New, Improved, Updated – Growth At Any Cost – Driving Global Warming, Ecocide and Addiction | Real Time with Bill Maher

I was astounded to listen to this last night for the first time.

New Rule: Growth At Any Cost | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO). 

No network news will EVER address this; NEVER address the business as usual, Profit for each Quarter status quo.

What if we just stopped buying and buying into it?

New and improved, just $19.99, $99.99, $99,099…

Bill Maher so boldly and eloquently unveils what we the consumer, blindly succumb to, the marketing tactics of the good ole United States of Apathy.

Where to begin to instate new habits and ways of seeing the world? Start with our unconscious addiction to buying. Consumerism bleeding the natural world.  

Great video depicting the tragedy of consumerism, Happiness by Steve Cutts

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDkHappiness by Steve Cutts

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the back yard of the family home where I was raised in Pennsylvania, USA

Tears of Delight PM of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern’s Well-Being Budget & Maori Guardianship | Friendship Bench

I am in tears of delight as I listen to the statements of the Prime Minister of New Zealand and leader of the Labour Party, Jacinda Ardern, speaking of well-being as the measuring stick at the Davos, Switzerland World Economic Forum. She speaks honestly and earnestly – brilliantly revealing to the other diplomats a lens through which to look that is not measuring the quantity of profits through the GDP, but the quality of life and well-being of the people.

Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand, politics of kindness, empathy, well-being

New Zealand politics of kindness, empathy and well-being

Among the leaders of the prohibitively expensive and exclusive Davos World Economic Forum, here is yet another example of a leader stepping outside of the dictates of the norm, to instead be a spokesperson for the quality of life. She states that numbers mean nothing, if people are homeless, if the teen suicide rate is high, if people are emotionally and physically ill. It’s another great step for humanity to have an excellent female leader with the bravery to speak the truth. She’s naturally a tremendous advocate for making changes to avert climate catastrophe.

We all know what disasters continue to strike due to industrial practices that are bent on wielding the highest profits, at the cost of health and life of human and species loss and environmental degradation.

Instead of complete lies, such as what comes from the USA present reality-show-muppet-leader, everything that she says speaks truth, conviction and dignity, from the content of her words to her tone and mannerisms. She speaks honestly, as do a number of recently elected female congresswomen in the US. Hurray for the people who are electing these women leaders throughout the world. It is great news.

Not unprecedented in her ideas, the government of Bhutan conceived of the model of Gross National Happiness as a more real measuring stick than the GDP. You can have a high GDP with great numbers, sales and profits that are off the charts…and as you focus the lens in close, you see that the Amazons and Walmarts that are employing high numbers of stressed people, have paved all of the pristine land; expanded their enterprises along with their parking lots stinking of tar and asphalt and wiped out swaths of land that are habitat to creatures who share the planet.

Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index

The construction of the GNH Index includes nine domains

Psychological wellbeing
Health
Education
Time use
Cultural diversity and resilience
Good governance
Community vitality
Ecological diversity and resilience
Living standards

We no longer need an economy bent on profit, so that the computer that I’m using has to be replaced every x amount of years, because of it being built to become obsolete in that short amount of time, as the Superfund sites where the minerals are harvested or skeletons of older models of trash accumulate, to litter and poison water and air. There is absolutely a different paradigm waiting for us around the corner.

Jacinda Ardern aims to to bring the New Zealand Maori philosophy of ‘guardianship’ of the environment into politics.

nothing to fear jacinda ardern urges world leaders

nothing to fear jacinda ardern urges world leaders

weforum Prince William aka HRH Duke of Cambridge, Prime Minister of New Zealand and Labor Party leader Jacinda Ardern, Dr. Dixon Chibanda of Zimbabwe discuss mental health and friendship bench

weforum Prince William aka HRH Duke of Cambridge, Prime Minister of New Zealand and Labor Party leader
Jacinda Ardern, Dr. Dixon Chibanda of Zimbabwe discuss mental health and friendship bench

One of the panelists was Dr. Dixon Chibanda of Zimbabwe. He is one of a total of 12 psychiatrists in the country of Zimbabwe, to serve a population of more than 16 million. He conceived of the idea of training grandmothers to essentially – listen – and the program has been wildly successful. HE created and implemented the ‘practice’ called a Friendship Bench. He talks of the Friendship Bench in this TED talk. Grandmothers in Zimbabwe are trained in cognitive behavioral evidence based talk-therapy; empowering them with the skills to listen, show empathy and provide emotional support.

The grandmothers have actually been more effective than doctors, in treating depression, anxiety, addictions and for patients’ overall success rates.

Grandmother Jack in Zimbabwe helped to pioneer the Friendship Bench program

Grandmother Jack in Zimbabwe helped to pioneer the Friendship Bench program

Grandmother Jack was one of the first grandmothers in Zimbabwe, empowered to provide evidence-based talk therapy. She saw 256 clients whose lives were improved dramatically. She is now deceased.

