A NEW AWARENESS
We become aware of new things. This is nothing strange and happens every day. The process of learning or of acquiring new awareness is favoured by true information, clearly presented. It is hindered or even prevented by false or incomplete information.
Magazines such as raum&zeit favour an increase in awareness because they present information without censoring them and in a way that promotes critical thought.
But for the most part what is offered in the mass media, including press, TV and movies, is of a numbing quality. These media are being misused as instruments of propaganda and are thus filled with false and one-sided information. This of course is not conductive to a free development of opinion and awareness.
Especially TV, with its overbearing way to hammer viewers with pictures and impressions without ever giving them the time to critically analyse, is one of our most potent "environmental poisons" so to say. Those falling into a tv-dependency show a certain slackness, loss of ability to critically evaluate and a sort of smug satisfaction indicative of having found their place in the false reality built and controlled by the tube.
Despite all this, there is a growing number of persons becoming more and more aware. Aware in the sense that they do not get put asleep by the mass media, aware of themselves and of their environment. It is modern now to learn about and to experience spiritual abilities. It is modern to think and act in ecological terms. But is that really enough to bring about a change?
SPACESHIP EARTH
Buckminster Fuller has coined the expression Spaceship Earth and he was exactly right. What is planet earth if not a spaceship, whether we are able to steer it or not? As a spaceship, earth is situated inside a spiral galaxy called the milky way. It is us, the inhabitants, that are not really aware that besides ourselves there are other races, other peoples living on this and other planets. Most of these are active participants in a galactic community.
We are not really an example of rationality and civilization, with our wars between nations, wars for the purpose of controlling raw materials and generally for power politics. It is time that we gain an awareness of the galaxy in which our planetary system is situated and that we claim our place in this galaxy as a civilization that has outgrown its internal conflicts.
What we are missing in my view is a comprehensive plan as to where "spaceship earth" should be directed. There are a thousand good ideas, a thousand initiatives, many of them worthwhile, but there is no holistic philosophy capable of directing all of these ideas and initiatives towards a definitive emancipation of our civilization.
More than 90% of all positive forces are being carefully collected and directed into "harmless" or inefficient activities. This is happening with environmentalism and with many other movements which often find themselves diverging from their original direction towards aims completely different than those evisioned by their founders.
The first step for misdirecting a group in such a way is identification. Being identified or "labelled" is a prerequisite for the control of any phenomenon. As long as a movement cannot be clearly defined and identified, as long as it cannot be put into a known category, it is very hard to control or in this case misdirect.
So it happens that a great deal of the best efforts end up in useless, if often spectacular actions that leave the status quo completely unchanged.
What is then the visible expression of the new awareness that is starting to spread, despite all opposition "from above"? There are several different forms of expression, all of them however in one way or another in direct opposition to what we are accustomed to calling established.
MEDICINE
The various natural healing arts and the new directions in medicine are well known to the readers of raum&zeit. The fact that in our age allopathic medicine is still the only "proper" medical authority is not in any way connected with the validity of its methods of therapy. It rather has to do with money made in farmaceutical production and with control of both the masses and certain individuals as practiced by psychology and psychiatry, now increasingly with the help of pharmaceutical drugs that tend to suppress any individual awareness.
Medicine that is worth its salt should work without or at least with very minimal side effects. It should - wherever possible - only help the body's immune system and the body's own capabilities for repair. Its understanding of the biological and biochemical changes in the body should allow quick and sure diagnosis and prevention of all those illnesses that are influenced by the equilibrium of certain biochemical elements in the body.
Apart from really necessary accident repairs, medicine should be working mainly in the diagnostic and the preventive area. Not the fighting of diseases but the attainment of optimal bodily health and thereby the prevention of illness should be the purpose of medicine. At this time prevention mostly goes no further than the giving of vaccinations, which apart from directly induced illness also weaken the immune system. How much longer will it take before the dangers of this kind of "prevention" are recognized by the health authorities?
TECHNOLOGY
What we are offered in these times as technology is mostly old hat, a little shined up and painted over, but inside it is closer to the age of the steam machine than to the third milennia. Even atomic power plants, which are about the most advanced expression of our technology are little more than modified steam turbines that use highly dangerous uranium for heating up the water instead of gas, oil, wood or coal.
Tomorrow's technology has been invented hundreds, even thousands of times but every time it has been locked away in the vaults of the "conventional" energy cartels. If the inventor could not be bought he was inactivated in other ways and in some cases died a sudden unfortunate death. The amount of capital and thereby power involved is obviously too great to allow us the use of a different, maybe much cheaper and more efficient energy source.
Where governments finance alternative energy projects the funding is carefully directed where the prospects for success are quite remote. We see an example of this in solar panels, windmills and similar proojects. Really new developments such as cold fusion are effectively silenced, not to even think about getting support.
