The following compiled article is circulating on the web. These kind of reports are often labled conspiracy hoaxes, and dismissed without much thought, but perhaps we should take a closer look?

Instant Weather Crisis

What you are about to read explains imminent events that will change our world forever, this appears to be certain. This is unsettling, but you must know, if you wish to plan for the future, what is coming will either be DRY and heat or ICE and freezing.

Global warming has been in the news for over 40 years, and by this time we have become complacent. Our scientists have come to the agreement that global warming will eventually cause major changes and problems in the world, but in their way of thinking it will be 50 to 100 years before we will actually have to deal with the effects.

 The general idea is that global warming will be slow and the world will find time to discover the solutions to the problems.

 New powerful evidence strongly suggests that this scenario is simply wrong, and we had better prepare for another more abrupt possibility.

DISCOVERY MAGAZINE

One of the first hints that something may be different than what we are being told (especially here in the US) was published in Discover magazine in September 2002 with the cover announcing ìGlobal Warming Surprise, A New Ice Age”, ìOceanographers have discovered a huge river of freshwater in the Atlantic formed by melting polar ice. They warn it could soon bury the Gulf Stream, plunging North American and Europe into frigid winters.”

That was almost two years ago, and no one listened. Life goes on oblivious to the incredible danger approaching.

ENGLAND & SIR DAVID KING

Then in January 2004 enter Sir David King. Sir King is the Prime Minister of England´s chief scientist. Sir King went to Mr. Blair and told him of the impending worldwide disaster and that they needed to tell the world of what was about to happen.

Tony Blair told Sir David King to be quiet and not speak. But Sir King felt that this was simply too important for him to say nothing, so in January of this year he deliberately went around Mr. Blair and went straight to the American Journal of Science where he published his information and concern.

Sir King said in this article, ìIn my view, climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism.”

England placed a gag order on Sir David King, and now he is not even allowed to discuss this subject publicly without threat of detention.

AMERICA & THE PENTAGON

A month later in February 2004, the Pentagon became involved, which has stirred the world to action.

The Pentagon has been studying Global Warming for many years because of its possible national security problems associated with the kind of changes that could present themselves to the world through Global Warming.

A special study was conducted through one of the Pentagon´s departments, the Office of Net Assessment, which is directed by Andrew W. Marshall, 83, who has the responsibility of identifying long-term threats to the United States.

Mr. Marshall went to a US based think-tank called Global Business Network to compile the possibilities of Global Warming on US national security. A study was completed in October of 2003 and released to the Pentagon, which was looking at this problem from the point of view of what is the worst that could happen. It was named ìAn Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.” The summary went far beyond what most Pentagon experts had expected.

Realizing the incredible possibilities of this study, Mr. Marshall made a decision to publicly report this and other information to the American people. And probably because of President Bush´s stance on Global Warming, which is beyond negative, he also decided to go around the president, and he published his information and concern in Fortune magazine on February 9th 2004.

In his article in Fortune, Mr. Marshall explains how the melting North and South poles and glaciers from around the world are composed of fresh water and within this fact is the basis of the impending global weather disaster.

The Gulf Stream, scientifically referred to as North Atlantic thermohaline conveyor, is a stream of warm water that comes from south of the equator and flows over the surface of the ocean toward the north where this warm water keeps Northern America and Northern and Western Europe from freezing. It also holds most of the world´s weather patterns in the way we are used to.

Then as this Gulf Stream cools down, it drops to the bottom of the ocean and returns as a river in the ocean to the south where it warms up again and rises to the surface and then returns to the north one more time in a continuous convection current. It is a huge three dimensional figure eight.

The motor that keep this warm water flowing is found in the north where the Gulf Stream drops to the bottom of the ocean. It is the salt density of the ocean that causes this river to drop and pulls the warm water up from the south.

Now that the poles are melting and fresh water is flowing into the Atlantic Ocean and the salt density is decreasing, the Gulf Stream does not drop quite as far, which results in a slowing down of this Stream. The Gulf Stream has been dramatically slowing down now for at least ten years.

As the Gulf Stream slows down, the warmth is not brought to the North Atlantic region, and the weather patterns begin to change for they are dependent on this warmth to keep a balance.

THE MELTING POLES

During the Bush administration when discussions have been held on the melting of the North & South Poles, this government and US corporate entities alike have stated that the world´s scientists are all wrong on their conclusions that say there is great danger, and have led the American public to believe there is no real problem at all.

However, George W. Bush was the focus of attack by Sir David King when he wrote his article in Science, for the world´s greatest scientific minds, at least one thousand seven hundred of them with the Union of Concerned Scientists say that Mr. Bush is ill informed at the least.

Since the US government is 25% of the CO2 pollution in the world that is creating Global Warming, a discussion of Mr. Bush´s Global Warming policies is paramount. Perhaps one of the best articles that summaries Mr. Bush´s position will be found in the ROLLING STONES magazine article of May 19, 2004 by Tim Dickinson. What follows in italics is a portion of this article.
Given the imminent threat from global warming, even the Bush administration might be expected to launch a War on Heat. After all, as a candidate in 2000, George W. Bush vowed to “establish mandatory reduction targets” for carbon-dioxide emissions, saying he would make the issue a top priority.

Once Bush became president, however, reducing carbon emissions was the first promise he broke — and his record has been all downhill from there. Only two months after taking office, the administration withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, the global treaty that the United States signed in 1997 to set strict limits on greenhouse emissions. Instead, Bush instituted a voluntary emissions plan that has been an abject failure: So far, only fourteen companies have pledged to curb their CO2 output.

The president also folded the interagency group that monitors climate change into the Commerce Department — led by Secretary Don Evans, a former oil and gas executive. And he called for additional climate research that would delay any meaningful regulation for at least another decade. “We do not know how much our climate could or will change in the future,” Bush declared in a speech in the Rose Garden. Such statements spurred an open letter signed by twenty Nobel laureates, who blasted the administration for having “consistently sought to undermine” public understanding of man’s role in global warming. (Bush’s science adviser refused to be interviewed for this article.)

