Shift Happens

by Barry Carter

Our economic situation, the global energy situation and climate change all are aspects of the same problem. We have created structures to serve us and forgotten that this is why they were created. Often these structures outlive those who created them. Generally when this happens, the structures initially become objects of adoration or even worship but ultimately those who serve these structures begin to believe that everyone else should be serving them as well.

Structures are, by their inherent nature, rigid. We build roofs and walls to resist the rain, wind and sun as long as possible. We build government structures using constitutions that are difficult to change. We build streets that will not get potholes for as long as possible. We build bibles that cannot be changed under penalty of law or damnation. We build corporate structures that must resist competition from new ideas.

Changeless structures are as close to dead as one can get. Even stones erode faster than many of the structures we have created.

All living things are always changing. The one thing you can count on with life is "shift happens". (Sometimes we think that it is something else that happens.)

So how do we relate to the shifts that are happening with energy, the economy and climate without serving the structures that have created these problems?

Structures often use fear as a tactic to get people to serve them. They say things like: “If you aren't on the grid and don't support the war you will freeze in the dark.” “If you don't fertilize with our product (made from Middle East oil) and purchase our pesticides (transported using Middle East oil) your food will not grow well and will be attacked by a horde of locusts or plague from Mexico .”

I have found that when I focus on what I fear, I just find more things to fear in my life.

So, what is the best way to prosper in times like these?

First we need to figure out what we really need to survive and then figure out ways to get as much as possible of what we need without depending on structures to provide it.

Here are some things that I think I need:

Clean air to breathe.

Clean water to drink and bathe in.

Nutritious food to eat.

Energy for heating, cooling, lighting, transportation and communication.

Materials for making and modifying the structures I live in and the clothing I wear.

Good health.

Here are some of the things that I have done or am doing to enhance the local availability of the things listed above.

Air Quality

I was born and still live in Baker City (a small town of about ten thousand people in eastern Oregon ) where the air is quite clean. In the mid eighties a copper “recycler” proposed building a plant to incinerate and recover the copper from electric transformers which were filled with PCB oil. I and several other environmentally conscious folks in Baker City opposed this incinerator because of the definite air quality problems that it would pose. We stopped this from happening.

I was involved with the formation of a couple of local environmental groups which were formed in response to this and other challenges to our local air quality.

Water Quality

As the director of the second of these groups I appealed a 1995 timber sale in the Baker City watershed. I believe that this appeal and the follow-up negotiations helped preserve the quality of our local drinking water supply. I continued to actively promote forest and grassland health and regeneration as a forest activist throughout the nineties.

Quality Food

In 1969 I planted my first organic garden. It was in the back yard of the first place I rented after I moved out of my parents house. I have been composting and/or gardening almost every year since then. One problem I noticed is that the food I grew did not always look as good as the food I could purchase at the supermarket. Eventually this problem was solved in the following way.

In 1995 I learned about the ORMUS minerals and in 2000 I got graphic evidence that their application improved the growth, taste and nutrition of plants they were applied to. That year I tasted and took some pictures of walnuts from a tree that had been given ORMUS nutrients for three years. The one tree that was given ORMUS consistently yielded the same weight of nuts in their shells as the combined yield of three fifteen year old trees plus four other three year old trees that were planted as seedlings from the same nursery stock in the same yard at the same time. You can see some pictures of these walnuts and the tree they were grown on at:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/walnuts.htm

Needless to say, growing food that is four times a large, that tastes better and is much more nutritious in your own garden is a very good way to have an independent source of supply for your own food.

Energy Independence

I have always been quite handy with tools. I built a “tree house” in the apple tree in front of our house when I was about nine years old. I have been remodeling old homes since 1963 when, at the age of 14, I began building the drawers for the desk in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother. You can see a picture of these drawers at:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/desk.jpg

A few years later, while I was in High School, I built closets and cabinets for our bedroom:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/closets.jpg

I used mill ends and other discarded lumber to build these cabinets. The skills and tools I got from these experiences in Junior High and High School later translated into making a living by remodeling old homes using as much recycled material as possible. I took woodworking and metal working classes in high school where I learned drafting, welding, plumbing and wiring. (I had to drop out of college after my first year because it was interfering with my education.)

