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I am writing this on the solstice but will probably not send the post until after Christmas, but I don't know for sure yet if that is the case. As you know, I wear a few hats, but when I check what people are reading, it is very often the astrological e-mails that have the most readership.

We are living in difficult times. We can ignore the bigger picture and put our attention on our own lives or we can try to make sense of the events . . . by connecting as many dots as we can.

As I have mentioned several times, I had a vision many years ago. I want to say it was in 1972, but I might be slightly off. It definitely was not before that year because I remember where I was at the time, in a sort of tree house in Hawaii. It was quite magnificent and spacious with a marvelous view of the sunsets. I am mentioning that detail since most people interested in Vedic architecture would not have built a place like that, but the entrance to the main house did face east, what we in Hawaii call mauka (towards the mountains) or makai (towards the water). Islands can be a bit like sombreros. One is often on the rim, but disorientation can be avoided if one remembers to look at the mountains for centering.

This was a very important time in my life. Jupiter was in Sagittarius as it is now but Neptune was also in Sagittarius and both were on my Moon in the 9th house. Now, of course, Neptune is moving through my first house, and it does feel like the beginning of a new spiritual cycle. I spent more than seven years in semi-retreat. The opus I was never able to complete dealt with how to recover innocence. One loses innocence when the real world encroaches on our purity, and I would actually like you to pause a moment to consider the ramifications. What if we are essentially pure but life deals us this card and then another and another and sooner or later, we are bruised and perhaps scarred.

Wall Street

For the sake of context, I would like to mention a few of the incidents that challenged my inner equilibrium. I have told bits and pieces about my brief stint on Wall Street. I was working for the U.S. Trust Company, a very old and dignified investment bank that recruited mainly Ivy Leaguers. Accounts under five million were discouraged but occasionally accepted if the applicant was young and stood to inherit a fortune at some point. Five million in 1964 was worth a great deal more than the same sum today, but let's just say that the rich were invested in a way that resulted in almost no taxation whereas I was paying 14% on my starting salary of $7000 a year. That did not bother me so much as the decisions about investments. Obviously, everything was about money, and there was little if any attention given to the impact of investment policies. If there are others who have dabbled in economics, then it would be fair to say that Wall Street is about moving money from one pocket to another. Except for an occasional new stock issue or bond, nothing of any importance at all was happening EXCEPT that those with the best investment strategies were getting richer while others were getting poorer. What I am trying to suggest is that all that movement had a net effect that is utterly meaningless except for the winners and losers. Developing countries were not escaping poverty and corporations were not interested in equitable distributions of assets as their goal is enhancement of the bottom line. In short, the job was not interesting or meaningful, but those were the days when companies were not obligated to hire women so I was basically lucky to have a job.

My boss was in charge of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries and when he was away, I had to cover for him. As the only woman in the research department, I had been assigned to the food and beverage industry. That did eventually change, but I took some trips and attended a lot of luncheons and came to realize that we were heading for the day when all supermarket food would be fake. To be honest, I had not anticipated plastic and nano particles. Rather, I thought soy beans were going to be used to imitate just about everything. Hold that thought.

The first enormous crisis was Vatican II when I was covering for my boss who was on a long summer vacation. The idea that someone in her early 20s could have even the slightest understanding of how to invest in pharmaceuticals was ludicrous, but there was a vice president who was seasoned. In a nutshell, the phone rang constantly and very rich people were asking which stock to buy if the Pope approves birth control. It meant studying the Vatican and the psychology of the Church, studying the various methods of birth control, and studying the histories of the companies who were players in this area. Since childhood, people always told me their secrets, but when this pattern repeated on Wall Street, I was taken by surprise. I had no idea how the whistleblowers even thought of calling the research department of a bank. That said, I want to say that all the whistleblowers were women, and they were motivated to unburden themselves by telling what they knew.

Thalidomide

Meanwhile, I was looking at horrifying pictures of thalidomide babies. The first question I asked the first whistleblower was why such a diabolical drug made it onto the market. The response was that management goes into the laboratory of the pharmaceutical company to push the researchers harder to beat the competition to the market with new wonder drugs. I could see how that could happen, but I asked how the data could be ignored. She said, "They just hide the dead monkeys." In short, animals that do not survive the trials are not counted.

