Sometimes we can't keep our hands out of the candy jar. Perhaps, then, we shouldn't even have a candy jar, but I have Kindle and can get almost any book for sale instantly, for the price of a movie ticket (and maybe a tub of popcorn).  And so, after reading a very long novel in Spanish, dictionary by my side, I went to the candy jar for comfort food, and came up with It's a Wonderful Afterlife, by Kristy Rosinett.  My intellectual pride bristled at first, as an Ann Landers - like Mid-West matron told tales of deceased loved-ones visiting the living, who in tears were most often comforted to know that the curtain of death is not such an iron curtain at all.  

It was hard to believe, and just too - well, comforting.  At first.  But as I quickly peeled the digital pages back to the second half, a deeper spirit of the book began to penetrate my skeptical skull.  

It is not that I took everything for fact, although one is almost forced to do so to continue reading.  Rosinett is one of several psychics I have read who claim that they have talked to and seen the dead since early childhood.  In fact, I have a niece who claims the same, and still I don't really believe.  But this woman has built a practice, written many books, often hosted radio shows, worked with police, and still takes in dozens of clients suffering from guilt, depression and hopelessness after the death of someone close - often of their young children.  What type of person could hoodwink those who are suffering so?  Only the most crass, and Rosinett is not a flashy psychic surrounded by sycophantic worshipers, but a plain Middle American.  I believe she is sincere, even as I remain a skeptic.  

I don't know how to bring those two together, for she is obviously not a schizophrenic or someone unusually unbalanced.  Yet, her encounters with the dead seem too pat, to normal.  It is that which makes me the most skeptical, for as my wife once said, "Whatever we think waits us after death, we are going to be surprised."  Should that not be true?  For if living with tribal hunters in the Amazon, for example, is an adventure into the unknown, how much more so is a trip to something or somewhere with no physical form? We can't even imagine it; so much so that we make up versions of what it is like so that we CAN imagine it.  

That is probably what Rosinett and other genuine spiritualists do - interpret psychic signals in more quotidian symbols.  They are probably the ultimate translators, even if they don't know it themselves. And in this, an Ann Landers-type woman would see the dead in an Ann Landers way- inviting the scorn of skeptics who know it cannot be so. 

But translations are never perfect, as I find when I read Spanish. And in time, I got used to Rosinett's plain visions.  What were very real were the emotions, which never get deeper than with death, when our ego walls come crashing down.  We wish we had been more loving; we wish we had done more; we wish we had paid more attention to the person rather than to our own preoccupations; we wish, ultimately, that we had been more authentic, more real, more human. All this comes out in her plain style, as tale after tale is told of long and painful deaths, of deaths and hard lives of children, of loss after loss after loss.  All as if we were talking to Auntie Bess in her Nebraska farm house kitchen.  

All so normal.  This morning I clicked on the radio as I cooked breakfast and immediately heard the voice of a very old woman - one who my wife told me was a regular on Illinois public radio. She had written a book about dying after the death of her husband, who had been living with a crippling degenerative disease for many years.  When at last he was hospitalized and could not live without intrusive aid, he told his family that he was ready to die.  "But Dad," said the children, "they can make you live comfortably."  At that, says the woman, her husband clenched his jaw as much as he could and answered angrily, "I said I am ready to die!"  His wife, who knew him best as a man, had them remove (at his request) not only life-support systems, but food and water.  He lasted, she said, ten days (which I did not think possible with a healthy person).  As difficult as that was, she was adamant that his wishes were followed.  "Dying is the most normal of things.  We all do it.  It should not be treated as something unnatural.  We should allow people's wishes at the end.  We should talk more about death.  It is as normal a part of life as anything, and is foolish to ignore." (my paraphrase).

So there you have it, and so true - it, death and dying, is absolutely normal.  It is not an avoidable chasm, but as certain to life as breathing air.  So why wouldn't a translator see it so?  For to Rosinett, it is as normal as her daily life.  That she cannot see dimensional leaps and so forth in it only means that she cannot see these in her daily life either. Her reading of the dead may seem simplistic to space cadets like me, but at least she is able to read them, and without fear.  It is all normal.  And if she cannot tell us of the stranger parts to it, she can tell us not to fear what is a part of life and inevitable; she can tell us that whatever comes should not freak us out, for it is no more or less real to every human as being human itself.  And one other thing I know she got right: death is the moment of truth, when the masks drop. These two things, one can argue, is all we know and all we need to know about death.  The candy jar remains open for another time. FK    

                                               

There's a joke a friend told me about a year ago that was new to me but could be 50 years old: three guys are sitting on a park bench, each with a big smile.  One is young, another middle aged and the other, old.  Says the second to the young man, "what you smiling about his morning?"  "Me?  I met this beautiful woman last night.  We went back to her place and had the most incredible sex of my life!  How about you?"  The middle-aged man regains his smile as his eyes roll back in memory: "I made the best deal of my life this morning - a 2 million $ contract that will boost my stock in the company to the roof!  Oh, and what about you?" he says to the old man.  "Me?" says the geezer wistfully.  "I just had the most incredible bowel movement..."  

