silent servers and the Goog

I earn my living from designing and developing computer systems, and I do believe that there is a lot we can learn about the nature of the New Paradigm from the computer world. For example, the moves from hierarchical control-based structures to free-form distributed relationships, and from selfish greed-motivated commercial activity towards altruistic giving and creation for the love of it, are illustrated very well in the growth and success of the open source movement. The original MIT hackers were pioneers of the New Paradigm, and the free software and open source movements, that grew out of their activities, provide clear signals as to the way ahead in other walks of life.

However, these days we all bask free in the Jupiter-sized benevolence of the Great God Google. The Goog keeps all of our data in its cloud, and provides us with all of the computer services we need, foree of charge, through our web connections and browsers... Don't get me wrong - I think Google IS great. They are on a glorious mission to free us from the evil empire of Micros&*t and I am an ardent user of their services: gmail handles all my emailing, and has done for 3 years or so now. Google docs has freed me from the horrors of MS Office, and from interminable waiting for Open Office to waken up... I get my daily RSS feeds fix via Google Reader. My web portal is iGoogle. I often go to Google News for news. I always go first to Google maps for online mapping. I love Google Earth. I blog on Blogger. I even use Google for searching (no - really!) and generally only go elsewhere when their servers break down (in which case ask.com takes the silver medal)... but there we have the rub: even the Great Google sometimes breaks. So far I have not lost any data, but I have found myself with fully functional broadband, but no email facility (for days at a time in the early days of gmail, admittedly downtime has been much more rare in recent times). With alarming frequency I have had to resort to inferior services when the GGG homepage takes a nap. The downtime is small compared to the uptime, and given the size and technical strength of the Google behemoth you might think that it is churlish, even paranoid, to be concerned about Google unavailability, but I am looking at a bigger picture...

Other people worry about what the Goog might do (or be doing) with their private data - and this is a legitimate concern as we are dealing with a commercial organization here, and these days the track record of commercial organizations when it comes to ethics and honesty is not good (as an understatement...). When bankers cannot be trusted then why should we trust financially motivated geeks? But I don't really care about this issue - I feel I have nothing to hide and so they can do what they like with my data: so long as they don't lose it, I am happy. I am not giving them vital passwords or bank account access codes. The risks from misuse of my data seem small to me compared to the advantages of free (as in beer) access to that data from any web-connected computer, along with the peace of mind that comes from not having to safeguard my data from loss. I grew up using tapes and floppy disks and then hard drives to store all my data, and all of these formats offered the feature of regular catastrophic loss of data. Accordingly, much time was spent on making multiple backups of everything, and much of my hair turned white through the stress of trying to keep some organisation and method to all of the backups, to ensure that my vital data survived the regular melt downs of media and equipment.

What concerns me about Google is not that they might lose my data, nor even that their servers may be down on occasion, but that I might lose my connection to Google for sustained periods of time. I am currently typing this on in my new home in rural Italy, where I am at the mercy of Telecom Italia for the provision of the phone line and broadband (or even dial-up) connection that I require to pursue my profession with any degree of professionalism... forget about mobile connections, as my cellphone struggles to even deliver usable voice telephony thanks to dramatic mountains and solid medieval buildings that barricade out the loutish advances of the cellular networks. I may wait many weeks before I can connect again (and upload a splurge of blogging..), but I am actually enjoying the break from emails and emailing and RSS feeds and blogging and global news trawling that had become the core of my daily existence - I am forced to go for walks in the leafy mountain lanes, rediscovering the wonders of nature.. I am having to idle away many hours basking in the mediterranean sun, instead of burning my eyes out on my monitor.... this actually counts as a major improvement in the quality of my life. My work consists of system design and programming, and my productivity in these activities (the ones that pay the rent) has gone through the roof, due to my being denied the time-sucking pleasures of online communication, internet TV, youtube, and the rest. But if I had relied on the Goog to store all of my data, instead of just my emails and RSS feeds, then I would be unable to work at all, until Telecom Italia run out of excuses for failing to turn up on appointed days and times and connecting a phone line for me... With the joys of USB sticks I can shuffle my work once or twice a week to other computers that are more connected, and thereby upload it to servers, and life goes on sweetly and quietly and increasingly chilled out....

But all of this has set me thinking:what happens when the server farms start to die? What happens when the connections start to drop? Don't be fooled by the apparent reliability of the internet and its service providers in recent years: we are now plummeting into an abyss of global economic meltdown on a scale unprecedented in the history of mankind. Organisations will die suddenly and catastrophically, en masse, in an unpredictable fashion. Our financial systems, our political systems, our cultures even, are all crumbling to dust. The oil supplies are dwindling - we have passed peak oil. We have failed time and again to moderate our squandering of the Earth's resources, and instead have ramped up our consumption in an exponential fashion. Now it starts to crash down around our ears. The old certainties mean nothing. We are entering armageddon.

The internet was designed from the start to cope with nuclear holocaust - it is armageddon-ready. But we must expect huge losses of servers and connections, and a general breakdown in reliability. Once the USA sticks the finger up at China and defaults on its debt, forcing China to nuke the USA in order to safeguard the all-important oriental honour, much of Google may disappear in smoke. Even if we still have sporadic access to the web, we cannot rely on the continuing existence of centralized data stores. The paradigm of client server is past its sell-by date. Google wants to store all of our data in its centralized storage facilities - yes they have built in redundancy and distribution of data within their server farm architectures, but the whole lot may be pulverized to dust. Even if it is not, we cannot expect to keep having 24/7 access to it. The monolithic model is approaching extinction. Google is old-paradigm and we should be very wary of getting fully on their cloud.

