EULOGY FOR JANE (and John)

Having known Jane's ways and also knowing (the hurt we (mostly her brothers) inflicted on her when she was in her formative years) it is understandable how she had closed down emotionally to a significant degree. And from a psychological point of view she was depressive and combative while guarding herself first, others be damned. Given the difficulties of trying to live with someone such as Jane, you, John, managed more than tolerably well. When you yourself gave in to strategies in coping with her that were less constructive, I'd say that you were simply being human and doing what you felt you had to do in order to co-exist. There is that old action/reaction thing that often gets in the way in relationships. It's called complementary schismogenesis. But whatever it is called, it is not easy to overcome. It takes two, working together in an honest, concerted effort to transcend knee-jerk, button-pushing, communication pathology. Myself, I am convinced that you loved Jane. I am thankful for the fact that you found each other. Bad times are a dime a dozen, but just one good time is a priceless gift. And I know that you enjoyed some very tender and poetic moments together. These memories will remain and should be dwelt upon in quiet lonely hours when life seems impossible. I think when you remember those times, Jane's good spirit will embrace you and help to guide and comfort you.


The secret life between a man and woman is a mystery that belongs only to them. It is never for others to judge, but rather to support and nurture the kernel of love that exists within each of them - unconditionally. Despite all of the cold and distant behaviors that visited your marriage, it survived afterall, even if barely. Despite all of the negativity and problematic relationships, misunderstandings and upheavals, I think you essentially acted honorably, with insight and principle. Let no one say otherwise - even Jane was not quite right in her condemnations. In her battered and beat-up heart I think she loved you too. I think she tried, as only she was able, to given her analyses and opinions, skewed as they were by her own imperfections. Neither of you was right and neither of you was wrong. Both did your best, which is all that can be asked of anyone.


To you and Jane I say, "Be of good cheer and know that you will be missed. Go on to your next adventure in life, as we all should do, with the knowledge and understanding of what we gain through experience with life - doing our best while realizing that we can always do better, and trying ever harder to live up to our full human measure. Atonement for past misdeeds is made complete by acts of love that are informed and strengthened by lessons learned and life endured on this soul-making planet."

WHY DOTH THE HEATHEN RAGE?

The heathen in us rages at what’s going on in the world today. Everything’s been cheapened. All is controlled and corrupted. Nothing works anymore.

But instead of whining about the effects, start raging against the cause.

America is being run-down by a dastardly cabal of men known as The Committee of 300. These plutocrats emerged (in their present form) about 150 years ago, heirs to the British East India Company’s opium trade. Now, through a descending hierarchy of executive arms such as the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Tavistock, The Club of Rome, NATO, The Council on Foreign Relations, and on down the line through government and military, the courts, mega-corporations, media chains, banking and insurance companies, law firms, public relations firms, think tanks, foundations, universities, and constellations of other entities – this Committee of 300 rules the world (at least most of it). It is the cause of all of the booms and busts, wars, and every so-called historical event we have had to endure to date. Rage, oh heathens, rage!

Whether or not heathens rage in Russia or China, we should be raging here in North America, oh brother! oh sister! Yes, rage, rage against the dying of the light! (D. Thomas)

As a taste of that about which I speak, tune into Dr. John Coleman at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=170819614143019768

Go to his website, the World In Review: http://coleman300.com/ – the only news magazine that refuses all advertising.

Find out the details about the assassination of JFK, its cover-up, and lots of other dark deeds: http://coleman300.com/books.htm#300

Yes, brothers, sisters – oh heathen nation – RAGE! RAGE! RAGE!

Why doth the heathen rage? – why does the wolf howl? – out of extreme alienation from truth by forces darker than can ever be fully known. Only heathens – especially those with intelligence, yet unselected for obedience and subservience – have the capacity to let out a rage so powerful it can shake this corrupt system to its core and bring this Committee and all its minions to their knees. Yes, all outsiders, even eccentrics, cranks and kooks – all of the "unselected" – are right. Find out for yourself why that heathen doth rage…

BLUES MEMOIR & FULL REPORT: Useless Tales

"What landed you in New Zealand?"

I've taken a position as a not-so-noted solicitor in the Wellington area. I'll be looking around to play some piano - always an iffy proposition...so much so that I just sort of wait and see and try to fall into something naturally. For me, the days of begging some money-grubbing bar owner for a gig in his booze palace were over long ago. This, of course, means I don't play that much. But...then I'm not out to prove anything or try to become "famous." I'm sort of an invisible and ambivalent bottom-feeder, content with my own rambling and researching of things. If someone wants to hear me though, I'll usually play and sing. Every once in a while someone finds my website and gives me a holler.