And so it seems that at different stages of life, we are imprinted with those memories that we consider most eventful and exciting. It seems true, but recently I have found that this is not the case.  I doubt I am alone in this.

I was not sitting on a bench, but laying back in a recliner after a too-large lunch of black beans, rice and carne mechada, a great and cheap combo that I first came to know in Venezuela.  At one point, I drifted into that half-sleep state that brings dreams almost to consciousness, where one would think I would be occupied with memories of our last trip to Costa Rica - or, at the very least, some darker anxiety dream about work.  But instead, in it I was reliving a memory that I had not known that I had even retained. I was in 6th grade and was visiting a new friend at his home for the first time, a place a few miles from my own.  Who it was didn't matter, because it was not about him or anything to do with him. Rather, it was about the scenery.  It was a moderately cold day, slightly above freezing, so that the light snow cover had become a little melty.  The sky was gray and the trees still and leafless, as one would expect in late winter.  The weather, in fact, was about what we are having now in Wisconsin, and I would not say it is anything to write home about, but here...the memory was so exquisite in feeling that I could barely stand it.  It's sweetness, simply the being there, provoked such deep nostalgia that I had to wake up and shake it off before I became too lost in the loss of it, in its being gone forever.  But why, why such longing for a nothing day so long ago?

My beaver-like waking mind, ever trying to figure things out, then decided to hold a little experiment.  I let myself drift into other memories, with the intent that they be the ones that bring the greatest pleasure.  Without fail, they were all similar to the first - memories of small things, of a pleasant day on the beach, or outside in a sunny field, or in a canoe at night looking at the stars. No great sex, great deals, or great dumps came to mind, although they surely would have immediately after. But these were not the ones that stuck.  Rather, always, it was the quiet moment, the moment of still beauty or gentle relationship that came forward.  How, my mind continued to work, could that be?

I do not know for sure, as few of us can of such things, but for the moment, it seems fairly clear: our greatest moments are not those of triumph or success, but rather those where we acquiesce to a still time, to a time apart from the whirring of planned human events.  These, almost by definition, would occur in situations where nothing much is happening, where we are not wrapped up in doing or performing.  

If true, this is a finding of the greatest import.  We are always told by old-timers that the greatest thing in life is family and a few close friends.  We are often, but not always, told by very successful people that success hasn't given them the closure that they had imagined.  In a recent finding by a long-term Harvard study, they found that the three most important things for happiness are, simply, good relationships with the family (all three, almost ridiculously, were different takes on the same thing).  Yet, as important as good relationships may be, it seems that the missing element to these beliefs and findings is the state of being of the person.  Strong family makes a place where we can simply be, not having to perform or be anything other than what we are, whatever we might think that is at the moment.  Yet, so does a quiet, uneventful day that somehow takes away our stray thoughts to focus us without effort on our lives, right then and there -  as it is without frills.  And there we find, usually without realizing it (until perhaps years later) that being - just being - is the most wonderful thing.  

Already my mind is gearing up again: time to edit a book, call a publisher, get this life going!  Yet I know it will be the barren trees in a field of snow that I have witnessed while doing nothing in particular that I will long for when all is closing down and the end to it all is near.  FK                

 
            

Upset over the excruciating ending of the Pats - Denver game, I lit out for the Anytime Fitness gym in town and sweated to the oldies, only to find later that I had left my one and only Mississippi State Bulldogs tee shirt there.  Too late to return to get it, it was left to this morning, when I didn't appreciate the break in my schedule one bit.  But as I stepped out onto the parking lot, an odd sensation greeted me - the daily joy of being alive.  Analytical as I can be, I quickly attributed it to the sunshine, which we haven't seen since leaving Costa Rica last Tuesday. There were piles of snow standing tall around me, not  palm trees, but it could have been an ideal beach for all l knew.  How sweet was the air! 

The night before, there was another ballgame after, a blowout between two teams I didn't care about, and it left us waiting impatiently for the new X Files mini-series as one Panther victor after another told us it was a team effort and they looked forward to the next... blah blah blah, until at last Scully came on the screen, looking spookily old, and then Mulder, looking like a rummy pulled out from behind the dumpster.  We saw footage of aliens crashing; of scientists with a reverse-engineered alien space craft that used point 0 energy and could slip to anywhere in our universe through cross dimensions; of strange Men in Black watching and killing coldly.  The conspiracy was back, now bigger than ever.  Perhaps not by coincidence, it dovetailed all too well with the sci-fi novel I am finishing.  Spooky coincidence or script pirating? You (music plays louder) be the judge. 

I thought it moved too fast, but I'll still watch the rest of the series as long as the stars don't fall from the sky.  The original has made me a life-long fan, although not quite enough to have a poster on my wall reading, "I want to believe." Actually, maybe I would.  But why? Why the love of the strange and the alien?  

