Dancing the Path of Love

 

COLLAPSE & REBIRTH

 

This chapter, and in fact this entire treatise, was drafted before Barack Obama became president. Possibly his audacity of hope will put us on the road to harmonize with one another and with our insufficiently beloved Mother Earth. However, politics is the art of the possible, and Obama is a centrist, advocating what is politically possible in a desperate time when very probably only extreme measures will save us. Still, if anyone can surf us thru the incoming series of catastrophes, Obama and his team may be the ones for the job. However, we have to face the very real possibility that the ship of state may sink in the gale, and things may get very bad indeed. The Tea Party may be a portent of what is to come. We can hope for the best, but must prepare for the worst. Obama is putting almost all of his energy into the economy, and the real problems are underneath that. We would hate to discover too late that his best efforts were only rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. On the other hand, if we could just live up to President Obama’s inspiring elegy in Tucson, we would have great reason for hope.

Obama’s State of the Union speech in 2011 highlights the problem. I think our challenge is to learn to live in harmony with Mother Earth, who supports us in every way. Obama never mentions this. He thinks our challenges are just to be innovative, be better educated, be competitive, be employed, be efficient -- all good things, but they don’t even approach what we actually need to be doing.

“As the backlog of unresolved problems grows, including rapid population growth, spreading water shortages, shrinking forests, eroding soils, deteriorating grasslands, and rising temperatures, weaker governments are breaking down under the mounting stress. … We do not have much time. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines are set by nature. Nature is the timekeeper, but we cannot see the clock.”  Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute and former president of Worldwatch, December, 2007

The end of the world as we know it is clearly coming. Perhaps not as early as 2012, but by 2020 we should see major elements of the collapse. It will come about because of some deeply ingrained habits and attitudes which are not likely to change fast enough. 

For the last couple hundred years we have believed that growth is good – and it is, up to a point. But it is impossible to grow infinitely in a finite space. Infinite growth is the mentality of a cancer cell. Reputable scientists have estimated that the carrying capacity for humans on this planet, a number which would enable all the other species to survive and thrive, may be as low as two billion people. In 2011 world population will reach 7 billion, over three times the carrying capacity and growing by about 70 million a year. We need not only to stop growing, but to reduce our numbers drastically. Certainly some of the things we could do are to widely disseminate information about birth control, disseminate condoms and other methods of birth control, and make widely available if not encourage abortions. We’re at a place where if a child is unwanted, that child should not be born into this life. We have too many already. It is not loving to bring unwanted children into an overcrowded world. This view is opposed by the Catholic Church, which seems to believe the more children, the better, and by the Christian fundamentalists, who believe that managing our numbers through abortion is positively sinful. Both groups seem to think that condoms and other methods of birth control are somehow evil. God gave us the capacity to make ecstatic love, but according to them we should only do so under heavily proscribed conditions.

Since the Catholics and fundamentalists believe that theirs is a moral position, it is worth asking, what is morality? Is it just some abstract principle, such as “All life is sacred?” We can skip the rejoinder that if all life is sacred, why doesn’t that principle apply to war, to the death penalty, or even to traffic accidents, since the 34,000 accident deaths a year could be largely avoided thru a European system of mass transit rather than our gluttonous love for independent vehicles. I stick with William James: truth is what works, morality is what works, both immediately and in the long run. How does “All life is sacred” work? It creates overpopulation to the extent that millions will starve to death, particularly in the poorer countries of the world. In the meantime, it creates back alley abortions or miserable mothers with unwanted and unloved children. I cannot find any positive consequences to the position. “All life is sacred” does not work in regard to saving the unborn. On the other hand, the unborn will never miss the life they never had. For sure, “life is sacred” is true in the sense that life should be honored, and taking it should only be done with serious reverence. Taking responsibility for both life and death may lead to smaller populations and well-loved children. 

Eventually, we will realize that since we are co-creators with God, and God creates life, maintains life, and destroys life, it is appropriate for us to take on similar responsibilities. There are times when we must destroy life, and up to a point we accept it in cases of war, capital punishment, auto accident, and euthanasia. In my view every woman has a holy right to terminate a pregnancy and for the most part will exercise that responsibility with great care. However, it is very doubtful that we as a world culture will come to the realization that we are in charge of life soon enough to prevent the population bomb from continuing to explode. The Rwanda genocide and the humanitarian crisis in Darfur show us what that explosion looks like.

To be sure, populations are already shrinking in most of Europe, Russia, and Japan, and China is well on its way, but populations continue to expand in India, in Latin America except Cuba, in Africa, and in the Moslem world. My grandchildren may see the last chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans eaten by starving humans. In fact a recent survey suggests only 870 wild gorillas are left in the jungle. When the burgeoning population of Brazil plus the endless greed of the corporations cuts down all of the Amazon jungle, we may well miss it, since it produces 25% of the world’s oxygen. Attempting to maintain an unsustainable population makes absolutely no sense. The population of the world will be reduced by famine, war, and genocide to meet the remaining resources unless we quickly find humanitarian means to do so.

A simple way to discourage large families in the US is to stop giving exemptions for dependent children on our income taxes and charge for excess children. A first child would make no difference on the income tax, but a second child would be charged 10% of the net income of both mother and father. Each additional child would be charged 20% of net income. Existing children could be grandfathered in but would be counted for positioning a new child. Multiple births would be counted once at their position in the birth order and the rest would be given a free pass, except in the case of fertility treatments, for which the standard charges would apply. In this way, we would clearly indicate we are serious about population reduction. If we depend entirely upon voluntary reduction, our most sensitive and intelligent citizens will elect to have no or only one child, while the insensitive and ill-informed will continue to have large families, which not only will impede reaching the goal but may also weaken the gene pool.

Unlike the Native Americans, Australian aborigines, and various other indigenous cultures around the world, Western culture and particularly American culture has always viewed Nature as wealth to be exploited rather than as bounty to be honored, cherished, and preserved. Ours is essentially a rapist’s attitude – take your pleasure now, and who cares what happens to the victim?  This attitude was not a problem for us as long as we were exploring lands new to us and stealing them from the inhabitants, and as long as we were discovering new and more efficient ways to extract whatever we found useful. But the bounty of Nature is now disappearing, devoured by our voracious appetite.

