I live in the UK so if you are reading this elsewhere some of the details might not be too familiar but the principles are, I believe, universal.

There are some people that understand the principles of scarce resources but many do not, or don’t want to think about it.  And of those that do understand, most don’t follow through to the logical conclusions or dare not talk about them.

I suspect that for most people I am going to end up being controversial at some point or other, please don’t be offended, I believe that if we truly took hold of these issues then we could have a far better society.

So, what is the real issue here?  Let’s take a couple of specific examples and then come back to the underlying principles to tie it back together again.  Please bear in mind that for the two examples I am not judging either way, i don’t have enough information to do that, but merely using them as an example to illustrate a point.

Example One: The Health Service

I recently heard on the news about a gentleman that died of cancer.  Relatives of the man were upset that he had not been allowed to have a relatively new, and rather expensive, drug that would probably have extended his life by several months – but not cured him.  I would argue most strongly that we should be making decisions to withhold drugs like this on both a national level because some drugs are just too expensive to use widely and also on an individual level because the cost benefit to society is too low.

Whoah !  I just measured several months of someone’s life against a cost to provide drugs.  I know many people will be horrified by that and in one sense I would agree – life cannot be measured.  However, the simple truth is that there are lots of expensive drugs and treatments out there that would benefit many people, extending their lives, improving the quality of their lives etc.  If we were to apply a rule stating that anyone who would benefit from a treatment should get it then the NHS (National Health Service) would be bust very quickly or, if government increased their budget to match, the whole country would be.

In practise, our health professionals make decisions like this all of the time.  But, we, as a society, don’t like to talk about it too much.  The reason we don’t like to talk about it is because of the underlying resource scarcity and the fact that some people will not get treatments that would benefit them and ultimately, there is nothing we can do about it.  Even worse, if we do raise it we find that the public has many different views ranging from we have a right to whatever we need, through a variety of views, based on values, on what is important right through to, what I believe is that the health service does an incredible job of managing resources and expectations most of the time.  (Not that it couldn’t be improved of course, but I don’t have time for that here).

Occasionally these health service issues make the news as did the story I heard on the radio.  We hear debates on talk shows.  We obviously don’t have it all worked out because if we did we would not need to talk, and argue, about it every once in a while.

Example Two: Afghanistan

Recently there has been quite a lot of discussion here in the UK about our role in Afghanistan.  More UK soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan recently and it is beginning to raise more questions.  Most specifically though has been the question of resources.  There has been quite a high level argument over whether the UK troops have enough helicopters.  The argument was that without enough helicopters the troops are having to travel by road much more where they are a lot more susceptible to roadside bombs.

In the last few days I also saw a report on TV that when UK troops are hit by explosive devices while travelling they sustain higher casualties than US troops because they are not so well armoured.

Both of these issues come down to resources and, ultimately, cost.

I am not going to pretend to know enough about the particular issues here to know whether we should be sending the additional money for extra helicopters in particular and I don’t want to get into that here.  I am simply pointing out that we again have a need and a resource / cost constraint.   Decisions have to be made based on a cost benefit basis.  And again, like in the health service, the cost/benefit involves people’s lives and the issues are complex.

The Big Picture

Resource at the National Level becomes a balancing act between the interests of lots of different needs.  The health service and our role in Afghanistan are just two, albeit high profile, examples.  It can’t be easy to perform this balancing act of allocating resources amongst all of the competing resources.

Essentially, most people don’t see this big picture and just want to fight their own corner which leads to well, metaphorically of course, one big fight.

But, there are a lot of people out there who actually have to manage public budgets and to make the required decisions as to who gets what budget – even if it does affect peoples lives and sometimes come down to life and death.

Personally I think it would help a lot if more people said that they appreciate the work that these decision makers have to put in.  Even better if they could be supported in some of the more difficult decisions and not criticised so much.  Maybe one day they will even be able to talk more openly about the hard decisions that have to be made regularly and even daily in some circumstance.  And then we will be able to make decisions that produce the best overall for everyone rather than having so many special interests pulling budgets in directions that really are not the best.

But first, we need to do a lot more work with the values of our cultures to open up the dialog and ensure we meet the basic needs of everyone for which I would turn to Spiral Dynamics – a socio psychological model that enables actions that support the multivaried needs of a society.

The new school website is not live yet and probably won’t be now until after the school holidays when more people have had a chance to look at it.  However, i did add some more to it and there are quite a few pages now and a couple of photo galleries.

You can see it at: http://host.quksdns.net/~iona/

Another small website I built yesterday is at: housepet holidays.  It has not got any real content yet, it is a school project for a friend’s daughter and she will be doing that part.   It shows wht you cn do with 5QuidHost, Joomla and Artisteer.   Setting up the host package, installing Joomla, building the framework and creating and uploading a template took about an hour in total.  Not bad – and now the web site can be edited through the Joomla web interface by the user (who is 13 ! ).

