Energy and the Human Journey: Where We Have Been; Where We Can Go

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Billy:

Great question, and I have to give credit to an exercise that I first saw Richard Heinberg suggest.  He said to just sit and look around at your life, at the objects and activities, and think of the role that energy plays in them.  Living in Australia, that can be quite an exercise, and not just because of the harm that your industrialized existence causes, but my essay draws a good picture of Australia’s amazing past.  

Australia was once part of a landmass called Gondwana today, which South America, Africa, and Antarctica also used to be part of, and they had a long history of independent evolution from the northern continents, going back to before there were dinosaurs.  My essay covers some of those differences.  Gondwana itself seems to have been responsible for mass extinctions (1, 2, 3).  When that bolide destroyed the dinosaurs (except for birds), it set the stage for the rise of mammals, but New Zealand, for instance, was entirely repopulated by birds and stayed that way until the Maori arrived.  They drove the big birds to extinction in less than a century, but it was just the latest in a series of human-caused extinctions, and the invasion of Australia was humanity’s first big one.  Because of fleet-footed kangaroos, Australian aborigines never gave up big game hunting, and according to a fascinating hypothesis, that prevented them from ever adopting agriculture, and they remained in about 600 mutually hostile patrilineal societies until the British invaded.  Like the Spanish in Mexico, the British invaders quickly destroyed the ecosystems of southeast Australia while driving the local inhabitants to extinction.  

So, depending who was on the wrong side of the bolide event, human invasion, or British invasion, Australia has seen many catastrophic events, with only the last two big ones being human induced, and the latest was human-on-human.

England’s industrialization had coal to thank, and more for metal smelting in the beginning rather than the power it could provide in steam engines.  That rise of England had everything to do with its imperial dominance and invasion of Australia.  After the American Revolution, Britain could no longer dump its “criminals” in North America, so it chose Australia as its next dumping ground.  Australia was kind of unique in the West, as it was an arid continent without the energy resources that Britain and North America had, so it developed as kind of a rump state in the West.  Today, Australia exports a lot of coal to Asia, and mining metals has always been a big part of the Australian economy.  But Australia never had much oil, and it conspired with the Indonesian genocide in East Timor in order to exploit the oil in Timor Gap.  So, today’s Australians have blood on their hands, too, but far less than the rest of the West.

On the energy front, you enjoy the energy that comes from burning fossil fuels, and that is almost solely responsible for your industrialized lifestyle, including interacting with me on the Internet, getting your food, and obtaining the material goods in your life, particularly energy guzzling machines such as trucks, airplanes, cars, and electric appliances.  As far as energy consumption per capita, Australia is relatively modest compared to the USA, at 78% of American consumption, but is still three times higher than China’s, for instance, which is the greatest energy using nation on Earth, but because there are so many people there, they are relatively poor compared to the West.

The “good news” about fossil fuel consumption is that the West is not razing forests to get their urban energy, like agrarian civilizations did.  But burning those hydrocarbons is warming Earth’s atmosphere, which might help cause another mass extinction by turning Earth from icehouse to greenhouse conditions in a few centuries.  That last transition like that coincided with the largest mass extinction in the history of complex life, and we don’t want to see how it might turn out this time.  

The rise of the West was largely based on learning to turn Earth’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane, its mastery of violence, exploiting fossil fuels, and invading Earth’s continents and enslaving humanity.  You and I both benefit from that heritage.  It is easy to close one’s eyes to that awesome toll and revel in our “bounty” (while simultaneously justifying the impoverished state of the rest of humanity), but that is not the path of integrity and sentience.  The West owes an awesome debt to humanity and Earth, and ushering in the Fifth Epoch may be able to pay for it all.  Making the Fifth Epoch happen is largely an opportunity that the West has (peasants are not going to do it), but people blinded in their egocentrism cannot help.  It will take caring and awakened people for that task, and not many exist anywhere on Earth, much less in the West.  Looking for needles in haystacks…   

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Billy:

Your thoughtful posts are appreciated, and you bring up big issues.  In the end, I think that the best perspective to attempt to attain is that highest of all mystical understandings: we are all one.  Jesus’s “love the enemy” is the most enlightened message ever delivered to humanity.  Another way to see it is that we are all behaviorally modern humans, with far more in common than we have differences.  

I live on the bones of the previous inhabitants, as you do.  I hike in pristine forests where three centuries ago white people were only a legend.  The evils of my culture are something that has to be acknowledged and embraced before we can let go and move onto something new, heck, before we can change our behaviors, which we keep repeating.  At the end of David Stannard’s devastating American Holocaust, he noted that the American genocide was just not some distant memory that the West is trying to sweep under the carpet in its cognitive dissonance, but something that continues today.  His magnum opus was published in 1992, just after the Central American genocides sponsored by the Reagan administration, and in the case of Guatemala, it was once again the indigenous people who bore the brunt of the white man’s murderous ways.  In the USA, these genocides are not something from a distant past that we can try sweeping under the carpet, but ongoing mass murders of children across the world, and yes, Australia, like the UK and Canada, and most of the West, has usually helped carry the USA’s bags for all of those evil deeds, or was an eager beneficiary.  So, the blood is on your hands, too.  But what is the point of acknowledging that?  IMO, it is not to feel guilty and flagellate yourself, but to accept responsibility, and that means being able to respond.  A hundred like me, combining our efforts, and we would have free energy today, and all wars and genocides would end, immediately.  You have the same opportunities that I had.  Heck, if I had encountered my work when I was your age, I would have not come up for air for a year or two.

As I stated the other day, in reply to another question of yours, initiating the Fifth Epoch would be by far the greatest service that the West could render the world, and by itself could right the scales of its awesome debt to humanity and the planet.  That is what being responsible means.  Can enough people muster the integrity and sentience to do that (it would not take very many people)?  That is what I am trying to find out.  

