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      
   

The last two comments by Cal and Roosen have got me thinking about what kids on the playground pretend to be nowadays.  We once wanted to be soldier heroes or (my favorite) spies like Ilya Kuryakin of the "Man from UNCLE" series or, yes, astronauts or even - if you are old enough to remember - president of the US. There were always those few who had realistic aspirations, and they were often the destined ones - people who wanted to be doctors, for instance, and became doctors, although none ever said, "accountant" or "machine operator" or "hassled mom of three working the night shift at Sears."  And that's just it - what we pretended to be and what we actually became were usually very, very far apart.  Yet, what we pretend to be as children speaks of our culture at large.  Wanting to be something big for most of us wasn't so much about our little egos, but of what we were taught America was.  Back then, it was believed that anyone could become president or spy, and that is why we played the parts. But what do they dream of now?

I have to go back a few years - less than ten, really - to recall what kids were talking about via my son.  At that time, he vaguely had an idea about becoming an engineer like his mom, although that was before he discovered that advanced math was hard.   One of his friends wanted to be a pro-ball player, about as possible as becoming president in the real world, but all the rest that I can think of wanted to be something, well, real.  Nursing, music teacher, mechanic, soldier (not the heroic Hollywood kind), dentist, even business man, but not an astronaut or spy or neuro-surgeon in the bunch.  This is anecdotal, but let's say these kids represented the rest of American kids in the 00's, and then take a look at what it might mean about the changing view of the American Dream.

First, it might not be what it seems.  In the '60's, most of us got the three networks on TV and pretty much watched the same shows.  We listened to the one or two pop radio stations in our areas which all played the same stuff, and our parents got the news from the local paper - most in sync with one another - and one of three broadcasters, also remarkably in sync.  Opinions varied, but most people were working with the same information.
I should also add that it was then a very patriotic country, thanks to the second WW and the Cold War (and more limited info), and a country filled with hope as the economy bounded upwards after years and years of awful depression.  We had also just gotten a Catholic president (unthinkable in the old days).  Put all that together, and you got the American Dream of the '60's - a combination of hope, patriotism and limited info which funneled our dreams through what we were watching for amusement on TV, and from what our parents were getting in the news, such as the perceived desperate race for power that we had with the Russians.  With all that, it seems natural (in hindsight) that children would want to be spies and hero soldiers and astronauts and president.  While hope and belief in our country was important, I would say that it was more our technology and the recent history of the world that shaped our playground fantasies.

Of course times have changed.  Our technology allows us to choose our version of the news - and the truth - as easily as we now choose the music we listen to.  We are also burdened - yes, burdened - with success, as hope fades into ennui.  This, too, is natural, for, as even we children of the 60's learned, our dreams seldom come true.  While a parent from the Depression and flush with the victory of war might tell his children that they can become anything now, "can" is not "will," as most of us have found out. Additionally, patriotism seldom thrives without a palpable outside threat, and our various news stories can no longer be contained by a watchful - and fearful - government.   Thus we don't convey the hope of another generation, a hope generated both by new possibilities and by a uniform, unrelenting fear.  That "hope" has instead become a reality, and in that, life is still tough, but not too tough.  Thus we don't tell our children to become president or astronaut, because the former is almost impossible, whether one is Catholic, Black or not, and the latter no longer carries the team USA banner against a hard and fast competitor.  

Instead, we direct our children according to our reality, and they choose their own alien worlds on their I- phones, or whatever they're called now.  The future, as far as careers go, is more "meh" than "oh boy!."  

Now for part II, and it is something different and dark.  It is that our very success not only has given us ennui, but also a new fear.  It is not a fear against a defeat-able foe, but a fear about our technology, our life-styles - a fear of our very selves.  Those alien games on the I Phones that children play are more often than not about a future distopia, a world that has been ravaged by pollution and/or terrible high-sci weaponry and'/or one of brutal clannish dictators in a world of mutant zombies.  If the children dream beyond their limits, it is often about the demise of their own civilization, and how they would survive within it.  We had that with the threat of nuclear war as kids, but that was specific and against specific "evil" empires.  Now, the evil is within us and invincible, even inevitable.

