Sometime in the beginning of last week I started to experience the psycho-emotional effects of the fact that my time here was nearly over. Menno, the former Dutch ambassador whose office is in the same suite as mine, asked me a few days ago if I was feeling sad yet, and I acknowledged that I was. What he didn't ask was whether I was sad because I was leaving, or sad because I was going back to the US. That would be a harder question to answer. It's certainly a little of both. But even that doesn't fully explain what I'm feeling. The truth is that I have a fair amount of ambivalence on both sides of that equation -- I'm a little sad and a little happy on both counts, for different reasons.
The ambivalence about leaving reflects mostly my ambivalence about Taiwan more generally. If I'm happy to be leaving, it's mostly because I'll be glad to stop climbing four flights of stairs every time I return to my room, and to get away from the constant sound of traffic as well as the hot humid weather which is now very definitely on its way, and beyond that, I guess it's just that it's been enough time here, and I'm ready to move on to something else. On the other hand, life here has been pretty good, not a lot of expectations or pressure and lots of flexibility to do what I wanted. Once I got settled in -- adjusted to my living circumstances, learned where to go to get food, developed the kind of "variable routine" I tend to build into my life wherever I am, and figured out how to keep the ants (mostly) at bay -- things were all in all fairly easy and enjoyable. My normal day, as usual, has included a mix of reading news/information on-line, processing emails, getting work done on the papers I'm writing and the presentations I've had to prepare, reading and commenting on things for students back at USC, and -- OK, I'll admit it -- usually a game or two of spider solitaire (or as I like to call it, the devil's game!) somewhere along the way. All those "normal" days have been punctuated by a number of trips, to Taipei, Taichung, Kinmen, Kaohsiung, and Kenting, with opportunities to see a number of former students who I am fond of. And in the midst of all that, there've been a few interesting outings and good dinners with Yungnane and his family -- the fireworks for the Festival of Lanterns, riding bikes at Cijin Island, eating the still-alive sea urchin, and plenty of others that I've written about. Saturday, we had our last little trip together, at least for this time around.
They picked me up a little after 9 AM and we went first to this little breakfast place we'd been to once before, a very busy place where the ladies cook their food right out on the sidewalk in front and you squeeze in between the stoves on one side and the table with all the hot food on the other, grab what you want, line up to pay for it, and then go find a place to sit down. After a little green onion pancake thing and some veggie dumplings, along with a soy milk, we were on our way. We headed north on the freeway, turned east towards the mountains, climbed up a few hundred meters and came to a little town that had a number of hot spring spas, where we were going to spend the next few hours. The facility had gender-separated indoor rooms with a hot pool, small cooler tub, and wet and dry saunas, as well as a gender-mixed outdoor facility where we spent most of our time. A main attraction out there was the mineral mud you could smear all over your body, which we all did, and the boys did multiple times. There was one hot pool where you could get in with the mud on your body, so that the water itself was saturated with those minerals. There was also another "clean" hot pool and then a cool pool, so we rotated among those. There was also a big swimming pool, and even though it wasn't a hot day, swimming around for a bit felt good. Then there was maybe the most unique part of the experience -- sitting with your feet in a pool where a bunch of little fish come and nibble the dead skin off. I figured why not, so I sat there for awhile as they nibbled away -- it was a little ticklish but other than that not a big deal. The fish ranged in size from about an inch to a big one about 4-5 inches long, and I could definitely feel it when it was him who was doing the nibbling!
We spent about three hours at the spa, then headed over to a restaurant on the side of the road heading back down the hill, with a view out over the river valley back behind us. The restaurant's specialty was chicken, which they cooked as a whole, I think by dipping it into a big pot of what I presume was boiling water, although I don't know if there were any seasonings in the water. I do know that they removed the insides of the bird and stuffed it with garlic gloves and a bunch of leaves -- think the equivalent of big bay leaves -- to add some flavor, and then we dipped the meat into a pepper seasoning. When I say whole chicken, I mean with head and feet, which came on the tray with the rest of the chicken, albeit already chopped off. I guess I wasn't entirely surprised to learn that they don't eat the head, as that seemed a little extreme even for folks who do eat shrimp and fish heads (one of the other dishes they ordered included fried little fish and shrimp that they ate whole -- I passed on that). But Yungnane did say they all liked chicken feet, which I think is pretty normal in Chinese culture, although I didn't notice if anyone ate these particular feet. We had other dishes along with the chicken and the shrimp/fish plate, including one made with mountain pig which, when they told me that, I said, kind of questioning, "shan zhu" which I knew was the literal translation of those two words, and Yungnane looked pleasantly surprised and said "yes, that's right!" There were two green veggie dishes of things I'm not sure I've had before but both tasty, one served hot with garlic mixed in and the other served cold with mayonnaise (go figure) spread on the top. And Yungnane and I split a big Taiwan beer, which tasted pretty good after all the sweating we did back at the spa.
Before heading back to Tainan, we stopped at a funky place where some kind of crack in the earth had created both a little spring as well as the release of some natural gas that burns continuously -- the sign said the place was first discovered (at least by a Chinese guy -- I bet the indigenous folks on the island knew about it before then) back in 1701. It's crazy that that fire's been burning for at least 300 years, but for all we know, maybe it's been burning for 300,000! We lingered at that spot for awhile, including a few purchases of food or drink from one or another of the many store/restaurants lining the walkway out to the Water Fire spring, and got back into the car at about 5:30. It was a sleepy ride back to Tainan, but I got alert for long enough to get a picture of an amazing orange sun burning through the haze as it lowered towards the horizon. We pulled into town just as it was setting, and since I wasn't yet ready for dinner, we decided instead to go get some coffee and a pastry. With Yungnane and I both awake now, his wife started asking for my thoughts on some interesting questions about religion, the 2012 scenario, UFOs, etc., so we chatted about all sorts of serious topics as we ate our snacks and I shared with them some of my crazy ideas about what I think is going on on the planet. Of course, Yungnane had to translate everything I said in order for her to understand, so I have no idea what actually got transmitted as my response to any of her questions.
As we headed back towards my dorm, Yungnane pointed out the building where his wife takes painting lessons. That was noteworthy since, when they arrived in the morning, they presented me with a painting that she had painted -- quite lovely, actually, some purple mountains behind a tree-lined lake. When they gave me the painting, they also gave me a pencil drawing that Jack had done, I think an image of, or at least inspired by, one of the creatures from one of the fantasy games that kids play these days. It's clear that they're both talented, which makes me wonder if or how it is that artistic talent is passed down genetically. Yungnane and I agreed that we had precious little of it -- I told him that drawing stick figures still gives me a little trouble. Anyway, as we approached the dorm, Yungnane was expressing his appreciation for my being here, and I guess I can tell that his family has also enjoyed having me around -- Jack, who is always being encouraged by his parents to talk to me in English -- decided to express his affection with a least one phrase he knew, chiming in from the back seat with a nice "I love you"! We all got out of the car, I got my artwork out of the trunk, gave a hug to all four of them and said goodbye to his family. (I saw Yungnane briefly this morning to say goodbye). I don't think you can spend that much time with people, under enjoyable circumstances I mean, without developing some bonds and attachments to them. I suspect that's an inherent, essential property of our human-ness. Which I guess is why the Buddha pointed out that "life is suffering." Suffering is a direct result of our attachments, and in this case that suffering manifests as the sadness I feel at leaving behind some nice people who I am fond of and have shared good times with.
