Joseph Chilton Pearce spoke and wrote passionately on the way medical-technological birth negatively impacts what was generally termed ‘bonding,’ the continued merging, shared meaning, and reciprocal dynamic imprinted during pregnancy and extended after. Bonding, in this primal meaning, is not simple affection. It is an identity-defining, and self-world view forming “experience,” not something abstracted by the intellect, as a name and social expectations. (see Pregnancy, Birth and Bonding and Bonding and the Intelligence of the Heart.)

A late lunch at the Getty in Los Angeles. “Enough with all the challenges, Michael. We want solutions,” lamented my brother and sister. Taking a breath, I stumbled, “we are colorblind to the source, and therefore how to get ourselves out of the mess we have made. Offering positive solutions demands seeing the problem clearly. But we are blind, as David Bohm notes;”

My last post, Machines Can Never Love, explored how the current global crisis is not a spontaneous event, rather a snake-like constellation of dark forces that wind back in time for decades, even centuries. To understand what is taking place today one needs to see this continuity and how it is attempting to define our future, if we let it.

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Follow the money; control and power over people connect our World Wars, the Great Depressions, the murders of JFK and his brother, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others, along with seventy-two orchestrated upheavals of other countries, 9/11, the invasions of Iraqi and Lebanon, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the sub-prime mortgage theft, twenty-one trillion dollars missing, unprecedented chronic illness of our children, and much more. The political and economic crisis called COVID is no different. Behind all of these, a common-core of forces stands in the shadows, slightly offstage. In 1983 Ashley Montagu wrote:

An invisible dis-ease, an affliction of the spirit, which has been ravaging humanity in recent times without surcease (without end) and virtually without resistance, which has now reached epidemic proportions in the Western World… this sickness of the soul might be called the “Fifty Horseman of the Apocalypse.” Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization… The realm of ideas and the world of affairs are joined in continuous and reciprocal interaction, and neither can be understood without reference to the other.

Presence, that invisible spark, spirit, or energy that permeates all living things, is like the broadcast frequency that delivers Game of Thrones to your device. Without presence, there is no show, no life. The full spectrum of human development might be viewed as the act of enlarging our capacity to decipher the hidden meaning in presence. Only a tiny fraction of our neural activity, five-percent, is invested in what is imagined; knowledge, cultural beliefs, all the things taught in school, and information. Some experiences, swimming in the natural world, for example, overflows with meaning, with presence. Others, relating to the digital and virtual world, or technology in general, is devoid of presence. The virtual-digital experience is a counterfeit. What’s missing is presence.

The very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem. David Bohm

Allowing David’s insight to sink in forces a complete reexamination of our approach and our priorities - to everything. With this in mind, below are a number of concepts that may be new; attention is different from thought or cognition, knowledge, memory, and imagination are not intelligence, attention has different qualities and capacities that can expand, personal identity is reality shaping and defining, conditioned thought and associative memory represent a tiny fraction of our neural activity, personal identity, the social-ego and culture are two sides of the same coin, both emanate from a common source, there is a reality behind the appearances our brain creates, true self-knowledge involves exposing and facing misconceptions about ourselves and more. Some care may be needed as we proceed. Shall we?

The root of our personal and global crisis is a Bio-Cultural Conflict or, a clash between our true nature and our imagined and abstracted thoughts, images, cultural beliefs, and conditioning, which together express as our social ego and culture.

A colleague suggested I view a conversation with Deepak Chopra and Vananda Shiva; Seeds of Love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WarbGqmMig8

I have had brief encounters with both. Deepak noted in the dialogue:

The environment is our extended body. The air is our breath. The sun is the source of life. The Earth is recycling as our physical body. The rivers and oceans, and even the puddles are our circulation. The trees are our lungs. So, we have a personal body; we have a universal body, and they are both equally ours. And, unless we have this emotional, spiritual shift, then the war will continue. What we need is a critical mass that can see reality as it is--that you, as a biological organism, are not separate from so called environment. In fact, you are a product of that; you are an activity of that.

Quite right. My collection of essays; Where do we go from here? linked below, addresses what Chopra is describing by revealing why we don’t live in the reality that we are not separate from the environment. Below is my correspondence to both.

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Deepak Chopra, MD and Vandana Shiva

February 7, 2020

Re: Seeds of Love, Extinction or not? Where do we go from here?

Dear Deepak and Vandana,

Time is short, a decade, perhaps two. If the attached; Where do we go from here? resonates, perhaps we can collaborate and meet this challenge together.

Please write a list of simple suggestions of how an individual, parent, educator, practitioner could make changes to turn the trends you are talking about.
Thanks. Helen

If the example which our behavior exhibits today was the template that would imprint how the next generation, and therefore the future of humanity, will behave, what would you do differently? What will make us change and what kind of change will actually make the difference we urgently need? Just today, on November 26, 2019, another extinction report filled the headlines:

There is the surface challenge du jure, of the moment, and the deeper challenge that created that challenge. We are exploring the root source of our chronic personal, social and ecological dis-ease, that has now turned into crisis. Why humanity has created the mess we find ourselves in, and have been in for thousands of years. As we began; the source of problem is not out there, in society, in our relationships, in the environment. The crisis is in each of us, how we perceive, think, feel, how we treat each other and the world. The deeper challenge is inner, a particular misuse of memory, and therefore structure of thought and our identification with this misuse.

The deeper challenge