Another trip to the cabin, alone, and again that surprising revelation of how important and intense are my closest relationships.  Yet, when I return, it seems like I am a soldier, just back from the war, where shockingly everyone is matter-of-fact and a little bored with life.  Can't they see?  But in a day or two, I quickly fall back to myself.  Life becomes anti-climatic.  And so the desire to move on, to live somewhere else to reclaim my ordinary life, begins to build.

We all want to grasp life by the tail and we all have our ways of doing it.  Some go deeply into religion, and that can be the best way of all, for it imparts everything with the cosmic significance it really has.  But this path can go horribly wrong.  

On the road, I listened to a book on CD, Pilgrim's Wilderness by Tom Kizzia, about a man, Papa Pilgrim (I shamefully admit to forgetting his real name, although he seldom used it) who searched desperately for the depth of his identity, which unfortunately was so clouded with narcissism and perhaps mental illness that it caused immense suffering to those around him, including his first wife who supposedly killed herself (at age 16) by placing a shotgun behind her left ear and pulling the trigger (gun owners know how difficult, if not impossible, this would be).  The girl was the daughter of John Connolly, the Texas politician who was in the car with JFK when he was assassinated.  But Papa's father, too, was rich and influential, a former football star who had spent long years as an FBI agent, and somehow this apparent homicide was quickly passed over as a suicide and the boy, the young Papa, was set free.  

But he remained troubled, obsessed with his own power and apparently the need to justify himself.  Born in 1939, he was present in San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967, taking LSD and bringing the heavens down into himself.  He met a 16 year old girl when he was in his early 30's, changed his name to Sunshine or some such, and hit the hippy trail with her before finally falling in with the Jesus Freak movement of the early 1970's, a collection largely of post- acid heads who sought guidance from a  reliable, old-time source as their minds spun wildly and frightfully in the infinite cosmos.  Most of these settled into a charismatic Christian religion, and most later became middle-age people pushing lawnmowers and helping the children with homework.  

But not Pilgrim.  Obsessed with himself, he saw in a vision that he MUST be a spiritual reincarnation of Moses, and he moved his wife and young child into the mountains of New Mexico, where they were to have a brood of 14 others.  They were thought of as Christian hippies, but they carried guns, and they stole and they poached at the direction of Papa, who thought of himself as the center at the End of the World, an Old Testament prophet with absolute authority over his wife and children and anyone who would allow his dominance.  Eventually, trouble mounted and he decided to leave.  Alaska was the best choice, he thought, for there he could live as he pleased.

It is a long story and a very, very good one, although chilling. We find that his dominance went well over the line.  His children were not schooled, so much so that they were illiterate and were dependent on the word of Papa for God's Word, and he beat them for the slightest annoyance.  His self-worship also led him to a long standing incestuous relationship with his first daughter - and eventually he was brought down, known for a while in Alaska @ 2005 as one of the state's most evil men.

And he was.  But if we were honest, we could see that his narcissism was only odd for its intensity and duration, for I believe most of us delude ourselves now and then into thinking that we, WE, are the center of the universe.  In Papa's case, he believed he was uniquely gifted with the ability to understand God's old book, which always seemed to dovetail with his own needs for dominance, and his desires.  For the rest of us, our narcissism is subdued by the need for social approbation, which, in contrast, is a good thing.  

But there is a problem with that which has become the problem of post-Industrial society, and that is: who or what informs the social norms?  Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, at this point Christianity still provides the narrative for the Western world, although it is now formally out of the hands of Church or God. Our morality is now thought to be common sense, without authority from any god, only the social norms. Thus it is in line for becoming easily rearranged - into, really, anything.  For Papa Pilgrim, he used the Old Testament for his firmament, even though for Christians, the old book was superseded by the New Testament (its own internal reformation, that many say the Koran has never had), but even then, biblical scholars could, and often did correct him, much to his fury.  

But consider a Papa Pilgrim without any tether but his own extreme narcissism; consider the scenario of such a man dominating a society in moral upheaval, one that had left its sacred roots behind.  As with the Kim family in North Korea, there would then be nothing holding him back from recreating everything social in his own image, exactly like Jehovah -  and so many despots of the last one hundred years.  

