A new essay for today, "The Ride Up North," in the Essay section of the website.  FK 

Today, another guest essay by Cal Roeker of a trip to the hills of Kentucky (under Essays).

A new book that I cracked open (or rather, lit up on my Kindle Fire) at the cabin and now continue, and will continue for a few weeks more, as it is very dense and over 800 pages long: Irreducible Mind, by Kelly, Kelly, et. al.  Hard to start, as the first of its long pages introduce us to the science of psychology and the view of the mind and brain/mind problem that arose with Descartes and continue to this day, but it gets better.  The points being made come from Fred Meyers, a turn of the century psychologist and friend/associate of William James, genius extraordinaire of his day. Meyers, it turns out, was a genius as well, but was so far removed from the mainstream at that time of hardened scientific materialism that he was dropped long ago from serious consideration.  In light of the new physics and new empirical data, we learn that this view of him is changing, at least with some in the field, and that the changes infringing on the mainstream  are momentous. 

To put what I have so far read in a nutshell, we find that an idea, becoming popular again, was championed by Meyers; that is, that the brain is NOT the source of mind (or consciousness) but rather a filter that specifies just what we will be conscious of in our time and culture.  He pictures it something like this: the information that is consciousness emanates from a source (so far not specified, but we understand) as a form of pure light (or at least what we can best represent it as) containing ALL, but undifferentiated.  Living beings emerge with specific filters (brains, ganglia, nervous systems) that are formed by the environmental needs of the organism; that is, the filters exist to dovetail with the needs of the organism, focusing mostly on what is needed for that organism to survive.  This we could say is a "prism" effect, where only a small amount of the total spectrum of light is usually perceivable.  But the total is "out there" and, for most of us, accessible, at least in larger part, under certain circumstances.  This will be further elaborated as the book moves on, but already what is noted is that a distraction, or suspension of the normal waking consciousness is what generally allows this greater information to avoid the filter.  That is to say, such things as rhythmic drumming, meditation and prayer (as well as abnormalities in the brain due to birth or injury) help take down the filters to allow much, much more information to pass.  Thus we get telepathy, mystical insight, telekinesis, and - most important to Myers - the ability (perhaps) to communicate with the dead.

This later point was pivotal to Myers; it was, we are told, his primary goal in research.  So if the mind transcends the brain (and body), therefore, after-life experience can exist.  The rest of the book attempts to show in a very rigorous way that Myers' essential ideas were correct.  We are more than our brains or bodies.  

To the layman, this may seem ho-hum; but to the psychologist, this is the all important question: the ramifications for both experimental models and for human potential (as well as for human mental pathologies) are enormous.  We will get into proofs of these ideas, as well as the potentials, over the next week.  Before hand, I have a few things I would like to note.  For one, we are back to our meditation/spiritual model, where a great totality can be recognized by suspending ordinary perceptions and internal chatter.  The "great totality," of course, has been named "God" or "the Absolute" by the religious.  We find once again that fringe, or cutting-edge science (take your pick) always leads back to here (this is why this blog finds this stuff of such interest, besides the simple fascination with the strange).  

For another, we have to look at the "brain" in a different way than mentioned so far: that is, we must understand that the perception of brain itself is filtered, or artificially structured.  Without a clear perception of everything, we cannot know the brain, and thus cannot make final judgement on its functions.  For the rigorous empirical scientist, this makes a sort of curious Catch 22 (which Myers recognized in his own way by demanding that no theory or approach should exclude others if anomalies to the present theories arise.  Thus we can continue to "evolve" on the perception of the brain itself).  It also, for me, puts everything back into the mystical perception that generally drives my meta-view of existence: that is, that we, that all, is "metaphor" as Joseph Campbell put it; but by this I mean something even more, for Campbell couldn't get himself to quite say it: that we are all not only "metaphor" in some artistic sense, but are living symbols of God, 'its' bits and pieces frozen in segments of time.  The argument about the brain at this level becomes literally immaterial.  As shards of God, we are also holographs of this ALL, and ultimately transcend what we perceive as our physical nature.  The metaphor most commonly used is that we are  drops in an infinite sea - but that has the sense that we are lost at death, smothered by infinity.  I do not believe this any more than I believe that our childhood is smothered by our adulthood - rather, there is an addition, and what we lose at first we gain and then some in the end (a classical vision of the enlightened man as the child who has become thoroughly self-aware).  

