by Richard C. Cook

An abridged version of this eulogy was delivered at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Williamsburg, VA, March 17, 2012

On behalf of the family, and especially my sisters Sandy and Christine, we want to offer our heartfelt thanks to all of you for coming today to celebrate the life of our mother, Marjorie Virginia Cook, who passed away peacefully on February 18 just before 7 p.m. at the home she shared with Christine and her family in Vienna, Virginia.

Our thanks also to Rev. Shirley Smith Graham and the staff and congregation of St. Martin’s for providing a home for Mom (literally at one point) and giving Mom and us so much love and support. The same for Rev. Sven vanBaars, rector of Abingdon Episcopal Church, formerly assistant rector of St. Martin’s.

“What a Life!”

This is the title of Mom’s memoirs, spoken on tape during the last year of her life.

“What a life,” indeed! Mom was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 30, 1922, at a time when Brooklyn was still one of the major melting pots of American society. Her mother was Ethel Gertrude Brown, from a Brooklyn family in the Bayside neighborhood. Her father was Carlton William Peilow, who sailed with the U.S. Navy on the troop transports out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War I.

Bill Peilow was from French Canadian lineage, while Ethel’s side had Irish and English. Her grandfather, William Forster, had immigrated through Ellis Island during the Irish potato famine and served as a gunnery sergeant in the Union Army (That’s right, the Union Army.). His unit was with General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.

In 1927 at the age of four, Mom waved her little flag at Floyd Bennett field when Charles Lindbergh returned to the U.S. from his famous transatlantic flight. Soon afterwards her parents placed all they could carry in a Model A Ford and drove cross-country on dirt roads to Montana where our Grandpa had relatives.

But when the Depression struck, there were no jobs back East to which to return. So Grandpa found work in the lumber camps and later with the Forest Service. Mom grew up at a place called Seeley Lake in the Rocky Mountains. Yes, she actually lived in a log cabin. Yes, a box in a stream was the family’s refrigerator. And yes, she did walk two miles each way to the one-room schoolhouse in the snow.

Seeley Lake did not have a high school, so Mom left home for good, attending high school in Missoula while boarding with relatives, then went to a year of college before her money ran out. She then attended nursing school on the government’s wartime ticket, then married our father, Richard Edward Cook, when he was on leave from duty with the Seabees during the last year of World War II.

Yours truly was born in 1946. A daughter was conceived, but tragedy struck. Our sister Barbara was a “blue baby.” Severely handicapped physically and mentally, she spent the rest of her life institutionalized in state facilities with our parents contributing to her support, until her death on October 14, 2004, which weighed heavily on Mom.

Our father had gotten his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Montana, and the family moved first to Oklahoma, where he was from, and then to Michigan, where he worked for Dow Chemical. When my sister Sandy was born in 1952 and my sister Christine in 1956, our parents struggled to save them from the same fate as our sister Barbara. Though medical technology was still relatively undeveloped in this area, they succeeded, and Sandy and Christine were able to lead normal lives.

In 1960 we moved to Williamsburg, with our grandparents joining us from Montana, after Dow opened a textile processing plant on the road to Newport News. We attended Bruton Parish Church, then joined St. Martin’s when it started up as a tiny mission church in 1963. Before long came Mom’s biggest break. Having to work full-time and then some after she and our dad were divorced, she became a tour escort with Colonial Williamsburg, where she excelled and loved every minute of it.

It was a time when a tour escort was both a researcher and scholar. It’s been called the Golden Age of the Williamsburg Restoration, and Mom was in the middle of it, teaching both school groups and celebrities, developing new programs, and using her job as a springboard to travel, both in the U.S. and abroad to places like Europe, Egypt, and other exotic destinations.

At one point CW even made her a supervisor. Mom hated it because supervisors are expected to criticize their underlings and even reprimand or fire them if they failed to measure up. Why was this so hard? Because Mom was so accustomed to seeing only the good in everyone, as she did throughout her life.

Mom was able to hold onto her house only by renting rooms to college students, friends of friends, and total strangers. And she became a mentor and friend to many in the Williamsburg community, many of whom we know are here today. And she became a grandmother to a group eventually numbering thirteen, now with nine great-grandchildren and counting.

Mom retired from Colonial Williamsburg in 1991. Over time she had some health issues and hospitalizations, but the worst was when she suddenly developed macular degeneration in 1997, which left her legally blind. She had been working part-time for some private tour companies but had to give that up. She no longer could drive. She could read with difficulty and only then with magnification or special equipment. Nevertheless, she was a beacon of light to all who knew her, especially during the annual Christmas celebrations at her house when the always-growing extended family gathered.

Let me just mention one personal anecdote which shows Mom’s spirit. In 2007, I retired from the government, having written a book on the space shuttle Challenger disaster based on my experiences while working for NASA at the time. To my knowledge, Mom was the first person to read the book. It was over 500 pages long and was packed with complex technical analysis. She read it cover to cover on her magnifying viewer. She was then 84 years old.

In 2009, Mom decided to sell her house and move into assisted living, which she did at Spring Arbor on Capitol Landing Road. This worked well for a while, but two hospitalizations followed by periods at a rehab facility caused her to decide to move in with Christine and her family three hours north in Vienna, VA, just outside Washington, D.C.

Leaving Williamsburg was one of the hardest things she had ever done. Her roots ran so deep, her friendships were so many, the memories so powerful. But people stayed in touch with her, and her spirit remained strong as her body continued to act up.

After a couple of months, her health was much better and she was able to go out and became more active. On her 89^th birthday, my wife Karen and I drove to Vienna to go out to lunch with her and Christine at Amphora restaurant, a local landmark. She had the seafood platter and some chocolate birthday cake. Not long before, she had gone with Christine and her husband Bob to a casino in West Virginia where she won $300 in a slot machine. She was thrilled and wanted to share her winnings. That was Mom.

But a month later she was taken to Fairfax Hospital by ambulance. Her breathing was giving out. She began to struggle and decided, with Christine and her doctors, to go back to the house under hospice care. I called Shirley to tell her. Shirley asked if hospice care was Mom’s own decision. I said, “We always do what our mother tells us.”

Until her final week, Mom was still giving me business advice. We had another family gathering, like so many before, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren attending.

Before the end of the week she received from the rector of Holy Cross Episcopal Church, Joy Weibefr, the last rites of the Episcopal Church and communion. On her last day Christine once again ministered to her physical needs, and Sandy sang to her one of her favorite songs: “Amazing Grace.” Mom was in peace that day. She was leaving for the light, and did so with her usual independence at a moment when Christine and Bob had stepped into the hallway with the hospice nurse.

So to what then do I liken our mother?

I call her a songbird.

In the springtime of her life she sang her song as a young girl scampering with her pet dog Teddy through the mountain landscape of Montana.

In the summer of her life she sang as a devoted mother, as a teacher of thousands about the history she loved, and as a mentor and devoted friend to many others.

In the autumn of her life her song was as a stalwart of strength, goodwill, and stability both to her friends, many also now aging, and to a large extended family who relied on her in turbulent times to always be there and be of good cheer.

In the winter of her life her song exhibited a backbone of steel as she looked calmly into the light of the great unknown. Into this light she departed. Someday we all hope to follow.

This songbird was our mom and our kids’ grandma. She is still singing.

by Richard C. Cook

There is something I want to say to each of us that will be taken as a challenge—even a slap in the face—by some of the many “I’s”—or personalities— within ourselves, my own included. But it should be said anyway.

And though I acknowledge that what you will be getting is strong medicine, be assured that I have already imbibed this medicine myself.

First, we should be clear that the Gnostic teachers identify the first requirement on the spiritual path to be the decision to lead an ethically upright life. From the standpoint of meditation practice, the reason is obvious—unethical behavior, even to the level of passing thoughts, disturbs the mind. It also gets us into situations, due to the law of cause and effect, that make it difficult or impossible to take the time to meditate with a clear conscience and a serene mind.

As the purpose of meditation is to pave the way for inner peace, where comprehension of reality in consciousness can take place, ethics then become critical.

Again, this seems obvious. A deeper reflection indicates, however, that it may not be so obvious after all, at least in certain areas.

Of course there are many categories of outer and inner behavior that no one can disagree are just plain wrong. Take murder or armed robbery, for instance. None of us goes around shooting, stabbing, or raping other people. The same with stealing, fraud, and other relatively high-profile misdeeds.

But then we get into some shadier areas. How many of us are absolutely, one hundred percent honest all the time, without hesitation or qualification? Who always refrains from lustful thoughts, honors our parents without exception, never expresses anger, refrains totally from gossip or slander, never experiences envy or covets another’s possessions, never feels resentful, impatient, or put upon, is without conceit, never has hurt feelings, does not over-indulge any appetites, is never greedy for money, and is never, ever lazy—again, all of the time, every minute of every day and, moreover, are never even tempted to do any of these things?

Through self-observation and seeing there are “I’s” within us who either need to clean up their act, be shown a better way, or be gotten rid of altogether, each of us clearly has some work to do in at least one or two areas.

But there is more. Even if our behavior is at a generally admirable level, are we ever anxious or fearful? Do we ever worry? Do we ever feel stressed? Do we ever wonder what is to become of us unless we get a break or can deal with some uncomfortable situation or difficult person? Do we ever have concerns about money? And how about worry about health issues, our own or our loved ones’?

Well, it is time for each of us to start viewing these as ethical issues also.  Because they may disturb our inner peace as much as outright sin and bad behavior.

But what sin are we committing in these less obvious areas? Is it really a sin to be anxious, for instance?

Note, however, that the word “sin” is the translation of a word that in Greek meant literally “missing the mark” or, simply, “error.” It did not have the connotations of an angry God sending down punishing thunderbolts.

The answer, very simply, is that mental disturbances mean, at a deeper spiritual level, that we are committing the sin-or error-of atheism. We are not taking into account the fact, which is taught by every religion and spiritual path that has ever been, that we have been created by a loving God who cares for us, loves us, and wants to give us the Kingdom if only we open ourselves to it and are ready.

For a truly spiritual person, these are incontrovertible facts. A failure to realize them is due to no other cause than our own low level of consciousness, lack of faith, materialistic prejudices and, often, just plain stubbornness.

So the challenge to all of us is to include this consideration in our self-observation. See how often in our anxiety we assume we are alone and separate from our Source. Then take steps to remind ourselves this is not so.

We must take it as an urgent ethical issue to begin to think rightly on this critical subject. We need to begin to communicate with our Source every day—whether we call it God or use some other name—through prayer and inner reflection, then through spiritual treatment when we need it. Of course the basis for all our efforts must be impartial self-observation, through which we become aware of our many “I’s.” Then see what the result in our meditation practice turns out to be.

The good news—and remember “Gospel” means just that—is that once we have seen and separated from our many “I’s,” it is a relatively straightforward process to dissolve them in favor of residing in our real Self. The battle is half-won just with that separation followed by self-remembering.

The method is to pray to God to free ourselves from a negativity whenever it arises in consciousness. The aspect of God to whom it is most productive to pray is often the Divine Mother, characterized in Christianity as Mary, in India as Kundalini, in ancient Egypt as Isis, among the Aztecs as Tonantzin, etc.

Here is the way Samael Aun Weor, the modern Gnostic avatar, presents the “Hail Mary”:

“Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Yeshua. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us, who have the sinning ‘I’, now and at the hour of the death of our defects. Amen.”

Weor writes that the Divine Mother “can forgive all our past Karma if we truly repent from our mistakes.”

Pick just one negative quality or habit and use this prayer to work on it for a month. You may then get your first profound taste of inner ecstasy.

By Richard C. Cook

Planet Earth and the humanity that inhabits it are in the midst of a terrible crisis arching above us like a tsunami. We know something is drastically wrong but cannot for the life of us see what is really going on or discern a way out.

