This article, on the inevitable 'end of empire' all thinking people have been waiting for...the naming of it, not the concept, which has been on our minds for some time now...is brilliantly crafted. From this morning's Times of London. (bold-face is mine)

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Rusty superpower in need of careful driver

Obama built his campaign on a positive vision, but in reality he will be the first US President to manage an empire in decline
Matthew Parris

How often does a leader know, before he asks us for our votes, what office will ask of him? He mouths the promises of the moment but history may have a different task in mind. The role may be glorious, it may be tedious, but - count on this - it will be different.

Barack Obama declares and believes that he will change America, and that this "makes possible incredible change in the world".

The accent throughout has been on the positive. Making things possible has marked the whole tenor of his campaign. Hope, optimism, ambition, confidence, reform amounting almost to renaissance - such has been his appeal. "Yes, we can" was a cocky, but not an empty slogan. A deep and swelling sense of the possible, focused on America's future but rooted in America's past, has dominated the struggle for the presidency. It would hardly be an exaggeration to call Mr Obama's promise transfigurative.

But maybe destiny has other plans. America's fate in the half-century ahead is not to be transfigured, but to be relegated. Steering your team through a relegation can be as important a test of leadership as handling a promotion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline. He will be the first US president in history to accept, and (if he has the gift) to teach, not the possibilities but the constraints of power.

The fate of his predecessor George W.Bush was to test almost to destruction the theory of the limitlessness of American wealth and power - and of the potency of the American democratic ideal too. With one last heave he pitched his country into a violent and ruinous contest with what at times seemed the whole world, and the whole world's opinion. He failed, luminously.

But maybe somebody had to. Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on President Bush for donning a mantle hardly of his own making but a well-worn national idea created in the triumph and hegemony of victory in the Second World War. Maybe somebody had to wear those fraying purple robes one last time and see how much longer the world would carry on saluting; to pull the levers of the massive US economy one last time and see if there was any limit to the cash that the engine could generate; to throw the formidable US war machine into two simultaneous foreign wars and test - and find - a limit.

Eight years later it's haemorrhage, not regeneration, that the Obama presidency will have to nurse as it looks ahead. Europeans tend to consider presidential prospects in terms of US foreign policy - and there's much bleeding still to do in Afghanistan - but the incoming president's dominating concerns will surely be domestic and economic, and the two are spliced.

As a keen amateur car mechanic I have, since the age of 16, been puzzled by something about America. Here was a nation crazy about automobiles and held out to me as the last word in modernity, innovation, capitalist dynamism and go-ahead technology in all that it did. But its cars weren't any good. I say "weren't" - we're talking 1965 here - because some commentary about the current woes of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler has suggested that it is in recent years that the US automotive industry has slipped behind; and it's certainly only quite recently that they've started losing a lot of money.

But the product, though always flashy, has been technologically inferior since the end of Second World War. While European carmakers were pioneering front-wheel drive, independent suspension, small diesel engines and efficient automatic gearboxes, the Americans kept churning out big, thirsty, fast-rusting, primitively engineered behemoths. Partly this was because fuel was cheap, but the oversprung American limo, loose-handling and imprecise, was always a pig to drive, too. At root the problem was lack of competition.

And when I visited America, first as a boy then as a postgraduate student (in the 1970s), what struck me was not the modernity of modern America, but its inefficiency and old-fashionedness. The bureaucracy was Stone Age, the postal service unreliable, medical and dental treatment twice the cost of private treatment in England, and government officials treated you like serfs. People lived richly and worked hard - that was undeniable - but in a parallel universe clumsily and wastefully managed, and beset with internal friction. You couldn't even get a bank account that worked properly outside your state; and, for all the ostentatious vigour of retail competition, there was a curious lack of diversity in product choice. Though infinitely more successful and politically free, it was in some indefinable way more like the Soviet Union than either country would have wished to acknowledge.

What (I now think) I was encountering as early as 40 years ago was an ageing empire, losing its edge, almost imperceptibly losing its immense economic momentum, but still indecently wealthy and impervious to the emerging challenge of competition.

Rather suddenly, all this has caught up with it.

