2nd Renaissance -7 : Melbourne Indymedia

From A Full Gallop to Light Speed [121]
Adrian Berry spent nearly two decades as Science Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in London. A prolific author in the field of science, Berry is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Royal Geographical Society and the British Interplanetary Society, and a member of the Planetary Society of the USA. In The Giant Leap - Mankind Heads For The Stars, he writes that, "From our earliest history as intelligent human beings we have been developing our ability to travel faster, not gradually but in sudden bounds."

Berry identifies sixteen orders of magnitude in the speed of human travel, from that of a crawling baby to a speed beyond that of light. He notes that for more than 95,000 years humans could not exceed Step 3 of the scale, the speed of a human runner (an average of about 30 k.p.h.). Five thousand years ago the horse was mastered and Step 4 (an average of 50 k.p.h.) was practical.

But in the 20th century technology kicked in and eight further steps of the scale were achieved. New technologies enabled half of all of the sixteen steps on the scale to be reached within the space of one hundred years. A number of robotic space craft have achieved Step 12 (150,000 k.p.h.), escaped our Solar System, and journeyed into deep space.

The next steps to be aimed for are: Step 13, a significant percentage of the speed of light (80 million k.p.h.); Step 14, a speed producing relativistic effects (750 million k.p.h.). The latter speed will enable humans to travel to the nearest star systems. No one knows how long it might take for humanity to invent and build vehicles capable of such speeds.

Adrian Berry thinks that Step 13 will come late this century, but this could prove to be a conservative estimate. New scientific knowledge and new technologies are growing exponentially, along with computer power. Interdependencies are important, a breakthrough in one field can spawn many developments in other areas of technology. It is not just the curve of the increases in the speed of travel that is significant, but knowledge in many other fields as well.

History shows that people always underestimate the rate of technological change and development. In 1953 the United States Air Force predicted, from a study of the advance of human transportation speeds, that it would be possible to land men on the moon by 1969. Their estimate was within a month of the actual landing date. However, in 1953, the scientific establishment and the media all considered that no landing could possibly happen before the year 2000.

Difficulties In Legislating For Strange Change [122]
Rapid emergence of new technologies means that new laws are required frequently. However, in an increasing number of cases, legislators must quickly invent laws relating to technical matters that they barely understand, and for which the future implications can only be guessed at.

When a fundamental lack of understanding is combined with the usual impacts of commercial and political interests on law making, the chances of good legislation being developed are slim. Not only are law makers and interpreters mired down in outdated precedents and stale mindsets, they are predominantly older men, who are disinclined to tackle the strenuous learning and continual updating required to understand and keep abreast of the waves of new technologies that are sweeping across our present societies.

Already, the rule of law is floundering in its responses to moral and ethical issues surrounding cloning, genetically modified seeds and foods, and the use of biorecognition technology for security and other purposes. In the near-future, the law makers are likely to face conundrums relating to the "rights" of non-human intelligences being used in the service of humanity, and the legalities of teleportation services (relating, initially, to inanimate objects) that bypass border checkpoints and customs procedures.

Life Patents Within The Rule Of Law [123]
In 1980 the US Supreme Court was required to rule on the question of whether a genetically modified bacteria constituted an "invention" under the terms of patent law. The learned judges collectively determined, five to four, that strains of the modified bacteria were unique and that such an "invention" could thus be protected by patent for a period of twenty years. The General Electric company became the first to hold a patent on a living organism.

In 1988, a mouse that had been genetically engineered to be highly susceptible to cancer became the first animal to be recognised as a human "invention" by the United States Patent Office. By 1996, the Roslin Institute, located near Edinburgh in Scotland, had produced the first cloned animal, Dolly the sheep, and had also patented their "invention". Western corporations and universities, particularly those based in the US, began a scramble to take out patents on a wide range of plant and animal life, as well as many traditional recipes.

Many patents have already been granted by courts and judiciaries that have been persuaded by an argument that is particularly powerful to people raised within what Daniel Quinn describes as the Mother Culture of taker societies. The corporations and universities contend that no research investments will be made unless all resulting discoveries are granted a 20 years monopoly of the commercial applications that flow from the inventions. No patents, no new "inventions" and no human progress, they say. In the West the rule of law has been rapidly reshaped to accommodate this piece of taker logic.