We are already experiencing that the demand for oil is exceeding the supply and the price skyrocketing. If we don’t like $100 a barrel oil, how will we feel about $200 or $500 a barrel? Right now countries like Zimbabwe cannot afford oil, and almost everyone has to walk. We will have more oil wars – even Alan Greenspan has said the second Iraq war was about oil. As we start to convert coal to gasoline and refine the Canadian tar sands, we are likely to greatly increase pollution and accelerate global warming. And do not imagine that biofuels will save us. In the first place, the world doesn’t grow enough crops to replace more than a small fraction of our oil use, perhaps 6% at most; and in the second place, biofuels accelerate starvation in the poorer countries by removing that much food from the supply. Sure, wind and solar power can help a little, but winds die down and the sun leaves at night. The best options may be ocean wave generators or tide generators, but they seem beset with technical problems.

Many Americans care deeply about the challenge Peak Oil is presenting us, but in March of 2008, before the bubble burst, the sale of SUV’s still exceeded the sale of hybrid vehicles by about six to one. It’s amazing how that changed when gasoline hit $4.00 a gallon. Many take mass transit, ride bicycles, or walk. However, there are not yet enough of us. Many of the rich don’t give a damn because they think their money makes them secure. They may eventually discover that they cannot eat money. Then there are the Christian fundamentalists who believe that the end of the world is approaching, when they will ascend to Heaven in the Rapture, and therefore it doesn’t matter how they treat our Mother Earth. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy for collapse, except of course there will be no Rapture. Furthermore, our major corporations have tended to hold the demented notion that ecological practices are bad for business. They sell us SUV’s because they can make more money off them than fuel efficient vehicles, and they have successfully lobbied against increasing our fuel efficiency standards for the last twenty years. The Obama energy bill increases fuel efficiency by 40% in 12 years, as if we had that much time, while Toyota Priuses and VW Jetta TDI’s already exceed that efficiency goal. The most fuel efficient vehicle ever sold in America remains the 1983 Honda CRX with the 1300 cc engine that got 69 mpg on the highway. Nobody bought it, perhaps thanks to all the propaganda favoring speed and power.

Will someone please tell me how it is that twenty years ago nobody needed an SUV, but all of a sudden so many people thought they did? Actually, I know. SUV’s are supposed to be safer for you in an accident. This of course is a totally selfish perspective. They may be safer for you, but they are more dangerous for the other guy. This is personal for me. In 2004 my friend Tom was showing me his brand new hybrid Honda Insight when a Jeep Cherokee drifted across the center line and hit us head on. A Honda Insight weighs 1800 pounds; a Jeep Cherokee, 3500. The three of us suffered over $750,000 in medical bills, and permanent disabilities. She walked away with bruises and the methamphetamine in her system.

I suspect a second reason some folks buy SUV’s is that they hope to escape to the wilderness in a good off-road vehicle when the collapse comes. However, it’s possible that there will be no gasoline, because they will have already used it all up.

It may be that technology will save us from oil depletion; much more likely, there may be no solution, and society as we know it will grind to a halt. Since agriculture is heavily dependent on oil for fertilizer, production, and transportation, food will disappear and prices will skyrocket. What will a person do when he cannot find or afford food for his family? Most will not dare to steal from the rich, because they will be heavily guarded by the likes of Blackwater, so they will steal from you and me. This in itself may cause society to break down into lawless gangs, scavenging however they can. Time for Soylent Green! 

The depletion of oil is not the only threat we face. Top soil is being eroded all over the world, decreasing our food supply. The diverse forests of the world are being cut down and replaced with monoculture, a single species of tree, which is much more subject to disease and insect infestation than diverse forests. Monsanto is pushing ahead with genetically engineered trees, which may have an incalculable negative effect on the ecology of the forests. And all for what? To make Kleenex and Swiffers and junk mail. We could replace an enormous amount of our paper use with the internet, but we are slow to do so. Most of the major fisheries in the oceans are severely depleted and dead zones are growing along our coast lines, probably from fertilizer and pesticide run-off. Unless we place severe restrictions on fish harvests, the ecology of the oceans may be destroyed, and the last fishermen may be catching nothing but starving sharks. Perhaps the disappearance of honeybees will sharply reduce the production of fruits and vegetables. These are just a few of the cards that are pulling out of our house of cards, and who can tell which one will cause the collapse of the structure?

Since the world is doing next to nothing to decrease greenhouse gases, global warming will continue to accelerate. It’s possible that as huge flows of ice slide off Greenland, the Gulf Stream will be disrupted, causing almost unimaginable climate change. The droughts in the West and Southeastern US, the brush and forest fires in California, the record breaking temperatures, the floods, and the unexpected tornadoes may all be harbingers of what is to come. Global warming causes more severe swings in weather, and may thus account for the East Coast blizzards of 2010. Such severe weather may cause much misery, disease, and death. Global warming may also have a severe negative impact on food production, again contributing to starvation and food wars. Converting crop lands to biofuel production is not helping either. Many of the food wars may be described as wars over territory or religious conflicts, but the truth is that when folks don’t have enough to eat, they are very likely to go to war. The increase in sea level as the ice caps melt may drown or displace large populations in low lying areas such as Bangladesh, the Maldives, the Netherlands, south Florida, and New York City.

Americans consume far more goods and use far more energy per capita than any other nation. The idea of simple living is to use as little as possible and to live as lightly on the earth as possible, but such an idea is an affront to our sense of prosperity. So ingrained is our idea that growth is good, if the economy shrinks a little we call it a “recession,” and if it shrinks a lot, we call it a “depression.” Actually, shrinking the economy would be highly salutary. We all ought to be working less, buying less, and enjoying life more. The faster we consume the resources of the world, the faster they are depleted. Yet President Obama is still in favor of growth. The more, more, more mentality shows a lack of respect for the environment that sustains us, but of course that lack of respect is endemic. Some of us throw their old TV’s and washing machines into the desert and use them for target practice, then tear up the fragile ecology with their ATV’s. Retired folks cruise around the country in huge RV’s that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and may get four or five mpg, while they tow their smaller vehicles behind. Most of us see nothing wrong with using aluminum foil, paper towels and napkins and plates, and disposable plastic tableware. We discard so much usable clothing which is then baled and sent to Africa that we have destroyed the textile industry in many African nations. Many of our consumer products are not repairable – if it breaks, throw it away. With such attitudes, we don’t deserve to survive.