I am mindful every day of the blessings that attend being a member of history’s most privileged demographic group, and my indefatigable writing is taking advantage of my position and doing my best to live in the light of my conscience.  I realize that my preposterous journey has given me a perspective that is unique on Earth, and if I just lived a life of drinking and watching TV, when I wasn’t shuffling along at a job that I hate, what a waste of a lifetime and waste of an opportunity that I sacrificed my life to attain.  Would my soul ever live it down?  That is part of my motivation, but as I always state, any journey like mine had to begin the heart.  Otherwise, I would not have lasted ten minutes on my path.  I have endlessly seen the pretenders come and go, and I have met only a few contenders.  

As far as the Greeks go, their day in the sun was more than two thousand years ago, and they “only” colonized the Mediterranean, which was relatively bloodless.  The feats of Greece were critical to the rise of the West, so your heritage is certainly wrapped up in the mix, especially living in a distant land that was brutally cleared of the natives.  But self-flagellating guilt is not needed.  Heck, my wife is a direct descendant of Columbus and Coronado, and her family cherishes that bloody heritage, but my wife understands that such a lineage is nothing to cheer.  She can’t do anything other than accept it.  Being proud of one’s heritage is of the ego (pride is a deadly sin, after all), and we have to get out of our egocentric focus if we want to make a dent.  People in thrall to their egos are effortlessly herded by the social managers who work on behalf of the elite.  This is another way of stating the integrity issue.  People in thrall to their egos are incapable of acting with integrity, because all of their interactions are all about them.  In that hellish Roads world, those gray beings were merely opportunists finding fertile ground in human egotism to play their games.  In that heavenly one, the highest and best for all was everybody’s goal, even the plants, animals, and bacteria.

In a world of scarcity and fear, it is very difficult to get out of an egocentric focus.  In my advancing years, I’ll say this: you are doing fine.  That you are even asking these questions means that you are doing the work, so no need to be hard on yourself.  Few people on Earth are brave enough to perform the introspection that you are doing, and that great Greek saying is to know yourself.   

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Before I get back to the lessons learned posts (I have been at it for six months!), a little on current reading.  I recently finished The Hidden Life of Trees.  What a marvelous work.  I have been reading more of Frans de Waal’s work lately, and those works will make it into my big essay update.  I have also been reading many works on the human afterlife, and they are amazingly consistent, from scientific works to public mediums who contact the “dead” to the reports of people who had NDEs.  We all live forever, and wherever you go, there you are.  Where you go on the other side is all about what kind of consciousness that you cultivated while you lived in physical reality.  You go where you are attracted, whether it is heavenly or hellish.  The vast majority of today’s humanity ends up in heaven’s suburbs, called Summerland, the mid-astral plane, and other terms, while they recover from life in physical reality and get ready to do it again, in order to grow their consciousness, which is all that we take with us when we go.    

The first two years of Star Trek, The Next Generation (“TNG”) were not very good, but as one reviewer said, TNG was like sex, in that even when it was not very good, it was still kind of good.  TNG did not really hit its stride until after Gene Roddenberry was no longer actively involved, but there was one show in the second season that ranks among the best Trek ever, which was The Measure of a Man, in which a Starfleet scientist wanted to dissect Data, to understand what made him work, in order to build more of him.  The show was concerned with whether Data was a sentient being with rights.  Of course, Hollywood takes liberties with logic to set the stage, such as that Data’s applying to Starfleet should have resolved the sentience question.  But nevertheless, a Starfleet scientist tried to get his way to essentially kill Data and dissect him, and that issue was the subject of a trial.  Riker was forced into becoming the prosecutor of his friend, while Picard defended, and Guinan provided her sage, otherworldly advice.

For me, the key moment was when that dissecting scientist was put on the stand, and Picard asked if Data was sentient.  The scientist denied that Data was sentient, and replied that sentience required, “intelligence, self-awareness, consciousness.”  Picard then asked the scientist to prove to the court that Picard was sentient, and the scientist replied with, “This is absurd,” as it was self-evident that humans were sentient beings.  Picard demonstrated that Data had intelligence and awareness, and made the point that if Data had consciousness, then he met all of the scientist’s criteria.  Picard asked all in attendance if they could say that Data had consciousness.  The judge ruled that Data had the right to choose, and concluded that the issue was whether Data had a soul, and the judge remarked that she was not sure whether she had a soul.  Thus ended one of the best Trek episodes ever.

With that, I will segue to The Hidden Life of Trees and de Waal’s work.  In the introduction to The Hidden Life of Trees, the writer (who was not the author) took pains to distinguish that work from The Secret Life of Plants, which he considered a New Age tract that fell short of a scientific effort.  But the author presented clear scientific findings that trees have nervous systems and make behavioral responses to their environment, and can make them very quickly.  They often shelter their young and feed them via their root systems, which are in symbiosis with fungal systems.  Trees are social beings that form communities that are in communication and provide mutual defenses against being eaten by animals, and the author speculated that a tree’s brain was in its roots, and he kind of asked Picard’s question, in that if a tree can respond to stimulus and change its behavior, who is to say that it does not have consciousness?  Like a good scientist, he leaves that question open, but again, who is to say that humans have consciousness or are sentient?  Like that scientist on the witness stand, who are we to grant consciousness and free will to ourselves, yet deny it to other life forms?  That reeks of the human ego.  

The Hidden Life of Trees takes me back to reading Seth 40 years ago, as he stated that plants have exquisite consciousness, that flowers enjoy being beautiful, and that a tree can recognize the human walking past it, can feel pain, and generally focuses its consciousness on the site of its body both before it lives and up to 50 years after its body dies.  Scientific findings are finally beginning to catch up with Seth, once again.  50 years is far longer than the usual three days that it takes human souls to disengage from their bodies after their deaths, if a great deal of mystical material is to be believed.  I vividly recall communing with a poppy on a spring hillside behind the dorms at the university where I lived, nearly 40 years ago.  It was happy to be there.  An enlightened scientist will leave open the question of the consciousness of any other life form, even bacteria, and the truly enlightened ones that I have encountered have a profound respect for all life.  The Hidden Life of Trees is a wonderful book.

