Today, an essay, "World's Ugliest Man," under the Essays section of the website.  

Briefly, to be taken up next time:  Why pray (or wish or hope or gamble)?  Why, if God (or the Absolute) is only interested in our resolution of separateness, would IT acquiesce to a wish?  I would have to think, first, that the very fact of our being must mean that there is more to "being" than the goal.  We don't - at least I don't - know why, but given that, why might we not change our temporal destiny through prayer-full or mental appeal?  Is not our very reality at least in part determined by our perception, a perception that we know is largely malleable?  Having a choice to influence our world by other than material means would also give further meaning to "free will," as well as to provide reference to the importance of "getting what you wished for" - perhaps as a life lesson.  Something to consider for next time.  FK     

In the quiet of this morning, I was given a clear idea about the implications of what I had written in yesterday's blog - that is, that realization of the Absolute was the ultimate goal, and the only one in which cosmic intelligence is fully reliable (that is, altogether sympathetic).  In this, it became obvious why the Absolute allows suffering, misfortune and all the rest: because, in a relative sense, it is absolutely unimportant.  This is nothing new to me, but the clarity with which I received it was - and it resolves all but one question that I have about the way our world works.  That is, that ALL is pointed at getting us to the God realization; that this power IS interested in our welfare, but the only welfare that counts is the eternal presence.  There is no happiness or achievement or state of being that can compare, and so reaching the highest trumps all, our worldly health and happiness included.  

Hard stuff, really, but all already said by the great spiritual leaders, including Jesus.  Give away your other cloak?  Leave your family and home?  Yes; all are inconsequential, and if they are holding you back , are not worth it.  This includes the objects of our ambitions, which I now find particularly hard - this website, for instance, was started primarily as an attempt to reach an audience for my current book and the several more to come.  I do have ambition.  And we can pray for our success, or, if you do not believe in prayer, work harder and harder for it and perhaps hope for that special ingredient, luck;  but if it is not compatible with the prime directive, cosmic consciousness, don't count on any extra help.  And if it comes, it may come as a back-handed hard lesson.  How many have been ruined by achieved goals?  Conversely, how many have been helped towards God by success?  Perhaps many on both counts, but we cannot see the results of success or failure until one or the other happens.  

Still, we must try - and pray or hope that our desires are consistent with cosmic design.

Of the one thing still unanswered:  Why?  Why the trial and sometimes torture to re-achieve what always AM?  In the face of all-knowing eternity, our lives, even our concepts of eternity, are nothing, not a dream, but dream-like in their ephemerality.  But why the dream of God, of us, in the first place?  In the Old Testament we are given a very human god wanting company, but that concept seems far too limited.  No, there is another game afoot.  It just hasn't come to me what, and may never; it may be the mystery that must remain so.  FK               

    

Here, the Sand Hill cranes are starting to gather, even as the temperatures remain high.  By the amount of sun, by the colder nights, by the changing flora, by whatever means, they know that fall is coming.  Soon they will gather to fly, circling first low, then high, then higher until they cannot be seen, perhaps purposefully caught in the jet stream to help them on their way south.  

They know.  Many peoples, most common among many tribes of Native Americans, have certain animals they identify with, either as their clan representatives or as personal guides.  After moving here (to Wisconsin), I felt that the Sand Hill cranes were mine - both majestic in their ancient ways and calls, and downright goofy in their flight and walk.  In both I see them as pertaining to me.  And within that idea of animal spirit guides or identifications, is a greater idea  - that the world is a sacred place, an imprint of God's design.  From taking something particular, such as a clan animal, we can extend this identification from the earth into the heavens, each thing here a mirror of ultimate meaning and purpose.  

And so I get back to my book, The Irreducible Mind.  Following Fred Myers, there is a belief that we partake of a far greater consciousness than we are ordinarily aware, one that is merged with another - whatever we wish to call it - that links all in a web of cosmic meaning.  We find this in the idea of the animal spirit identity.  To Myers, we are following an evolutionary path to this great uber-mind, but the totem animal reminds me of the conservative authors of the perennial tradition.  What, would they say, is so evolutionary about the modern mind?  From their perspective, we have gone down, backwards, away from greater meaning, just as we seldom seriously believe in a totem or a natural link to the heavens anymore. 