Offers of work to build web sites at extortionate rates may be considered

The Joomla Logo

It is not that it is incredibly hard to use, the issues are that it does take quite a lot of getting used to because somethings are not terribly obvious and some things really are quite awkward.  For example, menus are a bit odd until you get used to them and widget positions were a bit of a mystery for a while.

On the difficult side the editors are not yet anywhere near as good as the local PC web editing tools.  i know that is not surprising but it can be frustrating trying to get a page to layout, using complex merged cells in tables, the way you need to match an old site.  I guess the moral of that story is do what works naturally well rather than trying to match legacy sites.

But, after a few niggles, it is really starting to come together.  The system is incredibly powerful especially with the addition of a few well placed plugins.  You can even have a fully working social network embedded in your web site.  I chose to us Jom Social (http://www.jomsocial.com/)  for this and Agora’s forum tool (from http://jvitals.com/ ) for an embedded forum.

The biggest problem i had was getting a template that was just the way that I wanted it.  I solved that problem by buying a copy of Artisteer ( http://www.artisteer.com/ ) .   A visual designer for templates that is easy to use, powerful and requires no knowledge at all of difficult things like php.

If you want to see how i got on, here is a simpleweb site for a Steiner school i did  – it’s a copy of an existing site but tidied up and with the huge advantage that several people can now update it as required.  At the time of writing it was not live hence the temporary URL:

http://host.quksdns.net/~iona/

I have to say, I am rather pleased with the results I have achieved using Joomla.

Sometimes, an event can be the final meaningful act of an old paradigm, perhaps designed to strengthen it but ultimately seen to end it.  It becomes an act that releases a new paradigm.  A defining moment.

People have again died in Northern Ireland over the last few days.  Acts of violence that can only be condemned.  But Northern Ireland has woken up to a new future with a wave of feeling and a change of mood like the first time the curtains are opened to a new spring sunshine after a last hard frost.

May all those who have died and others before them now be remembered with a pride thats takes us forward to better things.

In the first parts I talked about books like The Celestine Prophecy and Conversations with God. I read The Celestine Prophecy in a day as I did CwG Book 1. If you are ready for them they really do just flow.

Both books I found really interesting and more than that I identified with them. People change over time and at the time I read these two books they really resonated for me. They both have a kind of magical quality to them, the Celestine Prophecy in particular and most directly, CwG in a more subtle and intellectual way.

These books represent a dream, the idea that if we do the right thing then not only will everything be ok, it will be wonderful. A nice message…

But !

There is a big but to this dream and that is that not everyone is in the right place, physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually or whateverly to resonate with these books. So, while it is ok for people to feel great about reading these books, to feel that they are important, can make a difference to the world etc they are, most certainly, not the whole story.

To be fair the Celestine Prophecy does not claim to be everything to everyone. It is a kind of allegorical inspirational book and it has been important for many millions of people.

Conversations with God is great too and looks into how we have choices and if we all choose to do the right thing there is enough for everyone. Absolutely true. However, I run into difficulty with this and that is the problem that most people in this world are either not inclined to think like this or are not in a position to change anything. The idea that we can solve the world’s problems by effectively all being nice simply does not work.

Why Not

I have to admit that the exact order in which I came across the following books is a little hazy. What I do remember is that I was first introduced to a Book called Spiral Dynamics by an acquaintance at a networking day which must have been at least fifteen years ago. The idea of the book sounded sterile and boring – something related to psychology and change and development. It was a number of years before I came across the book again.

What a difference a few years can make. This time I found Spiral Dynamics to be quite profound. I flew through the book, considering that it is not exactly an easy read, in just a few days. Many of the things that I had some grasp of from my experience with lots of people over the years, many of them in an informal personal development environment suddenly they were being explained in a clear, concise a rather enlightening way.

Whether it is possible to summarise Spiral Dynamics in a sentence or two or not, here is my attempt: Human evolution, both individual and collective, progresses through a series of stages, alternately with an individual and collective slant, such that their general world view is expanded at each stage to encompass a bigger logical group or environment. Movement through the stages is triggered by crisis, internal or external, within their current worldview and moderated by their openness to change. Wow

Further, there are two broad groups of these stages of evolution. The first group is one where the participants are not directly and clearly aware of their own movement through these stages or of the relative positions of others within them either. The mechanism by which ones own progress through these stages is hidden is one of reinterpretation of one’s own memories after each transition through the eyes of the new perspective.

A key observation of this development is that individuals or groups at one stage will have difficulty communicating effectively about many things with individuals or groups at a different stage. A very simple example is that environmentalists do not relate well to entrepreneurs or big business owners.

