From an article by Amory Lovins in this month's Resurgence:

According to the World Bank, of the six billion people on Earth, three billion live on less than $2 a day, and 1.2 billion live on less than $1 a day, which defines the absolute poverty standard. Access to clean water is denied to 1.5 billion people. Meanwhile, the world's richest 200 people are worth an average of $5 billion each.

The UN Development Program says that $40 billion a year would cover the cost for every poor person on Earth to have clean water, sanitation, basic health, nutrition, education, and reproductive health care.

The US armed forces costs the country $11,000 a second.

My heart leapt when I saw them. They took my breath away. The first pictures of Earth from Mars have come in from the Mars Global Surveyor. My heart is in my throat. This is what we have been waiting for -- an image of our planet from another planet. My soul sings!

The evolutionary leap in consciousness being experienced on our planet was begun in earnest by the image of Earth from the Moon. But the Moon is still Earth-space. This photo captures both the Earth and the Moon...from a place truly outside ourselves. Now, at last, we have this image of a blurry little aquamarine marble against the black velvet backdrop of space. Us! Everything will speed up now!

H.G. Wells in 1898: 'No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.' War of the Worlds

We had projected all our human drama of envy and bellicosity onto that splendid planet; now it returns to us bearing this gift -- not with 'envious eyes' but with the clear eye of a camera's lens. Mark it down as a milestone in New Time: Earth as seen in the evening sky of Mars, at 9 a.m. EDT, May 8, 2003.

This icon will create the new paradigm we have been craving and expecting. Hasten the day.

What's with Canada? Yesterday it was announced that the country is breaking out with mad cow disease, and today another case of SARS was uncovered in Toronto. That makes 24 people dead of SARS in Canada. We must do something immediately to end this threat to our democracy (tainted burgers! runny noses!): I suggest a regime change.

We are all immigrants into a new time.
Margaret Mead

Naturally, I want to believe, with Brezsny and the rest, that our species is awakening -- he even has a quote from Teilhard on his site -- but I wish they would begin to give us specific examples of how consciousness is quickening. Some days (like today, for instance), far from feeling awake, I just want to take a nap.

PAINFUL BLESSINGS
by Rob Brezsny

This is a perfect moment.
It's a perfect moment for many reasons,
but especially because you and I
are waking up
from our sleepwalking thumbsucking dumbclucking collusion
with the masters of illusion and destruction.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow,
We are waking up.

Thanks to them, from whom the awful teachings ooze,
We are waking up.

Their wars and tortures,
their devils and borders,
extinctions of species
and brand new diseases,
their spying and lying
in the name of the father,
sterilizing seeds and
trademarking water,
stealing our dreams and
changing our names,
their brilliant commercials,
their endless rehearsals
for the end of the world.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow,
We are waking up.

Thanks to them, from whom the awful teachings ooze,
We are waking up

Their painful blessings
are cracking open holes
in the sour and puckered
mass hallucination
mistakenly called reality.

News of the soul's true home
is pouring in,
infiltrating our increasingly lucid
waking dreams.

Wild ripe juicy eternity
is flooding in.

Our allies
from the other side of the veil
are swarming in.

We're waking up.

And as Heaven and Earth come together,
as the dreamtime and daytime merge,
as paradise and the underworld overlap,
we register the shockingly exhilarating fact
that we are in charge
-- you and I are in charge --
of making a brand new world.
Not in some distant time or faraway place,
but right here and right now.

As we stand on this brink,
as we dance on this verge,
we can't let the ruling fools of the dying world
sustain their curses.

We have to rise up and fight their insane logic;
defy and resist and prevent their tragic magic;
unleash our sacred rage and let them feel it.

But overthrowing the living dead is not enough.
Protesting the well-dressed monsters is not enough.
We can't afford to be consumed with anger --
can't be obsessed and possessed with complaint.
Our sweet animal bodies
need to feel rowdy blessings.
Our amazing imaginations
need to thrive on missions
that incite our delight.

We need truths in their wild state,
insurrectionary beauty
that excites our curiosity,
outrageous goodness
that drives us to perform
heroic acts of lusty compassion,
ingenious love
that endlessly transforms us,
tricky freedom
that is never permanent
but must be reinvented and reclaimed every day,
and a totally-serious-yet-always-laughing justice
that schemes and dreams
about how to diminish the suffering
and increase the joy
of every sentient being.