The Friendship Bench has since been adopted worldwide.

It has morphed to not be simply Grandmothers, but for peers to sit with each other to listen and show their support.  Certainly it helps dramatically the people who are suffering from physical or mental illness, or addiction and emotional trauma. And most brilliantly it also empowers the person who is trained as the listener, who can provide emotional support and empathy.

The Friendship Bench looks to get peers talking to each other about depression, suicide and mental health

The Friendship Bench looks to get peers talking to each other about depression, suicide and mental health

mental illness, friendship bench london for peers to talk to each other about depression

friendship bench london for peers to talk to each other openly

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bicycle before sunflowers

bicycle before sunflowers

Storytelling and Stories-Not-Sold in The Politics of Economics | Systems Theory | Social Commons | Happy Planet Index | feat: Rife, Harari, Capra, McKenna, Brewer, Monbiot

The recent mass shooting in Las Vegas lead me to pursue the alternative press because of various allegations that the mainstream media had a completely different reportage than what had been disclosed from other sources. Once I extracted myself from this subject and came up for air, the winding alt digital path lead me to information I certainly hadn’t heard about in any text books.

By entering into alternative media, we are introduced to information that not surprisingly, is quite different from what the main cultural avenues of information have surmised our history to be. Fortunately, we can see clearly how the various sectors of culture play out – from history books, to learning institutions, to government organizations – when only a few are privy to what stories are told. I mention stories-are-sold, because it comes down to economic censorship. The understanding of a needed systems approach to observing all things, is an emergence of the recognition of what is lacking in a one-sided, atomized, mechanistic and hierarchical view of life; from within which our current cultural myths have developed. And as we embrace the realization that all of life is a shared network, upon which humans have arbitrarily exercised domain by collectively believing in our fictional stories, the concept of a commons – of an intellectual and natural resources heritage shared by all – we will have more of a commitment to protect that which is rightfully ours, and to want to extend and share our abundance and happiness, outside of the domain of pure economics. As this balance shifts, we will see the earth and its inhabitants not as a commodity to be used, but as a paradise to love and protect. And as this moves towards a celebration of autonomy while building on the shared intellectual and spiritual network, we will evolve a new way of valuing all life, information, invention, our selves and our communication and motions on this planet.

Did you know that there was a proven cure for cancer, in the 1930’s? And that news of the man whose discoveries and experiments, which were lauded at the time, fell into silence, suppressed by the politics of economics, or the economics of politics? His name, Dr. Royal Rife was suspended from the history books, just as that of Nikola Tesla, a contemporary of Einstein, whose fantastic inventions and successful discoveries were inconvenient for the narrative of the time.

Royal Rife’s genius was the creation of a multi-faceted (thousands of parts) 200 pound microscope design. He was able to observe intercellular activity for the first time, rivaling current technology, with the exception that his microscopes were able to view live material. “Electron microscopes made today are capable of distinguishing even individual atoms, yet they can not be used to image living cells because the process of viewing with electrons, destroy the samples.”

Royal Raymond Rife was specifically focused on the fact that all life vibrates. He proceeded to do thousands of experiments with the optical microscopes he designed; observing, identifying and testing the resonances of pathogens of different organisms with varying frequencies. His aim was to find the corresponding vibration that would single out a specific pathogen, to eradicate it.

Dr. Royal Rife's Beam Ray Machine

Dr. Royal Rife’s Beam Ray Machine

His experiments in the 1930’s lead him to creating the ‘Beam Ray’, which was proven to effectively eradicate cancer and to cure people of a host of different diseases. He measured and utilized specific frequencies to attack specific pathogens through finding the appropriate resonance. “Rife claimed to have discovered the frequencies which destroyed herpes, polio, spinal meningitis, tetanus, influenza, and many other dangerous, disease-causing organisms. His high success rates with different types of cancer were what particularly brought him a great deal of attention and notoriety. Rife used different optical vibrations which he revealed were able to disintegrate specific pathogens, leaving all other activity within the cell unaltered. There were over 50 infectious diseases that he apparently discovered cures for.”

“The ‘Rife machine’ is an electronic device which emits audio and/or radio waves applied to an individual with the intent of bettering the individual’s health. By finding the proper resonance, Rife was able to shatter the virus, just as a singer can use it to break a wine glass. This is why he called it the Mortal Oscillatory Rate.”

vibration

vibration

It works on the principle of sympathetic vibration and resonance, which states that if there are two similar objects and one of them is vibrating, the other will begin to vibrate as well, even if they are not touching. Seems like people as a group could coordinate their efforts and tackle quite tremendous enterprises! It has been proven that people who meditate in unison, and focus their attention together in coherence, produces a distinctly stronger result than if they act independently.

Here’s a video describing Rife’s work and challenges.

