Arontius of Bygelswade

.....I remember back in the late '80's all those people who were convinced that the world was going to change radically with the 'Harmonic Convergence'. Lately I've been hearing all this talk of the world changing drastically, or even coming to an end in 2012. Mainly based on prophecies from the Bible, or the Mayan Calendar, or Nostradamus, or ??? But I read the below, and it really fell in line with a couple of the philosophies that really make me shrug my shoulders at all the doom talk. It was copied by one of my friends who is connected in a big way with a lot of the spiritual 'woo-woo' stuff. But if you read it carefully it can resonate with a wide spectrum of people and you don't have to be 'spiritual' at all to understand, or even agree, with what it has to say.

.....An interesting excerpt if nothing else...

"Elisabet Sahtouris is an evolution biologist whose goal is to re-imagine and reinvent our species and our way of life. She is an exemplar of a visionary artisan of cultural transformation. Read the full article by her at:

http://www.newfieldnetwork.com/New/News/0809/Crisis/index.cfm

The actual excerpt...

The emerging new story in the West tells us the universe is not running down because entropy is balanced by syntropy, radiation by gravity, in a continuously self-creating, living universe, and that Earth species can and do learn how inefficient and expensive mutually destructive hostile competition is, compared with the collaboration that is mutually beneficial, clearly seen in mature ecosystems such as unspoiled rainforests, prairies, and coral reefs....

....

The greatest story I know within the considerable trajectory of Earth’s evolution over five billion years is that of the formation of the nucleated cell by our very remote archaebacterial ancestors. Having evolved many competitive lifestyles as Earth’s pioneer creatures, having fruitfully multiplied to coat its surface from deep within rock to high within its atmosphere, having rearranged its crustal materials and created a complex atmosphere, these amazing, invisibly small beings both created and solved planetwide crises such as hunger and pollution. They did this with new “technologies,” ranging from the photosynthetic harnessing of sunlight to make food and the employment of deadly oxygen in processing food, to the creation of nuclear piles, electric bacterial motors, and the first World Wide Web in the form of planetwide DNA information exchange.

But the greatest of their achievements was maturing out of hostile, if creative, competition into life-sustaining collaboration. Colonies of archaebacteria with different abilities and lifestyles evolved cooperative divisions of labor and donated bits of individual DNA to nuclear gene libraries to form the first nucleated cells, each thousands of times bigger than a bacterial cell. The new enterprises were so successful that they still exist now, billions of years later, living side by side with still free-living bacteria as well as in the still larger colonies we know as multi-celled creatures, including ourselves. What good news that our bacterial ancestors could make friends of enemies in this lasting collaboration that now includes us!

This story also becomes our new story now—the story we call globalization. For what is globalization but our own species’ effort to grow out of hostile win/lose economics into a global family that works for all? If each of our cells is complex as a large human city, and we are each an amazingly harmonious body made of up to a hundred trillion cells, then we should hardly think it difficult to weave six billion people together as a global community. We already cooperate in so many ways, from communications and money exchange to travel, interfaith dialogue, international treaties, space stations, the United Nations, and so on.

What we lack is the win-win economics brilliantly modeled in these fabulous bodies of ours and the rainforest economies that create endless abundance through sharing and recycling. We have the information, insight, and power required to create a world every bit as cooperative as these. Look beyond the major media and you will see it happening all over the planet, not least in more than one million NGOs with endlessly creative ways of improving human and other creatures’ lives."

.....I found it an interesting read, and a good thing on which to think when you start believing all the hype about the world ending in 2012.

.....Aaron / Arontius.