​ 
Jerusalem is not a beautiful place.  It is odd, true: not a city all at once, but one scattered from one hilltop to the next, as if each were a little kingdom.  But kingdom of what?  It is semi-arid sheep country, or so it seemed to me, built in the hills not for its fertility or beauty but for its centrality to the Promised Land, and the ability to defend itself from countless marauders.  Where is this Fertile Crescent so proclaimed in all our history classes since grade four?
 
It is found “down” from Jerusalem, as they say, as most of Israel is down in elevation from Jerusalem, first in its lush, semi-tropical coast, second in the temperate area around the Sea of Galilee, and third, in the river-fed belt of fertility of the upper Jordan valley. 
 
And then there is the rest down below.
 
Down the Jordan, nature becomes hostile.  The desiccation starts not too far south of Galilee, but really kicks into gear at Jericho, the oldest continuously occupied city in the world (10,000 years.  Compare that to Milwaukee).  Below that is only bad goat country if there is no irrigation, and below that is much worse: the dead zone of the Dead Sea.  Here starts the Wilderness of John the Baptist, of Jesus’s forty days’ fast, that land of locusts and sparse honey where the prophets went to find God in His purest form, or rather where they sought God after their own self-purification far from the distractions of the world.  There, the tourist can now go to the barren hills of rock to view the brine-choked lake that shines like an eerie blue eye in calm, and reeks brackish gray in storm, standing out against the desolation of the desert as one crying out in the wilderness. 
 
It was there that a group of Jewish purists called the Essenes– fanatics to many – chose to settle some 150 years or so before Christ, there in the dry hills overlooking the Dead Sea, not to flourish as the Mormons did, but to drift away into God’s arms through the strict righteousness of their laws.  They built aqueducts to fill cisterns to quench their thirst and to provide water for ritual baths of purification during the long dry months.  They lived in a series of caves, their numbers replenished from the outside, as they had little or no sexual intercourse, like the Christian monks who centuries later would subconsciously follow their rules, rules formed to prepare for the Messiah and the end of the time of darkness.  Most of the time the Essenes prayed, and read scripture.  And they wrote. 
 
We know of them only because they wrote; they wrote extensively during the last few years of their existence, their lifestyle and many of their lives ended by the Romans in 68 AD.  They wrote because they had prophets who knew their time was soon to end, as was Israel’s shortly after with the Jewish rebellion against the Romans that ended tragically at Masada n 70 AD, where at least a million Jews were slaughtered and the others scattered across the earth, not to reform again until 2,000 years later.  They copied sacred scripture to preserve them for the end times, then sealed them in jars in the dry cliffs where they lived.  And this is where they sat until a shepherd discovered them by accident in 1947, the same year Israel became a nation.  Their discovery shocked the scholarly world.   In them they found proof of the authenticity of the Old Testament, and proof of the old prophesies, and proof of the existence of the Essenes themselves, the monkish Jews who taught John the Baptist, a man who then went on his way to tie the sandals of his master, Jesus of Nazareth, who then went on to change the world.
 
We saw their living site above the Dead Sea at Qumran first, and then traveled to Jerusalem to view the recovered scrolls at the Shrine of the Book, a museum dedicated solely to the Essenes and their works.  There we read of their history and their purpose and saw the artifacts of their living on display along with pictures of the Qumran site.  Then, as we reached the back of the museum, we were presented with the most precious works of all - the scrolls themselves.  We found little shreds of them behind glass here and there before we reached a raised rotunda where a large section of the scrolls was wound around a cylinder some eight feet in diameter.   Here one can walk around and read what is written if one reads Hebrew, or marvel at their antiquity if one does not. 
 
I do not read Hebrew, so I ended up gawking along with the rest of our group.  I noticed how the calligraphy was still sharp amid the creases in the paper and the discoloration, but nothing more until an elderly lady in our group, “B,” gave me a little nudge.  “Do you see the faces in the writing?”  “Why, no,” I said, looking hard and then squinting.  “Where?”  “There,” she said, indicating nothing more than the totality of the scrolls.  I tried again hard, and then just relaxed and looked again.  In that moment I saw them.  Dozens if not hundreds of them buried somehow within the etching of Hebraic writing.  I pointed this out to another member of our group by my side and she could not see them.  “What,” she said almost shrugging, “do you have to squint?”
 