One might first say "boredom" and that would not be a bad guess.  How much more interesting to have aliens and spacecraft and a parallel government leading us to an edge leading to either a new age or the end of the world?  How much better this, than a life of slogging through the gray of winter, and then the chores of summer, one after the other as our teeth go bad, and then our kidneys or chromosomes fail, and then our bodies give way with that final whimper.  But that's not quite it.  That's not it at all.

Rather, it is about standing in the sunshine and feeling the nameless, even pointless joy of being alive.

It is this because something in us knows at all times that this life we have made is a temporary facade.  The daily grind, or D Factor, has as little to do with reality as Scully and Mulder's X Factor, is in touch with reality no more or less than the conspiracy of the Men in Black.  We have been formed by a limited concept of nature, and continue to help form it, as comfortably alive in it as a turtle in its shell.  But, good lord we are bored with it!  Turtles aren't, but we are not turtles - we are not solely of the limited reality embraced by the natural order.  We know we are meant for cosmic things because we are able to penetrate into its mysteries now and then, either intellectually or as a sense, as nameless but elevating as a sunny morning.  We look to shows like the X Factor to flesh out the marvel that we have inured our daily selves from.  Such a show straddles the divide between our turtle world and our cosmic selves, but at no cost to our boring but coveted security.  To watch it is, then, not a flight into fantasy, but a tenuous step towards a greater reality without all the fuss. We can step away from it instantly and return to our safe schedules, as mind-numbing as they might be.  Here, the torch is kept a-lit, if only barely. 

I was upset about a game that means nothing, concerned for a cheap tee shirt that could disappear today for all the world cares, while a flaming ball of nuclear power punched its energy through a thin shell of translucent sky over a tiny orb to land right there on my shoulders and whisk away every care, even if for only a few minutes.  How can we not grasp that everything in the X Files is small potatoes compared to what each one of us has now, and forever? How can we not be always aware that the D Factor is an X Factor to the unlimited power?  

The clouds are returning as we turn towards an evening of snow and freezing rain.  The shell is back. How we can step into the sun forever, now, is a problem that seems to require a Scully and a Mulder to solve.  And yet, with a lift of the chin or a turn of the head, we could do it ourselves - but won't while thinking we can't. Beam me up, Scully.  FK           
                    

It must be the book.  Or maybe its the after affects of 10 days of strong coffee.  Or both.  It's such a silly thing, this book of 653 pages, La Resurreccion Maya by Steve Alten, that it almost makes me ashamed to admit that it is getting to my head, in Spanish no less.  Conspiracy.  In the book, there are circles within circles of conspiracies, from the lowest (simply making money or getting sex) to the most incredible: a race of superior beings that are beyond the restraints of time and space who are offering humans a way out of destruction through implantation of their own genetic code (60 million years before) set to express itself in certain humans starting in - you can guess from the title - 2012, the year that the Mayan calendar says that everything of the old age will begin to crumble into the new.  But, of course, human and super-human interference comes about in the form of selfishness and downright evil, something our genetically determined heroes must confront to save human kind. Bring in whales and pyramids and chakras, and you get the idea.

All in fun, for sure, but it can get to one's head, as it did to me the other day when reading about the meeting of the great financial heads of international banks and companies in Davos, Switzerland.  The article, read from the internet and taken from, I think, the Wall Street Journal or another well-respected source, matter- of -factly talks about the shock and even horror the people have there - including former #2 congressman Eric Cantor, who somehow (how?) was included on the list - of a Donald Trump presidency.  The reason?  That he is for blocking Muslim immigration to America for a waiting period to "find out what the hell is going on." (I recall that this is a direct quote).  

As usual, I do not talk politics here and take no sides for or against candidates.  What is so surprising is the reason for their horror.  In America - as one developed country similar in this regard to many others - the percentage of people who want greater regulation of immigration has run consistently for at least a decade at anywhere from 70 to 80%.  And yet - nothing has been done about it in real terms.  Again, I am not coming out for it or against this, but rather wish to use this to make a point.  Why has nothing been done?  How can politicians in a democracy ignore such huge numbers?  

The answer, in large part, seems to come from Davos.  The reason these high financiers and top dollar execs are horrified at stopping Muslim immigration has little to do with brotherly love, but movement - of money, of things, of people across all borders, as if borders did not matter.  They, in fact, do not like borders, for they believe, as the article states, that they are not good for business. Could it be that Big Money has been running our national destiny?  Our world destiny?  

Even saying such a thing reeks of naivete, for all of us older cynics know that this is largely the case, as it has long been.  But at Davos, we find that the cloud of "money" has a face - or, to be specific, many faces of a mutual accord.  It seems, indeed, that a small handful of elites are running the world.  What then of other "news" that we hear of?  Is the news that is reported, and the slant that it takes, meant to control us?  Further - and now even darker clouds roll in - is it really all about money?  Or is there something else involved?  