Then the censorship began. In September 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency released an air-quality report that-for the first time since 1996-included no mention of global warming. Seven months later, the White House made wholesale revisions to the climate-change chapter of the EPA’s “Report on the Environment,” playing down human influence, deleting references to the health impacts of global warming and inserting climate data funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute. The EPA withdrew the altered chapter, acknowledging in an internal memo that it “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change.”

Even some Republicans have been astounded at Bush’s meddling in EPA affairs. “What seems constantly evident with George W. Bush is that EPA is expected to take its marching orders from the White House on regulatory matters,” says Russell Train, who headed the agency under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. “During my time, I never had that happen. Never.” Train, a recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom from the elder Bush, calls the administration’s approach to global warming “totally wrong” and “irresponsible.”

Bush can rely on key Republicans in Congress to block any efforts to curb pollution and stave off disaster. Sen. James Inhofe, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, dismisses global warming as a “hoax.” In a speech last July, Inhofe compared the IPCC to the Soviets and extolled the virtues of what he called a “CO2-enhanced” world. “It is my fervent hope,” he concluded, “that Congress will reject the prophets of doom who peddle propaganda masquerading as science in the name of saving the planet from catastrophic disaster.”
From another point of view in the same article we hear: ìThey (the Bush Administration) do not have a credible plan, either domestically or internationally, for addressing the problem (Global Warming), says Michael Oppenheimer, a climatologist at Princeton University. They (the Bush Administration) argue that they don´t want to address global warming, he says, ‘because the science is shaky´. And that approach is indefensible, because the science isn´t shaky.”

The North Pole Melting

Let´s look at the facts. Two summers ago the North Pole completely melted for the first time in history that we know of. Both private and military ships floated directly over the actual North Pole as it was completely water. This area has never been seen to be less then ten feet of solid ice.

Greenpeace a few years ago announced that the North Pole´s winter to summer snow pack had receded by around three hundred miles, but no one listened.

And today, as I am writing this article, we are witnessing the Alaska fire that has consumed over one million acres of forest. This fire is burning in an area that is always wet with rain or snow until now. And this fire, as you will understand in this article is directly related to the melting of the poles and the Gulf Stream.

But finally the Pentagon, thanks to Andrew Marshall, has told the truth in the Fortune magazine on February 9th. The Pentagon shows a satellite photo of the North Pole in 1970 and then in 2003, which reveals that, according to the Pentagon, 40% of the North Pole has melted in just 33 years. And it is melting faster and faster now. The Pentagon has now proven that all these government statements that the poles are not melting were simply a lie. And it is a lie more damaging than anything that Bush´s Iraq war could possibly throw at the United States.

The South Pole Melting

In the South Pole a couple of years ago Larsen A ledge broke off, which surprised many scientists. At that time we were told by the scientific personnel that were studying this event that it was no big deal since this ice ledge had only been connected to the South Pole for about the last ten thousand years.

And these same scientists also added that Larsen B ledge that was behind Larsen A ledge would never melt as it has been there for many ice ages. Yet last year, Larsen´s B ledge broke off and went to sea. These same scientists said that it would take six months to melt because of its immense size, but again they were wrong. It melted in a mere 35 days, and more significant, it rose the entire world´s oceans by almost an inch.

Now with Larsen´s B ledge gone, an incredibly enormous ice shelf called Ross´s Shelf is exposed and the only thing holding Ross´s Shelf from sliding into the ocean was Larsen´s B ledge. According to my sources, Ross´s Shelf is now cracking.

If Ross´s Shelf were to slide into the ocean, it has been estimated that it would raise the entire world´s oceans by sixteen to twenty feet. And that, my friends, would change the world, as almost every coastal city in the world and many islands along with the county of Holland would be underwater. Perhaps it will take an event like this to wake up the world to become serious about Global Warming.

THE ANCIENT PAST

The Pentagon in their study of what is now happening in the North Atlantic ocean, has looked into the past to see when this slowing down or stoppage of the Gulf Stream has happened before and what actually took place at those time in the world´s weather patterns.

In actual fact, this North Atlantic ocean slowing or stoppage has happen hundreds of times before in the past going back hundred of millions years, but in our recent past of the last 10,000 years, it has only happened twice.

The most recent time was in the year 1300 AD, and at that time it simply slowed down. It never actually stopped. And why it slowed down, scientists are at the moment theorizing. They don´t really know why.

It resulted in abrupt global climatic weather changes that never returned to normal for 550 years. This period of time in our history has been named the ìLittle Ice Age” because of the havoc it caused to our weather and the dramatic cooling that resulted.

What the Pentagon has realized is that at that time of the ìLittle Ice Age”, the East Coast of America became extremely cold, while the middle and Western areas of the United States became so dry that the Midwest became a dust bowl and the mountain forests burned to the ground, just as they are doing right now today, for you see, this slowing down of the Gulf Stream has been going on today for about ten years. It also affected Europe dramatically as their weather changed completely during the ìLittle Ice Age”.

A study of the Anasazi Indians of the 14th century is enlightening. In Chaco Canyon in New Mexico the Anasazi completely disappeared, and where they went no one is sure. But one of the reasons that has emerged from the study of the New Mexico environment for their leaving the area is that soon after the turn of the 14th century, Chaco Canyon went into a drought where they didn´t receive a drop of rain for 47 years! 47 years of drought will definitely cause anyone to move. No water, no life.

The archeologists who presented this study didn´t know why the drought happened, but it is clear why it happened with the information of the Gulf Stream slowing down just before this period. And this is exactly what the Pentagon believes is about to happen here in America, Canada and Europe as we speak.

We may think that this current drought in the US West is going to stop soon, but the earth´s history with the Gulf Stream suggests strongly that it will continue for about another 40 years before it begin to regain balance.

