Syria, 9-11 and Growth

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

“A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interests in the present.”

George Santayana
In our own national pride and belief in American Exceptionalism we refuse to look up from our narrow view of the world and realize that we just cannot fix the world. Oh, we can punish, maybe we can slow the problem for a moment, but create a long term solution, not with guns or rockets, troops or covert missions.

The problems of the Middle East have been brewing and stewing for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and the festering of what started as local issues has become a collection of cultural hatreds that can only be solved by the people involved.

Look at the aftermath of the Iraq war, peace is not really known there, Shia and Sunni are still fighting, cultural minorities are hardly safe and welcome in the country, was this the goal of all those years of blood on our hands as a nation, is Iraq better than it was before?

Now we have Syria. We are banging the war drums and it is beginning to look like the politicians may just give the go ahead, will it solve the issue?

Bashar al-Assad, presuming he authorized the chemical attacks, has shown that he is a desperate man and is not interested in any kind of justice. You can attempt to punish men like that but they just get more desperate, and desperate men are capable of atrocities that our minds cannot wrap themselves around.

Sadly, as much as I mourn the loss of life that has and is likely to come, if you hand power to someone else without them being actually ready and prepared, you have not solved the problem, at best you have put a Band-Aid on it. The problem will return in a cultural conflict, it cannot do otherwise.

It seems that if power is handed to someone, they are rarely aware of just what a potentially dangerous and deadly responsibility it truly is. Sadly it takes going through the crucible to burn away the lust for power and make one appreciate peace, not pretty, but true. By going through the crucible, the emergent leader(s) are in a much better place to know the value of what they do, their friends and comrades were sacrificed to "win" the goal so the power has an extremely personal value.

When countries like ours insert themselves into the conflicts of others, especially cultural ones, we create an illusion we like to call stability, but our history of cultural insertion has not shown that we make good choices. Our people who supposedly "know" what they are doing actually come off in the rear-view of history to appear something akin to gullible.

Just because someone supported us in fighting their battle, does not mean that they are the leader that needs to rise, or that they have any interest in following the path that we would want them to, not that I find that to be a particularly brilliant motivation. Look at our history of imposed leadership in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran (that turned out well), Saddam Hussein (another success).

We like to say that our involvement is over the support of Israel, and somewhat it is, but if we take an honest look, it is about money as oil. What is really sad, is that about a hundred years ago, the people of the region felt, 'Americans were seen as good people, untainted by the selfishness and duplicity associated with the Europeans'^[1] and now we have become the selfish and duplicitous.

I like to think that under all the greed for oil, that part of it is that as a nation we see a collection of our fellow humanity in pain and are just clueless how to help them, but instead of sitting back and figuring out the big picture and actually creating long-term solutions to the benefits of the residents, we see a place where we can charge in like General Custer and in our pride just make it worse.

Every time someone talks about the US entering some country's civil war, I think of an old "Doonsebury" cartoon from the Vietnam era. B.D., our pro Vietnam War Conservative has managed to get lost in the rice paddies of a foreign country and be taken prisoner by Phred, a Viet-Cong "terrorist". In the strip I am thinking of, they are discussing the early years of the war and B.D. just is not getting why Phred doesn't see American involvement into the war his way, so Phred asks him, what would he think if the Vietnamese had shown up in Gettysburg and started handing out chocolate and chewing gum?

Now we have Syria, as much as the questions being asked are about chemical warfare and the response that should be made, once again America is threatening to react instead of thinking. For sure the Military-Industrial Complex is lobbying hard for the war, war is BIG business. What frightens me the most is that being so close to the anniversary of September 11^th, can our slow minded politicians separate the two? I would love to be able to say that I am sure they will make the right decision, but now all I can do is hope.

What is that decision? That is the question. Do we really currently know enough about what we are getting into? Are we seeing, or can we see, the big picture? What happens if we take the path being placed before us and President Assad does it again, are we ready to go round two, or three or all out war?