Mr Obama's vision of change - love, brotherhood, welfare, green politics and a new spirit of idealism - could now prove as irrelevant to the challenges a new president finds himself confronting as is David Cameron's early compassionate conservatism to his stern message today.

Both men's first drafts of politics got them to the launch pad; neither will fuel their rockets after lift off.

Instead, Mr Obama will face hard choices about how much of what America does (and what Americans do) can be afforded any longer; the next four years may be the worst possible time for hugely expensive healthcare reforms, a generous helping hand to the world's poor or a new military surge in Afghanistan.

In 2009 the US national debt will surge by $2trillion: some 70 per cent of gross domestic product. In these circumstances the questions must be: What can we cut? Where can we pull out? What can we stop doing that we're doing now? Mr Obama's fight - if fight he must - will be with the forces of economic protectionism, with anti-immigrant sentiment and with organised labour feather-bedding, pension protection and job protection.

But first, and underlying all these scraps, Mr Obama will have to find a way of being honest with Americans about their country's fall from predominance. Reading, as I often do, the furiously chauvinistic online reaction from US citizens to any suggestion that their country can be beaten at anything, I quail for him.

We British know something about the loss of empire. Successive 20th-century prime ministers struggled both to manage relative national decline and to make it explicable to the electorate. It is upon this road that 21st-century American presidents must now set foot. Mr Obama will be the first. "Yes we can!" was an easy sentiment to recommend. "No we can't," will be a far, far harder thing to say.

Getting Back to the Garden

The Obama Presidency Symbolizes the Recovery of the Youth Within — Reconnecting Us With the High Ideals and Aspirations of Our Youthful Selves.

We are stardust, we are golden,
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

For me, the seemingly eternal presidential campaign that ended with the election of Barack Obama turned on a single sting of images.

During the second debate between the two candidates in early October, the one with the ‘town-hall’ format moderated by Tom Brokaw, I found the body-language of the two men so compelling that at a certain point I turned off the sound on the TV and just watched them dance around the little arena surrounded by neat banks of well-dressed citizens. Obama was as sprightly and bright-eyed as a young spaniel. He stood straight and smiled disarmingly, and when he shifted his body position he glided easily from place to place.

McCain, on the other hand, his shoulders hunched up and his head bent, lurched around almost robotically. He seemed neck-less, stuffed into a too-small suit, a handicap that restricted his mobility and made his movements jerky. Over his tired eyes worry-lines waved like a fear-flag before disappearing into his thin white hair.

With the sound off, Obama appeared like a youthful Romeo; McCain a scheming, misshapen Richard III or worse, a furious Lear. I had made my own mind up months earlier, but this evening, I thought, not only clinched the election for Obama, but was what the election was really about. The next morning Tom Shales, the TV critic for the Washington Post, observed telegraphically what could not have been missed on the millions watching that night: ‘Brokaw looked old. McCain looked old. Obama looked young.’

What has unfolded in the past few weeks and months is nothing less than the stuff of myth. The great changing of the guard in our culture — and it is now a world culture — signals a renewed hope in the future and the recovery of our own youthful high ideals and aspirations.

In the world of symbols, dreams, and archetypes, the exhausted husk of the old yielding to the fresh energy of the young is a natural and necessary occurrence. It is Saturn, the old king, fading into the background so that Jupiter, the new king, can reign: the king is dead — long live the king! It is the Death Card of the Tarot, which signifies the transformation from the old and useless to the new and useful. It is the archetype of the Destroyer, — Shiva, Angra Mainya, Cailech, and all the other gods of Darkness — laying waste the past in order to make room for the next thing.

If we are to have a new world, the old world must die. The only other option is to cling to that which we know — and sink with it like the victims of the Titanic (another apt symbol for the end of the old way of doing things and no accident that the story of the ‘unsinkable’ ship has resurfaced, to widespread popularity, in our time) into the sea.

We may think it a coincidence that Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died the day before the election, but in the land of myth this event fits perfectly with the archetypal pattern of passing the scepter. In dream language, the grandmother stands for all the ancestors back to the edge of time; when she dies, the hero, leading on the new generation, can at last live fully and express himself in the world.