In the Mayan novel, even the selfish rich are being controlled by other, higher intelligences, although they do not realize it any more than the average Joe realizes how much of his world is being controlled by these human elites.  Circles within circles. And so I am forced to believe, at least when contemplating the darker side of life.  Getting rich is not a fundamental building block of life.  It may be based on the basic need for survival, but it obviously goes way beyond that.  But why and how?  It is well known that in some Native American groups, the most respected person was the one who gave away the most stuff.  He was often the poorest guy in the tribe, and yet he was the most revered and the most influential.  Why is it that massive accumulation has overtaken the simple need to be esteemed in the social group?  What force has done this, and why?  

We might easily say that greed runs the world, as Davos helps to show, but it only makes sense to those of us who have been raised in a world culture of greed.  But this greed has a face, or several of them, and these movers and shakers are no more aware of the nature of reality than the rest of us.  They, too, are being led by an ethos that they did not make.  What is the face, or faces, behind this ethos, for it is, indeed, largely responsible for our current events and relatively recent history?  And, even more provocatively, to what end does this ethos reach?  The big money people have no other vision than a world unified under the banner of commerce, although many will say that solving poverty is their impetus.   Still, that is not a visionary goal, but one so prosaic that, if humanity could only hope for that, we would soon disappear from earth out of despair, or at least out of boredom.  No - in this great unknown universe of limitless potential, that goal is no larger in perspective than the dream of a four year old to someday get a whole bag of cat's eye marbles.  And yet it is presented to us as the be-all and end-all from the crowd at Davos.

But they don't know.  What is the greater meaning, the larger circle that circles this mentality?  Our leaders are being led, but we don't know by what or towards what.  There is something stirring in our DNA, almost as alien as Alten's aliens.  And thus we are moved beyond finance and science and all our other pursuits back to page one, back to the basic questions: in a patterned universe, who is making the pattern?  Why?  What role does choice play?  What role does morality play?  From where comes morality?  What unknown powers compel and guide our own small powers? 

Suddenly, the Resurreccion Maya does not seem so silly. In substance, perhaps, but not so in perspective.  There are indeed controlling forces, some of which we know and many of which we do not.  We do have a destiny, for we are moving in a very specific direction, but towards an unknown fruition.  And so the questions, and the search, continues.  FK       

Yes, just back from Latin America, where I first experienced the "other" and the adventure of being an outsider, this time in Costa Rica.  I will have an essay on the adventure as a whole within a week, but here I will succinctly make a few observations.  First, Costa Rica is NOT Mexico or Venezuela, the two L.A. countries I know - or at least knew - best.  It may be that Mexico now is much different from what I knew in the early 1980's, which in many ways I know is true from watching the Mexican soap operas.   It is, now, more middle class, less traditional, and more - some will cringe when I say this - (North) American.  Still, drug lords rule in the mountains and the border states, corruption is widespread at every level, and violence still reigns. Venezuela, of course, is a mess, worse than I ever knew it from the 80's and the 90's, more violent and poor, more unhappy, and more anarchic. Costa Rica cannot be described by any of the these negatives.  Hard-core violence is low, power is more distributed and less corrupt, and things actually seem to run well.  Very well.

This was a shock.  There we witnessed the old stores of stucco painted in blue and white, the red tiled roofs, the little motorcycles, the tropical plants, the rapid-fire Spanish, but here was not the overwhelming presence of poverty, chaos and violence.  Almost as a letdown, it seemed a calm place with working-class values where highways were in good repair, where garbage did not litter the streets and canyons,.where shacks did not climb up the hillsides, where erosion and foul water did not bleed out in nearly every vista.  It was, instead, a land of comparative wealth, of natural beauty, of a nation that, while imperfect, had things under control, in a healthy way.  It was not, then, a place for Graham Greene-style stories of violence and evil. 

This first day at home, I miss the great coffee; and last night, an hour or so after our arrival in a dark, snowy, cold land, I had a shot of the best rum I have ever tasted, an elixir made in Costa Rica that almost was lost to our national security forces at the airport. With three adults going, if I had known, I would have bought the limit, but maybe it is for the best; the rum is almost TOO good. 

But, to keep up my Spanish, I kept reading the novel "La Resurreccion Maya,"  and in that, began to look for signs of evil. 

They were not hard to find.  Coffee to me is a genuine drug, a legal speed that takes me to great heights and then to dark lows.  I avoid it in the States, but could not resist its excellence in Costa Rica, and so for a few hours each day, I felt that I was slipping into a higher dimension, somehow separate from the common lot of humanity. But at every turn, something would bring me down.  For instance, as I walked along the edge of a hotel pool, feeling superior, I suddenly stepped on black-colored bricks, which had absorbed more of the heat of a tropical sun, and so burnt my feet, making me yelp and hop like any sunburned tourist.  Proud of my Spanish, I still got ripped off, either by chance or design, for 6 bucks buying coconut milk.  And so on, reminding me that both my feet and my mind were made of clay.  

