Sometimes it seems as if everything is magically pointed in a certain direction.  While this is often a casual thing - finding pennies everywhere, or the number 444 - it sometimes takes on grander proportions.  When it does, it is often hard to differentiate between true synchronicity and a type of ego-directed paranoia. On the other hand, what we believe to be "synchronicity" is often only a focusing on certain very real things or ideas to the exclusion of others.  Thus, the archaeologist will find arrowheads in a field, while the botanist will spy the ever-elusive trillium. Such coincidence is directed by our will, which is enhanced by our growing knowledge in the field our will has caused us to follow.

Such it must be for me, with finding just the right sort of material to investigate the power of the mind.  Lately, I have been reading Carl Jung's Red Book, which gives us access to a genius' shocking experiences with the unconscious - so profound that the outer reality is often absorbed by the inner.  So profound that one begins to understand how tiny is our own "willed" reality - so much so that I have to put "willed" in quotations to emphasize that even our will is not what we think it is; such that "will" most certainly stems from a greater depth than we can consciously recognize. Lately, too, I have been reading the Apocalypse trilogy by Steve Alten, the sci-fi fantasy book that has us believe that our destinies are written by extra-dimensional intelligences who have programmed certain members of our species with a different type of DNA, to one day save the world.  Lately, too, I saw the movies The Letters of Mother Teresa and Lucy this weekend, both, in one way or another, about the latent abilities that we have in our inner selves that can utterly change our outward reality.  

With Mother Teresa, those abilities have to do with the power of God and of prayer in our lives - something we have heard about so often that we take it with a shrug.  We shouldn't.  Mother Teresa was called to work with the poor through a "voice" she heard on a train, a voice she believed was from God.  From this, an entire new order of nuns was born that has saved the lives of thousands of people world wide, through nothing more, at the beginning, than faith.  More so, the title "Mother" has now (I believe it has finally gone through) been replaced by "Saint," as the Church has verified the required two miracles to place her among that pantheon.  In the movie, we are shown a medical room filled with doctors who all are amazed that the patient there has suddenly been relieved of a cancer that was about to kill her. Said she, "I prayed to the picture of Mother Teresa (that she had in a locket) and saw a beam of light come from it to me.  Then I was cured!"  This did happen.  It might not be from the powers of Saint Teresa, for all we know, but even if it came from blind faith, it is still a miraculous act that came not from methodical technology, but from the mind.  

We move on to Lucy.  In it, a rather stupid woman is convinced by her boy friend of a few weeks to carry a satchel to some people in Taiwan - for a measly 500 bucks.  She is captured by a triad of sorts, who insert in her lower intestine a new designer drug that is to be carried to Europe, removed by surgery, and sold to the youth drug market.  Unfortunately, it is released in her, flooding her with a vast quantity of this drug, with is a synthesized version of a maternal hormone that, in minute quantities, is used to direct the development of the fetus.  She finds that she soon has unusual powers of mind, and she forces a collaboration between herself and a professor of 'mind' to understand what is happening.  The professor has already written that "we only use 15 percent of our brain.  At 20%, we can direct our own bodies; at 30%, we can direct those of others; at 40 percent, we can alter the natural processes...and at 100 percent, who knows?  The power is vast and unknown" (my paraphrase).  

This is a fun movie, not a great work of philosophy, but we find that the woman can soon make people levitate, then make vast structures from nothing.  She can travel through time and space by a wave of the hand.  And in the end, she disappears.  When asked by someone where she has gone, he gets a message on his android: "I am everywhere."  Everywhere: full consciousness makes us one with God - all powerful, all knowing, all present.  

I began this blog while thinking of the last -  of how a change of consciousness - a change of levels - can have tremendous power.  But how?  Where is the technology?  In Lucy, the only technology is in the mind.  We understand how it might effect the body, but how  does it work on those things outside the body? In The Letters, we are not troubled by technology - we are familiar with those who talk of the power of God, even if we do not believe it.  But miracles really do happen.  In Red Book, we are told of the vast, deep world of the unconscious, of its power over our thin veneer of social consciousness.  To me, perhaps propelled by knowledge, perhaps by paranoia, it seems they all point to the same thing - to the astonishing revelation that this thin veneer of self also has a thin grasp on reality; that what we find limiting in our physical world is based on such limited awareness as to be practically useless.  We are constricted by this limited vision and so do not believe in what is clearly evident even in this reality, with both so- called miracles and the vast and terrifying power of the unconscious.  Neither are side -issues or beyond reach. They are only beyond reach from this current reality of ours, which shows its limitations by restricting our understanding.  

Where consciousness meets divinity is another question to be left for another time.  But as Cal Roeker put in the last comment, the other side of things might not be so far away or fantastical as we might think.  How we get there by mind, or by God, is still unanswered.  That, however, is the fault of our superficiality, not of the truth.  FK         

"No problem is able to be resolved from the same level of consciousness from which it was discerned." Albert Einstein

Such is my translation of Einstein from the Spanish, as I have read from the last of the trilogy about the Mayan end times by Steven Alten (originally in English), and it should be about right - we cannot solve a problem from the same level of knowledge in which we first noticed it.  In Alten's book, he talks about a necessary change in thought from the three-D world in which we live to the multi-dimensional 'nexus' in which his characters act to save the world; for Einstein, he is telling us that we need to think in entirely different ways to work out the problems created from an earlier level of thought. Einstein's theories are still beyond the reach of most of us today, and his theories have not been the last to expand our understanding of things. Einstein's thoughts have been followed by quantum theory, which includes possibilities as miraculous as the parting of the Red Sea, and these are forcing many to think further beyond, creating more problems to solve which will need even more new ways to think. It's enough to make one feel like one's 94 year old grandmother handed an I-pod for the first time.  Obsolete!

