2nd Renaissance -17
Lothar | 20.03.2006 00:46 | Analysis | Education | World
Education systems in free cities and regions must be very different to those of nation states. It is not just the methods of encouraging learning that will distinguish education in free cities from that of nation states, but the truth that the knowledge is rooted in. There is no point in swotting to pass examinations in subject knowledge that is wrong. Yet, that is exactly what young people in state education systems are doing. Neither they, or their parents, or their teachers realise this fact, but it remains the case.
Knowledge that is wrong
Numerical and logical sequence:
Plichta obtains the natural sequence by abandoning the convention
The First Steps Beyond Takerism [190]
Throughout thousands of years and two levels of civilization, people needed money to buy food that was otherwise unavailable. Unless you were a subsistence farmer, there was no alternative to working in a scarcity-driven economy in order to obtain money to pay for food, shelter and the other necessities of life. But now the conditions for a major change exist. Once food and energy become readily available at negligible cost, the way will be open for those with the knowledge to live outside the long-standing system of artificial scarcity.
The transition from the present socio-economic model to a new one based in free cities and regions will either happen progressively, as nation states lose more and more of their power over economic and other outcomes within their borders, or it will happen very suddenly, as a result of a catastrophe. The most likely candidate for the latter circumstance is total failure of the international monetary system, and resultant chaos that renders conventional governments impotent in managing economic and social affairs. The recent collapses of major banks in Argentina gave a glimpse of this scenario. People there survived by becoming self-sufficient at the community level. The financial troubles in Argentina are far from over and, given time, independent regions or free cities might yet arise from the ashes of that previously centralised economy.
There are already examples of a more evolutionary progression towards economic self determination. The Japanese author, Kenichi Ohmae, writing in his book, The Invisible Continent, identifies what he calls "region-states." Singapore, Trinidad-Tobago, Ireland, and New Zealand are said by Ohmae to be operating differently to traditional economies. They are doing this because they have to compete in global markets. National governments can no longer protect them from the changes beyond their borders, so whole regions and cities are finding ways to compete without tariffs and other regulatory mechanisms.
The new region-states also include areas within the wider borders of nation states. Ohmae cites Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Dalian, and Penang as examples of localities that are operating as semi-autonomous parts of larger countries such as India, China and Malaysia. He says that the national economy of the USA is now like a zebra. If you look at it from a distance it appears to be a uniform grey, but when you get close there are stripes of economic activity that are often globalised or moving to that position. Here are some examples of his observations.
*"Each 'stripe' of the American zebra is an autonomous economic unit. Some, like the areas around Chicago. New Orleans, and Cleveland, are struggling to escape their industrial-era identity and haven't succeeded. Others, like parts of Maine and the Great Plains states, are mired in a moribund fishing - or agriculture - based economy. These areas have declining per-capita gross domestic product. Hey, other parts of the US have economic growth of 20 percent per year: Colorado Springs/Denver/Boulder; Austin; San Antonio; Phoenix/Scottsdale; Seattle; San Jose; (Silicon Valley); Boston/Cambridge; parts of New York City area; and recently the outskirts of Washington D.C., known as the dot.com belt."
*"Iceland is one of the rare cases where the bright stripe of the zebra, - in this case, the zebra is a newly unifying Europe - is contiguous with a national government. The United States and Germany are more typical: the prosperous and nonprosperous regions do not fit neatly within national borders. Economic boundaries drift and change far more rapidly than national boundaries. In recent years, for example, Seattle and Vancouver together have come to constitute one prosperous stripe, while the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) helped create a single 'stripe' out of parts of southern Texas and northern Mexico. It would be fruitless to try to reconfigure national boundaries to match the stripes of any particular zebra."
There are close parallels between these descriptions of areas of new prosperity arising from new thinking at the local rather than national level, and the same situation in Renaissance Europe. Then, as now, new technologies and new thinking drove localised centres of prosperity, and this happened quite independently of national governments and lines on maps.
There is another similarity between what is happening now and what happened five centuries ago: new thinking is driving the stripes of prosperity upwards and outwards, while old thinking is condemning other regions to falling living standards and disaffection with politicians and their false promises. In the latter cases the main political debates are still about how to share a limited 'pie' of wealth. In the regions that are seizing opportunities in the global economy, the debate has shifted to how to share in a larger pie. Ohmae writes as follows.
*"In Canada , there is still a 'Nova Scotia versus British Columbia' syndrome: provincial forces battle over who gets rewarded what privileges. The province of Quebec is still soul-searching as to where it belongs. These are typical dilemmas of the nineteenth-century nation-state model. The implicit assumption is that there is a limited slice of the pie, and politics consists of battles over how to slice the pie. The new regions...have graduated from this model in two ways. First, their leaders now see that there is no limit to the slice of the pie, so long as they allow the region to interact with the global economy......Second, these regions have learned to expand the horizon into cyberspace. Like Dublin and Bangalore, they've learned that jobs and money can easily migrate over telephone lines and satellite transmission."
*"For the European Union to succeed, the most important step for Brussels to take is to free the regions - geographic areas smaller than countries - to become competitive in the global economy. These regions could be the size of Catalonia, Lombardy, Wales, or Scotland. They could even be smaller."
The one crucial point that Ohmae misses, at least in his book written in 2000, is the inevitability of the economic pie becoming infinite, early in the 21st century. However, this development does not invalidate his reasoning, it complements and strengthens his ideas. Once the technological elites realise that they don't have to serve the capitalist system in order to eat, they will have even more incentive to set up free cities and regions.
However, these will not be the 'region-states' that Ohmae writes of, they will be true leaver-giver societies with no ties to central administrations in Brussels, Washington, London or anywhere else. The technological elites will quickly realise that they don't need central governments any longer. The very limited civic administrations that exist in free cities and regions will not control anything. they will simply provide services to communities that operate on neo-tribal principles.
All the power in free cities will rest in tribes and the individuals that comprise them. These tribes will not consist solely of technologists and scientists, but all manner of people, young and old, skilled and unskilled. The tie that binds them together will not be due to their religion or ethnicity, but to a shared purpose of creating and distributing the abundance of goods and services that scientific discoveries and new technologies have made possible. The bond will be due to a common leaver-giver ethos.
Some Key Education Principles For Free Cities [191]
A city or region will not be truly free unless its people can know the truth. Not the 'official truth' of state propaganda machines and institutionalised science, but the real truth - at every level and in every field of knowledge. Knowing the truth will be essential to achieving spiritual awakening, and to the realisation of leaver-giver aims.
Because they remain firmly set in traditional forms of government and administration, none of the 'region-states' that Ohmae identifies are free in the above sense. Although these centres are globalising their commerce and switching from 'drop it on your foot' products to knowledge and services centred trade, they are still operating within the capitalist model. More significantly, the new technologies they are applying continue to be understood and taught in terms of the erroneous physics, chemistry and mathematics that fill the old Level 3 Civilization.
Education systems in free cities and regions must be very different to those of nation states. It is not just the methods of encouraging learning that will distinguish education in free cities from that of nation states, but the truth that the knowledge is rooted in. There is no point in swotting to pass examinations in subject knowledge that is wrong. Yet, that is exactly what young people in state education systems are doing. Neither they, or their parents, or their teachers realise this fact, but it remains the case.
When knowledge is revised on a massive scale, as it now must be, the people who often find most difficulty with the change are those who have been 'educated' in what becomes superseded. Children and young people must quickly learn the new foundations of knowledge, and the free cities will concentrate resources and emphasis on their education. When it comes to older people who are presently qualified in the superseded knowledge, there will be difficulties. It will be hard for many of them to accept that they are suddenly back on the bottom rungs of the learning ladder, in company with teenagers who are much younger than they are.
