About 3 weeks ago we were taking a walk out back.  It was a beautiful day, but none greater than any other in early summer.  With so much rain the week before, the grass was shooting up as never before, and when we got to the top of the field, the wind rippled through the blades like waves of water.  I was, as usual, talking about something - with other people around, I am always talking about something, be it politics or family matters or things strange or spiritual.  I noticed the calm, beatific scene, but was also becoming rapped with the sound of my own voice, again as usual, when an object appeared in an instant, coming out of that world outside that had, until then, just been a backdrop to my voiced thoughts.  The object changed everything in an instant.  Suddenly, and I mean suddenly, is was all about the outside, that great outside beyond my thoughts, no longer a backdrop, but the one and only thing existent.  The object had found its way inside my glasses, and then into my eye.  

It was all furious motion then: I ripped off my glasses, throwing them into the weeds without thought, to pry that "object" from my eye.  In that instant, I realized dimly that it was a bumble bee, and I naturally tried to wipe it from my eye, yelling "ow, ow, ow!" the whole time.  It wouldn't leave, though, clinging to the red corner of my eye and biting with all its might.  Another strong wipe and I could feel its pincers pluck at my eye, and then finally dislodge, the bee then tumbling to the ground in confusion somewhere near where my glasses had fallen.  I watched it buzz about on the ground while it oriented itself before flying off.  I couldn't know if it was as panicked as I was, but it didn't matter - the pain of the poison was mounting as my eye swelled.  "Damn, damn, ow, son of a bitch!" and some such was all I could say.  So much for grand ideas and wise words.  In a few seconds, I noticed Vicki standing behind me, helpless, holding my glasses.  It would be all I could talk about for the next several minutes as the pain continued to mount, then plateaued.  Soon enough, we were in the trees, continuing our hike.  

It didn't take long to realize the importance of that bee.  This had never happened to me before, but I realized that other things just like it often did: that other things, objects, and circumstances completely ignored had often come from out of nowhere to completely transform the comfortable present that I had been living, revealing that comfort as a dream, an abstraction, a life lived in the fog.  And as odd as it may seem, it is those occasional startling moments that reveal the Real, the bedrock of our existence: the body exists, pain exists, bad things happen, and life can really lay us low.  No, life WILL lay us low.  Most of us usually live in this cushion, satisfied, even if we think we're not, with an unreal view of life made real by regularity, by inertia.  It is, then, the extraordinary that reveals the ordinary as it is: a precarious construct that can de-construct at a moment's notice, and not only 'can' but will.  It is just a question of time.  

Where is God, Truth, spirituality, meaning in this?  It is, I think, not so much in the realization that we are bodies with pain and death our inevitable lot, but rather the understanding of our, all existence's, fragility.  It is not that the abstract is any less true than pain and death, but rather that the non-abstract, the 'real', is so ephemeral, so quick to change, to pass, to explode, to non-be.  It is a thought with teeth, making of it more than it is - no more permanent than the ideas that inform a droning voice.  One moment here, the next gone.  It gains our attention as such, and sometimes rivets it, but in the end, something even steels that, takes from the sting of a bee - something beyond all that, beyond the swirling stings of history, something that gives it pattern and draws us to notice it, too.  More than abstract, more than real, it absorbs all in the plan that informed the bee to rush blindly for my eye, and we know it, too, in moments when the voice and the sting are both silent and that 'something' passes through us like the turning stars pass through the night sky.  FK               

Back to the wild, crazy world of the chemical psychonauts: Reading Dennis McKenna's book (The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss), I have just passed the highlight - he and his brother Terrence's experience in the Colombian Amazon in 1971 spending  several weeks with magic mushrooms.  I have been there - having had my time with the mushrooms -  and am amazed that they survived such indulgence, but they did so barely and with tremendous personal consequences.  In effect, Dennis went temporarily insane and was only able to piece his world together over many months - and, as he puts it, the experience has never really left him.  What happened to him in some ways happened to me, although on a much smaller scale, and it is this; at first, the mushroom experience seems safe and laid-back, devoid of the adrenaline pumping of such drugs as LSD. Over the next few trips, however, it subtly works you into a very strange place - one where the mushrooms seem to speak to you from an extraterrestrial realm of advanced intelligence.  It can get very far out and hairy, as I may have said 35 years ago.  With Dennis it got beyond far-out: he felt that his very DNA was merged with the 'shrooms, which opened an alchemical doorway to eternity and immortality.  

