Nobel Peace Prize

But back to the substance of the question – what has the Internet done to enable “... fraternity between nations .. the abolition or reduction of standing armies and  .. the promotion of peace congresses.”? Well, plenty – if you look around. The Internet has weakened the control of various authoritarian regimes, by enabling the forces of popular democracy to organize and build support. Online campaigns have enabled major change of all kinds. And we could say that violence has many causes, with ignorance, disunity, and poverty being very common, and that clearly, the Internet can have a positive effect on all three. Of course the Internet can also be a tool to plan violence – as Al Queda has demonstrated. Perhaps the full potential of the Internet in the realm of peace has yet to be seen.

In his book Not-Two Is Peace Adi Da says “The Internet is an indispensable and, altogether, key and central tool–unique and new to global humankind–for organizing, implementing, and surely (in every practical sense) happening the global cooperative order of the totality of humankind. Therefore, the Internet should immediately be made thus to serve.” He goes on to say that “The necessary and immediate tool for the collective organizing of the total human population in Earth is the Internet!” Adi Da’s basic point here is that the only way things are going to change for the better (which they must – and soon, to avoid catastrophe) is the force of EVERYONE standing up for the collective interests of the planet. And the only vehicle for such a movement to arise, and manage the necessary change, is the Internet.

They gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama last year because he provided leadership and hope that great things – towards peace, could be achieved. Maybe the same kind of thinking points to the Internet as a worthy recipient for the next one.

For more on Adi Da’s instructions on Peace please see The Global Cooperation Project website.

Guest Blog Post – Dennis Bumstead

Complexity and Collapse

Empires on the Edge of Chaos

March/April 2010
Niall Ferguson
NIALL FERGUSON is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His most recent book is The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

There is no better illustration of the life cycle of a great power than The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole that hang in the New-York Historical Society. Cole was a founder of the Hudson River School and one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century American landscape painting; in The Course of Empire, he beautifully captured a theory of imperial rise and fall to which most people remain in thrall to this day.

Each of the five imagined scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop. In the first, The Savage State, a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn. The second picture, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, is of an agrarian idyll: the inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields, and built an elegant Greek temple. The third and largest of the paintings is The Consummation of Empire. Now, the landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrepôt, and the contented farmer-philosophers of the previous tableau have been replaced by a throng of opulently clad merchants, proconsuls, and citizen-consumers. It is midday in the life cycle. Then comes Destruction. The city is ablaze, its citizens fleeing an invading horde that rapes and pillages beneath a brooding evening sky. Finally, the moon rises over the fifth painting, Desolation. There is not a living soul to be seen, only a few decaying columns and colonnades overgrown by briars and ivy.

Collection of the New-York Historical Society The Savage State, from Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire (1833-36)

Conceived in the mid-1830s, Cole’s great pentaptych has a clear message: all empires, no matter how magnificent, are condemned to decline and fall. The implicit suggestion was that the young American republic of Cole’s age would be better served by sticking to its bucolic first principles and resisting the imperial temptations of commerce, conquest, and colonization.

[The balance of the article is available on the Foreign Affairs site at http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65987/niall-ferguson/complexity-and-collapse]

For information on the series see  SUPERPOWER

And for more on Adi Da’s guidance on what this time is and what we should do about it, please see www.Da-Peace.org

The market-research firm ComScore tells us that in October 2009, together, the big social-networking sites had over 800 million visitors – about 12% of the population of the planet.  FaceBook alone has over 350 million users who post over 55 million updates per day.  Social media sites have evolved a long way since their online community beginnings in the 1990s’s – a mere 15 years ago. They have now become superb tools for mass communications.  And the power of people making their collective voices, and votes, heard is manifesting in other areas too.

Empowered Interactivity

“As the finale got under way Wednesday, host Ryan Seacrest said more than 100 million votes were cast after Tuesday’s singing showdown between Lambert and Allen. A record-setting 624 million votes were cast over the season.”

