For today, a new essay, "Ricker's Mountain," under Essays in the website.  FK

​We had been lucky the night before, getting the very last spot in the “overflow” lot of the campground along Lake Erie in Ohio.  The next day, my son, whose current obsession is with the old Soviet-era East German dud car “Trabant,” saw two of them on the highway while heading to Gary, Indiana, his first view of them ever.  At nearly the same time, I looked at the dashboard clock, reading “3:33,” then looked up to see a billboard with an advertisement using the phone number, “333- 333- 3333.” What was happening? 
 
I had a clue, because we had been listening to the audio book, Struck by Genius, by Jason Padgett, and had learned that the mind in each one of us has miraculous powers that go far beyond what we can normally comprehend - including synchronicity with the universe.  Moreover, the author, Jason, had not been born a savant, or anything else more than average.  Instead, he had once been one of us, a normal head-down shmuck, until physical trauma changed everything and brought him into the world of what could be called the Universal Mind.  
 
He was 32 and a happy-go-lucky playboy living the young college grad life well after the norm, especially since he had never graduated from college.  Instead, he had flunked out, showing up hung-over to classes more times than even a dumbed-down curriculum could stand.  But he had a dad who owned a futon factory, and Jason knew the business well enough to earn a pay check that allowed him to buy faddish clothes, get styled haircuts, and work up his biceps at the gym to show off in short tee shirts to the girls.   It was this superficial lifestyle that led him to a seedy karaoke bar in Tacoma, where he was beaten after closing by thugs looking to steal his wallet.  They couldn’t find his wallet, but they found the sides of his head with fists and feet, pummeling him until he blacked-out with a severe concussion.   
 
This, at least, was all that an MRI could find, but things in Jason’s life changed dramatically.  Suddenly, he noticed everything with an intensity that he had never known.  Everything appeared in fractals, those geometric shapes that repeat over and over again in nature, and from this he began to understand the mathematical underpinnings of the universe.  At times he thought he was going insane, but after registering anew in college – this time in math and physics – he found that his hunches were proven right.  His teachers were shocked by his intuition, an understanding of deep mathematical concepts usually reserved for PhD’s deeply entrenched in their profession.  He became known to doctors who studied savant syndrome – that which gave some people marvelous abilities to, say, instantly intuit one hundred prime numbers (which cannot be done with standard algorithms) – as well as synesthesia, which gave the ability to hear numbers, or receive colors from music, the names for the abilities Jason had gained from his beating.  He found that he was both luckier than most – those with savant syndrome often suffer brain deficiencies like those of the man made famous in the movie “Rain Man” – and also unique, in that his savant syndrome had been acquired through trauma rather than genetically with so few negative side effects.  He also discovered that his condition was helping professionals who study consciousness to understand the nature of the universe, and the true nature of Man.     
 
Here’s some of what has been discovered through conditions similar to Jason’s:
 
It is now believed that ALL humans are born with these genius abilities, but that portions of the brain mute them in normal consciousness to make ordinary life simpler.  In effect, the selves that we understand to be ourselves are really dumbed-down versions that are more likely to survive in a complex and dangerous world.  However, the genius-like thought processes continue within us whether we are aware of them or not.  We are, then, all unconscious geniuses.  But why do we have this genius within us if we are not aware of it?
 
The answer becomes complex.  It is also believed that the human mind is coordinated with all other human minds – that there is a genetic intelligence (a poor term, really, because complex knowledge simply cannot be encoded in DNA material.  It is rather the relationship of the material that matters, which brings us back to the mystery of thought and consciousness) shared by us all, much like Carl Jung’s collective unconscious.  This collective unconscious, though, is much more than human – rather, it is also the collective mind of the universe.  What mind is, many think, is a reflection of the cosmos.  In effect, we are, beneath it all, reflections of the mind of God.  That is, that as the Good Book says, we are indeed made in the very image of God. 
 
Only we don’t know it.  As said, to survive in this world, we have to dumb down.  To me, this shows that spirituality as we practice it is the moral equivalent to the mathematical truth of the universe.  It is its other, humanistic side.  What is “dumbed down” to the scientist is, to the religious and spiritual, a deficiency of character that focuses on the competitive, gross materialistic aspect of the world.   Whereas a scientist might say we have to “clear our mind” to get at the innate processes, the religious would say that we have to deny our selfish self so that we might hear “the voice of God” – that is, hear the inner voice that carries the essence of cosmic intelligence. 
 
The parallels have not gone unnoticed by the professionals.  Consciousness scientists are truly embracing the idea that all is consciousness, that all is design, and that we indeed do live in an intelligent universe.  Which means that many now understand that the ultimate answers to life’s big questions, including those of a scientific nature, are ultimately to be found in the spiritual nature of the universe. 
 
Why then, once again, do we have this great intelligence that we normally cannot access?  First, it is likely that something happened along the way that made such intelligence anti-adaptive, simply because this intelligence is more basic to the brain, and thus made before our more superficial, discursive selves.  I might call this ‘something happened’ Original Sin, speaking again in moralistic terms, but whatever the cause, I believe that encompassing this genius within  our conscious self is the primary goal of our evolution – which is perfectly in synch with the notion that we are made by God to return to God.  It also seems that this evolution is contingent on two beautifully coordinated aspects of human evolution – the technological and the moral. 
 
It was my son who came up with the idea when I asked him, “why is it that this genius is hidden?”  He said “adaptation.”  I then said, sure, but our technology has taken us out of harm’s way of predatory beasts.  His reply: “It’s now people preying on each other.” Yes.  We have evolved technologically to the point where, even if the lion does not lie down with the lamb, it really is of no importance, but Man still cannot be peaceful among his own kind.  The space-cadet turned-on genius would be – and is – ridiculed and belittled by his fellow creatures.  To continue our intended evolution, we need to evolve morally as well as technically.  As is said, the first shall be last, the last first; blessed are the children, blessed are the meek.  Blessed are those who look beyond their selfish selves to the inner, more inclusive consciousness, that which makes the other also the self.  
 
Technology and morality, then, are mutually dependent components of our evolution.  As we are the reflection of cosmic consciousness, which is law and order meaning, we know where we have to take ourselves, and how to do it.  We know that the genius that will take us to our destiny is both smart and moral. 
 
We know because we already have it all hidden away in our own minds, all the time.  Jason had to find out that he was a natural genius, an active and integral part of the universe, the hard way, just as the gurus and the prophets and the scientists have understood forever or are now discovering.  Even seeing those Trabants, and those 3’s, and getting that last space at the campsite are all tied in, pointing to something, maybe even this essay.  But whatever the case, we all really know what it and most everything means, and that it is our destiny for this to become wonderfully clear to everyone someday.    
 