Is Everything Patentable? [124]
Although he was active in plant breeding, the original author of the US patent laws, Thomas Jefferson, specifically excluded animals and plants from the coverage of those laws. He also asserted that patents are a form of monopoly, and that whenever such monopolies were contrary to the public interest, the latter should take precedence. Today, Jefferson would be surprised, and probably dismayed, to see 20,000 gene patents being granted by the US Patent Office in a single year. From the antics of US and other courts it seems that every living thing and many traditional remedies and recipes are now fair game for patent claims. Among the patents already granted are the following examples.

Basmati rice, grown for thousands of years in India is the patent of the Rice-tec corporation, from Texas, USA.

The human insulin gene, vital to diabetics, is patented by the US company Eli Lily. The patent prevents other firms, including not-for-profit organisations from manufacturing this gene.

Azadirachitin is a natural pesticide derived from the neem tree and it is now patented by the W. R. Grace company of the US. The neem tree is said to have been Ghandi's favourite tree because, for centuries, it provided medicines for even the poorest people of India. The Latin name of the plant is taken from an ancient Persian word meaning "free tree."

Endod, commonly known as the African soapberry, is a traditional soap agent. It has been found to be an effective molluscicide or snail-killing agent and could be vitally important as a means of combating the schistosomiasis disease that afflicts people in over 70 countries in tropical Africa, Asia and Latin America, killing 200,000 each year. The University of Toledo, in the US, now holds a patent on Endod, as the molluscicide is also deadly to the zebra mussels that clog water pipes in North American waters and cause municipal water plants and ship owners to spend millions to keep pipes clear. Although one Ethiopian scientist will receive a part share of the royalties from the commercialisation of Endod, the descendants of the indigenous peoples who discovered it many centuries ago, will not.

Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt for short, is a long known bio-insecticide that forms the basis of pest resistant Bt cotton, wheat, and maize crops. More than 480 patents have been granted for Bt "inventions," and numerous law suits have been fought over alleged infringements.

The stimulus for US companies to seek an increasing number and range of patents can be found in the shift to intellectual property as a source of wealth.

High Stakes For Taker Economies [125]
All the industrialised economies were built on relatively "dumb" manufactured goods. At the close of the first half of the 20th century, the proportion of traded goods with high intellectual property content was quite low. One source puts the proportion of IP goods in US exports in 1947 at ten percent. But there has been a dramatic change. Knowledge goods have become increasingly important, and analysts now expect that by 2010 they will account for more than half of US goods traded internationally.

The message to takers is clear, own the patents or lose the 21st century economic contest.

Despite the fact that existence is not a contest in the natural world, and the looming realities of abundance through new technologies, Western authorities and executives continue to see international trade in "survival of the fittest" terms. Although it is not possible to "own" thoughts or knowledge in the same way that it is possible to possess tangible items, taker notions cause such people to want to patent and monopolise the natural world and the key ideas and "inventions" associated with both the traditional and scientific routes to the discovery and application of its wonders.

Given this type of thinking, the treasures of the forests are prime economic targets, and outright theft of the vast store of information and understanding that indigenous societies have accumulated over long periods of time is being sanctioned within the Western (particularly the US) rule of law. No one knows exactly how much money is at stake, but the amount is surely large. One often quoted estimate, which dates back to 1989 and is probably not as informed about the potentials of natural substances and recipes as current knowledge, is that the rainforests alone are worth US$ 43 billion, simply from the medicinal value of plant-based remedies.

No Chance Experimentation In The Forests [126]
One of the arguments that the corporate and academic biopirates employ to deflect criticism from their patent claims is that, "Indigenous peoples did not invent the many remedies that they use, they simply discovered them by chance, so their efforts do not compare with those of bona fide researchers and investors like us." But it is fanciful to contend that the tribal people of the forests simply stumbled across detailed medicinal knowledge.

Jeremy Narby is an anthropologist who has lived amongst the Peruvian Indians and understood the depth of their medicinal wisdom. Curare is a case in point, it is widely used to tip darts that Indian hunters fire from blowpipes. Once it is under the skin of tree-borne animals curare acts as a lethal poison, yet the meat remains edible because curare can be safely ingested. It is an intravenous rather than an intestinal poison.

