When I was very young in the early 1960's, our parents took us to town to see the Memorial parade, which then took up whole streets of still-young WWII and Korean War veterans.  We boys waited anxiously for the grand finally at the local park, where military men shot off M-1 rifles in salute to the fallen.  Our only concern was to beat the other boys to collect the cool spent cartridges, while the soldiers irritably shewed us away.  Later, in full teen punk mode during the late 60's, when anti-war sentiment was reaching a crescendo, we would smirk behind our graying elders as they "stupidly" showed respect, and often tears, as the flag was raised and the guns shot.  

​Decades later, I am finally struck by the enormity of the sacrifice of war - and of the bravery and camaraderie showed by simple civilian solders, people  just like myself.  It is hard for me to believe they did what they did.  Even to think of storming the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima gives me a cold sweat.  For the first wave, death was almost certain.  Still, they did it. Impossible.

My father, the war vet, said that about 15% of his fellow crew members liked war - not for the suffering caused, but for the thrill. The other 85% were scared, scarred, and disgusted.  It was probably because of this that they did not hate their ignorant children who paraded against the Vietnam War.  While we had done it out of an undeserved sense of moral superiority, they understood just how bad war was, and how it should only be initiated after all else fails - and that maybe the US had crossed the line in this case.  

Regardless, few would go back to all-out war once they had experienced it.  Bad things, lots of bad things, happen.  But on finishing the superlative book, Target Tokyo, by James Scott, I found a good reason for war - or, better said, a good side affect for such a horror.

Most of the crews of the 16 bombers that took off from the aircraft carrier Hornet to bomb Tokyo ran out of gas as they approached the coast of China (carriers did not have enough space to allow bombers to land).  Of these, the crew of two of them - of those who survived the crashes - were taken prisoner by the Japanese, where three personnel were executed, and the others languished in prisons for 40 months.  One died of disease, while all the others suffered horribly from starvation and torture.  They hated the Japs, of course, and particularly the guards.  Kept in solitary confinement and slowly going mad, one of them, George Barr (feeling he had little to lose) asked a guard for a Bible. Surprisingly, he got one. From there, somehow the book was passed along to the others, who all read it with the kind of focus one would have when under those circumstances.  Writes Scott:

"The hostility and anger soon vanished.  'We (the crewmen) decided that we had no hatred towards our guards, viscious as they were.  They were ignorant and mean, bu perhaps - they thought - there was some good in them...'

"DeShazer was the most affected.  'One day in my cell I felt the call as clearly as though a voice were speaking to me,' he said, looking back.  '...It was more like a flash of truth.'  He decided there in that awful cell in Nanking that if he survived the war he would return to Japan as a missionary.  He felt the burden lift. 'Hunger, starvation, and a freezing cold prison cell no longer had horrors for me....Even death could hold no threat when I knew that God had saved me...'

On the day of the second Atomic bomb to be dropped on Japan - on Nagasaki on August 9th: "DeShazer awoke that morning in his prison cell in China to hear an inner voice urging him to pray....The voice told him to pray for peace.  DeShazer did, unaware of what had happened on the Japanese homeland.  He prayed that Japanese leaders would welcome peace and that the public would not be demoralized or taken advantage of in postwar Japan. He prayed from 7 AM until 2 PM, when he heard the voice again.  'You don't need to pray anymore,' the voice told him.  'Victory is won.' "    

What is war good for?  As awful as it might sound, it can break us out of our dream, our shell-like daily human world.  It can make us see how petty our hates and fears and arguments really are. It can make us grateful for what we have, and to believe that we can make a better world.  

When I read these words in the book late at night, towards the end, I had the feeling of revelation, as if the truth of God had shot through me.  It is only a memory now, that shell overwhelming me again, but at least I am reminded (once more) that Greatness is out there, that it is more real than real, and that it can overcome anything.  It is too bad that it often takes extreme suffering to realize this, and for this I am grateful to the crew of those bombers and to all of those who died in our wars.  They have made it possible through their own suffering for me to see Greatness without the suffering.  

​May peace be with us this Memorial Day.  FK  
         

Last week I breathlessly binge-watched the last several episodes of the Spanish telenovela, El Hotel de los Secretos (originally, to get my Spanish up to snuff), which had been very good up to this point.  It was a period piece, taking place in the Mexican countryside of 1907-08, just before the dictatorial regime of Porfirio Diaz was tossed out by a long and violent revolution (Pancho Villa was part of it.  He crossed into US territory and robbed a town, and brought in the US army to chase him around the northern Mexican desert for a few months.  My great grandfather was a medical doctor on that expedition, and the US lost many men almost entirely due to disease.  Pancho Villa escaped unharmed).  In it, the rich "catires" - a derogatory word for white people - lounged at a luxury hotel in the country, surrounded by doting and servile maids and waiters.  The owning family was up to its eyeballs in intrigue over inheritance, and many murders were made that had to be solved.  The period costumes and sets were excellent, and the acting just as good. However, the last few episodes left me wondering in disbelief. 