If you think our over-consumption has no immediate connection to the coming collapse, think again. Imagine all the energy, goods, and services available in the world as a nice apple pie. If we take a very large piece, that leaves less for the rest of humanity. The pie is shrinking, as population grows and resources deplete. This requires us to take an ever larger piece to maintain our “standard of living.” If we take an ever larger piece, what do you suppose that does to the rest of humanity?

The coming catastrophe may begin as an economic collapse. In October of 2008 the stock market began a free fall. Our government deficit plus our trade deficit was running about a trillion dollars a year, and in 2008 the national debt stood at over nine trillion dollars, or $30,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. By summer of 2009 the government deficit by itself was over a trillion dollars and the national debt was over eleven trillion. Now the national debt has surpassed our gross national product of about fourteen trillion dollars. There will soon come a time when no other country will want to lend us money. China already has the power to ruin us, simply by refusing to buy any more American debt and by refusing to trade with us. Since we have sent our manufacturing base overseas, largely to China, we would be unable to produce almost everything -- from notepads to garden hoes. When the dollar is discredited, we will not be able to buy foreign oil, and Bingo! complete collapse is upon us. In order to survive, we need to do away with predatory capitalism. But the predatory capitalists expend huge amounts of money to propagandize us to their point of view. They are generally successful. We fail to grasp that we are going to collapse because of the preponderance of greed in the world.

We think it would be wonderful to become rich, and it never occurs to us that we can’t all become rich. If you become rich, you can then sit back and do nothing except watch your investments while somebody else builds your houses and cars, tends your lawn, cooks your food, cleans your house, etc etc. Yet if we were all rich, nobody would want to build your house or car, tend your lawn, or cook your food. Being rich depends on other people being poor so that they will work for you. So the dream is flawed. Economies work by an exchange of goods and services, and those who exchange nothing but simply live off their wealth are parasites on the rest of us.

Our economic system is heavily infested with parasites. Just ask if what a person is doing to make money is a benefit to society or only to himself? Hedge funds, day traders, real estate speculators, and a host of others need to be expunged from the system, since they contribute nothing. The more money they take, the less the rest of us have.

We can’t all become rich, because then there would be nobody to serve us, but we can become rich to the extent that technology serves us. Almost all of us in America have ample food, warm houses, running water, electricity, cars, TV’s, computers, etc. thanks to technology. Only the inefficiencies in our economy plus the horrendous profits skimmed off by the predatory capitalists keep us all from working only 20 hours a week. How is it that 30 years ago a husband could earn enough to support his family, but now both husband and wife have to work? How are our lives affected by the fact that more than half of the national budget is spent on our war machine? How is it that the French only have to work 35 hours a week and get six weeks of vacation a year? Economists tell us we have to consume endlessly to keep the economy going, yet that consumption is destroying the planet as well as our own lives.

It’s impossible to predict which strands will break down first in this delicate web of ecology and social fabric. You cannot have the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer forever. For a CEO to make hundreds of times what a worker makes is utterly unjust and immoral. Inevitably there comes a time of rebalance, which in itself could be very destructive. We will also see wars both large and small, some very likely to be nuclear, with unimaginable consequences. India vs Pakistan, Israel vs Islam, China vs Taiwan, US vs Venezuela – who knows? Does anyone seriously imagine we will reduce terrorism when we bomb the nuclear facilities of Iran, a nation of seventy million people who will then hate us all the more?

The inconvenient truth is that our government spending and foreign policy is largely dictated by the military-industrial complex, which makes money off of war and preparations for war. They don’t make money off of peace. Consequently they have led a campaign for more than fifty years to persuade us that the United Nations is bad. Don’t give it any money. If you make it stronger, that will be an attack on our sovereignty. This is dangerous nonsense. Any time we wanted, we could make the UN a true peace keeping force, and we would no longer have to spend half of our budget on arms, but we do not have the will.

Attitude makes all the difference. Many in the so-called New Age orientation are suffering from severe propaganda. Folks like Esther Hicks claim that we don’t need to be concerned about the environment: it is in good hands. If she were on the Titanic, she would probably claim that nobody needed to jump in the life boats, the ship was in good hands. The only hands are ours – we are the parts of God maintaining this show. The vacuous Law of Attraction seems to assert that paying attention to our looming catastrophes only gives them energy and makes them more likely to manifest. Just pay attention to the good stuff, and the bad stuff will somehow go away. Right, and if we suffer hunger we’ll just start mining the moon, because it’s made of green cheese. The truth is that if we do not go to meet the approaching evil, it will overtake us. Therefore it is good and proper to focus on positive solutions. When we face and accept the worst that can happen, it generally doesn’t. I am reminded of a documentary of some good Jews in Poland praying for God to save them as the Nazis put nooses around their necks and hanged them in the public square. Neither prayer by itself nor ignoring the issues will save us. If all of us do not do everything we can to save us, we are doomed. Convenient rationalizations only cause confusion and get in the way.

I put forth Dancing the Path of Love because I believe that if a dramatic transformation in consciousness takes place, we will be able to repair our relationship to our Mother Earth and save ourselves. If the transformation does not happen, we will see catastrophes that will probably wipe out 80 or 90% of the human race. First we will move to a military police state controlled by the major corporations. But as catastrophe follows catastrophe and our food supply fails, we will deteriorate into armed gangs scavenging the countryside for food. In return for blind obedience, the local warlord will protect you – provided you’re the right color and have the right religion. Eventually the few who survive will have a rebirth of brotherly love, and recognize that only thru love can we heal ourselves, and heal our relationship with the planet. This may take centuries.

It’s curious that the future looks so bleak, while simultaneously quite a number of us are getting really clear about our Spirit natures. It is possible to experience directly the holiness, the sacredness of Creation, and that makes all the difference. We are all parts of God, and if we deeply understand that, and deeply understand that we are creating this show by our free will, we can make it as beautiful and loving a show as we choose. So let us choose! It really doesn’t seem too hard to understand.