 
  
 
 
 

            I kinda feel bad about Cal, for his comment on the last blog (see below: “What If It Landed?”)  It began as a UFO contemplation, and ended with the now-usual spiritual stuff.  It was not intended, but this “spiritual stuff” is coming naturally these days to my pages.  Even so, I had thought about erasing that second half as somewhat incongruous to the first, but something odd happened, something that just might have to do with UFOs: I couldn’t get the essay/blog posted.  It took three days and four calls to my server before it finally went through, and by then I just wanted it off my hands and on the website. 
 
            Not odd?  Well – it was the first time it happened after 600 postings, and just when I was discussing – and I think quite smartly – what is going on with UFOs, as well as other government cover-ups.  Could it be that “they” were aware?  Could it be that “they” blocked it until they saw that it was later resolved in non-political spiritual stuff? 
 
            Not only that; the very same day that it finally was posted, I had a bicycle crash.  It was on a rails- to- trails location that is filled with chipmunk holes, but I had hit those dozens of times before.  This time, I was thrown at high speed off the trail’s edge into the woods, injuring my shoulder, incapacitating me in many ways to this day.  Was that a warning?  I mean, it had never happened before; what are the odds?  And both, that and my blog at the same time?  Are we talking – gasp – Men in Black? 
 
            Or is it destiny?
 
            I must tell Cal the truth – destiny is always debatable, but paranoia is un-provable and often demonstrably nuts.  That’s the trouble with the UFO phenomena.  While there are spiritual things that are undeniably true, at least to thinking people – I mean, look at our predicament! – those other things, those ghosts and goblins and aliens – can only take us so far.  I really do believe, given everything that I have read over decades, that the UFO phenomena probably points to an alien intelligence of sorts, but I cannot say what that is.  I cannot say if aliens have anything to do with our destiny or if they are going to someday land on the White House lawn or if they need some poor schmuck’s vital juices to continue their race.  They don’t seem that important to the great philosophers or prophets of this or any other age, unless we want to include the likes of Clive Custler in the ranks of our great sages.  There might be a reason for this.
 
But there are so many things that only God- knows- what.  I admit that all these things are fascinating.  I will get back to more of it soon, but it cannot be that deep, because we have so little to go on.  And recently, for me, life has been deep.  But maybe, just maybe, that’s what the Men in Black have wanted all along; maybe they’ve wanted me off their trail.  Let me tell them now, if they are listening, that I will not be intimidated – er, unless it gets really scary. 
 
But onward!  The end of summer calls!  Time to heal.  We will talk again to each other soon.  
 
           
 
 
 
 
 
 

​As we passed the small-plane, grass-surfaced airport of our town the other day, it struck me.  The open flat space was only big enough for prop planes, but for something landing helicopter style, there was a quarter of a mile of even grass in all directions ready for it to do so.  And then I had another thought - that yes, the government does hide things.  In the past several years, we have heard of the bad kinds of hiding, such as the NSA lying about holding our emails, or the FBI lying about warrants, or the … I won’t get into it, as it is too political, but you get the idea.  Sometimes the government lies.  Sometimes, not for good reasons, but sometimes because it has to, for defense and foreign spying and so forth.  Then there are other times when it lies only because it thinks it has to.
 
Of the last, as we drove past the airstrip, I recalled what my professor friend had told me in a hushed voice nearly thirty years ago: that the wolves were back in northern New England, not just a few, but in breeding pairs and packs.  He said this in a hushed voice because the powers that be had decided that no one should know about this.  Even to this day, Vermont has a lot of dairy farms, and New Hampshire and the Maine coast are filled with semi-rural communities where nearly every household has a cat or a dog.  Wolves eat calves and dogs and cats.  If the people new of the packs, the reason was, they would panic and demand their eradication.  And so, for the betterment of ecology, the public was kept in ignorance for decades.  This is still going on with wolves and cougars and bears in other areas.  Keep the panic down; don’t tell the people what many hikers and hunters already know – that in many areas, the big predators are back.
 
And that’s the thing; we all kind of know they are, from those hunters and hikers who know they are.  With that, the mass panic the smart people fear might happen slowly becomes attenuated.  That, I believe, is the plan.  Bit by bit, we become used to the idea, until, finally, when the big boys decide to tell us their big secret, we already kind of know.  There is no panic, just interest, and comments like “I knew that all along!”
 
This seems to be what the government is doing with the UFO phenomena.  The labeling of unidentified flying objects began after WWII, and ever since, we have been titillated with possibilities that are soon poo-pooed, or just left to drift into the ether.   We have gradually gotten immune to it all, to the point that about half of Americans think that UFO’s are alien visitors (or there abouts.  I can’t remember the exact percentage).   Recently, several videos taken from Air Force fighter jets have substantiated that something physical is being directed by intelligence to fly in ways that are now either beyond our technology or are thought to be impossible with any technology carrying living beings (high-speed right-angle turns).   They do not have to be directed by aliens – these could be experimental craft that are being hidden from us for defense purposes, or those of another nation whose technology has far surpassed our own.  Since the latter is highly improbable, the truth would fall to the former.  But if even Air Force pilots see something beyond their understanding, that would be quite a leap for our hidden technocrats; and if it is our own technocrats, why would they fly in front of our aircraft?  They would, after all, know that our Air Force fliers are there.  Why, if they wanted to keep it a secret, would they show off like that?
 
The simplest answer for me is that these UFOs are vehicles directed by an alien intelligence.  Apparently, the Air Force has no qualms about the pilots showing their films on U Tube.  So what we have here, I think, is a government that is willing to slowly let the cat out of the bag.  I don’t think they know what these things, or intelligences, are, but I think they are finally willing to let the chips fall where they may.  We have been prepped for this for seventy years – a lifetime, or three generations.  Maybe now, the big brain people think, is the time to open things up.  It could even be that they think others might understand what they obviously cannot.  At the very least, though, our unofficial managers seem to finally believe that we can take the news, just like we have learned to accept the idea that the big carnivores are coming back to our woodlots and backyards. 
 
But there still is a problem – wolves are not aliens.  As we looked at that big landing area, we envisioned a 200 -yard diameter flying saucer landing there.  We both pictured it clearly in our minds, and it was as if it were there.  We were frightened, and that was only using our imagination.  I believe that if it were real, we would be terrified and almost literally petrified.   I have had dreams of spaceships coming, and at first I am wonderfully amazed as the saucers appear, knowing that a new phase of human evolution is now upon us.  But then, the aliens themselves start to descend, and they kill.  It is the most horrible thing imaginable, this alien death, and I think the dream captures the reality of our fear – that is, that an actual landing on, say, the White House lawn, would not be taken with good humor.   We would be overwhelmed, and the old Air Force psychologists would be justified.
 
Which is not to say that this essay is all about UFOs.  It is not that I find them unreal, but believe in the back of my mind with a near certainty that we will not come face to face with alien craft (at least not most of us) in nearly everyone’s lifetime, if ever.   What the psychological phenomena really tells us is that huge, life-changing events cannot be duplicated in simulation.  In warfare, the attempt is made to turn the reality into a sort of simulation, which apparently works until the bayonets are fixed, or your buddy next to you literally loses his head.  Then it becomes real.  Then it takes us beyond where we ever thought we could be.
 