This truth is no more, or less, true than the truth of our parents (or grandparents) in the '60's, and I think that it, too,  can be found in the playground.  At its root is the same foe humankind has had forever - our own dissatisfaction with ANY lifestyle.  This is forgotten in times of duress, but once we feel comfortable, we also find that we are not comfortable - that nothing we can do will ever please us for long.  This syndrome can and has been described by psychologists, but here we look for spiritual causes, and in this discussion it is the same as in so many others: our future happiness is not of this world as we perceive it, but in the realization of it as our soul knows it.  Times of ennui come from comfort, and comfort should be our friend, as it gives us time to think.  Instead, we use it to chase happiness elsewhere, and in that become more jaded - so much so that we begin to wish it were all over with.  Those dreams of distopia were not put in our kids' heads by Marxist plotters, although these do play along with it; rather, they were put there by ourselves, propelled by our dark desire to end it all and start afresh. Where to start again, our children do not know and are usually not taught, but anywhere seems just fine, and if not today, then tomorrow - right after the Fall.

The Fall.  We will have hardships again, one way or the other, and if we are not destroyed, our children's fantasies, along with their comfort, will change.  As is often said here, it always comes back to spirit. In the end, we are already living in the fallen times that our children play with and imagine, and we are all looking, have always been looking, for a way to survive.  Somewhere deep within, we know that we cannot have true hope, hope that is sustained, until we find the  right way.  FK              

    
    



                          

Since it has already aired, I can give it away.  I am talking about the "Mars" science/sci-fi series put on by National Geographic (Mondays, 8 Central) which features a fictional drama about what astronauts might face when living on Mars in 2033, along with real-life astronauts and scientists talking about the challenges.  In the story, the leader of the group sacrifices himself by inhaling something while on an out-of-shelter exploration (we missed the first show, so we do not know what that was).  He is dying, and the team manages to get him back to the living pod during the freezing night.  The team surgeon cuts him open to relieve serious edema.  The program then shifts to real-life again, a conversation with the man who stayed in orbit for one straight year to test the affects of radiation and weightlessness for long periods, and then we are taken back to the pod.  We see the sick commander awaken, pull out the tubes in his body, put on a spacesuit while the others sleep (we scream, what, are you crazy?  You've almost died!) and walk to the top of a cliff overlooking the alien scenery.  Then suddenly, the man's father, who we have already learned helped him develop his love for space adventure, appears at his side.  Says the commander to his dad, "I thought I would find you here.  You know that we must do this.  We were made for adventure, to push to new limits, and space is our last, our only way now.  We need this to have hope. to live." (my paraphrase)  Then, we are suddenly back in the pod, and the surgeon is making the sign of the cross, ever so subtly, on his forehead.  He is still lying on the table, and is pronounced dead.  What we saw before was his final dream before he died.

The series will continue with a new commander, but the pronouncement of hope and adventure immediately caught my attention.  "No" I said to the TV screen, "no, that is not the only avenue.  There is and has always been another way."

Let me not diminish our efforts in space travel.  I am one of its greatest advocates, and believe it is part of our larger destiny.  If certain taxes were raised just for such exploration, I would gladly pay my share.  I see it as a destiny of fulfillment - that we humans, cast from energy into matter, and then into life, and then into self-reflecting beings, logically should come to understand and explore everything, as far as our abilities can take us, for that is what we are here for - to understand and reflect on creation. The more we explore, the more we can understand.  I agree with the commander here that this is what we are made for.  

But there has always been the other frontier, what I call, for convenience, the spiritual realm, which is even greater than what we have come to know as the material realm.  I will not go into the philosophical argument  about the meaning of the subjective vs the objective here, simply because it is not necessary.  All long-term societies have known of this realm for as long as humans have been humans.  I have read many accounts of shamans telling anthropologists, "why should we build a ship to travel to the moon, when we can travel there at will [through the spirit real]? I have never taken this to mean we should not travel in ships, but that we have always had other avenues of exploring the universe that do not require high technology or vast fortunes, and we as a race have always known it.  And this interior space is spectacular, so much so that those who experience it ALWAYS say that it is "more real than real."  More real, more fantastic, more reflective of the universe than any trip to Mars or Alpha Centuri  could ever be.

