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

Perhaps it is because of the time of year.  It is late February and the only sign of spring to come is the increasing strength of the sun and its length in the sky.  The snow from last December is still on the ground, crusty and pock-marked by animals feet and hooves, and the fields stretch out as white and forlorn as ever. The cold is unmoving, relentless, as if it will have no end. Perhaps that is why these old memories are stirring, ones that have not been felt for decades - memories of cold and snow going back to the beginning time, when all was new.

And tough.  One memory that came forth was of me at age 4.  I had followed the older boys to a  municipal building somewhere - it seems to be a school, but where could that one be, for none were close? - and we were involved in the most secret alchemy. Here, I was to learn from the cognoscenti, the first and second and third graders, how to make a wind-up Godzilla.  I had been forewarned and had brought  the necessary ingredients - an empty wooden thread spool, a pocket knife, a rubber band and a bobby pin.  Taking me out to the nearby woods, everything encased in old crusty snow, I was shown how to carve the all important "claws", or jagged tread marks in the spool before the real mystery began.  Then, the rubber band had to be threaded through the spool's center, and a stick, just the right size (thus the trip to the woods) to keep it in place on one side.  On the other, the bobby pin was put through the opening of the elastic, this resting in the loop at the end of the bobby pin, the pin's end to be used as a "tail."  Then one wound the elastic up and placed it carefully on the ground.  If all had been done right, the kinetic energy in the wound- up elastic would make the spool crawl across the ground (or hard snow) at a casual pace, self -fired.  It was a veritable Frankenstein, a living thing made with my own hands!  

And it was indeed alchemy, a mystic art as I understood it then, because I did not understand it.  How could this be?  How could an elastic unwind so slowly as to make my Godzilla crawl as if alive, menacing every ant that might crawl, if it had been summer and there were ants, and every tiny imagined mortal human as well?    

That it was beyond my understanding then is now hard to understand - how easy it is!  But, then again, I had a horrible time understanding division in the 4th grade, a tough time with Spanish in the 7th, difficulty understanding poetry and calculus in high school, and an impossible task in understanding the great European thinkers in philosophy class at college.  

There were other things that were tough in the past, too: how could one figure out how to get girls to go out on a date?  How to work oneself up the ladder in a job?  How to understand the even more arcane craziness of social thinkers while in grad school? But while all of these things, from thread spools to philosophy to math to girls, have not been entirely figured out, they at least do not appear as enormous obstacles.  If faced again, they would be fairly easy, in fact.  Instead, however, I have placed myself in the world of writing and getting that writing published, something that has so far eluded me for the most part.  It is alchemy, a mystery with which I continue to struggle.

We might see this as evolution, as survival of the fit, for if all were easy, there would be no competition and no need to work hard at all.  And yet, it's not as easy as that.  We are told by 19th century ethnologists that the Northwest Coast Indians, the Salish and Kwakiutl and others of the Oregon territory and western coastal Canada, that their life was fairly easy.  All that they needed was supplied in abundance, from the great rich forests to the never-ending supply of salmon that each year supplied them with enough fat-rich fish to dry and eat until the next spawning.  Yet they competed, so fiercely that they continually upped the ante in their annual potlatches.  Here, every big man of every clan would pile up more and more riches and burn them in an astounding waste of wealth to show everyone just how rich - and undisturbed by such richness - that they were.  Because of this, the people of the clan would have to work that much harder to buy the European goods that were flowing in so that they could burn most of them again the next year.  

Whether consciously or not, they made their lives much harder than they had to be.  Go figure.  

In fact, it seems that if we do not get the challenge from the natural world, we will invent it.  Few are in that position, however, as only necessity seems to cause invention.  If we had had the technical knowledge back in the early 19th century that we do now, with 700 million instead of 7 billion people on earth to keep alive, we would have been in fool's heaven.  But, as Malthus pointed out (and more correctly than many think), we will always press our boundaries, always catching up with need rather than outpacing it.  

