Juggernaut Rising:

[bluestar]

Juggernaut Rising:
The Disintegration Of Dystopia

Part I

By Diane Harvey


[Dystopia: a depressingly wretched realm whose people lead a fearful existence and where all is, contrary to common belief and expectations, in the worst possible condition.]

As a category of human communication, disaster prediction is flourishing, and with excellent reason. Emerging from widely different perspectives and employing different approaches, many of us unhappily sense exponentially growing difficulties looming on the murkily complex horizon. Differences in individual awareness, experience and psychological bias very naturally preclude agreement about the gory details. We even argue about the basic meaning and potential for damage of the events we are observing. But perhaps all who perceive the likelihood of oncoming catastrophes might at least agree on this much: the majority of human beings do not even begin to comprehend the actual significance of what is going on all around them. We might agree that what appears blithely disguised as business as usual on the surface of the world is, in reality, a bizarre and ultimately hopeless global network built entirely on the denial of the law of cause and effect.

No matter how assiduously the daily industrial-strength tissue of lies is spun, denying the discernible deterioration of our sick civilization, and no matter how many have invested their lives in believing and sustaining these lies: unpleasant realities are lumbering inexorably toward us. Experts in all fields are dogtrotted out by the truckload, and dutifully trundled through the mills of mass media, in order continually to bury and re-bury any signs of incipient awareness in the populace that all is not well. Official repertoires consisting of studied stupidities, frank falsehoods, diagrams for dummies, simpering smirks and posturing pomposities are designed to semaphore to a somnambulant citizenry that everything is under control. In fact, mounting evidence points entirely to a contrary conclusion. And in the face of our stunningly complicated world problems, the toddler's cartoon version of life, offered by those in power through the mass media's obedient mouth, is one of the most shocking aspects of our predicament. Of a multitude of symptoms indicating rampant human lunacy presently operating on a grand scale, the continual insulting offerings of Frankenspeak in lieu of meaningful communication is perhaps the most directly alarming, disgusting and telling.

It is not hard to fathom the hidden political and economic causes of the oncoming upset of our earthly applecart. At the same time the material achievements of the 20th century have brought incalculable temporary benefits to many, conveniently ignoring the hidden costs of such progress has eroded human consciousness to a degree beyond all our reckoning. It is not that material comfort need ever have been purchased at the price of sane and ethical existence - but that is nevertheless the path that was taken. It is not that a decent standard of living is a problem per se, or that in and of itself reasonable levels of civilized materialism represent some sort of inevitable wrongdoing. The criminal activity was all in how we got here, in the forms our corporate-born standard of living has taken, and in how we have allowed worldly powers to sustain themselves. It is everything we have chosen to ignore along the way, in order to enjoy prosperity at all costs, that has added up to our coming undoing. Our collective complacent refusal to look behind the scenes into secret and wholly unregulated corporate, government and military activities has resulted in a nightmarish world where the actual state of things is the polar opposite of what is told to and subsequently believed by the majority of the public.

This civilization of ours, so outwardly attractive to so many, has been constructed over a hidden foundation of widespread institutional theft, deadly levels of pollution, illegal secrecy, drugs and armaments empires, draconian legalisms, and the extraordinarily cynical manipulation of large segments of the population through highly sophisticated forms of genuine mind control offered as "news" and "entertainment". Behind the scenes this is no utopia, as advertised, but dystopia: a realm where all is, contrary to expectations and common belief, in the worst possible condition. Furthermore, dystopia is disintegrating before our eyes, and out from under our feet, even as the absurd efforts to pretend that all is well redouble. We see the ever-more-desperate desire of the many to mutually sustain their belief in a doomed system of interlocking institutions fuelled by ruthless and unregenerate human greed and the unbridled lust for domination. It is not that most people are innately incapable of observing the crumbling foundations of their own unthinking dependencies. Rather, people are still subconsciously choosing to avoid the pain and fear of confronting what is already well underway. Most of the so-called grown-ups on our planet still fearfully turn their minds away from the unwanted spectacle of oncoming troubles. A large percentage of the human race, facing the necessity of giving their highest quality attention to our common dangers, is instead frantically increasing the dosage of self-delusion.

