On his website, Mark Shepard writes: Contrary to his portrayal by Longfellow, Hiawatha was a statesman, peacemaker, and co-founder of the Iroquois League, Confederacy, or Confederation. This following address by the pioneering nineteenth-century linguist Horatio Hale offers one of the earliest recorded versions of Hiawatha’s story, and the one probably closest to historical fact. The address was published as the booklet Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation: A Study in Anthropology, private printing, Salem, Massachusetts, 1881, and as “A Lawgiver of the Stone Age,” in Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Vol. 30, 1882. It was then substantially reproduced by Hale in his book The Iroquois Book of Rites, Brinton, Philadelphia, 1883. From that book come the following remarks by Hale on his sources: “The particulars . . . were drawn chiefly from notes gathered during many visits to the Reserve of the Six Nations, on the Grand River, in Ontario, supplemented by information obtained in two visits to the Onondaga Reservation, in the State of New York, near Syracuse. My informants were the most experienced councillors, and especially the ‘wampum-keepers,’ the official annalists of their people.” The beginning and ending of Hale’s address have been omitted here, as they serve only to place his account in the context of an issue no longer of concern.

HIAWATHA: Synergic Pioneer

Horatio Hale (1881)

It is well known that the Iroquois tribes, whom our ancestors termed the Five Nations, were, when first visited by Europeans, in the precise condition which, according to all the evidence we possess, was held by the inhabitants of the Old World during what has been designated the Stone Age. Anyone who examines the abandoned site of an ancient Iroquois town will find there relics of precisely the same cast as those which are disinterred from the burial mounds and caves of prehistoric Europe—implements of flint and bone, ornaments of shells, and fragments of rude pottery. Trusting to these evidences alone, we might suppose that the people who wrought them were of the humblest grade of intellect. But the testimony of historians, of travellers, of missionaries, and perhaps his own personal observation, would make him aware that this opinion would be erroneous, and that these Indians were, in their own way, acute reasoners, eloquent speakers, and most skilful and far-seeing politicians. He would know that for more than a century, though never mustering more than five thousand fighting men, they were able to hold the balance of power on this continent between France and England; and that in a long series of negotiations they proved themselves qualified to cope in council with the best diplomatists whom either of those powers could depute to deal with them. It is only recently that we have learned, through the researches of a careful and philosophic investigator, the Hon. L. H. Morgan, that their internal polity was marked by equal wisdom, and had been developed and consolidated into a system of government, embodying many of what are deemed the best principles and methods of political science—representation, federation, self-government through local and general legislatures—all resulting in personal liberty, combined with strict subordination to public law. But it has not been distinctly known that for many of these advantages the Five Nations were indebted to one individual, who bore to them the same relation which the great reformers and lawgivers of antiquity bore to the communities whose gratitude has made their names illustrious.

A singular fortune has attended the name and memory of Hiawatha. Though actually an historical personage, and not of very ancient date, of whose life and deeds many memorials remain, he has been confused with two Indian divinities, the one Iroquois, the other Algonquin, and his history has been distorted and obscured almost beyond recognition. Through the cloud of mythology which has enveloped his memory, the genius of Longfellow has discerned something of his real character, and has made his name, at least, a household word wherever the English language is spoken. It remains to give a correct account of the man himself and of the work which he accomplished, as it has been received from the official annalists of his people. The narrative is confirmed by the evidence of contemporary wampum records, and by written memorials in the native tongue, one of which is at least a hundred years old.

According to the best evidence that can be obtained, the formation of the Iroquois confederacy dates from about the middle of the fifteenth century. There is reason to believe that prior to that time the five tribes, who are dignified with the title of nations, had held the region south of Lake Ontario, extending from the Hudson to the Genesee river, for many generations, and probably for many centuries. Tradition makes their earlier seat to have been north of the St. Lawrence river, which is probable enough. It also represents the Mohawks as the original tribe, of which the others are offshoots; and this tradition is confirmed by the evidence of language. That the Iroquois tribes were originally one people, and that their separation into five communities, speaking distinct dialects, dates many centuries back, are both conclusions as certain as any facts in physical science. Three hundred and fifty years ago they were isolated tribes, at war occasionally with one another, and almost constantly with the fierce Algonquins who surrounded them. Not infrequently, also, they had to withstand and to avenge the incursions of warriors belonging to more distant tribes of various stocks, Hurons, Cherokees and Dakotas. Yet they were not peculiarly a warlike people. They had large and strongly palisaded towns, well-cultivated fields, and substantial houses, sometimes a hundred feet long, in which many kindred families dwelt together.

At this time two great dangers, the one from without, the other from within, pressed upon these tribes. The Mohegans, or Mohicans, a powerful Algonquin people, whose settlements stretched along the Hudson river, south of the Mohawks, and extended thence eastward into New England, waged a desperate war against them. In this war the most easterly of the Iroquois, the Mohawks and Oneidas, bore the brunt and were the greatest sufferers. On the other hand, the two westerly nations, the Senecas and Cayugas, had a peril of their own to encounter. The central nation, the Onondagas, were then under the control of a dreaded chief, whose name is variously given, Atotarho, Watatotahlo, Tododaho, according to the dialect of the speaker and the orthography of the writer. He was a man of great force of character and of formidable qualities—haughty, ambitious, crafty and bold—a determined and successful warrior, and at home, so far as the constitution of an Indian tribe would allow, a stern and remorseless tyrant. He tolerated no equal. The chiefs who ventured to oppose him were taken off one after another by secret means, or were compelled to flee for safety to other tribes. His subtlety and artifices had acquired for him the reputation of a wizard. He knew, they say, what was going on at a distance as well as if he were present; and he could destroy his enemies by some magical art, while he himself was far away. In spite of the fear which he inspired, his domination would probably not have been endured by an Indian community, but for his success in war. He made himself and his people a terror to the Cayugas and the Senecas. According to one account, he had subdued both of those tribes; but the record-keepers of the present day do not confirm this statement, which indeed is not consistent with the subsequent history of the confederation.

The name Atotarho signifies “entangled.” The usual process by which mythology, after a few generations, makes fables out of names, has not been wanting here. In the legends which the Indian story-tellers recount in winter about their cabin fires, Atotarho figures as a being of preterhuman nature, whose head, in lieu of hair, is adorned with living snakes. A rude pictorial representation shows him seated and giving audience, in horrible state, with the upper part of his person enveloped by these writhing and entangled reptiles. But the grave Councillors of the Canadian Reservation, who recite his history as they have heard it from their fathers at every installation of a high chief, do not repeat these inventions of marvel-loving gossips, and only smile with good-humored derision when they are referred to.

There was at this time among the Onondagas a chief of high rank whose name, variously written—Hiawatha, Hayonwatha, Ayongwhata, Taoungwatha—is rendered, “he who seeks the wampum belt.” He had made himself greatly esteemed by his wisdom and his benevolence. He was now past middle age. Though many of his friends and relatives had perished by the machinations of Atotarho, he himself had been spared. The qualities which gained him general respect had, perhaps, not been without influence even on that redoubtable chief. Hiawatha had long beheld with grief the evils which afflicted not only his own nation, but all the other tribes about them, through the continual wars in which they were engaged, and the misgovernment and miseries at home which these wars produced. With much meditation he had elaborated in his mind the scheme of a vast confederation which would ensure universal peace. In the mere plan of a confederation there was nothing new. There are probably few, if any, Indian tribes which have not, at one time or another been members of a league or confederacy. It may almost be said to be their normal condition. But the plan which Hiawatha had evolved differed from all others in two particulars. The system which he devised was to be not a loose and transitory league, but a permanent government. While each nation was to retain its own council and its management of local affairs, the general control was to be lodged in a federal senate, composed of representatives elected by each nation, holding office during good behavior, and acknowledged as ruling chiefs throughout the whole confederacy. Still further, and more remarkably, the confederation was not to be a limited one. It was to be indefinitely expansible. The avowed design of its proposer was to abolish war altogether. He wished the federation to extend until all the tribes of men should be included in it, and peace should everywhere reign. Such is the positive testimony of the Iroquois themselves; and their statement, as will be seen, is supported by historical evidence.

Hiawatha’s first endeavor was to enlist his own nation in the cause. He summoned a meeting of the chiefs and people of the Onondaga towns. The summons, proceeding from a chief of his rank and reputation, attracted a large concourse. “They came together,” said the narrator, “along the creeks, from all parts, to the general council-fire.” But what effect the grand projects of the chief, enforced by the eloquence for which he was noted, might have had upon his auditors, could not be known. For there appeared among them a well-known figure, grim, silent and forbidding, whose terrible aspect overawed the assemblage. The unspoken displeasure of Atotarho was sufficient to stifle all debate, and the meeting dispersed. This result, which seems a singular conclusion of an Indian council—the most independent and free-spoken of all gatherings—is sufficiently explained by the fact that Atotarho had organized among the more reckless warriors of his tribe a band of unscrupulous partisans, who did his bidding without question, and took off by secret murder all persons against whom he bore a grudge. The knowledge that his followers were scattered through the assembly, prepared to mark for destruction those who should offend him, might make the boldest orator chary of speech. Hiawatha alone was undaunted. He summoned a second meeting, which was attended by a smaller number, and broke up as before, in confusion, on Atotarho’s appearance. The unwearied reformer sent forth his runners a third time; but the people were disheartened. When the day of the council arrived, no one attended. Then, continued the narrator, Hiawatha seated himself on the ground in sorrow. He enveloped his head in his mantle of skins, and remained for a long time bowed down in grief and thought. At length he arose and left the town, taking his course toward the southeast. He had formed a bold design. As the councils of his own nation were closed to him, he would have recourse to those of other tribes. At a short distance from the town (so minutely are the circumstances recounted) he passed his great antagonist, seated near a well-known spring, stern and silent as usual. No word passed between the determined representatives of war and peace; but it was doubtless not without a sensation of triumphant pleasure that the ferocious war-chief saw his only rival and opponent in council going into what seemed to be voluntary exile. Hiawatha plunged into the forest; he climbed mountains; he crossed a lake; he floated down the Mohawk river in a canoe. Many incidents of his journey are told, and in this part of the narrative alone some occurrences of a marvelous cast are related even by the official historians. Indeed, the flight of Hiawatha from Onondaga to the country of the Mohawks is to the Five Nations what the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina is to the votaries of Islam. It is the turning point of their history. In embellishing the narrative at this point, their imagination has been allowed a free course. Leaving aside these marvels, however, we need only refer here to a single incident which may well enough have been of actual occurrence. A lake which Hiawatha crossed had shores abounding in small white shells. These he gathered and strung upon strings, which he disposed upon his breast, as a token to all whom he should meet that he came as a messenger of peace. And this, according to one authority, was the origin of wampum, of which Hiawatha was the inventor. That honor, however, is one which must be denied to him. The evidence of sepulchral relics shows that wampum was known to the mysterious Mound Builders, as well as in all succeeding ages. Moreover, if the significance of white wampum-strings as a token of peace had not been well known in his day, Hiawatha would not have relied upon them as a means of proclaiming his pacific purpose.

Early one morning he arrived at a Mohawk town, the residence of the noted chief Dekanawidah, whose name, in point of celebrity, ranks in Iroquois tradition with those of Hiawatha and Atotarho. It is probable that he was known by reputation to Hiawatha, and not unlikely that they were related. According to one account Dekanawidah was an Onondaga, adopted among the Mohawks. Another narrative makes him a Mohawk by birth. The probability seems to be that he was the son of an Onondaga father, who had been adopted by the Mohawks, and of a Mohawk mother. That he was not of pure Mohawk blood is shown by the fact, which is remembered, that his father had had successively three wives, one belonging to each of the three clans, Bear, Wolf, and Turtle, which compose the Mohawk nation. If the father had been a Mohawk, he would have belonged to one of the Mohawk clans, and could not then (according to the Indian law) have married into it. He had seven sons, including Dekanawidah, who, with their families, dwelt together in one of the “long houses” common in that day among the Iroquois. These ties of kindred, together with this fraternal strength, and his reputation as a sagacious councillor, gave Dekanawidah great influence among his people. But, in the Indian sense, he was not the leading chief. This position belonged to Tekarihoken (better known in books as Tecarihoga) whose primacy as the first chief of the eldest among the Iroquois nations was then, and is still, universally admitted. Each nation has always had a head-chief, to whom belonged the hereditary right and duty of lighting the council-fire, and taking the first place in public meetings. But among the Indians, as in other communities, hereditary rank and personal influence do not always, or indeed ordinarily, go together. If Hiawatha could gain over Dekanawidah to his views, he would have done much toward the accomplishment of his purposes.