Here, the revolutionaries finally came to town, burning many buildings, setting free prisoners, and partying like it was 1908. The Gran Hotel had finally been inherited by a bastard son of the original owner (who had been poisoned by his wacky daughter), whose mother was a servant and non - catire.  And finally, finally, this bastard son gave the hotel to the servants, promising a better tomorrow. The old ways were gone, the new and fairer ways were coming in, and at last, justice and equality would be had for all.  Viva la revolucion! 

Except that is not, as far as we can now see, what really happened.  The democratic/socialist spirit of the revolution almost instantly gave way to warring factions, mass murder and rape and pillage, and a variety of dictatorships.  By the 1930's, Mexico had fascist sympathies and was shooting Catholic priests (see Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory).  It was then that a dictatorship finally solidified its grip on power, one whose political party would retain  near universal control, despite the facade of democracy, until the late 1990's. While the people of Mexico are wonderful as a whole, and the middle class has grown considerably since then, the power hierarchy is corrupt from president to local policeman.  Many honest men and women are targeted for assassination by the cartels.  Whole swaths of Mexico now are ruled by these narco-gangsters.  Life is still not good, as millions of legal and illegal immigrants to the US silently prove to the world every year.

But all this is swept under the rug in my telenovela, in a form which can only be called mythological history.  Here, the writers presumably mirror their watcher's belief that Mexico has come a long, long way from those  bad old days.  In stark reality, in some ways it has, but in many other ways, it is actually worse.  No matter.  This is what (I believe) they want to believe and will believe.  This is their history.  This is their myth.

I am immediately reminded of the gospel in which Jesus asks only those free of sin to throw the first stone.  Our own American myths are on obvious display now because the earlier one - the one that my generation grew up with - has now been almost thoroughly displaced.  The genius heroes that we were taught that our founding fathers were are now depicted as racists and sexists who did it all for profit and the retention of  power for their elite White Male group.  My son's history classes in high school accentuated Andrew Jackson's Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the Martin Luther freedom movement, ignoring many of the sacrifices and high ideals of our former (mostly white male) heroes.  As with my telenovela, the information we now are given is not necessarily wrong - but the emphasis has been changed, and many pertinent things as to the reality of the past have been ignored.  We have essentially changed America's mythological history so quickly that it is stunningly obvious to a large portion of older Americans.    

It will change again, without a doubt, and in so doing, should remind us that the models we accept as the nature of our reality are extremely limited, and ultimately untrue.  This works for the natural sciences as well as the social sciences.  None of us know any more than small portions of reality, and those in control of information further reduce what we know to fit into their preferred notion of reality.  Without another scrap of information, we could entirely alter our perception of what we are, not only as Americans or Mexicans, but as human beings.  In the natural sciences, certain information is discarded that does not fit into the "paradigm," again affecting the way we think about the very ground under our feet.  Our spirituality is even more malleable.  Whereas those of European ancestry once had an unshakable belief system, many now have an airy mix of beliefs or no belief in anything beyond the very ground under their feet which is also so poorly defined.  

While such realizations might make us uncomfortable, they can also be comforting.  We can see that our world is not "locked up", that no one can chain us to this or that paradigm without our consent.  We can see that there is always more to learn, and that magic and spirit - those experiences which are beyond our current concept structure - can really be real.  We can allow ourselves to open up to the infinite, beyond our simple constructs of reality, to find something far greater.  It is what the mystics have always talked about - that one must leave the world behind to find it.  This may be one of those times, lost in the confusion of cultural myths, where the window to something far greater - towards what we might call God - is about as open as it ever gets.  We might want to jump at this chance before the window is closed again by orthodoxy or dictatorship of some kind or other, which is, given our current understanding of history, almost always inevitable.  FK     

"We must always give our best, and when we die we want to feel that our life has been lived as fully as we could have lived it." Billy Farrow in a letter to his mother, as a crew member of Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo, 1942.  

The above quote was taken from the book Target Tokyo, by James Scott, a fascinating account of the first counter-attack on Japanese soil after Pearl Harbor.  This was a suicide mission to put fear into the hearts of the Japanese and boost sagging moral in America, after Japan had marched easily over the Philippines, Burma, Manchuria, and much more of the South Seas and Eastern Asia.  15 B-25 bombers took off from an aircraft carrier, unable to come back for a landing, and with not enough fuel to reach safety in China. I have not finished the book, but read the index - Billy Farrow died as a prisoner of the Japanese after the raid. This was to be one of the last of his letters, and it made me wonder - how do we live our lives to the fullest, knowing as we do, just as Billy did, that death is never really that far away?  Do we party hearty? Do we reach for an apex of material or professional success?  Do we travel the world and see as much as there is to see?