But we shall see what marvels and truths this book (hopefully) reveals over the next few weeks.  FK                  

Back at long last from Up North, 8 days spent alone in an isolated cabin getting to know myself.  A complex personality, consisting of contradictory aspirations and self - identifications, overlooked by the semi-omnipotent Overseer who notes it all down with fascination and mild amusement.  The Overseer is the voice in most of my books, and it is a little odd to find that this higher-level witness is also witness to my life, as if I were the novel.  This could be the Russian egg regression where each egg contains another and another, with the idea of a reflection to infinity...

But that is not what this entry is about.  Instead, it is a reflection about the Great North:

On arrival, it was 92 degrees and so humid that one would sweat just thinking about moving.  In the teeny little cabin there is no electricity, and so no AC - one has the joy of re-connecting with the environment as it actually is, 24 hours a day.  That includes not only the heat, but the bugs.  In the heat, the sand flies and deer flies come out by the droves, relieved by the mosquitoes and no-see-ums at night.  One nice thing the cabin has is a large porch, almost as big as the inside, but there was no porch- sitting because of the bugs, except on the third day, when a tremendous thunderstorm rolled through.  Then I sprayed down with DEET and sat before a strong and much cooler wind which brought in thunder and lightening and three inches of rain.  Next night it dropped to 40 degrees and the following day reached only 60.  Two days later it was 86 again, and more storms, then a cool mist the next day and highs again in the 60's.  

Down on Lake Superior, the water ran warm at first - but the sand flied were so bad that few of the people at the local campsite dared come down to the beach.  I took a long walk, swatting and stepping with short, quick steps to keep off the flies.  The water was as good for swimming as cold Lake Superior gets, and I spent as much time in as out, getting away from the flies.  Once back to the car, I drove to the water supply of the camp ground (as they have a solar-powered pump and I have a hand-powered pump at the cabin - I  was being lazy) and near the end of filling my bucket, another guy stood behind me with his bucket.  I hadn't even noticed that I was swatting and stamping my legs constantly, but he did and said, "how's the flies treatin' ya?  Fuckin' bastards!"  We both hoped the coming cold front would stop them.  He had on his snow-mobile outfit, long Carhartt overalls, pants made of tough canvass.  To keep off the bugs, even if he sweat to death.  

The ups and downs continued, both bugs and weather changing, mutating, annoying (challenging!) in a different way every day.  There were many moments of beauty - like when an evening rain began as the sun set behind the clouds, leaving an orange glow across a shadowed forest - and many more of discomfort.  I thought about being a deer in this environment - the constant bugs, as well as the predation of wolf, coyote and humans.  And then, in the winter, there's the fantastically deep snow.  

Tough, tough, beautiful but tough.  It has occurred to me that we forget this, we who live in comfortable homes and tamed environments.  It must be that this has changed us, in ways that seem obvious.  Discomfort, hardship, endurance, all these seem to us as failures of the social system rather than the work of nature - and in fact, we have turned them into works of humans.  But, in a way not connected to distribution of wealth and so on, we do so, I think, at our peril.  By avoiding the discomforts of nature, we avoid the discomforts that were meant to be for life.  That is, we were built for this and this for us, a feedback system that has at its core the essential symbol of our reason for being.  We forget too easily now that we are of a piece, the cosmos and ourselves, all writ large to small and small to large as The Word, one great, transparent meaning that is so close to us that we cannot read it.  But it is there in our skin and in the weather and in the bugs and the bites and in the stars.  It is there outside, waiting to be understood in one great, deep breathe that we will someday take.  But I think that breathe has to BE outside, to include it all.  It is why in the Essays section there is often a hint, or more, of darkness or disaster, because that is part of what it is.  Just like heat and storms and bugs.  FK                         
    

Just about to finish a book by Irvin Lazlo with very dense information on the new physics and how it relates to the holistic order of the mystics.  Very, very informative if you have the patience to get through stuff that most of us could never understand on the mathematical level.  Humbling, too: if you think you're smart, as I often do, this will make you think twice.  

More on that when I end vacation.  For the last blog until then, I feel I should mention something that happened - or, more exactly, that I found - that is truly amazing.  The one book I have published up to now, Dream Weaver (at Amazon and Kindle), is about the life of a certain segment of us baby boomers in the early 70's  involving cosmic consciousness and the use of mind expanding (and some other) drugs.  In my particular case, I set out, broke, on a hitchhiking trip that altogether lasted about a year, and the adventures I then had and the people I met are the primary subjects of the book.  I write in the Foreword that all was on memory, as I had no notebooks, nothing to go on, and that was true when I wrote the book.  Many of the adventures probably merge or split characters, and undoubtedly, many of the facts are wrong, although I do believe that the more important aspects are correct.  Still, all on memory. Or so I thought.

