The Manifestation of Unity

Organizing a Food and Energy Cooperative and Emergency Response Team

One possible synthesis and implementation of the transformational changes in my book Unity is to organize an interconnected global and bioregional grassroots community network that integrates the food, agroecology, spiritual, environmental, and revolutionary imperatives.

Background

Although we're all on different paths, we're united by fundamental desires and needs for health, food, comfort, and safety. UNITY is about achieving a high quality of life while unifying around higher values such as leadership, commitment to self-mastery, higher consciousness, and daily excellence.   

UNITY is also about addressing the problems with the consensus reality that involves a global and local communities at very high risk due to the crises of conflict, water, food, unemployment, the environment, climate, fiscal affairs, asset bubbles, diseases, infrastructure, and so on.  Therefore, we need community groups creating peace, harmony, and healing; being climate smart and developing immunity to diseases; and creating food, soil, and tree cooperatives for water and food security, and ecosystem rejuvenation.  

Unification 

There's a unifying need and opportunity for creating model community organizations around a simple three-fold approach with small groups of about 10-30 people—with the guidance of a shaman, yogi, or energy healer grounded in higher consciousness. 

1. Food Cooperatives

2. Energy Healing Centers 

3. Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs)

This combination prioritizes the biggest opportunities for accumulating significant value and accelerating transformational change. A 10-Member Cooperative could create over ten million of dollars worth of value within a year.

1. A Superfood Cooperative with 10 Members could create over $200,000 in revenue, with each Member's income over $10,000 per year ($200 per week) for about 6-10 hours of work per week. This model also creates over $60,000 for Cooperative operating expenses, to create value-added products, and deal with issues such as distribution, marketing, regulatory compliance, and to achieve higher standards of excellence, such as becoming 100% local-organic, zero waste, and fossil fuel free.  It's a multi-stakeholder coop that integrates farmers, aggregation, processg, distribution, retail.

"Superfoods" are foods that are nutrient dense and with significant health benefits. The Coop could specialize in products such as sprouts, kombucha (a probiotic tea), vermicomposting, mushrooms, algae, herbs, greenhouses, tree nurseries and so on, For example, each Member could turn $1,000 in seed into about $7,500 sprouts per year. Plus, each Member household could also make Kombucha tea, turning about $1,000 of sugar and tea into about $12,000 worth of probiotics.  

2. Energy Healing Center: The average person that commits to a WFPB diet prevents approximately $200,000 in lifetime medical costs. (Equivalent to about $11,400 per year.) If ten Members commit and only help forty others to transition and commit to this new healthcare standard, then this creates over $10 million in total lifetime health value (about $570,000 per year  health care costs avoided).

The largest health maintenance organization (HMO), Kaiser Permanente, recommends that all physicians should encourage a whole food, plant-based (WFPB) diet to all their patients because it is cost effective, it treats and prevents chronic disease mortality rates, and it is easier to meet all nutritional needs with WFPB nutrition than with any other diet. A whole food, plant based (WFPB) diet addresses the leading causes of death: it can prevent over 90% of all cancers, prevent nearly all heart attacks and strokes, reverse severe heart disease, and prevent and reverse Type 2 (90% of) diabetes.

3. CERTs: For every household that prepares for the next big flood, over $100,000 in property loss is avoided.  If the CERT team only helps 10 households prepare, this would create over $1 million in property loss avoided (valued at about $57,000 per year). A door-to-door campaign to talk about preparedness in a neighborhood can save many millions of dollars—and even reduce insurance rates hundreds of dollars a year.

CERTs are integrated into local and federal (FEMA) emergency management services as the official way for community groups to help save lives, reduce suffering, protect and restore livelihoods, and reduce risks. CERTS are essentially the first step in climate change adaptation. CERTs are trained by the local emergency management professionals in CPR, first aid, shelter operations, search and rescue, and providing home prevention assistance.  The biggest opportunity for CERTs is to help households in the so-called "500- or 1,000-year" floodplain because the actual risk is closer to a 50- and 100-year event.