Such it is with death, and because death is an integral part of life, such it is with life itself.  We cannot handle the truth, as the movie character says, and so we bury it in platitudes and the obscurity of time.  Heck, the young guy says, I’ve got fifty years before I have to worry about death.  Heck, says the older guy, on average, I still have fifteen to twenty years left.  But the old, those who still are sharp, do not say “heck” when they suffer another stroke, or another heart attack, or lose a leg to diabetes, or go blind or fall and break everything.  “Help!” is what they scream.  The preparation and the simulations were not adequate.  We stand near the edge of shore on D-Day waiting for the doors of the transports to drop.  The Nazi bullets are hitting the sides like hail.  We are going to die, and it can’t be real, now or later.  Yet it is the most real thing that we will ever encounter.  It is the final, and perhaps only, moment without bullshit in our entire lives.  
 
The importance of the martyrs to religion is not to show us how brave they are, although that is a good thing.  It is to show us that we must have faith, and that the faith must be absolute, so much so that it will take us through death.  We say we will not be hammered to a cross or roasted alive over a pit, but we are wrong.  Go to the hospital and you will see what most of us face.  We who are older have already seen it in the passing of our parents, and even our friends.   It is beyond belief, these things; better them than us we think, however cowardly that seems, because we know that it can’t be us.  It can’t be.  But it will be, and most of us have been given nothing more than weak soup, nothing more than placating images, of what death and dying is – and, with that, of what life is.  It is because of this that we can continue our lives as they are, vapid and petty in the face of eternity, filled with our cries and complaints that sound all the world like the whiny voices of spoiled children.  
 
No government, no state, will cure this vapidity, for they are all and only us.  It is only faith that can.  Faith is something that is more real than real, because the “real” of our lives falls off into an undefinable black hole of nothingness.  The real behind faith does not.   If you think this eternal world of spirit does not exist, then ask yourself how it is that we can percolate up from nothingness, then disappear into it again.   I mean, really ask, because if you are honest, you will admit that you do not believe in this blackness at the end.  You also do not believe in death.  Yet, there death is, inevitable, and no sadly sweet story dripped from the cinema or the pages of a romance novel will comfort.  Because they are incomplete and imaginary.  Because they are not real. 
 
Spirit is real, so real the faithful died for it, as some still do, and some gladly.   There are also the others, the involuntary near-death survivors, who often no longer fear death because they understand, not just that there is an afterlife, but what this world is.  For most of us, the world is an image of reality that will never be the real thing, at least not until death; a dream, not because it is a dream, but because that is how we live it.  For those others, they understand that reality has infinite depth and time, that it is in fact timeless, and that we are only on a stage here, playing our usually tiny part, and that there is so much more.  But most of us aren’t there yet.  We keep reality at bay because we can’t handle realty –a self-fulfilling prophecy that the great spiritual teachers have tried so hard to waken us from. 
 
We are too frightened and lost, most of us, to waken to reality, and so we need faith.  It, not work, will set us free.  It, not success or government grants or anything of the like, will open the way at the end.  We will still fear the real thing, the flying saucer of our lives that is death, but we will know for sure that it has not come to exterminate us.  It has come instead as an evolutionary moment, to bring us forward to something we cannot conceive but that is, at last, the reality behind the dream. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
“There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (“Man’s search for God”!) suddenly draw back.  Supposing we really found Him?  We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
“So it is sort of a Rubicon.  One goes across; or not. But if one does, there is no manner of security against miracles.  One may be in for anything.” (C.S. Lewis, Miracles, ch. 11)
 
I found this so “me” that it is embarrassing.  Yes, I was searching and dabbling, and then it became real.  I am telling you frankly, believe it or not, embarrassing though it might be for us intellectuals (as it was for Lewis and other intellectuals at Oxford), that the Holy Spirit is real.  No kidding.  And, just as they say, it comes through you like a river and you know it is as real as if it were water. But then it leaves.  Then it leaves and you are left standing in the desert with a choice to believe or not.  It has been given; now, do you revert back to what, from the perspective of the Spirit, seems blind, or do you now shake your head and say, “that was an illusion!  Enough of that!   That’s for crazy ignorant fanatics!”  You are split; you don’t want to abandon what you have found – or what has found you - because you realize that in this different reality there are miracles, marvels, the possibility for anything - the end to tedium and meaninglessness.  But you don’t want to be played the fool.  And there are so many reasons to disbelieve.
 
It is so that I was struck after seeing the movie, “The Clover Field Paradox.”  There is no theological intent, pro or con, at all in this movie.  Rather, it is a fairly well-done sci-fi pic that uses the outlandish and controversial physics of a “multi-verse” to create a horror thriller.  The plot goes like this: Earth is running out of energy.  Nations are gearing up for war.  An international effort has been put forth to take a particle accelerator into space, where it can (somehow) smash through space-time to create endless energy for our planet.  Test after test fails and rumblings of war increase down below.  They only have enough power to have two more tests.  They run it again and “bam!” Power surges!  Yay!  But then something goes horribly wrong.  Parts of the accelerator blow up, and then very weird things happen.  A crew member’s arm is swallowed by a wall, and then comes back on its own to communicate with the crew by writing; a woman is found partially enmeshed in interior wiring, a woman who was not on the space station before; a tech crew member goes crazy and dies, but the “arm” writes that the missing gyrocompass is inside him.  It is.  And the strange woman turns out to be a crew member – from an alternative reality.
 
And so it goes, weirdness followed by weirdness, catastrophe followed by catastrophe.  There is no appreciable order in this in-between state.   We learn that there is order in other states – just very different order.  In fact, as the multi-verse goes, all possible universes exist infinitely, some with natural laws that are impossible from our perspective – space and movement without time, for instance, or existence of objects at different locations at the same time, and so on. 
 
A real nightmare from our reality, which is why it is such a good theory for horror movies (also, because it is so weird and complex, the writers can make up anything at all.  A writer’s dream).  It is a nightmare because there is no ultimate order in the multi-verse – all things can and do happen in every possible way, which is infinite.  The problem is, in such a reality (or infinite set of realities), where is truth?   While an omnipotent god can, by definition, make and handle such a situation, we cannot, nor ever will be able to.  In this infinite set of realities, what is death?  The beginning or end?  Even, presumably, good and evil?  There is nothing firm, no values, no behaviors, nothing to hold on to at all.  How could we be capable of handling such a broad reality?  How could we judge ourselves in any possible way?   We could say that we should determine our behavior and truth by our own dimensional laws, but that would not be universal truth.  Where, then, do we gain footing?  Where can we even begin to say, “there is truth?”
 
