This month I have asked Charmian Redwood to come back to talk to us, this time to talk about her new book 2012 A New Earth Rising. We are approaching December 21st 2012 that the Mayans predicted to be the end of time. Their 56.000-year calendar stops at that date. What does this mean? Will life on the Earth end? Will we all be destroyed? To find an answer to these questions Charmian used hypnosis to guide several people forwards in time to discover the truth of what will really happen. I was involved in the preparation of a number of chapters so was very interested to receive a final version of the book to review.

Colin:- This book was quite a project, what inspired you to work with different people in this way?

Charmian:- As soon as I had published my first book Coming Home To Lemuria I was guided to start another one taking people through the dimensional shift to look at the New Earth and to see what we need to do to prepare for it.

Colin:- The observations made by the contributors varied but do you think most were optimistic of our future here on Earth?

Charmian:- Definitely, I realised after I had done the sessions that the reason for the strong impulse to write the book so quickly was that it is so positive about the future and many people are having such a challenging time with the shifting frequencies causing chaos on the planet.

Colin:- Were there any journeys you made with your co-authors that took you by surprise?

Charmian:- Yes I was surprised by some of the journeys off planet , including my own, how many other star systems we had spent time on to prepare for this shift which was planned aeons of time ago before we even came here. It made me realise just how important the leap we are making here on the Earth is in the greater scheme of things and how much help there is for us  “Out there”.

Colin:- In many of the journeys to the future the conversations revealed that we were interacting with our star family quite naturally and openly, as we were vibrating at a much higher vibration. For me this felt perfectly normal, have you had any feedback from readers so far as to their response to these revelations?

Charmian:- Yes, many people know that they are from Sirius or the Plaeides and are looking forward to reconnecting with the ships and their star families again. They have an inner knowing that their star brothers are here and are waiting to assist us.

Colin:- One of the overriding feelings that came through each of the interviews was that love was the key that opens our doorway to the wonderful new world that is being described in the book. Having worked so much to bring this about how did you feel when you found this was earth’s new future, one filled with love?

Charmian:- I was and am very optimistic about the New Earth, I intend being in the first wave of ascension  to experience living in the state of ecstatic bliss that many of the contributors reported. It was effortless and everybody was just living in perfect unconditional love with everyone and everything. Gathering the material for this book has changed my life. I feel relaxed and confident that all is unfolding in Divine Right Order and I am ready for this New World of Love. I have no fear and I know that my soul is already creating everything I need to make this shift, all I have to do is stay in my heart and have fun!

Colin:- During our journey we travelled in a ship constructed through our consciousness, something we have done many times, and it was encouraging to find that this mode of transport will become quite normal for us on earth in the future. We will travel through space and time, something only found in science fiction at the moment.  It was interesting the way children were being taught how to interact with this new world too, was this something you had seen in other journeys?

Charmian:- Yes the new children already know  all of this, it is quite normal for them to be able to travel between dimensions as they have not yet shut down their expanded consciousness. They are our teachers and they are already embodying their own Higher Self which is what the “ Shift” is. It is a shift in consciousness from our limited ego self to our Divine God Self while still in physical form.

Colin:- If there was one thing that you gained from writing the book that you feel would encourage someone to go straight out and buy it, what do you think that would be?

Charmian:- Connect with your Higher Self and know that he/she has planned perfectly everything you need to know  to make this dimensional shift with ease and grace. There is nothing you need to” DO”, just sit and “BE “the love that you are. When I asked my Higher Self what I needed to do to prepare for the shift the answer was’ Nothing”, I could sit under a tree from now until the Ascension beaming out love and my life purpose would be fulfilled.

About the Author

Charmian Amarea Kumara Redwood had a near death experience 30 years ago. Since then, she has lived her life with the purpose of helping others live a full life without a fear of death. She has trained as a transpersonal hypnotherapist and has worked with both groups and individuals for 20 years. Redwood lives on Maui in Hawaii, and works with hospice clients helping people to return to the Light in grace.

www.cominghometolemuria.com

Damiana Sage Miller has recently published her book Ambassadors Between Worlds, Intergalactic Gateway to a New Earth, where she channels information from a number of beings from different planets.

I am always fascinated to read this kind of conversation and asked Damiana if she would agree to an interview so we could discover a little more about her technique and explore some of the more controversial material.

Colin:- Hi Damiana, thanks for agreeing to take part in this interview. I’m really interested to know how you came to the point of writing the book, were you channelling information before this?

Damiana:- Hi Colin,Thanks for interviewing me. It’s quite interesting how this book came to be. About a year and half ago I began to question my life. Lost and confused, I turned to daily meditations for answers. Not too long after I started these meditations, I received my first channeling. I was working as a waitress, and one day at work I heard “Welcome, being of the light!” I looked around to see who said it and again I heard “Welcome, being of the light!" I realized the words were in my head so I quickly pulled out a pen and paper to transcribe my first channeling.

That first channeling was signed from “a special friend” from my time in Atlantis. She was welcoming me back and told me that I had been channeling spiritual beings from other worlds for many lifetimes and I could choose to do it in this life as well. After that, I started working frequently with my parents. We would alternate our days with regular meditations, channeled sessions, and third-eye travels. (My second book, Third Eye Awakening, Adventures of a Clairvoyant Traveler, will be published next year.) My very first channelings were from archangels and ascended masters. Shortly after that, I had my first encounter with an extraterrestrial. My father asked him lots of questions.

Every few days, other enlightened extraterrestrials — from Pleiades, Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, and LaZarus (a planet in another diimension) — also started speaking through me. I was hooked up to a microphone so we were able to record the sessions. My father asked the questions and my mother transcribed the recordings. It didn’t take us long to realize that these Q and A sessions would make a fascinating book.

Colin:- How did you feel when the beings were speaking through you, could you ‘hear’ what they were saying or were you ‘elsewhere’?

Damiana:- I feel like there are three distinct levels of channeling. The first level is where the channel receives images, concepts, and ideas and it is up to them to decipher the message. The second level is much more direct. The entities are connected to the channel. They are using the channel’s vocabulary and voice, but the message is much more direct and flows through the channel smoothly. The third level, trance channeling, is where the extraterrestrial (or angel) is fully present. They are using the channel’s voice and body by agreement. Right now, I’m at that second level, so I’m partially sharing my vessel although I am somewhat aware of the conversation as it occurs. However, quite often I will read a session from earlier that day and be surprised at the sophistication of the conversation and have no recollection of hearing or saying the message while the channeling took place.

Colin:- Throughout the book your guides mention that they were testing you to see how much energy you could tolerate to make sure you were as pure a channel as possible. How did that feel? Did you find you were growing in confidence as the book progressed?

Damiana:- I definitely feel like my gift developed as the book progressed. The sessions would become longer, the information that I was receiving became more direct, and I was less present in the channelings. In later chapters of the book, some of the information is very specific on topics that I have no knowledge about. For example, at one point in the book the extraterrestrials made the following statement: “Most inhabitants on Earth eat insects. However, for some reason most English-speaking beings on your planet avoid this (and are disgusted by it). But did you know that cattle cost millions of dollars to feed and farm, destroy your planet to raise, and only produce 18 percent protein with 18 percent fat, while insects eat natural food — fruits, vegetables, grass — cost very little to raise, and produce 30 percent protein and only 6 percent fat?” After this channeling session, I did a google search and was astounded to discover that these numbers are correct.

When I start to channel, I feel a strong pressure between my third eye (above my nose) and crown chakra (on top of my head). It feels like I have a little cap on that spot. Sometimes, though, I feel really strong energy throughout my body like they are preparing me or testing me for the third level of channeling. I think that with time I will leave my body and allow them to speak directly through me. They tell me that my third eye travels, where I am already having out-of-body experiences exploring other planets and dimensions, are preparing me for this next level of channeling. I appreciate that my guides are constantly pushing my limits because they know that I want to relay the most pure information.

Colin:- Your father posed the questions during the channelling sessions, did you find having this kind of support from your parents helped you develop your gifts?  (Damiana’s Mum Susanne Miller contributed two channeled interviews to The Magic of Being: Gene Roddenberry and Cleopatra)

Damiana:- Absolutely! I’m lucky to have such a strong relationship with both of my parents. Not only do they accept my unique calling, but they also work with me each day to develop it.

Colin:- One of the most controversial parts of the book is where your channels talk about how Jesus used a doppelganger to stand in for him on the cross. Your father asked for clarification a number of times and the story did not change, which was interesting. Why do you think this information came through now, when so many other channellings in the past have not mentioned it?

Damiana:-  We were very weary about putting that information in the book, but every time we discussed it with our guides they insisted that is was true. I don’t know whether that really happened or not but I think it’s certainly possible. The guides are very clear in the book that they do not wish to change anyone’s belief systems. However, they don’t want to deny us truths as they perceive them. I think we are coming up to a new period in time where we need to question everything, including our most cherished beliefs.  Perhaps people are using the concept that Jesus died on the cross for our sins as an excuse not to take responsibility for their own actions. The extraterrestrials are seeing where humanity stands on a number of different topics and slowly releasing new information that will push the envelope — and people’s buttons — helping us to grow.

Colin:- Did some of the answers to the questions about religion challenge your own beliefs or did you find them reassuring?

Damiana:- When my father asked the extraterrestrials to give their brief impressions of our major religions, they were honest but non-judgmental. The extraterrestrials are so loving and compassionate that their approach to sensitive topics like religion really made me appreciate the many similarities that our Earth religions share. I think that my true “religion” even before I started channeling was a belief in universal love, so I was not surprised or offended by their answers. I hope others are not offended as well.

Colin:- The explanation about past lives advised that we are all living in the now, and that past, present and future are all taking place at once. So our past lives, as well as our future ones, are currently being experienced by our souls. Was this something new to you and your father or did this just serve to confirm what you already felt?

Damiana:-  The concept of time has always mesmerized me, especially how it seems much more conceptual than concrete. I have often thought about time, trying to wrap my head around it: What exactly is time? Why does it appear faster when we’re having fun and slower when we’re doing things we don’t enjoy? What is the relationship between time and space? However, when the extraterrestrials said that everything is happening in the infinite “Now,” and that time as we understand it only exists in the third dimension, it was new to me, yet it made sense. When I travel with my third eye, I don’t have limitations of time and space. I can instantly travel anywhere in the universe, and I can go “back” in time to my past lives in Atlantis (or on other planets) or “forward” in time to events that haven’t happened yet in my third dimensional reality.

I also recently discovered that physicists are baffled by their mathematical formula for time because it shows that time should be able to move backwards just as easily as we perceive it moving forward. In my book, the extraterrestrials explain how they can fold time and space allowing them to travel great distances almost instantly. They also say, “Several things are just being. They don’t exist in any past or present form. They are just existing — as is God, your higher Self, time, love, and karma. They are not going anywhere. They are not coming from anywhere. They just are. They always will be.” These ideas were also new to me (and my father) although now they seem as natural to both of us as the hours of a day seem real to most people.

Colin:- Thanks so much for spending some time with us today Damiana, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and wish you every success with this and your next book.

Damiana Sage Miller is an internationally renowned spiritual channel, an ambassador for enlightened beings in other worlds. She communicates with benevolent extraterrestrials from advanced civilizations. She also receives messages from angels, archangels, and other beings of Light, sharing their messages of love and hope. Damiana is the author of Ambassadors Between Worlds, Intergalactic Gateway to a New Earth (New Atlantean Press, 2012). For more information, visit: www.SummonTheLight.com

I reviewed Sherrie's book The Miracle Workers Handbook last month and was so touched by the energy, and the connection to Mother Mary that comes through the pages, that I asked Sherrie if she would like to do an interview for The Magic of Being.

Luckly for us she agreed, I hope you enjoy.

With Love,

Colin.

Colin:- In your book The Miracle Workers Handbook you describe how Mother Mary came into your life despite your having had very little involvement with her in your early years. When was it that you first began to feel connected to Mary?

Sherrie:- I was brought up in a primarily Catholic neighbourhood, although I was not a Catholic. The first recollection I have of Mary is seeing her as a statue on the top of a big Catholic church in my home town. I would ride my bike up there and be kind of drawn to stare up at her, and have an experience that I could not explain, but that felt very good so I just kept doing it. When you are a child it really doesn’t matter if something is in your imagination or real, everything is real if you can feel it. This would be my first clear recollection of the feeling ‘this is Mary’. 

Sometime later I was working on a farm in upper New York state helping to plant vegetables in a garden for the poor in New York City. We would take all the vegetables down to the city to give to the homeless. The people who started the farm and did the core of the work there were very devoted to Mary, and this was the first time I had come to know people who relied on her to keep the farm going and to keep the money coming in. At that time I was a little resistant, I was a young hippy kind of girl and Mary didn’t seem hip, but I was open to new things and let her seep into my consciousness.

I remember walking up the hill to the cabin where I lived one evening and whilst looking over a field to the side I felt and saw Mary’s energy in a tangible three dimensional form. I can’t really put it into words but she was clearly there. At the time I thought it was because I was somewhere (the farm) where she was present, so I didn’t really think any more of it. That was probably my very first mystical experience of her in a way that makes your hair stand up on your arms, you feel the electricity and feel that life is forever different now. It makes you want to cry and to be happy at the same time and wonder where do I go from here?

I lived with that for a while and my wanting to be closer to Mary certainly deepened. Since then the constant feeling of her presence has been with me, I don’t know why most of the time, even now.

Colin:- When did you then decide to write a book structured around the life events of Mary which were linked to the seven levels of manifestation?

Sherrie:- I had already published two books,’ Discover Your Psychic Type’ and ‘Love and Intuition’, and they were doing well. My life overall was going very well, I was in a relationship, I had a nice home and then incredibly abruptly it all changed. The bottom kind of fell out and I found myself alone, but I knew there was some kind of purpose, that my life was being diverted for some reason. It was so clear that there was something else I was supposed to be doing but I didn’t know what it was.

I started walking at 5.30 every morning with my dogs and during one of those walks I became aware that I was supposed to be writing about Mary. Although I did not know exactly what I was going to write I just knew it was time. So every morning on my walk I would ask Mary ‘what do I write today’. I would then receive a very clear and concise complete download of information.  I would get home write notes about it, then after work seeing clients I would get back to it and fill in the spaces. The next day I would get another download and then go home and write again.

I didn’t know the steps until this happened and I didn’t know what I was writing or where it was going. It was not logical and cerebral, it was intuitive and given to me.

Colin:-  I found the act of reviewing was not a usual read and review, it was very much an experience, feeling the downloads so to speak. The book imparts such a powerful and accessible message, and carries Mary’s energy of love throughout.

Sherrie:- Yes, it really is a download although I can’t take credit for that at all. I went to the Yucatan for a week or so in the middle of writing the book, I was in a primitive hut right on the water with no electricity. I would go out on the beach and feel overwhelmed with Mary’s energy. It was sometimes so strong I couldn’t integrate it.  I would have to back off some as the energy was so immense. I was better able to handle all of what I was receiving there as there were no distractions, no computer, no television, no radio, no phones, just me and the beach for a week or so. A lot of her energies came in at that time and I could really ground them.

Colin:- You describe how Mary’s energy can be both nurturing and challenging, lovingly finding those places within us that need to be reviewed or cleared. Did you find this clearing process working for yourself as you wrote the book?

Sherrie:- . I learned the steps as I was writing the book. I was living the steps every day and integrating them and working with them at the same time.

Colin:- In each chapter you encourage the reader to consider repeating a prayer to Mary, asking her to come close. This was a very potent time for me as a reader, where I could feel her energy very clearly. Is this something you practice every day?

Sherrie:- Yes my mornings are still devoted to Mary.  It’s interesting that at one time I thought I would get back to normal once I had written the book. Yet I can still feel her energy with me most of the time. For a while I was not really pulling it in but eventually I allowed myself to completely absorb her energy. 

I feel I am like a portal for her energy, some days her energy is for me, perhaps to build my own energy levels or to help clear something. Other days I feel like a lighthouse. I can feel many Angels and I can feel Mary’s energy moving through me going out to the world. I don’t know where it’s going most of the time. I just know its happening. I think that those reading the book are also being used as portals of light.  Particularly during this new era beginning in 2012 which I feel is very significant for a shift into divine feminine energy.

I feel Mary’s energy is creating Miracles, grace and the paradigm of how we need to be living right now, and there are people coming forward like you who have had an experience of it and are accepting that this is what we are here to do.

Colin:- Much of the work I have been doing up until this year has been around balancing the masculine and feminine energies, but at the Jesus/Mary Magdalene level, the relationship between the two energies. This year however I have been drawn to the Mother energy, the divine feminine, and I think many people have been getting into the nurturing energy of the Mother, which is where I feel Mary. You use a similar language throughout your book, that of feeling Mary, do you ever see images of her?

Sherrie:- Lately I would say she appears as a translucent colour blue with other colours that shift in and out, but mainly blue.  I had a client recently who was having nightmares. She also kept seeing blue energy and couldn’t understand why. I suggested it was probably Mary’s energy present to help her. I have had many clients and people who have read the book tell me the same thing. She comes to me in a particular shade, a really clear blue. I also see Mary as a translucent outline of light.

Colin:- I think with The Miracle Workers Handbook you have managed to create a workbook without it really feeling like one. I’ve read quite a number of books that describe the 7 steps to some enlightened state, but often they feel like instruction manuals. What you have created is very energetically charged and I’m sure your readers will ‘get it’ if you like.