It seems, then, a natural law that whatever point we are in life, we will be challenged to the point of anxiety.  Retired on a comfortable income?  Well, here comes your children's children in need, or here comes the unexpected pain or lump under the armpit.  Even the comfortably born are as often as not miserable - they cannot ever meet with dad's approval, or worse, they are so bored they get themselves into a mess with drugs and vices and, if all else fails, there come the suicide attempts and mental illness.  That we are always taxed and never complete for long rises from evolutionary competition to cultural competition to personal competition.  It is the nature of the world. 

Why?  Is it something simply inbred, just this product of natural evolution through competition, or something more?  

There is no answer that will satisfy everyone, I know.  While it is hard to prove, the pure evolutionist would say that the mind reflects nature, just as it is nature's product - or, as I have heard, that the human brain is an aberration, unnecessarily large for its purpose and given to unnecessary abstractions.  The latter I reject with ease - the brain is nothing like the appendix - its function is much too complex to have accidentally stumbled into the realm of the vestigial or excessive organ.  On the former, I believe it is correct, but this does not answer the question. Rather, in a world that came into existence by a random alchemy of its own - we know of no experiment that can reproduce it - why would it have such a "law?"  Why would evolution always push its limits, and move, as science has proven very recently, always towards the larger and more complex?  Why not have a limited eco system where limits are natural,and not caused by competition and feeding?  Why must the rabbit breed until it is overcrowded, or more to the point, why would that initial species of bacteria have to continue to divide?  Couldn't it just relax and live?  

Apparently not.  And if you are sitting cozy right now, you won't be for long.  You will have another "Godzilla" moment any day or month now.  You will be forced to understand, to stretch your current abilities.  That is how it was made, and "IT" certainly seems to have a point, a direction, at least to me.  FK                

Last Friday we went to the Chasen Museum in Madison for a viewing of the Illuminated Pages - a new Bible done the old way, "illuminated" by the presence of gold and platinum placed throughout the illustrations made on each page.  If one has never seen an old Bible - the type made before the Gutenberg Press changed everything about books - it is a revelation.  First, they are huge, about three feet tall, so that they can be read by several people at once.  There are two reasons for this: one, the price of a Bible before the printing press was enormous. Because of the work put into it, the entirety hand-printed by dozens of monks working day and well into the night, it was made to last, and for that, very specific paper and ink had to be used.  The "paper" was vellum, specially treated calf hide that is translucent and nearly immortal (because of its translucence, each line on one side had to be matched with a line on the other; the planning for such a Bible is extremely complex); and the ink was made from natural pigments that now can rarely be found (for this Bible, the makers were able to buy Chines ink made the old way, in the pre-communist era).  To buy such a thing for each and every monk would have been impossible.

And two: because it was a work of such magnitude, it was embellished with illustrations, this artistry naturally flowing to a work of such time and expense, and so the pages would best be broad for a greater canvass.  

We were given the tour, and were loaded with facts: it took nearly 20 years in the planning, and 13 years in the making; it cost 9 million dollars to produce, even though much of the work was donated by experts and monks; it is stacked into over 12 volumes, its depth being several feet thick; and, more interesting, it is steeped in symbolism, both the fairly readable (Adam and Eve in the new- old Bible were made to be Southern African, like the Kalahari Bushmen, because anthropologists have genetically traced the oldest human genomes to them) and obscure: for instance, in the Psalms, which were meant to be sung, the actual sound waves of Monks singing were woven throughout the text, as were religious songs from other traditions.  With that, an expert in the future could actually tell what the notes were that were being sung.  And so on and on, a regular DaVinci code for any future esoteric explorer.  

Aesthetically speaking, however, my reaction was mixed.  First, it attempted to be world inclusive and modern, showing that the Bible is a universal and living thing.  But illustrations of modern buildings and people, with modern artistry throughout, I found rankling, when stacked up against more traditional art.  This was not just because it affronted a feeling of tradition, but also because, as seemed obvious, modern architecture and artistic design are simply not meant to be holy or spiritual.  They are rather commercial or mathematical or psychological. However, this, too, might be important for future observers, for they captured for the ages, against the maker's wishes I believed, the spiritual sterility of our era. Ours is in fact a de-spiritualized time. The making of the Bible was an outreach to hope, to the continued relevancy of the Bible, but its modernistic touches seemed to belie that outlook.  Instead, it recorded the erosion of faith in our era, making of this book the museum piece it was, something of vague interest for the art connoisseur, but hardly something for the believer.  