In the early dawn he seated himself on a fallen trunk, near the spring from which the inhabitants of the long-house drew their water. Presently one of the brothers came out with a vessel of elm-bark, and approached the spring. Hiawatha sat silent and motionless. Something in his aspect awed the warrior, who feared to address him. He returned to the house, and said to Dekanawidah, “a man, or a figure like a man, is seated by the spring, having his breast covered with strings of white shells.” “It is a guest,” replied the chief; “go and bring him in. We will make him welcome.” Thus Hiawatha and Dekanawidah first met. They found in each other kindred spirits. The sagacity of the Mohawk chief grasped at once the advantages of the proposed plan, and the two worked together in perfecting it, and in commending it to the people. After much discussion in council, the adhesion of the Mohawk nation was secured. Dekanawidah then despatched two of his brothers as ambassadors to the nearest tribe, the Oneidas, to lay the project before them. The Oneida nation is deemed to be a comparatively recent offshoot from the Mohawks. The difference of language is slight, showing that their separation was much later than that of the Onondagas. In the figurative speech of the Iroquois, the Oneida is the son, and the Onondaga is the brother, of the Mohawk. Dekanawidah had good reason to expect that it would not prove difficult to win the consent of the Oneidas to the proposed scheme. But delay and deliberation mark all public acts of the Indians. The ambassadors found the leading chief, Odatshehte, at his town on the Oneida creek. He received their message in a friendly way, but required time for his people to consider it in council. “Come back in another day,” he said to the messengers. In the political speech of the Indians, a day is understood to mean a year. The envoys carried back the reply to Dekanawidah and Hiawatha, who knew that they could do nothing but wait the prescribed time. After the lapse of a year, they repaired to the place of meeting. The treaty which initiated the great league was then and there ratified between the representatives of the Mohawk and Oneida nations. The name of Odatshehte means “the quiver-bearer;” and as Atotarho, “the entangled,” is fabled to have had his head wreathed with snaky locks, and as Hiawatha, “the wampum-seeker,” is represented to have wrought shells into wampum, so the Oneida chief is reputed to have appeared at this treaty bearing at his shoulder a quiver full of arrows.

The Onondagas lay next to the Oneidas. To them, or rather to their terrible chief, the next application was made. The first meeting of Atotarho and Dekanawidah is a notable event in Iroquois history. At a later day, a native artist sought to represent it in an historical picture, which has been already referred to. Atotarho is seated in solitary and surly dignity, smoking a long pipe, his head and body encircled with contorted and angry serpents. Standing before him are two figures which cannot be mistaken. The foremost, a plumed and cinctured warrior, depicted as addressing the Onondaga chief, holds in his right hand, as a staff, his flint-headed spear—the ensign which marks him as the representative of the Kanienga, or “People of the Flint”—for so the Mohawks style themselves. Behind him another plumed figure bears in his hand a bow with arrows, and at his shoulder a quiver. Divested of its mythological embellishments, the picture rudely represents the interview which actually took place. The immediate result was unpromising. The Onondaga chief coldly refused to entertain the project, which he had already rejected when proposed by Hiawatha. The ambassadors were not discouraged. Beyond the Onondagas were scattered the villages of the Cayugas, a people described by the Jesuit missionaries, at a later day, as the most mild and tractable of the Iroquois. They were considered an offshoot of the Onondagas, to whom they bore the same filial relation which the Oneidas bore to the Mohawks. The journey of the advocates of peace through the forest to the Cayuga capital, and their reception, are minutely detailed in the traditionary narrative. The Cayugas, who had suffered from the prowess and cruelty of the Onondaga chief, needed little persuasion. They readily consented to come into the league, and their chief, Akahenyonk, “the wary spy,” joined the Mohawk and Oneida representatives in a new embassy to the Onondagas. Acting probably upon the advice of Hiawatha, who knew better than any other the character of the community and the chief with whom they had to deal, they made proposals highly flattering to the self-esteem which was the most notable trait of both ruler and people. The Onondagas should be the leading nation of the confederacy. Their chief town should be the federal capital, where the great councils of the league should be held, and where its records should be preserved. The nation should be represented in the council by fourteen senators, while no other nation should have more than ten. And as the Onondagas should be the leading tribe, so Atotarho should be the leading chief. He alone should have the right of summoning the federal council, and no act of the council to which he objected should be valid. In other words, an absolute veto was given to him. To enhance his personal dignity two high chiefs were appointed as his special aids and counsellors, his “secretaries of state,” so to speak. Other insignia of preeminence were to be possessed by him; and, in view of all these distinctions, it is not surprising that his successor, who, two centuries later, retained the same prerogatives, should have been occasionally styled by the English colonists “the emperor of the Five Nations.” It might seem, indeed, at first thought, that the founders of the confederacy had voluntarily placed themselves and their tribes in a position of almost abject subserviency to Atotarho and his followers. But they knew too well the qualities of their people to fear for them any political subjection. It was certain that when once the league was established, and its representatives had met in council, character and intelligence would assume their natural sway, and mere artificial rank and dignity would be little regarded. Atotarho and his people, however, yielded either to these specious offers or to the pressure which the combined urgency of the three allied nations now brought to bear upon them. They finally accepted the league; and the great chief, who had originally opposed it, now naturally became eager to see it as widely extended as possible. He advised its representatives to go on at once to the westward, and enlist the populous Seneca towns, pointing out how this might best be done. This advice was followed, and the adhesion of the Senecas was secured by giving to their two leading chiefs, Kanyadariyo (“beautiful lake”) and Shadekaronyes (“the equal skies”), the offices of military commanders of the confederacy, with the title of door-keepers of the “Long-House”—that being the figure by which the league was known.

The six national leaders who have been mentioned—Dekanawidah for the Mohawks, Odatshehte for the Oneidas, Atotarho for the Onondagas, Akahenyonk for the Cayugas, Kanyadariyo and Shadekaronyes for the two great divisions of the Senecas—met in convention near the Onondaga Lake, with Hiawatha for their adviser, and a vast concourse of their followers, to settle the terms and rules of their confederacy, and to nominate its first council. Of this council, nine members (or ten, if Dekanawidah be included) were assigned to the Mohawks, a like number to the Oneidas, fourteen to the lordly Onondagas, ten to the Cayugas, and eight to the Senecas. Except in the way of compliment, the number assigned to each nation was really of little consequence, inasmuch as, by the rule of the league, unanimity was exacted in all their decisions. This unanimity, however, did not require the suffrage of every member of the council. The representatives of each nation first deliberated apart upon the question proposed. In this separate council the majority decided; and the leading chief then expressed in the great council the voice of his nation. Thus the veto of Atotarho ceased at once to be peculiar to him, and became a right exercised by each of the allied nations. This requirement of unanimity, embarrassing as it might seem, did not prove to be so in practice. Whenever a question arose on which opinions were divided, its decision was either postponed, or some compromise was reached which left all parties contented.

The first members of the council were appointed by the convention—under what precise rule is unknown; but their successors came in by a method in which the hereditary and the elective systems were singularly combined, and in which female suffrage had an important place. When a chief died or (as sometimes happened) was deposed for incapacity or misconduct, some member of the same family succeeded him. Rank followed the female line; and this successor might be any descendant of the late chief’s mother or grandmother—his brother, his cousin or his nephew—but never his son. Among many persons who might thus be eligible, the selection was made in the first instance by a family council. In this council the “chief matron” of the family, a noble dame whose position and right were well defined, had the deciding voice. This remarkable fact is affirmed by the Jesuit missionary Lafitan, and the usage remains in full vigor among the Canadian Iroquois to this day. If there are two or more members of the family who seem to have equal claims, the nominating matron sometimes declines to decide between them, and names them both or all, leaving the ultimate choice to the nation or the federal council. The council of the nation next considers the nomination, and if dissatisfied, refers it back to the family for a new designation. If content, the national council reports the name of the candidate to the federal senate, in which resides the power of ratifying or rejecting the choice of the nation; but the power of rejection is rarely exercised, though that of expulsion for good cause is not infrequently exerted. The new chief inherits the name of his predecessor. In this respect, as in some others, the resemblance of the Great Council to the English House of Peers is striking. As Norfolk succeeds to Norfolk, so Tekarihoken succeeds Tekarihoken. The great names of Hiawatha and Atotarho are still borne by plain farmer-councillors on the Canadian Reservation.

When the League was established, Hiawatha had been adopted by the Mohawk nation as one of their chiefs. The honor in which he was held by them is shown by his position on the roll of councillors, as it has been handed down from the earliest times. As the Mohawk nation is the “elder brother,” the names of its chiefs are first recited. At the head of the list is the leading Mohawk chief, Tekarihoken, who represents the noblest lineage of the Iroquois stock. Next to him, and second on the roll, is the name of Hiawatha. That of his great colleague, Dekanawidah, nowhere appears. He was a member of the first council; but he forbade his people to appoint a successor to him. “Let the others have successors,” he said proudly, “for others can advise you like them. But I am the founder of your league, and no one else can do what I have done.”

The boast was not unwarranted. Though planned by another, the structure had been reared mainly by his labors. But the Five Nations, while yielding abundant honor to the memory of Dekanawidah, have never regarded him with the same affectionate reverence which has always clung to the name of Hiawatha. His tender and lofty wisdom, his wide-reaching benevolence, and his fervent appeals to their better sentiments, enforced by the eloquence of which he was master, touched chords in the popular heart which have continued to respond until this day. Fragments of the speeches in which he addressed the council and the people of the league are still remembered and repeated. The fact that the league only carried out a part of the grand design which he had in view is constantly affirmed. Yet the failure was not due to lack of effort. In pursuance of his original purpose, when the league was firmly established, envoys were sent to other tribes to urge them to join it or at least to become allies. One of these embassies penetrated to the distant Cherokees, the hereditary enemies of the Iroquois nations. For some reason with which we are not acquainted—perhaps the natural suspicion or vindictive pride of that powerful community—this mission was a failure. Another, despatched to the western Algonquins, had better success. A strict alliance was formed with the far-spread Ojibway tribes, and was maintained inviolate for at least two hundred years, until at length the influence of the French, with the sympathy of the Ojibways for the conquered Hurons, undid to some extent, though not entirely, this portion of Hiawatha’s work.

His conceptions were beyond his time, and beyond ours; but their effect, within a limited sphere, was very great. For more than three centuries the bond which he devised held together the Iroquois nations in perfect amity. It proved, moreover, as he intended, elastic. The territory of the Iroquois, constantly extending as their united strength made itself felt, became the “Great Asylum” of the Indian tribes. Of the conquered Eries and Hurons, many hundreds were received and adopted among their conquerors. The Tuscaroras, expelled by the English from North Carolina, took refuge with the Iroquois, and became the sixth nation of the League. From still further south, the Tuteloes and Saponies, of Dakota stock, after many wars with the Iroquois, fled to them from their other enemies, and found a cordial welcome. A chief still sits in the council as a representative of the Tuteloes, though the tribe itself has been swept away by disease, or absorbed in the larger nations. Many fragments of tribes of Algonquin lineage—Delawares, Nanticokes, Mohicans, Mississagas—sought the same hospitable protection, which never failed them. Their descendants still reside on the Canadian Reservation, which may well be styled an aboriginal “refuge of nations”—affording a striking evidence in our own day of the persistent force of a great idea, when embodied in practical shape by the energy of a master mind.

The name by which their constitution or organic law is known among them is kay·nerenh, to which the epitaph kowa, “great,” is frequently added. This word, kay·nerenh, is sometimes rendered “law,” or “league,” but its proper meaning seems to be “peace.” It is used in this sense by the missionaries, in their translations of the scriptures and the prayer-book. In such expressions as “the Prince of Peace,” “the author of peace,” “give peace in our time,” we find kay·nerenh employed with this meaning. Its root is yaner, signifying “noble,” or “excellent,” which yields, among many derivatives, kay·nere, “goodness,” and kay·nerenh, “peace,” or “peacefulness.” The national hymn of the confederacy, sung whenever their “Condoling Council” meets, commences with a verse referring to their league, which is literally rendered, “We come to greet and thank the Peace” (kay·nerenh). When the list of their ancient chiefs, the fifty original Councillors, is chanted in the closing litany of the meeting, there is heard from time to time, as the leaders of each clan are named, an outburst of praise, in the words—

“This was the roll of you—
You that were joined in the work,
You that confirmed the work,
          The GREAT PEACE.” (Kay·nerenh-kowa.)

The regard of Englishmen for their Magna Charta and Bill of Rights, and that of Americans for their national Constitution, seem weak in comparison with the intense gratitude and reverence of the Five Nations for the “Great Peace” which Hiawatha and his colleagues established for them.

Of the subsequent life of Hiawatha, and of his death, we have no sure information. The records of the Iroquois are historical, and not biographical. As Hiawatha had been made a chief among the Mohawks, he doubtless continued to reside with that nation. A tradition, which is in itself highly probable, represents him as devoting himself to the congenial work of clearing away the obstructions in the streams which intersect the country then inhabited by the confederated nations, and which formed the chief means of communication between them. That he thus, in some measure, anticipated the plans of De Witt Clinton and his associates, on a smaller scale, but with perhaps a larger statesmanship, we may be willing enough to believe. A wild legend, recorded by some writers, but not told of him by the Canadian Iroquois, and apparently belonging to their ancient mythology, gives him an apotheosis, and makes him ascend to heaven in a white canoe. It may be proper to dwell for a moment on the singular complication of mistakes which has converted this Indian reformer and statesman into a mythological personage.

