Today, a new chapter in "Hurricane River" under the same name in the website.  It is "Henry," after "The Law."

[Note - thank you, Jane, for your condolences in the comment section.  I agree that my mother was one of the kindest of women, but then again, I am slightly biased.]  

We leave behind the interesting world of UFO paranoia (or is it?) for another theological heavy- Ilia Delio's "The Unbearable Wholeness of Being." The title is a take-off of the oft-quoted and probably seldom read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, a modern existentialist who hit the publisher's jack pot in the 1990's.  By chance - I am not one to read the current novels, although I would if I knew what was what - I have read Kundera, and it is no mistake that Delio borrows the title from him.  Kundera represents the absolute angst of a humanity without center and purpose.  In her first chapters, Delio tells us how this frame of mind happened.  We will learn in future chapters what we must do and are doing to find a new center of sorts, but for now we are left with the evolution of Western consciousness, which is no small thing.

It is a breathtaking romp.  We have the "Ptolemaic" view of the geocentric world, with sun, planets and heaven circling above and we below at God's heart of creation.  We then have the discoveries of Nicholas de Cuna and Copernicus and others in the Renaissance that told us of a heliocentric solar system, where we were just another planet circling around just another star.  I do recall my science teachers telling me in grammar and high school what a big deal this was, but I really didn't believe them.  Now I am believing them.  In a previous book, we found that this idea of an infinite universe where there was no earthly center helped to get Father Bruno burned at the stake in 1600. Yes, it was a big idea, and according to Delio it changed everything.  As the Earth was no longer the objective center, the apple of God's eye, so reason had to become the center of a subjective universe.  In this, Church authority waned, and finally, the very notion of God became archaic, a product of individual thought and illusion.  Only the hard-core measurable world counted for reality.  And thus we come to where many of us are now: a secure world of reason without a reason to live.

But a formidable idea has already occurred that should, once again, change everything - The Theory of Relativity.  In this, matter and time are not hard-wired, but relative to each other through gravity.  That I cannot define it more perfectly shows that this still is an idea that has not truly permeated the general social psyche.  And it gets more complex - with relative time and space, we come upon the notion that all is relational, with the observer being the final link in the chain of reality.  What we think effects what we get.  With this comes the non-local or "spooky" problem - that particles or anything that once interacted (ever!) effect each other "beyond the light cone," or at near instantaneous rates that exceed the speed of light.  Impossible, impossible, but such ideas are now, we are led to believe anyway, no more preposterous to those of us, like myself, whose rational is still in the Newtonian world, than the heliocentric universe was to minds of the medieval ages.  

And in the center of it all is the most revolutionary idea of all, one that has come to pervade everything: the idea of evolution.

I will leave that until later when the book discusses it more fully. For now, it is best to focus on something we cannot believe even if we say we do - that our reality is built on primary concepts, not a "real" reality.  This is made evident both through such history as revealed in Delio's book, as well as in ethnographies of often radically different cultures.  But do you believe it, really? I don't, even though I am logically convinced it is true.  

This became apparent after watching another of the Hobbit movies this weekend.  While this movie is pure fantasy to most of us, reports from as late as the 19th century in Europe - and in 20th century Ireland - tell us that many of the country people still believed in elves and witches and goblins and so on.  And they did not only believe - they saw and often times their lives were changed.  Such was often the case in other ethnographies - for instance, the Aztecs had the "myth" of Quetzalcoatl, the spirit god who would come as a white man on wings from the east and hearken a different era.  Indeed, "white" men with wings (sails) did come from the east and did change everything.  While this myth had the Spaniard wrong, it did describe the event in Aztec terms correctly.  There are other world views that did and did not coincide with our own on contact, but the evidence is there: that reality is strongly determined by our abstract notions of it.

So much so that we have to wonder if we can ever arrive at reality at all, for aren't even the notions in quantum physics and evolution only contemporary attempts to discover reality?  And isn't that Kundera's point - that we are beyond the notion of ever discovering reality, so much so that we can never have a center again?

Still, there are hints of greater truths in ethnographic coincidences like the Aztec prophesy.  But which are truly true? Where on this sliding scale of partial truths and historical aberrations is our center?


