Depopulation Mozart and Ice Cream

While Dayita made this last comparison of the coveted imperial depopulation project I felt terribly ill. I saw the images of the genocide that she had talked about earlier flashing into my mind. I was loosing my breath. I was beginning to cry. "Mankind must awake and prevent this while there is still time to do so!"

I heard myself say in protest, again and again, "this can't be allowed! This mustn't happen!"

I felt tears running down my face. The tears came unstoppable. The tears were for the people I had seen and had learned to admire during the conference, people like Nic, Astrid, Tara, and others. I could see their faces. I beheld their smiles. I remembered their gentle manners and their feelings and concerns for one-another and the world. I could mentally see them being erased. I cried for them, for myself, for the loss of humanity to the world. I couldn't control the deeply stirred emotions from this sudden eruption of a deep-reaching unspeakable sadness. I got up hastily and left the auditorium. I made it to the far end of the lobby before I broke down completely.

I cried not because the statistics had been overwhelming. I knew the statistics. I understood what they meant. I had talked about these issues with Steve and with others before him, and also with Nic. Indeed, the woman hadn't presented anything that I didn't already know. In fact, she had stepped lightly in defining the horror. I cried, because this knowledge had suddenly been given a new dimension against the background of an unfolding love that had come into my life, of people I had come into contact with. My love had begun to envelop them and myself. It had made everyone more precious. I suddenly felt more deeply for those people, including those that I had met only in passing at the conference. I cried also for the little Soviet children who had sung for us during the opening ceremony, and also for the beautiful people that I had fallen in love with five times in ten minutes in Randy's way. How many of them would find themselves on the target lists? And that didn't include all those other people who were most dear to me back home and abroad, like Sylvia, Ushi, Steve, Tony, and everyone else that I knew and embraced in my love, including all the rest of mankind that suddenly appeared much more precious. They were all suddenly caught up in this flow of death as targeted victims.

I cried because I knew Dayita from India had not fabricated one single aspect of her ugly presentation, because India was her home where this train of insanity began. Thus she had gone lightly over the facts. I felt deep within me that everything that she had said did have the potential to come to pass, because no one of humanity had cared enough for 3,500 years to raise one finger to stop the 'empires of the willing' from unleashing their tragedy, which the modern empires had promised they would unleash anew in ever larger measures. I cried, because the movement for a new renaissance of love that Steve, Ushi, and I had hoped to set in motion seemed so hopelessly feeble all of a sudden. I hardly noticed in my up welling agony that someone was sitting beside me.

I had rushed to the far end of the lobby in the hope to be alone. Even this seemed to be denied to me now. As I looked up, I noticed a woman sitting beside me offering me a handkerchief to try my tears. "Let me help you," she said in English with a Russian accent. She spoke with a lovely and clear voice. I looked at her, questioningly. She appeared to be one of the Soviet students who had organized the conference. She was sitting patiently beside me, offering me her handkerchief. I had noticed that her face seemed familiar. Perhaps she had been ushering at one of the doors. Now she was reaching out to me with an open hand. She began to smile as I looked at her. Her smile seemed infinitely precious against the dark predictions that would likely come true some day. Her smile appeared like a light in that darkness.

I reached for the woman's hand and held it tight. "We must not let this happen," I said to her. "Humanity is too precious. We are not cattle that have outgrown their pasture. We are human beings. We have made this Earth rich, not poor. We have created the resources that enable five and a half billion people to live on a planet that once supported just a few million. If it weren't for our ingenuity as human beings for creating constantly new resources for living, the Earth still wouldn't support more than just those few million people that existed for all those hundreds of thousands of years before we began to develop the capacity inherent in us as human beings. We have achieved immensely, miraculously almost. And now those noble and holy fascists in high places want to take all of this away from us and force us back to the stone age kind of subsistence. They want to destroy what we have become and what we have achieved. Just look at the world, we have become beautiful people in every respect. We can love, we can create art, technologies, civilizations; we can create wonders that never existed before. We also have the potential to create a future that is brighter than anyone has ever dreamed of. Now, suddenly, we face that insanity by the most powerful people on Earth whose goal is our doom. We can't let this happen! We simply can not let this happen! We must do all we can to stop them! But who are we compared to them?"

The woman just nodded. She didn't say anything.

After an 'eternity' had passed I took the handkerchief that was offered and dried my tears. Her patient listening to my outpouring pain seemed to have made the pain less severe.

Strangely, the woman didn't ask what it was that I said must never happen. Perhaps she knew the conference agenda and the type of lecture this lecture had been. Or she might have been in the auditorium with me. Or maybe those terrible details that caused my tears didn't seem important to her in the light of my agony. Perhaps it seemed more important to her at the moment just to stop my tears.

"My friends call me Olive," she said, when I gave her the handkerchief back, "I'm Olive Osipov." She reached out her hand moments later for a handshake. "May I offer you a cup of coffee?" she said during the handshake. "There is a restaurant not far from here. The cafe' at the center is already closed."

Coffee didn't seem important to me at the time. Still, I said yes. It was her beautiful human gesture that suddenly became important. It stood out above the background of pain as something infinitely precious. The touch of humanity that she offered was important to me, something to hold on to, to relish. A cup of coffee didn't compare as important to that. However, it also seemed important not to reject the lovely gesture of her outstretched hand.

She was right. The coffee shop was nearby. It wasn't more than a couple of blocks away along the crowed and windy sidewalk. She told me that she was a music student and also served as a volunteer assistant at the conference. "My boyfriend is a music student too," she said. She added proudly that he is already performing with the symphony. She said there would be a concert performed that very night. She even offered to 'smuggle' me into the concert hall for free, should I be interested. "The people who usher there are all my friends," she said proudly. "All music students are allowed to enter for free when there is room left. The free entrance privilege also includes our escorts. Would you like to go to the symphony tonight as my escort?"

She spoke with a grin. "I would recommend it," she said gently. "I always find peace in classical music whenever I am depressed."

I accepted her offer. How could I have refused? The offer was sincerely presented and with no other promises attached. I thanked her for her kindness. I didn't even ask what music was on the program. It didn't seem important in comparison to the world-engulfing problem that had been presented at the conference that I couldn't get my thoughts away from. I simply tagged along.

Actually, it wasn't quite that simple. I was drawn to be with her. She became a link for me to the brighter face of our humanity. I wanted to be with her for that, and also for her being a woman. Her offer to help contrasted so warmly with the cold determination of the imperial rulers of the world to destroy so much of what is human, just as they had in ancient days, which the modern depopulation policies represented on a larger scale. I gave her my hand and allowed her to take the lead.

As she had promised, we were seated for free and not just in the back rows as I assumed. We arrived early, even after having had a full-course dinner at the restaurant.

"I have never seen a grown man cry," she remarked after we were seated in the front row far to the right. "You must have lost all faith in humanity," she added quietly.

I nodded, though being totally embarrassed by it all. I didn't answer.

"I have brought you to the concert in order to help you to restore your faith in humanity," she said. "The music that you will hear comes from humanity's human Soul. Classical music has a long root that reaches deep into the fabric of our cultural development as a human society. You will hear music that portrays the inner beauty of the human Soul, which is reflected in the beauty that we find in our world. The beauty of the human Soul is reflected especially in music. You will hear music that is a portrait of our human strength, that represents a discovery of the principles as well as the beauty of our humanity."

I nodded in agreement. "Yes, I have always loved the classical Russian composers," I replied just to say something.

"Then I must disappoint you," she said with a smile, "Jean Sibelius is the star tonight. He is a Finish composer. We will hear his violin concerto, followed by his first symphony that was completed in 1899. Sibelius is a relatively recent classical composer. But don't worry about this, classical music is universal and timeless. It is always unfolding anew from the heart of our humanity. Also Sibelius' music stands in total contrast to Malthus, Darwin, and Galton, the princes of darkness that the Indian woman had referred to on the podium. These 'dark' people had made a mockery of our humanity. Sibelius can heal the resulting hurt."

I nodded in agreement.

"There is actually no such thing as typical Russian music, or typical German music, or Italian music," she continued. "Great music comes from the human heart and Soul. It unites us into one single humanity. The Russian, German, or Italian melodies speak of the same universal truth that is founded in the value of all human beings. Music is humanity's beauty. Music is its heart. Great classical music will always be beautiful to us."

She had been right. Sibelius' music was beautiful. It was a celebration of humanity's heart and Soul, just as she had said, and a celebration of beauty, sublimity, majesty and power. Its melodies echoed the lonely landscape of Finland, its empty spaces all standing in contrast with the fragile human presence in that empty world, a presence that gives meaning to it all. It spoke of a presence without which the landscape would be a silent void, a void without melodies. She was right about the music. It was powerful and captivating, and enriching and uplifting.

She was also right about her prediction. The music that we heard this night did have the effect on me that she had promised. It rekindled my faith in the human world. It gave me a New Hope and a reason to fight on. Humanity appeared richer through this music. The music seemed to say that we do have a chance to find a way to escape the closing of the depopulation trap. The music made it clear that human beings are immensely resourceful. I told her that I was deeply indebted to her for this reason, and also for another reason, which I didn't reveal.

"What is it that makes classical music so uplifting and enriching?" I said to her after the concert was over and we were waiting for the lineup to dissipate at the coat-check. "What is it about classical music that we don't find in modern music anymore?" I said quietly. "Is it because it is old?"

"Classical music has nothing to do with it being old, Peter," Olive replied, still smiling as ever. "Classical music is uplifting because it echoes the beauty that is lodged in our Soul. With this music that is 'touching' what we already have within us and what we are as human beings, the classical composer gives us a gift that mirrors our own humanity. In this way the music becomes a celebration. It becomes a celebration of the humanity that makes us all special as human beings. In fact, Peter, one has to be a human being to be able to hear classical music, because classical music is an expression of numerous universal principles that exist above the physical sensory world.

"Sure, Peter, the physical world is important," she continued. "We need to eat and have a place to live, and so forth. Even sex is important. We wouldn't exist without it. But as human beings we can step beyond the physical sphere into the sphere of such wonderful universal principles as love, and joy, and peace, and of their power to uplift our world. Classical music helps us from this higher standpoint. It is rooted there. It helps us to reach down to the ordinary and pull up all those lower things that matter to us, to this higher level where we are really human beings. That is what classical music does. It has its roots in one of the greatest periods of renaissance that ever was. Did you know that, Peter?"

"Are you talking about the Golden Renaissance of the 14th and 15th Centuries, Olive?"

"No Peter, I am talking about the greater renaissance that followed. I am talking about the Second Renaissance, the profound renaissance, the renaissance that was created in the 17th Century. That is the time when classical music really took off. It was the underlying principle that created this profound renaissance that makes classical music what it is, and why it is so powerful. It takes us back to the greatest period in human history."

"You are talking about the renaissance that created the Peace of Westphalia, aren't you, Olive?"

Olive nodded and grinned. "I heard you talking about this renaissance in the coffee shop with Nicolai a few days ago."

"You were there with us?"

"I was sitting at the table next to yours, Peter. It's a small world, isn't it? I heard you discussing that renaissance. You were exploring is possible connection with the Susanna story from the Bible. The story appears to have been used to discredit the war-philosophers in an effort to shut down the Thirty Years War. You were right in what you said. The Peace of Westphalia came out of that revival of the Golden Renaissance. However, you missed the active principle behind that great accomplishment. That active principle is what I think was the very heart of the Second Renaissance. Stopping a war is a passive thing. It doesn't cause a renaissance. It was the other way around. It was the Second Renaissance, based on a profound principle, which stopped the Thirty Years War. The Treaty of Westphalia was an expression of that renaissance, the Second Renaissance, that was built on this principle. The development of classical music was another such expression. Classical music is a living recognition of the great renaissance principles, especially the Principle of the Advantage of the Other, which Dayita from India had mentioned so often. That is why classical music is great and uplifting, because it is designed to reflect the core principles of our humanity that in the greatest periods had shaped the course of history and uplifted civilization."

"Wow!" was all I could say.

"The profound principle of this renaissance is the Principle of the Advantage of the Other," said Olive.

"Would you say that this principle might be a subset of the Principle of Universal Love, Olive?" I asked.

"Of course it is, but it gives it a specific focus that was needed at this time. For centuries the fascism of greed had been promoted and had opened the gates to hell. It had been deemed a person's right in the 17th Century to pillage and murder people of another country or another empire. Under those terms the armies of the Thirty Years War became roving hordes of beastmen that took or did whatever was within their power to take or do. It was deemed their right. Some say that much of Europe was destroyed that way, and half the population was killed in people exercising that right. So, how does one turn this madness around?

"It appears that the intellectual pioneers of this age recognized that it wasn't possible to stop this madness on the same platform on which it was created; on which the wars were fought. The pioneers appeared to have recognized that one would have to reach up to higher level and come face to face with the truth about our humanity, in order to come to an understanding that people could relate to and respond to, just like the woman from India had said is still needed. Thus the renaissance pioneers where looking for something of great value, something that could be recognized and be acknowledged by every human being. And that thing of great value, Peter, is what they discovered in our universal humanity. Out of that acknowledgement of the value of the human being the idea emerged to focus on and to promote what is to the advantage of the other person. That focus completely reversed the axioms of the fascism of greed.

"This profound principle, of focusing on the advantage of the other, which was discovered against the background of what became a horrendous crisis, suddenly caught on and created the Second Renaissance. The same renaissance principle also became the foundation for a new kind of music, Peter. Johann Sebastian Bach created the initial breakthrough by introducing higher-level musical principles that reflect the beauty of the human Soul and inspires joy out of the unfolding love for our humanity. His music wasn't just music. It was music built on profound principles of such a complexity that only a human being can hear this music, because only the human being has the capacity to recognize these principles and to be touched by them. Bach created music that is anchored in the universal human Soul, which creates a corresponding response in the listener. It literally awakens a person's sublimity as a human being. It doesn't create it. But it does awaken it. It gives one a faint sense of it.

"Franz Josef Haydn then carried forward Bach's 'revelation.' Haydn was followed in turn by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who took this human development process further to still greater heights of expression of our humanity, the humanity that we all share. Wolfgang van Beethoven, soon thereafter, raised the bar still another notch, perhaps not so much in a qualitative sense, but in an infinite sense. He created the feeling that there exists no limit in expressing the principles of our humanity that inspire in us a profound sense of joy. Johannes Brahms, later on, stood on the shoulders of all these pioneering giants, and so did many other composers of classical music. Nevertheless, the whole development of classical music was completely rooted in the principle of the Second Renaissance that puts the focus on the advantage of the other in acknowledging the value of our common humanity."

"That's the same renaissance that the USA became founded on as the first true nation-state republic on the planet," I interrupted Olive. "Did you know that the Principle of the Advantage of the Other became enshrined in the Preamble of our Constitution in the form of the General Welfare Principle. Nic pointed this out to me, I mean Nicolai. That principle appears to have become the core principle that all the laws of our nation were founded on, and which all future laws should reflect," I said to Olive.

"And they will reflect those principles again some day,' Olive interjected. "But shouldn't the Principle of the Advantage of the Other also be reflected in our dealings with one-another, individually? Isn't that how we uplift one-another individually?"

"That's implied by the Principle of Universal Love," I interjected. "Love can only be universal. We bring to each other our love to enrich our world."

"But does that includes sex too, Peter, if it can be raised to something so high that it uplifts and touches one-another's heart as music does?" added Olive. "Isn't that principle as valid there as it is anywhere, that we focus on the advantage of another, whatever this advantage may be? Only when this happens can sex be something beautiful and uniquely human as music is, by which both become essentially the same as something that cannot be found anywhere except in the human universe."

"I know people in East Germany who live by the Principle of the Advantage of the Other to uplift our embrace of our humanity," I replied. "Their names are Steve and Ursula. Their 'song' is, we bring to each other our love to enrich one-another. I was invited to their house for a day and a night. You wouldn't believe what amazing experiences I had there in the context of this 'song.' These people never mentioned the Principle of the Advantage of the Other by name, but they seemed to be fully aware of it. They seem to live it with every fiber of their being!"

"It appears that one doesn't have to talk about a principle anymore when it is rooted in every human heart, Peter. It simply comes to light then."

"As natural as the sunshine?" I interjected.

"Of course, Peter. That also applies in the social domain just as profoundly. Let me guess," said Olive, "you fell in love with the lady, right? You fell in love with the lady of the house and the gentleman didn't throw you out in a huff?"

I nodded. "However, that was just the beginning, Olive. The gentleman of the house, Steve by name, honored our love by inviting me to spend the night with her in his own bed. He even went to great lengths to explain to me the scientific platform that made this possible. It seemed like a miracle to me. Of course, against the background of the Principle of the Advantage of the Other, the miracle seems less like a miracle now."

"That must have been quite something, Peter," said Olive, "It's become far too rare that people allow themselves to live by any renaissance principle. Congratulation therefore, Peter, you've experienced the essence of the Second Renaissance in your own life. You have experienced the Treaty of Westphalia in the social domain. You had experienced something exceedingly rare, which should nevertheless be common place. But I bet, you were probably puzzled by what really is the advantage of the other, especially that night when it came to sexual intimacies."

I nodded. I squeezed her hand slightly in reply. "When the renaissance pioneers developed the Treaty of Westphalia it was obvious what had been to the advantage of everybody on the planet, especially in Europe after eighty years of war," I said. "The first item must have been to stop the never-ending retributions. Everybody was tortured by the retributions. Thus, everybody would have readily agreed that it was to each other's advantage to stop that."

"The second item must have been to impose no reparation demands or war debt collection," said Olive. "The people were barely able to survive, much less pay reparation demands or repay debt on loans that had created no economic riches. They all agreed that this forgiveness was to everybody's advantage. They must have felt, Peter, that the value of peace was infinitely greater than the value of the debts that could never be collected anyway. They must have felt that whatever was to the advantage of the other, was really also to their own advantage.

"The third item must have been to guarantee each other's sovereignty as a nation with the acknowledged right to exist. And that is what they all agreed to and signed their name to."

"It is easy to see the advantage to the other in every one of these crucial items that every nation had committed itself to," I interjected. "But in sexual intimacies?"

"Does the principle that powered the great Treaty of Westphalia not apply there?" said Olive. "The treaty was the expression of a principle more than treaty of intent. Of course, peace would not nave been possible otherwise, Peter. The intent had to have a foundation other than mere feelings."

"However, when it comes to the peace of the heart in the sexual domain we are at a loss to define what really is to the advantage of the other," I said. "What would a Treaty of Westphalia look like in the sexual domain, Olive?"

