Local filmmakers Foster and Kimberly Gamble unlock a universal code that they believe will dramatically shift today’s social systems and alter the way human beings live
There are two ornate Chinese guardian lions that command attention outside of The Forbidden City in Beijing, China. Built in 1420, the regal guardians, often referred to as Fu Dogs in the West, are believed to have immense mythic and protective benefits, but their placement in traditional Chinese culture isn’t just limited to imperial cities. They can be found, often in pairs—male and female—at imperial tombs, temples, residences and, over time, in front of businesses. Under the paw of the male guardian lion is a ball. On the ball is a symbol that holds many circular overlaying loops that form the appearance of a flower. The guardian is believed to be protecting that ball, which represents the knowledge of truth.
Meanwhile, on another far-away continent, archeologists who have studied the Osirian Temple in Abydos, Egypt, may be baffled by another truth: they just haven’t found that much written inside of the centuries-old temple. But there is one anomaly—an image on a significant rock. The image isn’t etched into the rock. It’s not carved into the rock. According to one noteworthy cosmologist, it’s burned into the rock’s atomic structure.
It’s the exact same image found underneath the paw of the Chinese guardian lion. Over in Ephesus, Turkey, that same image can be seen vividly on the ground at the ruins site. It’s also present at the Golden Temple of Sikhs in Amritsar, India. You can spot it at a sacred site in Erbanno, Italy.
What is it?
It’s called The Flower of Life and it has been present in many portals throughout history. Even so, local filmmaker Foster Gamble could never have predicted that he would somehow have a connection to that image or that it would be directly related to one of the most profound moments in his own life; a moment that triggered his life’s work—outlined in the thoughtprovoking documentary Thrive: What on Earth Will it Take? which he created with his wife Kimberly—and one that could possibly hold the code to profoundly transforming the way human beings live. That’s deep.
So let’s do the math: Life Insight + Universal Code = A Way To Thrive.
Actually, forget the math. Let’s start with science. But for that, we have to go back to school.
Go With The Flow
The Choate School—now Choate Rosemary Hall—is a private college prep boarding school nestled in charming Wallingford, Conn. An idyllic educational haven, it’s well known for how efficiently it helps mold young humans to not only venture forth in the world but to excel in it. Choate was a remarkable springboard for Foster Gamble, who began attending when he was 14 in 1961. By his own admission, he comes from a family of privilege. His great-greatgrandfather, James Gamble, was one of the founders of Proctor & Gamble, which came into being in Cincinnati back in 1837. Gamble was fully aware that the type of education he was receiving was rare. The middle child of five, it was clear that, like others in his family, he was being groomed for great things. He quickly excelled at his various studies at Choate and developed a deep interest in physics, in particular. In fact, he’d been placed in special math and science courses taught by a visiting instructor from Cambridge—Richard Mellersh.
Mellersh also happened to be a tennis coach, and Gamble, an avid athlete at the time, was on the tennis team. As the clan headed to a match on a school bus one afternoon, something happened that would forever change Gamble’s life.
He’d been gazing out of the window, watching the lights reflecting through the trees when the imagery shifted dramatically in his mind. “All of a sudden, I was seeing this vortex,” he says, describing the whirlpoollike pattern that forced him to pause and pay attention. Eventually, Gamble says, the image morphed, resembling an atom in the traditional sense, and then transformed yet again, resembling a solar system. “I thought, ‘Wow, they have a similar dynamic—the center and the outside.”
As Gamble was experiencing this, he also felt a wave of energy rush through his entire body. “I came to realize that I was also that same pattern I was looking at,” he adds, describing the visceral impact. “I had no idea how I could be that same pattern. I was somewhere in between that tiny little atom and the giant solar system.”
But these were the kind of heady, sci-high ideas that originally lured Gamble toward science; into trying to figure out how humans fit into the overall pattern of energy.
When the bus stopped at its destination, Gamble bolted right to the front where his physics teacher was sitting and promptly shared his thoughts—that he had had a kind of vision that an atom and a solar system were the same pattern but on a different scale.
