There are times when the walls start to close in on me. When that happens, I reach out for a true thing. Something that pushes the walls back out and that makes a way in my spirit.

This week I read two remarkable books by two remarkable people. True is not a word I use a lot. These two books are true. Their authors are way makers.

Deep Survival

The first was Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales (W.W. Norton & Company @2006). Click here to order from FTW.

Gonzales is a contributing editor for National Geographic who has spent a lifetime personally pursuing and studying wilderness and survival experiences – skydiving, aeronautics, rock climbing, wilderness training and motorcycle racing among them. Inspired by his father’s survival of a 27,000 feet fall after his airplane was shot down during WWII, Gonzales asks the question, ‘why do some people live and some die?’ What are the characteristics and behavior of the people who endure under conditions of extraordinary stress?

Quite remarkably, Gonzales takes us all the way into the heart of the matter. He takes our minds there, he takes our heart there and he takes our spirits there. This is a book that resonates through and through. Though my wilderness survival experience was an urban one, everything Gonzales says about what it takes to make it is true – urban, suburban, rural or wilderness.

Many Americans have been living in a day-to-day process in which – as our political options and powers diminish – our consumer options and powers increase, albeit these powers are probably temporary as well. We have become remarkably spoiled and “baby-fied.” At the same time, the quality of our food, water and air are diminishing in a manner that results in much less physical strength and stamina. As we weaken, we are consuming extraordinary amounts of popular culture that is designed to denigrate our intellect and humanity. We have become a people without the characteristics of those who survive the stress we now face. This was very much weighing on my spirit when I turned to Deep Survival looking for some answers. Our lack of spiritual, mental and physical preparedness is a matter of great concern for me – and one of the reasons why I believe it is so important to “come clean.” Deep Survival helped me come to terms with those concerns – reminding me once again of the importance of focusing on what I can do.

If you read Deep Survival, read it slowly and carefully. Take the time to feel it. Take the time to contemplate the application of a lifetime of Gonzales’ learning in your life. It is rare that a book can communicate intelligence that can save your life. Deep Survival has that potential. The last words of the Buddha were said to be, “Go work out your own salvation with diligence.” Gonzales puts meat on that bone.

1996

The second book was 1996, by Gloria Naylor (Third World Press @2005).

Naylor is a real favorite of mine. Her previous book The Women of Brewster Place (Penguin @1983) is on my list of best lifetime fiction. So when a member of the Solari Action Network forwarded me a message that Naylor had been interviewed about her new book describing her experience as a target of a covert operation similar to the one I had experienced, I was amazed (click here for interview). When the book arrived yesterday, I stopped everything and read it.

Naylor’s book is what she describes as a “conflation” — a combination of fiction genre and non-fiction genre. It is a brilliant way of dealing with the subject. Indeed, it is a practical, economic way of helping readers understand these situations from the various points of view of those involved. It makes clear some of the dark turns our culture has taken with new technology.

Naylor does an outstanding job of describing some of the types of people, tools and operations involved in domestic covert operations -– including the pleasure that some enjoy from terrorizing and destroying peoples lives. It’s a new form of hunting, a 21st century sport.

To this day, why this happened to Naylor remains a mystery. She does not explore the events at that time that might cause the National Security infrastructure to want to keep a leading Afro-American writer preoccupied.

For example, there is no mention of the extraordinary efforts to discredit Gary Webb and his 1996 story Dark Alliance from entering the mainstream consciousness (click here for details). Nor is there mention of the history of the development of non-lethal weapons by the military and the efforts to integrate that technology into domestic enforcement in the 1990s. My theory is that many situations at this time developed from the need for prototyping the application of this technology and the desire of the government contractors and vendors involved to generate business.

There is no mention of the extraordinary number of middle and upper middle class people who were targeted and assasinated during that period. I remember sitting in a cafe at DuPont Circle in Washington with our in house counsel at that time. Sam Smith at the Progressive Review, a block away, had been compiling lists of all the people around the Clinton’s that had been murdered under suspicious circumstances and he had broken a detailed story about the professional hit of a White House intern at Starbucks, not far away. We talked about the young female INS attorney who had disappeared, last seen in the DuPont Circle area. We talked about the subpoenas the cafe bookstore had recieved — for a time the waiters and waitresses wore yellow T shirts that said “I’ve been subpoened.” And how our company, Hamilton Securities, which had been right across the street had been invaded and shut down. My house three blocks away had been the site of ongoing harrassement, break in and surviellance. (See The Swat List: Audits, Investigations, Inquiries, Leaks Conflicts of Interest, Harrassment and Surveillance and Anatomy of a Swat from a Lawyer’s Perspective.) This tiny neighborhood was exploding with covert operations and deaths — yet the media was silent other than Sam and a brave few.

You can not help but wonder what would happen if all the people who had experience with or investigated these happenings came together to put their different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in place. Naylor does not discuss this, her book remains true to the scope that is her greatness. She is the master of the intimate within the day to day life of a person, a family, a neighborhood. She leaves the world of global politics, black budget operations and economic warfare for another forum.

The tactics that are used to target one person have extraordinary parallel to the tactics that are used to track and manipulate whole populations. Therefore, Naylor’s successes at surviving her targeting have invaluable lessons for us all. She takes the lessons of Deep Survival and moves them into a new type of wilderness — where the predators are human, the enemy is intimate and the tactics include the most invisible and invasive — into your computer, your phone, your airwaves and your mind.