"Maybe music can answer that question for you, Peter," said Olive. "I am thinking of one of the great classical composers of the Second Renaissance. He might help you with that. What you have experienced in East Germany probably wasn't too far out of place from what Mozart might have recognized in his time. Classical music is classical not because it is old, as I said, but because it is rooted in a great cultural renaissance. It appears that Mozart had faintly hinted at what the Principle of the Advantage of the Other looks like when it is expressed in the social domain where I think it has a vital role to play in the present world. Unfortunately, this principle has remained blocked from the social world to a large extent in spite of Mozart's effort. Are you familiar with Mozart's opera, ^The Marriage of Figaro,^ Peter?"

"Just vaguely, Olive. It's the story of a noble Count who falls in love with one of the maids of his staff who was to be married that day to somebody else. As I recall the Count wins the maid's consent to meet him secretly in the dark of the Count's garden. I also recall that the Count pours his heart out in a flood of joyous emotions for her, throughout the opera, expressing feelings of a deep love with words that had not been heard in his halls for years, all flowing profusely from his lips. However, as I recall the audience knows what the Count doesn't know, that when he meets his beloved in the dim of the moonlit garden, he is expressing this profusion of love to his wife. He doesn't know that the Countess had traded costumes with the girl. The opera ends when the deception is discovered and everyone is forgiven. Thus the opera ends with a happy note and everything reverting back to 'normal'."

"But does it really end that way, Peter? Doesn't it rather end with a paradox for the audience?" said Olive. "It leaves many unanswered questions that cannot be answered honestly by the audience without it overturning society's time-honored axioms and traditions in the privacy of its innermost thinking. Mozart pokes a hole into the mask of the traditions. He presents the Count honorably. In fact there is a general development of a more universal sense of love happening throughout the opera, especially in the Count's attitude towards others. Mozart scores this development with superb love songs with which the Count expressed his feelings for the woman of his embrace, by which he himself grows in grace. The 'song' of the Count's music is honest. It is real. There are no deceptions involved in the music. And the music of the 'song' ranks among the great operatic masterpieces. This means that Mozart doesn't condemn the Count for his outpouring of a profound love for someone who isn't his wife. Moreover, with his thoroughly supporting music Mozart stirs a response in the hearts of the audience where this same kind of honest universal love is likewise honored. However, if it is so honored by the audience, it is honored contrary to conventions and social dogmas and traditions, which are thereby put in doubt. That's the paradox the audience takes home and must now resolve on its own. However, Mozart opens up a still deeper-reaching paradox. The entire story leads up to the question as to why the Count would be moved to such a profusion of outpouring love to someone else other than his long-time wife who by all accounts is just as beautiful, kind, and a great and generous person, if not more so. That's the second paradox that Mozart leaves to be resolved by the audience, which the audience takes likewise home to puzzle over."

"But, how is one to resolve such paradoxes?" I asked. "Is the grass really greener on the other side of the fence? The opera doesn't suggest that it is. So what is your answer, Olive?"

"You should know the answer, Peter. Think of the Principle of Universal Love."

Wow! What was she saying to me? A vague idea entered my mind that had the potential to be immensely beautiful. "Are you suggesting that the face of love unfolds in its native form only in the universal domain, and that on any other platform, like privatized love, love is not truly unfolding at all so that we see just a shadow of it? Maybe that is why Thomas Hobbes demanded that love must be kept as small and confined as possible in order that his love-void, as an imperial platform for destroying the Golden Renaissance, might actually work."

"Eighty years of war came out of Hobbes' denial of universal love," said Olive, "by pushing love into the smallest possible domain, locked up behind doors where it cannot really exist as a universal principle. Thus it would not be seen in its native brilliance, and consequently not become an effective force for energizing society. In other words Hobbes had effectively destroyed the face of love, and with it society's passions for its humanity, as a precondition for staging his masters' religious imperial wars that culminated into the Thirty Years War."

"Are you suggesting, Olive, that the Count's outpouring of love is not extraordinary at all, as an event, but merely illustrates the native quality of love that should be commonplace once one actually discovers love that can only truly unfold in the universal dimension, which then uplifts everything else to that dimension?"

Olive just nodded and smiled. "Mozart brings to live in the Count the real dimension of love, reflected in his music of a profusion of profound emotions bubbling forth almost unstoppable. Mozart thereby illustrates that everything else that was deemed to be love in common perception is actually but a shimmer of it as if love had been wrapped up in a cloth so that its real face and its light cannot be fully seen. Maybe Mozart is telling us that if love were unwrapped, it would certainly counter the small-minded demands of the Hobbesian dogma and similar dogmas of those before him and after him. In other words, Mozart gives us in the love of the Count a glimpse of the true image of love that had been hidden from society by its own devices, created by its own worst philosophers."

"Are you saying, Olive, that Mozart, for a brief moment, pulled the veil off the face of love and let it shine, and then put it back again before the opera ends?"

Olive nodded. "By doing so he opened a gnawing pain in the audience's heart, which the audience must subsequently deal with, within the conventional world where the pain comes to light in the form of paradoxes that it invited to resolve," Olive replied. "If this were actually to be happening some significant humanist energy would be developed and come to the foreground and uplift society."

"The problem is, Olive, that two hundred years have gone by and we still haven't resolved the Mozartian paradoxes," I said. "In fact we are probably further away from resolving those paradoxes than society was in Mozart's time. We have added the fascism of greed now to the small-mind-demands of the modern cultural paradigms."

"That is why it is so puzzling to get a grip on what really is to the advantage of another in the sexual domain," said Olive. "We are unaccustomed to having to deal with the real face of love."

"I know a lot of sex-related elements that can't be to the advantage of another," I replied. "Those are elements like rape, jealousy, violence, exploitation, degradation, rage, self-serving demands, and so forth. The problem is, what's left of our sexual intimacies when one peels away all of that crap, when one pulls the dark cloth off that we have wrapped sex up with for centuries in the small-minded world? When I faced Ursula in the bedroom that night in Leipzig, in Steve's home, I didn't know what specifically I could embrace in sexual intimacies that would be enriching to her and would honor her fully as woman. I solved the puzzle by recognizing that there wasn't any point in pondering passive demands. The door to passive responses seemed closed, like weeding out what isn't love. I recognized that I was searching for a principle, an active principle, that would allow me to honor her fully as a woman and as a lover and a friend, and this in a manner by which all of those passive demands, whatever they might be, would be met. That active principle, evidently was the Principle of the Advantage of the Other, wasn't it? So I gave it my best effort that night. Did I succeed? I really don't know, Olive. I think I came a long way. Maybe I also messed up in some ways."

"I don't think we can really answer the question that you are puzzling yourself with, because we don't know for sure what the advantage of the other is in this infinite arena. I think, Peter, we are all still pioneers in building this particular renaissance."

"We have barely begun, Olive," I replied with a grin. "But we have begun! I think that is important."

"I think I know what the ultimate answer has to be, Peter," said Olive. "I think the answer has to be that we need to pull off both of the black cloths together, the one from the face of sex, and the one from the face of love, and do it simultaneously. We need to pull off all the small-mind-demands that deny both elements, so that the Principle of Universal Love becomes the active principle that assures that the advantage of the other is fully served."

"Are you saying, Olive, that sex needs to unfold in the universal domain and on the platform of the Principle of Universal Love, because it can only exist truly in the universal domain where every trace of blackness that isn't human is banned from the face it? Are you saying that only then, can it unfold as something uniquely human that we need to develop towards?"

"That's what Mozart seems to hint at," said Olive. "He also seems to point out to society that the Principle of Universal Love is far from being acknowledged if this doesn't happen. This is something which society wasn't prepared to deal with at the time. It think it was for that reason that Mozart wrapped the face of love back up with its veil of small-mind-demands and closed the opera on the same low-level plane that it opened with, the 'small' plane, the plane of Hobbes, the plane of the conventional dogmas and traditions. The paradox of that retreat too, Mozart had placed within the realm of society's responsibilities to mull over and deal with, individually and honestly."

Here I began to laugh. "Isn't that amazing. What I became a part of in Leipzig, really wasn't a miracle at all, was it? It was nothing more than Mozart's Marriage of Figaro extended a step further, much further than Mozart had dared to go. Still, it reflected the Mozartian kind of daring to deal with the higher principles that can only be brought to light when the covering of the face of love becomes removed and love is allowed to stand on its universal platform. My own 'miracle' with Steve and Ushi, as in Mozart's opera, likewise lasted just a single day, Olive. But this was enough. After the day was over the conventional world overshadowed everything again, but underneath that shadow the world remain not the same. Far from it. I suspect that the light of that single day will likely remain with me forever."

"And it will grow brighter, Peter. Pandora's box has been opened. We now have to deal with all those aspects that the hideous Zeus wanted mankind never to look at honestly and explore for the underlying principles, lest his imperial dynasty be broken."

"I think Zeus' dynasty will be broken," I said. "Pandora's box is open. The Principle of Universal Love is on the table. The real opening of Mozart's Figaro has just begun. There will be no depopulation in the world once the covering veil has been pulled off the face of love."

Olive nodded and grinned. "You are right, the world is getting brighter," she added.

I smiled and agreed. "Ever since I met Astrid I had this wonderful warm feeling for Astrid," I said to Olive. "Then the warm feeling of that new love had spilled over onto a woman named Tara, our love at the Tavern called Ruggels. From Ruggels and from Tara it had spilled over unto many wonderful people that have come to the conference. I realized that this growing universal love had been the reason why I had become so devastated by the depopulation lecture, where the depopulation focus suddenly had a deep-reaching human dimension of unspeakable ugliness. And now the same wonderful warm feeling of this further unfolding love that was so terribly invaded, is richly encircling you too. To be honest, I don't know if I could bear to listen to another depopulation lecture again, seeing you too being drawn into the picture of its dimension. These ugly things become harder and harder to face and to tolerate the more we become enveloped in love."

"And so it should be, Peter," Olive interjected. "The ugly dimensions shouldn't be tolerated. They should inspire revulsion. But with classical music to draw on, it becomes possible to see a definite hope which tells us that the looming ugliness can be held back and be overturned, never to come to pass. Don't you agree?" she said.

I agreed that she was right on the mark.

Long after we had left the symphony hall, Sibelius' melodies were still with me. Their mood and their sound lingered in thought in a beautiful way. I would have sworn that I'd never heard Sibelius' work performed as powerfully as I had heard it that night. I had been lifted out of my seat as it were. I had been floating on air. Now its refrain filled the empty streets with its 'song' that still lingered. The music seemed to unite Heaven and Earth and give meaning to human existence, without which there remains but a void. The music seemed to linger like a light that cannot dim. It illumined the night as we walked back to the hotel where I stayed.

Suddenly it struck me that this wasn't right. It should be the other way around. I should be accompanying Olive to her house and see her safely home, instead of she accompanying me to the hotel. I realized that this gesture was the very least of what I should offer in response to her wonderful gift of a night of music. Her gift of music had recovered my spirits from the terrible lecture that had reduced me to tears. It gave me a hope and a new faith in humanity just as she had said it would.

I stopped us right in the middle of a small plaza when this realization hit me. I made her the offer. I was about to insist on it, to tell her bluntly that I wouldn't take, no, for an answer, but before I had a chance to say another word, she had accepted. She accepted the offer most graciously with a kiss on the cheek. Except she didn't like the idea of going by taxi, as I had offered. She insisted on walking. "It's just an hour from here," she said.

In this hour many questions were asked and answered, about the conference, about my being there, about politics, my family, my experiences, my determination to make a difference in the world. She was interviewing me, perhaps to probe my honesty. I enjoyed it. I found the interview challenging.

Soon I returned the favor and queried her on my two leading edge topics, universal love and self-love. I told her what Steve thought about it, that self-love is a part of universal love. Steve had suggested that there can be no peace in the world without society being fully in love with its humanity to such a degree that it will rescue itself from the imperial stranglehold that destroys all that is human. Olive agreed with that assessment. She suggested that nothing less would be sufficient to rescue mankind from the imperial depopulation objectives. I told her in Steve's words, that "anything less won't empower us to be sublime and protect our civilization and our existence as something exceedingly precious." She agreed with that too.

She replied that Steve is a wise man to have recognized the importance of love, especially self-love expressed in universal love, and to have made it a way of life for himself.

I also told her about Astrid, the Swedish woman, who had come to much of the same conclusion in the Florida Everglades. "Astrid had recognized that self-love is a key element for a satisfying life, but she hadn't gone far enough with it. Astrid had stopped, perhaps having been frightened by the challenges. She effectively isolated herself from the humanity that she pretends to love, by focusing her loving exclusively onto herself, personally."

"I would counsel her to explore Mozart's Figaro opera," interrupted Olive. "She would instantly realize that on her tiny platform that opera could have never been written. All the doors would have been closed to every aspect that Mozart appears to have recognized to be valuable."

"She deprived herself thereby of experiencing the riches of our common humanity that we all share," I added, "which are inherent in all of us to be expressed. She made her world and her love small by denying what she pretends to embrace, and thereby she made her life self-confined. The whole of mankind seems to be doing that in countless different ways."

"That's why the imperials have free reign to control everybody," Olive interjected. "That is also why the world is in such a terrible mess."

"We should be aiming for the opposite, Olive," I replied. "We should make our love and our world as big as the universe and as wide as humanity. By focusing onto herself, Astrid has placed herself outside the Lateral Lattice Model of our universal humanity. My point is that she may never find what she is looking for, because what she is really looking for can only unfold from the Principle of Universal Love as defined within the Lateral Lattice Model."

"The Lateral Lattice Model?" Olive asked.

While explaining to Olive the principle of Helen's lateral lattice, and how she had discovered it, I was able to place before Olive what may be Helen's most profound recognition. I told Olive that Helen saw love as the interconnecting fibers that give a unifying structure to the human universe. The interconnecting links that she beheld in the lateral lattice were channels of light, or stands of love, out-flowing from one to another as rays of light like from a sun. "In the lateral lattice, where there can be no one lesser or greater in the light of universal love, Helen beheld a flow of love can only be understood in the universal context and never in any other context," I said to Olive joyously. "In this lattice we are all bound into one. It is love in the lattice that removes the distance between us. The strands of universal love, of course, unfold from our self-love for our humanity. That's what powers the light. That's the humanity that we all share. But the light doesn't stop there. We see this light of love reflected universally if we are honest with ourselves, which we thereby necessarily embrace. Love then becomes out-flowing in this process, like the light of the sun that is forever bringing life to the world. The flow of the sunlight cannot be reversed, or be bottled up, and neither can the flow of love."

"Maybe that is what Mozart had also discovered," Olive interrupted. "That is what he had laid before society as a paradox with his Figaro opera. The paradox exists only until the nature of love is understood according to the model of the sun that is reflected in every human being."

"I think the self-confined self-love what Astrid is aiming to build her life on doesn't really exist," I continued. "Helen pointed out to me that no one really exists outside of the universal lateral lattice that represents the reality of our being, which is illumined by stands of love. I think what Astrid regards as her humanity is like a light that she treasures, but which, wrapped up in a black cloth, she ever allows herself to see. She pretends that she lives outside the lateral lattice, and pretends to be happy in this self-isolation."

"I have news for you," said Olive. "Astrid isn't alone in this predicament. The whole of mankind has been dragged into the same predicament, and is looking for something that doesn't really exist. Love has been privatized universally. It's been wrapped up with a black cloth as you say. That is why there is so little humanist energy in the world to create the renaissance we need. We've been running at a deficit for 3,500 years. Isn't that what Mozart has been hinting at? You seem to understand the Mozartian paradox, that if one lets love unfold naturally in the universal domain it comes to light as something wonderful, profound, grand, and so majestic that the grandest arena is required to express it? If this became common place, the humanist energy that would sweep the world would then instantly vaporize the 'ice-house' of the imperial tragedy and bring freedom to mankind."

"That is why I feel sad for Astrid," I answered. "She isolates herself from what is really the reality of her being, and then pretends to be happy. I think she lives in an 'ice-house' of her own creating. I don't think she is really happy. I think she is working herself out of her box, like Mozart suggested the audience should work itself out of its trap. I don't think anyone can be happy, living structurally in a low-energy world outside the lateral lattice. She appears more like the sad clown to me who puts on a smiling face to make children laugh, while his heart fails to sing. That's from an old story. Maybe Astrid is playing this role, because if she weren't, she would want to share this happiness and let its 'song' radiate like the sun radiates light. I don't think happiness can exist all bottled up. Maybe Mozart closed his Figaro opera by reverting the scene back to the conventional small concept of love. Astrid does this too. But Mozart does this in order to highlight the paradox what the conventional, small, low-energy concept is built on. The conventional concept isolates society and puts it outside the Lateral Lattice Model. The conventional concept mythologizes love. It keeps it bottled up as a mythology. Maybe that is what got Astrid trapped. I don't blame her though. Much of society is stuck in this trap of self-isolation. That's why the so-called rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and civilization disintegrates."

"Don't we all pretend that love can be bottled up in the small and be isolated?" said Olive. "And by doing so we look for something that doesn't really exist."

"Astrid may find this out some day," I said. "Though I wish I could help her to get there sooner. Right now she doesn't even recognize this stepping ahead as a valid goal."

"As do we all," Olive interjected. "This doesn't mean that Astrid won't discover the Principle of Universal Love on her own some day. Just tell her about Mozart's Figaro and then watch her come to life. I even hope that we can do the same for the whole of society. So far society doesn't even recognize the paradoxes, much less is ready to solve them. That's our greatest problem, Peter. We fail to place ourselves into the universal fold of our humanity as human beings where we all stand side by side, not above or below each other, but side by side, just as your friend Helen had visualized this reality in her lateral lattice construct. In real terms, I think no one really exists outside the lattice of our universal humanity. We may pretend that we do, and close our eyes so as not to see it, but if we ever dare to open our eyes, as in the case of Mozart's Count in Figaro, then, wow, we don't want to believe what we see."

"How silly of us?" I interjected.

Olive nodded. "So you see, Peter, your friend Helen came to a similar perception as I have came to through music."

"Are you suggesting that music and love have a common root?" I asked.

"Oh, music is the mirror of the human Soul, as is love," she said and nodded.