Presently 'uneducated' people who have never been through the state-run schools and universities will have far less trouble with the new knowledge than those who have built their careers on it. Thus, it will often be quicker to establish free cities and centres of abundance in places where there are not many conventionally educated people. In locations that presently have many 'educated' workers there will be strong resistance to change and any new education systems there will need to include content to alleviate the ingrained resentment that many such people will harbour.
Writing in The Sovereign Individual, Davidson and Rees-Mogg identify the same potential source of resistance in relation to new technology . Listing some anticipated consequences of the transition from the industrial to the digital age they say.
*"The nationalist and Luddite reaction will be strongest, however, not among the very poor but among persons of middling skills, under-achievers with credentials, who came of age during the industrial era and face downward mobility."
*"Reactionary sentiments will be most intensely felt within the currently rich countries, and especially in communities with high percentages of the value-poor and skill-poor who previously enjoyed high incomes."
Although the authors of The Sovereign Individual are not writing about quite the same thing as a revolution in scientific truth and the foundations of knowledge, the parallels are obvious. The new education systems of free cities will need to do things differently to conventional education models. Some of the necessary characteristics of free city education systems might include.
*All ages participation. The new knowledge must be available to adults as well as younger people.
*Absolutely free enrolment and participation in learning. Internet access and materials should also be free.
(Where will the money come from? ....Abundance.)
*Curricula and new knowledge materials that build new understanding without confronting or criticising old teachings as 'wrong'. The emphasis must be on what is now known to be true, not on dismantling conventional knowledge or belittling its authors. Learning should not be a war zone.
*Mandatory skills modules in literacy, numeracy, music, and the like. Additional elective learning modules and options with a wide range of appeal and no disciplinary segmentation or boundaries.
*Reliance on review panels and student demonstration of learning rather than examinations. Emphasis on coaching weak students until they achieve a standard rather than failing a proportion of those taking a course. One hundred percent pass rates and full learning goals.
*Home schooling and special tuition options for those who want them. There might, however, be a requirement for students to demonstrate their learned knowledge to independent review panels and professional bodies.
*An absence of pressures to learn. No formal exams, no set homework and nothing that takes the fun out of learning.
*Continuing learning and education as a part of life, rather than schooling as a stage in a preparation for lifetime employment.
Note that learning in a free city should not be compulsory. But full opportunities to learn must be readily available to everyone, at all times throughout their life. Religious instruction is a separate process. In keeping with the ethos of a leaver-giver society, free cities should not restrict religious instruction in any way, and various religious groups should be free to combine other learning and religious studies however they choose.
The above points are not intended as a wish list of admirable, motherhood, conditions for free city education systems. Each is likely to be quite important to achieving the types of learning and the levels of learning that will be required in a Level 4 Civilization. Truth and the wide availability of information and knowledge will be essential to successful leaver-giver societies. For neo-tribes to function effectively, all members must contribute to success. And, to be able to contribute in the 21st century, individuals will require knowledge and a passion for learning in their particular field of expertise.
It will not be necessary, or even desirable, for every member of every neo-tribe in a free city to be a scientist or technologist. Indeed, this will be impossible in the early decades because many older and otherwise ill-equipped people will never be able to assimilate the knowledge involved. Neo-tribal principles require that each member contributes to the overall success and well-being of the tribe. In return the tribe offers what is probably the best form of cradle-to-grave security that humans have ever devised. It is the most natural form of social structure, and it incorporates a full transmission of accumulated knowledge and wisdom from one generation to the next.
All animal groups similarly communicate their knowledge to their young. Flocks, herds, packs, warrens, swarms, and hives all have mechanisms that preserve and freely pass on vital communal knowledge about how to survive and prosper on this planet. So do human tribes. State organised education systems, on the other hand, often transmit knowledge selectively, according to what authorities decide should be taught. Thus, it might come to be seen as 'wrong', or even illegal, to teach evolution in state schools. Whole areas of ancient history might be omitted from the curriculums of such systems. Or, worse still, the facts might be 'shaped' to conform with someone's ideas of what is acceptable for citizens to know and believe.
This is not meant to suggest that knowledge isn't sanitised or that truth cannot ever be distorted or suppressed in tribal societies. Clearly, such distortions and omissions of truth can and do happen. But the shaping of truth within tribal groups does not even begin to compare, either in scale or impact, with what happens at the national level in state education systems. During the 20th century there were obvious examples of severe distortions of knowledge in the Soviet Union and China, both communist regimes. A less pronounced, but more insidious, creation of whole bodies of official truth occurred in supposedly 'free' countries such as the United States, Britain, and Australia. In science, a shift in emphasis from a broad, holistic, examination of nature to a narrower, more material, approach took place in the late 19th century, and continues to the present day.
Institutionalised science and national education systems have created an attitudinal disconnect between cause and effect in environmental degradation. Whole generations have been educated to believe that man stands above and apart from the other life forms that he is surrounded by, and that nature exists to be managed and exploited for the benefit of humans. That is, after all, quite in keeping with the long standing assumptions of takerism. The one big problem is that it isn't true. The natural world was not created for us to exploit at the expense of other creatures, and we do not have any right to exterminate other species at will, just because our technology enables us to do so.
Most importantly, modern science that excludes all possibilities that it cannot touch and test in a laboratory is not necessarily superior to the knowledge of earlier tribal peoples who recognised both the material and non-material worlds. Modern science that shuts out the metaphysical realm is actually deficient and inferior to earlier systems of knowledge and wisdom.
Free cities and regions will recognise the need for people of all ages to study both the modern and ancient collections of knowledge. In particular, anybody who wants to will be able to explore the details of subjects such as sacred geometry, musical structures and the power of vibrations. These are areas where earlier civilizations held knowledge that is often more clear and meaningful than modern coverage of the same areas. Only recently, with the modern study of metaphysics, under the name of quantum mechanics, has it begun to be recognised that all matter is ultimately composed of vibrations, and that the faith that tribal peoples, such as the Australian aborigines, have in sound as a healing medium is likely to be well justified. Until the geometric nature of music is widely understood there will still be many people who dismiss the use of vibrations from the Didgeridoo to cure a range of serious ailments, as a myth. Sadly, that is the way they have been educated to think: that all knowledge from earlier times that is not readily explainable in terms of modern theories has to be nonsense.
Why Study Sacred Geometry? [192]
The importance of learning geometry as the ancients taught it is to cut through the abstractions that man has overlaid on the natural proportion and order of the universe. It is not a new-age hippie reason, but a serious pathway to a full comprehension of the truth about numbers.
Geometry does not need numbers in the sense of "one", "two", "goo", "zoo". It works with lengths and proportions. It is practical to construct the patterns of sacred geometry using only a pencil, a drawing compass, and a straight edge. Just as the relationships between notes and tones in music are independent of any contrived number system, so are the lengths, proportions, and angles of geometry. Indeed, geometry was described by the 18th century German poet and natural philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as "frozen music."
Robert Lawlor's wonderfully illustrated book, Sacred Geometry - Philosophy and Practice, provides some very revealing insights into the history of our present-day numerical conventions. Lawlor shows how the adoption of a decimal system that includes zero was significant in masking the properties of the underlying natural numbers. Although both the ancient Egyptians and the Romans used decimal systems, they had separate symbols for each unit of growth, tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on. During the twelfth century the works of the Arab mathematician, Al-Gorisma, were translated into Latin. Both the originally Indian numerals, 1 through 9, and the concept of zero, began to influence Western thought and mathematics from that time. Due to the practicality it afforded to calculations in commerce, zero together with the Arabic numerals, was quickly adopted by the merchant class in Europe.
Some excerpts from Lawlor's book explain the way in which zero changed mathematics.
