After five and a half years examining pandemic evidence, it is clear who should be winning the argument, but it is also apparent that attitudes have even hardened.

This week Tanya Unkovich resigned as an MP. Up until now she has been our advocate inside the government urging caution about biotechnology deregulation. It seems probable her unexpected resignation signals a determination on the part of the coalition, including NZ First, to ignore caution. There appears to be a growing determination to push ahead with the gene technology bill which will impose medical hegemony and genetic destruction on the whole population. There are overseas interests egging the government on. We are dealing with fanatics, for whom evidence can be ignored with impunity.

We will have to delve very deep into the structure of natural law to understand what is going on and how we can forge a path ahead.

We have issued over 500 articles to date, all of which contain references to scientific papers and reports, these describe severe damage to public health much of which appears to be associated with the growing use of biotechnology. In the latest example, the UK adult psychiatric morbidity survey published on 26 Jun 2025 by the NHS has found that “one in four young people in England now have a mental health condition”, rising by 37% between 2014 and 2024. Conditions including anxiety, depression, panic disorder, phobias, and OCD are rising sharply. More serious conditions including self harm and suicidal thoughts are rising even more rapidly. They have quadrupled since 2000 with the highest rates among 16-24 year olds. This parallels the results of a study of 2 million people in South Korea on psychiatric adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination that we have reported previously.

In another example, a study entitled “Rates of successful conceptions according to COVID-19 vaccination status: Data from the Czech Republic” was published in the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine on 19th June 2025. A study of 1,300,000 women aged 18-39 found that rates of successful conception among COVID-19 vaccinated women were considerably lower than among the unvaccinated.

There can hardly be two findings more relevant to the survival of the human race than the two we cite today—the desire to stay alive and the capacity to give birth. The fact that governments can continue to ignore such findings indicates a profound failure of intelligence on their part. They are not alert to reality.

We have arrived at a time where nature itself is regarded as a pathogen, something to be replaced with man-made invasive and essentially destructive technologies. Yet it seems that however much is destroyed in the name of progress even more destruction eventuates. It is not just in the field of military thinking that never ending destruction is governing action. Destructive tendencies have become embedded in most modern technologies, including so-called health technologies.

• Medical drugs and procedures aim to kill pathogens but then inevitably disrupt regulatory systems in physiology and the environment. Such medical misadventure has become the third leading cause of death,
• Pandemic outcomes have amply demonstrated that gene editing degrades the central managing power of organisms, undermining all the mechanisms which protect both mental and physical health. 
• It has happened so quickly, it is hard to comprehend how not just medicines but the entire world’s food supply has become adulterated with biotechnology. Staple crops have been paired with pesticides. Traditional ingredients, processing aids and additives have been substituted across the board with bio-synthetics produced via genetic engineering.
• Poisonous novel materials and chemical treatments, including building materials mandated to be utilised, end up polluting the soil and off-gassing throughout homes, cities and industrial sites, elevating cancer incidence.
• There has been a universal proliferation of agrochemicals, administered through pesticide, fungicide and herbicide routines sometimes sprayed from the air which are all designed to attack DNA structures. This degrades biodiversity, persisting in the soil, the water and our food. Farmers are actually required by food manufacturers, export rules and retailers to spray flowers, leaves and fruit, including the soil around the root. Even to inject the trunks of trees. The proliferation of cancers and neurological disease is the result of this madness.
• Petrochemicals are used in clothing, energy and transport systems which contaminate the air, the soil and the water with poisonous gasses and microplastics causing a wide range of illness.

When we review all areas of daily life around the world, we find that violation of natural law has become the norm. The reaction of natural law is reciprocal, as you sow so shall you reap. As Newton verified, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In this simple way, natural law promotes the positive and discourages the negative. Destruction leads to more destruction. The effect of a destructive approach to nature returns to haunt the health of everyone whose collective action and inaction allowed the situation to develop. This should be alerting us to think more deeply.

