TheConversation.org

Welcome to The Conversation. The following is an update from Suzanne Taylor and TheConversation.org Making Sense of These Times website at http://www.theconversation.org . Thank you for your interest. If you wish to be removed from this list at any time, just e-mail update@theconversation.org to let us know.


Contents:
- A note from Suzanne
- Suzanne's Monthly Report
- A note from the new webmaster


A year on from September 11th 2001, TheConversation.org starts a new chapter...

Have a look at our new home page for what Palden Jenkins, our new Webmaster, is doing.  We're developing our new venturing, Palden being another thinker whom I invited to think with me.  We met last summer in England, and cemented our friendship during a long sit feeling cosmic in the now famous Milk Hill crop formation, with its 409 separate circles in an area the size of two football fields.  Palden and I are equally anxious to get this hurting world to rethink reality, and are equally enthusiastic about the possibilities the crop circles offer in that regard.

It's been a dramatic time for me since the last Update, in which CROP CIRCLES: Quest for Truth, started running in movie theaters.  Although I am happy to have brought about more crop circle awareness thanks to its compelling pictures of formations, and I urge everyone to bring your friends if it comes to your city (check http://www.cropcirclesthemovie.com), it's not the film I commissioned and it shouldn't have my name as Executive Producer on it.  A long story, as you might imagine.

Palden and I are in the process of preparing another Update, for sending out in a day or two.  For now, here's what I wrote in the September Monthly Report:


Suzanne's Monthly Report

Boy, it sure doesn't feel good these days. All the stories I'm posting are about our country in incompetent hands. No provisions for things going well are being made. But sail on we do, the administration never grappling with what it would take to turn the world around. This may be the most foolhardy time in human history, with the powers that be refusing to change our course even though everyone can see the iceberg ahead.

With many smart social critics out there, still there is no mobilization to alter the course we are on. But, there is a mounting pressure. I take great heart from the five star piece of Howard Zinn's, "Break-In for Peace," [http://www.theconversation.org/break-in.html] about an acquittal for people who broke into a Federal Building to destroy draft records after several other incidents where people were convicted for doing the same thing. Zinn, who testified at the trial of the Camden 28, explains:

Most importantly, the year of the trial was 1973. By now the majority of the American people had turned against the [Viet Nam] war. They had seen the images of the burning villages, the napalmed children, and had begun to see through the deceptions of the nation's political leaders. As today we watch with some alarm a nation mobilized for war, the politicians of both parties in cowardly acquiescence, the media going timorously along, it is good to keep in mind that things do change. People learn, little by little. Lies are exposed. Wars once popular gradually come under suspicion. That happens when enough people speak and act in accord with their conscience, appealing to the American jury with the power of truth.

Even though there is value in our efforts, it feels like that tipping point is farther ahead than we can get to without serious damage along the way. How can anyone get cozy facing reality now?

What are my contributions to a different intelligence? Well, one comes from seeing the big picture, in which mutual interest becomes as important as self-interest; they need to be inseparable. I hardly believed my eyes when I read something that's so far out in support of this idea that it seemed impossible to be coming from someone in Congress. I bow at the feet of Dennis Kucinich [http://www.house.gov/kucinich], who just might get to be President. Would that change everything! And why not? We know the trouble we're in, and he would in fact bring us full circle to what the Founding Fathers were tuned into. Here's what he recently said:

Spirit merges with matter to sanctify the universe. Matter transcends to return to spirit. The interchangeability of matter and spirit means the starlit magic of the outermost life of our universe becomes the soul-light magic of the innermost life of our self. The energy of the stars becomes us. We become the energy of the stars. Stardust and spirit unite and we begin: One with the universe. Whole and holy. From one source, endless creative energy, bursting forth, kinetic, elemental. We, the earth, air, water and fire-source of nearly fifteen billion years of cosmic spiraling... As we aspire to universal brotherhood and sisterhood, we hearken to the cry from the heart of the world and respond affirmatively to address through thought, word and deed conditions which give rise to conflict: Economic exploitation, empire building, political oppression, religious intolerance, poverty, disease, famine, homelessness, struggles over control of water, land, minerals, and oil.