We take our heritage lightly now, and look at the Papa Pilgrims of the world as a grim reminder of how bad religion can be.  But having no sacred set of ground rules can be so much worse, setting us up for just such a narcissist and his infinite self-indulgence.  Multi-culturalism does not consider that the weakened momentum of former sacred rules of behavior can be easily transformed by the most power hungry and, from the old point of view, immoral among us.  

As many of us thought in our youth, rules are such a drag.  But there will always be amongst us some internal Lord of the Flies, or some animals who think they are more equal than others. Better the rules leavened by time, wisdom and grace than by the biggest pig on the farm.  FK

                                

"Rasmussen saw the destruction and the loss of ancient culture; most important, he saw a great loss of freedom in the new world order, in the progression from traditional societies to the market societies, and perhaps a crushing of the spirit...But what would happen when there was nowhere left to escape, when even the fringes were overtaken by civilization?   From White Eskimo by Stephen R. Bown.

In 1900 at the age of 21, Knud Rasmussen - the son of a Danish vicar with whom he had spent his first 12 years in Danish Greenland - found that school wasn't for him, and so set forth to be an adventuring free-lance writer.  After a gig writing about the Nordic Games held at that time in Stockholm, Knud was able to go north to live for a while with the Sami, or Laplanders, Scandinavia's version of the Eskimo who had lived by herding reindeer.  He had missed the freedom and joy that he had found among the Eskimos of Greenland, and hoped to recapture that time.  He did, but only in part, for (even over 100 years before our time), the industrial world was eroding the Sami way of life.  Many then worked part time for mining companies, and were experiencing the breakup of traditional communities and, as usual, the curse of distilled liquor.  The above quote summarized what Knud wrote in his articles - that modern society was swallowing traditional ways of life and, in so doing, cheapening it by an act of one-world sanitation.  Joy was being sucked up for profit; and tight-nit communities were broken, leaving the refugees to struggle in their drift into bleak loneliness.  And, just as bad to Knud, the machinery of modern expansion would someday absorb all the world, leaving nowhere else to go.

It was this exact concern that led me first to sympathize with the 'back to the land' movement in the 1960's and 70's, and then to go into Anthropology in the 80's.  I, too, along with millions of others, felt that the modern race towards world - unification under the aegis of industrial profit, was harming human beings in subtle but substantial ways.  At one point, I realized that it was, in effect, a spiritual crises - and thus my present day concerns and this blog.  

Now, as unification expands along with unprecedented migration, we find that those in the great working classes of the industrialized world are, to use an old hippie phrase, freaking out. The shock of Brexit is the latest iteration.  The people in the middle and the bottom feel that they are being ignored by the ruling classes in Brussels, and are being overwhelmed by immigration, especially by Muslims who they believe are not assimilating, but are rather changing the very core values of their country.  

Not really knowing what he was saying, a British expert explained this morning to NPR just how he and other experts had gotten the vote so wrong: (my paraphrase) - "We went with the bottom line on those who were betting on the results of the vote. The overwhelming money was on "stay," and since betters have something to lose, we believed that they had the best inside information.  What we found later (just this morning) was that the wealthy had placed large amounts on "stay" but that the less wealthy had bet much smaller amounts on "leave." We looked at the money, not the numbers of betters, which favored "leave" by 60 to 40."

What this tells us is that the people may have it right - that, of course the experts had not looked at the proper numbers, but rather, only at the money.  That's what they always do.  And that's why people are beginning to revolt against the great World Order that the leaders of western nations are so assiduously pursuing. This may lead to decreased wages, or even to greater possibilities for war, but the people - the lowly masses - are feeling that even what joy has been left after the Industrial Revolution is being taken away by a faceless bureaucracy.

Today, the Sami and the Eskimo live much more dependable lives.  Given the state of most governments under which they are found, they will probably never be left to starve to death, as often happened in the old days of tradition.  Yet I do not know anyone with any familiarity with these peoples who will tell you that, by in large, they are better off today than before.  Alcoholism and suicide are out of control, and few have found themselves on the comfortable side of the social power structures.  The story speaks not only to Native Americans in general, but also to all people, including those we refer to as "westerners."  What, exactly, is happening?  Towards what frightening world are we hurtling?