Sherrie:- Yes and ‘get it’ like I did and maybe like you did. I think anyone who reads the book with an open mind and an open heart will experience a shift, it acts somehow like an energy vortex. When I started to get the information for the book I felt like a portal had opened and the energy was just flowing in. Now that I have integrated it more that portal is with me all of the time and pulls energy in and disperses it outwardly.

I’ve heard from more people about this book than I have the others, less people have bought this book yet proportionately more people have been in touch. The experiences that they have been having with Mary since reading the book are amazing.

Until now Mary has not been overly popular, not like Magdalene or Archangel Michael, but I think her energy is really coming into being now, not just with me, I think it is just happening.

Colin:- We like to language and shape things to gain an understanding and I think Mary has offered us a very easy and comfortable way of accessing this energy.

Sherrie:- Yes very comfortable.

Colin:-  There were a few challenging moments during the energetic clearings, whilst working through the book, like when you come up against this very pure energy something has got to go. Have you had feedback from other readers around the impact the book is having?

Sherrie:- I feel that the divine masculine has been predominantly our paradigm for spirituality, no matter what religion or spiritual practice you might be involved in. As you know we are all male and female, so I’m not talking about men. The divine male energy is assertive, clears the way and dissolves the ego construct. We have reached a balance point, where the thinning of ego on the super conscious level both in the celestial and the earthly realms, can now support the divine feminine to come in and emerge through us.

I bring this up because some of the ways we have cleared and shifted in the past were based on that assertive energy of letting the ego drop away, but in a difficult way. Perhaps because the ego doesn’t let go lightly, there’s always a little bit of a kick back with it. However to answer your question I think much of the clearing is going to be done in a far more gentle way. Co-creative grace is allowing us to graciously receive.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges in it, for me it was to bring more of my spirituality into my life (not that I wasn’t before, but I have been holding some back). So I’ve committed to new levels of depth, and that dualism is slipping away too.

Colin:- I’d like to thank you for such a wonderful experience in reading the book, and now speaking with you, and to Mary for being present, even as I write these questions.

With a lifelong devotion and dedication to be of service, Sherrie has worked with diverse populations in unique settings. Along with her work as a professional intuitive she has helped to house and feed the poor and homeless in New York City, and in San Jose and San Francisco, CA. She has built simple water systems in Indian villages in the mountains of southern Mexico and Guatemala and created art therapy programs in treatment centres for troubled youth in North Carolina and Georgia.

Sherrie's love of service combined with her intuitive ability has catapulted her intuitive practice around the globe. She has given over 50,000 readings worldwide.

Sherrie holds a B.S. in Psychology and an M.Div. in New Thought pastoral counselling. She has taught intuition development classes at Duke University, Miraval Resort and in Europe, Costa Rica and Mexico. Her passion for the fusion of intuition, spirituality and conscious self-growth has made her a popular speaker and teacher at retreats and conferences both nationally and internationally.

http://www.sherriedillard.com

This month I was very fortunate to have been invited to review a new book by Master Charles Cannon 'Forgiving the Unforgivable'. It was such an enjoyable read I asked if he would be available to answer a few questions for our magazine, and I'm pleased to say he agreed.

I hope you enjoy.

Colin.

Colin:- Master Charles thank you very much for spending some time to answer a few questions about your book FORGIVING THE UNFORGIVABLE. What came out so vividly for me was how we can move from reaction mode to a more holistic view of each situation. Perhaps that is why you and your party were there in Mumbai at that precise moment, to experience first-hand a terrorist attack, then to pass on your learning? 

Master Charles:- Personal choice makes all the difference, which explains why two people in the same circumstance can have opposite experiences. Reactions are automatic, responses are deliberate. In Mumbai, all of us were challenged to examine our automatic reactions, such as fear and the urge to retaliate, then decide whether we really wanted to respond that way, and finally, consciously choose how to express ourselves. This 1, 2, 3 process can be practiced by anyone in any situation. Over time, it becomes a healthy habit. 

Colin:- One phrase that you use a lot in your book is ‘where your feet are’. This is a great way of describing what is going on ‘right now’. Can you give us a little more insight into what this means for you? 

Master Charles:- Your feet rest on the ground. They ground you in the earth, the here and now natural world. This is not theoretical, it’s real. So much of our activity is “head bound;” we’re in our heads, thinking about things. But where our feet are is our connection with nature, with reality. So, I like to advise people to pay attention to where their feet are, in order to make a conscious connection with their environment. It helps to get them out of their heads and relating to the actual circumstance they are in, which is always full of lessons to learn and service to offer.

Colin:- You say that Mumbai did not leave scars; it healed old wounds. How did that work for you and your group? 

Master Charles:- Traumatic events always shake you up. But who you choose to be within them determines whether you get scarred or healed. Victims get traumatized and often take years to get over what happened, if they ever do. We chose a different identity and it’s important to say that this was not a novel choice. It’s how we live. We didn’t really do anything revolutionary in Mumbai. We consciously chose as we always do, to be present in the situation and see what we could learn and contribute.

It’s true that the trauma of being in that life and death situation was stressful. But we chose to handle the stress in a way that minimized the damage. Time has told the tale; none of us are experiencing Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. In fact, the event did provide some healing relative to other traumas. Any time you can prevail in a challenging situation you come out strengthened. All those in my party have been on a learning track for many years. Each time any of them succeed in staying present in a challenging circumstance, it heals their memory of not having been as effective in some past encounter. Now they are!

Colin:- I love the idea of Masters being able to pass on their vibration by ‘entraining’ others. Have you seen this working within your own programme?

Master Charles:- Entrainment is the core value of what we offer through Synchronicity Foundation. It’s who we are, not just what I may say or write, that has the effect. We’ve seen this working for 30 years in the dramatically tangible results our associates have experienced, not in theory but in their increased happiness and fulfillment. And they will all tell you the same thing, that it’s the “field of energy” we share that does the most good. This is true wherever true mastery is available. The Master extends his or her amplitude of power through momentary livingness. It fills what they say and do and transmits throughout their associations. All those aligned with this frequency then become transponders, amplifying the signal. Entrainment is available this way to whoever chooses to come close and explore the meaning for themselves. And it emphasizes how important that originating broadcast is!

Colin:- An interesting reaction to your experience was how the media could not relate to your position of forgiveness rather than blame, of love rather than fear. Even now the word fear appears in every news broadcast; what would you say is the best way to deal with this phenomenon?

Master Charles:- Actually, many in the media we spoke to immediately after our rescue did relate to our position. Perhaps it was the shock of death, that two of our members had died in the attack. This made them naturally sympathetic, which opened their hearts. When they heard us speak about forgiveness many of them understood instinctively. Why? Because this was the truth, a life-affirming, healing response. It’s interesting how people will sort of “get it” in an extreme moment, like Mumbai was. Here were these veteran, world- tested journalists, and some of them really melted, they felt the truth of what we were saying.

Of course others didn’t. They trade on fear and supply whatever their audiences need to, as Eckhart Tolle says, “feed the pain body.” We all have one and if you’re devoted to feeding it, well, you’ve got to get your next meal. But some are feeding their love body, they are open to something more genuinely nourishing. We were grateful to meet quite a number of those in the media.

Colin:- Your book, associated videos and supporting text form a great basis for self-teaching the Holistic Lifestyle. Would you also advocate readers seek out their own Master who could help them assimilate the material?

Master Charles:- When the student is ready, the teacher appears. The ego does the seeking, the self does the living. Just live. Accept each moment as the teacher. You know, Masters show up in all sorts of forms. It can be your husband, your boss, a plane cancellation, bad news from the doctor, even a pet that teaches you about unconditional love! I always encourage people to live fully in the moment, to take full advantage of what is showing up for them right now. That will lead them from one Master to another.

Beware the self-promoting guru! Awakening to truth is not a business. When a person has evolved to the point where they are ready for what you might call “spiritual apprenticeship,” they will meet the teacher that is just right for them. They will be magnetically drawn to that particular one. This is how it has always happened in the great spiritual traditions. So, I encourage people to relax. They couldn’t be more on schedule if they tried.

Colin:- What other supporting materials have you made available for anyone who is inspired to begin practicing the Holistic Lifestyle for themselves?

Master Charles:- Meditation has always been the first and best tool for those moved to expand their self-awareness. I created High Tech Meditation over 30 years ago and it’s available on our web site, www.synchronicity.org in the form of a sample meditation cd that comes with a newly written introductory book, Modern Spirituality. This is probably the best resource for someone who wants to explore what we offer. There is an on-line course and a monthly meditation study program called Recognitions as well. Of course, we also welcome visitors to our sanctuary in Virginia where we hold a variety of retreats throughout the year.

Colin:- Master Charles thank you for your time today, it has been a joy to connect with you in this way.

FORGIVING THE UNFORGIVABLE

The Power of Holistic Living

The True Story of How the Survivors of the Mumbai Terrorist Attack Answered Hatred with Compassion

By Master Charles Cannon with Will Wilkinson

Foreword by Eckhart Tolle

Afterword by Neale Donald Walsch

In 2008, terrorists attacked the 5-star Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, where Master Charles Cannon and 24 of his associates from the Synchronicity Foundation for Modern Spirituality were staying. Four from their group were injured and two, a father and daughter, were killed. Following rescue by SWAT teams, the survivors made surprising statements to the international media using words of forgiveness to express compassion and understanding toward their attackers, rather than anger or hatred. Even the mother who had lost her child and husband forgave the killers. Thousands of messages from inspired people poured in asking, “How were you able to do this?”

FORGIVING THE UNFORGIVABLE: The True Story of How the Survivors of the Mumbai Terrorist Attack Answered Hatred with Compassion by Master Charles Cannon (SelectBooks, February 21, 2012), shows how principles of enlightened living proved themselves imminently practical during a traumatic, life-threatening circumstance. “This book is about forgiveness but, more essentially, it is about how to live in a certain state of consciousness out of which forgiveness arises naturally and effortlessly,” writes renowned spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle in the foreword.

From those who respect forgiveness as the final victory over those who have done them harm to those who seek the inner stillness of a lightened spirit, FORGIVING THE UNFORGIVABLE presents the spiritual practice that made it possible for the author and his colleagues to weather their ordeal with insight, compassion and unconditional love. Written in user-friendly language that readers can easily translate into their own results, Cannon remains a gentle and thoughtful guide throughout, inviting readers to see each moment as “an experience whose time has come” and to learn how to express the very qualities that may seem to be missing, like love in the face of hatred.

Master Charles Cannon is a modern spiritual teacher and founder of Synchronicity Foundation for Modern Spirituality.

Look out for the review next month.

This month we feature a book that I found had so many codes and reminders within it, those ‘Ah Yes!’ moments, it was a joy to read. Charmian has often taken me on journeys to these places to meet our ancestors, who in fact have never really left, as time is only an illusion. We are now beginning to feel our connections with these wonderful beings more and more, and realising that we are also of this lineage. To whet your appetite for the book further here is an interview with Charmian discussing our links with Lemuria and the Lemurians. 

Colin:- When you wrote about ‘Coming Home to Lemuria’ you felt that Hawaii was the nearest place to that feeling of home you had experienced. How is Hawaii linked to the ancient consciousness of Lemuria? 

Charmian:- The Hawaiian Islands are remnants of the continent of Lemuria. It was in Lemuria that we experienced The Fall or separation from the Source aeons ago and it is from these islands that the Return is being orchestrated. Many of the people on the planet at this time have links to Lemuria and remembering Lemuria will help them to return to full consciousness. 

Colin:- Did Lemuria cover a large area of the Earth, and if so, are there other places that resonate to a similar frequency? 

Charmian:- Lemuria was where the Pacific ocean is now so many of the other Pacific islands such as Easter islands were part of Lemuria as well as the west coast of America, Japan , Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. Many ancient temples such as Macchu Picchu and the stone carvings on Easter island are remnants of Lemuria. The Incas said the city was already there when they came to Macchu Picchu in Peru and the natives of Easter island said their legends told how the stones ” walked” from the quarry to the cliffs. The Lemurians knew how to levitate and cut huge stones using sound and focus. 

Colin:- You describe where we came from before Lemuria, from star systems far away. Was the Lemurian population a mixture of all these different beings and influences? 

Charmian:- Yes it was a co-operative project by Beings from many Star systems. The Ones who came to Lemuria first spent time on other systems such as The Pleaides, Sirius, Orion, Arcturus, Andromeda and Venus developing the skills they would need to transform the Earth into a fifth dimensional Being and for humanity to bring the full light of the Soul into physical form. 

Colin:- Much of the creative activity of these beautiful beings took place in   Temples, how would you describe the function of temples in the Lemurian society. 

Charmian:- The temples held the highest frequency in a Lemurian city. Here the Temple teams of gridmasters received the new codes of Creation as blueprints directly from Source. They translated them into energy grids which all other aspects of society used for their own speciality. For instance new codes for healing might come in through the Temple and be downloaded into the city grids, the healers would receive them and use them to develop new ways of healing. 

Colin:- The way you describe gardens and how we co-created with the plant kingdom is similar the images that James Redfield painted in his book about the Celestine Prophecy.  Do you think this is the way we will co-exist with the plant and animal kingdoms in the future? 

Charmian:- Yes. In the future, after the dimensional shift, when we return to the consciousness we had in Lemuria we will be able to communicate telepathically with plant and animal spirits. Everything we eat will be grown from love and by co-operation with the animals. We will sing and play with our brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom, many of them such as whales, dolphins, cats and dogs are already fully conscious Beings who are here to help us with our evolution. They never forgot who they are or who we are and they are helping us to wake up and remember. Many of us came together with the whales and dolphins from Sirius. 

Colin:- You describe how our DNA is being reprogrammed with the many new energies that are available to us at the moment. Are we becoming crystal light beings like our Lemurian predecessors? 

Charmian:- Yes. We have already existed on this Earth as fully conscious Beings with our lightbodies fully activated. We have the light codes for this in our DNA and they are being activated as the frequency of the Earth is lifted. The codes are in this book, reading it will help to awaken the Lemurian memories and activate the DNA codes. 

Colin:- Having described Lemuria the way it was, do you think this is what we will be co-creating again with our beloved Earth, a paradise on Earth? 

Charmian:- Yes this is why we have all returned at this time. To bring the Earth and all humanity back to the Garden. We came from Beauty, we walked this Earth in Grace and we chose to experience separation as an opportunity to advance our soul’s evolution. We chose to fall into Ego and now we are rising into Grace. 

Colin:- What would you say is the most important message we should take from your book? 

Charmian:- Have no fear. Everything that is happening on the planet right now is helping us to return to Love. Some people need to experience hate to realise that Love is the way. They will all return “Home” in their own way at the time of their choosing. You are a powerful Creator God so choose very carefully where you put your focus. Personally I came to create the new world not to participate in the destruction of the old one. There is no possibility of failure. All roads are leading ‘us ‘Home”. We wrote the script and it is perfect as we are perfect. 

Colin:- Thanks very much for your time today Charmian, it has been very ‘enlightening’, the energy of the book really comes through when we talk about it.

About the Author

Charmian Amarea Kumara Redwood had a near death experience 30 years ago. Since then, she has lived her life with the purpose of helping others live a full life without a fear of death. She has trained as a transpersonal hypnotherapist and has worked with both groups and individuals for 20 years. Redwood lives on Maui in Hawaii, and works with hospice clients helping people to return to the Light in grace – one focus of her sessions is about going back to Lemuria.

Tracy Holloway – Interview transcript

Today we are fortunate enough to be able to interview Tracy Holloway to discuss her latest offering, a course entitled ‘Who Are You?’

Colin:- Tracy – it’s great to have you here with us today. This is an intriguing title ‘Who Are You?’

Tracy:- Yes it is and it’s an ongoing process, it is not so much ‘Who are you?’,  but more like ‘Who are you, and how are you out there in the world projecting yourself? Who are you trying to be? Who are you seen as? Are you being your true authentic divine you of you? Or are you just a carbon copy of someone else with some kind of conditioned response or old programming from way back when? So the question’ Who are you?’ is something I feel we are all being called to ask ourselves at the moment, at this very deep fundamental level.

Colin:- Have you been presenting this material in training courses prior to launching this package?

Tracy:- It was about 2008 that the energy of authentic living, and ‘Who are you?’ as the basis for some course material as such, started to come through for me as an energy transmission and I realised that this was part of the build up of a foundation, or cornerstone, of the changes that we are currently going through with the onset of 2012. So it has been brewing and bubbling for a little while and it is such a great question that we can ask ourselves over and over again and journey with endlessly. There seems to be no limit to what we can learn and understand when we ask ourselves that very important question.

Colin:- It’s something anyone reading this with sympathise with and will have been doing no doubt , anyone looking on our website will have been looking and asking that question.

Tracy:- In a sense it’s a question that we have always been asking ourselves, at different times, in different ways, it’s one of those fundamental questions. Of course we get so distracted with life with all the different things that are going on that we can lose track of ourselves. Then there are those moments of meditation, those quiet times, where we find that still place within that asks us who are we really. It’s from that place of ‘who are we?’ that we discover that actually we’re everything, everywhere  and at one with all. From there everything becomes possible, everything becomes more clear, empowering  and intuitive. I think that as a foundation piece for existence, to understand that we are all one and all connected, is essential at this time.

Colin:- To get people into this place and to give them some kind of insight and background you have put together quite an interesting mix of insights, guided meditations and personal worksheets, which for me was a very powerful combination, how did that first come about?