The internet (i.e. the network) is bomb-proof (and, it seems, anything-else-proof too!) because of its new paradigm design: it is distributed, and it assumes that data will be lost en-route. If you have two working computers and a wire (or wireless) between them, the internet can still exist. Take out, at random, 99.999999% of the computers on the internet, and the internet can still exist and can still function. It is the primary wonder of the modern world. But our storage of data has to be done according to the same paradigm: we must assume that data stores will be lost, and that data will be lost in transit, and yet still provide a reliable persistence of whatever data is deemed to be important. Distributed technologies like bit-torrent and skype show the way forward: they utilize any machines they can, and coordinate these machines in a flexible way to provide data transmission and telecommunications that are every bit as armageddon-proof as the internet infrastructure itself. These systems operate in a viral fashion, and they are not susceptible to manipulation by saboteurs, censors or other rogues.

Every machine on the internet must be seen as a node: just as the internet itself sees each machine as an IP address, the data storage and data transmission systems of the future must see every machine as a homogenous cell. Each cell must be essentially identical in capability: they must be able to store and catalog whatever data comes their way that is deemed important - to the limits of their storage capacity (which will obviously vary enormously), and they must be able and willing to pass on their contents to other cells when connected to them and asked to do so. Data that is deemed important by many people will then be duplicated in many locations, while data that is deemed unimportant will be stored sparsely, if at all. Such a system will continue to provide utility, for as long as the internet itself does so. Monolithic data stores will die. Bye bye Google. Bye bye Wikipedia (may your glorious content be cached many times).

In this context the recent hyped announcement of Google Wave shows a failure by those in positions of influence and power to understand the way the world is going. Google Wave ( wave.google.com ) is a very interesting development: it creates a new document format, the 'wave' which wraps around (or replaces) many old types of document, such as email, instant messaging, wiki pages, text files, spreadsheets, image files, video files, etc. etc. Each 'wave' is stored centrally by Goog, or another 'server engine' provider. Instead of sending emails to each other, whereby I keep a copy of the email and you receive another copy, in the Google Wave paradigm, there is one central copy which we both can see online. I can then change my message to you after I first send it (indeed the whole concept of sending is essentially eliminated by Google Wave - we can watch our correspondents in the act of writing their messages, character by character. The process can scale up to multi-user collaboration (wiki style with instant messaging overtones) on one wave. All document types other than text messages are simply dragged and dropped on the wave, and thus become part of it. Clever stuff for sure, and on first encounter it can seem beguiling. Bye bye email, bye bye wiki, bye bye Google Docs? Hello Waves :)

Yes - just what I always wanted to do with my increasingly scarce time (once I have a web connection that is, and my current idyll is destroyed): watch my friends and colleagues, and a host of spammers also, as they laboriously type out, misspell and correct, delete and rewrite their messages... even more of an idle waste of time than Twittering... and yes, just what I always wanted, for those messages sent to me by my friends and colleagues to be changing in front of my eyes, hours, days, months, years, after I thought they were finished - for comments to be added here there and everywhere, at any time, in a totally non-linear and chaotic fashion - to be able to replay the evolution of these monstrous waves step by step ad nauseam.... the prospect is enough to drive me to permanently hitting the power off button and taking up farming full time. I have no doubt that a host of ardent believers will embrace Google Wave enthusiastically, and will become addicted to its gameplay, while losing sight of any real meaning in the content. More and more noise in our lives. Less and less value. I do not think I will be waving with the rest of the surfer dudes: I am just too old and crusty and cranky for such flash without substance. I want to craft and hone my prose before publishing it for others to read - I consider the time of my readers to be valuable and worthy of my effort. Less is more (OK OK I am not applying that maxim very well to this particular post....). The process of creativity is itself seldom an edifying sight: it makes a poor spectator sport. Google Wave will have its uses in brainstorming sessions and the like, and there is an admirable commitment to open source and to fostering collaboration, but while the centralized design (no duplication of data) obeys traditional database design ideology, it will not work during the apocalypse - the chances of the wave server being up, and of you having a working connection to it, at the time you wish to compose your opus, are slim. I am sure that the Goog will provide an offline mode so you can compose a message without being connected, but then all the bells and whistles that everyone is getting so excited about will vanish, and we are back to traditional messaging, without the benefit of multiple copies being distributed across multiple machines, and without the benefit of being stable and unchanging once posted.

No - Google Wave is not the golden technology of the new age, for us all to surf in blissed-out harmony. Something more appropriate must be put together before the sands of internet stability run out. I am going to search the web for a distributed messaging system that is suitable for the times we are entering. It should be very simple and very viral. If you know of such a system then please let me know. If such a tool does not exist then I may even build it myself. Watch this space :)

Slow down

As we sell the planet and ourselves down the river, we run in ever faster circles "chasing our tails". Here are some extracts from "The link between Mind and Social / Environmental-Issues" by Sushil Yadav:

The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature.
...
Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking.

If there are no gaps there is no emotion.

Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/ language) for emotion.
....
When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/ industrial/ financial/ fast visuals/ fast words ) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing.

There comes a time when there are almost no gaps.

People become incapable of experiencing/ tolerating gaps.

Emotion ends.

Man becomes machine.
...
In ancient times verbal processing was “live” in nature—ie it happened when people actually spoke.
Today there is non-stop verbal processing inside the mind through print and electronic media ( newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, computer etc…) as a result of which the verbal content & speed has increased thousands of times.

The speed of visuals ( and words ) has increased so much during the last
one hundred years that today the human brain has become incapable of
focussing on slow visuals /words through perception, memory, imagery.