She spoke in a matter-of-fact kind of way. She spoke as if she had contemplated this idea for a long time. "Music is not sound," she said. "If it were just sound, we could build machines to create music. Music unfolds from the dynamics of living in a human world. Music comes from love. It comes from loving oneself as a part of our universal humanity in which all beauty is anchored and by which we are all united. That is why a performer is also an artist. When I perform a composition, after I master the technical aspects, I try to elevate myself to the level where I see the human Soul so that my performance becomes a work of art. That is why I never truly perform for myself. The art unfolds in the outflow. There, life unfolds as something so special that I can sense the spark of joy that life reflects when we become truly at one with our universal humanity. When this happens love and music become one. From this height I can also feel the deep emptiness of despair, and the struggles, doubts, and darkness of living without hope in a world and without light. I think that Sibelius understood this emptiness. He also understood how this emptiness is transformed into something rich by the human presence or the humanist energy that we bring to bear with the 'passion' for our humanity. I think that in this human dimension, where our 'fires' mingle, we are all one. We live as one. This unity is all embracing. No one lives outside of this dimension. We are all married to it. We are all married to each other by it. When I perform great music I celebrate this all-embracing unity of our humanity in all the color that music can portray. This is universal love unfolding, isn't it? When I perform music I celebrate the reality of my being, of our being, of the being that binds us all to our humanity and brings us closer to one-another."

"We share one life, because we reflect one universal human Soul," I commented. I said this in order to keep the flow of ideas going. "We are one in the sense that a drop of water is one with the ocean and with the rainbow, and with the air that carries it, and with the rain that nourishes the flower and the heart. Yes, love is not a technical aspect. If it were, we would never master it for its all-encompassing complexity. But we are able to love, and we have proof of that, because if we did not love, why would we despair over the loss when even a single spark of life becomes extinguished and falls to the ground, and thereby darkens the universe? The despair that I felt after the depopulation lecture, Olive, was evidently a reflection of that all-embracing love that I felt before. You are right, then, Olive. I should count the despair as evidence of the unfolding of love that invariably becomes ever more universal in scope. But tell me, is this the way you play the funeral march in Mahler's symphony? Do you play it as a celebration of life? Do you celebrate life as a power that can only be defeated in the world of dreams, but never in the real world? Do you play the funeral march with the acknowledgement in your heart that life is undefeatable as a universal principle, which it really is? That's like stepping away from a dream into the making of joy, as we see the human universe as a universal family bound in love and encircled by this truth-inspired joy. The power of joy is to unite us, is it not? But it all glows with love. Joy, truth, and love are interlocked, aren't they?"

"This triple marriage is not one of empty tones, Peter," Olive interjected. "It is a Soul-filled symphony."

"Isn't that the way Mahler's grand symphony should open with, Olive? Shouldn't it open with a profound realization that takes us out of the dark world of dreams that has turned the progression of mankind into a funeral march indeed." I reached my hands out to her for a gesture, as if it were an invitation for her to agree. "Isn't this how Mahler should be played?" I added. "This uplifting of ourselves above the funeral march is what love is, isn't it. Its tones are the gentleness in embracing one-another; the tears of joy; the boundless sharing in the light; our touching hand to hand, heart to heart, breast to breast, face to face; and the knowing that no death will part or darkness overpower this human light."

"Depopulation is not a word found in the language of love," Olive replied softly. "That is why it fails when there is love. Maybe Mahler felt something of that. As for myself, I never performed Mahler."

I could certainly agree with her that depopulation is not a word found in the language of love. I felt close to her. I found it interesting to listen to her and to find myself responding to her interests and her hopes and fears. Only when my comments referred back to the conference and the lecture on depopulation did she stop me.

She stopped me right in my tracks and put a finger over my lips. "There is no need for this," she said. "I know why World War I and II were created. I have studied history. I also know why we are now being set up for a nuclear war and why depopulation is being pursued with more and more UN conferences pushing the theme. So, say no more my dear friend. Believe me, I know! I also know how urgent the fight is to rescue humanity with love, and ourselves with it. Remember, you said to me in the lobby when you were still crying, that we must not allow this to happen. Believe me, I understood what you meant. I heard that speech, too. I also know that only a precious few of humanity are committed to fighting against this. Far too few, really. Of course, I also know that this lack of interest can turn into a staunch commitment. People like us can change the world. We can cause this to happen."

Those words shook me up. They had been like my own words. I had said the same thing to Steve and Ushi in Leipzig. We had talked about love deep into the night, but I hadn't really understood it then. Perhaps they hadn't either. Steve had never mentioned the principle of the Second Renaissance that the Peace of Westphalia had been built on, the Principle of the Advantage of the Other. The woman from India had known about it. This principle was supported by love. Its foundation is universal love. Olive was right, depopulation has no support, because it is in the nature of mankind to love, and love will remain on the horizon for as long as human beings exist. The woman from India seemed to have recognized this fact. She seemed to have made it clear that those thirty-five centuries of Brahmanic atrocities against humanity that may have killed half a billion women, and many of them in the most horrible way, had not reached deep enough to eradicate love from the human scene. "Love still rules," Dayita had said, which led me to conclude that one day the Principle of the Advantage of the Other will be the universal principle of mankind and open the doors to a still brighter renaissance than it had supported in the 17th Century.

I suppose, when I had become devastated by the depopulation lecture, I hadn't fully comprehended what Dayita from India had been getting at, that the victory is bound to be on our side. With that in mind, the devastation that I felt wasn't based on anything real. It had been silly and unnecessary. I suddenly felt ashamed of the way I had reacted. I told Olive so. I felt impelled to ask for her forgiveness for having been so stupidly despondent when the horizon is so filled with hope and a new sunrise was dawning. I said that my despondency was actually a denial of all the other aspects of love that have come into my life, like it now unfolded in the form of music in a sunrise of love, joy, life, and the wonderful unity that they all inspire.

Olive forgave me with a smile. The smile became a grin as it were in acceptance of my now dawning love and joy and the all-uniting life in which these became reflected.

"Speaking about the Principle of the Advantage of the Other," I said to Olive while we were still on our way to her home, "I am at a loss to figure out what might be most to your individual advantage, personally."

"That's an easy one to answer," Olive replied. "What is most to my advantage is to love. Nothing that I could ever hope for or want would be more to my advantage than to love. I think you can agree on that. I also think that you are already supporting me with your own love for our common humanity."

"I hear what you are saying, but is this enough?" I countered her. "When I met Astrid on the first day of the conference, I fell in love with her in a strange way. Afterwards I found out over a cup of coffee that her whole life evolves around love, but in that narrow and confined kind of sense that I told you about. That narrow sense came about during a vacation some time earlier. She had been desperately hoping to meet her prince. She had been on vacation for just that purpose, but no prince ever appeared to sweep her off her feet. Maybe the princes of this world have all become too dull over time to recognize a gem when it appears before their eyes. In any case Astrid recognized the beautiful gem that she was and decided to fall in love with herself, as we all should. Except, as I said, she stopped there. She made herself her own best friend and found this to be sufficient. My scientific sense told me right then that this insufficient. I sensed a gnawing emptiness in her responses. Something was spiritually lacking. I feel that to merely love, even oneself, is not enough. I felt that love has no purpose as an end in itself. So I argued with her. That's when something interesting happened. In our conversation that day Astrid and I met two Islamic scientists. Astrid asked them two 'huge' questions that I think pertain to the answer to her puzzle and also to resolving Mozart's paradoxes. The first question that Astrid asked the scientists came like a surprise to me. 'What protects the fire from the water,' she asked them. The scientists answered her that the firewall that protects the fire from the water, is love. Then Astrid asked, but isn't the water that threatens the fire also the water that nourishes life?"

"That's an interesting metaphor, Peter, but what does it mean?" said Olive. She smiled as she said this and hugged me to her side.

"The scientists couldn't answer Astrid," I continued. "I think they were afraid of the answer. But the answer isn't that difficult to recognize. We have three elements to deal with here. We have fire, love, and water. I think the fire represents sex, a sense of sex that that unfolds as a passion for life that must always grow brighter and culminate into joy. I would say that the fire of humanist passion must be protected. It must be protected from the water that would quench it. The fire must never go out. Sex is rooted in our humanity, and what is rooted there must never go out, but must grow brighter and empower us to light up the world out of the riches of what we are as human beings."

Olive nodded. "You may be right," she said. "Sex is one of the profound aspects of ourselves that we have as human beings that closely matches the metaphor of fire. You are right, the fire of our passion for life in which in part sex unfolds, must be protected by our love for our humanity and for all humanity."

"I love the way that Dayita from India described the fire of our passion for our humanity," I interjected. "I like the way she compared it to the plasma state in high-energy physics that opens up a totally new super-energetic environment."

"We mustn't let this passion go out, Peter," said Olive, "even sexual passion, which is ninety percent mental anyway, and only ten percent physical. Obviously it has to be that way, because the merely physical aspects of our humanity won't take us up to the sublime level and to the level above it. Passion is mental, that's for sure. Sexual passion is the kind of passion for life that won't let us fall asleep and regress into the mediocrity of merely existing."

"The way I see it," I interrupted Olive, "passion is the flower of the human heart. It is love that does not have to be driven by reason but flows by its own power out of the riches of what we are, the riches of our humanity. Its fire is the living principle unfolding alive within us. The way I see it, sex falls into this realm as the summary term that comprises all aspects of our humanity that glow with the fire of passion. Music belongs to this category, as well as art, literature, dancing, caring, building, creating. Every song is a statement of passion. Every kind word, every helping hand, or loving thought, or gentle gesture, is a spark from the fire of passion that creates a super-high-energy humanist environment in our living and thereby in the world. The sparkle of a symphony, the paradox of a tragedy, the song of bow draw dawn across a violin, the melody of a poem, are all like beams of energetic light that project our riches from within that are unique to our humanity, that are as much a part of our sex as human beings as is a hug and a kiss. In fact, all of these aspects are aspects of our universal kiss with which we enrich one another and the world. The fire of passion that unfolds in this humanist dimension must be protected and be enriched, mustn't it? It is the impetus from the Soul that moves the artist's brush, the writer's pen, the dander's feet, the singer's voice, the actor's expression, as well as the lips that meet to say, I love you. Passion is the dynamo that takes us from merely existing in a 'solidly frozen' state, as Dayita had described it, to living intensely in a 'high-energy' state that impels us to pull our world up behind us and turn it into an intensely human world, the kind of world in which our children, and their children, are assured to have a future.

"Without this dynamism there will never be an Ice Age Renaissance possible," I added, "which is possible only in a high-energy environment, because the obstacles would be too great in a less-human world. Without the dynamism of this passion civilization cannot survive, Olive. Without this passion mankind will become lost in the coming Ice Age, even to the point that it might become extinct, especially when the Ice Age Wars erupt over the dwindling food resources that will then be likely. The fire of passion for our humanity that has the potential to prevent this chaos, appears to have become the key crucial factor in today's world, because we might only have a hundred years left before the return of the Ice Age begins, and it will take a hundred years of scientific, technological, and economic development to get our planet prepared for it. In other words we don't have any time to waste. We've wasted a whole century already with the insanity of two world wars, followed by the Cold War that is still raging. We are running with a hundred years deficit already. That's quite a handicap for a standing start, especially since we haven't yet learned to get moving."

"You said that the water that nourishes life must also be protected," said Olive.

"The water must be protected from the fire," I said and smiled. "It appears to me that the water represents satisfaction, and that real satisfaction must never come from sex and passion. If it were to come from there, the satisfaction derived there would quench the dynamism that impels us on. If this dynamism were quenched with satisfaction, what would we have left then that 'fires' us on towards joy, which impels us to launch the needed Ice Age Renaissance and its hundred years development cycle? Satisfaction can be a deadly thing for mankind when it keeps our passion on too low a flame or none at all. We would not have a civilization if this had been the case in the past. And so, for mankind to have a future, the fire must never go out that impels us to go beyond ourselves to the as yet unattained, but attainable."

"But Pete, I take it that you still say that satisfaction is needed," said Olive. "The water that nourishes is needed. It must be protected too. You say that it must be protected from the fire by love. Isn't that a paradox?"

"It is only a paradox until the paradox is resolved," I continued. "The Islamic scientists couldn't resolve that paradox either, for Astrid, and neither could I at the time. It seems now that there is a solution possible if one relates the water to science as the great resource for human development. That's not a passionate thing. It's an empowering thing. Have you ever had a profound idea, Olive, or discovered a principle that can enrich your existence? I am sure you had. This development brings with it great satisfaction, because it uplifts our world, but it isn't a passion, is it? I am sure that the discovery of an idea never gave you goose bumps or ever will, and make you feel all warm and cuddly inside, and make your toes curl up. I would say that this never happens, but it happens in music and so forth. However, it has been my experience that the discovery of ideas in scientific development that raises the platform of civilization with advanced recognition of truth and profound achievements in civilization gives one definitely a sense of satisfaction, even a deep satisfaction. It puts us into a New World. It opens up the gates to infinity. This satisfaction is a different kind of 'sexual' human experience, isn't it? It is rooted in a different quality that is also uniquely human, a spiritual quality that lets one see what the eye cannot see, and discover something that is totally new. It gives one a great sense of satisfaction to recognize for instance that we have the capability within us to change the world with profound ideas, to uplift it, to enrich the universe, to create resources and processes with scientific and technological progress that never existed before. All this takes us beyond the capacity of the natural world to provide for our needs, which is something we can do as human beings. That's satisfying, isn't it? That truly puts us on the map as an infinite species. I think there is a great satisfaction in that. All other species are bound to the limits of the natural world and become extinct when the natural world is changing and fails to provide for their need. But as human beings we can create our own resources beyond anything that the natural world can supply, or even prevent. We can create flower gardens and wheat fields and forests in an Ice Age world, and this in a richer measure than anything we have ever seen. That's the 'water' that nourishes life. It comes with a kind of satisfaction attached that doesn't close any doors, but nurtures a sense of wonder and curiosity about what else one might be able to discover and create. It really opens the door to infinity."

"But why didn't the Islamic scientists that you talked to come up with that answer?" Olive interrupted.

"They hadn't yet discovered that there is a fourth element that is equally as crucial," I continued, "which I think is really the first element. One might call this element, our peace. Peace unfolds when all the division and isolation of mankind is bridged with stands of love and thereby made invalid. I call this the first element, because this is the first thing that my friend Helen discovered about the reality of our being when she struggled to help a friend in great need. She saw the whole of mankind bound to each other by strands of love into a vast lateral lattice, with all strands reflecting our common humanity. The simple fact is Olive, that we are all human beings sharing a common humanity and reflecting a common universal human Soul. Everything that denies that reality and divides us is artificial. Sexual division, marriage division, political division, economic division, ethnic division, religious division, and so on are all artificial constructs. There won't be any peace possible until these artificial constructs give way to the profound recognition that we are all human beings. My friend Helen sees us as all bound together as human beings in one all-embracing universal marriage. She sees this as a fundamental reality of our being that all the artificial constructs should reflect profoundly and bring to the foreground more and more, rather than hinder. My friend Helen sometimes calls this first element in which our universal marriage unfolds, our universal kiss. She sees this kiss as an active expression of an active principle, creating an 'active' peace!"

"An active peace?" Olive repeated questioningly. "What is an active peace? How can peace be active?"

"The peace that an artist feels is an active peace, Olive," I said with satisfaction. "It is active because it reflects the artist's awareness that all mankind are human beings universally. An artist doesn't paint images, but paints ideas utilizing the images. The artist paints images from the heart and Soul. Thereby the artist knows that the ideas will not be lost to other human beings, since we all share a common humanity in which our universal sense of beauty is anchored, or our sublimity, or compassion, or joy, or whatever idea an artist is working with. Every artist works on the platform of the universal marriage of humanity as the reality of our being by which every work of art becomes an expression of our universal kiss that we simply cannot hold back. No one can hold back the dawn. It is powered by its own imperative, and so is the universal kiss. We find this art reflected not only in graphic form, but also in song, and in stories, and movies, and sculpture, and music. Our universal kiss has boundless dimensions, though all too few are yet expressed. We seemed to be terribly afraid to take the universal kiss out of the theoretical realm and make it real. We are all too often comparable to a politician who prostitutes himself and sells his soul for money or power. We do the same for our divisions. We prostitute ourselves by bowing to the demands of the countless forms of division and isolation that we are urged to accept, whereby we truly sell our soul. The great artists of the world give us a hint of what we would gain by stopping this self-prostitution. We would gain the peace that opens the gate fully to all the other three elements, fire, love, and water."

"This means that I must upgrade now what I recognize to be most to my advantage," said Olive, "and include the elements of peace, fire, and water, together with love, and regard them as equal in value. That's interesting, Peter."

"It gets still more interesting," I said to Olive. "I saw a series of four paintings in a small side-street gallery in New York, which reflect all that. The four paintings are all cityscapes, but they are painted in the light of the four different phases of the day. The first scene unfolds at dawn, and as I can see it now it does carry profound images of our universal marriage as human beings. Perhaps the dawn is our wakeup kiss. The second scene unfolds at the sunrise. Set against the fiery light of the sunrise the scene carries a powerful reference to sex that I found disturbing then, but not anymore. The artist had painted our humanity as a woman in a rocking chair holding a cane in her hand, with a boy standing next to her, the boy being alive and exuberant. However, the boy is placed in the painting in a strange and unnatural position by which the woman's hand, placed on her cane, is perfectly aligned with the boy's genitals as if she is firmly taking hold of the boy by his genitals and the boy responds with exuberance. It seems that the scene that the artist created reflects the fire of passion that Astrid referred to, which the Islamic scientists said must be protected from the water by the firewall of love. The artist painted the firewall of love in the third painting. The scene unfolds in the heat of the midday sun. It is a scene of healing. Mankind is being healed here from the sleep of self-imposed impotence. The fourth painting shows a scene bathed in the golden glow of the sunset, a scene of serenity and satisfaction. But here, another reference to sex is bought to the scene. Humanity appears in the form of an angel, and the angel is knocking at the front door of mankind. The doorknocker however is constructed in the shape of a man with hands folded in front of him. The angel's fingers are on the knocker, and the knocker does hit his genitals. This 'sexual' scene appears to be a spiritual scene that knocks at the higher 'sexual' dimension that is unique to the human being, which is mankind's profound, progressive, scientific intellect that sets us apart from any other species of life. The golden sunset reflects the atmosphere of satisfaction in our capacity for infinite achievements. The artist that created this series of paintings evidently understood a great deal about the reality of our being and the nature of human civilization."

Olive slowed her pace while I talked, until she suddenly stopped and responded to what I said, with a kiss.

We stopped speaking after that.

When we arrived at her apartment block, the world of her "humble abode" as she called it when we came to the front door, the 'midnight sunrise' that had begun between us continued. She invited me to join her for a nightcap. She spoke of love now in the same simple, but profound manner, in which she had talked about music before, as if there was no separation between the two; as if love had now merely been shifted into a different 'key.'

I accepted her offer to join her. I even bowed. Still, my words sounded shallow. For all my life I had loved to listen to music, standing on the outside and being treated to it. Now I was challenged to become a 'performer' of the music, an artist, and a participant in a grand symphonic performance where the very notion of being 'outside' becomes invalid. The offer she extended, to join her, made the 'music' more beautiful. It also made it more complex and challenging to put into words.

