​What I am to write might sound like a Bible lesson – I suppose it is that, too – but for the moment, it is meant to be an astounding piece of sociological evidence for the change in human consciousness. 
 
            I was aware of this change before, and wrote of it by way of Julian Jayne’s popular 1970’s book, The Bicameral Mind.  Among other sources, he regularly used the Bible to determine just how human thought changed over the course of the biblical era.  His was not a spiritual-themed book, however; what he thought he saw was a shift from right-brain thinking – the mythological mind – to left-brain thinking, the logical mind.  In the former, people saw and talked to the gods or to God; in the latter, direct contact with the spiritual world had and has largely disappeared, because we have grown up; that is, because we no longer live in the mind, but rather live from the material world that permeates the logical mind.  This is what Peter Pan is all about – a wistful longing to live in the childish world of magic.  But alas, as we all know in the modern world, we must all grow up.
 
            I contend that this in not necessarily so, and in a good way; but for now, I wish to take a look at the changing of consciousness from a moral perspective.
 
            This idea confronted me after our Bible class studied Mathew, Chapter 19, in the New Testament, where Jesus talks about the relationship between men and women through the laws of divorce.  The set-up is great.  Jesus has gone to the Jordan River where John the Baptist once preached, and he is questioned by the Pharisees, who by this time are determined to have him killed.  They try to trap him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatsoever?”  With this, they wish to have him say that it is not, because the governor, the son of Herod, had illegally forced his brother to divorce his wife so that he could marry her.  When John the Baptist preached against this, he was beheaded.  But to say it was OK would be to contradict the laws given to the Jews by Moses (many more than the basic Ten Commandments).  Ah ha! Caught in a no-win situation!  But Jesus turns the tables on them, quoting from Genesis, which states that when Woman and Man become one flesh, it is the work of God, which no man should rend asunder. 
 
            The Pharisees were not phased, and continued.  What, they asked, about Moses, who said that a man COULD divorce his woman for any number of causes?  But Jesus knows his stuff, replying, ‘It was not so from the beginning, but Moses gave them that law because of the hardness of their (the people of Israel’s) hearts.’
 
            Sounds like Case Closed, but we in class had more to learn; for the hardness of hearts that Jesus spoke of meant far more than just hurting a woman’s feelings, or even leaving her stranded and without property.  It meant killing her so that the husband could have something younger and fresher.  Thus Moses gave them an “out” that was morally preferable to murder, although far from the full intent of God.
 
            Imagine that – average guys killed their older wives so that they could have younger ones, like junking an old car before getting a new one.  These, mind you, were the more civilized people of the region, for unlike the followers of Baal, they did not sacrifice children by the thousands to appease their god.  But they did kill their wives, apparently without conscience.
 
            Think of the changes in Western consciousness and conscience since then.  While fewer (sane people) may talk directly to God, and that is a questionable “may,” far fewer view others as simply a means to an end.  The discussion over divorce contains the essence of what Jesus meant when he said he came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it – for it was never about when and how one could divorce, but about seeing, and treating, others as oneself, with complete empathy.   This was something the people at that time could not understand, and something that most of us affected by Western culture take for granted.   The change has been nothing short of a miracle.
 
            Is Julian Jayne right, however, when he says that the price paid for the modern mind is a loss of contact with what we think of as the divine?  I do not think so, although the quality of contact has changed as radically as our sense of right and wrong.   Rather, instead of seeing wood sprites or flying demons, people now sense the presence of a holy spirit, and sometimes see it as light, or even in the form of Jesus or Mary.  In fact, common people continue to see Jesus as if in the flesh – most famously, Sister Faustina in the 1930’s – and see, and talk to, Mary in abundance.   In fact, in the town of Medjugorje in Bosnia- Herzegovina, six visionaries saw the Virgin in 1981 and continue to see her and talk to her to this day.  Now, thousands who go there are physically healed, and hundreds of thousands spiritually healed every year.  This is only a continuation of Lourdes and Fatima, also in our current era. 
 
