Hello everyone

I'd like to share with you all a most mind-stirring series of emails exchanged this weekend. I first received "The Survivable Path" (see below) from Roan Carratu, a man who had been on my list for a good while, reading silently without much comments -- like most of you -- the material coming from this source.

I was frankly awed by the scope of his vision and radicalism of his initial words and also by his response to someone commenting on it. So I wrote back to him and was even more bowled over by his response.

See for yourself ;-)

Here's what has to happen to bring about the kind of world that could actually fit the basic concept of 'SANITY' which is almost a synonym of 'SURVIVABILITY'.

Certain basic concepts and social structures have to fade away. (Not be conquered, not be forced, not be redirected, but actually fade away without opposition)

These are:

Nations ... Not to be replaced by a global government, but the practice of delegating, or being forced by violence and threat to delegate, the individual's power to a 'official' group of people must end.

Economics ... The use of symbols and an irrelevant and spurious evaluation of everything in terms of those symbols has to end. The concept of 'exchange' between individuals is a falsehood which humanity cannot sustain in the long run. Everything comes from the ecosystem of this planet, including humans.

Military ... The ancient and highly organized subculture of gangsters calling themselves the Military has to dissolve completely.

Advertising ... in terms of psychological manipulation, must end. Entertainment... in terms of psychological manipulation, must end.

The all pervading socially promoted but actually insubstantial concepts of 'Rights' must evolve into something balanced with the perception of the ecosystem as the basic support system for all life on the planet. The concept of 'property' must fade into a use basis rather than an absolute 'right'. Without this change in the concepts of 'Rights', all other changes, of any kind, will be futile and eventually, as the ecosystem fails, humanity will become extinct.

All changes must come from the evolving perceptions and actions of the individual, however, and not forced through any violence or threat of violence. This is required or the results will not fulfill the requirements of a survivable future. Only a good means will create a good result.

There are four strategies which can bring this about. Each is a basic of our culture which has to be turned on it's head, or the current practices will become the forces which destroy us all.

First, the development and use, en masse, of geodesic democracy. Only humanity as a whole can make the kinds of decisions necessary to save this ecosystem, not a few handfuls of egocentric, greedy, power hungry morons with enough money and lying silver tongues to get mindblinded followers to support them. With real democracy, geodesic democracy, we can run the world without all the stupidity!

Delegation of individual power is First of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Second, the development and use of geometrically manufactured comprehensively designed livingry, the technology of living, on massive scales. The current concepts of totally blind expedient manufacturing has such waste built in, messes up the environment so badly by not factoring it in, and holds back so much development of environmentally intelligent technology, (not to mention the total waste called 'weaponry',) that amid plenty, millions starve and a billion goes without basic survival requirements... and they are not starving because it is some act of God, but because the people in power either deliberately plan for their deaths or don't give a shit, and drive the conditions which kill all those people, all the while killing the ecosystem at the same time. The ultimate 'RIGHT' is the right to live on the planet and get what we need from it to do so! Technology (like food, water, air, and our lives themselves,) comes from Nature FREE, and can provide for everyone freely ...WITHOUT DESTROYING THE ECOLOGY OF OUR WORLD!

This misuse of Nature-derived technology is the Second Horseman of the Apocalypse...

Third, the development and use of educational strategies which teach the actual relationship of humans to the ecosystem and each other.

The spurious superstition taught by the academic subculture, stranded in it's intellectual masturbation based upon thought as the supreme seat of existence is just plain stupid. Universe is the supreme seat of existence, and the clinging to ego centered concepts of separate realities leads only to spurious assumptions which led to the current global situation. It's not an accident that every meeting of people who claim the delegated power to make decisions about everyone else's lives are all taught within the same subculture, taught the same superstitions, and cling to the same cause/effect processes which are destroying the planet. Hell, they even wear the same uniform... suits and ties... or a female form of the same . The future of Humanity must not remain in the hands of those who only repeat the stupidity of the past!

