I Can Believe

Video Illustration exploring the holographic nature of reality as presented by Michael Talbot in his book, "The Holographic Universe" using his comments recorded in a 1992 workshop. Additional insights contributed by fantasty writer Lewis Carroll (from Disney's 1952 animated movie adaptation), mythologist Joseph Campbell (from his interviews with Bill Moyers) and comedian Bill Hicks, (from his 1992 Oxford appearance).

100th Monkey syndrome & Morphic Resonance

"In his book The Hundredth Monkey, Ken Keyes, Jr. wrote about scientists who had been observing monkeys in the wild for thirty years.

In 1952, on the island of Koshima, when there was a serious drought & famine, they provided monkeys with sweet potatoes which they had dropped in sand.

The monkeys liked the taste of the potatoes but found the sand unpleasant. One day, an eighteen month old monkey washed the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught the trick to her mother and her playmates, who taught it to their mothers.

As the story is told, perhaps 99 monkeys learned to wash their sweet potato between 1952 and 1958. One day the 100th monkey learned to wash the potatoes. Suddenly, almost every monkey on the island began to wash their potatoes before eating them. The added energy of this 100th monkey had somehow created a behavioral breakthrough.

But, more amazing, the scientists observed that the act of washing sweet potatoes had jumped over the sea, because the colonies of monkeys on other islands, as far as 500 miles away, began washing their sweet potatoes.

This phenomena is known as "critical mass." When a limited number of people know something in a new way, it remains the conscious property of only those people. However, there is a point at which if only one more person tunes in to a new awareness, that new awareness is picked up by everyone."



Nature As Alive:
Morphic Resonance and Collective Memory*
Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.d.

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ABSTRACT: Memory is inherent in Nature, and what we think of as the laws of Nature may be more like habits. The basis of this memory process is morphic resonance, which is the influence of like upon like through or across space or time. Its implication, in the realm of heredity, is that inheritance depends not only on the chemical genes coded in DNA but also on morphic resonance from past members of the species. Other implications are an accelerated rate of evolution of new patterns of form and behavior; memory in individuals being based on self-resonance and not stored in the brain; the existence of a collective memory, to which we all contribute and on which we all draw; and providing understanding of past-life memories, survival of bodily death, telepathy, and ritual.

This hypothesis is part of a wider change in paradigm in which all of Nature, the entire cosmos, is viewed as being alive. This new sense of the life of Nature connects with the morphic resonance idea in the idea of the memory of place, or field, exemplified by the sense of places both haunted and sacred, which is the basis of such human activities as pilgrimage. Regardless of the ultimate validity of morphic resonance, a return to the sense and idea of Nature as alive and animate is absolutely essential to coming into a better relationship with the environment, on which we depend, and therefore is probably essential for our very survival.



Memory Inherent in Nature
I suggest that there is a memory inherent in Nature and that what we usually think of as the laws of Nature may be more like habits.

I will give an example. When you make a new chemical compound, the first time it crystallizes it is usually assumed that the crystal form, the lattice structure, is completely determined in advance by the laws of Nature, electromagnetic laws, Schrodinger's equation, the laws of thermodynamics, and so on. It is assumed that these laws fully determine the crystal's structure. Therefore the way a crystal forms the first time, the thousandth time, or the millionth time should be exactly the same, because the laws of Nature never change and they are not themselves influenced by the events they determine.

This is the standard view. By contrast I suggest that the first time a compound forms there will not already be a habit developed for its structure. It may actually take a long time for that to happen. Still, the second time it forms there will be an influence on it from the first time it formed by a process I call morphic resonance. The third time there will be an influence from the first and second times, and so on. These events contribute to a cumulative memory, which is expressed all around the world. So the new compound should become easier to crystallize as time goes on, all around the world. A memory, a habit, is building up.

In fact new chemicals do generally get easier to crystallize around the world as time goes on. And chemists usually explain this, not in terms of rigorous theories, but in anecdotes which are part of the folklore of chemistry. The most common anecdote is that this happens because fragments of previous crystals get carried from lab to lab on the beards of migrant chemists. Another explanation that is heard is that fragments of crystals get wafted around the world in the atmosphere.

Obviously, I am suggesting that this increased rate of crystallization happens even without migrating chemists and even if dust particles have been filtered from the laboratory air. So, the formation of crystals is one example of the buildup of habits in Nature, which we mistakenly assign the status of laws.

The Present Crisis in Science
This idea of a memory inherent in Nature is obviously a very radical, controversial, and unconventional view. The reason I think we need to consider it seriously is that science is at present in crisis because two of its most fundamental models of reality have come into conflict with each other.

The Model of Eternal Laws

The first model is the idea of eternity: nothing really changes. This model has dominated the physical sciences for a very long time, beginning in ancient Greece with the Pythagorean who thought that the realm of mathematics—the realm of number and proportion—was an eternal truth and that the changing world we live in was a reflection of that eternal order. Plato incorporated these ideas into his well-known philosophy of eternal forms or Ideas. And with the revival of Platonism in the European Renaissance, these Platonic forms or Ideas were built into the foundations of modern science.

In Christian Neo-Platonism, as formulated by Saint Augustine, the eternal Platonic forms were ideas in the mind of God. And for the founding fathers of modern science—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, DesCartes, and others—science was about finding out the eternal mathematical truths which were these ideas in the mind of God. God begins to be conceived as an ultimate mathematician, and this is a perennially popular idea with mathematicians even to this day.

So the idea that the laws of Nature are eternal has a strong theological and metaphysical background. Most scientists do not actually discuss it; it is simply taken for granted, built into the foundations of the scientific method as we know it. The idea that any experiment should be repeatable anywhere, at any time, follows from this idea, as the practical application of it. The reason scientific experiments are supposed to be repeatable at any time is because the laws of Nature are supposed to be the same at all times and in all places.

Of course, these laws are not things you actually meet or encounter. You do not see E=MC2 written in the sky. You do not find it under stones. These are things that are abstract ideas. They are not made of energy or matter; they are not part of the physical universe in fact. They are part of a cosmic dualism built into mechanistic science since the Seventeenth Century: on the one side, eternal laws; governing eternal matter and energy on the other.

This way of thinking is deeply imbedded in the mentality of scientists. It is one of the most fundamental paradigms or models of Western science.

The Model of Evolution

The other fundamental assumption of Western science is the model of evolution, which is the idea that everything changes and develops in time. This one came to us not from the Greek but from the Jewish part of our cultural heritage.

Unlike most ancient peoples, the Jews believed that the historical process involved a development in time. Most ancient peoples, like the Greeks, the Hindus, and the Buddhists, believed that time was essentially cyclical. Things just repeated in cycles . . . including great cycles of cosmic repetition. But the Jews emphasized the nature of the historical process as a journey—the prototypic journey being the journey of the Jews out of Egypt through the wilderness and to the promised land. And in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature this promised land became the Millennium, the kingdom of God, the time in the future when history would end.

This idea was subsequently secularized in the Seventeenth Century and gave rise to the idea of progress through science and technology. And it is of course the same idea that underlies systems as diverse as Marxism and the New-Age movement. In Marxism it is thought there is an evolution to an end of history when the state withers away. Well, Marxist states have withered away, but history has not ended. And the entire New-Age movement is another way of thinking of history leading to some kind of new culmination.

Anyway, these originally Jewish ideas of change and development in time led to the idea of human progress. By the end of the Eighteenth Century, most people agreed that human beings progressed and society progressed, but the rest of Nature was still thought to be static. By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the idea of biological evolution was gaining ground. Darwin's theory was generalized so that human development was seen as part of a much larger process of biological development, biological evolution. Some philosophers began to suggest that maybe the whole cosmos evolves.

However, the physicists quickly contradicted them. They said the cosmos was not evolving, that it was an eternal machine that is in fact devolving—slowly running out of steam, heading toward a thermodynamic heat death. So it was generally held that the cosmos is going downhill whereas evolution on earth was a progressive development, a kind of momentary fluctuation in a universe headed nowhere.

It was not until the 1960s that physics finally adopted an evolutionary cosmology. This occurred with the introduction of the Big-Bang theory—the idea that the cosmos started small and has been growing ever since. With its corollary that the cosmos is continually forming new patterns and forms within it as it grows, the Big-Bang theory gives us a model of the cosmos that's far more like a developing organism than like any machine we know of. So we now have an evolutionary cosmology. All Nature is evolving. Human development is in the context of biological evolution. Biological evolution is part of a vastly greater evolutionary process, cosmic evolution.

Evolving Laws of Nature

It follows that until the 1960s the question I am raising did not come up. If the universe was eternal, the idea of eternal laws of Nature made sense. But if Nature were evolving, why should the laws of Nature not evolve as well? Why should we think of the universe as governed by a cosmic Napoleonic code which was fixed at the outset rather than being governed by evolving principles. As a matter of fact, as soon as you begin to think about laws of Nature you realize that this is an extremely anthropocentric concept. In the Seventeenth Century the image was clear. God was lord of the universe, and His laws applied to everything. Not only did He make up the laws, but He was omnipotent and provided the role of the all-powerful law-enforcement agency.

However most scientists no longer bring God into their thinking. And if, from a scientific point of view, we no longer think of God as a cosmic legislator, then why should we think of laws of Nature at all? As the English writer C. S. Lewis said, "To say that a stone falls to earth because it is obeying a law makes it a man and even a citizen." So this concept of law is intensely anthropocentric. And I think it is much better to change our metaphor than to continue this. The metaphor I suggest instead is habit.

Things may have the regularity they do and Nature may have its patterns of regularity because of habits that build up within Nature according to what has already happened and according to how often it has happened. Furthermore, habits are subject to natural selection. They can evolve. Only successful patterns of activity are capable of being repeated, and only the ones that are repeated become habits.

Morphic Resonance and Morphic Fields
Obviously, if there are habits in Nature, then there must be a memory in Nature. Our own habits depend on memory, largely unconscious memory. There is no need to assume the habits of Nature are any more conscious than our own. So what I am suggesting is an inherent memory process in Nature. The basis of it is the process I call morphic resonance.

Morphic resonance is the influence of like upon like through or across space and time. Similar things resonate with subsequent similar things on the basis of similarity of pattern and, particularly, of vibratory patterns of activity. A chemical of a given kind resonates with previous chemicals of that kind and is influenced by it. A member of a given species, like a giraffe, is subject to morphic resonance from previous giraffes. Each giraffe draws upon a collective memory of the species and in turn contributes to it. Each organism, I propose, is organized by a morphic field, morphic from the Greek word meaning form: morphi.

The morphic field is the organizing field of a system. Each crystal has its own kind of morphic field; each species has its own kind of morphic field. Then, say, within the body, each organ has a morphic field, each tissue, each cell, each kind of organelle, each molecule. There are nested hierarchies of fields within fields. The whole of Nature is built up of systems within systems: solar systems within galaxies, the Earth within the solar system, ecosystems within the Earth, and so on. Each of these, I suggest, has a morphic field which organizes it in accordance with habit, in accordance with the habits of that kind of thing.

Things that have been around for hundreds of millions of years—hydrogen atoms, for example, or salt crystals—have habits that are so repetitive that they become effectively fixed. They behave as if they are governed by eternal laws.

Therefore where we see the difference between the conventional theory and the one I am putting forward is when we look at new systems, new patterns of behavior, new patterns of activity. There, according to morphic resonance theory, it should be possible to see new habits building up, and this should be testable by experiment.

Testing Collective Memory

I have already mentioned a possible test with crystals. But the same theory applies in animal behavior, in biological morphogenesis, the development of form, and in many other areas. For example, the theory predicts that if you train rats in a new trick in Prague, then rats all around the world should learn the same thing quicker just because the rats have learned it in Prague.

Now, there is already evidence from studies done on rats in laboratories that this kind of effect actually happens. I have summarized this evidence in my books, A New Science of Life and The Presence of the Past. In fact, it is surprising how much evidence there already is for this principle.

The hypothesis also applies to human beings. It should be getting easier for children to solve or play video games of a particular kind just because so many have learned them . . . or for people to learn new sports, new skills like windsurfing. In the human realm I am suggesting that what we learn is facilitated by morphic resonance from all those who have learned it before.

This is the area where the theory has been tested most extensively. Some of the first experiments were done in response to an international competition organized by the Tarrytown group in New York, sponsored by Bob Schwartz. The Tarrytown group offered prizes—twenty-thousand dollars in prizes—for the best tests of the morphic resonance theory, which could either support or go against it. The results were very interesting. There were some very good experiments done in human psychology; these are summarized in my book, The Presence of the Past.

This effort was preceded by a competition in the British magazine, Scientist, which offered a more modest prize for suggestions of inexpensive ways of testing the theory. One of the things that has happened as a result is that I have been led to see that really interesting research can very often be done on very small budgets. With an idea as radical as this, that is a very convenient finding, because as you can imagine it is difficult to get conventional grant giving agencies to fund this kind of research. But if it is so cheap that anyone can do it, you do not need funding. Some of the most interesting experiments have actually been done by students. Research in morphic resonance is now going on at universities in Europe, in New Zealand, and in America.

Space does not allow summarizing all the work that is happening at present. I will just mention one experiment done recently. It is not, in fact, the best experiment, but it is the easiest to explain. This was done with crossword puzzles in the psychology department at Nottingham University. The young woman who did it, Monica England, reasoned as follows: If morphic resonance is happening, it should be easier to do today's newspaper crossword puzzle tomorrow than it would have been yesterday.

So we managed to persuade a London newspaper, The Evening Standard, to supply its crossword puzzle in advance for the purpose of this experiment. Students were tested in Nottingham the day before and the day after the crossword was published in London. They were also tested with a control crossword which was not published during that period. This of course involved testing different groups of students before and after. The control crossword gave a measure of each individual's ability to do crossword puzzles of that kind.

It turned out that students' performances on the test crossword did indeed improve by about 25 percent after it had been published, compared with the control crossword. This result is statistically significant and is, of course, very interesting.

Several other experiments have subsequently been done through the media, including magazines. Previous experiments have been done in Britain on television—the results of these are summarized in the Appendix to the new edition of A New Science of Life. Other tests are under way. Obviously this is an area where if the hypothesis is supported by evidence, as it seems to be so far, it could lead quite soon to applications in the realm of training and education. For if we could facilitate, if we could improve the way that we tune into the experience of others through morphic resonance, we could learn things quicker.


