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

I believe I have developed "SAD," or seasonal adjustment disorder.  This I first noticed shortly after we moved to Wisconsin. I am not sure if it has to do more with age than the state of weather here, but as I stare out at the cold, cloudy day, I'd put my money on Wisconsin for the blame.  Here, from late October to mid March, the wind blows furiously over the dead, plowed fields under leaden gray skies that can kill the most hearty of spirits. Thank god for snowmobiles and skiing!   But what if these clouds lasted forever?  

Continuing with Thomas Merton's "New Seeds of Contemplation," we find an interesting take on the Freudian model of the human mind.  Because of Freud, most of us view the unconscious as a subterranean realm of cloudy obscurity, with fears and sexual desires striking at the poor, surface ego who has been restrained and blinded by cultural norms.  But Merton challenges that picture.  For him, the unconscious is not just below us, but all around us, our conscious egos only a pinprick in a sea of unknown potential and activity.  Yes, there is the underground realm, but also the higher realm which also acts upon us from its unseen height.  This he calls the superconscious, that which links our minds to the realms of the sacred.  

Consider plants.  Most important to the majority of them is their life underground, but we would never know it if we never dug down to see.  There we find that the upper part of trees are only energy gatherers for the real heart of trees in the roots.  How could we know this if we did not dig?  Similarly, if the skies were to remain forever cloudy, and we did not develop flight, we would know nothing of the stars, nor have in our imaginations the idea of the miracle of infinity above us.  And so it is for the subconscious and the superconscious.  Our science has delved into the sub, but until recently the super has been the exclusive concern of magic and religion.  For many, once the spiritual sciences are cast off, the "stars" of our superconscious disappear as if they didn't exist.  We are then cast into the realm of SAD, without being the wiser.

He moves on to explain the old Greek idea of the anima, the animus, and the pneuma - that is, emotion and desire, reason, and spirit, where the pneuma takes in both the former (also seen as male and female) to make the complete person - the realm in Christian theology of the Christ.  From here we can see the connections with everything else - from the meaning of sex, to nature, to spirit, all working together in an astonishing whole. 

But Merton adds something else, something new to this writer, by answering the question: why is this higher realm hidden to us? We might ask the same of the subconscious, but I will stick with this: The higher realm is not of the same nature as the lower realms; rather, it supersedes them.  As we draw closer to its uniting truth, we are drawn away from the lower realms of separation.  The two concepts cannot be fully experienced at once, and so one vision must decline for the other to rise.  Thus, as we "ascend", the world that we have known darkens.  It is this, in part, what St Paul meant when he said he was "looking through a glass darkly."  At first, the greater realm appears obscured - but as it comes into our lives, so our normal life darkens.  At one point, we might find the Dark Night of the Soul, where neither the higher or lower realms yet dominate and we are left alone, adrift, in that temporary hell.  And so, as the upper realm comes within us, we are often left in the darkness, the ashes of what we once knew - before the new consciousness becomes fully known.  

I see now that the clouds outside have lifted, and if I were new born, I would now witness the sun and the blue sky for the first time.  Later, I might shrink in horror as the sun dropped and I was left in obscurity - until the mystery of the stars appeared at full darkness.  And so it seems to be for the higher truth - that we must lose the clouds for the sun, and the sun for the stars, each a loss in its way, and each an increase in our total realm of reality. But we know that reason or emotion alone can't bring us to the pneuma, just as they can't take away the clouds or the sun.  That answer, that help is found only in the Way, which we can only find if we have faith in the process - a faith that there is a sun beyond the clouds and a universe beyond the sun.  As I understand it, the process is inevitable, just as the passing of weather and day and night are.  We must have faith, then, to find the truth in this life, where we find ourselves so attached to the clouds or the sun.  To lose either, if that is all we have known, is terrifying; but we are told that behind them is something far greater.  That, the faith in that, is where the rubber begins to meet the road.  FK      

What a morning.  Waking up at 4 AM to worry about my son, who  is not exactly fitting well at college.  Then to find that a cord of wood carefully stacked fell down in the wind the night before; and then to have the polyurethane-filled can slip from my hands just as the finishing touches were being put on some outdoor furniture, creating a sizable mess to add to the day's joy. 