So I'm radically curious, my fellow creators;
I'm seriously delirious:
Since we are in charge
of making a brand New World,
where do we begin?

What truths in their wild state
are we planning to plant
at the heart of our creation?
What stories will be our reminders?
What questions will be our fuel?

Here's one for you:
In the New World
you will know through and through
that life is crazily in love with you --
life is wildly and innocently in love with you.

In the New World,
you will know beyond a doubt
that thousands of secret helpers are
angling to turn you into
the gorgeous curiosity you were born to be.

But then here's the loaded question.
The love that life eternally floods you with
has not exactly been unrequited,
but there's room for you to be more demonstrative.
If life is wildly and innocently in love with you,
are you prepared to start loving life back
the way it loves you?

In the New World, you will.

In the New World,
you will reject paranoia with all of your smart heart.
Instead, you will embrace Pronoia,
Which is the opposite of paranoia.
Pronoia is the sneaking suspicion
that the whole living world
is conspiring to shower you with rowdy blessings.
Pronoia is the dawning perception
that life is a conspiracy
to liberate you from ignorance,
and fill you with love,
and make you brilliantly soulful.

My fellow creators,
I want you to know
that I am allergic to dogma.
I don't trust any idea
that requires me to believe in it absolutely.
There are very few things
about which I am totally certain.

But I am absolutely certain
that Pronoia describes the way the world actually is.
Pronoia is wetter than water,
truer than the facts,
and stronger than death.
It smells like cedar smoke in spring rain,
and if you close your eyes right now,
you can feel it shimmering
in your soft warm animal body
like the aurora borealis.

The sweet stuff that quenches all of your longing
is not far away in some other time and place.
It's right here and right now.

Earth is crammed with heaven.

We are in need of a new Origin Myth. Joseph Campbell says that when it emerges, it will be about the Earth.

This is from the famous Talk given by Lee Brown in 1986 at the Continental Indigenous Council in Fairbanks, Alaska -- the 'Hopi Prophesies': 'There was the cycle of the mineral, the rock. There was the cycle of the plant. And now we re in the cycle of the animal coming to the end of that and beginning the cycle of the human being.

'When we get into the cycle of the human being, the highest and greatest powers that we have will be released to us. They will be released from that light or soul that we carry to the mind. But right now we're coming to the end of the animal cycle and we have investigated ourselves and learned what it is to be like an animal on this earth.

'At the beginning of this cycle of time, long ago, the Great Spirit came down and He made an appearance and He gathered the peoples of this earth together they say on an island which is now beneath the water and He said to the human beings, "I'm going to send you to four directions and over time I'm going to change you to four colors, but I'm going to give you some teachings and you will call these the Original Teachings and when you come back together with each other you will share these so that you can live and have peace on earth, and a great civilization will come about." And he said "During the cycle of time I'm going to give each of you two stone tablets. When I give you those stone tablets, don't cast those upon the ground. If any of the brothers and sisters of the four directions and the four colors cast their tablets on the ground, not only, will human beings have a hard time, but almost the earth itself will die."

To kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

'What processes do we engage in today to endeavor answering the questions that our ancestors lives once left behind? What images and symbols do we express today that anticipate the future, first manifesting in our psyches before such expressions flow outwardly to take material form? The increase in the conscious awareness each of us expresses inwardly towards our self and outwardly towards others will serve to illuminate the path of healing prior experiences and consequences of unconscious self, cultural, and collective -betrayal and thus promote the furtherance of wholeness expressed in single individuals and in time, throughout our species. The choice is for each of us now to make, reflecting the fact that the only thing one can actually and truly change is one's own self.' -- Edward Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness, Jung's Myth for Modern Man, 1984

'Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man's task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.' -- Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.326

'Mr. President, we are here to stay,' says Patrick Stewart at the end of 'X-Men 2', which Mike and I just saw, along with several million other people this weekend. In the closing narration, a woman's voice declares, 'We are experiencing an evolutionary leap.'

