I have just finished the book, Among the Headhunters by Robert Lyman, that surprisingly brought up a very controversial issue. It is a somewhat wonkish book for those who like history and anthropology - for those like me - although the tale it tells is fascinating: A mixed crew of Chinese and American soldiers and civilians were flying over the "Hump," or the border between India and Burma in 1943 during the war (following the route of the famous Flying Tigers of Chennault) on their way to investigate or fortify the forces of Chiang Kai-sheck, when the plane went down in the mountains in the territory of the Naga, a people known for warfare and head-hunting.  Among the survivors was the famed journalist Eric Sevareid, which brought a tremendous amount of publicity to the affair.  Suffice it to say, all resources were put out to rescue them, and they not only survived their stay with the head-hunters, but were, in general, treated as welcomed guests. Enter the controversy: for decades, the colonial British had tried to reign in the warfare, head-hunting, human sacrifices and slaving of these people, with a clear eye in the early 20th century to NOT destroy the culture as a whole while doing so.  But could such interference leave the remainder of the culture intact?  Was it the right thing to do?

This was my concern while doing fieldwork among the Hoti of Venezuela, to the point where I even questioned the wisdom of my being there.  Yet, at the same time, most of the younger Hoti wanted contact, even to the point of voluntarily attending Christian classes and services at the missions.  I felt that they did not know what they were getting themselves into, and I counciled against this contact.  But was it my right to do so?  Wasn't I being the all-knowing colonialist in trying to bend them against their will?  As it turned out, most did exactly as they had wanted, and that's that.  But were the British right in interfering, which was done, in the final analysis, to protect the tea-growers and commerce of the region?

For the administrators, the answer was an unequivocal "yes" - the evils of head-hunting and slavery outdid calls for cultural purity, even if it might ruin the ecology (the keeping down of the population), and thus, eventually, the way of life of these people. What was right, was right; and, after all, the weaker villages wanted the prohibitions, for obvious reasons.

But is right really right?  Is there trans-cultural agreement that peace is better than war?  Pacified life better than warrior death? Doesn't Ecclesiastes say that there is a season for everything?  More ominously, doesn't enforced peace mean less freedom?

The latter is a question for our time and place as well - does security outweigh freedom?  Is it better to live free or die?  These questions have caused contortions on both sides of our political spectrum - the right which champions liberty wants law and order, while the left, which champions social security, is pro-abortion - and sympathizes with warrior cultures, as long as they aren't from the Western tradition.

The confusion is warranted on both accounts, because the issue in the West since the Enlightenment has never been settled.  Is there one right way?  The relativist would have to say "no," but could he ever convince us that slavery and murder is a good thing?  And the moralist - could he ever convince the modern reader that annihilation of Native American cultures, which often included warfare and torture and slavery as a way of life, was a good thing?  

This week I am preparing a paper to be delivered to a Catholic audience, which takes as a given that the world is a place where evil is in constant conflict with the good.  To many Christians, that explains the state of the world as we live it, and as such, every day confronts us in that battle.  Of course, to do battle, one must have a clear sense of what the fight is over - that is, in this case, one must have a clear sense of what is right or wrong. Otherwise, how are we expected to choose the good over the evil?  The choice must be clear, but often even the Bible doesn't make that choice clear - there is, after all, a time for war, and a time to tear down.  Yes, there is the Golden Rule - to treat others as you would like to be treated - but how would that work with the head-hunting Nagas?  Might some want to be treated as warriors?  

To answer as best I can, I think it can be best expressed by Jesus's admonishment  that we "not be of this world," or, as the Buddhists would say, that we have no attachments.  From this perspective, we would have no dog in the hunt, no personal interests to protect.  Judgement would be, at the very least, dependent on experience and wisdom rather than on personal gain.  In fact, we might expect that wisdom would grow from such a perspective, and offer the best solution available at the time. How this would have influenced the decisions of the colonial administrators, who clearly had worldly interests, I cannot say. There is, after all, a concern that comes with non-attachment: that the disinterested leader might have no interest in humanity at all. So it appears that even the non-attached must have an attachment to a basic set of principles or at least some principle to govern well. 