What can I say?  Life is unpredictable, although I suppose a little more care could have prevented the mishaps.  Still - why would a boy born to obsessive college types be more suited to plumbing than to philosophy?  Wouldn't it have been better if he had avoided our expectations with another birth site?  On the other hand, anthropology came to me as a calling.  When no funding seemed possible, it suddenly arrived, and on went the show - to end in absolutely nothing.  Why that, too?

Very small things to cry about, I know, but the question remains: if this is a purposeful universe, why the apparent missteps?  Why, we could also add, must we have an end to all those lives in terrible wars, why childhood hereditary diseases, why the death of the regular guy going our for milk who gets shot in a robbery at the local Mom and Pop?  All hopes and dreams gone, some from man-made disasters, true - but others from sheer whims of fate. Yes, we learn from our trials more than from our successes, but what a learning curve!  Logically, we might conclude as many do that there IS no order to our lives other than the physical laws that happened to fall into place.  There certainly is plenty of evidence for that.       

But, all fancy new physics aside, it does seem more reasonable that a universe that is indeed ordered also carries the seeds for the order and meaning of our own lives as well.  More, many have experienced this in full-blow revelation, and given everything else about the universe, these were probably not hallucinations or delusions. 

There are many ways to look at this problem, but two aspects of the Ground of Being come first this morning to mind.  One - this Ground is more commonly referred to as God, but this word has a lot of faulty baggage.  It assumes that God is an object, much as we see in ourselves, and acts and interacts as such.  This is clearly not the case, as even the more primitive notions of God in the Old Testament confirm: "God's thoughts are not the thoughts of men."  That is, our logic and the Ground's are on different planes, to put it mildly.  A logic that stretches out through all space and time and everything else is certainly coming at our lives from a different angle than our own immediate concerns.  We simply don't know.  We are told that it comes from the good, the ultimate good, but we don't know what that is, either.  We can get a sense of it and sometimes an outright revelation, but we can never understand.  "Not the thoughts of men."

The Ground is ultimate creativity as well.  As one author put it, each moment is a new creative act, each moment a shimmering burst of cosmic genius.  We thus cannot know this future; we can plan and we can assume, but we cannot know, despite the physical laws that make up our universe.  As each moment is created anew, so this universe is not the clockwork envisioned by earlier science.  Instead, it is an evolving thing, whose destiny cannot ever be known.  

And yet: in hindsight, we often see the order.  Some may say that this is only our own order imposed on a disordered world, and in part this must be true, but not in the whole.  In the whole, we can see traces of the great Genius, from nature to our own lives, as Paul saw truth through the dark glass.  It is almost, but never quite touchable, this design.  It appears, for those who care to look, just enough to keep us going, to remind us that this, we, this moment and every moment is meant to be.  It is meant to be lived.  The spilt can, the fallen wood, the different child, the shadow career, all somehow together in the thoughts of a "mind" that thinks not as men and that creates in pure, limitless glory. And it is we who are left to mop up and rebuild while we see the sun rise and seasons change, each time different, each time with us as the center, but each with a periphery that goes where we cannot quite follow.  FK                       

With dark coming so early these days, I was forced to stop the outdoor work and sit in front of the tube waiting for the Packer's game at 7:00, half an hour before the (eventually disastrous) game, and fell into 60 Minutes - which surprised me by being unusually good.  It started with Ebola, naturally, but then led to genetic engineering, a science that is breaking wide open since the mapping of the human genetic code, with very little public fanfare.  The doctors interviewed showed us how genetic diseases - from breast cancer to certain types of Alzheimer's - can be nipped in the bud by selecting the right sperm and egg for re-implantation in the womb.  Thus, generations of people will no longer have to suffer from these maladies, a good thing.  

The caveats, however, are enormous.  One doctor plainly said, "In the future, all fertilization will (or should) occur in the lab; natural fertilization is just too risky."  That, needless to say, does not sound very romantic, and yet most of us know people who have had children with genetic deformities.  To alleviate the immense suffering involved might seem well worth it.  However, the interviewer raised the obvious question: might  this not lead to further genetic engineering?  She led with the (to-her) horrors of children being bred to have - gasp! - blue eyes!   For those of a certain ideology, such cosmetic differences seem to mean a lot, which I believe do not.  This is not Nazi Germany.  Children's hair and skin and eye color, in fact, would follow certain fads that would come and go, as all fads do. Far more troublesome, as all science fiction readers know, would be secret government intervention to create, say, a docile race with strong backs and simple, willing minds, or super-soldiers with great ability to kill and little ethical attributes to stop them.  This,however, might also not be the problem some believe, for humans have created men and armies with great ability and little pity for eons though cultural means.  

