Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Eating Garlic to cure a cold

Eating lots of garlic can stop or shorten a cold.

Sometimes we hear the body whine, “oh no, I’m getting a cold.” At that very first moment, go eat a lot of garlic. The garlic will boost our immune system and stop the cold from settling in.

Garlic contains 30 antiviral and antibacterial compounds. Garlic is a bulb, like a daffodil, that lives underground. When the bulb gets nicked or cut by a bug, it creates strong chemicals that resists unhelpful bacteria so the plant survives. Also, living underground, the plant needs to have strong anti-decaying properties so it doesn’t rot.

Garlic has different properties cooked and raw. Garlic is more powerful when raw, but it’s harder on the stomach. It’s good to a few cloves raw, and then a few full heads of garlic cooked. (The individual garlic bulbs are called cloves and the clusters of a dozen or so cloves are called heads of garlic.) If I’m trying to block a on-setting cold, I’ll eat two cloves raw, and two or three heads of garlic cooked, which is about 30-40 cloves. If I’ve got an established cold, I’ll eat this regiment everyday.

Here are a few ways to prepare garlic.

When cold fighting, I like to eat one or two cloves chopped fine and mixed with a spoonful of raw honey.

The easiest way to eat a bunch of garlic is to chop it and put it atop toast in the toaster over. As the bread toasts, it usually cooks the garlic enough to take the acidic burn off the garlic. After toasting, add some olive oil, sea salt, and nutritional yeast atop the “garlic bread” sweetens the deal.

Another way to cook voluminous garlic is to bake it covered in olive oil. Peal a couple heads of garlic, put it in over-safe bowl, cover it in cheaper olive oil. Try 300 degrees for 20 or so minutes until spreadable by fork. Add sea salt. The leftover oil can be reused for cooking and bread dipping.

Another easy way to eat your medicine is cooking garlic amidst fried eggs. In the sauté pan, add some olive oil and the garlic. Crack the eggs into the pan atop the garlic. Throw in some sea salt and herbs. Flip it overeasy. Done.

The easiest way to peel garlic is to squash the garlic glove with the tail of a big knife until the peal loosens. Another method is chopping off the knobby root end of the garlic and then pealing back the paper. The knobby bottoms are worth the effort to cut off if they are big and unpalatable.

Interestingly, garlic doesn’t respond to human breeding attempts, and so the plant we see are similar to what our Italian caveman ancestors ate.

Garlic is easy to grow. Stick single cloves in the ground, six inches apart. Plant four-to-six weeks before the ground freezes hard in the fall. Garlic likes hay mulch, as the delicate roots benefit from lack of weed-pressure competition. Harvest in the beginning of August when the leaves go brown.

Throw out moldy garlic and be sure to cut away any imperfections from the white flesh of the garlic where decay has started. Any mold that grows on antibacterial garlic is strong and we certainly don’t want to eat it or even breathe it too much.

It’s probably best not to eat tons of garlic all the time, though. As a medicine, we want to let our body reset. Though our body does appreciate antiviral and antibacterial boosts when needed, in general we are trying to cultivate in the body a garden of good bacteria. Kombucha, probiotic supplements, yogurt, fermented foods all create digester allies that that help our body. When a lot of garlic hits the digester gullet of the large intestine, our natural microherd of intestinal flora will notice.

Some people say garlic makes us smell, but I think it just makes us smell of garlic, and I like that smell. Perhaps garlic’s odorous reputation has been amplified by Big Pharma to keep people buying cold medicine that works less well than garlic.

Garlic is a helpful ally in stopping a cold, but it should be used along with other practices too. Other helpful cold-defeating habits include Echinacea tea with raw honey, rest, water. Vitamin C in large quantities can help. I like the fizzy Emergence-C packets. And it’s good to keep warm, and ideally, raise the body’s heat up, as some viruses live at lower temperatures. A good hot shower,or a sauna, or even being bundled up beneath ten blankets, can hot box our bodies to encourage the baddies move out.

Good luck and be well!

Friday, November 6, 2009

A Statewide Conversation on Building Vermont’s Food System

How can we build Vermont’s food system in the next ten years?

That’s the central topic of a well-organized conversation that’s happening in 8 places across Vermont in the next month.

The Farm to Plate Initiative and the Sustainable Agriculture Council are organizing local food summits. Farmers, food businesses and other stakeholders are being invited to say their piece. In the end, the state will spend some loot to make it happen. It sounds like government at it's best: trying to do good stuff by listening to the people doing the work.

An email from organizers says the events purpose is “to gather input from regional stakeholders as part of the Farm to Plate (F2P) strategic planning process whose goal is to enhance Vermont’s food system over the next 10 years. Not only will these events help in determining the contents of the strategic plan for Vermont’s farm and food sector, but it will also provide an opportunity for participants to learn more about what is happening in their region related to farms and food production.”

Distilled findings will be presented the VT legislature and the governor later this year. The eight events are designed to gather good ideas about where we want to go, what we need, what needs to increase, etc.

The conversation for southwestern Vermont is happening in Bennington, on Saturday Nov 14th, at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, at 200 Pleasant St., from 5:30- 8:30. There will be a nice dinner, prepared with food from local farmers. Info is on the web at http://www.vsjf.org/sustainable_agriculture/farm2plate.shtml. Farm to Plate Local Food Summits contact person is Heather Pipino, 828-1121, heather@vsjf.org

Here’s what I think we need to improve Vermont’s food system over the long haul. We need better winter storage capacity. We could use a carbon tax on vegetables grown over a thousand miles away (regardless of whether this violates the WTO’s “rules.”) We should have inexpensive tractor rentals for young/poor farmers to use during the spring. We should increase the flow of local food to schools by having portions of the school lunch budget set aside for local food. We should have a food co-op in every town.

Some of these goals could overlap. Today, in early November in Vermont, I found an apple from Chile in my kitchen. This is prime Vermont apple season, but somehow, this carbon-drenched apple appeared, looking agreeably crunchy. It got me grumbling about the meagerness of our food system and the hidden carbon costs in the industrial food economy.

Let Vermont start by being self-sufficient in apples. There should be large apple storage sheds, with the pumped in CO2 for preservation, and every Vermont student should have access to handfuls of fresh, local apples everyday.

The development of a healthy food system will mean challenging one of the main philosophies of modern economics: free-market fundamentalism. Let’s drop the free market economy doctrinaire rhetoric that everything functions better when we slut ourselves out to big corporations, economies of scale and the profit motive. Not every system works best purely with the profit motive as the driving force.

Take those apples for example. Say we wanted to provide every Vermont student one Vermont apple everyday, all school year long. We could do that, with some math, some storage sheds and some public/private organization. Free-market fundamentalism would say, if Chilean apples were cheaper, buy those. Further, the government shouldn’t be involved in apple storage, because all things function better under the benevolent gaze of businessmen. This is nonsense. To save the planet, we need to do a million things that can’t be coaxed into existence by the profit motive.

Last night I read “Now or Never: Why we must act now to end climate change and create a sustainable future” by Tim Flannery. This excellent little book reminded me that the stakes are very, very high. Humanity may totally wreck our delicate terrerium. We really need to get it together, and create systems that meet our needs without blowing so much smoke into the sky. A thriving local food system puts less carbon into the air, and so it’s a key to the living future.

Let us build a local food system that brings together farmers, government people and eaters. Come to these discussions in your part of the state and daydream with us about the food system that saves the future.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Getting the Generals to Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans

It is time to give Afghanistan back to the Afghan people and let them sort it out.

This means letting the Taliban “win”, an unpleasant prospect for a propagandized America, just like “losing” to the Viet Cong.

Afghanistan and Vietnam run so grimly parallel that we are fools not to remember our lessons.

Lesson #1: Don’t drag out a losing war indefinitely just because we can’t stomach the political pain of acknowledging a lost war.

Lesson #2: The native people support the insurgency because the Taliban/Viet Cong represent the people’s struggle for national independence, they speak the same language, and they are sick of Americans bombing their wedding parties.

Let us set down our doctrinaire US/Them propaganda and see who the Taliban are. The Taliban are the armed nationalist indigenous resistance movement against foreign occupation. They have set up a shadow government that issues passports, that calls itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Truck drivers who bring supplies to NATO bases must carry an IEA passport, and also pay a stiff tax to the Taliban. (See Patrick Cockburn’s excellent reporting at Counterpunch.org.) When Quadaffi spoke at the UN, he advocated for the Taliban’s right to set up the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The Taliban (aka the I.E.A.) have a website, where the war is sold from their point of view. It is an Orwellian experience to read celebratory comments about blowing up American conveys.

(Here’s a good place as a disclaimer as any: All things being equal, I’d like America to “win” in Afghanistan and establish equal rights for women, but since that’s not going to happen, screw it, let’s go.)

We can’t eliminate the social movement called the Taliban, because the Taliban are Afghans, largely comprised of Afghan’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtun, who are 42% of the population. The Taliban are Afghans acting as the legitimate indigenous nationalist military force resisting the foreign occupation. It is also clear, that the US has lost the opportunity to “win” in Afghanistan. What is winning? Defeating the Taliban? Oh really. Good luck with that. The Taliban are the Afghan people. Further, the Taliban movement is very resilient, surviving a crushing defeat in 2001, by just heading up into those endless, freezing mountains to regroup and eat their goat yogurt. Or maybe they ate Belgian chocolate airlifted in by the ISI paid for by wayward US tax dollars.

