tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-184024082024-03-23T12:17:44.246-07:00Quigley in ExileAsk yourself, "What would Special Agent Dale Cooper do?"Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.comBlogger52125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1149119622840317532006-05-31T16:53:00.000-07:002006-06-04T15:41:22.960-07:00Winter Light<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Dali%20The%20second%20coming%20of%20Christ%20edited.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Dali%20The%20second%20coming%20of%20Christ%20edited.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>This blog is about a change in the West. Varied swamis have paved the way. Considered here are Dante, Rabbi Loeb, Madame Blavatsky, Einstein, William Butler Yeats, Wolfgang Pauli, Neils Bohr, Andre Breton, Rene Magritte, <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/work-in-progress-prelude-to-orange.html">Salvador Dali</a>, C.G. Jung, The Beatles, the Apollo astronauts, Lao Tsu, Tolstoy, <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2006/01/rough-draft-aquarian-mandala.html">Black</a><a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2006/01/rough-draft-aquarian-mandala.html"> Elk</a> (at right, below), <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2006/01/age-of-thomas.html">Neo</a>, the 14th Dalai Lama, Kurt Cobain, George Lucas and <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/rebbes-farewell-steven-spielbergs.html">Stephen</a><a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/rebbes-farewell-steven-spielbergs.html"> Spielberg</a>. The most recent to appear is J.J. Abrams, creator of <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> (see below), but others haven’t arrived yet. <span style=""> </span>Dreams, the deepest and truest stories, are generally silent stories told in pictures and this blog has much to do with dreams. In blogworld, this story can be told in pictures as well. As is the nature of blogs, it begins at<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/black%20elk%20new.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/black%20elk%20new.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> the other end, <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/10/dreaming-north-south-where-are.html">here</a>, and ends below. But blog is its own literary form and genre and has its own life force so click <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/particles-and-waves-countries-divide.html">here</a> (Cities are Particles and Waves and So Are People) or <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/zen-quilting-why-i-love-indiana.html">here</a> (Zen Quilting) or <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/salvador-dalis-visionary-texas-who-was.html">here</a> (Salvador Dali's Dream of the Second Coming of Christ as a Buddhist monk emerging from the Christ wound of Pegasus, the Aquarian awakener - at left, above) or start anywhere you like, as is the custom in blogworld.Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1149119306087236062006-05-31T16:43:00.000-07:002008-12-06T02:44:31.707-08:00Free as a Bird: John Lennon's Unfinished Journey<span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">On the 25th Anniversary of His Death</span><br /><p class="MsoNormal"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/john%20and%20yoko.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/john%20and%20yoko.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="font-family:Garamond;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"Is it not written in your law . . . you are gods?" John 10:34</span></span></i></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i style=""><span style="font-family:Garamond;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"The crosses are all full," said the lay brother.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"Then we must make another cross. If we do not make an end of him another will, for who can eat and sleep in peace while men like him are going about the world?"</span> - </span></i></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:85%;" >"The Crucifixion of the Outcast," Celtic tale retold by William Butler Yeats in <span style="font-style: italic;">Mythologies</span></span><i style=""><span style="font-family:Garamond;"><br /></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:Garamond;">"Zen demands intelligence and will-power, as do all the greater things which desire to become real.</span></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >" These are the words of C. G. Jung in the introduction to D.T. Suzuki’s <i style="">An Introduction to Zen Buddhism</i>. Jung’s words and observations would win him a place top row center, right next to Edgar Allen Poe, on the cover of <i style="">Sgt. Peppers</i>.<span style=""> </span>In the 1950s Suzuki was always referred to as Dr. Suzuki – much as Richard Gere is referred to as only Richard today by Tibetan Buddhists. It is kind of an honorarium, a title. Dr. Suzuki was a solid forefather on the path East and one of the very first learned Masters to come from <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">the East</st1:place></st1:country-region> to the West. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/DTSuzuki.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/DTSuzuki.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In the 1950s he taught at <st1:placename st="on">Columbia</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">University</st1:placetype> and was a celebrity in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York City</st1:place></st1:city>, an exotic but common monk with a great smile and a pure vision of Zen. Personal experience is everything in Zen, said Dr. Suzuki. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing in experience. <i style="">Mystification is far from being the object of Zen itself, but to those who have not touched the central fact of life Zen inevitable appears as mystifying. Penetrate through the conceptual superstructure and what is imagined to be a mystification will at once disappear, and at the same time there will be an enlightenment known as</i> satori.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Dr. Suzuki talked straight: personal experience is everything in Zen. The purpose of life is love. I’m not sure if John Lennon read these words but perhaps his wife, Yoko Ono, did. She was a key figure in the <i style="">avant garde </i>art scene in <st1:city st="on">New York City</st1:city> at the time and had been in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state> for a long time, even as a student at Sarah Lawrence. She was well known as a conceptual artist before she met John Lennon, and lived and worked in the same realm as people like John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. These would be the first people in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state> to listen to Dr. Suzuki.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The art students were always the first to catch on, and John Lennon and his friend Stu Sutcliffe were the art students who started The Beatles. They were like pilot fish for the rest of us who were born at the end of the war and it was quite a large school of fish. 40 million people. All our fathers had been warriors. We were all the same age and born within months of one another, conceived by men who had been a long time without women, directly on return from war in Asia and <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >For us it was a bristling, exciting respite between childhood and adulthood and we were interested in new things. There were no teachers around to deflect our learning, no priests to lead us astray. For the briefest period, all of the shields were down. Other voices would come shortly. Swami Yogananda,</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/yogi.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/yogi.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > who wrote <i style="">The Autobiography of a Yogi</i>, would become very popular for awhile. John said he read about half of it, which I thought was pretty good, as I’d only managed about 80 pages. Later, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Tolstoy. But Suzuki’s message entered the river of our generation at the same time as John entered our river. At first much of the Zen around <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state> was dark, misunderstood in the West as nihilism, the shadow which withered the Western heart after 500 years of exploration and dominance. But John and Stu understood Dr. Suzuki’s Zen message that love is the purpose of life.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/early%20beatlescropped.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/early%20beatlescropped.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >John is said to have started The Beatles to have something to do with Stu. When McCartney entered the group he drove them to become more serious and businesslike. But at first it was always John and Stu. Stu had the artist’s eye for style – naming the group The Beatles after seeing Lee Marvin and Marlon Brando in <i style="">The Wild Ones</i>. Lee Marvin’s motorcycle gang was called The Beetles. Stu always attracted the coolest people as well. And when they went to Berlin before the group was fully formed he attracted the beautiful photographer Astrid Kirchherr, who would become an anima figure</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/astrid_kirchherr.small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/astrid_kirchherr.small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > – a muse – to the group and open them up in the mind in new ways and awaken new music and images.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >An <i style="">avante garde</i> photographer in <st1:country-region st="on">Germany</st1:country-region>, she and her friends, including Klaus Voorman, </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >traveled in the seedy night scene in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Berlin</st1:place></st1:state> and met the group there, which was still going under the name of The Silver Beatles. She gave them the playful Beatles haircuts. Friendship would bind them. Stu married Astrid and Klaus later drew the cover picture for the <i style="">Revolver</i> album, and much later, after The Beatles had broken up, he played as a background musician on the <i style="">Imagine</i> album.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Personal experience would guide the fledgling poet as well, and like many ordinary men before him, Lennon became great when someone he loved died. He would remember them all. And he would remember Stu, who never returned to <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region> with them.<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><i style="">I know I’ll always feel affection, for people and things that went before. I know I’ll always think about them.</i><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >But it was different with Stu<span style="font-style: italic;">.<br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><i style="">In my life, I loved you more.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This requiem, this love song, is considered today to be one of the greatest songs ever written. It is the beginning of the artist’s journey for John Lennon.</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/John_Lennon.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/John_Lennon.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">The Sixties</span> was a cacophony of a million sounds and smells and voices and music and colors and textures, but especially music. The electric guitar was like a key; an ancient iron ornamented key to a mediaeval dream door that would open to an age.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Every age, be it short or long, has a beginning, a middle and an end, like a person’s life, and this age was no exception. This age, someone pointed out, came with its own sound track. And it rose and fell rather quickly.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >At the center was The Beatles and the Sixties rose and fell with the fate of the Beatles. And at dead center, the man in the center of the Beatles was John Lennon.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >From beginning to end The Beatles was about John Lennon. He was not the most important innovator or instigator of the period, except perhaps in music, but the music would eventually become secondary to his life, as literature had become secondary to Tolstoy.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >He was one of us, common and working class, but of course, more gifted. And the transformation he made, we made. Eventually he left The Beatles behind to complete the passage himself. He was the Man at the Center who made passage with us and for us and completed the journey on our behalf. And I don’t think we could have or would have completed passage without him.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The remaining Beatles say they were transformed by Bob Dylan like the rest of us were. John was as well. It shows in his pictures. It shows in his clothes and in music like Norwegian Wood, a folksy, spare song inspired by the folk scene, written when the Beatles would begin to rise to a higher artistic level. John, they say, wanted to conquer the world, which The Beatles did with ease. Then, when they heard Bob Dylan, they aspired to be artists.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/bob%20dylan%20joan%20baez.small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/bob%20dylan%20joan%20baez.small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Dylan opened the gate and performed the Rite of Entry to the age with his soulful cohort Joan Baez, and the age rose to the center when The Beatles reached their artistic apex. Then followed the rite of exit with Joni Mitchell and the howling animal cries of Neil Young, mourning the passing of the brief and sacred moment.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The Beatles, at the top of their creative arc -- that would be somewhere within the Sgt. Peppers area -- brought the defining moment to a generation. Some 30 years later, in January, 2001, <i style="">New York Times</i> columnist Maureen Dowd contrasted the generation with George Bush, Jr., who last week threatened to cast the first veto of this presidency to overthrow Congress’s attempt to ban his policy of allowing the torture of military prisoners.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In his first month in office she wrote, “He said he never liked the Beatles after they got into that ‘kind of a weird psychedelic period.’” One either crossed the river or did not, and those who did not, struggled to create a counter-force. (Ten weeks into his presidency Dowd reported going hungry for a shred of modernity. “Bush II has reeled backward so fast, economically, environmentally, globally, culturally, it’s redolent of Dorothy clicking her way from the shimmering spires of Oz to a depressed black-and-white <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">Kansas</st1:state></st1:place>,” she lamented. “What’s next? Asbestos, DDT, bomb shelters, filterless cigarettes? Patti Page?”)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Not unlike George Bush, John Lennon was preoccupied with Jesus. You could see it early on with the trouble he got into when the Beatles were first big. Fans would crowd them and overwhelm them and once John said to a crowd of reporters, “We’re more popular than Jesus.” There was no arrogance to it, but subtle awareness. The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Yet Bush and Lennon couldn’t be more far apart in their quests. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In <i style="">The Tao of Jung</i>, psychiatrist and Jung scholar David H. Rosen discusses C.G. Jung’s decent into the shadowy world of the collective unconscious, the world beyond the conscious ego. On the way into the “cave” of the unconscious stood a dwarf with a leathery skin, as if he were mummified, which Jung squeezed past. Rosen explains this in terms of Indian mythology: “Shiva steps on a dwarf that represents the ego when this deity does its creative dance of death and rebirth.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Likewise with the Beatles. When they began their real creative work, they left behind the casings of their early ego identity, pictured as four mop-top wax dummies in early Beatles suits</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Sgt.%20peppers%20coversmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Sgt.%20peppers%20coversmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > at what appears to be a burial on the cover of the Sgt. Peppers album, while the “new” Beatles appeared above like butterflies just left the cocoon in brightly colored satins and playful epaulets.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >At the building vortex of their work, John went through a classic shaman’s arc, the same as the one described by Dante in<i style=""> The Divine Comedy</i>; the same ascribed to Jesus by his followers thus, “. . .he descended into hell the third day . . . .<span style=""> </span>he ascended into heaven.”<span style=""> </span>(As E.C. Krupp writes that Santa Claus, an archaic remnant of a Norse shaman, enters the subtle realms of the archetypal shamanic journey by descending the chimney to the Underworld and flying through the Cosmic Heavens with magical reindeer.)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/shaman.small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/shaman.small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This is the classic pattern of the journey of the shaman described by anthropologists and it occurred with John as the Beatles rose to the top of their creative arc. IN this kind of psychological transformation, the man or woman who is about to enter into Unconscious falls, out of nowhere and against his or her will, into a funk. He falls into a torpor, a sickness of the mind and heart and feels a worthlessness to his life. He goes through a period of spiritual death and descends deep into the earth. Afterwards, he ascends and rises into heaven. Finally he emerges transfigured and enlightened god king, leaves the celestial place and comes out, usually down from a mountain, with a simple transforming idea for the tribe, a gift from the Land of the Dead.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Lennon went through such a transformation, falling into a psychological funk and getting fat and afraid at the peak of the Beatles</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/entering-the-stream.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/entering-the-stream.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > initial popularity (“Help,” he sang. “I’m a loser, and I’m not what I appear to be.”) Then at the <i style="">Revolver</i> album, something new began to happen. Suddenly there is a sense of entering the river, an image which occurs in dreams at times of birth or death (“turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,”) and at times of psychological transformation. In Buddhism and Taoism, it is the sign of a new awakening.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >He sang a second song on the same album about floating downstream in a transcendent, blissful sleep, while everyone thinks he is just lazy, (but “I don’t mind,” he sings, “I think they’re crazy”). Some say <i style="">I’m Only Sleeping</i> is aesthetically the best song he ever composed.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In terms of anthropology, this is the first orientation of an earth shaman finding his feet in the Underworld – the creative unconscious – the world under the earth, where he will take you down with him into the density of the earth, but this is the Subtle Realm of the earth, the Underworld,<span style=""> </span>where “nothing is real” in <i style="">Strawberry Fields</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >And there he finds clarity and confidence, but in a new world, the world of the Unconscious where there is understanding of all you see with eyes closed, and the old world becomes a shell, a mere caricature of psychic life.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The shaman then ascends out of the earth and into the sky, like Jesus rising out of the tomb and entering heaven. John and the Beatles rise then to the very height of their work in <i style="">Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band</i>. And here at their best work is the shaman’s archetypal journey</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/dante%20heaven.small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/dante%20heaven.small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > to the heavens in <i style="">Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds</i>. Like the Underworld of Strawberry Fields, the Astral Heavens also have otherworldly features, like newspaper taxies and magical rivers with tangerine trees and marmalade skies (like the tree “showered with reddish blossoms” blazed in light, a cosmic vision Jung had – a <span style=""> </span>“vision of unearthly beauty” which oddly enough, took place in Liverpool, home of the Fab Four. Lennon’s dream vision in Lucy in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sky with Diamonds</span> also echo’s Dante’s, looking upon the stars from above, in Paradise: “I saw light in the shape of a river/Flashing golden between two banks/Tinted in colors of marvelous spring./Out of the stream came living sparks/Which settled on the flowers on every side/Like rubies ringed with gold . . .”).<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >At the peak, John wrote a song called I am the Walrus in which he invoked the <i style="">Upanishads</i>, which along with <i style="">The Autobiography of a Yogi</i> was very popular back in those days. John wrote, “I am he,” about the swimming together of all of us at the peak of the Sixties, and “we are all together.” “I am the Eggman,” he sang, with his characteristic <st1:place st="on">Liverpool</st1:place> humor, “. . . they are the Eggmen. I am the Walrus.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/walrus.small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/walrus.small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Lennon’s favorite book was <span style="font-style: italic;">Alice in Wonderland</span> and the <span style="font-style: italic;">Abbey Road</span> album contained a snippet of Lewis Carroll's prose. He may have drawn on Lewis Carroll’s wise Walrus, who would fit right in on <i style="">Sgt. Peppers</i>, holding forth on cabbages and kings to a horde of oysters.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It is all comic and hidden, but it reflects an awareness he had about being a man at the center of a world in transformation. The words, “I am he,” are from the core of Eastern spirituality and are well known to its practitioners. Shimon Malin’s recent book <i style="">Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality, a</i></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/edwin%20shro.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/edwin%20shro.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><i style=""> Western Perspective</i> offers an explanation from science: He writes, “Erwin Schrödinger had the experience of finding the soul of the universe within himself, as his own ultimate identity. He expressed his finding as follows: Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you – and all other conscious beings as such – are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the <i style="">whole</i>; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in the sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: <i style="">Tat twam asi</i>, this is you [or <i style="">I am he</i> or <i style="">this is that</i>]. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am above and below, <i style="">I am this whole world</i>’.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Malin writes that Wolfgang Pauli, when asked if he believed in a personal God, responded with an answer that suggests a mandala: “May I rephrase your question? I myself should prefer the following formulation: Can you, or anyone else, reach the central order of things or events, whose existence seems beyond doubt, as directly as you can reach the soul of another human being? I am using the term “soul” quite deliberately so as not to be misunderstood. If you put your question like that, I would say yes.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This expression reflects the sentiment of the <i style="">Upanishads</i> in which the Atman (the Eggman) or the individual soul, finds itself at one with another individual soul, then another, then the whole soul, the world soul, the God consciousness, the Brahmin (the Walrus). It is what Jesus had become after he had gone through the Transfiguration, referring to himself as at one with the God force, at One with the Father. This is the Brahma consciousness.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/maharishi.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/maharishi.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The Beatles were at their peak with Sergeant Peppers. There John would find fulfillment, anthropologically speaking. Then he would journey to the East, although Paul and Ringo were bored, and find the mystic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a father figure to him, but a Great Father, a spiritual father, not an earthly father.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The shaman’s work is essentially over by then, except to bring the gift idea to the community. The shaman has brought the tribe with him through the transformation of the Unconscious. It is up to us after that.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Yet some of the Beatles greatest work would come as they traveled down the back side of the mountain. <i style="">The White Album</i> is still a favorite to fans. One song, <i style="">I’m So Tired</i>, wonderfully reflects the <i style="">rite of exit</i> of the exhausted artist that comes at the end of the transformational passage, balancing the liberating <i style="">I’m Only Sleeping</i>, at the<i style=""> rite of entry</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It is characteristic of the dark side of the passage that the archetypes reverse themselves and show themselves not as they are in the holistic form of the inner life, but just the opposite, shattered in the outside world, reflecting that the center has been passed through and we have once again entered the flat consciousness of the everyday world. And in this instance, it was a hostile world at war in <st1:country-region st="on">Vietnam</st1:country-region> and on the streets and campuses of the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> (“Happiness is a warm gun,” sang John)<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“Can one live with a shattered glass?” the guru classically asks a Tibetan monk who has just found Enlightenment.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >And here – classically - the Beatles reject their psychological god-king, the Maharishi, and even publicly denounce him. Here John sings, “My mother is of the sky.” Lucy is of the sky, his anima, his female counterpart whom he found in transcendent journey. Mother is of the earth. And the tricksters continue their playful treachery, fooling their audience and keeping them off guard with pranks like this one: “ . . . here’s another clue for you all. The Walrus was Paul.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The Walrus, of course, was John.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Coming off the backside of the mountain – and on return form <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">India</st1:place></st1:country-region> - John sometimes believed he was carrying – channeling, we say – Jesus and said so to the Beatles. And he made occasional references, even paraphrasing the Gospel of Thomas “. . . the inside is out/the outside is in. . .” on the <i style="">White Album</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/St_Thomas-small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/St_Thomas-small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The full text is, “Jesus said to them:/When you make the two one,/and make the inside like the outside,/and the outside like the inside,/and the upper side like the under side,/and (in such a way) that you make the man/(with) the woman a single one,/in order that the man is not man and the/woman is not woman; when you make eyes in place of an eye,/and a hand in place of a hand,/and a foot in place of a foot,/an image in place of an image;/then you will go into [the kingdom].” – from <i style="">The Gospel of Thomas</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This preoccupation with Jesus appears again and again. “Christ, you know it ain’t easy,” he sang in one of his last songs, suggesting in <i style="">The Ballad of John and Yoko</i> that he, like Jesus, would be crucified.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/abbey%20road.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/abbey%20road.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Certainly Lennon made himself look like Jesus at the end of the Beatles. On their last album cover, <i style="">Abbey Road</i>, he is dressed all in white, like Jesus after the Transfiguration, with the Beatles trailing him across the road, like the Three Celestial Ones (see this blog in January,</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > 2006 for the Three Celestial Ones), following in his wake. (And cultism would abound in the Beatle myth. The old Catholic myth about the three secrets revealed to the</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/fatima-chidren-small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/fatima-chidren-small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > children at <st1:place st="on">Fatima</st1:place> by the Blessed Mother took a pernicious turn into hippie lore in the late 1990s when the Pope revealed the third secret to be about a “man in white” who would be gunned down when he returned from the mountain top. The Pope, who had been wounded in an attack at the same time that Lennon was murdered, revealed the contents of the letter to the public because he said the prophecy had been fulfilled. John Paul II, who wore white garments at public ceremonies, claimed to be the man identified in the prophecy.) <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/talismanlennon.little.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/talismanlennon.little.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Even later, at the very end of his life Jesus is suggested. All through the most</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > creative</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > period, the shaman’s journey from <i style="">Sgt. Peppers</i> to the end of <st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on"><i style="">Abbey Road</i></st1:address></st1:street>,</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > John wore a special flowered talisman around his neck. Afterwards, he stopped</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/john%20new%20york%20citylittle.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/john%20new%20york%20citylittle.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > wearing it. But in <st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state>, in one of the later pictures ever taken of him, a well-known photograph where he is wearing a t-shirt that says <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York City</st1:place></st1:city> across the</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > front, there is a tiny cross hanging from his neck.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >At the end of the Beatles period John continued in a prophet’s journey. Like Moses and the Bodhisattva, he returns from a celestial vision on top of the mountain with a simple</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > transforming idea, as Moses did with the tablets.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It is the same idea that has occurred throughout the century but is new to our century here in the West. It is Emerson’s message and here it is again expressed ten years before the Beatles by C.G. Jung: “Our world has shrunk, and it is dawning on us that humanity is <i style="">one</i>, with <i style="">one</i> psyche. Humanity</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/satchidanandasmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/satchidanandasmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > is a not inconsiderable virtue which should prompt Christians, for the sake of charity – the greatest of all virtues – to set a good example and acknowledge that though there is only <i style="">one</i> truth it speaks in many tongues, and that if we still cannot see this it is simply due to lack of understanding. No one is so godlike that he alone knows the true word.” As <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Woodstock</st1:place></st1:city> guru Satchidananda put it, “One truth, many paths.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It is the same idea that Leo Tolstoy, a Great Father figure to the non-violence movement of the Sixties, had brought to the world after his night of the dark soul when he went through a religious transformation.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/JOhn%20in%20toronto.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/JOhn%20in%20toronto.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Lennon, with his wife Yoko Ono, entered the peace movement when he left the Beatles, and like Tolstoy later in life, attempted to apply his natural gifts didactically to public purpose. He is said to have been reading Tolstoy’s late non-fiction work on religion and non-violence as many were in the late 1960s, and his final word, the simple transforming idea he brought down from the mountain is precisely the same thought as Tolstoy’s: Imagine there’s no country, it isn’t hard to do. . . Imagine all the people living life in peace.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/tolstoi%20small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/tolstoi%20small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Tolstoy claimed that there was one singular thought in Christ’s work and that was <i style="">do not return violence with violence</i>. On this he built the doctrine that would inspire Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the anti-war activists of the 1960s. Furthermore, in <i style="">Patriotism and Government</i>, Tolstoy wrote that patriotism was a practicable solution for nations early in their development, but it was time now to abandon national prejudices. Even Ghandi, who he corresponded with and who admired Tolstoy enormously, had failed in this, he said. The non-violent approach was the right approach, but, said Tolstoy, declaring the nation to be Hindu, “ruins everything.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It was time for the removal of all barriers. No country, and no religion, too. This would be Lennon’s final impression on the people: Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you can, no hell below us, a brotherhood of man.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This is precisely Tolstoy’s religious conviction at the end of his life. He advocated abandoning identity with a particular prophet as one would abandon nationalism.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In one of his last writings on the subject Tolstoy clearly states his opinion: “Attributing a prophetic mission peculiar to certain beings such as Moses, Christ, Krishna, Buddha, Muhammad, Baha’u’llah as well as several others is one of the major causes of division and hatred between men.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >John’s swan song, <i style="">Imagine</i>, reflects timeless Buddhist sentiment like that presented in <span style="font-style: italic;">What the Buddha Taught</span> by Walpola Rahula, which had gained popularity in the Sixties. And is likely an intentional reconstruction of Tolstoyan philosophy which was deeply influenced by Buddhism and Taoism. Intended or not, it completes the shaman’s journey and begins the transformation of the group.