Another contribution to help tune us into a next intelligence is the vision statement of Lex Hixon's [http://www.mightycompanions.org/page6.html] that he wrote for a Mighty Companions group we were in [The Herringbone Project at http://www.mightycompanions.org/page5.html ]:

A coalition already exists in spirit. It is coming together now in the social context by the attraction of its unconventional intelligence and compassionate form of high-mindedness. This natural coalition is drawn together by the recognition that the elevation of consciousness is our fundamental life work. This is a genuinely democratic, self-organizing force, flowing through persons of all descriptions. This force does not flourish as any highly structured form. It is not an institution or a foundation or a non-profit company or anything conventionally named. This coalition is a living organism – natural, wild, free. It is made up of individuals devoted to serving the world and developing themselves as finely-tuned instruments of service. They learn to gather in the energy of will-to-good, from which authentic goodwill flows out subtly to the entire world.

And another thing to keep us thinking along the lines of what's possible is Brian Swimme's cosmology [http://www.theconversation.org/swimme.html] about a new story we could see ourselves in. Brian says:

At key times in history, consciousness advances in spurts. In Athens, the foundations for western civilization were laid. At the School at Chartes Cathedral, the vision of the Middle Ages was given form. In the Florentine Academy, Renaissance humanism was brought forth. We are in the midst of such a spurt. Human creativity today gives birth to a new vision of reality, a new cosmology, one that will guide us out of the terrors of the late twentieth century. The creation of a new planetary mythology is an organic process requiring the intelligent participation of millions of minds.

You can track my best bet for how we might be spurred to change in our Crop Circle Diary at http://wwwmightycompanions.org/cropcircles/diary2002.html . With the release of Signs, so much that the government has been ridiculing is getting a new listening. Crop circles are signals to us by an intelligence that understands us. The phenomenon is the most intriguing and exciting thing going on on this planet. How breathtakingly beautiful the formations are, and how uplifted all would be in receiving the gifts from such an extraordinarily artful source.

You're welcome to participate in an edited conversation about how we can get from where we are to where we're going. Just e-mail me at suzanne@mightycompanions.org with your contribution.  The one that's featured now, with Walter Starck [http://www.theconversation.org/c-walterstarck.html], is my idea of how we can think our way there.

Suzanne Taylor


And a note from Palden...

Greetings!

As from the beginning of September, I have taken over as webmaster-editor and occasional contributor to TheConversation.  I hope my input serves you well, helps enrich this site and contributes to its purpose.  I am an author, editor, webmaster and a few other things besides, and you can find out a bit more about me, if you wish, by visiting my personal website at http://www.palden.jenkins.btinternet.co.uk .  I live in and write to you from the historic and rather mythic town of Glastonbury, England, in a house as old as the Pilgrim Fathers just under a rather strange hill called Glastonbury Tor.

In the coming weeks and months, design changes are taking place on TheConversation.org and its sister site Mighty Companions. If you find problems, have observations or suggestions, or if you run into bad links, please e-mail me at palden@mightycompanions.org (mentioning the precise location and issue please!). 

Even though we're separated by eight time-zones, Suzanne and I spark off each other quite well, and we hope, in time, to further develop TheConversation as a rich, fruity and nutritious source of insight, news and overviews, extending its scope more internationally.  Globalism means more than technologies, airports, markets and organisations - that was the easy stuff.  Now, in the 21st Century, we get to the real stuff - this concerns people, ideas, feelings and upcoming generations.  A meeting of cultures - to some extent, whether we like it or not.  This is no clash of civilisations, it is a process of becoming truly civilised.  May Suzanne's and my efforts, with your valuable contributions and reading eyes, play our part in assisting this evolution.

Palden Jenkins

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