Satish Kumar: Creating a Sense of the Sacred

   A wise and beautiful soul. 

May the wisdom of Satish Kumar 

inform and inspire us all. 

🙏 Molly

Photo by Molly

Wisdom Quotes From 

Satish Kumar

There is at the moment in the world a battle going on between those who are pursuing materialistic paths ― globalizers of economic growth and those hell-bent on this 'big is better' idea ― on the one hand, and on the other hand those who are dedicated to spiritual renewal, more small-scale development, more human scale, more sustainability, more crafts and arts. Where human beings are not just sold to companies and money and those kinds of things. Where human beings have a sacred path.

The force and the strength for peace will come from people. And that will happen when people start to realize that all the diversity and differences we see of nationalities, of religions, of cultures, of languages, are all beautiful diversities, for they are only on the surface. And deep down we share the same humanity, the global humanity.

We live under the power of Modern Consciousness, which means that we are obsessed with progress. Wherever you are is not good enough. We always want to achieve something, rather than experience something. The opposite of this is Spiritual Consciousness. By that I mean you find enchantment in every action you do, rather in just the results of your action. Spiritual Consciousness is not a particular religion but a way of being.

Look at what realists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of all the realistic leaders in the world. I tell people who call me 'unrealistic' to show me what their realism has done. Realism is an outdated, overplayed and wholly exaggerated concept.

At the moment, for example, maybe ten percent of money in the world is related to goods and services. Ninety percent of money is just moving around the world, chasing money. So, money has become the ruler. And we have become the servant. 

We are not slaves of the market. Our human life has a greater meaning than making money, making profit, and working for the market or for multinational corporations. 

In addition to world conflicts, the most challenging problem we face today is hunger, deprivation and social injustice. Because we're ruled by separate self-interest, we go on accumulating personal wealth, ignoring the well being of the others.

The scientific world, the materialistic world, the world of commerce, the world of business, the world of individualism, the world of capitalism, world of communism - all these worlds are the old story now. Where we think we exploit nature, we exploit people. Market rules, profit rules, money rules. We work for name, fame, power, money, profit. That's the old story. 

Speed is one of the great curses of modern civilization, obsession with speed leads to quantitative approach; we come to believe that more is better. This is very materialistic, we have to realize that it is the quality of life, quality of relationships, quality of food, medicine, education and everything else which matters. 

Someone, somewhere, needs to take courage to break the cycle of violence. Forgiveness is superior to justice. Being kind and compassionate to those who are good to you is easy. True forgiveness and compassion come only when one is able to forgive even those who have committed barbaric acts. 

We must realize that violence is not confined to physical violence. Fear is violence, caste discrimination is violence, exploitation of others, however subtle, is violence, segregation is violence, thinking ill of others and condemning others are violence. In order to reduce individual acts of physical violence, we must work to eliminate violence at all levels, mental, verbal, personal, and social, including violence to animals, plants, and all other forms of life.

Fire cannot be put out with more fire.

Economy without ecology means managing the human nature relationship without knowing the delicate balance between humankind and the natural world.

We depend on the gifts of nature, but these gifts must be received with gratitude and not exploited or abused.

What we call 'economic growth' is in fact a growth in waste and a decline in the health of natural habitat.

Earth is a living entity. And if it's a living organism, then we have to have a reverence for all life. Food should be local, organic rather than grown with chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides. 

Without the land, the rivers, the oceans, the forests, the sunshine, the minerals and thousands of natural resources we would have no economy whatsoever. 

Our relationship with Nature... the best way of forging this relationship... be a pilgrim and not a tourist on Planet Earth.

This was Mahatma Gandhi’s idea, moving from ownership to relationship —

seeing that land does not belong to us. We belong to the land. We are not the owners of the land. We are the friends of the land, like friends of the earth. The fundamental shift is in this consciousness that land does not belong to us, we belong to the land. 

In fact, the environmental crisis is related to the crisis of aesthetics, crisis of social cohesion and the crisis of spiritual values. 

All the big problems of the world today are routed in the philosophy of separateness and dualism. 

If you can kill animals, the same attitude can kill human beings. The mentality is the same which exploits nature and which creates wars.

If we had adhered to the concept of connectedness, then we would not have created nuclear weapons, huge armies and global warming. 

The way to healthy living is to shift from quantitative economic growth to quality of life, food, water and air - to shift from craving to contentment and from greed to gratitude.  

