​For our last holiday get-together, we watched the movie “Inception” starring Leonardo DiCaprio.  It has a great idea: in this not-so-distant future, there are specialists who can pull others into their dreams, dreams which they can largely control, to get information.  For the plot, it is used primarily for corporate espionage.  But there are huge drawbacks to this technology: for instance, Leo’s character had taken his wife with him “deep” – that is, to where the dreams are settled so far into the unconscious that they are completely real – where they lived into old age for what felt to them like 50 years (though only a night’s sleep in our reality).   Here, the wife became so convinced that all life was a dream, that when she came out, she killed herself to return to their ideal world – a death that was attributed by the police to Leo.  So Leo is on the run and plagued with guilt.        
            We also find that there is one deeper level – the level of inception – where we learn that Leo had taken his wife to get her out of the 50 year reality.  Here, he gave her the idea, which she thought of as her own, that her reality was just a dream – which made her believe that all reality was a dream.  Thus the true source of his great guilt, but also the source of the big idea behind the movie – that at this level, one could make others do what one wanted by planting in them ideas that they thought were their own.  The plot stirs around an industrialist who is concerned that his rival, a young man who has just inherited his father’s empire, will corner the market in energy and control the world.  He must have the young man break up the corporation.  To do that, he hires Leo to go to the inception level with the young man, where he must make him think that breaking up the empire is a good idea, and his idea alone.
            I’ll leave the ending for the reader, but I was left with two large ideas from the movie: one, that life very well could be a deep dream.  After all, how would we know?  In the movie, death was the certain way to get out of the dream and back into reality.  That is largely what the Tibetan Buddhists believe, while the Hindus have us in a perpetual dream within a dream spun by karma and reincarnation.  The Christians have a take on this as well, although I will leave that for another time.
            For now, on to the second idea: that “inception” is the most difficult of all the dreamer tricks.   It is one thing to trick someone in a dream into giving out secret information – this can be done in the waking world as well.  But it is another to get so far into the head of someone that he believes that your idea is his idea.  The movie tells us that such foreign ideas are like viruses in the blood system, and our unconscious like white blood cells, ready to attack such an invasion.  Thus, the unconscious must be totally fooled for the idea to grow.  It knows its own, we are told.  Still, though, we are not told where the unconscious gets its ideas from normally.
            To me, that is the biggest of a whole set of problems when speaking of the unconscious.  Normal dreams are sets of ideas and perceptions from the daytime world that are organized according to the emotional and physical feelings of the dreamer (the inner self).  Physical feelings can be manipulated: for instance, certain drugs will give certain users common themes for dreams.  Heroin users talk of “chasing the dragon”, users of hallucinogens often get “god” feelings,  and meth heads get rushes of great power and supposed insight.  Emotions, too, can be manipulated.  Obviously, movies are great at doing this, as Hitler well knew when he used this fairly new technology to get Germans to “live” the Teutonic myth.   Inspiration, then, can be swayed in certain directions, but still, it is the individual’s choice in the end exactly how to organize the feelings and emotions.  Where, however, does this choice come from?
            This is where we really get into the “quiet voice,” and where Carl Jung spent his greatest energies.  He came to understand that techniques of manipulation (and normal outer influences) were not the prime sources of personal persuasion.  They did not arise in a vacuum to create the ideas in a person’s head.  Rather, they built on ideas already there in hopes of channeling them in a certain direction.  The primal ideas were to be found in the racial archetype, or shared cultural subconscious, which itself was embedded in a species subconscious.  Unlike the structuralists who saw these ideas as reflections of the anatomy of the brain, Jung believed they arouse from a truth about the world – or, in the end, The Truth, that we are all aware of but unconscious of.   The conscious (our reality), then, is the dream, floating on a deeper unconscious dream of impressions of consciousness in one direction, and on interpretation of the deep unconscious in the other.   Jung never really wanted to say it – that there is a Truth – out loud, for that smacked too much of religion, but his reflections necessarily (I think) led to that - and to the idea that our waking reality is really only one of many dreams or reflections coming from the true source. 
            Which makes movies such as “Inception” that much more interesting.  We might even say that the movie is a reflection of our reality, and of dreams, and of the inner truth that our reality is more like a dream than not.  On a more practical level, we might say that the path to inception lies in appropriating basic myths to weave into our conscious reality.  That is what any good, inspired dictator does.  But nothing explains that ultimate, that primary ground of thought and reality, besides the religious myths (used here as deep stories, not untruths).  Rather, everything, including the movie, points to the “reality” that our reality is not really all that real, after all.  In fact, everything points to the alarming probability that a movie like “Inception” is a glimmer of just how lost we are in our dream world, and just how much we need to look for signs along the inner road that point our way out.  FK
                
          

For the Christmas weekend, a repeat of last year's "The Night My Father Shot Santa," under "Essays" in the website.

The story itself has accumulated some emotional impact with my family.  I read it to my mother last year over the phone as she lay near death in a nursing home.  It was hard for me to finish the last paragraph.  She died a few weeks later, truly at peace  - not because of the essay, but because it was her time and she had lived as good a life as she could.  We all, I think, have our "essays" of family at Christmas or the holidays, when most things went well even if they went wrong - when the spirit was upon us. The spirit - we don't know what it is, but we know when it has been with us, if only years later.  It is our mystery and our ultimate grace, our connection with what is greatest among us. May the spirit be with us all this holiday.  FK           

I have to admit it - since I got an audio book for a long drive from the Endtime series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, I have pressed ahead with the written versions of the 5 book saga. They are in the Sci Fi section of the library, which is strangely appropriate, even though the books themselves are based on John's Book of Revelations from the New Testament.  It is a fast-passed action thriller about the anti-Christ and the end of the world, and those who work under God's aegis to fulfill his will.  I said "I have to admit it" because it is more pulp than anything else - in other words, fun, but mostly fluff.  It also has a fair amount of fundamentalist Christian religion in it, which might offend some.  I am not fundamentalist, but I do enjoy having God play a direct and unquivacable role in human history, simply because I believe "I Am Who Am" does - although, to my mind, in more subtle form.   But all that is not what concerns me here.

Rather, I was surprised to see that the books, written primarily in the "90's, focus politically on the effort towards One World unification, which is the goal of the deceiving, all-too-human Anti-Christ.  He works under the guise of ecumenical humanism, bringing all to one religion, one government, one currency, one world-wide culture for the good of all humankind.  Of course, being the Anti-Christ, the ultimate agenda is the enslavment of humankind, and its total reliance on a secular one-world state in which there is only one truth, as spouted by the Anti-Christ.  In other words, the freedom from particular religions and want and war is to lead to the worst totalitarian nightmare ever.  I was surprised because I had not known that this - the (evil) move towards a single state - was a belief of the Christian fundamentalists.  I was also surprised because this is also the belief of many intellectual neo-Marxists, who most certainly are not in the fundamentalist camp.  

Of the latter, I became very familiar with them in grad school in the early '80's, with such names as Foucault and Lacan giving evidence of a subversive move towards the same ends as the fictional (in the series) Anti-Christ.  For the neo-Marxist, or post-structuralists (more descriptive of some, although I won't get into it), it is not a move of any one person or country.  Rather, it is the will towards power that is inherently built into the minds of those in hierarchical systems, whether they know it or not.  It is a part of their - of our - structure of thought.  Whatever twists and turns history at large might make, it always is redirected towards this one-world schemata, using whatever invention or disaster or dislocation to move closer to this goal.  The modern form of this thought, say the intellectuals, began in industrial Europe, and has spread, with outright or unconscious design, through the entire world.  For those of the Marxist bent, capitalism is the driving force, the "anti-Christ" of this movement, to be dashed upon the rocks of history by one-world communism.  For all the rest, including the fundamentalists, communism is the, or one of the possible, "Anti-Christs."  

Oddly, it can be said that the fundamentalist, the communist, and the purely structuralist approaches all stem from the Bible. Rather than our structure being geared solely for power, it is instead geared for an appocalyptic ending of a quasi-world government, with a new and better world to come after.  The secularists cleary took this idea of a will to power, and a final utopia (whether they know it or not) from the Jews and Christians.  Who or what is the Anti-Christ is the one great thing in contention.  For the fundamentalists, it is both the Western humanist atheistic governments and the harder -core communist dictatorships.  For the secularists, it is capitalism or, for some, religious fundamentalists. In the Reagan era, those were Christian fundamentalists.  Now, it might include all with a strong religious bent.

What is interesting is that this "will to power" is also at the root of Man's fall from Eden.  For the Christian (as well as other religious), this disobedient human will must be placed under the will of God.  It is much the same for the communist: the will of the individual must be placed under the will of the collective.  It is clear from this where the Marxists (who are modern, scientific communists) got the idea of their utopia from.  However, the religious believe that Man's will will always fail, as a collective or not, and that only God's will can bring us back to Eden.  Marxists belive God is a myth invented to subdue the masses, and that Man's evil is due to the violence of hierarchical (and especially capitalistic) societies, which will disappear once the evils are taken away.  

Phew.  I personally favor the religious perspective, but one thing is clear: beneath our modern will to power or whatever we want to call it, is the will towards the Apocalypse.  Call the Bible divine, or only ancient myth, but it seems to have captured the modern mentality from thousands of years ago, so much so that it serves as the template even for those who despise it.  Here, then, is the power of myth, telling truth in ways that might take centuries to discover.  But of the God of Man, or of Man as God, we still must someday discover which is the truth, and it may take an Anti-Christ figure in our midst to do so.  FK      

           
     

I believe today is the day they are going to bury John Glenn.  He probably means little to those born after 1960, but for the rest of us, he was THE American astronaut, superceded by only Neil Armstrong after Apollo 11.  He was called by someone famous the last true American hero, and while that might be hyperbole, it is pretty close.  He was a Marine who flew over 130 missions as a fighter pilot in both WWII and Korea, and eagerly sought out the space program to be among the first to be strapped atop a flaming missle that was very likely to explode. Unlike many of the other right-stuff pilots, he was true to his wife and didn't drink in excess, or brag, or do anything else that would stain his fame. So important was he to the space program that he was taken off missions - so we were told - because he had fallen in the bathtub and hurt his sense of balance, which (I learned just last year ) was not true.  It was a lie made up to explain his lack of participation in the Gemini and Apollo programs.  In fact, they - the powers that be - simply didn't want to risk his life because his death, they figured, would be such a blow to NASA and American pride itself.  He was that important.

What was it that made him so incredibly brave?  I have an uncle who also flew dangerous missions in both wars, and he seems to be honestly just plain born fearless.  I doubt it, however; rather, I think both he and Glenn, besides being brave, also believed in the missions themselves and the government that represented the people behind them.  Belief, then - they had belief that was strong enough to dispell all doubts.  With that, John Glenn could do just about anything.    

The same could be said for the fictional people on the National Geographic Mars series, characters taken from real life.  In it, the qualities of the astronauts were delineated, including the ability to live in small spaces for long periods of time along with several other people.  First and foremost, however, was the people's belief that this mission was the most important thing in their lives - more than family and any earthly pleasures.  They had to be true believers.  It was to be the most outstanding characteristic of those who would be chosen.  

In the world of hagiography - that is, highlights of the lives of saints - we also find this incredible bravery.  While it is true that many during the colonial era of Europe and America were also serving imperialistic masters, for most, that was an unfortunate side bar.  Like the reformed character in the movie, "The Mission," what gave these people such courage was belief - faith so strong that life itself was subservient.  

To be a follower of Jesus in the early years also called for such courage, but here, "courage" was the cart before the horse.  The idea was to have faith; to secure that faith, one had to be tested; and in that, courage was found (or not - Peter failed his first time). This courage was not to do service to self or government, however; it was to develope more faith for both the individual and his followers.  Again, courage was the consequence of faith, not the goal.  

And so the comparisons; John Glenn (probably) needed faith in his country to have such courage, which was necessary to serve his country as he did.  The religious believer needs faith for the courage of his convicitions, and courage is needed to not only serve his belief, but - and much more importantly -  to increase his faith.  John Glenn's bravery helped to increase the faith of Americans in their own country., but such patriotism - such faith - was a welcome consequence, not the goal.  In religion, faith is THE goal.  As it was with John Glenn, faith (belief) is necessary to do brave things, but unlike John Glenn, those "things" are not the goal. Rather, faith is, because the analogy goes further.  It has been said by more than one religious prophet of more than one religion that faith can move mountains (or literally change reality). The idea is that God is the goal, and only absolute, pure faith can get one to God. God is beyond our reality - out there in space farther than any rocket could ever take us.  The "trip" is so overwhelming that only absolute courage can take us there - which is dependent on absolute faith.  But it is the faith here that ultimately counts.  

Still, both courage of the world and out of the world are often co-dependent. Glenn was also a religous man, which undoubtedly supported his faith in country, and his courage to serve.   But in the end, it is not the tool that matters, but the job it does.  Both here require courage, and courage, faith; but for one, the job is the completion of a mission, and for the other, the completion of the transformation of the world from inside out.   FK     

I think it was yesterday that the Nobel prize for literature was given out, and the winner, Bob Dylan, didn't show because of "former commitments."  Really?  One million dollars and international glory, and you're busy?  It is in keeping with the Dyan mystique that he would shun the awards of the world (publicly, at least) for his own inner agenda, but the question at hand today I got while fiddling with the radio as I was occupied in the bathroom.  A man on a station from Chicago was saying, "what a stupid award!  His nasle singing, stupid tambourines, and non-sensical lyrics don't make him a contender.  All that is, is political nonsense from the Euro political agenda."  Then, the station played "a hard rain's gonna fall" as it was sung by his proxy in Stockholm, and there it was: although the woman had to pause for nervousnous, she got the tone perfectly, as Dylan would have it.  It hit the same chord with me as always - the combination of lyrics and song dug deeply into the "me" that shares the American psych. Regardless of the skill of voice or instrument, Dylan somehow captured the discontent and longing beneath American culture. I don't care what they say - he deserved the award, even if I can't quite understand how he did what he did.

This came to me after begining a new book by Bernardo Katstrup titled, More than Allegory: on Religin, Myth, Truth and Belief.  So far, this book has captured exactly how I perceive religion and the current cultural phase in our world.  For Katstrup, the shared objective reality (which is more than I will say here - that is for another time) contains, in its being and interaction, no inherent meaning that comes from simply experiencing it.  That is to say, objective reality is like a bunch of interacting pixels that have no meaning (to us) outside of what we, subjectively, give it.  That seems indesputible.  For instance, a jackel eating a gazell does not tell us "this is the circle of life" or "this is disgusting:" Rather, those are things we tell ourselves, given our individual and cultural background.  This background is what Katstrup calls our "myth" - that is, our story that gives coherence and meaning to the world. He further states that, in the past, myth gave voice to our inner, or intuitive, need for meaning and cosmic unity.  Now, our world myth is science, which does NOT give us the meaning we long for.  It gives us relational answers, but these are couched in terms of chance and morally blind interactions. It does not answer the needs of the soul, and with that, we live with an inner fear and discontent.

Enter again Bob Dylan.  While we might try to decipher just HOW Dylan's songs are great, we try in vain if we do so by picking those songs apart for harmony and classical depth.  Rather, his music echoes, at some level beyond words and analysis, our particular American discontent with our current inadequate myth, one that is now outside religion and well short of our psychic needs.  His music IS our discontent, making it ours not only for its reflection of anomie (lost sense of community), but for its grand vistas of land and travel that is a part of living in America.  So they paint the backdrop of our objective reality and fill it in with our feelings of being lost, of being pilgrims still on the long wagon trail to some glory, to some imagined personal utopia that we can never quite reach.  We think it might be found in the wealth and power of our nation, but know it will not be - no.  Instead, each one of us is that lonely wanderer along the long highways through our vast land, each of us stil in search, each of us still driven by this deeper-than-words longing.

Dylan does not anwer our needs; rather, he points out our longing and leaves the rest to us.  He often did not, I think, even known exactly what he was doing.  It is easy to see that some of his songs were exploiting popular agendas of his time.  Still, beyond even himself, he reflected our agony and our hoped-for glory. Which makes him - Yes - most certainly worthy of the prize.  

As for Kastrup, more on him later, for he DOES attempt to give us an answer, and so far, it seems, or at least I feel, that he is on the right track.  FK                

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

Fake news is one of the talks of the day, and I would avoid it except that I know someone - let's keep his name out of it - who actually fell for the Pizzagate troll that brought another young man up from North Carolina to check it out - with a gun.  In short, the story claims that the Clintons are running a child sex opperation out of a Washington, DC pizzeria.  The young man I know who took it seriously is, for one thing, young and, like many his age, has been pulled into the conspiracy theories that infest the internet.  This one, I explained to him, was just plain stupid. Whether about money or sex, the Clintons have plenty of both and can get more in less heinous ways anytime they want.  To expose themselves to that kind of slimminess would be far, far stupider (and infinately more immoral) than an inappropriate, but consensual tryst in the Oval Office.

But the question remains - where to make the cut?  Face Book, if I read it right, has some kind of system where they can "fingerprint" fake news and keep it off the internet.  How that works I don't know, but it does raise the question of surpressment of information.  For instance, I saw this report about fake news on one of the major media TV networks, yet, wasn't it Dan Rather who had fake news on W Bush concerning his enlistment in the National Guard?  And wasn't it Rather himself who said, well, THIS copy may be fake, but I know it is true?  But how, Mr. Rather, how?  

Who, then, is the arbitor of "real" news?  Who can we trust? Might this expose, for instance,  simply be a  way that some news sources have of making themselves look more legitimate than others?

We are all looking for the truth behind the curtain, where it most often seems to be.  But if objective  truth - that is, living, breathing
facts in the real world of gravity and death - is difficult to ferret out, how about "news" of God, of the hereafter, of anyhing in the spiritual realm?  It doesn't make it any easier for a Christian (to take what I know about best) to believe when their leader says, after proving to Doubting Thomas his substance after rising from the dead, "how much greater are those who believe without seeing."  Well, sure, faith is good.  But that was also demanded by homicidal nut cases from Waco, Tx, to Jonestown, Guyana. What makes Jesus - or Mosses or Siddhartha - any more believable than the others?  Where is the unaltered document that proves that what they have said is true?  

To say that this has already been addressed by theologians is an understatement.  For my own two cents, I will say that spiritual truth differs from the newspaper kind.  While it is taken from the real world of prophets, gurus and ancient history, it is not meant to reside there.  It is meant to penetrate the person at a deeper and more personal level, to what has been refered to as the soul or the heart.  It is only here that it, the information, can be coroborated.  Just like science, it is an experimental field, but it cannot really be disseminated as scientific fact (which also sometimes proves to be wrong) because the experiment must take place inside the "spiritual scientist."  Each and every one of us must substantiate scripture by allowing it to penetrate to the depths it was intended.  If it does not show us its affects, we can either have faith in others who we trust and have experienced its truth, or we can turn elsewhere - which might only be inwards on ourselves.  

In the end, spiritual knowledge requires a greater sort of maturity than newspaper or scientific knowledge.  While we trust others to give us hard-earth truth - or we don't, and perhaps spiral off into the absurd - for spiritual truth (for the skeptics and scientists among us), we can only confirm it by practicing one of its disciplines.  We must ultimately determine what is fake or not, not CBS or Fox News.  In the end, spiritual knowledge poses a far bigger challenge than earthly truths, but we are all made to do it if we really want to.  So, trust in others for your faith, as you would, say, Stephen Hawkins for physics, or do it yourself (for unlike Hawkings and his math genius, we all have spiritual genius).  It is really that simple, and no less confusing or "false" than when we put our faith in the daily news. Excpet that with spiritual news, we can know, for sure, if we really want to.  It is all there, a package that is hard to unwrap but more than eager to be opened.  FK                       

I just finished a long book by famous author Leon Uris called, I think (I dropped it back at the library already) Battle Cry, a fictional account of his time in the Marines during WWII. Guadalcanl, Tarawa, Saipan - we were there with all the blood and guts that a real Marine close in time to a real war would have to relate to read true.  Limbs flying, bloated, stinking bodies in the ocean, tough pros almost running for fear...it was there, with no punches pulled.  Much like Tolstoy's War and Peace, the peace time romances of the soldiers weren't nearly as interesting to me, and as this was Uris's first book, well, the love scenes seemed a little stilted.  But the battle scenes were not, and we the readers were told two things of importance.

First, what we all know: that although some of the Jap (I use the terminology of the time) brigades were brutal, others were made up of plain, scared soldiers who were as human as we were. And two: that under fire, the love between the Marines was as intense as any between even parents and their children.  This is a love that most parents know - that one really and truly would lay down one's life for the other just because.  With the Marines, once the fighting began, they would not leave the battle scene unless physically unable to fight off being taken away, because their buddies depended on them.  How could they leave?  Yet, how do we describe this love to those who have not known it?

For me, describing spiritual awareness is just as difficult, so much so that in attempting to do so, people soon get bored, either because they have known it and know that comparisons are futile, or because they have not, and the experience is impossible to relay.  Recently, though, it occurred to me that most of us have had a tangential experience of this sort, whether they have fought in battle, have been drawn in to their children, or no.  This is the passion of young love.

The memories make me wince, because sooner or later, this passion becomes unrequited, unless we are old enough to settle the issue with marriage.  It makes me wince because when the object of our passion does not return in kind, you become the fool. No one understands your obsession.  The object snubs you as if you were the ugly puppy in the litter, and your friends tell you to just get over it - hell, there are lots of girls way better than her, they say.  You are left alone and miserable until somehow, like magic, the spell wears off.  You look back in wonder at the idiot you were.  You join your friends again in scouting out babes for a tryst and make crude jokes about it.  You are, in a way, out of the sacred, where only one ephemeral thing mattered, "this thing called love," and all else was nothing, and back into the profane, the world of commerce and prestige and bad humor.  The "you" you were before becomes a stranger even to yourself. 

Going into and out of the spiritual mind is different in many ways, of course, but also the same in that one goes beyond the world of others for a while, and then returns, just as one was before, with no coherent explanation to give.  Only the memory of it as "real" persists, but memory is not the same thing; in fact, memory in our daily routine can only be from the perspective of our daily routine. All we can say is that something special happened, but we cannot say exactly what.  In a way, when we try to explain it, we become as stuipid to our friends as we were when we fell for the little tease from biology class.  

Another analogy, another inadequate reach, I know, but one everyone can relate to.  Pop songs are almost exclusively about this silly little thing, but poets throughout the ages have long known of the similartites of sexual infatuation and spirit - thus the great love sonnets and Divine Comedies that were really about much more than young love.  And thus the sometimes creepy references (for men) of followers of Christ as "the betrothed of the bridegroom." It is all analogy because young love is the one transendental experience that most of us have had where we live in another world, where our perspectives have been totally altered, where money, friendship, status, where nothing has meaning if it does not inclulde the beloved.  This is how it is in the spiritual frame of mind, although there is no gnashing of teeth, for the beloved - however the spirit may be envisioned - will never jilt us or mock. Rather, we ourselves somehow lose the feeling and long for it and try to tell others of it.  We hope and pray it comes again, and then, maybe forget about it after a while as if it were something a little crazy, like that teen-age crush.  It is the same, but different, however, for it never ever really goes away, and never fades or becomes jaded through time.  It is, and will always will be, our Beatrice.    

FK