world peas – blog action day 2011: food

October 16, 2011 at 11:15 am · Filed under contraction~expansion

The number one thing you can do to improve the world, far and above anything else in life, is to grow your own, and forage for, diversity of greens to eat every single day.

Seriously. Nothing else will have a huge an impact on the world as whether or not our brains are well nourished. And doing so in the most sustainable way, by harvesting them in your own community.

What is a green? The simple answer is that a green is the leafy green part of a plant.

Basil leaves, carrot tops, wood sorrel (the heart shaped leaves on the plant that looks like a shamrock), grass, purslane, curly dock, pea sprouts, and kale are just a few of the thousands of different greens that are exceptionally nourishing for the human body. Take a look at a list of the top most nutritious foods, as defined by the USDA’s nutritional data, at NutritionData.com (scroll down past the categories until you see Basil proudly holding the number one spot!).

The reason why harvesting your own organic local greens and eating them every single day is the most effective way to make a better world is because all of our behavior is governed by our brains. And when out brains are deficient in the nutrients that greens provide, they become low functioning, muddy, and slow, and then we can’t possibly solve any of our global or even personal problems well. Trying to work with others to create a more good, beautiful, true, and inspiring world without a well nourished brain would be like trying to climb a mountain while being totally covered in slippery mud. We’d just keep sliding backwards.

So, for our brains to work at peak problem solving ability, and to achieve our highest goals for ourselves and our world, we need those super green nutrients.

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democracy is just average, we want something better…

October 7, 2011 at 2:00 pm · Filed under contraction~expansion

When you are working with the capacity for third person perspective, which nearly every human who’s matured past childhood has, at least to some extent, you are able to consider your own feelings about what you want, the feelings of your closest companion about what they want, and the general consensus about what the community around you wants.

This is great because you can really do a lot of complex analysis on possible options for what you do with yourself. You learn to tailor your actions so that they can best meet your needs, your companion’s needs, and the social norm of your environment. This makes you become a healthy contributor to the world, capable of joyful self-direction that also serves others.

But… as those of us who are a little older – nearing or past middle age for humans – know, the world is pretty diverse. Really, really diverse, in fact. As such, there really is no “social norm”. What the world is, on average, has very little to do with what goes on at any given time and place. That’s because the “average” is only a small slice of the vast curve that is all of life, with many less common things lying outside of the very center.

Once we’re able to see things from a fourth person perspective, we can see how important it is to further refine our awareness of the different kinds of cultures that exist in our world. With this more spiritual, post-logical, evolutionary way of considering things, we can see that just averaging the opinions of a large group of individuals, the way we tend to run things like elections in a democracy, is very likely going to lead to us missing out on some very important, and quite possibly crucial, information. With a fourth person perspective we can see that there will be smaller groups within the larger group, and that each smaller group has different needs and wants, based on their particular circumstances. If we don’t use an approach that allows each smaller group to be served individually, and just create policies that only serve what we’ve decided the average needs are, then most of what we end up doing will be a waste, and we’ll end up serving almost no one’s needs at all.

Which is why it’s time for our governments to grow up. It’s time for politics to get rid of a voting system that looks only at the average, and instead create a voting system that allows each smaller group, within the whole of the public, to clearly state their own priorities. Then we can more easily allocate the collective resources we have to where they are needed the most.

And to figure out how to best serve the needs of each group, we can again use the fourth person perspective as we research all the diverse ways that have been discovered for serving our needs, rather than trying to find some “average” solution that has a reasonable probability of not working in any particular situation.

In other words, rather than looking for a single, average approach to things, we can sort the different approaches we’ve created and discovered into categories of where and when they work best, and we can keep those options available in a database that is accessible to all, both in the government and outside, so that everyone always has the best information available for solving their particular group’s problems.

Imagine a government that honestly works to give you what you need most, regardless of whether or not it’s the same thing that others need…

Imagine that next time you go to vote in an election, you had the option of selecting any or all of the following:

I want the government to focus our collective resources on providing me with the best quality…

Inputs
□ Food
□ Water
□ Air
□ Warmth
□ Light

Outlets for expressing my excess
□ Solids
□ Gases
□ Liquids
□ Energy

Wouldn’t that represent your own interests far, far more effectively than any government election you’ve ever seen before in the past? And what would you vote for in this election? And would you want to see these options be further subdivided?

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