So, while it's fair to say that I have some ambivalence about leaving Taiwan, the strength of those emotions puts me closer to the "indifferent" side of the meaning of that word -- I could stay or I could go, and be fine either way. In contrast, my ambivalence about returning to the US is much stronger in both directions, both looking forward to it and not. The downside is dominated by my frustration with what Amerika has become as a country, and the miserably dysfunctional role our nation-state is playing in the community of nations. Really, I am ashamed at this point to be an American -- I am dismayed by the progressive onset of the police state mentality, and by the stories I read about police brutality, TSA gropings, whistleblowers dying and disappearing, and other manifestations of government repression; I am horrified by the number of people we are killing in way too many countries around the world, and by the amount of depleted uranium we are spreading around those countries to destroy future generations as well; I am disgusted by our continuing support for industries that are destroying our planet, and by the lies our leaders tell us to cover-up how bad the problems are; I am angry at the sell-out mainstream corporate media who disseminate propaganda as though it were news, and at the gullible majority of the citizenry who still believe what they're being told; I am flabbergasted by how much of the American people's "wealth" has been stolen from them by the banksters, and by the fact that the people haven't really done a damn thing to try to stop them or make them "pay;" I am apprehensive about the coming collapse of the US dollar and all its economic ramifications, and about the effects all that will have on the people I love.
When I'm in the US, there's sort of a constant underlying buzz of cognitive dissonance in my consciousness, the disconnect between all those things I feel about the country and my actual presence there and participation in American society. That disconnect is a big part of the reason why I have spent as much time out of the country as I have over the last number of years, especially after it was clear to me that 9/11 was a false flag event and that the bad guys had suckered us into believing that a new Crusade was necessary to retaliate against our purported enemies. I'm tired of all the lies our government tells us to make us believe what they want us to believe, and to be honest, it is tiresome for me to live in a place where most people believe the lies and those who don't are ridiculed and discounted. There's so much about this silly bin Laden story that doesn't add up, so much counter-factual evidence, so many signs that they're just BSing us, and yet it sounds like Americans are pretty much swallowing all it hook, line, and sinker. And with the predictable "Al-CIAduh" threats to blow something up in retaliation, the fascists running the show now have a good excuse to "tighten security" some more, implement whatever new restrictions on our freedoms they feel like. I've got to pass through security in American airports three times in the next month or so, and I'm not at all excited about that. Even if/when getting through security is not a hassle, it's just an in-your-face reminder to me of all the bad things Amerika has become. I resent the whole phenomenon, as an unconstitutional search "without probable cause."
The fact that I'll be passing through three airports soon points to another reason why I have some emotional reluctance to return to the US. The reality is that I'm only going to be there for a month before heading off to Europe for much of the summer. So really, now is the time when being a nomad on sabbatical is going to get challenging. Like I said, it has been pretty easy living here, things have been stable and organized, but from here on out things are going to be a little more up in the air about where I'm going and what I'll be doing. I've got about a week and a half in LA, then another week in Phoenix, and then a conference in New York. That's what is definite, and I know where I'm sleeping up until June 5. But then I am going to be camping in the Adirondacks for a week before flying to Copenhagen to start traveling around Scandinavia for awhile. I've booked a campsite for my first two nights camping in NY, but I've still got a lot of leg work to do to line up where I'm going to be staying in Norway, which is the first country I'll be traveling around. So returning to the US means becoming a little "unsettled" if you will, plus having to allocate a bunch of time online to do the necessary planning. I guess the bottom line is that my life gets more challenging upon leaving Taiwan, and it's hard to look forward to that.
All that said, there are definitely some things I am looking forward to, some reasons why I'm excited to be getting back home. I am most psyched about getting back out to Sylmar to play disc with J and Bryan and Boehm. I've been pretty sedentary here, and there hasn't been a lot of "play" time, so I'm definitely looking forward to a little co-recreation! I also have USC's graduation this week, which is why I set my return date for now. Two of my PhD students, who I've been working closely with for a number of years, are graduating, so I definitely want to be part of that celebration with them. Beyond those specifics, I'm looking forward to seeing friends and family, people I love and care about, folks I haven't had much communication with while I've been here. As my frustration with America has grown over the years, and I've contemplated the possibility of trying to move somewhere else, I've realized that the toughest part of doing that would be leaving behind nearly everyone I care about, and being pretty much on my own wherever I chose to go. Being on my own wouldn't necessarily be the tough part -- I'm OK with being alone at this point in my life. But not being able to spend time with people I love, indefinitely, I think that would be hard.
When we were talking over cake and coffee the other night about all the craziness that may be coming down the pike in the next 18 months, Yungnane assured me that if things go to hell in the US like I think they might, I was certainly welcome to come back to Tainan. It is interesting that I have a stronger personal network here in Taiwan than I do pretty much anywhere else on this planet, in terms of the "social capital" I could draw on to help me stay alive, for example, if the world goes into survival mode. That probably isn't entirely true, since I am tapped into the "Trojan family" and thus part of a strong community there. But in the midst of LA, even that powerful network may not be able to get access to the key resources -- food, water -- people would need to stay alive. Here in Taiwan, in terms of my own personal connections, good relationships with people who might go a little out of their way to help me out if need be, my network is pretty good, extending from Taipei to Kaohsiung with a number of points in between. Not that Taiwan is the place I would most want to ride out the storm -- the northeast coast of Brasil seems much more enticing -- but one thing this island has going for it is that it could probably come pretty close to being self-sufficient in terms of food if circumstances forced them into that. And one thing I will say about Taiwanese culture -- people that I interact with in stores and restaurants and wherever -- they tend to be cheery and polite with a ready smile. When I mentioned that to Jose, he said that he was proud of his countrymen for having that quality. So all in all, I think things would be a lot saner here than in LA if some kind of global chaos were to ensue.
I don't know if we are going to get to that point or not, and certainly I hope we can avoid it, but underlying all my other emotions about heading back to the US and into an uncertain future is my concern about the radiation spreading around the planet, the possibility/likelihood that it will continue to get even worse, and the reality that soon there may not be any real safe place to be. A few weeks ago I started wondering if I should skip my Scandinavia trip, as I was wondering about the wisdom of walking around outdoors "unprotected" for all that time. Given the location of Japan and the nature of the wind currents, it seems like the northern hemisphere may have it worse than the southern, at least for the time being, so I started thinking I should head south instead. But I guess two things led me to conclude that there was no sense not going to Europe. First, whatever the effects of radiation are, in terms of causing cancer, etc., I guess it is "probablistic" in the sense that it increases the risk of getting cancer but -- in the absence of a high enough dosage -- won't necessarily do so. Since I am healthier than most people, and have some faith in the notion of "mind over matter" when it comes to health issues, I figure I have some control over whether or not I will suffer any long-term damage caused by whatever radiation is now circulating through the atmosphere. Second, I guess I reached the point of realizing that the amount of uncertainty regarding what is happening, what will happen, how bad things will get, where things will be the worst, and all that, is high enough that it doesn't make a lot of sense to try to plan around it, and much more reasonable to just go ahead and live my life the way I want, the way I have it planned, and deal with whatever consequences whenever they come. In short, it didn't seem like a good idea to bail on my trip just because of some vague fear about what is or isn't going to happen down the road.