May father was a gunner on a B-29 flying sorties over Japan during the war, and it was perhaps because of the book that I remembered him a few days ago on a warm and beautiful afternoon.  The nostalgia was intense, not only for him, but for the whole of life.  How I missed him!  What an immature ass I was to him so many times!  And how I missed also so many old friends, some now dead, others gone beyond my life.  What great times we had, but for what?  Had I lived my life to the fullest?  Was I now?  I would never have a chance to relive any of it, both from decades ago and from yesterday.  It was not hard to see that I had not lived as best as I could have, and still do not.  To this day I find ways to foul things up and to complain.

And to regret  - another waste of time that I am dong now. Yes, I could have done much, much more, but that is now over.  What I have left is the memories of life, which if inspected just might give me, give us, a clue as to how we can live our lives to the fullest. Looking at my own past, I find these traits as the essence of a good life: live life with a full heart, unafraid and open to possibilities, both of a professional and personal nature.  As to the former, find a way that gives you the necessities that go with your style (as much as possible), and then give it your all - not for approval of others, but to live the most with what you have.  Try to have no fear, either of failure or of criticism.  That should not be the point to life.  Work is both to provide a living and also something to simply live.  The same goes for the personal: don't focus on your own or other's negatives, and don't hide away out of fear.  As long as you are open and positive, if someone calls you a jerk, that is his own problem with negativity.  Regret is the realization of not having lived fully, and not having lived openly with friends and relatives will become a regret.  

All that is good advice, although it has been said so often as to appear hackneyed.  It is still good advice, though.  But the deepest essence of the full life is harder to grasp.  It is something like this: life, simple life, is already full enough.  There is no need to party or travel or excel to try to fill it up.  It is enough to be fully open to it, to fully live whatever you have to make it worth while. Even then, we will wax nostalgic at times, but we will have the wherewithal to not regret, because that is wasting the fullness of now.  Rather, nostalgia should be a reminder of how beautiful things once were - and how beautiful life can be, wrinkles and all, right now.  FK                   

The garden has been planted - or at least partially so - and the trip up north to rescue the wounded snowmobile was successful. In that short week, conversations were mostly about politics, in which I assured my son that this presidential election was the most bizarre in my lifetime.  The biggest news, though, has been the weather - it is full spring!  The young leaves on the trees are so green and delicate, wild flowers abound, and the taller grasses are putting out red and gold colored tassels.  All beautiful, so much so that on this soft blue morning, I feel in love.  It is glorious and I am inclined to whatever has made such beauty, and given me the ability to enjoy it.  Life is good.

It will not always be so, as so many others remind me.  It is not just the weather.  A neighbor who is usually as perky as a bird is now subdued, made somber by her recent diagnosis of breast cancer.  Others I know have severe financial problems.  A friend of my son talks of his youth, of how his parents gave him up at a young age to his uncle, who beat him just for the hell of it, among other horror stories. And of course, the weather will turn bad again, from tornadoes to drought to the usual turning of seasons. We are not always in love with life. It can be a bitch.

Thus it came as a surprise when, on an offhand comment, someone asked (almost but not quite sarcastically) yesterday - do you love Jesus?  I would not mention this were it not for today's church service, where the priest's sermon led to his final phrase, "and this is why we love Jesus so."  

But do I?  If one is Christian, one is supposed to, for Christ died on the cross for our sins, but I have to admit that I think I do not. Jesus is more of an abstraction to me, a philosopher who may indeed have been the unique Son of God - I am willing to accept that - but do I love him?  And how?  What is love?

I may love God when life is good, but do I when it is bad?  When the pain of a terrible disease strikes home, or a loved one dies tragically, do I love God?  The loved ones I can - they are flesh and blood and have been before me, offering me a cushion to lie upon in the bed of our social needs as a species.  These are the friends and family of "agape," or social love.  There is also that one - or more for some - that we love from "eros," that powerful sense of sexual love.  The former often stays for life, while the latter may come and go, or wax and wane, but both are built on the hard ground of actual face to face interaction.  The love of God, too, in good times is built on a tangible reality, even as it might wane, as with eros.  But Jesus?  

The god of experience is the Old Testament god - one of great mystery, of divine intervention, of beauty - and of wrath.  He is built on the realities of our lives.  If we say we love him, it is as much out of fear as out of human love.  It is complicated, but we understand it.  But, again - do I, do we of the Christian faith, really love Jesus?  Can we?