Not long ago I was looking for college transcripts to apply for some teaching jobs, and I came across a notebook from the U of Colorado.  I assumed it was from my U Michigan graduate days, for everything before then has been lost or thrown away in all the moves made since.  But when I looked inside, I found it was one of two notebooks I had taken with me on my hitchhiking trip; and not only was it one of the two, but it was the most important one, having the most relevant information.  

Too understand my shock, one must realize that I have thought of that notebook many times over the decades, because of the poems, lyrics, and notes inside.  I had thought that it had not only been lost, but lost before I even ended my hitchhiking.  Until a few weeks ago, I had thought I had left it in one of the cars that had given me a ride.  That is, I have not seen it since that hitching adventure.  I have since moved, traveled, lost, discarded - done so much that almost nothing is left from my pre-grad student days. What little WAS left has been presumed lost since my parent's house roof collapsed in a rain storm and all books and paper products were ruined.  To have this notebook pop up is literally, to me at least, a miracle. I have no idea how it survived nearly 40 years of movement UNKNOWN to me, traveling with me, I suppose, everywhere.   As said, I did not even believe it to be in my possession.  How?  

And why?  Why turn up now?  There were some things of great interest in it; for instance, there is a section titled "Dream Weaver" where I wrote about the episode (just days after it all went down) that would become the namesake chapter for my book.  I had not remembered this at all - it just happened that that particular title came to mind after I wrote the book.  And in another section, I wrote, "I just got the feeling that what I  am writing is a kind of a time capsule - that it will all be pulled out some day to explain this time."  And it now has been.  


To finish, though - overall, what I read made me feel embarrassed.  I should not be - I was an idealistic 20 year old at the time, and I should give myself slack, but that person reminds me too much of myself to do so.  He is almost me, uncomfortably close to being me.  I have changed less than I had thought - more in the veneer than in depth.  And it is embarrassing.  


Perhaps its appearance was meant to show me a miracle of sorts, for it truly is.  But also, to ship a little humility my way.  Although I believe that I've had enough humbling experiences already, it migh just be that I am wrong.  And maybe a little more sympathy towards the self and others of idealistic stripe is called for.  


In any case, amazing, and proof - and I feel sometimes that I need it - that what I have written of in the book really happened.  That seems almost as much an impossibility to me now as finding the notebook itself.  FK              

Today, an essay, "Believe in the Circle," under "Essays."  

Hopefully, there will be time for a few more blogs before I take a vacation.  There are many new ideas I have gotten from reading.  Never an end, never.  FK  

A diversion from Simon Weil to B. Weis; Simon has complications that will be explored through further readings - directions that fly in the face of many religions and mystics alike.  Disturbing, and - who knows? - perhaps with grains of truth.  For now, a comment on a new book, Same Soul, Many Bodies, by B. Weis.  

I have mentioned it before - there is something shallow that I find in New Age type literature, but something that always draws me back.  For one, most are easy to read, a relaxing stroll into the evening that does not require a wrinkled brow.  For another, they offer endless hope - that not only does life have intelligible meaning but that life is essentially GOOD.  In both of these, Weis does not disappoint.  I love it.  I have read him before and so have many others - he is the famous psychiatrist who has for years championed past-life regression and therapy.  He will take a patient, for instance, who has anxiety and terrible pains in her knees.  He will induce hypnosis, where the patient will find that she has done something horrible, or has had something horrible done to her, to cause this physical, and by extension, this mental agony.  In so realizing the source, the patient often becomes healed.  Underlying it all is his belief that our souls are immortal and pass through experiences meant to teach us the meaning of life (for those of us on the earthly plain), and that is: that we are meant to love, that we ARE loved, and that we are all united.  In this, he is unabashedly an evolutionist.  We are ALL going to get it sooner or later; his therapy only quickens the process.  

In all this, can I disagree?  He does strike to the core of many religions on this, and his therapy is not made from abstractions.  He treats real people and gets real results - including undeniable regressions where the people can speak a dead language and often know things that later can be and are verified.  This is not taffeta.  And it gives such hope!  Hope that, as I said earlier, we are under the guidance of supreme intelligence that only has our good in mind, and which will lead us to a glorious end.  I believe it.  

