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Sunspots, as signs in the heavens, are surely signs of the times that we must read. They come with a warning. And their burst and their flare and their fire do deliver a message of warning: "Cease and desist from your anti-Light and anti-Christ consciousness, else the Sacred Fire shall consume not alone your works and your words but yourselves."
Sunspots, then, precede the descent of the judgment. They give warning to all who will read and run that change is in order. Beloved Helios, dictating through our beloved Messenger Mark Prophet, said in his January 11, 1970 Pearl of Wisdom:
The current cycle of sunspots and solar flares affects the weather of the planet, the moods of its people, even business cycles and, of course, the release of spiritual light-energy to the earth. One should note, therefore, not only the negative interference to the radio networks of the earth but also the vast positive extensions of cosmic possibilities and revelations that shatter darkness with the brilliance of new and fervent hope for the overcoming of age-old problems.
Sickness, sin and death - all forms of discord, bigotry, tyranny, struggle and degradation - must yield before the great cosmic burst of light, else those who continue to be advocates of darkness and shame will find the spiral of karmic recompense becoming a lash of such chastening as to almost annihilate that portion of their consciousness which persists in identifying with unreality.1
In order for you to understand solar phenomena, I will give you some background on our solar system and galaxy.
Astronomers estimate that there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. Our galaxy is called the Milky Way because, from our vantage point at the edge, it appears to be a luminous band of light arching across the night sky.
The Milky Way is one of 27 galaxies known as the "Local Group" that revolve around a common center of gravity. The Milky Way is a large spiral galaxy. It is 100,000 light-years in diameter and 30,000 light-years thick at the nucleus. A light year is the distance light travels in a year - approximately 6 trillion miles. In other words, light takes about 100,000 earth years to cross the Milky Way.
Our star, the sun, is one of some 100 billion stars in our galaxy. It is about 30,000 light-years from the center of our galaxy, or two-thirds of the way from the center, and is situated in a spiral arm of the Milky Way.
Scientists say that the sun was born between 4-1/2 to 5 billion years ago. It orbits the galactic center at a speed of about 150 miles per second and completes one orbit every 200 to 250 million years. Since birth, the sun has made between twenty and twenty-two complete revolutions around the galactic center. Therefore, the sun is 20 to 22 "solar years" old.
Astronomers do not know how a star is formed. In the case of our sun and many other stars, they believe that some force acted on a cloud of dust and vapor so that the particles within it increased their gravitational attraction and began to collapse. As the matter collapsed, the particles began to collide, producing heat. The small degree of rotation present in the cloud increased and caused the cloud to take on a spherical shape. Expanding pressure from the heat in the cloud's core counterbalanced the pull of gravity and a proto-sun came into existence.
Over a 10-million-year gestation period the proto-sun continued to contract and get hotter. Suddenly the interior of the proto-sun became so hot that it ignited a nuclear chain reaction: A star was born. The sun stopped contracting and has remained in a state of equilibrium, the nuclear reaction at the core producing just enough heat and pressure to counterbalance the pull of gravity.
When the sun was young it was far more violent and active than it is today. It had a much faster rate of rotation, its magnetic fields were stronger and less stable, and it produced even more powerful flares than those it produces today. But it was only 70 percent as bright as it is now.
The sun became a mature star when it was about five to ten solar years old - or one to two billion earth years. Scientists believe that the sun will shine as it does today for billions of years. But in about seven billion years it will expand to 100 times its current size and become what is known as a "red giant." Its color will be deep red and its luminosity will be about 500 times greater than at present. After about 250 million years in the red giant phase, scientists expect that the sun will go through a "helium flash" - it will explode and eject about one-third of its mass into space.
Thereafter, our sun's evolution is uncertain. It will probably go through a period of degeneration. When it is about 15 billion years old, or 75 solar years, it will probably become a "white dwarf" star with a diameter similar to the earth's. It could finally become a "black dwarf," which is essentially a small, cold, burnt out shell. But we have a long way to go before the sun becomes a red giant or a white or black dwarf. The sun is in a long, quiet, relatively stable phase.
The surface of the sun is called the photosphere, or light sphere. It is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit and appears to be bright, smooth and shiny. But close-up, the photosphere looks like a boiling cauldron.
Currents of heat in the sun's core generate bubbles, or granules, that rise to the surface at a rate of 1000 miles per hour. After a granule transfers its heat to the surface, it expands, cools and sinks back into the sun.
There are about four million granules visible at any given moment. When seen through a telescope, these granules look like boiling grains of rice or kernels of wheat. And although they appear to be tiny, each granule is about 900 miles across - greater than the length and width of the state of Texas.
