Mars approaches. And burns people to death! Ten thousand or more in France, where idiot families left their old people in sweltering apartments while they went on les vacations. A report from The Guardian this morning says that a total of 36 kids died this year in cars -- distracted parents or daycare workers left them in the backseats, the temperatures got up to 140 degrees.

I'm looking for more of this, not less, now that Jupiter is on the scene.

When I saw the pictures of New Yorkers enduring the power outage, I was trying to place the expression of their faces. They were blank, numb. These same expressions -- or lack of expressions -- are on the faces of holocaust victims as they are being liberated. I'll try to find some of these for comparison.

These are the early hours of the power failure in the northeast section of The Culture, but not too soon to mull over its meaning.

I am starting to see that Mars is kicking us in the pants, and that this may be just the beginning -- Mars, which is approaching us quickly (next week is the closest meeting in 60,000 years, as far as anyone can tell). Mars is Power. Interesting that the first pictures of Earth from Mars came in only three months ago, on 22 May.

But beyond the obvious, I am thinking that The Culture is being asked to examine its conscience about Power -- by being Powerless for a time. Much is being said of 'the grid.' The first time I heard it mentioned, on NPR, I thought the announcer said 'the greed.' So if the grid is being unmasked and failing, there may be some hope toward The Culture salvaging itself. I wouldn't count on it, of course. The operative image of what's happening in these years is still the Titanic going down.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. (Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887)

Loss of power.

A gay Episcopal bishop? Why not? Certainly many churchmen would qualify...and have through history -- I'm thinking of Augustine, and probably St. Paul. The real issue here is: organized religion's main purpose, it appears, is to contain human sexuality -- to rein it in, to corner it, to deny it, to consign it to secrecy, to slow it down, and finally to torture and burn people for it. So, of course, it pops up in peculiar places -- like priests (men of God) obsessing over pre-teenage boys...or synods called (as this weekend) to discuss the grave matter of a bishop being a homosexual. It's not even the homo...just the sexual that causes organized religion's blood pressure to spike.

Look, we would be so much better off if the O. R.'s simply passed into the elephant's burial ground...and left the rest of us in peace to find our own sacred sexual expression. If they insist on hanging around, well, they can do that, then just go to hell.

I am haunted by the pictures of Saddam's sons. I am also devastated inside from the descriptions of the tortures they perpetrated. I seem to be too sensitive for these reports. Last month, I decided not to renew my subscription to The New Yorker. I am beginning to close down -- not to information, but to The Culture, and it's slant on information. All this should go without saying, noting the other things I have done lately (i.e., moving out of the country), but it still comes as a surprise to me that I want to fold my own tent of The Culture.

I am on the planet that you call Mars. From here, your world seems like a garden paradise. Full of possibilities. We have been observing you for many of your centuries. We have seen a great deal from here. From time to time we send Ambassadors to you. They appear as you, and in fact they voluntarily erase their Martian memory for the duration of their mission in order to harvest information in the most unbiased way.

For the first time in very many eons, we are alarmed. We see your species, which had been nursed to become the husbands of your planet, drowning in a sea of the inconsequential. You have no idea who you are, where you have come from, where you are going. You are on the verge of becoming an interplanetary disappointment.

Sometimes, recently, we have despaired of your ability to go to the Next Step. You take one step forward, and two steps backward. We continue to walk among you -- to guide, to teach, to encourage your evolution upward. Much rides on your blossoming, because you are part of our solar system...the other planets (there are twelve, by the way) are depending on your development to make the rest of us complete and whole.

We have work to do. We watch you spinning your wheels. Sometimes we feel there is nothing to do but to let you pass and wait for the next planetary opportunity with another species.

We have moved closer to you now than we have been in thousands of years. Consult your astronomers. See that we are here, ready to help.

The Washington Post is reporting that the Hillary autobiography, 'Living History,' has the highest sales marks for a nonfiction book at Barnes & Noble. I couldn't care less about Hillary. She's the past...the very distant pre-9/11 past, which is even more past than past. Seeing her mug all over the Internet is something like rumaging through a time capsule. I wish she would just go away...and take her nutty husband with her.

Her book should be called 'Dead History.'

But, never mind. The United States will be breaking up soon. It will go away just as suddenly and seemingly effortlessly as the Soviet Union did. The arc of evolution is acending with increasing velocity, and there's no room for the Other Empire in the scheme of things.

Hillary, go away -- or if not, stay and be the last President of the United States.

More handwringing from the pundits. Franch Rich in today's New York Times: Visit "Art of the First Cities" at the Metropolitan Museum — an exhibition of delicate Mesopotamian artifacts safely held by non-Iraqi museums — and weep for the many comparable pieces that are being destroyed or stolen as our occupation forces fail to secure the peace.

From an article by Amory Lovins in this month's Resurgence:

According to the World Bank, of the six billion people on Earth, three billion live on less than $2 a day, and 1.2 billion live on less than $1 a day, which defines the absolute poverty standard. Access to clean water is denied to 1.5 billion people. Meanwhile, the world's richest 200 people are worth an average of $5 billion each.

The UN Development Program says that $40 billion a year would cover the cost for every poor person on Earth to have clean water, sanitation, basic health, nutrition, education, and reproductive health care.

The US armed forces costs the country $11,000 a second.

My heart leapt when I saw them. They took my breath away. The first pictures of Earth from Mars have come in from the Mars Global Surveyor. My heart is in my throat. This is what we have been waiting for -- an image of our planet from another planet. My soul sings!

The evolutionary leap in consciousness being experienced on our planet was begun in earnest by the image of Earth from the Moon. But the Moon is still Earth-space. This photo captures both the Earth and the Moon...from a place truly outside ourselves. Now, at last, we have this image of a blurry little aquamarine marble against the black velvet backdrop of space. Us! Everything will speed up now!

H.G. Wells in 1898: 'No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.' War of the Worlds

We had projected all our human drama of envy and bellicosity onto that splendid planet; now it returns to us bearing this gift -- not with 'envious eyes' but with the clear eye of a camera's lens. Mark it down as a milestone in New Time: Earth as seen in the evening sky of Mars, at 9 a.m. EDT, May 8, 2003.

This icon will create the new paradigm we have been craving and expecting. Hasten the day.

What's with Canada? Yesterday it was announced that the country is breaking out with mad cow disease, and today another case of SARS was uncovered in Toronto. That makes 24 people dead of SARS in Canada. We must do something immediately to end this threat to our democracy (tainted burgers! runny noses!): I suggest a regime change.

We are all immigrants into a new time.
Margaret Mead

Naturally, I want to believe, with Brezsny and the rest, that our species is awakening -- he even has a quote from Teilhard on his site -- but I wish they would begin to give us specific examples of how consciousness is quickening. Some days (like today, for instance), far from feeling awake, I just want to take a nap.

