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Learn more about the World Dharma Online Institute - Exploring Activism Consciousness and Art

I write in fragments:

1- Freedom doesn’t exist as an exterior phenomena to me, it exists when I feel it as an interior to myself.

2- So no one can give me my Freedom, until I discover it in my inner self.

3- Freedom is a complex concept. It’s complexity exists before the presence of “the other”.

4- I fasten myself in my habits. I fasten myself in my believes. I fasten myself in my desires and my intents. I’m a prisoner of myself.

5- I’m a prisoner of myself, a prisoner of my language, the language which bears the weight of history, the shadow of “the other”.

6- The complexity grows when I feel “the other”, whatever as a present or absent. I fasten him/her with all my intents, with all my believes. Also with my language.

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Freedom to me is my ability to express myself through touch, words and actions, which are accepted with love, tolerance and respect - without censorship.

Also, freedom means the ability to dress, work and play the way I want and to live how and where I want, as long as I am not harming anyone else. The concept of freedom is so confronting to so many because it makes them question their values and behaviour which they know are lacking but either do not know, or do not want to know, how to change.

World leaders should be preaching tolerance, acceptance of diversity, especially in this age of rapid globalization, and love for all humanity regardless or color, creed, and religion. Much more energy and money could be put into programs and policies for healing and creating peace than for war.

We need to set an example for future generations; practice what we preach, dematerialize, love unconditionally and unreservedly and look after the planet.

by Jo Garnett
Australia

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Battle for SeattleI stand before you most of all as a heartbroken human being. I cannot bear any more to hear all about it, read all about, to know all about it.

Every day the evidence mounts about how bad it is, how much worse it’s getting and how the truth is full of lies, distortion and deception. The litany of loss we are facing in our civil rights, human rights, earth rights, spiritual rights has grown so extensive that it almost feels as though we are being flung back in time to some regressive science fiction state where warlords reigned and the people huddled together in hiding.

The diabolic manipulation by the corporate power structure of the tragedy of September 11, and the subsequent war on Iraq, are so shocking and shameful that any words used to describe them are mocked into meaningless. A friend of mine said that when she tries to talk about how she really feels, she feels as though she should be grasping for a new language. A language that isn’t made up of words.

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The Wellbeing of Children

And the Future of Freedom - A Manifesto:

Children are the mantle upon which the future of our planet rests, investing in their wellbeing is the ultimate sustainable and political act.

Every child is wanted and welcomed.

Pregnancy is a natural event (not a medical condition) and the importance of the mother’s emotional, mental and physical wellbeing is recognized and supported.

A natural birth affords significant benefits to mother,
baby, father and family; therefore both the potential
benefits and risks of any intervention warrant careful
consideration.

Parents have the right and responsibility to be fully
informed about pregnancy, birthing, health and education
choices.

Optimal development for infants and children is fostered
by full-term breastfeeding, baby-wearing, co-sleeping,
maintaining genital integrity (no circumcision), and
plenty of skin-to-skin contact.

Children are by nature social beings, born with the
drive to love and be loved, to learn about their world
through spontaneous play, exploration, and participation
inclusion in the activities of their elders, to cooperate
with others, and to contribute to their world. They are
most able to develop their full potential when treated
with care and respect.

Children are born with inherent, physical, emotional,
intellectual and spiritual needs.

Children depend upon their caregivers to protect
them from violence, abuse, being left to cry it out, shaming,
toxic food and toxic environments.

Children depend on their parents to demonstrate and
model to them appropriate ways of setting safe respectful
boundaries and limits to inappropriate behavior.

The role of the father and mother is profound and not
to be underestimated. Also important are the multiple
attachments outside the immediate family.

Optimal development includes supporting children’s
growth towards healthy sexual maturity across the physical,
emotional, social and ethical dimensions of sexual
wellbeing.

Family-friendly political, economic, educational and
social structures enhance parents’ opportunities and
ability to nurture and sustain a secure bond with their
children.

Community plays a vital role in raising children, both
as a support system for this secure bonding and also as a
source for secondary attachments.

Parenting our children means also re-parenting
ourselves. Self-discovery plays a major factor in the art of
effective parenting.

Imperfection is the lesson in how to be perfectly
human. Allowing ourselves as parents to make mistakes,
be transparently ourselves and emotionally alive in
relating to our children, enables them to individuate and
find their own separate and unique self.

