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For me, the basis, the foundation for all change and awareness is Love, with a capital "L". My grandmother taught me that Love is the most powerful force in the universe. So for me, Love is what others call God. And another awareness I have is that there are no "things" here. We are all beings. Every single rock, tree, river, worm, insect . . . we are kin and we are all, even those who appear inanimate or "dead", are alive and sentient. And I've felt this and known this every since I was a young child. This is why I loved Brian Swimme's "Green Dragon" book way back when it first came out. Because here was someone who knew the universe in a similar way, and had a language to describe it. It confirmed my experiences and inner knowings, which usually just got me shrugs or eye rolls.

Back in the 1980s through the late 1990s, I was an activist, a writer and researcher, an organizer and director of a nonprofit based in Montpelier, VT. I was one of the first people to integrate Earth into economics, what I called Gaian Economics (Economics as if the Earth Really Mattered, New Society Publishers, 1988 and a few years later, Invested in the Common Good, same publisher, both with forewords by Thomas Berry). Then I moved from Vermont to Maine to care for my disabled sister, and started a large, magical herb, flower, and vegetable garden that became one of my greatest teachers. I started making herbal medicine and body care products that I sold (and still do - Gaia's Garden Herbals on Etsy), and now my passion is making natural perfumes. I also joined the fight against Nestle (now Blue Triton) in Fryeburg, ME until I moved to NY to be closer to my kids and grandkids in 2018.

For me, my work and my "leading edge" of thought and awareness is Earth is alive, so we are living within the living body of Earth, as the cells of our body live within us. It is time, as Thomas Berry said, to recreate the human at the species level, right down to the DNA. Indeed, we are changing our DNA without even being aware with the technology we use (and abuse), with the chemicals in the environment (and in our food), with the myriad traumas being inflicted upon all life right now in the name of profit and greed. It is time to wake up to who and what we are, as individuals, yes, but more . . . as a species. I want to help people FEEL, within their bodies, and hearts, and spirits, that not only do we have a responsibility to engage with all species, as kin, but it is our birthright! By engage with I mean love, communicate with, play and work with, and bring into our conversations, just as we do with our human friends and families. These kinship relationships have the potential to shift our awareness, open us to the true nature of who we are, and form the foundation and the basis for a New Story, that humanity (and all life) desperately needs if we are to continue this journey together.

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Well, dear subscribers, meet a deep ally of mine who I'm reconnecting with. In 2007, she wrote a wonderful piece about Brian Swimme that endeared me to her: https://noetic.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/S15_Intentions_Swimme_ParticipatingWithUniverseInterview.pdf.

She's new on Substack and you can find out about her by clicking on her name and Substack at the top of this. We are both looking for more of us, who are tuned into how adopting the Universe Story, form being one humanity evolving together, that could create a bigger shift in how we behave than when Copernicus took Earth out of the center of the universe. It took centuries then to get us from kings and serfs to democracy, but they didn't have the internet that in shorter order can get us from democracy to knowing ourselves as one humanity where we care about each other as much as we care about ourselves!

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Something I like to muse upon... What if a superhuman species put us here EONS ago? What if they will be coming around sometime soon to see how we have fared? Will we have done better than their other experiments elsewhere? Worse? Will they be shocked? At our progress? At our failure? At our misunderstandings created from the tales they left with us?

Yes, it sounds something like what I remember from Gurdjieff, but I read his Tales from Beelzebub decades ago and have morphed them in my own mind-stew since.

If 'someone' did leave us here as an experiment, I wish they would speak up! Well, maybe not. But we do seem to need some VERY dramatic shifts. QUICK!

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My fantasy is life as a gameboard of sorts. There's every permutation for how people could be. Shakespeare got there before me, but as I get old (er), I'm not so caught up in things and observation has taken over. How insane people are, as if they will be here forever so plenty of time for misery. That's for people who have a choice -- not for the poor souls in misery who weren't born to privilege. My observer is all in to find that dramatic shift!

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I love you, Suzanne, and I am thinking. Thank you for putting this out there. One thing we do need is solidarity, whatever message or action is taken. And you lay the foundation for that. I want to hold up my portion of the net, through which our democracy and country is falling.

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Fingers crossed. What I think is everyday logical, where of course we'd put heads together to figure out what to do, turns out to be a wild thought. At least there is no argument that things are upside down in this world gone mad, where perhaps we wouldn't have to wonder if global warming is real because if we vote Trump in he'll destroy us before it will.

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After several decades of studying economy and society, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is one central driver of 90% of our problems — and also a simple, discrete solution: we must simply move beyond the profit motive as the central purpose of economic and social activity.

I realize this is a moon-shot (even Mars-shot) proposal, yet I see no other way to get off our destructive planetary course. Even if the vast majority can work responsibly in this system, as we currently see, it only takes a relative few endarkened souls to destroy society and planet.