That brings me to Frans de Waal’s work.  I have cited his work in mine before, but have read more of his work lately (I am in the middle of The Bonobo and the Atheist, and next up is Chimpanzee Politics) and he leads the charge on challenging the egocentric conceit that only humans have consciousness, sentience even.  Much of his career has been spent studying chimps and bonobos, and he strongly echoed Darwin’s observation that human intelligence was different from that of other animals only in degree, not in kind.  His work clearly shows the evolutionary heritage of many human traits, such as empathy, nurturing, play, and yes, violence.  He regularly takes to task the human conceit of how different humans are.  He said that human consciousnesses was like an iceberg, in that the iceberg’s tip is what separates us from other animals (he does not dismiss the importance of the mirror test, for instance), but all of what was hidden we had in common with all animals, and it was worth studying and made that iceberg’s tip understandable.  Studying that tip in isolation was a delusional approach, but is a human predilection.  

Many scientists and scholars obsess on that iceberg’s tip, and deny that the stuff below the surface is important or even exists, and de Waal noted that hypothesis were constantly floated about unique human traits, to only die in about a decade, when other animals were found to possess the same traits, if perhaps not quite so developed as in humans.  To deny any other life form consciousness and volition is a purely human conceit, and authors such as that forester who wrote The Hidden Life of Trees and de Waal are leading a very healthy trend to end those primitive notions, which justify evils such as vivisection and factory farming.  Human are animals, if highly cerebral ones, but using that to justify the “inferiority” or exploitability of other life forms is the height of arrogance, and I consider those authors as helping us all take some baby steps toward that heavenly Roads world.  

Peace on Earth, goodwill to all,

Wade

Edited December 24, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As an addendum to my previous post, I am updating my big essay this morning (it won’t be published until the essay update is, which might be a while, with my day job being insanely demanding), and I wanted to address a subject that I have written plenty about before, which is bonobo societies.  Frans de Waal has studied bonobos for many years, and he devoted a chapter of The Bonobo and the Atheist to bonobos, and it aligns with what I have already written on the subject, with some new wrinkles.  M. de Waal quoted Japanese researcher Takeshi Furuichi, who is the only scientist on Earth who extensively studied both chimps and bonobos, who said, “With bonobos, everything is peaceful.  When I see bonobos, they seem to be enjoying their lives.”  You can read this article on bonobos, which focuses on Furuichi, in which he is very pessimistic of great ape survival in Africa.  

The USA is almost entirely responsible for the recent demise of the bonobo, as it has been screwing over the Congo for more than 50 years, ever since the CIA assassinated the Congo’s first elected leader, Patrice Lumumba.  The USA also orchestrated the invasion of Rwanda from Uganda, to put the elite Tutsi back in power (to serve American, British, and Canadian mining interests), and Paul Kagame is a genocidist in the mold of Suharto, another staunch ally that we put in power.  Among Wikipedia’s many flaws is the handling of those butchers, as they served Western interests.  Suharto was responsible for three genocides, and the first was the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, who formed the backbone of the communist party, as the CIA drew up the murder lists for Suharto’s killers.  More than a million died in that bloodbath.  Suharto later invaded East Timor, with American weapons and diplomatic support, and killed off about a third of the population, while the American press was totally silent on the issue.  There is a vignette about East Timor in the documentary Manufacturing Consent, which has never played in the USA’s mainstream media, although it was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to that time (only exceeded by its “sequel” on American corporations).  As Uncle Noam said, in that instance, the American media literally enabled that genocide.  Suharto was also responsible for a genocide in Papua New Guinea, to clear the land of the natives for Indonesian “settlers.”  

Paul Kagame is a genocidal dictator who invaded the Congo and began those civil wars that wiped out bonobos, but don’t count on reading about it anywhere in the West, except the work of Uncle Ed and the few like him.  Nobody is better at deconstructing imperial propaganda than Uncle Ed.  He is still at it, and will be 92 in a few months.  His work is awe-inspiring.  

But back to bonobos.  There is no record of any lethal attack, of either infants or adults, in any bonobo society, ever.  The greatest taboo in bonobo societies is even the appearance of threatening an infant, which will bring a vicious response by the entire society on the offender, no matter what the offender’s status was.  Bonobo societies are dominated by females, for the only true matriarchal societies of any ape or human, and they are more peaceful than any human society ever was.  Bonobo societies are notorious for their X-rated sex lives, where it is always one big orgy.  When two groups of captive bonobos were joined together, to see what happened, it turned into one big orgy.  If two groups of captive chimps were joined like that, it would have been lethal vying for dominance.  

The evidence is clear that bonobos were only able to take their path because of an economic windfall, when the rainforest shrank during a glacial interval and gorillas left the region and never returned, which doubled the bonobo food supply.  Bonobos used that economic windfall to reengineer their society.  When I hear people spout off that violence and greed are part of “human nature,” and I bring up the situation of bonobos, all that I receive is silence and they change the subject, and even go on the attack, as happened to me recently, when I was essentially booted out of a forum by an administrator who did exactly that.

In de Waal’s book, he noted his Catholic upbringing in the southern Netherlands, where their relatively cavalier attitudes toward sex were like those found in Spain, France, and Italy, while the Calvinist northern part of the Netherlands was comprised of uptight prudes.  All English-speaking nations other than England were invaded by Calvinist Christians, and their prudish ways can still be seen in all of those nations.  However, the Industrial Revolution’s demographic transition has been changing that, and as women’s status has risen, sex as part of an economic contract has been waning.  I grew up during the Women’s Lib era of the 1960s and 1970s, but there was little balance there, as people explored the extremes.  But I have been witnessing kids coming of age in the 21^st century on the West Coast, and they are relatively free of the sexual hang-ups of their parents’ generation, and are kind of like bonobos in their sexual mores.  To a degree, it is a harbinger of the Fifth Epoch, and I think that the nuclear family may well fade away in the Fifth Epoch, being one option of many, but will be seen as a primitive anachronism, like slavery and other “hallowed” institutions of the human journey.  

