testimonies from more planets

planet 11 – Heroes

The fact that the people of our planet loved being a hero was in some respects praiseworthy – in others, it was a curse.

planet 16 – The world of empowerment

Everything begins with a thought. A thought might be the seed for a story. A story might be tested in reality. And we did. Tired of the inequality which drove us all nuts, we decided to do a U-turn. We had nothing to lose. We won more than we had ever dreamed of – and ended all wars for good.

planet 19 – We finally humanised ourselves

We had created a world so far removed from what our species needed to thrive that we were hardly humans anymore when the call to rethink and reshape ourselves reached us.

planet 34 – Arrogance

When our scholars read all the amazing testimonies of the planets of the universe alliance about how they ended all wars, a group remarked that one particular root of war was missing in most testimonies: arrogance. Many centuries ago, the people of our planet nearly destroyed everything because their arrogance didn’t allow them to empower each other. Instead of recognising what every single citizen has to offer, how rich every person’s mind is (or can be if used), how many solutions are already on offer, our ancestors kept the circle of those who whined about the state of the world small, and instead of shaping the world, they sank deeper into their conviction that only the thoughts of a few must ever have any value – unfortunately the thoughts they favoured were those of doom and complaint instead of being bold and shape. On our planet, every child learns those stories by heart and trains from an early age on to value each person’s mind and ideas. This is the story of how our ancestors overcame their arrogance.

planet 4 – Weapons

Love is treacherous – and we loved the weapons we built. Have you ever broken with a love?

planet 42 – Being the best

Today, I would say, we didn’t live. We didn’t even know what living is. All we knew was competition and that we had to constantly follow strict and often cruelling routines to fight for the top positions.

It were those among us who due to a disability couldn’t compete like the majority who, in their frustration, began to explore life and discovered that life is not about competition – quite the contrary.

This discovery was our starting point to healing and to ending all wars – those against ourselves, those against each other, and those our nations inflamed.

planet 6 – The Island

Enough is enough! This slogan started as a whisper among a few until it had turned into a loud proclamation, echoing across our planet – and finally, we acted swiftly and ended all wars.

planet 17 – Graduating from nursery

We are still proud people but since we finally managed to evolve from kindergarten to primary school, we are not that embarrassed any more to confess that for centuries, we got stuck in nursery and didn’t even know that we were being silly.

planet 21 – Communication sounds so easy

Bubbling is part of the process of learning to speak. Unfortunately bubbling has rarely anything to do with communication. We had become a planet of bubblers, and learning to communicate nearly drove us mad and into more wars – until …

planet 27 – Ending the game

We loved to play and it nearly cost us everything we had.

planet 28 – Bursting the bubble

Some called it a social contract: So long as I can live in my personal bubble, you can wage war wherever.
In order to end all wars, we needed to give people an incentive and a vision to leave their bubbles and to become an active part in the shaping process of our world.
It was a task that brought both exhaustion, anxieties and the funniest little stories to the surface.

planet 26 – Music

Yes, we really did it. We pressed pause on heartbreak and dissing songs, and created the songs we needed to save ourselves and our planet.

planet 39 – Language (2)

We all thought it was a joke and none of us was particularly inclined to pay this challenge much attention. But challenges have a way of prodding us, and at some point we get so annoyed by the prodding that we accept the challenge just to demonstrate how wrong the challenger is.

I think, that humans tend to react to challenges like this is a wonderful mechanism. It’s what saved our planet from total destruction.

Here is the challenge, and it makes me smile to imagine how you will reject it, just like we did (or maybe you are wiser than we were.) This is the challenge: Let’s drop every word and phrase that brings up our defences and begin an actual conversation about content without falling into the trap of starting labelling our conflicts with new (or old) words again, without throwing around slogans and accusations.

planet 43 – War is unfeasible

You might come to think of our planet as a dull place because we love numbers (and we can confirm that those planets who see numbers critically have a point. But numbers work for us).

We had never been to war when we joined the universe alliance but we got intrigued by the wars that played out on planet war. It was one of those situations where you are so horrified that you can’t look away.

