studies that have been done on the plants and the soil from inside circles. In the film, we have a couple of slides that show differences between the downed crop from inside them and from the standing crop right outside them. These were expensive studies, done with scientific protocols, and several papers that were written about them were published in peer-reviewed science journals.
Enter the arguers. The journals were not the top ones in the world — true. And the lab is run by someone who does not have a PhD — also true. End of story. Of course, these facts don’t impinge on whether the data is true — they just attempt to discredit the reports. So, for those of you who are interested in the nitty gritty about the circles, spend five minutes with this video. It’s W.C. “Lefty” Levengood, the man with the lab that has done the scientific circle studies — who does not have a PhD. He’s showing you results from one of the studies funded by Laurence Rockefeller, who, when he was alive, was the angel who was far-sighted enough to be interested in such matters. Pictures being worth 1,000 words, Lefty is showing us seeds inside seed heads, from two different crop circles, which have been altered by an extraordinary energy.
Anybody who knows crop circle lore knows about this, but, since many of you aren’t circle historians, I’m passing along what always is cited as the first irrefutable evidence of the appearance of crop circles, way before the modern era. Someone sent me this post about it from the BBC’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy forum :
Crop circles are not a new phenomenon. There are 17th Century woodcuts that record the observation of what appears to be crop circles. One such woodcut, entitled The Devil Mower, appeared in a Hertfordshire newspaper dated 22 August, 1678. The article described the apparition overnight of a strange design in a field of oats, so neatly pressed that ”no mortal man was able to do the like”, which was attributed to ”the devil or some infernal spirit ”. By convoluted logic this apparition confirmed the existence of God, since, it was argued, if devils have a Hell then there must be a Heaven and a God.
Here is what it says:
Being a True Relation of a Farmer, who Bargaining with a Poor Mower, about the Cutting down Three Half Acres of Oats: upon the Mower’s asking too much, the Farmer swore That the Devil should Mow it rather than He. And so it fell out, that very Night, the Crop of Oat shew’d as if it had been all of a flame: but next Morning appear’d so neatly mow’d by the Devil or some Infernal Spirit, that no Mortal Man was able to do the like. Also, How the said Oats ly now in the Field, and the Owner has not Power to fetch them away. Liscensed, August 22nd, 1678.
I was turned onto a site by listmember Bill Casey. If you want to quit your day job and get lost in internet info, have a look at http://www.pagenews.info, the site is run by Peter A. Gersten Esq., former Director of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS). I particularly picked up on one piece about the sense of time speeding up. It always bothers me when people speak of that, since it defies the laws of physics. I am not married to lawfulness across the boards, but there are limits to how far my mind will stretch and that idea is challenging. But, when I read this, about the Mayan calendar, I got some sense of how to interpret that idea to fit into the reality I know.
I sense an acceleration going on; that time itself seems to be going faster each year, and most people I talk to have the same view. But is it really time that is speeding up? Here’s an analogy that may explain the relationship:
Imagine a ball rolling across a level surface, the distance it travels each second would be constant, apart from the effect of friction
– this is a linear approach that is similar to how we perceive life. However, if the ball were dropped from the top of a tall building, in the first second it would travel thirty-two feet. But the time it would take to travel the next thirty-two feet would be less than half a second as its speed would increase exponentially because of the accelerating force of gravity.
If you were a microbe on this ball, you might therefore conclude that time is speeding up. In this case it is not time that is speeding up, it is the distance traveled that is increasing each second. In a similar way, evolution is also exponential and time is not speeding up, but the number of events occurring in each year is increasing: It took two billion years from the origin of life to the creation of cells and just fourteen years from the PC to the World Wide Web!
To demonstrate the exponential nature of evolution, astronomer Carl Sagan imagined a cosmic calendar (Video is above) in which one year represented the whole of history from the start of the universe (big bang) until today. His powerful conclusion was: “We humans appeared so recently that our recorded history occupied only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.” When this type of acceleration is plotted on a logarithmic scale, as was done by futurist Ray Kurszweil, the pattern unfolds as a straight line with events increasingly faster and faster. Author, Ken Wilber suggests that this scientific view of history as mere evolution suffers one great defect: “It cannot explain or even suggest the meaning of this going somewhere. Why evolution – What is the purpose of history?”
