April 2026

Our emphasis in this issue is in response to the dire circumstances created in the world by greedy, power-mad oligarchs hand in glove with benighted, reckless and cynical politicians who have reached such stages of insanity and inhumanity that not only are whole regions of the world deeply endangered but the future of the planet itself.

We continue to be grateful for the courage and clarity that Professor Jeffrey Sachs contributes to world affairs; we place his voice alongside those of Benjamin Creme, his Master and Maitreya, as well as adding our own voice calling on the people of the world to bring to bear their power to change the course of history and save the future. We thank all that’s good and true for Bernie Sanders, for his honesty, persistence and fearlessness; see the review of his latest book Fight Oligarchy: where we go from here.

As a promise of what can be, we consider various ways of working with, learning from, and interacting with nature. As an example of fearless action against injustice, we celebrate the life and courage of Jesse Jackson. The solution to much that threatens us is simple — to quote Maitreya: “Nothing happens by itself.” We must act and save the world. The world needs us to act and to make known our choice for peace, justice and the rule of law.

Benjamin Creme was asked: You said that Maitreya knows that we shall make the right choices; it gives the impression that everything will be all right in the end, so why worry. But surely we have to make sacrifices and make an effort to change things? We need to be motivated to make changes.

His answer was: “Yes! Yes! Yes! Exactly. That is the whole point. We have to do it; we have to make the changes. As Maitreya says: “Nothing happens by itself. Man must act and implement his will.” [Message 31] We cannot just sit back and let somebody else do it. If we want change we have to do it — call for change, march, organize, do everything legal to bring our desire for change to the notice of those who can produce change. Here is an opportunity for anyone to lead the way, to call for change, start the European call for justice and freedom for all. Why don’t you? Why come to listen to me? You could be out marching with banners calling for peace, justice and freedom in the world. That is the only way it will take place. It may be inspired by Maitreya; His energy will bring it into being. But we have to do it. We have to demand it.

The voice of the people is gaining ground — but you have to listen hard to hear it; we must make it louder. What Maitreya can do is educate, inform, inspire, create a reliable vehicle — the voice of the people of all countries of the world — and create an articulate mass against which no country in the world can stand. We need an informed, educated world public opinion for peace, justice and freedom. Nothing less will do. That is how it will be.”

It is clear. Divided we fall, we compete, fight, declare war, we slaughter and create chaos. Together, in cooperation, kindness and empathy we are a community strong enough to create a new civilization and to support one another in times of suffering, insanity and hardship.

We are each of us faced with a choice. This is the moment. We have to seize this moment for all our sakes.

What may save us from more mayhem is ‘people power’. That means all who are able in one way or another to protest against wars and corruption. A major concerted effort is needed to save the world from spiralling into further self-destruction: we, the people, must act in unison and solidarity now. People around the world, in every country need to stand up for justice, peace, freedom and sharing. We, the people, must make our voices heard louder, clearer and braver than ever: “End war now!” Otherwise, we will be complicit in murder and madness. “Stop now. Leave office! We will not vote for or support you any longer. Not in our name!”

We are not without power and influence. Call on every leader, politician, any person in a position of authority or influence — at any level. Demand that war and aggression stop immediately. We must translate our outrage, horror and sorrow into collective action. It is no exaggeration to say this is a turning point in our planet’s history. Concerted action can mean that finally humanity chooses a secure future that is fair and enabling for all 8.3 billion of us. This is the challenge we are called on to make to save ourselves and to ensure a continuation of life on planet Earth. It will take ingenuity, persistence, solidarity, energy and commitment buoyed by cooperation and a shared goal.

War and polarization are driving people onto either side of ‘the enemy line’. What will strengthen a forward-building civilization will be to make concrete the growing sense that humanity is one interconnected being. Our stand and our daily practice must be to express that oneness in every act. We can build on all previous social experiments in new ways of organizing work and social interaction. Since the elites obviously plan to hold on to power through criminal and desperate measures such as waging illegal wars, we need to work for and support systemic changes that get rid of structures that allow greed and corruption to work for the few while billions suffer hardship.

MAD
M.A.D. — Not only a reference to the prevailing insanity ruling the world, nor the state of mind of our leaders, but an acronym: M.A.D. — Mutually Assured Destruction, an agreed deterrent. M.A.D. refers to the principle of deterrence founded on the notion that a nuclear attack by one superpower would be met with a nuclear counterattack such that both the attacker and the defender would be annihilated. It is a concept familiar to anyone old enough to remember previous historical and pivotal moments when the threat of nuclear destruction was part of our lives.

But do those conditions still hold? Do the malcontents of the world recognize and abide by these principles? The problem is that over recent decades we have allowed the rule of law and respect for international treaties and human rights to be whittled away, so that the oligarchs and madmen see impunity as their guarantee to wreak destruction. That impunity combined with the corrupt and inept state of government and the judiciary is a free ticket — license to do whatever necessary to destroy perceived enemies, justify wars and avoid prison or worse.

The madness of war makes it easy to choose justice and peace. Most of us want a kind, cooperative future and already live like this. Others may need to experience further hardship and privation before accepting the essential change of direction to a cooperative society. The reckless decisions by leaders around the world face us with a clear choice.

Communal decisions, citizens assemblies, collective help, barter and exchange of services, knowledge, expertise to help and support are already becoming a daily reality. Social interaction can and will be based on our shared needs. Having seen the appalling effects of greed, lies, the impact of the loss of respect for the rule of law, the flourishing of amorality, competition, commercialization and corruption, we must surely abandon for ever those ways, and aim to live as citizens of a cooperative civilization.

We know enough. The lessons of history combined with our revulsion and distress at the current nightmare of country against country demand a response from us. Events past and present make it impossible to remain silent and inactive. The day and the future can still be won — if we act together to demand peace and justice.

The Israel-US war on Iran is engulfing the entire Middle East and could escalate to global war. The economic consequences are already severe and could become catastrophic. The Strait of Hormuz carries approximately one-fifth of all oil traded globally, and 30 percent of the world’s LNG. A sustained closure of the Strait would trigger an energy shock without modern precedent.

The conflict is likely to spiral out of control because the US and Israel are dead set on hegemony in the Arab world and West Asia — one that combines Israeli territorial expansion with American-backed regime control across the region. The ultimate goal is a Greater Israel that absorbs all historic Palestine, combined with compliant Arab and Islamic governments stripped of genuine sovereignty, including on choices as to how and where they export their oil and gas.

This is delusional. No country across the region wants Israel to run wild as it is doing, murdering civilians across the entire region, destroying Gaza and the West Bank, invading Lebanon, striking Iraq and Yemen, and carpet-bombing Tehran. No country wants its hydrocarbon exports under effective US control. The war will end if and only if global revulsion at US and Israeli aggression forces these countries to stop. Short of that, we are likely to see the Middle East in flames and the world in an energy and economic crisis unprecedented in modern history. The war could easily turn into a global conflagration, effectively into World War III.