Royal Rife musician, inventor, doctor used frequencies in his microscope to detect and disintegrate, cancer, pathogens

Royal Rife musician, inventor, doctor used frequencies in his microscope to detect and disintegrate cancer and other pathogens

Rife’s work was more or less erased from our modern day awareness, due to the influence of one man in particular, who had come to lead the American Medical Association (founded in 1847), Dr. Morris Fishbein. Fishbein had ulterior motives. Morris Fishbein began running the AMA in 1924, and by 1934 owned all the stock in the company. He used his authoritative position as director of the AMA to crush competition and choose what medical approaches would be funded or whether they would even be acknowledged. Initially, he tried to buy out Rife’s machine and when Rife refused to sell his plans, Fishbein proceeded to destroy his work and then his reputation, stealing his records and physically destroying his machines. He used his position of power to dissolve and eradicate Rife from history, just as Rife has used resonances to eradicate cancer.

History, as the word describes, is a story. And the angle of the story, how the information is conveyed and whether or not it is conveyed, depends on who is telling it.

There was another man with hundreds of inventions whose genius would be purged from history until his name emerged again a century later, Nikola Tesla. Edison’s (DC) direct current rivaled Tesla’s (AC) alternating current. Tesla was a fantastic and copious inventor. Notably, his Tesla coil was able to capture and transmit energy with very basic instruments, capturing it for free, from within the electromagnetic field which permeates the entire planet. Tesla recognized that the space around us, everywhere, is not a vacuum, but filled with energy. However, his inexpensive tools to extract and conduct energy were wiped from the slate of possibility, by those who envisioned establishing a monopoly on generating power. They didn’t want free or inexpensively acquired power, they wanted to charge the public. Similarly, Rife’s machine not only was a demonstrable cure for cancer, but an inexpensive device in which patients needed only stand near the machine for several minutes, every few days. They merely needed to have the frequencies of waves wash over their bodies in a non-invasive and non-toxic manner.

By preventing these inventions from reaching media or scientific evaluation, they were effectively obliterated from public awareness, merely by the dictates of a few people. The art of withholding the story, annihilated competition and allowed their profits to flow.

A little bit later I reference Andreas Weber, a biologist who states

“Nothing is more open-source than DNA.”

Joe Brewer recently wrote this article Why Are Universities Failing Humanity? “This is a time of extreme urgency and need, yet almost no major institution on Earth is mobilizing its capacities to address the scale of our predicaments.” Brewer determined through his years of research that in fact not only is the modern approach to studying information too segmented, with each of the avenues of research partitioned from the others, but what information is made available has to do with funding and who is to gain from distributing this information. “The situation is complicated further by the ways that funding mechanisms like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in the United States (and their analogues in other countries) set agendas for which topics will get financial support.” Brewer talks of the ‘disciplinary silos’ that create funnels for learning, teaching, research. Funding or lack of it, have created barriers to integration across domains of knowledge, which impede the convergence of information and awareness necessary to perceive a crises on a global scale.”

The biophysicist Mae-Wan Ho known for her critical views on genetic engineering and evolution, wrote a book called “The Rainbow and the Worm The Physics of Organisms”. She similarly points to the problem of the reductionist, mechanistic standards of science, that overshadow and subjugate knowledge, so that one is only seeing part of the picture. Ho claims that analytical reductionism doesn’t see things in terms of their coherent relationship. One has to look at the whole system; including the biology, physiology, chemistry, physics and mathematics. Brewer agrees, an interdisciplinary systems approach, is what is missing.

In his article, Brewer writes that “Scholars and researchers who seek to address systemic issues at universities must paddle against huge organizational currents, as is well known by anyone seeking to be both an academic and a transdisciplinary researcher. We need to stop selecting students, faculty, and grant proposals within disciplinary boundaries and start framing problems at systemic levels around which coordination is found to be needed for adequately addressing them. This means funding agencies need to be reorganized around systemic issues. Ecological disharmony and extreme inequality have already been named as two high-profile opportunities yet to be capitalized upon; dealing with exponential technological change would be another.”

The path of science and the means of instituting information and knowledge in the Western World for the last several hundred years has been one which separates, defines and isolates one discipline from another. From this one-sided approach is emerging the recognition of a completely different model other than the linear one, that of systems theory.

The book that the physicist Fritjof Capra and biologist Pier Luigi Luisi recently published after years of research, The Systems View of Life A Unifying Vision, echoes the recognition of the need for a holistic manner of viewing life and the world. Their awareness of the clear inadequacies of the standard, linear, prevailing scientific approach steered them to actually create the alternative that was loudly making itself clear.

Capra and Luisi see a systemic conception of life emerging at the forefront of science. “New emphasis has been given to complexity, networks, and patterns of organization, leading to a novel kind of ‘systemic’ thinking.” What they realize is that everything unto itself is a perfectly functioning and self-healing entity, which works cohesively and is integrally a part of the whole fabric with which it interacts and cooperates.

“The Systems Theory defines life of all kinds, as not a distinct entity which can merely be quantitatively measured and classified into a particular domain, but that the very essence of life is a qualitative interconnected network of relationships, an ecological system of relationships between different species.”

