0.0.0.0 Would Our Legacy Survive?

by Richard Graupner

  These discussions, at the time, had been depressing and disturbing for me. In hindsight, I could see the validity of it, but at the time, I was, like the vast majority of people, caught up in the publicized glamour of it all and still too young to have experienced the sharp end of the system. I did ask my father, if this information about the system was available, why more people did not take this up and begin to break down the process? ‘Think of it like this,’ he had replied. ‘Like all life on this planet, man is designed as a creature of habit. The morphic fields within which we all operate serve as a database from which we pull much of our behaviour. Even though we are essentially the same, we find ourselves asking why certain races or countries accept certain ways of life or do things in a certain way. They wonder the same about us. For example, it can be seen how long a country can take to adapt to changes, as in Africa. These morphic fields exist for all levels of organisation, from families to small villages to countries.

  ‘If you talk to people, they generally still retain an affinity for their original country even after having lived the vast majority of their lives elsewhere. People struggle to get out of communities they no longer wish to be in, be it a family or a village, being constantly pulled back by the need to belong where they feel comfortable. This belonging is the connection to the morphic field they grew up with. Knowing this, and being in charge of everything, can allow you to manipulate this to your advantage. Those who bring to the fore this aspect, or identify an alternative way, are generally ostracised or portrayed as the lunatic fringe by the system. This strong need to belong, to be normal, then drives people away from this new information, despite it making sense and possibly even being accepted intuitively. One must be prepared to live in isolation, to not fit in, if one wishes to pursue such thinking.

  ‘It goes even deeper, into the individual belief systems,’ he continued. ‘In his book The Biology of Belief8, Bruce Lipton outlines compelling evidence that we store our belief systems in our cells. Now we know from our BodyTalk training and experience that this is true and that we can affect our body and our actions unknowingly from what we think and believe. Think of the conditioning we receive as youngsters. “You have to go to school to learn” (in other words, you are stupid); “Don’t do that, you will get hurt” (in other words, you are incapable/incompetent); “You need to get a good job and work hard” (in other words, this is what your lot will be in attempting to be successful); and so on. These truths are then absorbed into our being, and we will continue to believe these truths as long as we fail to do something about them, to accept the pain of change and of being ostracised by mainstream society. I deliberately do not use the word civilization here,’ he had said, ‘as that would denote something civilised about the way we live, and I don’t believe this to be so. You cannot operate within a slave system and at the same time consider yourself civilized.’

  This was hard for a twenty-two-year-old to absorb. I see now how true that was though and that it was my own beliefs doing exactly what he said they would. My father had said that sadly, while I was young, he had bought fully into that system, and so my younger conditioning was exactly as the system wished it to be. It was up to me now to do my own investigating and research, to come to my own conclusions – as he had done by engrossing himself in as much alternative reading and courses as he could. Back then though, I was too busy, and sadly, had no real love of reading. How that changed later.

  Chapter 7

  I could hear quiet giggling. I had returned to my stool under my favourite tree and had been deep in thought, sitting there with my eyes closed. I opened them ever so slightly. Through my eyelashes, I noticed the twins, standing quite close and trying very hard not to laugh. I opened my eyes, remaining quiet but forming a question mark on my face by raising one eyebrow above the other. I remember how my Dad had done that to me, and how in retrospect I had so enjoyed that look. It had taken me many years to emulate it though. They straightened up, trying very hard to look and be serious. ‘Mom said we …’ and that was the end of that for a short while whilst they laughed again, interspersed with short periods of gathering their resolve, but again bursting into laughter. I just sat there quietly, appreciating the pure joy being experienced by these two. They were surely a blessing in the village, and it was obvious that part of their mission was to bring us all back to learning to enjoy the simple things in life as well.

  Merely enjoying something was proving to be a real challenge for me. I suppose I would not really be able to get over the last fifty-odd years, which had been so tough with so little to laugh about.

  The twins had finally gathered their wits and were trying again. ‘Mom said … Mom said we should bring you some fruit and water. It’s freshly picked – we picked it on our way to you.’

  ‘We looked for the best ones,’ said the other as I was handed the bowl and water. Thanking them, I asked what the giggling was about. In-between further giggling, they explained that I had been frowning, and every now and then, I had waved my hand around and muttered something. What I had been thinking about had obviously been disturbing me, and I realised now, with my recent life experience, just how far off our understanding of real life had been back when I was young.

  Watching the girls run off to collect eggs from the chickens, I bit into the peach and again marvelled at how delicious properly grown fresh fruit was, fresh anything in fact. My father would get upset at the new methods with which our food could be destroyed, while suppliers were actually punting it as a marvel of the day and a wonderful convenience.