Many years later, he still believes - although not with the same starry-eyed enthusiasm - that our DNA might be the pathway to the ultimate questions of the universe; that is, that it might be a blueprint for the cosmos, and can be read, with the help of such substances as contained in Mushrooms; and that the very presence of these substances points to an intelligence that put such things here for our use so that we might discover this key to the cosmos.  Very far out indeed and very quantum.  

I am not against this possibility.  It does make me wonder, though - is he talking of the different levels of being that the eastern mystics have been mentioning for thousands of years?  Are these the same astral realms mentioned?  If so, these were thought to be nothing more than other partial systems, different but just as misleading as our own normal reality.  Worse, their promise of and sometimes delivery of special powers made them a trap, no less so than the materialistic traps of our reality.  And this is what continues to strike me by reading such things - I find them fascinating (and no more demonic than things of this world), but are we spinning our tires here? Is it worth the effort, or are we only dealing with other illusions?; illusions that extend our knowledge in many ways, but none-the-less are still only partial realities, and as such, illusory?  

I do agree with Dennis that many traditional religions seem dry and un-effective - as most are to most people.  However, it does seem that buried within them is a wisdom that goes beyond the mushroom world - much as the highest heaven is above and inclusive of all others.  Yet, there is something to be said for the psychoactives - they work, without all the discipline required of traditional techniques, and, beyond the cosmic light show that they might present, they do often bring one to the wellspring of creation - not into it exactly, but to its foot.  For this, they are worthy, but not necessary for the dedicated mystic, and a red herring for others who may get too attached to the thrills and spills.  And yet again - perhaps, in some cases, might these work to get one involved in the real thing?  Might they be both a blind alley for some, but the beginning of the real search for others?    FK                 

Another interesting book,if you're into this sort of thing: a memoir by Dennis McKenna about the exploits of he and big brother, Terrence ("The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss").  Both of these guys are (were for Terrence: d) at age 51 of a brain tumor) psychedelic explorers, Terrence the kind of hippie I idealized in my youth.  Both would try just about any mind-drug there was - and do it again and again, following it to its depths.  There's a lot to say about these type of guys (besides 'stupid') , and I know of what I speak, having inhabited that world myself, but never with that sort of courage.  To take mushrooms, for instance, day after day for months in the Columbian jungle - the strangeness would seem unbearable.  

Yet they did it all and came back from it all with interesting ideas; but not all were exceptional ideas.  What Dennis said about traditional religion was to be expected, but still so shallow when I read the words.  Raised a Catholic, he ended his personal history with it by saying, "I hope it rots in its own hypocrisy and decay" or something similar.  Yes, to be expected, and yet ....he wrote several pages on the deep meaning of Christ, and got much of that right, as far as I could see, but to him, ALL organized religions were only tools of the power structure to control the people.  In my youth, I agreed with this; now I see this as especially shallow and callow.   Religions have been used to control the masses, no question about it, particularly the Catholic Church in the Euro tradition, but that is not only NOT was what it was intended to do, but simply not the only thing that it ever did.  In Europe after pagan Rome, the Church was unusually beneficent - rulers actually had a mission, often not followed, to enlighten the peasants into Christian ways - and practices.  And in pure practice, Christianity fought tooth and nail with power.  It periodically fell from this height, often with a huge crash, but everyone knew what its mission should be, and sometimes was and is.  

To put this in plain perspective, Dennis claimed that psychedelics were banned by Christian society to control the means to the sacred - in other words, to remain an unchallenged monopoly for spiritual - and temporal - power.  Yet Aztec society was awash in sacred mushrooms, and had one of the most brutal political and spiritual monopolies in history.  The stories of mass human sacrifice were true.  Yes, the use of the mushrooms were reserved for the priesthood, but this did not make the priesthood - the very people who tore out the beating hearts of the human sacrifices - any more benevolent or loving.  And, of course the regular people - particularly on the periphery - did use them, and other mind expanding drugs.  Yet we would be hard pressed to find benevolence anywhere in the southern half of Mexico before the conquest.  After wasn't much better, but it was better.  Dennis should recall this.  