Yet, there exists an alternative. The war could stop on rational grounds if Israel and the US are decisively called to account by the rest of the world. Ending the war requires a set of interlinked steps to provide basic security for all parties, and indeed for the world. Iran needs a permanent end to the US-Israel aggression. The Gulf countries need an end to Iran’s retaliatory strikes. The Palestinians need an independent state. Israel needs lasting security and the disarmament of Hamas and Hezbollah. The whole world needs the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and international monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program to ensure it abides by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as Iran says it wants to do. And all countries want, or should want, real sovereignty for themselves and their region.

Collective security could be achieved in five interconnected measures. First, the US and Israel would immediately end their armed aggression across the entire region and withdraw their forces. Second, Iran would stop its retaliatory strikes across the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) and resubmit to monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency under a revised Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which President Trump recklessly abandoned in 2018. Third, the Strait of Hormuz would reopen with mutual agreement of Iran and the GCC. Fourth, the two-state solution would be immediately implemented by admitting Palestine as a full member state of the UN. Israel would be required to end its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and Syria. Fifth, the UN recognition of the State of Palestine would form the basis for a comprehensive regional disarmament of all non-state actors, verified under international monitoring. The end result would be a return to international law and the UN Charter.

Who would win in this plan? The people of the region, of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the rest of the world. Who would lose? Only the backers of Greater Israel, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and Mike Huckabee, who have brought the world to the brink of destruction.

Here are the five steps in more detail.

First: End the US-Israeli Armed Aggression.
Israel and the US would stop their aggression and withdraw their forces. In turn, Iran would cease its retaliatory strikes. This would not be a mere ceasefire. Rather, it would be the first step of an overall peace agreement and collective security arrangement.

Second: Return to the JCPOA.
The nuclear question would be resolved through strict monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, not through bombing campaigns that merely put Iran’s enriched uranium beyond international monitoring. The UN Security Council would immediately reinstate the basic framework of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), under which Iran must strictly comply with IAEA monitoring and agreed limits on its nuclear program, while economic sanctions on Iran would be lifted.

Third: Reopen the Strait of Hormuz in an Iran-GCC Framework.
The Strait of Hormuz would be quickly reopened, with safe passage jointly guaranteed by Iran and the GCC. The GCC countries would assert sovereignty over the military bases in their countries to ensure that the bases would not be used as launchpads for renewed offensive strikes against Iran.

Fourth: The Two-State Solution.
The two-state solution would be implemented, by admitting Palestine into the UN as the 194th permanent member state. This requires nothing more than the US lifting its veto. Palestinian statehood is in accord with international law and with the Arab Peace Initiative, which has been on the table since 2002. In turn, the countries in the region would establish diplomatic relations with Israel, and the UN Security Council would introduce peacekeepers to ensure the security of both Palestine and Israel.

Fifth: An End to Armed Belligerency.
In conjunction with the two-state solution, all armed belligerency in the region would end forthwith, including the disarmament of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other armed non-state actors. In the case of Palestine, the disarmament of Hamas would underpin the authority of the Palestinian state. In the case of Lebanon, the disarmament of Hezbollah would restore Lebanon’s full sovereignty, with the Lebanese Armed Forces as the sole military authority in the country.

The disarmament would be verified by international monitors and guaranteed by the UN Security Council.

The key point is that the Israel-US war on Iran has not occurred in a vacuum. The Clean Break strategy, developed by Netanyahu and his American neocon backers in 1996, and implemented since then, calls for Israel to establish hegemony in the region through wars of regime change, with the US as the implementing partner. As NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark revealed after 9/11, the US drew up plans a quarter century ago to overthrow governments in seven countries: “starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” We are therefore living through the culmination of a long-standing plan by Israel and the US to dominate the Arab world and West Asia, create a Greater Israel, and permanently block Palestinian statehood.

We are not optimistic about the likelihood of our plan. The Israeli government is murderous and Trump is delusional about US power. We are perhaps already in the early days of WWIII. Yet because the stakes are so high, it’s worth laying out real solutions even if they are long shots. We do believe, however, that the non-Western world — the part that is not vassal states to US power — understands the urgency of peace and security.

Who, then, could champion a peace plan that the US and Israel will resist with every means at their disposal, until the weight of global opposition and economic catastrophe leaves them no choice but to accept it?

There is one main group, and that is the BRICS nations.

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and the bloc’s expanded membership, which now includes the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, represent approximately half of the world’s population and more than 40 percent of global GDP (compared to 28 percent for the vaunted but overblown G7 countries). The BRICS have the credibility, the economic weight, and the absence of the historical complicity in Middle East imperialism to bring the world to its senses. The BRICS should convene an emergency summit and present a unified framework incorporating the conditions for peace and security, which in turn would be pressed at the UN Security Council. There, world opinion would tell the US and Israel to stop pushing the world towards catastrophe, and would remind all countries to adhere to the UN Charter.

Source: Common Dreams

STATEMENT: The Elders warn today [18 March 2026] that countries will be drawn into an illegal war if they acquiesce to continuing US demands around the Iran crisis, such as to assist in securing the Strait of Hormuz for shipping. We urge countries to stand up collectively, resist pressure, and make it clear that those who initiated this war are responsible for its consequences and for ending it quickly.

International law should not be invoked selectively. Many Western leaders rightly insisted that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 demanded an unequivocal response. They were swift to criticize states that put their economic interests above principle.

Yet many of the same leaders now hesitate to call out unlawful military action by the USA and Israel. This hypocrisy is not lost on audiences in the Middle East or across the Global South. It is eroding trust in international institutions, and feeding the perception that Western countries invoke rules only when politically convenient.

The recent UN Security Council resolution condemning Iranian attacks on neighbouring states, while omitting any reference to the initial US-Israeli strikes, illustrates this troubling selectivity. When the Council applies the law unevenly, it undermines its own authority.

The ongoing US and Israeli aggression against Iran and Iran’s retaliatory strikes across the Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean threaten grave consequences for regional security and the global economy.

Military action will deliver neither peace, justice, nor the respect for human rights Iranians deserve following longstanding, systematic violations and the recent bloody repression of peaceful protesters by the regime.

The lack of a coherent US strategy raises the prospect of instability within Iran comparable to that following the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. This danger is further increased by uncertainty over the location and status of Iran’s stockpiles of highly enriched uranium.

There is no military solution to nuclear proliferation. When nuclear-armed states strike a non-nuclear state during negotiations, the message is unmistakable: that possessing nuclear weapons could provide protection. The most likely consequence of the illegal war launched on Iran is not greater security, but rather further incentives for nuclear proliferation.

Leaders who say they believe in international law must stick to their principles, and put long-term stability above short-term considerations.

(Source: The Elders)

This is an urgent and angry book, written and published only last year, in 2025. Its author, Bernie Sanders, once stood for US president and is long term Senator for Vermont. Previously in the Democrat party, he is now an Independent, which makes him free to criticize both parties and, in particular, President Donald Trump.

And criticize he does, passionately. The first part of this small book is spent setting out and damning the gross inequalities in the USA — of money and opportunity. Sanders is angry about the harm being done to almost every US citizen by the Trump regime, dominated by the ultra-rich, the billionaires — the ‘Oligarchy’. In July 2025, Republicans in Congress and the Senate passed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that provided $1 trillion in tax breaks for the rich while drastically cutting Medicaid, nutrition support and education for the general public. The bill “amounted to the largest transfer of wealth in modern American history” — to the wealthy.