Without knowing it (these things are always unconscious), the greatest compliment McCain gave Obama during the campaign was to call him inexperienced. McCain, as the symbol of the ‘experienced’ — the old and used-up — was uttering his own death sentence and writing his own epitaph.

* * * *

The great transformational drama playing itself out on the stage of our collective imagination has a special meaning and a particular poignancy for members of the Baby Boomer generation, my generation. I was surprised to find out a few years ago that the 78 million boomers in the United States are only a small part of the estimated 450 million Baby Boomers world-wide, mostly in the industrialized countries, which is to say, in the countries involved in the mid-century world war.

The name of the revolutionary epic at hand is the Recovery of the Youth Within, wherein we who were born in huge numbers all over the world between 1946 and 1964 identify ourselves with the youthful new president and pick up, as if returning to a bookmark in a treasured volume we never finished reading, the elevated ideals of our own youth.

Those aspirations, forged in the furnace of the 1960s, were wrought from the burning desire to be wholly realized persons, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The vision was an Aquarian dream of humankind as a vast interconnected tribe living in peace on a planet we had turned into a garden by our loving stewardship. It was about making ourselves and the world better, first by living personal lives of integrity, awareness, and depth, then by completing ourselves through service in the world: maturing to adulthood as a spiritual path.

The boomer generation grew up in a unique historical moment: at the end of World War II, when there was prosperity, a sense of expectation, and hope about the future. As the boomers came of age, they pushed every imaginable social hot button, expanding the universe of choices people have, from civil rights to women's rights to gay rights.

They became the most highly educated and wealthiest generation in history with a spending power of $2 trillion dollars a year. But they have spent far more than they have saved — much of it on themselves — part of a legendary self-indulgence that has a shadow side.

‘When you look at us, we're the most obese generation, the most drug-abusing — and we cause the most crime problems. We show the biggest increase in AIDS and new HIV infections,’ says University of California-Santa Cruz sociologist Mike Males. ‘The conventional wisdom is that in our youth we were a wild generation — all kinds of partying, drugs, and political protest. And then when we got older, we settled down and became very austere and clean living. But that's not happened at all. We’ve actually gotten worse as we've aged,’ Males says.

What became of the spiritually imbued promise of our youth? We had imagined a world where there would be ‘harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding,’ in the words of Hair’s anthem, ‘Aquarius.’ While we have grown in years, we may not have matured emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Our entire generation appears to have gotten stuck in a kind of perpetual adolescence of self-absorption, greed, materialism, and laziness.

Can Democratic primary voters have seen in Hilary Clinton and her blustering husband the embodiment of that narcissistic and self-indulgent side of the boomer character, and rejected it? If so, it may be the first sign that we were ready to awaken from the long spiritual slumber into which we had sunk.

* * * *

This is the vital importance to boomers of the Obama presidency: he is the symbol of our recovered youth, and the promise of a second chance to change ourselves and, by so doing, change the world. Whatever we may be expecting him to do now that he is president, in a way he has already served the metaphorical purpose of the moment: simply by being there, he has brought all of us to a place where we can reclaim the Youth within and rise from there to a spiritual adulthood.

Whether we actually will pick up the journey we began long ago, before we were detoured by the psychopathologies of our leaders, which were our own weaknesses magnified and projected, remains to be seen. On election night the CNN exit polls showed that boomers (Americans aged 45-64) voted 50% for Obama (the future) and 49% for McCain (the past), indicating that we may be ambivalent about or afraid to commit to the challenge of restoring our youthful ideals. Will we rise up to finish the humanitarian, world-healing work we envisioned or remain comfortably on the couch? This one may be too close to call.

But the tide of the times, led by a man who also represents the integration of our shadow (Obama is half-black, half-white), could be so compelling as to be irresistible. We might imagine a loud rush of wings from all quarters, led by boomers all over the planet rediscovering themselves in the presidential avatar — us, but young. George Eliot says, ‘It is never too late to be what you might have been.’

Beginning the last third of our lives, we may at last be able to create the heaven on earth we imagined in our youth, when we had neither the resources nor the power to bring it about — by becoming fully realized, by becoming, finally, truly and in all ways adult.

