All posts by Rick Simmons

Founding contributor and creator of Natural Earth Striving an Earth Ethic and Earth Research Explorers, a vision that accepts and includes everyone on Earth as stakeholders, stewards, explorers, researchers, creators, pattern recognizers, ground truthers, innovators, hypothesis generators, etc. Suppose you look at these two entities and consider them as a cycle. In that case, it gets everyone contributing towards a more continuous adaptive striving for desired future conditions on planet Earth from a broad scale to a fine scale. This leads us to a more holistic positive energy reality for the health of everyone, everything, everywhere on Earth. The vision includes a loving, caring, sharing, giving, forgiving, genuine kindness striving to bring about conditions of comfort, joy, love, hope, faith, and sustainable striving happiness foundation for everyone on Earth, transitioning most laws, rules, regulations, policies, to holistic prescriptive advice.

A tree as a microcosmic symbol of potential future functioning

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The tree is an illustrative example of how we could function in our world. We must look at ourselves like a tree where all of the people on planet Earth are represented in the nutrient-absorbing roots of the tree. Simply put, the vascular cambium in the bole of the tree transfers nutrients and water to the leaves and provides the ability for photosynthesis in the leaves using chlorophyll and the sun’s light to produce energy to grow the tree systematically. The nutrients in my illustrative example are the people on our planet. The roots represent all the people everywhere on Earth because everyone on Earth knows most about what they know about. Hence, everyone is important and matters to the rest of us. This unifying principle brings us together in a well-intentioned way and allows the working together paradigm to create potential leaders everywhere on Earth. In essence, everyone becomes a leader, relatively speaking, by doing all they can to help make the world a better place cumulatively speaking. It does not matter the hierarchy, nor does it matter the actual contributions that individuals are making as long as they contribute to a well-planned holistic ecological system to the best of our current ability, knowing that we must continually learn and adapt as we know more in the future. The information from the people’s knowledge (which was formerly taken from us) transfers up the tree’s bole to each appropriate multidisciplinary, holistically scientific, and academic knowledge-building Leaf. Energy is created and passed along to the rest of the tree from the bole (integrative functioning and knowledge accumulating growth), including the roots (people) for continual learning and adaptation as well as ecological prescriptive advice for people to live in a sustainable striving way. I believe everyone on Earth should have at least one ecological niche role as a part of at least one ecological niche organization. One of the most critical ecological niche roles is being a parent or family member. Many others include community members, world society/community members, and part of everything and everyone, including nature and God. We must transform all organizations worldwide into ecological niche organizations to maximize the well-intentioned, connected, and integrated functioning to benefit all and everything on Earth. World without end.

Out of context behavior, conventional blame games, liability machines, and malfeasance or holistic problem solving

It is rather interesting to me that the organizations and individuals with connectivity to those organizations that seek to blame individuals for all the problems on Earth may be the problem themselves.  I learned a long time ago that problem-solving is no easy task.  Closer to reality, it takes a long time to define problems.  Meanwhile, all those who are good at judging people, taking things out of context, playing blame games, or fooling people are only hurting themselves in the long run.  It is interesting how far people blame all the problems on one group or individual, for example.  Terrorism is such a thing as well.  Instead of trying to learn from our pseudo-systematic conventional functioning holistically, we all prefer to rush to judgment and blame those people who do the killing instead of those who are controlling.  We should work together with nature and every human being to bring world peace by loving and caring about one another first.  It concerns me that we have become all about being perceptively perfect.  These are what I call people in leadership positions who are not natural leaders.  People in leadership positions do everything for themselves and their politically allied associates.

In contrast, natural leaders do everything for everybody and everything else.  People in leadership positions make it appear that everything is just excellent and perfect.  On the other hand, leaders are real people who try to solve problems holistically, striving to do no harm and erring on the side of caution.  Leaders tend to blame others because they surround themselves with the types of people who are top-down judges and have a self-perception that they are perfect and can do no wrong.  Real leaders admit that problems are often more integrated and systematic and endemic to the way we have been conditioned to behave in our world.  It is time to transform.  We must stop looking up to people just in leadership positions because they are in leadership positions.  It is time to start solving problems and holistically preventing more and more problems from occurring in the future.  I have had enough control, power, and authority from those who primarily care about the bottom-line functioning and conventional stock market performance.  I believe that the priority ought to get everyone on Earth functioning together in a way that helps us survive in harmony with our society and the natural environment.  We must plan out a world based on learning, education, and knowledge-building for survival, expecting that the world will not end, at least anytime soon.  Everyone must act.