Implications of Shared Memory

Heredity and Genetics

This hypothesis has a great many implications. In the realm of heredity it suggests that inheritance depends not only on the chemical genes coded in DNA but also on morphic resonance from past members of the species. In fact, I think that chemical genes have been grossly overrated and that what they actually do is what we know they do, that is, code for the sequence of minor acids in protein. They give organisms their chemical heredity. They are able to make particular chemicals. But the way those chemicals are organized, the form they take up, and the way organisms behave—all that I believe is primarily controlled through morphic fields and morphic resonance.

So heredity involves both genetic changes and morphic resonance. If you think of the rat example I mentioned—rats learning things quicker in London after rats have learned them in Prague—there is no need of change in the DNA of the rats here or the rats there. The rats tune in on the basis of their chemical similarity, but what they pick up doesn't depend on genetic change.

Evolution

This also gives us a new view of evolution, because it allows new patterns of form and behavior to spread much more quickly than they could on the basis of conventional, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory based on random genetic mutation followed by generations of natural selection. Rats learning a new trick in one place could enable rats elsewhere to learn it much quicker, within days; it would not take many generations of natural selection.

In the human realm this, of course, has many interesting implications for change. It suggests that new ideas and new attitudes spread much more quickly than they might otherwise. Over and above the influence of the media and so on, morphic resonance enables these new things to spread much more quickly and effectively.

In the realm of evolution there are some examples that suggest this really happens. The best known of them concerns the behavior of certain birds, blue tits, in stealing cream from milk bottles. In England at the beginning of this century a system of milk delivery began where people had bottles of milk delivered to their doorsteps. After about twenty years in one city, Southhampton, blue tits started tearing off the tops of the milk bottles and drinking the cream from the bottle. This was a very successful habit. It spread by imitation throughout the whole city, and usually it worked very well. There were a few tragic cases where blue tits were found drowned, headfirst, in people's milk bottles, but most of these birds got a free breakfast. After a while this turned up in another city far away. The rate at which the habit spread throughout Britain was carefully monitored by observers all over the country.

Now, blue tits are home-loving birds. They move very short distances from their homes, so at the time it was concluded that the habit was being independently discovered again and again in different parts of the country. Yet the rate of discovery was accelerating. The professor of Zoology at Oxford, Sir Alistair Hardy, suggested this was so remarkable that it perhaps depended on telepathy. I would say, however, this is exactly the kind of effect you would expect with morphic resonance in evolution.

The most interesting developments actually came from Holland. After British blue tits had started stealing milk, Continental ones began doing it, too. And in Holland the habit spread as it had in England, until by the time of the Second World War, all over Holland blue tits were stealing milk. Then unfortunately for the Dutch blue tits, the Germans invaded and milk delivery stopped. It was not until 1948 that deliveries began again. But blue tits do not live more than three or four years, so there could have been no blue tits around in 1948 that remembered the golden age of free cream before the war. Nevertheless the habit reestablished itself all over Holland within two or three years.

So this is the kind of effect we would expect with morphic resonance. There are not many examples where people have studied behavioral evolution in animals; but this is one of the few well-documented cases, and it fits very well with the ideas I am suggesting here.

Memory

Another area where this hypothesis has many implications is in the realm of memory. Morphic resonance depends on similarity. The more similar something is to something that has happened before, the more effective, the stronger the resonance will be. It is a general principle that organisms in general are most like themselves in the past. I am more like me half an hour ago than like you. I am more like me ten years ago than like you ten years ago. In general the most specific morphic resonance acting on an organism from the past will be from its own past states. Thus, self-resonance is the predominant kind of morphic resonance.

In the realm of form, this self-resonance enables organisms to retain their form through the stabilizing of the morphic field even though the chemicals and the cells within the body may be changing over time. In the realm of behavior it enables organisms to tune in to their own past patterns of activity. If I get into a car, for example, and start driving it, then I come into morphic resonance, through similarity of the condition and of my activities, with all the previous times I have driven cars. There is a kind of habit memory that is transmitted through morphic resonance.

I think the same also applies to remembering events or acts. If I remember the last time I came to Prague, which was in 1971, that memory is also accessed in the same way, suggesting that these memories depend on morphic resonance, on tuning-in to ourselves in the past. We are the transmitters in the past. Morphic resonance moves through time; the tuning-in involves a resonance through time with ourselves in the past.

In other words I am suggesting it is not necessary for memories to be stored inside the brain. I am not ruling out the possibility that this can happen. Tony Soipler from Saint Petersburg, for example, has developed a kind of hybrid theory of memory bringing together a conventional molecular basis of memory and morphic resonance. That is possible. But what I am suggesting at the moment for purposes of clarity is the most extreme form of morphic resonance: that memory depends on morphic resonance through tuning-in to the activities of the brain in the past, but it is not necessary for your brains to store memories as traces.

This may be difficult to imagine because we have all been brought up with the idea that memories are stored inside the brain as memory traces. This just shows how much we are influenced by the dominant paradigms of science. This is very much part of the materialistic, mechanistic theory of the mind. From this outmoded view, the mind is just an aspect of the brain. We have memories, therefore they must be in the brain. This is taken for granted by a great many people. Many people, who have never studied science at all, take it for granted as an act of faith.

Yet it is not something borne out by a great deal of evidence. In fact throughout this century many scientists have looked at brains to try to find memories in them, to find localized memory traces, and they have failed repeatedly to find them. The evidence for memory storage in the brain is, if anything, weaker than it was fifty years ago, through repeated failures where millions of animals were sacrificed on the altar of science and vast amounts of money spent in research.

This failure to find localized memory traces is what led Karl Lashley, the great investigator of memory, at the end of his career to despair of finding it. He said, "Memory ought to be impossible, yet it happens." Someone else who worked in this field, Boycott, said, "Memory seems to be both everywhere and nowhere in particular in the brain." And this is the context in which Karl Pribram (1971) put forward his well known holographic theory of memory storage to account for the failure to find localized memory traces.

Well, I am suggesting that memory may well be holographic in the general sense of David Bohm's (1980) implicate order theory. It may not be present in the brain as memory traces at all. If I came to your house and analyzed the wires and transistors of your television set to try to find out what programs you had been watching last week, I would not be able to find any traces of them. That is because the television does not leave traces. What you tune into goes through the set. It is not stored within it. And I am suggesting the brain might be more like a TV receiver than like a video recorder.

Now, you may wonder, why is it then if we have accidents, brain damage, there can be loss of memory. This is not difficult to understand. Think again of the TV set. If I came and cut out bits of your TV set in the sound circuit, the TV set could no longer produce sound, but it could still give pictures. In other words you would have an aphasic TV set. This would not prove that all the sounds, the music, or the voices rose inside the bit of the set that was damaged. It would merely show that part was important for the reception of the information that was coming from somewhere else. Likewise, brain damage leading to loss of memory does not prove that memories are stored inside the damaged brain. It simply shows that those bits of the brain play some role in the recovery or the tuning-in to the memories.

Collective Memory
If we tune into our own memories, why do we not tune-in to other people's? Well of course, I think we do. The whole basis of this theory is that we tune into the memories of many other people, that there is a collective memory on which we all draw. This is something that many people are already familiar with from Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. From the point of view of morphic resonance, if the collective unconscious did not exist as a theory it would have to be invented, because it fits very well with this way of thinking.

However, Jung was suggesting the collective unconscious only in the human realm. I am suggesting that this is part of a much more general process throughout all Nature.

From a conventional, scientific point of view, a mechanistic point of view, Jung's theory does not make sense. And it is not taken seriously by most scientists. It is regarded as a flaky, marginal theory, which might appeal to people with literary educations but not to anyone with a proper scientific way of thinking. Of course it is of great value in many forms of psychotherapy and is one of the important ingredients in transpersonal psychology. However, from the point of view of morphic resonance Jung's theory becomes absolutely central, no longer on the margins of scientific psychology. It becomes absolutely central to an understanding of the human mind. Collective memory is an important ingredient of what we are.

Past-Life Memories

This also leads to several other rather surprising implications. One is that if we tune into lots of people in the past, occasionally we could tune into particular people in the past who are now dead and through morphic resonance pick up memories of past lives.

On this note, there is quite good evidence from the work of Professor Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia that some young children remember incidents from previous lives. They have memories which can not be explained normally and which seem to be valid when checked up on. There is also some evidence, which I think is less reliable, from hypnotic regression of past-life memories.

Usually this evidence produces a polarized response: on one side, a lot of people, usually dogmatic mechanists, say this is impossible therefore the evidence is wrong. We can not explain it, therefore it can not happen. That is one reaction I am sure everyone is familiar with. On the other side are people who say this is reincarnation, which is exactly what we believe anyway. But I am suggesting a middle path. It is possible to accept this evidence for past-life memories in terms of people tuning-in to people in the past, but it does not necessarily prove that you were that person. That is another question. It leaves that question open.

Survival After Death

This question of memory has many other implications. It has a great relevance to all religious theories of survival. All religions that I know of suggest that there is some form of bodily survival of death, some kind of personal survival—either in some shadowy ancestor realm or underworld; or through reincarnation or rebirth; or as in the Judaic, Christian, or Islamic traditions, through some kind of after-life. None of these theories would make sense if memories are stored in the brain, because obviously when the brain decays, all memories would be obliterated. Materialists like the idea of memory storage in the brain—not because it is strongly supported by evidence, it is not—but because it is such a simple and convenient argument which can be used to refute almost all religions. If memory is in the brain, the brain decays at death and that is the end. It would not make much sense if you arrive at the Last Judgment, for example, and you have totally forgotten who you are and what you have done.

However, if memories are not stored inside the brain, then the question of survival of bodily death is left open. This is one of those areas where changing the boundaries of science changes the boundaries between science and religion.

Telepathy

Indeed this change in perspective shifts the boundaries between the so-called normal and the paranormal as well. In a world in which morphic resonance occurs, telepathy also ceases to be shocking. You could even see where some people could say to me, "Well what's so new about morphic resonance? Isn't this just telepathy?" However, from a scientific point of view that would not be quite accurate. I think morphic resonance may be very akin to telepathy, but morphic resonance is a more general principle. We would not, for example, speak of a crystal influencing another crystal by telepathy, which means thought transference. Still, in a world with morphic resonance, telepathy would cease to be a shocking, paranormal phenomenon. It would seem quite normal. This is another one of the reasons why my hypothesis is so controversial.

Ritual

This hypothesis has many other implications. We can think of societies as governed by morphic fields, and I go into this in some detail in my book, The Presence of the Past. Here I will simply mention one implication, which has to do with ritual. All societies have rituals, and rituals are patterns of activity which are done usually in order to recall or relate to some previous event. The Jewish Passover Festival, for example, is a re-creation of the original Passover dinner, which Jewish people have celebrated every year since then. The Christian Holy Communion is another example like this, and so is the American national ritual of the Thanksgiving dinner.

In rituals people deliberately do things in as similar a way as possible to the way they were done before: the same words, the same language. In Hindu ceremonies, for example, the Sanskrit language, their ancient language, is used. There exists a great conservatism of ritual language; the same smells, the same places, the same gestures, the same food, and so on, are employed. I think that through ritual people are deliberately re-creating a particular pattern of activity, consciously re-creating this pattern of activity, in order to connect with those who have done it before. Through ritual, people claim there is a presence of the past, that the past becomes present to those participating in the ritual, that there is a kind of collapse in time. In the Christian Holy Communion, for example, it is believed there is a presence of the original Last Supper in the spirit of Christ and also of all those who have partaken of this ritual since—the Communion of Saints.

These kinds of ideas are found all around the world in all societies. From the point of view of conventional rationalism, this is just another example of meaningless mumbo-jumbo and superstition; but from the point of view of morphic resonance, these ideas make perfect sense because the conservatism of rituals creates exactly the right conditions for a morphic resonance between the present participants and those who have done it before. There really would be some kind of influence through time brought about by the ritual, which is exactly what those who do the rituals believe they are doing.

Nature As Alive
This hypothesis is part of a wider change in paradigm that is going on, which I summarized in my most recent book, The Rebirth of Nature, the idea of Nature as alive. This idea is not only that of the Earth being alive, as Gaia, but of the entire cosmos as alive, akin to a developing organism. Through science the mechanistic theory of Nature is being transcended. Science is returning us, I believe, to a new sense of the life of Nature.

Memory of Place, Field

To summarize one way where this new sense of the life of Nature connects with the morphic resonance idea, I wish to introduce the idea of the memory of places. All traditions have ways of thinking about the quality of place. Each place has its own kind of quality or character. The Romans spoke of the genius loci (spirit of the place). We all know that different places have different feelings or atmospheres; but there is nothing in mechanistic science, with its universalistic laws, that enables us to understand this very well. In terms of morphic resonance theory, however, I think it is possible to think of places as having fields. Places can have morphic fields, and morphic fields can have an inherent memory through self-resonance.

Upon my first thinking of morphic fields this way I thought, thinking of the fields of places is going too far. It is taking the concept beyond its legitimate limits. Then I realized that the concept of fields in the first place comes from placed bits of land in the countryside with hedges around them. The field concept was introduced into science by Farraday who borrowed it from the ordinary English usage of the word field—the primary use of which is agricultural. It has to do with a region of land. The most general definition of field is a region of influence, a region of activity.

So thinking of the fields of places on the one hand makes it easy to understand traditions of geomancy, which are ways of understanding the relations of different parts of a place in terms of its field. It also enables us to think in terms of the memory of places. The place itself can have a memory. There can also be a memory through going to a place. You are in the same environment other people have been in before so you can tune into the collective memory of other people in that place. Therefore there are two senses in which places can have memories: through the human collective experience in that place and through the memory in the place itself.

Now, this concept makes a lot of sense of beliefs found all over the world. For example, it is believed in most parts of the world that certain places are haunted, that there are ghosts or spirits in those places because of bad things that have happened there in the past. Ghosts are a kind of memory, if you like, of what has happened there. It is also believed that certain places can have a positive effect through what has happened there. These are holy places, where great men or women have been born or enlightened, or where many people have prayed, as in the great cathedrals of Europe, the great temples of Asia, and so on.

Pilgrimage

And these sacred places are traditionally, all around the world, places of pilgrimage. The Australian Aborigines with their song lines, the American Indians with their power places, the medieval Europeans with their great networks of pilgrimage all over Europe—all were relating to the spirit of places through a basic human tendency, this tendency to go on pilgrimage to places of power because of the memory and the power in that place.

Almost the only societies where pilgrimage has not happened are the Protestant societies of northern Europe. Pilgrimage was suppressed in the Protestant Reformation in England and elsewhere because it was identified as being essentially pagan by the reformers. I think they were right to see it as pagan in its roots. However, they were wrong to see it as something contrary to the spirit of religion. And I think that this suppression of pilgrimage has a great relevance to us today. Pilgrimage is such a basic instinct, it could not be suppressed for long. And within a few generations the English had invented tourism.

