July/August 2026

This July/August issue of Share International was created around a central theme, that of consciousness. To this end, three articles by Benjamin Creme’s Master were selected (see above), each presenting a different facet of the theme, introducing a combination of topics which make for a fascinating read. Evolution, science, the mind-brain relationship, the nature of thought and the nervous system are all brought into a rich exploration of this ‘special’ section. Benjamin Creme’s article refers to the part played by the soul in an arrestingly simple phrase — “what the soul wants”: “The path of evolution is the growing awareness of what the soul is, wants, and is seeking to express through the man or woman in incarnation.”

This month’s writers have brought further intriguing glimpses into broader approaches to our topic from the halls of science, mathematics, physics, and neurology, even venturing into the world of “what is termed ‘psi’ (psychic or paranormal) phenomena, investigating the relationship between consciousness and the physical world”.

Regular readers will recognize that, as always, each issue of the magazine presents two or three main themes and they appear in various sections, such as the choice of articles by Benjamin Creme’s Master, the Compilation featuring a complementary topic, the Q&A section, normally enhanced by a selection of related articles.

An extraordinary future is held out to humanity under the guidance of the Masters. As Benjamin Creme’s Master wrote in yet another article: “There lies ahead of man an immense increase in awareness through the unfolding of his intuition; an awareness of states of Being as yet altogether unknown to him, but which lie ready to be perceived by his awakened mind.

All expansions of consciousness are preceded by periods of tension, and this time of conflict and difficulty through which mankind is now passing will be succeeded by one of tranquility and poise, which will set the stage for the gradual flowering of the intuition. When that happens, man will know directly, past all gainsaying, his true nature as a soul created in the image of God.” (Benjamin Creme’s Master, from ‘Reason and intuition’)

Woven into the rest of this issue are charming, informative articles as diverse as the Albanian ‘Flamingo revolution’, Jeffrey Sachs, travelling the ancient Silk Road in the footsteps of Marco Polo; students creating hope from Waste; Jeremy Lent describes an Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All. We do not flinch from the suffering of others as we celebrate the resilience and courage of the Palestinian people. Esotericist Aart Jurriaanse takes us to the ‘Centre where the Will of God is known’ in his explanation of Shamballa and the energy streaming from that Centre, while Pope Leo examines AI in a new Encyclical: “Leo states in the very first sentence that humanity today is facing a pivotal choice: ‘either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together’”. Along similar lines, inspiration and guidance are offered on the ‘back page’ where, traditionally, we quote some wise words — see Maitreya’s advice and assurance.

Dear Earthlings — As you may know we come in peace and in love, on a mission to help, to rescue and support you and our precious neighbour Planet Earth. We’re here to aid you in so far as Cosmic Law allows, as part of the Great Being Whose creation we are. All our Solar System and the numberless other parts of His Creation are also His humble offspring and we revere His divine Plan for all life wherever it is, in whatever dimension it exists. We are co-creators and yet offspring obedient through our love for and identification with that divinity. Whatever your governments or influencers try to tell you, we come within the Law and to remind you that your nature is essentially one of joy and grace.

(So might our Space Brothers and Sisters address us — humanity, as many millions of us are working, co-operating to find better ways forward, solutions that work for all.)

We look at our poor suffering sister planet Earth, Gaia, and we are deeply troubled but strengthened too in our determination to carry out our mission of mercy and aid where and as far as we can within the Great Law. We wonder in grief and astonishment at how it is that you appear not to love your home while she sustains you and all life forms.

Now, your unwise men think they may invade your neighbouring planets, colonize and destroy (as always), determined to mine and extract all they see of value to support their insane way of ‘life’ — which to us seems closer to death than life. Your wiser brothers and sisters have dubbed them ‘the 1%’. Their greed is destroying your beautiful planet. Large sections of humanity seem distracted, exhausted by poverty, hunger, daily tensions, indoctrination and confusion, and this allows the lust for power, the heartless cruelty and barbarity of the ‘haves’ to flourish.

Your wise men, your great teachers, the Masters and the Master of all Masters — the Lord Maitreya (who is known, loved and revered in Cosmos) have all warned that such injustice and inequality could lead to a collapse of your systems, for instance, your economic and financial systems — a hard lesson but perhaps it will wake mankind up to values closer to those respected and understood throughout our Solar System. It is those who have for decades suffered who will suffer even more. It is your hungry, dispossessed fellow humans who will bear the brunt, whether on the streets of your huge cities or in countries you may try to ignore; their deaths that can and will be seen on your telephones and in your media (at least the ones that tell the truth).

How will you feed your children if you degrade the soil, disrupt the flow of currents in the oceans so that your farmers and fishermen can no longer predict weather patterns; you pollute life-giving rivers — in fact, you leave a trail of devastation behind you.

Our Solar System, the Great Life we are all part of, looks on in amazement and horror as you spend time, resources and talents to build increasingly clever, merciless machines to murder and destroy. You deploy your intelligence not to create, to help, sustain, heal and educate but to tear down and bomb and annihilate. Earth’s own Masters are begging you to stop waging war. The Lord Maitreya has appealed to you to help, to feed, cherish and support all who need your love and kindness. You know what needs to be done. You know it can be done. Choose wisely your leaders.

Humanity is magnificent, as is your planet — truly and in its potential. You share your godliness with us, since your divine spark is the very same that flames in our hearts as we seek to come to your aid. Join with your own people and join with us to work towards the beauty of a future that gives full expression to our shared divinity.

Think of how you could be. Imagine the future as described by your great World Teacher who is also the Lord of Love and the Christ on Planet Earth:

During the day in Tirana, life goes on as usual: people go to work, college students prepare for exams, children play in public parks, retirees have coffee at one of the many cafés and chat for hours… The first tourists, including a good number of Italians, visit the mosque and Skanderbeg Square. There are no posters, graffiti, or flyers… Everything is calm, in short, completely normal.

The only visible sign of what is happening are the booths collecting signatures for the two referendums to repeal the laws that allow environmental regulations to be circumvented, thereby facilitating real estate speculation even in Albania’s most beautiful protected areas. This is all to the benefit of local oligarchs, who launder dirty money from mafias around the world and, above all, open the doors to Trump’s Zionist son-in-law, who is said — though I cannot verify it — to be investing Israeli money… In short, the old, corrupt, and discredited political class of Edi Rama’s so-called ‘Socialist’ party and Sali Berisha’s so-called ‘Democratic’ opposition party is selling the country off to the most predatory form of capitalism.

At 6 pm, everything changes: the people of Tirana gather in ever-greater numbers in Skanderbeg Square, and when Tirana’s largest square fills up, they begin marching toward Prime Minister Rama’s nearby office.

Men and women, the elderly and children. So many children — from newborns who, despite the din, manage to sleep in their strollers and in their mothers’ baby carriers, to older children on their parents’ shoulders or in their arms — who happily wave their little flags or signs written and drawn at home and chant the most popular slogans: “Rama and Berisha, it’s over for you!”, “Revolution! Revolution!”

Yesterday [18 June], was a special day: the event was not merely a national one, as it brought together in Tirana all Albanians, including those living in Kosovo, North Macedonia, southern Montenegro, and northern Greece — in short, the entire territory of so-called ‘Greater Albania’ and members of the diaspora from all over the world, who took advantage of the holiday to return to their homeland and contribute to the liberation of their land.

A flood, an ocean of people that gradually swelled as far as the eye could see. Red, the color of the flag, dominated, along with the black double-headed eagle. Visible were the silhouettes of the Pink Flamingos moving in a line through the crowd, led by a white stork.

Speakers took turns on stage — intellectuals, artists, and representatives of civil society. Obviously, I didn’t understand a word, but the crowd applauded enthusiastically.

In front of the stage, dozens of shoes symbolized the emigrants forced to leave their country to seek work abroad.

No flags were visible from the three currently minor parties in Parliament, nor from environmental groups.

The New Albania Democratic Socialists carried a banner, without a symbol or signature, but bearing the slogan: ‘Albania is not for sale’.

Albanian patriotism has no supremacist sentiments and is free of xenophobic impulses: it is based on a bond with one’s homeland (like the patriotism of the Palestinians and Kurds, to be clear) and with their culture, which believes in and practises hospitality.

The steps leading up to Prime Minister Rama’s office were manned by about twenty police officers without helmets, shields, or batons, and without guns in their holsters. They politely asked people not to sit on the steps or climb the stairs. However, some ‘disobedient’ children were playing tag in front of the ministry’s entrance without the police having anything to say about it.

Today and in the days to come we will keep this up until the people’s victory, they tell me with peaceful determination.

(Source: Pressenza – reprinted with permission)

Seven hundred and fifty years ago, a Venetian 17-year-old set off east and didn’t come home for a quarter of a century. Marco Polo left the Venetian lagoon in 1271 with his father Niccolò and his uncle Maffeo — three merchants on horseback bound, eventually, for the court of Kublai Khan. Their expedition ran on one horsepower per traveler. Our troupe of four — my wife Sonia, our friend Patrick Zhong, his son Jimmy, and me — has just set out along that same road east, where West meets East along the ancient Silk Route. I won’t pretend we’re roughing it the way young Marco did. Our caravan is an all-electric BYD Denza, and the top models in that line reach an astonishing 1,582 horsepower in one quiet and smooth ride.

But strip away the horsepower and the seven and a half centuries, and the journey is the same: curiosity pointed firmly eastward, a belief that the surest road to peace runs through human encounters, and a long line of strangers who turn into new friends around the second cup of tea.

We call it the Marco Polo Drive of Peace, Culture, and Sustainable Development — 12 countries, 15,000 kilometers, 43 days, from Rome to Hong Kong. We began, fittingly, in the Eternal City, home of the Papacy, because like the Polos before us, we are carrying a message from the Pope eastward, in our case Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, a plea for peace, and for the wise and humane use of our powerful new technologies. The Polos once ferried messages between Pope Gregory X and Kublai Khan across a divided world. The aim, it turns out, has not changed all that much over 750 years.

From Rome we pointed the car north, and in Bologna we stopped to charge — and here the 21st century announced itself with a flourish. Using BYD’s “flash charge” and its remarkable Blade batteries, we charged to 97.5 percent in under nine minutes, before our espresso arrived. Marco Polo measured his progress in seasons and mountain passes; we measure ours in minutes at the charger, and in the remarkable ease of crossing Eurasia without burning a drop of oil. This, in short, is a main message of the trip: that the green technologies now arriving can serve humanity, knit us closer together, and lighten our environmental footprint all at once.

As I write, we are rolling toward Venice — the Polos’ own hometown, the city from which their journey began and to which, a quarter century later, they returned. From there our route turns to Croatia and Serbia, Bulgaria and Türkiye, across the Caucasus into Georgia and Azerbaijan, over the Caspian into Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan — Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, names that still host travels across the steppes — and then finally into China, to Xi’an and Shanghai and Shenzhen, ending in Hong Kong in late July.