On the whole, people have been avoiding all honest investigation into the genuine causes of galloping disintegration in human institutions. Yet this will change, and is clearly changing now, as vast shadowy shell games are inevitably exposed to glaring broad daylight. No sooner is the essential trickery-fakery of an institutional lie exposed, than people reel with shock and outrage. Yet it is precisely a long collective agreement to invest blindly in institutionalized criminal greed, and the refusal to know what corporations and governments are actually doing, that inevitably results in the very disintegration now so indignantly confronted. Anyone who wanted to could easily have understood this inevitable scenario long ago. If you asked individuals whether or not they believed their lives could safely be built on criminal or unethical activity, almost all would scoff and say "Of course not." Yet people have pretended that these same basic principles mysteriously do not apply to large human institutions and governments. As if humans in groups might magically be exempt from the great moral necessities of life governing all individuals who wish to live sanely.

By their own decisions and consensual collusion, many intelligent people have preferred to ride the greed-powered national gravy train, in self-willed blindness to the visibly immoral and ugly underpinnings of longstanding government, corporate and military chicanery. Naturally, as institutions begin to come unglued, we will all pay dearly for the willful self-deception of those of us who chose to hitch their earthly welfare to the dark forces of "civilized" corruption. There will be ever-louder howls of injured innocence from the hordes of victims as our dystopia comes apart at the seams. Yet one might give most normal human beings credit for the ability to discern the difference between ethical and unethical practices on many levels, if and when they care to do so. The alternative is to believe that the majority of people are far too stupid to tell the difference between nominally ethical behavior and rank criminality. On the face of it, while possible, this appears unlikely. Rather, most people seem to have assumed the ostrich position for the sake of short-term personal benefits, and then are astounded and outraged when reality brutally overtakes the forces of denial.

It is not only dysfunctional human institutions that are breaking down, despite all efforts to pretend otherwise. The Earth's natural systems are in a state of breathtakingly rapid degradation and subsequent mutation into who-knows-what new versions of themselves. The Earth as a whole is simultaneously undergoing both dramatic climate change and a systemic breakdown from toxic shock. And yet such a rapid accumulation, combining, and coalescing of disastrous forces is not causing the slightest change yet in collective human behavior at levels where it might make any difference. If ever there is a setting in which calamities are most likely to befall the human race, it is the current one. A sinister synergy is underway, composed of corrupt worldly authorities, a relatively apathetic and self-victimizing populace, severe spiritual and physical pollution resulting from a world powered by uncontrolled greed and totalitarian tendencies, and drastic changes occurring in the Earth's natural systems.

Recipes for disasters don't come with more potently volatile ingredients than these. And for some, no sudden catastrophe or combination of disasters will come as any surprise. A certain percentage of human beings throughout history, aware of being caught in cyclic periods of wholesale degeneration, have always instinctively felt the truth that life itself will never suffer the proliferation of human insanity beyond a certain point. The sole remaining question some of us ask ourselves these days is exactly what that point might be. In all human cultures, there have always been those who have warned people again and again that we cannot live on lies or thrive on degeneration. We have always been free to ignore such warnings, but we certainly have never been free of the fatal consequences of such ignorant decisions. Whenever human beings abandon the principles of reality for the foundationless hallucinations of egotism, willful ignorance, selfishness and greed, disaster must and will come to raze such illusions to the ground. This is as implacably true for civilizations as it is for individuals.

