“Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”
Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. Wikipedia
An inspiring manual for navigating humanity’s collective dark night and enacting personal and planetary transformation
• Explores how Sacred Activism–specifically, creative, wise, sacredly inspired action–offers an antidote to the crises facing our world
• Reveals how to uncover and sustain joy and how to use it as fuel for continuing Sacred Activism in dangerous times
• Includes practical maps of the dark night process and of the four-part path to transfiguration drawn from the secret depths of the mystical traditions
Presenting a manual for navigating humanity’s collective dark night, Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker explore potential antidotes, drawn from mystical traditions and Sacred Activism, to help us find inspiration and take action in the face of the daunting challenges to our world.
Offering a deep discussion of our global dark night in terms of the Kali Yuga, the authors examine the dangers of a growing constellation of intractable crises–authoritarianism both in America and abroad, climate change, economic inequality, social upheaval, and spiritual malaise. They then explore the antidotes to these crises: Sacred Activism–specifically, creative, wise, sacredly inspired action–and a profound understanding of our evolutionary ordeal and its potentialities. Examining the power of joy to help enact personal and planetary transformation, they explain how joy, or ananda, is a force all mystical traditions recognize as the essence of the Divine. They reveal how to uncover and sustain joy in ourselves and how to use joy as fuel for continuing Sacred Activism in dangerous times.
Drawing on the visionary teachings of mystics such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, the authors show how the global dark night is part of an evolutionary mutation process and how its very intensity makes it the potential seedbed of a new embodied, divine humanity. They offer practical maps of the crises, of the shadows that this global dark night is casting, and of the four-part path to transfiguration drawn from mystical traditions. Sharing a vision of a new and focused global moment of love in action, the authors reveal that apocalypse is not inevitable–if enough people awaken to the extraordinary possibilities of Sacred Activism.
576 pages, Paperback
Published November 29, 2022
(Goodreads.com)
The Tarantula Nebula, some 340 light years across, as recently photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope. It is 161,000 light years away, located inside the Large Magellanic Cloud (a satelite galaxy of the Milky Way). The pale blue stars in the center are massive, young stars never seen before.
Jeffrey Mishlove and the New Thinking Allowed Foundation (jmishlove@newthinkingallowed.com)
New Thinking Allo • Feb 25, 2023 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1992. Weston Agor, former professor of public administration at the University of Texas, El Paso and author of Intuitive Management and The Logic of Intuitive Decision Making, maintains that intuition is a brain skill that organizations must learn to tap in order to remain competitive. He discusses several ways in which organizations can learn to accomodate intuitive styles. Professor Agor founded the nonprofit Intuition Network. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. New!! Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY. Check out our new website for the New Thinking Allowed Foundation at http://www.newthinkingallowed.org. There you will find our incredible, searchable database as well as our new, FREE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE. Also, opportunities to shop and to support our video productions. There, you can also subscribe to our FREE, WEEKLY NEWSLETTER!
SPACE22 February 2023 (sciencealert.com)
Without finding ways to improve detection, Mars rovers might miss signs of life. (gremlin/Getty Images)
Mars rovers tasked with hunting for traces of biology could roll over microscopic life forms without smelling a thing, simply because their instruments aren’t up to the task.
A new study carried out in Earth’s oldest desert shows how current technology can’t always spot the signatures of life on our own planet’s surface. Let alone on Mars’s.
The researchers behind the investigation argue without improving our ability to identify long-dead ‘microbial dark matter’, life on Mars will continue to elude us. Especially if the life we are searching for existed billions of years ago when the planet was warmer and wetter than it is today.
Chile’s Atacama Desert features an ancient delta called the Red Stone, which contains sand and rock rich in hematite and mudstone. Geologically, this region is quite similar to parts of Mars, which is why astrobiologists often use it as a model for the red planet.
When researchers in Chile tested the Red Stone’s mineralogy with the best instruments available today, they uncovered some mysterious signs.