American money created the Taliban when they were America’s proxy army in fighting the Soviets partners. Once they were our allies, and perhaps they can be again. Surely, the Orwellian demonization of the Taliban can wear off after a few washes in the news cycle.

Americans live inside a bubble of propaganda that only extended living abroad can make clear. When one leaves the US, suddenly one decompresses from the Groupthink atmospheric pressure. The debate in the media about Afghanistan has been so strange. People pontificating like armchair 19th century English imperialists, twirling their handlebar mustaches while loaded on gin & tonics, talking about “our responsibility to the Afghan people” like it was our “white man’s burden.” Americans live behind enemy lines in a Thought War. PR firms catalog grumpy anti-war tracts like this one because they have Information War contracts to monitor and shape US public opinion.

The Afghan war is based on wrong foundational ideas: that America is the global cop, that America should be an occupying force, that America is the backbone of a global economic order that props up pliant crooks like Karzai. All this is wrong. Let us move towards a multi-polar world where the problems of the Age are settled by diplomacy and international organizations. Let’s start by handing Afghanistan to the UN.

Of course, the Taliban have many backward ideas about women, homosexuality, modernity, and music. I wouldn’t want to live next door to them. I’m just saying, let’s make peace with the Afghans and their armed advocates, the Taliban, and let Time and the awesomeness of Internet and pop music (and international aid and reparations) drag Afghanistan into the 21st century.

All this seems logical to me, a civilian who makes no money off the military, who wants peace, who generally likes Islam, and who is generally sympathetic with other countries that don’t want the US military stationed there.

Unfortunately, the Taliban are only half the problem in the Afghanistan war. The other half is the American military’s general.

The career militarists at the Pentagon want to extend the war in Afghanistan. The military-industrial complex wants to wring a few more years of billions out of the Afghan. Like Vietnam, a long war is a good paycheck. One military talking head said that winning would cost 5 billion a month for 10 years! I disagree that we can spend our way to victory there, though I agree that Halliburton would be willing to try.

Robert Drefeus has a smart article in the new Rolling Stone, where he writes of the difficulty Obama is having with the Generals.

Obama is smart, and living the world of Realpolitik, not in the Ideal world of the Leftist blogosphere, and so knows some history. Civilian presidents who resist the power of our military and our secret police (CIA) have often faced internal sabotage. Jimmy Carter was harpooned by the CIA spooks because they thought he was naïve for wanting to do the right thing, the Christian thing, even at the expense of short term loses in the field. Who knows about JFK, but the CIA certainly has been reluctant to release their files about Oswald.

So let’s have some patience with Obama, that in the first year, he hasn’t dismantled the entire apparatus of military conquest. We want Obama to go the distance and have a product 8 years, not throw a rod early and get coup de ta’d by the Raytheon heathens.

And of course, the good people in the military may honestly believe that we could still “win” in Afghanistan. The problem with military people can be caught in the proverb: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” However, there is no military solution to hammer the situation in Afghanistan with.

Politically, there will be a high cost if America is still in this new Vietnam in four years. The progressives are already getting grumble. We are starting to feel like we got played during the election, and a great disappointed watchfulness has set in. People voted for Obama as the anti-war candidate. Now, we’re still in all these wars! Recently I was at a gathering of progressives, and when people said Obama’s name, there was a new hesitancy has replaced the unbridled enthusiasm. Obama and the Democrats should know that extending the war in Afghanistan would hurt their chances in the long haul.

Most people don’t care about the nuances of world domination/geo-politics, they just want out. Here, the Americans and the Afghan people are in agreement: US out of Afghanistan.

And I’m with them. Out!

Monday, October 19, 2009

Learning to see Nature so we Awake

When we learn to look really closely at Nature, secret doors open to knowledge, biology, art, and mystery.

When our awareness steadies in focused observation, colors deepen, shapes define, strange relationships develop, and patterns emerge.

It takes bravery to receptively witness the beauty of the world. It takes a refined, disciplined, masocism to endure the pleasures of percieving the gorgeousness of our burning world.

We must willfully shake off our everyday daze and be voluntarily tazed by the miracles blooming and swooping all around.

A long, thorough, multi-seasonal contemplation of Nature in Her many forms brings ever deepening revelation.

Humans need these skills for appreciating Nature, so we’ll turn less Nature into parking lots, so we’ll be content with non-consumptive pleasures like looking at the subtle colors of sunset.

We take the right posture when we adopt a reverent appreciation for the great beauty that surrounds us in the Web of Life.

The skill of deep appreciation of Nature offers necessary skills that humans need in our effort to create planetary survival.

When we see Nature, when we learn to really open up to Nature’s beauty in her delicate and useful shapes/colors/forms, we are gifted with appreciation for the Lifeweb that supports us. And we need that gratitude for Life, in all her stunning complexity, because it strengthens our connection to the Earth that we need to work fiercely to protect.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Some Gratitude for Teddy Kennedy

I was named for Teddy Kennedy and so this man has been in my awareness since I was very young. My legal name is Edward Talcott, nicknamed Teddy when I was growing up, (though I go by Theo today). I've spent a lifetime in quiet respect for this guy, and today I feel like offering up some thanksgiving for this good guy from this good family.

When one watches politics habitually, one needs loadstars or points of reference. Teddy Kennedy was like that, a dependable "long-distance runner for justice' as Cornell West would say, someone you could count on to be aligned to the Good.

I appreciated Teddy as somebody willing to slog along for Team Good, one of us in there during the long, ugly trench warfare of American Politics, a liberal icon throughout the Ice Age of Reagan and the Dark Ages of Bush.

Teddy Kennedy fought for health care and for the poor, even when he and his family had their own. He was not a member of the cold-hearted, classist, sociopathic, privileged elite. Instead, he engaged in a life-long struggle on behalf of a vision of America where everybody deserves a piece of the action and equal rights and access to the good life.

I heard that at one time in Washington, there was a conference about his brother Bobby, entitled "Politics: A Profession Not Without Honor", to help political people remember that high-minded values are accessible in the political sphere, and that politicians don't have to be scoundrels. True, the profession does encourage people who can lie. And this makes the people who can bear the ugliness and yet keep pointed towards the Good all the more essential. Because politics is important as a way to have very serious arguments about life and death issues like who will get health care and who will go bankrupt and have their lives ruined.

There are many kinds of lives that a young person could aspire to in this world. Teddy is a good role model of a life well spent, somebody who lived to be an old man, working for good causes for decades and decades, siding with the Good and relentlessly wading into the struggles of our times.

The harps and Angels are certainly welcoming in this ally of the Good even now, this hard-working warrior of the public sphere, who spent so much of his life advocating 'for the least of these' among us. Onward and upward, brother...

Monday, June 29, 2009

Recommendations for That Big Trip to Mother India

Trips to India are awesome. Anyone with the slightest inclination should go. Last winter I had another great great trip their, deeply spiritual, and I really encourage anyone with spiritual leanings to do it. This winter I'm going back because this winter is the Kumba Mela, the closest one to 2012! So maybe I'll see you in the rainbow camp in Hardiwar in March!

Here's something I wrote up on the details of going to India.


India is magic and wise. India is difficult and monstrous. India is the delta of history and the holder of humanity’s highest wisdom. Everyone should visit. Yoga and meditation students will totally benefit from the perspective gained by visiting where these practices originate from.

Here’s some tips for the trip.

It’s great, have fun, walkabout, it’s relatively safe and inexpensive.

Don’t get sick. It’s harder to have spiritual thoughts when one is crabby and ill in the hotel room. An aggressive, pro-active approach towards health is recommended. Eating right, get good sleep, do the yoga.
A healthy body is more resistant.
Don’t drink the water, unless it’s boiled and purified. Ask for no ice cubes, which are unpurified water. Suck it up and buy the bottled water. It took me three weeks to realize that was my blockage: I’d never bought plastic bottles of water and I had a thing against it.
I got some nasty skin-fungul infection about three weeks in. I bought medicine like a spendthrift hypocondriac. Eventually the disease went away (after I took a friend's advice and lathered myself head to toe with Prell Anti-lice shampoo and let it dry on me like a mudman!) I think it was my body getting inoculated to India’s compost pile. Then I was pretty healthy for two months. Then, just as I was approaching the ETD, I got a nasty food poisoning case, from a food stall at festival, that drove me onto the plane. India is a hard place to be sick. I have so much compassion for all the people living there without health care. Auroville had a dank health clinic offered free to local villagers.
During the trip, I took droppers of “colloidal silver”, basically super small pieces of silver, almost just the vibration and frequency of silver, which apparently has a purifying quality. Hence, silver was used for spoons. Hard to find, perhaps, but available at Auroville.
I traveled with food, vitamins and medicine. I ate a garlic clove or two a day to boost the immune system with garlic’s antiviral antibacterial properties.

Bring your favorite health care products. The organic movement hasn’t hit India.

