I never thought I would be watching this conflict so dispassionately. I believe it is because, although I am a person of peace -- I have never questioned the immorality of the American Empire going into any of these states and bullying them into 'democracy' (hog consumerism) -- I have begun to take the longer view. Could it be that all of this was meant to unfold so that the species can go up to the next level of development? Destroying the Cradle of Civilization was the tip-off for me: maybe we are closing a chapter of human evolution. These would be momentous times, then, indeed. We are approaching 2012, the 'end' of the Myan calendar -- and the end/beginning of so many other mythical traditions, including the astrological start of the Age of Aquarius. Could this be the war to end wars?

An ending and a beginning.

Islam is already an extreme religion. After reading through about a third of the Koran recently, I was struck by its lack of spiritual content. A lot of rules and regulations, but precious little to inspire the heart. It is a testament of anger and rage and revenge and extreme measures -- I mean, just how many times during the day and night are we expected to drop everything and praise Allah? Isn't Allah within? Can't we praise It at all times in our hearts?

The Koran is a document on fire. Surely there are more exclamation points in the Koran than in any five other sacred texts put together.

So I would not mourn the passing of Islam -- along with all the other religions, of course, which in my mind have turned us poor humans into mincemeat over the centuries. Not that what we are seeing in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates is the destruction of Islam...but it's a start.

Enough. That is the civilization of bloody hands and rabid eyes we are bombing at its root, at its cradle. And I say, go to...bomb it and let the cradle rock. Maybe the next phase will be better. It can't be worse: during the previous century we slaughtered 100 million of each other. Bush, et al, unlikely tools of destiny, bring on the future!

A river watering the garden flowed from Eden, and from there it divided. It had four headstreams. The name of the first is the Pishon. It winds through the entire land of Havilah,where there is gold. The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (Genesis 2:8-14)

What I am seeing is that we are in species crunch-time. I believe we will come out the other end of this, but changed beyond recognition.

The Valley of the Tigris and Eurphrates Rivers is the probable location of the Garden of Eden. It is the 'Cradle of Civilization,' with a 9000 year history of nurturing our human species. We are now at war in that area, bombing it to oblivion.

It may be that we humans are destroying our nest. We may be going up to the next step in human evolution -- and erasing all evidence of our childhood. If true, that means, of course, that will we have to take responsibility for ourselves at this next level.

I am in Austin, Texas this morning, feeling uncomfortable about being, suddenly, in a war. Although I lived in this city from 1961 to 1963, and again from 1967 to 1970, and have returned several times since then, I recognize nothing. I feel quite disoriented. And this feeling extends to the whole culture, it seems. This place is a metaphor for me of the swift changes taking place. Everything is changing, and quickly. When Leonardo returned to Florence after being in France for all those years, I imagine he looked out at virtually exactly the same skyline as the one he left years earlier. But here, I cannot locate anything. I feel confused. Everything is changing, even as I try to get a fix, a focus.

'I love the smell of napalm in the morning.'... Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now.

Dark doctrines of the Evil Empire. Walter Cronkite at Drew University last night: Cronkite speculated that the refusal of many traditional allies, such as France, to join the war effort signaled something deeper, and more ominous, than a mere foreign policy disagreement.

'The arrogance of our spokespeople, even the president himself, has been exceptional, and it seems to me they have taken great umbrage at that,' Cronkite said. 'We have told them what they must do. It is a pretty dark doctrine.'

Bush's speech last night (I heard it on NPR through the computer) was almost convincing. So, I must be sleepwalking along with the rest of the citizenry -- and the Congress of the United States, to quote Senator Byrd. It's all too exhausting. He's done it: he's worn me down...to a frazzle. Yes! Go to war! Anything!

I keep receiving stuff in the email inbox that seem like they are from another age: cheapest airline deals! who would fly now? where would we go? what would we do?

The soul of this culture seems to be like a boil that is about to burst. If it takes a war, the deaths of children, to bring about, it all may not have been in vain.

Is the money market being manipulated? Is the Pope Catholic? Still, much of what Nelson Hultberg has to say in this stimulating article on the ways Big Money in our culture continues its corrupt rule was a revelation to me. Hultberg is an insider, which makes it all the more real...and scary.

In tomorrow's Newsweek, a huge piece on the evil empire (it's us!) Here is one of the money-lines: 'A war with Iraq, even if successful, might solve the Iraq problem. It doesn't solve the America problem. What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country--the United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us.'

What came home to me reading the piece was the fundamentally different perception of the present administration of the power of the US (unlimited) and how it can be wielded (however it wants). We have become the world's two-ton gorilla. The reigning junta does not see the US as part of a community of nations, subject to the sophisticated chess game of 'balance of powers' -- it sees America as THE unipower, answerable to no one and nothing, truth be known. The hubris of that attitude alone should be enough to unmask the psychosis that has set in at the heart of this government. Certainly the administration has presented the planet with an interesting problem.