This concept of energy independence became active for me when I read my first issue of Mother Earth News in 1970 and my first Whole Earth Catalogue in 1971. Since then I have remodeled and insulated four houses. I moved into the first of these houses in September of 1971. The insulation work I did dramatically decreased the heating costs in this house even though I was only using three inches of fiberglass in the walls.

In 1974 I installed my first demand hot water heater in the log house my first wife and I had in the mountains. I also built an “air lock” entry to help keep the heat in and installed a fireplace insert to make it more suitable for heating the house.

In 1975 I moved into an old house and started remodeling it into an apartment house with four apartments. Over the next five years I insulated the walls and ceilings and installed an additional window over each existing window. I also put in a wood stove, which my brother built from a propane gas tank, for heating my apartment and installed a rock hearth around it for heat storage. At first this house was completely heated with wood and, as the insulation proceeded, it required less and less wood to heat it. I remember using eight cords of wood per winter at first and this went down to about five or six cords as we got the place insulated.

I finished most of my work on this apartment house around 1980 but continued to live there till 1983 when my soon-to-be second wife and I moved into another old house that we eventually purchased for $30,000. First we installed an insulated foundation in this house, and then we started insulating what was already there. I used a foot of blow in paper based insulation in the attic and also filled between the studs in the existing walls. Then I covered the inner walls with a reflective aluminum foil vapor barrier and put in one by two spacers to create a space for the foil to reflect into and sheet rocked the inside wall. I then painted all of the inner walls with vapor barrier paint.

When I finally got around to finishing the outside of the house, in 1987 after building an addition on the back, I put on an inch of foil covered foam high R sheathing and covered this with 3/8 inch rough sawn exterior plywood. The final insulation value of the outside walls is about R 40 and of the ceilings is about R 50. I went from burning four cords of wood to heat the place in the winter to only burning one cord.

While this remodeling work was being done in the seventies and eighties, I was also working as a cabinet maker and finish carpenter. In 1980 I had the privilege of doing the cabinets and finish carpentry work on a double envelope solar house in Baker City. I used some of what I learned there when I built a solar greenhouse addition onto our house in 1993. I mostly use this greenhouse for ornamental plants and for starting plants in the spring but it is large enough to grow significant amounts of food if need be. Even when closed off from the rest of the house, the temperature in there never drops below 50 degrees at night. Here are some pictures of the greenhouse addition:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/1993-08-Greenhouse-Framing06.jpg

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/1993-Fall-Greenhouse-Done01.jpg

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/2001-01-03-greenhouse.jpg

I use a large fan in the East facing window of the greenhouse room to pull cool night air through the rest of the house in the summer and shut everything up during the day. This makes the daytime temperatures in my house at least ten degrees cooler than the temperature outside. Since it rarely gets hotter than ninety degrees in Baker City this means that inside temperatures rarely get over eighty degrees.

My front and back entries both use “airlock” double doors to help keep the living space cool in the summer and warm in the winter. My laundry room is between these double doors in the back and an additional plant growing space is between the double doors in the front “airlock”.

In the early nineties I also welded up an efficient downdraft wood stove for my shop:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/downdraft.jpg

This stove has recycled firebrick in the fire box and I made the wood support grill from iron window weights that I recycled from a couple of window replacement jobs. I can generally heat my entire shop burning wood scraps from my work.

We started using CF (compact fluorescent) lights in the late eighties. Since the early CF lights were straight tubes (not the spiral tubes we see now) I recycled some old light fixtures, that were big enough to hold them, which I had saved from a remodel job a few years before. Today, almost all of my household lights are fluorescent lights. The few which are not fluorescent lights are LED lights which are coming more and more into common use.

Recently I installed a motion sensor light for my hall way. Using this I don’t have to keep a light on between my office or bedroom and the bathroom at night. The light comes on when I start walking down the hall.

Also I installed switching outlets on my stereo, computer stations and everywhere else I could. This allows me to turn off all the power to external power supplies and wall bugs using one switch. Since I started doing this my electric bill went down ten dollars per month. The Energy Star water heater I installed last fall also dropped my electric bill by ten dollars. My latest electric bill was $57 for two people in my thousand square foot house. I no longer heat with wood and my highest natural gas bill this winter was under sixty dollars. (I do have a couple cords of wood out back if we need it.) My heating and cooling bill averages $30 per month.

