The Dead Man Lectures - On Becoming the Dragon

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Feel The Dragon's Breath. Heal.

 

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Everything is known. Everything's been written. Forgive my impudence in writing more, but some things need to be said over and over. 

[Caveat: this writing is for people in their 30's or older. Most younger folk still think this world can work out for them. They have not yet manipulated, seduced and tricked their way to success only to find their life still empty and the world a farce. So if you're happy and think life is grand (or someday will be), this is not for you. Don't be distracted. Continue to enjoy yourself. If and when you get miserable and feel the dragon's breath on you; that's time enough to read this.  
But be warned: any love or goodness you find in this world is not native. It will have been sewn and cultivated. Here, it is as 3rd century BC Confucian philosopher, Hsün Tzu, said: The nature of man is evil; his goodness is only acquired by training. (To be kind, we may say we are much mistaken, not evil, as human nature is). We try to be good in our way, on our own. But the ideas that spiritually untrained people hold onto are delusional, tendentious, self-defeating. We all like to call ourselves lovers, but then we denounce others as haters, and so we get lost, killed off, in our made-up petty-vicious world.]

Though lovers be lost, love shall not; and death shall have no dominion. (Dylan Thomas)

20^th Century Slim Slam - In the World of Illusion 1967

Be kind as you read this. It's my nature to say too much. When my son was twelve, he said asking me a question was like throwing a rock in space. I keep this in mind and try to restrain myself. Things were different with my dad. He said very little. He left volumes of ideas and experience stacked up in the dark behind his immigrant eyes. Even to himself, he made notes by folding up small blank pieces of paper and tucking them carefully into his wallet. 

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The first time I was locked up was in L.A. County jail 1967. My first cellmate was Vince Kennedy, a 26 year old black boxer from Boston doing two years for auto theft. He said park the car, pahk the cah. He was 6 foot 4 and weighed 260 pounds. He'd recently converted to Islam - instead of being called Vince or V-dog anymore, he wanted to be called Kwame. I was a 21 year old hippie from Chicago doing 5 to 20 for smuggling 3 ounces of hashish. I was told I'd be out in 20 months, as this was my first offense - but in fact, all sentences are life sentences. I was 5 foot 10, 160 pounds. 

Now, some may say this is an easy cliche’, that my report of a huge black man, who’s imprisoned ear to ear smile was always trying to escape through his face, looking hard into my eyes those first days, pounding me on my arm, and saying, C’mon, devil, let’s box, is a boring racial stereotype. But that’s what he did, and what he said.

I said back to him, Look, Vincent, my brother, all white people aren’t the devil, man - and my eyes, they’re not blue; they’re brown - doesn’t that mean something? (Of course, it didn't and doesn't - and on some level, we both knew it). Vincent just jabbed my arm again, hard, and said again, Let’s box, devil. I couldn't keep taking his hits. He was way too much to fight, but taking his hits made me look like food to the many circling sharks. I had to do something.

So in the deep dark of a hellish cell block night still shadowed by screaming neons, after the routine human screams had transformed into snores, and I could think at least a little, I struck. Like a big cat, I slipped down from my upper bunk onto Kennedy’s sleeping mass. I took hold of his soft steel wool hair with my left hand, and with my right pressed a single-edge razor blade against his throat, hard, but not breaking the dark brown skin above his great gurgling jugular. He woke up screaming, but he quickly controlled himself. I whispered sternly, over the sucking gravity of my own cavernous fear, If you keep f---ing with me, I’ll cut your throat, I promise.

His suddenly wide-awake eyes said we had a deal, so I climbed back to my bunk. After, he shouted at me for a couple days, but he didn’t beat me to death. Actually, we became friends. We got along so well, the guards made us trustees. We handed out pork chops, mashed potatoes and such. Nothing like a glob of mashed potatoes and gravy to ease an attitude. We sold extra pork chops for a quarter.

I still cried myself to sleep on occasion, hiding my face and muffling my sobs in a smelly government pillow - I thought too much about my ruined life and the pain I'd caused my parents. Being only 21, I was struck by the dimness of my present and my future. But Vince and I looked out for each other as best we could, idiots that we were, and that helped. Even today, I miss him. I don't actually miss him; but I do recall him fondly. In fact, I recall my whole prison time with some fondness, nasty as it was. I think life, in prison or out, is always as Dickens put it, The best of times and the worst of times. It is a matter of how we think, what we dwell on, who we choose as our teacher. But ultimately, one place is much like another, and wherever we go, there we are.

After the riot, they transferred me. I had to say adios to Vince/Kwame - and Fast Black, Dirty Jesus, Tall Tex, Frankie J, Rodriguez, Papa Two Bulls, Fierce Freddy, Clarence Low Down Brown, Jimmy Vasquez and his Hawaiians. So many prisons to see, so little time. I eventually did time in 13 prisons or lock-ups over a period of two years - for pot. I was inmate council chief in one joint. What a trip. A big friendly country boy from Texas, who'd served 30 years for a kidnapping he said he didn't do, told me I might have gotten even more spiritual growth out of my time in prison if I'd been in longer. Maybe so. 

[Decay is inherent in all material things. Only the truth is eternal; so seek your salvation with diligence. (Buddha, also known as Siddhārtha Gautama, Shakyamuni, or simply the Buddha, born in India between the 6th and 4th centuries BC)

There is a way that appears to be right but leads to (spiritual) death. (Proverbs 16:25).

So, pay attention! I'm sending you out like sheep among wolves. You must be as cunning as serpents and as innocent as doves. (Matthew 10:16).]

From No Where To Now Here

Today, fifty years after entering prison, I'm the cook and a sort of adjunct counselor at a locked mental health facility in Denver. Been here 9 years. I’m a sometime student of the mental health best practice, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and a long-time student of the Enneagram and A Course In Miracles. I’m respected, even loved, thank you very much, by most of my clients and co-workers. And I'm happy much of the time, not the totally ruined loser that once seemed my destiny.

Even after doing time for pot, I still don't know if drug use itself, or the 80 year war on drugs, is the greater burden on society. I know many people insist they know and are sure they're right about this giant mess. I say peace to them all. I just hope my story gives hope to those who've fallen low in life, as I did, and helps them recover well, as I think I have. (I thank my many teachers for this recovery). But I must say, being happy in this world may be an oxymoron. We're all too pressed here, impressed, depressed,  repressed, suppressed, etc. And as Freud said, we don't get over our stresses well, because - face it - we don't really want to. Fear, fear of change, fear of losing our cherished identity, leads us to resist the changes necessary for healing. From this resistance comes pain.

Anyway, I have a great wife, a loving son, two goofy dogs - a black lab, Bailie, and a border collie - blue healer mix, Biloxi, both females. From my living room, I have a million dollar view of the front range of the Rockies. I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy from University of Wisconsin - Madison. I know this ranks me low in the army of philosophers. I'm very small - tiny - a sergeant of philosophy not a general or a doctor. Oh well. (I sometimes call my family Mr. and Mrs. Small and our son, Tiny. I mean this in a good way, like in the movie Seven Years in Tibet where minimizing personal glory and pomp is seen as a virtue not a failing. A tiny ego can be a blessing.)

Nemaste

To keep my mind right as I write - and minimize my hating - I think from time to time, Nemaste (nay-mahs-tay), which in Nepal means, The part of me that is God acknowledges and salutes the part of you that is God - and this includes everyone. There is a divine part in each of us, a quiet peaceful spiritual part, and when we act from this part, we're nice and kind and that’s great. (For the moment, take the word of Thomas Aquinas that God is the First Cause of Being - that there must be some kind of cause greater than us up there or back there). But aside from the part of us that is God, another part is an angry fool. I’ve bunked with this fool forever. I’m now an expert on angry fools.

Some ancient wisdom about angry fools is in Proverbs 22:24 - Make no friendship with an angry man; and with a furious man thou shalt not go. And Proverbs 29:22 - An angry man stirreth up strife, and a furious man aboundeth in transgression. This applies, of course, to women as well. Women can get angry and stupidly condemning just like men. When women or men insult me, yell at me, call me names, etc., I still react too much. I need to remember more quickly that these attacks are not about me - unless I make them about me by reacting even a tiny bit. I must remember to remember, as quickly as I can, that anger is always projected guilt. It is the self-loathing of the attacker.

There is a claim made by some that if you're not angry, you don't understand the problem. But anger is a form of violence. If you're holding onto, validating, anger then you're part of the problem. Instead of validating or being guided by anger, we must ask our wise inner teacher - many times a day - Is what I'm feeling, saying, thinking or doing helping me or hindering my progress? Enlightenment is not about changing the world - it's about changing our mind about the world.
 
Of course, we can’t just stop having emotional reactions. They’re part of being human. And it’s not healthy to deny feelings however false they are. But we can and must deny their validity, their truth value, and take responsibility for them. We must see our emotional feelings as the ego-reinforcing phantoms they are. Unfortunately, we tend to validate and justify our emotional feelings. We indulge them way too much, and see them as, sort of, well, SACRED - uh oh. 
  

Working Man 

My father was a working man, a real working man. His hands were often cut and dirty. I love that about him. I think people who never work with their hands miss important lessons, and so lack soul, character, intelligence, integrity, courage, etc. Ooops; my bias is showing. But really, nowadays, the people who work with their hands are widely seen as children of a lesser god, not smart enough to escape physical labor. But I think physical labor helps us to be sane - at least, sane enough to be able to tell what's helping us and what's setting us back. Chopping wood and hauling water make life manageable. A life of leisure does not. Physical labor is a necessary step toward the light.

My dad was smart, but had no formal education. Like most real workers who sweat and get dirty to feed their families, he had no time to read the books that expose the schemes of our casual cannibal politicians. He worked with his dad from dark in the morning until dark at night building a knife sharpening business from scratch by hard, careful, relentless honest work. He bought a house for his family; paid cash. But he was politically adrift, and found no time for God. (God didn't mind.)

He drank too much; it killed him. He hit my mother at times. She may have unwittingly abetted this. And I think he cheated on his taxes. Well, nobody’s perfect. But I never heard him make excuses or speak ill of anyone. On his death bed, he spoke his last words to my brother, Peter, and me. Peter had asked him softly if it (life) had gone by fast. My dad, pale as onionskin, eyes full of fear, said very soulfully, Phew - as though life had indeed gone by very fast, as if in an instant, as though time itself did not exist. And maybe it doesn't.