However, an alternative with striking similarities to the scientific version of evolution is the Mayan Calendar which provides not only a context and a structure supported by history; it suggests a meaning of divine importance. The interpretations developed by Carl Johan Calleman, an internationally recognized authority in Mayan history, detail this inspiring viewpoint and provide credible evidence of its validity.
According to Calleman, the Mayan Long Count is not a calendar of time, but is believed to be a sacred schedule of energy for the evolution of consciousness through time. Its date of creation is unknown in the mists of centuries BC. It is a schedule of incredible mathematical precision in which time accelerates in each of nine overlapping epochs.
They cover from the ‘big bang’ billions of years ago until ending on the same date: 28 October 2011. Each new cycle commences with a distinct leap, a quantum jump, into an expanded form of consciousness which develops and matures toward the end of that cycle. The nine epoch with their significant starting events are shown in the diagram below.
The first cycle of the nine, labeled the CELLULAR CYCLE, puts the start of the universe – the big bang – at 16.4 Billion years BC. This is remarkably close to the current expert estimate of 15 Billion years. Over this vast period the galaxies and solar system were formed, eventually followed by the emergence of cellular life by 1.26 Billion years BC.
To give an idea of acceleration nested in these cycles, 95% of the time passes before the next cycle is initiated. Each successive cycle is exactly twenty times faster and twenty times shorter than the one below. (The mathematical duration of each one equals 13 X 20x years, where x reduces each cycle.)
Finally, the last cycle, optimistically named the COSMIC CYCLE, will start 10 February 2011 and last only 9 months.
First of all, thanks so much to all of you who posted on Yahoo about the crop circle video, getting the word out about my movie. The comments continued to be overwhelmingly critical of the video — but it could be cause it was all of you! Am continuing to try to see if Toyota would follow up cause of how mad people got at them. And look on my blog for how many of you wrote to me — never got so many responses, and, as I’ve said, that was only people who posted directly on the blog. My own person email was swamped. In fact, to get on the blog, where I’d like to put all the comments on all the posts, please do it through the comments boxes at the end of each blog entry, which is the way your remarks can indeed get on the blog site.
Here’s a story from UFO Digest, analyzing a particular crop circle. (Photo by Lucy Pringle of a glyph from 2004.) I pass it along not because I expect non-scientists to pore over what it says, but to show you a typical sort of thing the circles give rise to. Many pieces are written about many circles to describe intelligence that is embedded in them.
People frequently wonder what the message is of the circles, as if they are a giant jigsaw puzzle and we will get the picture when we get all the pieces fitted together. Or that they are something like hieroglyphics, and we’ll get their message when we get everything translated. I don’t think so. My speculation is that each formation is its own bundle of encoded smarts. It’s not about deciphering the master message, but about getting it that some source is trying to get attention to itself. Intelligence, intelligence intelligence pulses at us. I think of the circlemakers scratching whatever passes for the heads in wonderment that we haven’t realized, en masse, that they exist: “We see you, we understand you, we are feeding back evidence. When are you going to get it that that’s what’s going on?”
I was especially impelled to pass on a story about this particular formation because this one has a featured spot in my movie. It was perfect on the ground, with all the stalks laid in a gorgeous carpet, nothing damaged, no evidence of any human tampering. “Yes, there is a real phenomenon,” says Andy Thomas, who is using this perfect glyph in his presentation to a conference audience about the fact that there incontrovertibly is a real phenomenon.
Yesterday, after Yahoo ran a 2-minute video about crop circles, I got this email from my friend, Kaia, who is working on a proposed reality TV series about the circles:
Wow, are they really trying to re-visit Doug and Dave? This made the front page of Yahoo today: http://whoknew.news.yahoo.com/?vid=20899874 (Note from Suzanne on 7/26 — this link won’t take you there any more. Five days after this video was posted, it was cycled off, never to be retrieved.)
The video is beyond terrible. Watching it, I wondered if this total dismissal of anything mysterious going on, as if it’s a done deal that people have made all the circles, is where the world is at.
Then, I read the comments — not all 1,080 that were up by then, but a lot of them. Almost all of them were castigating Yahoo for showing something so shameful.
These are the 24 comments posted just before I posted one. They aren’t edited at all, to cherry pick for the most interesting ones (or to fix any grammar or punctuation), so you can see the overwhelming rejection of the video.
Is something changing out there? Is there a lot of awareness now about the circles, and acceptance of them as likely to be coming from elsewhere? It used to be the other way round — whenever something about the circles appeared, there was one defense to a slew of attacks. The comments on this video, up to 2080 and still going strong at the point at which I wrote this post, are extraordinarily good news!!!!