Nearly 9 percent of the genetic sequences obtained using Next Generation Sequencing fell into the ‘unclassified’ category, whereas 40 percent of the remaining sequences could not be assigned to anything more specific than the highest of taxa, such as orders or domains.
Researchers from the Autonomous University of Chile (Universidad Autónoma de Chile) say their findings unveil “an unusual high degree of phylogenetic indeterminacy.”
The team has proposed a new concept to represent that uncertainty, what they call a “dark microbiome”. This term essentially refers to microorganisms that scientists can detect via genetic sequencing without knowing exactly what they are.
“Thus,” researchers write, “the Red Stone dark microbiome may be composed by truly novel extant species not found anywhere else on Earth, but it may also be the case that such dark microbiome in fact represents the relict community of microbial species which used to inhabit the Red Stone delta in the distant past, of which no extant relatives are to be found in the existing sequence databases.”
The Red Stone samples were also analyzed by testbed instruments used on Mars or destined for Mars, showing detection of microorganisms to be far more challenging, with limited or non-detection in most cases.
Last year, the Perseverance rover on Mars found ‘strong signs’ of organic matter when rolling through an ancient river delta.
In the years before that, the Curiosity rover picked up signs of organic molecules in both sand and dried-up mud.
Those are promising discoveries, but organic matter isn’t a sure sign of life. It’s still unclear if those molecules actually have biological origins.
“Our analyses by testbed instruments that are on or will be sent to Mars unveil that although the mineralogy of Red Stone matches that detected by ground-based instruments on the red planet, similarly low levels of organics will be hard, if not impossible to detect in Martian rocks depending on the instrument and technique used,” researchers in Chile conclude.
“Our results stress the importance in returning samples to Earth for conclusively addressing whether life ever existed on Mars.”
For years now, NASA has been planning to retrieve their samples from Mars to take a closer look. But that’s easier said than done. Going to Mars and back requires a space mission to go further than ever before.
The date for this historic moment is currently set for some time in the 2030s or 2040s. Hopefully by then our technology will be better equipped to take a proper look at what we have found.
The study was published in Nature Communications.
The morning after Trump was elected president, the people who ran the US Department of Energy waited to brief the administration’s transition team on the agency it would soon be running. Nobody appeared. Across all departments the stories were the same: Trump appointees were few and far between; those who did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace.
Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative of the Trump administration’s botched presidential transition takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its leaders through willful ignorance and greed. The government manages a vast array of critical services that keep us safe and underpin our lives, from ensuring the safety of our food and medications and predicting extreme weather events to tracking and locating black- market uranium before the terrorists do. The Fifth Risk masterfully and vividly unspools the consequences of what happens when the people given control over our government have no idea how it works.
(Goodreads.com)
“I believe in reincarnation. I just don’t advocate its practice.”
–Thane of Hawaii
This is the revised edition of Dr. Stevenson’s 1987 book, summarizing for general readers almost forty years of experience in the study of children who claim to remember previous lives. For many Westerners the idea of reincarnation seems remote and bizarre; it is the author’s intent to correct some common misconceptions. New material relating to birthmarks and birth defects, independent replication studies with a critique of criticisms, and recent developments in genetic study are included. The work gives an overview of the history of the belief in and evidence for reincarnation. Representative cases of children, research methods used, analyses of the cases and of variations due to different cultures, and the explanatory value of the idea of reincarnation for some unsolved problems in psychology and medicine are reviewed.
While exploring the evidence for an afterlife, I witnessed some unbelievable things that are not supposed to be possible in our material world. Yet they were unavoidably and undeniably real. Despite my initial doubt, I came to realize that there are still aspects of Nature which are neither understood or accepted, even though their reality has profound implications for understanding the true breadth of the human psyche and its possible continuity after death.