The second major group of stages are where the individual, or group, has become consciously aware of these stages themselves and understand the changes in point of view between the different stages. In a very real sense, this understanding allows the breakout from the shackles of misunderstanding between stages – there is an enlightened understanding of all of the stages as opposed to an ignorant misunderstanding (which could often lead to conflict of one sort or another).

Maybe it still sounds rather sterile and psychology like to you but, if it does not and you find yourself drawn to this idea then you may see what I am trying to get at in many of my blog entries.

Ken Wilber.

If you like the idea of Spiral Dynamics then you will almost certainly like the work of Ken Wilber. Wilber is a prolific writer who has touched on many subjects and greatly expanded upon the ideas of Spiral Dynamics. I am not even going to try to expand further on the works of Wilber right now except to say that if you are drawn to his work follow your intuition on where to start with his books. They cover many different subjects and ideas.

These two books / authors were for me very important. They affected who I am greatly and are still a large influence on me and my ideas.

You will see the ideas from these books emerge in my posts from time to time and yet, in the next stage of this exploration -My Book Path , My Search – you will see how in some way my ideas and interests have moved on to a different place altogether.

That’s it for now. And thanks for listening…

Dante And Virgil In Hell

There are jokes around that talk about heaven and hell and the difference between the two.  One in particular had heaven and hell as pretty much the same, both being great places, with sunshine, no work and lots of great food everywhere.  The thing was that there was a condition in both and it was that you were only allowed to eat using six foot long chop sticks.

Of course no one can feed themselves with chop sticks that are six feet long and in hell no one was getting anything to eat and despite the great environment it really was a living hell.   In heaven, there was one little difference, people were feeding each other and everything was wonderful.

The moral of the story is of course that cooperation can transform our situation totally.

Zimbabwe

What reminded me of this story?  It was an email from Care2 about Zimbabwe (take action) which thirty years ago used to have a thriving economy, productive agriculture and good health care.  It was one of the best places to live in Africa.   Wind the clock forward and the situation we have now is very different.  One quarter of Zimbabwe’s population need food aid as the basic services of the country have collapsed and there is now hyper inflation.

What changed?

Mugabe

Well, it was not quite the same as the story about hell.  I would be pretty confident that the vast majority of the population of Zimbabwe were keen to cooperate and carry on living a reasonable life.  We don’t have to look too far to find the cause and his name is a rather well known Mr Mugabe.

Not wanting to go into the details of exactly what happened within the country I would rather ask the question why has it been allowed to continue for so long by the rest of the world?  If an individual went about life in a way that endangers, and even guarantees misery for, people within any one of most countries of the world then they would be imprisoned.  So why don’t we do anything about this?

My Way

There is a little thing called sovereignty.  It’s all about individual countries and their peoples having the right to self determination and to live in the way of their choosing.  There is also the rather intriguing and ongoing ideological experiment in what is the best way to run a country, society or people.  We all rather cling to our way of life and ideas. Individual and collective attachment and fear of difference and, ultimately, destruction make us rather protective.  And, historically and in many cases, when faced with hostility – rightly so.

So, in practise we have the major ideologies of the world still running it in a way that states that interference in sovereign nations is not allowed (except where it suits us and we can get away with it that is! ).

The answer I would propose is simple, in theory at least, and that is global cooperation between the major ideologies, because the opposite is ultimately unthinkable for humanity, until security for all of them is secured.  It appears that the Obama administration has set out on this path.  Once this were done we would simply send in the world police / army into Zimbabwe and straighten it up.

Implausible?  In the end I see few choices in a world where global expansion continues and resources become more precious.  We fight amongst ourselves and risk human society falling backwards or we cooperate and move forward.   This is our current crisis and our choice.  Do you want to live in heaven or hell?

Affecting the Earth on a far larger scale is our use of land for agriculture for food production and now on an increasing scale, fuel.  In many cases the use is not so dramatic as building but there are still significant changes in the local ecology when land is used for agriculture compared to being left wild.

Deer

The biodiversity of land is far lower when converted to agriculture.   The wide open spaces leave little room for small animals and remove most of the natural plant life too except in the relatively small areas of hedgerows.  Compare this against the huge diversity of natural woodland for example, which once covered a large percentage of many areas of the world, and the difference is stark.

One of the most worrying aspects of agriculture is a relatively hidden one.  The intensive use of farming including constant use and chemical fertilisers in particular is resulting in a frightening fall in micro biodiversity in the soil of our farms – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_biodiversity

Large scale changes

In some areas of the world humans have made changes to their environment that have had very large scale results.  An obvious example is the building of dams which can have an impact over very large areas.

In relatively recent years with the advent of satellites and the images they can capture the effects of human activity on the planet have been much easier to spot.

