​A year ago I reluctantly participated in the church retreat, a 4 day marathon that includes two 12 hour days of continual religious immersion, and have now just finished my 3rd.   Not for the young and restless, and a little spooky with cultish overtones, participating in the retreat none the less is an immense improvement over ordinary weekend activities.  To meditate on God in unison and within oneself for hours on end – that is the ultimate goal, and its benefits are immense, according to the testimony of all who attend.  No kidding.  It is surprising how moved people are by such an event, an indication of how universal is the need to get in touch with something bigger than ourselves and our daily social concerns.  It is surprising, too, how people find solutions to problems, even big problems, in such a setting.

It is not surprising that I was brought back twice more for the event, for the recruiting power is strong.  My role now: guitar player, even though I have never played publicly before.  Nerves a-jangle, but that’s growth, is it not?  Doing something beyond one’s comfort zone?

But that is small in comparison to what comes, even if fleetingly, at such times.  For me, two personal insights were gained this round.  One: that Jesus’s angry march through the temple, upturning the money-changers’ tables, was more about what is happening internally to the individual than about what happened thousands of years ago in a long vanished temple.  We, I understood, are each the temple; and the money-changers, the noise going inside of us, the concerns over money and other worldly things, marring the intent of the temple, which is to find union and peace with God.  The anger is not outrage, but rather the vigor necessary to clear the temple, for the rumblings, the draw, of the market are hard to ignore.  Push them aside!  See (and feel) with clarity!

Two, and this I have had before, but need to experience regularly: that nothing that happens here, in our reality, has any lasting importance; that there is a greater reality that is with us always, regardless, and within it is everlasting peace – not the peace of the old and dying, but brilliant peace alive with meaning.  It is so much more than anything we can have here.  And it is such a hard concept to fully integrate, for the money changers are always ready to fill our ears again.

Oddly, Greg Bear’s book Darwin’s Children, written about in the last blog, came to much the same conclusion when writing about the god that had come to Kaye, one of the novel’s protagonists.   Her god was peace; her god was always present, apart from the tumult; her god was non-judgmental, loving and accepting in the eternity of the Now where it exists. 

It was, for me, a surprising and deep conclusion for a sci-fi book, but I believe that there is one flaw in Kaye’s - and Bear’s – equivalence of Kaye’s ‘god’ to the big picture God. 

We find this at the end, in the author's note.   As Bear wraps things up on the flow of evolution and the role of viruses in it, he tells us that he cannot see a greater controlling intelligence behind the viruses or behind life in general.  Neither does he see nihilism, a world run only by blind chance.  Rather, he feels that there is a God (big ‘G’ for all of us), a power that runs through all of nature and its creatures uniting all in the sacred movement of life, but one that also does not interfere or direct the flow.  This God operates on the principle of divine union coupled with absolute freedom.  That is, this God makes no moral judgement whatsoever, nor does it have a particular end-point in mind; rather, it is simply the force that unifies and embraces all in love.

A far cry from Catholic religion, which holds the stick of Sin over one’s head just as it dangles the carrot of redemption and paradise, but we are not called to specific sin here.  I believe Bear is ultimately right – that all is embraced with love and all are free – except for one important caveat: there IS a type of sin we all carry, and it takes away both the love and the freedom given to us by God.  It is the cacophony – the song - of the money-changers.  It is this song that separates us from the Divine.  To participate in life consciously, not as reactive animals or busy little humans, we must block our ears to this song, with all its concerns for wealth, health and status.  This is the only way we can become ultimately free.  Freedom, as Bear said, is indeed God’s point, but we can never be free if we are controlled by the petty concerns of the social, or the concerns of the body.  To free ourselves from these is to become free.       

It is here where sin, morality, freedom and God meet, and it is not as simple as Bear would have it.  It is true that we are born free and desired by God to be free, but to be free, we must want for nothing.  To want for nothing means there is no reason to exploit for gain.  Without the desire to exploit, we do not sin.  It is here where human emotions create a sense of judgement in God, one that Bear does not like, but he misses the connections.  Morality points us towards detachment and away from exploitation, the two being intimately linked.  “Sin” is the sign that we are still attached and not free.  Once we are free, we become absolutely moral, without a need for a particular moral code.  But without the basic knowledge of this God of eternal love and peace, we remain corrupt.  By this I do not mean “bad,” as a parent might call a child, but lost, rambling, confused, and desperate.