I understood that we needed to talk more, since we had much more to share than we have had time for. She put the kettle on right after we entered. Her apartment had the tiniest kitchen, with barely enough room for one person to stand. She said she would make us some tea.

When she returned to the sofa she pulled her dress up over her head. "I want us to be able to embrace each other more fully," she said, and smiled gently. "We need to embrace each other to celebrate the universality of love that embraces everything. Let it nourish and protect the fire, so that the fire may never go out. We need to embrace everything that is human and is beautiful about us, and we need to do this as fully and as closely as all life is intertwined, or else we loose its 'tone.' Whatever we shy away from, Peter, we loose. Whatever we take for granted we loose also. That's false satisfaction, too, isn't it, that we must avoid? We loose what we don't cherish. What we don't cherish, we let slip out our life. That is how life becomes endangered, by being starved to death. I love your metaphor, Peter, that reminds us of our need to keep both the fire and the water separate, and protected by love, and to nourish the element of our peace that opens the door to them. In that we are artists, too."

She suggested that the principle behind my metaphor had actually been discovered a long time ago. "We can never afford to let go of each other," she added. "As human beings, we have a need for cherishing each other to the fullest possible degree. Without that, where is the substance of our unity that we can draw on to turn mere tones into a symphony? We need this substance, because the principle of our peace mustn't remain theoretical. It needs to be grounded in the Earth so to speak, in our experience at the real level where life unfolds every day, and be as true to life in all its forms as music should be on the concert stages of the world. If unity is the reality of our being, then we must celebrate it in as tangible forms as we can possibly have. It must not be just a theoretical reality. We must live it and celebrate it, mustn't we? What we don't cherish is left to die."

Olive finished undressing herself while she spoke. "Do I make any sense?" she asked.

In her innocent way she did make perfect sense. I told her so as I followed her lead. That is also where the talking stopped.

This night became an exploration of what is honorable about sexual sharing, exploring the dimensions of giving to another the most precious of ourselves in a process of cherishing one-another. It was done without the slightest trace of it becoming exploitation. There was a challenge involved. But there was no struggle unfolding in this hour of intimacies, nor ecstasy, nor fear, nor disappointment. Everything unfolded easily, naturally, and without tension, as if nothing was happening at all, while in reality a whole world of preconceptions were overturned and made invalid.

I realized, as I had in Leipzig with Ushi, that none of this should have been possible according to the conventional rules, especially not so easily and so beautifully. But it was happening! It was happening like miracles sometimes happen. Olive created a paradox and solved it at the same time with her rare sense of love.

I reacted with a sense of awe that this incredible good was possible, and that it could unfold with such ease. This was sex unfolding at a level that went far beyond what I imagined could be possible. And it was happening. We had met only hours ago. The closeness that I felt shouldn't have been possible, but it was, and it was still unfolding. I felt as if we had known each other always.

This process went on timelessly until it was crudely interrupted when Olive realized that the kettle had boiled dry, which she said was now ruined.

The tragedy of the ruined kettle meant that we had to go out for a nightcap. "I know the perfect place," she said, "that's open all night and sells the finest ice cream in all of Russia!" Thus, once again, we strolled through the empty streets, hand in hand.

"My grandfather was a boatman on the Volga," she said while we walked. "He understood the nature of life and love better than most people do today. He was hard working, honest. He was welcome wherever he went, and always helped others when help was needed. We, too, must help one-another, and we must do this because we must help humanity to survive. The only evil in the world is that which divides humanity. Is there any tragedy, Peter, which does not stem from the countless forms of division that isolate mankind? I don't think there is. Division splits people apart from one-another; it isolates people; it impoverishes; it murders; it makes one feel to be without hope."

The streets were empty as we walked to the ice-cream place, but the night was still warm. "I am happy tonight," she said and smiled, "because I know I am no longer alone. The substance that I feel in performing music is unfolding in this new and remarkable way. It is like light itself. By it, we have become one. I know, that when you return to your own country after the conference is over, you will take the memory of this night with you, a memory of something precious, something to fight with, not just something to fight for. We both need this. We must fight with all the riches we have within us, and we must never allow ourselves to forget that these riches must outweigh all the so-called riches of all the kingdoms of the Earth. We must fight together with all our might. Nothing else matters. Unity and life are one. So, my dear Peter, you must never forget that there is at least one person in Russia now who loves you as a human being, whom you are also making a little richer by just being alive as we touch one-another, and by whom you are enriched in return. That's something precious to take home with you, isn't it?"

We walked along the bank of a river for part of the way. We came to the river when the houses ended. The street had trailed out into a small park with a playground in the middle, surrounded by willow trees. From there a trail led to the riverbank. The trail seemed well used, but there was no one there at night. We were alone, eerily alone. A partial noon could be seen now and then though ragged gaps in the clouds.

Walking along the bank of the river in the moonlight reminded me of Mozart's Figaro opera that Olive had talked about earlier. The stands of trees, like shadows below the embankment, appeared as images of a garden that made the scene reminiscent of the Count's moonlight rendezvous. It reminded me of the Count's outpouring of love to Susanna.

"Since Mozart didn't ridicule the Count," I said to Olive, "but supported the deeply human legitimacy of his case with a passage of beautiful music, I wonder why Mozart didn't let the opera end on that brighter note? Why did he let it fall back to the conventional 'small-world' setting?"

"Oh, does this puzzle you?" Olive answered. "Why should this puzzle you, Peter?"

"I am posing the question, because it appears to relevant," I said. "It seems to relate to the four levels of society recognizing its humanity, which the woman from India had talked about. The Count's love was reflecting an element of universal love. The development of universal love pertains to the third level, the level of scientifically reaching up to the sublime, does it not? There, one comes face to face with the universal principles of our humanity. I find it odd that Mozart would close the door to this attainment once the attainment has been made, and then let the opera end on a lower level, on the conventional or moral level. By so doing he leaves the audience in a rather precarious state, doesn't he?"

"What are you getting at, Peter?" Olive interrupted.

"I am looking at something that maybe important, Olive. The woman from India talked about four levels. At the lowest level we see ourselves living like animals. That's the imperial fascist domain. For as long as we find ourselves living at this frozen imperial level, depopulation cannot be avoided, whether it is by nuclear war, or diseases, or by poverty. One way or another depopulation will happen, because if mankind insists on living like animals that don't have the capacity to create their own resources for living, the earth will indeed become too small to support the present population, and thereby we are doomed. We would certainly be doomed in an Ice Age. Our only hope lies in pulling ourselves out of this perceptional quagmire that we are currently in, and solve the problem from a higher level of perception where we begin to recognize ourselves as human beings with the humanist energy that can uplift also the botanic world and protect it in order to meet our needs in an Ice Age environment. This puts us onto the second level, the moral level. At the moral level, depopulation is no longer possible. However, the moral domain is a transitional one. Nothing is cast in concrete at this level. The slightest slipup, the slightest negation of our humanity, can drag us back down into the imperial fascist domain where mankind regards itself as animals. This means that we are not secure yet at the second level. Everything is precarious, because we are not going far enough. Morality is a philosophical thing, a doctrinal thing, rather than a power that is anchored in the discovery and understanding of the truth. It is a low-energy state that is coincident with zero-science in terms of our humanist development. This means that depopulation cannot be avoided by mankind falling scientifically 'asleep' at the merely moral level. Therefore it will happen, one way or another. When being 'asleep' we will slide back down into the imperial trap.

"We can only live securely when we pull ourselves up to the third level and live at the leading edge of it, aiming for the sublime. The principles that we discover in progressive development and build on come to light as our resources, our sublimity that is anchored at the fourth level, in the Principle of Universal Love and the principle of the Second Renaissance, the Principle of the Advantage of the Other, and so forth. Once we live by the imperatives of these universal principles, depopulation is no longer possible, because we are then committed and empowered to moving full steam ahead in the right direction, the humanist direction. Thereby we are safe. We are safe, not because depopulation will thereby be prevented, but because it will no longer be thinkable and therefore be possible. Our unfolding love for our humanity makes depopulation unthinkable and impossible to be carried out. Nobody talks about such notions as 'resolve' at this level. The bestial no longer roams the forest of human thinking. Once the sublime is touched in our development, and love is put on the table as a universal principle, we simply cannot slip back to a lower level where we regard ourselves as animals and live that way. It just won't happen.

"But Mozart allows this to happen in his opera, Figaro," I continued. "In a real live renaissance setting that reverting back to a lower state would never happen. The ending of the Figaro opera would have been written so that the Count's second love, as a step towards universal love, would be understood as natural, and be acknowledged as such, and be maintained. It would have been a tremendously challenging ending, no doubt, to put this forward, especially in an imperial age, I grant you that, but it would have been a more natural ending. In fact it would have been the more likely ending even now, although no one of today's audience would admit that either."

"I think you have discovered one of the paradoxes that Mozart laid before us to ponder over," said Olive. "In fact, I believe it is essential for us ponder this paradox, especially in the nuclear weapons age. We say that at the first level, the bottom level, the imperial fascist level, mankind recognizes itself as being devoid of any sense of humanity and lives like animals. We both certainly agree that nuclear war is inevitable at this level of the zero-energetic humanist environment where we regard ourselves as animals. And so it will happen. At the next higher level, at the moral level of living, I think we would destroy all of our nuclear weapons and celebrate the fact. But the knowledge to build them would remain. Peace would be passive at this level, but not active. Without an active principle as an imperative for peace, we would likely rebuild the nuclear weapons at some point and we would be back to where we started from, whereby nuclear war would become inevitable again and would likely happen. However, when we step up to the third level and the leading edge of it, we burn the bridges behind us to go back. While the knowledge to build nuclear bombs would still remain with us, as it will never go away, it would become effectively irrelevant by the operating principles of our humanity. At the level of the sublime it is irrelevant whether weapons can be built that can destroy us, because we would never use those weapons, and therefore we would never bother to build them."

"To some degree that is already happening," I interrupted her, "though, on a much smaller scale. You probably have enough financial resources in your bank account to go out and buy yourself a big sledgehammer with which to break your neighbor's door down to rob him. But you would never do this. You wouldn't dream of it. So it doesn't matter that you have capacity to do it. You'd sooner protect your neighbor's house against any would-be thief. Am I not right? That's what happens when the human environment begins to be powered by the sublime."

"If this happens on the global scale, Peter, peace and security will be inevitable," Olive replied.

"That's what I mean, Olive," I said. "Once we get to the third level there is no going back, and I believe that our getting to this level where we become sublime is inevitable, too. That is why we can say with certainty that the problem of nuclear war, which dooms our future, can be resolved in real life and not just in the world of dreams, because as human beings we have the capacity to go about it the right way. It appears then that Mozart came close to saying this, but didn't have the courage to say it."

"Ah, but do you have the courage today, Peter? Maybe the courage that you are talking about is that courage that Mozart wanted us to discover in ourselves, in his playful way, and have us to rewrite the ending ourselves, correctly, in our own lives" said Olive. "He certainly wouldn't have helped us if he had closed the opera on the third level. I think he wanted us to say to ourselves, oops, that ending isn't right. The ending has to be different in real life, because that's not how things work in the real world considering the principles that are involved."

"This means that we have to radically alter our measurements," I interjected. "We can no longer measure ourselves in a linear way as we do right now, but need to measure us in terms of the demands of universal principles, from a higher-level perspective. Right now society says that civilization is not in danger, while genocide is being carried out here and there, like for instance against the Palestinian people. Right now, when a few hundred Palestinians are shot dead each month, or when a thirteen year old girl has her little body riddled with twenty bullets before she falls to the ground, society looks away and says, so what? It seems to me, Olive, that we can no longer measure civilization that way. I would say that not a single person is secure from nuclear war or any other form of depopulation for as long as a single person anywhere falls victim to such tragedies, or a single child dies of hunger, and so forth. I would say that the murder of a single person is an infinite crime. This means that it really isn't anymore tragic for the perpetrator to carry out the infinite crime ten times, or a thousand times, or a thousand millions times. The mentality behind the infinite crime is the same in every case. Once a person reaches the bottom of the sewer, the beastman level, the unimaginable becomes 'normal.' Thus, a billion lives may be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust with the same ease with which a thirteen years old child is shot to death with twenty bullets while she drops to the ground, or even with a single bullet."

"If mankind's self-perception is at the level of animals, then its actions are far from the sublime and the worst is likely to happen," Olive interjected.

"For as long as any of that happens," I said to Olive, "society hasn't discovered the universal principles of its humanity, which alone can prevent the infinite crime down to the last single occurrence. We cannot say, for example, that we have made progress in nuclear disarmament when we reduce the numbers of warheads from sixty-five thousand that society now has, to maybe forty thousand. We can't talk about disarmament until a qualitative change has occurred by which the global warhead count becomes reduced to zero and no chance remains that a single new one will ever be built. No military or political process can get us to this point, or even close to it. The scientific and spiritual development that brings to light the sublime nature of the human being has to be carried out from within. Only when this happens can we say that society has found its humanity. Then, nuclear disarmament will not only be possible, it will be easily accomplished."

"Are you saying that the universal principles that come to light at the third level of society's self-discovery can facilitate all of that?" Olive interjected.

I nodded. "Tell me Olive, what would prevent mankind's ongoing self-discovery of its humanity, so that this won't happen? Thirty-five centuries of cultural warfare in India and around the world, hasn't prevented the ongoing development of love. There is nothing in history that tells me that this third-level development can be forever prevented, so that mankind would be irreversibly doomed to a terminal holocaust like the dinosaurs were doomed for causes that were beyond their control. I would even say that this third-level stage cannot be avoided. Everyone of humanity cannot only reach it, but it can also be reached quickly, so that that nuclear disarmament can happen quickly as a reflection of it. It can and will happen just as quickly and completely as poverty and hunger will be eliminated in the same context, together with the countless divisions and persecutions that presently cause so much damage to society."

"We must assume, however, that until we get to the third-stage level we are doomed to destroy our civilization and ourselves with it," interjected Olive. "So, let's rewrite the ending of Mozart's Figaro, rather then being doomed."

I nodded. "Of course we are doomed if we don't stir our stumps," I said to her quietly. "That, unfortunately, is a valid assumption, Olive. The assumption is prominently reflected in the fact that the English language regards genocide as an absolute term. This means that genocide on the smallest scale is the same as on the infinite scale. Eradicating genocide, then, becomes a matter of principle, not a matter of degree. It becomes a matter of society living on the third level, the level of the sublime, as the woman from India had described the third level. Yes, until we get there, genocide will continue. We may see it unfolding on any scale. Just look at Hitler's genocide operations. They started so small, so minuscule in scope that they were considered around the world as an internal matter of German politics. However, in real terms the opposite was true. From the moment on that the first Jewish person was officially branded subhuman, and was labeled a pest of society, the process of the infinite crime had begun, the process of genocide. History bears me out on that. This single infinite crime proliferated. It quickly took on countless forms and engulfed half of the world with its wave of death, with repercussions that society has not yet recovered from. Nor should Hitler's genocide be considered to have been an isolated case. The world is awash with these types of 'witch-hunt' genocide of targeted people with which society has victimized one-another. It's the same as the persecution of the Sudra in India, or the Negro and the natives in America, not to mention the countless holocausts that are still in progress for religious and sexual objectives. None of these 'witch-hunts' can be dealt with at the level at which they occur, at the level at which society regards itself as animals. The 'witch-hunts' can only be dealt with at the third level at which society discovers itself as human beings and begins to embrace the universal principles of its humanity. Hitler's holocaust should serve us as a warning in the nuclear age, to get our act together and become human beings while we still have a world that is fit to live in."

Olive and I always communicated with each other in a mixture of English and Russian while we explored these weighty issues, chatting through the night on the way to the ice cream place.

"I know that what you said is true," Olive answered after one of my long dissertation. She spoke quietly this time, and her smile had disappeared.

I was startled by the change. What had I done? What had I said? Had I opened some old wounds that still festered, that had remained unhealed? I hated to see her in anguish.

She revealed quietly that she knew from personal experience what today's urgency requires. She spoke about the Volga again and her grandfather's work there. "My father and grandfather both understood what the isolation of people from one-another can cause," she said. "They could sense the darkness of the future. There was always a great fear in the background for as long as anyone can remember. While the Jewish persecution had been outlawed in the Soviet State, it had in practice been merely replaced with political persecution, that the existence of our gulags is a testament of."

"Is your family Jewish, then?" I asked.

She shook her head and smiled again, slightly. She looked beautiful with this smile on her face in the moonlight.

"No our family lived in a constant state of a quiet fear for stepping out of line. My father and grandfather were always helping people. This made them suspicious. Many people still live with that quiet fear. I, for one, have stepped away from that. The cost to one is too high to live in fear. I found that life is much richer when one is living in love and in the world of music."

"Your grandfather and father must be both wise men to have raised a wonderful daughter like you," I added. "You are a real gem. They must be proud to have a daughter like you."

"They are both dead," she answered and became suddenly sad again. "My father died in an industrial accident before he was fifty. I never knew my grandfather. I was told that he was a beautiful man. I have seen pictures of him. He was killed during the war by one of the German police battalions while he was helping a friend in a Jewish town that was being raided along the Volga. Official records show that there were no survivors." She covered her face with her hands as if to hide her tears.

"Then you have experienced the genocide of depopulation personally, haven't you? You've been touched by it as if you had been there. It probably took you a long time to get over it."

She nodded. "I am not completely over it yet. It's not easy as it may seem to just walk away. Genocide is such civil word now. It no longer relates to the beastly reality that it represents."

"You mean you are still disturbed after all these years, Olive?"

She nodded again. "I was told about my grandfather as a child, but I couldn't put it out of my mind for a long time until I explored what really happened."

"Tell me, whom do you blame for this holocaust?" I asked her cautiously. "Do you blame Adolf Hitler, do you blame the SS murderers that carried out his orders, or do you blame the British/American oligarchy that financed Hitler into power?"

"I don't blame anyone of them," she said quietly. "I blame the German people."

I asked her to explain.

"A nation is its people," she said. "Society is responsible to itself." She explained that if a people have so little interest in their humanity that they allow themselves to be corrupted by money, poverty, power, threats, violence, status, or whatever, then they would be corrupted.