We can cut transportation energy costs significantly by purchasing as much food as possible from local farmers or by growing our own. In areas that are generally considered to dry or too cold to grow food year round, we can use the ORMUS minerals to increase the drought and freeze tolerance of our food plants:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/freezetolerance.htm

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/drought.htm

My growing zone is 5-6. I am convinced that the ORMUS minerals can enable people to grow plants that are best suited to the next warmer zone. (I was eating fresh lettuce from my garden on Thanksgiving after thirty days of below freezing nights.) This will help cut transportation energy use by growing a wider variety of foods locally.

Growing larger and better tasting food using no additional energy input also helps in this regard. When I was in Australia last October, an older gentleman showed me some second generation ORMUS radishes that he had grown in his garden. Some of the radish plants were taller than he was and one radish was as big around as a CD and twice as long:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/Wizards-of-Oz.htm

He said that these radishes tasted great without any of the woody feel that you might expect.

The ORMUS mineral nutrients can be concentrated from commonly available source materials using simple kitchen chemistry. One of these methods (the Wet Method) consists of taking sea water or whole sea salt dissolved in water and raising its pH to 10.78 using lye (also known as caustic soda or sodium hydroxide) to precipitate out these beneficial minerals. The precipitate contains the ORMUS minerals in a more concentrated form with reduced salt. (If you intend to consume, it should be washed two or three times.)

Materials

Almost since I started building cabinets in the mid sixties, I have been using recycled lumber as much as possible. Much of this lumber was pulled from the burn pile of a local lumber mill where broken boards and blue-pine mill ends were discarded. I built cabinets in my parent’s house using recycled pine boards when I was still in High School.

Starting in about 1975 I began building most of my own cabinet projects using this recycled lumber. I used it for all of the kitchen cabinets in the apartment house I remodeled in the late seventies. The lumber mill burn pile also often had rough-sawn boards that were cut too thin to be planed into finished lumber. I used these unfinished, rough-sawn boards on one wall in my apartment living room. I liked the look so much that I used these boards to cover one wall in my current living room and one wall in my bedroom. I also used them for the corner trim, baseboard and firewood box in my living room. Though they are totally unfinished they have aged beautifully. Just so you will know that recycled stuff is not always ugly, here is a wall that I covered with rough scrap lumber from a local mill. The shape over the door came from a yard sale but the door and ceiling are new:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/recycle10.jpg

I also built furniture using the mill end pieces. In about 1977 I built a coffee table/file cabinet for the living room of my small apartment. I still use this in my current house. Subsequent dents and dings have added to the character of this piece of furniture:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/File-Table.jpg

In 1986 I added a 32.5 foot by 18.5 foot addition to our house. I spent eighteen dollars on the framing and flooring lumber for this addition. Actually, I spent the eighteen dollars on recycled tongue and grove 2x6 for the sub-floor and used free discarded lumber from the mill for all the new framing. I built the outside walls using offset two by fours on 24 inch centers and insulated using fiberglass bat insulation. Since the wall framing was eight inches thick and the inside two by four framing was offset from the outside two by four framing the only place where wood went from inside to outside was on the corners and at the top and bottoms of the walls. The total thickness of the outside walls in the new section is ten inches and in the old portion of the house is eight inches.

Since the late seventies I have been going to garage sales. Most of my woodworking tools have come from garage sales. Many of the materials I have used on my household projects have come from garage sales and a lot of my clothing has come from garage sales. Several of the thermal windows and the insulated outside doors in my house came from garage sales. This is local recycling at its best.

Good Health

In the United States, if you loose your job, you also loose easy access to good health care. The dominant health related structures in the US are junk food suppliers and drug companies. One makes you sick and the other charges big money to treat your symptoms.

I think it is better to avoid illness as much as possible.

When I was a teenager in the sixties, I was hospitalized for depression. My depression was enhanced by low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) brought about by the sugary junk food and soft drinks I consumed as a kid. I had regular bouts with depression through the early seventies.

In 1968 my mom started the first health food store in Baker City. This was partly in response to the rising costs of health care for me and my five siblings. From this time I started moving my diet toward more healthy foods and vitamin supplements. On January 1, 1970 I resolved to quit eating meat and to eat live organic food as much as possible. I also started a totally raw diet that I continued for over three years. Many of my health problems diminished from that point but I still had some joint pain and weekly low blood sugar migraine headaches. These problems, though they were somewhat diminished, did not quit till I started ingesting the ORMUS minerals in 1996. Within a few months after starting the ORMUS, I quit having headaches and my joint pain went away. The only time it returns is if I quit taking ORMUS while traveling.