The environmental aspect of the crisis has been loosely attributed to “global warming,” though the notion that this is the result of man-made greenhouse gases is unproven and dubious. The pressure of the population explosion on limited natural resources is certainly reflective of the crisis. The destruction of non-human species and the continued proliferation of polluting chemicals are also deeply alarming.

But what may be most disturbing is the near-total failure of governments to be doing anything effective to respond. What we see instead is the takeover of governments, especially among the U.S. and its allies, by corporate and financial interests whose overriding desires are profits for themselves and control of the world population, which they see merely as the drones who work for them or the consumers who purchase their shoddy production.

Anyone who is a non-drone or a non-consumer, including whole nations or ethnic groups seen as unnecessary, are subjects for elimination through war, oppression, or genocide. Science and technology, which could be harnessed to provide everyone with at least a subsistence level of livelihood, is perverted by industry to create genetically-modified crops, assembly-line slaughter of food animals, dangerous pharmaceuticals, increasingly refined electronic surveillance devices to monitor the population, and ever-more sophisticated and ubiquitous weapons of war.

There is no one in the world with the power to stop any of this. The press, entertainment media, education, and every branch of industry are under corporate/banking control, with governments on-call to enforce the corporate will through its military/police powers. It doesn’t help matters that these governments are increasingly divided between the U.S., Israel, and Europe as one bloc and Russia, China, and India as the other, with less developed nations in-between trampled into oblivion. It’s a prescription for a third world war.

So is that how it will end? A violently destructive scenario seems likely if we don’t take into account the view of the spiritualists that Earth and humanity are only a small part of a much larger Universe where consciousness, divine grace, and destiny must enter in.

Humanity today, particularly the egomaniacs that rule every branch of government, finance, business, education, journalism, etc., is likely in its final phase before the cosmic powers that really and truly preside over our fate decide to wipe the slate clean. Prophecies of a rapidly-approaching destruction of the current phase of human civilization abound and can readily be found, including those from indigenous peoples around the world.

Millions are preparing in a fashion by stocking up on food, water, weapons, and other provisions. Governments themselves are preparing to hunker down in underground complexes where the top brass can hide out while the conflagrations rage on the surface.  If you don’t believe this or haven’t noticed you are indeed deaf, dumb, and blind.

But is this any way to prepare for what really may happen? Perhaps it appears to be a meaningful response for those who are spiritually asleep and just want to save their own skins. But how about for those who believe they have or even wish to have an immortal soul, for whom death is a portal that must be entered sooner or later regardless of external circumstances?

Every person alive will eventually face the Grim Reaper.

And what difference does it make if a person lives or dies if life is nothing more than being a cog in the wheel of samsara who inevitably will grow old, fall into ill health, decline to a shadow of one’s former self, then die like a worm?

Doesn’t the world crisis make you wonder about these things?

So please think about the following, which is that the only people who have any answers to these questions may be the ones who have inherited the wisdom of the ages conveyed by initiatic science. And do you think these initiates will tell you that the way to respond to current events is to find yourself a cave to hide in, grow a big garden, or stock up on guns and ammo?

Allow me to answer that question for you. The answer is “No.”

The answer, rather, is to begin to know yourself. And that means asking the question of just what is a human being, anyway.

A human being is a creation—of something. A human being derives from a source. Like anything created, a human being has something of the nature of what brought it into existence. That something is a power, an essence. Let’s call it God, which every civilized culture in the history of the world has spoken of.

I am not even going to address the patent idiocy that soulless people display by claiming with no real knowledge that human beings “evolved’ mechanically from apes or whatever. If they do believe this, let them try to save themselves by re-growing their hairy skins, moving back into the trees, and eating whatever nuts and berries they can find amidst the rubble.

No, a human being is brought into existence through a process of incarnation—the seed of a soul implanted in a planetary body. During his or her life on Earth, which may very well be one of a succession of many lives, the person has the ability, either helped or hindered by parents and society, to grow into something higher and better than what he or she brought with them into the world in the first place.

The person has the potential to develop—physically, psychologically, and spiritually. The person may or may not choose to aspire to such achievement and may simply wallow in pleasure, try to accumulate worthless possessions, cheat his fellow man out of all he can, and die like the worm mentioned above.

But if he or she does choose to develop, the question arises of how it is to be done. The short answer is through religion, though the religions of the world have largely become bogged down in corruption, bigotry, and self-love to the extent that their potency in assuring transcendence among their followers is close to nil.

But within each religion is a deeper, hidden knowledge of the psychology of transmutation. The methods for doing so fall into four categories, which have been called the “way of the fakir,” the “way of the monk,” the “way of the yogi,” or the “fourth way,” the way of balanced development in life, combining the methods of the first three ways.

The four ways have one thing in common—the idea that man is not born with an immortal soul but rather must develop one through specific efforts accomplished in cooperation with higher forces coming down from above that can raise human beings to a higher level.

In ancient times, societies were organized for this type of transformation to take place, though the actual procedures were secret. Today, official science, government, finance, business, etc., not only knows little about spirituality but actually opposes any real sign of it.

This is because today’s officialdom operates under the influence of forces that fear spiritual development as a threat to its power. These forces may collectively be called “satan,” and are represented in the psychology of every individual by the ego, which is simply that in a person which always uses the word “I.”

In fact no such “I” exists. Rather each human being is a multiplicity of thoughts, emotions, desires, opinions, prejudices, etc., each of which says “I” depending on circumstances, conditioning, and preferences.

“I” is the biggest lie we tell, and we tell it thousands of times a day. A person who is beginning to know himself or herself can no longer say “I” without embarrassment.

With the proliferation of self-help gurus today, many people are somewhat acquainted with the foregoing. So without wasting any more time, let’s get to the heart of the matter.

In developing oneself spiritually, a person must work with the raw material provided at birth—his or her own human machine, which, according to the spiritual teaching known as the Kabbalah, consists of seven interpenetrating bodies.

There are four lower bodies, known collectively as the “body of sin,” because this is where the illusions and error under which mankind lives are housed. These are the physical, vital, emotional, and mental bodies. Because of the noise and discord generated by these lower bodies, the human being is incapable of hearing and listening to the voices of the higher bodies that are continually calling out for recognition.

These higher bodies are the soul body, the body of consciousness, and the atmic body, also known as the Innermost. These bodies open to and connect with the Triune God—i.e., the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Son is the Christ Consciousness embodied most recently on Earth by Jeshua, a.k.a., Jesus Christ, but recognized as well by the inner traditions of all religions.

The Kabbalah is the centerpiece of the teachings of the Gnostics. Gnosticism has also been called the  “Perennial Philosophy.” It lies at the heart of such systems as Yoga, Sufism, Taoism, Shamanism, etc., and also existed in the teachings of Ancient Egypt as expressed in the Tarot, and in the ideas of the Maya and Aztecs in Mesoamerica and the Inca in South America.

The task of the human being aspiring to attain spiritual consciousness, and so having a chance of continuing to exist in awareness after physical death, is to create a link between the four “bodies of sin” and the three higher bodies. This link begins to be forged only when the person has studied about it in “truth teachings,” then learns to practice deep meditation.

Otherwise, what do you think you can accomplish? Meditation has to be studied and learned, and it can only be learned from someone who knows how to do it and can teach the same to you. Of course there are many “styles” of meditation available, some more valuable and authentic than others.

Meditation transmutes energy, the energy that has already been formed in the four lower bodies. The highest form of this mechanically-produced energy is the energy of sex. This is a very fine energy that fuels all the higher functions of the human being. A certain amount of this energy present and available within the organism is required for meditation even to be possible.

Moreover, the sex energy is also needed to raise the Kundalini, located at the base of the spine, from which it can ascend and activate the chakras, which are the organs of higher consciousness.

Some systems say there are seven chakras; some say nine. The human soul, it is said, is located in the fourth, the heart chakra.

But the key to the process is that the only way this spiritualization can take place is through the ascension and elaboration of the sex energy the body naturally produces. It cannot be done if the sex energy has been wasted and depleted.

Depletion takes place, most obviously, through sexual excess, particularly when sex is practiced outside a loving relationship between spouses, through fornication, adultery, viewing pornography, masturbation, etc. The so-called “sexual revolution,” where anything goes between the sexes or within a single sex, has destroyed for much of mankind their ability to develop spiritually. Fortunate indeed is the person who figures this out in time to make a difference in his or her life, because it is possible to reform and change one’s pattern of behavior.

But there are many other ways that sexual energy is wasted, including all kinds of vehement emotion and behavior, as at sporting events, rock-and-roll concerts, movie theaters, along with outbursts of anger, constant arguing, etc. Needless to say, wars are a gigantic cauldron of enflamed and perverted sex energy. So is politics.

We could even say that the entire purpose of modern life and its “culture” is to extract from people every ounce of sex energy they have available. Where does it go? It goes to feed low-level demonic entities, including those which inhabit the Moon. Hence today’s humanity consists almost entirely of “lunatics.”

So does the foregoing constitute an argument for sexual abstinence? The answer is “No,” because abstinence leads to the bottling up of sex energy and an eventual explosion. The perversions among so many Catholic priests and Protestant ministers are good examples of this.

The answer, rather, is Tantric sex, which consists of age-old practices known in Yoga and some other traditional teachings, whereby a married couple enjoys the highest delights of physical love by practicing sex as a spiritual sacrament, doing so without male ejaculation.

Such practices can be carried out by people of any age who have the necessary preparation. In a sane society, sex education along these lines would begin at puberty.

Tantric sex is the real answer, and for many the only answer, to the dilemmas facing people today who have some degree of spiritual aspiration and who wish to develop themselves in the face of the onrushing world catastrophe. It is through the practice of Tantric sex, combined with meditation, that people can engender the feelings of inner strength, purity, calmness, endurance, etc., needed to face difficult situations in difficult times.

And what about those who aspire but cannot practice Tantric sex due to circumstances such as the absence of a willing spouse? The answer is that in the meantime such people should engage in the deepening of their meditation practice.

Groups and teachers exist who impart the foregoing. All it takes to find them is a little diligence and the surrender of ego.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for people to take seriously the recommendations made herein. The world crisis cannot be met on its own level, whether by individual preparation for disasters, practice of the “law of attraction,” or any program of social, political, or economic reform or revolution. The situation can be resolved, as stated above, only at the level of the individual and only through the practice of deep meditation and the transmutation of sex energy.

References: The Perfect Matrimony by Samael Aun Weor, In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky, Lite in the Heart by Omna Last, etc.

© 2012 by Richard C. Cook

By Richard C. Cook

The purpose of this article is to examine the famous Mayan 2012 prophecies having to do with the so-called “end” of the Mayan calendar on the date of the winter solstice, December 21, 2012. Is it also “the end of the world,” a new beginning, or both?

To prepare the ground for our discussion, let’s talk about some spiritual symbolism. A central symbol of Mesoamerican spirituality is that of the feathered or plumed serpent—Kukulkan to the Maya; Quetzalcoatl to the Toltec/Aztec who came later.

These two cultures—the Toltec/Aztec and Maya—merged to build the great city of Chichén Itzá in northern Yucatan around the 9^th century C.E. The most notable structure in Chichén Itzá is the famous pyramid temple of Kukulkan.

Of course, serpent or snake symbolism is ubiquitous in the world’s spiritual traditions. In the Bible Jesus says: “Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” The snake shedding its skin annually symbolizes renewal, rebirth, recurrence, and immortality.

Of particular importance is the image of the serpent swallowing its tail: the Ouroboros. You find this symbol throughout history: in Gnosticism; in Egyptian mythology; and in Mesoamerica. It is a symbol of recurrence; of cycles of humanity and Earth.