No, one did not have to squint, as if trying to make out a giraffe in a cloud.  The faces were there in the letters as sharp as high-resolution photography.  In fact, I tried to reason that they were photos, somehow put in by those who made these copies for the display.  Thing is, I found out later that these were originals.  The faces in their sharpness were as real as real could be, black and white pictures of narrow-faced men in profile or in frontals, usually pictured from the upper torso through the entire face.  They could only be seen in the areas that had creases or discoloration, which comprised about a third of the total, the faces somehow, impossibly formed in the calligraphy itself.  I tried to see how this could be, but could not: they were part of the letters but not, as if the letters themselves were only framing the portraits.   I tried to imagine them as kitchen “Jesus art,” where jelly stains on a linoleum floor are claimed to be profiles of Jesus or Mary or some saint.  These were not.  They had eyes, mouths, lips and chins and, with some, facial hair in exact, undeniable detail.
 
I give the credit first to the Essenes for somehow making this possible, or to God or the Holy Spirit – who am I to say? – but also to B, who was “saved” at a retreat a few years ago and has since become an extremely devout Catholic.  Since then, I have found that I often anticipate the sermon that the parish priest will give that weekend, only to find that B has told the same to the priest beforehand.  I believe she somehow exudes prophecy that some of us pick up now and then.  I think she knows it, at least sometimes.  Said she after the other one could not see the faces, “Makes you feel special, doesn’t it?”
 
Yes it does.  But it has not made me any richer or better in any way that I can tell.  In fact, some will read this and think I’m deluded or lying.   It is not something that I would pray for.  The faces have no other purpose for me, I believe, than to underscore what I already know but often – too often – forget: that the world we live in is not the world we normally think we live in.  It is full of strange stuff that we cannot explain.  It is full of strange stuff that seems to have no importance but to remind us that life is an infinite novelty beyond our greatest thoughts and abilities; that something else is in charge, our lives granted us as a grace, not as a natural right; that we are in the hands of a powerful mystery that can at times be touched lightly by those whose devotion grants them some privilege that might bring us closer to a far greater truth than we know.   
 
What I do know is that something strange happened with those scrolls.  Born from the age of Christ, they came out of the same desert where Jesus contemplated and was tempted, where his fast of forty days and nights lead to three years of teaching that influenced the world beyond the wildest of odds.  My wonder at the scrolls is tiny in comparison, but both lead us to humility and awe; both lead us to give thanks for the miracle of our present and to pray for our future in a vastness that defies explanation, but frames us like the letters on a scroll. 
 
 
 

 
 
   

​ 
I am back, and am filled with opinions that have not quite jelled.  It was much as I had thought – often crowded and too civilized – but also not: some beautiful areas that still ring with deep meaning, at least for me, and some real and obvious danger.  I am not quite ready to dish, though, as said, and am suffering serious jet lag.  Perhaps the puzzle will be solved by Tuesday or the end of the week.  But there are a few things I will briefly mention, in whose depth I will delve into in a later essay.  These concern sin and grace and belief, and the power, or lack of it, of place.
 
For the first, sin and grace and belief:

It was on my third day that I was seized with an absolute disgust with all things religious.  I had had it.  I wanted to leave this group and be free.  What sort of madness was this, to tie myself to such a wheel of guilt when I could have near total freedom of action?  

Slowly, however, the reality of the situation cleared again.  For the first, belief in things Christian is not madness.  If we consider the world as we really should understand it, not as we normally think we understand it, nearly all things are possible.  This in itself does not prove death and resurrection by any means, but it makes it clear that it is as possible as anything else.  In a world that came from nowhere, and in which we are leaving to another nowhere, miracles and heaven and all such things are all quite possible.  How they came to seem probable again will be delved into later.
 
As for guilt, that’s the way it is once a certain sense of our situation becomes clear.  When one is tapped with even a sliver of grace – something that just is – one sees that daily life is coarse; one – we – see clearly that we have another image within us.  Sin, then, becomes not just those naughty things mentioned by priests and other destroyers of fun, but rather much of how we see and react to everyday life.  We virtually live in sin, which does not mean that we are butchering babies or such, but that we are blind to a greater, perfect reality that runs through all ordinary perception and beyond.  Guilt is our coarse way of acknowledging our coarseness; correction of our perception is the correct thing to do.  Guilt goads us to this correction because it is uncomfortable.
 