​What direction God may or may not have given to evolution is, then, beside the point, for we are already at childhood’s end; we already have the tools to ultimate liberation and self-realization.  But a deep and abiding revelation is needed first, and we need a spark to light the fire of this revelation.  This is what religion is for, no more or less, and religion speaks to us in simple human-social terms of sin and forgiveness.  Once we step off the crazy train of this closed reality – or what the Buddhists would call the wheel of desire – we are good to go.  Whether that leads us then to star travel or hunkering down in caves, only God knows and only humans care.  FK  
   
                                        

I am about two third’s the way through a fascinating and creepy sci-fi thriller, Darwin’s Children, by Greg Bear, concerning the action of viruses and how they affect us.  This is not only about disease, but about evolution, as the title suggests, and not of the mechanical “survival of the fit” kind; rather, it is about how viruses might be a – or even the – greatest factor concerning our evolution.  What is creepy is how viruses might lead us into the future – and it is not simply by random infection causing some to survive and some not, but rather the actual selection of evolutionary direction by the viruses themselves.   

In the story, we are made only tangentially aware of how a certain retro-virus – one that had either become extinct in humans, or had been rendered ineffective – came alive again in the human species.  In a single occurrence, one of our heroes, Mitch –acting as a lowly archaeologist – had dug up a Neanderthal family in a cave in the Alps, unknowingly unleashing an active retro back into the human population.  It did not kill many post-partum humans, however – rather, it worked through the male (sperm) to enter thousands of fetuses, and through the very different chemistry of the womb, became active again, provoking great changes in this fetuses.  Many of these children died in the womb, but others became our Darwin’s Children, modified in such a way as to become nearly another species.  The modification gave different looks, and more importantly, different (and better) powers to these children, who through smell could detect not only emotional states in others, but also (somehow) wordless ideas, which they were able to transmit to each other on demand – and also, to manipulate to some extent thoughts in normal humans.                          

The drama of the book lies in the popular and political reaction to these children, which one can imagine; to make an exciting novel, the author has people rise to the extremes of hysteria and bigotry.  However, what is most fascinating is the description of viral activity in very real (I believe) medical terms.  We discover what science has known in real life for some time – that viruses manipulate their host environment to improve their chances of survival.  It is here where we understand why this book is in the sci-fi section, for what it describes is unbelievable – except that it is fundamentally true.  Viruses have changed us to benefit themselves in a dance of symbiosis that now and then goes over the edge into parasitism.  It is then when viruses kill us, but only then.  Otherwise, they remain benignly active in our systems, entering our DNA to alter it in ways that to us now seem quite normal - making us, that is, the humans that we now are.

That is, until they become threatened by the new sub-species.  They, the viruses themselves, thus kick into gear a latent foot, hand and mouth disease that all of us possess, and are immune to, to kill off the new sub-species.  They do this for survival, for Darwinian purposes, but we the reader are confused.  How can viruses plot together like this?  Who is controlling them, and how much are they controlling us?

We are given a few clues; one: the Neanderthal find was (I am guessing ahead) killed off by this retro-virus, which made US, Homo sapiens-sapiens (modern humans).  The recombined retrovirus is thus poised to do the same to us to form a new sub-species.  But still, what is directing it?  Here we get the other clue: Kaye, mother of Mitch’s changed child, experiences an epiphany that feels to her much like God.  It is all-accepting and loving, bringing her long-sought peace.  We know that Kaye was partly changed by the virus while her daughter was in utero.  Are viruses, then, like God?  More: are viruses like cells, forming together by the billions a super-being that directs evolution?  For as hard as the old viruses try, we know that they will be defeated – perhaps understanding this even before they fight the new, recombined virus.  It is in them to fight for survival, but the new is also a part of them, from them, their child; and so might it also be in them to step aside, to accept the will (which arrived by chance, with Mitch discovering the Neanderthal family) of a greater whole?           

