[Below is a transcript of a talk that Charles shared at our local Awakin Circle.]

After that sacred hour of silence, I'm not really sure what to talk about. The Quakers have a saying in their meetings as a guideline about when to speak and when not to speak. They say, ask yourself, is this an improvement on the silence? :) That's a very high bar!



Maybe I'll just start with what I've been thinking about today. I'm here on the West Coast by myself. I was with Stella, my partner and Cary, our son, until a few days ago, and then they went back east and I stayed here because I have some events this week, meetings and things like that. So I've been on my own and despite my intentions to the contrary, ended up getting sucked into the inter-webs and getting a big dose of the public discourse today. There's this whole thing that I'm sure you've, unless you're unplugged, that you've come across where high school students from a Catholic high school wearing magna-caps were in Washington DC and then there's a two minute video which came out of a native American man drumming and them just staring at him and what seemed like they were mocking and being aggressive toward him. Then a longer video came out showing that he had actually approached them and had been harassed by another group. A whole lot of back and forth and both sides have a radically different interpretation of the whole event. One side saying this is the very face of white privilege, look at all those little Brett Cavanaugh's in the making, full of hate, full of racism. Then the other side is saying these are basically clueless, young men confronted with a situation that they were not prepared for. The young man confronted by a native American elder and he's trying to be polite and smile.

There are just so many narratives here and what I'm picking up from, and it's not just this issue; another issue that I got sucked in the rabbit hole… I'm even afraid to say it because half of you are going to get up and leave. Whichever half, maybe I'll disguise my opinion so you won't know which I believe. I can't even mention the issue, the very fact that I mentioned it as a legitimate source of disagreement will make you suspicious because to validate that there's legitimate disagreement on it, already puts me on the side of evil so maybe I won't. Maybe you’ll have to guess!

How could I possibly even doubt? How could I even countenance a valid other opinion when it comes to … (k, getting ready to get up and leave!?) … when it comes to the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Even if I mentioned this as an example of a polarizing issue, I get emails that say shame on you for even giving the idea that this could be argued about. Because this is already established science, so you must be anti-science. Even if I do think vaccines are safe and effective, to sow doubt, to countenance the possibility that other people could have a rational disagreement about that is already harming the narrative because what we have today is a growing realization that a narrative is a weapon to defeat the other side. Therefore, if you know that you're on the right side, then if there is an inconvenient truth that violates your narrative, you better not mentioned that, because that will not serve the cause. So, which side are you on? Are you on the magna side or are you on the resistance side? If you are on the resistance side, then if you come across a data point that doesn't fit that, that doesn't serve victory over the enemy, then you better not talk about it.

I'm just like waiting right into it here. Russia gate. Suppose that I say, you know, I really don't think that there's anything to Russia gate. I think that, and I could say various things, like it's an attempt to revive the Cold War, to promote militarism, etcetera, etcetera. Then it's like, well, you must be a Trump supporter. And I'm like, can you find something real to oppose Trump on? For example, like the horrendous things he's doing to immigrants or stuff on the environment or tons of many, many, other things. However, if I drop this potential weapon, then I'm not serving the cause of overcoming evil. So basically what I'm seeing as I scour the Internet is a secret agreement among both sides. The agreement being that the problem is the evil people on the other side and the solution is to defeat evil. Both sides think that they're on team good fighting against team evil and they are deeply convinced of this. This is a common situation in a war that pacifists are more intensely despised than the enemy because the enemy validates your position, validates your identity, but the pacifist calls your identity into question.

So I guess I'm feeling a little nervous now as I contemplate the essays I want to write this year because I think in most of these polarizing issues, the key to a solution lies in the secret agreements of the secret assumptions that both sides share and the questions that neither side asks.

For example, immigration, the wall, should we build a wall? Should we let people in? Should we keep them out? Is immigration going to drive down wages and harm the working class? Is it going to bring in more innovation and intelligence from highly motivated young people who have the wherewithal and the guts and the enterprising spirit to make a long journey, under great odds to another country? From within the terms of the debate, there are some reasonable arguments on both sides which neither side wants to admit, but what is not being asked is what makes conditions so miserable in Honduras or Guatemala that people will leave their homes behind, leave their culture behind, leave their language behind, risk their lives, risk their children's lives for no guaranteed result, why? What is going on there? I don't see anybody in conventional politics asking that question. Why? Because when you ask that question, two things happen. One is the answers are things that you do not know what to do about. The answer is being, I would say military, imperialism and neoliberal capitalism that essentially, through the debt-based financial system, sucks money out of every culture and community that has any natural resource or social wealth left; making life unlivable in those places. So, of course, they want to come here, where the wealth is being sucked to.