Writing about curare, in his book The Cosmic Serpent, Narby describes how the poison is made in the jungles, "There are forty types of curares in the Amazon, made from seventy plant species. The kind used in modern medicine comes from the Western Amazon. To produce it, it is necessary to combine several plants and boil them for seventy-two hours, while avoiding the fragrant vapours emitted by the broth. The final product is a paste that is inactive unless injected under the skin. If swallowed, it has no effect. It is difficult to see how anybody could have stumbled on this recipe by chance experimentation."

The explanation that is widely given by various Indians for the discovery of knowledge such as this does not fit alongside the ingrained mindsets of institutionalised science. Jeremy Narby writes that, "When one asks these people about the invention of curare, they almost invariably answer that it has a mythical origin. The Tukano of the Colombian Amazon say that the creator of the universe invented curare and gave it to them."

Shamans Know The Forest's Secrets [127]
Whatever the basis of the discoveries made by indigenous peoples, there can be little doubt that they have been able to amass a great store of knowledge about the medicinal properties of the plants around them. Besides the use of curare as a muscle relaxant in heart surgery, there are now hundreds of prescriptive drugs in Western medicine that are based on knowledge gleaned from traditional native usage.

Jeremy Narby notes that, "74 percent of the modern pharmacopoeia’s plant-based remedies were first discovered by traditional societies." Much knowledge remains unknown to Western science and this knowledge represents a vast storehouse of unexploited wealth. However, as Narby writes:

"Without the botanical knowledge of indigenous people, biotechnicians would be reduced to testing blindly the medicinal properties of the world's estimated 250,000 plant species."

Although they were considered uneducated by the first Europeans to contact them, the Shamans of the Amazon and other regions had memorised not only the details of an enormous variety of plants but also the various recipes for combining and processing them to make potions that were proven remedies for particular ailments suffered by humans and animals. Although they were not credited with having this knowledge, the fact is that the Shamans know more about the botanical richness of the rainforests and the natural remedies they offer than anyone else.

Much of the knowledge that has not yet been identified and stolen is in danger of being lost, unless adequate protections are offered to reassure the Shamans that the secrets of ages will not be patented by Western corporations and modern centres of learning. There is a saying that aptly sums up the situation:

"Every time a Shaman dies, it as if a whole library just burnt down."

A Single Victory For Traditional Beliefs [128]
The cost of challenging a patent in the US can be more than US$300,000 per time. With hundreds, or even thousands, of patents registered over the natural medicines, pesticides and other molecular treasures in their forests, the costs are beyond the peoples of the so-called "third world". Yet, despite the difficulties, nine South American countries were successful in their bid to have the US Patent and Trademark Office cancel a patent previously issued to a US citizen for the ayahuasca vine (pronounced "ah-yah-waska").

The traditional holders of the knowledge of how to prepare and use a potion derived from the ayahuasca plant, and others such as the chacruna plant (that contains one of the strongest known hallucinogens, DMT), did not object to its use in the West. What they objected to was the claim of ownership, and the prospect of commercialisation of one of nature's works by an individual. They regarded such a patent as blasphemous.

Antonio Jacanamijoy, of the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), stated that:

"The indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin believe that commercialising an ingredient of our religious and healing ceremonies is a profound affront to the more than 400 cultures that populate the Amazon basin."

In November, 1999, the US Patent and Trademark Office cancelled the patent previously issued for ayahuasca. According to the original patent claim the plant was "distinct," and therefore patentable, because the colour of its flowers had been changed by breeding (which is quite a simple thing to do). The colour of the ayahuasca flower, of course, has nothing to do with its use in the long standing traditional recipe, where certain chemical molecules in the vine are used to delay the breakdown of DMT in the gut, and enable that agent to enter the brain.

Under US patent law a plant can be claimed if it is a new and distinct variety. The alteration of the colour of the flower was an attempt to gain ownership of the unique chemistry of the ayahuasca vine. Ultimately, this attempt to own knowledge that is not only long standing, but sacred to traditional peoples of the Amazon, failed. But many other attempts have succeeded.