I think we will find that this is evolution's key intellectual role: that with it, we can find a center amidst constant change.  It is just the reality basis we need for a fast-moving world, and we might say that it is not necessary for this centering concept to ultimately be the only correct one; rather, it is important in that it is something, a center, that we can rally around to find our own meaning.  What we have learned through history and ethnography is that most realities are at least tangential to a greater reality - that they speak of some truth even though the kernel of it is still misunderstood.  Thus we can and will and must find this new piece of turf, for one must have some footage to make any progress.  After all, to have nothing to stand on is to fall into the black terror of Kundera's brave post-modern world.  FK      

Ingo Swann's book, "Penetration," on first looks doesn't really raise any credible new issues.  It is also a book that seems written by two people  - or one person with two objectives.  The first third is a far-out story about how Ingo was taken to an unknown location (hood over head and all) and asked to espy through ESP the lunar landscape.  On doing so, he was surprised to learn that the moon was inhabited by some extraterrestrial forms that were exploiting our satellite through mining or something of the sort.  The man who was in charge of the undisclosed site listened intently and was not surprised - -it was something that he had known, and was intensely concerned with. 

And then we move on to the next two- thirds of the book,which suddenly becomes very technical and logically complex - as if the first part was to lure in readers, and the second to reasonably convince them that something very big and strange was going on on the Moon.  Here we learn that astronomers have long established that there is a lunar atmosphere, and that water is present (the latter was revealed in the late 90's, which I recall - but the former is news to me); we learn that high-resolution photos have been taken of the moon since the late 50's or early 60's, yet few have been released to the public; that some of the few that were shown revealed building structures in the background; that suddenly, both the Soviet Union and the US stopped further exploration and colonization of the Moon, even though much more had been planned; and that an undisclosed fear was behind such limits of the former rival superpowers.  

We also learn that as Swann was surveying the Moon with his special gift, the aliens he saw spotted his psychic presence, something that is of utmost importance to the greater thesis of the book: that is, that human governments have been giving us disinformation to cloud the alien "facts" to keep us from exploring our own psychic potential.  This, we learn, was (is) done for two reasons: to avoid psychic contact with the aliens, who are already steering us with their own thoughts, and to keep us "dumbed down" so that we might not penetrate state secrets.  And thus we come to what I consider to be the relevant aspects of this book.  

One - that we all have psychic potential, but not in the way we think we do.  Swann, who should know, warns us that the "radio wave" hypothesis of ESP promulgated in the 19th century is incorrect, as experiments repeatedly show.  Rather, ESP arises from the realization that everything forms a "whole."  That is, that we penetrate the thoughts of others not by beaming inside their heads, but by becoming open to our communal mind.  That is a huge shift in perspective, and one that is more commensurate with both modern quantum physics theories and time-honored mystic concepts.  

And Two: that the governments of the world have a vested interest in keeping our psychic powers well leashed, for power comes from secrecy.  This is so not only because of the chess -moves that world leaders must make between themselves, but also because of the motivations of leaders and power brokers themselves.  Are they, for instance, telling us one thing that sounds good or important for us all only to achieve greater power or wealth for themselves?  And are a few or many involved in a conspiracy to foster, say, a world government that would violate the beliefs and practices of the many hundreds of cultures around the world?  Are we, then, being shepherded towards a destiny that we would not agree with if we knew?

Both are very relevant points, the first for sheer knowledge, the second to take control of our destinies.  Moreover, the second - concealment of motivations by leaders - is suspected by most of us continually, as it has happened again and again in history (Hitler and the Munich pact, for instance).  Also, and even more importantly, it does  seem that we are being directed towards an end that few of us desire.  

When we add it all up, then, we can see that a greater awareness of what we are - of the reality of consciousness - is essential to gain control of our lives and direct ourselves towards a better future, beyond the motivations of the power elite.  We might scoff at the idea that there are aliens on the Moon who are also directing us subtly with psychic powers, all covered up by the world governments, but we cannot deny our own powerlessness in the face of molding human destiny.  Such books as Swann's - and there are hundreds if not thousands - may be kooky on the outside, but they are based on something very real and disturbing on the inside, much as Swann's book is bifurcated by one-part science fiction, and another by serious thought.  

It does appear that we are being directed somehow towards a certain end of which we know little.  We do not know how this is happening and are nearly helpless to stop it.  Many explanations point to outlandish science fiction tales, but at bottom is a truth that we desperately need to explore.  We must stop being led by the forces that be, and to do that we must understand how we are being led.  It is purposefully difficult to do this, given "spin" and disinformation, but it can be done by focusing on the whole - on the psychic whole of which each of us is a part.  There may not be UFOs on the Moon, but there is certainly something going on here earth side that is very alien indeed.  FK              

Today, a new chapter in the book "Hurricane River," under that name in the website.  It is "The Law," after the chapter, "Derek."

