The Globalization of humanity

 

Elisabet Sahtouris, in "The Biology of Globalization states

"The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of globalization - its economy - is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization."

 

 

Time for Plan B

Lester R. Brown World watch Institue

Against rising temperatures and falling water tables, farmers will struggle to feed a surging world population in the coming decades. The technologies and strategies needed to sustain civilization in the 21st century are ready, but time may be running out.

 

This year, the world grain harvest is expected to fall short of world grain consumption by nearly 100 million tons, or 5%. This shortfall, one of the largest on record, will mark the fourth consecutive year of grain deficits, dropping global stocks to the lowest level in a generation.

Last year, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that humanity's collective demands first surpassed the earth's regenerative capacity around 1980. Its study estimated that our demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20%. We are now satisfying our excessive demands by consuming the earth's natural assets, in effect creating a global bubble economy.

 

The global bubble economy that is based on the over consumption of the earth's natural capital assets will affect the entire world. When the food economy bursts, it will raise food prices worldwide. The challenge for our generation is to deflate the economic bubble before that point.

Unfortunately, since September 11 2001, political leaders, diplomats and the media worldwide have been preoccupied with terrorism and, more recently, the invasion of Iraq. Terrorism is certainly a matter of concern, but if it diverts us from the environmental trends that are undermining our future until it is too late to reverse them

 

Mega-threats currently being neglected include climate change, eroding soils, aquifer depletion and expanding deserts. All are threatening the livelihood and food supply of hundreds of millions of the world's people. These issues do not even appear on the radar screen of many national governments.

Thus far, most of the environmental damage has been local: the death of the Aral Sea, the burning rainforests of Indonesia, the collapse of the Canadian cod fishery, the melting of the glaciers that supply Andean cities with water, the dustbowl forming in northwestern China, and the depletion of the U.S. Great Plains aquifer.

But as these local environmental events expand and multiply, they will progressively weaken the global economy, bringing closer the day when the economic bubble will burst.

Humanity's demands on the earth have multiplied over the last half-century as our numbers have increased and our incomes have risen. World population grew from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.1 billion in 2000. The growth during those 50 years exceeded that during the 4 million years since we emerged as a distinct species.

Population growth and rising incomes together have tripled world grain demand over the last half-century, pushing it from 640 million tons in 1950 to 1855 million tons in 2000. To satisfy this swelling demand, farmers have plowed land that was highly erodible Each year billions of tons of topsoil are being blown away in dust storms or washed away in rainstorms, leaving farmers to try to feed some 70 million additional people, but with less topsoil than the year before.

Demand for water also tripled as agricultural, industrial and residential uses climbed, outstripping the sustainable supply in many countries. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry. Rivers are also being drained dry, to the detriment of wildlife and ecosystems

Fossil fuel use quadrupled, setting in motion a rise in carbon emissions that is overwhelming nature's capacity to fix carbon dioxide.

The sector of the economy that seems likely to unravel first is food. Eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, collapsing fisheries, falling water tables and rising temperatures are converging to make it more difficult to expand food production fast enough to keep up with demand.

The question is: Can the world's farmers bounce back and expand production enough to fill the100-million-ton shortfall, provide for the more than 70 million people added each year.

Farmers around the world are facing two new challenges: rising temperatures and falling water tables. Farmers currently on the land may face higher temperatures than any generation since agriculture began 11, 000 years ago AND the first to face widespread aquifer depletion and the resulting loss of irrigation water.

The global average temperature has risen in each of the last three decades. Higher global average temperatures reduce crop yields through their effect on photosynthesis, moisture balance and fertilization. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture developed a rule of thumb that each 1^oC rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season reduces grain yields by 10%.

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The second challenge facing farmers, falling water tables, is also recent with the worldwide spread of powerful diesel and electric pumps during the last half-century, however, overpumping has become commonplace.

As the world demand for water has climbed, water tables have fallen in scores of countries, including China, India and the United States, which together produce nearly half of the world's grain.

Scores of other countries are also overpumping their aquifers, setting the stage for dramatic future cutbacks in water supplies. The more populous among these are Pakistan, Iran and Mexico.

This means that cutbacks in grain harvests will occur in many countries at more or less the same time when the world's population is growing by 70 million a year.

 

Unless we quickly reverse the damaging trends that we have set in motion, they will generate vast numbers of environmental refugees - people abandoning depleted aquifers and exhausted soils and those fleeing advancing deserts and rising seas. In a world where civilization is being squeezed between expanding deserts from the interior of continents and rising seas on the periphery, refugees are likely to number not in the millions but in the tens of millions. Already we see refugees from drifting sand in Nigeria, Iran and China.

