Today, a new essay, Mouse Trap, ​in the essay section of the website.  FK

​It is often difficult to watch the news, particularly that concerning our own country.  So many times I am mystified by the absolute malice some show towards certain politicians, political parties, and the country itself.  I am mystified because I have lived elsewhere.  I have lived in places like Venezuela and Mexico where there is mass corruption and little justice, places where the only goodwill to be found is among the people themselves.  But in the U.S.?  Not perfect, no way, but justice is often had, and almost always by those who make the issues known.  Few are starving in the streets, and those mostly due to addiction and mental illness.  Education is free to those who cannot pay, medical is to be had by all, at least in emergencies, roads get fixed, and when corrupt politicians are uncovered, they lose their jobs or go to jail - and those who uncover them don’t die afterwards in mysterious accidents. 
 
My point is not to wave the flag.  America will never make you happy, but it is so ordered as to allow YOU to become happy, with enough opportunities and security to be able to do so.   But many unhappy people blame the nation for their unhappiness, as if a slight of justice in the courts or a case of corruption in the oil fields or state house has caused this perpetual unhappiness.   It does not take unusual perception to grasp the fallacy, yet still, there they are, certain that somehow a change in this law or that football mascot will make their discontent go away.  Why?
 
This weekend, we saw the movie, “The Case for Christ,” based on the autobiographical book of the same name by Lee Strobel.   Strobel was a hard-bitten, award-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune in the ‘70’s and 80’s (the backdrop of 70’s décor in the movie was hilarious, including Strobel’s spray-can helmet hair).  Towards the beginning of the movie, he and his wife and child are happily eating out at a restaurant when his little girl begins to choke on bubble gum.  She is saved by a nurse who happened to be nearby.  The nurse then tells them that it was no coincidence but God’s work, as she was going to go elsewhere, but a little voice told her to think again – you get the idea.  Later, Strobel’s wife contacts the nurse to thank her, and gets invited to her charismatic church.  In short time, she becomes a convert. 
 
Lee is not amused.  He is an atheist because to him, the idea of our once having a god on earth is ridiculous, as is having a god itself.  As the movie progresses, Lee’s atheism becomes a beast.  He belittles his wife and comes near to separating from her.  Finally, he decides to do what good journalists do – investigate the facts.  He is certain he can prove that the Christ story is a myth, and with this indisputable proof convince his wife to leave her madness.  As it turns out, the reverse happens.  Visiting professionals in several fields, he learns that the journalistic evidence for Christ – that is, having hundreds of eye witnesses and numerous historical and biological facts at hand - is overwhelming.  Eventually he …well, I won’t spoil the ending for the reader, although it is not hard to guess, even though the story is, overall, true.
 
The point here being – why was Lee Strobel so upset by his wife’s conversion?  I can say with some certainty that if my wife converted to a belief that I did not share, I would not be concerned unless bad things – like, say, long periods of abstinence or drinking Kool-Aid – were involved. 
 
In the movie, we learn quickly that it is a daddy issue.  He hates his dad, who he believes was cold and unloving in his upbringing.  God the Father and his Son are dad, and dad’s a jerk who broke Lee’s heart.  Therefore, this other Father would also get no respect, no worship, nada, because, as a father, he, too, must be inadequate.  This is not the case with many atheists, whose “problem”, if we see their lack of belief as a problem, is due to an inability to escape from scientific materialism.  But those are the atheists who do not hate.  The haters, the strivers, those who mock and scorn – in these, there seems to exist a deep personal problem. 
 
We can expand on this.  When people react with hatred and violence to issues or others who do not a pose a grave threat, it does seem probable that they are really dealing with an interior issue that has been externalized.   There are causes that require harsh action, but is this true with the fundamentals of America?  And is this true for a non-mandatory belief in God?  As an example: The book, A Handmaiden’s Tale, was written during the Reagan era when it was supposed by his opponents that his silent majority would turn American into a born-again concentration camp.  This did not happen, it did not come close to happening, and really, it was never going to happen.  Yet the fear was real, and still is very much alive today.  It all seems so silly to those who do not have this particular “issue.”
 
But we ALL have psychological issues, including the concepts people who do believe in God have of Him.  We are all scarred and distorted in some way, but I think the effects of that can be moderated with careful insight.  When we hate, does the rationalization for it hold water?  Or, from another perspective, is hate the most effective response, even if what we hate might be worthy of it?  In most cases, probably not.  Hating does not make us feel better in the long run, and probably hurts the very effort being made to bring down what we hate, for others see our darkness more clearly than we do – and know to reject it. 
 
And so we come to the Golden Rule – to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves.  Beneath the surface of that rule we are also advised to understand the ‘other’ as we understand ourselves, for it is only in this way that we can have sympathy for them.  In having sympathy, we cannot have hatred.  We can hate certain aspects of the other’s belief, but in seeing the totality of the human, we cannot harbor hatred towards that other – who is our self in almost every way.  And so we come to treat the other as ourselves – which is not to demonize, to condemn, or to scourge.   
 
Here we find, as is often the case, that the rules of wisdom are called wise for a reason, for if we would extend ourselves to others, we would not develop the complexes that lead to violence.  In so doing, we would not cause others to develop their own complexes.  The cycle would end.   And just like that, we would have a better world.  Easy, simple, and infinitely difficult – as Lee Stobel found.  Sometimes, one needs a laborious – even complex - trip to OZ to find out the basic truth that it all really begins and ends at home.  FK
 


                            

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​Hudson wasn’t the only post copy write author I came across on my last Amazon shopping spree (where my new book can be bought as well – just sayin’).  More famous in the spiritual world is Rudolf Steiner, who bubbled up with Theosophy and Gurdjieff in the cross-cultural rush of spiritualism at the turn of the 19th century.   This one, How to Know Higher Worlds (1909 ed.), means pretty much what the title says.  There are some troubles in it from my perspective, as it instructs one to contact beings of all sorts in the invisible realm, but it largely avoids the horrible pitfalls of another spiritualist of the time, Allister Crowley, whose flirtation with Satanism was as ugly as it sounds.  No – with Steiner we are to expand our love for humanity and all things as we grow, in no way transgressing conventional morality along the way.  We are to avoid the demonic realm.  Just how, I will have to find out on later nights as I finish the book, but there is one peculiarity in his writings that seldom arises in my own contemplation of the spiritual – the importance of colors.
 