Again, more on that, and the circumstances for its consideration, later.  Now, the power of place:
 
When one walks into the tomb from which Jesus purportedly rose from the dead, one should be impressed.  I can say that some, such as myself, feel only somewhat impressed.  To build a cathedral around a cave so that that one can stand in line behind a gazillion people to see it reminds me of the Joni Mitchel lines, “They took all the trees/ And put them in a tree museum/ And they charged all the people/A dollar and a half just to see ‘em.” And yet, trees are impressive, museum or no.  They are just more impressive in their natural environment, just as the tomb would be better as it was, open to the sky by the side of the rock of Golgotha. 
 
And yet, there is something impressive about the ‘museum,’ and it feeds into the first of this little blog: belief.  It is impressive, isn’t it, that they built a cathedral around the tomb of a poor man from a small town in a small, conquered country?  Yes, very impressive.  It speaks of something of enormous power.
 
And so we go from belief through place to belief here in a nutshell, which are the first thoughts from this hard-felt little pilgrimage/tour of ours.  Again, and once more: more time is needed to digest it all, exactly because so much was in this museum that cannot really be put into a museum. 
 
Later, then, for more.  It’s good to be back. 
 
 
 
             
 

   

​…….
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze as pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel Shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?  (From “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats)
 
It is hard to believe now that I once did not understand this poem, which speaks to the poem itself.  At one time not long ago, any literate man would know what this is about with ease: the coming of the Antichrist as told in John’s Revelation, the last section of the New Testament.  But as other parts of the poem (not shone) state, a change has happened; “the centre (as he says) cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”  The new thing to come is a “rough beast,” one who does not know his own past and holds only scorn for it and his culture, rejecting “twenty centuries of stony sleep.”  This is me, and much more so some years ago, who did not know enough of his own past to grasp the meaning of the poem; this is us, our culture, the flip-side of the last, one of rejection, of “newness,” of rough, uncultured stimulation slouching towards Bethlehem – that is, moving like a dangerous beast towards a birth in the same village as Jesus.  It is to take his place.  It will not be a kind and just ruler, to say the least. 
 
I am about to slouch towards Bethlehem myself, and in fact should be there in just a few days.  Yeats wrote his poem nearly a century ago; we are now only a decade or some from a full 2,000 years since the death of Christ, and more than that since his birth.  It is time that I slouch, as millions more do every year, towards the center of modern civilization, where the uniting of the world under one global umbrella – almost a reality now with technology - began.  And oddly – no, spookily and prophetically – the fruition of that initial impetus is happening just as that center crumbles, not only in the chaos of war but in the massive collective shrug of the once-Christian nations who carried it through nearly to its completion. 
 
I have shrugged, too, and my rebirth into The Faith is only a pale reflection of what it once meant to believe.  Once, it was a sign of being fully human, as reverence for The Law was to the Jews, and those who knew the New Book – who knew the words of Jesus – stood out like beacons to the faithful even among the roughest men.  Now, I have grasped onto what seems to be a weak reed, or rather, I am the weak reed who can barely grasp, an anachronism of faith to most and even, sometimes, to myself.  I should go to Bethlehem in awe and reverence and even tears, but expect tourists and the flash of IPhone lights and cargo shorts and tee shirts.  I will not be much different.  From the modern view, we once had “twenty centuries of stony sleep,” but it was not sleep at all, but rather the fruits of the first grace from which we have now fallen.  We now think we are too smart for it, even as the darkness of addiction and suicide and fatherless children – or no children at all – rises over us like a cloud.  Or like the shadow of a beast standing before the sun, on its way to Bethlehem.   
 
Yes, I am certainly in that number, just too smart for the miracle which should seem at least likely if not inevitable.  All things began in a mystery we call God, so beyond our ‘smartness’ that anything – anything at all – should seem possible.  Certainly, we could or even should expect a flame to appear full face to us from that mystery, and it is more likely than not that the ‘father’ of his creation should seek to improve things through this flame.  This one flame from Bethlehem once seemed likely to a good portion of the world, too, less than 200 years ago, when all others from other cultures also had their flames, however dim or bright.  But now I, along with so many others, wrestle with the doubt that has been put into the world like a disease; like a cancer; or like a Beast.
 