The European Space Agency issues photo’s from space on a regular basis via their email list.  The latest one I received just this week showed an area on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It has seen huge changes recently with the Aral Sea (once the world’s fourth largest lake) shrinking dramatically as its sources have been diverted for agricultural needs.

Aral Sea - European Space Agency

The results are clearly visible from space and the changes to the local climate quite stark.  Sign up for regular images from ESA here.

John L. Petersen:

For almost a decade now, I have been traveling broadly speaking to groups of all sizes and almost every discipline you can think of about the big change that appeared to be converging on the horizon.

Often characterizing the coming shift in terms of breakdowns and breakthroughs, I’ve tried to build integrated mental pictures of the extraordinary nexus of driving forces – both conventional and unconventional – that seemed destined to reconfigure the way we live on this planet. My book, Out of the Blue, introduced an approach for making sense out of big events that would otherwise be surprises, and my latest volume, A Vision for 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change, uses the breakdown/breakthrough themes to propose a general approach for dealing with large scale change.

So, I’ve been thinking about this possibility for quite some time. (My wife would probably tell you that I think about it all of the time.)

I generally agree with the many thoughtful people who consider predicting the future to be a fool’s errand. It is intrinsically fraught with so much complexity and uncertainty that the best one can do with integrity is to array potential alternatives – scenarios – across the horizon, and then try to think about what might be done if one of those worlds materializes.

Scenario planning has certainly been an effective discipline, helping many organizations to imagine potentialities that probably otherwise wouldn’t have shown up in their field of view. But as I facilitate organizations going through these exercises, the little, nagging voice in the back of my head is not asking, “What is the array of possible futures?” – it is always wondering, “What is the future really going to be?”. It wants concreteness. It wants predictions.

I think that no one knows for sure what the future will bring, but after some time of being in this business one begins to be able to discriminate between what is substantive and structural and what is largely speculative. For me, at least, some things have an intuitive sense of being real and important, and the rest of the possibilities lack just enough gravitas that I know that they’re only “ideas”. That intuitive sense is supported when it becomes possible to triangulate from a number of independent sources that all point to the same conclusion – the possibility has substance.

People always ask me after my talks what I think is going to happen. “With all of these converging trends, what is 2012 really going to look like?”. It happened again last week in a radio interview. Mostly I hedge and dance a bit and say that I don’t know for sure. There will be a new world and a new human that will come out of all of this. The notion of cooperation will shape the way people see themselves and the rest of the world . . . and there will be new institutions and functions, etc. Pretty general stuff.

But, over a year ago, the notion that all of this big change could spell the substantial reconfiguration of the familiar country that I have lived in all of my life began to gel in a way that moved beyond the notion of being just a possibility – a wild card – into that space of plausibility. I now have come to believe that it is likely and will happen – soon.

Ideas like this are so big and disruptive that it is really quite hard to get to the place where we take them seriously. For most of us, our lives are evolutionary – punctuated, perhaps with trauma now and then, but mostly populated by events that are familiar, even if they don’t always make personal sense. The concept that EVERYTHING might change is so foreign to any experience that most of us have ever had that even if we say the words and talk about the possibility, we really don’t internalize what this might mean.

Therefore, along with most folks, I’m kind of late to this game. There are other notable thinkers who jumped to the natural conclusion quite some time ago. Dmitry Orlov, for example, first started to build a theory of superpower collapse that included the U.S. in 1995. Only in the last few years has he been talking publically about his ideas and the ultimate direction of U.S. trends. His book Reinventing Collapse is recommended. He also gave a great speech about the subject recently.

James Howard Kunstler, a wonderfully entertaining and provocative writer, was very clear about the systemic and structural nature of the larger problem in his 2006 book, The Long Emergency. His always interesting blog is a weekly assessment of where we’re going wrong. He clearly sees the demise of America coming this way.

Our own David Martin first outlined the financial dominos that were going to fall in a talk at The Arlington Institute in July of 2006, which he has updated on two subsequent occasions here in Berkeley Springs. Implicit in his treatise was the collapse of the U.S. and global financial system, but again, it’s one thing to imply those words and quite another to really believe them.

I was aggregating my own perspectives and being influenced by some of these folks such that last year while in Singapore I even told my friends there that I thought we were seeing the beginning of the end of the U.S. as we’ve known it. I didn’t think they really believed it then but, in the months since then, they reportedly have made major leadership changes in their government investment company to reposition it in the future away from the U.S. and the US dollar.

There are numerous indicators that suggest the big change is coming.