So, barring any unforeseen events that preclude me from doing so, I'll be getting on a plane in about 24 hours, and then three hours earlier I'll be landing in LA (I love crossing the international dateline this direction, so you get to live a few hours of your life over again!). I'm quite sure that I will be happy to be back, as I usually am, and I definitely look forward to sleeping in peaceful Santa Monica tomorrow night (even if it is in the little motel room -- bathroom down the hall -- that I've booked for the week). Regardless of all my thoughts and feelings about the US as a country, I have to say I really do like living in Santa Monica, and it's always good to be there when I'm not somewhere else. I also know that I'll be excited soon enough about heading east from there and to points beyond, on the continued adventure that awaits me in the midst of all this craziness unfolding on the planet. I'm gonna go find some peaceful little Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle and spend the summer solstice contemplating the mysteries of the universe in the glow of the midnight sun!
Peace and love, everybody -- this is Peter in Taiwan, signing out.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Talking about UFOs
It's Saturday night, 10:30 PM. I got back a little while ago from dinner with the Yang family. This time I invited them out, dinner on me, although as usual they drove, picked the restaurant and the food, and in this case, brought a bottle of wine that Yungnane and I split. (I think his wife doesn't drink -- I've never seen her do so.) Yungnane had given me a choice of red wine or Kinmen Kaoliang "white wine," which is definitely a misnomer since it is really a 58-proof liquor that they make in Kinmen, which is where Jose and I visited last weekend. I explained all about it in the post that got deleted -- we had dinner with the vice-president of the company that makes it as well as one of the guys directly involved in making sure the liquor comes out tasting the way they want it. They of course brought along a bottle to our dinner together, so I had enough Kaoliang liquor that night to last for awhile. I was happy to drink red wine tonight with what turned out to be a rather spicy dinner.
My trip with Jose was good. We rented a scooter and essentially spent our two days there riding round the island of Kinmen as well as a smaller island, Lieyu or "little Kinmen," that was a short ferry ride away. Kinmen is right off the shore of mainland China, across from the city of Xiamen, whose skyline across the water is already impressive and still growing -- we could see the big cranes building some new skyscrapers. Our sightseeing experience was dominated by the presence of the military on the two islands, and their role as Taiwan's first line of defense against potential Chinese aggression. Back in the 1950s, China and Taiwan took turns shelling each other, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of shells hitting Kinmen over an extended period of time. The people in Kinmen realized at some point that the high-quality steel from the shells could be refashioned into knives, so after awhile Kinmen became known as a place where excellent knives are produced. In August of 1958, China actually stormed the beaches of Kinmen with 9000 soldiers (maybe even more, but that's one number I read), but the Taiwanese mounted a successful resistance that led to the surrender of the Chinese troops after a couple of days of fighting in and around the villages dotting that part of the island. (My deleted post explained how this battle and the on-going tension between the two sides was actually a continuation of the Nationalist vs. Communist civil war that resulted in the Nationalists essentially retreating to Taiwan with the Communists taking over the mainland in 1947.) Somewhere in the midst of all that tension little Kinmen was well-fortified in terms of preventing an attack, including a large number of land mines buried along the coast of much of the island. As we traveled on our scooter along the road circumnavigating the island, there was a constant presence of barbed wire fence with little red signs warning that there were land mines buried on the other side. Jose told me that some company had been contracted to remove the mines, and later on we did indeed come across a crew of men who had been hired to do that work -- their orange jumpsuits and metal detectors gave them away! Jose stopped and asked a guy a question, but he asked it in English so I figured he assumed the guy was not Chinese. When he asked where they were from, the guy said Cambodia. I thought that was a pretty interesting case of outsourcing by Taiwan's government...
It's now Sunday night -- I knew I wasn't gonna get too far last night, and that I'd likely be writing this post in bits and pieces over the next couple of days. On Friday, I finished a rough first draft of the paper I'm writing with Yungnane, which now means putting lots of finishing touches on before it is really ready to go. He and I are meeting next Wed. to go over lots of details I wanted to discuss with him, and in the meantime I'm checking references, tracking down citations, etc. -- the detail work that makes academic writing a bit of a grind. I gotta admit, I kinda like the freedom of a blog, where I can pretty much say whatever I want however I want. (Well, OK, no, not in Chinese.) There's a blogger named Les Visible, who has the Smoking Mirrors website I link to under Favorite Blogs, who actually has four, I think it is, different blogs that he writes, each with a voice a little different than the others, maybe targeted to slightly different audiences. I've read a lot of his Smoking Mirrors posts, and he frequently verbalizes the very same sort of things I've just been reading and thinking about. If I want to keep blogging after I'm done in Taiwan, I think I'm going to either have to create a new blog or this one will indicate that I am still "in Taiwan" even though I'll really be in some other part of the world. With a new blog, maybe I could use a different voice -- hmm, have to think about that.
I've enjoyed writing the descriptions of some of what I've been doing here, but I also have to admit that, with all the interesting, crazy things going on in the world, it was always tempting to write about global events rather than the ultimately pretty trivial details of my experiences here in Taiwan. I did try to provide links to lots of interesting material that I came across in my daily scanning of news and information and opinions on the internet, but also made the choice to just provide the links without saying much about them in the posts. I have no idea if anyone has clicked through on any of those links, but I suppose just scanning the titles provides a pretty good clue of some of the things that I'm interested in and intrigued by.
One of those, obviously, is UFOs. Back in 1995, after I got tenure at USC, all of a sudden I had a little more free time and flexibility than I'd had for the previous six years. And during those six years, the "world wide web" pretty much came into being, with all sorts of information now available online and easy to get access to. With free time to explore a bit, one of the things I was curious enough about to start looking into was the UFO phenomenon. Starting that search with an open mind, it wasn't long before I had seen enough information and evidence to draw the conclusion that Earth probably is being visited by entities from places beyond our world, and that "the government" (and this could mean some sort of "shadow government" that is really calling the shots) has been covering up their knowledge of that fact for quite some time. For a number of years now, there have been groups actively working to try to get the government to "disclose" its knowledge about the existence of aliens and, presumably, their access to alien technology. (This ties in to the "free energy" issue, which is the "game-changer" technology we need to move global society forward into a new paradigm.) These folks are not kooks -- a number of them are serious researchers who have done the hard, time-consuming work of trying to track down and verify UFO events, get access to government documents, build the case about a cover-up, etc. Anyway, that's one storyline that I've paid a little attention to over the years -- keeping my eye out for new evidence (eg, an astronaut being quoted as acknowledging that there are UFOs, the story of lots of folks in Stephenville, Texas seeing a UFO traveling near Bush's ranch at Crawford, cool videos of UFOs that people post online, etc.) and for information about efforts to expose the long-standing cover-up (eg, a press conference at the National Press Club where lots of reputable people provided information about their contacts with UFOs, news about governments providing access to their UFO files, and the first story I posted when I started this blog, that Chinese TV announced that the Obama administration was close to making the disclosure announcement).