Mankind is inherently designed to understand what it means to live an honorable life. The suffering required before human beings freely accept this fact might be long and terrible, yet this reality must and will be made manifest. We may only shorten, or lengthen interminably, the quality and quantity of misery involved in accepting the fact that we are meant to become decent, reasonable and just. Humanity's age-old self-serving habit of offering meaningless lip service to spiritual truth is having very bad results. Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, we are endowed with conscience, intelligence, free will, the capacity to love, and the commensurate responsibilities for manifesting these astonishing gifts we have been given. Spiritual stewardship includes direct responsibility for the right employment of all of our capacities, in every aspect of our lives here. There is no such thing as being spiritual, for instance, while blissfully ignoring the implications of the present cesspool civilization has become. This world is one House and the inhabitants and systems it depends on are woven into a single interactive web of life. All efforts to pretend otherwise, in order to avoid the strenuous difficulties of solving seemingly intractable problems, are doomed to eventual destruction.

The general attitude of obliviousness and refusal to regulate worldly authorities has generated a thick psychic fog in which malevolent forces have been operating with near-perfect immunity. Most people are still settling for a position of complete passivity in relation to the entire external world, as if half-watching a rather boring television show. Extremes of disgraceful behavior, manifesting everywhere in the highest levels of military, government and corporate power, have been accepted, or barely registered, or excused as "the price of doing business", or perceived as a disgusting display about which nothing ever can be done. Meanwhile, suggestively interconnected natural and human systemic failures, likely to be of immense consequence to us all, are perceivable everywhere, and increasing by the day. As it is, those of us considered "alarmists" are dismissed with a sad shake of the head as psychologically malconditioned doom-mongers. And far worse yet, many are now summarily categorized as "traitors" for having the temerity to observe and comment in public on various outrageously wicked, dangerous and idiotic activities underway in the name of preserving "civilization". When venal, frightened, hopelessly dishonest and secretive authorities designate the most thoughtful and concerned segment of a population as "traitors", we may take it as one more certain sign that the disintegration of dystopia is proceeding apace.

[bluestar]

Juggernaut Rising: Unraveling Into The Unknown

Part II

By Diane Harvey


The stark raving evidence of complexly collapsing global systems is not difficult to come by. Indeed, waking consciousness is hard put not to stumble over the wretched truth wherever it goes: our earth, air and water are polluted to the point of toxicosis. Increasingly ferocious weather events indicative of climate change frequently displace awareness of the underlying sickness of the elements involved. Yet weather, and the distressed condition of the basic elements that create weather, are inextricably one. However often climate change and the pollution of the world are discussed as if somehow separate, these permutations of a single planetary system are not divisible. Other than in a shortsighted human mind, there is no place on Earth where the reality of severe pollution and observable climate changes can be teased apart into discrete, reliably identifiable, and provably non-interacting categories.

The deeply disturbed condition of nature has profound implications for our future, and therefore needs to be addressed openly, thoroughly, and immediately. Yet comprehensive analysis and a sense of reasonable urgency are almost entirely missing from the mass media's marketplace of over-the-counter mind control. Mainstream corporate news-midgets do not consider exploring the facts of our situation in depth to be suitable material for the carefully-controlled pomp and twitter of public interest pseudo-discussions. More honest brokers of reality, speaking from outside the ongoing services in the Church of the Bottom Line, are trying to convey the crucial missing sense of concern. They know that no one in military, government or corporate sectors has any intention of telling unsettling truth to that all-important devotee: the Constant Consumer. But the problems inherent in effectively communicating vital messages are themselves difficult to overcome, even for the most dedicated. How is it possible to transmit even the most important message, in such a way that the frantic cacophony of daily life does not cause people utterly to fail to be moved by it?

The blaring babble and hyperactive racing pace of television deliberately drown the discriminative senses of most minds willingly and witlessly tethered to it. Unfortunate slaves to that brutalizing conditioning so accurately referred to as "Programming, have accepted the mass murder of meaningful mental activity, in the name of "relaxing enjoyment". "Entertainment" and "infotainment" (that is, outright brainwave entrainment) have successfully seduced and stunned the guards once standing alert before the doors of perception. Never-ending parades of staccato visual and audio processionals trumpet and trample across the beaten-down ground of captured and conquered mass consciousness. By day and by night the addictive and punishing pummeling continues, until the average person is thrashed into a permanent state of undiagnosed emotional and mental senselessness. Ceaseless sensory overload eventually causes a condition of apparent functionality amounting to rudimentary Safe Mode. This is the emergency retreat into desensitized numbness taken by desperately overloaded psyches, which sooner or later becomes a permanent coping strategy. In far too many of us, the natural and appropriate emotional and mental responses to unfolding events have long ago been undermined, overwhelmed, overthrown, and replaced by wooden replicas.