* Multiple trends are converging – Huge, extraordinary, global trends, any number of which would be enough to derail our present way of life, are converging to precipitate a historic big transition event. A partial list would include:
o The global financial system is collapsing. During the next 10 months, it appears that wave after wave of blows will strike the system (see this Feb. 15th piece by Dave Martin about the next big shock), raising the very real possibility that it will experience large-scale failure sometime before the end of the year.
o We have reached the beginning of the end of petroleum. Global production has been flat for the last three years. Senior oil company executives are now saying that they will not be able to pump more. Supply will likely begin to decrease significantly after we move across the peak. Prices will increase again if the demand holds up. This is important because our present way of life is built upon petroleum.
o The global climate system is changing – some say it is getting much warmer, others now suggest a mini-ice age within the next decade. In any case, probably increased irregularities in local climates will result with attendant problems in agriculture, natural disasters, and economies.
o The cost of food is increasing rapidly as a result of global shortages not seen in 40-50 years. This could be exacerbated by increasing energy costs and climate changes.
o The effects of larger solar eruptions hitting the earth through a tear in the magnetosphere will disrupt global communications, weather, perhaps satellites, and even organic life over the next 3-4 years.
* Problems are much larger than government – These kinds of problems are much greater than anything that contemporary governments have ever had to deal with before. Peak oil, climate change, and the financial meltdown by themselves have the potential to significantly overwhelm the capabilities of government. If bureaucracies can’t deal with the aftermath of a natural disaster like Katrina, something ten or more times that damaging would leave most people fending for themselves. If these extraordinary, disruptive events end up being concurrent, then the whole system is at risk.
* The problems are structural – They’re systemic. Perhaps the best source for beginning to understand the deep, interdependent nature of all of this is by taking the Crash Course at www.chrismartenson.com. Some of these issues, especially the financial, oil, and food problems are also a product of how we live, our priorities, and our paradigms. We are creating the problems because of our values and principles. Without extraordinary, fundamental changes in the way we see ourselves and the world, we will keep getting what we are getting.
* Leaders think the old system can be “rebooted” — Almost everyone in leadership positions in the Obama administration and in other countries, wants to make the old system well again. Jim Kunstler has said it well: “Among the questions that disturb the sleep of many casual observers is how come Mr. O doesn’t get that the conventional process of economic growth — based, as it was, on industrial expansion via revolving credit in a cheap-energy-resource era — is over, and why does he keep invoking it at the podium? Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both. Among other things, contraction means that all the activities of everyday life need to be downscaled including standards of living, ranges of commerce, and levels of governance. “Consumerism” is dead. Revolving credit is dead — at least at the scale that became normal the last thirty years. The wealth of several future generations has already been spent and there is no equity left there to re-finance.”

That is why:

* We’re not dealing with the structural issues – All of the biggest efforts are attempts to reinflate the financial bubble, and keep the mortally wounded institutions alive. The knee-jerk reactions come from the same people who helped to design and feed the present system. These people are also deluded – they think (or act like) they know what they are doing. They don’t realize that:
* The situation is so complex that no one really understands it — The Global Business Network’s Peter Schwartz, reporting on a conversation with the Financial Time’s Martin Wolf said that Wolf’s key point was that the nature and scale of the credit crisis is so novel that it’s not clear we know what we’re doing when we try to stop it. He is deeply worried. Steve Roach of Morgan Stanley said at the World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos that he agreed with Wolf: we are in uncharted waters. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable, says the financial system is so complex that it is impossible for anyone to understand it . . . and because of that complexity it is inevitable that it will exhibit significant, unanticipated behaviors (his Black Swans) that careen across the planet.