Tourism

Tourism is best understood as a form of secularized pilgrimage. Tourists, you see, go to the great sacred places of the past, the cathedrals, the temples, the holy mountain, the pyramids, Stonehenge, and so on. But because they are modern people who think they have risen above superstition and that kind of thing—because they are rational, educated and modern—they are alienated from the places they go to. They can not kneel down and say a prayer, or light a candle in a cathedral. They can not do a puja in a Hindu temple. They can not invoke the gods or the goddesses, or the patron saints of the place, because that would be superstitious. So instead they have to pretend they are going to these places for educational reasons and are primarily interested in some figures about the place.

Well, this is a profoundly ambiguous activity. If they really did not feel anything about the power of the place, they would stay at home. Yet people are drawn to these places. In fact in England we call them "tourist attractions," and people come there because of the power of the place. When they arrive, they can not relate to the place adequately because the mechanistic theory of Nature first of all treats Nature as entirely lacking in any sacred power. There is nothing sacred in a mechanical world. Second, there is nothing animate. It is seen as some primitive animism to relate to places in this way.

If we recover instead a sense of the life of Nature, the life of the Earth, we can see that we can recover this sense not only theoretically, as I have been describing in this article, we can also recover it through a variety of actual practices. What follows is just one of the ways that we can recover a sense of the sacredness of the Earth. I suggest that one of the paradigm shifts that could make a big difference in the way we relate to the Earth is a very simple one—the shift from tourism to pilgrimage. If only a small percentage of the tourists would go as pilgrims, then the whole world would be linked up by networks of pilgrimage encompassing the sacred places of each country in the world. Already people are going there; already the infrastructure is in place to get people there. I believe that this would be one of the ways that this new paradigm, this new spirit, could be expressed in practice in our own lives.

Recovering Nature's Aliveness Essential For Our Survival

These ideas, you see, are part of a more general move, as I mentioned, towards a recovery of the sense of our life in a living world—Nature as alive. The morphic resonance idea as a scientific hypothesis has to be tested by the methods of science, but it is part of a more general movement of the recovery of the sense of the life of Nature. Regardless of whether morphic resonance turns out to be right or wrong, I believe that this sense of the life of Nature is absolutely essential for coming into a better relationship with the environment, on which we depend. In fact I think these changes in ideas are probably essential for our very survival.

Choose Life

choose life. choose awakening. choose rejecting your programming. choose opening your mind. choose questioning every distorted version of reality you are spoon-fed by the media, choose awareness that you are manipulated into demanding solutions to problems that do not exist, serving an agenda you do not understand, and that you are a human battery in the farm of fear.

choose not to walk through life like the living dead, dumb and unaware, accepting every injustice, every war, every crime against your fellow man, fulfilling your fate as the powerless drone society has conditioned you to be, choose to take control, to say no, choose to speak and be heard. choose love. choose not to honour those who pursue a career in death, who are paid to kill, who sell their souls to the system, whose brains are washed by the blood and tears of the people they destroy, who obey without question.

choose to reject the insane heirarchy that decrees that others have dominion over you by accident of birth, choose to reject the idea that your worth as a human being is measured by what you possess, choose to be free rather than another mindless consumer running on the eternal hamster wheel of materialism. choose not to be a number, a bar-coded, microchipped member of the herd, spending your life inside a box, watching a box.

choose your future, choose life.
~ali

The World According to Monsanto....

The gigantic biotech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.

Rik Clay

Absolutely amazing interview!

Police State UK

An over-view of how the "anti-terror" agenda is being used as a conduit to reduce civil liberties and implement a police state

Esoteric Agenda

Documentary illustrating the myth of prison religions, the use of aspartame and fluoride to lower IQ and the implementation of agenda 21 and codex alimentarius to reduce global population.

Repeaters ( a short story )

after 2012 came and went, he was disappointed. nothing much happened. he turned on the tv and it was still the same old war, life was still the same old gameshow with slightly different actors repeating the same old lines.

he sat on the morning train and looked at peoples faces and they seemed as asleep as ever. their eyes were open but they didn't seem alive. he listened to them speak and they all sounded like robots, programmed with the same story, the same 2.2 beta version of interaction. he started to make notes. he studied them.

at night, when he had removed his rather expensive striped silk noose and hung it on the back of the door next to his suit jacket, he would examine his notebook, read the snippets of conversation he had overheard and recorded.

the first thing he noticed was that people liked to talk about what they had seen on tv. they would speak so fondly of people who didn't exist, as if they were real. they would analyze every pretend situation and give their verdict as if it were a matter of life and death. this, he soon realised, was the only time people ever really seemed to come alive, when they were talking about these imaginary worlds and these imaginary places and these imaginary people.

alot of the time, people would repeat things they had read in a magazine or a newspaper. he heard the same story over and over again, like a pointless, stupid echo. even peoples lives seemed the same. every day a different face beside him on the train would recount the similar tale of the day before, meaningless anecdotes detailing some random child, or some random boyfriend, or some random car/holiday/house they had bought. it was like listening to the drone of a million and one ants, the pulse of the hive mind sweeping them from day to identical day.

he didn't know what to make of it all. he put on his tv and on every channel, people were dressing in the same clothes, trying to copy each other, people were going to plastic surgeons and demanding they be changed to look the same as someone else. people were all driving the same car, drinking the same cola, smoking the same cigarettes. they were all giving their children the same few names, all parting their hair in the same direction, all listening to the same music, all dying of the same diseases.

and he looked up from his notebook, and stared at the tie hanging on the back of the door. even that was the same. the same three diagonal stripes. and he looked at his shoes, and he thought, impossible! those were the same shoes a million other tired feet had worn before him.

and he got out his wallet and looked at his identity card. that grey, shocked, badly lit face didn't look anything like him. that name, printed underneath, that didn't capture the essence of who he was. how could it? he started to repeat his own name, over and over. it just sounded like noise, not like real words. it sounded no different to the squeak of a monkey in a zoo, or the squeak of any monkey, anywhere.

his ape heart beat furiously and he needed air.

he went outside and looked around. there was still enough light to see, so he lit a cigarette and started paying attention. he sat cross legged on the lawn, which he had trimmed to the same length as everyone else in his street, and looked at the grass. the more he looked, the more he noticed how no two blades were the same. they weren't even close.

he looked at the sky, at the clouds, and there was no symmetry. he went to bed feeling very confused.

the next morning on the train, he didn't make any notes, he just looked. he looked at the sea of faces in the same way he had looked at the grass but nothing stood out. it was just the same bland face over and over again, like some kind of repeating hologram.

some of the faces were male, and some were female, and some were old and some were fat and some were incredibly ugly, but when it came down to it it was just the same old face, repeating forever, a self-replicating fractal of identical skulls, to infinity. their lips moved and their eyes opened and closed but the more he looked, the more he could see that they were like animations in a perpetual loop. they never thought anything new, or expressed an opinion that was entirely their own, they were all stuck in one monotone vinyl groove, repeating themselves forever.

and he watched them disconnecting from the world, plugging themselves into music players so they wouldn't have to listen, texting each other so they wouldn't have to speak, and he thought, what the hell is this?

whenever one of them approached him at the water-cooler now, he didn't know what to say. he would just stare at their lips and hope he looked like he was listening. he lost all interest in girls, because eventually, no matter how pretty or different she appeared at first, all he could see was the dull grey face of his boss, writhing beneath him, and he would have to makes his apologies and leave.

he began to find he couldn't tell people apart anymore. his own face in the mirror every morning was the only thing that seemed real. all around him were programmed people following sub-routines he no longer understood. they went to work and came home and watched tv and went to sleep, then got up and went to work again, over and over again, as if they were sleep-walking, as if they had never fully been awake.

he was pretty sure he was awake. he turned the lights on and off in his room every now and then, because he was sure he had read that in dreams, this was impossible. he couldn't remember why.

he got out his notebooks again, tried to find an answer, or at least some meaning, anything. but it made no sense, and he cried with frustration.

and suddenly he remembered being a child, knocking on peoples doors and running away, scrambling behind the nearest bush and having to choke back laughter as a confused face would appear, staring blankly at their empty doorstep, looking this way and that, shaking their heads silently and going back inside.

he put on his trainers and went into the street. he knocked on his neighbours door. noone came. so he tried the next, and the next, and the next. he didn't bother running away. he knocked more and more furiously, shouting hello. he peered through windows. in each house, people were huddled around their tvs, while cold plasma light streamed the same images onto their empty eyeballs. in each house, people just sat and stared, barely noticing each other, or his face, pressed against the glass.

he went home and closed the door. this had to be a dream. a dream within a dream, with no waking. he got into bed and closed his eyes.

and as he slept, the meat robots did not once break their gaze, did not lift their hollow eyes from the screen. they watched every second of his dreaming. the last free human, his soul just a film, his mind their entertainment.

and they sat around, plugged directly in, chasing every last synaptic wave, every last abstract, confused, hyper-real thought, absorbing every memory, until all that was left was a tiny spark, feeding them with liquid light, and he was just a spot, fading into darkness on the screen.


~ali

Waking Life

A man shuffles through a dream meeting various people and discussing the meanings and purposes of the universe... Amazing animated film that looks into the meaning of life, reality and human consciousness.

atheism

my god. if i could really be bothered to disentangle my webcam from the veritable rats nest of wires lurking behind my desk, i would create some kind of response.

as it is, i can say only this. if you're an atheist, how are you different from a rock? how are you any more meaningful than a potato?

you're a victim of nihilistic programming. i don't believe in a hellfire and brimstone deity, but "atheism" is more than simply denying an affiliation with a God. it's a rejection of your spirituality as a sentient being... whatever your worldview, to deny that the energy that makes you slightly more animated than a corpse exists is a rejection of life itself. by proxy, that energy must have intelligence, sentience, and be part of a wider collective consciousness or else the universe is literally the dream of a cabbage.

atheism is not just a denial of creationism, it is a denial of the creation of the universe via conscious energy. could a simple accident of chemistry account for the sophisticated dream worlds we inhabit 8 hours a night? could random selection explain the unique, beautiful, starling complexity of a single thought?

deny the idea of you participating in thinking the material world into being, i won't.

e=mc2. where does that fit? energy, once created, cannot be destroyed. it can change form, transmute, but remains in some form. it is indestructable. so conscious, calculated, constructive energy.... where does that go?

the energy source that animates your body... whatever you wish to call it.... however simple your understanding... that spark that makes you BE... that represents your consciousness, your memories, your experiences, your hopes and dreams. everything that, again, differentiates you from a root vegetable.

are you really dening the power of your own consciousness? are you really admitting that you are essentially a meat robot, following a programme? maybe you are. i am not.

"atheism" isn't about rejecting the traditional creator God idealogy. atheism is a denial that your life even has a meaning. it is the mindset of the psychopath, an existentialist who sees no value in anything that exists. it is a kill-yourself-now mentality, it is a hollow, empty, self-replicating delusion that makes all life pointless, all being a projection. but a projection of what? what are you?
a fission of egg and sperm?

get back in the womb mate and consider yourself an abortion.
~ali

Carl Sagan "Pale Blue Dot"

our world is a cell in the body of the universe, one tiny air-lock endlessly adrift in infinite space. our world is one thought alone in the perpetual mind of being, a single seed cast to the wind, growing dreams and breathing ideas with the unstoppable pace of an A-bomb in reverse.
~Ali

In Lies We Trust

This feature length documentary about medical madness, cloaked in bioterrorism preparedness, will awaken the brain dead. It exposes health officials, directed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), for conducting a “War of Terror” that is killing millions of unwitting Americans.

This monumental film exposes the agents and agencies behind: Hollywood films and the media creating a profitable culture of bioterror; the “War on Terrorism” used to control populations; the most lucrative war in history—the “War on Cancer;” the onslaught of dozens of new immunological diseases and deadly flus; the “War on AIDS” triggered by contaminated vaccines; the anthrax mailings resulting in restricted freedoms, and sales of toxic drugs, deadly vaccines, and more.

this horrible God

from The Cassiopian Experiment

"Millions of Americans go to church every Sunday and contemplate a story about a man who was born 2,000 years ago, the son of a divine father and a human mother. This man, according to the story, grew up to raise the dead and perform other miracles until, at age 33, he was tortured and killed and then rose from the tomb to rejoin his father in heaven. Ever since then, one of the most sacred rituals of this story's adherents is to symbolically drink the blood and consume the body of this son of God.

I intend no disrespect to those who have faith in this particular story. I grew up inside that faith myself; during the catechism classes of my Catholic childhood, I was taught that Communion is not symbolic at all, that every Sunday at Mass we truly do eat the body of Christ.

By any measure, that is a wild story.

I remember how shocked I was to learn that about 60 million people died in WW II, but all I had ever heard about was the 6 million Jews. It was even more shocking to realize that Stalin had done away with - by various means - millions and millions of his own people. But nobody had said much about that at all. This was very much exercising me when I wrote "The Secret History of The World."

The Laws of Probability tell us that, without any intelligent input, 50% of the time the events in our world would lead to great good and benefit for mankind. In a strictly mechanical way, life in our world ought to have manifested a sort of "equilibrium." Factoring in intelligent decisions to do good would bring this average up to about 70%. That would mean that humanity would have advanced over the millennia to a state of existence where good and positive things happen in our lives more often than "negative" or "bad" things. In this way, many of the problems of humanity would have been effectively solved. War and conflict would be a rarity, at least 70 percent of the earth's population would have decent medical care, a comfortable roof over their heads, and sufficient nutritious food so that death by disease or starvation would be almost unheard of.

The facts are, however, quite different.

More than 840,000,000 people on the Earth suffer from hunger. That's about three times the population of the entire USA. This is chronic, persistent hunger, which kills 24,000 people every day, or over 8 million each year. Three of four who die from starvation are younger than five years old.

According to the Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, during the past 100 years there have been approximately 2 billion deaths (including civilians) resulting from war , tyrannical governments, and man-made famine. When these figures are broken down into deaths caused by Communism vs. Capitalism, they are almost equal, with the figures slightly higher for Capitalism which may surprise some people who believe that the Capitalistic system is the "right" one.

"By their fruits you shall know them."

Turning to mortality statistics that are NOT related to war and famine, we find that it is a bit difficult to get an actual number because the stats are nearly always expressed in terms of percentages rather than in hard population numbers. One gets the feeling that the actual count is so frightening that this approach is used for the express purpose of avoiding having to face the facts. One thing we do know is that deaths from cardiovascular diseases and stroke are the leading cause of death in 31 of the 35 Western Hemisphere countries that report disease related mortality statistics. The highest of these mortality rates are found in the English-speaking Caribbean, USA, Canada, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Mortality rates from these causes are increasing in the Central American and Latin Caribbean regions as they come more and more under the sway of Western capitalism.