Several governments have prepared a warm welcome for us, and we look forward to sitting with political, business and cultural leaders along the way — and, just as eagerly, with students, drivers, shopkeepers, and the young people who are inheriting this interconnected world. Our firm desire is not only to talk but to listen.

For those who’d like to come along, I’ll be teaching an online course as we drive — a moving classroom on the history of the Silk Road, on sustainable development, and on the old, stubborn, necessary idea that nations are far better off cooperating than colliding. You can sign up through the SDG Academy; the road is open to anyone with a curious mind. The sign-up page is here: https://sdgacademy.org/course/the-marco-polo-drive/

I return to one core belief as the kilometers tick by. Many so-called geopolitical strategists and politicians argue that the civilizations of East and West are fated to clash rather than cooperate. Marco Polo knew better. At the far end of the longest road to the East, he found not enemies but a brilliant, sophisticated civilization eager to trade ideas as readily as goods. The Silk Road has never been a single thread, much less a wall. The Silk Road from ancient times has been a vast network of interconnection. Globalization is a mark of civilization, from ancient times to our own era. Let us work for a globalization of peace, the harmony of diverse cultures, and sustainable development for all of today’s young people, the Marco and Maria Polo’s of the 21st century.

Our Denza hums where the Polos’ horses once plodded. The encyclical we carry has a new title, but the message is the same: if we meet face to face, peace stops being an abstraction or formula, and becomes a daily reality and joy.

More soon, from somewhere further east.

(Source: The Insider)

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Jeremy Lent’s new book (2026) is, at the same time, a warning about humanity’s progressive destruction of nature and a call for a re-think about our long-standing, voracious relationship with planetary life. It is a long, complex work (though written in clear language) that covers history and economics from the perspective of complexity theory. Lent claims that the world is on a downward spiral due to a combination of climate change and individual and corporate greed. He makes an excoriating and detailed critique of capitalism. But he also spells out his vision for the possibility (and he stresses it is only a possibility) of an alternative. He shows how society could be, and needs to be, restructured, so that every living being — humankind, plants, animals, the planet itself — can flourish. He outlines an agenda for an ecocivilization, which could come into being by applying “life-affirming principles”.

Chapter 1, ‘Careening toward a Precipice’, explores how the sole pursuit of economic growth-via-capitalism is destroying the planet and humanity’s relationship with nature. Human beings are fundamentally co-operative with “a sense of belonging both within our community and as a part of a living earth”. But capitalism’s pursuit of individual wealth, along with the state’s urge to colonization, has destroyed that understanding. And commercialization feeds on human competitiveness and greed.

Lent employs a terrifying image from indigenous tribal mythology to describe this individualistic trait: the Windigo monster with a heart of ice that seeks to devour human beings — and human beings, turned Windigo, in their turn devour others. He uses this trope to describe the objectification, the ‘othering’ of people that capitalism’s worldview promotes — simply using people as potential profit machines. And he claims that, from birth onwards, capitalism programmes us for competition. This leads to a doom scenario for humanity and the planet: that if we continue in this way, we will destroy everything.

‘Growth’ is what politicians promise us as the panacea to our economic woes, even when they can’t fulfil that promise. But as Lent points out: “untrammelled economic growth in future decades will bring us face to face with a slew of further existential threats”; and “We cannot continue to expect infinite growth on a finite planet, yet that’s what passes as ‘realistic’ today.” It would be more realistic to consider what conditions might allow us to flourish in the future, and then try to achieve those conditions.

Lent shows in some detail the historical context of the “inequities that brought us here”: the Middle Ages Enclosure movement of the common land that forced previously free men to work for landlords; the colonization (the “unbridled plunder”) that reduced what Lent calls the ‘majority world’ to work, often as slaves, for their conquerors; the Industrial Revolution where machines dominated people. By the end of World War Two, the Western nations had “amassed huge wealth at the expense of poor countries”, and by the 1970s had fallen under the influence of neo-liberalism with its belief in individual greed (“individual liberty”) and competition.

Many people are generally uncomfortably aware that big money exacerbates and keeps inequality going between the ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ nations. Lent spells this out, giving telling examples of the corruption and greed of the rich and powerful, past and present. He shows how, since the 1970s, wealth has increased in the rich countries at the expense of poorer nations, and that now the world’s richest one percent own 43 percent of all global financial assets. He traces in detail how financial corporations have become all-powerful; how the ‘the majority world’ has suffered at the hands of the big corporations; and how “the élite’s coercive apparatus”, used to maintain authority, results in the “militarization of police, criminalization of protests, demonization of peaceful protests as extremists and terrorists.” (This is increasingly true in the UK.) And, “As people become wealthier, they tend to become more selfish.” The idea of ‘green growth’ is a non-starter, as is the proposal that global warming can be mitigated by technology. Lent asks: “Is there a kind of death wish or killing urge in the refusal to deal with climate issues?”

The alternative that Lent advocates is an ecocivilization characterized by:

• Attempts to meet everybody’s needs
• Unpaid work acknowledged
• Sustainable well-being as the goal rather than GDP growth
• Putting humans above profit including those in the majority world
• Respect for the living planet

Generally, Lent claims, the current world view is based on the idea that the universe is like a machine and exists to be exploited by humanity. But when we can perceive that nature is alive, and that all is interconnected, we need a different model that enables us to live in harmony with nature. This involves an “ecological economics”: an economy that focuses on well-being, progressive taxation, green jobs, a shorter working week, scaled down use of fossil fuels, and rejection of growth as an economic aim.

The world also needs to be more equal: for example, reparation to the global South for slavery and other exploitation, a universal basic income (UBI) and, in accordance with UN Article 25, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a “standard of living adequate for [everyone] and his family — food, health care, housing security in the event of a lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control”. Generally, a more equal society, with a respect for nature, would be happier, with less violence and less sickness; it would focus on well-being rather than profit as it would ensure that everyone has access to life’s essentials. This could mean a move away from individual grasping towards a greater sense of the group and society.

Lent explores the idea of a different way of social organization, the ‘Commons’: “living social systems through which people address their shared problems in self-organized ways”. A large, strikingly successful example is the Mondragon co-operative founded in Spain. It’s the world’s largest, with 80 thousand workers in 37 countries, and operates mainly by worker assemblies. It is known for its innovation and industrial success. In other chapters, Lent shows how sustainability measures can be successful, and how current practices are not: for instance, agriculture, particularly meat, produces one third of all greenhouse gases while causing the suffering of 85 billion animals a year — and still 800 million people in the world go hungry and 3 billion people suffer from malnutrition.

The world Lent proposes would, of course, require something approaching a world government, which he also fully discusses and advocates. Importantly, he admits that often he talks in aspirational terms, but his aim is to inspire the reader with alternative suggestions for how to live; he also gives examples of societies that come nearer to his sense of an ecocivilization.

Finally, Lent asks for commitment from the reader: he asks us to “engage” — to act according to the key principles of an ecocivilization: “collaboration, solidarity, respect for the inherent dignity of others, and reverence for the intrinsic value of all life”.

A question to Jeremy Lent

Judy Kretmar

At a launch event for his new book Ecocivilization in Brooklyn, New York, Jeremy Lent was interviewed by renowned American ecologist and author Carl Safina. During the Question & Answer session that followed, I did not ask a question but made the following comments and invited Mr Lent to respond.

Comment:
The thing that really struck me was your statement about the interconnectedness of all things and all beings. To me that is really key. We as human beings see each other as separate and not interconnected and that is where all our problems stem from, and the cause of human suffering.

I saw an interview with British author and artist Benjamin Creme on the Merv Griffin Show back in 1982. Despite my total lack of interest in anything ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ because of my upbringing, I nonetheless found myself being struck by one thing he said. It changed my view of my place in the world, in the universe — just my whole perspective.

He said that spirituality cannot be relegated to religion. It is in all aspects of life: the political, the economic, the social. And once we actually recognize that, our world can become better — more fulfilling, more just and more equitable.

Jeremy Lent:
Thank you so much for that. The simple answer is “Yes”. I talk about this dominant world view that has caused all this destruction. It is basically a world view of separation. It’s all about separation. It’s like our mind is separate from our body.

I, as an individual, am separate from others, humans are separate from nature.

And if you truly believe [in] all this separation, which we are conditioned in our common culture to do, then it makes sense to be as wealthy and selfish as possible — just all for number one. And so I absolutely agree — and in fact it is unique to this dominant point of world view of early modern Europe.

Every other spiritual tradition looks at this connection. I’ve come up with a definition of spirituality as really that which focuses on the connection between things. So, to the extent that our attention is focused on the connections between things rather than just the things themselves, that’s another way of thinking that we are more spiritual. If we get completely into really living, experiencing just that connectivity, we get to this kind of non-dual awareness.

Comment:
So you mean there is hope?

Carl Safina:
Yes. He means there is hope.

As acronyms go, DOPS is perhaps not the catchiest, though inversely that in itself makes it oddly memorable. It stands for the Division of Perceptual Studies, a research unit that is part of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia (UVA). Over time, it has gained an international reputation for its groundbreaking work into what is termed ‘psi’ (psychic or paranormal) phenomena, investigating the relationship between consciousness and the physical world.

The faculty operates — much like ongoing research into the so-called quantum world — at the outer reaches of an established, orthodox, science framework, and, as a result, is somewhat viewed with a certain ridicule and skepticism by mainstream science and philosophy, which increasingly sees consciousness as nothing more than a byproduct of brain activity. For example, a multinational team of neuroscientists recently proposed a new theory, published in Nature Reviews Neurology, named the NEPTUNE model which explains near-death experiences (NDEs) and out-of-body experiences (OBEs) from a purely neurophysiological point of view, thus dismissing DOPS’s own findings from years of studying these phenomena. The NEPTUNE researchers argued that near-death “hallucinations” could be caused by changes in blood brain gases, endorphins or other chemical or electrical activity in the brain, and they pointed to two studies suggesting that OBEs may just be the result of an activation of a particular region in the brain, the temporoparietal junction.

In response, Dr Bruce Greyson, former Director of DOPS, has stated that as regards the NDE explanation, for example, putting it down to neurological hallucination, which typically only involves a single sense such as hearing or sight, does not align with the evidence collected by his team of researchers. Near-death experiencers frequently recall what they saw, heard, smelled and touched while dead. Also, the encounters they have are often remembered vividly for decades, unlike neurological hallucinations, which are only retained for a short period of time.