Which reminds me of the tremendous music I was listening to on the radio yesterday on a program called "Musica Antigua."  The high music of the pre-classical period was all about God and spirit - all of it - and one can tell.  Listening to it in quiet openness, one can feel the identity of the composer with the sacred.  How much of the music of today says the same thing?  And as I listened to the music, I understood better the perennialists.  For them, the highest plane of all is the plane of God - all other things and ideas are inferior.  It is similar to the feelings that I have gotten at times, in that praise of the Absolute is not a command, as it seems from religion, but the ultimate privilege, for in praising, one partakes; and by partaking of the Absolute, one is at one's highest, and most noble state.  And so the claim of the perennialists becomes clear: the less we are in touch (or in praise) with God (or the Absolute for those who do not like the western connotations of the word "God"), the further we are from an evolutionary apex.  All else - technology, space flight, even basic psi functions, are all nothing in its shadow. Thus they see not a straight time line to some distant perfection, but a cycle.  In this cycle, man is born "in the image of God," that is, in harmony with the great plan of being.  Through time, we become enamored of the outward forms, gradually forgetting the greatness of being from which we depart in our quest to understand, or use, the particular things in the environment.  Eventually, we become completely absorbed in the outward forms, and completely removed from the spiritual.  This, then, marks our nadir, not our ability to transform the environment.  

In the cycle, as we fall out of tune with the greater design of being, we screw up - that is, a monumental world-wide collapse of human institutions ensues.  From this, then, a new cycle is born: the phoenix, the resurrection from the ashes, from the "dead" eventually arises. Thus the spiritual traditions speak to us.

I have expressed hope before that this need not be the case, and so I still believe.  I still see something greater in the flight of the crane, and in the changing of the seasons.  I know I am not alone. Have we reached the end, then, or are we only in a temporary trough in the sign-wave of being?  FK     

Back to the never-ending but ultimately informative "Irreducible Mind:" The authors continue with an examination of genius, with some pretty amazing anecdotes.  Einstein, for one, claimed that his ideas were not reached so much by analysis, but by ideas "plucked from the air."  A renowned Indian mathematician of the 20th century, Ramanujan, whose schooling was sub-par at best, went on to write what premier mathematicians described as incredibly eloquent theorems that they are still trying to fully comprehend.  Ramanujan himself claimed that his local Hindu goddess, Namagiri, "wrote the theorems on my tongue."  Again, these were not reached by painstaking advancements built on former work, but came more or less whole - clothe, many of the proofs having to wait years before completion. 

My own idea on this is that all of us, bar none, receive this 'outside' input, generally in the form of a momentary inspiration.  As a way of example, and with the risk of angering Cal Roeker, I again will use one of my essays - with no claim to genius, but certainly of creativity.  In my recent essay, The Test, I began to write from an intense emotion of loss and guilt alone, because of the deliverance of my son to college.  My outburst of anger towards him in 5th grade seemed to finally have reached a point in which I felt I had to write about it.  I did not know what I would say, beyond explaining the simple incident.  It had not occurred to me that the test itself, being in religion, and specifically, being about the Jewish progression away from Egypt to the Promised Land, had any relevance - in fact, I had forgotten about it until the writing.  But then it formed itself, of a separate will, around that theme, making something small and painful into an expression of Biblical truth - that is, that my life had in this case taken on the form of the Jewish epic.  This was absolutely unexpected.  I was led by "something else," by an inner intelligence greater than what I normally know. 

