Another night of football, and I'm feeling the rebuke of the Protestant Ethic, but there is nothing parsimonious about football. It is all vainglory, especially the adds.  We can be anything if we try (sure we can), and success will bring us never-ending happiness - especially when we drive a new car.  

Besides beer, nothing is more advertised than cars during the game.  There was one add that had a waiter pouring coffee all over the table of his clients because he couldn't stop looking at the great shiny new car driving by the window.  The clients weren't upset because they, too, were staring at this mechanical wonder.  And not because they simply admired its chic design and shiny  exterior, but because they envied - with a capital E - the owner.  You, that is; you, if you are successful enough to be able to buy this car.  And thus You can be happy, not  just because of the smooth ride, but because everyone will know you are successful and envy you for it, and that will make you very, very happy.  Thus the one- in -a -million stars of the game and you have something in common - you are both successful and envied.  A perfect marriage of game, greed, and insecurity.

Something we all know, I think, and we have to wonder if anyone is buying this type of sell - unless the subliminal aspects of social insecurity are more powerful than we think, and that might be the case.  However, it made me reflect on what I envied, and for me it is not cars - I never had the panting desire for one other than the practical need for transportation; nor do I have a desire for a mansion or a jet or a big pool, although if I could afford a pool I would like that.  Still, no envy; and now, in my dotage, I don't even envy success, which I once was very needy for.  No.  In fact, a story about a man who lives in a little cave in California or some such and who makes beautiful observations and sketchings in a notebook while living on wild nuts and bread crumbs catches my attention more than the rich guy who owns the top three stories in a ritzy apartment building in New York City.  Sure, I would admire his art collection and neat gadgets that I could never afford, but I'd rather live in a cabin in the woods.  Truth.  The advertising apparently doesn't work on me.

But these musings got me to thinking about Thomas Merton and the impossible hurdles he wrote about in our efforts to reach God, the Ultimate.  Ah, he says, one must not even be satisfied with one's fasting and poverty, for in that one raises self-pride and proves himself as far from God as the common sinner buying his new car for prestige.  As such I realized he was talking about me.  Yes, I shrug at the rich guy, don't have class envy, and it only matters to me that the other guy has money if he is buying the next round.  Yes, to me, the things of the mind and the spirit matter more - does one have good ideas or talent?  Has one hiked the Appalachian Trail or lived in the wilderness off nuts and berries?  These things I admire much more, but find in thinking about it that with such thoughts, I feel superior; I feel that the great "I", me, is reaching up to the heights while the poor slob on the street is reaching out for a stupid car.  Arrogance?  You bet.  

So I'm not holier than thou after all, and Thomas Merton is right: the road to the Ultimate is not a matter of shifting one's feelings and desires and self-image from one thing to another, but rather in abandoning them all together.  Anything else only puts one in another exclusive club, where if one is not envied, it is only because of the stupidity of the other.  This can be the Club of the Yachts just as well as the Club of Jesus, or of Meditaters, or of Hobo Hikers.  Same arrogance, same selfishness, same childish need to feel superior to someone else.  

It does not have to be that way, of course - we can admire something without self-aggrandizement, but Merton is right to have us beware; the car makers know what they're talking about. We feel a need to set ourselves apart, however that might be. This might not sell cars, but it might sell a hipster or intellectual or artsy lifestyle that is no closer to the Real than the shiny objects sold in between plays on Sunday Night football.  Damn, and I thought I was doing so well!  FK 

[A new chapter has been added to "Hurricane River," listed in the website, entitled "The Sweater." It is after the new chapter posted last week and still on, "Three Amigos."  Another will be added next week and so on as a serial, with the former chapters deleted with each new chapter placed.]

Two questions were raised after the last few blogs: One: what are the prospects of Gaia, really, in protecting our earth?  And two - what's wrong with meaningless recreation?  

On the first - Gaia, as said, is not an earth goddess but the ecological collective of all species.  Humans alone, as far as we know, are (or might be) the only one to have free choice.  Yet we are part of the overall species continuum.  Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and biologist, argued that, as we are part of the continuum, we only have to reconnect with our deeper natural selves to live ecologically sound lives.  But he was restricted by the profane nature of his profession, while I am not.  It seems to me that morality was given to us as a counter to our natural tendencies of over-exploitation - an ability that is not held in check by the very same reason that we have morality- because we are abstract thinkers and introspective beings.  That is, our thinking abilities made us rise above natural limitations, while also giving us the ability to have cultural and personal morality systems which would limit over-exploitation.  Gaia, then, has been given a self-reference through us, and also a way to upset its balance.  It is, to my way of thinking, a spiritual gamble on the part of the Absolute that gives us a tremendous insight into the meaning of ourselves and our place in the universe.  On the other hand, we are but one of millions of planets.  The gamble, for God, is not a make or break one.  Of course not.  But it is for us and could go either way. I believe the Cosmos is literally pulling for us, but we must slay our dragons first - those dragons being the parts of us that allow gross exploitation (and anihilistic warfare) in the first place.  We are helped by our reference moralities and our sense of beauty and balance, but we have to subdue our 'animal side' because of our enhanced cognitive abilities.  It is, to me, a morality play in the flesh on a cosmic scale.