[No maybe about it. Time does not exist. It only seems to. As recently deceased Dr. Kenneth Wapnick, the amazingly loving and prolific master writer and speaker on the thought system, A Course In Miracles, said: We think we sinned in what seems like the past; we feel guilty in what seems like the present, and we fear punishment, which looks like a scary future. Really, there's no past, present or future, just this moment, now. Hard to grasp - but the illusion of Rome is now. The illusion of ancient Greece, the Soviet Union, etc., all right now. And contrary to what Sigmund Freud found when he turned over the rock of human consciousness to look at our unconscious, we're all still innocent. Our sins, our selfish hateful behaviors, exist in the illusory world of time and space, and in our petty fearful hearts, but not in the timeless One Mind. In the Reality of God, Oneness, or Total Love, we're all innocent - forever. That's Heaven; it's where the wise ones live and call home.]

Anyway, here I give my late in life words, as a heads up, mano a mano, puppet to puppet, human bean to human bean, to those I leave behind. Like me, it's a work in progress. I make changes as I find errors. I’ve changed the words a zillion times. I mean this to be helpful - to help me heal my thinking, help readers see the process, and help my son to know his father’s mind and be happy. Although, in this guilt and hormone driven fantasy we call life, most of us struggle even to imagine happiness. I hope this helps some to actually find it. Being a late bloomer myself, I urge even older readers to be optimistic that they, too, can find a manageable life, a path of peace, through this storm of feelings. 

If you turn a baby chick upside down and look for clues to its gender, you'll see nothing telling. Farm kids have long been taught to identify a chick's sex by looking at its underside and guessing. Then the teacher, someone who knows, tells them if they're right or not. Most students eventually learn to get it right every time - but they can never say in words exactly what they see that helps them get it right. Much of our learning comes this way - from teachers who know. 
As a teacher, I favor the cultivation of internal controls in (big and small) people - that is, insightful personal decision-making. I've always met opposition to this from government, which tends to push external controls; that is, rules and punishment. External controls allow authorities to distance themselves from the people they control.
  

To Speak Or Not to Speak - Huang Po and St. Francis

About 100 years ago, when my wife, Christine, and I were still floundering hippies, we agreed to talk out our troubles every night before going to sleep - to clear the air, clean the slate, make life more manageable. We rarely did it, but we thought this way. We felt we could ease our troubles by talking about them. I now think it may be more practical to accept that putting words to troubles only makes them bigger - like scratching mosquito bites - and eases nothing. No one wants to hear our bad news about them, or be told they're wrong about, well, anything. They just create instant defenses and counter-criticisms, maybe even get mean. So, maybe it’s best to stay quiet, not scratch or even try to explain, just fah-ged-a-bah-dit as they say in Brooklyn. 

St. Francis said we should always preach the Bible and, if necessary, use words. Huang Po said that as soon as the mouth is openned, evils spring forth. My spiritual guru says, When we go to analyze the actions of others, to compose critical comments or complaints, ego goes with us. Hmmm. And if we're even the tiniest bit irritated or upset, then we’re hating not loving, and can’t trust ourselves to be kind or objective. Damn! Most of my best critical comments come when I’m angry; and I’m angry a lot. Actually, I think the main thing we do in life is express anger - by guilt-tripping others, putting them down, making them wrong, and kicking them out of our hearts - all with stunning cunning draped in innocence and deny-ability.  

Hardly a minute goes by without anger leading us into condemning others, overtly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously. But we never condemn people for the reason we think. In this, we delude ourselves. We condemn others because we feel worthless. We always treat others the way we feel about ourselves. We can't do otherwise. People are constructs of our thinking. We are constructs of our thinking. We make everyone up, including ourselves, simply by determining what data to include in our thinking. And we include ONLY what we're WILLING to include. Case closed.

The hidden fear that we're worthless originates in the deep ancient dark, where we insanely imagine we hurt God by leaving Him and becoming separate. God is our highest concept of our origin, and He can't exist, we imagine in our subconscious, unless He is All in All, all-encompassing, Totality. If we're separate, He can no longer be God. This is the nutty secret we keep even from ourselves. Many people deny this problem even exists. They say, You're nuts. I don't hate myself; I don't feel guilty. But a few well-aimed questions from a good psychiatrist, and they're suddenly weeping like babies - no disrespect intended. 

This crazy idea that we killed God drives us to (try to) displace the consequent (unbearable) guilt and pain - to get rid of it, out there, anywhere. Inevitably we turn to tricking people into attacking us, so we can justify attacking them back. In condemning and guilt-tripping them and attacking them back, we shift (in our mind) our imaginary guilt onto them. We thus dump the punishment on them that we secretly believe we deserve. So any criticism we make that's tainted by even the slightest irritation or emotional charge, is really, technically, displaced aggression, a kind of mental mistake. 

Recovering Hater - We can always see peace instead of conflict.

Anyway, writing this kind of human awareness stuff may be a waste of time. We see and hear what we want to see and hear. We don't / won't see the light until the pain in life drives us to our knees and makes us see and think differently. We then take responsibility for our emotions instead of just caving in to them, being victims or slaves to them. We stop using them as excuses for being mean. But maybe we can't do a thing about all this by explaining it.

Nevertheless, I'm giving it a try. Also, I want to show that I’m wiser now, that I'm a legitimate elder and a good person. I want people to know what I think now, not just the stupid stuff I used to think, and to see that I learned a thing or two in life. Ironically, the main thing I learned is that you teach love by walking it, not by talking it or writing about it. Checkmate. Shut up.    

Everything I write, I write as a recovering hater, especially a recovering hater of haters, which cunning error took me a long time to grasp. We can feel so right and justified when we despise others for despising others. It slips through our logic filters and we let ourselves hate like it’s a virtue, as though being angry and unkind to people who are angry and unkind is fair and makes sense. For years, I loved to hate the folks who (unconstitutionally - see the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution) criminalize pot heads, threaten to shoot them, as in, Get down on the floor or I’ll blow your f-ing head off, put us in jail, savage our lives. I now see drug war supporters - as best I can - as mistaken, not evil - as versions of my own overbearing self; that is, as confused frightened goofballs just like me.

I also hated (as in, did not like; there's no middle ground; we love or we hate) the folks who say Christians hate non-Christians. They insist Jesus condemned non-Christians when He said His way is the only way. But Jesus wasn’t pitching any church or religion. He condemned no one. He was saying the only way to God, to love, to real peace, is to let go of anger and vengeance and love everyone, especially our seeming enemies. We can't make any exceptions in this, even for Nazis, serial killers, white men, gays, landlords, feminists, Christians, liberals, gay-haters, conservatives, socialists, or people who make bad laws that ruin lives. 

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Humorous aside: I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” - Dorothy Parker

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Hello Mogadishu 

So, I think of this as a little book about love and liberty. It's about a journey of no distance to a place I never left; indeed, a place we never left. Call this place Reality, Heaven, The Mind of God, or even The Place We All Came From. Despite hearing from that desperately enthusiastic atheist and Darwin champion, Richard Dawkins - peace be upon him - that super creatures from outer space may have planted us here, and that that's where we came from, maybe - I don't buy it. Even if I did, where did these super creatures come from, space dust? But who'd argue in earnest about how life began when no one really knows? 

Actually, anyone might. We humans love to be right and speak smartly about almost anything, even when we have no idea what we're talking about. E.g., most people today think very confidently, even smugly, that there's no evidence at all against Darwin's very interesting theory on the evolution of species, but they're wrong. There's a boat load of it; look it up. I don't know if Darwin's theory is wrong, but I know it has problems and might be wrong.

I’m almost 70 at this writing and consider myself a very late bloomer. My glory days as an altar boy in the choir at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Chicago are far in the past. I find glory nowadays in hardware stores and book stores, hot showers and super markets - and in my garage door, which opens when I push a button in my car. I can drive inside when it's raining or snowing. I lived most of my life without such a door. Now, I have one. It’s great! The trick is to enjoy such things without becoming too dependent.  

I keep my mom’s old house in Wisconsin for its garden space and safe distance from fierce cities. My retirement plan combines gardening and panhandling, though I may not be able to stand 45 below again or even afford to heat the place. I’m considering economy retirement plans in places where dollars buy more, like Bulgaria, Panama, Yemen, Somalia. Maybe I'll open a coffee house cum orphanage on the beach by Mogadishu. 

There are a few people and commitments I want to stay here for, but I'd like to be gone before any more big tests. I don’t mean gone physically, though that’s part of the equation. I mean spiritually, as in not seeing this world as so important anymore. Still, I may be here 20 or 30 more years. Whoa; and me on the brink of being poor! Correction: I used to think I was at the center of the economic world - half the people having more than me, half less. Then I saw that, despite unbelievably vast wealth in the hands of the tippy top elite, and some wealth for 300 million at the upper end, another 300 million Chinese folks at the bottom live nearly in the mud on $2 a day, their kids destined to the same.

I don't criticize China with any anger at all for this - I know life everywhere is hard (though evidence says China's military earns much or most of its money by selling organs ripped from executed Falun Gong prisoners). In China, it seems another people's war claiming to be about justice has failed to work out as advertised. They rarely do. War is about control, not justice. They rage constantly in this delusional world. The grandiosity in them reminds me of a great poem,  

Ozymandias. 

I met a traveler from an antique land  
Who said: 
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
Stand in the desert. 
Near them, on the sand,  
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,  
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,  
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read  
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,  
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; 
And on the pedestal these words appear:  
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:  
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”  
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay  
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare  
The lone and level sands stretch far away. 
(Percy Shelley 1792-1822)

Anyway, after noticing the situation of the poor in China, I now think I'm on the brink of being rich not poor - for all the good money does. And what good does money really do? I think we're way too into money and not enough into our non-material soul.

Finding Love on This Island of Death 

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away... (William Wordsworth 1770-1850)

We're boiling in materialism, shouting about god or justice, while careening toward yet another cataclysm. We seem to crave cataclysms. Even the smart rich powerful and famous are nuts. Why? Why do we give our hearts away? Why do we choose noisy passion instead of quiet compassion? Why don't we hear the call of conscience? Why do we thunder like idiots in pursuit of foolishness?  