Many years later, I read that Bush Sr. met Dan Quayle while sitting on the board of Eli Lilly. I am not checking the factoids now but I am sure someone will investigate this. I am relying on my memory. What I said to a friend was that once sworn into office, thalidomide will be declared a new wonder drug for something or other. I was astonished that this happened so quickly after the inauguration, but it was marketed then as a veterinary medicine . . . which is still horrifying.

Eventually, I was reassigned to a job created especially for me. The vice president told me that someone else would be taking over the food industry, and yet another person would handle retail trade. It took three people to replace me. I sat there quietly in his huge corner office and finally asked, "Am I fired?" He said, "No, we have decided we would like you to think. You will not be required to write anything, produce anything, or do anything except to follow your mind wherever it leads." I was stunned because they rate productivity so I asked what he really wanted. He said, "Well we got where we are by recognizing new industries and investing in them before they became popular." I said, "Oh, so you want me to look at desalinization of water and oceanographic mining and things like that?" He said, "I knew we picked the right person."

So, I could read anything I wanted, fly anywhere I wanted, phone anyone I wanted. In a kind of a way, it was a dream job, but I was anti-war and was convinced the U.S. was going to turn Vietnam into a hell hole. I ranted and raved but people thought I was crazy.

On weekends, I played mahjong with Japanese delegates to the U.N. and one day, they said they had to leave early to go back to work. I asked what kind of work was so important that they had to work on a Saturday night. They said, "the balance of payments". It's a little hard to translate what I said, but let's say I wasn't satisfied with the answer. They realized this and apologized for the secrecy. I said, "You want to estimate the effect of U.S. procurement when the war in Vietnam is expanded." They were shocked and said, "How did you know? No one else knows about this." I said I was just guessing but it seemed probable.

Reel Back a Few Years

Meanwhile, destiny was working hard. A close friend of someone who worked with my father was traveling to Japan at the same time I was. We met briefly at the Honolulu Airport in 1962. Some years later, Paul Langer met my father at a party and asked if he knew someone named Ingrid. He asked my father if I was still interested in Asia and if I still spoke Japanese. My father, always discrete, told Paul that he could phone me and ask those questions himself. I will omit a lot of colorful details but Paul worked for the Rand Corporation and wanted to hire me. I had no idea at the time what the Rand Corporation did but I agreed to meet Paul in D.C. He introduced me to people at the White House and at the State Department and after half a day of shaking hands, I had been offered several jobs in Vietnam. I look back on my decision and ask myself a lot of questions, but I chose the State Department because the boss-to-be was anti-war. I could not say that about the White House and, to be honest, I honestly did not know what the Rand Corporation was doing, supposedly a psychological study to see what motivates Viet Cong to fight or to defect. The answer was that they liked watching television, films like Batman, and it was better than starving or getting killed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Obviously, they were interviewing very immature combatants who probably had no idea what the war was all about . . . and just for record, I do not think American soldiers knew why either.

Vietnam

Once again, I encountered a lack of ethics. Politicians came across as personally ambitious. If I had to make a sweeping statement, I might state what is obvious. Wall Street is about money. I did not think at the time that people were necessarily greedy. They simply collected money the way some people collect postage stamps or baseball souvenirs. They are just placating their fantasies. There is nothing inherently evil about wanting to be comfortable in life, but there are meaningful occupations and industries and ones that definitely need to be replaced by better models.

In Vietnam, the rank and file were interested in promotions, not money. No one was really in a position to get rich unless they were selling war materials. That, of course, is an immense problem. I learned a lot about ambition and how ambitious people take credit for things they never did. They are masters of photo ops and that is actually their main claim to fame.

