The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight – A Lecture by Thom Hartmann
What follows is a talk given
by Thom Hartmann on the human environmental and social condition, and why we
have created ourselves this way. It was
taken from a videotaped lecture entitled The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, so named because the subject matter is that
of his book. 99% of it is verbatim; in
some places however I took the liberty of making small
changes/omissions/additions to enhance readability because the way we listen to
people talking is not the way we read text.
I also added the table of contents.
Along with reading this, get the videotape, and go to Thom’s web site. Some of the things he talks about here are
elaborated further at http://www.lasthours.com/
Table of Contents
3 The Reasons for the Situation
3.2.1 How Stories are Powerful
3.2.3 The Consequences of Stories
4 Our Stories That Need to Change
4.1.2 Separation From Other People
5.3 Stopping the Tyranny That Is
Ours
“After I finished reading The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight I knew several things: one, I knew that it was one of the single most important books I had ever read in my life; two, I knew that my life would never be the same, ever again, as a result of having read it; and three, I knew that the mind from which this book came was a mind of insight, wonder and brilliance that saw many things, and could interpret in a way that my mind could understand. I was deeply impressed with this book; I believe it to be one of eight books that could change the world. It is one of the most important books that our human race could read, from one of the most brilliant men I have ever met.”
Neale Donald Walsch - Author of Conversations
with God
In some ways, I’ve cast about for years for a metaphor to describe the situation we are in. One that came to me a few months ago was an old story I heard about a gambler who was a poker player. He had always wanted to draw a royal flush, the highest card hand you can draw in poker. After many years as a professional gambler, he went on vacation, on a cruise ship, and was sitting playing in one of the rooms with some other professional gamblers. The five cards were dealt and he picked them up and saw he had a royal flush, right there in his hand. He exclaimed, “The luck here on the Titanic must be extraordinary!”
There was a time for all of us when we didn’t know
anything. Very quickly you find out
there are things you don’t know that you need to know, like how to get your
diaper changed. As time goes on you
increasingly discover there are things you don’t know, that you thought you
knew. And you find you don’t know what
you need to know, and you don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t know
what you do know in many cases. As you get older you find that there is
more and more that you don’t know (except in the teenage years when there is
nothing you don’t know). As we get
older and wiser, we find that there is so much out there that we don’t know and
that we didn’t know that we needed to know, but we didn’t even know that we
needed to know it, so how can you know what you don’t know that you needed to
know, but still, you need to know it, you know?
Those are the things were going to talk about this afternoon. Because they are the things, by and large, that are not talked about in the media because they are the things that don’t entertain people and don’t sell advertising and don’t make money for the corporations who control the media of the world. So, that is the beginning point of this. We are going to go from the bad news to the good news, as it were. And I’m not going to leave you depressed, but I think it is important, to heal from any illness, to know what it is. Whether it is psychotherapy, or physical therapy, we cannot treat a disease until we have identified it.
Think of where you were at this time yesterday.
In the 24 hours since this time yesterday 45,000 people on this planet, every one of them as awake and aware and wanting to live as you and me, have died of starvation; 38,000 of them were children.
In the 24 hours since this time yesterday, 120 species have become extinct, not plants or animals or individuals, but entire species. The normal rate of species loss, is one every four years; it’s also used to be the normal replacement rate. There has not been as rapid a rate of species loss as we are experiencing now, since the end of the Jurassic period when the dinosaurs vanished, which is why Richard Leaky, the famous anthropologist, wrote a book called The Sixth Extinction, and says we are entering it, right now; and we are at risk.
In the 24 hours since this time yesterday, fully 13 million tons of toxic, largely cancer causing waste materials have been put into the air, the water, and the soil of our planet.
In the 24 hours since this time yesterday, fully 200,000 acres of rainforest have been destroyed.
Just since this time yesterday.
We have a situation on earth right now where over 1 billion people have tuberculosis; it has become the number one most rapidly spreading and deadly disease on earth. With every second, with every tick of the clock, someone dies of tuberculosis, a disease that is spread as easily as the common cold. I recently spent a week with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. One third of the population of that country, 340 million people, have tuberculosis. It’s incredible; it’s an epidemic.
We live in a world where fully 3 billion people, half the population of the planet, live on the equivalent of less than US$2 a day. This, according to James Wolfensohn the president of the World Bank, is, in his words, “a time bomb waiting to go off in our children’s faces”.
We have a significant problem here, and it’s interesting to see how it is being dealt with in different places.
I was working in Bogata, Columbia a few years ago. There are 100,000 children living on the streets there, and they’ve taken over part of the center of town. When we first started a social program in the La Paz slum, we were going to try and work with these street children, who are called Los Gamenez (the little animals, the little rats), but we learned if you go into this area where they live, they will kill you for your clothes.
It’s a real problem down there, so the response has been that middle class and upper middle class young men and off duty police officers have organized hunt clubs. The one I met with was called Los Cazadores (the hunters). They have nylon jackets with badges and emblems on the back and their names embroidered on the pocket.
They go out at night with high powered rifles and hunt children for sport. They take photographs of their kills. The Social Services Department’s main function is to go about each morning with large trucks and pick up the bodies. The second day I was there, I was in the slums, and here was a kid with his brains blown all over the wall of a building.
In the First World; the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, we tend to be insulated from a reality of 3 billion people living like this, but it’s very much a reality.
What has brought such world conditions about, is an explosion of population. The story we tell ourselves about the population explosion thing, is that this is something that has happened to the human race.
For the first 190,000 years of homo sapien sapien (fully modern people like you and me, the oldest fossil record being 197,000 years old) our population was fairly stable at more or less 50 million people. Then, about 10,000 years ago, we entered the age of pyromania; we got really good at using fire and started making metal instruments; we got more efficient at agriculture, and we entered what’s called the agricultural revolution. As a result of this we produced more food, and just like with any other animal, when you have more food, you get more of that animal.
By the time of Christ, 2000 years ago there was 250 million people on the planet; by one thousand years ago, there were 500 million.
At that point we discovered “ancient sunlight”; we began using stores of old sunlight in the form of coal and oil. There was a period 400-300 million years ago when there was much, much more carbon in the atmosphere than there is now, in the form of carbon dioxide. It kept the earth very warm; huge plants and ferns, some thousands of feet tall, grew across the Earth. They captured the sunlight, fell into the earth, and huge mats of vegetation sunk to the ocean floor. This became coal. We discovered coal about a thousand years ago, so we were able to cut down forests while saying, “We don’t need this forest for heat, because we can burn coal. We can turn this forest into farmland, and we can produce food.”
