Introduction
Did you ever stop to wonder how the world got itself into this situation, where a single virus could literally shut down the entire planet? It is quite crazy really.
The part that many of us overlook is quite simple. The reason we are in lockdown is to protect our hospitals. In Australia, and most other Western countries, our hospitals are already overwhelmed with patients battling some form of degenerative disease like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes. arthritis, lung disease and a variety of other diseases that arise from a modern lifestyle.
We have been told for years that these diseases have a genetic origin. There is almost no valid proof for such a claim. Even the website Breast Cancer Org states that “About 5-10% of breast cancers are thought to be hereditary…”. That is far from a definitive statement. At the Global Wellness Summit in West Palm Beach in 2017, Dr Richard Carmona, 17th Surgeon General of the United States said in his presentation, “The US spends 19% of GDP on Healthcare and 80% of that is spent treating preventable diseases.”
We have gone down the wrong path. We are valiantly trying to cure diseases that are probably not curable by intervention. We must turn our attention to prevention. If we did, our healthcare systems would not be under pressure and we would not need to shut down society when a virus comes along.
It is time we addressed the elephant in the room. We need to look at how we are living.
Humanity Experiments
We learn as we go. Human beings explore new ideas and perspectives and if they do not work, eventually abandon them and move on. The things that work well are embraced. An easy example is largely uncontrolled gun ownership in Australia. After several gun massacres, we realised that it was not a good thing to have such weapons available when any human can succumb to a fit of rage or mental disturbance and do a great deal of damage. We agreed together that gun ownership should be very select and tightly controlled.
For years, we believed that antibiotics were a “saviour of humanity”. We used them for everything, until recently we learned they were actually devastating the foundational building blocks of our immune system. General use has all but ceased.
There are still things we need to learn and things we need to change. But I am not here to tell you what you should or should not do. I will provide this information and you can decide for yourself.
Firstly, let’s look at our Health Care System – the stress it is under, the immense national costs, the high number of diseases that are rising in incidence without cures being found. Perhaps we could explore what we believe about all of this and in opening ourselves to new perspectives we may find a useful path forward.
I do not see anything as wrong. There are just things that are not serving us that we may need to change. Or there are things we have been doing that we realise we could do better. That may mean some businesses or industries will come to an end. But that is a fact of life that has continued since commerce began.
Some of the businesses and services that have disappeared or are disappearing in my lifetime include:
- Milk Bars
- Milk and bread delivery
- The night man
- Television repairers
- Record stores
- Record and CD producers
- Tape and cassette and recorder/player manufacturers
- Manual street sweepers
- Driveway service in petrol stations
- Typewriter manufacturers and servicers
- Facsimile machine manufacturers
- Camera film manufacture and processing
I am sure you can name some too.
Understanding Viruses
Viruses and bacteria are not the same. In fact, in some cases, a bacterial cell can be up to 1000 times larger than a virus. Further, whilst bacteria are alive, have their own metabolism, and live and multiply independently, viruses are not.
To do anything, a virus needs a living host. When the virus enters a host, it seeks out weakened cells that it can overcome enough to implant its DNA on the nucleus of the cell and influence its activity. In short, the cell becomes a production factory for the virus. The normal functions of the cell are often shut down to dedicate resources to the virus’s duplication.
Eventually, the virus moves out of the cell and the cell dies. The virus moves on to other cells that it can overcome. If the body in which these cells exist has many sick and weak cells that are vulnerable to the virus it may become very sick and perish as the virus takes over.
Many theories have been presented and widely accepted that viruses have played a significant part in the evolution of life. Virus DNA has influenced genetic expression to bring about changes in species, including humans. Some espouse that this is how weaker elements of a species have been removed from the genetic pool over time. But to this day, we are still learning about viruses. What we do know however, is that they do not tend to make it into healthy cells. They seek out weakened, unhealthy cells.
If we follow the germ theory created by Louis Pasteur that has existed for 150 years, one would think that a virus is like a catastrophic meteor crashing across a previously clear sky. But when you look closer, that is far from the case.