And so the greatest question of our era remains.  This does not involve "if" we are going towards greater world unity - even with Brexit, that will continue- but "how" we are going, and to what end.  After decades of thinking about this, and seeing the results of our modern pull, I can only say that the "how" and "towards what" MUST be governed by a tremendous rise in spiritual awareness, which is exactly what the modern pull has been destroying.  While it is probable that political solutions such as Brexit will do little to change the overall trajectory, we can hope - and pray - for a greater awareness, not only of cosmic unity, but of the joy that much of modernity has destroyed in favor of uniform rationalization to the deprecation of everything else.

Still, that is only an ephemeral hope.  It may be that political solutions are the only way to go, disturbing as that might be.  But one thing I feel is certain: "Spirit" will not allow us to lay dormant and half-dead in a world unified by profit and rationalization forever.  It will find a way to break free, for in it lies our core.  That we do it ourselves, in personal change, before large-scale and perhaps destructive solutions are inevitable, is the only hope we may have to avoid the consequences of personal and cultural suppression.  In the end, it is up to us all to decide how we solve our greatest problems by realizing, as  Rasmussen did, that they ultimately are problems centered on spirit.  FK  

            

Not long ago I read of a man who was a Theosophist, as well as a South American dictator (note: Hitler was also a Theosophist, although theosophy has nothing to do with violence or hate - very much the reverse, in fact) who had a deserved reputation for killing anyone who got in his way.  Commenting on this, he said, "It is much worse to kill an ant than a human.  An ant is part of the hive and will never live again as an individual.  A human is a soul and will live forever.  In killing him, I am only temporarily changing his destiny." Needless to say (I hope), he did not change my opinion of him as a ruthless - and wrong - dictator.  

I thought of this comment last night while reading Rosemary
Altea's The Pride of the Spirit (or so I translate it from the Spanish, El Orgullo del Espiritu).  Altea is a spiritual healer and a medium - someone who talks to the dead through possession - who herself has a guiding spirit who she calls Gray Eagle, who was on earth an Apache wise man.  In one of her final chapters, she asked Gray Eagle a variety of questions about the nature of the cosmos and morality, and summed up his view of the latter in one word - "tolerance."  Immediately I recoiled, as this has become a catch-all word for the politically correct, but in truth she was sincere and overall non-cloying about it.  Still... Admitting that this would be controversial and even repel some of her readers, she delved into some socially sensitive areas, including one of the thorniest - abortion.  On this, she repeated the word "tolerance" along with what Gray Eagle said.  For one, he told her to follow the laws of society, and if one found them unjust, to peacefully try to change them.  And two: to understand that we do not know the ways of God.  Sometimes, for instance, a soul only wants to experience the time in the womb and does not expect to be born.  In any case, this soul will not be killed by abortion, but will live on in another way, forever.  It is thus not for us to judge.  

Altea quotes Jesus's famous line, "He who has not sinned throw the first stone," to buttress her argument, but still - as always with the word "tolerance" - this whole line of rationality is easily challenged.  Without taking sides, but only sticking to logic, we might ask of abortion: yes, maybe the soul does want to die, but the child has no say with the abortion.  The mother decides. What of tolerance then?  Should not the mother tolerate the life of a child who is growing and clearly will continue to grow without interference?  Is it for her to decide for the life of the soul?  

This is why, In the abortion debate, the sticking point has always been, "when is a fetus a human being?," for the killing of another human being for no clear reason of self defense is indefensible to most senses of reality.  But what, then, of tolerance?  For, if we are tolerant, does that South American dictator have a good point?  Even without regard to the existence of a soul, isn't it his destiny to conquer and kill?  Who are WE to moralize about that, when we are clearly taking away this man's destiny by denying him the right to dominate.  

We might instead say, "live and let live," and so challenge the dictator, but with abortion, we again have to ask the uncomfortable question of when a soul becomes a human being. Live and let live, after all,means exactly that. But in "Live and let live, " we also run up against objections to both libertarian philosophy and political correctness.  With the former, what of the man who's industry pollutes a river for others?  Thornier still, what if that man wants to "marry" several underage girls, who acquiesce due to their upbringing (as in several African tribes, or in the splinter Mormon groups)?  Or what about the heroin dealer, whose young customers may not know the dangers, and whose older ones will become a burden to society?  And with the latter, the politically correct, why are they so concerned with someone's desire to unfurl a Confederate flag? How can they demonize a race of people, most of whom have always minded their own business? And, going back a bit, how can they demonize people who sincerely believe that fetuses are humans, and so are fighting to save lives?  