Yet the physical world - however it is being redefined - is not the only one in which infinite expansion of possibilities exist. Surprisingly, this works for the moral world itself.  Even in Alten's sci-fi thrillers, the most important thread that runs through everything is the direction of will of the protagonists.  Central to his end- of- the- world scenario is the hydron collider (if I have that right) or CERN, which is currently (in real life) operating in Switzerland, where atomic particles are whirled around at near-light speeds to collide which each other and reduce them to their fundamental substance - and thus give scientists a peak at the beginning of all things.  In Alten's book, we find that the collider is creating mini black holes that can escape from the machine; and then we find that one actually does, and will swallow the earth and end the history of everything.  What is important here, though, is not the machine itself, but the reason for its being.  The scientists and politicians giving them the research money are well aware of the possibility of the destruction of the world through the experiment, and while the scientists might want to continue for reasons of obsessive curiosity, the politicians and those wealthy elite who back them want to run against the odds to gain more money and power.  

In other words, the destruction of the world will not come about because of technological knowledge, but because of the motivation for such knowledge.  That motivation is our old nemesis, Greed and Power.  

But these motivations themselves are based on a certain plane of knowledge - one where fulfillment comes from vast wealth and power.  Like pre-Einstein science, this is a moral plane that asks more questions than it solves - for wealth and power have never led to permanent fulfillment.  In fact, as this sci-fi fiction makes so realistically clear, when wealth and/or power become an end to themselves, they create a more miserable life - although for the poor and powerless, this might seem like a fantasy.  It isn't, however, and as Einstein said, the problems created at this level of thought can only be answered at another level of thought.

In the moral world, Siddhartha pondered the sufferings of the world outside his family's palatial estate and found that suffering exists everywhere, with rich and poor.  He determined to find the solution and came upon the five-fold path of renunciation - a path that led in a direction opposite to that of the drive for wealth and power.  Desire, he found, was the source of unhappiness, and indeed, the source of life as we understood it.  To rise above it was to ascend into another world of thought, and indeed into other worlds in every sense of the word, including new planes of reality.  With Einstein, average minds like my own have been trying to truly understand his theories for over one hundred years; with the likes of the Buddha, or the Christ, we have been trying to understand them for two thousand years or more, with the same limited results.   

As trying as our math and science world might be, more trying still is the world of moral being - which rises above even our greatest scientific thoughts.  Couched in a variety of ways that different generations and cultures find more or less pleasing, what is trying to be communicated is that the foundation of our world is built on moral perspective. The advice from our spiritual masters is not only meant to make the world a better place, but to infinitely expand our possibilities. We have all heard of the remarkable feats of the Buddhist masters - of stopping the heart and even of levitation - but even more astonishing possibilities are to be found in the words of the Gospel: heaven, said Jesus, is with us now, if we could but see. He was not only talking about "getting along" and being nice to each other when he said this, but also of breaking through the barrier of our own limitations into a vastly greater reality.  He did not raise the dead just for laughs, but to show what is possible when we understand the nature of deep morality, and where it can lead us. There is more to it than just being nice.  In it, if we could see, is the key to knowledge beyond anything most of us can currently conceive.  FK                 

Ah, the movie store.  For the 3rd time I went to get "The Letters of Mother Theresa" and again, it was out for days to come.  Being in the mood for a decent movie, I quickly scanned the racks and came upon a sci-fi film I had never heard of and had no actor whose name I recognized.  Much like sci-fi novels, most are mediocre at best, and I hesitated until I saw that it was stamped with an "award winner" star and endorsed on the back by people who I did not know, but who worked for publications that I did.  As my wife loves sci-fi (she has a set of Spock ears, for instance) I took a breath and took a chance.  It was named "Ex Machina" and it was good. Low key, well acted, wonky in computer-ese, it was damn good for someone looking for something more than special effects.

We begin with a young man working at a computer coding firm who has joined a contest sponsored by his big, wealthy, genius boss.  The prize is to go to the boss man's estate out in the wilderness for a week to help with a break-through development that is top secret.  The young guy wins, and next we see him flying in a helicopter over a vast estate in the wilderness of the Northwest, where he is plopped down in a field because, as the pilot tells him, "I'm not allowed to go any closer."  There, he has to follow a river through rocky crags until he comes to the marvelous mansion of the Mr Big himself.  Passing electronic scrutiny, he is allowed in, and there meets the young boss genius,  who is somewhere in his thirties, and we learn what a brilliant, egocentric jerk he is.  We do not like him or trust him. The young man is shown to his room, which is in a concrete bunker with no windows.  He is told to sign incredibly stringent non-disclosure forms.  His boss continues to probe him in a hostile way.  Most of us by now would have left the program at this point, but our young man is a lonely computer nerd.  He must find out what the project is.  After he signs the papers, he does.