Herbert Friedman, in his book Sun and Earth, notes that despite this turbulence, "visible light and heat waves, which represent more than 99 percent of the sun's radiation, vary by less than 1 percent."2
This stable release of energy is known as the solar constant. As you know, the sun is 93 million miles from the earth, and light traveling from the sun at the rate of 18,000 miles per second reaches us in eight and a third minutes. Life could not exist on earth if there were not a constant, reliable source of light and heat from the sun.
I would like to point out to you that when you enter the Path to be a Lightbearer, to be an extension of the heart of Helios and Vesta, you have an obligation to stick to that course and that commitment. Because once you begin radiating the light of the sun of your I AM Presence to lifewaves on the earth, they come to depend upon it. The evolutions of the planet are like a baby in an incubator.
If you think you can suddenly walk away from your calling, your mantle and your office to bear the Mother Flame, you will soon discover that you can make more karma in leaving than you could have made had you never entered the Path before. And so the path of the bodhisattvas moving toward Buddhahood, of the disciples moving toward Christhood must be the awareness that the radiating sun of Light within us creates new opportunities, a new descent of Light to the earth. (This applies whether you are affiliated with Church Universal and Triumphant or you are a member of another activity or you are walking the Path of Light without being associated with any group.)
If we were suddenly to withdraw our radiating sun of Light individually or as a Community, it would be as catastrophic as the withdrawal of the physical sun from our solar system. Thus we remember the teachings of Gautama Buddha - of the Sangha, the Community, the sun center of the heart. We remember that, like our sun, Gautama Buddha, Lord of the World, never leaves off sustaining our threefold flame by the thread of contact from his heart.
At the moment that he should withdraw this thread of contact, perhaps we would still be in a state of oneness and attunement with our I AM Presence. But perhaps in another moment we would be going through the Dark Night of the Spirit or the dark night of the soul or severe temptation or the descent into Death and Hell.
Just as we depend upon our God Presence until the hour of our ascension - until we become, as Kuan Yin, the self-existent one - so do many other lifestreams on earth depend upon us.
Just as every living thing on earth depends upon the physical sun, those evolutions of earth who have become accustomed to our footsteps, our voices and our presences on the planet cannot do without the light-emanation of our hearts, for they too have come to depend upon us as sun centers and sun sources.
Returning to the discussion of the sun's characteristics: A steady stream of ionized helium and hydrogen particles radiate outward from the sun under great pressure, carrying about one million tons of gas per second. This is called the solar wind. The solar wind forms a spiral as it leaves the sun. It travels at a speed of about 450 miles per second and reaches the earth in about four and one-half days.
What are Sunspots and Solar Flares?
Much of the sun's behavior is still unexplained. One of the best known, yet most mysterious, solar phenomena is the periodic appearance of sunspots, which affect life on earth in numerous ways. Sunspots are the most easily observed solar feature and have been seen for centuries. The earliest known record of sunspots appears in the Chinese Book of Changes, written prior to 800 b.c.
Sunspots are magnetic disturbances, or storms, on the sun's surface that are thought to be caused by magnetic effects in the sun's interior. They form dark, cool depressions on the surface of the photosphere. They appear to be dark because they are several thousand degrees cooler than the photosphere. Nevertheless, they are still quite hot and bright. A typical sunspot would shine with ten times the brilliance of the full moon if it were to be placed in the night sky.
Scientists are not sure why sunspots are cooler than the sun, but they believe that this refrigeration effect, as well as many of the sunspot's other characteristics, is related to a strong magnetic field within the sunspot itself.
Sunspots may last from a few hours to a few months. They appear in a well-documented cycle. The number of sunspots rises from a solar minimum, when there are few or no spots visible, to a solar maximum, when as many as 300 spots may be observed at one time. The length of the cycle varies between 7 and 17 years, but on the average the cycle lasts 11.1 years.
It takes an average of four and a half years for the cycle to rise to the maximum and an average of six and a half years for it to fall to the minimum. No one knows how or why this works. Geological evidence shows that the sunspot cycle has continued regularly for nearly 700 million years.
As the sun rotates, sunspots appear to move across the face of the sun from left to right. At the start of a new sunspot cycle following a solar minimum, sunspots appear in both hemispheres about 30 degrees from the solar equator. As the cycle matures, sunspots move progressively closer to the solar equator. As the cycle nears a maximum, sunspots appear at 15 degrees latitude, and as the cycle draws to a close, they appear between 5 and 10 degrees on either side of the equator. When plotted on a graph, this forms what is called a "butterfly diagram" (fig. 18).
