Today, a new essay, "Zombie at the Picnic," under the "Essays" section of the website.
Note 1: A book of 35 of my selected essays, Beneath the Turning Stars, has been published recently and is available at Amazon and Kindle. 
Note 2: I will be taking a last summer vacation for the next 7 days or so.  See ya then, FK

​[Note: my new book of selected essays, Beyond the Turning Stars, is now out on Amazon and Kindle.]  

It was just another Sunday morning, with only the dog and I out for a hike along the same trail that I had taken with her for these past seven years, and yet there was something particularly beautiful about it.  Certainly it had to do with the time of year; just looking at the post date above, I am reminded of just how beautiful a day it was as well when I turned on the radio after dropping my son off at school on that day to hear of the perplexing tragedy that had just happened at the New York Trade Towers.  It would not be until the second jet came in that the source of the tragedy became known, but still it was such a beautiful day, just as yesterday.  But there was something more than just light and crisp blue sky to this Sunday.  I could hear the dropping of the acorns on the forest floor, abundant this year and good news for the squirrels and deer, as well as the rain-like patter they made in the nearby lake and it felt like the Holy Spirit was present, an undefinable thing that still could make its presence known, like a thin mist that cannot be seen but somehow can, nonetheless. 
 
In the realm of The Real, one might even call this unseen mist a miracle, although the sight – the feelings like this - happen a million times a day around the world.  How they come is unknown, too.  Just the night before, I had started the book Integral Christianity by Paul Smith, and I hadn’t been particularly inspired.  In those opening chapters, Smith blandly charted the course of spiritual evolution as seen by his mentor, Ken Wilbur, who is anything but a romantic.  I digress to say that I have a particular fondness for Ken Wilbur, for it was he who I was reading nearly 25 years ago as I waited to be interviewed by a committee for my PhD oral defense.  It was he who helped take away my nerves as he plotted, matter-of-factly, the various circles of awareness that culminated in God Consciousness, a plateau so far removed from the academic mind that it made both my tormenting professors and myself seem as insignificant as wall paper.  Still again, he in no way gave form to what he discussed, as dry it was - no better than Smith’s.  Both also reduced the kind of religion in which I now participate to the spiritual level of a child, to superstitions that were OK for kids, but not for the more advanced – that is, for those who could grasp Integral Christianity. 
 
Here’s the thing: normally I would agree with the two of them.  That morning as I hiked, I had just come from attending morning mass at the local Catholic parish.  The priest in charge is a good man, but his dedication, his duty as he sees it, is in saving us from hell fire because we do not obey the moral commandments of the Church.  He is not hateful in this, but pleading: listen, he said from the pulpit: “I do not say these things to condemn you, but because I want you to be right with God.  I do not hate you for acting on your homosexuality, or living together without marriage, but am only telling you that these things are wrong because they are against the commandments of God as understood through the Church.  You must obey these laws so that you will go to Heaven and live with God.”  The theology is a little thicker than this, if one wants to go into it, but one gets the idea – the good Father is an active representative of the church that Smith and Wilbur claim is for spiritual adolescents.  Intellectually, I would generally agree with Smith and Wilbur.
 
And yet, it was not to Wilbur or Smith’s philosophical musings that I give partial credit for having that beautiful sense of spirt that morning, but rather to that same immature church.  It was not what was said there by any means, but rather what was performed there – the act of the communion of Man with God.  As a preacher, Smith has acknowledged this value, but I do not think that he acknowledges it enough.  The rituals of the Catholic Church, as well as those of American Indian tribals or Tibetan Buddhists and so on, are what raises the spirit, as the spirit would tell you itself if it wished to – which it doesn’t.  It doesn’t, because spirit reaches far beyond our words and logic.  The words, the Creed - all that is necessary to hold a set of rituals together for a people over generations,  but it, they, are not of the core.  The core goes beyond the daily images, and even beyond our wildest fantasies; the core goes beyond quantum physics and different dimensions and all manner of magic mushroom experiences; the core goes to the very end, to that end that is also a beginning, and it defies every explanation.
 
Rather, it is poised within, waiting for its time with us. Sometimes it comes without notice or any preparation at all, but sometimes it comes from the mystery of ritual that we have somehow obtained, coming as that which goes beyond the stages of life, beyond evolution, and certainly beyond our cleverness and our philosophies and phrases.   All is foolishness from the height of the mist that is not mist.  What is important is that it comes.  I may wince at the words and the silliness of doctrine, but must remain grateful for the magic, the ritual, whatever one calls it that brings even the faintest hints of the beauty that lies so subtly but so pervasively both without and within.  FK
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​[Note to readers: At last, the book of essays long promised is available at Amazon (paperback for 12.99) and Kindle (for 3.99).  Titled Beneath the Turning Stars: glimpses of the sacred in a very profane life,” (by Frederick Keogh), it is a collection of 35 of my essays written over the past 3 or so years, many of which first appeared in the website in the Essays section.  As for me, I like them all, and love many of them.  I feel profoundly grateful for having been able to write them, for I do not think that I have the depth or skill to have done so on my own.  Most are multi-layered, giving different perspectives depending on one’s mood – something that I alone am incapable of producing.  I thank the spirit of the unconscious, or simply spirit itself, for having used me for such works.  They will never be good enough to thoroughly reflect the source, but I believe many are good enough to give one a look – a glimpse - into the greater depths of what it means to be alive.  FK]
 