            Much more on Medjugorje later, but Jayne was clearly wrong about modern contact with Spirit. It is not that the modern mind cannot see “the gods;” rather, just like consciousness, how that contact is experienced has changed.  In other words, we are not now alone, nor ever have been - for better or for worse, depending on one’s consciousness – and one’s conscience.    
 
 
 
 

Today, a new essay, "Wine Coast," under Essays in the website.  FK

This in reply to the comment by Roeker on the last blog:  

You fool!  Just kidding.  To those who have not read the comment, Roeker criticized this writer for being too cynical towards both the Olympics and the commercials that, in the end, allow us to see them.  Says he, to paraphrase: I like the competition of those trying to be their best, as well as the team spirit in many events; and the commercials?  What of them? Yes, they are trying to sell us something, but so what?  Buy the product or not, and move on!

To which I will reply: on the competition, yes, in most cases it is well contained, especially considering that most are very young.  Many, in fact, are not only more competitive than I was at that age, but also more graceful in both victory and defeat.  To those, I have no problem.  But we are sold on the idea that we should all be number one, or at least in that number of greats, when in reality, most of us can never be anywhere close to number one except, maybe, number one dad or something of that sort.  But for the most part, I agree with Roeker: I see the faults of some athletes, and the hard sell of the games, but these are not major problems.

Commercials are.  It is not simply a matter of selling products, but of uniting products with emotions in an attempt to manipulate us.  We are told that these ads act subliminally, but let's say they don't (of course they do - why else would they spend millions to produce them?).  The important thing is that we become cynical  because of the ads - yes, admit it Roeker, you do too - and in that, become cynical of the emotions  that are being used to sell the product as well, whether we want to or not.  This makes us afraid of expressing these emotions, for fear of appearing fake, and perhaps not taking others seriously when they are trying to be serious.  In sum, it makes us cynical all around.  This is spiritual death. 

However, perhaps Roeker missed the emphasis that I said had been given me by the vision of the holy spirit - that is, that it is ME who is most to blame for whatever cynicism I harbor.  The world is often a dark place - stupid ads are the least of our worries.  If I am to let darkness inside me, it is me who is allowing darkness to win.  That's the point of life, according to many religions - that we are tested by evil, even when that evil is only the banalities of life, those small things which can still cause us to fall into darkness (cynicism).  It is up to us to keep the FAITH, as I noted towards the end of the blog. That is, to keep the holy spirit in mind even when the world about us is engulfed in flames - or stupid ads, or ego-laden athletes. 

So I agree and disagree - disagree, in that ads are potentially more pernicious than Roeker thinks, but I agree that it is primarily up to us to decide what to do with the potentially harmful stuff we are given.  To make the right - the positive - decision is the point here on earth of the spiritual life.  Yes-no?  FK      

​Of course it had to be.  The last blog was to be only about UFO’s and the bearers of its weirdness, and it ended up spiritual-religious.  Again.  It was not my intention, but that’s the way this bus is rolling. 
 
And so it will roll today, because we have just finished another religious retreat, which is something of a brain-washing session.  But there is no equivalency with it to Kim Jong Un’s little paradise, because you can leave at will and you really, really WANT to be brainwashed because you really, really want to get the desired results – a glimpse at ultimate reality.  In comparison, Kim’s reality is the ultimate in superficiality, what we at the retreat are running from.  Whether his ‘People’s Republic” wins gold at the Winter Olympics or not is ultimately unimportant – they, even Kim, are still slaves.
 
But I digress; what happens to one on retreat depends on one’s time in life, but I do believe two things happen to everyone who goes along with the program: one, they get a deeper sense of the spirit they seek; and two, they also get a deeper sense of how far they usually are from that spirit. 
 