“What an amazing thought,” Mellersh shot back with sincerity. “Keep going with that and let me know what you come up with.”
“I kept going with it for the next 40 years,” Gamble now reflects, chuckling. “I like to joke that I became like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
It’s hard to forget the scene in the seminal film: Dreyfus, playing a beleaguered husband and father, is driven to create a vision he’s seeing in his mind. He spends countless hours, days, weeks, trying to replicate it in just the right way, passionately resorting to molding it out of mashed potatoes at one point.
“In high school, after sports, I would always come back to my room and build a ‘system’ or a model,” Gamble goes on. “I kept building until I created this floating ring of light. Intuitively, I felt I had to create that.”
Mellersh encouraged Gamble to keep exploring his ideas about the Universal energy pattern and that support contributed greatly to how the next four decades would unfold. “He was the one who taught me never to take anything in science as a final answer, but whatever is the most useful model,” Gamble says. “And that most answers would eventually be replaced with a more accurate, more useful model. That really opened my mind to treating education and science in a whole different way.”
After high school, Gamble says he grew “bored” of physics in the traditional sense. Yet, still fueled by his school bus experience, with a kind of mashed potato mountain-building fierceness to better understand life, he instead set out to discover how the cosmos works.
Yes … that small task.
Years later, while attending Princeton University— he also helped form the first film department there— after being groomed to be a leader in the “establishment” (his family’s, and elsewhere) he simply chose a different path. He found himself increasingly driven to help create change after seeing to much misery and fear in the world—U.S. forces had entered Vietnam—and he even told his friends that some day, he would make a film about his discoveries.
A burning question lingered: is it even possible for humans to thrive? And, if so, why don’t they?
Instinctively, Gamble felt it all came back to the pattern he originally saw on the bus. But how? Years later, his research led him to the discovery that the whirlpool/donut-shaped pattern was recognized by others in the scientific community.
Back in 1921, Albert Einstein nabbed a Nobel Prize for discovering the photoelectric effect, observing that when energy is released in the Universe, there are little pockets of wholeness that emerge, and that that pattern informs as to how life evolves. In fact, each of the pockets Einstein discovered, dubbed a quantum, is made out of its surroundings, but distinct within it—think whirlpool or tornado for instance—and the pockets always have the same pattern, no matter what the size.
Mathematicians call it the Torus. Left Brainers and other mental titans see it like this: V=2π2Rr2
Energy flows in through one end, then circulates around the center, and exits out the other side. It’s bound. It’s self-regulating. And it’s always whole.
Cosmologist/inventor Nassim Haramein notes in the film Thrive that the Earth’s weather patterns follow similar suit—going from the North Pole, down to the equator and back up. And just the opposite from the South Pole. “When you look at the solar system, embedded in the galaxy, embedded in a cluster, embedded in a super cluster, we’re traveling in this boundless sea of infinite Torus flow,” he says.
As futurist Duane Elgin points out in the film, “At every scale, throughout its entire history, the Universe has one single project: it’s growing Toruses.”
According to Gamble, just the basic pattern itself can be found in numerous places in nature. Slice an apple or an orange in half— it’s there. Scientists see it within a structure of an entire whirlpool galaxy, in a small atom, and in the magnetic field around the Earth.
In 1997, intrigued by the pattern and wanting to better understand “living geome- try,” Gamble co-convened The Soquois Symposium (in Ben Lomond), a powerful think tank designed to unite minds and explore Unification Theory. Mindbending insights came out of it and the group crystallized the primary patterning the Universe uses to sustain healthy systems, deducing that the use of that pattern could be a guideline to create sustainable, all-inclusive technologies and social systems. It was an enriching moment for Gamble—it intersected beautifully with science and the evolution of consciousness that he originally set out to explore after having the vision on the school bus. Some of the inventors at the symposium even claimed that they were using the Torus dynamic as the basis for devices that generated without combustion. The term “free energy” or “New Energy Technology” floated around, sparking more conversation.