But then we did what we usually do, we made some calculations and we can only recommend that you do the same. War is not feasible. The amount of prosperity and progress a single small conflict destroys is already devastating and that’s is easily exponentiated the larger the conflict.

We also love music. Maybe you would like that about us.

planet 49 – Language (3)

We tried so much: bodywork, therapy, communication, identifying the roots of war, laughter, demonstrations, stories.

All of these tools had positive effects but something was missing, some final piece of the puzzle – until someone suggested that we rewrite our dictionaries.

And they were right. Our dictionaries were full of example sentences which reflected the persisting divides in our societies, which normalised war, which expressed attitudes we no longer wanted to hold.

In a huge global effort, we rewrote out dictionaries, our encyclopaedias and eventually all our laws.

Language matters.

planet 3 – It all starts with the body

Unexpectedly, we ended all wars by learning about our bodies and by connecting to them.

planet 8 – The big clean-up

You might be surprised to hear that we ended all wars accidentally. It all began with a crazy woman. (…)
We liked and sometimes feared her because of her candour, her wit, her crazy ideas, her impatience with our slowness in getting things done.

A first draft of the story is now online. Take a look >

Input from environmentalists would be much appreciated for this fun story.

planet 52 – History

There are people who are to impatient to look at history. They want to shape the world today and the future.

On our planet we learned to balance both: looking back and actively shaping today.

As a prelude to our testimony, we share one of the stories of our past with you: The tale of two frightened villages.

planet 5 – The power of laughter

This is the story of how we used laughter to end all wars.

planet 1 – The roots of war

On the seventh day of the eighth month, nearly three months after our arrival on the island, we came together again in our barn, sat down in a circle, each of us on a little heap of hay, and continued with our work.
We all agreed that we needed to understand what war is and what its roots are before we could attempt to end all wars.
‘What is war?’ one of us asked.

The testimony of planet one will be published soon. How it begins can be read or listened to here >

planet 10 – SCREAM

Our planet used to have a name, a real name, until everyone simply called it the scream. Today, our planet has a name again, a real one.
Not everything is well, but we are no longer screaming like hurt animals who lash out at everyone and everything.

The idea for this planet came up recently after an unsettling incident and when I came across Gabor Maté again even more recently, I thought, I’d love to write this story with or with input from Gabor Maté.

planet 44 – Status

We humans, on our planet, used to be very strange creatures – as our young keep telling us. They luckily have the freedom to live their lives to the fullest. I can only call them, lovingly, lucky bastards.

When I was young, everyone had big dreams (it actually makes me laugh today what we used to call big dreams): a beach villa, a collection of fast cars, friends that made others jealous of who we hang out with, partners others which they could have, bodies like gods, an empire of businesses, several yacht (anyone could have one), large parties the world talked about, daring adventures, unrivaled records, and anything else that would make the neighbours, family members and practically everyone else jealous and that would make us look like the out-of reach perfect perfection, the person to be in awe of. (Insert a big sigh.) It’s not like these days were all bad. If you were in such a bubble, you could have some unforgettable moments (mostly fleeting but they were there).

But these moments were always fleeting and jealously is only gratifying at the very beginning. There comes a time when you wish you could have friends.

But that wasn’t even the big problem. That was the personal side of those of us who the more they had the emptier they felt.

The big problem was that we were exhausting ourselves, each other and our planet with the pursuit of things that have no meaning (as our young will explain to you in great length. Oh, do they love explaining.)

This is the story of how we debunked the pursuit of status and finally found life. Oh, and yes, we also ended all wars.

We might have to do something about our young though. They seem to become a little to smug for their own good.

planet 25 – Relationships

This is the story of how we focused on discovering what makes us raise a hand against another human, a child, our partner, our child, and how we eventually ended all wars by healing ourselves and with that the relationships with each other.

planet 2 – Resolve (1)

The greatest mystery for a few of us was why we continued to start wars, despite everything we had suffered in the previous wars.
The answer surprised us and opened a door to end all wars.

Co-writers with extensive historical knowledge welcome, especially with knowledge about the two world wars, the wars led by the British Empire, other colonial wars and the more recent wars. Potentially the basis of this story could be used for several stories for more focus.

