Wednesday, July 19, 2006 | A Beginning... THERE is another theory besides "the end" for what is happening in the world right now, and while I didn't make it up I'd love to help popularize it. The theory holds that our current tribulation is going to lead to what is really the beginning of sustainable human life. That is to say, the wars, environmental destruction, energy crisis, and the inability for our non-sustainable economy to continue beyond a certain point are what will lead to the foundations of what you might call ethical communities on Earth. One quality our method of "economy" has is how wasteful it is. I'll skip issues like single serving bottles of water or virgin petroleum being used for trash bags, and use just one example -- trucking. Whether you live in Europe, the UK or the United States, everything you consume is shipped by truck. Much of it is shipped over long distances; I've read that most produce (fruits and vegetables) in the United States is shipped two thirds of the way across the country. I talked to a trucker in Europe last night who told me that she was driving big loads of tortilla chips from Belgium to Germany, to give one example. Half the time she was driving her rig empty. It is possible to do most growing and manufacturing much closer to where the consumption happens, and where it's not possible, we can go back to the quaint experience of seasonable vegetables. Trucking on current scales is a stunning, unnecessary waste of oceans of oil, and it's just one example of the waste. Burning diesel fuel oil produces carbon, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, heat, dioxin, soot and other toxins, and it simply does not need to be done so much -- and the consequences are becoming serious. The best thing we could hope for is a shortage of oil that prevents this kind of waste and compels business to be more efficient. We need to see some of these new technologies to come out of the file cabinets where they've been kept safely locked away. This happening slowly and is only a matter of time. The ongoing series of environmental disasters is slowly waking people up -- at least the people in areas local to the situation. The connection between a hurricane or flood and the global environment is not necessarily intuitive, however, but the level of the discussion is improving gradually, even noticeably in the past two or three years. Sooner or later this will add up to the obvious need to change. A lot of homes may be lost along the way (a lot already have), but at a certain point equilibrium with our environment will be reached or perhaps a bit over-reached, as we are over-reaching today. War is a trickier issue. In understanding why wars happen, I rarely EVER see a critique of the arms trade. Who is making all these rockets, explosives and machine guns? Why don't we hear the names of the companies and the people who own them? And why is it that some societies can never get enough endless war? This being said, we may find ourselves arriving at a point where enough people realize war is so destructive and painful that it actually stops. It would need to get a lot worse, I fear, because people really don't get this message: our own inner tendency toward conflict is harvested in the drive of entire societies to war. Only a tiny percentage of people actually go and do the fighting, but the conflicted minds of millions of people support it. It would be far easier to work on the psychological level than on the global one here. Mind is much more flexible and it's a teaching, learning and transmission device. Mind has a collective quality. Gradually, enough of a new message getting to people is going to prompt a change, and that change would be a beginning. If we manage to survive our technological adolescence, that change, however slow, is pretty much inevitable. We need to be educated enough to understand that being flooded with nonstop images of death and destruction is a form of psychological abuse and violence which we can choose against. We can also understand, through repeated experiences, the extent to which we are trapped in a frame of mind that perpetuates our "need" to be exposed to this. There is, however, a fairly simple explanation: lack of creative imagination and lack of the discipline we need to apply it. In other words, nobody who had something more creative to do would sit and watch images of death all day long, with no processing of those images -- just direct, dead-end brain input. Around the time I was living at Miracle Manor, there was a fairly popular book going around called The Starseed Transmissions. It's still available, by the way. The book gives a picture of global evolution and suggests that for each person coming out of the trance, the slumber of violence, or the Matrix, a "psychological process" will be necessary. Opening one's human mind is a process; learning to see and hear is a process; learning to choose creative experience over numbing psychic death is a process which is almost always learned. It does not necessarily have fast effects on a global scale, but it will have lasting ones. And the real benefit, the lure and appeal, is that for individuals who do embrace a psychological process (which would translate as "spiritual" or "transformational"), there is some immediate relief from the pain and the destructive choices. Life can actually get better. One can see the light -- within. The transformations that happen defy logic, reason and "human nature" while specifically being part of human nature. People can, and do, choose -- in a moment -- to live differently, to experience reality differently, to devote their energy to healing rather than conflict. It is possible to awaken from the dream of pain and enter another way of experiencing existence: an experience of mutual support within our communities, workplaces and families, for instance; and the sudden recognition that "we are part of the world" and are personally participating in a planetary opening that cannot be complete without us.