UNLEASH YOUR SPIRIT'S POTENTIAL GARDENERS OF THE GALAXY

CASE STUDY: SOLARISTM AEROPONICS – DR. DOUGLAS HERSCH

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita.”

- Dante’s Divine Comedy

The year was 2013. As a serial inventor from even as a Tinkertoy tot, I am now a husband, father and college dean overseeing two dozen academic programs across three divisions. The online learning management system that I developed five years earlier was catching on like wildfire and, because it was the first to emulate a live classroom experience, it set the bar for modern online learning. At the same time, new programs that I established in cybersecurity, hybrid and electric vehicle repair, and rapid design with CAD and 3D printing were so popular that the classes were standing-room only. Everything seemed to be going great, except that I was deeply and fundamentally unhappy. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. First, I thought that I was suffering from clinical depression. But that turned out to be untrue. Then I thought that this malaise was existential in nature, meaning that if I could just change my profession, my work environment, or my colleagues, the queasiness would go away. But just as you can’t escape yourself by going on vacation, I soon realized that this, too, was a misdiagnosis. It was as if I was the curious cat that had walked into a paper bag and now couldn’t find its way out.

From deep within the yawning void that stretched out infinitely in every direc- tion, it was clear that this was something I could not get away from or get around. Nor could it be navigated by the same mentality that summoned it forth. By now it had become clear that what I was experiencing was fundamentally a spiritual event that required a uniquely spiritual approach. I packed my bags and headed into the Peruvian rain forest to study at the feet of a local shaman. Iquitos is a city that cannot be reached by road. Dropping in by plane, I took a ferry down the Amazon River, transferred to a narrower boat as the canopy began to enclose around us, and then switched to a dugout canoe on the Ucalayi. Years before SpaceX began lifting Falcon Heavies into the skies of Boca Chica, Tx., I flew forth with a cup in my hand and an icaro in my ears. Daedalus was wrong; it is not hubris to seek the sun.

The Black Hole And A Heart Of Darkness

Within each and every one of us lies a black hole. We fear it because down deep, we believe that if we come too close, it will tear us apart and suck everything we know down inside. This terrifying conviction loomed large as I plummeted into my heart of darkness. I soon discovered that at the center of every swirling galaxy is an object of such immense gravity that it births stars and makes them dance.

Imagine yourself in ancient Greece, approaching the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Look up as you enter and you will see, inscribed on a column, the paramount exhortation to “know thyself.” Yet when I came face-to-face with the Divine inside, a kind of koan emerged.

How can we truly know ourselves when this oneness with an incomprehensible Other is an unfathomable mystery? The answer lies in the difference between knowledge and gnosis, between that running commentary that you call yourself and an unfiltered experience of infinite awareness. Are you experienced?

YOUR HYPER-DIMENSIONAL BLUEPRINT

Through the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus reminds us how, by merely regarding the kernel, no one can possibly imagine the magnificent plant that will emerge. So too it is with man. It is for this reason that each of us must seek our own individual blueprint, align with it, and call forth its unfolding. Everyone you know who has failed to do this has paid the ultimate price through disease, disintegration and death. The good news is that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

As you seek your true nature, remember that it is not a Polaroid picture. The blueprint is not static; it evolves. Can an Infinite Being be perfectly realized and eternally becoming? Let the dogmatic Darwinians and the hardline creationists play tug-of-war to the end of time while you experience an extratemporal awareness that dissolves the illusion of duality.

THE HARD FORK VS. A GARDEN OF EATIN’

Over the last 600 million years, our planet has hosted some four billion species of plants and animals, as well as another six million species of fungi. Now when as many as 2,000 of these precious life forms become extinct every year, human beings would be wise to reflect upon the fact that we are but one among many.

If we have fallen, it is only that we have fallen out of love with Mother Nature. When did that happen? Consider the hard fork we took at the industrial revolution that has led to our modern techno-megastructure. In some ways, we ourselves have become machines, or merely cogs to the machine that we call civilization. As exemplified by the Manhattan Project, this specialization allows us to manifest enormous power while simultaneously externalizing its destructive consequences. Some thinkers today fear that applying this same approach to the confluence of robotics and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) may lead to an end-game scenario for our kind.