The College of Natural Law aims to provide education and knowledge about natural law, but we realise that modern life has become so complex and information dense (much of it distorted by deceptive public relations, hidden persuaders and now AI), and the pace of life so rapid, that it is hard for anyone to take wise decisions and make sensible choices. Moreover, the gloss of modern technology is so alluring that responsible people and even supposedly deep thinkers are attracted to novel technologies, failing to realise that much that is presented as progress is a poisoned chalice eroding our quality of life and sowing the seeds of future catastrophe.

In contrast, natural law is silently promoting evolution everywhere

Therefore it is necessary to make available a system and opportunities to become familiar with the source of natural law. As we have discussed in numerous releases the process of meditation increases alertness. Daily meditation turns daily life into an educational experience. In modern life, it has become hard to trust the leadership in all things. The self-referral experience of meditation, enables the individual to trust themselves

How does this happen? The process of transcendental meditation, coming to finer and finer states of thought, increases alertness as the mind simultaneously appreciates both inner silence and increasing dynamism. These two are experienced together in their finest state as the mind transcends thought and experiences universal consciousness which is infinite dynamism and infinite silence. This state of alertness is the need of the leaders of society today and the need of every citizen, especially as the world has become so polarised and unstable. Therefore the experience of deep meditation should be the foundation stone of education.

There is little doubt that the world is in the process of transformation. Clearly a lot has to change.

All over the world significant numbers of people in every country are fed up with their governments and the institutions which have been guiding national life. This process accelerated during the pandemic as it became clear that a great deal was being hidden or distorted to facilitate public compliance. Now there is a process of public awakening slowly gaining momentum, but the actual course and final outcome of this restorative process remains hidden in the future, subject to uncertain events.

The pace of life and the density of information in every field of knowledge and endeavour has been accelerating exponentially. This has become so overwhelming that politicians and administrators everywhere have put up barriers to exclude broad-based information sources from their deliberations. Instead relying on their preferred advisors, economic principles, corporate lobbyists, political ideologies and crucially AI. As a result, the idea that the world can be transformed by presenting information to those in power has become a largely forlorn hope. We need new strategies.

To manage the explosion of information, technocrats are touting artificial intelligence, but computers are unaware, unable to experience in the way we do. They can only sample and summarise large amounts of information from the past. Therefore AI is destined to rehash all the failures of the past. Repeating the same mistakes that awakening populations are rejecting the world over.

Worse still, governments have started to use AI to distance themselves from public opinion. An article in Stuff is entitled “ACT leader David Seymour suggested ‘bots’ drove ‘fake submissions’ against his Regulatory Standards Bill“. Seymour was complaining because a public consultation received 23,000 submissions, 88% of which were opposed. Seymour has no evidence to support his accusation, he should have realised that, especially since the pandemic, the public is becoming more organised and alert to oppose government overreach. The really revealing part of the article is as follows: The Ministry for Regulation deputy chief executive of policy Andrew Royle admitted the ministry used AI to analyse the submissions received, saying:

“Its process included a “qualitative” analysis of about 1000 individual submissions. Group submissions and submissions over 10,000 words were read separately. The rest were summarised using AI.”

In other words, your submission to the government was very unlikely to be read by a human unless it exceeded 10,000 words, and this is just the beginning of the use of AI to control our lives and edit public narratives.

Even positive government initiatives like the MAHA movement led by Robert Kennedy Jr. are facing an uphill battle against entrenched ideas as the rest of the Trump administration pushes a pro-chemical, pro-corporate, pro-industrial agriculture agenda.

In parallel with this, our food sources and health systems are being edited and transformed through biotechnology experimentation and manufacturing. This is proceeding on a vast scale affecting the whole world’s population. It is happening not just without adequate safety testing, but despite evidence available to those controlling the process that gene editing is not just risky, but actually harming public health. Much of this is happening under the radar with the result that the public is not just uninformed, they are being misinformed and misled.