When by the events of the Revolutionary war the original confederacy was broken up, the larger portion of the people followed Brant to Canada. The refugees comprised nearly the whole of the Mohawks, and the greater part of the Onondagas and Cayugas, with many members of the other nations. In Canada their first proceeding was to reestablish, as far as possible, their ancient league, with all its laws and ceremonies. The Onondagas had brought with them most of their wampum records, and the Mohawks jealously preserved the memories of the federation, in whose formation they had borne a leading part. The history of the league continued to be the topic of their orators whenever a new chief was installed into office. Thus the remembrance of the facts has been preserved among them with much clearness and precision, and with very little admixture of mythological elements. With the fragments of the tribes which remained on the southern side of the Great Lakes the case was very different. Except among the Senecas, who, of all the Five Nations, had had least to do with the formation of the league, the ancient families which had furnished the members of their senate, and were the conservators of their history, had mostly fled to Canada or the West. The result was that among the interminable stories with which the common people beguile their winter nights, the traditions of Atotarho and Hiawatha became intermingled with the legends of their mythology. An accidental similarity, in the Onondaga dialect, between the name of Hiawatha and that of one of their ancient divinities, led to a confusion between the two, which has misled some investigators. This deity bears, in the sonorous Mohawk tongue, the name of Aronhiawagon, meaning “the Holder of the Heavens.” The early French missionaries, prefixing a particle, made the name in their orthography, Tearonhiaonagon. He was, they tell us, “the great god of the Iroquois.” Among the Onondagas of the present day, the name is abridged to Taonhiawagi, or Tahiawagi. The confusion between this name and that of Hiawatha (which, in another form, is pronounced Tayonwatha) seems to have begun more than a century ago; for Pyrlaeus, the Moravian missionary, heard among the Iroquois (according to Heckewelder) that the person who first proposed the league was an ancient Mohawk, named Thannawege. Mr. J. V. H. Clark, in his interesting history of Onondaga, makes the name to have been originally Ta-oun-ya-wat-ha, and describes the bearer as “the deity who presides over fisheries and hunting-grounds.” He came down from heaven in a white canoe and after sundry adventures, which remind one of the labors of Hercules, assumed the name of Hiawatha (signifying, we are told, “a very wise man”), and dwelt for a time as an ordinary mortal among men, occupied in works of benevolence. Finally, after founding the confederacy and bestowing many prudent counsels upon the people, he returned to the skies by the same conveyance in which he had descended. This legend was communicated by Clark to Schoolcraft, when the latter was compiling his “Notes on the Iroquois.” Mr. Schoolcraft, pleased with the poetical cast of the story and the euphonious name, made confusion worse confounded by transferring the hero to a distant region and identifying him with Manabozho, a fantastic divinity of the Ojibways. Schoolcraft’s volume, absurdly entitled “The Hiawatha Legends,” has not in it a single fact or fiction relating either to Hiawatha himself or to the Iroquois deity Aronhiawagon. Wild Ojibway stories concerning Manabozho and his comrades form the staple of its contents. But it is to this collection that we owe the charming poem of Longfellow; and thus, by an extraordinary fortune, a grave Iroquois lawgiver of the fifteenth century has become, in modern literature, an Ojibway demigod, son of the West Wind, and companion of the tricky Paupukkeewis, the boastful Iago, and the strong Kwasind. If a Chinese traveller, during the middle ages, inquiring into the history and religion of the western nations, had confounded King Alfred with King Arthur, and both with Odin, he would not have made a more preposterous confusion of names and characters than that which has hitherto disguised the genuine personality of the great Onondaga reformer.

About the main events of his history, and about his character and purposes, there can be no reasonable doubt. We have the wampum belts which he handled, and whose simple hieroglyphics preserve the memory of the public acts in which he took part. We have, also, in the Iroquois “Book of Rites,” a still more clear and convincing testimony to the character both of the legislator and of the people for whom his institutions were designed. This book, sometimes called the “Book of the Condoling Council,” might properly enough be styled an Iroquois Veda. It comprises the speeches, songs and other ceremonies, which, from the earliest period of the confederacy, have composed the proceedings of their council when a deceased chief is lamented and his successor is installed in office. The fundamental laws of the league, a list of their ancient towns, and the names of the chiefs who constituted their first council, chanted in a kind of litany, are also comprised in the collection. The contents, after being preserved in memory, like the Vedas, for many generations, were written down by desire of the chiefs, when their language was first reduced to writing; and the book is therefore more than a century old. Its language, archaic when written, is now partly obsolete, and is fully understood by only a few of the oldest chiefs. It is a genuine Indian composition, and must be accepted as disclosing the true character of its authors. The result is remarkable enough. Instead of a race of rude and ferocious warriors, we find in this book a kindly and affectionate people, full of sympathy for their friends in distress, considerate to their women, tender to their children, anxious for peace, and imbued with a profound reverence for their constitution and its authors. We become conscious of the fact that the aspect in which these Indians have presented themselves to the outside world has been in a large measure deceptive and factitious. The ferocity, craft, and cruelty, which have been deemed their leading traits, have been merely the natural accompaniments of wars of self-preservation, and no more indicated their genuine character than the war-paint, plume, and tomahawk of the warrior displayed the customary guise in which he appeared among his own people. The cruelties of war, when war is a struggle for national existence, are common to all races. The persistent desire for peace, pursued for centuries in federal unions, and in alliances and treaties with other nations, has been manifested by few as steadily as by the countrymen of Hiawatha.

Reposted from the Harvard Gazette.

One of former Bogot· Mayor Antanas Mockus’ many inspired strategies for changing the mindset – and, eventually, the behavior – of the city’s unruly inhabitants was the installation of traffic mimes on street corners. (Photo courtesy of El Tiempo)

A New Approach to Governance

Mar“a Cristina Caballero

Antanas Mockus had just resigned from the top job of Colombian National University. A mathematician and philosopher, Mockus looked around for another big challenge and found it: to be in charge of, as he describes it, “a 6.5 million person classroom.”

Mockus, who had no political experience, ran for mayor of Bogot·; he was successful mainly because people in Colombia’s capital city saw him as an honest guy. With an educator’s inventiveness, Mockus turned Bogot· into a social experiment just as the city was choked with violence, lawless traffic, corruption, and gangs of street children who mugged and stole. It was a city perceived by some to be on the verge of chaos.

People were desperate for a change, for a moral leader of some sort. The eccentric Mockus, who communicates through symbols, humor, and metaphors, filled the role. When many hated the disordered and disorderly city of Bogot·, he wore a Superman costume and acted as a superhero called “Supercitizen.” People laughed at Mockus’ antics, but the laughter began to break the ice of their extreme skepticism.

Mockus’ seemingly wacky notions have a respectable intellectual pedigree. His measures were informed by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North, who has investigated the tension between formal and informal rules, and J¸rgen Habermas’ work on how dialogue creates social capital. (Staff photos Jon Chase/Harvard News Office)

Mockus, who finished his second term as mayor this past January, recently came to Harvard for two weeks as a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics to share lessons about civic engagement with students and faculty.

“We found Mayor Mockus’ presentation intensely interesting,” said Adams Professor Jane Mansbidge of the Kennedy School, who invited Mockus to speak in her “Democracy From Theory to Practice” class. “Our reading had focused on the standard material incentive-based systems for reducing corruption. He focused on changing hearts and minds – not through preaching but through artistically creative strategies that employed the power of individual and community disapproval. He also spoke openly, with a lovely partial self-mockery, of his own failings, not suggesting that he was more moral than anyone else. His presentation made it clear that the most effective campaigns combine material incentives with normative change and participatory stakeholding. He is a most engaging, almost pixieish math professor, not a stuffy ‘mayor’ at all. The students were enchanted, as was I.”

A theatrical teacher

The slim, bearded, 51-year-old former mayor explained himself thus:
“What really moves me to do things that other people consider original is my passion to teach.” He has long been known for theatrical displays to gain people’s attention and, then, to make them think.

Mockus, the only son of a Lithuanian artist, burst onto the Colombian political scene in 1993 when, faced with a rowdy auditorium of the school of arts’ students, he dropped his pants and mooned them to gain quiet. The gesture, he said at the time, should be understood “as a part of the resources which an artist can use.” He resigned as rector, the top job of Colombian National University, and soon decided to run for mayor.

The fact that he was seen as an unusual leader gave the new mayor the opportunity to try extraordinary things, such as hiring 420 mimes to control traffic in Bogot·’s chaotic and dangerous streets. He launched a “Night for Women” and asked the city’s men to stay home in the evening and care for the children; 700,000 women went out on the first of three nights that Mockus dedicated to them.

Bogot·’s women enjoy the fruits of a Mockus idea, a ‘Night for Women,’ when the city’s men stayed home and women police kept the night secure. (Photo by Martin Garcia/El Tiempo)

When there was a water shortage, Mockus appeared on TV programs taking a shower and turning off the water as he soaped, asking his fellow citizens to do the same. In just two months people were using 14 percent less water, a savings that increased when people realized how much money they were also saving because of economic incentives approved by Mockus; water use is now 40 percent less than before the shortage.

“The distribution of knowledge is the key contemporary task,” Mockus said. “Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change.”

Mockus taught vivid lessons with these tools. One time, he asked citizens to put their power to use with 350,000 “thumbs-up” and
“thumbs-down” cards that his office distributed to the populace. The cards were meant to approve or disapprove of other citizens’ behavior; it was a device that many people actively – and peacefully – used in the streets.

He also asked people to pay 10 percent extra in voluntary taxes. To the surprise of many, 63,000 people voluntarily paid the extra taxes. A dramatic indicator of the shift in the attitude of “Bogotanos” during Mockus’ tenure is that, in 2002, the city collected more than three times the revenues it had garnered in 1990.

Another Mockus inspiration was to ask people to call his office if they found a kind and honest taxi driver; 150 people called and the mayor organized a meeting with all those good taxi drivers, who advised him about how to improve the behavior of mean taxi drivers. The good taxi drivers were named “Knights of the Zebra,” a club supported by the mayor’s office.

Yet Mockus doesn’t like to be called a leader. “There is a tendency to be dependent on individual leaders,” he said. “To me, it is important to develop collective leadership. I don’t like to get credit for all that we achieved. Millions of people contributed to the results that we achieved … I like more egalitarian relationships. I especially like to orient people to learn.”

Taking a moral stand

Still, there were times when Mockus felt he needed to impose his will, such as when he launched the “Carrot Law,” demanding that every bar and entertainment place close at 1 a.m. with the goal of diminishing drinking and violence.

Most important to Mockus was his campaign about the importance and sacredness of life. “In a society where human life has lost value,” he said, “there cannot be another priority than re-establishing respect for life as the main right and duty of citizens.” Mockus sees the reduction of homicides from 80 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1993 to 22 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2003 as a major achievement, noting also that traffic fatalities dropped by more than half in the same time period, from an average of 1,300 per year to about 600. Contributing to this success was the mayor’s inspired decision to paint stars on the spots where pedestrians (1,500 of them) had been killed in traffic accidents.

‘Knowledge,’ said Mockus, ‘empowers people. If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change.’ (Photo by Gerardo Chaves/El Tiempo)

“Saving a single life justifies the effort,” Mockus said.

The former mayor had to address many fronts simultaneously. In his struggle against corruption, he closed down the transit police because many of those 2,000 members were notoriously bribable.

Mockus was a constant presence in the media, promoting his civic campaigns. “My messages about the importance of protecting children from being burned with fireworks, protecting children from domestic violence, and the sacredness of life reached many, including the children,” he said.

Once the mother of a 3-year-old girl called his office to say that meeting Mockus was her daughter’s only birthday wish.

But the meeting also revealed, said Mockus, that Colombian society has a long way to go. During the visit, the mother told him: “When I am going to hit her, she runs to the telephone and says that she is going to call Mockus. She doesn’t even know how to dial a number, but obviously she thinks that you would protect her.” Mockus, who has two daughters himself, was shocked at the woman’s nonchalance about striking her daughter.

Women’s night and mimes

There is almost always a civics lesson behind Mockus’ antics. Florence Thomas, a feminist and a professor at Colombian National University, pointed out to Mockus that in Bogot· women were afraid to go out at night. “At that time, we were also looking for what would be the best image of a safe city, and I realized that if you see streets with many women you feel safer,” Mockus explained.

So he asked men to stay home and suggested that both sexes should take advantage of the “Night for Women” to reflect on women’s role in society. About 700,000

women went out, flocking to free, open-air concerts. They flooded into bars that offered women-only drink specials and strolled down a central boulevard that had been converted into a pedestrian zone.

To avoid legal challenges, the mayor stated that the men’s curfew was strictly voluntary. Men who simply couldn’t bear to stay indoors during the six-hour restriction were asked to carry self-styled “safe conduct”passes. About 200,000 men went out that night, some of them angrily calling Mockus a “clown” in TV interviews.

But most men graciously embraced Mockus’ campaign. In the lower-middle-class neighborhood of San Cristobal, women marched through the streets to celebrate their night. When they saw a man staying at home, carrying a baby, or taking care of children, the women stopped and applauded.

That night the police commander was a woman, and 1,500 women police were in charge of Bogot·’s security.

Another innovative idea was to use mimes to improve both traffic and citizens’ behavior. Initially 20 professional mimes shadowed pedestrians who didn’t follow crossing rules: A pedestrian running across the road would be tracked by a mime who mocked his every move. Mimes also poked fun at reckless drivers. The program was so popular that another 400 people were trained as mimes.

“It was a pacifist counterweight,” Mockus said. “With neither words nor weapons, the mimes were doubly unarmed. My goal was to show the importance of cultural regulations.”

A bigger classroom?