I had scoured the Amazon website looking for books for a week without finding much, when suddenly, this long weekend, I happened on a treasure trove of marvelous works.  I wanted them all at once, but my grown-up side had me decide on one, as if I were being watched by grandma while at the cookie jar.  It was tough at first until I met with an old friend, Dr Raymond Moody, out with a relatively new (2009, I recall) book, Paranormal: my life in pursuit of the afterlife.  Not that I really knew him, but it seems so because of his books, particularly the groundbreaking Life after Life (@1975) which has changed our worldview forever, whether we know it or not.  It was he who first gave us the studies (and the term) on Near Death Experiences (NDE’s) with the whole gamut of strangeness that many people have had while near death, including leaving the body (out of body experience), seeing The Light, having a full life review, meeting a holy person (for Christians or those of Christian background usually Christ), and then joining dead relatives and friends who tell them “it is not your time.  You have more to do.  You must go back!”  And finally, showing us that many did not want to go back – that the after-life was better, and more real, than this life. 
 
This is now a part of popular culture, and has fostered dozens if not hundreds of other books based on his research.  But we did not really get to know the real Dr Raymond Moody – until this book.  Here we find that he had an undiagnosed thyroid condition that caused him to go crazy at times, so much so that he lost his money from his books, then his wife, and finally, almost his life when he attempted suicide by swallowing two dozen sedatives.  In the suicide attempt, he heard the spirits and levitated from his body, but was resuscitated before the other conditions of NDE’s prevailed.  He had, as he said, experienced some of what he had studied for so long.  And perhaps it was that experience (after which he took medication and was far better for it) which sent him on to other trajectories of investigations into death.
 
One, past life regression therapy, has resonated with time as well.  I do not know if he was the first to get into this, but he was certainly not the last, and again we can find dozens of books on this subject now.  But there was another, called scrying, which I will get into here simply because it is so bizarre and spooky.
 
I had heard of scrying before.  The Vikings claimed to be able to navigate around much of the globe without sextant or trigonometry or clock because of a scryer, or special crystal rock that they gazed into for the needed information.  I read a scientific piece that claimed that the crystal could actually enable one to see where the sun was on a cloudy day, facilitating navigation, but I believe the Vikings saw much more, thanks to another book I read about John Dee.  He was the physician/wizard who cared for Queen Elizabeth in the 1500’s, just before the time when the Inquisition and witch trials permanently separated science from the “spiritual arts” (which also began the separation of religion from science, a fascinating accident of conditions that created our world today).  One of his main instruments was a crystal ball, which is another iteration of a scryer, in which he claimed to talk to angels who gave him sage – and sometimes  treacherous – information.  Moody had read of Dee and of others, especially the Greeks who used pools of water in caves as reflective tools for people to see and conjure the dead, a practice also known a necromancy, something so condemned by both Protestant and Catholic teachings that one could be burned at the stake for it. 
 
Thus I was surprised and a little alarmed when, toward his final chapters, Moody wrote of his studies in scrying.  In his case, he set up a dark room lit with candles and had people stare into a mirror that was placed above their heads (where they would not see their own reflection) after a day of meditating on the person they wished to see.  Remarkably, some 80% of the subjects actually saw that or another dead person, with about a quarter meeting them fully in the flesh – with warm touches and everything.  Moody had started the experiments first with himself after a visit to the caves in Greece where such things had once been done.  In his case, he meditated on his maternal grandmother, who he had dearly loved, then mirror gazed for an hour or so before turning on the lights and going down to the kitchen to get a snack.  It was there, much to his surprise, where he met his grandmother as if in the flesh (I do not recall if she, too, possessed body heat) – except that it was his fraternal grandmother, who he had not liked.  They chatted and got to know each other better, Moody changing his opinion of her for the better.  And then she left.
 
I will not be doing any scrying soon – conjuring ghosts is not my style.  Generally this reluctance is out of fear, including a perhaps archaic belief that I would be damned for it.  It is only recently, after all, that I have accepted the occasional visits in dreams of dead people without terror.  But this line of inquisition is important – as is the NDE and another he is currently working on, the so-called shared death experiences (where those near a dying person experience death as well, while fully coming back.  This is important, because such an experience could not be caused by a diseased and dying brain, as some doctors and scientists have claimed is the reason for the NDE).  All have led Moody and some others who have experience such things to believe – emotionally as well as intellectually – that this life is little more than a mirage.  As one of his clients put it, “it’s as if we’re in Disneyland, and all the important stuff is done backstage and our life is only the superficial outcome.”  Moody himself had a talk with some spirits (I cannot remember the context) where he asked about his financial situation and his attempted suicide.  Those from the other side replied that suicide was ridiculous, because it meant we took this life too seriously.  As for money, they barely gave it a thought: “Money is of no importance at all.” 
 