War

There is a lot to despise about war: the motivation; the dislocation, the death and suffering, and the ripping apart of the values that sustain culture. We could take something as personal as family or as dangerous as Agent Orange or assassinations. I was single, but many of the people in my office as well as those in uniform, on both sides, were married. It is not sane to risk one's life for anything but a truly noble purpose, but it is particularly insane to risk one's life when one has children who depend on their parents. I spent a lot of my free time volunteering at an orphanage, but the Achilles heel for politicians is their popularity. I think most politicians aspire to be dictators but when they are forced to participate in elections, their personalities as well as their platforms have to popular. In the beginning of a war, they dominate by demonizing an enemy that is usually completely fabricated. How can one get big contracts for bombs and uniforms if there is no hatred.

There was absolutely no reason for the U.S. to go to war in Vietnam. Well, there might have been a reason, but not one for the masses. Maybe I need to state this differently. If you asked a Vietnamese person about the war, he or she would often say something to the effect of, "Mademoiselle, we are not dropping bombs on your cities, why are you bombing our cities?" Exactly! Neither Vietnamese civilians nor military did anything to annoy the U.S. or its citizens.

The Gap

Okay, I had a job in Vietnam. I worked as an economist in an office with lots and lots of other economists. The word that dominated discussions was "gap"; and it referred to the budget. There is income in one column and expenditures in another. The last numbers in each column need to match or there is a gap.

I was the sole person assigned to the income side. Loosely translated, that means taxes. The Vietnamese had a French system, a shattered remnant of a French system. People filed tax information and then waited for an audit and a bill. If no bill was received within three years, they were off the hook for that year. All but three assessors had been drafted so hardly anyone was sent bills which meant the gap was huge.

POTUS is dealing with this in the U.S. and will probably announce a change very similar to what I proposed in Vietnam. I suggested that the income tax be replaced by a consumption tax that was only applied to luxury items. In a war, some people make a lot of money so I proposed enormous taxes on non-essentials. To offset some of the resistance, I proposed a lottery for savings. Banks paid very low interest on deposits but every month, some accounts could be doubled or tripled by a carefully administered lottery that would encourage deposits. These were simple ideas with hundreds of pages of documentation, but the Diet (parliament) accepted them, and the North Vietnamese kept the system because it was easy to administer and fair. Food and medicine and clothing were not taxed. Education was not taxed. Basically, frivolous purchases were taxed and everyone else was left alone.

I like the idea for the U.S. also because it would take the IRS out of the law enforcement business and tax black money which exists outside the system as it now stands. By definition, black money is essentially hidden, but when the funds are used, the purchases can be taxed. For example, luxury homes and yachts can be taxed. I believe everyone has a right to a decent living space, but very few people need many homes.

Gossip has it that Trump might be leaning in a similar direction, and I am hearing a figure of 17%. I think that figure is way too high. The government can nationalize the Federal Reserve and make many other simple changes that are fair so long as vast resources do not go missing.

Imports

In Vietnam, imports also fell on my desk because they were not simply contributing to the gap, but they were taxed so that meant that the law enforcement aspect of goods moving across borders overlapped somewhat with my work on fiscal changes. Once again, there were whistleblowers and once again the callers found my number and told their stories; but a flight from Laos to Saigon does not take long so whether the issue was gold smuggling or narcotics, mostly opium, there was usually only 15 minutes or less to organize a raid. The raids made a lot of people very unhappy. The press, of course, seized the photo ops and there were lots of promotions for the people involved in cleaning up corruption. Of course, once the noise died down, the vaults were emptied so the people at the top were only a little inconvenienced by the raids.

It took me a long time to figure out who was behind the smuggling. Before leaving Washington, I had been briefed at the State Department. To tell you the truth, I never met so many incompetents in such a short time. For example, "We have no intelligence operations in Vietnam, no foreign operations at all. The CIA does not operate overseas." A few hours later, there would be another briefing, "We have no agents in Vietnam, but if one happens to ask for your assistance, please give them your full cooperation." I was born with something between my ears but evidently that did not happen for some people, and it looked to me like no one was trained and no one cared that this was the case.

How to Move up the Ranks

On Wall Street, promotions were based partly on productivity and partly on the value of the work performed. In the government, rank is determined by how many people are under one's supervision so, of course, there is strong motivation to say that the problem is that the staff is too small . . . which means more recruiting and a bigger budget to cover the employees. Nothing will ever get done to a high standard if merit is not assessed. Moreover, by aiming higher, there is very little motivation to solve problems if people will buy the claim that understaffing is the cause rather than incompetence or laziness.