There are seeds of doubt emerging—Biotechnology is a ticking time bomb

Your local newspapers are probably not carrying articles like this one published May 27 by Barrons Investment Updates entitled “Gene Therapy Death Worsens Picture for an Already Troubled Field” which reports the death from treatment complications of a patient enrolled in a trial of gene therapy which was meant “to treat a rare genetic condition called Danon Disease, which weakens the heart muscle and generally kills male patients in early adulthood.” The trial has been suspended and the share price of the company involved, Rocket Pharmaceuticals of New Jersey, has fallen by 63%.

As the article explains, this is not an isolated case within the biotech industry. Another recent death occurred in March, when a patient on Sarepta Therapeutics’ Elevidys, an approved gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, died of liver failure. The process of gene therapy alters genetic sequences which triggers an immune response designed to protect us by eliminating invasive foreign DNA. As a result, gene therapy recipients inevitably face a lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs which affect their health, limit their lifespan and require hugely expensive ongoing monitoring and treatment. Thus gene therapy has inherent contradictions. Not only will gene therapy never be able to fulfil its exaggerated promises, but it will have an open ended negative affect on public health outcomes, as happened during the pandemic

The Barrons article concluded, “gene therapies have become largely unattractive to investors, who are worried about unexpected safety risks and commercialisation challenges”. In fact, the procedures are so costly, not just in terms of money but also in terms of the required number of highly trained medical personnel and sophisticated equipment for each patient and the amount of procedural individualisation involved, that it is inconceivable for any health system to fund them. The article reports that as a result medical biotech companies are finding it hard to enrol patients.

However our politicians remain largely isolated from the harsh realities and risks of biotechnology. Instead, subject to lobbying from corporate interests and researchers dependent on government grants, they are deregulating biotechnology. If biotechnology experimentation is not stopped, inevitably within a short timescale there will be another outbreak of a novel man made illness that causes a precipitous decline in mental and physical health on a global scale.

The extraordinary refusal to acknowledge the dangers of biotechnology needs to be met head on. An article in the UK Telegraph entitled “It’s time for the truth. Here’s the Covid Paper they don’t want you to read” reports “Still the scientific establishment is refusing to take the lab leak hypothesis seriously, let alone investigate it.” It asks the scientific establishment: “There are over 20 million people dead, and you don’t want to know why?”

There are still chances for us to register our opinion on the Gene Technology Bill, for example by signing and sharing the “Petition of Lisa Er: Halt the Gene Technology Bill and set up a Commission of Inquiry.” It just takes a minute to sign, and we need more signatures. Go to:

https://petitions.parliament.nz/b64831bc-b0b2-4518-a62d-08dd708a9825

To have even more impact ask for a meeting with your local MP.

But some words of caution are needed here, we are not involved in a logical argument. There is an almost fanatical and certainly reckless mentality associated with biotechnology experimentation. The industry constantly projects false messianic messaging of a bright biotech future promising long life, health and enhanced abilities, but there is no evidence for this in fact the opposite and the people pumping out the message are well aware of the lie. There is a disregard for public preferences, scientific caution and medical outcome data. Therefore it would be a mistake to believe that a compromise is possible with the biotech industry. It should be clear that very little meaningful dialogue is taking place. To move out of this danger zone, we need to take big steps. Little steps, meaningless discussions, compromise and delay only play into the hands of the biotech industry and ultimately spell disaster.

We need a giant leap forward

Over the last few weeks we have been reflecting: “What more can we do?”What can our proposed Hill Station College of Natural Law offer to dispel the head in the sand attitude of governments, bypass the biotech corporate juggernaut and open the eyes of gaslit populations?

Despite all the turmoil and polarisation in society, the sun rises every day anew, the seasons revolve one into another and the business of natural law continues unabated. The managing power involved is beyond our comprehension. A simple analogy will explain this.