Just a few simple, obvious points:

1) Ideally, economic transactions would be equitable to all stakeholders. “Profit” implies getting more than one’s equitable share in a transaction. That extra value has to be extracted from somewhere — other people, Third World countries, the greater living ecosystem, or the planet itself. At this point in history, we’ve gone about as far as we can sustainably go with that ethic. Now, we have to start taking it from each other — and it’s getting ugly.

2) In many contexts, profit is essentially a bribe to do something that one would otherwise not think is worth doing. In that sense, if there is not a natural, compelling reason to do something, maybe it didn’t need to be done in the first place.

3) Most basically, the profit motive eventually weakens or destroys the social fabic. Essentially, we all become lone agents and competitors (euphemistically “self-made men”) who must use or exploit each other to “get ahead”.

A major paradigm-shift in evolutionary history was the movement from simple single-celled organisms to complex multicellular creatures. That’s great analogy for the times. When the lone agents work together for the benefit of each other and of the whole, that is when we stop stewing in the swamp and become capable of Moon-shots or Mars-shots — or likely something more practical and amazing.

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Hello Bill, are you familiar with degrowth? It encompasses much of what you write here and brings social justice and equity to developing nations. We must move away from an extraction economy. It's bad for our health and the planet's. The economy is going to shrink one way or another as oil becomes economically unviable to extract. We need a plan to transition or suffer great chaos and tragedy. https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/degrowth-the-vision-we-must-demand

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Holy shit. I wasn't tuned into you when you wrote your magnum opus you've linked to on how it is and how it could be. I am so glad we are paying attention to each other now.

Reading along, nodding my head at how intelligent your appraisal is, I also was shaking my head at the resistance to all those points you make that plain and simple are the difference between humanity thriving and maybe even surviving to how we are barreling ahead to an apocalypse. Here's where we need to join forces, where I echo what you say and also come in to augment you.

How to redo everything? As you have the case for a different way to operate, I have it for a different way to think. As the rugged individualists we essentially still are, everyone is out for personal gain and we get what we've got. As sacred creatures living in a sacred universe, we would operate from a mutuality where we would do what's best for everyone.

You know, it's as simple as that, and it's the reasoning behind what I write on my Substack about how humanity needs a new idea about itself.

Pausing here for now...

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I agree. So how do we get the way the world runs to run a different way? Here's a post focused on that: "Uh oh for modernity/We maintain endless growth at the expense of our humanity." https://substack.com/home/post/p-138208005. "If we see ourselves as sacred creatures in a universe where everything is sacred, this smart species will serve the good of the whole. Brian Swimme says, 'Our revolution in thinking dwarfs Copernicus’s announcement that the Earth travels around the Sun.'"

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Since mankind suborned Mother-Nature to domination (by bulldozers, chain-saws, JCB’s, and mining-drills), Earth has been relegated to ‘Neighbour From Hell’ on God’s Interstellar Federation (GIF); Number 1 (and only), on The Most Unwanted Dirty-Man List.

Earth is exiled in quarantine, while humanity exudes insanity, and will be so unless – as you suggest, Suzanne – a few concerned race-members choose to reason together, come clean of vibrational anti-life attitudes, and allow intelligent-life to call the shots for human restoration.

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Well, that's a colorful way to write our story! Am doing my best to play my part to allow intelligent-life to call the shots for human restoration!

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The foundation of consciousness is NOT God. It is that it survives. Too many people believe that proof of God is required before accepting the idea that consciousness survives death. It should be the other way around -- look at the evidence for survival and let God emerge from that, what God happens to be, whether He, She, or It. There is overwhelming evidence that consciousness survives death, which suggests a Creator of some kind. But it is not necessarily a anthropomorphic God. The religious idea of heaven and hell must be swept aside and the idea that the afterlife involves many dimensions, or, as Jesus put it, "many mansions" should replace it. Nihilism will prevail as long as the masses believe that they have to find God before finding Survival.

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I don't have any argument about the survival of consciousness and that consciousness is primary, so what makes you say this? What are you responding to?

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I'm responding to what should be obvious from reading and viewing what's going on in the world. People lose their faith because they can't believe God permits bad things to happen to good people . They picture an old man with beard and staff controlling things. They picture the heaven and hell of orthodox religions. Even that heaven is not very appealing. Who wants to sit around on clouds while worshiping God 24-7? Religion has taught them that they have to believe in their God before they accept Survival. As I suggested, it should be the other way around. Hollywood and Madison Ave. are controlling the "civilized" world.

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That doesn't have anything to do with my looking for people to think with. Maybe you meant to leave that comment somewhere else. To comment on it, though, the old man with a beard isn't from Hollywood or Madison Avenue but of a naivete from an earlier time that we are beyond now.