I read some of the narrative below on Bobby Radcliff, et al. Having grown up in DC, I remember Bobby well at the Top 'o the Foolery, the Rogue and Jar, and Cousin Nick's down on 13th Street. I sat in with him at the Rogue and Jar. Not long after he moved to NYC. I used to hang around with Big Chief Ellis when he was living over in SE. We'd go to each other's gig. He sold me his Fender Rhodes 88. That was when Bowling Green John Cephas and Phil Wiggins were just getting established and they would hang out with the Chief too. In '78 I moved to New Orleans to try and finish my undergraduate degree at Loyola U. My ulterior motive of course was to play and hang out in the juke joints. I did get a regular gig at an outisde place on Decatur St. called the Gazebo. And Tipitina's called one day in 1980 and asked me to open for John Lee Hooker. That was a highlight in my otherwise lackluster career as a blues piano player and singer. I went to Chicago after that and hung around at BLUES on Halsted mostly. There I met some fading heavyweights and sat in occasionally.

But I soon returned to DC late in '81. Lovey Lee, Jr. (the late Lee Rosenblitt) asked me to join him in throwing together a group. At first we called it The Honeydrippers, and later it was called Lovey Lee's Blues Revue. We played at a few places around town, but it wasn't anything to write home about, especially when you're already home. But we did record some tunes, which I have preserved on my website. I also did a brief stint with Little Red and the Renegades. Little Red (Tom Corradino) is a good man.

I went on to law school in Baltimore, then went into the Army as a JAG officer, got out in '91 and moved outside of Santa Fe for about a year and a half. There I played at a few spots around town and actually gained some short-lived notoriety. Then again, I returned to DC in '94, only to leave in early '95 for Korea. I had gotten it into my head that I wanted to be a writer and teaching might grant me the time and provide the means to stay alive long enough to do some scribbling. (I've since transcibed and added to the lot of writing I started over there - and even before - into three or four blogs.)

So, I took a job teaching ESL for a couple of years in a university over there in Korea. I got it in my head that I might just become an itinerant English teacher, taking assorted jobs here and there around the world. On my first vacation I flew down to Cairns, in Queensland, Australia. I had heard of an American guy who liked blues and lived in nearby Port Douglas. So I looked him up and discovered he owned a pub, bottle shop, bistro, motel...AND he did love blues. I was soon playing happy hours at his bistro five nights a week. And he called me again around the time my teaching contract was up and induced me to do another run down there. It is a lovely place, Port Douglas.

But my roving days were numbered. I had met a good woman in Korea who would "Catch the Coon at Last." (Memphis Slim) I tried to run - went first to Istanbul, then to Saudi Arabia (following in the footsteps of the French Foreign Legion) - but the pull was just too strong and this lifelong bachelor finally fell into the marriage bin in the Spring of '98.

Already a refugee from the law, I started getting interested in consciousness and esoteric traditions and decided to enroll in a course of studies online at the California Institute of Integral Studies in SF. Again I was back in Korea then, at a different university, and trying to get my wife back into the US with me, as I had to do some coursework in San Francisco. She was finally able to join me in SF and we spent our time there essentially in pauperdom while I finished my doctoral coursework. I was playing less and less. It seemed no one was much interested in traditional Chicago blues and the rest of what I had to offer. Eventually, as ever, I migrated back to DC and decided to stop resisting and tried to make a go at doing some law. As luck would have it, I became the perenial piano player for the IMF at their annual International Photographic Society exhibition. This was my only regular paying gig over the past 5-6 years, although I occasionally did impromptu gigs in Easton, often accompanied by brother Fred (Fast Fingers Freddy) on drums. During this time I also tried getting something going with Johnny Tickton, and we did some gigs at Clyde's in Chevy Chase (in my old neighborhood, Friendship Heights) and a few other places, but somehow it just didn't "take." To keep body and soul together I opened a title company and cashed in on the real estate boom until that petered out. But I did finish writing my dissertation and my doctorate in Humanities was conferred in May 2006. The title of my dissertation? - The Odyssey of the Western Legal Tradition - Integral Jurisprudence: Toward the Self-Transcendence of Deficient Mental Legal Culture. (Somewhat autobiographical yet forwarding-looking, and in compensation perhaps for years resisting the law, it essentially is about law and consciousness.)

As things began their slow financial demise in the states, I looked elsehwere and found this new gig in New Zealand. We shall see where it all goes from here. I might try to make the Manawatu International Jazz & Blues Festival going on this weekend in Palmerston, NZ. At any rate, life is a great big adventure when you're out and about as I am once again (wife to join me after some months) - and it's a whole lot better than the past year or so, when life seemed like a shit sandwich and every day I had to take another bite...Aren't you gald you asked what landed me here?

I guess I'm either bored shitless, homesick, or in the mood to tell a sordid and useless tale.

____________________________

Ok, I'm finally set up at home so I can now give you a full report.

The flight here was the longest I've ever been on in my life. It seemed like two nights passed and I lost a day when I crossed over the international dateline. Left LA around 10PM on Tuesday evening and arrived in Wellington at 10AM Thurs. At least the plane wasn't very full and there was no one in the two seats next to me so I could stretch out a little. But it was grueling and I didn't sleep much (the pills a friend gave me didn't do much of anything). Clearing customs in Auckland was a breeze, but they lost my checked bags. And I'm sorry to report that when they delivered them, my big leather suitcase was ripped all along the top. I wouldn't be surprised if it had dry-rotted a little over the years. Luckily though, nothing seems to have fallen out.

The husband of my new business partner met me at the Wellington airport. I liked him right away. He was kind of tall, thin and unshaven - reminded me of my buddy in Australia, Stephen Philpot - scruffy and friendly. He turned out to be a great guy (he makes organic apple juice and cider vinegar). Anyway, I opened a bank account right away and picked up the key to my new place from the rental agency. The three of us had dinner that evening. You can often bring your own wine or beer to restaurants here and we had a couple of bottles of NZ wine, which was tasty and hit the spot.

I rested up on Friday, though I took the train to Wellington that day ($3 each way/ 20 minutes away) to apply for the equivalent of a SSN. Taxes in my income bracket ($60K) are 33%. No wonder people here seem kind of poor. Still, though somewhat shabby in appearance, the folks I've run into so far are mannerly and kind. There are virtually no black folks. You can detect quite a pervasive Maori presence however. There is even a Maori TV station where they speak their own language. The first closing I sat in on was for a Maori couple. I guess there are a lot of mixed-bloods - whatever.

The new pad is kind of drab and dark, but it'll do until I get my bearings. There are two couches, a TV, a kitchen table with four chairs and small kitchen with most everything needed for cooking and eating. There's a full bath downstairs and upstairs there's only a shower (weird, it should be a toilet) There's a queen size bed and a single bed upstairs with a dresser. Two closets and vacuum cleaner. How's that for a rundown? The apartment is one in a series of apartments all under one roof in a two-story building.

In the morning I leave my little cage and walk to work - one block to the Melling train station (end of the line), then right, across the bridge that spans the Hutt River, and then right again onto a walking path that is atop a levee. It's about a four or five block walk and very pleasant. I can hear strange birds nattering in the trees along the riverbank and I don't have to dodge cars. My building is about five stories. My office is on the third floor. My partner, Martha Hu, owns the whole 3rd floor. She rents out part of it the Hutt City Council and part to a locally famous psychic and Pilates person (which just happened after I got here). There are lots of restaurants and bars and stores of all kinds, all within walking distance. You don't really need a bus. And if I need to go into the big city, the train is very convenient. In sum, it has all worked out very nicely.

Our office space is HUGE, very roomy. My office is in the corner, front, and I have a couple of windows. It's all set up with a computer and everything. Martha and her husband Tim invited me to their farm and picked me up Saturday morning after stopping at the farmer's market (where I had been earlier). There's a huge farmer's market just on the other side of the river from me every Saturday morning until about 2PM - lots of fresh veggies and fruit and other stuff. It's great!

Their farm is located up a very narrow, zig-zaggy road and is nestled among some big rolling hills. It's really quite beautiful and quiet there. They've only been there for about a year and a half. So they're still getting it organized. Tim was planning on planting about 150 apple trees and asked if I wanted to give him a hand. So, about 48 hours after arriving, I'm out in this field boring holes with one of those twirlybirds, each of them two meters apart from the next. It was actually invigorating to do something active after being a slug, more-or-less for so long. I had brought two bottles of wine with me. Martha made dinner while I played their piano. In short, it seems like we are already good friends who have known each other for a long time. The next morning we finished up the hole boring and they took me back to my place. As my ulterior motive is to eventually have my own farm here, it is very fortuitous in that Tim is a wealth of knowledge about farming. He's been doing that almost all his life I think.

So I spent the week trying to understand the flow of the office, poring over the files, and learning the settlement process here, which is completely different. There are two other women in the office, a paralegal and a receptionist, who seem very nice and easy-going. But it's almost as if I'm starting from scratch as a lawyer. Still, Martha is sure she made the right decision in hiring me. She wants me to learn to draft Trusts, which is a big part of her business, along with Estate work, and to develop a domestic relations practise. Down the road she's thinking of taking on another solicitor, who can do domestic relations, so all I need to do is kind of know what its all about in order to keep tabs on that once we get the other solicitor in place. There's another, as yet undefined area of practise that she wants to add - I, of course, have some very interesting ideas on that front. Martha essentially wants me to ease into and take over her firm, as she eases out of it, or at least reduces her daily involvement to just a few days per week. It's great because I would in fact inherit her practise and her clientelle. I'm "set up"! But...it will take a large amount of work and diligence to catch up and be competent at the level at which I need to be. I expect to hear from the NZ Law Society soon. Once I know what I must do to qualify as a solicitor and do it, then I can apply for residency, become a partner, and make much bigger money.

That's it, in a nut shell. Martha shares a lot of my own intuition as regards alternate realities and the like. So the chemistry seems good and I think it will all work out quite well. But I do have my work cut out for me. I do hope to start all over again here, but this time in the right way - no cell phone, no car (if I can help it), eating healthfully and exercising regularly. I'll tell you one thing - there is no high fructose corn syrup in anything here, at least that I've been able to detect from reading labels. And the water running in the river looks clean enough to drink. I hear people swim in it in the summer.

I believe the winter is about half over . The mornings are like cold Spring mornings back home. There are some misty days, not really heavy rains, with little if any humidity otherwise. It warms up into the upper 60s during the day. There are tropical-looking plants around, some date palms and some other palms with leaves that look like big ferns. Everything looks lush and green and seems ecologically sound. It's exciting to be back out into the great beyond again, and I'm enjoying myself immensely.

Keep in touch and let me know how things are going back in your neck of the woods.

LETTER TO GOD

Dear God,

“Formed in Your image and likeness” presents us with difficulties right off the bat that soar out of the ballpark of our imaginal capacities. And yet the premise informs us of an innate divinity, or at least the inherent capability thereof, and this is worth contemplating –

It is said that all of the god-like entities were stumped over Your creations here on Earth – more specifically, how your divine thought created Man (in the all-embracing sense of the word), this soul-on-ice packed into mobile units reaching all too well into the material world, in physical space – yet with a love, with feelings, the parameters of which only their free will would determine. We creatures have now fallen into time, making a laughing stock of You. And yet an eternal patience shines on Man; Your enlivening ray of goodness. We persist to exist in spite of ourselves, our errors, our almost complete ruination of the planet.

How was it that over millennia the occult high priests led us here? What has become of the abundant gardens that once comprised our Earth? We wail and gnash our teeth out of ignorance of who we really are and what has come before. In our dissociated state we formed states with boundaries and keep ourselves like farm animals, helplessly feeding at the trough provided to us – at a price – by the keepers of Your resources. Yet these are not Your resources, but theirs – deadened and voiding life. Still, we daily take up the yoke and harness, while each day could be awe-inspired if only we knew ourselves better.

The one great escape from our zoo-like stalls is that stewy mass of life called Nature. Here, the artificial information bubble cannot penetrate. Here we can walk among Your thoughts – a tree, a brook, the rays of light and many-voiced birds, a wistful wind, the enduring earth – but alas, to read the book of Nature is a lost art. Rather than read, we loll and bask in its life-giving energies, Your thoughts reading us, giving sustenance. Oh to re-create those gardens-of-life! Oh to co-create immortal selves to be born and reborn into our kins’ domains on this Paradise Earth, forsaking the graveyard of death desiring!

Your love comes into us from its Divine Source – You. There is no wrath, no fear, no darkness, no penance put upon us – only support, kindness, gentle understanding. You give freely only what a loving father and mother could give their offspring – eternal hope borne of abiding faith in us, Yourself, Ourselves, rooted as we are in this Your good Earth, beacon germinator of life throughout the planetary universe of You.

A MANIFESTO OF SELF

Here I am – the sum of my life experiences. From my earliest family memories of growing up in the late 50s and 60s, getting through school, hoboing, working at many seemingly unconnected jobs, traveling, going to law school, getting married, emigrating overseas to work for four or five years, settling back in America, working on a Ph.D., a dissertation, and now a drifting, independent iconoclast-scholar of sorts – here I am. Through it all, I felt a tiny voice within always murmuring to me, always making me question everything, always feeding my curiosity about the world. With my gaze outward, there was also an omni-present mirror of my self, turning me inward.

Who am I? This question has followed me everywhere it seems, haunting me. Genetically, I am the physical offspring of a long family line. But besides the inherited physical traits, what other familial secrets are encoded in my DNA, in my consciousness? I honor my ancestors but also wonder at the many facets of what goes into making up a human being. Just what does destiny have in store for me? To what extent am I master of my fate? Just who am I?

In my life’s quest to find out who I really am, I first look at those around me. I think back upon my mother and father, brothers and sisters, others. I am the sum total of the love I have received and the love that I have given, the hard knocks I have endured, the choices I have made or that were deftly forced upon me. Did I have a “happy childhood”? I suppose I did, or at least I can say that it wasn’t such an unhappy one. But did I learn who I am from my family? I learned to adjust to being a family member – to help and share.

Next I look around at my peers as a young student and think back on what behaviors they modeled. I consider my teachers and other elders and the lessons that they taught and the values they imparted to me. Resisting all the way, to some degree I have gradually learned to be mindful of others, to overcome depression, to even be cooperative and occasionally deferent, and at times I desperately sought a sense of belonging and a way of contributing to whatever community I ended up in – but alas, I met with limited success.

Perhaps the hardest time I have is wondering who I am in the context of my nation, America. In theory the state or government is set up to help structure the society, to impose law and order, to defend against enemies, and to generally provide for my health, safety and welfare. It seems to me that government is always dealing with issues of power and money. Moreover, as it has dealt in this area for such a long time, I think most if not all governments have been corrupted by the power and wealth they are set up to manage. Hence the old saying: Power corrupts; total power corrupts totally. I watched this with the military dictators in the U.S. client states in South America and Africa and in other spots around the globe, and I see this now with the present U.S. administration. And these days it is hard to see where government ends and big corporations begin. In fact, it appears that they have become one and the same, with the result that the people suffer tremendously. And so I have to say that I am suspicious of government. I am not a patriotic type or nationalist. How could I be if I feel castrated politically – impotent and alienated in what is now a sham political system?

I learned from my working experience that power resides in the boss. Whether the boss is my employer or some kind of government representative (political boss) there is rarely any genuine power at the individual level. However, I believe, as did the founders of America, that the People are sovereign; the people are the rulers of their government. And so the first real awakening I had was discovering that I am self-sovereign and that there is tremendous power if people can organize against tyranny. I think that many natural born American citizens are blind to who they really are, but I am not. Knowing who you are in the context of your American government is crucial to knowing who you really are – a person empowered with unalienable rights and power from the very Source of Creation.

In my view, the final step in apprehending who I am is to know who I really am as a human being endowed with an immortal soul. This is the greatest mystery of all. My life so far has taught me something about this greatest of mysteries. Just being in Nature, retaining some of the innocence of youth, always seeking beauty – these are the most important ways toward self-actualization. The exoteric lessons of religion, with morality and ethics taught in parables, is helpful I suppose. But if one can find the esoteric knowledge behind religion one is, I think, very fortunate. Self-styled “seekers” sometimes manage to find great spiritual truths. For me, the search for spirit, for truth, is within; it is in one’s breath; it is found in one’s compassion for others and for all non-human life as well; it is present in respect for the environment and for the dignity of life.

I believe that we come to know ourselves as true human beings by using our thoughts in a positive way, through our reason, but more importantly through our heart, our feelings, and our loving actions. Thus, my overriding life’s quest is one of continually perfecting myself in this respect. And I think that this yearning to perfect one’s spirit is itself the reward: for me this reward amounts to that which truly informs me about who I am.

I bring all of me into and out of myself – in my daily life, in my writings, in whatever I do. There is an art to living in such as way. My art is not just about painting pretty pictures, or critiquing entertainment or politics or ideology. It is not even solely about beauty. My art is being and becoming in the service of truth. Whose truth? – my truth as it has evolved over a lifetime and continues to evolve; it is my truth as a more-or-less middle class, American-born man whose life’s joys and struggles, reading and research have imparted a vision of reality that I call truth. Some elements of truth are unchanging, like love and mindfulness and hope. And yet when life is put into various contexts truth can seem ever changing, and this is what gives me an artistic temperament, working in the greatest medium of all – LIFE. From life itself I draw a never-ending source of material from which I can contribute to the overall general welfare of the planet; I can write, play music, cogitate as a creative loafer, and just pursue any and all activities that help me to uncover who I am in the the Universe.

In this universal sense, who am I? Am I a prophet, conveying images of some internalized sense of a certain future being born out of the present? Am I an avenger, out to destroy false images of the past that have crippled humanity’s self-image of itself and that even today promote great lies and distortions? Am I a victim, using my talents to express my rage and anger at how I and others have been manipulated for years? Am I a savior, holding my life’s work up as an ultimate panacea, an answer to a corrupt and debauched world? Or maybe, just maybe, by participating in and adding yet more “stuff” to the world I am nothing but another co-conspirator, marketing my images as a cog in a big wheel of action/reaction meant only to distract us from who we really are, and/or who we could actually become but for so much bickering about meaning, symbolism, abstraction, etc.

Could I be all of these? Some of these? None of these? More than these? Need I identify myself as being in any other role but con-artist, someone who co-creates at some relatively useless and worthless level and delights in so doing? What kind of an artist is that? But for making money from art, every artist is just an artist. The payment is the joy of co-creating and a self-satisfaction that comes from giving of oneself and one’s creations to others – but monetary worth of one’s art recasts the role of the artist as a part of an art industry – a participant in the world of networking, the right connections, financial types, putting on a show. In short, art as a commercial endeavor carries with it the risk of destroying me as an artist, causing me to assume roles in which I must play act in order to be successful. The irony is – all of this play acting is time spent away from creating art, being an artist – or is it? Inescapable is the fact that to be a successful artist who sells art I must also be a role player.

Thus I must confess that I am many things; I wear many hats, walk in many worlds – I am a con-artist. But the central core of me as a person is my focus on co-creation, joy, life, goodness, truth and beauty, in spite of whatever might distract me, slow me down, get between me and my creative expression. As a con-artist I must develop the ability to be more pragmatic about my vocation; I must expand the artistic definition of myself to encompass my many roles, always seeking to make all of my actions manifestations of the creative urge. When I talk, think, act away from my creative self I fail. I must train myself to do all things creatively, joyfully. Maybe in this way I can overcome the conspiratorial aspect that haunts most of us daily.

My overriding message as a poor dope struggling to know who I am is hope. Hope helps the world right itself and it is doing so right now; hope implies faith, faith that good shall prevail over forces of negative energy. This hope and faith I place in myself. I know, then, that I will be all right as long as I follow the whisper within and I am mindful of others. The world will not end; it cannot end if there is always another creation waiting to be born out of our own being and becoming…

THE ORDER OF THE 4Bs (O.4B.)

The Order
a loosely organized band of rogue, intello-spirito-interlopers (aided by accidentally-conjured-yet-invisible like-minded souls) who harvest dreams from a sea of noospheric possibility
    of the
Bewildered
hopelessly confused by something complicated and involved
Befuddled
stupefaction, as if by inebriants
Betwixt
in an intermediate state, not altogether one nor altogether the other
    and
Between
in or through an interval of space, time, or degree that separates yet connects or relates to…

We talk but say nothing. We huddle in thought, thinking nothing. The Order of the Bewildered, Befuddled, Betwixt and Between, forever voyaging, passes a broken cup of ideas and feelings – daring to authenticate ourselves.

Spirit, ensouled within and about the fibrous membranes of the corpuscular, glows behind the eyes in a hue of pulsating magenta. Meditato potato-heads, we just can’t seem to consciously, conscientiously quell life’s baffling confusions. And words gush, vent, spew and hurl themselves; thoughts fall through image after image; the passio-embrace, the collectivization, the will that won’t – we meet, it’s done. Paradox fooled. Again! Absurdity, humor routing fear, banishing (so we think) the demon pain of distance!

The original O.4B. came out of disorganizational meetings that began around mid-2000 on a mighty upright whale-of-an-Artship-thing that used to be waiting-her-silent-wait, barely moving, moored and tethered, parked and awaiting repairs at her Oakland, CA port. This leviathan, man-made Earth-goddess might have been better christened the Mate Me, Nurse Me. Oh dunderheads were we, those founding, core-four Fathers. Aboard and awake as if in a lucid dream, we would circle our wagons in the cabin and chase word illusions ‘round the decks. We cast out ghosts, during breaks walking the slippery cliff face decks in pow-wow meets, out and about those ancient mariner digs. Who knows? Maybe Jack London knocked his skiff alongside, ferrying aboard other great old souls, like Plato, Nietzsche, Lord Byron, to the night’s immovable feast. Out on the decks an archetypal feminine wind would enfold us in its magic presence. Back in those days, during irregular meetings of maybe two or three times a month, the O.4B. mythos would appear, would resurrect, only to dissolve back into night’s ruddied speckle.

O.4B.ers allow ideas to parade about, letting imagination’s interlocking pneuma propound in loving cadence. Standing back, observing where we really go – it might seem as if each of us is in dying Bladerunner replicant Roy’s head; as if beholding a pan-hedron luminescence of the magnificent, doomed but experientially aware. Turns in O.4B. conversation might steer us into ever more remote isles of the Beautiful. It was here we first harvested dreams in a sea of noospheric possibility. In a building moon crescendo, communal tongues would quicken the night. Minds absorbed in meaningful chat would herald a shared, somehow more transcendent B-ing of imaginal selves.

Since then and now, the O.4B. has dispersed, each of us a self-orbiting moon. And everywhere, from the cavern dankness of the superstructure originally beneath our feet, outward into Nature, or within whatever walled-in refuge we have found for ourselves, time floods back in as memories into the space occupied during such voyages as these.

THE ABNORMATIVE VIEW

Reading and discussing works by Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Morris Berman, and Erich Neumann help one to apprehend in much more detail the phenomena of consciousness. Their work is more than informative, and helped me to fill in some empty ground in my own knowing, allowing me to see more clearly the nature of the problems that our present-day, deficient consciousness poses for humanity at the brink of what scholars of indigenous prophecy call The Fifth World (1); and that a series of books recently translated into English, The Ringing Cedars,(2) offers as unconventional wisdom and hope for our shared future as planetary citizens. Herein I weave a brief, imagistic narrative of what I have learned from studying the evolution (and devolution) of consciousness.

Unconsciousness to consciousness to pathological consciousness – this has been our human trajectory so far as I understand it. The Earth has hosted us throughout, being progressively left behind, taken-for-granted, and degraded, as this evolutionary arrow of time has dragged us along, groping. All the while our blue shimmering planet with its swirling white clouds keeps on turning, hurtling through space. The sun and the moon, the planets and the stars shine and dance in a rhythm above us. Below our feet, little things crawl and wriggle. All around us, plant life breaks through the landscape and clutters our waterscapes; animal friends putter about on land, propel themselves through the seas, glide about in the wind. The congregating, many-voiced birds carry on with their songs up in the trees. And it’s hard to believe that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring has all but arrived – but it has, in many more ways than we know, or that we are willing to accept, even when fully and repeatedly informed.

Scientists and naturalists catalogue the disasters we have foisted upon our green Earth while we forget about our embeddedness in it. Available studies present the body counts of our species-cleansing, the demise of our natural ecology through technologies that run counter to Earth-based cosmological rhythms of life; the pathos of our heedlessness. This has been the cost of the heroic emergence of our ego-minds in this industrial nation-state (non)beingness we have created for ourselves in our present era. For those of us who live in the “developed” world (or aspire to live here), within the four walls of our separation from nature, among the structures we have erected as replacements – wherein we bask and loll, self-absorbed in solipsistic detachment, while being mostly ignorant or illiterate of the means by which we have arrived in this synthesized, artificial environment – our minds have been captured by a culture-trance of a rationalism that denudes the spheres of life it ignores. The physical – the air, the water, the earth – the biological: our very bodies have become disconnected from us. We are disembodied minds, somatically numbed.

We flush toilets, ride in our poison-producing cars along roads that choke off the free-ranging of other species, mindlessly consume electrical energy from a central grid fed by polluting fossil fuels or hydroelectric energy from dams that scar the waterways and displace or kill other creatures – and despite the techniques we have devised for the treatment of waste and water and keeping the air from enclosing us with poison vapors, we keep over-extending ourselves in the names of “progress,” “economic growth,” “democracy,” “techno-modernism,” “nationalism.” We keep producing non-Earth-friendly chemicals that we pour onto our land, feed to our animals, and ultimately to ourselves – chemicals that run off into streams and rivers, lakes and oceans, into aquifers that are drying out; chemicals that burn off into the air which all life forms breathe. In a scientism gone berserk, supported and encouraged by a military-industrial-athletic-entertainment-academia-corporate-controlled-media complex, we live in a demonic ignorant bliss, destroying life that has evolved and diversified – and the soil and sea that have nurtured it – over millions of years.

This ego, this pathological consciousness, IS the Great Satan. Surprise! Most of us humans ARE the Great Satan! We participate in the myths we perpetuate – myths of old, modern myths of science – myth to math, as the saying goes. And in our individual and collective arrogance, we find our identities by projecting our deformities-of-being onto others, disbelieving we are the cruel tyrants of this planet. We know not what we do. We revel in an ultra-materialist comfort while giving lip-service to high political, ethical, moral and religious values; we effectively lust after the very things that oppress us; we are not able to know ourselves, disconnected as we are from the essence, of Spirit, that is immanent in all; we are dispossessed of our full human potential that only shines through from time-to-time in saints and sages who have discovered the esoteric Truth (that should, hopefully, one day be closer to our normative condition – e.g., Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega point), even if they have brought us only part of the story within the parameters of the particular age within which they have lived and taught.

The secularist-descender backlash against the domination in the West by the exoteric-ascender Church – that began in earnest in the 16th century – has exceeded its mandate. It has also exceeded its scope in that it has sought to present itself as THE paradigm for our world’s future, the future as a homogeneous corporatist technocracy. Lest we flagellate ourselves into oblivion here, a few observations are in order.