If we cannot focus on slow visuals / words we cannot experience emotions associated with slow visuals /words.

In a fast society slow emotions become extinct. In a thinking ( scientific / industrial ) society emotion itself becomes extinct.
...
In small(slow)agriculture-based societies the mind used to experience a state of emotion all the time because of physical work and slow visual/verbal processing . People who do physical work experience the same good subjective-feeling which is experienced by people who do physical excercise. People who do physical work also sleep much better than people who do mental work - the quality of sleep is much better. If we read one thousand-year-old literature we will not come across the term "boredom" - the concept of boredom did not exist in slow societies. There were long gaps between different visuals and between words/ sentences - and people had the ability to experience/ tolerate the gaps - it was normal for them.
...
There are easy emotions and difficult emotions. Easy emotions are evoked within nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds - anger, lust, fear, pleasure, entertainment and excitement are some examples. These emotions are associated with fast breathing and heart-rate. These emotions don't require gaps between thinking to evoke, intensify and sustain. These are the emotions that can be found everywhere in today's fast society.

Then there are difficult emotions - which require ability and years of effort to develop - emotions associated with pain, compassion and peaceful states of mind are some examples. These emotions are associated with slow breathing and heart-rate. These emotions require freezing of thought - freezing of visuals and words - huge amounts of gaps between thinking - to evoke, intensify and sustain.
...
Our present lifestyle is destroying our Minds and Environment - the evidence is everywhere - left, right and center.

It is Science and Technology that created the consumerist Industrial Society which has led to the destruction of Mind and Nature/ Environment.

In the absence of Science, Technology, Industrialization/ Industrial Revolution the two problems of overpopulation and overconsumerism would not exist.
...
A thinking species destroys the planet. Animals lived on earth for billions of years (in very large numbers) without destroying nature.
...
This planet is on the verge of total destruction.

The cause of destruction is – overactivity.

The cause of overactivity is – Intelligence.

Intelligence is a curse - a disease - a disability - an abnormality.
...
People work because they cannot stop working.

It does not matter what kind of work we do - whether it is physical work or any kind of mental work. As soon as we stop working we suffer from restlessness, anxiety, uneasiness and discomfort.
...
For most people the choice is between physical and mental work.
The switch-over from physical work to mental work is disastrous for the planet.

Man can do the same physical work every day. Man cannot do the same mental work every day.
...
When we make consumer goods we kill Animals/ Trees, Air/ Water and Land - directly or indirectly.

Industrial Society destroys ecosystems - all Industrial Societies destroy ecosystems.
...
Most of the people living in cities are engaged in unnecessary work - making things, buying things and selling things. The switch-over from Physical work to Mental work/ Desk job has led to an endless cycle of unnecessary and destructive work.

When society switches over from physical work to mental work it starts making thousands of consumer goods. People start calling them necessities. They are not necessities at all - 90% of consumer goods that we see today did not exist 50 years ago

Food, Water, Air, Little clothing, Little Shelter - these are necessities.
...
There is too much discussion in modern society. Discussion is not solving our problems – discussion itself has become a problem – a gigantic problem.
...
There is very little discussion / debate / argument in societies that do physical work - ie, agriculture-based societies - And this is the reason why they are millions of times saner than industrial societies.
...
Industrial Society has collectively killed billions of Animals and Trees.
...
Industrial Society has flooded the ecosystems with toxic chemicals. Most of the Farm Land has been poisoned with pesticides due to Industrial Agriculture. The Land - The Air - The Water - the entire food chain is contaminated with thousands of man-made toxic chemicals which did not exist before industrialiation.
...
Make things
Buy things
Sell things

This is not the purpose of life.
...
Material things don't bring peace and happiness. Today billions of people have got things which even Kings did not have in the past. Car, computer, television, fridge, telephone - no King ever had these things. But people are still restless and unhappy.
...
Consumerist-Lifestyle is just not sustainable. If we do not immediately return to living a very simple and frugal life then very soon there will be no human life on earth. We would need several planet Earths to sustain the present lifestyle.
...
We cannot save the environment by doing something.

We can only save it by doing less of what we have been doing - much less of what we have been doing.

If we want to save the environment we will have to reduce human activity (overactivity) by 99%.
...
It is the human species which is the greatest threat to humans and all other life on this planet - In fact the human species is the only species which is a threat to all life on Earth.

Man has decimated all Animal and Plant species – polluted the Sky and Oceans - and poisioned every square inch of earth.

In a mere 200 - 300 years Industrial Society has destroyed all that Nature laboriously created over a period of millions of years.

Sushil seems to suggest we have to go backwards, undoing evolution. Actually we have to move forwards, evolving further, towards being balanced spiritual beings. Over a long time we evolved from instinctive creatures, to emotional creatures, and now to mental creatures. The next stage in our evolution is to become spiritual creatures - balancing our "being" with our "human". This does involve, to a large extent, switching our rational minds off. To get there we need to learn to meditate, to slow down, to stop our excessive thinking, and stop rushing around. We need to embrace nature instead of destroying it. We need to live in harmony with all other beings. We need to find once again the balance that we have lost. None of this can ever come from our suicidal old paradigm ways.

The "slow emotions" that Sushil describes (other than pain) are not emotions at all but feelings - they are spiritual in nature: love, compassion, benevolence, peacefulness, serenity, joy, bliss. We can only reach such elevated feelings by slowing down. We need to chill out, drop out of the old paradigm industrial/consumer society, and learn to smell the flowers, once again.

wake up

The decline of our civilization is happening on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented speed. We have to look into the mists of time, to the legend of a decadent Atlantis sinking beneath the waves, to find anything that parallels what we are now witnessing.