The most important negative aspect of this as I see it, though, rests on exactly what makes us human.  Certainly, we would select for health and strength.  And just as certainly, we would select for intelligence, and there I believe lies the real problem. For one, the competition among some well-healed parents would be endless, as each battled the other for IQ supremacy.  Most worrisome in this is what the cost of high IQ might be.  For example, most contemporary models for IQ measure not only task-oriented levels, but those for social IQ, creativity, empathy and so on.  Could the doctors balance math ability with social competence and compassion?  More to the point, what are the current models missing?  Would focus on certain aspects of being detract from other very important, even fundamental ones that are little understood?  

Would, in the final analysis, the soul of humans be distorted? Would or could science ever encourage the somewhat bizarre personality of St John of the Cross, or even a major prophet? Wouldn't we only encourage deep personality traits valued for our particular culture at a particular  time? Wouldn't it be possible, then, that we could engineer the "human" out of humans?

We do not know, and that is where the problem lies even with well-meaning people - we don't know how or what makes the fully human human.  We also do not know how a balance of humanity works, where each set of traits might work with others to form an ecology of the human race.  Would we select a world of Einsteins or Michael Jordans and dispense with the Thomas Mertons or Mother Theresas?  And who would choose a mentally disturbed Van Goph if he could make a go-getter quarterback and math wiz?  From the individual level to the collective, we do not understand ourselves fully, and in so doing would almost certainly mess up, big-time, just as the state of our natural world under the hand of humans shows.  To play God we must be like gods ourselves.  Perhaps the lab could whip up a version of what some scientist or some political committee considers to be god, but it would be incomplete and wrong, and nothing could be more nightmarish than a god-like being without the full attributes of God.  

There the problem lies, and we will, no doubt, learn someday of the consequences.  Certainly, some megalomaniac will dominate a country some day and seek to build a real super-race, not on blue eyes and blond hair, but on traits of domination.  We will see what kind of humans and human society they will make, and it will probably be with huge relief when this race and nation fall.  

I believe I have mentioned a certain "Star Trek: the Next Generation" episode where the "Q", a superhuman continuum, waxes poetic jealousy for the future of human kind.  But why when they can literally change the laws of physics?  How could they be jealous of us?  It is fiction, I know, but it is a deep thought, and one that has long been answered by the contemplatives: the future of human kind is to share in god-stuff - not just the power, but the whole shebang, the whole reason for being.  That, beyond all the genetic engineering, is the real story. That potential, which lies beyond monkey-like dexterity and mental acumen, is where our true story lies and we must be careful to not breed it out in the labs, ever.  Take away the disease, even give your children blue or iridescent red eyes if you must, but we must use  the greatest possible caution to stay away from those parts of the human that touch its essential self and its soul. FK         

I have an evil twin who seems to reside in the word section of my brain somewhere within my head.  He's the guy who's there before a public speech who tells me I'll say an inappropriate word or fart of freeze like a snowman.  The former two have never happened, but the latter has, on occasion and briefly, just enough to scare the heck out of me.  Just what the evil twin wants.  

The evil twin tells me I am going to breath while deep under water, or fall off a tower ladder.  He tells me I am not good enough for this society, or too good for that one.  I have never breathed under water or fallen off a ladder, but it does make me worry, maybe, who knows? enough to die; and society?  Up to my elbows in that swamp.  The evil twin wants me to have more of this or that than the other guy - something that makes me feel superior in some way - and then tells me it's not enough, that I'm still a putz.  The evil twin will make it hard to play guitar when under pressure, hard to tell a good story, hard to be an ordinary guy just when it is important to do any of those things or a score more of other things.  The evil twin even tells me that I am the only one with an evil twin, and that others are breezing along just fine and dandy (what's up with you, Putz!  Get working!)  I know the evil twin is wrong about that - that is why people say (really) that they would rather die than speak publicly; that is why people freak out on cliffs or ladders or other heights when they are otherwise safe; that is why people go lonely for years because they cannot break out of a shell of some kind or another.  It is also why some snap and do things that land then, briefly and infamously, on the news.  