*"The consequences were enormous. First or all, within the structure of arithmetic itself, the additive basis of calculation had to be cast aside. Formerly the addition of one number to another number always produced a sum larger than either of the original numbers. This was of course nullified by the utilization of zero. Other laws of arithmetic were also altered, so that we are now able to have operations such as the following: 3+0=3, 3-0=3, 03=3, 30=3x10, but 3x0=0, and 3/0=0 (???).
Here logic completely breaks down. The illogic of the symbol was accepted because of the convenience it afforded to quantitative operations. Yet this breakdown of the simple, natural logic of the arithmetic structure allowed a complicated mental logic to take its place and invited into mathematics a whole range of numerical and symbolic entities, some of which have no verifiable concept or geometric form behind them.
Arising from the sixteenth century onwards, these entities include relative numbers (i.e. negative quantities such as -3); infinite decimal numbers; algebraic irrational numbers (numbers such as e, the basis of logarithms, which satisfy no rational algebraic equation); imaginary numbers such as the square root of -1; complex numbers (the sum of a real number and an imaginary number); and literal numbers (letters representing mathematical formulae). The invention of zero permitted numbers to represent ideas which have no form. This signals a change in the definition of the word 'idea', which in antiquity was synonymous with 'form', and implies geometry."
*"The 'western' rationalistic mentality negated the ancient and revered spiritual concept of Unity, for with the adoption of zero, Unity looses its first position and becomes merely a quantity among other quantities. The advent of zero allows one to consider anything below the quantitative number series as nil or of no account, while anything beyond the quantitatively comprehensible range becomes an extrapolation subsumed under the word God and deemed religious or superstitious. Hence zero provided a framework in western thinking for the development of atheism or negation of the spiritual."
*"With zero we have at the beginning of modern mathematics a number concept which is physically misleading and one which creates a separation between our system of numerical symbols and the structure of the natural world. On the other hand, with the notion of Unity which governs ancient mathematics, there is no such dichotomy. "
*"...unthinkable though Unity may be, both reason and spiritual experience compel the traditional thinker to place it at the beginning. Everything that exists in his mathematical problem or in his universe is a fraction of the unknown One, and because these parts can be related proportionately to one another they are knowable."
*"Unity is a philosophic concept and mystic experience expressible mathematically. The Western mentality, however, withdrew its discipline of acknowledging a supra-rational, unknowable mystery as its first principle. But in rejecting this reverence to a single unknowable unity, our mathematics and science developed into a system requiring complex, interconnected hypotheses, imaginary entities such as those mentioned above, and unknown x quantities which must be manipulated, quantified or equalised as in the algebraic form of thought. So the unknown appears not just once but at every turn, and can be dealt with only by seeking quantitative solutions."
*"Our present thought is based on the following numerical and logical sequence:
-5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
With zero in the centre, there is a quantitative expansion 1, 2, 3, ... and our sense of balance requires having -1, -1, -2, -3 ... on the other side, giving a series of non-existent abstractions (negative quantities) which demand an absurd logic. The system has a break-point, zero, disconnecting the continuum and dissociating the positive numbers from the negative balancing series."
*"In the ancient Egyptian numerical progression, beginning with one rather than zero, all the elements are natural and real:
1/5, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
All the elements flow out from the central unity in accordance with the law of inversion or reciprocity. The Egyptians based their mathematics on this simple, natural series of numbers, performing sophisticated operations with it for which we now need complex algebra and trigonometry."
*"...In terms of the orthodoxy of ancient mathematics, the symbols of mathematics should reflect the realities they describe. With zero and the array or merely mental and statistical signs which followed it, we are very far from having a system of mathematical symbols which corresponds to the pure geometric order of living space."
In the words of the mathematician Leopold Kronecker:
"God made the integers and all the rest is the work of man."
Free cities and regions will provide education options that enable all members of society to study sacred geometry and ancient knowledge. This will greatly assist these centres to adapt to and embrace the ideas that will drive science and technology in the 21st century, and lead to the generation of the levels of abundance necessary in a leaver-giver society. Without the deep insights that such studies can bring, people will be likely to find it harder to understand and apply the right knowledge. All 'educated' people will need to re-learn and adapt much of the 'truth' they have accumulated during the industrial age. Children, on the other hand, will need to begin their education on a sound footing from the start. It should be quite practical for them to be fluent in new knowledge, that draws on Peter Plichta's work, by the time they are twelve years of age.
Kenichi Ohmae feels that Japan will be at a disadvantage in the new age, because of an inability to quickly free regions from central control. But that won't be the deciding factor in transforming the economy. The crucial element will be the capacity of the people to be able to accept discovered truth when it contradicts hundreds of years of teaching. In this regard traditional societies like Japan might have more affinity with ancient knowledge and truth than nations that have been deeply 'educated' in the truth of the West. Although Japan is a thoroughly modern industrial power it has probably retained its traditional culture better than any other country has managed to do. Combined with a 2nd Renaissance education system, their more receptive attitudes to surprising new knowledge, that accords with many ancient rituals, might be a decisive advantage for Japan.
It could be the ease with which the various countries, that are presently nation states, can reintroduce ancient teachings and forms of thought into their education systems that becomes the decisive factor in preparing for a Level 4 Civilization. Japan might have centralist bureaucracies to overcome, but so do all other nations. One difference between countries such as the USA and Australia, and those such as Japan and India, is that the latter have knowledge traditions, in mathematics, music, geometry, and astronomy, that stretch back thousands of years. All America and Australia have in this regard is materialistically oriented theories that evolved in Europe during the past two centuries. Most of these notions now need to be unlearned as a result of Peter Plichta's profound insights.
The Burden of Having A Modern Education [193]
It is noticeable that the few people who argue against Plichta on the Internet do so by using 'knowledge' that he has shown to be false. They try to disprove his findings using what they have been taught as 'truth.' The notions are so ingrained in their minds that they seem not to be aware that they are using what amounts to circular logic.
One such reviewer of God's Secret Formula, on the Amazon.com site, takes Plichta to task using what he has 'learned' about base notation. He writes, in part,
*"Plichta wants to use base notation to deliver the result 1/81=0.0123456789[10][11][12]..., however no constant base notation can do the trick. In order to preserve the integrity of the decimal (.0123456789), base-10 must be used. For the next number to be [10], however, a base of at least eleven must be used, and for the number after that to be an [11] a base of at least 12 must be used. If these alternate bases were used, they would totally change the evaluation of the first part of the decimal (.0123456789), so that a number other than 1/81 would be signified."
The person posing the above argument is, judged from his writing, neither unintelligent nor uneducated. In fact, he could be said to be too educated in the abstract mathematics of today's science. As a result he misses the point that Plichta is reverting to the natural number series that is masked by the conventions that have been adopted to make a decimal system of only nine numerals and zero function. Had this reviewer also learnt sacred geometry and the history of numbers he might have understood this better than he appears to have done.
Plichta obtains the natural sequence below by abandoning the convention adopted along with the use of zero. This is the first line result below.
The subsequent lines show how the convention is unmasked. This is done here in a diagrammatic, non-mathematical way. So that even your granny might be able to understand it. Peter Plichta has also proved the soundness of his reasoning using mathematics. He has done this in both of his books. Before you reject his conclusions, read his findings and study his explanations.
The fact that there is an artifice, a convention, involved in the decimal system in use today is not in any doubt. The great French mathematician, Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, put it thus, when explaining decimal notation and any other base in the abstract number system built around the Arabic numerals and the use of zero.
*"The numeral zero plays an important role in this principle. It employs the convention (Lothar's emphasis) that any numeral other than zero when raised to the power zero has the value one."