Tracy:- It’s such a huge package and like you say so many different methods within it. I realised that people learn in so many different ways. For some people reading a book is their way of unwinding and evaluating different things, tuning into themselves. For other people it’s more of an auditory experience, so the people who like to listen may choose to play the audio.

I wanted to address those different needs, how important all those things are, so it is not a one size fits all package. It’s more of an intuitive package, so that people can see what works well for themselves. You can just dip into the package or dive right in, depending on your preference and character,  some people like to nibble bite size pieces whilst others will approach it more like studying for exams, setting themselves tasks and timetables.

Colin:- Yes I’ve tried one or two of the exercises and in one of them you describe forgiveness, seeing yourself in the reflection of another, then asking for forgiveness. It is such a powerful tool, is this something you have seen working in your practice?

Tracy:- Yes absolutely, and it is the simplest thing to do yet it is something that people find so challenging and hard. Yet when they do it, the simple act of forgiving, everything transforms, things start to change immediately and they see the ripple effects of those changes within their relationships, their lives and circumstances. It’s something that anyone can do, it is very simple, yet it can feel challenging due to that inner resistance, restricting and holding us back in these old patterns of sub conscious memories, our limitations from the past, the blockages and things that create a brick wall holding us trapped or prisoner.

Forgiveness is where we should all be ‘for giving’ of ourselves fully, we should be ‘for giving’ of our light, giving it to ourselves, to others and to the world fully. Our divine light should be given endlessly and yet we are often ‘for restricting’ it, or ‘for withholding’ it, so forgiveness is a sense of being able to fully offer our light forward.

Anything that helps us give of our light rather than hold it back is part of that forgiveness exercise. Often we withhold our own love for ourselves when we blame others, but how about forgiving yourself for having created that in the first place. Suddenly once people have forgiven themselves, once they realise they could actually be responsible at some level, then everything falls away and just changes.

That is the place of power that we can come into at each and every moment, to be that change, to forgive ourselves and to forgive others allows that energy transmission to flow so beautifully in any direction that we wish to go in. Otherwise we end up being blocked behind a fortress of our own creation made by our fears, resistance, resentment, reflections or dramas. Forgiveness for me represents our ability to get beyond that wall, or to take a brick or two out of the wall and let the light shine through and allow the light to shine back to us.

Colin:-  I have been working with my inner child for some years, as so many of us have, and I loved the exercise of inviting our inner child to help with understanding the old patterns (the puppet) and bringing in the new. I tried this and was surprised that I still had some unresolved issues. You mention repetition is key, and I have certainly found this to be the case, so many issues come back in a slightly different form for us to observe. Do you see this as an ongoing process, one that we continue even after we have completed the course?

Tracy:- Yes and of course everyone is at a different place on their own unique and wonderful  journey. We are also at a very interesting time in history so even people who think they have got it all sorted and that they are wide awake are still falling back to sleep, still going back into those old patterns, all be it less and less.

The idea is to be present and to see what starts to present itself in that moment, if it is the insecure, fretful or worried child then that child still needs a lot of love and support in order to receive its light fully. One of the really interesting things about the inner child is that it is in two parts, there’s the fragmented child and the divine child. The fragmented child is the one that people to go visit that’s somehow perceived as being damaged, perhaps a sad, shamed or forgotten child. The more love, positive energy and reassurance we bring to this child the more it’s energy vibration shifts and changes, creating a better foundation for you in your adult life.

So there are many avenues and corridors to visit with this child, and depending on where people are on their journeys they may have lots of avenues to still explore with that child in order to heal it fully or, depending on their life experience and the way they were brought up, they may not have much to do in that particular area.

There is a shift in paradigm when the child moves from the fragmented to the divine child. Once the energy shifts to the divine child you can really see the difference in people, you can see the wisdom in their eyes, see the divine light shining out. The more light people are shining, then the more of their divine child energy they have embraced.

Colin:- Yes indeed. Although I have only really touched your course quite lightly whilst reviewing the materials (see my review next month), where I have I was quite moved. This is one of the reasons I was keen to talk to you, particularly if people were wondering whether to dive in or not. For me even this small sample has made me keen to go back and start doing more.

Tracy:- The reason I put this package together was to say to people ‘we all fall asleep (energetically) and that’s ok, but when you are awake, here are some things to do and the more you do them the less you’ll fall back to sleep and the clearer and easier things will get’.

That’s why there are so many different ways of accessing the course. When people are particularly resistant or blocked that’s where they need to be for a little while, but they tend to beat themselves up which makes them run even more of the old programming, so there is a lightness of invitation with this course.

We are human beings and we have been getting in our own way so this invitation is to say you are amazing, you are a divine being of light and you know this at your core. What we need to do is let go of all the stuff that tells you otherwise. Where we are collectively and individually at the moment means we have to let go of some particularly dense stuff, and this course is designed to help us get through this and help it to fall away more easily, to really create that resonance of absolute presence from deep within.

Whenever these moments are experienced they can be quite transformational. They may come occasionally to start with, then more and more, so that the short glimpse of the divine within becomes an everyday way of being, every moment is magical and your authentic light is shining wherever you go.

That is possible for all of us, but maybe at certain times we forget and need our hands held, and the course is designed to help you remember.

Colin:-  You use the metaphor of a puppet to describe the ego, have you found this works well with your groups?

Tracy:- Yes and it’s so much fun as well, we all need to lighten up really and when we perceive ourselves as the puppet that’s when we are running all our old programs. We can be all love and light and feeling great and then go to visit our family and get all our buttons pressed, where all the old behaviours come to the forefront. So that we do not deny these feelings and behaviours we need to love them, through the puppet.

It is in observing the puppet and keeping our sense of humour that we really get into the powerful vibration of transformation. Otherwise we just reject, resent, deny it or want to kill it, and that just keeps us in the old paradigm.

The lightness of seeing it as a puppet puts us fully in our power and, by being present, we can see our behaviour and perhaps think that we might like to consciously decide to change it. In that moment transformation is easy because you are firing up that new neural net of information that’s going to provide you with a map or information stream to keep you in that new authentic place, like building a new roadmap to the real authentic you which is in essence who you really are.

Colin:- The extensive recordings that accompany your book add another dimension to the course material, have you had any feedback as to how people have responded to this?

Tracy:- Yes, many people asked for the MP3 format for the meditations but for the material to be in the form of a physical book, because they wanted to sit with it, to hold it and jot in it rather than read it on their computer. Many described the need to curl up with it so I think that shows it meets all of those intuitive and sensitive needs that we have.

Colin:- Clearly anyone thinking of taking this course will need to put aside quite a lot of their time.  Is there a typical timeframe so that someone starting the course can understand the level of commitment necessary?

Tracy:- We are all individuals so this course will resonate with them wherever they are, and they can get from it whatever they need.

Colin:- You offer webinars to support the students, how does that work, do you run them in a specific order or are they ongoing? Would someone purchasing the course simply be offered your next webinar?

Tracy:- Yes there is an online forum, a community of people who are becoming more authentic encouraging each other to shine out, to find their gifts and talents. When people come into the course they can also have access to all the pre-recorded webinars and they can be accessed at any time.

Colin:- Well thank you very much for your time today.

Tracy:- It’s been my pleasure, and I’d like to thank all those people who are listening in (and reading this edited transcript).

This interview has been forwarded to me by so many people and having watched it myself I now know why.  If you are reading this perhaps you will be able to find time to watch it and then you may also find a message. It's quite long but with download technology you can always do what I did and watch short segments at a time. Excerpts of the interview are on Inelia's web site, where she introduces herself:-

"My full name is Inelia del Pilar Ahumada Avila, and I'm also known as Inelia Benz.

I was born in Chile in 1966, to very politically active parents. My parents fully supported, and were close to, President Allende, who was overthrown during a violent coup d'état in 1973. What followed was the fracturing and devastation of our family. We all eventually left the country, and I grew up in England.

During the 90s, I moved, with my first husband and 3 children, to Dublin, Ireland, where I went to college to graduate in Communication Studies. Throughout my stay in Ireland I was an active Buddhist group leader. A practice I kept for 14 years and would recommend to anyone who is looking for a powerful daily practice.

After that I have moved to various countries and have been involved in assisting lightworkers and lightwarriors in their path as well as exploring and investigating what the "dark side" is doing on the planet. I have also been developing and investigating tools and practices which are quick and effective in the raising of awareness and vibration of individuals and the planet. The journey was not without its dangers and injuries, but has been worth it.

On January 2010, I received a request from "Source" to go public, which I have done. This assignment has been growing steadily and earlier this year (2011), after another request from Source, I teamed up with Bill Ryan and have since launched into the public work together".

Here is the video that Bill and Inelia have posted on YouTube, I do hope you enjoy watching it:-

Colin:- Hi Allison, thanks so much for coming back for our New Year special to review 2010 and to share with us your insights for 2011. How would you say we have done with the opportunities presented to us, particularly when you look at 2010, it’s not that far from 2012 after all, and 2011 is even closer.

Allison:- I think there is a need to get people not only to pay attention, but to focus. It is one thing to pray for peace, and another to start making the changes that we need to make in order for peace to come about.

How well are we doing at actually harnessing these creational energies and focusing them on the changes that need to happen on the planet in this time of purification, so that we can truly be shaping a brighter future for upcoming generations? What kind of legacy are we leaving for our children needs to be the question in everyone’s mind, every conscious adult, parent, individual, every educator, government worker, leader, politician – we all need to be asking ourselves that question. We will all have views and differing approaches regarding how that needs to happen but it really is time to start talking and collaborating.

Colin:- An observation I would make is that the energies in 2010 have been very powerful and the gaps between these waves of energy have been closing. So a number of years ago we might have experienced one or maybe two big transitions a year, whereas 2010 has been one after another, in quick succession. With this there has been more people taking part in some really big worldwide events, internet based global meditations, so the potential for moving forwards has certainly been present this year. There are many companies now at least starting to build sustainability into their ways of behaving, with recycling bins appearing all over the place and ethical purchasing policies, there really has been a shift taking place, albeit a quiet revolution.

Allison:- Yes and I believe that 2011 offers us a choice point, a quantum choice point, and a critical mass can be reached much more effectively during this time so that a shift can happen and then sweep the globe very quickly. So the good news is the universe is on our side.

We have experienced in 2010 the disintegration of what has been and we have been envisioning what we would like to create during this new millennium, what we now need to learn for 2011 is how to work with these energies, how do we focus them? I believe we need to know the astronomical and astrological timings, not necessarily everything they are about, but we do need to know when they are happening because that is when the impact is the greatest.

So the article Astro Preview for 2011-12 and Beyond talks about this being the cusp period, this is the moment of opportunity and we don’t want to miss it. My sense is that 2011 is the year for us to become empowered as co-creators.

It would be great to see more people focusing on things that are actually happening in the world, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill would be one of those, where millions of people focused on the issue, sending love and working together. The problem is that it is still not cleaned up, the issue remains and we have not changed the way we use energy. When it went out of the news media we stopped worrying about it, we stopped vocalising it in our global meditations.

We need to be mindful about what still needs to be done, we have certainly made many incremental steps, but there are some bigger strides we can make very quickly in 2011 and again, the planetary energies and alignments are going to support that. So we need to stay mindful and focused, 2011 is the year of ‘just do it’.

Colin:- Many thanks for your time Allison, and thank you for preparing a special synopsis of your 2011: Gateway to 2012 and Beyond for us.

In her articles, books and other publications, Allison Rae explores cycles of time, our relationship to the cosmos and what's to come as the evolution of consciousness accelerates on Earth. A gifted natural clairvoyant and passionate teacher, Allison offers individual consultations by phone, and leads workshops, retreats and sacred sites journeys with groups. Visit StarPriestess.com for more information.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

Author, Futurist, Social Innovator and Educator
www.BarbaraMarxHubbard.com

Daniel Pinchbeck (DP) Barbara Max Hubbard (BMH)
DP: So what is conscious evolution?

BMH: Conscious evolution is the evolution of evolution from unconscious to conscious choice.

I really think it’s as major as the origin of life, or animal life or human life. Human life being intelligent enough to understand nature, to understand the process of evolution and to suddenly wake up that it could destroy its own life support system by its own knowledge like with the atomic bombs, and on and on.. with the environmental crisis.

So, we’ve woken up to the fact that we’re affecting evolution, we could destroy our own life, and there’s also the glimmer at the edges that we could evolve our own life. We could cooperate with nature, we could align ourselves with the process that seems to lead to higher consciousness and more intelligence so we could begin to have a positive view of how we could use the crisis as evolutionary drivers toward innovation, creativity and emergence.

So conscious evolution would be a help to all of those endeavors that want to involve healthcare, want to involve economics, want to involve politics, want to involve energy systems and if you see that as a whole, that would be the field of conscious evolution. That field has not yet been mapped as a whole system emergent. And so the challenge and work of the field of conscious evolution would be to create an integral framework to map, connect, and communicate to the human species not only what’s breaking down but what’s breaking through. And on the personal level, what is my calling within it. I feel that I always think of it like this, this spiral of evolution goes up inside me, it awakens my heart, it connects me to the world and then it awakens me to my creative aspect of your creative aspect of it. So conscious evolution is not only just the big story, it’s the evolution of the person, of the self, toward identifying with the process of evolution. My impulse to create is the creative process of evolution localized. And I think Andrew Collins says it very well, it’s like the internal Big Bang, it’s subjective. So conscious evolution had a subjective quality of being conscious that you are yourself, wanting to emerge.

It has a social aspect. Society is breaking down so have a yearning to create a society that is viable that is evolvable, that is compassionate, that is social in evolution. Scientific and technological really goes off the charts. If you put together biotech, nanotech, robotics, space development, zero point. You see we are a new species. The creature human phase is coming into the co-creative human phase. If we don’t blow ourselves up or destroy our life support system. Ultimately, conscious evolution would be the entire field of educating ourselves in order to evolve consciously, you know, solving immediate problems, which is just like the baby having to learn to breath and nurse. Its really the beginning. And then it moves on to how do you evolve a planetary system. How do you create life support systems in the solar systems. And then is it possible that we’re a galactic, that earth is giving birth to a galactic species. And that we are not alone in the universe.

So conscious evolution to me is a field of fields. Its popping up everywhere and I’ve been one of its mothers, one of its champions. Cause I caught hold early on.

DP: What are the biggest blockages to the process of conscious evolution?

BMH: That’s a really good question. What are the blockages to conscious evolution? I think the most fundamental one is the idea that we don’t know its happening. That we don’t have a sense that these are leading to a possible, desirable future. That we are very problem oriented, very immediate oriented, so we don’t have enough means or ideas or people able to express what’s emerging. In order for the average person to even be attracted to what’s coming forward. So the worldview doesn’t fully exist.

And for me it’s like the difference between the medieval worldview and the Enlightenment. It took a while for the Enlightenment worldview to come into forum and then it changed everything. I think we’re getting post-enlightenment into the evolutionary worldview.

The conscious evolution worldview and you need that framework for people to get it.

Secondly, there are real invested interests in the way it is. The financial interest, the power interest, the dominating structure of almost every organization, nations state, organized religion, academic institutions, and corporations are not designed for conscious evolution. They are designed for holding on to the power.

So if I have, I know there are a lot of things that oppose our evolutionary potential, the greatest challenge is really something in our power, which is how do we connect what’s emergent and that won't be even through a good President of the United States. It won’t be through the United Nations. It will be through the social networks.

And the timing is really delicate here because the collapse scenarios are going fast toward a perfect storm, so the evolutionary scenarios, if they’re going to work in time would have to go non-linear. There has to be a speed up. And that’s what I think the Internet, and the connectivity of creative innovations and solutions is about to happen.

DP: And it seems that some of these ideas have been around for a while. Especially in West coast culture. From my perspective on the east coast there’s been a sort of insularity to them. Do you feel there are any reasons why awareness around these subjects hasn’t permeated more into the mainstream discourse?

BMH: That another good question. I grew up, I went to Paris in 1947,48,49, my junior year abroad. I remember later thinking there were two great French men. There was Sarte and  De Charin. And Sarte the existentialism thought there was no specific meaning unless we could give it.

And there was not a universe of direction or progress or internalization of the devine. De Charin saw a different worldview. And the one caught hold in the popular arts in the culture was existentialism. My husband was an artist. And when you were in NY in the late sixties, the theatre of the absurd the expressionists, the whole art form picked up the disintegration aspect which was true, but the arts and the culture, and even the scientific materialists and fundamentalists did not take up the direction of the evolutionary potential until we got the study of cosmogenesis. I mean it just began to dawn on us. That the universe has been evolving for billions of years. No theology has that built in. No political science has that built in. No philosophy has that built in.

DP: So your existential-disintegrate model became more the mainstream current. And, why would that support, what kind of behavior patterns self reinforce?

BMH: First of all, I think it was a lot more obvious. I mean we had two world wars. The United States dropped the atomic bombs and burned people alive with this great intelligence of Einstein, and there was a feeling, a real genuine feeling that something was deeply wrong with the human species, that the most sophisticated, intelligent nations could have done this. And then we became aware that we also had an environmental problem. And I think those problems are far more obvious than the possibility of some radical positive future.