* The issues are global — Japan’s exports fell by 46 percent in January, and Hong Kong’s economy contracted 2.5 percent in the last three months of 2008. Foreign investors closed 45,000 factories in China in the last 8 months and China closed 20,000 itself. Those closed factories mean products aren’t being shipped.
* The system is fundamentally out of balance – In the U.S., the rich are getting richer (at unconscionable rates). National media has reported that the government is monitoring all internal communications of its citizens – but lies and says it is not. Common sense is not included in big, sweeping federal edicts. The Transportation Security Administration, for example, wants to make pilots produce background checks on members of their family (and their business associates) in order to legally give them rides in a non-commercial, private airplanes. The Agriculture Department in its NAIS program wants all small farmers (big feedlots are exempt, of course) to put GPS/RFID tags on all of their animals: chickens, cows, horses, goats – even fish were initially included – so that the beasts can be tracked, on a day to day basis by the government, It’s also now against the law in some states, like Illinois, for farmers to save the seeds that they’ve grown – they must buy new ones each year from large seed companies.
* Most of the U.S. federal budget goes to the military — More than half of the U.S. federal budget goes to military and military-related agencies. This kind of growth, of course, is what brought down the Soviet Union. In sharp contrast to the political apparatchiks that protest that more money is needed to reverse the shrinking, aging, and decline in readiness in the Army, Navy and Air Force, few seem to understand that budget increases are a primary cause of the problems, a symptom clearly described in the new book, America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress. (by Winslow Wheeler, et al., available in late March)
* No new ideas, government can’t be responsive – If the natural solutions to these massive issues include innovation, foresight, adaptability, sustainability, and resilience, it is unlikely that a thinking American could be found who would suggest that the source for these capabilities would be our government. They’re in charge, but they have no new ideas about how this all should work. They’re also slow – and this situation needs fast, agile responses. There is an additional problem: even if they did have good ideas the government wouldn’t be able to effectively implement them because -
* Too much inertia, too many lawyers and lobbyists — There is a huge, well-funded effort in place to maintain the status quo or to shift the future to benefit one group at the expense of others. It would be impossible within the present system to initiate dramatic change when the threat was still on the horizon. Every group or organization that might be negatively affected would fight in congress and the courts to keep themselves alive regardless of what was at stake for the larger community. Only when the crisis was about to crash down on everyone – when adequate time and resources for effective response were nonexistent – might everyone pull together for the common good.
* Potential solutions take too long to implement – These issues are so gigantic that confronting and redirecting them takes a long time. One study, for example, suggested that a national crash program to find alternatives for oil would need to have been started 20 years before the peak in order for there not to be significant disruption of the underlying systems. We do not operate with either that foresight or resolve.
* Supply chains are long and thin – Globalism and just-in-time production has produced supply chains in most areas of commerce that are very long – often to the other side of the earth – and very fragile. There are many places between there and here where something can go wrong. If and when that happens, necessities will not be available and in those situations, people resort to unconventional and/or anti-social behavior.
* $600 trillion in derivatives are a house of cards — Looming over the whole financial situation is an almost unfathomable quantity of financial instruments – derivatives – which are essentially casino bets with no underlying value supporting the transaction. Warren Buffett calls them financial weapons of mass destruction that could bring the whole system down. Derivatives only work if there is confidence in the system – you believe the casino will really pay your winnings. If other things in the environment erode that confidence there is the real possibility that things rapidly reconfigure themselves.

* Cooperation is unlikely, protectionism will prevail – Instead of countries cooperating with each other to deal with these big transnational problems, we’re seeing a pulling back to protect each country’s perceived short-term interests, regardless of what the implications might be in the longer term. At the same time we’re all connected to each other in very complicated ways, so if any substantial pieces of the system don’t work it will affect all of the other ones.
* History says it’s time – Perhaps what is most compelling to me is that history strongly suggests that the time is right for an upset – they always happen about now in the historical cycles. I talk about this in my book a bit, but the short version is that big punctuations in the equilibrium of evolution have produced extraordinary, fundamental reorganizations to life on this planet on a regular, accelerating basis from the beginning of time as we know it. We make progress as a species when we are forced in one way or another to evolve to seeing ourselves and the world in new ways. Necessity is the mother of invention, etc.

So, it doesn’t look to me like we’re going to be able to do what might be needed to maintain the present system . . . and it is likely that we’re at one of those extraordinary moments in history when each of us gets the opportunity to play an important role in not only transitioning to a new world, but also designing it.

It appears that the financial system is likely to collapse sometime this year – probably before the third quarter – which will then require a great deal of effort next year (and into 2012?) to design and build a new framework. It is obvious that many businesses will fail as the result of this abrupt slowdown (just read the papers today), and there will be unprecedented hardship for many people around the world. A long view of what is happening could posit that only through the collapse of a legacy system could a new world evolve . . . and that is what is happening.

So, what to do in the face of unprecedented change? Two specific things come to mind:

1. Plan for the transition – Start to think now about how you’re going to provide for yourself and those who are important to you in a time when many things don’t work the way that always have in the past. Dmitry Orlov talks about some options in his above-mentioned talk and book. There are many websites and books on this subject.
2. Key Concept: Cooperation You can’t do this alone. Start to work together with like-minded individuals to sustain yourself – regardless of whether your concerns are food, water, shelter, transportation or finances.
3. Start thinking about the new world – Now is the time to begin contemplating the design of the new world. Governments should be doing this. Companies should start skunk works. Big international organizations should put it on their agendas.

Here’s the catch. This might not happen. Personally, I think that if there is any one person that has the potential to at least soften this transition it is Barack Obama. As I’ve suggested, he will have his hands full just trying to get the underlying people and institutions to think differently and act fast enough, but if anyone has the chance to pull it off, it would be him. Already he’s getting government to move faster and in more substantive ways than any of his predecessors. It may be, by the way, that he will be the best guy to wind down the old system and reconstitute a new one. It’s all of the other folks running the government that I’d be concerned about – the ones who continue to see the world as it used to be.

There are any number of reasons why this scenario might not manifest itself, not least of which is that there will be many thousands, if not millions of people who will be working very hard to assure that the system doesn’t come apart (but then, they may be doing the wrong things).