Note to readers of yesterday's blog - my mother died last night.  It is only special to me and some others, I know, and it is the stuff of us all, but I have to say, that everyone there said it was a peaceful, even a beautiful death, just as it is supposed to be.  I am pleasantly surprised.  I have no doubt she will rest in peace.

A quick note on the current UFO conspiracy book I am reading: on Yahoo this morning, I saw an article about some hacked pictures that show, or purport by the hacker to show, the shadow of a human technician working on the Mars probe - on Mars!  Ah, but before I could finish the article, the computer crashed, in a way in which it never has before.  Coincidence?  Yes, surely, but paranoia strikes deep.  FK     

Death - to even put it so boldly as a heading seems wrong, as if the writer were, at best, a teen-age Goth struggling with adolescent angst and alienation.  In fact, this writer has been criticized for being too melodramatic about life by writing about death, and the criticism is a good one.  Why should we dwell on the inevitable and the unknowable?  And why get worked up over something that everyone must face (unlike, as they say, taxes)?  

And that is correct in its way.  My son asked me this morning how it is that soldiers will march into almost certain death, en masse.  I did not even have to think about the response: "Because the officers will shoot them if they run.  It's called desertion in the face of the enemy."  Yes, there is camaraderie and self-respect, but really, if it weren't for the certain discipline of the army, when the going got tough, just about everyone would get going.  And that is what might happen if we think about death too much.  Not only would we miss life's good moments, but we would all start a panic, a stampede that would go nowhere because there is no where to go.  But that doesn't stop people from panicking and trampling one another in a locked building on fire.  

No; we learn to live by not accepting the reality of death.  I once asked my mother, who had four children and would have had more if possible, how women stand the pain of childbirth, again and again.  She told me, "you forget about the pain.  It disappears almost as if it never happened.  It's strange."  That is not true with all women, I know, but true enough - and so it is with death.  We do not forget our actual death, but we pass it over each time someone we know dies.  Yes, it will happen to us someday - but that someday is in a never-never world.  If we really believed it, we might just run around with our hair on fire, every one of us.

And yet: in death is the key to understanding life.  It is almost never a pleasant thing, this death, and when faced squarely, it is impossible to be overly-dramatic about it.  It is more intense, more real than anything we will face in our lives.  If it occurs quickly, it destabilizes everyone who knows the deceased - thus cultures around the world have spooky taboos about sudden or violent death (we ourselves live in horror of suicide, which I think we should).  And if it occurs slowly, as it usually does these days, it is ugly, very ugly.  The 19th century Anglo nations spent quite a lot of effort romanticizing death, but in the end it still amounted to foul breath, soiled bed sheets and the screams or moans or pained faces of those undergoing their ordeal, one often worse than anything Torquemada could invent.  This is waht waits for most of us.  How can this ever be over-dramatized?

The key to understanding: as of this moment, my mother is in her last hours.  I am told that her breathing is shallow, her movements jumpy, her weak 89 year old heart pumping at 160 beats a minute, enough to kill an athlete if prolonged.  She is going through what is called the death cascade, where one organic emergency sparks another, and at her age and with her conditions it is unstoppable. She can no longer eat or drink, and no one is trying to make her do these things anymore.  The stage is set.  It is not pretty.  Her shriveled 80 pound husk quakes and emits regularly, her equanimity maintained, as such it can be, with a slow morphine drip - at least we have that.  My relatives who are watching this all are thinking the same thing - this, someday, will be us.  But we don't run in panic, only feel the shivers of its probabilities before they fade into hazy memory, like a long-ago birth.  

And yet - just as ephemeral beauty covers functionality in life, so functionality covers beauty in death.  The ephemeral beauty is long gone, and has in fact turned to the ugliness of crumbling functionality.  But something else, right at this point, seems to take over.  It is a different sort of haze, not one of forgetfulness, but one of memory; it seems, at the end game of death, that we begin to remember, and it is not the hidden pain of the functional past, but the greatness of something that we somehow understand has been forgotten. We sense it, sometimes, in memories from early childhood, and understand from this that what we have forgotten from this childhood is only a metaphor - a big, living metaphor - of what we have forgotten in life; that beneath, beyond, that all around life is a greatness that we long for, that has been covered up by what is really, in the great picture, the most minor of things - that functionality of living that we so prized and fought so hard to control in our maturation process.  But in that we lost the deeper beauty that resides in this world only so fleetingly.

