Incomplete Passings

I believe that everyone, at the end of his life experiences the ecstasy of enlightenment and passes willingly over into an existence where there is no time - only echoes. The sole exception is the suicide who has crossed the threshold already. It is what prompts suicide bombers to say, “We’re already dead.”

The sole exception is those who write wills in the belief that they will still be in a position to dictate what happens from beyond the grave. And even they will ask themselves at the very last moment, “Why did I bother?”

There are, however, always a relatively small number of incomplete passings which results in the tortured and wanderings of ghosts. No longer able to affect outcomes, they are nevertheless unwilling to “jump” (thank you, Corlyss, for the Jung quote)*.
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Feast or famine. Too much is happening right now to properly assess. Add to this the fact that ‘the first three reports are always wrong', and one runs the risk of appearing with one’s invisible pants down.
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Saw “Barney’s Version” yesterday and couldn’t help thinking “when your mind goes, you might as well forget it.” Why so much perverse interest in Alzheimer’s of late?
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If one were to have asked my father-in-law what he did for a living, he would have answered, “I was a miner.” In fact, he was the second in charge of finding yellow cake on the sub-continent of India during the 50’s. He chose to go down into the mines with the men. He was personally cited by the (then) president (of India) for his work. When the mines closed, he retired rather than stay on as a paper pushing bureaucrat. He died instantly (and in the peak of health) in a car accident while on vacation in the U.S.
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Thank you, J.G. for the kind words. Am unfamiliar with the writings of the authors you mention, but will make it a point to educate myself.
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Can you imagine if any of this had happened in places like Pakistan, Venezuela or Iran? If Japan is having so much trouble fixing any of this, all of us are in trouble. I have confidence that Japanese ‘experts’ are doing the very best they can under difficult circumstances and that they will succeed in bringing these problems (with the help of God) under control. Doomsday predictions from the peanut gallery are never helpful. It would be a shame to politicize this, though many will try. Besides carbon-based fuels, what else is there? Sushi?

Much more is at stake than simply this. There are those pushing hard to advance a 'new world order' without actually explaining what this would mean for the rest of us. I got a whiff of it when I got stopped the other night for not having a valid inspection sticker on my car. I paid the fine and got my car inspected. All of it amounted to a tidy sum which I spent gladly, essentially for protection (to not be stopped again).

Sidebar: My mechanic told me that if I could pay in cash, my bill would be less by a third. And, after all this, my ‘check engine’ light on the dashboard is still blazing. It’s amazing to me what simply scraping off an old sticker and replacing it with a new one can cost these days.
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*"If you find yourself falling, jump."

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

The Blunt Edge of Brutality

Religion, like language, is hard-wired into the human psyche. At their core, all religions are the same. Religion typically splits into two aspects: spiritual and political. The spiritual aspect of religion is straight forward. Its ‘signature’ is tolerance. It deals with questions regarding faith, God and eternity. The political aspect of religion currently draws most of our attention because it has the potential of affecting our immediate circumstances. The same is true for ‘isms’. We can say that man is in essence a religious animal. Or we can say man is in essence political. Both statements accurately reflect a singularity of the human condition.

While it is true that equating man’s spiritual nature with his political nature is paradoxical, the two are nevertheless inseparable. Mankind is most at ease when the political aspect of whatever his primary concern may be (as Alfred North Whitehead suggests) is benign. A wizened curmudgeon professing his belief in Marxism within the confines of an ivory tower suite is no threat to anyone. Man suffers when such concerns become militant as happened during the crusades and is happening now as militant Islam makes its moves.

The constant striving of religion is to reduce all the divergent aspects of life to one. People who may be several happy meals short of enlightenment do not recognize the essential oneness in what they see. They fail to make the connection that ties everything together. There are two ways to force the issue to its resolution. One is persuasion (proselytizing), militancy and violence; the other is tolerance.

Tolerance is the more difficult nut to crack. We have chosen the easy path. It is easier to lop off the heads of non-believers. It’s easier to ban conservatives from speaking at universities. It’s easier to call for jihad. It’s easier to cause havoc and break things, and then pick up the pieces of whatever is left and cobble these into a single atrocity based on the principle of exclusion. It is also easier getting people to submit.

We here in the West have chosen submission. Our enemies attack us and we submit. In order to rationalize our cowardice, we change the language. We blur the line between good and evil. We assume our enemy’s narrative and admit that we are at fault; that it is we who must adjust or even erase ourselves. Our mea culpas – and even our sacrifices - are flawed; it is only ego that speaks. We abandon our principles; our allies. We no longer tolerate ourselves.

This is the mindset of our current administration. It pays no mind to the violence, pain and dislocation that is certain to ensue. For them, all these comprise the necessary gateway through which we all must pass in order to achieve a more perfect union – the Utopia that is envisioned in James Hilton’s Shangri-La, in B.F Skinner’s “Walden Two”, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, etc.

In today’s world the concept of tolerance has been all but abandoned. Political strife has taken its place. Unfortunately, just as religion cannot be exorcised from the human psyche, we cannot fight ‘isms’ with ‘isms’ and arrive at a good place. Religion has always been a double-edged sword. We have chosen the blunt edge of brutality.

Enlightenment

On Batchelor’s website today there was a picture of Colleen R. LaRose, dibbed by the media as Philadelphia’s ‘Jihad Jane’, dressed in a black, tightly wrapped niqāb, showing only her eyes through a horizontal slit. It reminded me of a short story by Andre Malraux I just finished reading entitled, “The Tank Trap”. It talks about four men in a tank during WWII. The driver of the tank also saw the world only through a narrow slit. The aperture was designed for the crew’s protection but it was also severely limiting, revealing barely where they were going, not where they had been or what might be approaching from the sides.

Man’s highly touted perceptions in general can hardly be said to foster a state of enlightenment. On our best days we see only a narrow spectrum of light; we hear only a narrow band of sound – much less than a dog. We think in symbols arranged in linear form. In short, we are almost blind. It is the human condition itself that pronounces us ignorant as we stumble through the debris of fractured perception while, ironically, we often presume to hold ourselves on the same level as an all-knowing, all seeing God. It is a sign of supreme arrogance that has led so many of us to abandon the concept of ‘God’ altogether. As such we presume to control populations, the oceans, mortality and even the weather.

The truly enlightened man is humble. He is profoundly aware of his limitations. He does not abandon his humanity in favor of ridiculously play-acting God’s supposed role. All today’s troubles (and all the troubles that have ever been) are spawned by the striving for control which stems from a failure to recognize the remarkable fact that only the blind are forever condemned to rule.