The Yoga Guru Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi taught: “Seek the truth and the truth will set you free.

“Peace is the way. Love is the answer. Harmony is the result. The purpose of education, whether religious or secular, is to help a person function effectively in society. War is not effective either for the individual or society.

“All true religions teach peace. The Golden Rule is a peaceful principle because it produces equity. We should share our wealth with our brothers and sisters because we are all part of the same human family. All teachings which divide us are false and all prophets who preach such division are false prophets.

“True education empowers us to live in peace by teaching us the truth about life and liberty, personhood and society, materiality and spirituality as a single evolutionary dance. …

“Islam,
Judaism and Christianity are all recipes for war. The only true path to
peace is the path of equity, which means we should accept full
responsibility for the basic needs of all people on the planet. We
should share. We should treat each other as brothers and sisters of the
same human family, looking out for each other’s best interests and
correcting each other when we have done wrong.

“We should judge
religions by the fruits they produce in reality.” (05/26/08)
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David Korten speaks: We are all well aware of the crisis unfolding around us. The day of
reckoning for our reckless human ways that many of us have for decades
warned would be coming is here. The future is now. Peak oil, climate
chaos, financial collapse, and spreading social disintegration are all
consequences of deep cultural and institutional dysfunction. The
imperative to address them presents us with an epic test of our human
intelligence and creativity.

When I was a student in business
school my professors always told us. Go for the Big Picture. If you
find a problem, don’t just treat the symptoms. Look up stream to find
and deal with the cause. Although we face a daunting variety of
problems, the big picture of the human confrontation with the reality
of our Mother Earth becomes crystal clear once we step back and take a
look upstream. This big picture has three critical elements.

The
first element is environmental collapse driven by our relentless growth
in consumption and population. From the perspective of our Earth Mother
our human excesses have for millennia been little more than the normal
nuisance one expects from children.

Somewhere around 1970 we
passed a threshold. Our human consumption became more than a nuisance,
it began to exceed what our Mother could bear and began to threaten her
very life. We see the results in climate chaos, depletion of fresh
water and fertile soils, the collapse of fisheries, the erosion of
denuded forest lands and melting ice caps. We are building up toxics in
the water, soil, and air. We are killing our mother and thereby
ourselves. We must grow up fast and accept our adult responsibilities.
The implications are pretty straight forward.

Remember those
scenes in Star Trek. Scotty to Captain Kirk. Life support is failing.
Kirk to Scotty. Shut down all nonessential systems and direct all
available resources to life support. There it is - the order for our
time. No resources for war or extravagance. Focus all attention on the
health of the crew and the life support system.

No more
throwaway stuff. No more economic growth for the rich. Our priority
must be to grow our well-being rather than our consumption. Invest in
peace, education, and health care rather than war. Invest in compact
communities rather than suburban sprawl. Invest in local economies and
environmental rejuvenation rather than in shipping toys around the
world and speculating in the global financial casino. Invest in
sidewalks, bicycles, bicycle paths, and public transportation rather
than cars and highways. Invest in education for living rather than
advertising to get us to consume more.

Here is the kicker. We
must eliminate exactly those forms of non-essential production and
consumption that our economic and political systems are designed to
promote. (05/26/08)
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BBC Medical Science — Hospital admissions linked to alcohol use have more than doubled in England since 1995, an NHS report shows. Alcohol was the main or secondary cause of 207,800 NHS admissions in 2006/7, compared to 93,500 in 1995/96.

There has also been a 20% rise in the number of GP prescriptions for treating alcohol dependency in the past four years, the NHS Information Centre said. The British Liver Trust warned that the health impact of alcohol would only get worse in years to come.

Tim Straughan, chief executive of the NHS Information Centre, agreed that alcohol was placing an ever-increasing burden on the NHS. “These rises paint a worrying picture about the relationship between the population and the bottle,” he added.

The figures include hospital admissions for a specific alcohol-related condition - such as liver disease, but also admissions where alcohol is a contributory factor but not the main cause - such as falls due to drunkenness. Of hospital admissions in 2006/7 specifically due to an alcohol-related diagnosis, almost one in 10 were in under 18 year olds.

In 2006 there were 6,500 deaths related to alcohol, of which two thirds were men - a 19% rise from 2001 figures. The north west had the highest rate of alcohol-related admissions at 170 per 100,000, while the lowest was the east of England which had 72 per 100,000. Survey results also contained in the report showed more pupils aged 11 to 15 years who say they have never had an alcoholic drink increased from 39% in 2001 to 45% in 2006. But those who admit to drinking are drinking more - consuming 11.4 units per week on average, the highest figure ever recorded by the survey. And 30% of 15 year olds said it was fine to get drunk at least once a week, the poll of over 8,000 teens found. (05/26/08)
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BBC Biological Science — New protected areas must be created to prevent environmental damage from the expansion of Brazilian sugar cane, the Worldwide Fund for Nature has said.

The production of ethanol from sugar cane for biofuel production should have a positive impact on the environment, WWF Brazil says in a new report. The report argues that ethanol from sugar cane is much more efficient than other biofuels. But it adds careful planning is needed to prevent damage to local ecosystems.

Brazil’s sugar industry and its government claim the country’s growing ethanol industry does not suffer from the two main criticisms of biofuels - that they displace food crops and destroy ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest.

The WWF’s report mainly backs up those claims, saying that ethanol production is not having a significant impact on food production, and that it is not contributing to deforestation in the Amazon. But the report does warn that at a regional level, the rapid expansion of sugar cane plantations in areas such as the state of Sao Paulo could potentially cause problems such as loss of biological diversity and pressure on water resources. To avoid this, the report argues for strict rules on where the expansion can take place, aimed at safeguarding remaining forest and savannah areas. (05/26/08)
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BBC Science — A Nasa spacecraft has sent back historic first pictures of an unexplored region of Mars.

The Mars Phoenix lander touched down in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 680 million-km (423 million-mile) journey from Earth. The probe is equipped with a robotic arm to dig for water-ice thought to be buried beneath the surface. It will begin examining the site for evidence of the building blocks of life in the next few days.

A signal confirming the lander had reached the surface was received at 2353 GMT on 25 May (1953 EDT; 0053 BST on 26 May).

Engineers and scientists at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California clapped and cheered when the landing signal came through. “Phoenix has landed - welcome to the northern plain of Mars,” a flight controller announced. …

The final seven minutes of the probe’s 10-month journey to Mars were regarded as the hardest part of the mission. The probe had to survive a fiery plunge through the planet’s thin atmosphere, slowing from a speed of nearly 21,000km/h (13,000 mph). It released a parachute, used pulsed thrusters to slow to a fast walking speed, and then descended the last few metres to the Martian soil to land on three legs.

The Nasa team monitored each stage of the descent and landing process through radio messages relayed to Earth via the Odyssey satellite in orbit around Mars. “In my dreams, it couldn’t have gone as perfectly as it did tonight,” said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at JPL. (05/26/08)
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