Reading ahead, it seems that retroviruses might also cause de-evolution.  We shall see.  But we are lent to understand that evolution is a tricky thing, and that, to paraphrase the Bible, the small might in the end be stronger than the great.  In any case, whether or not evolution appears random becomes a moot point, for it eventually does lead somewhere, towards greater organization and complexity.  Where did this fundamental law come from?  If viruses are the main engine of change, we have to ask: who made them that way? 

​I am not at the point in the book where Kaye’s “god” is explained.  Perhaps the author will have something sublime to tell us.  But we can take two things from the book that are probably true: that nature works both in a morally neutral way, but also with a design.  Perhaps the virus is our original sin, as Kaye calls it at one point, which brings us hardship and strife.  But it also is bringing us somewhere, to a place that looks promising if we don’t all die off first.  Perhaps that is the other side of the coin – that original sin must lead us to salvation.  In religious terms that would highlight the redemptive qualities of Kaye’s loving god, working through our darkness to bring us back to the light with the most subtle of forces: the lowly, microscopic virus.  FK                
               
                                        

​            In the time that the computer was at the shop – again – Rooson and Roeker apparently have squared off (see “comments” on the last blog): the former claiming one right way to God, with many false prophets (as the Bible tells us); the latter, that we don’t know, or as Roker’s dad put it to the Jehovah Witness, “I don’t know and neither do you.”  This is a tough one for me, who is trying to be Christian but cannot accept that this is the only way.  We have been through this before – how much is the Bible symbol, metaphor or allegory, and how much is it “as we understand it,” meant to mean simply what it says? 

As with all holy texts or stories, there are, and are meant to be, multiple levels of understanding, for how else could they be holy?  How else could they take us from this profane world to one beyond our usual understanding?  However, does one level of understanding negate the other?  In other words, if, say, the Bible says the world (and universe) was created in six days, should we take this as astronomical fact, or only as a vehicle to show that God created all, and in a particular order, which roughly follows the modern evolutionary model?  Does one level of understanding override a simple, superficial level of understanding?

Or, from another perspective, do these holy stories, on the superficial level, only represent the face of the culture for which they were intended?  Or, more, is the atheistic or agnostic view more compatible – that all are the works of ignorance, primitive attempts to explain creation and meaning that have no real validity at any level?   

Personal insight has taught me to negate the last possibility, but the interrelation of Truth and Text is no simple matter.  For instance, the oft-quoted (and oft-hated) laws given to the Jews in Leviticus sanction eating shell-fish, demand that certain foods are cooked in different pots, and on and on.  Jesus defied these laws, but also claimed, “I have not come to refute the law, but to make it whole” (my memory of the quote.  I think I have retained the meaning.)    By which he meant, to make the spirit of the law live, to grow past the particulars once given to a primitive people, to arrive at the greater meaning – about which we have argued for centuries, and still do.  In the case above, we can say the laws were not meant as clearly written for all time, but were intended to help us grow into something far greater down the line. 

I have another example, more subtle and complex, that came to me during a sermon by a visiting priest.  The day’s Gospel was the very controversial one where Jesus told people to turn the other cheek, to return love and peace for hate and war from one’s enemies.  Said the priest of this, “We know that if we became total pacifists that we would be destroyed.  Some experts have said that what was MEANT by the Gospel was that this was an example of God’s love – that he forgave the sin (the slap in the face from us humans) to return with forgiveness and peace – an act of perfect love that humans could not continuously perform.  Thus, it was a reflection of what the perfect being would do (and God, of course, cannot be mortally injured by human acts).  The priest went on: “But we can also take it to mean that we must try to come to this perfection, by gradually enlarging our inner circle until, if all goes right, we come to love the whole world as God does.” 