Pasteur versus Bechamp
Louis Pasteur is famous for his germ theory. He created the popular theory that the body is a sanitary environment that gets sick when invaded by a germ – virus or unfriendly bacteria. At the same time, Antoine Bechamp was a chemist and microscopist who believed that the germ was not the problem but the terrain or environment of the body that was damaged or dysfunctional that created a state that allowed a germ to do damage.
Pasteur’s theory basically states that if a person gets sick, it is not their fault. It is unfortunate but nothing a person can do to prevent it. No personal responsibility required. That was appealing. Bechamp’s theory was the opposite, placing full weight on personal responsibility for the state of the environment in the body – the terrain. At the time his ideas were rejected. He lived till age 91.
“The microbe is nothing. The terrain is everything.” Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) is purported to have made this statement on his deathbed. The origin of the quote is attributed to Claude Bernard (1813-1878), a physiologist and contemporary of Pasteur. By quoting Bernard, Pasteur was recanting his germ theory, a theory that assigned the cause of disease to microbes invading and wreaking havoc on the body, with specific germs causing specific diseases.
All of allopathic medicine (Western medicine) has been built on the germ theory. Natural medicine is based on the terrain theory. The terrain theory gives you the power to be immune to the impact of invading pathogens like viruses and harmful bacteria.
New Discoveries that Reveal New Things
In recent years, due to the profound advances in technology, we have been able to explore more deeply the workings of human life. In this last decade, we’ve been presented with an entirely new paradigm for human existence. The paradigm consists of three stages:
- The Genome
- The Microbiome
- The Epigenome
The Genome is the part of us that comprises all the cells that make up all the human anatomy and biochemistry, e.g., bones, muscles, organs, connective tissue, skin, hair, blood, nerve tissue etc.
The microbiome is all the bacteria and fungi that cover all of the external surfaces of our body, including the gastrointestinal tract, the lung cavity and the vaginal canal. The microbiome matches the ecology of the entire planet and was gifted to us by our mother as we passed through the birth canal and vagina, and during our first few days of breast feeding.
The epigenome is more sensory and is the interface point between life experience and our microbiome and genome. How we experience life is imprinted on the genome and microbiome and they respond genetically. This is the factor that has allowed human beings to continually evolve and adapt to their environment over millennia.
Epigenetics is a fascinating science.
However, the focus for the next little while will be the Microbiome. It is a word we had not really heard 5 years ago, but now it is being thrown around like the cool term.
Here are some things you may not know about the Microbiome.
- The microbiome accounts for up to 98.5% of the cells in the human body (these cells are much smaller than genome cells).
- When the microbiome is fully thriving and flourishing to its potential, it creates a sort of protective cocoon around the genome, and the genome cannot get sick.
- For every human gene we have, we have 150 times more microbial genes that come from approximately 2,000 species. 24,000 human genes and about 3 million microbial genes. These are the ecosystem of our entire planet.
- The microbiome, like the mushroom mycelium network in mother nature, is a deeply sensitive underground communications network in the body where every single cell in the genome is connected to the entirety of the microbiome. This is a 14 quadrillion piece orchestra.
- This same microbiome exists right across the planet and can be found thriving and rich in the soil. It is crucial in the soil for the growth of plants that feed both the human microbiome and genome. Viruses and parasites are key elements of this microbiome.
- When the microbiome is weak and damaged or exposed to agents that threaten it, it cannot effectively protect the genome.
Everything is perfect in the great web of life. The microbiome in the soil ensures we produce optimum quality foods to feed the body. Farmers for centuries have lovingly tended to their fields to ensure the soil gets an opportunity to regenerate and remain healthy and rich so that it may produce the best quality foods.
The human microbiome is the frontline of your immunity and comprises 80% of your immune system.
A Long Running Experiment
Following the second world war, petroleum companies held stockpiles of ammonium nitrate, a common ingredient in explosives. A completely random discovery revealed that a grass growing storage stockpiles of ammonium nitrate grew quickly and seemed incredibly healthy. This is due to the conversion of the compound into nitrates by the soil. Nitrates are critical to plant growth.
It was discovered that the addition of ammonium nitrate or calcium ammonium nitrate to soil at the start of the growth cycle, led to
a sharp increase in soil nitrate levels which resulted in more abundant crops.
Petrochemical companies, eager to find new markets now that the war machine had stopped, quickly moved into action and soon after synthetic fertilizers would dominate the market for decades to come.