Sanders also takes an angry look at the support by the US government for Israel in its war against the Palestinian people in Gaza, because, he says, of the corrupt influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Sanders warns that ‘Trumpism’ is destroying democracy: favouring the oligarchs over the rest of society, pursuing an anti-union agenda, laying the groundwork for privatizing state and federal programmes — and enabling billionaires to get ever richer, both in the US and abroad.

Sanders asks: How could Trump have come to power — a “crooked businessman… a pathological liar, racist, sexist, xenophobe, bully and convicted felon?” He shows how the Democratic party that working Americans had habitually voted for, has become out of touch and done nothing for them. “The average American worker is less well-off now than in 1973. …America has the highest rate of child poverty of almost any major country on Earth… nearly 800,000 Americans are homeless.” And, asks Sanders, how did Trump use this national crisis to gain power? Simple: “He scapegoats powerless minorities… and with ugly, vicious and dishonest rhetoric blames them for society’s problems. …He fosters fear and pits one group against another. Racism, sexism, Xenophobia and homophobia can win votes.” Sanders documents how Trump is undermining democracy itself in his appointments, actions and hate-filled words. In particular, he stirs up hatred for immigrants (forgetting that the US, of course, is made up of immigrants). Leaning towards a fascist state (Sanders doesn’t use the word), perhaps the worst manifestation is Trump’s use of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents to prowl the streets of US cities, imprisoning and deporting — which led, for instance, to the notorious deaths of two innocent citizens in Minneapolis.

To end, Sanders takes a broader look at the world and sees that the “move to oligarchy income and wealth inequality is not just taking place in America”. He paints an excoriating picture of the few wealthiest in the world — “They are not nice people”. He points out that: “We live in a world where the top 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent of humanity” and: “The world’s top 1 percent have become $33.9 trillion richer since 2015. That, by the way, is enough money to eliminate world poverty twenty-two times over.” Sanders goes on to detail how extraordinary wealth inequality exists in Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Brunei. Britain joins the inequality stake with the richest fifty people controlling more wealth than the bottom half of the entire country — about 34 million people.

Finally, Sanders quotes the late Pope Francis: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a result, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”

On the other hand, all is not lost, there are reasons to hope; for instance in the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York which showed “that a progressive economic agenda” can win. And the last section of the book, ‘Where do we go from here?’ reveals a new vision. First, “We must expose Trump for the self-serving and authoritarian fraud that he is” and “fight for an agenda that works for the working class of this country”. Sanders spells out the harm that Trump has done to America: massive homelessness and food poverty, the “shortest lifespan of almost any wealthy nation…; spending over 1 trillion dollars on arms…”.

But a reformed society which ends poverty is possible only if certain steps are taken by the American public and lawmakers. So, Sanders makes a powerful case for improving the future of countless Americans: enact Medicare for all, similar to most European countries; provide quality education for all; make housing affordable; improve working conditions through increased unionization; raise the minimum wage; encourage employee ownership. If this sounds aspirational, rather than achievable at present, Sanders exhorts Americans to take a more active part in the political life of the country, and he gives examples of how and where this is happening, including the huge rallies across the country he has organized. He ends: “We can beat the oligarchs and create a much better world… let us stand together and go forward. Solidarity forever”.

Jesse Jackson’s legacy is larger than life, spanning in time 84 years and in space, achievements across the world, from the United States, where he was born, to the UK, the Middle East and Africa. His childhood began in one of the poorest districts in Greenville, South Carolina, but his charisma and leadership skills were evident very early. He was elected class president of the all-Black Sterling High School, and later student body president at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, where he earned a sociology degree.

As a college freshman, Jesse returned home to Greenville for a visit and was forbidden to check out a book he needed for his studies from the whites-only Greenville Public Library. A few months later, he led a peaceful protest with seven Black high school students, all simply browsing the library and reading books. They were arrested for disorderly conduct, but a judge ultimately ruled that they had the right to use that publicly-funded facility. The Greenville library system was integrated within two months.

Jesse continued his civil rights activism while still in college, participating in sit-ins at Greensboro restaurants, and later while he was studying at the Chicago Theological Seminary. He travelled from Chicago to Selma, Alabama, to join the civil rights movement there after watching news footage of nonviolent marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge and being beaten by police. Observing his leadership in Selma, Martin Luther King Jr offered him a position with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the civil rights group he co-founded.

Jackson started with SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket, an economic justice program that worked through Black churches to pressure companies to employ more Black people. Soon he became its National Director, organizing boycotts of companies engaged in job discrimination, and he became an ordained minister a year later. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, he stayed with SCLC for two more years and then started his own organization, People United to Serve Humanity, or PUSH.

He travelled abroad to South Africa to show solidarity with the anti-apartheid campaigners, and to Israel and Palestine, where he called for the creation of a Palestinian state. Across Africa he was revered as a global freedom fighter. In later years, he visited Operation Black Vote campaign events in the UK numerous times, helping to register tens of thousands of Black and minority voters across Britain.

One of Jackson’s many skills was bringing people together, and by combining two organizations that he founded into the unprecedented working-class, multiracial Rainbow/Push Coalition, he united Black voters, progressive whites, LGBTQ+ communities, environmentalists, Asian Americans, Indigenous Nations, Latinos, anti-war activists and labor unions. The Coalition’s focus was voting rights, social programs and educational and economic equality. Jackson’s people skills also allowed him to negotiate the release of an American pilot shot down over Lebanon in 1983, and, during the Gulf war, the release of hundreds of Americans and other nationalities from Iraq. In 1999, he secured the release of three downed US pilots from Serbia, and in 2000 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest civilian award in the US — by then President, Bill Clinton.

Jackson ran to be the Democratic candidate for United States President twice — once in 1984 and again in 1988 — to steer mainstream politics toward “the moral center of racial justice, gender equality, and peace”. He was unsuccessful, but he told a friend that sometimes when you lose, or think you’ve lost, you’ve in fact won — because you’ve paved the way for others to follow. Twenty years after Jackson’s second run, Barack Obama, the first Black US president, saluted Jackson for making his victory possible.

The following paragraphs were written by Meta Commerse, founder of Story Medicine Worldwide and author of several books on racial healing. Jesse Jackson was, she says, “part of my childhood, home church, and the history of my hometown. He did a tremendous job organizing and galvanizing in our city to bring about enormous changes.”

Her story begins: “One Chicago Saturday afternoon when I was 12 and excited to be at choir rehearsal, a cool breeze moved through the sanctuary. More excitement accompanied a young man from Dr King’s SCLC group into our church. Fellowship Missionary Baptist, to be exact. He wore a curious look, walking into an old building brand-new to him. He was tall, wearing blue overalls and a tee-shirt. He was clearly looking for someone, and even from the choir stand I could see his light.

“Little did we know he would soon become part of our church. An important part. His name was Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson. The next outstanding memory of his arrival is a march he organized including our Englewood neighborhood parents and children. It was my first protest, and we sang songs, carried signs and walked with our heads held high. We learned that “freedom ain’t free”, and that protest is the rent you pay to realize the meaning of democracy. We marched against the policy of Chicago’s Board of Education taking the easy way out, parking mobile offices on the school grounds and using them for classrooms rather than renovating and investing in our school’s future. At an early age, Rev. Jesse got me thinking deeply about change.