A good middle way, but ultimately not achievable in this world.  Rather, the Gospel describes God and what direction we should go towards, not what we must do now.  Still, think of great holy people in our own time.  Would we expect the Dali Lama kicking some kid for trying to steal his incense?  Mahatma Gandhi punching out some dude trying to make off with his spinning wheel?  Mother Teresa cold-cocking someone for cracking a dirty joke in her hospital?  Pope Francis slipping a good looking babe a roofy?  No.  These people remain examples of what humans could be if they were more concerned with other’s well-being than their own.  And still the world goes on, even for them – Gandhi himself was assassinated. 

All meaning, in the end, that I don’t believe we can understand a particular holy text without first studying and deeply understanding the whole.  It is not that one phrase is absolutely true, or is wrong, but rather, that it depends on how it fits into the whole.  We should not interpret the trunk or leg of an elephant to be the whole elephant.   All MUST be placed in context.  And in the end, we must study and study more, for the whole means exactly that – and the whole, for most of us, will never fully be grasped. 

​We act, then, like the man struggling with pacifism, to do the best we can at the time.  However, it seems that literalism of holy texts should not be thrown about loosely by those who have not first learned the full extent of the Law.  Nor should such texts be thrown away or mocked by those who are also lacking in fuller knowledge of that whole.  FK                                                    

​Back when I was in catechism class – on Saturday morning when all the Protestant kids were watching TV – the nuns would often tell us: “If you are taken over by tyrants who tell you to renounce your faith on pain of torture and death, resist like the martyrs of old.  For this you will be rewarded in heaven!”  I don’t think any of us showed anything on our faces, but later, we would all agree that, heck, we’d say “sure, we renounce God,” and then go on our merry way.  God would know, wouldn’t he?
            For my wife, who was Bible Belt Protestant and went to Sunday school while the grown-ups went to church (way better), the teachers were much more explicit.  “If the communists take over, they will burn the Bible.  Never forget your Bible (were they not to become martyrs?  That I don’t know), for that is the word of God.”  They then had every kid memorize a portion of the Bible, so that, if that awful day came, they could meet secretly and piece the whole of it together.  Of course, many would likely become martyrs as the cells were broken up.  I’m sure the kids thought the same – renounce the Word to their faces, but still keep it in your heart.  God would know.
            I am reading the End Times series on and off, which is mostly action and pulp writing (guilty pleasure) but also sprinkled with sermons and Bible phrases, mostly from the Book of Revelations about the end of the old world and the second coming of Christ.   Here, we have a world like our own in our own time, except that the prophesies of doom – oceans turning to blood, deadly horsemen and so on – are actually showing up.  In one of the latter books, people are forced to take the Mark of the Beast – of Satan – or be killed, sometimes gruesomely.  But if they do take the Mark, they are forever forsaken in Hell.  No easy outs this, and it brought me to think – yeah, if I saw the oceans turn to blood and supernatural creatures killing people, and one guy taking over the world, sure, I would probably go the martyr route.  The reason is obvious, because what would be happening would be obvious – the end of the world was coming, and it was real just like the Bible said, and what the hey, I’ll be dead soon anyway, so heaven, here I come. 
          Yet, what if it happened more like what we were told as kids?  What if it was Russia or China that took us over, and demanded our renunciation of faith?  As an adult, would I put myself up for torture, and maybe my entire family as well (as they do in North Korea), to prove my faith? Now I understand what we were being told as kids – for the deeply religious (of most faiths), the world is a temporary thing, and if anything, a mere trial of deeds and thoughts.  Surely if I truly believed, wouldn’t I put up with a trifling few days or months or even years of torture (and family too) for eternal paradise?   One would have to say yes.  Me, I’m not so sure.
           And worse: if I really believed in Christianity as a whole, wouldn’t I wish to convert all those I cared for to the faith?  For without Jesus – or at least, without a deep and true faith – there would be hell awaiting them, or at least (again of other faiths) eternal rebirths into hardships and misery or something like it.  Wouldn’t I, then, try to save those around me?
But I won’t.  As an American, I feel that each has his own path which is his own responsibility.  Just as important, I don’t want to be a pain in the ass, a wet blanket on every social affair, as the proselytizers often are.  I would lose friends, be shunned.  I would be mocked and laughed at – just as the Bible says will happen to those of true belief.  This is a martyrdom of a lesser kind, but not a hypothetical.  Just as a child, I prefer to have my own thoughts and talk about football (or – shudder – politics) or some such of much less importance.  No martyrdom for me.
         Doesn’t this point out my lack of faith, and even cowardice? Probably, but I am not alone, and the question is appropriate to all, not only to believers of a religion.  Would you, for instance, really die for your country?  Or how about your family?  Many would say yes, at least to the latter, but do you plan on, or have you, contributed all you can or could to your dying parents?  Did you put in all the time you could to your children?  Did you, or do you, even make an effort to make life good, beyond normal convenience, for your spouse?  Never mind death.
          Hoo boy, I know, guilt city - but that is not the point.  Rather, it is to underscore the depth of, or lack of, our belief in anything beyond our own comfort and survival.  Put in a more universal way, do you value – truly value, more than yourself and survival – anything?  Are we not usually just human animals, run by the same primitive impulses, no higher, no greater? 
         This is why we love the story of heroes, of people who go beyond these instincts.  This is why we attach ourselves to such heroes, but by how much?  We live as idealists, thinking ourselves greater than just our impulsive selves, but are we, really?  Thus the tests of faith, thus the suffering, thus all those things that must be in place to make the hero in this world.  It seems that in this, religion has it right, and it is not just a cliché: to become heroes, to become more than our animal selves, we need testing, sometimes to the extreme.   As with any tales of the heroic, suffering might really be necessary; it might really be essential to make of us more than what we normally are, whether for eternal salvation, or just to prove to ourselves that we are truly more, that we are truly human.  FK  