So, Gamble began to wonder: who else knew about the pattern? And then, the cosmic dots began to connect even more.
Some of the scientists at the symposium informed Gamble that the Torus had been encoded by many cultures for millennia; that it was present in Aztec, Greek, Native American, Mayan and other ancient cultures, encoded in stories, icons, alphabets, buildings.
How? It’s all in the geometry.
Follow along.
Remember that faint but precise image in the block wall found in the Osirian Temple in Abydos, Egypt, “The Flower of Life?” At first glance, the circular image resembles a series of intersecting loops—à la Etch-a-Sketch—to form the appearance that resembles a flower, or flower’s bud. But Haramein decoded the Osirian symbol in three dimensions. If the image was indeed a “code” of some kind, he no doubt concluded that codes relating to information about our world may not be limited to flat designs. His 3D version of the symbol is a perfectly balanced force field with 12 equal energy lines radiating out from its center. It’s called Vector Equilibrium, a term originally coined by Buckminster Fuller. And the balanced energy flow around the structure, that is the Torus.
Expanding from that image to the next larger scale—64 pyramids called tetrahedra—and adding spheres around each pyramid representing the Torudial energy, and then removing the pyramids …
(Relax … word problems in math are far more complex …)
… the result, according to Thrive, is an exact overlay for the Osirian icon, created thousands of years ago. The same geometry appears in other sacred sites such as the aforementioned Fu Dogs outside of Beijing’s Forbidden City. The Mayan Calendar, the Cabilistic Tree of Life, the Golden Temple of Sikhs, ruins in Ephesus, Turkey, the cross-section of a DNA strand—each of these boast a similar pattern; or pattern of 64 that can be decoded.
Is the Torus part of a recurring code that has been embedded in nature for centuries, in the arts, in icons? Does it also hold the key to human beings “thriving?” And thriving … how?
When Gamble’s wife, Kimberly Carter, entered the family fold about a decade ago—they originally met at think tank— the couple’s diligent, additional scientific research led to even more discoveries as they embarked on officially setting out to make a documentary. But there were more questions: how was/is the code linked to seemingly unrelated things such as ending wars, shifting the economy, generating liberty and justice, and creating a renewable, clean source of energy that could completely revolutionize how human beings are meant to live?
Houston, We Have A Problem
It’s not rocket science … it’s reality: human beings are in a precarious state on planet Earth.
War. Poverty. Hunger.
Need any more convincing?
Toss in the immense and oft-pushedaside issues of the environment, the ominous dealings of the Federal Reserve, the entire structure of today’s banking methods, healthcare, education, the occasional personal mood swing—or the ongoing one—and more, and it’s clear that we’ve all arrived as a group on a funky plateau, perhaps mentally and emotionally weathered, yet, still (come on, we have it in us) able to look up to the sky—and to each other—for help.
So, what went wrong?
The quest for global domination, says Gamble, noting on the Thrive website that “a small group of financial elite have gained control over key areas of our lives—energy, food, healthcare, education and more—and are the single greatest threat to humanity’s ability to thrive.
“It is not that humans are incapable of thriving,” he goes on. “It’s that we’ve been duped into a system that is designed to consolidate wealth and power, rather than provide a real opportunity for people to thrive.”
The Gambles attempt, often convincingly, to expose that agenda in Thrive and offer strategic solutions.
“We made a decision [with this film] to relate to people’s intelligence,” reflects Kimberly Carter Gamble, a self-described activist for social justice and former journalist for Newsweek International and other publications. She also launched Above The Line in Santa Cruz in 1994, the much-admired organization that works with at-risk youth, as well as finding proper homes for children and adolescents. In a coincidental twist, Carter Gamble’s son, Kyle Thiermann (kylethiermann.com), has also morphed into a bona fide advocate for change, himself. His original Surfing For Change video boldly exposes the money trail of big banks like Bank of America, and what they are actually funding. His latest short, J Bay Nuclear Plant, explores the dangers of a proposed nuclear power plant in the shores of Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa.