All small-time stuff.  But, as this was an eco-tour that we were on, I was reminded of the damage that evil does, not only to other humans but to our natural world.  While Costa Rica has 40% of its land protected, and while they enforce environmental laws well, we were still told of the toll that greed takes.  We are not talking here of poor people cutting down the forest to live - that is simply a matter of overpopulation (and, many times, of corruption that does not allow a fair distribution of wealth), but rather of beach-front properties sold to the very rich at the expense of sea turtles or small farming communities, of rare animals killed for aphrodisiac properties, or of rare timber harvested and sold on the black market. In Costa Rica, greed and planned violence have been reduced to levels that might be better than in our own nation, but still it exists.  

As I talked to my son on the ride back from the airport, he mentioned the evil in this world, which made me think of the story I have been reading and of the "world in decline" that all travelogues now mention.  We seem, somehow, to be in decline as a species, not in numbers but in world view.  And this, somehow, has to do with evil.  Not in a sociological or biological way, but in a metaphysical way.  We seem, regardless of what we do, to be influenced by evil.  Sometimes what discomforts us is not evil, like my walk on the black stones; but sometimes it is, like the slide towards extinction of the leather back, as the rich, often unknowingly, sit on their verandas drinking cocktails over the graves of an ancient species.  

But what it is, this evil, in its fullness is beyond me.  It is beyond me not only because of my limited capacities, but also because I do not wish to delve into its lair.  I do not want its taint, or its smell, to distort the fragile shell of my own life.  As I had to admit to my son, I do not feel strong enough to combat it, one on one.   As Costa Rican progress has shown, it can be subdued with a great tribal or national effort, but it can never be banished. 

Without getting too close to this core of darkness, I have come to the conclusion that it is evil that gives the world we live in its bite. When someone we are close to dies, we understand that this, what we live in, is not a joke.  When we are mugged or beaten, or when populations are tortured and killed, we cannot talk of our "movie," like some pot-washed surfer dude.  But it is more - it, evil, is a defining mark of our existence.  If we slide outside of moral judgement, we might say that the existence of evil is the existence of opposition, something that is within us that places us in the world around us that is defined by the struggle between life and death. In this, we might say that our inner being is what defines the kind of world that we live in.  We might even say that, as long as we harbor duality, we will always have impermanence - best exemplified by life and death.  We might say that our existence is defined by imperfection, both within and without, which in the end is defined and felt morally as evil.

To rise above this is, then, is to rise above the very laws that define nature.  While Costa Rica has done a very good thing by protecting its natural resources, we might not want to forget that earlier people defined much of nature that then was so overwhelming as the source, or home, of evil.  Thus it was in many myths, and thus it was that in the Old Testament, Man was told to subdue nature.  We now believe that nature is good and humans bad, but that is as human-centric as the Old Testament. It is best to seek the beauty in both nature and ourselves to keep evil at bay, but evil is something that sticks, regardless.  It is, as long as we share this world, what gives our lives that bite, whether they be the bites of mosquitoes and crocodiles, the bite of bad human intentions, or the bite of death.  

But, for now, I wish to go no further, but rather wish to remember the great coffee, the cloud forests, and the beaches that were as inviting as our Costa Rican hosts.  FK    

I first knew Sherlock Holmes from a tattered old anthology that my mother used to read from at night.  I loved "Hound of the Baskervilles" for its spooky old house on the moors, and the glowing fangs, but did not really appreciate him until middle school, when I read Sherlock myself.  Oh, to have such deductive powers!  And, for a boy of that age, to have such nonchalance, such cool!  I can't remember, but I may have asked for a deer stalker cap, and wouldn't have minded one of those 19th century capes that the upper crust wore so well. 

We know that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the character for sales, betting on the English middle class to fall for this oh-so-logical, cool, Victorian model of Anglo superiority, and he won his bet big-time, much to his dismay.  He came to hate Sherlock's detached, one-dimensional character, and gladly killed him off with nemesis Professor Moriarty, but was forced to exhume him because of the public outcry.  He had become a prisoner of his own creation, and I suppose he died somewhat bitter, although more than somewhat wealthy.  

But who cares?  The character lives on and on, and I had to see him in the latest iteration, the movie "Mr. Homes," with Ian McKellen as an ancient Holmes suffering from the first stages of senile dementia.  We first meet him arriving at his country place in Dover from a visit to post-WWII Japan (1947), with a small prickly ash bush tucked under arm.  A Japanese scholar had written him suggesting that the tea from this bush would cure memory problems, and he had traveled all the way to Japan for its powers, for there was something that he desperately needed to remember.  It had to do with his last case, which had forced him to end his detective work and live in solitude in the country. Dr Watson had written of it ( in the movie, he and Watson are real, but Watson had used liberal license to recreate the cases in what we now read today), but Homes knew that something was wrong about the ending. He simply could not remember, but knew that it had everything to do with his retirement and the empty feeling that lingered in his life.  

I will leave much the rest to those who wish to view it, but at last Holmes recalls the last case, of a woman who had had two still- born children, and whose husband coldly could not understand her distress.  Through twists and turns, he finds that Watson's conclusion was indeed woefully wrong - on purpose, to save feelings.  Rather, Holmes recalls that this woman sought him out, in the end, to share her loneliness, to find mutual relief from loneliness with him.  As a decent, stuffy Victorian man, he instead politely rebuffed her and sent her back to her cold husband.  It did not turn out well.