If the election of Obama has taught us nothing else, it has brought home the clear and uplifting message, so woefully missing from the lexicons of recent occupants of the office: We can be better. We can make the world better. Yes we can.



Joseph Dispenza is the co-founder of LifePath in San Miguel and the author of several books, including God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion. He is a Spiritual Counselor in private practice. joseph@lifepathretreats.com

RUSSIAN ANALYST PREDICTS DECLINE AND BREAKUP OF USA
Tue Nov 25 2008 09:04:22 ET

A leading Russian political analyst has said the economic turmoil in the United States has confirmed his long-held view that the country is heading for collapse, and will divide into separate parts. Professor Igor Panarin said in an interview with the respected daily IZVESTIA published on Monday: "The dollar is not secured by anything.

The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt. By 1998, when I first made my prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion.

Now it is more than 11 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse." The paper said Panarin's dire predictions for the U.S. economy, initially made at an international conference in Australia 10 years ago at a time when the economy appeared strong, have been given more credence by this year's events.

When asked when the U.S. economy would collapse, Panarin said: "It is already collapsing. Due to the financial crisis, three of the largest and oldest five banks on Wall Street have already ceased to exist, and two are barely surviving. Their losses are the biggest in history. Now what we will see is a change in the regulatory system on a global financial scale: America will no longer be the world's financial regulator."

When asked who would replace the U.S. in regulating world markets, he said: "Two countries could assume this role: China, with its vast reserves, and Russia, which could play the role of a regulator in Eurasia." Asked why he expected the U.S. to break up into separate parts, he said: "A whole range of reasons.

Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work. Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

He also cited the "vulnerable political setup", "lack of unified national laws", and "divisions among the elite, which have become clear in these crisis conditions." He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong. He even suggested that "we could claim Alaska - it was only granted on lease, after all."

Panarin, 60, is a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has authored several books on information warfare.

Maybe I'm just suffering from politofatigue, but when I saw TWILIGHT last night, I thought it might be the first Obama-era movie. Edward, with his super-human self-control seemed like an Obama figure, seducing young Bella, America, with his infinite coolness, keen intelligence, and ability to be in many places at the same time.

Edward has his own 'team of rivals' in his 'family,' headed by the eminent and equally dramaphobic Emmet.Edward is white-white, a polarized image of the President-Elect. He is aloof, aristocratic, icily chaste, and when he bares his chest he sparkles.

He is also eternally young. We may have rediscovered the mists of Camelot in the fog of Forks, Washington.

I suppose there are other connections between the movie and what is unfolding on the national and international stage, but it seemed clear to me that we may have at the dawn of a new presidency a film that sums up some of the feelings we are, like Bella, feeling now: a little apprehension, a little amazement...and an irresistible attraction for the possibilities.

The Guardian this morning reports an alarming rise in brain diseases caused, apparently, by pollutants.

On a metaphorical level, what seems to be happening is that our widespread smelly thoughts and emotions are bringing on early dementia.

We are at a turning point, a transitional time between the Very Old and the Very New. We are in the process of destroying our old creation myth (tearing up Iraq)...but we cannot see the new yet.

Riding the wave between these two extremes, who wouldn't get crazy?

Box Office Dreams

Dreams and movies have a lot in common, including what they can tell us about ourselves.

By Joseph Dispenza

Movies are the dreams of our culture. Both dreams and movies unspool vivid images into our brains while we restore ourselves in the dark. Both play with time, telling their stories in flashbacks, flash–forwards, dissolves, quick cuts, fade-ins and fade-outs. Both emerge out of the dark and entrance us, engrossing us completely in other times and other worlds. As in dreams, in movies we live vicariously."

Talking about dreams is like talking about movies," said master filmmaker Federico Fellini, "The cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of images. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream."

Fellini was so taken with the fundamental similarities between the mechanics of dreams and films that, after studying the pioneering psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung's essay "On Synchronicity," he met regularly with Rome's most distinguished Jungian analyst, Dr. Ernest Bernhard, and kept a meticulous dream journal that had a great influence on his films.

Jung was no less taken with movies. "The cinema," he wrote, "makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life."