The big thing now is "fake news," given popularity through regular news channels to debunk impostures - but now extending, rightly or wrongly, to all news.  But there is something in media just as disturbing, at least to me - that is, the eliciting of emotions through advertisements. It has been with us since as long as I can remember, but this Christmas season it really hit me - how does this manipulation affect the experience of legitimate emotions?

Not that some of these emotion-tugging adds are fake.  There's the one for the children's hospital showing cute kids with shaved heads or without limbs or outfitted with body castes.  There are the ones for wounded vets, with wives sobbing about the costs and care of their severally wounded husband, kids courageously lending a hand.  Not fake and probably good causes, but they come on so many times, again and again, that I do not want to see them.  For one, they are painful; but for another, I am forced to feel for these people over and over again until I do not genuinely feel for them at all.  Then I feel guilty  - I should feel, over and over again.  And then I feel anger at being manipulated. And then guilty at being angry.

But it is not my own discomfort that worries me; rather, it is the regularity of forcing these strong emotions of sympathy.  At some point, we all give up; at some point, most of us start feeling cynical, guilt be damned.  Therein lies the danger - what does this do to our natural sympathies?  Do we become inured, less and less ready to feel?  I think so.  Advertising as a whole, I believe, does this. Recall "A Christmas Story" where Ralphy eagerly decodes L'il Orphan Annie's message only to find "it's just a crummy commercial!"  He is being hardened to manipulation by advertising, literally a financial survival necessity, for if we believed all advertising, we'd have a house full of junk and an empty bank account.  The same goes for emotions - we will not be manipulated, for our own good, but what do we lose?  

I go back to the Indians I lived with in Venezuela and how child-like they seemed.  And yet the adults were not children at all -they fought and sometimes killed, they hunted and gardened and raised children and dealt with disease and invading miners.  But they were never manipulated for profit, or if they were, those were isolated events.  Their holidays were truly holy days, not tainted by commercialization or wise-guy manipulation.  They were not used to this, and it showed in their child-like behavior - child-like to us, but really, normal human behavior for a time before widespread adds and huckster-ism.  

How much faith and wonder have we lost to this necessary cynicism?  While we see in the march to civilization a growing humanism, we also see greater and greater cynicism, until today it seems that many  humanistic feelings - by our politicians, by our professors and even by our holy people - are phony, not really felt but only play-acted so that we might fit within our social norms as good people.  While a barbarian - a non-civilized person - might rape and kill in war, he might also fall to his knees at the suggestion of the presence of a holy spirit.  We might avoid the violence, but remain skeptical about any such intangible thing as "spirit" at all.  