PAINFUL BLESSINGS
by Rob Brezsny

This is a perfect moment.
It's a perfect moment for many reasons,
but especially because you and I
are waking up
from our sleepwalking thumbsucking dumbclucking collusion
with the masters of illusion and destruction.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow,
We are waking up.

Thanks to them, from whom the awful teachings ooze,
We are waking up.

Their wars and tortures,
their devils and borders,
extinctions of species
and brand new diseases,
their spying and lying
in the name of the father,
sterilizing seeds and
trademarking water,
stealing our dreams and
changing our names,
their brilliant commercials,
their endless rehearsals
for the end of the world.

Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow,
We are waking up.

Thanks to them, from whom the awful teachings ooze,
We are waking up

Their painful blessings
are cracking open holes
in the sour and puckered
mass hallucination
mistakenly called reality.

News of the soul's true home
is pouring in,
infiltrating our increasingly lucid
waking dreams.

Wild ripe juicy eternity
is flooding in.

Our allies
from the other side of the veil
are swarming in.

We're waking up.

And as Heaven and Earth come together,
as the dreamtime and daytime merge,
as paradise and the underworld overlap,
we register the shockingly exhilarating fact
that we are in charge
-- you and I are in charge --
of making a brand new world.
Not in some distant time or faraway place,
but right here and right now.

As we stand on this brink,
as we dance on this verge,
we can't let the ruling fools of the dying world
sustain their curses.

We have to rise up and fight their insane logic;
defy and resist and prevent their tragic magic;
unleash our sacred rage and let them feel it.

But overthrowing the living dead is not enough.
Protesting the well-dressed monsters is not enough.
We can't afford to be consumed with anger --
can't be obsessed and possessed with complaint.
Our sweet animal bodies
need to feel rowdy blessings.
Our amazing imaginations
need to thrive on missions
that incite our delight.

We need truths in their wild state,
insurrectionary beauty
that excites our curiosity,
outrageous goodness
that drives us to perform
heroic acts of lusty compassion,
ingenious love
that endlessly transforms us,
tricky freedom
that is never permanent
but must be reinvented and reclaimed every day,
and a totally-serious-yet-always-laughing justice
that schemes and dreams
about how to diminish the suffering
and increase the joy
of every sentient being.

So I'm radically curious, my fellow creators;
I'm seriously delirious:
Since we are in charge
of making a brand New World,
where do we begin?

What truths in their wild state
are we planning to plant
at the heart of our creation?
What stories will be our reminders?
What questions will be our fuel?

Here's one for you:
In the New World
you will know through and through
that life is crazily in love with you --
life is wildly and innocently in love with you.

In the New World,
you will know beyond a doubt
that thousands of secret helpers are
angling to turn you into
the gorgeous curiosity you were born to be.

But then here's the loaded question.
The love that life eternally floods you with
has not exactly been unrequited,
but there's room for you to be more demonstrative.
If life is wildly and innocently in love with you,
are you prepared to start loving life back
the way it loves you?

In the New World, you will.

In the New World,
you will reject paranoia with all of your smart heart.
Instead, you will embrace Pronoia,
Which is the opposite of paranoia.
Pronoia is the sneaking suspicion
that the whole living world
is conspiring to shower you with rowdy blessings.
Pronoia is the dawning perception
that life is a conspiracy
to liberate you from ignorance,
and fill you with love,
and make you brilliantly soulful.

My fellow creators,
I want you to know
that I am allergic to dogma.
I don't trust any idea
that requires me to believe in it absolutely.
There are very few things
about which I am totally certain.

But I am absolutely certain
that Pronoia describes the way the world actually is.
Pronoia is wetter than water,
truer than the facts,
and stronger than death.
It smells like cedar smoke in spring rain,
and if you close your eyes right now,
you can feel it shimmering
in your soft warm animal body
like the aurora borealis.

The sweet stuff that quenches all of your longing
is not far away in some other time and place.
It's right here and right now.

Earth is crammed with heaven.

We are in need of a new Origin Myth. Joseph Campbell says that when it emerges, it will be about the Earth.

This is from the famous Talk given by Lee Brown in 1986 at the Continental Indigenous Council in Fairbanks, Alaska -- the 'Hopi Prophesies': 'There was the cycle of the mineral, the rock. There was the cycle of the plant. And now we re in the cycle of the animal coming to the end of that and beginning the cycle of the human being.

'When we get into the cycle of the human being, the highest and greatest powers that we have will be released to us. They will be released from that light or soul that we carry to the mind. But right now we're coming to the end of the animal cycle and we have investigated ourselves and learned what it is to be like an animal on this earth.

'At the beginning of this cycle of time, long ago, the Great Spirit came down and He made an appearance and He gathered the peoples of this earth together they say on an island which is now beneath the water and He said to the human beings, "I'm going to send you to four directions and over time I'm going to change you to four colors, but I'm going to give you some teachings and you will call these the Original Teachings and when you come back together with each other you will share these so that you can live and have peace on earth, and a great civilization will come about." And he said "During the cycle of time I'm going to give each of you two stone tablets. When I give you those stone tablets, don't cast those upon the ground. If any of the brothers and sisters of the four directions and the four colors cast their tablets on the ground, not only, will human beings have a hard time, but almost the earth itself will die."

To kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

'What processes do we engage in today to endeavor answering the questions that our ancestors lives once left behind? What images and symbols do we express today that anticipate the future, first manifesting in our psyches before such expressions flow outwardly to take material form? The increase in the conscious awareness each of us expresses inwardly towards our self and outwardly towards others will serve to illuminate the path of healing prior experiences and consequences of unconscious self, cultural, and collective -betrayal and thus promote the furtherance of wholeness expressed in single individuals and in time, throughout our species. The choice is for each of us now to make, reflecting the fact that the only thing one can actually and truly change is one's own self.' -- Edward Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness, Jung's Myth for Modern Man, 1984

'Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man's task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.' -- Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.326

'Mr. President, we are here to stay,' says Patrick Stewart at the end of 'X-Men 2', which Mike and I just saw, along with several million other people this weekend. In the closing narration, a woman's voice declares, 'We are experiencing an evolutionary leap.'

Of course, the comic books -- this is a movie story based on characters in Marvel Comics -- have always presented human evolutionary advances as technological improvements on physical human bodies (knives that protrude from fingertips, flame-throwing eyes, breath that turns things to ice), when the real evolutionary excitement is happening on the inside. These special powers are metaphors for superhuman developments, our species emerging out of matter. And the story of their immanent appearance is preceding the actual transformation, the new paradigm, homo universalis, in our most widely attended entertainments -- widely attended is the giveaway: if species transformation (in 'X-Men 2', 'mutation') were not already present in mainstream consciousness, no one would be going to these movies, and in fact these movies would never be able to reach the screen. But they are the highest-grossing movies of all time. According to Variety, 'X-Men 2' opened the fourth highest in motion picture history.