Which makes me speculate on something larger than the book I am reading - which is, that ALL of our lives are fashioned such, in a much higher realm than we are normally privileged to see; that holy works such as the Bible are not only about epics on a grand scale from the past, but about our lives in particular, here and now.  We are all living an epic, filled with the joy and tragedy of life and death.  We are all confronted with difficulties that enable us to learn - and this is because each life is an expression of a greater cosmic idea.  It is through our own individual "genius," care we look for it, that this is realized.  As Aaron Copland, the composer of Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, and the Olympic theme, Fanfare for the Common Man wrote (paraphrase): why must I keep on creating?  It is because each creation reveals another aspect of myself in a continuous process of learning."  And we do not have to be geniuses to experience this - only to seek it within ourselves, because each of our lives is an expression of the ONE, and in that, of profound, cosmic proportion.  FK                     

Today, an essay "The Test," under "Essays" on the website.  FK

Sunday we had the bitter-sweet right of passage known as "dropping your kid off at college."  It was an odd day filled with a Gordian knot of emotions, in the end leading to a feeling of age and exhaustion.  But I was not exhausted those few hours after we saw our son run off to a premier luncheon, giving us no time to hug or hand shake or - the depths for men - cry.  Pumped on morning coffee, we left immediately for the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, just south of La Crosse, something we had long planned to do but had not gotten around to.  

Perplexed and emotionally torn, we eventually found our way to the shrine, not so much by directions, which were not entirely clear, but by the sight of a tall, fairy-tale like spiral we saw on a distant wooded hill.  That must be it, we sighed, and we were right.  A mile or two more and we were at the entrance building and souvenir shop, carved from a side of a steep hill, the likes of which are seldom seen in our area of Wisconsin.  It was very hot, the building cool and new, almost sterile, and we loitered in the comfort until we attempted to maneuver the site on our own.  It turned out to be easy.  
In the back was a slim paved road that wound further up the hill, arriving first at the Votive Candle Chapel.  This was the odd, Arthurian age spiral we had seen from the road, and my wife first thought it the church, which was having a mass, and did not want to enter.  I insisted, knowing that nothing outside of a direct hit stops a mass, and there we found the gleaming tile-floored, high ceiling-ed chapel, colored light splayed from stained glass falling on a pyramid of large  votive candles.  Of course we lit one for our son, and then were given the tour of the stained glass windows, each one devoted to a miracle involving Mary.  Although the entire Shrine is named for Guadalupe, the vision seen by a (former) Aztec peasant that united the old faith and the new in the New World - thus making her the Marian saint of all the Americas - there were none to this aspect of Her.  Instead, there were others - including one to "Our Lady of the Miraculous Medals," where a novice nun was given the vision of a medal to be struck which would give "great graces" to those who wore it.  Of course we bought two, for $1.98 a piece, at the gift shop later, which I have now by the side of the computer.  I could use some graces, really, although in many ways I already have an abundance. 

The pyramid of candles was a reminder of the Aztec pyramids, where blood sacrifice of many humans was replaced by the single sacrifice of one man-god, Christ, so that the previous evils - and in fact all evils - could be dispensed with.  This chapel, too, was cool, but it was a place to gaze at, not to meditate in, built for the movement of candle-lighters, not quiet prayer.  We left and continued up the hill.

Heavily wooded and at places steep, we stopped at the statues to the saints along the way, and then walked through the paths designated for the Stations of the Cross, depicting scenes from Christ's acceptance of his sacrifice in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the trial, to the crucifixion, to the resurrection; as well as a section on meditations for praying the rosary (something that I have never learned - in my youth, that was reserved for old ladies.  I think it still is).  Neither were particularly spectacular, but they did teach you of the meaning of Biblical events in clear words and statue-pictures, set against a deep and hilly woods.  It gets one in the mood.

Beyond is the church proper, large enough for a mid-sized city but visited only by those willing to walk the hill, and by the monks in the Friary (Friars in the Friary?), attached to the church.  The view was magnificent, of the hills that stand against the Mississippi River, and the interior, of what we saw, was beyond what one would think of a church in the woods; new, high-arched ceilings, solid wood doors, tastefully glittering altar.  We did not see more because mass, indeed, was in session, and time was getting to our feet.  Instead, we went towards the top of the hill and terminus of the path, where an arabesque/Romanesque mall - with arched, thick surrounding walls and deep-set window-portals -opened  to us, as a monument, in essence, to the unborn who were and are lost to abortion.  Disagree with the doctrine or not, this plaza is impressive, a semi-circle looking something like a miniature Colosseum, headed by a large statue of Mary, her cloak flowing, her face in pathos for the unborn, three of which she cradles in her arms.   Nearby is a wall set with blue mosaics depicting great scenes from the gospel, including my favorite, where Moses and Elijah join Jesus on a mountain in a blaze of glory while the disciples tremble.  Ah, glory is not all fuzzy kindness!