In traditional agriculture, it is the decomposition of plant material over time, including when fields are left in fallow for a period, that this nitrogen level naturally rises, along with the regeneration of a plethora of other soil nutrients and microbes.
Over time, the use of these fertilizers meant that farmers could cease leaving fields to fallow and plant crops in their fields every year. Whilst this continued to produce crops, the soil gradually degraded to the point where today, across the globe, a staggering amount of rich agricultural land has died, topsoil has been lost and the microbiome all but gone. 98% of the world’s topsoil has been destroyed?
Some extremely wise traditional farmers believe we have, at best, 60 harvests left before growing food becomes impossible.
This has also been sped up by the use of pesticides and herbicides that have contributed to the denigration and destruction of the microbiome in the soil.
Chemical farming has been a live human experiment that we now realise was not a good thing and we need to stop. The challenge of course is that there are huge companies in the world that make extraordinary profits from the sale of these synthetic fertilizers. They need to find other ways of doing business.
Many farmers have been fearful to return to traditional regenerative farming practices because they believe that it may take 10 years for their soil to recover enough to grow food. However, as outlined by Dr Zach Bush MD, farmers in Virginia USA are experiencing an increase in crop yields within a year and some, after just three years, have raised their average crop yield from $40 per acre to $900 per acre.
Since 1995, the use of glyphosate has compounded the problem. Monsanto began selling glyphosate as backyard weed killer in the 80’s, under the brand name Roundup, and warned openly that it was carcinogenic and should be used carefully and sparingly.
However, in the mid 90’s the company released its first genetically modified grain crops. These crops were designed to withstand large doses of Roundup and were labelled “Roundup Ready Crops”. Under the plan, farmers would have to buy their seed grain from Monsanto and use only roundup as the herbicide that will kill all plants and weeds competing with the crop for soil nutrition.
This initiative was meant to be the thing that would save the future of world food supplies because it would guarantee optimum crop yields, year after year.
They were so successful that by 2010, Monsanto owned 80-90% of the Western world’s primary food supply. However, the genetic modification to the plants meant that 3 of the essential amino acids that humans needed were missing from these crops.
Over this time, curious Doctors began noticing stark changes in disease trends and began exploring. It was discovered that this incredible spike in disorders like autism, several blood cancers, dementia in women and Parkinson’s disease in men could be easily traced on a timeline alongside the rising use of Roundup.
Autism rates alone exploded from less than 1 per one thousand in 1993 to one in 32 today.
Researchers discovered that glyphosate was breaking down the vital cell membrane structures that formed the critical points like the lining of the small intestine where the outside world touches the inside world, the blood brain barrier and several membranes within the body’s organs.
In a rapid decline, Monsanto’s aspirations were doomed as people across the world lined up to sue.
Recently, Monsanto was sold to Bayer, the largest pharmaceutical company in Europe. I am led to believe the Monsanto is now little more than a shell with a moderate war chest to pay out the lawsuits and little more. A record payout was awarded to a single claim for $270 million US. Commentators predict that in the near future, all Roundup Ready crops will be withdrawn from the market under the banner of “Oh we are sorry. That didn’t work the way we thought!” and then replace them with a different crop using a different matching herbicide.
These are experiments that we realise do not work, and that we realise we do not need. They do not improve crop yields and are not needed to feed the planet. They must stop.
The Campaigners
Long before GMO crops and Roundup appeared, there were campaigners in our world fighting for the removal of chemical fertilizers from our agricultural sector. Many were considered nut cases and fanatics and were never taken seriously.
If we’d had a strong media interested in the wellbeing of the public, they might have received a little more support.
A Side Note:
I feel it is important to explore another issue right here before I continue. When we believe something is true, without doubt, we do not ever really entertain alternative perspectives. They do not fit into our paradigms. For example, ardent test cricket traditionalists may never accept that T20 is a good thing.
In Western society, we are so locked into a viewpoint that if someone says something is scientifically ok, then it should not be questioned. We believe science is the fountain of truth. But in fact, science is nothing more than the study of the predictable repeatability of something. It is never about facts. It is about observation, understanding and prediction.