That is the Beast, of course.  This doubt is the beast that leads us to the darkness of the spiritually blind.  That is our Antichrist.  It has gone beyond smartness, because we are no longer all that smart, our greater troubles being solved by an elite of some sort or another, from techno-geeks to government planners.  It has brought us to this spiritual blindness so that it is impossible to see the truth, let alone refine it.  We are like the blind men touching the elephant, but much worse – we have decided, or been made, to not believe in the elephant at all.   Just like that.  We have become our new master, rough, unrefined beasts calling the stunning efforts of the last 2,000 years a slumber, when it is us who have our eyes closed as if in sleep.  The beast has already arrived in Bethlehem, and I fear it is he who I will see once there rather than the first, the flame from God.  I fear I will only see its shadow, because that is the shade under which I have long been accustomed to stand.
 
Or not.  Long-faced Yeats may have forgotten that something else is in Revelation as well: The Beast is not the second coming, but rather its sign.  But he did know that already it existed, as the beast slouching towards Bethlehem, the birds reeling above him winged scavengers picking from the carcasses left in his wake.  He is not the second coming of Revelation, then, but Satan coming forth as the Antichrist.  Thus it has been said: Satan shall briefly reign and then be struck down, opening one thousand years of peace before the true Second Coming and Judgement Day.  Here our doubt, our disbelief, will reach its climax, and then vanish before another sign yet to come, of which we do not know.   But this we do know: times will become worse, as Yeats says; but then infinitely better.  Hope is in those who have faith.  The Beast is not the end, but the crumbling bridge to the new.
 
So it is that I crawl, not slouch, towards Bethlehem, rocked by a crumbling world that has lost its center.  It is how it should be, as the pains of human childbirth lead to new life.  Thus she is left, our mother and ourselves, tired and retched but breathing with hope.    
 
So with hope, then, I go to Bethlehem.  In a few weeks I will report back what this one fading pair of eyes has seen.  I will not be able to tell you of the whole elephant, but I hope to speak of something great that I cannot know, but do know exists, something far greater than anything we can make or imagine, ever, even as the Beast whispers false promises atop this fallen world, this last tower over Israel.   
 

   


 
 
 
 

​ 
In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the boy who will become Jimmy Stewart (I mean, George Bailey) hits some little something on the counter every time he enters the drug store and says, “Wish I had a million dollars!”  Every time, whatever that thing he hits is, it does what he wants it to, because he says, “Hot dog!” while the ten-year-old girl who will one day be his wife looks on with loving adoration.  We know George Bailey will never have a million dollars because he is always helping those in need who will one day be worth much more than a million dollars, or, as the Beatles's tune says, “Money can’t buy me love.”  We also know that one million dollars is the minimum of what you need by retirement nowadays if you do not want to be warehoused in the moldy basement of an old folk’s home after Depends no longer are sufficient to do the job. 
 
So, yes, in keeping up with inflation and the demands of modern life, that wish of Jimmy Stewart’s younger double would now be about 25 million, so I must reword it: what would you do if you had 25 million dollars, taxes paid and just waiting to do as you command?
 
I am signing up for Medicare this week, and right off the bat I must go back to the medical thing, based on my repugnance of being dependent on the government (even though I eagerly took a Pell Grant to go to college): first thing, I would tell the Medicare people and anyone who has anything to do with giving me “free” government largess (my apologies to Pell once again) to go back to their Georgetown mansions where they so rightfully belong.  I would pay the doctors out-of-pocket so that they would talk to me in the office, not to a laptop where every procedure has to be given a number so that it can be evaluated by the insurance company d’ jour, or, in plain English, your Insurance Company from Hell.  I know, not exactly something from the average bucket list, so let’s move on. 
 
25 million dollars.  That wouldn’t crack the window let alone open the door to the mansions -that -tech -made in San Francisco or Seattle, but it would suffice just fine for my own purposes.  I would live where I want, which would be far from anything where I could make a living, like the mountain tops of southern Appalachia or the mountain valleys of Idaho; I would buy a great classical guitar, so good that only someone far better than I could tell the difference between its tone and an average 400 dollar Japanese Sigma; I would add an extension to the little coffin in the woods that doubles for a cabin that I now own in the UP; my SUV would not have rusting dents in the back because it did not have a back-up camera, and I would have the perfect camper trailer, not too big, not too small and bear-proof, which would be the reason that I would have an SUV, besides for the trailer for my snowmobile, which would be ever- new without rips to the vinyl seating or anything else imperfect. 
 