As we did this, our population continued to grow, so by the year 1800 we hit our first billion. We also had now discovered oil (liquid ancient sunlight), so we were getting very efficient at producing food; instead of having one horse plow a field we could have a hundred horses plow a field, in the form of a tractor.
Our first billion people took all of history, 190,000 years, but as a result of our increased food production ability, our second billion people took only 130 years, from 1800 to 1930. Our third billion took only 30 years, from 1930 to 1960.
By this time we were using ancient sunlight to not only make the land more productive and extract more human food from it, but also to kill our competitors of that food supply. With oil we were making herbicides and pesticides, and so our fourth billion took only 14 years, from 1960 to 1974. Our fifth billion took only 13 years, and our sixth billion took only 12 years.
In 1987, we
surpassed rats as the most numerous mammalian species on the planet. In 1993, we became the species made up of
the most biomass on the planet, surpassing termites. There is more human flesh on the planet than any other single
species.
When you see a curve like this in the distribution of the population of an organism. If you speak with a doctor of medicine, you will discover there are only two precedents for this. The first is called amplification, you are measuring the germs in the blood of a patient who has a blood borne illness and you see this sudden increase, and you know that person is about to die. Their immune system has been overwhelmed by the germ. The other is cancer.
The story we tell ourselves about these thing, is they are the story of all the human race, but in fact that’s not true. The fact of the matter is, there are thousands of cultures around the world who have not experienced this explosion in growth and who have not participated in or contributed to the statistics I gave you earlier describing the rapid destruction of our planet. In fact, there is only one culture that has experienced this explosion of growth. It is the worldwide culture that uses money, engages in trade, and is literate; it is our culture. So I guess you could say, the good news is, there is only one culture we have to change, out of the thousands of human cultures on this planet, the bad news is, it is us.
When we look at why our culture has done this, it turns out it has to do with the stories we tell ourselves. And a culture is the collection of stories we all agree to tell each other, pretend are real, and agree to behave as if they are real, even when they are invisible, intangible.
Stories have always fascinated me. I discovered the power of stories in 1978 when I was the executive director of a residential treatment facility for severely emotionally disturbed and abused children. We got the kids no one else could handle. We got the kids who had been through twenty and thirty foster homes and couldn’t make it, and if they couldn’t succeed with us, then they went to a lock down facility or the state mental hospital.
One afternoon a social worker showed up with a little girl named Shannon. Shannon was 10 years old, about yea tall, with brown hair and freckles, cute kid. The social worker said, “I don’t know Shannon’s story. I picked her up at the police station, I’m not her social worker; her social worker is on vacation this week, but I do know that she can’t go home, so if you don’t have an empty bed for her for the weekend or an emergency place for her to stay, then I’ll have to drop her off at the state mental hospital on my way home”. We had an empty bed, so I said it was fine, we would take her for the weekend and decide on Monday if she’s in appropriate placement.
I placed her with Karen, so Karen took Shannon up to her bed and said, “Here’s your nightgown and toothbrush, get ready and I’ll come back in 10 or 15 minutes to tuck you in”. Karen went downstairs, had a cup of tea and came back upstairs. Shannon had changed into her nightshirt and was laying on her stomach on her bed. Karen sat down next to her on the bed and reached over to give her a little back rub. She was going to say, “I’m really glad you are here, and it’s gonna be a great time, and really interesting and you’ll learn a lot; we’re gonna have fun, it’s going to be wonderful....”.
But she never had a chance to say that, because as her hand touched Shannon’s back, Shannon exploded off the bed at her screaming and clawing and biting and spitting and telling her she was going to kill her. Karen, to protect herself and to protect Shannon, grabbed Shannon’s wrists and fell on top of her. Both of them were face down with Karen on top, and Shannon was screaming and struggling so loud we heard it from next door and came over to see what was going on. For four or five minutes Shannon was screaming while Karen was trying to talk her down, holding her and saying, “It’s OK, just relax, everything’s going to be fine, everything’s going to work out in the end”. Finally Shannon depressurized, she ran out of steam.
Karen decided it was safe to let go, so she sat up. In the struggle, Shannon’s nightshirt had gotten hiked up to the middle of her back, and when Karen looked down, she saw that Shannon’s back was covered with cigarette burns.
If you were to ask Shannon at that point in her life who she was, she would have told you with absolute certainty, her truth, was that she was the little girl who was so bad, that in order to control her behavior, you had to put out cigarettes on her back. Absolutely, it was her reality; she had five years of cigarettes put out all over her body to prove it.
What happens is, as we go through life we collect stories. We begin to pick them up virtually at birth; they stick to us the way lint sticks to cheap suits, or burrs stick to dogs in the Fall.
There are two kinds of stories, the “I am, I can” stories, and the “I’m not, I can’t stories”. The I am stories are: “I’m the tall one”, “I’m the short one”, “I’m the fat one”, “I’m the skinny one”, “I’m the smart one”, “I’m the dumb one”, “I’m the cute one”, “I’m the ugly one”; though of course they get much more elaborate. These become the floor of our world, what we stand upon; these become the ground of our lives.
Above these, and the walls around them are the “I can’t” stories: “Oh, I could never get up in front of a group of people and speak”, “I could never write a book”, “I could never go bungee jumping”, again, fill in the blank. By the time we hit adolescence these stories are pretty much burned in. They are, you could say, our fate, our destiny, because very few people get outside this self-created box. These stories have extraordinary power.
What we had to do with Shannon, in the two years we had her, which we successfully did, was one of the most terrifying things that can happen to a human being, and one of the most difficult. That, was literally the disintegration of an old set of stories, an old personality, and the reintegration of a new one. We had to essentially say to her, “You know that person who you thought you were: incapable and incompetent, who people don’t really like and you’re really not all that smart, and you’re not all that attractive, and you screw things up all the time? Well, that’s not you. The person you really are is strong and capable and competent and brilliant and insightful and empathetic and loving and powerful. And, you can change the world if you decide to. That is who you are.”
Just like Shannon had her stories, and they were not useful stories, and so had to be changed, we as a culture have a set of broken stories that we must wake up to. This involves waking up to the reality of the wrong stories and finding some new alternatives. In fact, we don’t have to go out and find the alternatives, because they are already here. They are being lived out daily by those people around the world who are not destroying the planet.
