an essay that has been wanting to be written for years now manifests:

Nuclear Techhnology: The Inappropriate Exercise of Human Intelligence
-- and Given This, What Is Appropriate?

it's not finished. but then, whatever is when it can live on the web? so this is version 1.0. it feels very appropriate to be putting this "out there" on the new moon. it feels to be a propitious moment for new beginnings -- and it is hoped many of you will participate in the most portentious beginning of all, the summer solstice ocurring this fryday at 7:23 pm PDT. no doubt there will be all manner and form of additions to be made with the passage of days. two of which, it is hoped, will be your ideas and recommendations to augment the two partial lists: 11 entries starts the one in Some Fundamental Questions and 3 items initially making up "the more obvious life-affirming responses to this conundrum we find ourselves facing" at the beginning of "PART II: Our Remarkable Powers of Response Ability".

in all of this "communication" we do, there is such an extraordinary component of shared meaning (so well articulated by David Bohm) that takes place. in wrapping up the current form of this essay today, the words of Buckminster Fuller seemed especially fitting to close on. they are repeated here:

        Each year I receive and answer many hundreds of unsolicited letters from youth anxious to know what the little individual can do. One such letter from a young man named Michael -- who is ten years old -- asks whether I am a "doer or a thinker." Although I never "tell" anyone what to do, I feel it quite relevant to this point to quote my letter to him explaining what I have been trying to do in the years since my adoption of my 1927-inaugurated self-disciplinary resolves. The letter, dated February 16, 1970, reads:

Dear Michael,
        Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning "thinkers and doers."
        The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done -- that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.
        Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don't be disappointed if something doesn't work. That is what you want to know -- the truth about everything -- and then the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their system.
        Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word. Words are tools -- and once you have learned how to use a tool you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is not enough. If your vocabulary is comprehensive, you can comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.
        You have what is most important in life -- initiative. Because of it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.
Sincerly yours,

Buckminster Fuller

        The political and economic systems and the political and economic leaders of humanity are not in final examination; it is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can't deceive your mind-self -- for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all the truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are noncorruptible.
        Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.

-- R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, 1981, p. xxxviii.

today was also the day of a world wide synchronized meditation/prayer/visualization to transform the AIDS virus to a more beneficial form (see the march and april reports from The AIDS Transformation Project). lying on the grass facing the Sun shining so magnificently, i visualized people with HIV becoming transformed biologically with their blood now containing a new molecular structure absolutely harmless to human life system functioning, and yet possessing the energy to transmute radioactive matter into inert and stable non-radioactive elements. we in post-industrial culture were raised with the ignorant belief that thinking emits no energy. a friend had left hardcopy of the march/april reports off at the rat domicile some weeks ago. i had just come home from seeing Antonio's Line (first movie in a long time) and was feeling very moved. i read this and immediately felt, in answer to the obvious question, why not?!! -- let's see what happens.

finally, for anyone else who cood drink in some story telling of the most wonderous intuitively and instinctually nourishing kind, i heartfully recommend two books comprising one story by Laurens Van Der Post:   A Story Like The Wind, and its sequel, A Far Off Place. i have not read anything for at least 2 decades that has touched me as deeply and life-fully as this story has. an osteopath who had helped a few years back had given me both books. they clearly were very significant and meaningful for him. it wasn't until this past march that i intuitively (at the time i didn't "think" this out, but with hindsight i can see it was clearly and deliciously that intuitive fount of wisdom from within that is always ready to assist us in life's learnings if we are able to hear its "tapping") reached for the first book thinking i might just skim the introduction but not intending to commit to reading both through. it was not long before i was savoring each page. besides his own life's experiences, which are richly varied to exceeding degree and obviously have imparted a deep sense of the infinite mysteries of life we all too often have unlearned in consumer culture, Van Der Post's style -- of evoking such moving and insightful acknowledgement of human consciousness in the natural world (bestowed upon each of us as a birthright) before the rich instinctual and intuitive wisdom of eternity was "civilized" out of us -- is something truly glorious to drink in and feel the rekindling of in one's own heartfire.

There were many people who would try to prove to François that this kind of thinking was nonsense. Their condemnation would be all the more convincing because the world was full of know-alls who knew only what they knew and no longer what they did not know. To them, that there could be proof of any relationship between the mind and spirit of civilised man and the mind of the natural world, would be ridiculous. But this, Mopani said, was in his view the sickness in so-called civilised people. In the final analysis one had to stand by one's own experience of life and refuse to allow any one-sided specialist to discredit it.

-- A Story Like The Wind, "The Birds Change Their Tune," p. 277