It is an AI, or artificial intelligence project, and the boss has finally made a model that is near perfection.  The young guy is there, he is told, to ascertain the creativeness of the model, who is, outside of her see-through plastic arms and legs and torso, a beautiful woman with a sexy voice.  He is taped as he interviews her, and we watch holding our breath as she slowly begins to manipulate him, first and foremost against the boss man.  She convinces him that she is enough like life that she should not be disconnected, "killed," to make the next, and perhaps final model.  He is recruited to help her escape.  And it is in this where we find out - does she really think like a human in all ways?  Does she, in old-fashioned terms, have a  soul?

It is easy to see by the ending that she does not, and that, as the boss-man said, "do not pity her.  Pity yourself.  One day, they will rule the world and we will be like the bleached bones of the dinosaurs."  One wonders about the soul of the boss man at this, but we understand - just as with the Manhattan Project, once started, the scientist simply has to complete his research.  Simply to know.  

But there is something so obvious about the AI arguments that it seems to have eluded many or most, and it does not have to do specifically with the emotional "soul," or, for our purposes here, of distinguishing between right and wrong.  It has to do with the thought process itself.  The android in the movie was fed the conversations of all the cellphones in the world to build up a data base of humans and human inflections, and that seems, at first glance, reason enough to see how she could appear to have real feelings for humans.  She does not, but she does have real feelings - those of anger, those of beauty, those of freedom.  My God, we think, she is human-like, but without affiliation to humans, like an alien species!  

And yet, this cannot be so.  I have spent some time reading Jung's Red Book recently, which is about his harrowing experiences with the unconscious, and we realize in this - as well as in most other serious studies of the human mind - that we know virtually nothing about the unconscious.  And yet this vast, hidden territory is where our creative genius lies, and where the greater parts - the depths - of our thoughts and motivations come from.  Although it is impossible to give a real number, the unconscious undoubtedly accounts for the major part of our thinking, with the conscious aspects, at the very best, making up only about 10% of our mental activity.  Any AI would be missing the unconscious because we do not understand it nearly enough to program it. Any AI, then, would always remain thoroughly artificial.  It would only be when we grasped the unconscious that we could program a human-like machine, but at that point, we would not have any interest in machines, because at that point, we would be almost like gods.  

In fact, the unconscious connects us most directly to "god" - or what a scientist might call the root of being - or the entirety of our DNA evolution.  Grasping the unconscious, the only thing beyond our understanding would be the original creation itself -something that, for lack of a better phrase, even the scientist might have to call the 'plan of God.'  AI could be very clever, could even be programmed to outfight and overtake humanity, but it would not be humanity.  No matter how it expanded its knowledge base, it could not expand into the unconscious, or the field of creative being.  It could not, in its larger sense, recreate the soul, and its creative wellspring.

Back to Star Trek - in the "Next Generation" series, there is a "continuum" of being called the "Q" who can, as we often hear, simply re-program the laws of physics. Nothing seems beyond Q. But in one show, the Q admits that there is something in humans that will lead us to outstrip even them.  We are left to scratch our heads about that, but in light of the AI discussion, we can get an idea.  The human leads back, in the recesses of his mind, to the creation and that which gave, or continually gives it birth.  It is beyond even changing the laws of physics, for it goes to the reason for the laws, and to the very reason for being.  Of the last, Q seems to have no idea.  Neither would any AI, but with humans, there is the possibility.  It can and has been reached, but once reached, these few would not have the slightest inclination to create their mirror image by machine. In the infinity beyond the
infinite, that which lies at the edge of our deepest unconscious, there simply would be no need or desire.  Everything we needed to know would lie there, and what would be left would be left to the Source, who alone has both the power and the reason to create the image or images that can find their way back to the source.  FK         



                         

I have mentioned before the Catholic retreat I attended a month ago called "Light of the World," but I have not mentioned a peculiar inner vision that I had during it.  Once I attempt to explain it, the reader will know why I held onto it this long, something that I rarely do with anything.

It was during a meditative period in the church proper, where the acting priest carried around a statue of Mary dressed in a robe that was possessed with, I forget how, special virtues or powers (for those not Catholic, Mary is perhaps the best loved of all the saints.  Really, she is beyond "saint" because, according to orthodoxy, she was born without sin with the "immaculate conception" and rose directly to heaven on death.  She is, although the Church does not want to say it, the female Christian goddess.  Laymen know it and are glad for it).  We were allowed to touch it while we prayed for whatever, and were told that our prayer would then have special strength.  As is common with such sacred acts, many people cried, something I understand personally, although (as a man) have never allowed myself to do. But I know where the tears come from - from relief, as if a weight has been lifted from life. They are not quite tears of joy, for there is also tragedy there, mixed with frustration and crushed hopes. It is a cleansing feeling that we all want, but also fear, because a deeper part of our lives is exposed that truly expresses how we are experiencing life beyond our superficial personality shields. Life, beyond our tough exterior, is really tough.  Life is not how we want it to be, and it often crushes what is finest in us.  We swagger and laugh it off, but not really.  The pain of it runs deep and none of us are really free from it. 

And thus, I believe, the vision.  Time in the darkened church had made my mind go blank, and it was in that blankness that the picture came.  I seemed to be looking down on a village from dry mountains.  It was a small village of adobe, a bit of old Mexico, with the classic squared Mexican church slightly off to the side nearest the mountains.  The sky was a dull gray, and it capped the village and mountains like dense metal.  With that image came the idea that the sky WAS of metal, made like a giant bell from the church that covered the entire world.  And in that world was sin - relentless, inescapable sin.  It was oppressive, to say the least, an odd vision to have while in the midst of the sacred.