In the original Star Trek, James T. Kirk encountered some alien something or other that split him in two: the good Kirk and the bad Kirk.  But our evil twin is not so evenly set apart.  It is the doubting self, doubting everything, never secure, a gadfly that shadows all that we do.  It will not allow for any permanent peace or happiness.  It is the standard human condition.

This Thomas Merton knows when he speaks of the egoic self, for this self is both the striver (which is not always good) and the doubter (which is not always bad).  Whichever it is at any moment, however, it is superficial, a separate self that determines its own worth by standing apart from and superior to others in some fashion.  Of course this means that one stands beneath others in many ways as well - and often feels unworthy of the respect that it does get in its special area.  Merton even includes saints; nothing is more beyond saving, he says, than the self-satisfied saint, the sanctimonious prelate or guru who glories in the praise he receives for his holiness.  No - only a person of humble nature, who no longer thinks of himself as separate, as special, can receive the cherished keys to the holy door - and then refuse them if he can to allow others in before him.  


True, all brutally true - our ego plays infinite games with us, and keep us miserable and forever lonely.  Merton, we see, is talking to himself as much as to us, but as I read last night, my evil twin could not help but say: oh, come on!  Now you have made it impossible!  I cannot take pride in any accomplishment, even and especially my own self-sacrifice and piety?  Good lord, are you kidding?  Why even bother.


This is why, evil twin: because it IS true.  That it is difficult to surpass is the way it is, just as it is very hard to climb a high and steep mountain.  It, this human social world and the social facade it creates in us, is truly filled with ego traps.  So tangled are they that Jesus preferred the company of thieves and prostitutes to official holy men - because the armor of their false selves was so thick from their high opinion of themselves.  Better, stunningly, those who knew and know they are worthless or even worse - for they stand, at least possibly, on the brink of salvation.  


But my evil self sighs.  You ain't never gettin' to heaven, Freddy boy.  And that may be right.  But we call 'um like Merton sees 'um, no more or no less.  This tough world of ours really is about the separation we make with the false self and its pride - and the really hard path we must all take sooner or later to peel it off.  It is difficult and it hurts.  It can also only be done with special help - help that the sanctimonious might think he does not need, but that the sinner just might call for, in spite of or even  because of his evil twin.  FK      

Reading Thomas Merton's "New Seeds of Contemplation" has (of course) reinforced my commitment to meditation - one that needs reinforcement, for there is always so much to do!  Wood to be stacked, new shed to be built, garden to be furrowed, brush to be cut, chimney to be swept - on and on, the wheels turning.  Who has time to sit? 

But sit I have done.  This morning, I noticed as I calmed down the intricate movements of my body.  The one cup of weak tea I had had an hour earlier still was purring in the blood stream, causing a slight increase in the heart rate and an overall restlessness. And as the mind drifted to fantasy, as it always does at first, I could feel the impact of the images on that same heart rate, giving me an additional element of unease, of excitement.  These were not fantasies of warfare or UFO sightings, but rather internal diagrams of the new wood shed, and of how I could get rid of the mess the last wood delivery made of the back lawn.  Hardly exciting stuff, but I could feel the affect.  How much more the news of the day, presented to raise excitement and attract interest?  How much more our action movies or TV shows or video games?  

And it is addicting.  We have all read of the addictive nature of hard exercise  - mostly positive - but we do come to depend on that rush of endorphins.  Needless to say, there are the exotic chemical addictions, but also those other internals which only we create - an addiction to the thrill of gambling comes to mind.  And then there is the modern culture of continual stimulation itself. While living in Venezuela, I was puzzled as to why the farmers left good, fertile land - land not owned as in the past by usurious hacendados - to live in the ranchos, or make-shift slums of Caracas and Maracaibo.  Reading another anthropologist's study on this, he could come up with only one true generalization: they left the country for the city for the excitement. It was true as well with the Indians I lived with - many left the freedom of their villages voluntarily for the cloistered rule of the religious missions because they wanted to be part of the big game, the world-wide drama that we have created.

This excitement, however, takes a toll.  On the body,it raises blood pressure without corresponding physical activity, which wears the system down over time, contributing to diseases such as heart problems and possibly to many others.  But it also decreases the potential for meditative thought.  One wonders: while sitting bored in their huts in rural Venezuela, did they also have a higher degree of spiritual recognition?  That is, after all, a part of the biggest divide in human populations, that between rural and urban populations.  One also wonders: could the age of the Church in Medieval Europe have been possible if it had been largely urban?  Perhaps this, too, is the problem with the Muslim world; as those populations become largely urban, could they be losing the centrality of their faith - and in so doing, excite the decreasing numbers of  extremely faithful to violence in an attempt to slow this secularization down?  