The multi-verse theory is controversial, to say the least, and perhaps we shouldn’t even think about it, but such movies force me to, and force me to consider: under what circumstances do I still hold firm to the “spirit”?  Of the 12 Apostles, (not including Judas, but including his replacement, another Judas) all died as martyrs, holding firmly to their beliefs even under extreme torture.  They did not have ideas about multi-verses, but the ancient world was awhirl in ideas and beliefs about gods and different realities.  What made these guys hold out against such pain and death – and, just as importantly, why?  Was it the desperation of the ego, so committed to a reality that its loss was considered worse than death?  We hear of such stories about people overwhelmed by invaders such as the Taino Indians of Cuba, who purposefully killed themselves en masse rather than become part of the Spanish colonial system.  Was this the way of the Apostles and early Christians?  
 
It could be, and so movies about the multi-verse, as well as others about inherent evil, throw me off any pedestal of certainty that I might have.  On the other hand, I have to recall just what the Holy Spirit gives us – a glimpse of a totally different reality that puts our normal view on a par with a child’s game.  This goes for other views we might have of reality, including theories about a multi-verse.  These, too, become small potatoes in light of Spirit, which is beyond all thought and “laws.”  It is the living water, lived only as IS because it IS what is.  No mind games, no arms merging with walls, nothing freaky, but so different that freaky is normal in comparison. 
 
What happens when one goes over this Rubicon of the Holy Spirit?  In ancient times, crossing the Rubicon River from Rome meant leaving the homeland to embark in war.  Once war is started, there is no going back, because bringing in another side takes away that choice.  Here, we seemingly have a choice; the war is with common reality, but we can and often do return to it almost instantly after crossing the “Rubicon” of the Spirit.  It seems we can turn from it at a whim, at any time or forever. 
 
But maybe not.  Maybe once we are immersed in the waters of that river, it brings it into play, if not against our will, then against our normal judgement.  Why else would some consent to being tortured instead of simply bowing before a statue of Zeus, and then continuing on as usual?   That, I believe, is what I would do.  But again, maybe not.  Maybe once we have crossed this Rubicon, we can never be safe, as Lewis said, from miracles.  Anything can happen.  We do not know what, and we also do not know how we have been changed.  We have been placed into a multiverse that reaches to a firm foundation that, somehow, has no end, but it is not chaos.  It is peace and light.  We can turn from it, but once crossed, can we ever forget it?  And if not, can we really go on as if nothing at all has ever happened? 
 
Again, I don’t really know; but I do believe that once we cross the river, we witness a fantasy land that is more fantastic than imagination and more real than real.  It just might reach us once we are safe – and bored – back home.  Maybe against our will, but more likely, with a will that is ours but that we never knew we had - at least not in this dimension, or this side of the river.       
 
 
 
 
 
 
​

 
We usually just don’t know: your flight gets cancelled, so, plans ruined and still angry, you go to your friend’s weekend barbecue.  You meet a girl there who joins in the conversation about how crappy the airlines are, the conversation moves on to dating, the two of you get married, which leads to an extended line out into human history from that one accident.  Or fate.  There is no proof of either, but both you and your wife know it was ordained, don’t you?  We all have these coincidences that are so meaningful to us that we simply have to believe they were due to fate, even though our justice system would throw those cases out for “insufficient evidence.”  But sometimes the consequences of unlikely events are so great we that we almost have to believe, dragged kicking and screaming if necessary. 
 
Such is the case of one George Strake (all information below from the book The Fisherman’s Tomb, by John O’Neil).   Born in 1894 in St Louis, he and his siblings slipped into extreme poverty when both their parents died, the eldest being just old enough to care for the younger ones, including George.  He had to leave high school to work, but in off-hours kept up his fascination with engineering mechanics to such an extent that he was awarded a full scholarship to the local university.  Upon graduation, he became a wireless operator with the US army during WWI.  And so the technical stage was set.  After the Service, he became involved with a rich girl from Florida, but he would not marry her while he was still poor.  She suggested that he go to Tampico, Mexico, in the employ of Gulf Oil to explore the area for oil.  He did so, and in short time became the head of the Tampico office. 
 
Then the personal stage was set.  While on vacation in San Antonio, he met the woman he would soon marry, Susan Kehoe (I only wish she were a known relative!)  After the nuptials, she moved with him back to Tampico, where she would often babysit for an old Yankee family, the William Buckley’s, the children including the to-become-famous William F. Buckley Jr.  After cementing ties, William senior suggested that George leave Gulf Oil to explore on his own, with the help of money he would obtain from banks in NYC.  Thus George Strake became a “wildcatter.”  With those profits, and his knowledge of the wireless, he would also invest in a small start-up company called RCA, which then started the broadcast company, NBC.  George would continue to reap profits from these for years to come.
 
Alas, but not surprisingly, Mexico fell prone to violent revolution again, so George left for greener pastures, selling cars in Cuba until the Great Depression.  With what little money they had left, they moved back to Houston to be close to Susan’s mother, who had become seriously ill.  While in the area, inquisitive George the wildcatter noticed some strange things about an area just 40 miles north of Houston, in the township of Conroe: the streams went the wrong direction from all other areas close by, and the cattle refused to drink the water.  To make a long story short, he invested his last dollars in oil exploration there, and with the second test, went deeper than anyone else had done before to find the third largest oil field in America at the time.  George Strake instantly became one of the richest men in the world. 
 
A problem did arise, however – some wells in the area owned by others caught fire and exploded, creating a massive burning pit of the whole area.  The fires could not be stopped, and the field was doomed to burn out. In desperation, George hired a man, George Eastman, to put it out with his new technique for horizontal drilling.  He was successful, and Eastman’s technique would go on to be used in fracking, opening a new era for oil in America decades later and lessoning its dependence on the whim of international despots.   At the time, it made Conroe into one of the few “Depression-proof” cities in the US in the 1930’s.
 
Connections, effects, and more connections.  On top of all that, George was an extremely religious Catholic, who claimed that he had a partnership with God who always held the controlling interests (of course).  Because of this, George gave generously to the Church, never allowing, as the Gospels would have it, his name to be mentioned.  He frequently told his family that he expected to give away his fortune, his last dollar going out on his death bed.  The Catholic Church, as one might expect, was ready to take advantage of such good fortune, especially after an incident following the death of Pope Pious XI in 1939.   Then, the pope had requested to be buried beneath St Peter’s Cathedral, where legend had it that Peter “the Rock of the Church” had also been buried (on Vatican Hill, before construction of the Cathedral, of course) after his execution by the Romans around 65 AD.  As workers dug beneath the foundation for his burial site, they broke through a ceiling and fell into a vast underworld of Roman family crypts that had once dominated Vatican Hill.  In one place near the center of the cathedral, they found evidence of a Christian woman who had been buried there around 150 AD.  This was significant, as Christians then were killed by the state.  Had Vatican Hill become a secret graveyard for Christians?  And if so, why?
 
The reason, some in the Vatican hoped, was because they knew that Peter had been buried there.  The Vatican wanted to explore more, but needed lots and lots of money.  It was the Depression, though, and WWII was starting up, so money was tight.  The Vatican also did not want the world to know of the exploration because a failure to find Peter’s remains would cause more harm to a church already in decline.  They needed a very wealthy anonymous donor.  After the Vatican’s emissary, Father Walter Carroll, paid Strake a visit, the Vatican was given an anonymous blank check.  The search was on.
 