Some time ago I wrote a blog about an anthropological paper that speculated that the ancient Greeks could not see the color blue, so much so that they did not have a word for it.  In the Iliad, for instance, the sky is only said to be “bright” – not bright blue, just bright.  Behind the article is the linguists’ theory that one sees or notices only those things that are named.  How new things come into the cultural conscience happens by intercultural contact or changes in perception of a notable personality – that is, a breakthrough by a local genius.  I have argued against this theory in part, but let’s go with it in general, for it is probably true to an extent: we do notice things much more when they have been previously brought to our attention, and most certainly after they have been named. 
 
Steiner takes this much further.  In fact, he may have been the one who popularized the notion of auras – that each one of us (and all things) have an aura of color depending on our – or its - level of consciousness.  Humans would share in some colors, as we take up a particular niche, but also differ in others, as our personalities and levels of consciousness vary. 
 
As with so many things, once we open the box of an idea, it always gets bigger.  For the linguists, they must have at least toyed with the idea that the perception of certain colors might have to do with the level of consciousness of the people in a certain culture.  That is, that a certain intellectual or spiritual capacity must first be reached before a color can come to notice.  This goes beyond what the researchers stated, and for good reason, as it drags one relentlessly toward the spiritual dimension.  But we have to ask: for a people to see blue, what thought process has to change?  The change would not be technological, but an interior one that shaped the conscious itself.  It would have to emanate from some deep realm that those of us unafraid of materialist ridicule call the spiritual realm.  It just might be that Steiner was on to something with his colors.
 
What, then, of the color blue?  What might have changed in the Greek mind for them to be able to perceive it?
 
I would have to pour over the ancient literature and current ethnologies of the world in depth to be able to answer this question with assurance, but the color blue has a very prominent place in our own civilization, which is partly based on ancient Greek culture.  What makes us so different in thought from the Greeks and Romans, however, was the introduction to the West of Judaism and Christianity.  And what is prominent in early Christianity is the color blue.
 
Blue is the sky, and the Judaic concept of Jehovah was as a sky god.  But the Greeks had sky gods as well, sitting way up high on Mt Olympus.   What changed?  I believe it was the concept of women and of the feminine itself – or rather, the recognition of their, and its, importance.  Mediterranean cultures in general had, and still largely have, a deification of the mother coupled with a deprecation of the feminine.  Mom is a saint, but all you other women, pah!  This culture area has long been strongly patriarchal, emphasizing the toughness and strength of the man.  That changed with Christianity.  Suddenly, it was all about love, about understanding, about peace – all the traits of the perfect mother.  It seems to me that Christianity brought femininity out of the house and into the street.  It was Mother Mary herself who was publicly deified for these traits, and her color was…blue.  Virgin blue.  Sky blue; perfect, pure blue. 
 
More facts are needed to prove this particular notion of blue, but since both spiritualists and social scientists agree that color is culturally important and contingent, let’s take the next logical step: that consciousness filters how we perceive the world in general, and in big ways. If our perception of colors is contingent, then so might be our notion of shapes, of natural cycles, and of humans ourselves.  Certainly dogs don’t see us as we see ourselves; could, then, our self-perception and our perception of the fundamentals of the universe change with consciousness? 
 
The Roman Catholic apologist Tertullian stated that we were more or less “angels in training.”  Could this be our higher, more spiritual form?  And could our vision be so altered that the lion will really lay down with the lamb?  To what degree might consciousness actually alter what we can see and do, and decide just how we and the whole world will interact?
 
It is my contention that we are here in the world as we understand it because we share a certain consciousness that forms our world.  The color blue, or the lack of it, could alert us to how true this is.  Somewhere, from a niche in a church or from a bathtub cut in half, the Virgin Mary might be telling us from the holy blue of her robe that we only have to redirect our minds to change the world.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 

 


                            

​I had read of this 19th century British writer, WH Hudson, since way back in grad school.  He had written a book called Green Mansions about the Amazon that anthropologists had found amusing because of its projections of European sensibilities and desires onto the aggregate communities of Amazon Indians.  Lately, I have come upon him again and again in my investigations of the spiritual, and at last I looked him up on our digital Amazon to see what they had on him.  Since he is dead and his works are long past the copy write laws, old Hudson came cheap: 12 of his complete works for $1.99.  Having little to lose, I clicked on it almost as an afterthought.
 
What I met with on reading the first book, A Crystal Age, was both less and more than I had expected.  Less in that I had forgotten just how – let’s say – baroque, or curly-cued the writing of that time and country was.  On and on went each description, and more, on and on went tales of passion, of burnings in the breast, of “lingering melancholy,” and so on.  It was astonishingly boring, although I say this with caution.  I have often looked at my own writing and thought that it, too, presented too many words for what I wished to convey.  I, too, am trapped in the style of my time.  To date, experimental writing has not solved the problem.  Perhaps it will never be solved, as words are only symbols of ideas, but, man, that Victorian era stuff was thick as a Highland brogue.   
 