I will exhibit my own case, which is the only one I really know, beginning with what happened on the third day, which was the Big Day (as the third day often is in Christianity).    It was in the morning, when a large crystal bowl filled with water (the living water of life – all sorts of symbolism there) was placed towards the front, or altar, of the church and sanctified (made into holy water) by the priest.   This was to be our renewal of baptism, and one was supposed to stand before it and perhaps touch the fingertips to the water to cross oneself, and then let the spirit come in.  For me, as I suppose for most everyone there, it did indeed come in.
 
Here’s the thing, though – it comes in differently, both to the same person at different times, and to different people.  For me this time, it came as subtle deliciousness, like frothed icing on a cake.  Light of touch, I could sense that everything was filled with a luminous meaning; that is, that our reality radiates a deep knowledge that surpasses language, and that it is filled somehow with light itself.  It was not intense – it was not some cosmic mind-blow like I had gotten from some hallucinogens in my youth, but tantalizing and, well, almost tasty, as if to say: “This is only the beginning.  Stick around and you get to eat the cake, too.” 
 
Are you kidding?  Could I get more hooked?  And why, oh, why would I not want to deepen this dependency, for it is exactly what I have wanted from the days I took up anthropology and the study of comparative religions.  I had not really wanted to be a scholar, I understood, but to be a participant.  I was only searching for my own way.   As with UFOs, I had always wanted to believe - and not to just belief, but to live inside the belief. 
 
Ah, but then there is that other side.   With this sense of light – it is usually called the Holy Spirit – also comes a sense of purity, of perfection.  When I got home that night, I opened the garage door and, because of the snow that had piled up against the door and melted, was immediately spattered with dirty water.  I said, “Oh for Christ’s sake!” and then had to laugh – this, a note of blasphemy, was blemish number one from the pure time of the spirit.  Oh well, I thought, it was unintentional, and it seemed clever to reflect on how easy it is to slip back into the common world. 
 
But when I turned on the TV to catch up on the Olympics, this reflection on impurity no longer seemed clever of funny.  Ads blared out, and they were so obviously manipulative, however wholesome some seemed to be.  Look at that healthy and happy family: if you had what they had, maybe you, too, could be healthy and happy and normal!  Other ads virtue-signaled with homosexual couples, people with tats and piercings galore, mixed-race couples, and a girl (?) who could have, maybe, was a guy, but who could tell?  Regardless of what one thinks of these situations (racism, for instance, is against most Christian teachings), the exploitation was obvious and dark.  Buy our product and be hip and non-judgmental! 
 
All adults know of this exploitation in ads, but we usually don’t think of what it does to us.  From a perceived state of near-purity, I could tell easily – it was written on my face, for my mouth had turned into a cynical smirk.  I had been brought back into the real world just like that, and the greatest fault of it was my own.  I had allowed myself to fall back into the same old tired pattern.  I would then go out and spread this cynicism, and on and on it would go.  The world would be luminescent no longer, but smirched and tainted, with only occasional glimpses of beauty flashing out from behind clouds or through snow-covered pines. 
 
The news is worse.  We have to harden ourselves to what we are presented with or we would wither away in horror, but that leaves us with hardened hearts.  We also have to protect ourselves from mindlessly viscous people, or crabby people who might sometimes be ourselves. We live in a dark world, but again, it is primarily ourselves who are responsible, for to live under this cloud, we must first accept this darkness – and we do, out of ignorance and for fear of pain or loss. 
 
            What we need, then, is courage and knowledge.  Both are reached through experience of the true (universal) spirit, through whatever religion, or practice, or random act of grace that will deliver it.   We need the courage to allow ourselves to be hurt or ridiculed because we know the truth, and we need the knowledge that this truth brings, the knowledge that the world, that all of us, are born from light – that all of us are part of one great, beautiful whole; and that our darkness is superficial, banal, a coarse paint job over gold, sent by some negative or evil force to deceive. 
 
            We must find this spirit to truly live, but it comes and goes like smoke in the wind.  And so, we need further courage – to not only find this truth, but to embrace it, even as it fades behind ads and bad news and general nastiness.  This courage is called faith; and that is why it is the noblest of virtues, for it makes us whole even as we live in this world.
 