As WWII progressed, Mussolini, and then the Germans, began to round up the Jews for deportation to the death camps.  Partly because of the hidden construction site and Strake’s funds, Father Carroll, along with others, was able to hide and save some seven to eight hundred thousand Jewish lives.  And, although the story was long and filled with controversy, the Church was also finally able to credibly establish that Peter had indeed been buried at the very center of the Cathedral (or rather, the Cathedral had been built directly over his site).  The forensic evidence, site inscriptions, and historical data all showed that the myth had actually been a reality, and that the Church had been built, in every way, on Peter, who Jesus had proclaimed to be the Rock, or foundation, for advancing his teachings. 
 
Again, we might see all this as a string of coincidences – but the sheer luck of it all, of one man finding that oil when all others had failed, one man who was so devout that he could give his fortune to a belief that not only verified the reality of the founder of the Christian Church but also saved nearly one million people’s lives – we kind of have to start thinking it was ordained.  That last  point, I might cautiously add, could be more important than even saving 800,000 people from execution, for such stories help convince us that, 1), there is a god, and 2), that this god actively cares about us, even as we screw things up.  Such evidence might save thousands from suicide, and millions from pointless, desperate lives.  Think: if one truly believes that we are made by divine powers for a purpose, how could we have long-lasting despair?  We would no longer need to grope after power or distractions or things to fill our need for a reason for being.  We would know that it is already in place, and we only have to live with trust – with faith - that our reason will be revealed, both in the outside world and within ourselves.  That, indeed, was the wisdom and revelation given us in the New Testament, the true fulcrum for humanity’s turning point. 
 
And part of this truth came to light after a wildcatter discovered oil in Texas.   Amazing and true, and maybe even a revelation of divine origin.  Such revelations might be within each of us, tailored to our own personal reason for being.  It might not be a bad idea to start living as if this were true.  We may not strike oil, but we could well strike it rich.   
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 

​
I know I dangled an enticement on the last blog, but I’m going to delay that a bit because of something that suddenly came up.   It came from watching the Netflix series, “Manhunt,” which is about finding the Unabomber who, in the 1980’s and ‘90’s sent bombs in the mail to university professors and some people who worked in tech companies, airlines (the “a” in Unabomber) and government offices.  I have something of a connection with this, as one of his bombs went off at the U of Michigan just a few months after I had left Ann Arbor.  But really, my special connection with Ted Kaczynski, the man who was finally identified as the bomber, is a bit more controversial.  For those reading newspapers in the ‘90’s, you will recall that he sent a long and weary “manifesto” to several publications, which was then published in the Washington Post, in which he condemns modern industrial society.  At that time, I was still an academic, and I, too, condemned (in writing and in thought) modern industrial society, like just about everyone else in my profession.   In a way I suppose I still do, but with an exception: in the same stroke, I share a similar distrust of all hierarchical societies, which includes most people from the past several thousand years, and just about everyone today.  For instance, Rome was not dominated by tech as we understand it, but I would be a fool to say that it was a better, kinder and freer place than America is today.   Far from it.  Neither did we find an open, tolerant, and free society in the far less powerful and more primitive region of Palestine.  In retrospect, it isn’t tech that causes us to give up our autonomy to The Man.  Ted, the Harvard man and PhD in mathematics – the bona fide genius – was wrong.  But where might we find the mechanism in society that restricts our thoughts and behaviors, turning us into what Ted described as machine-like automatons? 
 
It is, for one, something that is inside all of us.  Later in the series, we get a more sympathetic look at Ted.  We are led through his childhood and early adulthood as his genius personality excludes him from the regular social world.  He has difficulty making friends.  We find that, at 53, he is still a virgin.  He is a social incompetent, and that made him angry.  He was a genius for God’s sake!  The world would pay for not recognizing his genius – for not, essentially, loving him.  In total, at least as the series has it, he killed for recognition; he killed because he was ostracized from the pack.  Which means he killed from the basic human need to bond and be accepted socially.  In the small family units of primitives, this wouldn’t have been a problem for most, but in larger societies, this is huge.  In larger societies, Humans are at a surplus, and certain ones can be and are rejected.  Most of these crumble and fail and slink through life, but a few strike back.  Thus, Ted.
 
It was difficult to watch and reminded me of the times during my youth – and even today - when I was (and am) rejected.  The memories are still painful.  This need to be accepted is an extremely powerful emotion, and it is this which causes us to conform to societal rules.  We might even say that this is social Darwinism – that is, that humans survive and thrive because we live in groups, and it is this psychological need to belong that makes us conform so that groups might exist. 
 
It is this, then, not technology that causes us to be “automatons,” but rather our need to belong to the pack.  The evidence is everywhere, but I bring up ancient Rome and Palestine for a reason.  At the time of Christ, about a third of Rome was comprised of slaves (if I remember correctly.  It was unbelievable high in any case).  They were not feeling the freedom.  But almost as bad, both average and upper-class Romans were compelled to act for “the family.”  For instance, if a male member brought dishonor to the family, he was literally expected to fall on his sword.  To kill himself.  If a woman did so – and most woman had no power at all outside the family – she was killed by the family.  A man could kill his wife and children legally – they were his chattel.  And all were expected to bow before the emperor and pay homage to the state-approved gods.  Keeping up with the neighbors was an obsession, and family crypts were kept to show to the world just how important the family was.  Even in death, then, Romans were tools of society.
 
In Jesus’s Jerusalem, keeping up with the Jones’s meant literally being holier than thou.  Being rich meant power as well, but for the average Jew, it was the religious leaders – the Pharisees – whom one looked up to.  These guys were necessary just to keep everyone up on all the religious purity and sacrificial rules.  Breaking them often meant death, but keeping them gave people such as the Pharisees their right to shine.  Everyone was controlled by rules, and the more one followed the rules, the holier, and thus higher up the status rungs, one was.
 
Back then, if one was a social outcaste or loser, one became a servant or slave, or a bandit.  In the age of the computer, people like Ted Kaczynski – although exceptionally bright – became back-bench research workers, or back-room postal workers, or food-stamp survivors or …serial killers.  Which is a shame, because for both then and now, Jesus – much like the Buddha – dismissed the social hierarchy, absolutely.  In general, everyone knows that Jesus favored the outcastes, even the whores and highway men (bandits), both because no one else cared for them, and because he understood their position in society.  They could not conform, and that was not only OK, but actually superior in many ways.  In particular, Jesus spoke many times of the hypocrites who performed for others to maintain their social position.  In Matthew chapter 5, for instance, he goes on and on about giving alms in secret, or of fasting in secret, so as to do what is right before God, not before man.  Of family, in Mathew chapter 8, a man begs leave to go bury his father, whereby Jesus replies, “Follow me and let the dead bury their dead.” (8:22) Of country, he tells the Pharisees to “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what is God’s” (22:21).  That is, give to the government what is the government’s – its laws and money – but give your soul only to God.
 
In other words, and to be very clear, do NOT be concerned with what society, family, or government thinks of you, whether personally or societally.  Live free of this mentality to live free.  Give your all to truth, that which you know from deep inside, not to the vagaries and insecurities of human social structure.  And more: this can be done in the sure knowledge that all are equal before God; that in heaven, no soul is accounted great by a person’s fame, glory or wealth.   These things are insignificant. 
 
Think if Ted had read and taken to heart the Gospels.  He had to make up this entire manifesto to justify his anger at being an eternal outsider, when he didn’t need to do it at all.  Whatever thought and effort and “genius” went into his treatise was entirely unnecessary.  The revolution that he had wanted to create had already been started, and the blueprint was already there.  The Gospels, though, are not what smart people believe now.  They are not even read by the elite.  They are not the path to personal glory.  But, just as with the Romans, even our elites are burdened with keeping facades and appearances and the right panache.  They are forever worried that they might slip, and they still wake in the middle of the night wondering just what the hell it’s all about.  All while they, too, have already been taken care of.  Their cure has already been presented.  It just has to be followed.
 
The “superman” philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote that Christianity was the religion of slaves, with a slave mentality.  It was for losers only.  But he did not understand, or would not understand, that in the social hierarchy game, all of us are losers.  There is only one guy at the top, and even he gets sick and dies; even he fears the dark.  Imagine if you didn’t give a damn about social standing, not out of anger, but because you realized it for the shallowness that it is; imagine if instead of bitterness or competitiveness, you saw others as yourself, no more nor less, all a part of the same whole under heaven; and imagine if you could love them and yourself and never fear being ostracized or lonely or lost.  All of this is at our fingertips, and all so easy it’s hard.  However difficult it might be, however, it is still far easier than living in the tortured ego of a humiliated social misfit who can only feel alive when a bomb is ripping apart others he believes have it so much better than himself.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
I have puzzled many times in this blog over coincidence and synchronicity, and as it happens, a comic strip in our morning paper brought the topic up to me once again yesterday.  I oddly discovered that I (think) I know the answer, and it’s pretty simple.
 
The comic strip, “Baldo,” thought it was pretty simple, too, but in an entirely different way.  In this, Baldo, an ordinary high school kid of Hispanic origin, exclaims to his extremely precocious little sister, “I just read this word in an article, and they said it on TV at the same time!  Wow!,” as if what had happened indicated some connection to the Deep.  His Brainiac sister becomes sarcastic, quoting the dictionary definitions of two words: ‘coincidence,’ where unconnected events happen randomly as if they were connected, and ‘synchronicity,’ where coincidence is linked to spooky things like the Collective Unconscious.  Says Baldo, “I’ll go with the second!”  His all-too-wise sister smirks.   Real science tells her that no spooky connections exist: all is a collection of random events that follow basic physical laws.  There are no surprises in the universe that transcend these known laws.   In other words, Baldo is a superstitious clod.
 
In this site, we have been here before: where, for instance, did those laws come from?  And why, in sub-atomic physics, are these laws transcended all the time?  In fact, smarter people than I tell us that at the quark level, what affects one thing affects everything – at speeds far, far faster than light.  Which is not possible by Einstein’s laws, but seems to happen nonetheless.    
 
For me, it is obvious, as it should be to all scientists, that we are a long way from knowing how everything works, whether or not one believes in a spiritual agency.  Yet, the spiritually attuned do seem to have a better handle on certain things than science – as one would expect if one knows about spirituality.  And the one thing that is known by all spiritually- attuned masters is that all thoughts and actions have consequences.  With that, then in one way or another, any thought or action has an effect on the rest of reality, albeit often on a minute scale.  And with that, everything is connected.
 
More so: if one believes that reality is created by a super reality (we call it God), which makes perfect sense, then we would believe that everything is created for a purpose, no matter how small.  Given these two spiritual probabilities together, we come to the conclusion that everything affects everything else, which is of great importance, since all things are created for a purpose.  This not only gives purpose to all things, including to each of our lives, but means that there is no such thing as coincidence.  Purpose drives purpose, and connects to all other things.  What happens while Baldo reads and the TV plays ARE significant.  The only trouble is, finding out what that significance is.
 
That’s our problem with it all, as astrologers must have realized long ago.  Certainly the motion of the planets and the birth of a person are connected, but how? 
 
The realization that the universe is meaningful and connected is (I believe) universally understood at a certain level by all of us.  Some, frustrated with the differences between the common physical reality and the universal reality, retreat into sister Brainiac’s view that all can be contained in the basic known mechanistic laws.   Others accept this inner truth, but still wish to understand it at a superficial level.  Here, they connect the few dots they can see with connecting lines that miss all that they cannot see.  In other words, many of us draw causal conclusions with inadequate information.  In some cases, this is what is called paranoia.  For instance, President Kennedy was hated by the Mafia because his brother was attacking it through his position as attorney general; Castro had a hatred of Kennedy for various reasons, and the Mafia had a long-standing relationship with Cuba through its pre-Castro casino connections.  Oswald, JFK’s assassin, was a Russian and Cuban sympathizer, and the man who killed him, Jack Ruby, had mob connections.  Ergo, Oliver Stone’s movie.  I am not laughing at it, but other things are missing from the equation, enough so as to make Oliver Stone-ish conclusions fall at least somewhat into the paranoid bracket. 
 
We all do this, both individually and as a culture, with connections that are not considered paranoid at certain times (End Times predictions, natural events or catastrophes and human behavior), until they are, and then we blithely skip on to other delusions that are considered normal for a while.  But in making these connections, as wrong as they are in the particular, we are fundamentally right: everything is meaningful and all thoughts and actions do affect other things (and non-things).  We simply do not have the information to predict the future from these interactions or explain why they happen in current time. 
 
 And so Baldo is right: the connection he experienced was real and was “spooky” because it did have meaning.  The only thing is, he and his smart sister will never know what that reason was, or what implications it has.  She blew it off as nonsense; in that, his response of “wow!” was better, but still useless.  Where it is useful is when it causes us to consider our connections with everything – to consider our pivotal position in the universe, no matter how small we or our actions seem to be. 
 
It is also useful if it leads us to get beyond the “wow” to the state of non-movement – what is is called the Zen Moment by some – in which we mindfully connect with the connection.  We are already connected; what we need is a way to realize it as it is, without standard context, because there is no other way to realize it (again, normal reality-thought is simply not adequate).  This is where we might gain prophetic and other powers. They are not directed by ourselves as we understand it, however, but rather through ourselves, because what we believe to be ourselves is such a minute fragment of our being.  So we can, but will almost certainly not, intuit the winning lottery number, because the big self almost never has a need for the lottery number, just as a super nova does not.  The big self, after all, thinks big. 
 