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Bless your heart. Bless our hearts. Bless God's heart. Bless the Devil's heart. Bless not only good but good and evil that turns out often to be the greater good after all. When you love the hell out of reality sometimes it comess to you that it loves the hell out of you right back. Love, Brad Blanton

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Original blessings to us all. A fitting line I picked up recently: "Never waste a bad experience." You've been looking at big pictures for a long time. Do you want to do it in my playing field?

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Yes. They Are Us. It's Touch and Go. We are on the way out. Only a matter of faster or slower right now. The 7th great extinction proceeds. What we have learned will probably only determine how we wave goodbye. But luckily we don't know what we are due to discover.

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Although extinction is a possibility to bear in mind, it's not propitious, by my lights, to attach ourselves to any context but a positive one. No one knows what can happen, and to see ourselves with a fatal disease robs us of energy with which to get healthy. All systems go toward breakthrough in my bailiwick.

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For the hard-of-thinking, it simply means 'be yourself', in the light-and-easy flow of the way life works.

Simpler still: -- 'let go.'

'What you resist persists', and so-on.

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Basic!

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“As we deal with redirecting ourselves, what vehicle are you welcoming me to?”

The ‘vehicle’ is the one you inhabit rent-free, so there can be no trickery, need to believe what someone else tells you, or any other kind of deception.

We are more than the ‘vehicle’, the sum of the parts, which we inhabit. Herein lies the human-problem, which is reflected by the chaotic, insane outer-world.

Why? Because human beings identify with the vehicle we inhabit, which is natural during self-centred childhood, but must change, as we mature from tots to adults, by what was referred to as “being born of the spirit.”

As I said, our ‘spirit’ – the ‘being’ identity; who we are – is what beats our hearts, heals our wounds, harmoniously orchestrates our organic-functions, and replenishes our 50-trillion cells as needed.

Our human-mind – or whichever capacity we’ve been conditioned to identify with as children – “I am only human”, or “I think, therefore I am” or “we are what we eat” – is not who we are; not the One Who Dwells, the Inner-Being.

I trust this answers your question, Suzanne, and also makes plain what has caused the chaotic-state we see around us in the mankind-made world, with so many bright people trying to manipulate life for self-centred human purposes.

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Sounds like a long way around to talk about need to move from an oppositional ground of being to a cooperative one, as one set of words to use.

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Thank you, Suzanne, on behalf of what beats our hearts, heals our wounds, harmoniously orchestrates our organic-functions, enables our endocrine-system to transmute blood-plasma to animating energy replenishing our 50-trillion cells as needed; oh, and sustaining Earth's trajectory at a safe distance from the sun to keep us from frying or freezing -- among a myriad other miracles intelligent-life performs 24/7 consistently, -- like growing all the food we need and dealing with human-pollution -- despite how many bright people try to manipulate life for adverse human purposes.

Welcome aboard, Suzanne! Any other takers/receivers?

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Just looking at this miracle we are part of should do the trick of sending everyone into awe, but, as our development has gone, money has blinded us at this stage of the game. As we deal with redirecting ourselves, what vehicle are you welcoming me to?

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Do you have your own vehicle or are you a cheerleader for people to get into mine?

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I trust I am being both -- our gift of consciousness, and freedom of creative-conversation, is an inalienable right. Let's exercise it together in agreement.

Robert Burns (poet) said "ach, what's a heaven for, if a man's reach canna exceed his grasp?" What is our consciousness for, if our vision is confined to earthly eyesight?

If change is called for -- witness the world -- as Einstein said, "a problem can't be resolved from the level-of-consciousness causing it" -- I offer a celestial-perspective, which, from a god's-eye view, adds the dimension of creative-consciousness essential to restoration.

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I'm thinking this ambition has at its core a desire for God-like power which, however, laudable the aim, is a poor example to start a new way of living. Agency in our own lives and the ability to influence those in contact with us is the real extent of our power. We may want universal change but the starting place is always with ourselves and those around us. The world I dream of is a reflection of the natural world, taking its cue from the constant incremental change, the micro upsets that ripple around, creating micro changes in response. Intention is important but the world is not ours to change. It is the sum of billions of small things who all have a mind of their own!

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Well then, you wouldn't want to be on my committee. By my lights, we do what we can to prevent a cataclysm from wiping us out.

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Apologies, Suzanne. Re-reading my comment I can see that it sounds pretty critical which was not my intent. I struggle daily with the weight of these matters like so many and feel the powerlessness in the face of the global scale. My way of dealing with it is to keep it manageable and accept that not everyone will share my point of view.

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I think the first thing we need to do is make sure we get our facts as straight as we can.

And, for actual solidarity, I think we need to accept all belief systems, God or no, and base what we want to help birth on our highest values.

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A few decades ago, I did The Herringbone Project: https://mightycompanions.org/page5.html. It was a year of monthly gatherings with representatives of different religions to show that at their core they all were based on a do-unto-others sort of dynamic: https://mightycompanions.org/page5.html. That's age old wisdom, and how to get that to be what governs us is the task at hand!

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