2030 and all that

I have not gone blog AWOL, but have been pondering, pondering.

In the year 2034 my story, The Gatherers Trilogy begins. Four years before that, in 2030, I am told, in a UN document, that 5 billion people will live in cities around the world. This is bogglesome information, really. I can’t quite make things work in favour of any who find themselves within the city gates, so to speak.

In the beginning of the story, I talk about terrible smog conditions, air pollution, poverty, sickness and starvation, but only to show a marked contrast between the cities and the wonderful place my main characters choose to live in.
Talk about a fantasy, there they are able to grow and raise all their own food and barter away the extra, and the quality is great and extremely varied, while in our real world, city housing has sprawled over the best agricultural land, which means that food has to be acquired from a distance, often a great distance, and can only be bought at a high price.

What’s it to be? $50.00 per plate of fish and chips, or lasagna or whatever takes your fancy! That figure is probably too low for 2034!
Remember when air was clean and sex was dirty! Remember also when pure butter was 25 cents a lb., ground beef 55 cents a lb., beans and spaghetti were 12 cans for 1 dollar, and bread was 12 loaves for $1.25 on Saturdays!

Let’s forget about transportation and the like for the moment and deal with our ability to feed ourselves. If eating only happened once a week, say, like a snake does, then perhaps we might limp by, but most people manage one meal a day, and many aren’t satisfied with three. Enjoy the privilege while it lasts.

Obviously cities should have been built with plans in place to set aside land to grow food on. It’s an old idea, well established throughout the world, when there was a strong relationship between town and country. I was looking at a current satellite map of Southern Italy, and every square inch that doesn’t have a house on it is farmed in some way or other. Probably a small town you say, and indeed this is true, but the projection for 2030 also predicts that the small towns and villages will experience staggering increases in population.

It seems that you may have a place to live or a garden, but not both, for removal of arable land to build homes upon means there will be no way to grow food locally.

We are living in some sort of large mental bubble that allows us to believe that all is well, that food will continue to be trucked in, that it will be good and fresh, not genetically modified, not picked before ripening to allow for travel time, not full of foreign bacteria which our bodies can’t cope with, not sprayed with pesticide to prevent the bugs, and that it will be affordable and available to all.

This blog is for the young folk; the oldies already know that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.
Get out there, young ones, and learn as many ways as you can to produce food. Traditional is good, but so will be the modern and esoteric.

The problem lies in trying to believe that 7 billion people can have a decent life. Wish it for them, but it can’t happen if development continues on the present course. Actually it doesn’t happen now. Poverty is rampant, disease and distress simply horrible, and too many people daily live a life of misery.

Maybe we will have to cash in all our chips and accept a completely new start.
The Gatherers Trilogy calls for it; it seems the only workable way.

UFO or no!

I think it is time to tell my UFO story. Actually there were two of us who saw the ‘thing’. The year was 1968, about 10 pm on a very clear evening in late September. We’d been studying at the university, and were in our car driving out of the parking lot when we saw it. A huge white ball was in the sky at the city end of the bay, and it was slowly moving westwards towards the open ocean. We stopped and got out to get a better look at the object, to hear how it was being propelled, and maybe catch the sound of some music attending an event. The night was quiet and still, no clues of any sort presented themselves. Using various buildings and a church to gauge its size, we decided that what we were seeing was very big indeed. We couldn’t understand why all the sirens in the town were not going off, but nothing stirred, and there it was, moving slowly westward, using almost forty minutes to cover three miles, but that was to be as far as it would go, for when I had the bright idea to drive much closer and get a better look, the thing seemed to gather itself together, and flashed out of sight northwards up the inlet. Gone, gone, gone, in two seconds, no more! Remember the start of Star Trek Voyager? Warp 10, maybe more! We had no answers.
Thirty years or so later, I was relating this tale, which had never gone from my memory, to a fellow workmate. He was not in the least put out, in fact settled down to tell me his story, which made ours pale by comparison.
He’d been a teenager in 1968, living out in the prairies, and as the weather was still warm late in the evening, he’d been lying out on the grass looking up at the stars, and waiting for one of very few satellites to flash by. A satellite, he thought, came up over the horizon, but it didn’t keep going, instead it stopped right above him, then set off again at right angles to the previous course. This changing of direction apparently happened several times, till the teenage boy, taking fright from the strange sight he couldn’t explain, high-tailed it to the bright lights of his mother’s kitchen.
Both incidents appeared to be ‘for our eyes only’. No one else saw either event; they didn’t make the papers or bring out the military, but they did happen.