Why so hungry for money? Of course, there's lots of stuff to buy with money, some we can eat, or drive, or hang on our walls. And money can build companies, make jobs, open hospitals, etc. But we get so mean about money; it seems to bewilder us and ruin lives. That no-capital-letters poet, e.e. cummings, wrote, how monstrous and how feeble seems some un-world which would rather have its too than eat its cake. I feel that. 

I think it's easy to get bewildered about how to deal honorably with money and stuff in this world. I think all humans, rich, poor, whatever, get money sick - probably the whole human race forever. I call this bewilderment prosperity disease. Arapata McKay, a Maori friend of mine (Maoris are the hearty aboriginal fellows from New Zealand) who taught me to dance the Haka - while beating one's chest and sort of line-dancing, you shout vigorously with your mates, Ka Ma-te! Ka Ma-te! Ka Ora! Ka Ora! Tenei te ta ngata puhuru huru. Nana nei i tiki mai, etc. Well, Arapata said his ancestors also experienced this prosperity disease, this money-sickness.

He said things went great for his people when they were rowing across the ocean, guessing at directions and distances, risking their lives every moment. They pulled in harmony and loved each other. Then they’d find an island, get comfy with regular food, shelter and safety, and they'd start falling out over status and stuff that hadn't mattered when they were at sea and hard put. It turns out paradise islands, worldly prosperity, are Islands of Death. We get hung up seeking to manipulate and control people, and this kills our spirit, corrupts us. Big government enterprises, like Rome, Great Britain, Spain, France, Ottoman Empire, etc., all failed, mired in haggling over stuff and standing. 

Arapata said his people would eventually pull up stakes and go back to the towering seas just to heal their corrupted spirits. My teacher calls this drifting away from good behavior mind-wandering. He says we indulge in it way too much, and this makes it very hard to find love here on our affluent Island of Death, our materially full but spiritually empty world. There's always war on our island of death - hot, cold, fought with bombs, guns, words, feelings. We want it to be so, or it wouldn't be so. But it's very hard to understand - and then to remember - why we want it to be so.  

Rene Descartes - My Main Man

I never expected to live this long. I’m pretty much ready to go, actually, almost yearning to go. I’ve felt for some time that I came to this planet by mistake. There's no real peace  here or love, and rarely even good common sense, or so it often seems.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a very smart man, full of good common sense, and called by many the father of modern philosophy, wrote:

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for everyone thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken: the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing Truth from Error, which is properly what is called Good Sense or Reason, is by nature equal in all men; and that the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of Reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellencies, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.

Descartes is famous for saying, I think; therefore I am. He also said, The study of philosophy affords the means of discoursing with an appearance of truth on all matters, and commands the admiration of the more simple. I think he meant that great minds are as vulnerable to ego trips as simple minds. I think many great minds, Wittgenstein, Russell, Chomsky, and countless others - God bless them all - led us, by their good intentions and mind-boggling linguistic acrobatics, to this Saul Alinsky land of anti-social socialism, where a God they hate but we need is dead, the straight road is widely forsaken, and vast conspiracies are all the rage.  

The Tragedy of the Commons

Marx’s concept of social justice captivated many minds great and simple. Brother Marx's shining dream was to make all property communal - and so force people to be more fair - as though his motives were pure and he knew what was fair. But as a matter of history and human nature, property held in common tends to go uncared for. Communalism tends to make poverty not wealth. As Milton Friedman said, The free choice by free men about how to spend their own money is key to creating the wealth we need to help the needy. We deprive the poor when we drag down the rich. Very tricky. 

The fact is, we don't try hard to find ways to preserve and protect property unless it's ours. No one does. But owners do protect their own property. Ego-tripping dirties their process, of course, but ultimately, it's best for all if everyone has their brain in the game and tries to take care of themselves and their stuff. Seemingly, private ownership does this. But brother Marx insisted private property is theft (the origin of this idea was anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, but history attributes it to Marx). 

On one level, since we're all really one single spiritual being, brothers and sisters in Christ, so to speak, separating ourselves by the artifice of ownership can be seen as a kind of failure. But Lenin and the boys didn't exhort us to share more, or urge us to persuade others to share more. He told us to kill the enemies of the people who refuse to share more, and erase their history and customs. How over-the-top biblical is that? Good-bye civil society. Hello insane cultural revolution.

In projecting his harsh judgment that his fellow Jews weren't serving God correctly, Marx declared war on human nature, on our felt need to own stuff. Lenin turned this judgment into a crypto-religion (that claims it's not a religion, that it's against religion). Lenin said, Peace is the absence of resistance to socialism. He said, The objective of socialism is communism. That’s PC diversity for you - very succinct, like Klansmen saying peace is the absence of blacks, jihadis saying it's the absence of kufars (non-Muslims,) or Nazis saying it’s the absence of Jews, etc. Ego peace is always about ridding the world of hated others, which is always a projection of self-hatred. 

On killing the capitalism he hated, Marx said, There's only one way to kill capitalism - by taxes, taxes, and more taxes. Hardly any liberals have heard this, and those who have will likely say it’s a lie. They don’t see that condemnatory judging destroys souls which, of course, they don’t believe we have anyway. Oh what tangled webs we weave... . 

So, the socialist way to dominate, (their religious compulsion), is to monopolize state power and use force and fraud on the people to make them change human nature and give up owning things. We should all own everything. What a mess that's made. (Fidel Castro, the icon of socialist revolution, said recently that it's not gone as he'd hoped, because the people who gained power in the revolution 50 years ago have held onto it and failed to pass it along. I credit his courage in admitting this.)

But this mess is not just about Marx or Lenin or socialism. Totalitarianism is about us all. As Vanessa Redgrave, that most excellent actress and socialist, commenting on Germany and the holocaust, once said, This is not bad news about the Germans; it's bad news about us all. Few listened carefully. To my mind, she was saying, indirectly, that the socialist crypto-religion of total government authority and communal ownership of all property is not bad news about socialists, it's bad news about us all. See Augustine on libido dominandi; i.e., the lust for power.

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Comic Relief: at an IBM plant one day, a manager put a sign by the sink in a bathroom that said, Think. The next day, he noticed someone had put another sign by the soap dish that said, Thoap.

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Metaphysical Monkey

Many years ago, a wise witty, wealthy West Coast lawyer asked me what I was in life. Still some hippie in me, I told him I was a metaphysician. He said there is no such thing. He was mistaken. I’m an amateur; no one pays me for thinking about metaphysics; so I can’t say I’m a professional. I’m not a genius at it, and I'm only part time. But thinking about metaphysics is a constant theme in my life. It’s part of my life script, you may say - one of the things I do a lot.  

Metaphysics is that branch of philosophy concerned with being and beings, time and space, existence, causality and abstract ideas. I sometimes look at myself pondering the very difficult concepts in metaphysics, and I think of a monkey playing with a slide rule. But there you are. In my human experience, I’m still a metaphysician, a metaphysical monkey. I may be at the very start of the beginning stage of the first journey, but I'm traveling as fast as I can from no where to now here. 


In Reality, there are no metaphysicians (with pants with pockets with wallets with driver’s licenses in them). There’s only energy. In Reality, we're a single spiritual being dreaming that we're billions of separate beings struggling for survival in a dangerous world of time and space. In Reality, we're resting in the arms of our loving Creator, only dreaming that we're in this world and slaves to fearful feelings. 

In the dream, metaphysics overlaps with spirituality, which is a first cousin to religion. A folkloric anecdote: Q. What’s the difference between people into religion and people into spirituality? A. People into religion want to avoid going to Hell. People into spirituality have already been there. 

Actually, my mission here is metaphysical - to encourage readers to accept that despite all the gruesome-ness of this world - which gruesomeness most folks surely see - we still can (and must) learn to joyfully participate in this world. Spiritual people say when the student is ready for this learning, a teacher appears. And even such as I - or you - can be a useful teacher.  

It's also said - hard as it is for beleaguered cynical minds to accept - we get exactly what we want in this life or we get something better. How excellent is that?! My teacher says the only thing of value we can teach is being calm and gentle - NOT enraged or despondent. To show peace is possible.

But first, we must see and understood that every human is by nature a desperate mosquito fighting a breeze, looking for blood; a mindless cancer cell floating in abyss, greedy to multiply and consume the world's air, frightened carnivores gorging on slower brothers and sisters - so we can BE! Pretty ugly. But there it is. Still, there is a way out. There is light.

Our ugly first self is a kind of myth. We can thank God, Lenin, or whoever we like, that this first individual self is fake - that we make up this demonic self. We're Really sitting peacefully in the lap of God, LOVE all the way down. (There's a story of a Buddhist teacher who tells his students that the world is being carried along on the back of a turtle. One unconvinced student asked the teacher what's under the turtle. The teacher responded respectfully, It's turtle all the way down.

What Can One Say?

Huang Po, 9th century Buddhist scholar, said, As soon as the mouth is opened, evils spring forth. (I think) he was not referring to the harmful micro-organisms we routinely spray about. He just didn't think much of what humans say. And I agree. There is little good we can count on in the words of men. We argue, overtly or covertly, aloud or in silence, over every single thing, in a blather meant to seduce, trick or manipulate others - make them wrong and us right - not nice. Actually, it's insane. I'm considering a vow of silence. Saint Francis said, Preach The Gospel At All Times; If Necessary, Use Words.

Huang Po taught that all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing else even exists. There is nothing but the One Mind. Our individual person does not really exist. Our treasured (secretly hated) self is like the shadow of a passing car on a sunny day. We see the shadow clearly, but what exactly is it? Some people call the One Mind, God. Some call it Love. Some call it baloney, but I think that's too cynical. (Freud was too cynical. He was an atheistic - whatever that means - Western scientist who thought humans were irretrievably nuts. His genius was in exposing the unconscious, hidden agendas in the human thought process. He studied dreams to find these weird agendas, but sleeping dreams aren't necessary. All life is but a waking dream. 

So, analyze that. Analyze your waking dream of a life - as though every item in it was chosen by you. But do it gently, with Jesus or Buddha at your side - or Marx or whichever teacher you like, but not just you all by yourself. In spiritual recovery, it is said that we must confront our inner dragon by our selves, but we don't have to do it alone. Actually, we can't do it alone - our ego won't let us.