Every day we are eating food. To digest this, our physiology makes trillions of decisions for us every second of the day, it guides physiological transformations which turn our meals into bones, muscle, blood, brains, organs and everything else which sustains and facilitates our life. Doing so, it maintains the enormously complex structural integrity of trillions of physiological components. Even the design of an eye for example is beyond our capacity to completely understand, reproduce or redesign. Now let us suppose we receive a 1000 piece jigsaw for our birthday, it will take us days to complete. Our body achieves millions of times more than this every millisecond. Cosmic law scales this up to inconceivable levels of organisation.

Despite this, the body cannot function properly without the input of our consciousness. We must make the right food choices, rest and exercise in time, while behaving sensibly and considerately. Natural law is intimately tied to our consciousness. Consciousness is the key to our relationship with nature. Gaining the support of natural law involves managing our consciousness. Consciousness is the essence of life, but what facet of consciousness? Our thoughts, feelings, ideas or dreams?

The home of the laws of nature is abstract, not obviously seen or heard, rather silent but all powerful. Our connection with the laws of nature can be strengthened in the silent depths of our consciousness. Communion with nature is not found in the endless sea of information, but rather in the abstract WHOLENESS of our inner consciousness. Holistic consciousness is the fulcrum point around which everything is balanced.

Therefore the first principle of the College of Natural Law is research in consciousness. Throughout the ages this has been the aim of the practice of meditation. The practice of meditation has nourished all cultural, intellectual and religious traditions. If you are new to the idea of meditation, it is not hard to learn, and the rewards can be immense for the individual and very powerful for society.

The massive effect of meditation on society is reported in my paper published in Psychology, Crime, and Law, 2:3, 1996. The research was completed originally in 1993 and presented by invitation as a keynote speech to the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society on Crime, 1-3 March 1993, Harrogate, UK. The study provided additional clear and powerful evidence that crime in any major city can be reduced within a few weeks by a group practicing meditation. The powerful Box-Jenkins ARIMA impact assessment time series analysis was used to test the hypothesis that Merseyside crime rate was significantly reduced after what is known as the Maharishi Effect threshold was surpassed by a group of 140 collectively practicing transcendental deep meditation and 12,000 others in the city practising at home. My book Your DNA Diet explains the details and more about the benefits of meditation.

My follow up study of quality of life in Merseyside in the years subsequent to 1988 illustrates a remarkable cascade of positive trends and initiatives engulfing everyday life in the city of 1.5 million people. The following effects illustrate the infinite organising power inherent in our own consciousness:

1) LOWEST CRIME

Crime decreased by 60% relative to national trends (p<0.00006). Merseyside used to have the second highest crime rate in the nation, but became the lowest among the Metropolitan areas by 1993.

2) REDUCED INSURANCE PREMIUMS

The Association of British Insurers announced that insurance premiums in Merseyside will fall due to falling crime rates

3) SHORTEST HOSPITAL WAITING LIST

By 1990 hospital waiting lists in the Merseyside Health Authority Region had fallen to the lowest in the UK, with numbers of people having to wait for vital operations 60% less than in the other UK regions.

4) FREEDOM FROM YOUTH RIOTS

There was an absence of riots among Merseyside youth in the early 90’s in contrast to the riots in other English cities (including Luton, London, Oxford, Salford, Cardiff, and Bristol)

5) IMPROVED DRUG TREATMENT PROGRAMMES

Merseyside became the world pioneer of the ‘harm reduction movement’ for the treatment of drug addiction and had the lowest rate of HIV positive among UK cities.

6) ECONOMIC REVIVAL

Formerly declining, Merseyside became a model of economic revival. The national press reported it as one of the first cities in the UK to show signs of an end to the 89/92 recession.

7) REDUCED UNEMPLOYMENT

Unemployment rates in Merseyside and West Lancashire improved steadily relative to national trends after 1988 with a cumulative 60% drop in hard core unemployment.

8) INCREASED EFFICIENCY AND PRODUCTIVITY

The UK Central Statistical Office rated Merseyside office staff as 20% more productive than their counterparts in London.