Mockus noted that his administrations were enlightened by academic concepts, including the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North, who has investigated the tension between formal and informal rules and how economic development is restrained when those rules clash; and J¸rgen Habermas’ work on how dialogue creates social capital. Mockus also mentions Socrates, who said that if people understood well, they probably would not act in the wrong way.

Luis Eduardo GarzÛn, the new mayor of Bogot·, is the first leftist who has been in charge of the second-most important political position in Colombia. Said Mockus, “His election expresses a consensus around the importance of addressing social issues. GarzÛn has the challenge of opening space to new political forces in a country that has been dominated by a ‘bipartidismo bobo’ (dumb two-party system).”

Mockus – a sterling exemplar of the current vogue in Latin America for “anti-politicians” – says that transforming Bogot·’s people and their sense of civic culture was the key to solving many of the city’s problems. He is looking forward to returning to the classroom at Colombian National University after a sabbatical year. But Mockus is also considering the possibility of launching a presidential campaign – and perhaps being in charge of a 42 million student classroom.

The following interview from 2001 was forwarded to me by reader Denise Anderson.

Interview with Michio Kaku

The following essay was written in 1996, as exercise to describe the future 10 years later.

The Syntropy Revolution

Guy Dauncey

The Atlantic Review, October 2006: In the year since Iqbal Kharoun and Elizabeth Mitchell published their paper in Nature and were featured on the cover of TIME Magazine, the cultural and intellectual world has been in a tumult of creative upheaval. You would have thought that they were proposing the abandonment of all civilization, instead of a simple adjustment to the way we perceive matter and consciousness.

Most of us don’t spend much time asking ‘Where do we come from ?’ or ‘What is Life ?’. We are content to let the scientists and philosophers ask these questions for us. On the other hand, we want the answers. You’ve only got to gaze up at the stars to realize how little we know. For those who lived in medieval Europe, the Catholic church explained everything by saying that God was in his heaven, the Earth was at the centre of an unchanging universe, and if you wanted to know any more you should ask a priest, since it was all in the Bible (which was written in Latin and only they could read). That was their story, and they went to great lengths to enforce it.

To understand the significance of what Kharoun and Mitchell are saying, you have to understand the origins of the story they displaced. In 16th century Europe, the Catholic church used to torture and burn people who disagreed with them. This wasn’t a simple disagreement over supper : that was being imprisoned, tortured, dragged to the market square, tied to a stake and burnt alive, flesh by screaming flesh. This was a problem for people who questioned what the church said, or who, like Galileo and the early scientists, liked to look at the universe through a telescope to see what was actually there.

In response to this difficulty, the French philosopher RenÈ Descartes proposed a new method. He declared that the world consisted of two separate but linked realities, res mens (things of the mind) and res extensa (things extended in space). The church could say what it wanted about res mens, but the scientists would focus their energies solely on res extensa, where the truth could be determined by careful observation and measurement, not by the dogmas of paranoid priests.

The implications of the new method were very profound. Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, it liberated people from the morass of fears and superstitions which had kept them in darkness and made them hang onto ancient beliefs. It opened the dusty trapdoors of the mind and invited them to explore the incredible universe that surrounded them. The light of reason poured in, displacing the gloomy recesses of the medieval age. It led to discoveries and inventions that we take for granted : gravity, computers, space stations.

Descartes’ new method did not deny the place of God, or spirit. In his mind, the two realms existed side-by-side, like a married couple who have stopped speaking to each other, but still live together in the same house. As the years went by, however, the husband (representing the material realm) gradually exiled his wife to the basement, and covered the trap-door with a mat. He began to deny the existence of the spiritual world, and the silence people pray to. The new story which the scientists were developing gave little credence to the world of spirit; the universe was a place of energy and matter, out of which life had sprung by the mysterious chemistry of chance.

The new story has been very powerful, helping scientists to unravel the secrets of the universe, from gravity to quasars. Today, we can sit by the ocean at night watching the stars, then open a laptop, click on the Hubble Space Telescope and watch a galaxy being born.

There have always been scientists who believed in God. By the 20th century, however, they had learnt to keep their beliefs to themselves. The new story said that we were material beings, in a material world. Even the mind, with all its dreams and journeyings, was a material process which would be fully understood just as soon as the complex biochemistry of the brain had been deciphered.

In the eyes of the new story, a forest ceased to be a place of wonder, filled with sacred groves : it became instead a stockpile of timber, waiting to be turned into lumber. Church membership declined, and western culture began to build its purpose around material progress. Nature became something to be exploited, not revered. For those who suffered illnesses, there were drugs and medicines, but for those who were dying, there was nothing. Black holes and supernovae, but no soul. As long as the story held excitement, however, it held people’s imagination. New homes, new cars, new highways – these were the promises of the 1950s, with the horrors of war behind us.

By the 1990s, however, after the knife-edge fear of nuclear destruction, the near extinction of the whales and the assault on the rainforests, the dream was fading. The story was still alive, but without joy.

The first rumblings of change began in 1962, with Rachel Carson’s eerie vision of a world bereft of songbirds in her book Silent Spring. As the 20th century ended, increasing numbers of people were seeking the forbidden basement, including some scientists, who made serious explorations into the world of consciousness. By the late 20th century, physicists such as David Bohm were reaching towards a greater picture, describing reality as a pattern of implicate order in which the whole was more than its parts. As the century ended, these scientists came closer and closer to opening the trap-door, re-uniting matter with its long-silenced soul-mate, spirit. They described mind as a process of self-organization that was present in all living matter, and came close to saying that consciousness was an inherent part of living matter – but they defined consciousness as self-awareness, requiring abstract thought and language, not something that could shared be by everything. They had broken Descartes’ spell, but they were like Copernicus, who understood that the Sun was the centre of the solar system, but who thought that the planets travelled around the Sun in a circle. They were still awaiting their Kepler, who would complete the final picture.

The theory of evolution was a relative newcomer to the modern story. Even the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton, living in the 1600s, assumed that the world was created in 4,600 B.C., as the Bible described. It was only in the 1800s that people began to realize that the world was not four thousand, but four thousand million years old. Darwin’s discovery that all life was connected through evolution shocked the Victorians like a thunderbolt, placing us as direct descendants of the apes, and cousins to every living being.

Writing in the 19th century, it was only natural that Darwin should set The Origin of the Species in the context of the modern story, in which spirit was locked away. His was a material story, which described the evolution of physical form from fish to humans; it did not say anything about consciousness.

It did not seem to trouble the evolutionary scientists that the human brain had stopped evolving a hundred thousand years ago, at a level of complexity which enables it to survive to pass on its genes successfully. Civilization, progress – these were just ephemera, which had nothing to do with evolution. Common sense said that this was absurd, but science ignored it.

There was another problem with evolutionary theory, too. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy is the measure of the disorder of a system, and that the total entropy of a closed system will always increase. It can never grow more orderly – only more disorderly, like a house that has been abandoned and left to fall down. According to the Second Law, the entropy of a closed system will always increase with time.

Ever since the appearance of life, however, two thousand million years ago, nature has been growing steadily more complex and ordered. Evolution as Darwin describes it is anti-entropic : it breaks the Second Law. When pushed to explain this small anomaly, the scientists would say “Oh, it’s just a temporary reversion of the law. Wait until the sun blows up,” meaning that one day, all life will collapse because the sun will go supernova, and entropy will re-assert itself.

The fact remained that evolution as explained by Darwin was in breach of a fundamental law of the universe. That should have been a problem – but since the problem seemed insoluble, most scientists preferred to ignore it.

Iqbal Kharoun was one of the exceptions. Born of a Pakistani diplomat father and a French biologist mother and raised in a village on the plains of the Punjab, he grew up among his parents’ cosmopolitan friends, travelling with his father to the troubled northern states, and with his mother to the rivers and fields of the delta, where he marveled at the richness and diversity of nature. He took his biology degree at Hyderabad and went on to complete a Ph.D. in consciousness studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he came across the work of the French physicist Jean Charon, and his study of consciousness within the atom.

It was while Kharoun was studying in Paris that Fritjof Capra was doing his seminal work on systems theory in California. From Capra, Iqbal learnt that mind was an organizing force which directed and coordinated complex biological wholes, which was present in all living forms, right down to the cellular level. From the British biologist Sir Rupert Sheldrake, he pondered the possibility that mind might express itself across time and space through ‘morphogenetic fields’, anywhere in the universe. From the American medical scientist Larry Dossey, he learnt that healing energy can be projected by consciousness from one life form to another.

What was happening ? If consciousness was present in all matter, and could project energy from one organism to another, it must play a role in evolution. But what ? What was consciousness ? What was healing energy ? These were the problems Iqbal wrestled with as he alternated between teaching at the Sorbonne and spending time meditating in the Himalayas, deep in thought. He observed the growing ecological crisis as the forest cover was stripped from the Himalayan foothills, and saw the farmers struggling with the increasing severity of the annual floods. He watched the forces of Islamic fundamentalism attempt to crush the modern story, with its materialism and moral pollution. And he pondered massive, far-reaching forces.

It was in France that he did his most seminal work. It was there that he came across the work of a mysterious woman known simply as ‘The Mother’. She was a Parisian, born in the early 1900s and raised in an intensely spiritual atmosphere. After travelling the world, she settled in India, in the French colony of Pondicherry, where she spent her life working alongside a yogi, philosopher and sage called Sri Aurobindo. Aurobindo, like Jean-Marc, had grown up in two cultures. After a childhood in India, he went to England, studying Goethe and Darwin at Cambridge, returning to India to become involved in the struggle for independence, then retreating to Pondicherry to begin his life’s work. It was from this transcultural fusion that Aurobindo developed his understanding of evolution.

For Aurobindo, dualism is only a problem when seen through western eyes. In eastern eyes, all life is imbued with spirit, an understanding which Kharoun absorbed with his mother’s milk. God is everywhere, in every flea, in every mountain. Go to the ends of the Universe, and God will be there. Go to the most microscopic level of your bodily cells, and God will be there. To Kharoun, this was as natural as listening to the flute before dawn. Spirit was everywhere, the Vedas said. But what was spirit, in scientific terms ? And how did it work in evolution ? These were the questions which Kharoun sought to understand, as he read Aurobindo’s voluminous works late into the night.

Evolution is yoga, Aurobindo said, the longing of the parts to unite with the whole. Yoga means union, from the Sanskrit word yuga, a yoke. Generation after generation of Indians, unaware of geological age, saw the world as a wheel of suffering which could only be escaped by enlightenment, the conscious realization of the divine. Like the Christians in medieval Europe, they saw life as full of suffering, and plotted their spiritual escape from the endless wheel of reincarnation. When Aurobindo re-translated the ancient Indian texts with modern eyes, however, he saw a different story. He saw that the whole of evolution was a form of yoga. The entire universe was seeking union with the divine, discovering ever greater unity.

To Kharoun, ‘spirit’ is a universal field of consciousness that penetrates everything. It exists within us, but we usually experience only its trapped individual form, as if a tiny dewdrop of universal spirit has been collected and dropped into each human form, without our being aware that it is there. The universal longing for God expresses the instinctual wish to reconnect with the whole, for the dewdrop to merge with the ocean.

Kharoun also credits the influence of the French priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist who spent much of his life in China excavating the fossil remains of early humans, while working to integrate his own spiritual and scientific understanding of the world. Like Aurobindo, Teilhard was driven to unravel the mysteries of evolution, and like Aurobindo, he came to the conclusion that matter and consciousness had evolved together. He believed that evolution would continue until it reached total wholeness, when everything would merge with the divine.

The seeds had been lain. From 2001 to 2004, while others struggled with food shortages, unemployment and climate confusion, Kharoun was immersing himself in study, supported over the Internet by like-minded thinkers. The concept that bound it all together, and which rocketed Kharoun and his colleague Elizabeth Mitchell onto the front page of TIME Magazine in December 2005, was syntropy. In Kharoun’s words,

‘Syntropy is an omnipresent evolutionary tendency which propels all mind, consciousness and matter towards organization, wholeness and unity.’

With these nineteen words, Kharoun rewrote the modern story. To Kharoun, spirit and syntropy are intimately bound together. When the individual expression of the universal syntropic field is weak, entropy will prevail. Where spirit is strong, syntropy will lead it to seek greater organization and wholeness. It is syntropy which has propelled evolution towards ever more complex and conscious expressions over millions of years. Entropy occurs when syntropy fails, when the spirit in matter weakens and starts to die.

With the arrival of syntropy, evolution’s entropy problem disappeared. Entropy does not exist at all, Kharoun declares – it is simply the absence of syntropy. Syntropy explains evolution’s progress towards ever more complex and psychically rich expressions of life.

To the mainstream scientists, this smells suspiciously like vitalism, a long rejected 19th century theory that proposed a vital spark within matter, giving it life. The idea that evolution could continue on the non-physical level was impossible to swallow if you had grown up in the scientific establishment, and your instinct for the spiritual had been suppressed.

In the year since their paper was published, Kharoun, Mitchell and their fellow scientists have been working night and day to integrate syntropy theory into physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, medicine, consciousness studies. Through syntropy, these disciplines can all be united. Einstein would have loved it – it is paradigm-change time, when the story of the world is turned upside-down. Psychotherapists, futurists and theologists are all exploring the implications of syntropy for their professions. Spirit and matter are being re-united, after their long divorce. Evolution is being reconfigured as a journey towards ultimate wholeness, for humans, for nature, and for all that exists, both here and throughout the universe.