Sometimes, however, the big self does work on something like lottery numbers, but for a bigger purpose than merely enabling us to become rich enough to ruin our lives.   The next blog will get into that through the most incredible true story.  Fittingly enough, it has something to do with three big things: Texas, the Vatican, and WWII.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
Eighteen years ago this month, our Jeep pulled a household of goods over the Appalachians to settle us in the Mississippi Watershed of Southern Wisconsin.  As I wrote in the Foreword to my travelogue, Dream Weaver, I was not happy about the move.  I was uprooted and left mostly by myself with my son, as my wife continued her sales work on the road.  Being a housedad had never been in my plans, and that first winter in Wisconsin, left to the cold winds blowing over expanses of tilled-under cornfields, was dreary to the extreme.  Still, what happened towards the end of the next summer after our move was unprecedented in my life.   Something bad clicked and my internal dialogue turned brutally towards myself.  It was relentless and ruthless, making me feel the helpless victim.  Worse, I suffered panic attacks so bad that I thought I was going insane.  As I played games with our preschooler, I worried that I might lose it, running out into the cornfields in my underwear screaming something like “Betelgeuse! The aliens are coming!” 
 
I didn’t, and I still don’t understand all of it, but I did find out the source of my anxiety: sleep apnea.  After weeks or months of waking up in the middle of the night in a panic because I was not breathing, I finally figured it out.  My inner mind, the pre-logical element that takes over in dreams, believed I was being methodically suffocated and would not let that fear leave me even during the day.  After a few months I was able to train myself to sleep on my side, and the problem stopped.  Some of the other symptoms lingered for a few years more, but the worst was over. 
 
Still, the fear of suffocating can loom large.  When I crawled into an MRI for an expensive and useless test of a sinus infection – health insurance can be a curse – I had to be pulled from it the first time.  I insisted on re-entering without drugs because, dammit, I was not going to be terrified by something so rationally benign.  Forty Five minutes later I emerged like a soul pardoned from Hell.   The nurses told me it had taken so long because I had moved too much.  They hated me for being such a non-patient patient, and I didn’t care much for them either.  That animosity soon passed for me (probably not for the nurses, but I don’t go to the hospital often), but I did realize that my bout with panic attacks had taken its toll.  I was now afraid of extremely tight spaces.  Not airplanes or closets or elevators, but coffin-like confinement, such as the MRI.  My worst nightmare now would be to be trapped head first in a deep and dark cave with no room to move.  No, not worst: add water to it.  Yes, that would be the worst.
 
So it was that horror filled me when I read of the boys’ soccer team trapped in a water-filled cave in Thailand more than two miles from the entrance.  There were twelve boys in their early to mid- teens with their soccer coach – the same number as Jesus and his disciples, although it was a diver rather than a coach who became the martyr – who were not even discovered for the first ten days of their entrapment after the monsoon rains had started.  After that, it had then taken two weeks more for the divers, a mix of international SEALS and avid underwater cave enthusiasts, to take them all out one by one.  One part of the cave that was underwater was so tight that the air tanks had to be removed from the back and pushed forward, all while keeping the breathing mask snuggly on the mouth and nose.  Holy crap.  Worst nightmare.  All the boys made it, as well as all but one of the divers. 
 
How were they able to do it?  First, the boys and the coach, many of whom could not even swim (not that that would have mattered much in a tight, ink-black water filled tunnel): were they drugged?  Not too much because they would need to be alert, but just enough to keep from panicking?  More so, the divers:  all, I’m sure, had been volunteers.  That means, and I have to repeat this to myself, they didn’t have to do it.  Are you kidding me?  Yes, there were young lives to save, but even if they had been my own children and I would very much have wanted to do it, I do not believe I could have.  How was this rescue, then, even possible?  Are these guys supermen? 
 
Maybe so, but I suspect not, and that brings up this inquiry: why are some people able to overcome certain fears – or perhaps not even have those fears – while the rest of us tremble before such things in terror?  Those dark, tight tunnels are my greatest fear, but I am no hero on the rock face of a cliff, either.  I have climbed such things in my youth, with a friend or two to egg me on, and I was able to complete them all, but in each, there was that moment in the middle when I wanted to call the Coast Guard.  Down is worse than up.  Panic rises, and rises more when you realize that panic will kill you.   I was barely able to conquer this fear of heights temporarily, but I would not do something like that again voluntarily.  And I simply could not do that cave thing.  No.  But others can, and do, and even do it for weekend holiday sport.
 
So the question remains.  I recently finished an autobiography written by a Seal, No Hero, who tells of his training and later experiences in combat.  He admitted to his intense fear of heights and even, almost unbelievably, his dislike of swimming.  But he learned to tough it out.   He learned to tough it out because of his driving need to be a SEAL, to be the best in a high-adrenaline profession.  He would pull more than a dozen tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He loved the tension.  He killed people who wanted to kill him, and he felt bad when he realized that he was burnt-out and had to retire.  He would miss the action. 
 
Some do not seem to be afraid at all of tight spaces or heights, but I think for most, it is the adrenaline rush.  The TV people did a profile on Shawn White, the red-headed ski boarder, just as he was becoming a big thing at the winter Olympics.  They had shots of him and his mother and others who knew him saying pretty much the same thing: Shawn was bored by normal stuff.  He needed the excitement of high-flight and the risk of severe pain and even death to feel alive.  He had already been through a lot of severe pain.  It did not stop him.  He was/is no god-man, but he is different. 
 
What of that guy who climbed El Capitan in about two hours without ropes, something thought to be impossible? Thousands of feet above the ground on a sheer face with nothing but toes and fingers and he didn’t even look scared.  I do not believe he was scared.  He, too, was no god, but he was not like the rest of us either.  In his case, he seemed to have little to no fear of heights at all.  How did that come to be?
 
My fear of tight spaces was probably already in place and the sleep apnea only brought it out.  But did that fear start, as Freud would have it, at some point in early childhood?  Or are we born with such things?  If so, what of those who are not – that is, what of those who can do what most of us can barely think about?  For those who take the scientific approach, to say that such complex behaviors and affinities come from genes is almost like saying nothing at all.  I do not believe that any geneticist could point out all the loci to such behavior, and I do not believe they ever will be able too.  But if not randomly - selected genes, then what can we say of the origin of those things that make others so different? 
 
Gifts.  In many spiritual/religious homilies, we are told of our ‘gifts’, that which has been given us by some spiritual source that is overall rare.  We have looked at some of the extremes, and there are many others with less physical impact.  Mozart was not great only because he had early music lessons in childhood; Newton did not invent calculus only because he had been trained in mathematics.  They had gifts.  And if them, so us, or so the old spiritual traditions tell us.   It is, as the non-affiliated grass-roots saint Peace Pilgrim has said, as if we were all part of the same body, each of us a cell contributing - if we do not go off track - to the overall health of the body.   We each have our rolls, some of which are standard, and at least one which makes us stand out.   This idea was not made up whole cloth; that we are all part of one body, for better and for worse, was stated again and again in the Old Testament and in the Gospels.  For instance, we all have original sin; and we all can be of “the body of Christ.”
 