If you wanted to
design a culture with a single purpose, that purpose being to create the
species with the largest mass of human flesh possible, we’ve done that very
successfully. The stories that are the
foundation of our culture: that people are essentially evil, that God is angry
with us, that women should be in subordinate positions to men, that it’s
appropriate to have slaves, that it’s appropriate to have hierarchy, that it’s
appropriate and right for some people to be terribly wealthy and others to be
terribly poor; this collection of stories has served us well for producing
enormous amounts of human flesh.
Perhaps you could make a case that thousands of years ago the village with the largest army and the most young men to be in that army, was the one that survived, so then stories were useful (setting aside moral judgements), but they are not useful any more.
We were reaching the limits of our resources in 1800 when we were only 1 billion people. We were consuming only about 5% of the world’s fresh water. Now at 6 billion we are consuming over 50% of the world’s fresh water; as a result, every other animal and plant on the Earth has to compete with every other animal and plant on the Earth for the remainder, and they are not doing it successfully, they are dying off at record rates.
As are we in many ways, as the result of epidemics and cancer due to toxins.
So what are the stories we need to change? One of the first is the story of disconnection. The story that we are not part of everything else.
We’ve put God in a box; we go visit Him once a week and think that, “That’s it. There’s that part of life, and then there’s the rest of life.” We’ve made this distinction, we’ve made this separation.
I remember the first time I met someone who was living what I call: the older culture, the older story, the more ancient story; what I think is a more truthful story. That was in 1978 when I met a man by the name of Gottfried Mueller. At the time he was 64 years old. He runs a children’s charity in Germany; it’s worldwide, but he lives in Germany. He had hired me to set up a concert, a orchestra for 34 abused kids and retarded children; he wanted it be a fund raiser for a new Children’s Village in the United States. He wanted the orchestra to play in the largest music halls on the east coast; Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Berkeley Performance Center.
I had met him once before, and I thought he was an extraordinary person, but really I had no idea. We were in Manhattan, New York City. He had flown through the night, arrived that morning, and I picked him up at Macys where he’d stopped to get a gift for his wife. It was about 10 o’clock on a cold grey April morning and we were driving up 8th avenue in a taxi; he sitting to my left, in the back seat. He was kind of nodding off because he had been on an airplane all night. I was wide awake looking out the windows.
We were driving past the intersection of 8th Avenue and 42nd Street, an area called Times Square. In 1978, Times Square was the sex capitol of the United States. We passed an old vaudeville theatre, that had fallen into decay, and on the marquee in big letters, it said, “Live Sex on Stage”.
The human, male, animal part of me was looking at that and thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what that would look like?” The psychotherapist part of me was looking at that thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what kind of a person would wonder what that would look like?” I began to free associate; the door was a curved arch door with a black blanket in it to keep the April wind out; it looked like a mouse hole, as in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. It made me think about mouse holes and that made me think about mouse traps, and I noticed the marquee again, “Live Sex..”, and I thought, “Sex can be a trap, many times in my life it certainly has been; I think it’s part of the human experience.”
Just as I was thinking that thought, Herr Mueller roused himself, semi woke up, leaned over and grabbed my arm, gripped it really hard. He laughed and said, “It is a trap”, and then he slumped back to rest again. I thought, “Woe, what a coincidence, well there must be a movie theatre nearby that says ‘The Trap’, coming Thursday”. So, I looked out the window, “Where’s the billboard?”, but there was none billboard. So, then I thought, “Wow, that’s incredible, he pulled that right out of my head; he read my mind. But wait a minute, if he knows that thought, then he also knows that thought, and he knows that one, and Oh my God, he might know about that one!” My hands were starting to get sweaty and my heartbeat was starting to rise; then Gottfried roused himself again and pat me on the leg, and says, “Thomas”, (he’s very formal), “Thomas, Thomas, don’t worry, I don’t know how to read minds”, and goes back to rest.
Then he said, “No, no, seriously, just relax, all my life, from time to time, I just get this knowing that I have to say something to somebody. Very often it’s a complete stranger, and I will walk up to them and simply tell them what I have to say, because I’m obedient to God and I know this is something God wants me to say.” (This how he frames it in his mind). He then said, “Suddenly I just had this feeling that I had to say those words to you; I didn’t hear them out of your head, and it wasn’t a voice from the sky, I just felt like I had to say those words, so I said them. Whenever I do this to other people, they get all bug eyed and they tell me that I read their mind, but don’t worry, I don’t. But, the important question for you Thomas, the important lesson for you, is that every moment of your life, from the moment of your birth to the moment of your death including this moment right now, God knows every thought in your mind and loves you absolutely nonetheless. If you truly know that, then you will be free.” And then he went back to rest. Astonished, I thought, “I have to get know this man better”, and that was the beginning of a 21 year long friendship that has taught me amazing things.
So we have this story that we are somehow separate from God, and this is one of those stories that serves well a dominator culture that produces enormous amounts of human flesh and regularly marches off to war as a way of stabilizing population. Herr Mueller lives out the story instead, that there is no separation between us and God. That it is all the same thing.
We also tell ourselves is that we are separate from other people. We tell ourselves it’s OK to have enemies, it’s OK to have slaves, and it’s OK to exploit people. We see this wildly distorted in the caste system in India, the idea of karma. As wealthy people walk down the street and see the beggars, they say, “Oh, he must have been a miserable SOB in his previously life, and I must have been very noble”.
Recently, I was part of a group of thirty people who spent three days with the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharmsala, India at something called “The Synthesis Dialogs”. It was a great honor to be invited; we represented the different disciplines, the sciences, some governments; I was there representing education.
During the first day of our meetings with him, someone brought up for discussion the topic of Tibet.
When the Chinese first invaded Tibet in the 1940’s and essentially ran the Dalai Lama out, there were six million Tibetans. Since that time, between 1.2 and 1.9 million of them have been murdered. Recently, the Chinese opened fire on Tibetans who were protesting the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and killed an “undisclosed number of people”, to quote the news reports. There is virtually not a person in Tibet who has not had a family member who has been murdered.