I didn’t get the shots, because apparently all the diseases have resistent strains anyway, and I worry about the mercury-based thimeresol used in vaccines. That said, I had alot of those shots in my 20s.

India has an unbelievably excellent train system. One can get anywhere on these trains. I recommend getting the 2nd class AC births, a bit more pricey, but totally worth it. The steerage class is like the tightpack method on the slave ships: all night, no seat, people talking about you in Hindi. Very difficult, but also very human. AC2 gets you sheets, privacy, class insulation, no beggars. India is easy enough once you are settled in someplace, but can be pretty challenging on the move.

I quizzed several American yogi travelers deeply before I went.
The best peace of advice I got was this: Don’t get all worked up if the taxi guy is trying to get an extra ten cents out of you. Don’t let it ruin your day. You can bargain till your stress level is shot up and your adrenals are maxed out, and you’ll have saved 50 cents. Keep it in perspective. They may be overcharging you, but it’s still cheap. Due to the rigged economic system’s exchange rates, our 1 dollar is worth about $5 dollars. A great meal will be $2. So it’s cheap. The taxi driver will spend an hour of his life and you’ll give him $2.
With that said, traveling on a budget does require some skillful bargaining. Generally, try and knock off 1/3 of the proposition price.
Appear willing to walk away without the sale. Remember Indians would probably pay 1/4 what you pay. If you know a few words in the local language, the price drops, such as “too much” in Tamil.
Decide how much you’d be willing to pay. Go to the next guy in line.
Fix a price before you consume the service, or they ask their price.( ie whadda-I-owe-ya to the taxi driver at the destination)

If somebody is walking beside you trying to sell you something, I found that changing direction was a good way to shake them loose. I’d walk 10 steps in the wrong direction, and they’d get the hint.

India is a great place to practice being assertive. “No, we definitely said 60 rupees for the cab ride” and
”no, I definitely don’t want your peacock feather fan, however beautiful it is, because I don’t want to support the cruelty to those animals.” There are varying degrees of “no.” “No” with tone, urgency, anger, firmness. Part of the trick is deciding clearly in your own mind. If you may want the offered thing, the sellers can sense that. Saying the word “Jao!” with varying degrees of firmness is helpful. Jao means, I think “go you fool!” or “Beat it!” The combo of the native language and tone is pretty effective.

And sometimes the answer is Yes. “Why yes, Mr. Pushy cab driver, Thank you for your gumption to walk down to the railway station platform and for leading me to the awaiting chariot.”
The cabbies are so dishonest. I got lied to a thousand times. I was lied to more in India than I’ve ever been lied to. It seems like it’s just part of it. Like in Vindivan, buying a lifetimes supply of Nag Champa incense, $40 worth, the incense shop owner said the price he was offering me was the wholesale price, that he was only making a penny or two on each box. I thought, “Hhhmmmnnn, no wonder India is so poor, because they have such a poor understanding of capitalism, that stores are supposed to sell items for more-than-it-cost-them, or as we say, profit.”
The dishonesty is tiring, and it takes some skill to recognize it. Once in Delhi, this taxi driver son of a bitch took me to a travel agent across the street from the Delhi train station. There, I was told that no tickets were for sale today across the street, and I could only get rail tickets from them, at, surprise surprise, a very very “low.” Good scam, almost got $20US out of me, but I politely said, “well, I’ll just walk over an see, and then I’ll come back.” Shysters!
But once again, don’t let it ruin your day. They are real poor, an extra dollar makes they’re day a huge success, and they are happy, so why not be generous when one can.

The second great piece of advice my friend gave me was “It’s OK to spend a little extra and get a nice hotel room when you need it. Don’t feel you have to camp out with the hippies all the time.” For an extra two dollars a day you can often step it up significantly. Safer, cleaner, less riffraff. Insulation.
In Delhi, they ask for American style prices, $60 a night. That’s unusually high. Usually, a good hotel is 200-500 rupees, or 4 to 10$.
I recommend learning exchange rate functionally pretty early. Learn get a rough estimate, or travel with a little hand held calculator. 1=42. or easier 1=40. 100R equals 2.50$
The most I spent was 65$ a night at the super swank hotel at Osho’s Club Meditation in Poona. That place was a nice respite, interlude, intermission during my trip, a submersion in a clean uplifted world.
In summary, a nice hotel room is totally worth it.

In summary, have a great spiritual time. Live healthy and try not to get sick. Don’t sweat the 20 cent scam.

As far as places to visit, I really loved meeting the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Aquarian experiment happening at Auroville, near Pondicherry. So beautiful. His teachings were the most profound spiritual thing I learned in India.
Second, Bodhgaya, where Buddha got Enlightened, is extremely sacred, and the Buddhafields of saint energy vibrates super super high there.
Third, Rishikesh is a sweet, spiritual yoga town, way up in the hills, where the Beatles hung with the Maharishi.
Fourth, Osho’s Club Meditation, in Poona, is expensive and decadent, but spiritual and a nice break from the poverty. Probably not really necessary or wholesome, but interesting. Everynight they have ‘white robe”, where 1000 people dress in white in a giant pyramid temple and dance wildy to rock and roll, do some meditations, and listen to a recorded Osho talk. It’s like being in California-style cult for a little while.
Delhi had a few nice museums, and the Gandhi Samatri, his final footsteps museum ahd a cool gandhi museum.

I had difficulties with money a few times. The ATM card isn’t as helpful as one would like. In Thailand, an ATM machine stole my card on the first day! One wrong pin attempt and gone! Trying to get somebody to speak English over the phone. I had fifty bucks, and I was jetlagged on Casong road. Luckily a CD street vendor was cranking Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Fairytales and i sat down and meditated in front of a 7/11 and made it all better.
In short, I used Western Union. A little expensive, 50-80 dollars, but the money shows up right away, but then you’ve got to carry lots of loot on you, which is stressful. Maybe travellers checks would be good next time. I may try that next time.

I noticed a funny phenomenon. If I didn’t see the beggars, they didn’t see me. If I kept my focus tight, my eye gaze close, I was much less hassled while walking through crowds. Rupert Sheldrake has a book out explaining the phenomenon of the sense of being stared at. Anyway, it works partially as a cloak of invisibility.
Also, a total blank, non-engagement allows one to float past situations. If one start talking or looking or even saying no, one has upped the ante of the interaction.

At these ancient and wise spiritual sites, pray like you mean it, crank open to the spirit, and you’ll find well worn pathways. India is a spiritually advanced nation.

For cheap tickets, I got a great cheap tickets following my friends advice to fly to Thailand first and get an India ticket there.
I got a one-way to Bangcock for $620. From there I hopped a regional airways, maybe Air India, for $280. Flying back from Dehli to NYC was about $700. By contrast, one way NYC to Dehli was $1400. Thailand was pretty sweet too, and a good ‘get-yer-feet-wet’ before India.

Good luck and safe travels, soul brethren

Monday, May 25, 2009

Living Within a Living System

We live within a living system. Our Earth is alive. We are inside a Life-process that's bigger than us.

Direct perception of nature through our senses, through our bodies working the land, through our food creates a deep, strange flow of information and knowledge directly from Earth. When we press against the glass through gardening, we peer into a world that surrounds us, but that we don't see. They say fish don't see the the water they're in. Humans don't see the living system we live within. But we are in something! We are part of, immeshed in, inside the terrarium of life on Earth.

Paul Hawkin gave a beautiful commencement address to the University of Portland that was on Commondreams.org.

He said 'All the living systems of the planet are in decline and the rate of decline is increasing. and there is no peer-reviewed article in 30 years that would contradict this fact.' i have been chewing this over, this bitter truth, this reality that's perhaps to grim and big to stuff into the soundbite consensus reality.

All the living systems are declining.

Why is there so little discussion of the actual state of the Earth? The house is on fire and we seem hypnotized in our beds, in the 'cultural trance' that the Pachamama Alliance talked about.

Humanity must drop the adolescent renter mentality to the delicate bio-fabric of Creation that birthed our species. Corporate chemists dump pollution into the bio-soup of LIfe. Next thing, our elders have Alzehimer's and Parkinson's because the delicate chemistry of the brain gets all screwy. Opps. Probably shouldn't have operated an entire civilization using a harsh slash-and-burn chemistry. Instead, we want a green chemistry.

Recently I read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. It was so good and useful. The main point is that industrial chemicals don't stop at the borders between things. Pesticides to leaf to seed to babyfood to baby brain to Alzehimers. Our society has yet to act upon Carson's insight. I recommend "A Sense of Wonder", the play about Rachel Carson's life, and the interview with Bill Moyers by the actress Kaulani Lee. Rachel Carson was a great American heroine and her message is essential if humanity is to make into the livable, fun, non-sucko future.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

The science of the heart and Sri Ramana Maharshi

The modern science about the heart and the teachings of Indian sage Sri Ramana Maharshi have much in common. The similarity suggests Ramana experienced truths that science has caught up with 50 years later. Ramana used personal experience and the yogic sciences to map these inner realities. Modern scientific methods maps the heart’s biological and neurological structures. And surprise surprise, they are talking about the same things.