I am reminded of this every time I open the computer to the news section.  There, I always find stories and adds about the most amazing places to visit in this world, from the Amazon to some far-out island in the South Pacific.  In this way, we are told, we can expand our horizons in unimaginable ways.  What a trip!  I have been to some of these places and am often amazed.  The trip is often worth it.  But there, the people are always, in the long run, much like us, and the environment is as well.  In the end, there is no Narnia in the material world.  But there is in the imaginative world.  Stepping beyond that into the spiritual realm, we find even greater worlds, and they are no longer ephemeral day-dreams.  They are, as said, more real than real.  They are greater than the material because they transcend the limits of the ordinary, as Mars never would (unless we find evidence of an ancient alien race that did transcend our ordinary world.  Thus, another reason for the travel).  In the spiritual realm, we do not just find an interesting reiteration of the material realm, but rather something else, something more encompassing - something totally different, and, well, more real than real.

Most of us will not become shamans, or people of great spiritual insight.  If we have the money, travel is often worth the time, and even more rewarding, I think, is travel to space.  It DOES give us hope, and I believe it also gives us a step -up towards the ultimate, what our longing is really for.  But it is not the ultimate. That remains within us, for anyone of any means -  but for most, the easiest and cheapest is usually the hardest and most expensive, in terms of life-style.  Thus, in a deeper way, the meek do inherit not only the earth, but the universe.  Meanwhile, however, I'll be rooting along with many others for Star Trek and the next-to-last frontier.  FK        

 

     
    

Monday late afternoon I had a date.  It was to see the movie "Arrival" at the local multi-plex, and when we got there on a Monday at 4:30 PM there were not many people - five, to be exact, including my date and I.  It would have been a perfect time to make the first nervous move towards romance, but seeing that I was with my wife of many years, we stuck to eating popcorn and actually watching the movie.  My, how times have changed.

Or had they?  The movie dovetailed with the last blog about time and prophesy  - in fact, time was the central scientific concept in this sci-fi thriller about the arrival of 12 alien - very alien - craft that positioned themselves around the world.  We were moved to ask: why have they come?  

It was a good movie, but Hollywood none the less, and we found that something approaching world peace was at stake.  We found that the aliens, which looked a lot like The Simpson's aliens (again, a dovetail with the last blog) but much, much larger, communicated in non-linear time, and thus lived in a universe that was already done.  Our heroin, a linguist who learns to communicate in this non-time language, discovers that she is living both past and present, over and over again.  She learns what her life will be and lives it in dreams and in a reality of cycles that seem to never end.  But here is the crux: knowing what her future will be - and it is filled with heartache - she chooses to live it anyway.  In that, we are supposed to find pathos and wisdom. We also learn that the aliens MUST play out their part, even though they know the outcome.  Again, they, too, must have had the ability to decide, to change the future, but chose instead to run with it as it had already played out.  

Overall, we are presented with the possibility of choice, even though choice seems to be an impossibility in a world that is already set for all time.  In a Hollywood movie one would not expect to hear resonances of the Judaeo-Christian theme, but there it was, as inescapable for the plot as an already-lived future would seem to be.   In a world beyond time, where everything is said and done at once, the movie tells us that we must have choice, just as the morality of religion under the aegis of an omnipotent god MUST have choice, or no human  morality is possible.  Choice must be to make any sense at all, just as the movie could not move, could not have drama, without the possibility of choice.  

The question then arises: although we cannot contemplate in one thought a universe already made, and one that we must make, we try anyway.  Is this because we have been conditioned for it from our religious heritage, or is it because we intuit its reality, which is why we put it in our religions?  But it is not only us, we of the Judaeo-Christian epic, who do so.  Myths - particularly those religious stories of tribal peoples - do not run in linear time.  In fact, a simple reading of them makes little sense to those outside the traditions when interpreted  from linear time. Could it be, then, that this all-time is the real real, and that our linear sense is only a simplification of that reality?  And could it be that we understand that in some deep part of ourselves?  