Below the surface of our awareness, Jung taught, lies an accumulation of attitudes, beliefs, values, mindsets, and accepted "wisdom" that is common to everyone in our society, and our world. Jung pictured all of this human experience draining into what he called the Collective Unconscious, just as a continent's streams and rivers drain into a great body of water. Out of the Collective Unconscious arise archetypes—characters that typify humanity and scenarios that summarize the history of our species.

As a summer of action movies and comedies winds down, we moviegoers can feel as if we are bobbing on a great lake of images and sounds, formula plots and swoony leading men and ladies. They are our archetypes.

The kinship between films and dream studies is partly a matter of history. Freud published his "Interpretation of Dreams," the first clinical examination of the subject, just four years after the Lumiere Brothers' first public exhibition of movies in Paris in 1896. By the time Jung's "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" appeared a decade later, D.W. Griffith's landmark "The Birth of a Nation" had already created the blockbuster, propelling movies to their central place in popular culture. It's little wonder these cradle mates share ideas and even terminology. Jung spoke about amplification, the shadow, projection, and the persona. Hollywood was nicknamed "the dream factory."

But the connection is more than chronological. Movies allow us to examine our culture the way a psychoanalyst uses dreams as a key to personality. Showing at the multiplex is what we really believe about the grand metaphysical issues that animate our material and spiritual lives--life, death, the afterlife, our human destiny, and God.

We need not look to deeply metaphysical films to tap into our dreamlife; quite the opposite. Since we're seeking a collective unconscious, blockbusters yield the purest information, since movies that make the most money are the ones that connect with something deep down. The huge moneymakers represent our common denominator, and therefore say the most about what is hanging out –– and hiding out –– in the human psyche.

We also need to suspend our critical facultiies. The usual thumbs–up, thumbs–down approach doesn't help us here. Art has little or nothing to do with a movie's usefulness as a shared cultural dream. Popularity, market saturation, merchandizing opportunities, and box office stats are everything.

For instance, let's examine the top-grossing movie of all time: Titanic, which has earned $1.8 billion since its release in 1997 (so far). Set at the end of empire and economic expansion, the popularity of "Titanic" signals our fear that our present age is passing, threatened by external forces and by shifts deep inside us.. In "Independence Day," still 19th on the all-time money list after eight years, the old order was threatened by aliens from outer space. The next year, "Armageddon" (No. 55) showed earth earmarked for annihilation by an asteroid.

Alien invasion is even at the heart of "Titanic." Remember the moment in when the sharp point of the iceberg pierces the hull of the 'indestructible'ocean liner? Think of that image juxtaposed with the now iconic video pictures of planes puncturing the walls of the World Trade Center. It was as if the movie had dreamed this defining event of our time, predicting it four years before it happened.

More recently, the agent of change has become a natural event, albeit one we are helping to bring on ourselves, as this year's "The Day After Tomorrow." Whatever births our new eposch, we seem to be convinced that, whatever is bringing it on, the coming of the new age will be accompanied by bloodshed and large-scale destruction.

Some will not make it. For those who do, life will be different—more compassionate, perhaps, more gentle, less materialistic, more spiritual. At the end of "The Day After Tomorrow," Americans who have managed to survive the destruction in the northern two–thirds of the country end up in Mexico, "grateful for the hospitality," in the words of a repentant and humbled president, 'of what we once arrogantly called "the Third World."'

Our bodies are going to require alteration in the new age. We feel the need to mutate, take on powers we don't yet possess. In "X–Men"—a surprise hit in 2001, now outgrossed by its sequel in 2003, and the two "Spider–Man" movies, mutating humans use their powers tohelp and heal. These plots ease, perhaps, our anxiety about cloning, cryobiology, in vitro fertilization, and other advances that fall under the heading of 'extropy'--the belief that we are driven by an insatiable passion for improvement.

As we transform, we appear like the centaurs, mermaids, satyrs, and other creatures of mythology, half–animal and half–human. Our spiritual nature is emerging from our animal selves, like Cat-Woman, and Batman.