Back to the point: it was also more than expected, for it broadly and honestly explored religion and spirituality and the human condition.  In A Crystal Age, a young man falls down a hill and is suddenly transported to earth 100,000 years later.  Here, people have learned to live as the Good Book tells us (although without the exclusionary presence of the Good Book), in gentle brotherly love.  Trouble is, most have lost the thorn of sexual passion.  That is where our interloping primitive Englishman comes into the equation.  But there are many other ideas considered as well.  For instance, at one point, our hero hopes for the health of the one ‘mother of the clan’ by proclaiming, “I hope to God that she is relieved of her suffering and regains her health,” (my recall), whereby the father of the clan admonishes him sternly.  (Here, again my recall): “Why would you do that?  Does not our Father know all that is best for us, and is he not the most loving father?  Then why would you ask Him to intercede with one’s life, for it is already as it should be.  If there is pain and sickness, He put it there for our best purpose.”  And so on. 
 
Which brings us exactly to the notion and utility of prayer.  When we read of Jesus when he is in prayer, he does not ask for anything, but rather prays for communion.  It is only after the last supper in Gethsemane when he asks his father to “spare me this bitter cup” but then quickly adds, “but thou will be done.”  Even in the face of agonizing death, his example is to accept what God gives us, for, if we are faithful to Him, it will always be for the best in the long run.
 
Except.  In our studies of the Gospel of Mathew, we read in chapter 7 that God will give us what we pray for, for what father would “give his son a rock instead of a loaf, or a serpent instead of a fish”?  We are to see God as Abba, a generous father, and to openly ask for what we wish. 
 
Many of us have at least heard of this passage before, and probably nearly as many have done what I do upon hearing it: we think, “yeah, sure, and I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya.”  Anyone past the age of 8 knows that we usually do not get what we pray for.  The less bitter among us tell ourselves that, well, God gives us what is best for us, not what we THINK is best for us - which is as true for us as it was for Jesus in that one moment when he wished to live and not suffer.  But by this, then, do we learn that we should only pray for communion ith God and never for anything or anyone?
 
A once-famous Catholic Archbishop whose name I cannot recall said, “When I pray, the coincidences in my life increase.  When I do not, they decrease.”  Not of great eloquence, that, which, considering WH Hudson, is probably good, for it gets us straight to the point.  This is not about us getting only what God wants for us from his far-away mansion in the sky, nor is it about us getting that pony we always wanted for Christmas.  Rather, prayer – getting in touch with the holy – keeps us in touch with the holy.  In so doing, we are connected with the deeper mechanisms of things, such that “coincidences” keep occurring.  These coincidences are not lucky accidents – rather, they are connections with other things that we suddenly begin to see.  These were there all along, these connections, but in seeing them, we begin to understand better the nature of our existence, and in doing so, our desires gradually begin to coincide with the greater reality.  This is mysterious, but also easy to understand, for in seeing how our lives are connected to so much more, our notion of our place in the universe changes.  We then do not care for, or do not care as much for, that pony or that sports car or that perfect mate.  Why should we, when the whole universe seems to be bending itself towards us?  We understand that by losing the soul to gain the earth, we lose almost everything.  With this, our desires change, to say the least.
 
The Gospels always tell us that it is the man of faith who is favored, and it must be this man who Jesus is talking about.  But this man does not accept what God gives him on faith alone.  Rather, in prayer, in meditation, he learns more about what he is in the cosmos, and as he grows, he learns better how to pray, and what to pray for.  As he grows, his prayers become more effective – but his desires also become more in line with the cosmic order, for that is what gives him greater and greater pleasure as it comes into his life.  So it might be that at first, when this man prays for a fish or a loaf, he may only get the bitter opportunity to work overtime at his crumby job.   Then coincidences begin to happen, ones that may or may not work to his benefit, but which give him greater insight.  In time, the fish and the loaf loose much of their importance, just as a dent in the new car would suddenly fade in light of, say, a discovery of a terminal disease by the doctor.  The smaller is always swallowed by the greater, and with that, our prayers change. 
 
For the most part, I’m still at the wishing- for- a -pony level, but that link with coincidences gave me the clue.  Yes, realizing that an invisible and powerful force is working in our lives is a real game-changer.  Everything else begins to look small in comparison.  And with that, everything starts to come together – faith, prayer, and – perhaps – prayers answered.  No pony for Christmas, maybe, but instead a stocking full of divine knowledge, wonder and awe.  I pray that this is what I’d pray for, and what I’d get after the pony got old.   FK
 
 


 

 


                            

​Thanksgiving has not made me proud of myself.  It has been years since I watched so much TV, and the feeling of vegging out – and not eating vegetables – lingers still as an embarrassment to my character.  But just as it was not solely Adam’s fault for eating of the forbidden fruit, so my boorish behavior can be directly attributed to two temptations: football and Sherlock Holmes.  Of the former, well, that has long been the case.  They were, after all, setting up the college bowl games.  But Sherlock was something new- and as diabolical as Moriarty.  
 
It began with a fairly innocuous purchase  - that of Netflix, for a reason so simple now that it is not worth mentioning.  And it was as we sat around fat and stuffed and bored on Thanksgiving night that we explored its possibilities.  And it was I – I believe it was I – who noticed that they offered Sherlock and I said, “The Sherlock Holmes series!  Jim told me about that.  Let’s give it a try.”  It is now Tuesday morning and we must have watched 15 hours of Sherlock since that fateful day.  I would have watched more if my wife had not turned off the system at 11:30 PM saying, “that’s enough!” I was mad then, but grateful now. 
 
I had loved the Sherlock Holmes stories as a middle-schooler, trying to be as smart as him then, and I have found that now I am doing the same thing.  I want to be brilliant like Sherlock.  I want to let public opinion and normal superficial social niceties, vagaries, and outright lies fall by the wayside as things too small and petty for such a great mind as mine.  And of course, I want to win.   Yes, I still want to be Sherlock.  I am still a nerd at heart and it is apparent that none of life’s tough lessons have really pried me from nerd pride.   Ten pounds heavier after Thanksgiving and wheezing from the weight of it, I have met myself again.  But the pride is now dropping away, for I am beginning to understand that Sherlock isn’t so smart after all, even if he is way, way smarter than I.
 