8200 Years Ago

However, the Pentagon report believes that the Gulf Stream, from everything they know, is not just going to slow down, but rather it is going to stop. And the last time this happened was 8200 years ago.

And according to the Pentagon, from their research, this is a much more dramatic scenario. When the Gulf Stream stopped 8200 years ago, it soon left Northern Europe under a half mile of ice, and New York and England quickly endured weather similar to Siberia.

Further it resulted in a true ìIce Age” that lasted about 100 years, and so you can see why the Pentagon is so worried. According to Andrew Marshall, like Sir David King, he says that this Gulf Stream problem is a greater threat to US national security (and other countries´) than all of the world´s combined terrorism. Really, when you think about it, terrorism is nothing compared to the stopping of the Gulf Stream. It´s not even close.

Realize that without stable weather conditions, the growing of food becomes almost impossible, and according to the Pentagon, this could become such a huge problem for the world in the near future, that wars will begin to form all over the world, not for oil or energy, but for food and water.

And with whole countries having to evacuate, if this were to happen, such as Finland, Sweden and Denmark, which will be under ice, and many other countries for other reasons, this enormous immigration is what will cause the most threat to national security, again according to the Pentagon report.

This is why Andrew Marshall and Sir David King wanted the world to know about what was coming so that the world could begin to prepare for the inevitable.

 THE US SENATE

Then in March 2004 the US Senate became aware of what the Pentagon was saying and they appropriated 60 million dollars to the study of ABRUPT GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGES. This offers hope that soon the US Senate will begin to tell the world of these coming climate changes.

THE UNITED NATIONS

In June 2004, ending on June 29th, a meeting was held at the United Nations to consider what to do about Global Warming and the Gulf Stream. 154 countries participated with the result that the only thing they could figure out what to do was to eliminate the use of oil and gasoline as soon as possible.

There are those who believe that if we continue to lower the CO2 levels, that possibly we can slow down the problems, and, of course, we must do everything we can. This is important for there are ocean currents other that the North Atlantic that are in every ocean, and if they all were to stop or slow down, Earth would all most certainly enter a true ice age. And history has shown that if that were to happen, our civilization would not return to a warm period again for 90,000 years.

But really, to change or increase the current of the entire Atlantic ocean to bring it back to ìnormal” is beyond the possibilities of the human race and all of it´s technologies. It is too late, by the estimate of most of the world´s scientists, to alter the course of what is about to happen. All we can do now is prepare for the shock. And preparation is essential, which is the main message of both Sir David King and Andrew Marshall.

NASA PREPARES

On July 13th, 2004, NASA launched a satellite, the first of three, that´s whole purpose is to study Global Warming. Besides the study of the ozone, another huge problem associated with Global Warming, these satellites will monitor the temperature and salt density of the oceans. Perhaps we will at least be able to monitor the rapid changes and predict what will happen next.

SOME UNUSUAL WEATHER CHANGES THAT HAVE HAPPENED SINCE THE GULF STREAM SLOWED DOWN

In March 2004 the world saw a major hurricane hit the coast of Brazil. This is the first time in all recorded history that a hurricane has struck land in South America.

In May 2004, the United States witnessed 562 tornadoes in a single month, breaking all records. A few of these tornadoes were recorded in Seattle, Washington. Never has a tornado been seen in Seattle.

Eastern Canada in the winter of 2003/2004 just had one of the coldest winters on record.

For several years forest fires have been burning around the world. The list would be extensive. The north part of Australia is on fire. Alaska, as we have already mentioned, is burning. Unprecedented!
The entire Western United States is under fire, jumping from region to region, with the US government announcing that this is the worse drought in 500 years. Really, the fires are worldwide.

France and Europe had a heat wave in 2003 that caused 15,000 people to die in France and 30,000 through-out Europe simply from the intense heat caused by Global Warming and the Gulf Stream.

Argentina this month July 2004, had the greatest storm they have ever seen in their history.

Mexico´s weather is so strange and wet in some regions that mold/fungus is forming on their crops. (And in other regions they are having a drought) As weather patterns begin to change more and more radically, food growth will become one of our biggest problems.

The coral reefs of the world are dying because of Global Warming, and this is threatening most of the islands in the oceans, including those in the Pacific. Anyone living on most islands will probably have to leave sooner or later because of their fresh water being corrupted with salt ocean water. Definitely they will have to leave if the oceans rise much higher.

Further, it was reported on NPR this morning, July 16, 2004, that fifty percent of the CO2 that has been released in the atmosphere from our technological society has ended up in our oceans and this in turn is dropping the PH to the acidic. This in turn is actually dissolving the coral reefs and killing them along with vast numbers of other life forms in the oceans.

These are problems simply off the top of my head. If one were to get serious and really research all the strange weather problems of the last ten years (the years the Gulf Stream slowed down) one would begin to be truly aware of the coming abrupt global climate weather changes that we must all adapt to if humanity is to continue on Earth.

THE 40-FOOT WALL

In the Pentagon report it suggests that the United States build a 40-foot wall around the entire country to keep out people who are immigrating and trying to escape world weather problems. The Pentagon believes that food and water will be the biggest problem, and since the US has the money to buy food, they believe we will be best able to resist this particular problem longer than most countries. People will want to come here just to get food.

This sounds like something out of a weird movie, but in fact the US government has already begun the construction of this wall between the US and Mexico.

SIDE NOTE:  Speaking of movies, The Day After Tomorrow, which was recently released, is based on this information of the Gulf Stream stopping. However, Hollywood exaggerated the results of the storms so much that most people simply thought it was fantasy. It is not fantasy, it is really happening, but will it happen as this movie predicts? And in this movie you saw a massive amount of Americans fleeing to Mexico to escape the extreme cold weather.

I just spoke with a US military person about two weeks ago who is involved in the construction of this 40-foot wall. In the discussion, with him about the Gulf Stream, which he was unaware of, he said, ìOh, now I understand. You see, the wall is straight up and down on the Mexican side, but it has steps and ladders on the US side to get over the wall and into Mexico. I never could understand why the government was doing this.”