To put this in context, I read that Trump has ordered all State Department employees in Syria to evacuate immediately. That is 2000 people in a tiny country. What are they doing? If it is anything like Vietnam, I am sure that only a handful of the people who are posted there are actually doing any meaningful work. How many people does it take to issue visas or attend diplomatic functions?

Recap

This is getting long, but a few of you might still be reading. Let me recap. Wall Street was about affluence. Vietnam was about ambition. I went to India next, and it gave me a lesson in apathy. It was actually more difficult for me to deal with apathy than affluence and ambition. "Memsahib, it be this way 5000 years, why you want to change it?" My title was "Special Assistant to the Ambassador for Low-End Poverty." Finally, I thought, I could do something more in alignment with my values, but what I encountered was a tremendous cultural conflict between farmers and men in business suits. The farmer might look at the uncomfortably dressed advisors and say, "I be here today because my father and his father and my grandfather's father and so on for hundreds of generations grew this kind of rice." No one told me that my job involved business interests so I tended to watch and not speak.

The Common Denominator

To be honest, I really did not know how to function in India but I connected with the Tibetan community in exile and that is another story for another time. I simply want to say that there were similar forces behind the thalidomide horrors, the opium trade, and the pressure put on Indian agriculture to embrace the technology of what I recognized as a rogue industry.

I had been subject to government medicine for four years and had been medically evacuated and heard the doctors say I was dying, but I knew the doctors had no idea what was wrong. A Nepali friend came to the hospital in Honolulu and said, "You have to get out of here. I will come back tonight with clothes and help you to sneak out." It took seven weeks for the doctor to realize I was gone. He called my mother to ask her if she knew where I was because he happened to visit the lab and the technician asked if he wanted to see the report. Only then did he remember he had a patient. I am sure some hospitals are better managed, but not that one.

Technically, I still had a job and I was supposed to get well and go back, but no one seemed to care one way or the other. The local doctor in Kona simply told me to rest and when I got stronger, I could talk back to my parents. I guess he was not very observant either.

In brief, I think I reached my limit with consensus reality, and it was time for my soul to lead. I quit in 1970, interesting stories there also, but I spent the whole of the 70s searching.

Visions

In one vision, I saw that when Saturn and Pluto transited Capricorn, the systems that we know will collapse. The replacements were already gestating and would roll out. When I sought further details about the collapse, I was shown it would involve authority in all forms such as the misuse of influence, including information, and all the motives behind the abuses.

A quarter of a century later when Gail and I were trying to take this to the next level, I mentioned that we must prevent another collapse of civilization such as happened with the sinking of Atlantis. I told her that many on Earth today had been involved with the events leading to the sinking as well as the peopling of the successor populations that would have to create new systems that were less flawed. Every time I was away from my desk, especially when driving, whole manifestos would drop into my mind with new constitutions, a totally different approach to education, equitable business models, farming plans, economic systems based on a combination of need and merit. No one would be overlooked or abandoned but there would be caps on the limit individuals could claim.

Gail and I did some very deep inner journeying, and I saw something I will not explain in technical details but all the people of power would be surrendering. I saw long lines and occasionally faces I knew from the news queued before a table where some officials accepted their surrender. They were giving up crowns, scepters, titles, ownership, property, influence, and it was peaceful. It was orderly and peaceful.

Indictments

Now, we hear there are over 61,000 sealed indictments. That number has not been plucked out of thin air. There is a list of courts and the number of indictments filed in each court. Then, there is total for each state. California tops the list with over 10,000 indictments. Wyoming and Vermont had the fewest. We have already seen unparalleled resignations from high corporate and governmental positions, not just the U.S. but worldwide. In the U.S., one indictment has now been unsealed. It focuses primarily on four individuals living in Panama who are alleged to be involved in money laundering and more.