Or was it?  On second thought, I felt something deeper still than a mild cynical despair.  Instead, it came to me that this Bible worked to reclaim the sacredness of the holy text, in spite of its nod to modernity.  It was, after all, a work of monumental effort and expense, and in its viewing I slowly came to appreciate that fact.  In our era, we have made such things as books so cheap and available that we have marginalized their importance.  But this Bible spoke still of a time when such words, such meaning, had sacred significance.  It stood out, all of a sudden, in a way I had never experienced it before: that in these pages were the actual words of God as understood by the men of that age; that in this work was a holy wonder and a marvel beyond understanding - a near eternal presence of the presence of God, regardless of the alien cultures that had experienced it.  

That had to be the thought of the makers - that in the ugliness of modernity, there was still this connection to God that nothing could destroy.  And in this, they were right: there is hope, for we have before us, in the Bible, a document that connects the Nameless God, that which is beyond understanding, to us, to be understood at least in part.  In this we have a reason to believe that God cares enough to communicate, and that with our return to caring about this care, we might find redemption and a brighter future, regardless of current conditions.

A complex exhibition when one thinks about it, as I'm sure its makers did, for two decades.  Well worth the view when it comes to a city near you.  FK                           

Today, a new chapter in "Hurricane River" under the same name in website.  It is "Derek," after "Devil's Choice."  

The last blog ended on the question - who dare's not eat the apple first?  In this case, I was thinking about self-defense in a hard world, something that has become increasingly relevant with the rise of ISIS and violent Muslim fundamentalism.  Among Christians, however, it has long been a problem.  There is nowhere in the New Testament where Jesus tells us to fight back. Rather, we are to turn the other cheek.  This seems pretty clear, and yet we know that with such passivity, one's world would very quickly become "not of this world."  I have read examples of Quakers laying down their arms, only to be slaughtered by attacking Indians in old Pennsylvania, and of a Buddhist village (the same passivity preached in Buddhism) exterminated because it would not fight off an invasion.  In the movie "Black Robe" (based on fact), a Jesuit priest manages to convert an Indian tribe in Quebec - with that tribe being wiped out by their traditional enemies within a few years.  Pacifism works in some cases, but not in many or most instances of invasion.  For every Ghandi or MLK victory are several defeats of the weaker by the stronger.  Genghis Khan would find  such passivity a laugh riot.  

For that reason, most Christian sects have delineated the "Just War," where a non-violent nation is allowed - or even compelled - to actively fight "evil."  However, as we have seen in some of the Gulf wars, what is evil and a threat is often debatable.

During the last two nights, a TV opinion show had representatives of both factors - the first set, a Catholic priest and a Rabbi arguing for the active engagement of evil, and the second, a Quaker and a minister from the group, "Sojourners." The host, an engagement type of guy, gave little room for the pacifist argument, but it did indeed seem shallow, considering the topic concerned stopping ISIS.  The brunt was: get the nearby Muslim countries and their populace to condemn the group.  This would stop recruitment and dry the movement up, without the need for the use of force.  In all fairness, I do not see that working, at least not  fast enough.  With such lack of push-back, this ruthless group would have its Caliphate as fast as one can say, "Adolf Hitler."

Still, there is no Holy Voice to condone violence against violence in the New Testament.  In fact, everything points to martyrdom, including the Crucifixion.  It did work to change the Roman Empire from within, but the empire only continued, and poorly at that, with renewed violence "in the name of Christ."  This would not have stopped a powerful movement from without.  

This blog will not untie a knot that has been fumbled with for centuries.  In the aforementioned Buddhist village, the villagers knew that they would be wiped out.  It was their opinion that it would be better to go to eternity with a cleaner karma than to live for a few more years - and their children's, and their children's children's years - on this earthly plain.  Is that what Christ was demanding?  There are arguments to be made in favor of this, but the reality of it is something else.  We would, indeed, become slaves or simply be killed.  The bite of the apple would be the idea that we deserve to live at the expense of other's lives, even if those others were threatening us.  Are we not one?  Is this not the breaking of the second greatest of divine laws, to treat others as we would like to be treated (the first is to love God with all one's heart)?  Shouldn't we simply turn the other cheek? 