The image has stuck with me, though, and I have theorized over it (of course).  The "Bell" that covered the world clearly held us in sin - but could its ringing (that is, the role of the Church) exorcise it?  Or could it be merely a vision from the Church doctrine itself that calls all of sinners, with none but Mary and Jesus free from this darkness since birth?

Those were later theories, however. What came to me immediately was the inescapable feeling that this world IS sin. We do not have to define sin, for we know it; we know it in our tears as the sacred digs beneath the surface.  We know it from a depth that understands perfection and knows that THIS, this world, is not it - and that we were nevertheless meant for perfection. We know that this is possible, but not here - for here, there is always something, always some thought or deed that brings us back from the flight to heaven, to live under the gray dome of disappointment, heartache, and death.

The tears come, I think, both as a relief from the internal pressure of our disappointments and heartaches, and also from the realization that this is NOT our only place. We realize at one and the same time that we have been torn and wounded (and, like animals, have torn and wounded back) but also have the spark of perfection in us - that life under the gray dome is not our only home.  

It is a cleansing thing, this realization, and we all crave it.  We also fear it.  It redefines life from a level of our being that is vastly more true than the one we live in, but also infinitely more demanding.  We want to slide along in our comfortable world, but we also understand that the status quo is sub-par - that it is not only not so comfortable after all, but too superficial to fulfill what our inner being demands - which is perfection and liberation.  In this, we have freedom from fear, freedom to do as we know we should; and freedom to be great, to be perfect in what we are, as we know we can and should be.  We know this from the very spark we were born with.  And it is this same spark that makes this life, isolated under the dome that is this world, so unsatisfactory.  

This is the paradox for all times - that we cannot have freedom until we become free from the petty demands of our age, something we cannot do without self-discipline.  It is the underlying theme of all the major religions.  It is also this discipline that our age has rebelled against.  Yet, in the vision it is clear: there is no real freedom under the dome.  Those tears do not lie.  FK             
   

          

The purpose of these blogs has become, for me, an exercise in finding ground, a reality that encompasses all that has come to my mind, as well as all that can be.  It is understood that the goal will never be reached, just as perfection in anything of consequence will never be reached.  It is a goal, but one that trails off into infinity.  Yet it also encompasses that which is communally known, or what we might call the cultural reality.  But even an understanding of this is a difficult task.

Take in point our knowledge of nature.  From our scientific-materialistic viewpoint, it is a set of interdependent systems - from weather to humans - that interact in a cause and effect manner that can be calculated, if only enough facts are known. There are, from this facet of our cultural perspective, no real mysteries to it - only unknown conditions or qualities that can be known and used to calculate what is and will be with greater accuracy.  Acquiring this knowledge and finding the underlying rules of the relationships is the job of the scientist.  Most look for nothing transcendental or mystic in any of it - only cause and effect relationships of matter and energy.  This perspective is the one we mutually understand to be the most real, exactly because it can be used to control and predict by anyone with the correct formula.  

But this understanding does not satisfy.  For one, it does not explain our personal relationship with nature - our sense of beauty in it or dread of it - nor does it represent our intimacies. We might love our dog, for instance, and think that it loves us, to the point where it and we behave in ways that are not reflexively logical.  Humans might love or hate each other, which is, in the objective sense, merely two entities interacting with each other, and yet it is these feelings that are the cause of many of the interactions.  We cannot, then, rule out the subjective to explain the objective.  Here, we are already turning our solid ground into sand.  

Might we extend the subjective, then, to nature at large?  For the Chinese, nature is the materialization of the laws of heaven, and in it, we can find the reasons - or laws - for human behavior.  For instance, nature shows us that plants sprout at a certain time, and regress or die at others.  Thus, they think, it is for human life: at times it is best to NOT act when the situation is like winter, and to act with great energy when signs show us we are in a personal spring.  More so, the Chinese concept links their culture to virtually every other traditional culture in the world, which treats the things and ways of nature in human- like ways: the bear might be the embodiment of power and anger, the wind a capricious personality, and water wise and thorough.  And with this lending of human qualities to nature, we find that we can access it, and perhaps control it, through personal, rather than material means.

The jump from human interaction to human-dog to human-natural forces might seem a stretch, but it is based on a rather scientific principle: that is, that humans are only a part of nature.  As this is so, why wouldn't nature share human qualities of personality?  Or at the very least, respond to the human in ways that humans see as human but are not, but still have an effect.  Behaviorist psychologists see humans as artifacts of nature, while traditionalists see in nature different sorts of humans, but either way, the effects of behavior might be the same.

To make a long story short, how real are wishes or prayers in the "real" world? 

I have struggled with this for some time in this blog.  Is there a caring God, a father-like being that grants us those prayers that do not contradict His plan for us?  Or is God like nature often seems to be, remote and uncaring, a power of the universe where our being is no more considered than we consider the life of an insect?  My recent instincts have often settled on the latter, especially given the failure of my own prayers.  Yes, I argue to myself, God does not give us what is not good for us, but that rests on a premise that does not allow us to examine the cause and effect process. If one's prayers are answered only to the degree one might predict from randomness, how can we speak of any efficacy here, or of a caring God?  Must we believe that God is premised only on the un-provable - on faith alone?