All of which brings us back to our perennial concepts contained in religion and in spiritual experiences in general.  More than once I have had the wonderful feeling of spiritual fullness, and in this felt that none of the problems of the world were worth anything.  And yet, once that feeling has left, the problems, the desires for more, return as usual, as if the feeling were a dream. 
 
It is not a dream.  More and more we are shown that there really is more – much more; that the life we are living, for the most part, is flat and cartoonish compared to what it really is.  It may be even larger than the afterlife of Moody, as he noted towards the end of his book: “There may be something much more profound beyond even the initial journey to heaven, a story that goes far beyond what even that could bring us” (all above in quotes are my paraphrases).  Yes, most certainly.  What we have on our hands is an adventure that only God could, or would, make.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​I first opened its pages on a dark evening in a campground in the Pennsylvanian hills as it rained buckets, the sound so intense on the canvass roof that talking had to be done in shouts.  The first chapter I could not believe – it was Dr. Seuss mixed with Dark Shadows.  By chapter two, it had added Playboy to its background, but with a quiet woman’s touch, not just sensual but smoothly, artistically pornographic.  By chapter three I had to decide – should I continue with this oddity?  The erotica was enticing, but the weirdness…was it too much? 
 
The book, Palimpsest, was written by a young author, Catherynne M. Valente, who well represented her age group in the novelist set.  I have ventured into new authors before – the cutting edge sort – and found them well-done but too odd, too straining to be something unique, and this book certainly fit that bill.  But maybe not.  With its high poetic vibration, it seems that it might be something more.  On page 61 now, I will continue to read, and if it really is “something more,” I will offer more comment on it in another blog.
 
Or maybe not.  Maybe this introduction is enough, for I have already referred to a “something more” which is at the crux of this book’s worth.  It is so ephemeral, this something more, that it can be referred to with many words – magical might be the best – but I will be more scientific, or really alchemical, in my definition, and call it “astral,” where its quality, its rhythm and its words bring one, ready or not, into another plane of thought and feeling, a place where nothing changes, and yet all becomes spiritually charged and fundamentally different.
 
Children’s books are generally of this sort, but so simple they do not really speak to adults.  Nor do they take children to another astral plane, for children are already in that other plane.  Rather, they speak to them in their own language, one that we find cutely, but not alchemically, enchanting.  But there are the others meant for both children and adults.  The Mary Poppins books were the first that I can recall, books which both speak to children and transport adults into other possibilities and other openings in reality - if one is willing.
 
Some are not willing, as can be seen in the latest film on the author, P.L. Traverse, which is centered on her involvement with Walt Disney and the making of the musical in the early 60’s with Julie Andrews.  For Tom Hanks and the author of the book from which this movie is adopted, Traverse’s Mary Poppin’s theme is a fantasy about her father, a tragic figure from her youth in Australia.  While there may be something to this, it is a very little something.  Rather, in full life Traverse was a member of the Theosophical Society when such things weren’t as popular as today, and her primary concern was for the raising of consciousness so that we might see into the unseen.  Her efforts through her books were so effective that I would call her a true magician of the old variety, where magic, science and religion are considered parts of the same coin.  Her works are of Merlin proportions.  The same can be said for another child’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, as well as my youthful favorites, the books of Carlos Castaneda. 
 
The reader can probably add many more.  The point is, that such books make of the ordinary an enchanted land.  I do not include many of the fantasy books here, for they may speak of enchanted lands without creating an enchanted reality for us.  The authors I speak of are or were true alchemists.  A psychologist might call these writings dissociative, as they separate us from ordinary reality, and might tell us as well that such thinking is unhealthy.  There is good reason for believing this.  Many of the “wizards” of which I write did have severe mental problems – Carlos Castaneda, for example, slipped into a lost world by the time of his death.  Closer to home, I knew a transpersonal psychologist and New Age priest, the man who married my older brother to his second wife, some years ago.  He lived in a beautiful home in the country surrounded by trimmed willows and flowers and garden pools that made the place into an exotic paradise.  By all accounts, this guy was living on another astral plateau.  It was a shock to hear that he had killed himself just three years after the wedding.
 
It should not be a shock.  It is known by the experts in spiritual flight – especially those gurus of India who have become so familiar to us – that the astral world is no joke.  The enticements are no less filled with thorns than those of this world.  We are told by the enlightened that the astral planes are no more about true heaven – about life with the absolute – than is our own world, but there is a difference.  In the astral planes we are enticed by something of a finer quality, something that is not God, but that points to God, or at least to something beyond the material sphere.  More than that, though - these other worlds tell us that there ARE other worlds, and that ours is only one of many.  These authors show us that what we have here is not all there is.  And with this knowledge, we no longer must be bound by earth; with this knowledge we can press on to something greater, or at least to something more.
 