  He explained it to me: ‘Picking food while still green, storing it in cold rooms, and months later placing it under a blanket of acetylene gas or other method to ripen it for sale, is an abomination and nothing but theft from people in even asking for payment for such nutritionally devoid foodstuffs. If people wished to, they could find out for themselves that science has proven that fruit and vegetables, for example, only produce the vast majority of the nutritional content in the last few days of ripening, and only while attached to the parent plant. Simply artificially changing its colour, as with the acetylene gas, does not ripen it.

  ‘Think about this logically,’ he would say. ‘Firstly, would a plant risk its future by ripening the flesh around its seeds before the seeds are mature, and having the immature seeds removed from the plant prematurely? Secondly, why do the wild animals not take the fruit while still green, so as to be first to get it? The reason is, they know the nutritional value at that point is very low and not worth the energy to try to obtain or digest it.’ His comments sounded so logical, yet purely for the sake of convenience it seemed, people were prepared to ignore such logic. Those who wished to do something for themselves or their families, usually resorted to buying multitudes of vitamins to compensate for the poor food, and even most of those were not worth it as they were not in a form recognizable by the body and were simply passed through our digestive system. I wondered now why, with so many people having had some knowledge of our deteriorating food quality, so little was actually done about it.

  Even before the Fall, my father had a number of young fruit trees bearing fruit on the plot. I can still remember him giving me fruit to compare. There was literally no contest. The fresh fruit from the plot was unmistakably tastier than the comparison fruit he purchased at the supposedly best store in town. This went for all the produce he produced himself. He made sure though, that he always retained sufficient of the seeds for a number of planting campaigns, slowly building up his seed store and replacing older seeds with newer ones. When I queried him on this practice, he explained that not only were we being sold genetically modified seeds, but that a large multinational seed company had made it its mission to take full control of seed production on the planet, selling only seeds that would produce plants with non-fertile seeds and thus ensuring that the world population had to buy food seeds every year from them, guaranteeing exorbitant incomes for the compa
ny as well as further control of people. ‘Much like the pharmaceutical companies tried to do with the human genome project,’ my dad had said, ‘those companies, in identifying the various genes and what their functions were, believed they had the right to take ownership of those genes through patent rights. How utterly insane was it for anyone to even think that way!’ This abuse of people on people, as well as on the planet as a whole, could really get my father upset, and at times mad, real mad.

  As I drank the water contained in a cup made from the shell of a butternut and tasted its sweetness, I remembered how my father had choked on the rhetoric put out by the authorities back then who claimed the water supplied to us was fit to drink. Being a chemical engineer by training, my father understood the limitations of the water works and which impurities they could remove and which they could not. He explained it to me as follows: ‘When originally designed, the water works were receiving fairly unpolluted water and simply had to remove particulates, such as silt and organic matter, and destroy any small amounts of bacteria present. Now, years later, they have to remove toxic chemicals from industrial wastes as well as all the detergents and other chemicals used in households, unprocessed hormones used by people to correct who knows what supposed medical conditions, increased raw sewerage from overloaded and overflowing sewerage works, and hence orders of magnitude more bacteria in the water system, and so on. This they attempted to do, with the same equipment as before, treating ever more amounts of water, with concomitant reduction in management skills and maintenance of the systems in cost saving drives.

  ‘What we are getting is water that has been cleaned of particulates and then injected with increasing amounts of chlorine to simply try to ensure limited bacteria in the water. The toxins, heavy metals, and other dissolved chemicals are still in the water, as well as toxins being generated by the decay of increased levels of dead bacteria in the water. To add to this problem, chlorine is in itself a serious toxin, able to kill living organisms, yet we add it in ever-increasing quantities to our water to make it safe to drink. How crazy is that?’ he would ask. I could not argue with that – the water I was drinking now was crystal clear and felt soft on the palate, if that makes any sense.

  In the village, we had arranged our water supply, for drinking and cooking purposes, to be taken from the very beginning of the spring emanating from the cliff base. We had arranged a low wall around it to prevent mud and other debris being kicked in while collecting water. It had a roof, again to protect it as far as possible from contamination, such as from bird droppings. Specific utensils were left there, used to collect water from the pool and transfer it to other vessels. This would limit the risk of contamination that could occur if we allowed just any old receptacle to be used for this purpose; this system was working well.

  Just below this point, in a natural rock pool, we allowed water removal for such practices as washing and bathing. Thinking back at the amount of water I used to use for bathing, versus now, it was embarrassing to think how much I wasted just because it was conveniently to hand. I remember clearly arguing with my father that ‘it was not a problem how much I used, we had a solar geyser now after all!’