For one thing, he is a fictional character who is supposed to be a genius, but is created by a writer or writers, who are not geniuses, at least in the Sherlock way.  In other words, they make up a lot of stuff to make him look like a genius.  But there is much more and less to it than that. 
 
Elon Musk stated five years ago that we would be taken over by AI (artificial intelligence) robots within five to ten years.  That has not happened, but he is insistent that it will happen soon, certainly within a generation.  He has said that it is already too late to stop it – that AI is so much smarter than we are that it will pass us by, and eventually eliminate us, as HAL almost did in “2001 – A Space Odyssey.” The only solution, he claims, is to become AI ourselves – that is, to insert an artificial neural web into our brains so that we can get immediate and unlimited information, too, just like our robots. 
 
Now, Musk might be a genius in his own way, but this is the stupidest idea I have heard in a long time, for two reasons: one - the more obvious one - that by inserting computers into our brain we will open ourselves up to be controlled by computers in such a way that the minions of North Korea would look like free- thinking Bohemian artists in comparison.  Horrible idea, for that alone.  More important, however, is reason number 2, dealing with the nature of the information itself. 
 
In the series with Sherlock, when he is putting together his “deductions” we are shown graphics that appear in his mind as if he were a computer.  His thinking is lightning fast and leaves no detail unturned.  He can figure out nearly every situation or person in no time at all – including what one’s habits are and who is sleeping with whom.  But just as Sherlock is really made by a normal IQ writer, so these “genius” AI robots are made by people only using one element of intelligence.  Simply put, the programmers can’t transfer the depth of their own programming into the robots, but only the perception of that intelligence from the outside – like someone explaining language from a grammar book alone, rather than presenting it truly in all its social subtleties as well as from the un-relatable unconscious level.  Thus, the robots are and will always be LESS than their creators, no matter how fast they can compute.
 
And more.  The AI people would argue that their robots are programmed to learn, and thus could overcome the problem mentioned above, just as a human would.  I doubt it, but let’s go with that.  Still, the robots could never think outside the capability of their software (and their hardware, which is also based on specific concepts).  This software was made for strictly rational purposes.  It does not carry the capacity to appreciate beauty, or wonder, or awe or gratitude.  It might be taught to simulate it, but it could never have it, inside; that is, it could never have a soul.  Leaving besides the deeper spiritual repercussions, it could therefore never get inspiration, which comes from ----well, nowhere, as far as our rational mind is concerned.  Rather, inspiration, true genius, comes from the same area (for lack of a better word) as does wonder, awe and beauty.  And even these are subsumed by all the possibilities that make up the human potential, about whose source we haven’t a clue.  Since we cannot even imagine that source, we certainly cannot manage that source for programming.    
 
Robots, then, would have an extremely limited reality base, one that must abide by our own very limited concept of reason – that is, by the type of thought that we can use to  manipulate our current concept of the universe - which certainly is not the ultimate concept of the universe.  
 
In more poetic and spiritual words – and more accurate ones – the robots would not only have no soul, but they would have no genius, no voice from nowhere that could leap across analytical thinking to bring absolutely novel ideas based on absolutely novel reasoning.  While the robots would, like Sherlock, be so much faster and more efficient than we are in our normal world, they could not transcend it.  They would be much better at it, but still, they could not transcend it.  We, on the other hand, could and probably will have new insights that will make such AI obsolete – and in a fairly short period of time.
 
That does not mean that AI is without risks.  It can be programmed to operate as soldiers, and be programmed with the artificial desire – that is, the coded aim – to dominate the world.  But it would operate on a premise about reality that is not whole and that is static within a certain plane of possibilities.  If it did not dominate us fast, we would kill it; we would eventually outsmart it and win. 
 
But here I go again, trying to be Sherlock with all my fancy reasoning, which is so difficult to present verbally exactly because our understanding can take us beyond normal reasoning.  Rather, perhaps it is simply enough to know that we are programmed by a designer who can not only make the universe, but all the laws thereof, and all the potential thoughts and concepts ever.  We could never be that designer; even at our very best, we could never top the works of the original designer – which include us.  Musk, I’m afraid, has fallen victim to the sin of pride – or at least has been trapped by his own conditioning to such an extent that he cannot see how simple it really is.  Elementary, my dear Watson.  FK 
 
 
  
 
   
 
 
 

​“I’m learning to fly/ but I don’t have wings./ Coming down/ is the hardest thing.”  Tom Petty
 
I am taking a Bible study class on Mathew, and as part of the lessons, we listen to about an hour of a guy on video giving us minute details of nearly every word.  It sounds dull, but it is not, as the connections with everything else we know bring a thrill of discovery.  On the latest one, however, the video wouldn’t play.  Rather, it got stuck at the beginning, where one is supposed to push the “play” button, but it took several minutes before someone could figure it out, and so we were subject to hearing the opening guitar piece play over and over.  It didn’t take long for me to discover that it followed the tune “Learning to Fly” almost to a tee, which made me giddy with suppressed laughter.  Here I was, all pious and earnest, listening to a song about heroin use.  As with much humor, it was the incongruity of it that made it funny.  That no one else seemed to take notice made it even funnier.
 
Then, I had to think again: why was it so incongruous?  The picture in my mind summed it up: the contrast of a bunch of dirty, skinny addicts sharing needles in a flop house with a gaggle of old fogies brushed clean and properly attentive in a church.  But do these physical aspects make us so different?  Weren’t we, really, both trying to get to the same place?  
 
Heaven.  Tom Petty made at least one other song about heroin use, “Free Falling,” and it is clear that for him, heroin was about reaching a higher plane.  We normally think of addicts as those who wish to escape reality, but, given our normal state of sobriety, isn’t the church- goer and meditator trying to do the same thing?  Aren’t we all dissatisfied with normal life, attempted to find something better?  Aren’t we all trying to reach the place that something deep inside tell us exists, that place that brings fullness and joy to life?   
 