Rosemay Altea is, as said, sincere, and often questions her own sense of moral superiority.  Still, she does not add to the long-held debate raised by Jesus twenty centuries ago: "He who is free of sin throw the first stone."  It seems clear to me, in context, that Jesus was not being "tolerant" in our sense then, for he understood very clearly the difference between right and wrong - look at his scathing comments on the Pharisees.  Rather, he was recognizing that all of us stray from the path - that in fact, the very nature of our concept of life is clouded by an imperfect vision that can be called "sin."  Tolerance is then meant to NOT exclude others from the human race because of bad actions in the past, but to try to bring them into the fold as fellow souls.  "Love" should prevail, not condemnation, but this in no way frees people from a certain right path.  Exactly what that is was somewhat obscured by Jesus himself when he violated many of the old Jewish laws, but we know that it begins with love that is extended outward.  That brings in the sinner from the cold, but still does not negate the sin.  We might then understand the "law" to be: love God with all your heart, and love others as one loves oneself, as Jesus said.  Altea would agree, I know, but does the aborting mother love her unborn child with all her heart? Does the dictator love his victims?  Do the politically correct love the man with the Confederate Flag, and does that man love others as he waves it about?  

Tolerance has its limits, set by love deepest from the heart. Otherwise, we might say that anything goes, and in the end, almost no one would be happy with that.  FK          

      
    

At one point years ago I was forced to study linguistics, which should be interesting, but which was so wound up with academic-speak and circular thought that it was downright painful.  At that time - the mid 80's - Noam Chompsky was the undisputed intellectual giant of this field, waving his god-like hand from the ivory tower of the social science dpt. of MIT.  No one was more obscure than he, but he did have a cool objective - to find the root language of all humans in the organic brain (a linguistic approach to structuralism, for you anthro wonks out there).  I admit that I could never fully understand him, but I did have an experience where I think I found that language.  I had just gotten back from Mexico and was suffering from severe stomach troubles, so much so that I would wake up groaning in the middle of the night.  At one point, I recall talking in a dream with perfect clarity; as the pain brought me to, I continued speaking, but the language I was using gradually became gibberish to my waking consciousness.  Yet it had been fluent and coherent at unconscious level.  Could I have found that hidden universal language out of bad stomach pains?

Putting that aside, I have since continued to read Chompsky whenever he comes up in the news, and recently read an interview with him from some international media source.  It was about his theory of a neo-liberal conspiracy to control all the moneys of the world by a cabal of wealthy elites in cahoots with politicians, and it lumped Obama right there with Thatcher and Reagan.  It all was presented with such certainty, with Israel as the brain and the (genocidal) US as the brawn, collaborated by a hodgepodge of historical facts put together just-so to make it all seem tangible.

Really, it was no more tangible than his works on linguistics had been to me decades before, and even less believable.  And it certainly wasn't new - there have been conspiracy theories about world-wide cabals since at least the mid 19th century.  But, as with linguistics, Chompsky made me think.  Given a look at the world at present, it certainly seems that we have a united direction, one that is aiming at greater and greater integration both on the monetary and the cultural levels.  And certainly, big multinationals are pulling a lot of strings for profit, and a lot of strings for politicians who are dependent on their campaign contributions, and maybe a bit more.  However, I cannot believe that this big money forms a solid cartel, for the simple reason that each leader or group from these companies is looking out for its own self interests. Even OPEC, a self-proclaimed  cartel, often can't get its act together because one or more nations will split from the others the minute they think their specific interests are compromised.  And so I have to say to Chompsky - no, I don't think so.