From newsvine.com – May 20, 2009

That’s American Idol they’re talking about. This TV show has demonstrated “Empowered Interactivity” – as in, the people who watch decide the outcome – really!

Marshall McLuhan’s global village is here!

But back to our theme—what does all of this have to do with ‘saving the planet’? And maybe we should address ‘saving the planet from what?’.  Well, as Keanu Reeves responded in the recent remake of the classic sci-fi movie ‘Day the Earth Stood Still’, saving it from us! Or rather, referring to the current real situation here today, saving it from the tribal the conflicts, massive debts, resource depletion, etc., etc. that we have created for ourselves, and for the biosphere.

Adi Da says:

“The Earth-world and all of the global human domain have already collapsed far enough. If the pattern of the whole collapses much further, the human life-sphere will not be retrievable. Now is the moment for self-rightening—while the resources that are necessary for the reclamation of the Earth-world and the global human domain yet exist.”

This may sound like a doomsday message, but it should not be one—IF we respond that is. And Adi Da says that the response will be mediated by the Internet:

“The necessary and immediate tool and method for the collective organizing of the total human population on Earth is the Internet!”

As we have seen from the above facts about the current levels of participation in social media, and American Idol’s very successful experiment with empowered interactivity, the basic tools and infrastructure for worldwide participation in an ongoing, real-time, collective process, are ready now.

And how is all of this supposed to happen? Adi Da says that it must take institutional form in what he calls a ‘Global Cooperative Forum’.

“The Global Cooperative Forum should (and indeed, must) be an Internet-based process, in which everyone on Earth is connected via a single website—and in which, as a practical matter, the “global business” is addressed and organized via formalized and completely accountable representatives of everyone-at-large”

Adi Da points out that pretty well every collective we could choose to look at, be it a household, a city, a business, or a whole country, is subject to many agreements and rules, if it is to be happy and successful. Such is not the case, however, for the whole of humankind—there is no overall instrument or body for collective management. And those that address a part of that need, like the UN, don’t work very well. Something different is needed.

What Is The Global Cooperative Forum

Let’s start with what it is not:

• It’s not a globally extended super-state.
• It’s not mob power.
• It’s not about a multitude of delegates coming to the table, each representing the interests of a certain group, religion, race, geographical region, or tribe of any stripe.

But it is:

• All-inclusive and non-confrontational.
• A forum where everyone participates.
• and it will, initially, be made up of very talented people, who are disillusioned with power, and who have the right non-confrontational discipline.

The power of the Global cooperative Forum will come, not from the barrel of a gun, but from the unsuppressible force of everybody-all-at-once. And that force of everybody-all-at-once can well evolve from FaceBook as it achieves ever greater participation from around the globe, and as more and more of the world’s population gain access to the Internet. (As of September 2009 this is estimated to be ~25%.)

Much of the structure and function of the Global Cooperative Forum will need to be created by the initial guiding members. Adi Da has laid down all of the key principles in his book Not-Two Is Peace, available for download from the Da-Peace site.

World remembers the Holocaust

Survivors return to Nazi Germany’s death camps for anniversary ceremony

BY MONIKA SCISLOWSKA
ASSOCIATED PRESS

January 28, 2010

The Holocaust can happen again – it already has happened again.

• From 1975 to 1979 the leaders of Cambodia systematically killed a total of about 1.7 million Cambodians because of their ideology or ethnicity.
• Over a 100-day period in 1994, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans of the Tutsi tribe were killed by government forces.
• In Srebrenica of the former Yugoslavia in July 1995, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by neighboring Serbian forces.

There are more examples.

And genocide can happen again.  Why? How can such an atrocity happen?

In a word: “tribalism”.

Adi Da Samraj says:

“The old civilization [meaning what we have now] is about “tribalism”. The new politics [meaning the one we need] is about the civilization of “humankind-as-a-whole”, and only this has the potential for a viable human future. Humankind cannot survive a “tribal” world.”