So begins Leslie Kean s impeccably researched, page-turning investigation revealing stunning and wide-ranging evidence suggesting that consciousness survives death. Here she continues her examination of unexplained phenomena that began with her provocative and controversial New York Times bestsellerUFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Keanexplores the most compelling case studies involving young children reporting verifiable details from past lives, contemporary mediums who seem to defy the boundaries of the brain and the material world, apparitions providing information about their lives on earth, and ordinary people who recount some of the most extraordinary near-death experiences ever recorded. Kean’s first book, and her credibility as a seasoned and well-respected journalist, made people take notice of a topic that many considered implausible. This book will do the same this time enriched by Kean s reactions to her own perplexing experiences encountered while she probed the universal.
(Goodreads.com)
As Russian tanks rolled across the border, some of our fellow progressives called it a justified attack in response to a threat from Western military imperialists.
The year was 1939.
That year, some on the Left, a minority for sure, bent themselves into moral pretzels to justify the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Russian-German murder-drenched conquest of Poland.
As a New York Tribune columnist, the abolitionist Karl Marx, wrote before the US Civil War, when some Britons supported the slavers: “History speaks twice; the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
Indeed, there is a nauseating, horrifying humor watching one-time fighters against injustice, self-proclaimed “anti-war” activists, dancing cheek to cheek with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson and fascist pin-up Silvio Berlusconi sharing their love, or at least, their sad excuse-making, for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
At its core, these strange bedfellows’ sympathy for the Russian invasion rests, ultimately, on the canard that it was NATO’s expansion that provoked Putin to attack.
Pay attention to Putin’s own words.
On July 12, 2021, months before his tanks rolled, Putin issued a detailed statement of his casus belli, his justification for total seizure of Ukraine, not just the Donbas, in a 21-page-long essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” No one should speak of this war unless they have read this, Putin’s Mein Kampf.
Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere in his essay does Putin say one word about NATO expansion.
The meandering screed boils down to two points: First, Ukraine has always been an inseparable part of Russkiy Mir, the soul and body of Mother Russia, for more than a thousand years.
But it’s not true. Putin’s phantasmic claim reaches back to the 10th century, to Volodymyr, Grand Prince of the Kievan-Rus principality — founded, not by the Slavs they conquered, but as an extension of the Viking Empire. The rulers of Ukraine and this proto-Russia were Swedish. Volodymyr (namesake of both Zelensky and Putin), ruled from the metropolitan capital of Kiev over a vast land including the swampy little village of Moscow.
Volodymyr put to the sword those who would not worship the giant icons he erected to Thor and Loki — until, in 988AD, he converted to Christianity and put to the sword to those who would not destroy the old icons and swear to the new one, the Crucifix.
Thus was founded the Orthodox Church, based in Kiev, not in a “Rus-sia” that did not exist. Nevertheless, here is the germ of Putin’s second casus belli, reason for invasion: religion, specifically, restoration of the one and true Orthodox Church.
It would be a deep misunderstanding to call Putin’s once and future Russia a dictatorship. It is a theocracy, ruled now and forever, in Putin’s mind, by the one and only Holy Muscovite Patriarch. Today, that crown, to which Putin bows, is the Moscow-based Patriarch Kirill, the ultimate source of Putin’s political power and Putin’s hold on rural believers.
It was Kirill who taunted and demanded Putin “save” the Muscovite faithful in the Donbas who side with Kirill in the Orthodox schism — and blesses what the Patriarch sees as a Crusade to restore the rightful church and cast out the heretics, the Ukraine and Greek Patriarchs.
Putin’s and Kirill’s quest is medieval, truly a new Crusade to restore the Church and its Empire. NATO? Putin only gives passing mention at the end of his anti-historical fever dream as a new locus of attack against the values of the true church. More on this later.
Putin’s tale of the unbroken, Christ-blessed rule of Ukraine by Russia has a problem. It’s bullshit. The Kievan-Rus empire shredded and disappeared in the pinwheel of history nearly a millennium ago, in 1242.
For most of the vast expanse of centuries between, Ukraine was an independent and voluntary member of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It is a great shame that this huge empire, often called the Golden Freedom, has little mention in history books because its member states ruled in peace by consensus, a proto-democracy that elected its leader and whose constitution demanded only peaceful coexistence among its states and religious freedom.