Whilst technically part of the University of Virginia, in reality, DOPS is a kind of outlier within the broader science fraternity and attracts scientists to the work who themselves are able to perceive the world we all experience, particularly with regard to the nature of consciousness, from a more unconventional viewpoint. Having said that, its stated mission is to employ rigorous, empirical methods of scientific investigation and disseminate its discoveries and their profound implications, both to the wider society and scientific communities, acting as a kind of bridge between mainstream, scientific materialism and the more subtle, esoteric realm of parapsychology. It is clearly a difficult position to occupy, which makes the work it has carried out over the many years since its establishment all the more remarkable.

Formed in 1967 by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, it was he who developed the research centre with a view to studying psi phenomena: extraordinary human experiences and capacities. From the outset, its main body of work has involved gathering information from around the world with regard to: NDEs; children’s past life memories; OBEs; ‘remote viewing’ (often associated with intelligence agencies like the CIA); extra-sensory perception (ESP); telepathy, and psychokinesis (for example, the abilities of Uri Geller) — in an attempt to show that consciousness, if the evidence is to be correctly understood, functions independently of the brain, thus challenging established paradigms.

As one can imagine, by no means was the attention particularly positive in the division’s early years, but some in science were more willing to suspend judgement. Fellow psychiatrist Harold Lief wrote in a 1977 article for the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease: “Either Dr Stevenson is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known as the Galileo of the 20th century.”

DOPS, as previously stated, is primarily focused on investigating the mind’s relationship to the body and especially concerning consciousness surviving physical death, therefore showing it is not bound by that body. Stevenson had always been interested in anomalous human experiences and started researching related phenomena, such as apparitions, NDEs and reincarnation, taking a trip to the East to hear the accounts of children who remembered their previous lives. American physicist and inventor Chester F. Carlson (responsible for the technology behind Xerox photocopying machines) sponsored more trips and eventually bequeathed funds that allowed Stevenson to conduct his research full-time, resulting in the formation of DOPS. He had previously been the chairman of the UVA Department of Psychiatry but left that position in 1967 to become the Director of the newly created division, remaining so for the following 35 years.

As a psychiatrist, Stevenson had become increasingly disillusioned with conventional medicine by the time DOPS was founded. In fact, it was after one of those early trips to India in 1966 that he first caught the attention of Chester F. Carlson, whose financial assistance went on to help him leave his role at UVA. In a 1999 New York Times interview Stevenson explained why he had switched to the study of parapsychology, expressing his discontent at conventional explanations of the human personality. “I wasn’t satisfied with psychoanalysis or behaviorism or, for that matter, neuroscience. Something seemed to be missing,” he stated.

Ever since Carlson’s initial generous contribution, DOPS has been entirely funded by private donations, including, interestingly enough, from British actor and comedian John Cleese, who has become an admirer of the research project. In an interview he gave to, again, the New York Times in 2025, championing their work, Cleese said: “These people are behaving like good scientists. Good scientists are after the truth: they don’t just want to be right. I think it is absolutely astonishing and quite disgraceful, the way that orthodox contemporary, materialistic reductionist theory treats all the things — and there are so many of them — that they can’t begin to explain.”

There are a number of short videos available on YouTube where Cleese interviews two key members of the team discussing their specialized fields of interest. Dr Jim Tucker, Professor of Psychiatry and Director of DOPS for over 10 years until January 2025, talks about his study of children’s past life memories, and Dr Edward F. Kelly, Professor of Research, shares his realizations concerning the survival of consciousness beyond death. Dr Kelly has written a number of books on the subject including Consciousness Unbound: Liberating Mind from the Tyranny of Materialism and Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality. Dr Tucker’s books include his most recent, BEFORE: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives, which actually contains his two previous books, Return to Life and Life Before Life.

Dr Tucker rarely studies adult accounts of past life memories and said in the same 2025 New York Times article mentioned above: “They’re not our primary interest, partly because, as an adult, you’ve been exposed to a lot. You may think that you don’t know things from history, but you may well have been exposed to it. But also, the phenomenon typically happens in young kids. It’s as if they carry the memories with them, and they are typically very young when they start talking.” He added that, for a child recalling a past life, it can sometimes be distressing: “They might be missing people or have a sense of unfinished business. Frankly it’s probably better for the child that they don’t have these memories, because so many of the memories are difficult. The majority of kids who remember how they died, perished in some kind of violent, unnatural death.”

A good example of this from the many case studies held at DOPS, albeit rather graphic in its details, concerns a young girl from Burma, born with certain deformities, who remembered how she had died. Corroborating evidence was obtained from the villagers where this took place, who were able to recollect the event. As Dr Tucker explained in the article: “According to villagers, the man whose life she [the young Burmese girl] remembered being, had been murdered, his fingers chopped off and his throat slashed by a sword.” It was also noted that the young girl was born with several of her fingers missing and with birthmarks across her back and neck.

In one of the YouTube interviews with John Cleese, Dr Tucker describes another remarkable example of a past life remembrance concerning a little boy called Ryan Hammons from Oklahoma in the US. At the age of four, Ryan began constantly begging his mother to go to Hollywood. He became obsessive about it, and so his mother at one point decided to get a book on Hollywood out of the local library, to help him process what he was experiencing. One day they were looking through the book together and got to an old movie called Night after Night, when he suddenly exclaimed: “Hey mama that’s George, we did a picture together!” and then pointed to another person in the photo and said: “And that’s me.”

The first person he pointed to, was in fact the famous actor George Raft, and the other, he said was him, was an unknown extra with no lines in the movie. Ryan’s mother decided to contact Dr Tucker to see if they could figure out whether this was true and who the unknown extra was. After this initial contact, she was then sending Dr Tucker emails virtually every day with a multitude of statements from her son concerning his previous life, which the doctor meticulously documented. Eventually, with the help of a Hollywood archivist, Dr Tucker was able to find out who Ryan had been before. The archivist went to the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences and managed to get all the materials on the movie Night after Night. There was one shot, from the movie, which included this extra and gave his name as Marty Martin.

Ryan described quite a life, in those emails from his mother, which Dr Tucker found somewhat unlikely for an extra in a movie with no lines! But, after having seen all the research from the archivist into the actor’s career, surprisingly he found it did actually fit. Ryan said how he had danced in New York and it turns out Martin danced on Broadway. He said he had worked in an agency and Martin had started and run a successful talent agency. He described this life of going to Europe on ships and so forth, which is verified from the archives. He also said the street address of his (Martin’s) house had the word Rock or Mount in it, and the actor had lived on North Roxbury. One time, Ryan told his mother he did not see why God would let you get to 61 and then bring you back again as a baby. Though Martin’s death certificate stated he was 59 when he died, Dr Tucker looked into it and found through census records, marriage listings and passenger lists that indeed he was 61 when he died and the death certificate was inaccurate. Altogether, Dr Tucker was able to verify that over fifty of Ryan’s statements matched the life of Marty Martin.

Dr Tucker reiterates in the interview, that Martin was an obscure person who died in 1964, so there was no information readily available on him anywhere. Of course, now, because this case has become somewhat well-known, there is a lot more that can be found on his life via the Internet. By the end of the interview, Dr Tucker and John Cleese conclude that if one considers a recalled past life such as this one, it would be impossible for someone like Ryan to have gained this knowledge through any ordinary means. This shows the possibility of a person retaining accurate memories of a previous incarnation and communicating those memories in the present life, usually at a young age. This can then be verified through archival records, as in this case, proving the continuity of consciousness from one life to another, including the temporary hiatus that occurs between death and birth.

From the extensive database at DOPS, the strongest cases of past life remembrances occur in children under the age of 10 and the majority of those are between 2 and 6, after which they appear to fade. The database also indicates that the average intermission between death and birth is around 16 months.

When asked recently about the significance of his research into past life memories, Dr Tucker proposed that: “It could certainly impact how people view their lives. I think it’s a more hopeful view than the idea that this is just a random universe that is meaningless. Of course, people find this in their religion, but if people could see that there is this aspect of themselves that continues, it could help with grief and death anxiety, and you know, hopefully help people treat each other a little better. There would be a stronger sense that we’re all kind of in this together, that, again this is not a pointless existence.”

An upcoming book entitled Dying to See the Light: A Scientist’s Guide to Reawakening by NASA scientist and oceanographer Ingrid Honkala, explores these same themes, touched on here by Dr Tucker. She did not have one but three NDEs and in each one, though many years apart, her experiences were identical.

The first was at the age of 2 after she fell into a tank of icy water at her home in Bogota, Columbia. Her mother saved her, having rushed back from where she was at the time to find her daughter lying unconscious in the tank. Honkala described how her awareness separated from her body, and she was therefore able to see herself from above floating lifeless in the water. Within that OBE, she could also somehow see her mother several streets away and was able to communicate with her without speaking, which is what brought her running back to the house. She describes how initially she panicked and struggled to breathe, after which everything shifted. “Instead of fear, a deep calm came over me. The panic disappeared and was replaced by an overwhelming sense of peace and stillness. At that moment, I no longer felt like a child in a body, but like pure consciousness, a field of awareness and light. It felt like being universal in a vast intelligence filled with love, clarity and peace.” The incident, though at such a young age, changed her life forever. “From that moment forward, I no longer feared death.”

Honkala had two more NDEs, one at age 25 after a motorcycle accident and the other at age 52 when her blood pressure dropped dramatically during surgery. Though the circumstances were very different, each experience brought her back to the very same ‘place’, a state of deep calm and heightened awareness, not dependent on the physical body. Contradicting the current neurophysiological standpoint on NDEs and OBEs, as with the NEPTUNE model, she also asserts that her experiences were not fleeting hallucinations, but consistent, as she returned to the same state of consciousness each of the three times she came close to death. She holds a PhD in Marine Sciences and has worked in environmental research, including collaborations with NASA and the US Navy, and, in the book, expresses her sense that science and so-called spirituality need not be incompatible, as both seem to be exploring the same unanswered questions, albeit from different perspectives.

The oceanographer’s view on science and spirituality in effect being complimentary, echoes the core principles governing all research at DOPS. On their website they state: “It is our hope that other scientists join in addressing the serious study of the nature of consciousness and its interactions with the physical world… Growing numbers of people are becoming convinced the prevailing physicalist view is fundamentally flawed and research needs to extend in directions that will accommodate genuine extraordinary experiences without loss of scientific integrity.”

As with all new frontiers of scientific enquiry, it inevitably faces strong opposition from the mainstream establishment. Dr Bruce Greyson (mentioned earlier), himself faced much resistance before joining the team at DOPS, particularly from his employer at the time, the University of Michigan. As Greyson put it: “They told me point blank, that I wouldn’t have a future there if I did near-death research because you can’t measure that in a test tube. Unless I could quantify it by a biological measure, they didn’t want to hear about it.” A significant challenge to this “prevailing physicalist view” dominant within science is still in its infancy, though, it would appear, developing fast thanks to the extraordinary work of institutions like DOPS and others around the world, most notably the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, started by Apollo 14 astronaut Dr Edgar Mitchell.

The experience of a shift in consciousness, of course, is not new, it occurs at the beginning of every new age. As the new energies, this time the energies of Aquarius, make themselves felt in human life, they necessarily affect our consciousness. I quote a statement from the Tibetan, DK, through Alice Bailey, which is, He says, an immutable law: “Consciousness is dependent upon its vehicle for expression and both are dependent upon life and energy for existence.” Consciousness can only be seen and demonstrated through a vehicle. That is why the source of consciousness, the soul, finds it difficult to demonstrate consciousness in time and space, in the physical, emotional and mental apparatus of the human personality. The inertness of the matter which constitutes the bodies of these three vehicles inhibits the expression of the consciousness of the soul at this level. That is why we have to incarnate over and over again. Gradually, we evolve a more sensitive apparatus or vehicle, expressive of the perfection of the soul which itself reflects the monad, the spark of God, the divine.

The evolutionary process, the return journey in growth of consciousness, is a series of unifications, each higher than the one before. First, at-one-ment with the soul, then at-one-ment with the monad, with the divine. The monad reflects itself as soul, the soul reflects itself as the man or woman in the world, and the return journey re-enacts that process in the opposite direction. At-one-ment only comes about when the soul in any given incarnation is able to create a vehicle sufficiently sensitive to its impulses and impression. That is why, as one nears the first initiation, the first of five great expansions of consciousness which makes one a Master, the soul brings its vehicle, the man or woman, into meditation of some kind. Meditation is a method, more or less scientific (depending on the meditation), of coming into contact with the soul. The soul brings its vehicle into meditation to construct a sensitive instrument for its purposes, for the carrying out of its plans on earth.

The plan of the soul is sacrificial service to the plan of evolution, which, as far as humanity is concerned, is the spiritualization of matter. Our task is to spiritualize matter. We do it through the spiritualization of our own successive vehicles or bodies of expression, sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman, but always (all else being equal) evolving a more sensitive instrument for the soul to use. The ability of the soul to express itself is absolutely dependent on the quality of that instrument. Therefore, the path of evolution is the growing awareness of what the soul is, wants, and is seeking to express through the man or woman in incarnation.

Pope Leo states in the very first sentence that humanity today is facing a pivotal choice: “either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together”. To emphasize the two choices, he compares in detail two biblical images: the construction of the Tower of Babel, as described in Genesis 11:1-9, and the rebuilding of the walls of ancient Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile, narrated in Nehemiah 2-6. He refers to these images repeatedly throughout the Encyclical, as they illustrate symbolically where we stand today in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The Tower of Babel

Toward the beginning of humanity, the people settled on a plain in the land of Shinar, and, seeking to guarantee stability and power for themselves, they decided to build a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens”. They adopted a single language, a single technology, and a single direction. However impressive, though, it was a project conceived without reference to God, characterized by uniformity rather than diversity, and homogeneity over communion. The result was not unity, but dispersion: communication broke down, languages were confused, and people no longer understood each other. The lesson of the Tower of Babel is that any effort — no matter how grandiose — that’s based on self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency, and seeks to reach heaven without God’s blessing will fail.

Rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem
When some of the Jewish people returned to Jerusalem after their exile in Babylonia, they found a city in ruins, with the walls collapsed and the gates burned. Nehemiah, a Jew in service to the Persian King Artaxerxes, received news of the state of his ancestral city, and after fasting and praying, asked the King for permission to return. On his arrival, he inspected the destroyed parts of the city in silence, but didn’t try to impose solutions. He brought together the families, listened to their concerns, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition. The city was reborn not through one man’s initiative, but through a collaborative effort with responsibility shared by everyone, and with God at the center. The result was communion rather than uniformity, and harmony as all people assumed their own role.

Building for the common good
Leo points out that technology in and of itself is neither a solution to humanity’s problems nor inherently evil. It’s never neutral, however, but takes on the characteristics of those who develop, finance, regulate and use it. The choice is whether or not we want to construct a modern Tower of Babel or rebuild Jerusalem. “We must, then, avoid the ‘Babel Syndrome’, namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.”

In order to build for the common good, he says, certain principles are crucial. First, everything must be built based on a firm relationship with God. Secondly, we should not see the limits and weaknesses of humanity as errors to be corrected. Instead of striving for unlimited ‘upgrades’ that can make inequalities worse, or immediate solutions incapable of healing wounds, we should aim for harmonious growth that incorporates mutual care and true solidarity. Progress should be measured by the dignity of each person and the good of all people.

Another important principle is shared responsibility, courage, and a subsidiarity where all have their own “sections of the wall” and parts to play. Subsidiarity values co-operation between generations, peoples, disciplines, and cultures as the best way to create stability, prosperity, and peace. Above all we have a “pressing duty to remain profoundly human” and “safeguard the grandeur of humanity… the splendor of which no machine can ever replace”.

The Social Doctrine of the Church
The Social Doctrine of the Church is a living, changing reality that responds to the challenges of the times. Although the expression “Social Doctrine of the Church” was coined in 1950 by Pope Pius XII, it indicates a long tradition of the Church reflecting on life in society from the Middle Ages onward. It’s not a handbook, but a process of discernment regarding eternal truths in relation to historical events, drawing insights from the contributions of science, culture and human experience.

The Doctrine is based on a core set of foundational truths: 1) the human person is created in the image and likeness of God, 2) all human beings are endowed with equal dignity which does not have to be earned, and 3) human rights are inherent in the human person, and are universal and inalienable.

Likewise, the Doctrine incorporates unchanging principles:

1. the promotion of the common good
2. the universal destination of goods — meaning the earth’s goods are given to the entire human family for their use
3. subsidiarity — that is, the role of individuals’ families, communities and intermediary organizations should not be supplanted by higher-level authorities
4. solidarity — the recognition that the future of each individual is connected to the future of all
5. social justice — the capacity of a social, economic and political order to allow everyone — particularly the weakest — to live a truly dignified life
6. integral human development, or growth of individuals and peoples that encompasses all dimensions of existence.

Pope Leo’s encyclical examines AI in relation to the Social Doctrine of the Church.

To be continued in the next issue

From the beginning, this project was a collaboration between student teams in Japan and Korea. Although we live in different countries, we shared one common question: How can young people reduce waste while supporting families facing food insecurities?

Our journey began with a problem we could see clearly in our communities.

In Japan, food insecurity often hides behind quiet dignity. According to a recent survey by Save the Children Japan, over 90 percent of low-income households with children reported struggling to afford enough food, with many families forced to cut back on even basic staples such as rice due to rising prices.

Single-parent households — most led by mothers — face especially high levels of food hardship and are often compelled to make painful decisions about how limited budgets are spent. For some families, this means choosing between symbolic moments of celebration and everyday nutrition. A ¥3,000 Christmas cake may represent joy for one household, but for another, that same amount must stretch to five kilograms of rice — enough to feed a family for several days.

At the same time, vast amounts of edible food are wasted in Japan. Official statistics show that millions of tons of food are discarded annually in Japan, much of it still edible. Seasonal items such as Christmas cakes, which cannot be sold after December 25, are frequently thrown away. This contrast — waste on one side and hunger on the other — reflects the global challenge addressed by SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production.

As students in Japan and Korea, we asked ourselves, “What role can we play in closing this gap?”

We knew that awareness alone would not change habits enough. Instead of telling people to feel guilty about food waste, we decided to take action together.

We began locally, but with shared purpose.

In Japan, students at Dalton Tokyo Senior High School noticed that mandarin oranges — one of the country’s most common fruits — often go uneaten, with peels and seeds discarded. In Korea, students identified a different issue: more than 150,000 tons of used coffee grounds are discarded each year, contributing to landfill emissions and greenhouse gas emissions.

Different materials.

One shared goal.

Rather than seeing waste as the end of a product’s life, we saw it as a beginning.

Research shows that citrus peels contain essential oils that can be used in soaps and cleaning products. Studies in Korea also demonstrate that spent coffee grounds can be processed into sustainable biomaterials suitable for eco-friendly design and 3D printing. Plantable seed paper — made from recycled paper embedded with seeds — is another example of how waste can be transformed into something regenerative.

Inspired by these ideas, our student teams turned theory into action.

Japanese students created handmade soaps using discarded citrus peels.

Korean students developed 3D-printed clip-on vases incorporating recycled coffee grounds, encouraging people to reuse empty bottles and cups instead of discarding them.

They also produced plantable seed paper from recycled materials, allowing waste to literally grow into flowers and herbs.

These products were not sold as charity goods. Instead, they were shared as examples of responsible consumption — showing that waste can have a second life through our design. Through this work, we directly supported SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, which calls for reducing waste through recycling and reuse, and SDG 13: Climate Action, by lowering emissions through upcycling.

At the same time, the funds raised had a clear purpose.

The profits were used to support families facing food insecurity. In Japan, we donated to single-mother families with hospitalized children through the NPO Keep Mama Smiling.

They also provided essential cooking ingredients to the Karuizawa Food Bank. By connecting environmental action with helping families in need, our project also supported SDG 2: Zero Hunger

Through this experience, we learned that caring for the planet and caring for people are not separate goals. Waste reduction and hunger relief became connected in one youth-led effort — turning environmental responsibility into community solidarity.

But our collaboration did not stop in Japan and Korea.

Through a partnership with the OneSmile Foundation — an organization that transforms digital smiles into donations — we connected our local initiatives to a global challenge. During workshops, we learned that school meal donations in Lesotho had stopped the previous year. Without reliable meals, many students were struggling to focus in class.

Together, our Japanese and Korean teams raised over 300,000 Japanese yen.

Working with local partners in Lesotho, we organized a community-based food support initiative at Rasetimela High School, which serves 863 students. School feeding programs play a critical role in Lesotho, and recent disruptions have left many students more vulnerable to hunger.

Ninety-one of the most vulnerable students were selected through transparent criteria, including those supported by social welfare programs and those who had previously relied on international assistance. Each selected family received staple foods such as rice and corn flour to make a local staple called pap. Distribution was organized near the school to ensure safety and allow parents to collect the supplies securely.

This cross-border effort — connecting students, NGOs, local leaders, and communities — reflects the spirit of SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals.

Although we live in different countries, climates, and cultures, this experience reshaped how we understand global co-operation. The students in Lesotho were not distant beneficiaries. We became peers in a shared world.

As young people, we often believe our impact is limited because we do not control large resources. This project challenged that belief. We learned that we can create change by designing solutions, raising awareness, and working together.

We even tried to measure what we called a “Happiness Index” by counting the smiles of students who received support. Those smiles reminded us that sustainability is not only environmental or economic — it is human.