Sunspots normally travel in pairs, or groups of opposite polarity. In the northern hemisphere the leading spots of the group usually have a positive polarity and the trailing spots have a negative polarity. In the southern hemisphere the polarities are just the opposite. In the next 11-year cycle, the polarities are reversed - the lead spots in the northern hemisphere have a negative polarity, while the lead spots in the southern hemisphere have a positive polarity. No one is sure what causes this effect. But the regular reversal of polarity suggests to many astronomers that the 11.1-year sunspot cycle is really one-half of a 22.2-year cycle.
The rise of the sunspot cycle to a solar maximum is accompanied by an increase in solar flares, the most powerful form of solar activity. Solar flares are huge gaseous outbursts from the sun. An average-sized flare may be more than 6,000 miles long. A flare can release the energy equivalent of 100 billion one-megaton bombs. At the solar maximum, there may be as many as three to four small flares per hour and one enormous flare each month. But during the minimum, weeks or months may pass without a flare of any significance.
Solar flares increase the intensity of the solar wind. The solar wind, which reaches the earth in about four and one-half days, impacts the magnetosphere, a magnetic field surrounding the earth, causing such phenomena as the aurora borealis and geo-magnetic storms. It can generate extremely low frequency (ELF) waves on earth. ELF waves are radio waves with a very long wavelength and can influence human biology and behavior.
How Solar Activity Influences Life on Earth
The radiation generated by sunspots and solar flares has a number of effects. The most easily detected is the disruption of radio communications. But some scientists also claim that everything from climatic changes to wars, earthquakes and flu epidemics are associated with increased solar activity.
Other scientists dispute these claims. And sunspots and solar flares are certainly not the only cause of such disturbances. But there is a correlation between solar activity and certain kinds of social, behavioral and geophysical effects.
Let us examine the kinds of events that correlate with sunspots and solar flares, starting with those that occur within days or weeks of intense solar activity. Riots, battles, arson attacks, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have been charted within days or weeks of intense solar activity.
For example, in 1980, solar flares in May coincided with riots in Miami and South Korea and the eruption of Mount St. Helens in May and June. Solar flares also preceded the April 1982 conflict between Great Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands and the U.S. attack on Tripoli, Libya, on April 14, 1986.
By tracking solar flares, biologist Marsha Adams was able to assist the San Francisco fire department by predicting arson attacks 72 hours in advance. She believes that flares affect people within the first few days after they happen. She has also found that earthquakes tend to occur about four days after flares. Adams and other investigators reported a correlation between increased solar activity and freak weather conditions, crime waves and political instability.
Mental instability appears to be connected with solar activity as well. Psychiatrists have noticed that voluntary admissions to mental hospitals increase for two to three days after a solar-induced magnetic disturbance. Joe H. Allen, Chief of the Solar-Terrestrial Physics Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said scientists at the Kettering Magnetic Laboratory have found that geomagnetic disturbances may produce a temporary deficiency of calcium or lithium ions inside brain cells, which is a characteristic of progressed manic-depressives.3
Adams found that wars tend to break out two to three years after the sunspot maximum - although they occasionally break out before it. She believes that large earthquakes, around 7.0 on the Richter scale, tend to occur near the peak of the sunspot cycle. Very large earthquakes, however - 8 and above - tend to occur two to three years after the sunspot peak.
Peaks in the sunspot-cycle have coincided with major flu epidemics going all the way back to 1761. The sunspot cycle is peaking right now, and once again there is a flu epidemic in the United States, Britain, Europe and the Soviet Union.
Economists have even found links between solar activity and the economy. For example, in "Solar and Economic Relationships," which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1934, Carlos Garcia-Mata argued that there is a correlation between the appearance of sunspots near the solar equator (which happens just after the sunspot peak) and times of economic depression.
The last sunspot cycle was at its maximum between 1979 and 1981. The following events occurred: The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza was forced out of power and the Sandinistas took over. The Shah was forced out of Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini came to power. Iran took 53 Americans hostage. Iraq invaded Iran, beginning an eight-year war. Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor. China invaded Vietnam.
We are now in the midst of a rising sunspot cycle that is expected to peak sometime before late 1990. In fact, it may already have peaked.
But whenever it does, the crest of the cycle, or solar maximum, will span late 1988 through 1990. This cycle is expected to be the most powerful, or the second most powerful, on record. Between March 6 and March 19, 1989, one of the most powerful solar displays ever observed caused a series of intense geomagnetic storms. Fifty-nine major solar flares erupted during that two week period along with hundreds of minor flares.4
There are two ways to measure and classify solar flares: for brightness, and for their emission of X rays. When measured for brightness, the smallest flares are called S-class. Progressively brighter and larger flares are called 1-2-or 3-class flares. When measured for X rays, the smallest flares are called A-class. Progressively larger flares are called B-C-and M-class, and the largest are called X-class.