And yet, these works always strike me as too good to be true.  For those who have been following the blog and essays, you will know that this writer is impressed with how difficult and bleak life often is; that the mystics always have to travel through hell to get to heaven, and that the road is hard, very hard, so hard that few can accomplish much in this life.  One has to lose everything to get everything, as did Christ on the cross, or the yogis in the Himalayan caves, or so many others who suffered agonies of mind and flesh to reach a higher level.  Weiss does not contradict this view; but it appears to me that he makes it seem too easy.  Flash back for a life review - or, in some instances, for a look into the future - find the source of discontent, and you're on your way.  Wouldn't it be nice?  I think he might agree with me that the road continues for most of us for a long, long time.  To use rebirth as an example, the time it takes for a soul to surpass the physical realm will take millennia, just as the Hindus believe, and these lives will more often than not have intense suffering.  So there is nothing ridiculous about his beliefs; rather, it is the impression that it is all so easy that is misleading.  I believe he wants to be our therapist and give us hope and love.  In that he does - this is one of the reasons I am drawn to read Weiss and others like him - but I cannot shake the impression that he is making us all feel too good about a process that is long and arduous.  As all the true religions have always known, the very ones we are abandoning exactly BECAUSE they offer too difficult a road.

Still.  The regressions are often hard to refute, and because of this, so is the idea that we are reborn multiple times.  He has found that in the interim, we are lead by beings more advanced than us who point us to new lessons to be learned on earth.  In fact, we are never left alone - those helpful entities - angels, as the old religions called them - are always there to help us, even during our hardest lessons.  I like it, believe it, and want it.  This, too, rings true.  But I, for one, will never forget that we must often suffer not only pain and loss, but bouts of meaninglessness that can be almost as bad.  And in all this we seldom get what we ask for,something that Weiss would agree with but does not emphasize.  Believe in the best, he would say, but we must be prepared for and expect bleakness and disappointment.  New Age brightness and enlightenment can sometimes make us forget this.  FK           
                            

Not a very rigorous long weekend, but at last - at long last!- I was able to see the movie, "The Way", directed by Emilio Estevez starring his father, Martin Sheen.  I had looked for it for at least a year, since it came out, even joining a new video store in town, which didn't have it in its entire chain.  Instead, it came unasked from a friend, my very own video, and at last I saw it.  It promised everything I'm interested in: death, spirit, redemption, meaning beyond discourse.  Death, that is, as the great awakener for  our somnambulance, the ever- ready alarm clock for our life-long sleep-walk through a poorly understood and nearly de-sacrilized world.   Death as the reality maker - the most effective Way to joy through the worst kind of sorrow; death, something I don't want but is always there, as the joker was always there for the conquering Roman emperor, whispering in his ear as the laurels were raised: rejoice now, for someday you, too, shall die.  

In that, the movie delivered, but for me, perhaps not as the director and writer had intended.   For the most part, it was surprisingly, and needfully, unemotional in a tear-jerk kind of way.  An older father finds that his middle-aged son has died on the first day of a pilgrimage on the Camino de San Diego, a five-hundred mile walk primarily through Basque country and the Pyrenees.  He flies to France to reclaim the body, but then has it cremated so that he might walk the Camino in his son's stead, spreading his ashes throughout.  He meets three other people in various states of need, and they work these needs out through  personality conflicts and eventual deep friendship and understanding.  Only at  spots - like bullet points - does intense emotionality come in, hard hitting but brief as the four travelers then get back to experiencing the road.  All of which left me with this one (as I said, perhaps un-intentional) particular realization: how hard it was for any along the road to humble themselves in the task they had (for many unknowingly) set out to do: to lose the daily self for the greater Self, the spirit.  

It is made very apparent that the modern man is nearly incapable of this; through the apparent arrogance of modern thought, the illusion that we are at the apex of history, the belief that we are truly knowledgeable about how things really are, that we are so far beyond the ignorance of our ancestors.  Yes, I do believe the movie hinted at this, but only subtly; in the end, one of the most secular a characters, a fat Dutchman, humbled himself enough to shuffle on his knees to the statue of  Saint James at the end of the pilgrimage.  It is telling that the others didn't, even though one of the characters read the words inscribed beneath the statue: words that stated "for centuries, Kings, Queens and Emperors have come to Saint James on their knees"  - and regularly.  So: in the past, even the most arrogant of power were able to do what most common man of today cannot: humble himself on his knees to some power, he might not know what, that was greater than his little self.  

Yes, I would say that was intended, but what was probably not intended was the truth behind the facade of modern arrogance: shame and humiliation.  Almost all of us know that we are weak and helpless in the universe; almost all of us have woken in the middle of the night afraid, anxious, children once again pitted against an incomprehensible universe crowned with the skull of death.  This we know; but somewhere, someone or somehow, we have been told to hide this; to never, ever admit to the superstitions of our ancestors; to raise our chins high as the symbols of enlightenment sprung from the depths of childish ignorance.  We KNOW that we are not those fonts of wisdom- that our deepest concerns remain unanswered by the triumph of technology, that we still tremble before death and even ghosts in the night.  But we cannot ever, EVER show it.  That is the modern weakness, a false arrogance that will not allow us to admit to our dormant fears and, beyond that, gain access to our inner knowledge.  It is the latter that the pilgrims seek on the road, but who can find it before they admit their ignorance, their hopelessness?  This is not  the "philosophy of the weak" as Nietzsche so famously put it, but the first sign of deeper intelligence in humans.  We do not know, cannot know, as humans; we can only know by the inner voice, the deeper self.  And to find that we need to get ourselves, our daily selves,  out of the way. Grace works, and it works best through the humble path; the path of the pilgrim.  