The question, as always, remains - are we evolving, getting better, or failing, falling more and more into a single-minded materialism?  The question goes farther, into theology: which is better, holy acts or being open to the holy?  If one says the latter - which is my preference, for to be holy might induce one to holy acts done from the heart -  than we must become aware of a negative world-wide social movement.  Are we getting better, or only heading faster towards some sort of Armageddon?  Ralphy still ended up enchanted by the snow on Christmas morning. Perhaps our greater emotions still remain active and genuine, but it is getting harder and harder to tell, even within ourselves. FK     

​At last, the computer is fixed.  How many things can happen in nine days?
            Lots.  Politics still swirl, so much so that it is hardly worth catching up, but snow swirled, too, and it is here that I must start, or at least lead up to, for it all began with a failed snowmobile a year ago in the back and beyond by our gas- only and outhouse-equipped cabin in the UP.   It had been February then, too, and the old Polaris had been acting up, but still it had started after much effort, and I could only assume – or hope – that it would start again on the morning we were to leave for civilization that morning.  After an hour and a half of pulling the chord, I gave up hope.  We were than left to hike the 4.5 miles out, and drag the sled with all out stuff part of that distance until a friendly couple on a two-up – a snowmobile designed to carry two- did us the favor of pulling the sled the rest of the way to the parking lot.  It could not have been done otherwise, and we will be forever grateful to that couple. 
            And to their snowmobile.  A two-up, fairly new, electric start, reverse, and a quiet four-stroke engine, it had left a silent but lasting impression on us, and when a dealer called telling us of a good, slightly-used snowmobile with the same qualities, we jumped.  The money would be more than we had wanted to spend, but that year before had given us incentive, and by the end of last week, we finally had our new snowmobile and the time to test it out, up north, up in the UP. 
            When we got there, the snow was coming down, lightly and in blinding bursts, lake-effect snow that would not stop the entire four days there.  It was fresh snow, powder on top of a two-foot base, and it was excellent.  All was excellent – every trail, every day, and the new snowmobile started every time with a simple push of a button.  It was so great that we took to exploring new trails, confident that we would not be stuck in the middle of nowhere waiting in the cold for a lift and an expensive tow, and we were right: everything worked fine, everything went fine, right up until the time I noticed the sign for the Baker Grade and had tapped Vicki’s helmet – she was driving - to take the turn.  I had not seen that sign for two years and had thought it was gone, along with the beginning of the Grade, and I was excited.  I had skied on it just that morning from the other end and had been passed by ten snowmobiles, so I knew the trail should be marked all the way through.  What could go wrong?
            Well, there was the wind.  It was blustering and blowing the powder into drifts, and the Baker Grade – an old railway spur that had been used for logging in 1900 and was now a back-woods road – went several miles through the open Kingston Plains, an area that for some reason resisted regrowth.  I knew that the drifting would partially cover the tracks, but certainly would not totally cover so many.  Besides, we had a great almost-new chariot that would pull us through anything.  Vicki did my bidding and drove on. 
            Within a mile we were on the plains, and sure enough, the snowmobile trails could still be discerned - if one could see, that is, through the great waves of airborne powder and the spray of drifts as they lifted over the hood of the snowmobile right into our faces.  Vicki dove from one drift to another for a while, leaping from one trail to the next as they appeared and disappeared in the drifts, the former drivers apparently as lost as we were quickly becoming, their trails weaving around in and out between themselves like thick, cold strands of spaghetti.  Soon, she gave up and stopped in a drift, her anger at my fatal decision apparent even through her snow-covered visor.   Now I would have to drive, and becoming the hero would only mitigate the damage, for just my decision and the current results were enough to cause at least a few hours of post-traumatic friction.   Which they would do, but first, I had to become the hero.