Dharmsala is at six thousand feet in the India Himalayas; the mountain then goes up to 18 thousand feet and drops to six thousand feet at Lhasa in Tibet. Virtually every day, people escape from the Chinese and climb this mountain and show up at the Dalai Lama’s house. About half of them don’t survive the trip; they die of hunger, or cold, or tigers, or bears, or frostbite. The Dalai Lama welcomes every one that makes it; they tell of horrific stories of families being killed and enslaved and working in factories making goods for sale to the United States, cheap stuff for department stores.
When the topic of Tibet came up, the Dalai Lama said, “Let’s not talk about that; we really want to be talking about how to make a world that really works, and that is my problem, that’s not your problem.”
The next day we didn’t meet with him, and Brother Wayne Teasdale, the one who put this together and a good friend of the Dalai Lama’s, stood up and said, “You know, Tibet is a litmus test for the human race, and if we let this go by...well, what they are doing in Tibet right now is what the Nazi’s did, so if we let this go by, we fail the test”. We then had a four hour debate about whether or not we wanted to get political. We decided finally to do something, so the next day we got together with the Dalai Lama. We were in a small room, just us, in a circle, with him.
A member of the group was a fellow who had been one of the original organizers of the boycott against South Africa. It was a successful boycott; it brought down the Apartheid regime. He stood up, and said, “Between the 30 of us in this room we have sold millions and millions of books” (present were some very famous people and major governmental organizations). “We have the audience of the world, we can make noise and it will be heard. In a discussion yesterday, we all agreed we are willing to initiate a South-Africa-like boycott of purchase of goods manufactured in China and of the purchase of stock in companies that do business in China. But we would need your blessing.”
The Dalai Lama smiled and said, “Well, you are not the first person to have suggested this” (I later learned that Steven Speilburg and Richard Gear had made a similar offer) He said, “In many ways what is going on in Tibet right now is the result of a marriage that happened between the King of Tibet and the King of China, their daughter and son 900 years ago. So, I have to realize that my actions will have consequences 900 years from now, and I have to be thinking of those consequences. So, I may not see Tibet free in my lifetime, but I have to do what is right, right now, and not look for short term gain. But more important than that, my understanding is that if you were to have your boycott, as in South Africa, then in some little town in rural China, there might be a family who would be thrown out of work and because of that they couldn’t feed themselves, and they might have a little son or daughter who might starve to death. Is that a possibility?”
The fellow he was talking to said, “Yes, in fact many people starved to death in South Africa as the result of boycotts”
The Dalai Lama
said, “Therein is the dilemma, because if even one child in China (my enemy),
if even one child in that country goes hungry as the result of a choice we make
in this room, that is too high a price to pay for the freedom of my
people.”
There was this moment of stunned silence, and it was then I understood I had been paying lip service to the idea that “we are all one” for my entire life. Somewhere back in the sixties, probably back in the anti-Vietnam war movement, I had come to the conclusion that when institutionalized evil reaches and certain threshold, we draw a line in the sand around us and say, “We’re us in here, and that is them out there, and we’ll do whatever is necessary....” The Dalai Lama had just come along with a broom, brushed away that line, and said, “Sorry, there is no line, it’s all us, even when we are killing us, it’s all us.”
And that was the end of the story of the separation of people from people. An end that is critically important if our civilization is to survive and grow.
One time I was going to Heidelburg to do consulting work for the U.S. Army, so I called up Herr Mueller and asked if I could visit and he said, “Sure, yeah, in fact I had a dream last night, and I think I have something to share with you, would you like to see the face of God?”. I said, “Sure!”. He said, “Well come on over”. So I flew over, took the train to Stadtsteinach, and got there fairly late.
At six o’clock I awoke, got up, and found him as he was about to go on his walk along a path he calls The Prophet’s Way. I wrote a book called that, which is mostly about him. He calls it The Prophet’s Way because he walks the path and yells things like, “Hey, Jeremiah look at this mess we’re in; will you do something? You said you were going to....”, and on like that.
We’re walking along the path, through the Frankenvald mountains, a hillside on one side, and a hundred foot drop off on the other side, with the Steinach river running below. As we are walking, he says, “What is the part of the face, that if you were to look at, you really would know a person’s soul, and you’d know their personality, what they were thinking, what’s really going on with them?”. I said, “Well, I suppose that would be the eyes”, and he said, “I think so too. So I’m not sure how to see the entire face of God, but I’m pretty sure that if you want to see enough of the face of God to know what’s going on with God, look into the eyes of any other living thing, whether it’s a dog or a cat or a person or a caterpillar, and there, looking back at you, is all the intelligence of the universe. You are looking in the face of God”. We walked a little further and there was a bush growing by the side of the trail with it’s leaves facing off toward the sun. He said, “Look at these leaves, they know where the sun is, they follow the sun during the day, the leaves actually move, they have eyes, this is the face of God also.”
Here it is that we all interconnect, we are all one, we are all in this together, the “we” is not just us humans.
Another story we have, that is a profoundly dysfunctional story, but one that serves well to produce human flesh, is that woman hold an inferior position to men.
The Iroquois had a slightly different notion of the status of women. While the men were the ones, the sachems, who were elected to councils, because they needed to travel long distances for the annual meeting of the Iroquois; the electors, the ones who did the voting, were the women; only women could vote, because they understood.
Ed Hallowell is a psychiatrist and a professor at the Harvard University Medical School. We were doing some workshops together on attention deficit disorder a couple of years ago. Over lunch one time we were talking about dangerous drugs, cocaine and heroin, and Ed says, “You think that stuff is bad, I’ll tell you what the most dangerous drug in the world is, the one that’s caused more deaths, more destruction, more maiming, more mutilation, more human misery than any other drug.” I said, “What’s that?”; he said, “Testosterone, that’s the most dangerous drug in the world”.
The fact of the matter is that the technological salvationists, those who believe technology can solve every problem, that technology will save us, suggest the solution to our explosion in population is simply that we have universal birth control. That if there were bubble gum machines on every corner in every country where women could walk out and get birth control pills, the problem would be solved.
The economic salvationists among us say if only we could raise everyone’s standard of living to that of the white middle class of America, which has zero population growth, then all our problems would be solved. Of course they conveniently overlook the fact that if everyone lived to the level of consumption that Americans do, it would take the resources of four planet Earths to support the world’s six billion people.