At his point, though, I have come around, not because any miracles (from my vantage point) have occurred, but because of the likeness that is found in nature.  Just as evolution has provided all living things with the same basic building blocks - from ratios of proportion to biological processes - so, it seems to me, that which we call emotions should also be built into nature's designs.  And with that, we get subjective malleability, and the possibility of altering our normal reality through an emotional process. 

This is no great leap forward for most - the polytheistic and animistic religions of the past all shared this belief, but for me it is a starting point, something to stand on besides cold, emotionless space.  What's more, it brings to mind miracles that have happened but have been overlooked because belief in them has been denied.  Look at where you are, how you got there, and how until now you have survived.  Were there not coincidences, "luck," and improbabilities in your life?  Is there not a kind of magic that runs through all our lives, that gives us what we are and what we have beyond our own conscious powers?  Are we not simply separate entities but also conjoined, where the great cosmic forces also are at work in our humble lives?

Yes, I think we are, and the cold blackness of space is only one aspect of being.  As Einstein said, Evil is not an entity unto itself, but merely the lack of love.  The blackness is filled with the power of the heart, and what we have faith in is the source of this power in its ultimate form.  From the pit of nihilism, then, we should be able to rise up and say that "the answer is blowin' in the wind," for even the wind carries our breath.  The cosmos is alive, as are we. FK     


  

                

Yesterday we made the trip to Brew City - Milwaukee, that is - but it wasn't for the beer.  Instead, it was to the Catholic Basilica (a regional center) of St Josephat, payed for and built by Polish immigrants some one hundred years ago.  We were told that it was fabulous, although having been to Italy, my nose high in the air, I hadn't expected much.  Still, I was up for the trip even though I hate cities.  I could be Oliver from "Green Acres" on that, always looking for "land stretchin' out so far and wide...", but a visit to see how Man competes with nature for wonder and diversion is always interesting - for a few hours at least.  On the way, the road crews were out, with slow- downs and people racing around, my unpracticed hands gripping the wheel, but finally we made it, finding a parking spot available right across from the entrance to the church as if the day was meant for us.

And more - my morning dose of tee had needed an outlet for the last half hour, and right after we entered  the church, I saw a sign for bathrooms, pointing left to a broad set of stairs.  Finding them as advertised, I noticed on coming out that there was a chapel to our right, and we tip-toed in not knowing what to expect.  It was bright and glittering, perhaps as an appeal to Catholics who had come from an area so close to the more ornamental Orthodox Church, and I was impressed.  More so, since in a niche of the chapel was something we had heard of before, but had not expected so handily - the relics room.  Once we wondered past the open wrought iron gates set off to the side, a woman (one of only two people there) followed behind us.  As it happened, she was the caretaker for the day and would explain what we were seeing.

It was not so much what we saw, really, but what we saw meant.  For the most part, there were plaques set upon the wall set with little star-like clear buttons that had teeny bits of something within them. Below were the names of various saints and prophets, many well known to anyone who has read even a bit of the Bible. What these little bits of something were, we were told, were pieces of the saint's body (primary relics) or something the saint had worn or had used (secondary relics).  To understand this was amazing - here before us were actual items from or at one time in possession of John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary, her mother, St Joseph, along with bits and pieces from all the Apostles.  In other glass cases were larger bone sections from early martyrs, as well as articles from later saints like Francis and Bernadette.  One relic was encased in a gold leaf cross, which we were told we could actually hold (which we did).  In it was visible a tiny splinter that our host said was a piece of the True Cross - that is, the actual cross upon which Jesus died.  

What, I asked, was the Catholic belief in the power of such relics? (this church was one of a few with so many relics housed together. In Italy, we had actually driven dozens of miles several times to see just ONE.)  Well, she said, the presence of the saints (etc) were supposed to be around such relics.  In such a room as this, the saints (etc) were there to hear our prayers, where they would be given an immediate audience in heaven, in which they were also present.  Of course, I immediately repeated in my mind my most fervent wishes, and joked later to Vicki: "Hey, I know what you prayed for.  All of a sudden, I feel like less of an asshole!"  

That stupid joke aside, the idea of "joke" had already intruded on my thoughts.  Who, having had an older sibling or having gone to grade school and worse, middle school, has not felt the sting of ridicule for certain beliefs? It starts with Santa, works its way into things about sex (the stork) and from there, explodes like an exposed magic trick into the rest of the world.  We are taught very harshly what NOT to believe in from a very early age.  No one wants to be a fool.  And so, just as I was presented with, and in some cases touched, what were supposed to be the material remains of the saints and the Christian God himself, I felt smug. Dealing in fake relics, I knew, had been a thriving business in Medieval times.  The Catholic Church does a fairly vigorous check on such items, but not always.  In some cases, they couldn't or can't really check the provenance, and in others, I suspect fraud was overlooked to awe the faithful.  And more, this thing about the saints being present in the room - this was a thing of magic, called sympathetic or contagious by anthropologists, a thing of unlettered savages from another time.  No fool me!

Yet, fool I felt in seconds for NOT believing.  Many of the relics were real, amazing bits of long-past history, and more - all of them, saints and prophets alike, had been attributed with supernatural powers.  That is a condition of sainthood, and in most cases since at least Medieval times, these miracles are scrupulously checked out by the church.  Some might be more sketchy than others, but it must be accepted by all but the most obdurate that miracles happen.  In fact, we know they do, as is well attested in unexplained cases of remission from disease.  And once we open that door, who knows what else is true?  Maybe, even with magic, the old people knew something of what they were talking about.  The same goes for the presence of the saints with the articles.  While I might not remain around my old underpants after I'm dead, whose to say what is possible of a saint?  