However the articles in raum&zeit that deal with new technologies and international and national conferences are finding great interest and this shows, that a growing number of persons is not any longer content to leave these things up to the 'experts'. There is a steady if slow progress even without the funds of governments and without the approval of scientific authorities. When the breakthrough will finally come, it will sweep away these rigid structures with even greater might.
The technology of the future will allow a decentralized, low-cost production of energy. Transports will be revolutionized first by magnetic levitation and then by antigravity. Space travel will no longer be a monopoly of the superpowers but will - with different forms of propulsion - be accessible even to individuals.
Furthermore, safety for man or people-friendliness of technology will become more important than it has been so far. We cannot much longer bombard our living quarters with microwaves and other damaging radiations without ourselves falling victim to this insanity. This is where medicine and technology meet each other. But as long as medical authorities deny the existence of damage done by TV-type monitors mobile telephones and microwave ovens, industry will hardly be moved to develop a more people friendly technology.
POLITICS
It is unlikely that the politicians will rush to our help in these matters. They have had all the possibilities to make changes but their inability to let go of the status quo is so obvious that they appear quite pathetic. It is not only the political parties that are in a crisis but the whole political system is losing credibility.
Think only of the denial of the existence of non-earth based flying objects, whose observation has been confirmed in many separate instances or of the technical and medical backwardness of our governors which makes progress in these fields almost impossible and you will see the inability of politicians to react to changed circumstances.
One could say with justification that our politicians have debased themselves to being the servants of a multinational clique of reactionary bandits who through their riches have ammassed an incredible amount of power. Even though it is not possible at this time to call these bandits by their names, their influence in the international arena is clearly visible. In any case, more and more people are tired of just being spectators to this game.
INTEREST AND RENTS
One of the reasons why some people are concentrating ever greater amounts of power and others are working for them is our finance system that I would call a system of interest and rents.
There have been various proposals for making a financial system without the practice of interest and some practical attempts have been made in this direction. They were soon forbidden by the authorities and so came to nothing. One example is the mayor of Woergl, a city in Austria, who during the time interval between the first and second World War established a kind of money in his city's area that would circulate without interest. This was promptly forbidden after a short while by the central bank. Several barter societies who wanted to operate without money and above all without interest were prohibited in the same manner. This is not difficult to understand as interest is an immense source of income for those who have succeeded in one way or another to amass riches.
To the common citizen, interest causes, through the inflation it brings about, the loss of his gains.
Interest is an evil concept because it violates the principle of exchange. The principle of exchange is one of the fundamental precepts of human interchange. It is not important whether goods are exchanged against goods or against money, whether money changes hands in return for a service or whether goods or money are given against the promise of a future service. Money in this sense is only a means that makes the action of exchange easier. It has no value in and for itself.
The concept of interest violates the principle of exchange by making a means of exchange (money) that is intrinsically without value, into something like goods, and by then asking a certain price for the possession or use of that means of exchange. This apparently small violation of the principle of exchange leads in time to incredibly large inbalances in the distribution of the means of exchange, until at last by the mechanism of interest and interest upon interest the means of exchange (money) and by that the majority of the existing values (goods and valuables) are concentrated in the hands of a relatively small clique.
PHILOSOPHY
It would be, I believe, a function of philosophy to explain these things to us and to help us avoid mistakes such as the establishing of interest. In this sense, philosophy has badly failed. Neither marxism-communism nor our western capitalism has ever clearly exposed these logical connections.
Philosophy is an analysis of what is happening and an exposition of alternative or better ways. Of course this is easier said then done, when the press is used to attack every heresy with lies and slander or better still, kill it by silence. A heretic is of course everyone who says something else than the powers-that-be.
PERSONAL AWARENESS
What can we do from our standpoint of just simple citizens in order to put our spaceship on the right course despite all contrary circumstances?
First of all we have to know our goal - where do we want to go. Next, everyone of us must act as if he or she was alone, as if we were the only ones who want to attain that goal. Don't wait for anyone else - certainly not for a party, an organization or a government to do it for you.
As a last thing, we have to adjust our actions in a way that every decision and every action will benefit not only ourselves but also our environment.
In this sense, the environment of a person is to be seen in concentric circles embracing first his or her immediate family and then ever greater groups up to the nation and even all of mankind.
However that is not enough. These circles have to extend further into the world of animal and plant and into the physical environment as such, the world with its mountains, seas and rivers and further into the spiritual dimension of man, the soul, and even into the dimension of God, a religious dimension.
All of these are part of the environment and every one of our decisions has to be calculated to not only benefit ourselves but also our environment. Only then do we have a chance to finally lead spaceship earth out of its isolation.
This article does not in any way want to call for a revolution. It is meant to stimulate thought. The more persons who really find their own standpoint and will defend it, the larger the number of those who will align their life in the direction of a certain goal and who will consider the environment when making their decisions, the sooner will it be possible for us to take our place in the galactic community.
Josef Hasslberger
Rome, Italy
1990