Those of the true faiths might be concerned here with Idolatry and illusion, but I believe these are not our main problems today.  Rather, it is our inability to even have idolatry or illusions.  It seems that for many now, life is dead, flat, fallen to the limited vision that we have of ourselves, which prove to be empty vessels indeed.  Perhaps at one time, the religious authorities would have brought Traverse before the Inquisition – and most certainly, they would have burned that wizard, Carlos Castaneda, at the stake.  But the hell of our times is much deeper.  Our hell is that we lack a true vision of anything beyond the conventional empire of empirical world culture.   It may be that the alchemists at long last have come to take their place as our saviors, or at least as our life rafts that may bring us to another island, where we can then think again of home.
 
 
I hope young Valente is another alchemist, a spark of light coming into our void.  I will read on.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​It is always an adventure on the road, and this last trip through the east to Connecticut was no exception.  A blow-out tire on the pop-up camper in Ohio led us to change to the spare with trucks whizzing past us only feet away in the tightness of a work zone, and on the way back, a recent accident closed our exit to a campsite in Indiana, forcing us to put on another 60 miles to someplace new.  The latter was instructive, for I felt that this would lead to something better for us, and in did, to a beautiful state park, in spite of my ill temper. 
 
For road travel adventure, though, the best for me are the books on CD’s if they are good, and this latest for our way back was very good. 
 
As with another a month or so ago, this one dealt with autism, which has drawn me for reasons both known and unknown, pulling me into this epidemic of mind disaster much the same way the accident in Indiana led me to a better campsite, for autism seems to be leading me somewhere.  On this last trip, I got a clue.  Perhaps, like much of what we think about autism, this clue is only an anomaly, but perhaps not.  If I am right, it is big news indeed.
 
The book is The Spark (a mother’s story of nurturing genius) by Kristine Barnett, a tale of frustration and tragedy that led Barnett to an amazing discovery.  It begins as this over-achieving woman finds that her first child, after the first year and a half, is suddenly falling behind the classic milestones of development.  He begins to talk less, then not at all; his skills at blocks and so on begin to fail; and he no longer is interested in cuddling or having emotional contact whatsoever.  She brings in experts and chews her nails, hoping her  boy is not what she fears, only to find that he is – he is pronounced by the experts as having Asperger’s, a mild form of autism.  While she finds some relief from this, she is beaten down again: his Asperger’s will regress until he totally disappears from the human world into deep autism.  She is told that he will be lucky to be able to tie his own shoes by the time he is 16.
 
Recovering from her shock, she remains true to form and dives in to all manners of therapy until the early developmental money from the state runs out.  Then she takes over herself, spending every minute extra of her busy, busy day doing what the experts were doing – going over rote skills again and again in an attempt to bring the child towards some low level of normal achievement.  But nothing works.  Her son continues to, as she says, disappear. 
 
Then she has a brainstorm: what if there really was a full person “in there” as she has continued to suspect?  What if the clue to developing that child to his fullest would be reached not by making him an incomplete replica of the normal, but more fully himself?  And what if, by doing that, she is able to connect with that person within, and bring him out into the society of people around him? 
 
She tries and is successful beyond her wildest imaginings.   Because her son was interested in astronomy books (for reasons she did not understand), one day she brings him to a planetarium for an advertised chance to look at Mars through a telescope.  When she gets there with tickets bought, she finds that they first must sit with a group of college students in a lecture.  She almost leaves.  But her son is adamant about staying, and even though she is bored by the lecture, he seems to be interested. Very interested.  By the end, this 3 year old boy is conversing with the lecturer, able to answer questions that none of the college students can.  He talks fully and in a relaxed manner, and everyone else there recognizes his specialness.  Here she comes to learn that her child is not only different but a genius. 
 
She starts an after-daycare school for other autistic children (she runs the daycare as her job) with this insight, and is fully rewarded: each of the autistic kids has at least one specialty in which they are fully engrossed.   She learns that to reach them, she must enter into that field of interest.  Once contacted on that level, she is able to draw them out into the shared social world.  She finds that, all along, the kids were not interested in the things of the normal world, and so withdrew.  But they had not disappeared to themselves within – only to those without. 
 
In this, she finds that the experts had gotten it all wrong – that they had remained glued to their own world and had only tried to bring the autistic kids out to a place where they could never fully perform.  She finds that her own genius son would have been ruined if she had continued the professional route.   All this, I, in reading (hearing) this, had already understood.  But something more stood out to me as a possibility for the first time.
 
Autism: those given that label have grown many fold in the past 30 years for reasons not fully understood.  Perhaps it is because women are having children later, or because of environmental poisons, or simply because the specialists are more prone to label odd kids with this diagnosis.  Of the latter, this may be so because our society is much more conformist than it used to be.  This was understood in the 19th and early 20th century when people saw how individualist farmers now had to conform to certain patterns of behavior for the modern workplace, but we have forgotten this in our century and have confused individualism for tattoos and certain forms of sexual behavior.  In fact, a famer could much more easily be “weird” back on his own forty acres in the old days than, say, at the office of Clinger, Clinger and Chaser nowadays.   But there might be much more.  This might instead be an evolutionary trend.
 