Then to enforce that regime, military imperialism. So what do you do about that? You can't build a wall to stop that from happening. The second thing that makes that uncomfortable is that not only do we not know what to do, but we are part of the problem. You can't blame it on somebody else. It implicates everybody and everything, and you don't know what to do. This is good, to realize that you don't know what to do because at least then, you're not disputed into thinking that you know what to do and pursuing false solutions that actually could be part of the problem, and that will never get you out of the maze.

I also was reading about plankton death. This is really bad news. Probably as bad as the insect holocaust around the world. Something like 50 to 75 percent decline in insect biomass or more so now in the oceans, since 1950 to this study in 2010, there was a 40 percent decline in total plankton count; phytoplankton and zooplankton. Now, a more recent study of the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador showed what I recall to be another 50 percent drop on top of that, in the space of just a few years. So to not know -- we are really uncomfortable as a culture with not knowing -- we want to jump to a cause. Preferably, a cause that we think we know what to do about it.

The comfort with a cause is part of a linear perceptual set that sees the world essentially as a very complicated machine, and believes that if you isolate causes and isolate variables, then you can exert a force upon those variables and solve the problem. For example, disease, we would love every disease to be caused by a pathogen. So there's been a decades-long search for the virus that causes cancer or the gene that causes something because if it's a virus or bacteria or a gene, then we know what to do. It's much less comfortable if a disease is caused by a complex of influences, I won't even say caused by many factors. The whole idea of factors is something that you can resolve into constituent parts. It's a mathematical metaphor, but I would say a complex. So anyway, it's uncomfortable because then there's nothing to kill, nothing to fight, nothing to destroy. In the case of plankton death, plankton die off. We want to find a cause. And of course, the cause du jour that everybody jumps to is it must be climate change.

There are plausible explanations for how that could be, that warmer temperatures are heating up the surface layer of the ocean, which reduces ocean mixing of deeper layers and creates a less permeable barrier between layers, and disrupts ocean currents so that the upwelling of nutrients from the deep water slows down and can't nourish as much plankton. So great; we found the solution, we found the cause. Now, all we have to do is fight climate change and climate change, meaning in the conventional discourse, global warming caused by greenhouse gases. So here's one thing, carbon, that we can cut, reduce, and that will solve the plankton death, that will solve colony collapse disorder for honey bees and bats, that will solve droughts and floods. That will solve the refugee problem because they're fleeing climate change, that will solve all of our problems. One thing to solve everything. Where do we get that mentality by the way? If I only had this one thing, all my problems would be solved.

Yeah, money. So this accounting mindset then gets applied to the environment, equating ecological health with levels of a measurable quantity, and then applying financialized solutions to limit that quantity. We're comfortable with that kind of problem and that kind of solution. But what does it leave out? What if that is the wrong diagnosis or a very incomplete diagnosis? I came across an interesting piece of research that associates plankton death with seismic testing and navy sonar. Basically, what they are doing to find oil and gas on the continental shelf, in exactly the places where the plankton is declining; they set off these compressed air blasts that are 165 decibels. They can be heard for hundreds of miles. And in the places where they do that, they're finding all this dead plankton. Not sure why. Another thing that it does though is it deafens the whales. It's agony for whales who are supposed to be communicating over hundreds of miles.

In my climate book, where I go with it is, that earth is alive and conscious, intelligent as a collective. In a way, like you could say that the whales are the neural network of the oceans. One of the functions of whales is nutrient transport. They feed in nutrient-rich areas and then go have their babies in nutrient-poor areas, pooping in those nutrient-poor areas and bringing the nutrients to those areas. They also aid ocean layer mixing, especially sperm whales, because they dive down really deep to get their food and they come up to the surface where they pass their wastes which are food for everybody else. And so you can say that we have the causality reversed, that plankton death is caused when everything that feeds on the plankton dies… and then the things that feed on those dies… and the things that feed on those dies, all the way up to the top. So plankton death is causing the demise of larger fish and whales. But it's also the other way around, it's industrial fishing and whaling means less kinetic mixing of the ocean. I read one study that says 50 percent of the ocean layer mixing is caused by fish and whale. Whaling and industrial fishing drift nets and bottom trawlers and stuff; they are basically damaging an organ. The fish and the whales are an organ of the ocean, that keep it healthy. This is something that is invisible in the dominant narrative of climate change because what's the carbon footprint of a whale? It doesn't register on the metrics.