The fabric of space, the space-time continuum, doesn’t need to be rolled out in a regular way. It can be thick or thin, slow or fast, maybe have great holes in it, through which incidents from another reality may be momentarily viewed. I have no problem adjusting to that idea, there may be billions of other realities coexisting in parallel or in a jumble with each other.
There are too many stories that knock the idea of a reliable consistency on the head, too many theories that would come right if the scientists would calculate in the potential for co-existent realities. When a big bomb goes off, the surrounding area involved is left in something of a mess. Why should the Big Bang be any tidier?

apple pie issues – second slice.

For those who have come lately to the Tetralogia and Wiggledywoo blogs, the intent has always been to reveal many of the ideas contained in my four novels.

A little on how four novels came about. I didn’t start writing Book One, dear me no, I thought there was a short article I could put together and send somewhere, concerning the over-population of the Earth, and Earth’s reaction to the ever-increasing burden on her being. That was twenty years ago, but ten years later I had a tome of over one thousand pages single spaced! When I presented this opus to a celebrated literary agent, she said, “Take it away, that thing has got to be two books, at least!”
It became B’Hemoth, prequel to The Gatherers Trilogy, and Book One of the trilogy, Cataclysm’s Day.

Apple pie has a lot to do with what I was thinking back then. Apple pie is quintessential, iconic, a perfect representation of the good life. It says my life is good, the world is good, it is the best of everything that is fresh, wholesome, sweet and memorable, and having been created with love and care, it is something really special.

Anyone who is younger than 55-60 years, doesn’t know what has been lost from the net worth of the Earth. Apple pie has become, for many, a pale, tasteless shadow of its former glorious self. The ingredients for its making have become severely degraded, not nearly as vibrant as they once used to be, and where goodness still prevails, it is not available to all, being expensive and much harder to find. Once upon a time being organic was the way of the world, now it is truly present in dangerously far too few places, and often the word ‘organic’ is used to divert the attention of the consumer, not add anything to the quality of his food.
There are many reasons for this state of affairs; in my next I’ll put on my oven mitts and have a go at what is a very ‘hot’ item.

Topsyturvy

The Hopi speak of there having been four civilisations on this planet prior to this one. I suppose this to mean that human beings were rather too much to the fore in them, as now; that there weren’t only hordes of dinosaurs or ants or bees or eels, and that the Hopi themselves had lived through each of those very ancient times.
It is certainly not easy to recognise the early signs of advanced living; they appear to have been utterly eradicated from the face of the Earth, as presumably our cultural state will be eventually. But, as we know the Mayans were aware of the occurrence of a significant energetic shift in the part of the universe where Earth is found, might we not speculate that prior societies also experienced similar cosmic shifts, and that far from being totally removed, they are right there, energetically translated next door in another dimension, continuing on as before.

We know absolutely nothing about who we are, where we are or why. There are some superficial known facts, nothing so fundamental, however, that would allow us to star travel, or move Earth out of the way of serious incoming trouble. Sounds like Sci-fi? Certainly not, mystics having been telling us for millennia about states of being that are clearly not from around these parts; somehow they have become aware of the very big picture.
Perhaps we have some say in what happens to the planet and the space around it. Maybe there are periodic convergences of souls, animal, vegetable and mineral, for instance, that set up strong resonances that in turn lead to a particular set of energy changes, and without being aware that it will happen, the teeter-totter swings the other way, and what was down becomes up and vice versa.
Maybe one should not take comfort from so radical a shift in Earth’s state of affairs, but why not? There is so much nasty man-made trouble these days that could well be gotten rid of by whatever means.

Up,up and away

Ascension cannot mean business as usual, surely.

Time Zero

I haven’t got round to posting my posts in the last few days, events took me for a whirl and I ended up being short-changed in the time department. I mean where did it go? It’s supposed to roll out evenly, but frankly I don’t think that can be true.
We measure time with clocks of all sorts, instruments that know how to keep the beat, but I am far from convinced that counting even ticks is that effective, it simply doesn’t tell the whole story.
I would say that time is perfectly arbitrary, that all we do with clocks is control ourselves. Time is, I believe, quite different for each person and every other sentient thing on this planet, and probably to infinity through the universes.
Time seems mashable, malleable, stretchable, able to be tightly compressed, round, smooth, rough and bumpy, and sometimes inclined to become crystalline, with facets that reflect in many different ways. Time operates on the horizontal, the vertical and round blind corners, while still remaining valid to the person who is experiencing it.
There can only be one moment when time is wholly synchronous, and that is the time of our birth into the Light of Consciousness, the instant we become alive to a new life.
This is Time Zero, the only measurable point that is the same for all of us.

How to say it.

Greatest Spirit as the All One; Watchful Shepherd; Innocent Bystander; Ministering Angel; Listening Friend, the Godhead we may touch in Spirit and know in our Soul, but cannot hold as our own.

The Light of Consciousness, Life, the spark of cognition, the grace of being in the presence of Greatest Spirit as the All One, the gift of knowing that Truth.

If the Mind resides in our brains we will be wilful, if it is in our hearts we will be true to ourselves and others.