You also find the image of the serpent in the writings of C.G. Jung, who wrote, referring to his study of the medieval alchemists:

“The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. The Ouroboros has been said to have a meaning of infinity or wholeness. In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself. The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. This ‘feed-back’ process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which [...] unquestionably stems from man’s unconscious.”

For the Maya, living in a region where large and dangerous snakes abound, including the fer-de-lance, coral snake, and rattlesnake, serpent symbolism was found in daily and seasonal rituals and carved into the very stones of religious and public buildings.

The Maya viewed the serpent’s mouth as the passageway to the Underworld. Rulers and deities were depicted as being born from the serpent’s mouth upon accession to the throne. They had  secret societies dedicated to the serpent in which the most profound initiations were given.

The snake conveyed life-and-death powers, the power of deity. As Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl, it was a culture-bringer and teacher of writing and other civilized arts.

Sometimes the plumed serpent was associated with the Sun, with Maya kings being viewed as avatars of the Sun. Throughout Mesoamerica could be found the belief that at some point in the future the feathered serpent would be returning to restore the Golden Age. At Chichén Itzá, people gather to this day on the spring equinox to watch the Sun form the undulating figure of a serpent as the light descends the pyramid’s steps.

And it is interesting to note that around the time Chichén Itzá was founded in the 9^th century a historic figure named Quetzalcoatl appeared in Mesoamerica. As cited in the writings of Gnostic teacher Samael Aun Weor, who was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and spent his mature years teaching in Mexico City:

“In the year Ce Acatl (895 C.E.), in the home of Iztacmixcoatl and Chimalma, Quetzalcoatl, the Nahua Cosmic Christ, was incarnated. He had a mystical and austere disposition. When very young, he practiced fasting and penance. When he was 30 years old, he was named grand priest and monarch of Tollan….Quetzalcoatl taught them how to farm the earth, how to classify the animals, how to carve precious stones, how to melt metals. He taught them about the goldsmith trade and about ceramics. Quetzalcoatl taught them about astronomy and how to use the calendar. He prohibited war. He taught them that they should sacrifice bread, flowers, and copalli instead of humans and animals. He prohibited homicide, thievery, polygamy, and any evil deed among human beings…. Quetzalcoatl talked to them about Ipalnemoani (he from whom we live), about the creation of the world, about the downfall of the human being, about the deluge, about Christ and his Gospel, about the baptism, about the circumcision, and about the cross (symbol of the immortality of life and of the regeneration of the human genre). Quetzalcoatl recommended that crosses be set upon the altars of the temples and in their homes….” (Aztec Christic Magic, p. 19-20)

So where does this take us in regard to the 2012 prophecies?

The Maya had three calendars. One was a 365-day cycle marking the solar year. Second was the sacred “Book of Days” consisting of 260-days, possibly to coincide with the period of human gestation, with the days recurring in 20-day cycles that are used for divination.

But for now we will be talking about the Long Count. The Long Count tracks time from a specific starting point, generally calculated to have been August 13, 3114 B.C.E. in our notation. The Long Count was perfected around 400-100 B.C.E. but was set up to be retroactive, establishing a start date of over 5,000 years ago and ending on the date of the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2012. It is the Winter Solstice when, as with ancient European cultures, the Sun was seen as being reborn. The name for this supreme solar avatar was Ahau, translated as “Captain Sun Disk.”

In Maya Long Count notation, any given day has five numerical designations separated by dots. The Long Count incorporated the concept of zero centuries earlier than its supposed invention in India.

The date December 21, 2012, is so momentous because it is written as 13.0.0.0.0. The number 13 designates the passage of 13 “baktuns” of 144,000 days each—actually 12, because “Day 1” was 1.0.0.0.0. From then to December 21, 2012, is exactly one-fifth of a full solar precessional cycle.

What does this mean? There has been much speculation, but relatively little solid analysis, even among professional Mayanists. The best book I know of on the subject is Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 by John Major Jenkins, from which much of this account is derived.

For centuries after the Spanish conquest, the culture and symbolism of the Maya remained a mystery. At the time of the Conquest, the classic Maya period had already ended. The great ancient cities had been swallowed up by jungle.

What was left the Spanish tried to destroy or suppress while imposing upon the natives of the Western Hemisphere the Catholic religion they brought to the New World. Centuries later, after the nations of the region gained independence from Spain, they too tried to suppress or assimilate the native Maya. Outright genocide also took place even into the 1980s.

But the Maya world is vast and resilient. Today there are seven to eight million Maya living in a large region extending from El Salvador and Honduras in the south, through Guatemala, and Belize to the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, Veracruz, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo of Mexico to the north.

There remains a powerful living culture heavily influenced by the age-old shamanistic spiritual tradition reaching back over untold millennia from its place of origin in Central Asia and Siberia across the Bering Strait down the Western Cordillera and spreading throughout the Americas. But the idea may also be found in literature that Mesoamerica was one of the regions on Earth that possessed a culture left over from the destruction of Atlantis. If so, the peoples entering the region from the less recent Siberian migration may not have found just animals and jungle but also representatives of that residual Atlantean culture.

Today’s popular Maya culture is an amalgam of the ancient teachings, whatever their sources, and the Western conquerors’ religion of Christianity, most particularly Catholicism. There remain native healers, shamans, and diviners, the latter called, significantly “skywatchers.” Westerners have come into the area in contemporary times to study and learn the ancient pathways, and a powerful revival of traditional Maya culture is underway.

“Skywatchers”—what a beautiful term. And it was indeed the sky to which the imagination of the priests, kings, and shamans turned.

In September 2012 I stood on top of the pyramid at Cobá in Yucatan as my wife Karen observed from the ground. Cobá was once a city of 30,000 carved from the jungle late in the pre-Conquest period, roughly contemporary with Chichén Itzá.

Cobá has the second-highest of all the Maya pyramids, of which every city had at least one. The steps are high, and you pull yourself to the top along a heavy rope bolted to the stones.

On top of the pyramid at Cobá is a small room with a single doorway. The room is built of stone with its door facing the front. Over the doorway is a remarkable carving of the “Descending God” hanging upside down as it emerges from the heavens.

There I spent a few minutes of meditation. There were some tourists, but we had arrived early, so the crowds were not yet on-site.

From the platform at the top I could see 360 degrees: a vast expanse of jungle spread in every direction with views unimpeded to the horizon. But as significant was the fact that you could also see the complete sky, from horizon to zenith overhead to the opposite horizon.

With eyes closed, I had a brief vision of an ancient Maya priest. His voice was crystal clear as he told me the pyramid was an astronomical observatory.

We moderns cannot even image the clarity of the view of the sky as seen in pre-industrial times. The air was more clear, with less pollution from automobiles, airplanes, and industry. And there was no modern-day light pollution.

The jungle, filled with wild animals and a vast storehouse of medicinal plants, along with the sky overhead, were the principal objects of study of a culture that has lasted continuously for thousands of years. This may be compared with the brief span of 500 years since Columbus “discovered America.”

In the old days, generations of professional priests—married with families—spent their lifetimes studying the sky. They mapped the sky thoroughly. They studied the positions of the stars and the planets, the phases of the Moon, and the movements of the Sun through the seasons.

It is likely that their perception of the night sky was aided for some by the ingestion of hallucinogenic substances from the peyote cactus and other sources. Additionally, the priests also had knowledge of esoteric meditative practices that they utilized for their own spiritual transformation.

Among these, according to Samael Aun Weor, were practices related to the raising of the spiritualized Kundalini energy from the base of the spine up through the chakras. Weor thus classifies the religion of the Maya and of the Toltecs/Aztecs as “serpentine.”

Another serpentine religion is found in the yoga teachings of India, where Kundalini was also associated with the symbolism of snakes or serpents. Others, according to Weor, were the religion of ancient Egypt, as well as those associated with Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Taoism. Non-serpentine religions are those such as modern Christianity based primarily on rituals and social works. Paradoxically the Christian Bible views the role of the serpent as negative in the story of Adam and Eve.

Also among the Mesoamericans, the priests made a major astronomical discovery—the precession of the equinoxes, which is the circle traced by the Earth’s axis over a repeating period of almost 26,000 years by which the pole star changes continuously and, along with it, the position of the Earth and the Solar System in relation to our Milky Way galaxy.

The Maya had a deep understanding of the influence of the Sun, Moon, and stars which they saw as vehicles of cosmic, or divine, forces. The aspect of deity manifesting through the Sun they called the Heart of the Sky. The Sun showed its highest degree of power when it was at the zenith, directly overhead, which in the tropics occurs twice a year, except at the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, when it happens only once.

It was a paradox that the night sky was viewed as the Underworld, as it exhibited those aspects of the Universe revealed when the Sun seemed to rotate and sink below the horizon. It was from the Underworld—the unseen dimension—that birth and creation came into being and to which human souls traveled at death.

A major place of power in the night sky was, to the Maya, the Pleiades, a bright bluish cluster of stars regarded with awe and reverence. Located in the constellation Taurus, the Pleiades consist of several hundred stars, of which six are visible to the naked eye while a seventh is nearly visible.

As with the symbol of the serpent, there is a vast literature on the Pleiades found in the world’s spiritual traditions. To the Romans, they were the daughters of Atlas, the Seven Sisters, including Electra, from which our word electricity was derived.

The Pleiades are mentioned in the Bible and the Koran. To the Egyptians they manifested as the goddess Neith, “the divine mother and lady of heaven.” They were also associated with the Seven Fates who foretold destiny of newborns. The Japanese called them the Subaru and named a line of automobiles after them.

The Pleiades were also the first stars mapped by the ancient Chinese, who called them the Flower Stars. To the Hindus they were associated with Agni, the god of fire. The pre-Christian Europeans saw them as a mother hen and her chicks. They were known to the Maori of New Zealand and the Australian Aborigines. The Khoikhoi tribe of South Africa called them the rain bearers.

In America, there were legends of human-like visitors from the Pleiades. The Hopi of Arizona and the tribes of Paraguay, along with the Australian aborigines, considered themselves direct descendants from these visitors.

The Iroquois prayed to the Pleiades for happiness. According to Crystalinks.com, “One Native American legend ties the Pleiades to the home of a Savior. Some believe that all tribes in North America came from the Pleiades. That they are actually descendants and had been given a task by the Pleiadians to keep the Earth safe.”

Today there are practicing spiritual groups in Europe and America who believe their founders have been visited by UFOs and extraterrestrials from the Pleiades. One such visitor was Semjase, who reportedly spent several years giving teachings to Swiss farmer Billy Meier.

Among the teachers of Pleaidian concepts is Barbara Hand Clow and her husband Gary. She was formerly the publisher of John Major Jenkins’ book. Clow says that she channels Satya, a Pleiadian goddess. A number of other popular books claiming to be channelings from Pleaidians are available.

Samael Aun Weor also writes about esoteric teachings with respect to the Pleiades. In fact he makes the statement in his book The Aquarian Message that our Sun revolves around Alcyone, one of the principal stars within the Pleiades cluster. He says Alcyone has a system of rings through which our solar system will soon be passing, resulting in specific effects including climate change.

With respect to the nearly 26,000-year precession cycle, Weor says further that it is divided for humanity and the Earth into four segments: The Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. The Iron Age corresponds to the Hindu Kali Yuga, the time of destruction. We are now at the end of the Iron Age, according to Weor.

Returning to the Maya, the Pleiades were also associated with the serpent. In the language of the Yucatec Maya, the word for the Pleiades—tzab—is the same as for the rattles on the rattlesnake.

On the particular species of rattlesnake in Maya land, the snake has a small circle below the rattles that seems to be a face. This, it is said, symbolizes the Sun.