I wrote about this upon discovering their work in a former blog https://digesthis.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/the-new-story-sustainability-fritjof-capra-pier-luigi-luisis-systemic-view-cel/

Rather than isolating disciplines, or organisms, or parts of a cell into singular events, recognize that all of these are part of a vibrant network and must be regarded and studied within this context. Similarly, in education, interdisciplinary approaches to complex situations, is a natural emergence of understanding networked relationships. We’ve had plenty of situations within our culture that reveal deliberate blockage of information, to benefit a few. In fact, culture becomes more sophisticated as the insights, observations, understanding and inventions are shared by all, not privatized and turned into commodities. Cities are like neurosynaptic centers, where concentrations of information come together, leading to inventions and exchanges, new levels of understanding. Which will lead to the point of the Commons.

The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari in his TED talk, clearly illustrates that human ‘history’ is profoundly and dynamically shaped by the stories that people tell. He mentions that biologically, humans are not terribly different from other species, from fungus to frogs, to chimpanzees. What sets us apart and has allowed homo sapiens to lunge ahead of all other life forms to essentially dominate the planet, is due to our capacity to flexibly cooperate with one another, over large networks. And our capacity to work together is due to our creativity and use of our imagination.

Whatever one imagines, can be created.

Harari states that humans have a dual reality; “They live in an objective reality, but over the centuries have constructed on top of this a second layer of fictional reality; made of fictional entities; like nations, gods, money, corporations. As history unfolded, this fictional reality became more and more powerful. Today, the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities.”

George Monbiot has written very often about the challenges of maintaining healthy ecosystems because of the political and economic climate that continually supports large industries (animal, petroleum, agriculture) which disseminate wildlife habitats, destroy environments and lead to more monoculture. http://www.monbiot.com/2017/09/11/how-do-we-get-out-of-this-mess/ In this Monbiot states, “Stories are the means by which we navigate the world. They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals. We all possess a narrative instinct: an innate disposition to listen for an account of who we are and where we stand….Those who tell the stories run the world.

The very survival of rivers and trees, lions and elephants, depends on the decisions and wishes of these fictional entities; like the United States, like Google, like the World Bank, like Palm Oil corporations. Quite brilliantly, Harari says that

“the master storytellers are the big bankers, the finance ministers, the prime ministers.”

“The Burning Paradise: Palm Oil in the Land of the Tree Kangaroo” reveals,
What happened when a giant Korean conglomerate set its eyes on Indonesia’s largest intact rainforest.”

Tree Kangaroos and Birds of Paradise in Papua Losing their habitat to Palm Oil Clearcutting

Tree Kangaroos and Birds of Paradise in Papua Losing their habitat to Palm Oil Clearcutting

Government leaders, finance ministers and corporate executives tell us a very convincing story. And if everyone believes this story, it actually works. Pharmaceutical companies are very slick in their delivery of advertising, with many tentacles in the air waves and a plethora of TV commercials, now surpassing those of the automobile industry. Yet in the case of petroleum corporations, animal or agricultural industries, lumber, palm oil…there’s a distance, and the work that they do is only really witnessed by people whose property is near to the dirty and consuming practices. In the case of Palm Oil companies dismantling and burning up the virgin Rain Forest, very few of us have an inkling of what is really happening in these remote areas, except for through organizations who do the scouting, who trek there, take aerial footage and who risk their lives, in some cases, to get close enough. I rely on the Guardian for example, and more and more alternative press. Like The UTNE READER Propagandopoly: Monopoly as an Ideological Tool and Mongabay, Korean palm oil firm burned large tracts of forestland in Indonesia, NGOs allege and since being informed about the English version of this paper, Le Monde Diplomatique “The century of revolution”

Noam Chomsky stated years ago the concept of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. These fictional realities generate power because of the fact that they are collectively believed and adhered to.

Yuval Noah Harari brilliantly states that “money is the most successful story ever invented and told by humans; it is the only story everybody believes.”

The ecologist Suzanne Simard discerns through her studies that trees communicate with one another regularly and over vast distances. In Simard’s Ted Talk “How Trees Talk to Each Other, she points out that trees are not competitive, but in fact are super cooperators.

Harari points out that stories that we’ve invented and spread around aren’t necessarily ones that are good for the collective species. “States and Nations are not objective reality, same is true of the economic field. The most important actors in the global economy presently are companies which are legal fictions. Corporations mostly want to make money. And our capitalist system is one built on growth as measured by the Gross Domestic Product. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the healthiest manner of cooperation with the ecosystem of the earth.

Terence Mckenna relates in his talk A Species Addicted

“There is no serious plan to deal with what havoc humans have created with the planet, nature, the other creatures, the diminishing rain forests. Through the propaganda and lies created by our most powerful storytellers, the human race, in an ego-driven manner, is following a culture which is a lie.”