It seems to me that the spiritual part of us lives this split impossibility with ease, while our daily selves suffer from an ignorance that makes this greater reality impossible - even as we try to make sense of it.  It also seems that time might be the fundamental essence of "original sin"; that is, that without time, we would be immortal and perfect even though still human. Here, if we were fully a part of that non-time world, our choices would be automatic, as we would live in harmony with all-time; here, we would be beyond morality, because we would be living in a world as it was designed to be.

But we live in linear time, with all its sufferings and choices. Here, we can make the wrong choice, and in so doing, separate ourselves from the grand design that will - again, paradoxically - unfold anyway, as if linear time were only a stream that diverts from the river, only to join it again later on.  

And so we return to the wisdom of our heroin, and to the core of our religions.  It is not God or the gods who have made a difficult world for us, one filled with pain and death, but our inability, which is somehow our choice, to see it all at once, as a masterful and perfect plan.  Our heroin and the aliens grasp this, but we run astray, bumping our heads against this wall and that, suffering because we refuse to see that the maze we live in has already been figured out.  We have instead chosen choice - what the Bible would call a rebellious choice - and so must suffer the consequences.  

Which makes me think: maybe I could have chosen to be young again at the movies last Monday. It would have been more exciting.  But time has made that choice for me, and somehow, I'm OK with that.  FK                              

Moving on now past he election, although this has something to do with the election, kind of like how The Simpson's starts with one thing that leads to something else entirely.  Well, it started like this: there was a meeting in church, and I think I brought the election up, coyly wondering if our priest favored Trump because of the abortion issue.  He remained vague (as he should) but mentioned something - really, someone - that I did not expect: the renowned prophetess Baba Vanga.  Again, he was wary of saying he believed in her predictions, but did send me a link to a site on her at news.com.au.  Here is what it said:

Born to a peasant family in Bulgaria in 1911 (died, 1996), she was blinded by a freak wind storm at the age of 12, returning to home after two or three days with her eyes sealed shut with dirt. Since then, she claimed to have gained powers to see the future, so much so that she was consulted regularly (and jealously guarded) by the  communist leadership.  But other notables from around the world visited her, including politicians and scientists, which must mean they saw something in her beyond the ordinary. Of her many predictions, here are a few:

In the 1950's, she predicted that the planet would warm and the polar ice caps would melt, bringing great problems by 2033; that a tsunami would kill many thousands in Asia in 2004 (it did); that Islam would attack Europe in 2016 and WIN, forming a caliphate in Rome by 2043 (after Europe becomes a desolate wasteland by 2025 - nuclear war?); that the US would have "brethren" (twins) attacked by Muslims on 9/11 (obviously, it did happen); what was started by the conversation above, that America would elect its first Afro American president as the 44th, but that HE WOULD BE THE LAST; also, that the world would go communist by 2076, and many other things in a more distant future that includes space aliens, the death of the earth, and star travel.

A lot of ground to cover, no?  As for the Caliphate, I don't know: can the invasion really happen by the end of this year?  One might say that it already began with massive immigration starting in the 1980's, but that is not what was specified.  It does seem that the "wasting" of Europe would be necessary to begin a caliphate at Rome, and that the most probable reason for this would be nuclear war.  Iran?  Pakistan?  A little help from the Russians (who are already saber-rattling)?  

And how about that "last president" thing?  It may be that Trump dies before his inauguration, but that would leave Mike Pence, or if he died as well, Paul Ryan as speaker of the house as next in line. Even if the entire congress is eliminated, we would still have some sort of successor, if even the Washington, DC, dog catcher. So, it must mean mass destruction of the country (but that is not specified; she also predicted that US would be around to topple the caliphate in Europe later on), or some other event that changes the nature of the presidency to, what: a dictator?  A theocratic head? Or maybe a parliamentary-style government? (Democrats are anxiously trying to end the electoral college and a parliamentary system would do it. They might wish they hadn't later, but that is another story.)  