This, coupled with the lives of his widowed housekeeper, her son, and the Japanese man, causes him to make the most brilliant deduction in his life: that with the slightest of effort, he could improve other's lives, and in so doing, could improve his own, for the lack he felt came from the loneliness of a man trapped in his acute but emotionless mind.  And so he does improve things - and comes to the most beautiful of endings (this, I think, won't spoil it for the would-be viewer): with the housekeeper's boy at his side , he sits out in the green, green grass of the English countryside just beyond the fabled coastal cliffs and circles himself with small white stones, each one being named as he does so - for his brother, for his friends, for other lost relatives. Here he sits in the middle, understanding now that they are what made his life.  We know that he forgives himself for his coldness when he stretches his hands out to the sky and then bows in the grass in reverence.  In this he acknowledges the supreme logic of love, and how his gifts can still help alleviate - if not solve - the mystery of the human condition, and its ultimate need, and aim. 
Brought to the realization with his great mind, he bows down before everything, to others and the world itself, in acknowledgement of the final mystery that can never be solved, but only lived with the heart.  

A beautiful fulfillment of the character that Doyle came to hate, and perhaps, with this, would have come to love.  FK                 

Ah, so you think you know a language?  It might be so simple in the classroom, but go talk to a native at a noisy bus stop and you realize that, hey, maybe you need more practice.  A lot more.

So it is with me, now that I will be heading south of the border again after two decades.  I once was pretty fluent in Spanish, but I know how one forgets, and so I tuned into a Mexican soap on Univision last week to boost the ol' language ears.  Caray!  It was bad enough when the main characters were speaking, but when the "people of the street" talked (as comic relief - there is no political correctness in Mexican soaps) it became like a ...well, a foreign language.  

I was starting to get the gist of things, but not fast enough, so I dug out a Spanish-language novel I had bought some years ago to accelerate the process.  I found quickly, much to my disappointment, that it was first written in English and published in 2004, and then translated, but the translation is good.  Not that it is a high-quality work like, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rather - and I chose it for this - it is an apocalyptic thriller based on the Mayan calendar that had the world as we know it ending in December of 2012.  It pulls out all the stops: aliens, the birth of evil twins, an asteroid, evil right-wing evangelicals (alas), bungling government officials hiding information, Roswell, lurking dark forces, necromancy, quantum physics - and so on, and I am only on page 70 out of 600 plus pages.  And this is only book two of a trilogy, The Mayan Resurrection (La Resurreccion Maya) by Steve Alten.  Great airplane and beach reading, really, and it gets to the heart of the conglomeration of the weird and the psychic commonly seen as New Age, that heart being, in a phrase,  "something BIG is coming!" 

Sure, the world didn't end three years ago, but for those of us who follow such things (like me) that was never the point of the Mayan calendar; the point was, that we are on the cusp of a new age, and who really can deny it? The secular see either a one-world techno-society of the future, or a post-apocalyptic world of smoldering ruins and mutants; the religious and/or spiritual see either a second coming or some kind of spiritual rebirth, or the domination of Satanic materialism (which may lead, then, to the first).  For both, though - really, for most of us - we know something big is up.  Melting polar ice caps, nuclear arms in the Middle East, overpopulation and water shortages, death of the oceans, expanding theocratic or secular imperialistic dictatorships, the death of traditional cultures, the loss of moral values, the End of the West ...the list goes on, and unlike events in our novel, few think that these possibilities are the product of kooky, LSD - laden minds.  Rather, one or many or all are real or could become real, leading to changes that are apocalyptic in nature and hard to process.  

So it is that this blog has often presented authors, many of them serious scholars, who think about our evolution or lack (and destruction) thereof. Given the very real possibilities and probabilities that our future holds, one cannot call such thoughts mere idle speculation.  We all know, with no great amount of thought, that we are in a crucial time.  Something's up, for sure, and for many it is simply too painful to think about for long. Everything now is coming down, from forests to glaciers to cultural and religious truths, and we know our world will be nothing like it is now, both on the natural and human level, within 50 or even 20 years.  We were made for great changes to occur over centuries or eons, but now we must confront them in decades or less.   

It is no wonder, then, that we look to the Mayans or to millennial scenarios, for nothing, really, is that odd compared to what is actually happening on the ground.  There is speculation that the aliens that Steven Alten employs for his books are psychic projections of our fears - and some might say, are mere images like nightmares.  In the end, though, it doesn't really matter; the changes our own priests of science and politicians are telling us are coming are every bit as profound - well, almost - as the Second Coming or an alien invasion.  Cities underwater; suitcase A-bombs in New York subways; millions and millions of immigrants from impoverished wastelands flooding what remains of the prosperous nations; drug use, broken families, the Caliphate, and so much more.  

And all of it is created by us.  But how, when almost no one wants what is coming?  How has everything gotten so out of control?  Is there any wonder that we think of international conspiracies or angels and devils or UFO's?  Our historical progression is following a template that was created somewhere beyond our wills.  We seem to be puppets in the hands of something sinister, something of massive and frightful power that is bringing us towards - what?  How could we NOT then hope for salvation, in science, in hero politicians, in gods, in UFO's?   