THE CHANGING OF THE SHAPE OF THE GULF STREAM

In the Pentagon report they said that they believed that the stoppage of the Gulf Stream would probably happen in three to five years from October 2003. This was their best guess, and admittedly it was only a guess and a theory.

But what they didn´t know, because it was beginning at the actual time of their release of their report, was that the Gulf Stream was beginning to change shape. The change of shape of the Gulf Stream is the beginning of the breakdown and stoppage of this warm water current and the end of our civilization as we know it.

I have this information from two sources, both of which do not wish to be named right now, but both of them are world famous scientists.

If this is true, then all the effects and timing of the Pentagon report have to be shifted closer to the present by three to five years.

I don´t know if this is true, but in the vein of holding nothing back, this info is placed in this article. The actual proof will follow if it will be given to me.

FROM MY HEART TO YOURS

As I became aware of this information, I didn´t know what to do or if I should send this article. But because I believe in and love humanity, I finally realized, like Sir David King and Andrew Marshall, that I must speak out, for knowledge is power.

And when the time comes for us all to make life decisions, my prayer is that we all go inside where God resides and listen to our inner Heart. If we trust in ourselves and the presence of Divine Guidance, we will all know exactly what to do and where to be.

May God bless us all in what is about to come.

Reposted from the Guardian.

A Cloud over Civilization

John Kenneth Gailbraith

At the end of the second world war, I was the director for overall effects of the United States strategic bombing survey – USBUS, as it was known. I led a large professional economic staff in assessment of the industrial and military effects of the bombing of Germany. The strategic bombing of German industry, transportation and cities, was gravely disappointing. Attacks on factories that made such seemingly crucial components as ball bearings, and even attacks on aircraft plants, were sadly useless. With plant and machinery relocation and more determined management, fighter aircraft production actually increased in early 1944 after major bombing. In the cities, the random cruelty and death inflicted from the sky had no appreciable effect on war production or the war.

These findings were vigorously resisted by the Allied armed services – especially, needless to say, the air command, even though they were the work of the most capable scholars and were supported by German industry officials and impeccable German statistics, as well as by the director of German arms production, Albert Speer. All our conclusions were cast aside. The air command’s public and academic allies united to arrest my appointment to a Harvard professorship and succeeded in doing so for a year.

Nor is this all. The greatest military misadventure in American history until Iraq was the war in Vietnam. When I was sent there on a fact-finding mission in the early 60s, I had a full view of the military dominance of foreign policy, a dominance that has now extended to the replacement of the presumed civilian authority. In India, where I was ambassador, in Washington, where I had access to President Kennedy, and in Saigon, I developed a strongly negative view of the conflict. Later, I encouraged the anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy in 1968. His candidacy was first announced in our house in Cambridge.

At this time the military establishment in Washington was in support of the war. Indeed, it was taken for granted that both the armed services and the weapons industries should accept and endorse hostilities – Dwight Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”.

In 2003, close to half the total US government discretionary expenditure was used for military purposes. A large part was for weapons procurement or development. Nuclear-powered submarines run to billions of dollars, individual planes to tens of millions each.

Such expenditure is not the result of detached analysis. From the relevant industrial firms come proposed designs for new weapons, and to them are awarded production and profit. In an impressive flow of influence and command, the weapons industry accords valued employment, management pay and profit in its political constituency, and indirectly it is a treasured source of political funds. The gratitude and the promise of political help go to Washington and to the defense budget. And to foreign policy or, as in Vietnam and Iraq, to war. That the private sector moves to a dominant public-sector role is apparent.

None will doubt that the modern corporation is a dominant force in the present-day economy. Once in the US there were capitalists. Steel by Carnegie, oil by Rockefeller, tobacco by Duke, railroads variously and often incompetently controlled by the moneyed few. In its market position and political influence, modern corporate management, unlike the capitalist, has public acceptance. A dominant role in the military establishment, in public finance and the environment is assumed. Other public authority is also taken for granted. Adverse social flaws and their effect do, however, require attention.

One, as just observed, is the way the corporate power has shaped the public purpose to its own needs. It ordains that social success is more automobiles, more television sets, a greater volume of all other consumer goods – and more lethal weaponry. Negative social effects – pollution, destruction of the landscape, the unprotected health of the citizenry, the threat of military action and death – do not count as such.

The corporate appropriation of public initiative and authority is unpleasantly visible in its effect on the environment, and dangerous as regards military and foreign policy. Wars are a major threat to civilized existence, and a corporate commitment to weapons procurement and use nurtures this threat. It accords legitimacy, and even heroic virtue, to devastation and death.

Power in the modern great corporation belongs to the management. The board of directors is an amiable entity, meeting with self-approval but fully subordinate to the real power of the managers. The relationship resembles that of an honorary degree recipient to a member of a university faculty.

The myths of investor authority, the ritual meetings of directors and the annual stockholder meeting persist, but no mentally viable observer of the modern corporation can escape the reality. Corporate power lies with management – a bureaucracy in control of its task and its compensation. Rewards can verge on larceny. On frequent recent occasions, it has been referred to as the corporate scandal.

s the corporate interest moves to power in what was the public sector, it serves the corporate interest. It is most clearly evident in the largest such movement, that of nominally private firms into the defense establishment. From this comes a primary influence on the military budget, on foreign policy, military commitment and, ultimately, military action. War. Although this is a normal and expected use of money and its power, the full effect is disguised by almost all conventional expression.

Given its authority in the modern corporation it was natural that management would extend its role to politics and to government. Once there was the public reach of capitalism; now it is that of corporate management. In the US, corporate managers are in close alliance with the president, the vice-president and the secretary of defense Major corporate figures are also in senior positions elsewhere in the federal government; one came from the bankrupt and thieving Enron to preside over the army.

Defense and weapons development are motivating forces in foreign policy. For some years, there has also been recognized corporate control of the Treasury. And of environmental policy.