Even the ancient human survival mechanism has been badly damaged by the modern reprogramming of so many human beings into an army of obedient automatons: usefully mindless and helpfully senseless Consumer Clones. And those most afflicted are, as a matter of course, the most unaware that any such deadening dysfunction has crept in. The primary human ability to correctly assess the meaning and significance of very different kinds of events has too often been eroded to a dull throbbing nub: the vague sense of unease. The power to correctly evaluate information has been overwhelmed by the incessant broadcasting of particular classes of rhythmic sounds and images, specifically calculated to undermine and eventually anaesthetize the faculty of reason. Under the pounding torrents of deliberately polluted streams of popular entrainment, the ability to discern what is meaningful and what is not is being lost. Far too many people have been trounced into passive submission by a frantic flux of the jumbled images and sounds of catastrophes and crimes, half-truths and trivia, trash and triumphalism. So much so that by now most incoming data, whether true, false, vital or meaningless, is received by overloaded perceptions almost as if it all had the same level of importance. The result of all this, in gruesome combination with a fiendishly corporatized educational system and corporately harnessed working life, is a kind of widespread "socially acceptable" psychotic break. This is the paralyzing psychological and social dislocation resulting from large numbers of people devoid of the ability and even the desire to think for themselves.

There are many of us who conclude, based on the evidence, that we have precipitously entered into the most hazardous time in human history. We trust that communications about what we observe will somehow thread their way through the impenetrable thickets of noise, into the minds and hearts of those who still retain a capacity for evaluating information, feeling the import, and acting on it. While no one knows the details of the future, a brew of elements has been coalescing which is bound to result in extreme difficulties for the human race. Above all else, for the last fifty years or so, civilization has been enthusiastically promoting the unification of ethical and spiritual degeneration with extraordinary advances in material technology. This is inarguably a fatal symbiosis; what remains to be seen is the extent and duration of the damaging effects. We have been subjected to greatly debilitating psychological manipulation in the past five decades. At the same time our capacity for harming all forms of life and causing vast and critical alterations in nature have been accelerating. The signs and symptoms of incipient social and planetary breakdown are everywhere. Yet even now, the majority of the most privileged human beings who have ever lived are still sleepwalking through existence in the typical consumer's Lifestyle Trance. We have been so appallingly conditioned to behave as if we were able to live apart and aside from our context in the natural world, that even as our vital living context mutates under our feet, we can hardly take it in. The problem then, in communicating the immense problems we face, is not so much that of avoiding causing useless fear and over-reaction in the average person. Rather, it lies in the inability of the raw facts, with all their implications, to make much of an impression on the public at all.

Here then is the basic message, yet again, for what it is worth. Because even those of us who think we already know, and believe we understand, cannot possibly encompass the full meaning and ramifications of this fact:

The intricate web of life on Earth is unraveling.

What this will eventually come to mean in practical terms to individuals and families and nations is incalculable. Here in the western world, terrorism notwithstanding, our unconscious underlying presumption is that we are relatively secure in our wealth, infrastructure, government, social structures and technological know-how. Do we not subconsciously feel this to be so, even as we observe the telltale patterns of increasingly brittle fragility everywhere? But this impressive camouflage of a superstructure amounts to a thin smear of protective routines spread over the foundations of a vast living world that is coming apart at the seams. The delicate balance of nature as a whole is undergoing a process of increasing disturbance, and falling away from the relative background stability that our global civilization takes for granted. We are seeing alterations on a grand scale directly due to human pollution, at the same time we are undergoing the unsettling influence of what we are supposing must be a natural cycle of change. Just how natural and unrelated to human activity the systemic changes underway really are remains to be seen. Yet rather than being investigated thoroughly and without preconceptions, this most dangerous situation has been reduced, for the most part, to the status of fodder for interminable human argument by various vested interests. Unimaginably complex natural systems are tilting out of harmony, toward climate, weather, and other types of extremes few people are willing to assess with sufficient sobriety and lack of prejudice. Pollution of these same life-support systems has reached levels that threaten the health, to one degree or another, of a significant percentage of the life forms on this planet. The natural environment that has given rise to and supported the lives we expect is diseased, disrupted and degenerating. This reality is currently coinciding with unknown degrees and unidentified causes of climate change, and no one really knows what all this might add up to, or where it all might end.