They say that this comes with wisdom, these principles.  But this carries us outside the relativist view once again. It seems, simply, that to rule well, one must keep to the greatest of the Biblical laws: to love others as oneself.  This is inherent in the Buddhist idea that non-attachment brings not only wisdom but loving concern as well, even as it speaks of "nirvana."  It seems then that this single principle, of loving others as oneself, is the best beginning for the best end.  FK     

        
        

By everyday standards, elections are bizarre.  I have often written here about the collective unconscious, and of personal spiritual healing affecting the world at large, even as it is silent or even tucked away in a monastery or Himalayan cave, and elections often pose the same kind of mental/spiritual weirdness.  (Me) Keeping neutral on our own presidential election, one has to wonder at how the polls have shifted so sharply towards Trump, although little has really happened.  The same could be said for Obama's win over Clinton for the nomination in 2008.  Even I felt it: there was this huge surge toward Obama that had little to do with events on the ground, other than speeches that gave little to nothing in substance.  Oftentimes, something happens in these grand displays of the collective, and no one can really, really say what that is or why.  The pundits wish to hell they could.  They tell us in flat language what they believe, but as often as not are proven wrong.  No one really knows, although that lack of knowledge is invariably buried by smart-people summations later on.  But how can they write about the truth, when the tools used for analysis cannot describe it?  It would be like a physicist describing the flight of a shaman in a trance.  Wrong tools for the job.  

This might be instructive for the pessimists among us.  Last night, I heard again the lament of some youth at the dismal prospects for our future.  Feeling wise, I stopped this line of reasoning in its tracks.  On the one hand, the facts are that, in many ways, times are tough, both financially and diplomatically, but what else is new?  The worst financial times in my life were during the latter half of the Carter admin., and first few years of Reagan's, @ 1978-82. Stagflation. Low moral in the military. High unemployment and, as Carter put it, a "malaise" over the nation which as I recall was very real.  And my parents!  The great depression, WWII and the start of the terrifying Cold War, with all its nukes.  Talk about end-times.   Then for both of us, the culture war of the late 60's and the attendant riots which make of anything today a mere party gone amok.  

On the other hand, and more important (I believe), is the fact-in-hindsight that all of these hard times were overcome.  This is not to be overly optimistic; in fact, we could have indeed been buried by Khrushchev or have fallen apart through bitter internecine fighting.  That such things didn't happen point not only to the structure and wealth of this country overall, but to our inner sense of destiny, of who we are and where we are going.  

There is great truth to self-fulfilling prophecies: if you believe you are going to fail, you are more likely to do so.  If youth in this country by-in-large believe we are really screwed and nothing can be done to stop it, this might just well happen.  But we, and they, can probably stop this from happening through a belief that there is a bright future before us.  On the one hand, this is not so mystical or artsy-fartsy as it sounds: if you act out of optimism for the future, you will be more energetic and productive.  On the other hand, though, artsy-fartsy does come into play. The communal spirit - and we have all felt it, whether at church or at a concert or among family and friends - brings others to think and feel in kind, either poorly (think rape and pillage among invading armies), or admirably.  So it is that today's youth, discouraged that they have no  voice to improve the world, are missing the one great power that they have, as a collective.  With no more action than the marking of a ballot with hope, or even just with affirmative  beliefs, they could seriously alter the chances of their nation for positive change.  

Norman Vincent Peal made a fortune saying just this, but apparently his message has to be repeated on a regular basis. No, not his message, but the message of many great sages throughout history.  Your actions  - or inward in-actions - on the moral and spiritual plane have tremendous power, not only for the inner life, but for the outer.   It is probable that darkness tends towards darkness, and light towards light (however that is judged), but watch the movement of this most interesting election.  It might hinge on an "October Surprise," a bit of ugly fact about the candidate that was hidden, but it is more likely that it will hinge, or the "surprise" will hinge, on some inner movement of the populace, dependent not only on a vast array of issues,. but on the communal common ground which often moves in directions that simply cannot be steered or be predicted by the experts.  

And young folks, keep up hope. Yours is an exceptional time, but most generations have to live through at least one exceptional time.  Keep your hope morally grounded, and see if it doesn't work out - if not for the best, at least not for the worst.  And remember that crucial knowledge of 'group spirit' for the generations who will follow you.  FK            

Last night, just before hustling off to take a very necessary shower, and just before my wife changed the channel on TV to something more entertaining, the news report was having a live interview of a young black woman in the midst of the Charlotte riot.  She was very angry and self-righteous about an incident which will probably turn out the way these things usually do - and not the way she would like.  Bored and leaving, I was suddenly struck with the word she kept repeating - a word that I forget now, but which meant, "I'm important!" or, as the slogan says, "I matter!"  It was repeated over and over again with virtually no other substance, but I got it - she WANTS to matter, and thinks she doesn't.  She wants to be recognized as someone who counts, as a human being just as important as, say, Barrack Obama - or at least someone who was not just a forgotten face, as she felt she was.  

Ah, yes, just like the rest of us, I thought, only more dramatically so.  And while we might agree that she doesn't really matter that much in the social scheme of things, we also must agree that neither do most of us.  Back in the days of small tribal living, we all really mattered, but now even the president could disappear and little would change.  With our numbers and the complexity of things, few of us are irreplaceable except to our families, and even then - well, what of Brad Pitt to Angelina Jolie?  What of Ivanna to The Donald?  Beyond the social, we might just consider the natural environment - do you think ANY of us matter to, say, the Moon?  Or to a wing of our own very common galaxy?  

By contrast, in all the major religions, we ALL matter, very much so.  For some, every one of us is in a battle between good and evil, a battle over our very souls, and each is important.  For others, the universe insists on spinning us out again and again until our souls - that basic god-stuff - is perfected.  It may well be that we as people in history don't matter all that much, but in the religious scheme of things, it is different.  We matter; the young woman matters; the cop with the gun and the guy bleeding in the street matter.  And until we grasp this basic concept, none of us will ever feel that he matters, because without it, we don't.  As basic material substances, we really don't matter. With the law of the conservation of energy, we will just be spit out into another form, no matter what we do or have done.

One would think then that, because of this, every one would crave religion.  Would the young woman be out in the street doing something that will probably only hurt her chances in life if she had religion?  But she is probably too proud for that - in spite of suffering severally from a poor self-image.  

This applies not only to the poor or dislocated, but also -even especially too - the well-centered.  I remember the autobiography of Margaret Mead's and Gregory Bateson's daughter, Mary Bateson, where she describes the death of her father.  Gregory Bateson was one of the leading anthropological theorists of the mid-20th century, bringing both his social and scientific knowledge together in wonderful and unique ways (I still use his stuff).  By the time of his death at age 77, he was a living legend for those of us into that sort of thing.  But he had been a lifelong heavy smoker, and as he was dying of emphysema, she recalled the look of fear in his eyes.  Suddenly, he mattered to himself very much, far beyond his scientific expectations.  He must have found that he was the center of his own world as we all are, and as such, I imagine he was taken by surprise at how much he mattered to himself.  Life from the scientific perspective was small and cheap, but to the personal, it was almost everything.  

I think it is true: we are both insignificant ants and everything at the same time.  From the outward perspective, most of us are no more important than that young black woman who ferociously wanted to believe she mattered.  She was wrong in her venue- in this vast social and natural universe, she, just like us, is nothing. But inwardly, if we are honest, we know this is not true, and it is not just egotism.  Somehow, in a different reference frame we often refer to as the spiritual, we all matter infinitely. If we all understood this contrast as deeply as we should, we would be, if not happier, at least firm in our sense of being, not needing the external to prove anything to the internal.  And when we think about it, that might solve some of the worst problems facing the people and the societies in which they live in the world today: yes, we matter, big time, but knowing this, we should not have to prove it to anyone with riots and wars and big yachts, least of all to ourselves.  FK                 
           

I might be a pagan at heart. "Pagans," Latin for "people of the country," or what we might call "country bumpkins," these were the last to embrace Christianity, to give up their local gods of nature.  Christianity solved this well - they made Virgin sites out of mother goddess springs, or replaced forest gods with saints, leaving the magic intact while refocusing the issue.  Now, nature bowed down to the one God, dependent on the greater hierarchy.
It was a brilliant - a "catholic" - move.  

But it left something out.  Edward Abbey, in his ground-breaking environmentalist book Desert Solitaire, wrote of good, God-fearing midwestern tourists coming to see the stone arches in Utah and exclaiming "God!"  No, not God, said Abbey, but nature in her inexplicable wonder.  God to him was church, Jesus, innocent children and humble men, not this, not this nature that sustained and killed almost indiscriminately.  Nature was not a social being.  It was vast, powerful, and left humans to their own devices much as it did ants.  It simply was, and could not be supplicated, or even cursed.  It stood alone, awesome in its heartless (but not hateful) being.

Such were my thoughts, too, when we reached the lake caves. We had been traveling around with our pop-up camper for a week, first seeing the cliffs and waterfalls of the North Shore of Minnesota that stretch of coast from Duluth to Canada, and we had been impressed.  Now, we were back in Wisconsin along the same lake, Superior, where the shore wore a different face.  We stopped at the parking lot to the Apostle Islands National Park and began the hike  outward towards the famous caves, which can be visited by kayak in good weather, and on foot during very cold winters, but now, in stormy but warm September, we would be going by foot. Within 2 miles, the views began of red sandstone cliffs artistically carved by millennia of waves: arches, crevasses, and yes, caves.  They took the breath away as the waves roared against the cliffs and shot into the crevasses and out the arches.  At one spot in particular, a great expanse of cliff wall lay open in a wide bay, its sides pocked with dozens of holes and small caves, the red of its rock burning into the mind like sacrificial blood.  I was left feeling like I did after reading Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan books - impressed, but spooked; awed, and humbled, but not filled with heavenly love.  Here there was no love, just power and beauty.  

Perhaps one could see God there, but he would be the Old Testament God, the One irreducible and inscrutable, the one who would wipe out entire tribes of people to prove a point, whatever that might be. Terrible, wonderful, life-affirming even as it promised death, fear even as you rejoice.  With it, this nature, this God, one must supplicate as a cliff climber would, being precise to get everything just right, or else...

In that lies the necessity, or so it seems to me, to see the Bible as a piece, even though to a Christian, it is the New Testament that really matters.  The god of the Old was like nature with a voice - powerful and awe-full, not something to trifle with or even to bargain with. You don't bargain with an avalanche or a flood.  You do it right, period, just as the Jewish scribes did.  Mercy could be had, just as nature sometimes allowed one to live, inexplicably, but it was always best, smartest, to do it right and leave pleading to the totally screwed, to those who had not done it right, or were to fit into God's plan in an ugly, and beyond-rational, way.  

Jesus, human-god, hope of hope, but seen wrongly by us, or at least by me.  My Jesus is not the cliff or the avalanche, but the hand of God on my shoulder, one who has my back.  As Abbey knew, the desert has no one's back.  It simply kills the ill-prepared, or maybe even the prepared.  It simply won't respond to plea-bargaining.

And yet: in the past few weeks I have had remarkable occurrences of synchronicity.  For instance, talking to a woman at a lighthouse on our journey, I became slightly annoyed as she referenced all the national parks she had been to, exclaiming on the wonders of nature.  Nature, as said, often bights, and so I threw in a curve ball that made her back away from me slowly, as if I were slightly mad.  Did you ever, I said, see the oil refineries of Elizabeth, New Jersey?  They, too, were beautiful at night, but not for their pristine nature.  Rather, the roaring flares from the escape towers that shot up in the dead landscape through sulfurous smoke into the blighted, starless night sky, all man-made and poisonous, was a beauty unto itself, hellish though it might be.   "Elizabeth New Jersey," she said, giving a brittle smile, "I guess I should see that, too,"  the smile fading as she walked quickly to catch her husband.

A week later, all hell broke lose in Elizabeth, New Jersey with the Afghan bomber.  I had probably not even thought of that city for years.

And others, too, but on to this thought: nature might seem to be dead to our human pleas, but it is not.  It does not act as a human would to us - just as any god would not - but it does interact with us in odd ways.  While the good Christians of the midwest might not have it right, neither did Edward Abbey.  We are not apart from  nature, or just mindless ants at its mercy. Somehow, amidst its unthinkable enormity, we matter to nature, but in ways as beyond us as this enormity.  It all, really, depends on how we define God to know if it exists. Nature - or God - is not as cold as we think a rock to be.  Something, indeed, is going on. Something is drawing us, or compelling us, towards something. Maybe the pagans were on to something. But we of Western culture could do worse than to see God as the Bible does, with its two major parts: mysterious, terrible, un-fair, yet somehow human and involved.  Why else, then, would the sandstone cliffs, or even Elizabeth, New Jersey, bring to us such great awe, even though awe has nothing to do with the mindlessness of a rock, or the chemical reactions of a refinery?  FK              

       

I will be taking a break for the rest of the week from the blog, but thought I'd add something on our national tragedies after 9/11:

The pivotal moment for my parent's generation was Pearl Harbor; for mine, the assassination of President Kennedy; and for my son, 9/11.  These "pivots" are times when the nation reacts almost as one to a highly important, or highly visible tragedy, one that invariably involves death and marks an important change in
the nation.  In the case of JFK, it concerned only one man who was easily replaced within our system, as it should be.  But, aside from the man being president, we as a nation knew that something crucial, some historical threshold had been crossed. Perhaps it was the assassination itself, giving us, at the height of the cold war (when all children were taught to "duck and cover" in case of nuclear explosions), something tangible to reflect the changes that were occurring due to the aftermath of WWII and an explosion of technological development. In a few short years after the death, America did change, so greatly that it would have been inconceivable just a decade earlier.  We are still dealing with the results today in evolving mores and family structure and even the very idea of national sovereignty.  The baby boomers' own vision got out of control, and in many ways no one knows where we are going with it.  And few seem happy, regardless of their political affiliation.

What of 9/11 and my son's generation?  Talking with him a few days ago, he said of himself and his peers that they see no future for the country; that, in fact, they expect the nation to dissolve into some sort of dystopic chaos within a few decades. Ideas of catastrophe and a world without borders and definite ways seems to have crept in along with the rogue jets of the hijackers of 9/11. Now, not only is no one safe, but there are no definite enemies, no nations we might go to war with to win or lose our cause.  For many young people, in spite of continued technological achievements and relative prosperity, theirs  is a world of entropy, without purpose as the world - both the human and the natural - crumbles.  No borders, no limits, no hope.  Disaster, and then anarchy.  With this they live and shrug - what can they do about it?

I am not so pessimistic, but perhaps they are on to something. Theirs is the second generation orphaned by high divorce rates, or no firm family at all, who now are told that the very fabric of their nation is, at core, rotten - slavery, sexism, all sorts of phobias, greed, violence.  This core is being torn asunder, but with nothing concrete to take its place - with no vision of a better tomorrow, however idealistic that might be.  For those pushing this agenda, no one knows the end-game, least of all the activists.  It does seem a doorway to anarchy.  As an anthropologist, I can say with great certainty that no human social group can exist for long under those conditions.  I cannot, however, predict what is to come.  I do not, or will not, concede (at least not yet) to global or national ruin.  But where, in this contradictory world where traditional values are belittled and chaos seems to be courted, can we go?  What is the logical conclusion?  

And what will be the next generation's pivot, for there probably will be one?  Will it close the circle and bring back confidence and prosperity as the horror of WWII did?  Or will it buttress the apparent unraveling of centuries of cultural evolution?  

The End Times have been preached for centuries, and in no time did the End Times come to Western Civilization.  But they did come for others, often at the hands of the West.  Are we now succumbing to our own designs?  Have we begun to conquer - and destroy - ourselves in some unconscious effort to at last bring the end - and with it somehow, a relief of an unseen burden?

Still, the wind blows and the leaves flutter without fluster.  In the Catholic Apostle's Creed, in spite of the belief in the Judgement Day, it ends, "world without end, amen."  Maybe, hopefully, it is only time to take a breath and be grateful for what we have - at least until the next pivot.  FK     

                

It was an interesting time at the cabin this last weekend, with some young men in tow, and the long and very close encounters made me bring up a question: what is maturity?  With me, I was so much older that mere age answered some of the question.  I had little energy for silly stuff, made myself stop drinking for fear of a hangover, went to bed early because I was tired, and so on. But there is much more.  Maturity, I came to realize, is not only an accumulation of wisdom and decency, but as often as not, an adjustment to the social norm, so that one does not look foolish. Period.  And often without recourse to any other standard.

It begins once the child understands that it is not alone in personhood, and accelerates with age, culminating for most in that most awkward of times, junior high, or what is now called middle school.  It continues for the rest of our lives, but for me, at least, that was the time of the crucible, where embarrassment and humiliation reached its height.  I scaled that height first by becoming a wise-ass, and then by becoming cool.  Later, that turned into being 'reasonable,' and perhaps even moral, but it was here that I was made - for better and most definitely for worse.  

I remember a joke told by the older boys, those in 8th or 9th grade, on us newbies to the adolescent world.  It went something like this: A polar bear is sitting in a bathtub.  A man comes upon him and asks, "what the heck are you doing in my bathtub?"  The polar bear replies, "no soap, radio!"  At this the older boys would laugh. If all went as expected, and it usually did, the younger guys also laughed, at which point the older boys would sneer, "what's so funny, idiot?  It doesn't make any sense!," by which the whole world (seemingly) understood that the younger guys were laughing only to fit in.  Humiliation!  Of course, we passed in on, for we had learned the lesson - be smug and/or cool, and show your superiority by putting others in their place.

Get along.  Never reveal your true self, because it is weak and desperate to belong.  Harden yourself.  Never be the fool.  

As it was, the young men with us had not learned how to do this very well, and were not in the upper echelons of their age group, to say the least.  And they were absolutely a delight to be with, because they were, against all efforts they might have put out, as natural as could be.  Real human beings.  For most of us, it takes a lifetime of de-learning to achieve this.  For these guys, however, they will probably take a lifetime of hard knocks before age mellows most into understanding that just being alive and honest is more than enough.  For most, this takes a long, long time.

In the Gospels, Jesus not only tells us to love the children, but to be like them and not harden our hearts.  He also tells us to leave our families and home to follow him, something which most of us cannot conceive - how could a loving god-man say such a thing? But the two are not incompatible.  We harden our hearts by fitting in, by becoming firm and respected parts of our social system, just as the Pharisees did.  We become, as it were, beyond ridicule, respected in our jobs and families.  And by this, we also reject those who have not done so as inferior, as misfits.  To become like children - little ones, I take it, not sneering adolescents - we must trust, be open, be ready to become fools, for thinking we know everything that we should, and behaving as we should, closes us to something greater.

The ego is not the greater, and that is what is built up in our socialization.  We must have it, of course, or we just might end up with "Lord of the Flies," but such socialization should revolve around the 'greater' that the elders, those with wisdom, have come to know.  This is incompatible with the world at large, I know, and it is hard to conceive of how such a society could compete with the worldly, but it is right.  We know this by how we have been socialized, and for what reasons.  Much - as Mister Rogers knows  - is necessary, but much is also dark, cold, and cloistering.  And if you don't believe me, I have a joke to tell you...FK                             

After the long weekend, a few more notes on the Mayans, stimulated by William Carlsen's book, Jungle of Stone: One - While catching up on the flotsam and jetsam of the news cycle, I came across a set of new discoveries on ancient civilizations from Listverse.  On one, we find that the Nazca of Peru (those of the famous Nazca Lines), who's civilization vanished around 500 AD, caused their own demise by over-cutting the sparse dry-forest trees that retained moisture and held down the soil during El Nino rain years.  On the other hand, the vast civilization in India known as the Harappan culture, one that stretched over 300,000 square miles up to 4,000 years ago, crumbled due to massive climate change.  Drought dried up the rivers and caused the people to disperse into small settlements as well as they could.  

So, in considering our own concerns on climate change, history leaves us hanging on the edge.  Climate change does occur naturally and sometimes spectacularly on a regular basis, without prompting from humans.  But humans are also often responsible for smaller changes that can lead to the demise of their subsistence base.  The question is: is the industrial age so powerful that it can change the course of an entire planet, or are we only witnessing, in global warming, a natural change well beyond our powers?  Certainly, our children or grandchildren will know for sure.  