We shall see; even the best of prophets of the modern era get things wrong. Baba Vanga is estimated to have been about 85% right so far.  Obviously, we want to know how the future is seen, but why the misfires?  Why that 15 % inaccuracy, as small as that is?   And why would a Catholic priest be interested in a Bulgarian soothe-sayer?

Of the last, Catholics have had prophets forever, including the heralded girls from Fatima - but that was all distinctly Catholic.  I leave that question for others to ponder, but of the former two, I have an opinion based on years of reading esoteric literature, both relatively reasonable and wacky alike, and have come to this tentative conclusion: that  the universe is a continuous web that exists all at once, beyond time, but also, paradoxically, can change at a  moment's notice.  This is the New Age equivalent of theological free will in a universe run by an omniscient God.  How can one choose freely if God already knows everything? Christian philosophers have locked horns over this for centuries, and I can't recall the Church's final position, but it seems that it is a contradiction only in the human mind.  Somewhere in the perspective of all-space, all-time, is an avenue to change all-space, all-time, being something like the chance given to Ebeneezer Scrooge.  "Spirit, is this what WILL happen, or what MIGHT happen?"  The ghost of the future never answers, perhaps because it cannot - for no human mind can carry the ideas of a set universe and a malleable one at the same time.  

And so we can have prophets who genuinely tap into the universal web, but who can also often be wrong.  Things that should be unchangeable CAN change (my bet is that some quantum theorist has already figured this out in more mathematical terms, but I can only vaguely recall - I am no mathematician).  And so we listen to prophets who have been proven to be right with genuine interest, but also with some doubt - for prophets, we must recall, have always been about warnings, or why would they prophesy?  What good, then, would it do?  

In the Old Testament, Jehovah sent Jonah against his will to bring the warning to Nineveh.  He tried to run away and was swallowed by a whale and deposited at ...Nineveh.   He could not escape his fate, to preach at Nineveh, but Nineveh could escape its destiny through a decision to heed the words of Jonah.  They did, and prospered.  

Must it happen, or might it happen?  Many things are there for us to decide.  The prophet brings warning,  but not necessarily doom.  And so I suspect - and hope - of Baba Vanga.  FK 

            

I was raised in a tumultuous household where argument was considered a valuable art, to be engaged in wherever and for whatever.  It took me years to understand that this was not normal - that many people (my wife included) considered it boring at best and usually disagreeable.  I have tried since to contain myself, with only modest results, but I figured that this presidential election would be like the icing on the cake - New York rude vs the Clinton Machine.  Could it get any better?  As it turned out, oh, yes it could.  Boring, no, but disagreeable, yes. Here, we did not have the flaunting of ideas, but rather attacks of such a personal nature that they made me gasp. In the final days before the election, I decided I needed a break.  Knowing that I could not avoid the radio and the TV at home, I headed north, where Verizon and most AM radio does not penetrate (I forced myself to ignore NPR, which really does reach everywhere), and where no TV or electricity is known for miles.  As it turned out, the election was so abnormal - so unexpected, even historical (regardless of party affiliation) that perhaps I should have stuck around.  How could everyone have been so wrong?  What is this country all about?     

I knew nothing of this until I headed out from the dusty cabin and came within the required distance of the nearest town Wednesday morning.  For hours afterwards I felt as if I had entered the Twilight Zone.  

In a way, however, I had already been living there for the past four days.  With a new book from the library in hand, Shanghai Grand by Taras Grescoe, I had been living in Shanghai, China at its apex in the 1930's, just a few years before the Japanese invasion and later, the dominance of Mao and his Little Red Book.  Shanghai has long been associated by me with all things degenerate - prostitutes, drugs, and the shangai-ed sailor who, after being slipped a mickey, would find himself as a reluctant deckhand on some nefarious schooner.  I found in this book that all that was there, but it had been much more: the 5th largest city in the world, equipped with electricity and air conditioned luxury suites for the rich and famous from around the world.  Much of this was thanks to Victor Sassoon, a British Jew whose family could be traced back to the house of David.  As one writer put it, "During the last thousand years, a Sassoon has never been known to be wrong."