The rate, for instance, at which the atmosphere is degrading is a very well kept secret that is right out in the open, well-protected by near-wholesale indifference. The facts are available for all to see, yet the public does not desire, or even retain much capacity at this point, to comprehend what this means. The oceans are sick, but the typical self-centered human being is already tired of hearing about it. The Earth is groaning with its load of toxic materials, but the public has heard all this before. We are, as a species, remaining curiously unmoved by the factual truth of our vulnerability in relation to our own festering garbage. What most people do not wish to fathom, and what the ruling powers will never helpfully prepare them for, is that underneath the veneer of normality, the world mankind has always known and depended on is unraveling. And there are synergistic effects of entirely unknown timing, complexity, and magnitude well underway.

There are sinister reasons why, even as each day brings its further proof of widespread systemic breakdown, the general population remains disinterested and entirely unable to respond rationally to such enormous potential catastrophe-in-the-making. First of all, if people understood the significance of what was happening all around them, the business of business-as-usual would be dramatically impacted. This is the basic motive behind the relative silence of the government/corporate/military/media world about our underlying predicament. Worldly authorities, the Elders of The Church of the Bottom Line, have declared an anathema on all that would deflect the populace from their worshipful devotions to shopping. Our economy these days is unusually dependent on the production and consumption of sophisticated luxuries and fripperies, corporate concoctions, military expenditures, and on non-renewable energy gluttony. We have no foundation whatsoever in the sane development of ecologically viable basic necessities for all. In the area of life's fundamental requirements there is a very dark cloud on the horizon. Available water is drying up, and even much of what is peddled as safe to drink is distinctly unwholesome. Energy requirements are rising, right along with the number of unsafe power plants and the mountains of brooding nuclear waste. Corporate agriculture has severed relations with nature and is betting the economic farm on criminally greedy and ruinous attempts to simulate edible food. The unspeakable hells of factory farming continue unabated, with the average devourer of such nightmarish suffering and disease blithely unconcerned. Modern medicine has mutated into a callous drug dealer with a lifetime pass into schoolrooms, and a runner in every doctor's office. The basic necessities of food, drink, and medicine have been transformed for the most part into exceedingly ugly inversions and perversions of the originals. In many or even most cases, the adulterated chemical stews people are addicted to or dependent on for basic survival are directly destructive to health and life, and of value only to their stockowners and shareholders.

Most of those who run this planet as a feudal fiefdom, benefiting mainly themselves, probably do see the dark shadow of things to come. In any case, they know something of the potential for downward spiraling, and have some idea of what the future might have in store. They also realize that there is probably nothing they are going to be able to do about it. Some of those in positions of influence and power have reacted by retreating behind the usual human mechanism of denial. They hope we will be able to adapt at the last minute to whatever natural and unnatural catastrophes are on the way. They hope that disasters arise sequentially, and only regionally and locally, as they have in the past, and that somehow or other, this level can be "managed". This is archetypical human shortsightedness, and a refusal to understand that the patterns of the past no longer suffice to forecast the future. Others in power have a clearer and far more cold-blooded grasp of the most probable future. The most heartless and soulless simply intend to squeeze the last penny out of the human race, every step of the way down. They are attempting, so far successfully, to own the world's water, to own the basic seed stocks, to own the means of food production, to own the land, to own all energy production and infrastructure, and to own all the other necessities of sheer existence. As nature continues to die off, they expect to benefit hugely from their relatively unchallenged ownership of what amounts to human existence. They obviously plan to increasingly insert their worthless factory substitutes for all forms of nature into the human chain - at the usual exorbitant profit. But what the shortsighted, corporate-owned so-called "leaders" of government, industry and the military think is not our major concern. We already know the gist of their attitude to humanity: fundamentally, as a flock to fleece. The point is that no "authority" has any intention of adequately preparing us either psychologically or physically for future problems. Reports of various kinds of extreme conditions will continue to increase; yet no overall picture will ever be presented of the ominous proportions of the unraveling. It is up to the individual to make the effort to examine the scattered bits of data, put the pieces of the puzzle together, and to try to understand the meaning of the partially completed picture.