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><i style=""><span style="font-family:Garamond;">Imagine</span></i></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > also bears a relationship to The Gospel of Thomas. Elaine Pagel's book <i style="">Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, </i>states that in Thomas’s account, Jesus challenges those who mistake the kingdom of God for an otherworldly place or a future event: Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, Look, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will get there before you . . .” In a word, Imagine there’s no heaven.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >William Butler Yeats writes: “What portion in the world can the artist have/Who has awakened from the common dream/But dissipation and despair?” Such was the lot of John Lennon.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Late in life, broken and in pain, he wrote, “I was the Walrus, but now I’m John.”</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/lennon%20last%20day.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/lennon%20last%20day.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></p> <span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-size:130%;">One of his biographers writes that he was never happy again after the Sgt. Peppers period. The pictures show it. He never smiled again for the camera after he returned from <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">India</st1:country-region></st1:place>.</span></span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1148292476230505692006-05-22T02:39:00.000-07:002006-05-24T02:56:43.440-07:00The Da Vinci Code<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/da%20vinci%20code.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/da%20vinci%20code.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>We enjoyed the <span style="font-style: italic;">The DaVinci Code</span> movie yesterday. What is fascinating is the "return to earth" aspect. We return from space and land in the 12th century. This movie is very like "first encournters" with space aliens movies in '50s - they are terrifying and frightening - like the mad monk of Opus Dei. But as space contained riddles to enlightenment, so now does the Earth and its Church, the Roman Church of the 12th Century. Since 9/11 people have greater dreams of the Pope - in one such dream the Pope gave a woman gold coins, while a contemporary "suitor" gave her chocolate coins covered with gold paper - false coins. Contemporary dreams parrallel this; as Dreamers dreamed of UFOs n the '50s and '60s, today they dream of "travelling" in the 12th century & into the earth. The Earth is giving birth again to the Human condition. Jedi Knights are astral versions of Knights Templar & today almost half the books on the NYTs best seller lists are about Templars. Parrallel event is the ascention of Pope Benedict. I find him a man of character & of the old ways. As early UFO dreams portended visions or an ascending space age, this movie portends a renewal of the Old Ways of the Catholic and Orthodox churches of Europe. The dual triangles represent a <span style="font-style: italic;">yin</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">yang</span> vision as the movie presents it, but in reference to the I.M. Pei triangles in the courtyand of the Louvre, the question should be not that they exist, but why is one big and one little? What is their nature? Why is one underground and one above ground? What are their qualities? If they are not identical as in the tai chi symbol, the one dominates or "territorializs" they other, and gives a clue as to the nature of the age we are in and the age ahead. In the previous age, from the time of Christ to the 14oos, the yin and yang was represented by the image of Madonna and Child motif. It was a <span style="font-style: italic;">yin</span> age and the Mother figure ascended and dominated the <span style="font-style: italic;">yang</span> figure, the Baby Jesus. The ultimate <span style="font-style: italic;">yin</span> symbol of this is down the road a few blocks from the Louvre, on the Ile de la Cite, <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/particles-and-waves-countries-divide.html">Notre Dame</a> (Our Mother). In the old portraits and paintings, the Mother represented the Earth, the Christ Child the Human Race. These features tell the story; they were seperated, one from the other, in the time of Leonardo - he opposed the seperation as the movie implies and it is clear in his pictures by<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Templars.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Templars.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a> suggestion. See Mother and Child & Triple Goddess <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/three-sisters-pt-2-in-progress-notes.html">here</a>. This is an awakening moment for our century. In Alchemist terms (Templar) the Horse has arrived in the Courtyard.<br /><br />There is a rational explaination for everything in the world. Zen calls this the world of samsara. Then there is a degree of irrationality of everything. The pattern and substance beneath this world is called nirvana. Templar travels the path to nivrana. He is the zen man, the Jedi monk/warriar described in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Tao te Ching</span> as the Knight of Dark and Mysterious consequence ("The ancient masters were subtle, were possessed of ineffable efficacy, and were in dark and mysterious confluence, so profound that they could not be perceived.' - #15, <span style="font-style: italic;">Tao te Ching</span>) and illucidated in the air as Jedi Knight. His sign is two on a horse. This journal was begun with a dream about Knights Templar & a dream of <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/10/dream-of-john-lennonknights-templar.html">two on a horse</a>.Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1144230025094433262006-04-05T02:36:00.000-07:002008-01-31T12:05:58.539-08:00LOST, a Taoist Classic: "The Brothers Karamazov" meets "Night of the Living Dead" - Henry Gale, marked by the Christ wound . . .<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Henry%20Galenew.1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Henry%20Galenew.1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">God doesn't know we're here. No one knows we're here.</span> - Henry Gale<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Note to Readers</span>: Viewers of <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> will appreciate <a href="http://dreams-visions.blogspot.com/">Miss3's dreams</a> as well.<br /><br />Like Shiva, Henry Gale casts aside his old body for a new Dance of Creativity - a dance of rebirth; the eternal dance of life and death. Hidden in its center of <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> is a contemporary <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/rebbes-farewell-steven-spielbergs.html">Quaternity</a>. With pseudo-ads for Hanso's Corp.'s (see Hans in Thomas Mann's 1924 classic, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Magic Mountain,</span> for <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> prototype) "subliminal advertising" and spin offs like the <span style="font-style: italic;">Bad Twin</span> book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> brings the Trickster forth like we haven't seen him since <span style="font-style: italic;">Sgt. Peppers</span> or the Surrealist Movement of the 1920s.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Inquisitor.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Inquisitor.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Buffy</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> is Prophecy - </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Lost</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> is a "Returning to Earth" myth for our day</span><br /><br />For young viewers who have not yet read <span style="font-style: italic;">The Brothers Karamazov</span> by Fyodor Dostoevsky, there is no better beginners guide to the tv show <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span>. The Prisoner in <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span>, marked by the Christ wound in the right chest, is Jesus, indicated by this book which is given to him by Locke. It comes from a chapter called <span style="font-style: italic;">The Grand Inquisitor</span>. After the <span style="font-style: italic;">Bros K</span>, go quickly to the classic spooky film, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Night of the</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/living%20dead.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/living%20dead.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;"> Living Dead,</span> for advanced insight into the Hatch & the Others. <span style="font-style: italic;">The X Files</span> also has a <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/returning-work-in-progress-quigley-in.html">Grand Inquisitor episode</a> in which Jesus is an Alien, imprisoned and tortured by The Cigarette Smoking Man. (As it is with Dali's Orange Monk, and the Alien Christ of <span style="font-style: italic;">The X Files</span>, Henry Gale comes from the sky - it is the mark of the Aquarian, from an air sign in the zodiac.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Clairemages.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Clairemages.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Derived from Jefferson and the Enlightenment (John Locke), ours is a culture based on happiness and its pursuit and on individualism. It is an outward moving journey disconnecting each from the other. It may be reaching its outer limits. (What do people want on the outward journey? My spam mail suggests they want a loan, a college degree and a large penis.) Dharma is just the opposite; an inward moving journey connecting each to the other and those past and future as well. Dharma implies duty and a path to the state of being outside of our individual ego. It is the path to ultimate innermost state of consciousness shared by everyone and by all things in the Universe. Each individual who enters enters through a gate and leaves behind what she or he had or was before. When you enter you<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/dharma.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/dharma.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> first enter a circle. The family is a circle, the place where you live is a circle. The world is a circle. Time is a circle. Within circles there are other circles and all circles (Chronos). It is the path to Enlightenment. Misteps cause madness or death. But everybody dies. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span>, as Claire opens the gate to Dharma, here is a caution from Kushog Wanchen, a holy man of Eastern Tibet, told<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/tibetanbagua.gifsmall.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/tibetanbagua.gifsmall.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a> to Alexandra David-Neel: "It is only prudent to beware of opening channels without due consideration. Few, indeed, suspect what the great storehouse of the world which they tap unconsciusly, contains. One must know how to protect oneself against tigers to which one has given birth, as well as against those that have been begotten by others." (Note: The stacks of lines around the Dharma insignia represent the sticks of the <a href="http://www.astrolim.com/eichi.htm"><span style="font-style: italic;">I Ching</span></a>. No doubt, Hurley's number sequence has references there. And the clicker in the hatch which counts to 108 and repeats implies the Tibetan beads in a string of 108 on which the sylable <span style="font-style: italic;">hri!</span> is repeated again and again. As David-Neel states: "Some understand it as signifying an inner reality hidden under the appearances, the basic essense of things.")<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/kate_sm.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/kate_sm.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> fans might be interested in my "Three Sisters" essay in this blog about <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/three-sisters-pt-3-notes-from-land-of.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Buffy, the Vampire Slayer</span></a>. In the last <span style="font-style: italic;">Buffy</span> episode, The Slayer is revealed to be the Earth Mother incarnate, scion of the Triple Goddess & the Lady of the Lake, the ancient-most archetype of the English-speaking people. She who put King Arthur's Sword into the Stone. (Buffy pulls it out.) I wrote the essay several years ago. (I just ran into <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> last month, when it came to my country store on DVD.) <span style="font-style: italic;">Buffy</span> is prelude<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/evanescence10.0.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/evanescence10.0.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a> to an Awakening of the Earth Mother, the essay claims, to come in the first days of the new millenium. "<span style="font-size:12;"><span style=";font-family:verdana;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">But today, as it is heard in a song/a prayer by Amy Lee, </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Evanescence</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">12 Stones</span><span style="font-style: italic;">, she falls in sleep and has been sleeping a thousand years. She cries to have her eyes opened again and to see again and to Awakened Inside Again and to Saved Again from the Nothing that she has become."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">A Visit from Spirit Bear</span><br /><br /></span></span></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">“I have looked into the eye of this island and what I saw was beautiful.”</span> - John Locke on <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span><br /></span> <p class="MsoNormal"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/lost.jpg250.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/lost.jpg250.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Among the Haisla people of British Columbia the Kermode Bear; called <span style="font-style: italic;">Spirit Bear</span> because it is a black bear that is colored white, is considered a sacred animal. The tribal elders say that when you meet with Spirit Bear the Creator has a message for you and your tribe, or some</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/spirit%20bear.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/spirit%20bear.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > healing is needed. It is a sacred moment and a moment of transition. The TV show <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> begins with an encounter</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > with Spirit Bear.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Synchronicity is an idea developed by physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung after a consultation with Albert Einstein. It means a relationship between Inner life and Outer life – parallel events expressed by coincidence. In the late 50s Jung wrote that the UFO dreams and visions of his patients were predictors of a new relationship with Space – a Space Age. Today prominent dreams are of returning to earth. All the prominent and forceful dreams I have heard of the last two years are of returning to earth. Likewise these dreams predict a new period of awareness of the Earth – psychologically a “return to earth” and an Earth Age. This psychological change is reflected in <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span>. Spirit Bear, the Magical Animal, leads to a door and the door is called Dharma. It is a Creation Myth (a parable of Awakening) for the new millenium. (See <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/returning-work-in-progress-quigley-in.html">Returning</a> for "returning to earth" myth.)</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> has the same psychic tone as early UFO dreams and movies of the 1950s. Naïve (popular, entertaining - the common stone of the culture) and unpretentious art and stories always reflects these changes. The <i style="">Survivor</i> TV series and all of its knock offs are a reflection</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > of this “return to Earth” theme in the naive culture (as <i style="">Close Encounters</i>,<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><i style="">E.T.</i>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Alien</span> and<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><i style="">The X Files</i> were "entering the Universe" dramas in the Space Age). <i style="">Lost</i> is the mythic drama which portends a new period of cultural awakening to the Earth, just as <i style="">Close Encounters</i> did to space. The Earth shares consciousness with the humans and the humans are part of the earth. <span style=""> </span>This is the natural state of humans in their natural environment. </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">Princess Mononoke</span>, the film by Hayao Miyazaki, the computer game </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">Myst</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Touching Spirit Bear</span> by Ben Mikaelsen - three of my</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Rose.jpg225.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Rose.jpg225.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > children's favorites and mine - make a contribution. And common themes from <span style="font-style: italic;">Jane Eyre</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Women in the Dunes</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Gilligan's Island</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wizard of Oz</span> (Henry Gale), Frances Hodgson Burnett's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Secret Garden</span>, Gurney's <span style="font-style: italic;">Dinotopia</span> ("Each person who arrives in Dinotopia becomes reborn, and the birth is different for each individual," says Levka) </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >and multiple others are applied and suggested. Notice that there are only two old people in the story; an old African-American woman named Rose (who sits closs-legged and quiet on the beach) and an old shamanistic guide name John Locke. Rose the symbol of Inner Life and the Unconscious (<a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/rebbes-farewell-steven-spielbergs.html">Yeats</a>, Jung and the Alchemists - the Rose and the "Rosy Cross" was their symbol - Rosacrucians, Templars; </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >y'all seen <span style="font-style: italic;">The DaVinci Code</span>?), John Locke the father of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. They are the <span style="font-style: italic;">yin</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">yang</span> (Love and Power; in the narrative voice on <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span>, "faith and reason") represented occationally throughout the story by two</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > stones, one black and one white.<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> is a generational story - all the characters are young, and it is a story marketed to teens. Notice as well that except for the child, Walt, all of the characters wear long pants all the time (on a tropical island - compared say, to <span style="font-style: italic;">Survivor</span>). It is a sign of responsibility and serious intention. It is geared to the fourth post-war genertion; the first generation which will take full responsibility in the new millenium (see William Strauss and Neil Howe, <a href="http://www.fourthturning.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Fourth Turning</span></a>).<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/danielle.jpg%20in%20Lost.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/danielle.jpg%20in%20Lost.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Most of the names and relationships in <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> appropriately suggest the spiritual and psychological condition at the end of the Second Millenium after the brith of Christ and the awakening of the Third Millenium, which awaits the second face of the avatar. The baby born on the island is Aaron, for example, who started the Judeo-Christian</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > procession millenia back, incarnate again in the awakening age of Aquarius (which began, technically, on January 1, 2001). Some</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/mona%20lisa.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/mona%20lisa.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > of these relationships are quite uncanny. The birth of Aaron restores and reunites the Earth and the Earth Mother (Claire) to its human occupant and natural child, after 500 years of separation. The island itself has a <span style="font-style: italic;">yin</span> spirit (a Dakini in Tibetan culture), a French woman named Danielle Rousseau (like John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau was father to the Enlightenment), who has</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > </span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/madonna%20and%20child.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/madonna%20and%20child.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >been driven to madness because she "lost her </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >baby." This is the core theme of the rise to the Renaissance as it found flower in philosophers Locke and Rousseau, discussed earlier in <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/three-sisters-pt-2-in-progress-notes.html">Madonna/Child portraiture</a> in which the Christ Child, representing the human race, is snatched from the arms of the Divine Mother (or Earth Mother or <span style="font-style: italic;">Mona Lisa</span> - who represents the Earth), causing 500 years of alienation, division and divorce between earth and human. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Jung and Pauli’s book on the subject of synchronicity is <i style="">The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche</i>, published in 1955. The tragic mine accidents taking place today in <st1:state st="on">West Virginia</st1:state> and <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Saskatoon</st1:place></st1:city> all in a sequence are synchronistic events reflecting the prevalent “returning to earth” myth – the prominent and directing myth in the culture today. Of course, no government officials will view this prognosis seriously, and increased shifts in the mines is an obvious contributor, but just the same, they should shut down the mines until they have reviewed all safety procedures as <st1:state st="on">West Virginia</st1:state> is doing and look at safety for the miners with new eyes to insure their safety throughout the industry in The United States and <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Canada</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Congress should also reconsider its</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/empty%20space%20suit.nasa.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/empty%20space%20suit.nasa.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > proposed spending for Space exploration and use as a barometer for public interest in these efforts evidence in the pop culture. The only space story generating interest today is that of an empty space suit, silently orbiting the earth, which was thrown out of the international space station. Space exploration is a scientific venture. If adventurism and novelty are removed from these projects they will be safer and more successful.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">Notes on </span><i style="font-weight: bold;">Lost</i><span style="font-weight: bold;"> – 3</span><sup style="font-weight: bold;">rd </sup><span style="font-weight: bold;">Season, Episode One: </span><i style="font-weight: bold;">Lost</i><span style="font-weight: bold;"> is an Aquarian Creation Myth</span><br /><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/dharma.1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/dharma.1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Ahead, Mr. Eko has been shown to be the man of unequivocal faith, while John Locke’s faith is all in the head. Locke fails, but Eko will bring the Dharma Inistative forward – Locke to be his second, following in Eko’s faith. Ben as a Christ figure is way interesting because although he is identified by the Christ wound and the <i style="">Bros. K</i> book, we see him and we know him to be a bad character – manipulative and self centered – he leaves his girl to die in the prison and Jack saves her. Easy to see that the entire Others cult is tired of Ben and the whole Dharma deal. But Mr. Eko does not see the bad parts & could take him – Ben – as the second Christ; the second face of Christ in the new Platonic month. FYI Lost is about a shift in Platonic Months, a 24,000 year journey around the sun under 12 signs of 2,000 years apiece. The procession started with the Birth of the Christ, 2,000 years ago. We have just left the Age of Pisces, the age of Christ and Mohammed (the dual fish in the zodiac sign) and entered the Age of Aquarius on January 1 of this year. From Madame Blavatsky to Salvador Dali, there has been the suggestion of the Second Christ as a Buddhist monk. Eko, most sincere of the faithful, is making the transition from traditional Roman Catholic to New Age Buddhist/Taoist (the 108 clicker suggests the Tibetan rosary which has 108 beads – the Dharma insignia is the <i style="">Ba Gua</i>, sing of the tai chi).</p><p class="MsoNormal"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Eko%20with%20smoke.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 250px; height: 166px;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Eko%20with%20smoke.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=""><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Notes on Lost: 10/18/06 episode - Hurley, Locke and Mr. Eko Encounter Spirit Bear</span> They always call them Polar Bears, but like many things in this thoughtful TV show, it works on two levels. In Dharma culture, these two levels are Nirvana (the Unconscious or inner life) and Samsara (the Conscious or outer life). The white bear can best be understood as a Spirit Bear. Hurley fears the bear. Mr. Eko has a full encounter with the Spirit Bear. Spirit Bear is actually a white black bear which is sacred to the Haida Indians of British Columbia. Spirit Bear finds those in the forest who are psychologically Lost, as all the characters on the island are. When Spirit Bear finds you it will take you on a devastating adventure of transformation & awakening. You come out a transformed person with heightened sensitivities and spiritual awareness. Walt has had a Spirit</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Touching%20Spirit%20Bear.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Touching%20Spirit%20Bear.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=""> Bear encounter. Now Mr. Eko has had an encounter with Spirit Bear in a cave (and encounter with the Earth). He finds a preternatural sense and is able to see John Locke’s true nature (“You will find them John because you are a hunter.”) Notice the cross has been torn from Eko’s neck. Eko’s faith is pure as it must be with a shaman, but he will find now a fuller context for his newly awakened state. Perhaps Locke is unable</span><span style=""> to undergo a Spirit Bear transformation as his faith is thin and based on intellectual properties. He needs “signs” and proofs. Mr. Eko’s faith is innate. Locke will anchor in Eko’s faith. Notice that Locke turns Mr. Eko's church into a sweat lodge, a house of transcendence of North American First People. Notice that Mr. Eko also loses his Jesus Stick to Desmond during the explosion. Desmond, Mr. Eko and John Locke are sure to evolve as the Three (see "Three Celestial Ones" on this blog). See <span style="font-style: italic;">Touching Spirit Bear</span> by Ben Mikaelsen.</span> </p>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1141910637613043622006-03-09T05:15:00.000-08:002006-03-27T05:20:48.803-08:00Thank you, thank you.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Suzuki%20grave.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Suzuki%20grave.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/life-with-lions-john-lennons.html">D.T. Suzuki</a>'s last words were: "Don't worry. Thank you! Thank you!" An introduction to his way of thinking can be found at the <a href="http://www.worldhaikureview.org/1-3/index.html">World Haiku Review</a>. His small book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Introduction to Zen</span>, is recommended. Photo of Dr. Suzuki's grave from World Haiku Review by Museki Abe of Tokyo. <span style=""> </span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1141738498223228502006-03-07T05:28:00.000-08:002006-03-07T05:34:58.226-08:00The End of the World: dream of "Dali"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/raelians.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/raelians.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>This more or less completes the ideas and themes which comprise this journal's original intentions. The other night I had a dream that I was driving into a city with "Dali" a Hindu Indian woman with whom I had been travelling every day to a city for lunch, over a bridge; she doing the driving. When I told <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/jim%20dine.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/jim%20dine.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>her of my fondness and affection for her, she said, "I'm dying now." This is a dream of the Anima, the female part of a masculine personality - the muse, which guides to prose, poetry and pictures. Death in a dream like this, where the character is arcane as in Tarot cards, generally means a change and a rebirth - a prelude. It was a suitable dream and a suitable time for this to end, as I'd received a yellow robe from my mother-in-law and been writing in it the last two years, then at this Christmas I received from my wife a beautiful long, green fleece robe, made by her. I have had four robes in the last 21 years of marriage - red for the first ten years, then dark blue for another seven years, yellow during the Awakening of this, now green. All marking significant passages and transitions. Like Jim Dine's <span style="font-style: italic;">Husband with His Left Arm on Fire</span> (above) - robes take on a significant cast to the<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Hildegard_von_Bingen_Liber_Divinorum_Operum.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Hildegard_von_Bingen_Liber_Divinorum_Operum.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> quiet life - synchronicity, say shrinks; the quiet river which tumbles beneath the city - meaningful coincidence. Likewise, there have been dreams to mark these transitions. On the day before I married I dreamed that the Indian warrior Cochise came to my car and we two drove over a bridge, with him doing the driving. This dream with "Dali" was such a dream. One of the first entries in this journal (October, 2005) is miss3's dream of a woman dying, and rising from the death was the Sun God. The Sun God archetype appears throughout this artist's work, perhaps the greatest dreamer of all time, HIldegard von Bingen.Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1141737997117145692006-03-07T05:26:00.000-08:002006-03-07T05:44:43.330-08:00Appendix 1: Pictures<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Magritte-Themaninthebowlerhat1964thumb.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Magritte-Themaninthebowlerhat1964thumb.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>If you Google "Parthalon Flyingsnake DeCoursy," a name my kids helped make up, about 10 pages come up which interpret Surrealist paintings as dreams, much as they were conceived in the collective state of Unconscious<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Magritte-Thesonofman1964%20red%20tie.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Magritte-Thesonofman1964%20red%20tie.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> in which these artists worked together and alone. (Or go to this <a href="http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.classifieds4u.co.uk/surrealists/Dali/SalvadorDali-TheenigmaofWilliamTell1933thumb.jpg&imgrefurl=http://surrealists.classifieds4u.co.uk/Dali/daligallery3.php&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;h=150&w=150&sz=2&tbnid=Iv7wjgie-l8J:&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;tbnh=90&tbnw=90&hl=en&start=6&prev=/images%3Fq%3DDali%2BWilliam%2Btell%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Dactive%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official_s%26sa%3DG">Surrealist website</a> and click on the pictures.) For example: two eggs - Man Ray, Magritte and Dali all had this dream and so did I and many others - a symbol of the New Creation in the Hindu, but not yet Awakened - pictured as a statue of Khrishna holding two eggs (<span style="font-style: italic;">wu chi</span> - unhatched or unmanifest karma - later they will become two birds in a <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/eggs%20magritte.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/eggs%20magritte.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>tree, or <span style="font-style: italic;">yin</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">yang</span>, the life force manifest in <span style="font-style: italic;">tai chi</span>). This picture of man and bird above on the left relates to the famous picture with the Green Apple face - the <span style="font-style: italic;">Son of Man</span> on the right. Here at left he has a white tie, implying an inner condition, while the spirit bird flies to the left of frame, also the direction of the inner condition. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Son of Man</span> the tie is red, implying an outward manifestation of the same condition (consider this to be an expression<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/orange%20monksmall.2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/orange%20monksmall.2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> of <span style="font-style: italic;">wu chi</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">tai chi</span>, and the moment of turning from the inner unmanifest condition to the outer condition of coming into the world at the date of these two paintings, 1964). This is discussed earlier at the beginning of these journals in the entry titled: <span style="font-style: italic;">Orange Monk: Salvador Dali's Dream of The Second Coming of Christ</span> apparently as a Buddhist monk.Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1141737933941766412006-03-07T05:25:00.000-08:002006-08-06T16:16:46.973-07:00Appendix 2: Dreams<span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">Better than a hundred years not seeing one's own immortality is one single day of life if one sees one's own immortality. </span><font>- The Dhammapada</span></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><font><font><br /><br />'I'd rather be dead than cool.</span></span></span><font><font><font> - Kurt Cobain<br /><br /></span></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/kurt%20w%20babymages.1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/kurt%20w%20babymages.1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><font><font><font>The richest dream I have ever had was of three ancient men in old, gray robes and wispy beards, kneeling in the pale light of an ancient Christian/Islamic temple, stone with large columns, like the Hagia Sophia or the Church of the Nativity. There was a swirling ball of light before them. I was told to keep my head down because I was in the House of God.<span style=""> </span>(My children have found a very close equivalent in <i style="">Magic: The Gathering</i> cards drawn by <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Seattle</st1:city></st1:place> artists at just around the same period.)