I would travel, and how.  I would travel for as long as I wanted to, so that if I went to New Zealand I could stay for a month without worry to make the hellish 24 hour jet flight worth it; I would hit the beer fests in Bavaria and the religious fests in Spain and the fest fests in the Caribbean that are far from the maddening crowds; I would venture into sublime wilderness along the African or South American coasts or into the depths of primordial wilderness with an exclusive guide and a well-set camp, tent or cabin.  I would do what Teddy Roosevelt did and what he could not do because he lacked the technology, and with the same sort of style that had him drinking wine every night while exploring the darkness of the River of Doubt during the day.  I would go to the wine country of California and stay at an airy 500 dollar- a- night hotel/vineyard where I would drink too much every day for a week but with such panache that hangovers would not have the class to be able to show up.   I would see the infinite stars from a mountain top or from the interior of the Kalahari, and would wake up to fire-brewed coffee and something so exotic and tasty that I would search for it everywhere else and never find it. 
 
     Yes, I am afraid that if I had 25 million dollars I would not be the soul of a saint or a biblical prophet.  True, I would not have my field general murdered so that I could continue to have sex with his wife, as David did, but I would not wear sackcloth either; and it would be too much for my pleasure-seeking self to give it all away to the poor so that I could follow Jesus, as the rich man who asked Jesus what he must do to follow God was told to do.  Yes, I probably would fail, too, walking away disappointed with myself before digging into another meal of fine wine and plank salmon.  I may not know myself well, but I think that this much I know.
 
On the other hand; on the other hand, when was it that I had the most memorable times in life, those times that have stuck with me and have probably changed me – and for the better?  As one after another pops into mind, in none of them was I rich, and in many I was dirt poor, and in none was it luxury that made the difference.   Some of those times were when I was twenty years old and hitching through the West, maybe lying on my back in some western Kansas prairie in the middle of nowhere, looking at the sky with no more than $5.00 in my pocket, dirt poor but absolutely free; some of those times were at the Ann Arbor co-ops where I was living with a hundred other poor but motivated students, all of us sure of getting where we wanted to go; and some of them were times with friends, playing guitar and singing around a campfire with cans of cheap beer and old cotton sleeping bags for the rest of the night.
 
Another time was while sitting in the sun on a rock in a stream in the Sierra Madre Mountains of central Mexico, miles and miles from anywhere where anyone knew me or cared; or swinging in a hammock in Indian country, southern Venezuela, smoking a cigarette in the lazy heat of early noon, listening to the monkeys chattering in the trees; or watching the rain fall from a porch in a small cabin in the Vermont mountains, or sitting in the upper branches of a tree while the wind swayed the boughs and rustled the leaves (among other stories from my book Beneath the Turning Stars); or here, where I live now, riding over the hill just before home and seeing the sun balanced on the horizon, somehow singing hallelujahs to all of creation, running like a river right through me.   
 
And more, so many more, with none of them having anything to do with luxury, and many of them having nothing to do with money at all, neither for travel or gear.  Many are sublime moments now forgotten, blended into all the others that are ordinary nothings that bring the greatness of being into focus like a looking glass.  None of them required waiters or champagne, although the greatness may have happened then, but not because of them.  So, while it is true that worry about money is a curse that draws one away from good things, it is not money that gives you the good things. 
 
All this we know to be true but often do not really believe it until we comb through our memories.  It is then that we see.  And yet still we go on believing that that one million dollars, or twenty five million now, will give us what we want even though it will not give us the half of what a seat on a rock in a stream might give us.  It is, rather, times of purpose, and times of communion, and times of deep contemplation that bring us what we really want.  This might be helped by money, but money is more likely to detract from these moments, or take them away entirely; take them away because we have come to believe that what money brings is happiness, and then make ourselves believe it, so much so that it is all we can believe. 
 
It is why Jesus told the rich young man who wanted to follow God to give away all that he had and come with him, because the young man had come to believe that his wealth is what gave him happiness, even as he sought God.  The first cannot be followed by the second, but the second most certainly can be followed by the first: if one finds God, even that little ray of light from a once-closed door now slightly open, it becomes easier and easier to find happiness with or without money.  Given what we are – conscious beings faced with immanent mortality – and what God is – everything and all of eternity – it is a no-brainer that He and/or anything to do with Him - not the 25 million - will give us what we want.  But still we hit the little gadget on the head, and when it pops up green or whatever, we shout “hot dog!”
 