The giant metaphysical truth (few understand) that needs to be said aloud over and over, so we remember it, is that life is a dream being dreamed by a single dreamer, in which all the dream characters are dreaming also. I learned this reading Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) - a great white dead Dutch philosopher (who'd read Huang Po). This idea is mind-boggling, and almost impossible to accept, as it reverses all our instincts and beliefs.

When a character learns something he'd previously not known, this is distinguished by Aristotle as anagnorisis or discovery. Peripeteia is his word for a complete reversal of belief or perspective. Aristotle said anagnorisis, leading to peripeteia, was the mark of superior tragedy - or sometimes even comedy. 

So it is, I once believed this world was real. Now, I think the opposite. I think now it's all illusion, a movie coming from our inner projector. I think now there's nothing real in this world, nothing true, only what we choose to think is real or true. As Shakespeare said in Hamlet: There's nothing right or wrong, but thinking makes it so. At the same time, we must live in this world as though bodies are real and feelings true - and we all believe that some things are right and some wrong. Tricky, maybe even impossible to manage without a good spiritual guide. 

What Can One Say That Is True? 

A current best practice in mental health, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, says we must get the true facts when we address mental illness. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), a great white dead German philosopher, said we should begin all statements of fact with the words I think. He meant that on our own, without guidance from a power higher than our ego, we only think, estimate, guess; ultimately, make stuff up. We don't know any absolutely true facts. We certainly don't know The Truth. We only know our perceptions, our interpretations of infinitely variable appearances. These appearances come to us like phone calls that we screen; and we only accept those calls we want to hear. Still, we have to think our way to the truest facts we can find.

I think this thinking we have to do can be a very tricky business. (An airline company put a billboard up in Chicago years ago - for what purpose, I don't know. At the top, it said, Humans use 10% of their brain. Lower down, it said, That's way too much!). (But this is no diatribe against thinking. The brain's a great tool for identifying pests in the garden or calculating the volume of a cylinder; but it has no wisdom. It's ego-driven and morally stupid.)

But for the purpose of communicating in this world, I think some true things need to be said over and over about who we are, and how we can escape the misery we make and cling to. To this end, Buddha said, Only the truth is eternal. Truth is important. Yet all statements about the world that we present as true facts, are somewhat speculative. We can assert anything we like, argue for any bright idea or lunacy we want, and do it as nicely or meanly as we wish. All law school student learn this. But we can never know for sure if we’re right or not. Still, if a disturbed person - we’re all disturbed - can come to see that there are many ways to interpret our situations, that we don't have to be slaves to our feelings, they/we may be more able to find a lighthearted view of our life and possibilities - and even a kind view of our neighbors as well. We may even learn to listen, spiritually, and see that we’re not hopeless victims or worthless losers. We're really all equal in every way that matters, all of us much mistaken, indeed, stubborn, stupid and insane, but also fortunate, worthy and well loved.


We must acknowledge all our thinking, positive and negative, but if we want to know the real truth, not just personal ideas about what might be true, we must ask our wise inner teacher, not our ego, not our brain. We must say, sincerely, I want to know the truth just because it is the truth. Then truth will be given to us. 

The human brain understands nothing. To understand, we must get our head out of our brain and see the two entirely different irreconcilable levels of being: Level One - content; i.e., spiritual truth or Reality. The Mind. We really exist only there. We're always there. We never left there. We can't leave there - but we go there in our awareness only rarely. Our awareness is mostly of Level Two - form, the actual world of time and space. It's not Real, but our brain and emotions tell us, sort of force us, to think and feel like it's real. Level Two is where we hang out most of the time, where we think our life is. But Level One is where we Really live. It's tough stuff to understand.

Anyway, we must keep an eye on both levels, and not confuse or conflate them. This is close to impossible as our human experience is so loaded up with drama, pain, ripping-great arguments about right and wrong, fear, and personal and political emergencies. Still we must stay aware of both levels. We must understand that life here is a dream - like the dreams we have at night - not real, though they seem real. To get free of this dream, this vast illusion, and find peace, we must remember we're in a dream we can't fully understand, and ask our inner teacher, not our dreaming self, for guidance in handling, well, everything in the world of form. We must become lucid dreamers. We must ask our inner teacher, What is the enlightened next step for me to take in my circumstances? This works.

It's an error to see this world as Real. Buses are real, in a way, and we shouldn't let them hit us. They can kill us in the world of time and space. Angry people are like buses, in a way, and we shouldn't let them hit us any more than their big metal brothers. This vast illusion we call the world is created in our Mind, by an US up there that's dreaming us down here. The intelligent design in our world comes from that Us dreaming us. Us is the being people widely call God, and consider the Creator of the universe. But the real God, the Real Creator, is, I think, upstream of the dreamer who's dreaming us. Our brain can't imagine the Real Creator. 

Our brain can't function outside time and space. We can know by faith that God Is, that the Creator is greater than we; but we can't know how to rightly speak of Him/Her/It, or how to describe Him, Her, It, whatever. We can just insist that God does not exist, of course; but that's no more insightful than insisting that He does exist. It's just words.

Big Main Point

In all the tendentious history we humans are fed in our corrupt fallen world, we must select some that seems factual and correct just so we have a foundation for operating in this world. A piece of my foundation is St. Augustine of Hippo. In 387 AD, he described the evil in men perfectly when he said we all come into this world corrupted by libido dominandi, an insatiable lust for power over others.

In Augustine's magisterial work The City of God, he contrasts the City of God with the City of Man. To Augustine, the (Catholic) Church is the City of God on pilgrimage through this age of men to the Eternal City, that divine commonwealth ruled by God and governed by the law of love. Augustine writes of the City of God:

For if we inquire whence it is, God created it; or whence its wisdom, God illumined it; or whence its blessedness, God is its bliss. It has its form by subsisting in Him; its enlightenment by contemplating Him; its joy by abiding in Him. It is; it sees; it loves. In God's eternity is its life; in God's truth is its light; in God's goodness is its joy.

By contrast, the City of Man is the secular order. It's the earthly city ruled by humans for their own gain using their own rules. Above all, says Augustine, it is itself ruled by the lust of rule. The lust of rule is a translation of the Latin libido dominandi. As Richard Neuhaus puts it, libido dominandi is the lust for power, advantage, and glory. It shouts, My way or no way! This lust for domination does not just characterize politics in the City of Man, it characterizes each of us. The libido dominandi is the dragon in each of us that plots and strives to have our way and make others do as we say. It's the controlling passion of our fallen nature and, thus, of our fallen world.

John Milton (1608-1674), wrote of this syndrome in Paradise Lost, saying humans would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. Much later, Rosie (Kathryn Hepburn) put it to Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) in "The African Queen,"Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above. 

But we must understand that the central focus of human animus is people arguing about God - some saying there is one, some saying there isn't - some describing Him in detail - everyone speaking smartly like they know. Of course, the world's definition of God is in total chaos, which is useful to the arguers as it hides the fact that their argument is really about which gang of arguers will be accepted as the most right or holy and so gain power over the daily lives of everyone everywhere. The arguers are trying to displace a hidden fear by insisting they're right and in this way dominating others.

Some ancients simply said, Say 'God is' then cease to speak. They thought all intelligent people knew they'd not themselves created the universe, were not themselves the God, the First Cause of being, but that some other (higher?) power had. They assumed this higher power was not some one or thing we could talk about intelligently, as He - It - was not from here, so to speak. He - It - She lived/lives way upstream of our Earthly, time-and-space-dependent intelligence. Take your pick. Believe what you will. 

Truth to Power - Listen Up

There's a way that appears to be right but leads to death. (Proverbs 16:25). (This is about the death of our soul, not our body, and how appearances are deceiving.) 

So, Pay attention! I'm sending you out like sheep among wolves. You must be as cunning as serpents and as innocent as doves. (Matthew 10:16). 
 
Long ago and far away, I went out to fight the dragon. Actually, I sort of drifted into the fight. Ever since seeing my dear old drunk dad strangling my screaming mom on the floor outside my bedroom when I was a kid, I'd lived in a kind of fog. I rarely barely understood at all what I was doing ever.

In the fight out there, I became the dragon. I'd been warned about this by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), another great white dead German philosopher. He said to fight the dragon is to become the dragon. He meant the dragon is not out there, a thing separate from us, but is an expression of animus from within ourselves, so to speak, although strictly speaking, there is no within ourselves.

[Another way to frame this lesson: one evening an old Ojibwe man told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside all people. He said, My son, the battle is between two 'wolves' inside us all. One is evil. It's anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, guilt, self-pity, lies, resentment, inferiority, false pride, superiority, and ego.  The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, serenity, humility, kindness, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith."  
The grandson thought about it for a minute, then asked the grandfather, Which wolf wins?
The old Ojibwe man simply replied, The one you feed. 
The grandfather is obviously not suggesting that there's actually a wolf inside us, (or a dragon); he's teaching that our fate depends on our mental choices. We're all loving brothers and sisters. But we all mistakenly savage each other from time to time, insisting we're right or that we're justified in our anger and that the fault is always someone else's.]

Anyway, instead of heeding Nietsche's warning about fighting dragons, I let myself be smitten by the idea that I was right about who the good guys and bad guys (dragons) were and that trashing bad guys was a smart and righteous thing to do. We love to trash seeming bad guys while insisting we're innocently defending ourselves, fighting dragons. We love to put people down, guilt-trip, ridicule, and demonize them, kick them out of our hearts and lives. We love to hate while insisting the other guy's the hater. I know better now. I get that trashing people is a form of self-hatred. It's not fighting dragons at all. 

But I joined the war. I went out to fight the dragon, battle the enemies of the people. In fact, I was running from a troubled home to join the circus of the world. I was trying to escape my unhappy life and culture by going to a new world where I'd be free of the old rules. It was pure hallucination. It was the 60’s. 

Gradually I morphed from politically nowhere Chicago Catholic college guy, dreaming of sexual adventures that rarely materialized, to fledgling America-hater. Instead of attending Annapolis, as my congressman wanted, or becoming a priest, as my mother wanted, I became a drifter and faux (fake) revolutionary - a hippie - no disrespect intended. I became a useful idiot, as Lenin called academics and idealists who supported communism, as part of their knee-jerk rejection of God, ma, pa, brothers, sisters, kids, traditional society, etc. 