On March 6, an X-class flare erupted that was then the biggest ever recorded. It catapulted billions of tons of matter into space and released so much radiation that space-based sensors could not measure it. We did not feel the full fury of that eruption because the flare was not aimed at earth.
But on March 10, a slightly less powerful flare erupted while aimed almost directly at the earth. "Eight minutes later, traveling at the speed of light, a blast of X ray and ultraviolet radiation seared the earth's upper atmosphere," Time magazine reported. "Within an hour, high-energy protons began to arrive, followed in three days by a massive bombardment of lower-energy protons and electrons."5
That flare generated widespread displays of the aurora borealis - the northern lights - which were seen as far south as the Caribbean. On the night of March 12-13, the sky in Montana and elsewhere was illumined by rose or ruby colored northern lights, which are generated only by the most powerful solar events.
But the flare produced more than a light show. As Time explained:
Heated by the incoming blast of radiation, the upper fringe of the atmosphere expanded farther into space. Low-orbiting satellites, encountering that fringe and running into increased drag, slowed and dropped into still lower orbits. A secret Defense Department satellite began a premature and fatal tumble, and the tracking system that keeps exact tabs on some 19,000 objects in earth orbit briefly lost track of 11,000 of them. Solar Max [a NASA satellite designed to study flares and other solar activity] descended by as much as half a mile in a single day, almost certainly hastening its demise.
On the earth, the flare's effects were equally disruptive. Shortwave transmissions were interrupted, some for as long as 24 hours, and satellite communication and a Coast Guard loran navigation system were temporarily overwhelmed. Powerful transient magnetic fields, generated in the upper atmosphere by the flare, induced electrical currents in transmission lines and wiring, and mystified homeowners reported automatic garage doors opening and closing on their own.6
Power surges in transmission lines and transformers in Quebec knocked out power throughout the entire province.
But there was more to this than physical effects. The March 1989 series of flares may have had a hand in triggering the following dramatic events:
The Eastern Airline strike and petition for bankruptcy; two train wrecks in the British Isles; rioting in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, which resulted in the Chinese imposition of martial law; civil unrest in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Estonia; political upheaval in Greece as Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou was caught up in personal and financial scandals; a break in diplomatic relations between Britain and Iran over Britain's refusal to suppress The Satanic Verses, a novel by Salman Rushdie; a serious outbreak of fighting in the ongoing Lebanese civil war; and the Chilean fruit scare, which began when the Food and Drug Administration impounded all Chilean fruit in the United States after inspectors discovered that two grapes imported from Chile had been injected with cyanide. Canada, Japan and West Germany took similar measures.
These flares were the opening salvo of the current solar maximum. And there have been many large flares since. It is too early to assess the full impact of the current sunspot cycle. But a review of sunspot and solar activity from March 1989 to February 1990 shows two things: (1) sunspot numbers have been unusually high, correlating with an unprecedented period of upheaval, particularly in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; (2) solar flares often precede or coincide with key events. For example, an X-class flare erupted on March 23, 1989. The following day, the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef off Alaska's southern coast and spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. It was the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Between May 29 and June 4, 1989, 26 M-class and 2 X-class flares erupted. On June 4, upheaval in China reached a crescendo with the Tiananmen Square massacre.
On August 16, 1989, the most powerful X-class flare ever recorded erupted.7 On August 18, the "unthinkable" happened: Polish president General Wojciech Jaruzelski asked Solidarity activist Tadeusz Mazowiecki to be Poland's prime minister - the first non-Communist prime minister of a Soviet Bloc nation since 1948.
On September 29, 1989, another X-class flare erupted. Two days later the first "freedom trains" rolled out of Prague and Warsaw, bringing more than 6,000 East Germans to West Germany.
On October 19, 1989, one of the three most powerful X-class flares of this cycle erupted. On October 23, 1989, a series of explosions ripped through a Phillips Petroleum plastics plant in Pasadena, Texas, igniting a fireball that could be seen for 15 miles. The force of the blasts killed 24, injured 124, threw pieces of metal and concrete six miles, and utterly devastated the plant, which had been capable of producing 4.5 million pounds of polyethylene plastic per day.8
Between November 6 and November 11, 1989, 33 M-class flares erupted. On November 9, East Germany opened the Berlin Wall. On November 11, Salvadoran rebels began a major offensive in San Salvador, in the worst fighting since the civil war began in 1979, during the last solar maximum.
The eruption of 11 M-class flares between December 18 and December 25, 1989, coincided with the U.S. invasion of Panama on December 20, the surrender of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to U.S. authorities on December 24, and the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu on December 25.