It is also the most difficult of virtues.  People fast, people abstain from sex and diversion, but faith: even the apostles lost faith after all those miracles, after all that time living with the very embodiment of truth. 
 
            And so something is needed: a renewal, a retreat, a lone pilgrimage, a routine of daily prayers – something that will hold our faith after the holiness has left us - for the world will only change when enough of us keep the faith, when enough of us relive the presence of spirit so that we might bring it home, at last to stay.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​Oh boy, and to think that I think of myself as a fair and objective skeptic.  Last week we watched the UFO documentary film, “Extraordinary: The Stan Romanek Story” (2013) and I thought it worthy enough to buy his latest book on Kindle.  Yeah, sure, a lot of the video looked fake, and the experts that were interviewed to verify his story – you know, those people with PhDs and such - all looked like they were in the second week of an AA recovery program.  Still, I wanted to remain open about it.  OK, I’ll man up – I wanted to believe, like Mulder on the X-Files.  
 
As said, I bought the book, but even at its Amazon site there were warning signs.  For one, I have read a lot of UFO stuff.  If this guy was so connected, why hadn’t I heard of him before?  For two, the Kindle version was too cheap for a big seller, which proved right – his ranking was not much better than MY books.   But people have peddled fake-looking stuff before and have gotten quite a bit of buzz, at least for a while.  Whitley Strieber comes to mind (and yes, I bought three of his back in the day).  So what was so wrong about this guy?
 
Romanek said that he had witnessed his first UFO around 2000, and had thought that maybe he was going insane.  That sounds true.  His girlfriend, later wife, assured him that he wasn’t.  Then, he got visitations, abductions, strange marks on his body, a miraculous cure of his knee (this is the one that got me to buy the book.  I’m still not sure how that was done, as he showed supporting documents.  Faked?), discovered a woman who supposedly had alien children through him (as “Starseed”), and recalled a formula for faster-than-light travel that, we learn, had already been written by a super genius human (which, though, could have been memorized by Romanek).  But, besides some really hokey videos of aliens, what in the end made this guy so unbelievable that not even the ‘Want To Believe’ crowd believed?
 
It was crime.  Scummy crime.  As the documentary ended, it showed a written statement saying that Stan had been indicted for possession of child porn.  It also noted that the FBI has been cited for possibly putting false information on people’s computers, and reminded us that we were all innocent until proven guilty.  After all, what could silence a man faster than a criminal prosecution for such scummy behavior?  This could certainly be a deep state plot.
 
So I bought the book anyway, but wondered at the book’s low rating.  It nagged, so I looked up Stan the Man to find out what had happened in the court case.  The answer came quickly: he had been found guilty, and during the trial had raised speculation that maybe his teen-aged stepson had downloaded the foul pictures.  Bad guy.  I wished that I had not paid a penny – never mind the seven bucks – for his crummy book.  Yick.
 
Later, I mentioned the sordid story to my son, who is a strong skeptic of the government.   He shrugged.  What better way to ruin a man’s reputation and his credibility, than to plant child porn on his computer?  And more: so what if the guy is a sexual creep?  His story could still be true.  Cops get information from low-lifes all the time.  They double-check, of course, but still, that is often the best or only way available to them to solve a crime.  It often works.
 
They double-check, but it often works.  Trust (a little) but verify.  As usual, my son had brought a deeper issue to the table: how important is a man’s reputation or character regarding the validity of his information?  With UFO’s, most of the best unsolved examples come from cops and Airforce officers who do not have histories of criminal activity or addictions.   Yet they are still not believed because of the nature of what they report.   But we usually believe a guy talking about more ordinary stuff if he has a good reputation.   We will also believe the guy talking about the same stuff who has a bad reputation, as long as it seems to corroborate other evidence, even if it is about a criminal case.   
 