What we are talking about above are the "quiet" statistics, from our present reality.

Even now it is easy to forget that there were 65 Million deaths from WW II alone and that deaths from disease and starvation continue as a quiet, steady, drum beat of increasing mortality behind the trumpeting of school shootings, sensational murder trials, and little Cuban boys who become the center of international custody disputes.

I don’t think that one single person on this planet will disagree that they want a better life for themselves and their children; and most of them will add that they do not presently have the capacity to make it a reality. Except for a very small minority of very sick people, I don’t think anybody likes to see misery and suffering, disease and death and despair, in any context. And again we must ask: if these things are so detestable to human beings at large, if so many people are working and thinking and praying to improve the conditions of our world, why isn’t it happening?

Seekers of "Ascension" - a large number of whom could be considered "Intelligentsia" - are always aware of these things, and they are asking "What is the origin of all the misery and suffering? Does it just happen? Do people and only people cause others to suffer? Is it that God is good, but allows bad things to happen?"

"Don't forget the power of prayer," we are told by our religious leaders, or "positive thinking," as we are told by the New Age gurus.
The only problem is, prayers and positive thinking do not seem to have improved the world very much on the occasions when it is certain that nearly every human being was praying for a certain outcome.

Jesus promised: "If any two of you shall agree and ask... it shall be done." (Matt 18:19) That's a promise. What do you want or need? Just ask!
But it doesn't work and we see it!

Over sixty million people died because God didn't do what everybody thought he should do. C.S. Lewis struggled with this issue in the latter part of his life. He saw clearly that, before World War II, practically every human being on the planet was praying—to Jesus, God the Father, the Virgin Mary, Allah, Buddha and whoever else you can name or mention, so all the bases were covered—that this terrible thing would not happen. The memory of the previous “Great War” was still fresh in the mind of mankind. They remembered the horrible carnage and vowed, never again!
In the end, after the most mighty cry of prayer in human memory, rising from the earth, almost one-third of the world was uninhabitable and sixty-five million human beings were dead.

That was God’s answer to prayer.

That was the result of the "power of positive thinking."

THINK ABOUT IT.

Throughout history we find one group praying to their god to protect them from the depredations of another group. The other group is praying just as fervently that their depredations will be successful. When one group succeeds in killing another, is that proof that its god is supreme?

What then happens if the members of the successful group are then reincarnated into the group that was defeated? (We are assuming some form of reicarnation to be highly probable based on research.)

This is not a rhetorical question since a very interesting book by Rabbi Yonassan Gershom, Beyond the Ashes, [1992, A.R.E. Press, Virginia Beach] was written about the great numbers of Jews who died in the holocaust now being reincarnated as Christians. There has also been some suggestion that many Nazis are now being reincarnated as Jews in the present time which would go a long way toward explaining the Fascist flavor of "Zionism."

What then, does such an idea do to the concept of “my god is the only right one?”
I can assure the reader from my own experience as a hypnotherapist, that every single case I have worked with in terms of “past life therapy,” has demonstrated a “string” of "past lives" in such variety of nationality and religious orientation, that it literally makes a joke of anyone stating with absolute certainty, that their beliefs or religious orientation now, are the only right ones.
It is quite plausible, assuming the reincarnation is "real", that those who declaim against another group most vehemently, will most certainly find themselves a member of that very group in the next “round” of incarnation.

I get really irritated with people who are "holocaust deniers," when they try to say that 6 million Jews were not systematically murdered by the Nazi war machine. But I get equally irritated by those who forget about the deaths of the other 59 million people.

In point of fact, one could say that, because of the Jews, many more millions of "Christians" or peoples of other religions have been killed than for any other single reason.

Because of the Jewish religion - monotheism - Christianity was "born" as the "new covenant" with the putative Jewish God.

Because of this Jewish God, claimed by Christianity, endless wars were fought in Europe, the Crusades took place, followed by the Inquisition. And then, of course, there are the endless deaths of entire cultures, due to the claims of the Christians and their "missionary" efforts.

So, in the end you could say that Yahweh/Jehovah has been the root cause of nearly all of the sufferings and deaths of humanity in the past four millennia.
Not a very good track record, and certainly, something to think about when pondering: "By their fruits, you shall know them."

[Note: we do not forget that cruelty and brutal killings of civilians has occurred in other cultures as well, though not on the same scale. And so, according to some sources, in December 1937, in a single attack, known as "The rape of Nanjing", Japaneese soldiers killed nearly 200,000 civilians. These soldiers considered themselves to be heros, serving their "One God" - the Emperor.]

Human beings as a whole ought to reject this horrible God in ALL his forms and variations from his beginnings as the god of the Jews right down to his putative appearance to Mohammed. A more evil being has never - I think - appeared on the stage of history."

Ethnosphere

In this stunning talk, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, many of which are disappearing, as ancestral land is lost and languages die. (50 percent of the world's 6000 languages are no longer taught to children.) Against a backdrop of extraordinary photos and stories that ignite the imagination, Davis argues that we should be concerned not only for preserving the biosphere, but also the "ethnosphere," which he describes as "the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness." An anthropologist and botanist by training, Davis has traveled the world, living among indigenous cultures. He's written several books, including The Serpent and the Rainbow and Light at the Edge of the World.

Terence Mckenna

The Corporation

THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Footage from pop culture, advertising, TV news, and corporate propaganda, illuminates the corporation's grip on our lives.

Money As Debt

The scam of money and global banking revealed.

History And The Masters Of Deceit: on the power of mass mind control through emotion

"'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.' "Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane." - 1984 (George Orwell)



History And The Masters Of Deceit:
on the power of mass mind control through emotion

By Stuart Harris

Human nature can be best understood by the study of history. Dates, locations of battles, and timelines are of secondary importance with regard to analyzing human nature through historical data. The actions of the few have not changed at all, not from Sumer, through the Roman Empire, to the present day. The lack of moral integrity and political righteousness has been haunting mankind for over 4000 years. Erich Fromm has provided insightful analysis of evil with many concrete examples from History. His approaches to psychoanalytic theory and dynamic social psychology illuminate the current crisis with which we are in.

The following passage is from The Heart Of Man 1964:


" Wars are the result of the decision of political leaders to wage war for the sake of gaining territory, natural resources...for defense against real or alleged threats to their country's security..."
Could we perhaps substitute "natural resources" for "oil"? Could "alleged threats" be substituted for Operation Northwoods, the burning of the Reichstag, The Gulf of Tonkin, or Pearl Harbour just to name a few? I think so. How naive and suggestible the masses have become to accept disinformation and opinions from any authority figure on T.V. or in the newspapers. This is what happens to those who do not get involved in the political processes, instead, they remain in their bourgeois cocoon watching T.V. and preoccupying themselves with accumulating wealth. Americans have become narcotized sheeple who have been misguided and conspired against via the mass media and corporate elitists.

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
- William Colby, former Director of the CIA (Please note that William Colby had died during a swimming "accident")

Take a look at the news stories presented by the conventional wisdom of the mass media. The suppression and control of information is quite apparent. We are distracted and bombarded with events such as child abductions. Without degrading or discounting the seriousness of this issue, it is noteworthy that there are over 3500 incidents of child abductions per year in the U.S. yet this is all we are fed at a time when we must be critical about our government's policies and our own civil liberties.

Fromm goes on by stating:

"There is hardly a case of an aggressive war which could not be couched in terms of defense. The tendency of pretending that any war is a defensive one shows that the majority of people cannot be made to kill and to die unless they are first convinced that they are doing so in order to defend their lives and freedom... it shows that it is not difficult to persuade millions of people that they are being attacked"

This passage was written almost 30 years ago, yet it shows Fromm's clear understanding of the marriage between sociopathic elitists and their amoral, cold-hearted actions.

Unfortunately, this example (although in a different costume) of mass repression and psychic numbing has thrived during the Crusades, the French Revolution, and Nazi Germany. The Nazi propagandists led by Goebbels had perfected the art of propaganda through every realm of media. For example, mass pamphlets were distributed such as How They Lie in 1940 accusing the Allies of inventing German atrocities. False Consideration, a weekly published by the SS suggested that German citizens should take drastic action to deal with those who grumble about the war or doubt final victory. What was considered "grumbling"? This sounds similar to the rhetoric we have been hearing about "If you're not with us, you're against us". Will the civilian, neighborhood snooping Operation Tips "find" those who are "against us" (i.e. those who are grumbling). Other propagandist material like America As A Perversion Of European Culture and Roosevelt Betrays America were clear attempts to brainwash the masses in order to vilify and demonize the enemy. The very same ploy is being carried out in the current War on Terrorism, the objectification and vilification of Bin Laden and Sadam Hussein.

Another example from history supports Fromm's position on leadership qualities.

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." -- Julius Caesar

The Nazi propaganda machine learned how to "Bang the Drums of War" from watching American football pep rallies (their expertise was "hired" by the CIA after WW2 via Operation Paperclip). President Bush's drum beating with regards to, "Patriotism", the "Evil One", and "Us vs. Them" rhetoric is blatant, " whipping the citizenry into a patriotic fervor…" The current war on terrorism employs the human experience of emotion rather than reason, "…the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed…" The same has been repeatedly stated by the father of "spin" Edward Bernays. He had never underestimated the power of mass mind control through emotion. The last passage from Caesar's quote is probably the most disturbing one relating to the current predicament, " …the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry…rather the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so…" How many times have we heard "I'm willing to get a National I.D. Card (which the Nazi's also imposed) in order to protect myself against terrorists!" or " I don't mind if my phone or e-mail accounts are monitored if it means I'm being protected."

History has proven that the masters of deceit have devilishly used their powers to manipulate and impregnate their citizens with lies, disinformation, and fabrications. People have to disillusion themselves from their lives, which is a conspiracy against reality.

As Hobbes stated, "Homo Homini Lupus" (Man is a wolf to his fellow Man). I believe that if Fromm were here today, he would probably say, " I told you so".

Ayahuasca and Human Destiny

"This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news."



by Dennis Mckenna

"...And suddenly, and literally, “out of the Amazon,” one of the most impacted parts of our wounded planet, ayahuasca emerges as an emissary of trans-species sentience, to bring this lesson: You monkeys only think you’re running things. In a wider sense, the import of this lesson is that we need to wake up to what is happening to us and to the planet. We need to get with the program, people. We have become spiritually bereft and have been seduced by the delusion that we are somehow important in the scheme of things. We are not.

Our spiritual institutions have devolved into hollow shells, perverted to the agendas of rapacious governments and fanatic fundamentalisms, no longer capable of providing balm to the wounded spirit of our species; and as the world goes up in flames we benumb ourselves with consumerism and mindless entertainment, the decadent distractions of gadgets and gewgaws, the frantic but ultimately meaningless pursuits of a civilization that has lost its compass. And at this cusp in human history, there emerges a gentle emissary, the conduit to a body of profoundly ancient genetic and evolutionary wisdom that has long abided in the cosmologies of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon who have guarded and protected this knowledge for millennia, who learned long ago that the human role is not to be the master of nature, but its stewards, Our destiny, if we are to survive, is to nurture nature and to learn from it how to nurture ourselves and our fellow beings. This is the lesson that we can learn from ayahuasca, if only we pay attention.

I find it both ironic, and hopeful, that within the last 150 years, and particularly in the last half of the 20th century, ayahuasca has begun to assert its presence into human awareness on a global scale. For millennia it was known only to indigenous peoples who have long since understood and integrated what it has to teach us. In the 19th century it first came to the attention of a wider world as an object of curiosity in the reports of Richard Spruce and other intrepid explorers of the primordial rainforests of South America; in the mid-20th century Schultes and others continued to explore this discovery and began to focus the lens of science on the specifics of its botany, chemistry, and pharmacology (and, while necessary, this narrow scrutiny perhaps overlooked some of the larger implications of this ancient symbiosis with humanity). At the same time, ayahuasca escaped from its indigenous habitat and made its influence felt among certain non-indigenous people, representatives of “greater” civilization.

To these few men and women, ayahuasca provided revelations, and they in turn responded (in the way that humans so often do when confronted with a profound mystery) by founding religious sects with a messianic mission; in this case, a mission of hope, a message to the rest of the world that despite its simplicity was far ahead of its time: that we must learn to become the stewards of nature, and by fostering, encouraging, and sustaining the fecundity and diversity of nature, by celebrating and honoring our place as biological beings, as part of the web of life, we may learn to become nurturers of each other. A message quite different, and quite anathema, to the anti-biological obsessions of most of the major world “religions” with their preoccupation with death and suffering and their insistence on the suppression of all spontaneity and joy.

Such a message is perceived as a great threat by entrenched religious and political power structures, and indeed, it is. It is a threat to the continued rape of nature and oppression of peoples that is the foundation of their power. Evidence that they understand this threat and take it seriously is reflected by the unstinting and brutal efforts that “civilized” ecclesiastical, judicial, and political authorities have made to prohibit, demonize, and exterminate the shamanic use of ayahuasca and other sacred plants ever since the Inquisition and even earlier.

But the story is not yet over. Within the last 30 years, ayahuasca, clever little plant intelligence that it is, has escaped from its ancestral home in the Amazon and has found haven in other parts of the world. With the assistance of human helpers who heard the message and heeded it, ayahuasca sent its tendrils forth to encircle the world. It has found new homes, and new friends, in nearly every part of the world where temperatures are warm and where the ancient connections to plant-spirit still thrive, from the islands of Hawaii to the rainforests of South Africa, from gardens in Florida to greenhouses in Japan. The forces of death and dominance have been outwitted; it has escaped them, outrun them.

There is now no way that ayahuasca can ever be eliminated from the earth, short of toxifying the entire planet (which, unfortunately, the death culture is working assiduously to accomplish). Even if the Amazon itself is leveled for cattle pasture or burned for charcoal, ayahuasca, at least, will survive, and will continue to engage in its dialog with humanity. And encouragingly, more and more people are listening.

It may be too late. I have no illusions about this. Given that the curtain is now being rung down on the drunken misadventure that we call human history, the death culture will inevitably become even more brutal and insane, flailing ever more violently as it sinks beneath the quick sands of time. Indeed, it is already happening; all you have to do is turn on the nightly news.