The Maya, like other indigenous peoples, saw creation as symbolic of the omnipresent Spirit that fills the world. So the rattlesnake, which is everywhere in Maya sculpture, mirrors the energy of the sky, including the night sky which, through the Pleiades, is again connected with Kukulkan and Quetzalcoatl. Speaking figuratively, John Major Jenkins says that the Pleiades “took flight” to the zenith where they joined the Sun, their flight like that of a serpent with wings.

But there is more, because the Maya viewed as one of the fundamental keys to viewing the night sky the relationship of celestial objects to the location of the Milky Way Galaxy.

The bulge at the center of the Milky Way, the Galactic Center, is like a pregnant woman and had special significance as the birthplace of souls. Shamans were believed to enter the Galactic Center in trance in order to gain knowledge.

According to John Major Jenkins, “the four-dimensional Maya Sacred Tree is the cosmic crossroads formed by the Milky Way and the ecliptic (the path followed by the planets, Moon, and Sun [in our Solar System].” From this point come the four sacred roads—the Black, White, Green, and Red, also revered by the Sioux Indians of the North American plains. Another name for the Sacred Tree was the Navel of Creation.

The cross itself was a powerful Maya symbol, appearing in its most impressive form in a mausoleum sculpture in the city of Palenque in northern Guatemala. The Franciscan brothers who followed the Conquistadors into the New World saw the cross symbolism as a sign the native Maya had a strong spiritual consciousness. In our day, Maya shamans assert that Jesus and the Christian saints visited their land far in the past and blessed the Maya traditional teachings. A similar account of a bearded white man bearing sacred teachings is found in the legends of North American tribes as well.

But to return to the Milky Way: when viewed in the night sky, it  has a dark band shaped like a mouth. At the far end of the Milky Way when seen from Earth at certain times, you will find the Pleiades. At the other end of the starry display you find a constellation that we know in Western tradition as Scorpio, a snake-like creature. So the Milky Way itself becomes a gigantic serpent and again is assimilated to the plumed serpent Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl. This assimilation of the snake to the Milky Way was also reflected in Maya monumental sculpture.

The dark band, also called the “Great Rift,” is a very dense cloud of space dust blocking the light from the stars behind it. The Quiché Maya call it the “Road to the Underworld” or “Black Road.” The Sun can enter this road and travel to the Underworld to the Creation Place in the Heart of Creation. There is even a suggestion by John Major Jenkins that the Maya symbolism anticipates modern speculation that at the center of the galaxy lies a gigantic black hole.

The Sun will in fact be moving through this dust cloud starting on December 21, 2012. The Earth will remain within the cloud for three to five months.

It is only once every 26,000 years, a periodicity caused by precession, that the Sun lines up in this way with the Galactic Center; i.e., when it merges with the very focal point of celestial power. When we view the Galactic Center as the heart of plumed serpent, we can see why the Maya saw the winter solstice of 2012 as so auspicious; i.e., as the end of one World Age and the start of another—the Fourth transitioning to the Fifth, according to some accounts.

As John Major Jenkins writes, “…the astounding property of the Long Count end-date, revealing how it structures World Ages, is the simple fact that the December [2012] solstice Sun will be in conjunction with [the Galactic Sacred Tree] on the Long Count end-date.”

According to these teachings, there could be no more meaningful and auspicious cosmic event affecting planet Earth and its inhabitants. And it is clear that such symbolism is not accidental or incidental to the Maya. Indeed it is central to their world view. Their whole mythology and cosmology was constructed over a span of untold millenniums to anticipate the December 21, 2012 date.

Now what does all this really mean? Does it mean the end of the world? Or does it means a possibly cataclysmic transition marking a major new beginning?

Granted, these teachings are deeply encoded, at least to Westerners trying to decipher so many mysteries, not only in the silent stones of the endless Maya ruins, but also in the great Maya epic the Popol Vuh, translated so powerfully by Dennis Tedlock. In this book, the characters, such as the Hero Twins, are actually celestial objects like the Sun, Moon, Earth, and Galaxy.

We should also note that there is a very auspicious celestial event that precedes the December 21 date. On May 20, 2012, only three months from today, there is a rare conjunction of the Sun and the Pleiades at the zenith; i.e., directly overhead. But overhead from where? Once again we speak of the pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichén Itzá, Yucatan, Mexico.

Not only that but, with the Sun being aligned between Earth and the Pleiades, there is also a conjunction of the Moon. That means, of course, that on that day there is a solar eclipse. This annular eclipse (where the Moon is entirely in front of the Sun though not covering it completely) will travel from China, across the Pacific south of the Aleutian Islands, then down across the western U.S., ending in Texas. Along the way the eclipse will pass almost exactly across the sacred lands of the Hopi, Navajo, and Pueblo Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, including the famed Taos Pueblo north of Santa Fe.

Modern man has largely lost touch with the magical level of consciousness by which the timeless archetypes understood by the Maya take meaning. But whether we understand or not, changes to our world are indeed likely. At the same time, the world is obviously dividing itself between the forces of renewal and those of stiffening resistance and reaction by all social, political, economic, and cultural/religious structures.

Of course, under pressure, that which stiffens and is the least resilient must shatter. We do not know how this will occur, whether the old skin of the world will be shed simply like a snake sheds its skin, or through a more destructive process.

And what do the Maya themselves say?

As quoted on the SERI Worldwide website, Carlos Barrios, Maya elder and priest of the Eagle Clan, says:

“Anthropologists visit the temple sites and read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. It’s just their imagination. Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.

“We are no longer in the World of the Fourth Sun, but we are not yet in the World of the Fifth Sun. This is the time in-between, the time of transition. As we pass through transition there is a colossal, global convergence of environmental destruction, social chaos, war, and ongoing Earth Changes.”

He continues: “Humanity will continue, but in a different way. Material structures will change. From this we will have the opportunity to be more human. We are living in the most important era of the Mayan calendars and prophecies. All the prophecies of the world, all the traditions are converging now. There is no time for games. The spiritual ideal of this era is action.”

Continuing, he says: “All was predicted by the mathematical cycles of the Mayan calendars. — It will change –everything will change. Mayan Day-keepers view the Dec. 21, 2012 date as a rebirth, the start of the World of the Fifth Sun. It will be the start of a new era resulting from and signified by the solar meridian crossing the galactic equator and the Earth aligning itself with the center of the galaxy….

“This process has already begun. Change is accelerating now and it will continue to accelerate. If the people of the Earth can get to this 2012 date in good shape without having destroyed too much of the Earth, we will rise to a new, higher level. But to get there we must transform enormously powerful forces that seek to block the way.”

Carlos tells a story about the most recent Mayan New Year ceremonies in Guatemala. He said that one respected Maya elder, who lives all year in a solitary mountain cave, journeyed to Chichicastenango to speak with the people at the ceremony. The elder delivered a simple, direct message. He called for human beings to come together in support of life and light.

Says Carlos: “Right now each person and group is going his or her own way. The elder of the mountains said there is hope if the people of the light can come together and unite in some way. We live in a world of polarity — day and night, man and woman, positive and negative. Light and darkness need each other. They are a balance.

“Just now the dark side is very strong, and very clear about what they want. They have their vision and their priorities clearly held, and also their hierarchy. They are working in many ways so that we will be unable to connect with the spiral Fifth World in 2012.

“On the light side everyone thinks they are the most important, that their own understandings, or their group’s understandings, are the key. There’s a diversity of cultures and opinions, so there is competition, diffusion, and no single focus.”

Carlos says: “We need to work together for peace, and balance with the other side. We need to take care of the Earth that feeds and shelters us. We need to put our entire mind and heart into pursuing unity and unity now, to confront the other side and preserve life.”

Change is coming, and given the present low level of consciousness of present-day humanity with its obsession with war and material possessions, it could be traumatic. The world today, seen in its broadest dimensions, is presently in a state of collapse as, shown by the horrible fratricidal wars of the past century and many other symptoms too numerous and obvious to mention.

Prophets such as Samael Aun Weor, who studied the teachings of the Mesoamerican cultures intensively, say that the next world will emerge only after terrible cataclysms. But Weor and others add that the seeds of the next era are being formed today by people who are awakening spiritually but who still must face a host of daunting trials and temptations.

So have the Maya, through their calendar, really delivered such a stern message to humanity? I believe they have. Can we continue to live oblivious to this message? That is for each person to decide for himself or herself. But we should be aware that failure to heed such clear warnings could have colossal consequences both individually and for the human race and planet Earth.

© 2012 by Richard C. Cook

Based on a Speech to the International Reciprocal Trade Association, Puerto Aventuras, Quintana Roo,  Mexico, September 20, 2011

© 2011 by Richard C. Cook. This article may be reproduced in print or on the internet only in its entirety and with appropriate attribution including the following biographical information.

First I want to thank you for inviting my wife Karen and me to join you in this beautiful land of ocean, sunshine, history, and mystery. Second, I want to offer the organized barter movement—and by this I mean the barter associations that have placed their work on a sound professional business level—my heartfelt congratulations. I congratulate you not only for acting in the face of the global monetary crisis but also for taking active and practical measures for putting something real in its place.

It proves you don’t have to fight something directly to change it. “Resist not evil,” says the wisdom of the ages. Rather see it as a business opportunity!

And while the word “barter” conjures up images of primitive people exchanging bushels of corn for hogs and chickens, in today’s computerized business environment, the barter movement has become a highly sophisticated component of global trading. Reflecting on this fact in the background will help us work together today to see through the illusion of money as the world’s Money Power defines it.

Our journey will start with an analysis of the crisis, followed by recognition of how the barter networks and the rest of the complementary currency movement monetize value through trade credits and scrip. We’ll tour history through the medieval trade fairs and the creation of bills of credit in colonial America. We’ll conclude with my advocacy for a worldwide Basic Income Guarantee that I am calling the Gaia Plan and introducing for the first time today by that name.

We’ll be making this journey as nation after nation becomes insolvent due to their unsustainable sovereign debt, giving the Money Power an excuse to enforce crushing austerity measures. In Spain, for instance, proposals to eliminate laws that protect workers from summary firings are called “labor reforms.” In nation after nation, including the U.S., workers’ wages and job security, as well as health care and pensions, have been slashed.

But the people of the world are starting to wake up and say, “Enough is enough,” though their anxiety and demands are often vague and contradictory, as are statements by those in the press and politics who attempt to define and respond to them.

Progressives in the U.S. demand a restoration of high taxes on the wealthy like those prior to the Reagan years. In contrast, those involved in movements like the Tea Party argue for dramatic reductions in government spending.

But you will see as we proceed that I take a different tack by advocating instead a new understanding of the meaning of money, the purposes of economics, and the methods of balancing an industrial economy between the value of production and the availability of consumer purchasing power. While control of the world’s economies by the Money Power makes reaching such a balance difficult, it is yet possible.

The Money Power—centered in the U.S. in the Federal Reserve, the largest banks, and Wall Street—gains its apparent legitimacy by enacting a simple clerical operation—pluses and minuses in a multitude of checkbooks and ledgers. Yet it tries to control everything, profit from everything, and determine which human activities survive and which do not.

My question is who gave it the right to do these things?  Is it a power of nature or is it manmade? If the latter, it can be changed.

Central to the problem is the fact that our monetary system is the reason it is so difficult for anyone to start a new independent small business. Actually, the Wall Street war against small business has been raging for over 30 years, starting with the Federal Reserve-induced recession of 1979, when the Fed raised interest rates to over 20 percent.

This amounted to a 20 percent tax on the circulating medium of exchange levied by the central bankers—officials elected by no one. From the carnage inflicted on the small business sector came the 1980s merger-acquisition bubble, as well as all the bubbles that came afterwards, including the housing bubble of recent catastrophic memory.

The bubble economy from the 1980s until the 2008 collapse was Wall Street’s calling card—its bread and butter. It was the Money Power’s takeover.