The seeds of the spectacular end game were sown with the rise of Darwinism and scientific rationalism in the 1800s. We became full of our own cleverness, and lost respect for spirituality and for nature. We started seeing ourselves as masters of the Universe. The agricultural revolution mechanized and centralized agriculture, as we turned nature's gardens into chemically enhanced food factories. Hot on the heels of this abomination came the industrial revolution, whereby our modern industrialized economies grew rapidly, like a cancer on Mother Earth, creating ever more powerful machines and methods to rape Mother Earth and to feed our own vanity and conceit.

The USA emerged from the ashes of the European empires, as the epitome of the modern way - the American Dream was sold across the entire planet, and gradually was embraced by all, as the modern idea of paradise on Earth: a big car, a spacious house, electrical appliances to serve our every whim, and toys galore to play with.

The USA grew fat and powerful, taking the lions share of the spoils of two world wars, and leading the world in adopting ever-more artificial lifestyles, based on conspicuous consumption of manufactured goods. The eminence of manufacturing in the west was gradually eclipsed by the rise of services, primarily financial services: as the US and western Europe grew fat, the more hungry India, Japan, and China started beating western manufacturing at its own game.

Having already lost much of its manufacturing capacity to Japan in the 1980s and China in the 1990s, the USA continued growing fatter by equipping the Chinese with all of the machine tools and technology they required to become a mega industrial engine for the World. Meanwhile India's burgeoning workforce, being much better educated than that of the US, and prepared to work for a fraction of the money, began sucking up the service jobs that the post-industrial west had been relying on for economic health.

Meanwhile, entering this new millennium, the apparent wealth and living standards of the west continued to grow, apparently defying gravity. Where was the money coming from? Now we know. We borrowed it from the Chinese. They lent us the money to buy their goods, and we maintained an appearance of credit worthiness by inflating our asset values - first it was a technology stocks bubble, and then, fatally, the biggest financial bubble ever seen in the history of mankind, our fabulous multi-national housing bubble.

The trickery and deception, greed, and downright dishonesty of the financial sector, which fueled this bubble, through fantasy economic modeling and false accounting on an unprecedented scale, was a marvel to behold: the last grand hurrah of the old paradigm. They created a gigantic pyramid of fake money, and consumed the entire inside of the pyramid in commissions, salaries, fees, bonuses, and dividends. Now only the hollowed out shell remains, with new burnt out holes appearing day upon day - there is still the appearance of a financial sector, functioning national economies, and functioning currencies, but anyone who looks closely can now see what a fragile sham it all is. There is no question as to whether it will all collapse: it is simply a question of when - and it cannot last for very long.

Meanwhile the banking titans are now staggering about in a panic, sucking up government money as fast as the printing presses can run. And our corrupt political leaders, taking advice from these same banking titans, and from our staggeringly incompetent mainstream economists, seem more than willing to keep shoveling money into the furnaces with complete abandon. There is no sign anywhere of any regard for our future, let alone the future of our children and grandchildren. Bluntly, there is no future for any of us, under this fatally damaged and rapidly collapsing system.

It is utterly futile to try to fix any of this. It is broken irreparably. It is a dead loss. The process of entropy is reducing order to chaos, and simplicity to complexity. We must not waste our time trying to fix our broken economic and political systems. It is too late for that. We have had a farewell party of exceptional extravagance and decadence, and soon we will be surveying the wreckage in the aftermath, but meanwhile we cannot see the mess for the seething masses of drunken partygoers continuing on their self-destructive binges. Soon they will all have fallen over, comatose, and very sick. I suspect that the clean-up operation will be well beyond our capacity - we will have to rely on Mother Nature to clean up the devastation we have caused to planet Earth.

So what will be left for those of us that survive this coming apocalypse? I don't think any of us can know for sure - we are entering a new paradigm, much of which is still beyond our comprehension. We cannot understand the new by using the mindset of the old. We must start again, by dispensing with scientific rationalism, and embracing our inner nature. We must move from left-brain dominance to a balance between left and right: from cold rationalism, to warm and intuitive empathy for our fellow beings. We may have big brains but we remain mammals, dependent on Mother Nature to survive. If we keep poisoning our food, and feeding ourselves with chemicals, we will keep getting sicker. If we keep torturing and murdering the animals, and then consuming their corpses, we will keep increasing our own inner torment.

Children of my generation grew their hair long, and wore beads, and flowers in their hair. Children of today stick needles in their bodies and cover themselves with tatoos. Is this progress? Or is it a collapse from love and hope into forlorn self-hate? This is just a symptom of the sickness of our society. We are now living in Hell. And we have created it ourselves. And it is only going to get worse, unless we waken up to the madness of what we are doing with the planet, and vow resolutely to change our ways. I do not envisage most of mankind taking this vow. Instead there will just be complaining and blaming, from the vast majority. And the complaints will escalate into abject fear and panic when there is no fuel available for our cars, and no food in our supermarkets, and the Army is patrolling the city streets and shooting at their own people. And billions will be starving, and billions will be sick. This is the new world we are now accelerating towards.

And yet, we do have an option, a much better option. Only a few of us can even see it. We can turn our back on our industrial and artificial existence. We can stop buying things we don't need. We can stop being consumers, and start being people again. We can stop vandalizing our homelands, and start nurturing them. We can free ourselves from the yokes imposed on us by our political and corporate overlords - they have already lost control of their infernal systems, and they are powerless now to stop us from turning our backs on them. We can stop feeding them with our labour and our earnings. We can stop giving them any attention whatsoever. Let them rot. We can focus our attention on our families, friends, and neighbors. We can grow our own food, and keep ourselves healthy by living outdoor lives and eating what nature provides. This lifestyle is good enough for the animal kingdom, and it will be better for us than our current wage slavery. We will be happier without telephones and televisions. We will not need make-up or fashion accessories, other than to play games. Life can go on, without our economic and political infrastructures, and such a life can be much more fulfilling than our current stress crazed confusion.