I can see the alternative arguments - that we are doing the world good by stopping evil, that we are protecting what life God has given us in natural defense and so on, but these are arguments. On the face of it, on the facts of the Gospel,  none of them seem to fly.  And in the end, it seems to all come down to that one phrase: who is brave - or foolish - enough to refuse the bite of the apple?  FK                                

Yesterday, I wrote of why the public still loves C.S. Lewis - he often goes beyond the academic to address us as living human beings. But he was also a confirmed Anglican, a religion almost exactly like Roman Catholicism with that English exception, and in that includes sin and guilt and lots of it.  In "The Problem of Pain," one whole chapter is devoted to how rotten we all are and how sin - and guilt - should be brought back in full, regardless of psychoanalysis.  In this, we can see why certain movements in our society wish to diminish religion, for individual sin leaves no excuse, no history to blame for our rottenness.  Yes, circumstances might make the holy life more difficult, but we are all obligated to try.  We know how we should behave, and that is that. God does not shrug His shoulders and say, "meh" to our selfish behavior.  

But why, then, are we like this?  Why is our journey to goodness so difficult?  What could God, who can do anything, have been thinking? 

To answer, Lewis has another chapter entitled "The Fall."  It is immaterial to him whether it is just or not to be blamed for Adam and Eve and the apple. In this he depicts how it could have been before the Fall: in this world, we worked in harmony with God's will; we did not have pain and suffering as we now know it; everything, from our digestive tract to our immune system was so guarded by spiritual might that death only came when our time was over, and that with great ease.  This, says Lewis, was cast away when, at some point we - one and then the other - decided to become our own god, to run our own lives according to selfish motives.  With this, we became less than the chosen of God and more like the animals and minerals of the material world.  No longer blessed, we were simply subjected to biochemistry and disease without protection.  With our rebellion, we became corpses exposed to the elements of nature.  And thus our greatest sufferings were, and are, our own damned fault - not Adam and Eve's, although they may have started it.  Rather, our fall is through the fault of our own free will, each and every one of us, right here and now.

This seems too much for the modern reader, myself included, but sometimes life provides an example of how this distasteful possibility might be true.  

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent when we Christians are called to give up at least some of the daily trappings of our lives for the sake of a sacred rebirth.  Ashes are put on our foreheads to remind us of our mortality - the ever present reality that one should never forget - and our complete dependence on God.  This morning, for the service we had to get up a little early - too early for my liking - and walk through the ridiculous cold to endure another Mass.  I say this because that was my feeling, as it often is when I force myself to go to church. Oh no, not again! - the platitudes, the saccharine songs sung poorly, the phony niceness of the congregation, the cheap sense of penitence that will soon be forgotten by all!  These sentiments do not make me feel proud, but they are there, and only gradually leave as the  more profound aspects of Mass take over.  For me, each trip is a struggle, a tiny tale of sin and redemption.

In light of Lewis's readings, however, and in the shadow of Lent, it seemed to go deeper this morning, this cynicism.  This time I could clearly understand - the resentment is indeed my rebellion, my refusal to be part of something bigger than myself.  In reflection, I know this; I know that for us to be in tune with the Absolute, we  must give up the false sense of self.  This brings peace and enlightenment and an end to envy and anxiety and even the fear of death.  But the little rebel hangs in there.  


In profane life, the classic rebel smokes and drinks and screws up his life, Jimmy Dean style, the rebellion always ending, it seems, in either disaster or conversion.  But really, we usually end with both; as we age, we calm the rebel, but never completely.  We still must insist that we are in charge.  In this, Lewis was right.  It's right there for anyone to see.  We do have a choice, but we cannot make the right one for long.  Call it our history or our evolution or our bad childhood, but in the end, the buck stops with each and every one of us.  Right to the end, we hang onto our pride, our personal rebel, and from the religious perspective we have only ourselves to blame.  