“I was in the audience on the Sunday of Rev. Jackson’s ordination, together with Rev. Henry O. Hardy. In seminary, the two had become close. Then, lifelong friends. If you look long enough at stage right of the 1984 Democratic National Convention, you’ll see Hardy standing behind the curtains, cheering mightily for his friend. Although Hardy is himself a peerless orator, everyone knew that there could be just one Jesse.

“This was the man who organized the economic arm of SCLC after Dr King’s assassination in 1968, then molded it to new heights of operation. He worked with corporations, demanding job opportunities for people of color where before there were none. He is the one who said in the early ‘90s, that “we ought to call ourselves African Americans!” And we did. Our Black boomer generation was able to walk through doors kicked open by Rev. Jackson’s resistance to bigotry and discrimination. At Chicago’s Christ Universal Temple in 2008, Rev. Jackson preached about “service” and told the congregation he’d been 40 years fighting for justice. Time, where have you gone?

“He wasted none of it, making a difference, changing the very landscape of our Chicago community and the face of the Democratic National Party. Ever in action, we saw him moving tirelessly. Negotiating union disputes, organizing corporate boycotts, registering voters, demanding jobs, preaching at the funerals of our history-makers, from Jackie Robinson to Sammy Davis Jr — offering unforgettable eulogies. Many boomers eventually packed up and heeded the call to elsewhere, walking through those doors he’d kicked open.

“And as dusk approached, I saw him attend the funerals of his mentors and friends of the church, unable to speak now and humbled by time. I saw him in the wheelchair attending Sunday service at Trinity, still waving his hand to all.

When he passed on Tuesday, February 17, 2026, we lost a giant soldier and pillar of our lives. Rest in power, Rev. Jesse. Thank you for affirming our collective healing and modeling a visionary life. To the very end.”

Veda Austin is a water researcher, public speaker, mother and author living in New Zealand. For the past 14 years she has observed and photographed the images and symbols that appear in semi-frozen water, which she terms as its ‘state of creation’. She describes her work as being a combination of science, art and spirituality, and has discovered water to be responsive to our thoughts and emotions, as well as to music, words, and images. The method involves a simple freezing technique where, for example, a word or photo is placed under a petri dish of water for 30 seconds before it is partially frozen.

Besides continuing her research with water, Veda Austin holds regular workshops, participates in web seminars, speaking tours and podcasts, and is currently working on a documentary. Her book The Living Language of Water, is a culmination of 10 years of research, and contains 1,500 photos with commentary.

She was interviewed for Share International magazine by Megan Scherer.

Share International: What influences or experiences motivated you to become a water researcher?
Veda Austin: The main thing that helped me see that there is more to water than meets the eye was when I had a healing experience after a very serious car accident. My car went under a seven-tonne truck, rolled twice and was a complete wreck. Over the course of 20 years, I had eight surgeries, mostly bowel surgery, because the seatbelt crushed my internal organs and my left clavicle. After my last surgery, I woke up surrounded by doctors telling me that I didn’t recover well, had showers of blood clots in my lungs, and that I might have to be on warfarin, a blood thinner, for the rest of my life. I was young, fit and healthy, and was shocked to be told this. For three and a half, maybe four months I took warfarin, then made a decision; I always make sure people realize this is my decision — I’m not recommending it — to stop taking it and go on my own healing journey. One of the reasons I chose to do that was three different doctors had told me I would never be able to have children based on the amount of scarring on my reproductive organs. I went on to have three children, so I knew that my body was capable of doing things that perhaps even doctors didn’t believe it could.

A friend who was a medical doctor, but also practiced Ayurvedic medicine, suggested that I start with drinking a naturally alkaline water, which might help bring my body back into balance. I trialled myself for two weeks each, on different naturally alkaline waters, meaning that the pH was above seven, but I didn’t notice anything much.

By this time, I was operating a wellness centre — I had some gift for healing. A client said there was a man with his own private source of water out of the ground; it had a pH of 9.9, and he was only giving it to cancer patients, who seemed to be having amazing results. He gave me a month’s worth of water to drink and, on Day 3, I noticed a change in bowel motions, which was a big thing as it’s a sign of internal health. Day 10, I had all these bumps coming up on my arm and jaw that were super painful. Between Days 10 and 12, [using tweezers] 27 pieces of green glass came out of my body — they had been in there for over 20 years. In the back of the car there had been crates of beer: my right side got more green glass and my left side got more [pieces of] windscreen. I thought that was remarkable.

This led me on to enquire what makes some waters healing. I looked at an analysis — there’s bicarb[onates] and lime which make it naturally alkaline and stable, but where’s the healing component? Then I thought of what Nikola Tesla said: “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

I became head of research and development for people forming a company around the water that had helped heal me. They were wanting to do clinical trials to see what made it so special. I had some glass petri dishes and my plan was to project a thought into the water and freeze it in my freezer and see what happens, which was kind of radical back then. Dr Emoto’s¹ work was essentially flash freezing a drop of water that had been exposed to a positive or negative thought, word, emotion, prayer, and then photographing the structure that it formed as it froze — the positively ‘informed’ one looked more like snowflakes, the negatively ‘informed’ one generally failed to form a structure.

I was holding my dish of water, and a bit of fluff was floating around in the dish, so I put my hand in, took out the fluff, and wondered if my hand would have any impact on the water’s memory. The first image I ever got looked like an X-ray of my hand, and it took up half of the petri dish. That led to me questioning: was this a coincidence? Then seeing over and over again that water is not just sharing information relative to your thoughts; it’s sharing information quite often relative to its environment, and wherever your attention is.

Now, after 15 years in this work, I have well over 85,000 photos of water responding in an incredibly intelligent manner — I say responding, not just reacting, to consciousness.

SI: Regarding Dr Masaru Emoto: he focused on the frozen state of water — why did you decide to study semi-frozen water?
VA: The semi-frozen state is called a liquid crystal. Water as a solid doesn’t move very well. There are tiny minute movements within it, but once it’s frozen solid, it really doesn’t share as much information.

A semi-frozen state is where essentially, in the petri dish, there’s liquid on top and ice underneath, and you tip the liquid away. It’s only frozen for about five minutes, so it’s a very quick process, and it’s called liquid crystal. The stage or phase that I freeze the water to has far more in common with the kind of water inside your cells than water that comes out of a tap. That’s because the water inside your cells is fourth phase water. It has an extra hydrogen and oxygen atom; it absorbs more light than regular water and has a negative charge. Imagine what aloe vera or egg white looks like — not as viscous as that, but it has a viscosity and acts like a battery.

Dr Gerald Pollack has written a book on this called The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor. He discovered in his lab that there is fourth phase water inside regular water. You put water into a test tube, include microspheres that allow you to see movement, insert a little Nafion tube, and look down a microscope. What you see is that if there is fourth phase water inside, the microspheres will be moving round and round, self-propelling through the tube. For fourth phase water to occur, it needs to be next to a hydrophilic surface like glass or your [body’s] cell membrane. Then this fourth phase water starts to build — it pushes everything that’s in it outside of itself. So all the minerals, salts, solvates are pushed out and it creates this microscopic little area that is pure and has negative charge; everything that’s been pushed out of it has positive charge. When you have a negative and a positive, you have a battery. That is the battery, if you will, of your cells.