Commenting on this and similar cases, David Downes of the Centre for International Environmental Law, said:

"When people claim as their own inventions naturally occurring plants and ancient knowledge, we worry that our patent law system has lost sight of its original goals of supporting innovation."

The Vision Vine [129]
The ayahuasca plant is often called the vision vine because of the hallucinogenic effects it produces when prepared and ingested in conjunction with plants such as chacruna, that are rich in the DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) alkaloid. DMT is found in a wide range of plants worldwide, including common varieties of Australian acacia (wattles). Pure DMT can be smoked to produce powerful visionary experiences, but that is not what the many tribes of the Amazon basin do. Ayahuasca, or yage as it is also called, is not a recreational drug for these indigenous people. The potion they brew is only used by Shamans, and only for the purpose of healing the sick or contacting the spirits that their legends say first gave them the knowledge of yage in the distant past.

However it was acquired, this knowledge is truly remarkable. The harmine and tetrahydroharmine alkaloids in ayahuasca reverse the effect of the neuronal enzyme monoamine oxidase (MAO) and also facilitate the accumulation of 5-HT amines that would otherwise be metabolised by MAO. Due to the blocking action of the active molecules from the ayahuasca vine, DMT is allowed to circulate in the bloodstream and enter the brain. Chemist, J.C. Callaway, has described this process as, "one of the most sophisticated drug delivery systems in existence."

The visions that DMT produces are equally as extraordinary. Rick Strassman, former Associate Professor of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, was one of the few scientists to conduct research into the effects of DMT on human subjects. Strassman described the typical experiences of DMT use in the following terms.

"There are feelings of extraordinary joy, timelessness, and a certainty that what we experience is 'more real than real'...a knowledge that consciousness continues after death; a deep understanding of the basic unity of all phenomena; and a sense of wisdom or love pervading all existence."

These findings are not drawn from anecdotal accounts compiled by anthropologists and missionaries who interviewed Shamans and ayahuasca users in the Amazon jungles. They are founded on scientifically conducted experiments in a clinical environment. Yet, the descriptions are remarkably similar to those recorded in the jungles.

Seasoned private experimenters in mind-shifting substances also confirm that DMT is something very special. One says, "It was the first time I had the revelation that time isn't linear - that it's a conglomerate mass that we travel through, and we only perceive this small string of what's actually going on. So while I thought, 'I'm going to die today', I realised 'today is every day'."

Another experimenter described his experiences of DMT thus. "Getting over the onset of the DMT trip always felt like dying to me. Intelligences of uncertain form beckoned me through a lighted tunnel. The belief that DMT turned me into some intergalactic telepathic gateway, through which I could commune with 'higher' alien life forms, was so strong and fascinating. When I caught myself slipping into this alien philosophy at my then workplace, I thought it was time to stop. But the impression of being in the presence of a curious gentle alien intelligence has never left me."

Conversely, a survey by the Australian national youth radio station Triple J discovered that casual users of DMT found it particularly challenging. Triple J says, "It's the only drug that every single caller said they would never use again."

WARNING:
Using DMT can be very dangerous. Impacts on heart rate and blood pressure can be extreme. Shamans prepare to use ayahuasca by following a strict dietary regime for several days and by sexual abstinence. Do NOT experiment with DMT unless you are medically supervised or under the guidance of a traditional Shaman. DMT is a banned substance in most Western countries, including the US and Australia.

The Spirit Molecule [130]
Dr Strassman's work with DMT at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine has been hailed as the first new human psychedelic drug research in a generation. But not by the scientific establishment. He writes that he had great personal difficulty with the findings of his studies because they challenged his own world view, besides that of conventional science. But in the end, Strassman, a qualified psychiatrist and medical researcher, was forced to conclude that, "...DMT provides access to realms that are not just 'in our heads.'" In particular, the overwhelming frequency with which subjects reported contact with non-material beings leads him to postulate that such beings actually exist.

In his book, DMT the Spirit Molecule, Strassman contrasts conventional Western science with indigenous beliefs and understanding.

"Our modern approach to reality relies upon waking consciousness, and its extensions of tools and instruments, as the only ways of knowing. If we can't see, hear, smell, taste, or touch things in our everyday state of mind, or using our technology-amplified senses, they're not real."

