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
Eastoil) and purchase our pesticides
(transported using Middle Eastoil) 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 BakerCity(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 BakerCityopposed 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 BakerCitywatershed. 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
fifteenyear 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.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/desk.jpg
A few years later, while I was in High School, I built closets
and cabinets for our bedroom:
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/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 BakerCity. 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.OrmusMinerals.com/1993-08-Greenhouse-Framing06.jpg
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/1993-Fall-Greenhouse-Done01.jpg
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/freezetolerance.htm
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/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 Australialast 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.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/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 USare 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 BakerCity. 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,
1970I 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 Netherlandsconducted 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 kingdomof 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.OrmusMinerals.com/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 Monroeparlance 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 Monroeor 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.OrmusMinerals.com/recycle01.jpg
Recycled lumber from the scrap pile of a local mill and from
the demolition of local buildings:
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/recycle02.jpg
Recycled metal roofing material from yard
sales:
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/recycle04.jpg
Recycled packing stuff in a box on my ceramic tile floor (made
using ceramic tile from a yard sale):
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/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,
1970in 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.OrmusMinerals.com/1978-2nd-St.jpg
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/mystory.htm
It felt good to build the cabinets and do the finish carpentry
work on one of the first double envelope solar homes inBakerCityin
1979:
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/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.OrmusMinerals.com/stattrap.htm
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/magtrap.htm
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/stortrap.htm
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/Vortrap.htm
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/tinytrap.htm
http://www.OrmusMinerals.com/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.