For example, we almost never consider what could possibly go too far wrong with what we are breathing. Even as the cities continue to deliver deadly fumes on a daily basis, we try to ignore it. We are thoroughly conditioned to believe that this is the price of "progress". We therefore more or less take what we breathe for granted. But ground-level ozone and other types of air pollution are unquestionably causing wide spread illness and premature death. This has found "acceptable" to the majority of human beings, so far, since we have been conditioned to believe this is merely the cost of doing business on Earth. The proof of this strange acceptance is that people have never yet been up in arms about this reality in any large numbers. On the whole we have preferred to pretend that the effects of air toxicity must be somehow bearable, and that our children will somehow manage to thrive in it, even when statistics demonstrate exactly the opposite conclusion.

Already the atmosphere is so heavily freighted with adulterants, and the ozone layer so frayed, that people, animals and plants are being very seriously affected. The UV levels across the globe are consistently so high right now that in many parts of the world people should not be staying outside for more than fifteen minutes. But what would happen to agriculture, construction, and all the rest of the outdoor work on Earth, if everyone were fully aware of this danger? Are there really any effective remedies to this growing danger, aside from staying indoors? Even if it was possible to issue sunscreen to everyone in the world, such chemical lotions are yet more questionable pharmaceutical items, with unknown long-term side effects. And what of that other infamous "sunscreen", Edward Teller's idiotic plan for a highly toxic chemical aerosol "protection" from the ravages of ozone depletion? We might reasonably suppose that this lunatic concept forms a large part of that incessant noxious drool from the skies called chemtrails. But whatever chemtrails are supposed to be for, we know for certain that this program is already having extremely bad results. We are clearly being accumulatively poisoned by these illegal aerosol dispersal operations, seen stealthily deployed and creepily oozing down all over this continent and elsewhere. The health complications already arising from this so-called sunscreen, if that is what it is, are already disastrous. And these terrible effects would certainly go a long way toward explaining the reasons for the impenetrable wall of silence, secrecy, relentless disinformation, and preposterous and insulting lies surrounding the blatant reality of chemtrails.

Furthermore, the electromagnetic and chemical weaponization of the atmosphere is also well underway. This too involves drastically meddling with the air, and further saturating it with deadly chemicals and wildly pumped-up levels of electromagnetic energies. All this mad frankenscience at work has, as usual, entirely unknown long-range effects and side effects. Furthermore, the ionization of the atmosphere, potentially dangerous in itself, says nothing about the unknown results of implementing the mysterious new types of scalar weapons technology in such a drastically altered atmosphere. Without the slightest public discussion, our entire atmospheric envelope is being ruthlessly transformed into, among other things, a high-tech chemical and electromagnetic weapons, communications, and control platform. Meanwhile, even the results of increased normal air traffic alone have seriously damaged the chemical balance of the air we breathe. This is the dirty little fact about air travel, which no one from the congregation of Lifestyle Uber Alles has the slightest desire to face. And of course no one knows what sorts of unintended consequences will arise through inevitable photochemical mutations in an already sick atmosphere. Pouring large amounts of yet more toxic chemicals into a system already mutating because of pollution with toxic chemicals is so far beneath reason as to render a sane person speechless. Yet this is exactly what is being done. It is therefore best to realize that madmen are in charge here at present, and to take our future into our own hands as much as possible. We must study, research, think for ourselves, and prepare as best we can for significantly changing conditions. Because the only alternative is to actually believe that as natural (and political) systems become increasingly chaotic, the government will, if called upon, take good care of us, in a place and in a way that we will find quite bearable. And if we should be capable of believing this, then we might want to take the time to think through the actual logical scenario of possible social upheaval, and how the government and military would be likely to respond to it.