Wars and conflicts begin in the mind, then they are expressed in words and then executed through physical action, so personal transformation is intricately connected with the social and political transformation.

Instead of seeking success we should look for fulfillment. And fulfillment is giving total attention to the process of living.

The great work of social transformation begins with the first small step of stopping, calming, relaxing, reflecting and acting in a beneficial way. 

Through yoga, meditation and other spiritual practices, we can learn the ways of personal equanimity. We can also learn how to use language in beneficial ways.

Whatever lessens suffering in yourself and others, that is right. Whatever increases suffering, that is wrong. The answer is within you. When you are free of pride and prejudice, when you are calm and attentive, a light will shine within you. Through meditation and through being mindful you will find your own knowledge of rightness. You will be your own light.  

We need to learn to live in the here and now; this moment is the best moment. Live it fully.

We human beings are spiritual beings. We have soul. We have spirit. We have mind. We have consciousness. We want fulfillment, we want happiness, we want satisfaction, we want joy. We want imagination. We want art, culture, music.

Human happiness, true prosperity and joyful living can only emerge from a life of elegant simplicity, embedded in the arts and crafts. 

We have to shift our attitude of ownership of nature to relationship with nature. The moment you change from ownership to relationship, you create a sense of the sacred.

If individuals start to walk on the path of spirit and feel a sense of the sacred connectedness, then social, economic and political problems will also begin to get resolved. 

Happiness is possible only when we are kind to others and contented within. 

Your children are not your children. They are lives longing for itself. They come here with their own destiny. Give them your love. They will find their own way. 

Large numbers of young people are waking up. And they are saying, "We are not here just to work for multinational corporations and make money for them. We are here to live. We have to find the meaning of life.

The old story is a story of measurement. And the New Story is to bring measurement and meaning together. You cannot measure meaning. 

I want to see a New Story education, which is not only about intellectual knowledge — not only about measurement — not only about academic achievement. It is also about heart, feelings, emotions, relationship, love, compassion, generosity, beauty. All these values are part of the heart. 

We are dependent on each other. Therefore, replenishing the soil, replenishing society and being part of one continuum — that's the new story. 

Sometimes I come across a tree which seems like Buddha or Jesus: loving, compassionate, still, unambitious, enlightened, in eternal meditation, giving pleasure to a pilgrim, shade to a cow, berries to a bird, beauty to its surroundings, health to its neighbors, branches for the fire, leaves for the soil, asking nothing in return, in total harmony with the wind and the rain. How much can I learn from a tree? The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer. 

Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth; Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust; Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace; Let peace fill our heart, our world, our universe.

https://highprofiles.info/interview/satish-kumar/

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: Our Heart Knows What Our Mind Has Forgotten

Photo by Molly

Our heart knows what our mind 

has forgotten — it knows the sacred 

that is within all that exists, 

and through a depth of feeling 

we can once again 

experience this connection, 

this belonging.

 

— Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Robert Hunziker: Do We Still Have Time?

I highly recommend the work of Robert Hunziker

to everyone.  — Molly  

Houses are partially submerged in muddy water along a river in Nepal's Nuwakot district Wednesday. Prabin Ranabhat / AFP via Getty Images 

Do We Still Have Time?

By Robert Hunziker

“We still have time” has been superseded by “How much worse can it get.”

The world has been turned upside down by a destructive, out-of-control global climate system. “Unprecedented” is found in every corner of the planet. There are no safe harbors, whilst disillusionment and anger build amongst 8.3 billion people. Indeed, climate deniers are at risk of being run out of town on a rail.

Along the way, oil, gas, coal producers quietly collect billions of dollars on the back of massive CO2 emissions bursting into the atmosphere. Oil, gas, coal are the primary sources of CO2 emissions (a record high 38GtCO2 in 2025) that cause global heat and climate-related disasters. It’s not at all surprising that anecdotal evidence points to a growing swell of public anger over failure to politically address climate change.

Nevertheless, as long as 8.3 billion inhabitants of the planet remain docile, while some may be angry, accepting fossil fuel poison of the atmosphere, with extreme heat, then they’ll simply have to realize it’s a brutal fact of life and learn to live with it. On the other hand, if they refuse, that’s an altogether different story; it’s messy!

Pockets of dissent: “This heat is political. It is where climate change driven by corporate greed and political failure collides with people’s rights, lives, and livelihoods,” according to Marta Schaaf, Program Director for Climate, ESJ and Corporate Accountability at Amnesty International.