But really, who of us would always turn the other cheek?  Give up our cloak for someone in need- always?  In that, we have learned, lies humiliation.  In that lies servitude, poverty, and, for a nation, enslavement.  This is why it is hard and why we rebel. We cannot serve two masters, and for our survival, we know which master we must serve: our own, our selves.  The question is, then, not that of original sin, for the apple has been eaten by us all; but rather, who will be the first brave enough to turn away from the forbidden fruit?  In a fallen world, it is not such an easy task.  FK   


    

"If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what he wished.  But the creatures are not happy.  Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both."

So begins Chapter 2, "Divine Omnipotence," of C.S. Lewis's short book, "The Problem of Pain."  What follows is some very good reasoning by Lewis against such a notion - for instance, that God cannot contradict himself, for that is nonsense (versus a perfect God) - and in that, to have free will and perfect happiness (for example) would be contradictory.  But that is word play, just as the above quote is  We know, when we look into our hearts, that word play is not enough to describe Being.  

But Lewis is popular exactly because he does not get lost in the war of words.  He comes home to the heart again and again to make us really feel his points even if we do not fully understand the wordplay, and that is exactly what he does in this book, tackling the biggest problem that there is concerning the concept of an omnipotent, all - loving God.  How could He allow such suffering? How could He (It) make a world in which suffering is unavoidable, as is ours?  While nimbly describing the need for contrast and pain in a world of free will, Lewis also delves into the mysteries of God that allow only the words of poetry: that God loves us absolutely, and in that, It desires our perfection, not for It, but for us; for to satisfy our desires, we must have God (who is all, just as we desire all); and to have God, we must be perfect; and to be perfect, we must perfect ourselves through the travails of suffering that try our free will.  As Lewis is a Christian, he then leads us to the historical point of the absolute love of God - of Christ dying on the cross for us - that closes the deal, albeit in a mysterious way: so that, through God's suffering with us, our need for absolute self-perfection is mollified, replaced with the need for absolute faith.

On this we will delve more thoroughly as the book proceeds, but of greatest insight to me so far has been the opening gambit of the book: why do we believe in God, anyway?  To look at nature, says Lewis, we find no materialistic confirmation of a spiritual being of any sort.  It is a world of cold and hot, of tooth and claw and deprivation and satiation.  Where in all of this is God? 

Lewis's answers are many fold, but the first and greatest is: we, all people, have always felt the numinous, the spirit behind life, and in this he is right.  In the past, this always led to a religious belief system of sorts.  Today, this is not necessarily so, but the atheist of today who purposefully directs himself away from the gods or God, for a myriad of reasons, still feels the numinous: the awe elicited from the night sky, the bliss from a beautiful sunset, the startling discovery of love in his newly born child.  It is, says Lewis, these feelings which have naturally led to a belief in God, not the empirically produced reasons of the scientist- primarily made from notions of the ignorance of the primitive mind.  

It is on this latter that I believe the modern intellectual places himself on the horns of a dilemma; for to say that all of humanity before the current time has been wrong, and our Western materialistic notion right, is ethnocentric in the extreme.  But, what, then?  Does the modern empiricist then embrace primitive beliefs that he himself cannot believe in?  

In Lewis, who is more than familiar with the arguments against God, we find an exit: go, he urges us again, to the heart.  Do not deny the love and beauty that comes to you in this world; instead, let it sink in, for in that, one will find a grateful prayer to life; and in that, a prayer to whatever it is that we have named God.  And in that, a realization that behind all is this goodness, is this love bigger than all of our love.  In that, and only in that, we overcome word play to find the truth of divinity within all things great and small.  With that, pain and suffering remain a problem, but not an obstacle to greater realization.  FK                         

Somewhere back in my middle years, my mother asked me if reading Siddhartha had been the reason for the failure of my professional life.  She didn't exactly say "failure," as she would be too polite for that, but I knew what she meant.  I vaguely recall denying it, and denying in fact that I was a failure.  Thus should have ended the question, for Siddhartha - the Buddha's earthly name - would not have cared one way or another about the question.  If only I were like Siddhartha. 