  The only part of my father’s reply I can safely mention here is ‘that does not make it right to do! You are also only considering the energy consumption for heating. What about the energy to pump the increased water, both to and from the house and for the treatment process in the sewerage work? Along with all that additional energy usage is the additional chemicals to treat the extra volume.’ He was right, of course, but at that time I was not in a mental position to want to accept this.

  Below the rock pool, we had created a small dam. It had taken some months to do so, even though the opening we had closed in the natural topography was less than ten paces across. Finding the right materials, such as clay, to make the inner core of the wall impervious, was time consuming and labour intensive, and had to be carried out amidst all the other chores and tasks of setting up and managing a village and community.

  The wood shovels we were using were of simple design and were made from the harder woods we were able to find. The problem with using the harder woods was that it made the shovel difficult to make – and time consuming! However, once made, they were effective, especially once the soil of our gardens had matured with all the humus we placed in them.

  The dam held its own as it filled and the overflow water was directed in a gentle fall along a channel dug across the slight slope above the fields that were set aside to be tilled, and in so doing deviating it from its original course to the river. This allowed for ease of irrigation of the tilled fields.

  Certain members of the community had asked, ‘Why the dam and all the hard work associated with it?’

  ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘the water comes in and goes out, just as if it was a channel. The dam, though, as you can see, now has some plant life in it, and a multitude of water insects, which are food for the ducks and other animals around the water. The children have thrown in small fish, no longer so small, which can be used to supplement the fish from the river. The food cycle in the dam creates phosphates and nitrates, nutrients required by the plants in our fields. And look at how well they are doing.’ People had to agree, our fields were something to behold, and something not lost on our agile primate neighbours in the area.

  The baboon and small vervet monkeys were constantly looking for ways to pilfer our wares. The log wall around the village was no obstacle to them, and we had constant patrols of young lads with large sticks along the perimeter from dawn to dusk. Luckily, the baboon and monkeys did not favour swimming due to the crocodiles in the river so our exposed perimeter was at least reduced. Occasionally one would get in, grab something, and run. It was incredible just how fast they were. To counter this, and as a further deterrent, more so for the smaller monkeys than the baboons, we raided the dens of a few wild jackals and removed one young pup from each, leaving the rest of the litter. Growing up in our environment, they adapted amazingly fast to domestic life, and with training, they took to the task of chasing the monkeys with fervour. Sadly, but also necessary I suppose, they managed to catch a few who did not survive the encounter. These experiences proved unsettling for the monkey troop, and we no longer have any real trouble from them and rarely see them anymore. Although a jackal is probably no real match for a full grown baboon, the baboons are also more wary and the younger ones, who were more willing to risk a raid against humans, have become less inclined to do so after having close encounters with often more than one jackal at a time. The need to protect against these invasions reduced significantly once we had been able to establish wild vegetables outside the perimeter of the village. This sharing with the animals, as my father had explained many years before, reduces the raiding of your own vegetables significantly.

  The jackals, along with the water birds, were a welcome assistance to early alarm of pending danger or the presence of other animals. The jackals especially, whether out with village members beyond the walls or simply within the walls, gave us early enough warning to either avoid, or prepare for, the now infrequent bands of roving wild humans or renegades as we called them. It seemed, from descriptions brought back by the villagers tasked with hunting, that disease was again exacting a heavy price on these bands of people, rapidly reducing their numbers over the past year or so. This had happened at least twice before, in both cases severely reducing their numbers. Although I could not be sure, I believed it must have some basis in hygiene and a lack of understanding with respect to the transmittal methodologies of disease. I suppose many saw a weakened group as a chance to raid them, with the obvious contamination therefrom of their own group. With instructions to our hunting teams to avoid their camps with a wide margin and to avoid contact with them at all cost such as to avoid contaminating the village, we had so far managed to avoid whatever it was that was causing their demise. My intention was to keep it so, and we had f
requent reminders to the younger members of the external teams that any curiosity or failure to follow these instructions could result in the death of the village. So far, they seemed to take this responsibility seriously.

  Looking around me, with the sun past its zenith and edging surreptitiously towards the western horizon, I was both amazed and proud at what we had achieved in the past twenty-something years on this site. Our little community was self-controlling, with people who now had a higher understanding of nature, how to work within it, and what the community required to function well. The extended period of good quality food and the basic understanding of hygiene had reduced illness to a rarity and increased birth survival to over 90 per cent, even in this supposedly unhygienic environment as it would have been labelled all those years ago. We could be proud of our achievement, and I was proud of all of them. There was a long way to go yet; we had embedded the basic knowledge quite well within the three communities in our area, and we required now to move into the finer and deeper aspects about life. I missed my dad at this point, as this was something close to his heart. My mind wandered back to a disturbing, and what turned out to be prophetic, discussion with my father not long before the fall.