Way back in that time of hippies and war and protests and transcendental meditation, millions of us tried the same thing, except with the non-addictive mind-bending psychedelics, and many of us found heaven, or at least something close to it.  Trouble is, it didn’t stick.  Knowing what I know now, the presumption that we could reach a permanent plateau of enlightenment with drugs strikes me as the height of arrogance and ignorance.  We thought that the mind only needed the veil to be pulled aside for us to go “ah-ha!” and there we would be, where Elijah and Moses stood, without all the hoopla.   Trouble is, we need all the hoopla.  Trouble is, we are so wedded to this mundane reality that we need to actually use all of our will, never mind grace, to give us a chance at escaping gravity.   Learning to fly means learning WHY we are stuck where we are, and then working out that problem. 
 
Yes, we need grace, too, that gift from God that allows us our final lift-off velocity, but the trouble with grace is that it IS a gift that cannot be forced.  We can make ourselves ready, we can facilitate its arrival with spiritual practice, but we cannot force the hand of God. Or maybe we can – maybe this is what drugs are for.  Maybe, after proper study and meditation and self-discipline, we can use one drug or another to replace grace.  I hold this possibility open, although all drugs carry risks.  Still, it is more theoretical than real, this possibility, because one thing is usually missing from the motivation of this type of seeker.  Selflessness. 
 
Does Tom Petty ever mention helping mankind by his shooting up?  Does he think he is spreading the love when he is in a nod in his hotel room?  In “Free Falling” he talks about being the bad boy, letting his good, God-fearing girlfriend down as he cruises the streets of LA looking for, and using, heroin.   He slightly mocks her for her all-American personality, but he also recognizes his own selfishness, and how he is letting any chance at a good life go through his drug use – and hurting those who love him.  He recognizes that the drug has taken all his attention, everyone else be damned.  He is gentle about it – he does not want to hurt anyone.  But it is out of his hands.  By trying to get to heaven, he has taken a detour to even greater dependency on the things of this world.  He has taken the proverbial wrong turn. 
 
This may, indeed, be the greatest test of one’s path.  While it is true that Jesus said to leave family, everything, aside to seek Him, what was meant – or so it seems to me – was that nothing should come between oneself and God, not family, not culture, not mammon, nothing.  But in coming to God, we also are led to understand that in doing so, we are admitting our communion with all of humankind, on whom we should, we must, have compassion.   It is the way of truth, for whatever reason, that enlightenment brings concern for other beings.   That is not the way of drugs, or certainly is not after the initial euphoria.  
 
And so, the contrast.  There is more than one way to get to heaven, and winning the lottery through grace is one of them.  But not through drugs, not on a daily-living basis.  Real life-changing compassion is the key life-style effect of enlightenment, and sneaking around alleyways looking for a fix, after selling the family silverware to get the money, does not bring us there.  Too bad, Tom – I understand your need.  I want the easy way, too, but it won’t come except through the lottery of grace.  Otherwise, we have to work at it.  Just like everything else in this world, learning to fly takes a lot more than just wanting to.  FK
  
 
   
 

​They’ve been running a series on the Vietnam War and the attendant political movements in the US on PBS lately, and my wife tunes into it regularly.  I, on the other hand, pass it by quickly on my way upstairs to read.  This is what I normally do when the tube is on, academic snob that I am (except for a good football game) but with the Vietnam War special, I walk – no run – especially fast.  It does not matter what element is on display at the time – the Tet Offensive, or slices of Woodstock – I still can’t stand it.  Last night, I saw the cops in Chicago clubbing protesters at the Democratic National Convention of 1968 with astonishing zeal, something that we would never see today, and on I ran.  No, I do not need to relive that. 
 
Which is funny, since I wrote an entire book, Dream Weaver, based on the immediate aftermath of that war.  As a matter of fact, it is with the war that the book began – what caused the US culture of victory, hatched from WW 1 and 11, to slide into one of self-doubt and, in many ways, self-annihilation - and it is because of this latter point that perhaps the era might now sicken me.  Perhaps writing the book was a sort of catharsis, a self-cleansing that I was throwing out to the world, which I know it was.  But the book was also something more- a look ahead to a possible new age, one with serious distractions and doubts to be sure, but with a new something that might someday get a head of steam and deliver us to another, and better, trajectory.    
 
The war era itself, though, brought much of something else.  As I look at the grainy photos, of the burning rice paddies in Vietnam and the side-burned youthful rebels in Chicago and elsewhere, I do not see hope, but rather the mess and hatred and loathing of a particular era.  In that time I was too young, missing mandatory military enlistment by a year, but the impact, the feeling of the time weighed heavily.  I thought then that I was having fun, being a rebel and getting high, but I can see now by my reaction to the documentary that it was much more about trauma than fun, much more about denial than facing what was really happening.  America was falling apart.  Not just from the military involvements, not just from the recent civil rights protests, but from everything and everywhere.  Everything was not only being brought into question, but being ridiculed and tramped upon, just like so many American flags at the protest rallies.  For a teenager who had first been raised in the old America of traditional values and patriotism, it was, in the end, truly traumatic.  
 
I know that now.  It is true that when civilizations crumble, it usually starts from within, but it is the barbarians from without who finish the job.  In America, that was not the case; within was strong, but it had serious divisions formed from its own guiding principles of free speech and free thought – and the desire for perfect justice.  But there is no perfect justice in this world, and everything is, at one level or another, superficial in the face of this perfection.  In light of the seemingly-endless Asian war, the self-criticism hit home, and we would never be happily chauvinistic again – as all other successful civilizations have been. 
 
Collapse.   Freefall.  We have joined the rest of the West, which decided it hated itself some time ago due to corrupt colonialism and two hideous wars. 
 