The 'convenience' of the number system introduced into medieval Europe caused it to be widely adopted for trade and commerce. Although it was not well suited to science, the abstract number series became the scaffold for modern mathematics and the investigation of the laws of the universe. It is significant that the Cistercian Order, which had been founded in 1098 near Dijon in France, strongly resisted the introduction of a decimal system that incorporated zero. Since their philosophical and practical knowledge was the foundation of the sacred geometry used by Masonic Guilds in the construction of the Gothic cathedrals across Europe, the Cistercians were well aware of the divine nature of harmonic proportions and inversions within the natural number series. They fully realised that the adoption of an abstract number series would serve to mask the geometric nature of matter and music from future generations.
Robert Lawlor's book, Sacred Geometry, is rich in practical exercises and examples that enable students to 'see and touch' proportional realities. Just as children who work through Plichta's tiles exercise, described earlier, can immediately comprehend Newton's inverse square law, students who use a drawing compass and a straight edge to construct the various geometric forms in Lawlor's workbook examples can quickly grasp the essence of mediation, and of arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic progressions.
Why is this important? Because modern science now understands that all matter is formed by vibrations and that these progressions, that are found within the natural number series, in both geometry and music, are fundamental to understanding the phenomena involved. If these young people want to become 21st century technologists and travel to other star systems in their lifetimes, this is some of the foundation knowledge they will need to have.
There is also another reason for young people to clearly comprehend the basis of all forms and vibrations. It is the sense of wonder they will experience as the patterns and numbers are revealed to them. By comparison, the study of abstract mathematics and its derived science is far less uplifting. There is cleverness there, but not the same wonder or sense of the divine. Scientists and technologists who have been educated in the traditional manner are also aware of the same progressions and inversions that are explored in Lawlor's workbook examples. However the context in which they learnt about these natural relationships was different to that in which 21st century students of sacred geometry will acquire their insights.
In the 20th century case the prevailing rationalistic philosophies of institutional science and the abstract nature of the number series that underlies modern mathematics combined to obscure the natural wonder of the subject. Educated 20th century people were, and still are, generally unaware of the real significance of the relationships they studied in geometry and the natural numbers. As a consequence their understanding of these areas is somewhat superficial. The fact that they believe that they have been taught the latest, and therefore the most complete, knowledge about geometry and numbers becomes an impediment to their acceptance of 'strange' insights in these fields.
Changing their view of reality is made even harder for them when those 'new' notions turn out to have been well known thousands of years earlier, by civilizations that they have been taught to regard as 'primitive' and inferior to our modern society. Therefore, disbelief is often their first reaction. Their second reaction is recourse to what they know, the knowledge they acquired during a good 20th century education, to disprove the 'erroneous' new notions confronting them. It's all very sad, but also very typical of people who have simply learned the wrong knowledge in the first place.
Related:
2nd Renaissance -16
Supporting secessions and the formation of free cities and regions is going to be crucial. Only in these new beachheads of tomorrow’s society will such innovations as home-schooling, and a lack of state censorship and media spin, enable young people to discover the truths they will need to know to build a Level 4 Civilization.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108722.php
2nd Renaissance -15
Historically, there have been periods when legal distinctions between animals and humans have been blurred. For instance, in medieval Europe, in the 14th and 15th centuries, numerous trials and executions of animals occurred. One source identifies 34 recorded instances of pigs having been tried and cruelly put to death. Besides pigs; rats, chickens, goats, and bees were similarly tried. Some of the pigs were fully dressed in human clothes at the time they were, inevitably, found guilty. In one case a vicar excommunicated a flock of sparrows that infested his church. All this happened despite the theological stance that animals had no soul, and no morals or conscience. They could not really be guilty of transgressing the Rule of Law.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108557.php
2nd Renaissance -14
Withdrawing Support For Militarism [179] The problem with revenge is that it lowers the humanity of those who exercise it down to the same level, of even below, those who committed the original crime. Although we can't yet know who was responsible for 911 or 1012, we do now know that forces of the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) have, on occasions, been just as barbaric as the people who killed on those dates. This has been amply demonstrated in Afghanistan and again in Iraq. If you doubt this, seek out more facts about the CoW's use of DU and NDU weaponry and cluster bombs. These horror weapons continue, to this day, to put young children and adult civilians at risk of injury or death from unexploded munitions, radiation, and toxic substances in the ground water and the food chain.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108373.php
Surveillance
It is up to ordinary people to raise the level of debate about the undemocratic surveillance practices of the many faceless and unaccountable agents who make daily intrusions on individual privacy, and about the apologists and propagandists for the War nn Terror who applaud every new attack on human rights and freedoms as "prudent" or "necessary". If there is no discussion of reverse surveillance in the national media, create it on the streets on a citizen to citizen basis. If nobody is talking about the outrageous assaults on privacy and human rights embodied in the new antiterrorist acts forced through US, UK and Australian legislatures, start talking about it to your neighbours and friends.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108175.php
2nd Renaissance -13
Such a development is part of the phenomenon of reverse surveillance that will come to characterise the 2nd Renaissance and a rapid transition to a Level 4 Civilization and a truly free society. You can learn more about reverse surveillance at the 'Surveillance' freesite. Reverse surveillance principles extend well beyond the use of ubiquitous digital imaging technologies, and include audits of all aspects of federal government operations, by randomly selected teams of citizens. The Feds and the parrot people will be quick to pronounce that such monitoting is "not in the national interest," but it will definitely be in our interests, and those of future generations of humanity.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/107989.php
2nd Renaissance -12
There are reports that in one Balinese kampong that provided labour to the clubs in Kuta Beach, seven empty coffins were buried, because there were no identifiable remains of the missing workers. It was as if they had been vaporised. Scores of people, mainly locals, are thought to have disappeared without trace.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/107756.php
2nd Renaissance -11
Fortunately, the power and control of government and military elites is illusory in the 21st century. The world no longer works the way it did, and there is nothing to compel people to support failed, outdated systems any longer. This is an understanding that must be widely and quickly shared. The future of our children and the planet depends upon our changing our thinking about governments, and our support for them.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107560.php
2nd Renaissance -10
In the Afghanistan turkey shoot the CoW forces used vast numbers of hard target weapons and other munitions containing depleted uranium (DU). This substance is almost twice as dense as lead. When it punches through concrete bunkers, armour, or mud huts, DU disintegrates into a chemically toxic and radioactive dust. In contrast to the earlier DU weapons used in Gulf War I, the newer ordinance produced deaths and deformities within weeks of the start of military action by the CoW. Between 1990-91 and 2001 the US arms manufacturers are thought to have "improved" the DU technology by introducing milled uranium ore to their warheads. This non-depleted uranium (NDU) is - wait for it - cheaper to produce and far more potent than DU. It poses massive health risks to civilian populations exposed to it, and constitutes, in every sense of the word, a weapon of mass destruction, or WMD. "Hey they're hunting them in Iraq, aren't they?"
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107216.php
2nd Renaissance -9
The Old World Order will not do anything to smooth the path to a Level 4 Civilization, and a better world. On the contrary, they will do whatever they can to make it difficult. The police, the military, the media, the financial system, the rule of law, and all the mechanisms of civil control and surveillance will be mobilised in defence of the status quo. But, once they understand their options, the people of the world will not engage in a battle with the forces of the OWO. They will simply abandon the old way of living under national rule, for a better, freer, life in new tribal societies. Kinship mechanisms will help people cope with the pressures of official opposition to radical changes that will finally enable them to escape the invisible prison that the OWO had fashioned around them.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107047.php
2nd Renaissance -8
Ultimately the old order will lose the battle to preserve their privileged way of life, based on all prevailing scarcity, pseudo-democracy, and the rule of law. But in the interim, hundreds of millions of innocent people might lose their lives in bloody resistance to the changes being made by the Old World Order (OWO).. If such a terrible thing happens, it will all have been for nothing, because:
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106816.php
Tales of Adam
Daniel Quinn*
http://ishmael.com/index1.cfm
2nd Renaissance -7
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.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106537.php
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.