"The whole world blames Hitler for the Nazi holocaust," she continued, "but I blame the German people who allowed Adolf Hitler to have that power. The German people committed a great crime. They committed a crime against the future. They robbed the future of the present. Sure, they allowed the murder of six million Jewish people, one at a time. That's a crime against humanity and against their own humanity. In the shadow of this bestiality they allowed the worst war in history to unfold that uprooted the lives of a hundred million people and killed over fifty million of them. That adds up to a huge crime. But the greatest crime was committed against the future. That crime robbed mankind of fifty years of human development that has put us into a critical handicap position on the Ice Age schedule. Their crime against the future might yet destroy nine-tenth of mankind, adding up to the death of many billions of people."

I shuddered at the thought. "Can you really say that, Olive? That makes us all criminals against the future. For decades we stood silently in the shadow of the worst cultural warfare in history that is being committed for the same effect. The crime against the future is too broad."

"That's part of the tragedy, Peter. My definition is not too broad. The crime against the future is what it is. It must include everything that has the potential to deprive mankind of its future. It is a tragedy that the mass of people is very broad that supports this crime. We are not dealing here with who should be hung and put in jail. You can't put a whole nation into jail or drag it to the gallows. Punishment never solved a crime. Many high-placed fascist criminals were executed after World War II for war crimes committed, while the fascism that caused these crimes remained and is now bigger than ever. Thus, the crime against the future continues. Fascism in all its dimensions, including cultural warfare and the Global Warming Doctrine, is and remains a crime against the future. Nothing changes that or ever would for any reason, even if the whole of mankind were to support that crime. Every cry about global warming is a crime against the future that blocks society's response to the Ice Age schedule that the universe is imposing, because the effect of blocking the needed Ice Age Renaissance is mass-genocide on an unimaginable scale. So, whom would you blame when this blocking happens, but the people of society themselves that allow the blocking of the proper response to be carried out and support it?

"So I say it is a cheap excuse to blame the German holocaust against the Jewish people on Hitler as the sole culprit," said Olive. "The oligarchy plays this game. It promotes the idea that the responsibility belongs with a leader, because it wants to assure that the people of the world won't stand in the way of its future madness. The oligarchy does this by assuring the people that they won't be blamed if they let future calamities happen or even play along if invited. And so the tragedies continue. Of course the oligarchy will always find another madman, or beastman, to do its bidding, who in the end will be vilified and given the blame. He then becomes the whipping boy for everyone. The oligarchy may very well name a future whipping boy for the 'oh so tragic' global warming mistake when the consequences can no longer be avoided and mankind looses its future existence in the coming Ice Age without being prepared for it.

"The problem is that society won't grow up to become human beings if it shifts the blame for its failing onto somebody else's shoulders," said Olive. "Of course, that affect is intended. It is even necessary in order to execute the planed crimes against the future. Holding a whipping boy to blame prevents people from taking responsibility. I simply won't allow myself to fall for this trick anymore, Peter. I have to blame the German society for what it allowed Hitler to get away with. Nothing absolves their crime against the future until the effects of this crime have been reversed by extraordinary efforts. And that, Peter, puts the imperative to fight against the same crime in modern times into my court and yours to stop it, to stop today's crime against the future that includes everything that potentially prevents the needed Ice Age Renaissance from happening, which alone assures mankind's future."

Olive told me that the people in Germany knew, or should have known, that Adolf Hitler's ideals were an insult to every sense of humanity that ever existed in human hearts. "In their dishonesty with themselves the people denied what they knew and abhorred," said Olive. "They denied their own culture as human beings when they chose to believe the lies they were told, especially the lie that the brutalities of the Nazis would make their nation great. That's how Germany destroyed itself, Peter. That's how Germany destroyed its own culture, its own civilization, the cultural achievements of its past, and its potential contribution to the future of mankind, which we now don't have for building on for what must be achieved."

"What about the people of India?" I interrupted Olive. "Would you blame them too? Would you blame the people for the cultural and physical destruction that the Aryan invasion caused?"

"That was a different environment, Peter, wasn't it? Can you say that the indigenous cultures of India knew or should have known that the perversion of the Vedas into murderous tools was the result of an intentional conspiracy?" said Olive. "Their early culture was entirely rooted in mythology. Sure, that mythology was abused, but a mythology isn't the truth. The indigenous people lacked the cultural platform that represents the humanist truth that might have countered the Aryan invaders. They had nothing to fight with. The same cannot be said of the German people during the fascist invasion, and of society today. The German society had a highly developed culture that was built on the greatest renaissance ever created on this planet. It cannot be said therefore that the German people didn't know that fascism was an affront to this culture and to the humanist light that had been roused in their very hearts. They knew! At the very least they had the capacity to know. They should have known. So say that they didn't know would be like saying that Schiller never existed, and Bach, and Heine, and Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn, and Gauss, and countless others were never a part of the German culture. It was for the sake of petty convenience that they denied what was in their heart and let the madness take over. That petty smallness started the greatest crime ever committed, and we are all today in 'lock-step' with them in countless ways, more or less, especially by allowing the Ice Age Renaissance to be blocked."

Olive suggested that the once great German culture became irreparably lost in the ravishing of that cultural war that soon became a murderous war. She added that the same destruction was in progress again in the modern cultural warfare that followed World War II. She suggested that once the ongoing destruction stops, it might still take many decades to rebuild what has been culturally lost, maybe three or four generations, if indeed the loss can ever be made up in full.

"Are you saying that this cultural loss in Germany was ultimately a greater tragedy than the tragedy suffered by the holocaust victims?" I asked.

"It must have been that," said Olive. "When a nation dies from within as human beings, in terms of its humanity, the resulting loss is to all mankind, to civilization itself, and to the future. We must never loose sight of the crimes that are being committed against the future. The persecution of the Jewish people followed in due course. It too was a crime against the future, even though the Jewish people's destruction was secondary for the fascist purpose. The primary tragedy was the loss of the German nation's humanist culture, because that loss to the world is greater than the effect of the destruction that Hitler's SS-forces had inflicted on individual lives, as horrendous as the individual tragedies have evidently been. In fact, the tragic destruction of those lives would not have been possible without the cultural destruction that happened in 'lock-step' with the destruction of Jewish people.

"This tragedy should cause the West to take notice," said Olive, "because the West's ongoing cultural warfare against its own population is opening the same trapdoors again. When a nation becomes destroyed from within and turns fascist, the resulting dehumanizing poison, like a deadly virus, spreads around the world and effects other people and nations, and the potential for mankind to have a future. That poison remains in the world for a very long time, indeed, as the proliferation of fascism illustrates. My point is that until this simple lesson is learned, and society begins to rouse itself to prevent a repeat of the process, we will see many more nations die in the same manner with America probably being among them. We may well see the Ice Age Renaissance being prevented in this manner by society's continuing crimes against the future, with the result that future generation will be denied to exist."

I raised my hand to interrupt her.

"No Peter, I know that I am correct in this. It may seem cruel to blame the German people for what Hitler had demanded. But the fact is that Hitler hadn't hurt a fly. He put himself above the humanist law, and authorized others to raise themselves above the law as well, and those others authorized society to do the same. And they all did it. That is how the German people did the killing and how they carry the blame. A society has no right to live like animals no matter who bids it to do so, once the standard of the truth has been raised. It is society's duty to itself to live as human beings and this as energetically as possible, even to be sublime. If America were today to launch its long threatened nuclear war and incinerate the whole world in the resulting holocaust, as may yet happen, whom will the visitors from outer space blame for the tragedy, but the people who lived here?"

"Shouldn't we do the same now, and act accordingly, to free ourselves from our ongoing involvement at the lowest level, so that we will never have to carry that blame?" I interjected. "That means stepping up to the third level and becoming sublime, which would assure our future."

"Of course, Peter," said Olive. "If we fail in that, what will future historians say about us and our worldwide reluctance to prepare ourselves for the future Ice Age while we still can? That is, provided there will be any future historians alive to lay this blame. What will they say about our current refusal to live like human beings, which would impel us to create the Ice Age Renaissance without which our children and their children cannot survive? They cannot say that we didn't know that the Ice Age is on the horizon, or couldn't have known. It's all public knowledge and has been so for 150 years. Will they say that we too put ourselves above 'the law' and refused to live like human beings according to the principles of our humanity that are all well understood? Will they say that we intentionally opted for the destruction of civilization and upwards to nine-tenth of mankind by staunchly refusing, as we do, to upgrade our world to what is required for an Ice Age transition? Will they say that we found it too expensive to bother to protect the future of mankind, or too inconvenient, or too challenging to raise our humanist energy-levels that would melt down the presently frozen world of imperial insanity in which we have become mired like sleeping children?"

"I hear what you are saying," I interrupted her.

Olive said that this is the reason why we must have an intense focus on becoming human again by falling in love with our universal humanity, the humanity that we all share. "Nothing is more important than this, Peter, no matter how shallow such a pursuit may seem in the beginning. Nothing is more important than starting to move in that direction and not stopping, ever. We must also realize that our self-love as human beings has no meaning unless it is unfolding in a love for our universal humanity, which unfolds at the third level. That is the most potent force we have available to save our society and our civilization."

"But do we use this force? Do we bring it to life in us?" I added. "They way I see it, we don't. We bury this force as deeply as we can, just as our 'masters' tell us we should."

Olive suggested that if a nation allows its human culture to be defeated in cultural warfare, it is thereby self-doomed to become a fascist power. It will destroy itself, together with all that is human. That's been proven in history countless times, Peter. The holocaust that follows will always be tragic, but it will always be secondary. "Nor will the people of that nation get their culture back for a long time to come as Germany experienced. Tell me, what would rebuild a people's lost culture if the people have lost their Soul in the process of loosing their culture? What would power their humanist energies?"

Olive explained that she has seen the outcome of this cultural warfare process too tragically and too personally, and that she felt that it is very difficult for a people to pull themselves away from such an abyss. She suggested that alertness to love is really the only protector of civilization that society can have, as universal love begins at the third level, the level of a profound renaissance.

Olive told me that she had to trace through history books and war-trial archives in her search for what had happened to her grandfather. She said that the most revealing sources were the trial transcripts of the German officers who had murdered those people. "I learned that the 'police' had worked in companies of 500 men," she said. "Typically, they would surround a Jewish town before dawn. By nightfall not a single person of the town's population would remain alive. They would be loaded onto trucks and be taken to nearby forests, except for a few strong men who would be deported to be worked to death in the work camps. That became a routine repeated many times. In the forests the police would await them, who would take them single file into the woods where they would be ordered to lay on the ground, face down, to be killed with a single shot in the back of the head. By nightfall the task would be completed and the police battalions would return to their base.

"So, Peter, believe me, I know all about the pains of the depopulation mania." said Olive. "I know how easily depopulation can be achieved when a people loose their Soul and become imperial beasts, by which they become stone-hard killers. What should forever seem impossible suddenly becomes possible. I have seen too many pictures in the archives of the 'impossible' happening, and read too much about those horrors that words can never fully convey. But what is worse, those horrors come to light in agonizing nightmares that cannot be evaded. I've been there, Peter, in the midst of it all. I have experienced the horror of depopulation. What I saw documented is still haunting me now and then, especially since depopulation is once again big on the horizon and has already become a way of life in Africa."

Olive told me that one of the unforgettable photographs that she found in the archives was that of man or woman crouched down on the knees as if in prayer. He had been totally blackened by the consuming flames of one of the last fires of World War II. "That person was one of several thousand Jewish prisoners," said Olive, "that were herded into a barn in the last hours of the war, which was then doused with gasoline and set ablaze. The fire apparently was still burning when the allied forces arrived. The image of that single person that died in that fire, created a wound in the heart that may not heal until there is a new hope for humanity unfolding, which I am now fighting for.

"There were other images that I found in the archives," she said, "other photographs. Many seemed easier to bear. I collected them all in order to keep the impetuous alive to prevent this from ever happening again by discovering the true image of ourselves as human beings that makes the unthinkable undoable. Only by upgrading our sense of humanity can we prevent those images of tragedy from blackening the face of mankind again in the future. I saw in those images the tragic result of a people's humanity torn from its roots. I saw something that I needed to heal, and heal with love."

Olive told me about some of the other pictures that she found in the war-trial archives. Some were pictures of a small Jewish town, named Lomazy. The people had been forced to dig their own mass graves and step into them. Then the German police had brought in other prisoners, non-Jewish prisoners, whom they made drunk. The drunken prisoners then performed the execution of the Jewish people. Of course, being drunk they were unable to aim properly. By all accounts it was an unimaginable circus of cruelty and inhumanity. Apparently the dying were still moaning in pain when they were covered over with dirt. They had photographs of those scenes in the court archives accompanied with eyewitness testimonies.

Olive said that this insanity appeared to have been even worse in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. She said that in the occupied countries too, not just in Germany, people had been poisoned by the cultural destruction of the wave of fascism that had invaded the European nations like a disease. She said that she had seen pictures of grizzly scenes from these Nazi occupied countries in the archives, scenes in which the local population had been 'allowed' to participate in the killing of the Jewish people. The atrocities were committed right in the streets in their own towns, carried out by the people of the community with their own hands, without weapons.

"I saw a photograph," said Olive, "of a man with an iron pipe standing amidst dead people lying on the ground around him. I saw in the photograph one of the victims, an elderly man, raising him up while a woman next to him was being stomped to death by another man standing on top of her chest. The man on the ground might have been her husband. This kind of cruel civil insanity begins to rule when it becomes determined for society that some human lives are deemed 'not worthy to be lived' as the Nazis had proclaimed."

"Are you surprised?" I asked Olive. "Without an active principle of universal love unfolding, without that humanist energy raising their perception of themselves, people invariably begin to subscribe to the insanity that is prescribed for them. That makes them play the role of animals, that they are told they are. That's the result of cultural warfare, Olive. That is why all of those great tragedies happened that should have been totally impossible in a humanist sense. Unfortunately, the train of insanity that you have seen in motion hasn't come to a halt yet, has it?"

Olive nodded. "The man with the iron pipe has many faces in today's world," she said slowly. She spoke so quietly as if to indicate that the tragedies should never be voiced. "The man in the photograph, a member from the community who is wielding that iron pipe to kill defenseless Jewish people, human beings like himself, is in the modern world he who cries, global warming, global warming, who by his crying keeps the door closed towards the needed preparation for the coming Ice Age. He thereby becomes personally involved in a process that potentially leads to the destruction of billions of people. He thereby becomes a potential murderer as surely as if he was wielding an iron pipe as the man did in that photograph. Except the man's victims in the photograph were few, maybe ten or twenty, certainly not billions. With that in mind I ask you, Peter, will future historians display in like manner the photographs of today's town criers in the market squares as murderers, who cry global warming while the greatest potential catastrophe in mankind's history looms on the horizon that they by their action assure as they are blocking the rescue efforts? The collapse of civilization and mankind as a whole in the coming Ice Age can be prevented with the proper response, but by crying global warming based on lies that takes the focus into the opposite direction, the needed rescue efforts will be blocked. That's the effect their cries are designed to have. Thereby the killing of much of mankind by starvation will be a near certainty. Those are the kinds of issues that we should raise today, Peter, or else we allow the past to be repeated."

I raised my hand. "Aren't we overstating the case by saying that?" I said to her. "You are not a climate expert to make such surefire predictions, and neither am I."

Olive shook her head. "Of course I am not a climatologist," she said. "But I can read, Peter. Also, a friend of mine, a professor who got me interested in this, has a lot of connection in the scientific community where the Global Warming Doctrine is not supported. I merely asked a lot of questions, and so did the professor. Our conclusion is that nobody can make accurate predictions. Modern science can no more predict the start of the next Ice Age than it can predict the day and hour of a volcanic eruption years in advance, or the precise moment of an earthquake. These things happen without warning. I found that the most reputable scientists don't make any hard and fast predictions about the coming Ice Age either. They merely lay out the facts that they know. The renowned Yugoslav climatologist Milankovitch, who is known for his work in exploring the Earth's orbital variations and spin axis variations, pointed out that all the numerous long term cycles that effect the warming of the Earth are presently lined up to give the northern hemisphere the least sun exposure in the winter. Since the longest of these cycles matches the ice ages cycles, the discovery by Milankovitch seems to tell us something. The specific interpretation Milankovitch leaves up to us.

"Another renowned scientist that I know of, the polish ice core researcher, Jaworowski, who has been exploring glacial records for fifty years from glaciers on six continents, discovered that the longest of the Milankovitch cycle matches the Earth's Ice Age cycles, which in turn closely coincide with discovered cycles in cosmic radiation intensity. He tells us that these are affected by solar cycles, which in turn affect cloud formation and global temperature. Jaworowski makes no predictions either, except to say that the cyclical transition to the next Ice Age is already overdue by a few hundred years, and that the transition period, when it begins may be relatively short, ranging from one year to fifty years and will likely start without warning. He seems to suggest that a possible 100-150 years continuation of the present warm period, which some researchers think we may still have remaining before the transition begins, are not unreasonable estimates. Nor does he dispute other scientist's suggestion that a slow transition may already be in progress. A lot of evidence supports such a view. For example a glacier-monitoring group in Zurich reports that 50% of the more than 600 glaciers that they monitor worldwide are advancing again. That agrees with what Alyona from Irkutsk reports, that the worldwide air temperature is cooling again."

"So you agree with me that our 100 years estimate for continuing warm climates is merely a best-guess projection based on a lot wishful thinking," I interrupted Olive.

Olive nodded. "The hundred years estimate seems to be shared by many scientists. Of course their estimate, like mine, may be influenced by the prediction that it will take at least 100 years to put the global food production into indoor facilities by creating an Ice Age Renaissance setting. It is tempting to look at things that way, but it's practical, Peter. It is practical to do this, because if we say to ourselves that we might not have the time remaining that is required to put agriculture into indoor facilities before the Ice Age starts, then we admit that we have already lost. With such a defeatist attitude no renaissance will ever be created, no preparations will be made. If this were to happen mankind would be unnecessarily doomed by our accepting defeat under what may turn out to be false expectations. Would you be willing to risk the unnecessary destruction of mankind on the basis of an irrational defeatist attitude for as long as there is even the remotest chance that the destruction of civilization and much of mankind can be avoided? Would you be willing to gamble with the lives of nine-tenth of mankind, on pure speculation?"

I shook my head and said no. "On the other hand we can't ignore that there are also scientists out there who estimate that the present interglacial period will last for another thousand years," I added.