History prefers its conquistadors, as does Putin, who picks up the tale of Ukraine as Russkiy Mir when Catherine The Great conquers its Eastern edge in 1793. (I’ve an inkling Putin takes note that “The Great” is only bestowed on those who grab territory by blood. Does he look in the mirror each morning and whisper, “Vlad the Great”?)
Ukraine, in Putin’s fantasy, was overjoyed to be occupied, given as a gift to Prince Potemkin, Catherine’s lover, a fiction worthy of the happy “Potemkin villages” the Prince created to hoodwink his visiting randy Empress. (When the Russians fled Kherson, they abandoned some of their soldiers to die — but carefully carted away Potemkin’s skeleton.)
Kiev was devoured by the Hapsburgs and spit out after World War I. It was never part of Russia. But that truth is niggling detail to Putin.
In Putin’s essay, his bloviating fury is not aimed at NATO, but at “the Bolsheviks,” those Commie traitors who, from day one of the 1917 Revolution, recognized Ukraine as an independent nation. Indeed, in 1945, Ukraine won its own seat at the United Nations based on Soviet insistence that Ukraine is a sovereign state.
Now to Putin’s casus belli #2: the existential threat to Russia from the West. The West, says Putin, will not rest until Russia is destroyed. The threat is not from NATO’s cruise missiles, but from NATO’s homosexuals.
Like the Ayatollahs of Iran, to Putin and Kirill, the poison of cultural, moral decay reaches its zenith in the vile desecration of the nuclear family and all the intellectual freethinking, freakery and vices that come from it.
Putin defenders in Washington, D.C. at a Rage Against The War Machine rally holding Russian flags with the Russian Empire emblem favored by white nationalists.
Photo: © Zach D. Roberts, February 19, 2023.
The Lord and his Patriarch are threatened — and indeed they are — by heretical freethinking that leads from liberty to libertinism. And like the prior restorers of the faith Grand Inquisitors and their armed wing, the Crusaders, there can be no vote, no newspaper chit-chat, when the word of God is defied and threatened. The post-Gorbachev orgies are over. Pussy Riot must be jailed. It is why Putin is the pin-up for the Christian fascist parties of the West, from Golden Dawn in Greece, Marine Le Pen in France, to the Proudboys and US Christian fascists, including Holocaust denier, January 6 suspect and Trump dinner guest Nicholas “Nick” Fuentes.
How odd, how tragic that some of my friends on the US Left, who will quibble over pronouns, defend Putin who made simply advocating for LGBTQ rights a crime and empowers “gay-hunting” pogroms.
Putin accuses the West of poisoning Russians with the “monstrosity…that a boy can become a girl and reversely, [that] they can play five or six gender roles.”
Read carefully Putin’s declaration of the invasion of Ukraine and the his true cause is declared:
“[The West] sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration because they are contrary to human nature.”
Putin, at his grand ceremony annexing Ukraine provinces, linked it directly to his war on Western-inspired transgender rights which he termed, “pure Satanism.”
I suppose that is provoked by NATO as well.* * *
In theocracies, the will of the people is not so important as the purity of the people. How strange to me, how sad, that some of my readers, rightly enraged at my revelations of vote suppression in Georgia, think nothing of Putin’s unique method of electioneering.
His presidential opponent, Alexei Navalny, after Putin’s bumbling assassins failed to kill him with the poison Novichok, is now in the IK-6 penal gulag commonly known as the ‘Torture Prison.’ Putin’s prior challenger, Boris Nemtsov, was shot in the back of the head, right in front of the Kremlin.
In 2018, I exposed GOP Gov. Brian Kemp’s vicious suppression of the Black vote in Georgia, denying Stacy Abrams the governorship. But, Kemp didn’t shoot her in the back of the head. How can anyone decry Kemp and excuse Putin?
And if Putin’s panzers had succeeded in occupying Kyiv and installing his puppet, would that not be the ultimate in “vote suppression”?* * *
Let me quickly dispose of the remnants of the canard that NATO expansion threatened Russia’s very existence, that Putin’s cause is justified. Yes, Ukraine sought to enter NATO. That was two decades ago. And NATO turned them down.