Our beliefs about science are at best misguided, but because we hold that belief, we stop questioning. This also stops us questioning medicine, energy production electromagnetic radiation and other factors that impact human health. We also fail, as a result of these things, to question corporate leaders.
People who go into politics with these fixed beliefs, simply accept what lobbyists tell them and enact legislation that support corporate entities that may not have the welfare of humanity as their primary interest.
When we fail to remain curious and refuse to explore our beliefs, we may turn a blind eye to the people who can see looming disasters. Whilst we all giggled at chicken little as kids, we think people who are raising alarms are equally mistaken.
I remember speaking at length with people at the Australian Conservation Foundation in the late 90’s and early 2000’s who were fighting to stop GMO crops. They warned that there were way too many unknowns. And they were right. There were no long-term studies, in fact, there were no short-term studies, to show if there was any potential harm to human beings.
GMO crops were accepted and given the green light by governments that within a decade were creating legislation to curtail the
activities of health care practitioners who did not practice Western medicine because their approach was not “sufficiently scientific”.
The ACF has continued to campaign bravely as have many others, to halt the use of these destructive chemicals. Finally, many people realise they were right all the time. I doubt a public apology and an increase in funding will be forthcoming.
Healthy food zealots who could feel that there was a problem with food wrote article after article promoting organic food and tried to inspire others to join the call. Research suggests that if less than 15% of people shift to organic food, the chemical agriculture business will collapse anyway.
Consumers are always the most powerful agents in a market economy.
Economics in Food Production
When I was a kid, I lived on a cattle station and then moved to a dairy farm. My Dad killed animals when we needed meat, and he grew all our vegetables. We also had fruit trees. When he killed an animal, it was done humanely with no distress to the animal and with every attempt to reduce impact on the herd. It was respectful.
As the world populations grew, large companies rolled into the industry claiming that they had the systems and strategies in place to feed the world and to be able to supply food to a rapidly growing world population.
Intensive farming followed. beef cattle feedlots, mega dairies, gigantic piggeries, broiler sheds housing tens of thousands of birds, cage egg layers crammed into sheds by the tens of thousands, all fed on grains that were being specifically grown to produce animal feed.
Along with these industries came huge mega farms producing astounding volumes of vegetables and grain. Yield became the name of the game, not nutritional quality. Herbicide and pesticide residues worked their way into the food chain, along with a change in the nutrient density of foods, perhaps most significantly, the sharp rise in omega 6 fatty acid concentrates in factory farmed meats.
As the cattle industry grew, more feed was required so more native bushland across the globe was flattened and turned into grain crops and grazing land. The lungs of the earth were being compromised and atmospheric carbon levels began to rise. These businesses were no longer stoppable. With massive wealth and power, they also had political clout.
Celebrities manipulatively urged us to eat more red meat to avoid protein and iron deficiency as the cancer and heart disease
rates slowly climbed. And claims by outsiders against this were shouted down as not being scientifically valid.
The beliefs became so strong that young mothers were frightened to not give their weening babies cows’ milk. I still struggle to see where that fits in the ecological plan.
We now find ourselves completely at the effect of a food industry that has done its level best to destroy the natural environment in its pursuit of profits, hidden behind its asserted agenda to “feed the world”.
Yet, for over 35 years we have known that it takes 16kg of grain to produce a kilogram of beef. We have been using about 54,000 calories to produce a food that contain only about 2500 calories, whilst using around 100,000 litres of vital water.
Intensive and factory farming has been an experiment that sounded OK to many at the start but has clearly proven itself to be non-viable. It was another human experiment that has not worked and really should cease.
Back in 1985, in his book “A Diet for a New America”, John Robbins wrote about the future of the environment, “The answer is in the middle of your dinner plate”.
Modern Societies – The Loss of Struggle
I cannot help but contemplate how tough it was for my grandparents back in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. They had no electricity, limited telecommunications, no cooling and limited access to support as they lived 50 kilometres out of town on a cattle station.
Apart from building a house, they had to build barns and fences, raise cattle, grow food, manage waste, maintain access to water supplies, keep predators away and endure the elements.
All I have to do is go inside, close the door, turn on some switches and see what’s in the fridge.
If all of our modern conveniences disappeared, many of us would not survive simply because we would have no idea what to do to survive nor could we survive the elements.