Our experience shows that youth are not just future leaders. We are active contributors today. When creativity meets collaboration, waste can become opportunity, and local action can grow into global solidarity.

Turning waste into hope is not an abstract idea. It is a choice — and young people are already making it.

(Source: IPS)

In November 2025, Norwegian physicist Maria Strømme published a scientific paper that attempts to reconcile consciousness and ageless wisdom with modern Western scientific theory. Published in the scientific journal, AIP Advances, her paper, titled “Universal consciousness as foundational field: A theoretical bridge between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy”, attempts to establish a framework for exploring the theory that consciousness, rather than being a by-product of biological neural processes, is actually the foundation for reality itself.

Strømme is a prominent research scientist well known for her pioneering work in nanotechnology. She is a distinguished Chair Professor of Nanotechnology at Uppsala University in Sweden, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, a recipient of the Gold Medal for Research, has authored more than 350 peer-reviewed scientific publications, and holds numerous patents, many of which have been successfully licensed to national and international biotech and energy companies. For several years she has also been exploring an interest in the link between quantum physics and non-dual philosophy.

Building on the work of such prominent physicists as Albert Einstein, David Bohm, Erwin Schrödinger, and Werner Heisenberg, Strømme constructs a mathematical framework based on the Three Principles of Universal Mind, Universal Consciousness, and Universal Thought, introduced by Sydney Banks¹, who “emphasized that these principles are formless and eternal, existing before space, time, and matter”. In this model, Mind is the formless, universal intelligence, the foundation from which everything else arises. Consciousness is “the universal capacity for awareness”. And Thought is the mechanism that transforms formless potential into objective forms.

Students of the Ageless Wisdom Teaching may find Strømme’s descriptions of these Three Principles strikingly familiar. One of the core principles of Theosophy is that there is “an Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless, and Immutable PRINCIPLE on which all speculation is impossible” and which lies behind all manifested forms in the universe. This is very similar to Strømme’s use of Universal Mind, which she describes as “the source of all potential, the driver of creation, … (and) the metaphysical foundation from which all differentiation and structure arise”.

In the writings of the Master DK through Alice Bailey (and elsewhere), we also have the idea that all forms come into manifestation through the vehicle of Active Intelligence (Thought), with Consciousness as the link between Unknowable Spirit on the one hand, and manifested forms on the other. So we have Mind, Consciousness, and Thought closely approximating the three Divine Aspects of Ageless Wisdom. These are often described as ‘Life, Consciousness, and Form’ or ‘Will, Love/Wisdom, and Matter/Active Intelligence’.

Strømme further posits that Consciousness is a “fundamental field” from which space-time (and all known reality) arises; a field that existed prior to the Big Bang.  In quantum physics, this is called the quantum vacuum: the formless foundational state containing the potential for all manifestation. In her model, Consciousness is this foundational state, rather than arising as a byproduct of the later evolution of matter and form.

She then puts forward a mathematical framework with which to describe some of the possible processes whereby formless Universal Mind and Universal Consciousness transition, through the vehicle of Universal Thought, into differentiated states, resulting in the manifestation of the field of space-time, or of forms such as a galaxy, a solar system, or a human being.

One of these processes she refers to as “self-reflection and creative emergence”, saying that “Self-reflection represents a unique mechanism through which universal consciousness may differentiate by becoming aware of itself. In this view, differentiation arises from the introspective act of the universal mind observing its own infinite potential — a creative feedback loop in which awareness itself gives rise to form.” This closely mirrors the Master DK’s description of how the Monad or Self gradually becomes aware of Itself in its various expressions through successive planes of manifestation and multiple human incarnations.

Another of these processes she calls “symmetry breaking”, in which the symmetrical, formless, unmanifested potential, “breaks” into differentiated, asymmetric ones through perturbations introduced by Thought. These could manifest as nearly any type of form: a star system, a species, or an individual human mind.

One way of looking at Strømme’s model is that in quantum physics a sub-atomic particle in its ‘wave’ state, exists as a ‘probability field’ — a wave function with no fixed location. Only when observed does it ‘collapse’ into a particle, at a specific location in space at a particular moment in time. In principle it could appear pretty much anywhere, but the wave describes the probability of how likely it is to appear in any given location.

Similarly, Strømme suggests that the Consciousness field is pure potential, capable of manifesting as matter, as a person, or as a solar system — providing a vehicle for that Consciousness to express itself in some particular form. The breakthrough in Strømme’s approach is that she proposes that Consciousness itself constitutes that universal field of potential from which everything else arises.

Many scientists have previously made connections between consciousness and form. In quantum physics, it’s a well-known principle that it’s impossible to observe a quantum event without having an effect on it. For example, a sub-atomic object such as an electron or a photon of light can manifest either as a particle, with a specific location in space at a particular moment in time, or as a “wave” that spreads out in various directions. But it literally can’t exist as both at the same time. How we choose to observe it — either as a particle or a wave — literally determines its existence at the moment of observation. So our choice determines its reality. This connection of sub-atomic events to consciousness is widely explored in physics, both theoretically and experimentally.

Much of her framework is grounded in previous exploration in physics. To establish the link between consciousness and quantum theory, Strømme expands on such work as David Bohm’s theory of Implicate Order, which proposes that the universe is one interconnected whole, with our perceived reality acting as a holographic projection of a deeper “implicate” dimension, which contains all things, space, time, and consciousness, enfolded within. She calls upon Werner Heisenberg’s potentia, which views quantum particles in their wave state as “objective possibilities” rather than physical realities, and that when we perceive or observe an object, these waves of multiple potential values “collapse” into a single, concrete “actual” state. She also draws on Einstein’s view that fields such as the electromagnetic or gravitational fields serve as the fundamental building blocks of reality, and that matter or mass is somewhat secondary to, and interchangeable with energy. She further cites Erwin Schrödinger’s perspective that consciousness is one singular, indivisible whole, and that the gap between the observer and the observed is artificial or illusory.

Interestingly, several of these founding fathers of modern physics were also heavily influenced by aspects of philosophy and Ageless Wisdom. For over 25 years, David Bohm and J. Krishnamurti had numerous, well documented, in-depth dialogues on consciousness, the nature of thought, and the fundamental reality of the universe. According to some reports, Einstein was said to have kept a copy of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine on his desk, and that he may have even recommended it to Heisenberg. Schrödinger was heavily influenced by Eastern non-dualistic philosophical traditions such as the Advaita Vedanta.   

In a bit of fascinating synchronicity, in 2025, Dan Brown, author of such best selling novels as The DaVinci Code, released his most recent book, The Secret of Secrets. The main theme of his story is identical to Strømme’s, that of Universal Consciousness as the fundamental field of reality. Much of Brown’s research for the novel came from sources such as the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where the same basic ideas of consciousness as fundamental to reality are explored.  Strømme, however, may have been the first to propose and formulate an actual mathematical framework to describe how it all might work. Her ideas have nonetheless faced professional skepticism.

Since it was published last November, Strømme’s article has generated a good deal of interest on the internet, and no small measure of controversy in scientific circles. In May of this year, AIP Advances published a retraction of her paper, stating that some of the central operators in her mathematical framework, such as T̂, which she uses as a mathematical operator for ‘Thought’, lacked measurable quantities and thus the framework could not be empirically proven or disproven.  Any future versions of the framework would therefore need to address the stringent requirements of mathematical ‘provability’ and experimentation in order to engage the scientific community in exploring it as a valid perspective.

Even though her mathematical framework has run up against a formal scientific roadblock, it nonetheless represents a new paradigm in advancing modern scientific exploration and bridging the apparent gap between science and ageless non-dualistic philosophical perspectives. It also seems to correspond to a rapidly expanding interest, in both popular and scientific circles, on the relationship between consciousness, life, and physical reality. Though she has thus far declined to comment specifically on the retraction to her proposed model, I suspect we may not have heard the last from Professor Strømme on this topic.

How do you raise yourselves up in the face of unparalleled, dehumanizing cruelty and injustice as continues to be shown to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank? How do you raise yourselves up when the rest of the world has forgotten the significance of your plight?

As Benjamin Creme put it: you strive to be the best you can be.

Subjected to extreme adversity and raw hatred, you keep going. Surrounded by devastation, you show determined resourcefulness and creativity. You meet mindless, heartless selfishness by serving the needs of others less able than yourself. Despite the pain and darkness, you light your world with harmless fun, hope and joy. You demonstrate the indestructibility of the human spirit in the face of evil.

The following are just a few examples of Palestinian resilience and resistance. They should not be taken as implying that all Palestinian culture is perfect. Far from it. Like any other nation, it has its strengths and flaws. But the Palestinians do show some of what is possible, even in the face of near-total desecration and destruction. Unlike Israel’s efforts to take the world backwards, the spirit of Palestine reaches forward to something better in whatever way it can.

Keeping hope alive through inclusivity, fun, joy, perseverance

In May, despite all the horrors being experienced there — or, more likely, because of them — Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank held the 10th Palestine International Marathon, after six years of cancellations and postponements due to Covid-19 and the war. In Gaza, this year’s event was particularly celebrated because of its inclusivity, with between 1,900 and 2,500 participants: men, women, many war amputees, families and children.

Associated Press noted that this was the first year that women were allowed to participate in Gaza. One said that she wanted “to deliver a message to the whole world that Gaza loves sports and perseverance”. Another said: “Even though we are a people of determination but a marginalized group in society, we are proving that … we can deliver sports,… We are delivering a message that we are still here, and we are insisting on continuing our lives.”

The start of the race was co-ordinated with the start of the main race in Bethlehem, where about 9,500 Palestinian and international runners, NGOs, EU representatives, and activists ran to demonstrate unity in support of their slogans: ‘Right to Movement’, ‘The Right to Life and Hope’. About 1,000 joined in other parts of the world to show solidarity.

Participants in Bethlehem ran the 42-kilometre race alongside separation walls, through refugee camps, and across rural communities, reflecting the everyday reality of life for Palestinians: a life of checkpoints, blocked roads, restricted access, and long delays between places only minutes apart. In Gaza, the 5-kilometre race reflected what was possible for people with poor nutrition. For amputees, it was 2 kilometres. Those amputees made an extraordinarily revealing sight. Pressing on with great determination despite those war injuries, with no prosthetic limbs available to them, only crutches or wheelchairs.

Mariam, a participant in the family 10-kilometre race in Bethlehem, said that lessons she’d learnt from races in the past led her to leaving home three hours early for this one, such were the number of checkpoints and other obstacles she would have to get through. But she described the atmosphere of the race as a source of joy. “Kids, adults, and families were thirsty for such activities. Everyone has been under pressure for so long, and we needed this space to breathe and feel something different again.”
(Sources: Associated Press; sportanddev.org; Al Jazeera)

Service and adaptability face down fear

In June 2025, the international disability charity Humanity & Inclusion (HI) published figures showing the dire need for practical support and rehabilitation for amputees in Gaza. Given the continued incarceration of the whole population by Israel and its restrictions on receipt of medical supplies, there is no reason to suppose that those figures will have improved at all since then.