We are already looking at the potential wholesale evacuation of cities as aquifers are depleted

The world is moving into uncharted territory as human demands override the sustainable yield of natural systems. The risk is that people will lose confidence in the capacity of their governments to cope with such problems, leading to social breakdown. The shift to anarchy is already evident in countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Business as usual - Plan A - is clearly not working. The stakes are high, and time is not on our side. There is mounting evidence that our modern civilization is in trouble. The good news is that there are solutions to the problems we are facing. The bad news is that if we continue to rely on timid, incremental responses, our bubble economy will continue to grow until eventually it bursts. We need a new approach - a Plan B - an urgent reordering of priorities and a restructuring of the global economy in order to prevent that from happening. We need a massive mobilization to deflate the global economic bubble before it bursts. This will require an unprecedented degree of international cooperation to stabilize population, climate, water tables and soils - and at wartime speed.

Our only hope now is rapid systemic change - change based on market signals that tell the ecological truth. This means restructuring the tax system: lowering income taxes and raising taxes on environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, to incorporate the ecological costs. Unless we can get the market to send signals that reflect reality, we will continue making faulty decisions as consumers, corporate planners and government policymakers. Ill-informed economic decisions and the economic distortions they create can lead to economic decline.

 

 

The Possible Human . . . and Conscious Evolution

 

by Jean Houston

In evolutionary theory Jump Time is known as the time of punctuated equilibrium - when a species is living at the edge of its tolerance in a state of gestation and ferment and suddenly jumps to a new order of being. This is it. This is the time.
This is especially critical, given the fact that we are now in Jump Time. In evolutionary theory Jump Time is known as the time of punctuated equilibrium - when a species is living at the edge of its tolerance in a state of gestation and ferment and suddenly jumps to a new order of being. This is it. This is the time. We are in a hot house environment: lots of members of the species congregated together with the aim of healing the whole self so that we can respond to the strange attractor, the lure of becoming that is calling us into new ways of being.

And yet, people and nations live as hobbled giants - Gullivers pinned down by the Lilliputians of limited thought, habituated patterns, toxic culture, or lives of serial monotony. How do people and nations learn to see and hear and feel our way into the mind of the maker in ways which add to the health and aliveness of those around us, renew our spirits, regain a deepened sense of our life's purposes, acquire courage to heal what has been hurt, replenish what has been exhausted and to redeem, in Mr. Eliot's beautiful phrase, the unread vision of the higher dream that each of us carries to restore our world and all its living things to a new wholeness? For it would seem that we also contain within ourselves a cultural inheritance as well - not genes, but memes - constellations of cultural memory, which also includes perhaps the woundings of the past.

Thus, in our time every shadow has risen, every hurt has come forward to be healed. We are in a time when not only are we required to heal the personal and ancestral wounds but also to heal the hurts of nations and cultures. Therefore, not only do we have to find ways of building new careers and communities as other times required but we must do it faster and deeper. Not only do we have to multiply new ways of being, living, tapping into vast untapped potential of our over-endowed brain, but all of these human potentials have to be bridged to social potentials. We cannot sit on the sidelines watching things grow worse. We need to savor the journey of engagement and draw strength from its challenges - to mend the broken connection between our beliefs and our lives.

. We strengthen our society, our world, and ourselves enormously when we find ways of expressing and working in social betterment, when we allow ourselves to become healers of a world in need, a world in which people and nations have been accelerating at an unparalleled rate in our ability to inform each other - printing, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, photocopying, computers, global telecommunication networks, internets - each move increasing prodigiously the quantity and availability of information. Humanity is now linked into a new cell of many cells, similar in structure and importance to the emergence of the first multicellular organisms a billion years ago.

This world network portends a potential renaissance of world culture and a decentralization of power, a radical democratization of everything and eventually everyone with all the responsibilities that this entails. What had been contained in the "unconscious" over hundreds and thousands of years is up and about and preparing to go to work. This fact is the news that rarely makes the News, and it will have consequences greater than anything we might imagine. The negative "Thank God, our time is now, " poet Christopher Fry says, "when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere. Never to leave us, till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took." Perhaps, then, it is our innermost psyche - the "nature that lies within" - the inner mirror of the Great Nature which has pushed the universe at large along on its evolutionary journey, that is the "who" calling us to be more than we ever thought we could be. Physicists know this force as the "strange attractor, " the universal principle by which increasing complexity produces beauty. In human terms, it is our lure toward a destiny beyond our present knowings, "the hound of heaven."