We cherish the progress in Civilization since biblical times and long before. But there is a needed and, indeed, accepted qualification. The US and Britain are in the bitter aftermath of a war in Iraq. We are accepting programmed death for the young and random slaughter for men and women of all ages. So it was in the first and second world wars, and is still so in Iraq. Civilized life, as it is called, is a great white tower celebrating human achievements, but at the top there is permanently a large black cloud. Human progress dominated by unimaginable cruelty and death.

Civilization has made great strides over the centuries in science, healthcare, the arts and most, if not all, economic well-being. But it has also given a privileged position to the development of weapons and the threat and reality of war. Mass slaughter has become the ultimate civilized achievement.

The facts of war are inescapable – death and random cruelty, suspension of civilized values, a disordered aftermath. Thus the human condition and prospect as now supremely evident. The economic and social problems here described can, with thought and action, be addressed. So they have already been. War remains the decisive human failure.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Reposted from the Orion Magazine.

High Tech Wasteland

Elizabeth Grossman

THE SCENARIO IS FAMILIAR. The day arrives when the computer that was going to be your personal bridge to the twenty-first century has become a dinosaur. The salesperson who touted that machine’s efficiency now explains in tones of pity and derision just how far from the cutting edge of technology you are. The only solution is a new computer. And so, in early 2001, when it became clear that my old laptop could not handle most websites and could not be upgraded, it had to go. I tried to find someone who wanted a Macintosh 5300c, but no one was interested in a computer that couldn’t surf the web without crashing.

Thanks to our appetite for gadgets, convenience, and innovation (and the current system of world commerce that makes them relatively affordable), Americans now own some two billion pieces of consumer electronics. For over two decades, rapid technological advances have doubled the computing capacity of semiconductor chips almost every eighteen months, bringing us faster computers, smaller cell phones, more efficient machinery and appliances, and an increasing demand for new products. With some five million to seven million tons of this stuff becoming obsolete in the U.S. each year, high-tech electronics are now the fastest growing part of the municipal waste stream. For the most part we have been so bedazzled by figuring out how to use the new PC, PDA, TV, DVD player, or cell phone, that until recently we haven’t given this waste much thought.

FROM MY DESK IN PORTLAND, the tap of a few keys on my laptop sends a message to Hong Kong, retrieves articles filed in Brussels, displays pictures of my nieces in New York, and plays the song of a wood stork recorded in Florida. Traveling with my laptop and cell phone, I have access to a whole world of information and personal communication — a world that, as electricity grids, phone towers, and wireless networks proliferate, exists with diminishing regard for geography. This universe of instant information, conversation, and entertainment is so powerful and absorbing — and its currency so physically ephemeral — that it’s hard to remember that the technology that makes it possible has anything to do with the natural world.

But this digital wizardry relies on a complex array of materials — metals, elements, plastics, and chemical compounds. Each tidy piece of equipment has a story that begins in mines, refineries, factories, rivers, and aquifers, and ends on pallets and in dumpsters, smelters, and landfills all around the world.

Where the garbage goes, where a plume of smoke travels, where waste flows and settles when it is washed downstream, how human communities, wildlife, and the landscape respond to the waste — these are costs that are traditionally left off the industrial balance sheet, and which industry is now just beginning to figure into the cost of doing business. As Jim Puckett, director of Basel Action Network (BAN), a nonprofit environmental advocacy group that tracks the global travels of hazardous waste, has said, “Humans have this funny idea that when you get rid of something, it’s gone.” The high-tech industry is no exception.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), more than two million tons of high-tech electronics are dumped in U.S. landfills each year, and only about 10 percent of discarded personal computers are recycled. The EPA expects at least 200 million televisions to be discarded between 2003 and 2010, 250 million computers to become obsolete in the next five years, and 65,000 tons of used and broken cell phones to accumulate by 2005. And these numbers are for the U.S. alone.

What makes this waste so problematic is that compared to the items we’re used to recycling, high-tech electronics are a particularly complex kind of trash. Soda cans, bottles, and newspapers are made of one or no more than a few materials. High-tech electronics contain dozens of tightly packed substances, which complicates separation and recycling. Many of the substances are harmful to human and environmental health.

The cathode ray tubes (CRTs) in computer and television monitors contain lead, a well-documented neurotoxin, as do printed circuit boards. Mercury, another neurotoxin, is used to light flat-panel display screens. Some batteries and circuit boards contain cadmium, a recognized carcinogen. Polyvinyl chloride, a plastic used to insulate wires, generates dioxins and furans — both persistent organic pollutants — when burned. Brominated flame retardants, some of which have been documented to disrupt thyroid hormone function and act as neurotoxins in animals, are used in plastics that house electronics. Some of these flame retardants have been found in the breast milk of women across the U.S., and in marine mammals around the globe. Copper, beryllium, barium, zinc, chromium, silver, and nickel are among the other toxic and hazardous substances used in high-tech electronics. These materials do not pose hazards while the equipment is intact, but when it is trashed they become a huge problem.

Photograph ¦ Bisson Bernard/CORBIS SYGMA

SO WHERE DOES THE E-WASTE GO? Where should it go? Despite electronics’ toxic contents, the U.S. — unlike a half-dozen or more other countries — has no national legislation regulating e-waste disposal and no national system for electronics recycling. The EPA considers discarded electronics hazardous waste. But unless your state or local government bans specific electronic components (such as CRTs) or the materials they contain — and unless you’re dumping over 220 pounds of e-waste a month (a federal violation) — it’s perfectly legal to toss it with the rest of your trash. Curbside recycling bins are given the once-over before being pitched into the truck, but no one picks through your trash on its way to the dump. Consumer education and conscience are often the only safeguards against putting small quantities of hazardous waste into the bin.