Schaaf’s thesis “political failure collides with people’s rights” can only be resolved one of two ways: (1) change politics to align with people’s rights (2) people’s lives are trampled to smithereens. Take your choice. At this nerve-rattling stage of climate change there is no middle ground.

Scientists Speak Out

The world’s leading climate scientists are speaking out to address a host of issues that have been largely ignored by the oligarch-led political class that’s inexhaustibly funded by Citizens United* to wit:

(1) Why are wildfire infernos hitting Europe and North America so hard? Extreme, high-intensity wildfire infernos have more than doubled globally since 2000. (A Look at Two Decades of Wildfires Globally, YaleEnvironment360)

(2) How is it possible that 30% of global land is trapped in ongoing drought conditions versus only 10%-to-12% in the year 2000, triple drought conditions within only one generation? (The New Normal: 2025 Data Reveals a Fundamental Shift in Global Drought, DowntoEarth). In total, according to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, drylands now make up 40.6% of all land on Earth. Dryland refers to arid, semi-arid, or dry sub-humid areas where water is scarce

(3) Why are the world’s oceans over-heating year-by-year, non-stop, to ridiculous levels threatening marine life? According to the Met Office (London), year-end 2025 ocean heat content (OHC) continued to set new yearly records, every year consecutively for nine years. (Ocean Heat Content Sets Another Record in 2025, University Corporation of Atmospheric Research, UCAR). “Marine Mammals are Dying in Record Numbers Along the California Coast,” LA Times, Oct. 3, 2025

Global sea surface temperatures (SST) were the highest ever recorded for the month of July 2026, according to both NOAA and Copernicus.

(4) Why have the 10 hottest years in recorded history of humanity all occurred over the last decade? (This is How Scientists Measure Global Temperature, NASA)

(5) In the face of a rip-snorting climate system that breaks every known scientific barrier, what does the future hold, and what can be done about a climate system that terrorizes humanity?

Asia’s Leading Climate Scientist

Ben Horton, Dean of the School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong, and a leading coastal scientist specializing in sea-level change, is widely considered Asia’s top climate expert. He was recently interviewed by South China Morning Post, July 10, 2026.

Sample quote: “There’s this phrase that right now ‘we are experiencing the worst weather of our lifetimes.’ But for our children, this year is the best weather of their lifetimes because adapting to the climate of 2026 is pointless. The climate of 2027 and 2028 and 2029 and 2030 is going to be worse.”

The world has been grappling with a barrage of disasters as the climate system becomes more unstable. Dr. Horton mentions predictions made by climate scientists as far back as the 1990s now playing out, e.g., Hong Kong is having record-breaking heat, the highest the city has ever experienced. Shanghai had record-breaking flooding. The U.S. has the warmest July since record-keeping started. European cities have all had record-breaking temperatures, record-breaking heat waves, record-breaking wildfires, record-breaking drought.

Years ago, it was stated, “that if greenhouse gases were continued to be put into the atmosphere, it would raise global temperatures on land and in the ocean, which, in turn, would cause extremes that hurt people throughout the world.”

Dr. Horton has been involved in ‘cutting edge’ experiments of “climate change attribution,” or how much any individual event is caused by climate change. Ten years ago, Horton did pioneer studies that looked at tropical cyclones and the influence of climate change. “Now, we see events that would have been impossible without climate change.”

“We Cannot Adapt Our Way Out of This”

There’s been a fundamental shift in the climate system, and longing for the friendly stable climate era of the past is out of the question. “Based upon physics, we’re not going to go back to the stable climates of 10, 20, 30 years ago.”

According to Horton, chatter about “adaptation” assumes we’ll see a stable system. But in the real world of today “adapting to the climate of 2026 is pointless because the climate of 2027 and 2028 and 2029 and 2030 is going to be worse… Going forward, unless we address this problem, it will only get worse to a point when adaptation is futile… we cannot adapt our way out of this.”

Horton solution: “The only answer is to change our energy mix and move from petroleum which is driving this problem and move to renewable energy. The issue of whether it’s too big of a problem to handle is exactly what vested interest in fossil fuels want people to believe. It’s not!”