At that time, there were known to be more than 123,000 people injured since October 2023, 4,000 of whom had lost one or more limbs; 6,000 prosthetic limbs were needed, including for many children. Gaza, HI reports, has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. It is essential that children’s prosthetics have ongoing specialist assessments and maintenance as their limbs grow and yet little is available.

In April 2026, HI said that they were one of the few remaining providers of such care in Gaza. Every member of the team is directly affected by the conflict, frequently displaced, living in shelters, “yet they show up every day at work to provide lifesaving support”. This, while worrying about their own families at home.

Some children have taken matters into their own hands by making prosthetic legs from drainpipes for other children.

Reclaiming the right to life and shared livingness

As well as health and welfare services, Israel targeted everything that could possibly help Gaza’s economy and education right from the start: the colleges and universities, journalism, the fishing industry, the growing and innovative tech and entrepreneurial hubs, and, of course, buildings and infrastructure along with any means for rebuilding. Yet much is being reclaimed and is being rebuilt by the people themselves rather than waiting for help to come.

In September 2025, the UN estimated that the war had created 61 million tonnes of rubble. From these ruins, Palestinians are creating their own cement — at great risk to their own health as they have no protective gear. Though the quality of the cement is not ideal, they are using it for basic constructions.

This year, two teenage sisters, Tala and Farah Mousa from Gaza, have been named the Middle East regional winners of the Earth Prize for their innovative reuse of rubble, turning it into reusable bricks. They plan to use their £9,245 prize to teach others how to make the bricks themselves. Speaking to the BBC, Tala said: “Even the view from our tent window became the main motivation. We transferred something negative into something positive by refusing to see rubble only as a symbol of destruction and loss. Instead of seeing it as the end, we tried to see it as the beginning of something new.”

Before the war, Gaza had a thriving and innovative tech sector — a source of hope and opportunity in the midst of mass unemployment. Its destruction, claims the rights group Euro-Med Monitor, appears to have been an intentional part of Israeli policy right from the start of the war. All the resources and facilities were eradicated or made useless, hundreds of experts and key staff were killed, many talented students left Gaza while they still could. But now, that sector too is starting to rise from the ashes.

The hope, vision, and resolve continue.

(Sources: Al Jazeera; Euro-Med Monitor; BBC)

Abby Maxman is the President and CEO of Oxfam America. Her work has taken her to more than 70 countries and spans critical global challenges from the apartheid era in South Africa, to the HIV AIDS and Ebola epidemics in Sub Saharan Africa, and chronic food insecurity in Ethiopia. She has been involved in post-genocide relief and recovery efforts in Rwanda, and has led large-scale humanitarian responses in Haiti and Ethiopia. She has been instrumental in advancing gender and climate justice, fighting inequality and driving Oxfam America’s ambitious 2030 strategy.

She was interviewed for Share International magazine by McNair Ezzard.

Share International: Can you share a bit of history about Oxfam?
Abby Maxman: We were founded originally in 1942 by a group of Quakers, social activists and academics in Oxford, England, as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief. It was in response to the plight of refugees in Greece. Then a couple of decades later, here in the United States, we had a similar group of activists and intellectuals, academics, Quakers, and Unitarians that founded Oxfam in America on the backdrop of the war in Bangladesh. Both were founded looking at the plight of a humanitarian crisis in the context of war, but also looking at respective governments’ roles in those contexts.

In the United States, when we were founded, there were some key decisions at the time that really influenced who we were and who we’ve become. Our founders decided that we would not accept US Government funding. Instead, the focus was on building a broad base of grassroots support to remain both independent of Government influence, and an independent voice to influence government and action. We also had some other key points in our founding about small scale work, about dignified imaging, and making sure we were educating the US public with fact and evidence-based information. A lot of that has held true.

SI: I would think the early decision not to accept Government funding turned out to be the right decision in light of what’s happening in the Government today.
AM: Absolutely. It’s something we held on to. We believe in overseas development assistance. We are big advocates of responsible foreign assistance. We always tried to use our voice as an organization that did not accept US Government funding, to be a good partner to the US Government, to influence good practice and positive reforms of how foreign assistance works. So what has happened has positioned us to use our voice and experience differently than some of our amazing international and national partners who have been hit hardest and most immediately by the cuts.

SI: What has been the effect of US aid cuts on the roles of other governments in terms of their funding?
AM: The actions of the US Government have impacted how other governments are showing up. We’ve seen a domino effect from the US administration’s actions. It has forced retreats, or even shifting of funding, since the US Government is no longer a reliable actor in global development, diplomacy and humanitarian and development action.

SI: One would have thought that other countries would have wanted to pick up the slack. But you’re saying that’s not what’s happened.
AM: I think other countries would have, would want to, but there’s a confluence of factors going on. One is that US investment, as the richest country in the world, was significant. Forty-two percent of the entire international, multilateral aid and development system was underpinned by the US Government funding, 50% of humanitarian funding in many countries. So already, in a world that was struggling with conflict, with climate change, the aftermath of COVID and public health issues, where there was a lot of sliding back on some of the Sustainable Development Goals, where progress had previously been made, there was already a stretched system. The fact that the US Government pulled out so abruptly left a huge gap that no government could fill. For those that were trying to protect foreign assistance, it’s been hard to backfill enough to meet the gap created by the US Government.

In a time of global insecurity with this upending of the norms that have underpinned the post-World War Two architecture; there’s a lot of stock-taking. Even those governments who are trying to maintain aid are looking at some shifting of what they have invested in aid to other places. Aid has always represented a tiny percentage of foreign assistance. In the case of the United States, it was less than 1% of the United States budget. Pulling down aid that helps people around the world is being done to basically create tax breaks for the ultra wealthy. It is a cruel reversal of the Robin Hood idea.

SI: Do you see the level of hunger and poverty increasing because of the slashing of US aid?
AM: There’s real risks of that. Before this administration came in, there was the latest report on global hunger that reflected the previous year. It showed slight progress in reducing hunger, but it also warned that over half a billion people could be chronically hungry by 2030, nearly 60% of them in Africa. I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo a year ago and saw the harmful impacts of the US Government pull out, on hunger, on food security, on access to all the things that go into helping people live in dignity and security. With humanitarian and peace investments, but also development, we anticipate huge backsliding.

SI: There was a statistic on the website for the Sudanese American Physicians Association that said nine million people in the world die from hunger and hunger-related diseases every year, which equates to almost 25,000 people dying from hunger every day. Over the last decade or so it seems like that number has stayed pretty stable.
AM: It’s a tough issue of our times. Those of us in the humanitarian and development system who have been working to save lives have seen this confluence of climate-related crises. The frequency and ferocity of climate-related disasters have pushed people who might be chronically food insecure to the cusp. At a time when investment in local farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, so they could farm and withstand some of these shocks, are now being pulled back.

Some of the main suite of issues that push people into hunger, or famine, are a lack of support for small-scale farmers, the climate crises, and conflict. Wars affect food security. Then there’s the global food system. The power and influence of large food companies and global trade create an export-driven approach to agriculture that harms poor countries. These countries must then import food. So there’s been an upending of the global food system as well, that has pushed communities further into poverty.

SI: There was a report from the World Bank that said there are nearly 700 million people worldwide living in poverty. That means people are living on less than $2.25 a day. It doesn’t seem like we are anywhere near achieving the UN development goal to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.
AM: That is true. At the same time, as we look back at the past five years or so, there were a lot of indicators showing real progress across many of the Sustainable Development Goals — poverty, hunger, inequality, gender, climate, water. But there was a setback during COVID. Now we’ve seen this rollback that has been supercharged by this administration in particular.

I hear stories from colleagues everywhere around the world of health facilities being shuttered. Even worse are reports that not only was aid stopped that was already agreed upon, but some of it was kept so long in places of transit, that it went beyond the expiration dates. Aid was being incinerated — food that could have provided meals, high energy biscuits and healthcare support to people who needed it. I’m out of adjectives some days to describe what has happened. If you’re anyone who has had the terrible experience of being with a child who is starving and knowing that these low cost, affordable, high protein peanut pastes can save lives, can turn a child on the verge of starvation back into a healthy, vibrant child, to know that kind of aid is withheld from mothers and children is just beyond one’s conscience.

SI: One of the issues in the news, and has been for some time, is the situation in Gaza. Can you talk about what the situation is for the citizens of Gaza at this time?
AM: First I want to emphasize — the humanitarian crisis is not over. More than six months into the ceasefire, humanitarian conditions for Palestinians in Gaza remain catastrophic and the promise of President Trump’s 20-point peace plan is not being kept. Despite the drop in Israel’s bombardment and some aid being allowed in, the chokehold on Palestinians in Gaza remains.

Israel’s attacks continue while food, clean water, sanitation materials, and medical supplies are in short supply. Organizations like Oxfam and other humanitarian organizations are still largely blocked from bringing in humanitarian materials and personnel into Gaza. Still, we continue as much as we can to carry out life-saving work. We continue to hear accounts from our colleagues — of loved ones and community members going to bed hungry; of havig to queue for hours in hope of filling a jerrycan with clean water; of continued fear of Israeli strikes killing loved ones; of families with young children still living in makeshift shelter among rodents and other threats.

Oxfam has been working in the occupied Palestinian territories in Israel since the 1950s. We have a lot of experience, and our staff, our Palestinian colleagues, are doing tremendous work. We work with a range of local partners, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations and operational partners who are operating in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and across the occupied territory. Now our own staff are suffering through the same trauma and crisis as the people we’re trying to support. While attention has been redirected to the regional conflict, the situation for Palestinians in Gaza, and the West Bank continue to be just horrific.

SI: How is Oxfam able to do anything in such conditions?
AM: Our teams there are nothing short of heroic. Despite the dangers and operational hurdles, Oxfam staff and partners continue to respond in Gaza and the West Bank. Since October 2023, we have reached more than 1.1 million people in Gaza with lifesaving assistance  — food, clean water, sanitation systems and hygiene support. Oxfam is a water and sanitation leader — distributing water in trucks and also rehabilitating water systems. We educate people on the importance of hygiene, even as it’s so difficult to maintain it in overcrowded, often flooded tents and informal settlements. We are working with more than twenty partners in Gaza, distributing food and supporting farmers seeking to re-establish agricultural production. We are helping women and girls survive sexual and psychological violence.