The depth of these questions is striking, and perhaps uncomfortable, for in admitting that we do not really, fully love Jesus, as, say, we love our children, we feel that we risk the wrath of that old god.  For me, any attempt to "love" Jesus has to begin with anthropomorphizing him, by turning him into a beloved relative, the perfect father; but that is an abstraction, and I know it. I really don't know the human Jesus at all, and with that, is is nearly impossible to love the god-Jesus, for he is both the green leaves and blue sky that I love, and a guy who once lived that I have never spoken to.  

Perhaps it is our times; in days of old, in seemed that many people actually loved their kings and would willingly die for them. We do not love our presidents like that, and if we die for our country, it is for those we know and love in it and our way of life. Even so, those people of old had the actual king before them, whereas the Christian does not.  Must this love, then, come from faith?  For in our era, love comes more from mammalian instincts than from some abstraction, so much so that we might  wonder if such love (of king) was actually real.  Could it be that our slide into a science of materialism has made this abstract love less real, less possible?  Could it be that what led the early Christians to such sacrifices was only possible because of a way of thought that is now largely gone?

I do not question the reality of the saints when they speak of their burning love for Jesus.  Given my belief, I would love that as well, but in all honesty, that is now not the case. Perhaps it is that our world needs more faith than ever, more grace than ever.  If God is as we think It is, then It would know and save us.  "It" would have to, for their are no masks before God - we cannot pretend.  I may love God now as the sustenance of nature, but even with that, this might, and probably will, change.  How much harder is love for a ghost being from a long, long time ago?   

And yet it is possible - it happens all the time.  And with this faith that has brought true belief and love, so many have come to love even the most vial; have come to work among the damned in prison and among the desperate in the worst of slums.  It must be real - but how does it come?  A question for this late Sunday morning, when all is beautiful and well.  FK  

I had heard about the movie many times throughout the 1980's - "Being There," starring Peter Sellers and Shirley McClain, a comedy from 1979 mocking the social and political scene of that era.  This weekend we finally saw it, and I could write a thesis on it.  It is about a half-wit who was kept isolated in an old city house in Washington D.C. by a rich old man who had him tend the small garden in the inner courtyard.  He was cared for by a black housekeeper and never allowed to go outside, his only contact with it being television, which he watched constantly.  When the old man dies, he is evicted, and walks the city streets dressed in the smart, although antiquated, clothing of his old protector - top hat, 2 breasted suit, alligator suitcase - looking for someone to take care of him.  Confused, he strays between two parked cars, where one backs into him, causing minor injury to his leg.  The driver is a chauffeur for a very, very rich lady (Shirley McClain) who takes him back to the incredible mansion that she shares with a huge staff and her much older, dying husband, to have him see their private doctor.  There, Sellers (Chance Gardiner) speaks softly and simply, answering questions from the only background he knows - gardening and TV.  His odd enigmatic phrases, really very simple, are taken to be words of great wisdom.  The rich old man, who is an adviser to the President of the US,  comes to see him as a man of great depth, and grows to love him as a man of perfect sincerity.  Chance is brought to advise the President, and soon is seen on TV and reported in the papers as the new genius behind White House financial planning. Shirley comes to love him as a man, with the encouragement of her husband.  Soon, all are trying to know this new wunderkind, a man who has absolutely no identity and little capacity to know the thoughts of the very smart people who he's dealing with. 

Farce follows farce; politicians connive and try to trick him, newspapers and TV follow him and interview him, and Shirley falls deeply in love.  Chancy, however, cannot love, does not understand human love.  At the death of his old caretaker, he did not shed a tear.  But finally, he learns.  At the death of the rich old man, tears form - he has been bitten by human pathos.  At the funeral, while the pallbearers talk politics, Chancy walks off into the woods and then onto a lake.  Yes, he walks on water, and off he goes, hopefully to some better place.

It is a Christ moment; having barely any contact with humans, he had existed as if on a cloud, but with life at the mansion with Shirley and the rich old man, he has come to know humanity, just as God sent his only son to know us.  He rises above material reality afterwards, with, we hope, no crucifixion before him.

There is much, much more to the movie.  Made just 37 years ago, we can see how much society has changed. In two examples, all the power players were white men and blacks were only maids or servants or gang members.  We see not only a change of culture here, but a change of movie culture - no such movie would be made now.  We also see our culture's timeless wisdom: that self-important men will claim another to be brilliant if this other leaves them to think things through for themselves, for it is themselves who they really think are brilliant.  "Still waters run deep," is our phrase, but Chance, although still, is not deep at all. In the old fashion categories of intelligence, he would be labeled an idiot.  

But how, then, could he become God's contact with humanity? We know that knowledge does not always come through words or logic; as hard as that is for some to understand, we only have to think of music, which speaks a deep language of its own.  Still, Chance had nothing on the ball, no talent other than his quiet way.  How, then?  

