I spent the first three cycles of my life in smaller towns, fifteen to thirty thousand people. They afforded a great advantage. I did not know everyone in the town, but having one public high school enabled me to come into contact with all my peers. It was a rich experience at a time when I was learning the shades of grey between black and white.

Thinking more would be better, I moved to progressively larger cities. College with 20,000 others in a town three times that size. Then Wichita, Kansas, with 150,000, later the million of New Orleans. A decade of criss-crossing the Midwestern U.S. from Dallas to Detroit to Denver enabled me to experience my largest city, Chicago. Millions of people in such a small space on the planet.

It was an adjustment to live in the quiet hamlet of Windyville, population 17.
The locals were not at all sure when the School of Metaphysics purchased 700 acres of land with the intention of building a college. Ten years had passed by the time I made Windyville my home, and the locals were still not sure about the School but they were starting to accept and even like the people.

Now as we draw closer to another decade of homesteading, most of the locals trust us.
It is a nourishing transformation, for me personally and for the work I share with many others.

Growing up, I never thought I'd live in the country. My dad will tell you my ruling passion as a teenager was to get out of "Dullsville", the name I had given the town we moved to when I was 12. I thought the country was too lonely and isolated. Had it come earlier in my life, before metaphysical studies, I probably would have missed its inherent gifts. One of these is the opportunity to experience creation in all of its forms.

There is fresh air, soothing to the lungs, energizing for the body. You can receive as much as you can possibly use. The land which embodies the College of Metaphysics campus enables one to become very intimate with minerals because we have a lot of rocks on this property. The plant life is lush, and we have each other as part of creation.

Nature puts us in contact with the reality of our existence. It reminds us of where we have come from and who we are. Nature lends itself to a type of experience that truly is magnificent as long as you use your senses wisely to produce experiences that will lead to deeper understandings of ourselves and each other.

Humanity's awareness of creation is quickening. It is quickening worldwide in a very physical way. Creation is more often a function of meeting the demand of temperamental spirits, immature in desire and experience. Creation is centered more upon what man wants to possess than how he can gain the wisdom he needs to wield the power he has.

The quickening is evident in the second thoughts of some influential people. For instance an increasing amount of thought is being devoted worldwide to preserving natural resources, to keeping our air and our water clean. Earth Day is a good example. A day set aside to think about how what we do affects the planet we inhabit. A time to seriously consider how the fulfillment of our physically-based desires affects the planet we inhabit. This is one response to man's need to respect the planet that he uses for his schoolroom. Thought is cause, therefore this type of thinking will bear fruit as long as it is nourished. The real challenge to man as creator is his willingness to change, to let go of comfort in order to see his ideas fulfilled.

I'm reminded of a television commercial featuring a well-known actress talking about terrible, hideous things that are happening to animals. She implores you to call a 900 number and save those animals. She is talking about man's use of animals for experimentation for frivolous, self-seeking pursuits. Killing animals to make another perfume as opposed to risking an animal's life in place of a human volunteer - while testing a possible life-saving drug. This mindfulness is an attempt to respect the fact that animals are a part of creation, a part we would be served well to understand before we significantly alter the balance of nature.

Then there is our need to respect our own kind, man's need to respect man. Worldwide religious and political organizations try to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. At their best, the former appeals to the heart of each individual for action, the latter to a unified, group consciousness with conscience. These activities are our response to attempt to respect one another, to respect humanity.

Metaphysicians recognize the root of these concerns to be man's need to know how to respond to his abilities as a creator. At its essence this becomes an appreciation of where we've come from. By bringing spiritual evolutionary cycles, these "root races", into our collective conscious awareness we are better equipped to respond with wholistic thinking, and the genius it brings forth.

Science studies these root races by separating the disciplines; from anthropology to nuclear fission, from biological cloning to space exploration. Religious philosophy stimulates us to bring them all together, the wholeness of all creation. By uniting the disciplines an awareness of the need for us to cooperate with creation as it exists is born. We take a maturing step by responding to our creative potential. In this way we become visionary creators.

This is the importance of what might at times seem like pointless discussion. For instance the debate about cloning. Cloning animals and most probably humans is no longer science fiction, rather it is science fact. Only its accessibility is controlled for the moment. The time to debate whether we should or should not is long past.

The discussion now must be centered on how do we respond to man as creator? Cloning is a natural step in scientific evolution. Our challenge is to make it a natural step in our spiritual evolution.

Beyond the debate of who gets cloned and who doesn't, are more far reaching questions. In a world already brimming, do we risk overpopulation? If we do, in time will we risk retarding our evolutionary growth promoting weakness by ignoring survival of the fittest? Will we unintentionally open the world to plagues? Will we eventually become a race of a small group of people, either specialized to the point of extinction or generalized to the point of mediocrity?

At some point we will get past these kinds of hypothetical questions and hopefully settle our consciousness into the responsibility of our creative science. We will begin to prepare ourselves for what is now in our hands. We will begin to wonder how we can become the kind of being worthy of being cloned.

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