True, I have no proof of this presence, or the efficacy of my prayers, but I understood right away what my greatest foolishness was, and it was from my doubt - for in this, I was denying what I was feeling.  Whether from the unconscious or the saints (we really don't know what consciousness really is anyway) I felt entirely different after that visit.  Later, we went to the main church upstairs, which was magnificent with its dome and stained glass, and I felt like I had never before.  Something had changed me for the time being, and with that, even my vision seemed to have changed.  I could see the other-worldly glory that the architect had attempted to reflect, and I could understand it - more than just feel it - in a way I can not normally understand.  For some hours after, this sense of greater understanding pervaded.

Something had indeed happened in the relic room, despite my pitiful wiseguy attitude, which was brushed aside as so much dust.  Regardless of the "how," another world was briefly opened to me, one that sat comfortably side-by-side with the everyday, yet was so unlike the everyday.  And again and again, I have to remind myself that the wiseguy in me, built up from childhood as a defense from ridicule, is no less pathetic than the innocent - or even more so, for while the innocent can be duped, he can also understand what the wiseguy will never allow.  

But sometimes all that cynicism is bypassed by some kind of miracle, and that greater something gets past the wiseguy anyway.  It is a reminder, to me at least, that the wiseguy only knows how not to be laughed at and often little more.  FK     

         

Many hold on to religious beliefs for a port in the storm, something secure in a world that contradicts itself at every turn.  Those who criticize the religious often claim that such sets of beliefs serve as a crutch, keeping believers from exploring beyond their beliefs for the sake of their security.  But, as Jesus said, never criticize another for the splinter in his eye before removing the beam from your own.  

In Carl Jung's complex diary, The Red Book, we find that no one - atheist scientist or pious religious - is free from the "crutch" that we call reality.  Any numbers, any language, any signs that anchor us to one point of view - what he called the current historic reality - is necessarily and always limited.  Beneath it all, he claims, there is no anchored reality.  The real reality is, that there is no reality that can be codified by a name or a concept.  It is beyond all that.  And while this might seem like a sophist luxury, a philosophical nothing, for Jung it is anything but.  Reality 'anchors' lead to real-life consequences, and they can be great - and horribly destructive.  

On a lighter note, he tells us that all things labeled must reject itself (as it is not the whole), including gender roles.  Jung may be the first to declare that all people are full - that no one is either wholly this or that, but share in all traits that can make up a human, including gender.  The more masculine or feminine one is (according to the historic reality of the time, or contemporary culture) the more the inner contra - the other side - unconsciously rebels.  The extremely masculine hates the feminine, and the extremely feminine hates the masculine.  Says Jung, men ought to put on a dress now and then to feel how it is to be feminine. The self-humiliation of it, he claims, is a good thing - it will free the inner opposite and lead to greater balance.  On reading this, I couldn't help but see Sean Connery as James Bond - the ultimate masculine male - dressed up in lacy pink.  The laugh it caused may have been a laugh at my own masculinity, but it was a laugh none-the-less.

On the other hand, hardened ideas can lead to massive destruction.  Jung first fell into the conscious perception of his unconscious in early 1914.  Thinking he was going mad, he saw rivers of blood, bloated bodies, and all the horrors of war.  He claimed he was relieved (for himself) when the war broke out a few months later, as it confirmed he had seen the future, not his own insanity.  But, we are forced to ask, how can one see the future?  How can one who claims to be a scientist say such a thing with such surety?   

Jung believed it wasn't so much evil that created the war, but rather Europe's virtues.  The extremely controlled and "civilized" customs of Europe at the time, he saw, necessarily held its opposite - the unleashed barbarity of war.  With one, the appearance of the other was a certainty.  His seeing of the future, then, was nothing more (or less) than the conscious knowledge of the interplay between the conscious and the unconscious - the expressed manner of beliefs and its shadow. The shadow was simply on the cusp of its due time.  The future war, from a psychological point, was thus inevitable.

Of course, it is more complex than that, as Jung himself would agree.  In fact, by labeling such a phenomena we are guaranteed to get its reverse, but we get the idea.  Seen in its broader implications, we can say that reality - the ultimate reality which is the vast presence we often call God - is beyond good and evil.  What this says for a broader view of religious or cultural morality is extremely hard to say, and would probably take a large book to simply state a few of the possibilities.  But for our purposes here, we can see how we might understand our own world present, as well as its future.  We might see that the current cultural upheavals are reactions to past certainties - but also that the changes - the "fixes" - are no better on a moral scale, but rather are simply reactions to fixes from a more distant past.  As far as the future is concerned, we might want to try to grasp what is most opposite to our current world view in the West- for that would be our future.  Is, for instance, the march towards relativism and multi-culturalism still relevant after over a century, or has it overplayed its hand, inviting its opposite?  