This subculturally taught body of mixed superstition and knowledge is the Third Horseman of the Apocalypse.

And what is the fourth Horseman?

He is the common, deliberately socially created, concept of division between people that convinces people that despite the obvious connection in all ways between us, we are totally separate and all power resides purely within each one of us. It ignores the easily observable fact that everything, including our individual power, is useful only in synergy, not as illusionary separate individuals. If this 'division paradigm' continues to be the most basic axiom of human behavior, the result will be eventual dissolution of the ecosystem and therefore, humanity itself. It must become commonly understood that the difference between the individual and the social group is scalar, not in competition. The differences are natural and must be respected on all scales!

This --socially amplified to the Nth degree-- illusion of being separate from each other and the ecology of the planet is the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.

We are all One.

Like it or not!

Face it ...or know your children and grandchildren and great grandchildren unto all the future will die because you choose to ignore it. (I, and people like me, will not let you forget it. We will presume to assert it to you as required... that is our job.) Heavy guilt, that, and not taken lightly or ignored lightly. This is why you were born though, at this time, and in this place. It is now up to each of us, each of you, to realize what this means and ACT upon it... together.

Peace and Long Life,

Yeeeeeeeees! Give this man a kiss! :)))))))

I generally agree with this.

But I am not so sure how one implements the things proposed, starting from where we are at. For example:

What should we, the people of the world who care about human rights, do about the "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia?

Not that I necessarily approve what Clinton done, but does that mean we should do nothing?

May your days be cheerful and bright!

If a child has chicken pox, and has sores all over it, does the doctor treat each individual sore, or the whole body?

For 10,000 years, we have allowed this illness of the world to go it's course, and it roared out of control, killing millions of people, like a high fever, breaking out with pox and open wars, oozing refugees and starvation, until it almost, several times, killed the whole body with nukes... It drew back from that ultimate ending, and has eased off lately, but over the last decade, with renewed confidence and by force of ancient habit, flared up again and again.

It is time to grow an immune system for this disease of insanity. It is time to attack the disease and heal the body, for it is in sore condition and failing. In terms of what will work, it is obvious that the ways we have been taught, even conditioned by social manipulation, are all in support of the disease, not the cure. Violence, protests, trying to attract the attention of the media and the masses, and silently praying by our ones and our millions, have either done harm or done almost nothing.

So all those ways are out. What is left? For this we have to go back to our root...

There is only one way to do it, and it is the hardest of all. It requires not that we do the easy thing, which is die for our cause, but that we do the hard thing, which is to live for our cause although it brings all kinds of upheaval into our individual, personal lives and the lives of our families. In other words, it will require incredible dedication, the most that anyone has ever had. The illness is so bad that it will require all those who really want to heal the planet and it's human population to dedicate their lives to the future, not just for the next generation, but for all coming generations. Those are the stakes in this survival game. We take the path of apathy or the path of action, but either way, the time has come to take a path, each one of us.

We have to actually, really, in our daily lives, come together and agree that the goal is worth whatever it takes to accomplish, within the bounds of nonviolence and higher consciousness. This means moving together, giving up luxuries, working together, planning together, sharing our material stuff with each other without hesitation, trusting each other, being willing to communicate clearly and completely with each other, being 'up front' with each other, being willing to overlook and tolerate each other opinions even if they conflict with our own...

We need to start communities together, businesses together, merge our bank accounts into sizes big enough to bring about new ways of doing things, target problems in the world and find the ways to solve them that do not end in conflict or destruction, eliminate the old ways of doing things by actually sidestepping them and doing the same constructive work in new ways which avoid the downside of the old ways. We have to take individual responsibility, not in some nebulous 'metaphysical' vague concept, but in moment to moment here and now, not just for what we think, but for what comes of all our thinking and all our actions...