I do not look for salvation in the blood-soaked culture of the ancient Mayans, nor in the dreams of politicians and dictators. UFO's seem a better alternative, but really, since it all came from us somehow, isn't it up to us somehow?  If it is all our fault, and where it came from within us is unknown, shouldn't we get to know a greater part of ourselves?  For whether the universe were created out of love or disinterested curiosity, we were born with a will to survive.  One would think that, then, this original instinct would still exist in us and call out, collectively, to do something, the right thing, if we could look deeply enough. 

For many who have done this, they tell us that the universe IS made from love, and that this is our home, and I believe them. This is the outside force that is at once also inside and can save us.  But even the scientist has to puzzle over our predicament, and must in the end admit that the solution is not in new techno-discoveries - although those can help - but in self-discovery. If we have dug this hole ourselves, we should also be able to fill it.  Ah, aliens would make it so much easier!  FK                 

It's been a while since I've been "up north."  This time of year, the last four miles to the  dirt track into the cabin remains unplowed, and travel there can only be on foot, on snowmobile or on skis; but this year the snow has been too late.  Normally, we go up with our son for the snowmobile trails that go on for hundreds of miles, but now, with only 7 or so inches on the ground, it is not worth it.  Next week will have several feet more they say, but we have other places to go, and after that, it's back to school.  

But that's all right.  The cabin to me has become a solitary affair, and the winter visits mostly for family amusement.  It is the solitary that I need.  This is not because of a lack of emotional attachment or any kind of inter-emotional turmoil, but because it is only in solitude that I can be me.  Other people make me into something "other." With some, I can feel stupid, with others, brilliant, not because of anything said but because of perception of the other's perception, which helps create "me."  I am not sure if this is universally shared, but the political process shows that it probably is; clearly, some politicians on the big stage make many of us feel better about ourselves, while others less so.  It is the former who win, not because they really are better, but because they make us feel better - somehow.  That is their gift, and it works.  

What, though, is this "me" that I find?  In Margee Kerr's Scream (which got better since my last posting on it), she shows clinically that we all fit into a few categories, or types, of reactors to stimuli.
What type we are depends on a complex blend of inheritance and experience, but in the end, we respond to intense stimuli beyond our conscious efforts.  We are nearly puppets to our bio-chemical and experiential backgrounds, although we can, with effort, overcome.  In her works with fear, Kerr wishes to find ways that our grinding fears, of death or violent experiences or tight spaces or hospitals (and so on) can be mitigated so that we might live more comfortable lives, free from the dictator that is fear.  How we do this is to confront fear in non-life threatening venues, such as horror houses, bungee jumping and the like, where certain experiences are remade into something less than triggers for paralyzing terror.  

However, the therapeutic and individual desires do not always match (this is my observation, not hers).  While she talks of working fear towards the good, most people in one way or another seek out fear for entirely different reasons.  Kerr claims that we do this to court the dangerous and to break taboos. She briefly mentions odd sexual practices, like bondage and discipline, in which some seek to explore different dimensions of the self.  And it is widely known that private sexual fantasies often stray into the forbidden zone, not so much because we wish to really experience them, but that we wish to know what that "forbidden" is like - in the safe space of fantasy.  

But we often seek out the dangerous or unpleasant for reasons beyond safe therapy, and in regions that are not safe.  We do it because we crave experience.

"We" "us" "me" "I"- what is this being that craves experience? What, for that matter, is the being in Kerr's biochemical machine that has free will - that is able to escape, at least to a degree, the reflexive actions that so influence the mind?  Is it the "me" I find away from everyone else at the cabin? If so, what is this me? Could I really define this solitary me without reference to others? For when I think of this me, he is neither good nor bad, brave or cowardly, hot tempered or cool.  He simply is a human being.  As such, he wants his comforts but also his thrills.  He seeks to explore.  He gradually takes more and more risks, longer adventures into the woods or the waters.  He is, alone like this, an "everyone" of no specific color, except that which is human.  

Where, then, are we?  Are we in our phobias, in our families, in our religion or our bodies? Of course, yes, but there is also this human thing that seeks experience, even fear, for no other reason but experience.  That, I think, is where we are when stripped down and on the edge of the wilderness.  Here is not found the fabled Self of the mystics, but the elemental human, who knows somehow that he is on a journey.  He knows that he must explore.  Where and why he does not always know, but it is this impulse that brings us all together under the human umbrella. It is this, I think, that most fundamentally defines us at the edge of our normal being - the being who wants to go beyond where and what he is - to and beyond fear, to something far far off that calls.  FK         

  

                      