When TIME Magazine featured Kharoun and Mitchell’s work, its editors wrote :

‘The implications of this discovery for science, and the cosmological foundation on which science has been based since the 17th century, are nothing short of stupendous. We have entered a new era of human knowledge and discovery.’

Not every review was so favorable. Christianity Today had its own brand of judgement :

‘This [syntropy] demonstrates the danger of meddling in the works of God. The leaders of the scientific community must take care not to endorse every piece of crackpot new age nonsense. The time has come for responsible Christians to stand up and say ‘Enough !’ We should render unto God that which is God’s, and unto science that which is science’s. Science has no business meddling in the affairs of God.’

‘This mixing of religious foofaroo with the rigor of science has produced a bastard, a mish mash of new age beliefs masquerading as science. Scientifically speaking, Kharoun’s work is as good a candidate for burning as any we have seen.’

Kharoun’s work is only half of the breakthrough, however. The other half belongs to Elizabeth Mitchell, who featured alongside Kharoun on the cover of TIME Magazine.

Elizabeth is a Greek American, raised in New York, whose parents met in Athens while her father was hitchhiking around Europe in the 1960s. As a couple, they were both excited by the new thinking that was going on at the time, and Elizabeth recalls joining her parents’ weekly discussion nights, and reading Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy when she was 12. Her father is a biotechnology ethics attorney, her mother a widely regarded poet who likes to take off for frequent sojourns in the mid-west, seeking the place, as she puts it, where heaven and earth collide.

Elizabeth grew up in a free thinking household where the family often shared month-long hikes into the wilderness. She was the only kid at high school who had never seen an episode of The Simpsons. At college, she became absorbed in the environmental movement, majoring in geography and climatology, and then spent three years travelling in the developing world, producing radio documentaries for the BBC World Service. In Nepal, she witnessed the devastating power of the mudslides caused by deforestation and intense rainfall. In Thailand, she lived through a typhoon when half of the village she was staying in was swept away.

The longest and most formative period of her travels was the year she spent in the Kalahari desert, with a group of nomadic Bushmen. Elizabeth has a personal magic, which gets her accepted in the strangest of situations. She even had a Bushman husband, which amused the tribe enormously, since she was a foot taller than he was. It was while living with the Bushmen that she began her seminal work on ethnoclimatology – the study of the influence of native cultural beliefs and practices on the climate. The bushmen had an ability to commune not only with nature, but also with the wind and rain.

Elizabeth has always been fairly psychic; she says she inherits it from her mother. In her biography, she describes how while she was living in the Namib desert, she dreamt one night that she was walking on a mountain top with her sister, Anna. They lit a fire, and then Anna said “Farewell”, and hugged her. She saw Anna’s soul fly up into the clouds, and knew that she was gone. The next day, she left for the seven-day walk to National Park office, where she learnt that her sister had died of a sudden chest infection on the night of her dream.

When she returned from her travels, Elizabeth worked with Greenpeace on their climate change campaign. She was restless to pursue her own studies, however, and won a fellowship to the New York Institute for Consciousness Studies, where she wrote her pioneering study on ethno-climatology, which was published in 2003. In many parts of the world, she demonstrated that indigenous people had traditions and skills which they used to influence the weather. By burning their drums and sacred objects and banning their rituals and dances, the Christian missionaries all but destroyed a source of knowledge that was tens of thousands of years old, which might yet be able to save us from the worst effects of climate change.

Her book was a best-seller, but her colleagues in the climatological sciences were embarrassed by it. Undaunted, Elizabeth has pressed on, exploring the ‘how’ of psycho-climatic interaction, delving into the realms of parapsychology and the new physics, taking seriously such questions as ‘How can some animals sense an earthquake before it happens ?’ and ‘How does a dog know that its owner is coming home before there is any physical evidence of her arrival ?’ Like Kharoun, she was familiar with the work of Rupert Sheldrake, who asked the same questions in an attempt to provoke the scientific community to address these ordinary anomalies in the modern story. The facts are irrefutable : study after study shows that dogs do know of their owners’ imminent return – but since there has been no theory which could give the data logical coherence, the data has been ignored.

Elizabeth had no difficulty in accepting the evidence. She knew it to be so from her own experience. From her observations of wild animals in the Kalahari, from the way the bushmen related with the natural world, and by observing her own German shepherd, Kasha, it became clear to her that animals participated in a shared telesensory field. Humans did so too, she observed, but when we developed language as a more effective means of communication, our telesensory awareness was pushed into the unconscious, in the back part of the brain, where it remains to this today, operating only as intuition, and as an emergency signal in times of crisis.

There is a field of consciousness, Elizabeth says, from which we are shielded by our advanced mental processes, which provides a telesensory connection between all forms of consciousness, including natural elements such as rocks, water and the weather. Consciousness does not only happen within the mind. It is a field that exists throughout the universe. As humans, we are only aware of a small part of it. By overcoming the limits of our perception, we can access the larger field, hear the messages that are to be heard, and send the messages we need to send.

Another of Elizabeth’s contributions has been to relate her findings to the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle argues that the mathematics of chance and probability make it totally impossible for humans to have evolved in the available time, and that there must therefore be a ‘directedness’ in the universe that is intent on producing mind, or conscious thought. Elizabeth’s genius has been to show how the universal field of consciousness can be used to communicate and acquire new evolutionary and behavioural traits, speeding up the whole process of evolution. At the atomic and molecular levels, she reasons, the telesensory sharing of perceptions is almost total. An atom does not have consciousness, as the French physicist Jean Charon believed : consciousness has it.

In humans, Elizabeth observes, the field of consciousness operates at the bodily level through the presence of ‘chi’, or ‘prana’, the energy that is used by acupuncturists and healers. On the cellular and the systems level, we participate in this field. We are one with the cosmos, and it can never be otherwise.

Elizabeth’s contribution has been to take the anthropic principle, and extend it to include the universal field of consciousness, which she terms the ‘chi-anthropic field’. She has shown us how syntropy uses the telesensory potential of the chi-anthropic field to achieve its evolutionary results. It was the close parallel between her work and that of Kharoun that propelled her work into the mainstream of scientific discussion, transforming our understanding of evolution and creating a whole new story for our time.

The full implications of the breakthrough will take a while to sink in. On the surface of things, the world is carrying on as normal. The popular magazines have just started to pick up the new ideas, however, and there was a week in May when no fewer than six magazines ran cover stories on syntropy. Throughout the world, a ripple of excitement is running through people’s mental and spiritual arteries.

The implications for science are almost too much to conceive. Until now, the understanding that there might be a field of consciousness wider than the limited experience of personal consciousness has been limited to mystics, poets, healers and those who have explored the world through LSD. For serious scientists to be saying that consciousness is all-pervasive is incredible. The Buddhists say that the self is like a drop of water in the ocean. If we let go of the boundaries of the self, we will experience the whole ocean. Now science is saying the same thing – that consciousness is a field, an ocean.

This idea is quite radical enough, with its thousand implications. But to absorb the second idea that this field of consciousness has an internal syntropic pull which draws all consciousness and all creation towards wholeness, and that it has been doing so throughout evolution, is amazing.

If you’re prepared to ride with it, it’s a thrill a minute. The field of consciousness is two-way. It influences us, and we can influence it. Thoughts count : they go out like waves into the field, shaping the landscape before we arrive. Feelings and intentions colour the field around us. A dying mother sends a message to her daughter across the world; her daughter receives it. An architect designs a building without care; its occupants feel it. A suffering teenager sends out a prayer for help, and the wholeness responds, placing fortunate coincidences in his path.

Some progressive universities have been rushing to set up departments of consciousness studies. In Boston, a medical research team has announced a program to try to capture chi energy on biosilicate, for implantation into cancerous tissues. Studies have already shown that patients who receive prayers recover faster than those who don’t; now there is evidence that doctors and nurses who bring a sense of love to their work achieve better results. They enrich the field of consciousness which surrounds their patients, who absorb the energy into the cells of their bodies.

Of course, there has been the inevitable backlash. Some conservative colleges have declared themselves syntropy-free zones, and one Dean of Physics went so far as to declare the whole subject ‘mind-buggery’. It is fascinating to see watch the scientific old-guard join forces with the religious right to oppose the new thinking. After all, the world was a much simpler place when science and religion were on opposite sides. Now they have to go right back to the argument they had in the 16th century, and start all over again.

Copyright Guy Dauncey, 1995 – 1996

From the author of Effectiveness Training for Women.

The Miracle of Dialogue

Linda Adams

How often have you had the experience of being with another person where you show an interest in them by asking questions about their life and listening to them and then realize that they don’t show the same interest in you?  Or have an experience where the conversation is almost completely superficial?  Do you often find yourself wishing, as I do, that the meeting or the discussion or the dinner were over because it wasn’t a satisfying experience for you?  Do you find yourself inwardly resisting or avoiding future encounters with such people?  

It’s a basic human need to want to communicate and to have meaningful interactions with others—spouses, children, parents, friends, co-workers.  And yet it isn’t easy or comfortable to achieve  real communication—meaningful exchange—which may explain why it occurs so rarely.

Communication That Strengthens vs. Diminishes Us

Dialogue is the key to having real communication—the kind of communication in which both people feel a connection with the other and have a strong sense that a meaningful interaction is taking place—where there is a flow of meaning between them.  To have dialogue means much more than two people talking to each other.  Often in conversations, each person is trying to one-up the other or make their point no matter what or impress the other one with their knowledge or experience with little or no sensitivity to the other’s reaction.  They talk past each other and one or both of them often feels frustrated or at least dissatisfied when it’s over.  Or one person does most of the talking while the other listens passively, gradually losing interest.

Having real communication starts with the belief that it’s possible to bring meaning to every encounter whether it be a department meeting, a dinnertime discussion or a phone conversation with a friend.  Then comes the conscious decision to engage in such encounters with the intention of having a dialogue—“I want to know how you think and feel and I also want to let you know how I think and feel so that we both will come away enhanced and strengthened by our interaction”. 

Such dialogue is possible only we genuinely care about the other person at some level and have the capacity to show interest in their ideas, values and experiences.  Equally as important are our desire, courage and ability to share our own views and beliefs. In short, real and meaningful communication requires each person to be both self-disclosing and empathic.   

The Gordon Model offers people the communication skills they need to have this kind of meaningful dialogue— it offers them both the ability to understand and empathize with another’s life experiences through Active Listening (accurate receiving) and the ability to express their own ideas, opinions, values and experiences in a way that lets others know them better and as a result allows them to know themselves better as well (I Messages or clear sending).

What Gets In Our Way 

Clear sending—It’s not always easy to be congruent, i.e. to have our words match what we are thinking or feeling.  It often takes real courage to be our authentic self, to be who we really are because we expose ourselves to the reaction of others.   Being congruent means that we will be known as we really are and there can be fear attached to revealing ourselves—fear that we will be judged, misunderstood, not taken seriously, ignored or rejected.   And when others aren’t fully present or aren’t attentive and skilled listeners, this too inhibits our willingness and ability to express ourselves as we really are.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that instead of feeling frustrated and upset because we didn’t speak up, there’s a feeling of well-being, satisfaction, peace, relief, even elation that comes when we have the courage to reveal ourselves as we are, without pretense.  Each time we do this, it contributes to our core strength—often in ways that aren’t instantly apparent.  

Accurate receiving—To do this means giving the other person our full attention, acceptance and understanding.  It means suspending our own thoughts and feelings for the time being and allowing the other person to express who they really are.  It doesn’t mean we need to agree with them; it does mean we set our judgments aside and attempt to see the world as they see it.  When we are able to be open to another’s experience, there is much less chance that they will feel defensive or on guard and a good chance that they will feel accepted and understood.  Think of the feelings of relief, even catharsis that you have experienced when someone has truly understood you at a deep level.   

Being Open is the Key

When we have the courage to open ourselves to others and when we can allow ourselves to be open to their experience, true dialogue can occur and as a result, the relationship and each person as an individual will flourish.  In addition, just think about how much more interesting life would be if we all made a conscious attempt to engage with others in this way.      

Interesting series at The Edge. What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?

I Believe

Ray Kurzweil

We will find ways to circumvent the speed of light as a limit on the communication of information.

We are expanding our computers and communication systems both inwardly and outwardly. Our chips use every smaller feature sizes, while at the same time we deploy greater amounts of matter and energy for computation and communication (for example, we’re making a larger number of chips each year). In one to two decades, we will progress from two-dimensional chips to three-dimensional self-organizing circuits built out of molecules. Ultimately, we will approach the limits of matter and energy to support computation and communication.

Would anyone be shocked if some subtle ways of getting around the speed of light were discovered? The point is that if there are even subtle ways around this limit, the technological powers that our future human-machine civilization will achieve will discover these means and leverage them to great effect.

Further reading on Edge: ” One Half of an Argument”;”The Singularity”

Beyond Edge: KurzweilAI.net

Interesting series at The Edge. What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?