There are many more examples of this.  For instance, the more-rural are always seen by the less-rural (or more technological) as more in tune with nature and magic and spirit.  Still, I have to remind myself of a disturbing phrase written by Merton that he has not yet remedied in what I have read so far: that is, that there is nothing we can do to make the presence of God (he always uses that word, which is so tangled in controversy, but he is a Catholic monk, after all) appear in our lives.  God is not an object to be manipulated, but rather comes through ITS grace.  It is almost certain that solitude helps us to hear IT, but it is not a given; as Merton says, we can still ourselves to the point of nothingness, but that will not be God.  IT comes of its own bidding.

So we may find grace in any situation, anywhere.  We know this of the many sinners, even of St. Paul himself on the road to Damascus to kill Jewish converts to Christianity, when he was stuck as if by a lightening bolt with the presence of God.  But certainly, and as Merton concedes, it is best to calm the background noise in case the voice comes - if we indeed want to hear it.  FK                                

It is sometimes difficult to choose the right book.  After the last three presented here, all spiritual heavies, I was looking for something a little lighter.  Hallucinogenics?  Poltergeists?  And aliens, angels, demi-gods, conspiracy theories - there are plenty of books on all, and all fall withing the interests of this blog.  I will eventually return to those and other topics, but last night as I searched Amazon, each of those seemed so - immature - compared with the big stuff, the ultimate, the Ground of Being. They are not, or are not necessarily, fluff, however.  Ebola - style plagues come and go, but if one is in an effected area, it is no child's play.  And while UFO's might seem silly in comparison to that temporary but miserable disease, that is not necessarily the case, either.  That is why we explore them here.

But the heavy stuff got the better of me, and out came the title "Seeds of Contemplation" by an old favorite, Thomas Merton. We do have official Catholic saints in America these days, but Merton is probably the closest to a saint that most Americans willw ever know, even though he is not one and would drop from astonishment if he ever was pronounced one.  He was a writer and a good one, and is well known for that; he was an Ivy Leager in the Roaring 20's who could have made a fortune, but instead made one for his monastery.  He had drunk too much, had unmarried sex (which may have produced a child) and died under quirky circumstances while on pilgrimage to the Far East.  And he understood God, which is what this current book is about, and is why I wished to switch to another genre for a while.

For God, as everyone who truly knows KNOWS, is undefinable, which is proclaimed again in the very first chapters of this book. Think you are getting a handle on ultimate reality with your meditation or in your church?  Think LSD or Mushrooms are bringing you to the top of the sacred food chain?  Think again. Or don't think, because one cannot know God through thinking. God is not an object or a thought or a concept; God cannot be known through one's own efforts; and IT cannot be possessed ever.  Nor will one's self ever get to know God, for the self as we understand it is an illusion, a mask; we will only know this Ground of Being when we are taken from ourselves and are offered, are gifted with this presence.  It is "I AM", just as the real self who experiences it, not the self that will, as Merton says, most surely and completely die.  And it is found, or gifted, with the help (but only help) of contemplation.

Such things I read last night in this new book, and such things I have read by true masters before.  They do not bring comfort. They tell us that God is not a congenial father, and we do not drift into heaven as a healthy and happier version of ourselves.  As Kathleen Singh pointed out in her book on death, the self must be burned off at considerable cost and pain before Union can come. Merton agrees: contemplation does not end suffering or doubt: in this world, it brings greater doubt and often greater suffering than normal.  The 'God' it allows to come is not a hide-away from pain, but rather a stripping away, a decentering that is essential for an eventual centering - without our comfortable little selves.  It is the hero's journey, and few of us - certainly not me - are heroes. 

Why then continue to forge ahead into this frightening abyss? We might say that if we want to know the ultimate truth that it is essential, but we already know that it will bring us no lasting comfort - quite the opposite.  It will not bring us money or fame or respect, but if anything, poverty and scorn.  Why then, when it will all be made present at death anyway?  