Seems to me, therefore, that flexibility and permeability (allowing new ideas to get through) are of critical importance here. Remember the first law of Discordianism: “Convictions cause convicts”. Whatever you believe imprisons you.

So, stay loose. The winners need to transcend, not try to work their way through all of this. Concentrate on building the new world, don’t get emotionally involved in the daily reports of the current global erosion. I’ll try to send along some additional thoughts as the situation matures.

If your group would like to hear more about this, I’m always happy to come give presentations on these subjects. Give me a call and we’ll see if we can make something happen.

JLP

Please visit The Arlington Institute

The Apple iPhone 3G. Thankyou !

I have had an iPhone now for a few months.  I love it.  The thought of losing it is really horrible and not just in the normal what if I lost my phone way, much, much worse than that.  You see, suddenly I have a device that does most of the useful things that I want a small electronic device to do – and it does it all in one small package.

I read my email, wherever I am.  My diaries is synchronised to the office Outlook system – if I want to check my diary I can do it anytime.  And, if I book something in my diary everyone else in the office knows about it straight away. It all sort of happens as if by magic.

(if you are fed up reading how great my iPhone is, just scroll down to the iPhone Max heading near the bottom to read about my great idea)

It is even the calculator that I occasionally use. Not just a pocket calculator with just the basic operations but a fully functional scientific calculator, just in case I ever need one that is.

So Simple

The weather forecast is only ever a click away.  It won’t be long before I can throw my sat-nav away.  Complete directions will be available at the touch of a button even when walking.  The beauty of this is that I don’t even have to remember to bring the sat-nav any more, I never leave my phone behind!

I guess you get the idea about it doing most of what I need.   But what really impresses me the way it is so simple to get at with those nice big buttons.  You see, I had a windows mobile phone for a few weeks a year or two ago.  It was truly horrible.  Now, I am a software engineer, in theory, although I rarely write much code any more, so I know how software hangs together, but I couldn’t find most of the stuff I needed, never mind use it.

Beautiful

Did I say the iPhone is beautiful yet?  Well it is and in several ways.  The screen is beautiful, the way the images are so clear and vivid.  The shape and feel of it is beautiful – even the way you can hardly even tell it is in your pocket, something I could not have even come close to saying about that ugly brick of a windows phone.   The applications all work way the same way – beautiful. I don’t have to think about it.  The applications are cheap and easy to get – beautiful  How many times have I had to ask how to use the app store?  Er, none.

After all that praise there have to be some bad points.  And there are.  Still no copy and paste – that can be mildly irritating.  Safari still crashes sometimes although much less since the last update.  Sometimes there are not quite enough options in an application to do exactly what I need.

However, the thing is, I really don’t care.  The iPhone does so many things so beautifully, so unobtrusively, so just plain usefully that I really don’t care if it is not quite perfect.  After all perfection can come later, as long as I have great right now.  The windows phone was rubbish for anyone except maybe a techno freak. (All opinions are my own and do not represent the views of any other person or organisation – just in case you are a techno freak that is, and even then it’s not personal, we need people like you to do really hard stuff).

iPhone Max

But why blog about all of this when so many people have said how great the iPhone is already and when it didn’t even need saying n the first place because so many millions of people are buying them.  Because I just had a great idea – I want an iPhone max.  Safari on iPhone is by far and away the best browser for a mobile device but the screen is still just that  bit too small.  Even with the magnificicent two finger zoom its still a bit awkward.  Not that I am complaining because I don’t see how they could have done any better, except that they will next time, they always do.

Still, I find that I want an iPhone max, at least ever since I thought about it this afternoon that is.  Let’s think about it – just imagine if the screen was almost twice as big, wow it would be amazing – I could almost work with whole web pages at once, sort of.  Just think of looking at photographs, reading books and more. Wow.

Stupid idea, you might say.  The iPhone is the perfect size right now.  Consider though, I looked at the little shiny phone thing in my hand and measured, maybe almost fifty percent wider?  Maybe thirty percent taller?  So I measured the space round my phone when it was in my pocket – loads of spare room there too.

Perhaps it might not fit quite so easily into my pocket but I could live with that for a better browsing experience.  After all – what’s life all about anyway if you can’t read your favourite web site in the middle of nowhere without having to squint.  And maybe it’s a man thing, maybe we need an iPhone mini too but it would not be for me.

Analysis and Verdict

I have used a windows mobile and an Apple iPhone.  In my opinion the windows mobile was rubbish and the iPhone is brilliant.  Unless you have a very good reason to get a windows mobile, like you have no choice or even less likely you actually like them, get an iPhone.

Someone tell Steve or Jonathan Ive or someone at Apple or whoever, next time I want an iPhone max.

Please.