Caitlin Johnstone echoes in her article about feminism in our current political environment, is that the patriarchal history was written by men. “Money is the engine room of the patriarchy. Humans have indeed used our superior neurology to out-survive and out-thrive all other competing organisms, but then we’ve also continued to use it to conquer, kill, exploit and enslave one another throughout the entirety of recorded history, and to decimate the ecosystem which we need to survive. If we end up going extinct due to anthropogenic climate chaos or nuclear armageddon, we will have failed as spectacularly as a species can possibly fail in the extremely short time that we have been here.”

Johnstone says in her article “It Is Evolve Or Die Time” “What few problems we encounter which aren’t man-made (natural disasters, some diseases) could be vastly minimized if our species was pouring all its mental energy and creativity into creating a better world for everyone instead of into economic competition and warfare.”

The journalist Chris Hedges in an interview following his publication in Truthdig September 17, titled The Silencing of Dissent, mentions that the same one-way story embraces media and politics, stemming from the forces of corporate capitalism and proponents of American imperialism. “The utopian ideology of neoliberalism and the primacy of corporate power have branded themselves into the human consciousness as inevitable forms of human progress. And those who have had the say, due to their positions and power, have imposed de facto censorship to shut out critics of unfettered capitalism and imperialism, such as Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn. This has rippled from politics, into the media and our learning institutions, as well as government agencies such as the American Medical Association, American Diabetes Association and American Institute of Health.”

“Do not significantly alienate those upon whom we depend for money and access!”

In the interview Hedges states, “Those who rise in the organization and hold power are consummate careerists. Their loyalty is to their advancement and the stature and profitability of the institution. With the bankruptcy of the ruling ideology, and the bankruptcy of the American liberal class and the American left, those who hold fast to intellectual depth and an examination of systems of power, including economics, culture and politics, have to be silenced.”

In a former blog I wrote WTF | “What the Health” documentary: America’s Medical Societies Driven by Corpocrisy | More Inconvenient Truths | Culinary Medicine | Farmacy I was describing the What The Health documentary film that uncovered excellent realizations about ‘standard procedure’ covert operations in funding and information withheld. This film is about the collusion of industries in their misinformation to the public about diet and health.

Same theme: information withheld, mis-information provided, which the film makers uncovered as they approached various American government health organizations, who toe-the-line of their sponsors. Therefore, instead of speaking the truth about diet and health, they withhold it. You can watch it here. The industries which use the land’s resources precipitously, wastefully and inefficiently to maintain the beef, pork and dairy industries, are in fact the same industries who paid off these large institutions who claim to be representing facts to provide the public with information about health. Therefore since their sponsors are the very same industries who operate food industries that are unhealthy, the various organizations maintain a deceptive policy.

Terence Mckenna mentions that ironically regardless of the wealth and GDP of the USA, the level of unhappiness is immense, there’s an utterly unhappy ruling class. Yet what has begun to emerge along with the awareness of the need for cooperation and diversification, is that certainly the dictates of capitalism and consumerism are not what bring health, happiness or progress, but are about continued growth for the purposes of profit, without regard to the entire health of the system. Mae-Wan Ho describes in The Communicative and Integrative Biology of her book concept The Rainbow and the Worm, that “life is essentially quantum coherent systems, based primarily on the degree to which the various parts of organisms are able to work autonomously but still remain highly coordinated.” She mentions that going against the grain of the established story, all lead to problems; such as lack of courage in addressing the big questions or to disagree with the mainstream, lack of imagination, lack of funding, too much concentration on molecular nuts and bolts, domination of reductionist biology, too much specialization and lack of interdisciplinary training, lack of appreciation of the beauty of nature. In my opinion, to really understand nature, one needs to be both a romantic poet and artist at heart.”

In George Monbiot’s article in the Guardian, Common Wealth, he asserts that two critical factions are missing in the standard assumption that the two main actors in the economy are the State and the Market. “In fact there are four major economic sectors: the market, the state, the household and the commons.” The household is almost entirely comprised of the work of women. Both market and state receive a massive subsidy from the household: the unpaid labour of parents and other carers, still provided mostly by women. If children were not looked after, fed, taught basic skills at home and taken to school, there would be no economy. And if people who are ill, elderly or have disabilities were not helped and supported by others, the public care bill would break the state. What is critically misconceived, is the concept of the commonwealth.

The vast wealth of the economic elite has accumulated at the expense of the populace, through their seizure of the fourth sector of the economy: the commons.

A commons is neither state nor market. It has three main elements. First a resource, such as land, water, minerals, scientific research, hardware or software. Second, a community of people who have shared and equal rights to this resource, and organise themselves to manage it. Third, the rules, systems and negotiations they develop to sustain it and allocate the benefits.

A true commons is managed not for the accumulation of capital or profit, but for the steady production of prosperity or wellbeing. The commons have been attacked by both state power and capitalism for centuries.

Resources that no one invented or created, or that a large number of people created together, (or in several cases where inventions have been submerged from collective consciousness by being dismissed or disregarded by the powers to censor them at the time), are stolen by those who sniff an opportunity for profit.