And now the Catholic church no longer has official power - along with many other traditional religions.  I can't see how it isn't obvious to everyone that such religions benefit more than harm.  Dennis didn't like the sex issues with the church, from its notions of sin to its molesters, and much of this is true.   But is society at large happier now that the average person does not feel guilt for sex?  Are we better off in general without the moral guidance of a traditional religion?  Moreover, is a wide open individualistic view of psychedelic weirdness really more worthy than the shared insights of the holiest of men and women throughout history?  His view is shared by drug rebels throughout the world, not as an insight but as a social truth.  But since it is real truth that they are after, shouldn't they put don't the rebel armor now and then so that they might find it?  FK 
         

Too Rooson - thanks for the appreciation of the essays.  I would do more, but they take real time.  I try for one a week and do the rest in blogs, which are somewhat off the cuff ideas that I happen to be thinking about.  For some essays, I have to be in the mood.  The next planned will be pretty dark - about death, about as dark as it can get.  I'm not quite there yet.   ASAP, I promise.

For now - I have promised to think about the proscription against sex in spiritual endeavors of all sorts, and now get back to it because it came up again in another unlikely place - the book "Inner Paths to Outer Space," whose authors are about as do-your-own-thing as one can get.  It was in the final article where Rick Strassman discussed organizing a "trip".  He put forth a slew of suggestions, including keeping the setting safe, getting all your odds and ends pulled together and so on - but these were gentle and practical suggestions.  At one point, though, he turned absolutist: "in no way should sexual touching or intercourse be allowed during a trip" (my paraphrase); but, AS ALWAYS, he did not explain why.  They never do.  Should we simply know that sex and spirituality do not go together?  And if so, why do I feel left in the dark?

Already I have pointed out a few things: some traditions see the loss of masculine energy as the reason; others, that sex is too intimately linked to the material - that it is the path to human materiality itself.  We also know that sex can cause jealousy and hatred and violence.  I think we can say that it is too primitive an emotion to play in the spiritual - that it is, in fact, the most primitive and arousing drive that we have.  Unlike eating, it demands that at least one other participates, and the motives for such participation may be unholy indeed - S and M, dominance, all-too-casual use and so on.  Here I get it.  Perhaps that explains Strassman.  But many other traditions proscribe marital sex (and sex of any kind) for days before a spiritual event.  For most of us, this precludes "use" - few feel used in marital sex, most do not go in for weird mind games as such in this situation, and it hardly seems to matter in regular life whether we did it with our spouse a few days before a spiritual event.

For sex in general, I can understand; for marital sex (or the equivalent), I can only say that: 1) part of the prohibition has to do with the "power loss" idea of earlier times (and some current traditions).  For instance, it has only been in the last 30 or so years that the idea of power loss fell from favor in our culture.  Professional sports players were admonished by their coaches well into the 60's - and perhaps much later - to not have sex the day of or the day before a major event.  For all I know, there may be something to it, although present thinking sides against this; and 2) that sex in any form detracts from thoughts of the spiritual.  But this can also be disputed.  Most of us know full well that the right form of intimacy is about as close as many of us will get to the mystical experience - and, in the right way, it most certainly is.  The loss of self, the feeling of love...it seems all too perfect a mimic of spiritual ecstasy.  Perhaps that is why it is prohibited - because it is a primarily selfish act that masquerades as a mystical experience, but...couldn't we then say that about the meditator in his chapel or cave?  Isn't he primarily, at least at first, into it for himself, following some impulse that he can't deny?

But this is a problem that is an abstraction for most of us.  What is not is the problem of old age, both for others and for ourselves.  At the current time, my family is wrestling with what to do with our mother, who cannot care for herself.  For my wife and me, we could remortgage and not send our kid to college, which would give her the money to live at home with professional care; or we could take her in ourselves, which would mean round-the-clock vigilance, including feeding, diaper changing, bathing and so on.  Or we could do what most do - get rid of any remaining assets and give her over to government care.  This is a WWJD moment, where philosophy hits the road.  As for ourselves, what do we expect when our time comes?  Would we want our children to sacrifice everything for our last few months or years?  I do not ask this question to make an obvious answer for the first, but just to put the whole thing in a totality.  I know what we will probably do - what most everyone else does.  But is this right?  It is more complicated than what I have proposed, but some have complained that sometimes my blog is too abstract.  This is not abstract.  What is the right thing to do?  FK            
   

An essay for today under "Essays" in the web contents, called "An Adventurous Flight." 