What I'm trying to do is to wade into this really polarized situation and say what hidden assumptions are not being acknowledged and what questions are not being asked. And where do these new questions come from? They come from a different perception of the earth as a living being, with a physiology, and even an intelligence or consciousness or spirit. When you understand that, when you believe that, why would you take a 165 decibels air gun and let it off every 10 seconds in somebody's neighborhood? I mean, only if you completely disrespect and dehumanize those people, would you do that?

If you see them as people, as part of your community, you are not going to do that. It's rude. Similarly, you would not come here and set off firecrackers in this room, it's rude and disrespectful to the host. So if we begin to see Earth as a host and whales as our companions in a community, then we're going to think twice before doing anything like that. And we're going to think twice before implementing mountain top removal or digging pits and cutting down all the trees to get tar sands or building pipelines that inevitably make oil spills. That's rude too, to spill oil in your house or fracking wells, anything like that. Anyway, I do not want to go into my whole climate change speech right now, but where I end up with it is I don't need to accept the dominant narrative of climate change in order to oppose everything that the climate change activists oppose because I have another reason to do that. The reason is respect for the organs and beings of this planet. By the same token, I would oppose some things that they support like massive biofuel plantations that involve cutting down virgin rain forests and displacing subsistence peasants so that we can have palm oil in Jatropha tree plantations everywhere. Millions of hectors are being devoted to this; across Africa, South America, palm oil trees/palm trees as far as the eye can see where there was once a bio-diverse ecosystem. But the numbers look good. Carbon neutral.

To get back to my earlier point, when you think that you know, and you identify yourself as good and that becomes an important part of your identity, then you will be impermeable to things that may be true but that does not fit the narrative that serves victory. You will erect defenses against the truth, such as well that video that shows a more nuanced, complicated picture of the encounter between the boys and the native American guy; that was from a white, a right-wing propaganda website. So I'm not going to trust that; like you can attack the source. That is one way to erect a barrier to information that doesn't fit your narrative, the narrative including yourself as being on the good team. Where it takes me ultimately is, what am I here to serve? What am I serving? What am I blind to, that I think I'm serving something, but I'm actually serving something else; because if I actually want to serve a more beautiful world, rather than serving my identity and perception that I'm one of the good guys, then I have to be open to being wrong.

Finding out that I'm wrong about something, that is a serious threat. If what I'm actually serving is seeing myself and having the image of being one of the good guys, because that was wrong. Gosh, maybe I wasn't one of the good guys after all? But if I am in service to the healing of Gaia, if I am in service to the healing of society, if I'm in service to a more beautiful world, then I will welcome being shown that I was wrong because that will allow me to be of better service. I would be like, thank you for the course correction. In order to receive that gift of a course correction, we have to make a sacrifice, the sacrifice of a self-image. I would invite everybody to touch that place in themselves that is ready and willing to sacrifice the image of being right and being on team good in the battle against team evil. I've come to believe that this is the most serious problem facing humanity right now. The cleavage of society into two opposing teams that none of our problems will be solved. If the solution template is that the right side finally wins. If that is your formula, you will be at war forever.

I'm not saying that all opinions are equal. I'm not saying that one side isn't right about something and one side's not wrong about something, but it's when winning over the other side takes first priority, that both sides will keep fighting forever. Also to recognize the discomfort of not knowing and all the things we do to push that away. Fortunately, we have an ally in our evolution toward a phase of not knowing, into which real knowledge can come. New knowledge can only come into the place of not knowing. It's a vacuum that brings in something new. We have an ally in this evolution of process, which is that everything we think we knew is falling apart. The world no longer makes sense. This is good. Thank you for that. I wish upon us mounting confusion until the shell of the cosmic egg cracks and unimaginable knowledge comes in, and I think I can kind of see the cracks already, and the light that shines through in the form of little events, little data points that were impossible in my old story of the world. My story of what's real and what's true and what's possible, the impossible is starting to happen. Let's welcome that too, especially because if we're limited to what the dominant culture says is possible, the situation is hopeless.

My mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September. A short death sentence, especially for a 77-year-old woman. She's been pursuing two alternative therapies after refusing chemotherapy which the oncologist said would possibly prolong her life three to six months. Average survival is three and a half months for this kind of cancer and this was four months ago and she's getting better and better, everyday getting stronger and stronger. Her appetite returned. She started putting on weight again. Totally impossible -- in the story of reality that she grew up in -- and causing some gears to turn in my family. Especially in the camps of my family that are very mainstream. It's like, what do you do with this data point?

I like to think if this is possible for the human body, what's possible for the ecological body or the body politic or the future of humanity?