Original Article
http://sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=64701&group=webcast
Throughout thousands of years and two levels of civilization, people needed money to buy food that was otherwise unavailable. Unless you were a subsistence farmer, there was no alternative to working in a scarcity-driven economy in order to obtain money to pay for food, shelter and the other necessities of life. But now the conditions for a major change exist. Once food and energy become readily available at negligible cost, the way will be open for those with the knowledge to live outside the long-standing system of artificial scarcity.
The transition from the present socio-economic model to a new one based in free cities and regions will either happen progressively, as nation states lose more and more of their power over economic and other outcomes within their borders, or it will happen very suddenly, as a result of a catastrophe. The most likely candidate for the latter circumstance is total failure of the international monetary system, and resultant chaos that renders conventional governments impotent in managing economic and social affairs. The recent collapses of major banks in Argentina gave a glimpse of this scenario. People there survived by becoming self-sufficient at the community level. The financial troubles in Argentina are far from over and, given time, independent regions or free cities might yet arise from the ashes of that previously centralised economy.
There are already examples of a more evolutionary progression towards economic self determination. The Japanese author, Kenichi Ohmae, writing in his book, The Invisible Continent, identifies what he calls "region-states." Singapore, Trinidad-Tobago, Ireland, and New Zealand are said by Ohmae to be operating differently to traditional economies. They are doing this because they have to compete in global markets. National governments can no longer protect them from the changes beyond their borders, so whole regions and cities are finding ways to compete without tariffs and other regulatory mechanisms.
The new region-states also include areas within the wider borders of nation states. Ohmae cites Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Dalian, and Penang as examples of localities that are operating as semi-autonomous parts of larger countries such as India, China and Malaysia. He says that the national economy of the USA is now like a zebra. If you look at it from a distance it appears to be a uniform grey, but when you get close there are stripes of economic activity that are often globalised or moving to that position. Here are some examples of his observations.
*"Each 'stripe' of the American zebra is an autonomous economic unit. Some, like the areas around Chicago. New Orleans, and Cleveland, are struggling to escape their industrial-era identity and haven't succeeded. Others, like parts of Maine and the Great Plains states, are mired in a moribund fishing - or agriculture - based economy. These areas have declining per-capita gross domestic product. Hey, other parts of the US have economic growth of 20 percent per year: Colorado Springs/Denver/Boulder; Austin; San Antonio; Phoenix/Scottsdale; Seattle; San Jose; (Silicon Valley); Boston/Cambridge; parts of New York City area; and recently the outskirts of Washington D.C., known as the dot.com belt."
*"Iceland is one of the rare cases where the bright stripe of the zebra, - in this case, the zebra is a newly unifying Europe - is contiguous with a national government. The United States and Germany are more typical: the prosperous and nonprosperous regions do not fit neatly within national borders. Economic boundaries drift and change far more rapidly than national boundaries. In recent years, for example, Seattle and Vancouver together have come to constitute one prosperous stripe, while the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) helped create a single 'stripe' out of parts of southern Texas and northern Mexico. It would be fruitless to try to reconfigure national boundaries to match the stripes of any particular zebra."
There are close parallels between these descriptions of areas of new prosperity arising from new thinking at the local rather than national level, and the same situation in Renaissance Europe. Then, as now, new technologies and new thinking drove localised centres of prosperity, and this happened quite independently of national governments and lines on maps.
There is another similarity between what is happening now and what happened five centuries ago: new thinking is driving the stripes of prosperity upwards and outwards, while old thinking is condemning other regions to falling living standards and disaffection with politicians and their false promises. In the latter cases the main political debates are still about how to share a limited 'pie' of wealth. In the regions that are seizing opportunities in the global economy, the debate has shifted to how to share in a larger pie. Ohmae writes as follows.
*"In Canada , there is still a 'Nova Scotia versus British Columbia' syndrome: provincial forces battle over who gets rewarded what privileges. The province of Quebec is still soul-searching as to where it belongs. These are typical dilemmas of the nineteenth-century nation-state model. The implicit assumption is that there is a limited slice of the pie, and politics consists of battles over how to slice the pie. The new regions...have graduated from this model in two ways. First, their leaders now see that there is no limit to the slice of the pie, so long as they allow the region to interact with the global economy......Second, these regions have learned to expand the horizon into cyberspace. Like Dublin and Bangalore, they've learned that jobs and money can easily migrate over telephone lines and satellite transmission."
*"For the European Union to succeed, the most important step for Brussels to take is to free the regions - geographic areas smaller than countries - to become competitive in the global economy. These regions could be the size of Catalonia, Lombardy, Wales, or Scotland. They could even be smaller."
The one crucial point that Ohmae misses, at least in his book written in 2000, is the inevitability of the economic pie becoming infinite, early in the 21st century. However, this development does not invalidate his reasoning, it complements and strengthens his ideas. Once the technological elites realise that they don't have to serve the capitalist system in order to eat, they will have even more incentive to set up free cities and regions.
However, these will not be the 'region-states' that Ohmae writes of, they will be true leaver-giver societies with no ties to central administrations in Brussels, Washington, London or anywhere else. The technological elites will quickly realise that they don't need central governments any longer. The very limited civic administrations that exist in free cities and regions will not control anything. they will simply provide services to communities that operate on neo-tribal principles.
All the power in free cities will rest in tribes and the individuals that comprise them. These tribes will not consist solely of technologists and scientists, but all manner of people, young and old, skilled and unskilled. The tie that binds them together will not be due to their religion or ethnicity, but to a shared purpose of creating and distributing the abundance of goods and services that scientific discoveries and new technologies have made possible. The bond will be due to a common leaver-giver ethos.
Some Key Education Principles For Free Cities [191]
A city or region will not be truly free unless its people can know the truth. Not the 'official truth' of state propaganda machines and institutionalised science, but the real truth - at every level and in every field of knowledge. Knowing the truth will be essential to achieving spiritual awakening, and to the realisation of leaver-giver aims.
Because they remain firmly set in traditional forms of government and administration, none of the 'region-states' that Ohmae identifies are free in the above sense. Although these centres are globalising their commerce and switching from 'drop it on your foot' products to knowledge and services centred trade, they are still operating within the capitalist model. More significantly, the new technologies they are applying continue to be understood and taught in terms of the erroneous physics, chemistry and mathematics that fill the old Level 3 Civilization.
Education systems in free cities and regions must be very different to those of nation states. It is not just the methods of encouraging learning that will distinguish education in free cities from that of nation states, but the truth that the knowledge is rooted in. There is no point in swotting to pass examinations in subject knowledge that is wrong. Yet, that is exactly what young people in state education systems are doing. Neither they, or their parents, or their teachers realise this fact, but it remains the case.
When knowledge is revised on a massive scale, as it now must be, the people who often find most difficulty with the change are those who have been 'educated' in what becomes superseded. Children and young people must quickly learn the new foundations of knowledge, and the free cities will concentrate resources and emphasis on their education. When it comes to older people who are presently qualified in the superseded knowledge, there will be difficulties. It will be hard for many of them to accept that they are suddenly back on the bottom rungs of the learning ladder, in company with teenagers who are much younger than they are.
Presently 'uneducated' people who have never been through the state-run schools and universities will have far less trouble with the new knowledge than those who have built their careers on it. Thus, it will often be quicker to establish free cities and centres of abundance in places where there are not many conventionally educated people. In locations that presently have many 'educated' workers there will be strong resistance to change and any new education systems there will need to include content to alleviate the ingrained resentment that many such people will harbour.