In the midst of helping create a sea change, Carter Gamble, who served as both director and producer of Thrive, felt strongly that the film needed to “speak to people as the caring, intelligent, thoughtful people that they are; to go through an array of subjects, some that are pretty complex, and make connections that aren’t, on the surface, really obvious. And to do that, knowing that they world would want to know and to follow it.”
As a result, the documentary boasts compelling interviews with such luminaries as “Democracy Now” host Amy Goodman, physician/ufolist Steve Greer, authors/speakers Barbara Marx Hubbard and John Robbins, C. Edward Griffin, Brian O’Leary, Deepak Chopra and former Commissioner at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration and currently president of Solari, Inc., Catherine Austin Fitts. But that’s just a handful of the notables featured.
“A long time ago, I picked up a little tape recorder and promised the Universe that if I were given the information I needed, that I would record it and share every bit of it,” Gamble says. “A lot of Thrive was the result of my opening up to something that was so much bigger than me and preparing the soil, but waiting for it to be nurtured by the water. And eat from a source much larger than my rationality.” The film actually feels like two films in one. The front end delves into why Gamble embarked on his mission—the school bus, the vision, the hows and whys of the Universe—then reveals the code/the Torus that Gamble originally saw. It also ventures into some thought-provoking territory as it relates that code to free energy.
Yes … “free” energy. In most circles today, this is better known as New Energy, or the New Energy Movement.
What is it?
According to the newenergymovement. org, it includes, “a class of innovative energy machines spanning several disciplines, from chemistry and physics, to electrical, electronic and mechanical engineering.” What sets the advanced designs apart is “their superior ability to access the primal forces of the cosmos.”
Don’t trip on that. Read it again. Here: “their superior ability to access the primal forces of the cosmos.”
Free energy. Is it here for the taking? Physicist/inventor Nikola Tesla once quipped: “Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by power obtainable at any point in the Universe. It is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.”
But naysayers argue that nothing can violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics— in a closed system, the organization of energy naturally runs down, meaning it’s impossible to get more energy out of a system than it takes to run it.
But the Torus is not a closed or isolated system, according to the Gambles. “It is open to the rest of the Universe, as are galaxies, solar systems and the atoms that provide the electricity in our very own bodies,” the film’s website notes. “None of these are plugged into a wall socket. They all run off the infinite torque of the Universe that is turning every system in existence. So what if there were devices that could tap into that?”
Apparently, there are. Imagine what the big oil companies might think of this.
Beyond the Torus, Free Energy and other interesting factoids, some that will raise eyebrows as much as they enlighten, the doc mindfully focuses on the current challenges—from financial upheaval to global domination. An insightful section, considering the state of the world’s economic affairs, is dubbed “Follow The Money” and it does just that— revealing an eye-opening history of banking, banking families (the Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Morgans) and how the Federal Reserve operates and why it’s in place.
Google “Federal Reserve is not federal” and see what comes up.
As for global domination, the filmmakers raise provocative points, suggesting that powerful private bankers are leading an agenda to control primary systems (from money and energy to food and media) in an effort “to establish a sole global authority—with themselves in charge.”
“They use the media, central banks, multinational corporations, governments, major foundations, and international agencies such as the IMF and World Bank to implement their strategies,” The Thrive film website reports. “ … they have successfully brought down countries across the globe, including Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Tanzania, Indonesia, Brazil, Poland, Mexico, Bolivia, Thailand, Iceland, the Soviet Union, Japan, Greece and scores of others. They are now attempting to dismantle the U.S. by collapsing the dollar and making sure Americans are in debt they can’t repay.”
Gamble is candid about these ideas and discoveries. Remember, here’s a guy who set out to find some answers about a curious shape he’d seen while he was riding a school bus one afternoon back in 1961 only to find himself suddenly pulled into a kind of cosmic rabbit hole filled with intriguing, often shocking, information about the way our current systems operate. The man uncovered far more than he ever imagined.
