????Perhaps some walls are tumbling down. For Daniel Pinchbeck, a fine writer and excellent speaker, who deals with shamanism and 2012 and crop circles, to turn up on the Business Insider website, is noteworthy. Although Daniel usually tells me he doesn’t agree with me — could it be  love spats? — in fact I am very much in agreement with him. When I listen to him, I feel like I am at the core of my perceptions that have me stoked on the circles. We need a shock to the gears of our tightly meshed system, and the circle phenomenon could give us a jolt that would have us reexamining the unworkable world we have moved into that Daniels is so articulate about.

Question:

If an alien race were to make itself known to us, what would they have to say about American capitalism in its current form?

Answer:

I think that a star-faring alien race, based on their survey of many worlds, would recognize our form of capitalism as a transitional system. It is the type of system that develops once a species establishes rational scientific inquiry and attains limited ego-based consciousness, but before it transcends that level of development to reach a truly holistic and planetary level of consciousness. With its tremendous dynamism, capitalism has meshed the world together through trade routes and communications technology. Soon we will need to supersede it to create a regenerative planetary culture where the rights of nature are protected, where manufacturing is redesigned to become zero waste, as William McDonogue describes in Cradle to Cradle, and where maximum efficiency is used in a systemic redesign of our built environment and our social institutions. We will also develop alternative instruments to exchange value, as the economist Bernard Lietaer describes in The Future of Money, or Tom Greco explores in The End of Money and the Future of Civilization.

As I discuss in my new book, Notes from the Edge Times, capitalism in its pure form has reached the limit of its usefulness and has become a destructive force. This is because the logic of the system forces the constant creation of new markets and turns all sorts of human relations into monetary exchanges. Nature has no rights under this system, and it is to the benefit of market calculations to turn natural reserves into economic producers – for instance, a forest has little economic value in itself, but when the trees are taken out and it is converted into a parking lot or soybean farm, it creates a series of economic transactions that feed the GDP. Since we have reached the resource limits of the earth, a system that runs on the ideology of endless economic growth and infinite material progress can no longer function and will soon self-destruct. The aliens in their silver ships would know about this, and would feel great concern that in the approaching chaos, horrific and meaningless destruction may be unleashed.

It does seem that many indicators point toward the inevitability of a global financial collapse, and this meltdown may very well occur around 2012. The global financial system is built on a debt pyramid. As long as there were new markets to penetrate and new resources to exploit, it was possible to ignore this, but now that the planet has been fully globalized and resources are declining, it is becoming impossible. According to many geologists, we are now facing “peak oil,” the point at which the annual amount of fossil fuels we are able to extract first levels off and then begins to decline, even as global demand for oil continues to grow. Personally, I hope the collapse of the financial system leads to a mass awakening as we recognize we have been focusing on virtual abstractions and profit-driven calculations that have nothing to do with the actual health and biodiversity of the earth or the resilience of our communities, and threaten our prospects for long-term continuity as a species...

I am not particularly concerned about the date. It is quite clear that we are in the crucible of a transformation, and either humanity will make a transition to a different form of civilization and a new awareness, or we will most likely not survive, at least in anything close to our current state. According to current estimates, 25% of all mammalian species – perhaps all species in general – will be extinct in 30 years. The melting of the glaciers and ice caps will eventually lead to coastal flooding and also deprive hundreds of millions of people of fresh water. The pollution of the global environment is rebounding negatively on human health, leading to epidemics of cancers and new mysterious syndromes that affect more and more people. We are all part of an uncontrolled scientific experiment, as nobody knows how much of the web of life on earth can be torn apart by our heedless behavior before the eco-system no longer supports the existence of large mammals such as ourselves. The collapse of bee and butterfly species that work for us as pollinators is one unambiguous warning signal…

I had a wide range of psychic, paranormal, and visionary experiences that ultimately convinced me there were other levels or dimensions of psychic life, that it was quite probable that the soul continues after death in other worlds, and so on. From my perspective, when you encounter these other aspects of reality, the goal of acquiring personal wealth and succeeding in the rat race doesn’t really make much sense. There is so much more happening in the cosmos, and it is the evolution of your soul and spirit that is ultimately important, not the numbers in your bank account.

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