In reading Ede Frecska, MD, from Inner Paths to Outer Space, I was struck by her obvious brilliance - "obvious" because what she said seemed so once she said it.  I have copied one quote: "It is not reality's problem, however, that it has immeasurable processes.  Rather, it is the problem of scientism, which limits nature to measurable."  This has been said in so many ways in this blog, but here it couldn't be more concise (to Cal - that's scientism vs "science," the latter a method to accumulate and analyse data which does not necessarily reject other methods).  The materialist paradigm starts from the perspective that only measurable phenomena are real - a very backward way towards knowledge.  It is, obviously, formed from a rejection of spiritual beliefs, particularly religions, that my be seen in hindsight as a rebellion against the church in the post- medieval era - which is still going on today.  And yet it has nothing to do with Reality.  It is something akin to rejecting your father's beliefs simply because your father has been a hypocrite about those beliefs - or simply because he is your father - without finding first if these beliefs have merit.  

Just as obvious, she stated that "divine encounters" have substantially altered human history.  Again, it become obvious once one thinks about it, but not before - today, we look at the development of technology as our primary mover.  But Divine Encounters?  But of course - in our own society, only think of the effects of the Bible or the Koran.  Both were inspired by divine encounters, from Abraham's conversations with God and angels, to Mary's (with angels) to Mohammed's (with God and angels and Satan).  Again, we seem to have put the horse before the cart here - the age of technology can rightly be ascribed to certain Christian beliefs (in academics, this array is called the Protestant Ethic), rather than the other way around.  

Now, it may seem paradoxical that the technological revolution that was spurred by the Protestant Ethic has led to scientism and the materialistic viewpoint in general - although the Protestants were part of a "protest" against the Catholic Church, just as materialists now protest against spirituality of any sort, so there is a sort of continuity.  But Frecska also mentions the "Archaic Revival" that is occurring among many small, usually unnoticed groups.  In this, she is referring to those attempting to access spiritual realms directly, instead of simply believing in the dogma of a religion.  This would include groups involved with ecstatic revival meetings, meditation, and other mind-altering practices or drugs.  I think I can add to this list something else as well: that the destructive side of technology is also leading to an Archaic Revival in such ideas as Deep Ecology, where our thoughts and actions are seen as part of the circle of all life - that is, that we are believed to be in essence part of the ecology of the planet.  Whether Deep Ecologists know it or not, those following this belief are moving many towards a form of pantheism; and with more thought about the connectivity of things, will move many further to pan-entheism, which is a form of true theism (pantheism is the belief that nature is alive with spirit; pan-entheism, that nature is imbued with divine energy from a divine source; and theism, a belief in God and/or gods.)  And in all this, some will (or already have) encounters Divine Beings again, to revitalize a movement towards spirit.  

Could this, then, always be the ultimate plan?  It reminds me of the use of the maze in various religions - and how it teaches us that movement is necessary, but that it always brings us back to ourselves in the end.  Dorothy had to go to Oz before returning home.  Apparently, so do we.  (oh, and thanks, Rooson, for the comment.  No question, the move from tribe to nation has caused personal and spiritual strife.  Again, can this be seen as a movement away from something that brings us back to it again, but this time with more wisdom?)  FK             

Reading from "Inner Paths to Outer Space," I was struck again and again by the concept of foreign intelligence.  I know what they (the writers in the book) are talking about, and most readers probably do, too, if they allow themselves to.  You don't have to take chemicals to find alternative reality/knowledge.  I find it comes with simple meditation and, if I loosen up, often on a good, long walk.  It is not usually spectacular.  It is often only a sudden realization that you don't really understand the reality that we are in - that the sun is out there in space, and that in that infinite space is us, here on earth, strange impossibilities... it is hard to say exactly what I mean to say, because I am talking of alternative thinking, but most will understand what I am trying to get at.  We have all been there, and that is the bridge.  One more simple step, and something else begins to open up.  Because it is not of our normal thought patterns, we cannot really describe it, but it is there, another integrated perception and one that is just as accurate - if not much, much, more so - in describing the real state of being.