The older cultures have something to teach us here.  Among many American Indian groups, it was believed that those who we would call "retarded" or "intellectually challenged" were touched by the spirits.  In fact, they had a respectful dread of them, because around them, anything could happen.  Being largely closed to the human world, they were seen as open to the spirit world.  The Irish, too, had the belief that "touched" people were fairy people, who often brought on spooky magical powers.
In the farce of the movie, we see how silly and self-centered the "smart" people really are; we come to appreciate the simpleness of Chancy; but we are astonished at his magical ability at the end.  We see that he works on another level, as an idiot in our small world, but as a genius in the other.

It is all about understanding that other language - something that we cannot understand from our language, but that we can allow if we drop the pretenses and the internal chatter.  We do not really know what it is or from where it comes, for in this we are as simple as Chancy is in our world.  The implications are grave, and bring some greater clarity to the teachings of major religious leaders and simple shamans alike.  But enough for now of chatter.  Still waters might run deeper than we think possible.

[Note - there will be no new blog until this weekend, either Saturday or Sunday.  As with Chancy, the garden needs tending.]  FK 

                     

        

At the very least, I have gotten one thing very useful from Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal's book The Supernatural: the definition of the word "hermeneutics."  In graduate school is was used often, but always breezed away with little context or explanation. The professors, it seemed, either couldn't believe that we didn't know what the word meant, or were unclear of it themselves.  Not wanting to stand out as an ignoramus, I did not press hard on the teachers for a greater definition, but looked it up myself.  The dictionary helped little, claiming it was a term first used by scholars for deciphering the Bible, and then used as a general term for interpreting texts in general.  But how?  

Kripal explains this "how" very well.  The word is taken from the god Hermes, also known as Mercury, the messenger god, but also the god of music, enlightenment (he often is pictured standing on a caduceus, the double snake that now stands for the medical profession), and of tricksters and thieves.  But how could he be the god of both knowledge and lies?  Because, as Kripal so well explains, knowledge is often found in lies and lies in knowledge.  That is, knowledge itself is a trickster: it changes with the interpreter and the interpretation, not only because of the interpreter's lack of knowledge, but because knowledge is also interpretation; that is (again), that knowledge becomes what it is by an active search for it - which constantly changes not only what we know, but - and this is very difficult and significant - what really is.  We, in our search for knowledge, change what there is to know.  Just like the physics model that tells us that in our experiment, our presence changes the outcome of the experiment, so our penetration into texts, or anything else, changes what is to be known.  In the case of texts, we understand them differently under interpretation; in the case of reality, reality as far as we can ever experience it changes as we change.  It is a two -way street.  In this, we do not have ultimate magical powers, for we are interacting with things or ideas that exist beyond our boundaries, but we do have power.  We can change the very ground of reality with interaction.

So knowledge is a trick.  We believe it to be "outside" us, but it is also within us, and as such, we change the knowable by what we know.  Squirrelly, yes; frustrating, yes; but on thought, it is the way it is, at least for those who are not complete, who are not "one with the universe."  I understand now why the professors did not get into the definition of "hermeneutics"; it would have been a class unto itself.  In fact, it was a class unto itself, called "Deconstruction" in my day in the 80's (as if this were something new), and it has led to all sorts of cultural and political changes, even though those doing the changes don't understand half of what they are doing.  Which is par for the course for a trickster god (who the ancients understood well.  How much more intelligent they were on such things).  

But to get back to the book and my point, I will say that the word . came up last night when I was trying to understand my discomfort with Strieber since his classic Communion, including this current book.  It has always seemed since that great book that he is pulling my leg.  Not exactly lying, but exaggerating or manipulating his experiences to produce best sellers.  He himself claims to have become financially and personally ruined by Communion, since both materialistic cynics and the religious have turned strongly against him for their respective reasons: one, because his stories defy common reality; and two, because they debunk what we think we know about angels, devils, and the greater cosmic purpose in general.  It is exactly here where I begin to disbelieve: really? UFO and ESP "experts" have been making hay off their books for years, often precisely because they infuriate different parts of cultural orthodoxy.  For instance, what good UFOlogist would ever sell a book if he did not say that the science of aliens was being hidden by the government and debunked purposefully to hide the grand and horrible truth?  And religion - do readers of the "weird" really only want an orthodox explanation for alien invasions?  That, in fact, is often the ground for a winning hermeneutics, a re-reading of the Bible or the Talmud or whatever to show that they are texts about other dimensions or aliens and so on. In the world of fringe knowledge, nothing could be more alluring than someone who is challenging orthodoxy.