The movie screen is the dreamland of cultural consciousness. I have always looked at films that way, and now that I see all these top-grossing motion pictures speaking about the same things in dream symbol language, I am even more convinced of their power to summarize the cultural condition -- and beyond that, the human condition -- and to tell us where we are going. 'Titanic' (1997), a gargantuan box office hit, foretold the sinking of the stock market and the US economy, and the fall of the image in the world of the US as the Good Empire -- from hubris (the Titanic was 'unsinkable' ); the 'impenetrable'' hull of the Titanic was pierced heartbreakingly by an iceberg...a modern symbol of money and power, the World Trade Center, would be pieced heartbreakingly four years later by hijacked (the hero of 'Titanic' is Jack) planes.

"Spider-Man" (2002), also based on a Marvel comic, holds the record of top movie opening weekends with $115 million, followed by "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" with $90.3 million and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" with $88.4 million. Spider-Man, a mutant with special powers, comes from humble beginnings as a foster child. Harry Potter also has foster parents, and is endowed with special powers, which he hones at a school for wizards in the English countryside -- the 'prep school' in 'X-Men 2' looks identical to Hogwats. As metaphors and models of species evolution out of matter, they are right in line with the great spiritual teachers (Moses had foster parents -- and special powers; Siddhattha left his father, Suddhodana, and became the Buddha, a man with special powers; Jesus had a foster father and special powers), but the news is that (1) the Leap is upon us and (2) it is for Everyone!

The news, also, is that the transformational Leap is in mass consciousness.

We can 'read' our blockbusters and find there clues to the inexorable drift we are in. I can't wait to see what the sequel to 'The Matrix' looks like.

Symbols crumbling. 'Daniel Webster, the 19th century New Hampshire statesman, once wrote of the Old Man of the Mountain: "In the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men."'

Today the Old Man crumbled and fell. Another creation myth symbol gets the heave-ho.

More on the reason for the recent war: the May 1 issue of The New York Review of Books has an essay by Jason Epstein titled 'Leviathan.' The fourth paragraph begins -- 'Meanwhile Americans are sharply divided over a preemptive assault whose urgency has not been adequately explained and for which no satisfactory explanation, beyond the zealotry of its sponsors, may exist.' My emphasis.

In my mind, the rush to war was unconscious and planetary, and symbol driven, to erase evidence of the birth of our species.

Vis-a-vis my comment on Mailer of 30 April, this morning, Andrew Sullivan takes him on (how snotty can one get?): MAILERMAN: "Mailer's latest analysis of the WAM psyche reminded me of an argument I used to have with my friends in grade school - Who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman? In the end it was a completely pointless argument because they don't exist but at least we didn't try to turn it into our line of work. What is the white American male psyche? It's a fiction of Norman Mailer's mind of course, but it's also a way for him group unique and individual people together and wag his omniscient finger in their faces and let them know how hip and with it he still is. The WAM psyche is ultimately the "NISE" (Norman Is Still Employed) delusion."

My observatory here on Mars is quite comfortable. From Terra, this planet appears hot and dry, or at least it seems to be presented that way often in Terra's science fiction. Not at all. We are further from the sun, remember. It's actually a bit cooler, brisker -- but...nice. True, our atmosphere is thinner, and virtually undetectable by the means still used on Terra.

Yawn. I sit here and observe the scene on the Blue Planet. What a riot to be seeing all this! And what a shame that it might all become unmasked soon by the inevitable, inexerable movement (upward) of Consciousness. Ah, well. Meanwhile, it is an excellent show. Bloody, heartbreaking, but entertaining.

'The key question remains — why did we go to war?' asks Norman Mailer in this morning's London Times.'It is not yet answered. In the end, it is likely that a host of responses will produce a cognitive stew, which does, at least, open the way to offering one’s own notion.'

The answer to the question is that the forces that were thrust with such ferocity against our civilization's cradle were unconscious -- nobody knew why we were going to war...it just had to be done because the symbol had to be accomplished. But it's good to see how these commentators are now coming out of the woodwork, carrying the Question on their backs. Mailer, of course, says, the answer is obvious, obvious: to boost the white male ego (and who should know that better than he!). I predict that the Question will be a kind of inkblot test for pundits. Look for Andrew Sullivan to proclaim that the war was waged to vindicate Catholic conservative homosexuals.

Still another argument for getting guns out of the hands of policemen, this from Takoma, where the Police Chief wasted his wife, then himself over marital disagreements. Really, we should be looking at the institution of marriage: what's it for, anyway? One in two fails. That should be enough for us to be questioning its purpose.

From a most unlikely source, an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and slapped onto AOL. This is the final paragraph of the piece, which harps, rather obviously, on the fact that Americans are terrified.

'Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of risk now is that humans are actually manufacturing it -- with nuclear power plants, the ozone hole, toxic waste, global warming, nuclear weapons, even terrorism. Most of these systems are so huge, complex and relatively new, that the possible consequences of them are wholly unknown. "We don't know how big or small our risk is," says Baruch Fischhoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University specializing in the study of how decisions are made. "It's possible that the world is in transition, and there are poorly understood factors that raise questions about the validity of historical statistics."'

Yes, indeed, it is possible the world is in transition. Good morning, Mr. Fischhoff.

In the 'Till Death Do Us Part' Department -- this just in: Man Kills Wife, Self, Hours After Wedding The Associated Press, Saturday, April 26, 2003; 11:38 PM

MILL HALL, Pa. - A man shot and killed his new wife Saturday shortly after their wedding reception, then turned the gun on himself, police said.

Police said Frank W. Shope II, 34, married Lori Ann Spangler, 35, on Friday afternoon, but they began to argue during a small reception in a bar. The dispute escalated after they returned home. About 12:30 a.m. Saturday, Shope shot his new wife, police said. He then shot himself in the head.

State troopers arrived minutes later. Shope and Spangler were pronounced dead at the scene, police said.The two started dating about five weeks ago after he ended a 16-year relationship with another woman, according to friends and neighbors.

Spangler had two children who were with relatives at the time of the shooting, friends said.

I am beginning to think that what is coming down around our ears is more than just the usual change-of-ages. This seems bigger even than the great astrological shifts, with their 2200-year (or so) changing of the zodiacal guard. We seem to be moving as a species out of a place where evolution was directing our development, into a place where we are directing it. It's the difference between unconscious and conscious evolution. The dividing line may just be, as Barbara Marx Hubbard says, 1945, the detonation of the Atomic Bomb -- and the subsequent shock of realization that we had the ability to abort the human mission by erasing the race. Certainly many of the prophesies seem to be converging at a point in the very near future, and seem to be saying the same things: ascend...or die.