Evolutionists tell us that with every change in a species that is beneficial, there is usually the loss of some other trait that is not as fundamental for survival.  We humans, for instance, with our greater cognitive skills, were able to create effective weapons, but in the process lost much of our speed and strength.  These would be cool to have, yes, but because they are no longer necessary, time has taken them from us. 
 
So it might work with autism.  Thanks to people like Barnett who have truly been able to step inside the mind of those with autism, we have come to understand that those with autism are specialists, able to do absolutely amazing things with their particular abilities.  But this comes at the cost of over-all general fitness on both the physical and social levels.  While it is true that they are able to come back into the normal fold somewhat once their ability is recognized and appreciated by the outside world, most will never have that generalist ability for contemplating the absurd or socializing, a complex skill in itself.  
 
These traits, however, are becoming less and less important.  We have become so interconnected and specialized in our daily work world that our ability to generalize might be seen as a handicap.  We will, after all, never be as bright mathematically as Barnett’s son, even if we get each other’s jokes.  As our individualism is parred down for the interconnected workplace, our social complexities might become superfluous.  What if each of us instead were born focused on a few particular specialties to the near-exclusion of others?  We would be geniuses of a sort in that specialty, and if we were all connected as it looks like we soon will be, we would function infinitely better as a collective.
 
This would look much like Arthur Clark’s Childhood’s End, where the minds of most of the world’s children became merged into one great mass through mental telepathy, after which they “wooshed” off the world to some greater destination.  The difference here is that this “telepathy,” at least at first, would be provided by electronic communications.  But the result would be the same; we would have an infinitely more advanced world where the collective genius would far exceed the efforts of the individuals as we now have.
 
Yes, Childhood’s End might be where we are headed, but in a way most of us never thought.  It could be right before us in the onrush of autism, which might soon bring us to Clark’s thought-collective.  This idea might repulse us, but hunters and gatherers were often repulsed by civilization, which was certain to dominate the world because of its greater collective energy. 
 
This could be humanity’s great breakthrough, brought to us by a curious and unexpected form of evolution that one might say is both naturally and divinely directed - as I believe evolution has always been.  And only God knows where it will bring us in the distant future.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Just a note to readers that The Quiet Voice will be taking a vacation from writing for the next few weeks.  To resume towards the end of the month.  Talkin' to ya then, FK

​Going over the collection of my essays that are soon to be published, I was struck by a constant theme that I had not been totally aware of: that we live our lives as if asleep.  We are buffeted by events that rock our world just as dreams do in sleep, even though dreams, as far as our current thought goes, are entirely created by us.  I do not extend this to a belief that we can manipulate life as we should be able to manipulate dreams, but more simply that we are largely unaware of the nature of the world in which we are a part.  We don’t understand that we have dumbed ourselves down to the small and particular, our concern focused on the incidental and the social while all around us is mystery: infinite space and time, death, creation, the forever unexplained.  Our life might not be exactly as a dream, but like a dream in that we ignore the more important facts of it for the particular and the relatively unimportant.  In this then, as in dreams, we are puppets to a seeming master who pulls these little strings to confuse us just as real life passes us by.     
 
Who is this master?  Why are we so easily distracted?  In the classic book of hidden knowledge (as opposed to the “occult,” which is now associated with satanic venues) by P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, we are led to believe that these and other eternal questions can be answered by the inscrutable Armenian trickster, G.I. Gurdieff.   Still stuck on page 89, I have not yet found those answers in full (and will probably be only tickled by possibilities, as is the habit of Gurdjieff) but have been practically run over again and again by this same idea -that we are asleep, mere puppets of cosmic law.  But no, even worse: although I believe it is due to his showmanship, Gurdieff (through Oupensky) insists that we are not only asleep, but are machines, total automatons with no will or volition of our own.   I have not been let in on the puppet master yet, but have learned of his strings: the natural movement of the cosmos.  Gurdieff believed that, for instance, the perturbations caused by, say, Mars coming closer to Jupiter in its orbit could rain holy hell down here on earth.   In this case, Gurdeiff was speaking to Oupensky at a café in St Petersburg during WW1, where he went so far as to state that the war was pre-determined by such cosmic movements and that nothing at all could have been done to prevent it.  Except one thing, that is: to become awake using Gurdieff’s special methods, which were not to come cheaply.   Gurdieff, the author explained, was not to be held back in poverty.   
 