I could say that I am drawn to it, and that would be true, but so are we all eventually.  For me, however, it has come to speak through a lonely destitution that I have found to be oddly pleasant and liberating.  Reading Merton's chapter on what contemplation is NOT (which is the route the Eastern sages use to tell disciples what it is, because one cannot name or describe IT), I involuntarily got the image of a much-younger me while hitchhiking through Kansas.  I was at this point destitute, going nowhere, and actually physically lost - but this is what I wrote (in my book Dream Weaver, Chapter 12: Dust in the Wind): "This place, this empty place in Kansas, had never figured in my dreams while hitching on the road, but I see it now as one of the more sublime gifts granted during my travels.  There were, in that moment, no goals, no fears, no complaints, no anything but youth in a great and open space. In it was the essence of happiness. For years to come, the thought of that great, gentle, open space would smooth the edges and help guide me from foolishness." This was not Nirvana, but the mirror image in this world - a draw, I now know, to sublime Nothing, to freedom, which gives us more than we can ever get in this world that we know.  Once allowed to taste it, our world is changed - and in this world, this change is very often for the worse, for unless we are led to a life task though grace, we can never care enough about success to obtain it. 

Merton brought success to his monastery, as he was clearly called to do.  As we read him, he brings us to the edge of our own Kansas, but from there, the chips will fall as they may.  It is not satisfying in itself, more like an itch, but once bitten we are bid to scratch and scratch.  "Better to not start the spiritual path; but if started, better to finish." How can we refuse such a challenge?  FK           

Years ago I read a short story by the enigmatic author, Jorge Luis Borges, on a man who stumbled on a fantastic find somewhere in north Africa.  Coming in to a hidden canyon, he found a hoard of naked people lying around doing nothing, whose interest in him also amounted to nothing.  He found with those who cared to talk that this was the valley of the immortals, of people who had been blessed to live forever.  Getting little more out of them, he began his long journey back, accompanied by one of the immortals for reasons he did not know.  After several days of the journey, during which this naked man simply hung around and followed, he finally began to talk.  

"We have lived every life possible.  We have been virtuous, and when we tired of that, we have been wicked.  We have lived with great power, and when that tired us, we have lived without.  We have been warriors and saints and prostitutes and murderers. We have been humanitarians, priests, artists, inventors.  And after all, we went to the valley, for there is nothing more to do.  We have lived it all." (my rendition).

The sense of ennui was excruciatingly clear in the story - that, at some point, when all possibilities are lived, there is nothing - there is complete boredom. Death would be preferable, although that is not the point of the story.  In fact, the point remained purposefully unclear, going no further than stimulating one's thoughts on such a situation, but for some reason that I cannot recall, it made me think of the problem of reincarnation.  According to the Hindus, we must be reborn to lives in reaction to our last lives, having to "live off" or burn off our previous imperfections until we are pure enough to reunite with Godhead. This would take eons as they recognize, hundreds of thousands of reincarnations.  The thought burdened me then, and burdens me now - please, no!  One shot at life and done!  Not human life for eternity minus one!

Like all religions, though, it is meant for the contemporary people's imagination.  It may not be that reincarnation as we understand it ever takes place.  It may instead be a metaphor for how we must lose our egoic (necessarily selfish) selves to be able to unite with God. Such is the old Catholic metaphor of purgatory,and such it is meant to mean.  However, Fr.  Thomas Keating has put in another idea about this, one that discomforts me: that is, that God must exist in all myriad possibilities to show his infinite love and humility under all conditions.  That would include torture cells, rooms of sick, dying children, the worst possible battle fields and so on.  A scary prospect, but one in which Keating might also be tending towards metaphor, whether he knows it or not.  

The metaphor has to do with the eternally complex idea of suffering under the power of a loving god.  Many cultures do not have this problem - some simply believe that with life, God is broken into a prism of gods, where out of the pure light of Being is born such things as good and evil.  Others believe even more simply that life is a contest between two gods, one of good and one of evil.  The People of the Book's view, as it is told to us, is that we the people have somehow caused a transgression, and our lives are a  story of healing that transgression to get back to God. Under Keating's idea, God is then showing himself in all conditions created by our imperfect selves to bring us back to him, showing that God is in all things, even in the most ugly of situations.  

And so we do not have to live indefinite lives, but to find in all aspects of life the absolute - which takes a faith almost as powerful as immortality.  But what of Borges's immortals? How, after living all possible lives, have they come to such utter boredom?  