            The powder was deep, from at least a foot to three feet, and there was a real chance we would be stuck up to our behinds in the whistling plains, but the great new machine seemed to be capable of it, pushing though large drifts like a spoon through whipped cream.  Still, the visor remained covered in snow, forcing me to slip it up and take the cold straight in the face.  Bracing.  Between gusts of snow, I could see the tree line a few miles to what I thought must be north – a quick stop on a knoll to check my compass confirmed this – and all we had to do was make it there, hopefully in some track already laid, and then coast along until we found the well-marked portion of the Grade, which would bring us to the side-trail to the cabin.   But the tracks continued like spaghetti, and we dashed from track to track through the drifts, each time getting a little closer to the tree-line before veering off to the west.  It seemed we were looking at a mirage that was unattainable because it wasn’t really there.   It was not time to panic, and fortunately, I didn’t, because the freezing snow on my face took all the extra effort. 
            Finally, we reached the trees, and after another tense few hundred yards, the Grade appeared again, stalwart and well-tracked, as if it had been that way throughout and we had just been sloppy -  or I alone had made the wrong decision, which I would hear about more than once. 
            A few days later, we easily and smoothly drove ourselves and the gear-sled out to the parking lot, our terrified dog tucked between us on the two-up, only to find that the car and trailer had been drifted in up to the roofs.  The shovel had a long and satisfying work-out, and then we were on our way south, happily listening to the second half of our CD sci-fi saga, a story of war and betrayal and mystery in the future on Mars. 
            War Dogs, by Greg Bear, had our grizzled warriors facing an alien menace from another star system who had positioned themselves on Mars to fight the so-called “Gurus,” another alien race that had come to Earth some years before.  At first, these few-dozen Gurus had brought great technological advances to humankind, which brought great and lasting prosperity to all.  Then they had mentioned, well, ahem, we have a large and hostile enemy after us and they have positioned themselves on Mars, and if you know what’s good for you, you’d better do our fighting for us (with our improved technology).  Most countries on Earth agreed. 
            The hostiles, called “Antags” for “antagonists” (the names for both groups could not be pronounced by humans) were a relentless foe, and at last, our heroes had to take refuge in a large underground cavern on Mars that had been created billions of years before by a crashing moon.  The moon had brought minerals and water, and these had been used by previous human settlers to make a livable, breathable atmosphere for humans in the vast cavern system.  Oddly, much of the cave was covered with a green mildew, and soon they were to find that the mildew brought them into mind-contact with the alien race that had evolved in the cave.  The mind-meld brought the humans out and beyond themselves, into a vast realm of intelligence which spanned the eons.  There was something hugely important in this, and this is what we, the reader, were being led to – and on to, to the next book in the trilogy.
            And this is what brings us to another mind-expansion point: what bridges thought and action, world-view and in-the-world view?  For I – for most of us – have had revelations that have brought us to another world, that have expanded our vision of what it is to exist.  Yet wind, troubles, cold, hunger, and more and more trouble snaps us back.  Always.  Is it this then, this tireless affront to our comfort, that is real, or our interpretation of it, which might change greatly from time to time and species to species?  Here, like our last heroes in the end of book one, we are left out to dry.  What is real?   For the heroes in the book, it looked like post-traumatic stress, this uncertainty, but what of us common warriors of life?  Do we not wedge ourselves between worlds, never certain? For even when we are certain, when we knock the hard wood of our table at work, we are mocked by dreams, by sudden life and slow death, by the eons of time and the limitlessness of space all around us. 
            Aliens all, I think, caught in the swirl of distant improbabilities and immediate sensations, caught by a freezing gale of snow while we search the horizon, the tree-line, for the final certainty that brings all the spaghetti trails of our lives and our history together in the safe grove of final Truth that we know is there but must fight to find - or not, for in this life our compass does not always point true north, not if we succumb either to the cold or the panic.  But even if we pull it together and raise our visors to see clearly, who, which alien race, which point of the compass will bring us to this most-distant, most-spectral tree-line?  
            Perhaps – one never knows - our life story is a trilogy, and it will be all known someday, somewhere, out beyond True North, to where we have been pointed – positioned - all along, both in our cold suffering and in our lofty thoughts and prayers, together, always.