The Ascended Masters have given us a further understanding of solar activity. On December 11, 1988, Lord Maitreya told us that "solar rings and sunspots play their role in inaugurating change."9
In his dictation of October 7, 1989, beloved God Harmony said:
Even the solar flares and activities of the sun in the remainder of this year will be a means whereby the spiritual Sun behind the sun of this solar system may be translated to the earth in positive ways, even though there be some negative side effects from these manifestations.10
Solar Activity and Weather Patterns
In addition to political, social and geophysical changes, solar activity may alter the weather. Climatologist Cliff Harris (who advises Purina, Coca Cola and Cargill grain company, among others) says that increased solar activity associated with the current sunspot cycle will produce erratic weather from the late 1980s through the early 1990s. That, in combination with a rare change in atmospheric circulation patterns, will trigger the most extreme weather in 510 years between 1990 and 1996.
Every 510 years or so, over the last 10,000 years, the global pattern of atmospheric circulation has shifted from the normal, calm flow from west to east to a north-to-south flow.
We are now in the early stages of this cyclic occurrence, which should last for five or six years.
Harris says that when the air flow shifts from north to south, it causes cold air to move from the poles towards the equator and rearranges the configuration of high and low pressure zones.
In the northern hemisphere, that causes the jet stream to move south. This pushes cold air further south than normal and warm air further north than normal, causing clashes between masses of cold-dry air and warm-wet air. And that generates extreme weather.
Harris says that over the next decade this cycle will cause record high and low temperatures, drastic shifts in patterns of precipitation, violent storms, and an increasing number of floods and droughts. In fact, he says, "The Midwest will be having record drought in the 1990s, like the 1930s."11 Due to climatic and other conditions, Harris is also predicting frequent seismic activity - 7.5 or higher - on every continent, as well as increased volcanic activity.
The Retrogradation of the Sun Around the Center of Mass
Not only is the current sunspot cycle nearly the highest on record, but it also coincides with a rare solar phenomenon, the retrogradation of the sun around the barycenter, or the center of mass of the solar system.
Strictly speaking, the planets of the solar system do not orbit the sun, they orbit the barycenter. The sun contains 99.9 percent of the mass of the solar system. But the center of the sun orbits the center of mass just like a planet does. And at times, the barycenter is actually outside the physical sun.
Solar physicist James Shirley explains:
The Sun, for most practical purposes, represents the center of the solar system. It is about 743 times more massive than the planets taken together, and it is easy to think of the Sun as a body at rest, with the minute, distant satellites such as Earth having no great influence. However, the solar system is a system of massive bodies in motion bound by gravity, and as a necessary consequence, the Sun has a definite and predictable motion.
The easiest way to describe the motion and its causes is by analogy. Imagine for a moment a dumbbell, with weighted ends, thrown into the air with a spin. The ends of the dumbbell will spin about one another, and the path of one end would be irregular. However, the dumbbell has a balance point, or center of mass; and if the path of this center of mass were traced over the flight, it would be found to be a regular arc (a parabola).
Similarly, the solar system has a center of mass, which traces a regular path as we orbit the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The Sun, however, like one of the weighted ends of the dumbbell, describes a rather different path. Figure [19] shows the path of the center of the Sun for the period from 1930 to 1984. The Sun moves to and fro, looping about the solar system center of mass (barycenter), with one loop taking on the order of 10-20 years. The Sun's center is at times more than a million miles from the barycenter; this distance is a little larger than the diameter of the Sun itself.12
The center of the sun moves counterclockwise around the barycenter in looping orbits that take between 15 and 24 years but have an average orbital period of 19.86 years (fig. 19). In its current orbit, the center of the sun will make its close approach to the barycenter in April 1990. Remember, the day the Dark Cycle enters the physical quadrant is April 23, 1990. But instead of looping around the barycenter, the center of the sun will fall short of it and actually go retrograde - that is, move backwards - relative to the center of mass (fig. 20).
The sun has gone retrograde only twice in the past millennium - in the 1630s and in the early 1800s. According to Shirley, "both periods were characterized by climatic extremes [severe cold] and by remarkable outbursts of explosive volcanic activity."13 The year 1816 was known as "the year without summer." The cold weather during this period stopped Napoleon's advance into Russia. It also triggered widespread famine in Switzerland and the Ukraine.
J. D. Post noted in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History that the period of unusual cold at the start of the nineteenth century inaugurated a period of social chaos: "The years 1812-1817 introduced three decades of economic pause punctuated by recurring crisis, distress, social upheaval, international migration, political rebellion and pandemic disease."14
Because of the upcoming retrogradation of the sun around the barycenter, Shirley says we can expect to encounter "climatic extremes of drought, flood and other severe and unusual weather along with, possibly, major explosive volcanic eruptions."15 The most likely time for these, he says, is between 1993 and 1999.