With that as a little backdrop, it was interesting to me that, on the way home from dinner with the Yang family a couple weeks ago, Yungnane translated his wife as asking me, out of the blue, what I thought about UFOs. So I said that I believe they're real, that there's lots of evidence from lots of very credible witnesses that something is flying around our skies that transcends the technological capabilities of the human race (to the extent that we know), and that there's good reason to believe that the government is covering up information relevant to the above. I explained that this had been one of the issues I had paid some attention to over the years, but when Yungnane concluded that I must then be an "expert" on the subject, I assured him I wasn't at all. But then the next morning I got an email from him asking me if I would talk to his class about UFOs! The request surprised me, first just that he would allocate time in his class to this topic, and second that he would want me to come talk to his students about it. So I assured him again that I am not an expert on the topic but that I'd be glad to talk to people about what I've learned over the years. That class is tomorrow night. The plan is for me to first give my talk on collaborative governance, which I presented in Taipei with Yungnane as translator, and then after that to talk about UFOs. At first I thought it would be a funny juxtaposition, but the irony is that my interest in collaboration and my interest in UFOs sort of came along at the same time in my life, and the two topics are kind of fused together in my own personal narrative as they relate to the "new paradigm" I've been talking about since way back then. So I'm hoping it will be easy enough for me to segue from one to the other tomorrow night...
It's Monday night now, and I've finished the class. I gave the collaborative governance talk, with Yungnane translating as we went, and then there were a fair number of questions afterwards, so when all that was done it was about 8:30, and Yungnane told them that I was now going to talk about UFOs til class ended at 9, and there was sort of a collective "oooh" from the class. And these were mostly working professionals in their 30s and 40s, not a young crowd, so without much introduction or segue, he just let me start talking. I told them some of what I explained above, about my search for information and the conclusions I drew, and then I elaborated on a few specifics that I think are interesting and thought they might too. Once I had agreed with Yungnane to do this, I looked around on the internet a bit for useful information, and somewhere came upon a documentary video made by a guy named James Fox that I watched last week (its' the history channel documentary on UFOs that I gave the link for under Cool Videos). This documentary focused on a press conference held in 2007 at the National Press Club in DC where a bunch of high level military officers, pilots, etc. shared their first-hand information about UFO sightings (some pretty up close and personal). It also included some conversations with many of those guys as they elaborated on the stories they told at the press conference. I had read about some of those stories before, but certainly not all, and to see and hear these guys explain what they know, all I can say is that it would be pretty hard for anyone but the most narrow-minded skeptic to watch this video and not take the UFO phenomenon seriously.
Yungnane's class is on public policy analysis, but I used the time I had left (actually, nobody got up to leave at 9 PM so we went a little long!) to cover some basics of the story and only scratched the surface on some of the relevant policy issues the existence of UFOs suggests. But that's what's kind of crazy to me -- the implications of an alien presence, with whatever advanced technologies they have, are just ASTOUNDING, and yet we are collectively indifferent about the whole subject. Sure, individually, everyone's got their beliefs, their stories, their curiosities, their best guesses, but collectively we have essentially decided not to talk about it. Fine, you've got your tabloid stories, but everyone knows that's not "real" news, and people can talk about UFOs among friends and family, but a major news organization is not likely to touch the topic with a ten-foot pole, and our "leaders" are happy to act like they've never really given the matter much thought at all. Apparently the military denies doing any investigations of UFO phenomena, which seems kind of remarkable if it were actually true! Essentially they're saying that they just don't care enough about it to look into it, which is undoubtedly a lie, but my point is that they can claim to be disinterested and apparently that just seems fine or normal. Even when there are major events, sightings seen by hundreds or thousands of people -- like the famous "Phoenix lights" from back in the 90s -- they make the news for awhile, no one really comes up with a good explanation for what everyone saw, but pretty soon life moves on and people go back to focusing on what they normally focus on and eventually the mystery and intrigue fade away and the event itself retreats into irrelevance. Really, it boggles my mind how Americans can remain agnostic and indifferent about a potential alien presence in the midst of all the evidence suggesting something funky is going on. I suppose maybe it's really just denial -- I guess the fear associated with the idea of advanced space beings hovering in our atmosphere is enough to make people just want to ignore the whole situation. Understandable, maybe, but not very wise.
Besides, why should we assume that any space visitors would inevitably have negative intentions towards us? Why not expect that they would come in peace, or even to give us some help? I figure the main answer there is that we are projecting onto them what we believe about ourselves -- that humans are inherently selfish, competitive, and warlike with an innate drive to expand our domain. And of course the media play on this perspective, by giving us blockbuster movies about fending off alien attacks that subtly or not just serve to feed the fear. So yes, if aliens are anything like what we expect them to be, like what we believe humans to be, then we could be screwed. But I'm going with the hypothesis that it's not so simple, that there might be some "good guy" aliens and some "bad guy" aliens, with different motives and modi operandi, but including some who really would like to help us get out of our mess and have some means at their disposal to do so. One version of events, that I mentioned in class tonight, is that the ETs started paying a whole lot more attention to us earthlings after we demonstrated our capacity for nuclear weapons -- the explanation being that nuclear explosions are a greater risk to the whole space-time fabric than our scientists are aware of, such that explosions here can cause problems elsewhere in the cosmos where some of these space brothers are trying to live their peaceful happy lives. Once earth humans started putting them at risk, I guess they felt a need to monitor things here a little more closely and make sure we didn't do anything stupid out of our ignorance about how the whole system works (ie, the "unified field" the physicists discovered last century). The ETs' interest in things nuclear also seems to have been demonstrated in the frequent UFO sightings in Japan around the time of the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown. I would bet money that they are working "behind the scenes" to prevent that radiation from being as bad as it otherwise would have been.
On the other hand, really, I have no idea what's going on. I feel very confident about the claim that living entities from beyond the confines of our little 4D world are appearing in our biosphere, as the evidence in support of that hypothesis is overwhelming (especially compared to the alternative explanation that everyone who "sees" a UFO is crazy or hallucinating or on drugs or just confused by some optical illusion). You can't explain away the Phoenix lights that way. Or the officers and pilots in the documentary, at the National Press Club. Something is out there, of that I'm sure. Who they are and what they're doing here -- well, I've got my conjectures and conclusions based on my filtering of all the information on the topic I've digested over the years, but I have no way of knowing yet how much of that is right and how much of it isn't. But to be honest, I'm kind of expecting to get some answers about all that before too much longer. As I told the students tonight, and as I say one way or another to lots of students I teach, any day now...