This is what lies ahead, for those of us that survive the meltdown. A simpler life. A life closer to nature. A life based around local communities, and real human interaction with our neighbors. A life based on giving and sharing, and enjoying what we have. A life lived now, in the moment, and not in the endless seeking of imaginary future pleasure. A life filled with joy and laughter. The more we give to each other, the more we receive ourselves - this is a natural law, and we should start paying attention to it. Some of us are already living such a life: they are the blessed and happy ones, who will be least affected by the coming changes. The rest of us must start mending our ways, or we are going to receive some very unpleasant shocks.

Our "leaders" cannot help us any longer, even if they wanted to (and believe me, they don't). We have to help ourselves. We have to move from complex ways to simple ways, from decadence and dissolution, to purity and honesty. We have to change our focus from global to local, and from machines to beings. Waken up people, waken up. We do not have much time left to ready ourselves for the big shift that is coming.

the paradigm shift

The new paradigm seeks to regain balance between our physical aspects (human) and our spiritual essence (being). Over millennia we, the human race, have gradually lost touch with the spiritual reality of our nature. Increasingly we have embraced rationality, and artificiality, while losing sight of our place in nature and in the natural universe. We have rejected whatever science cannot explain, and in doing so we have rejected our true nature.

The old paradigm that has taken us to this sleepwalking state, is biased heavily towards material values, wealth and power. Our obsession with the mundane has taken us away from spiritual understanding. We have lost respect for Mother Nature, and worse still, we have forgotten that we are spiritual beings. Instead, we have let scientists teach us that we are biogenetic machines, and we have come to identify ourselves with the short-lived bodies that we inhabit.

The old paradigm is based on fear and on ignorance. Fear is the basis of control, and the old paradigm is all about controlling us. We are treated like mushrooms: "keep them in the dark and feed them on bullshit". Everything is judged in terms of physical attributes: we are taught to value property, wealth, and power, and to devalue ethics, morals and virtue. The structures of our societies are rigid, hierarchical, power based structures, where change can only happen very slowly if at all, and where an elite few prosper on the breaking backs of the many.

Our focus is on work and on strife. We are born, we struggle, and we die. And death is a blessed release from the fear of death that dominates our lives. Those who think at all are fixated with finance, economics, politics, commerce - that is, in the occasional moments when we can rise above the instinctive calls of sexuality and consumption. Even science and the arts are seen primarily as branches of commerce, while spiritual beliefs are seen as a form of dementia. All of this is unnatural, and we are doing our utmost to re-create the world in our own image, as an artificial wasteland, where everything is controlled, adulterated, and abused in a mechanistic way. In our ignorant folly, we are raping Mother Nature in a systematic and deliberate way. Not content with destroying and poisoning ourselves, we are making sure we take all of the Kingdoms of Nature with us. We have created Hell on Earth.

Fortunately for us, there are forces more powerful than we are, that maintain balance in the universe and the cosmos. These forces are manifesting in the rising swell of the new paradigm, as it gradually takes over from the breaking waves of the old.

Accordingly, those of us who wish to survive must turn our backs on the ways of the old paradigm, the legal systems and political and commercial structures that are now failing us abjectly, and we must embrace the ways of the new paradigm.

This new paradigm takes us back towards the wisdom of the ancients. We are regaining contact with our original true nature of eternal spiritual beings, with the inherent spiritual qualities of love and light, in other words compassionate love and spiritual power. These bring inner peace with them: serenity and bliss. They also bring inner strength. And most importantly we realize that, at the spiritual level, the level of being, we are all interconnected: we are all one. This interconnection means that we get what we give. Through giving we receive. Through helping each other, we ourselves are helped. This is the universal law of balance, the "law of karma".

Under the new paradigm we act as a unified collective of empowered individuals, each living in harmony with nature and with each other. This is not an option for us, but a certainty. The old paradigm is dying and will in due course be cremated. Those who don't shift to the new paradigm will die with the old. We have shat in our own bed, and now the bedding must be replaced. There will be major upheavals, and there will be widespread death and destruction, as Mother Nature clears away the old rubbish to make way for the new garden.

The new world will not be about politics or finance or conflict. It will about enlightenment, balance, and harmony.

The shift to the new paradigm is not easy. We will encounter much ridicule and cynicism, from the many who are locked into the old ways of thinking. It takes great courage to think anew, to re-evaluate, and to start over, flying in the face of the established orthodoxy. This is not just about knowledge or understanding: we must embody the new ways - we must become enlightened. Our egos will fight against us, trying to take the easy way out, and to avoid true transformation. We must be disciplined in exploring what is true. We must seek guidance and feedback from trusted sources. We must be willing to question everything. We must strive continually to refine our intellects, and to become loving embodiments of spirituality. We must not allow ourselves to make excuses or use delaying tactics. We must become intuitive: this means surrendering our egotistic personalities to the inner wisdom of our higher selves, the wisdom of the soul. The ego will not relinquish control without a struggle, but instead will seek to squeeze whatever remaining pleasure it can from the old paradigm ways. But we must rise above the preferences of the selfish ego, and we must take the plunge and embrace inner change.

