Over sixty years ago, Emmet Fox wrote: Scientific prayer will enable you to get yourself or anyone else, out of any difficulty. It is the golden key to harmony and happiness.

To those who have no acquaintance with the mightiest power in existence, this may appear to be a rash claim, but it needs only a fair trial to prove that, without a shadow of doubt, it is a just one. You need take no one’s word for it, and you should not. Simply try it for yourself.

God is omnipotent, and we are God’s image and likeness and have dominion over all things. This is the inspired teaching, and it is intended to be taken literally, at its face value. The ability to draw on this power is not the special prerogative of the mystic or the saint, as is so often supposed, or even of the highly trained practitioner. Everyone has this ability Whoever you are, wherever you may be, the golden key to harmony is in your hand now. This is because in scientific prayer it is God who works, and not you, and so your particular limitations or weaknesses are of no account in the process. You are only the channel through which the divine action takes place, and your treatment will be just the getting of yourself out of the way.

Beginners often get startling results the first time, for all that is essential is to have an open mind and sufficient faith to try the experiment. Apart from that, you may hold any views on religion, or none.

As for the actual method of working, like all fundamental things, it is simplicity itself. All you have to do is this: Stop thinking about the difficulty, whatever it is, and think about God instead. This is the complete rule, and if only you will do this, the trouble, whatever it is, will disappear. It makes no difference what kind of trouble it is. It may be a big thing or a little thing: it may concern health, finance, a lawsuit, a quarrel, an accident, or anything else conceivable: but whatever it is, stop thinking about it and think of God instead — that is all you have to do.

It could not be simpler, could it? God could scarcely have made it simpler, and yet it never fails to work when given a fair trial. (05/17/09)
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Suzanne Duarte writes: Last month saw Earth Day, an international day of observance for the Earth. For nearly 40 years, it has been a day when environmentalists have had a chance to provide a reckoning of the damage that industrial civilization has been inflicting on the natural world. It is usually a time when print media make some obligatory gesture of recognition that humans live on a planet that we depend upon and that needs our attention. This year the statements were a little more urgent than usual, especially about climate change, which is increasingly referred to as “climate emergency.”

The reason that we are in a climate emergency — in fact, a biological holocaust, as it was identified over 20 yrs ago — is that the dominant Western, globalized culture has been in a “cultural trance,” drunk on oil, living in a delusional bubble for about 60 years. Now, the question is, is it unkind or rude or unskillful to try to wake people up from their cultural trance and point out that we are endangering the future of our species, and many others, to remain asleep? Is it “mean” to wake somebody up to tell them that their house is on fire? A lot of people seem to think so. I’ve lost friends by trying to wake them up. Waking up at this time of the Great Turning from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining way of life is painful. Many people still don’t want to know, don’t want to think, because it would entail facing painful truths and making hard choices. They can stand to think about it only briefly on one day out of the year. This is the reason I write letters to the future.

I feel that beings of the future need and deserve an explanation for the destruction caused by my generation. And I can be more straightforward with you than with my contemporaries, for the aforementioned reasons. In the last resort, perhaps I am writing only to my future incarnations to remind them of what this lifetime was like, remind them of the dismay, frustration and pain of not being able to wake people up so that the future might be more livable.

In any case, this missive is about what I observe to be the difficult stages of waking up at this time of crisis and danger. There is complex inner terrain to traverse before we can identify the opportunities and the adventure that await us if we have the courage to wake up and make the Great Turning. The challenge is that the Great Turning requires a psychological transformation from childlike dependence on external authorities and their outworn belief systems, to a mature, individuated, authentic sense of responsibility for oneself and one’s effects on the world. This is a major transformation, much more than is normally implied when we, at this time, speak of ‘growing up.’

It seems that the hardest part of waking up at this time is facing the fact that it is too late to avoid the pain, suffering and loss that could have been forestalled, had humans collectively heeded the warnings. The warnings were and are rational and scientifically based. The denial of the warnings was and is irrational, based on false beliefs. Pointing out that the denial was collective and irrational causes some people to point the ‘shame and blame’ finger at those who make this point. Instead of allowing themselves to evaluate the truth of the statement, they whine, ‘You’re shaming and blaming us. That’s not healing. You’re being apocalyptic. We don’t want to hear it, and it’s your fault for not giving us the message of hope that we need.’ This is a common shoot-the-messenger response, in which people who don’t like the message blame, or ‘shoot,’ the messenger.