As a useful idiot, I learned to casually betray myself, my country, friends and family by being a false witness, by painting America as an incomparably evil society and enemy of the civilized world. I was not well informed in this new role, but played it as part of a new group think, as useful idiots generally did and do. During my conversion, or transformation, I traveled in Europe, hitch-hiked across Africa, did acid in Chicago and California, had a few of the sexual adventures I'd always yearned for, even had glimpses of God. With the draft closing in 1967, I joined the Marines to see if I had any warrior in me - but I twisted my back in basic and was quickly (honorably) discharged. 

I attended the spectacularly misnamed Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury in knee-high moccasins and shoulder length hair. A better name would have been the summer of self-indulgence. I bumbled there in delusion with my confused generation. In my mind, I'd become a kind of socialist Buddhist. But we hippies were, I think, impudence cubed; at least, I was. Maybe the others were smarter. I (we?) put superficial sentimentality in place of true empathy, noisy passion in place of quiet compassion, and, totally missing the distinction between love and lust, we put sexual gratification in place of God. It was Sex all, God nothing. We made disrespect a virtue, turning the two finger “V” sign of peace into the middle finger “f--- you” sign. We were lost stinkers cavorting as heroes. 

[I do not mean to say sex is/was bad or wrong, only that it can be very addictive, overpowering, distracting. Does any intelligent person think otherwise? We got a bum steer from Margaret Meade - peace be upon her - in her shiny report on the Trobriander Islanders. She saw them and their casual sex as healthy and working well. It looked like the proof we'd been waiting for that all the Christian sexual restraints were neurotic and unnecessary. We'd been waiting forever for this word. A lot of us wanted to see sex as no more than a hand shake. We wanted to be out there shaking hands - a lot. But sex is much more impactful than that. The findings of Meade on sex, along with Darwin's idea on evolution, were body blows to the Christianity that made capitalist society somewhat humane. Throw in the false ecology leads of Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, and we have the grand trifecta of anti-American propaganda.]

Anyway, I came to think way back then, dimly and knee-jerkly like my pals, that all the wrong in the world was done by greedy American Christian white guys. Whoa. Where'd this hate trip come from? An Ivy League law school? Maybe it was devised by those chess lovers at the KGB. I never thought about it at the time - my hippie pals and I simply decided to bathe the bad white guys in love - like we knew about love - to heal them and make them mend their evil ways. Soon redirected by professional leftists, however, and by our own egos, we chose instead to permanently despise these bad white guys - uh oh - to sabotage their sick society in every way we could, to urinate on all they held dear, and vilify them forever by our vast conspiracy of relentless deceit and personal intimidation.
 
Wrecking the evil Christian male-dominated power structure became our plan, an agenda we saw only dimly. We didn't see that we might be trying to replace a seriously flawed but open,  productive and, yes, somewhat kind and spiritually evolved America with a mean new Sodom and Gomorrah. We were on auto-pilot; at least, I was. Actually, I was a political ignoramus and didn't really DO much of anything. It was just my shallow ideas, my self-absorption and knee-jerk judgments about who were good people and who were not, that slid me into the abyss. 

Meanwhile, professional leftists not on auto pilot, but very clear about the power they sought, made propaganda feature films showing America as evil and white men as greedy and stupid - all to foster social justice and level the playing field they said. Right. Movies then and now mostly pit good lefty guys against bad righty guys. Silly hateful stuff - destructive the way the world measures things. We got ourselves Balkanized into anti-American special interest groups that claimed they wanted social justice, but really, largely unwittingly, wanted vengeance.

Despite widespread naivete and sincerity in us useful idiots who claimed the opposite, the social justice movement was not about justice. It was about political elitism - just-us - that savage core of human character. Only the left was meant to survive. And after the right was destroyed, the leftists who seemed more to the right than far left; well, it would be their turn under the axe. It never ends.

I worked for a time in University of Wisconsin - Madison’s Philosophy Department. I met a woman there who attended leftist feminist meetings where she was told she must be promiscuous to be equal, because men were allowed to be promiscuous. Sounded nuts to me, but what did I know? Actually, I taught sex education to developmentally disabled adults for years. I taught them to minimize the risk of getting heart-broken, robbed, sick, beaten, pregnant, impregnating others, stigmatized, ridiculed or exploited, financially or otherwise. At that time, I was as atheistic and dismissive of Christian values as any good socialist, but I never saw any advantage in teaching promiscuity. Later, I would see how increasing promiscuity, as with increasing any social deviation, would put more burden on the traditional culture, help kill the evil West, and make social lebensraum (space) for the happy new socialist world of love, peace and equality. How deluded could we get?
 
Traditional white men became a North Star pointing at their bigotry and away from ours. In hating them, we purged our own ugliness and were born again, super potent and innocent as babes compared to that white scum from Hell. The contempt we saw in bad white Christian men compelled and concealed our own. Hating them was a fix of innocence. What a high! And a neat political trick - like Mao getting peasants to kill landlords, Hitler getting Germans to kill Jews, Klan leaders getting whites to kill blacks, or Muslim imams today who continue a tradition of killing non-Muslims (or Muslims who don't serve God correctly in the imam's unchallenged opinion). It’s a very old trick, convincing the gullible to do vile deeds, even convincing people to be promiscuous. Vile deeds are hard to repudiate, and they tie the doer to the party who got them to do it.
 
It’s hard to kill a Jew in a Berlin alley, hack off an infidel's head, or kill little girls by bombing their church, and then see it as wrong. We get hooked into the correctness of our behavior, however nuts it is. Killing Christians, gays, communists, Sudanese animists, etc., is all the same. Do one ideological murder, and you’re all in. Even a small semi-murder, like messing up a kid’s life (or several million kids' lives), jailing them for pot - is hard to take back and see as wrong.

Arresting a MILLION kids a year for pot, feeding them to sex abusers (homosexuals? - is this a valid category? Don't we all have this gear to use if we choose?) in prisons - joking about how the weak become unwilling wives. I spare you the details of the countless brutal prison rapes - not rapes of me personally; I was lucky. By temperament, I throw down on bullies, even when my brain is telling me to run. But I see our culture's routine brutalizing of the young and conniving with prison rapists as beyond horrific - and as a sign of deep denial and self-hatred. Of course, we all make ugly mistakes in life that we hate to admit to. We so love to be right, and hate, hate, hate to be wrong. 

We cling to this self-righteousness in the drug war. Some may have good intentions, but good intentions only cloud the view. They even cloud the view of the secondary gains for the victims of the drug war, like me. We get a permanent (false) claim to victim-hood, a pass on achieving anything in life, a kind of fake innocence, that puts us all in. I think we all play the same victim game in this world, in countless cunning variations, mostly subconsciously, all drawn to that unholy place of fake victory where we claim our seemingly lost innocence by saying, Behold me, brother, at your hands I die. Oh boy.


Actually, my hippie pals and I were lost sheep in the south end of a lifeboat tossing grenades at imagined enemy sheep in the north end. Really, we were all perfect, eternal, formless, changeless spiritual beings having a human experience - dreaming we were at war in a world of time and space.
Eventually, I came to see our world of time and space as a kind of mirror. The world a mirror! Duh! Wow! We’re puppets looking in a mirror! Holy Cow! But we weren’t careful puppets. 

Despite the warning from Nietzsche to be careful when we go out to fight the dragon - a warning we never understood - we were not careful enough. We became the dragon we'd gone out to fight. I hooked up with sexy French Communists, passionately told people to throw their bodies into the gears of the evil capitalist machine, to break it and save the world. I felt I was right in there with Mao and Che bringing peace and freedom to THE PEOPLE by destroying their worthless past and re-organizing their present. What an ignorant putz I was - no disrespect intended.

We're not supposed to notice, I think, that in a hundred plus years of lying and killing, totalitarianism, no matter what you call it, Marxism, progressivism, statism, leftism, fascism, socialism, humanism, secular fundamentalism, etc. - no disrespect intended) has not delivered on its grandiose promise to deliver social justice to the masses by forcing economic parity. I used to buy that story - I now see Marx's attack on property as a kind of unwitting suicide. 

The total-authority folks have, however, built the grandest bureaucracy and most effective propaganda machine ever, which I call Oz to highlight the kinship between that self-inflated king, Ozymandias, and the vast Borg of inner party bosses and outer party idiots - no disrespect intended.  

Family of Origin

I may have lionized my dad too much and/or minimized my mom. Pop was a heroically steady worker, to be sure, but to keep going, he medicated himself with alcohol. Mom didn't drink at all. She prayed. Father Barnabus from the Catholic church in ma's village used to cross the street regularly to come to her house for coffee and praise. She doted on him, and attended his mass every week. When I was in prison, the good father took time to speak ill of me for my being locked up for drugs. Mom ordered him out of the house, and never went into his church again until her funeral. She was one of millions pushed into misery by our silly drug war.

One of my early memories of mom and pop is from 1953. Americans flooded the theaters to see that year’s best picture, "From Here to Eternity"; Stalin died; Aldous Huxley tried mescaline; the IRS was formed; color TVs first went on sale; Jonas Salk made polio vaccine; Kinsey reported on sex in America; Queen Elizabeth II was crowned; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as spies; Russia got a hydrogen bomb; Mau Mau rebels killed whites and Kikuyus in Kenya; the Korean War ended - and I peeked out my bedroom door one evening to see my dear drunken dad strangling my screaming mom on the hallway floor of our bungalow on Chicago's south side. I can still see mom‘s eyes seeing me seeing her, seeing them, in their shame and pain.
 
Fifty years passed before my sister told me she thought pop’s drinking had pushed mom into having sex with his helper from work. Wow! Some helper. Poor mom; betrayed by sexual desire. And poor pop. How lost must you be to think strangling your wife might help. To me, looking back, pop was a kind and lovable worker bee who built a blue collar business by effort times lots and lots of hours. I once heard him talking with Mary Ross at her husband’s funeral in elegant Our Lady of Peace Catholic church. Mary was a friend of mom’s who knew there was trouble in our house. She said to pop in total sincerity, “Pete, how are things with you and Alma?” As pop pressed some dollars into her hand, to ease that part of her loss, he said in a sad voice, “I don’t know what to do. I give her plenty of money to run the house. She knows I’m at work or at the tavern. What else can I do?”
 