This is not conspiracy theory. The primary targets are people involved in human trafficking, including pedophilia and organ harvesting. I cannot imagine there is a single person of decency who would not wish an end to this deplorable epidemic.

The deeper question, I believe, is not who did what but why? How damaged is our race? I do not think we can fix the problem until we go way beyond the individuals involved and examine society itself. I do believe that we have choice in what we allow to influence us UNLESS we are being manipulated by exotic technologies and disgusting imprinting that causes us to veer off course. This does bring me full circle to the issue of recovering our original innocence.

Original Innocence

We do need to examine input: parental input, religious input, educational material, jobs, and so on and so forth. We need to ask why we have wars and not peace when most people will probably maintain that they prefer peace. Why are we depicting violence instead of respect? Why do we pillage when we could be building for posterity?

To round out this introduction, I would like to reiterate that the alternatives have been gestating, but in a rather strange way. By definition, an alternative is not mainstream and the metaphor I used in Hawaii was that everyone seemed to be engaged in highly creative work but we were all scattered on the rim of the sombrero and could not see what the people on the other side of the mountain were doing. Thanks to the Internet, there is much more sharing now. That is a mixed bag, and I would like to suggest that we use tremendous discernment and try to find the original material so we are not fed rubbish by people who only regurgitate second- or third-hand material. It takes a long time to reach a point of clarity, especially if one is charged with revamping an entire educational or political system.

Rumors

The rumors are that the pedophiles are the first target because the industry is enormous and is the source of funding for other illicit activities. This is therefore not just blood curdling but also dangerous because of the domino effect. So, the indictments and arrests are like defanging very dangerous snakes. The amount of time and organization it has taken to get this far is mind-boggling, but there is already speculation about round two. Most seem to think it will involve the pharmaceutical industry.

My own feeling is that chemical medicine has always been dangerous. The difference between then and now is that whereas chemicals used to endanger an unfortunate individual here and there, they are now a threat to the entire Planet. When I allow myself to ask how long it will take to re-educate academicians, scientists, researchers, students, doctors, and the general public, I think years and years, perhaps two, three, or even four generations, but the most difficult and decisive shift occurs in the early stages.

Rabbit Holes

During the Neptune transit of my ascendant, I spent a lot of time in a rabbit hole. Most of you will remember that, but when I emerged, I realized that the vast majority of us do not even know what we do not know because if we are taught or told something that is not true, it may take years or lifetimes to rewrite the script. I am therefore urging that our new year's resolution for 2019 is to keep an open mind. Practice observation. Put more trust in what you yourself can see and understand and recognize as valid. Ignore 90% of paid hacks and propagandists who try to influence our thinking. Trust yourself. However, to trust oneself, one must be calm, open to the truth, observant, and patient. The pieces will not fit together in the beginning. Take the most difficult jigsaw puzzle ever created. Do not even look at the picture. Just spread out the pieces. How many can you connect in the first hour? In the second hour, on day two, on day six, on day twelve? Little by little, you see more and more details and picture starts to become clear.

It will be like this for many people. I know we are going to be shocked, but this is a new era. We must allow ourselves to be open to the truth, but a lot of discernment will be necessary and we need not accept the first version of whatever we hear or are told. On the flip side, imagine for a moment that we do nothing? Are the elite going to continue their quest for more and more dangerous technology or will there be a point when we use knowledge divinely instead of threateningly? When will we say no to chemtrails, to nano particles in our food supply, to life-threatening electromagnetic experiments?

Knowledge and understanding must be coupled and subjected to the scrutiny of spirit, not to religion or dogma, but to what is divine in each of us. This is how spirit and matter, heaven and earth, are brought into harmony. Intelligence was meant to aid the collaboration between inspiration and emotion and to help us to shape our realities in accordance with a master plan drafted by our Creator, not by sociopaths and psychopaths and other demented individuals.

I urge people to take measures to detoxify the body and the mind. Yes, there are herbs to help with both, but in addition to the herbs, there is a need for inner poise, trust, and discernment. Be patient with yourself. Love yourself. You will start glowing and attract the guidance we all need.

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2018

Part II >>

Poulsbo, Washington

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2018

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