I hope to never be Pollyannish about this thing, this ugly thing of death.  It is a disaster to most of us - certainly to me - of the greatest proportions.  But it can't help but tell us in its no-nonsense  ass-kick way that beneath it all (and around it and so on) is the big one - the dream, the great, what we have forgotten.  
Inside out, outside in, around and around it goes, beauty and ugliness and death and truth; but for the dying, the game ends, or so they say.  They say - those experts who have witnessed it so many times - tell us that in the end, a peace comes like a light, like angel wings at the last moment, and I believe them.  I have felt it too.  But it is no romanticist poetry, no - it is as hard and fearful as all that nature can give us - as it has to be, for what else could make us forget the beauty but this fear, this ugly greatness? And how else to show its strength, this light after death, than to weather the most agonizing ordeal?  In that is the mystery, the ultimate triumph, but by God, no quest is any harder.  FK           

I have just completed the book on Bruno by Ingrid Rowland - an academic writer who is more interested in the facts than the pizzazz she might give to readers, although the last 60 pages moved very well.  It still surprises us that the Church, of all entities, could be so brutal in suppressing new or contrary ideas, so much so that Bruno, along with many, many others, were tortured and/or burned at the stake.  We come to understand that it was through ideas and ideas alone that the Church governed, not with a promise of social security but of heavenly security, something that could not be measured in the ordinary household stew pot.  Ideas were, then, everything.  We come to see that It is the pit into which theocracies might fall; and also come to understand the reason for the medieval cruelty of some of the radical Muslim groups now.  What do they offer?  A continuation of the unbalanced and unjust state of affairs in the archaic governance of the regions?  Or a reason to be content with injustice, for the feel of moral righteousness and the promise of heavenly paradise?

Thus it is a warning to people like myself who insist, from the comfort of a secure and open society, that the spiritual trumps the material.  Marx, I firmly believe, was entirely backwards in his attempt to create a philosophy (really, an atheistic theology, as contradictory as that looks), but he caught the bull by the horns with the failure of the Church.  Its incursion into the secular power structure was all too secular, ruining its moral authority, and muddying the concept of the spiritual as well.  Theocracy, as Pope Francis has been trying to say to an uncomprehending press, must be communistic - not Marxist, for sure, but rather, a rule that must arise from the people themselves.  It must thrive in the hearts and minds (arising from the soul) to the extent that they are primarily self-governed - just as Marx envisioned the proletariat paradise, but which could never happen while the secular, or the material, took precedence.  In that is struggle and winners and losers, as nature shows, always.  It is only in the spiritual realm that all might be winners - that all win by being winners.  In the world that Darwin studied, this can never be; in the world inhabited by the saints and sages, this must be.  But beware of the cross-overs from spirit to material - in that lies the Inquisition.  In that lies the modern jihad.

Books can and have been written of this, but sometimes we have to move on; sometimes, we might even have to take a leave of the heavy every now and then to the light; and so, my reading has moved on to Ingo Swann, one of the most famous of the ESP types in that sort of literature.  "Penetration: the question of extraterrestrial and human telepathy" is an autobiography of the remarkably weird.  It is not intended to be light, but it is SO weird that it must be taken as a sort of mythological Rorschach of the ESP world.  And the way it is written: from the academic heavy of Rowland, the change is like a polar bear plunge into icy waters on New Year's day.  

After writing several books I have become familiar with the "set-up" of fiction, where the ground is made ready for the content and action to come, and this book begins with a classic fiction set-up, including an enigmatic stranger who asks just the right questions to give us Swann's background into ESP and the direction the script will take.  In a word, it squeaks of best-seller pulp.     
  
And yet, for all his apparent attempts to gain money from this book, Swann is no charlatan - or at least not a complete one.  His presence on at least two government- run ESP programs is verifiable, as are his sometimes astounding accomplishments in such experiments, including the famous Stargate program. These, too, are verifiable, confounding the odds-making skeptics. ESP - telepathy and prescience (if not telekinesis) and the witnessing of ghosts, for example, are proven to exist as far as they can be proven,and some, like Swann, are very good at it. 

