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?