Fourth phase water also occurs between a liquid and a solid. I started to open the freezer earlier and earlier, to see when the pattern started to form. When I saw liquid on top and ice underneath, that’s when I tipped the liquid away, which was actually all the solids, the positive charge that’s been pushed out.

SI: In your book, you mention another person who works with ice or ice crystals: the French photographer Laurent Costa. I gather you really admire his personal ethos — he sees water as a spiritual teacher, and rather than use experimentation, he invites it to share through its formative designs. Does this invitational, rather than experimental attitude continue to underlie the work that you do?
VA: One hundred percent. I never like to think of my work as experimental. One of the many, many reasons for that is that I don’t think of water as a resource — I think of it as Source. I have seen that water is responsive to not just the environment, it’s responding to my feelings, and so there’s an intelligence there and it’s quite remarkable. My father is native New Zealand Maori [a well-known fisherman], who has been out on the ocean most of his life. Within the Maori culture, there are multiple sayings. One I really like is “I am the river and the river is me” [Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au]. We’re one. And within that, I think I have a different perspective on water.

Anyone can do this work. Anyone can learn my freezing method. One of the three things that you see when you start crystallography is a signature pattern of water, which allows you to see what type of water you are working with; or you might see art, and I always say art is the heart of water — that is where you might see a face that looks like the photo you put the dish of water on. Then the third one is hydroglyphs, which are symbols in ice that have one or more meanings [such as ‘stairway’ or ‘marriage’]. The water absorbs the energy of the written word and crystallises it into a symbol. To confirm it is a hydroglyph, the same experiment is repeated over fifty times, using both English and other languages.

The issue for many people is the expectation that comes up. Water is wild: it’s not always going to do what you want — it’s going to do what you need. Many people say you’re only getting repeatability because you’re expecting to see it. It’s the complete opposite, that’s not how this works: you need to not be attached to an outcome to see an outcome. It really is about allowing the water to do what it wants, not what you want, but being curious, which is one of the reasons children have so much fun doing this.

SI: I find really interesting the differences in your photos of municipal tap water and spring water. What type of water do you use in your research, and do we have the ability to improve the quality of our tap water?
VA: We can see massive change structurally, but we don’t see change chemically. So I’m not saying that you can just purify your water. I love working with spring water, but I also love working with municipal tap water. People are so shocked when I say that — the reason I like working with municipal tap water is because it is actually really sensitive.

What I have seen is that with municipal tap water, yes, you see a lot of disorder, but when you let it melt and then refreeze the same sample after giving it genuine, intentional, loving energy, it changes drastically structurally to start to look much more like what you’d see in a stream for example. Bringing in a Maori term, it’s essentially giving it ‘mana’ [dignity]; by giving its dignity back, it is able to have more of an energetic health.

Water behaves so much like people in some ways. It is very sensitive to emotions — it will override what I’m thinking to show me what I’m feeling, which is one of the reasons I think of it as being responsive, not reactive.

SI: Modern societies seem mostly unaware of how interrelated we are with our environment. How do you think we can go about improving our relationship with mother nature and water?
VA: If your skin and organs were invisible or see-through, what would you look like? You would be reminded that you look more like rivers and streams and tributaries. You are a liquid, moving, intelligent system. When you see yourself in that way, you start to realize, gosh, I actually have these signature patterns of all of nature. I have the branches of trees, I have streams. The tributaries that branch off your eye lens are 99 percent highly ordered fourth phase structured water. You literally see the world through the lens of water. So within that context, when you begin to study yourself — the inner reflection — then you start to see that you’re actually connected entirely to the outer reflection, and that the separation we see is because of form.

Any living thing has water, salts and consciousness of some kind, so the connecting piece that weaves through all life is always water and not just liquid water — water in the air that we breathe out means there’s water in the air.

SI: Traditionally scientists make discoveries through experimentation. So I was wondering if you thought that science in general might benefit from changing their attitude ie looking at what they’re studying in a more holistic or invitational way?
VA: I love the science — my whole work is weaving science, art and consciousness together. I think that art is the middle ground. Art is its own language. It can invite the science world to come and help, and it can invite spiritually-minded people to come and have a look as well.

Quantum physics can certainly help. As an example, mainstream science says that water can’t store memory because it is in molecular chaos. It’s updating information every trillionth trillionth of a second. The hydrogen bonds are breaking at these crazy speeds, but quantum physics would say there’s a difference between molecular chaos and molecular excitement. When consciousness is involved, molecular excitement is created; where there is more attention, there is more excitement. So I feel like this area will start to expand. If science actually started to take on a more open-minded approach to the study, they would probably get far further. Nikola Tesla said: “The day science begins to study non-phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the physical previous centuries of its existence.”

Quantum biology, quantum physics are actually starting to prove the observer effect. I think one of the most spiritual aspects of water is the observer, the witness. That then leads into many other concepts around water and spirit, and how can we observe ourselves? How do people that have near-death experiences become the observer?

SI: What do you see as being water’s message for humanity?
VA: I think that another word for water is hope. And one of the reasons I say that is two percent is a very small amount — I’m not talking about primary water which is held in the Earth’s mantle — I’m talking about the water on the surface of Earth; only about two percent of it is drinkable. But we only need two percent of people to really understand that as intelligent, fluid bodies of water, we are able to, as a collective, create change. We can make the biggest waves of change we’ve ever seen in this world, because we’re coming into this Age of Aquarius, where the water bearer is sharing the waters and the information with us. We just need to receive it and start to realize that water is not just water. Water is a mirror of the divine and we have trillions and trillions of water molecules. In fact, there are more water molecules in our bodies than all the stars in the perceivable universe.

¹ Dr Masaru Emoto (1943 — 2014) published the book ‘The Hidden Messages in Water’ (see article in Share International magazine July/August 2001)

Veda Austin’s website: www.vedaaustin.com

Access to clean drinking water is a major challenge for many communities. The UN estimates that 2 billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water. Solutions have been proposed to extract moisture from the air locally in regions where it does not rain, but the necessary funding for large-scale production — which would reduce costs — has not always been secured.

The Incas collected water from the air, using fog fences, where water would condense at night.

Since that time, several initiatives have sprung up, enabling water to be collected locally from the atmosphere through condensation, thereby providing water to local people where infrastructure is non-existent or has simply been damaged by a natural disaster.

One example is Majik Water, a Kenyan start-up which provides a device that collects water from the air by using solar energy to condense, filter and purify atmospheric water.

In 2023, these systems produced 200,000 litres of drinking water in arid regions of Kenya.

There is also Max Hildago, a Peruvian engineer and his start-up Yawa, winner of the 2020 Young Champion of the Earth award. His machine produces between 50 and 300 litres of water a day from moisture in the air.

Moreover, a completely new method has emerged for extracting water from the air.