Nor was Victor, at least until the arrival of Japanese army.  He built the tallest buildings in Asia on the swampy land at the confluence of the Whangpoo and Yangtze rivers, among them the Cathay Hotel, known by many as the Shanghai Grand. Here, the likes of Will Rogers and Noel Coward came to party and luxuriate in perhaps the most extravagant hotel in the world, built from the riches of unrestrained trade from around the world and an endless supply of cheap labor.  It was the latter that helped lead to the Glorious People's Republic of China, but that was to come. In this world, the finest art and wines commingled with the most adulated and the most debauched of the world's societies. Sassoon was in the thick of it, and had, like many of the very rich, satisfied his every desire until he was rebuffed by one Emily "Mickey" Hahn, an American author and journalist who instead chose a Chinese poet, Zau Sinmay, as her already-married lover.  
And so we have the set-up: vast wealth and luxury lying side by side with slack moral rules in a city that was wide open to everyone and everything.  Fame and fortune were everything to the upper echelons here, and everything else - from modesty to restraint - was only for the peasants.  One Chinese poet - not Zau, but another of that old Chinese world of mandarin scholars - tried to put it into a greater context.  Said he: a branch dangling from a dead tree had more beauty in it than all of Shanghai.  

The globe-trotting elite did not listen, of course, and the poet (of course) had the last laugh: few of us know of the "luminaries" of that time, and none are now in possession of their great wealth, but rather, are dust beneath the shadow of that dead branch.  We know the lesson - that wealth and pleasure are transitory, an illusion of time.  

But I think there is more to it than that; wealth and pleasure are not greater than the dead branch, but are not necessarily less.  It is, instead, how one looks at it all that counts.

This is the wisdom of the Orient: that existence itself is an impossible miracle, a stroke of magnificence from Heaven that is incomparable to anything we could know.  A dead branch is no less a miracle than the Grand Hotel - but no greater, either. Rather, it is one's approach to everything that matters.  What makes fame and wealth and debauchery so wrong is the emphasis put on them, as if to have one or more of these in one's life makes one more than the dead branch.  And what makes the dead branch morally superior is that it "knows," is unperturbed by its humbleness and unimpressed with social greatness.  So it was with Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, who took loss and gain and pleasure and poverty in equal stride, and so it was with Jesus, who repeatedly told everyone that what they thought was important was not.

Rather, what is important is one's perspective, or, as said, one's approach.  It is not that Sassoon or any of his clients were less worthy than the dead branch by themselves, but were so because they believed that they were through the glitter of their accomplishments.  Anyone can see that we all go to dust, but who lives the wonder of life regardless, as a prayer of praise to that which created the dust and the man alike?  Such a man might become rich through skill and interest, but he most likely would not.  To do so without losing oneself would imply wisdom, which would make one not care any more for the Shanghai Grand than one would for the dead branch.  In most cases, that would exclude the wealthy and the fame seekers of the Cathay.

And our presidents.  Once the braying is over, God grant them the wisdom to understand that they did not understand what they thought they wanted, and needed, so badly.  May they understand that their ascension may not be an ascension at all, but a trial through which they might be purified so that they might one day marvel at the branch - if they have the time - more than the trappings of power.   FK                   

It has been a very warm fall, with the grass still needing mowing and peppers still alive and well on the "vine" , but the lowering sun has done its work.  The trees have turned and are now shedding en mass, and the song birds have long since gone.  A few Sand hill cranes are still around, their occasional dinosaur- like cackle only echoing themselves (ok - what I THINK  dinosaurs would sound like), and now the last of the flocks of blackbirds and cowbirds are crowded by the thousands in the wood lots, occasionally filling parts of the sky like the shadows of the extinct passenger pigeons, who used to break branches from trees in their collective weight.  They are now, or will soon be, heading south.  They not only know the time for it, but the direction, and get it right, if not every time, then almost every time.  