Ho, ho, ho,

Wade

Edited December 24, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Just as I put up chapter drafts as I wrote my big essay, I am beginning to write updates to my big essay, and I will sometimes publish them, as I am below.  The quotes on Janice Moore come from Kathleen McAuliffe’s This is Your Brain on Parasites, and the de Waal quote comes from his The Bonobo and the Atheist.  

“While studying for writing this essay and its periodic updates, I read well more than 100 popular science books.  I regularly encountered branches of science that are relatively new, and typical responses to the pioneers were attacks and ridicule from their peers, which are not auspicious ways to establish careers.  Only highly persistent pioneers eventually made their marks.  One example that comes to mind is the recent award given to Janice Moore, who helped pioneer the science of the behavioral effects of parasites.  Her early career was spent scrapping for funding for investigating a subject that was initially met with disgust, disparagement, and indifference by the scientific establishment, and only after “howling in the wilderness” for more than a decade about the subject and her findings, in the early 1980s, studying parasites “became cool.”  After a career of studying animal behaviors, particularly those of chimps and bonobos, while adducing ground-breaking findings about behaviors of humanity’s closest cousins that show where many human traits came from (humans did not invent empathy, altruism, tool use, and many other traits once considered uniquely human), Frans de Waal had this to say about his fellow scientists:

“The typical scientist has made an interesting discovery early on in his or her career, followed by a lifetime of making sure that everyone else admires his or her contribution and that no one questions it.  There is no poorer company than an aging scientist who was failed to achieve those objectives.  Academics have petty jealousies, cling to their views long after they have become obsolete, and are upset every time something new comes along that they failed to anticipate.  Original ideas invite ridicule, or are rejected as ill informed.”  

Time to go hiking.  

To those who celebrate it, Merry Christmas,

Wade

Edited December 26, 2016 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have a little time this morning, as the year winds down and there is banter about traffic to my work.  When I see authors write about my work, especially my free energy and abundance work, such as here and here, I will usually try to contact the authors, but it rarely goes anywhere.  I have not contacted those authors yet, but it is on my list of things to do.  

In my circles are some pretty high-powered people, but they are usually afraid to be seen publicly associating with me.  They have more to fear from their social/professional circles than Godzilla’s minions, but I can’t get them over the hump, although I have never tried to drag them.  I’ll guarantee you that Godzilla is watching.  He never forgot about me after the Ventura days, he tried to set us up during my second stint with Dennis, so paranoia about Godzilla is understandable, but the paranoid cannot sing with me on the global stage.  I think that I am relatively low on his radar today, and at this stage, that suits me fine.

I get a lot of FE newbies who think that I should try to get on Oprah and other high-visibility venues, to spread my message, but none of those making such exhortations have studied my work at any length, and if they had, they would understand that I would risk my life at this stage to do that, more than I am already.  I need them to do the work, not come up with their worthless “bright ideas.”  But that hard work takes years, while those bright ideas can be shoveled out in instants, like some kind of reflex action, by those trapped in social consciousness, which is pre-sentient.  At this stage, nobody in the choir is in any kind of danger, but if I suddenly acquired some kind of high profile, they could be, with as few as there are.  When it gets bigger, the danger will decline.  I will never try to bait newbies into what I am doing, who see it as the New Age or conspiracist flavor of the day.  The only people who come close to understanding are those who spent years chewing on the material. Achieving an Epochal frame of mind is not easy, as you have to jettison almost everything that you think you know, as it is almost all in-group pabulum, even the seemingly intelligent stuff.   

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Serg:

In Seattle, this is my last post of 2016, but my first post in 2017, where Avalon’s servers are.   

Yours was an interesting take on some global issues.  I agree that asking capitalists to address the Global Warming issue is nonsensical.  However, in the USA, at least, the capitalists own the government, and having a billionaire as president highlights our plutocracy, as it has always been, ever since America’s richest man became its first president and its first Chief Justice said that those who own the country should run it.  Since, capitalists own the American government and seven cartels dominate the world economy, any effort coming from the world’s current institutions does not seem likely.  Building seawalls obviously are tiny Band-Aids at best, and kind of like Western medicine, that only manages symptoms and ignores causes.

In the Fifth Epoch, the average “workday” is going to be a few hours, if that.  There will be no such thing as drudgery, and people are not going to look at “work” anything like they do today, but as a way that they fulfil their souls.  

Today, I recently read some 2017 predictions by a contributor to one of those “fake news” sites who is pretty hip, and he is not really in denial of free energy’s possibility or desirability, but is at the most naïve level of the game, thinking that some inventor in his garage is going to make it happen, which I call Level 6, which I usually apply to those naïve inventors, but also applies to people who think that free energy is going to magically spring from that milieu.  Well, it often does, but it almost instantly ends up in Godzilla’s Golden Hoard.  I guess that their naïve stance is better than denial or fear, but they have such a long way to go.  That site has promoted that kind of thinking before, and I have seen capitalists talk about the coming free energy days, and I have even contacted some of them (and never heard back, of course!  ).

Of course, in the Fifth Epoch, taxes, nations, and the like will vanish, and as you have noted before, there will not be any coercion in the demise of those human constructs; people will simply realize that they make no sense in the Fifth Epoch, and the will take their place with other obsolete human constructs such as slavery and barefoot and pregnant women.  

Happy 2017,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

When I see a Chris/Serg exchange and similar, I try to stay out of it, but will comment on Chris’s notion of the Fifth Epoch.  In my high-tech days, I was around rich people, real rich, like $100 million rich, who never had to work another day in their lives.  Some did not know how to enjoy it, others did and were appreciative, but I never saw one of them just start playing all the time.  It did not matter how much money they had; they planned to work until they decided it was time to retire.  They might only work part-time (while some worked full-tilt, 70 hour weeks and the like), but they worked.  It was educational.  In contrast, when Americans win the lottery, or the black version when lucky men become professional basketball or football players, they go crazy and piss away the money as fast as they can, blowing it on jewelry, yachts, entourages, playing Big Man in Vegas, and the like, and in only a few years, it is all gone.  You won’t find any professional golfers doing that or people who earned their fortunes.  Where I live, you can find yourself behind Bill Gates in the popcorn line.  In the closest shopping center to my house, a pal stood in line behind Steve Ballmer at Starbucks.  These are little hints of how humans will behave in the Fifth Epoch.  There won’t be any potentates, or even any elite.  They just won’t make sense any more, like slavery no longer made any sense, and there will not to be any need for coercion, other than perhaps ensuring that free energy is not weaponized or used to further destroy Earth’s surface.  Both activities will quickly be seen as insane, and in a generation or two, nobody will have to be reminded anymore.

