by Dieter Duhm
Elementary values such as community, truth, solidarity, and compassion have been lost through millennia of war and the activities of global capitalism. The Earth’s population lives under a hypnosis of fear and violence. The youth currently rising against the despotism of the old powers need a vision for a new world. All the adversities and struggles of our time highlight humanity’s task of developing a convincing utopia and establishing planetary base stations for its manifestation. The Mayan date December 21, 2012 did not mark the end of humankind, but the beginning of a new era. The vision of a new interconnected world, as it is proclaimed by the digital prophets of Silicon Valley, is not wrong, but it urgently requires philosophical and ethical complementation if we are to make manifest the universal information pattern inherent to all beings, which enables a future without violence. This book is intended to further elucidate this.
Beyond All Tears
We who live in peace are constantly surrounded by a cruelty that we could not bear if we faced it directly. The structures of global capitalism have robbed hundreds of millions of people of their homes, their access to food, healthy drinking water, and a positive prospect for life. The methods with which wars are currently fought, dissidents tortured, news blocked, and witnesses killed are too cruel to be described. In addition there are strategies of global energy politics and globalized water management, which deprive the poor regions of Earth of their basic material resources. This development is systematic and will continue until we stop it or until it finds its ultimate end in a global holocaust of which we caught a glimpse in Fukushima, Japan in March 2011.
The pain of the world exceeds the scope of our comprehension. We can sympathize when we see the suffering of a dying animal in front of us, but we can no longer sympathize when we hear in the news of the great massacres of children, women, peoples, and animals every day. The worldwide barbarism has reached an unimaginable dimension. There is no public forum for the expression of this pain. There is no reverberation from the world to the death of young people in Syrian cities. Pain is especially horrible if there is no hope of relief.
The youth of the world look into a future without meaning and objective. This leaves them unable to make sensible use of their great potential for action. Moreover, they endure the collective experience of continuous betrayal, which results in the subconscious accumulation of hatred. A large proportion of young men around the world are presently living in “killer mode.” They are trapped in a spiral of violence from which they can no longer liberate themselves. The epidemic of cruelty that is erupting everywhere on Earth today is the logical consequences of a system which could not possibly have been more diabolically contrived. Before we can conceive of the dimensions in which a global peace movement must work, we must recognize the dimensions of suffering in which many currently perish. In a German news magazine I read the following report about a Vietnamese girl forced into prostitution…
Sina Vann … was kidnapped 12 years ago in her native Vietnam. Human traffickers smuggled her across the border to Cambodia, where Vietnamese women are in demand because of their light complexion – the whiter the skin, the higher the price. She woke up on a bed in Phnom Penh, drugged, naked and bleeding. Her virginity had been sold to a sex tourist for a few hundred dollars. She doesn't know where he was from. Then she was locked up, bound and beaten. She was sold as a virgin four or five more times, to Cambodian customers who didn't notice that her vagina had just been sewn shut – a common practice to ensure that the women bleed. She was tortured with electroshocks when she refused to service customers. The advantage of electroshocks is that they produce no visible damage that would reduce a girl's value.1
Do we still have feelings, thoughts, words with which we can adequately react to such savagery? It sounds like the most awful scene from a horror film but it is factual and it occurs on a daily basis! This is but one scene from the daily massacre on Earth – as quotidian as the abuse conducted in child pornography networks in all countries from Canada through Europe to Australia. Sexuality is one of the most atrocious crisis areas of our times. One among many. Those who direct their attention to the suffering of our fellow beings bear witness to a story that never ends. Behind the material consumption of our society stands the indescribable anguish of billions of our fellow beings. It stands behind the menus of our restaurants, the doctors’ prescriptions, and the numbers on the stock market. The well-being of one side is achieved through systematic murder on the other. Countless human beings and animals pay with their lives for our daily intake.
We need to do something to categorically end these atrocities; we need to develop an idea, a plan, a global undertaking, for the liberation of life and all creatures. A plan for the liberation of love, a plan for a new humanity on a new Earth. This is how the Healing Biotopes Plan came into being – this is the basis of our work (see Part IV).
In the name of life.
In the name of love.
In the name of all beings.
WORKS CITED
1. “Girl Rising: Malala Fires Up a New Generation,” Der Spiegel, Issue 28/2013 (July 8, 2013). Back to reading
Chapter 2: Revolution for Life
Back to the Table of Contents
The plan developed over the course of the apocalyptic peaks that have occurred on the planetary stage since the 1970s. To put it briefly, it is the plan to found a new culture in alliance with all beings in the great family of life. It also attends to the inner nature of the human being, to its liberation from all suppression, and integration into the higher ethic of life. It is ultimately about finding an essential code for a humane civilization on our planet. The features of the plan are described more precisely in Part IV of this book, but first we want to shed light on some aspects of the current overall situation.