We need, first and foremost, to move together into the same locations. This task cannot be done alone or separately. We need to create communities and merge our resources, our businesses, our brains, our bodies, our educations, our bank accounts, our possessions, our families, our visions, our hearts, and most of all, our love for this planet and the future of this planet and it's human component. We need to interlink these communities, globally, and become a net of sanity. It's a lifetime job we are faced with, a multigenerational job, and we will have to just ignore the existing social systems, and do it ourselves. It will take real commitment by millions, but there are millions out there now, and it is time to get started.

I would, right now, take a bullet for the future of this planet. I would toil hauling boulders up mountains until I dropped dead, if that took a minute or a thousand years. I would give away everything I have a thousand times. I would take beatings, be spat upon, lied to, or tortured, if it would bring about what I know must be created. I am not a masochist, but I would endure it to bring about what I know must be done. Am I a fanatic? No. Is someone who dives in to save a child from drowning a fanatic? No. There are limits to what I would do, and those limits are clear and clean and spiritual. I would not kill, I would not lie, I would not coerce, I would not intimidate, I would not diminish one to exult another... and I know none of these are required to do what I know has to be done. I would accept anything for what I know the future can have for the planet and it's people. I know that all of Life is my ally, my blood, my thoughts, my hands. I would do anything required because somebody has to. I've given up all the normal aspects of life for decades, children, relationships, wealth, concentrating upon what, when, where, and why the world is as it is... because I knew, --somebody had to-- !

I do this because I know, without the slightest doubt, that when I say, 'I AM', I am not speaking of this body or mind, but what we are all 100% part of, the One which is the Goddess, the God, Universe, Gaia, Jehovah, Allah, Jupiter, whatever you want to call 'IT'... it make no difference which grunt we attach to what we know is ONE. There is no 'inside' and 'outside'... there is only One. There is no 'me' and 'you'... there is only ONE. There's no 'Humanity' and 'Nature'... there is only ONE... We accept that, and we do what is required. We do not accept that, and we let the world and all the future slip into a coma and die.

It is by our love that we are known. It is by our love that we must make it happen. Regardless of the words we use, we must go back to our most ancient root, the observable root of our Oneness, and with the love that comes from knowing the One, we must become real creators of this world, active and productive and sane and most of all, no longer separate...

That is the only path left to us. Like it or not. We have to do it by the millions, not you doing it alone where ever you are, and me doing it alone where ever I am, but together, PHYSICALLY and spiritually together, we have to do it, because it will not be done separately. That is the only path left to us. Like it or not.

Mahatma Jesus said, "What does it serve to gain the whole world and lose our souls?" I say, "What does it serve to lose the whole world in the name of the fear of losing our souls?" ... much less a TV or a bank account or safety, (which doesn't exist anyway,) or a stable life, or a promotion or retirement in the HELL that will result if we just let it all go. Here and now the two are totally linked, for if we do not save the planet, we will be guilty of sitting back and letting it die, and that stain is more deadly to our souls than anything else we could do in our little personal lives.

So instead of sitting on our hands and bemoaning the illusion that we can do nothing, we have to start getting together, and create what will make a difference. This kind of movement is what we have to generate, --NO MATTER HOW DIFFICULT OR HOW MUCH OF A HASSLE IT IS-- or we will bemoan our way into Hell on Earth for all future generations. That, of all facts, should be obvious to anyone now. Pay attention, and make your vows... Do we go into a future of freedom and light, or slavery and darkness... and eventual extinction? The time has come to spiritually 'grow up' and make the most important decisions in the history of the planet... each one of us.

The point is as long as we keep throwing ideas - no matter how powerful, simple, radical or dumb - at each other without *first* connecting with the Universal wisdom within to which you rightfully alluded to, there is not much *real* change that will take place.

You wrote: "We need to start communities together"

We already live, unconsciously most of the time, within the community of Life. Almost everyone needs to reconnect with it, and rather sooner than later, if we are to avoid the cataclysmic ecocollapse of our planetary life support system now going on full speed ahead -- according to a biodiversity expert heard on radio this week, the pace at which life forms are becoming extinct because of us right now is 1000 faster than what occured during the 5 previous episodes of mass extinction of life forms in the past on our planet!!