Whilst my grandparents daily focus of attention was on their survival, mine tends to be on my comfort. As modern human beings, we have become soft and have lost our resilience, our capacity to endure hardship and struggle.
Yet, I feel that it is hardship and struggle that strengthens us. Having to fight for something helps us to grow. Modern marketing is all about comfort and security, about preventing struggle and finding an easy way. We are seduced by it. But then we fantasize about struggle, so we sit down and watch others and criticise them for their efforts on reality television. We are a strange lot.
But we learn from history that we learn nothing from history. This has all happened many times before. The Greeks, Persians, Romans, Egyptians, Incas and Aztecs all reached a pinnacle of abundance and wealth and they all eventually perished.
Archaeological digs in ancient Egypt have uncovered the remains of many humans, and DNA testing reveals that the common causes of death were cancer and heart disease.
We have become weak and dependant, controlled by our urges, cravings and desires. We exercise intensely then drink a bottle of wine. We meditate then take drugs. We lament about being bored then go and watch television.
Along the way we have:
- Become obese
- Lost physical strength
- Lost the power of our will
- Become dependent on substances
- Become completely disconnected from mother nature
- Worried and fretted about things that do not in any way threaten our physical survival
- Lost perspective
- Become selfish and intolerant
The ‘Me First’ Movement
Somewhere along the journey we got selfish. I can only imagine how this eventuated, but I guess it was part of the loss of struggle. When my grandparents were alive, not only did they have attention on their own survival, but they also had to care for their neighbours.
Back then, people needed each other to survive. They helped each other build houses, helped each other during harvests and cattle musters and shared the killing of animals for food. They supported each other through droughts, floods and fires and socialised when they could.
Life was about “We”.
However, in modern times, we have changed our focus and instead of supporting each other, we are more likely to compete. We are all safe and secure in our comfortable environment so rarely raise a concern for the welfare of the other.
And I am not saying we don’t care. But perhaps our competitiveness reduces our care to emergencies and self-serving moments.
With this change in viewpoint comes self-importance and entitlement. It has become our right to have and consume whatever we want with no need for justification or recompense for any damage caused. If we want to eat fish 3 times per week, even though we know the oceans are struggling, then we should be able to because it is our right. Right!
Then we point an accusing finger at Chinese people somewhere in Asia who cage bears for the extraction of supposedly medicinal body fluids.
Of course, getting everything we want to satisfy our indulgences and desires requires money. So instead of following our hearts to find something we can do in the world that will leave us feeling deeply content and happy, we sacrifice ourselves on someone else’s alter to get the pay packet we need. Eventually we become so empty and depressed that we need medication – prescribed or otherwise.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
Henry David Thoreau
Another path well tried and tested by humans, but a path that does not work.
What is Personal Responsibility?
When I was a kid, I sat in class at the age of five and the Nuns told us that if we sinned we could go to Hell and that if we were good we would go to Heaven. They gave us a list of things we must not do, like miss Church on Sunday.
The very next lesson, they told us that God had given us free will. Right then, I knew that none of it added up. I could not allow myself to accept what they were telling me. But it did take me another 16 years to escape the binds of my religious upbringing and then another 30 odd years to finally evolve out of the deeply held beliefs that I had accepted out of fear.
Human willpower is something I thought I understood. Put simply, it is the ability to decide. Many of us make choices. Deciding goes a little further. A choice is, for example, to select from some options, like two paths. A decision is to go where there is no option or path – because it feels like the right way to go.
We experience this at school. Many kids select a career path because of the money or the potential prestige or the perceived expectation of an adult. Then some just follow their heart, take none of that into account and just go for something different. They decide.
What I have learned over time, and mainly through all my studies of human consciousness in The Avatar® Courses, is that personal responsibility is taking ownership of everything you do and experience. Taking responsibility for your decisions, actions and responses. No blame! It is seeing all of my experiences as my own creation.
Now that is a pretty tall mountain to climb and it is OK if you are not there yet. You might say to me, “Well what happens if I get assaulted whilst walking down the street? Is that my fault?” I am not talking fault here. I am talking about personal power. Someone may well assault you, and you may have no control over that. But you do have control over how you respond to that. You can be consumed with anger, or you can forgive.