It most certainly is not.  At the bottom by the tourist building is also a statue of Mary, this in blackened bronze (or so it appears), where one approaches first from behind, seeing her robed back.  At the monument to the unborn, one also approaches from behind, seeing the same sight, although she is in lighter color.  But let me tell you, until one sees her face, in both cases there is a chill lent to the viewer.  From behind she carries the aspect of the grim reaper, the symbol of death.  I believe it is Kali who to the Hindus is the god/goddess of both creation and death.  Although Catholics do not talk of her in the darker aspect, the statues do, just as the apparitions, to which this shrine is devoted, also do.  There is fear lent to the blessed receivers from these apparitions, as well as enlightened joy, for she often speaks of humanity and its fate.  We are doomed to death, all of us, after all, and through free will, are only granted eternal life through proper living and faith - and by grace, the last ace card for us sinners.  The visions at Fatima in 1917, for instance, gave to poor Bernadette the burden of prophecy, many of them (for instance, the turn to evil and atheism in Russia) not pleasant at all.  And she reminds us that through our individual and collective wills, it is WE who determine which future we will have, in the end.  

A slap of darkness amid piety and light - that is the way of Catholicism and of most - perhaps all - of the true religions.  How else could it be, given what we are?  At Our Lady, everything is new and bright, the weight of heavy spirituality still not added to its bones, but, like an adolescent child, it is just a matter of time.  A place worthy of a visit.  And a place that made me think: what is it?  What is it that the church, this or any other of the old and true religions, what is it that they need now?  Something is lacking - not in the core, but in the dress, for we "moderns."  The medal and other things that I bought, for instance; they are icons, meant for the coalescence of faith, but used by the peasants of another era as good-luck charms, like shark's teeth and rabbit's feet.  For the peasant, they meant both, faith and good luck; for us, I don't know. Do we believe in either?  How many visions of Mary would it take to convince us?  Do we need the terror of the dark veiled-Mary before we can see the light?  FK                                      

Yes, I know - many people find anything to do with UFO's in the league of the tin-hat society, and there are certainly tin-hat UFO people out there.  I myself find the evidence beyond my personal reproach, but understand that it is not truly overwhelming - simply because no one knows exactly what the Others are.  Skepticism has also been promoted through the channels of government for purposes of obfuscation, itself highly indicative of something behind-the-scenes, and some find the possibility of 'intelligent others' against their religious beliefs.  I don't, but so be it.  

However, the interest I have in a book I'm reading, AD, or After Disclosure, is sparked by the speculations made by the authors about how the public would react to a full disclosure of all the classified information on UFO's, with the conclusion that they are here and real.  I was taking my son to his first freshman day of college yesterday, and I told him that I came across an interesting point of truth about myself when considering this event (or even something bigger, such as a mass appearance of alien vehicles in the sky):  that is, that although I believe they exist and have many theories about them, a full admission or exposition of their existence would probably terrify me.  He thought I was full of it, but he admitted, just before we left him in his typically ratty little dorm room, that he had become nervous - that, like the reality of UFO's vs. the abstract, the reality of living away at college was much scarier than the thoughts of it.  