For years I’ve been studying science about the heart via the Heartmath Institute. Recently I discovered Sri Ramana’s teachings and saw how they directly align to the current heart science. This overlap is what I will attempt to bring forward here.

I’ve been traveling in south India, where I’m staying at the foot of the sacred mountain of Arunachala. This mountain is home of Sri Ramana Maharishi’s Ashram, in town of Tiruvannamalai (a.k.a. “Tiru”). Ramana lived here for over 50 years. He loved the mountain and considered it to be his teacher. Arunachala is said to be Shiva himself. The mountain is many caves where saints have meditated down through the ages.

Ramana was part of the Hindu yoga tradition. The yogic sciences map the human physiology thoroughly within a worldview that includes the Divine. The search for truth in pre-modern times was often done by scientists who wore monks robes instead of lab coats.

The Heartmath Institute has been at the front of an emerging field called ‘neurocardiology’, or how the brain wires to the heart. They say the heart functions as an organ of perception, picking up and processing the vibrations of the world and sending intuitively felt synopsis to the brain that we register as feelings.

The universe is electromagnetic and everything gives of waves of energy. The heart sends off waves of energy into the world around that can be measured by a ‘magnetometer.’ These waves carry information as a holonomic imprint of the content of a person’s consciousness.

Our experiences that somebody has a ‘good vibe’ or ‘bad vibe’ are literally, scientifically verifiably true. The Heartmath Institute has used a ‘magnetometer’ to measure the subtle electrical impulses that come off people. The heart is the most powerful electrical generator in the human body, creating 5000 times more charge than our brain. The squeezing and pumping the four quadrants of the heart creates a spiraling, vortex effect.

People with good vibes give off coherent waves, repeating waves with the same steady peaks and valleys of energy. People can get into synch, or biological entrainment, with others who are giving off this coherent pattern. Feeling love or gratitude gets our heart to start emanating coherent waves. People feeling anger give off incoherent and disordered waves.

If we start to listen to our hearts, or tune into the intuitive impressions, we can start to process actual information that our bodies are receiving. We do it all the time, anyway, but this process can be made conscious.

This information is spelled out further in the books The Heartmath Solution by Doc Childers, and The Biology of Transcendence, by Joe Pearce. There are web resources at www.heartmath.com. If you have a heart, or knows someone who does, this info will helpful.

In the ashram bookstore, I got a little book called Spiritual Heart by A.R. Natarajan, that gathers Ramana’s thoughts about the heart. The following quotes come from this book.

Ramana identified a spiritual heart located on the right side of our chests, two fingers pointed upward to the right of the mid-line. Ramana says “This heart is different from the physical heart; beating is the function of the latter. The former is the seat of spiritual experience.”

“Heart is usually understood to be the muscular organ lying on the left of the chest. The Bible says that a fool’s heart is on the left and a wise man’s on the right. Yoga Vasishta says that there are two hearts; one is the samvit; the other the blood vessel.

Disciple: “What is Heart?”
Master: “It is the center of the Self. The Self is the center of centers. The Heart represents the psychic center and not the physical center.”

Ramana says that “The yogi is engaged in cleansing the nadis. Then Kundalini, the primal power is awakened which is said to rise up from the coccyx to the head. The yogi is later advised to come down to the Heart as a final step.”

“The yogic chakras counting form the bottom to the top are various centers in the nervous system. They represent various steps manifesting different kinds of power of knowledge leading to the Sahasrara, the thousand petaled lotus, where is seated the supreme Shakti. But the Self that supports the whole movement of Shakti is not placed there, but supports it from the Heart center.”

“The Heart in the Upanishads is construed as “Hridayam” meaning: this is the center. That is, it is where the mind rises and subsides. That is the seat of Realisation.”

This is important to know that the Heart is the proper seat of our consciousness and after Kundalini rises, it should settle back downward into the Hridyam. Ramana says “By yogic practice one goes down, then rises up, wanders all through until the goal is reached; by jnana abhyas (cultivation of spiritual wisdom) one settles down directly in the center.” And also “(Some) yogis say that the current rising up the sahasrara ends there. That experience is not complete. For jnana, (knowledge of the Absolute), they must come to the Heart. Hridaya (heart) is the alpha and the omega.

It is important to note that Ramana’s ‘hridyam’ heart center isn’t the same as the anahata heart chakra. Ramana says
“Anahata is the chakra lying behind the heart. It is not samvit (the full energy of knowledge).”

Disciple: “What is the difference between the bound man and the one liberated?”
Maharshi: “Self-aware is one who lives in the Heart. When he moves about and deals with men and things, he knows that what he sees is not separate from the one Supreme Reality, the Brahman, which he realized in the Heart as his own Self, the Real.”

Ramana introduces us to a useful word in “sphurana” to describe the rustling, vibratory pleasure that comes when the heart center ‘scintillates with consciousness.” The following exchange talks of sphurana and a central Ramana technique for finding the self, repeatedly asking yourself “who am I?”

Disciple: “Does the inquiry ‘who am I?” lead to any spot on the body?”
Maharshi: Evidently, self-consciousness is in relation to the individual himself and therefore has to be experienced in his being, with a center in the body as the center of the experience. It resembles the dynamo of a machine, which gives rise to all sorts of electrical works. Not only does it maintain the life of the body and the activities of all it’s parts and organs, conscious and unconscious, but also the relation between the physical and the subtler planes on which the individual functions. Also, like the dynamo, it vibrates and can be felt by the calm mind that pays attention to it. It is known to the yogis and sadhakas by the name ‘sphurana’ which in ‘samadhi’ scintillates with consciousness.

Disciple: How to reach that Center, where what you call the Ultimate Consciousness- the I-I- arises? It it simply by thinking “Who am I?”
Maharshi: Yes, it will take you there. You must do it with a calm mind- mental calmness is essential.

Disciple: How does that consciousness manifest itself when the center- the Heart- is reached? Will I recognize it?
Maharshi: Certainly, as pure consciousness, free from all thought. It is pure, unbroken awareness of your Self, rather of Being- there is no mistaking it when it’s pure.

Disciple: Is the vibratory movement of the Center felt simultaneously with the experience of Pure Consciousness or before, ore after it?
M: The are both one and the same. But sphurana can be felt in a subtle way even when meditation has sufficiently stabilized and deepened, and the Ultimate Consciousness is very near, or during a great fright or shock, where the mind comes to a standstill. It draws attention to itself, so that the meditator’s mind, rendered sensitive by calmness, may become aware of it, gravitate towards it, and finally plunge into it, the Self.”

“This self is the eternal, immutable Self that ever throbs as ‘I’, ‘I’. It is not touched by birth and death; it is eternal. It is not confined to the physical body in which it stations itself; it is universal in its spread” writes MK Pandit, scholar sage of the highest order, in the book "Mighty Impersonality."
“Where is this Self to be found, is the next natural question. In the heart, is the answer. But it is made unambiguously clear that it is not the physiological heart on the left side of the body that is meant. The Heart that Maharshi speaks of is not the usual heart muscle. It is the spiritual heart which is two digits to the right of the center of the chest. it is not physical. It is in the subtle body and lends itself to be felt and experienced to the earnest inquirer in the course of his quest.

Is it the anahata of the science of the Tantra? No, says Bhagavan. The anahata center is not this spiritual heart. Is this spiritual heart a special concept of Maharshi or is there any scriptural support or evidence for it? Yes, there is, says the Mararshi. It is mentioned as the ojasthana in an old Ayurvedic text “Ashtanga Hridayam.” It is also referred to as ullam (meaning Lord, the same as Heart) in one of the verses of Saint Appar’s Thevaram.

In Sri Aurobindo’s Purna Yoga, for instance, the anahata is described as the emotional center; behind it, behind the cardiac center, there is the psychic center, the seat of the antaratman. It is the locus of the divine entity in man.”

Sri Ramana talked a lot about residing in the Self, the great being, the divine consciousness, God, the larger I. He called this the Heart. And now we find that the physical heart in the body is related to a uniting point in the body where different realms of consciousness come together in a holonomic intersection.

The highest Vedantic vision of the Divine is a ‘field’. Krishna says in the Gita “I am the field and the knower of the field.” Quantum physics says that beneath matter is a sub-manifest realm where the information and energy and and consciousness and potential exists in a unified field. This appears to be where Ramana spent a lot of his time, fully plugged into the Unified Field that he called the Heart, the Self, God. Deepak Chopra spoke eloquently on this subject at 2005 conference of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. That talk called “Deepak Chopra on Action for the Future” is on-line from IONS “Shift-in-Action” program.

This vision of a unified field of consciousness as Self perfectly lines up to the best models physics can come up with. So Ramana got that to. So we might want to just look at his vision, his other ideas and say, since he got the heart right, what else was he saying?

Ramana’s life also demonstrated the positive effects of being heart centered. He was nice to everybody: the monkeys, the dogs, the poor people who came to see him. He went out of his way to be compassionate and kind to everybody. He had an open door policy, and people came to see him at all hours for decades. There are lovely stories about his relationship with animals. He mediated disputes between warring tribes of monkeys. He bandaged up a young monkey who was getting harassed by the other monkeys, and conceived the other monkeys to play nice. Clearly, Ramana’s heart worked in a big way.