“We are trained to not even be able to think of society without this paternalistic, authoritarian government,” Gamble says. “When I came across all this information, I was more than surprised. Whoa—I felt my own world on shaky ground all of a sudden. And it was my son Trevor who was teaching me about the economic side of it.”
(Trevor, by the way, recently published “The Secrets to Nonviolent Prosperity.”)
Gamble refers to it as the third great discovery in his life. Aikido was the first—being fully powerful as long as you didn’t violate other people. The second “great” discover was that when he took that same principal awareness of the Torus dynamic and related it to the idea of creating unlimited clean, free energy anywhere on the planet.
“So the third for me was this Liberty perspective,” he says, “taking the same awareness of fundamental wholeness, and that at the human level, it’s about honoring the individual not the group. And if we are rigorous about honoring the freedom of every single individual, then all of our systems become voluntary and the notion of violating somebody else is just going to drift away.
“Culture is going to look back in a hundred years and say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe they actually authorized somebody to go out and violate other people, and steal their money in taxes and send their kids off to war, and take other people’s oil’—it’s going to be, ‘what were they thinking?’ I love visioning what that society would be like.”
(It’s fitting to note that between college and the making of this film, Gamble created a training and technology company called MindCenter, which generated brainwave biofeedback to assist people in learning how to manage stress and to tap into their consciousness. He also created Interaction Dynamics, a training program for mastering communication skills. On another note: he and most of his family have divested their interests from Proctor & Gamble. Gamble is a modest shareholder in the company but the clan is mostly far removed from the company’s dealings. They have, however, been instrumental in suceeding with having the company eliminate 95 percent of animal testing.)
Meanwhile, the “solutions” bring us back to the Torus … or at least, how the Torus operates.
“It’s a model, a self-sustaining system,” Gamble adds. “It’s the only thing in nature that completely self-sustains, and if you look at our social systems, the main problem we have is that nothing sustains what we are building. It’s all just on trajectories that don’t last when you carry them forward, and they certainly don’t sustain justice, so we’re pointing out how to use that Torus as a template in our social system and learn as well.”
Still, Carter Gamble points out that we are very far from a self-organizing, self-empowered community-based world. “Getting from here to there is the part that intrigues me the most,” she adds, “because we are so far from there and don’t have the all resources now to get there. So, for me, setting up the alternatives, which hold that vision as to where we are going, and to empower people to have control over the decisions that impact them, is important.
“You don’t go head on and fight. You make [the old system] not necessary; obsolete,” she adds. “Because you have created the [new] systems where you can do these things for yourself. Partly, how this happens, is that you have to get the people in there who will not keep imposing things on you.”
But is it possible?
The Occupy Movement stands out as a vivid example. Carter Gamble also points out the way Santa Cruz County handled the moth spray incident (LBAM) from 2007-2009, as “a fabulous example of the way people got together and made it impossible for something to happen that was fundamentally unjust and invasive.
“I felt so proud to be part of this community,” she adds. “That program was funded, ultimately, from Homeland Security and George W. Bush. It was hundreds of millions of dollars and they had it outlined for 10 years. They were going to be spraying toxins over 7 million people between Monterey and Marin counties and inland from there. And it was Santa Cruz County that really mobilized the model that we present in Thrive.”
“I think Santa Cruz is a vanguard community for this country in terms of what a sustainable local organization/local community could look like,’ Gamble says. “Especially in terms of the diversity here and the commitment to growing natural foods; the commitment to open conversation and political activism. When we were successful as a community in stopping the moth spray, we got a hold of some internal emails from the Department of Food and Agriculture—they were saying something to the effect of ‘we had anticipated some resistance from Santa Cruz, but we had no idea it would be so well organized.’ I think that’s a microcosm of what Santa Cruz is pioneering, where people can be reasonably connected, sustainable and interconnected as communities but self sustaining … rather than beholden to some central authoritarian power.”