Again, I am drawn to the big question: annihilation or New Age?  And again, I am forced to look to the spiritual, for if there are not spiritual guiding principles, as so many now believe, there really is no hope.   If there is no spiritual guidance, then there is NO justice, NO truth, NO evolution of consciousness.  All, then, is man-made, morality and principles only products of the interests of those who hold the greatest power.  The Romans understood this.  They had principles, all right, but might was the greatest principle, victory being the one and only true signifier of truth.  We forget that now.  We think that the perfection of the principles that Christian Europe forged is humanity’s ultimate goal because our sense of justice seems naturally right to us, but it does not seem right to the North Koreans or to the Taliban or to the mainland Chinese.  In fact, all human societies are wrong if you believe in the now-standard evolutionary model of randomness. If this is true, then you must believe that, in the end, we are literally going nowhere.  Without the spiritual, there is no truth and there is no positive evolution of consciousness.
 
Which is why depression and suicide are ever increasing.  Many young people, too cynical and too smart to believe in the current political and scientific dogmas, see nothing but gray ahead, at best, and complete destruction, at worst.  The spiritual to them is a chimera as well, for if our cultural values are so false that they are falling apart, then how can invisible spiritual powers avoid the same fate?  
 
And yet, with a slight change in perspective, it is obvious that this is a spiritual universe.  I can name all the easy things – how did we come from nothing, why do we evolve into more complex organisms, how does self-consciousness arise from gross matter? – but there are always clever answers to anything.  Really, though, spiritual reality is about human experience.  Theologian Mathew Fox said that mysticism is about trusting our experience, and that is a wise and great observation.  All of reality is based on a shared trust, that what most see is real, and this includes the spiritual.  Nearly all, if not all, have had spiritual experiences.  It is only in denying them as “real” that they are given no importance.   Give them importance.  Our religious traditions help us parse the imaginary and insane from the spiritual, but after that, it is up to us to believe in what we experience.  In this is everything – our culture, our hope, our future, everything that makes life worth living.  In the gifts of the spirit – in the perception of beauty, in the patterns of nature, in the love of family and more, we are told that we are part of something greater.  We have all experienced this.  We only have to be subjective scientists, true to the call for proof, to understand that the sense of greatness in existence that all or most experience, is experienced because it is real.   So, be a mystic; believe in your experience and just maybe save the world.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 

 

​The timing was crucial.  Vicki was to have her operation on the 14th, which I had to be at and after that, too; but there were also other meetings, one maybe that could be skipped but not both, and one was Thursday and the other, the weekend.  Then there was the snow; the deep snow in the lake-affect snow belt of the UP usually started in the 20’s of November.  Thanksgiving was in the early 20’s this year, so that time was out, too.  So the trip had to be taken in the next few days, no excuses.
 
My friend Al, who was supposed to go, had his excuse, and I don’t blame him.  No, he wouldn’t be going with me to the UP in cloudy, cold, barren November to a little cabin with no running water or electricity, no showers or Packer’s games, and as much as he would be missed, that was OK with me.  Ah, solitude; I needed it as much as I needed festivities and drinking and people laughing, needed that other side with its depth and its real-ness, the no BS of the prison-house of self when it quiets and expands into something else, something that touches the nerve of the wilderness.  I needed it, but needed to drive there first, and all of that depended on just when the snow would come.
 
A few weeks out, they said there would be no snow, and anyway, I did not know then of my stingy time line; by a few days out, when I knew of my tight window of opportunity, they said it would be three to six inches.  There would be no plowing on the last four miles of road, and of course none for the remaining half mile of trail to the cabin, but I had a Jeep.  In the ads, Jeeps climb mountains, and I would only climb a mountain with someone else’s Jeep.  Still, mine was a Jeep, and three to six inches was doable, even for so long distance.  I could also leave earlier if I heard of a change of weather, as inconvenient as that would be. 
 
The next morning, I packed for the North in my usual frenzy that always left something behind, and six and one half hours later, there I was at the cabin, the ferns now gray and lifeless and matted to the ground, the trees stark and bony, the chill touching at freezing.  A shiver went through me then as it always does this time of year when I go up alone, a slight trembling in anticipation of the dark hours of loneliness to come, which would cause some complaint and discomfort before the good stuff came, the relief of the burden of the social self.  It is the deeper self that demands it, but like a cleansing fast, solitude requires a discipline that is hard to muster.  A determination must be made.  Here, though, it was easier: either stick with it or drive hour after hour back home.  The decision to stay had always been easy. 
 
Until that night, when I took out the little weather radio and cranked up its battery before flipping it on.  I caught it in mid-report, as it said in its mechanical voice, “… up to 19 inches in some places.  A storm warning means that it will be difficult or impossible to drive…”   Oh no.  I listened and cranked to keep the battery alive as it went through the marine report: “Up to 15 foot waves and gale winds up to 47 knots…” and then waited for the land forecast to come around again.  Yes, it said, the lake effect snow would begin the following night and continue for a day and a half, its fury, as usual, pointed right at the wilderness spot where the cabin sat – a wilderness spot for a reason, for few wanted to live in the annual path of such snows.  Maybe I could stay the next night and drive out before the snow was too deep?  But if I got caught, the mess, the expense…and I had that surgery and a wife who depended on my being there.  Oh no.
 
I left early the following afternoon, and in doing so, left a hole at my center that has yet to be filled – or more accurately, left a jumble of knots at my center that had not been cleared out to make a hole.  The time spent alone in the car, then at the cabin, had simply not been enough.  The purgation was incomplete, the drive almost for nothing. 
 