The message of ‘hope’ that is demanded is the hope that we don’t have to take responsibility for ourselves and our world by changing how we live, and what we preoccupy ourselves with. The hope that many people want is very conditional. They can only take hope if they are reassured that things will continue as they have been during these very extraordinary last few decades.

The cultural trance prevents people from recognizing that the reality of living on Earth is unconditional. Our survival depends upon facing the reality of the larger living system we depend upon, and that larger living system doesn’t make deals. We can’t bargain with it. We live within its jurisdiction. The Earth has been very patient. It has put up with a lot of abuse, but the biological life of living systems is quite fragile, very vulnerable to damage by machines. Living systems have limits and tipping points beyond which breakdown and/or evolution can occur. The limits to which we can push living systems have been in view for decades. Because the limits were ignored, we are now seeing and experiencing the tipping point stage, and systemic chaos can therefore be expected.

The reality is that, not only do we have to change the way we live, but we need to recognize our part in creating this necessity. In order to survive we need to own this responsibility and grow up, so that we don’t repeat our mistakes again. That this message is taken as an insult is an ego-based default response, which is irrational and childish. This is the crux of the reason that humanity needs to grow up. Growing up resets these immature default settings. Growing up means accepting responsibility, taking the blame upon oneself, acknowledging one’s blind spots, and one’s dysfunctional social conditioning. Growing up means getting honest and feeling remorse for the consequences of one’s childishness and self-deception. (05/17/09)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: Back in the golden age of American Flyfishing — say around 1913 –
when technical innovation in a prissy and recondite sport was joined by
a new leisure class emanating from the white glove canyons of Wall
Street, some new-minted guru of angling came up with method for
whipping up action on a trout stream when no fish would rise to the
fly. It was really lame. The idea was to artificially create the
illusion of a mayfly hatch — that moment when the larva of, for
instance, Ephemerella subvaria, the Hendrickson mayfly, swims
to the surface, molts, and dries its newly unfurled adult wings in the
brisk spring air. This is famously the moment that drives trout crazy,
and when it occurs en masse, with zillions of mayflies “hatching” off
the water, a trout feeding-frenzy can ensue. The idea with the
artificial hatch was to pitch a fake Hendrickson fly made of feathers
and fur in so many furious, rapid casts that the dumb trout lurking
below would get suckered into a feeding frenzy — and, shortly, into
the buttered frying pan, with a nice “tuxedo” of cornmeal and bacon.

In
the annals of flyfishing, this gambit has been all but discredited,
except among the mentally sub-normal who sometimes venture over from
the lumpen realm of crank-and-plug fishing in search of improved social
standing. But the tactic naturally transferred into the precincts of
finance, where it reappeared in such disparate practices as Ponzi
schemes and Keynesian “pump-priming.” Now it is being employed at a
scale never seen before, on an economy that is the equivalent of a
great dead river poisoned by the toxic effluents of the same society
that inhabits its banks (no pun intended). The dark secret of this
river is that the fish who once ran there are all dead. …

The Great Wish across America is to resume the life of comfort-and-convenience that seemed so nirvana-like just a few short years ago, when the very constellations of the heavens might have been renamed after heroic Atlanta realtors and Connecticut hedge fund warriors, and the boomer portfolios groaned with earnings, and millions of graying corporate salary mules dreamed of their approaching retirement to a satori of golf and Viagra, and the interior decorators grew so rich installing granite countertops that they could buy their own houses in the East Hampton, and every microcephalic parking valet in Las Vegas qualified for a bucket full of Ninja mortgages, and Lloyd Blankfein could dream of divorcing his wife to marry his cappuccino machine.