Reticular Chemistry, is a new scientific field founded by Omar Yaghi, and now studied by hundreds of scientific groups in the world. Yaghi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2025, along with Susumu Kitawaga and Richard Robson for “the development of metal–organic frameworks”. This new technology creates “molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow”. “These constructions, metal-organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air…”

Professor Yaghi was born in Jordan, without enough water in his home. He explains how one day, looking at molecular drawings in a library, “I went home actually feeling like I just met the love of my life”. At the age of 15, he then migrated to the US thanks to his family’s savings, and spent his life working on molecules.

Yaghi founded Atoco company, and built up a solution based on reticular chemistry, providing up to 1,000 litres of water a day, by an off-grid device, run by outside energy. This solution could help fragile communities where clean water is scarce.

Professor Yaghi concludes: “…taking water from air to water the world […] will give independence to people to have control about their own water…. Creativity in science is paramount to addressing societal problems.”

(Sources: majikwater.africa; Unep.org; atoco.com);

Grasslands and wetlands endangered by animal agriculture

Most environmentally conscious readers are aware that ancient forests, including in the Amazon, are rapidly being cut down to make space for pasture land. New research, however, has shown that non-forest ecosystems — grasslands, wetlands, and savannas — are disappearing at nearly four times the rate of forests. And as with forests, the primary culprit is livestock.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first attempt to analyze the types of agriculture responsible for the conversion of natural ecosystems on a global scale and what commodities are driving the need for the conversion.

These findings are important because grasslands take up more of the world’s ice-free surface than any other ecosystem and store almost as much land-based carbon as forests (about 34% compared to 39% for forests). Furthermore, although they’re the most at-risk ecosystems on Earth, they get little attention because of their disappearance and lack of clarity about the causes. Wetlands are being converted for agriculture at about half the rate of dry lands, but are especially important carbon sinks.

The study, looking at the period from 2005 to 2020, found that livestock production is driving about two thirds of the grassland loss, whether by conversion into pasture or cropland for growing feed. The remaining third of the loss is for growing food for people.

Biofuels are another major driver of grasslands loss — especially in the US. Elise Mazur, a researcher at the World Resources Institute and one of the report’s authors, says she hopes policy makers will begin to include grasslands in conservation targets. Some policies reduce conversion in one ecosystem, only to push agricultural expansion into other ecosystems. “Both forests and non-forest ecosystems need to be addressed together,” she says. “We want to make sure that any policy or voluntary targets address all natural ecosystems.”

An experiment that took place in 2019 in the Texas panhandle of the US demonstrated how lost grasslands can be restored quickly in a seemingly miraculous way, if we choose to do it. A group moved 5,000 bison into a remote area of the panhandle that had become desert when cattle ranching replaced its original bison inhabitants in the 1800s. Within two years, the landscape changed back into a shortgrass prairie. Water pooled in the thousands of bison wallows, and with abundant bison dung and aeration provided by the hooves of the 2,000-pound animals, the soil became rich, dark, moist earth rather than sand compacted like concrete. Wildlife began returning as the pooled water soaked in and awakened the dormant native grass seeds, and, after the second year, large predators moved in. The entire 150,000-acre ecosystem was restored without any human labor. The lesson is that nature is resilient if we eliminate the destructive elements (cows), provide the proper ‘tools’ (the bison, in this case), and don’t interfere.

Indigenous Treaty on Whales’ Rights could change New Zealand Law

New Zealand legislators have introduced a bill that recognizes whales as legal persons. The legislation would require the Government to consider whales’ rights when regulating activities that affect them and their habitats, including shipping, fishing, deep-sea mining and coastal development.

The bill is grounded in a landmark declaration signed by Pacific Indigenous leaders and titled He Whakaputanga Moana (Declaration for the Ocean) treaty. The Māori King Tūheitia Pōtatau Te Wherowhero helped galvanize Indigenous leaders from Aotearoa (New Zealand), the Cook Islands, Tahiti, Tonga, Hawaii, and Rapanui (Easter Island) to sign the declaration recognizing whales’ rights, and, shortly before his passing in 2024, met with NZ Green Party lawmakers.

Legal experts note that it’s rare for a treaty created by Indigenous nations to drive national law, and it represents a reversal of the usual top-down approach to environmental governance.

The bill affirms the rights of whales to migrate, maintain natural behaviours, and live in a healthy environment. A rights-of-nature approach focuses on protecting the natural world’s biological integrity, treating it as kin, not a commodity — a view held by many Indigenous cultures.

Existing Laws such as the Endangered Species Act and the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, although effective conservation tools, position whales and marine ecosystems as resources to be managed for human benefit. He Whakaputanga Moana starts from a different perspective: recognizing whales as ancestors with their own spirit and essence. (Whales and humans share a common ancestor from about 90 million years ago).

“We recognize the interconnectedness of all things, understanding that the ocean’s breath is our own,” the declaration says.

Tuiono, the lawmaker who introduced the New Zealand legislation proposal, says “We’ve always taken an anthropocentric view of the world, thinking it revolves around us. …We should be taking an ecocentric view — seeing ourselves as part of the web of life, not the centre of it.”

Tuiono went on to say: “It can’t be about extraction anymore. We live on a finite planet with finite resources. We need to respect the other species we share it with. …We need to care for the environment so it’s thriving — for everyone that calls this place home.”

(Source: insideclimatenews.org)

As a symbol of what our global consumerist culture is prepared to do in order to satisfy the lust for glory, wealth or the striving for excellence, or to offer distraction from a world almost too difficult to bear, we need look no further than the Winter Olympics held across northern Italy, from Milan to Cortina d’Ampezzo.

How many of us sat and watched athletes straining every fibre of their being to be the best in their field of sport whilst vicariously experiencing their successes and regrets? Perhaps we also celebrated the gracious support and congratulations on show between many combatants too? But how many of us wondered where did all that snow come from in a world that is heating up by the minute? Or whether it wasn’t just the ‘snow’ that was not quite what it seemed?

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) widely proclaims their policy on the sustainability of their games. And yet an article in The Guardian easily and very troublingly demolishes this as fantasy. To name just a few examples:

• As average snow depth in Cortina has fallen by 15 centimetres in the past 50 years, the only way to achieve the 1.5 metres of snow depth needed for the ski runs was to build four high altitude reservoirs and fill them with water pumped up the mountains from rivers already in drought much of the year. Such water then has to be cooled to create artificial snow. Even worse: the projects got behind and had to take three to five times the amount of water originally agreed from local rivers, causing them to nearly dry up, killing fish and causing pollution. This makes little sense in a world where water is a diminishing resource.
• A unique 150-years-old forest, the Bosco di Ronco, was totally destroyed and replaced by 2 kilometres of steel and concrete to create a new bobsleigh track. Although some of the local business owners aren’t troubled by the loss of the forest, believing that it is better to have the new business brought by the track, they seem unaware that tracks built for previous Olympic games hosted by Italy have long since fallen into disuse.
• Despite IOC claims that 85% of the venues being used already existed or were temporary, most were demolished and rebuilt for these games, leaving much larger footprints. And this, despite alternative venues nearby.
• Along with other environmental organizations invited to work with the IOC to help make these games truly sustainable, the World Wildlife Fund Italia walked away from negotiations as they could see no clear commitment, labelling the IOC’s approach as ‘greenwashing’ and there having been “no real discussion”.
• Despite this all happening in one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet, the Italian Government had waived any need for environmental assessment work to be done on 60% of the projects.