9) REDUCED STRIKES

Merseyside was once renowned for poor industrial relations, but by 1993 less than 1% of all working days lost in the UK were in Merseyside, despite the fact that almost 3% of the UK population live here.

10) PURIFICATION OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT

There was a complete purification and restructuring of the Liverpool City government which had previously been reported as one of the most extreme, inept, and corrupt among UK cities in the early 1980’s.

11) NEW BUILDING PROJECTS

Reconstruction and beautification of the inner city and the large old dock areas of the city got underway, which had been one of Britain’s worst slum areas in the late 1970’s.

12) IMPROVED HOUSING

Following years of decline in housing quality in the 70’s and early 80’s, the Liverpool Housing Action Trust became the largest in the country.

13) REVIVED ENTERTAINMENT AND TOURISM INDUSTRY

There was a revival in film production, theatre, and tourism which had been in serious decline in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Numbers of visitors to Merseyside were up by 53% to 29 million in 1990 compared to 1985.

14) SPORTING SUCCESS

Teams from the North West of England dominated in many sporting events in the early 1990’s.

15) BALANCED SEASONS & ADEQUATE RAINFALL

Merseyside escaped the droughts of 1988 to 1989. The North West was reported by the local press as the only area in the country to have adequate rainfall during this period.

16) INCREASED HARMONY & CO-OPERATION

A unique level of co-operation and harmony along with increased optimism and self-confidence was in evidence on Merseyside among public and private sector bodies. The Merseyside Partnership brought together over 40 organisations to promote progress in the region.

17) INCREASED HAPPINESS

A psychological study completed in the early 90’s at Liverpool University rated Merseyside pensioners as having 50% less depression than their counterparts in New York or London.

18) INCREASED ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS

In the first project of its kind in Europe, forty local organisations working together in the Estuary Project Group reduced the pollution load in the Mersey Estuary by 80%, enabling wildfowl numbers to increase by 60% and 35 species of fish to return.

19) HEALTHY LIFESTYLE

A unique experiment in the Wirral (a suburb of Merseyside) was described in the national press as ‘a rare piece of co-operation in the public sector’. Under the ‘Life Project’ initiative, inner city residents took more exercise, reduced use of prescription drugs, stopped smoking, cut back on drink, and changed their diet.

20) QUALITY OF LIFE

There were many articles in the local and national press analysing why all this optimism and positivity suddenly grew up in Merseyside. An article in the Daily Mail summed it up with the headline “Merseyside is my Heaven on Earth”, in the Daily Telegraph “A Good Place With Good People>” (June 13, 1995 p. 15), while an industrial development promotional advertisement in the Times of London (13 November 1991) trumpeted “Success After Success On Merseyside”.

Consciousness is at the centre of the Cosmos. This is an eternal verity found in every cultural and religious tradition. Christ said “the Kingdom of Heaven is within”. Krishna advised “Brahman [wholeness of consciousness] brings eternal freedom”. Buddha said, “Peace comes within, do not seek it without”.

Sufi’s say, “Meditation in God is my capital”.Einstein said “Man has infinite dimensions and finds God in his conscience.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Seneca said“It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable. ”Marcus Aurelius said “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.””

Despite this wisdom of the ages, the institutions of modern civilization (if that is the right term) have forgotten their founding principles. A great leap forward will result when research in consciousness becomes a priority in education. We are talking here about individual research in consciousness in the silent depths of self referral consciousness.

An article in the UK Telegraph this morning comments on the cover up of Biden’s cognitive decline saying: 

“The ability to have some trustworthy sources in the world does matter – and will matter an awful lot more in the years to come. The media that helped cover up Biden’s condition should take a serious and critical look at themselves – even though it’s not clear that self-criticism is something of which they are remotely capable.”