Now I was an east coast person. I grew up in NYC and then I was in Washington, DC for 12 years founding the committee for the future and when I met Buckminster Fuller, Abraham Lazlo. I read De Chardin, that was all East Coast. It really didn’t start on the West Coast. And there was in DC, in the seventies, the World Future Society got started and there was a real sense, still a small group, but when you got into that group, it was very hopeful. Marshal Mcluhan, the sense that we were a global species. That we had the resources and the technology to make the world work for everyone. We had the Apollo program. All of these were from the East Coast. And they didn’t catch hold as a pattern, the art, and we had of course a social movement. A peace movement, a civil rights movement, a women’s movement. They didn’t catch light of the evolutionary component of those movements.

And then I think we had the awareness with the collapse of the Soviet Union and all of that enormous type of violence within the human species itself and the environmental threat. So, I think, I can’t explain why it didn’t catch hold. It certainly caught hold in some of us. It caught hold in me and a small band of us. Maybe it's that the crisis is deep enough now, particularly the environmental, and financial. To have people searching.. is there a way through?

DP: Of course a lot of the world has been experiencing a mega-crisis of horrific proportions for decades or longer and then we’ve inflicted, you know, apparently 1 to 2 millioin deaths in Iraq. We’ve used depleted uranium to permanently irradiate big swaths in that country. Why hasn’t there been any kind of more permanent effort to counteract that? Why haven’t people been willing to put their ideals on the line and go and do sit-ins and protest and just do whatever it takes to break that, that you know, dominator process?

BMH: Its another good question. I don’t know if we know what the positive social alternatives are. And we’ve had some terrible social experiments in the 20th century such as Communism and Fascism and Nazism and democracy does not have a vision of what can move beyond it, and we then became the corporate power and so we inflicted our power and our empire on the rest of the world. But the rest of the world was actually struggling to get to the place of more material well being--Look at India, look at China. So there wasn’t another vision and I wouldn’t be at all surprised that in the USA, as we see the failures of our culture, that the rising up post-material integrative evolutionary is coming from here. But that’s how long it took. And I remember, I have a friend, FM Esfandiari, years ago, and he’s no longer with us. I was frustrated because I was way off in my timing. I caught all of this in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. I thought it would be happening right then, then it went almost the other way, conservatives, problems, violence. And this person pointed out.

It takes a while for a new worldview to take hold and the factors that we have now are certain problems that can’t be resolved by the power structure. Not just that the poor can’t resolve it, or the oppressed can’t resolve it, it’s the power structure that can’t resolve it. I think that’s important in the evolution of these ideas that we’ve been holding. I think there’s a failure in fundamentalist religions that have come in there because at least they have a transcendent vision.

DP: Fundamental religions are a postmodern phenomenon. They kind of take this idea of a pre-modern state, then they kind of idealize it. Tha earlier state didn’t exist in the way they conceptualize it. Fundamentalism is a way to bind identity together I guess.

BMH: Not only that, but it seems to have like there’s an Armageddon scenario in the Christian fundamentalist that leads to heaven, leads to the new Jerusalem: the chosen few. That’s a transcendent leap that powers the fundamental religions. Not only identity within the tribe, but your life is going somewhere. Certainly the Muslim fundamentalists that believe, as suicide bombers, that they are going to go to paradise. If that’s what they believe, that’s a transcendent vision. And I think that what’s been missing in the evolutionary liberal movement is a transcendent vision equal to our scientific, social, and spiritual capacity.

DP: But couldn’t some of the problem the problem of transcendence within its self. I mean, I really like that native cultures seem to be more based in imminence, not transcendence, and that the spiritual is somehow separate from the physical or material.

BMH: When I use the word transcendent vision in this particular thing I meant a vision that transcends current reality. Like the new Jerusalem or paradise.

DP: So you think we need to have more modeling of desirable states that we need to move towards.

BMH: I believe that if you really put together the evolutionary potential of humanity; spiritually, socially, and technologically, and imagine that there is a direction of evolution…

DP: What about sexually?

BMH: We’ll get to that. Spiritually, socially, scientifically, and then I’ll talk about super sexually…That you will see that we have the possibility of being born as a universal species. Extended intelligence, extended space, extended lifespan, and I think that’s imminent.

DP: Do you think people are actually scared of confronting the reality of that possibility?

BMH: Yes, for one thing we’ve…

DP: Somebody was telling me, most people fear success more than they fear failure.

BMH: Well we haven’t got good images again. See science fiction, except for star trek and a few of them, a disaster, war like species clashing. So nobody can become attracted to being that. And I started out my whole career asking what are positive images of the future equal to our new power. And actually we don’t have them and without vision people perish. So I’ve spent my life finding the means and the possibilities to what’s imminent but not necessarily going to happen. When you are attracted to them you start moving in that direction. And one of them was the Apollo program. I mean I suddenly saw that we could be a universal species physically.

DP: I guess the psychedelic experience opened me to a different worldview.

BMH: Then after that it was psychedelic and then after that it was women. And then there was the uprising of the peace movements and the civil rights movements. But to take hold of a dominator culture that actually a thousand year tradition of pyramid dominant structures, we’re really re-patterning civilization here. So I think we can give ourselves some slack. You know, this is not just a quick thing. This is the transformation of our species.

So, I caught hold of the possibility of us being born as a universal humanity. I got attracted and then I started to research what might possibly lead to a species able to restore the earth, to free ourselves from hunger and poverty and actually be attracted towards… I think realizing our spiritual, our creative potential personally and throughout the world, and throughout the solar system. I think the next social level is social synergy. Like nature itself creates these vast cooperative organisms. I think that force is at work in society now.

DP: So what are some of the practical ways we might get to this social synergy?

BMH: Well, social networking is certainly happening.

DP: Social networking like Facebook and Myspace? Or what do you mean exactly.

BMH: I actually mean, and I'll tell you the image I have and it actually came from my work with Buckminster Fuller, running for vice president and all of that. I see that the social planetary body is like a living system. And it has basic functions. Environmental functions, health, politics, governance, and so on; I see that as a wheel-like structure. And at different fractal levels, locally, socially all the way on up. We would find that there are now innovations and breakthroughs in every sector and every function. While there are break downs, there are break throughs.

I think the next level of social synergy would be the connecting of the best practices, social innovations at work across functions so that you begin to see the emerging world and that that emerging world is more positive than the world that is now threatened. It's not that we want to save the existing world as it is, it's too unjust, there's too much suffering--not what we’re aiming at. So the emerging world is all emergent and it would come from connecting that which is creative. And when I ran for vice president, I suggested a peace room as sophisticated as a war room in the office of the presidency, and it would scan for, map, connect what is creative. Not only in one sector but in each sector connected. And when you do that, even conceptually, you get the feeling of an emergent world.

DP: When you talk about putting that in the office of the presidency--that’s still to me a centralized, or pyramid-like model. Do you believe that the social networks point toward a new social structure that could be more collaborative, a distributed system of power, without rigid hierarchies?

BMH: I do, and when I was with Buckminster Fuller (this was way back in the seventies), he urged me to bring these ideas into the political arena, simply to lodge them there. That’s all. I mean, I was an idea candidate, but the idea was good enough to get over 200 delegates to sign a petition. Now when I got up to make my speech, the democratic party had to move up the whole convention so I wouldn’t get on national TV. They were horrified. I actually walked in there and got 200 delegates with the idea of finding out what works in America. And I made my speech, and the guy took me up to the platform and said, "honey, now they won’t pay any attention to you, they never do, you’re saying it for the universe." So I said it like a declaration. The USA will build a peace room as sophisticated as the war room and it will be in the Kremlin and it will be all over the world and we will see the emerging world. It more or less lay dormant. I did certain things with it, but not a lot. Only recently I was invited to the Democratic National Convention to present at the big tent where progressive voices are heard. And we pulled together a team to create the Citizens Solutions Council, locally for grassroots people for many kinds of social networks to see what’s working, and what’s creative at the local level, with an office in the presidency so there could be a connection. Between the social networking and the expression of our government, not that the government is controlling it or even has to implement it, but if it knows it, and this is the vision, and it takes the very same structure integrative model and places it within the office of the presidency, where citizens could feed it up and it could be communicated out and it doesn’t control the social networks but it creates that conduit. Because its really ridiculous to have all the citizen activity going on and have it disconnected.

DP: The progressive community has a lot of disconnections. It seems to me that a lot of the community gets caught in these individuation traps where people create their little thing with a name and foundation or institute or company. Then they’re very attached to those boundaries that they’ve created. This is my perception of that…

BMH: I see exactly the same thing, Daniel. I think that we’re not quite there yet. So people could realize that they’re actually doing it themselves or that they have enough energy to get their teams together or that they’re part of an environmental movement or a health movement. But the idea of integrating all of that into a whole system is the next step of social evolution.

So, I would say, when you asked what would be the next practical steps, it would be to build these integrated models locally, to connect the social networks, to see the pattern of the whole; to bring it up into the level of governor, the level of city council, the level of mayor, the level of president, and beyond--throughout the world, so that we could have a more graceful path to the next stage of evolution. ...llya Pregogine, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his study of dissipative structures and the question is how does nature evolve up the chain of complexity when the law of thermodynamics leans toward disorder, and evidently this tendency to higher order eats disorder. You need disorder to create higher order. If there’s a very stable situation you’re not going to get a higher order so when you get evolution interpretation of the disequilibrium of modern society, out of equilibrium of the whole global society, what you see is that there’s enough disorder for new patterns, mutations, and innovations to emerge.

I was actually here to write a book in Santa Barbara, and I got lost one day, and I found myself up a mountain here and I came to Mount Calvary Monastery. It’s a beautiful monastery here and there was a group of hang gliders jumping off the mountain, in butterfly colored wings above the cross at Mount Calvary. And I had a flashing experience over the presence of the Risen Christ. And the presence was not something I saw and it certainly wasn’t a man in flowing.. But it was a field of intelligence that said.. it didn’t look like anything… It said, the presence, the field said, 'when you combine the love of God above all else (meaning to be the great creating process), your neighbor as yourself, yourself as me--as a natural expression of the divine combined with science and technology, you will all be changed.' And I thought, oh my God, that’s true.

So the way you would possibly get to a future like Bucky was seeing or I saw like a mystery was not about dominating power. It was about completely transforming your consciousness. Loving one another as yourself, loving that diving process of creation above all else and orienting technology toward the good.

We’re just beginning to experience our possible failure and collapse.

There are a couple of things, just in the simplest way Bucky did, and the one that got me was one in a little book called “Utopia or Oblivion” and it was this phrase: “we now have the resources, technology and know-how to make the world a 100% physical success for everyone without taking it away or destroying our environment.” Just that idea shifts the worldview. When I read that--basically the world will work for everyone, the world could work for everyone. Just that idea, shifts the worldview. Then the design science revolution and the world game and trying to see it as a whole; it had a purpose, which was to make the world work for everyone. We didn’t have that as a purpose. I mean, certainly in the religious world, you’re not trying to make this world work for everyone. The liberal world wasn’t even dreaming of making the world work for everyone. So Bucky had a vision that this could happen and saw that we had the resources and technology then we had a design science revolution that attracted architects and students of great intellect. But it was premature. It couldn’t get applied yet.

And one of the things I’ve learned about being part of this movement for the last forty years is that we have seed ideas and we plant them, and sometimes it looks like they’re not going to work, but they’re growing behind your back, sort-of-speak. And I sometimes feel, for myself, like I’ve been planting little seeds and they’ve been in a greenhouse--and I thought they didn’t amount to much and then the top came off the greenhouse and suddenly, just like that peace room in the White House: the idea of going to the Democratic National Convention and proposing with Obama as president, it’s not that I think getting the president to do that is the most important thing, but that was a seed idea. I caught early on the importance of the space program as an Earth, space, human development program leading to a fact of us becoming a universal species. Well that’s still not quite what the space program is about but its potential is there.

I believe that many of us in the 60s, 70s, 80s and so on, have planted these viable seeds. Maybe the conditions have to be that there is a breakdown of old structures; that the danger is real for the top to come off this greenhouse and there you've got the seeds. Now, will they grow fast enough to prevent the collapse that makes it very hard for anything to grow because if you’re in a completely destroyed infrastructure, it’s really hard. So my hope is that these seedlings that have been planted in every field, get connected in a non-linear way through social interactive networking, which leads towards a vision not only of just a world that works for everyone, but an emerging world.

It makes me happy to say this. You know I actually feel a certain joy inside me to think this could be true. Its invigorating. But the thought here is its even more than a world that works for everyone the way the world is. Like middle income housing for everyone and enough, that’s good. But the minute you get it,you get restless. Look at the materialistic world.

DP: I agree with an idea that Buckminster Fuller and Herbert Marcuse shared: That getting everyone to work is the wrong objective. Fuller proposed that most people shouldn’t work. What is the work doing for the planet? You're going into offices and using toner cartridges, you're using fossil fuels, what are you making? Fuller thought that most people would be better suited living in there home communities growing food, being educated through interactive media, exploring their creative and spiritual potential.

BMH: That maybe exactly what is going to happen. We’re re-localizing our currency, we’re re-localizing our food. The whole system breaks down.

DP: What do you know about alternative currencies and timesharing systems?

BMH: ...I wish I could quote them to you but there are timesharing systems being used…

DP: There are many initiatives, but they tend to be quite small.

BMH: ...The Ithaca dollar.. That’s a seed link: the alternative currencies--what they call 'free currencies,' seedlings.... They won’t come up unless the climate is right for them. But when they start coming up in every field and you add to it, you start to think about people like Jim Gardner and the intelligent universe and the idea that we’re going to put forward silicon-based intelligence. Maybe there’s a lot of intelligence throughout the whole universe; maybe when it gets born from its planetary womb it has to be more intelligent or it won’t get out of the womb. And there’s a convergence of intelligence here that goes way beyond anything we’ve seen. I hold that there is a tremendous progressive tendency in nature that leads to ever-more creative life. I think the universe is a developmental process. Its pretty obvious from cosmogenesis. That we’re early in the universal story still. 13.7 billion years, according to what I’ve been told there are maybe a hundred or more billion years ahead and so the universe got started and it took Earth.

DP: Could be a good movie.

BMH: And it took the universe all this time to create human life and animal life. And a species intelligent enough to realize it's evolving or dying by its own action. Boy, is that an achievement of evolution. And I feel that we are just on the cusp of becoming aware that we are evolving: that we could destroy or create, and I don’t know how many millions are waking up to that. But the worst the crisis gets more people to start looking, and then here’s the cosmic drama. Does the connecting of that which is creative and sustainable go fast enough or do you have to go--how far down do you have to go. I use the birth image. Nobody really knows when a baby is going to be born, how it will come out. Not the doctor, not the mother, and probably not the baby. Because it's dangerous.

We’re in a very dangerous transition. Nobody on this planet has been through a high-tech, overpopulating, polluting, warring species toward a sustainable, evolving, regenerative world. We don’t have elders who’ve done that. We don’t even have youngsters who’ve been there. So, we’re in an evolutionary gap and the only way that I have managed to imagine that gap is to look at past jumps. You know: from pre-life to life; from animal to human.

And then you get into the experience that nature has been taking jumps through crisis for billions of years. In different eras--I’m putting us in the story. And then I’m assuming the tendency to higher intelligence won’t stop here and I see, actually, it’s not stopping. But it’s not mature, so I have a motherly approach to the situation. We’re a mess.

But mothers are really used to giving birth to messes. And the baby is a mess. But you know it has growth potential and you really don’t know what it's going to be. It's unknown; I would say we know we have growth potential. I know we have spiritual, social, scientific genius everywhere.

And I wanna give you information about my favorite theory called supra-sex. There have been two great human drives: Self preservation and self reproduction. And, starting in the mid sixties, we began to be aware that if we doubled the population once more we would destroy all life. So the drive to procreate is expanding past the drive to create, to express our uniqueness, and in order to get anything done, you probably have to join other people's uniqueness. And I call that supra-sexual co-creation.

I feel it all the time. I have a creative urge, I’m looking for partners, for teammates. In order to express more of it, and if they are expressing more of their creativity by joining with me than we have an energy of expanded sexuality. And if sexuality was so attractive and pleasurable, it gets us to reproduce up to a maximum--I think supra-sexual, co-creation is pleasurable. I know because I feel it.

DP: Are you talking about something that’s a little bit like Freudian sublimation of the sex drive into creativity, or are you talking about erotic intimate relationships also?

BMH: I’m talking much more in Abraham Maslow terms then in Freudian terms. I think Maslow put his finger on it when he studied healthy people over sick people. He discovered that all of them had one trait in common: chosen work that they found intrinsically self-rewarding and of service, at least, to one other person. In other words, we’re wired to create and express our potential. And if you want to be a fulfilled, joyful person--you almost have to find that once you’re not starving or in a war zone, you've got to find what it is you want to express. So when I was the mother of five and felt depressed I went to a Freudian analyst and he talked about the sublimation of the sexual drive and I felt even more depressed when I thought that was it.

When I read Maslow, I realized I wasn’t neurotic, I realized I had not found my vocation. I loved my children, but it wasn’t my vocation. And once I began to see I had a vocation as a communicator--as a student of evolution--I became self actualizing. I became happy. I reached out on and on, I became the person I am today. That is not sublimation.

DP: Do you see a shift in human society today also leading to a change in relationship patterns? You know we’ve had a monogamous based relationship model, do you see other patterns emerging, and what do you think those might look like, or be like?