The fact of the matter is, that while there’s a grain of
truth in both of those beliefs, ultimately neither of them are true. What is
true, is when women are fully of equal power with men, population instantly
stabilizes regardless of access to technology or wealth; whether it’s the Doni
people who have been living in trees 120 feet above the ground in the
rainforest jungles of Indonesia for the last 5000 years with a stable
population, or it’s an Icelandic, matrilineal, matriarchal culture from 230
years ago, or whether it’s the citizens of North America and Western
Europe. When woman have relatively
equal power with men, the population stabilizes in the snap of the fingers.
And in counties where women are bought and sold like cattle, regardless of access to wealth, population explodes. There are some very wealthy nations where woman can’t go out in public without keeping themselves completely covered, they have no power, and these countries are experiencing population explosions, right now.
In many ways you could say the most powerful of the human rights movements world wide, is the woman’s rights movement. And so, I would encourage you to participate in that, do what can be done to help stop, for example, the Taliban in Afghanistan and that whole mind set that says woman are to be bought and sold.
Another story that we need to change is the story of sin and punishment. We have in our culture that people are essentially evil. In fact we are quite sure of this because we know that the first evil was done by a woman; it was Eve with the apple, or Pandora with the box. In different cultures we have different variations of this story: number one, people are evil, and number two, God is angry at us, all because of some woman. All these year, this has been the justification for oppressing woman.
Therefore we have to have enormously complex and power based structures in order to contain human nature to keep people from acting out their essential evil nature. So we have police and prisons.
Isn’t it interesting that the Iroquois had no police or prisons. Still don’t, by and large, though I suppose it depends on where you go. In those areas where Native Americans are still living like they were a thousand years ago, they don’t have police or prisons. The aboriginal people from Australia didn’t have police or prisons. The Pic, the Catamajong, and the San of Africa don’t have police and prisons.
But we do, because we believe in sin and punishment. That when people act out their essential nature, we need to whack them upside the head and teach them a lesson.
The story that older cultures tell themselves about this is that there is no sin and there is no punishment, but instead what there is, is balance and imbalance, harmony and disharmony.
I got this lesson right in my face about six or seven years ago. I was in Arizona on an Apache reservation, hanging out with a group of Apache men. There were five or six of us sitting around one evening, basically telling stories and being guys. They were telling jokes at the expense of the Hopi who live 600 miles up the road – the Hopi tell Apache jokes and the Apache tell Hopi jokes – it’s all pretty good natured.
I didn’t know any Hopi to make fun of, so I did what we in our culture do, which is called a put-down joke. If you turn on any TV sitcom, within three minutes you will see one; it’s when you make a sarcastic remark about someone in your circle. I made a joke at the expense of the man opposite me around this fire. There was a sudden silence. It was as if I had loudly farted. Stunned silence.
After a long minute or two, the oldest man in the circle roused himself, and said, “I remember when I was young and didn’t know very much and I said something that really deeply hurt a good friend of mine and embarrassed him in front of everybody”. Then he went on to tell the story of what he did to make it right. When he was done, the next guy in the circle says, “Yeah I remember just a few years ago, I made a remark.....”, and each one of them had a story to tell about a time when they had hurt or embarrassed someone in public.
By the time they had gotten to the third one, I had figured out that I had some business to take care of with this fellow afterward when we were alone, and I knew exactly what I had to do because I had heard the stories. But never had any of them, either by tonality or by words implied I had done anything sinful, or bad, or evil, or wrong. What had happened was I had thrown the circle out of balance, and the job of the community was to restore balance. I had created disharmony, so they all had to take on the task of telling me how to reinstall or reinstate harmony.
And this is another marvelous lesson we need to bring into our culture. In the United States we have the second highest rate of prisoners on the planet, some would say the highest. We have over 650 people per 100,000 in prison, whereas in Norway it is 38 per 100,000. There’s some very interesting statistics that indicate the greater the disparity in wealth in a country, that is, the more powerful the dominators and the weaker the poor, the more people there will be in prison. We are certainly seeing that.
Another story that would be useful for us to change, is the story that we can be saved by toys; that salvation comes through the acquisition of material goods. The main religion in the western world today, in the United States, and Canada, and Western Europe, is not Catholicism, or Christianity, or Judaism or Hinduism, or Islam, or Buddhism; the main religion is the one that has subsumed the holy days of all the other religions and taken them as its own, it is the religion of consumerism; the belief that if I can only get more stuff then I will be happy.
In fact who is it, “Who knows when you’ve been sleeping, who knows when you’re awake, who knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake....”? It’s not Jesus, it’s not God, it’s the bringer-of-toys. This is the God of the religion of consumerism.
This religion is founded on both a truth and a lie. The truth is, that if you are cold and naked and hungry and outdoors at night and alone you are unhappy; we all agree on that. If someone then brings you inside and says, “Here have some clothing, and a warm blanket, and a place to sleep, and here’s a fire you can sit by, and here is all the food you want”, we go from being unhappy to happy, very quickly, that’s the truth.
The lie is, that if going from having nothing, to having
food shelter and warmth is going to make us this
happy, then having twice as much
stuff is going to make us twice as
happy, and ten times as much stuff will make us ten times as happy, a million
times more stuff will make us a million times as happy, and Bill Gates lives in
a state of perpetual bliss.
In fact, in the United States, they surveyed several thousand American teenagers, asking them who they most would like to grow up to be or to be like, and for one of the first times in history, it wasn’t a president or a leading moral figure of any sort, it was Bill Gates, because our major religion, is this salvationist religion of consumerism.
What we need to do, is help people see through the lie of this. Because what we do all day long in our young dominator culture, is manufacture goods and provide services. This is what we put in to the culture. What we take out of the culture, are goods and services; we buy them with the money we earn.
All along the way we try and grab little bits of security and safety here and there, but we’re always living on the edge, you know, “If I lose my job, if I lose my insurance, if I can’t pay my mortgage...disaster, what happens if the stock market crashes?”. But we’re trying as hard as we can, and while we are doing this, while we are running around this circle making goods and services and buying goods and services, the people at the top, the corporations at the top, are sucking out huge quantities of wealth from our efforts.
In older cultures, we find that what people produce, all day long, is security and safety, and food and shelter for everyone in the community. The product of the culture, the thing that everyone gets together and works on, is security. And what people take out of the culture, is security.
Lawrence Vanderpost, in his book “Bushman of the Calahari”, tells an incredible story about the San natives of northern south Africa (they used to be called the !Kun then they asked they be called the San). Vanderpost was a white south African, big game hunter, and writer in the 1950’s.