Writing in The Sovereign Individual, Davidson and Rees-Mogg identify the same potential source of resistance in relation to new technology . Listing some anticipated consequences of the transition from the industrial to the digital age they say.
*"The nationalist and Luddite reaction will be strongest, however, not among the very poor but among persons of middling skills, under-achievers with credentials, who came of age during the industrial era and face downward mobility."
*"Reactionary sentiments will be most intensely felt within the currently rich countries, and especially in communities with high percentages of the value-poor and skill-poor who previously enjoyed high incomes."
Although the authors of The Sovereign Individual are not writing about quite the same thing as a revolution in scientific truth and the foundations of knowledge, the parallels are obvious. The new education systems of free cities will need to do things differently to conventional education models. Some of the necessary characteristics of free city education systems might include.
*All ages participation. The new knowledge must be available to adults as well as younger people.
*Absolutely free enrolment and participation in learning. Internet access and materials should also be free.
(Where will the money come from? ....Abundance.)
*Curricula and new knowledge materials that build new understanding without confronting or criticising old teachings as 'wrong'. The emphasis must be on what is now known to be true, not on dismantling conventional knowledge or belittling its authors. Learning should not be a war zone.
*Mandatory skills modules in literacy, numeracy, music, and the like. Additional elective learning modules and options with a wide range of appeal and no disciplinary segmentation or boundaries.
*Reliance on review panels and student demonstration of learning rather than examinations. Emphasis on coaching weak students until they achieve a standard rather than failing a proportion of those taking a course. One hundred percent pass rates and full learning goals.
*Home schooling and special tuition options for those who want them. There might, however, be a requirement for students to demonstrate their learned knowledge to independent review panels and professional bodies.
*An absence of pressures to learn. No formal exams, no set homework and nothing that takes the fun out of learning.
*Continuing learning and education as a part of life, rather than schooling as a stage in a preparation for lifetime employment.
Note that learning in a free city should not be compulsory. But full opportunities to learn must be readily available to everyone, at all times throughout their life. Religious instruction is a separate process. In keeping with the ethos of a leaver-giver society, free cities should not restrict religious instruction in any way, and various religious groups should be free to combine other learning and religious studies however they choose.
The above points are not intended as a wish list of admirable, motherhood, conditions for free city education systems. Each is likely to be quite important to achieving the types of learning and the levels of learning that will be required in a Level 4 Civilization. Truth and the wide availability of information and knowledge will be essential to successful leaver-giver societies. For neo-tribes to function effectively, all members must contribute to success. And, to be able to contribute in the 21st century, individuals will require knowledge and a passion for learning in their particular field of expertise.
It will not be necessary, or even desirable, for every member of every neo-tribe in a free city to be a scientist or technologist. Indeed, this will be impossible in the early decades because many older and otherwise ill-equipped people will never be able to assimilate the knowledge involved. Neo-tribal principles require that each member contributes to the overall success and well-being of the tribe. In return the tribe offers what is probably the best form of cradle-to-grave security that humans have ever devised. It is the most natural form of social structure, and it incorporates a full transmission of accumulated knowledge and wisdom from one generation to the next.
All animal groups similarly communicate their knowledge to their young. Flocks, herds, packs, warrens, swarms, and hives all have mechanisms that preserve and freely pass on vital communal knowledge about how to survive and prosper on this planet. So do human tribes. State organised education systems, on the other hand, often transmit knowledge selectively, according to what authorities decide should be taught. Thus, it might come to be seen as 'wrong', or even illegal, to teach evolution in state schools. Whole areas of ancient history might be omitted from the curriculums of such systems. Or, worse still, the facts might be 'shaped' to conform with someone's ideas of what is acceptable for citizens to know and believe.
This is not meant to suggest that knowledge isn't sanitised or that truth cannot ever be distorted or suppressed in tribal societies. Clearly, such distortions and omissions of truth can and do happen. But the shaping of truth within tribal groups does not even begin to compare, either in scale or impact, with what happens at the national level in state education systems. During the 20th century there were obvious examples of severe distortions of knowledge in the Soviet Union and China, both communist regimes. A less pronounced, but more insidious, creation of whole bodies of official truth occurred in supposedly 'free' countries such as the United States, Britain, and Australia. In science, a shift in emphasis from a broad, holistic, examination of nature to a narrower, more material, approach took place in the late 19th century, and continues to the present day.
Institutionalised science and national education systems have created an attitudinal disconnect between cause and effect in environmental degradation. Whole generations have been educated to believe that man stands above and apart from the other life forms that he is surrounded by, and that nature exists to be managed and exploited for the benefit of humans. That is, after all, quite in keeping with the long standing assumptions of takerism. The one big problem is that it isn't true. The natural world was not created for us to exploit at the expense of other creatures, and we do not have any right to exterminate other species at will, just because our technology enables us to do so.
Most importantly, modern science that excludes all possibilities that it cannot touch and test in a laboratory is not necessarily superior to the knowledge of earlier tribal peoples who recognised both the material and non-material worlds. Modern science that shuts out the metaphysical realm is actually deficient and inferior to earlier systems of knowledge and wisdom.
Free cities and regions will recognise the need for people of all ages to study both the modern and ancient collections of knowledge. In particular, anybody who wants to will be able to explore the details of subjects such as sacred geometry, musical structures and the power of vibrations. These are areas where earlier civilizations held knowledge that is often more clear and meaningful than modern coverage of the same areas. Only recently, with the modern study of metaphysics, under the name of quantum mechanics, has it begun to be recognised that all matter is ultimately composed of vibrations, and that the faith that tribal peoples, such as the Australian aborigines, have in sound as a healing medium is likely to be well justified. Until the geometric nature of music is widely understood there will still be many people who dismiss the use of vibrations from the Didgeridoo to cure a range of serious ailments, as a myth. Sadly, that is the way they have been educated to think: that all knowledge from earlier times that is not readily explainable in terms of modern theories has to be nonsense.
Why Study Sacred Geometry? [192]
The importance of learning geometry as the ancients taught it is to cut through the abstractions that man has overlaid on the natural proportion and order of the universe. It is not a new-age hippie reason, but a serious pathway to a full comprehension of the truth about numbers.
Geometry does not need numbers in the sense of "one", "two", "goo", "zoo". It works with lengths and proportions. It is practical to construct the patterns of sacred geometry using only a pencil, a drawing compass, and a straight edge. Just as the relationships between notes and tones in music are independent of any contrived number system, so are the lengths, proportions, and angles of geometry. Indeed, geometry was described by the 18th century German poet and natural philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as "frozen music."
Robert Lawlor's wonderfully illustrated book, Sacred Geometry - Philosophy and Practice, provides some very revealing insights into the history of our present-day numerical conventions. Lawlor shows how the adoption of a decimal system that includes zero was significant in masking the properties of the underlying natural numbers. Although both the ancient Egyptians and the Romans used decimal systems, they had separate symbols for each unit of growth, tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on. During the twelfth century the works of the Arab mathematician, Al-Gorisma, were translated into Latin. Both the originally Indian numerals, 1 through 9, and the concept of zero, began to influence Western thought and mathematics from that time. Due to the practicality it afforded to calculations in commerce, zero together with the Arabic numerals, was quickly adopted by the merchant class in Europe.
Some excerpts from Lawlor's book explain the way in which zero changed mathematics.
*"The consequences were enormous. First or all, within the structure of arithmetic itself, the additive basis of calculation had to be cast aside. Formerly the addition of one number to another number always produced a sum larger than either of the original numbers. This was of course nullified by the utilization of zero. Other laws of arithmetic were also altered, so that we are now able to have operations such as the following: 3+0=3, 3-0=3, 03=3, 30=3x10, but 3x0=0, and 3/0=0 (???).