Whether they will be living in Jetson's-style floating houses, or in crude bark huts, remains to be seen, but we are not the Harappans or the Nazcans or the Maya.  Almost all of us now live in a global economy.  If great war or huge climate change does not take place, we will most likely continue along the path of science we have forged today, for small-scale disasters cannot take down the whole world.  However, if we do fall, it will be catastrophic. Our population is far too great to be supported by primitive agriculture, and - just as bad - most of us have no idea how to support ourselves from the ground up anyway.  For those who wish to see the 'monster' fall, better be careful for what you wish.

And two: Carlsen tell us that archaeologists have largely deciphered the writings of the Mayans, the only people in the New World to have a complete phonetic script. From this, we find that their lives revolved around war and blood sacrifice.  Kings would be carried on stretchers onto battlefields, and those who lost would be taken back to the victor's city to be killed (along with other elites.  Commoner soldiers were often forced into slavery). This would be done after a ball-game with some semblance to modern soccer, where the game was seen as a go-between and enactment of the mythological battle of the gods.  Here, the losers  would also be sacrificed, just as in the mythological past, where the losers of the god-wars were killed.  The winners, as in myth, were "good", and so the human battle, the ball game, and the mythical battle were seen as one in the same - a war between good and evil where the good eventually won.

Here, however, the "good" was decided only by victory, as the gods decreed, because, for the Maya, what happened on earth was a shadow of what happened in the god sphere and could not be any other way.  Destiny, morality, and reality coincided unfailingly.  The good was always, in the end, victorious, and by this, the good could be known on earth.

This is not only at odds with current Western (and other's) morality, but often the exact opposite.  For Jesus, the victor - or the rich man or the man of power - was at a disadvantage morally, and indeed had about the same chance to get into heaven as a camel through the eye of a needle.  This has influenced Western culture to such an extent that today, even and perhaps especially with the non-religious, it is the "victim," however that might be defined, who holds the moral cards. Nietzsche remarked on this over one hundred years ago, and vociferously opposed it, instead opting for the return of the hero (or the 'superman') to salvage Western civilization.  Instead, of course, the one man who took him all too seriously, Hitler, ended up causing the opposite to happen.

Hitler: paradoxically, he did lose, and the victors claimed the moral high -ground, just as the Mayan victors did.  However, his philosophy was based on the moral superiority of the strong. Who, then, was stronger, the winners or the losers?  The victims, or the "supermen"? 

We muddle through this today, lost in the same paradox.  Worse, as all the cultures of the world have been drawn together, we have become ecumenical by necessity.  But sometimes, we have to decide who is right.  If we, for instance, judge the victim culture to be superior, might not that culture, with more of a Mayan view, use that to its advantage, to become the victor in the end, and thus prove itself morally superior? Here we are dealing with two black and white concepts that appear to be universal, although different cultures flip them from one side to another.  Are, we all ask, the wealthy and powerful wealthy and powerful because god approves of them, and so, then, should we?  Or are they abusers, the disadvantaged of Jesus, who have to give up everything to follow him, but have so much more to give up?

Those like the Maya who believe in the victor have the easier path, because it makes more (common) sense.  Who would not rather be the hammer than the nail?  And yet, it is Western culture with its empathy for the victim that has, to date, been the most powerful force on earth ever.  Is this not proof, then, that Jesus was right?  But that would make the victim the victor, right here on earth.  

This is not a historic essay, for many have claimed that the Western "victim" has indeed been passive-aggressive and only used and abused its philosophy; rather I speak of morals and who is right or wrong.  Is "right" something that is steadfast, or does it move with the times, flipping back and forth to accommodate the circumstances?  Was it right for Jesus's time and place to be a victim, but wrong for the Maya?  For in the end, it is almost a certainty that even our civilization will end, and with that will go our concepts of right and wrong, following the path of the Maya.  