That, to me, was the greatest lesson of the movie, maybe intentional or maybe not.  Or maybe the subversive workings of the writer's inner voice.  FK                           
 

Today, a guest essay by Cal Roeker titled Elaine's Angel, under Essays.

A quick look at Simon Weil, a French-born Jewish woman who had visitations of various kinds from Christ from her adolescence onward.  She was ecumenical and mercurial - hard to follow, with ideas popping up everywhere, some startling.  One not so strange was this: her belief that all people throughout time were invested with God's grace - and that the difference in individuals was made by their own choices, to allow this grace into their lives or not.  As part of this, she reasoned from Scripture that Christ was always (is always) and has always functioned in the world, whether under the name of Krishna or Oden; that all true religions relate to His substance and are no less than the Catholic faith in bringing God to people.  None of these ideas are new here (I will bring some more startling ones forward in future blogs), but her views were radical for her day, the 1930's and 40's.  Her commentators argue that, however radical, the Catholic church listened; in fact, she had been close friends with a priest who would become a French cardinal - and who would later become Pope Paul, the first (so I have read) to initiate Vatican II (immediately championed by Pope John after the death of Pope Paul).  Vatican II is  the ecumenical council that recognized other religions as legitimate.  

Weil would never be baptized into the Catholic church, even though they implored her to do so.  She was, she said, "working outside" the church, her rightful place, for Christ, too, had worked outside the church.  Her's was to follow this example - to speak to the "gentiles" as much as to the faithful.  

And interesting idea and an interesting, if inscrutable, woman.  The church was necessary for those with limited energy about such matters, but to those who cared, God and God in Christ were there for everyone - in many, many forms.  More later, FK        

Something occurred to me this morning that has been written of for ages - that is, it occurred to me more as an idea, unfortunately, than an actuality.  And that is, that the greatest reality we can strive for is to become the sounding board - really, the bell - of God.  That is, to be filled with its presence to such a degree that we resound with it.  In this we find ecstasy and absolute purpose in our material form.  It is, from a Madison Avenue phrase, win-win.  To become a bell, we have to be empty, but not nothing; our substance, the shell of our being, must be of solid and sound metal.  I suppose if it is not, it might crack like the Liberty Bell, but much more likely would be that the Divine Urge wouldn't chose a broken bell.  By this I do not mean the physical shell of our existence  but he strength of our determination and integrity.  Still, God might chose us anyway, broken and all.  The Liberty Bell cracked, but liberty reigned.  We celebrate it now.

On liberty and the spiritual - they are not as separate as one might think; I am reading Simon Weil now, and to her, freedom is absolutely essential for the soul, or for any real love.  But I leave her and her ideas for another day.  What is clear of both liberty and the spiritual is that both are tirelessly co-opted.  I have spoken of this before, and was reminded of it in an advertisement, where a woman says that she is "freaked out" by her husband's obsession with a certain brand of car.  "Freaked out" is a phrase invented by the LSD crowd to describe an anxious portion of an intense psychedelic trip.  It usually means that you have discovered that normal reality is a sham, and that the infinite is clamoring to strip you of everything that you thought of as yourself.  That is a freak-out, not a husband's desire for a car or any other usual commodity.  The term has been debased into meaninglessness.

So, to a degree, has freedom.  Many have talked of this, so I will only brush on it lightly by saying that freedom, as originally proposed, was a sacred thing - although it didn't have to be.  It was sacred, because if could refer to one's calling, whatever that might be.  In freedom, one is allowed to follow that calling, limited only by the minimal standards of society.  Freedom assumes that a great portion of those in society are worthy of it - that is, they will use it for their calling - and, because of that, it is worth the abuse of this freedom by those not so noble, for to have one, we will have the other.  By this, they used to say that "freedom is not license " - that is, that it has its limits not only in basic laws, but also in worthiness.  We have decided that society cannot decide what is worthy.  That might be for the better, but we should also understand that freedom is meant, at bottom, to ennoble, not to debase.  Let freedom ring!  FK                  

Today, an essay under "Essays" titled Dark Angel." It is how it sounds.  FK