<span style=""> </span>Most lucid dreams occur between four and five in the morning, but this was at approximately 11 PM Eastern time (five or six PM Pacific time). I learned later that this dream occurred just as the singer Kurt Cobain died. I did<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/three%20celestial%20ones.2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/three%20celestial%20ones.2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > not know who he</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > was, so I learned. I felt he resembled Yeats’ Aquarian, the Unicorn born to a prostitute in a garret in <st1:city st="on">Paris</st1:city>, a squalid picture not unlike the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Seattle</st1:place></st1:city> grunge scene in the 1990s, noted for heroin and cappuccino from which Kurt Cobain arose to short prominence in what was, as far as I can see, a singular quest to find God. A suicide</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > in his early years, he</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > was never able to kick heroin or depression. His short life is a starling picture of <st1:city st="on">Americana</st1:city> in a tough logging town in the <st1:place st="on">Pacific Northwest</st1:place>. An account of his death in <span style="font-style: italic;">Rolling Stone Magazine</span> stated that when he was still a child his mother, in a fit of depression, tried to kill him by shooting him in the head. When the gun misfired she was shamed and threw all the guns her husband had left behind in a river. The young Kurt fished them out</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > and traded them for his first amplifier that day at a pawn shop. His Awakening came while sitting under a leaky bridge while he struggled with poverty and drug addiction. I did not know what to make of this dream at the time. I still don’t. Maybe I will learn someday. I have held on to dreams which felt important for up to 30 years and suddenly found their purpose and understood them. I was prompted by this dream to study the <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/draft-thee-celestial-ones-intro.html">The Three Celestial Ones</a> which an earlier chapter is about, as they seemed so vivid in this dream. I do know that something seemed to happen in the world at about that time – something opened. I have had a variety of very interesting coincidences with a variety of Kurts since then. Another dream episode: One day </span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/andre%20Breton.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/andre%20Breton.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I was talking to a student in my office about a dream he was having of Andre Breton (here by Max Ernst). In the dream he saw 13 concentric circles and as he drew them with pen on paper to explain, the electricity in my computer started wiggling. I told him to stop but he was wrapped up in his drawing. When he got to the 13<sup>th</sup> inner circle all the electricity went out in the building and there was a large explosion. Outside was a big hole, maybe eight feet across and six feet deep. It came from a surge in electricity they said, but they didn’t know what caused it. <o:p></o:p></span> </span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>In days gone by in the West, this journey into dreams was done by shamans, the one person in the tribe who could go into the unconscious and come out alive, bringing with her or him the goods of the psyche to show to his or her people. Anyone else, it should be noted, would risk madness. But without the shaman, the people were lost souls, lost in the material world, without access to the inner life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/shamans.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/shamans.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>Shamans are usually female and in cultures where they are male, they are almost always males that dress as women. The she/male is the link to the feminine ocean; the land of the dead, the Unconscious. The she/male’s female nature allows her into the unconscious without danger and her warrior ability allows him to climb back out. Characteristically, the shaman is the tribe’s soothsayer, healer and dream interpreter. Very often they are called to the position by a voice from the Unconscious, an archetypal deity of the tribe. They also have special roles in ceremony. Winktes, she/male shamans in New World Indian tribes, enter a trance state to find the appropriate name for newborn babies, for example. In rural <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Thailand</st1:place></st1:country-region>, they often dressed like Marilyn Monroe when I was there in the mid Sixties. There they have an unofficial role in the carnival atmosphere of city squares in the evening, with the fortunetellers, snake charmers and astrologers. Western psychologists, of course, considers them to be insane, but they change their cloak of inauthenticiy so frequently that their credibility dwindles with every new garment they don.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>Needless to say, this role has disappeared in the West, but at the cost of intimate knowledge of the Unconscious. Not only is this a loss to everyone in the West, but it was also a loss to those who would be shamans. Many traditional shamans, like Tibetan monks and the Taoist hermits of <st1:country-region st="on">China</st1:country-region>’s <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Cold</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Mountain</st1:placetype></st1:place>, practice celibacy, as the sexual practice is too tumultuous and disturbing to the life of the unconscious. (Too violent, said Surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, who was more shaman than artist.) The riddle proposed by the Rhine Maidens alludes to this. The inner life, they tell the journeyer, can only be seen by those who forgo love. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>I have been listening to my own dreams and other peoples for 40 years. In the absence of shamans, here are some thoughts on dreams:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></o:p></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>You cannot have a productive dream life if you drink alcohol. (Daily drinking can short-circuit psychic life and inhibit REM sleep. Alcoholism, says one Zen Buddhist monk, has become a substitute for religion in the West.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>Dreams accompany life. Coincidences related to dreams are important and are part of the dream and the life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>Dreams form a kind of archaeology to your life and perhaps to your ancestors, but not if you don’t have a life. Dreams are not a substitute for life or an escape from life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>You cannot have a continuously productive dream life if you live in a big city.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>The Chinese practice for activating the unconscious is to live three years away from the city, which is a rational matrix, and live alone or with monks on a sacred mountain. My own experience more of less concurs. In <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state> I dreamed sporadically. Exactly three years later on the farm in the foothills of the mountains, dream activity became much more enriched, eventually richer than I every imagined possible.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>Some people have a gift for dreaming as some people do for painting. Women are constitutionally better at it than men. Of the two most gifted dreamers I have ever encountered, the one is an Australian woman with access to the most primeval outbacks and nature. One of her dreams is given in the entry titled <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/returning-work-in-progress-quigley-in.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Returning</span></a>. She has five children and had her first at about the age 18, and thus has lived in a psychological cycle in sync with the biological cycle. She is also to date unimpeded by higher education and the objectivistist matrices and orthodoxies which come with it. She is keenly intelligent, fearless and inherently curious by nature. The other, miss3, whose dream of the <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/10/sun-king.html">Sun King</a> is discussed throughout this journal, is similar to the Australian woman. She lives in the northernmost forests of Ontario in the glow of the Arora Borealis with extended family on the very edge of the artic regions, far above city lights.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>Individuals with an aboriginal cast of mind are naturally good at dreaming. Related to this, people whose ancestors did not pass through the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason are better at dreaming and have better dreams than those who did. Zen Buddhism as it developed in classical Japanese culture is the antidote for those who did, and it was built specifically for that purpose by the analytically-inclined Japanese. It works as well for the analytically inclined in the West.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>People with a Myers-Briggs constellation of INTP or INFP, introverts who see the world flowing between events, are naturally good at dreaming. Taoism has it that the Inner Journey requires the two people; one with the gift of entry, the other able to understand what was there. These are different and opposite abilities. Whoever is good at the one will be constitutionally poor at the other.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>The Days of the Dead, Halloween, is, according to many folklore traditions, a period when the spirits of the dead run confluent with the living. This is said to be a good dream stretch, lasting to late into November.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>Births and deaths of loved ones, either blood family or friends, affect dreams. They are portals.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>Certain places are better for dreaming than others. The place for you to dream best is the place to which you belong. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -0.25in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style=""><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>-<span style=""> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font>Between four and five in the morning the body temperature is at the lowest, and consciousness at the lowest ebb. This is the time when most animals are born (it is true with my animals) and according to folklore, when most people die. There is a dream window here that can be opened. This is a very dangerous practice. This is the hour of the wolf.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font><font> <span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It should be stressed here on this last one, that this is extremely dangerous, particularly for men. It is a direct confrontation with the Unconscious. You could lose your mind. You could lose your soul. Or you could die. But everyone dies, and it is better to die like Kurt than not to have lived like Kurt. Live for love, die for love. Risk everything.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1141737853248387612006-03-07T05:23:00.000-08:002006-03-13T08:13:36.846-08:00Appendix 3: Heading down the mountain<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Tony%20Soprano.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Tony%20Soprano.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This and the other Appendixes originally were in my notes but didn’t fit in any text, but are interesting and amend what has been said. This part is about Tolstoy. He is most important and has been undervalued primarily because English professors who like his novels don’t like the second part of his life. But this second life has been the foundation of Gandhi’s non-violent movement in <st1:country-region st="on">India</st1:country-region> and the Peace Movement in the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>. The great book on this has not been written yet, nor the great movie been made. Tolstoy’s teaching is central to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of non-violence.<o:p></o:p></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >What is also important in Tolstoy is how he approached his old age. William James’ great book, <i style="">The Variety of Religious Experiences</i> should be required reading for those approaching 60 years old and I read in the paper this morning that there are approximately 80 million Americans approaching 60 in the next 20 years or so. Actual war babies, those born in 1946, turn 60 this year. It brings a crisis equivalent to adolescence, and it is a turning everyone must take. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Somebody tell the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Clintons</st1:place></st1:city>. I have an essay on my political blog that has been reprinted a couple of places about Bill Clinton being on the classic negative path of denial on this issue. Worse case, comes a sense of immortality. His attempt to start his own United Nations this summer qualifies as a episode of <i style="">persona</i></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Hillary%20and%20bill%20IMAGE.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Hillary%20and%20bill%20IMAGE.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><i style=""> madness</i>, to which the once important and famous, from Einstein to <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Clinton</st1:city></st1:place> are prone.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >For men in late 50s and 60s, the body depletes its driving hormones and the Mask of Death appears on the horizon and in your dreams. This, in the quaint phrase of <st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on">Madison Ave.</st1:address></st1:street> is called the mid-life crisis, and here is its most eloquent introduction:<o:p></o:p><br /><br />When I had journeyed half of our life’s way<o:p></o:p><br />I found myself within a shadowed forest,<o:p></o:p><br />for I had lost the path that does not stray.<o:p></o:p><br /><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p><br />In a very different era but at precisely the same mid-life juncture, fictional Mafia boss Tony Soprano suddenly falls into a similar collapse at the sight of a flock of ducks taking flight. Like Dante, Soprano finds his Beatrice; a female psychiatrist who brings him into the world of the Unconscious. This brilliantly written, acted and designed production clearly begins with Dante: “The morning on the day I got sick I’d been thinking,” Tony tells his Beatrice in the first episode, “. . . its good to be in on something from the ground floor, and I came to late for that . . . I know . . . but lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end . . . the best is over.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Tony Soprano is the working-class hero trying to find his way between old world and new world without succumbing to narcissism, individualism or the egregious business-class ethos of the “Wonder Bread wops.” Family, honor, duty, dharma, outcasts of the culture of denial, novelty, nihilism and eccentricity, today hide in Gangster Movies. But Tony's essential problem is disenchantment with his mid-life’s work after it has arced.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >If you can travel through this chasm it can be your most creative passage – as it was with Dante and ultimately with Tony Soprano. It is like that described by J.R.R. Tolkien as a journey to Middle Earth. “So it went on, until his forties were running out, and his fiftieth birthday was drawing near: fifty was a number that he felt was somehow significant (or ominous); it was at any rate at that age that adventure had suddenly befallen Bilbo.” In fact, Tolkien, born in 1892, was himself just entering his fifties when he began his great work, <i style="">The Lord of the Rings</i> (composed between 1936 to 1949).<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/TolstoyTolstoy_%281887%29.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/TolstoyTolstoy_%281887%29.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Probably one of the greatest and most creative middle life crises was by that “primitive oak” of a man, as William James called him, Leo Tolstoy, and his tenacious ability to carry through with it could be a lesson for today.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In his biographical book, <i style="">Confession</i>, written when he was 51, Tolstoy describes his previous life of literary fame lived on instinct, until five years before when something very strange started happening: “At first I began experiencing moments of bewilderment; my life would come to a standstill, as if I did no know how to live or what to do, and I felt lost and fell into despair. But they passed and I continued to live as before. Then these moments of bewilderment started to recur more frequently, always taking the same form. On these occasions, when life came to a standstill, the same questions always arose: ‘Why? What comes next?’”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >And then, he continues, what happens to everyone stricken with a fatal inner disease happened to him: “At first minor signs of indisposition appear, which the sick person ignores; then these symptoms appear more and more frequently, merging into one interrupted period of suffering. The suffering increases and before the sick man realized what is happening he discovers that the thing he had taken for an indisposition is in fact the thing that is more important to him than anything in the world: it is death.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >At this turning point Tolstoy gave up entirely any interest in his literary work and took himself completely out of that period of this life to the work he would address in the next. Like many do at this transition, he turned to the church to which he was born, the Russian Orthodox Church. But here he faced the dilemma many of us face today.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >When he returned to the Orthodox Church, he would not simply bow to the authoritarianism of the priests, but consider his own condition, and there he found a conflict.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Tolstoy grew up in the Age of Reason with a church from a previous age, and he was unable to reconcile the two. Rather than accept the authority of the church and believing on blind faith, which denied the integrity of the human being, he began to study other religions including Taoism, Buddhism, Islam and the Ba’hai religion, which was just taking shape in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Persia</st1:place></st1:country-region>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >When he embarked on his study of Christianity he felt himself, “. . . in the position of a man to whom is given a sack of refuse, who, after long struggle and wearisome labor, discovers among the refuse a number of infinitely precious pearls.” He decided to start from scratch, learned Greek and Aramaic, and translated the Gospel by himself, calling it<i style=""> The Gospel in Brief</i>, because it left out what he considered to be side-show trickery, such as “the walking on the sea, and the raising of the dead.” These he omitted, he said, “… because contains nothing of the teaching and describing only events which passed before, during, or after the period in which Jesus taught, they complicate the exposition.” Their sole significance for Christianity, he wrote, was that they proved the divinity of Jesus Christ for him who was not persuaded of his divinity beforehand.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Tolstoy’s dilemma is our own dilemma. He grew up in a religion built with dogma and authoritarianism. Then he took off that coat and put it aside to enter his adult life. As he passed into old age he went back to his original church. This is the way it was done effectively for all time and at all places, as the going back takes place through the same gate through which one enters. But here he found that the coat he put aside in his youth did not fit and that there was no portal for him to enter into death.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Nor does it fit today. This is the Aquarian dilemma for the first few generations growing up in a new century. The old coat belongs to an age that is past and it no longer fits. It is a particularly American dilemma. Tolstoy’s solution was to build an entire religion firsthand, one with features of Taoism and Buddhism, but one he found within himself, echoing the ancient strains of the early Russian Orthodox and the Muslim of the <st1:place st="on">Caucasus</st1:place>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >As one of his biographers said, Tolstoy was, in this period, a “being of evolution.” <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Russia</st1:place></st1:country-region> faced its greatest transition in this period. The Romanovs would be murdered in a decade and the Bolsheviks would take power. But Tolstoy faced the changes that were taking place on a deeper level, a greater level, than the political and economic revolutionaries of his time.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >We are “beings of evolution” and are just beginning to find our way through the murky darkness. The revolutionaries of Tolstoy’s time substituted a materialist fix for a decaying condition of the soul. We have done the same throughout the century with different prognostication and therapy, but still applying a materialist fix to a condition that is not at its root physical, but spiritual and psychological.<br /><br />We will begin to find our way forward in this new century and in the first centuries after this. Tolstoy may serve as a guide, as he did to the non-violent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement in the 1960s. In his rigorous analysis and lucid proscription for action without violence, Tolstoy Awakened a new world. And those who grew up in an Englightenment tradition and still were instructed in the New Testament in youth will find his translation, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Gospel in Brief</span>, instructive. When I read it I asked a dozen people raised Christian what the "moneylenders" at the temple were selling. No one knew the answer. They were selling animals for the purpose of blood sacrifice in the Temple. It is this which Jesus raged against. The conventional view based on the King James translation is that Jesus was angered at the Jews for sellling things on the Sabbath. </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This makes no sense. There is nothing in Christ's life which makes him a fetish for Blue Laws. </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >John 2:13-16, which relates the passage, makes no mention of blood sacrifice. </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The conventional translations change the story of Christ's life to fit the social scene of the early 1600s. As the English commerce class was rising, anti-Semetic pressures were growing and this passage as told created a mainstain charicature of Jews as petty and unethical financial dealers. If you Google the phrase "moneylenders in the Temple" today you find anti-Islamic entries - a new twist on a traditional Jew-as-Moneylender refrain. This passage as Tolstoy translates it makes an important point which has been twisted by Christian historians who have customized a Designer Christ to amend their own historiocal epochs. Tolstoy shows that as a Jewish reformer, one of the reforms Christ desired was the abandonment of blood sacrifice as barbaric and tribal. The Hebrews in fact abandoned this practise, but the Roman Church fathers, in conquering the northern lands, sublimated the Pagan practise of animal and human sacrifice as the primary ritual of the church, The Sacrifice of the Mass.</span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1139396595226336872006-02-08T02:58:00.000-08:002006-02-10T08:27:42.876-08:00Sacred Journey<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/young%20virgin%20small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/young%20virgin%20small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="">The sacred journey is invisible to the non-believer and hidden from the uninitiated. Like the small tribe of Indonesian dream shamans that Loren and Lawrence Blair write about in their perceptive book and video, <span style="font-style: italic;">Ring of Fire</span>, surrounded by a circle of head hunter tribes, <span style=""> </span>the <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/work-in-progress-prelude-to-orange.html">Surrealists</a> in their little circle are their own head hunters and hide their</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/woman%20at%20windowtiny.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/woman%20at%20windowtiny.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=""> sacred journey. In is an old Zen strategy. Tibetan hermits often chose as their solitary spot a place filled with demons. True play stops when the adults enter the room. The conspicuously bizarre and profane behavior of the Surrealists sends away the simply curious - the camp followers and the secular. Likewise the profane are detracted</span><span style=""> and absorbed by the freak show and never enter the sacred circle.</span><span style=""> </span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1138359055160276272006-01-27T02:43:00.000-08:002006-05-10T03:54:27.043-07:00Note to Death MotherIn <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/rebbes-farewell-steven-spielbergs.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Rebbe's Farewell</span></a> I mentioned that Stephen Spielberg's <span style="font-style: italic;">Jaws</span> is a Quaternity movie; Father, Son, Holy Spirit and Mary (who represents Psyche/feminine). But in <span style="font-style: italic;">Jaws</span>, the Ocean is the Psyche/feminine figure animated by her dangerous and toothy shark persona (<span style="font-style: italic;">vagina dentata</span>), as Ocean very generally represents <span style="font-style: italic;">yin</span> consciousness & Psyche in dreams. This is Death Mother like those (<a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/three-sisters-pt-2-in-progress-notes.html">discussed here</a>) in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Three Sisters</span> (Mother Kali below from <a href="http://www.exoticindiaart.com/">Exotic india Art</a>. <span style="font-style: italic;">Jaws</span> brings a specific relevance: the 50s brought space fear and UFO<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/jaws.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/jaws.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> dreams and all space movies were hostile encounters. Spielberg brought harmony and psychic awakening to the Universe encounter in<span style="font-style: italic;"> Close Encounters</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">E.T.</span> But away from home in the Stars, alienation and an "out of place" feeling arose for the natural environment, Earth and Ocean (perhaps we went to space to escape Mother) - thus the Toothy Mother. Lucas brought equilibrium in space (<span style="font-style: italic;">Star </span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/kali.jpg110.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/kali.jpg110.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Wars</span>) for 30 years. But then at the end of the millenium we returned to earth and then the pop culture was filled with "fear of earth" movies (<span style="font-style: italic;">Cave</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Reign of Fire</span>, the epic tv drama <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Survivor</span> and all of its spinoffs). As in the early UFO days when we went to space, return brought psychic encounters again, this time with earth in Tolkein's <span style="font-style: italic;">Rings</span> movies and <span style="font-style: italic;">Harry Potter</span>, (discussed in <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/returning-work-in-progress-quigley-in.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Returning</span></a>) when space was left behind. My guess is that J.J. Abrams's<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Sawyer%20againmagessmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Sawyer%20againmagessmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> creative popular hit <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span> is a Gatekeeper and this theme will extend for decades, as <span style="font-style: italic;">Star Trek</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars</span> did.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Also failed . . .<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/threesisters.jpgbeautiful.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/threesisters.jpgbeautiful.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I also failed to mention in <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/three-sisters-pt-2-in-progress-notes.html">The Three Sisters</a> (Palma Vecchio painting here, 1520, their last days) that the general consideration of Quaternity is almost always three males and a female, but the Three Sisters (the <b>Triple Goddess</b>) form their own Quaternity as well; maiden, mother, wise woman, and the boy child – the Star Child – born every year of the Winter Solstice. (Graves<st1:place st="on"></st1:place>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The</span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/yellow%20emp%20last.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/yellow%20emp%20last.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;"> White Goddess</span>). The Yellow Emperor, 27th century BC, who</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > founded ancient Taoism, was accompanied by three female deities.)It is my consideration that this, not the other, is</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > the essential Quaternity of the English-speaking peoples. The</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/tibetanbagua.giftiny.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/tibetanbagua.giftiny.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > boy child can be a satry or Traveller, or avatar – my astonishing Australian dreamer recently had such a dream. (Note: the four & four = the Ba Gua, featured as a portal above in the entries on <span style="font-style: italic;">Lost</span>.)</span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1137495028357198962006-01-17T02:47:00.000-08:002006-04-23T03:59:58.043-07:00A Reader's Vision<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Meru.jpgsmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Meru.jpgsmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;">Thoughts: At the beginning of these journals I illustrate an Eastern idea which has been amplified by Swiss Depth Psychologist C.G. Jung. That is, the idea that one can have a dream that another has and that significant events can arise spontaneously in dreams of different people and at different times – but the different times are not random – they form a package over a specific period which may be greater than one individual's lifetime; that is, as one individual may share in another's dream life or visionary life, so the individual can share in dreams beyond her or his time. As different places can have varying sincerity like Linus’s Pumpkin Patch, so can different stretches of time. I use Salvador Dali’s visions of a <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/work-in-progress-prelude-to-orange.html">White Grand Piano</a> to illustrate this and explain this idea more or less as it is understood to what the Dalai Lama refers to as “conservatives” – Old School, as he says he is. Myself I have had parallel dreams and important dreams shared by other people. My dreams have always been shared by women – some I know, like my wife, others like <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/10/sun-king.html">miss3</a>, whom I met way later than the dream. <o:p></o:p></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Anyway, a reader has kindly shared an interesting vision, which he or she feels portends to a tragedy which has happened or is perhaps about to happen. The vision begins with a mention of Mount Meru, in Tibetan Buddhism, the center of the Cosmic Universe - a singular ray of light which the adept attempts through devote practise to embody. I would like to make a few comments on this particular vision and on dreams in general. First of all, when a person has a difficult dream that stays with him it is usually and important dream – what Native American Indians call a “Big Dream” – suggesting something from the Unconscious of inherent originality. One point made earlier: persons capable of having clairvoyant dreams are not – in the Taoist realm – inherently great at understanding their vision. You see this from very early times. <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/work-in-progress-quigley-i_113301300653107818.html">Abbess Hildegaard’s visions</a> are cosmic, but her explanation of her dreams is faulty and generic. Likewise, <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/work-in-progress-orange-monk-salvador_28.html">Magritte</a>’s intuitions are cosmic but his explanations are pedantic and generic clevernesses prepared for a publicist class of misunderstanders. What makes Magritte a great painter and visionary makes him a poor publicist. Breton the the Surrealists intentionally confounded the uninitiated to send them away from their <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/sacred-journey.html">sacred circle</a>. Jung explains this division of abilities in personality type studies – Myers-Briggs in the U.S. Taoism as well makes the point – the vision requires one to have it and one to bring it out into the world. They are two people with different skills, and in the vision the two are One: the Inside and the Outside. In Myers-Briggs terms, I believe these would be INFP for the dreamer and INTP for the interpreter. When the Dalai Lama brings a dream or a thought to the Oracle in the Old Schol tradition for explaination and interpretation he describes, this is the Inside/Outside condition.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The Second point is more important. When people have a Big Dreams they almost always feel it portends disaster. It creates fear because it comes from the Unconscious where the dreamer doesn’t often go and can only go alone with difficulty. Most often Big Dreams are auspicious. A death in a Big Dream usually means a birth, as in Tarot cards. But of course, the dream may be a dark vision. For example: I dreamed in New York City in early mid-life – where I found it difficult to dream – that a Catholic nun was dancing with a cloak over her head in the hallway of the house where I grew up in Rhode Island. I came out of my room and my father, at the other end of the hall came out and aid, “Don’t worry, it’s not your mother.” When my sister called home the next day she found my cousin had died – the first of my generation to die in my family.