Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

Here we all are. And aren't we all a little unnerved?

I don't know about you. I think, I mean, there are a lot of us here who aren't actually physically in the United States or who

necessarily pay much attention to the United States.

One of the problems, I believe, about the United States is that we Americans, we United States,

we United States, Americans tend to believe that everybody is focused on us.

But on the other hand, we like cause a lot of

things to happen in the world. And right now, the situation is looking very scary for a lot of

people. I've been sort of out on line a little bit and looking at things people are writing and things people are posting.

And as the American election comes around in a couple of days, there's a lot of fear rising.

And it doesn't even matter which side you're on.

There are people afraid on both sides that everything they love is under threat.

And that if the election doesn't go their way, there's a lot of scary stuff ahead.

I watched one political strategist who did a sociological

prediction of four different outcomes, no matter which way the election went, and I'm not even

going to say them because they were not pleasant to think about. So I know that sociologists can

be wrong as often as they're right. So I'm not

going to bother you with that, but it's just part of this systemic fear. My personal belief is that

there's a system that was set up in the world that came out of the European, they called it the

Enlightenment, but it was really the dawn of the scientific era, which then led to the colonial era where people took that type of a world view, their philosophy, their religion, spread it all over the world, killed pretty much everyone they could, took everything they could reach, and dominated the society, the social norms

of the whole planet. That system has been going for about 500 years. And it actually worked

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