When the Fifth Epoch comes, some of the world’s former poor may wear gold everything for a while (it will come from an asteroid or another planet, not Earth), until they finally ask themselves what the heck they are doing, like that 20^th century man being transported to a Star Trek future.  I advocate those peacekeeping grandmothers and ensuring that the early days do not result in strip-mining Earth, and other than that, however people want to decompress from the Super-Epoch of Scarcity will be fine.  A pal noted the other day that if the Fifth Epoch began today, few people would immediately adapt to it, and I agree, but their children will find it easy, and their children will accept the Fifth Epoch as humanity’s natural state.

The entire species is going to move up Maslow’s Hierarchy, and playing elite fantasies (how the poor imagine how the elite live, not how they really live) will be put aside like toys are when children grow up.  Future generations will look back at our Epoch like we do at cave men or peasants.  They will see it as a phase that humanity went through, perhaps necessary or unavoidable, but they are happy that those days are behind them.  People are not going to sit around, watch the tube, and get fat.  Almost nothing about today’s world will survive into the Fifth Epoch, so to project the lottery winner mentality onto Fifth Epoch humans ignores the transformative potential of the end of poverty and drudgery.  People’s “jobs” will be how they fulfil their souls, and their time spent “working” will be called “joy time.”  Of course, almost nobody today can comprehend that, just like nobody could comprehend the end of slavery three centuries ago.  

I seek the needles in haystacks who are able and willing to dimly imagine that Fifth Epoch with me, as a way to help it manifest.  

Happy New Year,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Before I begin a busy New Year’s Day, I want to comment a little on Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist, which I finished yesterday.  I already started on his Chimpanzee Politics, but likely will not learn a great deal new from it, as I read plenty of de Waal’s subsequent work, which draws heavily on it, as well as plenty of other ape reading.

Dr. de Waal has long been one of the most enlightened voices on the issue of simian intelligence, and probably the most prominent advocate of studying them on their own terms, not continually comparing them to humans (and continually moving the goalposts of what being human means, when chimps and other simians demonstrate traits once thought to be uniquely human, or even birds, elephants, and cetaceans).  While de Waal left his religious upbringing behind long ago and is a materialist today, he writes sympathetically about organized religion, and like other relatively enlightened scientists these days, he looks at religion as an evolutionary social adaptation and notes how healthier and more stable religious communities are than secular ones.  Most Amish who go into the world (it is required of Amish-raised children, when they become adults) go back to their natal communities to live out their lives.  The Amish enjoy many benefits of the industrialized world, just as people who live off the grid do, but that they almost all go back to the farm says a lot about their communities, or industrial ones.

So, it is nice to see prominent scientists not going at it tooth and claw with organized religion, but few of them avoided becoming materialists.  The greatest physicists keenly realized the limits of today’s science and had views that often verged on the mystical.  Martin Rudwick avoided the materialism trap, and took those who used evolutionary theory to construct an atheist “quasi-religion” to task.  That is something that de Waal’s work hinted at: if people dispose of one religion, they merely invent another. 

But de Waal is a staunch materialist, no matter his views on organized religion and science, and this is an endemic problem among scientists, as if there are only two legitimate views: organized religion or materialism.  If you read Handbook to the Afterlife, Is there an Afterlife?, Randi’s Prize (2, 3), or a multitude of similar books, you will find a great deal of evidence, even scientifically adduced, that challenges the materialistic model of consciousness.  Again, I always recommend that people get direct personal experience of the “paranormal” before they dive into the literature and scientific evidence.  Experience is the only teacher, and my fellow free energy travelers that I most respected had a mystical awakening that came from direct personal experience, not a received teaching or literature review, and they were almost all scientists or scientists-in-training.  Mine happened the same way, and once you have experience, you know, and you know that no matter how logical and well-established materialistic theory is (but you can never prove a negative), it is still false, and is just another religion.  

That either/or of organized religion or materialism is truly nonsensical, but pervades the milieu.  As Ken Wilber noted, the greatest physicists did not see a conflict between science and religion, but the genuine and the bogus, with the bogus being the authoritarian dogmas of both disciplines.  As Seth said, dogma is always the enemy of enlightenment.  We all live forever.  

Happy New Year,

Wade

Edited January 1, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I plan to write a post, maybe this morning, which resumes my lessons learned posts, about rejoining Dennis in 1996, for a brief stint, but I wanted to briefly return to those elites in the Fifth Epoch, and celebrity culture in general.  When I stood behind Bill Gates in the popcorn line, I was the only person who recognized him, and even when Gates is recognized in my community, people leave him alone.  Gates has some ways to instantly put people in their place when they treat him like a celebrity.  When Ballmer was in line at Starbucks, again, nobody approached him, but left him alone, even those who recognized him.   But about a block away from where I encountered Gates, I stood in line behind Randy Johnson at the bookstore.  Because of his height, I suppose that he was more noticeable than Gates.  I have run into all manner of movie star, star athlete, and music star over the years, and I never bother them but let them go about their lives.  But as I stood behind Randy Johnson, he did not get off as easy as Gates and was besieged by autograph hunters, and he affably signed for them.  That must become tiring.

In the Fifth Epoch, there won’t be any of that.  No elites or celebrities, and people won’t become athletes, musicians, or actors to become rich and famous.  Competitive everything will become obsolete, as it is born of scarcity and survival.  Again, people are so conditioned that they cannot even imagine a world without those aspects.  It is like that question that Scott asked people, about what they would do with their lives if they were suddenly given a billion dollars, and the number one answer was, “I don’t know.”  It will take some decompression from the Super-Epoch of Scarcity, and the vast majority of humanity will not begin to understand abundance until they can experience it, which is normal.  I seek the few who can do it before having it dumped in their laps.  