After the strangle scene, the wood trim that edged around my bedroom ceiling became at times wriggling snakes I’d watch frozen in bed. I’d dream of giant bumble bees stinging squirrels and chipmunks to death. I love my parents today, but it took years of intentional re-framing to build a habit of seeing them as equal to all other parents, and dispel the idea that their angry outbursts meant they were extra nuts and, by extension, me, too. I've replaced the memory of the strangling scene with one of pop throwing me up in the air, then catching me, singing, Mickoly Mockoly, prince of Scokoly. That was nice.

Now, I think all parents are full of guilt - some know it, most deny it - though all are guilt-free in the spiritual world. In this world, we're all imperfect in ways we can’t precisely measure. So, we’re all, effectively, morally equal - or, at least, we're morally indistinguishable. Some of us may feed our kids better or hit them less, and we can usefully speak to such details, but we can’t prove this or that parent is more or less imperfect than any other. The data is far too complex or unavailable. We'd just be woofing. This logic mandates compassion for all.
 
Mom told me long after the strangling thing that pop was a fine, hard working man, but a bad drunk because his mother had crushed his self-esteem by running him down all his life. Maybe his mom had been crushed in her time and just passed it on. (The physics in metaphysics says we can’t really crush another's self-esteem). Mom seemed to forgive pop. But she complained that her mom, Mabel, had short-changed her, crushed her self-esteem, by sending her older sisters to college but her to beauty school. Mom worked hard to make sure her kids were properly educated - partly, I think, to validate her grudge against her mother. On and on goes our puppet demolition derby.
 
Most of the time, Ma took the role of fearless bleeding heart do-gooder or of raging harridan. She was very religious, having converted to Catholicism to marry pop. She left her mother's brand of Protestant Christianity behind and married a slightly off-white Italian immigrant. Both choices made her mother furious - and pop and granny never got along. Pop even worried out loud that she'd out live him - and it was close.
 
Ma was what we call today a drama queen - she intimidated us all by giving us cues that she might explode any moment, maybe drive the family car off a bridge. I think she may have crushed pop's self-esteem by running him down too much. Many of us use an ego-crushing strategy to cope with the despair in our life, not only the people in my family. But mom did suffer a lot in her life, even surviving an old fashioned snake-pit madhouse when she was a young mother of four. How horrible that must have been. But she survived it and grew strong. I lived with her in her last years, and saw her mellow a lot with age as she let go of her awful rage.
 
I don’t know if my siblings saw the strangle scene that night. Maybe I once knew and forgot. I lived in a fog thereafter. I don't blame this fog on my early experiences, but on my choices and my nature. On some level, out of my normal awareness, I'd chosen to be a person who didn't see himself clearly. At 40, I decided to try to see clearly. I began Adult Children of Alcoholics (12-step) meetings with Chris. We went to work on spiritual recovery. My fog began to lift. As it is for everyone, my spiritual recovery would be a life-long process.
 
Maybe my siblings lived in fog, too. We never talked about such stuff as adults, and I recall no talk with them from my young years. When I look back, I see my sister as a first born child absorbed in that struggle, and my older brother as a first son absorbed in that. They seemed to be staunch allies to each other. My folks raged on and finally divorced. My little brother, James, and I were left sort of separately alone. We joined the masses zigzagging through life with no confidence or self-esteem - and with no spiritual practice to buoy us up.

Before James died last year (from Viet Nam agent orange-accelerated cancer - he'd been a door gunner there), he asked if there was anything I was holding against him. He knew we would not be seeing each other much more. He wanted to clear the air and make amends where he could. I told him truthfully that there was nothing. I now feel I should ask this question of everyone I know. But that might bother people; so, I’ll ask them in my mind for a start. My little brother's question was a good one, though. It made me look at myself, at the puppet I'd become in this world of illusion. 

Prison

My prison sentence was 5 to 20 years for smuggling hashish - but insiders understand that all sentences are life sentences. My 5 to 20 years amounted to at least 20 months, but could have lasted up to 240 months. I don't think the police wanted such a big sentence for a young first offender, me, but they were angry because I wouldn't go to Morocco and be an agent for them. 

For the record, I still assert that I was legally correct in my view that it was my right to use pot. Laws against adults using pot are not constitutional. The arresting officers and their accomplices were the law-breakers. Our constitution guarantees us equal protection, which means that if my dad could use alcohol, then I could use pot - especially in view of the fact that pot would harm me less than alcohol. When I was young hippie, I wanted to keep pot cheap so organized crime would not bother selling it. I was naive; progressive world-fixers - Democratic and Republican - wanted pot illegal for their own reasons.

Did anyone really think that making a million young people into criminals each year would help solve our drug problem. This wrong-headed use of the law just encouraged gang activity, all manner of government corruption, an explosion in petty crime (to get money to buy drugs which were expensive because they were illegal), etc. Any mature person knows well how we can make things worse by poorly-thought-out attempts to fix them, especially when the fixing requires using force or fraud and violates the law.

I do not think I'm morally superior by virtue of the above argument. I just think my thinking conforms to the facts better than any alternative argument. I have no feeling regarding my argument. I'm just trying to get the facts straight - a purely practical matter related to achieving mental health.
I may be wrong, but I think progressive democrats started the drug war, but over the years, used legal chicanery to hang the issue around the neck of conservatives, (who claim to love the constitution). Now, like a rotting albatross, the drug war continues to expose Republican willingness to ignore the constitution when it pleases them to do so. Gosh! Are progressive Republicans as disrespectful of the constitution as progressive Democrats?

Ultimately, I imagine it would have been better for America if the drug war budget had been put towards efforts that actually work to keep kids off drugs instead of wasting 80 years turning neighbors into criminals, making brutal drug lords rich, expanding the police force exponentially (and turning them against the people - a socialist dream forever; look it up), and making scientists and doctors into government stooges by forcing them to back the drug war with bad science. Oh well, best laid plans...

After serving 20 months, the shortest period legally possible, I paroled. I still remember my visit to the parole board 50 years ago. In my crisp ironed prison denims, I was led into a conference room with a large table around which a dozen or more officials sat. It was surprisingly dark. I could barely see faces. A voice said, You're an educated person with a superior I.Q. Could you give us your ideas on how we could run this prison better. I was too tense to speak directly to such a question. I feared it was sarcasm or a trap. So I said in monotone, my eyes aimed at the table edge, I don't think I'm  qualified to answer that question. A few months after my parole, an appellate court overturned my conviction; i.e., they vacated the judgment against me. I was still an ex-con, sort of, but no longer guilty of anything, sort of. 

In the FCI (Federal Correctional Institution) in Sandstone, Minnesota, I worked in the carpentry shop, burned garbage by my shack outside the walls, and taught English to cons seeking parole. Getting a GED was supposed to help their chances. I gave a fiery speech on Nat Turner to the Afro-American Organization [in which I was a provisional (hippie) member]. I had cotton mouth all through it and wanted to run out of the room, but the mostly black audience said I looked calm, and they loved the speech. That was cool. 

In a dozen jails and prisons from California to Minnesota, I'd done many things, even been the chief of an inmate council for a time. I was generally a friend to most everyone, mafia, rednecks, the brothers, Native Americans, junkies. I’m not sure why most people liked me. It could have been because my friends put the word out that anyone who hurt me would themselves be hurt - but I like to think it was because I had a knack for giving everyone genuine respect.

Even with the court judgment against me cancelled, my life was still ruined, technically - it had all been a fine adventure, but there seemed to be no respectable place left for me. My life was sort of over. And I'm very aware that I was not the only one who suffered such degradation - millions of us of every color and background were killed off this way. Who profited from this, one might ask? 

Looking back, I’m still surprised that I was put in prison at 22 for pot; transporting it, smoking it, whatever. Actually, the relentless lovers of justice at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, seemingly in a fever to stamp out drug abuse, lied a bit, and upped a simple possession charge to smuggling. It got me 5 to 20 years for my first offense. The agents were/are my spiritual brothers, to be sure; but I have to work to stay aware and clear on this, to keep it in mind, and not see them as enemies or bad people. I think most of us, most of the time, must work to stay aware of our spiritual connection to everyone out there - especially to those who seem to abuse us.

That government could do such a hard thing to a mild young person for a relatively small matter is revealing. It shows me that somebody somewhere must have been very unhappy (was it really about pot?) to push things so far. The drug war reminds me of a study in the 1950’s on teacher complaints. It turns out the biggest complaint was kids sticking gum under desks. Boy, did that fade.

As society has dumbed down during our 100 year culture war, we've become, I think, increasingly uncivil, and students are increasingly more violent and destructive. Complaints about pot may fade as well, like the gum complaints, and rhetoric about drugs may eventually be replaced by legal practices that actually work to steer kids away from drugs. I keep repeating this idea because some folks still like to take credit for trying to protect kids from drugs when they really put their effort into fighting the drug war forever, no matter how long, expensive or unproductive that war may be. It's like watching Ahab destroy himself and his crew over and over. Who gained from the drug war?

Another thing I see now, that I didn’t see then, is how threatened my Judeo-Christian capitalist society was by international communism (socialism). My commie brothers and sisters, seemingly in a fever to fix the world, planned long and worked hard to fix it by killing traditional Western ways of being and praying, and replace them with progressive ways of being and praying. Not very nice - too judgmental, totalitarian, and humorless. Three strikes. Beware of people who want to fix the world. They talk of peace and freedom, but drive us into the ditch of poverty, insanity and murder - and into endless drug wars. 

Today

So, today, I live with my wife and her 90 year old mom in an old ranch house across the driveway from my work. We have a picture window on the front range of the Rockies and, of course, our dogs, Bailie and Biloxi. The dogs make our lives work; they're so unconditionally loving.

I cook for 12 to 15 clients. I serve 3 meals and fruit snacks in between. (Mayo clinic says the best way to get full value from fruit is to eat it by itself on an empty stomach; so, that’s how I do it). I help keep the milieu (the day, or common, room) therapeutic by being as kind as I can to all present. It’s basic healing to not frighten folks more than they already are - clients or staff. On rare occasions, I must run across the room to help tackle an acting-out client who might hurt themselves or others. I hate that part.

I’ve dealt with clients here face to face maybe 20,000 times. Each time is a tiny bit stressful, like the  rads in a tooth xray. But each contact, which I like to call Nemaste moments, is also a kind of prayer. Thinking Nemaste to clients many times has made me rich, spiritually, and seems to have helped some clients. At least, some have sent notes from the dark where they’re stuck, maybe scribbled on napkins, saying things like, You’re wonderful! Thank you for taking care of us when we weren’t able to take care of ourselves. I save the notes - tuck them carefully into my desk drawer.