May our hearts be as big as Ramana so that we’re strong enough to heal our planet.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

With “no condoms” stance, Pope molests Africa

The Catholic Church should just stop offering sex tips or edicts for a century or two. Really, all credibility on sexual issues is gone, and their reactionary ignorant public policy endangers humanity’s long-term survival.

On a recent tour in Africa, Pope Benedict says that condoms were not the answer to Africa’s AIDS problem, and could make the problem worse. This is a sinful lie that will cause death to poor people.

Every time there is a big international conference on world population, the Catholic Church has been there and blocked birth control. If the Earth ends up an overpopulated hell, the Infallible Popes will be partially to blame.

An Inuit village in Alaska recently sued the church for sending a known pedophile priest to “serve” their community.

See, it’s a theme. The Catholic Church is unhealthy about sexual issues and needs to stop screwing up public policy.

The Church should either shut up, or get help and become healthy. The Catholic Church could hire a consulting team of modern experts in healthy sexual human behavoir and just adopt their recommendations. Seriously. We’ll forgive you. Just apologize and rebrand and join the 21st century. And pay the pedophile lawsuits by selling some of that land and billion dollars worth of silverware.

The Catholic Church has been unhealthy about sexual issues since they demanded priests couldn’t marry so that the church would inherit the property of the aristocratic brethren. This gambit worked, and the church is the world’s largest landowner. But it’s left an organization befouled by scandal.

As arcane as this history sounds, it affect real people’s lives. Just a few weeks ago, a friend went looking for condoms in Calcutta and couldn’t find them! She was trying to help a young India woman acquire them to protect her and her lover. She had to search high and low. They were very, very difficult to find and the pharmacist was reluctant to sell them to her because she was a woman. This is madness. Calcutta needs free condoms to be as common as cows in the street. All our environmental problems are made much more difficult by the surging growing of world population.

Calcutta is where Mother Teresa did such saintly work all the while supporting the Church’s sexual rules. Mother Teresa did great work helping the poor after they were already born and poor, but didn’t act to turn off the flood at the spigot. And that was immoral of Mother Teresa. It is immoral to force the world’s poor people to have babies they can’t support properly.
But hey, thanks for helping with the problem that you helped create.

The Pope insists on prudish lectures to the world about the ins and outs of doing it. As a monastic Catholic, the Pope probably gave up having sex with women many years ago, and so probably doesn’t have much experience with condoms. That’s OK. But don’t teach about what you don’t know. I wouldn’t never lecture people on the proper way to fix a car’s engine.

The Christian community has long been plagued by a false morality on sexual issues. By taking easy, high-horse stances on difficult issues, Christians side with the past, society and the powerful. But complex moral issues have two sides, and sometimes we need to pick the lesser of two evils. Premarital sex with condoms is better than unplanned pregnancy any day.

It is a false morality that stops contraception. It claims the moral high ground, but hurts the poor. The “stop condoms” approach seeks to prevent sex, but mostly harms the vulnerable. Stopping abortion may protect a living fetus, but robs women of reproductive rights that give them self-determination. Forcing young women to bear babies they don’t want is more immoral than abortion. In all these issues, the minor moral benefit of the prudish approach is outweighed by the harm caused to the innocent.

And when did ignorance of the human reproductive pipes become a sacred value? An unscientific willful ignorance is the enemy of a sustainable world civilization. We have fifty odd years of scientific research into sexuality to help us with these murky topics. No need to listen to the Pope on this issue.

Fundamentalists Christians have long postured as protectors of a prudish heterosexual hegemony. Jesus said “Don’t worry about the speck of sawdust in your neighbors eye when you have a log in your own eye.” We’ve got bigger fish to fry than people making love before marriage: planetary survival, global warming, overpopulation, AIDS, endless wars, outdated authoritarian secret societies.

I always marvel that Christians dig in on sexual issues as the outrages that they’ll get worked up about. Really, sex you don’t approve of. Not Guantanamo, or modern-day slavery, or famine caused by export crops, or the broken sky. Really, that’s the issue. I think they choose sex issues to jump on because it seems an easy to explain cultural issue and it doesn’t rock the pro-corporate boat.

Dear Catholic friends, I apologize for mocking things you hold sacred. I do it because you need it and we need you to regain your moral clarity for the healing of the world.

Planetary survival depends on family planning. That makes it moral. It is immoral for Catholic Church to kill the planet from overpopulation because of failure to adopt modern approaches to family planning. Maybe Catholic ‘family non-planning methods’ worked to refill the pews, but today, those methods are a danger to everyone.

Condoms should be a sacrament, as they honor life, health, responsibility, intelligence and care for the poor.

Maybe in a few years the Pope will be blessing cargo planes of condoms heading for Africa.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Eco-lessons from “The City that the Earth Needs

Two million trees planted to transform a desert. Gift economy restaurants serving lunch. A method for sun-baked bricks that’s rebuilding Afghanistan. These are just some of the amazing things achieved by Auroville.

Auroville is an experimental city in south India that just had its 41st birthday on February 28th. Auroville is a living role model for planetary sustainability. Aurovilians seem reluctant to testify of their accomplishments, lest they draw even more lookie-loo tourists. However, I feel that the world need to be inspired by Auroville’s example of vision and design, and so I intend to spill the beans about this truly amazing, real life ecological city.

Auroville has the benefit that it already exists. As the eco-proverb says “it’s not impossible if it already exists.” Auroville role models a good example and a scout forward into the New World that we should seek to build.

Auroville began with the vision and will power of a French spiritual teacher called the Mother. She was the head of spiritual community centered around the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, in south India, in the former French colony of Pondicherry. The Mother was Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator and successor after he left his body in 1950. The long story of these great teachers can be started at Wikipedia and deepened with the book Beyond Man, (or Beyond The Human Species, in gender-neutral American editions) by Georges Van Vrekhem, an Aurovilian resident.

The Mother envisioned creating “the city that the Earth needs” to model human unity and right relationship to the Divine Consciousness. To live as an Aurovilian, no special religion or creed is required, only that people agree to be “Willing Servitors of the Divine Consciousness” as they perceive it. “It’s important to be ‘willing’. We are all servitors whether we know it or not, but getting to understand that and then surrender to It, and being willing to align to It, that is what is required for the New World” comments Bhavana Dee, an American who came to Auroville in 1973, one of Auroville’s 2000 full-fledged community members.

Perhaps Auroville’s most useful lesson is in the power of a vision to manifest. Auroville probably seemed unlikely to succeed at the beginning. Yet, 41 years later, here it is. So I offer the Auroville Equation for success of a vision: Strong vision, plus time, plus dedicated workers, plus Divine Support, equals fulfillment.

Auroville’s clearest victory has been the marvelous job at reforestation. Two million trees have been planted, restoring the forests clear cut by the British and French Imperialists. When Auroville began, the landscape was a desert. Erosion caused huge gullies. Auroville sits on a plateau that tilts slightly towards nearby sea, and all the topsoil had long ago washed into the Bay of Bengal. Today Auroville is a green oasis in the India subcontinent still plagued by desertification. The trees keep Auroville a little cooler than neighboring areas, though it still tropically hot most of the year.

During my first trip to India, I stayed in Auroville for a month. I assumed that all India was blessed with trees and Nature. Later, traveling throughout India, I was repeatedly shocked by denuded landscapes, dusty and rocky ground, the trees gone, the landscapes picked clean by goat herds and impoverished humans. Goats nibble down to the root, killing off the plants with an toxin in their saliva. Only pricker bushes make it, creating a dry, un-diverse, thorny ecosystem.

Aurovilians planted many trees and gardens in the beginning only to see the goats pass through and chew up two months work. So they developed methods for dealing with this problem, such as capturing a goat and charging a fee to release it to the owner, hiring local people as watchmen and fencing properties with thorny bushes. They even tried weaving baskets around each baby tree! Auroville’s successful reforestation and ecological restoration offers a role model to the world, showing that humanity can stop and reverse the planetary trend to desertification.

Aurovilians invented a new kind of brick that doesn’t need firing to harden. Instead, to the mud 5% cement is added and then the bricks are compressed at high pressure and then left to sun-bake until rock hard. This low-carbon technology has been exported widely, particularly into Afghanistan.

Auroville is experimenting with different economic models like gift economies and collectivism. The Mother said that Auroville should have no money. Aurovillians have struggled to embody this vision, and have obeyed the spirit of the law, though perhaps not yet the letter. To run a complex economy, to allow outsiders to visit, money is needed. There is an Auroville account system which acts as a debit card. For example, I paid in $80 dollars, got an account number and a card, and then was able to pay for events, guest house bills, yoga classes, and espresso at Solar Kitchen’s cafe from that account.

A gift economy is a really delightful idea whose time has come. Here’s an concrete example of a gift economy. I ate lunch at the Indus Valley Restaurant. There was a donation box and people gave what they could or felt was the right amount. There was no waitstaff or menus or checks. Workers put the food was put out buffet style, and I served myself a delicious meal of spicy Gujerati Indian vegetarian food. I gave a 100 rupee note, about 2$. A similar meal cost me 30 rupees days earlier at another restaurant. This made me a profitable guest. Leaving I saw a hungry looking Indian young man eating who I imagine gave much less. But we balanced out, and the restaurant has been running successfully for four years.