Happy New Year,

Wade

Edited January 2, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Until mid-May, my life will be crazy, with little free time.  When I finish the series of lessons learned posts, I plan to work on the essay update, and may work on it some before then.  Already, 2017 promises to be an “interesting” year.  

I read three Peak Oiler analyses for the coming year (1, 2, 3), and I have to give them credit for understanding that the financial economy is only an abstraction of the real economy, and often resembles a house of cards.  Today, it is definitely a house of cards, with the insane money printing and zero-to-negative interest rates engaged in by the world’s biggest central banks.  China has actually blown the biggest bubble of all, incredibly, and when this global bubble pops, it will dwarf what happened in 2007-2009.  The Fed has been playing the easy money game for a generation now, but when the third bubble pops in less than 20 years, maybe they are not going to be allowed to do it again.  It could really hit the fan, globally, in the wake of that manmade disaster, which could include wars that have not been seen since World War II, and perhaps far worse, in a nuclear way.  Can I fast-forward to the Fifth Epoch? 

Money printing is really a form of taxation on those who use that particular currency, as their money (which is only a claim on the government issuing it) is cheapened by printing more money.  Eventually, the currency becomes worthless.  Every fiat currency in history has been ruined this way.  It is pretty simple, really, but just like how Global Warming deniers get lost in the weeds, so do those who think that money printing is some path to endless prosperity.  The central bankers portray themselves as the keepers of arcane knowledge, but that it is a Big Lie.  Money printing is no solution.  It is a path of least resistance, as other interventions require actual real action, policy changes, and real economic changes, while any fool can get a printing press going, and as the money is increasingly electronic, all that the “money printer” has to do is use a computer keyboard for a minute.  

As those Peak Oilers know, all the money printing and other obfuscations cannot hide the fact that the world is quickly running out of energy, which is first manifesting in the end of cheap energy, with those high EROIs.  The so-called fracking boom is a fraud, and is nothing more than sucking at the dregs.  It is absolutely insane to call it some kind solution or path to America’s “energy independence,” but all manner of financial economy pundit parrots that idiocy.  

Best,

Wade

Edited January 4, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Freeknowledge:

You raise big issues.  On psychopaths, I don’t have a book that I could point you to, other than perhaps the DSM V.  The terminology keeps changing, and my psychologist wife will sometimes look askance at my use of terminology.  You can see the terminology controversy on psychopaths at the beginning of the Wikipedia article.  Here is a psychologist writing about the confusion between psychopath and sociopath, but agrees with the general thinking that I have seen, in that psychopaths are born and sociopaths are conditioned.  Scientists think that psychopathy may be the result of brain structure.  Here is another attempt to define  the distinction (and he has a book on serial killers).  

Those are also materialistic definitions, and because they are materialistic, I think that they will fall short of being a comprehensive definition.  This is a key area where if the soul was acknowledged, there would be greater understanding of the condition, but that is not going to happen until the Fifth Epoch.  There are no psychopaths or sociopaths in this world, but this world is full of them.  Let’s take emotional sadist Max, who ended up in his “heaven” when he passed over, but you sure would not call it heaven.  Max is on what I call the dark path, or what Ra would call the path of negative polarization.  But the dark path is not forever, and is something that most souls explore for a time, usually when they are younger souls, before they “get it” and leave behind that extreme egocentrism.  Can I “prove” any of that?  No.  However, there is a great deal of evidence, of reports of the other side, which impressively support that idea.  Of course, if you can die and come back, no need to read the reports.   

That is also kind of how it was with me and psychopaths.  I got to see Godzilla’s minions sicced on us (1, 2), and it was educational.  Bill and Ken were on Godzilla’s direct payroll, while Mr. Deputy was a psychopath in the employ of Ventura County, which is run by gangsters, who were only too happy to take us out for the right price.  A mere $10 million in greased palms can do the work of $1 billion in quiet money, but Godzilla prefers the quiet money route, as it is more effective.  Mr. Skeptic is a functional psychopath, but if he told his endless lies as “merely” part of his job, or was freelancing, is kind of irrelevant.  I have psychopathic and sociopathic relatives, one of whom is in prison today for murdering his infant son.  

So, I got a bellyful of psychopaths and sociopaths in the real world, and have not needed to read academic studies of them very much.  But right now, for instance, I am reading a book on Karl Wolff and his life.  I read one on Allen Dulles recently.  You want to call them psychopaths?  It would not be far from the mark.

My accounts of my encounters with Godzilla’s minions is one of the more important services that I have provided, IMO, to help sober up gung-ho newbies who try to enlist their social circles in the free energy quest.  Social circles are born of survival and ego, and social circle motivations are effortlessly exploited by Godzilla’s psychopaths.  That is why I keep saying that the social circle approach is not going to work, and neither will appeals to egocentric ideologies.  But people usually need to get some experience before they begin to understand, and that is why I continually write that the only people useful for my effort already had some kind of awakening experience.  That awakening helped them shake their in-group conceits.   

I have to rush off to another long day in the office, but briefly, yes, white men have been the most influential intellectuals of the Fourth Epoch, primarily because of their political-economic status (but some of it seems to have been genetically baked in).  In the Fifth Epoch, race will cease to exist, along with many other aspects of today’s humanity.  I have long stated that the free energy quest cannot be a boys’ club, but so far, it largely has been.  Men play heroes, and women play cheerleaders and groupies.  I don’t see a successful effort coming from people who are hardwired into those roles.  The men have to put away their swords and armor, and the women need to become scientifically literate, etc.