But still, the writing form - is it this that makes people roll their eyes at such accounts?  Surely it doesn't help, but there is something more, some inner need to deny that such things exist that compels the most ardent debunkers.  It is,at least for many of them, fear - fear of the unknown, fear of something that interrupts the sequence of our current reality, fear of something that cannot be so easily explained or controlled. And that is exactly what the book is about - how this fear is generated, and why.  

Glimpsing at the table of contents, the answers are really, really outlandish.  We are in for a good ride, and wait to see - is there something of truth in this?  Is there something that might help us break through the wall that divides our reality from a greater one? We shall see.  In America nowadays, no Inquisition keeps us from speculating about reality; rather it is ridicule that keeps us from straying from the consensus of the culture makers.  Like Bruno, we do not approve of this.  Unlike Bruno, who is braver than most of us, we do not face a blazing fire.  And so we shall proceed.  FK             

In the great wasteland of daytime weekend TV, I was looking for the Packer-Seattle pregame when I stumbled on an infomercial -style house remodeling show.  In the past, I spent quite a few years using my college degrees fixing up houses (they make great patches in drywall) and I quickly became hooked on the show - on the professional way to put in new windows, to rewire and to insulate.  What strikes the viewer most in these shows, I think, are the before and after pictures: here's a kitchen space with unfinished drywall with holes in the side for blowing in insulation, there's a window without the final sashes on the frame, here's the coil of wires sticking out from the holes around a socket, and so on; changed to this beautiful remodeled kitchen by some plaster patches, sand paper, paint, and a few thin boards. That's it - that's it that changes an unwelcome but functional mess to a home beautiful.  

This has occurred to me before, and people who work on houses must be somewhat like doctors who see guts and bones and blood where we see skin and lustrous hair and luscious feminine (or rock-solid masculine) forms.  Yes, the beautiful, what attracts us most, are the most superficial and least functional aspects.  It seems as if that which really counts is seldom as beautiful as that which entrances - even as the flower petals are more beautiful than its functional aspects, the stamen and pistol - which is itself curious, for even the insects are lured by superficial beauty. And so, if beauty is truth, then "truth" seems to be held in the most superficial aspects of a living thing; even the earth is more beautiful on its thin surface than its molten interior, this interior that is the creator of our electromagnetic field, which allows for life.  Yet, no one has written an "Ode on a Deep Hole," or "Pile of Guts."  

If we look at this deductively, this is indeed what we see - that beauty is superficial and unimportant.  But if we look at it with a more poetic or holistic eye, we have to wonder why the sense of beauty exists at all.  For flowers, as for women, beauty attracts pollinators of one sort or another - it is superficial but ultimately functional.  But why do we have beauty of other kinds?  Beauty of sunsets, beauty of natural and artistic or architectural or musical works?  These we do not pollinate - these, in fact, seem to serve no purpose at all.  And yet it is in these kinds of beauty that we find meaning in life, without which the whole thing becomes a Darwinian grind of reproducing and eating or being eaten.  

From this consideration, we see that the deductive method has it all wrong - that is, that its very premise is wrong.  It holds that it is functionality that counts most in this world - but that only holds for the functional, material world.  What beauty tells us is that the human consciousness has turned things inside out - has focused on the functional aspects of a lower dimension.  Yes, it is essential to do this or that to stay alive, but staying alive is not worth it without beauty - or the deep meaning it conveys beyond the functional. This is what beauty shows - that there is a greater, more profound aspect to existence that ultimately has little to do with (functional) life on this earth.  Rather, beauty points the way, is the signpost, to an eternal world, to the source of life itself (for it is this that we live for), that is not involved directly with the machinery of material existence.

Yes, inside out - the guts are more important to us than beauty to stay alive - and yet, it is beauty that we live for.  It is also a functional mindset that keeps us, well, functional, but it is the non-functional, more holistic abstract thoughts that give us intellectual meaning.   And yes, it is unfair - that that which nature teaches us so that we might stay alive leads us away from the source of life itself - away from beauty, which stretches towards truth, which stretches towards cosmic unity and eternal life.  It is unfair, but the way it is, and the reason the spiritual masters seem so ridiculously twisted in their words - the meek shall inherit the earth?  The rich are the poorer ones in heaven - or karmic cycles?  The proud and the powerful and the successful are the least likely to pass through that eye of the needle?  So it seems, that the whole mess of life is a twisted roller coaster - the superficial is worthless show, and yet points towards that which is greater than functionality.  That's why life has been called a trap. But we might rather see it as a puzzle - a beautiful, sometimes painful, always unique, puzzle.  FK                       