He and five or six friends were travelling through the San territory in the Calahari desert, and they came across a small group of San, a small tribe, about 30 of them. The San tribe were travelling to the east. Several hundred miles to the east they could see lightening, so they knew there would be water and there would be food. This wasn’t a problem, this is what they did, they were itinerant hunter gathering people. Vanderpost noticed they were low on food so he said to his fellows, “Let’s get them some food...”, so they took a whole day out in their Land Rover, tracked a herd of wildebeast, shot one, brought it back to the camp, dressed it, smoked the meat, dried it, and packed it up so it could be easily carried.
They gave it to the Bushman, the San, and the next morning the San got up, smiled and said goodbye, “Hope you have a wonderful trip and we hope you catch many wildebeast and we’ll see you some other time”, and they walked off to the east and to the lightening.
A member of Vanderpost’s group, a fellow by the name of Brian, was totally infuriated by this, because the San never thanked them for the food. Brian said, “I just spent a week’s salary on ammunition and petrol to shoot that animal, wasted an entire day of my time, and those buggers didn’t even say thank you, they must have no culture whatsoever; they have no manners; they have no civilization.....”.
Vanderpost had to explain, because he had spent a lot of
time with the San, that in San culture the third most obscene act a human being
can commit behind murder and rape, is to have or eat food in the presence of
another person who has none. They
didn’t say thank you to us, because to do so would have implied they thought we
were so barbaric we thought we had an option
of not giving them food.
On the way over here, when Louise and I drove here from our home in Montpelier, Vermont, we stopped at many red lights. There were many cars in front of us also stopped at the red lights. When a car stopped for a red light, Louise and I didn’t jump out of the car, walk up to the car in front of us and knock on the window and say, “Thank you for stopping at the red light; it’s so good that you did that, if you hadn’t there would have been a terrible accident and people could have died”. To do so would have been ridiculous; in fact, if you tried that, people would look at you assuming you were being sarcastic and wondering what was going on, wondering, “Why is he thanking me for this? Did I do something wrong?”. This stopping at red lights is just what we do, we stop for red lights.
Can you imagine a world, where simply what we do is feed people when they are hungry? As far as I can tell, of the 4 or 5 thousand known individual cultures on this Earth, there is only one that locks up food, there is only one that turns food into a commodity, and says, “If you want to eat, you have to dance to my tune and I will give you a medium of exchange you can use to acquire food”, and that’s our culture, our culture being about 96% of the planet’s population right now. I mean, not only are 1 billion people infected with tuberculosis, but this week, a different 1 billion people will watch Bay Watch – our culture has spread across the Earth.
Can you imagine living in a world where literally the Sermon on the Mount was lived? That’s the world of the San.
I have written two books on Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (alternatively ADD or ADHD), learning disabilities, and the psychiatry, psychology and neurology involved in them, so I was invited up to the Northwest Territories where they were having a terrible problem up there (before it was divided) with kids not graduating from high school and failing in the schools. This problem is particularly with the indigenous kids, children of the native tribes.
Don Morren, who was the Premier at the time, had read one of my books on Attention Deficit Disorder, in which I take what some people might consider radical positions like: “People aren’t defective, schools are..”, things like that. He invited Louise and I up to Yellowknife to spend a week and he brought in tribal elders from all over the Territories. The Territories are a huge area, a land mass larger than the continental United States.
There were about 250-300 people in this huge log cabin in Fort Resolution, right across Great Slave Lake from Yellowknife, and about a third of them spoke no European languages at all; there had to be simultaneous translation so there were translators all over the room.
I was to do an all day workshop for them. What had sparked this was that a group of psychiatrists had come up from down south in Alberta, and had evaluated some of the native kids in one town where only 7% of the children were graduating from high school. These psychiatrists had diagnosed 95% of the children with ADD, and put them all on Ridilin (In fact Dr. Will Crynan told me the story of a Deni group where 100% of the children had been diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ridilin, all the children in the school).
So, I was giving the seminar to these tribal elders and teachers and drug and alcohol counselors, basically the people who were the pillars of all these various communities from all over the Northwest territories that the government had flown in for this conference. For the first hour and a half, I wanted to establish what the medical notion of ADD was, because they were all being told this is what their children had. I talked about distractibility and impulsively, the need for high levels of stimulation, and my idea that ADD was really something that would be useful among hunting and gathering people, but would not be useful among farming people.
During the break, an enormous 6’5” tall, 250 pound man in his fifty’s came up to me. He had long black hair down to the bottom of his back. He wouldn’t look me in the face; he was looking down. He said, “My name is Joe, I am a Deni, I am one of the caribou hunting people, we used to follow the caribou. In my culture, it is very impolite to simply come up to someone and confront them with one’s opinions, but there is something heavy in my heart I need to share with you about what you have been talking about this morning. Normally we would have to become friends and know each other for a few years, and even then I would approach this indirectly, because it’s just not right in my culture, but I’ve lived among white men and I know your culture, so I would like your permission to speak to you as a white man.” I said, “That’s fine, in fact, please...”.
He stood up much taller and looked me in the eye, very friendly actually. He said, “I really appreciate your coming here; you’ve flown all the way up from the United States, and it hasn’t been an easy trip; I know you weren’t paid to come here. We greatly honor what you are doing and trying to do, but I think there is something you might be overlooking.” I said, “What’s that?”. He said, “Well, the fact of the matter is, my people have live here for 10,000 years, nobody disputes that, and we have been successful. We have had rich lives, a meaningful culture, and a deep significant religion. I know the names of my relatives back thousands of years; we have stories of when the blue walls of ice receded 9 thousand years ago, that the scientists are now discovering are accurate. We have a memory of the end of the ice age. If my people’s way of life didn’t work, I wouldn’t be standing here, because we would have died out.”
“We had a rich life, but 60 – 100 years ago some people from the south came up and discovered on our land there was uranium, gold, oil, and copper. They need to build mines, they needed slaves to work in the mines. So, they said to us, ‘If you want to stay on this land, you have to pay taxes. You have to pay taxes with the local currency, Canadian dollars. In order to get them, you have to work in the mine.’ They realized in order to have people working in the mines, these people had to learn to read and write so they could do performance evaluations and calculate taxes, so 30-60 years ago, you began building schools for our children.”
“At the height of
its empire, Rome was over 1/3 slaves.