The blind stubbornness of human beings may lead to our downfall. Nevertheless we can try. We can do our best. We can extend every effort. If we fail, we fail. But hopefully, we leave a legacy of spiritual consciousness that will help to raise the survivors from the ashes. Human beings will survive. We are as pervasive and clever as cockroaches, and perhaps, in the future, this time now will be known as the Lost Atlantis, which destroyed itself by an over-reliance on technology and a disregard for natural values. They will remember us as a barbarian society that did not have the perception and sense to live in harmony with this great Mother Earth that sustains us all.

I pray that I am wrong and that there will be a great spiritual evolution. I am working on it, but unless you do too, it will not happen. Because I know I am part of God, I can remain steadfast and be happy to be alive even as I see society collapsing. I’m an old man, born in 1935. I may die before the collapse becomes severe, or I may be among the first to go. It seems we have to inflict this severe learning upon ourselves in order to wake up. I wish it were not necessary.

However, I see great masses of people swept up by religion, frequently fundamentalist in nature. “Fundamentalist” means that they pay more attention to moral strictures, obedience, and punishment than to the message of love. It is not the right word. “Hypocrite” might be better. Yet fundamentalism infects Christians, Moslems, Jews, and Hindus. All religions teach great truths, but they also contain so much obsolete chaff  that it is hard to say whether the good they do outweighs the hypocrisy and evil that they perpetrate. Even Hitler sent his troops into battle wearing belt buckles that said “Gott mit uns!” God with us, or God’s on our side. Right! The Bush2 administration started to call the war against terrorism a great Crusade, until they realized what that word meant to Moslems. Until the great majority choose to see their religions as obsolete anachronisms and choose to see themselves as parts of the Great Mystery who can have a direct relationship with the Source of All, I see little hope. Religion is for folks who do not have a direct relationship with God, because when you have a direct relationship with God, you don’t need religion, except perhaps for social communion. When you realize that you are fully responsible for the values you choose, then there is the possibility that you will choose values of respect and love and harmony, and the world will change.

What actions will save us? In the present society a high degree of corruption is endemic in our political process. We call bribery “campaign contributions” and pretend it’s not bribery. If I want to be a politician and lead this country in what I consider the most favorable direction, in order to get elected I have to accept lobbyists’ contributions, and then those contributions may force me to compromise my ideals and stray from the best direction. I will accept that all of us are to some degree corrupt. Many people invite their corruption to run them and profit by it. Therefore I as a politician am willing to be a little corrupt too. I’ll try to make it as small an area as possible; I’ll try to do as much good as possible. But I’m dealing with a corrupt system, and inevitably it corrupts me. So the most obvious improvement that can be made to the system would be to remove the corruption. This can be done by having all elections government financed, no corporate money allowed, as currently being done in Arizona. This is the single most basic change which might enable us to turn our direction around. Once our legislatures are free of corruption, they can then pass all the laws necessary to bring us into balance with Mother Earth. But instead, almost everyone chooses to live with the corruption.

Another strategy that would end the corruption is to pass a law defining any contribution of more than $2000 by any individual or organization directly or indirectly to a political campaign as bribery, and prosecute with major fines and jail sentences.

Why do you suppose we have no laws requiring all plastics to be easily recyclable? Why are bottle bills so difficult to enact? Why don’t we have much stiffer fuel economy standards? Why don’t we have stiffer laws requiring honesty in advertising? Why don’t we outlaw clear cutting when we know that sustainable yield harvesting is more profitable in the long run, as well as being much more ecologically sound? Why is it so difficult to change building codes to allow for straw bale, cob, and other more ecological construction? Why is it impossible for Congress to pass a law requiring the minimum payment on credit cards to be 1/12 of the highest balance until paid off --  a move that would protect millions from overindebtedness? Why do our laws see nothing wrong with endless mergers into more and more megacorporations, or why is it ok for Clear Channel to buy up all of the commercial radio stations in the US that it can get its hands on? Why is it ok for hedge funds to be legal, and for the government to bail them out when they go bust? Why do our media lie so much by omission? On and on and on, the measure of our corruption. Taking the money out of elections could pave the way to change all this. Not only could we have government financed elections, but we could require both cable and over-the-air television channels to host a set number of political debates at all levels. The American dream of fairness and equality is only ours if we choose to commit to it – “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

I could go on about how our institutions are failing us and thus contributing to the coming collapse. I will discuss just four -- the Supreme Court, our failure to care for our citizens, our education system, and predatory capitalism.

The Supreme Court is crucially in need of improvement. While it has made many excellent decisions over the years, it has also made some that are a long ways from the Path of Love. I will not review the dismal record here. The interested reader can Google the following: United States v. Callender (1798) that affirmed it was against the law to criticize the government, Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) that determined an African American could not be a citizen of the United States, the civil rights cases of 1883 that said private discrimination is not covered by law,  Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) that suggested that corporations have the same rights as an individual, Fletcher v. Peck and Chisholm v. Georgia which denied debtor relief, Plessy v Ferguson (1896) that determined that separate but equal accommodations for African Americans was just, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) which justifies stealing Indian land, Bowers v Hardwick (1986) that upheld criminalizing sodomy among consenting adults, Coppage v. Kansas and Adair v. U.S. which protect corporations,  Bush v. Gore (2000) handing the election to Bush, and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns. If you Google variations of “Supreme Court bad decisions” you can find many more, and of course determine for yourself  whether the decisions were appropriate.

One has only to look at how the Supreme Court has dealt with the Ninth Amendment down thru the years to discover that it has done all it possibly could to invalidate the intentions of our Founding Fathers. As I discussed in an earlier chapter, the Ninth Amendment says that all the rights not enumerated in the first eight amendments are reserved by the people, and since the 1830’s the Supreme Court has argued that no rights whatsoever were secured by the Ninth Amendment, because additional rights are just too much of a hot potato for the Court to handle.

We have failed to define freedom, altho John Stuart Mill did so sixty years after the Constitution. Freedom is the right to do whatever we want, as long as we do not harm others or harm the environment, which harms us all. If we held that definition of freedom, then our fundamental right is to exercise our free will, and this is what the Ninth Amendment should be protecting. Personally, I believe that the government has no business trying to protect us from ourselves: its proper scope is to protect us from one another and to protect the environment. If the Ninth Amendment were understood and practiced with these considerations, numerous invasive and impractical laws would drop away, but this is a huge subject that I don’t need to go into here. Only note that freedom is not the right to do whatever we can get away with. If we want to live in a cooperative and just society, we must treat one another with respect, not explore how we can rip others off.