Unfortunately untrustworthy sources are not limited to the media. A paper published in the Journal of Independent Medicine is entitled “Metacritique of Influential Studies Purporting COVID-19 Vaccine Successes: Part 1 – Watson et al” which concludes that the risks of Covid vaccines outweigh any perceived benefits, saying one highly cited study, relied upon by health services, falsely purported to show Covid vaccines saved 14 million lives: 

“[The study included] the use of inaccurate estimates of effectiveness and safety due to inadequate counting windows; lack of recognition of waning effectiveness and eventual negative effectiveness; failure to account for confounding variables; exaggerated infection and case fatality rates; insufficient consideration of vaccine-related risks; and possible financial or political conflicts of interest.”

Search engines which employ AI are another source of unreliable and biased information, or rather misinformation. Last week I used Google to try to find out if the official March 2025 figures for New Zealand births and deaths had been published. Google AI overview told me: 

“In March 2025, New Zealand saw a 7% increase in both live births and deaths compared to the same month in 2024. There was a natural decrease, with 584 more deaths than births. The average daily birth rate was 44, while the average daily death rate was 63.”

This answer is entirely false, in fact the New Zealand March figures had not been published and AI, ever eager to speak with authority, simply substituted the latest Slovenian data for that of New Zealand. The current standard AI search engines which provide one sentence answers to complex questions, which may be inaccurate simplifications or even false, are going to be a greater and greater curse on our education system as time goes by.

Believing in one thing to the exclusion of many, thinking that a single winner is the only person worthy of praise and reward, maintaining faith in something that doesn’t work or for which there is no evidence, posing as an expert on something about which you know little and pretending to certainty when there is doubt are all symptoms of a failure of intelligence. This arises when the knower pays attention to a PART of a problem but fails to appreciate the WHOLE picture.

Last week there were articles in papers around the world like one in the NY Times entitled “Baby Is Healed With World’s First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment“. A nine month old baby known as KJ suffers from a rare genetic disorder which affects only one out of 1.3 million babies and is usually fatal. A customised gene editing intervention has saved his life for now. I don’t want to debate the merits of a life saving procedure which has so far cost many millions of dollars and has left the child dependent on the attentions of a team of doctors for the rest of his life, but I do take issue with Dr Peter Marks, the recently replaced director of the US FDA Centre for Biologics Evaluation and Research, who claims in the New England Journal of Medicine that the procedure will “transform healthcare”.

170 million Americans are suffering from one or more chronic diseases and a senior medic is suggesting that a risky gene therapy technique costing multi million dollars per person and requiring the lifetime attention of many doctors per patient will transform healthcare. Such a view is not just myopic, it combines blind faith, professional conceit, corporate greed and disregard of the glaringly obvious—gene editing will not solve the crisis in public health. On present evidence it is more likely to exacerbate it.

Far far more likely to transform healthcare is a story published in the UK Telegraph entitled “Eat three yogurts a day and other secrets from the woman who lived to 117. This reports the findings of a study of the exceptionally healthy gut biome of a supercentenarian published under the title “The Multiomics Blueprint of Extreme Human Lifespan. “Individuals with a greater variety and “balance” of microbes in their gut seem to have a lower risk of experiencing around 70 different chronic conditions, ranging from heart disease to Type 2 diabetes, as each type of bacteria or microbe does something different for the body.” The subject of the study who lived in California ate three yogurts a day, had a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, exercised regularly, cut down on alcohol and avoided toxic people. 

If you are going to start eating yogurt, remember to avoid the processed flavoured and sweetened versions that crowd our supermarket shelves, research shows they are unhealthy. Organic plain yogurts are available and it is very easy to make your own fresh yogurt overnight at home—the healthiest option.

Complementing this, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has published a study entitled “Premature Mortality Attributable to Ultraprocessed Food Consumption in 8 Countries“.  This reports “Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%”, according to research conducted in countries including the US and England. This adds to a growing body of evidence that UPFs are a fast track to an early death. For example, US research published last year in the BMJ found that people who consume the most UPFs have a 4% higher risk of death overall and a 9% greater risk of dying from something other than cancer or heart disease. It identified processed meat, sugar and ultra-processed breakfast foods, such as cereals, as the unhealthiest UPF products.