I Believe

Elizabeth Spelke

I believe, first, that all people have the same fundamental concepts, values, concerns, and commitments, despite our diverse languages, religions, social practices, and expressed beliefs. If defenders and opponents of abortion, Israelis and Palestinians, or Cambridge intellectuals and Amazonian jungle dwellers were to get beyond their surface differences, each would discover that the common ground linking them to members of the other group equals that which binds their own group together. Our common conceptual and moral commitments spring from the core cognitive systems that allow an infant to grow rapidly and spontaneously into a competent participant in any human society.

Second, one of our shared core systems centers on a notion that is false: the notion that members of different human groups differ profoundly in their concepts and values. This notion leads us to interpret the superficial differences between people as signs of deeper differences. It has quite a grip on us: Many people would lay down their lives for perfect strangers from their own community, while looking with suspicion at members of other communities. And all of us are apt to feel a special pull toward those who speak our language and share our ethnic background or religion, relative to those who don’t.

Third, the most striking feature of human cognition stems not from our core knowledge systems but from our capacity to rise above them. Humans are capable of discovering that our core conceptions are false, and of replacing them with truer ones. This change has happened dramatically in the domain of astronomy. Core capacities to perceive, act on, and reason about the surface layout predispose us to believe that the earth is a flat, extended surface on which gravity acts as a downward force. This belief has been decisively overturned, however, by the progress of science. Today, every child who plays computer games or watches Star Wars knows that the earth is one sphere among many, and that gravity pulls all these bodies toward one another.

Together, my three beliefs suggest a fourth. If the cognitive sciences are given sufficient time, the truth of the claim of a common human nature eventually will be supported by evidence as strong and convincing as the evidence that the earth is round. As humans are bathed in this evidence, we will overcome our misconceptions of human differences. Ethnic and religious rivalries and conflicts will come to seem as pointless as debates over the turtles that our pancake earth sits upon, and our common need for a stable, sustainable environment for all people will be recognized. But this fourth belief is conditional. Our species is caught in a race between the progress of our science and the escalation both of our intergroup conflicts and of the destructive means to pursue them. Will humans last long enough for our science to win this race?

She studies the origins and nature of knowledge of objects, persons, space, and number, by assessing behavior and brain function in human infants, children, human adults and non-human animals. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and cited by Time Magazine as one of America’s Best in Science and Medicine, her honors include the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association and the William James Award of the American Psychological Society

My focus for 2005 is to Think Globally, but Act Locally so I am busy with my new class A Time for Healing in Monterey, California. … So today, I feature a transcript of a speech delivered in 2000.

Making the World Work

Walt Patterson

The time has come for me to reveal an embarrassing secret. Some twenty years ago, at the end of the 1970s, I wrote a book. I gave it the title Energy and Purpose. By purpose I meant what we humans want from energy, and how we try to get it . A reputable publisher gave me a modest advance. I worked on the book for two years, eventually accumulating about 100 000 words of text. But the longer I worked on it the less I liked it. I finally had to confess to myself that I didn t know what I was talking about. I didn t understand enough about energy and purpose to say anything I considered useful or persuasive. I gave the publisher back the advance, piled the typescript in a cardboard box and stashed it in my archive, along with the unpublished novel, the unpublished textbook and the unproduced musical.

This evening I propose to return to the scene of my failure two decades ago, to talk again about energy and purpose – what we humans want from energy, whether we can get it and if so how. I have an alarming sense of deja vu, knowing I have been here before, and wondering whether I can do any better this time. I also have less than an hour, and less than 6000 words. Wish me luck.

Why talk about energy and purpose? The short answer is that we re making a mess of it. The world isn t working well enough. More than two billion people – one-third of humanity – have no access to the kinds of energy benefits we here tonight take for granted; and the proportion of energy have-nots is increasing, not decreasing. Worse still, the key fuels and energy technologies of the energy haves , like us – fossil fuels, nuclear power, large dams – all face problems that may become insuperable. If that doesn’t worry you, I m wasting your time here this evening. I hope I m not wasting your time.

What do YOU want from energy? You probably never gave the matter a moment s thought. That s as it should be. Almost everything you get from energy you get without even noticing. It doesn t involve a meter; you don t get billed for it. You get surroundings whose temperature mostly stays within limits your body can tolerate. You get sunlight processed by green leaves, that store up the solar energy in a form you can eventually eat, for your muscles to use. As a by-product from the green leaves you get the oxygen you breathe to process the food; and so on. You are immersed in – and indeed you are a part of – natural energy systems of astonishing complexity and variety; and you take them all for granted.

You are also, however, immersed in energy processes that you yourself, and other people, initiate and control – what we can call human energy systems. Some you take for granted as completely as you take natural energy systems for granted. I ll bet you can t remember the last time you turned on a light. Some human energy systems you notice, at least some of the time – particularly when they fail. When you turn the key in the ignition, or flip the light switch, and nothing happens, you notice. You also notice when you get a bill. That may be part of the problem. In the last three decades we have come to think of energy as something you get a bill for. Tonight I propose to argue that this should change.

Let s start with this word energy . When you think of energy, you probably think of oil, coal, natural gas, electricity. I don t. By training, I m a hard scientist. I used to call myself a lapsed nuclear physicist. I am also, as my family and friends will testify, a pedant. I m obsessively fussy about language. The language we now use to talk about energy drives me crazy. It s wrong, wrong, wrong. If we can t even describe the issues and options correctly we ll never get the policy right.

How many times have you heard some energy specialist refer to energy production or energy consumption ? These people are supposed to be experts. Haven t they heard of the First Law of Thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy? NO ONE produces energy. NO ONE consumes energy. The amount of energy in THE WHOLE UNIVERSE remains the same. That s what makes energy such a valuable and important concept for understanding how the world works. We don t have to conserve energy. Nature does it for us.

Why, then, do we talk this way? The answer is simple. When we talk about energy production, energy consumption and energy conservation, we don t mean energy . We mean energy carriers – that is, fuels and electricity. The confusion dates back only about three decades. Until the early 1970s governments had fuel policy . They had Ministries of Fuel, or perhaps of Fuel and Power – power meaning electricity. Then, in October 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries suddenly quadrupled the world price of oil, and plunged the world into a panic. Governments everywhere launched a frenzied search for a substitute for oil. Within weeks all the different fuels, plus electricity, were swept together and called energy, as if they were all potential substitutes for one another, all more or less interchangeable. Fuel policy became energy policy . Governments exhorted their citizens to conserve energy . Ministries of Fuel became Departments of Energy. Oil companies, coal companies, gas companies and electricity companies all became energy companies . Here in the UK the Institute of Fuel.

So what? Everyone knows that specialists talking about energy really mean energy carriers – oil, coal, natural gas, electricity. Lumping them all together and calling them energy is just a convenient shorthand. Does this quirk of language really matter, except to pedants like me? I think it does. It distorts our understanding of what we are actually doing with energy; and here I mean energy , not fuels and electricity. Worse still, this misleading language obscures crucial options we now have – ways for us to use energy much better.

Note that I m talking about using energy. That s what we do with energy. We don t consume it, we use it. Humans have been using energy on purpose since long before the beginning of recorded history. Our human ancestors began using energy by intervening intentionally in natural energy flows, or what I like to call ambient energy – energy that is there for us to use, with no meter and no bills to pay. The first energy technologies that our human ancestors hit upon were clothing and shelter. In cold weather clothing reduces the loss of heat energy from your body; in hot weather it protects you from too much solar energy. Shelter provides an enclosed space, reducing energy flows and keeping the temperature inside more stable than that outside; inside the shelter you are more comfortable. You may not usually think of clothing and shelter as energy technologies. But if you really want to understand how we humans use energy, clothing and shelter are fundamental. Note, too, that clothing and shelter are physical materials. You don t measure or pay for the energy flows involved; the clothing and the shelter manage the energy flows for you. Keep that in mind. It s important.

Humans were probably manipulating ambient energy in these basic but fundamental ways long before they learned to control fire and use fuel. Fire and the fuel to feed it opened many new possibilities. Nevertheless, intervening in ambient energy remained an important aspect of using energy on purpose. In many parts of the world, for instance, humans developed increasingly subtle and ingenious ways to design the energy technologies we call buildings. They selected materials and erected structures to use the ambient energy of sunlight, moving air and human bodies for comfort, light and ventilation. They also developed technologies including sails, windmills and watermills, to use the ambient energy of wind and water for human purposes.

Ambient energy is all around us, whether or not we explicitly want to use it. Fuel, by contrast, is a material containing energy that we can release on purpose, when and where we want to use it. The word fuel comes from old French fowaille , which comes in turn from low Latin focale and Latin focus , meaning fireplace . Etymologically, a fuel is material for a fireplace . Historically, a fuel is a material you can burn, to release its stored energy as heat. This creates a local high temperature, in which you can cook food, fire ceramics and smelt metals. But the real potential of fuel emerged only less than three centuries ago, with the invention of the steam engine. The steam engine could convert the heat energy from a burning fuel into mechanical energy – a source of controlled force and motion much more powerful than human or animal muscles, and more predictable than wind or water. The steam engine tipped the balance. Since the advent of the steam engine, giving us this potent additional way to use fuel energy, we have gradually forgotten about using ambient energy. Instead we have concentrated our attention on fuel energy – usable energy stored in a form that can be stockpiled, transported, and released in concentrated form, when and where we want to use it.

Note one important corollary. Fuel energy is comparatively easy to measure and quantify – so many tons of firewood or coal, barrels of oil, cubic metres of natural gas. Because it can be stored, it can be possessed – someone can take title to it and own it. It can therefore be bought and sold. Nobody can buy or sell ambient energy, because nobody owns it – not yet, at any rate. Keep the distinction between ambient energy and fuel energy in mind. It s important. The steam engine, and all the numberless energy technologies that have come after it, also demonstrate another key point. At its simplest, fuel energy can be released directly from the fuel and used as it comes – say from a bonfire. However, precisely because it is being released intentionally, for a human purpose, fuel energy is usually released in the context of some sort of physical hardware – an energy technology designed to control and direct the conversion of the fuel energy.

For example, my wife and I are building a little house on a remote hillside on a Greek island. The house is heavily insulated – roof, walls, windows and floor – in order to take maximum advantage of the ambient energy, whatever the temperature outside, to keep us cool in summer and warm in winter. In northern Greece, however, winters can be pretty cold. Rather than lighting a bonfire on the kitchen floor we have a black potbellied stove. It is essentially a metal canister with a lid, a small front door into which we put the fuel, and a pipe to channel the smoke of the fire out the back of the house. We burn dead heather branches from the hillside, scrap planks from the builders, cardboard packaging, essentially anything combustible. It converts the energy from the fuel into radiant heat energy that saturates the structural material of the house. If it s cold outside, a short burst of heat from the stove fine-tunes the temperature inside, and keeps us cosy for hours. Of course a lot of the heat from the stove escapes out the chimney, and the emissions would probably get us into trouble in London. As an energy technology our potbellied stove could scarcely be more basic. But we have fallen in love with it.

Our potbellied stove, however, illustrates another significant aspect of human energy use. Precisely because the stove is such basic energy technology, it can use the most basic fuel – whatever we can lay our hands on to burn. The only processing the fuel requires is to break or cut it into pieces small enough to put in the stove. Although we bought and paid for the energy technologies we use – the house itself, and the stove in the kitchen – we don t have to buy the fuel. We can gather and cut it up ourselves. It costs us our own time and effort, but doesn t take any expertise.

In that respect, our stove is no longer a typical energy technology, at least in this part of the world. Over the past three centuries, the interaction between fuels and energy technologies has become ever more specialized. A particular technology requires a particular fuel, and vice versa. The specifications of both the technology and the fuel have become steadily more stringent. Your car engine probably demands not petroleum, not even plain petrol , but unleaded premium petrol. As my wife and I now know, a cooker designed for natural gas will not work safely on bottled propane; and so on.

That’s the main reason why looking for a substitute for oil in the 1970s was misconceived. You can t change the fuel without changing the energy technology that uses it. Preparing, delivering and supplying fuels appropriate for their corresponding energy technologies now requires not only high levels of expertise, but elaborate organization of all the necessary skills and competences, with all that that implies. You can t collect the fuel on a hillside. Just as you buy and pay for the energy technology, you also have to buy and pay for the fuel. The companies you buy the fuel from used to be similarly specialized – oil companies, coal companies, gas companies. That, however, is now changing rapidly — as we shall see.

Within the past century, the human use of energy in much of the world has come to depend not merely on separate individual fuels and technologies, but on entire intricate human energy systems, complex and interconnected. To fulfil our many purposes these human energy systems use a combination of ambient energy and fuel energy not merely in individual energy technologies but in a vast human energy infrastructure. Enormous aggregations of buildings are expanding into megacities. The buildings are filled with other energy technologies, and linked by roads, pipes, cables and other interacting connections, extending human energy processes not only across entire continents but even bridging the oceans.

As well as natural energy systems, we now have a human energy infrastructure that also covers the planet. Much of this human energy infrastructure delivers the energy services we all want – comfort, cooked food, illumination, motive power, information handling and so on. However, a substantial part of this infrastructure is now devoted to collecting, preparing and delivering fuel energy to run the rest of the infrastructure. Making substantial changes to the delivery infrastructure can take as long as making substantial changes to the energy-service infrastructure, and cost at least as much.