Me too.  I guess if I were George Bailey I would wish for money because it might help me find that greater happiness; but I would also wish that the instant I found myself believing that it was the money itself that would buy my happiness, I would throw it into the river off the Bedford Falls bridge and never look back, not even for an angel.   The rich young man could not; common sense tells me that I should.  And yet I never wish to be so tested. 
 
In the end, though, we fail just as much when we do not show up for the test as when we take it and do not pass.  Give me a million, then, or twenty five million, but only so long as it teaches me to give it away for the wisdom of giving it away.     
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
Decades ago, I was a great fan of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books.  I say fan, but I was more a follower or devotee, convinced that I, too, could leap into the wonderful world of wizardry.   I was about 20 years old then, and although ordinary life did not seem exciting enough, it held out the promise that we could make of it anything – anything at all.  UFO’s, peace and love communes, angels and devils, and, of course, Carlos and his Yaqui (Indian) way of knowledge.  All of these wonders were possible outside the gray flannel world that my teachers and parents were pushing me towards. 
 
Those were the days when I experimented with anything that could deliver me to another, more exiting reality, and the American Indian way of sorcery, as told by the certified anthropologist Castaneda, seemed the coolest and the most reliable.  Castaneda did not hide the fact that there was great danger in the Way of the Warrior, as the name implies.  The spirit world, he found, was full of beings incompatible with the human way of thinking.  They could be summoned and worked with for great “power,” which is what his American Indian teacher Don Juan told him it was all about, but to gain the power was likened to hunting an animal for food – yes, it gave one power, but it did not want to do so.  It could be cajoled or forced into it, and that was the way of the teachings – to gain power without being killed or driven mad. 
 
Fortunately, I never found any power this way, but if we believe Castaneda, he did – and then he went mad.  His publisher and his handlers did not want this to be known, but towards the end of his life it became obvious to those who looked into it.  For one, his books changed.  First, they turned from startling revelations to something more akin to the “Lost” TV series, with lots of additional characters who were involved in a story with no meaningful end.  Then they became downright boring, teaching odd dance steps and yoga postures as the concrete “way of the warrior,” which were about as “warrior” as the Good Ship Lollipop.  It was apparent that Castaneda, in fact, had gradually given up his writing to someone else, until it was not his at all. 
 
I have a few personal vignettes on him that might be interesting.  One, I knew a woman in anthropology who had bought a small bit of land in the Colorado Rockies during the early 70’s hippie movement, when the state was first being “Californi-ized,” along with several of her hippie friends.  Most had since sold their lots, but she had retained hers.  One day while vacationing there, her ‘tween daughter mentioned meeting an odd man in the nearby hills who, after investigating, turned out to be Carlos himself.  I asked the woman what he was like.  “Weird” is all she would say.  She meant that to mean “so weird that it is uncomfortable talking about him.” 
 
Another happened when I was attending the conference of the hippie wing of the American Anthropological Society in Berkeley @ late ‘90’s.  There, a group of people had formed a dance/exercise group supposedly based on Castaneda’s new warrior dances, and they were giving a participation performance (for a fee).  I and the woman I was with walked out after about 15 minutes.  It was nonsense, a Richard Simmons- like rip-off of the early and exciting Castaneda books, a Led Zeppelin acid rock riff made into elevator music.  I was there to tighten my warrior skills, not to tighten my tush. 
 
In the aftermath, I met several people who supposedly knew Castaneda or people who knew Castaneda, and also read the last interview that had been done with him.  Although the warrior world is quite different, from our perspective Carlos had gone around the bend with paranoia.  Shortly after, he died at the age of 70 from causes unknown.  All odd and, again from our perspective, evidence of psychosis.   
 