I was born on June 25, 1949. At sixty years old, I always feel better than I ever felt as a teenager. I don’t sunburn easily any more. My tan never seems to go away. I never have low blood sugar confusion any more. Even when I don’t exercise, my strength and endurance diminishes at a much slower rate than it did when I was a teen. My hair has not gotten grey, though my beard has a bit of grey.

I have not seen a conventional medical doctor for a health problem in almost forty years. I occasionally get a cold but it does not last as long as it used to.

We have anecdotal reports of improvement from virtually every health condition through the use of good diet with ORMUS mineral supplementation but the only well documented tests were done on chickens in Holland. Here is some information about those tests:

During the latter half of 2006 an agricultural feed company in the Netherlands conducted tests with broiler chicks that involved 250,000 individuals.

These animals have been supplemented with a minute dose of Sea-Crop brand ORMUS at the rate of 0.02 ml per kg of bodyweight per day. The following observations were made:

1. Mortality reduction:

In all cases there was a reduction of mortality in the treated populations as compared to the control groups. Mortality during the vulnerable first two weeks of life was reduced as much as 90%. Overall average improvement of mortality figures for the entire six week growing cycle was between 5% to 15%.

2. Foot infections:

The reduction in feet infections as compared to the control groups was as great as 85%.

3. Skin abnormalities:

The reduction in skin abnormalities was as great as 66%.

4. Weight gain:

In most tests there was increased weight gain in the treated animals averaging between 3% to 10%.

5. Breast meat:

The ratio of valuable breast meat content was increased by 10%.

6. Feed conversion efficiency:

In all cases there was an improvement in feed to meat conversion efficiency as compared to the controls. The range of improvement has been between 3% to 13%.

A benefits relative to dose study has yet to be done. All tests thus far have been done at the very low dose of 0.02 ml of Sea-Crop per kg of bodyweight per day.

These results all suggest that the ORMUS minerals are essential nutrients for plants and animals. Deficiency in these minerals seems to exacerbate health problems. Sufficiency seems to alleviate them.

Being independently healthy is a great benefit in times like these. A greater benefit arises from being able to manifest more of what you want in your life. As I understand it, this process of manifestation is described in many spiritual teachings. Here is a quote from Jesus on this subject:

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God , and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.

-Matthew 6:25-34

The key here is getting into that allowing frame of mind. You know what you want, the universal source delivers it to your door, all you have to do is open the door and let it in.

In 1970 I found that this allowing frame of mind happened when I meditated or went into a state of allowing prayer. Scientists have determined that this state of allowing corresponds to brain coherence as measured by EEG (Electroencephalogram).

When I started ingesting ORMUS in 1996 I noticed that I would go into this coherent state of mind automatically and effortlessly. This effect has actually been measured in others as they ingested various ORMUS products. You can find some of these reports at:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/coherence.htm

Here is part of one of these reports from a colleague:

“I recently was “recorded” with a 22 lead EEG while I ingested a 12 ounce glass of my magnetic trap water run through Dave Schneider’s Rare Earth Activator tube. Within minutes of ingestion of a glass of trap water I was in a deep alpha rhythm with spikes of beta. Alpha is associated with deep relaxation and beta with alertness; in Monroe parlance this “mind awake, body asleep” is called Focus 10. Rather than producing such a state in a darkened isolation booth with my eyes closed, I was sitting at the table preparing to get in to the booth, and I was having a conversation about my intention in the session.

We decided to continue with eyes open, sitting at the table. With some concentration, I was recorded in deep delta rhythm in both hemispheres and my frontal lobes producing minute-long spikes of gamma. Delta is the rhythm of deep sleep and meditation, and gamma spikes (even faster than beta) have been observed in individuals who have meditated for forty years, eight hours a day. Such individuals produced twenty or thirty second-long spikes of gamma. I was able to carry on a conversation simultaneously, though I felt somewhat phased out of my physical body as if I was having awareness of both my physical self and my energetic self at the same time. Such rhythms persisted for as long as an hour, with spikes of gamma lasting for as long as three and a half minutes. This has recently been repeated in another individual (39 year old female) with similar results from 12 ounces of trap water run through a rare earth activator tube.