The book, though, was not a track written by a devout Buddhist, but by German national Herman Hesse, who had taken the intellectual world of the young by storm in the late 1960's.  Writing from the period between the world wars from the mess of the Wiemar Republic, his works were meditations on the meaning of the individual in this earthly span.  No believer in the Super Man and the master race, he sought to find a reason for living in the dull and hopeless world of a fallen nation.  In his book "Siddhartha," he sought to find solace in the wisdom of the Orient, seen by Europeans then as a perpetual motion machine of timeless traditions.  

His Siddhartha was not the classic Buddha.  As a young man, he was raised in the Buddhist tradition, before he left the monastery school for a life in the "world," in which he seemed to have little direction except to do.  And do he did - in not caring for his own material success, he took such risks which such calm detachment that he became a very wealthy and influential man. He even had a courtesan, with whom he had a child, before he reached middle age and left the world for a quiet life as a river ferry man, where he lived simply and for the moment.  At one point, the courtesan died and the child was sent to him for his care.  There, the restless boy, always in search of excitement and external fulfillment, was patiently treated to the living teaching of his guru- like father.  

I read the book sometime in my late teens, and so do not recall what happened to the boy - it seems to me that he, too, left to live in the world, thus repeating the cycle of training and experience before the (expectant) rejection of social status.  It is a dream-like story and my mother was right -  I was deeply affected by it. However, like most in the real world, I never came to live out its cycle.  For Hesse, before the rejection of worldly things, the individual must fulfill the greatest goals of the world by obtaining all or most of what it desires - wealth, power, and sensual pleasure.  It is only then that the mature rejection of that life can be complete, for until then there will be the nagging need for social and sensual fulfillment.  The book, as with the circumstances of the Buddha's real life, call for a princely background of indulgence before such indulgence can be truly rejected.  The Hindu caste system recognizes this, as only those of the upper castes are seemed fit for final realization.  Karma is the cosmic law that backs such apparent unfairness. 

The Middle Eastern religions have a different take on this - for weren't the Jews an oppressed people?  Wasn't Jesus a carpenter?  Wasn't Mohammed a mid-level merchant?  But both traditions leave us wanting, I believe, for how many people do we know of any class who have rejected status and wealth - the fulfillment of desire - to live contently as a hermit?  For Jesus, it was the rich who were cursed, but how many of the poor lived and live as saints, content with what they have and willing to let it all go?  

I know what my mother's question really was - get moving, son! Give up this pseudo-mystic lifestyle and act!  Be all that you can be!  And while I can answer like Siddhartha that it is all worthless, and like Jesus that concern for earthly success is the antithesis of the good and holy life, I cannot pretend that I am ever content for long.  The laid-back lifestyle has often been my excuse to simply be lazy, and in that there is no movement towards Truth, but rather an aimless rumbling around in a world of vague discontent. Mountains that I wanted to climb have never been climbed, things that I wanted to do will be left undone, and if I am honest, these undone things grate like a slight rubbing of a shoe on the heal.  In time they raise blisters.  

The greater truth remains, however - unlike Siddhartha, things of the world are seldom done with disinterest, and no matter the degree of a person's success, there is almost always a hill left to climb, a rubbing pebble in the shoe for all of us, rich or poor.  The life of Hesse's Siddhartha is then more an allegory than anything else - a tale of truth given to the young, the partial turning away from that truth, and then a final embrace of that truth late in life - perhaps so late that it is not embraced until near death.  Until then, we - most of us, anyway - continue to sigh for what we don't have.  It is, as the Buddha said, a condition of our universe and our greatest reason for discontent.  To slough it off is to open the door to real Truth.  Perhaps it can only be done when we finally realize that death is for real, and that life is a passing gift meant for wonder, not transient success.  Someday, I have read, we will all come to this realization, rich or poor.  FK   

Today, a new chapter - "Devil's Choice" - after "The Law" and "Henry," under "Hurricane River" in the website.  FK

I was not delighted when I woke up in my motel room by the airport and found on the computer that my flight, almost within arm's reach at 3 hours away, had been canceled due to a foot of snow that was inching its way up in blustery squalls.  Calling the airline, I found that the earliest flight that I could manage would be on the following day at 5:00 PM, an almost interminable wait given that I had no car and the busy industrial streets no sidewalks.  I was stuck like a  moth larvae in a cocoon.  Trapped.