BMH: First of all, those are already emerging. You don’t have to get married to live together in this culture. Its quite different. When I was, you know, 17 or 18, if you did have sex with somebody you didn’t tell anyone and you certainly didn’t overtly live together. Now…

DP: It is true how amazingly fast that transition has been. In the fifties or forties--or many people watching this film don’t realize we’ve had such a rapid transition in relationship patterns.

BMH: And then the whole Betty Friedan feminine-mystique book was very interesting for me because she interviewed many woman in the fifties and found that many women were sad, that they had this nameless problem.

And the problem was they had no self image beyond 21. No sense of identity beyond wife, and mother, and culturally, it was imprisonment of the feminine potential. So then we have the whole feminist movement and we start to become, not just equal, but what is the feminine, authentic feminine self outside the patriarchy. We don’t fully know yet because it's--we’ve been in a cultural structure of patriarchy and I found that the drive in me as a woman, beyond my reproducing the species and loving my children, was expressing my own creativity through joining. So what does that do to couples? In my case it broke up my marriage. Because my marriage was completely in the old structure. Because I was the wife, and mother, and editor, and helper, and my husband was the genius…

DP: I was asking where relationship patterns were transitioning too.

BMH: So in my case I wasn’t able to navigate that. Then for a while I had a wonderful co-creator relationship with a partner but we didn’t get married. I felt that the bonds of marriage, wedding vows, wedding bonds, wedlock...

DP: It had been unlocked.

BMH: I had broken through… that partner died, and now I’m with another partner. We’ve been together for 20 years and we say we’re permanently engaged. He’s 85. But He was an Episcopal priest and he basically saw the feminine co-creator, the goddess needed to come forward. And he felt that it was his vocation to love such a woman so that I wouldn’t have to be aggressive or press against a dominator pattern, however its very hard for the man when the woman becomes vocationally aroused, and she’s totally passionate about her creativity .There’s something that happens in the masculine, maybe not in the young men, I don’t really know. I think that what’s happening is that we’re moving towards coupling. Not in the point of view of procreating and having maximum babies, but maybe chosen children, purposefully, but then to give birth to more of our potential by joining. I think the purpose of couples, marriage, and partnership will be a more regenerated sexuality rather than a procreative sexuality, and it will be moving up into how we release each other's potential. And if we do, the marriage, the partnership will grow, but it doesn’t have to be a legal contract. In fact it doesn’t really make any difference if it’s a legal contract or not, if it's an evolving group.

DP: What do you think of 2012? Do you see it as a legitimate prophetic date? That intuitively we’re moving at this accelerating process that is going to peak at this structure?

BMH: Well it is interesting that the Mayans came up with that from a galactic, intuitive perspective. And then it somehow relates to exactly the situation we find ourselves in: where we’re heading for a perfect storm which could be a negative aspect of the dissipater structure. It could just go down fast. Is it possible that it could quickly be non-linear in its jump. The timeframe towards 2012--I don’t know--but I do believe that there is a very short time frame here. And I think that on a mass-collective scale we’re going to take a jump by mass-resonance, by mass-consciousness shift, a mass-connection of what's creative could make the difference. So I say lets go for it.

DP: Use it as a mean or signifier.

BMH: I would, and let's say there is a higher dimension to this that can’t be proved, it gives it mystique, it makes sense to me because we are a part of, not only a solar system, but a galaxy. And I know from my studies with Nassim Haramein and others, that a shift in the galactic core, and why would there not be? And so I would like to intend in the direction that there will be a positive jump, and I love the idea of December 22nd, 2012 – it happens to be my birthday so I’m not taking that personally. But I thought that I would love to part of a very big planetary birthday party for planet Earth. And I have a wonderful planetary phrase that we could have our first motherly smile which could be, “hey, we could make it.” Its not that we made it, or we solved it, but oh, there’s enough of us. Like with Obama. Oh, oh, you know the amazement. That we both have a woman candidate and a black American candidate and the man won beyond his race is oh, how amazing. If that could happen in 2008, there is no doubt in my mind that in 2012 we could connect the positive, personally, through Internet and at a global scale.

DP: Is there any practical advice that you’re giving people these days? I’ve been more and more feeling that when I write articles and stuff to suggest people even think about, well how would you live without money, and also thinking about maybe learning how to grow food. I don’t know how to grow anything--not even a potato--but it seems good advice to offer people. You ever feel like as a public figure, now’s the time one has to give more tangible and practical advice about maybe we are about to hit this massive destabilizing crisis, and just to say that there are certain ideas that are gelling and developing isn’t enough anymore. Do you think there are absolutely practical things you want to tell people to do?

BMH: Well, there are a couple. One is in a self-evolution piece, the other is social evolution. Self-evolution is to do the best that you can to shift your identity from your egoist-separated self to that essence of who you are and what it is you want to create yourself. What is your drive to express? Seek out others who share that creativity and join. And create ever more expanding arenas of community, whether they be locally or in cyberspace, and then really draw on the sophisticated knowledge of how to grow food and how to do it right, it’s everywhere but you have to call it in. So, I think the building of community, based on a sort of survival, but more than that, affirming the creative potential of the people we’re joining with to make it into a positive, rather than just a danger signal is what I would suggest.

João Amorim: You talked about that Christ experience you had. A big focus of this film is how personal change can lead to societal change. Was that a moment, or was there such a moment where you actually had an "ah ha" kind of experience that shifted your viewpoint.

BMH: When I had the Christ experience, and I saw that it could be a forecast of the evolutionary potential of humanity, I got a very personal commandment, which was, 'Barbara I want a demonstration right now, which means you.' So I set on a personal path of what it would feel like to incarnate within myself that Christ consciousness. And there’s a lot of teaching about that and so I started to shift my identity from the person who was striving to get things done, to the one who was already there internally, and then it means, reach out and love. So I began a practice, it's in my book Emergence on how to do that. And then as the futures creator I began to see I have a role to help realize the collective potential of humanity and so I got turned on to feeling the Christ energy within me, not as a religion but as a living, creating potential. That I would say has transformed my life.

JA: As far as Bucky is concerned, do you have any more experience, do you think he had, like, a--we were asking BFI Director Elizabeth Thompson about it, if he had this kind of notion of other realms and like a collective consciousness, a spiritual essence…

BMH: With Bucky I didn’t go into the esoteric at all, but into the evolutionary. And so when he said there’s only god, there’s nothing but God, he meant the entire universe is intelligent. And the universe can’t know less, it’s a constant learning and he felt personally responsible for doing what he could about that. And so he got that impulse that made him so strong. And so when he embraced me and said there is only God and he put his forehead against mine, I actually thought he zapped me with the design science revolution in some of its aspects, because when I went out to run for vice president and said lets build within the white house a way of identifying what’s creative, I was going on that. And the fact that 200 delegates signed a petition, I was going to go see Buckminster Fuller two days before he died and I was going to ask him, I would like to know the critical path exactly as you see it. What should I be promoting exactly a 1984 to shift the tide? And I said is there anybody else that I should go talk to other than you and he said no, you come to me. So I had the date, the whole thing and he died.
So, I felt there is a critical path and that part of it is self-evolution, part of it is social synergy, part of it is vision, and part of it is the nature of the divine, intelligent, universal process of creation and embody all of that to me.

JA: One more thing actually. Um, because a lot these people are not used to these ideas, could you give your best definition of design science maybe.

BMH: Design science would be the science of understanding the design of nature well enough to work with it, to restore our environment, to be able to generate enough abundance without destroying the environment that it could sustain the life of the people on this earth and evolve our species toward its next stage. That’s a combination of design and science. The current movement is called Bright Green. And the Bright Green movement is bio-mimicry where you try to understand how nature works and instead of working against nature, you’re working as nature to grow that which can sustain human life without destroying the rest of life. That’s veery intelligent. Its an intelligent universe and we have to become more intelligent rather than less. And the design science revolution, as far as I can see, has not yet come together collectively.

JA: What do we need to do to have that come together?

BMH: What we need to is build those wheels of co-creation, and start bringing innovative and creative people from different functions together to look at the synergy of what we already find we can do because it’s coming together as a whole that we can take the jump. And I feel in the world of the foundation for conscious evolution that we want to contribute to social synergy and the design science revolution at that level.

DP: So a lot of it is about people learning how to collaborate.

BMH: Yes, the whole system, not just in small groups. What you need is an overall effect or a whole optical, like the whole site, how the astronauts saw earth. The astronauts did not see the people as the systems. I see the ___sphere, the thinking layer as the people and the systems that are now connecting in huge power to destroy and create. And that system hasn’t yet become self aware, that’s the work of conscious evolution.

JA: Maybe something about time…

DP: Any questions when you read 2012 do you have for me?

BMH: I did, I do have a question for you…What’s the Queztacoatl.. The name of the book. Cause you were such a seeker of something substantially meaningful for you. Has anything broken through that you feel you could hold onto in your quest?

DP: You didn’t feel like that from the book at all?

BMH: I felt that you were tentative.

DP: Well, tentatively certain. Well that there is a set of psychic dimensions to reality. Um..that there is a kind of an evolutionary process that’s going. That things are getting more and more fascinating. Synchronicities are becoming more and more concentrated. That there is some sort of process under way, that goes way beyond the rigid secular materialism that I was brought up in.

BMH: I think that is the same thing with me, slightly different language, that the hour of evolution is intrinsic and its in me and you and it is directional and the crisis, so I felt…you were so intelligent in your observations that I didn’t quite catch hold of passionate, I don’t mean certainty, but maybe its just your temperament is um, somewhat not skeptical, but --

DP: I also felt for the book to be sort of a work of art and not a treatise. I feel if you leave some things open, the reader has to fill them in and there are definitely questions left open by the book. You know, those were really my questions, but I felt that by being honest about I was still in this journey; I wasn’t saying that I had the answer, I had the scoop. I hope it allowed readers to connect with the material at a deeper level actually, than if I pretended I had the whole shtick worked out. I actually get unnerved by thinkers of 2012 who think they have it all worked out. Someone like David Wilcock. If there is too much certainty it begins to seems like an ego projection to me.

BMH: Yes. Well that’s exactly what I felt. I felt you were holding back a little bit. But not zealous certainty, but certain inspirational zeitgeist in you , that you were holding back maybe for the exact reason you said.

DP: Maybe, I think also at a certain point I was just a writer who got interested in these ideas that seemed more and more important, and I became invested in the responsibility of the subject matter. And in a way I then couldn’t go as deeply into certain imaginative speculative realms. You know or literary realms that I might of gone before I had those experiences.

BMH: Yes, I respect that a lot and I would say its also a temperamental quality. Like in my temperament, when I had certain expanded reality experiences and felt we were being born a universal humanity I became overjoyed. Not so much zealous, like I knew the way, but I became excited. Then I became called to go tell the story. That was basically my vocation. So then I had to learn the story. But I felt there is a story that was an intrinsic narrative based on cosmo-genesis. I couldn’t see it stopping here so I became actually pretty enthusiastic and still am for that matter.

Richard Register
www.ecocitybuilders.org

Daniel Pinchbeck (DP) Richard Register (RR) João Amorim (JA)

RR –I think, in terms of compact pedestrian and streetcar and bicycle-oriented solutions, you can really do some wonderful building.

DP – So do people adapt those solutions there?

RR – No, absolutely not, no. What people are doing there is very reactive and going back to the same old pattern. Basically, New Orleans spread out and sprawled over a vast area out from the French Quarter and most of that happened early this century and they’re going back to the same old pattern.

What were you asking about – the automobiles impacts and all that? Oh, you were asking about the economy. The opportunity of the economy right now is really there. I mean people could wake up, but it could also re-trench; things could get a lot more severe, which is what I think might happen. I’m really happy Obama won, because it’s such a fresh perspective compared to what we’ve had with Bush and the Republicans; it's an opportunity to look at what really did happen in the last big depression…and the reality is, I mean, what Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried was to build out of the problem, not to bail out. He infused money, but he didn’t just give it to the loaners to just loan out to society willy-nilly. There was a scheme behind it, something to build. He was building highways and bridges and schools and post-offices and recruiting artists and engineers and architects and farmers. He was reviving the soil; he was reforesting the forests, all sorts of things. All really good things to do.

And I think if we think about building an ecological city and reforestation, if we think about sequestering Co2 in forests and high bio-diversity, if we start building cities that really make sense for the long haul…and transform existing cities in that direction, then I think we’ll be, at least, building a foundation for an economic recovery; but I don’t see recovery happening unless we actually do those things.

I think it’s getting to be a very, very late hour, vis-à-vis the climate situation and biodiversity on this planet. By the way, I think that, you know, ecological cities are a large part of the solution, but they’re not the only part. I think we need to deal with population; we need to deal with too much meat eating; it takes up too much land, massive amounts of land; and I think we have to deal with actually pushing ourselves to become much more generous people. I think we have to accept taxes. We have to spend them on the above three – those three being (1) building ecological cities, (2) dealing with the population situation, and (3) dealing with our agriculture and our diets. If we do that, and we generously invest in it, then we’re headed in the right direction.

DP – One aspect of our film has been the sense that, besides any technical fixes, there’s a consciousness shift that needs to take place like, an awareness shift. Most people are maybe not aware of how their actions are impacting the planet. So what kind of blockages and experiences have you had trying to bring these ideas to the public and to planners and architects and so on?

RR – Probably the largest problem is a desire to keep things really comfortable, especially among people who are well off. They are very well organized to prevent changes in neighborhoods, to prevent buildings from being too tall where maybe they should be tall. Here, in Berkeley, where we’re doing this filming right now, my organization brought forward an idea for restoring the creeks by having developers get a bonus if they could engineer buildings a little bit higher if they were downtown, another story or two higher, and create housing in the right place where transit works really well…if they put money into a fund to actually remove buildings that prevent the bringing of creeks back and the expanding of community gardens and the creating of bicycle and foot paths around the city and so on, in willing seller deals. In other words, if somebody wants to sell their house, then developers put some money into a fund that could be matched by taxes or matched by foundations or fundraising schemes or whatever. But the money would be there so you could remove buildings in one part of the town and shift towards a transit-oriented city, not just neighbourhoods, but cities.

DP – You’re saying part of the need would be to remove a bunch of the existing structures.

RR – Oh, yeah. I mean right now, the city probably covers 3 or 4 times the area that it needs to cover and that’s because we drive around in cars and have parking structures and parking lots and freeway interchanges and it goes on and on. And the houses themselves, most of them are 1 or 2 stories high in most cities in the United States, so it’s scattered out over a vast area.

So, we had this idea in Berkeley, and it relates to your previous question about resistance, to put people in their right place, to work with transit and energy conservation. Everyone is concerned about climate change here and energy conservation to open up the landscapes, everybody likes biodiversity and gardening…but they wouldn’t go for it, because it actually would mean some kind of significant change in the land use pattern. And people would get very nervous about their investments and their property values and any kind of change in their environment. So, when this is the case, you say, "Well, wait a minute. Here you say that you’re very concerned about climate change and that energy is a big problem…. Well, here’s the solution. Let’s go for it." And then you say, "Well, but not that solution." So I think what happens very frequently is that people just don’t really want to sacrifice; they don’t want to face really difficult changes…and I don’t know what it takes to get people ready to do that.

In my mind, change is exciting and fun. I’m an artist type. I like creating new stuff. I like seeing buildings go up if they’re good buildings. I don’t like ugly buildings going up, you know, that’s a matter of some aesthetic taste or something, but if buildings are going up that’s the right kind of building in the right place and it, you know, replaces the need to commute long distances, then it’s pretty good. If you restore a creek and bring it back into the city and it brings more life into the city, natural life, and the kids can see it, that’s good. So, I like those kind of changes, but a lot of people are very worried about any kind of substantial change, especially in real estate land use patterns. I think that’s a very big problem.

DP – What do you see in terms of like new technologies that are being developed? Do you see projects that could be really helpful for retooling society, and what kind of techniques would those be?

RR – I think they’re probably some new technologies that will come along that will be helpful. I don’t see any gigantic breakthroughs being necessary, I think solar energy is ready to go at the quantity of energy that could be delivered economically. It will probably be more expensive than the energy resources that we have now, but it would be a very good clean energy source, same for wind. But, the main idea in ecological city design, or one of the main ideas, is to just cut the demand way, way, way down and it can be done by designing right. And then if you come up with maybe some new technologies, I’m not sure what they would be, I haven’t seen any breakthroughs, I mean there’s information technology, but strangely enough, good ideas floated around pretty well before we had all this information technology, too. So, I’m not expecting any kind of technological breakthrough to solve these problems, but we will need a breakthrough to get to the point where we wish to work on redesigning and rebuilding our built environment.

DP – It sounds to me from what you were saying, and once again this is a theme in our film, that part of what’s lacking is a coherent positive vision that people would have a sense of what they’re moving towards, because you know they don’t want to think about what they’re giving up. You know, if they have to give up comfort, and the car, and all that stuff, that’s just negatives. So how do you present this as like, what’s the super positive new life pattern that people would be having if they followed this kind of path?

RR – Well, there’s different notions of prosperity. For example, you can have pretty bohemian people that live in what looks like poverty, but they have sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; essentially, you know, they have poetry, art and dance. They have music and sculpture, you know. There’s so many things in life that can be enjoyed – humor, and discussion, and conversation, and friendships, and all these sort of things. So, that’s one version of prosperity. What if prosperity is very flamboyant, exciting buildings with rooftop gardens, and solar greenhouses and cafes on rooftops and…you know, being able to see your friends within a short distance if you want to, walking out of the building and in 15 minutes finding yourself in the wilderness, in a beautiful agricultural zone or something. I mean this is one form of prosperity.