See also: planet 41, resolve (2)

planet 30 – Narratives

‘The narratives that serve us might damage others. Is it worth it to hold on to such narratives?’
This was the question that turned our world upside down, or as some said: It turned our world finally the healthy way up.

planet 35 – Breakfast

It was a group of artists who said (without mentioning any of our ongoing wars) that they intended to build the longest breakfast table ever, one which would wind through every country, across every ocean, desert and mountain range without breaking, one that would be built with the help of local artists and craftspeople along the way, and then we would all eat together. And we did. All at the same time, all at the same table, each of us bringing food, breakfast food (regardless of the time of the day or night) – and we made peace.

What is a breakfast but a beginning. What is a breakfast but the sharing of a meal.
What is a breakfast but a time to look ahead and make plans for the day, together.

planet 48 – The power of marketing

Bloody fog in our minds! We were so stupid. We allowed ourselves to be brainwashed. Not just once in a while. Not just once a week or once a day. No, we allowed ourselves to be brainwashed pretty much constantly.

OK, some people didn’t consume adverts. But the majority of us thought it was normal that some huge corporations should tell us what to drink, what to wash with, what to drive and what to wipe our baby’s ass with.

Here comes the good news, once we pushed advertising to a place we could chose to visit or not, we transformed. Our minds gaining free capacities and a new joy in thinking and discovering for ourselves. And our people began to talk to each other again and to hold big companies to account for the bullshit they had been selling us for decades.

And yes, this was part of ending all our wars. More in our testimony.

planet 18 – We are fighters

But the time came nonetheless to end all wars.

planet 9 – We created monsters

I was a history student who had lost their family to the war. I wanted to understand. I needed to understand why my parents, my siblings, my partner, my young child had to die.

As I dug deep into the books which are so often written by people who are not aware of their biases, I noticed that the monsters who kept igniting wars on our planet were not some evil taking possession of our world. It was much worse: We had created these monsters. As a reaction to former wars we wanted to do well, we wanted to do better, but all we actually did was pave the way for more destruction. This is a story of making ourselves see what we had done, of acknowledging our good intentions and how much our good intentions failed us. This is a story of very carefully re-crafting the ideas which shape the life on our planet.

planet 14 – True power is in creation

Our journey to end all wars began with a challenge. A billionaire gave twelve billion worth of money to two people. One of those people had to use the twelve billion to destroy and the other had to use the twelve billion to create. This was all the contestants were told.

We followed the competition with a kind of detached interest. Our billionaires were known for their weird pastimes.

But we did not expect that the constant comparison between images of destruction and images of creations would do something in our minds.

When we finally caught up with the billionaires intentions, we were ready to rebuild, reshape and rethink life on our planet.

planet 12 – The end of all gender

It was not as if we had a good choice. It was either dying out or finding a way back from the divides which saw the genders split the planet between them and engage in bitter wars.

planet 7 – Change the story, shape the world

I blush when I remember who we were, and I cautiously smile when I look at us now.
Wars had been part of our history for as long as anyone remembers until a cheeky student asked a few questions about the stories which inform our actions – and suddenly it was as if we got a whole set of new glasses, each of which showed us a new world.
With this experience came the realisation that we don’t have to stick to the old stories. We could use stories, new stories, to shape our world – and with that end all wars, restore our planet and actually enjoy the life we have been given.

planet 31 – Match

Knowing a little about Earthlings, let me give you a fair warning: This is not a love story – not as such. This is our story about how we realised of how much we deprived ourselves, our societies, our planets (we have three of them) by seeking practical matches, matches for security, matches for status, matches for convenience, matches to have (insert whatever comes to mind) – instead of matches which deserve the term: two people who match. Because a well-matched couple is capable of creating a deep bond, of enjoying and praising each others, of strengthening and empowering each other, of setting free energies and potentials which become the basis for a healthy society – just like all other kinds of relationships contribute to the destabilisation of all we on our planets can be.

planet 33 – Mirrors and sounding boards

It still makes me shake my head when I look back at how we ended all wars. It was so simple that today’s student’s are frustrated just by reading about the decades of unnecessary wars, conflicts, struggles for dominance, exploitation. All we needed were two things: mirrors to see and hear ourselves (and unfortunately our ridiculousness) and people trained as sounding boards.

planet 36 – Language (1)

We discovered that we had grown into a species of sloppy thinkers and that a lot of our troubles had their roots in our failure to shape our languages in a way that served us. Once we actively began to shape the words we use for what and whom, we were able to come together and to create thriving societies.

planet 40 – Purpose

Purpose is powerful – always.