The chronicle of the achievements of the human race – a race in time and space – is exhaustively listed in books the world over. Through written language and our self-reflective capabilities we have produced a wealth of literature and art, science, engineering and architectural feats, medical and legal and theological knowledge.

How we have accomplished this – at the cost of our living planet and the sacrifice of our deeper sense of self – is the issue.

In a hopeless impotence borne of an overwhelming sense of helplessness, a person might simply be driven to HOWL – howl in frustration under a moon hanging in the night sky! (Less bothered folks might pray or meditate.)

It is a tough philosophical nut-to-crack, trying to decide if humanity has been better off for civilization’s wonders – by such things as towering edifices and other alterations to the natural environment, or whether we might have been better off living in a deep ecology, non-“developed” state, e.g., similar to the native North Americans or down-under aboriginals or African villagers – who leave/left a richly natural culture heritage with few, if any, such monuments to themselves. As with the voicing of the female element embodied in the knowing of Carl Jung’s Great Mother archetype, the voices of indigenous peoples today who know and practice the old Way of life prefer this simpler way of being. But their voices are being drowned out by the status quo techno-modernism of patri-centric, plutocratic, hydra-headed corporate fascists in league with a government that includes both “sides” of one, conventional political spectrum.

Plainly we cannot turn back the clock, we cannot stop the arrow of time, we cannot return to some retro-romantic notion of a by-gone era – but we can begin to see the pathology of our own consciousness in these times. We can also use the environmental-friendly science and technology we have created and the great storehouses of knowledge we have generated, together with less hierarchical, more egalitarian modes of knowing, as a template for returning to a normative relationship with our Earth and the Universe; for creating a planet friendly to all species; for reviving the inherent notion of the sacredness within us and in the world around us. And it is the preservation of the planet’s natural ecology – a universal concern – that may be the guiding link for bringing together the Earth’s nation-states under new values of bioregionalism, evolutionary idealism, and developing strategies of global governance. The reclaiming of unprocessed, locally-grown real food for ourselves can help to guide us into a new millennial vision of balanced health within and more harmonious relations with one another. Proper nutrition and clean drinking water from local reservoirs – building strong bodies and minds – are a fundamental first step toward dispelling myths of scientism funded by corporate greed.

We are in an intelligible universe made so through narrative, through the stories we tell of our body/mind experience of it. There are some practical beginnings we can implement and undertake in order to realign our consciousness – from reading the accumulated literature to become more fully informed about the extent of our planetary ecological and consciousness tragedy, to planting our own gardens, being in nature more, and initiating home schooling programs at all levels wherein we can hear, in a more accessible way, this new-yet-age-old story of the universe, of consciousness, of Spirit. As Aurobindo puts it, “The time of religions is over.”(3) Major religions might instead heed the call of the Earth and speak out forcefully in an Earthfirst!-kind-of-way to help people to live within the reality of cosmogenesis (4) rather than to keep embracing an outmoded redemptive/salvation mentality that is antithetical to the body and to the Earth.

Aurobindo also proclaimed, “We have entered the age of universal spirituality, of spiritual existence in its initial purity.”(5) Such words echo in today’s world and may or may not redound in the collective consciousness. But not unlike that howl, still echoing in and among distant hills – slowly, the solitary way of more and more cultural creatives, viz., abnormatives, are gathering momentum. In fact, the abnormative view may already be giving shape, substance, and meaning to what is, in actuality, normative reality – the true nature, sacred inheritance, and full potential of our common humanity.

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NOTES
(1) See, e.g., Boylan, R. (1998) Transition form Fourth to Fifth World: "Thunder Beings" Return. Retreived Jan. 26, 2008 at http://www.wovoca.com/prophecy-rich-boylan-thunder-beings.htm; http://www.drboylan.com/; Jenkins, J.M. (1995) The How and Why of the Mayan End Date in 2012 A.D. (Mountain Astrologer, Dec-Jan '95). Retrieved Jan. 23, 2008 at http://www.levity.com/eschaton/Why2012.html
(2) Megre, V. (2005-2008) The Ringing CedarsSeries, Vols. 1-9. Retrieved January 23, 2008 at www.ringingcedars.com (NY: Ringing Cedars Press).
(3) McDermott, R., (1987) Introduction, p.34 to The Essential Aurobindo, quoting from Bull. I.C.E., p.6, Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press.
(4) A cosmological process/creation of the Universe – omnipresent, eternal, boundless and immutable.
(5) (McDermott, 1987: 34)