The kind of prosperity that we see now is just a bunch of things that we’ve collected in our lives and being able to drive, sort of, impulsively from place to place if we just happen to want to. I think that’s a prosperity that has an extremely high price. So if we can think through a prosperity that enriches our own lives, that's rich in biodiversity, that has butterflies and hummingbirds coming back and things like that; that has real significance. It’s part of a real prosperous way to live. And you can have good food; I mean, you can have more land for food growing if you reshape towards ecological cities…so many more options. There’s a whole other kind of prosperity.

In fact, one interesting thing is to think about economics in a different way. The economics we have now is you grow, grow, grow, grow, grow and that’s how capitalism defines health. And if you aren’t always growing, you think there’s a big problem, and then people go unemployed and so on. Well, another way of looking at it is the fewer people there are, the more there is for the people that are there. You know, if you have enough production, but you have fewer people, you don’t have to share with as many people. I mean, it seems like a strange notion in a capitalist world to say – well, maybe you could have a shrinking for prosperity. It’s a little slogan that, I think, is an intriguing one. To actually shrink for prosperity.

DP – Once again, that makes sense in a way, but then what you are actually saying to people tangibly is that one of the greatest pleasures that many people look forward to is raising a family and having children and you’re saying that that’s not ecologically feasible at this point in time – what’s that?

RR – Why not?

DP – Well, I mean, if you want to have less people.

RR – Well, no, I mean, you can have two kids. You can have other people have two kids around you, they can play with your kids. I mean, and they can have plenty of friends and so on.

DP – I guess another point you were talking about the build out, rather than bail out. You know, Buckminster Fuller, for instance, had talked about like a post-work society, you know, where maybe the type of work that most people are engaged in is actually not of benefit to the planetary environment anyway, so why not just allow them to grow their own food and not work …

RR – I think part of that was an illusion of the times, which was that we were going to have energy that was so cheap that you wouldn’t even have to meter it anymore. You might remember that’s what they talked about in the fifties when nuclear was coming on strong. The head of the AEC, the Atomic Energy Commission, was saying that pretty soon energy would be so cheap we wouldn’t even have to meter it and so this is the cauldron in which some of these ideas came forward, including a lot of Buckminster Fuller’s.

I think the idea of a lot of leisure and time for arts and so on is fine, you know, to a certain degree. But, I think it’s much more important to think in terms of really productive, creative, contributing work. You know, to actually be able to build stuff. To actually harvest food and make clothes, things like that.

I just got back from China a few days ago, and over there people were saying, "Well, can you tell us not only how we can make our city different, but more importantly how to get richer faster? How do we get richer faster?" And I was saying, "Well, you know, there’s something to the idea of, and you know it sounds kind of puritanical but, do good work…to actually work hard with your muscles and your brain and accomplish something. And then relax and have fun. But, you know, don’t think you’re gonna get there just by having fun and relaxing and being impetuous or, you know, dancing and singing all the time. You know, you have to actually produce something.

DP – To me, that sounds a little bit on the puritanical side. I think about like when the colonialists came to the New World and they found the Native American people sitting around like dancing, doing ritual, not really, they didn’t even have a concept of work, they would hunt and gather a few hours a day –

RR – It’s really hard.

DP – No, not actually at all. Actually a few hours a day, two to three hours a day is what anthropologists have figured out is how long it took the indigenous people to do any behavior we would consider work.

RR – I’ve read those. I have some doubts about it at that extreme. You know, if you wanted to live in a way where you have that much, where you don’t have that much in terms of material wealth, maybe it would work out in a place that isn’t overpopulated, in a place that does have high biodiversity. We don’t have that anymore. It doesn’t exist anymore. We’d have to recreate that. We’d have to shrink our population back. We’d have to, you know, repopulate massive numbers of animals around the world. You know, there’s a hundred times the body mass of human beings of any other species in our size range that ever existed on the planet.

DP – There’s definitely a bunch of us right now.

RR – There’s a lot of us. I mean, it is absolutely gargantuan.

RR – You know, Wilson said, I think his figure is that only seven percent of all the animals, by weight, on the planet now are wild. All the rest are either human beings or our food animals, our pets, or our pests.

DP I think there are a lot of beetles–.

RR – Well, I’m talking about, you know, mammals and birds and things. <both laugh> Probably more beetles and ants and termites than people.

DP – Do you see a spiritual dimension in this transformation process?

RR – Yeah, but I think the spirit is – well, Paolo Soleri had an interesting comment. He has a book called The Bridge between matter and spirit is matter becoming spirit. In other words, I think spirit is as the spirit does largely. Spirit is becoming something that has some really powerful essence to it, some kind of recognition of where we are in the Universe, of who we are and what it means to be alive…these sort of larger philosophical questions, and the sense of being one at home on the planet and so on. I don’t think you get there just by wanting to be there and by meditating. I think meditating can help. I think many things can help to enhance, as a discipline, your recognition of where you are and who you are and when you are in the world. But I think it ultimately comes down to are you going to do something about it?

I see a lot of very wealthy people that spend a lot of time never sharing but who are all on spiritual quests. Then, I see other people who don’t seem to be on a spiritual quest at all that are always helping other people. In my mind, they make more of an actual impact than other people's spiritual journeys, because what they do actually helps. So I think that spiritual advancement takes work. It takes an understanding of where you are and that life is pleasurable, too, and creative. One of the things that I thought is interesting about so much of the psychological studies is the dearth of the information on the creative personality. You have a lot on the abnormal personality, you have a lot of people that are seeking success in their life and getting comfortable and having the luxury to be introspective. But what about the creative personality?

What kind of essence does the creative amount to? I mean here God is supposed to be the Creator of the Universe or the Creator of forces seen as the deity of some sort and I think that’s really meaningful. So why don’t we talk more about how you create something like an ecological city? Like a future where people are really happy and the other plants and animals can co-exist; this, to me. is a spiritual quest.

DP – I think there’s always a tension though between imposing any model or trying to impose any vision or model onto social reality and some kind of self-organizing process that is taking place.

RR – Well, you can just sit back when you have what you think of as something that’s worth teaching somebody or that you think is true but a lot of people will say, "Well, who are you to say that cities should be organized like that?" Well, I’m just a person that studied it; that’s all. Maybe I’m wrong. You decide yourself. So I offer these things and if people want to do something about it, they can. I certainly can’t do it alone. But the issue has come up and I’ve had people from the spiritual angle and also from the angle of the academic say to me, "How can you architecture types, how can you architects" – I’m not an architect, I just draw architecture – but, "How can you architects feel so certain that you can do this stuff? Why are you so self-assured?"

And it’s because I know I can! I build houses. I’m a carpenter. I know how to lay the things out. I know how to dig the ditches and pour the concrete and do the framing and the finish work and everything. I just know how to do it. Now, if the client isn’t there, if the money isn’t there, you don’t get to do it. If the rest of the crew isn’t there, you don’t get to do it. Same thing with building ecological cities.

But that creative possibility needs the discipline to come together. Now, I can put it out there but if other people don’t want to do it, it’s not going to happen. The signs are it’s not going to happen, actually, because we haven’t gotten enough support. Among all the people I know who are doing ecological cities, the support is very small. In the meantime, the suburbs sprawl; in the meantime, the Chinese are crazy for cars.

I was in a cab in China a couple of days ago and the fellow in the cab with me who spoke both Chinese and English says, “Well if I can’t get a car how can I get a wife?” I mean you have things going on in the world now that need major change. Now when I come say, "Hey, we need major change;" it’s up to you to say, "Okay, well, maybe, maybe not." But, I’m gonna keep saying it, because I think we do need it.

DP – How do you factor in, I mean, I assume, you were talking about reading about peak oil studies and I assume you’re looking at the accelerating effects of climate change and how, potentially, you know, life anywhere on the earth is gonna get far more unpredictable in the next few years. I mean like, so I saw your model of rebuilding New Orleans, but what if New Orleans is just hit by a series of these cataclysmic weather events? Should we even be thinking about rebuilding New Orleans? Should we be thinking more in terms of either nomadic encampments or, you know, structures on the high grounds? I’m just wondering…

RR – Well, structures on high ground, you know. That’s better. <Both laugh> I agree with that. No, I think that, well, there’s a problem here, which I’ve been dealing with my whole life, which is a lot of people say well, that’s impossible; you just can’t do that, because people aren’t going to go for it. I talk to the politicians, they say "Politics is the art of the possible; we do what’s possible." I say, "Wait a minute. There’s two kinds of possible: (1) is it physically possible and (2) can you actually design it and build it? The answer to both is yes. Can you actually design and build a world where maybe you could even start reducing the temperature of the planet?

If you really thought it through and if you had people who got behind it, well maybe they’re never gonna get behind it, but let’s not say that right now. Let’s say, could it actually be done? Could we actually institute a whole series of changes that could actually start cooling the planet? Why isn’t anybody suggesting that we actually think that way? We could say we could do several things at once. We could deal with the population, we could deal with the built environment, we could deal with our diet, we could deal with our spiritual things, which I think is the essence of generosity, which I think we need to have.

We need to invest in not just ourselves, but the future. So if we pull all these things together, I think we might be able to make it. Now when the peak oil people hear the ideas of ecological cities and ignore them, which they’ve been doing, I mean, I know a lot of the peak oil people, and they never talk about ecological cities. And yet it’s something that’s viable, that you can design and build.

DP – Could they see things moving more to a township level and do they see the cities being abandoned?

RR – Most of them are very vague on what exactly to do except get basic skills.

DP – Are you talking about people like Richard Heinberg and so on?

RR – Yeah, Richard Heinberg, in particular. He never mentions ecological city design. I was at the 1st National Symposium on Peak Oil, which was held in Yellow Springs, Ohio, was it, near Antioch, about four years ago. They keep having them, you know, they keep saying the same thing. They never talk about ecological city design. They talk about little communities, small communities, going back out on a farm. I think you can’t support the number of people we have on the planet doing that now.

DP – Well, a lot of people think that we may not have this many people on the planet for much longer.

RR- Right, well, they think there’s gonna be a big dieback, but I think that’s – I think to acquiesce to that, like…a friend of mine by the name of Jan Lundberg, he says we must embrace the dieback and then after we learn our hard lesson, then we can move forward. I say, wait a minute, that’s like saying let’s endorse the Nazis and their extermination of people in Europe or the Jews and everybody else. I can’t go for that, learn our negative lesson that way. I mean, you try to learn from –

DP – I guess most people who say that don’t expect to be one of the ones who are diebacks –

RR – They don’t. You always sort of imagine they’re going to be the ones that survive for some reason, but I don’t think it works like that. I think it’s highly irresponsible to give up on trying to design a way of living that’s really healthy.

DP – Clearly at the moment we have an irrationally designed global system that is supporting massive unsustainable and inequitable behavior. And yet, we see that we have 6 billion plus people on the planet, stumbling by in the dark, getting along…so I agree with you that if there was a huge emphasis on the kind of more rational sharing, equitable sharing of resources, really re-thinking how food is produced and energy is produced, maybe there wouldn’t have to be that kind of traumatic diebeck.

RR – I think so. I think, I’m not –

DP – So, it’s like a failure of the cultural imagination in some sense.

RR – I’m not really that hopeful that people will catch on, but I’ll continue working as if they could, because maybe they can, you know? I’m not ready to give up. I think that –

DP – Well, you were saying that you just had this eco-cities conference, you had people from 73 different countries, 223 speakers, so obviously, there is some kind of growing groundswell or movement that could lead to what they call a tipping point. And I think a lot of fields that, to me, are complementary to what you’re talking about, are experiencing the same thing. So as this crisis deepens there might be almost like – we were talking with Barbara Marx Hubbard – it’s almost like a non-linear transition point where these ideas that have been gelling for so long, are able to transmit.

RR – Yeah. There’s many analogies. You can say you go through, you go over the threshold into a new territory like the Myth of Sisyphus where you’re pushing the rock up the hill and once you finally get to the top and it starts taking off down the other side; those kind of moments are possible -

DP – I thought he never gets to the top.

RR – Well, but, yeah okay. <both laugh> Okay, so the myth of Sisyphus’ son who’s triumphant. Let’s call it Sisyphus’ son. That’s a mouthful.

But anyway, no. We might be right at the edge of things right now. People are saying finally, “solar energy!" Let’s all do solar energy. Almost everybody thinks it’s a great idea now. I was writing about solar energy in 1971 along with the ecological city design and planning and that sort of thing. This was a long time ago and nobody did anything about it. They started, and they just backed off and it faded away, but now it’s coming on really strong and it’s looking really good and finally people are saying, which we all knew back then, too, that oil is a limited resource, that fossil fuels are gonna go away.

Well, now people are beginning to catch on to solar energy and so what’s the environment that fits with solar energy? It’s a city that requests less energy. If solar energy ends up being a little bit more expensive, and I’m sure it will be – I’m almost positive of that – then, make a city that doesn’t require that much energy; and it can be done. So the two go together. And then there’s this other possibility, finally people will start catching on in a bigger way…

For example last year at the Bali conference on climate, nobody talked about city design or city structure at all. It just didn’t come up. It's the biggest thing human beings create. I mean to me, this is an amazing puzzle that we could not see this gigantic thing that we live in. I mean look out here, all you see is city. We’re surrounded by city for miles and miles. They don’t even talk about it, and yet, a European city averages about 1/3 the land area for the same lifestyle about 1/3 the energy consumption … That’s big.

You’re talking 66% savings in energy just by going into a European mode of a city. And they’re stuffed with cars anyway. So, what if you came out to a city that wasn’t stuffed with cars…you’re talking about saving maybe 80 % or 90% of your energy. You get into thinking like that, you say, hey, it can be designed and why not start getting serious about it, and maybe we’ll start doing that.

DP – It seems to me, what I keep hearing and what you’re saying, which I’m reacting to in some sense and what I see as an emergent property of a global transformation process, is this open source model that’s coming from the software development. You know, so that now there’s like Firefox or something, which is such a better Internet browser than Internet Explorer or the one that Microsoft created. And nobody got paid to do it; it emerged out of a collaborative network of designers or Drupal or whatever…

Is there a way to mesh what you're talking about with a kind of open source collaborative approach where you have people actively engaged in a design re-conceptualization process?

RR – Sure. Well this is, there’s something like the Churet process where architects and people who are interested in designing their environments, whether they’re clients or just people in a community get together; and they do almost what you call an open source design process. I mean they all come together and share their ideas that’s usually directed towards a particular piece of property and somebody has the investment money to actually make something happen, so it gets kind of real and practical. But, these ideas are out there, I mean, I’m just one of the number of people who are proposing them. There aren’t a lot of us, but they’re out there. If anybody wants them, they can take these free ideas. We have a non-profit corporation, we put them out on the Internet and so on, so we definitely use those tools you talk about.

But, it’s up to people somewhere in their, deep in their heart to say, ‘I want to build a different world, and I’m willing to face some serious change, I’m willing to work hard for it, and I’m willing to put money into it, and I’m willing to’, you know – it’s not necessarily going to be comfortable.

DP – George Orwell said that he thought that the purpose of technology shouldn’t be to make life softer and more complex, but simpler and harder.

RR – Not like that, because I think evolution heads towards the more complex. It’s another interesting discussion here, because a lot of people that are friends of mine that talk about simple living. But if you get into perma-culture and ecological city design and how you actually live in a complex, very rich biological environment, there’s nothing simple about it. Ecology is very complex. But, if you work with whole systems , if you can imagine a whole city working 3-dimensionally, it becomes comprehensible. It’s complex, but it’s comprehensible.

I think that’s an important concept. For example, you look at a bird, all the way down to the DNA and its cells, and it is an incredibly complex organism. It has wings, and you know what the wing are for, and its beak is for eating, and its legs are for landing and so on. And you get the gestalt of a bird after knowing little about and what the bird actually is and from then on, you kind of got it. You understand the whole system, even though it’s extraordinarily complex. So, when you deal with whole systems, they’re more easily comprehensible than the out-of-control mass we have of this sprawling city that seems to make so little sense.

It’s hard to understand, because it’s hard to understand. It doesn’t make any sense. But, if you redesign it so it’s an ecologically healthy organism like other living organisms, it starts to make sense. Then it becomes much more comprehensible. So, I don’t believe the ideas that we’re heading, that we should head towards simplicity, but rather whole systems understanding, which orders your thinking and makes it much easier. It makes thinking easier, but not less complex.

DP – Isn’t there a city in Brazil that’s kind of an eco-city model? What’s the one?

RR – You’re thinking of Curitiba.

DP – I’m curious to see your reactions to that project and if you feel they manage to some of the parameters that interest you.

RR – I think Curitiba especially in the early days was well on its way and still very good. It’s about as good as it’s getting so far, but it hasn’t moved much in basic design in twenty years or more. One of the first things they did was discipline the transportation system to work with a high-density development. So they have five long arms of high-density development that go along with the dedicated bus route, which means the buses move up to 40 miles an hour down this route and there’s no cars.

…it’s dedicated to buses only and emergency vehicles. And that becomes a sort of a skeleton for organizing a city that works really well. You have a lot of open space; you have good recycling. They’ve given people the option to move out of areas where used to be flooding and into the higher-density areas with good deals. There’s many things they’ve done in Curitiba that are really good. But, they are also swamped in automobiles.