But whether it is a power for creation or destruction is a different matter.

On our planet, we had become so obsessed with purpose that we didn’t even notice how we became more and more destructive.

This is the story of our people who eventually took a step back and carefully examined all that purpose can be and all that it can destroy.

planet 45 – Holy People

Elevating some people is always dangerous.

This is the story of how we began to communicate with our holy people and which agreements we reached.

planet 46 – Criminals

I am so glad that some other writers already inserted sighs into their testimonies because sighs make it so much easier for me to tell our story.

You see, we loved our criminals. They were daring, cunning rascals. They also tyrannies, robbed and maimed us. And eroded our potentials to shape the way we want to live by telling us that bad players are part of the fabric of every society.

Hell, we loved our criminals. Some of our best movies centred around the most malicious minds.

But even these memories and my sighs don’t make me wish them back.

Once we woke up from our strange admiration for the rogue, we didn’t fight them, we found them and gave them a choice. Some took it, others are not among us any more.

planet 47 – Chosen

The people of a planet, in order to make life possible for everyone, need to be able to meet each other on equal and respectful terms. As soon as a person or a group declares that they are better than all others or that they have been chosen for a task, for a position, or even as a group – the whole planet is in trouble.

We, humans can only achieve a balance between our many worlds if we respectfully accept each other as equal. Everything else is a root of conflict and destruction.

Our story is about how we gently explored why and how someone came to believe that they are chosen and how such individuals and groups can become part of the people of our planet.

planet 51 – The bully and the bullied

We owe a lot to planet 5 and the workshops they did with us so that we could learn the ancient and healing art of laughter.

This is the story of how our bullies turned into some of our best thinkers and the bullied into some of our best comedians.

Funny enough, we didn’t believe that laughing would suffice to end all wars. On our planet it opened the gateways to wanting to end all wars, and while a lot more war was needed to make sure wars can never happen again, laughter was the medicine that healed us.

planet 23 – The brain

The brain doesn’t judge. It simply processes what we feed it.
We had filled our brains with rubbish, and there was no way to clean it out entirely.
But by now, we make sure to teach our children to be careful what they want to include in the sensitive structures of their brains.

planet 24 – Budget

It was a group of mathematicians, and strangely bureaucrats, who helped us to end all wars and to restore our planet.
Their trick was to introduce budgets. If you want war, you can’t have meat. If you want meat, you have to share it among your people, because there is only so much farming our planet can suffer, and you have to restore biodiversity in ecosystems which reflect the damage inflicted by the amount of flesh you want to eat.
These are just two examples, but these people really got under our skin with their constant budgeting.
Saying this, eventually the budgets helped us to rethink life and work on our planet.

planet 13 – Ending the war against ourselves

We were so busy fighting our individual inadequacies that we had no time to raise weapons against each other. When some of us woke up and began to explore what we were doing to ourselves, they discovered that we had been at war with ourselves for generations and in pretty much every aspect of life: our bodies exhausted from constant improvements, our minds degenerated from lack of use, thanks to AI, our souls chained and scared thanks to our high morals on one side and the toxicity of our social media platforms, our health weak due to ultra-processed food, lack of fresh water and polluted air, our frustrations showing in our fantasies to destroy, and in our inability to connect with each other.

Co-writers welcome. This might become a collection within the collection where several planets contribute, each picking one of the war-against-ourselves issues, such as AI, diets, plastic surgery, competition, overwork, overproduction, fossil fuels, social media, processed food …

planet 53 – We need trust

Without trust we are lost

Without trust we ere

Without trust we lash out
needlessly

Without trust we destroy

Without trust we die

These are the famous words inscribed on a gravestone of an unknown person.