Birds can do that.  We raised mallard ducks for several years when I was a kid, and for a decade after, they would stop by the nearby reservoir on their trips north and south, flying in salute (I tell the truth) around our house each and every time.  Gradually this stopped, but the originals and their prodigy knew the routes they flew to the exact house.  How?     

Scientific American articles have told me that they have an internal compass somewhere - the brain? - that points them this way and that, synchronized in some elegant way with the seasons.  Homing pigeons are even more complex - take them anywhere in a vast flying range and they will find their home, to the exact roof-top.  That's one hell of a compass.  In fact, it's so good I tend to doubt that this tells the whole story.  Instead, as biologist Rupert Sheldrake has postulated, there is probably an explicate order as he calls it, a pattern build into everything that has been formed by the mysterious implicate order, which is, in traditional terms, the generating portion of the godhead.  

Science or religion, call it what you will, but nature follows patterns so well drawn that few who study them can refrain from awe.  The question that I always ask, and have asked here at least several times, is: do we have a pattern?  Are we, as human animals, drawn as if by a magnet to a certain cycle of history, as natural as any of the other species?  In my own speculation, I have concluded that we are, and can only escape this pattern through the means provided by long-standing spiritual traditions (and it may be that some of us are drawn to them also by design, but that goes farther than I want to here).  But lets forget those traditions for now and take a seat back: what are our patterns?

Obviously, we grow and follow patterns that all recognize, from baby to parents to elders to death, but we are, like those birds in the trees, flock or herd animals.  What, then, is our compass drawing us towards?  Not in the very long term, for that seems clear: we are on a Promethean gallop to become flesh and blood gods, much like Nimrod and his tower of Babble, and we might fall to the same fate.  But rather, what is our near-future? Towards what is our compass pulling us? 

I come then in this round-about way to the current presidential election.  It seems we are in crises, or at least this is what many of us believe.  There seems to be two paths towards which we are being pulled.  Do we have a species direction, or is that fuddled up by our very American diversity, as is we were flocks of very different kinds of birds?  And if this is so, are we now subject to the survival of the most fit, to that flock that is strong enough to overcome all others?  

Birds, it seems, move as one, with no apparent or at least no permanent leader to guide them on their travels.  Mammalian herd animals, on the other hand, often have a leader, usually the strongest in the bunch who regularly fights with others for that right.  He or sometimes she still guides them on the old paths of instinct, however.  Is this what our leaders do?  Are they only fighting for the right to lead, but in the long run, only along the same path that is inevitable for our species herd?  More importantly, do we all, deep inside, know this path, as other migratory animals do?  Would we reject a freak, a deviant, who would take us from this path, even if he were the strongest?  

History tells us no - that is, in the short run for the smaller herds. However, we do seem to have a direction as a unity, as a species, that is becoming more and more apparent with better communication and means of travel.  In the short run (short, that is, compared to the long run towards man-gods), it seems we are coming together as a giant collective which will only have a few, and then only one big, extremely powerful herd leader.  With technology, our speed in that direction seems to be increasing, despite the failure of the big totalitarian experiment in Russia and the wavering one in China.  

Is the feeling we have about this election being pivotal true, or only hype, or is it for real?  Is our compass being fine-tuned for the big collective, or away, or only temporarily away as we eventually succumb to the tide?  For me, I intend, after all the voting and discussion, to sit back and people watch, for the magnet seems to be getting stronger, pulling us faster towards something. But towards which "south" - towards what - is the question, whose answer may already be spelled out in our DNA?  FK                  