Putting the charlatan issue aside, it seems to me that Gurdieff was more right than wrong, simply being more over-the-top than necessary. I came to think of Gurdjeff and his message over these last several days as my son and I spent time at the cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (it was this that got me stuck on page 89).   We got to talking about Pan-European culture and how it seemed to be annihilating itself in Western Europe with the massive importation of Muslims who were not interested in assimilation, and why this was so.  My son believed it was all about the destruction of traditional culture so that the state could gain more control.  I did not disagree, but made some refinements: it was not about the leadership; they, for the most part, believed that what they were doing was a good and moral thing.  Rather, it was about the impetus behind the culture.  Looking back on history, it is not that Euro-culture is trying to commit suicide, but rather that it has taken a different tack for greater world assimilation that is so well-hidden that it seems the reverse.  The logic behind it is that Euro-culture is so powerful that it will, in time, transform the great masses of Muslims now in or heading to Europe, and in that, will cause them to export their own transformation back to their native lands.  This is the only way such a conversion might take place. 
 
The trouble with this, I pointed out, is that this might be like the pig and the python problem, an idea that had struck me from a picture book from my childhood.  Here, in some place like Burma, a python had slithered into a pig pen and swallowed an entire pig.  Trouble is, once swallowed, the python could not leave the pen, and was thus open to the later fatal machete blows of the pig’s owner.  It had bitten off more than it could handle – just as Euro-culture might be doing.  Islam, after all, has an agenda of its own.
 
Who swallows who and so on, time will tell, but I was reminded of Gurdjieff by the idea that the leaders who are transforming Europe and probably the world have no idea why they are really doing what they are doing.  They are puppets of culture, which is running the show behind a curtain.  But who or what is behind the curtain creating this cultural momentum?  And how can we pull it aside to throw out the puppet master and reclaim our lives?  
 
Perhaps I will find the secret in this book, although I doubt it – not because it will not be in this book, but because, as Gurdieff himself put it, because I am not ready to understand his take on it all.  But this problem has already been explained by the Great Religions and perhaps by ALL religions.  Most agree that we are ignorant of what is really running our lives, and of what life is really all about.  Many tell us, too, that we are living in a kind of dream, just as Jesus pleaded with his Abba, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”  It is true, then - from Gurdieff to cultural theory to Christ and the Buddha – that we know not what we do, and in that we are ignorant puppets.  The religions seem to vary on the whys and who’s, but in the end, the wise all agree: we are, both individually and as a collective, deaf and blind.   And each tells us how we might deliver ourselves from this ignorance.
 
Which brings us back to my book on essays, for there is something else in them that speaks of my own ignorance that is in plain sight – the concept of coincidence.  So many of the essays speak of coincidence, but if we think about it, coincidence really only equals ignorance.  If we knew what was going on, coincidence would not be a mystery.  Such oddities, in our new framework, would be seen to run by a certain logic, and in that have a certain predictability. 
 
I do not believe that we are total puppets.  On this, I disagree with Gurdieff, and am more in line with the religions that posit free will even in the throes of ignorance, for religion could not give us solutions if we could not use them.  Boiling it all down, our superficial daily mind is not divorced from reality, but rather is as said, superficial.  We might picture the conscious as part of a greater mind that is the unconscious, which is part of a greater mind which is the cosmic, which is part of the Great Mind that we have chosen to call God.  None are divorced from the other, but one is hidden from the other behind modes of comprehension, functioning as it seems from behind a curtain.  Looking back on the Europe problem, Carl Jung called the cultural mind the archetypal conscious, but it didn’t stop there: he also had to admit to even more inclusive rings of influence which even he could not comprehend – until he faded into a sort of mystical wisdom in his old age. 
 
I believe that we can talk to these other “rings” in prayer and in meditation, the former humbling our conscious mode, the latter leaving space for the different modes to talk back to us.  I do not think that we can then twist reality to our desires as we understand it, but we should be able to free ourselves of the puppet strings.  With greater knowledge, these should not appear to be puppet strings at all, but rather new laws that operate as clearly to us as, say, the law of gravity.  We can then make clear choices – until, in the end, our choices will always be the same as God’s, for what other choices could be more true?
 
We might avoid fate, then, with certain introspection.  We might avoid being the pig or the python or the man with the machete.  Or we can wait and see how divine law percolates through the far realm in which we find ourselves, and hope that prayer will be enough.  FK    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                       
 
           
                       
 
           
                                                                                      
 

This is necessarily short, as late summer has me on the run - to return to another blog this Friday.  For now, this one quick comment: 

Reading North Men by John Haywood, I have been delighted in an odd way at their barbarity, and the barbarity at the time of Europe as a whole.  The Vikings had a special way of gifting the god Odin by taking a high-ranking captive and making from him a "blood angel" in which they would make two slits along the backbone and then pull out the still-functioning lungs to form pulsating bloody "wings" for as long as the victim survived.  

The Vikings had no peaceful resting place for the dead - only Valhalla for the greatest warriors, who would all die one day in the final battle of the world, where defeat would lead to the annihilation of the world and then its remaking - add infinitum.  And yet, although there was no hope in their religion for eternal paradise, they clung to it as proud warriors, becoming Christian only after defeat or for political gain.  

Was it pride, or overwhelming culture?  Is the call to high religion a matter of truth or only of levels of civilizations? Or do the two correspond according to a divine plan?  