Someone posted this piece I wrote about the female and male principle for the original manuscript that became Live Better Longer -- through the voice of Dr. Parcells.

Today is Earth Day. Maybe we should also have Oxygen Day and Lead Day. I've always thought it was silly beyond words, putting our dear mother planet Terra in the same category with Secretaries, Valentines, Grandparents, and Groundhogs. God save us.

My dear friend and former student Autumn Golden passed away this morning. I am trying to sort out my emotions. She was a highly spiritual person who often said, when something really good happened, 'That was God.' She is back home at last, after what seemed to me a mostly bumpy ride. Autumn, I'm sorry I gave you a B for that class -- my head did the grades that day, but my heart should have prevailed. Good work.

'We are now at the epicenter of a shift in the history of the world,' begins Ben Okri in an essay in The Guardian. 'The war against Iraq has unleashed unsuspected forces.' Yes, of course, but then he doesn't really tell us anything new...a commentary that doesn't deliver the goods. Still, it is certainly of note that an author who isn't known for paradigm shift philosophizing, has entered the 'as seen from Mars' crowd. We are shifting, Ben, more than you have imagined.

This remarkable quote from Chomsky in a Frontline interview (about the Iraq war and the ulterior motives of the rulers of the Empire): 'If somebody were watching this from Mars, they would not know whether to laugh or to cry.' I read the interview this afternoon, but Chomsky gave it on 02 April.

On 05 April, I wrote here: 'I am beginning to imagine myself on Mars, where I have been living a lifetime as an anthropoligist for several thousand Earth years.'

Something peculiar is getting into consciousness around Mars and observing the big picture on Terra.

More, from Reuters: 'The Iraqi National Museum held rare artifacts documenting the development of mankind in ancient Mesopotamia, one of the world's earliest civilizations. Among the museum collection were more than 80,000 cuneiform tablets, some of which had yet to be translated.

'Professional art thieves may have been behind some of the looting, said leading archeologists gathered in Paris on Thursday to seek ways to rescue Iraq's cultural heritage. Among the priceless treasures missing are the 5,000-year-old Vase of Uruk and the Harp of Ur. The bronze Statue of Basitki from the Akkadian kingdom is also gone, somehow hauled out of the museum despite its huge weight.'

The key phrase for me is documenting the development of mankind -- convincing me further of the unconscious destruction of the cradle. We are tearing up all evidence of our birth to make room for a new birth and a new creation myth.

The handwringing continues in a BBC report this morning about trying to save the artifacts of our species, some of them dating back 10,000 years. Here on Mars we have no such antropological sentimentality. We are watching the slum-clearing efforts of the Empire in that region, paving the dirt road that is both Islam and species history. It will be interesting to see what goes up on those dusty lots.

I am not concerned about the destruction of artifacts and libraries of precious documents that Robert Fisk writes about again today in The Independent. To me, all of the stuff that is being destroyed over there seems like the compost of a dead and dying civilization. I say, go ahead and smash it all to pieces. We are being lifted into a whole new realm. Why would we want to ever look back at who we were? Does a well person want to hold onto hospital records? I wish these people would stop the handwringing and begin to see the bigger picture.

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Progressive: 'Only three types of creatures engage in warfare -- humans, chimpanzees, and ants. Among humans, warfare is so ubiquitous and historically commonplace that we are often tempted to attribute it to some innate predisposition for slaughter--a gene, perhaps, manifested as a murderous hormone. The earliest archeological evidence of war is from 12,000 years ago, well before such innovations as capitalism and cities and at the very beginning of settled, agricultural life. Sweeping through recorded history, you can find a predilection for warfare among hunter-gatherers, herding and farming peoples, industrial and even post-industrial societies, democracies, and dictatorships.'

I agree with David Hare, writing in The Guardian, that 'all the explanations for this war are bogus,' but I do not believe that 'Bush only invaded Iraq to prove that he could.' In fact, Bush and the rest are being driven by the same evolutionary forces that are pushing the species upward at this time. The reason why all the explanations appear to be 'bogus' is because we have not entertained the notion that there is a law operating under all these seeingly baffling adventures. We are advancing into new territory as a species...a birthing with the most unlikely midwives, those who comprise the leadership of The Empire.

The Garden of Eden is a wasteland. From Sifi of India -- 'Al-Qurna, April 12: It is believed to be the Garden of Eden, the mythic place where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers join, the cradle of mankind where Adam came to pray to God. Today it is a desolate wasteland of excrement, cracked paving stones and bullet holes. The eucalyptus known as Adam's tree, a place of holy pilgrimage for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike, stands bleached and dead.'

The metaphor: the Cradle of Civilization that nurtured our human species is destroyed. A new civilization must emerge...with a new creation myth.

And just now, Robert Fisk, in The Independent/UK, reports on the destruction of artifacts at Baghdad's most important museum: 'They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete.

'Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history,­ only to be destroyed when America came to "liberate" the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilization.'

Well, and not just the evidence of their own nation's history -- Iraq is a modern invention: what happened in the Valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers is about the history of the human species itself. It was there that we became truly human for the first time.

The metaphor: all of the evidence of the birth of our species is being erased. I believe it is because we are about to ascend to a higher form of ourselves. This is unfolding before our eyes, and it is happening very fast. Welcome to Earth, Homo Universalis.

We are in transitional times. It is becoming more clear to me every day that a new evolutional age is dawning. I also have the distinct feeling that the Old is moving out kicking and screaming...we are in for a bloodbath, I just know it. The Old structures are brittle and weighty and overextended: the crash from the fall will be deafening. We had thought that the recent war was frightening, but the real Shock and Awe is yet to come.

However, the promise of the New structures coming into place around a softer center gives us comfort. Caught in the darkness, we see a little light.

I have returned to San Miguel. My entire three weeks in the States was circumscribed by the war in Iraq (or the War On Iraq, as AOL and some of the cable news shows are calling it). I arrived in Dallas on 19 March, three or four hours before the first bombs fell, and left there on Wednesday for Austin as the statue of Saddam was being pulled off its pedestal in the middle of Baghdad. During that time I experienced by own internalized war -- a hellish combat with inner demons.

Back in Mexico, at home, I am feeling exhausted from it all, but, oddly, energized at the same time. Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, the start of Semana Santa. I have decided to give myself to the continuing process of my own mental and emotional crucifixion, if only to try to experience a resurrection. These rituals are powerful. I trust them.

Since 19 March, when the first bombs were dropped on Baghdad, we all have been wondering whether Saddam Hussein was alive or dead. But yesterday I began wondering about the whereabouts of an important figure on the Empire side: where is Dick Cheney? While I was musing about that this morning, I received a note from Mathe to the effect that she thinks Cheney may be dead. I'm starting to believe it. If he does not show himself in another day or two, I'm going to start a rumor.