We can no longer let those in leadership positions determine our multidimensional fate.  We must look to those natural leaders who are responsible and knowledgeable about things of substance that matter more instead of focusing so much on pretending to be perfect while our society, families, individuals, natural environment, life support systems, and planet Earth get impacted detrimentally.  We must minimize the risk of our collective and integrated ecological perturbations into the future.  To do this, we must become a knowledge-building system that can visualize where, when, how, and why we must do things.  We can no longer play political games with outdated political tactics like out-of-context rules, laws, and regulations.  We must stop all the violence all over the world and give hope to those afraid of being impacted by the way things are in this world.  We must look over the horizon and anticipate what will happen to us and our planet if we do not alter course.  We must trust in our natural leaders.  Our real leaders may be all of us.  We must act according to our knowledge, ability, experience, and desire to improve the world.  However, it must be planned first by those who know more about how things can continuously adapt to a sustainable, striving world.  Those with more responsibility ought not just to feel confident in learning as it is easy to know out-of-context “facts” when you are in the know.  We must stop taking things from over-topped people and giving things to others for non-well-intentioned reasons.  We must work together and share what we know with those with more knowledge, skills, and abilities in research and interdisciplinary science for the most well-intentioned purposes, multidimensionally speaking.  We must know in context with everything else; otherwise, it is futile to solve problems because solving problems conventionally creates more problems somewhere else or at another place in time.  I favor holistic planning for the future.

Excessive Rules and laws in a free world.

Excessive rules and laws function as a way to control society and what we can and cannot do while working every day. However, this notion is flawed because ultra-opportunists have evolved to do absolutely anything else to one another to ultra-compete. Many have the philosophy that if it is not against the law, why not ultra-compete in that manner instead? We should not adopt a philosophy that anything else goes if it is not against the law, policy, and regulations. That is one reason the law is flawed. It is an infinite concept, and even if we had everyone on this planet writing laws, we would never be able to encompass all of nature and our functioning in every possible way. It is a futile effort. We must move beyond law, policy, and regulations to holistic prescriptive advice, education, and knowledge transference rather than law, policy, and regulations, which mainly exclude people by getting them in trouble instead of embracing and helping them. Holistic, prescriptive advice, knowledge, continuous learning, and education are all about helping people instead of hurting people. It is an all-encompassing concept that strives to do the right thing through learning in a loving and caring way instead of an ultra-competing way. Wouldn’t it be great if we all helped one another understand instead of wasting time memorizing laws, policies, and regulations while neglecting to transform our planet into a more sustainable striving functioning? In our current functioning, we care more about laws, policies, and regulations than people. We have evolved to believe that law, policy, and regulations are an end where that should be put in a knowledge education and holistic prescriptive advice context to simplify our functioning and switch our focus to system integration planning and the fundamentals of holistic functioning in a genuinely kind way. These should be the means to the end, the end being a sustainable, striving planet Earth in all its functioning and dynamic structure.

Too many out of context rules, policy, law, regulations, and complexity is destroying society and our natural environment

Excessive anthropocentric behavior in the form of rules, policies, laws, regulations, and procedures is driving people crazy in our society today. Every day, there is more and more to think about. Imagine knowing all the laws, regulations, policies, and procedures for every organization you work with, deal with, and do business with, not to mention all criminal law, all business law, employment law, all tax law, etc. It is ridiculous, and it is contributing to our insanity as well as itinerant over-topping behavior by the elite and those who have the power to control others with attorneys, laws, regulations, etc. It is interesting, but one of the main problems is when someone comes along who has the desire to help transform our planet in a sustainable striving way, there are an infinite number of ways to throw curve balls into progress because of all this manufactured anthropocentric complexity (Infinite variabilization). Imagine the people that love and care in this world and what they are going through. On top of all the manufactured processes to remember, people are trying to work, deal with excessive bureaucracy, contribute to society, bring up their families, be responsible, and contribute to our functioning in the best way they know how. Does anyone wonder where mental illness comes from? Only those who can try to stay on top of all the essential procedures and processes can survive in this world where those who can contribute are often subservientized. It is weird. In our society, those who have a lot to offer our world are being over-topped by the consequences of our reactively complex society. People have learned how to ultra-compete with the manufactured complexity. This behavior has resulted in stagnation, complacency, and status-quo static behavior, leading to horrific behavior by some executives, managers, administrators, attorneys, investigators, criminal justice managers and their employees, regulators, and anyone who cares more about process and procedure than working together to save our people, our planet and everything about it.

