News roundup, December 2017

The big term in the news this year, at least here in the States, is inappropriate behavior.

If you look around the Internet, you find that inappropriate behavior is not just being exposed throughout American entertainment, politics, sports, and business… it’s also in American schools, in Australian schools, in healthcare, in nursing homes, in Dubai, in China… just about everywhere.

And it’s especially rife throughout nature.

Recently I enjoyed watching a quirky BBC nature series on Netflix called Round Planet. In the first episode a lonely male polar bear wanders the vast frozen Arctic, hunts for seals, eventually finds a girlfriend, has sex, fights bloody battles with competing males, manages to hold onto his mate’s affections… and then suddenly the mating season is over.

“Now it’s time for the male and female to go their separate ways,” says the jolly commentator, “her to the joys of motherhood; him back to fighting and trying to kill things. Nature loves a gender stereotype….”

You get the idea. All of the rowdy antics among the animals of Earth over the course of the Round Planet series start to hit uncomfortably close to home for human society…

• where dads often pressure their sensitive, artistic sons to play tough sports…
• where governments train their young military men to kill and brutalize other young men…
• where girls attract, boys pursue, girls resist, and boys persist, leading to that dramatic line between romance and assault…
• where slaughterhouses kill, slice, dice, process, and package animals for human consumption on a massive scale….

Across the eons, Earth has become a rather onerous place where living things kill and eat each other to survive, and contend with frisky forces to breed… not just the frisky forces of competing suitors but also their own inner drives.

Humans on Earth, especially males, seem to have inappropriate behavior hard-wired into their genes and their neurochemical makeup.

Reflecting on the history of Earth, you begin to wonder if the term inappropriate human behavior is redundant.

Life itself, here on Earth, could well be viewed as inappropriate.

Indeed, life on Earth is described that way by those who live in finer worlds.

The famous English explorer Richard Francis Burton, a rugged scholar and adventurer, died in 1890, eventually got settled into the afterlife, continued his explorations in his new world, and then reported back to us (INIT) a century later, through a computer text:

For four days we had been traveling upstream on the river and had reached a strip of land called “Fireland” by the natives. Swejen had asked us to “see what was going on” since interference frequencies were reported from that area. Although our contact field was not disturbed greatly it had become a mild nuisance. As always, I followed Swejen’s wish. To be truthful, I had secretly hoped for an opportunity to leave the electric range in the kitchen and once again breathe the fresh air of the world of Marduk.

I had no trouble finding a few men who wanted to accompany me. They are upright, honest men with stout hearts who could be relied upon in times of danger. On our trip up the mountain we stopped twice to rest and to eat something. Every time I bite into a juicy bit of meat I have to remind myself that I am not eating part of an animal, but synthetic food. By God, it tastes better than anything I ever ate on that darn earth. 

The last sentence suggests that in Burton’s new world (i.e., the spirit world), life doesn’t have to kill life to survive. Coexistence is the culture at the third level of the afterlife, and memories of “that darn earth” must seem rather brutal and barbaric.

Burton’s afterlife partner, Swejen Salter, reported to us in another contact that sex and intimacy are also more refined at the third level than on Earth.

You do not put away your sexuality, as it is a truly human characteristic. Sexual partnerships exist, provided both partners harmonize and desire it….

So sex at the third level is enjoyed by mutual consent between individuals who resonate with each other, not driven by hormones and aggression as it often is on Earth.

I suspect that spirits residing in most of the spirit realms, and also extraterrestrials inhabiting other material worlds, all view life on Earth as needlessly brutal… i.e., inappropriate.

The violent images we see in Sci-Fi movies like Star Wars or Guardians of the Galaxy or Alien, with all sorts of hostile extraterrestrial creatures, are just our own fears of terrestrial savagery projected into the universe by the minds of directors and script writers.

In reality, I believe, coexistence is the rule throughout most of the cosmos. Brutality on Earth is the rare exception, thanks to our hormones and egos and our cataclysmic beginnings.

Our brutal nature is the reason why western religions state up front that to be human is to be a “sinner.” Whatever the word “sin” means to them, you can be sure it traces back to the unruly nature hard-wired into our carnal bodies and minds.

So… for us to judge each other as inappropriate, as we’ve been doing a lot this past year, might be somewhat sanctimonious or hypocritical.

I prefer the term noble-savage. If we can unravel our human nature and distinguish our spiritual (noble) qualities from our carnal (savage) qualities, then we might have a better playbook for being nicer to each other.

What I’ve learned through ITC contacts is similar to what all the great religions have taught down through the ages:

• Noble values include love, honesty, trust, good will, respect, concern for the less fortunate, service to the community, and the betterment of humanity. These are the qualities that make us more spiritual and universal.
• Savage values include fear, deception, mistrust, contempt, desire, selfishness, thievery, and callousness. These are the compulsions that drag us down into earthly dramas.

Life on Earth is a continuing struggle between the noble and savage forces within us and around us.

Peace on Earth starts by going within to foster the noble forces inside us.

Then we let those noble values boil over into our families, schools, companies, and governments so that policies and regulations reflect our noble side.

At some point, then, the Earth will start to become a more “appropriate” world… and then ITC will flourish here.

So, here’s wishing you all a happy holiday and a noble new year of inner exploration and burgeoning peace.