So then, what is Strieber's game?  I believe he is playing both thief and bringer of knowledge, just like Hermes.  As he explains in this book, he was long a student of the Gurdjieff school, the founder himself known both as a rascal and raconteur as well as a man of incredible psychic and intellectual power, and it seems he has learned the lessons well.  As Kripal states, one of the ways to know the ultimate, as the mystic Meister Eckhart put it, is to "say away" the images and understandings of God to reach God (Eckhart was not a trickster, but a serious Christian who found that God was beyond anything that could be taught). And so it is that Strieber is clearly 'saying away' everything we think we know about UFOs and the paranormal alike, while also profiting from it - or maybe not. Much like Carlos Castaneda in his Don Juan books, he puts himself away as a mystery, just as he believes both he and all of us and everything are.  He has become the trickster, to throw us off of every track he can imagine.  He probably is a trickster even to himself, not knowing the half of what he does - or much less, for he would be the first to say that we don't know what we are; that we are much much more than any think, and when we think we know, we are only fooling ourselves - and the trick again turns against us.

So Strieber, whether he knows it or not, is keeping us on our toes.  Seen in this light, it makes me feel less like I've been hustled when I read his stuff.  And one thing is for sure - when he gets to his storytelling of supposed real-life experiences, the reader is destabilized profoundly - expertly and wonderfully so.  And that, I suppose, has always been the trickster's reason for being - to take away what we know so that we might know much more.  FK      

           

      

About 15 years ago, when I started writing seriously, a few words came to mind when trying to explain just what greater consciousness is.  One was "the Overmind," which I first came across in an out of body experience, and then encountered again and again both in meditation and randomly.  This was that part of the mind that was both part of me, but not - something connected both to myself but to a much larger information- set that seemed above time and space.  It seemed to know where I was going and why, and was quite calm about it, as if it were an adult speaking to a very young child about, say, thunder.  Not long afterward, as I began reading more about the weird, I found that this word, and some others very similar, had longed been used for the exact same phenomena.  This was both a revelation and a welcome surprise.

Another was the term "flatland," which I used to explain our limited daily perception of reality because, in times of heightened awareness, this is exactly how it seemed.  Again, I soon found that not only had this word been used by others before for the exact same phenomena, but that it had actually been the title to a a sci-fi style book by Edmon Abbot published in the 1880's that emphasized the same thing.  It quickly appeared that not only was I not alone in these thoughts, but that there had been ample precedent to them in modern times.  These were not quirks of mentation or pathologies of the brain, but rather common experiences that had even elicited independently the exact same labels.  

Rummaging around Kindle Books looking for something exciting, and a bit less religious for a change, I came across a familiar author with a new co-author that I could not resist: Whitley Strieber's and Jeffrey Kripal's The Super Natural: a new view of the Unexplained.  Strieber is familiar to most of us through his remarkable book, Communion, in which he relates experiences of abduction by aliens, as well as visions of the dead, of elves, of all manner of strange things since his first experience in his cabin near Rosendale, New York, in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains (of which I am very familiar. The woman spoken of in my last essay, Car Wash, lived in Rosendale at the time of her incident, and I wrote of it earlier in my own book, Dream Weaver, as a mystical place that seemed full of odd things like elves and such before I knew of the location of Strieber's cabin, and before the incident in Car Wash took place.  It was the area where Washington Irving wrote of his famous Rip Van Winkle, and also an area that, in the 1980's, witnessed a several-year period of intense UFO sightings - exactly when Strieber had his first experiences.)   His later books on this same subject became confused and less interesting, but Communion is a classic, and scary as hell.  One could see that the author had been traumatized and was desperately looking for an explanation for his odd experiences, where ever that might lead.  

To date, it has led him to this book, which is co-authored by a professor of comparative religion.  So far, 86 pages into the 360 page book, it seems a good fit.  We learn more of Stieber's still ongoing experiences of the weird, and then have Kripal expand on them with his deep knowledge of religions.  So far, the point has been made clear that such oddness has been experienced by members of all societies that have left traces, at all points in history.  Many, claims Kripal, have led to the actual founding of religions, and certainly of myths.  When the authors come together, we see that they are pointing in a different direction than what we might think: not towards UFO's and interstellar aliens (although those are not ruled out as part of the mix), but towards a greater depth of mind - of human mind - that brings us genuinely real experiences that are not part of our reality.  The authors are suggesting at this point that these disparate incidences are a kind of language, distorted by our own backgrounds, that are trying to tell us something, or many things, that are beyond our current realm - beyond, that is, our mind as we experience it in the Flatland, exactly as Kripal calls it.