There’s still quite a few cars down in Curitiba. So, my feeling about that city was that it should have continued pushing on in the same manner that it started. It’s kind of ceased up a bit. And, as it’s been growing it’s become more automobile-dependent and into the future. It’s still pretty good, though. It’s still one of the best cities around.

DP – I keep wanting to come back to this sense of how deep the consciousness shift would have to be to create a thrivable future for humanity. And I wonder, what flashed in my mind, something like homeless people, street children, but I was also thinking of the whole question of private property in and of itself. If you go to indigenous communities, they don’t have private property in the same way we do. You know, people can sleep anywhere, move around, they invite you into their home. I mean, do you think that with our kind of ego-based mentality around possessing goods and structures and land that we could have an ecologically-thrivable future?

RR – Well, it’s very complex. You’re putting out a range of different scales where people have different types of relationships, radically different types of relationships. Village life and life of migratory bands and so in is just so radically different from what you get in a city or a large town or something…Just talk about disbanding all ownership and you know somehow sharing everything in an idealized sort of way, I don’t think makes too much sense unless you actually are willing to live in a situation where people used to live and do that sort of thing.

For example, bartering, I think, is absolutely impossible. I mean, who’s going to want me to come give them a lecture and then feed me and do my dentistry because I gave them a lecture about ecological cities? I’d have nothing to offer people for bread. I couldn’t go down and get bread all the time and trade them one book for a lifetime. I’ve got one book they might like to read. I mean, you’d have to – I think economics demands people to be fair with one another and to be compassionate and to share. I think you can do that with ownership, but you can’t do that with massive ownership that’s greedy.

DP – We are planning to interview Bernard Lietaer. Have you heard of him?

RR – No.

DP – He wrote a book called The Future of Money; he’s a European currency trader who’s one of the architects of the Euro, and he basically believes that the monetary system that we’ve constituted in itself is an insoluble disaster, because it enshrines competitive rather than collaborative behavior. People want to horde it, because it’s this virtual abstraction, and keep as much of it as possible.

So he’s come up with an idea of negative-interest currency, called the Terra, that would actually loses value as you hold on to it like natural goods. It’s indexed to natural goods that also degrade in value over time. So rather than horde it, you’re emphasis would be on sharing it. Like, if you had 100 cupcakes, you’d want to give them out to us, because they’re going to go bad in two days, but if you share them, then we’re happy that you shared them, we’d remember next time we have 100 cupcakes we would want to share back with you.

So I’m just curious how this resonates with you in terms of whole-systems thinking about how things might change?

RR – Well, that has to depend upon social trust that one another is going to do that sort of thing. Otherwise, you wouldn’t want to deal with that kind of currency in the first place. So, you have a leap of faith that you’re having social trust.

DP – Well, don’t we have social trust in our currency now? I mean, isn’t that part of the problem that’s happening.

RR – Absolutely. I mean, socialism is more social trust than capitalist hording. I mean, there’s a difference there.

I think when you talk about sharing, when you talk about investing in the future, there’s many different ways you can do that. And, one is to build ecological cities. One is for gratification: save, so you can give more to your kids, things like that. I mean there’s many, many ways you can share. You can share if you have ownership, but if you’re massively greedy and if you want it all for yourself, there’s a problem there. I mean, this is a spiritual problem. This is an economic problem. This is a problem for survival of humanity now, on the planet.

So, I don’t know about these little economic systems and how they would really work, because it seems like whenever one of them is constructed it has the assumption, like I have an assumption that maybe people will like ecological cities and want to build it. Well, their assumption is everyone will want to have a more equitable world and so they’ll join in on this, but a lot of people, of course, don’t want to do that, just like a lot of people don’t want to build an ecological city. So, we’re putting the ideas out there and these monetary systems, to me, seem somewhat beside the point, maybe not, maybe I’m just not educated enough about the way money works. But, I think –

DP – So he would probably say that your ecological cities are beside the point until you reform and transform the monetary system.

RR – Well, I don’t think that’s true, because, you know, you could go out and build anything with your hands. You could build a cob house, they’re really popular now in certain circles, perma-culture circles and so on. You could just make things with a knife and a piece of wood. You don’t have to wait for a monetary system that makes some kind of ecological sense. And, there’s money lying around that isn’t that much a part of a system that’s you know you get in oddball ways.

You could borrow money and build a house on the basis of your friends. You can charm someone into loaning you money. A lot of developers are really good at weaving fantasies and charming people and that is how they get their money in many cases. It’s very complex. But, just to get down to what I think is physically needed is to build an infrastructure that runs on 1/10th the energy that we build and live in now. And, that would make an enormous amount of difference.

How you get there – by socialist investment, by capitalist investment, by using money that’s declining in value as time goes on – I don’t know. Whatever it takes.

DP – Do you want to ask some questions, Joao?

JO – Do you want to go through your projects a little bit?

RR – Okay, so in this particular design, the idea is that people have their residences on the outside of the structure, and they look out past little gardens into the natural, or agricultural landscape. Then, on the inside of the structure are social spaces and you have big beams of light coming down from above like this, swimming pools up on the roof and other social spaces up there. So, that’s one design… A fellow named Gene Zelmer has been promoting this idea, kind of a little town on a hill…Let’s see…

JO – Is that a natural hill or re-sculpted?

RR – No, it’s an artificial hill…Let me get to one that’s kind of a basic set of ideas here. Where’s the really basic one? This one’s really basic. This one kind of gets you the general idea.

Here you have the international style of towers, or slabs, it could be sliced in this manner, pretty much single use with, sometimes, restaurants on the roofs, shops on ground level, and so on, but the ecological city idea is more to bring together all those pieces in real diversity and so you can put warehousing in the lower section, and storage and so on. And they do have storage in the bottom of most buildings, but, right now, warehousing is usually outside of town at a truck’s distance, so it takes millions of gallons of energy to get the warehouse goods back and forth from the warehouses to the city.

For example, in the San Francisco area, it’s 40-50 miles out into the Central Valley where most of the warehousing is. That requires the trucks, the freeways, and so on. But, if you have a train that simply goes into your little town like that, leaves off the warehouse goods temporarily, they go up to the various shops and then they go out to the public, all you need to do is have skip loaders going back and forth, those forklifts and things like that, and elevators to deliver in a matter of feet instead of many, many miles that you’re dealing with warehousing in the current city.

And, of course, you have here the darker interior areas, which would be things like movie theaters and clean industry, and labs and so on as well as the storage. Then you can raise the city up into the sun a little bit more, you get beautiful views, you can have solar greenhouses facing the sunny side, street systems that are way up in the air. You can link building by bridges, all these design possibilities are there to be explored.

There’s one little pattern that I like a lot, which I call a “Keyhole Plaza” or “View Plaza” and the idea here is that you celebrate the view of the nature. Something of nature is of importance to you, you value that, so you save the view and in this case, you ‘re looking up a curving beach like, maybe, Santa Monica, California, where I used to live, and so, instead of having a plaza that’s just closed in with buildings all the way around it, you have a view because you are open to nature and celebrate both nature and agriculture, I mean nature and your city at the same time.

DP – What do you think about what’s happened to public spaces in cities in the last hundred years or whatever?

RR – Well, public spaces in the last hundred years, that’s a wide-ranging variety of things.

DP – Well, there’s been a sense of privatization. There’s less and less public space. There’s less and less –

RR – There’s more and more malls and things. Yeah, privately-controlled space and so on. I think it’s very negative. We need public space. Public space is wonderful. We should have more public spaces and fewer sequestered private malls.

DP – Of civilizations in the past, who do you think had the most interesting city designs?

RR – Well, Europeans certainly had some interesting designs. They’re still there. You know they’re usually surrounded by and largely suffocated by automobiles, but they’re still there. I like Katmandu, pedestrian areas in Katmandu. Old medieval cities I think are pretty neat.

DP – Katmandu is an amazing place.

RR – It really is. Have you been there?

DP – Yeah, I have.

RR – This drawing here is representing a new neighborhood in New Orleans – what to do after the floods. And the idea is that you elevate the landscape, maybe 20 feet, and that should take care of a few decades, maybe a century or more of global warming and sea rise, as well as the hurricanes that come in there. So, if you did that, you’d be doing what they did in the first cities that ever existed – Eer and the Sumerian civilization, other cities in the Tigres and Euphrates Valley.

When the floods came, the floods simply didn’t get high enough to damage the cities, and they could do that in New Orleans. You could have compact areas that are dense like this picture, you could have street cars that go through the city. They love street cars there anyway, so they should build like the French Quarter is built which is compact and works with street cars and pedestrians.

DP – I’m not seeing in these designs a kind of urban perma-culture, agriculture element. Would you still see agriculture outlying the city, would that be redesigned in some way?

RR – First of all, the ecologically redesigned city, the city that would take up one quarter of the land probably, so you’re liberating an enormous amount of actual dirt where you could grow stuff very, very effectively right next to the city. So, that’s the big thing. Putting rooftop gardens onto your city, that’s fun, that’s nice. You can get a little bit of production. Not a lot. The denser the city gets, the less rooftop there is per person, of course. So that means you get less and less.

And rooftops, like the one we’re on right now, for example, have other interesting functions. For example, people get married up here. It’s a beautiful view. I have some pictures of a marriage ceremony that faces exactly the view that you see in the background right now. So there’s more things than just food that you can do on the rooftop. One of them is solar energy. But, the thing about agriculture and about solar energy is the energy to drive that - the solar energy from the sun - lands on a large area and has to get collected. The energy has to be gathered together…and then where it’s concentrated in small points, which are your cities and your towns and where the people live, then it’s concentrated enough that you get some real effect out of it. You can really warm things, you can power your electrical devices and so on, because you gather the energy over a large area. That implies the energy to produce food as well. So the big thing in terms of ecological city design is to take up a lot less space in the first place.

And you get that possibility when you move away from cars and sprawl development and paving and so on. Also, one of the interesting things to notice there is that if you power your cars with an alternative energy source, you get almost nothing out of it in terms of the form of the city, because you perpetuate the same old city that covers that vast landscape. So, the more energy-efficient car is not a very long step in the right direction. In fact, if you take that seriously and really spend time investing energy, you’ve wasted your time and money when the time is very, very important. And we really have to solve some of these problems quickly.

DP – Well, we were looking at a friend of ours in L.A. now; we had him do a prototype of a water electrolysis engine that runs on electricity that would be powered by these battery cells he’s creating called i-cells; they’re working on…so they could be powered by solar, so you would have like a closed loop process where you wouldn’t need carbon fuels to motor people around in their cars and vehicles. Wouldn’t something like that be a solution?

RR – No. It wouldn’t be a solution, because you still have the cars. You still have the sprawl. You still have the paving the surface of the landscape and so on. So, it’s only a very partial solution. It’s only a temporary solution. It’s one that if you spend a lot of your time and energy dealing with it, you’re wasting time when you really should be investing time and figuring out how to redesign the city that doesn’t have the cars. Why agonize over better cars when you can have bicycles and streetcars and walk around in your city?

DP – What do you want to do with the 300 million vehicles we have in the U.S. right now?

RR – Scrap them and turn them into building materials. <laughs> That’s exactly what you should do with them. Make bicycles and streetcars out of them and rail systems. It’s a very, very damaging system right now.

JO – Well, the cities themselves. You’re talking about actually bringing a lot of stuff down…

RR – Yeah. Well the city –

JO – How much of that would really –

RR – You can. You can recycle a lot.

Another thing that’s going on is that – people don’t think much about this, but – every year – I don’t know if it’s one, two, or three percent of the city – goes down. Termites and dry rot and earthquakes and fires and things like that. Don’t rebuild in the same place. You know, it’s going to take decades to rebuild your city. So, work on it for decades. You’re not going to tear it all down and waste all that energy of all the embodied materials, you can let it decay at its own rate. But when you do replace it, replace it in the right place.

You know, put the new buildings where it works with transit. Don’t put them out in the suburbs someplace. That’s a really bad idea. Don’t be building cars that keep going on to the suburbs, you know, start building streetcars and moving towards the centers. You can move towards the centers of small towns and villages, as well as big cities. You don’t have to be hung up on big cities only, I’m not at all. I think you can have all sorts of scales that work well.

DP – Do you think that humanity’s gonna make it as a species on this planet?

RR – I mean it’s hard for me to make any guess, because of so many variables, but I would think that human beings would be among one of the last things to go, because we’re so clever and manipulative and, you know, we’re survivors.

But, we might end up with a very poverty-stricken planet where there’s very little else other than our food supply and animals there alive with us. I doubt very much that we will eliminate all life on the planet. I think that’s almost an ego-trip in its own right. But, I think that we could thrive with lots of the other plants and animals that are still with us. We don’t have to exterminate them. We don’t have to change the climate in a very major degree. We could turn that thing around.

We have to actually try it. We have to systematize our thinking. We have to look at ecological cities. We have to look honestly at population. We have to look honestly at diet and agricultural systems. We have to make a very strong effort and be willing to invest in it and sacrifice for it. It’s like a war schedule, you know. We’re in the Third World War right now. It’s the war with the world. And it’s mainly because of the cities we've built; there’s so many of us living in them and they’re so badly designed, and it goes on and on. But, if you actually face up to those things and if you actually try to think about it as a whole, I think that the solutions can start coming up.

I think you also have to say, though, that I’m going to face this discussion. I’m not going to run from it. In political situations where I’ve been talking about ecological cities, I’ve never really been shot down for the content of the ideas. It’s always shut down by people turning their backs and they say things dismissive like, “Oh, Richard, get a horse”, you know, just to change the subject. They just won’t deal with it. But if you actually deal with it their answer is there. There really are answers there.

DP – What about a high-density city like New York City where you already have about a maximum density of people living together?

RR – Well, an interesting thing about New York City is that it runs on about half the energy of the average American city, because they don’t have so many cars and everybody gets around on transit and it is compact and it is fairly diverse. It’s pretty intense, though, I mean, I would guess it’s probably somewhat wasteful in terms of materials, because it is so dense.

I think it might have gone over some limits there, but unless we actually think through how to really try to work this set of ideas out, I don’t think we’re gonna come up with answers like how can you make New York a little bit better. And maybe the answer is, you know, you have a Downtown, an Uptown, a few things, you begin spreading Central Park around, in between it. I don’t know. But, I know that you can certainly radically alter suburbia right away.

DP – What about ideas like a lot of the bioneers type of ideas like John Todd’s living machines?

RR – I think they’re very good. I mean, the living machine idea, that’s simply using biology in a way that’s extremely reasonable. I think it fits right into the ecological city planning.

DP – What about the idea of creating sort of wilderness corridors, do you think that’s a good one?

RR – Oh yeah, sure. I planned that. In fact, we have a mapping system – I didn’t show the whole system in here, but – these corridors become whole zones in this particular way of looking at the way you can reshape cities. One of the things I do that I like doing more than anything else is restoring creeks. That is restoring corridors and existing cities, or little pieces of them. I’d like to systematize it. Most people that I’ve run into politically don’t want to do it. They don’t want to have a system by which you can actually remove buildings systematically, because they think maybe you’ll apply it to their neighborhood or something.

Even if you say, here’s the zoning map we’re gonna deal with, we’re dedicated to it, this is our recommendation. They say, oh no, it’ll spread all over town and you’ll be eliminating my house. I mean I’ve had this argument many, many times. But, no. The answer to your question is yes. Corridors are a very good idea.

DP – What are some of the most exciting new concepts and ideas that came out of your last eco-city conference?

RR – Let’s see…Thing guy named Andy Koontz had a really good slideshow on just how bad cars are and how good rail is. And, having the experience of high-speed rail in China just last week was pretty amazing. 150 miles an hour and you have glasses of whatever you’re drinking, you know, on a tabletop, and you can barely see any ripples whatsoever. You’re going 150 miles an hour. It’s not like Amtrak. So, seeing that a high-speed rail system can really work and learning about it at our conference was important.

Marcia McNutt was speaking there, she’s the, I don’t know if it’s called a director or president, but she’s the head of the Monterey Aquarium Institute, which does studies down in the Monterey Aquarium. And she spoke about the acidification of the ocean. She said if CO2 looks like a problem for the atmosphere, it’s an even worse problem for the ocean, because the CO2 is acidifying the water, which is beginning to affect shellfish now and corals. And, she had a graph that showed the whole earth and how much of it is covered with water, which is sixty-something percent. And then she says, but the volume, the living volume is much larger than that. So she showed another graph where it was more like 85-90 percent of the volume that is occupied by life is in the ocean and that is all being affected by CO2 in a way I hadn’t realized before so that was very interesting to learn about that.

On the creative, positive side, I’ve known all the people for quite some time, or almost all of them, that came there who are working on ecological city ideas, so it was more of the same. A lot of these ideas are not new. Compact, mixed-use development is not new. It is traditional. It’s been there thousands of years in cities. We just have to run with it.

JO – You keep on talking about diets and how we need to change our diets. Why do you think we need to change our diets and what the impact –

RR – Right now, for example, in Brazil a lot of the forests are coming down for meat-raising and this is happening all over the planet. A lot of the forests are coming down to run our vehicles, for raising bio-fuels at this point and I think that’s a very dangerous thing. But, I think when it comes to diet, it’s one of those things, we really have our strong tastes, we really enjoy what we eat, we’ve really gotten used to it and it’s a very hard thing to deal with, but raising meat requires anywhere from 5 to 10 times the land area than raising greens, vegetables and so on, and fruits, and so with a ratio like that simply the raw land area that’s required is enormous.