After bonding comes healthy separation, facilitated by our
perfectly human inability to be everything to our children.

by Kali Wendorf
Mother, activist, magazine publisher/editor
Mullumbimby, Australia
Kindred Magazine

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When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of Earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared.

We hold these truths to be self evident:

That all species are created different but equal;

That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights;

That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style;

That to protect these God-given rights, social structures naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life; That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings.

Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded for frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony of the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures.

Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government.

The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgment of generations to come.

These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.

They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.

They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth’s abundance and God’s endowment.

They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.

They have claimed private, personal ownership of God’s land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.

In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.

In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory education to coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.

In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.

In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.

In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.

In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.

For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas.

In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.

In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.

They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.

In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.

They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.

They have enlisted an army of informers.

In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids.

They never admit a mistake. They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement. Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier self-approval.

They are bores.
They hate beauty.
They hate sex.
They hate life.

We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshipping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.

We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God’s creatures - in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.

We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Freewomen may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing.

And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.

by Timothy Leary
Circa, Now

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Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer

Nuclear Power

“(Nuclear power) is a very important part of our energy policy today in the US.. America’s electricity is already being provided through the nuclear industry efficiently, safely, and with no discharge of greenhouse gases or emissions.”

~Vice President Cheney in a speech to the
Nuclear Energy Institute, May 22, 2001

It is now apparent that when Vice President Dick Cheney utters his words of direction and policy to the American people he is not always accurate and sometimes speaks with a forked tongue, as in “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. It seems clear that the present Bush administration believes that if it lies frequently and with conviction, the general public will be lulled into believing that their oft repeated dictums are true.

On June 22, 2005 President Bush gave a speech before a group of nuclear power plant workers at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear reactor saying “the 103 nuclear power plants in America produce 20% of the nation’s electricity without producing a single pound of air pollution or greenhouse gases”.

Let us now examine these claims made with such confidence by President Bush and Vice President Cheney. As [my book “Nuclear Power is Not the Answer” shows] no part of the “efficiently, safely and with no discharge of greenhouse gases or emissions” is true.

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Take That First Step

My ideas on freedom concern what is at the core of each of us. This is our ability to think freely, regardless of our physical state.

From the reading I have done on the subject, and the direct, personal experiences I have had, I agree with those who believe that what we think about is what we become.

Take that first stepIn fact, it determines our reality. Our thoughts affect whether we enjoy life or are tormented by it.

If we choose to express gratitude in our thoughts and actions, then we will have more to be grateful for. If we focus our energies on thinking and acting for the highest good, without predetermining what the specifics of that would be, then we will affect changes in that direction, not only in our own lives, but in those all around us.

I believe that our positive thoughts and actions actually emit energy, which can physically change other energy fields around us. I believe that we can bring about change by intending certain thoughts.

I believe that for me to help bring about freedom, I must feel free within myself. To affect the changes I want, I must first start within myself, with my own thoughts. I must choose detachment, openness, a willingness to understand and empathize, and an unconditional love and acceptance of others and myself.

These are, of course, large goals, but I am convinced that a simple desire to move in this direction is a huge step forward. The universe will respond to that urge with opportunities, tools, guidance, and assistance. I have felt this in my own life. Each one of us who thinks these liberating thoughts will continue along this wonderful journey to liberate freedom both within and without.

To paraphrase a famous saying: Take that first step. There is power in it!

by Vit D
Ottawa ON, Canada

Work: Canadian Federal Government
(nearing retirement)

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In the eloquent book, “The Unconquerable World,” author Jonathan Schell traces the grim and brutal history of warfare. A core notion of the book is that war has become non-winnable in the settling of disputes.

Shadow RiverDue to the evolution of nuclear weapons and the mutual annihilation inherent in their use, the reliance of politics on violent means throughout the centuries is called into question. While tracking the evolution of violence, Schell reveals a simultaneous force, moving in counterpoint to the martial system; a tradition of non-violence, born of the world’s spiritual traditions.

Like a sort of “shadow” river, flowing beneath the turbulent surface of the historical ocean, this force has been more persistent than we might suppose.

Indeed, our United States constitution was created from tributaries that tapped the ancient river of peaceful means. Its principles form a cauldron within which we are scorched in the flames of our mistakes, yet blessed with the freedom to correct ourselves.

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