Today a new essay, "Dinosaurs" under Essays in the website.  FK 

We were walking around The Farm the other day with one of our neighbors, and for a reason I cannot remember started talking about her mother's sickness and death.  She had gotten kidney disease, and because of this, or complications with something else, she had had both her legs amputated at the hip.  She also had to go to kidney dialysis every three days.  Our neighbor bore the brunt of her care, which pretty much meant that she was on-call most days of the week.  Her mother lasted three or so years in this condition.  

Yes, tough for all, but it gets worse: "My mother said that if she had known the pain of dialysis, she would never have started. She would feel sick to death for hours afterwards."  Her quality of life, then, was low; the expenses high; and much of her daughter's time was spent in her care. 

Now, I have made myself realize, it is our turn, the Baby Boomer's, to start feeling the pinch of old-age diseases and death.  We are an overwhelmingly large group, and we had fewer children than our parents.  We have immigration, yes; in fact, back in 1995, a congressman for the first and last time explained why the government REALLY wasn't cracking down on the flood of illegal immigrants.  "We need them for social security and medicare.  There's no other way."  But this plan does not suffice, for various reasons, and in the end, this is a pyramid scheme; at some point, the weight of overpopulation will be too great, for each generation will need MORE people to support them in their old age.  It is a real problem.

This old age business of today is the great, unmentioned elephant in the room for those of us of advancing age.  We have seen too many of our old people suffer for years as modern medicine kept them barely alive.  It has consumed much of our time and much of the national treasure.  I don't have the exact numbers, but they are something like this: the last year of a person's life (in aggregate) consumes around 90 percent of public medical funds.  We are going broke because of our medical advances, and worse, we see what those advances often bring to the very old - an agonizing period of slow death. 

Said the neighbor as she spoke of her mother, "I don't want it.  I would rather die."  That is what many of us say, but it's not true.  I will not bring others into it by name, as death is a particularly private affair, but I will bring in my father because I can clearly state that he was a braver (and better) man than I.  His last four years were ones of near constant suffering, allowed because of an advanced medical procedure, and he only came to peace in the last months of life when he lapsed into near-coma.  And yet, he fought for life until those last months.  He did not want to die, and neither did my neighbor's mother, for she could have foregone the dialysis at any time, and died.  What we say and what we really do, when it comes to death, are not the same.  

It is not cowardice, but the nature of things.  If someone held my head under water, I would fight frantically to become free, without thought of the final outcome (for instance: let's say that if I lived, I would then be tortured to death).  It appears that we cannot stop our struggle for life at any cost.  And yet, other cultures in other times show that we can, willingly.  It is not a lie that old women would wander off in the cold to die among the Eskimos.  Few men among them lived long enough to kill themselves, but if they did, they would do it, too.  I read a fascinating account by a late 19th century explorer of an old Eskimo man who held a big feast, gave and received honor to all his guests, and then hung himself in plain view.  It was standard stuff.  And then of the Kalahari bushmen, who would leave their old parents behind when one or both became too old to keep up with the larger family.  It was not done coldly, but it was done.  The author then described what they all knew would happen - after a few fights with the hyenas, they would finally succumb, to become their food.  It was the natural, "non-violent" way of death for the bushmen.

Could we change, then?  Could we save our children from the great bother and greater expense, not by hanging or hyenas, but by refusing medical care at the end of our lives?  "Necessity is the mother of invention," my teachers in high school loved to say (and we would mutter, "Necessity is a mother ......"), and perhaps the high price tag for modern medicine is that mother.  Maybe not; maybe that would coarsen our society in ways we would not like.  But it appears that something must be done.

I am reading a book now by Christopher Dickey, about the life of his famous father, James Dickey ("Deliverance"), and he gives an account of the poets Shelly and Byron swimming in a lake. Shelly goes under, and Byron waits for him - and waits and waits, until he becomes so concerned that he dives under and pulls him from the bottom.  Shelly, once on top, is upset:"In a few moments, I should have known the great secret!"  Could we ever become like this?  Not forced, but ready, and even eager, when our time comes?  Again, I know of  few accounts (there is one) where this has been so.  But it would not hurt us one bit to begin to see death as the natural and inevitable process that it is. If, as it seems, we have become more environmentally friendly and conscious, it follows that this most natural process could be drained of much of its dread.  But it cannot be a fad.  It must come from a real understanding of what we are, and what life - and death - are really all about.  Never easy, but perhaps possible, and maybe even necessary.  FK       

   

Back to the dusty cabin up north, I stepped outside to sit on the porch to get some air.  No bug problems this time - instead, it was the heat, up to 94 degrees, maybe a record for the area - and I plopped down in a cheap, creaky version of an Adirondack chair.  Doing nothing but sweating, the mind began to churn, and then it touched on the word "Adirondack," not for the mountains, but for the chair.  

The Adirondacks have had a significant impact on American lifestyles, even though I had never thought of it before.  In the 19th century, a new wave of wealthy elite bought up huge amounts of land there to have vacation paradises, made possible, I suppose, through rail road access from the big cities - mostly New York - where these rich people lived.  As part of their leisure, someone came up with the idea of this particular chair, made for one of the rich guys (again I presume).  It is a laid-back chair, so much so that one would expect to sit in it and stay sitting.  I don't particularly like them, but that is probably because I'm not rich, and don't have someone to deliver a cocktail to me on demand.  But we have two, because - well, because they were very cheap, but also it's what you bring to your leisure estate, even if it is only a one-room cabin in the pine barrens. 

And here is where the impact of those rich guys of yesteryear come in.  The rich guys did have servants; they had screens to keep off the bugs, and high ceilings indoors to keep them cool, and, most probably, large lakes before them used for swimming and boating.  But they, the lakes and the land, had always been there.  People had settled there before, and after a few generations, most went west for better climate and better soil. The Adirondacks are rocky, cold, snowy, and packed with bothersome bloodsucking bugs.  They are, for people from our culture, overall uncomfortable.  Regular people don't live in them if they don't have to.  

But the rich made something of them, and for this reason, many areas of these mountains are probably too expensive for most of us to comfortably buy for second homes - and they would be second homes, because it is hard to make a living there.  But we sigh when we think of them, those second homes.  Ah, the luxury!  The fresh air, the mountains, the lakes!  Seldom do we think of the hard reality of the place, of its discomforts and bothersome weather.  

No, the rich of yesteryear have convinced us that such places are paradises, prized and so priced that many of us cannot afford to have a place there, in this midst of wilderness from which others fled, preferring even Nebraska or Kansas.  The same can be said of,say, Aruba, or Puerto Rico, or other tropical "paradises."  There, people have sweated and died for centuries, and many who could, left.  But we have pictures in our minds of the warm beaches and the leisure - of lying back in a chair and having Margaritas delivered to us.  Pictures of us in paradise.  Pictures of us as living like the rich, if just for a moment.

So I sat thinking in my uncomfortable chair, sweating in the heat with no recourse to AC.  At least the bugs  weren't out, so bad the  last two visits that I dreaded going outside, even to the outhouse.  But I consider myself blessed.  What a great place! I think, and mean it.  No, I really mean it.  I love the place.  For its silence, for its pines, for the trails and the clear lake a half mile away, for the shores of Lake Superior not far down the road.  Love it, even as others of the past fled as soon as they could before vacations became what they are today.  Even as tourists today will often drive to town or stay in their tents on the lake shore campsites, hiding from the bugs.  Even as tourists hold their noses to stifle the stench of overheated public outhouses, feeling the grit of sand in their teeth from the morning meal, fried over an erratic fire or burner.  

The point being: have we been fooled?  Have the elite caused us to think we are having fun, even as we are miserable?  I think so - but it does not end at the myth of the Adirondack chair.  It extends, this fantasy, outward and behind, pointing back centuries to kings and queens and Romans and slaves and who knows what.  Our beliefs are like the manuscripts of old, when parchment was rare and expensive.  Then, they would scrape off old writing to begin anew, again and again, leaving faint traces of the former writing underneath. Scholars study these, and call them palimpsests, the word-of-the-year at some point in my graduate studies program, but the analogies are clear; we are not only not islands unto ourselves, but we do not even know ourselves, or where our attitudes come from.  We do not even know, at least sometimes, what our pleasures (or dislikes) are, but instead are handed them by someone or some group.   Advertisers know this and so, like the producers of the awful beer Corona, they try to build on other handed-down pleasures and tie their product to them, so that these, too, are associated with pleasures.  And it works; again and again, it works. 

What, though, would be our pleasures, our attitudes, without our cultural palimpsest?  What, if anything, is at the bottom, before the writing began?  Is it truly the philosopher's tabula rasa, the famous blank slate, or something else?  Would I, for instance, love New York City more than an Adirondack retreat if not for the myth?  Or would I, and will I, simply do as I am told by history, by culture, by family?

Vacation sites are small matters, but this thing of influence is not, not only for our political reasons, but for our ultimate truth, or truths.  Every culture is given (or, somehow makes) a myth about ultimate truths.  Sooner or later, all are co-opted somehow in the palimpsest of culture, but what of the original?  Is it made from whole cloth (that is, pure fantasy) or is it the stuff of reality altogether, packaged by and for members of our tribe?  Is it, then, the road map directing us beyond the palimpsest, which may lead us to a blank slate that is not a blank slate at all, but the beginning of something else?  

That is my guess, and it is my goal to read through the surface writing to see what is underneath, and then, finally, to see beyond the page itself, beyond the original transcription that came from beyond the page.  I believe it is possible, but very hard - as hard as convincing oneself that one isn't lucky to have a drink in one's hand on a sunny beach; as hard as it is to see how people who actually live in such a paradise, really live; and even harder, to see beyond the tin shacks of the poor of Jamaica or Trinidad to discover that some might be richer than the richest from New York, for they have found, somehow, the original traces and glimpsed beyond them, to see who they really are.   FK                   

"I have tried to learn the language of Christianity but often feel that I have made no progress at all.  I don't mean that Christianity doesn't seem to "work" for me, as if its veracity were measured by its specific utility in my own life.  I understand that my understanding must be forged and reformed within the life of God, and dogma is a means of making this happen: the ropes, clips, and to spikes whereby one descends into the abyss.  But I am also a poet, and I feel the falseness - or no, not even that, a certain inaccuracy and slippage, as if the equipment were worn and inadequate - at every step.  And that's in the best moments. In the worst, I'm simply wandering through a discount shopping mall of myth, trying to convince myself there's something worth buying." 

"Poetry has its uses for despair.  It can carve a shape for pain; it can give one's loss a form and dimension that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting.  It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture.  But poetry  is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain.  For physical pain it is, like everything else but drugs, useless."  {both quotes from My Bright Abyss - Meditation of a Modern Believer, by Christian Wiman}

I had planned to finish and publish an essay for today, but I will do that at another date because the immediacy of the book above has hit me hard.  It is by a poet who, in his late 30's and not long after marriage, discovered that he had a pernicious form of bone cancer that was not curable, but was very unpredictable - he might die in a month, he might last for decades.  With that hanging over his head for seven years, he put together this book and how it has affected his understanding of God.

He had only recently come to believe again before the diagnosis, like many of us who seek freedom from dogma in youth, but pain, horrible pain at the edge of death, has come to clarify his, and I think our, understanding of God.  And it is not tidy or pretty.  What is so wonderful about this book, although it is at times difficult to understand, is its complete honesty.  He is in no mood to fool around, to write chirpy little essays on St Francis and the birds, or of shining cities of gold lighted before his dying eyes.  No.  In his deepening belief - deepening, mind you - he finds that God is no bulwark against his pain or his fear; he finds that finding God is difficult beyond possibilities.  For God, through us, is mobile, as we are; God for us lives in our pain and our fears and our cruelties. God,for us, like Jesus, IS one of us; He suffers and doubts, is overwhelmed with terror and despair; cries again and again, to Himself, through us, through Christ, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"  

For all of us who have suffered loss or great pain or great fear or the black emptiness of doubt - and that would be most of us past a certain age - Wiman gives us a voice better than we can give to ourselves.  When one's father, once a noble man, dies in pain and fear like a frightened child, where is the glory?  When one's son is found spattered with blood at the bottom of a ravine, where are the angels?  When one's mind is chewed up by Alzheimer's or rocked to the core by mental illness, where are the sweet kisses from above?  

And yet, as Wiman knows, without sappy sentimentality and often even without hope, God is there.  It is mystery, it is a magnet, it unfolds in us, brings us forth, rolls through us like a tide that has reason beyond us, but that IS us.  Quoting from believers who have lived through the holocaust, of Saints who speak of religion as the "dry desert" that we must pass through to find our true end in death, of people who embrace the uncertainty of God because God will forever be  our uncertainty, he shocks us as a poet does.  He stymies our logic, destroys our simple images and beliefs, but then makes of them something deeper and truer still. Religion is, he says, flawed, even ridiculous, boring unto tears, and yet, even then, it is the way; in its tradition, in its words, it is the wisdom of our past, our words, the deepest we can move together within our limited time and space.  And God is unknown, unknowable, pain and cruelty as well as love and joy, all together through us and opening to - we do not know where.  But he beckons us even through our terror and pain.  He even, as Wiman tells us after all his pain and uncertainties, strengthens in him, in us.  Somehow.

It is a terrible and beautiful thing he writes.  It is death and the rolling hills and the joy of a simple touch.  It is the dishonesty of our certainties, and the honesty which must be made of them, in the end.  It is a hard thing, a thing that could not be harder. But it is his, and our, calling.  In rebellion, in pain, in anger, it is always and always will be our calling, and we only know 'why' in a far-away thing that is and always will be a mystery.  FK        

The last blog was stimulated by Michael Crichton's book State of Fear, as well as recent events highlighting the deeper suspicions many of us have on government and social institutions.  In it, I discovered what I believe to be true (writing often clarifies myself to myself) - that every human view has an agenda.  This is nothing new - feminism and post-structuralism and neo-Marxism all share this perspective; but they then go on to explore society at large with THEIR agendas.  I suppose - no, know - that I have an agenda, too.  It is not purposefully hidden in the many pages of this blog; it is, simply, that we, all human societies and their members, are saddled with a tightly-governed view of reality, and my purpose is to expose this, and attempt to find ways to enlarge this perspective.  

Often enough, almost inevitably, this brings me around to the religious sages, who, from my perspective, have been the leading minds of the world.  They, I find, get reality more than anyone else.  It is perhaps a prejudice, but I try not to deceive.  It is what I really believe, and what I generally come to write about.

And so Sunday's blog brought me to consider, once again, what Jesus (the sage I know most about) meant to convey.  Following the logic of the former blog, I surprised myself by finding that Jesus, although often called a revolutionary, was even more of a revolutionary than I had thought.   

For years, I have believed that the revolutionary aspect of Jesus came in forgiving others absolutely and unconditionally, and in casting off materialism for the benefit of others - a sort of holy communism that, in my mind, seemed nice but impossible to achieve.  But let's consider now that every society has its agenda - and now, that agenda often includes the common views of Jesus mentioned above, one that prods us to distribute the wealth and become pacifists.  That this ideal has been abused by those with an agenda is obvious, and a failing of the Jesus message.  But Sunday's discussion of the criminals in upstate New York showed me the greater and absolutely incorruptible message that I believe Jesus had.  

It is found both in how he favored the criminal class, society's outcasts, and despised the elite, the wealthy and the honored scribes and Pharisees.  While all of Jesus's parables carry multiple meanings, what struck me was this: the ways of most of the wealthy and of the religious elite were better than those of the criminals, many of whom were thieves and murderers and adulterers and prostitutes (it has been argued that many prostitutes had no other choice, but let's leave that aside here).  In the New Testament, the criminals did not even deny their criminality.  How, then, could they be more favored?

I have long thought that it is because the criminals were more humble and approachable than the wealthy and the honored, who were either stingy or conceited with their knowledge and position.  This is true.  But it is much more than that, if we recall that all societies have agendas.  The successful, then, are those who best fulfill the agenda; the criminals, those who society has cast out for NOT fulfilling the agenda.  The kernel to my new perspective is this: that not only do all societies have an agenda, but that, in this human world, none of these agendas is fully engaged with what Jesus called "the Kingdom of Heaven."  

With the perspective that we live in a fallen world separated by "sin" from God, who are the sinners?  We might say that they are those who are most successful in the ways of their societies.  It is these who are most invested, and these who are least likely to change their ways.  It is these, the best and the brightest, who are most likely to remain closed to the greater reality, God's reality, which has very little to do with humanity's preoccupations. Thus, in the greater view, both the criminals and the priests, are on the same footing.  The difference is that the elevated, the successful in the society will fight like hell to keep what they have.  The cast-offs, on the other hand, have nothing to lose.  If the hate or bitterness or "demonic possession" (the old term for psychopathology) that drove them to their crimes can be stilled, they would be the most open to the kingdom of heaven.  With a single spiritual leap, they could open themselves to another reality; while the rich and favored would find a hundred or more reasons not to give up their comfortable positions.

Thus, ultimately, the revolution of Jesus is not about being kind, or giving away your stuff; rather, it is about discarding the concerns of human society for the realm of God.  It could not be more revolutionary, making Marx's brave new world appear as only a pale cut-out.  And so, as Jesus said, the meek inherit the earth, the despised are the most beloved, and the first are last the last are first.     

It is not a new revelation, I am sure, but it has hit me directly.  It makes the wisdom of Jesus breathtaking in its scope.  Just as it makes his wisdom the enemy of ANY humanly - composed society.  That the Jesus movement came to dominate much of the world is a miracle, but it is not a miracle that his movement was quickly co-opted, for no society would promulgate its own demise.

Or would it? A discussion for another day, but we leave with this - Jesus proposed a reality above co-option, above an agenda.  It is why Christianity, as one wit said, has never been tried, at least not at the greater societal level.  In this view, from God's perspective, we are all sinners - that is, fallen from grace - and none of us can point a finger.  None of us can be holier-than-thou, not the philanthropist or the murderer.  It is casting off the blinders that saves us, and in the open air of the Kingdom, there is no agenda that we can manipulate or even understand, as we are now.  FK                             

Shifting from the heavy lifting of new-thinking philosophy, I got some good page-turning fiction from the library a few days ago - and, as usual, it has played havoc with my schedule.  The one I am reading now, State of Fear, is by Michael Crichton, one of his last (if not his last) before his death, and it is a classic pop nail - biter.  It also gives genuine, serious pause for those deeply concerned with global warming, or any other hot-button issue of the day.  What, we are forced to ask, is really behind the headlines?  Who is manipulating what we know and what we fear, and why?  

A topic all in itself, but it is about the ruined schedule that I write, and how the book managed to keep me up past 1 AM, and how, for some reason, that led me to wake up earlier than usual, enabling me to attend early morning Mass.

The Mass was normal in all respects, and the homily nothing especially new, but there was something that demanded notice. Looking around at the early morning crowd, I noticed a guy in uniform with sergeant stripes on his sleeve.  As we got up for communion, I saw that he was huge, and a policeman - and also that he had, tucked neatly at his belt, what looked like a service 45 pistol.  I had never seen one carried before at church, but in a moment of reflection, thought of the recent headlines about mass murder at Mass, and shrugged - heck, no one's going to blast up this place!  The sergeant, in line and as penitent as everyone else, looked totally human and decent.  We could count on him.

Of course many policemen are decent, regular guys, but then again, it is also true that none of them are.  Regardless of the purity of their souls, they represent the law, and as such have special powers that make many of us wary.  My encounters with them in an official capacity have always been unpleasant, although never scary - traffic tickets and stern warnings are all that I have ever walked away with.  Still, they represent a power both greater than myself, but also just as flawed.  Justice is capricious.  It is determined, like newspaper headlines, by our fears and our prejudices as much as by deep morality and real security.  For that reason, or so I believe, I found myself having more sympathy than I should for the New York State inmates who escaped last month and remained free for nearly two weeks.

One of them had killed his boss with a hammer after torturing him.  He had the look of a real thug, but surprisingly was an artist with some genuine talent.  The other was forgettable, but also deserved the life sentence that he received.  They had also deceived and heartlessly used a woman of small mental capacity, who will now end up behind bars for helping them.  Her life is in a shambles that is beyond fixing.  Still, I could not help rooting for them.  I felt akin to them in their exile, for they were taking on a power that exceeded theirs to an almost infinite degree.  The odds against them were so formidable that it came as no surprise when the artist was shot dead as he walked drunkenly with a shotgun, and the other was pried out of a ramshackle trailer and led away in chains.  End of story and absolutely predictable.

But I had wanted, in an abstract way, for them to make good on their escape, to make it to Mexico like the guy in The Shawshank Redemption. I did not think of what they would do there, but only that they would have beaten The Man.  Against all odds, they would have beaten The Man.

It is this, then, the desire to feel that one can beat the system, that runs my, and perhaps many other's, sympathy.  We feel impinged, even though we are not criminals.  We want to be able to shake off the feeling that we are always being watched, being judged, and on the edge of catastrophe - not because of nature, but because of Man.  We want to believe that there is a way out. Hollywood has made millions off of this feeling, and in the movies, the heroes beat the odds.  That it almost never happens is why Hollywood exists at all - it makes our fantasies come true, for fantasies they usually are.