Ready to Thrive
The Gambles say it took eight years to bring the film to fruition—well, 40, if you count Foster Gamble’s initial pledge to expose answers to some profound questions. The film premiered in the Bay Area on Nov. 11, 2011.
(How can you beat a launch date of 11.11.11?)
Since that time, the buzz over the film’s content has been steadily growing— it’s tagline “The World is Waking Up” is striking a chord. Nearly 3,000 screenings of the documentary have taken place around the globe. The film’s website, thrivemovement.com, has bloomed, too, offering resources, blogs and other information pertinent to promoting conversations that will effect positive change. And various “Thrive” groups/communities have already formed.
“We didn’t just want to create a film, we wanted to create the tools that people would need to find their own unique place in participating in solutions, and, also, to do the inquiries themselves so they just don’t just believe us,” Carter Gamble says. “Some of these are paradigm-shifting insights; we wanted people to do the critical thinking themselves and also to follow up on resources and connect with each other.”
It’s a valiant effort, no matter what side of the fence you sit on about the issues presented. (Although, it would be surprising if even the most conservative among us doesn’t walk away from the documentary questioning the way our current systems operate.) Beyond that, there’s this: In the case of Thrive, the Gambles smack of a latter-day Michael Moore by way of Morgan Spurlock (with a dash of Deepak and Buckminster). They have managed to boldly deliver a relevant, quasi-cosmic, socio-poli-sci offering that dares to expose today’s injustices and spur individuals to generate change for a more empowering future.
“We’re in the most dramatic juncture in recorded human history,” Gamble says. “We’re at time that, for the first time, as far as we know, humans have the capacity to destroy all life as we know it on planet Earth. And we’re in the period of maximum contraction—the would-be controllers using weaponry and deception to literally take over the whole world. It’s like a bad James Bond film, except it’s happening and destroying billions of lives.”
Carter Gamble adds: “I personally believe that we are part of a living Universe; that is awake also to what is going on. And the same way Thrive has been facilitated, I believe, somehow, what is happening is connected on all levels. It’s all working together. I don’t believe this is going to be a smooth transition. I can’t personally wrap around the information I have and think this is going to be smooth and without hardship, which it already is, for billions of people.”
“And yet,” Gamble muses, “at the exact same moment, right here and right now, there is the most powerful, independent, self-creating spiritual emergence in recorded history as well. People are evolving and shaping their lives around ecology or justice; around freedom or around peace.
“People are getting informed. I am actually the most optimistic I have been in the last 15 years. And most of the people that we worked with that are the most informed are also the most optimistic. Which seems strange at first but then I realized, no, it’s about getting a sense of what’s really going on so that the confusion and the hopelessness drifts away. And then there’s this sense of ‘oh my goodness, we actually outnumber the people who are perpetrating the problem— over a million to one!’”
Something Gamble says in the film immediately comes to mind: “If nature teaches us anything … it is that life is meant to work. And like every living thing, our purpose is to thrive.” That’s definitely something to “wake up” to. ?
That’s definitely something to “wake up” to.
The Thrive Action Plan – What in Earth will it take to make dramatic shifts?
Follow along:
1) Get informed. Speak up and connect to others.
2) Bank locally.
3) Buy and invest responsibly.
4) Join the Movement to Audit and End The Federal Reserve.
5) Keep the Internet Fair and Open.
6) Support Independent Media
7) Support organic, non-GMO farming.
8) Require election and campaign finance reform.
9) Advocate or renewable and “free” energy.
10) Take part in Critical Mass Actions.
The Thrive Action Plan – What in Earth will it take to make dramatic shifts?+++
Thrive Time Screenings
7 p.m. Thursday, March 15 at the Del Mar Theatre, Downtown Santa Cruz. Tickets are $10. The Gambles will be present to discuss the film. Visit thenick.com.
7 p.m. Friday, March 16 at the UCSC Media Theatre. Tickets are $10 (free for students and faculty.)
Visit thrivemovement.com or santacruztickets.com.