If I’d dumped my old laptop in the trash, it would have been eventually trucked out to a landfill in eastern Oregon. If I took an old Macintosh out of my closet today and shipped it to the manufacturer’s designated recycler, it would end up in a shredder in California. But first it would be dismantled, assuming the equipment cannot be reused or refurbished as is. The recycler separates certain components — batteries, CRTs, mercury elements, and some plastics — for special handling and hazardous materials recovery. The remainder, including circuit boards, is shredded, and later melted and smelted to extract the valuable metals, primarily copper and gold, for resale and reuse.

However, the way electronics are designed makes their disassembly and materials recycling cumbersome and expensive. This is especially true of older, obsolete equipment now making its way into the waste stream. So despite laws intended to prevent the export of hazardous waste, there’s a good chance that had I deposited my computer in a used electronics collection facility, it might have been loaded onto a ship bound for China, following what Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network calls “the economic path of least resistance.”

A woman squats over an open flame in a backyard workshop. In the pan she holds over the fire, a plastic and metal circuit board begins to melt into a smoky, noxious stew. With bare hands she plucks out the chips. Another woman wields a hammer and cracks the back of an old monitor to remove the copper yoke. The lead-laden glass is tossed onto a riverside pile. Nearby, a man wearing no protective clothing sluices a pan of acid over a pile of computer chips, releasing a puff of steam. When the chemical vapor clears, a small fleck of gold will emerge. Another worker crouches over a pile of broken ink cartridges, brushing the carbon black out by hand. A child stands on a pile of smashed electronics, eating an apple. At night, thick black dioxin-laden smoke rises from a mountain of burning wires, whose plastic insulation melts to expose the valuable copper within.

These images of Guiyu, a southern Chinese city, are from a film called Exporting Harm, produced by BAN and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a group that’s been watchdogging the computer industry for more than twenty years. Released in 2002, the film shows the city filled with enormous mounds of trashed electronics piled in open heaps: computer parts of all sorts, monitors, keyboards, wires, printers, cartridges, fax machines, and circuit boards — all imported from throughout the developed world for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling. The city’s water has been rendered undrinkable, the soil poisoned, and its river polluted with heavy concentrations of dioxins, as well as lead, barium, chromium, and other heavy metals.

Jim Puckett calls this e-waste the “effluent of the affluent.” According to Exporting Harm’s estimates for early 2002, some 50 to 80 percent of the electronics collected for recycling in the western half of the United States were being exported for cheap dismantling overseas, predominantly in China and Southeast Asia. The film’s footage, which includes pictures of equipment I.D. tags reading “Property of the City of Los Angeles” and “State of California Medical Facility,” startled officials from states around the country.

No one wants to see their state’s name on equipment handled by workers who might earn two dollars a day toiling under hazardous conditions, or to risk the liabilities of improper toxic-waste disposal. Consequently, the past few years have seen a flurry of state e-waste regulation bills. In 2003 alone, more than fifty bills were introduced in more than two dozen states. Meanwhile, in the absence of national legislation, a group of electronics manufacturers, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations is negotiating the National Product Stewardship Initiative, which would create a nationwide policy for dealing with used and obsolete electronics.

For now, a patchwork of different programs addresses e-waste. Some states have banned CRTs from landfills. Others will bar specific hazardous substances from products sold in the state. Some have initiated recycling programs — both ongoing and one-day collection events. Others have created task forces to recommend further action. Meanwhile, electronics manufacturers are carrying on with existing voluntary take-back schemes and developing new ones.

Under California’s recently passed electronics recycling bill, collections will begin with a fee based on screen size. Iowa began its electronics recycling program with one-day collection events that charged five dollars per item. Over 275 Massachusetts cities and towns now collect electronics for recycling — many at curbside. And community websites often announce upcoming collection events. But that nifty new PC or PDA does not yet come with end-of-life instructions.

Large-scale purchasers — corporations, governments, schools, hospitals — are now returning most used equipment to manufacturers. But none of the take-back programs up and running has the capacity to capture the vast amount of e-waste generated by households and small businesses, over 90 percent of which is currently not recycled.

Electronic waste — indeed, all trash and recycling in the U.S. — is regulated and financed by local governments and taxpayers. But e-waste is expensive to handle and piling up fast. According to research by a coalition of U.S. nonprofit groups, the cost of collecting and processing this waste from 2006 to 2015 — not counting cleanup of contamination from improperly managed e-waste — will exceed ten billion dollars.

Because of these costs, consumer groups, environmental advocates, and local governments have begun to question a basic assumption about handling the waste. “All the parts of a product’s lifecycle that involve making money, being profitable, are considered the realm of the private sector,” says Sego Jackson, solid-waste planner for Snohomish County, Washington. “But as soon as that product has lost its value, it crosses some magic line where it becomes the government’s responsibility. Clearly we need a different kind of system.”

In the U.S., that need has spawned the Computer Take Back Campaign, an effort to further involve manufacturers in the recycling of electronics. Launched in 2001 by a coalition of nonprofits that includes the GrassRoots Recycling Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, the campaign is helping communities craft legislation to control the hazards of e-waste, and is working with manufacturers and retailers on collection events. “Our biggest allies in this campaign are local governments,” says David Wood, executive director of the GrassRoots Recycling Network.

High-tech electronics are resource-intensive to produce, lose value quickly, and are expensive to dispose of — a “dysfunctional” cycle, according to Sego Jackson. He has his own test for what would be functional: “It should be as easy to recycle a computer as it is to buy one.” But reaching that goal will require “a fundamental paradigm shift,” says Jim Puckett. At the heart of this shift is the idea that end-of-product-life costs and responsibilities — traditionally borne by consumers, taxpayers, government, and the environment — should be shouldered by the manufacturer.

This concept, known as Extended Producer Responsibility, is new to Americans but in use across Europe, where it will soon be applied to electronics. The European Union recently passed legislation requiring electronics manufacturers to take back and facilitate the recycling of used products, in a system financed by “advanced recovery” fees attached to the price of new equipment. If revenues from the fees fail to cover the recycling costs, producers have to absorb the difference. The system provides an incentive to design products for easier, cheaper recycling. A companion piece of legislation will require manufacturers to eliminate some hazardous substances from new equipment.