An inner contradiction permeates all of today’s institutions – the contradiction between the laws of society and the laws of life, between sociosphere (see Glossary) and biosphere. The human being is a Zoon Politikon (see Glossary) – a societal being and as such is subject to the laws of society. However, in accordance with his physical and spiritual nature, he is at the same time a member of the “bio-cosmos” and is therefore subject to the laws of universal life. If these two laws contradict each other, disease, criminality, violence, and war arise. Today we are experiencing the global culmination of this contradiction. We have come to an apocalyptic edge beyond which survival is no longer possible.
What began in the Arab countries at the beginning of 2011 was a glimpse of a global war that could eventually erupt everywhere. The civil wars in the Arab countries will inevitably expand to the urban centers of the western world if we do not give this revolution a humane direction early enough. Oppressed life force rises up against their oppressors. We are experiencing a global battle between the powers of life and the forces of destruction. A highly organized syndicate of corporations, banks, lodges, secret services, and governments has enveloped the Earth in a network of exploitation and violence. Germany sends tanks to Arab countries, which can then be used on the whim of despots against protestors. Global capitalism has destroyed the last communities, the last loyalties, the last connections to home, humaneness, and ethics. Yet the epoch of capitalist globalization cannot continue without unimaginable bloodshed and without the destruction of nature on a massive scale, a fact banks and corporations know full well. Their Illuminati might want to consider waking up.
The world has broken open. The old systems are bursting; new powers are emerging which can no longer be contained. People everywhere are taking to the streets. They are protesting against a system that has broken its promises on all levels. The synthesis of these events gives rise to the call for a new concept of human life on planet Earth. We have slipped out of a higher order, the divine order of universal life, to which human being and nature equally belong. We call this the Sacred Matrix (see Glossary), and we have to find our way back to it. As grandiose as it may sound, this is the step we now need to take. W
e need a new fundamental order for our coexistence, and a new way of coexisting with all fellow beings. Two thousand years after Jesus Christ, seventy years after Auschwitz, and fourteen years after September 11th, we say with certainty: we need a new basis for life on our planet – new ethical, spiritual, scientific, social, sexual, ecological, technological, and economic foundations. Above all we need a new inner world from where the powers to create Terra Nova can emerge. This will not be achieved through the development of small, rural communes or urban groups so long as they are not embedded in a greater context. However, even the smallest groups, bookshops, and cafes can help to establish this greater context for Terra Nova.
The revolution can be won if it is grounded in the conviction in a positive goal. We need a revolution that accepts spirit, lust, and love, the right to life for all beings, and the right to humanity’s religious longings. We need a revolution that helps the poor, the exploited, and the oppressed, the children, animals, and all creatures that so urgently need our assistance today. We thereby also help ourselves. This new revolution has to once again provide children with the experience of home, and it needs to acknowledge that even animals raised or bred for meat or fur production have a heart and a soul. Herein lies the deepest system change and the innermost core of the global drama. The need is not only for a change in political power; it is about fundamentally transforming our concept of a humane society. It is a matter of changing from murderous mechanics to compassionate solidarity and assistance. We need a revolution whose victory will create no losers because it will achieve a state that benefits all.
The term “revolution” is potentially problematic because it is immediately associated with violence. The current revolution will have to renounce all thoughts of violence if its humane goal is to be reached. Any revolution that originates from violence and war will only reiterate the old structures of brutality and domination; this is a lesson from history. A humane goal cannot be reached through inhumane means. The end does not justify the means. The current revolution is not a process of military confrontation but of mental and spiritual struggle. The structure and implementation of the new culture emerges from mental and spiritual fields. (Instead of “revolution” we could speak of “transformation,” as it has to do with a spiritual convergence. This convergence however is so radical that I have chosen the word “revolution.”)
An essential theme of the current revolution, at its innermost core, is the issue of sexual love in connection with fundamental ethics of creation, the reunification of Eros and religion. Here religion no longer connotes affiliation to a faith group but the rediscovered life in unity with creation. Separated for thousands of years through dire moral doctrines from the world religions, Eros and religion need to come together again so that we human beings can rise up to the source from which all of life originates.