So, in the long run, whether we believe someone or not is as much about the type of information we are receiving as it is about character.  If the information concerns something that is ultimately verifiable, we can believe anyone, given certain circumstances; and if it is about something intangible or unprovable, we will not only flatly not accept the word of a creep, but will often only lightly consider the word of someone who is otherwise dependable.
 
Let’s look at a few: first, Martin Luther King.  Because he was considered a social troublemaker, J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, did something creepy and possibly illegal – he wire-tapped him.  In so doing, he found that King liked to be entertained by prostitutes.  But they don’t advertise that on MLK day, because what he is famous for was overall right and his courage indisputable.  He was, by ordinary moral standards, worse than the average married guy.  But he fought bravely for a righteous cause, and so was believed, and now is secularly canonized, if that is possible.
 
Maybe he would have been ruined by that info at the time, but under John Kennedy, the information was suppressed.  JFK is another big-league sinner who is idolized.  It was not known at the time by the American people, but JFK was not only a serial adulterer, but a masher who would make Harvey Weinstein blush.  Posthumously, he has been accused of actual rape (but not proven.  This is he said/she said evidence only).  But all that doesn’t matter today.  Presidents DO things, and the results of his presidency, along with his unquestionable bravery in WW11, were genuine and verifiable.  A creep in many ways, yes, but the actual physical results of his presidency (along with a manufactured glamor) are what now defines him.
 
How about Jim Baker, or more spectacularly, that guy who was the head of a mega-church in Colorado?  Of the latter, he was a fundamentalist with a wife and five kids who especially ranted against the evils of homosexuality.  He was exposed by a male lover as a bisexual who was into orgies and crystal meth.  This preacher’s message of (immaterial) spirituality did not matter.  He was a creep, a hypocrite, and all of his fruits were poisoned.  What he was to deliver was spiritual, and that depended deeply on his own integrity – on his own spirit. 
 
And how about Jesus Christ?  Imagine that you are known, or proclaim yourself to be, the direct, one and only Son of God?  Now, how perfect do you have to be?  You raise the dead, cure the sick, make the blind see, and walk on water, but that is not enough.   Because your ultimate mission is spiritual – your kingdom is not of this earth – you have to be absolutely perfect.  To the Pharisees, he was not – he ate with gentiles, allowed prostitutes to touch him, and cured (“worked’) on the Sabbath.  He was highly imperfect to the Jews of his day.  Despite the miracles, they did not believe because the bar was so high.  And yet…
 
And yet we know that his imperfection was his perfection – that he was teaching that the external law was only for the development of the internal law, the law of true morality – the law proclaimed in The Sermon on the Mount.
 
So, what could Jesus possibly have to do with Stan Romanek and his UFO’s?  Like Jesus, Stan spoke of things that cannot, will not, be accepted by society at large.  It, the whole UFO phenomena, is like Jesus’s story in that unexplainable things happen, but when an explanation is given, it cannot be believed because it is just too weird, too far-out.  And when the messenger is so badly flawed, as with Stan, it is almost a relief – we are allowed to dodge the bullet of the weirdness of our existence another day.
 
            The big difference, though, is that, unlike UFOs, we will not be able to dodge death and its meaning.  It is coming.  Someday we will have to face up to that impossible weirdness, crazier even than UFOs.  It’s then that we might consider ourselves lucky that a man of perfect moral righteousness, and who was also a miracle worker, has given us hope through his life - through his character - for what is impossible but also absolutely certain.   
 
           
 

​To begin this, I must admit to something shameful.   No, it has nothing to do with stealing that candy bar when I was eight, or with sex, although I suppose I could dwell on that as well (I won’t).  No; it is that I am a war-watcher.   Like everything, this atrocious habit had a beginning, and for me, it began with the first Iraq war under the supervision of Bush #I. 
 