Many of these characters are decades-old comic-book heroes. What's shifting is our awareness that our new powers are not novelties or toys. In a sobering moment, Spider–Man, for whom Manhattan is a big playground, is instructed about the uses of power. Spidey's uncle counsels him (and us), 'With great power comes great responsibility."

Our movies also betray our conviction that the world (like the movies) depends on our going along with an assumed idea of reality, as in "The Matrix" and its sequel. Time in this man-made world is exceedingly slippery. Dinosaurs can revive ("Jurassic Park"), we can move freely from past to future ("Back to the Future"), or a day can repeat itself over and over again ("Groundhog Day").

In such a universe, we live in the past, present and future all at once. In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the settings are pastoral, medieval, but the sensibility is futuristic. The Star Wars films take place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." but that "past" boasts advanced technology and easy intergalactic exchanges. Space also may be an illusion. Harry Potter walks through a train station wall just as Men in Black dash in and out of dimensions. In "The Truman Show," a man discovers his world is completely simulated, defined by a scrim at the outer edges of a television studio.

If the past is not even the past, nor are the dead dead. Compare the "undead" in "Night of the Living Dead" with the ghosts in "The Sixth Sense." Far from fearing them, we are charged with helping them in their process of transformation.

Or perhaps it is ourselves who, we dream, will be shown a way through. Not technically a blockbuster, Stephen Spielberg's "The Terminal" sports a blockbuster director and star. In the movie, Tom Hanks plays a man cannot leave a New York City airport, because a war causes his native country to collapse, rendering his passport invalid. The Terminal may be today's central, most insightful dream. We are between worlds. The old world (the Eastern European main character is literally from what we used to call the Old World) has passed away –– but the new world has not appeared yet. Far from despairing over the situation, we should be patient, Spielberg counsels, and try to make the best of it. Paradigms don't shift overnight.

What about God? We think of God as someone of something 'up there' or 'out there' to be feared: for some time, our major moneymakers have portrayed God the Father as professional avenger. This year's second highest grosser, "The Passion of the Christ," redoubles the suggestion that extreme suffering is necessary for salvation.

That dream image of the Divine is shifting, if subtly, fromGod as a Judging Destroyer to God as a Loving Parent. Just four spots down the all-time list from "The Passion" is "Finding Nemo." Set in an ocean--Jung's symbol for the unconscious—"Nemo" portrays a clown fish who searches for his son across the seas. It may look like a simple children's story, but in dream terms, it is a parable of, well, Biblical proportions, telling of the abiding love of the Creator for the creation.

The next time you are sitting in a theater watching a big, popular film, ask yourself what it is communicating about the large issues of life. You may be surprised to find that the cinematic dreams unfolding in the darkness hold the key to understanding who you, and the rest of us, truly are and where we appear to be going.

(posted on Beliefnet 08 August 2004)

In 'Troy,' Where Are the Gods?

A subtitle for the new blockbuster, Troy, could be: 'Where Have All the Gods Gone?'

Except for a few jabs at the apparent powerlessness of the sun-god, Apollo, patron and protector of Troy, the gods are absent. In this way, the movie may be an accurate mirror of our contemporary secular culture, where spirituality is kept discretely out of public affairs.

In the real Troy story, the gods play an active and decisive role. The story opens at a wedding feast on Mt. Olympus, the realm of the gods. King Peleus is marrying a sea-goddess, Thetis (they will become the parents of Brad Pitt...er, Achilles).

One of the minor deities, Discord, has not been invited to the wedding, for obvious reasons. Miffed, she tosses a golden apple into the banquet hall. When it comes to rest on the marble floor, the gods see that it is engraved "For the Fairest One." Immediately, the apple is claimed by three goddesses -- Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite.

To settle the dispute, the gods conscript a mortal, one of the hunky princes of Troy, Orlando Bloom...er, Paris, and bring him up to Olympus to make a judgment on the golden apple. One by one, the goddesses come to him secretly and offer him a bribe. Hera offers him power, Athena wisdom, and Aphrodite the love of the most beautiful woman in the world.