Naylor has worked out her salvation with diligence and written a book that tells the tale. It is an act of enormous courage. Beautifully written, it is a work of art. 1996 is a true thing — one that will also save lives.

I was back on the road last week — driving from Tennessee to New York to speak at Local Solutions to the Energy Dilemma, a wonderful conference hosted by: Peak Oil NYC, Local Energy Solutions, and Five Borough Institute. Very appropriately, my gas purchases topped $50 each time I stopped to fill up the tank along the way. In farming country that’s big news.

See my first Pick of the Week for this blog:
Texans Going To Pawn Shops To Get Extra Gas $$
From CBS 11 News, April 20, 2006 (also archived here)

The conference was quite a gathering, with terrific speakers, vendors, a smart and engaging audience and wonderful sponsors.

On Thursday nite I listened to Matt Savinar deliver an excellent speech. He pointed out if you wanted to do something positive, you should start a business and create a few jobs. What people need are jobs. Excellent point. Click here for his website lifeaftertheoilcrash.net.
Then we headed down to Colors, the new restaurant created and owned by former employees of Windows Restaurant which was previously based at the World at the World Trade Center. The owners have brought together their favorite recipes from over 24 cultures/countries and adapted them for a New York audience. The food was terrific and so was the service.

I spoke on Friday. You can find my slides on our website, just click here. Afterwards, folks gathered outside in the hall to ask questions. This was a very thoughtful, intelligent group of people. Many, many questions on the “real deal.” My good ally Carolyn Baker joined us; we’ve known each other for years but actually never met. Ditto Dale Allen Pfeiffer.

That afternoon, Megan Quinn showed the documentary produced by The Community Solution about the Cuban experience of switching to permaculture and organic farming when their fossil fuel supply dropped when the Soviet Union came apart. It’s called The Power of Community - How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. I strongly recommend it. Anais Starr in Kalispell, Montana will be showing it on May 21 at the Center for Community & Spiritual Development.

On Saturday I gave a two hour workshop that kept growing in number of attendees as it went on. I was delighted to find that people are very interested in understanding how the “Tapeworm” is draining us — including through our finances and the finances around us as well as dirty tricks — and what we can do about it.

Another Pick of the Week:
The Predator State
By James K. Galbraith, Mother Jones Magazine, May/June 2006 Issue (also archived with annotation here).

I found myself recommending Jon Rappoport’s latest audio seminar Mind Control, Mind Freedom and our new story, Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Prison Profits and website links as a great introduction to the inner workings of the Tapeworm.

In response to many of the questions on learning about the how the money works in our places where we live and work, the Solari team has posted some pointers along with my lecture slides. Many more questions centered around individual investment strategy and risk. As gold and silver were hitting all time highs, learning more about the falling dollar, what was really happening and how to protect ourselves and our families from inflation was a unifying theme. After much rich discussion, I recommended that everyone listen to my audio seminar Solari Portfolio Strategy - The Power of Financial Intimacy, which is a comprehensive step by step primer covering all this in depth.

More Picks of the Week:
Dollar Starts the Big Slide Against Major Currencies,
By David Smith, Economics Editor, The Sunday Times UK, Sunday 30 April 2006 (also archived here)

Prem Dixit, a very talented activist, attended. She is developing a participatory budgeting effort in New York. I believe that participatory budgeting is one of the most important success stories to emerge globally through the World Social Forum. Their slogan “another world is possible” has meaning when and where citizens get down to the business of mastering the cash and credit flows of their place for an integrated “eco-system” look at how to optimize the resources in their place. Participatory budgeting is a powerful step towards citizen responsibility to ensure that resources are well used. A successful participatory budgeting process in New York City could produce dramatic improvement in the benefits New Yorkers enjoy from governmental investment as a result of citizen understanding and input in the process of determining expenditures, credit use and the rules and regulations that guide them. The opportunity is quite significant not only in terms of better use of governmental resources, but in attracting private resources into infrastructure, housing, education, cultural institutions and small business.

See: The Experience of the Participative Budget in Porto Alegre Brazil, MOST Clearing House Best Practices Database

As I left the conference, Phil and I discussed the possibility of me coming back to do more speeches and workshops. I hope it happens. New York has so much talent. And this is a great group, great audience. Lots of good stuff happening here. And given the density, New York City is suprisingly energy efficient. The New Yorker just ran a great article about this.

After the workshop, I headed over to Greenwich Village to have lunch with first rate investigative reporter Lucy Komisar who writes about offshore havens and global money laundering and financial fraud. She was off the Athens for a global meeting of the Tax Justice Network.
I have their latest piece from Lucy and am learning more about this aspect of financial fraud.

I left New York on Saturday, headed for other stops along the East Coast and New England. Something very positive is happening. Something integrating. While the notion that the titanic is sinking can be frightening, the opportunities to build arks are looking more and more energizing. The company we keep in this flotilla of tiny arks gets better, richer, and more diverse every day. It’s like the first days of spring in Hickory Valley. The plants and trees are just starting to come alive and as the first spring shower waters them, life in all its forms bursts forth. The more we come clean, the more things feel “right as rain.”