Monbiot states that “Enclosure creates inequality. It produces a rentier economy: those who have captured essential resources force everyone else to pay for access. It shatters communities and alienates people from their labour and their surroundings. The ecosystems commoners sustained are liquidated for cash. Inequality, rent, atomisation, alienation, environmental destruction: the loss of the commons has caused or exacerbated many of the afflictions of our age. A commons, unlike state spending, obliges people to work together, to sustain their resources and decide how the income should be used. It gives community life a clear focus. It depends on democracy in its truest form. It destroys inequality. It provides an incentive to protect the living world. It creates, in sum, a Politics of Belonging.”

The German biologist, philosopher and nature writer Andreas Weber recognizes the interconnectedness of humans to nature. In his talk at the conference on “Economics and the Common(s): From Seed Form to Core Paradigm” Weber mentions that though we can maintain aspects of our modus operandi of the age of enlightenment, we need to make a paradigm shift to enlivenment; seeing all life in continuous interrelationship. “In our question of “what is life?”, we need to look beneath the ‘operating system’ engendered by the enlightenment in which things, life, humans are measured according to efficiency, competition and egoistical agents. This approach is cutting things down into blocks, separate parts, into arbitrary entities and dead objects. What is missing is that there are no feelings involved.”

He claims, “we need a new bios, enlivenment; stressing the expressive and experiential qualities of being alive. Instead of looking at nature and life in a causal way, when we see things as they are, they are constantly changing, in an unfolding process of freedom, autonomy and value. Every commons is a material and knowledge commons.”

 

Nothing is more open-source than DNA.

 

“The economy of the commons is naturally anti-capitalist. From within a cell to a whole organism, all life is in compartments with its own boundary. However it’s not a wall, but a permeable boundary, in which the inhabitants are continuously interrelating and crystalizing into a whole, a unity. Quantum physics demonstrates that we affect the outcome of the experiment by observing. When we’re talking about the biosphere, ecology, economy, we are always talking about ourselves. The new ism, enlivenment, stresses that we need to recognize and incorporate the fact that we are feeling beings, with living experiences, who wish to feel meaning.”

The Venus Project is about a Resource-Based Economy – All Resources are a Common Heritage.

Venus Project Resource-Based Economy - All Resources are a Common Heritage

Venus Project Resource-Based Economy – All Resources are a Common Heritage

The Venus Project – a Resource-Based Economy Blueprint for the genesis of a new world civilization.

This functioning, healthy system that has already been operating in Costa Rica, which Jason Hickel describes in “Want to avert the apocalypse? Take lessons from Costa Rica

Hickel points out, “If we want to have any hope of averting catastrophe, we’re going to have to do something about our addiction to growth. This is tricky, because GDP growth is the main policy objective of virtually every government on the planet. It lies at the heart of everything we’ve been told to believe about how the economy should work: that GDP growth is good, that it’s essential to progress. Costa Rica proves that achieving high levels of human wellbeing has very little to do with GDP and almost everything to do with something very different.

Redistribution can be a substitute for growth

Every few years the New Economics Foundation publishes the Happy Planet Indexa measure of progress that looks at life expectancy, wellbeing and equality rather than the narrow metric of GDP, and plots these measures against ecological impact.

Those factors which contribute to health and happiness do not go together with uninhibited growth of the Gross Domestic Product.

The Happy Planet Index measures what matters: sustainable wellbeing for all.

“In this sense, Costa Rica is the most efficient economy on earth: it produces high standards of living with low GDP and minimal pressure on the environment.

Costa Rica is a thorn in the side of orthodox economics. In fact, the part of Costa Rica where people live the longest, happiest lives – the Nicoya Peninsula – is also the poorest, in terms of GDP per capita. Researchers have concluded that Nicoyans do so well not in spite of their “poverty”, but because of it – because their communities, environment and relationships haven’t been ploughed over by industrial expansion. A series of progressive governments started rolling out healthcare, education and social security in the 1940s and expanded these to the whole population from the 50s onward, after abolishing the military and freeing up more resources for social spending. Costa Rica is one of only a few countries in the global south that enjoys robust universalism.”

Happy Planet Index is not about GDP but lower economic footprint

Happy Planet Index is not about GDP but lower economic footprint

According to their homepage “Wealthy Western countries, often seen as the standard of success, do not rank highly on the Happy Planet Index. Instead, several countries in Latin America and the Asia Pacific region lead the way by achieving high life expectancy and wellbeing with much smaller Ecological Footprints. Costa Rica tops the list of countries every time. With a life expectancy of 79.1 years and levels of wellbeing in the top 7% of the world, Costa Rica matches many Scandinavian nations in these areas and neatly outperforms the United States. And it manages all of this with a GDP per capita of only $10,000 (£7,640), less than one fifth that of the US.”