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Perhaps this vision is a dark harbinger. But the reader said he or she had the dream late in 1996 and in <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Australia</st1:country-region></st1:place>. This was an astonishing dream time, and I have found Australians to be particularly astute dreamers (if this person is an Australian). As mentioned in the beginning, these journals here are about and from thinking which occurred in dreams and intuition between 1994 and 2005, the life cycle of the <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/work-in-progress-quigley-i_113301300653107818.html">White Buffalo</a>, who was born in one millennium (and one Platonic month) and died in another. I am also interested in this dream/poem because it contains an anecdote about a goat and my journals here were originally jotted in 1996 as a five-page poem called "The Goat Man" ccompanied by <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/who-is-parthalon-flyingsnake-decoursy.html">a picture which I painted</a> in my barn, and twice this week I have received goat things from kind readers. I raise sheep and the kind of<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Tunis4%20sheep.jsmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Tunis4%20sheep.jsmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:130%;"> sheep I raise, <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">Tunis</st1:state></st1:place> sheep – beautiful North African sheep - (photo A here by William and Helen Kirby-Mende who have the best sheep) – to some degree resemble goats. I wish I knew more about this dream of the reader – the account here was written in 2005, almost 10 years after the fact,<span style=""> </span>and to understand important dreams like this there should be a recollection immediately after. But – as a dream – this poem appears to have key elements of a new Awakening:<span style=""> </span>the Sacred Mountain at the Center of the Universe; the Deathless Child which transcends avatars and Awakes new cycles of spirit and psychic awareness; a young Magical Animal – goats are capricious Trickster animals which initiate mischief and break old orthodoxies, clearing the Psyche for new Awakening; and a Great Beast lying on its back. It is important that the vision was in the sky, in Western (Zoroastrian) cosmology, the realm of the zodiac reflecting the millenia we are entering.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Vision<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">In the sky a vision appeared<br />To the Sky Dragon:</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">A mountain whose shape he realized -<br />Mt. Meru - centre of the Universe.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">From its clear form arose a face<br />A small boy in profile.<br />The face transformed into an enthronement crown<br />Clear against the vast blue sky.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Another form arose, a young sacrificial goat<br />Pleading for its life.<br />Alas, the boy was to be sacrificed!<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The Great Beast, huge and ugly appeared<br />Lying on its back -<br />Totally defenseless and vulnerable.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">What could it all mean?<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The Sky Dragon wept with frustration.<br />Why did he receive this vision?<br />He felt powerless to act<br />Yet knew some skillful action was required.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">One day he decided the time had come<br />To send the vision on the winds<br />To blow where it may, to sitr<br />The consciousness of those who suffered<br />And those who were the cause of suffering<br />Under the rule of the Great Beast<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">(Copyright July, 2005, by Sky Dragon. Reprinted with permission.)<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:130%;">This vision suggests to Sky Dragon the child monk, the Panchen Lama, whose fate is unknown. My essay earlier on the Panchen Lama prompted the correspondence. Dreams tell several stories and as this tales makes clear Sky Dragon's point of view, it also illustrates his or her own<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/shivadwarf.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/shivadwarf.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:130%;"> Awakening: the Great Beast lying on its back here is very like - exactly like - the path of Shiva abandoning his old ego after he has outgrown it, so as to find new life/dance - the deity stomps an a leathery old dwarf (old beast) underfoot (as <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/life-with-lions-john-lennons.html">The Beatles left behind four "corpses"</a> abandon their Old Selves and emerge as new "butterflies" at <span style="font-style: italic;">Sgt. Peppers</span>) - Shiva casts the old skin and begins his new dance of "the Creation of Birth and Death" and leaves the leathery dwarf stomped underfoot. Surely that is here in the dream as well: the Deathless Child appears in the Mountain in the Center of the World - this is the new Creative, Psychic, Spiritual Life, transplanting the old abandoned and useless beast. In fact, as the dreamer pointed out in a letter - he or she at the moment of the vision had just entered initiation into new cosmic life form and the dream vision here is one which classically accompanies a true spiritual change. The Deathless Child is born out of the death of the Great Beast. But the dreamer is part of the world and when the dreamer enters Awakening, so does the World begin again as well; the Beast is Kali - the Death Mother - her Reign is up in the world and the Deathless child Awakens again in the world. The dreamer fears for the health and welfare of the Panchen Lama and so do I. But the part of the<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Hale%20Bopp.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Hale%20Bopp.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:130%;"> boy that is divine is a light that cannot die - the Deathless Child brings new life form the Moutain at the Center of the Universe, and in that, this is a most auspicious dream - coming into the world with other events - late 1996 and early 1997 - the spontaneous Awakening of thousands of Chinese in the Falun Gong, the widescale popular interest in Tibetan Buddhism in the West and the rise of the Hale-Bopp star event which hung over my farm every morning for a month when I went out to feed my chickens.</span><br /></span></p>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1137333173315983032006-01-15T05:52:00.000-08:002006-01-15T13:25:32.573-08:00The Age of Thomas<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/matrix05.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/matrix05.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Tiny slips of paper falling from my desk which belongs somewhere but I can’t remember where</span>: . . . Neo presents the vivid picture of the shaman’s journey between millenia. It is a great contemporary shaman’s journey as it returns the shaman back to earth from his space journey. As science fiction went to the heavens in the 1970s, it <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/returning-work-in-progress-quigley-in.html">returns to earth</a> with Neo . . . <span style=""> </span>We are an Earth Species and must find ourselves and our way on this planet . . . To desire to find ourselves in the most distant space is to avoid our fate. In some ways it is a childish illusion of avoidance of adulthood and moral responsibility . . . One of life’s little 3 x 5 cards is the understanding of Hegel as a thesis vs. antithesis coming to a synthesis.<span style=""> </span>But this is a Power Principle view of life – a <i style="">yang</i> view. The two forces in the world in this view are not <i style="">yin</i> and <i style="">yang</i>, but <i style="">yang plus</i> and <i style="">yang minus</i>. I always see <i style="">yin</i> and <i style="">yang</i> presentations as an erroneous understanding of Hegel. Two men sword fighting is not <i style="">yin</i> and <i style="">yang</i>. There is no <i style="">yin</i> present. Thesis/antithesis is a vision of the world without <i style="">yin</i>, our world in the West since the 1400s. Most marriages today are <i style="">yang/yang</i> relationships, each partner with a separate corporate identity outside the body of the other. It makes no difference if they are biologically man and woman. They are friendship relationships - pal relationships. Family as Corporation. Relationships. But that is not marriage, and not <span style="font-style: italic;">yin</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">yang</span>. The popular book and upcoming movie, <i style="">The Da Vinci Code </i>on the surface suggests the dynamic Seal of Solomon code – the two interlocking triangles of the Seal of Solomon, but on investigation, there are no <i style="">yin</i> figures in this entertaining piece of pop mysticism . . . <span style=""> </span>Like most marriages today in Matrix world, all man and woman – everyone in the world perhaps - are <i style="">yang</i> figures and <i style="">yang</i> individuals (their nests will always be square). <i style="">Yin</i> is Andromeda, lost in the ozone, dangling her two Japanese fighting fish at the end of a string. <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/returning-work-in-progress-quigley-in.html">But she’s returning to earth now and here her name is Trinity</a>. <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i style="">The Matrix</i> presents a mythic picture of the <i style="">yin</i> world and the <i style="">yang</i> world and the <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/life-with-lions-john-lennons.html">shaman’s journey</a> from the one to the other. The difficulty in seeing comes from the fact that there are actually <i style="">four</i> things, not <i style="">two</i>. There is <i style="">yin</i> and <i style="">yang</i>, and each has a Dark Face, <i style="">yin minus </i>and <i style="">yang minus</i>. The <i style="">yang plus</i> and <i style="">yang minus</i> is brilliantly represented in Thomas Anderson’s journey. Before he Awakens, Keanu Reeves’ character, Thomas Anderson, has dual nature (Thomas means the Twin, specifically the Twin of Jesus and cosmoglomically, we enter perhaps The Age of Thomas, with the second incarnation of the Christ in Aquarius, - each of the Twelve will present as the Christ in a 24,000 Sun Cycle – this is suggested in the third <i style="">Matrix</i>, but put that aside). Neo’s dual nature is in the 3 x 5 Hegelian vision of anti-thesis and thesis (when someone speaks of the dual nature, ask if she means, man/woman, man/Dark Face, Woman/Dark Face, Man/God-Universe-and Male God [Sky and Fire] or Female God [Earth and Water] – I never know what they mean and think they don’t know). The one, the positive <i style="">yang</i>, is Thomas Anderson working days as a computer programmer. This is Mr. Anderson in the world. The other is the anti-Anderson, <i style="">yang minus</i>, working nights as a hacker to negate the work he does in the day. They could well be political parties which see in their sole initiatives contervailing the other. This is thesis and anti-thesis, but they do not form synthesis – they simply endlessly<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Trinity.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Trinity.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> swordfight throughout the ages, the one making the other stronger and visa versa. Mr. Anderson leaves this world and finds another, the <i style="">yin</i> world. Like all male shamans, he is sent inward by the <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/how-witch-came-to-new-england-intro-to.html">Triple Goddess</a> (Trinity). Mr. Anderson’s is a classic shaman’s journey and it begins in sleep, where the Universe enters the Unconscious of the living individual. Neo is sleeping. In his dream he hears a voice which says; <i style="">Wake up Neo, the Matrix has you</i>. <i style="">The Matrix</i> presents Keanu in the Hegelian dual nature of the current everyday world. It is a woman’s voice from the Unconscious which brings him out. A man’s journey into the <i style="">yin</i> world always starts with a woman’s voice – it is the female inner nature of a man (and <i style="">visa versa</i> for women). She lives in the part of consciousness that a man living in Ego/Ego Dark face like Mr. Anderson has never experienced and has no abilities to travel in. The Hegelian 3 x 5 says it does not exist (the <i style="">common misunderstanding</i> is all important in creating culture. It makes no difference and is of no importance as to what Hegelian actually meant and what is true in Hegel) . <span style=""> </span>. . In life, the most critical moment is the very first – the birth moment. It is then the organism is most likely to fail. Mr. Anderson has to respond to this message without any of the tools he has from his everyday or everynight natures. He has to abandon his skills and tools. He has to find intuition. He has to obey it. This is key to Awakening.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/white%20rabbit.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/white%20rabbit.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> Trinity tells him one thing to do: Follow the White Rabbit. Like Alice and Arguna, like most journeys to the Self, a <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/thunder-gods-pt-1-work-in-progress.html">Magical Animal</a> will lead the way. Suddenly friends appear at the door. He is not ready (one is never redy) – he is busy – he cannot go with them – then he sees the tattoo of the White Rabbit on one of the partyers – a Trinity manifestation – <span style=""> </span>he immediately says he will go. Without question, he puts aside his former everyday selves, and follows the guiding light of his Anima. The next he finds turmoil. This is the dangerous confrontation with the Unconscious in the modern world bereft of psychic experience and knowledge. Mr. Anderson has never been there,<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/morpheus.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/morpheus.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> and most who try to go there (as in the <i style="">Pokemon</i> movie) will not survive the journey. But Mr. Anderson’s instinctiveness in abandoning his reason-based matrix and hearing his intuition assures his Salvation. <i style="">The Matrix</i> is a classic journey to the Self and one like all others. Every journey a man has to the Self is exactly like this: A female voice invites you to the Psyche and her world, the <i style="">yin</i> world – (but her Dark Face – <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/12/rebbes-farewell-steven-spielbergs.html"><i style="">vagina dentada</i></a> - might eat you). Within that journey a man will find the Self if he is strong and if he can survive the Confrontation with the Self – the part of the person which is part of the Universe – the Lord of the Unconscious/Morpheus – and find a new self with a new name. In this Awakening, the new psychic life casts off the old as an abandoned skin. Neo represents us in the world today (or the one half of the world which identifies with the Neo journey/will be opposed by those who do not<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/twins.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/twins.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> in equal and opposite counterforce). It is an active journey of the Collective Unconscious. The movie is a catalyst – an <i style="">avatar</i> – to a greater Awakening of the general public. It could go on to greater phases just as the Mahabarata went on volume after volume. The arcane elements in this series – the Twins, for example, (like the Twin John Paul Popes in occult folk lore, <span style=""> </span>Church arcania, dreams and the zodiac, appear as Gates) present a public dream of a new world hatching. I have only talked to women who have had this journey. They dream <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/neo%20at%20end.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/neo%20at%20end.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>of Twins at the beginning. Sometimes they are twins or have twin siblings. They dream of all these elements. But it is interesting and perhaps significant that this picture occurs at the turning of the millennium. Neo emerges a different man. There is a whole cosmology today from Stan Lee to <span style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars</span> to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Matrix</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The X Files</span>, <span style=""> </span>Stan Lee again with new movies, <span style="font-style: italic;">The X Men</span>. These have profound inner intricacies which are confluent with mythical and anthropological thinking and have perhaps implications. </p>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1137242766533305882006-01-14T04:29:00.000-08:002006-01-15T09:31:50.173-08:00Note to Sirensong - Finding the Real Waldo<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/tintin%20in%20Tibet.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/tintin%20in%20Tibet.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>I wrote one of the first entries in this journal two months back after watching "Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin" with my kids. At the end Linus says the Great Pumpkin didn't arrive because the Pumpkin Patch wasn't sincere enough. He said next year he would find a more sincere Pumpkin Patch. Linus is a true monk. Likewise, I think TinTin would be a great guide. If you ever cross the Mississippi, try Cherokee, NC, and the Cold Mountain region for a sincere Pumpkin Patch. The gods hide in low places. They ask the question -<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/waldo.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/waldo.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-style: italic;">Who is the Masked Man?</span> - when we are the Masked Man, our identity not yet revealed even to ourselves. It is like Arjuna's Dharma path, guided by intuition. There are many guides hidden everywhere. The trick is to find the Real Waldo.Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1136997153051754082006-01-11T08:13:00.000-08:002006-01-11T10:35:43.050-08:00Buddhism Without Bullshit<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/monk%20sad.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/monk%20sad.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="">Did you ever dream that you were dreaming of someone and woke and called them and they were dreaming of you? I’ve heard that dream from a lot of people but only furtively, as if it were a dark secret. One such event – an Arrow in the Blue as Arthur Koestler<span style=""> </span>called it – occurs only a few times in life, but it changes everything. It gives personal experience evidence to Einstein’s great vision that time as we experience it is an illusion. An honest person,</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/alice-tennile-caterpillar.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/alice-tennile-caterpillar.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=""> as Koestler was, must base her or his life threafter on that moment of truth. It is the key to everything. Anyway, what I like about this picture on the left by my blog colleague Sad Monk, (photos </span>- all but Leonard Cohen - by Dan Farber- Visions of Buddhist life) <span style="">is that you can see in the faces of the monks the shock and joy of visiting the outside world (at its contemporary essense - Disneyland). Indeed in this context they look kind of geeky and freaked out. The deeply Introverted – if they have a decent venue to skillfully</span><span style=""> advance their Introversion and these monks do - anchor the outside Extroverted culture </span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/monestary.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/monestary.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="">within itself. <span style=""> </span>These lovely Elfs make a brief visit to the outside and look like fish out of water. But how serene they are in their own house. We Quigs live in old places, heat with wood and have bears in the yard and an occational wandering moose. When we venture briefly to the outside world and visit modern motels where you slide magnietic cards to open the door and a stop at McDonalds while travelling, it brings us the same innocent pleasures. Maybe the monks here follow the magic animal to Enlightenment. For Neo and Alice,</span><span style=""> it was White Rabbit who would lead the way. But my astonishing Australian dreamer friend dreamed of a luminous slug and a knapsack – an Earth Guide, like Caterpillar here – and it took<span style=""> </span>her on a six-month journey to the heart of the Earth Mother Herself. The week of the Caterpillar, my young daughter had the same dream as my Australian friend and so did my wife and</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/LeonardCohen_a.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/LeonardCohen_a.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=""> Sister-in-law, but I’d not mentioned the dreams to any of them. For myself, the mountains are silent. So I went to visit a Buddhist monestary nearby in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Vermont</st1:place></st1:state>, but Buddhism came by the crate and in pounds. My children’s friends dream of things coming out of the ground and flying down chimneys. It is characteristic of our age. We, as a people are <a href="http://quigleyinexile.blogspot.com/2005/11/returning-work-in-progress-quigley-in.html">returning to earth</a> in the new</span><span style=""> millennium & returning to ourselves. I go here. This is my monk. Buddhism without bullshit: Leonard Cohen.</span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1136475476510725102006-01-05T07:02:00.000-08:002006-01-05T15:35:38.690-08:00Waiting for Arnold<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/arnold.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/arnold.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I decided not to write about <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Arnold</st1:place></st1:city> as said. Too abstract to explain, to difficult to follow and tends to get lost in the ozone of things which have not yet occurred. Healthy ego rejects the future. <i style="">Mindless we laughed, mindless we loved, mindless at last we died</i>. Jean Shepherd. But I do have a few thoughts</span><span style="font-size:130%;">.</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p></o:p></span> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >When I write about politics, which has sometimes been my job, I use a long-term strategy of thinking that is best expressed in a book by</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/fourth%20turning.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/fourth%20turning.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > William Strauss and Neil Howe called <i style="">The Fourth Turning</i>. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Fourth Turning</span> looks at how ideas and trends travel generationally. It is almost as if an entire generation is encoded with the same formula. One generation celebrates Eisenhower, the next, Bob Dylan. There is a kind of charality to this. It forms a time engine of alternating currents.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >What I write about in politics today is that we are at the turning of the fourth and final generation of our historical period, and the generation which rises next will complete our historical passage. That is as far as we can see. The entire post-war period can be seen as an 80-year period which began at the conclusion of warfare in Europe and <st1:place st="on">Asia</st1:place> in the mid-40s.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >For a long time my innate feeling is that this historical period will somehow end with <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Arnold</st1:place></st1:city>. How that could happen is through a dumping of the current political environment – it has a failed legacy in every field of activity and is post-seasonal – and the beginning of a new one. When a new agenda builds now it will find success and stability, as after a great period of instability, what finds stability becomes institutionalized. One possible path: Consider an American government from the Northeast in the next 12 years with either New York Governor George Pataki or Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney at the helm (and a likeable and folkloric hero like John McCain as Vice President to restore dignity and honor as world ambassador) and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Secretary of State. In the first term of this realm, the governing party seeks a platform to allow foreign-born residents to become President (Elaine Chao, Jennifer Granholm, Arnold). If the new governing group is successful, such an amendment would easily pass. Twice in the last 30 years a President has won 49 out of 50 states, far more an a Constitutional Amendment needs in state endorsements. This would establish a new paradigm. But I don’t care to discuss that here as an external political issue. Anyone interested can look at my other blog <a href="http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Quigley: Culture, Politics, Sheep</span></a>, where I write about politics in the abstract and post my political articles written for journals.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/earth%20mother.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/earth%20mother.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Far more important in the understanding of the passages of time and public events is their inner dynamics. In this <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Arnold</st1:place></st1:city> figures even more prominently than as a politician. Key to this understanding is Miss3’s dream of the Dance of the Sun God at the beginning of this journal (it also comes up if you Google “Sun God Dance”). The Goddess cries, “I am dying.” In a sequence of dreams like this there is often a figure indicating both sexes, and sometimes it is a hermaphrodite. It is a transitional figure. In a sequence like this a hermaphrodite</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > indicates a shift in consciousness from the feminine to the masculine sphere – from <i style="">yin</i> realm to <i style="">yang</i> realm (or visa versa). From the death of the Goddess,</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Sun%20King.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Sun%20King.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > the Sun King (constuction here by Lisa Yount at LionLight) arises via a transitional figure. The dream presents a paradigm shift of cosmic poles.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In his early public appearance as a strong man on the beaches of Southern California in the early 1970s, <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Arnold</st1:place></st1:city> quickly became a kind of cultural icon. The muscle beach culture was oddly curious in the 1950s, but it came to full flower in the 1970s. At the time, one film critic said that the strong man culture, of which <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Arnold</st1:place></st1:city> was the singular representative, was an archetypal compensation for the weak male figures in movies of the day. Of that day and of this day.</span> <span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This approaches the truth. And although there were weak male figures in pop culture of the 60s and 70s, what brought overwhelming influence in the world was the sudden resurgence of Earth Mother culture. The men wore long hair. They sang of love. But they were not weak men; they were instead male agents of the <i style="">yin</i> principle – agents of the Earth Mother.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Celtic, Druid and Earth Mother themes which had long been forgotten, flourished and pervaded every level of society almost overnight. Although it was called the Age of Aquarius, the Sixties was in fact still well within the Age of Pisces and could more accurately be seen as the last days of that era.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/kristopherson.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/kristopherson.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The Sixties in fact reminded many of the first days of the Christian and the perceptive observer Kris Kristofferson made the good comparison in one of his popular songs: “Jesus was a Capricorn/ He ate organic food. He believed in love and peace and never wore no shoes. Long hair, beard and sandals and a funky bunch of friends/ Reckon they’d just nail him up if he came down again.” George Harrison’s final word on behalf of the Beatles and on behalf of the age was, “Here comes the Sun King.”<span style=""> It </span>is a harbinger of Aquarius and the coming of the new incarnation of the Sun King. But the Aquarian Age didn’t actually – technically - begin until the year 2001.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This Earth Mother manifestation in the Sixties was a very intense and creative period, but destabilizing to the mainstream psychological trajectory we in the West and throughout the world were on. The strong man beach culture of Southern California presented a conspicuous charicature of masuline life force, a symbolic and archetypal compensation to weak man of the 70s, but it was primarily a countervailing force in compensation for the return of the Earth Mother culture of the Sixties. And it followed directly on its heels.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Almost 40 years later saw a new transition: The critical first months of the war on <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> brought a disturbance to the force. As always, a crisis of this deep psychological magnitude brought</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/old-hippies.1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/old-hippies.1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > forth new figures. Two emerged in response as natural psychological reactions to</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > the first chaotic months, Howard Dean, the former Governor of <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Vermont</st1:place></st1:state>, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the most chaotic standard political recall in American history, <st1:city st="on">Arnold</st1:city> was sent almost overnight to the Governor's chair in California.<br /></span></p><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >These two men are agents of the two fields, <i style="">yin</i> and <span style="font-style: italic;">yang</span>, as they have played out in our country since World War II. Dr. Dean, product of a state, Vermont, which evolved its sensibility from a fantastic hippie vortex in the 1960s, which I shared in, and <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Arnold</st1:city></st1:place>, the compensating <i style="">yang</i> factor. It was a remarkable that these two Governors would arise as representatives of American <i style="">yin</i> and <i style="">yang</i> at the crucible. The Fourth Turning hinges therewith. One of these two figures will go forward, and with him will go the American condition. The other will yield.</span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1136470899279815472006-01-05T05:57:00.000-08:002008-05-11T05:13:11.185-07:00The Aquarian Paradigm<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/seal4.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/seal4.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >There is in <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place> a body of work that came about in the 1960s that is a harbinger of the new millennium. It is the full body of the mature work of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. The classic series starts with the most famous of his films, <i style="">The Seventh Seal</i>, and the haunting specter of death leading the dancers in shadow to the dark side of a hill. The story is about soldiers coming back from the Crusades, only to find northern <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place> torn by plague. Only one survives, the comic peasant with a clear vision of the Celestial Mother. It is the end of the Christian age, and Bergman begins the film with an appropriate quote from <i style="">Revelations</i>. The Seventh Seal is Wormwood. Here is the essence of the prophecy from <i style="">Revelations</i> : <i style="">And the seventh angel</i></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Seventh_Seal.%20death.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Seventh_Seal.%20death.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><i style=""> poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done</i>. (Rev. 16:17)<o:p></o:p></span> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >There follows a series of three films called the Silence of God trilogy, filled with a spiritual angst that was characteristic of the age, which could be interpreted as coming from anxieties that arise from sexual awareness in youth, the political uncertainties of the time, the destabilizing side affects of creating great art or other causes. They are masterful films, perhaps the greatest dramatic presentations of that time. But Bergman’s last major public presentation, a film adaptation of Mozart’s <i style="">The Magic Flute</i>, is perhaps his most important. It is the only moment in all of his work where the character experiences triumph in the end, and looking at the full body of work it becomes clear that the angst of the middle films were part of the spiritual and psychological struggle to find the character’s achievement in the last, and that those anxieties were allayed by the character’s spiritual victory in the last film. Other work would come, but much o fit seeking box-office cash and finding a generic audience.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/magicfluteTamino.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/magicfluteTamino.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Bergman’s rendition of <i style="">The Magic Flute</i> is a harbinger of the age here and pending. Taking his films out of their historical periods and viewing them as an expression of the artist’s own development and sensibility, his full body of work is a shaman’s journey which traverses ages, starting with <i style="">The Seventh Seal</i> at the very end of the Christian age and ending with <i style="">The Magic Flute</i> at the beginning of a new age.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/sarastro_inthica.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/sarastro_inthica.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Perhaps none surpasses Mozart’s <i style="">The Magic Flute</i> (1791) in knowledge of the masculine principle and the feminine, <i style="">yang</i> and <i style="">yin</i>, first performed at the high end of the Renaissance as the masculine principle and the Renaissance came to dominate the Earth Mother. In Mozart’s story three warriors guard the Lord of the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Temple</st1:place></st1:city> and his counselors, while three sisters accompany the Earth Mother. But now she is the Queen of the Night, the Earth Mother in her third and final phase. She is Kali, the Death Mother.<span style=""> </span>In Bergman’s movie the Queen of the Night is at one point composed with the moon behind her surrounded by zodiac symbols. And Sarastro, the Ruler of the <st1:city st="on">Temple</st1:city>, is shown with his male counsel in caves that resemble those at <st1:place st="on">Lascaux</st1:place>. Sarastro, here in a beautiful presentation at Ithaca College, has commandeered the Earth, the organic realm of the Goddess.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Tamino, the hero of the story, follows on a sacred love quest and in the process moves his allegiance from the Earth Mother to the Lords of the <st1:city st="on">Temple</st1:city> and joins the Lords of the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Temple</st1:place></st1:city>. Three boy spirits in a flying ship accompany the hero and give him three words to guide him in his quest. The words are: steadfast, silence, and obedience.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Mozart’s opera marks history’s turning point. It was the time of revolution throughout the world. It marks the end of the ancient regimes and the monarchies of <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place>. And it marks the end to the old Earth Mother cycle of Europe – white phase, rose phase, black phase – which brought them about over the proceeding thousand years. <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region> has a special place here and has a special trajectory. The age upon us and that which awakened with Mozart is the Enlightenment. All of Europe entered the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but it was only the German and Austrian regions of Europe that embraced the Power Principle and at the same time incorporated the <i style="">yin</i> or feminine sensibility - Abbess Hildegard and Meister Eckhart to Goethe and Leibnitz to Schopenhauer and Jung, embraced the <i style="">yin</i> world, this tradition follows unbroken from the 12<sup>th</sup> century until the present. The other rising Protestant nations rose in denial and opposition to it.