And so I believe it would be with most of us should we learn without a doubt that we are being visited.  On one level, this fear is easy to fathom - the others would be technologically advanced by definition, and their intentions perhaps not so noble; they could be like Cortes coming to Mexico, and they would have the tech edge, perhaps by a long shot.  But beyond this reasonable fear that this revelation would bring, would come something far deeper and more terrifying; the end of reality as we know it.  Overall, whatever we have been told or made to believe, we know little to nothing of Reality, of the infinite hedged in by creation and destruction.  With the development of science in the last century, we have come to learn that we know much, much less than we once thought.  In my opinion, we know so little that the really real is a mere thread in our minds, formed by a very superficial reflection of an objective "outside" through our very limited senses and machines.  The rest, the vast 99 percent plus, is made of dross, of imagination and need and hierarchy and power and emotions and desire.  Thus it is surprisingly easy to crush one's internal sense of reality; and with that, out goes emotional balance and security.  It has happened again and again in recent centuries with European expansion and imperialism.  Some cultures, if left largely autonomous, learn to adapt; others break down from within, and nearly all those that are completely dominated and overwhelmed collapse. 

Thus, surprisingly, I understand the reticence some of our government agencies have in letting the cat out of the bag.  There WOULD be panic and disruption.  However, without pressure from the Others, I do believe we would regroup after a while - within a few months to a few years - and recreate the internal scenario we call reality.  If we look to individuals who have gone through world-changing experiences, we can see that most come through as long as the experience is overall positive or neutral as far as issues of threat are concerned.  These include mystics, hallucinogen takers, and people involved with natural death or new life.  But many have also survived the truly horrible (death camps and torture, for instance) and have managed to pull themselves together.  In a world where everyone is experiencing the life -changing event, there would always be the strong (whether truly strong or simply unimaginative might make little difference, at least at first) to pull the rest of us through - given the chance.  

But I think I know how tough it would be.  I have had recurring dreams, not often but often enough, about aliens invading Earth, and I am terrified.   If it were the real thing, I would not have the solace of waking up.  There would be a terrifying sense of falling off from myself, a kind of induced schizophrenia, which would be difficult to handle.  At first.  But if the gate-keepers are wise (given that there are gate-keepers, as I think there are) they would disclose now rather than later.  If nothing else changes - that is, if the "aliens" do not then suddenly attack or get in our heads somehow - we would adapt.  Just how we would and what would change will be the subject of speculation at another time.  FK                
   

Just returned from a long visit home in CT to visit family and particularly my mother, who is 87, has progressive dementia and may well have a terminal recurrence of breast cancer.  On the flight out, I changed from the difficult and long book that I have been reading to lighter fair, one about Full Disclosure of UFO contact - how it might happen and what might happen when (not if) it occurs.  This book is essentially preaching to the choir, and I, being one of the choir, have found it soothes some need in me for the awesome to occur. 

I have no doubt that some form of "other" contact has occurred and is occurring, due to several second hand experiences that I may have mentioned in this blog before.  For instance, my high school and college-era girlfriend's family, who lived about a mile from my parent's house in the hilly countryside of rural Connecticut, were woken one night by bright lights outside their windows.  Looking out over the hills, they saw a huge disc, of a hundred yards or more in diameter, hovering over a well-known family's farmhouse not more than a half mile from my (parent's) own.  They all - my girlfriend's sister and her parents - watched it for more than an hour, lights spinning around the disc, until they grew tired and went back to bed (!)  A few weeks later I asked the father about it and he replied angrily, "I didn't see nuthin'!", a sure sign that he did.  The daughter, about 12 then, was enthusiastic about it, though, and no one contradicted her.  At that same time, cattle mutilations were occurring behind my parent's land, the stories of removed genitalia and tongue and eyes "as if by a surgeon" printed in the local paper. Something, indeed, was occurring.

My father, a gunner on a B-29, also saw "cigar-shaped vehicles" floating next to his squadron - as did everyone else.  These vehicles would hover by the planes for several minutes, then veer away at radical angles at incredible speed - beyond what they then had in technology, not to mention what we have now.  When reported, they were all told to keep quiet, as an order of "national security."  This was shortly before the war's end, when another B-29 dropped the notorious A-bombs on Japan.    

Then there are the tales told nationally by police, pilots, everyday people, etc, etc, to such an extent and with such similarities that it is difficult to doubt that something is going on.  

I believe, not because I want to, but because of the evidence; and I am excited about the prospect of "full disclosure," something the authors of my book think is inevitable - and will change life on Earth forever.   