Will ayahuasca survive? I have no doubt that ayahuasca will survive on this planet as long as the planet remains able to sustain life. The human time frame is measured in years, sometimes centuries, rarely, in millennia. Mere blinks when measured against the evolutionary time scales of planetary life, the scale on which ayahuasca wields its influence. It will be here long after the governments, religions, and political power structures that seem today so permanent and so menacing have dissolved into dust. It will be here long after our ephemeral species has been reduced to anomalous sediment in the fossil record. The real question is, will we be here long enough to hear its message, to integrate what it is trying to tell us, and to change in response, before it is too late?

Ayahuasca has the same message for us now that it has always had, since the beginning of its symbiotic relationship with humanity. Are we willing to listen? Only time will tell."


It's such a profoundly strange experience; meeting a plant spirit and hearing its voice and viewing creation through the roots of a tree. it makes you see the world is upside down.

it makes you conscious of the fact that the whole of existance is a swirling mass of intelligent energy trying to interact with us, but we are too busy to listen. it makes you re-evaluate; you will never look at a blade of grass in the same way again.

and this is exactly what we need. we need to awaken to the fact that we do not have to be parasites upon the planet, we can return to the conscious symbiosis we once knew as hunter gatherers. how can we continue to believe the lie that only we have spirit, only we have consciousness, and that everything else is merely commodity, resource, to be used and destroyed for our own ends?

we ARE stupid monkeys, until we start listening. the resources of the earth are finite. The Cree indians sum it up perfectly:

"Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money"
~ali

Darwinism: a crumbling theory?

"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect." Chief Seattle



LIFE, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
by Lloyd Pye

In Charles Darwin's time, nothing was known about life at the cellular level. Protoplasm was the smallest unit they understood. Yet Darwin's theory of natural selection stated that all of life--every living entity known then or to be discovered in the future--simply had to function from birth to death by "natural laws" that could be defined and analysed. This would of course include the origin of life. Darwin suggested life might have gradually assembled itself from stray parts lying about in some "warm pond" when the planet had cooled enough to make such an assemblage possible. Later it was realised that nothing would likely have taken shape (gradually or otherwise) in a static environment, so a catalytic element was added: lightning.

Throughout history up to the present moment, scientists have been forced to spend their W*rking lives with the "God" of the Creationists hovering over every move they make, every mistake, every error in judgment, every personal peccadillo. So when faced with something they can't explain in rational terms, the only alternative option is "God did it", which for them is unacceptable. So they're forced by relentless Creationist pressure to come up with answers for absolutely everything that, no matter how absurd, are "natural". That was their motivation for the theory that a lightning bolt could strike countless random molecules in a warm pond and somehow transform them into the first living creature. The "natural" forces of biology, chemistry and electromagnetism could magically be swirled together--and voilà!Éan event suspiciously close to a miracle.

Needless to say, no Darwinist would accept terms like "magic" or "miracle", which would be tantamount to agreeing with the Creationist argument that "God did it all". But in their heart-of-hearts, even the most fanatical Darwinists had to suspect the "warm pond" theory was absurd.

And as more and more was learned about the mind-boggling complexity of cellular structure and chemistry, there could be no doubt. The trenchant Fred Hoyle analogy still stands: it was as likely to be true as that a tornado could sweep through a junkyard and correctly assemble a jetliner.

Unfortunately, the "warm pond" had become a counterbalance to "God did it", so even when Darwinists knew past doubt that it was wrong, they clung to it, outwardly proclaimed it and taught it. In many places in the world, including the USA, it's still taught.


TOO HOT TO HANDLE

The next jarring bump on the Darwinist road to embattlement came when they learned that in certain places around the globe there existed remnants of what had to be the very first pieces of the Earth's crust. Those most ancient slabs of rock are called cratons, and the story of their survival for 4.0 billion [4,000,000,000] years is a miracle in itself. But what is most miraculous about them is that they contain fossils of "primitive" bacteria! Yes, bacteria, preserved in 4.0-billion-year-old cratonal rock. If that's not primitive, what is? However, it presented Darwinists with an embarrassing conundrum.

If Earth began to coalesce out of the solar system's primordial cloud of dust and gas around 4.5 billion years ago (which by then was a well-supported certainty), then at 4.0 billion years ago the proto-planet was still a seething ball of cooling magma. No warm ponds would appear on Earth for at least a billion years or more. So how to reconcile reality with the warm-pond fantasy?

There was no way to reconcile it, so it was ignored by all but the specialists who had to W*rk with it on a daily basis. Every other Darwinist assumed a position as one of the "see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil" monkeys. To say they "withheld" the new, damaging information is not true; to say it was never emphasised in the popular media for public consumption is true.

That has become the way Darwinists handle any and all challenges to their pet theories: if they can no longer defend one, they don't talk about it, or they talk about it as little as possible. If forced to talk about it, they invariably try to "kill the messenger" by challenging any critic's "credentials". If the critic lacks academic credentials equal to their own, he or she is dismissed as little more than a crackpot. If the critic has equal credentials, he or she is labelled as a "closet Creationist" and dismissed. No career scientist can speak openly and vociferously against Darwinist dogma without paying a heavy price. That is why and how people of normally good conscience can be and have been "kept in line" and kept silent in the face of egregious distortions of truth.

If that system of merciless censure weren't so solidly in place, then surely the next Darwinist stumble would have made headlines around the world as the final and absolute end to the ridiculous notion that life could possibly have assembled itself "naturally". They couldn't even be sure it happened on Earth.



TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

The imposing edifice of Darwinian "origin of life" dogma rested on a piece of incontrovertible bedrock: there could be only one progenitor for all of life. When the fortuitous lightning bolt struck the ideally concocted warm pond, it created only one entity. However, it was no ordinary entity. With it came the multiple ability to take nourishment from its environment, create energy from that nourishment, expel waste created by the use of that energy and (almost as an afterthought) reproduce itself ad infinitum until one of its millions of subsequent generations sits here at this moment reading these words. Nothing miraculous about that; simply incalculable good fortune.

This was Darwinist gospel--preached and believed--until the bacteria fossils were found in the cratons. Their discovery was upsetting, but not a deathblow to the Darwinist theory. They had to concede (among themselves, of course) that the first life-form didn't assemble itself in a warm pond, but it came together somehow because every ancient fossil it spawned was a single-celled bacteria lacking a cell nucleus (prokaryotes). Prokaryotes preceded the much later single-celled bacteria with a nucleus (eukaryotes), so the post-craton situation stayed well within the Darwinian frameW*rk. No matter how the first life-form came into existence, it was a single unit lacking a cell nucleus, which was mandatory because even the simplest nucleus would be much too "irreducibly complex" (a favourite Intelligent Design phrase) to be created by a lightning bolt tearing through a warm pond's molecular junkyard. So the Darwinists still held half a loaf.


In the mid-1980s, however, biologist Carl Woese stunned his colleagues with a shattering discovery. There wasn't just the predicted (and essential) single source for all forms of life; there were two: two types of prokaryotic bacteria as distinct as apples and oranges, dogs and cats, horses and cowsÉtwo distinct forms of life, alive and well on the planet at 4.0 billion years ago. Unmistakable. Irrefutable. Get over it. Deal with it.

But how? How to explain separate forms of life springing into existence in an environment that would make hell seem like a summer resort? With nothing but cooling lava as far as an incipient eye might have seen, how could it be explained in "natural" terms? Indeed, how could it be explained in any terms other than the totally unacceptable? Life, with all its deepening mystery, had to have been seeded onto Earth.



PANSPERMIA RAISES ITS UGLY HEAD

Panspermia is the idea that life came to be on Earth from somewhere beyond the planet and possibly beyond the solar system. Its means of delivery is separated into two possible avenues: directed and undirected.

Undirected panspermia means that life came here entirely by accident and was delivered by a comet or meteor. Some scientists favour comets as the prime vector because they contain ice mixed with dust (comets are often referred to as "dirty snowballs"), and life is more likely to have originated in water and is more likely to survive an interstellar journey frozen. Other scientists favour asteroids as the delivery mechanism because they are more likely to have come from the body of a planet that would have contained life. A comet, they argue, is unlikely ever to have been part of a planet, and life could not possibly have generated itself in or on a frozen comet.

Directed panspermia means life was delivered to Earth by intelligent means of one kind or another. In one scenario, a capsule could have been sent here the same way we sent Voyager on an interstellar mission. However, if it was sent from outside the solar system, we have to wonder how the senders might have known Earth was here, or how Earth managed to get in the way of something sent randomly (à la Voyager).

In another scenario, interstellar craft manned by extraterrestrial beings could have arrived and delivered the two prokaryote types. This requires a level of openmindedness that most scientists resolutely lack, so they won't accept either version of directed panspermia as even remotely possible. Instead, they cling to their "better" explanation of undirected panspermia because it allows them to continue playing the "origin" game within the first boundaries set out by Charles Darwin: undirected is "natural"; directed is "less natural".

Notice it can't be said that directed panspermia is "unnatural". According to Darwinists, no matter where life originated, the process was natural from start to finish. All they have to concede is that it didn't take place on Earth. However, acknowledging that forces them to skirt dangerously close to admitting the reality of extraterrestrial life, and their ongoing "search" for such life generates millions in research funding each year. This leaves them in no hurry to make clear to the general public that, yes, beyond Earth there is at the very least the same primitive bacterial life we have here. There's no doubt about it. But, as usual, they keep the lid on this reality, not exactly hiding it but making no effort to educate the public to the notion that we are not, and never have been, alone. The warm pond still holds water, so why muddy it with facts?

A PATTERN EMERGES

In my book, Everything You Know Is Wrong, I discuss all points mentioned up to now, which very few people outside academic circles are aware of. Within those circles, a hard core of "true believers" still seizes on every new discovery of a chemical or organic compound found in space to try to move the argument back to Darwin's original starting point that somehow life assembled itself on Earth "naturally".

However, most objective scholars now accept that the first forms of life had to have been delivered because: (1) they appear as two groups of multiple prokaryotes (archaea and true bacteria); (2) they appear whole and complete; (3) the hellish primordial Earth is unimaginable as an incubator for burgeoning life; and (4) a half-billion years seems far too brief a time-span to permit a gradual, step-by-step assembly of the incredible complexity of prokaryotic biology and biochemistry.

Even more damaging to the hard-core Darwinist position is that the prokaryotes were--quite propitiously--as durable as life gets. They were virtually indestructible, able to live in absolutely any environment--and they've proved it by being here today, looking and behaving the same as when their ancestors were fossilised 4.0 billion years ago. Scalding heat? We love it! Choked by saline? Let us at it! Frozen solid? We're there! Crushing pressure? Perfect for us! Corrosively acidic? Couldn't be better!

Today they are known as extremophiles, and they exist alongside many other prokaryotic bacteria that thrive in milder conditions. It would appear that those milder-living prokaryotes could not have survived on primordial Earth, so how did they come to be? According to Darwinists, they "evolved" from extremophiles in the same way humans supposedly evolved on a parallel track with apes--from a "common ancestor".

Darwinists contend such parallel tracks don't need to be traceable. All that's required is a creature looking reasonably like another to establish what they consider a legitimate claim of evolutionary connection. Extremophiles clearly existed: we have their 4.0-billion-year-old fossils. Their descendants clearly exist today, along with mild-environment prokaryotes that must have descended from them. However, transitional forms between them cannot be found, even though such forms are required by the tenets of Darwinism. Faced with that embarrassing problem, Darwinists simply insist that the missing transitional species do exist, still hidden somewhere in the fossil record, just as the "missing link" between apes and humans is out there somewhere and will indeed be discovered someday. It's simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

For as expedient as the "missing link" has been, it's useless to explain the next phase of life on Earth, when prokaryotes began sharing the stage with the much larger and much more complex (but still single-celled) eukaryotes, which appear around 2.0 billion years ago. The leap from prokaryote to eukaryote is too vast even to pretend a missing evolutionary link could account for it. A dozen would be needed just to cover going from no nucleus to one that functions fully. (This, by the way, is also true of the leap between so-called pre-humans and humans, which will be discussed in Part Two).

How to explain it? Certainly not plausibly. Fortunately, Darwinists have never lacked the creativity to invent "warm-pond" scenarios to plug holes in their dogma.


DOING THE DOGMA SHUFFLE

Since it's clear that a "missing link" won't fly over the prokaryote&endash;eukaryote chasm, why not assume some of the smaller prokaryotes were eaten by some of the larger ones? Yeah, that might W*rk! But instead of turning into food, energy and waste, the small ones somehow turn themselves--or get turned into--cell nuclei for larger ones. Sure, that's a keeper! Since no one can yet prove it didn't happen (Thank God!), Darwinists are able to proclaim it did. (Keep in mind, when any critic of Darwinist dogma makes a suggestion that similarly can't be proved, it's automatically dismissed, because "lack of provability" is a death sentence outside their fraternity. Inside their fraternity, consensus is adequate because the collective agreement of so many "experts" should be accepted as gospel.)

To Interventionists like me, the notion of prokaryotes consuming each other to create eukaryotes is every bit as improbable as the divine fiat of Creationists. But even if it were a biological possibility (which most evidence weighs against), it would still seem fair to expect "transition" models somewhere along the line. Darwinists say "no" because this process could have an "overnight" aspect to it. One minute there's a large prokaryote alongside a small one, the next minute there's a small eukaryote with what appears to be a nucleus inside it. Not magic, not a miracle, just a biological process unknown today but which could have been possible 2.0 billion years ago. Who's to say, except an "expert"? In any case, large and small prokaryotes lived side by side for 2.0 billion years (long enough, one would think, to learn to do so in harmony), then suddenly a variety of eukaryotes appeared alongside them, whole and complete, ready to join them as the only game in town for another 1.4 billion years (with no apparent changes in the eukaryotes, either).

At around 600 million years ago, the first multicellular life- forms (the Ediacaran Fauna) appear--as suddenly and inexplicably as the prokaryotes and eukaryotes. To this day, the Ediacaran Fauna are not well understood, beyond the fact they were something like jellyfish or seaweeds in a wide range of sizes and shapes. (It remains unclear whether they were plants or animals, or a bizarre combination of both.) They lived alongside the prokaryotes and eukaryotes for about 50 million years, to about 550 million years ago, give or take a few million, when the so-called "Cambrian Explosion" occurred.

It's rightly called an "explosion", because within a period of only 5 to 10 million years--a mere eye-blink relative to the 3.5 billion years of life preceding it--the Earth's oceans filled with a dazzling array of seawater plants and all 26 of the animal phyla (body types) catalogued today, with no new phyla added since. No species from the Cambrian era looks like anything currently alive--except trilobites, which seem to have spawned at least horseshoe crabs. However, despite their "alien" appearance, they all arrived fully assembled--males and females, predators and prey, large and small, ready to go. As in each case before, no predecessors can be found.