I run an open kitchen, which means 30 to 40 staff use it pretty much when they want. It makes me nuts. Most staff are careful, but some are kids in a candy store, and even refuse to wash their hands. In the commercial world, there are no open kitchens. No chef could take it - things always missing, damaged, dirty, improperly sealed, etc. I serve, order supplies, make menus, wash pots, everything. I get some stuff from a food bank, which means jiggling this almost-free food into the menu. It was on its way to a dumpster; so saving it, serving it, and not making anyone ill makes me proud. 

Getting grins or words of approval from clients who, for a moment, aren't as sad as before, also makes me proud. From time to time, someone suggests I train clients to get jobs in food service. But few jobs are more stressful than in kitchens. If you want to make a stable person unstable, get them work in a restaurant. I’m relieved when the health department blocks using clients this way. Still, my kitchen is barely manageable. It's a constant classroom in choosing peace, a classroom I must need.

I've worked with needy kids and adults off and on since 1963 - starting as night attendant (the owner told clients I was a doctor) at Mother of Holy Providence Shelter Home, or something like that. Later, for 5 years, I was a co-program director with Chris - we started-up and ran a program for the Chicago Assn. for Retarded Citizens. We taught independent living skills to developmentally disabled adults. Later still, we were substitute parents at Cunningham Childrens Home in Bloomington, Illinois, living with 9 teenage boys. We worked there for 2 years straight with a total of 2 weeks off. 

For another 2 years, while I was at UW-Madison, I supervised teens for the Dane County Juvenile Court. I did other similar jobs, but I used to be one of the many who couldn’t work with needy people forever. It took a kind of energy we'd run out of. We needed to get away, do something else. For me, the something else included driving a truck, selling rubber stamps, working in the family cutlery business, etc. I finally got to where the work made me stronger not weaker - but I think I’m in my last job in human service. I'm getting old. Can't trust my legs or even my arm strength. Oh well.
 
The human service field doesn’t seem to have changed much. We still pack ‘em in and struggle with paperwork and getting paid by the state. I’ve always felt the human service industry? is a bit corrupt? because we don’t keep remotely adequate follow-up records. Clients may return healed, unhealed, or simply disappear. We have no way to know the effects of our work.

Christine is the mainstay in a sister program up the road. We work hard and patients like us. One boss said I’m a great cook and his best clinician. I think he meant I’m less parental and better at engaging clients than most. My mom showed me how to use the food we had to make a decent meal, and how to be a kind volunteer social worker as she was in her day. I’m okay with all that, especially as the mental health field is in a mess.
 
Actually, calling Chris a mainstay is way too small. She’s a force of nature, she is, a little gray-haired Aries gal whose grandparents were all Polish. She ran her own Montessori school in Wisconsin for 20 years, never missing a day. For 6 years here in Denver, she ran a drop-in day program work that often hosts 40 to 100 mentally ill folks at a time. She knows almost all of them, is trusted by them; she beautifies the space where they meet, cleans up their spills and vomit, makes tea for them, picks up their litter when no one else does. 

She motivates these sad sick people to get up each day and leave their dark houses to come be together. She once put a notoriously smelly woman in the shower, gently, and showed her how to wash - stunningly heroic, largely unsung work. She carefully selects board games that break the ice, build intellectual, emotional and social skills, and routinely facilitate communication breakthroughs with isolated mentally ill folks. She teaches art, puts client art in free frames (that she buys at garage sales with her own money), and which is enormously uplifting to the clients. The list is endless.
 
But the mental health field is in a mess, no doubt. We have neither the time, money, or know-how to do the work we’re tasked to do. There’s no guiding consensus on what mental illness is, or how to cure it. Everyone has their own take. Don Miguel Ruiz, of The Four Agreements, says we're all sick with a disease called fear. When fear gets too great, the reasoning mind begins to fail, and we call it mental illness. Psychotic behavior results when the mind is so frightened and our wounds so painful, we break contact with the outside world. Ruiz says the cure is to forgive everyone, including ourselves, not because anyone deserves forgiveness, but because that’s the only way to heal. 

Of course, we must learn to see the difference between genuine forgiveness and forgiveness to destroy. When we truly forgive, we acknowledge that our peace is in God and is not touched by the actions of others. We could all heal rapidly if it weren't for our resistance. We’re all stuck being sick - in our own special and amazingly ingenious ways - and afraid to change or forgive.
 
Personally, I think mental illness is sometimes chemical, but is most often a result of poor or absent spiritual practice. I agree with Ruiz and other spiritual teachers who see the healing practice of universal forgiveness as the main work in life; i.e., getting over our guilt and fear, and rising above our reactive nature. I think we’re all really spiritual beings and need some kind of spiritual context to help us in our forgiving. We may find a spiritual context anywhere - in religion, climbing mountains, looking within - or not. If we find it, we may lose it in the rush of daily life; anyway, I did, and do. 

But clearly, worldly comfort and security is not enough, especially as pop culture defines these as sex, money and power over others. Whether we get lots of these or little, spiritual peace lies in our needing them less, not more. But genuine spirituality is not politically correct. Politically correct folks see the material world only. They may include a psychological component, but ultimately this is also physical. 

Political Correctness encourages us to addict ourselves to the opiates of physical and psychological devices (money and drugs) to ease our pain - it says religion is a bad opiate. I say religion is deeply flawed as a healing device - but it's a step in the right direction. As my mentor said about AA, it won't get you home, but it can get you out of a hole. Religion can be a start on spiritual practice. I think that without spiritual practice - for self-restraint and universal forgiveness - the material world of pleasure and pain and relief-seeking leads us inevitably into sad angry unmanageable lives.  

But, of course, there's no consensus on spirituality either, some of which looks pretty silly. Currently, the mental health field is sunk in a totally secular (anti-spiritual) bureaucracy. We don’t give spiritual aid to clients, patients (some call them consumers). We dare not speak of religion or spiritual matters. This makes staff, God bless us every one, look as lost as the patients. On the other hand, it may be that personal kindness is all the spiritual aid we can or should provide. Indeed, my teacher says the only lesson we can teach is standing in peace without fear or rancor, thus showing it’s possible.
 
My little plan is to meet the eyes of each client, one spiritual being to another, and invite them, as cordially as I can, to choose a meal. Actually, it’s not my plan; it’s one of the few places in life where I feel guided by a higher power and not my own self - not ego directed. If the client likes the meeting or the meal, I think a tiny ray of hope lights up in their dark. That’s it. It matters not which type of religionist, atheist, feminist, capitalist, socialist, whatever, the patient or I are trying to be, behind all our contrived identities, we tell the same lies, suffer the same pain. We all compare ourselves to others, thinking we know who’s who and what’s what. I remember this poem from high school:
 
Richard Corey
 
WHENEVER Richard Cory went down town,  
We people on the pavement looked at him:  
He was a gentleman from sole to crown, 
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,  
And he was always human when he talked;  
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,  
”Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,  
And admirably schooled in every grace:  
In fine, we thought that he was everything  
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,  
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;  
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,  
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
(Edwin Arlington Robinson 1869-1935)
 
I have also advocated vigorously (but without success) for what Hippocrates called man’s greatest healer, which he said is walking. Most patients spend their days sitting, lounging, actually decaying before our eyes. And we need service dogs! everywhere, and meaningful work every day! 

Beatings Will Continue

If you think mental health programs fix people’s lives, you’d be mostly wrong. We’ve built a vast archipelago of soft gulags in which people who seem less mentally ill; i.e., staff, are hired to forever manage the lives of people who seem more ill; i.e., patients. There are pluses in this, as in any system, but it’s soul-less tyrannical bureaucracy, not what people want for troubled loved ones. Most want hope for their eventual mental wellness or, failing that, dignity for them as they go their way.
 
But therapy is now a clerical business, a marketing operation that lacks accountability - because we don’t know how to heal the mentally ill. Not really. So we sell the hope that doctors, nurses and therapists can control our patients' symptoms through quick chat and surprisingly dangerous drugs that can have surprisingly uneven effects. Effects can be wonderful, but usually aren’t. Ever more controlling bureaucrats push doctors and nurses to work so fast they barely get to know patient names much less what makes them tick. If you want to be correct, you'd have to say that we’re conducting medical experiments on the masses.
 
There are many skilled big-hearted staff in the field, but they must work around the many busy but unproductive ones - no disrespect intended. It’s the culture; lots of powerless poorly-trained staff paid to shuffle lots of papers - and people’s lives - while being pressed by lots of authorities, and with no spiritual context. Regardless of intentions, old-fashioned management, still typical in this field, is inevitably disrespectful, it’s so top-down and ad hoc. An infamous, dark but illuminating desk sign reads: Beatings will continue until morale improves. Perfect.
 
Indeed, I work in a place where a steady stream of mostly unhappy workers leave, never to be heard from again. It’s like the old Soviet Union where photos disappeared from news archives. Some of my fellow staff feel they’re being treated like idiots by mean insensitive managers. I sometimes think that management’s (unconscious?) strategy is to push out long-time workers who know about and could expose management incompetence. More personally, I feel I’ve been micro-managed by people who can’t do what I do, dominated by bean counters and paper shufflers - no disrespect intended - who don’t even know what I do.

I could be wrong. But there are 600 things I track that no management person outside of food service could even guess at. E.g., bananas. They’re a main item in my menu. I can get them cheaper at Sam’s - as one condescending CFO pushed me to do - but Sam’s bananas are huge and green. They ripen but don’t yellow. Most people won’t pick up a huge green banana. As we’re not trying to reduce our banana consumption, but actually want clients to eat them, it works better to buy perfect small ripe yellow bananas, even if they cost more per pound. It ends up more efficient and, so, cheaper. I think I’ve done a great job for years, but upper management has only acknowledged this once. Poor me.

Donkeys

Before I forget, I mention here Claudio Naranjo’s Enneagram Structures which details an ancient (non-normative) system of 9 personality types (that correlate roughly with todays' DSM, Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, in conventional psychology. 

The DSM is normative, in that it lists symptoms of mental illness in a context where people are seen as well or as mentally ill. It begs the question about who and what we really are. It may be more correct to see us all as puppets, in a sense, all of us challenged by our personality type, some perhaps struggling much more than others, but not simply as sick or well. Our current system assigns sickness labels that encourage invidious comparing, and a kind of casual personal condemnation. 