There are various ways to reconnect with God/Life/Nature within. Some follow a spiritual path, others simply take time off their busy schedule to go in nature and feel again their roots with all Life - but only when they succeed in stopping the endless chattering going on in their mind to listen to their natural inner senses and feelings of connectedness with All That Is, beginning with the flower, the tree or the rock right in front of them.

A good friend of mine, Michael Cohen who has lived and slept outdoor in nature for the last 27 years, is the living embodiment of someone who passionately and realistically understand his role in helping others to likewise go back to a pre-mental state of mind when our instinct spoke louder than our reasoning and brain-washed civilized thinking and when we could *feel our oneness* with the land, the animals and all other living, sentient beings. He has designed a method to feel again what lies buried under thousands of years of strata of civilization and intellectual "knowledge".

Of course, as I said, it's not the only method - a method which does not rely on any spiritual dogma of belief, but *only* on personal real-life experience, preferably in a natural environment setting.

May I recommend you Roan, and anyone interested, to give a look at what he sent me below as an introduction to his work.

Take care and keep on with whatever you feel is right for you to do.

Thanks, as ever, for your role as the "Ralph Nader for Global Sanity."

Most people are deluded into believing that because the way we think can define "balance" our thinking also has the ability to produce peaceful personal and global balance.

Considering that the way we have learned to think has thrown the world out of balance, isn't it time to think again?

Our destructive personal and environmental imbalances globally produce war, abusiveness and mental disorder. They seldom improve because they result from psychological addictions that we neither recognize nor treat as such. Without receiving environmentally appropriate psychological treatment they continue.

The good news is that these addictions respond to proper treatment. The bad news is that, like any addiction, we deny they are addictions and refuse to treat them. Chances are, you are caught in this dilemma.

Considering the severity of our present situation, anybody who is not doing all they can do to alleviate the situation is part of the problem. Most of us are not doing all we can easily do.

For over a decade, I have described the source of our destructive psychological addictiveness. It is this: the way we learn to think has been hurtfully severed from the psychologically fulfilling way the natural world works in balance. This severance produces cravings that we must gratify, no matter their ruinous effects. The severence is overcome through a potent, but simple, psychological reconnection process. Sadly, most people who have the opportunity to impliment and teach this process do not do so. This is typical of addicts.

"The Lord helps those who help themselves," applies to reversing our disorders. Without including the needed addiction treatment process, we have been meditating, praying, educating, legalizing, compromising, negotiating, politicizing, preaching, celebrating, spiriting, warring, theorizing, dancing, singing, marching, confronting, arguing, purchasing, voting, philosophizing and taking action to produce life in peace and balance. But nobody has invented a replacement as good as Earth's free-of-charge wisdom.

For all of this, today, Earth and its people are more at risk than ever. Even Jesus was unable to reverse this abberation. Why? Because our society is addicted to thinking in literate ways that are estranged from the preliterate wisdom by which Mother Earth achieves her balance and beauty within and around us.

You might want to read the last sentence again. Most people have lost the ability to register, understand and act upon it. This is not surprising when you realize that, on average, we spend less than .000022% of our life in conscious sensory contact with the natural world. We have become so bewildered (meaning separated from wilderness) that we try to resolve our problems by using the same nature disconnected thinking that produces them.

Today, a new website and organization are establishing a thoughtful political and social force. It enables any leader or lay person to tangibly plug their thinking into the consensus based wisdom, balance and beauty of how nature works.

The folks who sponsor this organization are not guessing. They have had decades of experience using, teaching and validating a Natural Systems Thinking Process and its personal and global benefits. Via the internet, their hands-on website singularly teaches how to scientifically create moments that let Earth teach us what we need to know. Anybody can join once they overcome their psychological addictions long enough to recognize this: it is reasonable to learn how psychologically reconnect with Earth and think like nature works.