Beverly and I spent the day, most of it, with Barbara Marx Hubbard. She is a fascinating presence, an evolutionary force herself. Over lunch we talking about the symbolism of bombing in the Garden of Eden, and the need for a new Creation Myth. She agreed. Lots of talk about going up the next step in human evolution. I am sitting here sorting out the day.

Because what is happening on the planet is getting more and more intense, it may be better to observe this Cosmic Transition from the outside. I am beginning to imagine myself on Mars, where I have been living a lifetime as an anthropoligist for several thousand Earth years. What I am seeing is quite marvelous -- certainly a shake-up for the human consciousness units there, but a shift into a bright and excellent future. Old Time for that species, dear to us, after all, is coming to an end. An arrow went out from their Cradle of Civilization, hit the symbols of (the misuse of ) money and power (what Civilization had become) -- their own Towers of Babel -- and the egg was cracked. Now the arrow has flown back to hit the source. And the rest, as they say, is the end of history.

The old is passing away; the new is emerging. I am finding that I am internalizing the images of the destruction of Babylon I am seeing on television. The old and corrupt is passing away, being bombed away; the new and dazzling is emerging. Conflict will soon be over...the seed is buried in the fertile valley. The center could not hold. The Garden is planted and is already in bloom.

I saw 'The Quiet American' the other night. What is it with Brendan Fraser? He looks like he's made of mashed potatoes: perfect to play Orson Welles...and, in fact, he seems to be living out the Welles propensity to fleshy inflation.

Brendan, try a no-fat eating plan. For breakfast, eggs with many vegetables; mid-day, fruit with a little granola and non-fat yoghurt; fruit for an afternoon break; for supper, steamed vegetables, a bit of fish, a green salad with lemon, and a baked apple. Watch those pounds slip away!

I love watching Graham Greene movies...so moody and, in their own way, unpredictable. He wrote 500 words a day, no more, no less, every day. When the two pages were finished, he went out and had his day. In that way he wrote all those novels.

Bush at Camp Lejeune today, told the family of a solider killed in action in Iraq, 'He is in heaven.' This, of course, is also the definition of sainthood, something that only the Holy See can confer. Has Bush become a religious leader? Yes, I think so. And none too soon, either, since we will be needing a new Pope before long.

But what is interesting is this: families in Iraq (and Palestine, et al) are also being told that their children are in heaven for having suffered martyrdom at the hands of the followers of Bushism.

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. 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

The area of the world where tanks are trudging through sand and bombs are exploding in the night sky is no ordinary location. Our human species was nurtured in the fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. As early as 9000 BC, humans were cultivating wild wheat and barley in ancient Mesopotamia (‘between the rivers’), and domesticating dogs and sheep, evolving from food hunters to food producers.

Historians have always referred to the place as the Cradle of Civilization. Seven thousand years ago, people were building homes and temples there, trading with others, irrigating fields, and experimenting with government. Five thousand years ago, they were developing the skills of writing and mathematics, and making art.

A momentous turning point in human evolution happened there: we became truly human. Biblical legend places the Garden of Eden at that spot, a location symbolizing the birth of our species as thinking, feeling, self-reflecting beings apart from the animal kingdom.

Images coming to us on our television screens are showing vast destruction in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates. Thousands of warriors are converged there with their tanks, bombs, planes, and missiles. If what we are watching were a dream, instead of real, waking life events, how might we interpret these images? If we are destroying our own cradle of civilization, what could that mean?

Taking a long view, beyond the tangled morality of this war and its grisly statistics, beyond the politics and personalities of the moment, in symbolic terms we seem to be returning to the cradle to eradicate it. We humans are destroying our nest. Could we be doing it in order to mark the end of our species childhood and the beginning of our adulthood? We may be going up to the next step in human evolution -- and erasing all evidence of our childhood as a sign that we are ready to make the climb.

Seen this way, the war we are engaged in has a meaning quite apart from the various possible motivations that have been put forth, officially and unofficially. We had thought this war might have been about ending a corrupt regime, about exterminating terrorists, about gaining another US military foothold in the Middle East, about macho posturing, or even, drawing upon mythology, about completing a father’s great task. Taking a higher road, we had also entertained the idea that the meaning of the war was to bring about a new world order built on new national, ethnic, and religious alliances.

But the cloudy motivations for this war and the driving inexorability of it make us wonder if another, larger force is at play. What we are seeing in the Cradle of Civilization may be the unstoppable movement of human evolution expressing itself forward in a mighty leap. New planetary consciousness may be ready to emerge, with the egg hatching on the spot where it first did thousands of years ago when it brought forth the present human world.

While this perspective can bring little comfort to the people engaged in the present conflict, it may lend some meaning in terms of human evolution to a situation that, no matter how it is argued, seems oddly lacking in both logic and judgment. If we are ascending as a species into higher realms of planetary peace and cooperation, the drama we are witnessing unfold between the Tigris and the Euphrates — again — is momentous. It carries with it the promise that our human future may be to dwell in the Garden of Eden that we never had, but always aspired to.

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.

Many states are dealing with their exploding deficits by borrowing record amounts of cash, rather than either cutting services or hiking taxes. Last year, state and local governments borrowed $127 billion, or nearly 10 percent of their total revenue. That's the highest percentage since the 1950s. More evidence of a possible impending break-up. I believe that when it happens, the US of A will split up and go regional. I know it sounds idotic now, especially given the homogeneity created by the media, cemented in place with fear (people tend to huddle together when terrified), and over two hundred years of tradition, but if the state leaders do not come up with the brilliant idea of withdrawal from the Union on their own, finances (or the lack of them) may create the situation for them.

Imagine six or seven American regions, each with its own character and traditons and its own militia (all those defense trillions would be unnecessary -- who would want to go to war with New England or the Pacific Northwest?) -- instead of the monolith USA. The Empire is a huge target. What we truly need right now is not another foreign adventure, but another constitutional convention -- out of which, I trust, we would see that what we had created in the eighteenth century is now too large by far to function as a republic: we need to downsize ourselves to preserve our enlightened principles.

On another subject, the BBC reports this morning that one of France's most celebrated chefs has apparently committed suicide after his flagship restaurant was downgraded in a top restaurant guide. Bernard Loiseau was found dead at his country home yesterday, a hunting rifle by his side. I THOUGHT his cream sauce was a tad on the oily side, but I wasn't going to say anything about it.

Item, in toto, from this morning's Santa Fe New Mexican:

Underwear Stolen on South Side
One hundred pairs of panties were stolen Friday from a residence on the south side of Santa Fe.
City police reported a woman arrived home in the 2400 block of Calle Zaguan at 7 p.m., after a 90-minute absence, to discover her kitchen window smashed and her bedroom ransacked.
The panties apparently were the only property missing, police said.
The victim declined to talk more about the crime.