As our Hispanic population has risen, most people have become aware of El Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.  We see how little pastries are made into skeletons, how shots of Tequila are put out for their deceased Tio Juan, and marvel at the cool traditional masks that many take to the streets.  But in all this - as usual - pop culture misses the central point.  Just as with the original Irish Halloween, the traditional peoples were not/are not just honoring the dead and turning it into a party to boot - but also are showing their very real fear of the dead.  This is widely true for traditional cultures the world over.  Among the Indians I lived with in tropical South American, entire villages were left or burned on the death of one of its members, especially if he had died prematurely.  The fear might come for many  reasons - for the Chinese, it might be because someone failed to honor dead relatives properly - but most share this one basic tenet: that the dead might be coming back to take the living with them for company. In this, the dead are supposed to have emotions much like ourselves, with loneliness, and selfishness, thrown in as big motivators.  In giving to the dead, or in trying to scare them away with jack-o-lanterns, the hope is that the dead are being sent back to where they belong - to the other side of the curtain that is drawn closed during the rest of the year.

That's real religion, or folk belief, if you prefer.  The negative must always be taken into account in spiritual affairs because the world and human nature is filled with the negative, death and ego-drive being foremost among them.  If any religion or general belief avoids such things, it is probably  not going to last long, no matter how happy its message, because it simply does not reflect how things are experienced.    

For a recent example, I will mention a rather remarkable sermon given by our conservative priest.  After a long prelude, he got to his desired point - abortion.  Everyone knows that this is anathema to the Catholic Church, but we were told for the first time just how strongly this act is spiritually punished.  Not only are women who have an abortion in mortal sin, but they will also be excommunicated - that is, closed from the right to receive  the blessed soul-saving sacraments - if they know this rule, requiring the forgiveness of a Bishop before they can return to the fold.  If that seems sexists, well, at least the Church passes the test here, for anyone, man or woman, who knows of an impending abortion and does not try to stop it will also be in mortal sin (I forget if they, too, will be excommunicated).  This goes for those who vote for a politician who is known to favor abortion as well.  In our current presidential election, we know to whom he is pointing.  

Personally, I take this with a grain of salt, but the Church itself really isn't at the center of my thoughts.  Rather, it is that all religions I know of that have stood the test of time have a dark, punitive side. Even with Christians, who believe in a god far more loving than any human can be, the belief is that some sort of really bad punishment awaits the unrepentant sinner.  It is not, we are told, God's fault, but the facts of the world as it is, like warm weather and thunder storms.  Miracles can happen, of course, but they are rare - that is why they are called miracles.  Most religions give us a cure for out bad nature, but that cure must be taken - or else bad spirits take your soul, or off to a bad place you go at death.   Life is like a snake in the grass - don't grab it, and if you do, expect the bite, and pray for the antidote to work.  

We don't think that way about Halloween anymore, nor do non-Mexicans of certain native decent fear the spirits of the dead on this day, just as Christians don't fear the fires of hell like they used to.  We have had a general softening of spiritual beliefs as life has gotten less fearful and more dependable, and our religions in general have suffered for it.  They seem too harsh for a world that is not so harsh anymore, and many people are losing their faith, often happily so. I don't blame them one bit: who wants to live with fear and guilt?  But the world as such is NOT dependable nor free of suffering - rather, we have lessened such pain for much of our lives, and have hidden death in old folk's homes. Human nature has not changed, either.  We are still cheated, perhaps beaten, and war is always a possibility.  For better and for worse, if our old religions die, sooner or later we will invent new ones, and they, too, will have a harsh side, for what spiritual world could be real that did not reflect our basic nature here on earth?

There is much about all religions that, on the face of them, are simply made up.  Still, in the grain of them is the idea that life reflects the spiritual realm and our place in it, and that life, and we ourselves, are not as it and we should be.  There is truth in that, whether it is spun with excommunication or shots of tequila, and in that there is always the sign, the sign that our passages here and to the here-after are strewn with difficulties that must be overcome.  Maybe the remedies are silly or too heavy, but they serve as warning: that even a loving god cannot alter what we, one way or the other, have created, without some form of sacrifice.  So read the signs that we find just about everywhere and in every time one looks.  The details are all metaphor, no doubt, but the essence should not be taken lightly.  Someday the pumpkins will soften and rot, the party will be over, and we will be left with nothing but our selves and whatever remedies we have taken to hand - and these must have, have to have the essence of the real.  FK