So, the shift from the old paradigm to the new is not simply a change in external circumstances: the real shift must come from within each of us.

If we each focus on changing ourselves, then we will find the world changing with us, rather than against us.

one door closes

Jefferson's Guardian said...

Although it goes by many different names; A New Paradigm, the Age of Aquarius, and a multitude of others, it seems we're near the transitional point of a totally new experience. It's something that can't be intellectualized; it's a feeling.

Yes - the "Age of Aquarius", the new age, or whatever we choose to call it, we can indeed feel it. We sense it rather than understanding it. Our intuition tells us that we are heading for more enlightened times. And this enlightenment is not evolving from the old ways, but rather it is the fresh vibrant growth of a new sapling, as the diseased old tree withers away and rots from within.

One door closes, another one opens....

making space

From Being in Awareness on crystallotus.com:

The change that we are experiencing now is different from what has happened before. We are shifting into another dimension, from a Matrix of duality and polarity to one of expansion and oneness. We are moving from a reality based on fear and scarcity to a reality based on love and abundance. The New Energy is not simply an improvement of the Old Energy. We can’t just take the old systems and tweak them. Instead, the old paradigm and the institutions that are based on that have to be dissolved. Then we have space to create the new paradigm based on love.

the problem with capitalism

I have just been listening to a very good talk by Peter Schiff where he concludes by saying that the dollar will soon collapse in value, and then it will be the Chinese who are buying cars, and the Americans who are riding bicycles!

I have been guilty before of blaming the current financial and economic meltdowns on the actions and excesses of capitalism, but really this is not an accurate picture. True free-market capitalism would not have created the current mess - it is the result, not of free markets, but of interference in those markets. The housing bubble was created by artificial lowering of interest rates in the wake of the dot com bubble burst, and was also encouraged by tax policies that favor buying against renting. In the US, things were made far worse by the government guaranteeing mortgages, first implicitly, and now explicitly, through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the results of the bursting housing bubble are now being expanded and exacerbated enormously by giant government bailouts. Such market manipulations are entirely against the spirit of free market capitalism. Unfettered free market capitalism would have allowed the bankrupt institutions to fail, driving the bad debts out of the system. Those who had made bad decisions would have suffered the consequences of their own actions. In fact, if interest rates had been set by free market forces, there would not have been such a giant asset bubble in the first place.

However, capitalism is old paradigm, being based on competition, power, and rigid hierarchical structures of command. In a capitalist system the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The vices of greed, selfishness, and lust for material possessions, produce an advantage in capitalism - in general terms, the more voracious you are, then the more rich and powerful you will become. The greedy take control of everything, and most people become pawns in their power games.

What we are witnessing now with the US is the end game of capitalism - the decadent phase, whereby the US (and the west in general) have become like very spoilt children, accustomed to indulging every perverse whim, and growing fat and inert and inept on the backs of Chinese and Indian workers. The developing world toils and sweats, and the developed world consumes the spoils. We are now too fat and lazy to do anything much ourselves, other than play increasingly twisted tricks on our eastern worker slaves, as we persuade them to lend us all their money so we can keep buying their goods. We have no means to pay back these loans, and finally the Chinese are starting to realise this - in future they will sell their goods to their own people, and in so doing they will progress from being our slaves to enjoying the fruits of capitalism for themselves. In theory. In practice, there is unlikely to be a functional capitalist system remaining after it hits the concrete wall of global financial collapse, and even if there is, it will then run immediately aground in the sand trap of scarce resources.

The end result of world-wide capitalism, if it were allowed to reign unfettered by governments, would still be the raping of planet earth - the destruction of the forests, the killing of the soil, the poisoning of the oceans, the depletion of mineral resources, the cheapening of culture, and the subjugation of spirituality by material values.

The problem with capitalism is not the freedom or otherwise of the markets, but rather it is a problem equally inherent in communism and socialism - the lack of virtue in humanity itself. It is corruption, now more endemic than ever in the human race, that dooms us to suffering and self imposed misery. If we all looked out for each other, instead of looking out for ourselves, and if we all understood that, as spiritual beings, we are all one, then we would all understand the value of virtue. If I hurt my fellow man in order to help myself, then in fact I hurt myself also. If we, as a race, are not honest and caring and loving and giving, then we suffer, and we destroy, ultimately, everything we touch. This is the big lesson for us in the current destruction of our old "civilization". We have brought it on ourselves through false values. We have been like a plague of locusts, intent only on feeding ourselves right now, at the expense of having any food left for tomorrow.

I have said before that capitalism has eaten itself. And I will say it again in future, I am sure. But it is not actually capitalism that has done the eating. We did the eating ourselves, and it is our lack of humanity which has led us to embrace such a system. We lost sight of what we are - divine beings incarnated in human bodies, playing games in paradise, at one with the loving embrace of mother nature - and instead we have come to define ourselves in terms of physical appearances and material possessions, driven by fear and selfishness, greed and lust, and desperate to "get ahead" of our neighbors.

We should not blame capitalism, and we should not blame our governments, and we should not blame our neighbors, or our fellow citizens in other countries. Instead, we should take full responsibility ourselves, each and every one of us, for the hell that we have created from the paradise that we were given. We have destroyed our garden, and we must rebuild it according to a better methodology, or else we perish.

seeing through the dust

As the incompetent and corrupt governments of the US and the UK (and the many other nations who follow their appalling example), systematically destroy our economies and political systems by tipping shed-loads of new and unserviceable debt into the cratered wreckage of the biggest bad debt bubble in history, we beleaguered citizens can only watch on in disbelief and dismay.