THE PACE HEATS UP

Volumes have been written about the Cambrian Explosion and the menagerie of weird plants and animals resulting from it. The Earth was simply inundated with them, as if they'd rained down from the sky. Darwinists concede it is the greatest difficulty--among many--they confront when trying to sell the evolutionary concept of gradualism. There is simply no way to reconcile the breathtaking suddennessÉthe astounding varietyÉthe overwhelming incongruity of the Cambrian Explosion. It is a testament to the old adage that "one ugly fact can ruin the most beautiful theory". But it's far from the only one.

All of complex life as we understand it begins with the Cambrian Explosion, in roughly the last 550 million years. During that time, the Earth has endured five major and several minor catastrophic extinction events. Now, one can quibble with how an event catastrophic enough to cause widespread extinctions could be called "minor", but when compared to the major ones the distinction is apt. The five major extinction events eliminated 50% to 90% of all species of plants and animals alive when the event occurred.

We all know about the last of those, the Cretaceous event of 65 million years ago that took out the dinosaurs and much of what else was alive at the time. But what few of us understand is the distinctive pattern to how life exists between extinction events and after extinction events. This difference in the pattern of life creates serious doubts about "gradualism" as a possible explanatory mechanism for how species proliferate.

Between extinction events, when environments are stable, life doesn't seem to change at all. The operative term is stasis. Everything stays pretty much the same. But after extinction events, the opposite occurs: everything changes profoundly. New life-forms appear all over the place, filling every available niche in the new environments created by the after-effects of the catastrophe. Whatever that is, it's not gradualism.

In 1972, (the late) Stephen J. Gould of Harvard and Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History went ahead and bit the bullet by announcing that fact to the world. Gradual evolution simply was not borne out by the fossil record, and that fact had to be dealt with. Darwin's view of change had to be modified. It wasn't a gradual, haphazard process dictated by random, favourable mutations in genes. It was something else.

That "something else" they called punctuated equilibrium. The key to it was their open admission of the great secret that life-forms only changed in spurts after extinction events, and therefore had nothing to do with natural selection or survival of the fittest or any of the old Darwinist homilies that everyone had been brainwashed to believe. It was the first great challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy, and it was met with furious opposition. The old guard tagged it "punk eek" and called it "evolution by jerks".



TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

What Gould and Eldredge were admitting was the great truth that evolution by natural selection is not apparent in either the fossil record or in the life we see around us. The old guard insisted that the fossil record simply had to be wrongÉthat it wasn't giving a complete picture because large tracts of it were missing. That was true, but much larger tracts were available, and those tracts showed the overwhelming stasis of life-forms in every era, followed by rapid filling of environmental niches after each extinction event. So while parts of the record were indeed missing, what was available was unmistakable.

Arguments raged back and forth. Explanations were created to try to counter every aspect of the punk-eek position. None was ever particularly convincing, but they began to build up. Remember, scientists have the great advantage of being considered by one and all as "experts", even when they haven't the slightest idea of what they're talking about. That allows them to throw shot after shot against the wall until something sticks, or until the target of their wrath is covered in so much "mud" that it can't be seen any more. Such was the fate of the punk-eekers. By the early 1990s, they'd been marginalised.

One can hardly blame the old-guard Darwinists for those attacks. If granted any credence, the sudden radiations of myriad new species into empty environmental niches could have gutted many of the most fundamental tenets of gradual, "natural" evolution. That idea simply could not become established as a fact. Why? Because the warm pond was drained dry, biochemistry was rendering the "small-eaten-by-large prokaryotes turned into eukaryotes" story absurd, and the Cambrian Explosion was flatly inexplicable. If "sudden radiation" were heaped onto all of that, the entire theory of evolution could flounderÉand where would that leave Darwinists? Facing righteous Creationists shouting, "See! God did do it after all!" Whatever else the Darwinists did, they couldn't allow that to happen.

Speaking as an Interventionist, I don't blame them. To me, God stands on equal footing with the lightning bolt. I see a better, far more rational answer to the mysteries of how life came to be on planet Earth: it was put here by intelligent beings, and it has been continuously monitored by those same beings. Whether it's been developed for a purpose or toward a goal of some kind seems beyond knowing at present, but it can be established with facts and with data that intervention by outside intelligence presents the most logical and most believable answer to the question of how life came to be here, as well as of how and why it has developed in so many unusual ways in the past 550 million years.

So now we come to the crux.


COSMIC ARKS

Darwinists go through life waving their PhD credentials like teacher's pets with a hall pass, because it allows them to shout down and ridicule off the public stage anyone who chooses to avoid the years of brainwashing they had to endure to obtain those passes. However, their credentials give them "influence" and "credibility" with the mainstream media, who don't have the time, the ability or the resources to make certain that everything every Darwinist says is true. They must trust all scientists not to have political or moral agendas, and not to distort the truth to suit those agendas. So, over time, the media have become lapdogs to the teacher's pets, recording and reporting whatever they're told to report, while dismissing out of hand whatever they're told to dismiss out of hand.

Despite Darwinists' rants that those who challenge them do so out of blithering idiocy, that is not always the case. For that matter, their opponents are not all Creationists, or even Intelligent Designers, whom Darwinists labour feverishly to paint into the "goofy" corner where Creationists rightly reside. So Interventionists like me have few outlets for our ideas, and virtually none in the mainstream media. Nevertheless, we feel our view of the origin of life makes the best sense, given the facts as they are now known, and the most basic aspect of our view starts with what I once called "cosmic dump trucks". However, that term has been justly criticised as facetious, so now I call them "cosmic arks".

Imagine this scenario: a fleet of intergalactic "terraformers" (another term I favour) cruises the universe. Their job is to locate forming solar systems and seed everything in them with an array of basic, durable life-forms capable of living in any environment, no matter how scabrous. Then the terraformers return on a regular basis, doing whatever is needed to maximise the capacity for life within the developing solar system. Each system is unique, calling for specialised forms of life at different times during its development, which the terraformers provide from a wide array of cosmic arks at their disposal.

With that as a given, let's consider what's happened on Earth. Soon after it began to coalesce out of dust and gas, two forms of virtually indestructible bacteria appeared on it, as if someone knew precisely what to deliver and when.

Also, it would make sense that every other proto-planet in the solar system would be seeded at the same time. How could even terraformers know which forming planets would, after billions of years, become habitable for complex life? And guess what? A meteorite from Mars seems to contain fossilised evidence of the same kinds of nano- (extremely small) bacteria found on Earth today. All other planets, if they're ever examined, will probably reveal similar evidence of a primordial seeding. It would make no sense for terraformers to do otherwise.



THE RUST ALSO RISES

So, okay, our solar system is noticed by intergalactic terraformers as the new sun ignites and planets start forming around it. On each of the planets they sprinkle a variety of two separate forms of single-celled bacteria they know will thrive in any environment (the extremophiles). But the bacteria have a purpose: to produce oxygen as a component of their metabolism. Why? Because life almost certainly has the same basic components and functions everywhere in the universe. DNA will be its basis, and "higher" organisms will require oxygen to fuel their metabolism. Therefore, complex life can't be "inserted" anywhere until a certain level of oxygen exists in a planet's atmosphere.

Wherever this process is undertaken, the terraformers have a major problem to deal with: iron. Iron is an abundant element in the universe. It is certainly abundant in planets (meteorites are often loaded with it). Iron is very reactive with oxygen: that's what rust is all about. So on none of the new planets forming in any solar system can higher life-forms develop until enough oxygen has been pumped into its atmosphere to oxidise most of its free iron. This, not surprisingly, is exactly what the prokaryotes did during their first 2.0 billion years on Earth. But it had to be a two-part process.

The proto-Earth would be cooling the whole time, so let's say full cooling takes roughly 1.0 billion years. So the extremophiles would be the first batch of prokaryotes inserted because they could survive it. Then, after a billion years or so, the terraformers return and drop off the rest of the prokaryotes, the ones that can live in milder conditions. Also, they have to keep returning on a regular basis because each planet would cool at a different rate due to their different sizes and different physical compositions.


However many "check-up" trips are required, by 2.0 billion years after their first seeding of the new solar system the terraformers realise the third planet from the sun is the only one thriving. They are not surprised, having learned that a "zone of life" exists around all suns, regardless of size or type. Now that this sun has taken its optimum shape, they could have predicted which planet or planets would thrive. In this system, the third is doing well but the fourth one is struggling. It has its prokaryotes and it has water, but its abundance of iron (the "red" planet) will require longer to neutralise than such a small planet with a non-reactive core will require to cool off, so it will lose its atmosphere to dissipation into space before a balance can be achieved. The fourth planet will become a wasteland.

The terraformers carry out the next phase of planet-building on the thriving third by depositing larger, more complex, more biologically reactive eukaryotes to accelerate the oxidation process. Eukaryotes are far more fragile than prokaryotes, so they can't be put onto a forming planet until it is sufficiently cooled to have abundant land and water. But once in place and established, their large size (relative to prokaryotes) can metabolise much more oxygen per unit. Together, the fully proliferated prokaryotes and eukaryotes can spew out enough oxygen to oxidise every bit of free iron on the Earth's crust and in its seas, and before long be lacing the atmosphere with it.

Sure enough, when the terraformers return in another 1.4 billion years they find Earth doing well, but the situation on Mars is unimproved: rust as far as the eye can see. (Mars is likely to have at least prokaryotic life, because there wouldn't have been enough oxygen in the surface water it once had--or in the permafrost it still has--to turn its entire surface into iron oxide.) Earth, however, is doing fine. Most of its free iron is locked up as rust, and oxygen levels in the atmosphere are measurably increasing. It's still too soon to think about depositing highly complex life, but that day is not far off now, measurable in tens of millions of years rather than in hundreds of millions. For the moment, Earth is ready for its first load of multicellular life, and so it is deposited: the Ediacaran Fauna.

Though scientists today have no clear understanding of what the Ediacarans were or what their purpose may have been (because they don't exist today), it seems safe to assume they were even more prolific creators of oxygen than the eukaryotes.

If, indeed, terraformers are behind the development of life on Earth, nothing else makes sense. If, on the other hand, everything that happened here did so by nothing but blind chance and coincidence, it was the most amazing string of luck imaginable. Everything happened exactly when it needed to happen, exactly where it needed to happen, exactly how it needed to happen.

If that's not an outright miracle, I don't know what is.

MAKING BETTER SENSE

Assuming terraformers were/are responsible for seeding and developing life on Earth, we can further assume that by 550 million years ago at least the early oceans were sufficiently oxygenated to support genuinely complex life. That was delivered en masse during the otherwise inexplicable Cambrian Explosion, after which followed the whole panoply of "higher" forms of life on Earth as we have come to know it. (The whys and wherefores of that process are, regrettably, beyond the scope of this essay, but there are answers that have as much apparent sense behind them as what has been outlined.)

During those 550 million years, five major and several minor extinction events occurred, after each of which a few million years would pass while the Earth stabilised with environments modified in some way by the catastrophes. Some pre-event life-forms would persist into the new environments, to be joined by new ark-loads delivered by the terraformers, who would analyse the situation on the healing planet and deliver species they knew would survive in the new environments and establish a balance with the life-forms already there (the Interventionist version of punctuated equilibrium).

We've already seen the difficulties Darwinists have with trying to explain the flow of life on Earth presented in the fossil record. That record can be explained by the currently accepted Darwinian paradigm, but the veneer of "scholarship" overlaying it is little different from the divine fiat of Creationists. And it can be explained by Intelligent Designers, who claim anything so bewilderingly complex couldn't possibly have been arrayed without the guidance of some superior, unifying intelligence (which they stop short of calling "God", because otherwise they are merely Creationists without cant).

Considering all of the above, we Interventionists believe the terraformer scenario explains the fossil record of life on Earth with more creativity, more accuracy and more logic than the others, and in the fullness of time will have a far greater probability of being proved correct. We don't bother trying to establish or even discuss who the terraformers are, or how they came to be, because both are irrelevant and unknowable until they choose to explain it to us. Besides, speculating about their origin detracts from the far more germane issue of trying to establish that our explanation of life's origin makes better sense than any other.

We will continue to be ignored by mainstream media simply because the idea of intelligent life existing outside Earth is so frightening to the majority of those bound to it. Among many reasons for fear, the primary one might be our unfortunate habit of filtering everything beyond our immediate reality through our own perceptions. Thus, we attribute to others the same traits and characteristics we possess. Another bad habit appears when we discover new technology. Invariably our first thought is: "How can we use this to kill more of our enemies?" Collectively, we all have enemies we want to eliminate to be done with the problem they present. Like it or not, this is a dominant aspect of human nature.

Because we so consistently project onto others the darkest facets of our nature, we automatically assume--despite ET and Alf and other lovable depictions in our culture--that real aliens will want to harm us. Consequently, we avoid facing the possibility of their existence in every way we can. (Here I can mention the obstinate resistance I have personally found to serious consideration of the Starchild skull, which by all rights should have been eagerly and thoroughly examined three years ago.)

So Interventionism is ignored because it scrapes too close to UFOs, crop circles, alien abductions and every other subject that indicates we humans may, in the end, be infinitesimally insignificant in the grand scheme of life in the universe. There is much more to say about it, of course, especially as it relates to human origins, but that has to wait until the second instalment of this essay.

For now, let the last word be that the last word on origins--of life and of humans--is a long, long way from being written.

But when it is, I strongly suspect it will be Intervention.



THE EARLIEST PRIMATES

Darwinists believe the human saga begins with mouse-sized mammals called insectivores (similar to modern tree shrews) that scurried around under the feet of large dinosaurs, trying to avoid becoming food for smaller species. Then comes the Cretaceous extinction event of 65 million years ago that took out the dinosaurs and paved the way for those tiny insectivores to evolve over the next few million years into the earliest primates, the prosimians (literally pre-simians, pre-monkeys) of the early Palaeocene epoch, which lasts until 55 million years ago.

As with nearly all such aspects of Darwinist dogma, this is pure speculation. There is, in fact, no clear indication of a transitional insectivore-to-prosimian species at any point in the process. If any such transitional species had ever been found, then countless more would be known and I wouldn't be writing this essay. Darwinian evolution would be proved beyond doubt, and that would be the end of it.