Large chunks of the Middle East are going through amazing growth now, it is violent and painful to be part of and to watch. If we have any hope of lasting success in the area, I think we may just have to sit back and let them do it, on their own, without big-brother walking in and forcing solutions that they are not ready or willing to accept. Left to themselves, they will likely come to them on their own. Can we have the faith, that as human-beings, they will learn an extremely hard lesson on their own, as it should be.

Footnotes:

1. Fawcett, L. (2005) The International Relations of the Middle East UK: Oxford University Press p 285

Labor Day, The Secret, and Today's Labor

Monday, my usual day off, but it is also one of those Monday holidays, Labor Day (sorry Phyllis, it has nothing to do with childbirth), so I figured my schedule would get trumped, so far no, strange events are afoot!

I have five or six partial blog entries I could finish up and make a quick and easy dash to the beach having finished my Monday duties of finishing and publishing an entry on Monday. I guess I could postpone the entry till Tuesday since it is technically a Federal Holiday in the States. Ha...

It has been a very intriguing week, I have been so humbled by what a reminder that the Universe will take care of us if we will just give it the opportunity and stay the "f" out of its way.

Last week, I preempted my usual writing with the eulogy for one of my cats, Ms. Birdie, she passed the following morning about 10. I am sad that she felt it necessary to leave, but knowing that Spirits tend to travel in groups so I will see her again in another of her lives. Spirit is not constricted to linear time as is most of consciousness, so she may actually be in my life already, I may have to watch over my shoulder, she had vicious claws that drew blood on more than one occasion.

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I have had this idea for a book running around in my head for a while, I had started writing it but really did not like what I was getting, it was boring as bat-shit (such language, shame on me...), but I had an inspiration as to this new scene and realized that it would make the coolest opening.  So I wrote it up, edited it about 40 ways from Sunday and sent it to a select group of friends to see what they thought.

My proof-reader, aka the Grammar Cop, sent me a collection of edits, some of which I had done already in a later rework, several liked, but questioned, a reference to Danny Kaye from a personal favorite 1955 film. The one thing that was most relieving was that EVERYONE said one thing in common, "what happens next?" That is exactly what I was looking for.

The story has been coming out in scenes, somewhat disjointed and randomly dispersed, a kind of wordy jig-saw puzzle. I knew basic plot lines and the general direction of it, but I really had no idea what direction to go to put it into order, in steps the Universe.

I stopped by this neighborhood thrift store and was going through their abysmal DVD selection when I came across a phrase that caught my attention, "Hero's Journey". Was ist das?

I turned out to be a three CD (one disk missing, but what do you expect for $2.00) recording of "The Hero's 2 Journeys", a lecture on story analysis based on Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". Now I have been a huge fan of Joseph Campbell ever since I first saw "The Power of Myth" (sorry the link is for the book and not the video, Amazon doesn't have the DVD? Who'd have thunk). I have used "The Power of Myth" as a study aid for years in my studies of comparative-religion, but that it was actually about storytelling and its structure had completely missed me.

Interesting side-note, I have had a DVD rip of "The Power of Myth" for ages from the local library's collection, but the disks were so badly scratched that it was nearly unwatchable in places. About the time I started thinking about this story, I had just bought a copy of it from an online dealer and had been watching it again and still did not get that my answer for structure was right in front of me. It is amazing how blind we can be at times...

Note to any copyright detectives reading this:

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I have a standing policy, if I make a dub, copy or rip of any copy-written materials, if I watch/listen to it four or more times, I will buy a copy as soon as I find one, otherwise it will eventually be erased.

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I, like many people, are fans of the Law of Attraction, it has become a big industry in the last few years, films like "The Secret" and "What the #$*! Do We Know!?", as well as more books than I care to count, including my own "10 Secrets to the Secret" (which I will publish if I ever get it to a place that I am willing to put my name on--long story).