Writer, activist and former forest ranger, Luigi Casanova, said: “You have to remember that in all these situations, the Italian environmental movement proposed alternative solutions. Less environmentally impactful, less costly, safe and socially beneficial to communities. The environmental and landscape impact of the Olympics will be paid for by those who follow us.”

It is sometimes contended that man’s spiritual and religious life should not be subjected to study and analysis, since such a mental approach might lead to a loss of the mystical and sublime. If by mysticism is understood that feeling of vagueness and uncertainty associated with the unknown, then the sooner this obscurity can be clarified by the light of the mind, the more effective will religion be in creating a better understanding and closer relationship between the aspirant and his Father. But rest assured that although study might lead to greater clarity in certain respects, man’s most intensive probing will always leave ample unsolved mysteries to satisfy the needs of the most exacting mystic. It should, however, always be remembered that the characteristic of spiritual unfoldment is an ever-expanding consciousness, leading from revelation to revelation, from truth to ever greater truth, and from light to ever brighter light.

And why should man not be permitted to delve as deeply into the nature of his Deity as his mental capacity and consciousness will allow? Are there really those who consider that God has furnished man with a marvellous instrument of thought and mental analysis, which he is enjoined to use for the promotion of all human requirements except that aspect of his being which should play the most important role in his life — the spiritual or religious world? Does such an argument not sound rather naive? Is it not much more logical and probable that God provided man with an ever unfolding mental capacity, not to build more destructive weapons, nor to discover the secrets of ‘space’, thus enabling him to spy more effectively on his neighbour’s strategic position, but that he should better understand his own constitution and spiritual relationships?

Could those who reject the mental approach to spiritual life only once experience the inner joy engendered with the revelation of a new facet of truth after persistent mental probing; the thrill of becoming consciously aware of the inner self, the soul; could they but realize that the focused light of the mind leads to deeper understanding and consciousness, which must inevitably induce more effective aspiration and invocation, and an increasing reverence for God. God, or Truth, basically remains immutable and invariable; what does vary and change is the undefined and ephemeral conception which each individual entertains of this spiritual Being. With growing perception this concept of Deity is ever expanding, assuming ever wider dimensions of both the Might and the Love of the Father.

A more profound appreciation of the nature of the spiritual world, its functions and organization, and a realization of how this whole system remains subject to the Will, Purpose and Love of God, cannot but lead the aspirant increasingly to a sense of humility, respect and veneration for Deity, and the intensity of this feeling will grow with the expansion of his consciousness.

Before proceeding with an analysis of the Spiritual Hierarchy, two fundamental principles should be stressed again as they may contribrute to clearer recognition of concepts which many students find difficult to grasp. Firstly, the interrelation of all forms should be thoroughly realized; the fact that every created form is linked with the rest of the manifested worlds through the etheric sphere, which not only surrounds but also interpenetrates every form, and interlocks one with the other, thus synthesizing all creation into one co-ordinated Whole. This holds not only for our planet, but also for the unseen and spiritual, for the whole Universe, and for all that IS! Cosmic and solar energies or Rays, streaming through the etheric system, constantly impinge on the Earth and on all manifestation, evoking forces which are again radiated into the etheric surround to continue the perpetual process of action and interaction. Furthermore, it may be regarded that every existing body is only a component of some larger unit, which in turn forms part of a still larger complex, thus extending into ever bigger structures, until all may eventually be seen as only elements of the ONE. The reverse of this picture is that every form may be seen as a composition of several or innumerable smaller units, and these can again be broken down into still smaller constituents, until one ends at the other extreme by seeing All as Energy.

Secondly, every form must be regarded as the manifestation of a separate entity, whether reference is made to an atom, a man, a continent, a planet or a solar system. Man’s personality for instance is the form through which a Monad is temporarily manifested through the soul, and similarly the Sun with its planetary system is the physical manifestation of our Solar Logos. But please note that the solar system is not itself the Logos, but only represents His physical expression, and it is through the Sun that His energies are radiated to the planets — thus “the physical Sun serves to hide the Spiritual Sun”. The physical form of expression is always of a transient nature, although in human terms this temporary period may endure for billions of years. The inspiring Entity, on the other hand, which supplies the form with vitality, is of a spiritual nature and is immortal and everlasting.

Our planet Earth, with its kingdoms of nature, is again the physical form through which our Planetary Logos functions, and man’s physical body can thus be regarded as an atom in His physical form, with man’s Soul or Monad a spark of the One-Soul, Oversoul, God, or by whatever name this all-encompassing Spiritual Entity may be recognized. Our Planetary Logos is a subjective Entity, dwelling on the highest or Divine Plane of the Cosmic Physical Plane (of which the physical plane of the human being is the seventh, the lowest, and the most dense). Even as the Human Monad is represented in the physical body by the soul, so our Planetary Logos, focused in the higher spiritual planes, has delegated the Lord of the World to represent Him on the physical or rather etheric levels of the Earth. In the Orient He is generally known as the First Kumara or Sanat Kumara and, to prevent confusion, this name will also be retained in the present writing.

Owing to the extreme purity and high vibrations of His nature, and the exigencies of His functions, Sanat Kumara has assumed an etheric rather than a dense physical vehicle. With His senior helpers — the Hierarchy of the Brothers of Light — He has established His headquarters at an etheric centre, which is normally referred to as Shamballa.

Another center dedicated to cooperation with nature sprung up a decade later than Findhorn, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, in the United States. Machaelle Wright founded the Perelandra Center for Nature Research to study and provide tools for cooperating with nature’s intelligence. She believes our current global crises show that we don’t know how to live in balance with the intelligence inherent in nature. We created chaos together by “each of us acting independently and establishing a personal and professional lifestyle that was environmentally deaf, dumb, and blind.” By working in partnership with nature, however, we can learn to make the best decisions for ourselves and for the planet.

Machaelle’s Perelandra research work began in 1976 when she decided to learn about nature from nature itself. She had spent some time at Findhorn, and was inspired to work with nature intelligence in an effort she calls “co-creative science”. That is, the study of reality and how it works (which is the focus of traditional science) by man and nature intelligence working together in a partnership as peers (the co-creative part). She began by working with nature intelligence to develop flower essences and gardening aides to help and train others how to work in a co-creative way with nature.

One of the most unique and universally useful projects Machaelle developed is MAP: The Co-Creative White Brotherhood Medical Assistance Program, described in detail in her book by the same name. This came about when her original work with nature expanded to include the White Brotherhood in 1982. She describes the White Brotherhood as a “large group of highly evolved souls [not in dense physical form] dedicated to assisting the evolutionary process of moving universal reality, principles, laws and patterns through all planes and levels of form.” Currently the shift is from outgoing Piscean patterns and rhythms to ones that facilitate the dynamics of the incoming Aquarian era. She names St Germain as a master teacher from the White Brotherhood, for example.

The Medical Assistance Program (MAP) is not related to any alternative health modalities or any conventional medical specialty; nor is it esoteric, new age or spiritual. It’s a completely different approach to health that combines the involutionary (moving toward form) input of nature with man’s evolutionary development (moving toward spirit). It’s a physical program that works on an individual’s well-being from physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels simultaneously.