Perhaps that is why Christianity posits an end-time, for, to the Christian, the passing of its god as just another would be unthinkable.  On the other hand, never before has humanity had the ability as it does now to destroy itself.  Again, we can go back to the environmental question: are we only a part of the cycle, or have we indeed taken our own survival entirely into our own hands?  And if so, are those hands guided by a supernatural power?  For the first time in known history, we might just find out. Once again, paradoxically, we might want to pray to whatever god or gods that we know that we do not find out, even if that might solve the moral question once and for all.  FK                         



                          

 As I approach the end of the fascinating bio, Jungle of Stone by William Carlsen, two things have occurred: one - a report on the Mayans found on Yahoo confirms that the most popular theory for the demise of the imperial Mayans is that there were two great droughts, one around 900 and another in about 1100 AD, part of a sudden and dramatic change of climate.  This affected, at the very least, the pueblo cities of the Southwest as well, and I believe the Mound Culture of the Mississippi flowage.  No one knows why this happened, but it does point out that climate sometimes does change dramatically, and with huge consequences.  We know of other great changes as well - from the desertification of North Africa during early Pharonic Egypt, to a perhaps spectacular onslaught of the last ice age, which seems to have left mastodons frozen on the spot with fresh cud still in their mouths. Our world is indeed changing at all times, whether we understand why or not.  Something to contemplate on the last of our warm summer days.  

And two: that the human world is even more varied and changes even more spectacularly than the climate.  In the book, it is not only the Mayans who are strange to us, but the Western protagonists, Stephens and Catherwood, as well.  This is due not only to the distinctively patriarchal age in which they lived, but also to the ethos, or inner world, they inhabited.  At the time of their explorations @ 1840, it was nearly inconceivable that the savage Indians of the New World could possibly have invented the ways and means of the Mayans.  Instead, they were purported to have come from remnants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, or Phoenicians who had brought the genius of the east westward, where it was later crudely copied. While this peculiar racism is interesting, what is more so was the reliance at that time on the Bible for the ancient historical record.  Even in the mid-1800's, the final word on the age of the world and the movement of humans was thought to be found in the Bible.  It was at the time still thought to be 100% accurate and literal, the final "bible" for all scientific speculation. It was the word of God, and however secular one was, or mindless of morality, it still remained the foundation of truth.  How we, less than 200 years later, have changed - not so much morally, but cosmologically. Most of us will never see the world from that perspective again.

The Mayans themselves, of course, were so far 'out there' that few of us can even imagine the particular bible, the basis for their truth, that was floating in their heads.  Jaguar - headed serpent gods, a hungry sun god, heavenly wars and divine kings - beliefs the likes of which were left behind by the West in Medieval times.

However, we can imagine that world in a way.  As I read the pages of he exploration, I could feel its strangeness, so much so that they temporarily altered my own mental perception of the world around me.  Most of us have experienced this, if we think about it: a visit to ancient ruins, or to the Grand Canyon, or to a spectacular cathedral might do the same. Both with works of Man past and present, and with works of nature, we are often drawn out of our daily world into one that is not described by any of our institutions, including our religions.  Here we are brought to inner experiences that defy our concepts of reality - not through persuasion, but through an actual, although temporary, change of perspective.  Such is not only interesting, but mind-bending. Such proves to us that our world views are only superficial and ephemeral, even those views, such as Stephen's contemporaries had, of a Biblical- based world.

I end with the question I have often had after visiting these mind-altering scenes: if of human origin, did I partake of their vision, or did I instead see a brief universal vision, one that puts the ordinary human dimensions in (small) perspective?  That is, were these people as otherworldly as my feelings, or did they only have different beliefs, as did the Bible literalists of past centuries, but who were otherwise as pedestrian as we?   Were those of the lost cultures of the past truly alien, or is it our sense  of time and our own frailty and mortality that these sightings brings to us that give us such strange emotional insight?  

Given that nature, too, can bring us to such heights, it might often be the latter.  With all our different beliefs, we just might, mostly, be essentially human, just as essentially day -to-day, as those in every other time and culture.  We know now that the Indians could be as ingenious as the Israelites and later Europeans; so could they also have been just as banal?

This was the question I carried with me to fieldwork with Amazon Indians.  It was not answered then, and remains unanswered. Still, it is clear to me that all peoples from all times and places have always had a special space - something sacred - to ignite their lives, be it in nature or in temples.  If we might all be humdrum, then we are also all called to something greater, something just -  so often just - beyond our grasp.  FK