Here are those 24 that preceded what I wrote — to watch my movie, of course. (It would be lovely if you listmembers would do the same — the trailer is here: http://CropCircleMovie.com) :
Hank Winig
You people suck. What did you do sell your soul to the US Government. There the only ones dumb enough to think we will believe all crop circles were made be a few drunk collage kids. All with in hours or even minutes in some cases. Ya Yahoo this is the one that will flush you out of the lime lite.
David
WOW!! That was intense exposé! Yahoo should be deeply ashamed of airing something this blatantly stupid. Yes, many of them have been hoaxed, but the anomalies on too many of them require a different explanation.
BarefootBoy
Those who think Doug and Dave made all those crop circles cannot recognize a LIE even if it is tied to a board and whacks them over the head. Crop Circles are laid down at night in moments, some- times in a driving rain, even with researchers watching through the night with night vision.
Steven
1971 wasn’t the start of them. If they had done a little research they would find that crop circles have been appearing since the beginning of recorded history. Many are far too complex to be made by man. Try explaining the excess radiation and a magnetic field alteration. Just stupid propoganda!!!
Sierra
Its aliens. I heard people who go into the circles lose there cell signals, and its like there in a magnactic field or something. Also this isnt really news everybody knows its aliens theyre just making up stuff like area 51
TEJ
Okay, you know they don’t want us to know the truth and like someone said, people will just take this garbage and run with it. This is some Bu-u-l-l!
HiwayMan
Crop circles have been documented for centuries, on all continents and all cultures. This whole thing is a @#$% whitewash.
David
Crop circle were reported way before the 70`s In chile they have carved out mountains that are cut in half for the purpose a landing run way. Thousand of yards long. You can only see this from above. Airplanes are what? a little over a houndred years old from the Right Brothers.
Renee
Give me a break! Planks and rope! RIGHT!
Donald
The word is ZO ology, not ZOO ology
Jared H
Those two guys that claimed to have made are full of crap.
Howard
I’ve never seen a real crop circle myself, so I can’t speak from experience, but from what I’ve read and heard in interviews from the independent experts, the plants in these crop circles have undergone molecular changes, and are not simply “tipped over” with ropes and boards. Nice try, Yahoo.
G
YAHOO PROPAGANDA……YAHOO LEADS THE WORLD IN MISINFORMATION
Proper Drainage
Who cares if they are fake or the work of some lazy aliens its just a little disinformation scam by your government.
Danny
What dumbass made this video? The first recorded crop circles date back more than 200 years. And no, you can’t superheat the insides of plant stalks with a plank. You can’t char roots under the soil with a plank. The only thing that could do that would be a huge microwave oven…
Mik F
hilarious!! well im sold with such a fine detailed answer!! give me a break
Ann
Dave and Doug were debunked a long time ago. Get your facts straight. It’s so much easier to try to not think about something then to spend one moment of time giving a true mystery and wonder one iota of sincere thought. It must require just too much effort.
?
Some years back I remember actor Judd Nelson narrated an utterly ridiculous program that claimed this phenomenon was the work of crop circle ninja’s that appeared out of a cloud of smoke all dressed in black and traveled the planet making formations … it was just bizarre!!!
Samplethat
Wow, Government disinformation at it’s dumbest. My friend, Linda Moulton Howe sat in the middle of a field as the circles appeared….in less than 2 minutes. Doug and Dave were not there. BTW Doug and Dave were working for the British Govt. Calm the masses and cover your a$es.
Harpdog
whoever made this “report” should never have graduated highschool. read the book “secrets in the fields” and then appologize for the dumbest “report” i’ve ever seen from anyone older than a 10 year old. those man made things are actually called crap-circles, because that’s what a man made one is…
24FRANCISCO
WHO CARES! I NEED A JOB!
Mike
who posts this @#$%? Many crop circles are legit and are too complex to be created by man. This is just the ongoing smear effort to cover the growing sightings of UFO activity. Disclosure is coming, and soon.
David W
Good grief. What a brainless piece of propaganda. In this too-fast-paced society of ours, unfortunately, most people will just assume what they just saw here sums it all up and must be the truth. BULL. If you dig and study this phenomenon, you will find quite a different result.
Doug
This is such a lame video explanation of crop circles