Yet it’s small business—what we call Main Street—that should be the employment engine in a free enterprise economy. It’s a flourishing small business sector that should give an economy resilience and recoverability in the face of shocks.

We have lost that resiliency and recoverability. And it’s not just Federal Reserve policy. It’s also Wall Street-supported mega-business like the big box stores that suck money out of Main Street communities, money that should be circulating locally. And it’s tax and regulatory policy as well.

Cumulatively, the attack by the Money Power and its government enablers on small business in America, including family farming and small to medium-sized manufacturing concerns, has been an economic and cultural disaster. The greed of the Money Power has so severely damaged the U.S. economy that our nation is on the verge of implosion.

The same is happening elsewhere around the world. The tension is palpable.

Supposedly in an eleventh-hour attempt to avert calamity, the Federal Reserve recently stated its intent to keep interest rates at a level approaching zero into 2013. But even this measure is likely to damage small business further, as pointed out by Camden R. Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

Mr. Fine wrote in the Washington Post on August 25, 2011, that:

“…the Fed has taken away community bankers’ ability to compete in the free market. In the midst of a depressed economy with low loan demand, the central bank is exacerbating the financial crisis….Why? In my view, the Fed’s policy is nothing more than a backdoor bailout for the Wall Street mega-banks and investment houses. It amounts to the back of the hand for the community banks of this country… The Wall Street money houses are basically getting free money that they can hedge and arbitrage worldwide to make baskets of money, while local banks are stuck with deposits costing more than the federal funds rate….For the extended future… capital will be difficult if not impossible to raise, stifling growth on America’s Main Streets.”

Meanwhile, other nations and blocs of nations have learned to play the money game as well as we. However, they do not all seem so content to live on monetary manipulations as opposed to production as America has been, particularly once we outsourced our manufacturing to them, intending to live on financial profits alone. This in turn is tied in with our aggressive international currency policy.

In decades past it was the British pound that acted as the global trade and reserve currency and kept the British leisure class in control of world commerce. But by the 1930s Britain was bankrupt.

The U.S. stepped in. Since the end of World War II, it has been the U.S. dollar in the forefront, with the U.S. leisure class soaring into the stratosphere with income and wealth. With the outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing as a means of shipping dollars overseas, the middle and working classes have been sacrificed on the altar of dollar domination.

The jobs were sent abroad so U.S. dollars would become the world’s trading currency and be used by other nations to finance our government’s debt and to deposit in U.S. banks in order to extend their global leverage.

The American government has tried to keep the dollar supreme. The centerpiece of dollar domination, since President Richard Nixon removed the gold peg in 1971, has been the use of U.S. currency for the international oil trade—the petrodollar. Also in the 1970s, figures within the U.S. government induced OPEC to double the cost of oil, which ignited the inflation leading to the 1979-83 recession. 

But the dollar is increasingly threatened by the currencies of other nations and blocs, including the euro, which are maturing to the point when a time may be foreseen where currency multilateralism could become a reality. The threat of such a sea-change is the underlying reason the U.S. military is so intent on controlling the Middle East as did Great Britain until its decline. 

Meanwhile, regardless of whatever currency is under discussion, the objective of the Money Power is to assure that money can only be entered into circulation by being borrowed on credit from the privately-owned banking system.

Thus the crisis is not simply one of availability of credit. Yes, that availability has been reduced, which is why the Federal Reserve has supposedly taken such radical action. But even though interest rates are and will remain low and Wall Street and the big corporations are awash in cash, large numbers of people and businesses are excluded by the banks from borrowing because they are not viewed as credit-worthy.

All this reflects the persistence of the recession that now threatens to turn into the feared double-dipper. In fact there is a worldwide monetary deflation going on that no one talks about, caused by the withdrawal of money from circulation when loans are repaid, combined with the loss of equity through collapse of the housing market, and excessive “savings” through tying up of money in non-productive fixed assets like gold.

I’ll talk more about this later.  For now, we must simply realize that since the crash of 2008, absolutely nothing of substance has been done to reform the conditions that led to it.

Household debt is still off the charts, and unemployment remains high. What has happened is that tightening of credit, even with low rates, has made it harder for either the banks, government, or consumers to create another bubble.

But that is not reform. It’s simply the ongoing recession moving in the direction of a permanent condition. Without bubbles, both the Money Power and the U.S. government have lost the ability to generate real economic growth. Take away their bubbles and they have little remaining. The decline in the Dow-Jones average reflects such an awareness by investors.  

But let’s rise above the level of political finger-pointing and realize what few commentators do, which is that central to the problem is that all Western governments remain in collusion with the banks in calling only their debt-derived currencies “legal tender.” Ladies and gentlemen, the legal tender laws, are, in my opinion, a fraud upon the people.

The origin of these laws lies solely with the Money Power, and their purpose is to create and sustain the monopoly whereby the Money Power seeks to control the economic affairs of every nation. This understanding moves us powerfully in the direction of seeing the real causes of the crisis, not just their effects.

All the Money Power knows how to do is lend at a profit, remove money from circulation when loans are repaid, seize assets when loans are not repaid, and assist corporate predators by financing their gobbling up of any small fry that may threaten their own monopolies. The Money Power does not know how to invest in real production, and it does not know how to generate sustained consumer purchasing power. You simply cannot do these things by policy based on the money banks create from thin air.

Another underlying issue that no one focuses on is the fact that one of the most important responsibilities of any government is, or should be, to assure the presence of a sufficient quantity and quality of money to be used as a medium of exchange.

Without a medium of exchange, no commerce takes place. It is a fact that the U.S. government, as have most governments, has delegated the creation of a medium of exchange to the private banking system. But this system does not work in the long run. 

As any businessman knows, while borrowing money from a bank via a line of credit makes sense for operating liquidity, it is the worst possible means of investment because of the interest attached and the fact that lenders assume none of the risk of business failure. Much better means are gifts or grants, savings, retained earnings, or raising money in the capital markets. 

But these means have dried up under the financial crisis, except for some hi-tech start-ups or for the largest global businesses, and even then primarily for acquisitions where costs are cut, operations consolidated, and employees fired to pay off the loans used to finance the purchase. For individuals or small business, a satisfactory method of generating consumer purchasing power to allow their businesses to survive or grow simply no longer exists. This in a nutshell is why so many businesses and even state and local governments are exploring the creation of complementary currencies.

But the banks rule, so almost everyone else, including governments, are increasingly broke. The recent charade carried out by the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration, whereby the Republicans threatened to shut down government unless massive cuts were made to the federal budget was but play-acting by everyone involved.

We all knew the debt ceiling would be raised, because the government cannot live for one day without borrowing. The ceiling was raised, after massive handwringing, with deficit reduction targets that had social programs and entitlements facing cutbacks to pay for them.

No wonder Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post was candid in stating that the only challenge in the years to come will be how to “share the pain” from the collective sin of having lived beyond our means.

Next, the Money Power, acting through Standard and Poor’s, downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating. The same thing has been done to Japan by Moody’s, with the International Monetary Fund even recommending that Japan’s sales tax be raised to 15 percent to reduce the deficit there.

The Federal Reserve will be maintaining low interest rates supposedly to kick-start the private sector back into prosperity. Now we also have President Obama’s $477 billion job-creation proposal, if, of course, it can pass Congress. But unless a new economic engine is identified that is not simply another bubble like the housing one, these policies too will fail.

So will someone please tell me what the economic engine of the future is going to be? If it is to be more exports, won’t every other nation be trying to do the same? There can be no winners where a global economy tries to get over currency wars by creating trade wars. All there can be is more wars.

Or if the engine is to be infrastructure spending, including military construction to make up for cuts to the defense budget, what will happen when the loans to the federal government from the Federal Reserve used to finance it have to be paid back? 

Going back to the start of my speech, it won’t surprise you to hear that in my opinion the economic engine for a revived economy must be local and regional economic activity based on a resurgence of small business and the generation of individual and family purchasing power. And there must be adequate availability of currency as a means of exchange unencumbered by debt.

The Money Power is unable to do this through bank lending, even at low rates, because it has created a global economy which for decades has been based on price bubbles, concentration of wealth in global corporate cartels, speculation in resources, destruction of the manufacturing base as a means of sustaining a middle class, and enrichment of the financial elite at the expense of everyone else. 

Almost every solution that anyone has proposed to the crisis, including the progressives who habitually call for more federal government action, is a top-down approach, as though some macroeconomic quick-fix can change the lives of nations. But it’s all just trickle-down economics.

The right-wing advocates trickle-down from the rich. The left-wing advocates trickle-down from the government. This includes the Obama jobs-creation proposal.

But what we need is actually trickle-up. From the people. From the producers. From small business.

Token federal programs cannot cure the problem because fundamentally we are starved of a workable medium of exchange. There is today a vast shortage of money, including funding of day-to-day business operations through credit liquidity, at the grassroots level to meet the legitimate needs of the people who actually work for a living.

And this in turn is because of the illusion of money that the Money Power fosters. This illusion is that money is so sacred and scarce a commodity that only the wealthy, comfortable, and secure lenders and investors of Wall Street, along with their enablers like the chairman of the Fed, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the committee chairmen of both houses of Congress, can make the decisions the life and death of the community depend upon.

I can tell you that a person who buys into the illusion of money will be poorly equipped to understand the things I am talking about today. But it’s a different story for those in the complementary currency movement.

You do have the background and experience. Because you know what money is—you have proven it for yourselves. You know it is nothing sacred or mythical—it is merely trade credits or tokens created to move goods in trade. You know who really should have the right under the laws of nature to create those trade credits and tokens—the people who produce or have legitimate title to the goods that are available for trading.

The concept is simple. Yet most of the so-called progressives completely fail to grasp it. So do the conservatives who actually are the Money Power’s greatest apologists, because they confuse the money monopoly with “free enterprise” which it most emphatically is not.

I am now going to tell you everything you should need to know about economics. Economics is barter. Period.

Let’s be clear about that, in spite of the endless obfuscations of the so-called economics profession. I repeat: economics is barter.

Barter is the exchange of objects of worth, which includes the value of labor, ingenuity, and resources. Even when exchange is facilitated through what we call “money,” the principle is the same.

The unit of value of ancient civilizations was the cow. While gold, silver, or other metals had value, they were denominated in the number of healthy mature cows they could purchase.

This is a fact of history. A unit of gold meant, simply, “one cow’s worth.”

An economy of barter, including the barter those here today engage in, is not an emergency measure, not something to fall back on only when the system fails. I say this despite the fact that every financial crisis in history has had as one of its results an uptick in barter.

When you add to barter a system of tokens, or money, with or without its own intrinsic value, and add to that the ability quickly to create, store, and transport trading records, you have a full-fledged economic system. Credit may have a part to play in facilitating exchange within this system, but it is not primary. Production is primary. Credit and a satisfactory means of exchange should be tools. 

Trade in objects of real value is the way things are supposed to work. The separation of money from production that has developed today is destructive, dysfunctional, dishonest, and delusional.

The world’s largest market is in the trading of currencies to gain a profit from temporary fluctuations in relative value. For the producers of the world, it’s a disaster, because every industry and nation is subject to manipulated currency values that make long-term planning and financial security impossible.

Unless, of course, you happen to control the world’s reserve currency. But even there, as we have seen, control can only be maintained by having the world’s strongest military.

How then should the system work?

Let me take you back a few centuries to a simpler time—the medieval trading fairs. If you study medieval history, or read a good book on economic history, you see that the medieval trading fairs were one of the most remarkable economic and cultural phenomena ever seen. 

Merchants from all over Europe would transport the products of their localities and meet several times a year at central locations. Sometimes municipalities would build large warehouses for the fairs, some of which still stand.

At the fairs there would be agricultural products of all kinds—animals and produce—mainly from local sources. From farther away there would be articles of clothing, textiles, or the raw materials for making them. There would be manufactured objects from the various lines of artisan work. What there would not be was sufficient money to trade all the commodities that were brought to the fair.

