The Hundredth Monkey/5 Mass Action Is Effective

Eighty thousand people in June, 1977 marched in Australia demanding that uranium be left in the ground where it belongs.

This protest was successful!

In Germany, after experiencing nuclear protests, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt said, "One cannot simply force nuclear energy down people's throats."

A Time magazine poll showed that 76% of the voters in the U.S. support a nuclear freeze.

Statewide votes in Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, California, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia have called for immediate negotiations for a verifiable freeze in the production, testing and deployment of all nuclear weapons, missiles and delivery systems.

In Massachusetts voters backed a proposal that would require a referendum before any nuclear waste site or power plant can be established.

The United Nations organization with its worldwide offices will help if requested:

Once there is an initiative from a region, the countries and regional organizations concerned should be able, upon their request and in the manner they wish, to draw to the fullest extent on the resources and possibilities of the United Nations system.*

(*Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, "General and Complete Disarmament, Study on All the Aspects of Regional Disarmament." [Page 64, A/35/416, October 8, 1980])

Here's some good news.

In June, 1981 a Gallup poll asked Americans, "Do you think that the United States should or should not meet with the Soviet Union this year to try to reach agreement on nuclear disarmament?"

Eighty percent said we should meet, thirteen percent said we should not, with seven percent undecided.*

(*Nuclear War: What's in It For You? by Ground Zero is an excellent book that will increase your nuclear awareness. Pocket Books.)

In addition to mass action, we must alter the separating mental habits that created the nuclear problem from the start.

Let's examine the change in consciousness that must take place for four billion of us to get along together on planet Earth.

How we think and feel has got us into this nuclear problem,

The way to our survival lies in altering how we think and feel.

We must use the power of our collective consciousness as we learn to focus on peace — and human togetherness.

The men and women of the nuclear nations must be willing to give up their PLUTONIUM SECURITY BLANKETS.

Instead we must REALLY be willing to REALLY listen so we can REALLY understand what's REALLY bothering us.

We must get behind emotional rigidity, intellectual jargon and logic-tight compartments of the mind.

We must realize that there are no simple right answers.

We must stop risking the survival of our planet by demanding that we always get our way. If we always get our way, there is no real negotiation.

Together we must develop effective understandings based on both sides working together to create mutually acceptable solutions that we can all live with.

It's our separate-self mental habits that are the cause of our survival predicament.

The bomb is not the real problem — it's only an effect of our attitudes.

Our mental habits of understanding events in an "us-vs.-them" perception rather than an "us-and-them" insight are creating a devastating mental, emotional and moral separateness in our minds.

If the human race can't learn to get along with itself, it will soon exterminate itself.

A group of our top scientists working in the Manhattan Project during World War II developed the atomic bomb from textbook theory to Hiroshima in only four years!

What would happen if an equally dedicated group backed by our nation's resources worked together to create a world consciousness of our common humanity and a unity of our human hearts and minds that would make all armaments useless?

Any problem created by the human mind can be solved by the human mind.

What's stopping us?

If you had a highly contagious, often fatal, disease, you would care enough about other people to try to avoid transmitting it.

Could the expectations and demands that make you feel hatred, alienation and a "me-vs.-them" separateness be considered a disease?

Such emotion-backed demands are more deadly to the survival of the human race than all contagious diseases added together!!!

Remember this the next time your mind makes you experience hatred and hard-heartedness.

If we want humankind to survive into the next century, we can no longer afford to transmit the deadly disease of hatred, non-caring and forcefully getting one's was that lead to murder, assassination and ultimately to nuclear destruction.

Increasingly our minds have put great energy into three forms of separateness that make us create thoughts and actions that result in a lethal threat to our continued life on planet Earth!*

(*See No Boundary by Ken Wilber. Center Publications, 1979. This is a discussion of how our minds create division and separateness.)

First, your mind is divided against itself.

You have become self-conscious, self-downing, self-critical, and in too many ways have lost your deeper levels of appreciating yourself.

Have you sometimes noticed that when you're feeling most separate from someone else, behind it all your mind is just not feeling good about you?

Secondly, your mind has become divided against your own body.

Your thinking has obstructed the free flow of your feelings. Your mental activity constantly crowds out your experiencing the aliveness of your body.

You have neglected your body and instead put your energy into activities involving pride, prestige and that ever-seductive "success" that have not brought you happiness or peace of mind.

Thirdly, just as your mind has become divided against itself and against the body which houses it, it has also increasingly alienated itself from your four billion cousins that are here and now sharing the planet with you.

You have lost the bond with Mother Earth herself and all her creatures — and forgotten how we all depend on each other.

In too many situations we automatically experience people as "them" — not "us."

These jungle-type habits of mind are dangerous to our species.

In the millions of years in which our ancestors were surviving in the jungles, it was important for their minds to create an instant "self-vs.-other" perception.

For animals eat other animals and no species can survive if all of its members are eaten up.

This instant perception of "otherness" is basic to survival for animals in the jungle.

We can learn a more effective way to make our lives work.

We are still creating a "jungle" of our civilized lives by continuing the operation of our "us-vs.-them" mental habits.

We're all in this together!

"Love alone," wrote Teilhard de Chardin, "is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves."