​I first opened its pages on a dark evening in a campground in the Pennsylvanian hills as it rained buckets, the sound so intense on the canvass roof that talking had to be done in shouts.  The first chapter I could not believe – it was Dr. Seuss mixed with Dark Shadows.  By chapter two, it had added Playboy to its background, but with a quiet woman’s touch, not just sensual but smoothly, artistically pornographic.  By chapter three I had to decide – should I continue with this oddity?  The erotica was enticing, but the weirdness…was it too much? 
 
The book, Palimpsest, was written by a young author, Catherynne M. Valente, who well represented her age group in the novelist set.  I have ventured into new authors before – the cutting edge sort – and found them well-done but too odd, too straining to be something unique, and this book certainly fit that bill.  But maybe not.  With its high poetic vibration, it seems that it might be something more.  On page 61 now, I will continue to read, and if it really is “something more,” I will offer more comment on it in another blog.
 
Or maybe not.  Maybe this introduction is enough, for I have already referred to a “something more” which is at the crux of this book’s worth.  It is so ephemeral, this something more, that it can be referred to with many words – magical might be the best – but I will be more scientific, or really alchemical, in my definition, and call it “astral,” where its quality, its rhythm and its words bring one, ready or not, into another plane of thought and feeling, a place where nothing changes, and yet all becomes spiritually charged and fundamentally different.
 
Children’s books are generally of this sort, but so simple they do not really speak to adults.  Nor do they take children to another astral plane, for children are already in that other plane.  Rather, they speak to them in their own language, one that we find cutely, but not alchemically, enchanting.  But there are the others meant for both children and adults.  The Mary Poppins books were the first that I can recall, books which both speak to children and transport adults into other possibilities and other openings in reality - if one is willing.
 
Some are not willing, as can be seen in the latest film on the author, P.L. Traverse, which is centered on her involvement with Walt Disney and the making of the musical in the early 60’s with Julie Andrews.  For Tom Hanks and the author of the book from which this movie is adopted, Traverse’s Mary Poppin’s theme is a fantasy about her father, a tragic figure from her youth in Australia.  While there may be something to this, it is a very little something.  Rather, in full life Traverse was a member of the Theosophical Society when such things weren’t as popular as today, and her primary concern was for the raising of consciousness so that we might see into the unseen.  Her efforts through her books were so effective that I would call her a true magician of the old variety, where magic, science and religion are considered parts of the same coin.  Her works are of Merlin proportions.  The same can be said for another child’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, as well as my youthful favorites, the books of Carlos Castaneda. 
 
The reader can probably add many more.  The point is, that such books make of the ordinary an enchanted land.  I do not include many of the fantasy books here, for they may speak of enchanted lands without creating an enchanted reality for us.  The authors I speak of are or were true alchemists.  A psychologist might call these writings dissociative, as they separate us from ordinary reality, and might tell us as well that such thinking is unhealthy.  There is good reason for believing this.  Many of the “wizards” of which I write did have severe mental problems – Carlos Castaneda, for example, slipped into a lost world by the time of his death.  Closer to home, I knew a transpersonal psychologist and New Age priest, the man who married my older brother to his second wife, some years ago.  He lived in a beautiful home in the country surrounded by trimmed willows and flowers and garden pools that made the place into an exotic paradise.  By all accounts, this guy was living on another astral plateau.  It was a shock to hear that he had killed himself just three years after the wedding.
 
It should not be a shock.  It is known by the experts in spiritual flight – especially those gurus of India who have become so familiar to us – that the astral world is no joke.  The enticements are no less filled with thorns than those of this world.  We are told by the enlightened that the astral planes are no more about true heaven – about life with the absolute – than is our own world, but there is a difference.  In the astral planes we are enticed by something of a finer quality, something that is not God, but that points to God, or at least to something beyond the material sphere.  More than that, though - these other worlds tell us that there ARE other worlds, and that ours is only one of many.  These authors show us that what we have here is not all there is.  And with this knowledge, we no longer must be bound by earth; with this knowledge we can press on to something greater, or at least to something more.
 
Those of the true faiths might be concerned here with Idolatry and illusion, but I believe these are not our main problems today.  Rather, it is our inability to even have idolatry or illusions.  It seems that for many now, life is dead, flat, fallen to the limited vision that we have of ourselves, which prove to be empty vessels indeed.  Perhaps at one time, the religious authorities would have brought Traverse before the Inquisition – and most certainly, they would have burned that wizard, Carlos Castaneda, at the stake.  But the hell of our times is much deeper.  Our hell is that we lack a true vision of anything beyond the conventional empire of empirical world culture.   It may be that the alchemists at long last have come to take their place as our saviors, or at least as our life rafts that may bring us to another island, where we can then think again of home.
 
 
I hope young Valente is another alchemist, a spark of light coming into our void.  I will read on.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​It is always an adventure on the road, and this last trip through the east to Connecticut was no exception.  A blow-out tire on the pop-up camper in Ohio led us to change to the spare with trucks whizzing past us only feet away in the tightness of a work zone, and on the way back, a recent accident closed our exit to a campsite in Indiana, forcing us to put on another 60 miles to someplace new.  The latter was instructive, for I felt that this would lead to something better for us, and in did, to a beautiful state park, in spite of my ill temper. 
 
For road travel adventure, though, the best for me are the books on CD’s if they are good, and this latest for our way back was very good. 
 
As with another a month or so ago, this one dealt with autism, which has drawn me for reasons both known and unknown, pulling me into this epidemic of mind disaster much the same way the accident in Indiana led me to a better campsite, for autism seems to be leading me somewhere.  On this last trip, I got a clue.  Perhaps, like much of what we think about autism, this clue is only an anomaly, but perhaps not.  If I am right, it is big news indeed.
 
The book is The Spark (a mother’s story of nurturing genius) by Kristine Barnett, a tale of frustration and tragedy that led Barnett to an amazing discovery.  It begins as this over-achieving woman finds that her first child, after the first year and a half, is suddenly falling behind the classic milestones of development.  He begins to talk less, then not at all; his skills at blocks and so on begin to fail; and he no longer is interested in cuddling or having emotional contact whatsoever.  She brings in experts and chews her nails, hoping her  boy is not what she fears, only to find that he is – he is pronounced by the experts as having Asperger’s, a mild form of autism.  While she finds some relief from this, she is beaten down again: his Asperger’s will regress until he totally disappears from the human world into deep autism.  She is told that he will be lucky to be able to tie his own shoes by the time he is 16.
 
Recovering from her shock, she remains true to form and dives in to all manners of therapy until the early developmental money from the state runs out.  Then she takes over herself, spending every minute extra of her busy, busy day doing what the experts were doing – going over rote skills again and again in an attempt to bring the child towards some low level of normal achievement.  But nothing works.  Her son continues to, as she says, disappear. 
 
Then she has a brainstorm: what if there really was a full person “in there” as she has continued to suspect?  What if the clue to developing that child to his fullest would be reached not by making him an incomplete replica of the normal, but more fully himself?  And what if, by doing that, she is able to connect with that person within, and bring him out into the society of people around him? 
 
She tries and is successful beyond her wildest imaginings.   Because her son was interested in astronomy books (for reasons she did not understand), one day she brings him to a planetarium for an advertised chance to look at Mars through a telescope.  When she gets there with tickets bought, she finds that they first must sit with a group of college students in a lecture.  She almost leaves.  But her son is adamant about staying, and even though she is bored by the lecture, he seems to be interested. Very interested.  By the end, this 3 year old boy is conversing with the lecturer, able to answer questions that none of the college students can.  He talks fully and in a relaxed manner, and everyone else there recognizes his specialness.  Here she comes to learn that her child is not only different but a genius. 
 
She starts an after-daycare school for other autistic children (she runs the daycare as her job) with this insight, and is fully rewarded: each of the autistic kids has at least one specialty in which they are fully engrossed.   She learns that to reach them, she must enter into that field of interest.  Once contacted on that level, she is able to draw them out into the shared social world.  She finds that, all along, the kids were not interested in the things of the normal world, and so withdrew.  But they had not disappeared to themselves within – only to those without. 
 
In this, she finds that the experts had gotten it all wrong – that they had remained glued to their own world and had only tried to bring the autistic kids out to a place where they could never fully perform.  She finds that her own genius son would have been ruined if she had continued the professional route.   All this, I, in reading (hearing) this, had already understood.  But something more stood out to me as a possibility for the first time.
 
Autism: those given that label have grown many fold in the past 30 years for reasons not fully understood.  Perhaps it is because women are having children later, or because of environmental poisons, or simply because the specialists are more prone to label odd kids with this diagnosis.  Of the latter, this may be so because our society is much more conformist than it used to be.  This was understood in the 19th and early 20th century when people saw how individualist farmers now had to conform to certain patterns of behavior for the modern workplace, but we have forgotten this in our century and have confused individualism for tattoos and certain forms of sexual behavior.  In fact, a famer could much more easily be “weird” back on his own forty acres in the old days than, say, at the office of Clinger, Clinger and Chaser nowadays.   But there might be much more.  This might instead be an evolutionary trend.
 
Evolutionists tell us that with every change in a species that is beneficial, there is usually the loss of some other trait that is not as fundamental for survival.  We humans, for instance, with our greater cognitive skills, were able to create effective weapons, but in the process lost much of our speed and strength.  These would be cool to have, yes, but because they are no longer necessary, time has taken them from us. 
 
So it might work with autism.  Thanks to people like Barnett who have truly been able to step inside the mind of those with autism, we have come to understand that those with autism are specialists, able to do absolutely amazing things with their particular abilities.  But this comes at the cost of over-all general fitness on both the physical and social levels.  While it is true that they are able to come back into the normal fold somewhat once their ability is recognized and appreciated by the outside world, most will never have that generalist ability for contemplating the absurd or socializing, a complex skill in itself.  
 
These traits, however, are becoming less and less important.  We have become so interconnected and specialized in our daily work world that our ability to generalize might be seen as a handicap.  We will, after all, never be as bright mathematically as Barnett’s son, even if we get each other’s jokes.  As our individualism is parred down for the interconnected workplace, our social complexities might become superfluous.  What if each of us instead were born focused on a few particular specialties to the near-exclusion of others?  We would be geniuses of a sort in that specialty, and if we were all connected as it looks like we soon will be, we would function infinitely better as a collective.
 
This would look much like Arthur Clark’s Childhood’s End, where the minds of most of the world’s children became merged into one great mass through mental telepathy, after which they “wooshed” off the world to some greater destination.  The difference here is that this “telepathy,” at least at first, would be provided by electronic communications.  But the result would be the same; we would have an infinitely more advanced world where the collective genius would far exceed the efforts of the individuals as we now have.
 
Yes, Childhood’s End might be where we are headed, but in a way most of us never thought.  It could be right before us in the onrush of autism, which might soon bring us to Clark’s thought-collective.  This idea might repulse us, but hunters and gatherers were often repulsed by civilization, which was certain to dominate the world because of its greater collective energy. 
 
This could be humanity’s great breakthrough, brought to us by a curious and unexpected form of evolution that one might say is both naturally and divinely directed - as I believe evolution has always been.  And only God knows where it will bring us in the distant future.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Just a note to readers that The Quiet Voice will be taking a vacation from writing for the next few weeks.  To resume towards the end of the month.  Talkin' to ya then, FK

​Going over the collection of my essays that are soon to be published, I was struck by a constant theme that I had not been totally aware of: that we live our lives as if asleep.  We are buffeted by events that rock our world just as dreams do in sleep, even though dreams, as far as our current thought goes, are entirely created by us.  I do not extend this to a belief that we can manipulate life as we should be able to manipulate dreams, but more simply that we are largely unaware of the nature of the world in which we are a part.  We don’t understand that we have dumbed ourselves down to the small and particular, our concern focused on the incidental and the social while all around us is mystery: infinite space and time, death, creation, the forever unexplained.  Our life might not be exactly as a dream, but like a dream in that we ignore the more important facts of it for the particular and the relatively unimportant.  In this then, as in dreams, we are puppets to a seeming master who pulls these little strings to confuse us just as real life passes us by.     
 
Who is this master?  Why are we so easily distracted?  In the classic book of hidden knowledge (as opposed to the “occult,” which is now associated with satanic venues) by P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, we are led to believe that these and other eternal questions can be answered by the inscrutable Armenian trickster, G.I. Gurdieff.   Still stuck on page 89, I have not yet found those answers in full (and will probably be only tickled by possibilities, as is the habit of Gurdjieff) but have been practically run over again and again by this same idea -that we are asleep, mere puppets of cosmic law.  But no, even worse: although I believe it is due to his showmanship, Gurdieff (through Oupensky) insists that we are not only asleep, but are machines, total automatons with no will or volition of our own.   I have not been let in on the puppet master yet, but have learned of his strings: the natural movement of the cosmos.  Gurdieff believed that, for instance, the perturbations caused by, say, Mars coming closer to Jupiter in its orbit could rain holy hell down here on earth.   In this case, Gurdeiff was speaking to Oupensky at a café in St Petersburg during WW1, where he went so far as to state that the war was pre-determined by such cosmic movements and that nothing at all could have been done to prevent it.  Except one thing, that is: to become awake using Gurdieff’s special methods, which were not to come cheaply.   Gurdieff, the author explained, was not to be held back in poverty.   
 
Putting the charlatan issue aside, it seems to me that Gurdieff was more right than wrong, simply being more over-the-top than necessary. I came to think of Gurdjeff and his message over these last several days as my son and I spent time at the cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (it was this that got me stuck on page 89).   We got to talking about Pan-European culture and how it seemed to be annihilating itself in Western Europe with the massive importation of Muslims who were not interested in assimilation, and why this was so.  My son believed it was all about the destruction of traditional culture so that the state could gain more control.  I did not disagree, but made some refinements: it was not about the leadership; they, for the most part, believed that what they were doing was a good and moral thing.  Rather, it was about the impetus behind the culture.  Looking back on history, it is not that Euro-culture is trying to commit suicide, but rather that it has taken a different tack for greater world assimilation that is so well-hidden that it seems the reverse.  The logic behind it is that Euro-culture is so powerful that it will, in time, transform the great masses of Muslims now in or heading to Europe, and in that, will cause them to export their own transformation back to their native lands.  This is the only way such a conversion might take place. 
 
The trouble with this, I pointed out, is that this might be like the pig and the python problem, an idea that had struck me from a picture book from my childhood.  Here, in some place like Burma, a python had slithered into a pig pen and swallowed an entire pig.  Trouble is, once swallowed, the python could not leave the pen, and was thus open to the later fatal machete blows of the pig’s owner.  It had bitten off more than it could handle – just as Euro-culture might be doing.  Islam, after all, has an agenda of its own.
 
Who swallows who and so on, time will tell, but I was reminded of Gurdjieff by the idea that the leaders who are transforming Europe and probably the world have no idea why they are really doing what they are doing.  They are puppets of culture, which is running the show behind a curtain.  But who or what is behind the curtain creating this cultural momentum?  And how can we pull it aside to throw out the puppet master and reclaim our lives?  
 
Perhaps I will find the secret in this book, although I doubt it – not because it will not be in this book, but because, as Gurdieff himself put it, because I am not ready to understand his take on it all.  But this problem has already been explained by the Great Religions and perhaps by ALL religions.  Most agree that we are ignorant of what is really running our lives, and of what life is really all about.  Many tell us, too, that we are living in a kind of dream, just as Jesus pleaded with his Abba, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”  It is true, then - from Gurdieff to cultural theory to Christ and the Buddha – that we know not what we do, and in that we are ignorant puppets.  The religions seem to vary on the whys and who’s, but in the end, the wise all agree: we are, both individually and as a collective, deaf and blind.   And each tells us how we might deliver ourselves from this ignorance.
 
Which brings us back to my book on essays, for there is something else in them that speaks of my own ignorance that is in plain sight – the concept of coincidence.  So many of the essays speak of coincidence, but if we think about it, coincidence really only equals ignorance.  If we knew what was going on, coincidence would not be a mystery.  Such oddities, in our new framework, would be seen to run by a certain logic, and in that have a certain predictability. 
 
I do not believe that we are total puppets.  On this, I disagree with Gurdieff, and am more in line with the religions that posit free will even in the throes of ignorance, for religion could not give us solutions if we could not use them.  Boiling it all down, our superficial daily mind is not divorced from reality, but rather is as said, superficial.  We might picture the conscious as part of a greater mind that is the unconscious, which is part of a greater mind which is the cosmic, which is part of the Great Mind that we have chosen to call God.  None are divorced from the other, but one is hidden from the other behind modes of comprehension, functioning as it seems from behind a curtain.  Looking back on the Europe problem, Carl Jung called the cultural mind the archetypal conscious, but it didn’t stop there: he also had to admit to even more inclusive rings of influence which even he could not comprehend – until he faded into a sort of mystical wisdom in his old age. 
 
I believe that we can talk to these other “rings” in prayer and in meditation, the former humbling our conscious mode, the latter leaving space for the different modes to talk back to us.  I do not think that we can then twist reality to our desires as we understand it, but we should be able to free ourselves of the puppet strings.  With greater knowledge, these should not appear to be puppet strings at all, but rather new laws that operate as clearly to us as, say, the law of gravity.  We can then make clear choices – until, in the end, our choices will always be the same as God’s, for what other choices could be more true?
 
We might avoid fate, then, with certain introspection.  We might avoid being the pig or the python or the man with the machete.  Or we can wait and see how divine law percolates through the far realm in which we find ourselves, and hope that prayer will be enough.  FK    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                       
 
           
                       
 
           
                                                                                      
 

This is necessarily short, as late summer has me on the run - to return to another blog this Friday.  For now, this one quick comment: 

Reading North Men by John Haywood, I have been delighted in an odd way at their barbarity, and the barbarity at the time of Europe as a whole.  The Vikings had a special way of gifting the god Odin by taking a high-ranking captive and making from him a "blood angel" in which they would make two slits along the backbone and then pull out the still-functioning lungs to form pulsating bloody "wings" for as long as the victim survived.  

The Vikings had no peaceful resting place for the dead - only Valhalla for the greatest warriors, who would all die one day in the final battle of the world, where defeat would lead to the annihilation of the world and then its remaking - add infinitum.  And yet, although there was no hope in their religion for eternal paradise, they clung to it as proud warriors, becoming Christian only after defeat or for political gain.  

Was it pride, or overwhelming culture?  Is the call to high religion a matter of truth or only of levels of civilizations? Or do the two correspond according to a divine plan?  

More towards the end of the week.  The great green of late summer awaits (oh, and a special hello to  frequent contributor Roeker, who is now on his honeymoon after a great wedding.  I doubt he will be reading this at the moment - or at least I hope not.)  FK
 

Another religious retreat has passed, and along with my usual “never again” complaints - as I learned the not-so-fine art of complaining from my dad so well - came another usual - the unusual.  It was not only me who noticed, either – as usual.  Call it what you will, but what caused this is called “spirit” in the religious world and it is a fickle thing, or at the very least, a creative thing.   And that, this time, was the point.
 
First, to the testimonials, or rather, to a particular testimonial.  Often these are stories of sin and redemption, of hitting the bottom one way or another before finding the light, and after a while, we might grow tired of these, for the plot and resolution are already known.  This time, this testimonial, was different, however, which was made clear from the start.  ”I was not the prodigal child.  I never drank, smoked, or had affairs.   I always went to church and said my prayers.   I did not rebel against my parents or society and have always lived as I had been taught to live as a child.”  There was no “but” here – no sudden, “and then I met Fernando” or “it started with taking pills for my back pain.”  Instead, the speaker went to those special moments in life that each of us can have regardless of our choices.
 
“We (her young husband and she) were staying in a hotel in Madison when I woke up with an intense pain in my chest.  I went to the bathroom and sat down on the toilet and thought ‘so this is how I am going to die.’  Then, my attention lifted from my body and I hovered over it.  There was no fear; instead, I looked down at that body and thought, ‘how alone she is.  How difficult it is to live in that hard world.’  I was filled with the peace of being apart from that world when I suddenly found myself back in my body.  It was then that I knew that we are more than our body – that spirit is real.”
 
She gave two other accounts of special spiritual moments; one was a feeling for the suffering of Jesus, and the other, a revelation in the garden: “I was in my garden happy with the day and with pruning and weeding, when I suddenly had the feeling of what Earth would be like if we all followed the law of God.  It was paradise.  I realized then that all of our pain and suffering comes from our own actions.”   
 
Such was her testimonial, and it was the most powerful of the event.  There were no tears, no “come to Jesus” moments of redemption, but rather a clear-headed account of how things are and could be.  Different. 
 
As was the feeling I had most of the time, which I and others expressed throughout the long, long 4 days.  Towards the end, I summarized my own take on it this way: “I am a philosopher of sorts and I like to figure things out.  I can barely change a spark plug, but I do a bit better with the abstract, and I had thought I had kind of figured out how “spirit” acts in a group like this.  But no.  This time, it has affected me in a way that I have not experience before, and cannot really explain.  It is unique and not altogether comfortable.  I am learning again that spirit cannot be figured out – that God (as spirit) already knows my thoughts and so I cannot out-think that which is beyond and behind my thoughts.  It is impossible.  I just have to accept the mystery.”
 
Others there who had gone through the same retreat experience before also spoke of something different.  For me, it was not the flowering of power and goodness as it had been, but rather like a darker wind, one that came from a place that is unknown, and in that unknown, it was fearful.  And in that fear came the echoes of gnashing of teeth, of disaster, of things gone horribly wrong – of things demonic.  The spirit was coiled through it all, as if to say, “It’s not so easy, is it?  Takes some work, doesn’t it?, and courage too.  Courage to face the demons of your fears.”  Although in actuality the spirit would never say such things.  This spirit, this iteration, would never attempt to say anything, for words are hard and finite.  This spirit, instead, let it be known that it is unknown and cannot be known.  It is the source, beyond which we cannot reach.  It is fear of it that brings us to learn of it if we wish to someday, maybe, lose our fears.  Only in that way can joy be held and truly lived.
 
Or so it seemed to say.  Perhaps it doesn’t matter, for the spirit is infinite creativity and cannot be placed in a box to be taken out now and then at our convenience.  It comes when it will, and blows where it will.   We cannot out-think it and cannot ever predict it.  As my wife has said, “whatever we think heaven is, or after-death will be, we will all be surprised.” Still, we wish to know more, and for this we must face our fears, our demons, so that we might turn towards the unpredictable wind of spirit. Sometimes this requires that we fall so low that we have nowhere else to go.  Sometimes this requires heroic courage.  And for others, it requires only that they be open through faith in the (or a) right path.  As our speaker said, she was never the rebel, always the good girl, and still it came.  No lightning bolt on the road to Damascus, but rather that rare breeze of mystery that leads us on forever into what only the spirit knows.  FK