As I read last night, it also became evident that these authors and Carl Jung, in his book on his own adventures into the unconscious named the Red Book, were talking of the same thing.  Jung himself was shocked to find that he could not reduce this unconscious to epiphenomena, that is, solely to things that appear to us in the "real" world. His experiences in the unconscious were absolutely real to him, and he tried to do what I believe the above authors are trying to do - find the key to the bizarre language in which it spoke. Jung found that it pointed to something he labeled the archetype, whose base was portrayed in myth and religion, but he in no way exhausted its meaning - nor did he think he could. But he tread carefully.  As he himself admitted, he had a reputation to protect.

Unlike Jung, however, the above authors do not feel as if they have anything to lose.  They are delving, and will continue to delve, into this strange world of UFO's and gremlins with the point of view that these things are real - but just not like things in the flatland are real.  Very interesting.  We will see shortly what revelations they bring to us.  FK                      

One would not think that a church group reading Pope Leo's 1890 encyclical on social justice could be exciting - I sure didn't expect it - but it has been.  Last Wednesday we excitedly discussed ideas that are 130 years old, from an old pope no less, because they are as relevant now as then - and still controversial. At the time, Leo was responding to a growing call for socialism, as set up in Spain (then called "syndicalism"), which was responding to the growing power of Marx's theories first published in the 1840's, nearly 50 years earlier.  The field into which he was delving was (and still is) filled with land mines: how to address the disparity between rich and poor?  What was the family's role and that of the state?  What was religion's role in all of this?  What, in fact, was the RIGHT way?  

It is a complex discussion, but I will try to sum it up briefly in a pyramidal structure: Socially, the family is the physical base of all society. Above it, but of lesser importance, is (or should be) the state, which in no way should interfere with the fundamentals of the base, the proper family. Beneath the family lies the unseen foundation in the pyramid, laws of behavior for the family that come from religion, which in turn come from God.  Obviously, the state should also do nothing to compromise, or to replace, the unseen base of the family as well.  To do so would lead, eventually, to a man-made society which would become as debased as all things of man that are not informed by a higher power.  

As the laws of religion come from God, they have one overall purpose (from the Catholic perspective): to get one back to God. Anything that leads away from this hurts the family and thus society and the state, just as any state that hampers the laws of God, and their proper function in the family, hurts both, and thus itself.  

If this diagram is accepted - and it certainly was not by the Marxists both then and now - then the rights and obligations of every human and every human-made institution becomes much clearer.  

For example, what is the proper behavior of the rich towards the poor?  And how should the state become involved (if at all)?

Says Leo of this division in society: God does not care a wit about your economic status (or, I might add, of how fashionable or popular you are, how good looking, how smart, and so on).  It is rather how you behave with what you have that is important, the end-goal being union with God.  Thus the rich should share what is above their needs - including the greater needs of his station in life - because charity and turning from things "of the flesh" is part of the spiritual foundation of the Catholic religion (and most others).  The rich are obliged to give; and as they have much more to give, so it is that much more of a challenge.  Just as the poor(er) have their own obvious difficulties, so do the rich, for they must fight their own greed and desire for social elevation. With them, the fight is much harder.  We might even call wealth, then, a burden.

And, following this logic, it is a burden that the State should not interfere with, for various reasons.  For one, sharing is the cross the rich must bear, and it is this action which is often the greatest salvation of their souls.  Further, though, is the effect state interference  would have on the functioning of society and the family.  Man, says Leo, is meant to enjoy and share the fruits of his labor.  If that privilege is denied him, so will be the reason for his efforts. In the end, then, all society suffers, for overall production and thus well-being will decrease.  Further still, with mandatory redistribution, the State then takes on the role of Head of Family.  Here, the pyramid is reversed: the State sustains, and thus comes to have power over the family; and with this, it is no longer informed by the Holy Spirit that arises through the natural affections of the family.

All this was surprisingly relevant to us at the meeting, in which all were strongly in favor of helping those in need. In the end, though, its logic is based on one great cornerstone: that the role of life is union with God.  Once that is removed - as Marx well knew, and as did his functional successors in Russia and Cuba and elsewhere - control by the State - that is, control by what is above on the pyramid - becomes possible, and perhaps necessary.  But can it work? Can it function without the clarity of the spiritual masters who have informed religions?  Or will it always, sooner or later, fall in with the trappings of ego of all things human?  

Our lives depend on belief in the end, which is a reminder of how powerful a single belief - or lack of it - can be in shaping nearly everything important to humans in this world.  FK     

Since I do not have time today to write the usual involved theosophical or philosophical piece (some may be relieved to know), this story of a miracle came to mind.  

It happened only a few weeks ago, and is was told to us last week by a woman at church in this manner: "I have a friend who went blind in one eye from shingles, and she had to drive from a meeting one afternoon from Green Bay to Milwaukee.  The meeting was let out late, and the woman was in a panic. It was already dark, and because of her bad eye, she had tremendous difficulty driving at night.  She drove on anyway, and stopped [for reasons unknown to me] in Champion, WI, which is along the way."  