Israeli authorities are rejecting our requests to bring aid into Gaza, but we are procuring locally and working with partners to source basic life-saving items. This continues to be a drop in the ocean of need. But we are committed to doing all we can to save lives, to provide security and dignity to people caught in impossible circumstances, while ensuring the safety of our staff.

Leading international experts have told the World Health Organization (WHO) that the climate crisis should be declared a public health emergency of international concern (Pheic), to prevent millions more people dying unnecessarily. Pheics are the highest level of health alert and — as occurred during the Covid pandemic and the 2022 Mpox outbreak — trigger a co-ordinated international response.

The independent Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health convened by the WHO, states in their report: “…climate change poses an immediate and long-term threat to health, economic, food, water, environmental, personal, community and national security”. The report also mentions the health impacts of extreme weather, rising temperatures, pollution and food insecurity.

In an interview with The Guardian, the Commission Chair, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, said “The climate crisis may not be a pandemic, but it’s still a public health emergency that threatens humanity’s very health and survival.”

The WHO’s Regional Director for Europe, Dr Hans Kluge, responding to the report’s recommendations, said: “The case for acting on climate now is not just environmental. It is a security argument, a health argument and an economic argument, all at once. And it is a moral imperative.”

(Source: theguardian.com)

Strong action on climate change — UN vote

The UN General Assembly voted 141 to 8 in May, to support strong action to limit climate change. This was despite diplomatic efforts by the United States to have the measure withdrawn, and abstentions from 38 countries, including the US, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia — some of the world’s highest oil-producing nations and emitters of greenhouse gas.

The nonbinding resolution endorses last July’s landmark advisory opinion by the UN’s top court that said countries failing to protect the planet from climate change is a violation of international law.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement: “The world’s highest court has spoken. Today, the General Assembly has answered…. This is a powerful affirmation of international law, climate justice, science, and the responsibility of states to protect people from the escalating climate crisis.”

The text includes phasing out subsidies for fossil fuel exploration, production and exploitation; and urging those in violation to provide “full reparation” for damage.

(Source: apnews.com)

Global Earth Prize won by teen trio from India

Having won the The Earth Prize for the Asian continent in mid-May, three teenagers from India have gone on to win the Global Earth Prize. This is a competition open to teenage students worldwide, awarding those who develop the best solutions to create positive change in regards to environmental sustainability.

The 16-year-old winners, Vivaan Chhawchharia, Ariana Agarwal and Avyana Mehta, invented a microplastic filter called Plas-Stick. The all-natural microplastic clumping agent is based on powdered tamarind seed — a common ingredient in Indian cuisine. Designed for use in water containers, the powder binds plastic particles into visible clumps that can then be easily removed with a magnet, thus offering a simple, cheap alternative to complex filtration systems.

Over 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water infrastructure and so rely on stored water that may contain microplastics. Microplastics are a significant environmental and human health contaminant, and have been recorded in high quantities in every human organ and tissue.

In a statement, the trio said: “Being named the Global Winners of The Earth Prize is incredibly special for all of us, especially as the first team from India to receive this recognition.”

The team plans to use decentralised production hubs to scale the invention and make safer drinking water more accessible to rural communities across India and beyond.

(Source: goodnewsnetwork.org)

Thirty percent of ocean around French Polynesia now fully protected

On 7 June 2026, the Government of French Polynesia announced that it would expand its fully protected waters by another 520,000 square kilometres. This means that 30% of French Polynesia’s waters is now under full protection from extractive industries such as seabed mining and industrial fishing.

A year ago, French Polynesia, a French overseas territory, established the Tainui Atea marine protected area. This spans nearly 5 million square kilometres of the area of ocean that French Polynesia has exclusive rights to conserve and manage.

Donatien Tanret, Principal Officer of Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy, which helped develop the conservation plan, said that the protected area includes artisanal fishing zones so that local people can continue fishing and sustain their local communities. He also confirmed that the protected area was established after reaching consensus within communities in French Polynesia, and years of advocacy from local mayors.

The new protected zone will help conserve 20 species of shark, breeding sites for 22 bird species, including the endangered Polynesian storm-petrel, Phoenix petrel, and Murphy’s petrel, as well as support swordfish, bigeye tuna and opah, and 455 mollusk species.

The President of French Polynesia, Moetai Brotherson, told Agence France-Presse: “We also hope that it can inspire other countries, especially the larger ones, in the way they manage their relationship with the ocean.”

(source: news.mongabay.com)

Mangrove forests showing signs of recovery worldwide

After decades of loss from deforestation and coastal development, mangroves are expanding in many parts of the world, according to a study by researchers from Tulane University, a private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana. The study is based on forty years of satellite data, and was published in the journal Science.

Mangrove forests were once considered one of the world’s most-threatened coastal ecosystems, and play a critical role in protecting coastlines, as well as supporting fisheries and storing carbon.

Signs of recovery have been seen along the US Gulf Coast, coastal areas in China, New Caledonia and Australia, with the increase largely due to natural regeneration and mangroves expanding into newly-formed coastal areas.

The lead author of the study, Zhen Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar at Tulane University said: “… we’re finally seeing a global turning point for mangroves… this highlights their strong resilience and their potential as a powerful nature-based solution for climate mitigation and coastal protection.”

“While some mangroves are still being lost, this could make them a rare conservation success story and an important source of optimism for climate action,” said Daniel Friess, director for both The Mangrove Lab and the Center for Public Policy Research at the Murphy Institute.

Continued protection is key to sustaining the rebound, according to the study. Zhang said: “… when deforestation stops, mangroves can continue to accumulate carbon naturally over time, so there’s a major climate benefit in both avoiding emissions now and allowing future carbon storage.”

(source: news.tulane.edu)

Trump Administration gives up on fight to halt wind energy projects

The Trump administration has given up on efforts to halt wind energy projects across the US. It has also dropped its challenge to a court ruling made in December 2025, in which a Massachusetts federal judge blocked President Trump’s executive order indefinitely pausing permits for wind farm projects.

The judge had ruled that the order was arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law. States that challenged the order hail it as being one of the most significant legal victories against the administration’s anti-energy transition campaign.

It’s one of a series of setbacks for the administration, and despite hurdles imposed by the White House, clean energy production has continued to increase.

A recent rapport from the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and Atlas Public Policy, states that a record 79.7 GW of clean power is projected to come online in the US in 2026, far dwarfing the approximate 8 GW of clean energy projects being cancelled in the first quarter of the year.

A senior advisor to the Sierra Club, Nancy Pyne, said: “While everyday Americans face soaring bills and unstable prices, renewable energy offers an affordable, common-sense solution to lower costs and protect our health and our environment.”

(source: insideclimatenews.org)

People power in Albania

Over the past several weeks, the Balkan nation of Albania has been rocked by protests stretching from its capital Tirana, to rural coastlines, and in cities worldwide.

The demonstrations were sparked by the Government permitting firms linked with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, to develop a 10,000-bed luxury resort near the city of Vlorë on the Narta Lagoon and protected wildlands in Zvërnec. Kushner and Ivanka Trump also plan to turn Sazan Island, part of a national park, into a coastal enclave for the wealthy.

International coverage of the protests in Albania has focused on the environmental concerns being raised by demonstrators, and the projects’ ties to the Trump family. Pristine wilderness and critical ecosystems sustaining a rare colony of the world’s largest freshwater birds, endangered Albanian water frogs, and loggerhead turtles are threatened, as well as the last remaining Albanian habitat for flamingos.

The ‘Flamingo Revolution’, as it’s become known, is about more than the environment. Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law and the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz said, “This is a fight for freedom and democracy, and a future where the resources and the state work for all of us and not just for some of us,”

The protests have become the largest since the fall of Albania’s Communist government in 1991. Among other things, protesters demand the repeal of the legal framework that allows the government to grant “strategic investor” status to developers, and the withdrawal of special regulatory treatment for private development on state-owned land in rural areas.

Hasa said Albanians are enraged at “an economic model where political parties and businessmen are so entangled that you cannot figure out where one starts and the other ends”.

Protests may already be having an impact: Politico noted unconfirmed reports that Kushner’s Affinity Partners had withdrawn from at least one multibillion-dollar resort project.

(source: newrepublic.com)

In May, more than 40,000 people from 182 countries gathered in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku for the 13th session of the World Urban Forum (WUF13), the United Nations’ leading global conference on sustainable urbanisation. The theme this year was “Housing the world: Safe and resilient cities and communities”.

According to UN-Habitat, at least 3 billion people — mostly in Asia and Africa — do not have adequate homes, and over 1 billion live in slums or informal settlements. The scale of this crisis is increasingly being seen not just from a humanitarian perspective, but also in terms of the economic, political and environmental impacts.

Since 2009, urban dwellers have made up the majority of the global population, and as a consequence, cities have been facing mounting pressure to better accommodate population growth and rising living costs.

The challenge facing governments is no longer simply about building more houses, but how to create cities that can be stable, inclusive and resilient in a time of growing global pressure.

(Source: euronews.com)

Zambia — free education for children

Zambia’s President Hakainde Hichilema has signed into law the country’s first legislation guaranteeing free education for all children. The new law ensures that no child can be denied a place in a public school over inability to pay fees.

President Hichilema described the move as an “historic day for Zambia”, and said that: “These reforms will improve the lives of millions of Zambians, from the classroom, to the workplace, and into retirement, while delivering greater dignity, security, and hope for our people.”

The free education policy was one of Hichilema’s flagship commitments during his 2021 election campaign. It was implemented soon after he took office but was not a legal entitlement until now due to enforcement and sustainability issues. Its adoption has led to a surge in enrolment, the recruitment of over 41,000 teachers, and expansion of school feeding programmes.

(source: apanews.net)

The First Ray of Will or Power, streaming forth from Shamballa, is the most powerful force in the world today. It is demonstrated:

1. As the Will of God and therefore the will-to-good, guiding the affairs of men.
2. As the destructive element in planetary affairs. This destructive effect as a rule results from man’s abuse of this force for selfish purposes, leading to domination, intolerance, hate, separativeness, war, death and destruction. It may, however, also mean the destruction of that which has become redundant or obsolete, or which is obstructing the progress of the spirit of the will-to-good — whether in the field of religion, politics or human relationships, and whether personal, national or international.
3. It also manifests as the synthesizing force, binding together that which should be integrated.

For unthinking humanity it is difficult to recognize the sympathetic Will of God in the way this virile energy is manifested, forgetting that to produce the culture and civilization of the New Age, those organized bodies and material forms which obstruct the free expression of the Life of God, must either be removed or destroyed. But although First Ray energy may cause destruction in the early stages, it will also be the means of fusion, by blending and coordinating all that is good, strong and healthy, eventually proving to be the force required for achieving the objectives of the New Age.