And how is NATO’s presence in Hungary, led by Putin’s boy-toy Viktor Orban, an existential threat to Russia?
But what about NATO in Poland? I’ve searched and searched, and I cannot find evidence that Poland launched its missiles into Russia. And when Poland was part of Russia’s Warsaw Pact, would that have justified NATO’s invasion of Russia?
And if the threat is NATO, why is Russia bombing Ukraine? Why not bomb Poland? You know why.
Russia’s killing 130,000 in Ukraine because of a chimerical threat from Poland is like me having a shouting match with the guy in Apartment 2 so I knife the daughter of the guy in Apartment 4.
How can too many of my fellow progressives, who marched against Bush’s “preemptive” war in Iraq, now find preemptive war by Putin justified by “NATO provocation.” Thankfully, Putin has few such useful idiots.* * *
In 1939, after the Munich “peace” accord, when the Germans and Russians invaded Poland, they hunted down those who supplied weapons to the Polish Army.
They found my great-uncle Solie who supplied horses to the Polish cavalry, horses that fought the Panzer tanks. You know how that ended. The Nazis gathered the locals, and shot Uncle Solie in the head. Some cheered. He was, after all, like Zelensky, a Jew.
At the Dachau Concentration Camp is a plaque that says simply: Never again.
And today, it seems, some of my once-comrades have added an asterisk: Well, maybe, sometimes.
Zach D. Roberts and Leni Badpenny von Eckardt-Manzoni, who have reported from Kyiv and Kherson, contributed research for this article.
Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits and the book and documentary,
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
His latest film is Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman
Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract.” The first step is an ontological statement of being beginning with the syllogism: “Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all there is.” The second step is the sense testimony (what the senses tell us about anything). The third step is the argument between the absolute abstract nature of truth from the first step and the relative specific truth of experience from the second step. The fourth step is filtering out the conclusions you have arrived at in the third step. The fifth step is your overall conclusion.
The claims in a Translation may seem outrageous, but they are always (or should always) be based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week.
1) Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. therefore Truth is all that is. Truth being all is therefore total, therefore whole, therefore complete, therefore otherless, therefore one, therefore united, therefore harmonious, therefore orderly. I think therefore I . Since I am and since Truth is all that is, therefore I am Truth. Since I, being, am Truth, therefore I am total, whole, complete, otherless, one, united, harmonious, orderly. Since I am Truth and since I am Mind, therefore Truth is Mind.
2) Healing involves rooting out both mental and physical lies.
Word-tracking:
heal: whole, Helen, cure, to make well, care for, nurse, to mother
root out: rummage, look through cargo
mental: mind, to think, to remember
physical: physique, physician, to reshape, natural, native, birth
lie: warlock, to deceive, to fail
3) Truth being all that is, there can be no limit to all, therefore Truth is birthless, deathless, undying. Truth being birthless, deathless, undying, therefore the nature of Truth is birthless, deathless, undying. Truth being Mind and Truth being all, therefore Truth is all-knowing. Truth being without limitation, therefore Truth is without form/definition, therefore Truth is infinite, uninformed knowing. Truth being whole, cannot be healed or cured, therefore Truth is motherless independence. Truth being all-knowing, cannot be deceived to, lied to, therefore Truth is wise as serpents, harmless as doves.
4) Truth is birthless, deathless, undying.
The nature of Truth is birthless, deathless, undying.
Truth is all-knowing.
Truth is infinite, uninformed knowing.
Truth is motherless independence.
Truth is wise as serpents, harmless as doves.
5) Truth cannot fail to remember its all-knowing, limitless, unstructured wholeness.
The Weekly Invitational Translation Group invites your participation as well. If you would like to submit a Translation on any subject, feel free to send your weekly Translation to zonta1111@aol.com and I will anonymously post it on the Bathtub Bulletin on Friday.
For information about Translation or other Prosperos classes go to: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching
