I have just completed the book on Bruno by Ingrid Rowland - an academic writer who is more interested in the facts than the pizzazz she might give to readers, although the last 60 pages moved very well. It still surprises us that the Church, of all entities, could be so brutal in suppressing new or contrary ideas, so much so that Bruno, along with many, many others, were tortured and/or burned at the stake. We come to understand that it was through ideas and ideas alone that the Church governed, not with a promise of social security but of heavenly security, something that could not be measured in the ordinary household stew pot. Ideas were, then, everything. We come to see that It is the pit into which theocracies might fall; and also come to understand the reason for the medieval cruelty of some of the radical Muslim groups now. What do they offer? A continuation of the unbalanced and unjust state of affairs in the archaic governance of the regions? Or a reason to be content with injustice, for the feel of moral righteousness and the promise of heavenly paradise?
Thus it is a warning to people like myself who insist, from the comfort of a secure and open society, that the spiritual trumps the material. Marx, I firmly believe, was entirely backwards in his attempt to create a philosophy (really, an atheistic theology, as contradictory as that looks), but he caught the bull by the horns with the failure of the Church. Its incursion into the secular power structure was all too secular, ruining its moral authority, and muddying the concept of the spiritual as well. Theocracy, as Pope Francis has been trying to say to an uncomprehending press, must be communistic - not Marxist, for sure, but rather, a rule that must arise from the people themselves. It must thrive in the hearts and minds (arising from the soul) to the extent that they are primarily self-governed - just as Marx envisioned the proletariat paradise, but which could never happen while the secular, or the material, took precedence. In that is struggle and winners and losers, as nature shows, always. It is only in the spiritual realm that all might be winners - that all win by being winners. In the world that Darwin studied, this can never be; in the world inhabited by the saints and sages, this must be. But beware of the cross-overs from spirit to material - in that lies the Inquisition. In that lies the modern jihad.
Books can and have been written of this, but sometimes we have to move on; sometimes, we might even have to take a leave of the heavy every now and then to the light; and so, my reading has moved on to Ingo Swann, one of the most famous of the ESP types in that sort of literature. "Penetration: the question of extraterrestrial and human telepathy" is an autobiography of the remarkably weird. It is not intended to be light, but it is SO weird that it must be taken as a sort of mythological Rorschach of the ESP world. And the way it is written: from the academic heavy of Rowland, the change is like a polar bear plunge into icy waters on New Year's day.
After writing several books I have become familiar with the "set-up" of fiction, where the ground is made ready for the content and action to come, and this book begins with a classic fiction set-up, including an enigmatic stranger who asks just the right questions to give us Swann's background into ESP and the direction the script will take. In a word, it squeaks of best-seller pulp.
And yet, for all his apparent attempts to gain money from this book, Swann is no charlatan - or at least not a complete one. His presence on at least two government- run ESP programs is verifiable, as are his sometimes astounding accomplishments in such experiments, including the famous Stargate program. These, too, are verifiable, confounding the odds-making skeptics. ESP - telepathy and prescience (if not telekinesis) and the witnessing of ghosts, for example, are proven to exist as far as they can be proven,and some, like Swann, are very good at it.
But still, the writing form - is it this that makes people roll their eyes at such accounts? Surely it doesn't help, but there is something more, some inner need to deny that such things exist that compels the most ardent debunkers. It is,at least for many of them, fear - fear of the unknown, fear of something that interrupts the sequence of our current reality, fear of something that cannot be so easily explained or controlled. And that is exactly what the book is about - how this fear is generated, and why.
Glimpsing at the table of contents, the answers are really, really outlandish. We are in for a good ride, and wait to see - is there something of truth in this? Is there something that might help us break through the wall that divides our reality from a greater one? We shall see. In America nowadays, no Inquisition keeps us from speculating about reality; rather it is ridicule that keeps us from straying from the consensus of the culture makers. Like Bruno, we do not approve of this. Unlike Bruno, who is braver than most of us, we do not face a blazing fire. And so we shall proceed. FK
Thus it is a warning to people like myself who insist, from the comfort of a secure and open society, that the spiritual trumps the material. Marx, I firmly believe, was entirely backwards in his attempt to create a philosophy (really, an atheistic theology, as contradictory as that looks), but he caught the bull by the horns with the failure of the Church. Its incursion into the secular power structure was all too secular, ruining its moral authority, and muddying the concept of the spiritual as well. Theocracy, as Pope Francis has been trying to say to an uncomprehending press, must be communistic - not Marxist, for sure, but rather, a rule that must arise from the people themselves. It must thrive in the hearts and minds (arising from the soul) to the extent that they are primarily self-governed - just as Marx envisioned the proletariat paradise, but which could never happen while the secular, or the material, took precedence. In that is struggle and winners and losers, as nature shows, always. It is only in the spiritual realm that all might be winners - that all win by being winners. In the world that Darwin studied, this can never be; in the world inhabited by the saints and sages, this must be. But beware of the cross-overs from spirit to material - in that lies the Inquisition. In that lies the modern jihad.
Books can and have been written of this, but sometimes we have to move on; sometimes, we might even have to take a leave of the heavy every now and then to the light; and so, my reading has moved on to Ingo Swann, one of the most famous of the ESP types in that sort of literature. "Penetration: the question of extraterrestrial and human telepathy" is an autobiography of the remarkably weird. It is not intended to be light, but it is SO weird that it must be taken as a sort of mythological Rorschach of the ESP world. And the way it is written: from the academic heavy of Rowland, the change is like a polar bear plunge into icy waters on New Year's day.
After writing several books I have become familiar with the "set-up" of fiction, where the ground is made ready for the content and action to come, and this book begins with a classic fiction set-up, including an enigmatic stranger who asks just the right questions to give us Swann's background into ESP and the direction the script will take. In a word, it squeaks of best-seller pulp.
And yet, for all his apparent attempts to gain money from this book, Swann is no charlatan - or at least not a complete one. His presence on at least two government- run ESP programs is verifiable, as are his sometimes astounding accomplishments in such experiments, including the famous Stargate program. These, too, are verifiable, confounding the odds-making skeptics. ESP - telepathy and prescience (if not telekinesis) and the witnessing of ghosts, for example, are proven to exist as far as they can be proven,and some, like Swann, are very good at it.
But still, the writing form - is it this that makes people roll their eyes at such accounts? Surely it doesn't help, but there is something more, some inner need to deny that such things exist that compels the most ardent debunkers. It is,at least for many of them, fear - fear of the unknown, fear of something that interrupts the sequence of our current reality, fear of something that cannot be so easily explained or controlled. And that is exactly what the book is about - how this fear is generated, and why.
Glimpsing at the table of contents, the answers are really, really outlandish. We are in for a good ride, and wait to see - is there something of truth in this? Is there something that might help us break through the wall that divides our reality from a greater one? We shall see. In America nowadays, no Inquisition keeps us from speculating about reality; rather it is ridicule that keeps us from straying from the consensus of the culture makers. Like Bruno, we do not approve of this. Unlike Bruno, who is braver than most of us, we do not face a blazing fire. And so we shall proceed. FK
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