This can apply to the ripple effect of your choices in life. You might innocently purchase a leg of pork at the supermarket. But are you willing to take responsibility for the way that pig was raised and eventually killed?
As I mentioned earlier, my Dad and my Grandfather were deeply respectful to the animals they killed for food. Our society is not. And the consumer who buys the food is as responsible as the CEO of the company that runs the factory farm and the abattoir.
This is not a “you should feel guilty message”. But I do feel we all have to become much more responsible to what is happening in the world and not simply turn a blind eye and mourn that we can’t do anything about it.
I was once at a conference and a young lady joined our group to engage in conversation. She was wearing an attention-grabbing T Shirt that was extremely critical of BP, referring to the Deep Water Horizon disaster. A couple of people commented, and I said, “Funny. You know, every time I drive into a petrol station, I complain quietly to myself about the price of petrol”. She looked at me and smiled and said, “I think I will go take this off now”. Later she said to me, “I could not see before how I was connected to the cause of that accident, but now I do. They were cost cutting. Consumer pressure right!”
There is one way to change big companies that works every time. Simply stop buying their products. We live in a market economy that still operates on the fundamental laws of supply and demand. Every consumer has influence.
How can you take greater control over the quality of your food, how it was produced and the associated costs to the environment and to animal and human welfare? If you get out and look around, talk to people, you will find answers. Perhaps go and visit your local Farmer’s Market and talk to the producers.
Handing over responsibility for our food has been an experiment that humans have played with. But it has not worked out for the best.
Caring for the Environment
As John Robbins said, “The answer is in the middle of your plate”.
For years we have been bashing the oil and coal industries in our efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions. Certainly, they are huge carbon producers. It is easy to point the finger and blame these folks, yet we still get in our cars and turn on the power every day and complain about the prices. If they are the enemy, we are sleeping with them.
Greenhouse gasses include carbon and methane. The biggest producer of methane is farting cattle. We can change that one if we are prepared to. But the carbon problem is interesting.
As you know, trees and all plant life inhale carbon and exhale oxygen. That carbon gets released when the trees are burned. Bushfires like the ones we experienced in December and January are a devastating contributor to carbon emissions.
The reason old growth forests are so critical is that because they grow very slowly, have deep roots and extensive underground structures in place, they hold water close to the surface. This allows for a certain amount of evaporation which contributes to the water cycle and creates rain. This dynamic is completely different with new growth forests.
Clearing land drastically impacts the entire water cycle and changes rainfall and ultimately creates drought. Clearing land for agriculture on a mass scale has been another strategy that humans have tried, but it doesn’t work. Terrible bushfires have been one of the outcomes.
I learned something stunning recently. When we encourage the earth to do what it does naturally, and return our farming to regenerative agriculture, the soil comes back to life – as do the trillions of microbes, the mushroom mycelium and the networks of weeds. These all consume carbon.
Dr Zach Bush revealed to us that if America converted just 5 million acres of agricultural land back to regenerative farming, America would be carbon neutral. Read that again!
Five million acres accounts for just on 0.4% of America’s agricultural land. The answer to our problem is within our reach.
Maybe we can get the oil and coal industries to help us find a campaign for change.
What can you do in the meantime? You can start buying your food from the people who are producing amazing food using regenerative and organic agriculture. Visit a Farmers’ market and talk to the suppliers. And you will find their produce is generally cheaper than conventional produce sold in your supermarket.
There is no reason why we could not have a Farmers’ market in every area of our cities, every weekend. A visit to the Farmers’ market is a family outing, a community experience and a reconnection with nature. It is rejuvenating on so many levels.
Or you can grow some of your own produce. Even of you live in an apartment you can grow tomatoes on a balcony and herbs on the windowsill. etc
The Hidden Answer for Human Health
This one is simple. Stop being a cog in someone else’s machine. Step up and be a participant in your community and in your world. Stop blaming circumstance for your lot in life. Make some decisions.
I am not talking about changing drastically, although these past few weeks we have realised we can all cope with drastic change. I am talking about getting curious and exploring, trying different things.
If you are unhealthy, start on the road today to getting healthy. Get some guidance. Do some exercise. Try meditating if you like.