We are just at the beginning of the housing collapse, and already we are entering full scale economic depression. Commercial property will collapse in similar spectacular style, as credit card debts turn rotten on an unprecedented scale. The stockmarkets are already heading downhill like racing toboggans. Credit crunch? We ain't seen nothin' yet. Already we are hearing estimates that our apparent economic wealth has almost halved in this debacle so for.. and we are only at the beginning of this destruction of imaginary wealth!

The banking system is already beyond rescue, as zombie banks hide behind the imaginary asset valuations on their balance sheets, and grasp wildly at whatever welfare bailouts they can scare and scam from the zombie politicians.

So, we have financial systems dominated by zombie banks, and political systems dominated by zombie politicians, and their corrupt puppeteers. Our economic systems have advanced and terminal debt cancer. Our culture is rotten to the core, to the extent that vices have long been considered virtues, and virtues are derided as only fit for "suckers". Nobody can trust anyone else, and the last remnants of confidence are rapidly dispersing in the smog.

But hang on folks, there is a consensus that we will pull out of this "downturn" next year, and even sooner if the doom mongers are properly muzzled - it is only negative thinking and irrational fear that has gotten us into this mess.. right? Wrong, of course. The statistics and mathematics say clearly and emphatically that this paradigm is now plummeting headlong into an abyss. Psychics say likewise - those of us who listen to our intuition know that the old ways are finished, and we no longer even have to trust our intuition, as the physical evidence of terminal collapse abounds for anyone who is willing to see it.

Even if it were possible financially and economically to resume our old way of life, the oil would still run out, and climate change would still drown or starve most of us. The land and the oceans that we continually rape and poison would still poison us back through the food chain. And the people would continue to become ever more miserable and disconnected from nature, as they fiddle with their smart phones and pop their anti-depressants.

We are encouraged by our leaders and our TV pundits, to remain in a state of denial, and most people do cling on stubbornly to this - reality is too scary, compared to the sugary valium world of role model celebrities, where we take our advice from the advertisers. But no matter how firmly or persistently the heads of the multitude remain stuck in the sand, the days of the old ways are numbered, and the numbers are rapidly approaching zero. It really does look like the old paradigm is going to go out with a bang and not just with a whimper.

For those of us brave enough to look beyond the impending carnage, what do we see, through the dust of the wreckage? The new paradigm is not about growth, it is about sustainability. It is not about large scale formal systems of government, economy, and control of the people, but about local community and the willing collaboration of liberated individuals. The new paradigm is holistic - it is not about separation, selfishness, or conflict. It is about communion not competition. It is about living in harmony with nature, and not about abusing our fellow creatures and life forms: it is about a symbiotic relationship with Mother Earth, and not a parasitical one. It is about love and not fear. It is about intuition and not rationality. It is about achieving balance between the material and the spiritual, balance between earth and heaven: it is about becoming our true selves. The new paradigm is a higher level of existence for humanity.

The many that remain unable to see or understand this new paradigm will perish with the old paradigm. This may seem harsh but it is nature's way. Whenever a species expands to the point of suffocating its environment, nature will engineer a cull of the weak. To survive into the new world we must become open to our intuition, able to listen to our inner selves, and we will then be guided to safety, and ultimately to a new prosperity where wealth means contentment rather than possession.

The crossover from the old to the new - the confluence that we are now in - is a scary place of rapid and immense change. When the going gets tough the tough get going. In the new paradigm, non-attachment is the new toughness. This is no place for fear. We must fill ourselves with inner light and the strength that comes from understanding our true nature: we are immortal spiritual beings who simply play out dramatic roles in these crude bodies of skin and bone. We must be compassionate to those who will perish, without allowing ourselves to be pulled into their world view. We must have strong wills, and with focused determination must set about creating a new way of living with and on planet Earth that is fit for our children and their children. And we must do this even as the old ways die a horrible death in front of our eyes.

It will be tough, but it will also be wonderous.

time for a reboot

I have just read an excellent article by John Schettler at article by John Schettler called "Blue Screen of Death" in which he describes the unfolding of our current economic woes, with bankers getting fatter and fatter as they bleed us all dry. He proposes only one solution: "a complete shutdown and reboot of the system."

My favorite quote was president Wilson's lament on his creation of the Federal Reserve:

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

There we have in a nutshell, the essence of the old paradigm system: a small and secretive elite sitting at the top of a pyramid of power and controlling everything beneath them. Our governments are at the mercy of secretive and unelected power mongers, so we should not be surprised when these same governments repeatedly perform acts which make no sense to us. They are just following orders, and they are sworn to secrecy.

Yes - it is time to reboot this system. If we don't do it, then it is crashing quickly under its own momentum towards a shutdown that could be terminal. We need a reboot now, before any more damage is done: the sooner the misery of this old system is over, the better for all of humanity. The elite of power mongers have already hoovered up almost all of the wealth, leaving nothing much for the rest of us but debt and a planet that has been raped bare. The monster system they created is now consuming itself. We should now be celebrating the spectacular demise of the old paradigm, and looking forward with optimism to a fresh new start.

on gold, guns, and gardens

There are many people out there now investing their savings in gold, and buying guns and ammunition, and stockpiling food, in preparation for the coming breakdown of "civilization" as we know it.. Somebody commented recently on another blog (sorry - I failed to bookmark it and can't find it now) that out of investing in gold, guns, and gardens, only the gardens make sense. I agree with this.

Greed breeds greed, and violence breeds violence. The breakdown of the economic and political systems will free us from political and economic servitude, and will give us a chance to reinvent our way of life in a higher mold. This means becoming re-attuned to nature, and to the spirituality inherent in each and every one of us: the being - the spark of life - inside the human body.