All this came at Mass, where we are also exhorted to watch ourselves,.because here, too, we are  being judged.  The reminders of our imperfections make us uncomfortable, but there is a difference. Here, the big cop with the big gun was as penitential, as small and insignificant, as the rest of us.  And while religion often tries to distort the message of the prophet, the message is still there for all to see.  Ultimately, God as we understand It, is beyond the headlines of the day and even our own morality.  And oddly, it is the belief in a vastly greater power that can lead to freedom, for from that perspective, all of Man's works and all of humanity is small and frail and flawed.  

I don't know - I struggle with the loss of freedom all the time, and often resist ecclesiastical exhortations.  These, too, were written by humans, but there is something different to it.  We can go to the source if we try, and the source cannot be defiled.  Ultimately, the Source is even beyond the holy scriptures.  On the other hand, our media and cultural understandings cannot only be tinkered with, but are ALWAYS tinkered with.  It is true, then, what they say, or so I believe - that the path to enlightenment, as encumbered as it is, is the only way to freedom.  FK                      



       

Decades ago, a professor who had done fieldwork in Africa said repeatedly that "we think that our selves end at our bodies.  Maybe that is not the case; we think that magic cannot happen, but maybe that is not the case."  She said this in such a conspiratorial way that we knew she believed it, and had the secret - but she never went on to explain.  What the heck was she getting at? 

Finishing Bernardo Kastrup's Brief Peeks Beyond, promises answers to such questions, and more.  For instance (as an aside), Kastrup believes that the finding of life outside our planet would be a paradigm shift for science.  Why?  Because, if life happened by chance, as materialists say, then what are the odds that it would happen elsewhere, only by chance?  We might say that the conditions for life can exist elsewhere, and therefore would happen with the same frequency, but would it?  If it took billions of years to appear on Earth, exactly how likely would it be to happen elsewhere - unless the universe were set up to produce life?  Interestingly, he adds his own aside: if life were produced by chance, what would be the odds that this life would be self-producing, as it had to be?  For to come to life is one thing - but to come to life equipped for creating another life is another.  

Thoughts to ponder, but back to the main issue: what is the consistent reality for humans?  In other words, how malleable can human reality be?  In Kastrup's view, we are nothing but consciousness - or at least, can never know anything beyond consciousness.  How we appear physically, then, is simply how a particular perspective of consciousness makes us appear.  Our bodies are what consciousness appears to be from the outside (from consciousness's perspective).  This perspective is not Truth (the end-all), but rather a limited view of total reality that is shared by everything that appears to us in this reality.  Thus, what we see as a rock demonstrates a condition in our reality set; and what we see (really, experience) as a human also demonstrates a certain substrate of possibilities.  What is human, then, constitutes a certain set of possibilities in all humans.

And so, humans, as consciousness perceives itself, are of the same mold.  Put in group terms, what people in one culture experience should be amenable to what people in another culture experience.  

But this realization is not as easy as it looks.  Kastrup believes that our reality - that is, what separates us from the "one-ness" of the cosmic stream, is like a whirlpool in this stream.  It is of the same stuff, but localized, particularized.  We and all things in the whirlpool, then, are part of the same dream (albeit, a different sort of dream than our sleeping one) and thus are subject to the same laws of that dream.  However, Kastrup says that we as our ego - that is, what we relate to in waking life - focus only on a small substrate of the possibilities in the vortex.  Our "sub-conscious" as it is called, is really no "sub" at all, but another part of the consciousness of the vortex complex that we do not focus upon in the waking, egoistic state.  Therefore, all sorts of possibilities abound within this reality subset that no culture can ever exhaust.  What appears to be our bodies might, then, not limit our pesoanl influence on physical nature; and what seems like magic to us might just be part of the vortex that has not been focused upon in our cultural fixation (our group ego).  

Thus it is quite possible that healing techniques, for instance, might be successful if they operate on a part of us that is not visible in our egoistic state.  We have in our own science buzz terms such as "psychosomatic illness" and "the placebo effect" which really explain nothing - except that our science cannot understand the nature of the disease, or its cure.  While other people from other cultures might have a problem with imagining microbes and cellular division (and thus call our medicines magical), they might be comfortable with the concept of the psychic realm, just as their doctors  would be comfortable with manipulating it for health (or, for sorcerers, harm).