In this tiny town is found the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, where in the epic Peshtigo Fire of (I think) 1871 (at the same time as the Chicago fire, which happened for similar reasons of drought and wind), people bunched together in faith as their last resort.  3,000 people died in that fire, whose flames actually leaped across Green Bay to ignite parts of Door County, but the area around the shrine, which was then just a log-cabin church, remained miraculously untouched and the people there saved.  A vision of Our Lady was seen at this time, and for these reasons, it is now an official Mary shrine.

Anyway, back to the story: "She went inside and prayed, and when she opened her eyes, she could see perfectly out of both!"

Maybe a great miracle, maybe not; maybe psychological, maybe not.  But it was real, it happened just a little while ago, and it reminds us that miracles are still possible.

For those interested, the shrine is still open for visitors, as it always has been.  FK        

Cal Roeker's comment on last week's blog - that we are often left alone with anger - dovetail's with a comment made by a woman in a prayer group that I recently attended.  She had read somewhere of a "fall into the abyss of God," and thought it a beautiful expression: "You just let go and fall into God's love!"  I, too, liked that idea, but that is not what I have read by those well along on the spiritual path.  Rather, most (but not all - St Francis's "abyss" followed another path) relate that, after the calling has been heard, and then a personal relationship with God is established, comes a great challenge: that which St John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul."  We have talked of it before here, but I think it is too often dismissed as a time of simple doubt and retrenchment.  From what I have read, it involves far more than that, and we see it not only in the lives of the saints, but in more average lives like most, if not all, of those reading this (and he who writes this).  

Finishing the book The Shadow of the Valley of Death by Kermit Alexander et al., we find that, after the murder of his mother, sister, and two nephews in 1984, he had to undergo 30 years of living hell before he could truly pull his life together, even after the guilty were apprehended and sentenced, either to death or to life without parole.  For him, this gave no closer.  Rather, he had to fight his anger, an anger that was first forged by perceived racism towards blacks in America and later encouraged in his work, professional football.  This continued until his near death decades later while alone and sick in a motel in the Great Plains.  It was shortly after this that, at age 69, he married a blond-haired, blue-eyed white woman (his description), and adopted five desolate children (brothers and sisters) from Haiti. We are left to wonder if the marriage ameliorated his resentment (hatred?) of white people, but we are left with no doubts about the healing affects of his adopted children.  He felt, at last, that he was making a concrete contribution to the same kind of people - poor black youth - who had killed many in his family - and thus was helping to end the cycle of poverty and crime. He also felt that the love of a large family had brought him back to the love that had been lost with the murders.  We are left feeling that life was, at last, not only good for him again, but better than it ever had been - but also that the road to this redemption was hell itself.  He had fallen into the abyss and recovered, but we understand that we would never choose this path for ourselves. Ever.

Last week I saw the movie, "The Letters of Mother Teresa," and (as I had already known) we were told that in her greatest years of charitable work, she had felt abandoned by God, left alone and miserable.  In fact, it was this, as much as the miracles that came after her death, that told the Vatican that M Teresa was a saint, for that IS the saint's pass - to lose everything, even the notion and feeling of the presence of God.  

That is the abyss that I believe the woman in my group was unwittingly referring to.  It is a true abyss of terror and hopelessness, of utter abandonment (My God, why have you forsaken me?) that most who truly are close to unity with God must suffer.  It is so, we are told by those who know, not because of a perverse side to God, but because everything we think we know about God is wrong in its incompleteness. Like the natural athlete who has to unlearn what he has known to become truly great under a top-notch coach, so the natural athletes of the soul must lose every notion of God before they can truly become one with God.  So it was as well that Kermit had to struggle with his anger for 30 years until near death, before he could come out the other side.

As I told this woman of these things that I had read, I finished with something that seemed obvious in my own experience: "The good thing is," I told her, "is that most of us will never have to undergo such trials.  Most of us simply will never get that close to God (or, I add here, most will not have to revise their entire life's direction, as did Kermit).  She responded as I would have if I had not read so much about the paths of the saints:"But I want to!"  

If one is touched by God, or the "force" - whatever one wants to call the unknowable - one DOES want to draw ever closer.  In fact, with time, everything else seems less and less important, and that is a good thing.  I think, however, that for whatever reason, most of us were meant to live out our human-centered lives, at least until death.  It is there, or just before, that I believe we all meet our own dark night of the soul.  Where this leads - to heaven, purgatory, another dimension - I cannot say, but it, too, will be like nothing we have known.  To find it, we must literally die to ourselves.  This is not only symbolic, but the very real way of life that none can avoid.  FK