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><st1:place st="on"><span style="font-family:Garamond;">Europe</span></st1:place></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > faces a new age today and once again sings in one voice. And it sings a German song; its anthem is Beethoven’s <i style="">Ode to Joy</i>, written within four years of The Magic Flute. The flag of the European</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/eU%20flag.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/eU%20flag.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:14;" ><span style="font-size:130%;"> Union is a study in zodiac symbolism, a blue background representing sky and air, the masculine field of Aquarius, and 12 gold stars, the full counsel of the zodiac; the council of Sarastro and the Lords of the Temple.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1136400528102713012006-01-04T10:40:00.000-08:002006-01-10T06:50:59.746-08:00The Death of the Earth Mother<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Fall%20River%20mill.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Fall%20River%20mill.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">The Irish do not prosper so well; they love to drink and to quarrel . . .</span> from <span style="font-style: italic;">Letters from an American Farmer</span> by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1781)<br /><br />My father was a man of few words.<o:p></o:p> “Jews are better to work for than Protestants,” he once said. And French people cannot be trusted, he would say. That was about it.<o:p></o:p> The thing about French people was not a prejudice. Just the opposite. He wasn’t prejudiced against French people. He was prejudiced against everyone else except French people. He liked French people and his relatives would marry French people. Into his old age his only remaining friends were French people. I think he loved French people more than he loved the Irish and that’s what scared him.<o:p></o:p></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The only people who worked in the factories in <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Fall River</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">Massachusetts</st1:state></st1:place> were French people and Irish people, until the Portuguese came in, but then it was too late. So the only people you could trust were French people and Irish people. And you couldn’t really trust the French all the way, although they were Catholic, because they weren’t Irish.<o:p></o:p> His employment maxim about Jews was more complex. At the heart of the matter was the core intuition that lived secretly in the collective heart of certain working-class Irish factory workers in New England in those days that Protestant people couldn’t really run things on their own because they were guided by blind optimism, unfettered by the heart, and if they tried to do things on a large scale without the aid of Jews, things would fall apart. This at a time and place where Yankees had deep roots and the Irish were new arrivals. Thus, there was a complex tribal prejudice toward Jews; they were smarter and not as predictable as Yankees -- and then there was a prejudice against them; they were not Catholics, of course, like we were. But they were a mystical force of nature. It resembled somewhat the prejudice that certain primitive religious groups in the <st1:place st="on">Appalachians</st1:place> have about the Jews secretly controlling the world’s money supply, but it was just the opposite. It wasn’t secret and it wasn’t a conspiracy, it was supposed to be that way. It was nature. So some of the old Irish believed that in the modern world, Jews brought inner balance and were the only ones able to grasp the forces unseen; without them the world would fall apart. A notion that may have been carried across the ocean from Manchester, England when Disraeli was prime minister in Queen Victoria’s era, where a good percentage of the Irish and a half dozen of my living relatives at that time spent an interim decade or so awaiting passage to <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>. It is not unlike the common widespread mystic belief in fed chairman Alan Greenspan as a benevolent shaman/economist in recent times, without whose singular vision it would all go to pieces. And we working-class Irish were politically allied with Jews and polarized against Yankee Protestants. My father, who entered factory life after high school, once confided that the reason the Egyptians were a great nation thousands of years ago was because of the Jews, even though they were kept slaves, and all the history of the world was like that. It was a startling and complex observation by a man who went to daily mass and communion and said the rosary every evening with the family. And the American metamorphosis that brought this sincerely devout man from the vortex of the cavernous Mission Church in South Boston that he was born into, where the toes of the statue of the crucified Jesus were worn through the paint by humble pilgrims kissing the feet in the pale light; pilgrims who had left behind crutches, wheelchairs, eye glasses and leg braces at the feet of Jesus in surrounding piles to signify the miracles that had taken place, led him at the end of his life to seder feasts in a new eclectic Catholicism, which he didn’t fully understand but had no choice but to accept.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >My Aunt Nora would babysit for Jews and sneak the babies down to the Catholic Church to be baptized, but I inherited the wise guide secret Irish folkloric tradition of my father. In college, I’d look for Jewish names among the professors in the course listings and take their courses. Then, after I left home, most of my friends were Jews. Most still are.<o:p></o:p> My father’s folk prejudices about Jews and French people, passed on as a secret intuition in a rite of passage to his son in order to keep him oriented in the outer world, did no damage. I’ve always felt that I belong to Jews and French and Portuguese people more than to other outsiders, and in fact I do, as my closest cousins and native family are French/Irish.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It has been almost 40 years since I left <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Fall River</st1:place></st1:city> but I still feel a strong bonding. Whenever I see that most wonderful of all photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt of </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >the sailor kissing the</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Einstadt.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Einstadt.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > nurse at Times Square at war’s end, magically composed around the sailor’s huge, strong, magnificent hand, it first crosses my mind that the sailor is from Fall River (which he is). Or</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > when chef Emeril pops up on television I’ll say to my wife: he’s from <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Fall River</st1:place></st1:city>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The one prejudice that lived on tenaciously was toward the Yankee Protestant. They named their kids “Ike” and the Yankee preachers had fierce masculine smiles. Irish children knew that anyone with knowledge of God did not smile. And although people of my generation -- the Jews, the French, the Portuguese and the Irish -- were not particularly religious (it was a generation in which real men did not go to church and if they loved Jesus, they kept it to themselves), we considered ourselves organically rich and alive and in certain cases among the Irish, wild and aboriginal in animal power and poetry. This was not a religious prejudice. Our friends were Protestant; Episcopalian, Unitarian and Baptist and it didn’t seem to apply to them.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It was purely a class and political prejudice. They, the Yankee Protestants, were an inert class of business keepers. They cared about nothing except business. That was the way we saw it, and this deep and tenacious prejudice came to play out in final destiny in the single warrior political combat of John F. Kennedy and Henry Cabot Lodge. We saw no irony later when we did come of age and our first guides in the river between childhood and adulthood were Protestant singers with old rugged cross authenticity, brought up from the Appalachians in <st1:state st="on">Virginia</st1:state> and <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">North Carolina</st1:state></st1:place> and the Mississippi Delta for the emerging folk scene; Doc Watson, the Weavers, Elizabeth Kitchen.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >That was about all my father ever said, but that was enough. I can’t imagine having one of those fathers who talks all of the time like nowadays. Father bonding is less than freedom. I’d always felt man enough coming up as a boy and didn’t particularly want any interference. My friends were the same; go out in the morning, come home at night. So as most of the fathers bonded among themselves generationally during the Second World War, we developed early relationships among ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Mine was a perfect father and I couldn’t ask for more in a man. He was the last in a massive wave of Irish immigrants to work in a city of quite beautiful stone and glass cotton mills numbering up to 150 in its heyday and employing over a million and a half at the height of the Great Migration. He worked in the last mill to head south in the 1950s and he was the last to leave. He was the electrician. He turned the lights out.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It may be an Irish thing, not to particularly devalue men and the role of men, but to see the universe in women, and in the eyes of one’s mother. Irish or not, I certainly inherited that view. A father should do his work and shut his mouth; work like a man and die like a man. That’s what my father did. It was a nice discovery finding Lao Tsu and the <i style="">Tao Te Ching</i>, who found poetry in it.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >If I had anything to say as a child, it was to my mother. I notice my boys are the same way. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I remember being under the table in the living room with my mother while she was ironing, and the house was warm, and I remember the rhythm and the smell of the iron sliding and the sound it made. She watched the Garry Moore Show when we had our first TV set, because he had as a host a pretty singer named Gisele MacKensey. She was Irish and although my mother thought she was Protestant, it was close enough in the 1950s when the Irish thing was dwindling fast.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It was a perfect paradise between us and little was said, and I experienced it again when my daughter was born. Her hands were just like my mother’s, her eyes quiet like my mother’s and the time we spent holding hands together seemed virtually the same moment as the time my mother and I were together quietly while the others were at school or at work. It was a brief interval of love and grace, a moment perfect in a world that resolves itself into death. It is life’s greatest respite. Twice now I have found it before the outer world and the world of work would call.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >School was hard to enter and I had to leave my mother to herself. It meant leaving paradise for a man-made matrix of beating steam pipes, strict nuns and onward and upward to sergeants and corporate managers. Then eventually my daughter would have to leave for a few hours a day for play school, just as I did. She had wanted to go to school, of course, like her brothers. But when the time came she was dreary the day before. Then when the time came, she cried for a moment at the door, composed herself, let go of my hand, and left the celestial bliss behind and went in. That afternoon she came out a kid.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I took longer and even after 50 years have never really adjusted to the outside. But she had the strength, the primal strength, of my mother.<o:p></o:p> Whenever I have had to do something very hard in adult life, I recalled the strength of my mother at difficult moments. It was not that my father was weak, he was not. It was that I as a child already felt I held all a man needed and had nothing more to gain from another man. Indeed, it would weaken a boy to find strength from another man. But what a woman had was beyond the curtain. And when she showed strength it was greater than a man’s. It did not come from orders from the language centers of the brain or from a testosterone chemical directive, but from the heart or someplace secret that a man can’t know.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >My mother was fair natured and like many Irish who were raised still with stories of the old country and occasionally even hearing the rosary in Gaelic said with rented death wailers at an Irish wake, she was passive toward the work of the outside world and preferred quiet. But the passive field had a fierce center, a tiger in the rain, that would rise only rarely, when it was challenged. I’d be dead if I didn’t find it in her because I don’t believe I have it in myself and certainly have never seen that force so fierce in another man. But her strength was mine and now it is my daughter’s.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >A lot of my mother's family were fey and Elf-like, almost translucent and singularly tall and fine-boned. I think they no longer exists as a race. Many died of lung disease working in factories when they first arrived. I had pneumonia twice and three collapsed lungs by the time I was 30. The general idea was that if you made it past 30 you could count on getting through to 85 or so. Although the conditions that caused brown lung were probably a factor in the older generation, it was their introverted nature that was unsuited to the matrix world of factory life and the mass culture of industrialization.<o:p></o:p> It is certainly too late to lodge a complaint, and anyway, I’m glad to be here under any circumstances. But consider if a society is designed so all of the robust extroverts prosper and all of the delicate introverts fail and eventually die, then the society develops without artists, without vision and without grace. It is a society that is out of balance and one that cannot find balance.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Perhaps it is meant to be like that: perhaps the industrial movement since the 1830s is a bridge to a new world, the Titan in the icon of the ascending zodiac constellation of Aquarius pouring the water into the new world; people flowing from all corners of the world abandoning caste, religion, race and national purpose to come to the United States. And when they are all here, the bridge will collapse. Nature wastes nothing. And here, in the “land of the red-faced people,” as a Tibetan prophecy of twelve hundred years ago calls it, it will begin again.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Maybe the Black Death already killed off all the introverts and left only the extroverts. Europe a hundred years before was certainly a different place – the <st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on">land</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename st="on">Mary</st1:placename></st1:place> when she was still primarily the Earth Mother – than it was after – the land of the muscular Jesus in Michelangelo’s Sistene Chapel ceiling fresco, up from the earth and flying alone into the sky.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Maybe it is supposed to be like that.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Those with subtle mind experience the death of others. Van Cliburn froze on stage in <st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state> the moment his mother died in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Texas</st1:place></st1:state>. I have experienced the death of others, though not my mother’s. The pain of her death was only relieved years later when my daughter was born, and the odd thing was that I didn’t ever particularly like my mother.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The very first dream I had as a child was that there was a tiger in my room. I was frightened to death and woke up screaming. My mother came in to soothe things down and bring it back to the quiet night. It was incidental that I named a novel 30 years later <i style="">Tiger in the Rain</i>, but in hindsight it seemed related to the first dream. I'd written the novel in New York City. On the night I finished it I had a dream about flying to a mountain top and meeting a Chinese women flying in white robes from the East. We consumated our marriage in a Greek-looking temple on top of the mountain. The next day I back went to work and met my wife.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >When I was a child we had a yellow cat which my mother hated. I vaguely recall the smell of plaster in our new post-war house with my mother looking like Queen Elizabeth in an apron, standing in the center of the room, frozen solid in terror, while Sally, the little yellow kitten, brushed against her ankle with the back of her neck.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The incident with my mother might have triggered the first tiger dream in which the ascending life force appeared quietly in a passive field – a tiger in the rain would scare the wits out of the small child. I was afraid of life before I left the family and went to <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Thailand</st1:place></st1:country-region> to military service. Then I wasn’t afraid anymore.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >My family is not afraid of cats. In fact, we love cats and have a framed picture of a particular cat on an ancient bureau, more sacred to us than any of the ancestors.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Now, last year, I dreamed the same dream again. There was a tiger pouncing in my room, but I was not afraid. It was a vision dream; a dream, as Indians say, that has a particularly tangible quality or reality that is denser than an ordinary dream or ordinary waking reality. It is the essence of consciousness and makes waking reality seem pale by comparison. When I got up and went to wake up my little daughter in the morning, she said, “Do you see the tiger?” pointing up and all around the ceiling, laughing. “It’s there,” she laughed, “it’s there,” although I’d not told her about the dream. Two years later she had her first dream and it was about tigers. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I dreamed of the tiger three times in my life: as my first dream, 25 years later when I wrote <i style="">Tiger in the Rain</i>, and last year at Halloween. This coincides with the three phases of life: youth, active middle age and old age. Each time I had the experience a cat appeared at my door and I took her into my house.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Some of my ancestors are Anglican Irish and some Roman Catholic. All came from <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Ireland</st1:place></st1:country-region>. The Anglicans were on my mother’s side. They found their way into the working class after <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Victoria</st1:place></st1:state> went to the throne and the potato famine drove them out. Industrialization gave them a generation or so in <st1:city st="on">Manchester</st1:city>, <st1:country-region st="on">England</st1:country-region>, before they managed to find their way in a large homogeneous group to a mill town along the <st1:placename st="on">Saconnet</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">River</st1:placetype> in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Massachusetts</st1:place></st1:state>. After thousands of years in one place, one town, they lived from 1840 to 1914 in three countries, and when they settled, they faced participation in two wars and the Great Depression. But perhaps work was worse: virtually half of them died while working in cotton mills. My mother quit school at 16, after her father and older brother died in her house on the same day of different causes, to support her mother and the remaining children. That was between the wars at the beginning of the Great Depression.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >On the day my mother died twelve years ago, I built a solid wooden gate with concrete footings, but standing alone and without a fence attached to it, in the middle of my sheep pasture in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">North Carolina</st1:place></st1:state>, hoping she would return.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The dead find no comfort here and return to Europe. I dream of my Aunt Nora, the sister of my mother, long dead, whenever someone in my family is about to die or to be born, even a beloved animal. But we will be staying here now. When my daughter was about to be born Nora appeared in a dream and said, "Oh, we're all coming over here now." Presumably she meant the souls of the ancestors who had returned to Ireland.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Now they would be coming back.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I understood that until the event approaching, until the birth of the girl, they had found no purpose in remaining here.<br /></span></p> <span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:14;" ></span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1136394341402338852006-01-04T08:52:00.000-08:002011-04-17T08:40:13.397-07:00The Return of the Earth Mother<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/snake1400.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/snake1400.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Landing on this great continent is like going to sea; they must have a compass, some friendly directing needle, or else they will uselessly err and wander for a long time, even with a fair wind.</span> - From <span style="font-style: italic;">Letters from an American Farmer</span> by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1781) <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >My wife is from the South and she brought us back there eventually after a stop here and a stop there. Later, in the upper <st1:place st="on">Midwest</st1:place> we lived in a very big and a very old farm house that was loaded with bats. Here in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New Hampshire</st1:place></st1:state> our house goes back to 1790. Here we have bear.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >There was a female spirit in the old <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Michigan</st1:place></st1:state> house and I think that is why there were so many bats. The Dead are attracted to old houses in the country, especially if they lived there when they were alive. Death by snow plow is a common danger here in the cold parts, and the women who lived in our <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Michigan</st1:place></st1:state> house was killed by a snow plow just before we moved in. In her late 70s. She was a child psychiatrist in <st1:city st="on">Ann Arbor</st1:city>, a women from <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">Iowa</st1:state></st1:place> with two sisters. All three were doctors. Perhaps it was her, or Walker, who built the house in 1852, who remained behind after departure. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Generally, bats like houses built before the Civil War because they have character. And bats, the night side of birds, are attracted to the dead, because they scare people and keep them away, keeping it peaceful and quiet. You have to be careful in dealing with the spirit world and I wouldn’t advise it. Death doesn’t bother the spirits. They don’t believe in death. There is no death. It’s just moving furniture around. And with the Dead, its hard to get a grip on who they like and who they don’t and why, but we’ve always had good relations.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >We have always had a terrific array of unsolicited animals living in and around our houses, more than most people, it seems. And when we arrived in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Michigan</st1:place></st1:state> one of those huge fire balls from heaven almost landed in our back yard. It was a great round ball of blue sparks that looked from earth about like a big 18-wheeler moving slowly across the moon about ten miles above the earth. I was driving at twilight in one direction down 6 Mile and it was going in the opposite direction. It was on NPR and everything.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In the South, it was snakes. Mice living in the walls at first until our cats got rid of them, then snakes. In <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York City</st1:place></st1:city> it was hawks, and my wife and I felt we knew them all personally. 20 years later I read with interest that a one-eyed hawk had given birth on a TV antenna, up by where Yoko Ono lives. Very good karma. About when Catherine was born too. We thought we might have known the hawk’s ancestors. There is a strange absence of hawks here in the northern mountains of <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New Hampshire</st1:place></st1:state>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >There was also a snake in <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>, the first night I arrived at my wife’s dorm room before she was my wife, being none to relaxed in fact, being conspicuously older than the students. There was a python in her room. It belonged to a friend who was away for the weekend, she said. He asked her to take care of it while he was away. Then when we left for the South, snakes were everywhere.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In our first old house in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">West Virginia</st1:place></st1:state>, when only our first boy was born – a beautiful old brick farmhouse, built by German farm people in 1840 and put together with oak pegs – we were sleeping the first night when we heard a scraping sound. Like a shoe dragging by itself across the attic floor, directly above us. We sat and listened for awhile and looked at each other. Still being city people, we didn’t think that we needed to handle the situation right away and didn’t have a clue what to do. Maybe call the realtor: <i style="">there are snakes in this house</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Finally, I took a flashlight and went up to the attic and I couldn’t see anything, although I heard the scrapping noise right under my feet. Then I shone the light between my feet and between the boards and I saw it moving like a slow train in the night. Like it was in a different world.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It appeared as long as a train as well. It was maybe seven feet but seemed endless. I shone the light around the room and saw maybe a dozen discarded snake skins hanging off chairs and things discarded in the attic, lightly moving with the air coming up from downstairs.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I didn’t do anything, which was the right thing to do, just went back to bed. The next day I saw them climbing up the brick in the sun, seven, eight feet long, moving slowly. They were black snakes, which are common throughout the South and they are benevolent. They eat mice, rats and other snakes, particularly copperheads, which are deadly. Farmers want to have the black snakes or rat snakes in their barn to keep the rats down. We found that they eat eggs as well but only two or three a day, which we considered salary to the snakes for doing their job eating the rats.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >They are a big impressive sight, especially if you have never seen a big black seven-foot snake before. It lives in the part of your mind that has no interpretation, but is like getting past the man-made world of the mind all at once and you are back in the garden. It is like they were here first and are here always and will be here after we with our busy projects and city shoes have passed on.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I first saw one when my wife brought us South from <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state> for a visit. We were first starting out, and she took us to the top of one of the rolling hills in the west of Virginia, and looking out over the horizon in a state of new bliss, she said, “I can see it now . . .” waving her hand, then she screamed, “Eek!” A black snake was right under our feet crawling away from us. Six feet, maybe seven feet.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Ten years later when she was busy managing three kids and awaiting a fourth on<span style=""> </span>our little farm in Tobaccoville, North Carolina, she once mildly complained that there were 47 animals in and around the house, including sheep, chickens, indoor cats, kids, outdoor cats, dogs, including one that had been kicked by a neighbor’s cow and had to live in the kitchen until it’s broken leg healed, and snakes in the barn and snakes in the cellar. By then she’d lost the eek reaction and if a copperhead had managed to get past the dogs, the cats, the blacksnakes and close up near the babies, she’d lop off its head with a shovel without a thought.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I am one of the people who are drawn to snakes. Women share something with snakes, I think, and that is why I am drawn to them. They share the same soul, I think. And Bela Lugosi offers this in the movie <i style="">Ed Wood</i>: when giving birth, the woman enters into the unconscious of the world or the Universe and after a few births going back and forth, a woman is familiar with the Unconscious and comfortable in it and at one with it. And Sun Bear has an observation. He says they share soul with the moon as well. Once a month, they complete a lunar cycle and if they all live together, like in a college dorm, their period cycles all synchronize. They share the same channel of consciousness, especially sisters. And especially at birth. They know what snakes know and share it with the moon.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Relatively speaking, a man doesn’t know about these things. It is the way of quiet understanding; the knowledge and experience of the Unconscious as it is understood in Islam and to the Zoroastrian, not the object knowledge in the mind of a white man. And when it is birthing about to happen it pulls the man in, having an affect that can’t be managed by a man’s own experience or knowledge. There is a kind of magnetism to it.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In the country, the ordinary Southern woman folk will take a string and hang it on a key and hold it in front of the pregnant woman’s stomach at about six or seven months, to tell what sex the baby is going to be. If it swings to the right it will be a boy, to the left, a girl. You can also tell what kind of a life force it will have by the velocity of the key spinning. It’s magnetism drawing the woman around the Fibonacci curve that is a black hole, down into the Universe and then out again into the world. The country people say there’s magnetism in the mountains too, which makes the lights on <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Brown</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Mountain</st1:placetype></st1:place> so frequent and strange and they don’t have an explanation. Everybody in those parts believes in UFOs and don’t care what the city people think about it. They don’t even know about the string thing with a pregnant woman. Anyway, the <i style="">hant</i> woman at the farm market said the string thing doesn’t work with city people.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I was never able to put my finger on it or to understand why – maybe it is magnetism – but after a few years on the farm, people, not just twins who are famous for it, or sisters who would all be like one woman at the birth period, but everybody – high church, low church, trailer park, black and white – would all get synchronized after a few years of this kind of life among the snakes and chickens and the critters. Even for a displaced Yankee like myself, brought down from <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York City</st1:place></st1:city>. When I’d stand in my front yard thinking, “I’ve got to get that stump out one way or another,” later that day a good ole’ boy would drive up in his truck and ask if I needed any stumps removed. Or if I’d think to myself, “How am I going to get rid of those extra roosters?” an old country man with sons would appear who my wife had sold chickens to the year before and ask if I had any this year. Birth cycle, in and out, ties you all to the mountain like sewing, says the <i style="">hant</i> woman.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >But after a while it got kind of ponderous and heavy, especially after the third boy was born. It was about that period – when the third was five to six months in the womb – that there got to be a burden on my mind. Had I been raised on that particular mountain and on that spot it might have been different. Also, just about then our friend Catherine. I could feel her coming.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Driving to <st1:place st="on">Chapel Hill</st1:place> one day, I heard on a call-in radio show where you call in and ask the astrologer for advice, a man with my birth date, July 15, called and asked the woman on the radio what kind of wife he should get. Pisces, she said, early spring, or just the opposite; Scorpio, early fall. Now these are not opposites like <i style="">yin</i> and <i style="">yang</i>, she said, male and female, they are ascending and descending charges of the one force, in this case, the feminine force for the guy who called in about getting a wife. The both together represent the fullness of the force, in a united episode. My wife was Pisces, perfect for a man born under Cancer as I was, and Catherine was a Scorpio, perfect for a friend and companion. She was new in my office, the artist who would design the magazine I worked for. We would be friends and she would become a special friend of our family.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >But a lot of things started happening all at once, just before we met Catherine and I found it quite disturbing and destabilizing. It started one night when the third boy was six months in the womb. I had a dream that I was walking through the woods with a group of Indians. Suddenly, we got to a clearing in the woods and in the center there was a round stone circle, like a primitive holy site. I stood around it in a circle with the Indians. Then they all put their weapons down and backed away into the forest. I was left standing by myself. I shouted for the Indians to come back, but they shook their heads no.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >When I woke up I didn’t know what to do. I’d always dreamed of Indians acting as guides and felt navigating through life was a breeze, so long as I had my Indian guides. Now I was alone in</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/ship%20at%20sea.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/ship%20at%20sea.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > a stone circle. Next night I dreamed I was alone at sea in a ship and was being tossed about by the stormy sea.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The other unusual thing was a series of coincidences that occurred when I first encountered befriended Catherine.