The Medical Assistance Program is an example of the White Brotherhood and nature working together for our benefit through an organized framework. Its keystone is coning — technically speaking, a balanced vortex of conscious energy which permits working with more than one intelligence simultaneously. It could be thought of as a kind of ‘conference call’, and is set up to ensure perfect balance between the involution dynamic (nature) and the evolution dynamic (the White Brotherhood and the individual doing the coning). Before birth, the human soul (the force behind evolution) gives the necessary data to nature (the force behind involution) for whatever is required to fulfill an individual lifetime, and nature supplies a body according to these specifications.

Since nature engineers the human body, it also knows how to fix it if it isn’t working properly. Through MAP, nature provides the bridge between any person on our level and the medical teams in the White Brotherhood to help us keep our bodies functioning as they should. Because of nature’s involvement, no intermediary is needed to connect us to the White Brotherhood. The teams can work with us directly.

A coning is created and activated by us (the human team member), and is done by consciously stating the desire to open a MAP coning and to be connected with the appropriate team that includes nature, exactly as instructed in the MAP book. A regular MAP session lasts 40 minutes and can address all levels of health: emotional, mental, physical, or spiritual. Often problems involve more than one level and the medical team can work with all of them. Most people communicate with (get ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers from) their medical team by using kinesiology (muscle testing), and specific instructions for doing this effectively are given in the book. Surrogate MAP sessions can also be set up for our children, and there is a separate process described in the book for the health of our companion animals.

One of Perelandra’s products, ETS Plus (Emergency Trauma Solution Plus), is recommended for stabilizing oneself during a MAP session and immediately after the session for stabilizing the medical team’s work. It’s a liquid created by Machaelle Wright and nature using a combination of electrical infusions from 153 different plants, minerals, natural gases and elements found in the sea, atmosphere and on land. It’s natural, and by using only electrical patterns rather than the physical elements from the 153 “ingredients” that create the new electrical patterns, no allergic reactions or side effects are triggered — unless a person is allergic to water, vinegar or brandy (to preserve it). ETS Plus is designed to help with any sudden or long-term traumatic situation, so is particularly useful in these unsettling times.

Additional books on other aspects of Machaelle’s research, Perelandra flower essences, and soil balancing kits are available on the Perelandra web site. Instructional audios and videos on every aspect of Machaelle’s work at Perelandra are also offered for anyone seriously interested in working intelligently with nature.

As an analogy for the state of the global economy, we need look no further than A23a, the biggest iceberg ever known — exceptionally deep and, at 4,000 square kilometres, more than twice the size of Greater London. After it broke away from the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in West Antarctica in 1986, it became grounded on the seabed in the Weddell Sea and seemed unlikely to change for a very long time to come. However, it began moving again around 2020 and started breaking up. That process escalated as A23a moved into warmer waters and it is now being reported as about to fully disintegrate at ever-greater speed as climate change and warming oceans take their toll. Some forecasts say within a few weeks.

The symbolism of such an event should raise a red flag in the present context of the multiple wars spewing enormous blooms of climate-changing gases, but, as ever, it is rare to see any analysis in corporate media linking the two events. As just one example of the potential of armed conflicts to increase global emissions, the first 120 days of Israel’s war on Gaza produced emissions exceeding the annual total of 26 individual nations. The Israel/US/Iran and Russia/Ukraine wars must surely have exceeded that marker by now, thanks to the intentional targeting of critical energy infrastructure, oil storage depots, refineries, gas fields, and pipelines by all sides.

And yet it is anxiety about energy availability that has rocked the stock markets ie the threat to ‘business as usual’, not the threat to life on this planet for warmongers and peacemakers alike.

By now, we should be in no doubt whatsoever that the battle to save our planet is reaching a highly critical point and that it is becoming increasingly personal. Australians, long-used to blistering levels of heat and drought, are learning to dread the warmer weather thanks to punishing extremes of heat, fire and rain this year. Like many countries in the northern hemisphere, the UK swings from one extreme to another, with drought and rainfall records being smashed, affecting food production and producers alike. Similar patterns have occurred across Europe as the jet stream dipped and speeded up in response to periods of extreme cold in North America. Scientists link this pattern of ‘climate whiplash’ to fossil fuel pollution and predict that it will continue. But will we listen to them and their inconvenient truths any time soon?

Ironically, the strongest candidate for driving the much-needed change in public perception and political priorities essential to saving our planet is the insurance industry which, The Guardian reports, does not like the risks it is facing as climate change drives multiple disasters with no end in sight.

Insurance is described as the backbone of the global economy. It underpins confidence that there is a backstop when things go horribly and unexpectedly wrong. It reduces the risk of moving huge amounts of goods around the world to facilitate trade, commerce and agriculture; it supports investment and innovation. But the increasing unpredictability of extreme weather events is affecting pricing to the extent that insurance is becoming unaffordable for many. This, despite being an industry that generated record profits of $168 billion in 2024.

Of course, it wants to keep that buoyancy! But losses in 2025 were greater than $100bn in the first half of the year alone, leading to a sharp rise in risk aversion in the industry itself. That sector lives and breathes risk but it is running scared now and withdrawing support from many fire- and flood-risk areas. Insurers are not keeping their thoughts to themselves either, reminding economists and politicians that many other crucial financial services also become unviable when their risks can’t be protected by the insurance sector. As examples, Günther Thallinger, board member of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, pointed to mortgages and investments of every degree.

Climate impacts are now set to become very personal indeed.

The Climate Action Tracker predicts that current policies will result in a rise in global temperature between 2.2C and 3.4C above pre-industrial levels. Thallinger makes it clear that the damage at 3C will be so great that governments will be unable to provide financial bailouts and it will be impossible to adapt to many climate impacts.

However, he also reminds us that “The good news is we already have the technologies to switch from fossil combustion to zero-emission energy. The only thing missing is speed and scale. This is about saving the conditions under which markets, finance, and civilization itself can continue to operate.”

How many red flags and melting icebergs do we need before we take on the challenge of permanently changing our personal and global priorities, and accept that military might and forever-wars are never going to bring us security? Perhaps the total demise of the world of finance will be the final wake-up call?

The same essence

Human beings are members of one body,
Created from the same essence.
If one day you are struck by pain,
A change will come through your own hand. — Saʿdi

The poem above, which echoes the basic tenets of the Ancient Wisdom Teachings — the oneness of humanity — was written by the Persian poet Saʿdi (1213 — 1291). He is revered as one of the greatest figures in classical Persian literature.

Saʿdi is also remembered as a great panegyrist and lyricist and as the author of a number of masterly general odes portraying human experience. He is also known for particular odes such as the lament on the fall of Baghdad after the Mongol invasion in 1258. His lyrics are to be found in Ghazalīyāt-i Saʿdī [Lyrics of Saʿdi] and his odes in Qaṣāʿīd [Odes of Saʿdi]. Six prose treatises on various subjects are attributed to him; he is also known for a number of works in Arabic. The peculiar blend of human kindness and cynicism, humour, and resignation displayed in Saʿdi’s works, make him, to many, the most widely admired writer in the world of Iranian culture.