I think we have a responsibility to try to work with bio-diversity and reforest lots of the world and reforest the world in high biodiversity not just plantations and oil pumps for example but to actually do a real job of reintroducing biodiversity in the forest. Well, if we’re eating the kind of meat we’re eating and if we’re gonna be eating more of it into the future and if our population is going up at the same time and we’re requiring that much more land, that’s that much less land for biodiversity, that’s that much less land for the other forms of agriculture and for soaking up CO2. Let’s get effective about that, too.

If you have land that’s just grazing cattle and that doesn’t have much biodiversity anymore, I mean, you wonder why there aren’t any condors around. Well, there’s no dead animals that are left over from normal predation. You don’t have mountain lions killing deer, we don’t have condors coming down to eat what’s left over, things like that. So, we have a biodiversity that’s kind of scant, because everything’s in cows out there.

JO – What about the whole bio-fuels? How do you feel about that?

RR – I think bio-fuels – it’s really odd and interesting, because if we had a reasonable population on the planet and if we had very efficient ways of living in our cities, then bio-fuels wouldn’t be such a bad idea and you would cut a certain small fraction of the forests and so on and have your bio-fuels. But, we have such a gigantic population, we have such a gigantic appetite for running so many machines, bio-fuels are about as disastrous as it can get.

To run the automobiles of the United States, this is according to a lot of different statistics I’ve seen, but, let’s see, Lester Brown has quoted this statistic that to run the cars of the United States on bio-fuels would require all the agricultural land of the entire United States, actually a little more than all the agricultural land –

JO – Is that based on corn?

RR – No, any kind. I mean, well, different, but, what do they really represent? For example, oil pumps are much better than corn in terms of the amount of energy delivered. And I’ve flown over Malaysia and I’ve looked down, it looks like astro-turf.

You’re up at 30,000 feet and you look down at Malaysia and the whole thing looks like a plane of astro-turf from horizon to horizon. It’s all one plant. It’s all oil pumps. And, Indonesia’s going the same way. Malaysia’s about 50% oil pumps now. Indonesia is changing very rapidly and the forests are going, you know, for bio-fuels. If we had a very small appetite, it might be okay. But we have an absolutely gigantic appetite. So, put bio-fuels out of your mind for a while, go for solar and wind that don’t have any of those kind of negative connotations or almost none in comparison and build a city that requires not as much energy.

JO – Do you think we can actually generate enough energy from the sun?

RR – If we build right, yeah. And if we don’t keep growing our population, if we can actually have a little negative population growth for a while, which doesn’t mean killing off people, but it means reproducing more slowly.

JO – Do you think there should be a population control?

RR – Sure.

JO – Like in China?

RR – No. But I think people, individuals, should pick up on the idea. It’s interesting that the most Catholic country in the world, Italy, where the Vatican’s located right in the middle of it, has negative population growth right now. So, you know, there are ways to deal with it, other than the ways the Chinese have tried to deal with it for a while, Indians, too, for a matter of fact. But it’s a problem and I think it’s a consciousness problem more than anything else, people have to understand the whole thing. In fact, if there’s one lesson from what I think you might learn from my experience is that whole-systems thinking really accounts for a lot.

You can think of the whole system of the city and the way that all the parts fit together, the land use, the transportation, and so on, you come up with the ecological city. If you look at the problem of human’s surviving on the planet physically with the other plants and animals you can see there’s a whole system there. There’s all the people doing what we’re doing. But, the system is…there’s a population…we’re building the wrong kind of thing, we’re powering it with the wrong kind of power, we’re eating too much meat, we’re not conservative in terms of our demands from nature. So, if you look at this whole pattern, then I think you begin to see a wholeness there that begins to make sense and then you can have ways to deal with it that are much clearer. Maybe I’m wrong, but <laughs>

JO – Where do you see this type of project advancing the most?

RR – Where are the ecological city projects doing the best? They’re little bits and pieces everywhere. There’s no place where it’s all coming together. Chicago, they’re building on rooftops, I mean, they’re putting nice gardens on rooftops, green roofs, and things like that. Some cities have really good transportation. Portland downtown has –

DP – I think a much larger meta-question –

RR – What’s that?

DP – What should be the ultimate purpose of human society?

RR – Human society? I think compassion and creativity. You know, if we could create a society that furthers our own compassionate creativity, I think that’s it. I mean, I’ve thought about that a lot. How does an ecological city serve people? First of all it’s a creation. It’s something people create. And, it’s something that can be created well. It’s something that can even be created beautifully. What’s that all about? Well, you can create atomic bombs. You can create weapons to slice people up. You can create game plans to abuse other people. You can plot. You can have creative plots that do destructive stuff. Well, you have to differentiate creativity on a band that goes from the creative to the destructive, as well as just so you are actually able to create something new and different.

So, if you really understand creativity and you tune that up with what it means to be compassionate part of life on Earth, if you really appreciate the other life forms, if you really appreciate the other people, then you might have a chance of creating a more compassionate and creative world, and you’d be creating it. So, how do you be creative? As I was saying earlier, there’s almost no studies in psychology about the creative personality compared to the abnormal personality or the inquisitive person or the somebody who is extremely successful and self-seeking and who has a strong ego, you know, all sorts of stuff, but…I think creative compassion is either our destiny, or lack of it our doom.

JO – In your own life, did you always have these ideas or is there something that compelled you, because obviously your concern is the greater good of humanity, was there something that led you to that?

RR – Well, maybe. I grew up in a beautiful place, which is New Mexico, around Santa Fe. One of the things I was rather obsessed on was the fact that we were about to be exterminated any minute by the Soviets. I grew up in the Cold War era and I grew up right across the valley from Los Alamos, New Mexico where they were making the atomic bomb. I thought a lot about that and I thought a lot about us creating the tools of our own destruction, and I knew the people who were doing it, people designing hydrogen bombs, that’s what they did.

I had Thanksgiving with them, talked with them, they were my parents’ friends and that sort of thing. I was pretty nervous about life on Earth. I thought it was pretty beautiful and I grew up in a place that was really beautiful. I think that’s where my concerns about protecting life come from. And, I think you can have a city that not only protects life, but when you started this little interview, I was saying we could have a city that actually enhances biodiversity and creates rich soil. It’s a matter of designing it that way.

DP – What about like, I mean, even a state like New Mexico. Like somebody told me that the water within the state could support maybe like 30,000 people.

RR – It could support a lot more than that.

DP – Okay. But, I mean, much less than the people that are there right now.

RR – Much less than are there now, sure. It’s right. Like I said, population can be a problem in its own right, plus the demands. You can look at it with a very small population, you can have a very well-tuned society.

In very primitive circumstances, you could design a society that recycles water and uses it in productive greenhouses for example. There are many solutions out there that are healthy. I think the bottom line is maintaining planetary biodiversity, almost more than anything else. To get there, you need compassion and creativity. You need to be compassionate and you need to be creative. You need to be somewhat fearless, too. I mean, I have people – I have to say, in all honesty, it’s a harsh word, but I see a lot of intellectual cowardice. You know, people really being afraid to engage an idea.

DP – Where does that fear come from?

RR – I don’t know where it comes from. To me, it’s a little bit mysterious. I think it comes from fear of death or something really basic. And that people have fears that I don’t understand really. I think some fears are inculcated by religions…they make you fearful. Some politicians make you fearful…so they can manipulate you. I don’t know. There’s natural fear of pain and your own death, anyway. I mean you’re not gonna get around some base, residual, existential fear of your life going away, you know, that’s there.

DP – That’s one thing that we’re talking about in the film in terms of looking at shamanism and this kind of initiatory process where if you have kind of visionary experiences you have a sense of your life extending into other worlds and other dimensions even…you know, maybe less attached to this life.

RR – Maybe, I don’t know. It’s not my personality. I see the artistic personality as one that takes visions from the head into reality by way of whatever it is: poetry, music, art, city-building, it can be beautiful. So, you have these visions. They’re not real. They’re not out there.

But, they become real, because of the agency of your own activity and your own knowledge and your own skills, whatever. So, I think that the sort of the shamanistic thing, you know, you can have exciting hallucinations or experiences you think are very real that are very definitely not on the every day plane, but I think it’s particularly exciting if you can take those sort of things and posit futures that don’t exist and make them healthy and actually then head out to try to create them…and some people do that. I mean, a lot of people work with that actually.

JO – What is there here that you think would be worthwhile for us to look at?

RR – Well, just the fact that we’re up on the roof. That’s one thing that’s sort of unusual. It’s the first building that he’s done with a rooftop garden. I convinced him to do it and he built five more afterwards. It gets people up into the views and, I mean, I would’ve liked to have the guy have real gardens up here, not just decorative plants, but it’s too much, who knows, too much trouble, investment, and time.

To garden on a roof is more difficult than to garden on the ground surface. You have to elevate everything, you have to make containers, you have to deal with overflow, you have to deal with stains, deal with leaves getting in gutters, and all sorts of stuff. So, when you hear people talking about buildings full of plants or rooftop gardens –

DP – Vertical farms?

RR – Vertical farms, that doesn’t make any sense. It really doesn’t. In fact, do I have my little notebook with me here? No, I don’t.

I run that little vertical farm scene. I have a picture of a tube like that, you’ve probably seen it on the little solar collector up here. Okay, first of all, you’re only gonna get 1/5th the energy transferred from solar to electric. Okay, so, and then, when you take that 1/5th and you change it from electric to light you lose about half that, so you’re down to a 1/10th. Say it’s a ten-story building, you’re down to 1/100th the solar energy that you’d get on a flat surface outside arriving through the system in the building. It doesn’t make any sense.

Now, how it does make sense, if you want to be really, massively invested in it you could have 1,000 acres out there gathering solar energy to run your electricity and have electricity come into the building and run up there and running all those lights. You could do that. But if you planted that surface, you’d probably get 50 times the production, just by planting where you put your solar collectors, so it doesn’t make any sense.

DP – Thank you.

JO – Thank you.

This month we are lucky to be able to feature an interview with Therese Benedict who tells us about her life and how she has been inspired to write her book Days go by, Not love.

Colin:-  You realised you were clairvoyant from an early age, was that challenging for you initially, being that sensitive?

Therese:-  Ever since I was a young girl I have felt people’s emotions, for example I could tell if a person was good to be around or someone to stay away from. I thought it was normal, I thought everyone was like that. I could tell if a person was feeling sad or if they were a good or bad influence.

I would hear voices calling my name, I would see things, but it wasn’t something I could talk to my mother about. She was Catholic and very religious so she would not feel comfortable with this kind of thing. Her response would be to tell me to go to church.

I knew I was here to help people but I wasn’t sure in what way I was going to help. I thought about being a nurse, an EMT and other ways in the health profession but knew that was not the right direction for me to go.

In my late 30's spirits began to ask me to go to their loved ones and give them messages. I was very uneasy about honouring these requests at first, I was nervous and scared but did what was asked and the outcome was amazing and beautiful. I started to see more spirits in full form, then angels started talking to me more and more until it was every moment of my day, of my life.

I reached a particular level when God started talking with me more often and now I have been listening to him for years and obey everything I am told to do.  That is how I wrote my first book Days go by, not Love, some three years ago. I was told to write this book and then was given the words with the right amount of knowledge for the people to take their first steps. God and his angels had to tell me the words to write in the right level of detail because I had all the knowledge to give all the answers to change their lives. In order that people might have success in understanding the information it was given in small portions.  It is the most amazing journey one can walk, and I have been given so much information and wisdom I could have written a novel of a thousand pages, that is why there is a book two, three and four to follow.

Colin:-  You talk about God and angels in your book, but not in a religious context, do you find that works better for your readers?

Therese:- I talk to God, angels and spirits on a daily basis. It is all about Love. I don’t refer to the Bible or any other religious text, I just give the message that God wants us to love each other as he loves us. For it is the love that brings us inter peace and happiness.

Colin:- As part of your guidance you advise people to get in touch with their own angels, do you find that people come back to you with confirmation that they can feel their angels with them?

Therese:­- Yes, many times people have remarked that they feel a lot of energy around me and in our home or that they have felt the energy as well whey they have spoken to them. They have come back or had called me in tears because of the things that were coming to them in their lives, they were trying so hard to change their lives and were trusting in their angels. When you feel that big swoop of energy it’s the angels, you can feel them touch your shoulder or your face. The more you start talking to your angels the more you feel that they are there. My husband once said that he wanted a hug from an angel, he felt an energy getting stronger and stronger, he then hugged himself and felt their warmth and love so deeply he broke down in tears, it was so beautiful and intense.

Colin:- It’s interesting that was we were talking about Angels I started to feel a lovely warm and loving presence, they are here I’m sure.

Therese:- Really! That’s wonderful, in our daily lives they are with us all the time. It’s a life of enchantment that everyone can have.  If people choose to embrace it, they will find it is real, and a rich blessing.

Colin:-  A number of my good friends have had quite strict religious upbringings and that has been quite a challenge to step out of, do you find people may have a resistance to your teachings?

Therese:-  This is one of the reasons I do not preach any religion, I was brought up that way as well and I find it can make some people run. I do not live my life based on religious belief; I live my life with God, angels and my love for them. I am here to teach people about a deeper Love; how to love themselves and how to love each other. I love to give people insight and guidance about how to live in a more positive way, to release negative cycles of behaviour and bring compassion and comfort to ease their situation.

Colin:- Yes you speak about bringing out the good from within in your book which, as you say also involves having a look at those things you may not want to see. I notice you have left a lot of space after each chapter, do you find it helps to keep a record of progress, to use it more as a journal and workbook?

Therese:-  It’s important to have that space to describe how the reader is working on his/her issues or situations, what they are changing in their lives. In that way it is easier to see how each element connects to other areas that may need some work. It could be a log where they are tracking their progress. This is probably the biggest thing they have ever done in their lives. It could even turn into a story that they end up writing in a book themselves to encourage others.

It will become possible to see the connection with the spiritual world because when working with Angels you start seeing connections all the time. You start to see their messages with events that take place in your life to help ease your life. You start seeing that you have a hand to hold and that you are not going through something alone. You begin to see them and know that they are there, without seeing them with the naked eye. It brings so much peace and comfort in so many ways and even if there is a hard situation you know that you have heaven standing by your side. Once you start changing your life, the sooner you start getting to know your angel. To learn to have your own personal relationship with them and that is when you feel they become your family.

Colin:- Have you had any feedback from your book since its launch in May.

Therese:-  Yes I’ve had a lot of positive feedback so far and the book has reached over 32 countries now, which is great news.

Colin:- One of the points you make in your book is about the importance of being honest with yourself and with others, and it’s interesting how that very question can make you stop and think, ‘am I being honest in all things in my life?’. Sometimes we might persuade ourselves that leaving out the truth is ok, it’s not telling a lie after all.

Therese:- Often we find ourselves coming up with excuses about things we have done, and not being honest with ourselves that what we did needs to be looked at, we may find reasons for not going deeper to find out the causes of why we did our wrong actions and not acknowledging that they were just wrong. It is between ourselves (and God) so there is no need to try to hide, the truth is already known we just need to face it.

So when someone takes this journey they find there is less pain in their lives, less hurt in their relationships. It helps in every part of their lives. That’s why this book is only the beginning, because it can go so deep.

Colin:-  You mention addictions in your book, is this an area you are able to help with?

Therese:- Yes, because in each case we find there is something within that they is being suppressed. I have found that by working with someone, say with Alcohol addiction, once they have worked on the internal issues the addiction disappears. Traditional treatment centres can help but more often than not people go return to their addiction because there is still something within that they need to face and heal from.

Often we walk through our daily lives hurting, and we are so afraid of more hurt so we try to protect ourselves, which is when we start to hide our truth.

Colin:- Later in your book you discuss how we have the opportunity to make a choice, which is something we are all being asked to make as our lives change ‘what would you like in your life, how would you like it to change?’

Therese:- That’s right – do you want to be happy, do you want to face what you need to change to initiate healing in your life? It’s so important to me that I help people all over the world to find ways of relieving the burden that they carry in their lives.

Colin:- When we first got in contact you were talking about you going worldwide with your book.

Therese:- Yes, that is our intention, the further we go, the more people we can reach and the more opportunities we have to help people. This book also will help people start to see the unseen help that stands by their side. We all have angels and this book will help them see that angels are there helping them with each step. I’d love to have people read my books and then perhaps be invited to speak in seminars all over the world.

Colin:- So you were saying you had many more books to write, have you started that process, what is your next project?

Therese:-  Well this is really just the beginning of helping people to look at things in their lives and to offer guidance.  I have book two just about finished and my husband and I have completed an inspirational journal which we are just waiting for the right time to submit. I know a journal is a great way to keep focused on what people are doing to change their lives. I have also completed self growth cards to complement the book to help people stay on track and stay positive. When you change your life there is always hard issues to face, challenges to overcome, and it takes a great amount of courage to keep going.

Colin:- Thank you so much for your time Therese, I’m sure our readers will find this interesting, good luck with your book.

Therese Benedict is a clairvoyant with a gift that allows an authentic and direct communication with God and his angels. Therese helps people who are searching for peace and love to find it within themselves and in their lives. She works endlessly with the angelic realm to bring love, peace and healing to those seeking guidance; to step into happiness and love. 

Therese Benedict
Author & Clairvoyant
Days Go By, Not Love
Web: www.ThereseBenedict.com
Email: YourJourney_1@yahoo.com
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