This is the new paradigm - the universal tide is rising towards enlightenment, and it wants to take us with it - either we go with willing determination, or we drown.

Those who cling to old paradigm ways - the selfish pursuit of money or wealth or power, greed, corruption, violence, a fear-based approach to life - they will drown in a hell of their own making.

Those who focus on virtue and love and benevolence, the qualities of divinity - those who find their inner strength and proceed to use it for the benefit of all - they will rise with the tide, and will find themselves cast onto new shores, where many things will become possible. The meek shall inherit the earth.

Either we stay in the darkness, or we move towards the light. Gold and guns are part of the dark old paradigm ways of existence. Yes, if I create a garden that grows food for my family, then others who are hungry and angry may take it by force and steal all the food. I can either live in fear of that, and get a gun to defend my garden, or I can trust in karmic law, and peacefully tend my garden while sharing its' produce with my neighbors. I choose the latter defense - the defense of "do unto others as you wish others to do unto you". Fear attracts the very actions we fear - darkness attracts darkness - while peaceful inner strength creates a canopy of protection - light attracts light. Darkness flees from light. This new paradigm approach recognizes that at the spiritual level - the level of "being" - we are all one. If I hurt you then I hurt myself. If I share with you, and embrace you, and love you, then I will be loved in return, and will receive the embraces and gifts of others.

There is nothing the dark old paradigm forces can do when faced with light. The old paradigm is based on fear and manipulation. Where there is fearlessness and determined independence, the old ways break down - the destructive forces destroy only themselves.

So, violence committed against us, or threatened against us, does not justify the use of violence, or the threat of violence, by us. We should never resort to violence, and we should always stand up to it, fearlessly. Gandhi understood this, and lived his life by principles of non-violence: "There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for."

It is, of course, not likely that the average man in the street will suddenly understand and adopt such principles - many people will react in a more primal way, and out of fear and desperation will create an ugly, bloody, mess. In the short term. The final death throes of the old paradigm will not be pretty.

But we should not succumb to that fear ourselves, or we will be consumed by it too.

Those of us who have higher principles must live by them, and trust in our karma, fate, God, or whatever we believe in. The worst that can happen is we die in the carnage, at which point it is worth asking if life is worthwhile in a deteriorating "mad Max" environment. I believe in reincarnation, which makes death easy to face, and I believe in karmic law, which makes principles very important indeed. We can escape our bodies, but we cannot escape the consequences of our actions.

Our gardens will feed us, and nourish our souls. The hoards of gold and guns, on the other hand, will attract greed and violence and misery. You cannot eat your gold or your gun, and once you have shot the gardener, you will soon starve. Even if the gardener dies, he or she will die happy and fulfilled. The miser and the gunman will live and die in fear and misery.

We are entering times that will test our beliefs and our inner strength to the utmost. I believe that those of us who clearly see the writing on the wall for this "civilization", still have time to find ourselves a good environment to sit out the impending systemic breakdown, and time to prepare ourselves psychologically and spiritually for what we are about to face. But time is running out. We must reach out to each other and prepare for a better way of life.

full steam ahead

People who are paying attention are seeing our governments deliberately wrecking our "civilization" through rewarding greed, corruption, deceit, and ineptitude, while penalizing those citizens who have been responsible and prudent. We are watching our "leaders" print shed-loads of money and hand it all to their rich and incompetent banker and business cronies, so they can continue to eat caviar and drink champagne aboard their yachts. Many are asking "How long are we going to let the government play this game?".



Well, I don't think there is anything we can do. We are on board the Titanic. It is heading straight for the iceberg, The captain is holding his course, and setting full steam ahead. His crew are organized to prevent us storming the bridge. They are handing out some lifeboats, but only the rich are allowed on board. The rest of us should focus on getting ready to leave our bodies and prepare for the next life, which, our karma should ensure, will be better.

This is a metaphor - I am not saying we are all going to die imminently, but our way of life is about to end, and we should focus on that.

Getting involved in our local communities still makes sense - we can change things at the local level - indeed we have to - but at the national and global levels, forget it - the whole rotten carcass is beyond repair. Let it rot.

less is more

Here is a quote from Dr. Leonid Sharashkin, taken from a post on the cluborlov blog about Russian local food growing:

In 2003, 34.8 million families (66% of all households in the country) owned gardening plots (subsidiary plot, allotment, garden, or dacha) and were involved in growing crops for subsistence. By 2005, 53% (by value) of the country’s total agricultural output was coming from household plots (which in 2006 occupied only 2.9% of agricultural land), while the remaining 47% came from the agricultural enterprises and individual farmers, requiring 97.1% of agricultural lands.

So, Russian agri-business uses 97% of the land, to produce 47% of the food, while individuals squeeze out 53% of the food from 3% of the land! Even allowing for the known gross inefficiencies and failures of Russian agri-business, this is a staggering and encouraging statistic, indicating the potential on our doorsteps, currently in the shape of pointless and largely unused ornamental garden space. The Russians are showing us how "little people" can do an incomparably better job than the "professionals".

Why has this happened in Russia? Because they have already suffered and survived political and economic meltdown, and without growing their own food most people would have starved to death.

In the west the writing is very clear on the wall: financial meltdown and impending economic and political meltdown. Very simply, if we don't start growing our own food, we too will starve. The Russians had decades of early warning as their economy slowly failed - they had time to adapt and organize themselves into a high degree of self-sufficiency, before the complete meltdown came. Here, now, in the west, the meltdown is bigger, nastier, and coming much more quickly.

So we had better get those gardening gloves on, and get planting.