If you are unhappy, then go out and do something for someone else that makes them happy and see how you feel. If no change, think bigger and do it again.
If you are bored, try something new or something you are afraid of.
Getting Economies Back on Track
This whole COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world. Many of the collective beliefs we lived by have fallen by the wayside. Beliefs like, “Every morning, in every city, several hundred thousand people must descend on a particular geographical location by a particular time” has been exposed as insane. Peak hour traffic was something we endured for no good reason.
I have no doubt that companies will disappear. That happens with every recession. But new ones will arrive, perhaps more ethical and more dedicated to the greater good.
We always have this fear of losing jobs if industries close, but unemployment never stays high for long. We will move forward.
And why do we have to have 4% economic growth every year? Maybe that is a belief we need to explore. Why do company profits have to grow every year? How else can we measure success? Some companies destroy their best work in the search for economic growth. Costs get cut that diminish the quality of the services they are known for. I would rather own a company that had a reduction in profits but an increase in customer satisfaction.
Four percent economic growth has been yet another human experiment, but perhaps it hasn’t worked that well. Time for a change.
You Can Make a Huge Difference
The most powerful person in an economy is the consumer. None of us can wait for politicians to regulate things. That never really works well.
Education will always be more powerful than regulation.
None of us like to be told what to do or how to live. So please do not assume I am telling you what to do or how to live. I am exploring some perspectives here. Who knows really? I could be completely wrong.
But likewise, none of is like politicians passing laws that restrict our freedom. I do not feel we need laws. All we have to do is take a look at what is happening, educate ourselves, break ourselves free to some extent from the automated existence we have been living and make some different choices.
For example, I invite you to place some attention on the welfare of your children’s, grand children’s and great grand children’s lives. What can we do now to prevent them from facing catastrophic problems in the future?
Here are some of my suggestions as things we can all do to make this world a better place.
- Buy our produce from local suppliers and Farmers’ markets. The big supermarkets, if they want to stay in business, will eventually change the way they operate and work to offer products we will want to buy in the future.
- Grow your own produce
- Speak to your local council. Ask them about community gardens for growing vegetables. Ask them about placing planter boxes on the nature strip to grow herbs and vegetables.
- Plant fruit trees. Talk to your neighbours. Arrange with them for everyone to grow different types of fruit so that you can share.
- Visit old and lonely people. Help them get started with a vegetable plot they can care for. Invite them to participate in yours. Make sure they are included in the community.
- If there are single parents in your community who are struggling a little with managing their kids, get their kids involved in the gardens, or go get involved in the local sports clubs to lend a hand and make sure all the kids are getting to participate.
- If you get a community garden going, see if you can get the people living in nearby retirement homes involved. Get them out into nature. Let them get their hands in the soil too.
- Stand your ground and choose free range animal products, ethically farmed and compassionately slaughtered. Or, give animal products a complete miss. You might like it.
- Walk more.
- Get out in nature and sit under a tree. Your body loves sunlight. We have been made fearful of sunlight in recent years, but it is a rigid viewpoint that is based on some questionable science. Please do not get sunburn but get some sun. Did you know that by sitting under a tree for 30 minutes you will breath in wonderful microbes that will become part of your microbiome. They are in the air in nature.
- Smile at more people. Stop and say hello. Get to know some new people in your neighbourhood.
All of these things will create a positive epigenetic experience which will probably increase your longevity. Funny how that all works!
Finally, I invite you to get interested in how you might have gotten into such a space before the virus pandemic. Ask yourself what you can learn about yourself and how your mind works. Explore your inner universe. You might find some incredible things and you may even find your busy mind slowing down. Check out an Avatar Course.
Moving Forward and Helping Others
I am seeking now to do everything I can to become more personally responsible, and everything I can to help others. I feel it is a critical time.
Further, I invite you to do Avatar. If you are feeling the need to act, and perhaps take a leadership role in your community right now, it is nice to have your own Universe under control so that you can act with compassion, stability and kindness.
Soon I will be launching a course online in Community and Family Wellness. It is designed to equip you with a range of really cool skills and a broader understanding so that you may live better yourself, help your family, assist your community and make the world better.
It will not be an expensive course as I would like to have many, many people participate. If you would like to know more, drop me a not at jt@wideawakewellness.com.au.
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