One area that many people seem to miss is that the Law of Attraction can be, but rarely is, instantaneous. On occasion, the manifestation of ones dreams and hopes are pretty quick in their arrival, but I find that more often then not, you are given inspiration what directions you need to go in to bring about the manifestation.

For example, you might want to manifest $7,000,000, now it is possible that you may just win the lottery with that ticket you bought (even with the lottery you have to put action into it; buy the ticket), but more likely you will start receiving ideas and inspirations that give you an actual charge to contemplate.

Lynn Grabhorn, in her amazing book "Excuse Me, Your Life Is Waiting: The Astonishing Power of Feelings", calls it "the warm and fuzzies"; when you are being given an inspiration toward some goal you are trying to manifest, whenever you think about it, you get a warm and fuzzy feeling. My personal experience is that you get the "warm and fuzzies" even when you really do not want to do "it", we so often want to get to the end without taking the journey, but the growth needed for the destination is in the journey.

So while I work on my new journey of writing my story with its "Hero's 2 Journeys", start on your own Hero's Journey and may you be blessed with whatever you manifest for you and yours. This is your Labor for today.

P.S.
     I did find a copy of disk 3 so I have the entire lecture, no worries!

A Eulogy for Ms. Birdie

OK, this is not the blog entry I was planning to write today, I will finish and publish it later, but today, I am in a dark space, I saw it coming, but I ignored it, we all tend to.

There is one thing that we all tend to avoid, the passing of friends, loved ones and family. Many do not accept the idea that pets can be friends, loved ones and family, they obviously have never loved an animal that does nothing but love you back, even when you probably do not deserve it.

My oldest, Ms. Birdie, is on her way to her next life.

I find myself going through all the questions about what to do, how to react, what to respond as we all do when these times come up. It is a fact of life, as Wayne Dyer quotes Deepak Chopra:

“Life is a sexually transmitted incurable decease”

All living things in time pass to be returned to the star-stuff of which their bodies are made and Spirit continues to advance on its journey of education and experience on its way back to Source.

I ask myself if I should do this or that, what is most helpful, what is respectful and appropriate? My two girls are the closest thing I expect to ever have in the realm of children and at my age, possibly the closest thing to a lover.

I have a good day and they are waiting for me to share it, I have a bad day and they are waiting to help me get a grip and give me an outlet for whatever I need to expel.

It is a shame that people spend so much time "not loving", it is such a gift. I am currently working on an inspirational piece and in one of my notes I was contemplating the difference between angels and humans;

Angels are designed around Service at their core while Humans are designed around Love. For an Angel, fulfillment is found through the performance of whatever task has been handed to them. Humans find fulfillment through the manifestation of the Love that is at their core.

I spend so much time writing and talking about how much time and effort we put into judging EVERYTHING! Imagine how much joy we would have time for if we lived life like our pets, loving everything and just being what we are at our core?

Oh, I know that the religions like to tell us that we are evil at the core, that darkness is our nature, and that God will only love us if we live by ideals that even most of his teachers (little less their followers) can live up to. Even Jesus has his moment of doubt, look at the Garden of Gethsemane. If that were not enough reason to question the "official" proponents of the assorted gods of hatred, sadly, that is where a lot of the followers are taught to take their religion.

Love just is, it has no strings attached, no rules to be followed, no "things" that earn it, it is eternally free and is not only abundant, but in unlimited supply. The more of it that you give away, the more that it will find its way back to you and the more avenues you allow it to enter, the more unique places you will find it.

Like a pet who is at the door, love just wants to be let in, love will never desert you, it will never turn its back on you, only you can turn your back on it and I think the biggest travesty is that those who should be telling you this, instead, hold it out like the gold ring on a carnival ride. That is not love, that is a power grab.

So Ms. Birdie, please forgive me for those days I was not the loving being that you were so trying to teach me to be. Thank you for spending such a large piece of your life trying to get through my hard-assed head and thank you for sharing my life, know that you go with love.

Is Gay the new Jew?

Not long ago, while DOMA and California's Prop. 8 were being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, there was also a collection of stories in the news from around the world, same-sex marriage bans, criminalization of saying anything pro-gay and in some places, the possibility of being imprisoned for life for being honest about it in one's own life. Russia has since declared open season on gay men.

About the same time, I saw a collection of stories that asked the question, "Is Gay the new Black?" The population of Americans of African Ancestry sometimes come across as if they hold some unique history of suffering in their past, similar to speaking with Jews about the Holocaust, as if only 6 million Jews were killed and not 5-6 million non-Jews as well. We really seem to love and take pride in our pain.

While I was working on the previous blog entry, "Judas Iscariot & Adolf Hitler", I was really re-awakened to how the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler used longstanding cultural hatreds to persuade people to do and allow despicable things to be done to others.

I am often amazed at the things people are willing to justify to validate their need to demonize those who think, feel, believe or love differently then themselves. There seems to be a nearly pathological need in the human ego to be right and to make others conform to its view of rightness.

While thinking about the one and hearing about the other, I started to compare the three: Black, Jew and Gay. In many ways I found them to be surprisingly similar from a "haters" perspective.

All three have collections of people who deny their personhood because of aspects of themselves, the hated, are not in control of; yes, it is possible to convert your religion, but Germany was interested in bloodlines and you can deny your sexual orientation, but I cannot imagine that is ever a happy and fulfilling relationship for either party.

From the specific view of the fight for civil rights, Black and Gay have many similarities, but I think in many ways, Jew and Gay are much more in alignment. Race, somewhat cannot be hidden. A light-skinned person may choose to pass for whatever reason, but most do not have that option open to them.

Jew and Gay are both things that in the "predominant society" can be kept quiet and hidden away into those secret places, both require a statement of self to make others aware.

Both have suffered from cultural and historic misunderstandings and persecutions for standing up for who they are. In many places, it takes serious personal strength to admit to those around you what you are, and if you come from a more Orthodox background, to wear the clothing that will mark you as an outsider, how much less to be a "girlie-boy" and just be what God made you.

The lies of Jewish persecutors have ranged from the ridiculous to the laughably insane, with the need to demean another to justify the hatred and invalidation of another; Christian babies are slaughtered for their blood for Jewish religious rituals, get real. Homosexuals have likewise been slandered in the need of an unquestioning majority to justify the ability to validate bashing; Gay men cannot procreate so they must recruit your children. Gay men cannot be near small boys as they will want to molest them, but the fact that most men on boy sexual assaults take place by self-proclaimed heterosexual men.

As far as Germany goes, in the concentration camps, Jews were given the golden Star of David to demarcate them from the other populations, but in the hierarchy of the social structure, as much as the Jews were hated by Germans and other prisoners, there was a group of lower status, they wore a pink triangle to show them as homosexual.
Either way, Black, Jew or Gay, the simple fact is that "if you can hate one, you can easily hate another" (if you know who said that, please let me know) and yet:

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”

Herman Hesse
I often wonder what aspect of race, religion or orientation triggers within ourselves and what place that self-love/loathing inhabits? I firmly believe that to be truly human, will eventually require each of us to look within and find those self-loved spots that we have been taught to feel shame for that allows us to deny personhood to another, whatever the reason.

“In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.”

Michael Jackson

Judas Iscariot & Adolf Hitler

“You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”

“A Late Delivery from Avalon” Marcus Cole
Babylon 5 Season 3 Episode 13
22 Apr 1996, Television
It has been an ongoing discussion that probably the hardest part of following the pathway back to Source or allowing the Law of Attraction to work in our life is the lesson that WE are responsible for EVERYTHING that happens in our lives. We either caused it, or chose it. Since we live in a state of self-induced amnesia, we usually do not remember these choices, actually it is our avoidance of this fact as to WHY we live in that state.

Unless you are a Sociopath or a Psychopath (I can never remember which is which), it is part of human nature to do what one thinks or believes is right. Throughout history, there have been many people that have been tagged by the world as dark and evil and from the common perspective of things, they were; so let us look at two of them.

Judas Iscariot

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In several pieces of scripture, mainly from the east, there are examples of people that have been asked to be the "Bad Guy" at the behest of God or some advanced being so that other good could come out of it. We could look into them, but since they are unfamiliar to most of my audience, let's start from one of Christianity's most despised characters, Judas Iscariot.

The version that most people know is that Judas, one of the original 12 Apostles, was the money-keeper and later betrayed Jesus to the Jewish leadership for 30 pieces of silver and after the crucifixion, hung himself.

Among the Christian Gnostics, there has long been a tradition that Judas and Jesus were very close friends since childhood. The story goes that when Jesus was in Egypt, to escape the slaughter of the innocents by Herod, that a possessed child, Judas, was brought before him and after removing the demon, they became fast friends.

Many years later, back in Judea, they reclaimed their friendship and Judas became a close follower and later announced to be one of the chosen 12 Apostles.

The Canonical Gospels all agree that Judas had met with the Jewish Leadership before the Feast of Passover and made the arrangements to turn Jesus over to them, as Matthew says:

Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, and said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him.

Matthew 26:14-16 KJV
According to the Gnostic tradition, at some point Jesus had asked Judas to do what he did, hence the calm and supportive statement at the last supper, when Jesus announces that someone will betray him, but John gives us an insight when Jesus says to Judas:

That thou doest, do quickly.

John 13:27b KJV
A surprisingly supportive and encouraging statement for what Jesus knows is about to begin.

I have always wondered about the statement in each of the Gospels where the writers attribute Judas being possessed by Satan, I guess the writers needed to explain why he did it. It may have also just been a judgment and a need to demarcate "him" from "us". This brings us to what Jesus had to say about passing judgment in general:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Matthew 7:1-5 KJV
Keep these verses in mind, we will be coming back to their content in a few moments.

Adolf Hitler

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The vast majority of people in today's world do not think that there is much one can say about Adolf Hitler, as far as the "PC" crowd goes, anything in a remotely positive light will basically cause the doorway to Hell to open and swallow you whole. (Since I am about to say less than hateful things, I went to the store and bought dogs and marshmallows, just in case they are right.)

When we look at European History, we find a long tradition of anti-Semitic thought, yet we are still inclined to think that Hitler created this hatred out of thin air as a political ploy. Sadly, it was actually the re-emergence of longstanding animosities between European Christians and their Jewish neighbors taken to drastic and dark new heights of action, though even the killing of masses of Jews was not a new idea in Europe, by both Christians and Muslims.

Adolf Hitler, along with much of Germany, despised the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War with its economic sanctions and crippling reparations. The declaration in Article 231 which placed the blame and responsibility on Germany as the cause of World War I was seen as a national humiliation.

One oft overlooked fact is that the National Socialist German Workers' Party, then called DAP, started as a response to the Treaty of Versailles by a cadre of people who already had;

"...antisemitic, anti-monarchist and anti-Marxist views, as well as believing in the superiority of Germans whom nationalists claimed to be part of the Aryan "master race" (Herrenvolk), but he [Anton Drexler, founder of the DAP] also accused international capitalism of being a Jewish-dominated movement and denounced capitalists for war profiteering in World War I."

"National Socialist German Workers' Party" Wikipedia.org
The point being that Adolf did not create these mentalities, but used them to his advantage later when he came into power in the party. Sadly, these thoughts were not that uncommon in much of Europe at the time and specifically in Germany. Add to this mix the whole "Master Race" silliness and you have a recipe for a disaster of immense proportions and that is exactly what it turned into, as some 11-12 million plus people would attest to.