I cannot disagree.  But while sitting with my mother across from her old wooden kitchen table - a table given to her by her mother after she was married in 1949 - I felt the slightest touch of impending death, one that I had first noticed shortly before my father died.  In that time, I had sat by his hospital bed and talked of recent events both familial and political.  He had said "hello" at my entrance, but after a few minutes of talk, I realized that he was not listening.  Instead, he was elsewhere, far away beyond my reach.  Everything I had said then seemed petty and stupid, as if the shadow of death made all our concerns irrelevant.  I felt that again sitting by my mother, only briefly but mistakenly: that eerie vacuum of silence, the standing before the incomprehensible that made all I knew or said vacuous.

And so I thought on the flight back as I popped open the book on UFO's again: what is the point to this?  In the face of that dark eternity, what is the point?  This would concern, too, all matters I have recently written about, such as "genius" and Psi.  Compared to that which deals with the infinite, that is, true spirituality and religion, what is the point of everything else?  

This point, I think, is the truth; and yet, other things must take up our lives.  We are not of the infinite world, not yet, and until we are, such things as we have made of our world - or agreed to make of our world from somewhere beyond where we talk to the angels or creative darkness itself- remain for a time relevant.  And there is a hierarchy.  Do Psi phenomena not talk more to the infinite than, say, an action movie or an IPod?  Isn't UFO contact more relevant to the Greatness of Being than struggles in congress over domestic policies?  And yet billions are spent on these simpler, time-contingent matters.  Higher plains of knowledge are not to be compared with the field of ultimate knowledge, but they are higher plains.  And if I watch the evening news and read the daily paper, should I not write of these things that dwarf their relevance?  I have felt the void, but am not there yet.  I will keep things in perspective hopefully, but as a contingent being, I cannot help but be interested and involved in those things that bridge that contingency with other realms of consciousness that may be many times greater - smaller than the reality of my dying parents, but still, for a time, worthy of interest.  FK              
           

More from "The Irreducible Mind," on genius: following Fred Myers, the authors in this chapter expound on why genius is such a pivotal phenomena when considering the reality of psi, mind beyond brain, and ultimately, cognizance  beyond physical death.  We have been over this before - that genius and mediumship and such are evidence of contact with a field - we might call it an information field - beyond the normal personality, with knowledge beyond that which the brain, relying on sense-impression, could possibly have.  As also said, I experience this sometimes when writing, and I believe we all do at some times - the sudden answer to our problems brought from an imagined "depth" beyond our consciousness, for instance.  

The critiques to this view generally perceive these ideas as arising from some unconscious mentation that is going on in the brain at a sub-level, but they cannot say exactly how; and they really can't say how this mentation can often be not only complete (endowed with a full personality) but - and this important to the psychologists - far smarter than the daily personality.  And, as mentioned, when this other self also has information beyond what the person should have, we have a double whammy on the materialist view.  

As for me, this is preaching to the choir.  Like our discussion of "over-analysis", when you experience it, you know it.  

More exciting are the accounts of true geniuses of their muse.  The true genius is one who not only receives the most sublime information from the hidden realm (some information 'from the depths" are unimportant or rattled fragments, such as in many dreams) but also is capable of handling such information with his duly-practiced skills.  So they say, but to read what these geniuses have to say about it, one wonders; the idea of "automatism", that is, work done with little or no input from the physical person, does come to mind.  

And so with that in mind, I give some quotes from or about such geniuses that I found very interesting and revealing: 


From psychologist Ghiselin (1952):  "There is a sense of self-surrender to an inward necessity inherent in something larger than the ego and taking precedence over the established order...Production by a process of purely conscious calculation seems never to occur...More or less of such automatism is reported by nearly ever worker who has much to say about his processes, and no creative process has been demonstrated to be wholly free from it."


From William Blake, about his famous long poem Milton: most of the work came "from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will.  Th time  it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study...I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be other than the secretary." 