Fortunately, the motel, a Days Inn, had free WiFi and I a Kindle, and with that a whole library opened up to me.  I was not in the mood for the heavy theology I had been reading, and had already done a recent stint with the UFO literature - the latest nearly devoid of anything truly useful to think about except: paranoia! Your government is hiding unimaginable information from you! Tantalizing but devoid of any further verifiable facts.  

It's then that I returned to the hallucinatory drug literature, a category in its own right, with possibilities out the wazoo - but which were serious?  Which would provide some useful information for my own endless research into deeper truth?

As it turned out, I got very lucky.  The first that I clicked on was "Decomposing the Shadow" by James Jesse, published only a few years ago by a young man not yet in his thirties.  His story was nearly identical in structure to my own when I was around 20 - a confused young man searching for meaning in all the wrong ways, with drinking, heavy recreational drug use, and then travel as a means to escape the wrong turns and find something, anything, Out There (in my book, Dream Weaver).  At first, this did not look like such a lucky find, for there was a lot of youthful reiteration of the shallow and destructive ways of our industrial culture, but soon, very soon, this changed.  Jesse, with surprising clarity, hit on several core concepts of reality, aided by his use of the "magic mushroom," psilocybin.  These were not dry academic monologues meant to satisfy the need to posses reality, but intimations of direct contact with such issues.  These were deeply felt and understood, as I had once understood them for similar reasons: some chemicals, the best found in natural substances, can clear the mind for deep sensate knowledge of being.  

As I see it, he made three major points, each essential to the modern reader who seeks to expand personal depth knowledge.


One: that the person who we think we are is a shallow mirage. This I discovered in my early tripping days, and it has been confirmed ever since, by both the ancient philosophers and mystics that have since been read as well as by observation of human life in general.  What we THINK we are has been easily manipulated and deconstructed by psychologists, for this 'thing' is far more Pavlovian than most of us wish to think.  It is a construct of stimulus and response, an aspect of self that allows us to survive in nature as well as in human social groups.  It is self-centered, anxious, constantly on the alert to protect what it thinks it is.  It is the self's survival of the fit, no less a product of basic nature than the dog or the hummingbird. 

Two: that this self creates a shadow, or all the values opposite the socially approved ways of conditioning - for to have a positive, one must have a negative; and, as a characteristic of the distinctly human animal, one must have an internal notion or understanding of the contrast.  It is usually hidden from daylight, both figuratively and actually, so that the social self can carry on its business.  But the shadow is never far away - not only surfacing in the subconscious through dreams, but also in neurosis and self-defeating behavior.  This is the point that concerns the author most, and thus the title to the book.  As an older - almost old - man, this is the point that concerns me least, although that was not the case when I was younger.  As someone who's been around the block too many times, this uncomfortable side has simply become the night that must accompany day.  This is not to say that the psychological discomfort is born with a cheery smile, but rather that the aging persona simply begins to accept this as 'just so.'  Lest I seem too casual, it would take a lot to get me to use hallucinogens again - they can be scary as hell itself.  No; but like the deft jungle tribesman, I now know how to circle around the hidden fire - ant nest.  Yes, it exists; yes, I feel it when it's inhabitants are biting me; but I let it lie when at all possible.

Three: that there is an infinite mystery and depth to each individual beyond the superficial persona, and in that depth is found the basis of life, the unitive. So it is that all things are complimentary in an impossibly beautiful arrangement that, for lack of a better word, the mystics throughout the ages have called Love.  So it is that in complimentarity we find a depth of unity that is Truth and beyond iteration.  It, this knowledge, 'just is,' or as the author put it, is "all that there is, all at once," another term for the loaded word, God.  