In order to end the spiral of violence we need to find an inner power that enables us to not retaliate against injustices we have suffered. The pilgrimages Sabine Lichtenfels guided through Colombia, Portugal, and Israel-Palestine were dedicated to this paradigm shift. “Grace” is what she calls the power that is “stronger than all violence.”1 We were very moved when we met a young woman in Israel whose face had been disfigured; she had been severely injured when a young Palestinian had carried out a suicide attack close to her. In her book, Grace: Pilgrimage for a Future without War, Sabine Lichtenfels describes the situation…
Three years ago she became the victim of a suicide-attack in a bus and by a miracle she survived. We had already met her here, years ago in the Jerusalem forest, a beautiful young woman. Now she sits here in our tent and talks. For two months she had lain in a coma and the doctors had given up on her. She fully understands the Palestinian suffering (…)
Everyone listening is struck by her story. After intensive days in the West Bank where we have been made very aware of the suffering of the Palestinians, we now closely feel the experience of the other side. This young woman wanted nothing else but to live. Just like the Palestinians do. The soul has to understand anew: this is not so easy. It is not possible to divide the world into victims and perpetrators. Healing does not result from accusation. When she was asked about her feelings toward her tormentor she only said, “Maybe I would have done the same if I had been in his position.”2
On which side do we stand? Whosoever has decided for the side of life can no longer say “yes” to the habits he or she has hitherto mindlessly followed. If we have the courage to look at current world events, our entire organism reacts with an absolute “no!” Stop a system that does such things. Stop it also on the inside, in our own lives. This is the outcry of a healthy emotional body (see Glossary). But the world cannot be changed through emotions. Now the mind, the analyzing and synthesizing intellect, has to get involved in order to translate this emotional “no” into a positive helping strategy. With every small deed, every thought, and every decision we can consciously position ourselves on the side of life. Through our daily actions, we are weaving a web with which we strengthen one or the other side. While washing dishes we can decide “whether we serve the devil or the Lord.”3
Stop the Global Idiocy
Countless millions of young people all around the globe would be available for building a new world if they were offered a credible vision to work toward. Yet they hardly ever find opportunities to express their humane potential. Before they can become conscious of their power, their energy is programed and channeled in the logic of the existing systems. They are being used as henchmen of the system to solve conflicts they have not caused. There are only very few people at the top of the societal pyramid that give the orders, as exemplified by those behind the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar. How many human lives are being sacrificed here for an insane economic deal! And the world just watches. In fact, after 150 years of democracy and civil rights it is still small groups of powerful people that steer the destiny of billions. We can hardly believe this story while we stand inside of it, but when we take sufficient distance we see the boundless despotism that still directs human society on all continents.
Fall 2013 – In Istanbul young policemen are on a full combat mission against protestors of the same age. Everywhere in the world we see the same idiotic theater. Everywhere two hostile camps of young people confront each other, people that could actually be friends. Enemies that could actually be friends! We must not allow hostilities to arise purely on the basis of affiliation to different ideologies and political camps. This primitive mentality should have ended with playing “Cowboys and Indians” in our childhood. It is not personal hatred that makes people enemies but the logic of a distorted system. Enough! Stop this whole insanity! There is an alternative. Another life is possible. There exists another plan of creation for all of us. We are not here to fight each other but to build the world we need for our children and ourselves. We must join with all those who stand for peace, against war, against any form of hypocrisy, and against distorting or concealing reality. We can no longer avert our gaze from what is really happening to the victims, be they in Syria or the nearby supermarket. We have friends in Palestine and Israel, in Colombia and Mexico. The children, the friends, the beloved ones that are dying in this moment could be our own. Whoever has heard their cries will never forget them. This war will persist everywhere so long as the societal structures that perpetuate it remain.
During a demonstration in Sao Paulo a policeman throws his pistol into the fire saying, “Enough! I will no longer participate in this.”4 Together with his colleagues he was supposed to proceed against the demonstrators; he could not continue because he knew justice was on their side. Justice was on the side of the demonstrators; injustice was on the side of the government. Like everywhere in the world, the police have the task to protect the system from its indignant citizens. This is how injustice is protected, often by military means. This is how every revolution begins. Yet the police also consist of young people, as young and likable as the protestors. The p
olice officers know, at some level, that justice is on the side of the protestors; more and more of them know it, but they have to do their job and earn money; they do not yet have another perspective. The protestors will also one day, when they have lost the battle, return to their old places and do their “jobs.” Let us be sure that they will gain another perspective!
What would happen if they really had an alternative perspective – the vision of a society free from injustice and violence? The vision of a society in which they all have enough to eat without needing to obey unjust laws? The vision of a world where they, especially women, could love freely and without censure? What would happen if the millions that are currently demonstrating on the streets and in the squares had a clear vision and started to manifest it? We would experience the real emergence of a free world with functioning communities and subsistence economies, with love couples free from the fear of punishment, with free religion, and free culture. We would have schools for learning the secrets of life, research sites for new communication systems, new architecture, new energy systems, new housing arrangements, new water landscapes with alimentary biotopes, new healing methods, a new coexistence with animals; we would have Love Schools to teach new ways for the genders to meet and new “monastery” schools for cooperation with the spiritual world. Everywhere on Earth, in all countries, on all continents, the new projects will arise. Young police officers will no longer fight against protestors, but will ally with them to create the new world. A world that is currently closer than ever before because we have the knowledge to make it happen.