What I have found is that most people - pro or con this or that - have a view that we are headed for a collapse of one kind or another, anything from nuclear war to environmental disaster to an alien invasion.  In any case, most I know feel that we have gone too far - whether or not they come from the right or left perspective.  But this does not necessarily mean that catastrophe it closing in on us.  Rather, from Jung's perspective, the right always reaches for the left, and both reach for a center, a balance, that, in time, will call for an upset to the balance.  Following this, we could certainly say that we of the West are not balanced, and probably have not been so since the Renaissance.  But where are we on the pendulum?  Many of Jung's time predicted war, but very few predicted the vast and lengthy war that occurred and upset the entire European hierarchy and culture.  Are we at this tipping point, or merely shy of a particular goal that has yet to reach a temporary (which might mean centuries) balance?

It seems only a genius like Jung can see this future, for although it is already locked in our psyches, few have the ability to reach in that far and read it accurately.  It is my belief that we are heading towards a multi-cultural one-world totality - something akin to, but perhaps not quite, a one-world dictatorship.  It is not necessary that we go there, though - if we do not fully buy into the "historic reality."  This, it seems to me, is simply good advice regardless, for nothing is worse than a lurching ship, one that shifts dangerously from one side to the other until it tips.  To avoid absorption in the mentality of the times requires finding something in oneself that is eternal, that does not partake of current world realities.  This, as Jung must have known, is what lies at the center of religion - not its does and don'ts, but its core, that for which it aims.  This "that" is beyond good and evil, in a way, but as a non-ego force, it can never be truly evil.  And so it seems that, by penetrating and living the unconscious that is our soul, we might prevent the worst of what otherwise seems inevitable.  FK                             

After a long, long weekend with a religious retreat, the organizers had our group set up our own meetings - one day per week for two hours.  Last night was the first, and I, as reticent as ever but still pulled by "the spirit," was a little dismayed, although not surprised, at the demographics: out of 20 people, only 2 of us were male.  It is another topic of conversation here, but women in Christian societies always make the majority of participants.  It is easy to understand why; at such meetings, people have to humble themselves and be sincere, admitting weaknesses and praying for deliverance.  Men don't do that in public.  My contention is that this is more than a cultural anomaly, but, as said, that is another story.  

But there I was, amidst a group of women who, for the most part, were older than I, and at one point, we were to speak of our "cross to carry."  This is the burden we have in life, either long-term or short, that we find the most intolerable, and one in which we are not only to ask Jesus for strength, but to dedicate this suffering to God, as did Jesus with his own.  One cannot get more touchy-feely that, and of course I had a minor panic when I thought of my own turn - what could I say that wouldn't be too sappy but also not insincere?  But as usual, it was never about me.

It was about the older women, people who have experienced much and are not afraid to talk.  What tales they told, of husbands dying of cancer, of children and grandchildren going horribly wrong, and of course, of their own diseases, running the gamut from bad to really, really bad.  But there was one that stood out among the rest, said by a woman who normally sparkles with positive energy. Her greatest cross, she said, had been (and perhaps still is) the suicide of her husband.  That stopped me, for sure.  How impossibly awful!  

She did not comment on the how or why, but on her response to it.  She said that she could not think afterwards, to the point that she was often unaware of who she was (or maybe THAT she was).  For her, it was not only tears and mourning, but stumbling disbelief, as if the world had been only a clever mirage which now had vanished, leaving nothing.  What got her through first, she said, were other people, friends of faith that reminded her again and again that there was much more, that life continued in another realm behind the mirage, and that life itself was real because of the affection, the being of these others.  She could not have done it alone, she claims.  Within the year, she also found comfort in her faith itself, alone and without the need for others, and by the end of the year, she was healed to the point of daily continuation.  By her current demeanor, it is almost impossible to believe that she had lived through such a tragedy. In saying, "after a year I was able to go on," I could only wonder: only a year?  Do such wounds ever heal, enough to live a normal life afterwards?

In the fictional movie "Jeremiah Johnson," a frontier woman's family, complete with several small children, is killed and mutilated by an Indian group.  She and one of her children were able to survive, but in this, she had gone mad.  She gave her now-mute son to Jeremiah, realizing that she could not take care of anyone, let alone herself.  We learn that the Indians thus forth left her alone, for she was possessed by spirits.  Some time later, we find that she had died.  It is this that seems to be the most likely outcome of such tragedy - madness and death - but there are millions world wide (millions from WWII alone, in the recent past) who have lived through horrors and gone on to live life - changed, but competent.  But how?

For different people, survival is achieved through different means, ranging anywhere from obsessive behavior to eternal yearnings for revenge.  For this woman in church and others like her, they survive first from the comfort of others, and then from the comfort of their own faith.  The faith does not have to be Christian, although here the worth of suffering is made explicit, but it does have to have the power to turn suffering into meaning.  But to do that, one has to have faith in that meaning.

I am reminded of a sad piece written by Renato Rosaldo, a noted anthropologist whose wife died while doing fieldwork in the Philippines.  According to anthropological common knowledge, he said, funerals were supposed to comfort the living - that this, indeed, was their intention, hidden or not.  He said that he, however, was not comforted in the least.  I believe this was so for two reasons.  First, funerals are thought, from a religious standpoint, to primarily help the dead on their journey to the afterlife. It is more for them than for anyone else.  As for the living, why would funerals help if one did not believe in the rites that were being performed?  Like most anthropologists, Rosaldo was probably, at best, an agnostic.  It is no wonder that, without belief - without faith - that the ceremony only reminded him of his loss, not of the paradise to which the wife was going, and the ultimate, mystical sacrifice that all those who live must make.