He goes on to explain that starting in the nineteenth century all tribes have found themselves ‘face-to-face’ – due to the various effects of easier travel, expanding populations, communications technologies, etc.  And so now we have modern nation-states which are really, just big tribes based on ethnic or religious traditions.  Some of these nation-states have nuclear weapons.

“… This trend is all about “tribalization”, setting up absolute pockets of power—based on mythologies of the past, the traditions of the past, the separateness of geographic zones, the separateness of particular classes or races of people.”

There is only one power on Earth that can stop this trend:

“… the power of the human population declaring it will not cooperate with this nihilistic culture of total war and ideologies of total dominance.” – what Adi Da calls “everybody-all-at-once”. NOT mob power, but a new cooperative process for dealing with issues.

And he does not equivocate about the alternatives:

“The future is either going to be a catastrophic disaster, or it is going to be the turnabout moment in human history, in which humankind will step out of its dark ages of “tribalism” into a new mode of cooperative order.”

The Nazi regime was single-minded and efficient in its targeting of the Jewish race. We got rid of the Nazis, but there’s plenty more of that kind of orientation present in the world today. And now the weapons available are more powerful – ‘weapons of mass destruction’ we call them, including biological and chemical weapons that are potentially worse than nuclear.

Adi Da pinpoints the tribalism of mankind as the terrible characteristic of the current dark age we still live in. It is that feature of human tendency that is the ground for assuring you that ‘the holocaust can happen again’.  Let us tackle the real issue here to ensure that will never happen.

To read more about Adi Da Samraj’s work in this area go to www.da-peace.org where you can download the full text of the book.

the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be

one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened

in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it …”

‘Audiences Experience ‘Avatar’’ Blues’, CNN, January 11, 2010

We’re hearing a lot of that these days – people deeply moved, in one way or another, simultaneously, all over the world, by the movie Avatar.  Why?  It is easy to understand why in the context of Adi Da’s writings about ‘Prior Unity’.  James Cameron has described, in engaging and beautiful detail, an environment where Prior Unity is visible, palpable, and enjoyed by the whole planet: self-aware beings, animals, plants, and even the space itself.  This picture has great appeal. Again – why?

It’s because Prior Unity is the state of this world and of your life (and everything!) – right now. You (unconsciously) feel a tacit awareness and familiarity with the concept of everything being somehow interconnected. So when that is popped in front of you in iMAX 3D, you ‘recognize’ it. Not because it’s somebody else’s alluring fantasy vision, but because it is your own, unconscious awareness of reality.

That principle – of ‘recognition’ – is how the precarious state of the world is going to change for the better, says Adi Da.  Things are not going to change because of all the usual heros, speeches, institutions, etc. that we are putting our hopes in. No. Things are going to change because we recognize this prior unity and its attractiveness, relative to what we now experience, and what it will lead to in terms of arresting the disastrous global collapse now underway. Things are going to change because everybody ‘gets’ it and demands the change.

In Not-Two Is Peace Adi Da writes:

“Human beings must accept, with humility, that their rightful position (and that of everyone) in the naturally indivisible world-family of Earthkind (including humankind) is not the ego-place of prior dis-unity (and thus separateness, domination, and control), but the “heart-place” of prior unity (and, thus, of ego-transcending cooperation and tolerance) …”

For more, please go to www.Da-Peace.org where you can download the full text of the book Not-Two Is Peace

Not-Two Is Peace by Adi Da

Writing pacifist words does not produce peace. Making pacifist speeches does not produce peace. Peace marches and meetings do not produce peace. Big peace events do not produce peace. Praying for peace does not produce peace.

All those things are good, but if they could produce peace, we would already have it. Why don’t all the good things produce peace?

Because they are based on an all-pervading error in consciousness.

What is that error? It’s the error that humankind has been making for thousands of years. It’s the presumption of separation—the old consciousness that presumed that basically we are all separate.

What is the truth? The truth is that basically—even scientifically established—we are one, we are in the state of prior unity—inherently one before any act or feeling of separation.