Instead, each merchant, upon arrival, would deal in paper bills of exchange authorized by the managers of the fair. Often these bills would be dated to expire at the end of the fair, so were not viewed as having intrinsic value or serving as a repository of wealth. So a medium of exchange was created as needed on the spot.

And the method worked. Its spiritual descendant is the Swiss WIR system, a hugely successful non-official trading system with its own self-generated trade credits and system of record-keeping. Something similar is working today through the on-line trading networks such as yours.

Another type of self-generated complementary currency is scrip. The most famous scrip currency of the last 30 years has been Ithaca Hours in Ithaca, New York, which began during the 1991 recession.

Scrip has gotten a bad name because often coal miners were paid in scrip that could supposedly be redeemed only at the company store. But there is an element of bankers’ propaganda in this depiction.

For much of the 19^th century scrip as a means of exchange was a cornerstone of local economies in the U.S. Thousands of businesses issued scrip; for instance, drug stores and lumberyards. The scrip had value because it would be redeemed by the issuing merchant; such as, so many board feet of lumber. It had the added advantage of not having bank interest added to it.

In some areas, as in Appalachia where Karen and I now live, this system continued well into the 20^th century. I have spoken to people whose grandparents survived with it.

So it should be no surprise to hear that this is the way the people in hundreds of municipalities in the U.S. traded during the Great Depression. It’s the way the people of Argentina saved their nation during the currency collapse of the early 2000s. They met at central warehouses and traded goods through scrip created by the trading clubs that were set up.

It’s happening in America and Europe today. A couple of weeks ago CNBC ran a clip on the town of Filettino, Italy, minting its own money. Even residents of Washington, D.C., are printing local currency—the Potomac.

Pure barter has also reemerged. It’s the way Russia survived when the currency of the Soviet Union disappeared in the 1990s due to a full-front monetary attack by the West.

It’s said that by the mid-1990s up to 50 percent of Russia’s economic activity took place through barter, including goods accepted by the government as taxes. One author describes how he was able to travel through Russia at the time doing research for a book on the crisis with a trunk full of vodka his only spending money. Many large corporations and even nations deal directly in barter transactions today.

But back to scrip. Scrip was and is “money” in its natural form. Scrip does not require a government to issue a decree as they do when calling only bank-issued interest-bearing notes legal tender. But scrip can be driven out of circulation by such a decree.  

Use of scrip was the way the British colonies in America functioned in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. Apart from barter and trading in such currencies as Spanish dollars and Indian wampum, the colonies had begun to issue scrip currency by the year 1700.

Sometimes the currency consisted of receipts of goods deposited in public warehouses, as was done with tobacco in Virginia. Sometimes the currency originated with a land bank, as was done in Pennsylvania, where landowners used their land as collateral. Sometimes the colonial governments spent scrip into circulation through bills of credit, as with the colony of Massachusetts.

It was this variety of scrip used as a means of exchange that helped create the economic prosperity of the colonies. But here’s the key. Scrip received its value not only from its convenience and convertibility but also from the fact that governments accepted it in payment of taxes.

Remember this principle. It shows one way we can unlock the power of barter and complementary currencies today. 

But, as we know, the bankers launched a long campaign to take over the U.S. economy, whose milestones were the First and Second Banks of the United States and the National Banking Acts of 1863-64, culminating in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The 20^th century saw two parallel phenomena: 1) the ever-growing power of big finance with its control over nations and their economies and 2) the worst wars ever fought among human beings on the planet, with the half-century of warfare carried out by the U.S. and its allies from Vietnam to Iraq to Serbia, with Afghanistan, Iraq again, and now Libya just a continuation.

But the global crisis is not just economic. The world stands at a crossroads today in every category of human life. There are two completely different visions competing for humanity’s future. These two visions are the materialistic vs. the spiritual.

The materialistic vision is based on the presumption that the world consists entirely of what we perceive with the physical senses and that human beings are essentially thinking animals living in a world of limited material sustenance and subject to constant threat of privation due to lack, limitation, disease, and ultimately death.

According to this view, a human being is only a physical body, controllable by conditioning based on the pleasure-pain principle. 

People might yet enjoy a few fleeting moments of pleasure, of personal and family enjoyment, of hope in a better material future, or even of getting to heaven if they are good. But life on earth, believes the materialist, is a struggle for survival, a struggle that the social classes, nations, and races which are the most clever and energetic in beating out the others not only will win but deserve to win.

Materialism is a function of what may be called biogenetic consciousness. But taken to an extreme, it’s Social Darwinism elevated to theology. Add to it the power of modern technology, and it becomes extremely dangerous.

Given this view, politics and planning are best left to an elite functioning across international lines to control and dominate the world as they see fit, even if vast and increasing numbers of human beings are left out to the point of having their futures and lives sacrificed if there is not enough to go around of the crumbs that fall from their masters’ tables. It’s a trickle-down world.

Big dog eats little dog—that’s the materialistic philosophy. It’s the big dogs who think they have the right to rule the world.

This is obviously the vision of the Money Power that strives to run things by putting everyone, even the technicians and militarists who support and extend its power, into endless cycles of debt. It is this debt above all that defines the global crisis.

Nations and individuals are mired in debt they can never get rid of. For debt on this scale is never repaid and no one is ever out of debt. It is simply rolled over to the next cycle of debt while the Money Power acquires title to everything it can get its hands on.

As I said earlier, the obvious answer for those foreclosed upon is austerity. Stop living beyond your means. If the banks so dictate, or if you can’t get a job and the public entitlements have run out, then starve and die and even blame yourself in the process.

Governments and businesses try to cope by raising taxes and prices and so generate inflation. But debt catches up with that too. It’s a treadmill that gets faster all the time.

The police and military are there to step in if anyone gets out of line and tries to defy the established order. The same goes for the educational system, whose objective is to train the drones of the world to passively accept their fate, strive to stay out of trouble, and feel lucky if they can get a job or a low interest rate on a mortgage or a loan. Meanwhile, the corporate owned-press and entertainment industry is there to provide a little distraction.

Is this the world you want to live in? Obviously the result of materialism is massive and growing levels of psychological and physical stress.

A dark cloud of fear hangs over the world where people subsist amid nagging anxiety over losing what little they have if something should go wrong. Bankruptcy and loss of one’s home threaten if a person should lose his or her job or a family member become ill.

While this is going on, the rich become richer by the day, the earnings of CEOs and Wall Street tycoons set new records, universities which hand out tickets to prosperity by monopolizing the job credentialing process raise tuitions ever higher, and the giant corporations and too-big-to-fail banks wallow in more money than they know what to do with.

These are all the results of the materialistic perspective, or the belief that man “lives by bread alone.”

The spiritual vision starts with the realization that man is a spiritual being living in a spiritual universe. What does this mean?

Let us consider the following statement that has beckoned to man for 2,000 years: “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Does this statement establish a gulf between the material and spiritual worlds? Or is it of a higher vision, where the everyday world of getting and spending may also be seen as suffused with an inner light of meaning?

May the statement then signify, at least in part, that our daily bread also comes from the world of goodness and abundance which the words “the mouth of God” point to? The words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” would signify as much.

This is certainly what the Catholic Workers Movement believes or the old Distributist movement that favored maximum property ownership by householders and families. It is also what the ancient Hebrew religion believed through its periodic debt-forgiveness jubilees and what the Islamic religion maintains with its prohibition of usury. It was what Jesus Christ manifested by overturning the tables of the money lenders at the temple in Jerusalem, an incident which the scribes and Pharisees down through the ages have never been able to explain away.

The spiritual dimension was reflected in comments by Pope Benedict XVI in Spain only a month ago. Responding to the crisis where unemployment in Spain has climbed to over 20 percent he said:

“The economy doesn’t function with market self-regulation but needs an ethical reason to work for mankind. Man must be at the center of the economy, and the economy cannot be measured only by maximization of profit but rather according to the common good.”

He added that the crisis shows that a moral dimension isn’t “exterior” to economic problems but rather “interior and fundamental.”

We all know that spiritual vision means that we must not judge by appearances. It means we do not judge people by their nationality, the color of their skin, how prestigious a job they have, what university they attended, how many possessions they have piled up, whether or not their education conforms to our approval, and a host of other external factors.

The spiritual perspective means that we view every human being as worthy of respect, entitled to live on the earth with dignity, being equal not only before the law but in the sight of God. It means everyone should have a chance and should be treated decently and fairly.

Where does this vision come from? It comes from every religion, every spiritual teaching, every humanistic vision that has ever appeared on the planet. In the U.S. it also comes from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, and the 14^th Amendment providing for equal protection under the law.

The spiritual vision also comes from deep down inside each of us in the common understanding and divine spark of conscience that truly civilized and cultured people know in their hearts make us all members of the human family.

I worked for NASA at one time, and I can tell you that the space program gave tremendous impetus to the vision of earth and humanity as one of unity and togetherness. The images sent back from space of the beautiful but fragile blue marble we inhabit and of the incredible vastness and beauty of the other worlds and galaxies with which we share a place in the universe—all this changed our perspective forever and opened doors that will never close again.

But there is more even than that. Spiritual vision shows that the earth is not limited in its resources as most people believe and fear. Remember, this is a spiritual universe. Spiritual consciousness points to awareness of the infinite, of goodness without end.

Physics has started to understand that what we see of materiality is really only the outward manifestation of vast processes from the universal core of being that every millisecond give birth to energy vibrations on a scale too vast to contemplate but which crystallize to form the measurable worlds of matter.

In the 1890s the newspapers were reporting on the economic crisis that would destroy the birth of the industrial age because we were going to run out of horses. Today we fear we will run out of food or oil.

It has been figures representing the Money Power who, more than anyone else, have bemoaned the population explosion. Obviously a very effective means for stopping it is genocide in its many forms, and if war can’t always be counted on, then raising food and gas prices, allowing poverty to run amuck, tolerating high unemployment, or cutting pensions and government services will do a pretty good job as well.

I would even go as far as to say that the elite’s tolerance of un- and underemployment in our complex society is a crime against humanity, one responsible for many of the other crimes that plague us.

So that is where matters stand today. This is what in my opinion the Money Power believes and is up to. And it all goes back to the materialistic vision. I can’t have more, or even enough, if you have some too. Gimme. It’s mine.

The ideology of the Money Power comes from greed and destroys all that makes us human. The spiritual vision, by contrast, is one of moderation. It sees that if you have what you need, and thereby become a happier, more productive person, then I will benefit also.

Because there is truly no limitation on what an expansive universe can potentially produce if its resources are used wisely. We have scarcely even begun to tap the energy resources available when you think of wind energy or geothermal energy, or, of course, solar energy.

Then there’s zero-point energy, based on the theories of scientists such as Nikola Tesla, who said that seemingly empty space is in fact the repository of an unlimited source of energy in its potential state. Many independent researchers have been working to make Tesla’s ideas a reality in ways that would advance human freedom beyond anything dreamt of in the past. The computer revolution, where virtually unlimited computing power can be packed into microchips of infinitesimal size, hints at these possibilities.

In the field of economics, the spiritual vision means that everyone on earth should have fair access to purchasing power without having to go to a bank to beg for a loan at interest or a government handout if hardship can be proven to a bureaucrat.

In monetary affairs, the materialistic vision says money is a commodity to be tightly controlled by a financial oligarchy that will use it as they see fit to enrich themselves while everyone else struggles. This in spite of the fact that much of the money they lend they have created out of thin air under a license from government whose politicians they buy and sell at will. Government benefits because it can run up trillions of dollars in debt by borrowing this fictitious money from domestic and foreign banks through an arrangement presided over by the Federal Reserve and the central banks of other nations.