She was obviously trying to protect her 'south side.'

An article in tomorrow morning's New York Times Magazine says that repression may be more therapeutic than clearing out the traumas (Greek for 'wounds') of the past in talk therapy. This seems to me a rather daffy and irresponsible position. Anyone out there reading this -- and the article, of course -- who has a 'take' on the subject, please let me have it: jdispenza@aol.com.

We finished a retreat last Friday, and we begin another one tonight. The work is to uncover the wounds of the past, heal them, and move on so they can stop being an obstacle to the progress of body, mind, emotions, and spirit. If repression is a better way, maybe we should be in a different profession -- or the same one reframed to include the spiritual practice not of forgiving, but of...forgetting?

Signs. These images of nightclubs going up in flames -- last night in Rhode Island (yes, there is a little state called Rhode Island), the other day in Chicago: I had a chilly feeling that I was witnessing scenes from Dante's Inferno. There seems to be a 'dance of death' going on up there, people dancing in the face of the death of the Empire, then falling exhausted to the floor and being tampled upon or incinerating themselves. The war has begun: we are the dead and wounded.

Still another good reason to protect ourselves against illegal aliens:

A Los Angeles woman is suing the Sci-Fi Channel because she was a 'nonconsenting and unwitting victim' of a hidden camera prank that caused her to believe that she was actually being chased by a space alien on a remote desert road in California. Kara Blanc thought she was headed last March to an exclusive Hollywood industry party with two actors (who, unbeknownst to Blanc, were working on the reality show Scare Tactics) when the trio's car appeared to stall. At that point, the two male actors were set upon by an 'alien,' which caused Blanc to take off 'running for her life through a dark, desert canyon area.'

Amos Oz in this morning's New York Times: If you are envied by all, you should be careful about wielding a big stick....The big stick is necessary, but it is best used to deter or repulse aggression, not to 'impose good.'

Blizzards seem far away from here, not only in geography but also in time. They are a thing that is of another place -- and also of another time, perhaps even another age of Earth. Snow was a part of my childhood, but it is not present in my life now, nor has it been for quite some time. When I hear about huge amounts of snow accumulating in fields and in streets, stopping trains, planes, cars, closing schools, it is as if I have returned to another time somewhere in the long ago. I am a boy again there, watching the wonder of the elments, pulling on my boots.

Here we have palm trees, sun, and 75-degree afternoons. In this place I am lulled into believing that this is the way the world was meant to be: earth as a planet of mild weather.

Spam email might be valuable to gain some insight into the collective consciousness of the G.C. (Greed Culture). Reading the spam in my box over the past three days the way one might read tea leaves -- or the entrails of owls, and so on -- I am evolving some conclusions...tentative, naturally, because one never knows what next Big Concern will float by like intellectual sewage in the cultural mainstream.

Number one is money, or rather the lack of it. This surprised me, since I had thought that sex would be first on the minds of everyone in the empire: I based that assumption on the numbingly repetitious advertising of products on TV and in magazines with its more or less overt promise to deliver a quick orgasm upon sale. This month's issue of Vanity Fair has ads so titillating that they are virtually dry-fucks, as we used to say (about slow dancing) in the 1950s.

No, spam about getting credit cards in spite of bad credit, low mortgage rates, earning money at home stuffing envelopes, alternatives to declaring bankruptcy, gaining access to secret credit ratings, winning money prizes, and saving big bucks by refinancing the house outnumbered penis enlargement and herbal Viagra by almost two to one. All of this confirms my suspicions that everyone in the culture is two paychecks away from the street...you know, pushing around a shopping cart loaded down with a bedroll and lots of aluminum cans.

Number two is sex, or rather, apparently, the lack of it. Spam promises bigger sexual equipment, better sexual performance, longer sexual ecstasy, more sexual fun. If you dug up this culture a couple of thousand years from now the way we dig up the ruins of Rome, Greece, Carthage, and Troy, you would have to surmise, just from the exhumed evidence, that we are a pleasure-deprived, genitally insatiable culture on a sex-drunk...pumped up, but oddly the victims of agonizing inadequacies in every sexual department -- and permanently unsatisfied.

Number three is weight loss: we are a culture of fatties, with one in three of us declared clinically obese. Thirty years of eating fast (fat) food, delivered to us by the food industry -- note the word -- has made us all look like Humphrey Pennyworth. Diseases directly caused by overweight, like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, are going through the roof. But no one is suggesting that people try simply eating less to benefit their health. Would you like fries with that?

Number four is about having the ability to spy on other people.

Note to myself: do not automatically delete spam; save it, count it, analyze it, search its entrails for signs. Like other garbage, it might be concealing some gems.

The numbers of people protesting US war policies over the weekend was impressive, but the Financial Times reports this morning that Washington is turning a deaf ear to the crowds. The brittle arrogance of this Administration may not bring it down -- it didn't Nixon's at first -- but continuing along this line of single-minded isolation eventually will take its toll. I am being careful in my mind and heart to separate myself from the karma accumulating around the president and his people. When the breaking up comes, I want my conscience to be clear.

Meanwhile, the citizenry seems to be bracing for war, even in the snows of one of the harshest winters on record up there: almost as if Nature was trying to put out the fires of the war cries with ice.

This beautiful afternoon. The temperature is 75 degrees. Juanito and Antonio just came in from washing our car. Mike is cleaning Madre's ears. Down the street, people are having a garage sale...we bought a beach umbrella for the patio; we almost bought a big blue couch, but when we sat on it, it was like sinking into a marshmallow.

This morning we ate nopales and eggs in the courtyard at the little place on Calle Jesus next to the bookstore. I seem to be without allergies. Mike is thinking of studying one of his naturopathy courses later. Sali Ann writes, Jennifer writes. I am listening to Mozart.

The afternoon is hanging in the sun, like sheets on the line. We hang lightly here with it, caught.

Probably three million people were out on the streets yesterday on behalf of peace and against US war policies, but the leads in the New York Times are about other (although related) subjects. And one, singing the praises of the apparently undervalued Bo Diddley, is completely unrelated. There is a photo of a rally today in Australia. I suppose there is not much to say about an event that draws 750,000 people (London) out of their homes and into one public place for one purpose except that it happened. Still, one has to wonder what it takes to get banner headlines in our curiously somnambulant print media.

Georgelle writes me early this morning with Senator Byrd's speech in the Senate the day before yesterday. 'In only the space of two short years this reckless and arrogant Administration has initiated policies which may reap disastrous consequences for years,' he says, sounding like Cicero condemning Cataline. Why hasn't this been picked up by the major media? It appears to be making the rounds on the Internet underground, but that is preaching to the choir. Twice in the speech Byrd makes reference to the fact that fully half of Iraq's population is under the age of fifteen: going to war with that nation would be going to war with a nation of children.

