Dear Team:

What's the deeper meaning to this translation project in which we have all been swept into?

I returned from Asia in 1998 after a seven month trip to Japan, Nepal, Bhutan and India. This trip was the source of 2-ss my latest book which will be published next year and which the Russians completed translating last year. In 1999 in Seattle as I was struggling to re-enter society after almost ten years in the wilderness, the first global demonstrations against multinational corporations broke out. This was a watershed in human history. With the Cold war over the focus now was on the IMF and the World Bank aswell as the huge banks and MNCs that were rapidly turning the planet into a runaway locomotive of ecological and cultural sterility.

The Seattle protests were relatively small and sometimes violent and were written off by some in the mass media as a temporary abberation. But since then protests have broken out in Prague, Genoa, Toronto, and Washington. Wherever the big boys have decided to meet and talk about the future. I strongly now believe that these protests are an important leaf in the wind.

By the dawn of 2000 the Y2K crisis was on everybody's mind. But it rapidly turned into a non-event. Nevertheless the Millennial celebrations were a world-wide event celebrated by all peoples at the same time and covered by all the local and global media. It was a Teilhardian moment. A global mind was stirring and being documented on a second by second basis.

In the Summer of 2000 I began exploring the idea of multiple translations of Harvest and the translation project took off in early 2001. I'm sure many of you remember this day. Possibly a few of you are really cursing it. Then 9/11 hit like an A-bomb. Another Teilhardian moment--far more perverse than the Seattle protests which highlighted more violent opponents of the new economic global order. We certainly remember this shocking day. I was in Big Sur and our Italien editor saw the tragedy unfold from the Empire State building.

I am now in the Bay Area still struggling to bring on this difficult translation project to a successful conclusion. Yet, I now can see that between 2000-2002 a global vision was forming with the global translation team translating a book with a global message at the formal start of the millennium in 14 languages with a global mind concept ultimately evolving from a synthesis of Buddhism, Tantra, Vedanta, systems theory, McLuhan and Teilhard. A powerful pattern is coming into focus now.

What kind of media event would bring home the idea of a global mind? What if 100,000 people in New York stood in front of the UN in silence for ten minutes demanding peace in the middle East? What a strange new evolution from the events first undertaken in Seattle? Also from the Millennial celebrations undertaken all over the world. What if New York was joined by San Francisco? Chicago? Los Angeles? Washington D.C. ? Then Rome, Paris, Madrid, Moscow, Shanghai? Beijing? Tokyo, Jerusalem? Sau Paulo? Mexico City? Bombay and Calcutta?

What if all these Teilhardian nodes began demanding not only peace in the Middle East, but also a more equitable distribution of global wealth? The Seattle-Millennial syndrome would then be taking on a far more sophisticated symbolical form for the global media to look at and analyze. It would be a new Teilhardian moment that would ultimately lead to a new global movement. The media event covering this Teilhardian moment would simply be the trigger.

Just writing and talking about this scenario is liberating in itself. So feel this and tell me what you think.....