Today, a guest essay by Cal Roeker titled Elaine's Angel, under Essays.

A quick look at Simon Weil, a French-born Jewish woman who had visitations of various kinds from Christ from her adolescence onward.  She was ecumenical and mercurial - hard to follow, with ideas popping up everywhere, some startling.  One not so strange was this: her belief that all people throughout time were invested with God's grace - and that the difference in individuals was made by their own choices, to allow this grace into their lives or not.  As part of this, she reasoned from Scripture that Christ was always (is always) and has always functioned in the world, whether under the name of Krishna or Oden; that all true religions relate to His substance and are no less than the Catholic faith in bringing God to people.  None of these ideas are new here (I will bring some more startling ones forward in future blogs), but her views were radical for her day, the 1930's and 40's.  Her commentators argue that, however radical, the Catholic church listened; in fact, she had been close friends with a priest who would become a French cardinal - and who would later become Pope Paul, the first (so I have read) to initiate Vatican II (immediately championed by Pope John after the death of Pope Paul).  Vatican II is  the ecumenical council that recognized other religions as legitimate.  

Weil would never be baptized into the Catholic church, even though they implored her to do so.  She was, she said, "working outside" the church, her rightful place, for Christ, too, had worked outside the church.  Her's was to follow this example - to speak to the "gentiles" as much as to the faithful.  

And interesting idea and an interesting, if inscrutable, woman.  The church was necessary for those with limited energy about such matters, but to those who cared, God and God in Christ were there for everyone - in many, many forms.  More later, FK        

Something occurred to me this morning that has been written of for ages - that is, it occurred to me more as an idea, unfortunately, than an actuality.  And that is, that the greatest reality we can strive for is to become the sounding board - really, the bell - of God.  That is, to be filled with its presence to such a degree that we resound with it.  In this we find ecstasy and absolute purpose in our material form.  It is, from a Madison Avenue phrase, win-win.  To become a bell, we have to be empty, but not nothing; our substance, the shell of our being, must be of solid and sound metal.  I suppose if it is not, it might crack like the Liberty Bell, but much more likely would be that the Divine Urge wouldn't chose a broken bell.  By this I do not mean the physical shell of our existence  but he strength of our determination and integrity.  Still, God might chose us anyway, broken and all.  The Liberty Bell cracked, but liberty reigned.  We celebrate it now.

On liberty and the spiritual - they are not as separate as one might think; I am reading Simon Weil now, and to her, freedom is absolutely essential for the soul, or for any real love.  But I leave her and her ideas for another day.  What is clear of both liberty and the spiritual is that both are tirelessly co-opted.  I have spoken of this before, and was reminded of it in an advertisement, where a woman says that she is "freaked out" by her husband's obsession with a certain brand of car.  "Freaked out" is a phrase invented by the LSD crowd to describe an anxious portion of an intense psychedelic trip.  It usually means that you have discovered that normal reality is a sham, and that the infinite is clamoring to strip you of everything that you thought of as yourself.  That is a freak-out, not a husband's desire for a car or any other usual commodity.  The term has been debased into meaninglessness.

So, to a degree, has freedom.  Many have talked of this, so I will only brush on it lightly by saying that freedom, as originally proposed, was a sacred thing - although it didn't have to be.  It was sacred, because if could refer to one's calling, whatever that might be.  In freedom, one is allowed to follow that calling, limited only by the minimal standards of society.  Freedom assumes that a great portion of those in society are worthy of it - that is, they will use it for their calling - and, because of that, it is worth the abuse of this freedom by those not so noble, for to have one, we will have the other.  By this, they used to say that "freedom is not license " - that is, that it has its limits not only in basic laws, but also in worthiness.  We have decided that society cannot decide what is worthy.  That might be for the better, but we should also understand that freedom is meant, at bottom, to ennoble, not to debase.  Let freedom ring!  FK                  

Today, an essay under "Essays" titled Dark Angel." It is how it sounds.  FK 

Maybe that title is unfair - this is a last comment on Dennis McKenna's book, "Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss," aptly named given some of the mind experiences encountered.  Interesting, all, but we look for gems we can sort out for our own life, and the last I will mention is a doozy - some information Dennis receives from the other side of the chemical wall that is both comforting and chilling.

It comes from a very powerful trip he has on ayahuasca at a meeting of a religious group in Brazil that uses the naturally occurring substances as a sacrament, with the belief that the plants involved connect to a larger, cosmic intelligence that can help humans in both large and small ways.  Here, he first uses the prescribed dose and gets little more than a buzz.  He then returns to the "altar" to receive another, and upon sitting down hears the message, "you wanted a strong trip?  Hang on to your seat belts!" or some such.  And away he goes.  

Dennis is a botanist, so many of his visions are not unexpected.  He becomes a water molecule and is carried along on the inside of the plant to do his part in the process of photosynthesis, something he understands very well in his rational mind.  He is then given a global view, showing how plants sustain all life on earth and as such are integral to everything - and then how humans are screwing it all up.  These insights we could also expect.  Then the clincher; as he is groveling in his feelings of guilt and despair, a voice comes back to him, telling him not to worry, adding, "you monkeys think you run the show, but you don't.  We will not LET you screw things up!"  (my paraphrase).  Ah, what a relief.

Or maybe not.  How, in fact, will the collective plant intelligence of the planet - or perhaps the collective intelligence of all life or the cosmos itself - keep us from screwing up?  What is that mechanism?  Once again, we are back to the nature of supreme cosmic intelligence and human free will.  It might seem that we, as beings who are a part of the natural cycle, will get the message and change our ways before we ruin the planet.  Our consciousness will expand to include our whole being, which would partake of the natural order and natural balance.  We could see this as a new age, the dawn of a golden era.  Many religions talk of this, and of how God manages our lives in ways that we do not know, to our benefit.  

But there are also coinciding beliefs that insist we must first sink to the depths of depravity and ruin before any of this can happen.  There are reports that God - or the cosmos - has a colder, more brutal side to its nature, just as nature as we know it on earth has its cold, brutal side; just as this greater intelligence experienced by McKenna seems to intuit - that we will not be permitted to screw things up.  This sounds like a "vengeful" god to me.  And nature has many ways to shrug off a species: disease, meteors, global climatic change, seismic chaos, overpopulation - all these can and have worked very well in cleansing the film of life on earth.  

Dennis McKenna is not religious; he would not have us pray to God or gods for help; rather, I think he would have us listen to the chastisement of the plants and reform our ways through knowledge.  That is, certainly, free will.  But can we rethink ourselves to pull back from this abyss that he mentions?  Can we overcome our naturally-given tendencies for accumulating more things and more power? 

Or, if we are not really running the show, as he puts it, do we then not have this free will?  Will we be subtly forced to change our ways, or simply annihilated?  Oddly, the world of cosmic plant intelligence is no more comforting than a god of the traditional religions; perhaps even less so, for one tells us that we are made in God's image (and thus have a strong relationship to the creator), while the other that we are essentially freeloaders in a world dominated by plants.  Could we ever expect their mercy?

Seems to me that every time an attempt to uncover eternal truth is made, at some point it gets scary - and laden with guilt.  Could it be that our new age prophets are running round a circle, or at best a spiral, bringing them back or nearly so to the starting point?  FK