The Path

Originally, when i started writing “My Book Path”,  I had intended to simply write out a list of the books that had been influential in my life with just a few comments on each one.  It was not very long at all before I realised that was not really what the post was going to be all about.  The original title for the post had to be quickly extended with “My Search” added on the end.  It was becoming a brief history, still in relation to and centred around the books, of my search for answers in life.

If you did not see part one of this blog article you might like to take a quick look at it now.  Don’t feel obliged though, part two is pretty much separate and focuses on a completely new area.

While writing part two I am beginning to realise that there are not going to be just three parts as I expected just an hour ago!    This entry has deteriorated into a collection of memories from the early days that part one covered.   I can appreciate now how hard it would be to write a book and get everything  in the right places.  Oh well, here goes, I hope it gives a small flavour of my early search.

Recap of Part One

First I would like to recap on what happened in part one of my book path.  With the first three books, Clairvoyant Reality, The Tao of Physics and The Four Fundamental Questions there is a definite expression of the need to explore the mystical.  However, at that stage it was not my only interest.

A young Nityananda

The final two books The Celestine Prophecy and Conversations with God marked a new phase.  As I said in part one, having been involved in Adidam somewhat and having had “experiences” associated with that I then came back into the world and tried to introduce Adi Da to the masses, a quest that was destined to fail miserably.  Unlike many of his more ardent followers I quickly, ok relatively quickly, it was only a couple of years, realised that Adi Da’s particular form of spiritual practise was not for everyone and even, in the end, not for me.

I still hold an affinity for the underlying themes of Adidam and strangely enough his teachers teacher, Nityananda.

While reading The Celestine Prophecy and Conversations with God I became quite interested in all sorts of New Age and such topics.  I took a first level Reiki introduction, hugged a tree or two, meditated, attended a Subud group, had a kind of out of body experience (not the first, I had had one a lot earlier as a teenager) and probably quite a lot more as well.

The Rosicrucian Order

I am jumping back here – it is quite amazing how writing these things down can bring memories back.

It would also be worth mentioning that I joined the Rosicrucian Order at the age of eighteen – a supposedly ancient organisation with its roots in Egypt (as also claimed by many other semi secret organisations).  I never attended any meetings but I did follow the course booklets for a few months.  This part of the story should really have sat in part one of this story but as I had completely forgotten about it until just a few minutes ago it will have to stay here now.

The Rosicrucian Order is a rather fascinating organisation with I suspect many ideas that have partial truths buried in them somewhere.  It is also a very old fashioned organisation, as I suppose it might be if it really is thousands of years old.  It was rather a long time ago now and it hard to say how much the reading affected me but I can’t say I would recommend this organisation to anyone now unless they had a particularly strong affinity for ancient Egyptian mysticism and even then I would be rather wary.  Having said that I don’t think there is anything too sinister about it all but I didn’t get involved enough to find out.

What I would say is that the Rosicrucian Order does not sit too well in modern society – it has a kind of medieval feel to it.  I know a lot of what I have talked about doesn’t either but not in quite the same way.  It is perfectly possible to meditate or be into Reiki etc and lead a perfectly normal life but I suspect that things like the Rosicrucian order cannot quite synch with the modern world.  If  was to try to express it is a new age kind of way I would say that the energy is out of phase with modern life but to be honest I couldn’t justify that in any meaningful way but you may still know what I mean anyway.

A Strange Meeting

All this talk of magical stuff reminds me of an invitation I received to meet a magician in a pub.  This resulted in a rather strange conversation but when he showed me what I can only describe as his “fangs” (mind you not of werewolf proportions thankfully) I did decide that this particular relationship was one that I should follow up on with any kind of urgency.

Other People I Met

Rather than go on endlessly I am going to finish this entry off with a list of people that I met in the course of co-founding and then running what began as a Celestine Prophecy study group, stuttered through the Conversations with God course book and went on to organise talks. Hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of the group must have attended – it ran in the end for what was around ten years.

So, in no particular order, some people I met, some briefly, some through longer aquaintances:

•    An ex Zen monk
•    David Icke (I am not sure how to classify him to be honest)
•    A Horse Whisperer
•    An lady who talked with angels
•    Reiki, homeopathy, acupuncture, Chinese medicine, meditation, etc practitioners
•    The Multi Faith organisation
•    Buddhist speakers
•    Energy workers
•    Networkers
•    Massage and aromatherapy practioners
•    Tarot readers
•    Red Indians
•    A handful of spiritual teachers
•    And many, many more.

There have to be quite a few stories in there somewhere and who knows, perhaps I will return to some of them in later entries.

For now, I will leave you with a glimpse of part three (hopefully) in that it will pertain to a part of my search that revolved around a couple of authors and their work in particular.

•    Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck
•    The books of Ken Wilber, especially perhaps No Boundary

And that is, for now, that.

Good night.