Whether he likes it or not, I will drag one of my brothers into it (if he ever reads this blog he will be surprised!).  We were both well-prepped by the media for it, as we had seen the threats and the fist shaking first, and then the “Mother of All Wars” battle cry from Saddam, and then the self-burning of the oil fields.   And then…Scud Stud!  For the first time, we were able to see war in almost-live action, as tiny cameras on scud missiles showed us just how cool technology was.  At the time, the PC was entering our homes at an ever-increasing rate, but the internet was then in its infancy, and we didn’t have all those marvelous websites to cure our need for entertainment.  Besides, what are words and stupid pictures compared to bombs?  Technology usually is boring, but not when it is tipped with a camera and high explosives. 
 
So when we started seeing those missiles actually enter through the windows of buildings, we were enthralled.  We got on the phone and talked for hours as we watched the bombs go off.  It was the coolest thing since, I don’t know, the landing on the moon.  Maybe, perversely, even better. 
 
It didn’t stop with that, either.  Ten years later, we were on the phone right after the first jet flew into one of the Trade towers in NYC.  We were actually on the phone – if I remember correctly – as the second one slammed into another tower, that moment when we all understood that this was no accident.  We were at war – again.  And it was thrilling.  
 
We did not see bloody limbs in Iraq, but we did hear the thump of bodies as they hit the pavement in NYC.  Those things are not nice, but the cameras focused on the massive destruction, on buildings collapsing and dust rising – and on the dangers for other, unknown people as well.  Little gore, no real risk to us, and lots of excitement and noise.  I have to admit, these events put any Super Bowl to shame. 
 
And in between, from war to war?  The same old.  Worry; disappointment; minor pleasures, and boredom. 
 
Boredom.  Imagine that.  In Peter Kreeft’s revelatory book Jesus Shock, he confronts boredom straight on, naming war, as well as promiscuous sex and other vices, as our pallid and fleeting antidotes to boredom.  Yes, the book is about the shock of God on Earth, but one doesn’t have to believe in Jesus to get the message.  Here we are in this marvelous contradiction of existence, both animal and angel, both limited and infinite, and we are bored.  We are bored because we are waiting for fulfillment, the where and how of which we do not know.  Those many who are more thoughtful seek this fulfillment in the right direction – towards some uplifting sight, some high mountain, some depth of desert filled with silence and night stars, but these, too, are fleeting.  
 
Kreeft reminds us that we have had the where and how all along.  He quotes Annie Dillard (from An Expedition to the Pole): “Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?...Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of Power we so blandly invoke?...The churches are children playing on the floor with chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hat and velvet hats to church; we should be wearing crash helmets … For the sleeping god may wake some day [and] draw us out to where we can never return.”  
 
Jesus, as usual is right: “We know not what we do.”  We know not what we do because it is our essential nature to not know, just as it is in our essential nature to know.  We are a paradox, just like the universe.  Just like the mad scientist in Kurt Vonnegut’s book, we mix up a batch of water that could turn the whole world into ice – “Ice Nine” – just for the hell of it, but also because we need to grasp it, to control it, to know it all.  And, oops, down the faucet it goes.  In boredom we play as gods with life, as only gods should do, because that is almost our calling – not to become gods, but to be with God.  It is only then when we will no longer be bored; only then when we will no longer play with Scuds and mindlessly tinker with dangerous chemistry sets.
 
What we seek is not only hidden right before us as I write, but as Annie Dillard says, is explicitly portrayed to millions at church every day or week.  This is a different kind of chemistry set, but capable of making an explosive more powerful than TNT.  We play with it at church because we enter bored and leave relieved of boredom – for the moment.  But it is there.  For Catholics, the power is stupendously, even outrageously conjured in the bread and wine that actually, really becomes the body and blood of the Christ – and then we eat it, and are part of it almost unknowingly, for we do not understand the power. 
 
But Annie is right – it, the power that humans evoke in their mysteries of the spirit,  might explode at any time, and will forever change those in its blast radius, striking at our hearts and raising our souls, each and every one there, like a precision Scud missile.  It is scary, it is terrifying, but it is what we want; and it sure as hell beats cleaning up the streets of NYC for years and years as we await the next big, fake expression of the gods in the next explosion, in the next war.