It comes as a huge surprise to me that there is a voice -- and an eloquent voice, at that -- of dissent out there. I had assumed from reading the US press that the nation is on a single-minded course. The opposition party in the Congress has been, as Byrd notes, 'ominously, dreadfully' silent -- perhaps because this Administration has it so confused over issues of loyalty. The culture has been mesmerized into this impending war by leaders (and I use the term loosely) bent on executing a peculiar and for the most part covert policy in the name of the electorate.

Where are our leaders on the other side, by the way? Where is a responsible media at this critical time?

But while Byrd's speech moved me on one level, it left me vacant on another. Something lethargic is setting in. I believe the reason I am losing interest in the whole war affair is because I see and feel it as further confirmation of the drift toward the breaking up of the Empire, and its movement is inexorable. When something this large is afoot, the appropriate response may be simply to witness, and try to turn to something more personally interesting and satisfying. In that way, I tell myself, the horrible, unthinkable matter of dead and maimed children will be out of my hands.

Like Mark Twain, who made 'a separate peace' with the Confederacy, I seem to be making a separate peace with my culture of origin, which I see as intent upon self-destruction because the center cannot hold.

I open the morning papers these days and I am greeted with the same headline, in various forms, wordings, and degrees of gravity: Bush Says War Inevitable, War is Certain, Iraq Given Last Chance by UN, Powell Says War Looms, Absolutely War on the Horizon. There is so much of this that I have begun to zone out. Like Rhett Butler, I am ready to say, 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.'

Can this be? On the subject of a conflagration in the Middle East, a conflict that will leave thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people (the children!) dead or virtually dead, I appear to have lost interest. Something in me seems to be responding to all this 'news' as if it were in a dream or a movie. The news is old news. I am bored with it, and want something else to turn my attention to. I have stopped reading idiot hawks like Andrew Sullivan -- and idiot doves also. I am wanting news about art, about love, about life. I want to hear about new and daring opera productions, breakthrough films, shocking plays, dazzling novels...imaginative vegetarian recipes.

If others are feeling this way, maybe the 'news' -- Bush, Iraq, the UN, France/Germany, North Korea, blah, blah, blah -- will just evaporate from lack of...what?...ratings?

Americans are in debt by $1.7 trillion. But go ahead and send in that application for another platinum card.

My feelings about the center not holding and the breaking up of the whole under the weight of its very heaviness (brought about by ego inflation and the resulting general drift toward cultural psychosis) are now concentrated on money, and particularly its misuses in the American scheme of things. When the World Trade Center went down, it surely was symbolic, beyond all the other geopolitical issues, of the destruction of the money culture: we appear to be living in the final days of that culture, about to witness its dismantling...with no small amount of human suffering attendant upon it.

From the interview with Camille Paglia (is she the smartest person in the country, or what?) in today's Salon:

What is your position on the increasingly likely U.S. invasion of Iraq?

Well, first of all, I'm on the record as being pro-military and in insisting that military matters and international affairs were neglected throughout the period of the Clinton administration -- which partly led to the present dilemma. The first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 should have been a wake-up call for everyone. However, I'm extremely upset about our rush to war at the present moment. If there truly were an authentic international coalition that had been carefully built, and if the administration had demonstrated sensitivity to the fragility of international relations, I'd be 100 percent in favor of an allied military expedition to go into Iraq and find and dispose of all weapons of mass destruction.

But most members of the current administration seem to have little sense that there's an enormous, complex world beyond our borders. The president himself has never traveled much in his life. They seem to think the universe consists of America and then everyone else -- small-potatoes people who can be steamrolled. And I'm absolutely appalled at the lack of acknowledgment of the cost to ordinary Iraqi citizens of any incursion by us, especially aerial bombardment. Most of the Iraqi armed forces are pathetically unprepared to respond to a military confrontation with us. These are mostly poor people who have a profession and a dignity within their country, and they're not necessarily totally behind Saddam Hussein's ambition to dominate his region. There's just no way that Saddam's threat is equal to that of Hitler leading up to World War II. Hitler had amassed an enormous military machine and was actively seeking world domination. We don't need to invade Iraq. Saddam can be bottled up with aggressive surveillance and pinpoint airstrikes on military installations.

As we speak, I have a terrible sense of foreboding, because last weekend a stunning omen occurred in this country. Anyone who thinks symbolically had to be shocked by the explosion of the Columbia shuttle, disintegrating in the air and strewing its parts and human remains over Texas -- the president's home state! So many times in antiquity, the emperors of Persia or other proud empires went to the oracles to ask for advice about going to war. Roman generals summoned soothsayers to read the entrails before a battle. If there was ever a sign for a president and his administration to rethink what they're doing, this was it. I mean, no sooner had Bush announced that the war was "weeks, not months" away and gone off for a peaceful weekend at Camp David than this catastrophe occurred in the skies over Texas.

From the point of view of the Muslim streets, surely it looks like the hand of Allah has intervened, as with the attack on the World Trade Center. No one in the Western world would have believed that those mighty towers could fall within an hour and a half -- two of the proudest constructions in American history. And neither would anyone have predicted this eerie coincidence -- that the president's own state would become the burial ground for the Columbia mission.

Including one small town where the debris fell called Palestine, Texas.

Yes, exactly! What weird irony with an Israeli astronaut onboard who had bombed Iraq 20 years ago. To me this dreadful accident is a graphic illustration of the limitations of modern technology -- of the smallest detail that can go wrong and end up thwarting the most fail-safe plan. So I think that history will look back on this as a key moment. Kings throughout history have been shaken by signals like this from beyond: Think twice about what you're doing. If a Roman general tripped on the threshold before a battle, he'd call it off.

I heard the other day that the Vatican was doing a search (I use the phrase advisedly) for a saint to be the patron of the Internet. For a couple of days I forgot about it, then, for some reason, I became quite interested in the idea. I went to the Vatican's site and found the roster of all the saint -- Lord, there are a lot of them! -- and started sifting through.

When I mentioned this to Marthe this morning, she immediately came up with St. Christopher. But Christopher has been de-sainted, remember. About thirty years ago, the Vatican said the evidence for his having lived, let alone having died and gone to heaven, was rather slim. It was around the same time that the decree came down to turn the altars around, say mass in the vernacular, and so on. In other words, the literalists took over the Church, and as a result the mythos of the Great Mystery was lost to the misguided proponents of the logos.

This actually had been in the works for the better part of a century, and picked up enormous steam with the promulgation in 1950 of the dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady into heaven. At that point, to be a Roman Catholic, one had to believe and profess that the body of the mother of Jesus was taken up to 'heaven' when she, um, 'died' (but even that was fuzzy -- did she die? did she go to heaven without dying?).