But I also have to add that Chompsky, in his study of linguistics, hit upon the right idea for his "neo-liberal cartel."  The holy sages of the past understood it well - that we are all connected, both as an entire cosmos, but more specifically as a species.  That is, what once made that primordial language that Chompsky was looking for (whether through biology or archetypes or a combination of the two) also has made human thought in general.  And while we once played out our cultural struggles in apparent isolation from many other cultures, we now simply cannot. However group- thought worked in the past, those times of subtlety are over.  We now, for better or worse, have an informed world-wide group mind.  But it is not a cartel.  It is not run by worldly logic or wholly selfish design.  It is rather something akin to the salmon migration: while out at sea, each fish seems to live separately; but when the time comes, they all seek their place of birth to breed and die, in unison.  The group mind for them, and I think for us, has been at work all along, and for us, it is only now becoming apparent.    

But what it is is much deeper, much more profound than Chompsky's materialistic explanation of the neo- liberal conspiracy.  We are, I think, coming home like the salmon.  I can and often do speculate as to the reason and the results, but of course I do not really know at a discursive level.  And yet, all of us know what is happening at the deeper level, just as we understand the universal language that under girds all others.  I do think it is knowable to some degree on the superficial level, and it is worth the search to find that translation from the unconscious to the conscious, to help tweak the better part of it along its way and subdue the worst, if there is one or the other.  

Many have grasped this movement in their unconscious and have attempted to translate it already: from the Age of Aquarius gurus to Doomsday sayers, many know that something really, really big is happening.  Many know that there is order beneath our separate ways, but no one really knows where it will lead. Maybe it is contingent to some extent on our conscious efforts; that good will and spirituality will tilt it in the direction that we would like (for we all know that bad will and technology will not lead to any good). It seems we have the  freewill that the salmon were not given because they do not need it.  With our gifts as humans, apparently we do - and with it, should not accord with Chompsky's dark vision, but rather should will for one and all on a far brighter one.  FK       
 

The last 10 days have been ones of exploration and anxiety and wonder.  Packing up the pop-up camper and the one-eyed dog, we headed back east, driving the northern routes through Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania for the first time in 17 years, the last being on our move out from Connecticut to Wisconsin.  It is an odd direction for Americans - or at least me - to move. Americans go West for adventure and camping.  The land opens up to big skies and then to big mountains and vast scenery. Going east, the land tightens as smaller mountains and the increasing lushness of forests hedge one in.  But until Springfield, Massachusetts, all went shockingly well.  We camped in Ohio and twice in NY state, and the campsites were all good and uncrowded.  Poison Ivy made its first appearance, but we knew poison ivy.  We also knew the closeness of the damp forests, which had so long been my home, and marveled at the miles and miles of woods, of uncut swaths that ran up and over mountain after mountain. We even stopped at Niagara Falls and were not disturbed by the commercialism.  As the Niagara River increased its downward trajectory, it fell with awesome power, at times right below our feet.  This, too, was not too crowded.  The weather was always good in day, and when rain fell at night on the canvass of the pop-up, it served as a lullaby.    

As we hit I -91 on our last leg into CT., the road became a moving parking lot, the power and ceaselessness comparable to the Falls, and at one point, a car careened in front of us and hit the concrete divider in the left lane, blowing out tires and scrapping the sides before it careened back and off an exit.  We were brought near death, but we escaped and finally rolled into my brother's place in CT, where we had all grown up.  Here, we were nearer death than before, because that is what the trip was all about.  

It was about two deaths, really: one, to release my mother's ashes in Long Island Sound where she had grown up, and another to honor the death of our long-time friend Bill, who had died just two months earlier at the age of 61.  That Saturday evening, we let her remains go in the sound, the cloud they made shocking to me.  So much had been left!  I had thought there would be a little pile of dark ash, but instead there were several pounds of white pebbles and lumps which had once been bone, and they lingered in the sound as if unwilling to finally let go. Go, go! I urged.  The remains reminded me too much off what really had happened this side of the spiritual divide, of the reality of death and its gross finality, leaving me confused and conflicted. Death is not only spiritual for us, but a reminder of how fragile our bodies and our lives really are.  