The great secret is that the billions of humankind actually already has the power to take control and make global peace our reality. What is required to realize peace is an all-pervading change of consciousness–the force and integrity of everybody, resonating with the truth of our inherent unity.

“PARIS — French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked world leaders to join a “revolution” in the measurement of economic progress by dropping their obsession with gross domestic product to account for factors such as health-care availability and leisure time … A great revolution is waiting for us …” Sarkozy said.

From the Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, CA, By EMMA VANDORE, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Whatever his motivation, Le President de la République takes a step in the right direction by calling for major country national governments to move away from their huge focus on the current model of economic indicators that everybody equates to a measure of how well the country is doing. These days, we have a lot more to consider to make a judgment about that.  GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, is a blunt instrument at best, equating economic output created by running prisons, with that of growing food. The money made making and selling bombs adds in to the same total as the money made treating their victims.

Adi Da has said, in his book ‘Not-Two Is Peace’:

“The present-time human world is fragmented and stupefied, utterly misled by the grossest kind of deluded thinking about “reality”.  The mass populations of the world are being seduced by the absurdities of “consumerism”. Human beings are, now and everywhere, entrenched in their commitment to absurd “consumer” notions about the potential of absolute “self”-satisfaction—and otherwise, human beings are (based on their failures of “self”-satisfaction) overwhelmed by gross realism views that appear to sanction nihilistic despair, and even unlimited (and intrinsically meaningless) violence.”

This is the view from the source – the “radical” view. Adi Da explains that the GDP picture, the total consumption of a society, is a deluded measure of value, or benefit.  The move to at least broaden the picture of what is of true value to societies is a step in the right direction.

For more please go to: http://www.globalpeacecentral.org/

Reference:

Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, by

Professor Joseph E. STIGLITZ, Chair, Columbia University, Professor Amartya SEN, Chair Adviser, Harvard University, Professor Jean-Paul FITOUSSI, Coordinator of the Commission, IEP

I spent many years working in Canada’s central bank, and in the department of government supporting Canada’s Prime Minister. I have had the opportunity to see how certain important processes work from a perspective not available to most people. Also, my work gave me a good reason to stay current with the affairs – political and economic, in the world. My background is physics, not ecomics or politics, so I am not writing to you from any specialist perspecitve. Rather, grounded in my experience in the world, my perspective is that of a student of the work of Adi Da Samraj, a great spiritual master. In his book “Not-Two Is Peace“, Adi Da describes the current reality in a different way. And he presents the principles describing or underlying the changes that must take place at this unique turning-point in human history. I welcome you to join with me now in this critically important consideration.

‘E Pluribus Unum’ is Latin for ‘Out of Many, One’, a motto found on the great seal of the United States. Originally, perhaps it simply meant that a single nation emerged out of many colonies or states, but since then, it has come to suggest that out of many peoples, races and religions, a single people and nation – the United States, came to be.

But ‘Prior Unity’ is NOT a union ‘out of many’. And ‘Prior Unity’ does not mean some condition that used to exist in some bygone golden age. Prior unity is already there – like now, before anybody does anything.  Prior Unity means a unity in which there is no separateness, no “difference”, no otherness and therefore, no opposition. It is already ‘one’. In his book of the same name Adi Da says: “Not-Two Is Peace”. “Not-Two” is another way of saying prior unity.  So he is saying that the acknowledgement of prior unity is the requirement for there to be peace in the world.

Notice that we’re not talking here about struggling with anyone to establish some kind of structure or system, or convince everyone that there is prior unity. If prior unity really does exist, then it is like the law of gravity: it operates whether you know about it or not – whether you understand it or not.  But in spite of the law of gravity, planes can still fly and rockets still can go into orbit.  And despite the truth of prior unity, people can still have wars and huge difficulty getting things done together.  How is that? I’ll comment on that in future posts.

The full text of Adi Da Samraj’s brilliant Not-Two Is Peace, my principal source, can be downloaded from the Da-Peace website.