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The magnitude of the challenges that our communities face necessitate an organizational capacity commensurate with that challenge. Therefore, a cooperative network with ten 10-Member Coops would be a good start for a mid-sized city such as Portland, Maine (population 66,300).  This network could thus produce $2 million in superfoods for institutions such as hospitals, senior housing, or schools; could help over one hundred people transition to the new whole food plant-based standard, preventing $20 million in healthcare costs; and can help at least one hundred people in flood-zones prepare for the next big flood, preventing over $10 million in properly loss. And all of this is accomplished with a part-time commitment to community service. There is obviously great opportunity to dramatically expand the impact of this type of organization. Achieving transformational change and a culture of commitment and excellence suggests that there should be 10X or even 20X effort. 

Even if the valuations are off, creating an asset bubble in health and black gold from vermicomposting would be far more beneficial than the asset bubbles of death and Wall St. bullshit. And there's obviously room to dramatically expand. This assumes that each Member household is only working for the Cooperative about 10-hours per week for 50 weeks, is only interested in producing sprouts and kombucha, and only helps five people per member transition to the WFPB diet and prepare for the next big flood. 

This model is very flexible. It's a blueprint for transformational change and creating community resilience through identifying the needs, vision, plan, and communication. It's about providing energy healing, lifestyle, disaster preparedness, and food services and products in a way that is cheaper, faster, better, and more convenient. It's possible to rapidly expand these groups to create a billion-dollar business based on  noble cause, exceptional customer service, consumer control, high technology (including wireless sensors for gardening efficiency, mobile devices for emergency alerts, big data, etc.), and completely redefining the industries of health, climate adaptation, and agriculture. It's a big idea, deliverable, economically viable, adaptable, and transformative. (These are the elements for building a billion-dollar business, according to John Scully's Moonshot).

There are unlimited possibilities for the creation and accumulation of value with the coordination of  knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, for the attainment of these types of definite purposes. 

The Possibility and Vision

Summary

1. Food Cooperatives (1) WWOOF & Shared Earth style small-scale backyard gardening; (2) Institutional Selling, (3) Spiritual Gardening, and (4) accelerating a re-localized food system. 

2. Energy/Spiritual Healing Centers: (1) spa, AirBNB, detox, and Center for Awakening; (2) an evolutionary Mystery School; and (3) global environmental healings ("spiritual geoengineering") to diffuse the $60 trillion arctic methane bomb.

3. Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs): (1) community preparedness campaigns, (2) emergency management, and (3) forecasting and preventing disasters.

1. Food Cooperatives

Food coops can participate in the Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) network, a place where workers on organic farms volunteer 5-6 hours a day for food and accommodation. Another option for attracting workers is Shared Earth, the largest community of gardeners connecting people with land with gardeners. During WWII, over 50% of people's produce were produced in backyard gardens and the local food movement is expanding this type of home-scale revitalization with models with agroecology, permaculture and biointensive methods such as SPIN ("small plot intensive"). 

At the next level of evolution, the Findhorn and Perelandra models have developed thriving gardens with guidance from devic and spirit realms to produce energy-enhanced food and healing. Peer-reviewed scientific studies show that focused meditation and consciousness enhances the growth and nutrition of plants.  These models inspire and facilitate transformations in consciousness and include holistic learning centers in their ecovillages, with regular workshops and events such as a raw detox week, equinox retreats, and singing and dancing for unity.  The primary purpose in combining a food cooperative with an energy healing center is to train cooperative members to work with plant-spirit consciousness, described in Unity, pp.308, 323.

Strategic Plans, Visions, and Goals  for Local Food

The local food movement is about planing and analyzing the whole food system, from inputs (land, soil, fertilizer, seed, labor, equipment), production, processing (value-added), wholesale distribution (aggregation, delivering), retail distribution (coops, consumer purchases, stores, institutions), nutrient management (food waste, manure, fertilizer), and consumer demand (for food and food products). There are jobs at every level: services, store, farm operations, hired workers, manufacturing, storage, distribution, and inputs.

It's based on values of community (belonging, trust, engagement), the environment (stewardship, working landscape), hard work (agrarianism, "agripreneurialism", resourcefulness, creativity), independence (individual freedom and self reliance), privacy (respect toward others, tolerance, open mindedness about lifestyle and beliefs), and small scale (accessible businesses and community). 

The vision is for cooperation to advance independent family farms, united in diversity, advancing innovation, leading renewed vitality of agriculture as a key foundation to the economy and communities. For a region where agroecology and permaculture revitalizes the landscape and communities, fulfills traditions and values; where family farmers earn a good living in a food system driving the economy, providing more jobs, expanding the region's identity in national and international markets, with fresh local foods dramatically improving health and community; where all have access to high-quality foods, with security in the face of challenge; to be a national and global leader in food systems vitality and innovative best practices. 