That topic can never be exhausted - but another rose in regard to seeking the alternatives, and that is the topic of sexual abstinence.  This is so common to spiritual seekers that it must be explored more fully.  I touched on it before in this blog, but I had forgotten that this prohibition is not only among well-known religions as well as among American Indian groups, but also among the new religions that are arising so quickly in South America, particularly among those using "ayahuasca," a mixture of plants that produce hallucinogenic experiences.  With most of these, there is no question: the prohibition does NOT proceed from some type of Puritan morality.  Outside of preparing for ceremonies where they use ayahuasca, there is no mention of sex being immoral or debased.  No, it is just to make the experience better, safer and more enlightening.  But why?  Some traditions have it that men lose important spiritual energy when they ejaculate, but this would not apply to women.  And although one might guess that sex can be selfish and detract from the seriousness of the situation, the prohibition is against sex well before the ceremony, not immediately before (or during, of course).  To me, if sex is seen as a distraction, it would seem preferable to get it done with and out of the way a day or two before, so that there would not be an obsession with it.  But no.  

What is it?  Does sex absorb our consciousness to such a point that it must be avoided several days or even weeks before an important spiritual event?  If it does, I cannot tell, at least not in normal marital relations.  

I have to think about it more - again - for next time.  For now, I hope to have another essay for the web in the next few days.   FK        

I have been told by someone near and dear that my long, complex blogs are probably never read, so I will try to keep things shorter and sweeter (but how do you talk of the meaning of it all in a few short words?  Write a haiku?)  So, Forward:

Reading a book now, Inward Journeys  to Outer Space (by Rick Strassman,MD, et. al.) that came up with a few fascinating ideas.  The first - that the powerful hallucinogen DMT is found in most (if not all) animals, including humans.  DMT has no use-resistance either, its effects not diminished by constant exposure.  DMT is one of the few drugs that is readily transported across the blood-brain barrier directly into the brain, and it is also possible that the pineal gland creates it and/or is receptive to it.  The pineal gland has long been understood as a "gateway" inner eye that allows humans to have contact with higher gods, dimensions, or heavens (however it is put).  Descartes himself remarked on it as such.  It is situated in the center of the frontal lobe, almost exactly where the Eastern religions posit the spiritual third eye.   

Thus is the background.  What Strassman conjectures is this: that it is possible that endogenous (natural) DMT directly affects how we experience reality - that its continual release and use at a specific dose creates the reality we perceive.  By supplying additional amounts artificially, he speculates that the visions we see and the realities that we then experience are no less valid than ordinary, but rather are simply other levels whose experience is made possible by higher doses of DMT.  That is, that we live in a reality that is instantaneously multi-faceted and multi-dimensional.  This leads to speculation # 2:

That the realities experienced under high levels of DMT are just as real as this one, which would make knowledge gained from their experience genuine and usable.  Strassman even proposes that such knowledge might help solve the many problems we are encountering in our present era of this reality.  

In my book (so far unpublished) Remission, I gave to one of my characters the ability to move about the "many worlds" exactly to experience and collect knowledge from other worlds.  It was my thesis that not all knowledge from one world was applicable to this, but that some was; and that such knowledge, through practice, could be "wheedled through" the reality barrier back into ours.  In this way, fetes of apparent magic or miracles could be had, as our protagonist demonstrates in the book again and again.  

And there it was, this same idea, taken from scientific observation as something that one day might be proven true even by our dull, flat, ordinary means of testing.  Who knew?  Then again, who knows where many ideas come from?  

I think they come from different reality spectrums that are available beyond our immediate perceptions and thoughts - whole realities available at the slightest twitch of chemistry, or the slightest  wriggling of the mind.  FK     

I had not intended on writing on today's topic until a few minutes ago.  Instead, I had planned to discuss something that had come up while reading The Brothers Karamazov - a discussion in the novel about he role of the state and religion in issues of morality.  It was a nuanced discussion: the non-clerics claimed that the use of the church to punish wrongdoers would hurt the central mission of the church, which is to love and accept wrongdoers and in so doing, to change their ways by moral persuasion via conduct.  The clerics countered that they agreed with that to a point, but that beyond that point, the church would naturally reclaim the role of the state as people became more perfect through its actions.  Oddly, the latter argument dovetails with Marxist philosophy - that as the consciousness of the proletariat improves through the ownership and so on of production, that the need to have the state manage affairs would wither away (and we would all be free!).  Yes, nuanced, difficult and at times inscrutable in its tautologies.  