Here logic completely breaks down. The illogic of the symbol was accepted because of the convenience it afforded to quantitative operations. Yet this breakdown of the simple, natural logic of the arithmetic structure allowed a complicated mental logic to take its place and invited into mathematics a whole range of numerical and symbolic entities, some of which have no verifiable concept or geometric form behind them.
Arising from the sixteenth century onwards, these entities include relative numbers (i.e. negative quantities such as -3); infinite decimal numbers; algebraic irrational numbers (numbers such as e, the basis of logarithms, which satisfy no rational algebraic equation); imaginary numbers such as the square root of -1; complex numbers (the sum of a real number and an imaginary number); and literal numbers (letters representing mathematical formulae). The invention of zero permitted numbers to represent ideas which have no form. This signals a change in the definition of the word 'idea', which in antiquity was synonymous with 'form', and implies geometry."
*"The 'western' rationalistic mentality negated the ancient and revered spiritual concept of Unity, for with the adoption of zero, Unity looses its first position and becomes merely a quantity among other quantities. The advent of zero allows one to consider anything below the quantitative number series as nil or of no account, while anything beyond the quantitatively comprehensible range becomes an extrapolation subsumed under the word God and deemed religious or superstitious. Hence zero provided a framework in western thinking for the development of atheism or negation of the spiritual."
*"With zero we have at the beginning of modern mathematics a number concept which is physically misleading and one which creates a separation between our system of numerical symbols and the structure of the natural world. On the other hand, with the notion of Unity which governs ancient mathematics, there is no such dichotomy. "
*"...unthinkable though Unity may be, both reason and spiritual experience compel the traditional thinker to place it at the beginning. Everything that exists in his mathematical problem or in his universe is a fraction of the unknown One, and because these parts can be related proportionately to one another they are knowable."
*"Unity is a philosophic concept and mystic experience expressible mathematically. The Western mentality, however, withdrew its discipline of acknowledging a supra-rational, unknowable mystery as its first principle. But in rejecting this reverence to a single unknowable unity, our mathematics and science developed into a system requiring complex, interconnected hypotheses, imaginary entities such as those mentioned above, and unknown x quantities which must be manipulated, quantified or equalised as in the algebraic form of thought. So the unknown appears not just once but at every turn, and can be dealt with only by seeking quantitative solutions."
*"Our present thought is based on the following numerical and logical sequence:
-5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
With zero in the centre, there is a quantitative expansion 1, 2, 3, ... and our sense of balance requires having -1, -1, -2, -3 ... on the other side, giving a series of non-existent abstractions (negative quantities) which demand an absurd logic. The system has a break-point, zero, disconnecting the continuum and dissociating the positive numbers from the negative balancing series."
*"In the ancient Egyptian numerical progression, beginning with one rather than zero, all the elements are natural and real:
1/5, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
All the elements flow out from the central unity in accordance with the law of inversion or reciprocity. The Egyptians based their mathematics on this simple, natural series of numbers, performing sophisticated operations with it for which we now need complex algebra and trigonometry."
*"...In terms of the orthodoxy of ancient mathematics, the symbols of mathematics should reflect the realities they describe. With zero and the array or merely mental and statistical signs which followed it, we are very far from having a system of mathematical symbols which corresponds to the pure geometric order of living space."
In the words of the mathematician Leopold Kronecker:
"God made the integers and all the rest is the work of man."
Free cities and regions will provide education options that enable all members of society to study sacred geometry and ancient knowledge. This will greatly assist these centres to adapt to and embrace the ideas that will drive science and technology in the 21st century, and lead to the generation of the levels of abundance necessary in a leaver-giver society. Without the deep insights that such studies can bring, people will be likely to find it harder to understand and apply the right knowledge. All 'educated' people will need to re-learn and adapt much of the 'truth' they have accumulated during the industrial age. Children, on the other hand, will need to begin their education on a sound footing from the start. It should be quite practical for them to be fluent in new knowledge, that draws on Peter Plichta's work, by the time they are twelve years of age.
Kenichi Ohmae feels that Japan will be at a disadvantage in the new age, because of an inability to quickly free regions from central control. But that won't be the deciding factor in transforming the economy. The crucial element will be the capacity of the people to be able to accept discovered truth when it contradicts hundreds of years of teaching. In this regard traditional societies like Japan might have more affinity with ancient knowledge and truth than nations that have been deeply 'educated' in the truth of the West. Although Japan is a thoroughly modern industrial power it has probably retained its traditional culture better than any other country has managed to do. Combined with a 2nd Renaissance education system, their more receptive attitudes to surprising new knowledge, that accords with many ancient rituals, might be a decisive advantage for Japan.
It could be the ease with which the various countries, that are presently nation states, can reintroduce ancient teachings and forms of thought into their education systems that becomes the decisive factor in preparing for a Level 4 Civilization. Japan might have centralist bureaucracies to overcome, but so do all other nations. One difference between countries such as the USA and Australia, and those such as Japan and India, is that the latter have knowledge traditions, in mathematics, music, geometry, and astronomy, that stretch back thousands of years. All America and Australia have in this regard is materialistically oriented theories that evolved in Europe during the past two centuries. Most of these notions now need to be unlearned as a result of Peter Plichta's profound insights.
The Burden of Having A Modern Education [193]
It is noticeable that the few people who argue against Plichta on the Internet do so by using 'knowledge' that he has shown to be false. They try to disprove his findings using what they have been taught as 'truth.' The notions are so ingrained in their minds that they seem not to be aware that they are using what amounts to circular logic.
One such reviewer of God's Secret Formula, on the Amazon.com site, takes Plichta to task using what he has 'learned' about base notation. He writes, in part,
*"Plichta wants to use base notation to deliver the result 1/81=0.0123456789[10][11][12]..., however no constant base notation can do the trick. In order to preserve the integrity of the decimal (.0123456789), base-10 must be used. For the next number to be [10], however, a base of at least eleven must be used, and for the number after that to be an [11] a base of at least 12 must be used. If these alternate bases were used, they would totally change the evaluation of the first part of the decimal (.0123456789), so that a number other than 1/81 would be signified."
The person posing the above argument is, judged from his writing, neither unintelligent nor uneducated. In fact, he could be said to be too educated in the abstract mathematics of today's science. As a result he misses the point that Plichta is reverting to the natural number series that is masked by the conventions that have been adopted to make a decimal system of only nine numerals and zero function. Had this reviewer also learnt sacred geometry and the history of numbers he might have understood this better than he appears to have done.
Plichta obtains the natural sequence below by abandoning the convention adopted along with the use of zero. This is the first line result below.
The subsequent lines show how the convention is unmasked. This is done here in a diagrammatic, non-mathematical way. So that even your granny might be able to understand it. Peter Plichta has also proved the soundness of his reasoning using mathematics. He has done this in both of his books. Before you reject his conclusions, read his findings and study his explanations.
The fact that there is an artifice, a convention, involved in the decimal system in use today is not in any doubt. The great French mathematician, Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, put it thus, when explaining decimal notation and any other base in the abstract number system built around the Arabic numerals and the use of zero.
*"The numeral zero plays an important role in this principle. It employs the convention (Lothar's emphasis) that any numeral other than zero when raised to the power zero has the value one."
The 'convenience' of the number system introduced into medieval Europe caused it to be widely adopted for trade and commerce. Although it was not well suited to science, the abstract number series became the scaffold for modern mathematics and the investigation of the laws of the universe. It is significant that the Cistercian Order, which had been founded in 1098 near Dijon in France, strongly resisted the introduction of a decimal system that incorporated zero. Since their philosophical and practical knowledge was the foundation of the sacred geometry used by Masonic Guilds in the construction of the Gothic cathedrals across Europe, the Cistercians were well aware of the divine nature of harmonic proportions and inversions within the natural number series. They fully realised that the adoption of an abstract number series would serve to mask the geometric nature of matter and music from future generations.