Among the specialized and complex energy systems we have created, perhaps the most specialized are those that function with an energy carrier quite different from fuel. I mean of course electricity. No matter what you may hear from politicians and others, electricity is not a fuel. A fuel is a physical substance. You can store it until you want to use it or sell it. Electricity, in the form in which we use it, cannot be stored. Electricity is not a physical substance; it is a physical phenomenon, happening simultaneously throughout an entire interconnected system; it has to be generated more or less exactly as it is being used. Fuels and electricity also differ in another fundamental way. A fuel such as natural gas comes out of a hole in the ground at a particular place. If you want to use it somewhere else you have to carry it there. Electricity, by contrast, you can generate anywhere, at a price. Just ask the person with the hissing headphones sitting next to you on the bus.

Because electricity can t be stored, whenever you use it you have to have the entire system in place and operating. The person with the headphones, for example, is carrying the whole system. Back in the 1870s, the first systems for electric light were likewise local; generator, cables, and lamps were all on the same site. Some generators used ambient energy, with a water wheel; others used fuel, with a steam engine. The arrangement was reassuringly expensive; only the wealthiest and most ostentatious could afford electric light. At the beginning of the 1880s, however, Thomas Edison had a bright idea. He scaled up the entire system, to reduce the unit cost of lighting individual lamps; and he enlisted subscribers on sites all around his central generating station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, charging them according to how many lamps they used. Edison was selling electric light – what his customers actually wanted. To keep the cost of the electric light as low as possible Edison had to optimize the entire system – generator, cables and lamps.

Soon thereafter, however, came a critical change in the arrangements – the introduction of the electricity meter. From that time on, Edison, his contemporaries and their successors were no longer selling electric light; they were selling electricity, by the metered unit. The advent of the electricity meter had an additional consequence. If you are selling electric light, you want the whole system producing the light to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible. If, on the other hand, you are selling units of electricity as measured by an electricity meter, someone using less efficient lamps has to buy more electricity from you to get the same level of illumination. From the point of view of you, the seller, inefficiency on your customer s premises is good for your business. This perverse incentive has underpinned the electricity business for a century.

The introduction of the electricity meter made electricity analogous to fuel in one key respect. If you used electricity from a central-station system you bought the electricity by the unit, just like fuel. In other respects, however, electricity evolved as a distinct and specialized form of energy carrier. As an energy carrier electricity proved extraordinarily versatile. It could even be used to collect and convert for use ambient energy from concentrated sources — even as dramatically concentrated as Niagara Falls. But electricity demanded highly skilled specialists to design the interconnected system and operate it continuously in real time, responding immediately whenever some electricity user threw a switch. It also involved what eventually became staggering amounts of capital investment in the electricity infrastructure itself. Nevertheless Edison s crucial idea, of scaling up the system to lower the cost of the services it could provide, succeeded magnificently. In my book Transforming Electricity I declared that Electricity systems may be the most spectacularly successful technology of the twentieth century. They work so well that those who most rely on them hardly notice them .

Remember, however, that you can generate electricity anywhere, at a price. The whole point of traditional central- station electricity systems following Edison is to lower the cost of delivering electric light and the many other services electricity technologies provide. But electricity by itself is useless. Electricity just carries energy; the energy has to be converted into a useful form by an energy technology such as a lamp, a motor or a computer. When it is being used, the energy technology involved – lamp, motor, computer – becomes a functioning part of the electricity system. In this respect electricity as an energy carrier is fundamentally different from any fuel. The whole system – generators, networks and end-use technologies or loads – is part of the human energy infrastructure, operating continuously in real time. You can keep a stack of wood, a pile of coal, a tank of oil or even a canister of compressed natural gas on site, ready to use when you wish. But if you want to use electricity from a traditional system the whole system – that vast array of capital assets – has to be operating with you, in real time. In that respect, oddly enough, using electricity has a lot in common with using ambient energy, and the link is going to get steadily closer. Like electricity, ambient energy is delivered continuously. Ambient energy can t be stored, except as low-grade heat. To use ambient energy on purpose, you need physical assets – a building, a water turbine, a wind turbine, a photovoltaic panel – that is, physical infrastructure. For some purposes, such as comfort – probably the single most important human purpose for using energy – if you make the physical infrastructure good enough, ambient energy may well suffice, with no resort to fuel energy. In much of the world, however, we have accumulated a built infrastructure whose performance with ambient energy all too often seems wilfully poor, making fuel energy essential if we are to get the comfort we want. When I first arrived in Britain from Winnipeg in Canada forty years ago, I could not believe the buildings in Britain. The heat inside barely slowed down before it escaped outdoors.

We also settle for poor performance from the energy technologies inside and around the buildings. When I arrived in London I lived in a bedsitter in Bayswater. The bath was in a sort of greenhouse over the front door. The boiler was in the basement. The hot water pipe from the boiler ran up the exterior wall. Not only was it not lagged, it was painted black — the best colour for radiators. As you can imagine, the water running into the tub was barely tepid. I couldn t understand why they bothered.

That may sound like an extreme example, but it s not. Countless reports and analyses have underlined the inadequate performance of lighting, motive power and other energy technologies in many parts of the world, and deplored the missed opportunities for so-called energy efficiency – another expression I have come to avoid. Many reasons have been suggested. I m sure you ve all read the meticulous and detailed lists of barriers to energy efficiency that have been pouring out since the 1970s, and they are all true. But the single underlying reason why our human energy infrastructure does not perform better is that most of us can t be bothered. We have other things to think about. If we are ever going to make the sweeping improvements in human energy use long since readily available, if we are ever going to make the world work better, someone has to want to – someone who can make it happen.

By now you re probably thinking What about costs? How can he talk so long without mentioning costs? Let s talk about costs. Energy itself costs nothing. However, if you want to use ambient energy you have to design and fabricate the technology to do so. If you want to use fuel energy you have to produce and process the fuel, and deliver it to where it is to be used; and you have to design and fabricate the technology to use the fuel. Once you get beyond the mud hut and the bonfire, all these activities have become variously part of a financial economy, carried out in transactions mediated by money. The skills, competences, responsibilities and risks involved have been divided up and apportioned out in ways that once appeared to make sense, but now look profoundly unsatisfactory, because of what they have done to human energy infrastructure.

Consider, for instance, the two parts of this infrastructure I mentioned earlier. One part delivers the energy services we want. The other part delivers the fuels and electricity to run the first part. Both parts represent investments in physical assets. Because the fuels and electricity are to be sold by the unit to users, the investment in all of this part of the infrastructure generally receives favourable tax treatment, as business investment. An investment, say, to increase the generating capacity of an electricity system, is allowed against tax; whereas investments in, say, more efficient refrigerators to make extra generation unnecessary are not. This one single anomaly, replicated across all the energy infrastructure, skews the pattern severely, in favour of more investment in delivering fuels and electricity, and less investment in delivering better energy services. Tax regimes thus tend to encourage investment in infrastructure that makes money, rather than in infrastructure that delivers the energy services we citizens want. Using ambient energy does not make money — not at the moment. But fuel energy can be stored and sold, by the unit. What costs money is not the energy, but storing it, carrying it to where it is to be used and converting it. We use fuels and electricity to have energy available where, when and in what form we want; and we pay for the privilege. Policy people call this commercial energy , as if paying for it makes it better. Commentators scrutinize the prices of fuels and electricity, and analyze their movements minutely. However, in our modern interconnected society the prices of fuels and electricity by the unit have long been essentially artificial, shaped by preferential tax regimes, subsidies and cross-subsidies, cartels and outright monopolies, as in the case of electricity networks. With this in mind the highly respected chairman of Ireland’s Electricity Supply Board, Patrick Moriarty, once remarked succinctly The price of electricity is what the government wants it to be. Much the same can be said of fuels. Except for short-term advantage, price is not a good enough criterion.

If we were stuck with these traditional arrangements for using energy on purpose, concentrating on selling fuels and electricity by the unit at more or less arbitrary prices, we would have little chance of making the world work better. Fortunately, however, within the past five years or so something remarkable has begun to happen. I don t really understand it yet, and I m not alone. But if I’m reading it right we may at last be starting to move in the right direction.

I noted earlier that if we really want to change human energy infrastructure to make it work better, someone has to want to – someone with the clout to make it happen. Well, now someone wants to – and not just a single someone but a rapidly lengthening catalogue of some of the biggest players in the game. As some of us foresaw, the apparently modest and constrained measures originally billed merely as privatization and restructuring of traditional electricity industries in the UK and elsewhere have acquired a headlong momentum, far beyond the expectations of those who set the changes in motion just over a decade ago. The speed of change is already breathtaking, and accelerating.

Companies whose business used to be centred entirely on supplying fuel or electricity by the unit are now evolving in many different directions, at breakneck speed. In the mid-1980s, for instance, Enron was a low-profile operator of natural gas pipelines in the US. In the intervening fifteen years it has ramified into an independent electricity generator with assets all over the world, a international water company, and most recently an almost hyperactive global trader via the internet. In the autumn of 1999 Enron and the major industrial firm Owens Corning signed a contract for more than one billion dollars, according to which Enron will manage all of Owens Corning s energy requirements for ten years – not just fuels and electricity but plant upgrades, maintenance, a complete energy service package.

Less than a year ago the world s largest engineering company, ABB, was one of the handful of huge companies manufacturing large-scale generating equipment for traditional electricity systems. Then, in the autumn of last year, ABB sold off all its nuclear activities; and at the end of March this year ABB also sold off all the rest of its large- scale power generation interests. Two weeks ago today, on 8 June, ABB s chief executive and top management held a dramatic press conference in London and on the Internet, announcing a new company-wide strategy focusing on solutions and services for much more decentralized electricity systems. ABB is launching a whole porfolio of innovative on-site and local generating technologies, including microturbines, fuel cells and a new design of wind generator, plus all the innovative network technologies and controls the new systems will require. The company is offering not just the technologies but complete service packages, including finance, operation and management. Meanwhile the German companies RWE and VEW, as they gradually merge, are publishing full-page ads in the Financial Times in which the new company calls itself an energy infrastructure company. TXU Europe announces a new programme it calls Staywarm in which it will sell agreed levels of comfort to low-income households, at a fixed price, not according to units of electricity. ScottishPower, too, is upgrading the homes of low-income neighbourhoods in Glasgow, on a similar basis. Vattenfall in Sweden is promoting the Smart House , with its own on-site generation. In Brussels last month the European Commission and Eurelectric, the union of electricity industries, held a high-level conference entitled From Electricity Supply to Energy Services . Our hosts tonight, PowerGen, are now offering not just units of electricity but energy solutions, as you ll see from the programme pack this evening.

These are only a handful of examples; I could cite many more. Do you see a pattern emerging? These major companies are redefining the business they are in, and the relationship they want to have with their customers. Their focus is shifting steadily away from selling fuel and electricity by the unit. Instead they are offering to sell the energy services that their customers actually require, bringing both expertise and financial resources to bear on the energy service infrastructure itself. These big players can overcome the hassle factor , the can t be bothered factor that keeps the rest of us from making energy work better; and they can do so for sound commercial reasons. How this is going to work out in practice no one yet knows. But here are some possibilities you might like to ponder. In the sort of world we may be moving towards, big companies will do the short-term trading, not only in fuels and electricity but also in all the requisite energy hardware. This is happening already; the internet is humming with deal-making of every kind. But relations between companies and energy users will be on the basis of service contracts — contracts to supply whatever comfort, illumination, motive power, information handling or other energy services customers desire, at fixed contract prices over stated periods of time. For energy users, units of fuel and electricity will disappear from the picture.

Big companies will out-source a vast amount of their on-site activities; they will need plenty of staff and contract employees to install, maintain, service and upgrade energy technologies for their customers. They will also enter alliances, to bring together skills and competence hitherto separate and disconnected, from architects and designers through to electronics, control and network specialists, pooling their expertise and sharing responsibility to get the whole service system right. Financial links with customers need not include outright sale of hardware; leasing and other contractual arrangements may be more appropriate when technology is evolving so rapidly.

Governments, in turn, will have to revise and reshape company law to foster these activities, and to ensure that big players deal fairly with each other, with employees, with smaller players and with customers. Energy service contracts, even those with individual householders, will have to be enforceable in law, with penalties for failure. Governments will also have to reorganize tax regimes and fiscal structures. They must shift the balance away from expanding fuel and electricity delivery infrastructure, in favour of upgrading the energy service infrastructure. Governments will set an example and prime the pump for energy service business, by calling for tenders and contracting for their own requirements, especially for their own extensive stock of buildings. Governments will have to take explicit responsibility to make energy services available to the poorest and most vulnerable in society, by tenders and contracts for services, paid for out of government social service budgets.

For years we ve been talking about sustainable energy . In my more hopeful moments I think we may at last be seeing the initial stages of the evolution that will get us there — not just just those of us among the energy haves , but also the two billion people who are still waiting. In the course of this new century we may even manage to make human energy systems work like natural systems, continually delivering the services we want while most of us don t even notice. Can human energy systems converge toward natural energy systems? I find the vision appealing and exhilarating.

I know all too well that energy is only one of the fundamental issues that challenge us. But if we don t get energy right the other issues will be insoluble. Last year I tackled what proved to be the most difficult piece of writing I ve ever done. It was a millennium essay, written for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, published at the end of last November. I called it Running The Planet. As this modest title indicates, the essay was an attempt to reassess the fundamentals of human life on earth, from first principles. As you might imagine, I lay awake night after night for many months, wrestling with it. I don t intend to summarize the analysis; if you re interested we ve included some copies with the programme material here this evening, and you can also download the essay from the Royal Institute web site. But Running The Planet proved to be a distillation of my own world-view. Since writing it I have found that I read newspapers and watch the TV news in a very different way.