For Paris, this is a no-brainer. He awards the apple to Aphrodite and receives in return the beautiful Helen, who is at the moment married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. The gods transport Paris to Sparta, where he and Helen instantly fall in love. The two flee to Troy. Menelaus calls his fellow-Greek kings together, armies are assembled under Agamemnon, the brother of Menelaus, they sail for Troy, and the rest, as they say, is history.

All during the ten years of the Trojan War, the gods, like celestial cheerleaders, root for their favorite side, often influencing the back-and-forth battle victories by direct divine intervention. They also figure highly in the end of the war: the Horse, created by the tricky hero, Odysseus, is sacred to Poseidon, god of the sea; by dragging it into their city, the Trojans believe they have captured the defining spiritual token of the withdrawing Greeks.

Troy the movie, unlike Troy the legend, is virtually godless. What references there are to the Olympians are couched in the arrogant boasting of heroes. As the helpless Trojans look on, Achilles chops off the head of Apollo's statue, as if to say, "So much for your belief in spiritual help!" King Priam of Arabia...er, Troy...makes fatal state decisions based on the results of auguries by temple priests.

The unintended message of Troy may be that in a world without gods -- spirituality -- we are deprived of life's deeper meaning. What exactly are we learning about life from watching men battling it out with each other? One by one the great heroes of the war fall; eventually the invincible fortress of Troy itself falls. But their toppling appears to have little consequence beyond testosterone provoked score-settling.

Ironically, Achilles, with his disdain for the gods, is brought into the conflict through his desire to be like them, immortal. Invulnerable except for his heel, the place where his mother held him to dip him into the mystical waters of the River Styx, he falls to the arrow as part of the same lethal game of tag.

In the Iliad, which 'inspired' Troy, all these heroic falls come to pass, but, with the gods involved, they have a far-reaching significance that affect the affairs of both mortals and immortals for the ages. The whole story of the Trojan War can been seen as a lesson in human -- and divine -- nature. It is a textbook in psychology, anthropology, cosmology, and metaphysics.

All the myths have something important to say about human nature, because they are always about the interaction of men with the gods. The myths are spiritual at their core, and therefore offer us guidance in how to relate to the higher power within us. A myth told without the gods is only half of the story, and not the better half at that.

In Troy, the gods have become useless, foolish, and even dangerous; to put our confidence in them is to bring about ruin. Like our secular culture, which avoids the mysterious (mythos) in favor of what we can see, hear, and measure (logos) a story of Troy without the gods is only about the arrogance of warriors and their strategies, which end in either victory or defeat. A story thus told misses the opportunity to teach us about the human heart and the human soul.

Another argument for polytheism: this morning, news that the word GOD is hampering efforts to establish the European Constitution. We have been chained down with the word (and concept) of GOD for so long now. It's tearing us apart. I say, up with the gods. Down with monotheism.

An article in this morning's New York Times about The Da Vinci Code being made into a film...not quite yet, but some talk about it.

The collapse of the Roman Catholic Church is part of the new planetary scenario. I believe we are living under the last full papacy. When JPII goes to heaven, a new guy will be put in, but only to oversee the dismantling of the whole operation.

The Code has opened up the public imagination to the notion that organized religion is at least suspect, if not dangerous. We don't need it. We've outgrown it.

Epiphany

A Christian feast celebrating the manifestation of the divine nature of Jesus to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi. January 6, on which this feast is traditionally observed. A revelatory manifestation of a divine being.

A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something.

A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization: “I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would change the way I viewed myself” (Frank Maier).

We are not emotionally mature enough to send humans to Mars. If you had thought that we were ready to venture outside our Terra/Luna confines, look at this piece on US plans for weapons in space. I suggest we stay at home on our own planet until we grow up.

The Passion of the Christ: A Nail in the Coffin of Organized Religion

Every form of culture, in its vanishing, receives its most elaborate and intense expression. (William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light)

A couple of weeks and $212 million (domestic box office) into the screen history of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” a bit of the dust kicked up around its opening seems to be settling –– a good time, perhaps, to reflect dispassionately on what the film might represent as a cultural phenomenon.

Audience reactions to the movie are all over the place, from adulation to freak–out (at least one patron died of a heart attack in the aisles), but critical appraisals are virtually unanimous: the depiction of the last twelve hours in the life of Jesus is violent in the extreme, a sadistic dead-man-walking downer that strives for a realism bordering on fanaticism.

