Bee The Change for Peace on Earth
After Humanity, but 6 months later.
Bee Extinction Facts: Why The Extinction of Bees Would End Humanity?
In May 1965 a French periodical about nature and animals called, Achat La Vie Des Bêtes, Et L’ami Des Bêtes. stated that Einstein had calculated a grim four year time limit for humanity if bees disappeared.
This was the earliest evidence known to QI of a connection between Einstein who died in 1955 and the dire deadline.
Honey bees (a phenomenon attributed to everything from global warming
to insecticides to radiation from cell phone towers, and now thought to be the result of a fungus) have seen a resurgence in repetitions of a quote attributed
to Albert Einstein, citations claiming the noted scientist once said If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.
This truly sounds alarming: Bees are disappearing for reasons we cant yet explain and a certified genius such as Einstein noted long ago that if all the bees disappeared, we’d soon be following them into extinction. If the intent
of propagating this quote is to get our attention, it’s certainly been working. Did Einstein sagely foresee an environmental crisis we’re only just now beginning to notice?
To answer that last question (without denying the importance of the honeybees), we have to consider the related question of “Did Einstein really
say this?” First off, searches of Einstein’s writings and speeches and public statements, as well as of (scholarly) compilations of Einstein quotations reveal nary a reference to the “four years” phrase or any other statement mentioning bees (save for a brief comparison between humans and colony insects such as ants and bees). The compiler of The New Quotable Einstein also found no Einsteinian source for this quote and lists it as “Probably Not by Einstein.”
Riding the High Life in a Zombie Apocalypse – Days Gone
This remarkable story describes a time of great fear on
the planet, the cold war.
It tells how the simple and profound act of passing a torch of peace around
the world in partnership with the United Nations engaged the participation of millions of people, the world’s political leaders, and through the media, an estimated 20% of the planet’s population. It is a story of how the impossible became possible, creating transformative ripples out into the world.
First Earth Run: A Catalyst for Hope on Vimeo & Bing video
In 1986 at the height of the cold war, a torch of peace was passed around the world. The First Earth Run, in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund, directly engaged 25 million people and 45 heads-of-state in 62 countries. Twenty percent of the planet — a billion people — watched the torch circum – navigate the globe via the media. For 86 days, wherever the Torch of Peace went, all wars stopped and the world was united as one.
The Torch of Peace was lit in a sunrise ceremony on the grounds of the
United Nations on September 16, 1986 — the International Day of Peace in the International Year of Peace. At that ceremony, Grandmother Caroline, a keeper of the Hopi Prophecy, shared these prophetic words: The Torch of Peace launched from this Great Hall of Mica marks the great turning toward 1,000 years of peace. Pay attention to the signs as they will help guide its journey. Since then, this modern-day mythic story embodying humanity’s noblest aspirations for peace on earth has continued to be told all over the world.
Now the signs indicate that it’s time for the Torch of Peace to be reignited to fulfill its prophetic mission of creating peace on earth. The planet’s wisdom-keepers tell us that when ½ of 1% of humanity (40 million people) wholeheartedly believe peace on earth is possible, there will be enough coherence of thought and emotion to shift our collective consciousness to make this a reality. But to create this future we need to believe it is possible. What we believe becomes our reality for better or worse. To shift humanity’s belief system requires a new story — and the means to attain it.
That new story is called Peace on Earth by 2030. To achieve this, we are building a 40-million-person movement of DreamKeepers empowered with the seven actions that enabled the First Earth Run to unite the world and create peace on earth over its 86-day journey. These seven actions are designed as a global game that will take place between 2020 and 2030.
On September 21, 2020 — the International Day of Peace and 34 years after the Torch of Peace circumnavigated the globe — we’ll launch the
seven actions to create peace on earth – by 2030 and the Second Earth Run! In this case, a 12-month virtual Earth Run that will take place annually over the decade. With the reach of the internet, we don’t need to literally run around the world to inspire and empower people with this vision of hope and possibility.
The goal of the annual Earth Runs is for teams playing the game to create Peace on Earth (POE) Zones in their communities where these seven actions are practiced. The POE Zones established each year will be honored through a global musical celebration of our collective achievement. With the torch held high, we will experience the world we most want in our hearts coming into existence and witness the dawning of a new future for humankind!
Be the CHANGE you WISH to see in the WORLD!!!
At this critical time when we are becoming more and more divided,
this game serves as deep medicine to heal that which separates us. The First Earth Run’s seemingly impossible achievement of peace on earth for 86 days became possible. Because the world was so divided it needed light to remind us of the oneness of our humanity. It is time to build on this base camp achievement for humanity and make the full ascent to peace on earth in one decade!