Perspectives on planning planet Earth and working together

Let’s remove our blinders and look at our planet as more of an integrated planning system. We must stop conceiving of the world in one way or the other. In other words, the political systems, governments, and businesses should all work together as well as individuals. It appears that by creating named systems like capitalism, democracy, monarchy, communism, socialism, dictatorship, etc, we are neglecting the potential of what we can be in a more integrated holistic functioning. To me, it is not one way or the other. We need to plan things so that our integrated functioning is reasonable, rational, and more nature-like. We need to strive to become more natural functioning because it makes sense in terms of the demonstrative simplicity and efficiency that nature teaches us. In many ways, wild nature functions in ways that minimize waste and create little pollution (except for methane and naturally occurring greenhouse gases or volcanoes). Everything works together and is related to everything else. Wouldn’t it be great to learn this simple lesson about nature and natural functioning and allow ourselves to mimic nature as much as possible while living on our planet? We need to connect with nature in every way and integrate our functioning with that of wild nature because, after all, even though we have become more anthropocentric, more materialistic, and more resource exploitive and polluting over time in every sense of the word, we are still part of nature as well as God. Wouldn’t it be great if we could look at ourselves as the children of Mother Nature and children of God at the same time? I believe nature and God are an integrated concept, not a divisive one or the other. Likewise, I think we ought to extend this concept to include transforming anthropocentric boundaries of counties, states, countries, towns, etc, to a more continuous regional concept, keeping the old borders to identify where you are from from a broad perspective. We know people from Sudan who call themselves Africans, but it is sort of in a transitory region between the continent of Africa and the Middle East region. It gets confusing, but wouldn’t it be great if we all called ourselves Earthlings first? We are all in this together and ought to start functioning together all around the Earth in a well-planned, holistic way with the most responsible, well-intentioned people in positions of integrated, holistic planning. We must look at our planet more continuously and rid ourselves of the perception that everything has to be behind a border or boundary and segmented out from the rest of us. We must eliminate the perception that there is an “us” and a “them.” I favor wilderness because “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”(Thoreau) In other words, I believe we can all function closer to nature while at the same time being relatively speaking part of the wilderness. It is a continuum from more anthropocentric wilderness to natural environment wilderness to natural Earth striving development. In these situations, ecology and geography are very important, as well as all science and other integrated disciplines, especially those that function in a holistic, well-intentioned manner.

The most holistic and well-intentioned human endeavor is educational enlightenment in all its integrated aspects and functioning. Therefore, we must transform ourselves from an out-of-context, segmented, rule and law-based, countrified, insulated, and isolated functioning to that of a well-intentioned sustainable striving and holistically integrated functioning that is based on knowledge acquisition and helping one another learn instead of ultra-competing people to death. We must stop all the fighting, litigiousness, war, crime creation, illness creation, and premature death. We need absolutely everyone on board to do whatever they can to help our planet and people recover from years of degradation, killing, illness, epidemics, and loss of nature. We must transform into an embracing, loving, and caring community for one another at several levels, multi-dimensionally. Even communities should be an ecological niche organization integrated with everything else in nature. They need to work together with everyone else, and all individuals should function in their ecological niche roles on the continuum from more public benefit producing to whatever they want to do in this world to contribute to our collective functioning.