I think this, too, is a metaphor for desire and the human condition; for as long as we are worldly humans, we will wish for what we do not have.  Given infinite time and lives, however,we will grow tired of every temptation and every pleasure or perversion. There will be no will, nothing left to will for in the end, and it is in this end where we understand that we are all equal, that every sinner is a saint and vice versa.  

But still, this is incomplete.  There is one more step - where our desire ends, another desire takes root.  I thought of it this groggy, grumpy Monday morning as my eyes became adjusted to the brilliant light of a clear autumn day: that regardless of the situation, there pulses the beauty, the brilliance of creation; that without having to contrive anything, Spirit is in everything.  There is no need to create evil or good or anything else, for spirit is always there.  This the immortals still had not found - and this we, as mortals, never find until we understand the drama that is our lives - how behind it, behind the desire and the joy and suffering, is the bright autumn day that was always there and has never left us.  FK           

          

I write now at 6 AM, having been awake for some time with the excitement of a solution to a big problem.  It appeared from out of a disturbed dream, which was spurred not only from the problem, but from Thomas Keating's book "Reflections on the Unknowable," which I have been discussing this last week.  What comes to mind as the mist clears are two points he made in the latter part of the book:

One: God is Chaos.  By this it is not meant mindlessness, but infinite creativity, present at every moment.  It is precisely what we don't like, this chaos, for our world is built on order. As many authors have pointed out, this order not only gives us comfort, but also monotony, depression, and anxiety; monotony from the predictability, depression from living in this rut, and anxiety because we know this order is built on sand, the sand of mortality.  This order we all know will crumble, and this is terrifying.  In the chaos of creativity,we solve the problems of monotony and depression, but increase the anxiety because we find no firm footing.  We are left dangling over the void.  This last can only be ameliorated by faith, by trust in a greater order beyond our comprehension.  But this leads to the second point:

God in the Ground of Being - that is, God before realization, or what the Buddhists call the Void - is beyond passion or concern. It just IS.  For Christians, Christ is the investment of this void in the human condition, an investment that is understood by Love - but what form does this divine love take?  It will not give you what you want when you want it; it will not keep you from suffering and death.  As we know from the personage of Christ in Jesus, it is precisely to this suffering that we are destined.  So what do we get from this, this infinite creativity made human?  Keating points out the suffering of the saints, quoting one woman who wrote: "if I did not have my faith, I would commit suicide."  Her suffering was, as she saw it, divinely inspired, a  work of God; a suffering so great that she could not touch the Love of God that she so deeply desired.  For Keating, this was the greatest depths of the Dark Night of the Soul, one that only the greatest saints are asked to endure.  And one that many, many of us are forced to endure in our final days. 

And so we see this great game played out - the chaos of creativity against a backdrop of a god, or an Absolute, that most certainly is not a Santa Claus for our desires.  It reminds me of a very cynical book written about a passive, well-meaning man who is killed in a random robbery and is sent to hell.  He objects - why me to hell?  How did I deserve this?  God's reply? "That's art!" That is, hey, whatever strikes my mood, ya know?

As with all things spiritual, though, there is more to it than that. We are, as Keating points out, part of this infinite creativity, and there is, if we have eyes to see, great joy in this and - most importantly - freedom as well.  To cast aside the narrow order of humans, one joins ranks with God in this wide open and infinite splendor.  Unfortunately, from our perspective, the ticket to freedom is bought with the demise of our order, of our small world, and in that, we must suffer the horror of the abyss, of a chaos that is beyond our comprehension.  

In the glib depiction of life as a believer in Christ, all is supposed to go well once His will is accepted.  It does not, although the "wages of sin" - of vice - are avoided.  Divorce happens, businesses fail, sickness comes.  But there is something left between the cracks, between Chaos and suffering; there is indeed a guiding voice, even for those trapped in the limited world.  Just as there are gradations of love (and of hate), so it seems there are gradations of spiritual interplay. Apparently, it is not an all or nothing thing; it is rather something that does not require the passage to Hell to get to heaven.  It is a clearing of the air, a solution to the problem.  It has always been there for all people in all times; it is the "eureka!" of the scientist, the coincidence of a ride at the right time, a fluke that rearranges our lives for the better.  Why this is so is lost in the talk of the greater things, of ultimate surrender and enlightenment.  It is, after all, a world of infinite creativity and anything can happen.  From the perspective of the enlightened, all is perfect, but from our lowly level, all is not.  Sometimes solutions don't come; sometimes we are forced to dangle over the abyss.  But in infinite creativity, there are also those flukes, those acknowledgments that there is a force at work greater than ourselves that cares, at least sometimes, about our nearsighted frivolities.  