As I already mentioned in part 2, the United States is vulnerable to food shortages and famine. That may come as a surprise to many Americans, due to regular reports of agricultural surpluses. Nevertheless, a ruinous grain export policy combined with erratic weather is likely to produce food shortages or famine in the United States in the 1990s.
The United States is the world's largest grain exporter. But it is also one of the largest food importers. We import almost as much food as we export - primarily beef, fruit, vegetables and dairy products. In fact, we import a greater percentage of our food than the Soviet Union does!
To summarize what I said in part 2, grain export policies set by Congress and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), largely at the behest of the big grain companies, encourage the export of the maximum amount of grain. Between the drive to export and the droughts of 1988 and 1989, we have depleted our grain surpluses to the point where we cannot meet one or two more bad harvests without a sudden crisis.
Crisis could come sooner than we think, because U.S grain reserves are being depleted rapidly. In 1986, the United States had a wheat carryover stock (surplus) of two billion bushels (54.4 million tons). But by June 1990 it will have fallen to about 435 million bushels (11.8 million tons). And supplies of wheat and other grains are expected to continue to decline due to low levels of soil moisture.
In addition to the carryover stock, the government maintains a very small reserve of wheat for emergencies, some four million metric tons. But the government recently used three million metric tons of that reserve to meet its commitments to Third World nations under the Food for Peace Program.
In 1989 Mark Ritchie, agricultural trade policy analyst for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, said that U.S. grain supplies are so low due to the drought of 1988 that if we have even "half a drought" anytime in the near future, we could have a big food problem in this country. "It's not safe," he said.16
Drought conditions persisted in the U.S. winter wheat and Western corn belts in 1989 and 1990. Don Wilhite, director of the International Drought Information Center, said that as of March 1, 1990, "if you take the areas with moderate, severe and extreme drought and add them together, they represent about 50 percent of the country."17 In fact, Wilhite said that 26 percent of the country - a huge area that starts in Wisconsin, sweeps through the spring-and winter-wheat belts and the Western corn belt, and ends in Southern California - has severe or extreme drought conditions.
There is very little chance that the spring-wheat, winter-wheat or Western corn belts will come out of the drought soon, Wilhite said. "I've seen statistics coming out of the Midwestern Climate Center showing that the probability of coming out of the drought in north-central Iowa by mid-summer is 1 percent. In other major grain producing areas of the country, it's about 5 percent," he said.
"It's a rather desperate situation for many people. Everybody keeps hoping for rain, but nothing seems to be changing."18 Even if we get adequate rain in those areas in 1990, which now seems doubtful, crop yields will be low because it takes at least a year to rebuild the subsoil moisture that was depleted by past droughts.
Replenishing subsoil moisture isn't the only problem, however. Wilhite said that the water table itself is being depleted in a number of key agricultural areas in the United States. And drought conditions in the United States could soon intensify, since there are indications that another El Nino is starting.
El Nino is a weather condition characterized by warmer-than-normal waters in the Pacific Ocean along the equator, which alter global weather patterns and produce storms, droughts and flooding. Scientists are not yet sure how quickly it will develop. But Paul Krumpe of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance in the Agency for International Development (AID) says that if an El Nino forms in the spring of 1990, it could trigger a drought in the corn or wheat belts of the United States in the summer of 1990 or 1991, as well as exacerbate already poor crop conditions in the horn of Africa.
Louis Thompson, associate dean emeritus of the College of Agriculture at Iowa State University, says that "corn belt droughts have been part of an El Nino cycle. But, in nearly every case, they have occurred in the year following an El Nino." Like Krumpe, he is uncertain whether there will be an El Nino in 1990. But he says, "If there is no occurrence in 1990, there will be a greater probability of an El Nino in 1991. If there is an El Nino in 1991, we can expect 1992 to be an unfavorable year for corn in the U.S. corn belt. ... If a drought does occur in 1992, it may prove to be as severe as any drought of this century."19
Continued drought in the corn and wheat belts are sure to reduce grain stocks in the United States even further. Climatologists Cliff Harris and Dr. Iben Browning20 say that bad weather is likely to cause crop losses throughout the next decade that could reach famine proportions. Both of them use a number of cycles to make their predictions - including the sunspot cycle; the tidal cycle of the sun, moon and earth; and the 510-year cycle of change in atmospheric circulation.
There seems to be no end to the cycles converging in the early 1990s that coincide with bad weather, and hence with poor agricultural production.
Add to that volcanic eruptions that coincide with the retrogradation of the sun, and we could get a global cooling, which would further decrease crop production. When a volcano erupts with enough force to inject debris into the stratosphere, such as occurred with the eruptions of Redoubt Volcano in Alaska in late 1989 and early 1990, volcanic ash circulates in the jet stream for an extended period of time, blocking out some sunlight and cooling the earth. If a number of volcanoes go off more or less at the same time, the cooling could shorten the growing season and therefore significantly reduce crop yields.