Eden exists in each of us in the form of latent human capacities, which can be awakened and called into play. My studies have shown me that the

Consider my fantasy of "the possible human, " a once and future person, who may be both what we were and what we may yet become: The first thing you notice about her is that she enjoys being in her body. A fullness of being inhabits that body, with its flexible joints and muscles, its movements fluid and full of grace. She is given to long pleasures and short pains. And if her natural zippiness and boundless curiosity entice her into situations where she gets physically hurt, she is able to control any bleeding and accelerate her own healing.

Like the yogi adepts in the Himalayas, she can voluntarily control involuntary physical processes and stay warm in cold weather and cool in hot. (This is true in emotional climates as well as physical ones.) She can also self-regulate skin temperature, blood flow, heart and pulse rate, gastric secretion, and brain waves. Indeed, she can consciously enter into alpha and theta brain wave states for meditation and creative revery, drop into delta whenever she wants to go to sleep, and call upon beta waves when she needs to be alert and active. Scanning her body, she self-corrects any function that needs improving.

This new Eve celebrates acute senses, which are not limited to five, for she enjoys synesthesia or cross-sensing, the capacity to hear color and touch the textures of music, capture with her nose the smell of words, and taste the subtlest of feelings. Since her sensory palette is so colorful and wide ranging, she engages and is engaged by the world as artist and mystic, seeing infinity in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. The splendor of her sensory life graces her with an accompanying gift, an excellent memory, for she is so present to the perceptual richness of everyday life that little is lost or disregarded and all is stored in her memory banks for later review and delectation. She can time travel into these memories, walk around in them as if they were happening now - talking to this friend, reliving that moment of joy, even holding the hand of a long-ago loved one. Thus she need never feel lonely, for the past is as present as the present.

And wherever in the past wounding occurred, she can visit that time in her mind as the wiser version of her former self and bring understanding, compassion, and wisdom to the occasion. She is, thus, a time player, able to speed up subjective time when she needs it to go faster, or slow it down so as to savor lovely moments or have more time to rehearse skills.

The possible human can think in inward imageries and experience subjective realities as strikingly as she can know objective ones. She listens to inward music as complex as any symphony, in fact often richer, for instruments and sounds are added which are unknown or too expensive for any formal orchestra. She views new movies on her inner screen whenever she wishes, for she knows that it is the nature of the brain to provide stories, well wrought novels for the Inward Television Station (ITS). She uses these imageries to entertain herself as well as to provide the materials of creativity and invention. She is already an adventurer into a vast reservoir of virtual realities and doesn't need any machine to assist her. She makes use of the fact that self-creating works of art are always budding out of the fields of her mind, and she can capture and rework them as she wishes.

to cultivate the human capacities that we need to deal with the opening times that follow upon closing times.

Critical to this new psychology is the integrative or essential self. It has a radiance that our local self does not. It is in touch with both our life and the Life of the Universe. It is in touch with the wisdom of the earth and the wisdom of the heart. It can put us in touch with the unexplored continents that lie within our minds and bodies, for it knows the maps of the soul and the treasures that can be found there.

The Essential Self knows the possible paths our life may take and wants to help us choose the best ones. It knows how to turn imagination into reality and make the life we live fulfilling and creative. Above all, it knows why we are here and what we yet can do; where we can go and why we need to go there.

Closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet, the Essential Self is the mysterious friend who has always been ever near, however much we have denied its existence.

. Things that belonged to extraordinary experiences of reality are becoming ordinary. And with the coming of so many realities and ways of being from all over the planet, many of the maps of the psyche and of human possibilities are undergoing awesome change. That is why the myths are rising - because they give us maps and templates of who we are and and what we may become.

 

 

 

 

 

Nam Myoho Renge Kyo gives us the opportunity to change this state of affairs of the potential demise of the planet AD THE Human Beings on it.

Why ?

 

The principle of synchronicity applies. You are in the right place at the right time

Chanting revitalises you and your environment

You can heal yourself

Chanting heals people at a distance

Creativity increases and new solutions are found

The positive influence of chanting on Society and the Environment is enormous

 

The level of consciousness becomes Integrative . Life is a kaleidoscope of natural hierarchies (holarchies), systems, and forms. Flexibility, spontaneity, and functionality have the highest priority. Differences and pluralities can be integrated into interdependent, natural flows.The natural flows are like rivers which flow into the all embracing sea of enlightenment, Egalitarianism is complemented with natural degrees of ranking and excellence. We are all equal before the Ultimate overarching fundamental Law of life and death and wisdom, knowledge and competency at this level should supersede power and status. The Group in Itai Doshin is unified and telepathic enough to discern differences and see and acknowledge them as positive.