Or not.  I am now on another spiritual quest, this time with the Catholic version of Christianity, and, from an outside perspective, some of the spiritual actions in the Church are not that much different from the Yaqui way of knowledge.  The ways and means are certainly different – we are not hunting power from reluctant spirits, but begging for its gentler version, grace, from a god that exists to give, but we are still fighting spirits.  Here, there are actual battle lines drawn, positioning the minions of Satan against the angels and saints, the minions of God.  It was this mentality that had the Catholic clergy of the Conquest zealously crush American Indian sorcerers like Don Juan.  I once hated that about Christianity, but now am more ambivalent.  I know very little about the spirit world, but I do know that evil spirits do exist, at least in the mind.  Although many of the priests of old used tactics that now are unacceptable, they very well may have perceived real evil in the spiritual practices of others.  And if nothing else, they perceived it among themselves.
 
This I know because I have perceived this evil myself. 
 
For me, it usually comes as an internal voice, like the sneering of a precocious teenager.  It mocks anything to do with religion.  This happens not only with perfectly normal doubts – for instance, the doubt that Jesus actually was the son of God – but also to fairly benign activities of the Church that require some degree of belief.  Late at night, it sometimes shows itself in greater force, playing on any fears or regrets I may have, in an attempt to keep me from any spiritual attachments whatsoever.  It might also play to my sense of self-importance, insisting that I would be a fool to give any of my will or belief over to scripture or liturgy, or to anyone else’s idea of truth.  It is almost a caricature of evil influence, that little devil on the shoulder telling one to have another piece of cake, but its affects sometimes run deep. 
 
In fact, it would win me over were it not for the counterforce, which is often presented here in these essays.  This is the voice of the angel on the shoulder, which tells me golden truths that are so obviously true when spoken that all doubts pop like soap bubbles.  It tells me – in a way, shows me – that creation is divine and lit with spiritual force.  It tells me that the ultimate creative force is absolute goodness and union.  It tells me that evil is short-sighted ignorance mixed with a desperate fury of will without reason, not worthy of consideration.  And it assures me that, whatever life is, it does not end, not as we think.  There is mystery and surprise there, and, finally, hope that lights the end of the tunnel, however dark it might seem.
 
Perhaps the goodness seems too saccharin, like simple dream candy, but it is not, not when compared with the evil counterforce.  This, in a way, is what makes it so real – that there is a tension behind our being, a battle to be won.  It is never dull, never boring, and it lights all with meaning, even in the dark fear of the night. 
 
In fact, this spiritual struggle is much like Castaneda’s, except that is has meaning far beyond a struggle for simple power.  It is not about winning magical skills to experience the thrill of life, but rather about gaining power over one’s will to alter the foundation of life and the world beyond life.  For the sorcerer Don Juan, living life “impeccably” meant having absolute control over the will to manipulate the spiritual realm, but in the religious quest, gaining control over the will is meant to will oneself to the divine power.  Rather than being about gaining personal power, it is about losing it for the attainment of a far greater power that might give nothing in the ways of earth. 
 
The struggles of the spiritual warrior run parallel, but the goals differ.  With different goals we use different means, and through both, we become very different people.  Religious seekers do not hunt spiritual forces to steal their power, but rather seek to share in a power that only increases for both giver and taker.  In this there is cooperation, not winner-take-all competition.  This creates someone who gives rather than someone who takes.  Because religious seekers are not competing for power in the spiritual world, the tendency in believers is towards less tension rather than more; that is, the closer the seekers get to their goal, the less fear they have because their spiritual target desires and rewards their presence.  This would decrease rather than increase the likelihood of paranoia.  And the thrill the religious seekers seek is knowledge, knowledge that can bring power but only as an afterthought.  It is the kind of power that the Yaqui warrior might not even understand.  It is not about personal glory, the way of the egotist, but rather about losing oneself in the glory of the eternal act of creation, which is union and bliss.  Loving bliss.
 
Both ways bring excitement.  Of the sorcerer’s ways, I have known of them in South America, and eventually this path leads to competition not only with spirits, but with other sorcerers who wish to steal each other’s power.  Of the religious way (as I call it, to include others besides my own), it should and often does lead not only to cooperation, but to insights that exceed those of the sorcerer.  For the sorcerer seeks his own will, and so is confined to what his will can accomplish, but the religious seek the will of God, which can accomplish anything. 
 
Such, anyway, is my experience.  It is not the same with everyone, but I would say that the way beyond self – that is, the self-less way – is the better of the two for both depth and sanity.  As for excitement, both have traits of the Way of the Warrior, but only one makes sense in the end.  The other ends like Lost, with a lot of storm and fury and weirdness that signifies nothing.