Saturday, July 23, 2016

Spiritual Engineering 101


               What can a foolish old man like me do to help make the world a better place? There's never been such thing as a "Personal Enlightenment." With so much hardship and bigotry in the world, any attempt to push back against violence always draws attention. There is a very real need for escape. Even in my bohemian paradise, bullets rain. Cops shoot citizens, citizens in my country carry weapons too. Citizens shoot each other, sometimes out of misdirected sorrow and hatred. When "Hurt people, hurt people" there is no peace. And now we have campaigns of misery promoting the politics of brand marketing.

               During the Viet Nam war the most popular reading materials amongst U. S. troops was not the Bible, it was "ALICE IN WONDERLAND" and "THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS." There's a real need for escape. My writing have been informed by these traditions of Spiritual Fiction. Just like the works of Lewis Carol, "The Wizard of OZ" by Frank L. Baum also was a moral fable. It would seem that we are now returning to a time of Strife Politics, we need Civil Rights Movements the world over. The free world came to an end in 1969, not at Kent State University when the U. S. National Guard shot many students protesting the war. But at another college where there were over five times as many black students slaughtered for demonstrating against the war which indiscriminately killed black male conscripts. This was for the U. S. an end to free speech through assembly. We are afraid to assemble anymore. Casual assassinations made the conspiracy of popular paranoia all too easy, motivating people into being powerlessly apathetic. And now with an economy of scale, only money talks. Billionaires vie for the political leadership of the so called free world. And Big Science still goes only to the biggest money.

               Hope thus is a story with no end. Where do we begin? The People of the Russian Pale between the Baltic and the Black Sea, told stories about the Intelligences of God's Angels. Each waging wars in heaven to keep the world in balance. That good might prevail in the face of the Czar's inescapable Pogroms, Golems were the statues of clay animated by the written word of god. (Will he kill the Czar?) These traditions inform todays fantasies for the divine warfare. Even the poor of Haiti have evolved a perfect spiritual fiction of living machinery. These Loa, are the ancestor spirits of intelligent divine justice, mercy and welfare. These forces inhabit the actions of the pure and troubled innocent, to purge and cleanse the worshipper. All these traditions work on a mechanical precision of divine rightness. In India we also have the divine Hindu and Buddhist traditions of ritual purification, called Puja. Let us bring out a proverbial "Golden Broom" to sweep away the filth and decrepitude of spiritual obesity, racial intolerance and renew our faith in a moral fairness. What else is there to do?

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Referral Guide to the KINDNESS GATE: A New Book of Dreams


               Led by her followers, the Great Mother Goddess prepares for an inevitable return to her CoTraining. ReSocialization is the conspiracy of joy, love and hope. We are all enjoined to release the children from their dreamless discontent. "Come quickly my children." Mother says. "Make your way to the Kindness Gate." All of the innocent children can smell the sweet spiritual waters of kindness, flowing just beyond the cooling shadows. Waiting on the other side, Mom chides them on. "There is no such thing as a personal enlightenment," she say. "This dream is for all of you, plural." Discreet variables of diversity can unify and equalize every individual, forming ever new Circles of Mutual Influence.

               Then the rains can fall, and the trees will grow. And flowers will bloom, and all the children can begin to laugh and play just inside the Mother's Garden. "There is always enough for everyone." she says. (And there always has been. But man does not see it.) "Do not wake your father," she says as her children take place in the New World of Becoming. "He has had much too much to do for himself, and now he desperately needs his well deserved rest." The children wanted the history. "God made the world in his sleep, but he forgot how to recreate himself," Mom says rolling her eyes. {He wasn't a really a bad husband, he was just so jealously insecure, always needing constant strokes.}

               {Long ago and far away, all the world knew was strife and sorrow. Enter the Kindness Gate children. The future awaits.}