It is my belief that such expanded energy states are transformational. Such expanded states produce out-of-body experiences and great clearings and healings, both for the individual and for those inclined to share it, and finally for the planet, too. I am not sure if the ORMUS improved my experience with HemiSynch™ at Monroe or if the HemiSynch™ improved my ORMUS experience, but I feel truly fortunate to have discovered both”

I have found that this quiet state of allowing is the best way to manifest the things I want in my life.

Lately I have been watching some programs on the Planet Green channel. Some of my favorite programs are:

Greenovate

Greensburg

G Word

Invention Nation

Living With Ed

Renovation Nation

Wa$ted !

World's Greenest Homes

I particularly like the programs above because they focus on solutions. They show many of the ways that ordinary people have devised to use less energy, pollute less and restore or reuse "damaged" goods. I particularly appreciate this approach since it empowers each individual.

In February of 2009 I posted the following to the ORMUS and Plants forum as a suggestion about how one might build an inexpensive greenhouse:

You might consider building a recycled greenhouse. I have built much of my house from recycled materials. Some recycled raw materials I currently have access to for future projects are recycled glass from a local glass shop:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/recycle01.jpg

Recycled lumber from the scrap pile of a local mill and from the demolition of local buildings:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/recycle02.jpg

Recycled metal roofing material from yard sales:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/recycle03.jpg

Recycled tempered glass from an old TV set on the left and recycled insulation from a yard sale in the barrel at the right:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/recycle04.jpg

Recycled packing stuff in a box on my ceramic tile floor (made using ceramic tile from a yard sale):

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/recycle05.jpg

Here are some ways I have already used these materials.

I framed half of my house using the recycled scrap lumber and have insulated a portion of my attic using recycled styrofoam as you can see at:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/recycle06.jpg

I built the gate using recycled rough lumber, put on the roof of recycled sheet metal and installed a window from a yard sale as you can see at:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/recycle07.jpg

I built a shed using recycled framing lumber, recycled electric wire, a recycled metal door and a recycled door knob. The sheathing is new and the lock is new:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/recycle08.jpg

The floor in part of my attic is made of wood from a wall I tore down and I purchased my shoes at a yard sale:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/recycle09.jpg

I would also like to build a partly underground green house to take advantage of the constant temperature five feet underground here.

I "retired" on January 1, 1970 in order to "follow my bliss". Since then I have only been "employed" by corporations for about a year. The rest of my time since then has been mostly devoted to seeking what feels best as suggested in Matthew 6:25-34.

It felt good to dig and plant my first organic garden in 1969. It felt great to eat and share the food from this garden.

It felt good to insulate and remodel the apartment house I lived in through the mid seventies to early eighties at:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/1978-2nd-St.jpg

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/2009-2nd-St.jpg

The small apartment, I lived in there, inspired me to build a subwoofer as the seat of my couch as you can see in the lower right at:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/1977-2nd-St.jpg

I also built the wall behind the couch and the stereo cabinet from lumber discarded by a local sawmill.

At the same time, I designed and built a pair of speakers. One of these can be seen at:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/speaker.jpg

While I was planning this subwoofer and the speakers for the apartment, I learned of a speaker expert, forty miles away, named Jim. Working with Jim, over the years, lead me to ORMUS. You can read this story at:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/mystory.htm

It felt good to build the cabinets and do the finish carpentry work on one of the first double envelope solar homes in Baker City in 1979:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/doublenvelope.jpg

Richard, a local friend from High School, hired me as a subcontractor on this house. You will notice that Richard was the first person to tell me about David Hudson in mystory.htm above.

The tools I bought at yard sales and the skills I developed while remodeling old houses have enabled me to design, build and explain the magnetic traps that you can find at:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/research/stattrap.htm

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/magtrap.htm

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/stortrap.htm

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/research/Vortrap.htm

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/tinytrap.htm

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/traps/housetrap.htm

My philosophy of finding the simplest and cheapest methods for making or obtaining ORMUS arose out of my lazy desire to build cabinets and houses in the simplest and cheapest way. I would not have found ORMUS if I had not wanted to experience the pleasure of listening to great music from the cheapest high-quality speakers I could build.

I have noticed that the more time I spend facing any awful reality, the less time I spend doing good for myself and others. When I used to focus on disempowering things like fear, anger, conspiracies, depression, hunger, violence and global cataclysm I became less and less able to do things for myself and others. Since I have been focusing on doing what feels best, things have lined up for me and for the ORMUS community.