We know in our soul as a species that we are primed for deep transformation to occur at this time. There are so many people of good will connected through social networks that with the right spark we can ignite a global fire that empowers humanity to fulfill its deepest dream. These seven actions for creating peace on earth have proven they can ignite such a global fire.
Is peace on earth humanity’s destiny? It can be if enough of us say: “I am willing to be one of the DreamKeepers and carry the torch to make it a reality.” We invite you to be one of the planet’s DreamKeepers and a sacred torch bearer for our future as a species!
May those of us living in the 21st century be known in the history of our planet as the heroic generation that brought goodwill to all of humanity and established peace on our beautiful Earth!
To learn about the game, click here.
David Gershon conceived and organized the First Earth Run. Co-founder
and CEO of Empowerment Institute, David has been called “the number one expert on social change.” He applies his visionary leadership and social change expertise to designing second-order change solutions for cities, countries,
and the planet that enable the seemingly impossible to become possible.
He’s the author of 12 books, including the award-winning Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World and the bestselling Empowerment: The Art of Creating Your Life as You Want It.
Based on his decades of transformative social change knowledge and experience,
he’s architect a bold plan to change the world called Reinventing the Planet.
The “Peace on Earth by 2030” game plays a central role in this grand
strategy. Drawing on his three decades in the trenches of large-scale societal transformation, David Gershon–founder and president of Empowerment Institute, and described by the United Nations as a “graceful revolutionary”–offers an original and comprehensive roadmap to bring about fundamental change in our world. His goal is to empower change agents to tackle pressing social problems or unmet social needs by providing them with strategies and tools to effect transformative change at any level of scale.
From his initiation as architect of the United Nations-sponsored First Earth Run–a mythic passing of fire around the world symbolizing humanity’s quest for peace on earth that drew tens of millions of participants, the planet’s political leaders and, through the media, over a billion people at the height of the cold war–to his recent climate-change work helping citizens, cities, and entire states measurably reduce their carbon footprint (using his book Low Carbon Diet), Gershon offers readers strategies to evolve an effective new model for social change.
Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
When I was learning about World War II from my father,
I remember thinking how grateful I was that society had finally matured to the point in the intervening years that war no longer ever broke out. Today I can hardly remember what bizarre thought process led me to conclude that people had actually become less barbaric with time.
I do remember I also believed racial prejudice had died out decades ago and that the pronouncement of guilt or innocence by our justice system reflected actual guilt or innocence.
But I’ve forgiven my earlier self this embarrassing naivete because I think his conclusions weren’t based entirely on ignorance as much as on a hope for how things could be. And though for many years I scoffed at the notion, I have to confess now that I’ve become convinced world peace is indeed possible.
WHAT IS THE TRUE CAUSE OF WAR?
Countries don’t go to war. The leaders of countries go to war.
They marshal their reasons, stir up the public, dehumanize the enemy
(as I wrote about in an earlier post, The True Cause Of Cruelty), and send out their forces. The number of people actually responsible for the decision to go to war can usually fit comfortably inside a single large-sized room.
Leaders, of course, only occasionally represent the best of what humanity has to offer so they usually exhibit the same failings and weaknesses as the rest of us. They get angry when they shouldn’t, let their egos motivate them more than they should, and are entirely too concerned with doing what’s popular rather than what’s right. They suffer from the same three poisons as the populations they lead: greed, anger, and stupidity.
The true cause of war lies in the unchecked rampaging of these three poisons through the hearts of individual people. Though the situations confronting world leaders that lead them to decide to wage war often seem complex, the only way in which they’re different from conflict that erupts between two people standing in a room is that they occur on a larger scale. But if in civilized societies we expect people to work out their differences amicably (whether themselves or with the help of the courts), why don’t those same expectations apply to differences between civilized countries?
IS WAR EVER NECESSARY?
In a world in which tyranny continues to exist, war may in fact sometimes be justified. In the same way it’s necessary to fight to defend oneself when attacked, so too it’s sometimes necessary to go to war to put down injustice, or even the possibility of injustice when its likelihood is great enough. Rarely, however, is this given as a primary reason. Even democracies seem to be roused to war only by self-interest.
Fair enough. But when any leader chooses war, he or she should do so
with a heavy heart. As the original Buddha, Shakyamuni, once said when asked if killing was ever to be permitted: “It is enough to kill the will to kill.” In other words, we should strive to kill the the idea that killing others should be anything other than the very last action we ever permit ourselves to take. Shakyamuni was a realist. He knew the world would always be filled with people bent on committing evil, people whose ideas about how to live involved oppressing and killing others, and though he felt compassion even for them would speak loudly and passionately about the necessity of standing against them in concrete, practical ways.