"In contrast, indigenous cultures are in regular contact with denizens of the invisible landscape and have no problems with straddling both worlds. Often, they do this with the aid of psychedelic plants."

DMT is known to be produced naturally in our bodies. In this regard it is different from every other hallucinogen. Why do we produce such a powerful molecule and what purpose does it serve? Rick Strassman set out to find these answers. He followed up findings that DMT not only exists in our blood (discovered in 1965) but also our brain tissue (discovered in 1972 by a Japanese team). It seems that not only does the brain actively transport DMT across the normally impenetrable blood-brain barrier, it seems to hunger for it. Strassman says, "There are precious few chemicals the brain allows into its sensitive tissues...and even fewer it uses valuable energy to bring in: glucose is one, essential amino acids are another, DMT is yet another."

The Ancients believed that the pineal gland, located behind the third ventricle of the brain, is the seat of the soul, and both Eastern and Western mystics, to the present day, consider it to be the highest organ of consciousness. While Strassman has not yet proved that DMT originates in this pea sized gland, he has established that the pineal is rich in the enzymes and other ingredients necessary to produce the molecule. He postulates that an individual's life force, "...enters the body through the pineal at 49 days after conception, and leaves it through the pineal gland at death." Apart from those occasions on which DMT is deliberately taken into the body to achieve a psychedelic state, Strassman contends that the highest concentrations of this wondrous alkaloid in our blood occur during our birth and death, and during meditation or prayer.

Strassman acknowledges that his conclusions and theories take him well outside the bounds of conventional psychiatry, to the boundary between neurology and theology, and the realm of the metaphysical. In this regard he is a true scientist of the 2nd Renaissance.

From his experiences of administering DMT under clinical conditions, Dr Strassman thinks that this remarkable molecule might act as a sort of "reality thermostat." He writes that when normal people are given an anti-psychotic medication, which blocks the DMT that is naturally in their bloodstream, their consciousness becomes flat and dull. Alternatively, those people who receive additional DMT from external sources experience things that normally fall outside their consciousness.

Strassman says, "I suggest that DMT alters the receiving qualities of the brain, and employ a television analogy. Personal healing occurs by an enhancement of 'contrast and focus'; invisible worlds and entity contact takes place by changing the reception of 'channels'..."

Shamans exploit their knowledge of the chemistry of rainforest plants, and use DMT to "see" beyond the veils of normal reality. Indigenous people who have experienced DMT through the ingestion of potions made using the ayahuasca vine are fully aware of the channels beyond normal consciousness. Jeremy Narby records that natives of the Amazon region often refer to ayahuasca as "the television of the forest." One of Narby's major conclusions set out in his book, The Cosmic Serpent - DNA and The Origins of Knowledge, is remarkably reflected in the notes of a DMT session taken down by Dr Strassman. The subject said she discovered that:

"God dances in every cell of my body, and every cell of life dances in God."

A Remedy For Heroin Addiction [131]

Another remarkable "folk remedy" concerns a natural alkaloid extracted from the root of the Taberanthe iboga shrub that grows in West Africa. Traditional people use ibogaine for its vision-giving properties, but it has a growing reputation in the West as a way of kicking heroin and other addictions.

Despite being a US Schedule-1 prohibited drug, and having side effects that might have resulted in the death of at least one patient, ibogaine is slowly gaining recognition for its remarkable capacity to change not only the craving for addictive substances such as heroin, methadone and morphine, but the life-attitude and self-image of addicts.

Incredibly, proponents of ibogaine treatment assert that, in most cases, such outcomes are achieved after a single dose.

Harold Lotsof, who first used ibogaine when he was a student experimenting with drugs in 1962, says that his subjects often wake from a session alert and ravenously hungry. "It's a miracle for a heroin addict of ten years, who has been shooting up a gram and a half a day, to wake up wanting steak and eggs for breakfast."

When Lotsof first began clinical trials of ibogaine in the Netherlands, in 1990, there was only one scientific paper on the effectiveness of ibogaine in treating heroin addiction. There are now more than 140 scientific papers, and two projects to develop safer derivatives of ibogaine are nearing the stage of human trials.