Olive just laughed. "I know," she said, "some scientists have dug up fossil records which they say prove that historic interglacial gaps in the Ice Age have lasted for 20,000 years, even 30,000 years. Other scientists laugh at those findings. They don't correlate with the Milankovitch cycles and with the ice core data. But even if these perceptions that the interglacial warm period would last another 10,000 years have a remote chance to be correct, would you gamble the life of five or ten billion people that my be at risk a hundred years from now, by not making the needed preparations now on that remote chance that the preparations may not be needed? The overwhelming evidence suggests that the Ice Age transition is near at hand. Shouldn't one respond to that while it is still possible to do so? What would we loose if were truly mistaken and were to create the Ice Age Renaissance now and it turns out in a hundred years time that the Ice Age won't begin for another thousand years, or ten thousand years? What would we loose by erring on the side of caution? I put it to you that we wouldn't loose anything. To the contrary, a vastly richer world would be the outcome, in which the Ice Age, whenever it comes, won't be a hindrance. The whole of mankind would gain a more powerful human existence. I would say that creating an Ice Age Renaissance should not even be regarded as a timeline target, but as a qualitative target that measures the humanist power of mankind against a potential threat, thereby establishing a new timeless standard for civilization, with or without the Ice Age happening in the near future. We should do all of this, because it is the human thing to do."

"Except aren't we setting this standard not a bit too high?" I interrupted Olive. "We really don't know how severe the next Ice Age will be, and how severe its impact on agriculture will be."

Olive laughed again. "Does that really make any difference?" she said. "We know as a certainty that during the last Ice Age the Northern Hemisphere was covered with twenty-seven million square kilometers of ice sheets thousands of feet thick. Agriculture will be devastated long before these massive ice sheets accumulate. Likewise agriculture will be devastated in areas where the ice sheets don't accumulate, where the climate is merely too cold to grow anything, or too dry, or too wet, or too unreliable. Nobody can predict how large that affected area is going to be. Yes, we could have an extremely mild Ice Age in which only Canada, Russia, Greenland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Poland, England, and Germany become agriculturally devastated. However, Russia's own leading expert in climatology, Budyko, on whose work most of the textbooks are based, seems to suggest that the coming Ice Age might be more severe than those in the past, since the present CO2 levels in the atmosphere are at a Earth-historic low, maybe even dangerously low. That might mean that the agricultural limit might be pushed southward to the 25th parallel or to the Tropic of Cancer. Most of the area that thereby remains for agriculture is presently in covered in jungle? The bottom line is, what remains of a productive agriculture might only be sufficient for ten percent of the present population. The ratio could be very much greater, of course. It could also be less. Therefore I must ask you again if you are willing to gamble with the life of billions of people by assuming that the Ice Age impact on agriculture will be the mildest imaginable. That's the real determinant, isn't it? I think no human being can justify planning for anything less than a 100% coverage of the global food supply to come from indoors agriculture, which alone can be 100% protected no matter what the coming Ice Age imposes. The tragedy that I see is that everybody is saying, no, no, no, don't do that, dream of global warming instead."

Olive sighed. "That is why I see the collective face of society reflected in the man in the photograph wielding the iron pipe, murdering people. Every cry about global warming, etc, that closes the door to upgrading the world for an Ice Age Renaissance stings in my heart like another blow with that iron pipe, because the effect is the same as in the photograph, potentially for all mankind. The rank of the beastman has thereby broadened and grown unimaginably. Most people would be horrified if they say saw themselves as they truly are by their actions."

"Can we really say that?" I interrupted Olive again. "There may be some scientific truth behind the global warming predictions."

"I see no evidence, Peter. I only see lies," said Olive. "It is tragic, isn't it, Peter, that there is so little scientific honestly left in the world that one simply can't trust anybody and any results. One of the leading global warming proponent said so himself, recently. He justified the sad state of the world by saying, 'we all have to decide what is the right balance between being effective and being honest.' Really, Peter, that is what the man said. The factor of being effective versus being honest probably plays a big role when it comes to research grants, tenure, fame, or to scarring the public even more, with the hand reaching out for money. Squashing the truth for any reason, is a crime against the future. The end result makes it a worse crime than all the atrocities that marked the face of ancient India, even those that are still continuing. The focus on science is no longer on truth, but on satisfying the designs of those who own people's professional future or the future of their institution. The truth about almost anything, from climatic trends to economic reality, recedes far from sight under the yoke of political mastery. In this process of yielding to their masters many scientists have become professional fairytale authors whose only true claim to fame is their skill in selecting the 'proper' evidence to prove the politically correct conclusion that have been predetermined for them as underlings. Sadly, this fateful disposition is a feature of the imperial world that Shakespeare had already recognized centuries ago and lamented.

"In many cases the distortions of the truth in the modern world, especially about global warming, have become so obvious that they border on being an insult. In some cases the stories are actually quite comical for their irrationality. For instance, the global warming czars are demanding draconian cutbacks in the use of fossil fuel around the world, as much as 60-80%. They say this is required in order to reduce global warming by two-tenth of a degree by the year 2100. Their demand is so huge that it would choke much of the world to death. It would wreck the global economy with murderous consequences vastly larger than the Aryan genocide. All of that is demanded for the equivalent of a six years delay in the projected manmade warming over a hundred year time span, which itself is a fairy tale. If it weren't so patently fascist, it would be laughable that they propose wrecking the world economy with genocidal consequences for a minuscule effect, like delaying the projected 2094 world temperature to the year 2100. What they propose is insane, isn't it, especially since the cited figures don't even represent the truth. Our world-renowned Academy of Science laughs at this, because as all the evidence that doesn't fit the prescribed global warming master plan has been discarded, which renders science a joke. In the West people bow to it obediently, and say amen, because of their successful training as underlings."

I began to laugh. "Maybe that is what they mean when they talk about finding the right balance between being honest and being 'effective.'"

"The sad part is," said Olive, "that these games are all a part of a horrendous crime against the future for which society will carry the blame. It will carry the blame because it knew or should have known the truth. The fact is that no matter how intensely society becomes smothered with lies, the reality is accessible and knowable."

"Evidently, the global warming master plan is depopulation," I interjected. "That's knowable, too. Energy production and energy use are interlinked with food production, food processing, and food distribution. You can't have large-scale food production without large-scale energy use. If an 80% reduction in energy use were forced on the USA, though the actual target is in the 90% range, radical depopulation would be forced on America by starvation. That's the part that the global warming czars won't tell society about their plan, but it is knowable, it's basic economics. Also they won't tell society that their global-warming depopulation objective is the Western equivalent to the NSSM200 depopulation policy for Africa, and the DDT-ban-caused decimation of children in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world, but that too is knowable. Of course neither do they ever mention that the global warming hype was 'invented' in the same timeframe when all the other depopulation-oriented policies were enacted. However, that's history. It's knowable. Nor would they ever have the honesty to even hint that the return of the Ice Age is on the horizon, in which manmade global warming, if it could miraculously be achieved, would actually be a good thing and take the brunt of it. All of that, too, is knowable. Neither would they ever admit that the primary focus of their global warming hype is to sweep the entire subject of a coming Ice Age under the rug in order to prevent mankind from taking the needed steps to defend itself against it. The facts indicate that this conspiracy to steal the future is the only logical objective that makes sense, and that, once again, is knowable."

Olive responded with laughter. "Did the global warming czars ever say the phrase 'Ice Age' at all?" she said. "That phrase won't pass their lips unless they can find a way to blame manmade global warming for the coming Ice Age, which I'm sure they will do in time when the evidence of the coming Ice Age can no longer be avoided."

"We'll probably have snowfall hitting Texas and California," I said and laughed with her, "and the biggest snowfalls ever recorded covering the US grain belt and decimate farming, and it will all be explained as just another terrible aspect of global warming that 'plays havoc' with the weather patterns."

"We really shouldn't be joking about this," Olive interrupted. "I agree it would be funny, but it's too serious for that. The lives of billions of people are at risk."

"I suppose we expect too much honesty from the global warming czars," I interjected. "How silly of us. Why would we expect them, and the scientists who take their money, to be any more honest than the world's politicians are, or the world's governments, or the used car salesmen, or the investment brokers? They all play their own game. Honesty has become an evermore rare commodity that stands in the way of objectives."

"Don't insult the used car salesmen like that," said Olive and laughed again, then stopped abruptly. "The tragedy becomes even nor pronounced when the innocents of society become hornswoggled by fallacious arguments to become the proud defenders of the lies, and become their sentinels in the Market Square," said Olive. "I must hand it to Dayita in this respect. She is a courageous woman to speak about the power of the religious underpinning of the Brahmin's doctrines that had killed hundreds of millions of women in India. I suspect she was metaphorically referring to the 'religious' underpinning of the Global Warming Doctrine, which is designed to cause massive depopulation by the same process as a crime against the future that is infinitely worse than what the Brahmins had inflicted. I think Dayita was courageous, because I see the old Brahmanic instigated religious fervor very much reflected in the rhetoric of the global warming town criers. Just listen to their language. For many of them the Global Warming Doctrine has become the word of God. That is how they preach the Doctrine while they demand from society their pound of flesh for the sacrifice in homage of their mythical 'deity' that their masters own, just as the Brahmins did in the Vedic Dark Age and the Brahmanic Dark Age. The only difference in today's age is that the outcome of the crime is the potential death of all mankind."

"This means that the worst villains in modern times aren't the ones who wield the 'iron pipe' as in your photograph," I said to Olive. "The worst villain then are those that trample on the truth as did that man in your photograph who stood on the chest of that woman."

Olive nodded. "That woman was treated exactly like the truth is treated today, including the people who dare to speak the truth," said Olive, "unless of course, the truth is authorized to exist. The woman who is stomped to death in the photograph represents the opponents of the Global Warming Doctrine, Peter, whose voices are squashed in the same manner. My professor tells me that his colleagues in Heidelberg in Germany organized a worldwide academic appeal in opposition to the Global Warming Doctrine. They got over 4000 signatures from 70 countries including Nobel Price winners, I think 60 of them, but their voices were squashed. They were trampled on as if they were meaningless, just like the woman in the photograph was trampled on as if her life was meaningless.

"The professor said that this defeat, though, didn't stop the honest academics and scientists who represent the truth. He said that a while later the University of Leipzig stood up and made its mark in the world with great daring, with a major declaration of opposition to the Global Warming Doctrine. Their declaration, which became as a call for reason, carried the signatures of 110 of the world's foremost 'real' climate specialists. The resulting worldwide declaration was likewise trampled under foot. After that, the academics from your country, Peter, from the West Coast of America, launched another worldwide opposition effort that was signed by 17,000 academics and scientists, many with advanced degrees. My professor said that this petition project was likewise trampled to death by the powers that rule, by hiding it from the world and treating it as if it were worthless trash."

I raised my hand to protest.

"No, Peter," she said. "Just ask yourself this one question. Did you ever hear any mentioning of any of these opposition efforts in any newspaper at any time? I bet you haven't, Peter, because those efforts had the wind stomped out of them. In this sense, Peter, the woman in my photograph that doesn't appear to be quite dead yet, represents in metaphor the billions of humanity whose lives are potentially at risk, being trampled on as worthless. So the processes in that ugly photograph that I have, haven't ended, have they? We must ask ourselves therefore, you and I, if we are abetting those processes today by not being as effective as we can be in countering them? Are we doing all that we can do, and then stand committed to double that effort? Let's face it, Peter. The woman in that photograph being stomped to death represents our children, and their children, the future body of humanity. Is our love for our children sufficient to stop the process in this age? In the photograph a lot of people idly looked on. Are we among them? I hope not."

I remained silent after that shock, "It's amazing what comes out of one single photograph," I said in a quiet tone a while later in astonishment.

"I can show you a copy of the photograph if you like," said Olive, "if you have the stomach for it. As I recall, the perpetrators were never prosecuted. They couldn't be identified."

"Don't be so sure about that," I said to her just as quietly. "I think the real perpetrators were all prosecuted and hanged. Under the Nuremberg Statute all the war crimes trials acknowledged the crime of intent. The Nazi leaders were prosecuted and hanged, though they never shed a single drop of blood. They were convicted for the intent of their policies. They were convicted under the Nuremberg Statute for the reason that they knew, or should have known, that their actions or policies would have large-scale murderous outcome."

"But what about society today? Do the lies being cast about excuse anyone from this sharp-cutting criterion that they should have known the truth?" said Olive. "While the truth is knowable, if people don't want to see it, they are more inclined to take in the lies."

"That changes nothing," I interrupted her. "Lying to oneself doesn't absolve one from the lack of response to reality. The Nuremberg trials made this plain. Their shift in focus represent a pioneering breakthrough in justice. It raised a point that everybody had been trying to sweep under the rug afterwards, and for good reason. Under this statute many political leaders, in many a country, would qualify today for the death penalty, including the advocates and the makers of the nuclear bombs. Don't such acts all qualify as crimes against the future?"

"I would add the global warming czars and their town crier to the list if I didn't know better," said Olive. "But that's not possible."

"Why shouldn't that be possible," I interrupted Olive before she even finished saying the last words. "The global warming czars may think they have found a way to wiggle out of that danger. But have they really? They borrowed a page from India's Vedic and Brahmanic Dark ages. They hijacked society's environmental sensitivity and mythologized it, and then religionized it and 'imposed' it on society as society's own imperative. In this cleverly imposed manner, just as in ancient India where society had been killing its own babies, our modern society is subjecting itself once again religiously to tragedies and to self-destruction at their master's bidding. This puts the perpetration of today's crime against the future on the same broad base as in ancient India, that can never be persecuted under the Nuremberg Statute or else the prosecution itself would result in genocide. However, that universal failure of society doesn't absolve the instigator of the crime of the guilt on their part. Nor does it absolve society that carried forward the crime. The only absolution that is possible for anyone, comes from ending the crime. This means raising oneself up to the third level, the scientific level, and discovering there the sublimity of our humanity and its power for creating the needed Ice Age Renaissance. No other absolution from the crime against the future is possible than this."

"Do you know what this means?" said Olive. "This means that when Dayita spoke about the effects of the targeted depopulation in terms of the auditorium being empty in each row from the second seat to the end, she was talking about effects of depopulation that are largely self-imposed by society, by its own staunch fascination with the global warming insanity and its murderous demands."

"That's an invalid statement, is it not?" I interrupted Olive. "If nine-tenth of mankind dies in the coming Ice Age, a hundred years from now, it won't be a self-imposed calamity. We will impose their death. We will be the beastmen executioners of them by failing to become sublime human beings today and creating an Ice Age Renaissance."

"It won't come that far, Peter," interjected Olive. "If the global warming insanity keeps us tied up in knots so that the Ice Age Renaissance won't be created, and we won't reach for the sublime of our humanity, depopulation will happen long before the Ice Age begins. It will happen because the imperial system would then remain undefeated, which would be defeated in an Ice Age Renaissance. For this reason depopulation will happen in the near future. It cannot be avoided in an imperial world. It might be achieved with diseases, or nuclear bombs, or poverty, or economic disintegration, or political action. There are many roads open to the graveyard. The intent is written in big letters for this to happen. So I am right, Peter, that the end-result is self-imposed by society."

I nodded back in agreement. "A Nuremberg judge would say to these foolish people," I added quietly, "that they knew, or should have known as human beings, that the effects of their daydreaming with global warming would keep the imperials in power who would steal their future, one way or another, and would be our future. This tragic outcome would be the result of the death of the truth."

"Of course," said Olive, "it would also be correct to say that the death of nine-tenth of mankind would be incurred if the needed preparations for the coming Ice Age are prevented, for which an Ice Age Renaissance would be required."

"So it all comes down to the same thing," I said. "We are both right. It's always the same critical choice of creating the Ice Age Renaissance that determines the outcome."

Olive called this a logical assessment. "Maybe that is why I have kept copies of those nightmarish photographs, to remind me of that," said Olive. "Maybe we need to remind ourselves that to close our eyes to these historic events prevents us from protecting our humanity and the future of mankind. Seeing the ghastly scenes reminds us of how gross the results tend to become if we fail to uplift our humanity to the level of becoming sublime human beings."

"Do we really need those ghastly scenes, Olive. We see enough of those in our cities every day. You won't believe how many homeless people suffer the same kind of plight in our American cities? A few people regard themselves to be noble and throw a few pennies in their cup. Most people don't even do that. Can you imagine what it is like to live as a homeless person without status, without an income since a homeless person cannot get employment, and without even a place to live? Most homeless people live a relatively short and precarious life, especially in the winter. But where is the helping hand to get them back on their feet, and the love behind that helping hand? Most people despise those who have been reduced to begging. They aren't wielding lead pipes yet, but they walk by them with closed fists rather than open hands. I have heard it said that even churches are now being 'condemned' by the public in some cities, for 'harboring' the homeless. Many public places and areas have already become closed to them. So tell me, where is the difference between those modern victims that die in the West on the highway of greed, who are treated like trash, and those people that you have seen in the war-trial archives who died as victims of similar insanity?"

"I don't see a difference in principle," said Olive. "Nor is there likely any difference in the pain of the dying. The only difference that I see is that the modern victims live quite visibly in the open, while the Nazi victims had remained largely hidden from society. So, tell me, who is fighting for the modern economic outcasts? Who is fighting for a human economy based on love and mutual support rather than the freedom of greed and freedom to kill people economically by stealing their means for existence? Homelessness, Peter, is an early sign of a successful campaign of cultural warfare against society. Homelessness is depopulation in progress under disguise. For many the Ice Age has already started as most of them go hungry now."

"The homeless, so it appears, might not even be the actual intended victims in this war," I said to her. "It appears that society as a whole is meant to be the victim by intent. The homeless appear to be just early collateral damage, a kind of early indication that a war is in progress and is going well according to plan."

"This criminal war against humanity appears to be already far advanced, Peter, and more so in the West than here in the Soviet Union," said Olive.

Olive paused, searching for words. "Can you imagine the cultural destruction that had to be achieved before Hitler could openly declare that certain human lives are not worthy to be lived, and to get society's agreement on this point, to the point that people became stone-hearted killers? It took Hitler nine years to accomplish that, to win this victory over society's humanity. It took forty years of cultural warfare to get America to the same point. Now the same victory has been won once more, by which the same lies are commonly believed again, and the same insanity that Hitler spouted out is being embraced willingly, including the depopulation insanity. Just go out into the street in your cities and talk to people, Peter. Most people accept the depopulation theories. Most people will tell you that the world is extremely overpopulated. Most people will tell you that mankind is destroying the planet, because too many people are being kept alive in the world that cause all of those problems. They insist that something drastic has got to be done. That's what people have been made to believe. And they do believe it. Thus, they walk by the homeless beggars on the street with 'closed fists' and mentally spit on them, just as the people did in Hitler's time who did the same to the Jewish people, and the Jewish people do today to the Palestinian people whose country they have 'invaded.' The sad fact is, that by submitting to this insanity society looses its humanity and becomes its own executioner, precisely as the imperial objective demands."