Best,

Wade

Edited January 6, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The Neanderthal article that Freeknowledge linked to did not have much new in it, but presented how indeed Neanderthals were denigrated until recently.  But it was just like how all other non-Homo sapiens have been denigrated by our august species, which de Waal has written extensively on.  I am coming to the end of his classic Chimpanzee Politics, and it has been an interesting read, getting into the details more than his other books that I have read.  I just purchased some more of his books, and related ones, and I guess that I am going to see these days as my chimp/bonobo days.  I have studied the issue plenty before, but I am taking a deeper dive than usual, which I have longed to do for more than 20 years.  Chimps and bonobos provide a great window into the human past, even human nature.  

One finding that I keep seeing in chimp and bonobo studies is the same point that I make about the Fifth Epoch: social changes are dependent on the economic ones.  People who think that we can somehow have some social movement, in which humanity suddenly becomes enlightened and lives in peace and happiness, conjuring it from our growing awareness, really don’t understand the human journey, much less what studies of chimps and bonobos are telling scientists.

It was not until some chimps found themselves isolated by the Congo River, and their gorilla competitors left and never returned, which doubled the food supply of those chimps, did they make the social, and ultimately biological, changes that resulted in bonobos.  Bonobo societies are dominated by females, and like when horticultural humans became matrilineal, bonobo societies are the most peaceful of all great ape societies, including humans.  

In the wild, female chimpanzees do not form strong social bonds, and are kind of sex toys of the dominant males.  But in captivity, when three square meals a day are guaranteed, with no work required, then female chimps begin to form coalitions, and I think that traces of the path to the sisterhood of bonobos can be discerned.  Once their economic conditions changed, and captive chimps live far longer and healthier than wild ones do, at least in places such as the Arnhem Zoo, where de Waal did his seminal work, and while many behaviors of captive chimps can be seen in wild ones, there has also been marked social change, particularly females banding together like they do.  In fact, when de Waal began his work, the colony was dominated by a female who died just last year, at age 59.  They removed her and another dominant female from the population, to let the males rise to dominance, which was controversial but highlights how female chimps rose in the hierarchy in captivity, with a radically different economy than seen in the wild.

This issue of Neanderthals having advanced cognitive abilities has not been disputed in scientific circles for quite some time, but is still slowly becoming acknowledged amongst the lay public.  In my opinion, behaviorally modern humans drove Neanderthals to extinction, and likely violently, while interbreeding with them, as there is Neanderthal DNA in the human genome.  That is not unusual.  There is also Denisovan DNA in the human genome, and likely that of other “archaic” humans.  I think that the term “human” can be confidently applied to Homo erectus onward, which includes Neanderthals and Denisovans, and we are almost certainly not finished finding the fossils of human species that will be new to science.  If you want to consider australopiths and the “hobbits” as human, which may be island-dwarfed australopiths, I won’t argue strenuously against it, but Homo habilis is the argued founder of the Homo genus, and I can see why.  But behaviorally modern humans won the contest, and all other human lines were driven to extinction, and it would be no surprise to discover that Homo erectus drove australopiths to extinction.  On the evolutionary scene, there is nothing strange about that, and the tool-mastering human line, which was far more proficient than what came before it, would have had great advantages over its more “primitive” progenitors.

Many scientists have urged caution on the idea of behaviorally modern humans driving Neanderthals to extinction, and some caution is warranted, but relatively disinterested scientists see the other human species as just more megafauna casualties of the rise of behaviorally modern humans.  This is not a very speculative idea, but for humans defending their ancestors, it can be hard to swallow, so we see all sorts of climate change hypotheses, but I strongly doubt that climate change had much to do with it.  Humans are a very adaptable lot, and Neanderthals had been thriving in Europe for a quarter million years or more when behaviorally modern humans arrived, which coincided with the Neanderthal extinction, just like the “coincidence” for most of the world’s megafauna, when behaviorally modern humans arrived.  Some scientists, such as Clive Finlayson, whom that New York Times article discussed, have become strong Neanderthal advocates, maybe even too strong, as Finlayson has modeled alleged Neanderthal regalia.  

The Neolithic Expansion drove hunter-gatherer men from the gene pool, as did the Bantu Expansion, as did Spaniards when they invaded the Caribbean.  The idea that expanding Homo sapiens drove all other human species to extinction is not a stretch, based on the evidence.  

Best,

Wade

Edited January 15, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi guys:

Ah, language!  I am going to use yesterday’s posts as an opportunity to visit the language issue.  I am a professional, and if I reproduced the conversations that I have with my peers, they would be unintelligible to lay readers, as they would be full of jargon and strange concepts, citing arcane parts of the rules of accounting, which are constantly changing.  When I wrote my big essay, I made an effort to use as little scientific jargon as possible.  I am currently reading a great book on the last 65 million years of evolution in Europe, but it is for specialists, full of technical jargon, and I won’t be using it as a reference for my big essay.  

Forty years ago, when I was reading Seth, what Jane Roberts was doing was called “spiritual mediumship.”  Several years later, as I began my career in LA, I heard the term “channeling,” and did not like it.  Around the same time, the term New Age began to appear, and today, that term is nearly an epithet, and I have encountered people who pronounce it to rhyme with sewage.  I understand.  But I use the term channeled today.  I still don’t like it much, but it is the lingua franca of the phenomenon.  I don’t read channeled work much anymore.  It has its place, and it can be a wonderful place, but I have largely moved on from it.  

In 1984, when Dennis was in Yakima, trying to sell his heat pump to apple processors, the local electric company sent out an engineer to help Dennis, as Dennis’s heat pump would increase electric company sales and “disrupt” the natural gas market.  The term “disruptive innovation” was not coined for another decade, and “disruptive technology” is a related term.  I have worked in high tech since the 1990s, and in the high tech field, disruptive technology is a normal term, and I worked at “disruptive” companies.  The city of my birth is getting wrecked today by the success of Amazon, which may be the most disruptive high tech company on Earth, putting brick-and-mortar stores out of business at a prodigious rate.