Robert Lawlor's book, Sacred Geometry, is rich in practical exercises and examples that enable students to 'see and touch' proportional realities. Just as children who work through Plichta's tiles exercise, described earlier, can immediately comprehend Newton's inverse square law, students who use a drawing compass and a straight edge to construct the various geometric forms in Lawlor's workbook examples can quickly grasp the essence of mediation, and of arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic progressions.
Why is this important? Because modern science now understands that all matter is formed by vibrations and that these progressions, that are found within the natural number series, in both geometry and music, are fundamental to understanding the phenomena involved. If these young people want to become 21st century technologists and travel to other star systems in their lifetimes, this is some of the foundation knowledge they will need to have.
There is also another reason for young people to clearly comprehend the basis of all forms and vibrations. It is the sense of wonder they will experience as the patterns and numbers are revealed to them. By comparison, the study of abstract mathematics and its derived science is far less uplifting. There is cleverness there, but not the same wonder or sense of the divine. Scientists and technologists who have been educated in the traditional manner are also aware of the same progressions and inversions that are explored in Lawlor's workbook examples. However the context in which they learnt about these natural relationships was different to that in which 21st century students of sacred geometry will acquire their insights.
In the 20th century case the prevailing rationalistic philosophies of institutional science and the abstract nature of the number series that underlies modern mathematics combined to obscure the natural wonder of the subject. Educated 20th century people were, and still are, generally unaware of the real significance of the relationships they studied in geometry and the natural numbers. As a consequence their understanding of these areas is somewhat superficial. The fact that they believe that they have been taught the latest, and therefore the most complete, knowledge about geometry and numbers becomes an impediment to their acceptance of 'strange' insights in these fields.
Changing their view of reality is made even harder for them when those 'new' notions turn out to have been well known thousands of years earlier, by civilizations that they have been taught to regard as 'primitive' and inferior to our modern society. Therefore, disbelief is often their first reaction. Their second reaction is recourse to what they know, the knowledge they acquired during a good 20th century education, to disprove the 'erroneous' new notions confronting them. It's all very sad, but also very typical of people who have simply learned the wrong knowledge in the first place.
Related:
2nd Renaissance -16
Supporting secessions and the formation of free cities and regions is going to be crucial. Only in these new beachheads of tomorrow’s society will such innovations as home-schooling, and a lack of state censorship and media spin, enable young people to discover the truths they will need to know to build a Level 4 Civilization.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108722.php 2nd Renaissance -15
Historically, there have been periods when legal distinctions between animals and humans have been blurred. For instance, in medieval Europe, in the 14th and 15th centuries, numerous trials and executions of animals occurred. One source identifies 34 recorded instances of pigs having been tried and cruelly put to death. Besides pigs; rats, chickens, goats, and bees were similarly tried. Some of the pigs were fully dressed in human clothes at the time they were, inevitably, found guilty. In one case a vicar excommunicated a flock of sparrows that infested his church. All this happened despite the theological stance that animals had no soul, and no morals or conscience. They could not really be guilty of transgressing the Rule of Law.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108557.php 2nd Renaissance -14
Withdrawing Support For Militarism [179] The problem with revenge is that it lowers the humanity of those who exercise it down to the same level, of even below, those who committed the original crime. Although we can't yet know who was responsible for 911 or 1012, we do now know that forces of the Coalition of the Willing (CoW) have, on occasions, been just as barbaric as the people who killed on those dates. This has been amply demonstrated in Afghanistan and again in Iraq. If you doubt this, seek out more facts about the CoW's use of DU and NDU weaponry and cluster bombs. These horror weapons continue, to this day, to put young children and adult civilians at risk of injury or death from unexploded munitions, radiation, and toxic substances in the ground water and the food chain.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108373.php Surveillance
It is up to ordinary people to raise the level of debate about the undemocratic surveillance practices of the many faceless and unaccountable agents who make daily intrusions on individual privacy, and about the apologists and propagandists for the War nn Terror who applaud every new attack on human rights and freedoms as "prudent" or "necessary". If there is no discussion of reverse surveillance in the national media, create it on the streets on a citizen to citizen basis. If nobody is talking about the outrageous assaults on privacy and human rights embodied in the new antiterrorist acts forced through US, UK and Australian legislatures, start talking about it to your neighbours and friends.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/108175.php 2nd Renaissance -13
Such a development is part of the phenomenon of reverse surveillance that will come to characterise the 2nd Renaissance and a rapid transition to a Level 4 Civilization and a truly free society. You can learn more about reverse surveillance at the 'Surveillance' freesite. Reverse surveillance principles extend well beyond the use of ubiquitous digital imaging technologies, and include audits of all aspects of federal government operations, by randomly selected teams of citizens. The Feds and the parrot people will be quick to pronounce that such monitoting is "not in the national interest," but it will definitely be in our interests, and those of future generations of humanity.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/107989.php 2nd Renaissance -12
There are reports that in one Balinese kampong that provided labour to the clubs in Kuta Beach, seven empty coffins were buried, because there were no identifiable remains of the missing workers. It was as if they had been vaporised. Scores of people, mainly locals, are thought to have disappeared without trace.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/03/107756.php 2nd Renaissance -11
Fortunately, the power and control of government and military elites is illusory in the 21st century. The world no longer works the way it did, and there is nothing to compel people to support failed, outdated systems any longer. This is an understanding that must be widely and quickly shared. The future of our children and the planet depends upon our changing our thinking about governments, and our support for them.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107560.php 2nd Renaissance -10
In the Afghanistan turkey shoot the CoW forces used vast numbers of hard target weapons and other munitions containing depleted uranium (DU). This substance is almost twice as dense as lead. When it punches through concrete bunkers, armour, or mud huts, DU disintegrates into a chemically toxic and radioactive dust. In contrast to the earlier DU weapons used in Gulf War I, the newer ordinance produced deaths and deformities within weeks of the start of military action by the CoW. Between 1990-91 and 2001 the US arms manufacturers are thought to have "improved" the DU technology by introducing milled uranium ore to their warheads. This non-depleted uranium (NDU) is - wait for it - cheaper to produce and far more potent than DU. It poses massive health risks to civilian populations exposed to it, and constitutes, in every sense of the word, a weapon of mass destruction, or WMD. "Hey they're hunting them in Iraq, aren't they?"
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107216.php 2nd Renaissance -9
The Old World Order will not do anything to smooth the path to a Level 4 Civilization, and a better world. On the contrary, they will do whatever they can to make it difficult. The police, the military, the media, the financial system, the rule of law, and all the mechanisms of civil control and surveillance will be mobilised in defence of the status quo. But, once they understand their options, the people of the world will not engage in a battle with the forces of the OWO. They will simply abandon the old way of living under national rule, for a better, freer, life in new tribal societies. Kinship mechanisms will help people cope with the pressures of official opposition to radical changes that will finally enable them to escape the invisible prison that the OWO had fashioned around them.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/107047.php 2nd Renaissance -8
Ultimately the old order will lose the battle to preserve their privileged way of life, based on all prevailing scarcity, pseudo-democracy, and the rule of law. But in the interim, hundreds of millions of innocent people might lose their lives in bloody resistance to the changes being made by the Old World Order (OWO).. If such a terrible thing happens, it will all have been for nothing, because:
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106816.php Tales of Adam
Daniel Quinn*
http://ishmael.com/index1.cfm 2nd Renaissance -7
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.
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/106537.php 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.
Original Article
http://sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=64701&group=webcast
Lothar
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