Olive paused. "The Ukraine once had a Jewish population of three million people. I read that the Nazis killed most of them in their blind rage. I also read that in today's world the Jewish people now behave like the Nazis had, as killers of other people, driven by the same kind of rage. How much further down that road to total insanity does humanity need to travel to kill three or five billion people in a similar kind of rage, and to do it with the same stone-hard resolve?"

"I think we may soon see this happening," I interjected. "Right now society's callous attitude towards its own destitute and homeless is but the surface telltale of a growing insanity within. Nobody knows how much further we can go until society as a whole loses its cultural bridge to recognizing themselves as human beings? In this mental rot that we are in, the festering depopulation-disease might easily become pandemic long before the Ice Age even begins."

"All right, Peter, tell me how many generations it may take for mankind's humanity to be rebuilt," said Olive, "and how that fits in with the schedule that the Ice Age is imposing?

"Too many generation," I replied. "That is why the Ice Age schedule seems so much like a dream. That is why creating an Ice Age Renaissance is key to everything. Its greatest benefit for mankind would be its short-term benefit, because without it, what happens a hundred years from now would be of no consequence."

Olive took a deep breath and sighed. "With the return of the Ice Age fast approaching we may enter a new Dark Age without hope, from which mankind may never recover. We've got to make the critical choice now. The Ice Age Renaissance would be needed now, even if we knew with total certainty that the Ice Age wouldn't hit us for another 10,000 years. We would need the big renaissance now, to survive the immediate period ahead."

"This means preparing ourselves in earnest with intensified efforts," I said cautiously.

"I see no hope for us without it," said Olive in a sad voice. "How can we possibly hope to create the vast physical infrastructures that would be needed for mankind to survive in the coming Ice Age while we are still all tied into knots by greed and fascism that have created this utter insanity in which we are now killing one-another with ever greater 'resolve,' even rage. The return of the Ice Age is real. It is coming. People want to believe that it isn't real, but they can't avoid it. With a forty-to-fifty-percent drop in average global temperatures, the world's food supply is in danger of collapsing. We can't avoid that either. I see no hope for the survival of our civilization and us if society doesn't quit the current insanity of waging war against itself. The Ice Age task is too horrendous. Even to get to the Ice Age involves a huge challenge. This means we have to hit all the bases at once and create a radically new world. Any other approach would be too small to get us anywhere. Only the sublime is big enough."

"Most of the people in the world have been so deeply destroyed as human beings in the course of modern cultural warfare," I said to Olive, "that their self-discovery on the level of the sublime appears not only hopelessly idealistic to them, but also unattainable. If you challenge them, Olive, they'll quote Hobbes to you and Aristotle, and they'll argue with you till the cows come home, insisting that mankind is an animal and is not a human being. They will tell you that mankind has made a mess of its planet and deny to their last breath that mankind is the most advanced species of life in the known universe, with vastly higher qualities of the kind that an animal simply cannot attain. They will deny that we can discover and utilize universal principles, which an animal is absolutely incapable of perceiving, which gives us the capacity to create a whole New World for ourselves. Instead, they will argue that mankind is a villain and a cancer on the Earth. Maybe we are expecting too much of people, Olive. Maybe the Ice Age Renaissance will indeed remain forever an unattainable dream, as they insist it is."

"Then why are we discussing the fight against depopulation?" Olive cut me off. "I agree mankind is in a mess, but as human beings society is redeemable. We may be asleep, but we can awake. We don't have to willingly lay ourselves down onto the ground and give up, and to let the human journey end. That is what the small-minded insist is our inevitable future when they say that the Ice Age Renaissance is unattainable. That nonsense has to stop. I am disappointed in you that you even raised the subject, Peter."

"I am merely echoing the song of despair that is typical for a small-minded world," I said. "Under cultural warfare the refrain of the song has become, if it can't be done easily, it won't happen. We'll have to find and answer to the song."

"My answer is that it doesn't take a lot of time to wake up, Peter. People will wake up when they are hit over the head with the harsh reality, and their dream song will end. Why should society remain 'drugged' into a dream-state and allow itself to be let to the slaughterhouse by its imperial masters? Why should society not be able to recognize itself as human beings? Human beings are not led to the slaughterhouse. The slaughter of mankind is avoidable when the Ice Age begins. As human beings we have the capacity to protect out food production. It will take a hundred years development cycle, but mired in drudgery, but awe inspiring as age-old limits are overcome. That's exciting stuff. Why should we not recognize that those limits exist only because we have kept ourselves in chains for so long? We can shed those chains?"

I nodded in agreement. "But why do I so few people in the US prepared to talk about the coming Ice Age. People shy away from it as if it were a forbidden subject, which it may well be. While no one can forecast how soon and how fast the Ice Age transition will occur, very few people who are willing to talk about it. When I tell them that the transition could come without warning and could happen in the space of a single year, they think I'm nuts. How can anyone convince people of the truth who don't want to hear it? How can I tell them that the Ice Age is coming, and is coming 'soon,' and that there is nothing anyone can do to stop it, but that it is possible to deal with the consequences? Whenever I did this, they say: What are you talking about?"

"Isn't it obvious, Peter? Tell them that we have no control over the galactic forces that cause ice ages. Tell them that these forces have caused cyclical ice ages on our planet for the last two million years, with astrophysical clockwork precision. Ask them why that process should suddenly stop. My professor compared the present interglacial warm period to a hundred-year-old person who presently supplies all of our needs. We know that the person's days are coming to an end. We just don't know the precise day. In fact, we refuse to acknowledge that the day is at hand. Thus, we fail to prepare ourselves for the day when the person dies by creating a New World for ourselves with new resources for living. Maybe that is what it takes to hit people over the head with to wake them up. It worked for me, I tell you. Yes, and I did say to the professor: What are you talking about?"

I nodded and stopped our walk. "Right now we still have enough of our human resources intact to create that New World of an Ice Age Renaissance," I said to her. "A hundred years crash program could accomplish that. But why haven't we started? Why aren't we raising a finger? Instead we are squandering our resources in every imaginable way, and we have done this for decades. We have squandered the entire last century with war after war, while we should have been building the scientific and technological infrastructures for our civilization to be able to survive in an Ice Age environment. Why then are we going on wasting these last few opportunities that we still have, Olive? We have known for a hundred and fifty years that we are facing a new Ice Age, but we still act as if we didn't know, while we waste the most precious resources that we have, our human potential."

"Forget the past," said Olive. "The future is now. We are putting the Ice Age on the table for all to see. Doesn't that have the potential to change things? We've come to the critical junction, but not empty-handed. We need the remaining human resources of mankind not just applied, but rapidly upgraded and mobilized scientifically and spiritually. We need to drive the development of nuclear fusion power forward in a crash-program effort. We've been neglecting this work for decades already. We are lagging behind by a century while the Ice Age transition could begin fifty years early. That's what should be driving us. Nuclear fusion power mustn't remain a dream, Peter, or else the survival of civilization remains a dream. My prof tell me the same that we already know, that nuclear fusion power is a necessity for the large-scale projects that we require in order to shift much of the world's agriculture into indoor facilities. Right now we utilize nuclear fusion technology only for making hydrogen bombs. We use atom bombs to ignite miniature solar fusion furnaces on earth over living cities. That's what we are prepared to unleash to incinerate human beings. But when it comes to harvesting nuclear fusion power for life, almost nothing is being done anymore in comparison to what is needed."

"That's not quite true," I interrupted Olive. "We started a lot of research work in America to harvest fusion power as an avenue for upgrading our civilization with abundantly available energy resources. You heard Dayita. She is quite right on that. However, while the projects look promising the funding is being choked for moving ahead into the future at anything greater than just a snails pace. It seems to me, and to people that I talked to, that the entire project is being secretly starved to death to prevent it from coming to fruition. Luckily, the National Ignition Facility for inertial confinement fusion research is still being built. I think the only reason for that is, that it promises to be a vital tool for advanced nuclear bomb research."

"That is why I am saying that almost nothing is being done anymore in comparison to what is needed," said Olive.

"I guess your prof didn't tell you about the wonderful projects that we had once on the wish list that projects the real dynamism that once existed. America was once the world leader in looking to the future, especially in fusion technology. We were king! We had made huge strides. We are now the world leader in technologies for killing people. The focus has changed. I fear that our humanist dynamism is all gone. That has sad side effects. Typically, during times of rapid contraction the not so visible assets get blown away, like the leading edge research teams that took the nation decades to assemble and develop. They quietly dissipate into the winds of funding fascism that takes the life out of the future. It will likely take decades once more to redevelop the needed dynamism and the scientific infrastructure regime for this absolutely vital technology. Aren't we insane to let this happen? While time is running out, we hardly do anything anymore that's revolutionary except shutting things down."

"This is how much we value our own existence," said Olive and shook her head. "We call ourselves human beings, but we don't behave like human beings. We scrap what we most need. What we are doing to ourselves technologically is worse than an Olympic runner shooting herself in the foot prior to a race. Without nuclear fusion power we won't be able to gain access to the metals that we need for the Ice Age Renaissance. We need the metals that are locked into the silicates of the mantle of the earth in infinite abundance. My prof tells me that we need the high temperature fusion power to gain access to those metals and other material. We are sitting on top of an infinite resource of magnesium and iron bound into silicates that extends right around the Earth thousands of kilometers deep. Those are the kind of riches that fusion power makes potentially accessible to us. That is also what we require to create the needed large-scale infrastructures to shift agriculture into indoor facilities. The infrastructures to create the infrastructures are probably as large as the infrastructures that we aim for. A hundred years effort may be sufficient to get us there. However, we have to do this before the global temperature drops and decimates the world's food production capacity. With a forty-percent drop towards freezing all outdoors agriculture ends in Canada, Russia, and in many parts of Europe and some parts of USA. It must become mankind's priority to protect and enrich its food supply. Without indoor food resources many nations will become history. The entire world-agriculture is build around the present warm climate that is about to end."

"All this tells me that we must add two new dimensions to the meaning of universal love," I interrupted Olive. "The meaning of universal love must be expanded to include future generations. Their very existence depends on what we do. We must also create a new dimension of love for ourselves. The technological capabilities that presently lie at our feet unused are features of the face of our humanity. We have become co-creators with the universe at the pinnacle of the unfolding dynamism of life. The entire universe is unfolding in a vast progressive developmental process. The Earth itself is the end product of a gigantic process of non-biotic progression, a kind of pinnacle at its were in material development, without which biological development would not be possible. The biological development in turn changed the planet in countless progressive cycles. We are presently the pinnacle of that development and the boundary layer for a still higher development that further transforms the world and the universe. In a sense, we are children of this progressive creative process that is the universe itself. The human intellect and its unfolding scientific, cultural, and technological dimension takes us to that higher developmental stage beyond the biological sphere. Maybe the universe needs us to protect the biosphere in the ever-changing astrophysical world. Without our intervention the Earth might revert back to its giant snowball state that once decimated the Earth 700 million years ago when it froze up from pole to pole. The universe needs us to protect the rich biological world that has developed, even from the ravishing of the coming Ice Age or future Ice Ages, and to spread the wonders of life to other planets before the Earth ceases to exist. Every solar system is inherently a terminal system that burns out once its fuel is exhausted. At this stage the Sun contracts, re-heats, and then re-ignites into a Red Giant powered by helium fusion that will likely consume all the planets. At this point mankind and the biological universe will likely be repositioned in countless different places far beyond the solar system, by which and the progressive development of the universe continues. I think our universal love should embrace ourselves for what we truly are as children of the endless development of the universe. In fact, it appears that we cannot survive unless we live up to the design parameters determined for us by the universe."

"That puts us into the big league," said Olive.

"But why isn't the universe helping us?" said I in return.

"Isn't it, Peter? The fact that we are exploring our place in the universe right now, with a determination to live up to its challenge, may be evidence of that process already in operation. Aren't we moving within the parameters of that universal design right now, you and I and a lot of others that we know, like Dayita and Alyona, and Nic and countless others? Aren't we already fulfilling our role? Many others might have done the same in the past and didn't quite make it as their efforts were derailed, but in global terms the universe is helping us, and the Ice Age may be a factor in this. Whenever there was a deep crisis in civilization mankind responded with a new Renaissance. The post-Roman humanist crisis impelled mankind into the Islamic Renaissance Age. The Lombard financial collapse and the resulting Black Death plaque impelled mankind to rouse itself into the Golden Renaissance Age. Then the horrendous war period that culminated into the Thirty Years War impelled mankind to rouse itself still further into what became the greatest renaissance ever. Now we face the deepest crisis in the entire history of mankind. Do you really think that this historic pattern of mankind's renaissance-creating self-impellment will no longer continue?"

"Why should it stop?" I answered. "Why should it not open the door to a super-renaissance with a plasma equivalent in humanist energy levels, the kind of renaissance that gives a whole new meaning to what Schiller called the sublime state of our humanity. I think we are barely beginning to recognize our enormous role in the universe and the meaning of human prosperity that unfolds in the universe a whole new dimension of 'light.' I have always felt that we are far greater than the little image of mankind that we've made ourselves to believe in. I really did. Talking with Steve rekindled that belief, and look what is happening now! I see this light not only in scientific and technological terms, which are infinite themselves, but also in a new unfolding of the Principle of Universal Love in dimensions that we never even dreamed of until now. That is something that all the great periods of renaissance in the past had but faintly hinted at in the remotest sense.

"Can you imagine how far away we presently are from realizing that, and what is necessary just to protect ourselves?" Olive interrupted when moments of silence that gave way to my dream-like vision that wasn't a dream anymore but the beginning of a concrete realization. "What we are talking about would seem like a dream to most people since society has been presently put into a deep sleep, dreaming of global warming," said Olive. "That is why we allow ourselves to be pushed around and be bullied into the opposite direction than the one we need to go, and why we still risk nuclear war. So we really need the kind of universal love that you are talking about. That is what our embrace of the human future brings to the present. If nuclear war should ever erupt in the present, or any other form of large scale depopulation project should succeed, or a financial collapse should put us into an extended New Dark Age, mankind will never be able to recover itself to recreate the human and technological resources that we have right now for creating the needed Ice Age Renaissance. That means that future must bear its weight on all these present problems, for which we must apply the same principles that we must built on to solve the big problems.

"Of course, Peter," Olive continued. "If we destroy our people, whether war or depopulation, or wreck society's human potential through cultural warfare, that precious potential becomes lost and there may not be enough time left to rebuild it if we wake up too late. In this case we may never regain what we are prepared to squander right now. We are already becoming poorer and increasingly impotent. In the end, if we don't change our intent in economics, we won't have the needed human resources left to create the big technological and economic infrastructures for the New World that we need to enter an Ice Age with. The entire future of the universe may be altered by our present insanity and all the rich work that has been done by mankind throughout the ages becomes wasted. Then the imperials have won their ongoing fight for mankind's oblivion. Right now, they evidently hope that mankind will squander its human resources with poverty and war. The imperial dream is that the few people that might survive the transition to the new Ice Age will be easily ruled over in a new revival of the golden age of feudalism and Brahmanism, that promises to be incredibly rich in religious fundamentalism and irrational ideologies. Africa is already being depopulated to make room for the new imperial feudal world with a tiny small-minded society."

"I think, I hope, no I am convinced, Olive, that the imperatives for the future will change the present world. We know that if we destroy ourselves any further, then we won't have enough left. That is why we will empower ourselves to make those Hundred Years Investments. We have to find the justifying value for that investment in ourselves on a global scale, and future will force us to do that."

"When we get there I will burn my Nazi-archive photographs, which will become invalid thereby," said Olive.

"This means as the very first step, scrapping the imperial model of reacting to market forces in a setting of greed-based fascism, called economics. The fascist market forces are short-term focused forms of insanity. They would close the door to the needed high profile hundred-year development cycle, and to the new page in human existence. Market forces demand profit. We have to learn to react to reality, the demands of the future, and find our profits and our riches in the development of ourselves as human beings. The next step towards this goal will have to be to redevelop scientific education and take it to new levels as an infrastructure for the research effort and human development. The human potential is our chief resource for creating the nuclear fusion power technologies as a first step in the physical development of our planet and ourselves. This means that the scientific and technological potential needs to be developed beyond anything we have seen so far, in spite of the fact that too much of it has already been destroyed. We've already lost decades already, but the future forces us to become realistic again. Also this huge effort needs to be supported indefinitely, and it will be our joy to do so. Then we have to develop the needed application technology for large-scale universal power development. Only after all this is done will we be able to build the infrastructures to actually accomplish what must be accomplished, and it will be more that just a joy to do it, it will be a joy that unfolds from the fire of the passion of living like human beings. That is what the future demands. In the interim, while all this development goes on, we will have to put fission-based nuclear power development on the front burner, so to speak, to get us through the initial development period, especially to power the vast infrastructures needed for indoor agricultural research that promises to add a whole new powerful dimension to the biosphere and enables us to multiply and optimize the biotic processes that our physical wellbeing depends on."

At this point Olive stopped our walking and pointed a faint light in the distance over the forest. She said that the ice-cream place is located where the light is, farther down the river and across the forest. "It won't take us more than an hour to get there," she added.

The faint light in the distance that we were aiming for looked to me like a perfect metaphor for the human journey before us, and the countless footsteps it would involve. I drew Olive's attention to it.

"Before any of that can happen, Peter, we have to change ourselves as human beings," Olive responded. She suddenly began to laugh. "Isn't it ironic, Peter, that I had to learn to appreciate music in order to discover what an economy is that accomplishes these necessary achievements, and what our humanity is all about? An economy isn't primarily a physical thing, Peter. It's primarily a structure of intent. The intent shapes everything. If the intent reflects the principle of the Second Renaissance, the Principle of the Advantage of the Other, then the outcome will correspond with that intent and the resulting economy will take us towards a brand New World with a prosperity in civilization that has not yet been seen on this planet. If, inversely, the intent is to create a liberal environment for stealing from one-another, like the one that we already have, then society will destroy itself in the process and we'll get nowhere. So it is again the future that determines the present."

I began to laugh. "The present imperial intent appears to be to let the world disintegrate into poverty, insanity, and to let it wipe itself out in imperial wars for dominance over the remaining scraps that are left in the primitive world. That's already happening, isn't it? The Oil Wars have already begun. If we don't change course they will soon be expanded into vicious wars over mineral resources and wars over food resources."

"Your Anglo/American liberal system of greed-based fascism, which runs much of the world today, assures that the stealing by force will escalate until the coming food wars will wipe out much of mankind," said Olive.

I began to laugh again. "That's already happening," I interjected. "The majority of the global food production and distribution is already privately owned by the imperial cartels. They already determine who eats and who is starving to death. If the present course isn't altered mankind will meet the return of the Ice Age with empty hands and empty hearts as an inwardly empty society that is essentially already dead as human beings. Then the subsequent physical dying won't alter anything fundamentally."