It is at this point that I confuse this book with the other, for the conclusions that they reach are similar - as is the youthful discordance that brought them there.  Between the two, I was brought to a somewhat hopeful conclusion - that the young of today are searching for meaning, wholeness and love as much as any other generation. The difference from my own, the Baby Boomers, is that they have no nationally or internationally recognized "movement" happening.  And this, I have come to believe, is a good thing.  The hippie movement of my own time was quickly swallowed up in commercialism and cynicism, populated quickly by poseurs who wished to be part of this new "coolness." I have little doubt that this affected my own personality as well.  Today,  however, many youths are working under cover, as has always been necessary for mystical things. There are small groups that one can find on the web, some with publishing houses and fairly extensive membership, but these have kept below the radar of popular thought, almost as if the hippie era was a first, and partially failed, attempt by deep Self to promote the discovery of Self.  It is as if we are being led by Self, by deep truth, towards a new way; as if we were, really, an evolutionary species rather than just another experiment gone horribly wrong.  FK        
      

It was a longer and more complex journey than expected.  Flying out to Connecticut for my mother's funeral was met with an odd fear and reticence, as if the act itself would finalize the death, but there was more.  Somewhere buried in it all were unresolved issues of my own, of family, of my own evolution as a person - of certain triumphs and just as certain failures or detours or dead ends.  It was - and remains - maddeningly complex, this putting to sleep the earthly life of my last parent.  It feels as if I have been left an old man and a struggling adolescent, both, neither one happy or settled as it is.  

Amidst it were the funeral and wake, both equally dreaded, and both equally met with surprising ease as everything fell into place, as if it were all normal, which it was not.  Again, a struggle, of superficial things and things laying deeper, unresolved, because, like death, they have been refused a hearing, a clearing, a final resolution, although perhaps some things cannot be resolved ever, and were never meant to be.  As if life is a continuing work, a work in progress, meant to meet dead ends and new branches.  What do I know?

And amidst the wake, in the last hour as only close family remained and too much wine and beer had passed uncounted as guests came and went, came the argument, the passionate discussion that told of the new beginnings and those things unresolved.  Of the unresolved, let the dead bury the dead for now.  Of the new beginnings, beneath it all, came the question again, the big question for our age: are we evolving or falling further from the ideal?  Are we really a work in progress, or a work that was once perfect and is falling to decay?  

Both are natural tendencies and I had a lot of time to think about our argument and the implications, as I was holed up in a motel by Bradley International Airport as yet another blizzard slammed the area, closing this airport as well as Logan in Boston, the entire area under a seeming permanent icecap several feet thick, as if the Ice Age were returning with a vengeance.  Are we advancing as a species, or returning to some apocalypse, like the ice age? My sister argued for the first, citing gay rights, women's rights, and an opening up of the old guard to new ideas; I, being in an adolescent mood fueled by contrariness, argued the latter - oh, but look at the environmental devastation of an industrial society spreading across the world, look at the rising numbers of single parent homes, of increasing dependence on welfare, of decreasing privacy rights, of the shocking rise of dictatorships both secular and religious!

In the nearly two days alone in that motel, though, I read nearly three books and had long private thoughts.  One of those books, "The Unbearable Wholeness of Being" by Delio, argued not only for evolution, but for the absolute necessity of evolution.  It was a well-padded argument and one that I am favoring, regardless of the argument at the wake.  But in the same book came, against the wishes of the author I believe, the seed of the other; she spoke of the meaning of education back in medieval times, how all knowledge, whether practical or philosophical, was intended to aid the student in his search for God;  all of it, from math to history.  Have we not fallen from those times?  Even though women can vote and gays can marry, are we not further from the greatest research of all, that which involves our selves with the eternal?  

Two other books, though, were written by currently young authors concerning their own search for Truth, involving at least tangentially the use of mushrooms or ayahuasca, the entheogen of South America (I have a vine from which the latter is made from my fieldwork of 20 years ago still in my attic, dusty, old and dry.)  Both were atheists or agnostics at best at the start; both ended up as true believers in the end, having followed their own difficult path to a concept of God that was far more personal and active than many of those who still follow the traditional route.  Is this our future?  Are our young searching now for a living religion that brings them into the presence of God in ways the old can no longer accomplish?  Is this, then, evolution?

The dour old man that was risen from my mother's death says no; the struggling adolescent that was risen from my buried psyche says "yes."  And I am still left in death's shadow, not knowing what to believe, except that this is no dry study, this life.  It is involved; it does not let you off the hook.  Downward spiral or upward surge, we must all deal with our own internal demons and angels in our own time.  This is not a choice.  This is life for the human, the sapien, the cursed and the chosen of God.  FK