One key aspect that emerged is my profound conviction that we humans cannot long survive as a species, on this interconnected planet we share, unless we can rectify the gaping disparities that divide us. As I said in Running The Planet The co-existence of opulent luxury and desperate poverty, sometimes within the same urban area, is not a recipe for stability . Nor can we keep borrowing from our descendants.

If we are to meet this challenge, we have to get energy right. We have to make the world work better, and I think we can. But I must close with the closing lines of Running The Planet: No one knows all the answers. We may not even be asking the right questions. We re all in this together, and we’ll need all the help we can get.

On 22 June 2000, at the London Planetarium, the Institute of Energy presented its highest award, the Melchett Medal for 2000, to Walt Patterson, Senior Research Fellow at the Energy and Environment Programme. After the presentation Walt delivered his Melchett Medal lecture, entitled ’Energy 21: Making The World Work’.

I am starting a new Class on Health and Wellness in Monterey, California tomorrow evening. Among other things I will be discussing stress and disease.

A Definition of Disease

Timothy Wilken, MD

Since the beginning of medicine, physicians have sought an understanding of the cause and definition of disease. They have not been very successful in finding either. A book entitled Theories and Philosophies of Medicine, published in 1973, has a chapter entitled, “Disease—An Undefined Word”. In this chapter, the authors list 39 different definitions of disease used in the history of medicine. These 39 definitions cover the entire gamut of man’s experience. None of these definitions are satisfactory from a scientific viewpoint. I will present two of the definitions that are still in widespread use today. These definitions are presently being taught to the medical students of the western world.

DORLAND’S MEDICAL DICTIONARY defines disease as: “In general, any departure from a state of health, or an illness, or a sickness. More specifically, a definite morbid process having a characteristic train of symptoms. It may affect the whole body or any of its parts and its etiology, pathology, and prognosis may be known or unknown.”

STEDMAN’S MEDICAL DICTIONARY describes disease thusly, “Morbus, illness, sickness. An interruption or perversion of functions of any of the organs, a morbid change of any of the tissues or an abnormal state of the body as a whole, continuing for a longer or shorter period.”

These two definitions both fail to meet the criteria of an operational definition. They suffer from what in science is called circular logic and in fact are of little value. Dr. Selye does not explicitly define disease in his classic work THE STRESS OF LIFE published in 1976; however, he states his preference for a definition from a much less popular medical dictionary called BLAKISTON’S NEW GOULD MEDICAL DICTIONARY.

BLAKISTON DEFINES DISEASE AS FOLLOWS: “The failure of the adaptive mechanism of an organism to counteract adequately the stimuli or stressors to which it is subject, resulting in a disturbance in function or structure of any part, organ, or system of the body.”

This definition of disease is not circular and is presently the best definition available to western medicine. Any general theory of health will require an explicit operational definition of disease. That definition will need to be as absolute as the definitions we use in classical physics.

The Nature of Stressors

Dr. Hans Selye discusses the definition of Stress at length in many writings. His simplest and most generally accepted definition is: “The non-specific response of the body to any demand.” Selye further defines stressor as: “that which produces stress.”

In view of the mind-body unification, we can define stressor as follows:

“STRESSOR—ANY DEMAND MADE ON THE MIND-BODY TO ADAPT.”

This expanded definition of stressor is broader and includes things not normally considered to be stressors. This definition allows to divide stressors into two general classes—external and internal stressors. The external stressors can be further divided into three types—physical stressors, biological stressors, and social stressors.

Physical Stressors—The physical stressors are any physical demand made on the mind-body to adapt. They include heat, cold ionizing radiation, chemicals, poisons, toxins, fire, electricity, and trauma of any type.

Biological Stressors—The biological stressors are any biological demand made on the mind-body to adapt. These are primarily adversary living systems which adapt by attacking and exploiting the mind-body. They may be simple or complex. Examples include viruses, bacteria, rickettsia, fungi, parasites, and predators.

Social Stressors—The social stressors are any social demands made on the mind-body to adapt. Social stressors are of two types: coercive and non-coercive. The coercive social stressors are non-voluntary demands made upon the mind-body to adapt. This would include assault, murder, rape, theft, arson, and any crime against an individual and his property. Another example of the coercive social stressors are the non-voluntary demands made by any form of political government such as taxation, regulation, restriction, and incarceration. This would further include all social stressors produced by action of the political government—i.e. war, inflation, recession, injustice, et cetera.

The non-coercive social stressors are voluntary demands made on the mind-body to adapt. They include all voluntary contractual demand relate to marriage, employee/employer relationships, personal friendships, purchase contracts, financial loans, et cetera. The non-coercive social stressors also include the positive stressors for humankind, These are the demands we place on ourselves to achieve our goals and build our civilization. So, some stressors are good for us.

Internal Stressors—The internal stressors are produced by maladaptation of the mind-body. They are the result of errors of stressor adaptability (the ability of the mind-body to adapt to stressors). The most common internal stressors encountered in humans are the maladaptive negative emotions. For this discussion, I propose to use a definition of a human emotion modified after, and expanded from, the operational definition of a human emotion by Dr. David Graham of the University of Wisconsin:

Human Emotion—”A human emotion is the internal, physiological sensation (i.e., gut feeling or inner urges to act) that a human experiences in anticipation and adaptation to stressors. These sensations are the result of the release of powerful adaptive hormones and physiological change that occur throughout the mind-body in preparation for adaptation.”

If a human emotion is appropriate to the provocative stressor, then the emotion serves as part of the mind-body’s stressor adaptability. However, if the emotion is inappropriate, then that emotion becomes an internal stressor for the mind-body. Anger is the emotion that accompanies the mind-body’s preparation to fight. If an individual becomes angry when attacked by a mugger, the individual’s ability to fight off the mugger is improved, and, therefore, the anger is part of the individual’s stressor adaptability. However, if a mother becomes angry with her two-year old child, her anger interferes with her ability to rationally communicate with her child. Since it would be irrational for the mother to want to fight her two-year old chid, her anger acts as an internal stressor for her and her actions as an external stressor for the child.

Other examples of errors of stressor adaptability which produce internal stressor would include auto-immune phenomena (when the immune system of a living system loses its ability to recognize self and attacks its own cells and tissues) and cancer (when a cell type loses its identity with the living system and begins functioning like an adversary living system reproducing itself and parasitizing the living system for which it originated).

Our expansion of the concept of stressors to include physical, biological, volitional, and internal stressors results in a major simplification and an important step toward the understanding of all disease.

THE STRESSOR HYPOTHESIS OF DISEASE PROPAGATION

Disease results within a living system whenever the system’s stressor adaptability (the total ability of the living system to adapt to stressors) is exceeded by the sum of the stressors acting upon the system.

Disease————> when (sa – s) < 0

(where sa represents stressor adaptability and s represents stressors)

A NEW CONCEPT OF STRESS AND DISEASE

Disease, from the stressor Hypothesis of Disease Propagation, results within a living system when the sum of stressors acting upon that living system exceeds the system’s ability to adapt. Disease further results in any living system wherein the order within the system is decreasing, or the disorder within the system is increasing. Disease may be localized or generalized, and can affect part of the living system or the entire living system. Disease can affect any level of organization within a living system—cellular, tissue, organ, or organism as a whole. The Stressor Hypothesis of Disease Propagation leads to a more satisfactory definition of stress within living system. This definition of stress is patterned after the classical definition of stress from physics. Stress in physics is defined as follows:

If a steel wire is put under tension, then:

(physical stress) S p = F/A

(force along the wire) divided by (the cross-section area of the wire)

For living systems, I define stress as follows:

(living system stress) S ls = s / sa

(sum of stressors) divided by (stressor adaptability)

From the above definition of living system stress, it follows that disease can be said to exist in any living system wherein the stress is greater than one (1).

S ls = s / sa > 1

Disease is an evolutionary process, and the concept of living system stress is helpful in staging disease within a living system. I find it useful to define four stages of disease that can exist within the living system as a whole or within any of the levels of organization within the living system. The four stages of disease are defined as follows:

DISTRESS—Stage 1—Distress exists within a living system when the sum of stressors acting upon the living system exceeds the stressor adaptability of the system producing a localized or generalized loss of function. The living system, by using reserves and stored energy, is able to restore function without disability.

DISABILITY—Stage 2—Disability exists within a living system when the sum of stressors acting upon the living system exceeds the stressor adaptability of the system producing a localized or generalized loss of function. The living system is unable to restore function even using reserves and stored energy. This must always include functions considered essential; should include functions considered normal; and when more is know, will include functions thar are considered optimal. When using this definition of disability, it is necessary to state the level of organization with the living system to which the disability refers. Disability, by definition, is reversible.

DAMAGE—Stage 3—Damage exists within a living system when the sum of stressors acting upon the living system exceeds the stressor adaptability of the system producing a non-reversible disability. Damage can exist at any level of organization within the living system or within the living system as a whole. No cure is possible at this stage of disease.

DEATH—Stage 4—Death exists within a living system when the sum of stressors acting upon the living system exceeds the stressor adaptability of the living system producing a loss of ability of the living system to produce negentropy or order. Death is irreversible. Disease is evolutionary—first distress, then disability, then damage, and finally death.

Distress, disability, damage, and death can exist at individual levels of organization within living systems as well as the living system as a whole. The first few stages of disease—distress and disability —are curable. The second two stages of disease—damage and death—are not curable and not reversible. As the science of medicine progresses, disease presently considered damage may be converted to disability by new understanding and technology.

The test of the rightness of any hypothesis lies in corroboration The Stressor Hypothesis of Disease Propagation was formulated over a six-month period, beginning late August of 1978. As a physician providing care for patients on a daily basis, I have had ample opportunity to corroborate the essential features of this Hypothesis. Widespread corroboration and acceptance, of course, can only come after widespread disclosure. The usefulness of any hypothesis depends upon application. I have been applying the Unified Stress Concept to my own life and to the lives of my patients for over two decades now. I am satisfied that such application is of great benefit to me and to my patients. In over twenty years of application, I have found no instances in which the principles are not valid.

Read the full paper

Voluntary Simplicity & Soulful Living

Duane Elgin

Writing in 1845, Henry Thoreau set the soulful tone for the simple life in Walden, in which he wrote these famous lines:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront all of the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach , and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. . .

The Hindu poet Tagore wrote, ” I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.” Those choosing a life of simplicity are not leaving the song of their soul unsung. Instead, they are living “deep,” diving into life with engagement and enthusiasm. And, in living that way, they are no doubt experiencing what Thoreau discovered—that “it is life near the bone where it is sweetest.” To live simply is to approach life and each moment as inherently worthy of our attention and respect, consciously attending to the small details of life. In attending to these details, we nurture the soul. Thomas Moore explains in Care of the Soul:

Care of the soul requires craft, skill, attention, and art. To live with a high degree of artfulness means to attend to the small things that keep the soul engaged. . . to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfulness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparent insignificance.

For many, the American dream has become the soul’s nightmare. Often, the price of affluence is inner alienation and emptiness. Not surprisingly, polls show that a growing number of Americans are seeking lives of greater simplicity as a way to rediscover the life of the soul.

Although the mass media may focus on the external trappings of a simple life, if we look below the surface, we find a powerful new form of personal spirituality motivating the vast majority of these life-way innovators. For many, their spirituality is an individualized form of faith that minimizes rules and absolutes, and bears little resemblance to the pure form of any of the world’s religions. Their experience with the soulful dimensions of life and relationships is so rich and meaningful that a consumerist lifestyle appears pale by comparison.

I have had a quarter-century of experience writing about, speaking about, and living a life of voluntary simplicity. Based on that, here are other priorities (beyond material frugality) that I have found that characterize this way of living:

ï Sacred relationships—Those choosing the simple life tend to place a high priority on the quality and integrity of their relationships with every aspect of life—with themselves, other people, other creatures, the Earth, and the universe.

ï Giving One’s True gifts—This way of living supports discovering and expressing the true gifts that are unique to each of us, as opposed to waiting until we die to discover that we have not authentically lived out our true potentials.

ï Living with Balance—The simple life is not narrowly focused on living with less; instead, it is a continuously changing process of consciously balancing the inner and outer aspects of our lives, an immensely demanding process in our busy, complex, and confusing world.

ï Life as a Meditation—Living simply enables us to approach life as a meditation. By consciously organizing our lives to minimize distractions and needless busyness, we can pay attention to life’s small details and deepen our soulful relationship with life.

All of the world’s spiritual traditions have advocated an inner-directed way of life that does not place undue emphasis on material things. The Bible speaks frequently about the need to find a balance between the material and the spiritual sides of life, such as in this passage: “Give me neither poverty nor wealth.” (Proverbs 30 : From China and the Taoist tradition, Lao-tzu said that: “he who knows he has enough is rich.” In Buddhism, there is a conscious emphasis on discovering a middle way through life that seeks balance and material sufficiency. The soulful value of the simple life has been recognized for thousands of years. What is new is that world circumstances are changing in such a way that this way of life now has unprecedented relevance for our times.