Under the Ninth Amendment it seems we ought to have a right not to be subjected to arbitrary and frivolous laws. Therefore, if the Supreme Court could determine that a law was arbitrary or frivolous, they could throw it out. As it is, the Supreme Court tends to support the laws that are in place, and during the late sixties the Supreme Court couldn’t even figure out if a man had the right to wear his hair long

The definition of justice used by the Supreme Court is “meeting the requirements of the law and the Constitution.” But laws are fallible, and therefore it might be appropriate for the highest court of the land to determine justice in terms of what is fair to all, so that everyone gets what they deserve, neither more nor less, as best as can be determined. This would probably take a Constitutional amendment, so it is not likely to happen. However, can you imagine how things might change if the Supreme Court justices sought Guidance on the Path of Love in determining their decisions? Then they might truly be wise elders, instead of ideologues, and very possibly they would make fewer mistakes. This would be a fundamental redefinition of the role of the Supreme Court.

Our failure to care for our citizens can be seen in our institutions or lack of them, most obviously in our legal system. How can we describe our legal system as other than dysfunctional when we have the most folks per capita in jail of any country in the world, and our recidivism rate is about 67%? We would rather put the same folks in jail over and over again at a cost of around $25,000 per year than do anything serious about rehabilitation. Consequently our legal system cannot be described as even close to the Path of Love.

The Anglo-Saxon system of justice required that the criminal indemnify the victim, but ever since William the Conqueror, crimes have been considered crimes against the state. Consequently, the victim first has his goods or his life taken from him by the criminal, and second, the victim has to pay thru his taxes for the criminal to be incarcerated. He thus loses twice, and we call this justice?

If we were truly following the Path of Love, we would be helping the homeless get jobs and stability – and not sending all their jobs overseas. We would be counseling ex-cons to help them find jobs and housing, and offering counseling and free treatment for meth and other drug addicts. Our present society does not know the Path of Love or justice. To a considerable extent its failure to take care of its citizens is a cause for collapse. It fails by exporting all the jobs; it fails by arranging agriculture wages so that only Mexican laborers need apply, instead of our own people. Health care of course is another major issue where we are not adequately caring for our citizens, and Obamacare simply gave a profit bonanza to the health insurance companies. We do not care for our own people in far too many ways for society to continue for long. A major plank of conservatives is to reduce taxes and reduce government, even when the government’s aim is to help those in need. Note Bush’s veto of S-CHIP (The State Children's Health Insurance Program) that Obama eventually signed. That they do not want to help their fellow citizens is sheer short-sighted selfishness and a demonstration of our corruption. Conservatives tend to see government as some alien entity, totally forgetting that government is us, elected by us to do what is good for us.

Jesus said, “love one another as I have loved you.” What can be plainer than that? He made it as clear as he could that he loved everyone. He honored the Samaritan as well as the Jew and gave respect even to the adulteress. He arranged food, drink, healing, bringing back from the dead. Yet some of us who pretend to be Christians do not want to do anything to help their fellow citizens. They’d rather help orphans in Nigeria, where they can spread “God’s word.”

Our education system is so far below its potential that it is a contributor to the coming collapse. It is a failure for two simple reasons. First, it is very slow to change and does almost nothing in the way of scientifically controlled experimentation to determine what works the best. In the thirty years I taught I saw only one significant improvement, and that was the advent of computers, which came from the outside and was not self-generated by the system.

The second reason is that we long ago determined that schools should just teach subject matter and should not teach values, self-awareness, or how to handle one’s emotions. Subject matter is non-controversial for the most part, safe. We have a wonderful book about the values learned in kindergarten, but the values are not carried through. In my district and I believe throughout Oregon, high school seniors were required to take a course titled “Modern Problems,” which was an investigation of how to think logically about political issues. Sometime in the 1980’s, it was replaced by “Consumer Finance.” Evidently it was more important to teach students how to balance their checkbooks and handle credit than to teach them how to vote intelligently. Of course “Modern Problems” always received a lot of flak from folks who felt their particular point of view wasn’t being given appropriate attention. Administrators don’t like flak. So thinking logically about political issues is not a value that schools wish to inculcate.

Few schools have courses in ecology because it’s controversial. They have a hard enough time keeping “Intelligent Design” out of the curriculum. Nor are there many schools that teach anything about self-awareness or handling emotions or getting along with one another. Schools do such a bad job teaching basic honesty that one year I had a cheating student who couldn’t understand why I was flunking her for the term. “Everybody does it,” she said. “What’s the big deal?”  Actually a lot of evidence shows that a sizable percentage of students do cheat, both in high school and college.

Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” is a program which puts all the emphasis on subject matter. It is a recipe for boring students to death, as well as not giving them what they actually need in life. As one critic rightly observed a long time ago, the purpose of public education is to make most students feel so bad about themselves that they won’t complain or agitate, and a very small number of students feel good about themselves so that they can become the leaders of society. The failure to teach the right brain, to teach the emotions, and to teach values causes the dumbing down of society, and consequently we may be too stupid to save ourselves.

To be sure, charter schools with their greater freedoms may be a step in the right direction. I believe that a properly constructed voucher system might be an opportunity for tremendous experimentation and growth. If a school were eligible for vouchers only if it would admit everyone who applied and if it did not require any courses in religion, we might safeguard against the worst potential abuses. But vouchers are resisted by the educational establishment. Change is slow, and how much time do we have?

There is a deeper issue here. Our Founding Fathers bravely decided that democracy was the most appropriate system, but at this point we are failing to support its necessary component. A democracy cannot work unless we have an educated, reasonably logical public. I find myself wondering if at the time of the American Revolution when education was much more precious and many were self-educated, did they produce a better result than regimenting kids the way we do today?

The most important element in education is teaching the capacity to evaluate information – to distinguish fact from opinion, truth from falsehood, logic from illogic, probability from improbability. The more we develop our capacity to evaluate our inputs, the more clear-headed and practical we become. But our schools focus more on simply filling students with information than really developing the capacity to evaluate that information.