I am reminded of a quote from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: 'The eagle loves to soar above the world, not to look down on people, but in order to encourage them to look up.' From her lips to God's ears.

A piece by Norman Mailer, in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, contains an eloquent reminder that things had begun to turn sour before -- and by his accounting, long before -- 11 September 2001. Really, to look at it, the slide began in the post World War II period (the period when Mailer was publishing his first works -- he wrote 'The Naked and the Dead' in 1948, when he was 25). Louis Lapham has an essay in Harpers this month placing the pre-slide phase in the 1950s, rather nostalgically recalling the relative innocence of the golden days of the republic. But back to Mailer: here is some of his dreamy prose on the subject of corporations and their corruption --

'America had been putting up with the ongoing expansion of the corporation into American life since the end of World War II. It had been the money cow to the United States. But it had also been a filthy cow that gave off foul gases of mendacity and manipulation by an extreme emphasis on advertising. Put less into the product but kowtow to its marketing. Marketing was a beast and a force that succeeded in taking America away from most of us. It succeeded in making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. One has only to cite fifty-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box with balconies, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways with their vistas into the void; and, beneath it all, the pall of plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant's tactile senses, plastic, front-runner in the competition to see which new substance could make the world more disagreeable. To the degree that we have distributed this crud all over the globe, we were already wielding a species of world hegemony. We were exporting the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful American corporations. There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor— only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.'

Oriana Fallaci has a passionate -- operatic -- essay in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Stupendous in scope, and studded with personal experience of warfare. I want to read and read and read her. I agree with every word she utters here.

Listen to the music in this: '[America's enemies] are also in Europe. They are in Paris where the mellifluous Jacques Chirac does not give a damn for peace but plans to satisfy his vanity with the Nobel Peace Prize. Where there is no wish to remove Saddam Hussein because Saddam Hussein means the oil that the French companies pump from Iraqi wells. And where (forgetting a little flaw named Petain) France chases its Napoleonic desire to dominate the European Union, to establish its hegemony over it. They are in Berlin, where the party of the mediocre Gerhard Schröder won the elections by comparing Mr. Bush to Hitler, where American flags are soiled with the swastika, and where, in the dream of playing the masters again, Germans go arm-in-arm with the French. They are in Rome where the communists left by the door and re-entered through the window like the birds of the Hitchcock movie. And where, pestering the world with his ecumenism, his pietism, his Thirdworldism, Pope Wojtyla receives Tariq Aziz as a dove or a martyr who is about to be eaten by lions. (Then he sends him to Assisi where the friars escort him to the tomb of St. Francis.) In the other European countries, it is more or less the same. In Europe your enemies are everywhere, Mr. Bush. What you quietly call "differences of opinion" are in reality pure hate. Because in Europe pacifism is synonymous with anti-Americanism, sir, and accompanied by the most sinister revival of anti-Semitism the anti-Americanism triumphs as much as in the Islamic world. Haven't your ambassadors informed you? Europe is no longer Europe. It is a province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were at the time of the Moors. It hosts almost 16 million Muslim immigrants and teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas, chadors. It lodges thousands of Islamic terrorists whom governments don't know how to identify and control. People are afraid, and in waving the flag of pacifism--pacifism synonymous with anti-Americanism--they feel protected.'

Where are there journalists of this stature in the US? Avanti, Fallaci.

This, from an extended essay by Lee Harris in Tech Central Station: 'Today we are in the midst of this collision [between the old order and the new order of things]. It is the central fact of our historical epoch. It is this we must grasp. Unless we are prepared to look seriously at the true stakes involved in the Bush administration's coming world-historical gamble, we will grossly distort the significance of what is occurring by trying to make it fit into our own pre-fabricated and often grotesquely obsolete set of concepts. We will be like children trying to understand the world of adults with our own childish ideas, and we will miss the point of everything we see. This means that we must take a hard look at even our most basic vocabulary - and think twice before we rush to apply words like "empire" or "national self-interest" or "multi-lateralism" or "sovereignty" to a world in which they are no longer relevant. The only rule of thumb that can be unfailingly applied to world-historical transformations is this: None of our currently existing ideas and principles, concepts and categories, will fit the new historical state of affairs that will emerge out of the crisis. We can only be certain of our uncertainty.'

Today I heard from seven people. All of them are experiencing what appear to be nervous breakdowns (do we still use that term?). The dreams are filled with terror...really frightening. Something is going on in the cultural psyche. The leaders have everyone paralysed with fear. For the first time in a long time I felt, this afternoon, sitting in the splendid courtyard of the Bellas Artes, that I am out of harm's way. I trust it is not an illusion.