Of course, the comic books -- this is a movie story based on characters in Marvel Comics -- have always presented human evolutionary advances as technological improvements on physical human bodies (knives that protrude from fingertips, flame-throwing eyes, breath that turns things to ice), when the real evolutionary excitement is happening on the inside. These special powers are metaphors for superhuman developments, our species emerging out of matter. And the story of their immanent appearance is preceding the actual transformation, the new paradigm, homo universalis, in our most widely attended entertainments -- widely attended is the giveaway: if species transformation (in 'X-Men 2', 'mutation') were not already present in mainstream consciousness, no one would be going to these movies, and in fact these movies would never be able to reach the screen. But they are the highest-grossing movies of all time. According to Variety, 'X-Men 2' opened the fourth highest in motion picture history.

The movie screen is the dreamland of cultural consciousness. I have always looked at films that way, and now that I see all these top-grossing motion pictures speaking about the same things in dream symbol language, I am even more convinced of their power to summarize the cultural condition -- and beyond that, the human condition -- and to tell us where we are going. 'Titanic' (1997), a gargantuan box office hit, foretold the sinking of the stock market and the US economy, and the fall of the image in the world of the US as the Good Empire -- from hubris (the Titanic was 'unsinkable' ); the 'impenetrable'' hull of the Titanic was pierced heartbreakingly by an iceberg...a modern symbol of money and power, the World Trade Center, would be pieced heartbreakingly four years later by hijacked (the hero of 'Titanic' is Jack) planes.

"Spider-Man" (2002), also based on a Marvel comic, holds the record of top movie opening weekends with $115 million, followed by "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" with $90.3 million and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" with $88.4 million. Spider-Man, a mutant with special powers, comes from humble beginnings as a foster child. Harry Potter also has foster parents, and is endowed with special powers, which he hones at a school for wizards in the English countryside -- the 'prep school' in 'X-Men 2' looks identical to Hogwats. As metaphors and models of species evolution out of matter, they are right in line with the great spiritual teachers (Moses had foster parents -- and special powers; Siddhattha left his father, Suddhodana, and became the Buddha, a man with special powers; Jesus had a foster father and special powers), but the news is that (1) the Leap is upon us and (2) it is for Everyone!

The news, also, is that the transformational Leap is in mass consciousness.

We can 'read' our blockbusters and find there clues to the inexorable drift we are in. I can't wait to see what the sequel to 'The Matrix' looks like.

Symbols crumbling. 'Daniel Webster, the 19th century New Hampshire statesman, once wrote of the Old Man of the Mountain: "In the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men."'

Today the Old Man crumbled and fell. Another creation myth symbol gets the heave-ho.

More on the reason for the recent war: the May 1 issue of The New York Review of Books has an essay by Jason Epstein titled 'Leviathan.' The fourth paragraph begins -- 'Meanwhile Americans are sharply divided over a preemptive assault whose urgency has not been adequately explained and for which no satisfactory explanation, beyond the zealotry of its sponsors, may exist.' My emphasis.

In my mind, the rush to war was unconscious and planetary, and symbol driven, to erase evidence of the birth of our species.

Vis-a-vis my comment on Mailer of 30 April, this morning, Andrew Sullivan takes him on (how snotty can one get?): MAILERMAN: "Mailer's latest analysis of the WAM psyche reminded me of an argument I used to have with my friends in grade school - Who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman? In the end it was a completely pointless argument because they don't exist but at least we didn't try to turn it into our line of work. What is the white American male psyche? It's a fiction of Norman Mailer's mind of course, but it's also a way for him group unique and individual people together and wag his omniscient finger in their faces and let them know how hip and with it he still is. The WAM psyche is ultimately the "NISE" (Norman Is Still Employed) delusion."

My observatory here on Mars is quite comfortable. From Terra, this planet appears hot and dry, or at least it seems to be presented that way often in Terra's science fiction. Not at all. We are further from the sun, remember. It's actually a bit cooler, brisker -- but...nice. True, our atmosphere is thinner, and virtually undetectable by the means still used on Terra.

Yawn. I sit here and observe the scene on the Blue Planet. What a riot to be seeing all this! And what a shame that it might all become unmasked soon by the inevitable, inexerable movement (upward) of Consciousness. Ah, well. Meanwhile, it is an excellent show. Bloody, heartbreaking, but entertaining.