Krumpe says that the U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance Office is monitoring at least 15 high-risk volcanoes that could "blow at any time," all of which are capable of injecting large quantities of volcanic ash into the stratosphere.
If, as the evidence suggests, this period of unstable weather lingers through the decade, U.S. food supplies will not be adequate - particularly since the United States imports about $20 billion worth of food annually, and the countries that export food to us, beset by their own problems, probably will not be able to satisfy our needs.
There is a supreme irony in all of this. The United States government spends a great deal of money on agriculture subsidies in order to export food (see part 2). In 1986, for example, the government paid out about $12 billion in subsidies in order to enable grain merchants to export about $4 billion worth of corn.
The beneficiaries of our export agricultural policy are not the farmers but the large grain exporting companies, such as Cargill and Continental. They influence the government to adopt agricultural export policies that increase the volume of grain exported at low prices.
This hurts the farmer, who gets a low price for his grain, as well as the taxpayer, who pays the farmer a subsidy to keep him in business. But it helps the grain merchant, who makes money by selling a greater volume of grain. It also helps our biggest customer for subsidized grain - the Soviet Union.
Ritchie says we spend a lot of money selling grain overseas, but since we do not keep a good reserve on hand for domestic use, we could wake up one day and find out that we are short of food.
I have mentioned a number of world changes associated with solar activity, including seismic and volcanic activity, climatic changes, flu epidemics, economic depressions, and wars and battles. What can make these conditions worse is that they may interact with and amplify one another to set in motion what might be called a series of "vicious circles."
For example, the weather is expected to be unstable during the next decade, largely due to solar activity. A number of climatologists say that erratic weather in some of the major food-growing areas throughout the world will decrease global food production.
Major crop losses in the United States will reduce or eliminate U.S. grain exports, creating profound changes in other nations - especially those that have come to depend on our exports for a substantial part of their food supply, such as the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. Grain shortages in the United States will also cause higher prices on the world market. Higher prices in turn are likely to cause food shortages or famine throughout the world, triggering political instability.
Instability due to food shortages could well lead to changes of government and even to war. In fact, Dr. Browning has shown that changes in climate coincide with food shortages, depressions, mass migrations, wars and revolutions.
It is commonly known that the Soviet Union has major food production and distribution problems and that it is facing a great deal of internal resistance to solving those problems. But few people realize just how bad things really are in the Soviet Union.
John Miller of the London Daily Telegraph wrote, "Staple foods are now rationed in eight of the 15 Soviet republics."21 In March 1989, Reuters news service reported:
Shortages of consumer goods in the Soviet Union have become dire, and Moscow must look to the West for new credits if it is to check a rapid slide in living standards, two leading economists say.
The warning by the economists, writing in two different publications, reflects concern that chronic shortages of food and basic goods threaten confidence in Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika reform program.
"The worsening of the situation on the consumer market was such last year that we cannot hold out for much longer," Otto Latsis wrote in the Soviet weekly Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta.
"Another year like that and the market could collapse. We could find ourselves in a situation like that of Poland in 1981-1982 - with empty shelves and trade that has virtually ceased to exist."22
These reports were published in March of 1989. Since then, conditions have grown worse. In fact, according to Krumpe, it has been reported that as of February 1990 "there's virtually no meat in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe due to a shortage of feed grain."23
In the Daily Telegraph, Miller described a bitter power struggle in the Politburo over how to solve the Soviet Union's number one domestic problem. Gorbachev wants to "reform" the system by leasing land to the farmers - a socialist version of letting private enterprise solve the problem. An opposing faction wants to improve the current system of collective farming by throwing more money at it. But Soviet agriculture is so inefficient that neither solution is likely to work in the short run, even with the best weather. The weather, however, is not expected to be good and Soviet crop production is likely to fall significantly.
In addition, the cyclic southerly displacement of the jet stream, which will take place in the early 1990s, will probably disrupt food production in the central Asian areas of the Soviet Union and drive the Asiatic populations into the European Russian areas of the Soviet Union.
Concurrent with global food shortages and higher food prices, less money will be available to purchase what food there is. A global recession (or depression) is waiting to happen in the international economy. And even if the world economy stays afloat, the Soviet economy is rapidly disintegrating.
This time the United States won't be able to bail the Soviets out. Adverse weather conditions are likely to reduce food production in the United States to the point where we couldn't export sizable quantities of grain to the Soviets even if we wanted to.