From Nietzsche: "There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces an entire world of forms (length, the need for a widely extended rhythm, is almost a measure of the force of inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension).  Everything occurs quite without volition, as if in an eruption of freedom, independence, power and divinity. The spontaneity of the images and similes is most remarkable; one loses all perception of what is imagery and simile; everything offers itself as the most immediate, exact, and simple means of expression."      


Of the last, I found most interesting the idea of "rhythm" because, some where along in my writing career, I noticed for the first time that I was often tapping my foot to the inner rhythm of the book, one about which I had no previous idea.  As Nietzsche said, this is a "widely extended rhythm," with some markings of musical rhythm, but different, too, and one that I had never heard of before.  It is tempting to speculate on the importance of rhythm here in human history, as poetic form was formerly THE way to communicate stories.  Julian Jaynes claims this is a trait of the mythopoetic mind found in the right hemisphere, exactly where "God" is found.  And yet the authors of "Irreducible," in other sections, point out that the hemispheres of the brain are much more coordinated than that; and besides, one has to wonder where the "homonucleus" is that orders the right brain to produce such profound works, works made,as the materialist would have it, from the scraps and bits provided by our senses.  FK   

Commenting on a comment made by Cal Roeker yesterday, in that an explanation of perspective is "over-analysis":  it IS true - that can often be the case.  While in graduate school for anthropology, I was struck, and very disappointed, by nearly all the analysis offered by the profession.  They drained people of what we are, making a science of us when we are anything but.  Why not just take the people's word at what they understood and leave it at that?  On the other hand, there really are functional reasons for certain behavior, ones that can be analysed - it is only that these explanations are not the end all and be all.  

Perhaps the worst offenses were made by analyzing religion and mystical/magical beliefs.  It is one thing, for instance, to inspect the history of certain ideas - for instance, the Hindus have their religion and the European Christians theirs from certain historical circumstances.  This is a legitimate concern of the analysis.  To put ultimate truths experienced at the deepest levels of these religions under such a microscope, however, is a gross crossing of different levels of meaning.  The error is not so much in over-analyzing, but in using the wrong frame of  reference for the analysis.  The literate religions have endless treatises on their beliefs, but they are internal to the belief  system and have to be to make sense.  The All of the HIndus or Buddhists cannot, by definition, be defined by articulated logic.  And yet we do so.

In the book I am currently reading, The Irreducible Mind, the authors take great pains in showing how the materialist arguments for psi and near death experiences and out of body experiences and so on simply don't work, and they do a good  job.  They feel it is necessary to do so to get the scientific community behind greater research into such things, as by not doing so, this community misses the boat on the true nature of human psychology, and the authors are right.  However, I am both amused and annoyed when they try to explain the sense of such experiences in scientific  terms.  They are not trying to be reductionistic, but rather, are trying to cross the divide between those who really know of these things and those others who do not and, under the current climate of scientific thought, simply cannot.  Having had some experiences in this other world, I find the explanations boring, at best.  If you have experienced them, you KNOW.  The rest is all words.  But how, then, to convince others?

In yesterday's blog, I did not so much analyse, but put into direct words the perspective I have been trying to get across.  Of course they could not be as beautiful or as meaningful as the poetry that is in the essays.  In fact, I almost didn't write it, knowing how clumsy it is to try to put such things into a logical format, and how many people would find this boring.  However, I felt it a good thing to do to explain for some why quotidian events in my life are matched so regularly with grandiose scenes of nature and of chasms of mystery.  It was nothing more than a primmer for those who either do not get it, or for those who thought that I was being too grandiose about myself.  And I, like the authors of "Irreducible" have a mission I feel deeply about - to help others, along with myself, to get beyond the weight of the dogmatism of our cultural and, perhaps to a limited degree, our genetic predispositions so that we may better see the miracle that being really is. 

And yet, regardless, the mystery of the workings of life, along with the marvelous impossibility of our existence, continues in the metaphors of the literary works.  At a certain point, one must leave it at that - for one cannot describe the infinite.  If, as Cal believes, I went too far in plotted language, I apologize.  But I remain well aware that we must step back at some point (but where is a difficult question) and let art, and then spirit, lead us to what is beyond the explanation.  FK