My professor never told us why she asked the questions she did, and I wonder if she really had an explanation.  But in Kastrup's view, it would be easy to see that the physical influence of the will could extend beyond the body; and that what we call magic could indeed exist.  

A fascinating book with much more than can be discussed here, from UFO's to the future of the world.  Perhaps for other blogs.  FK   

For many months now, a different view of reality has flitted about in my mind that, when put into words, sounds about as profound as a guy high on weed saying, "oh wow, man!"  Yes, I've been there.  Back in those groovy times, my hip house-mates and I would often record our break-through, brilliant highs, only to find 
later that what we thought - no, knew - were revolutionary  developments in philosophy had a lot more "and like, it's all a whole, man" phrases than deep, mind-bending gems from Kierkegaard.  And so, with time, we passed off much of it as the product of chemistry.

But really, we knew differently.  Simply put, you had to be there, because the words, with our limited abilities, could not express the realizations.  There is a whole essay to write on that alone, but here I want to focus on the author I have been reading lately who manages to do a far better job with words than my former group of college buddies and I did on one of the same topics we "realized" and that has now come to haunt me.  That is, that the brain itself is a product of consciousness, not the other way around; that is, that the bleak limitations of our material understanding of reality are only in our imaginations.  

The book is Brief Peeks Beyond by Bernardo Kastrup, and it is not an easy book to break into.  It hits hard right off, and after 50 pages, I was ready to give up when it suddenly made sense.  It is not solipsism - that is, that everything is just a made- up fantasy - because his view encompasses shared reality, and acknowledges that this reality is quite real, but only incomplete.  Rather, he goes right to the nut, stating something so simple that it often eludes us: that everything we experience is a product of consciousness. Scientists might say, "here!  Touch the brain right here and the patient will feel certain things.  Surely, the brain is the seat of consciousness!," but, as Kastrup puts it, this is only the scientist's view from the outside of the mind at work.  By touching certain nerves, they have no more a concept of the experience of that nerve touching than a nearby brick.  They are only seeing what a materially-minded person can see of consciousness.

While he uses many such examples to clarify this, one of the best involves our common experience of dreams.  In a dream, we believe we are individuals subjected to an exterior reality that binds us by the laws of nature and the action of others.  But we know on waking that this is not true - that, instead, it is our consciousness that has controlled everything from the beginning, even though we didn't know it.  As such it is analogously with waking reality.  We feel impinged by the outside, but in truth, there is no outside; rather, we have consciously (for an elusive reason) chosen the reality set that we believe impinges and informs us.

To get another take on this, Kastrup brings up the functions of memory.  Many of us believe that memory resides in discreet neurons that are accessible like office drawers, sitting ready for use.  Many cases show, however, that memory resides throughout the brain in ways that are not understood.  More importantly, however, is the question of the identity of the file user.  A neurologist might point to a certain area of the brain imaged by a CAT scan and say, "see, now he is accessing a memory!" But who, exactly, is doing the accessing?  Where is the image for the hidden hand that chooses a particular file, or memory?  

Kastrup himself uses the analogy of a stream of water, where consciousness is an eddy, or whirlpool, in the stream.  Shared reality is our collective focus on the whirlpool (the focus IS the whirlpool), but, as he puts it, "the whirlpool does not create the water.  The whirlpool is created from the water."  In other words, consciousness is a concentration on certain aspects of potentiality in the stream of being.  It is not being itself. 

Again, he does not attempt to understand the why and where-for of this focus, but such an understanding clarifies my recent "oh, wow!" moment, this time without the aid of chemicals.  That is, that our view of the brain as the end-all and be-all of consciousness is simply a misunderstanding of focus.  We "imagine" our brain (not as a hallucination, but as something only partial to the entirety) - our brain does not imagine us.  Our brain places us in this focus of reality, but once it's gone, as happens with death, the consciousness that created the brain continues on its merry way.  We do continue after death, only without the restraints of our current focus.  This understanding allows for out-of-body experiences, various forms of ESP, and even quite possibly ET's, who might just be beings in a different "whirlpool" who have accessed ours.  What is beyond the brain-mind experience, neither the author nor my nagging hint at a greater reality are ready to say.  But all of us will probably know it first hand, once we leave this eddy for the greater stream.  FK