The goals are to increase local food consumption, less health issues, improved environment, more profitable farms, local foods at all food outlets, organics diverted from landfills to compost (zero waste systems) for agricultural products, increased food system education workshops, programs and certificates; access to capital for food entrepreneurs; and a minimization of fossil fuels and an overall positive ecological footprint.

2. Spiritual Healing Centers

One excellent model for a Spiritual Healing Center is the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center run by Dr. Gabriel Cousens, author of Spiritual Nutrition.  Joining the Tree of Life requires a very high standard of excellence (described in Unity, p.252, 593, requiring members commit to a raw, vegan, drug free lifestyle plus Dharma, the Six Foundations and the Sevenfold Peace).

The vision is to support and inspire a holistic lifestyle through education and life-changing experience. It's dedicated to healing and the transformation of the world. It's about healing and harmony with self and society and creating an "Awakened Normality" and an "Oasis of Awakening." It involves pure agriculture, personal health, spiritual vitality. The evolutionary programs and practices involve a 21-Day Transformation (including three meditations daily, fasting, yoga, spiritual discussions, nutritional workshops, cooking classes, and so on); Spiritual Fasting Retreats (7-Day green juice fasts for detoxifications and cleanses); and Energy Healings.

The Center includes a Cafe (raw, vegan, organic, local, gourmet); a spa; an Oasis Shop (with foods, herbs, supplements, body care products and energy healing technologies); and greenhouses, a sprout house, and gardens. The Centers could also sign-up with AirBNB to raise money by renting lodging to guests.  The Center could provide anything from luxury spa amenities to  hostels (which could be turned into emergency shelters and part of the CERT infrastructure).

Other excellent inspirations and models include the Omega Institute—dedicated to developing people's extraordinary potential, innovative education at the frontier of development, and healing—and the Modern Mystery School. The Mystery School educates the next generation of healers and light-workers with wisdom from shamanic traditions and other ancient knowledge, for evolution and awakening.

A 20X vision involves teaching students to develop latent yet innate abilities for healing, genius, psychic powers, remote viewing, precognition, weather working, telepathy, collaborating with interstellar civilizations, and working on creating free energy and other advanced technologies. I describe these mental technologies in Unity, pp. 264-366. These schools will be on the leading edge of the revolution of consciousness in education.

The Healing Centers can be a type of Tirtha, a pilgrimage place that's storied (with gods, heroes, myth, and legend), connected with the landscape, symbolic, and a place for liberation (moksha) within a larger network of association, in a 10-mile zone and also within a 5-day pilgrimage. Ancient and modern Tirthas ("crossings") have temples, bathing tanks, cold springs, mountains, forests, and villages. The Centers could network with the New Earth Communities project.

The Healing Centers would also engage in a global energy healing, peace, and coherence project to hep revitalize, detoxify, and harmonize our inner and outer environments. The Healing Centers could be on the frontier of climate change mitigation and adaptation through a focused effort on resolving the arctic methane crisis, through "spiritual geoengineering" or "the yoga of climate change," described in Unity, pp.465-89.  Even if all emissions were to stop tomorrow, the climate system has already past tipping points such as the arctic methane bomb that threatens the existence of civilization and the human species. Spiritual geoengineering is a way to deal with this existential crisis, which involves a network of organizations training thousands of people who commit to a focused meditation on environmental harmony every day.

3. Community Emergency Response Team (CERT)

I discuss the integration of the lower and higher levels of environmental consciousness, adaptation, mitigation, and preparedness in Unity, p.400 et. seq., and I give extra attention and focus to flooding preparedness, pp.413-419. I wrote a full legal and policy analysis of FEMA's disastrous flood zoning in an award-winning paper called Zone X: Catastrophic Flooding & Flood Frequency Determinations in an Era of Climate Crises (PDF, 32p). 

The next level of disaster preparedness is at intersection of Energy Healing and CERTs, where we'll see a very high demand for forecasting and preventing "natural disasters." The Spiritual Centers can train groups with the extraordinary shamanic ability to forecast storms and provide community protection (and agricultural protection), described in Unity, pp.453-64. This is a multi-billion dollar opportunity to significantly help communities.