Another example of the gift economy is the Tsunamika project. After the 2004 tsunami, an Aurovilian design unit created an economic project to help traumatized women from the local villages. They trained the women to make little dolls call Tsunamika, which they gave away, gift economy style. They’ve made over 2 million dolls and given these women financial stability and purpose in their lives. Tsunamika founder tells of a Paris fashion company who wanted a large quantity to put one Tsunamika with every garment they sold that year. In aggressive emails, he wrote trying to barter for a good price. She responded, you don’t understand, you can have as many as you want, for whatever you want to pay. Eventually, the fashionista got clear on the concept, they agreed he would pay for shipping, and he got thousands of dolls. Months later he showed up, with awe, a changed heart and a big check in his hand and said to the founder “I’ve negotiated all my life, but you really took the rug out from under me.”

Auroville also offers a solution to the eco-problem of energy inefficient McMansions. Here the houses are modest, yet beautiful. Yet people have a vibrant community life, and so can live well outside their private home. The private house doesn’t need to be as big if the public space is inviting.

Some of Auroville’s innovations are less material though no less useful. Auroville was created with the idea of actualizing Human Unity. Today Auroville is populated by people from around the world. There are hundreds of Europeans and Americans. There are lots of Koreans both living here and coming as guests. 45 nationalities are represented. Founded at the height of the Cold War, Auroville forged a brave path outside the divisive framework of nationalism and geopolitics. Today, progress toward world unity has been made because of the Internet and global trade and issues of planetary survival. But long before the Internet, Auroville was saying “We are One Big Human Family.”

Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual ideas were Earth-positive. Many religions view the Earth as a second rate stopover on the way to the big Pie-in-the-Sky. Some Hindu philosophy says all this Earth is illusion, only Brahman is real. Sri Aurobindo said that the Earth is Brahman too, that Matter is also part of the Oneness. There is no running away. The job of humanity was to make the Earth and ourselves reflect and become the Divine. We are to bring Heaven onto Earth. This philosophy empowered hundreds of industrious spiritual people to work for 40 years in south India to create heavenly Auroville.

To look at the pictures of the early days, one gets a sense of dedicated spiritual hippies beautifully in-shape from working hard in the sun. Handsome bearded men construct palm-roofed buildings and women carry babies in slings. An Aurovilian challenges my use of the word hippie, saying “Not everyone was a hippie by any means. The Indian devotees and businessmen, the engineers and architects. Many were ‘straight’ and the hippies became straight quickly as they worked to settle the land.” Still, there is an Aquarian vibe that’s part of Auroville’s DNA. Auroville is on a visionary adventure to build a New World based on Love, Consciousness and World Unity. Sounds good, I say! Bring it on!

So if you want to join the Auroville community and be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness, you can. Check out Auroville.org. Or visit as a guest in the Dec-Feb when the weather is best, though also busy, so book reservations. Or visit in Sept-Dec, when it’s quite wet with monsoon rains, but still interesting. Or visit in July-Sept when it’s hot and humid, but there is a distinct sense of actual community. One can participate in the ecological restoration by volunteering to plant trees at Sadhana Forest. College students can visit and earn credit with the Living Routes program. Auroville does have a problem of Indian tour buses unloading on weekends swarming the Visitors Center. So while guests are welcome as an integral part of the Aurovilian economy, there is ambivalence to living in a fishbowl. Hence Aurovilian’s desire to “lay-low” and not testify to the planet of their achievements. I encourage guests to come if they can promise to be polite to the locals and be receptive to their higher spiritual selves

Perhaps Auroville’s greatest attribute is an activist willingness to step boldly forward into the task of creating a New World. We need this spirit of creative innovation of design and intention. Auroville is an living example of the ‘bright green environmentalism, advocated for by Worldchanging.com and described in the following article from What Is Enlightenment magazine.

“Bright green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than “the tools, models and ideas” that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions. As Bruce Sterling said in his first Viridian design speech, “The future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.”

Indeed, the future is already partially built in Auroville.

I will close with an Auroville-style prayer. May Auroville’s good example inspire planetary transformation. May the Divine Consciousness swiftly and easily manifest a New Age of sustainability, truth and beauty.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Photos from Auroville and Pondcherry



Auroville's Birthday is February 28th, and that morning they had a meditation in the amphitheater near the Matramandir temple. Dawn came up blue and quiet as a several hundred people meditated. For a few minutes they played a recording of the Mother reading the Auroville Charter in many languages. Auroville is to have no dogmas, but to be an Aurovillian one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.



This is the roof of my guesthouse Verite. Here you see the solar panels, and the roof of Verite's main hall, site of events and mystical kirtan and so forth.




This is Verite's windmill. The rudder of the windmill is decorated with Sri Aurobindo's symbol, which like the Star of David, united triangles, only here it's elongated in the middle into a square, with a lotus to symbolize the enlightened consciousness that arises out of the muddy pond of Creation.



This is a schoolyard garden at the New Creation School. Bamboo has been well-employed as the sides.




In Pondicherry, fishermen head out before dawn, to take advantage of the hours before the sun blares upon the skin like a toaster oven. Their boats are sometimes very primitive, curved logs tied together into canoes, paddled out.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

a poem of Sri Aurobindo about "Goethe"

I found this poem of Sri Aurobindo in his book "Colllected Poems" about the amazing philosopher and naturalist Goethe, who I learned to love through the book by Stephen Buhner called "The Secret Teaching of Plants."


Goethe


A perfect face amid barbarian faces,

A perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme,

Traveller with calm, inimitable paces,

Critic with judgement absolute to all time,

A complete strength when men were maimed and weak,

German obscured the spirit of a Greek.

Friday, January 30, 2009

GOP Congresss co-conspires with GOP arsonists

Bush set fire to the country and now the GOP members of Congress seem to let that sucker burn.

All 178 Republican members of Congress voted against the stimulus bill of Obama.

The GOP is trying to repeat the play on Clinton in ‘92, where they cockblocked him on everything, then blamed him for the failure of the health care bill, and were rewarded with retaking control of Congress. This is just how these guys think. As in “Just ignore that our president started two wars and torched the economy. Don’t put those fires! In two years, we can blame Obama from amidst the rubble and smoke damage. Then we’ll gain a few seats in this arcane electoral body.”

Republicans are behaving as a ‘disloyal opposition.’ Wikipedia defines the root term this way: “Loyal opposition is the concept that one can be opposed to the actions of the government or ruling party without being opposed to the constitution of the political system.”

A loyal opposition is loyal to the country first, while still in opposition over ideological reasons. Country first, dogma second. A disloyal opposition seeks to undermine the ruling party with everything they’ve got, whether legal, illegal, moral or immoral.

Rush Limbaugh said he wants Obama to fail and the GOP is acting to make that so. The GOP so lacks vision that it takes marching orders from a cold-hearted sociopath turned mean and bitchy from ongoing opiate addiction. Someone with an opiate addiction once told me that a side-effect of the dope was a grumpy bitchiness snuck into his personality. I hear that bitchiness in Rush, and I wish his mean voice wasn’t polluting our national dialogue.

At the risk of aiding a disloyal opposition, the obvious direction for the redemption of the Republican Party is towards Ron Paul. Otherwise, the GOP will go the way of the Whigs. Which would be good for the planet and fun to watch.

But the stakes are high. The human species could wind up in Mad Max pretty quick here if we don’t play our cards right. Hopefully the GOP won’t burn us all out on the way down.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Letter to Obama on healing the planet and the economy

Dear President Obama and allies,

I write to offer some ideas for solving the environmental crisis while encouraging economic growth.


Executive summary

1. Scale up existing solutions.
2. Catch up to European laws first.
3. Create a national composting and recycling system.
4. Parlay the whole foods movement into an economic engine.
5. Get pioneering green innovation brought into the mainstream.
6. Encourage eating less meat.
7. Create a long-term human survival plan to encourage economic development.


1. “Scale up” existing solutions.

Solutions already exist. Now we need a massive ‘scaling up’ of existing technologies and practices. Every roof should have a solar hot water system. Every city should have a “Complete Streets” with bike lanes. And so on. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but rather, we need to mass produce the wheel that’s already working fine in small numbers. “Scaling Up” deserves to be an organizing theme in coming years.

2. Catch up to Europe first.

The EU is ahead on environmental issues and the US should start by copying them to catch up. While corporate America stalled, Europe raced ahead.

The US should adopt EU standards on toxic substances in products. For example, European kids are safer than American kids because their laws prevent phthalates in toys. In the last five years, the EU economy has flourished while adopting this strong eco-regulatory framework, according to Mark Shapiro, author of Exposed. We can start by making American products comply with European law so we have access to those markets. Easier still, we can require products to be labeled if they’d be banned in Belgium, as a new California law requires.