To read the fossil record literally is to discover the legitimacy of punctuated equilibrium (discussed in Part One) as a plausible explanation. "Punk eek", as detractors call it, points out that in the fossil record life-forms do seem simply to appear on Earth, most often after extinction events but not always. Both the supposed proto-primates and flowering plants appear during the period preceding the Cretaceous extinction. They come when they come, so the relatively sudden post-extinction appearance of the earliest primates, the prosimians (lemurs, lorises, tarsiers), is one of many sudden manifestations.

In terms of human origins, it begs this question: did proto-primates actually evolve into prosimians, into monkeys, into apes, into humans? Or did prosimians appear, monkeys appear, apes appear, and humans appear? Or, in our "special" case, were we created?

However it happened, there is a pattern. The earliest prosimians are found in the fossil record after the Mesozoic/Cenozoic boundary at 65 million years ago. It is assumed their ancestors will someday be found as one of countless "missing links" needed to make an airtight case for Darwinian evolution. Prosimians dominate through the Palaeocene and the Eocene, lasting from 65 to 35 million years ago. (There won't be a test on terms or dates, so don't worry about memorising them; just try to keep the time-flow in mind.) At 35 million years ago, the Oligocene epoch begins and the first monkeys come with it.

Again, Science assumes that monkeys evolved from prosimians, even though evidence of that transition is nowhere in sight. In fact, there is strong evidence pointing in the other direction, toward the dreaded stasis of punctuated equilibrium. The lemurs, lorises and tarsiers of today are essentially just as they were 50 million years ago. Some species have gone extinct while others have modified into new forms, but lemurs and lorises still have wet noses and tarsiers still have dry, which seems always to have been the case. That's why tarsiers are assumed to be responsible for spinning off monkeys and all the rest.

Monkeys start appearing at 35 million years ago, looking vastly different from prosimians. There are certain physiological links, to be sure, such as grasping hands and feet to permit easy movement through trees. However, prosimians cling and jump to move around, while monkeys favour brachiating--swinging along by their arms. Also, prosimians live far more by their sense of smell than do monkeys. This list goes on.

The reason they're linked in an evolutionary flowchart is because they seem close enough in enough ways to make the linkage stick. Simple as that. Science focuses on the similarities and tries hard to ignore their gaping discrepancies, assuming--as always--that there is plenty of time for evolution to do its magic and generate those inexplicable differences.

For the next 10 million years the larger, stronger, more "advanced" monkeys compete with prosimians for arboreal resources, quickly gaining the upper hand over their "ancestors" and driving several of them to extinction.

Then, at around 25 million years ago, the Miocene epoch brings the first apes into the fossil record, as suddenly and inexplicably as all other primates appear. Again, Science insists they evolved from monkeys, but the evidence to support that claim is as specious as the prosimian&endash;monkey link. The transitional bones needed to support it are simply not in the fossil record.

If this isn't a distinct pattern of punctuated equilibrium, then what is?



THE PUZZLING MIOCENE

In terms of primate evolution, the Miocene makes little sense. By 25 million years ago, when it begins, prosimians have been around for about 30 million years and monkeys for 10 million years. Yet in the Miocene's ample fossil record, prosimians and monkeys are rare, while the new arrivals, the apes, are all over the place.

The Miocene epoch stretches from 25 million to 5.0 million years ago. (These are approximations quoted differently in various sources; I round off to the easiest numbers to keep track of.) During those 20 million years, the apes flourish. They produce two-dozen different genera (types), and many have more than one species within the genus. Those apes come in the same range of sizes they exhibit today, from smallish gibbon-like creatures, to mid-range chimp-sized ones, to large gorilla-sized ones, to super-sized Gigantopithecus, known only by many teeth and a few mandibles (jawbones) from India and China.

That's another interesting thing about Miocene apes: their fossils are found literally everywhere in the Old World--Africa, Europe, Asia. Most of them are known by the durable teeth and jaws that define Gigantopithecus, while many others supply enough post-cranial (below the head) bones to grant a reasonably clear image of them. They present an interesting mix of anatomical features. Actually, "confusing" is more like it. They are clearly different from monkeys in that they have no tails, just like modern apes. However, their arms tend to be more like monkey arms--the same length as their legs. Modern ape arms are significantly longer than their legs so they can "walk" comfortably on their front knuckles. More than any other reason, this is why we hear so little from anthropologists about Miocene apes. Their arms don't make sense as the forelimbs of an ancestral quadruped. Miocene arms fit better withÉsomething else.

This is not to say, of course, that no ape arms in the Miocene fossil record are longer than legs. That's nowhere near to being determined because many species--like Gigantopithecus--have yet to provide their arm bones. However, since we do have some tailless, ape-like bodies with monkey-like arms and hands, we have to consider how such a hybrid would move around. Swing through trees by its arms, like a monkey? Not likely. Monkey arms are designed to carry a monkey's slight body. An ape's body needs to be brachiated and leveraged by an ape's much longer, stouter, stronger arms. So how aboutÉwalking?

From a physiological standpoint, an ape-like body with monkey-like arms and hands does not move as easily or comfortably as a quadruped (down on all fours). It simply can't happen. In fact, there's really only one posture that lends itself to the carriage of such a monkey-ape hybrid, and that's upright. Go to a zoo and watch how much easier monkeys--tails and all--stand upright compared to apes. Any monkey can move with grace on its hind legs. In comparison, apes are blundering, top-heavy oafs. Thus, it seems likely that at least some of the hybrid monkey-apes of the Miocene probably had to carry themselves upright, in opposition to the other apes of the era bearing the longer, thicker arms of gibbons, orang-utans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Remember, we're talking about two dozen genera and around 50 species.

WALKING THE WALK

Walking is critical to an understanding of human origins because Darwinists feel it is the factor that set our ancestors on the road to becoming us. The theory is that around 5.0 to 10 million years ago, when the heavy forests blanketing Africa began shrinking, some forest-dwelling quadrupedal Miocene apes still living then (there had been the inevitable extinctions and speciations during the preceding 15 to 20 million years) began to forage on the newly forming savannas. Though terribly ill-equipped to undertake such a journey (more about that later), several ape species supposedly took the risk by learning to stand upright to see out over the savanna grasses to scout for predators. Then--after millennia of holding that position for extended periods--they adopted constant upright posture. In doing so, one of those daring, unknown species took the real "giant step for mankind".

No one can yet say which of the early upright-walking "pre-humans" went on to become us, because the physiological gaps between us and them are simply enormous. In fact, physically, the only significant thing we have in common with those early ancestors is upright posture. But even that reveals noticeable divergence.

Incredibly, we have the walking trail of at least two early pre-humans at 3.5 million years ago. Found in Laetoli, Tanzania, these tracks were laid down on a volcanic ash fall that was then covered by another ash fall and sealed until their discovery by Mary Leakey's team in 1978. Photos of that trail are common and can be accessed in any basic anthropology textbook or on the Internet. What is not commonly portrayed, however, is that detailed analysis of the pressure points along the surface of those prints indicates something that would be expected: they didn't walk like us. After all, 3.5 million years is a long time, and from a Darwinist standpoint it's logical to assume extensive evolution would occur. But whether it was evolution or not, our methods of locomotion are uniquely different.

Humans have a distinctive carriage that starts with a heel strike necessitated by our ankles placed well behind the midpoint of our feet. After the heel strike, our forward momentum is swung to the left or right, out to the edges of our feet to avoid our arches (in normal feet, of course). Once past the arch, there's a sharp swing of the momentum through the ball of the foot from outside all the way to the inside, where momentum is gathered and regenerated in the powerful thrust of the big toe, with the four small toes drawing themselves up to act as balancers. (Watch your own bare feet when you take a step and you'll see those final "thrust-off" stages in action.)

The pre-humans at Laetoli walked with marked differences. Instead of having a heavy heel-strike leading the way, their ankle was positioned at the centre balance point of the foot, allowing it to come down virtually flat with an almost equal distribution of weight and momentum between the heel and the ball area. Instead of a crazy momentum swing out and around the arch, their arches were much smaller and the line of momentum travelled nearly straight along the midline of the entire foot. That made for a much more stable platform for planting the foot and toeing off into the next step, which was done by generating thrust with the entire ball area rather than with just the big toe. When you get right down to it, the Laetoli stride was a superior technique to the one we utilise now.

Slow-motion studies of humans walking show that we do virtually everything "wrong". Our "heel-strike, toe-off" causes a discombobulation that courses up our entire body. We are forced to lock our knees to handle the torque as our momentum swings out and around our arches. Because of that suspended moment of torque absorption, we basically have to fall forward with each step, which is absorbed by our hip joints. Meanwhile, balance is assisted by swinging our arms. Because of those factors, we don't walk with anything approaching optimum efficiency, and the stresses created in us W*rk, over time, to deteriorate our joints and eventually cripple us. In short, we could use a re-design.

What we actually need to do is to walk more like the pre-humans at Laetoli. In order to secure that heel-and-toe plant with each step, we'd have to modify our stride so our knees weren't locked and we weren't throwing ourselves forward through our hip joints. We'd have to keep our knees in a state of continual flexion, however slight, absorbing all the stress of walking in our thighs and buttocks, which both are designed to accommodate. This would provide us with a "gliding" kind of stride that might look unusual (it would resemble the classic Groucho Marx bent-kneed comedic walk), but would actually be much less stressful, much less tiring and incredibly more efficient physiologically.

Based on the evidence of the Laetoli tracks, this is exactly how they walked.



WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

When Darwinists present reconstructions of so-called "pre-humans", invariably they look nothing like humans.

Lucy and her Australopithecus relatives were little more than upright-walking chimpanzees. The robust australopithecines were bipedal gorillas. The genus Homo (habilis, erectus, Neanderthals and other debatable species) was a distinct upgrade, but still nowhere near the ballpark of humanity. Only when the Cro-Magnons appear, as suddenly and inexplicably as everything else, at around 120,000 years ago in the fossil record, do we see beings that are unmistakably human.

The Laetoli walkers lived 3.5 million years ago. Lucy lived around 3.2 million years ago. Recent discoveries show signs of pushing bipedal locomotion back as far as 6.0 million years ago. So let's assume for the sake of discussion that some primates were upright at no less than 4.0 million years ago.

Thus, from approximately 4.0 million years ago all the way to the appearance of Cro-Magnons some time before 120,000 years ago (95% of the journey), all pre-human fossils reveal distinctly non-human characteristics. They have thick, robust bones--much thicker and more robust than ours. Such thick bones are necessary to support the stress generated by extraordinarily powerful muscles, far more powerful than ours. Their arms are longer than ours, especially from shoulder to elbow. Their arms are also roughly the same length as their legs, à la Miocene apes. And in every aspect that can be quantified--every one!--their skulls are much more ape-like than human-like. Those differences hold from australopithecine bones to the bones of Neanderthals--which means that something quite dramatic happened to produce the Cro-Magnons, and it wasn't the result of an extinction event. It wasÉsomething else.

The chasm between Cro-Magnons (us) and everything else that comes before them is so incredibly wide and deep that there is no way legitimately to connect the two, apart from linking their bipedal locomotion. All of the so-called "pre-humans" are much more like upright-walking chimps or upright-walking gorillas than they are incipient humans. Darwinists argue that this is why they are called pre-humans, because they are so clearly not human.

But another interpretation can be put on the fossil record--one that fairly and impartially judges the facts as they exist, without the "spin" required by Darwinist dogma. That spin says that the gaping physiological chasm between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons can be plausibly explained with yet another "missing link".




LOOKING BACK TO SEE AHEAD

Darwinists use the missing link to negate the fact that Cro-Magnons appear out of nowhere, looking nothing like anything that has come before. What they fail to mention is that dozens of such links would be needed to show any kind of plausible transition from any pre-human to Cro-Magnons. It clearly didn't happen--and since they're experts about such things, they know it didn't happen. However, to acknowledge that would play right into the desperate hands of Creationists and Intelligent Designers, not to mention give strong support to Interventionists like me. They face a very big rock or a very hard place.

Let's accept for the moment that in Darwinian terms there is no way to account for the sudden appearance of Cro-Magnons (humans) on planet Earth. If that is true, then what about the so-called "pre-humans"? What are they the ancestors of? Their bones litter the fossil record looking very unlike humans, yet they clearly walk upright for at least 4.0 million years, and new finds threaten to push that back to 6.0 million years. Even more likely is that among the 50 or more species of Miocene apes, at least a few are walking upright as far back as 10 to 15 million years ago. If we accept that likelihood, we finally make sense of the deep past while beginning for the first time to see ourselves clearly.

We can be sure that at least four of the 50 Miocene apes were on their way to becoming modern quadrupeds, because their descendants live among us today. Equally certain is that others of those 50 walked out of the Miocene on two legs. Technically these are called hominoids, which are human-like beings that are clearly not human. In fact, every bipedal fossil preceding Cro-Magnon is considered a hominoid--a term that sounds distinctly outside the human lineage. So Darwinists have replaced it in common usage with the much less specific "pre-human", which not so subtly brainwashes us all into believing there is no doubt about that connection. And that brainwashing W*rks.

We are further brainwashed to believe there are no bipedal apes alive in the world today, despite hundreds of sightings and/or encounters with such bipedal apes every year on every continent except Antarctica. Darwinists brainwash us to ignore such reports by showering them with ridicule. They call such creatures "impossible", and hope the weight of their credentials can hold reality at bay long enough for them to figure out what to do about the public relations catastrophe they will face when the first hominoid is brought onto the world stage--dead or alive. That will be the darkest day in Darwinist history, because their long charade will be officially over. The truth will finally be undeniable. Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman and several relatives are absolutely real.

IF THE SHOE FITSÉ

I'm not going to waste time and space here going over the mountain of evidence that is available in support of hominoid reality. I cover it extensively in the third part of my book, Everything You Know Is Wrong, and there are many other books that cover one or more aspects of the subject. If you care to inform yourself about the reality of hominoids, you won't have any trouble doing so. And the evidence is solid enough to hold up in any court in the world, except the court of public opinion manipulated by terrified Darwinists. However, I will go over a few points that bear directly on the question of human origins.

Let's grant a fairly obvious assumption: that the thousands of ordinary people who have described hominoid sightings and encounters over the past few hundred years (yes, they go back that far in the literature) were in fact seeing living creatures rather than Miocene ghosts. And no matter where on Earth witnesses come from, no matter how far from the beaten path of education and/or modern communications, they describe what they see with amazing consistency. To hear witnesses tell it, the same kinds of creatures exist in every heavily forested or canopied environment on the planet--which is precisely what we would expect if they did indeed stride out of the Miocene epoch on two legs.