When Dennis told that electric company engineer that the big opportunity for his heat pump was selling to homeowners, as Dennis did on the East Coast, that engineer got a “deer in the headlights” look and fled, and Dennis did not begin to figure it out until the next year.  Dennis’s heat pump, sold to homes, would disrupt the electric market in Washington, and the next year, Dennis gained intimate knowledge of organized suppression.  “Organized suppression,” like “Global Controllers,” is a term that I coined to describe the situation.  Amusingly, I am now associated with “Godzilla,” while Greer is associated with “petronazi” and other terms, but I first heard the term “Godzilla” from Greer, at our NEM conference in 2004.  Dennis called them the “Big Boys,” and I primarily used that term until 2007, when I wrote this essay, and the person that I wrote it for (who was stupefied into silence by the essay, which also brought Brian back into my life), thought that the “Big Boys” was too flippant, I coined the term “Global Controllers” just for that essay.  So, it is funny and ironic that Godzilla is today seen as my term and not Greer’s.  I use Godzilla for my informal writings.  It is a fun term to use.  On the Internet, Scott made a multimedia presentation out of one of our interviews, and when he put a cartoon image of Godzilla on the screen, as I mentioned Godzilla, I laughed.  

So, Dennis was doing “disruptive innovation” long before the term was coined.  He did it with his foam companies in the 1970s, too.  My use of “disruptive technology” with Dennis’s efforts was very conscious and meaningful, and I don’t associate it with any “meme” out there, and I really don’t use it much in conjunction with the GCs.  Although the GCs may well have been involved in the Seattle events more than it might seem, I see the Seattle events more as the local electric industry’s protecting its turf from disruptive technology than it was some global effort.  While Bill the BPA Hit Man was on Godzilla’s payroll somewhere along the line, it was not until 1987 that we received the first entreaty that I now know to be from the GCs.

So, I have not really used “disruptive technology” to describe Godzilla’s games, but free energy would obviously be the most disruptive technology of all.  But I don’t use that term to describe free energy.  I call it an Epochal technology, and “Epochal Event” is also a term that I coined while writing my big essay.  Creating neologisms while writing about new events and concepts is normal.  I don’t do it much, but on this leading edge, there is often not the language to neatly describe the ideas, players, and events.  I have tried to be pretty conservative in coining terms.

Sentience is another charged term.  I first heard Brian bring up the idea, back in 2001, and I have used it since.  The issue of sentience is an aspect of the consciousness issue.  Brian’s question of whether humanity is a sentient species is a fair one.  Cetaceans are only beginning to wonder if humanity is a sentient species.  I call humanity semi-sentient.  The potential is there, but is rarely realized.  In the Fifth Epoch, humanity will finally become a truly sentient species.  

In finishing, maybe “disruptive technology” has become a “meme” in conspiracist circles, but I am not in that crowd.  I really don’t want to be part of the free energy milieu, either, but people keep trying to drag me into it, like Dennis keeps wanting to drag me back into his efforts.  The free energy field has been in a state of arrested development since before I was born, and Greer’s inventor-centric efforts only highlight its arrested development.  I am trying to mount something that goes far beyond those notions.  I am doing something very different, but people have great difficulty in understanding it.  I constantly hear from Internet surfers and YouTube watchers who try to stick me in the same bag with Greer, Keshe, etc.  Again, my work is closest to Brian’s, that I have seen.  A major point of my big essay (and perhaps the primary one) is to reorient my readers to the energy issue, to help ground them and lead them away from the free energy field’s arrested development.  

Hey Serg, glad that these posts give you some solace.  

Best,

Wade

Edited February 4, 2017 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Melinda:

That was a meaty post, and deserves as comprehensive a response as I can muster before rushing off to work.  Ah, mystical haircuts.  Growing up in Southern California and working in LA for five years, and being a rather prominent member of the mystical milieu, I saw it all.  So much posturing, including clothing, jewelry, and other trappings, including haircuts, for both men and women, and all of it was meaningless.  In fact, people who did that you could almost guarantee did not have the right stuff.  Of course, in LA, there was also the Hollywood Effect, and it could get bizarre.  No names, but one guy cultivated a kind of Indiana Jones, fringe scientist persona, with shoulder-length hair and rugged good looks, and I once saw it exploited by conference organizers, on the cover of their brochure, and it nearly shouted, “Come and get it, girls!”

Rappoport was one of Brian’s pals, and while I am no fan of Infowars or Natural News, venues like those are always under fire, and the high tech mavens are proving to be just as corrupt as their oligarchical forbears.  I have very specifically designed what I am doing so that I don’t need money to do what I do.  I can likely build the full choir without needing any money.  When money changes hands, the game changes radically, as I learned from my days with Dennis, and not only do people you have known your entire lives turn into Orcs lusting after the One Ring when the issue is free energy, but every time that Dennis was taken out (when it wasn’t by his “allies” and provocateurs), it was by “consumer protection” activities.  Protecting the public is the biggest racket on Earth, and encompasses energy, medicine, etc.  It did not matter if you put the world’s best heating system on people’s homes for free, the gangsters still found a way to attack you, as they “protected” the public.  And the public eagerly played along, even when it meant certain death.  It was incredible to witness at first, but I came to learn that that is what abdicating one’s responsibility looks like, given to people who literally see you as a profitable piece of meat, at least while you are still alive.

Attacking the tumor as the only “legal” way to treat cancer is completely insane, but that is how the rackets work.  I have not closely followed the situation for some time, but a quarter-century ago, I read that there seems to be two kinds of breast “cancers.”  The first is really a benign condition, and almost all “successful” breast cancer treatments (if the patients don’t die from the treatment) are treating that benign condition.  The real breast cancer is uniformly fatal under attack-the-tumor treatments, as all such treatments only deal with symptoms, not the disease itself.  I read something recently that also emphasized that distinction in the breast “cancers.”

Mammograms may cause as much cancer as they detect, and, of course, diagnostic procedures such as those used by Rife and Naessens are always under fire.  Which do you think might have a better chance at diagnosis and understanding: snapshots of death or movies of life?

Yes indeed, I wish that there were a hundred blogs devoted to a comprehensive discussion of the Fifth Epoch and how to get there, and maybe someday.  For now, it is just a few of us.  

Best,

Wade