The city of Hague in the Netherlands has the best public transport in the world: street-level trams link to subways and trains, plus a bike system of bike lanes and bike racks. On the tram, they have little TV screens that announce each stop! As the green proverb says, “It’s not impossible if it already exists!” Let’s make our cities rebuild and flourish around a 21st century post-car transportation system. We can start by having one aspiring city install and model the Hague’s system as an engine for urban renewal.

3. Let’s create thorough national composting, recycling and E-waste program.

Our responsibility to future generations is to leave a planet that’s not a toxic swamp. Let us become conscious of our society’s digestion processes of our waste. We need national programs to deal with e-waste, recycling and compost. These programs are win-win for creating jobs, educating the public, creating a durable society, forging new technologies, and encouraging good design by manufacturers.

Cities should have composting facilities and curbside pick-up. This would create some industrial jobs creating the compost turning equipment. Lawn waste makes up 1/3 of trash, and so just composting it saves vast dollars and gives us the compost to use. The city of LA has done great work in this area with the help of Andy Lipkis, founder of Tree People.

Most importantly, composting teaches people about the recycling process inherent in matter. From old lettuce to compost pile and then the garden and back to lettuce. People think they can throw things “away”, but there is no “away” in a closed system like the test-tube of the Earth.

E-waste is an opportunity for economic development. We can build electronics so that we can easily reclaim the valuable metals for re-use. Currently, our E-waste is going to China to the planet’s most toxic work sites. People burn bonfires to melt the plastic off the wires, sending plumes of smoke into the sky and pollution into the rivers. This system will cause birth defects for generations around the world. The book High Tech Trash documents this problem in spooky detail.

Green jobs and a green economy ultimately mean creating products and jobs in harmony with Earth’s biological life-support systems. We need clean production processes and safe disposal for a product’s afterlife. We must “make a way out of no way” and create new methods for responding to our criminally disorganized trash system.

Humanity has yet to redesign around Rachel Carson’s central truth that the borders between things are permeable, and toxins in the environment enter the flesh, bioaccumulate and cause disease. One in 150 kids is autistic from toxins disrupting the brain’s delicate biochemistry. In 20 years, that ratio might be 1 in 5. We need to end “laissez-faire” environmental regulation too.

Global pollution is on track to bioaccumulate into “Global Toxicity.” Future generations may all be born with birth defects due to inescapable environmental toxins. Already mother’s milk around the world contains DDT traces.

Therefore, Green Jobs initiatives should focus on areas of municipal recycling and bioremediation. Our universities should invest all out in Biomimicry, Biodegradable Design, and Green Chemistry.

I recommend Professor William McDonough to head the Dept. of Design.

4. Build on the healthy food movement to create an economic boom that also solves root causes of the health care crisis.

During the Bush Dark Ages, many Americans took refuge from politics by retreating to make change in the private sphere of health choices. Many started ‘voting with their dollar’ for earth-friendly products and food. One of America’s most vital social movements surrounds healthy food.

The Obama Administration should amplify and invest in this whole foods movement. A vital web of people are ready to serve as a platform for a great national endeavor of healing the food supply.

Many food advocates support planting a “Climate Crisis Victory Garden” for the White House. Starting that garden would encourage all the right people.

Furthermore, our schools can serve healthy food. We can build school yard gardens. We can create a national network of farmer’ markets. We can insure poor people have access to fresh, clean food. We can make sure our hospitals serve healthy food. We can heal our food supply and that will help solve the health care crisis from the front end.

Next, we can get America’s industrial agriculture system to convert to ecological methods by ‘scaling up’ the best practices coming out of the organic farming movement. The Department of Ag spends 2% on organic Ag and 98 % on chemical Ag. We should flip those numbers. The Dept of Ag should create an Advisory Council headed by Michael Pollan, Alice Waters and Francis Moore Lappe. These are the names that need to be involved in healing American agriculture. These people have been throwing down the truth for decades.

We should assist US farmers in transitioning to organic methods. We should have organic farming development zones to create hubs of new green agribusiness.

5. Encourage into the mainstream green innovations and ecological ideas that have developed at society’s periphery.

America has a strong environmental movement that hasn’t gotten enough government support or cooperation. This entire movement has grown and thrived at the margins. Let’s create an onramp for ideas from the alienated progressive environmental movement. For example, Elliot Colemen is famous among organic growers for pioneering production of salad greens in unheated green houses in New England. This carbon-neutral technology should be massively scaled up.

For decades, many good people have been working steadily on environmental solutions. Remember, hairy post-hippies pioneered the Internet in California. One of America’s great strengths is a counterculture that has been steadily moving in the right direction for decades. Co-housing, organic farming, alternative medicine, vegetarian diets and less-consumptive lifestyles are all innovations from the progressive edge that now need to be scaled up for the mainstream.

Unfortunately, this movement has been largely opposed, discouraged, un-funded, harassed by government during this long Ice Age of Reagan. The Right wing has made cultural war on all things “60’s” for 40 years through various forms of prohibition. I think some Republicans oppose windmills because they don’t want that ethical vegetarian family member to win that long-running cultural argument.

So how does an aspiring to-be-green America access and upload all this waiting wisdom?

I recommend starting with organizing an idea-sharing project with the network surrounding the Bioneers Conference. This conference has been a real hub of dedicated, well-intentioned ecological thinking.

The Post Office can issues stamps of Rachel Carson, Helen and Scott Nearing, and J.I. Rodale to honor American pioneers of a sane relationship to the Earth.

We can install waterless toilets at the rest area’s along the highway system. Vermont Law School has toilets that should be replicated far and wide, with long drops and fans pushing the air downward. Let’s mainstream this ready-to-go technology.

America's indigenous First Peoples have ecological wisdom to offer and would be healed and uplifted in the process of being asked to share.

Humanity faces the challenge to integrate an surging population into the fragile life web of the Biosphere. Luckily, people have been working on it for years. Now let’s get the government to support, fund, and replicate the efforts of America’s grassroots environmental movement.

6. Encourage the reduction of eating meat.

Dealing with the Climate Crisis will require getting people to eat less meat. The crunched Climate Crisis numbers show that meat is a prime villain. While the gov’t can’t dictate private dietary choices, it can stop funding “perverse incentives” that encourage meat consumption. The gov’t should end subsidies for meat production on federal land, cut meat budgets to schools and prisons, make meat priced at true cost, and enforce safety standards in the meat industry. This would help decrease meat consumption and thus promote health and cut carbon emissions.

Make the prisons largely vegetarian. Studies show that vegetarian diets reduce prison violence, and meat production creates a lot of carbon. The motto could be “Can’t do rice & beans all the time, don’t do the crime.” A program could teach people in prison how to grow food and how to prepare healthy food. The link between diet and behavior problems in young people is well established. If America starts eating well, many other problems dissipate.

Additionally, we should raise stiff taxes on antibiotic use in factory farms to discourage the overuse that’s causes antibiotic resistance. Future generations need antibiotics to work.

7. Create long-term strategic plan for survival of the planet. Make this “design assignment” the inspiration and container for economic development.

We need to plot a trajectory towards a healthy human future. In some ways, the Economic Crisis comes at a good time. Better the economy collapsing now than the Biosphere collapsing in a decade or two. We have a real opportunity to start moving towards a 21st century civilization that won’t just eat all the resources and go off the rails in 20 years.

We can create comprehensive strategy for long-term human survival. We can make economic and strategy decisions within the constraints of good Earth stewardship. Our design assignment is the creation of a sustainable world civilization.

This is a tall order. We are very far from it now. But if we put our best minds on it, if we unleash human potential on the truest of true goals, we can surely do this.

Furthermore, economies flourish on continuity and long-term investment. When we get the parameters set for the next 300 years of human civilization, people will know where to invest. We can create a global renaissance of business, innovation, cooperation and prosperity. When humanity understands the design assignment, we will know how and what to build. When companies know what the environmental laws will be in 20 years, they will know where to invest their efforts. When industry knows there are taxes for creating toxic waste, they’ll reengineer the manufacturing process towards ‘green chemistry.’ Government can provide the vision and direction and the carrot and the stick for the new society’s design parameters.

Now is the time to create a vision and plan for the long-term survival of human civilization.

May humanity get it together and live happily ever after.


Theo Talcott grows certified organic food professionally, writes on environmental issues and studies green issues at the Bioneers Conference. He blogs at thinkingaboutsurvival.blogspot.com

stop mailing dead people!

Dear Corporate America,


please stop mailing dead people.

I just got a direct mail for my beloved grandmother, who dropped her body 5 years ago, for Gevalia Kaffe, some fancy coffee mailorder thing. I did the ethical thing: I got the no-postage-necessary envelope, and filled out a little note and I'm sending it back to them, saying please take us off your mailing lists.

Think about how many trees it takes to mail dead people.

direct mail has gotta' go.


yours in the trees,

Theo

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

The Zeitgeist of Obama

"HAPPY OBAMA NEW YEAR!"

Try yelling that to friends and strangers, it feels good and true. We are transitioning to a new era. The Bush Dark Ages are over! Humanity pivots and races into the Obama Age of Light. Personally, I am gleeful and at regular intervals dancing around the room.