Given my confidence that we are being visited by beings from elsewhere (footnote here: elsewhere doesn't just have to mean some other part of the physical 4D universe as we know it, but could include other dimensions that essentially co-exist with ours but beyond our perceptual awareness), a corollary conclusion is that the government has indeed been covering up their knowledge of, and probably some interaction with, some of these beings (dead and/or alive). When I brought this possibility up in class tonight, one of the ladies just spontaneously asked "why," and the first answer I gave was because of their fear that there would be mass panic if the populace knew that aliens were hanging out within range of contact. If things really did get started with Roswell in 1947, it's easy enough to imagine that the powers-that-be would want to keep the story under wraps at that point to prevent any kind of large-scale panic, right in the wake of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War, etc. But I suggested to the students that all those governments that have contributed to the cover-up are now in a bit of a double-bind. Even if they wanted to let the people know that the UFOs are real, if they felt we could now handle the info without going nuts, they would essentially have to confess that they've been lying to us all these years. And what government (read: politician) is ever going to do that!
On the other hand, an argument can be made that there is a slow process of "disclosure" already underway, as at least a few governments around the world have been opening their UFO files, making them accessible to those who want to review them, which will have the effect of letting "official" information spread out to the public, adding credibility and legitimacy to whatever information is contained there. In the US, I don't think they've gone that far yet, but there are a number of researchers who for years have been asking for and gaining access to US files through FOIA requests, in an ongoing effort to get the government to provide more information than it has shared about what it knows about the phenomenon. The 2007 National Press Club event was affiliated with a group called The Disclosure Project, which I think was founded by some of the key researchers who have for years been documenting the government's cover-up efforts and trying to uncover the secret entities that have had responsibility for dealing with UFO activities. By getting extremely credible witnesses to insinuate that the government withheld information from the public about real events that they were directly involved in, The Disclosure Project keeps making it harder and harder for the government to continue to pretend that it doesn't have any interest in or information about the topic. So rather than just coming out and admitting it, all at once, like I guess the Chinese were predicting Obama was on the verge of doing, it seems like the strategy is to let the realization about the reality of UFOs diffuse more slowly and incrementally -- open up the information bit by bit, let people get acclimated to the idea over time rather than have to deal with the strong reactions of a sudden and explicit verification of the facts...
OK, now it's Tuesday night, time to wrap this up. I've gone back and read what I wrote above, so I guess now I have just a couple more things I want to add, to try to bring a little closure to the story. If there is an alien presence, and if the powers-that-be are aware of that fact, then it is reasonable to conclude that our present circumstances are likely to bring that information out into the open one way or the other. Between the Gulf oil spill and Japan's nuclear disaster, the planet has taken two huge, serious blows to the health and well-being of the global ecosystem that keeps us alive. The full-scale effects of these events may still take some years to do their damage, but that damage is likely to be severe. In the short-run, it will likely contribute to higher food prices and economic problems more generally, which will probably result in even more widespread unrest around the world as the masses get more and more angry at the banksters and their corporate minions who are the cause of most of these problems.
If there is a systemic economic collapse, there will be the need for some kind of monetary system reform, of the kind Soros and his crowd as well as the BRICS partners have all been discussing over the last few weeks. That may be a moment of truth for the planet, to see whether those implementing a new system create one that continues to privilege the financial elites or one that is more populist in its design. In other words, that's sort of the crux of the matter as to what the nature of the "new world order" will be. Will it be a new world order still run by the elites for the elites, or will the new monetary system signal a change to something new and different? I think that, behind the scenes, at the top level of the game, there is a sort of battle going on around this issue. To the extent that our bankster rulers represent and embody the dark forces on the planet, I have a feeling there are also some lightworkers, some "white knights," who are operating at high levels of the game countering the efforts of the dark cabal to impose their system of world-wide control. If that's true, if there really are two alternative strategies that are being proposed and offered to global leaders as a way to get out of our current financial fiasco (ie, systemic bankruptcy -- so much more debt spread throughout the system than there is money to pay it all off), then the geo-political alignments that are in play these days may very well reflect who's aligning with whom on which side of that fight. (That's just a hunch, I have no information to that effect.)
I guess my point here is that the big issues taking place in the world right now, here in our 4D material plane, may actually be manifestations of a more metaphysical battle between light and dark, with the latter doing everything they can to maintain control of a system they created that is now falling apart all around them, and the former working diligently to wrest control of the planet away from this dark cabal. My understanding is that the ETs are not indifferent to the outcome, nor just passive observers of the process. While there may very well be some ET types (eg, the "reptilians" that David Icke has brought to the world's attention) that are conspiring with the dark forces, there appear to be some who are working to help free humanity from the constraints imposed upon us by the dark, constraints that they've been developing for most of the last 12,000 years or so. And part of humanity gaining this freedom is to become aware that we are not alone, that reality is quite a bit more expansive than we have been led to believe, that our little 4D reality is embedded in a very complex, multidimensional universe (multiverse) that is filled with all sorts of beings "living" at lots of different levels of consciousness. And some of those beings are here now, at this "moment in time," to help Gaia and her inhabitants transition to the next, higher level of consciousness (5D). It's this jump to a higher level of consciousness that is the essence of the paradigm shift I've been talking about for so long.
Over the years, teaching about the new paradigm in my classes, and the possibility that it could arrive more quickly than anybody ever thinks is possible, I have sometimes joked that if a UFO ever decides to land and aliens get out, the paradigm is going to change immediately. But it's not a joke. If a UFO ever decides to land and aliens get out, the paradigm is going to change immediately. The impression I've gotten is that, up til now, they have largely been constrained from doing this, that there is some kind of rule that says they are supposed to wait until they are invited, in a sense. Thus, disclosure -- if it ever comes -- will almost be tantamount to an invitation, because once the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, there won't be a lot of good reasons for them to remain mostly hidden and elusive. They may as well land so that we can start figuring out what's really going on, and step over the threshold into a new era of human civilization.
The dark forces running the planet want to avoid disclosure, because it essentially means that they have to give up control. In other words, the dark forces have been actively working against the process of our evolution to a higher level of consciousness, because the only way they can maintain their power, and in some sense maybe even their existence, is to keep us functioning at this lower level. Rumors are they would rather "take the planet down" than give up their control, which may well explain why in the case of both the Gulf and Japan they made decisions that increased rather than decreased the amount of damage caused by the original disaster. Other rumors are that they have planned a mass population die-off, maybe in part to bring the world back closer to its carrying capacity of human beings, and that they've built huge underground bunkers where they think they could go live for a few years if things got too unbearable here on the surface. I don't know how much if any of that is true, but I would have to say that whoever is calling the shots on the planet sure seems to be doing more to mess things up than to make things better. Maybe that's intentional.