Because Europe is a significant market for consumer electronics, U.S. companies, including Dell, HP, and IBM, will be making products to meet EU requirements. And given the industry’s global manufacturing and distribution efficiencies, those products will be sold worldwide.

To meet the EU regulations, engineers are rushing to find alternatives to lead solder now used in computers, and to eliminate certain flame retardants. And as companies fall under growing pressure to conserve resources and reduce toxics, they are moving away from piecemeal elimination of undesirables and toward redesign. Mercury, for example, is highly toxic and expensive to dispose of. As HP environmental product steward Nathan Moin explains, the company could rework the current design of flat panel display screens to make it easier to remove the mercury lamp now used. But it will be more efficient to design a new lighting device that eliminates mercury altogether. This is an example of what architect William McDonough, coauthor of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, describes as going beyond the “less bad approach” of reducing and eliminating individual toxics, to addressing the problem holistically.

	Photograph ¦ Manfred Vollmer/CORBIS

The high-tech industry is one of the first that is being pushed to internalize its costs, a move that will have fundamental implications for other industries as well. These changes will not mean that the economy or high-tech innovation will come to a screeching halt. There will still be commerce, education, entertainment, electronic love letters, and wireless calls to far-flung friends and family, but it won’t be business as usual.

Meanwhile, my old printer, laptop, cell phone, and Zip drive are still in the closet, even though I now know where they should go. As for my old Macintosh 5300C, I believe it ended its useful life in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood where I once recycled an old TV by taking it down to the street, where it was immediately carted off by a passer-by who said, “Hey, can I have that?”

Copyright 2004 The Orion Society

This article has been significantly abridged for the web. To read the full article, Click Here to receive a Free Trial copy of the current issue of Orion magazine.

For more on High Tech Waste Disposal Problems: The Basel Action Network, and/or Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

Reposted from the July 19th issue of Common Dreams.

Avoiding a Facist America

Thom Hartmann

The Republican National Committee has recently removed from the top-level pages of their website an advertisement interspersing Hitler’s face with those of John Kerry and other prominent Democrats. This little-heralded step has freed former Enron lobbyist and current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his attacks on Americans who believe some provisions of Bush’s PATRIOT Act, his detention of American citizens without charges, his willingness to let corporations write legislation, and the so-called “Free Speech Zones” around his public appearances are all steps on the road to American fascism.

The RNC’s feeble attempt to equate Hitler and Democrats was short-lived, but it brings to mind the first American Vice President to point out the “American fascists” among us.

Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents – John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”

In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word “fascist” – the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled “The Doctrine of Fascism” he wrote, “If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.” But not a government of, by, and for We The People – instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the “Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni” – the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:

” If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. … They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.”

Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace’s view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. “American fascism will not be really dangerous,” he added in the next paragraph, “until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information…”

Noting that, “Fascism is a worldwide disease,” Wallace further suggest that fascism’s “greatest threat to the United States will come after the war” and will manifest “within the United States itself.”

In Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician – Buzz Windrip – runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new “patriotic” laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.

As Lewis noted in his novel, “the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: ‘There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don’t belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!’ The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy.” And, President “Windrip’s partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the ‘Corpos,’ which nickname was generally used.”

Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book “It Can’t Happen Here.” And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace’s thinking when he wrote:

” Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after ‘the present unpleasantness’ ceases.”

Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com) notes, fascism/corporatism is “an attempt to create a ‘modern’ version of feudalism by merging the ‘corporate’ interests with those of the state.”

Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as “rule by the rich.”

Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in his new book “What’s The Matter With Kansas” that, “You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America – ‘going out of business’ signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush.”

The businesses “going out of business” are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business “are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage.” He added, “Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.”

But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don’t generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a “them” to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.

In a comment prescient of George W. Bush’s recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued:

” The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination…”

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation’s largest corporations – who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media – they could promote their lies with ease.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” Wallace wrote. “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.”

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added, “They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

Finally, Wallace said, “The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. … Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must…develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.”

This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of “Trust Buster” Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).

As Wallace’s President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party’s renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, “…out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties…. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction…. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man….”

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core: “These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

But, he thundered in that speech, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

In 2004, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself “compassionate conservatism.” The RNC’s behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, “In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.”

It’s particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican National Committee would have chosen to put Hitler’s fascist face into one of their campaign commercials, just before they launched a national campaign against gays and while they continue to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-shirts in public places.

President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace’s warnings have come full circle. Which is why it’s so critical that this November we join together at the ballot box to stop this most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing complete control of our nation.

Another lesson from a remarkable wise man.

What I Teach

Robert Rabbin

When people come to one of my Truth Talks for the first time, they want to know what I teach. I tell them I teach what you already know, though you may have lost sight of it.

I tell them that when I was young, I was haunted by a single question: Who am I? I traveled for a long time, all over the world, in search of answers. One day I came upon Silence. In Silence, this question was finally answered. In Silence, I saw that I was freedom itselfÖI was pure awarenessÖI was joyÖa simple happiness, all the time. Of course, this is only true as far as words goÖthe thing itselfÖI can’t say. But I love to talk, and so I do my best to stir up their own knowing. I am really more of a reminder than a teacher.

I am a reminder of what you know when your mind is still, when your heart is open, when your listening is deep–and when you forget all about the small self with which you are usually preoccupied. I remind you of that Silence which opens to the world of endless beauty and truth, in which you discover that you are different than anything you have thought you are.

I remind you of what you are, beneath all your ideas, beliefs, and concepts, beneath the burdens, problems, and aspirations that you call your life. I remind you of what you are in those quiet, precious moments in which you lose your small self–the one that is built from thought and lives alone in its quiet desperation. I remind you that to let go of that small self is to return to your true Self, the one that is not alone or desperate, the one that is a whole part of mysterious, unknowable immensity of creation.