"That won't happen," said Olive. "The future will determine that there'll be a change in the present. If the intent of society reflects the principle of the Second Renaissance, the Principle of the Advantage of the Other, then the focus is on universal human development and the outcome will reflect that intent in the form of created riches for society. That, all by itself, would bring the present on track which what is needed for the future. No miracles are involved here," she said.

"That's love-based economics," I interjected.

"No, Peter, that's the principle of economics," said Olive. "Love-based economics is the principle of economics. There exists only one principle of economics and that is love-based economics. In music there is only one principle of harmony possible, which may have many expressions, but there is only one principle. The same is true for economics, Peter. The principle of economics is love-based economics in its countless expressions. There exists no other principle of economics, and consequently no other economic process. All other processes, such a financial looting and slavery-based stealing, result in poverty and the social and physical collapse of society. But that's not economics. That's insanity."

I nodded. "That difference makes all difference, doesn't it?" I said quietly. "I agree, social and physical collapse can't be called an economic process."

"Real economics has only one intent, Peter," Olive continued, "which is to improve the human condition and brighten civilization. Its goal is to brighten our lives as human beings."

"Real economics began with the agricultural revolution, aeons ago," I replied. "It enabled mankind to grow its own food and enabled the domestication of animals that soon depended on this humanly created food resource. The well-functioning modern economy doesn't supercede this process. One can't supercede a principle. One can only utilize it more and more efficiently. That opens the door to technology and efficient industrial processes and advanced machinery in agriculture and machinery in transportation, and advanced cultural development. And for this to function well, a society has to create an efficient supporting infrastructure, such as the machine-tool industry that supplies the productive industry, and an efficient transportation infrastructure to make the whole thing workable. All of that, of course, needs to be supported by scientific and technological progress that develops the efficient processes further and further, including the human skills needed to carry out those processes. And finally, in order to make this possible, a society has to make huge investments in human development. This includes the kind of education that teaches the process of discovery and the dimension of the real history of our humanity as human beings. We need education that unfolds the potential of our self-development, which takes us beyond the present attainments. All of that needs to be created once again, Olive, since much of it doesn't exist anymore. The investment in human development must also include the creating of sufficiently spacious housing that advances the inner development of the human being, and efficient healthcare to protect the human potential, and efficient transportation which assures that that this potential isn't wasted in gridlocks on the freeways, and efficient administrative rules to overcome the current immense waste of our human potential in red-tape processes that don't add to the power of the human potential. Society's investment in its self-development must also include the building of efficient cities, neighborhoods, and communities, which enable a rich cultural and social development to happen. Once we have that kind of an economy functioning, since a real economy provides all of that, then we have the infrastructure in place to do the higher level development that is becoming evermore crucial. On this higher-level foundation we can begin the development of nuclear fusion power on the scale that is needed, and the high temperature materials processing technology that gives us access to the metals and other materials that are bound in the silicates of the rocks and the in the mantle of the Earth. Society needs a richly functioning economy to do this, Olive. Nothing less can support those large-scale hundred-year development projects without a whimper. Since we are pressed for time, we have no choice to pursue all the development processes simultaneously. Won't that create an exciting world for us? Only then, when all of that is happing in a big way, can we even begin to think in terms of building the large-scale indoor agriculture projects. And we must achieve all of that, Olive. We must not hesitate. Our goal must be to bring a naturally growing world population into the coming Ice Age in such a highly developed technological renaissance that the climatic changes, when they occur, have no affect on us. Nor will we find this development process a burden if the process is happening. It will create the richest and most exciting world that we can imagine, at every step along the way. Am I dreaming too tall, Olive?"

Olive shook her head. "You are 'dreaming' with open eyes. What we must do may seem like a dream indeed, Peter, but that 'dream' must become real. While the return of the Ice Age cannot be avoided, the death of mankind that it would cause can be avoided if we begin with the intent of creating a real human economy and scrap imperialism as a necessary step along the way. All this must happen long before the Ice Age begins, and it will happen. The future impels us to make it happen, if we intend for mankind to have a future. Scrapping imperialism has the potential to change the world more deeply than any other event is history, and therefore it will happen, because to have no future isn't an option. The imperials want us all to dream of global warming and remain snugly asleep until the Ice Age wipes the human slate 'clean' in depopulation. That's dreaming, Peter, because the future is interposing itself."

"In comparison with the vast amount of fantastically exciting work that can and needs to be accomplished," I continued, "the present trend that creates evermore unemployment should be considered a crime against humanity and against the future. What do you think of that, Olive?"

"Homeless should be added to the list," Olive replied without hesitation. "There exists no greater waste in the world today than the awful waste of our human potential that we are tolerating so easily as a society. To tolerate that waste is a high crime against ourselves. Tolerating homelessness is no less a crime than building nuclear weapons, because both processes destroy our humanity. The building and holding of nuclear weapons is a blatant self-condemnation of society, akin to spitting into the face of our own humanity, even our own face. Unfortunately we are creating more and more homeless and are building more and more nuclear weapons every day. Turning the process around on both fronts is a start the future demands."

"Cultural warfare should be considered a crime of the highest order," I cut Olive off. "We've destroyed two generations of people in America with the fascism of greed and insane violence. That's the result of the imperial intent behind cultural warfare. The fascism of greed has turned a portion of society into a parasite that feeds on the rest of society and sucks the life-blood out of it. Then the cultural warfare process fills the resulting emptiness with violent entertainment, exhilarating sports, self-destructive pursuits like drug abuse, drunkenness, degrading sex, rage, and even music that isn't music anymore, but is just another disguised element of cultural warfare. Education is on the same collision course with reality. Humanist education that is focused on the discovery of universal principles and truth is almost banned. It doesn't exist. Nothing remains that caused our young people to relive in their mind the processes behind the great discoveries of the geniuses in mankind's past. That type of education is banned. Education has become employment training at best, or obedience training saturated with a kind of repeat-after-me learning of the politically correct so-called 'knowledge' that hails both the fascism of greed, misnamed economics, and the truthless world of empiricism, misnamed science, a kind of science without truth. We are stuck in a terrible rut in America, Olive, that we have to dig ourselves out of, in order to begin to create the kind of economy without which we cannot survive. The tragedy is, Olive, that it took us thirty years to get us into this rut, and that it may take us another thirty years to even develop the intent to get out of it. We are starting with a huge deficit in human development, and we won't likely make it unless the evermore-urgent agenda that the Ice Age inspires us to accelerate the process of our redevelopment. That is how the future will be driving the present. We may only have a hundred years left for the entire development cycle to be completed, all the way to the point of creating an Ice Age Renaissance which mankind needs to survive. Instead of launching into this life-saving project right now, we are stuck with this enormous handicap of imperial dreaming. I think it is a terrible tragedy that we are now forced to start the greatest development cycle in mankind's history with a huge handicap while nothing much is being done to overcome it, or even to stop the cultural warfare that is driving it."

"The handicap was intended, Peter, in order to prevent this most-needed humanist development cycle altogether. But we can change that intent. You and I have already started to do that. Actually, Peter, America is less insane in its handicap than we are in the Soviet Union. When it comes to the insanity of developing ever more nuclear weapons, which appears to be intended for increasing the handicap, we in the Soviet Union are leading the world," said Olive and laughed. "While America has been reducing its nuclear arsenal following the Cuban missile crisis, from thirty thousand nuclear warheads down to twenty-three thousand, we in the Soviet Union, have been expanding our arsenal eight-fold, from five-thousand to forty thousand nuclear weapons. I hate to say this about my own county, Peter, but that is the direction in which we are being driven in by the insanity that is driving the West. We are locked into this madness, Peter. I don't think our leaders will ever forget that Russia was nearly wiped out during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that this crisis started with America's massive threat against us from its bases in Turkey and other places on our doorstep."

"The Cuban Missile Crisis started with the third attempt by the West to wipe out Russia," I interjected. "Napoleon tried to conquer Russia on behalf of the Western Empire in 1812 and failed. Russia suffered tremendously. Then Hitler tried it again on behalf of the same empire, and failed too. Russia suffered huge human losses this time, on a scale that no one can imagine. After that the same Western Empire set up Russia once again for a tragedy that was designed to pale everything in the past into insignificance. To wipe out Russia with a comprehensive preemptive nuclear strike had been intended."

"That is what we are reacting to with our massive nuclear weapons buildup," said Olive. "But we can stop the present madness with the intent to create the needed renaissance-development in preparation for the Ice Age. The imperials are fully aware of the coming Ice Age. They are not that stupid. Their game plan is to utilize the coming Ice Age to their fullest 'advantage,' as insanely as that may sound. With mankind meeting the Ice Age unprepared, as they would have us to assure, would give them the massive depopulation that they have been crowing about for ages. But our future needs will assure that we'll stop playing that game for them. That assurance rests on the fact that we are human beings. The future is assured under the Principle of Universal Love."

"Nuclear war is one of the elements of sheer insanity that we've got ourselves stuck in by trying to live without the Principle of Universal Love," I said. "The wholesale accumulation of these terror weapons for our genocidal self-destruction is absolute insanity, considering the consequences for mankind's long term future, even if these weapons will never be used. This means that insanity is defined by trying to live without the Principle of Universal Love, in which our future is anchored. That's like the Rajputs killing their female babies. Evidently, insanity has no national face as society fails itself under the cultural tyranny of the globally ruling Empire. In real terms, Brahmanism isn't dead at all, Olive. It has become globalized. So, let's globalize the Principle of Universal Love instead."

"Insanity is actually too soft a term for what is happening today," said Olive. "Our country has sixty submarines in service carrying nuclear weapons. We have the world's largest among them, the giant Typhoon class subs. We can destroy the whole world several times over with our submarines alone. And as everyone should know, we do have the plans to use them, otherwise they wouldn't have been built. I am convinced, Peter, that our Soviet Union is thereby doomed to collapse under the weight of its inhuman insanity. Nicolai thinks the collapse is an economic issue. I think the real cause is deeper. It's an issue of insanity, of trying to live without the Principle of Universal Love, of trying to live without a future. What we are seeing in progress right now in the Soviet Union is like a replay of Hitler's insanity that collapsed Germany in a process of war. I think there are people in our country who are prepared to shut the Soviet Union down, to rip it apart for no other reason than to prevent that war that is presently being prepared from playing itself out in the total collapse of Russia. America appears to be similarly endangered. The whole world appears to have scrapped the Principle of Universal Love and replaced it with imperial insanity without a future, and it appears to me that it was all done intentionally to save the existence of an empire that has no natural foundation to exist. However, as human beings society will decide to have a future on this planet. That will change everything."

I had to laugh at this point. "You cannot imagine how right you are," I said to her. "We have developed insanity in America beyond the Hitler-level. Hitler's methods were crude. We accomplish the same today with the stroke of a pen through financial looting. We have professionally trained economic hit men to do the job. I've read parts of a transcript of one of the people being interviewed. They are trained professionals, Olive, with the job to build up the American Empire. They are trained to assure that large foreign resources flow into our country, to our corporations, and to our government. So far they've been successful at enormous cost to mankind. First they employ coercion, if that fails, they bring in the Jackals. The Jackals foment social unrest to topple the targeted government. A few million dollars go a long way for that. And if that fails, coups or assassinations follow. When the assassinations become impossible, then the military option is utilized. One way or another the imperial economic hit men get what they want, and so they've made America the foremost 'welfare' recipient in the world, meaning, they've built America into the largest empire in history as they see it. That has been the course since World War II. America was made an empire by economic hit men with very little military might used, primarily by means of manipulation, simple plain cheating, outright fraud and seducing people into the new 'American' way of life of becoming rich by stealing. According to the interviewed economic hit man the organizations that run the process utilize the ideology of globalization that is designed to 'cheat poor countries out of trillions' as the interviewed hit man has put it.

"The person interviewed admitted quite freely that he was very much a part of that process," I continued. "He and others like him worked through the US National Security Agency, which he described as the nation's largest and least understood spy organization. He worked on their behalf under the cover of private front corporations. He testified that the first major victim was the government of Iran in the 1950s. The government didn't cooperate, so it was promptly replaced with the Shah. There was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention. The spending of a few millions of dollars did the job. And so, bang, the imperials effectively owned the country. The world has never been the same since. It was all done 'cleanly' and 'legally,' and America didn't have to worry about any threat of war with Russia by doing all the dirty operations privately, through private enterprise, as in the early days of the British East India Company Empire. The hit man said that the CIA and the National Security Agency recruited the potential people for the job, trained them, and then send them to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, and construction companies, so that if anything went wrong there would be no traceable direct connection to the government. The man interviewed became chief economist in one of those front companies. His job involved giving out huge loans to other countries, much bigger loans than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan would be that the receiving country would give 90% of that loan back to a US company, or US companies, to build infrastructure in the receiving country. There would be electrical systems build, or ports or highways, which basically ended up serving just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries and perhaps a few American owned businesses as well. The poor people in those countries would then be stuck with this amazing debt that they could never repay. The interviewed hit man said that some countries now pay over 50% of their national budget just to service their debt."

I told Olive that the man failed to mention that this debt could never be repaid for the simple reason that the cheating never stops. "Once a country has trouble making payments, the speculators devalue the currency, by which the debt becomes multiplied. But the looting doesn't stop there. If the currency becomes devalued the country is deemed a higher risk, by which the interest rates becomes jacked up sky-high. And so the trap becomes deeper and deeper, while more and more people go hungry and die of starvation. When the trap is deep enough and the countries see no way out, the imperials drive for privatization begins. The targeted nations are demanded to sell their national resources at auction prices. And so the nations become poorer and poorer and the population becomes ravished and destroyed.

"It is impossible to build the Ice Age Renaissance on that foundation," I said to Olive. "The interviewed economic hit man points out, according to the transcript, that 24,000 people are now starving to death every day around the world as the result of the process that he was involved in. He notes with regret that the death toll of the process that he supported with his own handiwork makes Hitler's holocaust already appear rather puny in comparison. He fails to mention though that in today's world, the now largely imperialized society of the West no longer abhors the tragedy, but hails the process of international financial profiteering and free-trade slavery and tries to profit from it. Thus, society has joined the imperial world and become the beastman monster itself that devours its own kind."

I told Olive that the Spanish painter Francisco Goya had painted a 'portrait' of this process as far back as the 1820s, in the form of the terrifying portrait of ^Saturn devouring one of his sons.^ I told her that the economic hit man's testimony had reminded me of Goya and the bestial Inquisition that had been revived in Goya's time. In the space of three centuries 35,000 citizens had been burned to death at the stake by the Inquisition against the background of countless more blood-curdling denunciations of a people's identity as human beings forced upon them by terror, torture, execution by strangulation, by bodies chopped to pieces, and so on. 'We have no need for the Inquisition,' Goya had said in many ways in his ^Disasters of War^ series, since the people are now doing this all by themselves, having been bestialized by the imperial clergy and gripped by the absurdity of war. That's not the future that we want to be driving the present. On that train mankind won't see the Ice Age alive."

I told Olive that the interviewed hit man failed to mention a vital fact that he probably wasn't even aware of. "He failed to state that the American organizations that had recruited him, and that he had worked for, are themselves but links in much a larger chain that is anchored in imperial Europe and its three hundred years British-Venetian-Brahmanic imperial background. He should have pointed his finger not at America, but East across the Atlantic to the old imperial complex that emerged from the 1688 invasion of England by the Dutch Venetian asset Prince William of Orange and from the Aryan Portuguese and Anglo-Saxon-Brahmanic invasion of India where the modern British world-imperial history is rooted. America doesn't have such a deep-reaching imperial cultural history that goes back 3,500 years, with which to set itself up as a world-empire. America has none of that to blacken its identity. In this sense the term 'American Empire' is actually a contradiction in language. What is flaunted as an 'American Empire' exists in real terms merely as an agency for hire that serves the old European imperial complex like an ignorant stooge. The interviewed economic hit man should have laid the American rot at the root of the modern Anglo-Dutch liberal system of private central banking and its near psychotic obsession with vise-grip-type global private cartel-control over strategic raw materials. That's the world-empire that the hit man really served. He also served the deep commitment of this long-standing imperial complex to drag the whole western society into the same self-victimizing subjection to speculative looting of one another with the goal to collapse society itself, built on the Malthusian nightmare-policy of poverty-induced population reduction. That's what the hit man should have said about what he served, but he didn't. He didn't say that, because the imperials are not honest enough to call their orgies of looting 'demographic adjustment' or depopulation as in Brahmanic India. The economic hit man probably didn't know what games were in progress at the hidden levels underneath the official game. That's why he boasted about his 'success' in building the American Empire into the greatest empire that ever existed on the planet, being unaware that his dream-empire functions as but a greedy lackey for the far more 'exalted' interests on the hierarchical stage that he didn't even know he served. Nor did he mention that the World Bank and the IMF too, are but links in that chain. He only mentioned that the World Bank and the IMF had supplied the loans for the international 'extortion' racket that he helped carry out. He merely had second thoughts about his involvement when he saw the proverbial tip of the iceberg in terms of the consequence and didn't like what he saw. So he wished in the end that these institutions that trashed the world might be turned around to help reconstruct the devastated parts of the world that he helped to destroy, and thereby genuinely help the world's poor people a little."

"I think that hell will freeze over, as you Americans like to say, before we see any of this healing happening," interjected Olive. " If you want to wait for that to happen, the Ice Age arrives long before you see any action. And it would be too little in itself what would come out of it. It wouldn't establish the only possible future in which mankind is able to survive. In fact, the man's little dream wouldn't be enough to unhook a single link from that chain. The entire world needs to be restructured, away from an imperial platform built on an imperial intent, to an economic platform built on a super-high-energy humanist intent. Nothing short of that will do any good. The entire imperial chain needs to be dismantled as a matter of principle. The underlying intent needs to be uplifted. Everything else follows from that. And it needs to be done quickly and globally, Peter."

"But how can we help with that?" I interjected.

"Mankind must acquire a new mindset in which people recognize themselves as human beings," said Olive, "and use this as a foundation to build an economy on, based on the universal principles of economics, which is love-based economics, as you like to call it. That's what mankind must do around the world, and we must get this process rolling by living ourselves to the fullest extent possible the Principle of Universal Love. It is totally possible to do that. But will we do it? We know that our survival and that our children and their children will absolutely depend on our success in that. But will this be enough to get us moving? Will the need for the future determine the present? Will our love for our children and their children be enough to assure a human future for them?"

"That's the big question, isn't it?" said Olive.

"This means that we stand on the crossroads toady," I said to Olive.