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I raised sheep, and was in the market for some. <st1:state st="on">Tunis</st1:state> sheep; pretty, reddish sheep with long ears like goats – these were sheep of African stock that were well suited to the hot, dry climate of <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">North Carolina</st1:place></st1:state>. But they were hard to find. There were only two breeders in the state. I’d been to one that weekend, but didn’t like his stock, as they’d been crossed with <st1:place st="on">Dorset</st1:place> and had lost their pretty faces. So I needed to find the other breeder.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >That Monday morning I went to work and was introduced to Catherine, who would be my new office mate. We got into a conversation and I told her about my weekend trip to look at sheep.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“I have sheep,” she said, to my surprise.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Sure enough. I checked the breeder’s directory and there she was. Listed as the only other breeder of <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">Tunis</st1:state></st1:place> sheep in the state.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >There was a truck thing too. I had a 20-year-old Dodge pick-up with a Custom Cab that I’d paid $800 for ten years before when I bought if from an Elvis worshiper. It was a rare beauty. Jim, my office mate, said that as long as I had that truck I was a special person. If I didn’t have that truck I’d just be a chump, down from <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York City</st1:place></st1:city> and talking louder than the other people. The Custom Cab only underwent small production in that model and I’d never seen one exactly like it in ten years. But Catherine had one exactly like it. Only mine was red and hers was blue.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >After I had that dream about the stone circle I started to have great but confusing dreams. I’d always taken my Indian guides for granted and assumed they would always be by my side. Now I was alone.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >My sister-in-law who has a gift for knowing what to do in situations like this, suggested I read <i style="">Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain</i> and learn to draw. She bought a variety of pencils and drawing papers. I discovered what I’d long forgotten, that I can draw. That is, I could draw as a child, but had given it up and forgotten about it as a teenager.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I was suddenly taken by the desire to draw and set up a studio in the barn. Dreams were unrelenting now and I decided to draw the pictures that appeared in the night. Some students and a few faculty became interested and so did Catherine and I often had visitors in my studio barn.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This continued for two years. The third boy was born and things were going well, not bad that is, without my Indian helpers, but I was managing, just managing, to retain balance by painting my visions in the barn. There were flaming swords and many pictures and sculptures of a strange stick man with branches growing out of his head who I often dreamed of. These dreams were so rich and intense that they made the outside world pale by comparison. When I started to draw in the barn, I noticed the sheep and chickens would all get very quiet and become passive. One night I dreamed that the strange stick man climbed out of the stone circle. Then I discovered that other people had seen these pictures in dreams as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >At a special exhibit of old Celtic manuscripts at the college, I happened to notice a figure just like the stick man, Chernunnus, he was called. He was considered a fore-father of the Green Man, the text said. I looked further and found drawings of other things I had drawn.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I began to understand that this was an ancestral force coming to the conscious mind. It could be nothing else. But I’d about lost interest in these ancient things as a new image was compelling my drawing and painting. I felt a strong desire, a compulsion, to draw snakes.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Catherine often visited the studio and stayed with the family for supper. When she moved to a city house from the country, she asked if she could leave her chickens with us, and we agreed, so she dropped off a chicken that the children named Magisto, the Flying Chicken, and two others.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This was a very special chicken, it turned out. It was a very small bantam, pure white, more like a dove than a chicken. What was special about her was that she liked to be picked up and pet by the children like a puppy or a kitten. The children loved to play with her and Magisto would rush out to see them when they arrived home from school. Magisto could also fly – only very small chickens can fly, ours could not – and he would fly up and light on the childrens’ shoulders. Catherine’s two other chickens were giants called Dominiques, beautiful black and white spotted birds that followed Magisto everywhere she went, one on one side, one on the other, like guard dogs.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >But I wasn’t elated by the birds or anything else.<span style=""> </span>And I knew what had sent my soul down beneath a funk for almost two years now that I could not retrieve it from. My mother had died almost three years earlier, and if a husband flows into the wife’s soul at child birth to some unsettling degree, so too when his mother dies, maybe his soul goes with her.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >When my mother died, I died, and I could not get back. And that is what sent my soul to the Celtic netherland of flaming swords and Trees with the Eyes of God. I had no idea how I would get out or how I could survive there. And on top of that my wife was heavy with what would be our fourth child and, the tests told us, our first girl.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Snakes in the night, then snakes under water and snakes rising out of the water. These were the pictures I was compelled to paint in the barn while I ignored the demands of my family. The most vivid dream was of an ancient ship maybe a thousand years old coming into port but at a subway stop filled with water. I touched the old charred hull but found it to be fresh pitch. But then I had the most pleasant dream: I dreamed that I was standing in a river – the river of life and death, I knew – when a brightly colored snake, like a coral snake, flowed down the river. Everyone was afraid of the deadly coral snake and ran away, but I was not afraid. I knew it was not a coral snake but a milk snake, a gentle snake which disguises itself as a coral snake to fool its predators. I lifted it up out of the river, held it high and joyfully played with it.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >One day just before the baby was born, I was standing in the corral with the sheep, leaning on the gate, thinking. Why don’t we name the baby Catherine, I thought to myself, like our friend? Just then my wife walked out of the house and came down to talk, not knowing what I’d been thinking.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“Do you know what I’ve been thinking?” she asked.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“What?” I answered.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“Why don’t we name the baby Catherine,” she said?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >I was not surprised because things like that were happening all the time now.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“Your mother’s name was Catherine,” she said, “Did you know that?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >No, I answered, she was wrong. My mother’s name was Kathleen. I ought to know my mother’s name.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“No, you’re wrong,” she said, then she relayed an astonishing story.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Before my grandfather came over from <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Ireland</st1:place></st1:country-region> he had been married to a woman named Catherine who had died in child birth. When my grandmother gave birth to my mother she named her Catherine and that was the name put on the birth certificate. Then, coming home from the hospital she recalled her husband’s first wife had been named Catherine and didn’t want to name her daughter after her husband’s first wife. So she scratched the name Catherine off the birth certificate and wrote in Kathleen. All my life my mother had been cheated out of her true name.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“How do you know this?” I asked my wife.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“Your sister learned it at your mother’s funeral,” she said.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Catherine was the name decided on for the baby and the other Catherine, our friend, was delighted.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Then a few weeks before the baby was born Catherine came to my office to tell about a dream she had had, the first and only time we talked about her dreams. She dreamed that Magisto, the white dove chicken, was carrying the soul of my mother to baby Catherine, who was about to be born, and as soon as the baby was born, Magisto would die.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >That week baby Catherine was born. Mother-in-law and sister-in-law managed the house and family while I stayed at the hospital with mother and daughter. The only nuisance that occurred was the presence of a snake that had found its way into the house, which my sister-in-law kindly asked to have removed.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Magisto disappeared the following day. We never saw the bird again. Gotten by fox, coyote or hawk most likely. And I discovered the man’s joy of having a daughter and a love that transcends life and death. The boys are wonderful and I love them too, but as I was with my father, they are colleagues. They are my friends and equals. The love between a boy and his mother and a father and his daughter is exit and entrance to the world. The ancient ship that brings out the dead and brings in the living.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:14;" ><span style="font-size:130%;">Maybe it is an Irish thing. Or maybe it is the dance of all life for all who have a mother.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1136154519266291262006-01-01T14:24:00.000-08:002006-01-02T15:09:06.456-08:00The End of the World - intro to The Aquarian Mandala<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/cassandra.jsmall.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/cassandra.jsmall.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Here we shall raise our children and be as little chickens under mother sheo's [Prairie hen's] wing. </span><span style="font-size:85%;">- from <span style="font-style: italic;">Black Elk Speaks</span></span><br /></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >There has been a rash of scholarly books in recent years, like Cassandra here in <span style="font-style: italic;">Dr. Who</span>, declaring the End Times (and millenialist spiritualist societies, like the Raelians above from an <span style="font-style: italic;">Economist</span> article). In fact, it has become a small industry. As it is in the pop culture, the thinking man’s <i style="">Mad Max</i> or <i style="">Bladerunner</i> usually ascribes the imminent fall as a uniform failure throughout the entire culture, like the fall of the U.S.S.R. all at once, due to some virus that affects the entire body; <i style="">liberalism</i>, <i style="">permissiveness</i> or <i style="">drugs</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/end%20of%20the%20world.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/end%20of%20the%20world.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The fairly recent of these is <i style="">The Death of the West</i> by conservative presidential candidate Pat Buchanon, presenting himself here as the working man’s Jacques Barzun. Spengler he ain’t, but his point is essentially the same as the mandarin-class <i style="">fin de seicle</i> scholars of the 1990s. This might be called a death archetype at work, and it has been apparent since the end of the</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > Second World War. <span style=""> </span>We always think we are going to die. There was a stock cartoon back in the 1950s in magazines like <i style="">The New Yorker</i> and<i style=""> The Saturday Evening Post</i> which showed an itinerant non-denominational monk in beard and sandals walking down a street like <st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on">Madison Ave.</st1:address></st1:street> filled with business types, carrying a placard that read: <i style="">The End Is Near</i>. But p</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >erhaps it is as it is in dreams; a death dream means a rebirth. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It is a vague collective fear that something is dying. This is a vagueness that comes naturally to</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Buchanan_Pat.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Buchanan_Pat.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > people, particularly those over 50, particularly men, so it should be cautioned that this could be a projection that death is being seen by one whose time is up or coming up, and he or she projects it onto the world around him. As comic Jackie Vernon once put it in one of his</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > routines: he had an uncle who was always predicting that the world was coming to an end and for him it did.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >But that which weakens one faction of the culture often strengthens another. And for a public prognosticator, it is less than responsible to predict the End of Days and not say <i style="">why</i> or <i style="">how</i> or <i style="">what is dying</i> and<i style=""> what will follow</i>. Where many of the public pronouncements are particularly lacking is in the <i style="">what</i>; that is, in identifying what groups, classes and specifically what cultures will be affected in the impending doom. WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! Is the general trend. This is an inherently silly view of old men for whom it hasn’t gone as they’d liked the last 20 years of so. Everybody dies.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This is important because societies, like the human body, are made up of component parts that are interdependent on each other and with component parts that are dependant on universal systems of the body. If the heart dies, all systems collapse. But if the appendix fails, it can usually be safely removed, and it has lost its overall historical function anyway. Then again, if an arm or leg is lost it doesn’t mean the entire body will give up the ghost. The function can be mechanically replicated or it can be done without.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The human body is a good analogy for cultural failure but not a great one. A family is a better one: If a father dies he may be replaced by a daughter, which could bring fundamental change to the family culture, maybe positive change, but not necessarily destruction. And that analogy</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/father%20knows%20best.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/father%20knows%20best.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > is limited as well, as the larger human society is infinitely more complex. But that one is better because in a human society, when one component dies it often allows life to flourish in other components. Particularly in a culture as young and healthy as the <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">United States</st1:country-region></st1:place> and the Canadian provinces.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Often when a prognosticator sees death it is the death or the loss of function of his own particular class or social group. But death is a necessary ingredient for the long and continued life of the overall culture. When one force grows to strength it sends others into submission. And when the strong force dies, the submissive forces grow strong and flourish.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The classic novel and film <i style="">Gone With the Wind</i> illustrates. The film is often described as an account of an entire culture swept away by the Civil War. Very definitely a certain way of life was swept away and a certain class of people lost their function. The planter class, particularly those in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Virginia</st1:place></st1:state>, was swept away. These were English Anglicans who settled the Southern colonies and supplied the governing class from the last quarter of the 17<sup>th</sup> century to the Civil War. They formed a Southern caste, in a land that was arranged in a strict caste system. (And in which religion did and does identify social class.)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/scarlett%20ohara%2C%20Vivian%20%28Gone%20With%20the%20Wind%29_01.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/scarlett%20ohara%2C%20Vivian%20%28Gone%20With%20the%20Wind%29_01.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >After the Civil War it was largely over for the English planter class. Some moved to New England and some back to <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Their governance function was taken over by conquering Yankees, generally Presbyterians, who also assumed the roles of professionals. Their business function eventually yielded to the white yeoman farmers, largely Baptist, and eventually most, if not all governance would devolve to the Baptist.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In terms of cultural death, the only thing that was really gone with the wind when the Southern independence movement yielded to Yankee federalism was the function of the Southern upper class. Its historical time had already passed before the war and when it finally lost its function it liberated new forces such as those of the poor-white – the so-called Scotch-Irish - and the blacks who were kept impoverished and enslaved under the previous system.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span style="font-family:Garamond;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > today is made up of component cultures interacting and feeding off one another, including religions, classes and national groups of social and generational identity. And there are overall cultural themes that pervade the country and the world; pop trends and identity themes.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The overall death predicted by some public prognosticators doesn’t appear to be the death of the whole culture, but a change in the culture as a whole. This may seem like death to components that are yielding, but others feel like they are just coming to life.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The black Pentecostal church, for example, is not dying in this milieu of ennui. Indeed, it glows and bringing health and strength to its churchgoers and to its regions, whether in rural</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/black%20singers.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/black%20singers.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > <st1:state st="on">Mississippi</st1:state> or in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Detroit</st1:place></st1:city>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >When we lived in the South, all our neighbors, both white and black, seem to have preserved a slight degree of healthy indifference to the rise and fall of the American condition and its globalist networks, in spite of the region’s overall acceptance of the Yankee management principles. The scholarly death cry comes from elsewhere. Perhaps because the South has found the amazing grace that accompanies utter failure; the seed of salvation that came with devastation in the Civil War. As C. Vann Woodward expressed it, “. . . Southern history, unlike American, includes large components of frustration, failure, and defeat. It includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social, and political life. Such a heritage affords the Southern people no basis for delusion that there is nothing whatever that is beyond their power to accomplish.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Southerners share this with the general run of mankind, Vann Woodward points out, but not with the rest of Americans.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:14;" ><span style="font-size:130%;">Vann Woodward’s observation is more responsible than the<i style=""> Gone With the Wind</i> prognostication and more mature. Everything dies and everything is born again. When the strong yields, the weak become strong and find their full life. When they reach their full expression, they will yield. There is no exception.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1136153747760065652006-01-01T14:15:00.000-08:002008-05-11T05:27:58.020-07:00rough draft - The Aquarian Mandala<span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It is worthwhile to look at symmetries as they occur in history and not ignor</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Samurai.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Samurai.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >e them or consider them random. The patterns of early Christianity bear looking into as they press westward from Christian Constantinople to empower Christian Rome and subsequently the secular and Protestant movement of northern <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place>. The patterns they formed may be the patterns we will form.<o:p></o:p></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Histo</span><span style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Buttons"><span class="on down" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Italic" title="Italic" onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);FormatbarButton('richeditorframe', this, 4);ButtonMouseDown(this);"><img src="http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.italic.gif" alt="Italic" border="0" /></span></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >rian Edwin O. Reischauer points out that <st1:country-region st="on">Japan</st1:country-region>’s rise to secular power in modern times matches that of northern <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place>, and the two rose out of feudalism at the same period but were distinctly separate and unrelated to each other. Another symmetry: calculus, the tool by which the Enlightenment rose to materialization and the catalyst for the age of science was discovered in roughly the same period by mathematician Takakazu Seki Kowa in the East, as it was by <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city></st1:place> and Leibnitz in the West. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Today, we see a reversal of Kipling’s maxim: East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Now, East and West, like the recently-photographed</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/celestial%20stars.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/celestial%20stars.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > galaxy known as IC2163, swinging counterclockwise past its celestial partner NGC2207, appear to be about to form into one unified solar system. Now they cannot be kept apart, and regional cultures like those in Calgary and Vancouver where populations are in the area of 50% Chinese and 50% Canadian Caucasian are in the <i style="">avant garde</i> of North American life. These cities bring together in harmony Asian and Victorian business and cultural ethics and eastern directions of Taoism and Buddhism. So too, Hindu thought finds its way gracefully into Canadian culture in Toronto and the middle Canadian cities, which have recently received a large number of Indian immigrants. One young filmmaker recently made a film about Lord Khrisna returning to earth as a hockey player. (But doesn’t The Great One already carry that spark which dances amongst the suns?) <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/aquariusstar.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/aquariusstar.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It almost appears as if history was waiting for this moment to bring these two forces together in unity. An ancient spiritual force from the East and a new-to-history technical force in the West, as the Dalai Lama generally expressed it recently.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >These two forces could not have come together at any other time in history. Nor could they have flowed together into a unique new culture at any place other than the North American continent. The “old souls” of the old world inhibit clear action and when change does occur, so often it merely consists of breakage of the old, as the new tradition of nihilism since the 1830s in Russia, simply breaks the past. Into pieces. But alienation also opens the West to a new future, and that unique but<span style=""> </span>trecherous condition that deprives the American of ancestral lineage and psychological fullness of old world Asian, African and European, welcomes and rapidly adapts to new growth.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><st1:place st="on"><span style="font-family:Garamond;">North America</span></st1:place></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > is the Aquarian continent, made up of all the world’s peoples, castes, races and religions, pouring freely in, as the water pours from the vessel of the Titan. And its epic tale, <i style="">Huckelberry Finn</i>, identifies the vortex, the <st1:place st="on">Mississippi River</st1:place>. The water pours freely over the falls at Niagara to the sacred lakes of the Manitou, the</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/manitou.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/manitou.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > Great Spirit, into <st1:city st="on">Chicago</st1:city> thereabouts and down the <st1:state st="on">Mississippi</st1:state> to where the Amish flourish, on to the sacred primal place of Elvis’ Graceland and out into the <st1:place st="on">Gulf of Mexico</st1:place>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The westward movement of the last century is matched now by an Eastern movement from Asia to the <st1:placename st="on">Pacific</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Coast</st1:placetype> in <st1:country-region st="on">Canada</st1:country-region> as well as in the <st1:country-region st="on">United States</st1:country-region>, creating vortex forces in, around and above the <st1:state st="on">Mississippi</st1:state> and the <st1:place st="on">Great Lakes</st1:place>. This effects all classes and castes that enter and changes their destiny forever. It is worth pointing out the Hindu text which says when you leave your homeland, and start from scratch.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/jackie6.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/jackie6.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Vancouver, with its Hong Kong cash, is developing as a Paris on the Pacific, but the life force also shows it’s power in the plain people. Jackie Chan, master of the karate opera, is to North America today what Jimmy Cagney was 80 years ago, and if Cagney represented the collective promise and optimism for the millions of immigrants who swarmed to Ellis Island from Europe and Ireland, Chan does the same for the large immigration from the East, who settle primarily as a new American influence to the west and the north of the Mississippi.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This is the Aquarian mandala, which will find creative energy in centuries ahead. This means the development and enrichment of regional cultures on the North American continent, forging one another, helping one another and hating one another; forming new dynamic relationships and creating a new world.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >North Americans have more in common with other North Americans than they do with Europeans. This transcends caste and religion, which, in the <st1:country-region st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region>, have entirely different structures than in Europe and <st1:place st="on">Asia</st1:place>. And it has been like this for a long time and even in the darkest days. W.J. Cash pointed out that the wealthy white woman of the South in the 19<sup>t </sup>century had more in common with her black maid than she did with people out of the region. And Thomas Nelson Page, a popular Southern writer writing at the end of the Civil War, pointed out that the Southerner had more in common with his Yankee enemy than with foreigners.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Outside of academia, almost none default to Europeanism in <st1:country-region st="on">America</st1:country-region>, particularly in the South and the <st1:place st="on">Midwest</st1:place>. And people who live near the borders of <st1:country-region st="on">Mexico</st1:country-region> or <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Canada</st1:country-region></st1:place> share in those cultures in direct relation to the proximity of their borders.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >These all three together, <st1:country-region st="on">Canada</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region st="on">Mexico</st1:country-region> and the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>, make for the most dynamic singular cultural union in the world today. In terms of global action and passion, they are the center of the world as we enter the new millenium.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >We come together in a federalist state. With federalism, everyone is equal, but no one is connected. This is the Hamiltonian model of federalism and it is singularly responsible for how we develop. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Hamilton</st1:place></st1:city> favored a vast, singular state with a central government to aid and abet industry and the business class. Thomas Jefferson envisioned instead a series of autonomous regions, each with their own provincial culture and life force. My prediction is that the <st1:city st="on">Hamilton</st1:city> way is temporary, and once we are all here and found the place we like, we will stay here and grow here to our own Peoples, as <st1:place st="on">Jefferson</st1:place> envisioned a free society. But we are not all here yet and will not be for another 100 years, and in that time, flow in capital, industry and people will come from the East. Then the regions will settle, find themselves, and begin to look inward to find themselves as new people in a new place. Till then, the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Hamilton</st1:place></st1:city> model is appropriate. And in the end, we will be an East/West nation and an East/West continent.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/black-elk%20best.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/black-elk%20best.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >As <i style="">Revelation</i> closes the gate for one epoch which began its historical march in <st1:place st="on">Constantinople</st1:place>, the Indian visionary opens a gate to the next. Here is Black Elk, in language like that of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">St. John</st1:place></st1:city>: “The oldest one spoke again: ‘Your Grandfathers all over the world are having a council, and they have called you here to teach you.’ His voice was very kind, but I shook all over with fear now, for I knew that these were not old men, but the Powers of the World. And the first was the Power of the West; the second, of the North; the third, of the East; the fourth, of the South; the fifth, of the Sky; the sixth, of the Earth. I knew this, and was afraid, until the first Grandfather spoke again: “Behold them yonder where the sun goes down, the thunder beings! You shall see, and have from them my power; and they shall take you to the high and lonely center of the earth that you may see; even to the place where the sun continually shines, they shall take you there to understand.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >And here is Black Elk as the perennial guide – from Cooper to Kevin Cosner -- for the new arrival on this continent who has lost his orientation and is wandering with a sick soul in the desert of the new world: “And the Voice said: Give them now the flowering stick that they may flourish, and the sacred pipe that they may know the power that is peace, and the wing of the white giant that they may have endurance and face all winds with courage.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The recent novel <i style="">Cold Mountain</i> with its Indian guide is representative of the journey to the Self as it unfolds here on what still is a new continent and in what is surely a new age. As Bunyan’s</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/han%20shan.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/han%20shan.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > Christian pilgrim seeks a life of the highest integrity and moral perseverance in a world torn asunder in the 1600s, so Frazier speaks to us today. There are two <st1:placename st="on">Cold</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Mountains</st1:placetype>, one in <st1:country-region st="on">China</st1:country-region> where Taoist sages and hermits have lived for ages, and one in <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">North Carolina</st1:place></st1:state>, considered sacred to Indians in those parts. At the beginning of the novel Frazier quotes the eighth century Taoist sages, Han shan: <i style="">Men ask the way to <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Cold</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Mountain</st1:placetype></st1:place>. <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Cold</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Mountain</st1:placetype></st1:place>: there’s</i></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><i style=""> no through trail.</i> It is a mandala novel; it begins with the character on the edge broken, and in a brief but perfect life he finds in the center, whole. And he finds wholeness and completion in the house of the Indian. It speaks well of the North American journey, a journey for all which is just beginning.</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:14;" ><span style="font-size:130%;"></span> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 200%;"><span style="line-height: 200%;font-family:Garamond;font-size:14;" ><o:p></o:p></span></p>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1135943539436400712005-12-30T03:48:00.000-08:002006-01-03T05:12:14.626-08:00draft - The Thee Celestial Ones - intro.<div style="text-align: left;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/roostersmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/roostersmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">It's okay to be a man.</span> - <span style="font-style: italic;">Journals</span>, Kurt Cob</span>ain<br /></div> <span style=""><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />There is a Japanese wood cut of a famous 16</span><sup style="font-weight: bold;">th</sup><span style="font-weight: bold;"> century Zen Buddhist monk</span>, viewing a rooster fight with rapt fascination, and if<span style=""> </span>you have ever seen these animals go at it naturally in the woods or in the barn yard when they hit adolescence and fight to establish dominance, you can see the hypnotic effect. They still raise and fight these birds in the hills of <st1:state st="on">Tennessee</st1:state> where it crosses into the mountains to <st1:state st="on">Virginia</st1:state> and <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">North Carolina</st1:place></st1:state>, far from the gaze of those who would disapprove. We raised our kids in those parts.