Read on >

planet 20 – Logic

Logic nearly brought us to blow up our planet.

This is a story about logic, order and the freedom and benefits of chaos.

Two snippets for this story are now online. Take a look >

planet 22 – What we learn

If a child learns that war is heroic, there is a good chance this person will still believe it in adulthood – until they have been on a battlefield.

planet 41 – Resolve (2)

We learned a lot from the testimony of planet 2 who discovered that many conflicts had never been resolved after a war had ended. Usually, people had just wanted to forget.

That was true for our the nations of our planet, too.

As we embarked on the journey to research the causes of past conflicts and to resolve them, we discovered that something else was in need of resolve: The traumata caused by these conflicts.

planet 32 – Talking

On our planet, people talked, and talked and talked, and talked a lot. They said very little – if anything.
The trouble with a lot of words and no content is that nothing gets said. If nothing gets said. Nothing gets done. And worse most things are assumed.
When we began to explore the roots of our wars, we soon realised that we needed to add content, as in the result of actual thinking, to our negotiations if we wanted to get anywhere. And interestingly, once we began to talk about what mattered, it was comparatively easy to come to our senses and to end all wars.

planet 15 – Freetowns

We made a bargain. You get to screw the planet. We get a network of independent Freetowns. You get to wage war. We will build a rail network to connect our towns.
In exchange, we won’t protest and anyone who could get dangerous to you, will have a place in a Freetown. You do you. We do we.
A single Freetown might have been overlooked by too many, but a network makes people wonder whether waging war, chaining people and destroying the planet really are that desirable.

planet 37 – We failed to establish a world order

– and with that, we unwittingly lay the foundations for ending all wars.

planet 38 – Condescension

There were a lot of people on our planet who were good, who cared about the future, about the environment, about what makes people hate or exploit.

I remember often thinking: since we have so many good, concerned, active, compassionate people why are we still engaged in wars, why are we still exploiting and scamming each other, why are we still destroying our habitat, the basis of our very existence?

It was a puzzle that pained me because I dearly liked many of the good people. I liked their minds, their reasoning, but something was amiss.

In the middle of a harsh winter, sitting shivering and a little peckish in my small room, I read an article by someone I respect much. And suddenly it hit me. This person wrote about their last dinner with their family and the pleasant walk they had afterwards as a prelude to launching an attack on everything that is wrong on our planet.

And I thought: it’s condescension. That’s what keeps us from listening to each other. There is this person who might feel some of the pain that is felt all around the planet but who essentially lives a cosy life, and from that cosy place, they think they should teach the world what is and what isn’t, what should be done and what shouldn’t.

‘Should only people speak up who suffer?’ a friend of mine asked when I shared my thoughts with them. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘But those who are comfortable would achieve much more if they included some self-reflection, if they were aware of their flaws and faults, and if they knew that they don’t have the answers to everything.

These thoughts, and I was not the only one who had them, eventually led us, the people of our planet, to examine ourselves and to seek to explore rather than to teach, to unearth rather than to patronise. And with this we granted ourselves the respect, the courage, even some healing so that we together could bridge the divides and eventually come together.

It was not an easy road but honest self-reflection is a powerful tool on the way to end all wars.

planet 29 – Ending economic wars

Our starting point was that so long as nations lead wars for economic dominance, small scale and large scale, we can’t have peace.

planet 50 – Self-pity

To be honest, I would rather not write this testimony, since from today’s perspective, ours is an embarrassing story.

But the other planets encouraged us to add our experiences and so we dig deep into our past in the hope it will give you some insights.

At the core of our story is the self-pity which enveloped most of us, back then, and which let us bury ourselves in sad poetry and songs, in attempts to improve ourselves and often enough in paralysing depression.

Self-pity occasionally has its place. But only ever temporarily. We made it into a planetwide culture which eventually led us to wage war against each other because we had made ourselves believe that no one would ever understand us and our needs anyway.

This is the story of how we made our self-pity visible, how we overcame it and how we learned to enjoy life with ourselves and with each other.