If the dark forces want either control or destruction, and are doing everything they can to pursue those goals, then the light beings are here to make sure we transition successfully into 5D consciousness. One of the cool things about 5D consciousness is the recognition that darkness is an illusion, a perceptual error associated with not having enough light. In 5D there's enough light that there is no darkness, which means that the global transition to 5D consciousness -- which may well be the event implied by the end of the cycle in the old Mayan calendar, which of course has become associated with the year 2012 -- will entail the removal of the dark energies from the planet. That's why lots of old control systems are falling apart, or losing their legitimacy, or facing a crisis, or whatever. If there really is an "end" to a cycle that is giving rise to a shift in collective consciousness, then it could be that there is some point in time when this process is "supposed" to be completed, such that more and more events are likely to transpire that move the process along more and more quickly. The Gulf and Japan have increased the urgency of discontinuing our destructive patterns, and to the extent that these toxins in some way also threaten the health and well-being of Gaia herself (not to mention all life on the planet), there is probably growing urgency among the light beings to escalate the process of transformation.
So, I guess what I'm saying is this -- don't be surprised if UFOs start making themselves even more obvious, if the media start giving a little more serious attention to the possibility of their existence, if governments continue to let out more information about what they know, if insiders or whistleblowers come forward with more information about what's really going on. And who knows, maybe one day a UFO will land, and an alien will get out and say something like "yo, wassup" and then the new paradigm will begin!
My trip with Jose was good. We rented a scooter and essentially spent our two days there riding round the island of Kinmen as well as a smaller island, Lieyu or "little Kinmen," that was a short ferry ride away. Kinmen is right off the shore of mainland China, across from the city of Xiamen, whose skyline across the water is already impressive and still growing -- we could see the big cranes building some new skyscrapers. Our sightseeing experience was dominated by the presence of the military on the two islands, and their role as Taiwan's first line of defense against potential Chinese aggression. Back in the 1950s, China and Taiwan took turns shelling each other, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of shells hitting Kinmen over an extended period of time. The people in Kinmen realized at some point that the high-quality steel from the shells could be refashioned into knives, so after awhile Kinmen became known as a place where excellent knives are produced. In August of 1958, China actually stormed the beaches of Kinmen with 9000 soldiers (maybe even more, but that's one number I read), but the Taiwanese mounted a successful resistance that led to the surrender of the Chinese troops after a couple of days of fighting in and around the villages dotting that part of the island. (My deleted post explained how this battle and the on-going tension between the two sides was actually a continuation of the Nationalist vs. Communist civil war that resulted in the Nationalists essentially retreating to Taiwan with the Communists taking over the mainland in 1947.) Somewhere in the midst of all that tension little Kinmen was well-fortified in terms of preventing an attack, including a large number of land mines buried along the coast of much of the island. As we traveled on our scooter along the road circumnavigating the island, there was a constant presence of barbed wire fence with little red signs warning that there were land mines buried on the other side. Jose told me that some company had been contracted to remove the mines, and later on we did indeed come across a crew of men who had been hired to do that work -- their orange jumpsuits and metal detectors gave them away! Jose stopped and asked a guy a question, but he asked it in English so I figured he assumed the guy was not Chinese. When he asked where they were from, the guy said Cambodia. I thought that was a pretty interesting case of outsourcing by Taiwan's government...
It's now Sunday night -- I knew I wasn't gonna get too far last night, and that I'd likely be writing this post in bits and pieces over the next couple of days. On Friday, I finished a rough first draft of the paper I'm writing with Yungnane, which now means putting lots of finishing touches on before it is really ready to go. He and I are meeting next Wed. to go over lots of details I wanted to discuss with him, and in the meantime I'm checking references, tracking down citations, etc. -- the detail work that makes academic writing a bit of a grind. I gotta admit, I kinda like the freedom of a blog, where I can pretty much say whatever I want however I want. (Well, OK, no, not in Chinese.) There's a blogger named Les Visible, who has the Smoking Mirrors website I link to under Favorite Blogs, who actually has four, I think it is, different blogs that he writes, each with a voice a little different than the others, maybe targeted to slightly different audiences. I've read a lot of his Smoking Mirrors posts, and he frequently verbalizes the very same sort of things I've just been reading and thinking about. If I want to keep blogging after I'm done in Taiwan, I think I'm going to either have to create a new blog or this one will indicate that I am still "in Taiwan" even though I'll really be in some other part of the world. With a new blog, maybe I could use a different voice -- hmm, have to think about that.
I've enjoyed writing the descriptions of some of what I've been doing here, but I also have to admit that, with all the interesting, crazy things going on in the world, it was always tempting to write about global events rather than the ultimately pretty trivial details of my experiences here in Taiwan. I did try to provide links to lots of interesting material that I came across in my daily scanning of news and information and opinions on the internet, but also made the choice to just provide the links without saying much about them in the posts. I have no idea if anyone has clicked through on any of those links, but I suppose just scanning the titles provides a pretty good clue of some of the things that I'm interested in and intrigued by.
One of those, obviously, is UFOs. Back in 1995, after I got tenure at USC, all of a sudden I had a little more free time and flexibility than I'd had for the previous six years. And during those six years, the "world wide web" pretty much came into being, with all sorts of information now available online and easy to get access to. With free time to explore a bit, one of the things I was curious enough about to start looking into was the UFO phenomenon. Starting that search with an open mind, it wasn't long before I had seen enough information and evidence to draw the conclusion that Earth probably is being visited by entities from places beyond our world, and that "the government" (and this could mean some sort of "shadow government" that is really calling the shots) has been covering up their knowledge of that fact for quite some time. For a number of years now, there have been groups actively working to try to get the government to "disclose" its knowledge about the existence of aliens and, presumably, their access to alien technology. (This ties in to the "free energy" issue, which is the "game-changer" technology we need to move global society forward into a new paradigm.) These folks are not kooks -- a number of them are serious researchers who have done the hard, time-consuming work of trying to track down and verify UFO events, get access to government documents, build the case about a cover-up, etc. Anyway, that's one storyline that I've paid a little attention to over the years -- keeping my eye out for new evidence (eg, an astronaut being quoted as acknowledging that there are UFOs, the story of lots of folks in Stephenville, Texas seeing a UFO traveling near Bush's ranch at Crawford, cool videos of UFOs that people post online, etc.) and for information about efforts to expose the long-standing cover-up (eg, a press conference at the National Press Club where lots of reputable people provided information about their contacts with UFOs, news about governments providing access to their UFO files, and the first story I posted when I started this blog, that Chinese TV announced that the Obama administration was close to making the disclosure announcement).
