PUNCTUATIONS

(Editor’s note: This article is reproduced from FUTUREdition Volume 14, number 3. I found Mr. Pertersen’s thoughts to be very stimulating. I hope you do a well.)

by John L. Petersen
There are any number of sources – mostly unconventional – that are suggesting that this year is going to be particularly memorable for humanity and this planet. Most assessments of the Mayan calendar, for example, say we are entering a particularly active and disruptive period. The big astrological picture points to a ramping up of instability from now to April and then continued big shifts through September, and the Half Past Human folks see this year as being really quite extraordinary. Other sources like Kryon and the Hathors are explicit in describing what we are experiencing.

It’s one thing to hear these prognostications (among many others) in January and muse intellectually about the possibilities that might be on the horizon. It’s quite another – for me, at least – to watch the converging vectors of great change play out in the news each day.

We’re watching rapidly growing political instability and shifts within the Islamic Middle East – a trend that really caught most of the world flat-footed and now clearly has the potential of fundamentally – and rapidly – reconfiguring the geopolitics of the world. At the same time, the climate is generating all kinds of weather surprises – significant anomalies that haven’t been seen, in some cases in 1500 years.

In the energy arena a new report in the prestigious journal Nature proposes that the world may peak in its ability to economically mine and deliver coal within a decade. That’s new: peak coal. And now, the Wall Street Journal reports that ExxonMobil, a corporation which spent a great deal of money pooh-poohing the notion of peak oil is now discovering less than it is pumping. “The company said that for every 100 barrels it has pumped out of the earth over the past decade, it has replaced only 95. It’s a conundrum shared by most of the other large Western oil-producing companies, which are finding most accessible oil fields were tapped long ago, while promising new regions are proving technologically and politically challenging.”

Sounds like the classic description of peak oil to me.

There’s also big domestic political disruption in the U.S. that, responding to impending fiscal disaster on the horizon, feels like the first significant attempt to change the conventional approach to budgeting and politics since I’ve been around. This after the U.S. Federal Reserve has given as much as $15 trillion (really) to bail out foreign and U.S. banks and insurance companies and there are many indications that the present “recovery” is fundamentally manipulated. On that point, read this piece by Giordano Bruno on How to Fake an Economic Recovery. Discount the hyperbole, if you want, but think about the logic of the argument that is advanced.

The global financial system gives many indications of being in the final throes of one lifetime, about to be necessarily reincarnated into a new system that operates on a whole new set of principles. The transition will certainly be interesting.

There’s a growing sense of fear behind all of these changes with people desperately reaching out to apply conventional, familiar tools to push the out-of-control forces back into a familiar box of predictability. For example, in Obama’s budget there is $44 billion for naked body scanners for airports. Think about that. Why do we need 275 more naked body scanners? Are the terrorists beating their way through the conventional scanners that seem to work for every other building in the country? What good things could we do to deal with problems like education and poverty with $44 billion? How about rebuilding our infrastructure? And then, there’s good reason to believe that this technology is harmful to humans – that’s what I’ve heard from very authoritative sources who know what the technology is being used for in other areas. Maybe that’s why the Transportation Security Agency hasn’t published the report on the health implications of the scanners that has been mandated by Congress.

Our government, for instance, is contemplating a “kill switch” for the Internet in the U.S. This kind of thinking is extraordinarily short-sighted. The notion that the government wants to control (and potentially immobilize) the essential connective infrastructure of our society and species is an extension of the fundamentally flawed perspective that has undermined the commitment to net neutrality.

Here’s the idea. Humanity’s and America’s ability to rise to the extraordinary occasion of a global shift to a new world will be DIRECTLY determined by the ability of the Internet to facilitate the unimpeded flow of ideas needed to allow the organism to evolve. The Internet is a global brain – a global nervous system. Constraining it is like drugging a person and then hoping that they will be able to fly an airplane safely. You degrade the senses, response times decrease, new ideas are lost in the fog. The necessity to invent the solutions needed for a rapidly morphing world are fundamentally threatened if the nervous system is inhibited. Drunks don’t generate good ideas.

If the national and global nervous system is run on the golden rule of “he who has the gold, rules”, then it will necessarily degenerate to being heavily biased toward mediocrity. It doesn’t take much thought to understand that most of the people in a society don’t generate most of the new ideas and discoveries that illuminate the path to the future. In a world of junk food and cable television it’s obvious where the interests of most people lie, and it’s not National Public Radio and public television.