I have been reading lately about angels, of all things.  If we believe in them at all, we love them as our protectors and as our earth –to- heaven connectors, but they have been traditionally so much more.  Thomas Aquinas, who is still the primary “doctor” of the Catholic Church, wrote on and on about them, and what he says is surprising – that they take no space, although they can take on human form for our sake at will; and that they take no time, being able to be in one spot and then another without traversing space.  Some quantum physicists have related these qualities to the photon, which as a wave is everywhere and eternal, but as a particle is localized and limited.  Interesting and perhaps profound, but as a laymen of such things, what interested me most was his description of their voices: a choir of joyous song to the creator (and creation) that we can hear in the silent spaces of our mind.  How can a heavenly choir sing in silence? 
 
The better question is, how could they not?  Aquinas himself fell ill in the last year of his life, saying as he came out of a spell that all that he wrote, all the thousands and thousands of pages of brilliant discourse on heaven and God and doctrine, was as straw to the truth – to what he now understood without discourse - that is, in silence.  He seldom spoke again for his remaining year and would not write, not even to finish his Theologica, for he had found the silent choir of angels and knew, then, that discourse is nothing when confronted with the rousing glory of eternal silence.  There, we find knowledge; there we find the peace and fulfillment that our busy lives had been so frantically trying to construct, and so fruitlessly.  There, in heavenly silence, we find that the voices of the wisest are as straw, and the silence of the lowliest simpleton is as the angels’.
 
That was my hole, then, what was left behind to escape the blizzard – the hole, one could say, that I sought in the comparative nothingness of the wilderness.  But that was not a loss, either, not really, for it has brought me here to understand the loss.  Maybe I had taken it for granted; maybe, even, I had not really understood its blessing.  For now once again, I do, as the real hole, the bleak emptiness that is not THE hole but an overfull drawer of stuff, reminds me of where it is that the real “stuff” is, where the real chorus of angels can be heard.  In silence; in silence that brings awareness, that brings astonishment, that brings praise, that brings the choir that cannot be heard but can be, too, vibrating not in the ears but in every cell within that goes out and out, beyond even the storm- filled skies.  FK
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 

 

​It is another one of those trips from my teen years that comes back to haunt me, usually in dreams.  I am standing before the 200 foot cliff of the trap rock quarry, already a hundred feet up from the road, far into illegal company property.  You are not supposed to go there, even when they aren’t working, because they use explosives and there are loose rocks and heavy equipment and maybe a stray blasting cap lying around to take off the arms of high school ferrets like ourselves, but we are there anyway.  We are tripping on what the dealer called mescaline, but whatever it is, it is working, and there are the cliffs.  Up up they go, seams of quartz or sandstone or what -have -you sending brightness from the otherwise dark-purple heftiness of the brittle-hard trap rock that the quarry masters crush for highways and driveways.  The cliff speaks, almost human but never either, never human, but still almost in a voice that can be heard: “I am old, old, old.  I have seen the dinosaurs come and go.  You are small, small, looking at me, sensing age that I cannot sense.”  It feels what we feel, we feel what it feels, and it is us in eternity, blown away, sent out there – out to be scared and amazed. 
 
I wake from such dreams just like that, a little scared and a bit more amazed as the feeling runs through me like the seams in the rock, and then I recall the real trip, so way, way back in time.  It was different then.  I stood with my friends beneath that cliff with the fool’s laughter gone as it got too real, too seriously real.  One of them, a tall jock popular with the ladies and always cool, pulls out a piece of paper with a cartoon on it.  It is of a goofy man wearing striped shorts who has his prickly-haired scrotum hanging out below one cuff, and his penis hanging below the other.  Beneath the picture it reads, “Why I don’t wear Bermuda shorts,” and it would have been funny just an hour ago, but it is not now.  Still, it is funny in not being funny, and others of us laugh at the stupidity of thinking that it is funny, unable to stop even as the popular jock is humiliated in a way that he never is.  He tries to hand someone else the cartoon, saying “here, I don’t want it, you can have it,” his lie, his attempt to save face, now a tortured truth, too much to take, too much to not laugh at.  It is horribly uncomfortable but hilarious, too, because we can sense what is happening.  We are losing our common humanity.  We hear the rock speak, telling us of its age, letting us feel eternity as it never could by itself.  Our laughter dries up.  All else is pretense.  Life is intense.  This is not an interlude, a juvenile rebellion with drugs, not anymore.  It is real, and it is heavy, heavy as this towering cliff of incomprehensible age.
 
There is a movie with William Hurt – “Altered States” - about a scientist who takes peyote and then lies in a deprivation chamber, one of those iron coffins filled with water where you feel, see, or hear nothing.  In doing this, he begins to travel back in evolutionary time, so much so that he actually changes his DNA for a while to become primitive man.  But it does not stop there; the progression continues, until he is drawn down to single cell life, then into the primordial soup, then into exploding matter, and finally into the singularity of the Big Bang itself.  He is losing his mind, until his estranged wife shows him care, concern – love.  We find that this is what was missing from the whole equation, and what is essential for our sanity.  Could this be Hollywood’s admittance of a loving God behind creation, or is it a call only to love while alive, for ‘ye shall all perish into nothing in the end’?
 
The question remains, held dangling as the two come together, and I am brought to remember the cliff again.  The rock knew no love; time knew no love.  Rather, it was all awe, all   fearsome, terrifying, the stuff of warriors and the mystical way.  The joke was only funny in that it was stupid, and then even that thought was stupid, squalid human flotsam that has no more to do with reality than a strand of straw in an immense prairie.  
 
But this is not the answer either – we are not to be somber Pharisees standing above fools and infidels.  Jesus drank wine at the wedding of Cana and perhaps, no certainly, he danced or sang or both.   The Buddha plays tricks, the Master laughs at our struggles, and things happen in life that are miracles but useless, mere coincidences or strokes of luck that make us laugh or puzzle.  Is it love that does this?  Or is it that the universe is also us, thinking through us, feeling as we do, for it cannot feel for itself?  Is it that our fear can change to laughter, and in that light the dark horror of infinite space?  Is it that the terror of the seas might also be our playground, a nest for children and lovers?  Is it also that God, what we sense in the eternal, could be both horrible and loving, both hard flint and gentle parent? 
 