Following up on yesterday's Telegraph article on pre-natal consciousness, suddenly there is a great deal of talk about revisiting Roe/Wade. This, from Camille Paglia's Arion essay -- a hugely insightful statement: 'Reproductive rights, establishing women's control over their own bodies, was always a major issue in feminism but over the next quarter century would become an obsessive preoccupation, determining campaign politics and judicial appointments. Feminism inextricably identified itself with abortion -- with termination of life rather than fertility.' She rushes to say in the next parenthetical sentence, ' (I am speaking as a militantly pro-choice feminist.)'

I received an emal today from someone, a God Bless America animated letter of the American flag flying proudly, etc. I almost gagged on my coffee at the line (from the flag), 'I am arrogant -- people around the world fear me.'

There appears to be tremendous confusion among the citizenry of the Empire at the moment. An exhaustive CBS poll states that two out of three Americans believe the country should take military action against Iraq (66%/30%), but 40% believe war would make the US economy worse and 55% say that war would increase terrorist attacks against the country. Go figure...it sounds like a death-wish.

The Telegraph this morning carries an article titled 'Foetuses May Be Conscious Long Before Abortion Limit.' We have just completed another LifePath II Retreat, where we facilitated a rebirthing ritual with shaman Eduardo Morales, so I am particularly attentive to such headlines.

In the past, I have always sided with the rights of women and the choices of women on whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term. But now I am thinking that more personal responsibility needs to be exercised in this area. We had assumed that bringing a child onto the planet is nobody's business but the prospective mother's; from what I've seen and experienced in the retreats, however, bringing a child onto the planet actually is planetary business.

What I have seen in the rebirthings is that we appear to enter the human situation at conception -- even before, if we count the choosing of our parents. Consciousness is there in some form (perhaps in full form) all through the process, from parental thinking about it, to lovemaking, to conception, to the entire nine-month round of physical development.

I once had a client who came to me with a disturbing recurrent dream: she was living inside a huge glass dome, feeling very comfortable and enjoying life -- then violence broke out inside the dome, and there was nothing she could do to stop it...she was attacked by monsters, dragged away, and finally killed. I was silent for a few moments, then I asked the woman if she had ever had an abortion. She turned white and nodded her head. The little soul that had been extracted some time ago was returning to its intended mother to seek resolution. I suggested the woman have a Mass said for the aborted child. She did, and the those nightmares ended.

"Given that we can't prove consciousness or not, we should be very cautious about being too gung ho and assuming something is not conscious," says Baroness Greenfield, the professor of neurology at Oxford University quoted in the Telegraph piece. "We should err on the side of caution."

Indeed.

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of the Soviet dictator, today's Pravda asks the question, 'Was Stalin Russia's Cross or Salvation?' I did not realize there was a question, but apparently 53% of Russians believe he created order, kept prices down, and allowed government officials to have great careers.

I suppose he also made the trains run on time.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the paper a report has come in that still another mass grave from the Stalin era, this one at an artillery range outside St. Petersburg, has been uncovered: 30,000 people shot in the back of the head with 45s in what might have been live target practice for young Soviet soldiers.

Jennifer Esperanza sends me a piece by David LaChapelle about a non-local Universe, falling birds, and the rush to war...I found it interesting, although commentators have been observing the Columbia break-up in terms of omens for some time now. I had not known before that pigeons engaged in combat with each other in Trafalgar Square in August of 1939 on the eve of Germany's invasion of Poland -- or that 'scores of blackbirds were found dead' on the banks of the Danube during the same week.

Of course, it goes without saying that to see omens -- let alone to believe in them and act upon their warnings -- one has to live in both the world of logos and mythos. The dominant culture stands firmly in logos-land, and so misses many great opportunities. When I hear about paradigm shift, it usually does not include the awareness of multidimensionality as one of the outcomes of the new paradigm, but I am adding that to my list.

Camille Paglia's majestic article in the Winter 2003 issue of Arion is an absolutely must read. She goes into the roots of New Age spirituality by tracking it back to religious mini-movements in the last half of the 1960s. One of the major points she makes is that the self-destructive behaviors of cult spiritual leaders, brought on by the very Dionysian practices they were espousing, caused an absence of leadership in what should have been the carry-through of their promising spiritual revitalization of the culture.

Paglia is particularly insightful when she talks about how religious art has been trivialized in America by the official curatorial powers not so much out of misguided views, but because of a leadership vacancy of spiritually charged artists. Here she is on the subject:

"The absence of those sixties seekers from the arena of general cultural criticism can be seen in the series of unresolved controversies in the last two decades over the issue of blasphemy in art. With the triumph of avant-garde modernism by the mid-twentieth century, few ambitious young artists would dare to show religious work. Though museum collections are rich with religious masterpieces from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, major American museums and urban art galleries ignore contemporary religious art—thus ensuring, thanks to the absence of strong practitioners, that it remains at the level of kitsch. And the art world itself has suffered: with deeper themes excised, it slid into a shallow, jokey postmodernism that reduced art to ideology and treated art works as vehicles of approved social messages."

The piece is several thousand words long, but fascinating. Suggestion: print it out and read it over a couple of days to savor her language and her intelligence.