A draft of the website is located at http://www.ecopsych.com/mesa1.html

For Unity,

I agree very much that people need to rethink the most basic 'axioms' of our societies. There are many of these unexamined 'axioms' (seemingly self evident 'truths') are at the base of much of what we think and therefor what we do, as individuals and as a culture. Let me tell you a little about myself so you have some idea where I am coming from...

Born in 1948, I was raised as an Air Force dependent, which meant we moved almost every year of my childhood, with only a few periods of longer residence. At age 10, being very conscious of the looming threat of Nuclear War, I realized that it was quite possible that everything I was being taught was flat out wrong. The teachings of my elders did not make sense considering the insanity of looming nuclear war threatening every moment of our lives.

I have only one major talent, and lack a few common ones because of it. My talent is to see large scale patterns, and with the enhanced imagination this talent requires, at age 10 I actually manifested a vision of what the world would be like after a nuclear war, which has turned out to fit most of the predictions of the scientists published later. From that moment on, I took nothing taught me as automatically 'true' no matter how logical it was, and sought to clean my mind of any data which I had not examined and experienced thoroughly in my daily life. I cultivated a 'alien with amnesia' perspective, so successfully that even the human shape looked strange to me for a number of years.

This made my childhood rather difficult, because while I had an IQ higher than anyone had ever seen in the school systems I went to, and therefore everyone had high expectations for me, I consistently questioned everything I was taught and answered from my own understanding rather than cooperate with what my teachers wanted to teach me, which rarely made sense to me. By the time I graduated from high school, I realized two things; First, I needed to understand how people thought, how they saw life, in all kinds of cultures, and second, that to understand Humanity's current state required a study of all of history and especially prehistory, observing the data but not accepting the theories of others. The consistently bad data that was being taught and absorbed by everyone as 'axioms' originated from the ancient past, and there would be found the sources of the problems and hopefully the solutions.

I decided to try out various subcultures in our society, both regional and independent. I joined the Army and became a Green Beret, finding that it gave me access to all the strata of that most ancient of subcultures. After three years of that, where I learned many of the most ancient roots of our difficulties, often from Generals and others who maintain the core of that subculture, I got out and started traveling, seeking to actually think in the regional mindsets of the people I met.

I spent extensive time listening to thousands of people, often as I hitchhiked back and forth across the country. People open up to strangers when traveling long distances, riding for hours in the darkness, and I learned much. I joined biker clubs, cults, went into the government for awhile, and worked at dozens of different professions and jobs. Then I realized that to think like the earliest people, I needed to shed all the technology and literally go back to the way humanity lived before technology.

I moved into a cave in the high desert of California and lived without even fire. I wore a loincloth only because the people there might well shoot me if I went as naked as our earliest ancestors did for millions of years. I ate a lot of bugs, because they were the easiest and most abundant source of food, along with small lizards and desert mice... along with pretty much anything else I could find that was eatable in the wild. I learned a lot about how we were before technology in almost a year, and learned we did not survive alone in the wild without technology. We are instinctively a social species... and much of what is being taught is biased by the cultures of the scientists who come up with the theories.

After that and a few other experiments, I went to the Farm in Tennessee, where I lived for 8 years, spending time on six of the satellite communities around the US. After that, I moved to Nashville, where I studied computer technology and started using the old bbs 'echo' network to talk to people around the world and then proceeded onto the internet when it became available.

I now live in Utah, where I do a little webwork to support myself and spend most of my time trying to get out the results of 40 years of observing and experiencing Humanity with as objective a perspective as possible. I have spent decades studying everything I could get my hands on as intensively as anyone in school, using my one talent of pattern integration to fit together the data into an understanding of this world few in all our billions could have without taking the same path. I know I am here specifically at this time, with the rare talent I have, because of what is and will be happening in the relationship of Humanity to the ecoentity I call Gaia in the near future. I am not unique in that. There must be millions with the same talent, and many of those will come to much the same evolving conclusions I did. I have found a few, but too few to do anything yet. I know the mistakes we made, why we made them, the results of those mistakes, and how to heal the situation on a global scale.