Each day brings new data about the shockingly deteriorating and distressed conditions in the oceans of the world. These bits and pieces of critical information arrive one or two at a time, and make little impression on the majority of busy hard-working people. Apparently it is going to take outright calamity before most people finally realize what nature is, what has happened to it, and how far out of balance it is. Modern "civilized" people dispensed with awareness of the natural world some time ago, other than as a kind of backdrop to our own ego-stories. Modern so-called lifestyles insist on and depend on our willingness to ignore all the unpleasant details about where things come from and how they are made, and what their hidden costs are. Our civilization is built for the most part on the sands of instant gratification and the purchase of shiny surface surroundings. Nevertheless, we remain forever woven into an incomprehensibly complex and dynamically balancing unified field of livingness. We have slowly come to believe the fatal illusion of ourselves as exempt from the natural laws of our own living context, but that does not make it true. Decades of deliberate conditioning have intensified and solidified such ignoring, bringing the human species to the point of near-perfect insanity in terms of its overall direction and habitual heedless behavior. But it is hardly surprising that modern humanity has fallen into various degrees of sleep, folly, and semi-functional dementia. We have been, painstakingly and cleverly, over the course of several generations, psychologically engineered away from all relation to reality. The reasons for this are obvious: truth does not lend itself easily to manipulation for excessive profit.

That which we have always taken for granted, for generations upon generations, can no longer be taken for granted. Mere money cannot create a safe atmospheric envelope as we continue to load it with corrosive substances when it is already saturated with toxins and badly tattered. Money alone will not create sufficient pure air, pure water, and pure food for all, when these are already approaching the beginning of the end of their availability. Money cannot cause climate changes to halt in their tracks. No amount of money will be able to force genetically modified food to become nourishing to the human system. Money won't prevent these monstrosities from escaping and interacting with normal food plants, with easily foreseen disastrous results in the long run. Money will not convince increasingly violent weather to calm down. We have pretended to ourselves for a very long time that we are separate from and superior to the intricacies of the web of life itself. We still generally believe that our wealth and technology will always rise to the occasion to save us from our mistakes, no matter what. But we are about to discover the obvious flaws in our civilization,s ravenously self-serving and willfully ignorant substitutes for understanding.

All who thoughtfully address the prospect of serious alterations to the way we live will have their own individual set of circumstances to consider. Each will have a unique set of ideas about what is most likely and least likely to happen in the years ahead, and what, if anything, they care to do about it. There is no one "answer" to the problems we face, caught up as we are in far too Interesting Times for easy answers. In terms of both material and spiritual preparation and security, all of us have our own innate inclinations, established relations, and future possibilities. We might remember that our excursions here in these temporary forms are relatively brief in any case. There never was anything more to lose than were obliged to leave behind us here anyway, sooner or later. Certainly worry and fear are not reliable guides to anything besides worry and fear. It is always possible to attain such a consistent awareness of the spiritual realities in back of bodily existence that much of what might otherwise frighten and worry us yields to higher and deeper truth. Peace of mind and heart need not be dependent on circumstances, as the history of the human spirit rising to the occasion proves. Trying times are well known for offering great spiritual opportunity, however much we might well have understandably mixed reactions to this idea. Most of us are accustomed merely to reading and hearing about those who have had to live up to and through extreme circumstances. Now it looks as if it may well be our turn to manifest physical resourcefulness, emotional equanimity, intelligent activity, and spiritual truth in the face of unforeseen difficulties. If it turns out that this is indeed our future common destiny, we may - and indeed we must - seek strength in the fact that such a situation has always been, is now, and forever will be, a great and worthy test of the intrinsic mettle of human souls.