Anyway, by then everyone was quite certain that there was probably no 'heaven' up there beyond the clouds, and that even if there were, the idea that a human body would rise up, and so on -- you get the drift. There is a point at which religious mystery does not, and should not, hold up in the 'real world' of what we can see, touch, smell, and hear. When mythos is forced to cross over into logos, the mystery evaporates. Pius XII stubbornly failed to grasp that there was an apple-and-oranges situation as regarded the Blessed Virgin's demise. Speaking from the power of myth, it is no problem at all to believe that Mary sighed a deep sigh -- her last -- and immediately angels came and swooped her up, her face as ecstatic as the face of the Bernini St. Teresa, and carried her off to heaven, the home of God, the gods, and, eventually, us. But try to lay that out on the blackboard of a high school physics classroom, and you're in big trouble.

Back to Marthe and St. Christopher. At first I thought it was a bad idea -- mainly because he had been taken off the Vatican's official list of saints. But now I am coming to like the idea very much, and for the same reason. St. Christopher lives in the word of mythos -- his de-saintment lives in the world of logos. By naming St. Christopher the patron saint of the Internet, we would be inviting the mysterious into this rather dreary land of zeros and ones. So, I support St. Christopher for the position: with the understanding that he represents, Christ-bearer that he is, the possibility of imbuing this marvelous new technology with Christ (union with the Father/Mother God) consciousness.

I believe the Internet will be for Christ consciousness what the Roman roads were for early Christianity -- a vehicle for the Mysterium Magnum to reach the minds and hearts of humankind. Such a noble undertaking deserves a saint of high quality, a saint who has stood the test of time.

St. Christopher, Patron of the Internet, pray for us!

Breaking up, breaking down. Something's afoot, and I can't seem to put my finger on it. Maybe one of you astrologers out there have an explanation. The pieces are: The Empire, too big, cannot maintain the frontiers, tighter rules/less personal freedom, unmasking, harder to hold together, breaking apart, using all the energy to keep up the front, to keep the center from caving in, being uncomfortable with permanent extension and expansion -- a crack down the middle, a tear of fabric, a rip. The parts falling off. A coming apart at the middle.

My dreams are all about this.

More about the culture of fear and greed: I have this feeling about the weightiness of it all, and how the center can't hold and must break. Another friend writes and uses the word 'hubris' -- and what is hubris, after all, but the extension of the inflated ego so far out that the center breaks apart? For the ancients, hubris was madness: 'He who the gods would bring down, they first make mad.' And madness does appear to be the order of the day...psychosis in the culture. Psychosis -- the condition of being out of touch with reality. We have disconnected ourselves from nature and from each other, and that separation has brought about a loss of sanity.

And so, a comet containing humans bursts in the heavens over Texas. The news reports were about 'breaking up.' Things are breaking up. What to watch for now -- now that this potent portent in the heavens has given us notice: a breaking up.

Sabine writes to remind me that in the days of the Roman Republic, and later the Empire, an omen in the skies of the magnitude of the space shuttle Columbia would have sent the citizens to storm the doors of the Senate to demand an end to warlike policies. Of course own latter-day Senators, sans togas, but with similar girth (Teddy Kennedy is looking swollen, like Charles Laughton toward the end), have long ago left off representing the people for the necessity of representing the lobbyists...gotta get re-elected, ya know. In case you missed the ironies of the day yesterday: the omen flew over Texas, the home state of the incumbent US president; the first account I read had the shuttle, carrying an Israeli astronaut, breaking up over the little town of...Palestine, Texas; Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, falling from the sky -- a sign, at long last, of the fall of empire?

One of the best articles I read in the past year appeared in Harper's last summer. It was written by a professor at Emory University in Atlanta. In it he put forth a remarkable thesis: things can get too big...and when they do, they begin to break down...their weight, length, and breadth get so outsized that they fall to pieces. They cannot maintain. Such, I believe, is the problem with the dominant culture at the moment, localized in the United States. Look what happened when the old Soviet Union attempted to maintain itself -- all those people, all that geography. It fell apart. Knowing how this principle works, it might be better for us now, instead of making ourselves bigger and bigger (and we are doing it on a personal, physical level, also) , to begin considering how we can downsize ourselves.

Suggestion: roll up the flags, pull in the attitude, break down the monoculture, live simply, as the bumper stickers say, so that we may simply live.

It is starting to become clear to me that under all this talk of war with Iraq is that American old messiah-complex rearing its head again. I suppose it's part of the inflation syndrome from which we have been suffering for, what?, a hundred years, two hundred years? Something in the national psyche appears to believe itself so morally right that it is simply forced to make everything else right everywhere. This Administration, for instance, will not rest, it seems, until, as Harper's observed a few months ago, the whole world looks like a suburb in Connecticut.

What I'm seeing in this cry for war is a Grand Scheme to reconfigure the entire Middle East as a group of democratic states -- perhaps even eventually a European-style alliance -- that would be a socially orderly and economically responsible entity. Grandiosity is one of the qualities of personality inflation. This is the high road, of course...I can also see the oil interests, and after them the fast-food and soda pop multinationals, and then the entertainment moguls licking their chops and moving in.

Naturally, all this is midguided. Mandela comes out today and says that the United States has 'no moral authority' to police the world -- moral authority. ''If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings,'' he said. Well, it's a bit much, but there it is.

At some point we will have to stop trying to drive civilization so much, and just be good neighbors. That seems unlikely, given the American missionary zeal, rooted maybe in the Protestant ethic, to make little Americans of everyone on the planet.

Apparently the connection between Bush's State of the Union Address the other night and the movie 'Wag the Dog' has been noted, sorta, by Iraq: an editorial in Al-Thawra, the Baath Party's newspaper in Baghdad, is calling the Address 'a Hollywood farce.' Can the televised image of a young woman running from the bombed ruins of an Albanian village carrying a cat be far behind?

This is the first entry on this blog. I have been wanting to do this for some time, now -- actually since the Event of 11 September 2001. Now, it appears, it is a reality. Readers here will have my observations on what I see happening in the world, from this small corner of it, just off the grid.

To begin with, Mike and I decided to not listen to (we couldn't watch, because none of the regular TV stations here carried it) Bush's State of the Union Address last night. Instead, we watched 'Wag the Dog,' which neither of us had seen. It's one of those prophetic films...and a fine counterpart, I think, to what was going on in TVLand in the States. Mike fell asleep around the time the young woman actress, playing an Albanian peasant, was being directed on how to run from her bombed-out village carrying a cat. I stayed awake. I particularly liked the idea of killing off the movie producer (Dustin Hoffman, looking alarmingly short) at the end: he was an appropriate casualty of the war with Albania.