The liberal arts tradition that I partook of at Reed College taught how to evaluate information by giving us information and asking us to compare, contrast, and develop, which is all very good, but how many of us, including myself, went away thinking that those test questions that we endured were just that – test questions? They weren’t necessarily anything we were supposed to do ourselves when dealing with the information that we came across. To be sure, the habit of evaluation may sink into our unconscious and we may use it effectively, but this is not a sure or certain process. We need to be consciously aware that evaluation of information is a major tool in our tool chests, so that in discussion and debate, we can depend on it in one another. If most of us developed a capacity to evaluate information, we wouldn’t be so susceptible to the questionable assertions of religion; we wouldn’t be taken in by the arguments of the predatory capitalists who are winning the class war; we wouldn’t be fooled by the politicians who pretend it’s ok to increase our indebtedness endlessly; we would recognize that any time government calls an endeavor a “war,” it is probably taking the wrong approach; and we would accept the evidence of reputable scientists that our ecology is collapsing and we had better do something about it.

A fourth element which must be changed if we are to survive is predatory capitalism. For predatory capitalism, the bottom line is to make as much money as possible, and to constantly increase profits. Consequently, American jobs are shipped overseas, and the quality standards become lower and lower, so that we are surrounded by junk that breaks down just past the warranty period, or maybe the day after we buy it. If the bottom line were to serve others as ecologically as possible, and thereby make a fair and appropriate amount of money, everything would be different. The German example, in which every business must recycle what it produces, is illustrative. Cooperatives tend to be more consumer oriented than predatory capitalists, but their decision making process is often awkward and slow.

It’s possible predatory capitalism may be contained with appropriate laws governing quality, wages, ecological concerns, excess profits, and financial finagling such as derivatives and subprime mortgages. It’s possible we need to devise a whole new system based on cooperative models. It may even be that as the catastrophe worsens, businesses will come to their senses and commit to doing what must be done. The record on greenhouse gases suggests this is not likely. I don’t know the answer, but it is clear that predatory capitalism is destroying America and is a major factor in the collapse.

It is time to debunk Milton Friedman and his immoral position that the only thing that matters is the bottom line. It is time to demand that corporations be responsible members of society.

Imagine how different things might be if the law required the charters of every corporation doing business in America to include these points, in order of priority:

1. This corporation will produce high quality goods and/or services that make a clear contribution to society. This point can be used to eliminate hedge funds and other parasites that are of no benefit to anyone but themselves. It would enable us to jail all the crooks who bundled mortgages and misrepresented them. With appropriate taxation, we could also eliminate commodity and stock speculators including day traders altogether.

2. This corporation will function as ecologically as possible in all ways. This point would be a major challenge to coal companies and other polluters. Cap and trade is a sham that allows for enormous fraud. Taxing unecological practices would work much better.

3. This corporation will hire Americans to produce goods and services sold in America and will pay fair wages and benefits, as determined in negotiation with its employees. This would eliminate sending all our jobs overseas. Making a product or service cheaper somewhere else does us no good when we’re out of work, and sending our moneyn overseas simply leaves us in debt. Let’s get real about this! Corporations can be fined or taxed for not hiring Americans to make goods and services sold to Americans. This can apply to foreign and off-shore corporations as well as those registered in America.

4. As well as the corporation as a whole, management and board members shall be individually liable for significant breaches of these first three points. It is time to straighten out the Supreme Court on what the appropriate rights and responsibilities of corporations are. We could pass a law that says individuals can make political contributions up to $2000. Corporations and other organizations cannot. All else is bribery.

5. This corporation is entitled to make a reasonable and appropriate profit on its operations. Note that this so-called bottom line is fifth in order of priority of a responsible contributor to society. This simple change would do away with the claim that a corporation has to do all kinds of heinous things because the bottom line requires it. The bottom line is not money: it is contribution to society. Allowing for the growth of innovative companies, excess profits can be taxed.

These reforms would eliminate the excesses of unbridled capitalism and give us a steady and productive economy.

So first we need to take the bribery out of politics, and then we can deal with the four major areas just discussed. We will then be in a much better position to deal with the threatening collapse. But will we be able to do it? Except for health care, politicians are not even talking about these challenges, and in the summer of 2009 we got to see how politicians shied away from Single Payer, which is the most sensible and cheapest option, because they were bribed with hundreds of thousands of dollars from the healthcare insurance industry. Will we stop driving? We don’t even have successful carpool programs. Will we switch to simple living? Our houses have grown bigger and bigger over the last twenty years, at a time they should have been growing greener. Can we stop consuming when most of us throw out so much stuff that we’re running out of landfills? Can we follow Europe’s example and start reducing our population?  Can we stop destroying the environment in all the ways that we do?

There seems to be very little chance of enacting all the proposals I suggest. It seems much more likely that one way or another, the entire system will collapse, and it will take centuries to rebuild. If we do not take the appropriate steps to avert the coming catastrophe, then we may very well sink into an inhumane world, where life is nasty, brutish, and short. It may be that even as we sink, we will learn our true connections to one another and to Mother Earth, and begin the next wave of our spiritual advance. I imagine that we will discover a new social order quite different from the patriarchal authoritarian culture which lies just behind our emergent democracy. When we rise again, we will have left the old attitudes and prejudices behind. We will start with a basic respect and love for one another. We might greet one another with a namasté: I honor you for the representative of God that you are, or if you prefer, I see your Spirit shining! We will know love, have enough love, spread love, spread joy. We won’t be engaged in all the foolish materialism of this dying culture, but instead we’ll be concerned with seeing and appreciating one another, discovering our special talents, and finding ways to make the most of them. So, if we want to be reborn at a higher level than this mess that we’re living here, the way to do it is with this fundamental respect for one another. I see you as the representative of God that you are. Consider the fundamental respect that we give babies. We are all babies on the spiritual path, and to see one another as such gives the right perspective. You thus automatically have my respect. All it takes is that fundamental recognition. It holds for everything. I see a tree as the representative of God that it is. I see the waterfall as the representative of God that it is. I see the grain, the grapes, the pineapples, the chocolate all as magnificent and beautiful representatives of God that they are, in this amazing, complex mix of interdependent life.