And the insight from this is this: never give up until it is truly time to give up. The future is never written, as hard as we try to make it so.  It can change on a dime in the most unusual ways.  There is more to life than death, more to life than ashen supplication. There is, in a word, life, and if not anything else it is an adventure towards which we must have openness and great courage to appreciate.  Never give up until it is time to give up - and that time, if we are open, will be given to us to know.  FK           

                  

We read in Mark that "blessed are the poor of spirit," and I am again reminded of a remark I read on the bathroom wall while at the U of Michigan.  It was a comment made underneath another etched scrawl reciting a Simon and Garfunkel tune, I forget which, about being lonely and helpless.  The comment under it went something like this: "to hell with your meek surrender!  That is only giving way to the decadent embrace of weakness brought on by the Jewish explanation for their defeat.  It is an excuse of the losers!"  I do not exaggerate its tone and have, if anything, dumbed down the logic.  It was obviously made by a student taken in by a philosophy course that highlighted Fredrick Nietzsche, whose appeal to the superman was made all too famous by Hitler.  I have talked about this side of Nietzsche with many people, and just as many people have a different interpretation of his ideas, of what they mean in the greater picture.  However, there is no doubt that he saw the Jewish religion and its offshoot, Christianity, as religions of slaves, meant to enslave, above all, the will; that is, meant to keep us from striving for our utmost, struggling bravely against the forces of man and nature that may come against us.

For those living in the European subculture that is America, this is a tough one.  Regardless of the anti-Christian and anti-religious movement of the intellectuals and their followers, even these - especially those in the PC movement - embrace the main message of the poor of spirit: that is, that the weak are superior to the strong, are in fact victims of the strong and thus should be given every advantage.  And yet we have the counter-movement of striving for excellence, of getting ahead, of being the top dog, and we all embrace that as well.  This is one of the cultural rifts in our country that creates movement and possible decline, rifts that all civilizations have although they might be different in specifics (another topic for another time).
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The trouble is, this interpretation of Mark's words is missing an essential element.  According to Father Thomas Keating in his book, "Reflections on the Unknowable," what is meant by this is that we must lay down all our barriers - essentially our false egoic self - to will God's will.  The poor of spirit are those who have done this.  They are not victims at all; in fact, what they have done is the hardest thing anyone can do, and requires an iron will.  They are not weak, although they may have come to this position from weakness.  Yet, they also may have come to this position from great power, just as the prince Siddhartha did after he saw the emptiness of his own cloistered life,  and so set out to resolve the problem of suffering to become the Buddha.  I cannot recall if Nietzsche got into this, but if we take his "superman" as it commonly is understood, we see that great power and wealth do not create lasting happiness - but neither do imposed poverty of goods and material power.  Rather, it is the giving up of the ego-directed self that gives lasting happiness, in being One with "the way" of God, or Tao.  

We do not want to be poor of spirit.  We want things to go our way, and are hurt when some things inevitably go astray.  For Keating, not only is this a potentially good thing, but can also be so even if one actually gives up on God, or on hope, from such frustration.  As puzzling as this might seem, Kathleen Singh in her book on dying says that hope is one of the last things we must give up to have a good death.  We must give in to the notion that nothing can be done, that death will come, that we are powerless; we must give up our bargaining and pleas to God before this Ground of Being may enter us.  This is "poverty of spirit."

It is a fearful prospect, but one that WILL come to us all.  It requires absolute courage from us, and we all get it because we have no choice.  It is one of those twists in reality that is not evident in our normal world, but is the stuff of which the greater world - the world that we sometimes refer to as the spiritual world - runs on. This poverty of spirit comes not from weakness, but from courage.  Seeing oneself as a victim of others brings no relief, and no political movement can make our weakness right - these are limited thoughts gained from the spiritual plain and applied incorrectly to the material plane.  Spirit does not run that way; all our clever logic simply does not work, nor do our supplications to the human power structure. 

We might just as well call the "poor of spirit" the true supermen, for they have indeed inherited the kingdom and left behind fear. Fear is the emotion of the weak, and the more power one has in this world, the more one fears the loss of it. Those who have surrendered the all of themselves are beyond fear - the truly courageous, the true victors.  FK