A Small Minority Holds Society Hostage to CO2

Fortunately, society knows more about the natural world and how the earth works than at any time in history. We know what happens when we increase greenhouse gases. We also know the solutions. We have alternatives to consider. “But the frustration is that we’re all held back by a very, very small number of people.” (Horton)

Worst Case Scenario

The worst case, assuming we don’t take immediate action: “Paleoclimate history has shown that relatively small forcing factors can have big consequences. It’s all about planetary boundaries, according to Dr. Horton: “That we as a civilization for the past 8,000 years have grown from nomadic to developing the first cities to a huge amazing technological planet living in cities, but we live within a very small planetary boundary. The problem is when we go beyond that boundary and then stay beyond, civilizations don’t exist.”

Additionally, the climate change dilemma cannot ignore the astronomical population explosion post WWII, tripling from 2.5B to 8.3B within only a couple of generations, putting a lid on nature’s capabilities: “There are think tanks that claim Earth can only support maybe three billion people.”

We’re overshooting Earth’s capabilities which requires a change in socio-economic behavior from focus on infinite growth to husbanding finite resources.

What to do?

Horton’s viewpoint: “Net Zero is crucial for survivability of civilization.”

Yet, in some quarters of climate science Net Zero is thought to be nothing more than a dangerous Trojan Horse that leads a naïve society around by the nose.

Horton’s way forward: In the short term, it’s all about education and awareness. Individuals need to learn how to personally protect themselves from dangerous heat.

Horton’s medium term, we must employ ‘green’ cities with cooling water pools and green vegetation and creation of wind corridors, all-natural cooling, reflective paint on buildings. This has been pioneered at City University of Hong Kong. It reflects 90% of the sun’s heat. This should be implemented everywhere.

The Central Problem

*At the heart of the global warming problem, specifically in America, special interest money is dictating policy to the benefit of too few people. Citizens United Makes this possible: “Citizens United has reshaped American campaign finance at every level of government since 2010. The decision tossed aside a century of tight regulation over corporate political spending and threw open the floodgates for the unlimited super PAC spending and undisclosed dark money that dominate the U.S. political system today. It’s had an immediate and dramatic effect. Reported independent expenditures of outside groups exploded by more than 28-fold from 2008 to 2024 (from $144 million to $4.21 billion). Unreported money also skyrocketed.” (Center for American Progress) One billionaire can outspend millions of people for control of their political future.

“Public Citizen reports that as of August 2024, 842 local governments, 22 states, and Washington, D.C., have called for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. A state statutory change, which is a much lighter lift than a federal constitutional amendment, would likely enjoy even higher levels of support… Americans from across the political spectrum overwhelmingly oppose Citizens United and would dearly like to rid the U.S. political system of corporate and dark money. Voters and the state legislators they elect have the power to do it,” Ibid.

Meanwhile, excessive CO2 emissions hold onto Citizens United for dear life.

P.S. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed July 4th, 2025, subsidizes the fossil fuel industry by $3,500,000,000 annually. (United States Senate Committee on the Budget, 02/26/2026)

For more from Robert Hunziker,

please go here:

https://countercurrents.org/author/robert-hunziker/

Wendell Berry: Shall We Do Without Hope?

 In loving memory of Wendell Berry.

💜Molly

Photo by Molly

Shall we do without hope? Some days

there will be none. But now

to the dry and dead woods floor

they come again, the first

flowers of the year, the assembly

of the faithful, the beautiful,

wholly given to being.

And in this long season

of machines and mechanical will

there have been small human acts

of compassion, acts of care, work

flowerlike in selfless loveliness.

Leaving hope to the dark

and to a better day,

receive these beauties freely

given, and give thanks

— Wendell Berry

From the book Leavings

EXCELLENT — Chris Hedges: The Next Election May be Our Last

Chris Hedges has long been the canary in the mineshaft warning of things to come. In 2008 I read his excellent, chilling book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (https://www.amazon.com/American-Fascists-Christian-Right-America/dp/0743284461?tag=ustxtaddt-20). It was then that Chris accurately predicted where we are today. And now all of the red flags are up for what is happening right now and also awaiting us over the coming weeks. It is my belief that it is essential that we read and listen to the wisdom of Chris Hedges and prepare ourselves for whatever courageous actions are asked of us in the days to come. Truly, everything we love and cherish is at stake. — Molly  

Speechless - by Mr. Fish

Donald Trump is determined to subvert the midterms. All that can save us, if he succeeds, is a national strike.

By Chris Hedges

The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression.

Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.

If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections.

The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.

Trump-backed mid-decade gerrymandering has already dismantled Democratic-held districts and created new ones for the Republican.

Federal ID and citizenship-document requirements will disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, including lower-income Americans who lack access to the required documents and married women whose current names do not match those on their citizenship records.

Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 — will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting.

The Republican majority in the House — regardless of the vote — will use its authority to certify election results to retain power, gaming the Electoral College and refusing to seat newly elected members of the opposition.

Overseeing the massive election fraud will be loyalists seeded by the Trump administration across state and federal election offices.

Trump — who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results and said he would refuse to accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost — ruminates about defying the Constitution in order to serve a third term. He has also floated the idea of canceling the upcoming election, telling Reuters “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

When Volodymyr Zelensky — whose presidential term ended in May 2024 — informed Trump that elections would not be held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump responded, “So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections…So, let me just say, three and a half years from now, so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”

Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail-in ballots – Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans – but voting machines and tabulators which allow election boards to post results on election night.

Trump laid the groundwork for federal interference in his national address in July on election fraud, charging that the elections are dangerously exposed to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.”

This assault has been decades in the making. It did not begin with Trump.

I warned about the Christian nationalist movement and its latent fascism in my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” These Christian fascists are enemies of the open society. They seek to disenfranchise huge segments of the public, demand the deregulation of industry and the elimination of all social services, including public education, public health programs and consumer protection. The only proper tasks for the federal government, they believe, are tax collection, war and domestic security.

These goals are laid out in numbing technical detail in Project 2025.

Power — as in all dictatorships — is to be permanent. It will be configured to enrich the inner circle of Trump and his family, who have made at least $2.3 billion from their crypto currency ventures during Trump’s first year since returning to the presidency. The billionaire class and corporations will continue to pay little or no income tax. They will have no external restraints or oversight as they exploit the citizenry and pollute and poison the earth.

The rest of us, under constant state surveillance and denied legal redress, will be reduced to the status of serfs.

Dissent will be criminalized. The media will be an echo chamber for the dictatorship. Education — from kindergarten to graduate school — will be indoctrination. Culture will be reduced to its lowest common denominator: sentimental kitsch. Christian tropes, iconography and symbols will be employed to sacralize white supremacy, capitalism, endless war and empire, while demonizing those on the margins of society.

Trump has already been handed absolute power. In 2024, the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity from prosecution for acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor charged that as a result of the court’s decision “[i]n every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy — unlike anything seen in U.S. history — makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”

Theil is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.”

“The populists get the MAGA anti-woke hymn book,” write Mark Medish and Joel McCleary in their “Dancing in the Dark” series in The Spectator on the upcoming elections:

The lords of the cloud get the contracts and the deregulation; the President gets the adulation, the money, tools to destroy his enemies, and dominance of all forms of media. Each of the partners believes it is cleverly using the others. All of them need the marriage to survive this November and to further consolidate power.

FBI agents seized original 2020 ballots, ballot images and voter rolls in Georgia. The Justice Department seized 2024 ballots from Michigan. And Chad Bianco, the Sheriff in Riverside County, California, as Medish and McCleary point out, in March “seized some 650,000 ballots on a complaint from a local ‘election integrity’ group that is organizing to replicate the maneuver in a half-dozen more counties this cycle.”

This is a foretaste, I expect, of the widespread seizures of ballots in November.

Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) which are “pre-drafted emergency orders in case of an attack on the homeland,” await “only a decision and a signature to become operative law by necessity,” Medish and McCleary note, giving Trump unilateral power to suspend civil liberties in a domestic crisis.

First created under President Dwight Eisenhower, the secret directives have since been periodically revised and expanded under successive administrations.

“At least fifty-six of these PEADs exist, by the last credible count,” Medish and McCleary continue. “None has ever been published, leaked, invoked, reviewed by Congress, or tested in any court. Their reported subject matter includes suspension of habeas corpus, martial law, censorship, the detention of citizens ‘considered dangerous,’ [and] the seizure of property.”

The feebleness of legislative and judicial branches of government, coupled with the transformation of federal agencies into appendages of the Trump White House — including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security — make these institutions unreliable.

We can only save ourselves.

This means shutting the country down.

Millions of us must be prepared to take the streets or the iron doors of fascism will slam shut.

Please go here for the original article: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-next-election-may-be-our-last-831