To recognize that all land, ocean, soil, trees, air and plants that we have not created but are part of the earth, which sustains us, is our home to protect. To shift our activities to maintain these benefits and resources; caring, maintaining, learning and providing to equally distribute to all, making this commons something we integrally work towards nurturing and protecting. And the more we advance in education and awareness towards constructing inventions that are the least toxic and most energy efficient, is something that we can all participate in with pride. The stories we tell, can lead us to a very happy and harmonious planet.

Terence McKenna A Species Addicted TV

Terence McKenna A Species Addicted; our addiction to objects which he calls object fetichism.

Why not live the adventure of creating and doing exactly what you love to do, and celebrating that everyone else is as well. None is to be privatized or controlled from an outside source with money trickling to this outside source, but kindled and honored and redistributed among all. With the priority being not to make an economic profit, but to have the best quality outdoor and indoor environments, the best quality of education, an emphasis towards local and diversification. A stress on creativity and autonomy among individuals who pull together, cooperatively sharing access to resources and benefits. With cohesion, respect and harmony and intimate interaction with all of the natural world. All of the living world adds delight and dimension to our beings, as we put our full awareness towards these with empathy and joy, with all of our senses. Hearing wind, birds, sensing moisture or heat, seeing the design of nature, smelling the fragrances of plants. The thought of doing anything that has a negative environmental impact to ruin our environment, would be as obvious as not putting waste on a valued space.

We can do it, collectively, because that is our nature. Homo sapiens thrive when cooperating. Not with heroes or figureheads pandering to the same old forged industrially, financially entangled world. We simply need to keep dynamically spreading our joy through being the best that we can actively be and imagine ourselves to be and to live celebrating this diversity of spirit among ourselves, rather than crushing or suppressing this.

Hazrat Inayat Khan, Resonance

Hazrat Inayat Khan quote Resonance

Incredibly, the first thing I saw when I was triggered to write this blog, was a quote from a Sufi master whose name I was familiar with. Several years ago I participated in a ‘Heart Rhythm Meditation’ course taught by a South African pediatrician at Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. This meditation practice was influenced inspired by this Sufi musician, mystic, and healer Hazrat Inayat Khan.

“A person does not hear sound only through the ears; he hears sound through every pore of his body. It permeates the entire being, and according to its particular influence either slows or quickens the rhythm of the blood circulation; it either wakens or soothes the nervous system. It arouses a person to greater passions or it calms him by bringing him peace. According to the sound and its influence a certain effect is produced. Sound becomes visible in the form of radiance. This shows that the same energy which goes into the form of sound before being visible is absorbed by the physical body. In that way the physical body recuperates and becomes charged with new magnetism.” – Hazrat Inayat Khan

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan Sufism and the Mysticism of Music, Charlie Sarafan, Infinity

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan on Sufism and the Mysticism of Music interviewed by Charlie Sarafan for Infinity. Khan speaks of life as a vibration of wave-like patterns, all life having a signature vibration and frequency that can resonate with other life forms. “The tradition of Sufism has been accused of pantheism, as all is considered ‘god’. You can not divide the universe. In as much as something is a fraction of the universe, it has within it the potentiality of all the universe. The origin of all reality is wave-like. Every object in the world has a signature tune. When objects resonate, this is the key to the experience of relationship. One can heal bones by putting them into an electromagnetic field with the same signature vibration.”

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Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz welcomes donations for her writing, photography, illustrations, eBook & music composition

Batman hitting the earth with oil oozing out

Batman hitting the earth with oil oozing out

Carol Keiter the blogger

Carol Keiter the blogger

Unbounded Spirit | Opposite of Addiction is Connection | Johann Hari “Chasing the Scream”

This short video “Drugs Don’t Cause Addiction” is one of the most profoundly accurate looks into our modern societal malaise and misguided notions about what is of value today. As the unbounded spirit acknowledges, “This Brilliant Animated Video Will Change Your View on Drugs Forever”, and I add, and Your View of Our Modern Society.

Addiction

Everything We Think we Know About Addiciton is Wrong

Obviously much thought went into it, as this video project is a collaboration with Johann Hari, the author of the book “Chasing the Scream”. It reveals that pointing the finger of blame to ‘drugs’ or ‘the war on drugs’ is actually completely missing the point.

"Chasing the Scream, Joann Hari

“Chasing the Scream” by Joann Hari – brilliant reviews

As is typical, the fingers are pointing in the opposite direction of the real problem. What we need to realize is that the real blame is our collective societal values of materialism over connection with others. As the western world has become more and more focused on material wealth and financial gain, this has been accompanied with increasing social isolation. The problem is not a drug, nor an individual addiction, but a collective one which has been driven by consumerism.

We need to rebuild our society towards values in which the individual derives happiness through accomplishments from actions in which he or she is engaged in which makes him/her happy and feel joy from emersion in that activity, and in which collectively we are sharing activities and experiencing joy through camaraderie and sympathy; recognizing that we are all living this life together and that only when all beings have peace, comfort and security can we all share in that joy.

Paraphrasing the video…

Addiction is just one symptom of the crisis of disconnection that is happening all around us.