Taken together, food shortages, population pressure and recession or depression could place intolerable political pressure on the Soviet leadership. Faced with an economic squeeze and tight agricultural supplies, the world's preeminent military power, the Soviet Union, may find it expedient to use its military to obtain needed economic and agricultural resources.
The nearest agricultural and economic resources are in Western Europe. If the Soviets go to war to seize scarce resources, it would start another vicious circle that would damage economies, food production, health and so on.
There is yet another vicious circle related to food shortages. According to climatologist and historian Evelyn Garriss, famines are accompanied by disease because malnourished people suffer from immune suppression. As a result, people get diseases that they would not normally be susceptible to and contract new diseases, which enter the population.
The immune system can be compromised by other factors. Dr. Robert Becker, an authority on the effects of electromagnetic radiation on human health, integrated data from numerous sources that strongly suggests that ELF waves, which are generated by solar flares, lead to a decline in a person's ability to fight off disease. A decline in the immune system is associated in turn with a number of new diseases, including AIDS, Legionnaire's disease and Herpes genitalis. Thus, the human immune system may be depleted by two different activities that increase when solar phenomenon increases - malnutrition and ELF waves.
This contributes to another vicious circle. A worldwide increase in disease is costly. Two health economists, Anne Scitovsky and Dorothy Rice, estimate that by 1991 health-care costs for AIDS patients in the United States will be about $65 billion a year, and lost productivity will be another $55 billion.24 So solar activity indirectly affects the economy in two ways: it makes food shortages and increased health-care costs more likely.
Solar flares are not the only cosmic events believed to cause disease. Comets may also play a part. Although Halley's comet came and went in 1986 with no perceivable effects, since ancient times comets have been thought to be harbingers of events - usually the death of kings, wars, famines, plagues and other disasters.
In modern times, Fred Hoyle, an astrophysicist, and Chandra Wickramasinghe, an astronomer, have argued that all infectious diseases - from plagues to the common cold - were originally brought from deep space by comets and transferred to earth by micrometeorites.
They believe that a comet was responsible for the influenza epidemic of 1918 to 1919, which killed 30 million people. Although the scientific community almost uniformly disagrees with this assertion, science writer Robert Kunzig points out that "there is probably more support now than ever before for the idea that the organic precursors of life - not life itself but its building blocks, or maybe the building blocks of the building blocks - could have been brought to Earth by comets early in the planet's history."25
Scientists have discovered amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, both in interstellar space and in meteorites. Kunzig points out that scientists now agree that "comets contain supertanker-loads of organic material and that at least some of that material was probably produced in interstellar space."26
Astronomers are continually discovering new comets. And according to Science News, "Swarms of tiny comets are hurtling through the solar system and bombarding earth at the incredible rate of 10 million comets per year."27
If comets are indeed carriers of bacteria and viruses to the earth and have been responsible for outbreaks of disease, then the degradation of the human immune system in the coming years may be more serious than anyone imagines.
Not all comets may be harbingers of evil, however. On June 30, 1973, the Elohim Purity, speaking of the comet Kohoutek, said:
And so I am come, and so I have made to you the announcement of this century for the Elohim of the Fourth Ray - the release of purity this day. It is an awesome and ... auspicious event in the halls of the Great Central Sun, and mighty Messengers of Light go forth bearing purity. And the mighty comet that shall appear in the heavens ere six months shall pass is a manifestation of the Messengers of cosmic purity that come forth periodically from the Heart of Alpha and Omega as emissaries of Light to greet those twin flames who hold the focus of Light on behalf of evolutions.28
On October 14, 1973, the Ascended Master Lord Maitreya also referred to Kohoutek:
Opportunity is given for you to elect to present yourselves a living sacrifice unto the Lord God Almighty. And to you I make known this hour that the comet of the century comes to foretell the birth of many Christed ones, many souls who are to descend within the coming twelvemonth.
And thus, because preparations must be made, we shall not tarry in our announcement of this dispensation. For those who would apply and receive the seal of our approval and our blessing must do so speedily, that time and space might provide the cradle and the crucible for incoming souls.
Let your life, your very being, your very consciousness provide the nexus for the descent of Lightbearers. The nexus is the place in the hourglass where the sand falls, grain by grain. The Christ is the nexus of man's being. As the Mediator, the Christed One stands between God and man. Your own Christed being, therefore, is the Mediator whereby you may receive into your being and consciousness souls of Light hallowed, waiting to come forth.29
"Prophecy for the 1990s III" Part 6 is based on a lecture given by Elizabeth Clare Prophet May 22, 1989, Chicago Teaching Center, Chicago, Illinois, updated for publication in the 1990 Pearls of Wisdom. Throughout these notes PoW is the abbreviation for Pearls of Wisdom.