It is the Will of God that certain radical changes be effected in the consciousness of man by implementing a totally new approach to life and to his concepts of the spiritual realms. Combined with the energy of the Love of God, these two divine energies are in process of bringing about a tremendous crisis in the world of men, which will be demonstrated by a general awakening and expansion in consciousness of the race. This will in turn lead to a more general discovery, study and understanding of the principles of the Ancient Wisdom teachings, and a consequent revelation of the many truths which for ages have remained hidden to the obscured and purblind spiritual eyes of men.

The effects of Shamballa energy certainly do not remain limited to the human being. These forces impinge upon creation as a whole, affecting all the kingdoms of nature. Their destructive effect will be marked by the removal of forms which are retarding the plans of evolution, while simultaneously stimulating forms evolving according to the prescribed pattern.

The reaction of First Ray energy on humanity itself is demonstrated in many ways, depending on the quality of the personality concerned and the point in evolution achieved. During the past few decades it has been striking how many powerful and dominating personalities have emerged into the theatre of world activity. These personalities are today making their appearance on practically every terrain, and their activity and influence towards either good or bad will depend on the attributes of the individual through which the energies are functioning. The energies are of divine origin, but the reaction called forth will depend on the instrument on which they impinge. They will produce leaders and directors in all fields — educational, social, financial, administrative, political and religious — guiding their followers to new heights, or perhaps to their temporary downfall.

When spiritually immature aspirants are influenced by the Shamballa energy, the effects may be displayed as headstrongness, and even cruelty, imposing their will, or dictating and enforcing their often unreasonable desires. But even such unpleasant display of power might still be a reflection of the Will of God, by bringing about changes which eventually will prove beneficial to mankind and promoting the divine Plan. So often the pain and suffering caused by implementing the will-to-good, in discarding that which is evil or redundant, may temporarily blind observers to the benefits and beauty of superseding conditions. These individual reactions may not be of great moment but, when accumulated into mass negativity, they may definitely have a detrimental effect. It is therefore important that public opinion should be correctly educated and guided.

For ages the Hierarchy has been the sole recipient of Shamballa energy, where it was transmuted and tempered before being passed on to humanity. For some time now Shamballa has, however, been experimenting with partly transmitting its energies direct to humanity, without the mediation of the Hierarchy, and according to the Sages, human response to this impact is proving satisfactory. With humanity gradually adapting itself to this First Ray force, it will also develop the power of withstanding stronger doses, which will mean the possibility of even more rapid progress.

Shamballa force may be invoked by either individual or group effort, and when evoked becomes a strong inner driving force, with destructive powers when misapplied, but otherwise tending towards stabilization, clarification and creativity. When the evoked Will becomes focused by the light of the soul, and directed with love towards establishing right human relations, effective responses must inevitably follow. Correct response to the energy of Will, is always characterized by a spirit of sacrifice and forgiveness; when the impulse underlying the loving Will of God is sensed and suitably interpreted, the desire will be born to participate in that Will, giving rise to a spirit of sharing and sacrifice.

The drastic impact of Shamballa energy will be mitigated when it is received in group formation and becomes evenly distributed between mutually supporting group members.

Part of the responsibility of the Hierarchy is to balance and moderate this virile energy of Will, which sometimes tends to undue destruction, by blending it with a simultaneous inflow of the Second Ray energy of Love-Wisdom — the Love of God expressed as Christ energy. These Second Ray forces of Love will provide the needed powers for reconstruction and rehabilitation. In this respect man may rest assured that his destiny lies in safe and loving hands, and that he need never doubt or hesitate for a single instant, provided he contributes his share to the best of his ability.

As a rule man is so purblind that he cannot as yet recognize the evidence of the constructive activity of these creative energies. The founding of the New Age structure is, however, proceeding apace, but the outlines remain unseen by the majority, since they are too occupied with selfish concerns. But the Shamballa energies, guided by Hierarchical effort, are steadily achieving the objectives of the Plan. So far the vision has, however, been accorded only to the relatively few, enabling them truly to discern the beauty of the steadily emerging pattern.

One of the functions of the Lord of the World is to communicate to His Grand Council in Shamballa those Divine Inspirations with which He has been impressed from Solar and Cosmic Sources. The Divine Will is then formulated by the Council into the unfolding phases of the Divine Purpose. The senior Lives in the Hierarchy are subsequently impressed with the Purpose, where it is also stepped down and translated into the Plan. The Plan is the blueprint which the seven Ray Groups will utilize to bring the underlying principles and ideas of the Purpose into practical expression in the three worlds of men, as well as in the lower kingdoms of nature.

The Divine Purpose emanating from Shamballa is therefore that aspect of the Will of God which is seeking expression on Earth. The Hierarchy is the channel through which this energy from Shamballa is transmitted, and as the Hierarchy is characterized by the energy of Love, this divine Purpose is expressed by the Hierarchy as the will-to-good, which in human living is translated into goodwill, loving understanding, and a striving towards right human relations.

But this spirit of the will-to-good, to which humanity is definitely beginning to react, is but a single aspect of the Purpose, the real esoteric meaning of which still eludes the conception of humanity. It is only with the expansion of consciousness associated with the third initiation that the first faint light will be thrown on the deeper significance of the Will of God. Apparently it mainly concerns humanity’s role in linking the spiritual and sub-human planes, but this phase still lies far ahead. Humanity is meanwhile being subjected to the influence of various energies, and is slowly being led and trained in the desired direction, being unconsciously exposed to every possible form of experience — good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant — all contributing to the pool of experience, which will eventually burst the floodgates of the limiting mind, allowing entrance into much vaster areas of consciousness.

According to the Ageless Wisdom, when the intent and Purpose of the Lord of the World comes nearer to fruition, a Light of supernal beauty will be revealed to those with the opened eye. Through the Light of Wisdom radiated by Shamballa, the Light of Life itself will be perceived — a concept which still remains inexplicable to the human being, but which will be revealed progressively with the rupturing of the etheric veil.

The Hierarchical Plan
The Plan may be described as a pool of wisdom and consciousness, a thought reservoir established on hierarchical levels, and energized by the Will of God. This reservoir becomes accessible to and may be drawn upon by those with the necessary consciousness and sensitivity. The disciple who wishes to serve his fellow man learns to project his mind to this pool of inspired thought-forms, or source of Light, where his sensitive mind will be impressed with thoughts and ideas which may subsequently be applied on behalf of mankind in the form of practical help or teachings.

The disciple need not consciously strive for the attainment of these characteristics — they will arise naturally as an expression of soul quality, which will emerge after reaching suitable alignment. Such a person will in effect become a magnet for these spiritual ideas and concepts, at first becoming aware of the general outline, and later of the details of as much of the Plan as may be required for his particular service objectives. These impressions will drop into his field of consciousness because his magnetic aura has acquired the necessary sensitivity. This sensitivity is a property which unconsciously begins to develop from the earliest stages of soul control, and will deepen and grow with extended and more frequent contact, till it becomes a constant and natural state of awareness — the attribute of a soul-infused server. Such a disciple thus becomes an evocative channel, which can be utilized by the Hierarchy, and through which relevant aspects of the Plan may be evoked for distribution and application in his particular sphere of service. Thus another small facet of the Purpose or Will of God may become implemented and materialized through a human channel, signifying another minute step forward in the progressive evolution of world affairs as envisaged by the Lord of the World.

The Plan is not concerned with individuals or separate entities in any of the kingdoms of nature, but only with the overall picture, with time cycles, nations and races, with political structures, with world religions, cyclic manifestations, and similar broad aspects affecting mankind in general.

Although the Plan is formulated on hierarchical planes, the Masters have to depend, for its application on physical levels, on the capacities and ingenuity of man. Thoughts and ideas (brain-waves) concerning the Plan are cast into the minds of idealists and disciples, where they are assimilated, brooded over, and eventually converted into modified thought-forms, coloured by the particular mind characteristics of the thinker. As these take clearer shape, they are embodied or materialized either in speech, the written word, or may be expressed in physical shape as some new invention. The stage of development of the recipient of the impression will determine the purity with which he can serve as a channel for the transfer of the impression — so often the expressed product represents such a distorted version of the original idea that it can hardly be recognized. In these instances the Masters will have to find other and more effective avenues for conveying the ideas or principles which should be transmitted on behalf of mankind. The Masters are often sorely handicapped by the unreliable quality and even failure of the instruments at their disposal.

The World Inequality Report 2026, published by the World Inequality Lab (WIL), spells out in detail that an equal and habitable world is materially possible — if we choose to act and change our current course.

The WIL is a global research center located primarily at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California at Berkeley. It works with social scientists around the world to help us all understand the drivers of global inequality through evidence-based research. The new report, subtitled “a plan for equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries”, is the product of 45 authors and is based on database research compiled by more than 200 researchers.

WIL has outlined the alternative to the bleak future envisioned by billionaires, nationalists, and far-right techno-extractivists, those who argue that climate disruption, inequality, and fossil fuels are unavoidable. The report concludes that it is entirely possible to limit global warming to under 2°C over preindustrial levels — while doubling the incomes for 89% of humanity by 2100.

Without discarding traditional benchmarks for GDP, inequality, and climate science, the report also broadens the definition of prosperity and champions “sufficiency,” showing that quality of life trumps material accumulation. Steps toward sufficiency include reducing working hours to 2.5 days per week, encouraging adoption of a more ecologically sustainable vegetarian diet, and shifting investments from materially intense sectors, such as industry and mining, to education and health. French economist Thomas Piketty, a director of WIL explains: “One extra euro of GDP in education and health has three to four times less material footprint and energy consumption than one extra euro of GDP in the manufacturing sector. So that’s why the sectoral shifts are hugely important.”

A summary of the report in The Guardian notes that the plan aims to tackle inequality as a central goal: “Under the plan, the average per capita gross national income across the world would be €5,000 a month by the end of the century — an increase for almost everyone, with the greatest gains in the global south.” Piketty adds that inequality and the climate crisis must be addressed together. Along with a proposed wealth tax on billionaires, a global justice fund is envisioned to finance the energy transitions needed to lower carbon emissions close to zero.

Cornelia Mohren, the environmental coordinator of the World Inequality Lab, says: “We try to capture the reality that happiness is not just determined by economic metrics. Preserving a habitable earth does not just have a monetary benefit. You can make life better if you have more time to spend with family or in nature.” Noting the current depressing political reality, she adds, “It is good to know we can combine an equal world with staying within carbon budgets. That is a very helpful result. It makes me feel hopeful.”

Piketty reminds us, “There’s a huge cultural, intellectual, political battle that is going on. And we all have a role to play. […] At the end of the day we’ll have to come to this kind of cooperative redistribution of resources and power because the alternative will simply lead to disastrous outcomes both on the environment, on the climate, but also on social grounds. We are not in a situation where things can just continue as they are forever.”