Hi there,
While we are anxiously waiting for Armageddon to unfold, we might as well do some philosophizing and become a little more aware of what we can do to assuage the blow, and maybe even survive with some good spirits to spare.
One of my personal He-roes – actually a She-roe as she points out with self-conscious feminine pride – is Aquarian evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris Ph.D., author of EARTHDANCE, one of the great books of our time, and one that gives us well-documented hope for the future of Humanity. This week I am offering you some memorable quotes and opinions of hers with my own comments.
One of Dr Sahtouris´ big interests in life is Worldviews. Paradigms in other words. She loves giving workshops on cultural and personal worldviews in order to show people how we ourselves create both our cultural realities and our personal realities. And that for the first time in history our official cultural story, that in our present society is being written by scientists, is no longer automatically taken as the ultimate and absolute truth.
She writes, “Philosophers of science explained long ago that science was not in the business of proving truths, that all theories were testable stories, and could only be tested for their usefulness, not for their truth. I thought that was the century´s most profound sea-change in western culture.”
She points out that we’re still doing a lot of arguing in the world about who’s right and who’s wrong, yet objective profound thinkers now understand that we live in a creative, living universe. Not an accidental universe. Not a mechanical universe. A universe where consciousness precedes the plane of material manifestations, not one where consciousness is a product of material evolution. This is to say, a spiritual universe.
“That’s an enormous cultural change in story. No longer are we caught helplessly in a running-down-through-entropy universe that has no meaning, that gave rise to Dadaism and Existentialism and other depressing philosophies. At least the Dadaists laughed. I used to hang on my mirror the motto, “Life is too important to be taken so seriously.”
We´re in a very serious situation, but we’d better try to enjoy our roller-coaster ride, because it won´t come to an end any time soon. We´re in for huge changes everywhere in the world.
“As we recognize the universe to be conscious, intelligent, alive, and all of us co-creators, what is our role? Are we not the creative edge of God? We are the universe inventing itself. And that intelligent Cosmos, or God — whatever you call it; doesn’t matter which word you use as long as we agreed that it’s alive, intelligent, conscious, and creative — that is looking through your eyes, working through your hands, walking on your feet. Isn’t that exciting?”
Dr Sahtouris would ask her audience, “How many of you know how to play Monopoly? Would you raise your hands? OK, when was the last time you played it?” – It’s her trick question. Audiences would respond “so and so many years ago.” And she responds, “Wrong, we’re all playing it. That is the world game, isn’t it? We’re playing Monopoly.”
Indeed, most of us are playing the game of concentrating wealth, even if we are on the losing side. And what happens at the end of the Monopoly game? You either re-distribute the wealth and start over, or you play a different game. That’s the choice. We can play a different game if we want.
There are many ideas on how to change the money game. There shouldn’t have to be a national debt. All governments should be able to create money as needed through its own central bank, publicly owned by each sovereign nation.
In both the US and Britain, the central banks are privately owned, which means that neither the government nor parliament or congress controls the money supply. This is instead controlled by a coterie of international bankers whose only purpose is to concentrate as much wealth and power as possible in their own hands.
As long as our societal value system is based exclusively on material resources, and material resources can be exchanged for money, those in control of the money supply also control industry, politicians, and all of society with very few exceptions. This incongruous system was introduced in the US in 1913 through a coup by a handful of the most powerful bankers. Until very recently, very few people knew that the Federal Reserve Bank is privately owned, and not a government agency controlled by congress or the White House. Thanks to the Internet, people are now becoming aware of a lot of unsavory facts about money and politics.
Incidentally, a sister event with equally tremendous impact on society and politics ever since, also occurred in 1913. I am referring to the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation. With its money and prestige, under a false label of charity and scientific progress, they have assumed indirect control of the most fundamental pillars of society, namely education, medicine, energy and food. Far from offering objective scientific results that benefit society as a whole and all its members equally, they have produced tailor-made policies and systems that benefit the financial elite and lead to the so called New World Order agenda. What it amounts to is covert long term social engineering on a vast scale, including drastic population control by many simultaneous and synergistic methods. And part of the scheme – or scam – is to ensure that all these areas are run as BIG BUSINESS, making trillions in profit on people´s needs, misfortunes and illness. Not to forget the permanent WARS across the globe, which are among the military-industrial complex´s most profitable activities.
Elisabet Sahtouris assures us that
“Somebody changes the rules of the game all the time. We live in a dynamic universe. Not a static one. Life is not static, it’s dynamic. And this is the first time in history when anybody can play in the big world game. It is the Internet that is largely responsible for the ability of a twelve-year-old, who gets upset about child labor in India or somewhere, to start a whole Save-the-Children organization, or whatever.
“The Internet is a very interesting phenomenon. It behaves a lot like a living system. As an Evolution Biologist, I spent years honing my list of the basic principles of living systems, abstracting them from nature. Trying to see, By what principles does a cell self-organize and self-maintain? These principles should be the same for a body, for an ecosystem, for a family, for a corporation, for a world economy — one set of consistent principles for all.
“I created a list of fifteen operating principles found in all healthy living systems and sat down with a corporate consultant to show it to him. I said, `Let’s look at the Internet in these terms, though they come from biology.’ We went down the list one-by-one and saw that the Internet demonstrates every one of them.
“The Internet is self-organizing as a living system, for better or for worse. We may not like everything that’s happening on it, but it came out of a free, chaotic situation and it is operating by the principles of living systems.”
Today the Internet is sucking the corporate world into itself. Corporations have not traditionally functioned by the operating principles of living systems, so perhaps this shows the power of life over non-life. Corporations simply can no longer ignore the Internet – in fact they are falling over each other to be part of it.
“Now, consider that all living entities are embedded in other living systems. That’s why I looked for the same principles in cells, bodies, ecosystems, companies, corporate bodies, worlds, etc. That embeddedness means that every level of an embedded system must be healthy for the whole system to be healthy.”
Dr. Sahtouris recommends companies to include all stakeholders in their equations, instead of only worrying about the interest of the shareholders. The stakeholders include everyone who has some kind of a stake in the business, such as the people supplying the resources and the people buying the goods, along with those involved with the production, sales, and distribution. It’s a network.
It´s important for businesses to take on more accountability to stakeholders. We can even argue that they should include the entire ecosystem in which the company and all its human stakeholders exist. In this way the concept of stakeholders will end up engulfing the whole planet because of how very interwoven everything is.
“I know that my body wouldn’t function if my cells couldn’t talk to each other. I know that all my cells are in dialogue, all my molecules are in dialogue, all of nature is in dialogue.
“It’s wonderful to see all the different stories and to know that we don’t have to arrive at a single story. And yet we can look for principles that work — that work toward health. You can argue that health is a natural ethic. How do I decide whether something is good or bad? Does it promote my health, my family’s health, my community’s health, my world’s health? If it is at least harmless, and good at some of those levels, go for it. Creative edge of God. We’re here to experiment. And this is the most incredible experiment that any of us could imagine. No matter how many incarnations we may have had, this is the big one!
“In the eternal ‘now’ I see my incarnations as lotus petals, all there at once to dialogue with. It is so wonderful! — It’s all wide-open now. We can be so creative about the way we see things. That’s what gives me hope. And whenever you’re feeling really down, rise above it, look down, say: “I needed the bad guys in my game. I came here as a world transformer; there had to be something to transform. They need me — I need them.” We’re all connected anyway. It’s a game. And it’s a wonderful game. And it’s getting more exciting by the minute.”
That´s all from Play Station Earth for this week. See you again next week!
Dr. Jens