Maybe so, maybe not!

By Book Two of the trilogy the ability to move to another reality beyond that on Earth is made known, and through the medicine woman, Rachael, the other refugees in Astar become aware of how to access this ‘other’ place.
I don’t think it is so very odd to suppose that another reality could exist. It seems to me we already employ bits of somewhere else and don’t realise we’re doing it.
There’s the simple Duhs-ville day-dreaming states, the kind where we retain a little sense of what is going on around us while we wander off, but then there’s the other deep, deep, kind when we click back into our present, with not the vaguest idea of where we’ve been, although our whole body seems to be perfectly comfortable with having gone awhile.
Strange!
Think also of the many occasions when we call beings and objects to us, or we ‘go’ to where they are, and continue on our lives as if nothing had happened.

Small example: We are feeding the hummingbirds right now. It’s winter time; you would think that these little birds would always be about the feeder, but this is not so. Every time, however, when I notice their absence, and say something such as ‘Where are the hummers today?’, within seconds one or even two will appear, hovering in front of the window or at the feeder to prove their existence.
The same happens with people. How often has one said; ‘Where’s so and so, I haven’t seen them for ages,’ yet in no time at all the absent one reappears.

Perhaps reality is something of a revolving door, and we don’t always stay on the one side. We can move about, carrying along with us sufficient basic information as to place and how it should look
The animal kingdoms are probably well aware of this sort of journeying and take it for granted; birds and fish are likely clued in too. Our young children often display an awareness of a dimension outside what we would consider normal, and are quite comfortable using it.

I well remember our eldest boy, at the age of four, coming into our bedroom in a state of great indignation, demanding that we go to his bed and remove the three foxes that had been stomping all over him. I asked that he hand them to me so that they could be let loose in the garden. It was done, and while we saw nothing and carried nothing away, we did it with great seriousness. The child was experiencing an intrusion from somewhere, and could not be pacified until the beasties, in this case, were got rid of.

Manifestation, illusion – names are possibly too restrictive for such matters. As I remarked in an earlier blog, the saying, ‘Things have to be seen to be believed,’ can also be rendered, ‘Things have to be believed to be seen.’

Evolution

When I worked in admin, overseeing the activities a number of community based non-profit societies, I noted that each of these tiny organisations had unique ways of going about their business. Also that no matter how often the personnel and staff changed, the uniqueness of the units stayed the same. As a result I was able to anticipate when they would hit a high or low spot, and help mitigate the situation.
So what, you say, life is cyclical. Agreed, but that was not so interesting as the fact that the fixated form of each society never changed no matter what.
I drew the conclusion that organisations of all sorts maintain their own particular focus, and that nothing short of a cataclysmic event can alter their ways. Therefore there must be some sort of encoding that the initial covenant imprinted on all future members, and as a result it’s virtually impossible for them to go in another direction.
I now think this is a condition of the Universe, that having taken form, it’s not free to adopt anything else. Also that abstractions, such as thinking, remembering, planning are equally affected by this inherent condition.
Pain cannot be remembered after it is has passed away, and I think history must be equally uninformed. Nevertheless, what goes around comes around, and while it appears there has been alteration, it is not enough to affect the original graven image.
The action of Mandelbrot fractals exhibit change that is almost no change at all; always the same original form will be rediscovered, no matter how convoluted its journey.
If I have arrived anywhere in this thinking, the question I ask is: if history repeats itself, where in history are we now, and if we cannot get out of our own way voluntarily, what do we have to look to, to move on?
Evolution, maybe?

Duh!

Thought creates Reality; it does so, but tell me this, what thought creates what reality?

Sleep dreaming? A poorly understood condition, incapable of useful assessment.

Day dreaming? Probably worse, because the doer will adamantly claim the rationality of the irrational doing and knowing.

Premise?
“A statement that is assumed to be true and from which a conclusion can be drawn.”
Source:Wordweb.
There’s a finely crafted thought for you, which might add up to less than an ‘Eh’, when all the facts are collected and the saying done.

Opinion?
“A personal belief or judgment that is not founded on proof or certainty.”
Source: Wordweb.

Now we might be getting somewhere when trying to understand what level of thought might be driving our general reality. Regurgitated fluff, perhaps, scum with an odour hanging about on unmoving water, or reported sources from which we can derive barely an inkling of fact or truth.
Truth isn’t entirely esoteric and mind-driven, it is quite palpable much of the time; it is an other word for observation, for study of the facts as observed by the senses, but whose value in our lives seems to be more and more underrated.

Finding the Truth of Reality, and only as far as it affects us directly, should be a major part of our daily thinking. Take nothing at face value; don’t believe a word anyone says until time is taken to assess the facts; be alert to being put upon; always be ready to enact Plan B, because if we’re not pushing our own wagon, who is?
Just a thought.