Then I read a political article by Bill Murchison, decrying the loss of morals in the current generations.  No, he was not talking about gay marriage or libidinous youth, but rather the ease with which people now decide what is right or wrong based on their personal assumptions of such.  He was pointing to the latest scandal in politics, this one involving the NSA's general surveillance of phone calls and e-mails, and how the scandal arose from one young "whistle blower" named Edward Snowden, comparing him to another famous leaker, Julian Assange (released records regarding military matters in the middle east).  It then struck me that the two conversations were somewhat entwined, and that both pertained to central question in this blog: that is, where does moral authority come from?  

Murchison does not directly say - he only decries the personalization of such authority.  But we have to ask: where does this individual sense of morality come from?  Is it from religion or the state, or from the rumblings of the unwritten volkheist, the spirit of the people?  

On this, the traditionalists are unswerving: moral authority can only come from divine inspiration which is then canonized in inspired religion.  But mustn't this "inspiration" first be recognized by the people?  If Jesus, to take an example, had simply been forgotten as another Jewish zealot, would his message be less true?  

Of course, that did not happen, and the traditionalists would say that it could not happen - but why, then, the rise of the "debased" religions of the pagans during that era?  Were they not, too, destined to influence the people for the hundreds of years that they were practiced and believed in?  

Again, nuance; to find that a religion is true, it must meet with something in the human that makes it ring true; wouldn't that mean that true morality, and truth itself, was at least partially present in the average person?  And if this is so, would Snowden or Assange necessarily be incorrect when they stated that they were doing the moral thing, even though it was against the laws of the state?  Assange's information led to the deaths of US service men - a wrong, clearly; but he felt that US servicemen were obeying orders that were causing the death of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Is the truth in the numbers, or is there a moral absolute to be found beneath it all?  Certainly,we cannot rely on a state to be the source of morality - but in our country, we have, in effect, a separation of church and state.  Our morality, then, is based in large on the government; and the government, at least in principle, is based on the will of the people.  Thus we go round the circle - and are no closer to the truth, at least as far as I can see.  For instance, If our government were a theocracy, basing their judgments on a religion that the majority of the people had accepted as True, would their decisions be any more correct?  Are those of the mullahs of Iran?  Are those of the ideas of Pat Robertson?  

So: does Bill Murchison have a point, or is his disgust no less based on his own personal opinion than that of Edward Snowden?  And, casting aside personal differences and the volkheist of the moment, how effective would, say, the Catholic Church now  be as the temporal ruler of the USA?  

It might be Jesus Christ himself who has the answer: render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.  That is, work on the 'right' from within, basing it on values consistent with the Golden Rule (treat others as you would have them treat yourself) as well as the knowledge, buried in us all, that what we are capable of living is vastly greater than what is Caesar's.  No, it is not ironclad; for instance, should you go to war for a cause that you consider unjust?  Should you support a government that you consider unjust?  The Hindus would clearly state "yes" - do you your duty as well as and with as much moral responsibility as you can, no matter the duty.   The Quakers would clearly state "NO" as they have in our various wars, allowing themselves to work for "our side" only in non-lethal capacities.  In this country, the individual may decide for himself what religion he might have, thus making a case that the individual is deciding just what his reaction to the outside world will  morally be. 

 I suppose in the end the morality of one's decisions can be decided by the degree to which the individual has committed himself to the ideal - as long as the nature of this ideal is not egoistic, but determined by a higher collective conscious in the form of a morally secure religion or body.  And here is where Bill Murchison's article makes the most sense.  He compares the leakers to black people in the civil - rights era south.  These people would, say, refuse to sit in the back of the bus, thus violating state law.  The differences were: for one, they  were on solid ground from their religion's viewpoint (we are all equally human) and from the "just" government's (similarly, all  men are created equal); they hurt no one in their defiance (vs.  Assange and perhaps Snowden); and they were willing to accept the consequences; unlike Assange and Snowden, they did not run for political asylum, but held out their wrists for the cuffs.  