A twist on the materialistic idea is that the money supply should be tightened because only precious metals like gold and silver have real value. The gold bugs and the bankers represent two sides of the same coin so to speak. Both would throttle commerce for the sake of a materialistic ideology.

So what would a spiritual economics look like? What would spiritual money consist of? These have been questions I have been writing about since I retired from the federal government in 2007.

First of all, a spiritually-oriented currency would be available to everyone in sufficient quantity to satisfy the needs of life and provide for free and fair exchange of goods and services.

Obviously employment should be a chief means of acquiring the means of exchange. But it is not necessarily the only means. Earlier we mentioned grants, savings, and capital markets. But in addition, associations of producers, as well as states and municipalities, should be able to create complementary currencies, as you do and as many others are exploring.

But there is more. We know for a fact that not everyone needs to work to provide the necessities of life for society. The productivity of modern industry is phenomenal.

Too many workers on the job are inefficient, as any factory manager knows. Also, as we discussed earlier, business centralization and the decimation of the small business sector have sharply decreased the number of jobs available.

Structural unemployment resulting from changing conditions in the workplace is also a fact of life, and the types of jobs that can potentially be eliminated by computers and robots increase daily.

The result is, of course, that machines can produce far more than there is consumer income available to purchase it. While this is obvious to anyone with commonsense, economists seem not to have noticed. Henry Ford realized this when he decided to pay his workers enough to purchase the automobiles they constructed on the assembly line.

So what many of us believe is that there should be a public stipend for people who are not needed to work, who cannot work, for university-level students, for those who do volunteer work, for those trying to get a new business or career off the ground, for those whose work is not highly paid like teachers or eldercare providers, or for mothers or fathers who want to remain at home and raise their children while the spouse works.

I am speaking of a Basic Income Guarantee. There is a vitally important and growing worldwide movement for a Basic Income Guarantee, and I am proud to be part of it. A Basic Income Guarantee is the only practical way to create the leisure dividend the industrial age promised but has never delivered.

Some oppose the Basic Income Guarantee because they claim it is a socialistic measure. I emphatically disagree with this viewpoint.

Rather its roots may be found deeply implanted in the three historic religions of the Western world—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three share a common ancestry and have a powerful social welfare component. Eastern religions contain the same idea in their concepts of compassion and the oneness of creation. A Basic Income Guarantee also makes economic sense.

The first modern figure to advocate a Basic Income Guarantee was Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and the famous saying, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine wrote, following the American Revolution, that U.S. citizens should receive a regular stipend as compensation for “loss of his or her natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property.” (Agrarian Justice, 1795).

Within the U.S. many famous economists have spoken in favor of a Basic Income Guarantee, including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Milton Friedman. Another strong supporter was Friedrich Hayek, a major figure in the Austrian school of economics.

In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote:

“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

In 1973, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published The Politics of a Guaranteed Income that became the basis of a proposal by President Richard Nixon that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1973 but was defeated by a coalition of Southern senators in a vote with strong racial overtones. What did emerge from that era was the earned-income tax credit as a limited guaranteed income that expanded to become a major anti-poverty measure under President Bill Clinton and remains a chief means of support for many low-income families.

In Western Europe an extensive social safety net became a cornerstone of post-World War II society that is increasingly threatened by societal debt. Other nations such as Brazil have begun to consider enacting a Basic Income Guarantee through statute.

The purest form of a Basic Income Guarantee in existence is the Alaska Permanent Fund, where all residents receive an annual payment of around $1,200 from the state’s resource revenues. Such a system would be replicable anywhere in the world.

The logic of the Basic Income Guarantee may be seen through the game of Monopoly where players collect $200 each time they pass “GO.” What would happen if, instead of receiving the free $200, it was a loan from the bank at 10 percent interest? What if you had to pay back $220 when you arrived at “GO” before receiving your next loan?

Clearly what would happen would be that every player on the board would soon be bankrupt, with the bank owning everything. And what would happen in real life if unemployment compensation or Social Security consisted of loans, not payments?

As automation continues to grow and eliminate jobs, more and more nations must begin to realize that to maintain a functioning economy people must simply be granted a subsistence income. Of course there is less chance of this happening every day under the global financial crisis.

Which raises the question of how a Basic Income Guarantee anywhere in the world can be paid for? By taxing everyone to the max who still has a job? No. For the interesting thing is that such grants of public funds do not always have to be balanced by taxation or government debt.

This is what the Money Power and their politically conservative allies want us to believe. That money is scarce and the resulting pain inevitable. Or even that money should be kept scarce because that is how its value is maintained for those fortunate enough to possess it. Of course the pain envisioned is always someone else’s, never one’s own.

But what I have been arguing since I entered the field of discussion after leaving the Treasury Department is that money creation for programs like a Basic Income Guarantee can be balanced by increased economic efficiencies, by the augmented production its availability would call forth, and by enhancing the velocity of money—the rate at which it is turned over by an active economy.

These are concepts many experts within and outside the government have known for decades. It’s what gave Keynesian economics its force for so long.

The fact is that money can simply be created by any sovereign authority or delegated by that sovereign authority to any organized entity within society. Conservatives deride this power as simply one of “printing money.”

But so what? It’s how the private banks—which, again, the conservatives never criticize—lend today under the fractional reserve system. They create a debit in a ledger and transfer it as a credit to the borrower’s bank account.

When the loan is repaid, the credit is cancelled from the books. After the banks tally up the interest charges, of course.

This cancellation actually subtracts from the money supply, as does locking up money in the creation of fixed assets like yachts or mansions that sit and rot while producing nothing of value. This type of conspicuous consumption is actually a type of hoarding.

Are the conservatives really so naive they don’t understand any of this? Or are they just terminally addicted to crying crocodile tears over whatever threatens to upset their self-absorbed world view?

Don’t they understand that credit should be treated as a public utility and used in the same way that bankers now use it except for the benefit of society rather than just the already-rich?

Yes, money can and should be created and distributed sufficient to society’s need, and in the industrial age the need is massive. In fact a Basic Income Guarantee could and should be “printed.”

And it need not be inflationary if it is balanced by what really gives money value—production. This balance is the key to maintaining the value of money—not artificial scarcities created by the Money Power when it wants to crash the economy.

The Social Credit theorists of the British Commonwealth nations tackled this problem under the leadership of British engineer C.H. Douglas almost a century ago. They advocated the distribution of money as a National Dividend in order to bring into balance cumulative consumer prices with available national income, noting that income always lagged due to the enormously important factor of retained earnings which any business must engage in to prepare for the future. Distribution of a National Dividend, they said, can be safely and readily done so long as it is balanced by an equivalent level of economic appreciation in terms of future productive capacity.

Those engaged in barter should understand this, because you know quite well that credit does call forth increased production. But lending by the banks is not necessary for this. Simply distributing the money against a national credit ledger would be far better, because the money remains in circulation and so sustains economic growth without the overhead of interest charges.

The math has been done. You can read about it in my writings and many other places. Similarly, barterers know that even if you have huge amounts of valuable goods and services ready for use, unless a medium of exchange is created they sit stagnant. But once that medium is created, trade begins to move again.

Indeed, anyone with objects of value to trade, including their own labor, should have a right to monetize them as you are doing. Another method in widespread use is computerized labor exchanges.

All such systems have a close intellectual and spiritual affinity to the concept of a Basic Income Guarantee. All such systems would transfer the privilege now allocated only to banks to individuals and associations under a similar public license now monopolized unfairly by the banks.

And all such systems can readily be created in the computer age. Think what the world would be like if eBay or Craigslist traded not just in dollars but in trade credits as well. There might really be an economic recovery, and—heaven forbid—without any bank-generated debt-based currency.

And what if people were given a certain amount of trade credits free and clear just to set the trading in motion? This would also be a Basic Income Guarantee.

What stands in the way of all this? Obviously a major factor is the tax system, which is another monopoly run by collusion between the Money Power and governments.

We saw earlier the economic advantages in colonial America of accepting scrip in payment of taxes. The same could and should be done today.

There is a great injustice, of which those in the barter movement are well aware, in the government having no compunction in taxing the trade of your clients to the full extent of its equivalent in U.S. dollars. Of course organizations like the International Reciprocal Trade Association are to be commended for keeping the barter associations legal with IRS and other national taxing authorities by helping you work with your clients to include in their accounting systems the payment of such taxes.

But you know it is unjust. And why is it unjust? Well, obviously because if the government considers your trade units as real money that can be taxed they should accept trade units in payment of taxes as well.

Yes, your barter trade credits should also become a legitimate currency with which to pay taxes. In fact, any association of producers that comes together with a functional system of trading, and this should include the hundreds of complementary currency systems cropping up around the world, should be able to pay taxes in that complementary currency if the government chooses to tax it as being real money. Then we would see whether the legal tender laws have any meaning or not, because then complementary currencies would be accepted in trade everywhere in the world.

In fact the government would benefit by realizing a large increase in revenue simply by converting these taxed trade credits to dollars in its accounting systems. I can tell you from my own experience that the Treasury Department could implement this policy in a matter of months and retire much of the national debt in so doing.

It could even be argued that doing otherwise should be considered unconstitutional by denying traders in complementary currencies the equal protection of the law.  Am I saying then that the declaration by the government that only Federal Reserve Notes may be legal tender could be found unconstitutional?

Yes, I am. I would urge the complementary currency movement to create test cases and undertake litigation to argue this issue in court.

It’s a simple matter of justice and equity. Confirming the full legal status of complementary currencies, combined with a Basic Income Guarantee, would break the money monopoly held by the Money Power that is destroying the economies of the world.

True, there are many other proposals out there for various types of monetary reform, including public banking, allowing the government to spend money into existence as was done with the Greenbacks of over a century ago, and so on. But unless individual citizens and associations of producers can obtain sufficient quantities of the medium of exchange needed to survive and to monetize their production, we will just be trading one type of money monopoly for another, and the same deadly crisis of poverty in the midst of plenty will remain.

Now, I am, for the first time, going to introduce another proposal that could help solve the global financial crisis. You will hear it today for the first time. 

Let’s start with what I have called the Cook Plan. I first presented the Cook Plan at the 8^th Congress of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network in New York on February 27, 2009. The plan was part of a paper entitled: “A Bailout for the People: Dividend Economics and the Basic Income Guarantee.”

My suggestion was to place a substantial amount of credit directly into the hands of the U.S. population through a Basic Income Guarantee consisting of a sufficient amount to supply every adult a subsistence living in the form of vouchers for such necessities as food and housing, then having the vouchers deposited in a national network of community savings banks that invest in locally productive enterprises.

The system would require no government means test to prove a person really needed the vouchers and no bureaucracy to administer them. They would be treated as a human right. 

The Cook Plan is based on the principle mentioned previously that full-employment is not at all necessary or even desirable in a modern economy. Rather there should be any number of options for work of a volunteer or low-income nature that, when undertaken, do not threaten a person’s survival.

But I now propose to take the idea of the Cook Plan a step further. I am calling it the Gaia Plan, which I am today unveiling for the very first time.

The Gaia Plan would be a Basic Income Guarantee issued by the International Monetary Fund to every adult on the planet under an accord administered by the United Nations.

The Gaia would be a worldwide currency named for the Greek designation for Mother Earth. The name would signify the care of Mother Earth for her human children.

Of course one of today’s concerns is that the Money Power obviously wants a global currency they can use to control humanity by abolishing the sovereignty of nations. The IMF, already having vast experience in impoverishing the people of many nations through austerity regimes, would be one of the agencies they would use for their purposes. 

The Gaia would also be a global currency, but not the kind the Money Power has in mind. Instead it would be a means of exchange for all the people, a means of exchange unencumbered by debt.