Today, a new chapter, "Derek" after "Devil's Choice" under the heading "Hurricane River" in the website.  FK

I was forced to set the clock for early this morning - early now that the wife and I have been set aside from the work force - to discuss money matters with the local accountant.  Towards the end, he veered off into future possibilities for saving money, something he did with a certain amount of glee.  Hopefully keeping a game face - he was only trying to help - I mentioned something like, oh, well, maybe, seems like a lot of trouble though, to which he replied, "no one ever has enough.  Every ceiling is seen as a blockage.  Spending money makes people happy, and the more they have to spend, the more they want to spend."  Whoa! Too early for my delicate sensibilities!

My mother was a genuine member of the communist party in her youth.  Thta she was also very religious shows that she didn't truly understand what she was getting into, but I was taught from an early age that money was literally dirty; that it had been in everyone's hands and on barroom tables and, although she didn't mention it, whorehouses and privies and who knows what.  In this she was right, as analysis now shows that most 100 and 20 dollar bills have trace amounts of cocaine on them (or had - this was a study of 10 years ago or so), meaning they have been up one or many people's noses.  But I think there was something more to this dirty money thing - that it was and is a dirty thing altogether.  That it, money, is not simply an expression of honest wages, of hard work turned into an easily transferable (fungible, I think the accountants say) item, but rather a symbol of greed, of accumulation, of hierarchy, of rich and poor.  

It seems obvious that both ideas are right - it is a handy fungible resource as well as a handy way for some people to accumulate resources vastly greater than what they need or what others have. The point being, money is both dirty and not dirty, like, say, sex, which is both a gift of fertility and love from God, as well as the source of the oldest and, one might argue, most disagreeable professions.  

And so I had to analyse my own recoiling at the accountant's expression, for what he had said - that spending money made people happy - was both a reflection of the natural and of the pathetic, both the good or at least neutral, and the bad.  

Bad in that people need to spend their life's blood on things to be happy, when things that are not essential for life should never form a basis of happiness.  It is rather love that we should concentrate on.  Money, as any priest will tell you, would be better spent buying food for starving children, or medicine for the poor and sick, or dental care or any number of other things besides, say, gold chains for our ego and ATV's for our childish amusement.  Feeling bad yet?  

And then the good, or perhaps neutral; I can almost say that I am above this need to spend money for happiness.  On the other hand, I get a kick out of having it saved tightly in the bank - again, where no starving orphan can get to it, as if this will safeguard me from harm for the rest of my life. But I DO find happiness in sheer spending sometimes, and it is usually when I am out with friends buying mugs of beer at the ridiculous prices they charge at bars.  This is an odd thing; for, yes, beer does make me happy, but I can drink it at home for a third or a quarter the price; more still, I can invite friends over and buy for everyone at less than the price of my own mugs at a bar.  Why, then, enjoy spending money at a bar?

For one, it is a different and a neutral place for all too meet.  But for me, there is something more: spending money on beer, once I am loosened up enough to do it, loosens me even more.  It makes me feel free.  And I think that this is what spending money is to others as well - the feeling of being free, of not having constraints.  In this, then, the greater happiness would lie in the greater freedom, and the greatest freedom would be gained by having unlimited money.  

Thus having and spending money is not necessarily about selfishness or pigginess, although it could be; as said, money, like many things, has its dirty side.  Rather, it is often about freedom - not from immediate want, or fear, but from constraint; freedom, that is, to run and fly, to do everything that comes to mind, to party - in short, to live in the ecstasy of the moment.  

Oddly, and in this most of us have to take the rich's word for it, this formula does not work.  The wealth in time, like a drug, does not deliver, and in that, life is devastated, for there is then nothing new to live for in this material world.  The only alternative is to place restrictions on spending, as many of the old wealth families do (making them tighter than the rest of us, and disagreeable for it), or to turn to spiritual study and practices - again, something that the wealthy often do.  While these seem remedies for the main malady, money, they are really remedies for life's problems in general.  "All things in moderation," as maddening as such a thing is to people like myself, is truly wise, as it keeps all things new enough, never using them until they become worthless or harmful.  And the spiritual - that I have mentioned enough.  In it lies the meaning for everything else.  And in it, money becomes neither dirty or the source of happiness, but just another life resource that may give us or others material life as well as time to pursue a greater life, or life's meaning. And if we see that greater  meaning, we become, as Jesus and Buddha and probably every other great spiritual soul has said, free; free from want beyond life, free from social pressure, free from anything more than is necessary to live (and free from fear of death, if necessary).   