Zeitgeist is an useful German word that means roughly "the spirit of times" or "the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation." There is a lovely zeitgeist afoot right now. There is a national mood that's new. I've seen optimistic and idealistic pockets of Americans, but I've never seen gleeful, idealistic national unity as a pervasive pop phenomenon. In the collective emotional body of the nation, there is an exultation and healing and relief! There is a sweet joy and gratitude and hope. America is back, baby!

We are experiencing the literal spiritual Rebirth of America. Everything eternally good and true about America is being brought forward. America stands for some powerful ideas that humanity needs: national unity from ethnic and racial diversity, religious tolerance, progressive inclusion of all for equal rights, the Rule of Law, and a fair legal system to administer Justice. And when a person or country stands for Good ideas, we are aligned to that great moral force that guides the universe. And so America is being plugged into the Divine again.

Obama is also asking us to expand our sense of identity beyond our ego to a greater identity as Americans and as humanity. Transcending ego is essential mechanism of a mystical spiritual experience. That unidentified spirituality lurks beneath pundit commentary. I heard an CNN commentator striving to overcome embarrassment as she said the mood on the DC mall had a flavor of the 'Brotherhood of Man." Go with it, sister, because it's a relief to not have to live inside the tiny prison of the ego, and to be released from the narcissistic self-absorption of the ego. It is joyful to start caring about our larger identities, like the country and the planet and the Brotherhood of Man.

Something died in the America during the Bush years. I, like many, was embarrassed by America's Imperial wars. America was torturing and abandoning the Rule of Law. Democracy became Corprotocracy and Kleptocracy. America became aligned to historical forces that need to opposed. The Bush version of America is not an America I love, but that I loathe! I am against the America that sends a War-Machine to other countries to steal the oil that we shouldn't be burning anyway.

They say that "Patriotism is the last refuge for a scoundrel." The Bushites wrapped themselves in the flag and the name and the symbols of America, and then totally abandoned the deeper meaning and purpose of America. In doing so, they turned the American flag into a phony-baloney fascistic propaganda tool. America isn't great because we have a nice flag. It's great because Jefferson's Bill of Rights guaranteed so many human rights that our political arrangement is an evolutionary leap forward.

America is great because we have traditionally been aligned to a great forward march of history towards greater liberty, dignity, distributed justice, and freedom. Bush has taken us two steps back, but now Obama has realigned the nation's moral compass on that great march. For example, in the inaugural speech, Obama said that we won't sacrifice our sacred ideals for expediency. He has promised to close the gulag prison at Guantanamo Bay. This is Good America returning.

America died and been born again. On Election Night '08, Norman Lear had an epiphany on this subject and eventually created some art about it at www.bornagainamerican.org.

So if we are Born Again Americans, then now what?

Well, first of all, this country is a bit of fixer upper and needs work.

Luckily, Obama and friends seem to have pretty good bead on where to go.

So how do we become allies of Obama?

How do we become Good Americans in a time of a Good America?

I don't know, but I'm willing to learn.

May humanity learn to be cooperative, supportive allies in the effort to heal the planet.

Happy Obama New Year!

Monday, January 19, 2009

Befriending Bacteria: Kombutcha, Candita and the Bottom Floor of Creation

We should Befriend to the bottom floor of creation, the bacterial microherds. These are the support system of everything we do. Inside our stomach is a million billion trillion creepycrawly little monsters, I mean, hard working digestors. I admit it's a little spooky on first glance, and that explains our naive society's heavy reliance on antibacterial soaps and antibioitics.

I recommend the Synergy Cosmic Cranberry Kombutcha tea as a way to introduce your belly to a new friends in the microbiobial "probiotic' community.

When we keep a healthy microherd, we are impervious to the baddies. Anti-microbial soap clear cuts the probiotic communities on the skin and leaves an open territory that the body must replenish and thus creates opportunity for sickness. Antimicrobial soap is a criminal abuse of consumer ignorance.

Likewise, Candita is a noxious, difficult-to-beat yeast infection that comes when the body is made vulnerable after heavy anti-biotics.

Humanity's lesson for the 21st century: Learn to live within the BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS in which we are embedded.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Obama and the Truth and Rebirth of America

Today at my chuch they had Jack Healy talk, in honor of MLK day, an organizer who was with Dr. King back in '63. The church was packed and the vibe was high. There is something profound afoot in this country. A rebirth of what it means to be American. For years, the American flag has been polluted with torture and war and waterboarding. But something is happening, and we are returning to that shining dream inside the American Experiment.

Obama says in an article from our Findhorn friends who advocate for visionary leadership

click here to read the article

that when he's talking the truth he can feel a special power in that isn't there if he's just being glib or clever.

i mean, it's an incredibly inspiring moment in our nation, this rebirth of what is possible.

People are pretty jaded about politics because we've been raped by savage heathens using all the sacred language to tie us in knots. And here comes Obama cutting through the clouds of illusion with spiritual clarity because he can actually talk about truth things and true issues without getting caught in a cloud of phoney language and posturing. That's was Obama's secret power in the primaries. All the other candidates felt compelled to speak in the gobbledeegook of triangulated posturing.

In the Hindu tradition, they talk about Satyagraha, or Truth Force, or Firmness in Truth. Gandhi named his movement after this and it explains alot about Obama's success.

link to great way to meet Rachel Carson

insightful Rachel Carson play on the Bill Moyers show

Friday, January 16, 2009

a picture of solar system




Here's a picture of the solar system on our house. These 80 evacuated tubes gather solar energy as heat, warming these wavey blue-ish sheets of metal that transfer the heat into proplyn glycal (or anti-freeze, like in your car's radiator), which circulates into the basement where it transfers the heat to a 500 gallon water tank. From here, the heat is then distributed to radiant floor heating. Awesomely warm feet in the winter, and free energy from the sun, though not free to put in the system, but with an expected 10 year payback in saved money on oil bills.

It's very exciting that the Obama administration is keen to help people hook up their homes on an environmental level.

A little insulation goes a long way.

I'm reading a book called "The Hot Topic" on the Climate Crisis and it says that investing in insulation and energy efficiency is by far the most cost effective way to cut carbon. So let's do it! Go Green America!

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

The Comedy of the Madoff Economy

The unfolding story of Bernie Madoff has been fun to watch.

Bernie Madoff is, of course, the Wall Street titan busted for running a $50 billion dollar Ponzi scheme. It is fabulously ironic that Bernie Made-off made off with so much investor money. The Universe secretly runs on meaning, and people symbolically represent their true nature without even intending it. Assistant Treasury Secretary is Neel Kashkeri, as in Cash-carry. And Kashkeri certainly has carried out a ton of cash out of the Treasury to get snorted by his Wall Street pals.

It is sad/funny that Bernie Madoff is under house arrest, living large in his mansion still. How many poor black people are in jail for being poor? Ahh, but Bernie isn’t the class of citizen we use to fuel the great slave-machine of the Prison Industrial Complex. It reminds me of the proverb “They only hang the little thieves.”

So it was pleasant to see Bernie busted again for trying to mail $1 million in jewelry to relatives. Prosecutors want him to go to actual jail now, as this jewelry mailing violates his bail conditions. I wonder how they caught his wife at the post office? Was the box suspiciously heavy and jangling?

It is funny how Madoff perfectly symbolically represents the American economy. The US economy is running a giant Ponzi scheme. We have an $800 billion trade deficit annually. We keep borrowing, China keeps buying our bonds, we buy the cheap toxic crap. So, I guess the lesson here is: it’s only a Ponzi scheme if it’s small enough or after it goes belly up.

Another amusing story was the people sneaking into Madoff’s mansion and stealing a 5 foot bronze statue of Madoff! (I mean, it’s funny enough that Madoff has a statue of himself!) The statue was returned later with a note that said “Your days of plenty are numbered.” The note was signed ”the Edukators.” A German movie seems to have been the inspiration for this movie. (And the award for the guerilla marketing for film goes to....”)

It has been a pleasure to see Wall Street taken down a notch. These slick fellows with their suits have been racing an economic engine that’s consuming the world. Big Business has dismissively stonewalled on environmental regulation. Climate Change is breaking the sky and Wall Street blocks solutions. The thinking of paper pusher billionaires is sociopathically dissociative and cold-hearted and alienated from the Earth and the ecosystems that support biological life. It’s good that Wall Street’s blind confidence gets shaken now before we have full-on biosphere collapse in a few years.

Finally, it is joyful to see karma ripening for “The Masters of the Universe.” Wall Street has been dominating the world and the national dialogue for decades. Deal with the Climate Crisis? Nope, not economically feasible. Cutting down the Amazon rain forest? Nope, need the land for McDonald’s hamburgers. A terrible, foolish greedy mentality has run the world for too long. Robert Bly writes about “the greedy soul”, and how humanity is always struggling with an avaricious part of ourselves. The Muslims call these bundles of desires our 'nafs', and we purify them through effort and struggle to be good and generous.

Bernie Madoff suffers from a greedy soul. I feel a little sorry for him because he looks like a nice enough guy who won at the wrong game. He is just like thousands of other soft-handed, educated but amoral Wall Street money movers who have partied like rock stars on other people’s money for decades. And it’s satisfying to see them get what they deserve...

handcuffs.