Among the many benefits of working with sacred plant medicines is the ability to listen to the language of Nature and learn to speak it. While evolutionary biologists have long focused on the power of competition to fuel evolution, Nature is quietly conversing in dulcet tones of cooperation, co-evolution, and emergence. As a result, we are the blessed inheritors of a tourmaline world. Across billions of years, this planet has transformed through processes that began with physics, crossed into chemistry, leapt the threshold of biology, developed consciousness, and is now taking flight into the spiritual.

What is our role at the avant-garde of this process? I would suggest that it has something to do with telling fewer stories about bashing in skulls with clubs and paying more attention to the nature of symbiosis. We’ve all seen mutualism in action. Clownfish and sea anemones, aphids and ants, oxpeckers and wildebeest, humans and our gut bacteria. The list goes on because it is the way of Nature.

Nature As Inventor

The truth is that collaboration and cooperation is the real story of Nature. Yet because it is woven into our reality like the air we breathe, it is often overlooked.

We only need to pay attention. Nature sings innumerable melodies of harmony. Like Archimedes, DaVinci, and Alexander Graham Bell, all great inventors look to the example of Nature. The Swiss Engineer George De Mestral got the idea for Velcro® after struggling with cockleburs in his dog’s fur. In a similar fashion, I received the essential technologies behind the SOLARISTM Aeroponic grow system by emulating the plants through a kind of cognitive helio-taxis. In the radiant glow of the Universal Sun, I listened to the plants and they whispered their secrets.

The End Of Career And The Beginning Of Mission

In an act of the greatest foolishness or faith, I returned from the rain forest and left the ivory tower. I started to tinker again and found myself implementing the knowledge that I received from the plants and emulating the systems of Nature into an engineered structure.

As just one example of this, I was shown that where man strives within an economy, Nature thrives through a symbiotic ecology. Just as we cannot digest food without the over 50 trillion bacteria and fungi that live in our guts, so too, plants absorb nutrients that are passed on to them by an army of rhyzospheric micro-organisms.

The plants reward these “beneficials” with the sugars they need to drive their metabolism. Seeing this, I created a sort of three-dimensional petri dish to support the proliferation of these unseen biofertilizers that powerfully promote plant growth and vigor. By cultivating the ecology that, in turn, cultivates the plants, I created a soil-less system that yields abundant, nutrient-dense foods with far less water, energy, fertilizer, labor and time than is required by modern industrial agriculture.

The result is pristine, fresh, delicious food that you can grow, consume and enjoy. With its integrated solar panel, the system can even be grid-free, making it available to the unfarmed every- where, from those living where there is no arable land to the billions stuffed into high-rise apartment buildings. Even better, when deployed as a cost-effective solution to decentralized farming, the SOLARISTM system simultaneously provides decentralized carbon sequestration, thereby being the first net-zero and even net-negative agricultural system on the planet. For those of us seeking the philosopher’s stone, turning climate-changing carbon dioxide into healthy foods at your fingertips is a rabbit trick.

Imagine Peace

Have you noticed how many movie posters boast people with guns? Why is that? Do you think it may have something to do with a mass fixation upon the drama of survival? I would suggest that it is also the result of a lack of imagination. We have forgotten how wonderfully awe-inspiring it is to be alive, and how incredible it is to create coherent, glorious reality in alignment with the nature of our true Nature.

What is your gut instinct? Do you believe that you are what you eat? Do you know that your brain chemistry starts in your stomach? If so, I encourage you to make a healthy start by detoxing your system with the phytonutrients in the foods that you can grow yourself. As you let the natural polyphenols, flavonoids, isoflavonoids, anthocyanidins, phytoestrogens, terpenoids, carotenoids, limonoids, phytosterols, glucosinolates and fibers do their work across the 15 feet of your gastro-intestinal tract, you will feel better, look better, and - I assure you - even begin to act better. You will be a better you, and the fun never ends. Let’s start by setting aside our human exceptionalism and recognize our innate unity with the very Nature that birthed us. Then, by stepping into our roles as stewards of ourselves and of this beautiful planet, we will naturally ascend to our role as gardeners of the galaxy… and beyond