Unsparing, punishing realism apparently was the essential approach to the Jesus story for Gibson and his colleagues. One of the publicists working on the film’s pre–release promotion got the Pope himself to say after a screening, “It is as it was!” –– as if the Holy Father were present at the Crucifixion and therefore qualified for religious quality control. Later, the Vatican repudiated the “alleged” Papal statement by saying that the Pope holds no opinions on matters of artistic expression (you can hear Julius II, who commissioned art from Raphael and Michelangelo, turning over in his crypt), but the seed had been planted.

“The Passion of the Christ” appears to want us all to return to religion, and Gibson’s fundamentalist take on it in particular, as if extreme realism by itself could pry souls open. But, ironically, this in–your–face cinematic Stations of the Cross might be another indication that organized religions everywhere are on the way out. The drift at this moment in history is away from the specific practice of religion, with its doctrines and regulations, and toward a more eclectic and personal spirituality.

A recent Gallup poll [1] confirms a trend which sociologists and others have observed for some time –– Americans are abandoning institutional religion in favor of “cafeteria style” faith, and replacing denominational dogma with a more nonspecific “spirituality.” The results of the survey suggest that despite their outward affiliation with a religion and frequent church attendance, “less than half of Americans live their daily lives strictly by the code or teachings of their religious faith.”

“People want more than a long-distance relationship with God,” Gallup says. Organized religion puts priests, ministers, rabbis, ayatollahs, rinpoches and gurus of every sort between your and my relationship to the Divinity. But if it is true that so many of us are growing away from the “long–distance” religious dynamic in favor of direct spiritual experience, how to explain this peculiar movie?

The anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace has explained how a culture at the edge of extinction explodes into a ritualistic ‘revitalization movement.’ The end of a cultural activity is announced by the activity’s frenzied and fanatical application by its core adherents. From this perspective, organized religion resists being dragged kicking and screaming to the bone yard by making itself even ‘more religious.’

In this way, Mel Gibson is right in line with, Pat Robinson–type Protestant Christian fundamentalists, Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sunni Muslims in Egypt, Shii Muslims in Iran, Buddhist and Hindi monks in India who incinerate themselves to protest modernity, and religious fundamentalists in other places around the world who are trying to reverse the inexorable decay of organized religion by applying it more vigorously –– literally, violently, and fanatically.

Karen Armstrong, in her brilliant study of religious fundamentalism, “The Battle for God,” tells us that fundamentalists “fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past.” If you were wondering about the use of Aramaic and Greek in “The Passion of the Christ,” it’s only another way the film seeks to be literal, and therefore “pure.” Dr. Armstrong: “To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture…” –– remember that Gibson leads a small congregation of reactionary Roman Catholics out in Malibu who hear Mass in Latin.

It’s a losing battle. Here in the real world, most of us aren’t interested in saving religion. We are growing up spiritually, and growing away from the patriarchal, rule–bound religious structures of our spiritual childhood. We are beginning to understand that we may not need religion (“religare, to restrain, tie back”) to restrain our own unruly passions to tie us back to God. We can define the Divinity and relate to It directly on our own, thank you.

When you think about it, Jesus himself was on the side of the personal spiritual seeker –– and quite against organized religion. He likened the Pharisees and Sadducees, those rigid interpreters of God’s law, to whitened sepulchers and encouraged his listeners to seek the Kingdom of God within their own hearts and souls. Jesus was anti–religious. In the end, that is what got him crucified.

“The Passion of the Christ” is a religious shock treatment designed to convert the heathen and bring the wayward back into the fold, but the jolt doesn’t work. It just reminds us that the dinosaur of organized religion is lumbering slowly but surely toward extinction, leaving considerable blood and gore in its path.

The new biography of Jung is making the round of reviewers. The New York Times reviewer turned in a scathing report, making him into a boor and wife-beater. The genius of Jung was that he understood myths as the dreams of the collective unconscious -- and dreams as personal myths.

What is needed now is to cultivate a cosmic consciousness.

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.