Furthermore, what witnesses describe is exactly what we would expect of upright-walking apes. They are invariably described as having a robust, muscular body covered with hair, atop which sits a head with astonishingly ape-like features. In short, the living hominoids are described as having bodies we would expect to find wrapped around the bones found in the so-called "pre-human" fossil record. In addition, witnesses describe what they see as having longer arms than human arms, hanging down near their knees, which means those arms are approximately the length of their legs. Witnesses also contend that the creatures walk with a "gliding" kind of bent-kneed stride that leaves tracks eerily reminiscent of the tracks left at Laetoli 3.5 million years ago.

Now we come to the crux for Darwinists, Creationists and Intelligent Designers. Evidence supporting the reality of hominoids is overwhelming. Truly. And if they are real, it means the "pre-human" fossil record is actually a record of their ancestors, not ours. And if that's the case, then humans have no place on the flowchart of life on Earth. And if that's true, then it's equally clear that humans did not evolve and could not have evolved here the way Darwinists claim. And if we didn't evolve here, that opens the door to the Interventionist position that nothing evolved here: everything was brought or created by sentient off-world beings whom I call terraformers, whose means and motivation will remain unknown to us unless and until they see fit to explain themselves. I hope no one is holding their breath.

The point is that the Miocene epoch had the means to produce living hominoids--50 or more different species (which almost certainly will be shaved down to perhaps a dozen as more complete bodies are found) as far back as 20 million years ago. It produced some with monkey-like arms better suited to an upright walker than a brachiating tree-dweller or knuckle walker.

By the time it ended, 5.0 million years ago, a half-dozen or more bipedal apes were on the Earth, which we know from the ape-like australopithecine and early Homo fossils. And we know from Laetoli that they had a walking pattern distinct from humans, which modern witnesses describe as still being the way hominoids walk. In short, they've followed the punctuated equilibrium pattern of long-term stasis.



SO WHAT ABOUT HUMANS?

Humans simply do not fit the pattern of primate development on Earth. Notice the word development instead of evolution. Species that appear here do undergo changes in morphology over time. It's called microevolution, because it describes changes in body parts. Darwinists use the undeniable reality of microevolution to extrapolate the reality of macroevolution, which is change at the species-into-more-advanced-species level. That is blatantly not evident in the fossil record, especially when it comes to human physiology.

We have shown, I hope, that humans have been shoehorned by Darwinists into having a place in the fossil record that doesn't belong to them but to living hominoids (Bigfoot, etc.). Furthermore, humans have been shoehorned into being primates, when there is little about them--certainly nothing of significance--that fits the classic primate pattern. In fact, if it weren't for the desperate need of Darwinists to keep humans closely linked to the primate line, we would have had our own appellation long ago--and we'll surely have it once the truth is out from the Pandora's box of Darwinist deception.

Relatively speaking, primate bones are much thicker and heavier than human bones. Primate muscles are five to 10 times stronger than ours. (Anyone who's dealt with monkeys knows how amazingly strong they are for their size.) Primate skin is covered with long, thick, visible hair. Ours is largely invisible. Primate hair is thick on the back, thin on the front. Ours is switched the other way around. Primates have large, round eyes capable of seeing at night. Compared to theirs, we have greatly reduced night vision. Primates have small, relatively "simple" brains compared to ours. They lack the ability to modulate sound into speech. Primate sexuality is based on an oestrus cycle in females (though some, like bonobo chimps, have plenty of sex when not in oestrus). In human females, the effects of oestrus are greatly diminished.

This list could go on to cite many more areas of difference, but all of them are overshadowed by the Big Kahuna of primate/human difference: all primates have 48 chromosomes, while humans have "only" 46 chromosomes. Two entire chromosomes represent a heck of a lot of DNA removed from the human genome, yet somehow that removal made us "superior" in countless ways. It doesn't make sense. Nor does the fact that even with two whole chromosomes missing from our genome, we share what is now believed to be 95% of the chimp genome and around 90% of the gorilla genome. How can those numbers be made to reconcile? They can't.

Something is wrong here. Someone has been cooking the genetic books.



THE STUFF OF LIFE

In the wild, plants and animals tend to breed remarkably true to their species. That's why stasis is the dominant characteristic of life on Earth. Species appear and stay essentially the same (apart from the superficial changes of microevolution) until they go extinct for whatever reason (catastrophe, inability to compete for resources effectively, etc.). When "faulty" examples appear, they're nearly always unable to put the fault into their species' collective gene pool. A negative mutation that doesn't kill the individual it appears in is unlikely to be passed along to posterity, despite Darwinist assertions that this is precisely how evolution occurs. All genomes have hard-wired checks and balances against significant changes of any kind, which is why stasis has been the hallmark of all life since beginning here. Aberrant examples are efficiently weeded out, either early in the reproductive process or soon after reproduction (birth). Faulty copies are deleted.

This deletion of faults holds true in the vast majority of species. Most genomes are--and stay--remarkably clear of gene-based defects. All species are susceptible to mistakes in the reproductive process, such as sperm/egg misconnections. In mammals, this produces spontaneous abortions, stillbirths or live-birth defects. However, there are precious few defects that swim in the gene pools of any "wild" or "natural" species. The only places we find significant, species-wide genetic defects are in domesticated plants and animals, and in those they can be--and often are--numerous.

Domesticated plants and animals clearly seem to have been genetically created by "outside intervention" at some point in the distant past. (For those interested in learning more about this, I discuss it in considerable detail in NEXUS 9/04.) Domesticated species have so many points of divergence from wild/natural species, it's not realistic to consider them in any kind of relative context. As we've seen above, the same holds true for humans and the primates we supposedly evolved from. They're apples and oranges.

We humans have over 4,000 genetic defects spread throughout our common gene pool. Think about that. No other species comes close. And yet, our mitochondrial DNA proves we have existed as a species for "only" about 200,000 years. Remember the first Cro-Magnon fossils showing up in strata 120,000 years old? That fits well with the origin of a small proto-group at around 200,000 years ago. (There will almost certainly be Cro-Magnon fossils found prior to 120,000 years ago, but it is unlikely they were dispersed widely enough to have left fossils near the 200,000-year mark. Naturally, the very first one could have been fossilised, but that's not the way to bet. Fossilisation is quite rare.)

All that being the case, how did over 4,000 genetic defects W*rk their way into the human gene pool, when such genome-wide defects are rare to nonexistent in wild or natural species? (Remember, Darwin himself noticed that humans are very much like domesticated animals in many of our physical and biological traits.) It can only have occurred if the very first members (no more than a handful of breeding pairs) had the entire package of faults within their genome. That's the only way Eskimos and Watusis and all the rest of humanity can express the exact same genetic disorders.

If we descended from apes, as Darwinists insist, then apes should have a very large number of our genetic defects. They do not. If, on the other hand, we've been genetically unique for only 200,000 years, then the only way those defects could be with us is if they were put into our gene pool by the genetic manipulation of the founding generation of our species, and the mistakes made in that process were left in place to be handed down to posterity. And, as might be expected, this is also how domesticated plants and animals came to have their own inordinate numbers of genetic defects. It simply couldn't happen any other way.

THE FINAL NAILÉ

When Einstein was asked in reference to relativity, "How did you do it?", he replied, "I ignored an axiom." This is what everyone must do if we are to get anywhere near the truth about human origins.

Darwinists ask us to believe a theory based on this axiom: "There are good grounds to believe our early ancestors lived in forests. There are equally good grounds to believe our later ancestors lived by hunting game on African savannas. Therefore, we can assume that somehow, some way, we went from living in forests to living on the savannas." The trick, for Darwinists, is in explaining it plausibly.

Savanna theorists ask us to believe that, 5.0 to 10 million years ago, several groups of forest-dwelling Miocene apes were squeezed by environmental pressures to venture out onto the encroaching savannas to begin making their collective living. This means they had to rise from the assumed quadrupedal posture attributed to all Miocene apes to walk and run on two legs, thus giving up the ease and rapidity of moving on all fours. Those early groups had to make their way with unmodified pelvises, inappropriate single-arched spines, absurdly under-muscled thighs and buttocks, and heads stuck on at the wrong angle, and all the while doggedly shuffling along on the sides of long-toed, ill-adapted feet, thereby becoming plodding skin-bags of snack-treats for savanna predators. If any harebrained scheme ever deserved a re-think by its originator(s), this would be the one.

Of course, the real re-think needs to be done by Darwinists, because it is glaringly obvious that no forest-bound species of ape could have ventured onto the savanna as a stumbling, bumbling walker and learned to do it better out there among the big cats. If a collective group had been unfit for erect movement on the savanna, they wouldn't have gone. If they did go, they couldn't and wouldn't stay. Even primates are smarter than that. And understand, there are primates that did make the move onto the savanna, albeit always remaining within range of a high-speed scurry into nearby trees. Baboons are the most successful of this small group, all of which have retained quadrupedal locomotion.

In addition to the forest-to-savanna transition, Darwinists face numerous other improbable--if not impossible--differences between humans and terrestrial primates. In addition to bipedalism and the genetic discrepancies already addressed, there are major differences in skin and the adipose tissue (fat) beneath it; in sweat glands, in blood, in tears, in sex organs, in brain size and function, and on and on and on. This is a very long list that can be examined in much fuller detail in the W*rk of a brilliant, determined researcher into human origins, named Elaine Morgan.

Ms Morgan is the chief proponent of what challenged Darwinists derisively call "the Aquatic Ape theory", as if the juxtaposition of those disparate words were enough to dismiss it as an absurd notion. Nothing could be further from the truth. In books like The Scars of Evolution (Souvenir Press, London, 1990), she makes a devastating case against the notion that humans evolved from forest-dwelling apes that moved out onto the savannas. She believes humans must have gone through an extended period of development in and around water to generate the bizarre array of physiological oddities we exhibit relative to the primates we supposedly evolved from.

However, despite all her wonderfully creative W*rk, Ms Morgan remains wedded to the Darwinist concept of evolution, which had to play itself out in only the 200,000 years dictated by our mitochondrial DNA.



MAKING SENSE OF THE INSENSIBLE

The pieces of the puzzle are on the table. The answer is there for anyone to see. But rearranging those pieces properly is no easy task, and it is even more difficult to get dogmatists of any stripe to look at the picture in a light different from their own. That has been my purpose in writing these two essays on origins--of life and of humans. They are two of the world's most sensitive areas of scholarship and debate, producing some of the most vitriolic exchanges in all of academia. But vitriol, like might, doesn't make right.

I once knew a baseball player who'd pitched a no-hitter against a seriously inferior team. Upon being criticised for the obvious imbalance between his abilities and those of his opponents, the pitcher shrugged and said, "A no-hitter is a no-hitter, even against Lighthouse for the Blind." And so it is with a mistaken belief. If millions believe a thing, that doesn't make it correct.

I believe that the facts, if fairly evaluated, will over time prove that humans--and indeed, life itself--did not originate on Earth, and that nothing has macroevolved on Earth. It has all been brought here and left to fend for itself, then replaced when events required the introduction of new forms. No other theory suits the facts nearly as well.

As for humans (the object of this essay), look back to the Miocene epoch, where the earliest traces of our ancestors supposedly originate. Apes dominate. Look at the fossils--the so-called "pre-humans"--from the Pliocene epoch, starting 5.0 million years ago. Other than bipedal walking, all of their physical aspects shout out "ape roots". Look at today's tracks, sightings and encounters with living hominoids, Bigfoot and others. These all-too-real creatures will one day be proved to have a direct link back to the Miocene--which, at a stroke, will eliminate any possibility that humans and apes share any kind of common ancestor.

We humans are not indigenous to planet Earth. We were either put here intact or we developed here, but we did not evolve here. Our genes make clear that we've been cut-and-pasted from other, non-primate, non-Earthly species.

Personally, I believe that the W*rk of Zecharia Sitchin (The Earth Chronicles) comes closest to a plausible explanation. But even if some aspects of what he says are wrong, or even if all of it someday is proved to be wrong, that won't change the basic facts that his W*rk--and my own W*rk--address.

Humans are not primates. We do indeed stand apart as a "special" creation, long espoused by theologians and now by certain credentialled scientists. The only question left hanging is, of course: who or what was the creator? I don't think I'll be privileged to learn that in my lifetime. But I'm confident I'm within reach of the next best answer.

I'm confident that we were created by invasive genetic manipulation."






Darwinism and Christianity are responsible for the fallacy that we have dominion over other life-forms, even each other. It's just reinforcing the programmed heirarchy that binds us all to get so lost in what is essentially a pointless argument. The only point of measurement is the ability to manipulate matter, and going along these lines you eventually end up in Nazi territory; if we are superior simply because we are "more intelligent", then logic dictates that we sub-divide humans accordingly - and there you have the archaic basis of the class system.

It's interesting that animist societies, who have never been force-fed the superiority programming, respect all life, live in harmony with their environments and recognise the whole planet as a spiritual entity of which we are an indistinguishable part, albeit with a "care-takers" role.

I don't care if i'm an ape, or if i'm not. i am probably even less capable of doing algebra than a zebra. we're all different, but all living beings are endowed with consciousness and having respect for that is the only thing that really matters.

extraterrestrial intervention or otherwise, this argument represents two different varieties of repeating; one creationist, the other darwinian. that is not to say that i don't encourage the questioning of our origins for those who have never considered it further than either the schoolbook scientific version or the "god did it" approach. all things considered, alien intervention makes the most sense as it joins up the dots between millenia of religious teaching and what we now know as scientfic fact regarding the nature of evolution. i have never believed the two are mutually exclusive.

however, ultimately, it doesn't matter how we got here. we're just here. the journey isn't about understanding our origins, it's about where we are going. you don't buy a car and then spend the rest of your life obsessing about which factory it was built in, being so concerned about the details that you forget how to drive and don't actually go anywhere!

i think part of our problem as a species is the fact that we think we are separate from every other living being, that we are superior. this kind of thinking is the reason that people have no respect for other sentient beings, and think we have the right to just consume every resource this planet has to offer with no concern for anything else that lives on it alongside us. it's just an ego trip of cosmic proportions.

the whole point of infinite consciousness is that ALL consciousness combined creates infinite energy, not just OUR consciousness. the fact that we happen to inhabit a more capable vehicle than other lifeforms is irrelevant; it's the same spark of divine energy that makes everything from an amoeba to us alive.

most of us don't even understand our own consciousness, never mind that of anything else. it's like trying to measure the unmeasurable. we build stuff, animals don't. this actually tells us nothing about the nature of consciousness, only matter.

it makes no difference whatsoever what we evolved from, or whether we were deliberately constructed in this form. whatever we are, we're here on this planet on our own individual journeys, just like every other creature. some of us are walking, some of us are on pushbikes and some of us are flying. we all get to the same place in the end.
~Ali