Figurative, authoritative, imaginative, and regulatory borders and boundaries

Adding borders and boundaries to our natural world was like adding more complexity to nature when we needed to simplify. The complexity leads to divisiveness and contributes to ultra-competition and war-like behaviors because we focus on our differences primarily rather than our unified strengths of similarity. I believe it should be the other way around. We should focus on our unifying strengths first as a priority, then celebrate our diversity as a source of enlightenment. We should be continuously learning and adapting as those with different perspectives contribute what they have to contribute to those who can research and understand how to put knowledge together in an integrated way. After all, learning and education should be one of the primary goals of an advanced knowledge-striving, sustainable striving planet Earth. The other way is about racing to get an authority position in our society because it is easier to control your destiny and have information from sources in the know. If things do not change, it would be prudent to tell your kids to strive to become managers, administrators, bosses, criminal justice employees, lawyers, legislators, judges, finance, banking, real estate moguls, traditional investors, business people in leadership positions, and people of elitism and status. If things do change, we should give our children enough exposure to holistic methods and sustainable striving concepts such that they can develop a context that leads them in a direction that brings more harmonious and unifying knowledge creation for the benefit of all people and the natural environment (which includes human society in my opinion). It would be great to transform former roles into more enlightened knowledge-creating and striving roles. Many people employed in those roles of the past have tremendous potential and brain power, so I do not believe that it will be too difficult to provide the necessary transitory mentoring and education to have them transform themselves into roles that offer much more sustainable striving beneficially impacting behaviors on this planet. We must all work together to help one another strive to be what we as individuals can become according to the sustainable striving context rather than the rigid, out-of-context structures and functions contained in countrified structures of complexity. In many respects, we need to be more extensive rather than intensive to tread lightly on our ecosystems, life support systems, people, and entire natural environment. After all, aren’t these the foundation of our survival on planet Earth?

Moving beyond privilege and elite status and spreading sustainable striving behaviors around the world

Elitism and rights of the privileged “American” and others that are similar have become a static concept in many people’s minds. I believe that many people have become complacent in the USA and other places and have given up striving for more because of their elite status and privileged attitude. Many have lost touch with trying to live life in a sustainable striving way. Instead, they fail to adapt instead of relying on their historical status. Because this status has been known as the desired definition of success and destination of the world’s inhabitants, many have become arrogant and complacent, forgetting the essential ideals to strive for. I have suggested that it is best to embrace the entire world and help it not be like America necessarily but strive to be themselves by finding their own identity while having others around the world mentor and help the less fortunate areas that need help. It is best to seek best practices from everywhere worldwide as long as they are contextually appropriate. However, many are more in need of significant help. At some level, we need to unify and embrace those things that are sustainable striving while providing incentives to work towards sustainable striving behaviors and actions that will propel us towards a more desirable, continuously striving, dynamic state of being on planet Earth. Status quo static behavior fosters elitism and conceited reliance on the “way things are,” relying on the associative powers in control that are not adapting to changing conditions sustainably. Oddly, dogmatic static laws, policies, procedures, and the “way things are” have given rights and privileges to certain people who are part of the system or controllers. Their sole reliance on these rigid structures and over bureaucratic functioning has created a system for the means, not the ends. We have over-complexified everything in an out-of-context way and have expected everyone to deal with all the complexity, laws, regulations, policies, rules, and expectations. It is an impossible task. I believe life is difficult enough without all this extra baggage. We must simplify and plan in a more holistic, well-intentioned manner that considers the needs and wants of human miracles first. We must plan with a sustainable striving context of holistic prescriptive advice from those who know the most, love the most, care the most, and have the most knowledge instead of those who want to control the most or have power and authority over us as a primary individual need. Unfortunately, we have adopted a system of laws and policy as a primary means to live on this planet because it only creates authority power for the elite when it is not the power and authority we should strive for. We should strive to live on this planet in a way that minimally detrimentally impacts individuals, families, communities, regions, the natural environment, our life support systems, and planet Earth itself. Wouldn’t it be great to get everyone on board? I am not suggesting eliminating jobs. I think we ought to transform them into more in context ecologically beneficial roles in society rather than firing those who were part of the way things were.