Professor Piotr Popik, of the US National Institute of Health, has been quoted as saying that ibogaine is, "..a potentially life-saving new strategy for treating addiction to a diverse range of drugs." Lotsof is less cautious, he considers that ibogaine is capable of reducing the number of heroin addicts by a third, within three years of its large-scale application.

One of the alternatives to ibogaine that are being developed in an effort to avoid its more unpleasant side effects, is being developed by Stanley Glick, a neuropharmacologist of the Albany Medical Centre in New York. His work was reported in New Scientist magazine (26 April, 2003) and that article provides a useful outline on ibogaine as well. Glick is collaborating with a medicinal chemist from the University of Vermont, Martin Kuehne, to test a synthetic substance, 18-methoxycoronaridine (18-MC), which closely resembles ibogaine.

Animal trials, using rats, suggest that 18-MC is as effective as ibogaine. If, as Glick suspects, 18-MC works by blocking the brain's main dopamine reward pathway, the New Scientist article observes that it will be a sensational outcome. "If he's right, the implications would be huge. Glick would have a drug that could muzzle any addiction: heroin, cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, you name it."

But other researchers wonder whether a synthetic alternative to ibogaine might fail to provide the important hallucinogenic effects that help change addicts attitudes to themselves. Deborah Mash, a neuropharmacologist at the University of Miami Medical Centre, is developing noribogaine, a natural derivative of ibogaine that results from the metabolism of the latter substance. She hopes that it will be safer than ibogaine but retain the visionary effects of that substance.

"Whether the visions are important, I cannot say, but there are very profound experiences associated with ibogaine that can be life-transforming," she says. One recipient of ibogaine described the experience in the following terms:

"I was able to quit methadone without any cravings whatsoever. I don't know what changed, but I do know that my past is not such a burden now. Ibogaine has given me a new freedom. It isn't a drug: it's something divine - which sounds stupid, but it's true."

Resistance To Providing Ibogaine For Those Who Need It [132]
Needless to say, there are US patent disputes holding up the development and wide application of drug cures based on ibogaine or its derivatives. Major pharmaceutical companies are also circling the substance, waiting for one on Lotsof's patents to expire.

However the two greatest obstacles to the achievement of Lotsof's dream of a cure for heroin and other addictions have nothing to do with patent legalities and the notion of the "ownership" of knowledge taken from indigenous sources.

One of the impediments is attitudinal. Besides the political difficulty of gaining approval for the clinical use of what is presently a Schedule-1 drug in the US, there is also resentment in the medical research establishment. Lotsof says of ibogaine, "It was principally a drug discovered and developed by drug users. If you were a researcher who had spent years developing your career, the last thing you'd want is that someone with no academic credentials has developed the grail that you've been seeking."

The second obstacle is the resistance of vested interests, principally the criminal drug lords and the corrupt police and politicians they control. One person to offer ibogaine cures, in the hope of saving just 1% of the 140 million addicts in the world, found that it was impossible to set up a clinic in Mexico. He now operates from a boat in international waters. But he remains determined to help people cure their addiction. Ibogaine treatments presently range in cost from US$ 10,000 to US$ 2,000, but such expense is a small price to pay to get one's life back.

Drug addiction became a scourge of the 20th century, however it seems that it can and will be largely eliminated during the 2nd Renaissance. The hope for addicts everywhere is not that government programs or institutionalised science will save them. The more positive hope is that when free city states form outside the existing civilization, the leaver-givers of these places will develop and distribute medicines and cures at little or no cost.

After all, the indigenous peoples who have used substances such as ibogaine and ayahuasca do not wish to deny the knowledge and benefits to the rest of us. Nor do they claim to have "invented" the drugs involved. They say, without exception, that the knowledge was given to them through their contacts with the spirit world. Who are you and I to call these people liars or superstitious fools?

The attitude of new leaver-givers will be to let everyone who needs the treatments and visions derived from traditional knowledge have access to them, and let patent attorneys and global pharmaceutical companies be damned!

Death Is a Little Thing [133]
Christiaan Barnard, who is remembered as the first surgeon to transplant a human heart, would have encountered death many times in his career. Interviewed shortly before his own death Barnard said, "At almost 79, people ask me: where do you go from here? I say to them I'm on the waiting list. I don't know exactly where I am on the list or where I'm going, but I'm on it."