Not everyone can cave- dive or create a masterpiece or do anything of a spectacular nature.   But we all have something, a special flavor at the very least, that is intended to affect the body Human in a positive way.  Dang if I know mine.  But we are told that if we act as if we are all one in the end – that is, if we treat others as ourselves - that our specialty, our gift or gifts, will shine – perhaps whether we know it or not.  To have, as the apostles did, tongues of flame coming out of their heads as they gained such gifts as universal language and healing sure would help, but I think it is true regardless. 
 
If this seems too Pollyann-ish, don’t worry - trouble and suffering are sure to relieve you of that saccharin flavor sooner or later.  But I do believe it is true, that we all have a gift or gifts, and that we will find it or them once we understand that we are not alone, but have always been an intended part of it all.      
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

(Note - go to the next essay below this one for a belated but always welcome comment from Cal)

​The great shaman/huckster Gurdjieff once said that if we could truly see our lives in reflection, we would not be able to stand to live.  Unfortunately, I think I understand at least part of what he means. 
 
It comes to me in dreams, and in this last, I am with a crowd of tired, dirty people who are nevertheless elated, having just achieved some great goal on a dangerous expedition.  They have been to the ends of the earth and they have grown in their wisdom and found fulfillment and comradery.  I, on the other hand, stand aside as they congratulate themselves.  For some reason, I have missed out.  I am on the outside.  I have missed out on the great adventure of my lifetime and now I can only imagine what it might have been, and how that empty longing within might have been filled. 
 
It is a terrible feeling, and I think it is to this that Gurdjieff directs his warning: that most of us do not fulfill even a fraction of what is possible for us; that most of us, in the dark words of a writer I have forgotten, live lives of quiet desperation.  We want something great; we know we are meant for something great, and we do not do it.  This is from lack of imagination or of courage, but mostly it is from our lack of vision as we see ourselves trapped by our circumstances, be it family or mortgage or some other perceived obligation.  We think “if only” and then go about our meek lives, so much less than some other hero who has responded to his calling.   I do not think this is enough to force us to leap from a cliff in despair – Gurdjieff was a showman after all – but it is a great tragedy of our, and of many other, times. 
 
However, many of the greats, those who fulfill themselves, do so with disregard for others.  Some are born egotists, or are born with such overriding talent that, like a golden retriever chasing a ball into the water, they are simply towed by instinct.  But many do find a way to walk the fine line, controlling impulses while still achieving their goals. 
 
Such, it seems, was the case of Jon Kerstetter in his autobiography, Crossings.  I have mentioned him before: this is the man born in poverty on the Oneida Indian Reservation in Wisconsin in 1950 who beat all odds to become a medical doctor.  For him, though, that was not enough; he then went on to become a flight surgeon who served three tours during the second Iraq War.  It was during his last tour that he fell into some earth pits by an airfield and broke several bones in his arm and leg.  He was flown stateside for surgery, where they found another more serious problem with blood vessels in the brain.  During the operation to fix them, the worst happened: he suffered a massive stroke that left him almost incapable of walking, and more: it left him almost incapable of thinking. 
 
As we read the book, we come to realize (with almost disbelief) that it was written by a man who struggles to form complete and cogent sentences, even though it is well done, largely because of its unflinching truth.  From the start, he admits to his drive, which he attributes to his insatiable need to learn, but which, with no great thinking on our part, leads us to understand that it comes primarily from an intense need to be somebody.  We understand this in the context of his life, this same struggle that my parents had as they fought to rise above the Depression-era poverty that they were born into.  It is this, this need not only for basic material necessities but for self-approval, which drives so many new immigrants in this country.  Like so many rags to riches stories in American, Kerstetter fulfilled his own need by excelling at the highest levels.  Then, with one operation, he was functionally reduced to one of the lowest, that of stroke survivor. 
 
We learn of his anger and frustration with completing the simplest of tasks, but more importantly, of his struggle to maintain the level of self-respect that he had worked so hard to construct.  It was agonizing for him to realize that he would never be the competent surgeon/soldier that he had been, and we see that as he writes to the Medical Board to revoke his medical license.  A doctor, a soldier no more, but instead, a struggling invalid. 
 
It does not end there, obviously, but rather at this very book that he wrote.  We understand his fortitude as he enrolls in a master’s program for writing, where he finally completed his MFA.  He has not stopped, even though writing a simple page for him might take hours or sometimes days.  We are encouraged by this strength.  Still, I sensed something was missing in his conclusion.
 
This ‘something missing’ I deduced from my dream.  Kerstetter needed the excitement of combat, but just as importantly, he needed his own approval, which was shaped by society.  He was willing to sacrifice even his life for that goal.  When he was greatly decreased, he admirably did not rest on his laurels or succumb to depression, but still, there was something almost pathological about his need to become ‘somebody’ again.
 
I understand. In my dream, it was not the adventure I dreamed of, but the results, the kudos and the camaraderie that comes from insiders, from the people who have been there.  It was, simply, ego boost, which is as insatiable as a drug or sensual addiction. 
 
Think of the movie, “The Karate Kid.” Wasn’t the Japanese master a gardener?  Didn’t he live in obscurity, awaiting the will of heaven with abiding patience?  Could we imagine him planning to do something - damn it! - to get the recognition he deserved (needed)?  No, that would have ruined our vision of him as a wise man.  As a wise man, he did not need outside props or approval, from himself or from anyone else.   His satisfaction was in knowing who he was in the face of eternity.  The rest, life, was a short play, a shadow from eternity meant to teach or to prod or to lead.  From this, we can get the impression that the Way of Heaven was leading Kerstetter to the wisdom of the humble, and that he did not quite understand.  Close, but not quite. 
 
Instead, his is still fighting, as if life is a foe.  Which it is, but of an entirely different kind.  It is instead a fight with oneself, with one’s petty needs.  How many times does Jesus say, “abandon all and follow me”? How many times does the Buddha tell us to turn from the celluloid-like play of existence to live outside of the ego and all its distractions? 
 
As my own dreams tell me, I speak as someone who knows; someone who knows wisdom but does not live it, for the obsessions of this world still cling.  Kerstetter wanted action and challenge and he got almost more than he could handle after his stroke.   He dealt with it as he dealt with everything else in this life – with dogged determination to overcome.  But it seems something greater was waiting at his door that he didn’t quite get; something that he couldn’t quite live with that heaven was trying to teach him.  I, most of us, understand and could not have done better. 
 
I had hoped that he would get it, for heroes make it easier for us to go the distance, but maybe it is better this way.  In his failure (by my view), Kerstetter has helped by showing the tenacity of the tune master who makes us dance to his harsh demands, like those found in my dream.  Like most of us, I hope I don’t have to have something like a stroke to fully understand who our true adversary is.  But, as with most, I probably do.  Hopefully, it will prove worthwhile in eternity.