<o:p></o:p></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">I first saw roosters fight when our day-old chicks arrived at the post office from the mail order house 20 years ago. They arrived peeping in the box, one day old. We ordered a dozen Rhode Island Reds, docile egg layers, but received cocks by accident occasionally and once a game bird. They can be as tame as cats, allowing the children to pick them up and pet them like kittens.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">Any rooster will fight if there is more than one and there are females around. Sometimes they will crow in a masculine way to express dominance over the other males, and if the cock’s crow is fierce enough, the other roosters won’t even bother to fight, but will simply submit to dominant rooster.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">After that, the submissive ones never crow, unless something happens to the dominant rooster, like he is killed by a hawk. Then the strongest of the submissive roosters will take on the dominant rooster characteristics.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">Once my dominant rooster, a Speckled Hamburg, proud and hyper-alert, white with black spots and reddish tints the color of autumn leaves – one of the most exquisitely beautiful animals I’d ever seen - had his crown and almost the entire back of his neck torn off by a coyote that had ravaged through the barn just before dawn. I knew by the extent of his injuries that he couldn’t</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Toshiro%20Mifune.small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Toshiro%20Mifune.small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=""> possibly survive, but he strutted through the yard with his usual cockiness until noon with no sign of weakness, even looking for a fight, then found a quiet place under a piece of sheet rock to wait quietly for his death.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">My friend Barr, who once lived as a Zen monk in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Japan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, died like that.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">The submissive roosters even take on the behavior of the females sometimes, and try to sit on the eggs, like a broody hen. But usually they fight, and sometimes to the death. They circle one another slowly, intently staring, eye to eye, each ready to pounce, their cowls extended for the event in a perfect circle sticking straight out around their necks.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">Then after a tense silence they pounce simultaneously, feathers flying and wings out, lifting them up off the ground, and flail at each other with their claws. It is usually over in a minute when one male establishes dominance over the other.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">The focused, concentrated fight and the intense stillness that precedes it brings Zen to mind, as it was practiced by ancient Japanese Samurai swordsman. Zen monk D.T. Suzuki, writing not about roosters but about the silence of God says, “This sort of silence pervades all things Oriental. Woe unto those who take it for decadence and death, for they will be overwhelmed by an overwhelming outburst of activity out of the eternal silence.” It is the same silence and intensity which precedes a cock fight.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">The swordsman class of ancient <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Japan</st1:place></st1:country-region> exclusively chose Zen as its discipline, and the short, violent clash that follows the slow dance of the Samurai explains why: it is the most masculine of behavior in a spiritual discipline that is masculine to the core.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">The Samurai tradition of Zen creates in the mind of the swordsman an ability to give up his fear of death and to face every battle thinking he will die. Only when he faces battle, like the rooster, unafraid and unthinking of his own death, will the swordsman find the ability to live with simplicity and clarity.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">Samurai culture presents an exaggerated picture of the masculine force and presents in high relief the fear that most inhibits a man after he has left the womb and left his mother, the fear of death.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">It is the fear of death that prevents him from finding fullness. And it is this fear that leads him to avoid risk, and to go instead to the middle ground, to middle management and to the middle class. To be, as we said in those parts of the South where we raised our kids, neither man nor master, but mid’lin.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">The end of the millennium has brought Middle Man to the high water mark. Here in the Age of Information the binary matrix offers alternatives to the sword and the path to manhood of the Samurai. Archetypally, the prevalent dangerous myth in the computer culture most resembles the maze designed by the shaman Daedelus to hide the whereabouts of the Beast, so to ease the mind of King Minos. The maze creates an “alternative consciousness” for the King. So too middle man’s defector, the computer geek – and computer geek cults are almost exclusively defaulted male or man/boy types like the Lost Boys – projects his consciousness onto the computer screen and slays imaginable beasts, but none to match the bull within himself which is the one that is calling. The bull is the man calling the boy forth and if he is denied or circumvented the boy will not enter manhood.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">There is no alternative. In the end, the computer man/boy lost in Daedelus’s maze is left behind</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/kurtz.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/kurtz.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=""> when the age passes. To the defaulted man/boy of Computer World, information is not power, it is a distracting dance of light, distracting him from the fear that Lord Krishna instructs him to resist: the fear that prevents him from becoming himself. Better to go mad and die on the river like Mr. Kurtz.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">At a college I worked at a few years ago an imaginative doctor at the teaching hospital observed over the years a difference in the reaction of his male and female patients before they went under the knife.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">A man, he noticed, even for a trivial operation, often asked the doctor if he was going to die before he went under the anesthesia. The doctor began to take notes and tally these questions and he found that over 50% of the male population who entered surgery with him wanted to know if they were going to die. The number of occasions when the female population under similar circumstances asked that question? Zero.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">I can well picture computer man/boy, his life extended behind a screen, being afraid to get out of there to face his death. But can you imagine Anwar Sadat who instinctively raised himself bolt-upright when he saw the gun man coming at him, and unflinchingly stood at attention to take the bullet in the chest? Can you imaging Walter Reuther, facing the federal agents and their armed goons about to fire on the <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Detroit</st1:place></st1:city> factory workers, standing high on a wall in plain sight, pulling off his shirt and baring his chest, telling the thugs to fire the first shots here?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="">In the movie <i style="">Gladiator</i>, there is throughout the conspicuous use of the salute, “strength and honor” among the Roman soldiers and the gladiators, terms which recall both the Third Reich and the honor code of the officer class of the Confederates in the Civil War. With artistry by the director, Ridley Scott, and the masterful craftsmanship of actor Crowe, these human strains of personality are retrieved as if from a dark cave where no one should go, and retrieved for the general culture as virtues utterly needed by any human society, and particularly by the boy about to become a man in that society. These virtues are needed for the man or boy to pass successfully to the fullness of his adulthood, whether he aspires to be priest, pirate or panderer. Strength and honor, in an exaggerated and explosive masculine episode brought on the destruction of <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place>. But without strength and honor there is no manhood, there is no balance, there is no dharma.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Danielle%20sauvageau0401.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Danielle%20sauvageau0401.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="">And it is not a guy thing, it is a cultural thing - a <i style="">yang </i>thing. When Hayley Wickenheiser led the Canadian woman’s hockey team to gold victory in the 2002 winter Olympics, head coach Daniele Sauvageau gathered the team around her after the victory for a final word on the virtues that would carry the women and their families through the difficult times in their lives. She said three words: Responsibility, Determination and Courage.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=""><span style="font-size:100%;">These are the Three Celestial Visitors.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1135882050903729172005-12-29T10:44:00.000-08:002006-03-24T20:22:46.246-08:00draft - The Three Celestial Ones<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/lone%20gunmen%20-%20good%20shot.small.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/lone%20gunmen%20-%20good%20shot.small.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">There is a Taoist myth of the Three Celestial Ones</span>, the Celestial Worthy of Primordial Being, the Celestial Worthy of Numinous Treasure and the Celestial Worthy of the Way and Its Power, three male deities who are said to live beyond the Big Dipper. They descend to earth during periods of cultural transition and appear as passerbys, accompanying a human who will have a spiritual task to perform here in the world. They accompany action, transition, movement of the masculine principle (<span style="font-style: italic;">yang</span>). Archetypally, these would be the Three Visitors who appeared to Abraham, the Three Magi, Yeats’ three gnarly Irish with the unicorn in his volume <span style="font-style: italic;">The Gift of the Magi</span>, young Baggins and his three Hobbit travel companions in the Old Forest, the Three Spirits who visit Scrooge in Dickens’ great story of Awakening (the second of whom is certainly the Green Man), the Buddha and the Three Messengers, Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three and on the pop-culture scale, the three Men in Black of sci-fi folk lore of the 1950s, now a pop movie hit, and the three Lone Gunmen, who advise agent Fox Mulder of <i style="">The X Files</i> in his quest for the Truth. The Chosen One frequently returns as one of the Three Celestial Ones: Jesus appears with two almost identical white-robed male figures on identical thrones as the Trinity in a 15<sup>th</sup>-century French Book of Hours, and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob become the Three Jolly Fishermen. Three Men in a Boat (like the shrewd advisors who fly across the stage in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Magic Flute</span>) shows the Three Celestial Ones in one of their favorite containers. A boat is a gynecological shape, a</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/ThreeStars7.jsmall.2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/ThreeStars7.jsmall.2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > gateway to the sea, the psychic or feminine field, as the Three Celestial Ones rise out of the unconscious. (Boats - <span style="font-style: italic;">Nina</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Pinta</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Santa Maria</span> - are invariably named after women.)<o:p></o:p></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Artists, and not only great but also good and competent artists, know instinctively about archetypes and psychic manifestations. A friend of mine, Joe King, who painted portraits of the wealthy and influencial in North Carolina, once did a portrait of a well-known philanthropist from a tobacco family, and in the background he painted a sail boat alone in the distance out at sea with a dark sky, as the gentleman in the portrait enjoyed sailing. The day he finished the painting he discovered, as he prepared to ship it, that the man had just died. A ship or a boat at sea is a folkoric symbol of death as well as birth. It was the only painting King ever did with a boat sailing alone in the distance like that. This is a relationship between parallel events that C.G. Jung called <span style="font-style: italic;">synchronicity</span>, and artists are most conductive to this native intuition.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/astrology.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/astrology.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The Three Celestial Ones precede Lao Tsu and recede into Chinese Taoism up to 5,000 years. Lore has it that like their sisters, the Three Women, each has an second face; a dark nature, which contains the unexpressed characteristics of their life force. And so there are really six. Twelve, counting the Three Celestial Ones and the Three Women together with their Dark Sides, composing the dozen signs of the zodiac, six <i style="">yin</i> and six <i style="">yang</i>. The double is usually hard to find and it sometimes takes a Wizard. But in the last five hundred years with the rise of the West, the three agents of the ascending masculine principle (<span style="font-style: italic;">yang</span> - what Vermonter Scott Nearing called the Power Principle), <st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city>, <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:city> and Freud, have been prominent and their doubles are easy to spot.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The West began its outward extension with <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Columbus</st1:place></st1:city> and it continues like a reflex today. By 1492, the ideal of the inner life brought by Jesus to <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Constantine</st1:place></st1:city>’s church and brought to high pitch at the Hagia Sophia and in the West perhaps, in the mandala paintings and music of Abbess Hildegard von Bingen, was entirely abandoned. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Columbus</st1:place></st1:city>'s outward journey represented the new world and the new religion of action. Action followed as the anthem guiding the orthodox religious direction of subsequent champions from John Calvin to John Wesley: You are what you make, and you will be measured in the hereafter by what you build in the outside world including who you bring into your fold and how many.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The period of the exclusive reign of the Power Principal is entrance and resolve of the High Renaissance, the period described by Jacques Barzun in his book <i style="">From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life</i>. Three pivotal figures accompany this rise and the ascent of power. They are Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Charles Darwin (1809-1892) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/mace-windu-palp-osmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/mace-windu-palp-osmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In the <span style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars</span> series, director George Lucas uses the two faces as a theme throughout. Jedi Master Mace Windu ruminated, after the <i style="">sith</i> had been dispatched in <i style="">The Phantom Empire</i>, that they always come in twos. (As does the Princess.) The question was, which was the good guy and which the bad guy? (Likewise, many cartoons since, like <span style="font-style: italic;">Pokemon</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Shaman King</span>, and many computer games are influenced by the East and have incorporated Zen themes and psychological patterns. Currently, in <span style="font-style: italic;">Prince of Persia: Warrior Within</span>, for example,</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Prince-of-Persia-Spiri.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Prince-of-Persia-Spiri.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > the Warrior has dual nature, light and dark, as everyone has dual nature.)<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >So it is with <st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city>, <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:city> and Freud. Each had a double who had a similar philosophy who plagued the life of the other and was rejected by the other. Newton’s double was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed a theory of calculus independent of, but simultaneously with Newton, Darwin’s was Alfred Russel Wallace, who developed a theory of natural selection independent of but simultaneously with Darwin, and Freud’s was C.J. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who, after working with Freud, broke with him to found his own school of depth psychology, analytic psychology.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The views of <st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city>, <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Darwin</st1:city></st1:place> and Freud reigned unfettered in the West, then by the 1960s, serious challenges were brought favoring the opposite champions.<o:p></o:p> One book in particular lucidly runs parrallel to the traditional view of the Renaissance, like Jacque Barzun's. Carolyn Merchant's 1980 book,<i style=""> The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Merchant writes that the world we lost in the rise of the Power Principle was the organic world. From the obscure origins of our species, she said, human beings have lived in daily, immediate, organic relation with the natural order for their sustenance. In 1500, the daily interaction with nature was still structured for most Europeans, as it was for other peoples, by close-knit, cooperative, organic communities. Nature is female, writes Merchant, and as Western culture became increasingly mechanized in the 1600s, the female earth and virgin earth spirit were subdued by the machine.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“The female earth was central to the organic cosmology that was undermined by the Scientific Revolution and the rise of a market-oriented culture in early modern <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place>. The ecology</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/bregel.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/bregel.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > movement has reawakened interest in the values and concepts associated historically with the premodern organic world. The ecology model and its associated ethics make possible a fresh and critical interpretation of the rise of modern science in the crucial period when our cosmos ceased to be viewed as an organism and became instead a machine,” she writes.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The critical turning point, she argues, came with <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city></st1:place> and Leibniz, who “. . . saw their mechanics, their philosophies, and their own beliefs about God and nature as deeply divergent from each other.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span style="font-family:Garamond;">Newton</span></st1:place></st1:city></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > could not entertain the pantheistic assumption that God was immanent in matter, she writes, together with its associated radical intellectual and social implications. He argued against this position in <i style="">Opticks</i> (1706): “And yet we are not to consider the world as the body of God, or the several parts thereof, as the parts of God.” “God was neither a living animal-writ-large,” she writes, “nor the soul of the world.” Additionally, she argues, the laws of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Newton</st1:place></st1:city>’s mechanical “system of the world” predicting the ordered motions of both terrestrial and celestial bodies served as a cosmological exemplar for political and economic order in English society.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/leibniz.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/leibniz.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This contrasted with Leibniz’s view, which saw the world of substance as organic. Every being in the universe, from living animals down to the simple monad, was alive or composed of living parts.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Leibniz’s dynamic vitalism was in direct opposition to that of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city></st1:place> and the mechanists and the “death of nature,” says Merchant.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“Leibniz stressed the idea of a life and perception permeating all things,” she writes. “The main distinction between his philosophy and that of the mechanists lay in the idea that substance was life, not dead matter. He criticized the ‘advocates of the new philosophy’ for ‘maintain[ing] the inertness and deadness of things.’ As he had once written to Jansenist theologian Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694): ‘All matter must be full of animated, or at least living, substances.’”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span style="font-family:Garamond;">Newton</span></st1:place></st1:city></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > himself had reservations about the mechanistic theory and in unpublished manuscripts wrote about the “vegetable spirit” and the earth resembling a “. . . great animal or rather</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > inanimate vegetable.” However, she writes, a study of culture extending from the seventeenth</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > century to the present day shows mechanical models of the self, society, and the cosmos. Thus the human body and the human psyche are treated as reactive, conditionable entities, and the human brain as a computer.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“During the three centuries in which the mechanical world view became the philosophical ideology of Western culture, industrialization coupled with the exploitation of natural resources began to fundamentally alter the character and quality of human life. Through popular scientific education, through commonsense empirical philosophy and natural religion, and through the spread of scientific, rationalizing tendencies to manufacturing, government</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/green%20man%20new.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/green%20man%20new.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > bureaucracies, and medical and legal systems, the mechanical science, method, and philosophy created in the seventeenth century have gradually become institutionalized as a form of life in the Western world,” she states.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It is interesting and maybe useful to note that the European left his rich inner life, a life, writes Merchant in which, “The earth was alive and considered to be a beneficent, receptive, nurturing female,” with Columbus for the acquisition of the culture of an outer life: goods, action, worlds to conquer and convert, and that Columbus began this adventure on a journey to the East, to the Spice Islands in particular. But this world, recently described by anthropologists and filmmakers Lawrence and Lorne Blair as among the richest places on earth; is not so rich in material goods as it is in spiritual goods.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/blair.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/blair.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The Blair brothers describe the Spice Islands and surrounding <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Indonesia</st1:place></st1:country-region> as a wonder world of magicians, shamans and dream interpreters, one that still exists but is quickly losing ground to globalism.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Like <st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city>’s twin, <st1:city st="on">Darwin</st1:city>’s is nearly forgotten, but any half-learned individual at the turn of the century knew of Alfred Russel Wallace*, and many credited him with the discoveries that made <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:city> famous. He has been retrieved recently in a PBS television series and accompanying book called the <i style="">Ring of Fire: Exploring the Last Remote Places of the World</i>, in which the Blair brothers follow the path of Wallace on his wandering travels throughout <st1:country-region st="on">Indonesia</st1:country-region> and into the <st1:place st="on">Spice Islands</st1:place>, following the path he took to his original theory of evolutionary theory.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Like the relationships between <st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city> and Leibnitz and between Freud and Jung, that between Wallace and Darwin was fraught with hostility, although, “… it is now quite certain that <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:city>,” writes Lawrence Blair, “would have been quite unable to write it (the evolutionary</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/lawrence.blair.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/lawrence.blair.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > theory) without his essential contribution.” The results of this contention, he says, “ … has profoundly affected the subsequent tenor of both science and the humanities.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It was Wallace’s paper that came first, says Blair, which forced publication of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Darwin</st1:city></st1:place>’s theory, although Wallace’s contribution was considerably more enlightened.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“’Survival of the strongest,’ for instance, and its tooth-and-claw ethic which became associated with Social Darwinism, is not at all what Wallace had meant by ‘survival of the fittest,’ where fitness was defined by him as a far subtler and more complex weave of forces than mere pugnacious self-interest. A further major difference was in the two men’s attitudes towards tribal peoples – whom Wallace recognized as fascinating equals, rather than as ‘a lower order of the human race’, which was <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:city>’s perhaps unwitting contribution to 20<sup>th</sup> century racism,” writes Blair.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Wallace believed that natural selection’s checks and balances were not the only forces in evolutionary play but also saw spirit or mind playing through matter. As with <st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city>, however, it was not so much the scientific community but the general cultural understanding or misunderstanding at large which chose <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:city> and exiled Wallace.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/i%20ching.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/i%20ching.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Recently, a new translation of the <i style="">I Ching</i>, the ancient Chinese book of oracle, was translated by Kerson Huang, a distinguished theoretical physicist at MIT, and his wife Rosemary. It contains an essay in which Huangs point out that Leibnitz did not consider his discovery of calculus to be a new idea, because he had received a copy of the <i style="">I Ching</i> from a Jesuit friend in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">China</st1:place></st1:country-region> just as he was making his historic discovery, and he wrote about it in the introduction to his work. Calculus, Leibnitz wrote, was basically the same as the <i style="">I Ching</i>. In his first full discourse on binary integers, published in 1703, write the Huangs, Leibniz acknowledged their origin in “the ancient Chinese diagrams of Fohy (Fuxi).” It was Leibniz’s belief that God revealed the truth to Fuxi three thousand years before his time. </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:12;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >But the world has moved away from the rigidly mechanistic world view of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, they write, and physics is no longer able to get away with drastic idealizations because it deals with simple measuring instruments, such as scales that read between 1 and 10.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >“Everything not in the domain clearly marked out by physics is beyond its grasp, and this is the domain in which the <i style="">I Ching</i> and other nonscientific endeavors operate. The domain is vast, including such diverse phenomena as the stock market, classical music, and love,” they write. “In fact, it covers all situations and phenomena in which the ‘measuring device’ is a person.”<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Not only in calculus and physics have these comparisons been made. In 1974, molecular biologist Harvey Baily observed that the mathematical structure of the DNA molecule is strictly analogous to the structure of the In ching. See John F. Yan's <span style="font-style: italic;">DNA and the I Ching: The Tao of Life</span>.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In each of these three thinkers, <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Newton</st1:place></st1:city>, Darwin and Freud, left behind was the temptation of the East. Leibnitz drew his comparison directly to the Oriental occult and the<i style=""> I Ching</i>. Jung rejected Freud’s sexual theory and drew much of his inspiration from the mandala philosophy of</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/cgjung2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/cgjung2.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > wholeness that pervades Eastern thinking and is pronounced in Tibetan Buddhism. And Wallace's picture of natural evolution, which was imbued by mind and spirit, resembles the Hindu story of evolution.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >At the end of his life <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Newton</st1:place></st1:city> is said to have been preoccupied by numerical sequences in the Bible, perhaps defensively. But by our own century, the determinism of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Newton</st1:place></st1:city> would yield to quantum mechanics, which resembles the philosophies of the East. Physicist Neils Bohr would enter a classroom and illustrate the principle of quantum physics by drawing the yin/yang symbol on the board, expressing the balanced universe of masculine and feminine. While Einstein, in his last years refused to accept it, insisting on the single force theory. But if Bohr’s theory recalled the Eastern view, Einstein’s single-force view recalled Yahweh, the one true god of the Old Testament and the Prince of Egypt.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The point has been made by many that the public misunderstanding of scientific principles, particularly those of <st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city> and the mechanists, was unfortunate, and <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Newton</st1:place></st1:city>’s official journal has actually apologized for mischief done. But from the archetypal view, that is the point. In terms of which direction the culture will take it makes no difference what the scientist understands; presumably he understands his work. What is important is <i style="">how the principles are misunderstood by the public</i>, for that will determine how they will be applied in the future. The public misunderstanding is guided from the Collective Unconscious. Thus it is on the Power Principle that we have sallied forth these five hundred years.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Kuhn%20book.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Kuhn%20book.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >But that began to change radically in the academic world in 1962 with the publication of <i style="">The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i> by Thomas S. Kuhn. Kuhn shifted the culture at its base. And largely by a popular misunderstanding or no understanding at all of his book. Kuhn gave the academic and professional management world common usage of the word <i style="">paradigm</i>, and the world was ready for this word and its application – as in<i style="">, change the paradigm</i> or <i style="">subvert the dominant</i> <i style="">paradigm</i> – by the late 1980s and the early 1990s.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In fact, Kuhn changed the dominant <span style="font-style: italic;">paradigm</span> within academic and management culture, but probably more by accident than intention. </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >And if the world was ready for change in the 17<sup>th</sup> century if not before, it is ready for change again. And, again, it isn’t really important how the scientist or the science historian understands Kuhn’s work. What is important is <i style="">how the general public misunderstands his work</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >And the conventional understanding of Kuhn’s book to those in the professional and academic arenas can fit on a 3 x 5 card: it is that scientific revolutions come and go like religious revivals, build to an arc, then disappear, gone with the wind, like the Anasazi or</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/lone%20gunmen.jin%20window%20small.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/lone%20gunmen.jin%20window%20small.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > Tree Druids.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This brought an Awakening, especially to the post-war generation; a feeling that the world was not fixed in one place and could move on now to other things. Prior to that we seemed impermeable to change. The “ . . . single vision of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Newton</st1:city></st1:place>’s sleep,” may have been dark, flat and static, but it had to be accepted because it was the truth. Science was, as the Cigarette-Smoking Man said, the people’s religion.<br /><br />Now the <i style="">paradigm</i><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>h</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:14;" ><span style="font-size:130%;">ad shifted. </span> <o:p></o:p></span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1135683560109698562005-12-27T03:37:00.000-08:002008-06-12T14:52:20.105-07:00Particles and Waves - Countries divide into binary chakra orientations & so does the individual & so does the family & so does the world<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/ile%20de%20la%20cite_color.jpg400.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/ile%20de%20la%20cite_color.jpg400.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=""><span style="font-weight: bold;">This is essentially, an edited out section of the last episode on the Six Grandfathers</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">and American history</span>.</span><span style=""><br /><br />Current research shows that on the day of birth a baby boy will look at a mobile hanging above his bead. A baby girl will look at a face. The one is a techomatrix orientation and inate fascination with technicality (head), the other empathy (heart). Head and heart are biological divisions and they are binary <span style="font-style: italic;">yang</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">yin</span> orientations in</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/notredamerose%20glass.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/notredamerose%20glass.