You know how the Romans identified their slaves? They cut their hair, because you can’t fake
that, it takes a year to grow back. Now
they are telling my son at school that he has to cut his hair because he looks
too Indian. What I would like you to
consider, and I say this with great respect, and great honor for the effort
you’ve made and the thought you’ve given this, but what I would like you to
consider is the possibility that 93% of our children do not have a brain
disease, or disorder, but rather, that we would simply not want to be your
slaves.”
It was just “Ah!” for me, this moment, and so after the break, I shared this with the group (not identifying this man by name, which would have humiliated him). We changed the course of the discussion, away from ADHD, to one about how can we create schools that respect children as human beings and that will produce children who are literate and know math, but are not robots or slaves.
I didn’t know how this was going to go with the Premier, because this isn’t what I was asked to do, but everybody really got into it, and by the end of the day, Don, who himself is Cree, was so excited he requested that the next day I address the legislative assembly. So we flew over to Yellowknife at 6:00 the next morning and he pulled the legislature together and I gave the talk. That afternoon he shut down the schools in Yellowknife, brought the teachers in and said, “You got to talk to the teachers about this”.
The last I heard, they have made many changes in the schools as the result of this.
You never know
the power of one person’s actions or words.
The lever for that enormous change in what might be an entire province
of schools or what could be even the nation’s schools, was this one man coming
up to someone at a seminar. You never
know when you are going to be that pivot point or lever. Also, what this illustrates is the
importance of understanding that historically, those human cultures that didn’t
destroy the world and survived for 10’s of thousands of years and lived good
meaningful rich lives, were not hierarchically organized. They were laterally organized.
The title “Chief” did not mean the person who had the power, it meant the person who had the greatest obligation, the greatest burden.
Another story we need to change is that time is a line. We have the idea that time has a beginning point and an end point; that we are going from some mythical beginning point, Adam and Eve, or the Big Bang, to some place in the future. We have science stories about it, we have religious stories of it. We image we are going from a beginning point, along a straight line toward an end point, and that presumably things are getting better and better all along the way.
For older cultures, time is instead a circle. Spring comes after winter, and after spring is summer and after summer is fall and then winter again. In that context, in that way of looking at it, this is the 48th November 6th of my life, it’s probably the 40th more or less that I can remember, and it’s probably only the fifth or sixth that I really have any clear recollection of because it is within a week of Louise and my 27th wedding anniversary, so I remember a few of these weeks kind of vividly. That’s not very many; even 48 isn’t very many when you think of it that way. Here is an extraordinary day, and how many times does it come around in my life; how many more times will it come around? We are coming out of Fall and heading into Winter; this will be my 48th winter.
General Custer had enlisted Crow Indians to be his scouts; he took their woman and children and held them in a stockade and told them he would murder their woman and children if they didn’t work for him as scouts. These six Indians who were stuck with this job rode up over the hills the night before the day of Custer’s last stand, and saw thousands of Sioux. They came back to Custer and told him they were going to get slaughtered.
Custer said, “Nah, they’re ignorant savages, they don’t have guns, they just have bows and arrows, don’t worry.” In fact, Custer split part of his army up to go to the now unprotected village, burn it, and kill all the woman and children. Custer thought this would demoralized them; well it didn’t, it just angered them.
The six Crow Indian scouts (one lived to tell the story), knew what was about to happen so they went into the forest the next morning, covered their faces with mud, joined hands, and sang their death song, the song they learned as part of their initiation into early childhood. At 7 or 8 years old, or at puberty, depending on the tribe, you would learn your death song, which is the song you sing when you know you are going to die.
They understood life is a cycle, and that after the death song would come death and after death there is something else, and it just keeps going around. They understood their death is just the appropriate order of things in the cycle. One of them then got on his horse, and said, “Come on men, today is a good day to die.” They rode off with Custer and five of the six of them died.
The man who told me this was an ancestor of this survivor, and he looked at me and said, “Is today a good day to die for you?” I thought about that and said, laughing nervously, “No I don’t think so. I got a lot of loose ends.” He said, “Well, call me when it is“. So, I went home and I started calling people up. I called up my parents and said, “Have I told you I loved you?” I called up my kids, “We hadn’t had a meaningful conversation in a long time, talk to me..”. I called up Louise too. I called Tim, my publisher, and said “Tim is there anything between us that needs to be cleared up? Have I offended you in any way?” He asked me if I was in a twelve step program or something. Apparently that is one of the steps, cleaning up business.
Finally after a couple of weeks I called my friend Ari back and said, “OK, I think today’s a good day to die”. He said, “Good, then now you can live, fully, because you need have no fear of dying”.
Prior to that I had been afraid to get on airplanes, because I have been in three near crashes and I’m a pilot myself and I know everything that can go wrong. If I am flying it doesn’t bother me, but if I’m in the passenger seat, three gin and tonics would not be enough. The first flight I got on after this all unfolded, I was with Louise, and as the plane was going down the runway, I patted her on the hand and said, “Today is a good day to die”, and she gave me this aghast, “What?!”. So I told her the story of Ari and the conversation.
So, coming back to the connection with people, coming back to the connection with life, coming back to the connection with all living things, coming back to the connection with divinity, coming back to a connection with sense of time; I have a couple more important points to illustrate.
Most people in our culture go through their days, go through their lives, stuck in one of three primary places: the visual, auditory, or feeling senses. Those people most stuck in the visual sense will reveal it to you by the way they speak, by saying, “Yes, I see what you are talking about; yes that is very clear to me; or, Hey, it’s great to see you, see you later”. Those who are stuck in the auditory sense, will say things like “Yes, I hear what you are talking about; yes I understand perfectly what you are saying; Hey, it’s great to hear your voice; we’ll talk again soon; talk to you later”. Those who are stuck in their feelings will say, “That’s an idea I can get my hands around; I like the feel of that; that’s a really strong idea; great to be in touch, stay in touch, catch ya later”. They reveal it too us in these ways. What happens is, we get stuck in one of these senses, for most people it is visual.
We also tend to have a constant internal dialogue where we are either worrying about the future, being miserable about the past, or judging the present. For example, “Is this good enough; is it too hot or too cold; how do I feel; what do I think about this...?” Our brains are going all the time.