Next day was for Bill, beginning at noon.  In honor of Bill, his widow had brought a boat load of good beer, and I dove into it with a little too much relish at first.  Along with my younger brother who was throwing the bash, I was nervous about the people I would meet, many for the first time in 40 years.  Bill had linked us all from the heady days of my brother's bands, where Bill was always present, to my old high school crowd, many who had been lost to time and circumstance so long ago.  And boy, did they come.  For each, time flashed back to when I had last seen them, to what they were and what I was then - and was no longer.  One guy said, "That's your wife?  I wouldn't have believed you would ever marry or stay married.  You were such a rambling guy! (read, unreliable bum.)  And such it was throughout, all of us clicking back to when we had last seen each other, then clicking forward to access just who and what was before us.  None of us were the same, and not just in appearance.  Life had changed us all, some for better, some (apparently) for worse, but most for better; for friendlier and safer and less competitive.  My  brother had actually tensed waiting for a certain guy and his brother who had left one of his bands after physical blows.  He had been a tough guy, a roofer who was hard as nails sober and a real danger after drinking.  But he had now been changed into a harmless old man who stuck to drinking seltzer water.  It was all so different.

And everywhere, amid the smiles and laughs and memories, was the presence of death.  Our changes would be nothing compared to what was to come, to what had already come to Bill. When the crowd was nearly gone 6 hours later, Bill's widow hugged me as if for dear life and cried - and cried and cried.  I did not know what to do but feel the emptiness and the disbelief and the loneliness that death brings.  It had been there with my mother the night before, and now clung to me in the form of a distraught, traumatized woman.  Death - the greatest and harshest teacher of any life, no matter how great or harsh it had been.  We had been made near-equal with age, and now stood before the greatest equalizer of them all; all of us together, and most certainly for the last time, because next time, many of us would no longer walk the fields and woods anywhere ever again.

The ride back was good, disbelief leveling off as the road brought us west again, back to great open farmland and straight roads. But the snapshots, the jolts and changes of time, clung for longer than I would have thought.  It is so clear that it is all a dream, a beautiful and harsh dream, that one day we simply wake from, step out of.  One day, a tough guy; another a gentle old man; and another, gone, gone, leaving someone to cry and others to stand before a truth that we simply cannot bear.  FK         

"The individual self is nothing else in essence than universal soul...Human beings all are as head, trunk and legs unto one another." (Hindu scripture, taken from Brian Weiss).  

St Paul also spoke of the Christian community as being 'one being in Christ,' the head, trunk, legs and so on.  And of course, John Dunn in his famous poem tells us that no man is an island - that whatever happens to one happens to another.  This means that we are all hurt by the hurt given and felt by others - but also are helped by the love and grace received and given by others.   

It has often been said that the mystic in his little cabin, or the monk in his monastery, (if he is genuine) has greater positive effect on human kind than do those who physically help others. This does not make  sense until one understands that there is only one body of humanity, and that the opening up to spirit of one opens all to some degree to spirit.  Since we are talking of spiritual things, then the monk indeed would have greater effect on our lives than the man passing out bread.  It is only in this way that we can understand this, but then again, that has always been the spiritual perspective, one that has been for and from all ages.  It is part of that greater truth that so many seek, but fail to find because it is not of our smaller perspective.  And that is the desert that we must all cross.  FK

[Note: I will be taking a holiday from this blog for the next week or two.  Summer, its fine breeze and living light, is at last here!]    

 "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."  Most of us have heard that one, and we can throw it around or at each other as we please.  What is a little knowledge?  When do we know enough to act responsibly?  Recently, we have heard a lot about Hiroshima and the hotly debated question: did it save lives?  Was it immoral and racist?  Was it only the opening salvo to eventual world destruction?  And, most relevant here: was it too much technological knowledge for a species with too little moral knowledge?  

As with many things, only time will tell.  But what of spiritual knowledge?  Do we or anyone have enough to judge anyone else?  

As I continue (sometimes reluctantly) with a program of Catholic learning, this last constantly comes up.  I happen to have a fairly large knowledge about religions both past and present which continually dogs me.  I know enough to question the reality of each, yet not enough to fully believe in any.  One might say I have too much of too little for my own good.  My assessments of two phenomena bring this to mind.  