So when we have that fundamental respect, and when we dedicate to the Path of Love in all that we do and all that we are, we will create a new world, we will create Heaven on earth. Which is not to say that there will not be adversity, as adversity appears to be a necessary part of our growth process. But we will make paradise by our expectations and our actions to the best extent that we can.

Enlightenment has to do with how we treat one another. We’re just beginning this process of becoming conscious of who we are. We’ve been playing all these silly competitive roles because we didn’t have a deeper understanding.  When you have a deeper understanding you may still play the roles, but they may seem very amusing. We’ll play some new roles of getting in touch with the environment, with Mother Earth; of seeing us and everything as all connected, part of this great web of being that the Creator is manifesting; of experiencing the great joys of true love for all. It’s time for us to leave the terrible two’s and grow up. We’ll either learn to love one another and the planet now, or we will have to experience a collective dark night of the soul, in order to have some sense pounded into us.

We might be able to make the changes described here by working within the present system of democracy, but the chances are extremely weak because of the power of money and the incapacity of too many of our citizens to ascertain the facts and think logically about them. We have seen over and over again that our democracy works exceedingly poorly, and the frequent gridlock in Washington suggests it doesn’t work at all. The easiest way to effect the necessary changes is to replace our democracy with a better system. Plato argued for philosopher kings to rule the state, or a strong argument can be made that the totalitarian system of China works much better than our partisan mess.

Our best chance to dig ourselves out of this mess may be to try something altogether new. When I attended the Planetary Congress in Toronto in 1983, I got a glimmering of what a new system might be like. Eight hundred of us managed to produce a “Declaration for the World We Choose” in three days, by having focus groups in every area draw up a list of proposals, prioritize that list, and then pass on only the top two proposals to the central committee for inclusion in the Declaration. Most of us thought it worked great, but a vociferous minority complained because their favorite projects were not included in the final document.

Observing this system in action, a great light turned on in my head, which gradually developed into what I then called “The Motherings.” The idea is quite simple. Pilots could organize themselves into groups, or rings, of about a dozen, not larger than thirteen, based on geographical proximity. While it is true a Ring could meet via the internet and Skype etc, meeting in our actual bodies face-to-face has many subtle advantages and is certainly more natural. Meeting once a week or once every two weeks, the Ring would function first of all as a support group, giving each member an opportunity to report on hir (his or her) progress and challenges in dancing the Path of Love, discuss spiritual, self-development, relationship, and family issues, and give one another spiritual, emotional, and physical support. It would be an opportunity to make new and deep friends, and for those into polyamory, might even result in something like a group marriage. This is all written up in my 1997 novel, The Birth of the Motherings.

Rings would also function as a political committee, dealing with questions such as, How can we become more green? How can we help our community or state to become more green? How can we help the world to become more peaceful? Some Rings might choose to start a green business or organic farm that would give jobs to members.

Perhaps once a year each Ring would elect a representative who would meet with a dozen other representatives once every couple weeks or once a month to coordinate interests, activities, and projects. This second level Ring would also elect one member to serve in a third level Ring with a dozen other Third Ringers, and so on up the ladder. Seven levels would include more than 35 million people, and 9 levels would include every adult on earth. If the first level were titled the Alpha Ring, and the second Beta, nine levels would bring us up to the Iota, which seems humorously appropriate. It’s a case where one Iota can make all the difference.

Creating several levels of Rings, a Ring String, means a couple of things. First, while the Alpha Ring might be concerned with local  issues, Beta might be concerned with city wide issues, Gamma might be concerned with county or state issues, Delta with national issues, and Epsilon with international issues. The scope of each level will be defined more precisely as the Rings grow. Second, thru the Ring String from bottom to top, everyone can give input and play a role in determining direction. Everyone will know exactly how decisions are made.

This Rings organization offers some special advantages over our present system. First, all elections would be held among a dozen people. Everybody would know everybody. There would be no need for expensive television campaigns. Campaign funds would not be needed. Second, it would be virtually impossible for any corporation or special interest group to bribe any elected official, because each official would be so intimately connected and responsible to the twelve who elected hir. Third, and perhaps most important, differences of opinion could be talked out among friends, and understandings reached. In our present society, Tea Partiers almost never talk to lefties and there is virtually no forum to do so. On divisive issues the Ringers could hold Common Ground debates, where experts on both sides present their positions and then strive to reach mutual agreements – a very different objective than trying to prove your side right and the other side wrong. An impartial panel of fact checkers might be engaged to ensure that each side’s facts are correct and complete. When I held a series of such debates leading up to the Planetary Congress, the results were amazingly positive even tho the participants were not Pilots. A fourth and final point is that the Rings would have tremendous power, because they would be focused.

Pilotopia can be supported by something like this: Each Pilot contributes 7% of hir net monthly income. If we assume the average Ring contains 10 members and their average net income is $2000 a month, an Alpha Ring would contribute $1400 a month. All higher Rings would contain 12 members and by the time we get to the fifth level, Epsilon, we would have over 200,000 members contributing over $29 million a month. This looks like an enormous amount of money. No wonder mega churches do so well!

No large organizations can function only with volunteers. Folks need to be paid for their time and efforts. A member of the third level Gamma Ring might be attending an Alpha Ring meeting once a week, a Beta Ring meeting once a week or every other week, and a Gamma Ring meeting once or more a week. This is a considerable investment of time and energy. Consequently, altho Beta Pilots might serve as volunteers, Gamma Pilots might be paid $300 for each meeting. Delta Pilots $450 per meeting, and Epsilon Pilots $600 per meeting. There may also be administrative time, staff and expense accounts. Thus, An Epsilon Pilot would receive per month $1200 for Gamma participation, $1800 for Delta participation, and $2400 for Epsilon participation. Becaue s/he would be attending so many meetings, s/he might be paid an additional $150 for each Beta meeting, or $600 a month for a grand total of  $6000  a month. If the Epsilons elect one National Captain, s/he would not be meeting with a Ring of fellow Zetas but just with fellow Epsilons, so perhaps no further remuneration would be necessary. $72,000 a year plus pay for administrative time is very low for a CEO of an organization of over 200,000 individuals, but I would like to see us aim for a pay scale in which the highest paid does not earn more than four times the lowest paid, and this figure is in that ball park.