And wouldn’t it be a just turn of fate if the IMF were used to administer it? After all, the IMF employs a large number of highly-paid economists and accountants. Why not give them something to do that would benefit instead of destroy humanity?

Under the plan, there would be no means test for receipt of the Gaia. Every adult human being would receive it every month. I would suggest around $800 per payment.

The value of the Gaia could be based on a basket of currencies including the dollar, the euro, the ruble, the Chinese yuan, and the Japanese yen. The plan thereby has some affinities with the proposal by Belgian author Bernard Lietaer for a worldwide complementary currency he called the Terra. However, the Gaia Plan is far more comprehensive in calling for a global Basic Income Guarantee.

Like the Terra, however, the Gaia would help stabilize world currencies. The Gaia would also allow economies to be rebuilt from the bottom up, through entrepreneurship and small business growth.

As with the Cook Plan, the system could also include creation of a worldwide network of savings and development banks. The integrity of the Gaia could be maintained by a pledge nations signing the Gaia treaty would make for competent administration and prohibitions on profiteering through price gouging and other anti-competitive measures.

But let there be no doubt about it. To induce the UN, the IMF, and the governments of the world to reverse the present course of events and replace the oppression of the Money Power and its agents with a humanitarian program to benefit all mankind would constitute one of the great revolutions in history.

It is not a revolution that can be brought about by force. Yet it can happen through the ongoing planetary awakening of consciousness we see all around us.

In conclusion, let me say without reservation that it is impossible to believe that the world really does belong to a delusionary monetary system based on greed. It’s time for that mythology to end.

The world’s consciousness is indeed changing. Globalism is in fact here. Narrow nationalistic policies and national rivalries should be a thing of the past. But human freedom and dignity now call out for answers that benefit everyone, not just the elite and their repressive structures in their race to the bottom in destroying worker livelihoods.

The Golden Rule that all religions affirm requires us now, immediately, to alter our actions to reflect love of neighbor s of self. The Gaia plan would be a tangible expression of the highest ethical ideals of conscience recognized by the entire world over thousands of years.

Meanwhile, organizations like the International Reciprocal Trade Association are providing day-in-and-day-out many of the answers we need so urgently, including having the word “international” in its name. Let’s now take further steps. A functioning world economy would have a multitude of features with units used to pay taxes a prominent one.

So I say: Move forward with boldness and confidence into the future. Do what you are doing now as efficiently and fairly as possible, and be prepared for a future where you will help lead the way by teaching society what human freedom means in the marketplace and how crucially important monetary freedom is today.

Of course we really don’t know what the future holds. But no matter what happens, seeing through the illusion of money is a place to start.

There is a new earth and a new humanity in the making. Let us be part of bringing them to fruition.

Richard C. Cook was born in Missoula, Montana, later moved with his family to Virginia, and graduated with honors from the College of William and Mary, the alma mater of Thomas Jefferson, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. For the next 37 years he served with several federal agencies, including the Carter White House, taught history, and, for a time, operated organic farms in West Virginia and Virginia.

In 1986, while working for NASA, Richard became one of the foremost whistleblowers of modern times as the first NASA official to testify on the causes of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. He left NASA but in 1990 received the Cavallo Foundation Award for Moral Courage in Business and Government for his forthrightness.

Richard completed his government career in 2007 after 21 years as an analyst with the U.S. Treasury Department. On retirement in January, 2007, he published “Challenger Revealed,” his memoirs of the 1986 NASA tragedy.

He then published his book on the causes and cures of the global financial crisis entitled “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He has also written dozens of articles on both a host of public policy issues, as well as contemporary spirituality, and speaks regularly on these topics. His articles may be found on his website at www.richardccook.com

After a search through southwest Virginia, Richard and his wife Karen moved to Roanoke, Virginia, over a year ago from their previous home in Maryland. Their goal was to seek the “high places,” both in the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains and within their own hearts and spirits.

They have established a small business rehabbing old houses, and in January 2011, they decided to formalize their teaching activities through founding the Peace Spiritual Center, where they teach meditation and offer spiritual counseling. The center’s website is www.peace-spiritual-center.org.

To ask about Richard’s  speaking schedule, please contact monetaryreform@gmail.com

2011 is the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

The most misused word in the English language may be the one spelled G-O-D. It is a word used freely and frequently by hundreds of millions of English-speaking people who belong to the Christian churches, and even as a curse word by many people.

But how many really understand the meaning behind that word? How many have truly attained the state of consciousness known as God-realization? How many instead use the word to justify various forms of bigotry against those they perceive as non-believers? Can it be that misuse of the word has even given the being or reality the word may represent a bad name?

Christians profess belief in the Bible. Yet the word “God” never appears in the original language of the Bible. Instead, such words as Yahweh, Elohim, Ho Theos, or Ho Kurios are used.

According to the Reader’s Digest Family Word Finder, page 351, “Our word ‘god’ goes back via Germanic to Indo-European, in which a corresponding ancestor form meant ‘invoked one.’  The word’s only surviving non-Germanic relative is Sanskrit hu.” This form “appears in the Rig Veda, most ancient of Hindu scriptures [as]  puru-hutas,  ‘much invoked,’ epithet of the rain-and-thunder god Indra.”

The word “God” found its way into English-language Christianity through such translations as the King James Bible of 1611. But its origins are decidedly both racial and “pagan.” So in the most important word of their lexicon, Christians use a term that may be far-removed from the scriptures they profess to believe and often cite in looking down their noses at others.

What has probably done the most damage to the idea of “God” has been the use of religion by its adherents for the justification of war. Throughout history, more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion or its ideological derivatives than for any other cause. In this way, organized religion has often made itself repulsive to sensitive souls.  

The charge has often been led by Christians of the West. Immense damage was done to religion by World War I, when Christian nations murdered each other by the millions. The damage continues in what is obviously a latter-day crusade being carried out today by the U.S. military, and whatever allies it can muster, against the Islamic world. This crusade has been cheered on by many Christians, even to the point of burning the Koran in public.

The churches have also had little to say in criticism of the predatory system of Western-based capitalism that has increasingly polarized the world. The rich live in ever-increasing luxury, while increasing numbers are consigned to low standards of living or a growing hell of unemployment, poverty, and even starvation. While the churches rail against homosexuality and abortion, they say little or nothing about the corporate greed that places profits over people or destroys the natural environment.    

The hypocrisy of the Christian churches has led many to flee the usual denominations for alternative types of worship. This has included the formation of independent Christian congregations, reliance on the ethical standards inherent in secular humanism, or conversion to other religions such as Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism.

Striking have been the emergence of movements such as the Nation of Islam among African-Americans, the spread of yoga as both a spiritual practice and way of life, and the widespread adoption of Buddhist forms of practice among the Western intelligentsia. Also notable are the growth of the Sufi movement, the revival of indigenous forms of spirituality, especially among Native Americans of the Western hemisphere, and the search among Christians for their authentic roots by study of the Essenes, the Gnostics, and early Jewish Christian teachings.  

One development dating from the 1960s is the Madonna House apostolate within the Roman Catholic Church that brings the Orthodox Russian practices of the prayer of the heart and poustinia into a Western context. Another important source of teachings is the Spiritis movement, deriving, it says, from direct appearances of Jesus Christ himself to its adherents, resulting not only in new and vibrant explanations of Christian scripture but also integration of spirituality with scientific discoveries in unified field theory.

Spiritualism too has played a role through such figures as Edgar Cayce, the appearance of channeled teachings like A Course in Miracles, and even the search among accounts of extraterrestrial contacts for the spiritual messages therein.

Notable among the new forms of spirituality is the rejection of archaic definitions of sin and guilt. Instead, errant behavior is viewed as an error to be corrected through greater awareness and understanding rather than a permanent stain leading to hellfire and damnation. The new forms also seem much more open to concepts of human equality and freedom and far less beholden to rigid social, economic, political, and ecclesiastical structures. 

Faced with this plethora of new avenues of profound soul-searching, the standard Christian denominations often have little to say, except to retreat more deeply into doctrinaire interpretations of scriptures they do not really seem to understand. No wonder Gandhi said: “I like your Christ. But I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”

But what all these movements point to is that in spite of the rejection by many of the forms of religion historically practiced in the West, the search for spiritual meaning and experience has never been stronger. So the likelihood remains that whatever the truth may be that hides behind the word “God,” it is a truth that continually calls to humanity for its exploration, understanding, and expression. For many, this search for truth has become a living fire. 

Copyright 2011 by Richard C. Cook

YouTube link: watch?v=Q3p48upXJaA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

Many thanks to Lori at Dandelion Salad for getting the series reposted to YouTube when Google went out of the video business. Thanks Lo!

Link to Dandelion Salad site: credit-as-a-public-utility-the-solution-to-the-economic-crisis-by-richard-c-cook-videos

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Synposis

Part One of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“Our Early Political Leaders Warned Us Against the Banking Interests”

Early U.S. statesmen, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson worked to free the nation from control by the bankers who had been behind the establishment of the First and Second Banks of the United States. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln implemented a true democratic currency by spending Greenbacks directly into circulation without borrowing from the banks. These measures allowed the U.S. to develop for much of the 19th century largely free from bankers’ control. By the end of the century, this had changed, and the bankers were taking over.

Part Two of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Federal Reserve System: The Bankers Take Over”

President Lincoln’s Greenback system worked but was undermined and replaced by the financiers who got Congress to pass the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, then the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The United States now became a nation dominated by the financial elite, the banks, and a debt-based monetary system. Consequently, the 20th Century was one of constant cycles of inflation and deflation resulting in the economic chaos we see today.

Part Three of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Collapse of the Financial System”

The collapse we are seeing today began in the financial system, not the producing economy. The crisis started with the housing bubble which the Federal Reserve created by cutting interest rates and then brought own by raising them. The trigger of the 2008 bank meltdown was refusal by European banks to purchase any more “toxic” U.S. debt based on mortgages and sold as securities. Now, with the decline in equity values, the burden of debt in our economy has grown even larger. Thus a renewal of bank lending will not solve the problem, while the economic stimulus program of the Obama administration is likewise insufficient to restore economic health.

Part Four of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“What is Credit and Who Should Control It?”

Fractional reserve banking is the process by which banks create credit out of thin air. But despite abuses of the system, credit is still a crucial part of modern economics. An enlightened concept of governance would view credit as a public utility. This means that government must take back the control of credit from the private financiers.

Part Five of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Gap Between Prices and Income”

One of the most important and least understood concepts in modern economics is the existence of a gap between prices and purchasing power. This gap results when a portion of prices must be set aside as business and private savings. The money is then used by the financial system for lending and speculation. Keynesian economics takes control of some of the savings through government deficit spending but is still a compromise with control of the economy by the financiers. In fact Keynesian economics has helped cause the collapsing debt pyramid. A better system would be to provide consumers with a National Dividend as a way to monetize the continuous appreciation of the producing economy.

 Part Six of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Greenback and National Dividend Solutions”

The U.S. should convert to a system where the money supply is created by the federal government by being spent into circulation without government borrowing or taxation as was done with the Greenbacks. The Federal Reserve should no longer be a bank of issue. Additionally, a National Dividend should be paid directly to the people. The “Cook Plan” calls for the initial distribution of vouchers in the amount of $1,000 a month plus a new system of community savings banks. Greenbacks combined with a National Dividend will create a non-inflationary democratic currency and transform the economy of the United States.

http://blogs.roanoke.com/arts/2011/03/nasa-analyst-richard-c-cook-the-complete-interview/

On February 25 & 26, 2011, Richard C. Cook gave Power Point presentations on “50 Years of Human Space Flight” at the Gainsboro and Williamson Road branch libraries in Roanoke, Virginia.

Coming next: “From Challenger to Extraterrestrials: Answering the Call of Space” at the main library Tuesday, March 29, 6-8 p.m.