This is not just about engendering new ideas . . . it is about distributing and proliferating them. If a new idea never gets out of the shower where it showed up, it isn’t worth much. The organism grows and develops only if the new options are shared – broadly and rapidly shared.

The powers that be have influenced and shaped a world where the majority are numb to what is being discussed here. It is a world that is mostly about being economically productive enough to make a living and then being entertained during those times when one is not working. Value has been equated to money and acquiring money has become the principle objective.

That is the argument that is being made for the eliminating the underlying capability of the Internet to neutrally transmit whatever anyone wants – to let ideas flow. Listen to the politicians making the argument: they all argue about the investment made by the wireless companies. They are oblivious to the underlying function and extraordinarily power of the ideas that do, or do not, get proliferated. The ability of the social organism to evolve is absolutely determined by the health of the neural system and an environment that encourages development.

It’s like a child born with extraordinary, if not unlimited potential. In one situation, having the encouragement and freedom to explore and think and become everything that he or she might, the fledgling sees hope and opportunity and happily engages in becoming more than where they came from. In a constrained environment that revolves around mass market economics, the system produces mediocrity – individuals that must be sustained by the system and are unable to rise to the occasion that is being presented to all of us.

The notion is even more sinister if you consider the likely motivation of governments for developing the capability to shut the Internet down. It’s obvious in the way it has already been used. The proposal may be couched in “national security” and cyber attack defense terms, but in the end it is all about maintaining the power of the government in extraordinary times – regardless of what the people desire. That’s admirable to have this capability if there is a large-scale attempt to take down the system, for sure. But it is far more likely that the switch would be used to constrain ideas and behavior that the government (for whatever reason) found distasteful. Look around. The government and large institutions are largely about control.

It is not an overstatement to suggest that the literal future of humanity will depend upon the freedom (or not) that underpins the continued development of our species’ social nervous system – the Internet.

Of course, other major things are in play in this amazing confluence of converging forces and opportunities. Growing numbers of observers are pointing to accelerating changes in the earth’s magnetic field, for example, which protects us from a growing bath of cosmic energy that is coming from the center of our galaxy and also from the sun. Some are also positing the likely collapse and reconfiguration of the magnetosphere (a magnetic pole shift) that might also uncouple the crust of the earth from the moving liquid core . . . and lead to a physical pole shift.

Changing surface temperatures, the reconfiguration of water (and therefore weight), and the interaction of the earth and the sun appear to be producing more, larger earthquakes and volcanoes than have been seen in any time in modern history.

The changing magnetosphere and increasing energetic environment appears to be changing our DNA – opening up the possibility of a variety of new capabilities.

We are in the middle of an unprecedented basic reorganization of the physiology of plants, animals and humans, the reconfiguration of the essential operation of the planet, an explosive expansion of knowledge coupled with broad-based access to both the physical and spiritual, and a new era characterized by an evolutionary jump of our species. Seems like nothing less to me.

There are amazing breakthroughs happening and under development that have the clear potential of shaping a new world. It’s as though the organism is providing the means – like the Internet – for an evolutionary jump, but instead of preparing and adapting to the inevitable shift, most institutional efforts are trying to blunt it – to sustain the familiar. We must offer an alternative.

So, what’s driving all of this? Although certainly some aspects of the convergence of all of these events are hard to directly attribute to them, I think the major forces behind much of this change are the byproducts of unprecedented cosmic events – both related to unparalleled on-goings in the Milky Way galaxy, our solar system, other sources in the cosmos and activities of the Sun. Some of the explanations are necessarily unconventional (if they were conventional, everyone would know about them, wouldn’t they?), and certainly speculative, but they are informed by multiple substantive sources which all point in this general direction.

I’ve been doing a series of audio interviews over the past few months with a Swedish friend on different future-oriented subjects and a couple of weeks ago I addressed these cosmic shift issues directly, talking about what seems to be happening and what the implications might be. There are also ideas about how one might best position oneself to deal with this change. You can download that interview here until the 5th of March. This is a 44MB file and an hour-and-a-half-long interview so it may take a little time for you to download it. You’ll find it provocative though, I’d guess.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in the coming months. We’ll keep revisiting this transition in this space as it evolves.