I also remind you to ask two essential questions: Who am I? and How shall I live?

It is only by asking these questions, in pursuing these questions to a very deep place within us, that we become fully human. I pursued these questions for a long time, traveling all over the world in search of answers. One day I came upon Silence. In Silence, these questions found fulfillment. In Silence, I experienced a clarity, freedom, and joy that I recognized as my Self.

And so I also remind you of Silence, that Silence which turns our mind to a place beyond words, beyond the constant internal dialogue which hides the world of beauty and truth, that Silence which is of the soul, that Silence in which lovers give themselves away to that greater loving, that selfless loving, that Silence which is the language of the heart, that Silence which knows only this moment, this present moment, this incredible instant of pure life, not the past, not the future. That is Silence which lifts us above this world, that we may better know its truth, and beauty, and that is Silence which then returns us to this world, full of gratitude, clarity, and compassion.

Silence is that presence we sense when we are inwardly still, when we stare at something beautiful, when time suddenly stops, or when we breathe the high-altitude air we call love. Silence resolves our internal and external conflicts and heals our confusion, fear, and insecurities.

I want to remind you of these forms of knowing and being, and of Silence, all of which we know, but may forget, and in forgetting we feel lonely, sad, and heavy.

The 15th century Indian poet-saint Kabir once wrote:

“We sense there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants–the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother’s womb. Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now? The truth is you turned away yourself, and decided to go into the dark alone. Now you are all tangled up in crazy ideas. You have forgotten what you once knew, and that’s why everything you do has some weird failure in it.”

We know we are all descended from this spirit that loves birds and animals, the same spirit that gave us our radiance in the womb, the same spirit that lives within us now as love and outside us as beauty.

The spirit that created and loves birds and animals is within our very genes. It is wound together in our DNA. It is the essence of who we are. It is within the breath. It is the light within our eyes. It is the high arc of birds we long to follow home to their secret nests. It is in the rhythm of waves, the innocence of children, the deep feelings within the heart that have no cause, when the heart is pierced without warning and our eyes fill with tears. It is within the kindness and care of one to another. It is within the stillness of nights and peace of early mornings. It is there when music makes you listen with ears that animals have, hearing what we can’t hear with human ears. It is there when you see the one you love coming towards you, and your pulse pounds and races with delight and you move with her in a twilight not of this world, but of the spirit world, the world of our knowing, the world of original cause, my parents, your parents, our parents calling us home, calling us into their arms, into their embrace of peace.

How do we forget? How is it that we turn from what we once knew? We simply invest our thoughts and beliefs with a reality they are not entitled to. There is life, and there are thoughts about life. If we see our thoughts as thoughts, we don’t become our thoughts; we recognize that we are different from our thoughts. Thoughts just arise and disappear; we can’t even say they arise within us. Leave them alone. Do not grab them, do not collect them, do not push them away, do not think about them. Leave them alone. We just have to recognize that thoughts are thoughts, and we are not those thoughts. We just have to recognize that we are not the complex beliefs woven from single strands of thought. We just have to recognize that we are not the albums of pictures and images created by thoughts.

In this recognition, we make direct contact with life, we open to life, and as we open to life, life opens to us, life reaches towards us and touches us right in the center of our heart. Our heart breaks open, and another heart is revealed. This is the true heart, the one that knows how to meet life with open arms.

This meeting with life occurs in Silence. In Silence we have no problems, nor are we confused or frightened by life. When we are not confused or frightened, we do not act in crazy ways.

Without this recognition, we become our thoughts, and we begin to have a lot of problems. Trying to solve these problems with more thought only tightens the noose. Soon, we can’t breathe, we become afraid, and we start acting out our fear in crazy ways. The only effective way to solve these problems–the ones created by thinking we are our thoughts–is to touch life again, through Silence.

Silence is the recognition that thoughts about life are not life itself. If we stay in touch with life through Silence, life will stay in touch with us. In this way, we become life itself, not thoughts about life. And then the mystery of life, the magic of life, and the beauty of life become our life.

Remembering this truth, our lives become what they are supposed to be: simple, clear, joyous, free, even beyond free, happy, even beyond happy, full of the most ordinary magic imaginable. Knowing this truth, our lives stop as when touched by a vast power; stopped, we become still, open, listening, listening to Silence, to what we once knew. We know ourselves for the first time. We see the world for the first time. Remembering this truth is dying to sadness and sorrow, to confusion and doubt, to fear and hate. Remembering what we once knew stops us in our tracks, and we walk toward the light, away the darkness of forgetfulness and crazy ideas.

Remembering what we once knew is knowing Silence. Knowing Silence is knowing yourself. Knowing yourself is freedom. I simply want to remind you that you are free, that you are as clear as the sky, that you are the very embodiment of joy, the very expression of love. All this is true right now, in this moment, and nothing needs to be changed or achieved, nothing needs to be given away or won. Just enter yourself fully and deeply. You will find this Silence, and in Silence you will know your own truth, your own freedom. As the embodiment of Silence, truth, and freedom, you will become a treasure to the world in its time of great poverty and need.

This is what I teach.

IONS-Insight into Action: Merging Spirit with Political Activism

Monday July 19, 2004
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm 
 
Event Location: Monterey Beach Resort , Pts. Cabrillo Room, 4th Floor
Street: Hwy 1at (218) Seaside/Del Rey Oaks Exit – on the Beach
City, State, Zip: Monterey, CA 93940
Phone: Anne Auburn 831-659-1424

Notes: Robert Rabbin, writer, speaker, and spiritual activist (http://www.robrabbin.com) will lead our first in-depth theme program on Spiritual Activism. This theme of expanding our spiritual lives to include personal responsibility for the state of the world will be developed over the next three months of meetings, all of which Robert will facilitate. This new format will include active participation by all attendees in dialogue, reflection, and the creation of specific projects we’ll initiate by way of turning “insight into action.” Suggested donation $5.00 and bring a friend.

Visit Robert Rabbin’s website. Read more about him.