According to the enneagram, we each have a chief feature, a way of paying attention that others tend to see before we do. My son, Adam, is a 5, an observer, he isolates in his own ways in order to maintain a (safe) distance from a world they find too hungry. Christine is a 3, a doer. I’m a 6, a reactor to threats. I may defend myself against threats that do not even exist - a 'bad' thing about myself that it's 'good' for me to know.

1. The Perfectionist - angry virtue
2. The Giver - egocentric generosity
3. The Performer - success through appearances
4. Tragic-Romantic - seeking happiness through pain
5. The Observer - seeking wholeness through isolation
6. The Devil’s Advocate - the persecuted prosecutor
7. The Epicure - opportunistic idealism
8. The Boss - coming on strong
9. The Mediator - going with the stream

My favorite story from Dr. Naranjo is about the hiddenness of God; how, in our search for meaning and being in concrete terms, the most obvious truths are the most hidden:  

It is told that the mullah, Nasruddin, was seen at a remote outpost of customs officials crossing the border again and again on his donkey; he was suspected of smuggling something, but customs agents were never able to find anything but hay in his donkey’s bags. When one of them ran into Nasruddin later in life, when both lived in a different country and had left behind the circumstances of their past, he asked the mullah what it was that he was surely smuggling so astutely that they were never able to catch him for it. Nasruddin’s answer was: donkeys. 

It’s A Goat

Of course, you don’t have to buy any of this. You can insist you’re right, that you know what’s good, and that your angry judgments are justified. A friend of mine from Morocco told me a story about such stubbornness.
The Bedouins are desert people in North Africa famous for being able to see long distances. The Berbers are mountain people famous for being stubborn. One day a Berber and a Bedouin were standing together in the desert looking at the far Atlas mountains. 

The Bedouin saw a speck on the side of a mountain and said, “There’s an eagle.”  

The Berber said, “No, it’s a goat.”  

The Bedouin said again, “No, it’s an eagle.”  

The Berber said again, “It’s a goat.”  

The Bedouin said, “I’m sorry to disagree with you, my friend, but it’s an eagle.”  

The speck then rose up from the mountain and flew away. “You see, my friend,” said the smiling Bedouin; it’s an eagle.”  

The Berber said again, “It’s a goat.”  

This stubbornness is in us all, not just Berbers.

The End - sort of

PS:


Ansarbak 


Ask and ye shall be answered.


My parallel code is Ansarbak. It's l986 and these notes are for my son, Adam. We were separated by the Cap-Com War. He was caught behind the lines in North America. His mother and I can get out. We have an escape tunnel - an old-fashioned astral projection type that Adam, who is only 9, is not yet able to use. When we're together in North America, we must live according to the Cap Com life program. We must be circumspect and discreet. Informants are everywhere. Any expression of personal idiosyncrasy or intellectual deviation can be dangerous.


Adam may lose his ability to be honest, joyful and intimate if we don't act soon. He needs to experience group singing, focused silence, elder story-telling, genuine conversation, and other human behaviors that are nearly extinct in North America. Emigration would be dangerous. Caps and Coms have stretched their tentacles to the remotest parts of the planet - and in most places, life is even more rigid and desperately secular than in North America. The best place to hide is here where we grew up.

While we consider alternatives, a thing we can do is to pass along this book of notes. The operating instructions for the old escape tunnel are encoded in the text, in a Level 3 subliminal cypher that can't be decoded by analytical means. Any Cap or Com authorities who find this material will insist they understand it, but they will not. The old tunnel instructions will only be visible the way Adam's magic dagger was visible to his parallel uncle, Terry. It would be too dangerous to give Adam these instructions in the clear.


These notes will also serve as an antidote for the personal isolation contaminants we absorb through contact with Caps and Coms. Personal isolation is their main method of control. We use it in the parallel worlds, but only as a meditation device. Each reading of this text from beginning to end will provide additional inoculation against the ideological propaganda contamination in the Cap-Com social system. 


The permanent Cap-Com War escalated after the Russian Revolution in 1917, when Communists gained control of Russia. Their condemnation of the Capitalist plan for global development ceased to be academic. Their plan to destroy Capitalism surged. Caps retaliated by blockading Russia. Children starved and died. A blood feud commenced between world capitalism and world communism. Each side became preoccupied with maintaining its military capacity and chain of command. All social, economic and personal issues were subsequently managed according to their theoretical potential for impacting the War and the chain of command.


The Cap-Com War recessed during World War II, 1939-1945. Caps and Coms became temporary allies to fight the Axis totalitarians of Germany, Japan and Italy. Vast armies were decimated. Cities full of people were incinerated. Millions of non-combatants were exterminated.


I grew up in Chicago during the manic period just after World War II, in a slim sliver of time when we thought the world was at peace. Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini were all dead. The total authority governments were defeated - or so we thought. The huge blood sacrifice of WW II was seen as the purchase price of permanent peace, freedom and prosperity. The final irony of WW II was the judgment issued by the War Crimes tribunal at Nuremburg, Germany - it confirmed that each person on Earth was obliged to heed their conscience even against the legal demands of the state. We reveled in optimistic hope for the future.


The military vacuum created by the collapse of the Axis armies was invisible to the public. A renewed Cap-Com War immediately began to fill that vacuum. It was called the Cold War. It was a period of reorganization, during which many in America thought they'd slipped the military leash. American Caps dominated the world economy, and held all the atom bombs. They began to build a global Pax Americana. The Russian Coms then shocked the world by building an atom bomb of their own. They sought the special justice their political elite found worthy. The leaders of the world, all trapped in a soul-less brain-lock, committed humanity to perpetual war. 


As of this writing, the last of the leaders who knew a world at peace is dead. The Cap-Com War has evolved into a mindless bureaucratic tyranny - the only remaining growth industry. It is the status quo on Earth. It may last for the life of the human race. It may destroy the human race. At present, the only way out is through the parallel worlds.



You are looking into a mirror - always. What you see out there is a reflection of what you see when you look inside yourself. So, what are you choosing to see? What are you willing to see? What does your out-picturing betoken? Can you accept for yourself all the roles you assign to others?

This world is where starved and thirsty creatures come to die. It's a chamber pot full of guilt-ridden power-trippers swimming in De Nile who don't know what they're doing, don't even know they have strings much less who's pulling them. (We actually pull them ourselves, sort of unconsciously). You can't fix this kind of disease with big, bigger, even bigger government.

The only point to being here is to learn to become open windows through which love can pour into this loveless world. But managing this world so love can flourish in it requires virtuous men, as our founders put it. And we don't teach virtue much. We teach mostly self-gratification and ideological purity (ie, being right). Still, God bless us every one. But there is no righteous man here; not even one. Jesus, that famous rabbi from 2000 years ago, said this and included himself. What a wise son of God and excellent teacher. 

Everyone's main addiction is the same - it's putting others down, in thought or deed - making others wrong. We all do it. Most of us can't go five minutes without unleashing negative thoughts on someone. This guilt-tripping is hate. It only makes us hurt more. It doesn't fix anything. To truly heal and feel better, we must notice our mean guilt-tripping thoughts as quickly as we can, and let them go, no matter how justifiable they may seem. And we must pay as little attention as we can to meanness in others - that's their work. This is hard to do, but it's the only way that works.

As a practical matter, we should cultivate patience without anxiety while we await inspiration - and stay active and meditate (pray) in some way so we don't think too much - and remember that all things eventually work out for the best.

This mistake (that's plagued every human born), is the lust to gain power over others, to ensnare and enslave them by force, fraud and infinite disguises we don't even recognize as our own - all the while claiming that we're love and justice. 

We seek salvation by power in the material world, though this world is an illusion, and we can only be saved by a power greater than our selves, greater than our own ego. But we don't have to buy into any conventional God concept. We can believe there is no god. I think, with great confidence, that God won't mind.) But without spiritual training from a teacher of discipline and kindness, life here is merely the perfect expression of an unconscious desire to see ourselves unfairly treated. Hard as it is to grasp, acquiring worldly power is a maladaptive solution to a nonexistent problem. Go figure.

Do what people normally do in the circumstances. That's tricky because normal is being flooded by anti-normal. We're told by carnal cynics and professional victims that being special is good,  and being ordinary is lame. No matter, do your best.

Remember - the slightest anger or irritation is a mask over intense fury. This fury, or upset, is not what we think. Indeed, we're never upset for the reason we think. And when we finally do see why we're upset, we think our understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth. Our ego is relentless.

http://youtu.be/olbRz5vry70   - Wapnick on detachment vs denial.  http://youtu.be/0kNGnIKUdMI

There is grim darkness in our (wrong) mind - as ACIM puts it - that we mistake for evil out there in the world or in a neighbor. It's a kind of dragon we carry around inside us. We have to defeat this dragon, or hide from it forever in denial, pretending it isn't there.

For 1500 imaginary years, Muslims have seen this dragon in kufars (non-Muslims) and in bad Muslims. The cure is death to all kufars, or their conversion to Islam - atheists and homosexuals need not apply. A lot of bad blood there.

For 500 years, the Catholic Church saw the dragon in the Christians (Protestants) who said giving money to the Church could not gain more love from God. More bad blood. On the positive side, the Pope recently said the Church was wrong all that time - that God loves us all the same no matter what we do. All's forgiven. Olee Olee Oxen Free.

For 100 years, Marxism/Leninism (socialism, communism, progressivism, whatever) has claimed the dragon is in religion and private property. They threaten death to those who'd limit state power in managing these matters. Whazzup with us crazy humans?  So needy and tendentious - everybody with a slam dunk argument justifying their anger. Hutus, Tutsis, Irish, English, Sunni, Shiite, etc., etc. What do we think we gain by bitter self-righteous contesting? What do we think we know that might justify our misery? The laws of life on Earth are nearly impossible to figure out; so, what are we so sure of?

It would take many books to explain the mess we've made of this world. We're so angry, defensive, condemning - and the constancy of it means that, on some level, we want all the conflict, want the trouble in our lives. At least, we hold onto our trouble, hold on to it, hold onto it, hold on to it...

 Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. 
(Last stanza of Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold 1822-1888)


Preach The Gospel At All Times; If Necessary, Use Words - Saint Francis.