The pay for all the Pilots in the Ring String would be less than $3 million per month. The rest of the $29 million would be used to further Pilotopia financial interests to make us as independent as we can be from the predatory capitalist system. It would be used to set up for members a cooperative banking system, insurance company, farms, businesses, and possibly external campaign financing and other ventures.

As the Pilotopia Ring movement grows, special interest Rings might spring up along side the basic Rings. These might be concerned with political issues such as preserving wilderness in one’s state, or interests like scuba diving or paleontology, or starting an internet company. These might advise and consult the basic Rings system at appropriate levels. Thus a Pilot might participate in two or three Rings at once. Everyone would know that hir input was heard and paid attention to. In time, the Pilotopia Rings might have their own banking system, insurance, wind farms, factories, stores, all based on a Rings cooperative model, so that Pilotopia could function quite independently from the larger society. Perhaps we might create our own internal money system.

Such a cooperation would have some very significant advantages. First, we could live as we choose, in simple-living comfort, largely independent of the predatory capitalists. There is an excellent chance we could gradually decrease the work week by as much as two days, which is the best way to deal with unemployment. Second, as we prove that our system works better than the prevalent system, more and more people would join us, and they would not necessarily have to become Pilots if they want to stick to their outmoded religions. Third, as we win local, state, and national elections, the Pilotopia system could replace our ineffective government. Finally and perhaps most important, as Pilotopia grows all over the world, we could gradually create a world government that works by Pilotopia Rings, and put an end to war, tremendously increasing the world’s prosperity and well being. Such a focused system might actually be able to make the necessary changes to bring us humans into balance with Mother Earth, and thus prevent the otherwise inevitable collapse. We would indeed become the nervous system of the planet.

Why is a Rings organization so necessary? Because of the widespread corruption! In a ZNet article titled Online Astroturfing Is More Advanced and More Automated Than We’d Imagined on February 24, 2011, George Monbiot says, “Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren’t what they seem to be. The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns, which create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there’s a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them.

“After I last wrote about online astroturfing, in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them. Like the other members of the team, he posed as a disinterested member of the public. Or, to be more accurate, as a crowd of disinterested members of the public: he used 70 personas, both to avoid detection and to create the impression that there was widespread support for his pro-corporate arguments. I’ll reveal more about what he told me when I’ve finished the investigation I’m working on.

“But it now seems that these operations are more widespread, more sophisticated and more automated than most of us had guessed. Emails obtained by political hackers from a US cyber-security firm called HB Gary Federal suggest that a remarkable technological armoury is being deployed to drown out the voices of real people.

“As the Daily Kos has reported, the emails show that: companies now use “persona management software”, which multiplies the efforts of the astroturfers working for them, creating the impression that there’s major support for what a corporation or government is trying to do.

- this software creates all the online furniture a real person would possess: a name, email accounts, web pages and social media. In other words, it automatically generates what look like authentic profiles, making it hard to tell the difference between a virtual robot and a real commentator.

- fake accounts can be kept updated by automatically re-posting or linking to content generated elsewhere, reinforcing the impression that the account holders are real and active.

- human astroturfers can then be assigned these “pre-aged” accounts to create a back story, suggesting that they’ve been busy linking and re-tweeting for months. No one would suspect that they came onto the scene for the first time a moment ago, for the sole purpose of attacking an article on climate science or arguing against new controls on salt in junk food.

- with some clever use of social media, astroturfers can, in the security firm’s words, ‘make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise … There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas’

But perhaps the most disturbing revelation is this. The US Air Force has been tendering for companies to supply it with persona management software, which will perform the following tasks:

a. Create ‘10 personas per user, replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent. … Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms.’

b. Automatically provide its astroturfers with ‘randomly selected IP addresses through which they can access the internet.’ [An IP address is the number which identifies someone's computer]. These are to be changed every day, ‘hiding the existence of the operation.’ The software should also mix up the astroturfers’ web traffic with ‘traffic from multitudes of users from outside the organization. This traffic blending provides excellent cover and powerful deniability.’

c. Create ‘static IP addresses’ for each persona, enabling different astroturfers ‘to look like the same person over time.’ It should also allow ‘organizations that frequent same site/service often to easily switch IP addresses to look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization.’

Software like this has the potential to destroy the internet as a forum for constructive debate. It makes a mockery of online democracy. Comment threads on issues with major commercial implications are already being wrecked by what look like armies of organised trolls – as you can often see on the Guardian’s sites. The internet is a wonderful gift, but it’s also a bonanza for corporate lobbyists, viral marketers and government spin doctors, who can operate in cyberspace without regulation, accountability or fear of detection. So let me repeat the question I’ve put in previous articles, and which has yet to be satisfactorily answered: what should we do to fight these tactics?”

At least internally, a Rings organization could avoid such deception. One might suspect that this kind of deception created the Tea Party.

We have been exploring democratic systems since the ancient Greeks, and we are still stuck with Winston Churchill’s famous quote: “Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have ever been tried.” This being the case, isn’t it time to graduate to a better system? The only disadvantage I see to the Rings system is that it might take more time than most of us usually spend on politics. But I expect that in the Alpha Rings most of the time would be spent on the support functions rather than directly on politics. Time limits can be set for reporting and discussing political matters. Furthermore, the Pilotopia Rings hold up the hope that very soon we can all start working a four day week, and eventually only a three day week, so that the Rings will eventually give us much more leisure time than the predatory capitalists will ever allow us. With the Rings we have an opportunity to transform the world for the better, and isn’t that worth exploring?

Of course some may say the Rings organization sounds like communism. Yes, communists formed cells and we form Rings. But there is an enormous difference. Communist cells were not organized as a Ring String. Despite its promise, communism always worked by authoritarian top-down decision making, and the top never tolerated much disagreement. The Rings work from the bottom up. Any Ring at any level can always recall their representative if they don’t like what s/he is doing, and it only takes a majority – or perhaps two-thirds -- of the twelve folks voting. The Rings are therefore a much purer and more effective democracy than what we have now, and not at all like communism. It’s time for a change, not only to a world we can believe in, but to a world that we create!

For comments or questions, contact

donangelo@spiritualadventurer.com