More towards the end of the week.  The great green of late summer awaits (oh, and a special hello to  frequent contributor Roeker, who is now on his honeymoon after a great wedding.  I doubt he will be reading this at the moment - or at least I hope not.)  FK
 

Another religious retreat has passed, and along with my usual “never again” complaints - as I learned the not-so-fine art of complaining from my dad so well - came another usual - the unusual.  It was not only me who noticed, either – as usual.  Call it what you will, but what caused this is called “spirit” in the religious world and it is a fickle thing, or at the very least, a creative thing.   And that, this time, was the point.
 
First, to the testimonials, or rather, to a particular testimonial.  Often these are stories of sin and redemption, of hitting the bottom one way or another before finding the light, and after a while, we might grow tired of these, for the plot and resolution are already known.  This time, this testimonial, was different, however, which was made clear from the start.  ”I was not the prodigal child.  I never drank, smoked, or had affairs.   I always went to church and said my prayers.   I did not rebel against my parents or society and have always lived as I had been taught to live as a child.”  There was no “but” here – no sudden, “and then I met Fernando” or “it started with taking pills for my back pain.”  Instead, the speaker went to those special moments in life that each of us can have regardless of our choices.
 
“We (her young husband and she) were staying in a hotel in Madison when I woke up with an intense pain in my chest.  I went to the bathroom and sat down on the toilet and thought ‘so this is how I am going to die.’  Then, my attention lifted from my body and I hovered over it.  There was no fear; instead, I looked down at that body and thought, ‘how alone she is.  How difficult it is to live in that hard world.’  I was filled with the peace of being apart from that world when I suddenly found myself back in my body.  It was then that I knew that we are more than our body – that spirit is real.”
 
She gave two other accounts of special spiritual moments; one was a feeling for the suffering of Jesus, and the other, a revelation in the garden: “I was in my garden happy with the day and with pruning and weeding, when I suddenly had the feeling of what Earth would be like if we all followed the law of God.  It was paradise.  I realized then that all of our pain and suffering comes from our own actions.”   
 
Such was her testimonial, and it was the most powerful of the event.  There were no tears, no “come to Jesus” moments of redemption, but rather a clear-headed account of how things are and could be.  Different. 
 
As was the feeling I had most of the time, which I and others expressed throughout the long, long 4 days.  Towards the end, I summarized my own take on it this way: “I am a philosopher of sorts and I like to figure things out.  I can barely change a spark plug, but I do a bit better with the abstract, and I had thought I had kind of figured out how “spirit” acts in a group like this.  But no.  This time, it has affected me in a way that I have not experience before, and cannot really explain.  It is unique and not altogether comfortable.  I am learning again that spirit cannot be figured out – that God (as spirit) already knows my thoughts and so I cannot out-think that which is beyond and behind my thoughts.  It is impossible.  I just have to accept the mystery.”
 
Others there who had gone through the same retreat experience before also spoke of something different.  For me, it was not the flowering of power and goodness as it had been, but rather like a darker wind, one that came from a place that is unknown, and in that unknown, it was fearful.  And in that fear came the echoes of gnashing of teeth, of disaster, of things gone horribly wrong – of things demonic.  The spirit was coiled through it all, as if to say, “It’s not so easy, is it?  Takes some work, doesn’t it?, and courage too.  Courage to face the demons of your fears.”  Although in actuality the spirit would never say such things.  This spirit, this iteration, would never attempt to say anything, for words are hard and finite.  This spirit, instead, let it be known that it is unknown and cannot be known.  It is the source, beyond which we cannot reach.  It is fear of it that brings us to learn of it if we wish to someday, maybe, lose our fears.  Only in that way can joy be held and truly lived.
 
Or so it seemed to say.  Perhaps it doesn’t matter, for the spirit is infinite creativity and cannot be placed in a box to be taken out now and then at our convenience.  It comes when it will, and blows where it will.   We cannot out-think it and cannot ever predict it.  As my wife has said, “whatever we think heaven is, or after-death will be, we will all be surprised.” Still, we wish to know more, and for this we must face our fears, our demons, so that we might turn towards the unpredictable wind of spirit. Sometimes this requires that we fall so low that we have nowhere else to go.  Sometimes this requires heroic courage.  And for others, it requires only that they be open through faith in the (or a) right path.  As our speaker said, she was never the rebel, always the good girl, and still it came.  No lightning bolt on the road to Damascus, but rather that rare breeze of mystery that leads us on forever into what only the spirit knows.  FK
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I admit it – I am one of those old guys who loves watching weather.  I have often turned on a channel that runs 24 hour displays of the radar, and pondered it for minutes on end – and then returned to it minutes later to see what has changed.  I look at the sky, sense the air pressure, see what the birds are doing, all that stuff that may give a hint to the upcoming weather.  But I have taken for granted the daily forecast, knowing that they are great for 24 hours, good for a few days, and then are often spectacularly wrong in the long-term forecasts.  I didn’t know why, only that it was so.  Now, after reading Bill Streever’s book, And Soon I heard a Roaring Wind, I understand far more why we don’t understand the weather: chaos theory.
 