Faith can move mountains.  Indeed, it can and has cured many people through what is known in science as the Placebo Effect. In science, no one really knows why or how this works. To those who believe, they know - regardless of their twist on it, they learn from belief that their belief system is of value.  For the poor woman who lost her husband, faith - first from her friends, then from herself - got her through a terrible loss.  And someday, it may help any one of us cope with the trials of dying - or even survive them, in a way.  With faith, who knows what is possible?  FK                   

Has anyone reading this ever had a problem with finding his or her vocation?  To be clear, not all people even believe in a spiritually mandated, or at least preferred, vocation.  Some years ago, I remember a dialogue from the film, "A River Runs Through It" where the character played by Brad Pitt, a young rebel with a penchant for booze, loose women and gambling, is asked by his preacher father, "what is your calling?"  Pitt responds with a look of scornful incredulity, "what calling?"  This was too much for the hardened cynic Pitt had become as a reporter and columnist in his local Montana publication.  "Hey," he clearly telegraphs, "stuff happens.  This is a messed up and dirty world, where the rich get richer and the rest of us get what's left."

Sometimes I am left to think that Pitt's character might have been right.  When I think of the rag-pickers who live in and off the garbage dumps in Manila, or the thousands of poor women world-wide who live by prostitution - often by their family's demand - it seems a conceit of the better-off that we might think of vocations.  The Hindus have solved that doubt with the idea of karma - that the positions into which we are born give us our vocations because of our actions in past lives.  But in America, the West in general, and many other countries besides, this is not the case. Billions have a choice, and sometimes finding the right path is painful and confusing.  If we believe in any sort of spiritual guidance whatsoever, we also believe that our jobs - just as our marriage or children and other important parts of our lives - should receive the benefit of divine guidance.  The trick is, of course, in finding the voice of this spirit.  What, many of us have asked, is God asking of us?  What is our practical purpose here on earth?  

For some, it has always been easy - not the work part of it, but the vocation.  I have known kids who from elementary school on who knew exactly what they wanted, people who stuck with it and succeeded.  A next-door neighbor, for instance, had wanted to be a locomotive engineer, something that seems a near impossibility, and yet even now, he is driving the line from Boston to Washington.  The cynic might say that it was merely the obsession that paid off, but it amounts to the same thing - these people knew what they wanted from an early age and got it, not for the money or even for the prestige, but because they knew.

An enviable comfort, to be sure, but even when the "calling" comes, in youth or at a later age, it might be that it is not met with success.  For instance, I, along with several of my friends, went into anthropology as a calling.  I know I did, at least - it just came to me in my late teens, and after a decade of twists and turns, there I was at graduate school.  But for me and most of these friends, the jobs simply were not there, and we have had to live with our disappointment and go on to other things.  In such cases, was this a true calling?  Can a calling, that is, end in failure?

I am working up to Thomas Merton's book, No Man is an Island, in which he spends an entire chapter on the subject of vocation.  I was hoping for a clear-cut sign that the sage could give me - a way to hear clearly the voice of God - but (of course) it was not there.  Instead, he spoke of the necessity to find the will of God through a certain attitude.  This was not as fulfilling as, say, a Gypsy woman's clear forecast, but it was to the truth.  God (or the divine), says Merton, rarely makes its will known in clear and unmistakable signs.  Rather, we must ready ourselves for the actuality by shifting our desires away from ourselves to the desire of pleasing God.  By this, Merton means that we should not choose what we do for our own fulfillment or wealth or prestige, but rather with the intention of following God's will.  While this sounds circular, it is not, for the attitude that one must achieve is at the heart of finding the calling.  Says Merton: be not obsessive about the work; become competent, of course, but unattached; take pleasure in the doing, but understand that in the doing of everything, we should have God's will in mind, for that is the only will that is perfect.  If one fails to make money off of it, or is compelled to another vocation, then that is what one is supposed to do - and we should understand that the mistakes and the trials are part of the divine will.  Again, this becomes clear as truth only through detachment from our careers in the name of something greater. Only when we are thus free of our own egoistic desires, then, will we be able to hear the calling.  It will come, one way or another, and it will be correct, whether or not it brings positive results from a materialistic or social standpoint.  

Frustrating in a way, yes, but I believe Merton is spot-on.  Take away our own personal glory from the equation, and our situation and willingness to comply will give us a vocation - even if that vocation will have to be dropped in the future for another. Considering everything as a gift from God, and our choices as choices to please God, we cannot go wrong, for we cannot be disappointed.  Its will having been done, we simply continue with Its (God's, or the Will of Heaven's) will.  We are thus in fulfillment. Yes, this is not a Gypsy teller's neat formula, but one that cannot have any dark thorns hidden in it.  In the end, if not in the beginning, our line of vocation will become clear to us - if we focus not on our own egoistic needs, but on the often secret or inscrutable designs of Providence.  

Because, as Merton says, our ultimate joy and fulfillment does not come from the outside - what is that but a reflection of God? - but from the inside, where God, or the Spirit, resides.  Allowing this will to 'become' would thus be the only way to find the vocation, whatever it is, that will fulfill us.  Practically, that means, for me at least, continuing doing what I am doing until something else seems more essential (or perhaps necessary), while keeping the faith - which in itself is the beginning of fulfillment.  FK                             

Today, a new essay, "Car Wash," found under 'Essays' in the website.  FK