If you think back on yesterday, you probably see, in your memory, kind of a long grey cloud punctuated by little crystal clear moments of recollection. Some of these are easy to explain; I remember the day I was married, I remember the day each one of my children was born. But why do we remember some things over others? Why is it that I remember yesterday, after we got the car washed, noticing the dashboard. Why is it that I can remember that, as clearly as if it happened thirty seconds ago. Why is it that I remember just one moment, when we were driving just on the other side of the Canadian border and I turned over and looked at Louise and I can see her face, just in that moment. Why? It wasn’t a big deal. Why these little idiosyncratic events?
My guess is those moments of recollection are moments when for just a second you suspend the internal discussion and get unstuck from your one habitual sense, and become aware of all the senses and are fully present in this moment.
So, I would like to give you an exercise for doing this, and encourage you to try to follow along with me, and then teach it to other people, to share it.
This is a profound, powerful way of centering and it’s very simple. You start out by noticing your visual field, notice what you are seeing, notice the colors, the textures, the depth, the room. Notice what you are seeing, isn’t it extraordinary? All this variety of color, the shape, the empty space in the room. Notice it and let that be the most fascinating thing in the world.
Now notice what you are hearing and let sound be the most interesting thing; the spaces between my words, the sound of your own breath, the sound of the air conditioning, the sound of people around you. We are immersed in a sea of sound.
Now let your feelings be the most interesting thing in the world. Notice the sensations in your body, gravity pulling you down into the seat, the weight of your clothing on your skin, how tight your shoes are, the feeling of air going in and out of your lungs, places of tension or relaxation in your body. Notice your feelings and let those feelings be the most interesting thing in the world.
Now notice your sense of smell and taste, the smells of the cologne and body odor around you, the room and the carpet, and the tastes in your mouth left over from lunch, coffee and tea. Let smells and tastes be the most fascinating thing in the world.
Now notice the passage of time. We are standing here in a river as if time is flowing by.
And here we are, bring your attention and all those senses, what you are seeing, what you are hearing, what you are feeling, and what you are smelling and tasting, all to this moment, right now, and be fully alive. Then this will be one of those crystal clear moments of recollection.
Isn’t it extraordinary, this moment, this moment of aliveness? Just down the street there is a cemetery of dead people; can you imagine what any one of them would give for one minute of sitting in here breathing this air seeing this light, just one minute? What an extraordinary gift we have of life. And we fritter it away, past, present, future, thinking, “Is it good enough; is it not good enough; get more; consume this; work....”
Be alive, in the moment; this is an extraordinary and powerful, powerful tool.
Finally, I would like to wake you up to the gap in human values.
There’s an organization called Adbusters; they run an incredible television commercial which CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN all refused to broadcast for any amount of money. I don’t know if they tried it here in Canada or not.
In this commercial, it starts out with a bull running through a china shop breaking things, and the announcer starts off by saying, “Traditionally we have measured the health of a country by its gross national product. The problem is...”, and we flash to a picture of a seagull, all black, trying to get up out of an oil slick, “....whenever there is an oil spill the GNP goes up....” (this is because it creates activity; money gets spent when the slick needs to be cleaned up). Then they flash to a forest and a giant tree, “When ever a forest is cut, GNP goes up”, then they flash to a woman on a hospital bed with a cat scan machine around her, “Whenever a new cancer patient is diagnosed, GNP goes up”. Then they flash to a picture of the world, ”If we are to save ourselves, economists must learn to subtract.”
The message is
that we have organized a culture and a society in a way that says: if someone
makes money off it, it’s good, and if they don’t, it’s bad. This has been our only index, and it is time
to change that and instead ask: is this healthy for humanity and every other
living thing. And add that to the metrics of it all.
In 1775 Thomas Paine, an American patriot, stood in front of the city hall in Philadelphia to read the first paragraph, of the first page, of the first newsletter ever published in America. After the first issue he named the newsletter, “Common Sense”, but the first issue was called “The Crisis.” He stood there in front of a small group of people, and he said, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots will no doubt shrink from the service of the country, but tyranny like hell is not easily conquered.”
We are facing a new tyranny. It is the tyranny of the corporate driven religion of consumerism; it is driving them to work themselves to death. It is creating an army of latchkey children; over half the children of America and Canada come home to an empty house. It is the tyranny of a culture that’s consuming the planet and spitting out waste. It is the tyranny of a culture that ignores the fact that three billion people go to sleep every night without enough food or nutrition. It is the tyranny of insanity that says it’s appropriate that woman be slaves in more than half the world, or even that slaves exist at all, and that the notion of wage slave is a very real thing. It is people feeling a lack of security and a profound sense of disconnection from their community, and people spending 5-6 hours a day glued to a neurological drug we call television instead of interacting with their community, their friends, and their family. This is the tyranny of the dominating conquering culture. It is a tyranny that’s producing human flesh at such a rate that we are adding population of the city of Los Angeles to the world every three weeks, and we are adding the population of the country of Australia into the world every three months. It is the tyranny of a culture run amuck that is now destroying the planet.
It is a tyranny that you and I can overthrow. Every revolution that has been successful has started from the bottom up. Successful revolutions never start from the top down. I know it is possible.
For seven thousand years in our civilization we have believed it is perfectly appropriate to hold slaves, it’s even in the Bible. It’s perfectly appropriate for woman to be second class citizens, we only gave them the vote in the United States in 1920. We gave them. Paul in the Bible says they should sit down and shut up in the back of the church.
Suddenly, really just in one lifetime, these stories which we have held for seven thousand years to be true, have been blown apart because someone, Rosa Parks, stood up on a bus in Alabama, and Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke up, and Cary Nation in 1920 stood up, and they said, “Wait a minute, these stories are sick, they are toxic, they are destroying us. We need to replace them with more egalitarian, more useful more productive stories.”
So I know change is possible, and I know radical rapid change is possible. All we have to do is wake up enough people. How many people is enough people? I don’t know. Nathan Grey suggests it’s eighty thousand people, he said, “Thought is a wave, and when waves are in synch, they amplify according to the square. So if you square eighty thousand, you get 6.4 billion, which is the population of humans on earth.” He is trying to wake up 80 thousand people. Carl Jung talked about the collective unconsciousness, Rupert Sheldrake talked about the morphic field; they all say essentially that this same thing.
And it starts with you and me, if each one of us were to wake up one person next month, and that person were to wake up one person next month, etc...within one and a half to two years we will have awakened the planet. And we can do that. I ask you to join me in that job.
Thank you very much.