The choices now are stark and the kind of life on offer by the future is rather austere. The job of the current president, and the people who work with him, is to manage an epic contraction — let’s say, to land a very large, loaded defect-ridden airplane that has both run out of fuel and suffered grievous mechanical breakdown… and to bring down that vehicle in an unfamiliar country filled with angry savages. Sadly, the new president and his co-pilots just want to keep the plane up there, circling. The president’s viziers are working round-the-clock to come up with some way, some toggle-switch, that might turn off the laws of gravity (which are not unrelated to the laws of thermodynamics). But all they seem to be able to come up with are mumbled prayers that are pale imitations of the algorithms once concocted by the Wall Street engineers who designed the aircraft they’re riding in. …

I remain confident that the months ahead will introduce the American
public and our leaders to a range of horrors that will begin to
penetrate our addled collective imagination. We’re far from done with
the crisis of banking and money and the related fiasco in mortgages –
which translates into the very real situation of many people become
homeless. It remains to be seen what may happen on the food production
scene, but the current severe shortage of capital and the intense
droughts shaping up around the world will resolve into a much clearer
picture by mid-summer. The price of oil has resumed marching up and has
now re-entered a range ($50-plus) that spun the airline industry into
bankruptcy last time around. Enough carnage has already occurred on the
jobs scene that the next act among many chronically jobless may tilt
toward desperation, anger, and violence. The sporting goods shops
around the nation are already rationing ammunition.

It’s not
just the stock markets that have decoupled from reality as we enjoy the
fragrant vapors of spring — it’s the entire conscious consensus of
everybody holding the levers of power and opinion. To put it as simply
as possible, we’re still sleepwalking into the future. (05/17/09)
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BBC Medical Science – Mandatory fortification of bread with folic acid would slash the risk of babies being born with a heart problem, experience from Canada shows. Rates of severe congenital heart defects among newborns in Quebec fell significantly after the move to fortify flour and pasta began in 1998.

The British Medical Journal online study lends support to calls for introducing fortification to Europe. …

Folic acid is a synthetic form of folate, a B vitamin found in a wide variety of foods including liver and green leafy vegetables.

Pregnant women and those trying to conceive are already advised to take folic acid supplements to reduce the risk that their baby will have a “neural tube” birth defect like spina bifida. But uptake is not ideal, particularly because some pregnancies are unplanned and can go unnoticed for some weeks. The latest work suggests folic acid also cuts the risk of baby heart defects.

In the seven years after fortification was introduced there was a 6% drop per year in the birth prevalence of severe heart defects. This compares with a 9% drop in neural tube defects.

Writing in the BMJ, lead author Professor Louise Pilote of McGill University in Montreal, said: “Given that severe congenital heart defects require complex surgical interventions in infancy and are associated with high infant mortality rates, even a small reduction in the overall risk will significantly reduce the costs associated with the medical care of these patients and the psychological burden on patients and their families.” (05/17/09)
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BBC Medical Science — Spending more time in the sun could help older people cut their risk of heart disease and diabetes say experts. Sun exposure helps the skin make vitamin D - a vitamin older people are generally deficient in due to their lifestyles and ageing processes.

A team at Warwick University has shown a deficiency increases the risk of metabolic syndrome, which is linked to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Their study of more than 3,000 people is published in Diabetes Care.

The researchers say older people would benefit from more sunshine, although it is still important to be sensible in the sun as UV damage is linked with skin cancer. Among the 50 to 70-year-olds living in China that the scientists studied, 94% had a vitamin D (25-hydroxyvitamin D) deficiency or insufficiency and 42% also had metabolic syndrome.

Lead researcher Dr Oscar Franco says the same can be seen in British and American populations too. “Vitamin D deficiency is becoming a condition that is causing a large burden of disease across the globe with particular deleterious impact among the elderly. We found that low vitamin D levels were associated with an increased risk of having metabolic syndrome, and was also significantly associated with increased insulin resistance.”

Metabolic syndrome’s cluster of obesity, high blood sugar, high blood pressure and high cholesterol can lead to heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Vitamin D is mainly obtained from exposure to the sun, as well as from certain foods such as oily fish and eggs. There are concerns that many people, including the elderly, pregnant women and those who wear all-concealing clothing do not get enough of the vitamin. (05/17/09)
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