You might think that faced with such overwhelming evidence, government health experts would be rushing to warn the public about UPFs and incentivise healthy eating. In fact, governments the world over seem to be suffering from extreme myopia. A May 17 article in the UK Guardian is entitled “UK government dropped health push after lobbying by ultra-processed food firms“. This recounts the sorry tale of how planned government advice to supermarkets to prioritise promotion of fresh produce and drop promotions of junk food was abandoned after lobbying by the Food and Drink Federation (which represents corporations including Nestlé, Mondelēz, Coca-Cola, Mars and Unilever), repeatedly demanded the government ditch the healthy initiative.

These are the very same corporations who have been very busy substituting the natural ingredients in our traditional foods with genetically modified processing aids which contain harmful contaminated residues, as we reported in our article “Major Health Alert: the Extraordinary Genetically Modified Invasion of Our Supermarkets by Stealth“. As the 117 year old supercentenarian advised: ‘it is sensible to avoid toxic people’ and that goes for the glossy products of toxic corporations too. As consumers, we have more power than we realise. Time to STOP putting UPFs in our supermarket carts. 

Our government is planning to deregulate biotechnology experimentation, putting millions of our taxpayer dollars into risky biotech research whose inevitable mistakes cannot be recalled or remediated, while proven measures to greatly improve public health which can be easily implemented with virtually no cost and managed at home go unnoticed, unheralded and unsupported. This is all the result of an education system which is failing the young who are the future leaders of society. Overwhelmed with an explosion of technology, people are gradually losing the capacity to think clearly and comprehensively. We are being bombarded with messaging tailored to influence our financial and political choices touting the very latest fad over simple, cheap, traditional tried and tested solutions. This war on common sense, nature and tradition is increasingly being designed by inherently dumb computers with the aim of subtly usurping our cognitive abilities.

We may not appreciate the scope and size of the effects, but reaching for a calculator, accepting the answer of a search engine, media source, or government pronouncement uncritically, copying and pasting without thinking, letting AI write it for you, and putting something in our mouth without reading the label are all rendering our intellect inactive and rusty. Use it or lose it. 

Outer depends on inner. 

There is a deeper kind of technology fully available to all of us—a technology of consciousness. Reflective time spent in deep meditation or prayer is a means to revive and refresh our intellect, quietly integrating experience into a broader knowledge framework, connecting the PART with the WHOLE. Modern education with its focus on exterior technology and superficial ideas is debasing this possibility. The kind of society and times we are living through are the end result of ignoring our inner life. History records the rise and fall of civilisations. Invariably, it is the wide availability of deep spiritual and intellectual insight that drives the rise, and ignorance and cruelty that drives the fall. We are sleepwalking into the end times of our civilisation, because we don’t understand life, yet life is the closest thing to us. If you haven’t yet begun a personal journey to fully discover inner life, it is time to begin. As Wordsworth put it so beautifully in Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey:

“….that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”

It would be a mistake to think that such deep insight comes upon us solely by chance. We have control over our behaviour and food, we can mostly choose what experiences we expose ourselves to. Our consciousness is our own to manage. Christ said the Kingdom of Heaven is Within, echoing the wisdom of the ages. St Francis found peace in nature and reflection, we can do so also. The Bhagavad Gita promises the natural result of the regular practice of deep meditation, saying “He whose mind is unshaken in the midst of sorrows, who amongst pleasures is free from longing, from whom fear and anger have departed, he is said to be a sage of steady intellect”. This is not a mood cultivated through indifference but the natural result of repeated experience of the transcendental bliss that Wordsworth described as he sat above Tintern Abbey. It is time we looked within and taught the next generation to do likewise. The collective effect of meditation on society is transformative and beneficial in a way that is unmatched by any modern technology. You can find out more about transcendental meditation and its effects on individual and collective consciousness in my book Your DNA Diet available from Amazon as a Kindle.