Although the term and the physics were there already, it was a man named Edward Lorenz who first made that phrase applicable to weather in the 1970’s, and who also made the “if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, it can cause a tornado in Texas 3 months later” phrase popular.  And it all started with a computer.  A big, desk-sized computer that weighed over 700 pounds and was run with hundreds of vacuum tubes, and had the calculating capacity far smaller than a hand-held IPhone of today. 
 
The story of computer evolution is well known, but back in the 70’s, Lorenz, having his computer, was able to put in a vast amount of variables into his device to maybe come out with mathematical certitude about the weather.   At one point, he re-fed his computer with numbers already generated, but put his numbers in only to the 3rd (if I recall right) decimal point.  The original data was put in to the 6th decimal point.  Lorenz naturally thought that what would come back would be nearly identical to what he had originally gotten, and this was true in the initial numbers.  But with time – going out to, say, 3 days of forecasting, he found that the second set of numbers came up with radically different readings for the upcoming weather.  With more experimentation, he discovered that the slightest discrepancies in data would, over several days, bring dramatically different results.  The conclusion was obvious – minute differences accumulated over time to great differences, and these differences were impossible to predict.  Impossible, because all data could never be taken (every atom, etcetera) and that each small difference would result in great divergences over time.
 
That is not to say that this chaos was completely chaotic – there were limits.  In fact, we find that the differences fan out and curve back within certain boundaries, and when graphed, look for all the world like butterfly wings. Thus, the poetic applicability of the butterfly to chaos theory.  However, within this discovery we find the idea, still accepted by science as well as the author, that the weather always follows physical laws, and as such, is theoretically predictable.  This has generated the expression “Laplace’s Monster,” named for the early 19th century French mathematician who stated that, if all information were known, we could perfectly predict ALL physical phenomena.  The monster, of course, is All Information, and all information could never be known.  With chaos theory, we now know what that can mean – huge differences rendered from small initial differences. 
 
 
Which is not to say that more and better information doesn’t make for better predictions, for it does: reliability for short-term forecasting has shot up from 50% in the 1960’s to over 90% (for 24 hour forecasts) today.  Not bad.  But I have a bone to pick with Laplace’s Monster.  Although the math is waaaay beyond me, quantum theory clearly states, and has been proven again and again, that the observer effects the action of the observed.  The observer – the human – behaves according to thoughts.  Thus, Laplace’s Monster must then have as a part of its measurements the thoughts of all people – never mind that of all animals, simple as they might be.  And we don’t have to go to complex theory to show this: human thought leads to all kinds of physical changes, from cutting down forests to driving a car to the grocery store for items necessary for something as unpredictable as sex.  Thus, it is not even necessary to speculate that our silent thoughts cause atoms to act differently – our expressed thoughts will do this just fine.   And no computer made by Man can ever know all the thoughts of Man, or even a small bit of them.  Thus weather will always remain, in the long run, an unpredictable monster. 
What this says about current notions of weather – from theories about desertification to Co2 levels – raises one necessarily to the level of skeptic.  But in finding that the smallest changes can make for huge differences over time, we must rethink the amount of power that each of us has over things as vast as the weather.  Could a reverent approach to nature change the course of weather history, and thus human history?  Although not certain, it is absolutely possible.  More so, if I can make the jump from physical laws to human laws – which in this case I believe I can – isn’t it possible that small changes in thought can have huge implications for changes of thought world-wide?  Even if we take out some sort of ESP effect, these thought patterns would change physical actions, which we know can lead to greater changes later on.
 
It is odd that chaos theory can contribute to what the great sages have been saying for centuries – that we can change the world, not just by the might of a Genghis Khan, but by the peace of a saint or monk.  Further, I do intuitively agree with those quantum theorists who think that even silent thought, without actions, affects the physical world.  What are thoughts?  Are they not, in some sphere, tangible things?  The thought that went into writing this blog was there before it was written, and even then, it was something, somehow, somewhere.  Could it be that those thoughts were already having an effect?  Jesus, among other wise beings, claimed that we were all of one body (an idea contained in quantum theory that spreads out to ALL things and intentions).  Would not every thought affect that body?  Wouldn’t it then be true that, if the kingdom of God is within us all, that this realization among even a few could bring it too all of us?
 
Of course, in chaos theory, nothing is predictable within the parameters.  A butterfly flapping its wings might cause a tornado, but it might stop a tornado, or do nothing at all.  Still, more and more evidence is pointing to a directed universe, one with a driving intelligence that has led, for instance, to the development of humans and self-reflective thought.  Couldn’t it also mean that, eventually, the realization of heaven on earth by one or a few, like the flapping of the butterfly’s wings, could be the force that drives us to a greater, even the greatest, future, one that is intended for us if we so decide?    

​Weather – I’ll be looking at you differently now, but with even greater interest.  Just like any old fool, surely, but now with eyes further opened, even though there is a lot more to weather than meets the eye.  FK