With that as a little backdrop, it was interesting to me that, on the way home from dinner with the Yang family a couple weeks ago, Yungnane translated his wife as asking me, out of the blue, what I thought about UFOs. So I said that I believe they're real, that there's lots of evidence from lots of very credible witnesses that something is flying around our skies that transcends the technological capabilities of the human race (to the extent that we know), and that there's good reason to believe that the government is covering up information relevant to the above. I explained that this had been one of the issues I had paid some attention to over the years, but when Yungnane concluded that I must then be an "expert" on the subject, I assured him I wasn't at all. But then the next morning I got an email from him asking me if I would talk to his class about UFOs! The request surprised me, first just that he would allocate time in his class to this topic, and second that he would want me to come talk to his students about it. So I assured him again that I am not an expert on the topic but that I'd be glad to talk to people about what I've learned over the years. That class is tomorrow night. The plan is for me to first give my talk on collaborative governance, which I presented in Taipei with Yungnane as translator, and then after that to talk about UFOs. At first I thought it would be a funny juxtaposition, but the irony is that my interest in collaboration and my interest in UFOs sort of came along at the same time in my life, and the two topics are kind of fused together in my own personal narrative as they relate to the "new paradigm" I've been talking about since way back then. So I'm hoping it will be easy enough for me to segue from one to the other tomorrow night...
It's Monday night now, and I've finished the class. I gave the collaborative governance talk, with Yungnane translating as we went, and then there were a fair number of questions afterwards, so when all that was done it was about 8:30, and Yungnane told them that I was now going to talk about UFOs til class ended at 9, and there was sort of a collective "oooh" from the class. And these were mostly working professionals in their 30s and 40s, not a young crowd, so without much introduction or segue, he just let me start talking. I told them some of what I explained above, about my search for information and the conclusions I drew, and then I elaborated on a few specifics that I think are interesting and thought they might too. Once I had agreed with Yungnane to do this, I looked around on the internet a bit for useful information, and somewhere came upon a documentary video made by a guy named James Fox that I watched last week (its' the history channel documentary on UFOs that I gave the link for under Cool Videos). This documentary focused on a press conference held in 2007 at the National Press Club in DC where a bunch of high level military officers, pilots, etc. shared their first-hand information about UFO sightings (some pretty up close and personal). It also included some conversations with many of those guys as they elaborated on the stories they told at the press conference. I had read about some of those stories before, but certainly not all, and to see and hear these guys explain what they know, all I can say is that it would be pretty hard for anyone but the most narrow-minded skeptic to watch this video and not take the UFO phenomenon seriously.
Yungnane's class is on public policy analysis, but I used the time I had left (actually, nobody got up to leave at 9 PM so we went a little long!) to cover some basics of the story and only scratched the surface on some of the relevant policy issues the existence of UFOs suggests. But that's what's kind of crazy to me -- the implications of an alien presence, with whatever advanced technologies they have, are just ASTOUNDING, and yet we are collectively indifferent about the whole subject. Sure, individually, everyone's got their beliefs, their stories, their curiosities, their best guesses, but collectively we have essentially decided not to talk about it. Fine, you've got your tabloid stories, but everyone knows that's not "real" news, and people can talk about UFOs among friends and family, but a major news organization is not likely to touch the topic with a ten-foot pole, and our "leaders" are happy to act like they've never really given the matter much thought at all. Apparently the military denies doing any investigations of UFO phenomena, which seems kind of remarkable if it were actually true! Essentially they're saying that they just don't care enough about it to look into it, which is undoubtedly a lie, but my point is that they can claim to be disinterested and apparently that just seems fine or normal. Even when there are major events, sightings seen by hundreds or thousands of people -- like the famous "Phoenix lights" from back in the 90s -- they make the news for awhile, no one really comes up with a good explanation for what everyone saw, but pretty soon life moves on and people go back to focusing on what they normally focus on and eventually the mystery and intrigue fade away and the event itself retreats into irrelevance. Really, it boggles my mind how Americans can remain agnostic and indifferent about a potential alien presence in the midst of all the evidence suggesting something funky is going on. I suppose maybe it's really just denial -- I guess the fear associated with the idea of advanced space beings hovering in our atmosphere is enough to make people just want to ignore the whole situation. Understandable, maybe, but not very wise.
Besides, why should we assume that any space visitors would inevitably have negative intentions towards us? Why not expect that they would come in peace, or even to give us some help? I figure the main answer there is that we are projecting onto them what we believe about ourselves -- that humans are inherently selfish, competitive, and warlike with an innate drive to expand our domain. And of course the media play on this perspective, by giving us blockbuster movies about fending off alien attacks that subtly or not just serve to feed the fear. So yes, if aliens are anything like what we expect them to be, like what we believe humans to be, then we could be screwed. But I'm going with the hypothesis that it's not so simple, that there might be some "good guy" aliens and some "bad guy" aliens, with different motives and modi operandi, but including some who really would like to help us get out of our mess and have some means at their disposal to do so. One version of events, that I mentioned in class tonight, is that the ETs started paying a whole lot more attention to us earthlings after we demonstrated our capacity for nuclear weapons -- the explanation being that nuclear explosions are a greater risk to the whole space-time fabric than our scientists are aware of, such that explosions here can cause problems elsewhere in the cosmos where some of these space brothers are trying to live their peaceful happy lives. Once earth humans started putting them at risk, I guess they felt a need to monitor things here a little more closely and make sure we didn't do anything stupid out of our ignorance about how the whole system works (ie, the "unified field" the physicists discovered last century). The ETs' interest in things nuclear also seems to have been demonstrated in the frequent UFO sightings in Japan around the time of the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown. I would bet money that they are working "behind the scenes" to prevent that radiation from being as bad as it otherwise would have been.
On the other hand, really, I have no idea what's going on. I feel very confident about the claim that living entities from beyond the confines of our little 4D world are appearing in our biosphere, as the evidence in support of that hypothesis is overwhelming (especially compared to the alternative explanation that everyone who "sees" a UFO is crazy or hallucinating or on drugs or just confused by some optical illusion). You can't explain away the Phoenix lights that way. Or the officers and pilots in the documentary, at the National Press Club. Something is out there, of that I'm sure. Who they are and what they're doing here -- well, I've got my conjectures and conclusions based on my filtering of all the information on the topic I've digested over the years, but I have no way of knowing yet how much of that is right and how much of it isn't. But to be honest, I'm kind of expecting to get some answers about all that before too much longer. As I told the students tonight, and as I say one way or another to lots of students I teach, any day now...
Given my confidence that we are being visited by beings from elsewhere (footnote here: elsewhere doesn't just have to mean some other part of the physical 4D universe as we know it, but could include other dimensions that essentially co-exist with ours but beyond our perceptual awareness), a corollary conclusion is that the government has indeed been covering up their knowledge of, and probably some interaction with, some of these beings (dead and/or alive). When I brought this possibility up in class tonight, one of the ladies just spontaneously asked "why," and the first answer I gave was because of their fear that there would be mass panic if the populace knew that aliens were hanging out within range of contact. If things really did get started with Roswell in 1947, it's easy enough to imagine that the powers-that-be would want to keep the story under wraps at that point to prevent any kind of large-scale panic, right in the wake of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War, etc. But I suggested to the students that all those governments that have contributed to the cover-up are now in a bit of a double-bind. Even if they wanted to let the people know that the UFOs are real, if they felt we could now handle the info without going nuts, they would essentially have to confess that they've been lying to us all these years. And what government (read: politician) is ever going to do that!