Pangea as an illustrative paradigm for the future

People learn about Pangea when studying geology, Earth science, plate tectonics, or continental drift. Wouldn’t it be great if we could imagine the physical or anthropocentric boundaries that have been created didn’t exist? I believe that it is the borders and boundaries created either as a physical Earth process like separate continents or by human beings that create division, separation, divisiveness, ultra competition, blame games, geographic shell games, and ultimately war, terrorism, and violence. It does not make sense. It would be a better ecological, geographical principle to diversify through unity rather than having diversity through divisiveness, argument, complexity, and conventional politics and war. We all need to work together holistically to save our planet rather than controlling nature from a dominating anthropocentric point of view. We are not as omnipotent as many pretend to be. We are all in this together and ought to all work together to enable us to survive on this planet for eternity. Our conventional “way things are world” will not get us there soon. Therefore, we must transform from a reactive law and politics ultra-competitive culture to a holistic, well-planned, and cohesive working together culture. We must recognize that we are all in this together on Earth. Therefore, we must all be included in this effort. We must be led by those most responsible who are not necessarily politically attractive. It is sort of a weird concept that we elect people who believe in anything that resembles our current functioning because of all the devastatingly impacting occurrences and conditions happening every day worldwide. It has gotten to the point that we seek only to condemn individuals who pull literal and figurative triggers while neglecting to focus on the broader, more detrimental systematic integral functioning that has evolved. It is best to transform from the continual creation of a more and more reactive complex society to a more integrative, well-planned, loving, and caring world that believes more in holistic ecological prescriptive advice and knowledge acquisition functioning in an educational context. We must continually adapt to changing conditions and continuously learn over time. This is one of the essential concepts because we have often created a static perception in our world, neglecting the ever-changing dynamic nature functioning closer to reality than our out-of-context static anthropocentric functioning. Imagining a world free of rigid boundaries and borders like the Pangea supercontinent will help us get our minds around what needs to be planned in the near future. Unfortunately, those itinerant functioning power competitors in our way things are the world will want maximum ultra-competitive advantage in our present way of doing things before planning.

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Drugs and medicine in a way things can be world.

Drugs and medicine should all be the responsibility of the people who know the most about drugs and medicine and their physiological effects, psychological effects, and overall cumulative impact on individual health and societal health. All drugs should go through an interdisciplinary research potential problem exploration first. Then, all precautions and holistic prescriptive advice should be given to the people wanting or needing a specific drug. However, I believe that once we transform to a more sustainable striving planet Earth, there will be less demand for certain drugs and medicine as our society gradually becomes healthier at an increasing rate temporally speaking. In essence, I believe that some drugs may help society, but research must find this to be relatively accurate before advocating for them. Likewise, anyone who decides they would like to use a specific drug may want to get involved in a continual research project meant to help determine the longer-term effects and impacts of their use holistically. Because the context in the world is changing from a getting people in trouble context and war to a loving and helping one another context, it will be acceptable to talk about drugs and their impacts and effects. One of their impacts and effects on society is the increased violence associated with many drugs illicit status. We must stop the war immediately and make all acceptable and approved drugs available through conventional professional outlets where the ingredients and contents of any drug will be researched to the best of our ability. This is while the individual taking the drug has to understand that there is risk in almost anything you take that is a manufactured chemical or a natural poison. I believe that living in a more natural way, closer to nature, and living and loving produces natural brain chemicals that are the best, most healthy chemicals for you because they are naturally made in your body. If your body is healthy, you will feel healthy and produce more natural chemicals, including the love chemical, the strongest and best drug. Wouldn’t it be great to spread love worldwide by increasing the amounts of beneficial hormones and chemicals naturally so we do not have to make ourselves feel better all the time artificially?

Furthermore, drugs and medicine can have benefits that outweigh the risks. We experience precautionary statements about research findings today, but wouldn’t it be great to increase the sample size to everyone so we can know the impacts of various drugs and medicines closer to reality? It is the right thing to do, and I suggest we start immediately.

Fundamental education in nature, love, and holistic integrated spirituality.

The most essential and significant education everyone should have is a fundamental education in nature, love, and holistic, integrated spirituality. It should be a 6-12 month intensive class prepared by the most respected interdisciplinary experts. It will only be produced once and distributed to everyone in every language. It will serve as each individual’s foundation for living on planet Earth. As such, it will contribute immensely toward transforming planet Earth into a more sustainable striving, loving, and caring place to live. It will be the first intensive bit of holistic prescriptive advice offered to everyone. Eventually, holistic prescriptive advice will transform and replace traditional reactionary law.