People have an innate need to connect. When we’re happy and healthy we will bond with the people around us. Yet when we’re traumatized, isolated or beaten down by life, we will bond with something that will give us some sense of relief; such as:

Endlessly checking a cell phones

addiction to cell phones

addiction to cell phones

addiction to pornography

addiction to pornography

addiction to video games

addiction to video games

addiction to gambling

addiction to gambling

addiction to cocaine

addiction to cocaine – drugs in general

because…as the video elucidates, we will bond with something, because THIS is our human nature.

Since the 1950’s the average number of close friends an American has, has been steadily declining, whereas the amount of floorspace in their homes has been increasing. Choosing floorspace over close friends, stuff over connection.

The path out of unhealthy bonds, is to form healthy bonds; to be connected to people you want to be present with.

It’s not the chemicals, it’s your cage.

We need not talk about individual recovery from addiction, but must talk about social recovery.

We need to change the unnatural way that we live.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection.

I recall a ‘waking dream’ I had decades ago. It was not while I was sleeping, but during the day. I was witnessing what has since been created, virtual reality, before it existed. In the dream I was climbing a mountain. I could feel the breeze. The ‘camera’ pulled back so that I was then seeing myself from above, and then moved further away until I was high above my body looking down at myself and the earth. Then suddenly I was climbing out of a box, an isolation tank, in my living room. I then was disconnecting these wires from my scull. When I awoke from this engaging dream during the day while I was living in Washington D.C., I recall feeling very disturbed emotionally from the thought of having cheated myself by not ‘actually’ having the real experience of traveling to a mountain, and then to put out the effort to reach its summit. Instead, I was only alone in a box – the shell of the real experience. 

A few years later I was startled to watch a movie while I was traveling and visiting Europe called “Strange Dayshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film) because it was recapturing the essence of the mechanics of how this ‘virtual reality’ of my vision and virtual experience occurred.

Strange Days

1995 film Strange Days

I have since continued to feel this conviction (even though I’m sitting here ‘working’ and writing, creating and communicating in isolation on my MacBook Pro – and loving and needing this machine – so I think 🙂 That if we don’t maintain a balance, our technologies will continue to isolate us from ourselves, from one another and from our connection to the natural world.

I had hypothesized that primitive people perhaps had not lost our special connection to the cosmos. A friend then pointed out to investigate my theory by looking at the aborigines of Australia. They once consistently demonstrated telepathy and ultra human powers of consciousness. As modern man relies more and more on our gadgets to do things for us, our human powers of mind and heart and connection to one another and the universal intelligence will atrophy. I believe human beings do have capabilities of telepathy and of connection with the divine through allowing ourselves to quite our minds and engage our spirits and heart – our sixth sense or intuition or gut instincts – whatever you want to call it. Yet, if our thoughts are constantly engaged and busy worrying about the past and the future and what we don’t have and judging one another and watching sitcoms and shit, we don’t have the time or space to tap into what is available to us as spiritual beings on the material physical plane. yep, I said it. I always thought it. And I keep finding other human beings who also reiterate and reverberate the same message….

This video was put together with http://www.patreon.com

patreon

patreon dot com description / kurzgesagt

http://addiction.mobydigg.de and the unbounded spirit.

carol keiter, blogger, arizona, wwoof

Carol the blogger in her Moose-themed residence at her first WWOOF experience in Arizona

Here’s a pic of me, the blogger in my ‘moose lake lodge’ residence in the Sonoran desert where I’m participating in my first WWOOF experience on the Veteran’s Ranch, a means of avoiding homelessness while at the same time being very interested in learning about farming techniques from the pros – the people who run the farms and ranches – and I absolutely love and adore animals of every type.

When I’m not working with the animals or on my own projects, I’m taking pictures of sunsets.

Solitude, Serenity, Sonoran, Sunset, Feb. 20th 2016

Solitude and Serenity Sonoran Sunset Feb. 20th 2016

IMG_0003

And I’ve started to take videos of the animals, with the incentive to capture the sounds, to then weave into some new music (sounds on the ranch 🙂

Carol Keiter aka nomadbeatz ~ As an avid blogger who is presently picking up where I left off with my eBook to complete it and and beginning again to compose music, I ask you rather unambiguously and unabashedly to please donate, if you are able. !-))

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In addition to the fact that donations are always welcome and appreciated, I just discovered to day February 20th, 2016 patreon, which I am very happy to join and am about to create an artist profile. It is a very similar concept to something I conjectured a month or so ago: wishing there was an artist residency somewhere where the artists can collaborate if they choose, yet which is based on earning money for what they create. They are paid, as they commit to producing work. Well, patron is not a residency, yet it does offer capital, and I’m pretty stoked to have discovered it. Certainly it will act as a motivator for all artists, lighting a fire to keep them producing new work!!! I’ll sign on to patreon as a blogger/photographer/illustrator/author creating a profile tomorrow, and will be de light ed to find some patrons encouraging me to keep on producing work!