Certainly yes, I think, for in my mind the cliff still rises cold and terrible, speaking of ancient things steeped in mystery; but the comic, the little scrap of paper with crudely drawn genitals, is no longer just a joke on the jock.  It is just itself, a stupid joke, and now, sometimes, I can feel the cliff and hear the joke, stupid but funny in its stupidity, and humanity returns.  Not just “why not,” I think, but of course; of course we are stupid, snarling and sniping and angling for this or that, but that does not take away our eternity.  We are dying fools but immortal too, and it is not only the fool who laughs, but the wise man as well.   We measure what is given us and then give back, and it is never enough.  We laugh because we know this, and in this knowing we learn more about what we fear, which is what we do not know.  It is through us that even the rocks cry out, surprised as we are that they exist, and there we meet.  So strange, so wonderful, so mind-blowing that even a god might dance, and even we might laugh.    FK 
 
  
 
 
           
 
 
 
  
 
 
 

​
​Nothing is easier than criticizing the present in view of the past, and with education it is sooo easy.  In my day, when color TVs were expensive and huge because they were filled with vacuum tubes, we read a smidgen of (ancient) classic literature and a slew of the contemporary greats that were esteemed as such for their depth.  We did not know then what depth was, but they tried to teach us.  Nowadays, kids are taught social justice through novels and biographies that have no depth whatsoever – what you see is what you get, and what you get is the prevailing ruling class’s idea of what is socially correct. 
 
But my generation of dinosaurs could also be found wanting.  Until the public school system took over education in the latter half of the 19th century, most people who got an education were taught literature from the Greek and Roman classics, and from the Bible.  By my time, the real classics were thought a bit stogy and perhaps irrelevant, and the Bible, an affront to our non-religious citizens.   Too bad, for it has taken me until the last decade of my life to understand that the classics and the Bible truly formed modern western thought, a way of thinking that, like it or not, brought the western European nations to dominate the world.  The two were both necessary and worked in tandem: the classics to perfect western logic – which has given rise to our technological world – and the Bible to give us individual moral conscience and, with it, depth.
 
Depth, layers, relationships, levels – these are words to specify that what we see is not what we get; rather, we learn that what we see is only what we are capable of seeing, given our knowledge and mindset, and that this mindset can expand and expand, growing from the previous level.  From this, we learn that we ourselves have tremendous depth and, finally, might be nothing less than a microcosm of the universe.  To bring us to this point, nothing in the Western world can compare to the Bible.  
 
Here is an example, learned from my Bible class on the gospel of Mathew:
 
To begin the greatest part of his ministry, Jesus was first baptized by John the Baptist and then went on his famous sojourn into the desert where he fasted for 40 days and 40 nights.  At the end of this time, he was enticed by the devil who played upon his hunger, his pride and his loyalty in an attempt to steal him away from his “abba,” God the Father.  Jesus quoted from scripture at each of his 3 temptations, denying the devil his triumph. 
 
This is all we usually learn in Sunday school, which fits the intellectual level of a child: turn away from temptation and do what Mom and Dad – and their moral lessons – tell you.  But, as the tele-commercials tell us, “there’s more!”
 
40 days – this dovetails with the 40 days that Moses spent in meditation on Mount Sinai at the border of the promised land, and the 40 years that Israel wandered the desert after turning back from their goal (in defiance of God.  It also reiterates the 40 days that Noah spent on the ark, but that is one level too deep for this discussion).   And the three temptations: In Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people at the end of their wanderings how they failed before God three times – once, when they grumbled about food (hunger), another when they demanded water (in this case, pride, because they thought they deserved it as God’s chosen people), and the third when they worshipped the golden calf (one must have loyalty to God alone).  Thus, Jesus’s three temptations.  The scriptures used by Jesus to refute the devil were taken from Deuteronomy as well, nailing this reiteration – and this interpretation - to the door.  So we are shown that Jesus’s trials mirrored Israel’s journey, with one significant – THE significant – difference: Jesus passed the tests.  In such, he was not only reiterating the history of Israel in his own body and life, but was also signaling that he had come to fulfill the promise made by God to Israel – that through him, Israel would gain dominance of the world through a peaceful kingdom.  As we know from history, the fulfillment was more than Israel could understand, for it sought a kingdom in the then- prevalent mode of material dominance. 
 
We could go on and on from here, and others could take us much further still, but this is enough, I think, to make the point: that from the Bible we learn that what meets the eye is not what is really running the show; that life itself is much more than this “material kingdom;” and that our own lives are also reiterations of creation and the cosmos itself, just as Jesus’s life mirrored Israel’s history.  More concretely, we see that our lives are dramas where our limited, material selves (the devil) comes to do battle with the higher, God-connected self (the son of God, or children of God as we all are).  All of which gives us an interior morality beyond the tribal  morality of Law, forming in us a sense of individualism, responsibility, and depth that manifests itself as the conscience – which is, in itself, a more expansive form of thought. 
 
Thus, whether we now study the Bible or not, our mode of consciousness has been altered by it none the less.  I might also add that this expansive form of thought might just be the trampoline that is needed for the human race to bounce to the next level, which might just be a world kingdom based on peace, maintained not by force but by willful adherence to God. 
 
Which is just a thought.  But depth, yes - the Bible would tell us more about the continued struggle to achieve this world of peace, but for now, I admit to being astonished by learning what true depth there is in this foundational book.  One might not accept the Bible’s teachings or prophecies at all, but anyone can see that what it tells us has made it self-evident that we are much more than we seem – or at least that we are capable of understanding much more than we currently do, not only in information but in our manner – in our depth – of understanding.  The logic of the Classics have given us the tools, but the Bible has given us the sense of destiny, of why we struggle to move on, to improve, to grow in the first place.  Fascinating stuff.  FK