One: I have nearly finished another book by Brian Weiss, Messages from the Masters, which I bought because I am familiar with his work and wanted another positive high - which he again delivered.  Weiss is an Ivy- educated psychiatrist who became fascinated, and then transformed, by revelations of past lives through patients who he was treating with hypnosis.  The links between past lives as remembered and their current problems were so precise that the correlation was beyond doubt. While these might have been merely transference of real problems to the symbolic (the past lives), not so with other information he received, which told of real villages and real people from other times, and also gave information which only those "other lives" could have known.  The phenomena was and is very real.  

And more: Weiss began to get messages about and also directly from those helpful beings on another plane who were often called by his patients "the masters."  They dropped in very precise information about what life is and is about.  It is about perfection through trial and error through many lives, as many as we need to get the idea that Love is the Answer - and of course, to determine exactly what love is.  We further learn that the whole of reality is run on love, and that we are, as souls, immortal.  We are told to live courageously for the right, for we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.  We are told that "you can't take it with you," that is, that success and fame and money and all that are not transportable - only relationships are, and in that, love should always be the goal.  We are told that the Masters serve us in love, and that we are helped to choose  our next lives with them to work out our problems.  We are told that nothing is an accident; that although we have free will, the overall directions of our lives are pre-determined (that is, what situations we will encounter) , as well as the people we will meet, who are there to either help us or give us an opportunity to change our ways for the better.  

Most of this I want to believe; moreover, I can confirm through my own experiences that a higher intelligence does interact with us and makes its presence conscious at times.  Unfortunately, it all sounds too good to be true.  What about the Greek belief in that sorry, fading land of the dead?  And what about the hell that awaits many people of Christian belief, as well as many others from current and former spiritual beliefs (such as Tibetan Buddhists or the Vikings of the past).  Is this only or largely wish-fulfillment?  Or do I have too much of too little knowledge to make a judgement?  

Two: In our Catholic workshop, we filled out a questionnaire which asked questions about our first experiences of God, and of times we could see God working in our lives.  I had a head start on this, having written many essays about this before, but still, some questions revealed a lot.  Who had helped along the way?  I had thought few, but then realized my mother had had tremendous influence.  

In any case, we ALL were able to realize that God (or angels or what have you) has indeed come into our lives to help change our destinies for the better, although we seldom knew it at the time (try it, using whatever name you have for The Force, and you will probably discover the same).  In this, God comes forth in the same role as the masters - as a loving force guiding us towards our greatest ends - if we allow it.  Suffering is explained as well, in the same way; and hell - that is now seen as the persistent denial of God's love rather than an eternal and external punishment, thus completing the circle: Weiss and the pope, in the long run, have much more in common that not.

Still, I have too much of too little.  What of that awful end that the Vikings believed?  And the near eternal reincarnation of the Buddhists, equivalent to the old Christian concept of hell?

Worse, as a Christian, my doubts about Jesus as Christ have continued.  A few blogs ago, I found I had no love of Jesus.  He was, to me, a caring philosopher of the past who MIGHT have been the special creation of God - I have no desire to doubt it - but still, where was the love?  

Oddly, in last nights meeting, a glimmer of knowledge came to me, not as a revelation, but as just that, a glimmer.  What began to dawn on me was that I was thinking of Jesus all wrong.  We are told that he was the link of Man to God - that God was too beyond us for all but the greatest of saints to grasp - but that Jesus was that hand of God that we could hold.  Could it be then that Jesus is the love which one feels in times of revelation? Could it be that what I think of as God - or as Masters - was also Jesus, the spirit of God brought to Man?  Could it be that I have loved Jesus all along, but did not know it?  

It seems that we can be too clever to be smart.  It seems that I have been missing the point all along.  This might be the same with knowledge as well: that there is never "too much" or "too little" knowledge.  Rather, there is either a  lot of noise which poses for knowledge, or real knowledge, which takes no great studies to find at all.  Real knowledge - the kind that is just enough - is like finding of the pot of gold.  Clues may run wild, but don't mistake the clues for the actual gold, which is all there in that one pot.  One may call it what one wishes, but it amounts to the same.  We know it when we find that, instead of being left with more clues, we are able to stay in one place and build on what we found.  That is the cornerstone, what is strong enough to build on.  The pot of gold, that cornerstone to begin with, has long been known, from Jesus to Brian Weiss:  it is love itself, and that is where the greatest inquiry begins.  FK