On the last blog, way back in 2015, I briefly noted that the influenza, or whatever it was that hit me on Christmas Eve, seemed to have peeked.  In fact, it had not, and I can only now say, tentatively, that this may have occurred yesterday, as we hiked along a packed path of snow by the river.  It was not that I was suddenly anxious to jog along in my snow boots, or that the endless drool from the nose had stopped, but because, for the first time in over a week, I felt hope.  Not about getting well - I presume that will take place in its own time, as usual - but about life in general.  It may have been only a feeling of normalcy, but in contrast to the last week, it seemed like a gift of grace.  There was no light of the sun shining through the gray clouds, but the dark river edged by shelf ice looked beautiful.  There were no bright red cardinals greeting me like a sign along the way, but suddenly, from out of the blue - or gray - all things seemed possible and good.  In short bursts that took me by surprise, I liked being alive.  There was a future, and  better yet, an appealing present.  I took this as a change in body chemistry that could only mean one of two things: either I was being prepared for the Holy Gates, or health was on the way.  As I feel no closer to death today than yesterday, I assume it was the latter.  

Early morning has stilled this optimism, as coughing fits woke me at 5 AM, but it got me to thinking about the book I am currently reading, Scream, by Margee Kerr.  It is a modestly interesting book about fear - why we have it, how the body reacts to it (or creates it) and, most essential for her thesis (for it reads in many places much like a thesis), why we crave it.  I will leave the latter for another time; what has occurred to me now is Kerr's continual use of bio-chemistry to explain just how we are, and, almost, who we are.  It brings up a debate that started, as far as I know, with Descartes, and continues unabated to this day.  Are we only our chemistry, DNA and culture?  Or is there something more?  Is Man, as I believe Descartes said, a spirit (god) in a machine (body), or are we the machine alone?  

On this fine Monday after a long holiday, I will not drag out all the canons of philosophy and theology on this one - even if I could, for those accounts would be nearly endless.  Rather, I will offer only my own humble experiences that have assembled themselves haphazardly into an informal personal philosophy.  It is this: the results of mood caused by body chemistry, whether by inner states of health or outer stimuli, do not in themselves constitute who or what we are.  Rather, they offer us a possible way to act or think, as directed by the reader, that which experiences the biological sensations.  This reader, oddly, is itself outside the sensations; and if this reader remains truly objective, it becomes what I call the overmind, a part of ourselves that is both interested in our experiences but also detached, more of an observer than anything else.  This overmind, I have found, is supremely intelligent, although not perfect or unlimited.  It might be called the soul by some, or a guardian angel by others, but it exists independent of both body chemistry and current events, even as it finds them interesting.  I have been this overmind (as its consciousness alone is what "I" experienced) in a few out of body experiences, as well as at other unexpected times.  It is both me and not me, but it is, from a Pavlovian view, free.  

I suppose this would be called the God in the Machine, but it gets weirder than that; there is another vantage point that is either the soul of the overmind, or something different.  It is, for me, a consciousness most often found in intellectual revelation, but not of the discursive kind.  It is that sudden flash of knowledge that brings one to understand that the self, history, nature, all that is observed and lived is itself an artifact, or shadow, of something else.  That is, that the body and the thought processes that come from it, including the brain, are themselves a reflection of a condition, or a specific view, of creation.  And while I might think of it and write of it now from my brain to my fingers, the actual realization is intuitively understood to bring us beyond the limits of physical reality. This view is not fantasy, but a "given," every bit as real as our currently shared reality.  Some have called this view "more real than real," and I would agree, but one doesn't have to.  Rather, it informs us of at least another context beyond our current "read" - that is, the bio-chemical.  In this, we, our deeper selves, would not be a god or spirit in the machine; rather, both the god and the machine would be a partial manifestation of a fuller reality that can, at times, be discerned from some kind of outside by - by what?  

The strict materialist would claim that this "realization" is only, in and of itself, a bio-chemical change manifesting as a thought.  He could perhaps point to an area of the brain that is lit with increased energy and say, "see?  There is your realization."  Of course, it is not, and he knows it - for what, after all, is his perception of my "lit" brain but another part of his brain being lit?  More importantly, I would simply say, "yes, that is what you perceive - but his perception itself is only an angle, or an attitude, or a way of seeing "seeing" itself.  I can see, from this  case of realization, that what you see is simply a reflection from the Great of a certain aspect of it.  In effect, I can understand your experience of understanding from outside, just as you think you can understand my experience with your brain monitor."   I don't think, however, that he would be convinced.  

We almost never are.  If a miracle comes one day, it won't be long before we ask, "what have you done for me lately?" and then, sooner than we could have thought, we would be saying, "nothing has been done for me ever."  It is the way of our shared form of perspective.  But still - how can a dark snowy day go from blah to beautiful in one instant? Whatever the biochemistry in it, what is the meaning behind it?  And how, most importantly, can we bring this meaning ever closer to ourselves?   I personally have tried to coerce this with an array of exogenous chemicals, but they, in the end, only bring another sort of flatness or even misery.  In the end, I have come to believe, it is the belief in something greater, bigger, in something more wonderful and beautiful, that allows this "something" to light up an area of our brain with greater regularity.  And at that, we don't care what the brain monitor says, for it says nothing of what we really are, at least at that moment.  FK