Catfood


So today I'm waiting for a plumber and then I'm off to work again in Camp Verde, so I've only got about an hour to write. I'm looking back at yesterday's blog, which took off in an entirely different direction than I thought it would go. This one might do the same. But what begins it is my looking back at the line yesterday, where following my claiming I was not talking about religion but observable fact when I talked about psychology, I said, "In my mind I hear the cock crow three times."

The betrayal of spirit is trying to make it materialize, because if it does, it isn't spirit anymore. If somehow everything could be reduced to observable, material, fact, then it would be devoid of spirit. And so my trying to defend essentially abstract knowledge by claiming it to be material observation was a kind of betrayal of the equal importance of Spirit in my energy field. The fact that I have created a container for it that works for me doesn't mean that it works for somebody else.

Mr. Burroughs said that the road to Wagdas is hard, and that what worked yesterday is today's death trap. He obviously was not discounting the reality of evolution. He also wrote that because it is the road to the Western Lands, or immortality, it is the most heavily guarded road in the world. There is no end to the parade of hucksters and self-appointed messiahs trying to cheat the travelers out of the energy they'll need to reach the Western Lands.

Now if this sort of writing was taken literally, an expedition would set off to find the five Persian cities related in the mythology of the journey through the five cities; Tamaghis, Ba'dan, Yas Waddah, Wagdas, and finally the twin cities of Ghadis and Nafana. I have written about this myth, and even converted it into a folk song with an American flavor in my ballad, "Poppy Trail." I changed a couple of things, such as using the mountains, or hillsides, for the mother symbol in Yas Waddah in place of Burrough's description of it as a flat brown swamp. I just liked the feel of it better in my song, and besides, we have different temperaments in some areas.

There is always an assumption that there is a historical, material reality from which spiritual reality has seeped out, like decaying plutonium or something. This is an unconscious bias toward materialism in most cases, at least in my opinion. Rather than detail examples of this I can link you to an online film that details the process by which this tends to happen in the first section. It also contains some contemporary material on the world bank and the collapse of the World Trade Center that is pure opinion. The use of statements which can be corroborated first, followed by opinions which cannot be, is a hypnotic technique by which opinion can be moved past the critical faculties.

I do agree with Rosie O'Donald, however, that the best physicists in the world should be pulled together to explain the contradictions in the physics of what is possible, and the reality of what took place when the World Trade Center buildings collapsed. I would like to hear the issue debated to resolve the conflicting accounts I have heard. It is one of those areas where we have to take the word of an expert, so the experts should be objectively chosen, as for example the heads of the physics departments of major universities not just in the United States, but also in France, England and India, for example.

I do have trouble with any conspiracy theory which would involve more than a handful of people keeping quiet about it to maintain a respectable cover over it. My own opinions are something else entirely. I certainly think there are people in power who can justify anything in the pursuit of their long term goals of maintaining American Empire, including knowing that there was going to be a terrorist attack and allowing it to go forward in order to emotionally galvanize the population to war. It's exactly how we normally get into war, so there's no particular reason to find it surprising. The physics of structural collapse is out of my pay grade. I'm more into literary devices which are analogous to physical phenomena.

For example, I talk about energy fields a lot in "Ash Fork." I might more accurately describe them as magnetic fields, with the dual polarities separated in order to create between them a defined energetic. This has always been of interest to me since I read Randolph Stone's books on Polarity Therapy about twenty five years ago, and began to apply his principles to healing work.

As the interest has evolved I have observed that there is a tendency on the part of materialistic people to think of this kind of work as charlatanism, and a tendency on the part of spiritual people to think of it as factual. This has been going on a long time, and makes an interesting study whether viewed from the vantage point of the practitioners or the skeptics. There is no particular reason to link it to the Theosophical Society. It can as easily be linked to Don Juan and Carlos, or the Reverend Billy Graham and Christopher Hitchens.

The situation is always one in which a rational inquiry discovers that spirituality is trickery. There is less investigation into whether tricking somebody into believing something is true, and thus incorporating it into their belief system, can have a healing effect. We know that the mind has a powerful influence on the body which can be demonstrated in a negative way, as for example when people are falsely told they are getting chemotherapy when they are getting distilled water, and their hair all falls out.

There is some argument for not reducing all spiritual practice down to material demonstrability. It reminds me of one of my favorite stories, which is a chapter out of Steinbecks, "Pastures of Heaven." There is a kid who lives on a farm where he fishes with his dad and a hired hand (if I recall it correctly after all these years). They live a wonderful life and everything is fine until some of the pillars of the community give the kid some clothes and things, and for the first time he realizes he is poor, and has low status in the community. The story ends with the father leaving with the kid, in still shoes and suits, for a job in the city.

I was lucky enough to do a seminar with a man who was initiated as a tribal shaman and who then got PhD's from Brandeis and the Sorbonne. He was one of the few people around who was conscious of the fact that there are two separate realities existing side by side in the world, where those on one side cannot see the other side. These two realities are separated not by distance, but by a time delay factor, in my conceptual understanding of them.

Sometimes the matter just sucks spirit out of the air, where it flies like a bird. On the ground a cat is liable to get hold of it.

Posted: Tue - August 21, 2007 at 10:39 AM