EXPERT HUMAN BEINGS
To achieve world peace—to create a world in which war ceases to break
out—seems impossible because of the sheer number of people who haven’t yet mastered themselves, who haven’t tamed their ambition to raise themselves up at the expense of others, and who haven’t learned to start from today onward, letting past wrongs committed by both sides remain in the past. In short, it seems an impossible dream because we’re in desperately short supply of human beings who are experts at living.
An expert at living isn’t a person who never experiences greed, anger, or stupidity but rather one who remains in firm control of those negative parts (which can never be entirely eliminated), who’s able to surmount his or her darkest negativity, and displays a peerless ability to resolve conflict peacefully. What generates this expert ability to resolve conflict?
Wisdom and joy. Wise people are happy people, and happy people are wise.
If enough people in the world’s population became happy and wise, violence would be used far less often to solve conflict. If this pool of experts at living became large enough, we’d start seeing some of our leaders being picked from among them. And if enough leaders were experts at living, war, too, would be used far less often to solve conflict and further the interests of nations.
I’m no Pollyanna.
I fully recognize that as long as there remain inequities between classes, as long as people feel they have little hope for a good life and remain unable to tolerate others believing differently than they do about important issues, violence and war will continue. Which means the real path to world peace can’t be found in the passing of more laws, in diplomacy, or even in war itself. It can only be found in the actions individual human beings take to reform the tenets they hold in their hearts in order to become experts at living. Some argue human nature being what it is precludes the possibility of world peace, but I would counter that human nature doesn’t need to change—it only needs to be managed. Haven’t countless numbers of us already learned to do this every day, denying our baser impulses in order to contribute to solutions instead of problems?
THE REAL BARRIER TO WORLD PEACE
The reason most scoff at the notion of achieving world peace is because
if you buy the principle that individual human revolution is the real solution, then literally some billions of people would need to actively embrace the notion of devoting themselves to continual self-reformation. But—if you buy the principle that enough people becoming experts at living would create world peace, then you can’t argue world peace is literally impossible—just extraordinarily unlikely.
I don’t believe world peace will be achieved in my lifetime. But I do believe
it won’t be achieved in any lifetime after mine unless I make causes for it to happen now. How can I-and you-make those causes? As Gandhi famously said, by becoming the change we wish to see. Strive to become an expert at living.
Be good to those around you in concrete ways. Create an island of peace in your own life. If you do, it will spread. If enough of us do this, our islands will meet, ceasing to be islands and becoming whole continents. World peace exists literally in the actions each one takes in our own lives.
The most significant obstacle to achieving world peace isn’t the extraordinary difficulty involved in becoming a genuine expert at living, though. It’s those most in need of reforming the tenets they hold in their hearts, who most need training in how to be an expert at living, are those least interested in it, a point well articulated here.
The only real lever we have to pull with such people is their desire to become happy. We must convince them to follow our lead by becoming so happy ourselves—so ridiculously, genuinely happy—that they decide on their own they want to be like us, that they want what we have. And then we have to show them how to get it. Good ideas are our weapons. When people come to deeply believe in notions that promote peace, peace will follow like a shadow follows the body.
To say this strategy is long-term would be an understatement.
But all other solutions seem to me even less likely to succeed than the one
I’m proposing here. You may think me as hopelessly naive as my younger
self thought war had already been eliminated for continuing to hope that widespread, lasting peace is possible, but as John Lennon famously sang,
I’m not the only one. The ultimate dream of every Nichiren Buddhist is the accomplishment of world peace by the achievement of individual happiness.
We need to summon the courage to even voice a commitment to the goal. We can’t worry about if it can be done at all, or how long it might take. It can be done. It will take a long, long time. But the argument that it can’t be done and therefore shouldn’t be attempted is the argument of cowards. If there weren’t people throughout our history who refused to listen to that logic, we’d all still be living in caves. Look again at the last word in the title of this post.
STEVE JOBS: Stanford Commencement (English Subtitles)
Be the Change for Peace on Earth…
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Kristin McGee is a celebrity yoga and Pilates instructor in New York City.
She is currently teaching yoga with Peloton. She is the star of over 100 videos, seen in several magazines and tv shows and is a spokeswoman for many brands and causes she believes in. A proud mom to three, she sure keeps herself busy!
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion #NoMoreLockdowns #NoNewNormal
Stay strong with your views, be mindful of others.