Jesus did not come specifically for this world, but his teachings were meant to have practical applications.  One did not fight a government over profit or raw power; rather, one did do so (as did Paul and the martyrs) to uphold the right to live the inner truth - which in the case of the civil rights activists noted above, were writ in their material life as well, uniting both.  The quandary, then, is not as messy as it at first seems.  We recognize what is moral through others, and others through a recognized canon of morality; then we apply this to the outside world after seriously considering our motives - are they for a desire to express, in life, the timeless truths?  Or are they for our own aggrandizement or to revenge our own hurts and humiliations?  Certainly not cut and dried, but certainly a good start.  FK           

Cal has made a very good point (see "comments, June 7); I, too, went to the graduation of my child - excuse me, young man - this weekend, and it would be hard to say that anything more than a small minority were 'evil.'  The point must be refined; it is not so much that a majority might be evil, but that the inclination - that is, the cultural mind-set - might be situated on self-aggrandizement at the cost of spiritual considerations.  If we look at American history, we can see that the people of the earlier centuries, the 19th and the 20th, appear to have almost universally accepted the notion of a higher power.  On the other hand, we could not say that the leadership was any more moral than now - from thefts of Indian provisions to adulteration of foods to the gross excesses of the Robber Barons and the Gilded Age.  It's hard to asses the degree of rot that has crept down to the remainder of us - is it more or less than in other times?  Was piety in the past largely superficial and accounting for nothing?  We also have to asses the world at large,and we can say that  it is, without question, more involved in the world commercial enterprise.  Tibet is a prime example of a truly spiritual country that has been destroyed for profit and power.  China, India, much of Africa, Latin America - all are far more concerned with economic prosperity than they (collectively) once were.  Of course, many more people are now able to get rich, and perhaps the envy of the peasant in past times was no less than it is today.  Still...on the face of it, we are a more materialistic, spiritually callous world.  There are signs of change - what I often deal with in this blog - but are they enough?  We will return to this theme later, for sure.

But for now: Graduation.  It was horribly long and filled with bloviating on the ordinary scale - which for graduation ceremonies is extraordinary.  One speaker in particular went on for some time, making us all squirm on our hard bleacher seats (another may have been a bit lubricated, but that is not relevant here.  It kept me a little more on the edge of my seat, though, as I waited for something truly unusual which, alas, never happened.)  He did say something of note, though - that his uncle had given him much sound advice, and part of it was: never be ashamed to show your deeper, humane emotions (as opposed to anger and hate).  I nodded dumbly at this at the time, marking it as a truism that I would never comply with.  And then there were others, and songs and fuzzy loudspeaker background music, and - well, just what one would expect in small town, small bank-account America.  And then came the time: the tassels were turned on the caps, and at that, they were graduates at last, the last time my son and wife and I would ever have to flatten our butts on bleachers again in that gymnasium.  Mortar boards flew in the air, too-loud music was cranked through the inadequate speakers, and we were done.  

Surprisingly, on my way out to freedom I met my son coming  from his place among the steel fold-out chairs.  I saw only his back, and I slapped it semi-hard while adding, "so, you've done it.  Through!"  And then he turned towards me with the most unexpected, thoroughly delighted, innocent look that I could ever imagine.  Such absolute joy, unfettered by cynicism, relief or anything else.  Just joy.  And I almost lost it.  I wanted to speak, but for a few seconds, couldn't - not because of graduation, but because of that pure, innocent joy, the ego-less delight of an angel.  I immediately thought of the speaker who recommended not to hold back on our better emotions, but you know - can a man cry at a graduation?  No, and I didn't.  But that look, I hope I always retain the precision of it that I have now.  Pure joy, nothing short of love for life.  Certainly the young are still filled with it, and CAN stop this tumbling world from falling down if they let that out in life.  Just as important, it's a comfort to know that we old cynics are just as susceptible to joy and open love, even if we must come by it through others. 

I could close with a tear -jerker line, but I'll leave that to the graduation speakers.  For me, just that brief moment made all those long hours worth it (yes, kind of like life, but I promised not to end with a tear-jerker).  FK