A Larger Perspective

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(OK, for those of you with delicate constitutions, brace yourself...)
From the common perspective, Hitler and his associates turned into one of the deadliest examples of man's inhumanity to man and we tend to pass that completely sane judgment onto the events in Europe under the Nazi Party as well as on the actions of Judas Iscariot toward Jesus.

"A Course in Miracles" has an interesting statement when it comes down to the whole judgement thing:

1. When you lack confidence in what someone will do, you are attesting to your belief that he is not in his right mind.
2. This is hardly a miracle-based frame of reference.
3. It also has the disastrous effect of denying the power of the miracle.
4. The miracle perceives everything as it is.
5. If nothing but the truth exists, right-minded seeing cannot see anything but perfection.
6. I have said that only what God creates or what you create with the same Will has any real existence.
7. This, then, is all the innocent can see.
8. They do not suffer from distorted perception.

Schucman, Helen, A Course in Miracles
1996, 2^nd Edition, "Text" Chap 3 Sec II Par 3
New York: Viking: The Foundation for Inner Peace
If we expand our view to include the perfection of all things in their time and place, as difficult as that seems (especially from our limited perspective), the actions of both Judas and Hitler must be perfect as well.  This will drive many to very angry places, we thrive on our ability to judge ourselves superior and others as inferior. We could almost call this "Nazi Light" in that it is in the diminishment of others that we plant the seeds that history has shown us we are capable of.

Here in the United States we like to think ourselves to evolved for such insanity, but are we really?  At the same time Hitler was incarcerating anyone he saw as an impediment to his holding of power, what were we doing? We had started rounding up anyone of Japanese descent and putting them into internment camps under the guise of self-protection, albeit Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, but we did not round up German descendants even when it became clear that war with Germany was likely, if not imminent.

Very shortly later, it was not biology but an ideology that we deemed as being less than "us" during the "Red Scare" of McCarthyism. As a nation we had decided that anyone of a differing opinion on the subject of Democracy was a threat and therefor less than, leading to Senator McCarthy's "Black Lists".

Of course we justified it, there were "very good" reasons, it made sense and as a nation we convinced ourselves that it was the right thing to do. We did not think of ourselves as anti-social, we believed that it was correct.

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All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,

William Shakespeare, As You Like It Act II Scene VII
Shakespeare wrote this as part of a piece describing the seven acts, or stages of life, ranging from infancy to old age. Many have also used it to describe the basic framework for explaining reincarnation of a single Spirit into multiple lives over the span of time.

There is a certain logic to the idea of reincarnation, that the eternal Spirit continues to learn beyond a single life. In traditional Christianity the idea is dismissed in favor of the idea that one has a relatively short period to make the right decision and if not, an eternity to pay for it. To me, that seems to make the Christian God excessively vindictive for a lack of understanding and acceptance. Of course there is the part of me that would find the traditional view to give credence to the verses where it speaks of the punishments for those who mislead others.

There is the old expression about not judging someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes, it gives you an insight into what is behind the reasoning for their actions.

An Example

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One example comes from the "broader view" of sexual permissiveness; in the U.S. we have a large collection of people who just cannot get over the fact that some people have sex outside marriage, as someone once wrote, "Promiscuous is anyone getting laid more than you are."

Now I am not saying that sleeping around is necessarily a good thing (albeit, more fun and better entertainment than most network programming), but what people are really searching for in this activity is happiness, and eventually they will realize that though enjoyable, the joy is fleeting and cannot be made permanent. Ironically, it is the attempt to hold onto these happy, pleasant and enjoyable experiences that make us even more miserable in that as the Buddha said as his 2^nd Noble Truth; attachment to impermanent things breed sorrow (OK, technically the 2^nd Noble Truth is that sorrow is caused by attachments, but in his later discourses he clarifies the previous statement's meaning. An example of this would be the old adage; even the best sex becomes commonplace after a while).

Some of us learn from our pain quickly, others take longer and some seem to be as addicted to their pains and sorrows worse than any addict to Crack or Heroin.