As for recreation, yes, we have a tendency towards self-righteous workaholism.  I just read Thomas Merton's "The Sayings of the Desert Fathers" and was confronted again and again with the importance of hard work for the servants of the lord.  Recall the saying, "an idle mind is the Devil's playground."  Tell me about it, for how much guff I've gotten for being a writer.  My retort is, "the only thing that defines what I do as work or as an idle waste is the money.  The work is the same." To no avail, but that is a side issue.  Overall, it has been understood by Northern Europeans that it is God's command to suffer to make a living - and to appreciate the suffering. For the desert fathers, I believe they were reacting to the idle rich of the era, the same demonized by Jesus.  For the more modern Northern European model, we look to the Protestant Ethic, which affected northern Catholics too. We are to work but not appreciate the fruits of it, for as sinners we must sweat and toil but not indulge.  This, as it is now understood, gave rise to Capitalism, for the hard-working Protestants had nothing more to do with their money than to reinvest (to capitalize).  

Paradoxically, this produced the richest, most profane general culture since the time of the late Roman Empire.  We might say, then, that while being idle by living off of someone else's sweat is not morally correct, neither is it to work beyond what is necessary.  Rather, self-sufficiency and attention to the quality of the work and to its place in a greater plan is the better attitude.  
So I'd say, enjoy. Maybe I can better, too, when my big break comes.  Then again, there can never be too much humility.  FK   

[Note: tomorrow I will add another chapter to the novel, "Hurricane River" found in the website under that name.  With that, I will erase all but the latest two chapter, to fashion a weekly serial.  If the reader wants to get in on the beginning, today is the day to do it.]     

For the last few days, the Milwaukee Journal has been running a series on the ecology of fish in the Great Lakes.  They have used up nearly all their front section space with it, and it was a good decision: the story is fascinating as well as frightening, a real page-turner.  It starts with the opening of the canal that allowed ocean liners to steam directly up the St Lawrence River into the Great Lakes system.  With that, a host of invaders came on the hull and ballast of the ships, most notorious among them in the 50's and 60's being the lamprey eel and the small, sardine like alewife. I remember the eel well from my Weekly Reader, for that is a gruesome tale of a monster that attaches itself to a fish and slowly sucks out its blood - and guts if it can, like an ET horror film.  Much worse, though, were the innocent looking alewives. They have an enzyme in them that keeps the native lake trout from reproducing, and with the collapse of the native big fish because of the this and the lamprey, the alewives were left with no predators.  Their population mushroomed to such an extent that net fishermen caught them to use as fertilizer and animal food; beaches were overwhelmed with their rotting carcasses; and clots of the dead fish, so overcrowded, reached miles in extant, like algae blooms.  

Enter the biologists.  Convinced that they could not mess up the eco system any more than it was, one man thought to stock coho, and then Chinook salmon.  They thrived on the alewives, and for the next 20 years a great new fishing tradition - along with a great new money generator for the lakes - was born.  But the salmon soon reduced the alewives, and with the addition of new invasive species like the zebra muscle, the food source of both alewives and (by extension) salmon became scarce.  In Lake Huron, the salmon population collapsed; in Lake Michigan, it is barely hanging on.  

And yet - a new small invasive fish, the gobe, also entered the system.  They have molars and are able to eat the zebra muscles (they both come from the same region of the Caspian Sea).  The remaining larger native fish learned to eat the gobe, and suddenly, without planning, Lake Huron, and to a lesser extent, Lake Michigan, came nearer to their natural ecological balance than they had been in decades.  

What is mind-numbing about this is that marine biologists still wish to keep the salmon populations up in Michigan, because of its popularity with the fishermen.  Fishermen, they say, bring in the fishing fees and support Great Lakes efforts to maintain its waters.  But what could be better for the lakes than a natural balance once again achieved?  Is it possible they fear more for their jobs and salaries than the lakes? 

I can't really answer that question, and it is not to the larger point. Rather, I wonder at this: how is it that humans, as we are now, are so capable of destroying ecological systems that, for the most part, are not really that delicate?  They are, after all, made from a rough and changing planet.  I also wonder at this: does the Gaia hypothesis really work? Is the planet like an organism, with self-correcting mechanisms? 

Many authors, mostly ecologists, have dealt with the first issue, condemning mechanized man for his blindness to the natural processes.  But this condemnation is unjust; all species exploit the environment they have to the fullest, without moral compunction.  Deer, when too dense, will destroy forests by eating saplings; locusts are infamous for their devastation; and rodents of various species have a boom and bust cycle that deeply effects the environment.  It is true, however, that the Great Lakes did not fall because of the alewife and lamprey, but because humans made it  possible for species that were not part of the balanced system to enter.  Nature, like American politics, does not count on moral restraint; it has built-in checks and balances, the greed of one, if we can call it that, limiting the greed of the other.  Introduce one species into a novel environment and it may run roughshod, until it, too, is discovered by other species which cancel its destructive hegemony.     

On to humans: we exhibit the same elemental greed to expand and consume as other species.  What sets us apart is not our fundamentally different level of greed, but our ingenuity at expanding our grasp with technology.  This is possible because of our ability for abstract thought (and, of course, hands to carry out this thought into action).  But it is this same mental quality that allows us to erect moral systems that might ameliorate our natural rapaciousness.  On cue, the very ability to cause massive destruction to the world is coupled with the ability of self-restraint. Our god-like powers over nature, then, are held in check (or can be) by our ability to conceive of gods or God, who have justified the moral imperative for thousands of years.  Not by chance, this ability and these beliefs lead into the reality of supernatural power itself, and to the idea of Gaia, the self-sustaining earth.

The notion of Gaia to a scientific mind seems silly on the surface of it - what mind, what brain does the Earth have that may direct such a complex process, such as living beings have?  We may look to the natural balances of nature, after all, and claim they came about by natural selection and resource competition, and there are many diagrams made by naturalists to show how this can or did happen.  But if we look at humans, we see something strange: a new ability to destroy the earth as no other creature can, coupled with the ability to regulate his own behavior by choice.  The choice not to destroy is seldom couched only in practical terms, either, but in more compelling moral ones: it is the right thing to do.  We have beauty to consider, after all, and this is something we all need - and beauty depends in part on the balance of nature.  What other creature thinks like that?  And how fortunate that our ability to destroy can be balanced with our ability to not destroy because of such abstractions as beauty?

There, then, is where we find the mind of Gaia - not in the core of the earth like an ancient god, but in all things according to their abilities.  For where raw nature no longer rules, as in human behavior, another abides or can abide, one that also restrains and leaves us capable of fitting in to the ecology of the world.  Where, one might ask, is the mechanistic selection process of classical Darwinism here?  To have a species that can rise above standard species competition, only to be subdued by a moral consciousness that no other creature before, as far as we know, has possessed?  This seems far more than coincidence. 

The mind, then, of Gaia, is no only in all things, but beyond all things, a hidden thing found in an exquisite order that not only reacts but anticipates.  Human morality, after all, was well in place long before bulldozers and bombs made the human such a dangerous species.  Yes, everything co-evolved with society, but all so neatly, so elegantly, that one cannot help but look to Occam's Razor and conclude that a design, not just a print but an evolving one, does exist.  As Fr. Teilhard de Chardin said, we are not pushed by evolution so much as pulled by it.  It is a system with meaning, and we are being pulled towards its source in the strange drama of Gaia.  FK      
                        

The last few nights have not been spent in reading or contemplation, but in football.  My team from New England, the Patriots, pulled out a fast one, and my adopted team, The Packers, barely hung on to win after a huge early lead.  Instead of thinking for myself, I let the players do it for me, and it was fun, except that it leaves something of a vacuum afterwards - what, after all, have I accomplished?  

Well - for one thing, I kept up with the national conversation.  The front page news being repetitive and political, where else can I go to but football?  It could also lead to scintillating insights into our culture - except that this has been done ad nauseum by social scientists since, oh, nineteen aught one, or approximately the age of the dinosaurs.  Ah, yes, we are a competitive lot - but so are the nations of soccer.  We like rules, we like bread and circuses, we take sides; in effect, we are so much like everybody else that it is hardly worth the mention.  Our ball is oblong, theirs' is round, and that's about the size of it, or so my trickster side tells me. 

Almost surprisingly, then, we might conclude that we are all fundamentally the same, and such I found often enough, again surprisingly, with life with rain forest Indians.  In the differences that do exist, their is still something to gleam, however.  In reading about the Inca at the time of the Spanish conquest, the conquistadors were surprised with how quickly the population gave up resistance after their king-god was captured and then killed.  Women, for instance, gave up restraint and allowed themselves to be had by the men as if in a trance.  With my own exploits, I found that certain fundamental outlooks - not on the family/nurturing level, which was very recognizable to me - made the people appear almost hypnotized, hemmed in by cultural beliefs that I considered unnecessary.  For  instance, at a little food party we had with some, one man became enraged because we had given food to a woman before him.  This was an assault on his dignity. They also would not trade their spears for anything; blowguns, yes, but never spears.  Why we never knew, but it was a big deal that to us made no sense.  We understand better why Muslims destroy images of holy people and prophets, as strange as that might seem, but what of this obsession with woman and burquas?  

As with football, learned papers have been written about the reasons for such odd behavior, but we know that our normal behavior often seems odd to others.  That's anthro 101.  In the bigger picture, we might even say that ALL of us are doing things that seem perfectly rational, but really are not necessary for the basics of survival.  In essence, we all live in something of a dream state, not even understanding that what we consider to be ourselves are social constructs.

In yesterdays blog, I fumbled around with the barely visible (to me) idea that "good and bad," or in old fashioned religious parlance, "sin," was not what we thought it was - that is, a rebuke from a supernatural judge.  Rather, sin is a dream state, a system of beliefs that keeps us from viewing the real world, which is at bottom a spiritual whole.  So I revisit original sin.  Where once I saw it as this separation from God, which it is, I can also envision it in this concept of systems, or premises of belief.  In the Bible, we learn with consternation that knowledge is the fruit of "evil."  With this,  we are forced to backtrack to redefine evil, and find that is not naughty behavior, but a vision of the world as a discrete entity filled with other discrete entities, one thing or person having little or nothing to do with another.  Here, even spirit (wholeness) has been separated as well, as something "sacred" rather than profane.  Original sin, then, is the beginning of the first great rift, the false premise that underscores human thought.  We can see something of many false premises in other's, but can only conjecture many of our own by another premise - that we are all, at the core, the same.  The scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries did not believe this, and thought to set Western culture apart from the 'primitives' of the world. And yet, in their own way, our intellectual mavens today do much the same.  We are, as it turns out, all still lost in a dream of false premises.

The question returns again and again, however - how did this first happen?  Where was the real "garden of Eden" and why must it have played out so?  This also leads to something that, to me, is a little spooky: that we have all self-selected for this world of human "sin." That is, that we are all here because we have bought into the first wrong premise, the forbidden fruit, and as such, our world and all its laws run accordingly, the truth of Reality hidden from us because we have decided not to see it. We are, then, One in more than a mystical senses, but also One in choice.  We also are all left to struggle out of our choice, pressed on not only by logical inconsistencies but inevitable suffering and death.  It seems that we have created this deadly game just as surely as we have created football.  

Do we create the  mountain in order to have something to climb? Does the courage and endurance it takes to climb such a mountain add up to the reason that we want to create such a mountain in the first place?  That is, is there really a purpose behind it all, beyond winning a Super Bowl of sorts? Looks like it's time again to stop watching games.  FK 
        
                  

This weekend I was giving a pep-talk to my son, who was feeling down because of a certain class at college.  I did my best to talk from what I believed, telling him of the parable of the wheat harvesters who were all paid the same, regardless of when they came to work: 'it is not for social approval or personal aggrandizement or even simply for sustenance that we should work, for work is not what it is about - it is about realizing God in all things - and that is the ultimate and only truly worthwhile reward.'  Of course he sighed when I brought out scripture, and I don't blame him.  Even worse, though, was my own realization as I talked that I didn't really mean it - that I wanted him to be successful in society's eyes, to make me proud.  So, in honesty, I had to add, "don't even work for my approval.  I'm too steamed in middle class American values.  Do it for the ultimate cause."  

To my surprise, he understood, but this showed to me how immersed I am in social behavior, regardless of theological reasoning.  And so I also understood why he should sigh at the mention of scripture, and why anyone who's "with it" avoids it all together.  It is because 'it,' the wisdom of the holy people, is seen as a moralizing rebuke of our own desires.  Who, we want say, dares tell us what is wrong and right?  We are adults and are free to run our own lives.  Why listen to some ancient on antiquated rules of behavior?

I agree, if that were the case - except that, at the bottom, what the holy people are telling us is not what we usually think.  It is not empty moralizing, or spanking us for bad thoughts and deeds. We only see it that way because we are so lost in our way of life, mistaking the vision of Truth for another reality that is mostly within our own limited concepts.  In Christianity, it is easy to see why - God is seen as the Father in the Jewish tradition, and thus the condemning overlord of our behavior.  Jesus had, for his time, no other choice but to speak through that template, so that people of his time could understand at least something .  The Eastern mystics had no such tradition, and talked of "reality" much more as it really is - with God being equated to a void. However, their weakness is just as great as Christianity's, for as the Christians are hampered by the vision of God as a large human, those in the east are more often than not left in confusion, thrown like the Hindus to create gods out of animals and natural forces.  We cannot conceive of God, so what is a wise person to do?  

So it is that morality, in what it is really about, is very difficult to grasp.  No, it is not about being a good little boy or girl, where the stern father comes to give a sad look or spanking when we have strayed. Rather, morality - what we take take to be laws of behavior, like not hitting one's little brother or sister - is about what Truth is about.  It, the set of moral strictures conveyed by the holy, is really an attempt by the wise to get it through our heads that what we think the world is all about is dead wrong.  It is not about being nice, but changing our distorted view of reality to coincide with Truth - and in Truth, suffering will end.  Thus Jesus speaks in parables, challenging the minds of those who have studied them for two thousands years.  And the eastern mystics?  For most of us, we hear of cosmic duality and the void and give up in exasperation.

However, it must be the wise who are most exasperated.  How can they break through our mirage of reality?  How can they reach us?  

To say that we must treat others as we treat ourselves, for instance, is giving us notice that we are all tied to each other as closely as our own skin.  We do not see it that way because of our "fallen" perspective, but this is Truth.  To treat others as oneself is to teach us, not to be nice, but to show the way to Reality.  We are our brothers and sisters.  See this and not only will strife end, but we will be seeing Reality, things as they really are beyond our social and perhaps biological blinders.  

What about Karma and reincarnation?  On the face of it, it looks like divine retribution: rape and ye shall return to be raped.  But that's not the point, either; instead it means the same thing as the Christian Golden Rule - our neighbors are ourselves.  Rape another and we are raping ourselves - that is, doing damage to ourselves as well.  Reincarnation means that we have not realized this truth, and will continue in this blind alley of human thought for as long as we hold that people are separate and unequal.  That it goes on for all eternity until the realization is made, I don't know.  Maybe at death we do finally see the light, and forever.  But in what we call life, suffering will continue as long as we do not see the Truth. 

When we Catholics confess our sins, it is as though we were pleading to a father for forgiveness - in fact, that is what we are told.  But we are not being forgiven, as humans understand it; rather, we are being handed the platform, the way out of our egotism through humility - and from humility, we might experience union, or the Reality behind our divisive reality.  

And so on, and even as I try to explain what has come to me through readings, I have a very difficult time making the shift.  As I found while talking to my son, I, too, am very much a part of the social reality, no matter my intellectual thoughts.  It is an impossibly tough bind to get out of, as the basis for our thinking about reality forms the false reality of our total thoughts, as confusing as that might seem (called a tautology in philosophy. Once you accept a certain premise as the basis of reality, all other things necessarily fall into place behind it.  Truth, that which is behind the premise, is then either distorted to fit the premise or totally ignored, for lack of consistency, or reference).  The  death of  Jesus, for instance, is not a divine sign that we are evil, but that we must kill the very premise or premises that give us our false reality. (Whether Jesus in his holy person actually helps us in the end to do this, I don't know - that is beyond my grasp of ultimate Reality, but must rather become a fact in faith).  The reason we must do so, to 'kill' our current reality, is not just for Truth's sake, although that would be enough; but to, as the Buddha put it, end suffering.  And so it would, at least as far as we understand it now.        

Why did I start this on a Monday?  We can be fools in more ways than one, but the ideas here have tantalized me for months. There is Truth somewhere in there.  Trouble is, it is so diffuculy to actualize in our current reality continuum.  Maybe that takes something more than intellect, something that we can only pray for.  FK                    

[A note: I have separated my book, "Hurricane River," from "Books by Frederick Keogh" to its own title.  Starting today and each Friday from here on out, I will add an additional chapter or two until it is complete.  I will leave all chapters presently up until next week for those who want to start it, and then leave only the two latest chapters up at a time, as a serial, starting next week. This is to add to the website something new besides the blog.  I am seriously working on getting the Essays into a book, and so will only have one or two new ones a month posted until this book is finished, hopefully with the hardest part done by spring.]     

Reading Todd Balf's book, "The Darkest Jungle," about the American attempt to find a passage through the Darrien of Panama for a canal in 1854, we find the typical tale of Europeans in the tropical jungles: disease, starvation, desperation - and the prospect of cannibalism.  I call it the "green hell" syndrome, the name given by many explorers to the Amazon region, and it scared the hell out of me before my own explorations in southern Venezuela some 20 plus years ago.  Oddly, in my two years in Indian country, I was never healthier, although my co-worker did get malaria and almost died from a burst appendix.  Still, life was good there, in large part because we lived with accommodating natives who knew the territory.  For them, and those like myself who lived with them, living there was no more difficult than in any other fairly benign area of the world. 

But not so for the intrepid explorers going it alone.  Led by naval officer Isaac Strain, the supposedly short jaunt across 40 miles of isthmus turned into a nearly 3 month trek into hell.  Vasco Balboa had done it first through the Darien in the early 1500's, but he was supported by friendly Indians.  After the more brutal conquistadors took over from him, the Indians were no longer friendly, and gave, at best, no help to anyone.  Thus Strain and his men withered in the tropical mountains.  At one point, one of his group became so starved that two men plotted to kill some of the others for meat.  This was nothing new to Strain: he had been in California during the 1849 gold rush, where thousands were left broken on the beaches to starve to death.  Hundreds of dead were found in those years, including many who had had limbs gnawed at by fellow humans.  

Revolting, especially to the American Navy.  In this time of exploration and whale hunting, cannibalism came to be known as "the custom of the sea," where not only those who had died naturally were eaten, but lots were chosen as to who should be killed to keep the others alive by the desperately shipwrecked. The navy would have none of it, for their world was built on hierarchy and discipline.  For those attempting such cannibalism, they received the firing squad, and as such, Strain's men did not resort to living on each other.  

But cannibalism was never as rare as we would wish to believe.   In the late 19th century, China was in such a precarious state that starving families sold newborns to others for meat pies, so that they could buy other food themselves.  Familial cannibalism existed in New Guinea until the 1960's, although that occurred only among relatives on the corpse of the recently dead.  In the Americas, it was reportedly very common (although many anthropologists rejected the information as biased, it is simply too overwhelming.)  In coastal Brazil, captives were treated and fed well for 6 months or a year before they were made into a great banquet.  Apparently human flesh was a delicacy, although it is more likely it served some war-like spiritual notion.  The Caribbean Ocean was so named for the "Caribs," a group of Indians that terrorized the others with conquest, war, and cannibalism ("carib" related to "carrion" or meat).  It was with horror that 19th century American and Europeans discovered that some doomed parties of explorers to the polar regions probably ate each other, and the Donner party became a national sensation when it was found that the stranded pioneers killed each other for meat.  Such is also the evidence from the lost Jamestown colony in early 17th century Virginia.

Starvation is a powerful thing, but so it social custom.  We can see how the taboo against some sorts of cannibalism, universal even among those who might eat enemies or their dead relatives (they did not eat those out of the prescribed categories) came about: reflective humans could not live well with one another knowing that at any moment they could become a stew for their neighbors.  And yet, there is something more: the eating of things, especially of animals by animals, for theirs is an active hunt, is something of a holy thing.  It is an expression of the "whole," of our interconnective natures, of cosmic law.  It is not for nothing that Brazilian Indians of the lower Xingu river refer to sex as eating, and certainly many of us understand this notion: in the throws of passion, we want to consume each other, to become one.  It is not a feeling of compassionate love, but of magnetic need, the call of the wild.  We tame it and neutralize it to some extent, but the drive is there and bleeds into everything: to consume, dominate, merge, to engulf.  This sense has run nations, and runs commerce to this day.  It is a prime directive.

And it is also a prime directive to ameliorate this drive, not just to maintain society, but to rise above both that and our selves. Precisely, the very call of nature for corporate union in the form of sex and eating and consuming in general is that which is most targeted by religion.  We as humans have thus divided the world for as long as we can know into the sacred and the profane, as if the world were split in two by moral darkness and light.  Freud claimed that we were all driven by the sexual urge, and that the primary task of socialization was to redirect, or sublimate, this drive towards greater social rather than individualistic ends.  But is seems much more than that.  It seems, rather, that the call towards union has both its gross and sublime aspects in the cosmic order.  It is humans who have the ability to act on both levels, and in this we make our choice: the spiritual and sacred, or the physical and profane.  We might do both, as most of us do, but in that one or the other is lessened.  

There are some who dislike the idea of "levels," but in this, the concept does seem appropriate.  One level here feeds into the other, off the other, but both inhabit a very different dimension. We are compelled towards union in the profane world, just as we are compelled, at least at some time, towards sacred union.  Both ultimately derive from the same source.  Which is the more correct can be determined by its fruits, but even that is not so simple.  In the animal world, the profane is the law, as spiritually correct as it could be.  But in the human world, we are forced to be more discriminating.  We cannot violate other's directives for survival and procreation and still have our essential social structure.  We also find that the profane form of union never satisfies for long.  It is as if the social is the precursor, or profane template, of the spiritual: still mired in greed and injustice, but tinged by the spiritual directive to live beyond one's smaller self. If societies could be safely placed outside the realm of other more ravenous societies, the fruits of the ones based on the sacred level would undoubtedly be sweeter and infinitely more durable.

For many people, the ones they love most are their young children.  Born of sexual union, they seem to bring the greatest love to the terrestrial-bound person.  Again, it is an animal instinct, to protect the young, but it is also a directive from another level: this form of love gives the most satisfaction, and yet it gives no sensual gratification, no food or goods or sexual pleasure.  Society is built on the family, this love, and as such, is exactly that precursor to spiritual union when stripped of intrigue and selfishness. Yet, like religion, it, too, is profane, earth bound. Like cannibalism is to sex, so society, and the religion of our society, is to holy union, to the higher level.  Each mirrors the other, one earth bound, the other opening beyond all boundaries.  FK                     

I heard from someone with no credentials whatsoever that the second most compelling need for humans is to rationalize - that is, to make sense of any situation.  The first need?  According to him it is not sex or food or water, but sleep.  I find both assertions debatable, but it is also surprisingly true: we need to make sense of things and event in our lives. 

Without this, we become unbalanced, even insane.  Animals have a built-in sense, but ours is more flexible.  This is good, yes, for it gives us creative options, but it can be very costly.  The Nazis had the superior race and the superman, this glowing human juggernaut confined by the 'evil Jew' and his insipid lackeys; the communists had the rich, pulling every lever to diabolically engineer a whole society, even the world.  

And for some, well, this deviation in rational thought is more personal.  A recent item on Yahoo news told of an account by a woman who claimed to have worked for NASA.  She said that on the first landing of the Mars rover in the late 70's, she saw its camera on the surface of the planet pick up moving images of men in spacesuits working to fix certain problems with the probe. When she reported this to others, she said, the monitor was removed to a sealed room.  The spacesuits of the men, she said, were not like those worn at the time by US astronauts, but those inside them were most certainly humans.  

What to think of this?  It is most probably a conspiracy theory made by a mentally disturbed person that never had anything to do with NASA - or if she did, she was one of those "brilliant minds" that had a serious kink in it, like a tendency towards schizophrenia.  We think this because it does not make sense - why would NASA hide their superior technology?  To surprise the Soviet Union?  But why not let them know that they are outclassed and, as Captain Picard said, "resistance is futile?  

As such, we weed out the irrationals among us, but this weeding process itself can only go as far as the normal minds of the time will allow.  Our European ancestors once believed in unicorns and fire- breathing dragons and the Garden of Eden in South America, not thousands of years ago, but only 500.  Before that, they thought the world rested on a giant turtle or on the shoulders of Atlas; after that, they long believed that Earth was the center of the universe, the celestial dome a literal dome painted with moving stars and the moon that twirled around us in a giant bubble.  Beyond that was heaven.  And only ten years ago, they (our experts) believed that margarine was better for you than butter.  

There was a hike we had when we lived in Connecticut, and along the way deep in the woods, I saw a crane standing by itself, so large that it at first shocked me.  We both were certain of it until nearly upon it, when it finally revealed itself to be a fallen branch.  For two years after, though, I always first saw it as a crane.  The mind had to make sense of it, and given its shape, turned it into an improbable large bird.  

In fact, our reality is just such a Rorschach test, sometimes working on simple images, others on grand ideas.  Some realities are verifiable, like the crane and the movement of the earth through space.  Others are not, at all.  I have often gotten into the grand theories behind quantum mechanics, for instance, in part because it shows how little we know, and also how what might really be true is contrary to common sense.  Why, for instance, is there co-variance among atomic particles?  Why, that is, is there a mutual reaction by particles that are miles or perhaps even light years away from one another?  The experimental results show that, once particles interact, they forever, regardless of time or space, react to a force placed on the other.  Since all particles once interacted together (supposedly in the Big Bang), wouldn't every action in one place or time affect another? And even without the big bang, over billions of years, wouldn't most particles have interacted with another?   Aren't we just one big billiard table, then, with the hits on one and the other all happening at the same time?

This does not make common sense - but common sense to us is not common sense, say, to a Siberian Shaman, who might see in your illness the work of an evil sorcerer rather than that of microbes you ingested hours ago with that rotten caribou steak. We can confirm some things, like the stick and the crane, but we can only rationalize others through our group thought, a shared vision of reality that science has shown is always inadequate and sometimes dead wrong.  

I am reading a book now about the 19th century exploration of Panama to find a path for a canal connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.  One cartographer, just after his own exploration, complained that others before him had simply made up their maps and journeys.  In hindsight, it was then found that this cartographer, too, made up his own maps and observations. Said the author, 'it was not that he was lying.but rather was confirming the expectations and hopes of he and all others concerned.' That is, even as a professional, his own mind rearranged things to his expectations.  Because of this, several men died on another expedition while counting on his recordings.

We, then, cannot be comfortable with our notion of reality, ever. Even with quantum physics, perhaps the co-variance of particles is only a wish by those of a more mystical bent, and they are unconsciously misinterpreting the data.  In our daily lives, we too do not know how we are misinterpreting our own data.  Much of it is shared, as we wish to conform to others' ideas of sanity, confining us to a narrow view.  

The question, "what is reality," makes some people laugh in disdain, but it is a valid question.  In the recent disturbances at Ferguson, MO, while it seems perfectly clear to white people that the Grand Jury conclusions were correct, it seems equally clear to many black people that it was a rigged deal. In both cases, we are working from our group expectations of reality.  There is a reality in this case, but it will never be universally shared because it does not fit with many's expectations of the universe.

I was talking with my idealistic son the other day about societal issues and the responsibility of certain peoples for their own actions, but had to stop myself: what if we all believed in Christ's or Buddha's understanding of the world, for real?  From different perspectives, we would have the same results: there would be no greed, no overpowering physical or emotional desire beyond the spiritual, and, in the end, no overpopulation, no rich and poor, and no class suffering. With the overarching rationalization that God or the Absolute alone empowers the universe, and that our selves are only transitory husks for the dwelling of our immortal souls or Selves, we would have the perfect world, the true Utopia.
In John Lennon's song "Imagine", he speaks of a Utopia where there is no god or heaven or hell.  In this he is fatally flawed exactly because he is working from a standard materialistic platform. We have made this reality fit everything just so, and in that reality, idealism becomes only that, a simpleton's dream. 

Just a thought or two; a thought that was given to me through others centuries past, and that continues to rumble through our subconscious like so many atomic particles, each connected through the other mysteriously, working, perhaps one day, towards critical mass.  At least we can believe.  It's at least as good a rationalization as any other.  FK
                                       

   

For two days it was all rush - airport on Thursday, get to New Haven and the wedding dinner, then Friday the wedding itself. Saturday, the aftermath, and Sunday a brief respite before the rush on back to O'Hare.  Largely because of my brother's wedding and its timing, nothing was traditional.  I don't believe I saw a shred of turkey or stuffing anywhere.  And we, my cohorts and I, had become the home crowd, the centers of ceremonies, for the old people, our parent's crowd, are either dead or incapacitated.  Odd in all, although not bad either, with two outstanding facets for this blog. 

One: the guests of the wedding were to stay at The Study, a hotel on the edge of the Yale campus that catered to the concept of an American elite set.  Books by Yale authors were laid about, while references to tradition, to Yale football, to famous members, and to the gripping present (former Pres Carter was to give a speech on campus the following week!) made one believe in that rarefied air, the sense of an unofficial American nobility of greater ability and influence that keep the Ivy League in business. 

We are, I suppose, supposed to resent it if we are not included and I suppose I did and am a bit, but that is not the outstanding facet.  Rather, it was the juxtaposition of the elite and the street, for outside The Study on the edge of campus was The City.  We walked around that Friday morning looking for congratulation cards, for forgotten items of hygiene in the drug store, and for the best pizza in the US, and found much more - the America of the city, the drug addicted, the alcoholics, the insane who wander dazed or strung out in filthy clothing to beg.  I know this is nothing new for those who live in the big city, and I have lived there myself, in Philadelphia and Caracas, and it is always the same, but the black and white of it, of Yale superiority and beggars in the street, called out for thought.  The poor will always be amongst us, Jesus said, and he is right (of course), for wherever civilization is, there is hierarchy and always will be, regardless of politics.  But these were not the poor- they were the lost, so many found cheek and jowl with the found, with the connected and smart and talented, with the people for whom civilization was created - and who continue to recreate it.  

I will not get political about it, for that, too, recreates a hierarchy of sorts, but simply wonder about the have and have nots; why, again, are the loosers, those on the bottom, blessed?  And how is it that the movers and shakers, the doers and the talented and the hard workers are fallen, are beggars themselves at the Lord's table?   

Two: visiting my mother at the dementia section of the old folk's home.  We go to the third floor, my bothers and wife and son and I, and the door is locked so that the inmates cannot escape into the cold, to wander and die.  My mother is brought out, more dazed than usual from her nap, her teeth out, and she is skeletal. It takes my breath away.  I am immediately reminded of the ancient mummies found recently in caves high in the Andes of Peru.  She comes to life slowly, and with time and the cups of juice we hold to her mouth, the words form, the eyes knitted trying to make them come together to make sense.  My niece comes then, her two year old with her, and my mother brightens at her baby's light blond hair.  She had beamed on seeing me, too, knowing who I was while not being able to grasp a name, any name.  

Still, she knows, as a passive baby might know, not having words but having a sense and that sense is simple.  After some time we have to go to the airport and I hug her in her wheelchair as I never would have when she was one of us, the rationals, and she holds my hand for warmth and tells me so, clearly, and says just as clearly that she is glad to see me, and then presses my warm hand to her cheek and kisses it.  

That is all the goodbye that there is, she left smiling and a little dazed in her wheelchair as the elevator door closes and my younger brother goofs, pretending to hold off crying to keep from holding off crying.  She could never address a room of the smart and talented now; she would not be welcomed as the ancient but still rational and well-connected former Pres Carter will be at Yale.  I can barely write of this myself, as hackneyed and used a platform that it is, but I do anyway because it is real.  There was more to that visit than the movers and shakers could give, not because they are bad, but because they are here, they are part of this world that we have made, so complex and layered.  But we see how the poor of spirit are welcomed, for sometimes in their alienation they are the ones who really are for real, with hearts that are uncovered.  They do not grasp for the future because they have none. It is all here now, all they have, and when it is beautiful, it is beautiful, simply and just so, as the first rays of morning on the first day that is every day.  FK