On the other hand, an argument can be made that there is a slow process of "disclosure" already underway, as at least a few governments around the world have been opening their UFO files, making them accessible to those who want to review them, which will have the effect of letting "official" information spread out to the public, adding credibility and legitimacy to whatever information is contained there. In the US, I don't think they've gone that far yet, but there are a number of researchers who for years have been asking for and gaining access to US files through FOIA requests, in an ongoing effort to get the government to provide more information than it has shared about what it knows about the phenomenon. The 2007 National Press Club event was affiliated with a group called The Disclosure Project, which I think was founded by some of the key researchers who have for years been documenting the government's cover-up efforts and trying to uncover the secret entities that have had responsibility for dealing with UFO activities. By getting extremely credible witnesses to insinuate that the government withheld information from the public about real events that they were directly involved in, The Disclosure Project keeps making it harder and harder for the government to continue to pretend that it doesn't have any interest in or information about the topic. So rather than just coming out and admitting it, all at once, like I guess the Chinese were predicting Obama was on the verge of doing, it seems like the strategy is to let the realization about the reality of UFOs diffuse more slowly and incrementally -- open up the information bit by bit, let people get acclimated to the idea over time rather than have to deal with the strong reactions of a sudden and explicit verification of the facts...
OK, now it's Tuesday night, time to wrap this up. I've gone back and read what I wrote above, so I guess now I have just a couple more things I want to add, to try to bring a little closure to the story. If there is an alien presence, and if the powers-that-be are aware of that fact, then it is reasonable to conclude that our present circumstances are likely to bring that information out into the open one way or the other. Between the Gulf oil spill and Japan's nuclear disaster, the planet has taken two huge, serious blows to the health and well-being of the global ecosystem that keeps us alive. The full-scale effects of these events may still take some years to do their damage, but that damage is likely to be severe. In the short-run, it will likely contribute to higher food prices and economic problems more generally, which will probably result in even more widespread unrest around the world as the masses get more and more angry at the banksters and their corporate minions who are the cause of most of these problems.
If there is a systemic economic collapse, there will be the need for some kind of monetary system reform, of the kind Soros and his crowd as well as the BRICS partners have all been discussing over the last few weeks. That may be a moment of truth for the planet, to see whether those implementing a new system create one that continues to privilege the financial elites or one that is more populist in its design. In other words, that's sort of the crux of the matter as to what the nature of the "new world order" will be. Will it be a new world order still run by the elites for the elites, or will the new monetary system signal a change to something new and different? I think that, behind the scenes, at the top level of the game, there is a sort of battle going on around this issue. To the extent that our bankster rulers represent and embody the dark forces on the planet, I have a feeling there are also some lightworkers, some "white knights," who are operating at high levels of the game countering the efforts of the dark cabal to impose their system of world-wide control. If that's true, if there really are two alternative strategies that are being proposed and offered to global leaders as a way to get out of our current financial fiasco (ie, systemic bankruptcy -- so much more debt spread throughout the system than there is money to pay it all off), then the geo-political alignments that are in play these days may very well reflect who's aligning with whom on which side of that fight. (That's just a hunch, I have no information to that effect.)
I guess my point here is that the big issues taking place in the world right now, here in our 4D material plane, may actually be manifestations of a more metaphysical battle between light and dark, with the latter doing everything they can to maintain control of a system they created that is now falling apart all around them, and the former working diligently to wrest control of the planet away from this dark cabal. My understanding is that the ETs are not indifferent to the outcome, nor just passive observers of the process. While there may very well be some ET types (eg, the "reptilians" that David Icke has brought to the world's attention) that are conspiring with the dark forces, there appear to be some who are working to help free humanity from the constraints imposed upon us by the dark, constraints that they've been developing for most of the last 12,000 years or so. And part of humanity gaining this freedom is to become aware that we are not alone, that reality is quite a bit more expansive than we have been led to believe, that our little 4D reality is embedded in a very complex, multidimensional universe (multiverse) that is filled with all sorts of beings "living" at lots of different levels of consciousness. And some of those beings are here now, at this "moment in time," to help Gaia and her inhabitants transition to the next, higher level of consciousness (5D). It's this jump to a higher level of consciousness that is the essence of the paradigm shift I've been talking about for so long.
Over the years, teaching about the new paradigm in my classes, and the possibility that it could arrive more quickly than anybody ever thinks is possible, I have sometimes joked that if a UFO ever decides to land and aliens get out, the paradigm is going to change immediately. But it's not a joke. If a UFO ever decides to land and aliens get out, the paradigm is going to change immediately. The impression I've gotten is that, up til now, they have largely been constrained from doing this, that there is some kind of rule that says they are supposed to wait until they are invited, in a sense. Thus, disclosure -- if it ever comes -- will almost be tantamount to an invitation, because once the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, there won't be a lot of good reasons for them to remain mostly hidden and elusive. They may as well land so that we can start figuring out what's really going on, and step over the threshold into a new era of human civilization.
The dark forces running the planet want to avoid disclosure, because it essentially means that they have to give up control. In other words, the dark forces have been actively working against the process of our evolution to a higher level of consciousness, because the only way they can maintain their power, and in some sense maybe even their existence, is to keep us functioning at this lower level. Rumors are they would rather "take the planet down" than give up their control, which may well explain why in the case of both the Gulf and Japan they made decisions that increased rather than decreased the amount of damage caused by the original disaster. Other rumors are that they have planned a mass population die-off, maybe in part to bring the world back closer to its carrying capacity of human beings, and that they've built huge underground bunkers where they think they could go live for a few years if things got too unbearable here on the surface. I don't know how much if any of that is true, but I would have to say that whoever is calling the shots on the planet sure seems to be doing more to mess things up than to make things better. Maybe that's intentional.
If the dark forces want either control or destruction, and are doing everything they can to pursue those goals, then the light beings are here to make sure we transition successfully into 5D consciousness. One of the cool things about 5D consciousness is the recognition that darkness is an illusion, a perceptual error associated with not having enough light. In 5D there's enough light that there is no darkness, which means that the global transition to 5D consciousness -- which may well be the event implied by the end of the cycle in the old Mayan calendar, which of course has become associated with the year 2012 -- will entail the removal of the dark energies from the planet. That's why lots of old control systems are falling apart, or losing their legitimacy, or facing a crisis, or whatever. If there really is an "end" to a cycle that is giving rise to a shift in collective consciousness, then it could be that there is some point in time when this process is "supposed" to be completed, such that more and more events are likely to transpire that move the process along more and more quickly. The Gulf and Japan have increased the urgency of discontinuing our destructive patterns, and to the extent that these toxins in some way also threaten the health and well-being of Gaia herself (not to mention all life on the planet), there is probably growing urgency among the light beings to escalate the process of transformation.
So, I guess what I'm saying is this -- don't be surprised if UFOs start making themselves even more obvious, if the media start giving a little more serious attention to the possibility of their existence, if governments continue to let out more information about what they know, if insiders or whistleblowers come forward with more information about what's really going on. And who knows, maybe one day a UFO will land, and an alien will get out and say something like "yo, wassup" and then the new paradigm will begin!
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