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=""> the world. All societies divide between head and heart. Paris (above, Ile de la Cite and Left and Right Banks with Notre Dame's Rose Glass superimposed on the Ile de la Cite) gives a perfect example: the bankers and burgers live on the Right Bank of the river Seine (in red) and the artists,</span><span style=""> writers, hippies and mystics live on the Left Bank (in blue). The two halves are divided by a river connected by the <span style="font-style: italic;">Pont Neuf</span> and held together by a perfect jewel: The Notre Dame Cathedral with its rose glass on the Ile de la Cite. <span style=""> </span><st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place> likewise divided between Roman (head) and Greek (heart) in Imperial, Christian and Cold War spheres, but unfortunately has no Ile de la Cite to unify and absorb its opposites today in a mandala.<o:p></o:p></span> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="">A distinct binary relationship can be seen extending across Asia as well from <st1:country-region st="on">India</st1:country-region> to <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Japan</st1:country-region></st1:place>. Vedic (<i style="">yin</i>) Asia has its source in <st1:country-region st="on">India</st1:country-region> but extends to areas that were once Vedic and are now Buddhist, like <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Thailand</st1:place></st1:country-region> and its neighbors. The Vedic influence is palatable in <st1:country-region st="on">Thailand</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Laos</st1:place></st1:country-region>. With Taoist (<i style="">yang</i>) Asia, <st1:country-region st="on">China</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region st="on">Korea</st1:country-region> and <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Japan</st1:country-region></st1:place> (Japanese <i style="">zen</i> owes itself to Taoism and is an extension to Taoism: See Suzuki’s <i style="">Introduction to Zen</i>), a binary relationship can be seen. The Vedic/<i style="">yin </i>regions feature yoga and graceful dancing, while the Taoist/<i style="">yang</i> regions express themselves in cerebral discussions (or non-discussion discussions as in Japanese <span style="font-style: italic;">Zen</span>) marshal arts, stick fighting and in the farthest corner, Samurai swordsmanship, none of which are prominent in the Vedic areas.<span style=""> </span><st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Tibet</st1:country-region></st1:place> has influences of both; archetypal deities that resemble the Hindu pantheon, and the Taoism’s <i style="">tai chi </i>(<i style="">yin</i>/<i style="">yang</i> symbol) sits in the center of the Tibetan flag. <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Tibet</st1:country-region></st1:place>, which calls the center of consciousness the Jewel Heart is in itself the Jewel Heart of the extended mandala of the East. The destruction of <st1:country-region st="on">Tibet</st1:country-region> as a sacred center and its occupation by communist <st1:country-region st="on">China</st1:country-region> will likely upset and destroy the ancient, balanced symmetries between <st1:country-region st="on">China</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">India</st1:place></st1:country-region> and those within the entire Asian continent.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style="">The Asian regions developed these relationships over thousands of years, but the entire region will lose its internal <span style="font-style: italic;">yin/yang</span> features as East and West adjoin in our times and a new global relationship develops a new Jewel Heart between East and West, founding a new benign mandala vortex around the Chicago/Toronto area thereabouts. This is a new world picture which has been moving to this one point since the beginning of civilization. It is the Aquarian mandala.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Henry%27s%20dream.jpgsmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Henry%27s%20dream.jpgsmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="">There is a well-known analysis in psychiatric lore about "Henry’s dreams" (picture here from <span style="font-style: italic;">Man and His Symbols</span>, edited by C.G. Jung), which refers to a long series of archetypal dreams that brought a psychiatric patient of C.G. Jung associate Jolande Jacobi to face deep and irrational powers within himself. During analysis, Henry drew a picture with a blue field on the right with a Madonna-like woman standing in it and a red field on the left with a wolf-like black monster in it. The picture suggests that the forces within Henry are dangerously incompatible, but in the center of the picture is a mandala-like flower which links the opposite sides.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/flag%20of%20france.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/flag%20of%20france.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="">This personal dream of Henry's classically illustrates the situation described in the illustration above on the banks of the Seine in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:city>, the left bank (artists and writers), the <span style="font-style: italic;">yin</span> side, and the right side (bankers and business people), the <span style="font-style: italic;">yang</span> side, united by the cathedral on the Ile de Cite. Further investigation</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/flag%20of%20moldova.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/flag%20of%20moldova.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=""> reveals that this is the same pattern on the flag of <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region>; a left field blue and a right field red, connected by a white field, meant to suggest the lilies of the field.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/mississippi%20river%20map.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/mississippi%20river%20map.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="">Many flags, particularly in mature countries, have this same balance; the blue sometimes green and the red sometimes orange, and with a flower or an icon of some type in the center holding them together. (The icon stashed up in the corner and with only one color suggests a transitional phase or a country out of balance.)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style="">Many towns, cities and countries are thus divided, very often like <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state> into artsy (hippies, poets) “downtowns” and business-like “uptowns” (Madison Avenue). And the beautiful city of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Washington</st1:place></st1:city>, D.C. serves as a center-most mandala for North and South prior to the Civil War. And the Mississippi River divides the world today with Chicago at top and New Orleans at bottom uniting the U.S. east and west and all of the Eastern world and the Western world into one world. So far, like <st1:place st="on">Europe</st1:place>, it has no mandala. But maybe it will one day. At center is the Lakes Region, which forms a water star - maybe a world mandala in the new center of the world will feature the Sea Serpent in the Great Lakes known to First People as the Manitou - the Primary Spirit of the Earth.)</span>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18402408.post-1135433589258339362005-12-24T05:48:00.000-08:002005-12-28T08:09:29.436-08:00The Six Grandfathers; 4th part of The Three Celestial Ones, thereabouts<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/george-washington-small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/george-washington-small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >When God created the world he divided it into two teams</span>," <span style="font-size:85%;">Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.</span><o:p></o:p></span></span> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">The archetypes occur in places where no one is looking. It is again like the Yeats’ tale of the fairies playing in the bog – they disappear when the priest arrives. Same when the critics, fashion-makers, learned opinion-makes arrive. Invariably they create an orthodoxy and leave the living spirit a calsified statue.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">In his most influential essay <i style="">Heaven and Hell</i>, published together with <i style="">The Doors of Perception</i><span style=""> </span>Aldous, Huxley talked of the influence of art which no art critic considered to be art. In the period when the institutional critics were agog over fur-lined coffee cups and chocolate machines which didn’t make chocolate, Huxley was discussing the folk art of the chalice used in the Catholic Sacrifice of the Mass, for example, considered irrelevant</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/chalice.small.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/chalice.small.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> to the cultural priests and police of the day (and long since and before). The gods hide in low places. It is the way of all things. The face of God never reveals itself direct, always behind a screen, a curtain or a smoky mist. It can never be called by its name direct.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">The Three Celestial Ones, as suggested, have dual faces, light and dark, as do the Three Sisters, and the totality form the full six female, then the six male – the 12 faces of the zodiac. Salvador Dali, who said, “I don’t know what my</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> dreams mean but I think they mean something,” expressed it correctly – the artist, the folk-tale teller, the dreamer dreams in this language, not of precision, logic and language, but of association and intuition. The official artist or poet laureate may do so too perhaps, but not up in these mountains. They are as scripted as politicians and Pentagon officials. Invariably if the culture is going through an “idealist” phase, its priests which assign Noble Prize and Pushcart Awards to those which amend their package and will deny Tolstoy as being “too nihilist.” Seventy years later when the Priests are in a nihilisic phase, the idealist will be scorned. The artist sees from the center, the crtic from the edge. The successful critic is an extravert and amends the edge and consolidates opinion, forming groups. But bonding forms orthodoxy. A true artist or writer should have no colleagues. Not even any friends, as their expectations will always be either to the positive or the negative, wherever the culture is going, and the artist has to go alone. But that is not to be alienated, the neurasthenic and nihilistic outsider - the <span style="font-style: italic;">cliche</span> of suburban culture, but the consumate insider who seeks and finds, the center.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/dali.six%20lennons.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/dali.six%20lennons.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">It is better usually to look to the artist no one listens to as a serious artist. Stan Lee or Fran Striker, who wrote the scripts for <i style="">The Lone Ranger</i>.<span style=""> </span><i style="">The Lone Ranger</i> starts with six coffins –</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> spirits from the Land of the Dead, to send forth a champion on a new and idealistic journey. Dali’s vision here was formed in the Unconscious as a "partial Hallucination" and an "Apparition" of “six Lenins” – six skulls on a grand piano, again from the Land of the Dead – and Black Elk’s vision</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/a1_stan_lee.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/a1_stan_lee.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> was of the “six grandfathers” – spirits again; sacred spirits which pervaded the consciousness of the Earth at the beginning of a new age.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">The American condition as well came at its start essentially with six men who would fix its destiny for 400 years and until today and tomorrow. The Six are what made us organically a North/South country, filled with North/South contention and conflict.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Tensions today in the American</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> political condition between the so-called Red states and Blue states are in a four-hundred year pattern. Perhaps this is an end game. In the next hundred years as economy and strength shifts to Asia, particularly <st1:country-region st="on">China</st1:country-region>, the American Southwest and <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">California</st1:place></st1:state> will more fully interact with Asia and become more influential The ground will shift again and we will become an East/West country in an East/West world. Likely we will remain so for a long time. <st1:city st="on">Washington</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">D.C.</st1:state> was the perfect center – a benign vortex between two contentious forces – in the North/South condition, but as East/West develops we will likely find a new center – possibly around <st1:state st="on">Indiana</st1:state>, where <st1:city st="on">Indianapolis</st1:city> already resembles a star-shaped world Mandela, or <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Ohio</st1:place></st1:state> thereabout. Then there will be new Grandfathers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/grant.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/grant.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Until now, however, there are six men who made our country what it is, three on each side (or team, as Vonnegut has it). They are <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Hamilton</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">Washington</st1:state></st1:place> and Adams, on the one side, and Jefferson, Madison and Monroe on the other. The Northerners brought from <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region> and Europe Enlightenment strategies – a way of the head - the way of seeing the world as a matrix of Ideas; a left-brain and language and logic-based matrix in which everything has a square spot to fit in. The Southerners brought forth spirit and heart-based energies – a pastoralist vision driven by agriculture and country lif, and saw the cosmic package more likely to be and more akin to a river than Yankee crate, cubicle or a skyscraper. On the Northern team</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/stonewallsmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/stonewallsmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> was John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. <st1:state st="on">Washington</st1:state> joined up with them shortly after the Revolution, casting the fate of <st1:country-region st="on">America</st1:country-region> with <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Hamilton</st1:place></st1:city>’s perspective. Thomas Jefferson and his colleague James Madison, and their acolyte, James Monroe, consolidated the Southern point of view.<span style=""> </span>These are America's Six Grandfathers. Inevitably these two forces would come into conflict. <st1:place st="on">Jefferson</st1:place>expected a northern invasion as early as 1897. But it</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> was not until 1861 that they sent forth their two champions, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/chakras_Elvis.jsmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/chakras_Elvis.jsmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">This difference in outlook and these contentions can only be fully understood by understanding the chakras. Knowledge of the chakras will also explain why people act </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">differently in different cultures and in the same culture. It is important to understand the chakras because they explain a lot that has been ongoing in the culture and a lot that is just beginning now. The low chakra of the gonads thereabouts brging in primal energy rich in sexuality and empowering emotions, like Elvis did, from which the world begins again.</span><br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Most of my antecedents have come from </span><st1:country-region style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;" st="on"><st1:place st="on">Ireland</st1:place></st1:country-region> relatively recently. The Irish lived in the heart chakra, while the northern European and the Calvinists in <st1:place st="on">New England</st1:place> moved on to the head some 500 years ago. It was strong with us because my mother’s parents had come over together and formed an enclave among other Irish with similar habits and customs. That is why it was so hard to leave my mother and start school. Although it was a Catholic school, it was 1950, and the secular theme of reason dominated. The Catholic schools were paralyzed in conflict between the head chakra and the heart chakra.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Jesus%20crown%20and%20heart.small.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Jesus%20crown%20and%20heart.small.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >There is a picture of Jesus that is such a bad work of art that it has probably contributed to anti-Catholic sentiment over the ages, not because of content but because of kitsch. The picture is of Jesus holding his outer gown open around his chest and his heart is revealed beneath it. It is on fire and there is a crown of thorns circling it. Terrible though the art may be, it perfectly illustrates the heart chakra. (<i style="">Magic: The Gathering </i>cards have better pictures illustrating this, as Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism do.)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Zen Buddhism is very easy to understand by one who lives in the heart:</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/shiva.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/shiva.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > it says the head is a trickster. It says the world of reason creates a material world, an artifact house, an illusion of language and logic. God is love and God lives in the heart. This is the center of the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Growing up in the fifties as Irish near Boston eventually brought a conflict between heart chakra – well reinforced by repeating until it was known “by heart” we used to say – of the <i style="">Magnificat</i> and the other prayers to the Blessed Virgin – and the practical secular world. The <i style="">Magnificat</i>, from Luke 1:46-55, is the Virgin’s joyous prayer in response to the Angel Gabriel’s annunciation to her that she will become the mother of the Son of God. We Catholics were technically at war with those who lived by the head, and their compulsive materialism was stressed throughout the whole program in the Catholic school. But their agents were not unfriendly and didn’t seem particularly hostile to us. If anything, they were indifferent.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/dave%20garoway.small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/dave%20garoway.small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Dave Garoway and Garry Moore, these, the first pioneers of live, daytime television, I think were the first Protestants ever to enter our house. After TV they couldn’t be kept out of our living room and anyway they appeared quite harmless.<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >These were the agents who would bring you in. Bring in your parents, bring in the whole household and especially the kids. Eventually, the glow of the heart chakra when the Irish women would chant the rosary in a circle around a statue of the Blessed Mother would lose its serene luster compared to the entertaining prat falls and low</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Howdy%20Doodysmall.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Howdy%20Doodysmall.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > theatre of Phineas T. Bluster and Princess Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring. And as we got older, it became increasingly clear to us boys that these outsiders, the People of the Head, were a lot better at doing things and making things and figuring things out than we Irish of the Rosary.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In the North, I was among the last to leave the heart chakra because of the recent arrival of my grand parents from <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">Ireland</st1:place></st1:country-region>, but when I did, in early adolescence, there was very little conflict. It was, as a priest in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Boston</st1:place></st1:city> once said, like taking off an old coat and that was the end of it.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In the South, people both black and white, still live in the heart. That is changing now because people are heading South now from the North. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >There is something in nature that drives the head away from the heart and destines them to despise one another. In his perceptive book, <i style="">Southerners and Other Americans</i>, Forrest McDonald tries to account for the differences between Northerner and Southerner, but he feels he failed in that quest.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Sociologist John Shelton Reed may be leading the way in this, as he points out that the North is different from the South just because we are herre and they are there. Reed, a professor at <st1:placetype st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename st="on">North Carolina</st1:placename> at <st1:place st="on">Chapel Hill</st1:place>, asks his students to list the qualities of Northerners and the qualities of Southerners in his class, and he finds that his Southern students, whatever they list for the South, will generally list the opposite for the North. If the South is polite, the North is nasty and boorish. If the North is cheap and penny-pinching, the South is generous and kind. If the South is pious and devout, the North is a bunch of heathen horse worshipers.<o:p></o:p> Before our federalist birth as colonial Baptist and Quaker split with Congregationalist, and <st1:place st="on">Beacon Hill</st1:place>’s white-glove Unitarian scorned the earthy tent revivalist, we were destined to be divided.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Grady McWhiney’s <i style="">Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South</i>, finds many opposites between Northern and Southern parts. These are estrangements between the heart and the head. Forest McDonald writes in the preface to McWhiney’s book that fundamental and lasting divisions</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/chakrasarthur.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/chakrasarthur.0.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > between Southerners and Northerners, “began in colonial <st1:country-region st="on">America</st1:country-region> when immigrants from the Celtic regions of the British Isles – <st1:country-region st="on">Scotland</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region st="on">Ireland</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region st="on">Wales</st1:country-region> and <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Cornwall</st1:place></st1:city> – and from the English uplands managed to implant their traditional customs to the Old South.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >By contrast, Massachusetts and Boston were settled by urban English, Calvinists and Protestants who brought with their entourage a lasting Calvinist ethic, from which would evolve the Yankee work ethic. In a word, New England was an extension of the cultural transformation England and northern Europe was going through, while the South’s culture was ultimately formed not so much by British planter society, but by ordinary folks, described by Frank L. Owsley in<i style=""> Plain Folks of the South</i>. Real plain folk – chiefly farmers and herders – shaped the Old South. Like Yeats’ peasants, communicating with the spirits in the bog, these folks had little involvement with the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. They still lived in the heart and off the earth.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >From here, the North, particularly <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>, would grow federalism and an extension of the reason principal, the high chakra of the head, into a universal business ethic, and it would grow in power against the ethic of the South, which preferred to be left alone.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Divisions of head and heart are differences between a left-brained techno-matrix orientation in the world (<i style="">yang</i>) and an empathetic (<i style="">yin</i>) orientation in the world. In the Southern manifesto by the “reconstructed but unregenerate” literary renegades of Vanderbilt University known as the Fugitives, this was summed up as a distinction in the phrase, “Agrarian versus Industrial.” Furthermore, W. J. Cash, in his landmark study would write that it t’was ever thus, and the Southern fight against the Yankee in the Civil War was simply an outbreak of an inner conflict that continued into the next century by other means.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The Southern mind, wrote Cash in<i style=""> The Mind of the South</i> in 1941, was a defense against, “The Yankee Mind, the Modern Mind and the Negro Mind.” He might better have called it the Southern heart.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/john%20hope%20franklin.small.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/john%20hope%20franklin.small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >C.G. Jung wrote in 1927 after a visit to the American South that virtually all American music and religion in the South found its chief inspiration in African-American influence. He also compared the participation mystique of <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>to the African village culture and saw the African-American influence pervading every aspect of American culture. These sentiments would be echoed 50 years later by John Hope Franklin and other Southern scholars. These African influences, like those of the country Scots and English influences advanced and fulfilled the heart orientation of the South, fixing it in opposition to the left-of-brain New Yorker.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >And still it continues. Historian Dan Carter writes in his book,<i style=""> The Politics of Rage</i>, a biography of George Wallace, that the entire Wallace rise and fall was a reaction to the new initiatives of the culture of the 1960s, of the Freedom Riders in the South, the integration decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education, the hippies and so on. “. . . as the civil rights movement expanded in the 1960s to inspire the women’s rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the politics of sexual liberation, George Wallace adroitly broadened his message,” writes Carter. “Journalists might greet this growing counterculture with curiosity, even approval. But Wallace knew – instinctively, intuitively – that tens of millions Americans despised the civil rights agitators, the antiwar demonstrators, the sexual exhibitionists as symbols of a fundamental decline in the traditional cultural compass of God, family, and country.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Wallace invoked images of a nation in crisis, writes Carter, a country in which thugs roamed the streets with impunity, antiwar demonstrators embraced the hated Communist Vietcong, and</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/george%20wallace_250.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/george%20wallace_250.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > brazen youth flaunted their taste for “dirty” books and movies. “And while <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region> disintegrated, cowardly politicians, bureaucrats, and distant federal judges capitulated to these loathsome forces."<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >And furthermore, in the summer of 1974, after Wallace made a much-heralded visit to the <st1:city st="on">Lynchburg</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">Virginia</st1:state>, <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Liberty</st1:placename> <st1:placename st="on">Road</st1:placename> <st1:placename st="on">Baptist</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Church</st1:placetype></st1:place>, home of the burgeoning “Moral Majority” movement led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the Wallace bid would evolve into what has come to be known as the Religious Right and the church-based political movement which has today sent its champion to the Presidency.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >From first days to the present, there it is: Pat Robertson, the NRA, the “culture wars,” the teaching of Creationism, the whole nine yards – it’s all about the Beatles and the hippies. But even the new influence find their way to the South when they were heart-based. I once spoke to a Southern anthropologist who was hired to teach the FBI "non-confrontational" strategies of disarming radical confrontations, like those which occurred at Waco and Ruby Ridge. These strategies were bsaed on Eastern thinking, but he said it was quite easy from Southern police and military to understand them strategically as they come from the same heart-based orientation as the Hindu. In fact, the three major Hindu influences of the Sixties despised by Robertson and Falwell all found their homes in the South. The Khrishna's, the Maharishi </span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/flowersatchidanada.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/flowersatchidanada.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Mahesh Yogi and Woodstock guru Swami Satchidanda all establishing teaching and retreat centers in the mountains of West Virginia, North Carolina and Virginia. Satchidanda was given land for a retreat in Connecticut and he sold it and moved his retreat to Virginia However, the more cerebral Buddhist influences in the seme period established permanent bases in Woodstock, Vermont and Barnet, Vermont and in Woodstock, New York.<o:p></o:p><br /><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >David McCullough’s recent biography of John Adams nicely brings American and French revolutionary history down to two phrases: Thomas Jefferson’s expression selected for the Constitution, “ . . . born free and equal,” – a view from the heart - in opposition to that which John Adams preferred, “ . . . born equally free and independent,” – clear, objective and legalistic; the judgment of the head. Here at the very birth of federalism a life-long alienation arises between the “binary” founding fathers Adams and Jefferson, Northerner and Southerner (who died within hours of each other on the Fourth of July, 50 years after the signing of the Constitution). Both strong idealists, but idealists of the head and of the heart. The first major</span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > threat of secession came during the Adams Presidency and the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jeffferson considered these repressive laws to be in opposition to the spirit of the <st1:state st="on">free state</st1:state> and he and Madison wrote secession resolutions for <st1:state st="on">Virginia</st1:state> and <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Kentucky</st1:place></st1:state>. The second major threat of secession came from <st1:place st="on">New England</st1:place> during the War of 1812 when Jefferson and the Southerners were in charge.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><st1:place st="on"><span style="font-family:Garamond;">Jefferson</span></st1:place></span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > is a great study of heart-based truth; usually the view of the artist more than the politician. It is no surprise that he was a great architect. <st1:place st="on">Jefferson</st1:place> listens to his heart first and his head second – his nature is to choose his heart and deny his head as temptation. Adams, the Calvinist, listens to his head first and his heart second – his nature is to choose his head and deny his heart. Both have two contending opinions within them, one weak and one strong – both men are right and both are wrong in opposite balance.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >The North/South contention in American life has been organically oppositional from the beginning in 1607, but the key moment of change came only when George Washington firmed his alliance with Northerners Hamilton and Adams who favored Jay’s Treaty, which firmed a new alliance with England only 18 years after the Revolution. The Virginians, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were shocked, and preferred the Revolutionary alliance with <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">France and the traditional Revolutionary identity</st1:place></st1:country-region>. When Washington cast his lot with the Northerners,</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/thomas%20jefferson.0.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/thomas%20jefferson.0.gif" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > Jefferson, Madison and Monroe began to consolidate the South’s position in opposition to them. </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" > Jefferson expected invasion by the Northern states as early as 1897. </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >Perhaps it was only the great national status of the Founders, respect for Jefferson in particular, which prevented it. It was not until they were all dead, by which time the North had built into an enormous economic and world power and was experiencing great growth in manpower from Ireland and Europe to work in factories, that they began to take action. It was not until William Lloyd Garrison, of Boston <span style="font-style: italic;">Clipper Ship</span> class and his father a sailing master, published <span style="font-style: italic;">Liberator</span>, in 1831, that the simmering conflict opened to overt and hostile relationships, which backed by the industrial class of the North, would inevitably be decided in favor of the North. Jefferson had died only five years before, in 1826.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In his 1930’s essay, <i style="">The Irrepressible Conflict</i>, Frank Lawrence Owsley has the regional conflict evolving between New Yorker Alexander Hamilton’s vision and the Southern pastoralist Jefferson’s:<span style=""> </span>“Their social systems were hostile; their political philosophies growing out of their economic and social systems were as impossible to reconcile as it is to cause two particles of matter to occupy the same space at the same time; and their philosophies of life, growing out of the whole situation in each section, were as two elements in deadly combat. What was food for the one was poison for the other.”<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/1600/Peepal_Tree_of_Eternal_life.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1593/1751/320/Peepal_Tree_of_Eternal_life.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >In the beginning, wrote Owsley, two men defined fundamental principles of the political philosophy of the two societies, Alexander Hamilton for the North and Jefferson for the South. "The one was extreme centralization, the other was extreme decentralization; the one was nationalistic and the other provincial; the first was called Federalism, the other State Rights."</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.25in;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" ><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >This is the vision of Lord Krishna holding two eggs. It is represented in the Upanishads as a story of two birds perched on the branch of a pippala tree. </span><span style=";font-family:Garamond;font-size:130%;" >It is the Dance of All Creation. <o:p></o:p></span></p>Bernie Quigleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11360730932876716461noreply@blogger.com0