You wrote: ">We need to start communities together"

The observation of our condition and our relationship with Nature is only the start of the process of healing ourselves and our planet. We are taught to see things on the most local of scales, usually purely as individuals, but the only way to see what is needed and how to heal it, is to see things from the large scale down, in a systemic way.

While the efforts of individuals alone is good, to be truly effective will require larger synergy, with groups who see the same thing working while living together to spread the perspective and do the work required together.

I'm not saying that everyone will join communities or that such a thing is required, but the next step is to move together, to start the process of showing the greater population of the planet that our perspectives work in daily life and are not arbitrary like so much of the greater culture is now. The Farm was an effort like that, and the knowledge gained by that experiment is valuable in doing better efforts. The effect of the Farm's existence and work was extensive throughout the whole planet, far disproportionate to the 1500 people who lived there. Synergy is a requirement of survival, and exists right now in the 'shotgun' results of our culture, where both good and bad results. We need to extend it in more focused ways.

>(SNIP)according to a biodiversity
>expert heard on radio this week, the pace at which life forms are becoming
>extinct because of us right now is 1000 faster than what occured during the
>5 previous episodes of mass extinction of life forms in the past on our
>planet!!

I agree. I know this data thoroughly. I understand why it is happening and what to do about it. However, enough others have to know our relationship with the rest of our greater common body to accomplish the task. My message was a carefully crafted 'probe' to see how many others out in cyberspace were at a place to do what is required. That time will come, but from the responses, it is not apparently now. Our diffuse efforts will continue however.

While I believe we have delayed a natural process of integration by our entrenched social practices, what is happening is natural, and the changes required will naturally occur, and in the near future, although not necessarily in my lifetime. (which is rather short now)

BTW, my 'probe' messages were not emotionally generated, although I put in some strong 'tags' to attract attention. I may have slightly overdone it, since many seem to have interpreted the letter as desperate or angry, which it was not. It was intentionally intense, dramatic, because email carries little weight in people's minds.

>There are various ways to reconnect with God/Life/Nature within. Some
>follow a spiritual path, others simply take time off their busy schedule to
>go in nature and feel again their roots with all Life - but only when they
>succeed in stopping the endless chattering going on in their mind to listen
>to their natural inner senses and feelings of connectedness with All That
>Is, beginning with the flower, the tree or the rock right in front of them.

Agreed. I am a Taoist and Zen teacher, and know exactly of what you speak. We are One. I have known this since early childhood. Perhaps it was a result of living in so many places among so many different cultures and peoples. Please understand that I am not coming from a place of ego in my words or work... I am absolutely the same as everyone else, no better and no worse, but I did do something unique and necessary to learn what I am spouting in such dramatic ways.

My knowledge is available to anyone who is willing to concentrate their whole lives on it, as I did. But there are drawbacks in our culture to becoming single mindedly polymathic and globally minded. It is a very hard life. Nobody asked me to do it, but someone had to, and I accepted the job. I am sure there are many others who also did it. I learned everything the hard way, by learning from mistakes and foolishness. Like one of my mentors, R. Buckminster Fuller, I am an ordinary person reaching out for extraordinary knowledge of Universe.

>A good friend of mine, Michael Cohen who has lived and
> slept outdoor in nature for the last 27 years,(CLIP)

Exactly why I lived in that cave. That is very good. Until people realize that in the same way their livers or eyeballs are part of them, they are part of the ecoentity 100%, they cannot understand that what works, works in common reality and has long term results. We are natural, and our existence is not some accident or separate from anything else at all. We evolved for a purpose, and this purpose is clear when that connection is made. It is an experience, not a concept, that breaks the illusion of separation and brings awareness of the greater One.

Keep on doing the Beautiful Work, Jean. I honor your efforts in the name of the One.