Oddly, to spend money is to be free; but to use it for ultimate freedom is to become crushed with disappointment.  To not need it, nor the social or personal meanings it holds, makes us truly free, or at least makes freedom possible.  Now, why is everything always backward from what it seems?   FK           
   

Rooson's comment on Reason, from the last blog, brings up points that the Medieval scholars argued about for centuries.  It was Thomas Aquinas who at last settled the case for the Catholic Church in the 13th century: Reason was given to Man by God for a purpose.  As Bruno would write 3 centuries later, nature is God's footprints - not the actual flesh and blood of God, but His hints and traces.  It is our reason that is given to us to explore, to follow those footprints. By the same token, Aquinas acknowledged that only faith - and then grace (given by God, who controls ultimate access to himself)  - could take us beyond the world, those footprints, to the true heights.  Thus the rupture between faith and reason was healed, as far as the Church was concerned.

The argument, however, did not end; Bruno himself brought the mysticism of Plato back into the fold, claiming, as Aquinas did, that even the Perfect Philosopher (Aristotle) had erred in certain ways.  Plato, as far as I can recall, put more emphasis on the substance behind the form - on that which makes the shadows that we see as material life.  How reason fits into this exactly, and how this differs from Aristotle, I can't recall - just that the emphasis was different.  

It seems a small thing to us now, but the conflict between the real and the ideal - between nature and Truth (as Plato understood it) - continues strongly to this day.  I believe that in this most of us are bipolar.  It has to do, again, with faith and fact - namely, for us, faith (and religion/magic/mysticism) vs science.  I know the differences have got me snared by the brain.  Still, I have reasoned - yes, reasoned - that the brain, that the subject and workings of reason itself, that all this stuff and body about us, are in many ways shadows - or rather, footsteps - indicative of the "prey" itself but certainly not the prey.  Thus we differentiate between the lower beliefs - the pagan polytheism - and True Religion, which claims to understand, to point a way towards, the Truth, God, the Absolute. The former makes gods of the footprints, the latter, see in the footprints only the signs.  But still, those signs are meant to be  read, and understood, by human reason.

Yet Rooson's point is a good one - to rely solely on reason is idolatry itself, taking our limited human faculty as the measure to end-all.  Yet, as the old theologians would argue, the "made" cannot encompass the maker; that which is given to us is always less than the giver.  Reason cannot overcome this - and if it believes it does, it is forever caught in the mire of "angels on the head of pins."  Clever, complex, but never complete.  Reason is a working of the brain, which, with free will, may err; while BEING is the work of God.  

Oddly, it is the lower beasts, the ones without reason, who are then closest to God - the very footsteps themselves, non-reflective works unsullied by tricks of reason and self-reflection.

But how would such beasts satisfy God's self-reflection?  To that, many (such as Teilhard de Chardin) believe it is through this further separation, this human gift of self-reflection, that we might become God's mirror - and then become what is reflected in a glory of reunification.  Yes, that is how we are "made in the image of God" - not by our arms and bodies (and long flowing beards) but in our self-reflection.  In this we thus see the plan, first through our own growing sense of truth through reflection, and then in God's reflection in us (and then ultimately, we go through the looking glass to the image maker itself).  

Which means that reason is essential for the work of God in Man, for the beast without reason is already at one with God in its own way - exactly as it should be - and yet unsatisfactory in itself in the great plan.  Or so we can reason - for why would God create beings who could defy his plan in the first place, but so that they could reason their way back to the foot of the mountain?; and once at the foot, climb it with the certainty of the beast, but also with the wonder and glory of one who has been dispossessed and is now reclaimed.  The gospel of the Prodigal Son comes to mind. 

Pretty heady stuff for our small reason; but we should also consider that without reason, we might also fall prey to false religions, to false beliefs, to that swamp before the base of the mountain. Yes, grace and faith alone will get us to God, but reason is there for a reason.  All things, as the wise men say, in their place.  FK