Barnard used also to tell a story about an encounter with an old African man, a Bushman from the Kalahari desert, in western Botswana. As one also nearing the end of his mortal life the old man explained to Christiaan Barnard that he did not regard death as very significant. He noted that everything dies: the trees die, the grass dies, birds die, snakes die, and people die. Holding his hand up so that his first finger almost touched his thumb, the old man said, "Death is a little thing."

With very few exceptions, tribal societies with traditional cultures that predate the rise of takerism and imposed scarcity, had little fear of death. Not only was this true of the Bushmen of the Kalahari, but of Australian aborigines, and the tribes of the Amazon. Because such societies had a close spiritual empathy with nature, and did not consider themselves beings apart from the other animals, the people had a clearer sense of death being a part of life. They were not afraid of dying. This is still true of small pockets of pre-taker culture in remote locations. But for the most part the forces of colonisation and organised religion, from the West, have obliterated the old understandings of death.

Whether it was intentional or not, the actions of colonial powers in converting indigenous populations to Western religions was, for them, a necessary condition for achieving control of new territories. When the native peoples stopped understanding death to be a part of nature and began to fear it, they became susceptible to coercion and the rule of law.

Rulers of every persuasion have long understood that a populace that does not fear death is ungovernable. So, the British, the French, the Germans, the Dutch, and others, all worked hard at eliminating traditional Leaver societies and converting native people to new ways of taker thinking. Then, death was no longer a "little thing," it became a big thing, involving a day of judgement, with a risk of hell fire and damnation.

When coupled with the introduction of artificial scarcity and taker concepts of property ownership and legal tender, Western death-fearing religions played a significant role in subduing, otherwise independent, tribal peoples.

Related:

2nd Renaissance -6

The second route involves the setting up of entirely new living spaces on tribal lands that were previously seized by colonising governments that espoused and followed Taker philosophies. This route has greater credibility, in the sense of secession rights, where clear historical ownership of the land can be shown.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106327.php

2nd Renaissance -5

Quinn contends that while governments can imagine a revolution they can't imagine abandonment. As he puts it, "..even if it could imagine abandonment , it couldn't defend against it, because abandonment isn't an attack, it's just a discontinuance of support."

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106136.php

2nd Renaissance -4

In due course, there is one achievement of overriding significance that Caral might well provide. One great contribution or lesson that can be applied to the 2nd Renaissance. How to live in peace, with spiritual meaning, and without warfare, for a thousand years.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105935.php

The New Renaissance
Daniel Quinn*

http://www.mnforsustain.org/quinn_d_new_renaissance.htm

2nd Renaissance -3

Plichta writes of this model as follows. "There was a time I used to make fun of the Apocalypse of St John and believed it to be a totally unreliable historical source. Today I am filled with deep humility, perhaps because I am now able to give a concrete description of the foundation of the world as seen by St John with my mathematical discoveries, and thus possibly open a new way to all of humanity which has now reached a dead end."

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105799.php

2nd Renaissance -2

Georg Cantor (1845-1918), by his origination of modern set theory and his studies of the nature of infinity, left science a valuable legacy. Cantor was regularly admitted to a psychiatric clinic within the University of Halle, in Germany, where he lectured and worked as a Professor of Mathematics. On each occasion that he became ill he had been thinking about infinity and the continuum hypothesis. Such intense thought, at the boundaries of his comprehension, caused Cantor to suffer repeated mental breakdowns. Infinity drove him mad.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105634.php

2nd Renaissance

This story was published in September 2004 and it was a big secret. I received it on disk but I think it should be public by now anyway. It is interesting to look back at it and in terms of today's world some two years on. I will link each chapter as I go along over the coming weeks.- The Old World Order - Happy reading!

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105519.php

Fight Iemma - Debnam

All they can say is 'lock em up'

It seems we are in the thick of it again - the stupid, heartless "Law & Order" auction.

Premier Morris Iemma and Opposition leader Peter Debnam are trying to outdo each other with idiotic "tough on crime" policies.

Feature
http://sydney.indymedia.org/archive/features/current#10384

Article
http://sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=64701&group=webcast